THE 
 
 COMPLETE WORKS 
 
 OF 
 
 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY 
 
 UPON HIS 
 
 PHILOSOPHICAL AND THEOLOGICAL OPINIONS. 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 PROFESSOK SHEDD. 
 
 IN SEVEN VOLUMES. 
 VOL. II. 
 
 NEW YOEK: 
 
 HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, 
 Nos. 329 AND 331 PEARL STREET, 
 
 FRANKLIN SQUAB E. 
 1 854. 
 
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand 
 eight hundred and fifty-three, by 
 
 HARPER & BROTHERS, 
 
 in the Clerk s Office of the District Court of the Southern District 
 of New York. 
 
THE 
 
 COMPLETE WORKS 
 
 OP 
 
 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, 
 
 VOL. II. 
 THE FRIEJSTD. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 
 HARPER & BROTHERS. 
 
 1854. 
 
THE FRIEND 
 
 A SEKIES OF ESSAYS 
 
 TO AID IN THE FORMATION OF FIXED PRINCIPLES 
 
 IN POLITICS, MORALS, AND RELIGION, 
 
 WITH LITERARY AMUSEMENTS INTERSPERSED. 
 
 BY SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 WITH THE AUTHOR S LAST CORRECTIONS AND AN APPENDIX, AND WITH A 
 SYNOPTICAL TABLE OF THE CONTENTS OF THE WORK, 
 
 BY HENRY NELSON COLERIDGE, ESQ., M.A. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 
 HARPER & BROTHERS. 
 1854. 
 
"V 
 
 Now for the writing of this werke, 
 I, who am a lonesome clerke, 
 Purposed for to write a book 
 After the world, that whilome took 
 Its course in oldS days long passed : 
 But for men sayn, it is now lassed 
 In worser plight than it was tho, 
 I thought me for to touch also 
 The world which neweth every day 
 So as I can, so as I may, 
 Albeit I sickness have and pain, 
 And long have had, yet would I fain 
 Do my mind s hest and besiness, 
 That in some part, so as I guess, 
 The gentle mind may be advised. 
 
 GOWER, Pro. to the Confess. Amanti*. 
 
ADVERTISEMENT. 
 
 THE present edition of THE FRIEND comprises all the correc 
 tions, and most of the notes, found in the author s handwriting 
 in an interleaved copy of the work, bequeathed by him to his 
 daughter-in-law. The Editor has revised the text with as much 
 care as circumstances would permit, and has added a prelin.indry 
 sketch of the plan and details of the whole, with an appendix, con 
 taining several passages, parts of the scattered essays originally 
 published in 1809, and omitted in the recast of the work in 1818, 
 but which seem worthy of separate preservation. It is earnestly 
 hoped that what has thus been done may further the more general 
 acceptance of a work, which, with all its imperfections, is, perhaps, 
 the most vigorous of Mr. Coleridge s compositions ; and which, if 
 it had contained nothing but the essays, in the first volume, on 
 the duty and conditions of communicating truth, and those in 
 the third, on the principles of scientific method, with the recon 
 cilement of the Platonic and Baconian processes of investigation, 
 would still, as the Editor conceives, have constituted one of the 
 most signal benefits conferred in this age on the cause of morals 
 and sound philosophy. 
 
 Lincoln s Inn, ) 
 llth Sept. 1837.) 
 
OBJECT AND PLAN OF THE WORK. 
 
 THE FRIEND consists of a methodical series of essays, the prin 
 cipal purpose of which is to assist the mind in the formation for 
 itself of sound, and therefore permanent and universal, principles 
 in regard to the investigation, perception, and retention of truth, 
 in what direction soever it may be pursued ; but pre-eminently 
 with reference to the three great relations in which we are placed 
 in this world, as citizens to the state, as men to our neighbors, 
 tend as creatures to our Creator, in other words, to politics, to 
 morals, and to religion. The author does not exhibit any perfect 
 scheme of action or system of belief in any one of these relations ; 
 and that he has not done so, nor meant to do so, are points which 
 must be borne in mind by every reader who would understand 
 and fairly appreciate the work. For its scope is to prepare and 
 discipline the student s moral and intellectual being, not to pro 
 pound dogmas or theories for his adoption. The book is not the 
 plan of a palace, but a manual of the rules of architecture. It 
 is a riQonaldevfja, something to set the mind in a state of 
 pure recipiency for the specific truths of philosophy, and to arm 
 its faculties with power to recognize and endure their presence. 
 
 In pursuing, however, this main design, the author has exam 
 ined with more or less minuteness many particular systems and 
 codes of opinion lying in his way ; and in stating the grounds of 
 his rejection of some, and entire or partial admission of others of 
 them, he has in effect expressed his own convictions upon several 
 of the most important questions, yet disputed in moral and politi 
 cal philosophy. But it is not so much to any given conclusion 
 so expressed that the reader s attention seems to be invited, as to 
 
viii OBJECT AND PLAN OF THE WOKK. 
 
 the reasoning founded on principles of universal application, by 
 which such conclusion has been evolved ; the primary and pre 
 vailing aim throughout the work being, as well under the forms 
 of criticism, biography, local description, or personal anecdote, as 
 of direct moral, political, or metaphysical disquisition, to lay down 
 and illustrate certain fundamental distinctions and rules of intel 
 lectual action, which, if well groundad and thoroughly taken up 
 and appropriated, will give to every one the yower of working out, 
 under any circumstances, the conclusions of truth for himself. 
 The game from time to time started and run down may be rich 
 and curious ; but still at the end of the day it is the chase itself, 
 the quickened eye, the lengthened breath, the firmer nerve, that 
 must ever be the huntsman s best reward. 
 
 The Friend is divided into two main sections ; the first com 
 prising a discussion of the principles of political knowledge ; the 
 second treating of the grounds of morals and religion, and reveal 
 ing the systematic discipline of mind requisite for a true under 
 standing of the same. To these is prefixed a general introduc 
 tion, for the greater part devoted to a statement of the duty of 
 communicating the truth, and of the conditions under which it 
 may be communicated safely ; and three several collections of 
 essays, in some degree miscellaneous and called Landing-Places 
 interposed in different places for amusement, retrospect, and prep 
 aration complete the work. 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 THE following synoptical view of the plan and contents of " The 
 Friend" may prove useful to those who read the work for the 
 first time in the present edition. 
 
 GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Particular 
 Introduction. 
 Essays I-IV. 
 
 pp, 19-41. 
 
 Duty of the 
 communication 
 of truth, and 
 the conditions 
 under which it 
 may be safely 
 communicated. 
 Essays V-XIII. 
 
 pp. 42-95. 
 
 ESSAYS I XVI. pp. 19-118. 
 
 ESSAY 
 
 I. Design of the work. 
 
 II. Ditto continued : necessity of attention and 
 thought, and distinction between them. 
 
 III. Style : author s hopes and expectations. 
 
 IV. Defence against charges of arrogance and presump 
 
 tion. 
 
 V. Inexpediency of pious frauds: indifference of 
 
 truth and falsehood denied : objection from the 
 
 impossibility of conveying an adequate notion 
 
 answered. 
 
 VI. Conditions, under which right, though inadequate, 
 
 notions may be taught. 
 
 VII. ( Application of those conditions to publications 
 VIII. < by the press : 1. as between an individual 
 IX. ( and his own conscience. 
 X. Ditto. 2. As between the publisher and the state : 
 
 free press. 
 
 XI. Law of libel: its anomalies and peculiar difficul 
 ties. 
 XIL Despotism and insecurity without a free press 
 
 Charlemagne and Bonaparte. 
 
 XIII. Only solution of the difficulties of the law of libel 
 compatible with a free press: toleration and 
 tolerance. 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 Necessity of 
 
 principles 
 founded in the 
 reason as the 
 
 basis of all 
 genuine expe 
 dience. 
 
 XIV-XVI. 
 pp. 95-118. 
 
 rKSSAY 
 
 XIV. Clearness of conceptions in the understanding 
 essential to purity in the will : duty of commu 
 nicating knowledge. 
 
 XV. Right use of metaphysic reasoning : principles 
 founded in reason the sole root of prudence : dis 
 tinctive powers of the human mind. 
 XVI. Supremacy of the reason : power given by acting 
 f on principle : falsehood and unworthiness of 
 modern principles in taste, morals, and religion. 
 
 Historic 
 
 parallels. 
 
 Essays I. and II. 
 
 pp. 121-134. 
 
 Theory of 
 
 Apparitions. 
 
 Essay III. 
 
 pp. 134-137. 
 
 Review of 
 
 the work and 
 
 prospect. 
 
 Essay IV. 
 
 pp. 137-142. 
 
 On the Reason 
 
 and the 
 Understanding. 
 
 Essay V. 
 pp. 143-150. 
 
 FIRST LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 ESSAYS I-V. pp. 121-150. 
 
 I. Voltaire and Erasmus : Rousseau and Luther. 
 II. Luther s visions in the Warteburg. 
 
 III. Theory to explain Luther s visions : apostrophe on 
 Thomas Wedgwood. 
 
 IV. Purpose of the Landing-Places : summary of the 
 preceding essays: use of the term "reason." 
 
 V. Do. continued : the reason and the understanding 
 distinguished : their mutual and necessary rela 
 tion : eduction of the conscience. 
 
 FIRST SECTION. 
 ON THE PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 ESSAYS I XVI. 
 
 Three systems 
 
 of political 
 
 justice, or 
 
 Three theories 
 
 on the origin of 
 
 Government. 
 
 Essays I-V. 
 
 pp. 153-202. 
 
 pp. 
 
 153-307. 
 
 I System of Hobbes : fear aud the force of custom : 
 
 confutation. 
 
 II. Do. continued: spirit of law: use of the phrase, 
 " original contract." 
 
 III. System of expedience and prudence adopted : 
 
 system of the pure reason : motives for exposing 
 its falsehood. 
 
 IV. Statement of the system : Rousseau s " Social Con 
 
 tract," and Paine s "Rights of Man:" French 
 physiocratic philosophers: Cartwright: confu 
 tation. 
 
 V. Cartwright ; party-spirit : Jacobins and Anti-Jac 
 obins: injudicious treatment of the former by 
 the latter. 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 Personal retro 
 spect. 
 Essay VI. 
 pp. 203-207. 
 
 Political 
 
 Reform. 
 
 Essays VII-IX. 
 
 pp. 208-238. 
 
 International 
 
 Law. 
 
 Essays X-XIV. 
 pp." 239-284. 
 
 Principles of 
 political con 
 duct. 
 
 Essay XV. 
 pp. 285-296. 
 True love of 
 
 liberty. 
 Essay XVI. 
 pp. 296-307. 
 
 VI. The author never a Jacobin : pantisocracy : peace 
 of Amiens, its character and good effects. 
 
 VII. Vulgar errors respecting taxes and taxation : true 
 
 principles : national debt. 
 
 VIII. Classes of political reformers : elective franchise. 
 IX. Catechism preparatory to examination of the prin 
 ciples of the English Government: letter of 
 Decatur s, and anecdotes illustrative of principles. 
 X. Review of circumstances which led to the peace 
 of Amiens, and recommencement of the war, 
 especially with regard to the occupation of Malta, 
 introductory to, and as commentary on, the 
 subject of international law. 
 
 Yj f Interposed in vindication of freedom of thought, 
 J and of the duty of searching out, and abiding by, 
 YTT ] the truth: reason and faith: extracts from 
 "" [Taylor and Bedell. 
 
 XIII. Law of nations : cosmopolitism and nationality. 
 
 XIV. Law of nations continued : modern political econ 
 
 omy : balance of European power : allegoric fable 
 on the seizure of the Danish fleet : defence of the 
 principle. 
 
 XV. Doctrine of general consequences as the best 
 criterion of the right or wrong of particular ac 
 tions not tenable in reason, or safe in practice. 
 
 XVI. Address delivered at Bristol in 1795. 
 
 SECOND LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 Miseries of 
 misgovernment 
 
 in a country 
 nominally free. 
 
 Essay I. 
 
 pp. 311-326, 
 
 Principles of 
 
 true biograj 
 
 Essay IL 
 
 pp. 326-332. 
 
 Miscellaneous. 
 
 Essays 
 III. and IV. 
 pp. 333-343. 
 
 ESSAYS I-IV. pp. 311-343. 
 
 I. Tale of Maria Eleonora Scheming. 
 
 IL Spirit of anecdote-mongering condemned : extract 
 from R. North s Life of Lord Keeper Guilford. 
 
 IIL Fable of Irus (Bonaparte) and Toxaris : Christ 
 mas within, and out of doors in North Germany : 
 extract from Mr. Wordsworth s MS. poem. 
 
 IV. Rabbinical Tales. 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 SECOND SECTION. 
 
 ON THE GROUNDS OF MORALS AND RELIGION, AND THE 
 
 DISCIPLINE OF THE MIND REQUISITE FOR A TRUE 
 
 UNDERSTANDING OF THE SAME. 
 
 ESSAYS i-xi. pp. 347-472. 
 
 Introduction. 
 pp. 347-375. 
 
 Dignity and 
 necessity of 
 speculative phi 
 losophy, and a 
 history of its 
 
 decline. 
 Essays I-III. 
 pp. 376-407. 
 
 Principles of 
 the Science of 
 
 Method. 
 Essays IV-XI. 
 
 pp. 408-472. 
 
 III. 
 
 Letter from Mathetes (Professor "Wilson and Mr. 
 A. Blair) : internal and external difficulties to a 
 mind endeavoring to establish itself on sure 
 principles, moral and intellectual : answered by 
 The Friend (Mr. Wordsworth) : advice and 
 caution. 
 
 Relation of morality and religion : pamphlets of 
 the age of Charles I.: -extract: sanity of true 
 genius : distinction between genius, talent, sense, 
 and cleverness : relative character of the national 
 mind of Germany, England, and France. 
 
 Self-interest and conscience : ethics not founded on 
 utility : honor : universal assent a presumption 
 of truth: ground of belief in miracles: true 
 Christian enthusiasm : mysteries of faith not to 
 be explained by mere human analogies : Taylor s 
 latitudinarianism. 
 
 Greek sophists : their character and principles : 
 separation of ethics from religion : the author s 
 convictions of the nature and results of the his 
 tory of the last century and a half. 
 
 Method, in the will and in the understanding: 
 illustrated from Shakspcare : founded on obser 
 vation of relations^o? tilings": want and excess of 
 generalization : necessity of a mental initiative : 
 definition of method. P*J 
 
 V. 
 VI. 
 VII. 
 
 VIII. 
 IX. 
 
 Two kinds of relations in which objects of mind 
 may be considered : 1. Law : synthetic and 
 analytic process : Plato s view. 
 
 2. Theory : method in the fine arts intermediate : 
 poetry and music : mental initiative in botany : 
 history and estimate of the science : in chemistry. 
 
 Intention of Plato s writings: zoology and John 
 Hunter : theory can not supply the principle of 
 method: nor hypothesis: necessity of an idea: 
 contrast between the state of science as to elec 
 tricity and magnetism : law of polarity. 
 
 True character of Plato: Aristotle: unpleasant 
 side of Bacon s character : Hooke : Kepler : Tycho 
 Brahe : reconcilement of the Platonic and Bacon 
 ian methods. 
 
 Investigation of the Baconian method: shown to 
 be essentially one with the Platonic, but in a dif 
 ferent direction: method the guiding light in 
 education and cultivation. 
 
TABLE OF CONTEXTS. 
 
 xiii 
 
 Principles of 
 the Science of 
 
 Method. 
 (continued.) 
 
 X. Existence of a self-organizing purpose in nature 
 and man : illustrated : operation of this idea in 
 the history of mankind : patriarchal state : cor 
 rupted into a polytheism : early Greeks : their 
 idolatry checked by the physical theology of the 
 mysteries : portion which they represented of the 
 education of man : their discoveries in the region 
 of the pure intellect and success in the arts of 
 imagination contrasted with their crude essays 
 iu the investigation of physical laws and phaenom- 
 cna : Romans : Hebrews the mid-point of a line, 
 towards which the Greeks as the ideal, and the 
 Romans as the material, pole were approximat 
 ing, Christianity the synthesis. 
 
 XI. Trade and Literature essential to a nation : conse 
 quences of the commercial spirit preponderating : 
 difference of ultimate aims in men and nations : 
 evidence of objective reality in man himself: 
 nature and man, union and difference : mere 
 being in its essence : the idea, whence origina 
 ted: revelation: God: the material world made 
 for man : universal laws for the whole tempered 
 by particular laws for the individual in nature 
 and man : causation : invisible nexus : ground of 
 union : difference between the reason and the 
 understanding : what they can respectively 
 achieve : method of the will : religious faith. 
 
 Existence of 
 
 luck or fortune 
 
 under the 
 
 Christian 
 
 scheme. 
 
 Essay I. 
 
 pp. 475-478. 
 
 Notices of the 
 life and charac 
 ter of Sir Alex 
 ander Ball, and 
 of the circum 
 stances of the 
 English occupa 
 tion of Malta. 
 Essays II-VI. 
 pp. 479-522. 
 
 THIRD LANDING-PLACE. 
 ESSAYS i vi. pp. 475-522. 
 
 I. Fortune favors fools : different meanings of the 
 proverb : luck has a real existence in human af 
 fairs : how : invidious use of the phrase. 
 
 II. Impression left by Sir A. B. on the author : state 
 of Malta : corruption. 
 
 III. Personal memoir of Sir A. B. : anecdotes of him. 
 
 IV. Ball and Nelson : Nelson s reliance on him : Ball 
 
 at the battle of the Nile : explosion of the ship 
 L Orient: anecdote. 
 
 V. Ball s habits of mind : conduct during the siege of 
 Valetta : behavior of English to foreigners : 
 Ball s decisive conduct with the court of Naples : 
 unjust and unwise treatment of the Maltese by 
 the British government. 
 
 VI. Ball s popularity in Malta: jealousy of him in the 
 government : discussion of the importance of 
 Malta to this countrv. 
 
 APPENDIX... ..525 
 
! were an author privileged to name his own judge, 
 in addition to moral and intellectual competence I should look 
 round for some man, whose knowledge and opinions had for the 
 greater part been acquired experimentally ; and the practical 
 habits of whose life had put him on his guard with respect to all 
 speculative reasoning, without rendering him insensible to the 
 desirableness of principles more secure than the shifting rules and 
 theories generalized from observations merely empirical, or un 
 conscious in how many departments of knowledge, and with how 
 large a portion even of professional men, such principles are still 
 a desideratum. I would select, too, one who felt kindly, nay, 
 even partially, toward me ; but one whose partiality had its 
 strongest foundations in hope, and more prospective than retro 
 spective would make him quick-sighted in the detection, and un 
 reserved in the exposure, of the deficiencies and defects of each 
 present work, in the anticipation of a more developed future. In 
 you, honored friend ! I have found all these requisites combined 
 and realized : and the improvement, which these essays have 
 derived from your judgment and judicious suggestions, would, of 
 itself, have justified me in accompanying them with a public ac 
 knowledgment of the same. But knowing, as you can not but 
 know, that I owe in great measure the power of having written 
 at all to your medical skill, and to the characteristic good sense 
 which directed its exertion in my behalf; and whatever I may 
 
 * Dedication to the second edition. Ed. 
 
XVI 
 
 have written in happier vein to the influence of your society and 
 to the daily proofs of your disinterested attachment ; knowing, 
 too, in how entire a sympathy with your feelings in this respect 
 the partner of your name has blended the affectionate regards of 
 a sister or daughter with almost a mother s watchful and un 
 wearied solicitudes alike for my health, interest, and tranquillity ; 
 you will not, I trust, be pained, you ought not, I am sure, to 
 be surprised that 
 
TO 
 
 MR. AND MRS. GILLMAN, 
 
 OF HIGHGATE, 
 
 Volumes are bebicaiefc, 
 
 ;N TESTIMONY OF HIGH RESPECT AND GRATEFUL AFFECTION, 
 BY THEIR FRIEND, 
 
 S. T. COLERIDGE. 
 
 October 7, 1818. { 
 Higbgate. i 
 
THE FRIEND, 
 
 ESSAY I. 
 
 Crede mihi, non est parvce fiducice, polliceri opem decertantibus, consilium 
 dubiis, lumen ccecis, xpem dfjectis, refrigtrium fessis. Magna quidem hcec 
 sunt, sifiant; parva, si promittantur. Vcrum ego non tarn aliis legem po- 
 nam, quam legem vobis mece proprice mentis exponam ; quam qui probaverit, 
 teneat ; cui non placuerit, abjiciat. Optarem, fateor, talis esse, qui prodesse 
 possem quam plurimis. PETRARCH. De vita, solitaria.* 
 
 Believe me, it requires no little confidence, to promise help to the strug 
 gling, counsel to the doubtful, light to the blind, hope to the despondent, 
 refreshment to the weary. These are indeed great things, if they be ac 
 complished ; trifles if they exist but in a promise. I, however, aim not -so 
 much to prescribe a law for others, as to set forth the law of my own 
 mind ; which let the man, who shall have approved of it, abide by ; and 
 let him, to whom it shall appear not reasonable, reject it. It is my ear 
 nest wish, I confess, to employ my understanding and acquirements in that 
 mode and direction, in which I may be enabled to benefit the largest num 
 ber possible of my fellow-creatures. 
 
 ANTECEDENTLY to all history, and long glimmering through it 
 as a holy tradition, there presents itself to our imagination an 
 indefinite period, dateless as eternity ; a state rather than a time. 
 For even the sense of succession is lost in the uniformity of the 
 stream. 
 
 It was toward the close of this golden age (the memory of 
 which the self-dissatisfied race of men have everywhere pre 
 served and cherished) when conscience acted in man with the 
 e.ase and uniformity of instinct ; when labor was a sweet name 
 for the activity of sane minds in healthful bodies, and all enjoyed 
 
 * Lib. I. tract, iv. c. 4. Some clauses in the original are omitted, and 
 one or two changes of words have been made, by the Author, in this quota 
 tion. vEtf. 
 
20 THE FRIEND. 
 
 in common the bounteous harvest produced, and gathered in, by 
 common effort ; when there existed in the sexes, and in the in 
 dividuals of each sex, just variety enough to permit and call 
 forth the gentle restlessness and final union of chaste love and 
 Individual attachment, each seeking and finding the beloved one 
 by the natural affinity of their beings ; when the dread Sov 
 ereign of the universe was known only as the universal parent, 
 no altar but the pure heart, and thanksgiving and grateful love 
 the sole sacrifice. 
 
 In this blest age of dignified innocence, one of their honored 
 elders, whose absence they were beginning to notice, entered 
 with hurrying steps the place of their common assemblage at 
 noon, and instantly attracted the general attention and wonder 
 by the perturbation of his gestures, and by a strange trouble both 
 in his eyes and over his whole countenance. After a short but 
 deep silence, when the first buzz of varied inquiry was becoming 
 audible, the old man moved toward a small eminence, and hav 
 ing ascended it, he thus addressed the hushed and listening com 
 pany : 
 
 "In the warmth of the approaching mid-day, as I was repos 
 ing in the vast cavern, out of which, from its northern portal, 
 issues the river that winds through our vale, a voice powerful, 
 yet not from its loudness, suddenly hailed me. Guided by my 
 ear, I looked toward the supposed place of the sound for some 
 form, from which it had proceeded. I beheld nothing but the 
 glimmering walls of the cavern. Again, as I was turning round, 
 the same voice hailed me : and whithersoever I turned my face, 
 thence did the voice seem to proceed. I stood still, therefore, 
 and in reverence awaited its continuation. Sojourner of earth ! 
 (these were its words) hasten to the meeting of thy brethren, 
 and the words which thou now nearest, the same do thou repeat 
 unto them. On the thirtieth morn from the morrow s sunrising, 
 and during the space of thrice three days and thrice three nights, 
 a thick cloud will cover the sky, and a heavy rain fall on the 
 earth. Go ye therefore, ere the thirtieth sun arise, retreat to the 
 cavern of the river, and there abide, till the clouds have passed 
 away, and the rain be over and gone. For know ye of a cer 
 tainty that whomever that rain wetteth, on him, yea, on him 
 and on his children s children will fall the spirit of madness. 
 
ESSAY I. 21 
 
 Yes ! madness was the word of the voice : what this be, I know 
 not ! But at the sound of the word trembling came upon me, 
 and a feeling which I would not have had ; and I remained 
 even as ye beheld and now behold me." 
 
 The old man ended, and retired. Confused murmurs suc 
 ceeded, and wonder, and doubt. Day followed day, and every 
 day brought with it a diminution of the awe impressed. They 
 could attach no image, no remembered sensations, to the threat. 
 The ominous morn arrived, the prophet had retired to the ap 
 pointed cavern, and there remained alone during the appointed 
 time. On the tenth morning, he emerged from his place of 
 shelter, and sought his friends and brethren. But alas ! how 
 affrightful the change ! Instead of the common children of one 
 great family, working toward the same aim by reason, even as 
 the bees in their hives by instinct, he looked and beheld, here a 
 miserable wretch watching over a heap of hard and innutritious 
 small substances, which he had dug out of the earth, at the cost 
 of mangled limbs and exhausted faculties. This he appeared to 
 worship, at this he gazed, even as the youths of the vale had 
 been accustomed to gaze at their chosen virgins in the first sea 
 son of their choice. There he saw a former companion speeding 
 on and panting after a butterfly, or a withered leaf whirling on 
 ward in the breeze ; and another with pale and distorted coun 
 tenance following close behind, and still stretching forth a dagger 
 to stab his precursor in the back. In another place he observed 
 a whole troop of his fellow-men famished and in fetters, yet led 
 by one of their brethren who had enslaved them, and pressing 
 furiously onward, in the hope of famishing and enslaving. another 
 troop moving in an opposite direction. For the first time, the 
 prophet missed his accustomed power of distinguishing between 
 his dreams and his waking perceptions. He stood gazing and 
 motionless, when several of the race gathered around him, and 
 inquired of each other, Who is this man ? how strangely he 
 looks ! how wild ! a worthless idler ! exclaims one : assuredly, 
 a very dangerous madman ! cries a second. In short, from 
 words they proceeded to violence : till harassed, endangered, 
 solitary in a world of forms like his own, without sympathy, 
 without object of love, he at length espied in some foss or furrow 
 a quantity of the maddening water still unevaporated, and ut 
 tering the last words of reason, IT is IN VAIN TO BE SANE IN A 
 

 22 THE FKIEND. 
 
 WORLD OF MADMEN, plunged and rolled himself in the liquid 
 poison, and came out as mad as, and not more wretched than, 
 his neighbors and acquaintances. 
 
 The plan of The Friend is comprised in the motto to this es 
 say. This tale or allegory seems to me to contain the objec 
 tions to its practicability in all their strength. Either, says 
 the skeptic, you- are the blind offering to lead the blind, or you 
 are talking the language of sight to those who do not possess 
 the sense of seeing. If you mean to be read, try to entertain, 
 and do not pretend to instruct. To such objections it would be 
 amply sufficient, on my system of faith, to answer, that we are 
 not all blind, but all subject to distempers of the mental sight, 
 \ differing in kind and in degree ; that though all men are in 
 / error, they are not all in the same error, nor at the same time ; 
 ) and that each, therefore, may possibly heal the other, even as 
 ( two or more physicians, all diseased in their general health, yet 
 \under the immediate action of the disease on different days, 
 may remove or alleviate the complaints of each other. But in 
 respect to the entertainingness of moral writings, if in entertain 
 ment be included whatever delights the imagination or affects 
 the generous passions, so far from rejecting such a mean of per 
 suading the human SQ ul, my very system compels me to defend 
 riot only the propriety, but the absolute necessity, of adopting it, 
 if we really intend to render our fellow-creatures better or wiser. 
 But it is with dullness as with obscurity. It may be positive, 
 and the author s fault ; but it may likewise be relative, and if 
 the author has presented his bill of fare at the portal, the reader 
 has himself only to blame. The main question then is, of what 
 class are the persons to be entertained ? " One of the later school 
 of the Grecians (says Lord Bacon) examineth the matter, and is 
 at a stand to think what should be in it that men should love 
 lies, where neither they make for pleasure, as with poets ; nor 
 for advantage, as with the merchant ; but for the lie s sake. 
 But I can not tell : this same truth is a naked and open daylight, 
 that doth not show the masques and mummeries and triumphs 
 of the world half so stately and daintily, as candle-lights. Truth 
 may perhaps come to the price of a pearl, that showeth best by 
 day ; but it will not rise to the price of a diamond or carbuncle, 
 that showeth best in varied lights. A mixture of a lie doth ever 
 add pleasure. Doth any man doubt that if there were taken 
 
ESSAY I. 23 
 
 from men s minds, vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valua 
 tions, imaginations as one would, and the like, but it would leave 
 the minds of a number of men, poor shrunken things, full of 
 melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves ?"* 
 
 A melancholy, a too general, but not, I trust, a universal 
 truth ! and even where it does apply, yet in many instances 
 not irremediable. Such at least must have been my persuasion ; or 
 the present volumes must have been wittingly written to no pur 
 pose. If I believed our nature fettered to all this wretchedness 
 of head and heart by an absolute and innate necessity, at least 
 by a necessity which no human power, no efforts of reason or 
 eloquence, could remove or lessen ; I should deem it even pre 
 sumptuous to aim at other or higher object than that of amusing 
 a small portion of the reading public. 
 
 And why not ? whispers worldly prudence. To amuse, though 
 only to amuse, our visitors is wisdom as well as good-nature, 
 where it is presumption to attempt their amendment. And 
 truly it would be most convenient to me in respects of no trifling 
 importance, if I could persuade myself to take the advice. Re 
 leased by these principles from all moral obligation, and ambi 
 tious of procuring pastime and self-oblivion for a race, which 
 could have nothing noble to remember, nothing desirable to an 
 ticipate, I might aspire even to the praise of the critics and 
 dilettanti of the higher circles of society ; of some trusty guide 
 (:{ liiiinl fashion; some ])! -;is;in1 ;iii;:!yst oftastej ; S it exists Imiii 
 in the palate and the soul ; some living gauge and mete-wand 
 of past and present genius. But alas ! my former studies would 
 still have left a wrong bias ! If instead of perplexing my com 
 mon sense with the flights of Plato, and of stiffening over the 
 meditations of the imperial Stoic, I had been laboring to imbibe 
 the gay spirit of a Casti, or had employed my erudition, for the 
 benefit of the favored few, in elucidating the interesting deformi 
 ties of ancient Greece and India, what might I not have hoped 
 from the suffrage of those, who turn in weariness from the Para 
 dise Lost, because compared with the prurient heroes and gro 
 tesque monsters of Italian romance, or even with the narrative 
 dialogues of the melodious Metastasio, that adventurous song, 
 
 Which justifies the ways of God to man, 
 * Essays. I. Of Truth. Ed. 
 
24 THE FRIEND. 
 
 has been found a poor substitute for a Grimaldi, a most inapt 
 medicine for an occasional propensity to yawn ! ffor, as hath 
 been decided, to fill up pleasantly the brief intervals of fashion 
 able pleasures, and above all to charm away the du^ky gnome 
 of ennui) in the chief and appropriate business of the poet and 
 the novelist"! This duty uniultilled, Apollo will have lavished 
 Ills host gills in vain; and Urania henceforth must he content 
 to inspire astronomers alone, and leave the sons of verse to more 
 amusing patronesses. And yet and yet but it will be time to 
 f be serious, when my visitors have sat down. 
 

 ESSAY II. 
 
 Sic oportf.t ad librum, presertim miscellanei generis, leyendum acccderc Icc- 
 torem, ut solct ad convivium conviva civil is. Oonvivator annititur omnibus 
 satisfacere : ct tamen si quid apponitur, quod hujus aut illiuc, palato non 
 resoondeat, ct hie el ille urbane disximulant, et alia fercula probc/int, ne quid 
 contristent convivatorem. Quis enim eum convivam ferat, qui tantum hoc 
 animo veniat ad mensam, ut carpens qua apponunter, nee vescatur ipse, nee 
 alias vesci sinat ? Et tamen his quoque reperias inciviliores,- 1 qui palam, qui 
 sine Jin e damnent ac lacerent opus, quod nunquam legerint. Ast, hoc plus- 
 quam sycophanticum est damnare quod nescias. ERASMUS. 
 
 A reader should sit down to a book, especially of the miscellaneous kind, 
 as a well-behaved visitor does to a banquet. The master of the feast exerts 
 himself to satisfy all his guests ; but if after all his care and pains there 
 should still be something or other put on the table that does not suit this 
 or that person s taste, they politely pass it over without noticing the cir 
 cumstance, and commend other dishes, that they may not distress th^ir kind 
 host, or throw any damp on his spirits. For who. could tolerate a guest 
 that accepted an invitation to your table with no other purpose but that of 
 finding fault with every thing put before him, neither eating himself, nor 
 suffering others to eat in comfort. And yet you may fall in with a still 
 worse set than even these, with churls that in all companies and without 
 stop or stay, will condemn and pull to pieces a work which they have never 
 read. But this sinks below the baseness of an informer, yea, though he 
 were a false witness to boot ! The man, who abuses a thing of which he is 
 utterly ignorant, unites the infamy of both and in addition to this, makes 
 himself the pander and sycophant of his own and other men s envy and ma 
 lignity. 
 
 THE musician may tune his instrument in private, ere his 
 audience have yet assembled ; the architect conceals the founda 
 tion of his building beneath the superstructure. But an author s 
 harp must be tuned in the hearing of those, who are to under 
 stand its after-harmonies ; the foundation stones of his edifice 
 must lie open to common view, or his friends will hesitate to 
 trust themselves beneath the roof. 
 
 From periodical literature the general reader deems himself 
 
 VOL. n. B 
 
20 THE FRIEND. 
 
 entitled to expect amusement, and some degree of information, 
 and if the writer can convey any instruction at the same time, 
 and without demanding any additional thought (as the Irishman, 
 in the hackneyed jest, is said to have passed off a light guinea 
 between two good halfpence), this supererogatory merit will not 
 perhaps he taken amiss. Kow amusement in and for itself may 
 be afforded by the gratification either of the curiosity or of the 
 passions. I use the former word as distinguished from the love 
 of knowledge, and the latter in distinction from those emotions 
 which arise in well-ordered minds, from the perception of truth 
 or falsehood, virtue or vice : emotions, which are always pre 
 ceded by thought, and linked with improvement. Again, all in 
 formation pursued without any wish of becoming wiser or better 
 thereby, I class among the gratifications of mere curiosity, whether 
 it be sought for in a .light novel or a grave history. We may 
 therefore omit the word information, as included either in amuse 
 ment or instruction . 
 
 The present work is an experiment ; not whether a writer 
 may honestly overlook the one, or successfully omit the other, 
 of the two elements themselves, which serious readers at least 
 persuade themselves that they pursue ; but whether a change 
 might not be hazarded of the usual order, in which periodical 
 writers have in general attempted to convey them. Having my 
 self experienced that no delight either in kind or degree is equal 
 to that which accompanies the distinct perception of a funda 
 mental truth, relative to our moral being ; having, long after the 
 completion of what is ordinarily called a learned education, dis 
 covered a new world of intellectual profit opening on me not 
 from any new opinions, but lying, as it were, at, the roots of those 
 which I had been taught in childhood in my catechism and 
 spelling-book ; there arose a soothing hope in my mind that a 
 lesser public might be found, composed of persons susceptible of 
 the same delight, and desirous of attaining it by the same pro 
 cess. I heard a whisper too from within, (I trust that it pro 
 ceeded from conscience, not vanity) that a duty was performed in 
 the endeavor to render it as much easier to them, than it had 
 been to me, as could be effected by the united efforts of my un 
 derstanding and imagination. 
 
 Actuated by this impulse, the writer wishes, in the following 
 essays, to convey not instruction merely, but fundamental in- 
 
ESSAY II. 27 
 
 struction ; not so much to show the reader this or that fact, as 
 to kindle his own torch for him, and leave it to himself to choose 
 i the particular objects, which he might wish to examine by its 
 light. The Friend does not indeed exclude from his plan occa 
 sional interludes, and vacations of innocent entertainment and 
 promiscuous information, but still in the main he proposes to 
 himself the communication of such delight as rewards the march 
 of truth, rather than to collect the flowers which diversify its 
 track, in order to present them apart from the homely, yet food- 
 ful or medicinal herbs, among which they had grown. To refer 
 men s opinions to their absolute principles, and thence their feel 
 ings to the appropriate objects, and in their due degrees ; arid 
 finally, to apply the principles thus ascertained, to the formation 
 of steadfast convictions concerning the most important questions 
 of politics, morality, and religion these are to be the objects and 
 the contents of his work. 
 
 Themes like these not even the genius of a Plato or a Bacon 
 could render intelligible, without demanding from the reader 
 thought sometimes, and attention generally. By thought I here 
 mean the voluntary production in our own minds of those states 
 of consciousness, to which, as to his fundamental facts, the writer 
 has referred us : while attention has for its object the order and 
 connection of thoughts and images, each of which is in itself 
 already and familiarly known. Thus the elements of geometry 
 require attention only ; but the analysis of our primary faculties, 
 and the investigation of all the absolute grounds of religion and 
 morals, are impossible without energies of thought in addition to 
 the effort of attention. The Friend will not attempt to disguise 
 from his readers that both attention and thought are efforts, and 
 the latter a most difficult and laborious effort ; nor from himself, 
 that to require it often or for any continuance of time, is incom 
 patible with the nature of the present publication, even were it 
 less incongruous than it unfortunately is with the present habits 
 and pursuits of Englishmen. Accordingly I shall be on my 
 guard to make the essays as few as possible, which would require 
 from a well-educated reader any energy of thought and voluntary 
 abstraction. 
 
 But attention, I confess, will be requisite throughout, except 
 in the excursive and miscellaneous essays that will be found inter 
 posed between each of the three main divisions of the work. On 
 
28 THE FKIKND. 
 
 whatever subject the mind feels a lively interest, attention, 
 
 though always an eflbrt, becomes a delightful ellbrt. I should 
 ho quite at, case, could I secure lor the whole work as much of it, 
 an a card party of earnest whist-players often expend in a single 
 evening, or a lady in the making-tip of a fashionable dress. But 
 where no interest previously exists, attention (as every school 
 master known) can he procured only hy terror: which is the true 
 reason why the majority of mankind learn nothing systematically, 
 except as school-hoys or apprentices. 
 
 f Happy shall I he, from other motives besi^os those of self-inter- 
 /est, if no fault or deficiency on my part shall prevent the work 
 ji rom furnishing a. presumptive proof, thai there are still to ho 
 Mound among us a respectable number of readers who art; desirous 
 Jto derive pleasure from the consciousness of being instructed or 
 I meliorated : and who (eel a sufficient interest as to the foundations 
 /of their own opinions in literature, polities, morals, and religion, 
 i to afford that degree of attention, without which, however men 
 /may deceive themselves, no actual progress ever was or ever eau 
 )\w made in that knowledge, which supplies at once both strength 
 I and nourishment. 
 
ESSAY III. 
 
 A A A <if Trap&aftov T//V TK%VI]V irapH aov, 
 Qifiovaav vni) KOfnraa/LiiiTuv, KCIC pi)fj.uTuv 
 
 uTiarov avrijv, /cat ro 
 /f Kal TrrpnruToic Kal TEvrtdoiat, [iiKpol? 
 XvXoi (Jt^oT f oruuv^uuTUVf UTTO f3if3^,iti)Vf I ITT 7/OcJv. 
 
 AuisToni. RAN^E. 939. 
 
 IMITATION* 
 
 When I received the Muse from you, I found her puffed nud pampered, 
 
 With pompous sentences and terms, a cumbrous huge virago. 
 
 My first attention was applied to make her look genteelly, 
 
 And bring her to a moderate bulk by dint of lighter diet, 
 
 I fed her with plain household phrase, and cool familiar salad, 
 
 With water-gruel episode, with sentimental jelly, 
 
 With moral mince-meat: till at length I brought her within compass. 
 
 FttERK. 
 
 IN the preceding essay I named the present undertaking an 
 experiment. The explanation will be found in the following 
 letter, written to a correspondent during thcjirst attempt, and 
 before the plan was discontinued from an original error in the 
 mode of circulation. 
 
 When I first undertook the present publication for the sake 
 and with the avowed object of referring men in all things to 
 principles or fundamental truths, I was well aware of the obsta 
 cles which the plan itself would oppose to my success. For in 
 
 * This imitation is printed here by permission of the author, from a 
 series of free translations of selected scenes from Aristophanes : a work, of 
 which (should the author be persuaded to make it public) it is my deliberate 
 judgment, that it will form an important epoch in English literature, and 
 open out sources of metrical and rhythmical wealth in the very heart of our 
 language, of which few, if any, among us are aware. 
 
00 THE FRIEND. 
 
 order to the regular attainment of this object, all the dryest and 
 least attractive essays must appear in the beginning, and thus 
 subject me to the necessity of demanding effort or soliciting pa 
 tience in that part of the work, where it was most my interest 
 to secure the confidence of my readers by winning their favor. 
 Though I dared warrant for the pleasantness of the journey on 
 the whole ; though I might promise that the road would, for the 
 far* greater part of it, be found plain and easy, that it would pass 
 through countries of various prospect, and that at every stage 
 there would be a change of company ; it still remained a heavy 
 disadvantage, that I. had to start at the foot of a high and steep 
 hill : and I foresaw, not without occasional feelings of despond 
 ency, that during the slow and laborious ascent it would require 
 no common management to keep my passengers in good-humor 
 with the vehicle and its driver. As far as this inconvenience 
 could be palliated by sincerity and previous confession, I "have no 
 reason to accuse myself of neglect. In the prospectus^ of The 
 Friend, which for this cause I reprinted and annexed to the first 
 essay, I felt it my duty to inform such as might be inclined to 
 patronize the publication, that I must submit to be esteemed dull 
 by those who sought chiefly for amusement : and this I hazarded 
 as a general confession, though in my own mind I felt a cheerful 
 confidence that it would apply almest exclusively to the earlier 
 essays. I could not therefore be surprised, however much I may 
 have been depressed, by the frequency with which you hear The 
 Friend complained of for its abstruseness and obscurity ; nor did 
 the highly flattering expressions, with which you accompanied 
 your communication, prevent me from feeling its truth to the 
 whole extent. 
 
 An author s pen, like children s legs, improves by exercise. 
 That part of the blame which rests on myself, I am exerting my 
 best faculties to remove. A man long accustomed to silent and 
 solitary meditation, in proportion as he increases the power of 
 thinking in long and connected trains, is apt to lose or lessen the 
 talent of communicating his thoughts with grace and perspicuity. 
 Doubtless too, I have in some measure injured my style, in respect 
 to its facility and popularity, from having almost confined my 
 reading, of late years, to the works of the ancients and those of 
 the elder writers in the modern languages. We insensibly imitate 
 * See Appendix A. Ed. 
 
ESSAY III. 31 
 
 what we habitually admire ; and an aversion to the epigrammatic 
 unconnected periods of the fashionable Anglo-Gallic an taste has 
 too often made me willing to forget, that the stat6ly march 
 and difficult evolutions, which characterize "the eloquence of 
 Hooker, Bacon, Milton, and Jeremy Taylor, are, notwithstanding 
 their intrinsic excellence, still less suited to a periodical essay. 
 This fault I am now endeavoring to correct ; though I can never 
 *o far sacrifice rny judgment to the desire of being immediately 
 popular, as to cast my sentences in the French moulds, or affect 
 a style which an ancient critic would have deemed purposely 
 invented for persons troubled with the asthma to read, and for 
 those to comprehend who labor under the more pitiable asthma 
 of a short-wittcd intellect. It can not but be injurious to the 
 human mind never to be called into effort : the habit of receiving 
 pleasure without an v exertion of thought, by the mere excitement 
 of curiosity and sensibility, maybe justly ranked among the worst 
 effects of habitual novel reading. It is true that these short and 
 unconnected sentences are easily and instantly understood : but 
 it is equally true, that wanting all the cement of thought as well 
 as of style, all the connections, and (if you will forgive so trivial 
 a metaphor) all the hooks-and-eyes of the memory, they are 
 easily forgotten : or rather, it is scarcely possible that they should 
 be remembered. Nor is it less true, that those who confine their 
 reading to such books dwarf their own faculties, and finally re- 
 duce their understandings to a deplorable imbecility : the fact ^du 
 mention, andwhich I shall hereafter make use of, is a fair in 
 stance and a striking illustration. Like idle morning visitors, the 
 brisk arid breathless periods hurry in and hurry off in quick and 
 profitless succession ; each indeed for the moments of its stay pre 
 vents the pain of vacancy, while it indulges the love of sloth ; 
 but all together they leave the mistress of the house (the soul, I 
 mean) flat and exhausted, incapable of attending to her own con 
 cerns, and unfitted for the conversation of more rational guests. 
 
 1 know you will not suspect me of fostering so idle a hope, as 
 that of obtaining acquittal by recrimination ; or think that I am 
 attacking one fault, in order that its opposite may escape notice 
 in the noise and smoke of the battery. On the contrary, I shall 
 do my best, and even make all allowable sacrifices, to render 
 my manner more attractive and my matter more generally inter 
 esting. Iii the establishment of principles and fundamental doc- 
 
C2 THE FRIEND. 
 
 triues, I must of necessity require the attention of my reader to 
 become my fellow-laborer. The primary facts essential to the 
 intelligibility of my principles I can prove to others only as far 
 as I can prevail- on them to retire into themselves and make 
 their own minds the objects of their steadfast attention. But, on 
 the other hand, I feel too deeply the importance of the convic 
 tions, which first impelled me to the present undertaking, to leave 
 miattempted any honorable means of recommending them to as 
 wide a circle as possible. 
 
 Hitherto I have been employed in laying the foundation of my 
 work. But the proper merit of a foundation is its massiveness 
 and solidity. The conveniences and ornaments, the gilding and 
 stucco" work, the sunshine and sunny prospects, will come with 
 the superstructure. Yet I dare not flatter myself, that any en 
 deavors of mine, compatible with the duty I owe to truth and 
 the hope of permanent utility, will render The Friend agreeable 
 to the majority of what is called the reading public. I never 
 expected it. How indeed could I, when I was to borrow so little 
 from the influence of passing events, and when I had absolutely 
 excluded from my plan all appeals to personal curiosity and per 
 sonal interests ? Yet even this is not rny greatest impediment. 
 No real information can be conveyed, no important errors recti 
 fied, no widely injurious prejudices rooted up, without requiring 
 some effort of thought on the part of the reader. But the obsti 
 nate (and toward a contemporary writer, the contemptuous) 
 aversion to intellectual effort is the mother evil of all which I 
 had proposed to war against, the queen bee in the hive of our 
 errors and misfortunes, both private and national. To solicit the 
 attention of those, on whom these debilitating causes have acted 
 to their full extent, Avould be no less absurd than to recommend 
 exercise with the dumb-bells, as the only mode of cure, to a pa 
 tient paralytic in both arms. You well know, that my expecta 
 tions were more modest as well as more rational. I hoped, that 
 my readers in general would be aware of the impracticability of 
 suiting every essay to every taste in any period of the work ; and 
 that they would not attribute wholly to the author, but in part 
 to the necessity of his plan, the austerity and absence of the 
 lighter graces in the first fifteen or twenty numbers. In my 
 cheerful moods I sometimes flattered myself, that a few even 
 among those, who foresaw that my lucubrations would at all 
 
ESSAY III. 33 
 
 times require more attention than from the nature of their own 
 employments they could afford them, might yet find a pleasure 
 in supporting The Friend during its infancy, so as to give it a 
 chance of attracting the notice of others, to whom its style and 
 subjects might be better adapted. But my main anchor was the 
 hope, that when circumstances gradually enabled me to adopt 
 the ordinary means of making the publication generally known, 
 there might be found throughout the kingdom a sufficient num 
 ber of meditative minds, who, entertaining similar convictions 
 with myself, and gratified by the prospect of seeing them re 
 duced to form and system, would take a warm interest in the 
 work from the very circumstance, that it wanted those allure 
 ments of transitory interests, which render particular patronage 
 superfluous, and for the brief season of their blow and fragrance 
 attract the eye of thousands, who would pass unregarded 
 
 flower s 
 
 Of sober tint, and herbs of med cinable powers. 
 
 In these three introductory essays, the Friend has endeavored 
 to realize his promise of giving an honest bill of fare, both as to 
 the objects and the style of the work. With reference to both I 
 conclude with a prophecy of Simon Grynaeus, from his premoni 
 tion to the candid reader, prefixed to Ficinus s translation of 
 Plato, published at Leyden, 1557. How far it has been gradu 
 ally fulfilled in this country since the Revolution in 1688, I leave 
 
 to my candid and intelligent readers to determine : 
 
 ^_ > 
 
 Ac dolet mihi quidem deliciis literarum incscatos subito jam 
 homines adeo esse, prtesertim qui Christianas se profitentur , ut 
 legere nisi quod ad presentem gustumfacit, sustineant nihil : 
 unde et disciplines et philosophia ipsa jam fere prorsus etiam a 
 doctis negliguntur. Quod quidem propositum studiorum nisz 
 mature corrigetur, tarn magnum rebus incommodum dabit, quam 
 dedit barbaries olim. Pertinax res barbaries est, fateor ; sed 
 minus potent tamen, quam ilia persuasa prudcntia literarum si 
 ratione caret, sapientice virtutisque specie misere lectores circum- 
 ducens. * * 
 
 Succedet igitur, ut arbitror, hand ita multo post, pro rusti- 
 
34 THE FRIEND. 
 
 cana sceculi nostri ruditate, captatrix ilia blandiloquentia, robur 
 animi virilis omne, omncm virtutem masculam, projligatura, 
 nisi cavetur* 
 
 In very truth, it grieveth me that men, those especially who 
 profess themselves to be Christians, should be so taken with the 
 sweet baits of literature that they can endure to read nothing 
 but what gives them immediate gratification, no matter how low 
 or sensual it may be. Consequently, the more austere and disci 
 plinary branches of philosophy itself are almost wholly neglected, 
 even by the learned. A course of study (if such reading, with 
 such a purpose in view, could deserve that name) which, if not 
 corrected in time, will occasion worse consequences than even 
 barbarism did in the times of our forefathers. Barbarism is, I 
 own, a wilful headstrong thing ; but with all its blind obstinacy 
 it has less power of doing harm than this self-sufficient, self-satis 
 fied plain good common sense sort of writing, this prudent sale 
 able popular style of composition, if it be deserted by reason and 
 scientific insight pitiably decoying the minds of men by an impos 
 ing show of amiableness, and practical wisdom, so that the de 
 lighted reader knowing nothing knows all about almost every 
 thing. There will succeed, therefore, in my opinion, and that 
 too within no long time, to the rudeness and rusticity of our age, 
 that ensnaring meretricious popularness in literature, with all 
 the tricksy humilities of the ambitious candidates for the favor 
 able suffrages of the judicious public, which if we do not take 
 good care will break up and scatter before it all robustness and 
 manly vigor of intellect, all masculine fortitude of virtue. 
 
 W 
 
 * In the original of this passage, the -words gulam and mortales stand re 
 spectively for prtesentem gustum and lectores. Ed. 
 
ESSAY IV. 
 
 Si modo quce natura et ratione concessa sint, assumpserimus, prcesump- 
 tionis suspicio a nobis quam longissitne abesse debct. Multa antiquitati, no- 
 bismet nihil, arrogamtis. Nihilne vos ? Nihil mehercule, nisi quod omnia 
 omni animo veritati arrogamus et sanctimonies. 
 
 ULE. Rixov. De Controversiis. 
 
 If we assume only what nature and reason have granted, with no shadow 
 of right can we be suspected of presumption. To antiquity we arrogate 
 many things, to ourselves nothing. Nothing ? Aye, nothing : unless in 
 deed it be, that with all our strength we arrogate all things to truth and 
 moral purity. 
 
 IT has been remarked by the celebrated Hailer, that we are 
 deaf while we are yawning. The same act of drowsiness that 
 stretches open our mouths, closes our ears. It is much the same 
 in acts of the understanding. A lazy half-attention amounts to 
 a mental yawn. "Where then a subject, that demands thought, 
 has been thoughtfully treated, and Avith an exact and patient 
 derivation from its principles, we must be willing to exert a por 
 tion of the same effort, and to think Avit.h the author, or the au 
 thor Avill have thought in vain for us. It makes little difference 
 "for the time being, whether there he an hint-its oscitans in the 
 reader s attention, or an hiatus lacrymabilis in the author s 
 manuscript. When this occurs during the perusal of a work ot 
 known authority and established fame, we honestly lay the limit 
 on our own deficiency, or on the unfitness of our present mood . 
 but when it is a contemporary production, over which we have 
 been nodding, it is far more .pleasant to pronounce it insufferably 
 dull and obscure. Indeed, as charity begins at home, it would 
 be unreasonable to expect that a reader should charge himself 
 with lack of intellect, when the effect may be equally well ac 
 counted for by declaring the author unintelligible ; or that he 
 should accuse his own inattention, when by half a dozen phrases 
 
GO THE FKIEND. 
 
 of abuse, as "heavy stuff, metaphysical jargon," &c., he can at 
 once excuse his laziness, and gratify his pride, scorn, and envy. 
 To similar impulses we must attribute the praises of a true mod 
 ern reader, when he meets with a work in the true modern 
 taste : namely, either in skipping, unconnected, short-winded, 
 asthmatic sentences, as easy to be understood as impossible to 
 be remembered, in which the merest common-place acquires a 
 momentary poignancy, a petty titillating sting, from affected point 
 and wilful antithesis ; or else in strutting and rounded periods, 
 in which the emptiest truisms are blown up into illustrious bub 
 bles by help of film and inflation. " Aye !" (quoth the delighted 
 reader) " this is sense, this is genius ! this I understand and ad 
 mire ! I have thought the very same a hundred times myself!" 
 In other words, this man has reminded me of my own clever 
 ness, and therefore I admire him. Oh ! for one piece of egotism 
 that presents itself under its own honest bare face of I myself I, 
 there are fifty that steal out in the mask of tu-isms and ille-isms f 
 It has ever been my opinion, that an excessive solicitude to 
 avoid the use of our first personal pronoun, more often has its 
 source in conscious selfishness than in true self-oblivion. A quiet 
 observer of human follies may often amuse or sadden his thoughts 
 by detecting a perpetual feeling of purest egotism through a long 
 masquerade of disguises, the half of which, had old Proteus been 
 master of as many, would have wearied out the patience of 
 Menelaus. I say, the patience only : for it w r ould ask more than 
 the simplicity of Polypheme, with his one eye extinguished, to 
 be deceived by so poor a repetition of Nobody. Yet I can with 
 strictest truth assure my readers that with a pleasure combined 
 with a sense of weariness, I see the nigh approach of that point 
 of my labors, in which I can convey my opinions and the work 
 ings of my heart, without reminding the reader obtrusively of 
 myself. But the frequency with which I have spoken in my 
 own person, recalls my apprehensions to the second danger, which 
 it was rny hope to guard against ; the probable charge of arro 
 gance, or presumption, both for daring to dissent from the opin 
 ions of great authorities, and, in my following numbers perhaps, 
 from the general opinion concerning the true value of certain 
 authorities deemed great. The word presumption, I appropriate 
 to the internal feeling, and arrogance to the way and manner of 
 outwardly expressing ourselves. 
 
ESSAY IV. 37 
 
 As no man can rightfully be condemned without reference to 
 some definite law, by the knowledge of which he might have 
 avoided the given fault, it is necessary so to defme^the constitu 
 ent qualities and conditions of arrogance, that a reason may be 
 assignable why we pronounce one man guilty and acquit another. 
 For merely to call a person arrogant or most arrogant, can con 
 vict no one of the vice except perhaps the accuser. I remember, 
 when a young man who had left his books and a glass of water 
 lo join a convivial party, each of whom had nearly finished his 
 second bottle, Avas pronounced very drunk by the whole party 
 he looked so strange and pale ! Many a man, who has contrived 
 to hide his ruling passion or predominant defect from himself, 
 will betray the same to dispassionate observers, by his proneness 
 on all occasions to suspect or accuse others of it. Now arrogance 
 and presumption, like all other moral qualities, must be shown 
 by some act or conduct : and this too must be an act that im 
 plies, if not an immediate concurrence of the will, yet some 
 faulty constitution of the moral habits. For all criminality sup 
 poses its essentials to have been within the power of the agent. 
 Either, therefore, the facts adduced do of themselves convey 
 the whole proof of the charge, and the question rests on the truth 
 or accuracy with which they have been stated ; or they acquire 
 their character from the circumstances. I have looked into a 
 ponderous review of the corpuscular philosophy by a Sicilian Jes 
 uit, in which the acrimonious Father frequently expresses his 
 doubt, whether he should pronounce Boyle or Newton more im 
 pious than presumptuous, or more presumptuous than impious. 
 They had both attacked the reigning opinions on most important 
 subjects, opinions sanctioned by the greatest names of antiquity, 
 and by the general suffrage of their learned contemporaries or 
 immediate predecessors. Locke was assailed with a full cry 
 for his presumption in having deserted the philosophical system 
 at that time generally received by the universities of Europe ; 
 and of late years Dr. Priestley bestowed the epithets of arrogant 
 and insolent on Reid, Beattie, &c., for presuming to arraign 
 certain opinions of Mr. Locke, himself repaid in kind by many 
 of his own countrymen for his theological novelties. It will 
 scarcely be affirmed, that these accusations were all of them just, 
 or that any of them were fit or courteous. Must we therefore 
 say, that in order to avow doubt or disbelief of a popular persua- 
 
38 THE FRIEND. 
 
 sion without arrogance, it is required that the dissentient should 
 know himself to possess the genius, and foreknow that he should 
 acquire the reputation, of Locke, Newton, Boyle, or even of a 
 Reid or Beattie ? But as this knowledge and prescience are 
 impossible in the strict sense of the words, and could mean no 
 more than a strong inward conviction, it is manifest that such a 
 rule, if it were universally established, would encourage the pre 
 sumptuous, and condemn modest and humble minds alone to 
 silence. And as this silence could not acquit the individual s 
 own mind of presumption, unless it were accompanied by con 
 scious acquiescence ; modesty itself must become an inert quality, 
 which even in private society never displays its charms more 
 unequivocally than in its mode of reconciling moral deference 
 with intellectual courage, and general diffidence with sincerity 
 in the avowal of the particular conviction. 
 
 We must seek then elsewhere for the true marks, by which 
 presumption or arrogance may be detected, and on which the 
 charge may be grounded with little hazard of mistake or injus 
 tice. And as I confine my present observations to literature, I 
 deem such criteria neither difficult to determine nor to apply. 
 The first mark, as it appears to me, is a frequent bare assertion 
 of opinions not generally received, without condescending to pre 
 fix or annex the facts arid reasons on which such opinions were 
 formed ; especially if this absence of logical courtesy is supplied 
 by contemptuous or abusive treatment of such as happen to doubt 
 of, or oppose, the decisive ipsc dixi. But to assert, however 
 nakedly, that a passage in a lewd novel, in which the Sacred 
 Writings are denounced as more likely to pollute the young and 
 innocent mind than a romance notorious for its indecency to as 
 sert, I say, that such a passage argues equal impudence and 
 ignorance in its author, at the time of writing and publishing 
 it this is not arrogance ; although to a vast majority of the 
 decent part of our countrymen it would be superfluous as a truism, 
 if it were exclusively an author s business to convey or revive 
 knowledge, and not sometimes his duty to awaken the indigna 
 tion of his reader by the expression of his own. 
 
 A second species of this unamiable quality, which has been 
 often distinguished by the name of Warburtonian arrogance, be 
 trays itself, not as in the former, by proud or petulant omission of 
 proof or argument, but by the habit of ascribing weakness of in- 
 
ESSAY IV. 39 
 
 tellect, or want of taste and sensibility, or hardness of heart, or 
 corruption of moral principle, to all who deny the truth of the 
 doctrine, or the sufficiency of the evidence, or the fairness of the 
 reasoning adduced in its ^support. This is indeed not essentially 
 different from the first, but assumes a separate character from its 
 accompaniments : for though both the doctrine and its proofs 
 may have been legitimately supplied by the understanding, yet 
 tho*bitterness of personal crimination will resolve itself into naked 
 assertion. We are, therefore, authorized by experience, and justi 
 fied on the principle of self-defence and by the law of fair retalia 
 tion, in attributing it to a vicious temper arrogant from irritability, 
 or irritable from arrogance. This learned arrogance admits of 
 many gradations, and is aggravated or palliated, accordingly as 
 the point in dispute has been more or less controverted, as the 
 reasoning bears a smaller or greater proportion to the virulence 
 of the personal detraction, and as the person or parties, who are 
 the objects of it, are more or less respected, more or less worthy 
 of respect.* + 
 
 Lastly, it must be admitted as a just imputation of presumption 
 
 * Had the author of the Divine Legation of Moses more skilfully appro 
 priated his coarse eloquence of abuse, his customary assurances of the 
 idiocy, both in head and heart, of all his opponents ; if he had employed 
 those vigorous arguments of his own vehement humor in the defence of 
 truths acknowledged and reverenced by learned men in general ; or if he 
 had confined them to the names of Chubb, Woolston, and other precursors 
 of Thomas Paine ; we should perhaps still characterize his mode of con 
 troversy bv its rude violence, but not so often have heard .his name used, 
 even by those who have never read his writings, as a proverbial expression 
 for learned arrogance. But when a novel and doubtful hypothesis of his 
 own formation was the citadel to be defended, and his mephitic hand- 
 granados were thrown with the fury of lawless despotism at the fair repu 
 tation of a Sykes and a Lardner,-we not only confirm the verdict of his in 
 dependent contemporaries, but cease to wonder, that arrogance should 
 render men objects of contempt in many, and of aversion in all, instances, 
 when it was capable of hurrying a Christian teacher of equal talents and 
 learning into a slanderous vulgarity, which escapes our disgust only when 
 we see the writer s own reputation the sole victim. But throughout his 
 great work, and the pamphlets in which he supported it, he always seems 
 to write as if he had deemed it a duty of decorum to publish his fancies on 
 the Mosaic Law as the Law itself was delivered, that is, in thunders and 
 lightnings : or as if he had applied to his own book instead of the sacred 
 mount, the menace, There shall not a hand touch it but he shall surely be 
 stoned or shot through. 
 
40 THE FRIEND. 
 
 when an individual obtrudes on the public eye, with all the high 
 pretensions of originality, opinions and observations, in regard to 
 which he must plead wilful ignorance in order to be acquitted of 
 dishonest plagiarism. On the same seat must the writer be 
 placed, who in a disquisition on any important subject proves, by 
 falsehoods either of omission or of positive error, that he has neg 
 lected to possess himself, not only of the information requisite for 
 this particular subject ; but even of those acquirements, and. I hat 
 general knowledge, which could alone authorize him to com 
 mence a public instructor. This is an office which can not be 
 procured gratis. The industry, necessary for the due exercise of 
 its functions, is its purchase-money ; and the absence or in 
 sufficiency of the same is so far a species of dishonesty, and im 
 plies a presumption in the literal as well as the ordinary sense of 
 the word. He has taken a thing before he had acquired any 
 right or title thereto. 
 
 If in addition to this un fitness which every man possesses the 
 means of ascertaining, his aim should be to unsettle a general 
 belief closely connected with public and private quiet ; and if his 
 language and manner be avowedly calculated for the illiterate, 
 and perhaps licentious, part of his countrymen ; disgusting as his 
 presumption must appear, it is yet lost or evanescent in the close 
 neighborhood of his guilt. That Hobbes translated Homer into 
 English verse and published his translation, furnishes no positive 
 evidence of his self-conceit, though it implies a great lack of self- 
 knowledge and of acquaintance with the nature of poetry.* A 
 strong wish often imposes itself on the mind for an actual power : 
 the mistake is favored by the innocent pleasure derived from the 
 exercise of versification, perhaps by the approbation of intimates ; 
 and the candidate asks from more impartial readers that sentence, 
 which nature has not enabled him to anticipate. But when the 
 philosopher of Malmesbury waged war with "Wallis and the 
 fundamental truths of pure geometry, every instance of his gross 
 ignorance and utter misconception of the very elements of the 
 science he proposed to confute, furnished an unanswerable fact in 
 
 * At the time I wrote this essay, and indeed till the present mouth, 
 December, 1818, 1 had never seen Hobbes translation of the Odyssey, which, 
 I now find, is by no means to be spoken of contemptuously. It is doubtless 
 as much too ballud-like, as the later versions are too epic ; but still, on the 
 whole, it leaves a much truer impression of the original. 
 
ESSAY IV. 41 
 
 proof of his high presumption ; and the confident and insulting 
 language of the attack leaves the judicious reader in as little 
 doubt of his gross arrogance. An illiterate mechanic, who mis 
 taking some disturbance of his nerves for a miraculous call pro 
 ceeds alone to convert a trifle of savages, whose language he can 
 have no natural means of acquiring, may have been misled by 
 impulses very different from those % of high sell-opinion ; but the 
 illiterate perpetrator of the Age of Reason must have had his 
 very conscience stupefied by the habitual intoxication of presump 
 tuous arrogance, and his common sense over-clouded by the va 
 pors from his heart. * 
 
 As long therefore as I obtrude no unsupported assertions on 
 my readers ; and as long as I state my opinions and the evidence 
 which induced or compelled me to adopt them, with calmness 
 and that diffidence in myself, which is by no means incompatible 
 with a firm belief in the justness of the opinions themselves ; 
 while I attack no man s private life from any cause, and detract 
 from no man s honors in his public character, from the truth of 
 his doctrines, or the merits of his compositions, without detailing 
 all my reasons and resting the result solely on the arguments ad 
 duced ; while I moreover explain fully the motives of duty, which 
 influenced me in resolving to institute such investigation ; while 
 I confine all asperity of censure, and all expressions of contempt, 
 to gross violations of truth, honor, and decency, to the base cor- 
 rupter and the detected slanderer ; while I write on no subject, 
 which I have not studied with my best attention, on no subject 
 which. my education and acquirements have incapacitated me 
 from properly understanding ; and above all while I approve 
 myself, alike in praise and in blame, in close reasoning and in 
 impassioned declamation, a steady friend to the two best and 
 surest friends of all men, truth and honesty ; I will not fear an 
 accusation of either presumption or arrogance from the good and 
 the wise, I shall pity it from the weak, and welcome it from the 
 wicked. 
 
. 
 
 ESSAY V. 
 
 In fodem pcctore nullam est honestorum turpiumque consortium i et cogi- 
 tare optima simul ac deterrima non in<i<j!s cut unins anhni quain ejuxdan 
 tK boii.um esse ac malum. QUJNCTILIAN.* 
 
 There is uo fellowship of honor and baseness in the same breast; and to 
 combine the best and the worst designs is uo more possible in one mind, 
 than it is for the same man to be at the same instant virtuous and vicious. 
 
 Coynitio veritatis omnia falsa, xi tnodn profcrantur, ctiam qua: prints inau- 
 dita erant, et dijudiCare et subvertere idoncu cKt. AUGUSTIX. 
 
 A knowledge of the truth is equal to the task both of discerning and of 
 confuting all false assertions and erroneous arguments, though never before 
 met with, if only they may freely be brought forward. 
 
 I HAVE said, that my very system compels me to make every 
 fair appeal to the feeling s, the imagination, and even the fancy. 
 If these are to be withholden from the service of truth, virtue, 
 and happiness, to what purpose were they given ? In whose 
 service are they retained ? I have indeed considered the dispro 
 portion of human passions to their ordinary objects among the 
 strongest internal evidence of our future destination, and the at 
 tempt to restore them to their rightful claimants, the most impe 
 rious duty and the noblest task of genius. The verbal enunciation 
 of this master truth could scarcely be new to rne at any period of 
 my life since earliest youth ; but I well remember the particular 
 time, when the \vords first became more than words to me, when 
 they incorporated with a living conviction, and took their place 
 among the realities of my being. On some wide common or open 
 heath, peopled with ant-hills, during some one of the gray cloudy 
 days of late autumn, many of my readers may have noticed the ef 
 fect of a sudden and momentary flash of sunshine on all the countless 
 
 * XII. 1. 4. Ed. 
 
ESSAY V. 43 
 
 little animals within his view, aware too that the self-same influ 
 ence was darted co-instantaneously over all their swarming cities 
 as far as his eye could reach ; may have observed, with what a 
 kindly force the gleam stirs and quickens them all, and will have 
 experienced no unpleasurable shock of feeling in seeing myriads 
 of myriads of living and sentient beings united at the same mo 
 ment in one gay sensation, one joyous activity ! But awful in 
 deed is the same appearance in a multitude of rational beings, 
 our fellow-men, in whom too the effect is produced not so much 
 by the external occasion as from the active quality of their .own 
 thoughts. I had walked from Gottingen in the year 1799, to 
 witness the arrival of the Queen of Prussia, on her visit to the 
 Baron Von Hartzberg s seat, five miles from the University. The 
 spacious outer court of the palace was crowded with men and wo 
 men, a sea of heads, with a number of children rising out of it 
 from their fathers shoulders. After a buzz of two hours expecta 
 tion, the avant-courier rode at full speed into the court. At the 
 loud cracks of his long whip and the trampling of his horse s 
 hoofs, the universal shock and thrill of emotion I have not lan 
 guage to convey it expressed as it was in such manifold looks, 
 gestures, and attitudes, yet with one and the same feeling in the 
 eyes of all ! Recovering from the first inevitable contagion of 
 sympathy, I involuntarily exclaimed, though in a language to 
 myself alone intelligible, " man ! ever nobler than thy circum 
 stances ! Spread but the mist of obscure feeling over any form, 
 and even a woman incapable of blessing or of injuring thee shall 
 be welcomed with an intensity of emotion adequate to the recep 
 tion of the Redeemer of the world !" 
 
 To a creature so highly, so fearfully gifted, who, alienated as 
 he is by a sorcery scarcely less mysterious than the nature on 
 which it is exercis^fl, yet, like the fabled son of Jove in the evil 
 day of his sensual bewitchment, lifts the spindles and distaffs of 
 Omphale with the arm of a giant to such a creature truth is 
 self-restoration : for that which is the correlative of truth, the ex 
 istence of absolute life, is the only object which can attract to 
 ward it the whole depth and mass of his fluctuating being, and 
 alone* therefore can unite calmness with elevation. But it must 
 
 truth without alloy and unsophisticated. It is by the agency 
 of indistinct conceptions, as the counterfeits of the ideal and tran- 
 scendant, that evil and vanity exercise their tyranny on the feel- 
 
44 THE FRIEND. 
 
 ings of man. The powers of darkness are politic if not wise ; but 
 surely nothing can be more irrational in the pretended children 
 of light, than to enlist themselves under the banners of truth, and 
 yet rest their hopes on an alliance with delusion. 
 
 As one among the numerous artifices, by which austere truths 
 are to be softened down into palatable falsehoods, and virtue and 
 vice, like the atoms of Epicurus, to receive that insensible clina- 
 men which is to make them meet each other half-way, I have 
 an especial dislike to the expression, pious frauds. Piety indeed 
 shrinks from the very phrase, as an attempt to mix poison with 
 the cup of blessing : while the expediency of the measures which 
 the words were intended to recommend or palliate, appears more 
 and more suspicious, as the range of our experience widens, and our 
 acquaintance with the records of history becomes more extensive 
 and accurate. One of the most seductive arguments of infidelity 
 grounds itself on the numerous passages in the works of the Chris 
 tian Fathers, asserting the lawfulness of deceit for a good purpose. 
 For how can we rely on their testimony concerning the supernat 
 ural facts ? That the Fathers held, almost without exception, 
 that " wholly without breach of duty it is allowed to the teach 
 ers and heads of the Christian Church to employ artifices, to in 
 termix falsehoods with truths, and especially to deceive the ene 
 mies of the faith, provided only they hereby serve the interests of 
 truth and the advantage of mankind,"* is the unwilling confes 
 sion of RIBOF. St. Jerome, as is shown by the citations of this 
 learned theologian, boldly attributes this management -fahitatem 
 dispensativam even to the Apostles themselves. Bat why speak 
 I of the advantage given to the opponents of Christianity ? Alas ! 
 
 * De ceconom. Patrum. Intcgrum oninlno doctor i bus et ccetus Christiani 
 antistitibuK essc, ut dolo* ver sent, falsa ver is intermiscvbnt, et imprimis religi- 
 oni* hoKtes fallant. dummodo veritatis commod s ct utilitati inxerviant. I 
 trust, I need not add, that the imputation of such principles of action to the 
 first inspired propagators of Christianity, is founded on a gross misconstruc 
 tion of those passages in the writings of St. Paul, in which the necessity of 
 employing different arguments to men of different capacities and prejudices, 
 is supposed and acceded to. In other words, St. Paul strove to speak in 
 telligibly, willingly sacrificed indifferent things to matters of importance, 
 and acted courteously as a man, in order to win attention as an Apostle! A 
 traveller prefers for daily use the coin of the nation through which he is 
 passing, to bullion or the mintage of his own country : and is this to justify 
 a succeeding traveller in the use of counterfeit coin ? 
 
ESSAY V. 45 
 
 to this doctrine chiefly, and to the practices derived from it, we 
 must attribute the utter corruption of the religion itself for so 
 many ages, and even now over so large a portion of the civilized 
 world. By a system of accommodating truth to falsehood, the 
 pastors of the Church gradually changed the life and light of the 
 Gospel into the very superstitions which they were commissioned 
 to disperse, and thus paganized Christianity in order to christen 
 Paganism. At this very hour Europe groans and bleeds in con 
 sequence. 
 
 ! So much in proof and exemplification of the probable expedi 
 ency of pious deception, as suggested by its known and recorded 
 consequences. An honest man, however, possesses a clearer 
 light than that of history. He knows, that by sacrificing the 
 law of his reason to the maxim of pretended prudence, he pur 
 chases the sword with the loss of the arm that is to wield it. 
 The duties which we owe to our own moral being, are the ground 
 and condition of all other duties ; and to set our nature at strife 
 with itself for a good purpose, implies the same sort of prudence, 
 as a priest of Diana would have manifested, who should have 
 proposed to dig up the celebrated charcoal foundations of the 
 mighty temple of Ephesus, in order to furnish fuel for the burnt- 
 oflerings on its altars. Truth, virtue, and happiness, may be 
 distinguished from each other, but can not be divided. They 
 subsist by a mutual co-inherence, which gives a shadow of di 
 vinity even to our human nature. Will ye speak wickedly for 
 God ; and talk deceitfully for him ?* is a searching question, 
 which most affectingly represents the grief and impatience of 
 an uncorrupted mind at perceiving a good cause defended by ill 
 means : and assuredly if any temptation can provoke a well- 
 regulated temper to intolerance, it is the shameless assertion, 
 that truth and falsehood are indifferent in their own natures ; 
 that the former is as often injurious (and therefore criminal) as 
 the latter, and the latter on many occasions as beneficial (and 
 consequently meritorious) as the former. 
 
 I feel it incumbent on me, therefore, to place immediately be 
 fore my readers in the fullest and clearest light, the whole ques 
 tion of moral obligation respecting the communication of truth, 
 its extent and conditions. I would fain obviate all apprehen 
 sions either of my incaution on the one hand, or of any insincere 
 *Job xiii. 7. Ed. 
 
46 THE FKIKND. 
 
 reserve on the other, by proving that the more strictly we ad 
 here to the letter of the moral law in this respect, the more com 
 pletely shall we reconcile that law with prudence ; thus securing 
 a purity in the principle without mischief from the practice. I 
 would not, 1 could not dare, address my countrymen as a friend, 
 if I might not justify the assumption of that sacred title by more 
 than mere veracity, by open-heartedness. Pleasure, most often 
 delusive, may be born of delusion. Pleasure, herself a sorceress, 
 may pitch her tents on enchanted ground. But happiness (or, to 
 use a far more accurate as well as more comprehensive term, 
 solid well-being) can be built on virtue alone, and must of neces 
 sity have truth lor its foundation. Add, too, the known fact that 
 the meanest of men feels himself insulted by an unsuccessful at 
 tempt to deceive him ; and hates and despises the man who has 
 attempted it. What place then is left in the heart for virtue to 
 build on, if in any case we may dare practise on others what we 
 should feel as a cruel and contemptuous wrong in our own per 
 sons ? Every parent possesses the opportunity of observing how 
 deeply children resent the injury of a delusion ; and if men 
 laugh at the falsehoods that were imposed on themselves during 
 their childhood, it is because they are not good and wise enough 
 to contemplate the past in the present, and so to produce by a 
 virtuous and thoughtful sensibility that continuity in their self- 
 consciousness, which nature has made the law of their animal 
 life. Ingratitude, sensuality, and hardness of heart, all flow from 
 this source. Men are ungrateful to others only when they have 
 ceased to look back on their former selves with joy and tender 
 ness. They exist in fragments. Annihilated as to the past, they 
 are dead to the future, or seek for the proofs of it everywhere, 
 only not (where alone they can be found) in themselves. A 
 contemporary poet has expressed and illustrated this sentiment 
 with equal fineness of thought and tenderness of feeling : 
 
 My heart leaps up when I behold 
 
 A rainbow in the sky ! 
 So was it, when my life began ; 
 So is it now I am a man ; 
 So let it be, when I grow old, 
 
 Or let me die. 
 The child is father of the man, 
 
ESSAY V. 47 
 
 And I would wish ray days to be 
 Bound each to each by natural piety.* 
 
 WORDSWORIH. 
 
 Alas ! the pernicious influence of this lax morality extends 
 from the nursery and the school to the cabinet and senate. It is a 
 common weakness with men in power, who have used dissimu 
 lation successfully, to form a passion for the use of it, dupes to 
 the love of duping ! A pride is flattered by these lies. He who 
 fancies that he must be perpetually stooping down to the preju 
 dices of his fellow-creatures, is perpetually reminding and re 
 assuring himself of his own vast superiority to them. But no real 
 greatness can long co-exist with deceit. The whole faculties of 
 man must be exerted in order to noble energies ; and he who is 
 not earnestly sincere, lives in but half his being, self-muti 
 lated, self-paralyzed. 
 
 The latter part of the proposition, which has drawn me into 
 this discussion, that, I mean, in Avhich the morality of intentional 
 falsehood is asserted, may safely be trusted to the reader s own 
 moral sense. Is it a groundless apprehension, that the patrons 
 and admirers of such publications may receive the punishment 
 of their indiscretion in the conduct of their sons and daughters ? 
 The suspicion of Methodism must be expected by every man of 
 rank and fortune, who carries his examination respecting the 
 books which are to lie on his breakfast-table, farther than to 
 their freedom from gross verbal indecencies, and broad avowals 
 of Atheism in the title-page. For the existence of an intelligent 
 
 * I am informed, that these very lines have been cited, as a specimen 
 of despicable puerility. So much the worse for the citer. Not willingly 
 in his presence would I behold the sun setting behind our mountains, or 
 listen to a tale of distress or virtue; I should be ashamed of the quiet 
 tear on my own cheek. But let the dead bury the dead ! The poet sang 
 for the living. Of what value indeed, to a sane mind, are the likings 
 or dislikings of one man, grounded on the mere assertions of another ? 
 Opinions formed from opinions what are they, but clouds sailing under 
 clouds, which impress shadows upon shadows ? 
 
 Fungum pelle procul, jubeo ; nam quid mihi fungo ? 
 Conveniunt stomacho non minus ista suo. 
 
 I was always pleased with the motto placed under the figure of the 
 rosemary in old herbals : 
 
 Apagc, sus I Hand tibi spiro. 
 
48 THE FRIEND. 
 
 First Cause may be ridiculed in the notes of one poem, or placed 
 doubtfully as one of two or three possible hypotheses, in the very 
 opening of another poem, and both be considered as works of 
 safe promiscuous reading virginibus puerisque : and this, too, by 
 many a father of a family, who would hold himself highly culpable 
 in permitting his child to form habits of familiar acquaintance 
 with a person of loose habits, and think it even criminal to re 
 ceive into his house a private tutor without a previous inquiry 
 concerning his opinions and principles, as well as his manners 
 and outward conduct. How little I am an enemy to free in 
 quiry of the boldest kind, and in which the authors have differed 
 the most widely from my own convictions arid the general faith, 
 provided only, the inquiry be conducted with that seriousness, 
 which naturally accompanies the love of truth, and be evidently 
 intended for the perusal of those only, who may be presumed 
 capable of weighing the arguments, I shall have abundant oc 
 casion of proving in the course of this work. Quin ipsa pliiloso- 
 phia talibus e disputationibus non nisi bencjicium recipit. Nam- 
 si vera proponit homo ingeniosus veritatisque amans, nova ad 
 earn accessio Jiet : sin falsa, refutatione eoriim priores tanto 
 magis stabilientur * 
 
 The assertion, that truth is often no less dangerous than false 
 hood, sounds less offensively at the first hearing, only because it 
 hides its deformity in an equivocation, or double meaning of the 
 word truth. What may be rightly affirmed of truth, used as 
 synonymous with verbal accuracy, is transferred to it in its higher 
 sense of veracity. By verbal truth, we mean no more than the 
 correspondence of a given fact to . given words. In moral truth, 
 we involve likewise the intention of the speaker, that his words 
 should correspond to his thoughts in the sense in which he ex- 
 
 * GALILEI, Syst. Co*m. p. 42. Moreover, philosophy itself can not but 
 derive benefit from such discussions. For if a man of genius and a lover of 
 truth brings just positions before the public, there is a fresh accession to 
 the stock of philosophic insight; but if erroneous positions, the former 
 truths will by their confutation be established so much the more firmly. 
 
 The original is in the folloAviug words : 
 
 Lafilosofia medesima non pud se non ricever benefizio dalle nostre dispute ; 
 perc/ie se i nostri pensieri saranno vcri, nuooi acquisti si saranno fatti ; se 
 falsi, col nbuttargli, tnaggiormente verranno confermate le prime dottrine. 
 
 Dial. I 44. Padov. 1774. Ed. 
 
ESSAY V. 49 
 
 pects them to be understood by others : and in this latter import 
 we are always supposed to use the word, whenever we speak of 
 truth absolutely, or as a possible subject of moral merit or de 
 merit. It is verbally true, that in the sacred Scriptures it is writ 
 ten : As is the good, so is the sinner, and he that sweareth as he 
 that fear eth an oath. A man hath no better tiling under the 
 sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry. There is one 
 event unto all : the living know they shall die, but the dead 
 know not any tiling, neitlier have they any more a reward.* 
 But he who should repeat these words, with this assurance, to 
 an ignorant man in the hour of his temptation, lingering at the 
 door of the alehouse, or hesitating as to the testimony required of 
 him in the court of justice, would, spite of this verbal truth, be a 
 liar, and the murderer of his brother s conscience. Veracity, 
 therefore, not mere accuracy ; to convey truth, not merely to say 
 it, is the point of duty in dispute : and the only difficulty in the 
 mind of an honest man arises from the doubt, whether more than 
 veracity, that is, the truth and nothing but the truth is not 
 demanded of him by the law of conscience ; whether it does not 
 exact simplicity ; that is, the truth only, and the whole truth. 
 If we can solve this difficulty, if we can determine the conditions 
 under which the law of universal reason commands the commu 
 nication of the truth independently of consequences, we shall then 
 be enabled to judge whether there is any such probability of evil 
 consequences from such communication, as can justify the asser 
 tion of its occasional criminality, as can perplex us in the con 
 ception, or disturb us in the performance, of our duty. 
 
 The conscience, or effective reason, commands the design of 
 conveying an adequate notion of the thing spoken of, when this 
 is practicable : but at all events a right notion, or none at all. 
 A schoolmaster is under the necessity of teaching a certain rule 
 in simple arithmetic empirically, (do so and so, and the sum 
 will always prove true) ; the necessary truth of the rule, that 
 is, that the rule having been adhered to, the sum must always 
 prove true requiring a knowledge of the higher mathematics 
 for its demonstration. He, however, conveys a right notion, 
 though he can not convey the adequate one. 
 
 * Eccles. viii. 15 ; ix. 2, 6. Ed. 
 VOL. II. C 
 
ESSAY VI. 
 
 itj Kapra [lev dipeAt-et, Kiipra 6 fi/M-Ttt rbv exovra. Ityelset 
 fjv TOV df.^ibv tivdpa, /3/laTrre i (5e rbv piiidiur (buvsvvTa m iv tTrof KOL t~v Trawl 
 Si/fiu. Xpj) (5e Kdipov fiKTpa eidzvai ao$ii]q yap orof opof. Ei (5e o/ 
 Kaipov prjGiv fiOVCLKrjv KEirwui-vus dtiaovaiv, ov Trapa J^ovrai ev upyiy 
 yvuprjv, airLrjv 6 cxovai fiupiaf. 
 
 ANAXARCHUS, apud Stobajum, Serm. XXXIY.* 
 
 General knowledge and ready talent may be of very great benefit, but 
 they may likewise be of very great disservice to the possessor. They are 
 highly advantageous to the man of sound judgment, and dexterous in ap- 
 plving them ; but they injure your fluent holder-forth on all subjects in all 
 companies. It is necessary to know the measures of the time and occasion : 
 for this is the very boundary of wisdom (that by which it is defined, and 
 distinguished from mere ability). But he, who without regard to the un- 
 fitness of the time and the audience, will soar in the high region of his 
 fancies with his garland and singing robes about him, will not acquire the 
 credit of seriousness amidst frivolity, but will be condemned for his silli 
 ness, as the greatest idler of the company, because the most unseasonable. 
 
 THE moral law, it has been shown, permits an inadequate 
 communication of unsophisticated truth, on the condition that it 
 alone is practicable, and binds us to silence when neither an ade 
 quate, nor even a right, exposition of the truth is in our power. 
 We must first inquire then, what is necessary to constitute, and 
 what may allowably accompany, a right though inadequate no 
 tion, and, secondly, what are the circumstances, from which we 
 may deduce the impracticability of conveying even a right notion ; 
 the presence or absence of which circumstances it therefore be 
 comes our duty to ascertain. In answer to the first question, the 
 conscience demands : 1. That it should be the wish and design 
 of the mind to convey the truth only ; that if in addition to the 
 negative loss implied in its inadequateness, the notion communi 
 cated should lead to any positive error, the cause should lie in 
 
 * Edit, Gaisford. Ed. 
 
ESSAY VI. 51 
 
 the fault or defect of the recipient, not of the communicator, whose 
 paramount duty, whose inalienable right, it is to preserve his own 
 integrity,* the integral character of his own moral being. Self- 
 respect ; the reverence which he owes to the presence of human 
 ity in the person of his neighbor ; the reverential upholding of 
 the faith of man in man ; gratitude for the particular act of 
 confidence ; and religious awe for the divine purposes in the gift 
 of language ; are duties too sacred and important to be sacrificed 
 to the guesses of an individual, concerning the advantages to be 
 gained by the breach of them. 2. It is further required, that 
 the supposed error shall not be such as will pervert or materially 
 vitiate the imperfect truth, in communicating which we had un 
 willingly, though not perhaps unwittingly, occasioned it. A bar 
 barian so instructed in the power and intelligence of the infinite 
 Being as to be left wholly ignorant of his moral attributes, would 
 have acquired none but erroneous notions even of the former. At 
 the very best, he would gain only a -theory to satisfy his curiosity 
 with ; but more probably, would deduce the belief of a Moloch 
 or a Baal. For the idea of an irresistible, invisible Being, nat 
 urally produces terror in the mind of uninstructed and unprotected 
 man, and with terror there will be associated whatever has been 
 accustomed to excite it, anger, vengeance, &c. ; as is proved by 
 
 * The best and most forcible sense of a word is often that which is con 
 tained in its etymology. The author of the poems, the Synagogue, fre 
 quently affixed to Herbert s Temple, gives the original purport of the word 
 " integrity," in the following lines of the fourth stanza of the eighth poem :* 
 
 Next to sincerity, remember still, 
 
 Thou must resolve upon integrity. 
 
 God will have all thou hast, thy mind, thy will, 
 
 Thy thoughts, thy words, thy works. 
 
 And again, after some verses on constancy and humility, the poem con 
 cludes with 
 
 He that desires to see 
 The face of God, in his religion must 
 Sincere, entire, constant, and humble be. 
 
 Having mentioned the name of Herbert, that model of a man, a gentle 
 man, and a clergyman, let me add, that the quaintness of some of his 
 thoughts, not of his diction, than which nothing can be more pure, manly, 
 and unaffected, has blinded modern readers to the great general merit of 
 his poems, which are for the most part exquisite in their kind. 
 
 * Church-Porch. Ed. 
 
52 THE FKIEND. 
 
 the mythology of all barbarous nations. This must be the case 
 with all organized truths ; the component parts derive their sig 
 nificance from the idea of the whole. Bolingbroke removed love, 
 justice, and choice, from power and intelligence, and yet pre 
 tended to have left unimpaired the conviction of a Deity. He 
 might as consistently have paralyzed the optic nerve, and then 
 excused himself by affirming, that he had, however, not touched 
 the eye. 
 
 The third condition of a right though inadequate notion is, that 
 the error occasioned be greatly outweighed by the importance of 
 the truth communicated. The rustic would have little reason to 
 thank the philosopher, who should give him true conceptions of 
 the folly of believing in ghosts, omens, dreams, &c. at the price 
 of abandoning his faith in divine providence, and in the continued 
 existence of his fellow-creatures after their death. The teeth of 
 the old serpent planted by the Cadmuses of French literature, 
 under Lewis XV., produced a plenteous crop of philosophers and 
 truth-trumpeters of this kind, in the reign of his successor. They 
 taught many truths, historical, political, physiological, and ecclesi 
 astical, and diflused their notions so widely, that the very ladies 
 and hair-dressers of Paris became fluent encyclopedists : and the 
 sole price which their scholars paid for these treasures of new in 
 formation, was to believe Christianity an imposture, the Scrip 
 tures a forgery, the worship, if not the belief, of G od superstition, 
 hell a fable, heaven a dream, our life without providence, and 
 our death without hope. They became as gods as soon as the 
 fruit of this Upas tree of knowledge and liberty had opened their 
 eyes to perceive that they were no more than beasts somewhat 
 more cunning, perhaps, and abundantly more mischievous. What 
 can be conceived more natural than the result, that self-ac 
 knowledged beasts should first act, and next suffer themselves to 
 be treated, as beasts. We judge by comparison. To exclude the 
 great is to magnify the little. The disbelief of essential wisdom 
 and goodness, necessarily prepares the imagination for the su 
 premacy of cunning with malignity. Folly and vice have their 
 appropriate religions, as well as virtue and true knowledge : and 
 in some way or other fools will dance round the golden calf, and 
 wicked rnen beat their timbrels and kettle-drums to, 
 
 Moloch, horrid king, besmeared with blood 
 Of human sacrifice and parents tears. 
 
ESSAY VI. 53 
 
 My feelings have led me on, .and in my illustration I had 
 almost lost from my view the subject to be illustrated. One 
 condition yet remains : that the error foreseen shall not be of a 
 kind to prevent or impede the after acquirement of that knowl 
 edge which will remove it. Observe, how graciously nature in 
 structs her human children. She can not give us the knowledge 
 derived from sight without occasioning us at first to mistake 
 images of reflection for ^substances. But the very consequences 
 of the delusion lead inevitably to its detection ; and out of the 
 ashes of the error rises a new flower of knowledge. We not only 
 see, but are enabled to discover by what means we see. So, too, 
 we are under the necessity, in given circumstances, of mistaking 
 a square for a round object : but ere the mistake can have any 
 practical consequences, it is not only removed, but in its removal 
 gives us the symbol of a new fact, that of distance. In a similar 
 train of thought, though more fancifully, I might have elucidated 
 the preceding condition, and have referred our hurrying en- 
 lighteners and revolutionary amputators to the gentleness of na 
 ture, in the oak and the beech, the dry foliage of which she 
 pushes off only by the propulsion of the new buds, that supply its 
 place. My friends ! a clothing even of withered leaves is better 
 than bareness. 
 
 Having thus determined the nature and conditions of a right 
 notion, it remains to consider the circumstances which tend to 
 render the communication of it impracticable, and oblige us of 
 course, to abstain from the attempt oblige us not to convey false 
 hood under the pretext of saying truth. These circumstances, it 
 is plain, must consist either in natural or moral impediments. 
 The former, including the obvious gradatic is of constitutional in 
 sensibility and derangement, preclude all temptation to miscon 
 duct, as well as all probability of ill-consequences from accidental 
 oversight, on the part of the communicator. Far otherwise is it 
 with the impediments from moral causes. These demand all the 
 attention and forecast of the genuine lovers of truth in the matter, 
 the manner, , and the time of their communications public and 
 private ; and these are the ordinary materials of the vain and the 
 factious, determine them in the choice of their audiences and of 
 their arguments, and to each argument give powers not its own. 
 They are distinguishable into two sources, the streams from 
 which, however, most often become confluent, namely, hindrances 
 
54 THE FRIEND. 
 
 from ignorance, (I here use .the word in relation to the habits 
 of reasoning as well as to the previous knowledge requisite for the 
 due comprehension of the subject,) and hindrances from pre 
 dominant passions.^ 
 
 From both these the law of conscience commands us to ab 
 stain, because such being the ignorance and such the passions of 
 the supposed auditors, we ought to deduce the impracticability of 
 conveying not only adequate but even right notions of our own 
 convictions : much less does it permit us to avail ourselves of the 
 causes of this impracticability in order to procure nominal prose 
 lytes, each of whom will have a different, and all a false, con 
 ception of those notions that were to be conveyed for their truth s 
 sake alone. Whatever is, or but for some defect in our moral 
 character would have been, ibreseen as preventing the convey 
 ance of our thoughts, makes the attempt an act of self-contradic 
 tion : and whether the faulty cause exist in our choice of unfit 
 words or our choice of unfit auditors, the result is the same and 
 so is the guilt. We have voluntarily communicated falsehood. 
 
 Thus, without reference to consequences, if only one short 
 digression be excepted from the sole principle of self-consistence 
 or moral integrity, we have evolved the clue of right reason, 
 which we are bound to follow in the communication of truth. 
 Now then let me appeal to the judgment and experience of the 
 reader, whether he who most faithfully adheres to the letter of 
 the law of conscience will not likewise act in strictest correspon 
 dence to the maxims of prudence and .sound policy. I am at 
 least unable to recollect a single instance, either in history or in 
 my personal experience, of a preponderance of injurious conse 
 quences from the publication of any truth, under the observance 
 of the moral conditions above stated : much less can I even 
 imagine any case, in which truth, as truth, can be pernicious. 
 But if the assertor of the indifTerency of truth and falsehood in 
 their own natures, attempt to justify his position by confining the 
 word truth, in the first instance, to the correspondence of given 
 words to given facts, without reference to the total impression 
 left by such words, what is this more than to assert, that ar 
 ticulated sounds are things of moral indifferency ; and that we 
 may relate a fact accurately, and nevertheless deceive grossly arid 
 wickedly ? Blifil related accurately Tom Jones s riotous joy 
 * See Lay Sermon addressed to the higher and middle classes. VI. 
 
ESSAY VI. 55 
 
 during his benefactor s illness, only omitting that this joy was oc 
 casioned by the physician s having pronounced him out of danger. 
 Blifil was not the less a liar for being an accurate matter-of-fact 
 liar. Toll-truths in the service of falsehood we find everywhere, 
 of various names and various occupations, from the elderly young 
 women that discuss the love affairs of their friends and acquain 
 tances at the village tea-tables, to the anonymous calumniators 
 of literary merit in reviews, and the more daring malignants, who 
 dole out discontent, innovation and panic, in political journals : 
 and a most pernicious race of liars they are ! But who ever 
 doubted it ? Why should our moral feelings be shocked, and the 
 holiest words with all their venerable associations be profaned, in 
 order to bring forth a truism ! But thus it is for the most part 
 with the venders of startling paradoxes. In the sense in which 
 they are to gain for their author the character of a bold and 
 original thinker, they arc false even to absurdity ; and the sense 
 in which they are true and harmless, conveys so mere a truism, 
 that it even borders on nonsense. How often have we heard 
 " The rights of man hurra ! The sovereignty of the people 
 hurra!" roared out by men who, if called upon in another 
 place and beibre another audience, to explain themselves, would 
 give to the words a meaning, in which the most monarchical of 
 their political opponents would admit them to be true, but which 
 would contain nothing new, or strange, or stimulant, nothing to 
 flatter the pride, or kindle the passions, of the populace ! 
 
 ITT"}? i 
 
 OP IT* 
 
 7ET 
 
 t ~ 
 
ESSAY VII. 
 
 At profanwn vulgus lectorum quomodo arcendum est? Librisne nostris 
 jubeamus, ut cor am indignis obmutcscant ? Si linguis, ut dicitur, emortuis 
 utajnur, ehcu ! ingenium quoque nobis cmortuumjacet : sin aliter, Minervce 
 Kccreta crassis hidibrium divulgamus, et Dianam nostram impuris hujus sce- 
 culi Actceonibus nudam proferimus. Eespondeo : ad incommodi. tales hujus- 
 modi evitandas, ncc Greece nee JLatine scriberc opus cst. Snfficict, nos sicca 
 luce usos fuisse et strictiore argumcntandi mettiodo. Sujficiet, innocent er, 
 utiliter scripscisse : eventus est opud lectorem. Nuper emptmn est a nobis 
 Ciceronianum istud De Officiis, opus quod semper pcctte Christiana d/ynum 
 putabamus. Minim! libcllus factus fuerat famosisximus. Credisne ? Vix: 
 at quomodo ? Maligno quodcun, ncscio quern, plena marglne et super tergo, 
 annotation cst, et exemplis, calumniis poti.us, superfcetatain ! Sic et qui in- 
 trorsum uritur injlammationes animi vel Catonianix(ne dicam, sacroxanctis) 
 pagin ts ftccipit. Omni aura mons, omnibus scriptis mens ignita, vescitur. 
 
 ]luDOLr>n LANGII, Epist. ad amicum qucmdam Italicum, iu qua 
 
 lingujo patrise et hodici-na> usuin defendit et eruditis coiu- 
 
 mendat. 
 
 Nee me faUit, ut in corporibus hominum sic in atiimis multiplici passione 
 affectis, inedicamentct verborum wullitt inefficaeia visum iri,. Sed nee illud 
 quoque me prwtcrit, ut invisibiles animorum morbos } sic invisibilia esse reme- 
 dia. Falsis opinionibus circumventi veris scntentlis liberandi simt, ut qui 
 audiendo ceciderant audicndo consurgant. 
 
 Prefat. in lib. de rcmed. utriusque fortunce, sub fin. 
 
 But how are we to guard against the herd of promiscuous readers ? Can 
 we bid our books be silent in the presence of the unworthy ? If we employ 
 what are called the dead languages, our own genius, alas ! becomes flat and 
 dead : and if we embody our thoughts in the words native to them or in 
 which they were conceived, we divulge the secrets of Minerva to the ridicule 
 of blockheads, and expose our Diana to the Actaxnis of a sensual age. I re 
 ply : that in order to avoid inconveniences of this kind, we need write nei 
 ther in Greek nor in Latin. It will be enough, if we abstain from appeal 
 ing to the bad passions and low appetites, and confine ourselves to a strictly 
 consequent method of reasoning. 
 
 To have written innocently, and for wise" purposes, is all that can be re 
 quired of us : the event lies with the reader. I purchased latelv Cicero s 
 work, De Officiis, which I had always considered as almost worthy of a 
 Christian. To my surprise it had become a most flagrant libel. Nay 1 but 
 
ESSAY VII. 57 
 
 how f Some one, I know not who, out of the fruitfulness of his own malig 
 nity, had tilled all the margins and other blank spaces with annotations a 
 true superfsetation of examples, that is, of false and slanderous tales ! In 
 like manner, the slave of impure desires will turn the pages of Cato, not to 
 say, Scripture itself, into occasions and excitements of wanton imaginations. 
 There is no wind but fans a volcano, no work but feeds a combustible mind. 
 I am well aware, that words will appear to many as inefficacious medi 
 cines when administered to minds agitated with manifold passions, as when 
 they are muttered by way of charm over bodily ailments. But neither does 
 it escape me, on the other hand, that as the diseases of the mind are invisi 
 ble, invisible must the remedies likewise be. Those who have been en 
 trapped by false opinions are to be liberated by convincing truths : that 
 thus having imbibed the poison through the ear they may receive the anti 
 dote by the same channel. 
 
 THAT our elder writers to Jeremy Taylor inclusively quoted to 
 excess, it would be the very blindness of partiality to deny. More 
 than one might be mentioned, whose works are well character 
 ized in the words of Milton, as a paroxysm of citations, pampered 
 metaphors, and aphorisming pedantry. On the other hand, it 
 seems to me that we now avoid quotations with an anxiety that 
 offends in the contrary extreme. Yet it is the beauty and inde 
 pendent worth of the citations far more than their appropriateness 
 which have made Johnson s Dictionary popular even as a reading 
 book and the mottos with the translations of them are known 
 to add considerably to the value of the Spectator. With this 
 conviction I have taken more than common pains in the selection 
 of the mottos for The Friend : arid of two mottos equally appro 
 priate prefer always that from the book which is least likely to 
 have come into my readers hands. For I often please myself 
 with the fancy, now that I may have saved from oblivion the 
 only striking passage in a whole volume, and now that I may 
 have attracted notice to a writer undeservedly forgotten. If this 
 should he attributed to a silly ambition in the display of various 
 reading, I can do no more than deny any consciousness of having 
 been so actuated : and for the rest, I must console myself by the 
 reflection, that if it be one of the most foolish, it is at the same 
 time one of the most harmless, of human vanities. 
 
 The passages prefixed lead at once to the question, which will 
 probably have more than once occurred to the reflecting reader 
 of the preceding essay. How will these rules apply to the most 
 important mode of communication ? to that, in which one man 
 
 c* 
 
68 THE FRIEND. 
 
 may utter his thoughts to myriads of men at the same time, and 
 to myriads of myriads at various times and through successions 
 of generations ? How do they apply to authors, whose foreknowl 
 edge assuredly does not inform them who, or how many, or of 
 what description, their readers will be ? How do ther 3 rules 
 apply to books, which once published, are as likely to fall in the 
 way of the incompetent as of the judicious, and will be fortunate 
 indeed if they are not many limes looked at through the thick 
 mists of ignorance, or amid the glare of prejudice and passion \ 
 I answer in the first place, that this is not universally true. The 
 (readers are not seldom picked and chosen. Relations of certain 
 /pretended miracles performed a few years ago, at Holywell, in 
 /consequence of prayers to the Virgin Mary, on female servants, 
 and these relations moralized by the old Roman Catholic argu 
 ments without the old Protestant answers, have to my knowledge 
 been sold by travelling pedlers in villages* and farm-houses, not 
 only in a form which placed them within the reach of the narrow 
 est means, but sold at a price less than their prime cost, and doubt 
 less, thrown in occasionally as the make-weight in a bargain of 
 pins and stay-tape. Shall I be told, that the publishers and rev 
 erend authorizers of these base and vulgar delusions had exerted 
 no choice as to the purchasers and readers ? But waiving this, 
 or rather having first pointed it out, as an important exception, I 
 further reply, that if the author have clearly and rightly estab 
 lished in his own mind the class of readers, to which .he means to 
 address his communications ; and if both in this choice, and in 
 the particulars of the manner and matter of his work, he con 
 scientiously observe all the conditions which reason and con 
 science have been shown to dictate, in relation to those for whom 
 the work was designed ; he will, in most instances, have effected 
 his design arid realized the desired circumscription. The posthu 
 mous work of Spinoza (Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata) 
 may, indeed, accidentally fall into the hands of an incompetent 
 reader. But (not to mention, that it is written in a dead lan 
 guage), it will be entirely harmless, because it must needs be ut 
 terly unintelligible. I venture to assert, that the whole first book, 
 De Deo, might be read in a literal English translation to any 
 congregation in the kingdom, and that no individual who had not 
 been habituated to the strictest and most laborious processes of 
 reasoning, would even suspect its orthodoxy or piety, however 
 
ESSAY VII. 59 
 
 heavily the fe\v who listened might complain of its ohscurity and 
 want of interest. 
 
 This, it may be objected, is an extreme case. But it is not so 
 for the present purpose. 1 am speaking of the probability of in 
 jurious consequences from the communication of truth. This I 
 have denied, if the right means have been adopted, and the neces 
 sary conditions adhered to, for its actual communication. Now 
 the truths that is, the positions believed by the author to be 
 truths conveyed in a book are either evident of themselves, or 
 such as require a train of deductions in proo: and the latter will 
 be either such truths as are authorized and generally received ; 
 or such as are in opposition to received and authorized opinions ; 
 or lastly, positions presented as truths for the appropriate test of 
 examination, and still under trial, adhuc in lite. Of this latter 
 class I affirm, that in no one of the three sorts can an instance 
 be brought of a preponderance of ill-consequences, or even of an 
 equilibrium of advantage and injury from a work, in which the 
 understanding alone has been appealed to, by results fairly de 
 duced from just premises, in terms strictly appropriate. Alas ! 
 legitimate reasoning is impossible without severe thinking, and 
 thinking is neither an easy nor an amusing employment. The 
 reader, who would follow a close reasoner to the summit and ab 
 solute principle of any one important sulfject, has chosen a cha 
 mois-hunter for his guide. Our guide will, indeed, take us the 
 shortest way, will save us many a wearisome and perilous wan 
 dering, and warn us of many a mock road that had formerly led 
 himself to the brink of chasms and precipices, or at best in an 
 idle circle to the spot from which he started. But he can not 
 carry us on his shoulders : we must strain our own sinews, as he 
 has strained his ; and make firm footing on the smooth rock for 
 ourselves, by the blood of toil from our own feet. Examine the 
 journals of our humane and zealous missionaries in Hindostan. 
 How often and how feelingly do they describe the difficulty of 
 making the simplest chain of reasoning intelligible to the ordi 
 nary natives : the rapid exhaustion of their whole power of atten 
 tion, and with what pain and distressful eflort it is exerted, while 
 it lasts. Yet it is amongst individuals of this class, that the hid 
 eous practices of self-torture chiefly, indeed almost exclusively, 
 prevail. ! if folly were no easier than wisdom, it being often 
 so very much more grievous, how certainly might not these mis- 
 
60 THE FKIEND. 
 
 arable men be converted to Christianity ? But alas ! to swing 
 by hooks passed through the back, or to walk on shoes with nails 
 of iron pointed upward on the soles, all this is so much less diffi 
 cult, demands so veiy inferior an exertion of the will than to 
 think, and by thought to gain knowledge and tranquillity ! 
 
 It is not true, that ignorant persons have no notion of the ad 
 vantages of truth and knowledge. They see and confess those 
 advantages in the conduct, the immunities, and the superior pow 
 ers of the possessors. Were these attainable by pilgrimages the 
 most toilsome, or penances the most painful, we should assuredly 
 have as many pilgrims and as many self-tormentors in the ser 
 vice of true religion and virtue, as now exist under the tyranny 
 of Papal or Brahman superstition. This inefficacy of legitimate 
 reason, from the want of fit objects, this its relative weakness, 
 and how narrow at all times its immediate sphere of action must 
 be, is proved to us by the impostors of all professions. What, I 
 pray, is their fortress, the rock which is both their quarry and 
 their foundation, from which and on which they are built ? 
 The desire of arriving at the end without the effort of thought 
 and will, which are the appointed means. Let us look back 
 ward three or four centuries. Then, as now, the great mass of 
 mankind were governed by the three main wishes, the wish for 
 vigor of body, including the absence of painful feelings ; for 
 wealth, or the power of procuring the external conditions of bod 
 ily enjoyment, these during life ; and security from pain and 
 continuance of happiness after death. Then, as now, men were 
 desirous to attain them by some easier means than those of tem 
 perance, industry, and strict justice. They gladly therefore ap 
 plied to the priest, who could insure them happiness hereafter 
 without the performance of their duties here ; to the lawyer who 
 could make money a substitute for a right cause ; to the physi 
 cian, whose medicines promised to take the sting out of the tail 
 of their sensual indulgences, and let them fondle and play with 
 vice, as with a charmed serpent ; to the alchemist, whose gold- 
 tincture would enrich them without toil or economy ; and to the 
 astrologer, from whom they could purchase foresight without 
 knowledge or reflection. The established professions w^ere, with 
 out exception, no other than licensed modes of witchcraft. The 
 wizards, who would now find their due reward in Bridewell, and 
 their appropriate honors in the pillory, sat then on episcopal 
 
ESSAY VIII. 61 
 
 thrones, candidates for saintship, and already canonized in the 
 belief of their deluded contemporaries ; while the one or two real 
 teachers and discoverers of truth were exposed to the hazard of 
 lire and fagot, a dungeon the best shrine that was vouchsafed 
 to a Roger Bacon* and a Galileo ! 
 
 ESSAY VIII. 
 
 Pray, why is it, that people say that men are not such fools now-a-days 
 as they were in the days of yore ? I would fain know, whether you would 
 have us understand by this same saying, as indeed you logically may, that 
 formerly, men were fools, and in this generation are grown wise? How 
 many and what dispositions made them fools ? How many and what 
 dispositions were wanting to make em wise ? Why were those fools ? 
 How should these be wise ? Pray, how came yo\i to know that men 
 were formerly fools ? How did you find that they are now wise ? Who 
 made them fools ? Who in Heaven s name made us wise ? Who d ye 
 think are most, those that loved mankind foolish, or those that love it 
 wise ? How long has it been wise ? How long otherwise ? Whence 
 proceeded the foregoing folly ? Whence the following wisdom ? Why did 
 the old folly end now and no later ? Why did the modern wisdom begin 
 now and no sooner ? What were we the worse for the former follv ? 
 What the better for the succeeding wisdom? How should the ancient 
 folly have come to nothing? How should this same new wisdom be 
 started up and established ? Now answer me, an t please you ! 
 
 RABELAIS Preface to his 5th Hook. 
 
 MONSTERS and madmen canonized and Galileo blind in a dun 
 geon If It is not so in our times. Heaven be praised, that in 
 this respect, at least, we are, if not better, yet better off, than our 
 
 * " It is for his country, not his order, to glory in the man whom that 
 order condemned to imprisonment, not for his supposed skill in magic, 
 but for those opinions which he derived from studying the Scriptures, 
 wherein he was versed beyond any other person of his age." 
 
 SOUTHEY S Colloquies, viii. 
 
 And see the note there. Ed* 
 
 \ This is not strictly accurate. Galileo was sentenced by the Inquisi 
 tion at Rome, on the 22d of June, 1633; and, although his right eye had 
 been formerly affected, he did not become blind till the end of 1637. His 
 confinement, likewise, in the proper prison of the Inquisition, was merely 
 nominal, although the restrictions under which he was kept to the end 
 cf his life, were of tho most distressing and injurious description. Ed. 
 
62 THE FRIEND. 
 
 forefathers. But to what, and to whom (under Providence) do 
 we owe the improvement ? To any radical change in the moral 
 affections of mankind in general ? Perhaps the great majority 
 of men are now fully conscious that they are bom with the god 
 like faculty of reason, and that it is the business of life to devel 
 op and apply it ? The Jacob s ladder of truth, let down from 
 heaven, with all its numerous rounds, is now the common high 
 way, on which we are content to toil upward to the objects of 
 our desires ? We are ashamed of expecting the end without the 
 means ? In order to answer these questions in the affirmative, 
 I must have forgotten the animal magnetists ;* the proselytes 
 of Brothers, and of Joanna Southcote ; and some thousand fanat 
 ics less original in their creeds, but not a whit more rational in 
 their expectations ; I must forget the infamous empirics, whose 
 advertisements pollute arid disgrace all our newspapers, arid al 
 most paper the walls of our cities ; and the vending of whose 
 poisons and poisonous drams with shame and anguish be it 
 spoken supports a shop in every market-town ! I must forget 
 that other reproach of the nation, that mother- vice, the lottery ! 
 I must forget, that a numerous class plead prudence for keeping 
 their fellow-men ignorant and incapable of intellectual enjoy 
 ments, and the revenue for upholding such temptations as men so 
 ignorant will not withstand, yes ! that even senators and offi 
 cers of state put forth the revenue as a sufficient reason for up 
 holding, at every fiftieth door throughout the kingdom, tempta 
 tions to the most pernicious vices, which fill the land with 
 mourning, and fit the laboring classes for sedition and religious 
 fanaticism ! Above all I must forget the first years of the French 
 revolution, and the millions throughout Europe who confidently 
 expected the best and choicest results of knowledge and virtue, 
 namely, liberty and universal peace, from the votes of a tumult 
 uous assembly that is, from the mechanical agitation of the. air 
 in a large room at Paris and this too in the most light, unthink 
 ing, sensual, and profligate, of the European nations, a nation, 
 the very phrases of whose language are so composed, that they 
 can scarcely speak without lying ! No ! Let us not deceive 
 ourselves. Like the man who used to pull off his hat with great 
 demonstration of respect whenever he spoke of himself, we are 
 
 * Recanted since 1817. After subtracting all exaggerated or doubtful 
 testimonies, the undeniable facts are as important as they are surprising. 
 
ESSAY VIII. 63 
 
 fond of styling our own the enlightened age : though as Jortin, I 
 think, has wittily remarked, the golden age would be more ap 
 propriate. But in spite of our great scientific discoveries, for 
 which praise be given to whom the praise is due, and in spite of 
 that general indifference to all the truths and all the principles 
 of truth, that belong to our permanent being, and therefore do 
 not lie within the sphere of our senses, that same indifference 
 which makes toleration so easy a virtue with us, and constitutes 
 nine tenths of our pretended illumination, it still remains the 
 character of the mass of mankind to seek for the attainment of 
 their necessary ends by any means rather than the appointed 
 ones ; and for this cause only, that the latter imply the exertion 
 of the reason and the will. But of all things this demands the 
 longest apprenticeship, even an apprenticeship from infancy ; 
 which is generally neglected, because an excellence, that may 
 and should belong to all men, is expected to come to every man 
 of its own accord. 
 
 To whom then do we owe our meliorated condition ? To the 
 successive few in every age, more indeed in one generation than 
 in another, but relatively to the mass of mankind always few, 
 who by the intensity and permanence of their action have com 
 pensated for the limited sphere, within which it is at any one 
 time intelligible ; and whose good deeds posterity reverences in 
 their results ; though the mode, in which we repair the inevitable 
 waste of time, and the style of our additions, too generally furnish 
 a sad proof, how little we understand the principles. I appeal 
 to the histories of the Jewish, the Grecian, and the Roman re" 
 publics, to the records of the Christian Church, to the history of 
 Europe from the treaty of Westphalia, 1648. What do they 
 contain but accounts of noble structures raided by the wisdom of 
 the few, and gradually undermined by the ignorance and profli 
 gacy of the many ? If therefore the deficiency of good, which 
 everywhere surrounds us, originate in the general unfitness and 
 aversion of men to the process of thought, that is, to continuous 
 reasoning, it must surely be absurd to apprehend a preponderance 
 of evil from works which can not act at all except as far as they 
 call the reasoning faculties into full co-exertion with them. 
 
 Still, however, there are truths so self-evident, or so imme 
 diately and palpably deduced from those that are, or are ac 
 knowledged ibr such, that they are at once intelligible to all men, 
 
64 THE FRIEND. 
 
 who possess the common advantages of the social state ; although 
 by sophistry, by evil habits, by the neglect, false persuasions, and 
 impostures of an anti-Christian priesthood joined in one conspiracy 
 with the violence of tyrannical governors, the understandings of 
 men may become so darkened and their consciences so lethargic, 
 that a necessity will arise for the republication of these truths, 
 and this too with a voice of loud alarm, and impassioned warn 
 ing. Such were the doctrines proclaimed by the first Christians 
 to the Pagan world ; such were the lightnings flashed by Wick- 
 liff, Huss, Luther, Calvin, Zuinglius, Latirner, and others, across 
 the Papal darkness ; and such in our own times the agitating 
 truths, with which Thomas Clarkson, and his excellent con 
 federates, the Quakers, fought and conquered the legalized ban 
 ditti of men-stealers, the numerous and powerful perpetrators and 
 advocates of rapine, murder, and (of blacker guilt than either) 
 slavery. Truths of this kind being indispensable to man, con 
 sidered as a moral being, are above all expedience, all accidental 
 consequences : for as sure as God is holy, and man immortal, 
 there can be no evil so great as the ignorance or disregard of 
 them. It is the very madness of mock prudence to oppose the 
 removal of a poisoned dish on account of the pleasant sauces or 
 nutritious viands which would be lost with it ! The dish con 
 tains destruction to that, for which alone we ought to wish the 
 palate to be gratified, or the body to be nourished. 
 
 The sole condition, therefore, imposed on us by the law of con 
 science in these cases is, that we employ no unworthy and 
 heterogeneous means to realize the necessary end, that we in 
 trust the event wholly to the full and adequate promulgation of 
 the truth, and to those generous affections which the constitution 
 of our moral nature has linked to the fall perception of it. Yet 
 evil may, nay it will, be occasioned. Weak men may take 
 offence, and wicked men avail themselves of it ; though we must 
 not attribute to the promulgation, or to the truth promulgated, 
 all the evil, of which wicked men predetermined, like the wolf 
 in the fable, to create some occasion may choose to make it the 
 pretext. But that there ever was, or ever can be, a preponder 
 ance of evil, I defy either the historian to instance, or the philoso 
 pher to prove. " Let it fly away, all that chaff of light faith that 
 can fly off at any breath of temptation ; the cleaner will the true 
 grain be stored up in the granary of the Lord," we are entitled 
 
ESSAY VIII. 65 
 
 to say with Tertullian :* and to exclaim with heroic Luther, 
 " Scandal and offence ^ Talk not to me of scandal and offence. 
 Need breaks through stone walls, and recks not of scandal. It is 
 my duty to spare weak consciences as far as it may be done 
 without hazard of my soul. "Where not, I must take counsel for 
 my soul, though half or the whole world should be scandalized 
 thereby."! 
 
 Luther felt and preached and wrote and acted, as beseemed a 
 Luther to feel and utter and act. The truths, which had been 
 outraged, he re-proclaimed in the spirit of outraged truth, at the 
 behest of his conscience and in the service of the God of truth. 
 He did his duty, come good, come evil ! and made no question, 
 on which side the preponderance would be. In the one scale 
 there was gold, and impressed thereon the image arid superscrip 
 tion of the universal Sovereign. In all the wide and ever- widen 
 ing commerce of mind with mind throughout the world, it is 
 treason to refuse it. Can this have a counter-weight ? The 
 other scale indeed might have seemed full up to the very balance- 
 yard ; but of what worth and substance were its contents ? 
 Were they capable of being counted or weighed against the for 
 mer ? The conscience, indeed, is already violated when to moral 
 good or evil we oppose things possessing no moral interest. Even 
 if the conscience dared waive this her preventive veto, yet before 
 we could consider the twofold results in the relation of loss and 
 gain, it must be known whether their kind is the same or equiva 
 lent. They must first be valued, and then they maybe weighed 
 or counted, if they are worth it. But in the particular case at 
 present before us, the loss is contingent and alien ; the gain es 
 sential and the tree s own natural produce. The gain is perma 
 nent, and spreads through all times and places ; the loss but 
 temporary, and owing its very being to vice or ignorance, vanishes 
 at the approach of knowledge and moral improvement. The 
 gain reaches all good men, belongs to all that love light and de- 
 
 * Avolcnt, quantum volcnt, palece leves Jldci quocnngue afflatu tentationum I 
 eo purior mcatsa fntmenti in horrea Domini reponetur. DC Prescript, ad- 
 voi-8. Hteretic. I. c. 3. Ed 
 
 \ Aergernixs kin, Acrgerni&x her! Noth briclit, Ei&en, nnd hat kcin 
 Aergernixs. Ich soil der xchwachen Gcwisscn xchonen so fern es ohnc Gcfahr 
 meiner Seclen geschehen mag. Wo nicht, no soil ich meiner Seelcn ralhe?i, 3 
 aergere sich daran die ganze odcr halbe Welt. 
 
66 THE FRIEND. 
 
 sire an increase of light : to all .and of all times, who thank 
 Heaven for the gracious dawn, and expect the noon-day ; who 
 welcome the first gleams of spring, and sow their fields in confi 
 dent faith of the ripening summer and the rewarding harvest- 
 tide ! But the loss is confined to the unenlightened and the 
 prejudiced say rather, to the weak and the prejudiced of a sin 
 gle generation. The prejudices of one age are condemned even 
 by the prejudiced of the succeeding ages : for endless are ihe 
 modes of folly, and the fool joins with the wife in passing sen 
 tence on all modes but his own. Who cried out with greater 
 horror against the murderers of the Prophets, than those who 
 likewise cried out, Crucify him ! Crucify him ! Prophet and 
 Saviour, and Lord of life, Crucify him ! Crucify him ! The 
 truth-haters of every future generation will call the truth-haters 
 of the preceding ages by their true names : for even these the 
 stream of time carries onward. In fine, truth considered in itself 
 and in the effects natural to it, may be conceived as a gentle 
 spring or water-source, warm from the genial earth, and breath 
 ing up into the snow drift that is piled over and around its outlet. 
 It turns the obstacle into its own form and character, and as it 
 makes its way increases its stream. And should it be arrested in 
 its course by a chilling season, it suffers delay, not loss, and waits 
 only for a chairge in the wind to awaken and again roll onwards : 
 
 i pantori 
 Bui Vesolo ncvoso 
 Fatti curvi e canuti, 
 Tf alto stupor son muti, 
 Miranda al fonte ombroso 
 11 Po con pocln umori ; 
 Poscia udendo gli onori 
 Dell urna anguata e stretta, 
 Che Y Adda, die I Teaino 
 Soverchia in suo cammino, 
 Che ampio al mar s affretta, 
 Che si xpuma, e si suona, 
 Che gli si da corona !* 
 
 * Chiabrera Rime, xxviii. "But falsehood," continues Mr. C., "is fire in 
 stubble ; it likewise turns all the light stuffs around it into its own sub 
 stance for a moment, one crackling blazing moment, and then dies; and all 
 its converts are scattered in the wind, without place or evidence of their 
 existence, as viewless as the wind which scatters them." 
 
ESSAY IX. GT 
 
 The simple shepherds grown bent and hoary-headed on the 
 snowy Vesolo, are mute with deep astonishment, gazing in the 
 overshadowed ibuutain on the Po with his scanty waters : then 
 hearing of the honors of his confined and narrow urn, how he 
 receives as a sovereign the ADDA and the TESINO in his course, 
 how ample he hastens on to the sea, how he foams, how mighty 
 his voice, and that to him the crown is assigned. 
 
 ESSAY IX. 
 
 Great men have liv d among us, heads that plann d 
 And tongues that utter d wisdom better none. 
 
 ***** 
 Even so doth Heaven protect us ! WORDSWORTH. 
 
 IN the preceding essay I have explained the good, that is, the 
 natural consequences of the promulgation to all of truths which 
 all are bound to know and to make known. The evils occasioned 
 by it, with few arid rare exceptions, have their origin in the at 
 tempts to suppress or pervert it ; in the fury and violence of im 
 posture attacked or undermined in her strongholds, or in the ex 
 travagances of ignorance and credulity roused from their lethargy, 
 and angry at the medicinal disturbance awaking, not yet broad 
 awake, and thus blending the monsters of uneasy dreams with 
 the real objects, on which the- drowsy eye had alternately half- 
 opened and closed, again half-opened arid again closed. This 
 re-action of deceit and superstition, with all the trouble and tu 
 mult incident, I would compare to a fire which bursts forth from 
 some stifled arid fermenting mass on the first admission of light 
 and air. It roars and blazes, and converts the already spoilt or 
 damaged stuff, with all the straw and straw-like matter near it, 
 first into flame, and the next moment into ashes. The fire dies 
 away, the ashes are scattered 011 all the winds, and what began 
 in worthlessness ends in nothingness. Such are the evil, that is, 
 the casual consequences of the same promulgation. 
 
 It argues a narrow or corrupt nature to lose sight of the gen 
 eral and lasting consequences of rare and virtuous energy, in the 
 
68 THE FRIEND. 
 
 brief accidents which accompanied its first movements to set 
 lightly by the emancipation of the human reason from a legion 
 of devils, in our complaints and lamentations over the loss of a 
 herd of swine ! The Cranmers, Hampderis, and Sidneys, the 
 counsellors of our Elizabeth^and the friends of our other great 
 deliverer, the third William, is it in vain that these have been 
 our countrymen ? Are we not the heirs of their good deeds ? 
 And what are noble deeds but noble truths realized ? As Prot 
 estants, as Englishmen, as the inheritors of so ample an estate 
 of might and right, an estate so strongly fenced, so richly planted, 
 by the sinewy arms arid dauntless hearts of our forefathers, we 
 of all others have good cause to trust in the truth, yea, to follow 
 its pillar of fire through the darkness and the desert, even though 
 *,s light should but suffice to make us certain of its own presence. 
 if there be elsewhere men jealous of the light, who prophesy an 
 excess of evil over good from its manifestation, we are entitled to 
 ask them, on what experience they ground their bodings ? Our 
 own country bears no traces, our own history contains no records 
 to justify them. From the great seras of national illumination 
 we date the commencement of our main national advantages. 
 The tangle of delusions which stifled and distorted the growing 
 tree, have been torn away ; the parasite weeds, that fed on its 
 very roots, have been plucked up with a salutary violence. To 
 us there remain only quiet duties, the constant care, the gradual 
 improvement, the cautious, unhazardous labors of the industrious 
 though contented gardener to prune, to engraft, and one by one 
 to remove from its leaves and fresh shoots the slug and the cater 
 pillar. But far be it from us to undervalue with light and sense 
 less detraction the conscientious hardihood of our predecessors, or 
 even to condemn in them that vehemence, to which the blessings 
 it won for us leave us now neither temptation nor pretext. That 
 the very terms, with which the bigot or the hireling would black 
 en the first publishers of political and religious truth, are, and de 
 serve to be, hateful to us, we owe to the effects of its publication. 
 We ante-date the. feelings in order to criminate the authors of 
 our tranquillity, opulence, and security. But let us be aware. 
 Effects will not, indeed, immediately disappear with their causes ; 
 but neither can they long continue without them. If by the re 
 ception of truth in the spirit of truth, we became what we are ; 
 only by the retention of it in the same spirit, can we remain what 
 
ESSAY X. 69 
 
 we are. The narrow seas that form our boundaries, what were 
 they in times of old ? The convenient highway for Danish and 
 Norman pirates. What are they now ? Still but " a span of 
 waters." Yet they roll at the base of the misled Ararat, on 
 which the ark of the hope of Europe and of civilization rested ! 
 
 Even so doth God protect us, if we be 
 
 Virtuous and wise. Winds blow and waters roll, 
 
 Strength to the brave, and power and deity : 
 
 Yet in themselves are nothing ! One decree 
 
 Spake laws to them, and said that by the soul 
 
 Only the nations shall be great and free 1 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 ESSAY X. 
 
 I deny not but that it is of greatest concernment in the church and com 
 monwealth to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves as well 
 as men ; and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on 
 them as malefactors. For books are not absolutely dead things, but do con 
 tain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose pro 
 geny they are ; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and 
 extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively 
 and as vigorously productive as those fabulous dragon s teeth : and being 
 sown up and down may chance to spring up armed men. And yet on the 
 other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a 
 good book. Who kills a man, kills a reasonable creature, God s image ; but 
 he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as 
 it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burthen to the earth ; but a good 
 book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured 
 up on purpose to a life beyond life. 
 
 MILTON S Speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing. 
 
 THUS far then I have been conducting a TO.USC between an in 
 dividual and his own mind. Proceeding on the conviction, that 
 to man is intrusted the nature, not the result, of his actions, I 
 have presupposed no calculations ; I have presumed no foresight. 
 Introduce no contradiction into thy own consciousness. Act 
 ing, or abstaining from action, delivering or withholding thy 
 thoughts, whatsoever thou doest, do it in singleness of heart. In 
 all things, therefore, let thy njeans correspond to thy purpose, arid 
 let the purpose be one with the purport. To this principle I have 
 
70 THE FKIEND. 
 
 referred the supposed individual, and from this principle solely I . 
 have deduced each particular of his conduct. As far, therelbre, 
 as the court of conscience extends, and in this court alone I have 
 been pleading hitherto I have won the cause. It has been de 
 cided, that there is no just ground for apprehending mischief from 
 truth communicated conscientiously, that is, with a strict obser 
 vance of all the conditions required by the conscience ; that 
 what is not so communicated, is falsehood, and that to the false 
 hood, not to the truth, must the ill consequences be attributed. 
 
 Another and altogether different cause remains now to be 
 pleaded ; a different cause, and in a different court. The parties 
 concerned are no longer the well-meaning individual and his 
 conscience, but the citizen and the state the citizen, who may 
 be a fanatic as probably as a philosopher, and the state, which 
 concerns itself with the conscience only as far as it appears in the 
 action, or still more accurately, in the fact ; and which must de 
 termine the nature of the fact not merely by a rule of right 
 formed from the modification of particular by general conse 
 quences, not merely by a principle of compromise, that reduces 
 the freedom of each citizen to the common measure in which it 
 becomes compatible with the freedom of all ; but likewise by the 
 relation which the facts bear to its the state s own instinctive 
 principle of self-preservation. For every depository of the su 
 preme power must presume itself rightful : and as the source of 
 law not legally to be endangered. A form of government may 
 indeed, in reality, be most pernicious to the governed, and the 
 highest moral honor may await the patriot who risks his life in 
 order by its subversion to introduce a better and juster constitu 
 tion ; but it would be absurd to blame the law by which his life 
 is declared forfeit. It were to expect, that by an involved con 
 tradiction the law sjjpuld allow itself not to be law, by allowing 
 the state, of which it is a part, not to be a state. For, as Hooker 
 has well observed, the law of men s actions is one, if they be re 
 spected only as men ; and another, when they are considered as 
 parts of a body politic.* 
 
 But though every government subsisting in law, for pure law 
 less despotism grounding itself wholly on terror precludes all con 
 sideration of duty though every government subsisting in law 
 must, and ought to, regard itself as the life of the body politic, of 
 * Eccl. Pol. I. xvi. 6. Ed. 
 
ESSAY X. 71 
 
 which it is the head, and consequently must punish every attempt 
 against itself as an act of assault or murder, that is, sedition or 
 treason ; yet still it ought so to secure the life as not to prevent 
 the conditions of its growth, and of that adaptation to circum 
 stances, without which its very life becomes insecure. In the 
 application, therefore, of these principles to the public communi 
 cation of opinions by the most efficient mean, we have to decide, 
 whether consistently with them there should be any liberty of the 
 press ; and if this be answered in the affirmative, what shall be 
 declared abuses of that liberty, and made punishable as such ; 
 and in what way the general law shall be applied to each par 
 ticular case. 
 
 First, then, ought there to be any liberty of the press ? I do 
 not here mean, whether it should be permitted to print books at 
 all ; for this essay has little chance of being read in Turkey, and 
 in any other part of Europe it can not be supposed questionable 
 but whether by the appointment of a censorship the government 
 should take upon itself the responsibility of each particular publi 
 cation. In governments purely monarchical, that is, oligarchies 
 under one head the balance of advantage and disadvantage from 
 this monopoly of the press will undoubtedly be affected by the 
 general state of information ; though after reading Milton s 
 Speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing * we shall proba 
 bly be inclined to believe, that the best argument in favor of li 
 censing under any constitution is that, which supposing the ruler 
 to have a different interest from that of his country, and even 
 from himself as a reasonable and moral creature, grounds itself 
 on the incompatibility of knowledge with folly, oppression, and 
 degradation. What our prophetic Harrington said of religious, 
 applies equally to literary, toleration : " If it be said that in 
 France there is liberty of conscience in part, it is also plain that 
 while the hierarchy is standing, this liberty is falling, and that if 
 ever it comes to pull down the hierarchy, it pulls down that 
 monarchy also : wherefore the monarchy or hierarchy will be 
 
 * 11 y a un voile qui dolt toujours couvrir tout ce que Ton pent dire et 
 tout ce qu on pent croire du droit dcs pevples et de celui des princes, qui nc 
 s accordentjamais si bien ensemble que dans le silence. 
 
 Mem. du Card, dc Retz. 
 
 How severe a satire where it can be justly applied ! how false and ca- 
 vumnious if meant as a general maxim 1 
 
72 THE FRIEND. 
 
 beforehand with it, if they see their true interest."^ On the 
 other hand, there is no slight danger from general ignorance : 
 and the only choice, which Providence has graciously left to a 
 vicious government, is either to fall by the people, if they are 
 suffered to become enlightened, or with them, if they are kept 
 enslaved and ignorant. 
 
 The nature of our -constitution, since the Revolution, the state 
 of our literature and the wide diffusion, if not of intellectual, yet 
 of literary, power, and the almost universal interest in the pro 
 ductions of literature, have set the question at rest relatively to 
 the British press. However great the advantages of previous ex 
 amination might be under other circumstances, in this country it 
 would be both impracticable and inefficient. I need only sug 
 gest in broken sentences the prodigious number of licensers that 
 would be requisite the variety of their attainments, and inas 
 much as the scheme must be made consistent with our religious 
 freedom the ludicrous variety of their principles and creeds 
 their number being so great, and each appointed censor being 
 himself a man of letters, quis custodiet ipsos custodes ? If these 
 numerous licensers hold their offices for life, and independently 
 of the ministry pro tempore, a new, heterogeneous, and alarming 
 power is introduced, which can never be assimilated to the con 
 stitutional powers already existing : if they are removable at 
 pleasure, that which is heretical and seditious in 1809, may be 
 come orthodox and loyal in 1810 ; and what man, whose at 
 tainments and moral respectability gave him even an endurable 
 claim to this awful trust, would accept a situation at once so in 
 vidious and so precarious ? And what institution can retain any 
 useful influence in so free a nation when its abuses have made it 
 contemptible ? Lastly, and which of itself would suffice to justify 
 the rejection of such a plan unless all proportion between crime 
 and punishment were abandoned, what penalties could the law 
 attach to the assumption of a liberty, which it had denied, more 
 severe than those which it now attaches to the abuse of the lib 
 erty, which it grants ? In all those instances at least, which it 
 would be most the inclination perhaps the duty of the state 
 to prevent, namely, in seditious and incendiary publications, 
 (whether actually such, or only such as the existing government 
 chose so to denominate, makes no difference in the argument)* 
 * Syat. of Politics, vi. 1 Q.Ed. 
 
ESSAY X. 73 
 
 the publisher, who hazards the punishment now assigned to sedi 
 tious publications, would assuredly hazard the penalties of un 
 licensed ones, especially as the very practice of licensing would 
 naturally diminish the attention to the contents of the works 
 published, the chance of impunity therefore be so much greater, 
 and the artifice of prefixing an unauthorized license so likely to 
 escape detection. It is a fact, that in many of the former German 
 states in which literature flourished, notwithstanding the estab 
 lishment of censors or licensers, three fourths of the books printed 
 were unlicensed even those, the contents of which were unob 
 jectionable, and where the sole motive for evading the law, must 
 have been either the pride and delicacy of the author, or the in 
 dolence of the bookseller. So difficult was the detection, so vari 
 ous the means of evasion, and worse than all, from the nature of 
 the law and the affront it offers to the pride of human nature, 
 such was the merit attached to the breach of it a merit com 
 mencing perhaps with Luther s Bible, and other prohibited works 
 of similar great minds, published with no dissimilar purpose, and 
 thence by many an intermediate link of association finally con 
 nected with books, of the very titles of which a good man would 
 wish to remain ignorant. The interdictory catalogues of the Ro 
 mish hierarchy always present to my fancy the muster-rolls of 
 the two hostile armies of Michael and of Satan printed promis 
 cuously, or extracted at haphazard, save only that the extracts 
 from the former appear somewhat the more numerous. And yet 
 even in Naples, and in Rome itself, whatever difficulty occurs in 
 procuring any article catalogued in these formidable folios, must 
 arise either from the scarcity of the work itself, or the absence of 
 all interest in it. Assuredly there is no difficulty in obtaining 
 from the most respectable booksellers the vilest provocatives to 
 the basest crimes, though intermixed with gross lampoons on the 
 heads of the church, the religious orders, and on religion itself. 
 The stranger is invited into an inner room, and the proscribed 
 wares presented to him with most significant looks and gestures, 
 implying the hazard, and the necessity of secrecy. A creditable 
 English bookseller would deem himself insulted, if such works 
 were even inquired after at his shop. It is a well-known fact, 
 that with the mournful exception indeed of political provocatives, 
 and the titillations of vulgar envy provided by our anonymous 
 critics, the loathsome articles are among us vended and offered 
 
 VOL. II. D 
 
74 THE FRIEND. 
 
 for sale almost exclusively by foreigners. Such arc the 
 effects of a free press, and the generous habit of action imbiber) 
 from the blessed air of law and liberty, even by men who neither 
 understand the principle, nor feel the sentiment, of the dignified 
 purity, to which they yield obeisance from the instinct of charac 
 ter. As there is a national guilt which can be charged but 
 gently on each individual* so are there national virtues, which 
 can as little be imputed to the individuals, nowhere, however, 
 but in countries where liberty is the presiding influence, the uni 
 versal medium and menstruum of all other excellence, moral 
 and intellectual. Admirably doth the admirable Petrarch ad 
 monish us : 
 
 Nee sibi vcro quisquamfaho pcrsuadeat, eos qui pro libertate 
 excnbant, atquc hactenus desertce reipufilicce partes suscipiunt, 
 alienuni agere negotium ; suum agunt. In liac una repnsita 
 sibi omnia norint omnes, securitatem mcrcator. gloriam mile*, 
 utilitatem agricola. Postrcmo, in eadem religiosi ccerimomas, 
 otium studiosi, requiem senes, rudiment a discdplinarum pi/eri, 
 nuptiaspuellce,pudicitiam matrons, gaudium omnes. invenient. 
 # * x * Huic unireliquce, cedant curcc ! Si hanc omittitis, in 
 quantalibet occupations nihil agitis : si hide incumbitis, etsi 
 niliil agere videmini, cumulate tamcn et civium et virorum im- 
 plevistis officia* 
 
 Nor let any one falsely persuade himself, that those who keep 
 watch and ward for liberty, are meddling with things that do 
 not concern them, instead of minding their own business. For 
 all men should know, that all blessings are stored and protected 
 in this one, as in a common repository. Here is the tradesman s 
 security, the soldier s honor, the agriculturist s profit. Lastly, in 
 this one good of liberty the religious will find the permission of 
 their rites and forms of worship, the students their learned leisure, 
 the aged their repose, boys the rudiments of the several branches 
 of their education, maidens their chaste nuptials, matrons their 
 womanly honor and the dignity of their modesty, fathers of fami 
 lies the dues of natural affection and the sacred privileges of their 
 ancient home, every one their hope and their joy. To this one 
 
 * Petrarch. Epist, 45, ad Nicolaum tribunum urbis almtz novissimum et 
 adpopulum Romanum. The translation contains clauses referring to ex 
 pressions, which in the second edition, were inserted in the Latin quotation 
 by Mr. C. himself. Ed. 
 
ESSAY XI. 75 
 
 solicitude, therefore, let all other cares yield the priority. If you 
 omit this, be occupied as much and sedulously as you may, you 
 are doing nothing : If you apply your heart and strength to this, 
 though you seem to be doing nothing, you will, nevertheless, 
 have been fulfilling the duties of citizens and of men, yea, in a 
 measure pressed down and running over. 
 
 I quote Petrarch often iu the hope of drawing the attention of scholars to 
 his inestimable Latin writings. Let me add, in the wish likewise of recom 
 mending to the London publishers a translation of select passages from his 
 treatises and letters. If I except the German writings and original letters 
 of the heroic Luther, I do not remember a work from which so delightful 
 and instructive a volume might be compiled. 
 
 To give the true bent to the above extract, it is necessary to bear in mind, 
 that he who keeps watch and ward for freedom, has to guard against two 
 enemies, the despotism of the few and the despotism of the many but espe 
 cially in the present day against the sycophants of the populace. 
 License they mean, when they cry liberty 1 
 For who loves that, must first be wise and good. 
 
 ESSAY XI. 
 
 Nemo vero fallatur, quasi minorasint animorwn contagia quam corporum. 
 Majora sunt ; gravius Iccdunt ; altius descendant, serpuntque latentius. 
 
 PETRARCH. De Vit. Solit. L. 1. tract. 3. e. 4. 
 
 And let no man be deceived as if the contagions of the soul were less than 
 those of the body. They are yet greater ; they convey more direful dis 
 eases ; they sink deeper, and creep on more unsuspectedly. 
 
 WE have abundant reason then to infer, that the law of Eng 
 land has done well and concluded wisely in proceeding on the 
 principle so clearly worded by Milton : " that a book should be 
 as freely admitted into the world as any other birth ; and if it 
 prove a monster, who denies but that it may justly be burnt or 
 sunk into the sea ? We have reason then, I repeat, to rest sat 
 isfied with our laws, which no more prevent a book from coming 
 into the world unlicensed, lest it should prove a libel, than a 
 traveller from passing unquestioned through our turnpike-gates, 
 because it is possible he may be a highwayman. Innocence is 
 
76 THE FEIEND. 
 
 presumed in both cases. The publication is a part of the offence, 
 and its necessary condition. Words are moral acts, and words 
 deliberately made public the law considers in the same light as 
 any other cognizable overt act. 
 
 Here, however, a difficulty presents itself. Theft, robbery, 
 murder, and the like, are easily denned : the degrees and circum 
 stances likewise of these and similar actions are definite, and 
 constitute specific offences, described and punishable each under 
 its own name. We have only to prove the fact and identify the 
 offender. The intention too, in the great majority of cases, is so 
 clearly implied in the action, that the law can safely adopt it as 
 its universal maxim, that the proof of the malice is included in 
 the proof of the fact ; especially as the few occasional exceptions 
 have their remedy provided in the prerogative of pardon* in 
 trusted to the supreme magistrate. But in the case of libel, the 
 degree makes the kind, the circumstances constitute the crimi 
 nality ; and both degrees and circumstances, like the ascending 
 shades of color or the shooting hues of a dove s neck, die away 
 into each other, incapable of definition or outline. The eye of 
 the understanding, indeed, sees the determinate difference in each 
 individual case, but language is most often inadequate to express 
 what the eye perceives, much less can a general statute antici 
 pate and pre-define it. Again : in other overt acts a charge dis 
 proved leaves the accused either guilty of a different fault, or at 
 best simply blameless. A man having killed a fellow-citizen is 
 acquitted of murder ; the act was manslaughter only, or it was 
 justifiable homicide. But when we reverse the iniquitous sen 
 tence passed on Algernon Sidney, during our perusal of his work 
 on government ; at the moment we deny it to have been a traitor 
 ous libel, our beating hearts declare it to have been a benefaction 
 to our country, and under the circumstances of those times the 
 performance of an heroic duty. From this cause, therefore, 
 as well as from a libel s being a thing made up of degrees and 
 circumstances, and these too, discriminating offence from merit 
 by such dim and ambulant boundaries, the intention of the 
 agent, wherever it can be independently or inclusively ascertained, 
 must be allowed a great share in determining the character of 
 the action, unless the law is not only to be divorced from moral 
 justice, but to wage open hostility against it.* 
 * According to the old adage : you are not hanged for stealing a horse, 
 
ESSAY XI. 77 
 
 Add too, that laws in doubtful points are to be interpreted 
 according- to the design of the legislator, where this can be cer 
 tainly inferred. But the laws of England, which owe their own 
 present supremacy and absoluteness to the good sense and gener 
 ous dispositions diffused by the press more, far more, than to any 
 other single cause, must needs be presumed favorable to its gen 
 eral influence. Even in the penalties attached to its abuse, we 
 must suppose the legislature to have been actuated by the de 
 sire of preserving its essential privileges. The press is indiffer 
 ently the passive instrument of evil and of good : nay, there is some 
 good even in its evil. " Good and evil we know," says Milton, 
 in the Speech from which I have selected the motto of the pre 
 ceding essay, " in the field of this world, grow up together al 
 most 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 incessant labor to cull out 
 and sort asunder, were not more intermixed." " 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 way-faring 
 Christian. I can not praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, un- 
 exercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and see.s her ad 
 versary." "That virtue, therefore, which is but a youngling 
 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." " 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 manner of tractates, and 
 hearing all manner of reason?" Again but, indeed the whole 
 treatise is one strain of moral wisdom and political prudence : 
 " Why should we then affect a rigor 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 
 
 but that horses may not be stolen. To what extent this is true, I shall have 
 occasion to examine hereafter. 
 
78 THE FRIEND. 
 
 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. Arid were I the 
 chooser, a dram of well-doing should be preferred before many 
 times as much the forcible hindrance of evil-doing. For God, 
 sure, esteems the growth and completion of one virtuous person, 
 more than the restraint of ten vicious." 
 
 The evidence of history is strong in favor of the same princi 
 ples, even in respect of their expediency. The average result 
 of the press from Henry VIII. to Charles 1. was such a diffusion 
 of religious light as first redeemed and afterwards saved this na 
 tion from the spiritual and moral death of Popery ; and in" the 
 following period it is to the press that we owe the gradual as 
 cendency of those wise political maxims, which casting philo 
 sophic truth in the moulds of national laws, customs, and exist 
 ing orders of society, subverted the tyranny Avithout suspending 
 the government, and at length completed the mild and salutary 
 revolution by the establishment of the house of Brunswick. To 
 what must we attribute this vast over-balance of good in the 
 general effects of the press, but to the over-balance of virtuous 
 intention in those who employed the press ? The law, there 
 fore, will not refuse to manifest good intention a certain weight 
 even in cases of apparent error, lest it should discourage and 
 scare away those, to whose efforts we owe the comparative in- 
 frequency and weakness of error on the whole. The law may, 
 however, nay, it must demand, that the external proofs of the 
 author s honest intentions should be supported by the general 
 style and matter of his work, and by the circumstances and mode 
 of its publication. A passage, which in a grave and regular dis 
 quisition would be blameless, might become highly libellous and 
 justly punishable if it were applied to present measures or per 
 sons for immediate purposes, in a cheap and popular tract. I 
 have seldom felt greater indignation than at finding in a large 
 manufactory a sixpenny pamphlet, containing a selection of in 
 flammatory paragraphs from the prose-writings of Milton, with 
 out a hint given of the time, occasion, state of government, and 
 other circumstances under which they were written not a hint, 
 that the freedom which we now enjoy, exceeds all that Milton 
 dared hope for, or deemed practicable ; and that his political 
 creed sternly excluded the populace, and indeed the majority of 
 
ESSAY XL 70 
 
 the population, from all pretensions to political power. If the 
 manifest bad intention would constitute this publication a sedi 
 tious libel, a good intention equally manifest can not justly be de 
 nied its share of influence in producing a contrary verdict. 
 
 Here then is the difficulty. From the very nature of a libel it 
 is impossible so to define it, but that the most meritorious works 
 will be found included in the description. Not from any defect 
 or undue severity in the particular law, but from the very nature 
 of the offence to be guarded against, a work recommending re 
 form by the only rational mode of recommendation, that is, by 
 the detection and exposure of corruption, abuse, or incapacity, 
 might, though it should breathe the best and most unadulterated 
 English feelings, be brought within the definition of libel equally 
 with the vilest incendiary pamphlet, that ever aimed at leading 
 and misleading the multitude. Not a paragraph in the Morning 
 Post during the Peace of Amiens, (or rather the experimental 
 truce so called,) though to the immortal honor of the then edi 
 tor, that newspaper was the chief secondary means of producing 
 the unexampled national unanimity, with which the war re 
 commenced and has since been continued, not a paragraph 
 warning the nation, as need was and most imperious duty com 
 manded, of the perilous designs and unsleeping ambition of our 
 neighbor, the mimic and caricaturist of Charlemagne, but was a 
 punishable libel, The law of libel is a vast aviary, which en 
 cages the awakening cock arid the geese whose alarum preserved 
 the Capitol, no less than the babbling magpie and ominous 
 screech-owl. And yet will we avoid this seeming injustice, we 
 throw down all fence and bulwark of public decency and public 
 opinion ; political calumny will soon join hands with private 
 slander ; and every principle, every feeling, that binds the citizen 
 to his country arid the spirit to its Creator, will be undermined 
 not by reasoning, for from that there is no danger ; but by the 
 mere habit of hearing them reviled and scoffed at with impunity. 
 Were we to contemplate the evils of a rank and unweeded press 
 only in ils effect on the manners of a people, and on the general 
 tone of thought and conversation, the greater the love which we 
 bore 1o literature and to all the means and instruments of human 
 improvement, the greater would be the earnestness with which 
 \ve should solicit the interference of law : the more anxiously 
 should we wish for some Ithuriel spear, that might remove from 
 
80 THE FRIEND. 
 
 the ear of the public, and expose in their own fiendish shape 
 those reptiles, which inspiring venom and forging illusions as 
 
 they list, 
 
 thence raise 
 
 At least distempered, discontented thoughts, 
 Vain hopes, vain aims, inordinate desires. 
 
 PARADISE LOST. 
 
 ESSAY XII. 
 
 Qitomodo antem id futurwn sit, ne guis incredibile arbitretur, ostendam. 
 Imprimis multiplicabitur regnum, et summa rerum potestas per plurimos 
 disnipata et concisa minuetur. Tune discordiw civiles in perpetuum serentur, 
 nee ulla requies bellis cxitialibus erit, donee reyes dcccm pariter exiatant gut 
 orbem terra, non ad regendum, scd ad consumendum, partiantur. Hi exer- 
 citibiis in immensum coactis, ct agrorum cultibns destitutes, quod est princi- 
 pium cversionis et cladis, diftperdent omnia, et commitment, et t vorabunt, 
 Turn repcritc adverms eos Jiostis potentissimus ab extremis finibu.s plagcesep- 
 tentrionalis orictiir, qui tribus ex co numero deletia qui tune Asiam obtine- 
 bunt, assumetur in societatcm /< cccteri-i, ac princeps omnium constituetur. 
 Hie insustentabili dominatione vcxabit orbem ; divina ct hioi^aiia mixeeMt ; 
 infanda dictu et execrabilia molictur ; nova conni/ea in pectorc fttto volutabit, 
 ut proprium sibi constitnat imperium ; leges commtitabit, suas sanciet ; con- 
 taminabit, diripiet, spoliabit, occidet. De.nique imnmtato nomine, atque im- 
 perii sede translata, confusio ac perturbatio hwnani generis consequetur. 
 Turn vere detestabilc, atque abominandum tempus existet, quo nulli ]>ominum 
 sit vitajucunda. LACTANTIUS de Vita Beata, Lib. vii. c. 16. 
 
 But lest this should be doomed incredible, I will show the manner in 
 which it is to take place. First, there will be a multiplication of independ 
 ent sovereignties, and the supreme magistracy of the empire, scattered and 
 cut lip into fragments, will be enfeebled in the exercise of power by Urw 
 and authority. Then will be sown the seeds of civil discords, nor will there 
 be any rest or pause to wasteful and ruinous wars ; while the soldiery kept 
 together in immense standing armies, the kings will crush and lay waste at 
 their will ; until at length there will rise up against them a most puissant 
 military chieftain of low birth, who will have conceded to him a fellowship 
 with the other sovereigns of the earth, and will finally be constituted the 
 head of all. This man Avill harass the civilized world with an insupporta 
 ble despotism, he will confound and commix all things spiritual and tem 
 poral. He will form plans and preparations of the most execrable and 
 sacrilegious nature. He will be forever restlessly turning over new 
 
ESSAY XII, 81 
 
 schemes in his imagination, in order that he may fix the imperial power 
 over all in his own name and possession. He will change the former laws, 
 he will sanction a code of his own, he will contaminate, pillage, lay waste 
 and massacre. At length, when he has succeeded in the change of names 
 and titles, and in the transfer of the seat of empire, there will follow a con 
 fusion and perturbation of the human race ; then will there be for a while 
 an era of horror and abomination, during which no man will enjoy his life 
 in quietness.* 
 
 I INTERPOSE this essay as an historical comment on the words 
 " mimic and caricaturist of Charlemagne," as applied to the des 
 pot, whom since the tirue that the words were first printed, we 
 have, thank Heaven ! succeeded in encaging. The motto con 
 tains one of the most striking instances of an uninspired prophecy 
 fulfilled even in many of its minutice, that I recollect ever to 
 have met with : arid it is hoped, that as a curiosity it will rec 
 oncile my readers to its unusual length. But .though my chief 
 motive was that of relieving, by the variety of an historical par 
 allel, the series of argument on this most important of all sub 
 jects, the communicability of truth, yet the essay is far iirom be 
 ing a digression. Having given utterance to quicquid in rem 
 tarn maleficam indignatio dolorque dictarent, concerning the 
 mischiefs of a lawless press, I held -it an act of justice to give a 
 portrait no less lively of the excess to which the remorseless am 
 bition of a government might go in accumulating its oppressions 
 in the one instance before the discovery of printing, and in the 
 other during the suppression of its freedom. 
 
 I have translated the following from a voluminous German 
 work, Michael Ignaz Schmidt s History of the Germans, from 
 CharltJs the Great to Conrade I. ; in which this extract forms the 
 conclusion of the second chapter of the third book. The late 
 tyrant s close imitation of Charlemagne was sufficiently evidenced 
 by his assumption of the iron crown of Italy, by his imperial 
 coronation with the presence and authority of the Holy Father ; 
 by his imperial robe embroidered with bees in order to mark him 
 as a successor of Pepin, and even by his ostentatious revocation 
 of Charlemagne s grants to the Bishop of Rome. But that the 
 differences might be felt likewise, I have prefaced the translation 
 with the few following observations. 
 
 * This translation has expressions referring to some words inserted by 
 the author in the Latin quotation in the previous editions. Ed. 
 
82 THE FRIEND. 
 
 Let it be remembered then, that Charlemagne, for the greater 
 part, created for himself the means of which he availed himself; 
 that his very education was his own work, and that unlike Peter 
 the Great, he could find no assistants out of his own realm ; that 
 the unconquerable courage and heroic dispositions of the nations 
 he conquered, supplied a proof positive of real superiority, indeed 
 the sole positive proof of intellectual power, in a warrior : for how 
 can we measure force but by the resistance to it ? But all was 
 prepared for Bonaparte ; Europe weakened in the very heart of 
 all human strength, namely, in moral and religious principle, and 
 at the same time accidentally destitute. of any one great or com 
 manding mind : the French people, on the other hand, still rest 
 less from revolutionary fanaticism ; their civic enthusiasm already 
 passed into military passion and the ambition of conquest ; and 
 alike by disgust, terror, and characteristic unfitness for freedom, 
 ripe for the reception of a despotism. Add too, that the main 
 obstacles to an unlimited system of conquest, and the pursuit of 
 universal monarchy had been cleared away for. him by his 
 pioneers the Jacobins, namely, the influence of the great land 
 holders, of the privileged and of the commercial classes. Even 
 the naval successes of Great Britain, by destroying the trade, 
 rendering useless the colonies, and almost annihilating the navy 
 of France, were in some respects subservient to his designs by 
 concentrating the powers of the French empire in its armies, and 
 supplying them out of the wrecks of all other employments, save 
 that of agriculture. France had already approximated to the 
 formidable state so prophetically described by Sir James Steuart, 
 in his Political Economy, in which the population should consist 
 chiefly of soldiers and peasantry : at least the interests of no other 
 classes were regarded. The great merit of Bonaparte has been 
 that of a skilful steersman, who with his boat in the most violent 
 storm still keeps himself on the summit of the waves, which not 
 he, but the winds had raised. I will now proceed to my transla 
 tion. 
 
 " That Charles was a hero, his exploits bear evidence. The 
 subjugation of the Lombards, protected as they were by the Alps, 
 by fortresses and fortified towns, by numerous armies, and by a 
 great name ; of the Saxons, secured by their savage resoluteness, 
 by an untamable love of freedom, by their desert plains and 
 enormous forests, and by their own poverty ; the humbling of the 
 
ESSAY XII. 83 
 
 Dukes of Bavaria, Aquitania, Bretagne, and Gascony ; proud of 
 their ancestry as well as of their ample domains ; the almost en 
 tire extirpation of the Avars, so long the terror of Europe ; are 
 assuredly works which demanded a courage and a firmness of 
 mind such as Charles only possessed. 
 
 " How great his reputation was, and this too beyond the limits 
 of Europe, is proved by the embassies sent to him out of Persia, 
 Palestine, Mauritania, and even from the Khalifs of Bagdad. 
 If at the present day an embassy from the Black or Caspian Sea 
 comes to a prince on the Baltic, it is not to be wondered at, since 
 such are now the political relations of the four quarters of the 
 world, that a blow which is given to anyone of them is felt more 
 or less by all the others. Whereas in the time of Charlemagne, 
 the inhabitants in one of the known parts of the world scarcely 
 knew what was going on in the rest. Nothing but the extraor 
 dinary, all-piercing report of Charles s exploits could bring this 
 to pass. His greatness, which set the world in astonishment, 
 was likewise, without doubt, that which begot in the Pope and 
 the Romans the first idea of the re-establishment of their empire. 
 
 " It is true, that a number of things united to make Charles a 
 great man favorable circumstances of time, a nation already- 
 disciplined to warlike habits, a long life, and the consequent ac 
 quisition of experience, such as no one possessed in his whole 
 realm. Still, however, the principal means of his greatness 
 Charles found in himself. His great mind was capable of ex 
 tending its attention lo the greatest multiplicity of affairs. In the 
 middle of Saxony he thought on Italy and Spain, and at Rome 
 he made provisions for Saxony, Bavaria, and Pannonia. He 
 gave audience to the ambassadors of the Greek emperor and 
 other potentates, and himself audited the accounts of his own 
 farms, where every thing was entered even to the number of the 
 eggs. Busy as his mind was, his body was not less in one con 
 tinued state of motion. Charles would see into every thing him 
 self, and do every thing himself, as far as his powers extended 
 and even this it was, too, which gave to his undertakings such 
 force and energy. * 
 
 " But with all this the government of Charles was the govern 
 ment of a conqueror, that is splendid abroad and fearfully oppres 
 sive at home. What a grievance must it not have been for the 
 people, that Charles for forty years together dragged them now 
 
84 THE FRIEND. 
 
 to the Elbe, then to the Ebro, after this to the Po, and from 
 thence back again to the Elbe, and this not to check an invading 
 enemy, but to make conquests which little profited the French 
 nation ! This must prove too much, at length, for a hired sol 
 dier : how much more for conscripts, who did not live only to 
 fight, but who were fathers of families, citizens, and proprietors ? 
 But above all, it is to be wondered at, that a nation, like the 
 French, should suffer themselves to be used as Charles used them. 
 But the people no longer possessed any considerable share of in 
 fluence. All depended on the great chieftains, who gave their 
 willing suffrage for endless wars, by which they were always sure 
 to win. They found the best opportunity, under such circum 
 stances, to make themselves great and mighty at the expense of 
 the freemen resident within the circle of their baronial courts ; 
 and when conquests were made, it was far more for their advan 
 tage than that of the monarchy. In the conquered provinces 
 there was a necessity for dukes, vassal kings, and different high 
 offices : all this fell to their share. 
 
 " I would not say this if we did not possess incontrovertible 
 original documents of those times, which prove clearly to us that 
 Charles s government was an unhappy one for the people, and 
 that this great man, by his actions, labored to the direct subver 
 sion of his first principles. It was his first pretext to establish a 
 greater equality among the members of his vast community, and 
 to make all free and equal subjects under a common sovereign. 
 And, from the necessity occasioned by continual war, the exact 
 contrary took place. Nothing gives us a better notion of the in 
 terior state of the French monarchy, than the third capitular of 
 the year 811.* All is full of complaint, the bishops and earls 
 clamoring against the freeholders, and these in their turn against 
 the bishops and earls. And, in truth, the freeholders had no 
 small reason to be discontented and to resist, as far as they dared, 
 even the imperial levies. A dependant must be content to fol 
 low his lord without further questioning : for he was paid for it. 
 But a free citizen, who lived wholly on his own property, might 
 reasonably object to suffer himself to be dragged about in all 
 quarters of the world, at the fancies of his lord : especially as 
 there was so much injustice intermixed. Those who gave up 
 
 * Compare with this the four or five quarto volumes o f the French Con 
 script Code. 
 
ESSAY XII. 85 
 
 their properties entirely, or in part, of their own accord, were left 
 undisturbed at home, while those, who refused to do this, were 
 forced so often into service, that at length, becoming impover 
 ished, they were compelled by want to give up, or dispose of, 
 their free tenures to the bishops or earls.* 
 
 " It almost surpasses belief to what a height, at length, the 
 aversion to war rose in the French nation, from the multitude 
 of the campaigns, and the grievances connected with them. The 
 national vanity was now satiated by the frequency of victories : 
 and the plunder which fell to the lot of individuals, made but a 
 poor compensation ibr the losses and burthens sustained by their 
 families, at home. Some, in order to become exempt from mili 
 tary service, sought for menial employments in the establish 
 ments of the bishops, abbots, abbesses, and earls. 4 Others made 
 over their free property to become tenants at will of such lords, 
 as from their age or other circumstances, they thought would be 
 called to no further military services. Others even privately took 
 away the life of their mothers, aunts, or other of their relatives, 
 in order that no family residents might remain through whom 
 their names might be known, and themselves traced ; others 
 voluntarily made slaves of themselves, in order thus to render 
 themselves incapable of the military rank." 
 
 When this extract was first published, namely, September 7, 
 1809, I prefixed the following sentence : " This passage contains 
 so much matter for political anticipation and well-grounded hope, 
 that I feel no apprehension of the reader s being dissatisfied with 
 its length." I trust, that I may now derive the same confidence 
 from his genial exultation, as a Christian, and from his honest 
 pride as a Briton, in the retrospect of its completion. In this be 
 lief I venture to conclude the essay with the following extract 
 from a " Comparison of the French republic, under Bonaparte, 
 with the Roman empire under the first Ciesars," published by me 
 in the Morning Post, 21st September, 1802. 
 
 If, then, there be no counterpoise of dissimilar circumstances, 
 the prospect is gloomy indeed. The commencement of the pub 
 lic slavery in Rome, was in the most splendid eja of human 
 genius. Any unusually flourishing period of the arts and sci- 
 
 * It would require no great ingenuity to discover parallels, or at least 
 equivalent* hardships to these, in the treatment of, and regulations concern 
 ing, the reluctant conscripts. 
 
86 THE FRIEND. 
 
 ences in any country, is, even to this day, called the Augustan 
 age of that country. The Roman poets, the Roman historians, 
 the Roman orators, rivalled those of Greece ; in military tactics, 
 in machinery, in all the conveniences of private life, the Romans 
 greatly surpassed the Greeks. With few exceptions, all the em 
 perors, even the worst of them, were, like Bonaparte,* the liberal 
 encouragers of all great public works, and of every species of 
 public merit not connected with the assertion of political freedom : 
 
 O juvcnes, circumspidt atque agitat vos, 
 
 Materiamque sibi Duds indnlgentia quarit.\ 
 
 It is even so, at this present moment, in France. Yet, both in 
 France and in Rome, we have learned, that the most abject dis 
 positions to slavery rapidly trod on the heels of the most outra 
 geous fanaticism for an almost anarchical liberty. Ruere in ser- 
 vitium consules, patres, eques : quanta quis illustrior, tanto 
 magis falsi ac festimmtes.^. Peace and the coadunation of all 
 the civilized provinces of the earth were the grand and plausible 
 pretexts of Roman despotism : the degeneracy of the human 
 species itself, in all the nations so blended, was the melancholy 
 effect. To-morrow, therefore, we shall endeavor to detect all 
 those points and circumstances of dissimilarity, which, though 
 
 * Imitators succeed better in copying the vices than the excellences of 
 their archetypes. Where shall we find in the First Consul of France a 
 counterpart to the generous and dreadless clemency of the first Caesar ? 
 Acerbe loqucntibus satin kabuit pro condone dcnundare, tie persevcrarent. 
 Antique CfEdnce criminosissimo libro, et l^itholai carminibus maledicentis- 
 simis laceratam ezistimationem suam dvili animo tulit. (Sueton. I. 75. 
 Ed.) 
 
 It deserves translation for English readers. " To those who spoke bit 
 terly against him, he held it sufficient to signify publicly, that they should 
 not persevere in the use of such language. His character had been mangled 
 in a most libellous work of Aulus Caecina, and he had been grossly lam 
 pooned in some verses by Pitholaus ; but he bore both with the temper of 
 a good citizen." 
 
 For this part of the First Consul s character, if common report speaks 
 the truth, we must seek a parallel in the dispositions of the third Caesar, 
 who dreaded the pen of a paragraph writer, hinting aught against his 
 morals and measures, with as great anxiety, and with as vindictive feelings, 
 as if it had been the dagger of an assassin lifted up against his life. From the 
 third Caesar, too, he adopted the abrogation of all popular elections. 
 
 f Juvenal Sat. vii. 20. Ed. 
 Tacit. Ana. i. 7. Ed. 
 
ESSAY XII. 87 
 
 they can not impeach the rectitude of the parallel, for the pres 
 ent, may yet render it probable, that as the same constitution of 
 government has been built up in France with incomparably 
 greater rapidity, so it may have an incomparably shorter dura 
 tion. We are riot conscious of any feelings of bitterness towards 
 the First Consul ; or, if any, only that venial prejudice, which 
 naturally results from the having hoped proudly of an individual, 
 and the having been miserably disappointed. But we will not 
 voluntarily cease to think freely and speak openly. "We owe 
 grateful hearts, and uplifted hands of thanksgiving to the Di 
 vine Providence, that there is yet one European country and 
 that country our own in which the actions of public men may 
 be boldly analyzed, and the result publicly stated. And let the 
 Chief Consul, who professes in all things to follow his fate, learn 
 to submit to it, if he finds that it is still his fate to struggle with 
 the spirit of English freedom, and the virtues which are the off 
 spring of that spirit ; if he finds, that the genius of Great Brit 
 ain, which blew up his Egyptian navy into the air, and blighted 
 his Syrian laurels, still follows him with a calm and dreadful 
 eye ; arid in peace, equally as in war, still watches for that lib 
 erty, in which alone the genius of our isle lives, and moves, and 
 has its being ; and which being lost, all our commercial and 
 naval greatness would instantly languish, like a flower, the root 
 of which had been silently eaten away by a worm ; and without 
 which, in any country, the public festivals, and pompous merri 
 ments of a nation present no other spectacle to the eye of reason, 
 than a mob of maniacs dancing in their fetters. 
 
ESSAY XIII. 
 
 Must there be still some discord mix d among 
 The harmony of men, whose mood accords 
 Best with contention tun d to notes of wrong ? 
 That when war fails, peace must make war with words, 
 With words unto destruction arm d more strong 
 Than ever were our foreign foernens awards; 
 Making as deep, tho not yet bleeding wounds ? 
 What war left scarless, calumny confounds. 
 
 Truth lies cntrapp d where cunning finds no bar : 
 Since no proportion can there be betwixt 
 Our actions which in endless motions are, 
 And ordinances which are always fixt. 
 Ten thousand laws more can not reach so far, 
 But malice goes beyond, or lives commixt 
 So close with goodness, that it ever will 
 Corrupt, disguise, or counterfeit it still. 
 
 And therefore would our glorious Alfred, who 
 Join d with the king s the good man s majesty, 
 Not leave law s labyrinth without a clue 
 Gave to deep skill its juxt authority, 
 
 ****** 
 
 JBitt the last judgment this his jury s plan 
 Left to the natural sense of work-din/ man* 
 
 I RECUR to the dilemma stated in the eighth essay. How 
 shall we solve this problem ? Its solution is to be found in that 
 spirit which, like the universal menstruum sought for by the old 
 alchemists, can blend and harmonize the most discordant ele 
 ments ; it is to be found in the spirit of a rational freedom dif 
 fused and become national, in the consequent influence and con 
 trol of public opinion, and in its most precious organ, the jury. It 
 
 * Daniel. Epistle to Sir Thomas Egertoii. The lines in italics are sub 
 stituted by the author for the original, and there are a few other verbal 
 alterations. Ed. 
 
ESSAY XIII. 89 
 
 is to be found, wherever juries are sufficiently enlightened to per 
 ceive the difference, and to comprehend the origin and necessity 
 of the .difference, between libels and other criminal overt-acts, 
 and are sufficiently independent to act upon the conviction, that 
 in a charge of libel, the degree, the circumstances, and the inten 
 tion, constitute not merely modify the offence, give it its being, 
 and determine its legal name. The words maliciously and ad 
 visedly, must here have a force of their own, and a proof of their 
 own. They will consequently consider the law as a blank power 
 provided for the punishment of the offender, not as a light by 
 which they are to determine and discriminate the offence. The 
 understanding and conscience of the jury are the judges in toto : 
 the law a blank conge d? dire. The law is the clay, and those 
 the potter s wheel. Shame fall on that man, who shall labor to 
 confound what reason and nature have put asunder, and who at 
 once, as far as in him lies, would render the press ineffectual and 
 the law odious : who would lock up the main river, the Thames, 
 of our intellectual commerce ; would throw a bar across the 
 stream, that must render its navigation dangerous or partial, 
 using as his materials the very banks, which were intended to 
 deepen its channel and guard against its inundations.! Shame 
 fall on him, and a participation of the infamy of those, who mis 
 led an English jury to the murder of Algernon Sidney. 
 
 But though the virtuous intention of the writer must be allowed 
 a certain influence in facilitating his acquittal, the degree of his 
 moral guilt is not the true index or mete-wand of his condemna 
 tion. For juries do not sit in a court of conscience, but of law ; 
 they are not the representatives of religion, but the guardians of 
 external tranquillity. The leading principle, the pole-star, of the 
 judgment in its decision concerning the libellous nature of a pub 
 lished writing, is its more or less remote connection with after 
 overt-acts, as the cause or occasion of the same. Thus the pub 
 lication of actual facts may be, and most often will be, criminal 
 and libellous, when directed against private characters : riot only 
 because the charge will reach the minds of many who can not be 
 competent judges of the truth or falsehood of facts to which them 
 selves were not witnesses, against a man whom they do not know, 
 or at best know imperfectly ; but because such a publication is 
 of itself a very serious overt-act, by which the author without au 
 thority and without trial, has inflicted punishment on a fellow- 
 
90 THE FRIEND. 
 
 subject, himself being witness and jury, judge and executioner. 
 Of such publications there can be no legal justification, though 
 the wrong may be palliated by the circumstance that the inju 
 rious charges are not only true, but wholly out of the reach of 
 the law. But in libels on the government there are two things 
 to be balanced against each other : first, the incomparably greater 
 mischief of the overt-acts, if we suppose them actually occasioned 
 by the libel (as for instance, the subversion of government and 
 property, if the principles taught by Thomas Paine had been 
 realized, or if even an attempt had been made to realize them, 
 by the many thousands of his readers) ; and second, the very great 
 improbability that such eflects will be produced by such writings. 
 Governrnent concerns all generally, and no one in particular. 
 The facts are commonly as well known to the readers, as to the 
 writer : and falsehood therefore easily detected. It is proved, 
 likewise, by experience, that the frequency of open political dis 
 cussion, with all its blamable indiscretions, indisposes a nation 
 to overt-acts of practical sedition or conspiracy. They talk ill, 
 said Charles V. of his Belgian, provinces, but they suffer so much 
 the better for it. His successor thought differently : he deter 
 mined to . be master of their words and opinions, as well as of 
 their actions, arid in consequence lost one half of those provinces, 
 and retained the other half at an expense of strength and treas 
 ure greater than the original worth of the whole. An enlight 
 ened jury, therefore, will require proofs of more than ordinary 
 malignity of intention, as furnished by the style, price, mode of 
 circulation, and so forth ; or of punishable indiscretion arising 
 out of the state of the times, as of dearth, for instance, or of what 
 ever other calamity is likely to render the lower classes turbulent, 
 and apt to be alienated from the government of their country. 
 For the absence of a right disposition of mind must be considered 
 both in law and in morals, as nearly equivalent to the presence 
 of a wrong disposition. Under such circumstances the legal 
 paradox that a libel may be the more a libel for being true, be 
 comes strictly just, and as such ought to be acted upon. 
 
 Concerning the right of punishing by law the authors of heret 
 ical or deistical writings, I reserve my remarks for a future essay, 
 in which I hope to state the grounds and limits of toleration more 
 accurately than they seem to me to have been hitherto traced. 
 There is one maxim, however, which I am tempted to seize as it 
 
ESSAY XIII. 91 
 
 passes across me. If I may trust my own memory, it is indeed a 
 very old truth : and yet if the fashion of acting in apparent igno 
 rance thereof be any presumption of its novelty, it ought to be 
 new, or at least have become so by courtesy of oblivion. It is 
 this : that as far as human practice can realize the sharp limits 
 and exclusive proprieties of science, law arid religion should be 
 kept distinct. There is, in strictness, no proper opposition but 
 between the two polar forces of one and the same power.* If I 
 say then, that law and religion are natural opposites, and that the 
 latter is the requisite counterpoise of the former, let it not be 
 interpreted, as if I had declared them to be contraries. The law 
 has rightfully invested the creditor with the power of arresting 
 and imprisoning an insolvent debtor, the farmer with the power 
 of transporting, mediately at least, the pillagers of his hedges 
 and copses ; but the law does not compel him to exercise that 
 power, while it will often happen that religion commands him 
 to forego, it. Nay, so well was this understood by our grand 
 fathers, that a man who squares his conscience by the law was a 
 common paraphrase or synonyme of a wretch without any con 
 science at all. We have all of us learnt from history, that there 
 was a long and dark period, during which the powers and the 
 aims of law were usurped in the name of religion by the clergy 
 and the courts spiritual : and we all know the result. Law and 
 
 * Every power iu nature and in spirit must evolve an opposite as the 
 sole means and condition of its manifestation: and all opposition is a ten 
 dency to re-union. This is the universal law of polarity or essential dual 
 ism, first promulgated by Heraclitus, 2000 years afterwards re-published, 
 and made the foundation both of logic, of physics, and of metaphysics by 
 Giordano Bruno. The principle may be thus expressed. The identity of 
 thesis and antithesis is the substance of all being; their opposition the con 
 dition of all existence or being manifested; and every thing or phenomenon 
 is the exponent of a synthesis as long as the opposite energies are retained 
 in that synthesis. Thus water is neither oxygen nor hydrogen, nor yet is- it 
 a commixture of both ; but the synthesis or indifference of the two : and as 
 long as the copula endures, by which it becomes water, or rather which 
 alone is water, it is not less a simple body than either of the imaginary ele 
 ments, improperly called its ingredients or components. It is the object of 
 the mechanical atomistic philosophy to confound synthesis with Kynartcxis, 
 or rather with mere juxtaposition of eorpuscules separated by invisible in 
 terspaces. I find it difficult to determine, whether this theory contrail icts 
 the reason or the senses most : for it is alike inconceivable and unimagi 
 nable. 
 
92 THE FKIEND. 
 
 religion thus interpenetrating 1 , neutralized each other ; and the 
 baleful product, or tertium aliquid, of this union retarded the 
 civilization of Europe for centuries. Law splintered into the 
 minuticB of religion, the awful function and prerogative of which 
 it is to take account of every idle ivord, became a busy and in 
 quisitorial tyranny : and religion substituting legal terrors for the 
 ennobling influences of conscience remained religion in name only. 
 The present age appears to me approaching fast to a similar 
 usurpation of the functions of religion by law : and if it were re 
 quired, I should not want strong presumptive proofs in favor of 
 this opinion, whether I sought for them in the charges from the 
 bench concerning wrongs, to which religion denounces the fearful 
 penalties of guilt, but for which the law of the land assigns 
 damages only : or in sundry statutes and all praise to the late 
 Mr. Wyndham, Romanontm ultimo in a still greater number 
 of attempts towards new statutes, the authors of which displayed 
 the most pitiable ignorance, not merely of the distinction between 
 perfect, and imperfect obligations, but even of that still more 
 sacred distinction between things arid persons. What the son 
 of Sirach advises concerning the soul, every senator should apply 
 to his legislative capacity : reverence it in meekness, knowing 
 how feeble and how mighty a thing it is !* 
 
 From this hint concerning toleration, we* may pass by an 
 easy transition to the, perhaps, still more interesting subject of 
 tolerance. And here I fully coincide with Frederic H. Jacobi, 
 that the only true spirit of tolerance consists in our conscientious 
 toleration of each other s intolerance. Whatever pretends to be 
 more than this, is either the unthinking cant of fashion, or the 
 soul-palsying narcotic of moral and religious indifference. All of 
 us without exception, in the same mode though not in the same 
 degree, are necessarily subjected to the risk of mistaking posi 
 tive opinions for certainty and clear insight. From this yoke we 
 can not free ourselves, but by ceasing to be men ; and this too 
 not in order to transcend, but to sink below, our human nature. 
 For if in one point of view it be the -mulct of our fall, and of 
 the corruption of our will ; it is equally true, that contemplated 
 from another point, it is the price and consequence of our pro- 
 gressiveness. To him who is compelled to pace to and fro within 
 
 * The reference, probably, is to Ecclus. x. 28. My son, glorify thy soul in 
 meekness, and give it honor according to the dignity thereof. JKd. 
 
ESSAY XIII. 93 
 
 the high walls and in the narrow court-yard of a prison, all ob 
 jects may appear clear and distinct. It is the traveller journey 
 ing onward full of heart and hope, with, an ever-varying horizon 
 on the boundless plain, who is liable to mistake clouds for moun 
 tains, and the mirage of drouth for an expanse of refreshing 
 waters. 
 
 But notwithstanding this deep conviction of our general falli 
 bility, and the most vivid recollection of my own, I dare avow 
 with the German philosopher, that as far as opinions, and not 
 motives, principles, and not men, are concerned ; I neither am 
 tolerant, nor wish to be regarded as such. According to my 
 judgment, it is mere ostentation, or a poor trick that hypocrisy 
 plays with the cards of nonsense, when a man makes protestation 
 of being perfectly tolerant in respect of all principles, opinions, 
 and persuasions, those alone excepted which render the holders 
 intolerant. For he either means to say by this, that he is 
 utterly indifferent towards all truth, and finds nothing so insuffer 
 able as the persuasion of there being any such mighty value or 
 importance attached to the possession of the truth as should give 
 a marked preference to any one conviction above any other ; or 
 else he means nothing, and amuses himself with articulating the 
 pulses of the air instead of inhaling it in the more healthful and 
 profitable exercise of yawning. That which doth not withstand, 
 hath itself no standing place. To fill a station is to exclude or 
 repel others, and this is not less the definition of moral, than of 
 material solidity. We live by continued acts of defence, that in 
 volve a sort of offensive warfare. But a man s principles, on 
 which he grounds his hope and his faith, are the life of his life. 
 We live by faith, says the philosophic Apostle ; and faith with 
 out principles is but a flattering phrase for wilful positiveness, or 
 fanatical bodily sensation. Well, and of good right therefore, do 
 we maintain with more zeal, than we should defend body or es 
 tate, a deep and inward conviction, which is as the moon to us ; 
 and like the rnoon with all its massy shadows and deceptive 
 gleams, it yet lights us on our way, poor travellers as we are, and 
 benighted pilgrims. With all its spots and changes and tempo 
 rary eclipses, with all its vain halos and bedimming vapors, it 
 yet reflects the light that is to rise on us, which even now is 
 rising, though intercepted from our immediate view by the moun 
 tains that inclose and frown over the vale of our mortal life. 
 
9-i THE FRIEND. 
 
 This again is the mystery and the dignity of our human na 
 ture, that we can riot give up our reason, without giving up at 
 the same time our individual personality. For that must appear 
 to each man to be his reason which produces in him the highest 
 sense of certainty ; and yet it is riot reason, except so far as it is 
 of universal validity and obligatory on all mankind. There is a 
 one heart for the whole mighty mass of humanity, and every 
 pulse in each particular vessel strives to beat in concert with it. 
 He who asserts that truth is of no importance except in the 
 signification of sincerity, confounds sense with madness, and the 
 word of God with a dream. If the power of reasoning be the 
 gift of the supreme Reason, that we be sedulous, yea, and mili 
 tant in the endeavor to reason aright, is his implied command. 
 But what is of permanent and essential interest to one man must 
 needs be so to all, in proportion to the means and opportunities 
 of each. Woe to him by whom these are neglected, and double 
 woe to him by whom they are withholden ; for he robs at once 
 himself and his neighbor. That man s soul is not dear to him 
 self, to whom the souls of his brethren are not dear. As far as 
 they can be influenced by him, they are parts and properties of 
 his own soul, their faith his faith, their errors his burthen, their 
 righteousness and bliss his righteousness and his reward arid of 
 their guilt and misery his own will be the echo. As much as I 
 love my fellow-men, so much and no more will I be intolerant of 
 their heresies and unbelief and I will honor and hold forth the 
 right hand of fellowship to every individual who is equally in 
 tolerant of that which he conceives such in me. We will both 
 exclaim I know not what antidotes among the complex views, 
 impulses and circumstances, that form your moral being, God s 
 gracious providence may have vouchsafed to you against the ser 
 pent fang of this error, but it is a viper, and its poison deadly, 
 although through higher influences some men may take the rep 
 tile to their bosom, and remain unstung. 
 
 In one of those poisonous journals, which deal out profaneness, 
 hate, fury, and sedition through the land, I read the following 
 paragraph. " The Brahmin believes that every man will be 
 saved in his own persuasion, and that all religions are equally 
 pleasing to the God of all. The Christian confines salvation to 
 the believer in his own Vedas and Shasters. Which is the moro 
 humane and philosophic creed of the two ?" Let question an- 
 
ESSAY XIII. 95 
 
 swer question. Self-complacent scoffer ! "Whom meanest thou 
 by God ? The God of truth ? and can He be pleased with 
 falsehood, and the debasement or utter suspension of the reason 
 which he gave to man that he might receive from him the sacri 
 fice of truth ? Or the God of love and mercy ? and can He be 
 pleased with the blood of thousands poured out under the wheels 
 of Juggernaut, or with the shrieks of children offered up as fire 
 offerings to Baal or to Moloch ? Or dost thou mean the God of 
 holiness and infinite purity? and can He be pleased with 
 abominations unutterable and more than brutal defilements, 
 and equally pleased too as with that religion, which commands 
 us that we have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of dark 
 ness but to reprove them ; with that religion, which strikes the 
 fear of the Most High so deeply, arid the sense of the exceeding 
 sin fulness of sin so inwardly, that the believer anxiously inquires : 
 Sliall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my 
 body for the sin of my soul ? and which makes answer to him, 
 He hath sJwiced thee, O man, ivhat is good ; and ivhat doth the 
 Lord require of thce, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to 
 U alk humbly with thy God ?* But I check myself. It is at 
 once folly arid profanation of truth, to reason with the man who 
 can place before his eyes a minister of the Gospel directing the 
 eye of the widow from the corpse of her husband upward to his 
 and her Redeemer, (the God of the living and not of the 
 dead) and then the remorseless Brahmin goading on the discon 
 solate victim to the flames of her husband s funeral pile, aban 
 doned by, and abandoning, the helpless pledges of their love 
 and yet dare ask, which is the more humane and philosophic 
 creed of the two ? No ! No ! when such opinions are in ques 
 tion I neither am, nor will be, nor wish to be regarded as, tolerant. 
 
 * Micali vl 7, 8. J2 
 
ESSAY XIV. 
 
 Knowing the heart of man is set to be 
 
 The centre of this world, about the which 
 
 These re\ r olutions of disturbances 
 
 Still roll ; where all the Aspects of misery 
 
 Predominate ; whose strong effects are such, 
 
 As he must bear, being powerless to redress : 
 
 And that unless above himself he can 
 
 Erect himself, how poor a thing is man ! DANIEL.* 
 
 I HAVE thus endeavored, with an anxiety which may perhaps 
 have misled me into prolixity, to detail and ground the conditions 
 under which the communication of truth is commanded or for 
 bidden to us as individuals, by our conscience ; and those too, 
 under which it is permissible by the law which controls our con 
 duct as members of the state. But is the subject of sufficient 
 importance to deserve so minute an examination ? that my 
 readers would look round the world, as it now is, and make to 
 themselves a faithful catalogue of its many miseries ! From what 
 do these proceed, and on what do they depend for their continu 
 ance ? Assuredly, for the greater part, on the actions of men, 
 and those again on the want of a vital principle of action. We 
 live by faith. The essence of virtue consists in the principle. 
 And the reality of this, as well as its importance, is believed by 
 all men in fact, few as there may be who bring the truth for 
 ward into the light of distinct consciousness. Yet all men feel, 
 and at times acknowledge to themselves, the true cause of their 
 misery. There is no man so base, but that at some time or other, 
 and in some way or other, he admits that he is not what he 
 ought to be, though by a curious art of self-delusion, by an effort 
 to keep at peace with himself as long and as much as possible, 
 he will throw off the blame from the amenable part of his na- 
 
 * Epistle to the Countess of Cumberland. Ed. 
 
ESSAY XIV. 97 
 
 ture, his moral principle, to that which is independent of his will, 
 namely, the degree of his intellectual faculties. Hence, for once 
 that a man exclaims, how dishonest I am ! on what base and 
 unworthy motives I act ! we may hear a hundred times, what a 
 fool I am ! curse on my folly ! and the likc.^ 
 
 Yet even this implies an obscure sentiment, that with clearer 
 conceptions in the understanding, the principle of action would 
 become purer in the will. Thanks to the image of our Maker 
 not wholly obliterated from any human soul, we dare not pur 
 chase an exemption from guilt by an excuse, which would place 
 our melioration out of our own power. Thus the very man, who 
 will abuse himself for a fool but not for a villain, would rather, 
 spite of the usual professions to the contrary, be condemned as a 
 rogue by other men, than be acquitted as a blockhead. But be 
 this as it may, in and out of himself, however, he sees plainly the 
 true cause of our common complaints. Doubtless, there seem 
 many physical causes of distress, of disease, of poverty and of 
 desolation tempests, earthquakes, volcanos, wild or venomous 
 animals, barren soils, uncertain or tyrannous climates, pestilen 
 tial swamps, and death in the very air we breathe. Yet when 
 do we hear the general wretchedness of mankind attributed to 
 these ? Even in the most awful of the Icelandic and Sicilian 
 eruptions, when the earth has opened and sent forth vast rivers 
 of /ire, and the smoke and vapor have dimmed the light of heaven 
 for months, how small has been the comparative injury to the hu 
 man race ; and how much even of this injury might be fairly 
 attributed to combined imprudence and superstition ! Natural 
 calamities that do indeed spread devastation wide (for instance, 
 the marsh fever), are almost without exception, voices of nature 
 in her all-intelligible language do this ! or cease to do that ! By 
 the mere absence of one superstition, and of the sloth engendered 
 by it, the plague would probably cease to exist throughout Asia 
 and Africa. Pronounce meditatively the name of Jenner, and 
 ask what might we not hope, what need we deem unattainable, 
 if all the time, the effort, the skill, which we waste in making 
 
 * I do not consider as exceptions the thousands that abuse themselves by 
 rote with lip-penitence, or the wild ravings of fanaticism; for these persons 
 at the very time they speak so vehemently of the wickedness and rottenness 
 of their hearts, are then commonly the warmest in their own good opinion, 
 covered roi^yd and comfortable in the wrap-rascal of self-hypocrisy. 
 
 VOL. II. E 
 
98 THE FKIEND. 
 
 ourselves miserable through vice, and vicious through misery, 
 were embodied and marshalled to a systematic war against the 
 existing evils of nature ! No, It is a wicked world I This is so 
 generally the solution, that this very wickedness is assigned by 
 selfish men, as *their excuse for doing nothing to render it better, 
 and for opposing those who would make the attempt. What 
 have not Clarkson, Granville Sharp, Wilberforce, and the Society 
 of the Friends, effected for the honor, and if we believe in a retrib 
 utive Providence, for the continuance of the prosperity of the 
 English nation, imperfectly as the intellectual and moral facul 
 ties of the people at large are developed at present ! What may 
 not be effected, if the recent discovery of the means of educating 
 nations (freed, however, from the vile sophistications and mutila 
 tions of ignorant mountebanks) shall have been applied to its full 
 extent ! Would I frame to myself the most inspiring represen 
 tation of future bliss, which my mind is capable of comprehend 
 ing, it would be embodied to me in the idea of Bell receiving, at 
 some distant period, the appropriate reward of his earthly labors, 
 when thousands and ten thousands of glorified spirits, whose rea 
 son and conscience had, through his efforts, been unfolded, shall 
 sing the song of their own redemption, and pouring forth praises 
 to God and to their Saviour, shall repeat his new name in heaven, 
 give thanks for his earthly virtues, as the chosen instruments of 
 divine mercy to themselves, and not seldom perhaps turn their 
 eyes toward him, as from the sun to its image in the fountain, 
 with secondary gratitude and the permitted utterance of a hu 
 man love ! Were but a hundred men to combine a deep convic 
 tion that virtuous habits may be formed by the very means by 
 which knowledge is communicated, that men may be made bet 
 ter, not only in consequence, but by the mode, and in the process, 
 of instruction ; were but a hundred men to combine that clear 
 conviction of this, which I myself at this moment feel, even as I 
 feel the certainty of my being, with the perseverance of a Clark- 
 son or a Bell, the promises of ancient prophecy would disclose 
 themselves to our faith, even as when a noble castle hidden from 
 us by an intervening mist, discovers itself by its reflection in the 
 tranquil lake, on the^opposite shore of which we stand gazing.* 
 What an awful duty, what a nurse of all other, the fairest vir- 
 
 * This is, I fear, too complex, too accidental an image to be conveyed by 
 words to those, who have not seen it themselves in nature. 
 
ESSAY XIV. 99 
 
 tues, does not hope become ! We are bad ourselves, because we 
 despair of the goodness of others. 
 
 If then it be a truth, attested alike by common feeling and 
 common sense, that the greater part of human misery depends 
 directly on human vices, and the remainder indirectly, by what 
 means can we act on men so as to remove or preclude these 
 vices, and purify their principle of moral election ? The question 
 is not by what means each man is to alter his own character 
 in order to this, all the means prescribed and all the aidances. 
 given by religion, may be necessary for him. Vain, of them 
 selves, may be 
 
 the sayings of the wise 
 
 In ancient and in modern books enrolled 
 * * * * * 
 
 Unless he feel within 
 Some source of consolation from above, 
 Secret refreshings, that repair his strength 
 And fainting spirits uphold.* 
 
 This is not the question. Virtue would not be virtue, could it 
 be given by one fellow-creature to another. To make use of all 
 the means and appliances in our power to the actual attainment 
 of rectitude, is the abstract of the duty which we owe to our 
 selves : to supply those means as far as we can, comprises our 
 duty to others. The question then is, what are these means ? 
 Can they be any other than the communication of knowledge, 
 and the removal of those evils and impediments which prevent 
 its reception ? It may not be in our power to combine both, but 
 it is in the power of every man to contribute to the former, who 
 is sufficiently informed to feel that it is his duty. If it be said, 
 that we should endeavor not so much to remove ignorance, as to 
 make the ignorant religious ; religion herself, through her sa 
 cred oracles, answers for me, that all effective faith pre-supposes 
 knowledge and individual conviction. If the mere acquiescence 
 in truth, uncomprehended and unfathorned, were sufficient, few 
 indeed would be the vicious and the miserable, in this country 
 at least, where speculative infidelity is, God be praised ! confined 
 to a small number. Like bodily deformity, there is one instance 
 here and another there ; but three in one place are already an 
 undue proportion. It is highly worthy of observation, that the 
 * Samson Agonistes. 
 
100 THE FRIEND. 
 
 inspired writings received by Christians are distinguishable from 
 all other books pretending to inspiration, from the scriptures of 
 the Brahmins, and even from the Koran, in their strong and 
 frequent recommendations of truth. I do not here mean verac 
 ity, which can not but be enforced in every code which appeals 
 to the religious principle of man ; but knowledge. This is not 
 only extolled as the crown and honor of a man, but to seek after 
 it is again and again commanded us as one of our most sacred 
 duties. Yea, the very perfection and final bliss of the glorified 
 spirits represented by the Apostle as a plain aspect, or intuitive 
 beholding, of truth in its eternal and immutable source. Not 
 that knowledge can of itself do all ! The light of religion is not 
 that of the moon, light without heat ; but neither is its warmth 
 that of the stove, warmth without light. Religion is the sun, 
 the warmth of which indeed swells, and stirs, and actuates the 
 life of nature, but who at the same time beholds all the growth 
 of life with a master-eye, makes all objects glorious on which he 
 looks, arid by that glory visible to all others. 
 
 But though knowledge be not the only, yet that it is an indis 
 pensable and most effectual agent in the direction of our actions, 
 one consideration will convince us. It is an undoubted fact of 
 human nature, that the sense of impossibility quenches all will. 
 Sense of utter inaptitude does the same. The man shuns the 
 beautiful flame, which is eagerly grasped at by the infant. The 
 sense of a disproportion of certain after-harm to present gratifica 
 tion, produces effects almost equally uniform : though almost 
 perishing with thirst, we should dash to the earth a goblet of 
 wine in which we had seen a poison infused, though the poison 
 were without taste or odor, or even added to the pleasures of 
 both. Are not all our vices equally inapt to the universal end 
 of human actions, the satisfaction of the agent ? Are not their 
 pleasures equally disproportionate to the after-harm ? Yet many 
 a maiden, who will not grasp at the fire, will yet purchase a 
 wreath of diamonds at the price of her health, her honor, nay, 
 and she herself knows it at the moment of her choice, at the 
 sacrifice of her peace and happiness. The sot would reject the 
 poisoned cup, yet the trembling hand with which he raises his 
 daily or hourly draught to his lips, has not left him ignorant that 
 this too is altogether a poison. I know it will be objected, that 
 the consequences foreseen are less immediate ; that they are dif- 
 
ESSAY XIV. 101 
 
 fused over a larger space of time ; and that the slave of vice 
 hopes where no hope is. This, however, only removes the ques 
 tion one step further : for why should the distance or diffusion 
 of known consequences produce so great a difference ? Why are 
 men the dupes of the present moment ? Evidently because the 
 conceptions are indistinct in the one case, and vivid in the other ; 
 because all confused conceptions render us restless ; and because 
 restlessness can drive us to vices that promise no enjoyment, no 
 not even the cessation of that restlessness. This is indeed the 
 dread punishment attached by nature to habitual vice, that its 
 impulses wax as its motives wane. No object, not even the 
 light of a solitary taper in the far distance, tempts the benighted 
 mind from before ; but its own restlessness dogs it from behind, 
 as with the iron goad of destiny. What then is or can be the 
 preventive, the remedy, the counteraction, but the habituation of 
 the intellect to clear, distinct, and adequate conceptions concern 
 ing all things that are the possible object of clear conception, 
 and thus to reserve the deep feelings which belong, as by a nat 
 ural right, to those obscure ideas* that are necessary to the 
 moral perfection of the human being, notwithstanding, yea, even 
 in consequence, of their obscurity to reserve these feelings, I re 
 peat, for objects, which their very sublimity renders indefinite, 
 no less than their indefiniteness renders them sublime, namely, 
 to the ideas of being, form, life, the reason, the law of conscience, 
 freedom, immortality, God ! To connect with the objects of our 
 senses the obscure notions and consequent vivid feelings, w r hich 
 are due only to immaterial and permanent things, is profanation 
 relatively to the heart, and superstition in the understanding. 
 It is in this sense, that the philosophic Apostle calls covetousness 
 idolatry. Could we emancipate ourselves from the bedimming 
 influences of custom, and the transforming witchcraft of early 
 
 * I have not expressed myself as clearly as I could wish. But the truth 
 of the assertion, that deep feeling has a tendency to combine with obscure 
 ideas, in preference to distinct and clear notions, may be proved by the 
 history of fanatics and fanaticism in all ages and countries. The odium 
 Iheohgicum is even proverbial : and it is the common complaint of philoso 
 phers and philosophic historians, that the passions of the disputants are 
 commonly violent in proportion to the subtlety and obscurity of the ques 
 tions in dispute. Nor is this fact confined to professional theologians : 
 for whole nations have displayed the same agitations, and have sacrificed 
 national policy to the more powerful interest of a controverted obscurity. 
 
102 THE FRIEND. 
 
 associations, we should see as numerous tribes offetisch-\voYship- 
 ers in the streets of London and Paris, as we hear of 011 the 
 coasts of Africa. 
 
 ESSAY XV. 
 
 A palace when tis that which it should be 
 Leaves growing, and stands such, or else decays ; 
 With him who dwells there, tis not so : for he 
 Should still urge upward, and his fortune raise. 
 
 Our bodies had their morning, have their noon, 
 And shall not better the next change is night ; 
 But their far larger guest, t whom sun and moon 
 Are sparks and short-lived, claims another right. 
 
 The noble soul by age grows lustier, 
 Her appetite and her digestion mend ; 
 We must not starve nor hope to pamper her 
 With woman s milk and pap unto the end. 
 
 Provide you manlier diet ! DONNE.* 
 
 I AM fully aware, that what I am writing and have written (in 
 these latter essays at least) will expose me to the censure of 
 some, as bewildering myself and readers with metaphysics ; to 
 the ridicule of others as a school-boy declaimer on old and worn- 
 out truisms or exploded fancies ; and to the objection of most as 
 obscure. The last real or supposed defect has already received 
 an answer both in the preceding essays, and in the appendix to 
 my first Lay-Sermon, entitled The Statesman s Manual. Of the 
 former two, I shall take the present opportunity of declaring my 
 sentiments ; especially as I have already received a hint that my 
 idol, Milton, has represented metaphysics as the subject which the 
 bad spirits in hell delight in discussing. And truly, if I had ex 
 erted my subtlety and invention in persuading myself and others 
 that we are but living machines, and that, as one of the late fol 
 lowers of Hobbes and Hartley has expressed the system, the as- 
 
 * Letter to Sir Henry Goodere. The words in italics are substituted 
 for the original. Ed. 
 
ESSAY XV. 103 
 
 sassin and his dagger are equally fit objects of moral esteem and 
 abhorrence ; or if with a writer of wider influence and higher 
 authority, I had reduced all virtue to a selfish prudence eked out 
 ly superstition,* for, assuredly, a creed which takes its central 
 point in conscious selfishness, whatever be the forms or names 
 that act on the selfish passion, a ghost or a constable, can have 
 but a distant relationship to that religion, which places its essence 
 in our loving our neighbor as ourselves, and God above all, I 
 know not, by what arguments I could repel the sarcasm. But 
 what are my metaphysics ? Merely the referring of the mind to 
 its own consciousness for truths indispensable to its own happi 
 ness ! To what purpose do I, or am I about to, employ them ? 
 To perplex our clearest notions and living moral instincts ? To 
 deaden the feelings of will and free power, to extinguish the light 
 of love and of conscience, to make myself and others worthless, 
 soulless, God-less ? No ! to expose the folly and the legerdemain 
 of those who have thus abused the blessed machine of language ; 
 to support all old and venerable truths ; and by them to support, 
 to kindle, to project the spirit ; to make the reason spread light 
 over our feelings, to make our feelings, with their vital warmth, 
 actualize our reason : these are my objects, these are my sub 
 jects ; and are these the metaphysics which the bad spirits in 
 hell delight in ? 
 
 But how shall I avert the scorn of those critics who laugh at 
 the oldness of my topics, evil and good, necessity and arbitra 
 ment, immortality and the ultimate aim ? By what shall I re 
 gain their favor? My themes must be new, a French constitu 
 tion ; a balloon ; a change of ministry ; a fresh batch of kings on 
 the Continent, or of peers in our happier island ; or who had the 
 best of it of two parliamentary gladiators, and whose speech, on 
 the subject of Europe bleeding at a thousand wounds, or our own, 
 country struggling for herself and all human nature, was cheered 
 
 * " And from this account of obligation it follows, that -we are obliged to 
 nothing but what we ourselves are to gain or lose something by ; for noth 
 ing else can be a violent motive to us. As we should not beobliged to 
 obey the laws, or the magistrate, unless rewards or punishments, pleasure 
 or pain, somehow or other, depended upon our obedience ; so neither should 
 we, without the same reason, be obliged to do what is right, to practise 
 virtue, or to obey the commands of God." Paley, Moral and Political Phi 
 losophy, B. II. c. 2, ct passim. Ed. 
 
104 THE FRIEND. 
 
 by the greatest number of " laughs*," ;t loud laughs," arid " very 
 loud laughs :" (which, carefully marked by italics, form most 
 conspicuous and strange parentheses in the newspaper reports.) 
 Or if I must be philosophical, the last chemical discoveries, 
 provided I do not trouble my reader with the principle which 
 gives them their highest interest, and the character of intellec 
 tual grandeur to the discoverer ; or the last shower of stones, and 
 that they were supposed, by certain philosophers, to have been 
 projected from some volcano in the moon, care being taken not 
 to add any of the cramp reasons ibr this opinion ! Something 
 new, however, it must be, quite new and quite out of themselves ! 
 for whatever is within them, whatever is deep within them, must 
 be as old as the first dawn of human reason. But to find no 
 contradiction in the union of old and new, to contemplate the 
 Ancient of days with feelings as fresh, as if they then sprang 
 forth at his own Jiat this characterizes the minds that feel the 
 riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it ! To carry on 
 the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood, to combine 
 the child s sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances 
 which every day for perhaps forty years has rendered familiar, 
 
 With sun and moon and stars throughout the year, 
 And man and woman 
 
 this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks 
 which distinguish genius from talent. And so to represent famil 
 iar objects as to awaken the minds of others to a like freshness 
 of sensation concerning them that constant accompaniment of 
 mental, no less than of bodily, health to the same modest ques 
 tioning of a self-discovered and intelligent ignorance, which, like 
 the deep and massy foundations of a Roman bridge, forms half 
 of the whole structure (prudem interrogate dimidium sci- 
 entice, says Lord Bacon) this is the prime merit of genius, and 
 its most unequivocal mode of manifestation. Who has not, a 
 thousand times, seen it snow upon water ? Who has not seen it 
 with a new feeling, since he has read Burns s comparison of sen 
 sual pleasure, 
 
 To snow that falls upon a river, 
 
 A moment white then gone forever !* 
 
 * Tarn O Shanter. JStf. 
 
ESSAY XV. 105 
 
 In philosophy equally, as in poetry, genius produces the strong 
 est impressions of novelty, while it rescues the stalest arid most 
 admitted truths from the impotence caused by the very circum 
 stance of their universal admission. Extremes meet ; a proverb, 
 by the by, to collect and explain all the instances arid exemplifi 
 cations of which, would constitute arid exhaust all philosophy. 
 Truths, of all others the most awful and mysterious, yet being at 
 the same time of universal interest, are too often considered as so 
 true that they lose all the powers of truth, and lie bed-ridden in 
 the dormitory of the soul, side by side with the most despised and 
 exploded errors. 
 
 But as the class of critics, whose contempt I have anticipated, 
 commonly consider themselves as men of the world, instead of 
 hazarding additional sneers by appealing to the authorities of re 
 cluse philosophers, for such, in spite of all history, the men who 
 have distinguished themselves by profound thought, are generally 
 deemed, from Plato and Aristotle to Cicero, and from Bacon to 
 Berkeley I will refer them to the darling of the polished court 
 of Augustus, to the man, whose works have been in all ages 
 deemed the models of good sense, and are still the pocket com 
 panion of those who pride themselves on uniting the scholar with 
 the gentleman. This accomplished man of the world has given 
 us an account of the subjects of conversation between himself 
 and the illustrious statesmen who governed, and the brightest 
 luminaries who then adorned, the empire of the civilized world : 
 
 Sermo oritur non de villis domibusve alienis, 
 
 Nee male, nccne, Icpus aaltet. Sed quod magis ad nos 
 
 Perlinet, ft nescire malwm est, agitamus : utrumnc 
 
 Divitiit homines, an sint virtute beati ? 
 
 Quidve ad amicitias, itsus rectumne, trahat nos ; 
 
 Et qua sit natura boni, summumque quid ejuft. Hon.* 
 
 Berkeley indeed asserts, and is supported in his assertion by 
 Lord Bacon and Sir Walter Raleigh, that without an habitual in- 
 
 * Serm. II. vi. 71. Conversation arises not concerning the country seats 
 or families of strangers, nor whether the dancing hare performed well or 
 ill. But we discuss what more nearly concerns us, and which it is an evil 
 not to know : whether men are made happy by riches or by virtue : whether 
 interest or a love of virtue should lead us to friendship ; and in what con 
 sists the nature of good, and what is the ultimate or supreme good the 
 tummum bonum. 
 
106 THE FKIEND. 
 
 terest in these subjects, a man may be a dexterous intriguer, but 
 never can be a statesman. Would to Heaven that the verdict to 
 be passed on my labors depended on those who least needed them ! 
 The water-lily in the midst of waters lifts up its broad leaves, 
 and expands its petals at the first pattering of the shower, and 
 rejoices in the rain with a quicker sympathy, than the parched 
 shrub in the sandy desert. 
 
 God created man in his own image. To be the image of his 
 own eternity created he man ! Of eternity and self-existence 
 what other likeness is possible, but immortality and moral self- 
 determination ? In addition to sensation, perception, and practi 
 cal judgment instinctive or acquirable concerning the notices 
 furnished by the organs of perception, all which in kind at least, 
 the dog possesses in common with his master ; in addition to 
 these, God gave us reason, and with reason he gave us reflective 
 self- consciousness ; gave us principles, distinguished from the 
 maxims and generalizations of outward experience by their abso 
 lute and essential universality and necessity ; and above all, by 
 superadding to reason the mysterious faculty of free-Avill and con 
 sequent personal amenability, he gave us conscience that law 
 of conscience, which in the power, and as the indwelling word, 
 of a holy and omnipotent legislator commands us from among 
 the numerous ideas mathematical and philosophical, which the 
 reason by the necessity of its own excellence creates for itself, 
 unconditionally commands us to attribute reality, and actual ex 
 istence-, to those ideas and to those only, without which the con 
 science itself would be baseless and contradictory, to the ideas of 
 soul, of free-will, of immortality, and of God. To God, as the 
 reality of the conscience and the source of all obligation ; to free 
 will, as the power of the human being to maintain the obedience 
 which God through the conscience has commanded, against all 
 the might of nature ; and to the immortality of the soul, as a 
 state in which the weal and woe of man shall be proportioned to 
 his moral worth. With this faith all nature, 
 
 all the mighty world 
 
 Of eye and car * 
 
 presents itself to us, now as the aggregated material of duty, and 
 new as a vision of the Most High revealing to us the mode, and 
 
 * Wordsworth. Lines near Tintern Abbey. Ed. 
 
ESSAY XVI. 107 
 
 time, and particular instance of applying and realizing that uni 
 versal rule, pre-established in the heart of our reason. 
 
 " The displeasure of some readers," to use Berkeley s words,* 
 " may, perhaps, be incurred by my having surprised them into 
 certain reflections and inquiries, lor which they have no curiosity. 
 But perhaps some others may be pleased to find themselves car 
 ried into ancient times, even tliough ikey should consider the 
 hoary maxims, defended in these essays, barely as hints to 
 awaken and exercise the inquisitive reader, on points not beneath 
 the attention of the ablest men. Those great men, Pythagoras, 
 Plato, arid Aristotle, men the most consummate in politics, who 
 founded states, or instructed princes, or wrote most accurately on 
 public government, were at the same time the most acute at all 
 abstracted and sublime speculations ; the clearest light being 
 ever necessary to guide the most important actions. And what 
 ever the world may opine, he who hath not much meditated 
 upon God, the human mind, and the summuni bonum, may pos 
 sibly make a thriving earth-worm, but will most indubitably 
 make a blundering patriot and a sorry statesman." 
 
 ESSAY XVI. 
 
 Blind is that soul which from (his truth can swerve, 
 
 No state stands sure, but on the grounds of right, 
 
 Of virtue, knowledge ; judgment to preserve, 
 
 And all the pow rs of learning requisite : 
 
 Though other shifts a present turn may serve, 
 
 Yet in the trial they will weigh too light. DANIEL, f 
 
 I EARNESTLY entreat the reader not to be dissatisfied either 
 with himself or with the author, if he should not at once under 
 stand every part of the preceding essay ; but rather to consider 
 it as a mere annunciation of a magnificent theme, the different 
 parts of which are to be demonstrated and developed, explained, 
 illustrated, and exemplified in the progress of the work. I like- 
 
 * Siris, 350. The words in italics are substituted for the original. Ed. 
 f MuKophiius. The Hue iu italics in gubstituted. Ed 
 
108 THE FRIEND. 
 
 wise entreat him to peruse with attention and with candor, the 
 weighty extract from the judicious Hooker, prefixed as the motto 
 to a following essay.* In works of reasoning, as distinguished 
 from narrations of events or statements of facts ; but more par 
 ticularly in works, the object of which is to make us better ac 
 quainted with our own nature, a writer whose meaning is every 
 where comprehended as quickly as his sentences can be read, may 
 indeed have produced an amusing composition, nay, by awaken 
 ing and re-enlivening our recollections, a useful one ; but most as 
 suredly he will not have added either to the stock of our knowl 
 edge, or to the vigor of our intellect. For how can we gather 
 strength, but by exercise ? How can a truth, new to us, be made 
 our own without examination and self-questioning any new 
 truth, I mean, that relates to the properties oi the mind, and its 
 various faculties and affections ? But whatever demands eflbrt, 
 requires time. Ignorance seldom vaults into knowledge, but 
 passes into it through an intermediate state of obscurity, even as 
 night into day through twilight. All speculative truths begin 
 with a postulate, even the truths of geometry. They all suppose 
 an act of the will ; for in the moral being lies the source of the 
 intellectual. The first step to knowledge, or rather the previous 
 condition of all insight into truth, is to dare commune with our 
 very and permanent self. It is Warburton s remark, not the 
 Friend s, that of all literary exercitations, whether designed for 
 the use or entertainment of the world, there are none of so much 
 importance, or so immediately our concern, as those which let us 
 into the knowledge of our own nature. Others may exercise the 
 understanding or amuse the imagination ; but these only can im 
 prove the heart and form the human mind to wisdom. 
 
 The recluse hermit ofttimes more doth know 
 
 Of the world s inmost ivheels, than worldlings can. 
 
 As man is of the world, the heart of man 
 
 Is an epitome of God s great book 
 
 Of creatures, and men need no farther look. DONNE, f 
 
 The higher a man s station, the more arduous and full of peril 
 his duties, the more comprehensive should his foresight be, the 
 more rooted his tranquillity concerning life and death. But these 
 
 * Essay IV. Sect, On the Principles of Political Knowledge. See Eccl 
 Pol. L c. I. Z.W. 
 
 f Eclogue. The words in italics are substituted. Ed. 
 
ESSAY XVI. 109 
 
 are gifts which no experience can bestow, but the experience 
 from within : and there is a nobleness of the whole personal 
 being, to which the contemplation of all events arid phenomena 
 in the light of the three master ideas, announced jn the foregoing 
 pages, can alone elevate the spirit. Atlima sapiens, says Gior 
 dano Bruno, and let the sublime piety of the passage excuse 
 some intermixture of error, or rather let the words, as they well 
 may, be interpreted in a safe sense anima sapiens non timet 
 mortem, immo interdum illam idtro appetit, illi ultro occurrit. 
 Manet quippe substantiam oninem pro duratione etemif.as, pro 
 loco imniensitas, pro actu omnifonnitas. Non levem igitur ac 
 futilem, atqui gravissimam perfectoque komine dignissimam 
 contemplation-is partein per&equimur, ubi divinitatis, nat.urceque 
 splendorem, fusionem, et communicationem, non in cibo, potu, 
 et ignobiliore quadam materia cum attonitorum secido perquiri- 
 mus ; sed in augusta Omnipotentis regia, immenso cetheris 
 spatio, in injinita naturcc gemince omnis ficntis ct omnia facien- 
 tis potcntia, uncle tot astrorum, mundormn, inquam, et numi- 
 num, uni aUissimo concinentium atque saltantium absque 
 numero atque Jine juxta projiositos ubique fines atque ordines 
 contemplamurt Sic ex visibdium ceterno, immenso et innu- 
 merabili cffectu scmpiterna iminensa ilia majestas atque bonitas 
 intellecta compicitur, proque sua dignitate innumerabilium 
 deorum (inundorum dico) adsistcntia, concincntia, et gloria 
 ipsius enarratione, immo adoctdos expressa condone glorijicatur. 
 Cui immenso mensum non quadrabit domicilium atque tern- 
 plum ; ad cujus majestatis plenitudinem agnoscendam atque 
 percolcndam, numerafrilium ministrorum nullus esset ordo. 
 Eui igitur ad omnifonnis Dei omnifonnem imaginem conjecte- 
 mus oculos, vivum ct magnum illius admiremur simulacrum ! 
 Hinc miracalum magnum a Trismegisto appellabatur homo, 
 qui in Dcum transcat quasi ipse sit Deus, qui conatur omnia 
 fieri sicut Deus est omnia ; ad objectum sine fine, ubique tamen 
 Jiniendo, contendit, sicut injinitus cst Deus, immensus, ubique 
 totus* 
 
 * De motiade, &c. A wise spirit does not fear death, nay, sometimes 
 as in cases of voluntary martyrdom seeks and goes forth to meet it, of its 
 own accord. For there awaits all actual beings, for duration eternity, for 
 place immensity, far action omniformity. We pursue, therefore, a species 
 of contemplation not light or futile, but the weightiest and most worthy of 
 
110 THE FRIEND. 
 
 If this be regarded as the fancies of an enthusiast, by such as 
 
 deem themselves most free, 
 
 When they within this gross and visible sphere 
 Chain down the winged soul, scoffing ascent, 
 Proud in their meanness, * 
 
 by such as pronounce every man out of his senses who has not 
 lost his reason ; even such men may find some weight in* the 
 
 an accomplished man, while we examine and seek for the splendor, the in 
 terfusion, and communication of the Divinity and of nature, not in meats 
 or drink, or any yet ignoble matter, with the race of the thunder-stricken ; 
 but in the august palace of the Omnipotent, in the illimitable ethereal space, 
 in the infinite power, that creates all things, and is the abiding being of all 
 things. 
 
 There we may contemplate the host of stars, of worlds, and their guar 
 dian deities, numbers without number, each in its appointed sphere, singing 
 together, and dancing in adoration of the One Most High. Thus from the 
 perpetual, immense, and innumerable goings on of the visible world, that 
 sempiternal and absolutely infinite Majesty is intellectually beheld, and is 
 glorified according to his glory, by the attendance and choral symphonies 
 of innumerable gods, who utter forth the glory of their ineffable Creator in 
 the expressive language of vision ! To him illimitable, a limited temple 
 will not correspond to the acknowledgment and due wqf ship of the pleni 
 tude of his majesty there w r ould be no proportion in any innumerable army 
 of ministrant spirits. Let us then cast our eyes upon the omniform image 
 of the attributes of the all-creating Supreme, nor admit any representation 
 of his excellency but the living universe, which he has created ! Thence 
 was man* entitled by Trismegistus, the great miracle, inasmuch as he has 
 been made capable of entering into union with God, as if he w^ere himself a 
 divine nature ; tries to become all things, even as in God all things are ; 
 and in limitless progression of limited states of being, urges onward to the 
 ultimate aim, even as God is simultaneously infinite, and everywhere all ! 
 
 Giordano Bruno, the friend of Sir Philip Sidney and Fulk Greville, was 
 burnt under pretence of atheism, at Rome, on the 17th of February, 1599- 
 1600 (Scioppio ends his narrative in these words : Sic ustulntus misere periit, 
 renunciaturus, credo, in reliquis iJlis, qaos finxit, mundis, guonam pacto 
 homines blasphemi et impii a Romania tractari solent. Hie itaque modus in 
 Roma est, quo contra homines impios ct monstra hujusmoui proccdi a nobis 
 solet. Ed.) His works are perhaps the scarcest books ever printed. They 
 are singularly interesting as portraits of a vigorous mind struggling after 
 truth, amid many prejudices, which from the state of the Romish Church, 
 in which he was born, have a claim to much indulgence. One of them (en 
 titled Ember Week) is curious for its lively accounts of the rude state of 
 London, at that time, both as to the streets and the manners of the citizens. 
 
 * Poetical Works VIL p. 83.J& 
 
ESSAY XVI. Ill 
 
 historical fact that from persons, who had previously strengthened 
 their intellects and feelings by the contemplation of principles . 
 principles, the actions correspondent to which involve one half 
 of their consequences, by their ennobling influence on the agent s 
 own soul, and have omnipotence, as the pledge for the remainder 
 we have derived the surest and most general maxims of pru 
 dence. Of high value are they all. Yet there is one among 
 them worth all the rest, which in the fullest and primary sense 
 of the word is, indeed, the maxim, that is, maximum, of human 
 prudence ; and of which history itself, in all that makes it most 
 worth studying, is one continued comment and exemplification. It 
 is this : that there is a wisdom higher than prudence, to which 
 prudence stands in the same relation as the mason and carpenter 
 to the genial and scientific architect ; and it is from the habits 
 of thinking arid feeling, which in this wisdom had their first for 
 mation, that our Nelsons and Wellingtons inherit that glorious 
 hardihood, which completes me undertaking, ere the contemptuous 
 calculator, who has left nothing omitted in his scheme of proba 
 bilities, except the might of the human mind, has finished his 
 pretended proof of its impossibility. You look to facts, and pro 
 fess to take experience for your guide. Well ! I too appeal to ex 
 perience : and let facts be the ordeal of my position ! Therefore, 
 although I have in this and the preceding essays quoted more 
 frequently and copiously than I shall permit myself to do in fu 
 ture, I owe it to the cause I am pleading not to deny myself the 
 gratification of supporting this connection of practical heroism 
 with previous habits of philosophic thought, by a singularly ap- 
 
 (Z<j cena de le ceneri. See particularly the second dialogue. Ed.) The 
 most industrious historians of speculative philosophy, have not been able to 
 procure more than a few of his works. Accidentally I have been more for 
 tunate in this respect, than those who have written hitherto on the un 
 happy philosopher of Nola ; as out of eleven works, the titles of which are 
 preserved to us, I have had an opportunity of perusing six. I was told, 
 when in Germany, that there is a complete collection of them in the royal 
 library at Copenhagen. If so, it is unique. 
 
 (Wagner has collected and published seven of the Italian works of Bruno: 
 Leipzig, 1830. These are, 11 Candelajo ; La cena de le ceneri ; De la causa, 
 principio et uno ; De tinfinito, universo e mondi ; Spaccio de la bestia trion- 
 fante ; Cabala del caballo Pegaseo ; and De gli eroici furori. Two others 
 are mentioned by Bruno, himself in the Cena, <fcc. ; namelv, L arca di Noe. 
 and Puryatorio dell inferno. Wagner could not discover these. The titles 
 of twuty-thr works ia Latin are given by Wagner. Ed.) 
 
112 THE FRIEND. 
 
 propriate passage from an author whose works can be called rare 
 only from their being, I fear, rarely read, however commonly 
 talked of. It is the instance of Xenophon, as stated by Lord 
 Bacon, who would himself furnish an equal instance, if there 
 could be found an equal commentator. 
 
 " It is of Xenophon the philosopher, who went from Socrates 
 school into Asia, in the expedition of Cyrus the younger, against 
 King Artaxerxes. This Xenophon, at that time, was very young, 
 and never had seen the wars before ; neither had any command 
 in the army, but only followed the war as a volunteer, for the love 
 and conversation of Proxenus, his friend. He was present when 
 Falinus came in message from the great King to the Grecians, 
 after that Cyrus was slain in the field, arid they, a handful of 
 men, left to themselves in the midst of the King s territories, 
 cut off from their country by many navigable rivers, and many 
 hundred miles. The message imparted, that they should deliver 
 up their arms and submit themselves to. the King s mercy. To 
 which message, before answer was made, divers of the army conr 
 ferred familiarly with Falinus, and amongst the rest Xenophon 
 happened to say : Why, Falinus ! we have now but these two 
 things left, our arms and our virtue ; arid if we yield up our 
 arms, how shall we make use of our virtue ? Whereto Falinus, 
 smiling on him, said, If I be not deceived, young gentleman, 
 you are an Athenian, and I believe you study philosophy, and it 
 is pretty that you say ; but you .are much abused, if you think 
 your virtue can withstand the King s power. Here was the 
 scorn : the wonder followed ; which was, that this young schol 
 ar or philosopher, after all the captains were murdered in par 
 ley, by treason, conducted those tea thousand foot through the 
 heart of all the King s high countries from Babylon to Grascia, 
 in safety, in despite of all the King s forces, to the astonishment 
 of the world, and the encouragement of the Grecians, in time 
 succeeding, to make invasion upon the kings of Persia ; as was 
 after purposed by Jason the Thessalian, attempted by Agesilaus 
 the Spartan, and achieved by Alexander the Macedonian, all 
 upon the ground of the act of that young scholar. "^ 
 
 Often have I reflected with awe on the great and dispropor 
 tionate power, which an individual of no extraordinary talents or 
 attainments may exert, by merely throwing off all restraint of 
 * Advancement of Learning. B. L Ed. 
 
ESSAY XVI. 113 
 
 conscience. What then, must not be the power, where an indi 
 vidual, of consummate wickedness, can organize into the unity 
 and rapidity of an individual will all the natural and artificial 
 forces of a populous and wicked nation ? And could we bring 
 within the field of imagination, the devastation effected in the 
 moral world, by the violent removal of old customs, familiar 
 sympathies, willing reverences, and habits of subordination al 
 most naturalized into instinct ; of the mild influences of reputa 
 tion, and the other ordinary props and aidances of our infirm vir 
 tue, or at least, if virtue be too high a name, of our well-doing ; 
 and above all, if we could give form and body to all the effects 
 produced on the principles and dispositions of nations by the in 
 fectious feelings of insecurity, and the soul-sickening sense of un 
 steadiness in the whole edifice of civil society ; the horrors of bat 
 tle, though the miseries of a whole war were brought together 
 before our eyes in one disastrous field, would present but a tame 
 tragedy in comparison. Nay it would even present a sight of 
 comfort and of elevation, if this field of carriage were the sign 
 and result of a national resolve, of a general will, so to die, that 
 neither deluge nor fire should take away the name of country 
 from their graves, rather than to tread the same clods of earth, 
 no longer a country^ and themselves alive in nature, but dead in 
 infamy. What is Greece at this present moment ? It is the 
 country of the heroes from Codrus to Philoprcmen ; and so it 
 would be, though all the sands of Africa should cover its corn 
 fields and olive-gardens, and not a flower were left on Hymettus 
 for a bee to murmur in. 
 
 If then the power with which wickedness can invest the hu 
 man being be thus tremendous, greatly does it behoove us to in 
 quire into its source and causes. So doing we shall quickly dis 
 cover that it is not vice, as vice, which is thus mighty I but sys 
 tematic vice. Vice self-consistent and entire ; crime correspond 
 ing to crime ; villany entrenched and barricadoed by villany ; 
 this is the condition and main constituent of its power. The 
 abandonment of all principle of right enables the soul to choose 
 and act upon a principle of wrong, and to subordinate to this one 
 principle all the various vices of human nature. For it is a 
 mournful truth, that as devastation is incomparably an easier 
 work than production, so may all its means arid instruments be 
 more easily arranged into a scheme and system : even as in a 
 
114 THE FBIEND. 
 
 siege every building and garden, which the faithful governor 
 must destroy, as impeding the defensive means of the garrison, 
 or furnishing means of offence to the besieger, occasions a wound 
 in feelings which virtue herself has fostered : arid virtue, because 
 it is virtue, loses perforce part of her energy in the reluctance 
 with which she proceeds to a business so repugnant to her wishes, 
 as a choice of evils. But he, who has once said with his whole 
 heart, Evil, be thou my good ! has removed a world of obstacles 
 by the very decision, that he will have no obstacles but those of 
 force and brute matter. The road of justice 
 
 Curves round the corn-field and the hill of vines, 
 Honoring the holy bounds of property ; * 
 
 but the path of the lightning is straight ; and straight the fearful 
 path 
 
 Of the cannon-ball. Direct it flies and rapid, 
 
 Shatt ring that it may reach, and shatt ring what it reaches.f 
 
 Happily for mankind, however, the obstacles which a consistently 
 evil mind no longer finds in itself, it finds in its own unsuitable- 
 ness to human nature. A limit is fixed to its power : but within 
 that limit, both as to the extent and duration of its influence, 
 there is little hope of checking its career, if giant and united 
 vices are opposed only by mixed and scattered virtues ; and those 
 too, probably, from the want of some combining principle, which 
 assigns to each its due place and rank, at civil war with them 
 selves, or at best perplexing and counteracting each other. In 
 our late agony of glory and of peril, did we not too often hear 
 even good men declaiming on the horrors and crimes of war, and 
 softening or staggering the minds of their brethren by details of 
 individual wretchedness ? Thus under pretence of avoiding 
 blood, they were withdrawing the will from the defence of the 
 very source of those blessings without which the blood would flow 
 idly in our veins ! Thus lest a few should fall on the bulwarks 
 in glory, they were preparing us to give up the whole state to 
 baseness, and the children of free ancestors to become slaves, and 
 the fathers of slaves ! 
 
 Machiavelli has well observed, Sono cli ire generazioni cer- 
 velli : Vuno intende per se ; Valtro intcnde quanta da altri gli e 
 
 * Poetical Works, VII. p. 480. 2itf. f Ibid. p. 480.^. 
 
ESSAY XVI. 115 
 
 mostro ; e il terzo non intende neper se stesso, ne per dimostra- 
 zione di altri* " There are brains of three races. The one un 
 derstands of itself; the second understands as* much as is shown 
 it by others ; the third neither understands of itself nor what is 
 shown it by others."! I should have no hesitation in placing 
 that man in the third class of brains, for whom the history of 
 the last twenty years has not supplied a copious comment on the 
 preceding text. The widest maxims of prudence are like arms 
 without hearts, disjoined from those feelings which flow forth from 
 principle as from a fountain. So little are even the genuine 
 maxims of expedience likely to be perceived or acted upon by 
 those who have been habituated to admit nothing higher than 
 expedience, that I dare hazard the assertion, that in the whole 
 chapter of contents of European ruin, eveiy article might be un 
 answerably deduced from the neglect of some maxim which has 
 been repeatedly laid down, demonstrated, and enforced with a 
 host of illustrations, in some one or other of the works of Ma- 
 chiavelli, Bacon, or Harrington. Indeed I can remember no one 
 event of importance which was not distinctly foretold, and this 
 not by a lucky prize drawn among a thousand blanks out of the 
 lottery wheel of conjecture, but legitimately deduced as certain 
 consequences from established premises. It would be a melan 
 choly, but a very profitable employment, for some vigorous mind, 
 intimately acquainted with the recent history of Europe, to col 
 lect the weightiest aphorisms of Machiavelli alone, and illustrat 
 ing by appropriate facts the breach or observation of each, to 
 render less mysterious the present triumph of lawless violence. 
 The apt motto to su cha work would be, The children of dark 
 ness are wiser in their generation than the children of light. 
 
 So grievously, indeed, have men been deceived by the showy 
 theories of unlearned mock thinkers, that there seems a tendency 
 in the public mind to shun all thought, and to expect help from 
 
 * 11 Principe, c. xxii. Ed. 
 
 f Ovrof fjtev 7ravdpiGTO, of avrti Trdvra voijari, 
 
 Qpaavu/Lievoc TO, K eireiTa nal If re/lof ijoiv d/j,ivu 
 
 E<70?,of 6 av /cu/ceivof, 6f ev EITTOVTI Tridrjrai. 
 
 r Of <5e KE fj.Tjr avrdf voi rj, JUTJT u/lAou UKOVW 
 
 Ev dvfj.u> (3d?*A7]Tai, u 6 O.VT dxpr jioc dvqp. 
 
 Op. et Dies. 293, <fcc. 
 Cic, p. Clueut. c. 31. Lir. xxii. 29. Diog. Laer. vii. 1. 21. Ed. 
 
116 THE FRIEND. 
 
 any quarter rather than from seriousness and reflection ; as if 
 some invisible power would think for us, when we gave up the 
 pretence of thinking for ourselves. But in the first place, did 
 those, who opposed the theories of innovators, conduct their un- 
 theoretic opposition with more wisdom, or to a happier result ? 
 And secondly, are societies now constructed on principles so few 
 and so simple, that we could, if even we wished it, act as it were 
 by instinct, like our distant forefathers in the infancy of states ? 
 Doubtless, to act is nobler than to think : but as the old man 
 doth not become a child by means of his second childishness, as 
 little can a nation exempt itself from the necessity of thinking 
 , which has once learnt to think. Miserable was the delusion of 
 the late mad realizer of mad dreams, in his belief that he should 
 ultimately succeed in transforming the nations of Europe into 
 the unreasoning hordes of a Babylonian or Tartar empire, or even 
 in reducing the age to the simplicity so desirable for tyrants 
 of those times, when the sword and the plough were the sole 
 implements of human skill. Those are epochs in the history of 
 a people, which, having been, can never more recur. Extirpate 
 all civilization and all its arts by the sword, trample down all 
 ancient institutions, rights, distinctions, and privileges, drag us 
 backward to our old barbarism, as beasts to the den of Cacus 
 deem you that thus you could recreate the unexamining and 
 boisterous youth of the world, when the sole questions were 
 " What is to be conquered ? and who is the most famous leader ?" 
 r In an age in which artificial knowledge is received almost at 
 the birth, intellect and thought alone can be our upholder and 
 judge. Let the importance of this truth procure pardon for its 
 repetition. Only by means of seriousness, and meditation, and 
 the free infliction of censure in the spirit of love, can the true 
 philanthropist of the present time, curb-in himself and his contem 
 poraries ; only by these can he aid in preventing the evils which 
 threaten us, not from the terrors of an enemy so much as from 
 our own fear of, and aversion to, the toils of reflection. For all 
 must now be taught in sport science, morality, yea, religion 
 itself. And yet few now sport from the actual impulse of a be 
 lieving fancy and in a happy delusion. Of the most influential 
 class, at least, of our literary guides the anonymous authors of 
 our periodical publications the most part assume this character 
 from cowardice or malice, till having begun with studied igno- 
 
ESSAY XVI. 117 
 
 ranee and a premeditated levity, they at length realize the lie, 
 and end indeed in a pitiable destitution of all intellectual power. 
 
 To many I shall appear to speak insolently, because fhe pub 
 lic, (for that is the phrase which has succeeded to The Town, 
 of the wits of the reign of Charles II.) the public is at present 
 accustomed to find itself appealed to as the infallible judge, and 
 each reader complimented with excellencies, which, if he really 
 possessed, to what purpose is he a reader, unless, perhaps, to re 
 mind himself of his own superiority ! I confess that I think very 
 differently. I have not a deeper conviction on earth, than that 
 the principles of taste, morals, and religion, which are taught in 
 the commonest books of recent composition, are false, injurious, 
 and debasing. If these sentiments should be just, the conse 
 quences must be so important, that every w r ell-educated man, 
 who professes them in sincerity, deserves a patient hearing. He 
 may fairly appeal even to those whose persuasions are most op 
 posed to his own, in the w r ords of the philosopher of Nola : 
 Ad isthcec qu&so vos, qualiacunque primo videantur aspectu, 
 adtendite, ut qui vobis forsan insanire videa? , saltern quibits 
 insaniam rationibus cognoscatis. What I feel deeply, freely 
 will I utter. Truth is not detraction ; and assuredly we do not 
 hate him to whom we tell the truth. But with whomsoever we 
 play the deceiver and flatterer, him at the bottom we despise. 
 We are, indeed, under a necessity to conceive a vileness in him, 
 in order to diminish the sense of the wrong we have committed, 
 by the worthlessness of the object. 
 
 Through no excess of confidence in the strength of my talents, 
 but with the deepest assurance of the justice of my cause, I bid 
 defiance to all the flatterers of the folly, and foolish self-opinion 
 of the half-instructed many ; to all who fill the air with festal 
 explosions arid false fires sent up against the lightnings of heaven, 
 in order that the people may neither distinguish the warning 
 flash nor hear the threatening thunder ! How recently did we 
 stand alone in the world ? And though the one storm has 
 blown over, another may even now be gathering : or haply the 
 hollow murmur of the earthquake within the bowels of our own 
 commonweal may strike a direr terror than ever did the tempest 
 of foreign wurfare. Therefore, though the first quatrain is no 
 longer applicable, yet the moral truth and the sublime exhorta 
 tion of the following sonnet can never be superannuated. With 
 
118 THE FRIEND. 
 
 it I conclude this essay, thanking God that I have communed 
 with, honored, and loved its wise and high-minded author. To 
 know that such men are among us, is of itself an antidote 
 against despondence : 
 
 Another year ! another deadly blow ! 
 
 Another mighty empire overthrown ! 
 
 And we are left, or shall be left, alone ; 
 
 The last that dares to struggle with the foe. 
 
 "Tis well ! from this day forward we shall know 
 
 That in ourselves our safety must be sought ; 
 
 That by our own right hands it must be wrought ; 
 
 That we must stand unpropt or be laid low. 
 
 O dastard ! whom such foretaste doth not cheer ! 
 
 We shall exult, if they, who rule the land, 
 
 Be men who hold its many blessings dear, 
 
 Wise, upright, valiant ; not a venal band, 
 
 Who are to judge of danger which they fear, 
 
 Aud honor, which they do not understand. WORDSWORTH. 
 
THE LANDING-PLACE: 
 
 OR ESSAYS INTERPOSED FOR AMUSEMENT, RETROSPECT, 
 AND PREPARATION. 
 
 MISCELLANY THE FIRST. 
 
 Jttiam a Musis si quando animum paulisper abducamus, apud Musas 
 nihilominus feriamur : at reclines qnidi in, at otiosas, at dc hi-s ct iilis infer 
 se libcrc colloquentcs. 
 
THE LANDING-PLACE, 
 
 ESSAY I. 
 
 O blessed letters ! that combine in one 
 All ages past, and make one live -with all : 
 By you we do confer with who are gone, 
 And the dead-living unto council call ! 
 By you the unborn shall have communioii 
 Of what we feel and what doth us befall. 
 
 Since writings are the veins, the arteries, 
 And undecaying life-strings of those hearts, 
 That still shall pant and still shall exercise 
 Their mightiest powers when nature none imparts : 
 And the strong constitution of their praise 
 Wear out the infection of distempcr d days. 
 
 DANIEL S MUSOPHILUS. 
 
 THE intelligence, which produces or controls human actions 
 and occurrences, is often represented by the Mystics under the 
 name and notion of the supreme harmonist. I do not myself ap 
 prove of these metaphors : they seem to imply a restlessness to 
 understand that which is not among the appointed objects of our 
 comprehension or discursive faculty. But certainly there is one 
 excellence in good music, to which, without mysticism, we may 
 find or make an analogy in the records of history. I allude to 
 that sense of recognition, which accompanies our sense of novelty 
 in the most original passages of a great composer. If we lis 
 ten to a symphony of Cimarosa, the present strain still seems not 
 only to recall, but almost to renew, some past movement, another 
 and yet the same ! Each present movement bringing back as it 
 Avere, and embodying the spirit of some melody that had gone 
 before, anticipates and seems trying to overtake something that 
 is to come : and the musician has reached the summit of his art, 
 
 VOL. ii. F 
 
122 THE LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 when having thus modified the present by the past, he at the 
 same time weds the past in the present to some prepared and 
 corresponsive future. The auditor s thoughts and feelings move 
 under the same influence : retrospection blends with anticipation, 
 and hope and memory, a female Janus, become one power with 
 a double aspect. A similar effect the reader may produce for 
 himself in the pages of history, if he will be content to substitute 
 an intellectual complacency for pleasurable sensation. The events 
 and characters of one age, like the strains in music, recall those 
 of another, and the variety by which each is individualized, not 
 only gives a charm and poignancy to the resemblance, but like 
 wise renders the whole more intelligible. Meantime ample 
 room is afforded for the exercise both of the judgment and the 
 fancy, in distinguishing cases of real resemblance from those of 
 intentional imitation, the analogies of nature, revolving upon her 
 self, from the masquerade figures of cunning and vanity. 
 
 It is not from identity of opinions, or from similarity of events 
 and outward actions, that a real resemblance in the radical 
 character can be deduced. On the contrary, men of great and 
 stirring powers, who are destined to mould the age in which they 
 are born, must first mould themselves upon it. Mohammed born 
 twelve centuries later, and in the heart of Europe, would not 
 have been a false prophet ; nor would a false prophet of the pres 
 ent generation have been a Mohammed in the seventh century. 
 I have myself, therefore, derived the deepest interest from the 
 comparison of men, whose characters at first view appear widely 
 dissimilar, who yet have produced similar effects on their differ 
 ent ages, and this by the exertion of powers which on examina 
 tion will be found far more alike, than the altered drapery and 
 costume would have led us to suspect. Of the heirs of fame few 
 are more respected by me, though for very different qualities, than 
 Erasmus and Luther ; scarcely any one has a larger share of my 
 aversion than Voltaire ; and even of the better-hearted Rousseau 
 I was never more than a very lukewarm admirer. I should per 
 haps too rudely affront the general opinion, if I avowed my whole 
 creed concerning the proportions of real talent between the two 
 purifiers of revealed religion, now neglected as obsolete, and the 
 two modern conspirators against its authority, who are still the 
 Alpha and Ornega of continental genius. Yet when I abstract 
 the questions of evil and good, and measure only the effects pro- 
 
ESSAY I. 123 
 
 duced and the mode of producing them, I have repeatedly found 
 the names of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Robespierre, recall in a 
 similar cluster and connection those of Erasmus, Luther, and 
 Muncer. 
 
 Those who are familiar with the works of Erasmus, arid who 
 know the influence of his wit, as the pioileer of the Reformation ; 
 and who likewise know, that by his wit, added to the vast variety 
 of knowledge communicated in his works, he had won over by 
 anticipation so large a part of the polite and lettered world to the 
 Protestant party ; will be at no loss in discovering the intended 
 counterpart in the life and writings of the veteran Frenchman. 
 They will see, indeed, that the knowledge of the one was solid 
 through its whole extent, and that of the other extensive at a 
 cheap rate, by its superficiality ; that the wit of the one is always 
 bottomed on sound sense, peoples and enriches the mind of the 
 reader with an endless variety of distinct images and living in 
 terests ; and that his broadest laughter is everywhere translatable 
 into grave and weighty truth : while the wit of the Frenchman, 
 without imagery, without character, and without that pathos 
 which gives the magic charm to genuine humor, consists, when 
 it is most perfect, in happy turns of phrase, but far too often in 
 fantastic incidents, outrages of the pure imagination, and the poor 
 low trick of combining the ridiculous with the venerable, where 
 he, who does not laugh, abhors. Neither will they have forgotten 
 that the object of the one was to drive the thieves and mummers 
 out of the temple, while the other was propelling a worse ban 
 ditti, first to profane and pillage, and ultimately to raze it. Yet 
 not the less will they perceive, that the effects remain parallel, 
 the circumstances analogous, and the instruments the same. In 
 each case the effects extended over Europe, were attested and 
 augmented by the praise and patronage of thrones and dignities, 
 and are not to be explained but by extraordinary industry and a 
 life of literature ; in both instances the circumstances were sup 
 plied by an age of hopes and promises the age of Erasmus rest 
 less from the first vernal influences of real knowledge, that of 
 Voltaire from the hectic of imagined superiority. In the volumi 
 nous works of both, the instruments employed are chiefly those 
 of wit and amusing erudition, and alike in both the errors and 
 evils, real or imputed, in religion and politics are the objects of 
 the battery. And here we must stop. The two men were es- 
 
124 THE LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 sentially different. Exchange mutually their dates and spheres 
 of action, yet Voltaire, had he been ten-fold a Voltaire, could not 
 have made up an Erasmus ; and Erasmus must have emptied 
 himself of half his greatness and all his goodness, to have become 
 a Voltaire. 
 
 Shall I succeed betted or worse with the next pair, in this our 
 v iiew dance of death, or rather of the shadows which I have 
 brought forth two by two from the historic ark ? , In our first 
 couple I have at least secured an honorable retreat, and though 
 I failed as to the agents, I have maintained a fair analogy in the 
 actions and the objects. But the heroic Luther, a giant awaking 
 in his strength, and the crazy Rousseau, the dreamer of love-sick 
 tales, and the spinner of speculative cobwebs ; shy of light as the 
 mole, but as quick-eared too for every whisper of the public opin 
 ion ; the teacher of stoic pride in his principles, yet the victim 
 of morbid vanity in his feelings and conduct ! From what point 
 of likeness can we commence the comparison between a Luther 
 and a Rousseau ? And truly had I been seeking for characters 
 that, taken as they really existed, closely resemble each other, 
 and this, too, to our first apprehensions, and according to the 
 common rules of biographical comparison, I could scarcely have 
 made a more unlucky choice : unless I had desired that my par 
 allel of the G erman son of thunder and the visionary of Geneva, 
 should sit on the same bench with honest Fluellen s of Alexander 
 the Great arid Harry of Monmouth. Still, however, the same 
 analogy would hold as in my former instance : the effect pro 
 duced on their several ages by Luther and Rousseau, were com 
 mensurate with each other, and were produced in both cases by 
 what their contemporaries felt as serious and vehement eloquence, 
 and an elevated tone of moral feeling : and Luther, not less than 
 Rousseau, was actuated by an almost superstitious hatred of su 
 perstition, and a turbulent prejudice against prejudices. In the 
 relation too which their writings severally bore to those of Eras 
 mus and Voltaire, and the way in which the latter co-operated 
 with them to the same general end, each finding its own class of 
 admirers and proselytes, the parallel is complete. 
 
 I can not, however, rest here. Spite of the apparent incongru 
 ities, I am disposed to plead for a resemblance in the men them 
 selves, for that similarity in their radical natures, which I aban 
 doned all pretence and desire of showing in the instances of Vol- 
 
ESSAY I. 125 
 
 taire and Erasmus. But then my readers must think of Luther 
 not as he really was, but as he might have been, if he had been 
 bom in the age and under the circumstances of the Swiss philoso 
 pher. For this purpose I must strip him of many advantages 
 which he derived from his own times, and must contemplate him 
 in his natural weaknesses as well as in his original strength. 
 Each referred all things to his own ideal. The ideal was indeed 
 widely different in the one and in the other : and this was not 
 the least of Luther s many advantages, or, to use a favorite 
 phrase of his own, not one of his least favors of preventing grace. 
 Happily ibr him he had derived his standard from a common 
 measure already received by the good and wise ; I mean the in 
 spired writings, the study of which Erasmus had previously 
 restored among the learned. To know that we are in sympathy 
 with others, moderates our feelings as well as strengthens our 
 convictions : and for the mind, which opposes itself to the faith 
 of the multitude, it is more especially desirable, that there should 
 exist an object out of itself, on wilich it may fix its attention, and 
 thus balance its own energies. 
 
 Rousseau, on the contrary, in the inauspicious spirit of his age 
 and birth-place,^ had slipped the cable of his faith, and steered 
 by the compass of unaided reason, ignorant of the hidden currents 
 that were bearing him out of his course, and too proud to consult 
 the faithful charts prized and held sacred by his forefathers. But 
 the strange influences of his bodily temperament on his under 
 standing ; his constitutional melancholy pampered into a morbid 
 excess by solitude ; his wild dreams of suspicion ; his hypochon- 
 driacal fancies of hosts of conspirators all leagued against him and 
 his cause, and headed by some arch-enemy, to whose machina 
 tions he attributed every trifling mishap all as much the crea 
 tures of his imagination, as if instead of men he had conceived 
 them to be infernal spirits and beings preternatural these, or at 
 least the predisposition to them, existed in the ground- work of his 
 nature : they were parts of Rousseau himself. And what corres- 
 
 * Infidelity was so common in Geneva about that time, that Voltaire in 
 one of his letters exults, that in this, Calvin s own city, some half-dozen only 
 of the most ignorant believed in Christianity under any form. This was, 
 no doubt, one of Voltaire s usual lies of exaggeration : it is not, however, to 
 be denied, that here, and throughout Switzerland, he and the dark master 
 in whose service he employed himself, had ample grounds of triumph. 
 
126 THE LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 ponding in kind to these, not to speak of degree, can we detect in 
 the character of his supposed parallel ? This difficulty will sug 
 gest itself at the first thought, to those who derive all their 
 knowledge of Luther from the meagre biography met with in the 
 Lives of eminent Reformers, or even from the ecclesiastical his 
 tories of Mosheim or Milner : for a life of Luther, in extent and 
 style of execution proportioned to the grandeur and interest of the 
 subject, a life of the man Luther, as well as of Luther the theolo 
 gian, is still a desi deration in English literature, though perhaps 
 there is no subject for which so many unused materials are ex 
 tant, both printed and in manuscript.^ 
 
 ESSAY II. 
 
 Is it, I ask, most important to the best interests of mankind, temporal as 
 well as spiritual, that certain works, the names and number of which are 
 fixed and unalterable, should be distinguished from all other works, not in 
 degree only but even in kind ?{ And that these, collectively, should form 
 THE BOOK, to which in all the concerns of faith and morality the last re 
 course is to be had, and from the admitted decisions of which no man dare 
 
 * The affectionate respect in which I hold the name of Dr. Jortin one 
 of the many illustrious nurslings of the college to which I deem it no small 
 honor to have belonged Jesus, Cambridge renders it painful to me to as 
 sert, that the above remark holds almost equally true of a life of Erasmus. 
 But every scholar well read in the writings of Erasmus and his illustrious 
 contemporaries, must have discovered, that Jortin had neither collected 
 sufficient, nor the best, materials for his work : and perhaps from that 
 very cause he grew weary of his task, before he had made a full use of 
 the scanty materials which he had collected. 
 
 f This is one of the hinges on which the gate of egress from the spiritual 
 Rome turns. Historically, the affirmative to the question has been the con 
 stant and close companion of Protestantism : but whether it be likewise 
 its indispensable support, remains yet to be discussed, at the tribunal of 
 sound philosophy. Hitherto both the ay and the no have been, as it ap 
 pears to me, but very weakly and superficially argued. But I confess that 
 Chill ingworth makes me half a Roman Catholic on this point ; lest in ac 
 ceding to the grounds of his arguments against the Romanists, I should be 
 come less than half a Christian, and lose the substantive in my earnestness 
 to tear off its parasitical and suffocating epithet : that is, cease to be a 
 Catholic in aversion to the Papal bull of Roman Catholic. 1830. 
 
ESSAY II. 127 
 
 appeal? If tbe mere existence of a book so called and charactered be, as 
 the Koran itself suffices to evince, a mighty bond of union, among nations 
 whom all other causes tend to separate ; if moreover the book revered by 
 us and our forefathers has been the foster-nurse of learning in the darkest, 
 and of civilization in the rudest, times ; and lastly, if this so vast and wide 
 a blessing is not to be founded in a delusion, and doomed therefore to the 
 impermanence and scorn in which sooner or later all delusions must end ; 
 how, I pray you, is it conceivable that this should be brought about and 
 secured, otherwise than by God s special vouchsafement to this one book, 
 exclusively, of that divine MEAN, that uniform and perfect middle way, 
 which in all points is at safe and equal distance from all errors whether of 
 excess or defect ? But again, if this be true and what Protestant Chris 
 tian worthy of his baptismal dedication will deny its truth? if in the one 
 book we are entitled, or even permitted, to expect the golden mean through 
 out : surely we ought not to be hard and over-stern in our censures of the 
 mistakes arid infirmities of those, who pretending to no warrant of extraor 
 dinary inspiration have yet been raised up by God s providence to be of 
 highest power and eminence in the reformation of his Church. Far rather 
 does it behoove us to consider, in how many instances the peccant humor 
 native to the man had been wrought upon by the faithful study of that 
 only faultless model, and corrected into an unsinning, or at least a venial, 
 predominance in the writer or preacher. Yea, that not seldom the infir 
 mity of a zealous soldier in the warfare of Christ has been made the very 
 mould and ground-work of that man s peculiar gifts and virtues. Grateful 
 too we should be, that the very faults of famous men have been fitted to 
 the age, on which they were to act : and that thus the folly of man has 
 proved the wisdom of God, and been made the instrument of his mercy to 
 mankind. 
 
 WHOEVER has sojourned in Eisenach, will assuredly have vis 
 ited the Warteburg, interesting by so many historical associations, 
 which stands on a high rock, about two miles to the south from 
 the city gate. To this castle Luther was taken on his return 
 from the imperial Diet, where Charles V. had pronounced the 
 ban upon him, and limited his safe convoy to one and twenty 
 days. On the last but one of these days, as he was on his way 
 to Waltershausen, a town in the duchy of Saxe Gotha, a few 
 leagues to the south-east of Eisenach, he was stopped in a hol 
 low behind the castle Altenstein, and carried to the Warteburg. 
 The Elector of Saxony, who could not have refused to deliver up 
 Luther, as one put in the ban by the Emperor and the Diet, had 
 ordered John of Berleptsch, the governor of the Warteburg, and 
 Burckhardt von Hundt, the governor of Altenstein, to take Lu 
 ther to one or the other of these castles, without acquainting* him 
 which ; in order that he might be able, with safe conscience, to 
 
128 THE LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 declare, that he did not know where Luther was. Accordingly 
 they took him to the Warteburg, under the name of the Cheva 
 lier (Ritter) George. 
 
 To this friendly imprisonment the Reformation owes many of 
 Luther s most important labors. In this place he wrote his works 
 against auricular confession, against Jacob Latronum, the tract 
 on the abuses of masses, that against clerical and monastic vows, 
 composed his exposition of the 22, 27, and 68 Psalms, finished 
 his declaration of the Magnificat, began to write his Church 
 Iromilies, and translated the New Testament. Here too, and 
 during this time, he is said to have hurled his inkstand at the 
 devil, the black spot from which yet remains on the stone wall 
 of the room he studied in ; which, surely, no one will have vis 
 ited the Warteburg without having had pointed out to him by 
 the good Catholic who is, or at least some few years ago was, 
 the warden of the castle. He must have been either a very su 
 percilious or a very incurious traveller if he did not, for the grati 
 fication of his guide at least, inform himself by means of his pen 
 knife, that the said marvellous blot bids defiance to all the toils 
 of the scrubbing brush, and is to remain a sign forever ; and with 
 this advantage over most of its kindred, that being capable of a 
 double interpretation, it is equally flattering to the Protestant 
 and the Papist, and is regarded by the wonder-loving zealots of 
 both parties, with equal faith. 
 
 Whether the great man ever did throw his inkstand at his 
 Satanic Majesty, whether he ever boasted of the exploit, and him 
 self declared the dark blotch on his study wall in the Warteburg, 
 to be the result and relict of this author-like hand-grenado, 
 (happily for mankind he used his inkstand at other times to bet 
 ter purpose, and with more effective hostility against the arch 
 fiend) I leave to my reader s own judgment ; on condition, how 
 ever, that he has previously perused Luther s Table Talk, and 
 other writings of the same stamp, of some of his most illustrious 
 contemporaries, which contain facts still more strange and Avhim- 
 sical, related by themselves and of themselves, arid accompanied 
 with solemn protestations of the truth of their statements. Lu 
 ther s Table Talk, which to a truly philosophic mind, will not be 
 less interesting than Rousseau s Confessions, I have not myself 
 the means of consulting at present, and can not therefore say, 
 whether this ink-pot adventure is, or is not, told or referred to, in 
 
ESSAY II. 129 
 
 it ;* but many considerations incline me to give credit to the 
 story. 
 
 Luther s unremitting literary labor and his sedentary mode of 
 life, during his confinement in the Warteburg, where he was 
 treated with the greatest kindness, and enjoyed every liberty con 
 sistent with his own safety, had begun to undermine his former 
 unusually strong health. He suffered many and most distressing 
 effects of indigestion and a deranged state of the digestive organs. 
 Melanethon, whom he had desired to consult the physicians at 
 Erfurth, sent him some de-obstruent medicines, and the advice to 
 take regular and severe exercise. At first he followed the ad 
 vice, sate and labored less, and spent whole days in the chase ; 
 but like the younger Pliny, he strove in vain to form a taste for 
 this favorite amusement of the gods of the earth, as appears from 
 a passage in his letter to George Spalatin, which I translate for 
 an additional reason ; to prove to the admirers of Rousseau, who 
 perhaps will not be less affronted by this biographical parallel, 
 than the zealous Lutherians will be offended, that if my compar 
 ison should turn out groundless on the whole, the failure will not 
 have arisen either from the want of sensibility in our great re 
 former, or of angry aversion to those in high places, whom he re 
 garded as the oppressors of their rightful equals. " I have been," 
 he writes, " employed for two days in the sports of the field, arid 
 was willing myself to taste this bitter-sweet amusement of the 
 great heroes : we have caught two hares, and one brace of poor 
 little partridges. An employment this which does not ill suit 
 quiet leisurely folks : for even in the midst of the ferrets and 
 dogs, I have had theological fancies. But as much pleasure as 
 the general appearance of the scene and the mere looking-on 
 occasioned me, even so much it pitied me to think of the mys 
 tery and emblem which lies beneath it. For what does this sym 
 bol signify, but that the devil, through his godless huntsmen and 
 dogs, the bishops and theologians to wit, doth privily chase and 
 catch the innocent poor little beasts ? Ah ! the simple and 
 credulous souls came thereby far too plain before my eyes. 
 Thereto comes a yet more frightful mystery : as at my earnest 
 entreaty we had saved alive one poor little hare, and I had con 
 cealed it in the sleeve of my great coat, and had strolled off a 
 short distance from it, the dogs in the mean time found the poor 
 * It is not. Ed. 
 
130 THE LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 hare. Such, too, is the fury of the Pope with Satan, that he de 
 stroys even the souls that had been saved, and troubles himself 
 little about my pains and entreaties. Of such hunting then I 
 have had enough." In another passage he tells his correspondent, 
 " You know it is hard to be a prince, and not in some degree a 
 robber, and the greater a prince the more a robber." Of our 
 Henry VIII. he says, " I must answer the grim lion that passes 
 himself off for king of England. The ignorance in the book is 
 such as one naturally expects from a king ; but the bitterness and 
 impudent falsehood is quite leonine." And in his circular letter 
 to the princes, on occasion of the peasants war, he uses a lan 
 guage so inflammatory, and holds ibrth a doctrine which borders 
 so near on the holy right of insurrection, that it may as well re 
 main untranslated. 
 
 Had Luther been himself a prince he could not have desired 
 better treatment than he received during his eight months stay 
 in the Warteburg ; and in consequence of a more luxurious diet 
 than he had been accustomed to, he was plagued with tempta 
 tions both from the flesh and the devil. It is evident from his 
 letters* that he suffered under great irritability of his nervous 
 system, the common effect of deranged digestion in men of seden 
 tary habits, who are at the same time intense thinkers ; and this 
 irritability added to, and revivifying, the impressions made upon 
 him in early life, and fostered by the theological systems of his 
 manhood, is abundantly sufficient to explain all his apparitions 
 and all his nightly combats with evil spirits. I see nothing im 
 probable in the supposition, that in one of those unconscious half- 
 sleeps, or rather those rapid alternations of the sleeping with the 
 half-waking state, which is the true witching time, 
 
 -the season 
 
 Wherein the spirits hold their wont to walk, 
 
 the fruitful matrix of ghosts I see nothing improbable, that in 
 some one of those momentary slumbers, into which the suspen- 
 
 * I can scarcely conceive a more delightful volume than might be made 
 from Luther s letters, especially from those that were written from the 
 Warteburg, if they were translated in the simple, sinewy, idiomatic, hearty, 
 mother-tongue of the original. A difficult task I admit and scarcely pos 
 sible for any man, however great his talents in other respects, whose favor 
 ite reading has not lain among the English writers from Edward VI. to 
 Charles I. 
 
ESSAY II. 181 
 
 sion of all thought in the perplexity of intense thinking so often 
 passes, Luther should have had a full view of the room in which 
 he was sitting, of his writing-table and all the implements of 
 study, as they really existed, and at the same time a brain-image 
 of the devil, vivid enough to have acquired apparent outness, 
 and a distance regulated by the proportion of its distinctness to 
 that of the objects really impressed on the outward senses. 
 
 If this Christian Hercules, this heroic cleanser of the Augean 
 stable of apostasy, had been born and educated in the present or 
 the preceding generation, he would, doubtless, have holden him 
 self for a man of genius and original power. But with this faith 
 alone, he would scarcely have removed tho mountains which he 
 did remove. The darkness and superstition of the age, which 
 required such a reformer, had moulded his mind for the reception 
 of impressions concerning himself, better suited to inspire the 
 strength and enthusiasm necessary for the task of reformation, 
 impressions more in sympathy with the spirits whom he was to 
 influence. He deemed himself gifted with supernatural influxes, 
 an especial servant of heaven, a chosen warrior, fighting as the 
 general of a small but faithful troop, against an army of evil 
 beings, headed by the prince of the air. These were no meta 
 phorical beings in his apprehension. He was a poet indeed, as 
 great a poet as ever lived in any age or country ; but his poetic 
 images were so vivid, that they mastered the poet s own mind ! 
 He was possessed with them, as with substances distinct from 
 himself : Luther did not write, he acted poems. The Bible was 
 a, spiritual, indeed, but not a figurative armory in his belief: it 
 was the magazine of his warlike stores, and from thence he was 
 to arm himself, and supply both shield and sword, and javelin, 
 to the elect. Methinks 1 see him sitting, the heroic student, in 
 his chamber in the "Warteburg, with his midnight lamp before 
 him, seen by the late traveller in the distant plain of Bischofs- 
 roda, as a star on the mountain ! Below it lies the Hebrew 
 Bible open, on which he gazes, his brow pressing on his palm, 
 brooding over some obscure text, which he desires to make plain 
 to the simple boor and to the humble artisan, and to transfer its 
 whole force into their own natural and living tongue. And he 
 himself does not understand it ! Thick darkness lies on the ori 
 ginal text : he counts the letters, he calls up the roots of each 
 separate word, and questions them as the familiar spirits of au 
 
182 THE LANDING-PLACE, 
 
 oracle. In vain ; thick darkness continues to cover it , not a ray 
 of meaning dawns through it. With sullen and angry hope he 
 reaches for the Vulgate, his old and sworn enemy, the treacherous 
 confederate of the Roman anti-Christ, which he so gladly, when 
 ho can, rebukes for idolatrous falsehoods, that had dared place 
 
 "Within the sanctuary itself their shrines, 
 Abominations ! - 
 
 Now thought of humiliation he must entreat its aid. Beef 
 there has the sly spirit of apostasy worked-in a phrase, which- 
 favors the doctrine of purgatory, the intercession of saints, or the 
 efficacy of prayers for the dead ; and what is worst of all, the 
 interpretation is plausible. The original Hebrew might be forced 
 into this meaning : and no other meaning seems to lie in it, none 
 to hover above it in the heights of allegory, none to lurk beneath 
 it even in the depths of cabala ! This is the work of the tempter " f 
 it is a cloud of darkness conjured up between the truth of the 
 sacred letters and the eyes of his understanding, by the malice 
 of the evil one, and for a trial of his faith ! Must he then at 
 length confess, must he subscribe the name of Luther to an ex 
 position which consecrates a weapon for the hand of the idola 
 trous hierarchy ? Never ! never ! 
 
 There still remains one auxiliary in reserve, the translation of 
 the Seventy. The Alexandrine Greeks, anterior to the Church 
 itself, could intend no support to its corruptions the Septnagint 
 w r ill have profaned the altar of truth with no incense for the 
 nostrils of the universal bishop to snuff up. And here again his 
 hopes are baffled ! Exactly at this perplexed passage had the 
 Greek translator given his understanding a holiday, and made 
 his pen supply its place. honored Luther ! as easily mightest 
 thou convert the whole city of Rome, with the Pope and the 
 conclave of cardinals inclusively, as strike a spark of light from 
 the words, and nothing but words, of the Alexandrine version. 
 Disappointed, despondent, enraged, ceasing to think, yet continu 
 ing his brain on the stretch in solicitation of a thought ; and 
 gradually giving himself up to angry fancies, to recollections of 
 past persecutions, to uneasy fears and inward defiances and float 
 ing images of the evil being, their supposed personal author ; he 
 sinks without perceiving it, into a trance of slumber ; during 
 which his brain retains ils waking energies, excepting that what 
 
ESSAY II, 138 
 
 would have been mere thoughts before, now the action and 
 counterweight of his senses and of their impressions being with 
 drawn shape and condense themselves into things, into realities. 
 Repeatedly half-wakening, and his eyelids as often reclosing, the 
 objects which really surround him form the place and scenery of 
 his dream. All at once he sees the arch-fiend coming forth on 
 the wall of the room, from the very spot, perhaps, on which his 
 eyes had been fixed vacantly during the perplexed moments of 
 his former meditation : the inkstand which he had at the same 
 time been using, becomes associated with it: and in that struggle 
 of rage, which in these distempered dreams almost constantly 
 precedes the helpless terror by the pain of which we are finally 
 awakened, he imagines that he hurls it at the intruder, or not 
 improbably in the first instant of awakening, while yet both his 
 imagination and his eyes are possessed by the dream, he actually 
 hurls it. Some weeks after, perhaps, during which interval he 
 had often mused on the incident, undetermined whether to deem 
 it a visitation of Satan to him in the body or out of the body, he 
 discovers for the first time the dark spot on his wall, and receives 
 it as a sign and pledge vouchsafed to him of the event having 
 actually taken place. 
 
 Such was Luther under the influences of the age and country 
 in and for which he was born. Conceive him a citizen of Geneva, 
 and a contemporary of Voltaire : suppose the French language 
 his mother-tongue, and the political and moral philosophy of 
 English free-thinkers re-modelled by Parisians/or^ esprits, to have 
 been the objects of his study ; conceive this change of circum 
 stances, and Luther will no longer dream of fiends or of anti- 
 Christ but will he have no dreams in their place ? His melan 
 choly will have changed its drapery ; but will it find no new cos 
 tume wherewith to clothe itself ? His impetuous temperament, 
 his deep working mind, his busy and vivid imaginations would 
 they not have been a trouble to him in a world, where nothing 
 was to be altered, where nothing was to obey his power, to cease 
 to be that which it had been, in order to realize his pre-concep- 
 lions of what it ought to be ? His sensibility, which found ob 
 jects for itself, and shadows of human suffering in the harmless 
 brute, and even in the flowers which he trod upon might it not 
 naturally, in an unspiritualized age, have wept, and trembled, 
 and dissolved, over scenes of earthly passion, and the struggles of 
 
134: THE LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 love with duty ? His pity, that so easily passed into rage, would 
 it not have found in the inequalities of mankind, in the oppres 
 sions of governments and the miseries of the governed, an entire 
 instead of a divided object ? And might not a perfect constitu 
 tion, a government of pure reason, a renovation of the social con 
 tract, have easily supplied the place of the reign of Christ in the 
 new Jerusalem, of the restoration of the visible Church, and the 
 union of all men by one faith in one charity ? Henceforward 
 then, we will conceive his reason employed in building up anew 
 the edifice of earthly society, and his imagination as pledging it 
 self for the possible realization of the structure. We will lose the 
 great reformer, who was born in an age which needed him, in 
 the philosopher of Geneva, who was doomed to misapply his 
 energies to materials the properties of which he misunderstood, 
 and happy only that he did not live to witness the direful effects 
 of his own system. 
 
 ESSAY III. 
 
 Pectora cui credam ? quis me lenire docebit 
 
 Mordaces cnras, quis longas fallere nodes, 
 
 Ex quo summa dies tulerit Damona sub umbras ? 
 
 Omnia pttulatim consumit longlor atas, 
 Vivendoque simul morimur, rapimurque mancndo. 
 
 Ite tamen, lacrynifc ! puruin colis cctltcra, Damon ! 
 Nee mi hi convcniunt lacrymcc. Non omjiia terras 
 Obruta I vivit amor, vivit dolor ! ora negatur 
 Dulcia conspicere : ftcre et meminisse relictum est. 
 
 MILTON : PETRARCH : MILTON. 
 
 THE two following essays I devote to elucidation, the first of 
 the theory of Luther s apparitions stated perhaps too briefly in the 
 preceding essay ; the second for the purpose of removing the only 
 obstacle, which I can discover in the next section of The Friend, 
 to the reader s ready comprehension of the principles, on which 
 the arguments are grounded. First, I will endeavor to make my 
 ghost theory more clear to those of my readers, who are fortunate 
 
ESSAY III. 135 
 
 enough to find it obscure in consequence of their own good health 
 arid unshattered nerves. The window of my library at Keswick 
 is opposite to the fire-place, and looks out on the very large gar 
 den that occupies the whole slope of the hill on which the house 
 stands. Consequently, the rays of light transmitted through the 
 glass, that is, the rays from the garden, the opposite mountains, 
 and the bridge, river, lake, and vale interjacent, and the rays re 
 flected from it, of the fire-place, &c., enter the eye at the same 
 moment. At the coming on of evening, it was my frequent 
 amusement to watch the image or reflection of the fire, that 
 .seemed burning in the bushes or between the trees in different 
 parts of the garden or the fields beyond it, according as there was 
 more or less light ; and which still arranged itself among the real 
 objects of vision, with a distance and magnitude proportioned to 
 its greater or lesser faintness. For still as the darkness in 
 creased, the image of the fire lessened and grew nearer and more 
 distinct ; till the twilight had deepened into perfect night, when 
 all outward objects being excluded, the window became a perfect 
 looking-glass : save only that my books on the side shelves of the 
 room were lettered, as it were, on their backs with stars, more or 
 fewer as the sky was less or more clouded, the rays of the stars 
 being at that time the only ones transmitted. Now substitute 
 the phantom from Luther s brain for the images of reflected light, 
 the fire for instance, and the forms of his room and its furniture 
 for the transmitted rays, and you have a fair resemblance of an 
 apparition, and a just conception of the manner in which it is 
 seen together with real objects. I have long wished to devote an 
 entire work to the subject of dreams, visions, ghosts, and witch 
 craft, in which I might first give, and then endeavor to explain, 
 the most interesting and best attested fact of each, which has 
 come within my knowledge, either from books or from personal 
 testimony. I might then explain in a more satisfactory way the 
 mode in which our thoughts, in states of morbid slumber, become 
 at times perfectly dramatic, for in certain sorts of dreams the 
 dullest weight becomes a Shakspeare, and by what law the 
 form of the vision appears to talk to us its own thoughts in a 
 voice as audible as the shape is visible ; and this too oftentimes 
 in connected trains, and not seldom even with a concentration of 
 power which may easily impose on the soundest judgments, un- 
 instructed in the optics and acoustics of the inner sense, for reve- 
 
136 THE LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 lations and gifts of prescience. In aid of the present case, I will 
 only remark, that it would appear incredible to persons not ac 
 customed to these subtle notices of self-observation, what small 
 and remote resemblances, what mere hints of likeness from some 
 real external object, especially if the shape be aided by color, will 
 suffice to make a vivid thought consubstantiate with the real ob 
 ject, and derive from it an outward perceptibility. Even when 
 we are broad awake, if we are in anxious expectation, how often 
 will not the most confused sounds of nature be heard by us as ar 
 ticulate sounds ? For instance, the babbling of a brook will ap 
 pear for a moment the voice of a friend, for whom we are wait 
 ing, calling out our own names. A short meditation, therefore, 
 on the great law of the imagination, that a likeness in part tends 
 to become a likeness of the whole, will make it not only con 
 ceivable but probable, that the inkstand itself, and the dark- 
 colored stone on the wall, which Luther perhaps had never till 
 then noticed, might have a considerable influence in the produc 
 tion of the fiend, and of the hostile act by which his obtrusive 
 visit was repelled. 
 
 A lady once asked me if I believed in ghosts and apparitions. 
 I answered with truth and simplicity : No, madam ! I have seen 
 far too many myself. I have indeed a whole memorandum-book 
 filled with records of these pliccnomena, many of them interest 
 ing as facts and data for psychology, and affording some valuable 
 materials for a theory of perception, and its dependence on the 
 memory and imagination. In omnem actum perceptions ima- 
 ginatio injluit efficlenter, says AYolfe. But he* is no more, who 
 would have realized this idea ; who had already established the 
 foundations and the law of the theory ; and for whom I had so 
 often found a pleasure and a comfort, even during the wretched 
 and restless nights of sickness, in watching and instantly record 
 ing these experiences of the world within us, of the gemina na- 
 tura, quce Jit et facif,, ct crcat et creatur ! He is gone, my friend ; 
 my munificent co-patron, and not less the benefactor of my in 
 tellect ! He who, beyond all other men known to me, added a 
 fine and ever-wakeful sense of beauty to the most patient accu 
 racy in experimental philosophy and the prof bunder researches 
 of metaphysical science ; he who united all the play and spring 
 of fancy with the subtlest discrimination and an inexorable judg- 
 * Thomas Wedgwood. 
 
ESSAY IV. 137 
 
 ment ; and who controlled an almost painful exquisiteness of 
 taste by a warmth of heart, which in the practical relations of 
 life made allowances for faults as quickly as the moral taste de 
 tected them ; a warmth of heart, which was indeed noble and 
 pre-eminent, for alas ! the genial feelings of health contributed 
 no spark toward it. Of these qualities I may speak, for they 
 belonged to all mankind. The higher vitues, that were blessings 
 to his friends, and the still higher that resided in and for his 
 own soul, are themes for the energies of solitude, for the awful- 
 ness of prayer ! virtues exercised in the barrenness and desola 
 tion of his animal being ; while he thirsted with the full stream 
 at his lips, and yet with unwearied goodness poured out to all 
 around him, like the master of a feast among his kindred in the 
 day of his own gladness ! Were it but for the remembrance of 
 him alone and of his lot here below, the disbelief of a future state 
 would sadden the earth around me, and blight the very grass in 
 the field. 
 
 ESSAY IV. 
 
 rrch , u Aai/j.6vi, u/} -xapadeiyfiaat xpu/nevov, iKavug IvdeiKvvaOai TI 
 TUV (j.ei6vuv. Kiv6vvVi yap ?/[iuv t /carof, olov ovap, idtj uTravra, TTUVT 
 
 av 7TU/.IV WCTTTfp VTTCtp d") VOtV. PLATO, PoliticUS. 
 
 It is difficult, excellent friend ! to make any comprehensive truth com 
 pletely intelligible, unless we avail ourselves of an example. Otherwise we 
 may, as in a dream, seem to know all, and then, as it were awaking, find 
 that we know nothing. 
 
 AMONG my earliest impressions I still distinctly remember that 
 of my first entrance into the mansion of a neighboring baronet, 
 awfully known to me by the name of the great house,* its ex 
 terior having been long connected in my childish imagination 
 with the feelings and fancies stirred up in me by the perusal of 
 the Arabian Nights Entertainments. f Beyond all other objects, 
 
 * Escot, near Ottery St. Mary, Devon, then the seat of Sir George 
 Young, and since burnt down, in 1808. Ed. 
 
 f As I had read one volume of these tales over and over again before 
 my fifth birth-day, it may be readily conjectured of what sort these fancies 
 
138 THE LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 I was most struck with the magnificent staircase, relieved at well- 
 proportioned intervals by spacious landing-places, this adorned 
 with grand or showy plants, the next looking out on an extensive 
 prospect through the stately window, with its side-panes of rich 
 blues and saturated amber or orange tints : while from the last 
 and highest the eye commanded the whole spiral ascent with the 
 marble pavement of the great hall, from which it seemed to 
 spring up as if it merely used the ground on which it rested. My 
 readers will find no difficulty in translating these forms of the 
 outward senses into their intellectual analogies, so as to under 
 stand the purport of The Friend s landing-places, and the ob 
 jects I proposed to myself, in the small groups of essays inter 
 posed under this title between the main divisions of the work. 
 
 My best powers would have sunk within me, had I not soothed 
 my solitary toils with the anticipation of many readers (wheth 
 er during my life, or when my grave shall have shamed my de 
 tractors into a sympathy with its own silence, formed no part in 
 this self-flattery ) who would submit to any reasonable trouble 
 rather than read, as in a dream seeming to know all, to find on 
 awaking that they know nothing. Having, therefore, in the 
 three preceding essays selected from my conservatory a few 
 plants, of somewhat gayer petals and a livelier green, though 
 like the geranium tribe of a sober character in the whole physi 
 ognomy and odor, I shall first devote a few sentences to a cata 
 logue of my introductory lucubrations, and the remainder of the 
 essay to the prospect, as far as it can be seen distinctly from our 
 present site. Within a short distance, several ways meet : and 
 at that point only does it appear to me that the reader will be in 
 danger of mistaking the road. Dropping the metaphor, I would 
 say that there is one term, reason, the meaning of which has be 
 come unsettled. To different persons it conveys a different no 
 tion, and riot seldom to the same person at different times ; while 
 the force, and to a certain extent, the intelligibility of the fbllow- 
 
 and feelings must have been. The book, I well remember, used to lie in 
 a corner of the parlor-window at my dear father s vicarage-house : and I 
 can never forget with what a strange mixture of obscure dread and intense 
 desire I used to look at the volume and watch it, till the morning sunshine 
 had reached and nearly covered it, when, and not before, I felt the courage 
 given me to seize the precious treasure and hurry off with it to some sunny 
 corner in our play-ground. 
 
ESSAY IV. 139 
 
 ing sections depend on its being interpreted in one sense exclu 
 sively. 
 
 Essays I. to IV. inclusively convey the design and contents of 
 the work ; my judgment respecting the style, and my defence of 
 myself from the charges of arrogance and presumption. Say 
 rather, that such are the personal threads of the discourse : for it 
 will not have escaped the reader s observation, that even in these 
 prefatory pa^es principles and truths of general interest form the 
 true contents, and that arnid all the usual compliments arid cour 
 tesies of a first presentation to the reader s acquaintance the sub 
 stantial object is still to assert the practicability, without disguis 
 ing the difficulties, of improving the morals of mankind by a di 
 rect appeal to their understandings ; to show the distinction be 
 tween attention and thought, and the necessity of the former as 
 a habit or discipline without which the very word, thinking, must 
 remain a thoughtless substitute for dreaming with our eyes open ; 
 and lastly, the tendency of a certain fashionable style with all its 
 accommodations to paralyze the very faculties of manly intellect 
 by a series of petty stimulants. After this preparation, I proceed 
 at once to lay the foundations common to the whole work by an 
 inquiry into the duty of communicating truth, and the conditions 
 under which it may be communicated with safety, from essay V. 
 to XVI. inclusively. Each essay will, I believe, be found com 
 plete in itself, yet an organic part of the whole considered as one 
 disquisition. First, the inexpediency of pious frauds is proved 
 from history, the shameless assertion of the indifference of truth 
 and falsehood exposed to its deserved infamy, and an answer 
 given to the objection derived from the impossibility of conveying 
 an adequate notion of the truths, we may attempt to communi 
 cate. The conditions are then detailed, under which, right 
 though inadequate notions may be taught without danger, and 
 proofs given, both from facts and from reason, that he, who fulfils 
 the conditions required by conscience, takes the surest way of an 
 swering the purposes of prudence. This is, indeed, the main 
 characteristic of the moral system taught by The Friend through 
 out, that the distinct foresight of consequences belongs exclusively 
 to the infinite Wisdom which is one with that Almighty Will, on 
 which all consequences depend ; but that for man to obey the 
 simple unconditional commandment of eschewing every act that 
 implies a self-contradiction, or, in other words, to produce and 
 
140 THE LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 maintain the greatest possible harmony in the component im 
 pulses and faculties of his nature, involves the effects of pru 
 dence. It is, as it were, prudence in short-hand or cipher. A 
 pure conscience, that inward something, that 6eog olxsiog, which 
 being absolutely unique no man can describe, because every man 
 is bound to know, and even in the eye of the law is held to be a 
 person no longer than he may be supposed to know it the con 
 science, I say, bears the same relation to God, as an accurate 
 time-piece bears to the sun. The time-piece merely indicates the 
 relative path of the sun, yet we can regulate our plans and pro 
 ceedings by it with the same confidence as if it was itself the 
 efficient cause of light, heat, arid the revolving seasons : on the 
 self-evident axiom, that in whatever sense two things for in 
 stance, A. and C. D. E., are both equal to a third thing, B., 
 they are in the some sense equal to each other. Cunning is cir 
 cuitous folly. In plain English, to act the knave is but a round 
 about way of playing the fool ; and the man, who will not per 
 mit himself to call an action, by its proper name without a pre 
 vious calculation of all its probable consequences, may be indeed 
 only a coxcomb, who is looking at his fingers through an opera- 
 glass ; but he runs no small risk of becoming a knave. The 
 chances are against him. Though he should begin by calculating 
 the consequences with regard to others, yet by the mere habit of 
 never contemplating an action in its own proportions and imme 
 diate relations to his moral being, it is scarcely possible but that 
 he must end in selfishness : for the you, and the they will 
 stand on different occasions for a thousand different persons, while 
 the 1 is one only, and recurs in every calculation. Or grant 
 that the principle of expediency should prompt to the same out 
 ward deeds as are commanded by the law of reason ; yet the doer 
 himself is debased. But if it be replied, that the reaction on the 
 agent s own mind is to form a part of the calculation, then it is a 
 rule that destroys itself in the very propounding, as will be more 
 fully demonstrated in the second or ethical division of The Friend, 
 when I shall have detected and exposed the equivoque between 
 an action and a series of motions, by which the determinations 
 of the will are to be realized in the world of the senses. What 
 modification of the latter corresponds to the former, and is enti 
 tled to be called by the same name, will often depend on time, 
 place, persons and circumstances, the consideration of which re- 
 
ESSAY IV. 141 
 
 quires an exertion of the judgment ; but the action itself remains 
 the same, and like all other ideas pre-exists in the reason, or, in 
 the more expressive and perhaps more precise and philosophical 
 language of St. Paul, in the spirit, unalterable because uncondi 
 tional, or with no other than that most awful condition, as sure 
 as God liveth, it is so ! 
 
 These remarks are inserted in this place, because the principle 
 admits of easiest illustration in the instance of veracity and the 
 actions connected with the same, and may then be intelligibly ap 
 plied to other departments of morality, all of which Woollston- 
 indeed considers as only so many different forms of truth and false 
 hood. So far I treated of oral communication of the truth. The 
 applicability of the same principle is then tried and affirmed in 
 publications by the press, first as between the individual and his 
 own conscience, and then between the publisher arid the state : 
 and under this head I have considered at large the questions of a 
 free press and the law of libel, the anomalies and peculiar diffi 
 culties of the latter, and the only possible solution compatible 
 with the continuance of the former : a solution rising out of and 
 justified by the necessarily anomalous and unique nature of the 
 law itself. I confess that I look back on this discussion concern 
 ing the press and its limits with a satisfaction unusual to me in 
 the review of my oAvn labors : and if the date of their first publi 
 cation (September, 1809) be remembered, it will not perhaps be 
 denied on an impartial comparison, that I have treated this most 
 important subject, so especially interesting in the present time, 
 more fully and more systematically than it had up to that time 
 been. Interim turn rccti conscientia, turn illo meconsolor, quod 
 optimis quibusque certe non improbamur, fartassis omnibus 
 placituri, simul atque livor ab obitu conquieverit. 
 
 Lastly, the subject is concluded even as it commenced, and as 
 beseemed a disquisition placed as the steps and vestibule of the 
 whole w r ork, with an enforcement of the absolute necessity of 
 principles grounded in reason as the basis or rather as the living 
 root of all genuine expedience. Where these are despised or at 
 best regarded as aliens from the actual business of life, and con 
 signed to the ideal world of speculative philosophy and Utopian 
 politics, instead of state wisdom we shall have state-craft, and for 
 the talent of the governor the cleverness of an embarrassed spend 
 thrift which consists in tricks to shift off difficulties and dan- 
 
142 THE LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 gers when they are close upon us, and to keep them at arm s 
 length, not in solid and grounded courses to preclude or subdue 
 them. We must content ourselves with expedient-makers with 
 fire-engines against fires, life-boats against inundations ; but no 
 houses built fire-proof, no dams that rise above the water-mark. 
 The reader will have observed that already has the term, reason 
 oeen frequently contradistinguished from the understanding and 
 the judgment. If I could succeed in fully explaining the sense 
 in which the word reason is employed by me, and in satisfying 
 the reader s mind concerning the grounds and importance of the 
 distinction, I should feel little or no apprehension concerning the 
 intelligibility of these essays from first to last. The following sec 
 tion is in part founded on this distinction : the which remaining 
 obscure, all else will be so as a system, however clear the com 
 ponent paragraphs may be, taken separately. In the appendix* 
 to my first Lay Sermon, I have, indeed, treated the question at con 
 siderable length, but chiefly in relation to the heights of theology 
 and metaphysics. In the next number I attempt to explain my 
 self more popularly, and trust that with no great expenditure of 
 attention the reader will satisfy his mind, that our remote ances 
 tors spoke as men acquainted with the constituent parts of their 
 own moral and intellectual being, when they described one man 
 as "being out of his senses," another as "out of his wits," or 
 "deranged in his understanding," and a third as having "lost 
 his reason." Observe, the understanding may be deranged, 
 weakened, or perverted ; but the reason is either lost or not lost, 
 that is, wholly present or wholly absent. 
 
ESSAY V. 
 
 
 
 Man may rather be defined a religious than a rational creature, in regard 
 that in other creatures there may be something of reason, but there is noth 
 ing of religion. HARRINGTON. 
 
 IF the reader will substitute the word " understanding" for 
 " reason," and the word " reason" for " religion," Harrington has 
 here completely expressed the truth for which I am contending. 
 Man may rather be defined a rational than an intelligent crea 
 ture, in regard that in other creatures there may be something of 
 understanding, but there is nothing of reason. But that this was 
 Harrington s meaning is evident. Otherwise, instead of compar 
 ing two faculties with each other, he would contrast a faculty 
 with one of its own objects, which would involve the same ab 
 surdity as if he had said, that man might rather be defined an 
 astronomical than a seeing animal, because other animals pos 
 sessed the sense of sight, but were incapable of beholding the 
 satellites of Saturn, or the nebula of fixed stars. If further con 
 firmation be necessary, it may be supplied by the following 
 reflections, the leading thought of which I remember to have 
 read in the works of a continental philosopher. It should seem 
 easy to give the definite distinction of the reason fxom the un 
 derstanding, because we constantly imply it when we speak of 
 the difference between ourselves arid the brute creation. No one, 
 except as a figure of speech, ever speaks of an animal reason ;* 
 
 * I have this moment looked over a translation of Blumenbach s Physiol 
 ogy, by Dr. Elliotson, which forms a glaring exception, p. 45. I do not 
 know Dr. Elliotson, but I do know Professor Blumenbach, and was an 
 assiduous attendant on the lectures, of which this classical work was the 
 text-book ; and I know that that good and great man w r ould start back with 
 surprise and indignation at the gross materialism mortised on to his work : 
 the more so because during the whole period, in which the identification 
 of man with the brute in kind was the fashion of naturalists, Blumeubach 
 
144 THE LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 but that many animals possess a share of understanding, per 
 fectly distinguishable from mere instinct, we all allow. Few 
 persons have a favorite dog without making instances of its in 
 telligence an occasional topic of conversation. They call for our 
 admiration of the individual animal, and not with exclusive 
 reference to the wisdom in nature, as in the case of the aiooj T], 
 or maternal instinct of beasts ; or of the hexangular cells of the 
 bees, and the wonderful coincidence of this form with the geo 
 metrical demonstration of the largest possible number of rooms 
 in a given space. Likewise, we distinguish various degrees of 
 understanding there, and even discover from inductions supplied 
 by the zoologists, that the understanding appears, as a general 
 rule, in an inverse proportion to the instinct. We hear little or 
 nothing of the instincts of the "half-reasoning elephant," and as 
 little of the understanding of caterpillars and butterflies.^ But 
 reason is w r holly denied, equally to the highest as to the lowest of 
 the brutes ; otherwise it must be wholly attributed to them, and 
 with it therefore self-consciousness, and personality, or moral being. 
 I should have no objection to define reason with Jacobi,f and 
 with his friend Hemsterhuis, as an organ bearing the same rela 
 tion to spiritual objects, the universal, the eternal, and the 
 necessary, as the eye bears to material and contingent phenomena. 
 But then it must be added, that it is an organ identical with its 
 appropriate objects. Thus, God, the soul, eternal truth, &c., are 
 
 remained ardent and instant in controverting the opinion, and exposing its 
 fallacy and falsehood, both as a man of sense and as a naturalist. I may 
 truly say, that it was uppermost in his heart and foremost in his speech. 
 Therefore, and from no hostile feeling to Dr. Elliotson (whom I hear spoken 
 of with great regard and respect, and to whom I myself give credit for his 
 manly openness in the avowal of his opinions), I have felt the present ani 
 madversion a duty of justice as well as gratitude. April 8, 1817. 
 
 * Note, that though " reasoning" does not in our language, in the lax use 
 of words natural in conversation or popular writings, imply scientific con 
 clusion, yet the phrase "half-reasoning" is evidently used by Pope as a 
 poetic hyperbole. 
 
 f Von den Gottlichen Dingcn, Bcilage A. Jacobi, in this passage, speaks 
 of reason in man as being recipient rather than originant, and of this as the 
 true Platonic doctrine. The affirmation of identity rather than pre-con- 
 formity between the finite and infinite Reason, by Coleridge, in this 
 passage, is more than Jacobi is ready to affirm, as Coleridge evidently 
 neans to indicate by his criticism. A better statement of the doctrine may 
 be found in an extract from John Smith, I. p. 264, note. Am. Ed. 
 
ESSAY V. 145 
 
 the objects of reason ; but they are themselves reason. "We name 
 God the Supreme Reason ; and Milton says, 
 
 whence the soul 
 
 Reason receives, and reason is her being.* 
 
 Whatever is conscious self-knowledge is reason : and in this sense 
 it may be safely defined the organ of the supersensuous ; even as 
 the understanding wherever it does not possess or use the reason, 
 as its inward eye, may be defined the conception of the sensuous, 
 or the faculty by which we generalize and arrange the phenom 
 ena of perception ; that faculty, the functions of which contain 
 the rules and constitute the possibility of outward experience. 
 In short, the understanding supposes something that is under 
 stood. This may be merely its own acts or forms, that is, formal 
 logic ; but real objects, the materials of substantial knowledge, 
 must be furnished, I might safely say revealed, to it by organs of 
 sense. The understanding of the higher brutes has only organs 
 of outward sense, and consequently material objects only ; but 
 man s understanding has likewise an organ of inward sense, and 
 therefore the power of acquainting itself with invisible realities 
 or spiritual objects. This organ is his reason. 
 
 Again, the understanding and experience may existf without 
 reason. But reason can not exist without understanding ; nor 
 does it or can it manifest itself but in and through the under 
 standing,! which in our elder writers is often called discourse, or 
 the discursive faculty, as by Hooker, Lord Bacon, and Hobbes : 
 and an understanding enlightened by reason Shakspeare gives as 
 the contradistinguishing character of man, under the name dis 
 course of reason. In short, the human understanding possesses 
 two distinct organs, the outward sense, and the mind s eye, which 
 is reason : wherever we use that phrase, the mind s eye, in its 
 proper sense, and not as a mere synonyme of the memory or the 
 
 * P. L. v. 486. Ed. 
 
 f Of this no one would feel inclined to doubt, who had seen the poodle 
 dog, whom the celebrated BLUMENBACH, a name so dear to science, as a 
 physiologist and comparative anatomist, and not less dear as a man to all 
 Englishmen who have ever resided at Gottingen in the course of their edu 
 cation, trained up, not only to hatch the eggs of the hen with all the 
 mother s care and patience, but to attend the chickens afterwards, and find 
 the food for them. I .have myself known a Newfoundland dog, who watched 
 and guarded a family of young children with all the intelligence of a nurse, 
 during their walks. 
 
 VOL. II. G 
 
146 THE LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 fancy. In this way we reconcile the promise of revelatior that 
 the blessed will see God, with the declaration of St. John, No 
 man Jiath seen God at any time.* 
 
 I will add one other illustration to prevent any misconception, 
 . as if I were dividing the human soul into different essences, or 
 ideal persons. In this piece of steel I acknowledge the properties 
 of hardness, brittleness, high polish, and the capability of form 
 ing a mirror. I find all these likewise in the plate glass of a 
 friend s carriage ; but in addition to all these I find the quality 
 of transparency, or the power of transmitting, as well as of re 
 flecting, the rays of light. The application is obvious. 
 
 If the reader therefore will take the trouble of bearing in 
 mind these and the following explanations, he will have removed 
 beforehand every possible difficulty from The Friend s political 
 section. For there is another use of the word, reason, arising out 
 of the former indeed, but less definite, and more exposed to mis 
 conception. In this latter use it means the understanding con 
 sidered as using the reason, so far as by the organ of reason only 
 we possess the ideas of the necessary and the universal ; and this 
 is the more common use of the word, when it is applied with any 
 attempt at clear and distinct conceptions. In this narrower and 
 derivative sense the best definition of reason, which I can give, 
 will be found in the third member of the following sentence, in 
 which the understanding is described in its three-fold operation, 
 and from each receives an appropriate name. The sense, vis 
 sensitiva vel intuitiva perceives : vis regulatrix the under 
 standing, in its own peculiar operation conceives : vis ration- 
 alis the reason or rationalized understanding comprehends. 
 The first is impressed through the organs of sense ; the second 
 combines these multifarious impressions into individual notions, 
 and by reducing these notions to rules, according to the analogy 
 of all its former notices, constitutes experience : the third -subor 
 dinates both of them, the notions, namely, and the rules of ex 
 perience, to absolute principles or necessary laws : and thus con 
 cerning objects, which our experience has proved to have real 
 existence, it demonstrates, moreover, in what wa^they are possi 
 ble, and in doing this constitutes science. Reason therefore, in 
 this secondary sense, and used, not as a spiritual organ, but as a 
 
 * 1 Ep. iv. 12. Ed. 
 
ESSAY V. 147 
 
 faculty, namely, the understanding or soul enlightened by that 
 organ, reason, I say, or the^ scientific faculty, is the intellection 
 of the possibility or essential properties of things by means of the 
 laws that constitute them. Thus the rational idea of a circle is 
 that of a figure constituted by the circumvolution of a straight 
 line with its one end fixed. 
 
 Every man must feel, that though he may not be exerting 
 different faculties, he is exerting his faculties in a different way, 
 when in one instance he begins^ with some one self-evident 
 truth, that the radii of a circle, for instance, are all equal, 
 and in consequence of this being true sees at once, without any 
 actual experience, that some other thing must be true likewise, 
 and that, this being true, some third thing must be equally true, 
 and so on till he comes, w r e will say, to the properties of the lever, 
 considered as the spoke of a circle ; which is capable of having 
 all its marvellous powers demonstrated even to a savage who had 
 never seen a lever, and without supposing any other previous 
 knowledge in his mind, but this one, that there is a conceivable 
 figure, all possible lines from the middle to the circumference of 
 which are of the same length : or when, in another instance, he 
 brings together the facts- of experience, each of which has its own 
 separate value, neither increased nor diminished by the truth of 
 any other fact which may have preceded it ; and making these 
 several facts bear upon some particular project, and finding some 
 in favor of it, and some against it, determines for or against the 
 project, according as one or the other class of facts preponderate : 
 as, for example, whether it would be better to plant a particular 
 spot of ground with larch, or with Scotch fir, or with oak in 
 preference to either. Surely every man will acknowledge, that 
 his mind was very differently employed in the first case from 
 what it was in the second ; and all men have agreed to call the 
 results of the first class the truths of science, such as not only are 
 true, but which it is impossible to conceive otherwise : while the 
 results of the second class are called facts, or things of experi 
 ence : and as to these latter we must often content ourselves with 
 the greater probability, that they are so or so, rather than other 
 wise nay, even when we have no doubt that they are so in the 
 particular case, we never presume to assert that they must con 
 tinue so always, and under all circumstances. On the contrary, 
 our conclusions depend altogether on contingent circumstances. 
 
148 THE LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 Now when the mind is employed, as in the case first mentioned, 
 I call it reasoning, or the use of the pure reason ; but, in the 
 second case, the understanding or prudence. 
 
 This reason applied to the motives of our conduct, and com 
 bined with the sense of our moral responsibility, is the conditional 
 cause of conscience, which is a spiritual sense or testifying state 
 of the coincidence or discordance of the free will with the reason. 
 But as the reasoning consists wholly in a man s power of seeing, 
 whether any two conceptions ^which happen to be in his mind, 
 are, or are not in contradiction to each other, it follows of neces 
 sity, not only that all men have reason, but that every man has 
 it in the same degree. For reasoning, or reason, in this its sec 
 ondary sense, does not consist in the conceptions themselves or in 
 their clearness, but simply, when they are in the mind, in seeing 
 whether they contradict each other or no. 
 
 And again, as in the determinations of conscience the only 
 knowledge required is that of my own intention whether in do 
 ing such a thing, instead of leaving it undone, I did what I should 
 think right if any other person had done it ; it folio AVS that in the 
 mere question of guilt or innocence, all men have not only reason 
 equally, but likewise all the materials on, which the reason, con 
 sidered as conscience, is to work. But when we pass out of our 
 selves, and speak, not exclusively of the agent as meaning well 
 or ill, but of the action in its consequences, then of course experi 
 ence is required, judgment in making use of it, and all those other 
 qualities of the mind which are so differently dispensed to differ 
 ent persons, both by nature and education. And though the rea 
 son itself is the same in all men, yet the means of exercising it, 
 and the materials, that is, the facts and conceptions on which 
 it is exercised, being possessed in very different degrees by differ 
 ent persons, the practical result is, of course, equally different 
 and the whole ground-work of Rousseau s philosophy ends in a 
 mere nothingism. Even in that branch of knowledge, where the 
 conceptions, on the congruity of which with each other, the rea 
 son is to decide, are all possessed alike by all men, namely in 
 geometry ; for all men in their senses possess all the component 
 images, namely simple curves and straight lines ; yet the power 
 of attention required for the perception of linked truths, even of 
 such truths, is so very different in A and in B, that Sir Isaac 
 Newton professed that it was in this power only that .he was 
 
ESSAY V. 149 
 
 superior to ordinary men. In short, the sophism is as gross as 
 if I should say, the souls of all men have the faculty of sight in 
 an equal degree forgetting to add, that this faculty can not be 
 exercised without eyes, and that some men are blind and others 
 short-sighted, and should then take advantage of this my omis 
 sion to conclude against the use or necessity of spectacles, and 
 microscopes, or of choosing the sharpest-sighted men for our 
 guides. 
 
 Having exposed this gross sophism, I must warn against an 
 opposite error namely, that if reason, as distinguished from pru 
 dence, consists merely in knowing that black can not be white 
 or when a man has a clear conception of an inclosed figure, and 
 another equally clear conception of a straight line, his reason 
 teaches him that these two conceptions are incompatible in the 
 same object, that is, that two straight lines can not include a 
 space the reason must therefore be a very insignificant fac 
 ulty. For a moment s steady self-reflection wiD show us, that 
 in the simple determination black is not white - -or, that two 
 straight lines can not include a space all the powers are im 
 plied, that distinguish man from animals ; first, the power of 
 reflection 2d, of comparison 3d, and therefore of suspension of 
 the mind 4th, therefore of a controlling will, and the power of 
 acting from notions, instead of mere images exciting appetites ; 
 from motives, and not from mere dark instincts. Was it an in 
 significant thing to weigh the planets, to determine all their 
 courses, and prophesy every possible relation of" the heavens a 
 thousand years hence ? Yet all this mighty chain of science is 
 nothing but a linking together of truths of the same kind, as, the 
 whole is greater than its part ; or, if A and B = C, then A = B : 
 or 3 + 4 = 7, therefore 7 -f 5 = 12, and so forth. X is to be 
 found either in A or B, or C or D : it is not found in A, B, or ; 
 therefore it is to be found in D. What can be simpler ? Apply 
 this to a brute animal. A dog misses his master where four 
 roads meet ; he has come up one, smells to two of the others, 
 and then with his head aloft darts forward to the fourth road 
 without any examination. If this were done by a conclusion, 
 the dog would have reason ; how comes it then, that he never 
 shows it in his ordinary habits ? Why does this story excite 
 either wonder or incredulity ? If the story be a fact, and not a 
 fiction, I should say the breeze brought his master s scent down 
 
150 THE LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 the fourth road to the dog s nose, and that therefore he did not 
 put it down to the road, as in the two former instances. So aw 
 ful and almost miraculous does the simple act of concluding, that 
 take three from four, there remains one, appear to us, when at 
 tributed to one of the most sagacious of all brute animals. 
 
THE FRIEND, 
 
 SECTION THE FIRST. 
 ON THE PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 Hoc potissimum pacto felicem ac magnum regem se fore judicans, non si 
 tpiam plurimis sed si quam optimis impcret. Proinde parum e sse putat justis 
 praesidiis regnum suum muniisse, nisi idem viris eruditione juxta ac vitce in- 
 legritate precceUentibus ditct clique honestet. Nimirum intelligit hccc demum 
 esse. tera regni decora, has vcras oj)e-s. 
 
 ERASMUS : EPIST. AD EPISC. PARIS. 
 
THE FRIEND. 
 
 ESSAY I. 
 
 Dum politici scepiuscule hominibus magis insidiantur qu am consu lunt, po 
 tius callidi quam sapientes ; thcoretici e contrario se rern divinam facere et 
 sapientice culmen attingere credunt, quando humanam naturam, quce nullibi 
 est, multis modis laudare, et earn, quce re vera est, dictis lacessere norunt, 
 Undefactum cst, ut nunquam polilicam conceperint quce possit ad usum re- 
 vocari ; sed quce in Utopia vel in illo poetarum aureo sccculo, ubi scilicet 
 minime necesse erat, institui potuisset. At mild plane pcrsuadco, experien- 
 tiam omnia civitatum genera, quce concipi possunt ut homines concorditer 
 vivant, et simul media, quibus multitudo dirigi, seu quibus intra certos lim- 
 ites contineri debeat, ostcndisse : ita ut non credam, nos posse aliquid, quod 
 ab expericntia sive praxi non abhorrcat, cogitatione de hac re assequi, quod 
 nondum expertum compertumque sit. 
 
 Cum igitur animum ad politicam applicuerim, nihil quod novum vel in- 
 auditum est ; sed tantum ea quce cum praxi optime conveniuiit, certa et in- 
 dubitata ratione dcmonstrare aut ex ipsa humance natures conditions dcducere, 
 intendi. Et ut ea quce ad hanc scientiam spectant, eadem animi libertate, 
 qua res matJiematicas solemus, inquirerem, sedulo curavi humanas actiones 
 non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari ; sedinteliigerc. Nee ad imperil se~ 
 curitatcm refert quo animo homines inducantur ad res recte administrandas, 
 modo res recte administrentur. Animi enim libertas, seu fortitude, privata, 
 virtus est ; at imperil virtus securitas. SPINOSA Op. Post. p. 267. 
 
 While the mere practical statesman too often rather plots against man 
 kind, than consults their interest, crafty, not wise ; the mere theorists, on 
 the other hand, imagine that they are employed in a glorious work, and 
 believe themselves at the very summit of earthly wisdom, when they are 
 able, in set and varied language, to extol that human nature, which ex 
 ists nowhere, except indeed in their own fancy, and to accuse and vilify 
 our nature as it really is. Hence it has happened, that these men have 
 never conceited a practicable scheme of civil policy, but, at best, such 
 forms of government only, as might have been instituted in Utopia, or 
 during the golden age of the poets : that is to say, forms of government 
 excellently adapted for those who need no government at all. But I am 
 
154 THE FRIEND. 
 
 fully persuaded, that experience has already brought to light all conceiv 
 able sorts of political institutions under which human society can be 
 maintained in concord, and likewise the chief means of directing the mul 
 titude, or retaining them within given boundaries : so that I can hardly 
 believe, that on this subject the deepest research would arrive at any re 
 sult, not abhorrent from experience and practice, which has not been al 
 ready tried and proved. 
 
 When, therefore, I applied my thoughts to the study of political philos 
 ophy, I proposed to myself nothing original or strange as the fruits of 
 my reflections ; but simply to demonstrate from plain and undoubted 
 principles, or to deduce from the very condition and necessities of human 
 nature, those plans and maxims which square the best with practice. And 
 that in all things which relate to this province, I might conduct my inves 
 tigations with the same freedom of intellect with which we proceed in 
 questions of pure science, I sedulously disciplined my mind neither to laugh 
 at, nor bewail, nor detest, the actions of men ; but to understand them. 
 For to the safety of the state it is not of necessary importance what mo 
 tives induce men to administer public affairs rightly, provided only that 
 public affairs be rightly administered.* For moral strength, or freedom 
 from the selfish passions, is the virtue of individuals ; but security is the 
 virtue of a state. 
 
 ON THE PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 ALL the different philosophical systems of political justice, all 
 the theories on the rightful origin of government, are reducible 
 in the end to three classes, correspondent to the three different 
 points of view, in which the human being itself may be con 
 templated. The first denies all truth and distinct meaning to 
 the words, right and duty ; and affirming that the human mind 
 consists of nothing but the manifold modifications of passive sen 
 sation, considers men as the highest sort of animals indeed, but 
 at the same time the most wretched ; inasmuch as their defence 
 less nature forces them into society : while such is the multipli 
 city of wants engendered by the social state, that the wishes of 
 one are sure to be in contradiction to those of some other. The 
 assertors of this system consequently ascribe the origin and con 
 tinuance of government to fear, or the power of the stronger, 
 aided by the force of custom. This is the system of Hobbes. 
 Its statement is its confutation. It is, indeed, in the literal sense 
 
 * I regret, that I should have given, by thus selecting it *for my motto, 
 an implied consent to this very plausible, but false and dangerous position. 
 1830. 
 
ESSAY I. 155 
 
 of the word, preposterous ; for fear pre-supposes conquest, and 
 conquest a previous union and agreement between the conquerors. 
 A vast empire may perhaps be governed by fear ; at least the 
 supposition is not absolutely inconceivable, under circumstances 
 which prevent the consciousness of a common strength. A mil 
 lion of men united by mutual confidence and free intercourse of 
 thoughts form one power, and this is as much a real thing as a 
 steam-engine ; l$it a million of insulated individuals is only an 
 abstraction of the mind, and but one told so many times over 
 without addition, as an idiot would tell the clock at noon one, 
 one, one. But when, in the first instances, the descendants of 
 one family joined together to attack those of another family, it 
 is impossible that their chief or leader should have appeared to 
 them stronger than all the rest together ; they must therefore 
 have chosen him, and this as for particular purposes, so doubt 
 less under particular conditions, expressed or understood. Such 
 we know to be the case with the North American tribes at pres 
 ent ; such, we are informed by history, was the case with our 
 own remote ancestors. Therefore, even on the system of those 
 who, in contempt of the oldest and most authentic records, con 
 sider the savage as the first and natural state of man, government 
 must have originated in choice and an agreement. The appa 
 rent exceptions in Africa and Asia are, if possible, still more 
 subversive of this system : for they will be found to have origi 
 nated in religious imposture, and the first chiefs to have secured 
 a willing and enthusiastic obedience to themselves as delegates 
 of the Deity. 
 
 But the whole theory is baseless. We are told by history, we 
 learn from our experience, we know from our own hearts, that 
 fear, of itself, is utterly incapable of producing any regular, con-, 
 tinuous, and calculable effect, even on an individual ; and that 
 the fear, which does act systematically upon the mind, always 
 pre-supposes a sense of duty, as its cause. The most cowardly 
 of the European nations, the Neapolitans and Sicilians, those 
 among whom the fear of death exercises the most tyrannous in 
 fluence relatively to their own persons, are the very men who 
 least fear to take away the life of a fellow-citizen by poison or as 
 sassination ; while in Great Britain, a tyrant, who has abused 
 the power, which a vast property has given him, to oppress a 
 whole neighborhood, can walk in safety unarmed and unattended, 
 
15G THE FRIEim 
 
 amid a hundred men, each of whom feels his heart burn with 
 rage and indignation at the sight of him. It was this man who 
 broke my father s heart ; or, it is through him that my children 
 are clad in rags, and cry for the food which I am no longer able 
 to provide for them. And yet they dare not touch a hair of his 
 head ! Whence does this arise ? Is it from a cowardice of sen 
 sibility that makes the injured man shudder at the thought of 
 shedding blood ? Or from a cowardice of selfishness which 
 makes him afraid of hazarding his own life ?* Neither the one 
 nor the other ! The field of Waterloo, as the most recent of a 
 hundred equal proofs, has borne witness that, 
 
 bring a Briton frae his hill, 
 
 ****** 
 
 Say, such is royal George s will, 
 
 An there s the foe, 
 He has nae thought but how to kill 
 
 Twa at a blow. 
 
 Nae cauld, faint-hearted doubtings tease him ; 
 Death comes, wi fearless eye he sees him ; 
 ~Wi bluidy hand, a welcome gies him ; 
 
 And when he fa s, 
 His latest draught o breathin leaves him . 
 
 In faint huzzas.* 
 
 Whence then arises the difference of feeling in the former case ? 
 To what does the oppressor owe his safety ? To the spirit-quell 
 ing thought ; the laws of God and of my country have made 
 his life sacred ! I dare not touch a hair of his head ! Tis con 
 science that makes cowards of us all, but oh ! it is conscience 
 too which makes heroes of us all. 
 
 * Bums. Ed, 
 
ESSAY II. 
 
 Le plus fort n est jamais assez fort pour &tre toujours le maitre, tfil ne 
 transforme sa force en droit et I obeissance en devoir. RousgEAU. 
 
 Viribus parantur provincice, jure retinentur. Igitur breve id gaudium, 
 quippe Germani victi magis, quam domiti. FLORUS, iv. 12.* 
 
 The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he 
 transforms his power into right, and obedience into duty. 
 
 Provinces are taken by force, but they j|re kept by right. This exulta 
 tion therefore was of brief continuance, inasmuch as the Germans had been 
 overcome, but not subdued. 
 
 A TRULY great man,f the best and greatest public character 
 that I had ever the opportunity of making myself acquainted 
 with, on assuming the command of a man of war, found a mu 
 tinous crew, more than one half of them uneducated Irishmen, 
 and of the remainder no small portion had become sailors by 
 compromise of punishment. What terror could effect by severity 
 and frequency of acts of discipline, had been already effected. 
 And what was this effect ? Something like that of a polar win 
 ter on a flask of brandy. The furious spirit concentered rfself 
 with tenfold strength at the heart ; open violence was changed 
 into secret plots and conspiracies ; and the consequent orderliness 
 of the crew, as far as they were orderly, was but the brooding of 
 a tempest. The new commander instantly commenced a system 
 of discipline as near as possible to that of ordinary law ; as 
 much as possible, he avoided, in his own person, the appearance 
 of any will or arbitrary power to vary, or to remit, punishment. 
 The rules to be observed were affixed to a conspicuous part of the 
 ship, with the particular penalties for the breach of each particu 
 lar rule ; and care was taken that every individual of the ship 
 should know and understand this code. With a single exception 
 in the case of mutinous behavior, a space of twenty-four hours 
 * Slightly altered. JE& f Sir Alexander Ball. Ed. 
 
158 THE FRIEND. 
 
 was appointed between the first charge and the second hearing 
 of the cause, at which time the accused person was permitted 
 and required to bring forward whatever he thought conducive to 
 his defence or palliation. If, as was commonly the case for the 
 officers well knew that the commander would seriously resent in 
 them all caprice of will, and by no means permit to others what 
 he denied to himself, no answer could be returned to the three 
 questions Did you not commit the act ? Did you not know that 
 it was in contempt of such a rule, and in defiance of such a pun 
 ishment ? And was it not wholly in your own power to have 
 obeyed the one and avoided the other ? the sentence was then 
 passed with the greatest solemnity, and another, but shorter, 
 space of time was again, interposed between it and its actual ex 
 ecution. During this space the feelings of the commander, as a 
 man, were so well blended with his inflexibility, as the organ of 
 the law ; and how much* he suffered previously to and during 
 the execution of the sentence was so well known to the crew, 
 that it became a common saying with them when a sailor was 
 about to be punished, the captain takes it more to heart than the 
 fellow himself. But whenever the commander perceived any 
 trait of pride in the offender, or the germs of any noble feeling, 
 he lost no opportunity of saying, "It is not the pain that you are 
 about to suffer which grieves me ! You are none of you, I trust, 
 such cowards as to turn faint-hearted at the thought of that ! but 
 that, being a man, and one who is to fight for his king and coun 
 try, you should have made it necessary to treat you as a vicious 
 beast, it is this that grieves me." 
 
 I have been assured, both by a gentleman who was a lieuten 
 ant on board that ship at the time when the heroism of its cap 
 tain, aided by his characteristic calmness and foresight, greatly 
 influenced the decision of the most glorious battle recorded in the 
 annals of our naval history ; and very recently by a gray-headed 
 sailor, who did not even know my name, or could have suspected 
 that I was previously acquainted with the circumstances I have 
 been assured, I say, that the success of this plan was such as as 
 tonished the oldest officers, and convinced the most incredulous. 
 Ruffians, who, like the old Buccaneers, had been used to inflict 
 torture on themselves for sport, or in order to harden themselves 
 beforehand, were tamed and overpowered, how or why they 
 themselves knew not. From the fiercest spirits were heard the 
 
ESSAY II. 159 
 
 most earnest entreaties for the forgiveness of their commander : 
 not before the punishment, for it was too well known that then 
 they would have been to no purpose, but days after it, when the 
 bodily pain was remembered but as a dream. An invisible power 
 it was, that quelled them, a power, which was therefore irresisti 
 ble, because it took away the very will of resisting. It was the 
 awful power of law, acting on natures pre-configured to its influ 
 ences. A faculty was appealed to in the offender s own being : a 
 faculty and a presence, of which he had not been previously 
 made aware, but it answered to the appeal ; its real existence 
 therefore could not be doubted, or its reply rendered inaudible ; 
 and the very struggle of the wilder passions to keep uppermost 
 counteracted their own purpose, by wasting in internal contest 
 that energy which before had acted in its entireness on external 
 resistance or provocation. Strength may be met with strength ; 
 the power of inflicting pain may be baffled by the pride of endur 
 ance ; the eye of rage may be answered by the stare of defiance, 
 or the downcast look of dark and revengeful resolve ; and with 
 all this there is an outward and determined object to which the 
 mind can attach its passions and purposes, and bury its own dis 
 quietudes in the full occupation of the senses. But who dares 
 struggle with an invisible combatant, with an enemy which 
 exists and makes us know its existence but where it is, we ask 
 in vain ? No space contains it time promises no control over 
 it it has no ear for my threats it has no substance, that my 
 hands can grasp, or my weapons find vulnerable it commands 
 and can not be commanded it acts and is insusceptible of my 
 reaction the more I strive to subdue it, the more am I compel 
 led to think of it and the more I think of it, the more do I find 
 it to possess a reality out of myself, and not to be a phantom of 
 my own imagination ; that all, but the most abandoned men, 
 acknowledge its authority, and that the whole strength and ma 
 jesty of my country are pledged to support it ; and yet that for 
 me its power is the same with that of my own permanent self, 
 and that all the choice, which is permitted to me, consists in 
 having it for my guardian angel or my avenging fiend ! This is 
 the spirit of law ! the lute of Amphion, the harp of Orpheus ! 
 This is the true necessity, which compels man into the social 
 state, now and always, by a still-beginning, never-ceasing, force 
 of moral cohesion. 
 
160 THE FRIEND. 
 
 Thus is man to be governed, and thus only can he be gov 
 erned. For from his creation the objects of his senses were to 
 become his subjects, and the task allotted to him was to subdue 
 the visible world within the sphere of action circumscribed by 
 those senses, as far as they could act in concert. What the eye 
 beholds, the hand strives to. reach ; what it reaches, it conquers, 
 and makes ^he instrument of further conquest. We can be sub 
 dued by that alone which is analogous in kind to that by which 
 we subdue : therefore by the invisible powers of our nature, 
 whose immediate presence i% disclosed to our "iifner sense, and 
 only as the symbols and languag^ of vwiich all shapes and modi 
 fications of matter become formidable to us. 
 
 A machine continues to move by the force which first set it in 
 motion. If only the smallest number in any state, properly so 
 called, hold together through the influence of any fear that does 
 not itself pre-suppose the sense of duty, it is evident that the 
 state itself could not have commenced through animal fear. We 
 hear, indeed, of conquests ; but how does history represent these ? 
 Almost without exception as the substitution of one set of gover 
 nors for another : and so far is the conqueror from relying on fear 
 alone to secure the obedience of the conquered, that his first step 
 is to demand an oath of fealty from them, by which he would 
 impose upon them the belief, that they become subjects ; for who 
 would think of administering an oath to a gang of slaves ? But 
 what can make the difference between slave and subject, if not 
 the existence of an implied contract in the one case, and not in 
 the other ? And to what purpose would a contract serve, if, 
 however it might be entered into through fear, it were deemed 
 binding only in consequence of fear ? To repeat my former illus- 
 tration-^-where fear alone is relied on, as in a slave ship, the 
 chains that bind the poor victims must be material chains : for 
 these only can act upon feelings which have their source wholly 
 in the material organization. Hobbes has said, that laws with 
 out the sword are but bits of parchment. How far this is true, 
 every honest man s heart will best tell him, if he will content 
 himself with asking his own heart, and not falsify the answer by 
 his notions concerning the hearts of other men. But were it 
 r true, still the fair answer would be Well ! but without the laws 
 * the sword is but a piece of iron. The wretched tyrant, who dis 
 graces the present age and human nature itself, had exhausted 
 
ESSAY II. * 161 
 
 the whole magazine of animal terror, in order to consolidate his 
 truly Satanic government. But look at the new French cate 
 chism, and in it read the misgivings of his mind, as to the suf 
 ficiency of terror alone ! The system, which I have been confut 
 ing, is indeed so inconsistent with the facts revealed to us by our 
 own mind, and so utterly unsupported by any facts of history, 
 that I should be censurable in wasting my own time and my 
 reader s patience by the exposure of its falsehood, but that the 
 arguments adduced have a value of themselves independently of 
 their present application. Else it would have been an ample 
 and satisfactory reply to an assertor of this bestial theory Gov 
 ernment is a thing which relates to men, and what you say 
 applies only to beasts. 
 
 Before I proceed to the second of these systems, let me remove 
 a possible misunderstanding that may have arisen from the use 
 of the word contract : as if I had asserted, that the whole duty 
 of obedience to governors is derived from, and dependent on, the 
 fact of an original contract. I freely admit, that to make thiiT 
 the cause and origin of political obligation, is not only a danger 
 ous but an absurd theory ; for what could give moral force to the 
 contract ? The same sense of duty which binds us to keep it, 
 must have pre-existed as impelling us to make it. For what 
 man in his senses would regard the faithful observation of a 
 contract entered into to plunder a neighbor s house, but as a tre 
 ble crime ? First the act, which is a crime of itself ; secondly, 
 the entering into a contract which it is a crime to observe, and 
 yet a weakening of one of the main pillars of human confidence 
 not to observe, and thus voluntarily placing ourselves under the 
 necessity of choosing between two evils ; and thirdly, the crime 
 of choosing the greater of the two evils, by the unlawful observ 
 ance of an unlawful promise. But in my sense, the word con- 
 /tract is merely synonymous with the sense of duty acting in a 
 I specific direction, that is, determining our moral relations, as 
 members of a body politic. If I have referred to a supposed ori 
 gin of government, it has been in courtesy to a common notion : 
 for I myself regard the supposition as no more than a means of 
 simplifying to our apprehension the ever-continuing causes pj^so- 
 cial union, even as the conversation of the world may be repre 
 sented as an act of continued creation. For, what if an original 
 contract had really been entered into, and formally recorded ? 
 
162 THE FKIEND. 
 
 Still it could do no more than bind the contracting parties to act 
 for the general good in the best manner, that the existing rela 
 tions among themselves (state of property, religion, and so forth), 
 on the one hand, and the external circumstances on the other 
 (ambitious or barbarous neighbors, and the like), required or per 
 mitted. In after-times it could be appealed to only for the 
 general principle, and no more, than the ideal contract, could it 
 affect a question of ways and means. As each particular age 
 brings with it its own exigencies, so must it rely on its own 
 prudence for the specific measures by which they are to be en 
 countered. 
 
 Nevertheless, it assuredly can not be denied, that an original, 
 more accurately, an ever-originating, contract is a very natu 
 ral and significant mode of expressing the reciprocal duties of 
 subject and sovereign. We need only consider the utility of a 
 real and formal state contract, the Bill of Rights for instance, 
 as a sort of est demonstratum in politics ; and the contempt 
 lavished on this notion, though sufficiently compatible with the 
 tenets of a Hume, will seem strange to us in the writings of a 
 Protestant clergyman,* who surely owed some respect to a mode 
 of thinking which God himself had authorized by his own exam 
 ple, in the establishment of the Jewish constitution. In this in 
 stance there was no necessity for deducing the will of God from 
 the tendency of the laws to the general happiness : his will was 
 expressly declared. Nevertheless, it seemed good to the divine 
 wisdom, that there should be a covenant, an original contract, 
 between himself as sovereign, and the Hebrew nation as subjects. 
 This I admit was a written and formal contract ; but the rela 
 tions of mankind, as members of a body spiritual, or religious 
 commonwealth, to the Saviour, as its head or regent ; is not 
 this, too, styled a covenant, though it would be absurd to ask for 
 the material instrument that contained it, or the time when it 
 was signed or voted by the members of the church collectively.! 
 
 * See Paley s Moral and Political Philosophy. B. vi. c. 3. Ed. 
 
 f It is perhaps to be regretted, that the words, Old and New Testament, 
 they having lost the sense intended by the translators of the Bible, 
 have not been changed into the Old and New Covenant. We can not too 
 carefully keep in sight a notion, which appeared to the Primitive Church 
 the fittest and most scriptxiral mode of representing the sum of the contents 
 of the sacred writings. 
 
ESSAY III. 163 
 
 With this explanation, the assertion of an original or a per 
 petual contract is rescued from all rational objection ; and how 
 ever speciously it may be urged, that history can scarcely pro 
 duce a single example of a state dating its primary establishment 
 from a free and mutual covenant, the answer is ready : if there 
 be any difference between a government and a band of robbers, 
 an act of consent must be supposed on the part of the people 
 governed. 
 
 ESSAY III. 
 
 Human institutions can not be wholly constructed on principles of sci 
 ence, which is proper to immutable objects. In the government of the vis 
 ible world the Supreme Wisdom itself submits to be the author of the bet 
 ter ; not of the best, but of the best possible in the subsisting relations. 
 Much more must all human legislators give way to many evils rather than 
 encourage the discontent that would lead to worse remedies. If it is not in 
 the power of man to construct even the arch of a bridge that shall exactly 
 correspond in its strength to the calculations of geometry, how much less 
 can human science construct a constitution except by rendering itself flexi 
 ble to experience and expediency : where so many things must fall out ac 
 cidentally, and come not into any compliance with the preconceived ends : 
 but men are forced tolgwnply subsequently, and to strike in with things as 
 they fall out, by afterilpplications of them to their purposes, or by framing 
 their purposes to them. SOUTH. 
 
 THE second system corresponds to the second point of view 
 under which the human being may be considered, namely, as an 
 "animal gifted with understanding, or the faculty of suiting meas 
 ures to circumstances. According to this theory, every institu 
 tion of national origin needs no other justification than a proof, 
 that under the particular circumstances it is expedient. Having 
 in my former essays expressed myself, so at least I am conscious 
 I shall have appeared to do to many persons ; with comparative 
 slight of the understanding considered as the sole guide of human 
 conduct, and even with something like contempt and reprobation 
 of the maxims of expedience, when represented as the only steady 
 light of the conscience, and the absolute foundation of all moral 
 ity ; I shall perhaps gfeem guilty of an inconsistency, in declaring 
 myself an adherent of this second system, a zealous advocate for 
 
164 THE FRIEND. 
 
 deriving the various forms and modes of government from human 
 prudence, and of deeming that to be just which experience has 
 proved to be expedient. From this charge of inconsistency* I 
 shall best exculpate myself by the full statement of the third sys 
 tem, and by the exposition of its grounds and consequences. 
 
 * Distinct notions do not suppose different things. When I make a three 
 fold distinction in human nature, I am fully aware, that it is a distinction, 
 not a division, and that in every act of mind the man unites the properties 
 of sense, understanding, and reason. Nevertheless it is of great practical 
 importance, that these distinctions should be made and understood, the ig 
 norance or perversion of them being alike injurious ; as the first French 
 constitution has most lamentably proved It was the fashion in the profli 
 gate times of Charles II. to laugh at the Presbyterians, for distinguishing 
 between the person and the king ; while in fact they were ridiculing the 
 most venerable maxims of English law ; the king never dies the king can 
 do no wrong, and subverting the principles of genuine loyalty, in order to 
 prepare the minds of the people for despotism. 
 
 Under the term "sense," I comprise whatever is passive in our being, 
 without any reference to the question of materialism or immaterialism ; 
 all that man is in common with animals, in kind at least his sensations, 
 and impressions, whether of his outward senses, or the inner sense of im 
 agination. This, in the language of the schools, was called the vis receptiva, 
 or recipient property of the soul, from the original constitution of which 
 we perceive and imagine all things under the forms of space and time. By 
 the " understanding," I mean the faculty of thinking and forming judgments 
 on the notices furnished by the sense, according to certain rules existing in 
 itself, which rules constitute its distinct nature. iQf the pure " reason," I 
 mean the power by which we become possessed of principles, the eternal 
 verities of Plato and Descartes, and of ideas, not images as the ideas of a 
 point, a line, a circle, in mathematics ;* and of justice, holiness, free-will, 
 and the like, in morals. Hence in works of pure science the definitions of 
 necessity precede the reasoning, in other works they more aptly form the 
 conclusion. 
 
 To many of my readers it will, I trust, be some recommendation of these 
 distinctions, that they are more than once expressed, and everywhere sup 
 posed, in the writings of St. Paul. I have no hesitation in undertaking to 
 prove, that every heresy which has disquieted the Christian Church, from 
 Tritheism to Socinianism, has originated in and supported itself by argu 
 ments rendered plausible only by the confusion of these faculties, and thus 
 demanding for the objects of one, a sort of evidence appropriated to those 
 of another faculty. These disquisitions have the misfortune of being in ill- 
 report, as dry and unsatisfactory ; but I hope, in the course of the work, to 
 gain them a better character and if elucidations of their practical impor- 
 
 * In the severity of logic, the geometrical point, line, surface, circle, and 
 so forth, are theorems, not ideas. 
 
ESSAY III. 165 
 
 The third and last system, then, denies all rightful origin to 
 government, except as far as it is derivable from principles con 
 tained in the reason of man, and judges all the relations of man 
 in society by the laws of moral necessity, according to ideas. I 
 here use the word in its highest and primitive sense, and as nearly 
 synonymous with the modern word ideal, according to arche 
 typal ideas co-essential with the reason, the consciousness of these 
 ideas being indeed the sign and necessary product of the full 
 development of the reason. The following then is the funda 
 mental principle of this theory : Nothing is to be deemed rightful 
 in civil society, or to be tolerated as such, but what is capable of 
 being demonstrated out of the original laws of the pure reason. 
 Of course, as there is but one system of geometry, so according to 
 this theory there can be but one constitution and one system of 
 legislation, and this consists in the freedom, which is the common 
 right of all men, under the control of that moral necessity, which 
 is the common duty of all men. Whatever is not everywhere 
 necessary, is nowhere right. On this assumption the whole 
 theory is built. To state it nakedly is to confute it satisfactorily. 
 So at least it should seem. But in how winning arid specious a 
 manner this system may be represented even to minds of the 
 loftiest order, if undisciplined and unhumbled by practical experi 
 ence, has been proved by the general impassioned admiration and 
 momentous effects of Rousseau s Du Contrat Social, and the 
 writings of the French economists, or, as they more appropriately 
 entitled themselves, physiocratic philosophers : and in how tempt 
 ing and dangerous a manner it may be represented to the popu 
 lace, has been made too evident in our own country by the tem 
 porary effects of Paine s Rights of Man. Relatively, however, to 
 this latter work it should be observed, that it is not a legitimate 
 offspring of any one theory, but a confusion of the immortality of 
 the first system with the misapplied universal principles of the 
 
 tance from the most momentous events of history, can render them interest 
 ing, to give them that interest at least. Besides, there is surely some good 
 in the knowledge of truth, as truth we were not made to live by bread 
 alone and in the strengthening of the intellect. It is an excellent remark 
 of Scaliger s Harum indagatio subtilitatum, etsi non eat utilis ad machinas 
 farinarias conftciendas, exuit animwn tamen inscitifc rubigine, acuitque ad 
 alia. Exerc. 5307. 3. The investigation of these subtleties, though of no 
 use to the construction of machines for grinding corn, yet clears the mind 
 from the rust of ignorance, and sharpens it or other things. 
 
166 THE FRIEND. 
 
 last : and in this union, or rather lawless alternation, consists the 
 essence of Jacobinism, as far as Jacobinism is any thing but a 
 term of abuse, or has any meaning of its own distinct from 
 democracy and sedition. 
 
 A constitution equally suited to China and America, or to 
 Russia and Great Britain, must surely be equally unfit for both, 
 and deserve as little respect in political, as a quack s panacea in 
 medical, practice. Yet there are three weighty motives for a dis 
 tinct exposition of this theory,* and of the ground on which its 
 pretensions are bottomed : and I dare affirm, that for the same 
 reasons there are few subjects which in the present state of the 
 world have a fairer claim to the attention of every serious English 
 man, who is likely, directly or indirectly, as partisan or as oppo 
 nent, to interest himself in schemes of reform. 
 
 The first motive is derived from the propensity of mankind to 
 mistake the abhorrence occasioned by the unhappy effects or ac 
 companiments of a particular system for an insight into the false 
 hood of its principles. And it is the latter only, a clear insight, 
 not any vehement emotion, that can secure its permanent rejec 
 tion. For by a wise ordinance of natu*e our feelings have no 
 abiding-place in our memory ; nay, the more vivid they are in 
 the moment of their existence, the more dim and difficult to be 
 remembered do they make the thoughts which accompanied 
 them. Those of my readers, who at any time of their life have 
 been in the habit of reading novels, may easily convince them 
 selves of this truth, by comparing their recollections of those 
 stories which most excited their curiosity, and even painfully 
 affected their feelings, with their recollections of the calm and 
 meditative pathos of Shakspeare and Milton. Hence it is that 
 human experience, like the stern lights of a ship at sea, illumines 
 only the path which we have passed over. The horrors of the 
 Peasants War in Germany, and the direful effects of the Ana 
 baptist tenets, which were only nominally different from those of 
 
 * As metaphysics are the science which determines what can, and what 
 can not, be known of being and the laws of being, a priori, that is, from 
 those necessities of the mind or forms of thinking, which, though first re 
 vealed to us by experience, must yet have pre-existed in order to make ex 
 perience itself possible, even as the eye must exist previously to any par 
 ticular act of seeing, though by sight only can we know that we have eyes 
 BO might the philosophy of Rousseau and his followers not inaptly be en 
 titled, metapolitics, and the doctors of this school metapoliticians 
 
ESSAY III. 167 
 
 Jacobinism by the substitution of religious for philosophical jar 
 gon, struck all Europe for a time with affright . Yet little more 
 than a century was sufficient to obliterate all effective memory 
 of those events : the same principles budded forth anew, and pro 
 duced the same fruits from the imprisonment of Charles I. to the 
 restoration of his son. In the succeeding generations, to the 
 follies and vices of the European courts, and to the oppressive 
 privileges of the nobility, were again transferred those feelings of 
 disgust and hatred, which for a brief while the multitude had 
 attached to the crimes and extravagances of political and reli 
 gious fanaticism : and the same principles, aided by circumstances 
 and dressed out in the ostentatious garb of a fashionable philoso 
 phy, once more rose triumphant, and effected the French revolu 
 tion. That man has reflected little on human nature who does 
 not perceive that the detestable maxims and correspondent crimes 
 of the existing French despotism, have already dimmed the 
 recollections of the democratic phrenzy in the minds of men ; by 
 little and little, have drawn off to other objects the electric force 
 of the feelings, which had massed and upholden those recollec 
 tions ; and that a favorable concurrence of occasions is alone 
 wanting to awaken the thunder and precipitate the lightning 
 from the opposite quarter of the political heaven. The true 
 origin of human events is so little susceptible of that kind of evi 
 dence which can compel our belief even against our will ; and so 
 many are the disturbing forces which modify the motion given by 
 the first projection; and every age has, or imagines it has, its 
 own circumstances which render past experience no longer ap 
 plicable to the present case ; that there will never be wanting 
 answers and explanations, and specious flatteries of hope. I well 
 remember, that when the examples of former Jacobins, Julius 
 Caesar, Cromwell, &c. were adduced in France and England at 
 the commencement of the French Consulate, it was ridiculed as 
 pedantry and pedants ignorance, to fear a repetition of such 
 usurpation at the close of the enlightened eighteenth century. 
 Those who possess the Moniteurs of that date will find set proofs, 
 that such results were little less than impossible, and that it was 
 an insult to so philosophical an age, and so enlightened a nation, 
 to dare direct the public eye towards them as lights of admoni 
 tion and warning. 
 
 It is a common weakness with official statesmen, and with 
 
168 THE FKIEND. 
 
 those who deem themselves honored by their acquaintance, to at 
 tribute great national events to the influence of particular per 
 sons, to the errors of one man and to the intrigues of another, to 
 any possible spark of a particular occasion, rather than to the 
 true cause, the predominant state of public opinion. I have 
 known men who, with most significant nods, and the civil con 
 tempt of pitying half-smiles, have declared the natural explana 
 tion of the French revolution, to be the mere fancies of garreteers, 
 and then, with the solemnity of cabinet ministers, have pro 
 ceeded to explain the whole by anecdotes. It is so stimulant to 
 the pride of a vulgar mind, Hb be persuaded that it knows what 
 few others know, and that it is the important depository of a sort 
 af state secret, by communicating which it confers an obligation 
 on others ! But I have likewise met with men of intelligence, 
 who at the commencement of the revolution were travelling on 
 foot through the French provinces, and they bear witness, that in 
 the remotest villages every tongue was employed in echoing and 
 enforcing the doctrines of the Parisian journalists ; that the public 
 highways were crowded with enthusiasts, some shouting the 
 watchwords of the revolution, others disputing on the most ab 
 stract principles of the universal constitution, which they fully 
 believed, that all the nations of the earth were shortly to adopt ; 
 the most ignorant among them confident of his fitness for the 
 highest duties of a legislator ; and all prepared to shed their 
 blood in the defence of the inalienable sovereignty of the self-gov 
 erned people. The more abstract the notions were, with the closer 
 affinity did they combine with the most fervent feelings, and all 
 the immediate impulses to action. The Lord Chancellor Bacon 
 lived in an age of court intrigues, and was familiarly acquainted 
 with all the secrets of personal influence. He, if any man, was 
 qualified to take the gauge and measurement of their comparative 
 power ; and he has told us, that there is one, and but one infalli 
 ble source of political prophecy, the knowledge of the predomi 
 nant opinions and the speculative principles of men in general, 
 between the age of twenty and thirty. Sir Philip Sidney, the 
 favorite of Glueen Elizabeth, the paramount gentleman of Europe, 
 the nephew, and as far as a good man could be the confidant 
 of the intriguing and dark-minded Earl of Leicester, was so 
 leeply convinced that the principles diffused through the majority 
 Df a nation are the true oracles from whence statesmen are to 
 
ESSAY III. 
 
 learn wisdom, and that when the people speak loudly it is from 
 their being strongly possessed either by the godhead or the daemon, 
 that in the revolution of the Netherlands he considered the uni 
 versal adoption of one set of principles, as a proof of the divine 
 presence. If Her Majesty, says he, were the fountain, I would 
 ii>ar, considering what I daily find, that we should wax dry. 
 But she is but a means which God useth. But if my readers 
 wish to see the question of the efficacy of principles and popular 
 opinions for evil and for good proved and illustrated with an elo 
 quence worthy of the subject, I can refer them with the hardiest 
 anticipation of their thanks to the late work concerning the rela 
 tions of Great Britain, Spain, and Portugal, by my honored friend, 
 William Wordsworth, quern quoties lego, non verba mihi videor 
 audire, sed tonitrua.* 
 
 * I consider this reference to, and strong* recommendation of, the work 
 above mentioned, not as a voluntary tribute of admiration, but as an act of 
 mere justice both to myself and to the readers of The Friend. My own 
 heart bears me witness, that I am actuated by the deepest sense of the 
 truth of the principles, which it has been and still more will be my endeavor 
 to enforce, and of their paramount importance to the well-being of society 
 at the present juncture : and that the duty of making the attempt, and the 
 hope of not wholly failing in it, are, far more than the wish for the doubt 
 ful good of Literary reputation, or any yet meaner object, my great and 
 ruling motives. Mr. Wordsworth I deem a fellow-laborer in the same vine 
 yard, actuated by the same motives and teaching the same principles, but 
 with far greater powers of mind, and an eloquence more adequate to the 
 importance and majesty of the cause. I am strengthened too by the knowl 
 edge, that I am not unauthorized by the sympathy of many wise and good 
 men, and men acknowledged as such by the public, in my admiration of his 
 pamphlet. Neque cnitn debct operibus ejus obesse, quod vivit. An si inter 
 eos, quos numquam vidimus, floruisset, non solum libros ejus, verum etiam 
 imagines conquircremus, ejusdem mine honor prcesentis, ct gratia quasi 
 satietate languescet ? At hoc pravum, malignumquc est, non admirari 
 homincm admiratione dignissimum, quia videre, alloqtd, audire, complecti, 
 ncc laudare tantum, vcrum etiam amare, conlingit. PLIX. Epis. Lib. I. 1C. 
 
 It is hardly possible for a man of ingenuous mind to act under the fear 
 that he shall be suspected by honest men of the vileness of praising a work 
 to the public, merely because he happens to be personally acquainted with 
 the author. That this is so commonly done in reviews, furnishes only an 
 additional proof of the morbid hardness produced in the moral sense by the 
 habit of writing anonymous criticisms, especially under the further disguise 
 of a pretended board or association of critics, each man expressing himself, 
 to use the words of Andrew Marvel, as a synodical individuum. With re 
 gard, however, to the probability of being warped by partiality, I can only 
 
 VOL. II. H 
 
170 THE FRIEND. 
 
 That erroneous political notions they having become general 
 and a part of the popular creed have practical consequences, 
 and these, of course, of a most fearful nature, is a truth as cer 
 tain as historic evidence can make it : and that when the feel 
 ings excited by these calamities have passed away, and the 
 interest in them has been displaced by more recent events, the 
 . same errors are likely to be started afresh, pregnant with the 
 same calamities, is an evil rooted in human nature in the pres 
 ent state of general information, for which" we have hitherto 
 found no adequate remedy. It may, perhaps, in the scheme of 
 Providence, be proper and conducive to its ends, that no adequate 
 remedy should exist : for the folly of men is the wisdom of God. 
 But if there be any means, if not of preventing, yet of palliating, 
 the disease, and, in the more favored nations, of checking its 
 progress at the first symptoms ; and if these means are to be at 
 all compatible with the civil and intellectual freedom of mankind ; 
 they are to be found only in an intelligible and thorough exposure 
 of the error, and, through that discovery, of the source, from 
 which it derives its speciousness and powers of influence on the 
 human mind. This therefore is my first motive for undertaking 
 the disquisition. 
 
 The second is, that though the French code of revolutionary 
 principles is now generally rejected as a system, yet everywhere 
 in the speeches and writings of the English reformers, nay, not 
 seldom in those of their opponents, I find certain maxims asserted 
 
 say that I judge of all works indifferently by certain fixed rules previously 
 formed in my mind with all the power and vigilance of my judgment ; and 
 that I should certainly of the two apply them with greater rigor to the 
 production of a friend than to that of a person indifferent to me. But 
 wherever I find in any work all the conditions of excellence in its kind, it is 
 not the accident of the author s being my contemporary or even my friend, 
 or the sneers of bad-hearted men, that shall prevent me from speaking of 
 it, as in my inmost convictions I deem it deserves. 
 
 no, friend ! 
 
 Though it be now the fashion to commend, 
 As men of strong minds, those alone who can 
 Censure with judgment, no such piece of man 
 Makes up my spirit : where desert does lire, 
 There will I plant my wonder, and there give 
 My best endeavors to build up his glory, 
 That truly merits ! 
 
 Recommendatory Verses to one of the old plays. 
 
ESSAY IV. 171 
 
 or appealed to, which are not tenable, except as constituent 
 parts of that system. Many of the most specious arguments in 
 proof of the imperfection and injustice of the present constitution 
 of our legislature will be found, on closer examination, to pre 
 suppose the truth of certain principles, from which the adducers 
 of these arguments loudly profess their dissent. But in political 
 changes no permanence can be hoped for in the edifice, without 
 consistency in the foundation. 
 
 The third motive is, that by detecting the true source of the 
 influence of these principles, we shall at the same time discover 
 their natural place and object ; and that in themselves they are 
 not only truths, but most important and sublime truths ; and thaf 
 their falsehood and their danger consist altogether in their mis-" 
 application. Thus the dignity of human nature will be secured, 
 and at the same time a lesson of humility taught to each indi 
 vidual, when we are made to see that the universal necessary 
 laws, and pure ideas of reason, were given us, not for the -pur 
 pose of flattering our pride, and enabling us to become national 
 legislators ; but that, by an energy of continued self-conquest, we 
 might estabhsh a free and yet absolute government in our own 
 spirits. 
 
 ESSAY IV. 
 
 Albeit therefore, muoh of that we are to speak in this present cause, may 
 seem to a number perhaps tedious, perhaps obscure, dark, and intricate 
 (for many talk of the truth, which never sounded the depth from whence it 
 springeth : and therefore, when they are led thereunto, they are soon 
 weary, as men drawn from those beaten paths, wherewith they have been 
 inured) ; yet this may not so far prevail, as to cut off that which the mat 
 ter itself requireth, howsoever the nice humor of some be therewith pleased 
 or no. They unto whom we shall seem tedious, are in no wise injured by 
 us, because it is in their own hands to spare that labor which they are not 
 willing to endure. And if any complain of obscurity, they must consider, 
 that in these matters it cometh no otherwise to pass, than in sundry the 
 works both of art, and also of nature, where that which hath greatest force 
 in the very things we see, is, notwithstanding, itself oftentimes not seen. 
 The stateliness of houses, the goodliness of trees, when we behold them, de- 
 lighteth the eye : but that foundation which beareth up the one, that root 
 which ministereth unto the other nourishment and life, is in the bosom of 
 
172 THE FRIEND. 
 
 the earth concealed ; and if there be at any time occasion to search into it, 
 such labor is then more necessary than pleasant, both to them which un 
 dertake it and for the lookers-on. In like manner, the use and benefit of 
 good laws, all that live under them, may. enjoy with delight and comfort, 
 albeit the grounds and first original causes from whence they have sprung, 
 be unknown, as to the greatest part of men they are. But when they who 
 withdraw their obedience, pretend that the laws which they should obey 
 are corrupt and vicious ; for better examination of their quality, it behoov- 
 eth the very foundation and root, the highest well-spring and fountain of 
 them to be discovered. Which, because we are not oftentimes accustomed 
 to do, when we do it, the pains we take are more needful a great deal than 
 acceptable, and the matters which we handle, seem by reason of newness 
 (till the mind grow better acquainted with them), dark, intricate, and un 
 familiar. For as much help whereof, as may be in this case, I have en 
 deavored throughout the body of this whole discourse, that every former 
 part might give strength unto all that follow, and every latter bring some 
 light unto all before : so that if the judgments of men do but hold them 
 selves in suspense, as touching these first more general meditations, till in 
 order they have perused the rest that eusuc ; what may seem dark at the. 
 first, will afterwards be found more plain, even as the latter particular de 
 cisions will appear, I doubt not, more strong when the other have been 
 read before. HOOKER.* 
 
 ON THE GROUNDS OF GOVERNMENT AS LAID EXCLUSIVELY IN THE 
 PURE REASON \ OR A STATEMENT AND CRITIQUE OF THE THIRD 
 SYSTEM OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY,-; THE THEORY OF ROUSSEAU 
 AND THE FRENCH ECONOMISTS. 
 
 I PROCEED to my promise of developing from its embryo prin 
 ciples the tree of French liberty, of which the declaration of the 
 rights of man, and the constitution of 1791 \vere the leaves, and 
 the succeeding and present state of France the fruits. Let me 
 not he blamed, if, in the interposed essays, introductory to this 
 section, I have connected this system, though only in imagination, 
 though only as a possible case, with a name so deservedly rever 
 enced as that of Luther. It is some excuse, that to interweave 
 with the reader s recollections a certain life and dramatic inter 
 est, during the perusal of the abstract! reasonings that are to fol- 
 
 * Eccl. Pol. B. I c. 1, 2. Ed. 
 
 \ I have been charged in The Friend with a novel and perplexing use of 
 the word abstract, both as verb and noun. RTovel it certainly is not ; it be 
 ing authorized by Lord Bacon, Des Cartes, and others. The fact is this : I 
 take the word in its proper meaning, as abstr a/io, I draw from. The im 
 age, by which I represent to myself an oak-tree, is no fac simile or ade- 
 
ESSAY IV. 173 
 
 low, is the only means I possess of bribing his attention. "We 
 have, most of us, at some period or other of our lives, been 
 amused with dialogues of the dead. Who is there, that wishing 
 to form a probable opinion on the grounds of hope and fear for 
 an injured people warring against, mighty armies, would not be 
 pleased with a spirited fiction, which brought before him an old 
 Numantian discoursing on that subject in Elysium, with a new 
 ly-arrived spirit from the streets of Saragoza or the walls of 
 Gerona ? 
 
 But I have a better reason. I wished to give every fair ad 
 vantage to the opinions, which I deemed it of importance to 
 confute. It is bad policy to represent a political system as hav 
 ing no charm but for robbers and assassins, and no natural origin 
 -but in the brains of fools or madmen, when experience has proved, 
 that the great danger of the system consists in the peculiar fas 
 cination it is calculated to exert on noble and imaginative spirits ; 
 on all those who, in the amiable intoxication of youthful benevo 
 lence, are apt to mistake their own best virtues and choicest 
 powers for the average qualities and attributes of the human 
 character. The very minds, which a good man would most wish 
 to preserve or disentangle from the snare, are by these angry 
 misrepresentations rather lured into it. Is it wonderful that a 
 man should reject the arguments unheard, when his own heart 
 proves the falsehood of the assumptions by which they are pref 
 aced ; or that lie should retaliate on the aggressors their own 
 evil thoughts ? I am well aware, that the provocation was great, 
 the temptation almost inevitable ; yet still I can not repel the 
 conviction from my mind, that in part to this error, and in part 
 to a certain inconsistency in his own fundamental principles, we 
 are to attribute the small number of converts made by Burke 
 
 quatc icon of the tree, but is abstracted from it by my eye. Now this 
 appears to me a more natural as well as more grammatical and philosophi 
 cal use of the word, than that elliptic construction, by which an accusative 
 noun, and the preposition following it are to be understood, namely, I 
 draw (my attention from) the, <tc. Thus : I give the outline of a flower 
 on a slate with a slate pencil. Now, I would say, I abstract the shape 
 from the flower, or of the flower. But the objector would express the 
 same thing by saying, I abstract the color, (fee. (that is, my attention from 
 the color, (tc.) 
 
 Perhaps the latter might be better in familiar writing ; but I continue 
 to prefer the former on subjects that require precision. 1830. 
 
174: THE FRIEND. 
 
 during his life-time. Let me not "be misunderstood. I do not 
 mean, that this great man supported different principles at dif 
 ferent seras of his political life. On the contrary, no man was 
 ever more like himself. From his first published speech on the 
 American colonies to his last posthumous tracts, we see the same 
 man, the same doctrines, the same uniform wisdom of practical 
 counsels, the same reasoning and the same prejudices against all 
 abstract grounds, against all deduction of practice from theory. 
 The inconsistency to which I allude, is of a different kind ^it is 
 the want of congruity in the principles appealed to in different 
 parts of the same work ; it is an apparent versatility of the prin 
 ciple with the occasion. If his opponents are theorists, then 
 every thing is to be founded on prudence, on mere calculations of 
 expediency ; and every man is represented as acting according 
 to the state of his own immediate self-interest. Are his oppo 
 nents calculators ? Then calculation itself is represented as a 
 sort of crime. God has given us feelings, and we are to obey 
 them ; and the most absurd prejudices become venerable, to 
 which these feelings have given consecration. I have not for 
 gotten, that Burke himself defended these half-contradictions, on 
 the pretext of balancing the too much on the one side by a too 
 much on the other. But never can I believe but that the straight 
 line must needs be the nearest ; and that where there is the most, 
 and the most unalloyed truth, there will be the greatest and most 
 permanent power of persuasion. But the fact was, that Burke 
 in his public character found himself, as it were, in a Noah s ark, 
 with a very few men, and a great many beasts. He felt how 
 much his immediate power was lessened by the very circumstance 
 of his measureless superiority to those about him : he acted, 
 therefore, under a perpetual system of compromise a compro 
 mise of greatness with meanness ; a compromise of comprehension 
 with narrowness ; a compromise of the philosopher, who, arm 
 ed with the twofold knowledge of history and the laws of spirit, 
 looked, as with a telescope, far around and into the remote dis 
 tance, with the mere men of business, or with yet coarser intel 
 lects, who handled a truth, which they were required to receive, 
 as they would handle an ox, which they were desired to purchase. 
 But why need I repeat what has been already said in so happy 
 a manner by Goldsmith of this great man : 
 
ESSAY IV. 175 
 
 "Who too deep for his hearers, still went on refining, 
 And thought of convincing, while they thought of dining.* 
 
 And if iii consequence it was his fate to " cut blocks with a razor," 
 I may be permitted to add, that in respect of truth, though not 
 of genius, the weapon was injured by the misapplication. 
 
 For myself, however, I act and will continue to act under the 
 belief, that the whole truth is the best antidote to falsehoods, 
 which are dangerous chiefly because they are half-truths : and 
 that an erroneous system is best confuted, not by an abuse of 
 theory in general, nor by an absurd opposition of theory to prac 
 tice, but by a detection of the errors in the particular theory. 
 For the meanest of men has his theory, and to think at all is to 
 theorize. With these convictions I proceed immediately to the 
 system of the economists, and to the principles on which it is con 
 structed, and from which it must derive all its strength. 
 
 The system- commences with an undeniable truth, and an im 
 portant deduction therefrom equally undeniable. All voluntary 
 actions, say they, having f6^ their objects, good or evil, are moral 
 actions. But all morality is grounded in the reason. Every man 
 is bora with the faculty of reason : and whatever is without it, be 
 the shape w"hat it may, is not a man or person, but a thing. 
 Hence the sacred principle, recognized by all laws, human and 
 divine, the principle indeed, which is the ground- work of all law 
 and justice, that a person can never become a thing, nor be 
 treated as such without wrong. But the distinction between 
 person and thing consists herein, that the latter may rightfully be 
 used, altogether and merely, as a mean ; but the former must 
 always be included in the end, and form a part of the final 
 cause. We plant the tree and we cut it down, we 1 breed the 
 sheep and we kill it, wholly as means to our own ends. The 
 wood-cutter and the hind are likewise employed as means, but on 
 an agreement of reciprocal advantage, which includes them as 
 well as their employer in the end. Again : as the faculty of 
 reason implies free-agency, morality, that is, the dictate of rea 
 son, gives to every rational being the right of acting as a free 
 agent, and of finally determining his conduct by his own will, 
 according to his own conscience : and this right is inalienable 
 except by guilt, which is an act of self-forfeiture, and the consc- 
 
 * Retaliation. -JSii 
 
176 THE FKIEND. 
 
 quences therefore to be considered as the criminal s own mora] 
 . election. In respect of their reason* all men are equal. The 
 measure of the understanding and of all other faculties of man, 
 is different in different persons : but reason is not susceptible of 
 degree. For since it merely decides whether any given thought 
 or action is or is not in contradiction with the rest, there can be 
 no reason better, or more reason, than another. 
 
 Reason ! best and holiest gift of God and bond of union with 
 the giver ; the high title by which the majesty of man claims 
 precedence above all other living creatures ; mysterious faculty, 
 the mother of conscience, of language, of tears, and of smiles ; 
 calm and incorruptible legislator of the soul, without whom all 
 its other powers would meet in mere oppugnancy ; sole prin 
 ciple of permanence amid endless change, in a world of discord 
 ant appetites and imagined self-interests the one only common 
 measure, which taken away, 
 
 Force should be right ; or, rather right and wrong, 
 
 Between whose endless jar justly resides, ; 
 
 Should lose their names, and so should justice, too. 
 
 Then every thing includes itself in power, 
 
 Power into will, will into appetite ; * 
 
 And appetite a universal wolf, 
 
 So doubly seconded with will and power, 
 
 Must make perforce a universal prey ! 
 
 Thrice blessed faculty of reason ! all other gifts, though goodly 
 and of celestial origin, health, strength, talents, all the powers 
 and all the means of enjoyment, seem dispensed by chance or sul 
 len caprice ; thou alone, more than even the sunshine, more 
 than the common air, art given to all men, and to every man 
 alike. To thee, who being one art the same in all, we owe the 
 privilege, that of all we can become one, a living whole, that 
 we have a country. Who then shall dare prescribe a law of 
 moral action for any rational being, which does not flow imme 
 diately from that reason, which is the fountain of all morality ? 
 Or how without breach of conscience can we limit or coerce the 
 powers of a free agent, except by coincidence with that law in 
 his own mind, which is at once the cause, the condition, and the 
 
 * This position has been already explained, and the sophistry grounded 
 on it detected and exposed, in Essay V. of the First Landing-Pi ace. II. pp, 
 143-150. 
 
ESSAY IV. 17.7 
 
 measure of his free agency ? Man must be free ; or to what 
 purpose was lie made a spirit of reason, and not a machine of 
 instinct ? Man must obey ; or wherefore has he a conscience ft 
 The powers, which create this difficulty, contain its solution 
 likewise : for their service is perfect freedom. And whatever 
 law or system of law compels any other service, disennobles our 
 nature, leagues itself with the animal against the god-like, kills 
 in us the very principle of joyous well-doing, and fights against 
 humanity. 
 
 By the application of these principles to the social state there 
 arises the following system, which, as far as its first grounds are 
 concerned, is developed the most fully by J. J. Rousseau in his 
 work Du Contrat Social. If then no individual possesses the 
 right of prescribing any thing to another individual, the rle of 
 which is not contained in their common reason, society, which is 
 but an aggregate of individuals, can communicate this right to 
 no one. It can not possibly make that rightful which the higher 
 and inviolable law of human nature declares contradictory and 
 unjust. But concerning right and wrong, the reason of each and 
 every man is the competent judge : for how else could he be an 
 amenable being, or the proper subject of any law ? This reason, 
 therefore, in any one man, can not even in the social state be 
 rightfully subjugated to the reason of any other. Neither an in 
 dividual, nor yet the whole multitude which constitutes the state, 
 can possess the right of compelling him to do any thing, of which 
 it can not be demonstrated that his own reason must join in pre 
 scribing it. If therefore society is to be under a rightful consti- / 
 tution of government, and one that can impose on rational beings 
 a true and moral obligation to obey it, it must be framed on such 
 principles that every individual follows his own reason while he 
 obeys the laws of the constitution, and performs the will of the 
 state while he follows the dictates of his own reason. This is 
 expressly asserted by Rousseau, who states the problem of a per 
 fect constitution of government in the following words : trouver 
 line forme d 1 association -par laquelle cliacun s unissant atous, 
 ti obeisse pourtant qy} d lui memc, ct reste aussi libre qi<? aupa- 
 ravant, that is, to find a form of society according to which 
 each one uniting himself with the whole shall yet obey himself 
 only and remain as free as before. This right of the individual* 
 to retain his whole natural independence, even in the social state, 
 
 H* 
 
178 THE FRIEND. 
 
 is absolutely inalienable. He can not possibly concede or compro 
 mise it : for this very right is one of his most sacred duties. He 
 would sin against himself, and commit high treason against the 
 reason which the Almighty Creator has given him, if he dared 
 abandon its exclusive right to govern his actions. 
 
 Laws obligatory on the conscience, can only therefore proceed 
 from that reason which remains always one and the same, 
 whether it speaks through this or that person : like the voice of 
 an external ventriloquist, it is indifferent from whose lips it ap 
 pears to come, if only it be audible. The individuals indeed are 
 subject to errors and passions, and each man has his own defects. 
 But when men are assembled in person or by real representatives, 
 the actions and reactions of individual self-love balance each 
 othe ; errors are neutralized by opposite errors ; and the winds 
 rushing from all quarters at once with equal force, produce for 
 the time a deep calm, during which the general will arising from 
 the general reason displays itself. It is fittest, says Burke him 
 self,* that sovereign authority should be exercised where it is 
 most likely to be attended with the most effectual correctives. 
 These correctives are furnished by the nature and course of par 
 liamentary proceedings, and by the infinitely diversified charac 
 ters which compose the two Houses. The fulness, the freedom, 
 and publicity of discussion, leave it easy to distinguish what are 
 acts of power, and what the determinations of equity and reason. 
 There prejudice corrects prejudice, and the different asperities of 
 party zeal mitigate and neutralize each other. 
 
 This, however, as my readers will have already detected, is 
 no longer a demonstrable deduction from reason. It is a mere 
 probability, against which other probabilities may be weighed : 
 ;is the lust of authority, the contagious nature of enthusiasm, and 
 other of the acute or chronic diseases of deliberative assemblies. 
 But which of these results is the more probable, the correction or 
 Hie contagion of evil, must depend on circumstances and grounds 
 of expediency : and thus we already find ourselves beyond the 
 magic circle of the pure reason, and within the sphere of the un 
 derstanding and the prudence. Of this important fact Rousseau 
 was by no means unaware in his theory, though with gross in 
 consistency he takes no notice of it in his application of the the- 
 
 * Note oil his motion relative to the Speech from the Throne, vol. ii. p, 
 647, 4to Edit. 
 
ESSAY IV. 179 
 
 ory to practice. He admits the possibility, he is compelled by 
 history to allow even the- probability, that the most numerous 
 popular assemblies, nay even whole nations, may at times be 
 hurried away by the same passions, and under the dominion of a 
 common error. -This will of all is then of no more value, than 
 the humors of any one individual : and must therefore be sacred 
 ly distinguished from the pure will which flows from universal 
 reason. To this point then I entreat the reader s particular at 
 tention : for in this distinction, established by Rousseau himself, 
 between the volonte de tous and the volonte generale, that is, 
 between the collective will, and a casual overbalance of wills 
 the falsehood or nothingness of the whole system becomes mani 
 fest. For hence it follows, as an inevitable consequence, that all 
 which is said in the Contmt Social of that sovereign will, to 1 
 which the right of universal legislation appertains, applies to no r 
 one human being, to no society or assemblage of human beings, \ 
 and least of all to the mixed multitude that makes up the peo 
 ple : but entirely and exclusively to reason itself, which, it is 
 true, dwells in every rnan potentially, but actually arid in per 
 fect purity is found in no man and in no body of men. This dis 
 tinction the latter disciples of Rousseau chose completely to for 
 get, and, a far more melancholy case the constituent legisla 
 tors of France forgot it likewise. "With a wretched parrotry they 
 wrote and harangued without ceasing of the rolonte generale 
 the inalienable sovereignty of the people : and by these high- 
 sounding phrases led on the vain, ignorant, and intoxicated pop 
 ulace to wild excesses and wilder expectations, which entailing 
 on them the bitterness of disappointment cleared the way for 
 military despotism, for the Satanic government of horror under 
 the Jacobins, and of terror under the Corsican. 
 
 Luther lived long enough to see the consequences of the doc 
 trines into which indignant pity and abstract principles of right 
 had hurried him to see, to retract and to oppose them. If the 
 same had been the lot of Rousseau, I doubt not, that his conduct 
 would have been the same. In his whole system there is beyond 
 controversy much that is true and well reasoned, if only its ap 
 plication be not extended farther than the nature of the case per 
 mits. But then we shall find that little or nothing is won by it 
 for the institutions of society ; and least of all for the constitution 
 of governments, the theory of which it was his wish to ground 
 
180 THE FRIEND. 
 
 on it. Apply his principles to any case, in which the sacred and 
 inviolable laws of morality are immediately interested, all be 
 comes just and pertinent. No power on earth can oblige me to 
 act against my conscience. No magistrate, no monarch, no legis 
 lature, can without tyranny compel me to do any thing which the 
 acknowledged laws of God have forbidden me to do. So act that 
 thou rnayest be able, without involving any contradiction, to will 
 that the maxim of thy conduct should be the law of all intelli 
 gent beings is the one universal and sufficient principle and 
 guide of morality.^ And why ? Because the object of morality 
 is not the outward act, but the internal maxim of our actions. 
 And so far it is infallible. But with what show of reason can 
 we pretend, from a principle by which we are to determine the 
 purity of our motives, to deduce the form and matter of a right 
 ful government, the main office of which is to regulate the out 
 ward actions of particular bodies of men, according to their par 
 ticular circumstances ? Can we hope better of constitutions 
 framed by ourselves, than of that which was given by Almighty 
 Wisdom itself? The laws of the Hebrew commonwealth, which 
 flowed from the pure reason, remain and are immutable ; but the 
 regulations dictated by prudence, though by the divine prudence, 
 and though given in thunder from the mount, have passed away ; 
 arid while they lasted, were binding only for that one state, the 
 particular circumstances of which rendered them expedient. 
 
 Rousseau indeed asserts, that there is an inalienable sovereignty 
 inherent in every human being possessed of reason : and from 
 this the framers of the constitution of 17&1 deduce, that the peo 
 ple itself is its own sole rightful legislator, and at most dare only 
 recede so far from its right as to delegate to chosen deputies the 
 power of representing and declaring the general will. But this 
 is wholly without proof ; for it has already been fully shown, that 
 according to the principle out of which this consequence is at 
 tempted to be drawn, it is not the actual man, but the abstract 
 reason alone, that is the sovereign and rightful lawgiver. The 
 confusion of , two things so different is so gross an error, that the 
 Constituent Assembly could scarcely proceed a step in their decla 
 ration of rights, without some glaring inconsistency. Children 
 are excluded from all political power ; are they not human 
 
 * Kant s Grundlegung zur Meiaphysifc dcr Kitten, pp. 46, 47. 
 18S8. Am. Ed. 
 
ESSAY IT. . 181 
 
 beings in whom the faculty of reason resides ? Yes ! but in 
 them the faculty is not yet adequately developed. But are not 
 gross ignorance, inveterate superstition, and the habitual tyranny 
 of passion and sensuality, equally preventives of the development, 
 equally impediments to the rightful exercise, of the reason, as 
 childhood and early youth? Who would not rely on the judg- 
 ment of a well-educated English lad, bred in a virtuous and en 
 lightened family, in preference to that of a brutal Russian, who 
 believes that he can scourge his wooden idol into good-humor, 
 or attributes to himself the merit of perpetual prayer, when he 
 has fastened the petitions, which his priest has written for him, 
 on the wings of a windmill ? Again : women are likewise ex 
 cluded a full half, and that assuredly the most innocent, the 
 most amiable half, of the whole human race, is excluded, and 
 this too by a constitution which boasts to have no other foun 
 dations but those of universal reason ! Is reason then an affair 
 of sex ? No ! But women are commonly in a state of depen 
 dence, and are not likely to exercise their reason with freedom. 
 "Well ! and does not this ground of exclusion apply with equal 
 or greater force to the poor, to the infirm, to men in embarrassed 
 circumstances, to all in short whose maintenance, be it scanty 
 or be it ample, depends on the will of others ? How far are we 
 to go ? Where must we stop ? What classes should we admit ? 
 Whom must we disfranchise ? The objects concerning whom 
 we are to determine these questions, are all human beings, and 
 differenced from each other by degrees only, these degrees, too, 
 oftentimes changing. Yet the principle on which the whole sys 
 tem rests is, that reason is not susceptible of degree. Nothing, 
 therefore, which subsists wholly in degrees, the changes of which 
 do not obey any necessary law, can be subjects of pure science, 
 or determiriable by mere reason. For these things we must rely 
 on our understandings, enlightened by past experience and im 
 mediate observation, and determining our choice by comparisons 
 of expediency. 
 
 It is therefore altogether a mistaken notion, that the theory 
 which would deduce the social rights of man, and the sole right 
 ful form of government from principles of reason, involves a ne 
 cessary preference of the democratic, or even the representative, 
 constitutions. Accordingly, several of the French economists, 
 although devotees of Rousseau and the physiocratic system, and 
 
182 THE FPTTEND. 
 
 assuredly not the least respectable of their party either in morals 
 or in intellect, and these, too, men who lived and wrote under 
 the limited monarchy of France, and who were therefore well 
 acquainted with the evils connected with that system, did yet 
 declare themselves for a pure monarchy in preference to the aris 
 tocratic, the popular, or the mixed form. These men argued, 
 that no other laws being allowable but those which are demon- 
 strably just, and founded in the simplest ideas of reason, and of 
 which every man s reason is the competent judge, it is indiffer 
 ent whether one man, or one or more assemblies of men, give 
 form and publicity to them. For being matters of pure and 
 simple science, they require no experience in order to see their 
 truth ; and among an enlightened people, by whom this system 
 had been once solemnly adopted, no sovereign would dare to make 
 other laws than those of reason. They further contend, that if 
 the people were not enlightened, a purely popular government 
 could not co-exist with this system of absolute justice : and if it 
 were adequately enlightened, the influence of public opinion would 
 supply the place of formal representation, while the form of the 
 government would be in harmony with the unity and simplicity 
 of its principles. This they entitle le despotisme legal sous I em 
 pire dc I evidence. The best statement of the theory thus modi 
 fied, may be found in Mercier dc la Riviere, Vordre naturel ct 
 essentiel dcs societes politiqucs. From the proofs adduced in 
 the preceding paragraph, to which many others might be added, 
 I have no hesitation in affirming" that this latter party are the 
 more consistent reasoners. 
 
 It is worthy of remark, that the influence of these writings 
 contributed greatly, not indeed to raise the present emperor, but 
 certainly to reconcile a numerous class of politicians to his un 
 limited authority : and as far as his lawless passion for war and 
 conquest allows him to govern according to any principles, he 
 favors those of the physiocratic philosophers. His early educa 
 tion must have given him a predilection for a theory conducted 
 throughout with mathematical precision ; its very simplicity 
 promised the readiest and most commodious machine for despot 
 ism, for it moulds a nation into as calculable a power as an army ; 
 while the stern and seeming greatness of the whole, and its mock 
 elevation above human feelings, flattered his pride, hardened his 
 conscience, and aided the efforts of self-delusion. Reason is the 
 
ESSAY IV. 183 
 
 sole sovereign, the only rightful legislator : but reason to act on 
 man must be impersonated. The Providence which had so mar-- 
 vellously raised and supported him, had marked him out for the 
 representative of reason, and had armed him with irresistible 
 force, in order to realize its laws. In him, therefore, might be 
 comes right, arid his cause and that of destiny (or, as he now 
 chooses to word it, exchanging blind nonsense for staring blas 
 phemy), his cause and the cause of God are one and the same. 
 Excellent postulate for a choleric and self-willed tyrant ! What 
 avails the impoverishment of a few thousand merchants and 
 manufacturers ? What even the general wretchedness of mil 
 lions of perishable men, for a short generation ? Should these 
 stand in the way of the chosen conqueror, the innovator mundi, 
 et stupor sceculorum, or prevent a constitution of things, which 
 erected on intellectual and perfect foundations groweth not old, 
 but like the eternal justice, of which it is the living image, 
 
 -may despise 
 
 The strokes of fate, aud see the world s last hoijr ? 
 
 For justice, austere, unrelenting justice, is everywhere holden 
 up as the one thing needful ; and the only duty of the citizen, in 
 fulfilling which he obeys all the laws, is not to encroach on 
 another s sphere of action. The greatest possible happiness of a 
 people is not, according to this system, the object of a governor ; 
 but to preserve the freedom of all, by coercing within the requi 
 site bounds the freedom of each. Whatever a government does 
 more than this, comes of evil : and its best employment is the re 
 peal of laws and regulations, not the establishment of them. 
 Each man is the best judge of his own happiness, and to himself 
 must it therefore be intrusted. Remove all the interferences of 
 positive statutes, all monopoly, all bounties, all prohibitions, and 
 all encouragements of importation and exportation, of particular 
 growth and particular manufactures : let the revenues of the 
 state be taken at once from the produce of soil ; and all things will 
 then find their level, all irregularities will correct each other, 
 and an indestructible cycle of harmonious motions take place in 
 the moral equally as in the natural world. The business of the 
 governor is to watch incessantly, that the state shall remain com 
 posed of individuals, acting as individuals, by which alone the 
 freedom of all can be secured. Its duty is to take care that itself 
 
184 THE FRIEND. 
 
 remain the sole collective power, and that all the citizens should 
 enjoy the same rights, and without distinction be subject to the 
 same duties. 
 
 Splendid promises ! Can any thing appear more equitable 
 than the last proposition, the equality of rights and duties ? Can 
 any thing be conceived more simple in the idea ? But the exe 
 cution ! Let the four or five quarto volumes of the Conscript 
 Code be the comment ! But as briefly as possible I shall prove, 
 that this system, as an exclusive total, is under any form imprac 
 ticable ; and that if it were realized, and as far as it were real 
 ized, it would necessarily lead to general barbarism and the most 
 grinding oppression ; and that the final result of a general at 
 tempt to introduce it, must be a military despotism inconsistent 
 with the peace and safety of mankind. That reason should be 
 our guide and governor is an undeniable truth, arid all our notion 
 of right and wrong is built thereon : for reason is one of the two 
 fountain-heads in which the whole moral nature of man origi 
 nated and subsists. From reason alone can we derive the prin 
 ciples which our understandings are to apply, the ideal to which 
 by means of our understandings we should endeavor to approxi 
 mate. This, however, gives no proof that reason alone ought to 
 govern and direct human beings, either as individuals or as states. 
 It ought not to do this, because it can not. The laws of reason 
 are unable to satisfy the first conditions of human society. We 
 will admit that the shortest code of the law is the laest, and that 
 the citizen finds himself most at ease where the government 
 least intermeddles with his affairs, and confines its efforts to the 
 preservation of public tranquillity ; we will suffer this to pass at 
 present undisputed, though the examples of England, and before 
 the late events, of Holland and Switzerland, surely the three 
 happiest nations of the world to which perhaps we might add 
 the major part of the former German free towns, furnish stubborn 
 facts in presumption of the contrary, yet still the proof is want 
 ing that the first and most general applications and exertions of 
 the power of man can be definitely regulated by reason unaided 
 by the positive and conventional laws in the formation of which 
 the understanding must be our guide, and which become just be 
 cause they happen to be expedient. 
 
 The chief object for which men first formed themselves into a 
 state was not the protection of their lives, but of their property 
 
ESSAY IV. 15 
 
 Where the nature of the soil and climate precludes all property 
 but personal, and permits that only in its simplest forms, as in 
 Greenland, men remain in the- domestic state and form neighbor 
 hoods, but riot governments. And in North America the chiefs 
 appear to exercise government in those tribes only which possess 
 individual landed property. Among the rest the chief is. their 
 general ; but government is exercised only in families by the fa 
 thers of families. But where individual landed property exists, 
 there must be inequality of property . the nature of the earth and 
 the nature of the mind unite to make the contrary impossible. 
 But to suppose the land the property of the state, and the labor 
 and the produce to be equally divided among all the members of 
 the state, involves . more than one contradiction : for it could not 
 subsist without gross injustice, except where the reason of all and 
 of each was absolute master of the selfish passions of sloth, envy, 
 and the like ; and yet the same state would preclude the greater 
 part of the means by which the reason of man is developed. In 
 whatever state of society you would place it, from the most sav 
 age to the most refined, it would be found equally unjust and im 
 possible ; and were there a race of men, a country, and a climate, 
 that permitted such an order of things, the same causes would 
 render all government superfluous. 
 
 To property, therefore, and to its inequalities all human laws 
 directly or indirectly relate, which would not be equally laws in 
 the state of nature. Now it is impossible to deduce the right of 
 property* from pure reason. The utmost which reason could 
 give would be a property in the forms of things, as far as the forms 
 were produced by individual power. In the matter it could give 
 no property. "We regard angels and glorified spirits as beings of 
 pure reason : and who ever thought of property in heaven ? Even 
 the simplest and most moral form of it, namely, marriage (we 
 know from the highest authority), is excluded from the state of 
 pure reason. Rousseau himself expressly admits that property 
 can not be deduced Irom the laws of reason and nature ; and he 
 ought therefore to have admitted at the same time that his whole 
 theory was a thing of air. In the most respectable point of view 
 
 * I moan, practically and with the inequalities inseparable from the ac 
 tual existence of property. Abstractedly, the right to property is deduci- 
 ble from the free-agency of man. If to act freely be a right, a sphere of 
 action must be so too. 
 
186 THE FRIEND. 
 
 he could regard his system as analogous to geometry. If indeed 
 it be purely scientific, how could it be otherwise? Geometry 
 " holds forth an ideal which can never be fully realized in nature, 
 even because it is nature ; because bodies are more than exten 
 sion, and to pure extension of space only the mathematical 
 theorems wholly correspond. In the same manner the moral 
 laws of the intellectual world, as far as they are deducible from 
 pure intellect-, are never perfectly applicable to our mixed and 
 sensitive nature, because man is something besides reason ; be 
 cause his reason never acts by itself, but must clothe itself in the 
 substance of individual understanding and specific inclination, in 
 order to become a reality and an object of consciousness and ex 
 perience. It will be seen hereafter that together with this, the 
 key-stone of the arch, the greater part and the most specious of 
 the popular arguments in favor of universal suffrage fall in and 
 are crushed. I will mention one only at present. Major Cart- 
 wright, in his deduction of the rights of the subject from prin 
 ciples " not susceptible of proof, being self-evident, if one of which 
 be violated all are shaken," affirms (Principle 98th ; though 
 the greater part indeed are moral aphorisms or blank assertions, 
 not scientific principles) " that a power which ought never to be 
 used ought never to exist." Again he affirms that " laws to bind 
 all must be assented to by all, and consequently every man, even 
 the poorest, has an equal right to suffrage ;" and this for an ad 
 ditional reason, because " all without exception are capable of 
 feeling happiness or misery, accordingly as they are well or ill 
 governed." But are they not then capable of feeling happiness 
 or misery accordingly as they do or do not possess the means of 
 a comfortable subsistence ? and who is the judge, what is a com 
 fortable subsistence, but the man himself? Might not then, on 
 the same or equivalent principles, a leveller construct a right to 
 equal property ? The inhabitants of this country without proper 
 ty form, doubtless, a great majority ; each of these has a right to 
 a suflrage, and the richest man to no more ; and the object of 
 this suffrage is, that each individual may secure himself a true 
 efficient representative of his will. Here then is a legal power 
 of abolishing or equalizing property : and according to Major C. 
 himself, a power which ought never to be used ought not to exist. 
 Therefore, unless he carries his system to the whole length of 
 common labor and common possession, a right to universal suf- 
 
ESSAY V. 187 
 
 frage can not exist ; but if not to universal suffrage, there can 
 exist no natural right to suffrage at all. In whatever way he 
 would obviate this objection, he must admit expedience founded 
 on experience and particular circumstances, which will vary in 
 every different nation, and in the same nation at different times, 
 as the maxim of all legislation and the ground of all legislative 
 power. For his universal principles, as far as they are principles 
 and universal, necessarily suppose uniform and perfect subjects, 
 which are to be found in the ideas of pure geometry and, I trust, 
 in the realities of heaven, but never, never, in creatures of flesh 
 and blood. 
 
 ESSAY V. 
 
 ON THE ERRORS OF PARTY SPIRIT: OR EXTREMES MEET. 
 
 And it was no wonder if some good and innocent men, especially such as 
 he (Lightfoot) who was generally more concerned about what was done in 
 Judea many centuries ago, than what was transacted in his own time in his 
 own country it is no wonder if some such were for a while borne away 
 to the approval of opinions which they, after more sedate reflection, dis 
 owned. Yet his innocency from any self-interest or design, together with 
 his learning, secured him from the extravagances of demagogues, the peo 
 ple s oracles. LIGHTFOOT S Works, Publisher s Preface to the Reader. 
 
 I HAVE never seen Major Cartwright, much less enjoy the 
 honor of his acquaintance ; but I know enough of his character, 
 from the testimony of others and from his own writings, to re 
 spect his talents, and revere the purity of his motives. I am 
 fully persuaded that there are few better men, few more fervent 
 or disinterested adherents of their country or the laws of their 
 country, of whatsoever things are lovely, of whatsoever things 
 are honorable. It would give me great pain should I be sup 
 posed to have introduced, disrespectfully, a name, which from 
 my early youth I never heard mentioned without a feeling of 
 affectionate admiration. I have indeed quoted from this vener 
 able patriot, as from the most respectable English advocate for 
 the theory, which derives the rights of government, and the 
 duties of obedience to it, exclusively from principles of pure 
 
188 THE FKIEND. 
 
 reason. It was of consequence to my cause that I should not be 
 thought to have been waging war against a straw image of my 
 own setting up, or even against a foreign idol that had neither 
 worshipers nor advocates in our own country ; and it was not 
 less my object to keep my discussion aloof from those passions, 
 which more unpopular names might have excited. I therefore 
 introduced the name of Cartwright, as I had previously done 
 that of Luther, in order to give every fair advantage to a theory, 
 which I thought it of importance to confute ; and as an instance 
 that though the system might be made tempting to the vulgar, 
 yet that, taken unmixed and entire, it was chiefly fascinating for 
 lofty and imaginative spirits, who mistook their own virtues and 
 powers for the average character of men in general. 
 
 Neither by fair statements nor by fair reasoning should I ever 
 give offence to Major Cartwright himself, nor to his judicious 
 friends. If I am in danger of offending them, it must arise from 
 one or other of two causes ; either that I have falsely represented 
 his principles, or his motives and the tendency of his writings. 
 In the book from which I quoted, " The People s Barrier against 
 undue Influence" (the only one of Major Cartwright s which I 
 possess), I am conscious that there are six foundations stated of 
 constitutional government. Therefore, it may be urged, the 
 author can not be justly classed with those who deduce our social 
 rights and correlative duties exclusively from principles of pure 
 reason, or unavoidable conclusions from such. My answer is 
 ready. Of these six foundations three are but different words 
 for one and the same, namely, the law of reason, the law of 
 God, and first principles : and the three that remain can not be 
 taken as indifferent, inasmuch as they are afterwards affirmed 
 to be of no validity except as far as they are evidently deduced 
 from the former ; that is, from the principles implanted by God 
 in the universal reason of man. These three latter foundations 
 are, the general customs of the realm, particular customs, and 
 acts of Parliament. It might be supposed that the author had 
 not used his terms in the precise and single sense in which they 
 are defined in my former essay ; and that self-evident principles 
 may be meant to include the dictates of manifest expedience, the 
 inductions of the understanding as well as the prescripts of the 
 pure reason. But no ; Major Cartwright has guarded against 
 the possibility of this interpretation, and has expressed himself 
 
ESSAY V. 180 
 
 as decisively, an<} with as much warmth, against founding gov 
 ernments on grounds of expedience, as I have done against 
 founding morality on the same. Euclid himself could not have 
 defined his words more sternly within the limits of pure science ; 
 for instance, see the 1st, 2d, 3d, and 4th primary rules : A 
 principle is a manifest arid simple proposition comprehending 
 a certain truth. Principles are the proof of every thing : but 
 are not susceptible of external proof, being self-evident. If one 
 principle be violated, all are shaken. Against him, who de 
 nies principles, all dispute is useless, and reason unintelligible, 
 or disallowed, so far as he denies them. The laAvs of nature are 
 immutable. Neither could Rousseau himself, nor his predeces 
 sors, the Fifth-monarchy men, have more nakedly or emphati 
 cally identified the foundations of government in the concrete 
 with those of religion and morality in the abstract : see Major 
 Cartwright s primary rules from 31 to 39, and from 44 to 83. 
 In these it is affirmed ; that the legislative rights of every citi 
 zen are inherent in his nature ; that, being natural rights, they 
 must be equal in all men ; that a natural right is that right 
 which a citizen claims as being a man, and that it hath no other 
 foundation but his personality or reason; that property can 
 neither increase nor modify any legislative right ; that every one 
 man shall have one vote however poor, and for any one man, 
 however rich, to have more than one vote, is against natural 
 justice, and an evil measure ; that it is better for a nation to 
 endure all adversities, than to assent to one evil measure ; that 
 to be free is to be governed by laws, to which we have ourselves 
 assented, either in person or by representative, for whose election 
 we have actually voted : that all not having a right of suffrage 
 are slaves, and that a vast majority of the people of Great Brit 
 ain are slaves ! To prove the total coincidence of Major Cart 
 Wright s theory with that which I have stated, and I trust con 
 futed, in the preceding essay, it only remains for me to prove, 
 that the former, equally with the latter, confounds the sufficiency 
 of the conscience to make every person a moral and amenable 
 being, with the sufficiency of judgment and experience requisite 
 to the exercise of political right. A single quotation will place 
 this out of all doubt, which from its length I shall insert in a note.* 
 
 * But the equality (observe, that Major Cartwright is here speaking 
 of the natural right to universal suffrage, and consequently of the univer- 
 
190 THE FRIEND. 
 
 Great stress, indeed, is laid on the authority, of our ancient 
 \ laws, both in this and the other works of our patriotic author ; 
 and whatever his system may be, it is impossible not to feel, that 
 the author himself possesses the heart of a genuine Englishman. 
 But still his system can neither be changed nor modified by these 
 appeals : for among the primary maxims, which form the ground- 
 work of it, we are informed not only that law in the abstract is 
 the perfection of reason ; but that the law of God and the law 
 of the land are all one ! What ! The statutes against witches ; 
 or those against papists, the abolition of which gave rise to the 
 infamous riots in 1780 ! Or, in the author s own opinion, the 
 statutes of disfranchisemerit and for making Parliaments septen- 
 
 sal right of eligibility, as well as of election, independently of character or 
 property) the equality and dignity of human nature in all men, whether 
 rich or poor, is placed in the highest point of view by St. Paul, when he 
 reprehends the Corinthian believers for their litigations one with another, 
 in the courts of law where unbelievers presided ; and as an argument of 
 the competency of all men to judge for themselves, he alludes to that eleva 
 tion in the kingdom of heaven which is promised to every man who shall 
 be virtuous, or in the language of that time, a saint. Do ye not know, says 
 he, that the saints shall judge the world? And if the world shall be judged 
 by you, are ye unworthy to judge the smallest matters? Know ye not that 
 ye shall judge the angels? How much more things that pertain to this life? 
 If after such authorities, such manifestations of truth as these, any Chris 
 tian through those prejudices, which are the effects of long habits of injus 
 tice and oppression, and teach us to despise the poor, shall still think it 
 right to exclude that part of the commonalty, consisting of tradesmen, 
 artificers, and laborers, or any of them from voting in elections of members 
 to serve in Parliament, I must sincerely lament such a persuasion as a -mis 
 fortune both to himself and his country. And if any man, not having given 
 himself the trouble to consider whether or not the Scripture be an au 
 thority, but who, nevertheless, is a friend to the rights of mankind upon 
 grounds of mere prudence, policy, or expediency, shall think it advisable 
 to go against the whole current of our constitutional and law maxims, by 
 which it is self-evident that every man, as being a man, is created free, 
 born to freedom, and, without it, a thing, a slave, a beast ; and shall con 
 tend for drawing a line of exclusion at freeholders of fovty pounds a year, 
 or forty shillings a year, or householders, or pot-boilers, so that all who are 
 below that line shall not have a vote in the election of a legislative guar 
 dian, which is taking from a citizen the power even of self-preservation, 
 such a man, I venture to say, is bolder than he who wrestled with the 
 angel ; for he wrestles with God himself, who established those principles 
 in the eternal laws of nature, never to be violated by any of his creatures. 
 Pp. 23, 24. 
 
ESSAY V. 191 
 
 nial ! Nay ! but (Principle 28) an unjust law is no law : and 
 (P. 22) against the law of reason neither prescription, statute, nor 
 custom, may prevail ; and if any such be brought against it, they 
 be not prescriptions, statutes, nor customs, but things void : and 
 (P. 29) what the Parliament doth shall be holdeii for naught 
 whensoever it shall enact that which is contrary to a natural 
 right ! I dare not suspect a grave writer of such egregious tri- 
 iiing, as to mean no more by these assertions, than that what is 
 wrong is not right ; and if more than this be meant, it must be 
 that the subject is not bound to obey any act of Parliament, 
 which according to his conviction entrenches on a principle of 
 natural right ; which natural rights are, as we have seen, not 
 confined to the man in his individual capacity, but are made to 
 confer universal legislative privileges on every subject of every 
 state, and of the extent of which every man is competent to 
 judge, who is competent to be the object of law at all, that is, 
 every man who has not lost his reason. 
 
 In the statement of his principles, therefore, I have not mis 
 represented Major Cart wright. Have I then endeavored to con 
 nect public odium with his name, by arraigning his motives, or 
 the tendency of his writings ? The tendency of his writings in 
 my inmost conscience I believe to be perfectly harmless, and I 
 dare cite them in confirmation of the opinions which it was the 
 object of my introductory essays to establish, and as an additional 
 proof, that no good man communicating what he believes to be 
 the truth for the sake of truth, and according to the rules of con 
 science, will be found to have acted injuriously to the peace or in 
 terests of society. The venerable state-moralist, for this is his 
 true character, and in this title is conveyed the whole error of his 
 system, is incapable of aiding his arguments by the poignant 
 condiment of personal slander, incapable of appealing to the envy 
 of the multitude by bitter declamation against the follies and op 
 pressions of the higher classes. He would shrink with horror from 
 the thought of adding a false and unnatural influence to the cause 
 of truth and justice, by details of present calamity or immediate 
 suffering, fitted to excite the fury of the multitude, or by promises 
 of turning the current of the public revenue into the channels^ of 
 
 * I must remind the reader, that this essay was written in October, 1809. 
 If Major Cartwright has ever since then acted in a different spirit, and 
 tampered personally with the distresses, and consequent irritability of the 
 
192 THE FRIEND. 
 
 individual distress and poverty, so as to bribe the populace by self 
 ish hopes. It does not belong to men of his character to delude 
 the uninstructed into the belief that their shortest way of obtain 
 ing the good things of this life, is to commence busy politicians, 
 instead of remaining industrious laborers. He knows, and acts 
 on the knowledge, that it is the duty of the enlightened philan 
 thropist to plead for the poor and ignorant, not to them. 
 
 No. From works written and published under the control of 
 austere principles, and at the impulse of a lofty and generous en 
 thusiasm, from works rendered attractive only by the fervor of 
 sincerity, and imposing only by the majesty of plain dealing, no 
 danger will be apprehended by a wise man, no offence received 
 by a good man. I could almost venture to warrant our patriot s 
 publications innoxious, from the single circumstance of their 
 perfect freedom from personal themes in this age of personality, 
 this age of literary and political gossiping, when the meanest 
 insects are worshiped with a sort of Egyptian superstition, if 
 only the brainless head be atoned for by the sting of personal 
 malignity in the tail ; when the most vapid satires have become 
 the objects of a keen public interest purely from the number of 
 contemporary characters named in the patch- work notes, which 
 possess, however, the comparative merit of being more poetical 
 than the text, and because, to increase the stimulus, the author 
 has sagaciously left his own name for whispers and conjectures ! 
 In an age, when even sermons are published with a double 
 appendix stuffed with names in a generation so transformed 
 from the characteristic reserve of Britons, that from the ephem 
 eral sheet of a London newspaper to the everlasting Scotch pro 
 fessorial quarto, almost every publication exhibits or flatters the 
 epidemic distemper ; that the very last year s rebuses in the 
 Lady s Diary, are answered in a serious elegy On my father s 
 death, with the name and habitat of the elegiac QEdipus sub 
 scribed ; and other ingenious solutions are likewise given to the 
 said rebuses not, as heretofore, by Crito, Philander, A B, X Y, 
 &c., but by fifty or sixty plain English surnames at full length, 
 with their several places of abode ! In an age, when a bashful 
 
 ignorant, the inconsistency is his, not mine. If what I then believed and 
 avowed should now appear a severe satire in the shape of a false prophecy, 
 any shame I might feel for my lack of penetration would be lost in the sin 
 cerity of my regret. 1818. 
 
ESSAY V. 193 
 
 Philalethcs or Philelcutlicros is as rare on the title-pages and 
 among the signatures of our magazines, as a real name used to 
 be in the days of our shy and notice-shunning grandfathers ! 
 When more exquisite than all I see an epic poem spirits of 
 Maro and Msnonides, make ready to welcome your new compeer ! 
 advertised with the special recommendation, that -the said 
 epic pocrn contains more than a hundred names of living per 
 sons ! ]NTo if works as abhorrent, as those of Major Cartwright, 
 from all unworthy provocatives to vanity, envy, and the selfish 
 passions, could acquire a sufficient influence on the public mind 
 to be mischievous, the plans proposed in his pamphlets would 
 Cease to be altogether visionary : though even then they could not 
 ground their claims to actual adoption on self-evident principles 
 of pure reason, but on the happy accident of the virtue and good 
 sense of that public, for whose suffrages they were presented. 
 Indeed with Major Cartwright s plans I have no present con 
 cern ; but with the principles, on which he grounds the obliga 
 tions to adopt them. 
 
 But I must not sacrifice truth to my reverence for individual, 
 purity of intention. The tendency of one good man s writings is 
 altogether a different thing from the tendency of the system itself, 
 when seasoned and served up for the unreasoning multitude, as 
 it has been by men whose names I would not honor by writing 
 them in the same sentence with Major Cartwright s. For this 
 system has two sides, and holds out very different attractions to 
 its admirers who advance towards it from different points of the 
 compass. It possesses qualities, that can scarcely fail of winning 
 over to its banners a numerous host of shallow heads and restless 
 tempers, men who, without learning, or, as one of my friends 
 has forcibly expressed it, strong book-mindedness, live as alms- 
 folks on the opinions of their contemporaries, and who, well 
 pleased to exchange the humility of regret for the self-complacent 
 feelings of contempt, reconcile themselves to the sans culotterie 
 of their ignorance, by scoffing at the useless fox-brush of pedan 
 try.* The attachment of this numerous class is owing neither to 
 
 * He (Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk) knowing that learning hath no 
 enemy but ignorance, did suspect always the want of it in those men who 
 derided the habit of it in others : like the fox in the fable, who, being with 
 out a tail, would persuade others to cut off theirs as a burthen. But he 
 liked well the philosopher s division of men into three ranks some who 
 
 VOL. ii. f 
 
194 THE FB1ENJD. 
 
 the solidity and depth of foundation in this theory, nor to the 
 strict coherence of its arguments ; and still less to any genuine 
 reverence for humanity in the abstract. The physiocratic sys 
 tem promises to deduce all things, and every thing relative to law 
 and government, with mathematical exactness and certainty, 
 from a few individual and self-evident principles. But who so 
 dull, as not to be capable of apprehending a simple self-evident 
 principle, and of following a short demon s1 ration? By this sys 
 tem, the system as its admirers were wont to call it, even as 
 they named the writer who first applied it in systematic detail to 
 the whole constitution and administration of civil policy, Du 
 Q,uesnoy le doctcur, or the teacher ; by this system the ob 
 servation of times, places, relative bearings, history, national cus 
 toms and character, is rendered superfluous ; all, in short, 
 which, according to the common notion, makes the attainment 
 of legislative prudence a work of difficulty and long-continued 
 effort, even for the acutest and most comprehensive minds. The 
 cautious balancing of comparative advantages, the painful calcu 
 lation of forces and counterforces, the preparation of circum 
 stances, the lynx-eyed watching for opportunities, are all super 
 seded ; and by the magic oracles of certain axioms and definitions 
 it is revealed how the world with all its concerns should be 
 mechanized, and then let go on of itself. All the positive insti 
 tutions and regulations, which the prudence of our ancestors had 
 provided, are declared to be erroneous or interested perversions 
 of the natural relations of man ; and the whole is delivered over 
 to the faculty, which all men possess equally, namely, the com 
 mon sense or universal reason. The science of politics, it is said, 
 is but the application of the common sense, which every man 
 possesses, to a subject in which every man is concerned. To be 
 a musician, an orator, a painter, a poet, an architect, or even to 
 be a good mechanist, presupposes genius ; to be an excellent ar 
 tisan or mechanic, requires more than an average degree of 
 talent ; but to be a legislator requires nothing but common sense. 
 The commonest human intellect, therefore, suffices for a perfect 
 
 knew good and were willing to teach others ; these he said were like gods 
 among men others who though they knew not much, yet were willing to 
 learn ; these he said were like men among beasts and some who knew not 
 good and yet despised such as should teach them ; these he esteemed as 
 beasts among men. Lloyd s State Worthies, p. 33. 
 
ESSAY V. 195 
 
 insight into the whole science of civil polity, and qualifies the 
 possessor to sit in judgment on the constitution and administra 
 tion of his own country, and of all other nations. This must 
 needs be agreeable tidings to the great mass of mankind. There 
 is no subject, which men in general like better to harangue on 
 than politics ; none, the deciding on which more flatters the 
 sense of self-importance. For as to what Johnson calls plebeian 
 envy, * I do not believe that the mass of men are justly charge 
 able Avith it in their political feelings ; not only because envy is 
 seldom excited except by definite and individual objects, but still 
 more because it is a painful passion, and not likely to co-exist 
 with the high delight and self-complacency with which the ha 
 rangues on states and statesmen, princes and generals, are made 
 and listened to in ale-house circles or promiscuous public meet 
 ings. . A certain portion of this is not merely desirable, but ne 
 cessary in a free country. Heaven forbid that the most ignorant 
 of my countrymen should be deprived of a subj ect so well fitted to 
 
 impart 
 An hour s importance to the poor man s heart !j- 
 
 But a system which not only flatters the pride and vanity of men, 
 but which in so plausible and intelligible a manner persuades 
 them, not that this is wrong and that ought to have been man 
 aged otherwise ; or that Mr. X. is worth a hundred of Mr. Y. as 
 a minister or Parliament man ; but that all is wrong and mis 
 taken, nay, almost unjust and wicked, and that every man is 
 competent, and in contempt of all rank and property, on the 
 mere title of his personality, possesses the right, and is under the 
 most solemn moral obligation, to give a helping hand toward 
 overthrowing all ; this confusion of political with religious 
 claims, this transfer of the rights of religion disjoined from the 
 austere duties of self-denial, with which religious rights exercised 
 in their proper sphere can not fail to be accompanied ; and not 
 only disjoined from self-restraint, but United with the indulgence 
 of those passions, self-will, love of power, which it is the prin 
 cipal aim and hardest task of religion to correct and restrain ; 
 
 * I now more than fear that Dr. Johnson was in the right : and that I 
 must recant my opinion with Coleridge ! thy wish was father to that 
 thought, not a clearer insight into the nature of man, not a wider expe 
 rience of men. October 20th, 1818. 
 
 f Deserted Village. Ed. 
 
196 .THE FKIEND. 
 
 this, I say, is altogether different from the village politics of yore, 
 and may be pronounced alarming and of dangerous tendency by 
 the boldest advocates of reform not less consistently, than by the 
 most timid eschewers of popular disturbance. 
 
 Still, however, the system had its golden side for the noblest 
 minds : and I should act the part of a coward, if I disguised my 
 convictions, that the errors of the aristocratic party were full as 
 gross, and far less excusable. Instead of contenting themselves 
 with opposing the real blessings of English law to the splendid 
 promises of untried theory, too large a part of those, who called 
 themselves anti-Jacobins, did all in their power to suspend those 
 blessings ; and thus furnished new arguments to the advocates 
 of innovation, when they should have been answering the old 
 ones. The most prudent, as well as the most honest, mode of 
 defending the existing arrangements would have been, to have 
 candidly admitted what could not with truth be denied, and 
 then to have shown that, though the things complained of were 
 evils, they were necessary evils ; or if they were removable, yet 
 that the consequences of the heroic medicines recommended by 
 the revolutionists would be far more dreadful than the disease. 
 Now either the one or the other point, by the double aid of his 
 tory and a sound philosophy, they might have established with a 
 certainty little short of demonstration, and with such colors and 
 illustrations as would have taken strong hold of the very feelings 
 which had attached to the democratic system all the good and 
 valuable men of the party. But instead of this they precluded 
 the possibility of being listened to even by the gentlest arid most 
 ingenuous among the friends of the French revolution, by deny 
 ing or attempting to palliate facts, which were equally notorious 
 and unjustifiable, and by supplying the lack of brain by an over- 
 ilow of gall. While they lamented with tragic outcries the in 
 jured monarch and the exiled noble, they displayed the most dis 
 gusting insensibility to the privations, sufferings, and manifold 
 oppressions of the great mass of the continental population, and 
 a blindness or callousness still more offensive to the crimes and 
 unutterable abominations of their oppressors.* 1 Not only was the 
 
 * I do not mean the sovereigns, but the old nobility of both Germany and 
 France. The extravagantly false and nattering picture, which Burke gave 
 of the French nobility and hierarchy, has always appeared to me the great 
 est defect of his, in so many respects, invaluable work. 
 
ESSAY V. 197 
 
 Bastile justified, but the Spanish Inquisition itself; and this in 
 a pamphlet passionately extolled and industriously circulated by 
 the adherents of the then ministry. Thus, and by their infatu 
 ated panegyrics on the former state of France, they played into 
 the hands of their worst and most dangerous antagonists. In 
 confounding the conditions of the English and -the French peas 
 antry, and in quoting the authorities of Milton, Sidney, and their 
 immortal compeers, as applicable to the present times arid the 
 existing government, the demagogues appeared to talk only the 
 same language as the anti- Jacobins themselves employed. For 
 if the vilest calumnies of obsolete bigots were applied against 
 these great men by the one party, with equal plausibility might 
 their authorities be adduced, and their arguments for increasing 
 the power of the people be re-applied to the existing government, 
 by the other. If the most disgusting forms of despotism were 
 spoken of by the one in the same respectful language as the ex 
 ecutive power of our own country, what wonder if the irritated 
 partisans of the other were able to impose on the populace the 
 converse of the proposition, and to confound the executive branch 
 of the English sovereignty with the despotisms of less happy 
 lands ? The first duty of a wise advocate is to convince his op 
 ponents, that he understands their arguments and sympathizes 
 with their just feelings. But instead of this, these pretended 
 constitutionalists recurred to the language of insult, and to meas 
 ures of persecution. In order to oppose Jacobinism they imi 
 tated it in its worst features ; in personal slander, in illegal vio 
 lence, and even in the thirst for blood. They justified the cor 
 ruptions of the state in the same spirit of sophistry, by the same 
 vague arguments of general reason, and the same disregard of 
 ancient ordinances and established opinions, with which the state 
 itself had been attacked by the Jacobins. The wages of state 
 dependence were represented as no less sacred than the property 
 won by industry or derived from a long line of ancestors. 
 
 It was, indeed, evident to thinking men, that both parties were 
 playing the same game with different counters. If the Jacobins 
 ran wild with the rights of man, and the abstract sovereignty of 
 the people, their antagonists flew off as extravagantly from the 
 sober good sense of our forefathers, and idolized as mere an ab 
 straction in the rights of sovereigns. Nor was this confined to 
 sovereigns. They defended the exemptions and privileges of all 
 
198 THE FKIEND. 
 
 privileged orders, on the presumption of their inalienable right 
 to them, however inexpedient they might have been found, as 
 universally and abstractly as if these privileges had been decreed 
 by the Supreme Wisdom, instead of being the offspring of chance 
 or violence, or the inventions of human prudence. Thus, while 
 they deemed themselves defending, they were in reality blacken 
 ing and degrading the uninjurious and useful privileges of our 
 English nobility, which rest on nobler and securer grounds. Thus 
 too, the necessity of compensations for dethroned princes was af 
 firmed as familiarly, as if kingdoms had been private estates : 
 and no more disapprobation was expressed at the transfer of five 
 or ten millions of men from one proprietor to another, than of as 
 many score head of cattle. This most degrading and superannu 
 ated superstition, or rather this ghost of a defunct absurdity, 
 raised up by the necromancy of a violent re-action, such as the 
 extreme of one system is sure to occasion in the adherents of its 
 opposite, was more than once allowed to regulate our meas 
 ures in the conduct of a war, 011 which the integrity of the Brit 
 ish empire and the progressive civilization of all mankind de 
 pended. I could mention possessions of paramount and indis 
 pensable importance to first-rate national interests, the nominal 
 sovereign of which had delivered up all his sea-ports and strong 
 holds to the French, and maintained a French army in his do 
 minions, and had therefore, by the law of nations, made his ter 
 ritories French dependencies which possessions were not to be 
 touched, though the natural inhabitants were eager to place them 
 selves under our permanent protection and why ? They were 
 the property of the king of Naples ! All the grandeur and maj 
 esty of the law of nations, which taught our ancestors to distin 
 guish between a European sovereign and the miserable despots 
 of oriental barbarism, and to consider the former as the represen 
 tative of the nation which he governed, and as inextricably con 
 nected with its fortunes as sovereign, were merged in the basest 
 personality. Instead of the interests of mighty nations, it seem 
 ed as if a mere law-suit were carrying on between John Doe and 
 Richard Roe ! The happiness of millions was light in the bal 
 ance, weighed against a theatric compassion for one individual 
 and his family, who, I speak from facts that I myself know, 
 if they feared the French more, hated us worse. Though the 
 restoration of good sense commenced during the interval of the 
 
ESSAY V. 199 
 
 peace of Amiens, yet it was not till the Spanish insurrection that 
 Englishmen of all parties recurred, in toto, to the old English 
 principles, and spoke of their Hampdens, Sidneys, and Miltons 
 with the old enthusiasm. During the last war, an acquaintance 
 of mine least of all rneii a political zealot had named a vessel 
 which he had just built The Liberty ; and was seriously admon 
 ished by his aristocratic friends to change it for some other name. 
 What ? replied the owner very innocently should I call it The 
 Freedom ? That (it was replied) would be far better, as people 
 might then think only of freedom of trade ; whereas Liberty had 
 a Jacobinical sound with it ! Alas ! (and this is an observation 
 of Denham and of Burke) is there then np medium between an 
 ague-fit and a frenzy-fever ? 
 
 I have said that to withstand the arguments of the lawless, 
 the anti- Jacobins proposed to suspend the law, and by the inter 
 position of a particular statute to eclipse the blessed light of the 
 universal sun, that spies and informers might tyrannize and es 
 cape in the ominous darkness. Oh ! if these mistaken men, in 
 toxicated with alarm and bewildered by that panic of property, 
 which they themselves were the chief agents in exciting, had ever 
 lived iii a country where there was indeed a general disposition to 
 change arid rebellion ! Had they ever travelled through Sicily, 
 or through France at the first coming on of the revolution, or 
 even, alas ! through too many of the provinces of a sister-land, 
 they could not but have shrunk from their own declarations con 
 cerning the state of feeling and opinion at that time predominant 
 throughout Great Britain. There was a time Heaven grant 
 that that time may have passed by ! when by crossing a nar 
 row strait they might have learned the true symptoms of approach 
 ing danger, and have secured themselves from mistaking the 
 meetings and idle rant of such sedition as shrank appalled from the 
 sight of a constable, for the dire murmuring and strange conster 
 nation which precedes the storm or earthquake of national dis 
 cord. Not only in coffee-houses and public theatres, but even at 
 the tables of the wealthy, they would have heard the advocates 
 of existing government defend their cause in the language and 
 with the tone of men, who are conscious that they are in a mi 
 nority. But in England, when the alarm was at the highest, 
 there was not a city, no, not a town, in which a man suspected 
 of holding democratic principles could move abroad without re- 
 
200 THE FRIEND. 
 
 \ ceiving some unpleasant proof of the hatred in which his sup- 
 I posed opinions were held by the great majority of the people : 
 I and the only instances of popular excess and indignation, were 
 I on the side of the government and the established church. But 
 ^""why need I appeal to these invidious facts ? Turn over the pages 
 of history, and seek for a single instance of a revolution having 
 been effected without the concurrence of either the nobles, or the 
 ecclesiastics, or the moneyed classes, in any country in which the 
 influences of property had ever been predominant, and where the 
 interests of the proprietors were interlinked ! Examine the revo 
 lution of the Belgic provinces under Philip II. ; the civil wars of 
 France in the preceding generation, the history of the American 
 revolution, or the yet more recent events in Sweden and in Spain ; 
 and it will be scarcely possible not to perceive, that in England, 
 from 1791 to the peace of Amiens, there were neither tendencies 
 to confederacy nor actual confederacies, against which the exist 
 ing laws had not provided both sufficient safeguards and an ample 
 punishment. But alas ! the panic of property had been struck 
 in the first instance for party purposes ; and when it became 
 general, its propagators caught it themselves, and ended in be 
 lieving their own lie ; even as the bulls in Borodale are said 
 sometimes to run mad with the echo of their own bellowing. 
 The consequences were most injurious. Our attention was con 
 centred on a monster which could not survive the convulsions in 
 which it had been brought forth, even the enlightened Burke 
 himself too often talking and reasoning as if a perpetual and or 
 ganized anarchy had been a possible thing ! Thus while we 
 were warring against French doctrines, we took little heed 
 whether the means by which we attempted to overthrow them 
 were not likely to aid and augment the far more formidable evil 
 of French ambition. Like children, we ran away from the yelp 
 ing of a cur, and took shelter at the heels of a vicious war-horse. 
 The conduct of the aristocratic party was equally unwise in 
 private life and to individuals, especially to the young and inex 
 perienced, who were surely to be forgiven for having had theii 
 imagination dazzled, and their enthusiasm kindled, by a novelty 
 so specious, that even an old and tried statesman, Mr. Fox, had 
 pronounced it a stupendous monument of human wisdom and hu 
 man happiness. This was indeed a gross delusion, but assuredly 
 for young men at least, a very venial one. To hope too boldly 
 
ESSAY V. 201 
 
 of human nature is a fault which all good men have an interest 
 in forgiving 1 . Nor was it less removable than venial, if the party 
 had taken the only way by which the error could be, or even 
 ought to have been removed. Having first sympathized with the 
 warm benevolence and the enthusiasm for liberty, which had con 
 secrated it, they should have then shown the young enthusiasts 
 that liberty was not the only blessing of society ; that, though de 
 sirable, even for its own sake, it yet derived its main value as the 
 means of calling forth and securing other advantages and excel 
 lences, the activities of industry, the security of life and property, 
 the peaceful energies of genius and manifold talent, the develop 
 ment of the moral virtues, and the independence and dignity of 
 the nation in its relations to foreign powers : and that neither 
 these nor liberty itself could subsist in a country so various in its 
 soils, so long inhabited, and so fully peopled as Great Britain, 
 without difference of ranks and without laws which recognized 
 and protected the privileges of each. But instead of thus win 
 ning them back from the snare, they too often drove them into it 
 by angry contumelies, which being in contradiction with each 
 other could only excite contempt for those that uttered them. 
 To prove the folly of the opinions, they were represented as the 
 crude fancies of unfledged wit and school-boy statesmen ; but 
 when abhorrence was to be expressed, the self-same unfledged 
 school-boys were invested with all the "attributes of brooding con 
 spiracy and hoary-headed treason. Nay, a sentence of absolute 
 reprobation was passed on them ; and the speculative error of 
 Jacobinism was equalized to the mysterious sin in Scripture, 
 which in some inexplicable manner excludes not only mercy but 
 even repentance. It became the watch- word of the party, once a 
 Jacobin always a Jacobin. And wherefore ?* I will suppose 
 this question asked by an individual, who in his youth or earliest 
 manhood had been enamored of a system, which for him had 
 combined at once the austere beauty of science with all the light 
 and colors of imagination, and with all the warmth of wide re 
 ligious charity, and who, overlooking its ideal essence, had dreamed 
 of actually building a government on personal and natural rights 
 
 * The passage which follows was first published in the Morning Post, in 
 the year 1800, and contained, if I mistake not, the first philosophical appro 
 priation of a precise import to the word Jacobin, as distinct from republican, 
 democrat, and demagogue. [The article appeared Oct. 21, 1802. S. C.] 
 
202 THE FKIEND. 
 
 alone. And wherefore ? Is Jacobinism an absurdity, and have 
 we no understanding by which to detect it ? Is it productive of 
 all misery and all horrors, and have we no natural humanity to 
 make us turn away with indignation and loathing from it ? 
 Uproar and confusion, insecurity of person and of property, the 
 tyranny of mobs or the domination of a soldiery ; private houses 
 changed to brothels, the ceremony of marriage but an initiation 
 to harlotry, and marriage itself degraded to mere concubinage 
 these, the wiser advocates of aristocracy have said, and truly said, 
 are the effects of Jacobinism ! In private life, an insufferable 
 licentiousness, and abroad an intolerable despotism. Once a 
 Jacobin, always a Jacobin wherefore ? Is it because the 
 creed which we have stated is dazzling at first sight to the young, 
 the innocent, the disinterested, and to those, who judging of men 
 in general from their own uncorrupted hearts, judge erroneously, 
 and expect unwisely ? Is it, because it deceives the mind in its 
 purest and most flexible period ? Is it, because it is an error, 
 that every day s experience aids to detect? An error against 
 which all history is full of warning examples ? Or is it because 
 the experiment has been tried before our eyes and the error made 
 palpable ? 
 
 From what source are we to derive this strange phenomenon, 
 that the young and the enthusiastic, who, as our daily experience 
 informs us, are deceived in their religious antipathies, and grow 
 wiser ; in their friendships, and grow wiser ; in their modes of 
 pleasure, and grow wiser ; should, if once deceived in a question 
 of abstract politics, cling to the error forever and ever? And 
 this too, although in addition to the natural growth of judgment 
 and information with increase of years, they live in the age in 
 which the tenets have been acted upon ; and though the conse 
 quences have been such, that every good man s heart sickens, 
 and his head turns giddy at the retrospect. 
 
ESSAY VI. 
 
 Truth I pursued, as fancy sketched the way, 
 And wiser men than I went worse astray. 
 
 | 
 
 I WAS never myself, at any period of ray life, a convert to the 
 Jacobinical system.* From my earliest manhood, it was an 
 axiom in politics with me, that in every country where property 
 prevailed, property must be the grand basis of the government ; 
 and that that government was the best, in which the power or 
 political influence of the individual was in proportion to his 
 property, provided that the free circulation of property was not 
 impeded by any positive laws or customs, nor the tendency of 
 wealth to accumulate in abiding masses unduly encouraged. I 
 perceived, that if the people at large were neither ignorant nor 
 immoral, there could be no motive for a sudden and violent change 
 of government ; and if they were, there could be no hope but of 
 
 la change for the worse. The temple of despotism, like that of 
 the Mexican God, would be rebuilt with human skulls, and more 
 firmly, though in a different style of architecture.! Thanks to 
 the excellent education which I had received, my reason was too 
 clear not to draw this circle of power round me, and my spirit too 
 
 honest to attempt to break through it. My feelings, however, and 
 imagination did not remain tmkindled in this general conflagra 
 tion ; and I confess I should be more inclined to be ashamed than 
 roud of myself, if they had. I was a sharer in the general vor- 
 
 tex, though my little world described the path of its revolution /fli 
 an orbit of its own. What I dared not expect from constitutions 
 of government and whole nations, I hoped from religion and a 
 small company of chosen individuals. I formed a plan, as harm 
 less as it was extravagant, of trying the experiment of human 
 
 * See Essay XVI. of this volume. Ed. 
 
 \ To the best of my recollection, these were Mr. Southey s words in the 
 year 1794. 
 
204 THE FKIEND, 
 
 perfectibility on the banks of the Susquehanna ; where our little 
 society, in its second generation, was to have combined the inno 
 cence of the patriarchal age with the knowledge and genuine re 
 finements of European culture ; and where I dreamed that in the 
 sober evening of my life, I should behold the cottages of indepen 
 dence in the undivided dale of industry, 
 
 And oft, soothed sadly by some dirgeful wind, 
 Muse on the sore ills I had left behind ! 
 
 Strange fancies, and as vain as strange ! yet to the intense interest 
 and impassioned zeal, which called forth and ^trained every 
 faculty of my intellect for thefrorganization and defence of this 
 scheme, I owe much of whatever I at present possess, my clearest 
 insight into the nature of individual man, and my most compre 
 hensive views of his social relations, of the true uses of trade and 
 commerce, and how far the wealth and relative power of nations 
 promote or impede their welfare and inherent strength. KOI 
 were they less serviceable in securing myself, and perhaps some 
 ethers, from the pitfalls of sedition : and when we at length 
 alighted on the firm ground of common sense from the gradually 
 exhausted balloon of youthful enthusiasm, though the air-built 
 castles, which we had been pursuing, had vanished with all their 
 pageantry of shifting forms, and glowing colors, we were yet free 
 from the stains and impurities which might have remained upon 
 us, had we been travelling with the crowd of less imaginative 
 malcontents, through the dark lanes and foul by-roads of ordinary 
 fanaticism. 
 
 But oh ! there were thousands as young and as innocent as 
 myself who, not like me, sheltered in the tranquil nook or inland 
 cove of a particular fancy, were driven along with the general 
 current ! Many there were, young men of loftiest minds, yea, the 
 prime stuff out of which manly wisdom and practical greatness 
 are to be formed, who had appropriated their hopes and the ardor 
 of their souls to mankind at large, to the wide expanse of national 
 interests, which then seemed fermenting in the French republic 
 as in the main outlet and chief crater of the revolutionary tor 
 rents ; and who confidently believed, that these torrents, like the 
 lavas of Vesuvius, were to subside into a soil of inexhaustible fer 
 tility on the circumjacent lands, the old divisions and mouldering 
 edifices of which they had covered or swept away enthusiasts 
 
ESSAY VI. 205 
 
 of kindliest temperament, who to use the words of the poet, having 
 already borrowed the meaning and the metaphor, had approached 
 
 the shield 
 
 Of human nature from the golden side, 
 And would have fought even to the death to attest 
 The quality of the metal which they saw. 
 
 My honored friend Mr. "Wordsworth has permitted me to give a 
 value and relief to the present essay, by a quotation from one of 
 his unpublished poems, the length of which I regret only from its 
 forbidding me to trespass on. his kindness by making it yet longer. 
 I trust there are many of my readers of the same age with myself, 
 who will throw themselves back into the state of thought and 
 feeling in which they were when France was reported to have 
 solemnized her first sacrifice of error and prejudice on the blood 
 less altar of freedom, by an oath of peace and good-will to all 
 mankind. 
 
 Oh ! pleasant exercise of hope and joy ! 
 For mighty were the auxiliars, which then stood 
 Upon our side, we who were strong in love. 
 Bliss was it in that dawn to be ah ve, 
 But to be young was very heaven ; Oh ! times, 
 In which the meagre stale forbidding ways 
 Of custom, law, and statute, took at once 
 The attraction of a country in romance ; 
 "When reason seem d the most to assert her rights, 
 When most intent on making of herself 
 A prime enchanter to assist the work, 
 Which then was going forward in her name. 
 Not favor d spots alone, but the whole earth 
 The beauty wore of promise that which sets 
 (To take an image which was felt no doubt 
 Among the bowers of paradise itself) 
 The budding rose above the rose, full blown. 
 What temper at the prospect did not wake 
 To happiness unthought of? The inert 
 Were roused, and lively natures rapt away. 
 They who had fed their childhood upon dreams, 
 The play-fellows of fancy, who had made 
 All powers of swiftness, subtilty, and strength 
 
 ^ 
 
 Their ministers, used to stir in lordly 
 Among the grandest objects of the sense, 
 And deal with whatsoever they found there 
 As if they had within some lurking right 
 
206 THE FRIEND. 
 
 To wield it ; they too, who of gentle mood 
 
 Had watch d all gentle motions, and to these 
 
 Had fitted their own thoughts, schemers more mild 
 
 And in the region of their peaceful selves ; 
 
 Now was it that both found, the meek and lofty 
 Did both find helpers to their heart s desire 
 And stuff at hand, plastic as they could wish 
 Were call d upon to exercise their skill 
 Not in Utopia, subterraneous fields, 
 Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where, 
 But in the very world, which is the world 
 Of all of us, the place where in the end 
 We find our happiness, or not at all. 
 
 The peace of Amiens deserved the name of peace, for it gave 
 iis unanimity at home, and reconciled Englishmen with each 
 other. Yet it would be as wild a fancy as any of which I have 
 treated, to expect that the violence of party spirit is never more 
 to return. Sooner or later the same causes, or their equivalents, 
 will call forth the same opposition of opinion, and bring the 
 same passions into play. Ample would be my recompense, 
 could I foresee that this present essay would be the means of 
 preventing discord and unhappiness in a single family ; if its 
 words of warning, aided by its tones of sympathy, should arm a 
 single man of genius against the fascinations of his own ideal 
 world, a single philanthropist against the enthusiasm of his own 
 heart. Not less would be my satisfaction, dared I natter myself 
 that my lucubrations would not be altogether without effect on 
 those who deem themselves men of judgment, faithful to the 
 light of practice, and not to be led astray by the wandering fires 
 of theory ; if I should aid in making these aware, that in recoil 
 ing with too incautious an abhorrence from the bugbears of in 
 novation, they may sink all at once into the slough of slavishness 
 and corruption. Let such persons recollect that the charms of 
 hope and novelty furnish some palliation for the idolatry to which 
 they seduce the mind ; but that the apotheosis of familiar abuses 
 and of the errors of selfishness is the vilest of superstitions. Let 
 them recollect, too, that nothing can be more incongruous than to 
 combine the pufillanimity, which despairs of human improve 
 ment, with the arrogance, supercilious contempt, and boisterous 
 anger, which have no pretensions to pardon, except as the over 
 flowing of ardent anticipation and enthusiastic faith. And finally, 
 
ESSAY VI. 207 
 
 and above all, let it be remembered by both parties, and in 
 deed by controversialists on all subjects, that every speculative 
 error which boasts a multitude of advocates, has its golden as 
 well as its dark side ; that there is always some truth connected 
 with it, the exclusive attention to which has misled the under 
 standing, some moral beauty which has given it charms for the 
 heart. Let it be remembered that no assailant of an error can 
 reasonably hope to be listened to by its advocates, who has not 
 proved to them that he has seen the disputed subject in the same 
 point of view, and is capable of contemplating it with the same 
 feelings as themselves ; for why should we abandon a cause at 
 the persuasions of one who is ignorant of the reasons which have 
 attached us to it ? Let it be remembered, that to write, however 
 ably, merely to convince those who are already convinced, dis 
 plays but the courage of a boaster ; and in any subject to rail 
 against the evil before we have inquired for the good, and to ex 
 asperate the passions of those who think with us, by caricaturing 
 the opinions and blackening the motives of our antagonists, is to 
 make the understanding the pander of the passions ; and even 
 though we should have defended the right cause, to gain for our 
 selves ultimately from the good and wise no other praise than the 
 supreme Judge awarded to the friends of Job lor their partial 
 and uncharitable defence of his justice : My wrath is kindled 
 against you, for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is 
 right.* 
 
 * Job xlii. 7. Ed. 
 
ESSAY VII. 
 
 ON THE VULG-AK ERRORS RESPECTING- TAXES AND 
 TAXATION. 
 
 "Ovrep yap ol rag ty^e/le^f dijptJ/uevoi 
 
 "Orav IJ.KV rj hifMVT] nara^i], "kan 
 
 Edv 6 uvo) re K.CU HUTU rbv j36p(3opov KVKUGLV, 
 
 Alpovot KOL cv hafj.j3dvei, fjv TTJV TTO^LV Taparrris* 
 
 It is with you as with those that are hunting for eels. "While the pond is 
 clear and settled, they take nothing ; but if they stir up the mud high and 
 low, then they bring up the fish : and you succeed only as far as you can 
 set the state in tumult and confusion. 
 
 IN a passage in the last essay, I referred to the second part of 
 the " Rights of Man," in which Paine assures his readers that 
 their poverty is the consequence of taxation : that taxes are ren 
 dered necessary only by wars and state corruption ; that war and 
 corruption are entirely owing to monarchy and aristocracy ; that 
 "by a revolution and a brotherly alliance with the French repub 
 lic^ our land and sea forces, our revenue officers, and three fourths 
 of our pensioners, placemen, and other functionaries, would be 
 rendered superfluous ; and that a small part of the expenses thus 
 saved, would suffice for the maintenance of the poor, the infirm, 
 and the aged, throughout the kingdom. Would to God that this 
 infamous mode of misleading and flattering the loAver classes were 
 confined to the writings of Thomas Paine ! But how often do we 
 hear, even from the mouths of our parliamentary advocates for 
 popularity, the taxes stated as so much money actually lost to the 
 people ; and a nation in debt represented as the same both in 
 kind and consequences, as an individual tradesman on the brink 
 of bankruptcy ! It is scarcely possible, that these men should be 
 themselves deceived ; that they should be so ignorant of history 
 as not to know that the freest nations, being at the same time 
 * Aristoph. Equites, v. 864, <fec. Ed. 
 
ESSAY VII. 209 
 
 commercial, have been at all times the most heavily taxed : or 
 so void of common sense as not to see that there is no analogy in 
 the case of a tradesman and his creditors, to a nation indebted 
 to itself. Surely, a much fairer instance would be that of a hus 
 band and wife playing cards at the same table against each 
 other, where what the one loses the other gains. Taxes may be 
 indeed, and often are, injurious to a country: at no time, how 
 ever, from their amount merely, but from the time or injudicious 
 mode in which they are raised. A great statesman, lately de 
 ceased, in one of his anti-ministerial harangues against some pro 
 posed impost, said, the nation has been already bled in every 
 vein, and is faint with loss of blood. This blood, however, was 
 circulating in the mean time through the whole body of the 
 state, and what was received into one chamber of the heart was 
 instantly sent out again at the other portal. Had he wanted a 
 metaphor to convey the possible injuries of taxation, he might 
 have found one less opposite to the fact, in the known disease of 
 aneurism, or relaxation of the coats of particular vessels, by a dis 
 proportionate accumulation of blood in them, which sometimes 
 occurs when the circulation has been suddenly and violently 
 changed, arid causes helplessness, or even mortal stagnation, 
 though the total quantity of blood remains the same in the sys 
 tem at large. 
 
 But a fuller and fairer symbol of taxation, both in its possible 
 good and evil effects, is to be found in the evaporation of waters 
 from the surface of the planet. The sun may draw up the mois 
 ture from the river, the morass, and the ocean, to be given back 
 in genial showers to the garden, the pasture, and the corn-field ; 
 but it may likewise force away the moisture from the fields of 
 tillage, to drop it on the stagnant pool, the saturated swamp, or 
 the unprofitable sand- waste. The gardens in the south of Eu 
 rope supply, perhaps, a not less apt illustration of a system of 
 finance judiciously conducted, where the tanks or reservoirs 
 would represent the capital of a nation, and the hundred rills 
 hourly varying their channels and directions under the gardener s 
 spade, give a pleasing image of the dispersion of that capital 
 through the whole population, by the joint effect of taxation and 
 trade. For taxation itself is a part of commerce, and the gov 
 ernment may be fairly considered as a great manufacturing house, 
 carrying on in- different places, by means of its partners and over- 
 
210 THE FRIEND. 
 
 seers, the trades of the ship-builder, the clothier, the iron-founder, 
 and the like. 
 
 There are so many real evils, so many just causes of complaint 
 in the constitution and administration of governments, our own 
 not excepted, that it becomes the imperious duty of every well- 
 wisher of his country, to prevent, as much as in him lies, the 
 feelings and efforts of his compatriots from losing themselves on 
 a wrong scent. Whether a system of taxation is injurious or 
 beneficial on the whole, is to be known, not by the amount of 
 the sum taken from each individual, but by that which remains 
 behind. A war will doubtless cause a stagnation of certain 
 branches of trade, and severe temporary distress in the places 
 where those branches are carried on ; but are not the same ef 
 fects produced in time of peace by prohibitory edicts and com 
 mercial regulations of foreign powers, or by new rivals with su 
 perior advantages in other countries, or in different parts of the 
 same ? Bristol has, doubtless, been injured by the rapid pros 
 perity of Liverpool and its superior spirit of enterprise ; and the 
 vast machines of Lancashire have overwhelmed and rendered 
 hopeless the domestic industry of females in the cottages and 
 small farm-houses of "Westmoreland and Cumberland. But if 
 peace has its stagnation as well as war, does not war create or 
 re-enliven numerous branches of industry as well as peace ? Is 
 it not a fact, that not only our own military and naval forces, 
 but even a part of those of our enemy are armed and clothed by 
 British manufacturers ? It can not be doubted, that the whole 
 of our immense military force is better and more expensively 
 clothed, and both these and our sailors better fed than the same 
 persons would be in their individual capacities : and this forms 
 one of the real expenses of war. Not, I say, that so much more 
 money is raised, but that so much more of the means of comfort 
 able existence are consumed, than would otherwise have been. 
 But does not this, like all other luxury, act as a stimulus on the 
 producing classes, and this in the most useful manner, and on the 
 most important branches of production, on the tiller, on the gra 
 zier, the clothier and the maker of arms ? Had it been other 
 wise, is it possible that the receipts from the property tax should 
 have increased, instead of decreased, notwithstanding all the rage 
 of our enemy ? 
 
 Surely, never from the beginning of the world was such a trib- 
 
ESSAY VII. 211 
 
 ute of admiration paid by one power to another, as Buonaparte 
 within the last few years has paid to the British empire. With 
 all the natural and artificial powers of almost the whole of con 
 tinental Europe, with all the fences and obstacles of all public 
 and private morality broken down before him, with a mighty 
 empire of fifty millions of men, nearly two thirds of whom speak 
 the same language, and are as it were fused together by the in- 
 tensest nationality ; with this mighty and swarming empire, or 
 ganized in all its parts of war, and forming one huge camp, and 
 himself combining in his own person the two-fold power of mon 
 arch and commarider-in-chief ; with all these advantages, with 
 all these stupendous instruments and inexhaustible resources of 
 offence, this mighty being finds himself imprisoned by the enemy 
 whom he most hates, and would fain despise, insulted by every 
 wave that breaks upon his shores, and condemned to behold his 
 vast flotillas as worthless and idle as the sea-weed that rots 
 around their keels ! After years of haughty menace and expen 
 sive preparations for the invasion of an island, the trees and build 
 ings of which are visible from the roofs of his naval store-houses, 
 he is at length compelled to make open confession, t hat he pos 
 sesses one mean only of ruining Great Britain. And what is it ? 
 The ruin of his own enslaved subjects. To undermine the re 
 sources of one enemy, he reduces the continent of Europe to the 
 wretched state in which it was before the wide diffusions of trade 
 and commerce, deprives its inhabitants of comforts and advan 
 tages to which they and their fathers had been for more than a 
 century habituated, and -thus destroys, as far as his power ex 
 tends, a principal source of civilization, the origin of a middle 
 class throughout Christendom, and with it the true balance of 
 society, the parent of international law, the foster-nurse of gen 
 eral humanity, and, to sum up all in one, the main principle of 
 attraction and repulsion, by which the nations were rapidly, 
 though insensibly, drawn together into one system, and by which 
 alone they could combine the manifold blessings of distinct char 
 acter and national independence, with the needful stimulation 
 and general influences of intercommunity, and be virtually uni 
 ted, without being crushed together by conquest, in order to 
 waste away under the tabes and slow putrefaction of a universal 
 monarchy. This boasted pacificator of the world, this earthly 
 
212 THE FRIEND. 
 
 Providence,^ as his Roman Catholic bishops blasphemously call 
 him, professes to entertain no hope of purchasing the destruction 
 of Great Britain at a less price than that of the barbarism of all 
 Europe. By the ordinary war of government against govern 
 ment, fleets against fleets, arid armies against armies, he coiild 
 effect nothing. His fleets might as well have been built at his 
 own expense in our dockyards, as tribute offerings to the masters 
 of the ocean : whilst his army of England lay encamped on his 
 coasts like wolves baying the moon ! 
 
 Delightful to humane and contemplative minds was the idea 
 of countless individual efforts working together by a common in 
 stinct and to a common object, under the protection of an uitwrit- 
 ten code of religion, philosophy, and common interest, which made_ 
 peace and brotherhood co-exist with the most active hostility. 
 Not in the untamed plains of Tartary, but in the very bosom of 
 civilization, and himself indebted to its fostering care for his own 
 education and for all the means of his elevation and power, did 
 this genuine offspring of the old serpent warm himself into the 
 fiend-like resolve of waging war against mankind and the quiet 
 growth of- the world s improvement in an emphatic sense the 
 enemy of the human race. By these means only he deems Great 
 Britain assailable, a strong presumption, that our prosperity is 
 built on the common interest of mankind ; this he acknowledges 
 to be his only hope and in this hope he has been utterly baffled. 
 
 To what then do we owe our strength and our immunity ? To 
 the sovereignty of law, the incorruptiicss of its administration, 
 our national church, our religious sects, the purity, or at least 
 the decorum, of private morals, and the independence, activity, 
 and weight, of public opinion ? These and similar advantages 
 are doubtless the materials of the fortress, but what has been the 
 cement ? What has bound them together ? What has rendered 
 Great Britain, from the Orkneys to the rocks of Scilly, indeed 
 and with more than metaphorical propriety, a body politic, our 
 
 * It has been well remarked, that there is something far more shocking 
 in Buonaparte s pretensions to the gracious attributes of the Supreme Ru 
 ler, than in his most remorseless cruelties. There is a sort of wild gran 
 deur, not ungratifying to the imagination, in the answer of Timur Khan to 
 one who remonstrated with him on the inhumanity of his devastations : cur 
 me homincm putas, et non potius iram Dei in terris agentem ob pcrniciem 
 humani generis? Why do you deem me -a man, and not rather the incar 
 nate wrath of God acting on the earth for the ruin of mankind ? 
 
ESSAY VII. 213 
 
 roads, rivers, and canals being so truly the veins, arteries, and 
 nerves, of the state, that every pulse in the metropolis produces 
 a correspondent pulsation in the remotest village on its extreme 
 shores ? \Yhat made the stoppage of the national bank the con 
 versation of a day without causing one irregular throb, or the 
 stagnation of the commercial current, in the minutest vessel ? J 
 answer without hesitation, that the cause and mother principle 
 of this unexampled confidence, of this system of credit, which is 
 as much stronger than mere positive possessions, as the soul of 
 man is than his body, or as the force of a mighty mass in free 
 motion, than the pressure of its separate component parts in a 
 state of rest the main cause of this, I say, has been our national 
 debt. What its injurious effects on the literature, the morals, 
 and s religious principles of this country, have been, I shall here 
 after develop with the same boldness. But as to our political 
 strength and circumstantial prosperity, it is the national debt 
 which has wedded in indissoluble union all the interests of the 
 state, the landed with the commercial, and the man of independ 
 ent fortune with the stirring tradesman and reposing annuitant. 
 It is the national debt, which, by the rapid nominal rise in the 
 value of things, has made it impossible for any considerable num 
 ber of men to retain their own former comforts without joining 
 in the common industry, and adding to the stock of national pro 
 duce ; which thus first necessitates a general activity and* then 
 by the immediate and ample credit, which is never wanting to 
 him, who has any object on which his activity can employ itself, 
 gives each man the means not only of preserving but of increas 
 ing and multiplying all his former enjoyments, and all the sym 
 bols of the rank in w r hich he was bom. It is this which has 
 planted the naked hills and inclosed the bleak wastes in the low 
 lands of Scotland not less than in the wealthier districts of South 
 Britain : it is this, which, leaving all the other causes of patriot 
 ism and national fervor undiminished and uninjured, has added 
 to our public duties the same feeling of necessity, the same sense 
 of immediate self-interest, which in other countries actuates the 
 members of a single family in their conduct toward each other. 
 
 Somewhat more than a year ago, I happened to be on a visit 
 with a friend, in a small market-town* in the south-west of Eng 
 land, when one of the company turned the conversation to the 
 * Nether Stowcy. Ed. 
 
214 THE FRIEND. 
 
 weight of taxes and the consequent hardness of the times. 1 
 answered, that if the taxes were a real weight, and that in pro 
 portion to their amount, we must have been ruined long ago : for 
 Mr. Hume, who had proceeded, as on a self-evident axiom, on 
 the hypothesis, that the debt of a nation was the same as the 
 debt of an individual, had declared our ruin arithmetically de 
 monstrable, if the national debt increased beyond a certain sum. 
 Since his time it has more than quintupled that sum, and yet 
 True, answered my friend, but the principle might be right, 
 though he might have been mistaken in the time. But still, I 
 rejoined, if the principle were right, the nearer we carne to that 
 given point, and. the greater and the more active the pernicious 
 cause became, the more manifest would its effects be. We might 
 not be absolutely ruined, but our embarrassments would increase 
 in some proportion to their cause. Whereas instead of being 
 poorer and poorer, we are richer and richer. Will any man in 
 his senses contend, that the actual labor and produce of the 
 country has not only been decupled within half a century, but in 
 creased so prodigiously beyond that decuple as to make six hun 
 dred millions a less weight to us than fifty millions were in the 
 days of our grandfathers ? But if it really be so, to what can we 
 attribute this stupendous progression of national improvement, 
 but to that system of credit and paper currency, of which the na 
 tional* debt is both the reservoir and the water- works ? A con 
 stant cause should have constant effects ; but if you deem that 
 this is some anomaly, some strange exception to the general rule, 
 explain its mode of operation, make it comprehensible, how a 
 cause acting on a whole nation can produce a regular and rapid 
 increase of prosperity to a certain point, and then all at once pass 
 from an angel of light into a daemon of destruction ! That an in 
 dividual house may live more and more luxuriously upon bor 
 rowed funds, and that when the suspicions of the creditors are 
 awakened, and their patience exhausted, the luxurious spend 
 thrift may all at once exchange his palace for a prison this I 
 can understand perfectly : for I understand, whence the luxuries 
 could be produced for the consumption of the individual house, 
 and who the creditors might be, and that it might be both their 
 inclination and their interest to demand the debt, and to punish 
 the insolvent debtor. But who are a nation s creditors ? The 
 answer is, every man to every man. Whose possible interest 
 
ESSAY VII. . 215 
 
 could it be either to demand the principal, or to refuse his share 
 toward the means of paying the^ interest ? Not the merchant s : 
 for he would but provoke a crash of bankruptcy, in which his 
 own house would as necessarily be included, as a single card in 
 a house of cards. Not the landholder s ; for in the general de 
 struction of all credit, how could he obtain payment for the pro 
 duce of his estates ? Not to mention the improbability that he 
 would remain the undisturbed possessor in so direful a concussion 
 not to mention that on him must fall the whole weight of the 
 public necessities not to mention, that from the merchant s 
 credit depends the ever-increasing value of his land and the 
 readiest means of improving it. Neither could it be the laborer s 
 interest ; for he must be either thrown out of employ, and lie 
 like the fish in the bed of a river from which the water has been 
 diverted, or have the value of his labor reduced to nothing by the 
 irruption of eager competitors. But least of all could it be the 
 wish of the lovers of liberty which must needs perish or be sus 
 pended, either by the horrors of anarchy, or by the absolute 
 power, with which the government must be invested, in order to 
 prevent them. In short, with the exception of men desperate 
 from guilt or debt, or mad with the blackest ambition, there is 
 no class or description of men who can have the least interest in 
 producing or permitting a bankruptcy. 
 
 If then, neither experience has acquainted us with any na 
 tional impoverishment or embarrassment from the increase of 
 national debt, nor theory renders such efforts comprehensible ; 
 for the predictions of Hume went on the false assumption, that a 
 part only of the nation was interested in the preservation of the 
 public credit ; on what authority are we to ground our appre 
 hensions ? Does history record a single nation, in which rela 
 tively to taxation there were no privileged or exempted classes, 
 in which there were no compulsory prices of labor, and in which 
 the interests of all the different classes and all the different dis 
 tricts, were mutually dependent and vitally co-organized, as in 
 Great Britain, has history, I say, recorded a single instance of 
 such a nation being ruined or dissolved by the weight of taxa 
 tion ? In France there was no public credit, no communion of 
 interests ; its unprincipled government and the productive and 
 taxable classes, were as two individuals with separate interests. 
 Its bankruptcy and the consequences of it are sufficiently com- 
 
210 THE FRIEND. 
 
 prehensible. Yet the cahicrs, or the instructions and complaints 
 sent to the National Assembly, from the towns and provinces of 
 France, an immeijse mass of documents indeed, but without ex 
 amination and patient perusal of which, no man is entitled to 
 write a history of the French revolution, these proved, beyond 
 contradiction, that the amount of the taxes was one only, and 
 that a subordinate cause, of the revolutionary movement. In 
 deed, if the amount of the taxes could be disjoined from the mode 
 of raising them; it might be fairly denied to have been a cause at 
 all. Holland was taxed as heavily and as equally as ourselves ; 
 but was it by taxation that Holland was reduced to its present 
 miseries ? 
 
 The mode in which taxes are supposed to act on the market- 
 ableness of our manufactures in foreign marts, I shall examine 
 on some future occasion, when I shall endeavor to explain in a 
 more satisfactory way than has been hitherto done, to my appre 
 hension at least, the real mode in which taxes act, and how and 
 why, and to what extent, they affect the wealth, and what is of 
 more consequence, the well-being of a nation. But in the pres 
 ent exigency, when the safety of the nation depends, on the one 
 hand, on the sense which the people . at large have of the com 
 parative excellences of the laws and government, and on the 
 firmness and wisdom of the legislators and enlightened classes in 
 detecting, exposing, and removing its many particular abuses 
 and corruptions on the other, right views on this subject of taxa 
 tion are of such especial importance ; and I have besides in my 
 inmost nature such a loathing of factious falsehoods and mob- 
 sycophancy, that is, the flattering of the multitude by informing 
 against their betters ; that I can not but revert to that point of 
 the subject from which 1 began, namely, that the weight of taxes 
 is to be calculated not by what is paid, but by what is left. 
 What matters it to a man, that he pays six times more taxes 
 than his father did, if, notwithstanding, he with the same por 
 tion of exertion enjoys twice the comforts which his father did? 
 Now this I affirm to be the case in general, throughout England, 
 according to all the facts which I have collected during an ex 
 amination of years, wherever I have travelled, and wherever I 
 have been resident. I do not speak of Ireland, or the Lowlands 
 of Scotland : and if I may trust to what I myself saw and heard 
 there, I must even except the Highlands. In the conversation 
 
ESSAY VII. 217 
 
 which I have spoken of as taking- place in the south-west of 
 England, by the assistance of one or other of the company, we 
 went through every family in the town and neighborhood, and 
 my assertion was found completely accurate, though the place 
 had no one advantage over others, and many disadvantages, 
 that heavy one in particular, the non-residence and frequent 
 change of its rectors, the living being always given to one of 
 the canons of Windsor, and resigned on the acceptance of better 
 preferment. It was even asserted, and not only asserted but 
 proved, by my friend,* w4io has from his earliest youth devoted 
 a strong original understanding, and a heart warm and benevo 
 lent even to enthusiasm, to the service of the poor ^nd the labor 
 ing class, that every sober laborer, in that part of* England? at 
 least, who should not marry till thirty, might, without any hard 
 ship or extreme self-denial, commence housekeeping at that age, 
 with from a hundred to a hundred and twenty pounds belonging 
 to him. I have no doubt, that on seeing this essay, my friend 
 will communicate to me the proof in detail. But the price of 
 labor in the south-west of England is full one third less than in 
 the greater number, if not all, of the northern counties. What 
 then is wanting ? Not the repeal of taxes, but the increased ac 
 tivity both of the gentry and clergy of the land, in securing the 
 instruction of the lower classes. A system of education is want 
 ing, such a system as that discovered, and to the blessings of 
 thousands realized, by Dr. Bell, which I never am, or can be, 
 weary of praising, while my heart retains any spark of regard 
 for human nature, or of reverence for human virtue ; a system, 
 by which in the very act of receiving knowledge, the best vir 
 tues and most useful qualities of the moral character are awa 
 kened, developed, and formed into habits. Were there a Bishop 
 of Durham no matter whether a temporal or a spiritual lord 
 in every county or half-county, and a clergyman enlightened with 
 the views, and animated with the spirit, of Dr. Bell, in every 
 parish, we might bid defiance to the present weight of taxes, 
 and boldly challenge the whole world to show a peasantry as 
 well fed and clothed as the English, or with equal chances of 
 improving their situation, and of securing an old age of repose 
 and comfort to a life of cheerful industry. 
 
 I will add one other anecdote, as it demonstrates incontrover- 
 
 * Thomas Poole. Ed. 
 VOL. II. 
 
218 THE FRIEND. 
 
 tibly the error of the vulgar opinion, that taxes make things 
 really dear, taking in the whole of a man s expenditure. A friend 
 of mine, who has passed some years in America, was questioned 
 by an American tradesman, in one of their cities of the second 
 class, concerning the names and number of our taxes and rates. 
 The answer seemed perfectly to astound him : and he exclaimed, 
 " How is it possible that men can live in such a country ? In 
 this land of liberty we never see the face of a tax-gatherer, nor 
 hear of a duty, except in our sea-ports." My friend, who was 
 perfect master of the question, made semblance of turning oft the 
 conversation to another subject : and then, without any apparent 
 reference to the former topic, asked the American, for what sum 
 he thought a man could live in such and such a style, with so 
 many servants, in a house of such dimensions and such a situa 
 tion (still keeping in his rnind the situation of a thriving and 
 respectable shopkeeper and householder in different parts of Eng 
 land), first supposing him to reside in Philadelphia or New York, 
 and then in some town of secondary importance. Having re 
 ceived a detailed answer to these questions, he proceeded to con 
 vince the American, that notwithstanding all our taxes, a man 
 might live in the same style, but with incomparably greater 
 comforts, on the same income in London as in New York, and on 
 a considerably less income in Exeter or Bristol, than in any 
 American provincial town of the same relative importance. It 
 would be insulting my readers to discuss on how much less a 
 person may vegetate or brutalize in the back settlements of the 
 republic, than he could live as a man, as a rational and social 
 being, in an English village ; and it would be wasting time to 
 inform him, that where men are comparatively few, and unoc 
 cupied land is in inexhaustible abundance, the laborer and com 
 mon mechanic must needs receive not only nominally, but really 
 higher wages than in a populous and fully occupied country. 
 But that the American laborer is therefore happier, or even in 
 possession of more comforts and conveniences of life than a sober 
 or industrious English laborer or mechanic, remains to be proved. 
 In conducting the comparison, we must not however exclude the 
 operation of moral causes, when these causes are not accidental, 
 but arise out of the nature of the country, and the constitution of 
 the government and society. This being the case, take away 
 from the American s wages all the taxes which his insolence, 
 
ESSAY VII. 219 
 
 sloth, and attachment to spirituous liquors impose on him, and 
 judge of the remainder by his house, his household furniture, and 
 utensils and if I have not been grievously deceived by those 
 whose veracity and good sense I have found unquestionable in all 
 other respects, the cottage of an honest English husbandman, in 
 the service of an enlightened and liberal farmer, who is paid for 
 his labor at the price usual in Yorkshire or Northumberland, 
 would in the mind of a man in the same rank of life, who had 
 seen a true account of America, make no impressions favorable 
 to emigration. This, however, I confess, is a balance of morals 
 rather than of circumstances : it proves, however, that where 
 foresight and good morals exist, the taxes do not stand in the 
 way of an industrious man s comforts. 
 
 Dr. Price almost succeeded in persuading the English nation, 
 for it is a curious fact, that the fancy of our calamitous situa 
 tion is a sort of necessary sauce without which our real prosper 
 ity would become insipid to us Dr. Price, I say, alarmed the 
 country with pretended proofs that the island was in a rapid state 
 of depopulation ; that England at the Revolution had been, 
 Heaven knows how much more populous ; and that in Q,ueen 
 Elizabeth s time, or about the Reformation, the number of in 
 habitants in England, might have been greater than even at 
 the Revolution. My old mathematical master, a man of an un 
 commonly clear head, answered this blundering book of the 
 worthy doctor s, and left not a stone unturned of the pompous 
 cenotaph in which the effigy of the still living and bustling Eng 
 lish prosperity lay interred. And yet so much more suitable was 
 the doctor s book to the purposes of faction, and to the November 
 mood of what is called the public, that Mr. Wales s pamphlet, 
 though a master-piece of perspicacity as well as perspicuity, was 
 scarcely heard of. This tendency to political nightmares in our 
 countrymen, reminds me of a superstition, or rather nervous dis 
 ease, not uncommon in the Highlands of Scotland, in which men, 
 though broad awake, imagine they see themselves lying dead at 
 a small distance from them. The act of Parliament for ascer 
 taining the population of the empire has laid forever this uneasy 
 ghost : and now, forsooth, we are on the brink of ruin from the 
 excess of population, ani he who would prevent the poor from 
 rotting away in disease, misery, and wickedness, is an enemy to 
 his country. A lately-deceased miser, of immense wealth, is re- 
 
220 THE FKIEND. 
 
 ported to have been so delighted with this splendid discovery, as 
 to have offered a handsome annuity to the author, in part of pay 
 ment for this new and welcome piece of heart-armor. This, how 
 ever, we may deduce from the fact of our increased population, 
 that if clothing and food had actually become dearer in propor 
 tion to the means of procuring them, it would be as absurd to as 
 cribe this effect to increased taxation, as to attribute the scanti 
 ness of fare, at a public ordinary, to the landlord s bill, when 
 twice the usual number of guests had sat down to the same num 
 ber of dishes. But the fact is notoriously otherwise, and every 
 man has the means of discovering it in his own house and in 
 that of his neighbors, provided that he makes the proper allow 
 ances for the disturbing forces of individual vice and imprudence. 
 If this be the case, I put it to the consciences of our literary 
 demagogues, whether a lie, for the purposes of creating public 
 disunion and dejection, is not as much a lie, as one for the pur 
 pose of exciting discord among individuals. I entreat my readers 
 to recollect, that the present question does not concern the effects 
 of taxation on the public independence and on the supposed bal 
 ance of the three constitutional powers, from which said balance, 
 as well as from the balance of trade, I own, 1 have never been 
 able to elicit one ray of common sense. That the nature of our 
 constitution has been greatly modified by the funding system, I do 
 not deny ; whether for good or for evil, 011 the whole, will form 
 part of my essay on the British constitution as it actually exists. 
 
 There are many and great public evils, all of which are to be 
 lamented, some of which may, and ought to, be removed, and 
 none of which can consistently with wisdom or honesty be kept 
 concealed from the public. As far as these originate in false 
 principles, or in the contempt or neglect of right ones, and as such 
 belonging to the plan of The Friend, I shall not hesitate to make 
 known rny opinions concerning them, with the same fearless sim 
 plicity with which I have endeavored to expose the errors of dis 
 content and the artifices of faction. But for the very reason that 
 there are great evils, the more does it behoove us not to open out 
 on a false scent. 
 
 I will conclude this essay with the examination of an article 
 in a provincial paper of a recent date, \\jjiich is now lying before 
 ine ; the accidental perusal of which occasioned the whole of the 
 preceding remarks. In order to guard against a possible mistake, 
 
ESSAY VII. 221 
 
 I must premise, that I have not the most distant intention of de 
 fending- the plan or conduct of our late expeditions, and should be 
 grossly calumniated if I were represented as an advocate for 
 carelessness or prodigality in the management of the public purse. 
 The public money may or may not have been culpably wasted. 
 I confine myself entirely to the general falsehood of the principle 
 in the article here cited ; for I am convinced, that any hopes of 
 reform originating in such notions, must end in disappointment 
 and public mockery. 
 
 " ONLY A FEW MILLIONS! 
 
 " "We have unfortunately of late been so much accustomed to read of 
 millions being spent in one expedition, and millions being spent in another, 
 that a comparative insignificance is attached to an immense sum of money, 
 by calling it only a few millions. Perhaps some of our readers may have 
 their judgment a little improved by making a few calculations, like those 
 below, on the millions which it has been estimated will be lostj to the nation 
 by the late expedition to Holland ; and then, perhaps, they will be led to 
 reflect on the many millions which are annually expended in expeditions, 
 which have almost invariably ended in absolute loss. 
 
 "In the first place, with less money than it cost the nation to take 
 "VValchcren, <fcc. with the view of taking or destroying the French fleet at 
 Antwerp, consisting of nin^ sail of the line, we could have completely built 
 and equipped, ready for sea, a fleet of upwards of one hundred sail of the line. 
 
 " Or, secondly, a new town could be built in every county of England, 
 and each town consist of upwards of 1000 substantial houses for a less sum. 
 
 " Or, thirdly, it would have been enough to give 100^. to 2000 poor fami 
 lies in every county in England and Wales. 
 
 "Or, fourthly, it would be more than sufficient to give a handsome 
 marriage portion to 200,000 young women, who probably, if they had even 
 less than 50/. would not long remain unsolicited to enter the happy state. 
 
 " Or, fifthly, a much less sum would enable the legislature to establish a 
 life boat in every port in the United Kingdom, and provide for ten or 
 twelve men to be kept in constant attendance on each ; and 100,000^. could 
 be funded, the interest of "which to be applied in premiums to those who 
 should prove to. be particularly active in saving lives from wrecks, <fec. and 
 to provide for the widows and children of those men who may accidentally 
 lose their lives in the cause of humanity. 
 
 "This interesting appropriation of ten millions sterling, may lead our 
 readers to think of the great good that can be done by only a few millions." 
 
 The exposure of this calculation will require but a few sen 
 tences. These ten millions were expended, I presume, in arms, 
 artillery, ammunition, clothing, provision, and the like, for about 
 one hundred and twenty thousand British subjects : and I pre- 
 
222 THE FRIEND. 
 
 sume that all these consumables were produced by, and pur 
 chased from, other British subjects. Now during the building of 
 these new towns for a thousand inhabitants each in every county, 
 or the distribution of the hundred pound bank notes to the two 
 thousand poor families, were the industrious ship-builders, clothiers, 
 charcoal-burners, gunpowder-makers, gunsmiths, cutlers, cannon- 
 founders, tailors, and shoemakers, to be left unemployed and starv 
 ing ; or our brave soldiers and sailors to have remained without 
 food and raiment ? And where is the proof, that these ten 
 millions, which, observe, all remain in the kingdom, do not cir 
 culate as beneficially in the one way as they would in the other ? 
 Which is better ? To give money to the idle, houses to those 
 who do not ask for them, and towns to counties which have 
 already perhaps too many, or to afford opportunity to the indus 
 trious to earn their bread, and to the enterprising to better their 
 circumstances, and perhaps to found new families of independent 
 proprietors ? The only mode, not absolutely absurd, of consider 
 ing the subject, would be, not by the calculation of the money ex 
 pended, but of the labor of which the money is a symbol. But 
 then the question would be removed altogether from the expedi 
 tion : for assuredly, neither the armies were raised, nor the fleets 
 built or manned for the sake of conquering the Isle of Walcheren, 
 nor would a single regiment have been disbanded, nor a single 
 sloop paid off, though the Isle of "Walcheren had never existed. 
 The whole dispute, therefore, resolves itself into this one ques 
 tion : whether our soldiers and sailors would not be better em 
 ployed in making canals for instance, or cultivating waste lands, 
 than in fighting or learning to fight ; and the tradesman, in 
 making gray coats instead of red or blue and ploughshares 
 instead of arms. When I reflect on the state of China and the 
 moral character of the Chinese, I dare riot positively affirm that 
 it would be better. When the fifteen millions, which form our 
 present population, shall have attained to the same general purity 
 of morals and shall be capable of being governed by the same 
 admirable discipline, as the society of the Friends, I doubt not 
 that we should be all Quakers in this as in the other points of 
 their moral doctrine. But were this transfer of employment 
 desirable, is it practicable at present, is it in our power ? These 
 men know, that it is not. What then does all their reasoning 
 amount to ? Nonsense. 
 
ESSAY VIII. 
 
 I have not intentionally either hidden or disguised the truth, like an ad 
 vocate ashamed of his client, or a bribed accomptant who falsifies the quo 
 tient to make the bankrupt s ledgers square with the creditor s inventory. 
 My conscience forbids the use of falsehood and the arts of concealment : 
 and were it otherwise, yet I am persuaded, that a system which has pro 
 duced and protected so great prosperity, can not stand in need of them. If 
 therefore honesty and the knowledge of the whole truth be the things you 
 aim at, you will find my principles suited to your ends : and as I like not 
 the democratic forms, so am I not fond of any others above the rest. That 
 a succession of wise and godly men may be secured to the nation in the 
 highest power, is that to which I have directed your attention in this essay, 
 which if you will read, perhaps you may see the error of those principles 
 which have led you into errors of practice. I wrote it purposely for the 
 use of the multitude of well-meaning people, that are tempted in these 
 times to usurp authority and meddle with government before they have 
 any call from duty or tolerable understanding of its principles. I never 
 intended it for learned men versed in politics ; but for such as will be prac 
 titioners before they have been students. 
 
 BAXTER S Holy Commonwealth, or Political Aphorisms. 
 
 THE metaphysical, or as I have proposed to call them, meta- 
 political reasoning hitherto discussed, belong to government in 
 the abstract. But there is a second class of reasoners who 
 argue for a change in our government from former usage, and 
 from statutes still in force, or which have heen repealed, so 
 these writers affirm either through a corrupt influence, or to 
 ward off temporary hazard or inconvenience. This class, which 
 is rendered illustrious by the names of many intelligent and vir 
 tuous patriots, are advocates for reform in the literal sense of the 
 word. They wish to bring back the government of Great Brit 
 ain to a certain form, which they affirm it to have once pos 
 sessed ; and would melt the bullion anew in order to recast it in 
 the original mould. 
 
 The answer to all arguments of this nature is obvious, and to 
 my understanding appears decisive. These reformers assume 
 
224 THE FRIEND. 
 
 the character of legislators or of advisers of the legislature, not 
 that of law judges or of appellants to courts of law. Sundry 
 statutes concerning the rights of electors, we will suppose, still 
 exist ; so likewise do sundry statutes on other subjects, on 
 witchcraft for instance^ which change of circumstances have 
 rendered obsolete, or increased information shown to be absurd. 
 It is evident, therefore, that the expediency of the regulations 
 prescribed by them, and their suitableness to the existing cir 
 cumstances of the kingdom, must first be proved ; and on this 
 proof must be rested all rational claims for the enforcement of 
 the statutes that have not, no less than for the re-enacting of 
 those that have, been repealed. If the authority of the men 
 who first enacted the laws in question, is to weigh with us, it 
 must be on the presumption that they were wise men. But the 
 wisdom of legislation consists in the adaptation of laws to cir 
 cumstances. If then it can be proved, that the circumstances, 
 under which those laws were enacted, no longer exist ; and that 
 other circumstances altogether different, and in some instances 
 opposite, have taken their place ; we have the best grounds for 
 supposing, that if the men were now alive, they would not pass 
 the same statutes. In other words, the spirit of the statute in 
 terpreted by the intention of the legislator would annul the letter 
 of it. It is not indeed impossible, that by a rare felicity of ac 
 cident the same law may apply to two sets of circumstances. 
 But surely the presumption is, that regulations well adapted for 
 the manners, the social distinctions, and the state of property, of 
 opinion, and of external relations of England in the reign of 
 Alfred, or even in that of Edward I., will not be well suited to 
 Great Britain at the close of the reign of George III. For in 
 stance : at the time when the greater part of the cottagers and 
 inferior farmers were in a state of villenage, when Sussex alone 
 contained seven thousand, and the Isle of Wight twelve hundred, 
 families of bondsmen, it was the law of the land that every free 
 man should vote in the assembly of the nation personally or by 
 his representative. An act of Parliament in the year 1660 con 
 firmed what a concurrence of causes had previously effected : 
 every Englishman is now born free, the laws of the land are the 
 birthright of every native, and with the exception of a few 
 
 * Repealed now ; but many other equally obsolete acts remaiii on the 
 etatute book, as illustrations of the principle in the text. Ed, 
 
ESSAY VIII. 225. 
 
 honorary privileges all classes obey the same laws.* Now, 
 argues one pf our political writers, it being made the constitution 
 of the land by our Saxon ancestors, that every freeman, should 
 have a vote, and all Englishmen being now born free, therefore, 
 by the constitution of the land, every Englishman has now a 
 right to a vote. How shall we reply to this without breach of 
 that respect, to which the reasoner at least, if not the reasoning, 
 is entitled ? If it be the definition of a pun, that it is the con 
 fusion of two different meanings under the same or some similar 
 .sound, \ve might almost characterize this argument as being 
 grounded on a grave pun. Our ancestors established the right of 
 voting in a particular class of men, forming at that time the 
 middle rank of society, and known to be all of them, or almost 
 all, legal proprietors and these were then called the freemen of 
 England : therefore they established it in the lowest classes of 
 society, in those who possess no property, because these two are 
 now called by the same name ! Under a similar pretext, 
 grounded on the same precious logic, a Mameluke Bey extorted 
 a large contribution from the Egyptian Jews : " These books, 
 the Pentateuch, are authentic?" "Yes!" "Well, the debt 
 then is acknowledged < and now the receipt, or the money, or 
 your heads ! The Jews borrowed a large treasure from the 
 Egyptians ; but you are the Jews, and on you, therefore, I call 
 for the re-payment." Besides, if a law is to be interpreted by the 
 known intention of its makers, the Parliament in 1660, which 
 declared all natives of England freemen, but neither altered nor 
 meant thereby to alter the limitations of the right of election, 
 did to all intents and purposes except that right from the com 
 mon privileges of Englishmen, as Englishmen. 
 
 A moment s reflection may convince us, that every single stat 
 ute is made under the knowledge of all the other laws, with 
 which it is meant to co-exist, and by which its action is to be 
 
 * The reference is to the abolition of the military tenures at the Res 
 toration. " For at length the military tenures, with all their heavy ap 
 pendages (having during the usurpation been discontinued) were destroyed 
 at one blow by the statute 12 Car. II. c. 24, which enacts that * .* * 
 all sorts of tenures, held by the king or others, be turned into free and 
 common socage ; save only tenures in frank-almoign, &c. A statute, which 
 was a greater acquisition to the civil property of this kingdom than even 
 magna charta itself." Blackst. Comm. II. c. 5. Ed. 
 
226 THE FRIEND. 
 
 modified and determined. In the legislative as in the religious 
 code the text must not be taken without the context. Now, I 
 think, we may safely leave it to the reformers themselves to make 
 choice between the civil and political privileges of Englishmen 
 at present, considered as one sum total, and those of our ances 
 tors in any former period of our history, considered as another, on 
 the old principle, take one and leave the other ; but whichever 
 you take, take it all or none." Laws seldom become obsolete as 
 long as they are both useful and practicable ; but should there 
 be an exception in any given law, there is no other way of reviv 
 ing its validity but by convincing the existing legislature of its 
 undiminished practicability and expedience ; which in all essen 
 tial points is the same as the recommending of a new law. And 
 this leads me to the third class of the advocates of reform, those, 
 namely, who leaving ancient statutes to lawyers and historians, 
 and universal principles with the demonstrable deductions from 
 them to the schools of logic, mathematics, theology, and ethics, 
 rest all their measures, which they wish to see adopted, wholly 
 on their expediency. Consequently, they must hold themselves 
 prepared to give such proof, as the nature of comparative expe 
 diency admits, and to bring forward such evidence, as experience 
 and the logic of probability can supply, that the plans which 
 they recommend for adoption, are ; first, practicable ; secondly, 
 suited to the existing circumstances ; and lastly, necessary .or at 
 least requisite, and such as will enable the government to accom 
 plish more perfectly the ends for which it was instituted. These 
 are the three indispensable conditions of all prudent change, the 
 credentials, with which wisdom never fails to furnish her public 
 envoys. Whoever brings forward a measure that combines this 
 threefold excellence, whether in the cabinet, the senate, or by 
 means of the press, merits emphatically the title of a patriotic 
 statesman. Neither are they without a fair claim to respectful 
 attention as state-counsellors, who fully aware of these conditions, 
 and with a due sense of the difficulty of fulfilling them, employ 
 their time and talents in making the attempt. An imperfect 
 plan is not necessarily a useless plan : and in a complex enigma 
 the greatest ingenuity is not always shown by him who first gives 
 the complete solution. The dwarf sees farther than the giant, 
 when he has the giant s shoulders to mount on. 
 
 Thus, as perspicuously as I could, I have exposed the erro- 
 
ESSAY VIII. 227 
 
 neous principles of political philosophy, and pointed out the one 
 only ground on which the constitution of governments can be 
 either condemned or justified by wise men. 
 
 If I interpret aright the signs of the times, that branch of poli 
 tics which relates to the necessity and practicability of infusing 
 new life into our legislature, as the best means of securing talent 
 and wisdom in the cabinet, will shortly occupy the public atten 
 tion with a paramount interest. I would gladly, therefore, sug 
 gest the proper state of feeling, and the right preparatory notions 
 with which this disquisition should be entered upon : and I do 
 not know how I can efi ect this more naturally, than by relating 
 the facts and circumstances which influenced my own mind. I 
 can scarcely be accused of egotism, as in the communications and 
 conversations which I am about to mention as having occurred to 
 me during my residence abroad, I am no otherwise the hero of 
 the tale, than as being the passive receiver or auditor. 
 
 To examine any thing wisely, two conditions are requisite *. 
 first, a distinct notion of the desirable ends, in the complete ac 
 complishment of which would consist the perfection of such a 
 thing, or its ideal excellence ; and, secondly, a calm and kindly 
 mode of feeling, without which we shall hardly fail either to 
 overlook, or not to make due allowances for, the circumstances 
 which prevent these ends from being all perfectly realized in the 
 particular thing which we are to examine. For instance, we 
 must have a general notion what a man can be and ought to be, 
 before we can fitly proceed to determine on the merits or demerits 
 of any one individual. For the examination of our own govern 
 ment, I prepared my mind, therefore, by a short catechism, which 
 I shall communicate in the next essay, and on which the letter 
 and anecdotes that follow, will, I flatter myself, be found an 
 amusing, if not an instructive, commentary. 
 
ESSAY IX. 
 
 Hoc potissinmm pactofelicem ac magnum regem se fore judicans ; non si 
 quam plurimis sed si quam optimis impcret. Proinde par-urn esse putat 
 justis prcssidiis regnum suum mitniisse, nisi id-cm viris eruditions juxta ac 
 vita; intcgritate prcccellentibus ditet atque honcstet. Nimiruin intelligit liccc 
 deinum esse vera regni decora, has veras opes : hanc veram et nullis itnqaam 
 sccculis cessuram gloriam. Erasmi Poncherio, Episc. Parisien. Epis-tola. 
 
 Judging that he will have employed the most effectual means of being a 
 happy and power f ul king, not by governing the most numerous but the 
 most moral people. He deems it of small sufficiency to have protected the 
 country by fleets and garrison, unless he shall at the same time enrich and 
 illustrate it with men of eminent learning and sanctity. For these verily 
 he conceives to be the true ornaments and wealth of his kingdom, these 
 its only genuine and imperishable glories. 
 
 IN what -do all states agree ? A number of men exert 
 powers in union. "Wherein do they differ ? First, in the qual 
 ity and quantity of the powers. One state possesses chemists, 
 mechanists, mechanics of all kinds, men of science ; the arte of 
 war and peace ; and its citizens naturally strong- and of habitual 
 courage. Another state may possess none or a few only of these, 
 or the same more imperfectly. Or of two states possessing the 
 same in equal perfection the one is more populous than the other r 
 as in the instance of France and Switzerland. Secondly, in the 
 more or less perfect union of these powers. Compare Mr. 
 Leckie s valuable and authentic documents respecting the state 
 of Sicily with the preceding essay on taxation. Thirdly, in the 
 greater or less activity of exertion. Think of the papal state 
 and its silent metropolis, and then of the county of Lancaster 
 and the towns of Manchester and Liverpool. "What is the con 
 dition indispensable to the exertion of powers in union by a num 
 ber of men? A government. What are the ends of govern 
 ment ? They are of two kinds, negative and positive. The 
 negative ends of government are the protection of life, of per 
 sonal freedom, of property, of reputation, and of religion, from 
 foreign and from domestic attacks. The positive ends are ; 
 
ESSAY IX, 229 
 
 First, to make the* means of subsistence more easy to each indi 
 vidual : Secondly, that in addition to the necessaries of life he 
 should derive from the union and division of labor a share of the 
 comforts and conveniences which humanize and ennoble his na 
 ture ; and at the same time the power of perfecting himself in 
 his own branch of industry by having- those things which he 
 needs provided for him by others among his fellow-citizens ; the 
 tools and raw or manufactured materials necessary for his own 
 employment being included. I knew a profound mathematician 
 in Sicily, who had devoted a full third of his life to the discovery 
 of the longitude, and who had convinced not only himself but 
 the principal mathematicians of Messina and Palermo that he 
 had succeeded : but neither throughout Sicily nor Naples could 
 he find a single artist capable of constructing the instrument 
 which he had invented :* Thirdly, the hope of bettering his 
 own condition and that of his children. The civilized man gives 
 up those stimulants of hope and fear which constitute the chief 
 charm of the savage life : and yet his Maker has distinguished 
 him from the brute that perishes, by making hope an instinct of 
 his nature, and an indispensable condition of his moral and in 
 tellectual progression. But a natural instinct constitutes a natu 
 ral right, as far as its gratification is compatible with the equal 
 rights of others. Hence our ancestors classed those who were 
 bound to the soil (adscriptitii gleb<x) and incapable by law of 
 altering their condition from that of their parents, as bondsmen 
 or villeins, however advantageously they might otherwise be sit 
 uated. Reflect on the direful effects of castes in Hindostan, and 
 then transfer yourself in fancy to an English cottage, 
 
 * The good old man, who is poor, old, and blind, universally esteemed 
 for the innocence and austerity of his life not less than for his learning, and 
 yet universally neglected, except by persons almost as poor as himself, 
 strongly reminded me of a German epigram on Kepler, which may be thus 
 translated : 
 
 No mortal spirit yet had clomb so high 
 As Kepler yet his country saw him die 
 For very want ! the minds alone he fed, 
 . And so the bodies left him without bread. 
 
 The good old man presented me with the book in which he has described 
 and demonstrated his invention : and I should with great pleasure transmit 
 it to any mathematician who would feel an interest in examining it and 
 communicating his opinion on its merits. 
 
230 THE FRIEND. 
 
 Where o er the cradled infant bending 
 Hope has lix d her wishful gaze, 
 
 and the fond mother dreams of her child s future fortunes. Who 
 knows but he may come home a rich merchant, like such a one, 
 or be a bishop or a judge ? The prizes arc indeed few and rare, 
 but still they are possible : and the hope is universal, and per 
 haps occasions more happiness than even its fulfilment : Lastly, 
 the development of those faculties which are essential to his 
 human nature by the knowledge of his moral and religious du 
 ties, and the increase of his intellectual powers in as great a de 
 gree as is compatible with the other ends of social union, and 
 does not involve a contradiction. The poorest Briton possesses 
 much and important knowledge, which he would not have had, 
 if Luther, Calvin, Newton, and their compeers had not existed; 
 but it is evident that the means of science and learning could 
 not exist, if all men had a right to be made profound mathema 
 ticians or men of extensive erudition. Still instruction is one of 
 the ends of government ; for it is that only which makes the 
 abandonment of the savage state an absolute duty : and that 
 constitution is the best, under which the average sum of useful 
 knowledge is the greatest, and the causes that awaken and en 
 courage talent and genius, the most powerful and various. 
 
 These were rny preparatory notions. The influences under 
 which I proceeded to re-examine our own constitution, were the 
 following, which I give, not exactly as they occurred, but in the 
 order in which they will be illustrative of the different articles of 
 the preceding paragraph. That we are better and happier than 
 others is indeed no reason for our not becoming still better ; 
 especially as with states, as well as individuals, not to be pro 
 gressive is to be retrograde. Yet the comparison will usefully 
 temper the desire of improvement with love and a sense of grati 
 tude for what we already are. 
 
 I. A LETTER RECEIVED, AT MALTA, FROM AN AMERICAN OFFICER OF 
 HIGH RANK,^ WHO HAS SINCE RECEIVED THE THANKS AND REWARDS 
 OF CONGRESS FOR HIS SERVICES IN THE MEDITERRANEAN. 
 
 SIR, GRAND CAIRO, Dec. 13, 1804. 
 
 The same reason, which induced me to request letters of in 
 troduction to his Britannic Majesty s agents here, suggested the 
 * Decatur. ,Etf. 
 
ESSAY IX. 231 
 
 propriety of showing an English jack at the main top-gallant 
 mast-head, on entering the port of Alexandria on the 26th ult. 
 
 The signal was recognized ; and Mr. B was immediately on 
 
 board. 
 
 We found in port, a Turkish Vice Admiral, with a ship of the 
 line, and six frigates ; a part of which squadron is stationed there 
 to preserve the tranquillity of the country ; with just as much in 
 fluence as the same number of pelicans would have on the same 
 station. 
 
 On entering and passing the streets of Alexandria, I could not 
 but notice the very marked satisfaction, which every expression 
 and every countenance of all denominations of people, Turks and 
 Frenchmen only excepted, manifested under an impression that 
 we were the avant-couriers of an English army. They had con 
 ceived this from observing the English jack at our main, taking 
 our flag perhaps for that of a feint, and because as is common 
 enough everywhere, they were ready to believe what they wished. 
 It would have been cruel to have undeceived them : consequently 
 without positively assuming it, we passed in the character of 
 Englishmen among the middle and lower orders of society, and 
 as their allies among those of better information. Wherever we 
 entered or wherever halted, we were surrounded by the wretched 
 inhabitants ; and stunned with their benedictions and prayers for 
 blessings on us. " Will the English come ? Are they coming ? 
 God grant the English may come ! we have no commerce we 
 have no money we have no bread ! When will the English 
 arrive ?" My answer was uniformly, Patience ! The same tone 
 was heard at Rosetta as among the Alexandrians, indicative of 
 the same dispositions ; only it was not so loud, because the in 
 habitants are less miserable, although without any traits of hap 
 piness. On the fourth, we left that village for Cairo, and as well 
 for our security as to facilitate our procurement of accommoda 
 tions during our voyage, and our stay there, the resident directed 
 his secretary, Capt. V , to accompany us, and to give us lodg 
 ings in his house. We ascended the Nile leisurely, and calling at 
 several villages, we plainly perceived that the national partiality, 
 the strong and open expression of which proclaimed so loudly the 
 feelings of the Egyptians of the sea-coast, was general through 
 out the country ; and the prayers for ^the return of the English as 
 earnest as universal. 
 
232 THE FRIEND. 
 
 On the morning of the sixth we went on shore at the village 
 . of Sabour. The villagers expressed an enthusiastic gladness at 
 seeing red and blue uniforms and round hats ; (the French, I 
 believe, wear three-cornered ones.) Two days before, five hun 
 dred Albanian deserters from the Viceroy s army had pillaged and 
 left this village ; at which they had lived at free quarters about 
 four weeks. The famishing inhabitants were now distressed 
 with apprehensions from another quarter. A company of wild 
 Arabs were encamped in sight. They dreaded their ravages and 
 apprized us of danger from them. We were eighteen in the 
 party, well armed ; and a pretty brisk fire which we raised 
 among the numerous flocks of pigeons and other small fowl in the 
 environs, must have deterred them from mischief, if, as is most 
 probable, they had meditated any against us. Scarcely, how 
 ever, were we on board and under weigh, when we saw these 
 mounted marauders of the desert fall furiously upon the herds of 
 camels, buffaloes, and cattle of the village, and drive many of 
 them off wholly unarinoyed on the part of the unresisting inhabi 
 tants, unless their shrieks could be deemed an annoyance. They 
 afterwards attacked and robbed several unarmed boats, which 
 were a few hours astern of us. The most insensible must surely 
 have been moved by the situation of the peasants of that village. 
 While we were listening to their complaints, they kissed our 
 hands, and with prostrations to the ground, rendered more affect 
 ing by the inflamed state of the eyes almost universal among 
 them, and which the new traveller might venially imagine to 
 have been the immediate effect of weeping and anguish, they all 
 implored English succor. Their shrieks at the assault of the 
 wild Arabs seemed to implore the same still more forcibly, while 
 it testified what multiplied reasons they had to implore it. I 
 confess, I felt an almost insurmountable impulse to bring our little 
 party to their relief, and might perhaps have done a rash act, 
 had it not been for the calm and just observation of Captain 
 V , that " these were common occurrences, and that any re 
 lief which we could afford, would not merely be only temporary, 
 but would exasperate the plunderers to still more atrocious out 
 rages after our departure." 
 
 On the morning of the seventh we landed near a village. At 
 our approach the villagers fled : signals of friendship brought 
 some of them to us. When they were told that we were English- 
 
ESSAY IX. 233 
 
 men, they flocked around us with demonstrations of joy, offered 
 their services, and raised loud ejaculations for our establishment 
 in the country. Here we could not procure a pint of milk for our 
 cofiee. The inhabitants had been plundered and chased from 
 their habitations by the Albanians and desert Arabs, and it was 
 but the preceding 1 day, they had returned to their naked cottages. 
 Grand Cairo differs from the places already passed, only as the 
 presence of the tyrant stamps silence on the lips of misery with 
 the seal of terror. Wretchedness here assumes the form of mel 
 ancholy ; but the few whispers that are hazarded, convey the 
 same feelings and the same wishes. And wherein does this mis 
 ery and consequent spirit of revolution consist ? Not in any form 
 of government but in a formless despotism, an anarchy indeed, 
 for it amounts literally to an annihilation of every thing that can 
 merit the name of government or justify the use of the word even 
 in the laxest sense. Egypt is under the most frightful despotism, 
 yet has no master. The Turkish soldiery, restrained by no dis 
 cipline, seize every thing by violence, not only all that their ne 
 cessities dictate, but whatever their caprices suggest. The Mam 
 elukes, who dispute with these the right of domination, procure 
 ihemsclvcs subsistence by means as lawless though less insup- 
 portably oppressive ; and the wild Arabs availing themselves of 
 I he occasion, plunder the defenceless wherever they find plunder. 
 To finish the whole, the talons of the Viceroy fix on every thing 
 which can be changed into currency, in order to find the means 
 of supporting an ungoverned, disorganized banditti of foreign 
 troops, who receive the harvest of his oppression, desert and be 
 tray him. Of all this rapine, robbery, and extortion, the wretched 
 cultivators of the soil are the perpetual victims. A spirit of rev 
 olution is the natural consequence. 
 
 The reason the inhabitants of this country give for preferring 
 the English to the French, whether true or false, is as natural as 
 it is simple, and as influential as natural. " The English," say 
 they, "pay for every thing, the French pay nothing, and take 
 every thing." They do not like this kind of deliverers. 
 
 "Well, thought I, after the perusal of this letter, the slave-trade, 
 which had not then been abolished, is a dreadful crime, an 
 Engiisl 1 iniquity, and to sanction its continuance under full con 
 viction -anti ariiawienteTy confession of its injustice and inhu- 
 
234 THE FRIEND. 
 
 manity, is, if possible, still blacker guilt. "Would that our discon 
 tents were for a while confined to our moral wants ! "Whatever 
 may be the defects of our constitution, we have at least an effec 
 tive government, and that too composed of men who were born 
 with us and are to die among us. We are at least preserved 
 from the incursions of foreign enemies : the intercommunion of 
 interests precludes a civil war, and the volunteer spirit of the 
 nation equally with its laws, gives to the darkest lanes of our 
 crowded metropolis that quiet and security which the remotest 
 villager at the cataracts of the Nile prays for in vain, in his mud 
 hovel ! 
 
 !Nbt yet enslaved nor wholly vile, 
 
 Albion, my mother isle ! 
 
 Thy valleys fair, as Eden s bowers, 
 
 Glitter green with sunny showers ; 
 
 Thy grassy uplands gentle swells 
 
 Echo to the bleat of flocks ; 
 
 Those grassy hills, those giitt ring dells 
 
 Proudly ramparted with rocks, 
 
 And ocean mid his uproar wild 
 
 Speaks safety to his island-child, 
 
 Hence for many a fearless age 
 
 Has social quiet loved thy shore ; 
 
 Nor ever proud invader s rage 
 Or sack d thy toAvers or stain d thy fields with gore.* 
 
 II. ANECDOTE OF BONAPARTE. 
 
 BONAPARTE, during his short stay at Malta, called out the 
 Maltese regiments raised by the Knights, amounting to fifteen 
 hundred of the stoutest young men of the islands. As they were 
 drawn up on the parade, he informed them, in a bombastic ha 
 rangue, that he had restored them to liberty ; but in proof that 
 his attachment to them was not bounded by this benefaction, he 
 would now give them an opportunity of adding glory to freedom 
 and concluded by asking who of them would march forward 
 to be his fellow-soldiers on the banks of the Nile, and contribute 
 a flower of Maltese heroism to the immortal wreaths of fame, 
 with which he meant to crown the pyramids of Egypt ! Not a 
 man stirred : all gave a silent refusal. They were instantly sur 
 rounded by a regiment of French soldiers, marched to the Marino, 
 * Ode To the Departing Year. Poetical Works, VII. p. 103. Ed. 
 
ESSAY IX. 235 
 
 forced on board the transports, and threatened with death if any 
 one of them attempted his escape, or should be discovered in any 
 part of the islands of Malta or Goza. At Alexandria they were 
 always put in the front, both to save the French soldiery, and to 
 prevent their running away ; and of the whole number, fifty 
 only survived to revisit their native country. From one of these 
 survivors I first learned this fact, which was afterwards confirmed 
 to rne by several of his remaining comrades, as well as by the 
 most respectable inhabitants of Valette. 
 
 This anecdote recalled to my mind an accidental conversation 
 with an old countryman in a central district of Germany. I 
 purposely omit names, because the day of retribution has come 
 arid gone by.* I was looking at a strong fortress in the distance, 
 which formed a highly interesting object in a rich and varied 
 landscape, and asked the old man, who had stopped to gaze at 
 me, its name, adding How beautiful it looks ! "It may be well 
 enough to look at," answered he, "but God keep all Christians 
 from being taken thither !" He then proceeded to gratify the 
 curiosity which he had thus excited, by informing me that the 
 Baron had been taken out of his bed at midnight and car 
 ried to that fortress that he was not heard of for nearly two 
 years, when a soldier who had fled over the boundaries sent in 
 formation to his family of the place and mode of his imprison 
 ment. As I have no design to work on the feelings of my 
 readers, I pass over the shocking detail : had not the language 
 and countenance of. my informant precluded such a suspicion, I 
 might have supposed that he had be<5n repeating some tale of 
 horror from a romance of the dark ages. " What was his crime ?" 
 I asked. " The report is," said the old man, " that in his capa 
 city as minister he had remonstrated with the concerning 
 
 the extravagance of his mistress, an outlandish countess ; and 
 that she in revenge persuaded the sovereign, that it was the 
 Baron who had communicated to a professor at Gottingen the 
 
 * This anecdote refers to the transfer made by the Landgrave of Hesse- 
 Cassel of a body of his troops to the service of Great Britain in the first 
 American war : 
 
 and leagued with these 
 
 Each petty German princeling, nurs d in gore ; 
 
 Soul-harden d barterers of human blood 
 
 Death s prime slave-merchants scorpion whips of fate ! 
 
 Poetical Works, VII. p. 76.~^W. 
 
236 THE FRIEND. 
 
 particulars of the infamous sale of some thousands of his subjects 
 as soldiers." On the same day I discovered in the landlord of a 
 small public-house one of the men who had been thus sold. He 
 seemed highly delighted in entertaining an English gentleman, 
 and in once more talking English after a lapse of so many 
 years. He was far from regretting this incident in his life, but 
 his account of the manner in which they were forced away ac 
 corded in so many particulars with Schiller s impassioned de 
 scription of the same or a similar scene, in his tragedy of Cabal 
 and Love, as to leave a perfect conviction on my mind, that the 
 dramatic pathos of that description was not greater than its his 
 toric fidelity. 
 
 As I was thus reflecting, I glanced my eye on the leading par 
 agraph of a London newspaper, containing much angry declama 
 tion, and some bitter truths, respecting our military arrange 
 ments. It were in vain, thought I, to deny that the influence of 
 parliamentary interest, which prevents the immense patronage 
 of the crown from becoming a despotic power, is not the most 
 likely to secure the attest commanders or the fittest persons for 
 the management of our foreign empire. However, thank God ! 
 if we fight, we fight for our own king and country : and griev 
 ances which may be publicly complained of, there is some chance 
 of seeing remedied. 
 
 III. A celebrated professor in a German university, showed me 
 a very pleasing print, entitled, Toleration. A Roman Catholic 
 priest, a Lutheran divine, a Calvinist minister, a Quaker, a Jew, 
 and a philosopher, were represented sitting round the same table, 
 over which a winged figure hovered in the attitude of protection. 
 " For this harmless print," said my friend, "the artist was im 
 prisoned, and having attempted to escape, was sentenced to draw 
 the boats on the banks of the Danube, with robbers and murder 
 ers : and there died in less than two months, from exhaustion 
 and exposure. In your happy country, sir, this print would be 
 considered as a pleasing scene from real life : for in every great* 
 town throughout your empire you may meet with the original." 
 " Yes," I replied, " as far as the negative ends of government are 
 concerned, we have no reason to complain. Our government 
 protects us from foreign enemies, and our laws secure our lives, 
 our personal freedom, our property, reputation, and religious 
 rights, from domestic attacks. Our taxes, indeed, are enormous" 
 
ESSAY IX. 237 
 
 " Oh ! talk not of taxes," said my friend, " till you have re 
 sided in a country where the boor disposes of his produce to 
 strangers lor a Ibreign mart, not to bring back to his family the 
 comforts and conveniences of foreign manufactures, but to pro 
 cure that coin which his lord is to squander away in a distant 
 land. Neither can I with patience hear it said, that your laws 
 act only to the negative ends of government. They have a man 
 ifold positive influence, and their incorrupt administration gives a 
 color to all your modes of thinking, and is one of the chief 
 causes of your superior morality in private as well as public 
 life."* 
 
 My limits compel me to strike out the different incidents which 
 I had written as a commentary on the former three of the posi 
 tive ends of government. To the moral feelings of my reader* 
 they might have been serviceable ; but lor their understandings 
 they are superfluous. It is surely impossible to peruse those 
 ends, and not admit that all three are realized under our govern 
 ment to a degree unexampled in any other old and long peopled 
 country. The defects of our constitution, in which word I in 
 clude the laws and customs of the land as well as its scheme of 
 legislative and executive power, must exist, therefore, in the 
 fourth, namely, the production of the highest average of general 
 information, of general moral and religious principles, and the 
 excitements and opportunities which it affords to paramount ge 
 nius and heroic power in a sufficient number of its citizens. 
 These are points in which it would be immorality to rest content 
 with the presumption, however well founded, that we are better 
 
 * "The administration of justice throughout the continent is partial, ve 
 nal, and infamous. I have, in conversation with many sensible men, met 
 with something of content with their governments in all other respects 
 than this ; but upon the question of expecting justice to be really and fairly 
 administered, every one confessed there was no such thing to be looked for. 
 The conduct of the judges is profligate and atrocious. Upon almost every 
 cause that comes before them interest is openly made with the judges; and 
 woe betide the man, who, with a cause to support has no means of conciliat 
 ing favor, either by the beauty of a handsome wife, or by other methods." 
 This quotation is confined in the original to France under the monarchy ; I 
 have extended the application, and adopted the words as comprising the 
 result of my own experience : and I take this opportunity of declaring, that 
 the most important part of Mr. Leckie s statement concerning Sicily, I my 
 self know to be accurate, and am authorized by w T hat I myself saw there, to 
 rely on the whole as a fair and unexaggerated representation. 
 
288 THE FRIEND. 
 
 than others, if we are not what we ought to be ourselves, and are 
 not using the means of improvement. The first question then 
 is, What is the fact ? The second upon the supposition of a de 
 fect or deficiency in one or all of these points, and that to a de 
 gree which may affect our power and prosperity, if not our abso 
 lute safety, are the plans of legislative reform that have hither 
 to been proposed fit or likely to remove such defect, and supply 
 such deficiency ? The third and last question is, Should there 
 appear reason to deny or doubt this, are there any other means, 
 and what are they ? Of these points in the concluding essay of 
 this section. 
 
 A French gentleman in the reign of Louis XIV. was comparing 
 the French and English writers with all the boastfulness of na 
 tional prepossession. "Sir !" replied an Englishman, better 
 versed in the principles of freedom than the canons of criticism, 
 " there are but two subjects worthy the human intellect, politics 
 and religion, our state here and our state hereafter ; and on 
 neither of these dare you write." Long may the envied privilege 
 be preserved to my countrymen of writing and talking concern 
 ing both ! Nevertheless, it behooves us all to consider, that to 
 write or talk concerning any subject, without having previously 
 taken the pains to understand it, is a breach of duty which we 
 owe to ourselves, though it may be no offence against the laws of 
 the land. The privilege of talking and even publishing nonsense, 
 is necessary in a free state ; but the more sparingly we make 
 use of it the better. 
 
ESSAY X. 
 
 Tli en we may thank ourselves, 
 Who spell-bound by the magic name of peace 
 Dream golden dreams. Go, warlike Briton, go, 
 For the gray olive-branch change thy green laurels : 
 Hang up thy rusty helmet, that the bee 
 May have a hive, or spider find a loom ! 
 Instead of doubling drum and thrilling fife, 
 Be lull d in lady s lap -with amorous flutes. 
 But for Napoleon, know, he ll scorn this calm : 
 The ruddy planet at his birth bore sway ; 
 Sanguine, adust, his humor, and wild fire 
 His ruling element. Rage, revenge, and cunning 
 Make up the temper of this captain s valor. 
 
 LITTLE prospective wisdom can that man obtain, who hurrying 
 onward with the current, or rather torrent, of events, feels no in 
 terest in their importance, except as far as his curiosity is excited 
 by their novelty ; and to whom all reflection and retrospect are 
 wearisome. If ever there were a time when the formation of 
 just public principles becomes a duty of private morality ; when 
 the principles of morality in general ought to be made to bear on 
 our public suffrages, and to affect every great national determi 
 nation ; when, in short, his country should have a place by every 
 Englishman s fireside ; and when the feelings and truths which 
 give dignity to the fireside and tranquillity to the death-bed, 
 ought to be present and influential in the cabinet and in the sen 
 ate that time is now with us. As an introduction to, and at 
 the same time as a commentary on, the subject of international 
 law, I have taken a review of the circumstances that led to the 
 treaty of Amiens, and the recommencement of the war, more es 
 pecially with regard to the occupation of Malta. 
 
 In a rich commercial state, a war seldom fails to become un 
 popular by length of continuance. The first, or revolution war, 
 which towards its close, had become just and necessary, perhaps 
 
240 THE FRIEND. 
 
 beyond any former example, had yet causes of unpopularity pecu 
 liar to itself. Exhaustion is the natural consequence of excessive 
 stimulation, in the feelings of nations equaUy as in those of in 
 dividuals. Wearied out by overwhelming novelties ; stunned, as 
 it were, by a series of strange explosions ; sick too of hope long 
 delayed ; and uncertain as to the real object and motive of the 
 war, from the rapid change and general failure of its ostensible 
 objects and motives : the public mind for many months preceding 
 the signing of the preliminaries had lost all its tone and elasticity. 
 The consciousness of mutual errors and mutual disappointments 
 disposed the great majority of all parties to a spirit of diffidence 
 and toleration, which, amiable as it may be in individuals, in a 
 nation, and above all in an opulent and luxurious nation, is al 
 ways too nearly akin to apathy and selfish indulgence. An un 
 manly impatience for peace became only not universal. After as 
 long a resistance as the nature of our constitution and national 
 character permitted, or even endured, the government applied at 
 length the only remedy adequate to the greatness of the evil, a 
 remedy which the magnitude of the evil justified, and which 
 nothing but an evil of that magnitude could justify. At a high 
 price they purchased for us the name of peace at a time when 
 the views of France became daily more and more incompatible 
 with our- vital interests. Considering the peace as a mere truce 
 of experiment, wise and temperate men regarded with compla 
 cency the treaty of Amiens, for the very reasons that would have 
 insured the condemnation of any other treaty under any other 
 circumstances. Its palpable deficiencies were its antidote ; or 
 rather they formed its very essence, and declared at first sight, 
 what alone it was, or was meant to be. Any attempt at that 
 time, and in this treaty, to have secured Italy, Holland, and the 
 German empire, would have been, in the literal sense of the 
 word, preposterous. The nation would have withdrawn all faith 
 in the pacific intentions of the ministers, if the negotiation had 
 been broken off on a plea of this kind : for it had taken for 
 granted the extreme desirableness, nay, the necessity of a peace, 
 and, this once admitted, there would, no doubt, have been an ab 
 surdity in continuing the war for objects which the war furnished 
 no means of realizing. If the First Consul had entered into 
 stipulations with us respecting the continent, they would have 
 been observed only as long as his interest from other causes 
 
ESSAY X. 241 
 
 might have dictated ; they would have been signed with as 
 much sincerity and observed with as much good faith, as the ar 
 ticle actually inserted in the treaty of Amiens, respecting the in 
 tegrity of the Turkish empire. This article indeed was wisely 
 insisted on by us, because it aflectcd both our national honor and 
 the interests of our Indian empire immediately ; and still more, 
 perhaps, because this of all others was the most likely to furnish 
 an early proof of the First Consul s real dispositions. But deeply 
 interested in the fate of the continent, as we are thought to be, 
 it would nevertheless have been most idle to have abandoned a 
 peace, upon the supposition of its being at all desirable, on the 
 ground that the French government had refused that which 
 would have been of no value had it been granted. 
 
 Indeed there results one serious disadvantage from insisting on 
 the rights and interests of Austria, the Empire, Switzerland, &c. 
 in a treaty between England and France, and, as it should seem, 
 no advantage to counterbalance it. For so, any attack 011 those 
 rights instantly pledges our character and national dignity to com 
 mence a war, however inexpedient it may happen to be, and 
 however hopeless : while if a war be expedient, any attack on 
 these countries by France furnishes a justifiable cause of war in 
 its essential nature, and independently of all positive treaty. 
 Seen in this light, the defects of the treaty of Amiens become its 
 real merits. If the government of France made peace in the 
 spirit of peace, then a friendly intercourse and the humanizing 
 influences of commerce and reciprocal hospitality would gradually 
 bring about in both countries the dispositions necessary for the 
 calm discussion and sincere conclusion of a genuine, efficient, and 
 comprehensive treaty. If the contrary proved the fact, the 
 treaty of Amiens contained in itself the principles of its own dis 
 solution. It was what it ought to be. If the First Consul had 
 both meant and dealt fairly by us, the treaty would have led to a 
 true settlement : but he acting as all prudent men expected that 
 he would act, it supplied just reasons for the commencement of 
 war, and at its decease left us, as a legacy, blessings that assur 
 edly far outweighed our losses by the peace. It left us popular 
 enthusiasm, national unanimity, and simplicity of object ; and 
 removed one inconvenience which cleaved to the last war, by at 
 taching to the right objects, and enlisting under their proper ban 
 ners, the scorn and hatred of slavery, the passion for freedom, 
 
 VOL. n. L 
 
242 THE FKIEND. 
 
 all the high thoughts and high feelings that connect us with the 
 honored names of past ages ; and inspire sentiments and lan 
 guage, to which our Hampdens, Sidneys, and Russels, might lis 
 ten without jealousy. 
 
 The late peace then was negotiated by the government, rati 
 fied by the legislature, and received by the nation, as an experi 
 ment, as the only means of exhibiting such proof as would be 
 satisfactory to the people in their then temper ; whether Bona 
 parte devoting his ambition and activity to the re-establishment 
 of trade, colonial tranquillity, and social morals, in France, would 
 abstain from insulting, alarming and endangering the British em 
 pire. And these thanks at least were due to the First Consul, 
 that he did not long delay the proof. With more than papal in 
 solence he issued edicts of anathema against us, and excommuni 
 cated us from all interference in the affairs of the continent. He 
 insulted us still more indecently by pertinacious demands respect 
 ing our constitutional laws and rights of hospitality ; by the of 
 ficial publication of Sebastiani s report ; and by a direct personal 
 outrage offered in the presence of all the foreign ministers to the 
 king of England, in the person of his ambassador. He both in 
 sulted and alarmed us by a display of the most perfidious ambi 
 tion in the subversion of the independence of Switzerland, in the 
 avowal of designs against Egypt, Syria, and the Greek islands, 
 and in the mission of military spies to Great Britain itself. And 
 by forcibly maintaining a French army in Holland, he at once 
 insulted, alarmed, and endangered us. What can render a war 
 just its expedience being pre-supposed if insult, repeated 
 alarm, and danger do not ? And how can it be expedient for a 
 rich, united, and powerful island-empire to remain in nominal 
 peace and unresenting passiveness with an insolent neighbor, who 
 has proved that to wage against it an unmitigated war of insult, 
 alarm, and endangerment is both his temper and his system ? 
 
 Many attempts were made by Mr. Fox to explain away the 
 force of the greater number of the facts here enumerated : but 
 the great fact, for which alone they have either force or mean 
 ing, the great ultimate fact, that Great Britain had been insulted, 
 alarmed, and endangered by France, Mr. Fox himself expressly 
 admitted. The opposers, however, of the present war concentre 
 the strength of their cause in the following brief argument. Al 
 though we grant, say they, the grievances set forth in our mani- 
 
ESSAY X. 243 
 
 festo to be as notorious as they are asserted to be, yet more noto 
 rious they can not be than that other fact which utterly annuls 
 them as reasons for a war, the fact, that ministers themselves 
 regard them only as the pompous garnish of the dish. It stands 
 on record, that Bonaparte might have purchased our silence for 
 ever, respecting these insults and injuries, by a mere acquiescence 
 on his part in our retention of Malta. The whole treaty of 
 Amiens is little more than a perplexed bond of compromise re 
 specting Malta. On Malta we rested the peace : for Malta we 
 renewed the war. So say the opposers of the present war. As 
 its advocate I do not deny the fact as stated by them ; but I 
 hope to achieve all, and more than all, the purposes of such de 
 nial, by an explanation of the fact. The difficulty then resolves 
 itself into two questions : first, in what sense of the words can 
 we be said to have gone to war for Malta alone ? Secondly, 
 wherein does the importance of Malta consist ? The answer to 
 the second will be found in the notice of the life of Sir Alexander 
 Ball, the liberator and political father of the Maltese, contained 
 in a subsequent part of this work :* while the attempt to settle 
 the first question, so as at the same time to elucidate the law of 
 nations and its identity with the law of conscience, will occupy 
 the remainder of the present essay. 
 
 I. IN WHAT SENSE CAN WE BE AFFIRMED TO HAVE RENEWED 
 
 If we had known or could reasonably have believed, that the 
 views of France were and would continue to be friendly or nega 
 tive toward Great Britain, neither the subversion of the in 
 dependence of Switzerland, nor the maintenance of a French 
 army in Holland, would have furnished any prudent ground for 
 war. For the only way by which we could have injured France, 
 namely, the destruction of her commerce and navy, would in 
 crease her means of continental conquests, by concentrating all 
 the resources and energies of the French empire in her military 
 powers : while the losses and miseries which the French people 
 would suffer in consequence, and their magnitude, compared 
 with any advantages that might accrue to them from the exten 
 sion of the name, France, were facts which, we knew by ex- 
 
 * See Essays 3, 4, 5, 6, of the third Landing Place. Ed. 
 
244 THE FKIEND. 
 
 perience, would weigh as nothing with the existing government. 
 Its attacks on the independence of its continental neighbors be 
 came motives to us for the recommencement of hostility, only as 
 far as they gave proofs of a hostile intention toward ourselves, 
 and facilitated the realizing of such intention. If any events 
 had taken place, increasing the means of injuring this country, 
 even though these events furnished no moral ground of com 
 plaint against France (such .for instance, might be the great ex 
 tension of her population and revenue, from freedom and a wise 
 government), much more, if they were the fruits of iniquitous 
 ambition, and therefore in themselves involved the probability 
 of a hostile intention to us then, I say, every after occurrence 
 would become important, and both a just and expedient ground 
 of war, in proportion, not to the importance of the thing in itself, 
 but to the quantity of evident proof afforded by it to a hostile 
 design in the government, by whose power our interests are en 
 dangered. If by demanding the immediate evacuation of Malta, 
 when he had himself destroyed the security of its actual in 
 dependence on his promise of preserving which our pacific 
 promises rested as on their sole foundation and this too, after 
 he had openly avowed such designs on Egypt, as not only in the 
 opinion of our ministers, but in his own opinion, made it of the 
 greatest importance to this country, that Malta should not be un 
 der French influence ; if by this conduct the First Consul ex 
 hibited a decisive proof of his intention to violate our rights and 
 to undermine our national interests ; then all his preceding 
 actions on the continent became proofs likewise of the same in 
 tention ; and any one* of these aggressions involved the meaning 
 
 * A hundred cases might be imagined which would place this assertion 
 in its true light. Suppose, for instance, a country, according to the laws 
 of which a parent might not disinherit a son without having first convicted 
 him of some one of sundry crimes enumerated in a specific statute. Caius, 
 by a series of vicious actions, has so nearly convinced his father of his utter 
 worthlessuess, that the father resolves, on the next provocation, to use the 
 very first opportunity of legally disinheriting this son. The provocation 
 occurs, and in itself furnishes this opportunity, and Caius is disinherited, 
 though for an action much less glaring and intolerable than most of his 
 preceding delinquencies had been. The advocates of Caius complain that 
 he should be thus punished for a comparative trifle, so many worse misde 
 meanors having been passed over. The father replies : " This, his last ac- 
 tiou, is not the cause of the disinheritance ; but the means of disinheriting 
 
ESSAY X. 245 . 
 
 of the whole. Which of them was to determine us to war 
 would be decided by other and prudential considerations. Had 
 the First Consul acquiesced in our detention of Malta, he would 
 thereby have furnished such proof of pacific intentions, as would 
 have led to further hopes, would have lessened our alarm from 
 his former acts of ambition, and relatively to us have altered in 
 some degree their nature. 
 
 It should never be forgotten, that a parliament or national 
 council is essentially different from a court of justice, alike in its 
 objects and its duties. In the latter, the juror lays aside his 
 private knowledge and his private connections, and judges ex-^ 
 clusively according to the evidence adduced in the court : in the 
 former, the senator acts upon his own internal convictions, and 
 oftentimes upon private information, which it would be impru 
 dent or criminal to disclose. Though his ostensible reason ought 
 to be a true and just one, it is by no means necessary that it 
 should be his sole or even his chief reason. In a court of justice, 
 the juror attends to the character and general intentions of the 
 accused party, exclusively, as adding to the probability of his 
 having or not having committed the one particular action then 
 in question. The senator, on the contrary, when he is to deter 
 mine on the conduct of a foreign power, attends to particular 
 actions, chiefly in proof of character and existing intentions. 
 Now there were many and very powerful reasons why, though 
 appealing to the former actions of Bonaparte, as confirmations 
 of his hostile spirit and alarming ambition, we should neverthe 
 less make Malta the direct object and final determinant of the 
 war. Had we gone to war avowedly for the independence of 
 Holland and Switzerland, we should have furnished Bonaparte 
 with a colorable pretext for annexing both countries immediately 
 to the French empire,* which, if he should do (as if his power 
 
 him. I punished him by it, rather than for it. In truth, it was not for 
 any of his actions that I have thus punished him, but for his vices ; that is, 
 not so much for the injuries which I have suffered, as for the dispositions 
 which these actions evinced : for the insolent and alarming intentions of 
 which they are proofs. Now of this habitual temper, of these dangerous 
 purposes, his last action is as true and complete a manifestation as any or 
 all of his preceding offences ; and it therefore may and must be taken as 
 their common representative." 
 
 * The greater part of this essay was written in the year 1804, in Malta, 
 at the request of Sir Alexander Ball. 
 
246 THE FRIEND. 
 
 continued he most assuredly would sooner or later) by a mere 
 act of violence, and undisguised tyranny, there would foilow a 
 moral weakening of his power in the minds of men, which might 
 prove of incalculable advantage to the independence and well- 
 being of Europe ; but which, unfortunately, for this very reason, 
 that it is not to be calculated, is too often disregarded by ordinary 
 statesmen. At all events, it would have been made the plea for 
 banishing, plundering, and perhaps murdering, numbers of vir 
 tuous and patriotic individuals, as being the partisans of the 
 enemy of the continent. Add to this, that we should have ap 
 peared to have rushed into a war for objects which by war we 
 could not hope to realize ; we should have exacerbated the mis 
 fortunes of the countries of which we had elected ourselves the 
 champions ; and the war would have appeared a mere war of 
 revenge and reprisal, a circumstance always to be avoided where 
 it is possible. The ablest and best men in the Bataviari republic, 
 those who felt the insults of France most acutely, and were suf 
 fering from her oppressions the most severely, entreated our gov 
 ernment, through their minister, not to make the state of Hol 
 land the great ostensible reason of- the war. The Swiss patriots, 
 too, believed that we could do nothing to assist them at that time, 
 and attributed to our forbearance the comparatively timid use 
 which France has made hitherto of her absolute power over that 
 country. Besides, Austria, whom the changes on the continent 
 much more nearly concerned than England, having refused all 
 co-operation with us, there is reason to fear that an opinion, de 
 structive of the one great blessing purchased by the peace, our 
 national unanimity, would have taken deep root in the popular 
 mind, namely, that these changes were mere pretexts. Neither 
 should we forget, that the last war had left a dislike in our 
 countrymen to continental interference, and a not unplausible 
 persuasion, that where a nation has not sufficient sensibility as 
 to its wrongs to commence a war against the aggressor, un- 
 bribed and ungoaded by Great Britain, a war begun by the gov 
 ernment of such a nation, at the instance of our government, 
 has little chance of other than a disastrous result, the character 
 and revolutionary resdlirces of the enemy considered. Whatever 
 may be the strength or weakness of this argument, it is however 
 certain, that there was a strong predilection in the British peo 
 ple for a cause indisputably and peculiarly British. And this 
 
ESSAY X. 247 
 
 teeling is not altogether ungrounded. In practical politics and 
 the great expenditures of national power, we must not pretend 
 to be too far-sighted : otherwise even a transient peace would be 
 impossible among the European nations. To future and distant 
 evils we may always oppose the various unforeseen events that 
 are ripening in the womb of the future. Lastly, it is chiefly to 
 immediate and unequivocal attacks 011 our own interests and 
 honor, that we attach the notion of right with a full and efficient 
 feeling. Xow, though we may be first stimulated to action by 
 probabilities and prospects of advantage, and though there is a 
 perverse restlessness in human nature, which renders almost all 
 wars popular at their commencement, yet a nation always needs 
 a sense of positive right to steady its spirit. There is always 
 needed some one reason, short, simple* and independent of com 
 plicated calculation, in order to give a sort of muscular strength 
 to the public mind, when the power that results from enthusiasm, 
 animal spirits, arid the charm of novelty, shall have evaporated. 
 There is no feeling more honorable to our nature, and few that 
 strike deeper root when our nature is happily circumstanced, than 
 the jealousy concerning a positive right, independent of an im 
 mediate interest. To surrender, in our national character, the 
 merest trifle that is strictly our right, the merest rock on which 
 the waves will scarcely permit the sea-fowl to lay its eggs, at the 
 demand of an insolent and powerful rival, on a shopkeeper s cal 
 culation of loss and gain, is in its final, and assuredly not very 
 distant consequences, a loss of every thing of national spirit, of 
 national independence, and with these, of the very wealth for 
 which the low calculation was made. This feeling in individuals, 
 indeed, and in private life, is to be sacrificed to religion. Say 
 rather, that by religion, it is transmuted into a higher virtue, 
 growing on a higher and engrafted branch, yet nourished from 
 the same root ; that it remains in its essence the same spirit, but 
 
 Made pure by thought, and naturalized in heaven ; 
 
 and he who can not perceive the moral differences of national and 
 individual duties, comprehends neither the one nor the other, and 
 is not a whit the better Christian for being a bad patriot. Con 
 sidered nationally, it is as if the captain of a man-of-war should 
 strike and surrender his colors under the pretence, that it would 
 be folly to risk the lives of so many good Christian sailors for the 
 
248 THE FKIEND. 
 
 sake of a few yards of coarse canvas ! Of such reasoners I take 
 an indignant leave in the words of an obscure poet : 
 
 Fear never wanted arguments : you do 
 Keason yourselves into a careful bondage, 
 Circumspect only to your misery. 
 I could urge freedom, charters, country, laws, 
 Gods, and religion, and such precious names 
 Nay, what you value higher, wealth ! But that 
 You sue for bondage, yielding to demands 
 As impious as they re insolent, and have 
 Only this sluggish aim, to perish full !* 
 
 And here it is necessary to animadvert on a principle asserted 
 by Lord Minto (in his speech, June 6th, 1803, and afterwards 
 published at full length), that France had an undoubted right to 
 insist on our abandonment at Malta, a right not given, but like 
 wise not abrogated, by the treaty of Amiens. Surely in this 
 effort of candor, his Lordship must have forgotten the circum 
 stances on which he exerted it. The case is simply thus : the 
 British government was convinced, and the French government 
 admitted the justice of the conviction, that it was of the utmost 
 importance to our interests, that Malta should remain unin 
 fluenced by France. The French government bound itself down 
 by a solemn treaty, that it would use its best endeavors, in con 
 junction with us, to secure this independence. This promise was 
 no act of liberality, no generous free-gift, on the part of France 
 No ! we purchased it at a high price. We disbanded our forces, 
 we dismissed our sailors, and we gave up the best part of the 
 fruits of our naval victories. Can it therefore with a shadow of 
 plausibility be affirmed, that the right to insist on our evacuation 
 of the island was unaltered by the treaty of Amiens, when this 
 demand was strictly tantamount to our surrender of all the ad 
 vantages which we had bought of France at so high a price, 
 tantamount to a direct breach on her part, not merely of a solemn 
 treaty, but of an absolute bargain ? It was not only the perfidy 
 of unprincipled ambition the demand was the fraudulent trick 
 of a sharper. For what did France ? She sold us the indepen 
 dence of Malta ; then exerted her power, and annihilated the 
 very possibility of that independence, and lastly, demanded of us 
 that we should leave it bound hand and foot for her to seize 
 * Cartwright. The Siege, or Love s Convert. Act I. sc. 1. Ed. 
 
ESSAY X. 249 
 
 without trouble, whenever her ambitious projects led her to re 
 gard such seizure as expedient. We bound ourselves to surrender 
 it to the Knights of Malta riot surely to Joseph, Robert, or 
 Nicholas, but to a known order, clothed with certain powers, and 
 capable of exerting them in consequence of certain revenues. 
 "We found no such order. The men indeed and the name we 
 found : and even so, if we had purchased Sardinia of its sovereign 
 for so many millions of money, which through our national credit, 
 and from the equivalence of our national paper to gold and silver, 
 he might have agreed to receive in bank notes, and if he had re 
 ceived them doubtless, he would have the bank-notes, even 
 though immediately after our payment of them we had for this 
 very purpose forced the Bank company to break. But would he 
 have received the debt due to him ? It is nothing more or less 
 than a practical pun, as wicked though not quite so ludicrous, as 
 the (in all senses) execrable pun of Earl Godwin, who requesting 
 basium (a kiss) from the archbishop, thereupon seized on the 
 archbishop s manor of Baseham. 
 
 A treaty is a writ of mutual promise between two independent 
 states, and the law of promise is the same to nations as to indi 
 viduals. It is to be sacredly performed by each party in that 
 sense in which it knew arid permitted the other party to under 
 stand it, at the time of the contract. Any thing short of this is 
 criminal deceit in individuals, and in governments impious perfidy. 
 After the conduct of France in the affair of the guarantees, and 
 of the revenues of the order, we had the same right to preserve 
 the island independent of France by a British garrison, as a law 
 ful creditor has to the household goods of a fugitive and dishonest 
 debtor. 
 
 One other assertion made by Lord Minto, in the same speech, 
 bears so immediately on the plan of The Friend, as far as it pro 
 posed to investigate the principle of international, no less than of 
 private morality, that I feel myself in some degree under an 
 obligation to notice it. A treaty, says his lordship, ought to be 
 strictly observed by a nation in its literal sense, even though the 
 utter ruin of that nation should be the certain and foreknown 
 consequence of that observance. Previously to any remarks of 
 my own on this high flight of diplomatic virtue, we will hear 
 what Harrington has said on this subject : " A man may devote 
 himself to death or destruction to save a nation ; but no nation 
 
 L* 
 
250 THE FKIEND. 
 
 will devote itself to death or destruction to save mankind. Ma- 
 chiavel is decried for saying, that no consideration is to be had 
 of what is just or unjust, of what is merciful or cruel, of what is 
 honorable or ignominious, in case it be to save a state or to pre 
 serve liberty : which as to the manner of expression may per 
 haps be crudely spoken. But to imagine that a nation will de 
 vote itself to death or destruction any more after faith given, or 
 an engagement thereto tending, than ijf there had been no en 
 gagement made or faith given, were not piety but folly."" Crudely 
 spoken indeed, and not less crudely thought ; nor is the matter 
 much mended by the commentator. Yet every man, who is at 
 all acquainted with the world and its past history, knows that 
 the fact itself is truly stated : and what is more important in the 
 present argument, he can not find in his heart a full, deep, and 
 downright verdict, that it should be otherwise. The conse 
 quences of this perplexity in the moral feelings are not seldom 
 extensively injurious. For men hearing the duties which would 
 be binding on two individuals living under the same laws in 
 sisted on as equally obligatory on two independent states, in ex 
 treme cases, where they see clearly the impracticability of realiz 
 ing such a notion, and having at the same time a dim half- 
 consciousness, that two states can never be placed exactly on the 
 same ground as two individuals, relieve themselves from their 
 perplexity by cutting what they can not untie, and assert that 
 national policy can not in all cases be subordinated to the laws 
 of morality ; in other words, that a government may act with 
 injustice, and yet remain blameless. This assertion was hazard 
 ed, I record it with unfeigned regret, by a minister of state, on 
 the affair of Copenhagen. Tremendous assertion ! that would 
 render every complaint, which we make, of the abominations of 
 the French tyrant, hypocrisy, or mere incendiary declamation for 
 the simple-headed multitude. But, thank God ! it is as unne 
 cessary and unfounded, as it is tremendous. For what is a treaty ? 
 A voluntary contract between two nations. So we will state it 
 in the first instance. Now it is an impossible case, that any na 
 tion can be supposed by any other to have intended its own ab 
 solute destruction in a treaty, which its interests alone could 
 have prompted it to make. The very thought is self-contradic 
 tory. Not only Athens (we will say) could not have intended 
 this to have been understood in any specific promise made to 
 
ESSAY X. 251 
 
 Sparta ; but Sparta could never have imagined that Athens had 
 so intended it. And Athens itself must have known, that had 
 she even affirmed the contrary, Sparta could not have believed 
 nay, would have been under a moral obligation not to have be 
 lieved her. Were it possible to suppose such a case for in 
 stance, such a treaty made by a single besieged town, under an 
 independent government as that of Numantia it becomes no 
 longer a state, but the act of a certain numbe^ of individuals 
 voluntarily sacrificing themselves, each to preserve his separate 
 honor. For the state was already destroyed by the circumstances 
 which alone could make such an engagement conceivable. But 
 we have said, nations. Applied to England and France, rela 
 tively to treaties, this is but a form of speaking. The treaty is 
 really made by some half-dozen, or perhaps half a hundred in 
 dividuals, possessing the government of these countries. Now 
 it is a universally admitted part of the law of nations, that an 
 engagement entered into by a minister with a foreign power, 
 when it is known to this power that the minister in so doing 
 has exceeded and contravened his instructions, is altogether nu 
 gatory. And is it to be supposed for a moment, that a whole 
 nation, consisting perhaps of twenty millions of human souls, 
 could ever have invested a few individuals, whom altogether 
 for the promotion of its welfare it had intrusted with its govern 
 ment, with the right of signing away its existence ?# 
 
 * See Paley s Moral and Political Philosophy, B. vi. c. 12. Ed. 
 
ESSAY XI. 
 
 Arnicas reprehensio?ies gratissime-accipiamus oportet ; etiam si reprehendi 
 non mcruit opimo nostra, vel lianc propter causam, quod recte dffendi potest. 
 Si vcro infirmitas vel humana vcl propria, etiam cum veracitcr arguitur, non 
 potest non aliquantulum contristari, mclius tumor dolet dum curatur, quam 
 dam et parcitur et non sanatur. Hoc enim est quod acute v idit, qui dixit : 
 utiliores csse plcrumquc inimicos objurgantes, quam amicos objurgare metu- 
 entes. llli cnim dum rixantur, dlcunt aliquando vera quae. corrigamus : isti 
 autem minorem, quam oportet, cxhibcnt justitue libertatem, dum amicitice ti- 
 ment cxasperare dulcedincm. AUGUSTIX. HIERONYMO.* 
 
 Censures, offered in friendliness, we ought to receive with gratitude : 
 yea, though our opinions did not merit censure, we should still be thankful 
 for the attack on them, were it only that it gives us an opportunity of suc 
 cessfully defending the same. For never doth an important truth spread 
 its roots so wide or clasp the soil so stubbornly, as when it has braved the 
 winds of controversy. There is a stirring and a far-heard music sent forth 
 from the tree of sound knowledge, when its branches are fighting with tho 
 Btorm, which passing onward shrills out at once truth s triumph and its 
 own defeat. But if the infirmity of human nature, or of our own constitu 
 tional temperament, can not, even when we have been fairly convicted of 
 error, but suffer some small mortification, yet better suffer pain from its 
 extirpation, than from the consequences of its continuance, and of the false 
 tenderness that has withholden the remedy. This is what the acute ob 
 server had in his mind, who said, that upbraiding enemies were not sel 
 dom more profitable than friends afraid to find fault. For the former 
 amidst their quarrelsome invectives may chance on some home truths, by 
 which we may amend ourselves in consequence ; while the latter from an 
 over-delicate apprehension of ruffling the smooth surface of friendship 
 shrink from its duties, and from the manly freedom which truth and justice 
 demand. 
 
 ONLY a few privileged individuals are authorized to pass into 
 the theatre without stopping at the door-keeper s box ; but every 
 
 * August. Op. Tom. ii. Epist. xv. Ed. Basil. The original of the former 
 part of the quotation, which is a good deal altered, stands thus :Ut et ego 
 amicissimam reprehensionem gratlsslme accipiam, etiam si repreJiendi non 
 meruit quod recte defendi potest. * * * * Si vero infirmitas vclut hu 
 mana mea, etiam cum veraciter argiior, non potest non aliquantulum contris- 
 tari, melius capitis tumor dolet, d c. Ed. 
 
ESSAY XI. 253 
 
 man of decent appearance may put down the play-price there, and 
 thenceforward has as good a right as the managers themselves 
 not only to see and hear, as far as his place in the house, and his 
 own ears and eyes permit him, but likewise to express audibly 
 his approbation or disapprobation of what may be going forward 
 on the stage. If his feelings happen to be in unison with those 
 of the audience in general, he may without breach of decorum 
 persevere in his notices of applause or dislike, till the \vish of the 
 house is complied with. If he finds himself unsupported, he rests 
 contented with having once exerted his common, right, and on 
 that occasion at least gives no further interruption to the amuse 
 ment of those who feel differently from him. So it is, or so it 
 should be, in literature. A few extraordinary minds may be al 
 lowed to pass a mere opinion ; though in point of fact those, 
 who alone are entitled to this privilege, are ever the last to avail 
 themselves of it. Add too, that even the mere opinions of such 
 men may in general be regarded either as promissory notes, or as 
 receipts referring to a former payment. But every man s opinion 
 has a right to pass into the common auditory, if his reason for 
 the opinion is paid down at the same time : for arguments are 
 the sole current coin of intellect. The degree of influence to 
 which the opinion is entitled should be proportioned to the weight 
 and value of the reasons for it ; and whether these are shillings 
 or pounds sterling, the man, who has given them, remains 
 blameless, provided he contents himself with the place to which 
 they have entitled him, and does not attempt by strength of 
 lungs to counterbalance its disadvantages, or expect to exert as 
 immediate an influence in the back seats of the upper gallery, as 
 if he had paid in gold and been seated in the stage box. 
 
 But unfortunately, and here commence the points of differ 
 ence between the theatric and the literary public, in the great 
 theatre of literature there are no authorized door-keepers : for our 
 anonymous critics are self-elected. I shall not fear the charge 
 of calumny if I add that they have lost all credit with wise men 
 by unfair dealing : such as their refusal to receive an honest 
 man s money, that is, his argument, because they anticipate and 
 dislike his opinion, while others of suspicious character and the 
 most unseemly appearance are suffered to pass without payment, 
 or by virtue of orders which they have themselves distributed to 
 known partisans. Sometimes the honest man s intellectual coin 
 
254 THE FRIEND. 
 
 is refused under pretence that it is light or counterfeit, without 
 any proof given either by the money scales, or by sounding the 
 coin in dispute together with one of known goodness. We may 
 carry the metaphor still farther. It is by no means a rare case, 
 that the money is returned because it had a different sound from 
 that of a counterfeit, the brassy blotches on which seemed to 
 blush for the impudence of the silver wash in which they were 
 misled, and rendered the mock coin a lively emblem of a lie self- 
 detected. Still oftener does the rejection take place by a mere 
 act of insolence, and the blank assertion that the candidate s 
 money is light or bad, is justified by a second assertion that he is 
 a fool or knave for offering it. 
 
 The second point of difference explains the preceding, and ac 
 counts both for the want of established door-keepers in the audi 
 tory of literature, and for the practices of those, who under the 
 name of reviewers volunteer this office. There is no royal mint 
 age for arguments, no ready means by which all men alike, who 
 possess common sense, may determine their value and intrinsic 
 worth at the first sight or sound. Certain forms of natural logic 
 indeed there are, the inobservance of which is decisive against an 
 argument ; but the strictest adherence to them is no proof of its 
 actual, though an indispensable condition of its possible, validity. 
 In the arguer s own conscience there is, no doubt, a certain value, 
 and an infallible criterion of it, which applies to all arguments 
 equally ; and this is the sincere conviction of the mind itself. 
 But for those to whom it is offered, there are only conjectural 
 marks ; yet such as will seldom mislead any man of plain sense, 
 who is both honest and observant. 
 
 These characteristics I have attempted to comprise in a pre 
 vious part of this work,^ and to describe them more at large in 
 the essays that follow, on the communication of truth. If the 
 honest warmth, which results from the strength of the particular 
 conviction, be tempered by the modesty which belongs to the 
 sense of general fallibility ; if the emotions, which accompany all 
 vivid perceptions, are preserved distinct from the expression of 
 personal passions, and from appeals to them in the heart of 
 others ; if the reasoner asks no respect for the opinion, as his 
 opinion, but only in proportion as it is acknowledged by that rea 
 son, which is common to all men ; and, lastly, if he supports an 
 *P.4l. #< 
 
ESSAY XI. 255 
 
 opinion on no subject which he has not previously examined, and 
 furnishes proof both that he possesses the means of inquiry by his 
 education or the nature of his pursuits, and that he has endeav 
 ored to avail himself of those means ; then, and with these con 
 ditions, every human being is authorized to make public the 
 grounds of any opinion which he holds, and of course the opinion 
 itself, as the object of them. Consequently, it is the duty of all 
 men, not always indeed to attend to him, but, if they do, to at 
 tend to him with respect, and with a sincere as well as apparent 
 toleration. I should oilend against my own laws, if I disclosed at 
 present the nature of my convictions concerning the degree, in 
 which this virtue of toleration is possessed and practised by the 
 majority of my contemporaries and countrymen. But if the con 
 trary temper is felt and shown in instances where all those con 
 ditions have been, observed, which have been stated at full in the 
 preliminary essays that form the introduction to this work, and 
 the chief of which I have just now recapitulated ; Ihave no hesi 
 tation in declaring that whatever the opinion may be, and how 
 ever opposite to the hearer s or reader s previous persuasions, one 
 or other of all of the following defects must be taken for granted. 
 Either the intolerant person is not master of the grounds on 
 which his own faith is built ; which, therefore, neither is nor can 
 be his own faith, though it may very easily be his imagined in 
 terest, and his habit of thought. In this case he is angry, not at 
 the opposition to truth, but at the interruption of his own indo 
 lence and intellectual slumber, or possibly at the apprehension, 
 that his temporal advantages are threatened, or at least the ease 
 of mind, in which he had been accustomed to enjoy them. Or, 
 secondly, he has no love of truth for its own sake ; no reverence 
 for the divine command to seek earnestly after it, which com 
 mand, if it had not been so often and solemnly given by revela 
 tion, is yet involved and expressed in the gift of reason, and in 
 the dependence of all our virtues on its development. He has no 
 moral and religious awe for freedom of thought, though accom 
 panied both by sincerity and humility ; nor for the right of free 
 communication which is ordained by God, together with that 
 freedom, if it be true that God has ordained us to live in society, 
 and has made the progressive improvement of all and each of us 
 to depend on the reciprocal aids, which directly or indirectly each 
 supplies to all, and all to each. But if his alarm and his conse- 
 
256 THE FRIEND. 
 
 quent intolerance, are occasioned by his eternal rather than tem 
 poral interests, and if, as is most commonly the case, he does not 
 deceive himself on this point, gloomy indeed, and erroneous be 
 yond idolatry, must have been his notions of the Supreme Being ! 
 For surely the poor heathen who represents to himself the divine 
 attributes of wisdom, justice, and mercy, under multiplied and 
 forbidden symbols in the powers of nature or the souls of extraor 
 dinary men, practises a superstition which (though at once the 
 cause and effect of blindness and sensuality) is less incompati 
 ble with inward piety and true religious feeling than the creed 
 of that man, who in the spirit of his practice, though not in di 
 rect words, loses sight of all these attributes, and substitutes in 
 stead of the adoptive and cheerful boldness, which our new al 
 liance with God requires," a " servile and thrall-like fear."*" 
 Such fear-ridden and thence angry believers, or rather acquies 
 cents, would do well to re-peruse the book 01* Job, and observe 
 the sentence passed by the All-just on the friends of the sufferer, 
 who had hoped, like venal advocates, to purchase the favor of 
 God by uttering truths of which in their own hearts they had 
 neither conviction nor comprehension. The truth from, the lips 
 did not atone for the lie in the heart, while the rashness of agony 
 in the searching and bewildered complainant, was forgiven in 
 consideration of his sincerity and integrity in not disguising the 
 true dictates of his reason and conscience, but avowing his inca 
 pability of solving a problem by his reason, which belbre the 
 Christian dispensation the Almighty was pleased to solve only 
 by declaring it to be beyond the limits of human reason. Having 
 insensibly passed into a higher and more serious style than I had 
 first intended, I will venture to appeal to these self-obscurants, 
 w r hose faith dwells in the land of the shadow of darkness, these 
 
 * Milton Of Reformation i>i England, B. i. sub initio. For in very deed, 
 the superstitious man by his good-will is an atheist ; but being scared from 
 thence by the pangs and gripes of a boiling -conscience, all in a pudder 
 shuffles up to himself such a God and such a worship as is most agreeable 
 to remedy his fear : which fear of his as also his hope, fixed only upon the 
 flesh, renders likewise the whole faculty of his apprehension carnal ; and all 
 the inward acts of worship issuing from the native strength of the soul, run 
 out lavishly to the upper skin, and there harden into a crust of formality 
 Hence men came to scan the Scriptures by the letter, and in the covenant 
 of our redemption magnified the external signs more than the quickening 
 power of the spirit. Ibid. Ed. 
 
ESSAY XII. 257 
 
 papists without a pope, and protestants who protest only against 
 all protesting ; and will appeal to them in words which yet more 
 immediately concern them as Christians, in the hope that they 
 will lend a fearless ear to the learned apostle, when he both as 
 sures and labors to persuade them that they were called in 
 Christ to all perfectness in spiritual knowledge and full assurance 
 of understanding in the mystery of God. There can be no end 
 without means : and God furnishes 110 means that exempt us 
 from the task and duty of joining our own best endeavors. The 
 original stock, or wild olive-tree of our natural powers, was not 
 given us to be burned or blighted, but to be grafted on. We are 
 not only not forbidden to examine and propose our doubts, so it 
 be done with humility and proceed from a real desire to know 
 the truth ; but we are repeatedly commanded so to do ; and 
 with a most unchristian spirit must that man have read the pre 
 ceding passages, if he can interpret any one sentence as having 
 for its object to excuse a too numerous class, who, to use the 
 words of St. Augustine, qucerunt non ut fidem sed ut infidelita- 
 tem inveniant ; such as examine not to find reasons for faith, 
 but pretexts for infidelity. 
 
 ESSAY XII. 
 
 Such is the iniquity of men, that they suck in opinions as wild asses do 
 the wind, without distinguishing the wholesome from the corrupted air, 
 and then live upon it at a venture : and when all their confidence is built 
 upon zeal and mistake, yet therefore, because they are zealous and mis 
 taken, they are impatient of contradiction. JEREMY TAYLOR.* 
 
 "Ir," observes the eloquent bishop in the work, from which 
 my motto is selected, " an opinion plainly and directly brings in 
 a crime, as if a man preaches treason or sedition, his opinion is 
 not his excuse. A man is nevertheless a traitor because he be 
 lieves it lawful to commit treason ; and a man is a murderer if 
 he kills his brother unjustly, although he should think that he 
 
 * Epist. Dedicat. to the Liberty of Prophesying. Vol. vii. p. 409. He- 
 ber s edit. Ed. 
 
258 THE FRIEND. 
 
 was doing God good service thereby. Matters of fact are equally 
 judicable, whether the principle of them be from, within or from 
 without."* 
 
 To dogmatize a crime, that is, to teach it as a doctrine, is 
 itself a crime, great or small as the crime dogmatized is more or 
 less palpably so. " You say," said Sir John Cheke, addressing 
 himself to the papists of his day, " that you rebel for your reli 
 gion. First tell me, what religion is that which teaches you to 
 rebel." As my object in the present section is to treat of toler 
 ance and intolerance in the public bearings of opinions and their 
 propagation, I shall embrace this opportunity of selecting the 
 two passages, which I have been long inclined to consider as the 
 most eloquent in our English literature, though each in a very 
 different style of eloquence, as indeed the authors were as dis 
 similar in their bias, if not in their faith, as two bishops of the 
 same church can well be supposed to have been. I think too, I 
 may venture to add, that both the extracts will be new to a very 
 great majority of my readers. For the length I make no apology. 
 It was part of my plan to allot two essays of The Friend, the 
 one to a selection from our prose writers, and the other from our 
 poets ; but in both cases from works that do not occur in our 
 ordinary reading. 
 
 The following passages are both on the same subject ; the 
 first from Jeremy Taylor ; the second from Bishop Bedell. 
 
 1 . The rise and progress of a controversy, from the speculative 
 opinion of an individual, to the revolution or intestine war of a 
 nation. 
 
 " This is one of the inseparable characters of a heretic ; he 
 sets his whole communion and all his charity upon his article ; 
 for to be zealous in the schism, that is the characteristic of a 
 good man, that is his note of Christianity ; in all the rest he 
 excuses you or tolerates you, provided you be a true believer ; 
 then you are one of the faithful, a good man arid a precious, you 
 are of the congregation of the saints, and one of the godly. All 
 solifidians do thus ; and all that do thus are solifidians, the 
 church of "Rome herself not excepted ; for though in words she 
 proclaims the possibility of keeping all the commandments ; yet 
 she dispenses easier with, him that breaks them all, than with 
 him that speaks one word against any of her articles, though but 
 * Liberty of Propb. s. 13. Ed. 
 
ESSAY XII. 259 
 
 the least ; even the eating of fish and forbidding flesh in Lent. 
 So that it is faith they regard more than chanty, a right belief 
 more than a holy life ; and for this you shall be with them upon 
 terms easy enough, provided you go not a hair s breadth from 
 any thing of her belief. For if you do, they have provided for 
 you two deaths and two fires, both inevitable and one eternal. 
 And this certainly is one of the greatest evils, of which the 
 church of Home is guilty : for this in itself is the greatest and 
 unworthiest uncharitableness. But the procedure is of great use 
 to their ends. For the greatest part of Christians are those that 
 can not consider things leisurely and wisely, searching their bot 
 toms and discovering their causes, or foreseeing events which are 
 to come after ; but are carried away by fear and hope, by affec 
 tion and prepossession : and therefore the Roman doctors are 
 careful to govern them as they will be governed. If you dis 
 pute, you gain, it may be, one, and lose five ; but if you threaten 
 them with damnation, you keep them in fetters ; for they that 
 are in fear of death, are all their Lifetime in bondage,* saith 
 the apostle : and there is in the world nothing so potent as fear 
 of the two deaths which are the two arms and grapples of iron 
 by which the church of Rome takes and keeps her timorous or 
 conscientious proselytes. The easy protestant calls upon you 
 from Scripture to do your duty, to build a holy life upon a holy 
 faith, the faith of the apostles and first disciples of our Lord : he 
 tells you if you err, and teaches ye the truth ; and if ye will obey, 
 it is well ; if not, he tells you of your sin, and that all sin de 
 serves the wrath of God ; but judges no man s person, much less 
 any states of men. lie knows that God s judgments are right 
 eous and true ; but he knows also, that his mercy absolves many 
 persons, who, in his just judgment, were condemned : and if he 
 had a warrant from God to say, that he should destroy all the 
 papists, as Jonas had concerning the Ninevites ; yet he remem 
 bers that every repentance, if it be sincere, will do more, and 
 prevail greater, and last longer than God s anger will. Besides 
 these things, there is a strange spring, and secret principle in 
 every man s understanding, that it is oftentimes turned about by 
 such impulses, of which no man can give an account. But we 
 all remember a most wonderful instance of it in the disputation 
 between the two Reynoldses, John and William ; the former of 
 * Heb. ii. 15. 
 
260 THE FRIEND. 
 
 which being a papist, and the latter a protestant, met and dis 
 puted, with a purpose to confute and to convert each other. 
 And so they did : for those arguments which were used, pre 
 vailed fully against their adversary, and yet did not prevail with 
 themselves. The papist turned protestant, and the protestant 
 became a papist, and so remained to their dying day. Of which 
 some ingenious person gave a most handsome account in the fol 
 lowing excellent epigram : 
 
 Bella inter geminos plusquam civilia fratres 
 
 Traxerat ambiguus religionis apex, 
 llle reformats fidei pro partibus instat ; 
 
 Jstc reformandam denegat cssc fidem. 
 JPropositis causfs rationibus, alter utrinque 
 
 Concurrere pares, et cecidere pares. 
 Quodfuit in votis, fratrem capit alter liter que ; 
 
 Quodfuit infatis, perdit utcr que fidem. 
 Captivi gemini sine captivante fuerunt, 
 
 Et victor victi transfuga castra petit. 
 Quod genus hoc pugncc est, ubi victus gaudet uterque, 
 
 Et tamen alteruter se superasse dolet? 
 
 But further yet, he considers the natural and regular infirmi 
 ties of mankind ; and God considers them much more ; he knows 
 that in man tMfere is nothing admirable but his ignorance and 
 weakness ; his prejudice, and the infallible certainty of being de 
 ceived in many things : he sees that wicked men oftentimes 
 know much more than many very good men ; and that the un 
 derstanding is not of itself considerable in morality, and effects 
 nothing in rewards and punishments ; it is the will only that 
 rules man and can obey God. He sees and deplores it, that 
 many men study hard and understand little ; that they dispute 
 earnestly and understand not one another at all ; that affections 
 creep so certainly, and mingle with their arguing, that the argu 
 ment is lost, and nothing remains but the conflict of two adver 
 saries affections ; that a man is so willing, so easy, so ready to 
 believe what makes for his opinion, so hard to understand an ar 
 gument against himself, that it is plain it is the principle within, 
 not the argument without, that determines him. He observes 
 also that all the world (a few individuals excepted) are unaltera 
 bly determined to the religion of their country, of their family, of 
 their society ; that there is never any considerable change rrrade, 
 but what is made by war and empire, by fear and hope. He re- 
 
ESSAY XII. 261 
 
 members that it is a rare thing to see a Jesuit of the Dominican 
 opinion, or a Dominican (until of late) of the Jesuit ; but every 
 order gives laws to the understanding of their novices, and they 
 never change. He considers there is such ambiguity in words, 
 by which all lawgivers express their meaning ; that there is such 
 abstruseness in mysteries of religion, that some things are so much 
 too high for us, that we can not understand them rightly ; and 
 yet they are so sacred, and concerning, that men will think they 
 are bound to look into them, as far as they can ; that it is no 
 wonder if they quickly go too far, where no understanding, if it 
 were fitted for it, could go far enough ; but in these things it will 
 be hard not to be deceived, since our words can not rightly ex 
 press those things ; that there is such variety of human under 
 standings, that men s faces differ not so much as their souls ; and 
 that if there were not so much difficulty in things, yet they could 
 not but be variously apprehended by several men. And hereto 
 he considers, that in twenty opinions, it may be that not one of 
 them is true ; nay, whereas Varro reckoned that among the old 
 philosophers there were eight hundred opinions concerning the 
 summum bo?ium, that yet not one of them hit the right. He 
 sees also that in all religions, in all societies, in all families , and 
 in all things, opinions differ ; and since opinions are too often be 
 got by passion, by passions and violence they are kept ; and every 
 man is too apt to overvalue his own opinion ; and out of a desire 
 that every man should conform his judgment to his that teaches, 
 men are apt to be earnest in their persuasion, and overact the 
 proposition ; and from being true as he supposes, he will think it 
 profitable ; and if you warm him either with confidence or oppo 
 sition, he quickly tells you it is necessary ; and as he loves- those 
 that think as he does, so he is ready to hate them that do not ; 
 and then secretly from wishing evil to him, he is apt to believe 
 evil will come to him ; and that it is just it should ; and by this 
 time the opinion is troublesome, and puts other men upon their 
 guard against it ; and then while passion reigns, and reason is 
 modest and patient, and talks not loud like a storm, victory is 
 more regarded than truth, and men call God into the party, and 
 his judgments are used for arguments, and the threatenings of the 
 Scripture are snatched up in haste, and men throw arrows, fire 
 brands, and death, and by this time all the world is in an uproar. 
 All this, and a thousand things more the English protestants con- 
 
262 THE FRIEND. 
 
 sidering deny not their communion to any Christian who desires 
 it, and believes the apostles creed, and is of the religion of the 
 first four general councils ; they hope well of all that live well ; 
 they receive into their bosom all true believers of what church 
 soever ; arid for them that err, they instruct them, and then leave 
 them to their liberty, to stand or fall before their own master."* 
 
 2. A doctrine not the less safe for being the more charitable. 
 
 " Christ our Lord hath given us, amongst others, two infallible 
 notes to know the church. My sheep, saith he, hear my voice :f 
 and again, By this shall all men know that ye are my disciple?,, 
 if ye have love one to another. $ What ! shall we stand upon 
 conjectural arguments from that which men say ? We are par 
 tial to ourselves, malignant to our opposites. Let Christ be heard 
 who be his, who not. And for the hearing of his voice that 
 it might be the issue ! Bat I see you decline it, therefore I leave 
 it also for the present. That other is that which now I stand 
 upon, the badge of Christ s sheep. Not a likelihood, but a 
 certain token whereby every man may know them : by this, 
 saith he, shall all men know that ye are my disciples if ye have 
 charity one towards another. Thanks be to God, this mark of 
 our Saviour is in us, which you with our schismatics and other 
 enemies want. As Solomon found the true mother by her natu 
 ral affection, that chose rather to yield to her adversary s plea, 
 claiming her child, than endure that it should be cut in pieces ; 
 so may it soon be found at this day whether is the true mother. 
 Ours, that faith, give her the living child and kill him not ; or 
 yours, that if she may not have it, is content it be killed rather than 
 want of her will. Alas ! (saith ours even of those that leave 
 her) these be my children ! I have borne them to Christ in 
 baptism : I have nourished them as I could with mine own 
 breasts, his testaments. I would have brought them up to man s 
 estate, as their free birth and parentage deserves. Whether it 
 be their lightness or discontent, or her enticing words and gay 
 shows, they leave me : they have found a better mother. Let 
 them live yet, though in bondage. I shall have patience ; I per 
 mit the care of them to their father ; I beseech him to keep 
 them that they do no evil. If they make their peace with him, 
 
 * Dissuasive from Popery. Part II. B. i. s. 7. Ed. 
 
 f John x. M.Ed. J 76. xiii. 35. Ed. 
 
ESSAY XIII. 263 
 
 I am satisfied : they have not hurt me at all. Nay/ but saith 
 yours, I sit alone as queen and mistress of Christ s family, he 
 that hath not me for his mother, can not have God for his fa 
 ther. Mine, therefore, are these, either born or adopted ; arid 
 if they will not be mine, they shall be none. So without expect 
 ing Christ s sentence she cuts with the temporal sword, hangs, 
 burns, drawt, those that she perceives inclined to leave her, or 
 have left her already. So she kills with the spiritual sword those 
 that are subject not to her, yea, thousands of souls that not only 
 have no means so to do. but many which never so much as have 
 heard whether there be a pope of Rome or no. Let our Sol 
 omon be judge between" them, yea, judge you, Mr. Waddesworth ! 
 more seriously and maturely, not by guesses, but by the very mark 
 of Christ, which wanting yourselves, you have unawares discov 
 ered in us : judge, I say, without passion and partiality, accord 
 ing to Christ s word, which is his flock, which is his church."* 
 
 ESSAY XIII. 
 
 ON THE LAW OF NATIONS. 
 
 EvdaLfioviav teal diKaioavvrjv iruvra Idi&rov e/UTrpoadev rera/c- 
 rai <j)vcef TOVTCJV d r<l fj.ev dvdpuiriva e/f TO. Oela, ra 6t dela elf TOV i]je/j.6va 
 vovv %v(j.iravTa del /3%7retv, ovx wf ^rpof dperi^ rl /nopiov, uhTia npbg dptTrjv 
 iv dperai del vTrofievovaav, cjf rrpbg v6fj.ov riva vo/uoOerovvra. PLATO. 
 
 For all things that regard the well-being and justice of a state are pre-or 
 dained and established in the nature of the individual. Of these it behooves 
 that the merely human (the temporal and fluxional) should be referred and 
 subordinated to the divine in man, and the divine in like manner to the 
 Supreme Mind, so however that the state is not to regulate its actions by 
 reference to any particular form and fragments of virtue, but must fix its 
 eye on that virtue, which is the abiding spirit and (as it were) substratum 
 in all the virtues, as on a law that is itself legislative. 
 
 IT were absurd to suppose, that individuals should be under a 
 law of moral obligation, and yet that a million of the same in- 
 
 * Letter to a friend who had deserted the Church of England for that of 
 Rome. Ed. 
 
264 THE FRIEND. 
 
 dividuals acting collectively or through representatives, should 
 be exempt from all law : for morality is no accident of human 
 nature, but its essential characteristic. A being altogether with 
 out morality is either a beast or a fiend, accordingly as we con 
 ceive this want of conscience to be natural or self-produced ; a 
 mere negation of goodness, or the consequence of rebellion to it. 
 Yet were it possible to conceive a man wholly immoral, it would 
 remain impossible to conceive him without a moral obligation to 
 be otherwise ; and none, but a madman, will imagine that the 
 essential qualities of any thing can be altered by its becoming part 
 of an aggregate ; that a grain of corn, for instance, shall cease 
 to contain flour, as soon as it is part of a peck or bushel. It is, 
 therefore, grounded in the nature of the thing, and not by a mere 
 fiction of the mind, that wise men, who have written on the law 
 of nations, contemplate the several states of the civilized world, 
 as so many individuals, and equally with the latter under a 
 moral obligation to exercise their free agency within such bounds, 
 as render it compatible with the existence of free agency in others. 
 We may represent to ourselves this original free agency, as a right 
 of common, the formation of separate states as an inclosure of 
 this common, the allotments awarded severally to the co-pro 
 prietors as constituting national rights, and the law of nations as 
 the common register-office of their title-deeds. , But in all mo 
 rality, though the principle, which is the abiding spirit of the 
 law, remains perpetual and unaltered, even as that Supreme 
 Reason in whom and from whom it has its being, yet the letter 
 of the law, that is, the application of it to particular instances, 
 and the mode of realizing it in actual practice, must be modified 
 by the existing circumstances. What we should desire to do, 
 the conscience alone will inform us ; but how and when we are 
 to make the attempt, and to what* extent it is in our power to 
 accomplish it, are questions for the judgment, and require an ac 
 quaintance with facts, and their bearings on each other. Thence 
 the improvement of our judgment, and the increase of our knowl 
 edge, on all subjects included within our sphere of action, are 
 not merely advantages recommended by prudence, but absolute 
 duties imposed on us by conscience. 
 
 As the circumstances, then, under 4 which men act as states 
 men, are different from those under which they act as individuals, 
 a proportionate difference must be expected in the practical rules 
 
ESSAY XIII. 265 
 
 by which their public conduct is to be determined. Let me not 
 be misunderstood : I speak of a difference in the practical rules, 
 not in the moral law itself, the means of administering in par 
 ticular cases, and under given circumstances, which it is the sole 
 object of these rules to point out. The spirit continues one and 
 the same, though it may vary its form according to the element 
 into which it is transported. This difference, with its grounds 
 and consequences, it is the province of the philosophical publicist 
 to discover and display : arid exactly in this point (I speak with 
 unfeigned diffidence) it appears to me that the writers on the law 
 of nations,* whose works I have had the opportunity of studying, 
 have been least successful. 
 
 In what does the law of nations differ from the laws enacted 
 by a particular state for its own subjects ? The solution is evi 
 dent. The law of nations, considered apart from the common 
 principle of all morality, is not fixed or positive in itself, nor sup* 
 plied with any regular means of being enforced. Like those du 
 ties in private life which, for the same reasons, moralists have 
 entitled imperfect duties (though the most atrocious guilt may be 
 involved in the omission or violation of them), the law of nations 
 appeals only to the conscience and prudence of the parties con 
 cerned. Wherein then does it differ from the moral laws which 
 the reason, considered as conscience, dictates for the conduct of 
 individuals ? This is a more difficult question ; but my answer 
 would be determined by, and grounded on, the obvious differ 
 ences of the circumstances in the two cases. Remember then, 
 that we are now reasoning, not as sophists or system-mongers, 
 but as men anxious to discover what is right in order that we 
 may practise it, or at least give our suffrage and the influence of 
 our opinion in recommending its practice. We must therefore 
 confine the question to those cases, in which honest men and real 
 
 * Grotius, Bynkerschoek, Puftendorf, Wolfe, and Vattel ; to whose works 
 I must add, as comprising whatever is most valuable in the preceding au 
 thors, with many important improvements and additions, Robinson s Re 
 ports of Cases in the Admiralty Court, under Sir W. Scott : to whom in 
 ternational law is under no less obligation than the law of commercial pro 
 ceeding was to the late Lord Mansfield. As I have never seen Sir W. Scott, 
 nor either by myself or my connections enjoy the honor of the remotest 
 acquaintance with him, I trust that even by those who may think my opin 
 ion erroneous, I shall not at least be suspected of intentional flattery. 
 1817. 
 
 VOL. II. M 
 
266 THE FEIEND. 
 
 patriots can suppose any controversy to exist between real patriot 
 ism and common honesty. The objects of the patriot arc, that 
 his countrymen should, as far as circumstances permit, enjoy 
 what the Creator designed for the enjoyment of animals endowed 
 with reason, and of course that they should have it in their 
 power to develop those faculties which were given them to be 
 developed. He would do his best that every one of his country 
 men should possess whatever all men may and should possess, 
 and that a sufficient number should be enabled and encouraged 
 to acquire those excellencies which, though not necessary or pos 
 sible for all men, are yet to all men useful and honorable. He 
 knows that patriotism itself is a necessary link in the golden 
 chain of our affections and virtues, and turns away with indignant 
 scorn from the false philosophy or mistaken religion, which would 
 persuade him that cosmopolitism is nobler than nationality, the 
 human race a sublimer object of love than a people ; and that 
 Plato, Luther, Newton, arid their equals, formed themselves 
 neither in the market nor the senate, but in the world, and for 
 all men of all ages. True ! But where, and among whom are 
 these giant exceptions produced ? In the wide empires of Asia, 
 where millions of human beings acknowledge no other bond but 
 that of a common slavery, and are distinguished on the map but 
 by a name which themselves perhaps never heard, or hearing 
 abhor ? No ! in a circle defined by human affections, the first 
 firm sod within which becomes sacred beneath the quickened step 
 of the returning citizen ; here, where the powers and interests 
 of men spread without confusion through a common sphere, like 
 the vibrations propagated in the air by a single voice, distinct 
 yet coherent, and all uniting to express one thought and the same 
 feeling ; here, where even the common soldier dares force a pass 
 age for his comrades by gathering up the bayonets of the enemy 
 into his own breast, because his country expected every man to 
 do his duty, and this not after he has been hardened by habit, 
 but, as probably in his first battle ; not reckless or hopeless, but 
 braving death from a keener sensibility to those blessings which 
 make life dear, to those qualities which render himself worthy to 
 enjoy them ; here, where the royal crown is loved and wor 
 shiped as a glory around the sainted head of freedom ; where 
 the rustic at his plough whistles with equal enthusiasm, " God 
 save the King," and " Britons never shall be slaves," or, perhaps 
 
ESSAY XIII. 267 
 
 leaves one thistle unweeded in his garden, because it is the sym 
 bol of his dear native land ;* here, from within this circle de 
 fined, as light by shade, or rather as lighf within light, by its in 
 tensity, here alone, and only within these magic circles, rise up 
 the awful spirits, whose words are oracles for mankind, whose 
 love embraces all countries, and whose voice sounds through all 
 ages ! Here, and here only, may we confidently expect those 
 mighty minds to be reared and ripened, whose names are natu 
 ralized in foreign lands, the sure fellow-travellers of civilization, 
 and yet render their own country dearer and more proudly dear 
 to their own countrymen. This is indeed cosmopolitism, at once 
 the nurseling and the nurse of patriotic affection. This, and this 
 alone, is genuine philanthropy, which like the olive-tree, sacred 
 to concord and to wisdom, fattens not exhausts the soil, from 
 which it sprang, and in which it remains rooted. It is feeble 
 ness only which can not be generous without injustice, or just 
 without ceasing to be generous. Is the morning star less brilliant, 
 or does a ray less fall 011 the golden fruitage of the earth", be 
 cause the moons of Saturn too feed their lamps from the same 
 sun ? Even Germany, though curst with a base and hateful 
 brood of nobles and princelings, cowardly and ravenous jackals to 
 the very flocks intrusted to them as to shepherds, who hunt for 
 the tiger and whine and wag their tails for his bloody offal even 
 Germany, the ever-changing boundaries of which superannuate 
 the last year s map, and are altered as easily as the hurdles of a 
 temporary sheep-fold, is still remembered with filial love and a 
 patriot s pride, when the thoughtful German hears the names of 
 Luther and Leibnitz. Ah ! why, he sighs, why for herself in 
 vain should my country have produced such a host of immortal 
 
 * I can not here refuse myself the pleasure of recording a speech of the 
 poet Burns, related to me by the lady to whom it was addressed. Having 
 been asked by her, why in his more serious poems lie had not changed the 
 two or three Scotch words which seemed only to disturb the purity of the 
 style, the poet with great sweetness, and his usual happiness in reply, an 
 swered that in truth it would have been better, but 
 
 The rough bur-thistle spreading wide 
 
 Amang the bearded bear, 
 I turn d the weeder-clips aside 
 An spar d the symbol dear. 
 
 An author may be allowed to quote from his own poems, when he does it 
 with as much modesty and felicity as Burns did in this instance. 
 
268 THE FRIEND. 
 
 minds ! Yea, even the poor enslaved, degraded, and barbarized 
 Greek can still point to, the harbor of Tenedos, and say, "There 
 lay our fleet when we were besieging Troy." 
 
 Reflect a moment on the past history of this wonderful people. 
 What were they while they remained free and independent, 
 when Greece resembled a collection of mirrors set in a single 
 frame, each having its own focus of patriotism, yet all capable, 
 as at Marathon arid Plalea, of converging to one point and of 
 consuming a common foe ? What were they then ? The fountains 
 of light and civilization, of truth and of beauty, to all mankind ! 
 they were the thinking head, the beating heart, of the whole 
 world ! They lost their independence, and with their independ 
 ence their patriotism ; and became the cosmopolites of antiquity. 
 It has been truly observed by the author of the work for which 
 Palm was murdered, that, after the first acts of severity, the Ro 
 mans treated the Greeks not only more mildly than their other 
 slaves and dependents, but behaved to them even affectionately 
 and with munificence. The victor nation felt reverentially the 
 presence of the visible and invisible deities that gave sanctity to 
 every grove, every fountain, and every forum. " Think," (writes 
 Pliny to one of his friends) " that you are sent into the province of 
 Achaia, that true and genuine Greece, where civilization, letters, 
 even corn, are believed to have been discovered ; that you are 
 sent to administer the affairs of free states, that is, to men emi 
 nently free, who have retained their natural right by valor, by 
 services, by friendship, lastly by treaty and by religion. Revere 
 the gods their founders, the sacred influences represented in those 
 gods ; revere their ancient glory and this very old age N which in 
 man is venerable, in cities sacred. Cherish in thyself a rever 
 ence of antiquity, a reverence for their great exploits, a reverence 
 even for their fables. Detract nothing from the liberty, or the 
 dignity, or even the pretensions of any state ; keep before thine 
 eyes that this is the land which sent us our institutions, which 
 gave us our laws, not after it was subjugated, but in compliance 
 with our petition."* And what came out of these men, who 
 were eminently free without patriotism, because without national 
 independence ? (which eminent freedom, however, Pliny him 
 self, in the very next sentence, styles the shadow and residuum 
 
 * Lib. VIII. Ep. 24. Ed. 
 
ESSAY XIII. 269 
 
 of liberty.)* While they were intense patriots, they were the 
 benefactors of all mankind, legislators for the very nation that 
 afterwards subdued and enslaved them. When, therefore, they 
 became pure cosmopolites, and no partial affections interrupted 
 their philanthropy, and when yet they retained their country, 
 their language, and their arts, what noble works, what mighty 
 discoveries may we not expect from them ? If the applause of 
 a little city, the first-rate town of a country not much larger than 
 Yorkshire, and the encouragement of a .Pericles, produced a 
 Phidias, a Sophocles, and a constellation of other stars scarcely 
 inferior in glory, what will not the applause of the world effect, 
 and the boundless munificence of the world s imperial masters ? 
 Alas ! no Sophocles appeared, no Phidias was born ; individual 
 genius fled with national independence, and the best products 
 were cold and laborious copies of what their fathers had thought 
 and invented in grandeur and majesty. At length nothing re 
 mained, but dastardly and cunning slaves, who avenged their 
 own ruin and degradation by assisting to degrade and ruin their 
 conquerorg ; and the golden harp of their divine language re 
 mained only as the frame on which priests and monks spun their 
 dirty cobwebs of sophistry and superstition ! 
 
 If then in order to be men we must be patriots, and patriotism 
 can not exist without national independence, we need no new or 
 particular code of morals to justify us in placing and preserving 
 our country in that relative situation which is most favorable to 
 its independence. But the true patriot is aware that this object 
 is not to be accomplished by a system of general conquest, such 
 as was pursued by Philip of Macedon and his son, nor yet by the 
 political annihilation of the one state, which happens to be its 
 most formidable rival ; the unwise measure recommended by 
 Cato, and carried into effect by the Romans in the instance of 
 Carthage. Not by the latter ; for rivalry between two nations 
 conduces to the independence of both, calls forth or fosters all the 
 virtues by which national security is maintained ; arid still less 
 by the former ; for the victor nation itself must at length, by the 
 very extension of its own conquests, sink into a mere province ; 
 nay, it will most probably become the most abject portion of the 
 empire, and the most cruelly oppressed, both because it will be 
 
 * Quibus reliquam umbram ft residuum libertatis nomen cripere, durum, 
 ferum, barbarumquc est. 76. Ed. 
 
270 THE FRIEND. 
 
 more feared and suspected by the common tyrant, and because it 
 will be the sink and centre of his luxury and corruption. Even 
 in cases of actual injury and just alarm the patriot sets bounds to 
 th% reprisal of national vengeance, and contents himself with 
 such securities as are compatible with the welfare, though not 
 with the ambitious projects of the nation, the aggressions of 
 which had given the provocation : for as patriotism inspires no 
 superhuman faculties, neither can it dictate any conduct which 
 would require such" He is too conscious of his own ignorance of 
 the future, to dare extend his calculations into remote periods ; 
 nor, because he is a statesman, arrogates to himself the cares of 
 Providence and the government of the world. How does lie 
 know, but that the very independence and consequent virtues of 
 the nation, which in the anger of cowardice he would fain reduce 
 to absolute insignificance, and rob even of its ancient name, may 
 in some future emergence be the destined guardians of his own 
 country ; and that the power which now alarms, may hereafter 
 protect and preserve it ? The experience of history authorizes to 
 believe not only in the possibility, but even the probability, of 
 such an event. An American commander,* who has deserved 
 and received the highest honors which his grateful country, 
 through her assembled representatives, could bestow upon him, 
 once said to me with a sigh : In an evil hour for my country did 
 the French and Spaniards abandon Louisiana to the United 
 States. We were not sufficiently a country before : and should 
 we ever be rnad enough to drive the English from Canada and 
 her other North American provinces, w r e shall soon cease to be a 
 country at all. Without local attachment, without national 
 honor, we shall resemble a swarm of insects that settle on the 
 fruits of the earth to corrupt and consume them, rather than men 
 who love and cleave to the land of their forefathers. After a 
 shapeless anarchy and a series of civil wars, we shall at last be 
 formed into many countries; unless the vices engendered in the 
 process should demand further punishment, and we should pre 
 viously fall beneath the despotism of some military adventurer, 
 like a lion consumed by an inward disease, prostrate and helpless 
 beneath the beak and talons of a vulture, or yet meaner bird 
 of prey.f 
 
 * Decatur. Ed, 
 
 f See Table Talk, VI. p. 398.^. 
 
ESSAY XIV. 
 
 "O, % [j.tv ~pbg rov is o^ov TT^OVTOV, juu/.9iov (5 Trpof rl tyuvraajua 
 77acr?/(,-, 6 iravrax / KOI ovfiap] i~i, (pspei fj.ddrj[J.a Kal eTrfnydev^ 
 ILOV KC^ ootyov rl 8o%aadi jGTai ruv 6t- u/lAwv K.araye Xa 6 TroAm/tdf. Tavrfjv 
 rr/v ahiav xpn <j>dvat rov fir/re a/.Ao Kahdv, p jre ru Trpdf rov irohepov fj-eyako- 
 7^pt-~u^ dcKetv rag Tr6hei, TUV TToAtrcjv //uA iviore OVK dtyvtiv ovruv 6vc- 
 e JUT/V. Hug Aeyetf ; Ilwf fiev ovv avTOV ov "hiyoi/j, uv irapdrrav 
 . f ye uvdyKi] 8i& (3iov ireivtiai ri)v Tpv%r/v del TJJV avrcJv tiiegeWecv. 
 
 PLATO* 
 
 Whatever study or doctrine bears upon the -wealth of the whole, say 
 rather on a certain phantom of a state in the whole, which is everywhere 
 and nowhere, this shall be deemed most useful and wise; and all else is the 
 Btate-craftsrnan s scorn. This we dare pronounce the cause why nations 
 torpid on their dignity in general, conduct their wars so little in a grand 
 and magnanimous spirit, while the citizens are too often wretched, though 
 endowed with high capabilities by nature. How say you? Nay, how 
 should I not call them wretched, who are under the unrelenting necessity of 
 wasting away their life in the mere search after the means of supporting it ? 
 
 IN the preceding essay I treated of what may be wisely desired 
 in respect to our foreign relations. The same sanity of mind will 
 the true patriot display in all that regards the internal prosperity 
 of his country. He will reverence not only whatever tends to 
 make the component individuals more happy, and more worthy 
 of happiness ; but likewise whatever tends to bind them more 
 closely together as a people ; that as a multitude of parts and 
 functions make up one human body, so the whole multitude of - 
 his countrymen may, by the visible and invisible influences of re 
 ligion, language, laws, customs, and the reciprocal dependence 
 and re-action of trade and agriculture, be organ^ed into one body 
 politic. But much as he desires to see all become a whole, he 
 
 * DC Lcffibus, viii. The Greek is chiefly taken from the beginning of this 
 book of the Laws; but it is not taken consecutively; some of the expres 
 sions are from other parts of Plato, and some seem to be the Author s 
 own. Ed. 
 
272 THE FKIEND. 
 
 places limits even to this wish, and abhors that system of policy 
 which would blend men into a state by the dissolution of all those 
 virtues which make them happy and estimable as individuals. 
 Sir James Steuart, after stating the case of the vine-dresser, who 
 is proprietor of a bit of land, on which grain (enough, and no 
 more) is raised for himself and family, and who provides for their 
 other wants, of clothing, salt, &c. by his extra labor as a vine 
 dresser, observes : From this example we discover the differ 
 ence between agriculture exercised as a trade, and as a direct 
 means of subsisting. We have the tAvo species in the vine 
 dresser : he labors the vineyard as a trade, and his spot of ground 
 for subsistence. We may farther conclude, that as to the last 
 part he is only useful to himself ; but as to the first, he is useful 
 to the society and becomes a member of it ; consequently were it 
 not for his trade the state would lose nothing, although the vine 
 dresser and his land were both swallowed up by an earthquake. * 
 Now this contains the sublime philosophy of the sect of econo 
 mists. They worship a kind of nonentity under the different 
 words, the state, the whole, the society, and so on, and to this 
 idol they make bloodier sacrifices than ever the Mexicans did to 
 Tescalipoca. All, that is, each and every sentient being in a 
 given tract, are made diseased and vicious, in order that each 
 may become useful to all, or the state, or the society, that is, to 
 the word, all, the word state, or the word society. The absurdity 
 may be easily perceived by omitting the words relating to this 
 idol as for instance in a former paragraph of the same (in 
 most respects) excellent work : If it therefore happens that a 
 additional number produced do no more than feed themselves, 
 then I perceive no advantage gained from their production. ! 
 What ! No advantage gained by, for instance, ten thousand 
 happy, intelligent, and immortal beings having been produced ! 
 yes ! but no advantage to this society. What is this society, 
 this whole, this state ? Is it any thing else but a word of con 
 venience to express at once the aggregate of confederated indi 
 viduals living in a certain district ? Let the sum total of each 
 man s happiness*be supposed 1000 ; and suppose ten thousand 
 men produced, who neither made swords nor poison, nor found 
 corn n/>r clothes for those who did but who procured by their 
 labor food and raiment for themselves, and for their children ; 
 * Polit. Econ. vol. i. c. 14. Ed. f Ib. Ed. 
 
ESSAY XIV. 273 
 
 would not that society be richer by 10,000,000 parts of happi 
 ness ? And think you it possible, that ten thousand happy hu 
 man beings can exist together without increasing each other s 
 happiness, or that it will not overflow into countless channels,* 
 and diffuse itself through the rest of the society ? 
 
 The poor vine-dresser rises from sweet sleep, worships his 
 Maker, goes with his wife and children into his little plot returns 
 to his hut at noon, and eats the produce of the similar labor of a 
 former day. Is he useful ? No, not yet. Suppose then, that 
 * during the remaining hours of the day he endeavored to provide 
 for his moral and intellectual appetites, by physical experiments 
 and philosophical research, by acquiring knowledge for himself 
 and communicating it to his wife and children. Would he be 
 useful then ? He useful ! The state would lose nothing although 
 the vine-dresser and his land were both swallowed up by an 
 earthquake ! Well then, instead of devoting the latter half of 
 each day to his closet, his laboratory, or to neighborly conversa 
 tion, suppose he goes to the vineyard, and from the ground which 
 would maintain in health, virtue, and wisdom, twenty of his 
 fellow-creatures, helps to raise a quantity of liquor that will dis 
 ease the bodies and debauch the souls of a hundred Is he use 
 ful now ? yes ! a very useful man, and a most excellent 
 citizen.f 
 
 In what then does the law between state and state differ from 
 that between man and man ? For hitherto we seem to have 
 discovered no variation. The law of nations is the law of com 
 mon honesty, modified by the circumstances in which states dif 
 fer from individuals. According to my best understanding, the 
 difference may be reduced to this one point : that the influence 
 of example in any extraordinary case, as the possible occasion of 
 an action apparently like, though in reality very different, is of 
 
 * Well, and in the spirit of genuine philosophy, does the poet describe 
 such beings as men 
 
 Who being innocent do for that cause 
 
 Bestir them in good deeds 
 
 Wordsworth. 
 
 Providence, by the ceaseless activity which it has implanted in our nature, 
 has sufficiently guarded against an innocence without virtue. 
 
 j- So in Jollie s and Hutchinson s History of Cumberland, the writer 
 apeaks of a small estatesman, bred to a rural life, who can not betake him 
 self from an indolent habit to manufacturing and labor ! Introd. p. 39, 1830. 
 
 M* 
 
274 THE FEIEND. 
 
 considerable importance in the moral calculations of an individ 
 ual ; but of little, if any, in those of a nation. The reasons are 
 evident. In the first place, in cases concerning which there can 
 be any dispute between an honest man and a true patriot, the 
 circumstances, which at once authorize and discriminate the 
 measure, are so marked and peculiar and notorious, that it is in- 
 capable of being drawn into a precedent by any other state un 
 der dissimilar circumstances ; except perhaps as a mere pretext 
 *f>r an action, which had been predetermined without reference 
 N; this authority, and which would have taken place, though it 
 had never existed. But if so strange a thing should happen, as 
 a second coincidence of the same circumstances, or of circum 
 stances sufficiently similar to render the prior measure a fair 
 precedent ; then, if the one action was justifiable, so will the 
 other be ; and without any reference to the former, which in 
 this case may be useful as a light, but can not be requisite as an 
 authority. Secondly, in extraordinary cases it is ridiculous to 
 suppose that the conduct of states will be determined by exam 
 ple. We know that they neither will, nor in the nature of 
 things can, be determined by any other consideration but that of 
 the imperious circumstances, which render a particular measure 
 advisable. But lastly, and more important than all, individuals 
 are and must be under positive -laws : and so very great is the 
 advantage which results from the regularity of legal decisions, 
 and their consequent capability of being foreknown and relied 
 upon, that equity itself must sometimes be sacrificed to it. For 
 the very letter of a positive law is part of its spirit. But states 
 neither are, nor can be, under positive laws. The only fixed 
 part of the law of nations is the spirit : the letter of the law 
 consists wholly in the circumstances to which the spirit of the 
 law is applied. It is mere puerile declamation to rail against a 
 country, a? having imitated the very measures for which it had 
 most blamed its ambitious enemy, if that enemy had previously 
 changed all the relative circumstances which had existed for 
 him, and therefore rendered his conduct iniquitous ; but which, 
 having been removed, however iniquitously, can not without ab 
 surdity be supposed any longer to control the measures of an 
 Innocent nation, necessitated to struggle for its own safety ; es 
 pecially when the measures in question were adopted for the very 
 purpose of restoring those circumstances. 
 
ESSAY XIV. 275 
 
 There are times when it would be wise to regard patriotism 
 as a light that is in danger of being blown out, rather than as 
 a fire which needs to be fanned by the winds of party spirit. 
 There are times when party spirit, without any unwonted excess, 
 may yet become faction ; and though in general not less useful 
 than natural in a free government, may under particular emer 
 gencies prove fatal to freedom itself. I trust I arn writing to 
 those who think with rne, that to have blackened a ministry, 
 however strong or rational our dislike may be of the persons 
 who compose it, is a poor excuse and a miserable compensation 
 for the crime of unnecessarily blackening the character of our 
 country. Under this conviction, I request my reader to cast his 
 eye back on rny last argument, and then to favor me with his 
 patient attention while I attempt at once to explain its purport 
 and to show its cogency. 
 
 Let us transport ourselves in fancy to the age and country of 
 the patriarchs, or, if the reader prefers it, to some small colony 
 uninfluenced by the mother country, which has not organized 
 itself into a state, or agreed to acknowledge any one particular 
 governor. We will suppose this colony to consist of from twenty 
 to thirty households or separate establishments, differing greatly 
 from each other in the number of retainers and in extent of pos 
 sessions. Each household, however, possesses its own domain, 
 the least equally with the greatest, in full right ; and its master 
 is an independent sovereign within his own boundaries. This 
 mutual understanding and tacit agreement we may well suppose 
 to have been the gradual result of many feuds, which had pro 
 duced misery to all and real advantage to none ; and that tho 
 same sober and reflecting persons, dispersed through the different 
 establishments, who had brought about this state of things, had 
 likewise coincided in the propriety of some other prudent and 
 humane regulations, which from the authority of these wise men 
 on points, in which they were unanimous, and from the evident 
 good sense of the rules themselves, were acknowledged through 
 out the whole colony, though- they were never voted intQ a 
 formal law, though the determination of the cases, to which 
 these rules were applicable, had not been intrusted to any recog 
 nized judge, nor their enforcement delegated to any particular 
 magistrate. Of these virtual laws this, we may safely conclude, 
 would be the chief: that as no man ought to interfere in the 
 
276 THE FKIEtfD. 
 
 affairs of another against his will, so if any master of a household; 
 instead of occupying himself with the improvement of his own 
 fields and flocks, or with the better regulation of his own estab 
 lishment, should be foolish and wicked enough to employ his 
 children and servants in breaking down the fences and taking 
 possession of the lands and property of a fellow-colonist, or in 
 turning the head of the family out of his house, and forcing those 
 that remained to acknowledge himself as their governor instead, 
 and to obey whomever he might please to appoint as his deputy 
 it would then become the duty and the interest of the other 
 colonists to join against the aggressor, and to do all in their power 
 to prevent him from accomplishing his bad purposes, or to com 
 pel him to make restitution and compensation. The mightier 
 the aggressor, and the weaker the injured party, the more cogent 
 would the motive become for restraining the one and protecting 
 the other. For it would be plain that he who was suffered to 
 overpower, one by one, the weaker proprietors, and render the 
 members of their establishment subservient to his will, must soon 
 become an overmatch for those who were formerly his equals ; 
 and the mightiest would differ from the meanest only by being 
 the last victim. 
 
 This allegoric fable faithfully portrays the law of nations 
 and the balance of power among the European states. Let us 
 proceed with it in the form of history. In the second or third 
 generation the proprietors too generally disregarded the good old 
 opinion, that what injured any could be of real advantage to 
 none ; and treated those, who still professed it, as fit only to in 
 struct children in their catechism. By the avarice of some, the 
 cowardice of others, and by the corruption and want of foresight 
 in the greater part, the former state of things had been com 
 pletely changed, and the tacit compact set at naught, the gen 
 eral acknowledgment of which had been so instrumental in pro 
 ducing this state and in preserving it, as long as it lasted. The 
 stronger had preyed on the weaker, whose wrongs, however, did 
 not remain long unavenged. For the same selfishness and blind 
 ness to the future, which had induced the wealthy to trample on 
 the rights of the poorer proprietors, prevented them from assist 
 ing each other effectually, when they were themselves attacked, 
 one after the other, by the most powerful of all ; and from a 
 concurrence of circumstances attacked so successfully, that of the 
 
ESSAY XIV. 277 
 
 whole colony few remained, that were not, directly or indirectly, 
 the creatures and dependents of one overgrown establishment. 
 Say rather, of its new master, an adventurer whom chance and 
 poverty had brought thither, and who in better times would 
 have been employed in the swine-yard, or the slaughter-house, 
 from his moody temper and his aversion to all the arts that 
 tended to improve either the land or those that were to be main 
 tained by its produce. He was however eminent for other quali 
 ties, which were still better suited to promote his power among 
 those degenerate colonists ; for he feared neither God nor his 
 own conscience. The most solemn oaths could not bind him ; 
 the most deplorable calamities could not awaken his pity ; and 
 when others were asleep, he was either brooding over some 
 scheme of robbery and murder, or with a part of his banditti 
 actually employed in laying waste his neighbor s fences, or in 
 undermining the walls of their houses. His natural cunning, 
 undistracted by any honest avocations, and meeting with no ob 
 stacle either -in his head or heart, and above all, having been 
 quickened and strengthened by constant practice and favored by 
 the times with all conceivable opportunities, ripened at last into 
 a surprising genius fqr oppression and tyranny : and, as we must 
 distinguish him by some name, we will call him Misetes.* The 
 only estate, which remained able to bid defiance to this common 
 enemy, was that of Pamphilus,f superior to Misetes in wealth, 
 and his equal in strength ; though not in the power of doing 
 mischief, and still less in the wish. Their characters were in 
 deed perfectly contrasted : for it may be truly said, that through 
 out the whole colony there was not a single establishment which 
 did not owe some of its best buildings, the increased produce of 
 its fields, its improved implements of industry, and the general 
 more decent appearance of its members, to the information given 
 and the encouragements afforded by Pamphilus and those of his 
 household. Whoever raised more than they wanted for their 
 own establishment, were sure to find a ready purchaser in Pam 
 philus, and oftentimes for articles which they had themselves 
 been before accustomed to regard as worthless, or even as nui 
 sances ; and they received in return things necessary or agreeable, 
 and always in one respect at least useful, that they roused the 
 purchaser to industry and its accompanying virtues. In this 
 * Bonaparte. Ed. f England. JStf. 
 
2T8 THE FRIEND. 
 
 intercommunion all were benefited : for the wealth of Pam- 
 philus was increased by the increasing industry of his fellow- 
 colonists, and their industry needed the support and encouraging 
 influences of Pamphilus s capita]. To this good man and his 
 estimable household Misetes bore the most implacable hatred, and 
 had publicly sworn that he would root him out ; the only sort of 
 oath which he was not likely to break by any want of will or 
 effort on his own part. 
 
 But fortunately for Pamphilus, his main property consisted of 
 one compact estate divided from Misetes and the rest of the 
 colony by a wide and dangerous river, with the exception of one 
 small plantation which belonged to an independent proprietor 
 whom we will name Lathrodacims ; * a man of no hirlm Urt* ^o 
 the colony, but much respected by Pamphilus. They were in 
 deed relations by blood originally, and afterwards by intermar 
 riages ; and it was to the power and protection of Pamphilus 
 that Lathrodacnus owed his independence and prosperity, amid 
 the general distress and slavery of the other proprietors. "Not 
 less fortunately did it happen, that the means of passing the 
 river were possessed exclusively by Pamphilus and his above- 
 mentioned kinsman ; and not only the boats themselves, but all 
 the means of constructing and navigating them. As the very 
 existence of Lathrodacnus, as an independent colonist, had no 
 solid ground but in the strength and prosperity of Pamphilus ; 
 and as the interests of the one in no respect interfered with those 
 of the other ; Pamphilus for a considerable time remained with 
 out any anxiety, and looked on the river-craft of Lathrodacnus 
 with as little alarm, as on those of his own establishment. It 
 lid not disquiet him, that Lathrodacnus had remained neutral 
 in the quarrel. Nay, though many advantages, which in peace 
 ful times would have belonged to Pamphilus, were now trans 
 ferred to his neighbor, and had more than doubled the extent 
 arid profit of his concern, Pamphilus, instead of repining at this, 
 was glad that some good at least to some one came out of the 
 general evil. Great then was his surprise, when he discovered, 
 that without any conceivable reason Lathrodacnus had employed 
 himself in building and collecting a very unusual number of 
 such boats, as were of no us e to him in his traffic, but designed 
 exclusively as ferry-boats ; and what was still stranger and more 
 * Denmai-k. Ed. 
 
ESSAY XIV. 279 
 
 alarming, that he chose to keep these in a bay on the other side 
 of the "river, opposite to the one small plantation, along-side of 
 Pamphilus s estate, from which plantation Lathrodacnus derived 
 the materials for building them. Willing to believe this conduct 
 a transient whim of his neighbor s, occasioned partly by his 
 vanity, and partly by envy (to which latter passion the want of 
 a liberal education, and the not sufficiently comprehending the 
 grounds of his own prosperity, had rendered him subject), Parn- 
 philus contented himself for a while with urgent yet friendly re 
 monstrances. The only answer, which Lathrodacnus vouchsafed 
 to return, was, that by the law of the colony, which Parnphilus 
 had made so many professions of revering., every proprietor was 
 an independent sovereign within his own boundaries ; that the 
 boats were his own, and the opposite shore, to which they were 
 fastened, part of a field which belonged to him ; and, in short, 
 that Pamphilus had no right to interfere with the management 
 of his property, which, trifling as it might be, compared with 
 that of Pamphilus, was no less sacre(^by the laws of the colony. 
 To this uncourteous rebuff Pamphilus replied with a fervent wish, 
 that Lathrodacnus could with more propriety have appealed to 
 a law, as still subsisting, which, he well knew, had been effec 
 tually annulled by the unexampled tyranny and success of 
 Misetes, Together with the circumstances which had given oc 
 casion to the law, and made it wise and practicable. He further 
 urged, that this law was not made for the benefit of any one 
 man, but for the common safety and advantage of all : that it 
 was absurd to suppose that either he (Pamphilus) or Lathrodacnus 
 himself, or any other proprietor, ever did or could acknowledge 
 this law in the sense that it was to survive the very circum 
 stances, of which it was the mere reflex. Much less could they 
 have ever tacitly assented to it, if they had ever understood it as 
 authorizing one neighbor to endanger the absolute ruin of an 
 other, who had perhaps fifty times the property to lose, and per 
 haps ten times the number of souls to answer for, and yet for 
 bidding the injured person to take any steps in his own defence ; 
 and lastly, that this law gave no right without imposing a cor 
 responding duty. Therefore if Lathrodacnus insisted on the 
 rights given him by the law, he ought at the same time to per 
 form the duties which it required, and join heart and hand with 
 Parnphilus in his endeavors to defend his independence, to restore 
 
280 THE FRIEND. 
 
 the former state of the colony, and with this to re-enforce the old 
 law in opposition to Misetes who had enslaved the one and set 
 at naught the other. So ardently was Pamphilus attached to 
 the law, that excepting his own safety and independence there 
 was no price which he would not pay, no sacrifice which ho 
 would not make for its restoration. His reverence for the very 
 memory of the law was such, that the mere appearance of trans 
 gressing it would be a heavy affliction to him. In the hope 
 therefore of gaining from the avarice of Lathrodacnus that con 
 sent which he could not obtain from his justice or neighborly 
 kindness, he offered to give him in full right a plantation ten 
 times the value of all his boats, and yet, whenever the colony 
 should once more be settled, to restore the boats ; if he would 
 only permit Pamphilus to secure them during the present state 
 of things, on his side of the river, retaining whatever he really 
 wanted for the passage of his own household. 
 
 To all these persuasions and entreaties Lathrodacnus turned a 
 deaf ear ; and Pamphilus remained agitated and undetermined, 
 till at length he received Certain intelligence that Lathrodacnus 
 had called a council of the chief members of his establishment, in 
 consequence of the threats of Misetes, that he would treat him as 
 the friend and ally of Pamphilus, if he did not declare himself 
 his enemy. Partly for the sake of a large meadow belonging to 
 him on the other side of the river which it was not easy to secure 
 from the tyrant, but still more from envy and the irritable tem 
 per of a proud inferior, Lathrodacnus, and with him the majority 
 of his advisers (though to the great discontent of the few wise 
 heads among them) settled it finally that if he should be- again 
 pressed on this point by Misetes, he would join him and commence 
 hostilities against his old neighbor and kinsman. It is indeed but 
 too probable that he had long brooded over this scheme : for to 
 what other ^end could he have strained his income, and over 
 worked his servants in building and fitting up such a number of 
 passage-boats ? As soon as this information was received by 
 Pamphilus, and this from a quarter which it was impossible for 
 him to discredit, he obeyed the dictates of self-preservation, took 
 possession of the passage-boats by force, and brought them over 
 to his own grounds ; but without any further injury to Lathro 
 dacnus, and still urging him to accept a compensation and con 
 tinue in that amity which was so manifestly their common inter- 
 
ESSAY XIV. 281 
 
 est. Instantly a great outcry was raised against Pamphilus, who 
 was charged in the bitterest terms with having first abused Mise- 
 tes, and then imitated him in his worst acts of violence. In the 
 calmness of a good conscience Pamphilus contented himself with 
 the following reply : " Even so if I were out on a shooting party 
 with a Quaker for my companion, and saw coming on toward us 
 an old footpad and murderer, who had made known his intention 
 of killing me wherever he might meet me ; and if my companion 
 the Q,uaker would neither give me up his gun, nor even discharge 
 it as (we will suppose) I had just before unfortunately discharged 
 my own ; if he would neither promise to assist me nor even prom 
 ise to make the least resistance to the robber s attempt to dis 
 arm himself you might call me a robber for wresting this gun 
 from my companion, though for no other purpose but that I might 
 at least do for myself what he ought to have done, but would not 
 do either for or with me ! Even so, and as plausibly, you might 
 exclaim, the hypocrite Pamphilus ! Who has not been deaf 
 ened with his complaints against robbers and footpads ? and lo ! 
 he himself has turned footpad, and commenced by robbing his 
 peaceful and unsuspecting companion of his double-barrelled 
 gun !" 
 
 It is the business of The Friend to lay down principles, not to 
 make the applications of them to particular, much less to recent 
 cases. If any such there be to which these principles are fairly 
 applicable, the reader is no less master of the facts than the writer 
 of the present essay. If not, the principles remain ; and I have 
 finished the task which the plan of this work imposed on me, of 
 proving the identity of international law and the law of morality 
 in spirit, and the reasons of their difference in practice, in those 
 extreme cases in which alone they have been allowed to differ. 
 
 POSTSCRIPT. 
 
 The preceding essay has more than its natural interest for me 
 from the abuse, which it brought down on me as the defender of 
 the attack on Copenhagen, and the seizure of thejDanish fleet. 
 The odium of the measure rested wholly on the commencement 
 of hostilities without a previous declaration of war. Now it is 
 remarkable, that in a work published many years before this 
 event, Professor Beck had made this very point the subject of a 
 
S82 THE FRIEND. 
 
 particular chapter in his admirable comments on the Law of Na 
 tions : and every one of the circumstances stated by him as form 
 ing an exception to the moral necessity of previous declaration of 
 war concurred in the Copenhagen expedition. I need mention 
 two only. First, by the act or acts, which provoked the expedi 
 tion, the party attacked had knowingly placed himself in a state 
 of war. Let A stand for the Danish, B for the British govern 
 ment. A had done that which lie himself was fully aware would 
 produce immediate hostilities on the part of B, the moment it 
 came to the knowledge of the latter. The act itself was a waging 
 of "war against B on the part of A. B therefore was the party 
 attacked ; and common sense dictates-, that to resist and baffle 
 an aggression requires no proclamation to justify it. I perceive a 
 dagger aimed at my back, in consequence of a warning given me, 
 just time enough to prevent the blow, knock the assassin down, 
 and disarm him : and he reproaches me with treachery, because 
 forsooth I had not sent him a challenge ! Secondly, when the 
 object which justifies and iiec Jbⅈ;^? the war would be frustrated 
 by the proclamation. For neither bidte nor ^dividual can be 
 v Burned to have given either a formal GL A .acit assent to 
 
 :v such modification of a positive right, as would suspend and 
 
 Anally annul the right itself ; the right of self-preservation, for 
 Visuar.ce. This second exception will often depend on. the exist 
 ence of the first, and must always receive additional strength and 
 clearness from it. That both of these exceptions appertained to 
 the case in question, is now notorious. But at the time I found 
 it necessary to publish the following comment, which I now 
 adapt to The Friend, as illustrative of the fundamental prin 
 ciple of public justice ; namely, that personal and national mo 
 rality, ever one and the same, dictate the same measures under 
 the same circumstances, and different measures only as far as*the 
 circumstances are different. 
 
 As my limits will not allow me to do more in the second, or 
 ethical, section of The Friend, than to propose and develop my 
 own system, without controverting the systems of others, I shall 
 therefore devote the essay, which follows this postscript, to the 
 consideration of the question : How far is the moral nature of an 
 action constituted by its individual circumstances 1 
 
 It was once said to me, when the Copenhagen affair was in 
 dispute, " You do not see the enormity, because it is an affair be- 
 
ESSAY XIV. 
 
 tween state and state : conceive a similar case between, man and 
 man, and you would both see and abhor it." Now, I was neither 
 defending nor attacking the measure itself. My arguments were 
 confined to the grounds which had been taken both in the ar 
 raigning of that measure and in its defence, because I thought 
 both equally untenable. I was not enough master of facts to 
 form a decisive opinion on the enterprise, even for my own mind ; 
 but I had no hesitation in affirming, that the principles, on which 
 it was defended in the legislature, appeared to me fitter objects 
 of indignant reprobation than the act itself. This having been 
 premised, I replied to the assertion above stated, by asserting the 
 direct contrary ; namely, that were a similar case conceived be 
 tween man and man, the severest arraigners of the measure would, 
 on their grounds, find nothing to blame in it. How was I to , 
 prove this assertion ? Clearly, by imagining some case between 
 individuals living in the same relation toward each other, in 
 which the several states of Europe exist or existed. My allegory, 
 therefore, so far from being a disguise, was a necessary part of 
 the main argument, a case in point, to prove the identity of the 
 law of nations with the law of conscience. We have only to con 
 ceive individuals in the same relations as states, in order to learn 
 that the rules emanating from international law, differ from those 
 of private honesty, solely through the difference of the circum 
 stances. 
 
 But why did I not avow the application of the principle to 
 the seizure of the Danish fleet ? Because I did not possess suf 
 ficient evidence to prove to others, or even to decide for myself, 
 that my principle was applicable to this particular act. In the 
 case of Pamphilus arid Lathrodacnus, the prudence and necessity 
 of the measure were certain ; and, this taken for granted, I 
 showed its perfect rightfulness. In the affair of Copenhagen, I 
 had no doubt of our right to do as we did, the necessity supposed, 
 or at least the extreme prudence of the measure ; it being taken 
 for granted that there existed a motive adequate to the action, 
 and that the action was an adequate means of realizing the pur 
 pose. 
 
 But this I was not authorized to take for granted in the real, 
 as I had been in the imaginary, case. I saw many reasons for 
 the affirmative, and many for the negative. For the former, the 
 certainty of a hostile design on the part of the Danes, the alarm- 
 
284 THE FKIEND. 
 
 ing state of Ireland, that vulnerable heel of the British Achilles, 
 and the immense difference between military and naval supe 
 riority. Our naval power collectively might have defied that 
 of the whole world ; but it was widely scattered, and a combined 
 operation from the Baltic, Holland, Brest, arid Lisbon, might ea 
 sily bring together a fleet double to that which we could have 
 assembled against it during the short time that might be neces 
 sary to convey thirty or forty thousand men to Ireland. On the 
 other hand, it seemed equally clear that Bonaparte needed 
 sailors rather than ships ; and that we took the ships and left 
 him the Danish sailors, whose presence in the fleet at Antwerp 
 turned the scale, perhaps, in favor of the worse than disastrous 
 expedition to Walcheren. 
 
 But I repeat, that I had no concern with the measure itself; 
 but only with the grounds or principles on which it had been at 
 tacked or defended. Those who attacked it declared that a right 
 had been violated by us, and that no motive could justify such 
 violation, however imperious that motive might be. In opposi 
 tion to such reasoners, I proved, that no such right existed, or is 
 deducible either from international law or the law of private mo 
 rality. Those again who defended the seizure of the Danish 
 fleet, conceded that it was a violation of right ; but affirmed, 
 that such violation was justified by the urgency of the motive. 
 It was asserted (as I have before noticed in the introduction to 
 the subject) that national policy can not in all cases be subor 
 dinated to the laws of morality ; in other words, that a govern 
 ment may act with injustice, arid yet remain blameless. To 
 prove this assertion as groundless and unnecessary as it is tre 
 mendous, formed the chief object of the whole disquisition. I 
 trust, then, that my candid judges will rest satisfied that it is 
 not only my profession arid pretext, but my constant plan and ac 
 tual intention, to establish principles ; that I refer to particular 
 facts for no other purpose than that of giving illustration and in 
 terest to those principles ; and that to invent principles with a 
 view to particular cases, whether with the motive of attacking 
 or defending a transitory cabinet, is a baseness which will scarcely 
 be attributed to The Friend by any one who understands the work, 
 even though the suspicion should not have been precluded by a 
 knowledge of the author. 
 
ESSAY XV. 
 
 Ja, ich bin dcr A theist und Gottlose, der ciner imagindren Bcrcchnuny- 
 slckre, ciner blossen JEinbildung von allyeme men Folgen, die nie folgen kon- 
 ncn, zuwider liigen will, ioie Desdemona sterbend lag ; lugen und betriigcn 
 will, wie der fiir Orcst sich darstellende Pylades ; Tcmpelraub unternehmen, 
 wie David ; ja, Aehren ausraufen am Sabbath, auch nur darum, weil mic/i 
 hwigert, und das Gesetz um des Menschcn willcn gemacht ist, nicht dcr 
 Mensch um des Gcsctzes willen. 
 
 Yes, I am that atheist, that godless person, who in opposition to an imag 
 inary doctrine of calculation, to a mere ideal fabric of general consequences 
 that can never be realized, would lie, as the dying Desdemoua lied ;* lie 
 and deceive as Pylades when he personated Orestes; would commit sacri 
 lege with David ; yea and pluck ears of corn on the Sabbath, for no other 
 reason than that I was fainting from lack of food, and that the law was made 
 for man, and not man for the law. JACOBI S LETTER TO FIOHTE. 
 
 IF there be no better doctrine, I would add ! Much and 
 often have I suffered from having ventured to avow ray doubts 
 concerning the truth of certain opinions, which had been sancti 
 fied in the minds of my hearers by the authority of some reigning 
 great name ; even though, in addition to my own reasons, I had 
 all the greatest names from the Reformation to the Revolution 
 on my side. I could not, therefore, summon courage, without 
 some previous pioneering, to declare publicly, that the principles 
 of morality taught in the present work will be in direct opposi 
 tion to the system of the late Dr. Paley. This confession I 
 
 Emilia. who hath done 
 This deed ? 
 
 Desd. Nobody ; I myself ; farewell ; 
 Commend me to my kind lord. O farewell. 
 
 Othello. You heard her say yourself, it was not I. 
 
 Emilia. She said so ; I must needs report the truth. 
 
 Othello. She s, like a liar, gone to burning hell ; 
 twas I that killed her. 
 
 Emilia. Oh I the more angel she ! 
 
 Othello, Act v. scene 1. 
 
286 THE FRIEND. 
 
 should have deferred to a future time, if my opinions 011 the 
 grounds of international morality had not been contradictory to a 
 fundamental point in Paley s system of moral and political phi 
 losophy. I mean that chapter which treats of general conse 
 quences, as the chief and best criterion of the right or wrong of 
 particular actions. 1 * Now this doctrine I conceive to be neither 
 tenable in reason nor safe in practice : and the following are th* 
 grounds of my opinion. 
 
 First ; this criterion is purely ideal, and so far possesses no 
 advantages over the former systems of morality ; while it labors 
 under defects, with which those are not justly chargeable. It is 
 ideal : for it depends on, and must vary with, the notions of the 
 individual, w r ho, in order to determine the nature of an action, 
 is to make the calculation of its general consequences. Here, as 
 in all other calculation, the result depends on that faculty of the 
 soul in the degrees of which men most vary from each other, 
 and which is itself most affected by accidental advantages or dis 
 advantages of education, natural talent, and acquired knowledge 
 the faculty, I mean, of foresight and systematic comprehension. 
 But surely morality, which is of equal importance to all men, 
 ought to be grounded, if possible, in that part of our nature which 
 in all men may and ought to be the same, in the conscience 
 and the common sense. Secondly : this criterion confounds mo 
 rality with law ; and when the author adds, that in all probabil 
 ity the divine Justice will be regulated in the final judgment by 
 a similar rule, he draws away the attention from the will, that 
 is, from the inward motives and impulses which constitute the 
 essence of morality, to the outward act ; and thus changes the 
 virtue commanded by the gospel into the mere legality, which 
 was to be enlivened by. it. One of the most persuasive, if not 
 one of the strongest, arguments for a future state, rests on the 
 belief, that although by the necessity of things our outward and 
 temporal welfare must be regulated by our outward actions, 
 which alone can be the objects and guides of human law, there 
 must yet needs come a juster and more appropriate sentence 
 hereafter, in which our intentions will be considered, and our 
 happiness and misery made to accord with the grounds of our 
 actions. Our fellow-creatures can only judge what we are by 
 what we do ; but in the eye of our Maker what we do is of no 
 * Moral and Political Philosophy. T5 II. tne tirst eight chapters. S i. 
 
ESSAY XV. 287 
 
 worth, except as it flows from what we are. Though the fig- 
 tree should produce no visible fruit, yet if the living sap is in it, 
 and if it has struggled to put forth buds and blossoms which have 
 been prevented from maturing by inevitable contingencies of 
 tempests or untimely frosts, the virtuous sap will be accounted as 
 fruit ; and the curse of barrenness will light on many a tree from 
 the boughs of which hundreds have been satisfied, because the 
 omniscient judge knows that the fruits were threaded to the 
 boughs artificially by the outward working of base fear and 
 so] fish hopes, and were neither nourished by the love of God or 
 of man, nor grew out of the graces engrafted on the stock by re 
 ligion. This is not, indeed, all that is meant in the Apostle s 
 use of the word, faith, as the sole principle of justification, but it 
 is included in his meaning, and forms an essential part of it ; and 
 I can conceive nothing more groundless, than the alarm, that 
 this doctrine may be prejudicial te outward utility and active 
 well-doing. To suppose that a man fenould cease to be beneficent 
 by becoming benevolent, seems to me scarcely less absurd, than 
 to fear that a fire may prevent heat, or that a perennial fountain 
 may prove the occasion of drought. Just and generous actions 
 may proceed from bad motives, and both may, and often do, ori 
 ginate in parts, and, as it were, fragments of our nature. A 
 lascivious man may sacrifice half his estate to rescue his friend 
 from prison, for he is constitutionally sympathetic, and the bet 
 ter part of his nature happened to be uppermost. The same man 
 shall afterwards exert the same disregard of money in an attempt 
 to seduce that friend s wife or daughter. But faith is a total act 
 of the soul : it is the whole state of the mind, or it is not at all ; 
 and in this consists its power, as well as its exclusive worth. 
 
 This subject is of such, immense importance to the welfare of all 
 men, and the understanding of it to the present tranquillity of 
 many thousands at this time and in this country, that should 
 there be one only of all my readers, who should receive conviction 
 or an additional light from what is here written, I dare hops 
 that a great majority of the rest would in consideration of that 
 solitary effect think these paragraphs neither wholly uninterest 
 ing nor altogether without value. For this cause I will endeavor 
 BO to explain this principle, that it may be intelligible to the 
 simplest capacity. The Apostle tells those who would substitute 
 obedience for faith (addressing the man as obedience personified), 
 
THE FRIEND. 
 
 Know that thou bearest not the root, but the root thee* a sen 
 tence which, methinks, should have rendered all disputes con 
 cerning faith and good works impossible among those who pro 
 fess to take the Scriptures for their guide. It would appear 
 incredible, if the fact were not notorious, that two sects should 
 ground and justify their opposition to each other, the one on. the 
 words of the Apostle, that we are justified by faith, that is, the 
 inward and absolute ground of our actions ; and the other on the 
 declaration of Christ, that he will judge us according to our ac 
 tions. As if an action could be either good or bad disjoined from 
 its principle. As if it could be, in the Christian and only proper 
 sense of the word, an action at all, and not rather a mechanic 
 series of lucky or unlucky motions ! Yet it may be well worth 
 the while to show the beauty and harmony of these twin truths, 
 or rather of this one great truth considered in its two principal 
 bearings. God will judge each man before all men : conse 
 quently he will judge us relatively to man. But man knows 
 not the heart of man ; scarcely does any one know his own. There 
 must therefore be outward and visible signs, by which men may 
 be able to judge of the inward state ; and thereby justify the 
 ways of God to their own spirits, in the reward or punishment 
 of themselves and their fellow-men. Now good works are these 
 signs, and as such become necessary. In short there are two 
 parties, God and the human race ; and both are to be satisfied. 
 First, God, who seeth the root and knoweth the heart : therefore 
 there must be faith, or the entire and absolute principle. Then 
 man, who can judge only by the fruits : therefore that faith must 
 bear fruits of righteousness, that principle must manifest itself by 
 actions. But that which God sees, that alone justifies. What 
 man sees, does in this life show that the justifying principle may 
 be the root of the thing seen ; but in the final judgment God s 
 acceptance of these actions will show, that this principle actually 
 was the root. In this world a good life is a presumption of a 
 good man : his virtuous actions are the only possible, though 
 
 * liom. xi. 18. But remember a yet deeper and more momentous sense 
 is conveyed in these words. Christ, the Logos, Deltas objectiva, centered 
 humanity (always pre-existing in the Pleroma) in his life, and so became 
 the light, that is, the reason of mankind. This eternal (that is, timeless) 
 act he manifested in time cap!; t-ylvsro, and dwelt among men, an individ 
 ual man, in order that he might dwell in all his elect, as the root of the 
 divine humanity in them. 1825. 
 
ESSAY XV. 289 
 
 still ambiguous, manifestations of his virtue : but the absence of 
 a good life is not only a presumption, but a proof of the contrary, 
 as long as it continues. Good works may exist, without- saving 
 principles, and therefore can not contain in themselves the prin 
 ciple of salvation ; but saving principles never did, never can, 
 exist without good works. On a subject of such infinite impor 
 tance, I have feared prolixity less than obscurity. Men often 
 talk against faith, and make strange monsters in their imagina 
 tion of these who profess to abide by the words of the Apostle 
 interpreted literally : and yet in their ordinary feelings they 
 themselves judge and act by a similar principle. For what is 
 love without kind offices, wherever they are possible ; (and 
 they are always possible, if not by actions commonly so called, 
 et by kind words, by kind looks ; and, where even these are out 
 of our power, by kind thoughts and fervent prayers) yet what 
 noble mind would not be offended, if he were supposed to value 
 the serviceable offices equally with the love that produced them ; 
 or if he were thought to value the love for the sake of the ser 
 vices, and nor the services for the sake of the love ? 
 
 I return to the question of general consequences, considered as 
 the criterion of moral actions. The admirer of Paley s system is 
 required to suspend for a short time the objection, which, I doubt 
 not, he has already made, that general consequences are stated 
 by Paley as the criterion of the action, not of the agent. I will 
 endeavor to satisfy him on this point, when I have completed my 
 present chain of argument. It has been shown, that this crite 
 rion is no less ideal than that of any former system ; that is, it is 
 no less incapable of receiving any external experimental proof, 
 compulsory on the understandings of all men, such as are the 
 criteria exhibited in chemistry. Yet, unlike the elder systems 
 of morality, it remains in the world of the senses, without deriving 
 any evidence therefrom. The agent s mind is compelled to go 
 out of itself in order to bring back conjectures, the probability of 
 which will vary with the shrewdness of the individual. But this 
 criterion is not only ideal ; it is likewise imaginary. If we be 
 lieve in a scheme of Providence, all actions alike work for good. 
 Tli ere is not the least ground for supposing that the crimes of 
 Nero were less instrumental in bringing about our present ad- 
 vantages, than the virtues of the Antonines. Lastly ; the crite 
 rion is either nugatory or false. It is demonstrated, that the 
 VOL. n. N 
 
290 THE FRIEND. 
 
 only real consequences can not be meant. The individual is to 
 imagine what the general consequences would be, all other things 
 remaining the same, if all men were to act as he is about to act. 
 I scarcely need remind the reader, what a source of self-delusion 
 and sophistry is here opened to a mind in a state of temptation. 
 "Will it not say to itself, I know that all men will not act so ; and 
 the immediate good consequences, which I shall obtain, are real, 
 while the bad consequences are imaginary and improbable ? 
 "When the foundations of morality have once been laid in outward 
 consequences, it will be in vain to recall to the mind, what the 
 consequences would be, were all men to reason in the same way : 
 for the very excuse of this mind to itself is, that neither its action 
 nor its reasoning is likely to have any consequences at all, its 
 immediate object excepted. But suppose the mind in its sanest 
 state. How can it possibly form a notion of the nature of an ac 
 tion considered as indefinitely multiplied, unless it has previously 
 a distinct notion of the nature of the single action itself, which is 
 the multiplicand ? If I conceive a crown multiplied a hundred 
 fold, the single crown enables rne to understand what a hundred 
 crowns are ; but how can the notion hundred teach me what a 
 crown is ? For the crown substitute X. Y. or abracadabra, and 
 my imagination may multiply it to infinity, yet remain as much 
 at a loss as before. But if there be any means of ascertaining 
 the action in and for itself, what further do we want ? Would 
 we give light to the sun, or look at our fingers through a teles 
 cope ? The nature of every action is determined by all its circum 
 stances : alter the circumstances and a similar set of motions may 
 be repeated, but they are no longer the same or a similar action. 
 What would a surgeon say, if he were advised not to cut off a 
 limb, because if all men were to do the same, the consequences 
 would be dreadful ? Would not his a^wer be " Whoever does 
 the same under the same circumstances, and with the same mo 
 tives, will do right ; but if the circumstances and motives are 
 different, what have I to do with it ?" 1 confess myself unable 
 to divine any possible use, or even meaning, in this doctrine of 
 general consequences, unless it be, that in all our actions we are 
 bound to consider the effect of our example, and to guard as much 
 as possible against the hazard of their being misunderstood. I 
 will not slaughter a lamb, or drown a litter of kittens, in the 
 presence of my child of four years old, because the child can not 
 
ESSAY XV. 291 
 
 understand my action, but will understand that his father has 
 inflicted pain upon, and taken away life from, beings that had 
 never offended him. All this is true, and no man in his senses 
 ever thought otherwise. But rnethinks it is strange to state that 
 as a, criterion of morality, which is no more than an accessary 
 aggravation of an action bad in its own nature, or a ground of 
 caution as to the mode and time in which we are to do or sus 
 pend what is in itself good or innocent. 
 
 The duty of setting a good example is no doubt a most impor 
 tant duty ; but the example is good or bad, necessary or unne 
 cessary, accordingly as the action may be, which has a chance of 
 being imitated. I once knew a small, but (in outward circum 
 stances at least) respectable congregation, four fifths of whom 
 professed that they went to church entirely for the example s 
 sake ; in other words ta cheat each other and act a common lie 
 These rational Christians had not considered that example may 
 increase the good or evil of an action, but can never constitute 
 either. If it was a foolish thing to kneel when they were not 
 inwardly praying, or to sit and listen to a discourse of which they 
 believed little and cared nothing, they were setting a foolish ex 
 ample. Persons in their respectable circumstances do not think 
 it necessary to clean shoes, that by their example they may en 
 courage the shoe-black in continuing his occupation : and Chris 
 tianity does not think so meanly of herself as to fear that the 
 poor and afflicted will be a whit the less pious, though they 
 should see reason to believe that those, who possessed the good 
 things of the present life, were determined to leave all the bless 
 ings of the future for their more humble inferiors. If in this I 
 have spoken with bitterness, let it be recollected that my sub 
 ject is hypocrisy. 
 
 It is likewise fit, that in all our actions we should have con 
 sidered how far they are likely to be misunderstood, and from 
 superficial resemblances to be confounded with, and so appear to 
 authorize, actions of a very different character. But if this cau 
 tion be intended for a moral rule, the misunderstanding must be 
 such as might be made by persons who are neither very weak nor 
 very wicked. The apparent resemblances between the good ac 
 tion we were about to do and the bad one which might possibly 
 be done in mistaken imitation of it, must be obvious ; or that 
 which makes them essentially different, must be subtle or recon- 
 
292 THE FRIEND. 
 
 dite. For what is there which a wicked man blinded by his 
 passions may not, and which a madman will not, misunderstand ? 
 It is ridiculous to frame rules of morality with a view to those 
 who are fit objects only for the physician or the magistrate. 
 
 The question may be thus illustrated. At Florence there is an 
 unfinished bust of Brutus, by Michel Angelo, under which a car 
 dinal wrote the following distich : 
 
 Dutn Bruti cffigiem sculptor de marmore finxit, 
 In mentem sceleris venit, et abstinuit. 
 
 As the sculptor was forming the effigy of Brutus in marble, lie recollected 
 his act of guilt and refrained. 
 
 An English nobleman, indignant at this inscription, wrote 
 immediately under it the following : 
 
 Brutum effinxisset sculptor, sed mente recur sat 
 . Multa viri virtus ; sistit et obstupuit. 
 
 The sculptor would have framed a Brutus, but the vast and manifold virtue 
 of the man flashed upon his thought : he stopped and remained in as 
 tonished admiration. 
 
 Now which is the nobler and more moral sentiment, the 
 Italian cardinal s, or the English nobleman s ? The cardinal 
 would appeal to the doctrine of general consequences, and pro 
 nounce the death of Cresar a murder, and Brutus an assassin. 
 For (he would say) if one man may be allowed to kill another 
 because he thinks him a tyrant, religious or political. frenzy may 
 stamp the name of tyrant on the best of kings : regicide will be 
 justified under the pretence of tyrannicide, and Brutus be quoted 
 as authority for the Clements and Ravailliacs.^ From kings it 
 may pass to generals and statesmen, and from these to any man 
 whom an enemy or enthusiast may pronounce unfit to live. 
 Thus we may have a cobbler of Messina in every city, andbravos 
 in our streets as common as in those of Naples, with the name of 
 Brutus on their stilettos. 
 
 The Englishman would commence his answer by commenting 
 on the words " because he thinks him a tyrant." No ! he would 
 reply, not because the patriot thinks him a tyrant ; but because 
 
 * Jacques Clement, a -monk, who stabbed Henry III. of France, and 
 Francois Ravailliac, an attorney, the well-known assassin of Henry IV. E(L 
 
ESSAY XV. 293 
 
 he knows him to be so, and knows likewise, that the vilest of his 
 slaves can not deny the fact, that he has by violence raised him 
 self above the laws of his country because he knows that all good 
 and wise men equally with himself abhor the fact. If there be 
 no such state as that of being broad awake, or no means of dis 
 tinguishing it when it exists ; if because men sometimes dream 
 that they are awake, it must follow that no man, when awake, 
 can be sure that he is not dreaming ; if because a hypochondriac 
 is positive that his legs are cylinders of glass, all other men are 
 to learn modesty, and cease to be certain that their legs are legs ; 
 what possible advantage can your criterion of general conse 
 quences possess over any other rule of direction ? If no man can 
 be sure that what he thinks a robber with a pistol at his breast 
 demanding his purse, may not be a good friend inquiring after his 
 health ; or that a tyrant (the son of a cobbler perhaps, who at 
 the head of a regiment of perjured traitors, has driven the repre 
 sentatives of his country out of the senate at the point of the 
 bayonet, subverted the constitution which had trusted, enriched, 
 and honored him, trampled on the laws which before God and 
 man he had sworn to obey, and finally raised himself above all 
 law) may not, in spite of his own and his neighbors knowledge 
 of the contrary, be a lawful king, who has received his power, 
 however despotic it may be, from the kings his ancestors, who 
 exercises no other power than what had been submitted to for 
 centuries, and been acknowledged as the law of the country ; on 
 what ground can you possibly expect less fallibility, or a result 
 more to be relied upon, in the same man s calculation of your 
 general consequences ? Would he, at least, find any difficulty in 
 converting your criterion into an authority for his act ? What 
 should prevent a man, whose perceptions and judgments are so 
 strangely distorted, from arguing, that nothing is more devoutly 
 to be wished for, as a general consequence, than that every man, 
 who by violence places himself above the laws of his country, 
 should in all ages and nations be considered by mankind as placed 
 by his own act out of the protection of law,, and be treated by 
 them as any other noxious wild beast would be ? Do you think 
 it necessary to try adders by a jury ? Do you hesitate to shoot a 
 mad dog, because it is not in your power to have him first tried 
 and condemned at the Old Bailey ? On the other hand, what 
 consequence can be conceived more detestable, than one which 
 
294 THE FRIEND. 
 
 would set a bounty on the most enormous crime in human nature, 
 and establish it as a law of religion and morality that the accom 
 plishment of the most atrocious guilt invests the perpetrator with 
 impunity, and renders his person forever sacred and inviolable ? 
 For madmen and enthusiasts what avail your moral criterions ? 
 But as to your Neapolitan bravos, if the act of Brutus who 
 
 In^pity to the general wrong of Rome, 
 Slew his best lover for the good of Rome, 
 
 authorized by the laws of his country, in manifest opposition to 
 all selfish interest, in the face of the senate, and instantly pre 
 senting himself and his cause first to that senate, and then to the 
 assembled commons, by them to stand acquitted or condemned 
 if such an act as this, with all its vast outfitting circumstances 
 of distinction, can be confounded by any mind, not frantic, with 
 the crime of a cowardly skulking assassin who hires out his dag 
 ger for a few crowns to gratify a hatred not his own, or even with 
 the deed of that man who makes a compromise between his re 
 venge and his cowardice, and stabs in the dark the enemy whom 
 he dared not meet in the open field, or summon before the laws 
 of his country what actions can be so different, that they may 
 not be equally confounded ? The ambushed soldier must not fire 
 his musket, lest his example should be quoted by the villain 
 who, to make sure of his booty, discharges his piece at the un 
 suspicious passenger from behind a hedge. The physician must 
 not administer a solution of arsenic to the leprous, lest his exam 
 ple should be quoted by professional poisoners. If 110 distinction, 
 full and satisfactory to the conscience and common sense of man 
 kind be afforded by the detestation and horror excited in all men, 
 (even in the meanest and most vicious, if they are not wholly 
 monsters) by the act of the assassin, contrasted with the fervent 
 admiration felt by the good and wise in all ages when they men 
 tion the name of Brutus ; contrasted with the fact that the honor 
 or disrespect with which that name was spoken of, became an 
 historic criterion of a nobler or a base age ; and if it is in vain 
 that our own hearts answer to the question of the poet 
 
 Is there among the adamantine spheres, 
 Wheeling unshaken through the boundless void, 
 Aught that with half such majesty can fill 
 The human bosom, as when Brutus rose 
 
ESSAY XV. 295 
 
 Refulgent from the stroke of Caesar s fate 
 Amid the crowd of patriots ; and his arm 
 Aloft extending, like eternal Jove, 
 When guilt brings down the thunder, call d aloud 
 On Tully s name, and shook his crimson sword, 
 And bade the father of his country, hail ! 
 For lo ! the tyrant prostrate on the dust 
 And Rome again is free ! * 
 
 If, I say, all this be fallacious and insufficient, can we have 
 any firmer reliance on a cold ideal calculation of imaginary gen 
 eral consequences, which, if they were general, could not be con 
 sequences at all : for they would be effects of the frenzy or fren 
 zied wickedness, which alone could confound actions so utterly 
 dissimilar ? No ! (would the ennobled descendant of our Russells 
 or Sidneys conclude). No ! calumnious bigot ! never yet did a 
 human being become an assassin from his own or the general ad 
 miration of the hero Brutus ; but I dare not warrant, that vil 
 lains might not be encouraged in their trade of secret murder, 
 by finding their own guilt attributed to the Roman patriot, and 
 might not conclude, that if Brutus be no better than an assassin, 
 an assassin can be no worse than Brutus. 
 
 I request that the preceding be not interpreted as my own 
 judgment on tyrannicide. I think with Machiavel and with 
 Spinosa, for many and weighty reasons assigned by those philoso 
 phers, that it is difficult to conceive a case, in w r hich a good man 
 would attempt tyrannicide, because it is difficult to conceive one, 
 in which a wise man would recommend it. In a small state, 
 included within the walls of a single city, and where the tyranny 
 is maintained by foreign guards, it may be otherwise ; but in a 
 nation or empire it is perhaps inconceivable, that the circum 
 stances which made a tyranny possible, should not likewise render 
 the removal of a tyrant useless. The patriot s sword may cut 
 off the Hydra s head ; but he possesses no brand to stanch the 
 active corruption of the body, which is sure to re-produce a suc- 
 
 * Akenside. Pleasures of the Imagination, 2d ed. B. II. p. 361. Ed. 
 
 " and shook the crimson sword 
 
 Of justice in his rapt, astonish d eye, 
 And bade" <fec. 
 
 So in the original. S. 0. 
 
296 THE FKIEND. 
 
 I must now in a few words answer the objection to the for 
 mer part of my argument (for to that part only the objection 
 applies), namely, that the doctrine of general consequences was 
 stated as the criterion of the action, not of the agent. I might 
 answer, that the author himself had in some measure justified 
 me in not noticing this distinction by holding forth the probabil 
 ity, that the Supreme^ Judge will proceed by the same rule. The 
 agent may then safely be included in the action, if both here and 
 hereafter the action only and its general consequences will be 
 attended to. But my main ground of justification is, that the 
 distinction itself is merely logical, not real and vital. The char 
 acter of the agent is determined by his view of the action : and 
 that system of morality is alone true and suited to human nature, 
 which unites the intention and the motive, the warmth and the 
 light, in one and the same act of mind. This alone is worthy 
 to be called a moral principle. Such a principle may be ex 
 tracted, though not without difficulty and danger, from the ore 
 of the Stoic philosophy ; but it is to be found unalloyed and 
 entire in the Christian system, and is there called faith.* 
 
 ESSAY XVI. 
 
 THE following address was delivered at Bristol, in the month 
 of February, 1795. The only omissions regard the names of per 
 sons ; and I insert it here in support of the assertion made by me, 
 in the beginning of Essay II. of this volume, and because this 
 very address has been referred to in an infamous libel in proof of 
 my former Jacobinism. Different as my present convictions are 
 
 * It may, perhaps, be not uninteresting to insert in this place a not* 
 which Mr. Coleridge wrote in his own copy of The Friend : 
 
 This last paragraph falls off from all the preceding. The reasoning i? 
 just, but it is dimly stated, not brought out, nor urged to the point 
 Want of space was the original cause of this deficiency. The Friend ap 
 pearing on stamped sheets, and the author haying reached the sixteenth 
 page in the treatment of the moral question, he was forced to compress the 
 promised answer to the objection into the remainder of a single page ; and 
 in the attempt slurred it over. 22d June, 1829. Ed, 
 
ESSAY XVI. 297 
 
 on the subject of philosophical necessity, I have for this reason 
 left the last paragraph unaltered.* 
 
 Act yap Tr/$ ^evdepia^ tyieftai rrohha d ev nal role if>t%,efav8l 
 
 For I am always a lover of liberty ; but iu those who would appropriate 
 the title, I find too many points destructive of liberty aud hateful to her 
 genuine advocates. 
 
 Companies resembling the present will, from a variety of cir 
 cumstances, consist chiefly of the zealous advocates for freedom. 
 It will, therefore, be our endeavor, not so much to excite the tor 
 pid, as to regulate the feelings of the ardent : and above all, to 
 evince the necessity of bottoming on fixed principles, that so we 
 may not be the unstable patriots of passion or accident, nor hur 
 ried away by names of which* we have not sifted the meaning, 
 and by tenets of which we have not examined the consequences. 
 The times are trying ; and in order to be prepared against their 
 difficulties, we should have acquired a prompt facility of advert 
 ing in all our doubts to some grand and comprehensive truth. In 
 a deep and strong soil must that tree fix its roots, the height of 
 which is to reach to heaven, and the sight of it to the ends of all 
 the earth. 
 
 The example of France is indeed a warning to Britain. A na 
 tion wading to its rights through blood, and marking the track of 
 freedom by devastation ! Yet let us riot embattle our feelings 
 against our reason. Let us not indulge our malignant passions 
 under the mask of humanity. Instead of railing with infuriate 
 declamation against these excesses, we shall be more profitably 
 employed in tracing them to their sources. French freedom is 
 the beacon which if it guides to equality should show us likewise 
 the dangers that throng the road. 
 
 The annals of the French revolution have recorded in letters 
 of blood, that the knowledge of the few can not counteract the 
 ignorance of the many ; that the light of philosophy, when it is 
 confined to a small minority, points out the possessors as the vic 
 tims, rather than the illuminators, of the multitude. The pa- 
 
 * This speech, or lecture, was, with another on the then war with France, 
 published in November, 1795, under the title Condones ad populum, Iu 
 this edition the author has made some alterations, but they are confined to 
 the mere stvle. Ed. 
 
298 THE FRIEND. 
 
 triots of France either hastened into the dangerous and gigantic 
 error of making certain evil the means of contingent good, or 
 were sacrificed by the mob, with whose prejudices and ferocity 
 their unbending virtue forbade them to assimilate. Like Sam 
 son, the people were strong like Samson, the people were blind. 
 Those two massy pillars of the temple of oppression, their mon 
 archy and aristocracy, 
 
 With horrible convulsion to and fro 
 
 They tugg d, they shook till down they came and drew 
 
 The whole roof after them with burst of thunder 
 
 Upon the heads of all who sat beneath, 
 
 Lords, ladies, captains, counsellors, and priests, 
 
 Their choice nobility !* 
 
 The Girondists, who were the first republicans in power, were 
 men of enlarged views and great literary attainments ; but they 
 seem to have been deficient in that vigor and daring activity,, 
 which circumstances made necessary. Men of genius are rarely 
 either prompt in action or consistent in general conduct. Their 
 early habits have been those of contemplative indolence ; and 
 the day-dreams, with which they have been accustomed to amuse 
 their solitude, adapt them for splendid speculation, not temper 
 ate and practicable counsels. Brissot, the leader of the Gironde 
 party, is entitled to the character of a virtuous man, and an elo 
 quent speaker; but he was rather a sublime visionary, than a 
 quick-eyed politician ; and his excellences equally with his faults 
 rendered him unfit for the helm in the stormy hour of revolution. 
 Robespierre, who displaced him, possessed a glowing ardor that 
 still remembered the end, and a cool ferocity that never either 
 overlooked or scrupled the means. "What this end was, is not 
 known : that it was a wicked one, has by no means been proved. 
 I rather think, that the distant prospect, to which he was travel 
 ling, appeared to him grand and beautiful ; but that he fixed his 
 eye on it with such intense eagerness as to neglect the foulness 
 of the road. If, however, his first intentions were pure, his sub 
 sequent enormities yield us a melancholy proof, that it is not the 
 character of the possessor which directs the power, but the power 
 which shapes and depraves the character of the possessor. In 
 Robespierre, its influence was assisted by the properties of his 
 
 * Samson Agonistes, with alterations in italics. Ed. 
 
ESSAY XVI. 299 
 
 disposition. Enthusiasm, even in the gentlest temper, will fre 
 quently generate sensations of an unkindly order. If we clearly 
 perceive any one thing to be of vast and infinite importance to 
 ourselves and all mankind, our first feelings impel us to turn with 
 angry contempt from those, who doubt and oppose it. The ardor 
 of undisciplined benevolence seduces us into malignity : and when 
 ever our hearts are warm, and our objects great and excellent, 
 intolerance is the sin that does most easily beset us. But this 
 enthusiasm in Robespierre was blended with gloom, and suspi- 
 ciousness, and inordinate vanity. His dark imagination was still 
 brooding over supposed plots against freedom ; to prevent tyr 
 anny he became a tyrant, and having realized the evils which he 
 suspected, a wild and dreadful tyrant. And thus, his ear deaf 
 ened to the whispers of conscience by the clamorous plaudits of 
 the mob, he despotized in all the pomp of patriotism, and masquer 
 aded on the bloody stage of revolution, a Caligula with the cap 
 of liberty on his head. 
 
 It has been affirmed, and I believe with truth, that the sys 
 tem of terrorism, by suspending the struggles of contrariant fac 
 tions, communicated an energy to the operations of the republic 
 which had been hitherto unknown, and without which it could 
 not have been preserved. The system depended for its existence 
 on the general sense of its necessity, and when it had answered 
 its end, it was soon destroyed by the same power that had given 
 it birth popular opinion. It must not however be disguised, 
 that at all times, but more especially when the public feelings 
 are wavy and tumultuous, artful demagogues may create this 
 opinion : and they, who are inclined to tolerate evil as the 
 means of contingent good, should reflect, that if the excesses of 
 terrorism gave to the republic that efficiency and repulsive force 
 which its circumstances made necessary, they likewise afforded 
 to the hostile courts the most powerful support, and excited that 
 indignation and horror which everywhere precipitated the sub 
 ject into the designs of the ruler. JSTor let it be forgotten that 
 these excesses perpetuated the war in La Vendee, and made it 
 more terrible, both by the accession of numerous partisans, who 
 had fled from the persecution of Robespierre, and by inspiring 
 the Chouans with fresh fury, and an unsubmitting spirit of re 
 venge and desperation. 
 
 Revolutions are sudden to the unthinking only. Strange 
 
300 THE FRIEND. 
 
 rumblings and confused noises still precede these earthquakes 
 and hurricanes of the moral world. The process of revolution 
 in France has been dreadful, and should incite us to examine 
 with an anxious eye the motives and manners of those, whose 
 conduct and opinions seem calculated to forward a similar event 
 in our own country. The oppositionists to " things as they are," 
 are divided into many and different classes. To delineate them 
 with an unflattering accuracy may be a delicate, but it is a neces 
 sary task, in order that we may enlighten, or at least be aware 
 of, the misguided men who have enlisted under the Jbanners of 
 liberty, from no principles, or with bad ones : whether they be 
 those, who 
 
 admire they know not what, 
 And know not whom, but as one leads to the other ; 
 
 or whether those, 
 
 Whose end is private hate, not help to freedom, 
 Adverse and turbulent when she would lead 
 To virtue. 
 
 The majority of democrats appear to me to have attained that, 
 portion of knowledge in politics, which infidels possess in reli 
 gion. I would by no means be supposed to imply that the ob 
 jections of both are equally unfounded, but that they both at 
 tribute to the system which they reject, all the evils existing 
 under it ; and that both, contemplating truth and justice in the 
 nakedness of abstraction, condemn constitutions and dispensations 
 without having sufficiently examined the natures, circumstances, 
 and capacities of their recipients. 
 
 The first class among the professed friends of liberty is com 
 posed of men, who unaccustomed to the labor of thorough inves 
 tigation, and not particularly oppressed by the burthens of state, 
 are yet impelled by their feelings to disapprove of its grosser de 
 pravities, and prepared to give an indolent vote in favor of reform. 
 Their sensibilities not braced by the co-operation of fixed princi 
 ples, they offer no sacrifices to the divinity of active virtue. 
 Their political opinions depend with weathercock uncertainty on 
 the winds of rumor, that blow from France. On the report of 
 French victories they blaze into republicanism, at a tale of French 
 excesses they darken into aristocrats. These dough-baked patriots 
 are not, however, useless. This oscillation of political opinion 
 
ESSAY XVI, SOI 
 
 will retard the day of revolution, arid it will operate as a preven 
 tive to its excesses. Indecisiveness of character, though the ef 
 fect of timidity, is almost always associated with benevolence. 
 
 Wilder features characterize the second class. Sufficiently 
 possessed of natural sense to despise the priest, and of natural 
 feeling to hate the oppressor, they listen only to the inflammatory 
 harangues of some mad-headed enthusiast, and imbibe from them 
 poison, not food ; rage, not liberty. Unillumined by philosophy, 
 and stimulated to a lust of revenge by aggvated wrongs, they 
 would make the altar of freedom stream with blood, while the 
 grass grew in the desolated halls of justice. 
 
 "We contemplate those principles with horror. Yet they pos 
 sess a kind of wild justice, well calculated to spread them among 
 the grossly ignorant. To unenlightened minds, there are terrible 
 charms in the idea of retribution, however savagely it be incul 
 cated. The groans of the oppressor make fearful yet pleasant 
 music to the ear of him, whose mind is darkness, and into whose 
 soul the iron has entered. 
 
 This class, at present, is comparatively small yet soon to form 
 an overwhelming majority, unless great and immediate efforts 
 are used to lessen the intolerable grievances of our poor brethren, 
 and infuse into their sorely-wounded hearts the healing quali 
 ties of knowledge. For can we wonder that men should want 
 humanity, who want all the circumstances of life that humanize ? 
 Can we wonder that with the ignorance of brutes, they should 
 unite their ferocity ? Peace and comfort be with these ! But 
 let us shudder to hear from men of dissimilar opportunities sen 
 timents of similar revengefulness. The purifying alchemy of 
 education may transmute the fierceness of an ignorant man into 
 virtuous energy ; but .what remedy shall we apply to him whom 
 plenty has not softened, whom knowledge has not taught be 
 nevolence ? This is one among the many fatal effects which re 
 sult from the want of fixed principles. 
 
 There is a third class among the friends of freedom, who pos 
 sess not the wavering character of the first description, nor the 
 ferocity last delineated. They pursue the interests of freedom 
 steadily, but with narrow and self-centering views : they antici 
 pate with exultation the abolition of privileged orders, and of 
 acts that persecute by exclusion from the rights of citizenship. 
 "Whatever is above them they are most willing to drag down ; 
 
802 THE FRIEND. 
 
 but every proposed alteration that would elevate their poorer 
 brethren, they rank among the dreams of visionaries ; as if there 
 were any thing in the superiority of lord to gentleman so morti 
 fying in the barrier, so fatal to happiness in the consequences, as 
 the more real distinction of master and servant, of rich man and 
 of poor. Wherein am I made worse by my ennobled neighbor ? 
 Do the childish titles of aristocracy detract from my domestic 
 comforts, or prevent my intellectual acquisitions ? But those 
 institutions of society which should condemn me to the necessity 
 of twelve hours daily toil, would make my soul a slave, and 
 sink the rational being in the mere animal. It is a mockery of 
 our fellow-creatures wrongs to call them equal in rights, when 
 by the bitter compulsion of their wants we" make them inferior 
 to us in all that can soften the heart, or dignify the understand 
 ing. Let us not say that this is the work of time that it is 
 impracticable at present, unless we each in our individual capa 
 cities do strenuously and perseveringly endeavor to diffuse among 
 our domestics those comforts and that illumination which far 
 beyond all political ordinances are the true equalizers of men. 
 
 We turn with pleasure to the contemplation of that small but 
 glorious band, whom we may truly distinguish by the name of 
 thinking and disinterested patriots. These are the men who 
 have encouraged the sympathetic passions till they have become 
 irresistible habits, and made their duty a necessary part of their 
 self-interest, by the long-continued cultivation of that moral taste 
 which derives our most exquisite pleasures from the contempla 
 tion of possible perfection, and proportionate pain from the per 
 ception of existing depravity. Accustomed to regard all the 
 affairs of man as a process, they never hurry and they never 
 pause. Theirs is not that twilight of political knowledge which 
 gives us just light enough to place one foot before the other : as 
 they advance the sceile still opens upon them, and they press 
 right onward with a vast and various landscape of existence 
 around them. Calmness and energy mark all their actions. 
 Convinced that vice originates not in the man, but in the sur 
 rounding circumstances ; not in the heart, but in the understand 
 ing ; the Christian patriot is hopeless concerning no one ; to 
 correct a vice or generate a virtuous conduct, he pollutes not his 
 hands with the scourge of coercion ; but by endeavoring to alter 
 circumstances wculd remove, or by strengthening the intellect 
 
ESSAY XVI. 303 
 
 disarm, the temptation. The unhappy children of vice and folly, 
 whose tempers are adverse to their own happiness as well as to 
 the happiness of others, will at times awaken a natural pang- ; 
 but he looks forward with gladdened heart to that glorious period 
 when justice shall have established the universal fraternity of 
 love. These soul-ennobling views bestow the virtues which they 
 anticipate. He whose mind is habitually impressed with them 
 soars above the present state of humanity, and may be justly 
 said to dwell in the presence of the Most High. 
 
 "Would the forms 
 
 Of servile custom cramp the patriot s power ? 
 Would sordid policies, the barbarous growth 
 Of ignorance and rapine, bow him down 
 To tame pursuits, to indolence and fear ? 
 Lo ! lie appeals to nature, to the winds 
 And rolling waves, the sun s unwearied course, 
 The elements and seasons : all declare 
 For what the Eternal Maker has ordain d 
 The powers of man : we feel within ourselves 
 His energy divine : he tells the heart 
 He meant, he made, us to behold and love 
 What he beholds and loves, the general orb 
 Of life and being to be great like him, 
 Beneficent and active.* 
 
 That general illumination should precede revolution, is a truth 
 as obvious, as that the vessel should be cleansed before we fill it 
 with a pure liquor. But the mode of diffusing it is not discover 
 able with equal facility. "We certainly should never attempt to 
 make proselytes by appeals to the selfish feelings, and conse 
 quently, should plead for the oppressed, not to them. The author 
 of an essay on political justice considers private societies as the 
 sphere of real utility ; that (each one illuminating those imme 
 diately beneath him), truth by a gradual descent may at last 
 reach the lowest order. But this is rather plausible than just or 
 practicable. Society as at present constituted does not resemble 
 a chain that ascends in a continuity of links. Alas ! between 
 the parlor and the kitchen, the coffee-room and the tap, there is 
 a gulf that may not be passed. He would appear to me to have 
 adopted the best as well as the most benevolent mode of diffus- 
 
 * Akenside. Pleasures of Imagination, 1st edit. B. III. 615. The words 
 in italics are altered. Ed. 
 
304 THE FKIEND. 
 
 ing truth, who, uniting the zeal of the Methodist with the views 
 of the philosopher, should be personally among the poor, and 
 teach them their duties in order that he may render them sus 
 ceptible of their rights. 
 
 " Yet by what means can the lower classes be made to learn 
 their duties, and urged to practise them ? The human race may 
 perhaps possess, the capability of all excellence; and truth, I 
 doubt not, is omnipotent to a mind already disciplined for its 
 reception ; but assuredly the over- worked laborer, skulking into 
 an ale-house, is not likely to exemplify the one, or prove the 
 other. In that barbarous tumult of inimical interests, which the 
 present state of society exhibits, religion appears to offer the only 
 means universally efficient. The perfectness of future men is 
 indeed a benevolent tenet, and may operate on a few visionaries, 
 whose studious habits supply them with employment, and seclude 
 them from temptation. But a distant prospect, which we are 
 never to reach, will seldom quicken our footsteps, however lovely 
 it may appear ; and a blessing, which not ourselves but posterity 
 are destined to enjoy, will scarcely influence the actions of any 
 still IQSS of the ignorant, the prejudiced, and the selfish. 
 
 Preach the Gospel to the poor. By its simplicity it will meet 
 their comprehension, by its benevolence soften their affections, by 
 its precepts it will direct their conduct, by the vastness of its 
 motives insure their obedience. The situation of the poor is 
 perilous : they are indeed both 
 
 from within and from without 
 Unarmed to all temptations. 
 
 Prudential reasonings will in general be powerless with them. 
 For the incitements of this world are weak in proportion as we 
 are wretched : 
 
 The world is not my friend, nor the world s law. 
 The world has got no law to make me rich. 
 
 They too, who live from hand to mouth, will most frequently* be 
 come improvident. Possessing no stock of happiness, they 
 eagerly seize the gratifications of the moment, and snatch the 
 froth from the wave as it passes by them. Nor is the desolate 
 state of their families a restraining motive, unsoftened as they 
 are by education, and benumbed into selfishness by the torpedo 
 
ESSAY XVI. 305 
 
 touch of extreme want. Domestic affections depend on associa 
 tion. We love an object if, as often as we see or recollect it, an 
 agreeable sensation arises in our rninds. But alas, how should he 
 glow with the charities of father and husband, who gaining 
 scarcely more than his own necessities demand, must have been 
 accustomed to regard his wife and children, not as the soothers 
 of finished labor, but as rivals for the insufficient meal ? In a 
 man so circumstanced the tyranny of the present can be over 
 powered only by the tenfold mightiness of the future. Religion 
 will cheer his gloom with her promises, and by habituating his 
 mind to anticipate an infinitely great revolution hereafter, may 
 prepare it even for the sudden reception of a less degree of meli 
 oration in this world. 
 
 But if we hope to instruct others, AVC should familiarize our 
 own minds to some fixed and determinate principles of action. 
 The world is a vast labyrinth, in which almost every one is run 
 ning a different way, and almost every one manifesting hatred to 
 those who do not run the same way. A few indeed stand mo 
 tionless, and not seeking to lead themselves or others out of the 
 maze, laugh at the failures of their brethren. Yet with little 
 reason : for more grossly than the most bewildered wanderer 
 does he err, who never aims to go right. It is more honorable 
 to the head, as well as to the heart, to be misled by our eagerness 
 in the pursuit of truth, than to be safe from blundering by con 
 tempt of it. The happiness of mankind is the end of virtue, and 
 truth is the knowledge of the means ; which he will never se 
 riously attempt to discover, who has not habitually interested 
 himself in the welfare of others. The searcher after truth must 
 love and be beloved ; for general benevolence is a necessary mo 
 tive to constancy of pursuit ; and this general benevolence is be 
 gotten and rendered permanent by social and domestic affections. 
 Let us beware of that proud philosophy, which affects to inculcate 
 philanthropy while it denounces every home-born feeling by 
 which it is produced and nurtured. The paternal and filial du 
 ties discipline the heart and prepare it for the love of all man 
 kind. The intensity of private attachments encourages, not pre 
 vents, universal benevolence. The nearer w r e approach to the 
 sun, the more intense his heat : yet what corner of the system 
 does he not cheer and vivify ? \ i 
 
 The man who would find truth, milt likewise seek it with a 
 
806 THE FKIEND. 
 
 humble and simple heart, otherwise he will be precipitate and 
 overlook it ; or he will be prejudiced, and refuse to see it. To 
 emancipate itself from the tyranny of association, is the most ar 
 duous effort of the mind, particularly in religious and political 
 disquisitions. The assertors of the system have associated with 
 it the preservation of order and public virtue ; the oppugners, 
 imposture and wars and rapine. Hence, when they dispute, 
 each trembles at the consequences of the other s opinions instead 
 of attending to his train of arguments. Of this, however, we 
 may be certain, whether we be Christians or infidels, aristocrats 
 or republicans, that our minds are in a state insusceptible of 
 knowledge, when we feel an eagerness to detect the falsehood of 
 an adversary s reasonings, not a sincere wish to discover if there 
 be truth in them ; when we examine an argument in order that 
 we may answer it, instead of answering because we have exam 
 ined it. 
 
 Our opponents are chiefly successful in confuting the theory of 
 freedom by the practices of its advocates ; from our lives they 
 draw the most forcible arguments against our doctrines. Nor 
 have they adopted an unfair mode of reasoning. In a science 
 the evidence suffers neither diminution nor increase from the ac 
 tions of its professors ; but the comparative wisdom of political 
 systems depends necessarily on the manners and capacities of the 
 recipients. Why should all things be thrown into confusion to 
 acquire that liberty which a faction of sensualists and gamblers 
 will neither be able nor willing to preserve ? 
 
 A system of fundamental reform will scarcely be effected by 
 massacres mechanized into revolution. "We can not therefore in 
 culcate on the minds of each other too often or with too great 
 earnestness the necessity of cultivating benevolent affections. 
 We should be cautious how we indulge the feelings even of vir 
 tuous indignation. Indignation is the handsome brother of anger 
 and hatred. The temple of despotism, like that of Tescalipoca, 
 the Mexican deity, is built of human skulls, and cemented with 
 human blood ; let us beware that we be not transported into 
 revenge while we are levelling the loathsome pile ; lest when 
 we erect the edifice of freedom we but vary the style of archi 
 tecture, not change the materials. Let us not wantonly offend 
 even the prejudices of our weaker brethren, nor by ill-timed and 
 vehement declarations of opinion excite in them malignant feel- 
 
ESSAY XVI. 307 
 
 ings towards us. The energies of the mind are wasted in these 
 intemperate effusions. Those materials of projectile force, which 
 now carelessly scattered explode with an offensive and useless 
 noise, directed by wisdom and union might heave rocks from 
 their base, or perhaps (apart from the metaphor) might produce 
 the desired effect without the convulsion. 
 
 For this subdued sobriety of temper a practical faith in the 
 doctrine of philosophical necessity seems the only preparative. 
 That vice is the effect of error and the offspring of surrounding 
 circumstances, the object therefore of condolence not of anger, is 
 a proposition easily understood, and as easily demonstrated. But 
 to make it spread from the understanding to the affections, to 
 call it into action, not only in the great exertions of patriotism, 
 but in the daily and hourly occurrences of social life, requires the 
 most watchful attentions of the most energetic mind. It is not 
 enough that we have once swallowed these truths : we must 
 ieed on them, as insects on a leaf, till the whole heart be colored 
 by their qualities, and show its food in every the minutest fibre.* 
 
 Finally, in the spirit of the Apostle, 
 
 Watch ye ! Stand fast in the principles of which ye have 
 been convinced ! Q,uit yourselves like men ! Be strong ! Yet 
 let all things be done in the spirit of love. 
 
 * I hope that this last paragraph, in all the fulness of its contrast with 
 my present convictions, will start up before me whenever I speak, think, 
 or feel intolerantly of persons on account of their doctrines and opinions. 
 
 30th Oct. 1818. 
 
THE SECOND LANDING-PLACE i 
 
 OR ESSAYS INTERPOSED FOR AMUSEMENT, RETROSPECT, 
 AND PREPARATION. 
 
 MISCELLANY THE SECOND. 
 
 Etiam a musis si quando animum paulisper abducaimts, apud Musas 
 ninilominus feriamur ; at reclines quidem } at otiosas, at de his et illis inter 
 se libere colloqucntes . 
 
THE SECOND LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 ESSAY I. 
 
 It were a wantonness, and would demand 
 
 Severe reproof if we were men whose hearts 
 
 Could hold vain dalliance with the misery 
 
 Even of the dead ; contented thence to draw 
 
 A momentary pleasure, never mark d 
 
 By reason, barren of all future good. 
 
 But we have known that there is often found 
 
 In mournful thoughts and always might be found 
 
 A power to vktue friendly. WORDSWORTH, M.S. 
 
 I KNOW riot how I can better commence my second Landing- 
 Place, as joining on to the section of Politics, than by the follow 
 ing proof of the severe miseries which misgovernment may oc 
 casion in a country nominally free. In the homely ballad of the 
 Three Graves* I have attempted to exemplify the effect, which 
 one painful idea, vividly impressed on the mind under unusual 
 circumstances, might have in producing an alienation of the 
 understanding ; and in the parts hitherto published, I have en 
 deavored to trace the progress to madness, step by step. But 
 though the main incidents are facts, the detail of the circum 
 stances is of my own invention ; that is, not what I knew, but 
 what I conceived likely to have been the case, or at least equiva 
 lent to it. In the tale that follows, I present an instance of the 
 same causes acting upon the mind to the production of conduct 
 as wild as that of madness, but without any positive or per 
 manent loss of the reason or the understanding ; and this in a 
 real occurrence, real in all its parts and particulars. But in 
 truth this tale overflows with a human interest, and needs no 
 philosophical deduction to make it impressive. The account was 
 * Poet. Works, VII. p. \tf.-Ed. 
 
312 SECOND LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 published in the city in which the event -took place, and in the 
 same year 1 read it, when I was in Germany, and the impression 
 made on my memory was so deep, that though I relate it in my 
 own language, and with my own feelings, and in reliance on the 
 fidelity of my recollection, I dare vouch for the accuracy of the 
 narration in all important particulars. 
 
 The imperial free towns of Germany are, with only two or 
 three exceptions, enviably distinguished by . the virtuous and 
 primitive manners of the citizens, and by the parental character 
 of their several governments. As exceptions, however, I must 
 mention Aix la Chapelle, poisoned by -French manners, and the 
 concourse of gamesters and sharpers ; and Nuremberg, the in 
 dustrious and honest inhabitants of which deserve a better fate 
 than to have their lives and properties under the guardianship 
 of a wolfish and merciless oligarchy, proud from ignorance, and 
 remaining ignorant through pride. It is from the small states 
 of Germany that our writers on political economy might draw 
 their most forcible instances of actually oppressive, and even 
 mortal, taxation, and gain the clearest insight into the causes 
 and circumstances of the injury. One other remark, and I pro 
 ceed to the story. I well remember, that the event I am about 
 to narrate, called forth, in several of the German periodical pub 
 lications, the most passionate (and in more than one instance 
 blasphemous) declamations concerning the incomprehensibility 
 of the moral government of the world, and the seeming injustice 
 and cruelty of the dispensations of Providence. But, assuredly, 
 every one of my readers, however deeply he may sympathize 
 with the poor sufferers, will at once answer all such declamations 
 by the simple reflection, that no one of these awful events could 
 possibly have taken place under a wise police and humane gov 
 ernment, and that men have no right to complain of Providence 
 for evils which they themselves are competent to remedy by 
 mere common sense, joined with mere common humanity. 
 
 MARIA ELEONORA ScnoNiNGwas the daughter of a Nuremberg 
 wire-drawer. She received her unhappy existence at the price 
 of her mother s life, and at the age of seventeen she followed, as 
 the sole mourner, the bier of her remaining parent. From her 
 thirteenth year she had passed her life at her father s sick-bed, 
 the gout having deprived him of the use of his limbs, and seen 
 
ESSAY 1. 313 
 
 the arch of heaven only when she went to fetch food or medi 
 cines. The discharge of her filial duties occupied the whole of 
 her time and all her thoughts. She was his only nurse, and for 
 the last two years they lived without a servant. She prepared 
 his scanty meal, she bathed his aching limbs, and though weak 
 and delicate from constant confinement and the poison of melan 
 choly thoughts, she had acquired an unusual power in her arms, 
 from the habit of lifting her old and suffering father out of and 
 into his bed of pain. Thus passed away her early youth in sor 
 row : she grew up in tears, a stranger to the amusements of 
 youth, and its more delightful schemes and imaginations. She 
 was not, however, unhappy : she attributed, indeed, no merit to 
 herself for her virtues, but for that reason were they the more her 
 reward. The peace ichich passetli all understanding disclosed 
 itself in all her looks and movements. It lay on her countenance, 
 like a steady unshadowed moonlight : and her voice, which, was 
 naturally at once sweet and subtle, came from her, like the fine 
 flute-tones of a masterly performer, which still floating at some 
 uncertain distance, seem to be created by the player, rather than 
 to proceed from the instrument. If you had listened to it in one 
 of those brief sabbaths of the soul, when the activity and discur 
 siveness of the thoughts are suspended, and the mind quietly 
 eddies round, instead of flowing onward (as at late evening in 
 the spring I have seen a bat wheel in silent circles round and 
 round a fruit-tree in full blossom, in the- midst of which, as within 
 a close tent of the purest white, an unseen nightingale was piping 
 its sweetest notes) in such a mood you might have half-fancied, 
 half-felt, that her voice had a separate being of its own that it 
 was a living something, the mode of existence of which was for 
 the ear only : so deep was her resignation, so entirely had it be 
 come the unconscious habit of her nature, and in all she did or 
 said, so perfectly were both her movements and her utterance 
 without effort, and without the appearance of effort ! Her dying 
 father s last words, addressed to the clergyman who attended 
 him, were his grateful testimony, that during his long and sore 
 trial his good Maria had behaved to him like an angel ; that 
 the most disagreeable offices and the least suited to her age and 
 sex, had never drawn an unwilling look from her, and that 
 whenever his eye had met hers, he had been sure to see in it 
 either the tear of pity or the sudden smile expressive of her aflec- 
 roL. TI. O 
 
314 SECOND LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 tion and wish to cheer him. God (said he) will reward the good 
 girl for all her long dutifuliiess to me ! He departed during the 
 inward prayer, which followed these his last words. His wish 
 will be fulfilled in eternity ; but for this world the prayer of the 
 dying man was not heard. 
 
 Maria sat and wept by the grave, which now contained her 
 father, her friend, the only bond by which she was linked to life. 
 But while yet the last sound of his death-bell was murmuring 
 away in the air, she was obliged to return with two revenue 
 officers, who demanded entrance into the house, in order to take 
 possession of the papers of the deceased, and from them to dis 
 cover whether he had always given in his income, and paid the 
 yearly income-tax according to his oath, and in proportion to his 
 property.* After the few documents had been looked through 
 and collated with the registers, the officers found, or pretended to 
 find, sufficient proofs, that the deceased had not paid his tax pro- 
 portioriably, which imposed on them the duty to put all the 
 effects under lock and seal. They therefore desired the maiden 
 to retire to an empty room, till the Ransom Office had decided on 
 the affair. Bred up in suffering, and habituated to immediate 
 compliance, the affrighted and weeping maiden obeyed She 
 hastened to the empty garret, while the revenue officers placed 
 the lock and seal upon the other doors, and finally took away the 
 papers to the Ransom Office. 
 
 Not before evening did the poor faint Maria, exhausted with 
 weeping, rouse herself with the intention of going to her bed ; 
 but she found the door of her chamber sealed up and that she 
 
 * This tax called the Losung or ransom, in Nuremberg, -was at first a 
 voluntary contribution : every one gave according to his liking or circum 
 stances. But in the beginning of the 1 5th century the heavy contributions 
 levied for the service of the Empire forced the magistrates to determine the 
 proportions and make the payment compulsory. Every citizen must yearly 
 take what is called his ransom oath (Losungseid) that the sum paid by him 
 has been in the strict determinate proportion to his property. On the 
 death of any citizen, the Ransom Office, or commissioners for this income or 
 property tax, possess the right to examine his books and papers, and to 
 compare his yearly payment as found in their registers with the property 
 he appears to have possessed during that time. If any disproportion is 
 detected, if the yearly declarations of the deceased should have been inac 
 curate in the least degree, his whole effects are confiscated, and though he 
 should have left wife and child, the state treasury becomes his heir 
 
ESSAY I. 815 
 
 must pass the night on the floor of the garret. The officers had 
 had the humanity to place at the door the small portion of food 
 that happened to be in the house. Thus passed several days, till 
 the officers returned with an order that Maria Eleonora Schoning- 
 should leave the house without delay, the commission court hav 
 ing confiscated the whole property to the city treasury. The 
 father before he was bedridden had never possessed any consider 
 able property ; but yet, by his industry, had been able not only 
 to keep himself free from debt, but to lay up a small sum for the 
 evil day. Three years of evil datys, three whole years of sickness, 
 had consumed the greatest part of this ; yet still enough re 
 mained not only to defend his daughter from immediate want, 
 but likewise to maintain her till she could get into some service 
 or employment, and should have recovered her spirits sufficiently 
 to bear up against the hardships of life. With this thought her 
 dying father comforted himself, and this hope too proved vain. 
 
 A timid girl, whose past life had been made up of sorrow and 
 privation, she went indeed to solicit the commissioners in her own 
 behalf; but these were, as is mostly the case on the continent, 
 advocates the most hateful class, perhaps, of human society, 
 hardened by the frequent sight of misery, and seldom superior in 
 moral character to English pettifoggers or Old Bailey Atcorneys. 
 She went to them, indeed, but not a word could she say for her 
 self. Her tears and inarticulate sounds for these her judges had 
 no ears or eyes. Mute and confounded, like an unfledged dove 
 fallen out from its mother s nest, Maria betook herself to her 
 home, and found the house door too now shut upon her. Her 
 whole wealth consisted in the clothes she wore. She had no re 
 lations to whom she could apply, for those of her mother had dis 
 claimed all acquaintance with her, and her father was a Nether 
 Saxon by birth. She had no acquaintance, for all the friends of 
 old Schoning had forsaken him in the first year of his sickness. 
 She had no play-fellow, for who was likely to have been the 
 companion of a nurse in the room of a sick man ? Surely, since 
 the creation never was a human being more solitary and forsaken 
 than this innocent poor creature, that now roamed about friend 
 less in a populous city, to the whole of whose inhabitants her 
 filial tenderness, her patient domestic goodness, and all her soft 
 yet difficult virtues, might well have been the model : 
 
816 SECOND LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 But homeless near a thousand homes she stood, 
 And near a thousand tables pin d and wanted food !* 
 
 The night came, and Maria knew not where to find a shelter. 
 She tottered to the church-yard of St. James church in Nurem 
 berg, where the hody of her father rested. Upon the yet grassless 
 grave she threw herself down ; and could anguish have pre 
 vailed over youth, that night she had been in heaven. The day 
 came, and like a guilty thing, this guiltless, this good being, stole 
 away from the crowd that began^o pass through the church-yard, 
 and hastening through the streets to the city gate, she hid herself 
 behind a garden hedge just beyond it, and there wept away the 
 second day of her desolation. The evening closed in : the pang 
 of hunger made itself felt amid the dull aching of self- wearied 
 anguish, and drove the sufferer back again into the city. Yet 
 what could she gain there ? She had not the courage to beg, and 
 the very thought of stealing never occurred to her innocent mind. 
 Scarce conscious whither she was going, or why she went, she 
 found herself once more by her father s grave, as the last relic of 
 evening faded away .in the horizon. 
 
 I have sat for some minutes with my pen resting : I can scarce 
 summon the courage to tell, what I scarce know whether I ought 
 to tell. Were I composing a tale of fiction, the reader might 
 justly suspect the purity of my own heart, and most certainly 
 would have abundant right to resent such an incident, as an out 
 rage wantonly offered to his imagination. As I think of the cir 
 cumstance, it seems more like a distempered dream : but alas ! 
 what is guilt so detestable other than a dream of madness, that 
 worst madness, the madness of the heart ? I. can not but believe, 
 that the dark and restless passions must first have drawn the 
 mind in upon themselves, and, as wi^th the confusion of imper 
 fect sleep, have in some strange manner taken away the sense of 
 reality, in order to render it possible for a human being to perpe 
 trate what it is too certain that human beings have perpetrated. 
 The church-yards in most of the German cities, and too often, 1 
 fear, in those of our own country, are not more injurious to health 
 than to mortality. Their former venerable character is no more. 
 The religion of the place has followed its superstitions, and their 
 darkness and loneliness tempt worse spirits to roam in them than 
 
 * "Wordsworth s Female Vagi-ant. Ed. 
 
ESSAY 1. 317 
 
 those whose nightly wanderings appalled the believing hearts of 
 our brave forefathers. It Avas close by the new-made grave of her 
 father that the meek and spotless daughter became the victim to 
 brutal violence, which weeping, and watching, and cold, and 
 hunger had rendered her utterly unable to* resist. The monster 
 left her in a trance of stupefaction, and into her right hand, which 
 she had clenched convulsively, he had forced a half-dollar. 
 
 It was one of the darkest nights of autumn ; in the deep and 
 dead silence the only sounds audible were the slow blunt ticking 
 of the church clock, and now arid then the sinking down of bones 
 in the nigh charnel house. Maria, when she had in some de 
 gree recovered her senses, sate upon the grave near which not 
 her innocence had been sacrificed, but that which, from the fre 
 quent admonitions and almost the dying words of her father, she 
 had been accustomed to consider as such. Guiltless, she felt the 
 pangs of guilt, and still continued to grasp the coin which the 
 monster had left in her hand, with an anguish as sore as if it had 
 been indeed the wages of voluntary prostitution. Giddy and faint 
 from want of food, her brain becoming feverish from sleeplessness, 
 and this unexampled concurrence of calamities, this complication 
 and entanglement of misery in misery, she imagined that she 
 heard her father s voice bidding her leave his sight. His last 
 blessings had been conditional, for in his last hours he had told 
 her, that the loss of her innocence would not let him rest quiet in 
 his grave. His last blessings now sounded in her ears like curses, 
 and she fled from the church-yard as if a demon had been chasing 
 her ; and hurrying along the streets, through which it is probable 
 her accursed violator had walked with quiet and orderly step 5 * to 
 
 *It must surely liave been after hearing of or witnessing some similar 
 event or scene of wretchedness, that the most eloquent of our Avriters (I had 
 almost said of our poets,) Jeremy Taylor, wrote the following paragraph, 
 which at least in Longinus s sense of the word, we may place among the 
 moot sublime passages in English literature. " He that is no fool, but can 
 consider wisely, if he be in love with this world, we need not despair but 
 that a witty man might reconcile him with tortures, and make him think 
 charitably of the rack, and be brought to admire the harmony that is made 
 by a herd of evening wolves when they miss their draught of blood in their 
 midnight revels. The groans of a man in a fit of the stone are worse than 
 all these ; and the distractions of a troubled conscience are worse than those 
 groans : and vet a careless merry sinner is worse than all that. But if we 
 could from one of the battlements of heaven espy, how many men and women 
 
818 SECOND LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 his place of rest and security, she was seized by the watchmen of 
 the night a welcome prey, as they receive in Nuremberg a re 
 ward from the police chest, for every woman they find in the 
 streets after ten o clock at night. It was midnight, and she was 
 taken to the next watch-house. 
 
 The sitting magistrate, before whom she was carried the next 
 morning, prefaced his first question with the most opprobrious 
 title that ever belonged to the most hardened street-walkers, and 
 which man born of woman should not address even to these, 
 were it but for his own sake. The frightful name awakened 
 the poor orphan from her dream of guilt, it brought back the 
 consciousness of her innocence, but with it the sense likewise of 
 her wrongs and of her helplessness. The cold hand of death 
 seemed to grasp her, she fainted dead away at his feet, and was 
 not without difficulty recovered. The magistrate was so far 
 softened, and only so far, as to dismiss her for the present ; but 
 with a menace of sending her to the House of Correction if she 
 were brought before him a second time. The idea of her own 
 innocence now became uppermost in her mind ; but mingling with 
 the thought of her utter forlornness, and the image of her angry- 
 father, and, doubtless still in a state of bewilderment, she formed 
 the resolution of drowning herself in the river Pegnitz in order 
 (for this was the shape which her fancy had taken) to throw 
 herself at her father s feet, and to justify her innocence to him, 
 in the world of spirits. She hoped, that her father would speak 
 for her to the Saviour, and that she should be forgiven. But as 
 she was passing through the suburb, she was met by a soldier s 
 wife, who during the life-time of her father had been occasion 
 ally employed in the house as a chare-woman. This poor wo 
 man was startled at the disordered apparel, and more disordered 
 
 at this time lie fainting and dying for want of bread, how many young men 
 are hewn down by the sword of war ; how many poor orphans are now 
 weeping over the graves of their father, by whose life they were enabled to 
 eat ; if we could but hear how many mariners and passengers are at this 
 present in a storm, and shriek out because their keel dashes against a rock, 
 or bulges under them ; how many people there are that weep with want, 
 and are mad with oppression, or are desperate by a too quick sense of a con 
 stant infelicity ; in all reason we should be glad to be out of the noise and 
 participation of so many evils. This is a place of sorrows and tears, of 
 great evils and constant calamities : let us remove hence, at least in affec 
 tions and preparations of mind." Holy Dying, ch. i. s. 5, with omissions. Ed. 
 
ESSAY I. 319 
 
 looks of her young mistress, and questioned her with such an 
 anxious and heart-felt tenderness, as at once brought back the 
 poor orphan to her natural feelings and the obligations of reli 
 gion. As a frightened child throws itself into the arms of its 
 mother, and hiding its head on her breast, half tells amid sobs 
 what has happened to it, so did she throw herself on the neck 
 of the woman who had uttered the first words of kindness to her 
 since her father s death, and with loud weeping she related what 
 she had endured and what she was about to have done, told 
 her all her affliction, and her misery, the wormwood and the gall. 
 Her kind-hearted friend mingled tears with tears, pressed the poor 
 forsaken one to her heart ; comforted her with sentences out of 
 the hymn-book ; and with the most affectionate entreaties con 
 jured her to give up her horrid purpose, for that life was short, 
 and heaven was forever. 
 
 Maria had been bred up in the fear of God ; she now trem 
 bled at the thought of her former purpose, and followed her friend 
 Haiiin, for that was the name of her guardian angel, to her 
 home hard by. The moment she entered the door, she sank 
 down and lay at her full length, as if only to be motionless in a 
 place of shelter had been the fulness of delight. As when a 
 withered leaf that has been long whirled about by the gusts of 
 autumn, is blown into a cave or hollow tree, it stops suddenly, 
 and all at once looks the very image of quiet such might this 
 poor orphan appear to the eye of a meditative imagination. 
 
 A place of shelter she had attained, and a friend willing to 
 comfort her in all that she could : but the noble-hearted Haiiin 
 was herself a daughter of calamity, one who from year to year 
 must lie down in weariness and rise up to labor ; for whom this 
 world provides no other comfort but the sleep which enables 
 them to forget it ; no other physician but death, which takes 
 them out of it. She was married to one of the city guards, who, 
 like Maria s father, had been long sick and bed-ridden. Him, 
 herself, and two little children, she had to maintaia by washing 
 and charing ;* and some time after Maria had been domesticated 
 with them, Haiiin told her that she herself had been once driven 
 to a desperate thought by the cry of her hungry children, during 
 
 * I am ignorant, whether there be any classical authority for this word ; 
 but I know no other word that expresses occasional day -labor in the housea 
 of others. 
 
320 SKCOND LANDING-FLACK 
 
 a want of employment, and that she had been on the point of 
 killing one of the little ones, and of then surrendering herself 
 into the hands of justice. In this manner, she had conceived, 
 all would be well provided for ; the surviving child would be 
 admitted, as a matter of course, into the Orphan House, and her 
 husband into the Hospital ; while she herself would have atoned 
 tor her act by a public execution, and together with the child 
 that she had destroyed, would have passed into a state of bliss. 
 All this she related to Maria, and those tragic thoughts left but 
 too deep and lasting impression on her mind. Weeks after, she 
 herself renewed the conversation, by expressing to her benefactress 
 her inability to conceive how it was possible ibr one human being 
 to take away the life of another, especially that of an innocent 
 little child. " For that reason," replied Harlin, " because it was 
 so innocent and so good, I wished to put it out of this wicked 
 world. Thinkest thou then, that I would have my head cut off 
 for the sake of a wicked child ? Therefore it was little Nan, 
 that I meant to have taken with me, who, as you see, is always 
 so sweet and patient ; little Frank has already his humors and 
 naughty tricks, and suits better for this world." This was the 
 answer. Maria brooded awhile over it in silence, then passion 
 ately snatched the children up in her arms, as if she would pro 
 tect them against their own mother. 
 
 For one whole year the orphan lived with the soldier s wife, 
 and by their joint labors barely kept off absolute want. As a 
 little boy (almost a child in size, though in his thirteenth year) 
 once told me of himself, as he was guiding me up the Brocken, 
 in the Hartz Forest, they had but " little of that, of which a great 
 deal tells but for little." But now came the second winter, and 
 with it came bad times, a season of trouble for this poor and 
 meritorious household. The wife now fell sick : too constant 
 and too hard labor, too scanty and too innutritious food, had 
 gradually wasted away her strength. Maria redoubled her ef 
 forts in order, to provide bread and fuel for their washing which 
 they took in ; but the task was above her powers. Besides, she 
 was so timid and so agitated at the sight of strangers, that some 
 times, with the best good- will, she was left without employment. 
 One by one, every article of the least value which they possessed 
 was sold off, except the bed on which the husband lay. He died 
 just before the approach of spring ; but about the same time the 
 
ESSAY I. 821 
 
 wife gave signs of convalescence. The physician, though almost 
 as poor as his patients, had been kind to them : silver and gold 
 had he none, but he occasionally brought a little wine, and often 
 assured them that nothing was wanting to her perfect recovery, 
 but better nourishment and a little wine every day. This, how 
 ever, could not be regularly procured, and Harlin s spirits sank, 
 and as her bodily pain left her she became more melancholy, 
 silent, and self-involved. And now it was that Maria s mind 
 was incessantly racked by the frightful apprehension, that hei 
 friend might be again meditating the accomplishment of her for 
 mer purpose. IShe had grown as passionately fond of the two chil 
 dren as if she had borne them under her own heart ; but the 
 jeopardy in which she conceived her friend s salvation to stand 
 this was her predominant thought. For all the hopes and 
 fears, which under a happier lot would have been associated 
 with the objects of the senses, were transferred, by Maria, to her 
 notions and images of a future state. 
 
 In the beginning of March, one bitter cold evening, Maria 
 started up and suddenly left the house. The last morsel of food 
 had been divided betwixt the two children for their breakfast : 
 and for the last hour or more the little boy had been crying for 
 hunger, while his gentler sister had been hiding her face in 
 Maria s lap, and pressing her little body against her knees, in 
 order by that mechanic pressure to dull the aching from empti 
 ness. The tender-hearted and visionary maiden had watched 
 the mother s eye, and had interpreted several of her sad and 
 steady looks according to* her preconceived apprehensions. She 
 had conceived all at once the strange and enthusiastic thought, 
 that she would in some way or other offer her own soul for the 
 salvation of the soul of her friend. The money, which had been 
 left in her hand, flashed upon the eye of her mind, as a single 
 unconnected image : and faint with hunger and shivering with 
 cold, she sallied forth in search of guilt ! Awful are the dis 
 pensations of the Supreme, and in his severest judgments the 
 hand of mercy is visible. It was a night so wild with wind and 
 rain, or rather rain and snow mixed together, that a famished 
 wolf would have stayed in his cave, and listened to a howl more 
 fearful than his own. Forlorn Maria ! thou wast kneeling in 
 pious simplicity at the grave of thy father, and thou becamest 
 the prey of a monster. Innocent thou wast and without guilt 
 
822 SECOND LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 didst thou remain. Now thou goest forth of thy own accord ; 
 but God will have pity on thee. Poor bewildered innocent ! In 
 thy spotless imagination dwelt no distinct conception of the evil 
 which thou wentest forth to brave. To save the soul of thy 
 friend was the dream of thy feverish brain, and thou wast again 
 apprehended as an outcast of shameless sensuality, at the moment 
 when thy too spiritualized fancy was busied with the glorified 
 forms of thy friend and her little ones interceding for thee at the 
 throne of the Redeemer ! 
 
 At this moment her perturbed fancy suddenly suggested to her 
 a new mean for the accomplishment of her purpose : and she 
 replied to the night-watch, who with a brutal laugh bade her 
 expect on the morrow the unmanly punishment, which to the 
 disgrace of human nature the laws of some Protestant states in 
 flict on female vagrants, that she came to deliver herself up as 
 an infanticide. She was instantly taken before the magistrate 
 through as wild and pitiless a storm as ever pelted on a houseless 
 head, through as black and tyrannous a night as ever aided the 
 workings of a heated brain. Here she confessed that she had 
 been delivered of an infant by the soldier s wife, Harlin, that she 
 deprived it of life in the presence of Harlin, and according to a 
 plan preconcerted with her, and that Harlin had buried it some 
 where in the wood, but where she knew not. During this 
 strange tale, she appeared to listen with a mixture of fear and 
 satisfaction to the howling of the wind ; and never sure could a 
 confession of real guilt have been accompanied by a more dread 
 fully appropriate, music. At the moment of her apprehension 
 she had formed the scheme of helping her friend out of the 
 world in a state of innocence. When the soldier s widow was 
 confronted with the orphan, and the latter had repeated her con 
 fession to her face, Harlin answered in these words, " For God s 
 sake, Maria ! how have I deserved this of thee ?" Then turning 
 to the magistrate said, " I know nothing of this." This was the 
 sole answer which she gave, and not another word could they 
 extort from her. The instruments of torture were brought, arid 
 Harlin was warned, that if she did not confess of her own accord, 
 the truth would be immediately forced from her. This menace 
 convulsed Maria SchOning with aflright ; her intention had been 
 to emancipate herself and her friend from a life of unmixed suf 
 fering, without the crime of suicide in either, arid with no guilt 
 
ESSAY I. 323 
 
 at all on the part of her friend. The thought of her friend s 
 being put to the torture had not occurred to her. Wildly and 
 eagerly she pressed her friend s hands, already bound in prepara 
 tion for the torture ; she pressed them in agony between her 
 own, and said to her, " Anna, confess it ! Anna, dear Anna ! it 
 will then be well with all of us ! all, all of us ! and Frank and 
 little Nan will be put into the Orphan House !" Maria s scheme 
 now passed, like a flash of lightning, through the widow s mind ; 
 she acceded to it at once, kissed Maria repeatedly, and then 
 serenely turning her face to the judge, acknowledged that she 
 had added to the guilt by so obstinate a denial, that all her 
 friend had said was true, save only that she had thrown the dead 
 infant into the river, and not buried it in the wood. 
 
 They wore both committed to prison, and as they both perse 
 vered in their common confession, the process was soon made out 
 and the condemnation followed the trial : and the sentence, by 
 which they were both to be beheaded with the sword, was or 
 dered to be put in force on the next day but one. On the morn 
 ing of the execution, the delinquents were brought together, in 
 order that they might be reconciled with each other, and join in 
 common prayer for forgiveness of their common guilt. 
 
 But now Maria s thoughts took another turn. The idea that 
 her benefactress, that so very good a woman, should be violently 
 put out of life, and this with an infamy on her name which 
 would cling forever to the little orphans, overpowered her.. Her 
 own excessive desire to die scarcely prevented her from discover 
 ing the whole plan ; and when Harlin was left alone with her, 
 and she saw her friend s calm and affectionate look, her fortitude 
 was dissolved : she burst into loud and passionate weeping, and 
 throwing herself into her friend s arms, with convulsive sobs she 
 entreated her forgiveness. Harlin pressed the poor agonized girl 
 to her arms ; like a tender mother, she kissed and fondled her 
 wet cheeks, and in the most solemn and emphatic tones assured 
 her that there was nothing to forgive. On the contrary, she was 
 her greatest benefactress and the instrument of God s goodness to 
 remove her at once from a miserable world and from the temp 
 tation of committing a heavy crime. In vain. Her repeated 
 promises, that she would answer before God for them both, could 
 not pacify the tortured conscience of Maria, till at length the 
 presence of the clergyman and the preparations for receiving the 
 
324 SECOND LANDING-FLAG ^. 
 
 sacrament occasioning the widow to address her thus " See, 
 Maria ! this is the body and blood of Christ, which takes away 
 all sin ! Let us partake together of this holy repast with full 
 trust in God and joyful hope of our approaching happiness." 
 These words of comfort, uttered with cheering tones, and accom 
 panied with a look of inexpressible tenderness and serenity, 
 brought back peace for a while to her troubled spirit. They 
 communicated together, and on parting, the magnanimous wo 
 man once more embraced her young friend : then stretching her 
 ha*iid toward heaven, said, " Be tranquil, Maria ! by to-morrow 
 morning we are there, and all our sorrows stay here behind us." 
 I hasten to the scene of the execution : for I anticipate my 
 reader s feelings in the exhaustion of my own heart. Serene and 
 with unaltered countenance the lofty-minded Harlin heard the 
 strokes of the death-bell, stood before the scaffold while the stafF 
 was broken over her, and at length ascended the steps, all with a 
 steadiness and tranquillity of manner which was not more distant 
 from fear than from defiance and bravado. Altogether different 
 was the state of poor Maria : wdtli shattered nerves and an ago 
 nizing conscience that incessantly accused her as the murderess 
 of her friend, she did not walk but staggered towards the scaf 
 fold and stumbled up the steps. While Harlin, who went first, 
 at every step turned her head round and still whispered to her, 
 raising her eyes to heaven. " But a few minutes, Maria ! and 
 we are there !" On the scafibld she again bade her farewell, 
 again repeating, " Dear Maria ! but one minute now, and we are 
 together w r ith God." But when she knelt down and her neck 
 was bared for the stroke, the unhappy girl lost all self-command, 
 and with a loud and piercing shriek she bade them hold and not 
 murder the innocent. " She is innocent ! I have borne false 
 witness ! I alone am the murderess !" She rolled herself now 
 at the feet of the executioner, and now at those of the clergymen, 
 and conjured them to stop the execution, declaring that the 
 whole story had been invented by herself; that she had never 
 brought forth, much less destroyed an infant ; that for her 
 friend s sake she made this discoveiy ; that for herself she 
 wished to die, and would die gladly, if they would take away 
 her friend, and promise to free her soul from the dreadful agony 
 of having murdered her friend by false witness. The executioner 
 asked Harlin, if there were any truth in what Maria Sehdning 
 
KSSAY J. 335 
 
 had said. The heroine answered with manifest reluctance : 
 "Most assuredly she hath said the^truth : I confessed myself 
 guilty, "because I wished to die and thought it best for both of us : 
 and now that my hope is on. the moment of its accomplishment, 
 I can not be supposed to declare myself innocent for the sake of 
 saving my life ; but any wretchedness is to be endured rathei 
 than that poor creature should be hurried out of the world in a 
 state of despair." 
 
 The outcry of the attending populace prevailed to suspend the 
 execution : a report was sent to the assembled magistrates, and 
 in the mean time one of the priests reproached the widow in. bit 
 ter words for her former false confession. " What," she replied 
 sternly but without anger, " what would the truth have availed? 
 Before I perceived my friend s purpose I did deny it : my assur 
 ance was pronounced an impudent lie : I was already bound for 
 the torture, and so bound that the sinews of rny hands started, 
 and one of their worships in the large white peruke, threatened 
 that he would have me stretched till the sun shone through me ; 
 and that then I should cry out, Yes, when it was too late." 
 The priest was hard-hearted or superstitious enough to continue 
 his reproofs, to which the noble woman condescended no further 
 answer. The other clergyman, however, was both more rational 
 and more humane. He succeeded in silencing his colleague, and 
 the former half of the long hour, which the magistrates took in 
 making speeches on the improbability of the tale instead of re-ex 
 amining the culprits in person, he employed in gaining from the 
 widow a connected account of all the circumstances, and in lis 
 tening occasionally to Maria s passionate descriptions of all her 
 friend s goodness and magnanimity. For she had gained an in 
 flux of life and spirit from the assurance in her mind, both that 
 she had now rescued Harlin from death and was about to expiate 
 the guilt of her purpose by her own execution. For the latter 
 half of the time the clergyman remained in silence, lost in 
 thought, and momently expecting the return of the messenger. 
 All that during the deep silence of this interval could be heard, 
 was one exclamation of Harlin to her unhappy friend " Oh ! 
 Maria ! Maria ! couldst thou but have kept up thy courage for 
 another minute, we should have been now in heaven !" The 
 messenger carne back with an order from the magistrates to 
 proceed with the execution ! With re-animated countenance 
 
326 SECOND LANDING-PLACE, 
 
 Harlin placed her neck on the block and her head was severed 
 from her body amid a genoral shriek from the crowd. The exe 
 cutioner fainted after the blow, and the under hangman was or 
 dered to take his place. He was not wanted. Maria was al; 
 ready gone : her body was found as cold as if she had been dead 
 for some hours. The flower had been snapt in the storm, before 
 the scythe of violence could come near it. 
 
 ESSAY II. 
 
 The history of times representctli the magnitude of actions and the pub 
 lic faces and deportment of persons, and passeth over in silence the smaller 
 passages and motions of men and matters. But such being the workman 
 ship of God, as he doth hang the greatest weight upon the smallest wires, 
 maxima e minimi s suspendens ; it comes therefore to pass, that such his 
 tories do rather set forth the pomp of business than the true and inward 
 resorts thereof. But lives, if they be well written, propounding to them 
 selves a person to represent in whom actions both greater and smaller, pub 
 lic and private, have a commixture, must of necessity contain a more true, 
 native, and lively representation. BACOX.* 
 
 MANKIND in general are so little in the habit of looking steadily 
 at their own meaning, or of weighing the words by which they 
 express it, that the writer, who is careful to do both, will some 
 times mislead his readers through the very excellence which 
 qualifies him to be their instructor : and this with no other fault 
 on his part, than the modest mistake of supposing in those, to 
 whom he addresses himself, an intellect as watchful as his own. 
 The inattentive reader adopts as unconditionally true, or perhaps 
 rails at his author for having stated as such, what upon examina 
 tion would be found to have been duly limited, and would so have 
 been understood, if opaque spots arid false refractions were as rare 
 in the mental as in the bodily eye. The motto, for instance, to 
 this paper has more than once served as an excuse and authority 
 for huge volumes of biographical minutice, which render the real 
 character almost invisible, like clouds of dust on a portrait, or the 
 counterfeit frankincense which smoke-blacks the favorite idol of a 
 
 * Advancement of Learning, B. ii. Ed. 
 
ESSAY II. 827 
 
 Roman Catholic village. Yet Lord Bacon, by the expressions 
 public faces arid propounding to themselves a person, evidently 
 confines the biographer to such facts as- are either susceptible of 
 some useful general inference, or tend to illustrate those qualities 
 which distinguished the subject of them from ordinary men ; 
 while the passage in general w r as meant to guard the historian 
 against considering, as trifles, all that might appear so to those 
 who recognize no greatness in the mind, and can conceive no 
 dignity in any incident, which does not act on their senses by its 
 external accompaniments, or on their curiosity by its immediate 
 consequences. Things apparently insignificant are recommended 
 to our notice, not for their own sakes, but for their bearings or in 
 fluences on things of importance : in other words, when they are 
 insignificant in appearance only. 
 
 An inquisitiveness into the minutest circumstances and casual 
 sayings of eminent contemporaries is indeed quite natural ; but 
 so are all our follies, and the more natural they are, the more 
 caution should we exert in guarding against them. To scribble 
 trifles even on the perishable glass of an inn window, is the mark 
 of an idler ; but to engrave them on the marble monument, 
 sacred to the memory of the departed great, is something worse 
 than idleness. The spirit of genuine biography is in nothing 
 more conspicuous,- than in the firmness with which it withstands 
 the cravings of worthless curiosity, as distinguished from the 
 thirst after useful knowledge. For, in the first place, such anec 
 dotes as derive their whole and sole interest from the great name 
 of the person concerning whom they are related, arid neither 
 illustrate his general character nor his particular actions, would 
 scarcely have been noticed or remembered except by men of weak 
 minds : it is not unlikely, therefore, that they were misapprehend 
 ed at the time, and it is most probable that they have been re 
 lated as incorrectly, as they were noticed injudiciously. Nor are 
 the consequences of such garrulous biography merely negative 
 For as insignificant stories can derive no real respectability from 
 the eminence of the person who happens to be the subject of them, 
 but rather an additional deformity of disproportion, they are apt 
 to have their insipidity seasoned by the same bad passions that 
 accompany the habit of gossiping in general ; and the misappre 
 hensions of weak men meeting with the misinterpretations of ma 
 lignant men, have not seldom formed the groundwork of the most 
 
328 N SECOND LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 grievous calumnies. In the second place, these trifles are subver 
 sive of the great end of biography, which is to fix the attention, 
 and to interest the feelings, of men on those qualities and actions 
 which have made a particular life worthy of being recorded. It 
 is, no doubt, the duty of an honest biographer, to portray the 
 prominent imperfections as well as excellencies of his hero ; but 
 I am at a loss to conceive how this can be deemed an excuse for 
 heaping together a multitude of particulars, which can prove 
 nothing of any man that might not have been safely taken for 
 granted of all men. In the present age (emphatically the age of 
 personality) there are more than ordinary motives for withholding 
 all encouragement from this mania of busying ourselves with the 
 names of others, which is still more alarming as a symptom, than 
 it is troublesome as a disease. The reader must be still less ac 
 quainted with contemporary literature than myself a case not 
 likely to occur if he needs rne to inform him that ^iere are men, 
 who trading in the silliest anecdotes, in unprovoked abuse and 
 senseless eulogy, think themselves nevertheless employed both 
 worthily and honorably, if only all this be done in good set terms, 
 and from the press, and of public characters, a class which has 
 increased so rapidly of late, that it becomes difficult to discover 
 what characters are to be considered as private. Alas ! if these 
 wretched misusers of language and the means of giving wings to 
 thought, the means of multiplying the presence of an individual 
 mind, alas ! had they ever known, how great a thing the 
 possession of any one simple truth is, and how mean, a thing a 
 mere fact is, except as seen in the light of some comprehensive 
 truth ; if they had but once experienced the unborrowed compla 
 cency, the inward independence, the homebred strength, with 
 which every clear conception of the reason is accompanied ; they 
 would shrink from their own pages as at the remembrance of a 
 crime. For a crime it is (and the man \vho hesitates in pro 
 nouncing it such, must be ignorant of what mankind owe to 
 books, what Ijp himself owes to them in spite of his ignorance), 
 thus to introduce the spirit of vulgar scandal and personal inquie 
 tude into the closet and the library, environing with evil passions 
 the very sanctuaries, to which we, should flee for refuge from 
 them. For to what do these publications appeal, whether they 
 present themselves as biography or as anonymous criticism, but to 
 the same feelings which the scandal-bearers and time-killers of 
 
ESSAY II. 329 
 
 ordinary life seek to gratify in themselves and their listeners ? 
 And both the authors and admirers of such publications, in what 
 respect are they less truants and deserters from their own hearts, 
 and from their appointed task of understanding and amending 
 them, than the most garrulous female chronicler of the goings-on, 
 of yesterday in the families of her neighbors and townsfolk ? 
 
 I have reprinted the following biographial sketch, partly in 
 deed in the hope that it may be t^ means of introducing to the 
 reader s knowledge, in case he should not have formed an ac 
 quaintance with them already, two of the most interesting 
 biographical works in our language, both for the weight of the 
 matter, and the incuriosa felicitas of the style. I refer to 
 Roger North s Examen, and the Life of his brother, the Lord 
 Keeper Guilford. The pages are all alive with the genuine 
 idioms of our mother-tongue. 
 
 A fastidious taste, it is true, will find offence in the occasional 
 vulgarisms, or what we now call slang, which not a few of our 
 writers, shortly after the restoration of Charles II. , seem to have 
 affected as a mark of loyalty. These instances, however, are 
 but a trifling drawback. They are not sought for, as is too often 
 and too plainly done by L Estrange, Collyer, Tom Brown, and 
 their imitators. North never goes out of his way either to seek 
 them or to avoid them ; and in the main his language gives us 
 the very nerve, pulse, and sinew of a hearty, healthy, conversa 
 tional English. 
 
 This is my first reason for the insertion of this extract. My 
 other and principal motive may be found in the kindly good-tem 
 pered spirit of the passage. But instead of troubling the reader 
 with the painful contrast which so many recollections force on 
 my own feelings, I will refer the character-makers of the present 
 day to the letters of Erasmus and Sir Thomas More to Martin 
 Dorpius, which are commonly annexed to the Encomium Morice; 
 and then for a practical comment on the just and affecting sen 
 timents of those two great men, to the works of Roger North, as 
 proofs how alone an English scholar and gentleman will permit 
 himself to delineate his contemporaries even under the strongest 
 prejudices of party spirit, and though employed 011 the coarsest 
 subjects. A coarser subject than the Chief Justice Saunders 
 can not well be imagined : nor does North use his colors with a 
 
830 SECOND LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 sparing or very delicate hand ; and yet the final impression is 
 that of kindness. 
 
 EXTRACT FROM NORTH S LIFE OF THE LORD KEEPER GUILFORD. 
 
 The Lord Chief Justice Saunders succeeded in the room of 
 Pemberton. His character and his beginning were equally 
 strange. He was at first no^better than a poor beggar boy, if 
 not a parish foundling, without known parents or relations. He 
 had found a way to live by obsequiousness in Clement s Inn, as 
 I remember, and courting the attorney s clerks for scraps. The 
 extraordinary observance and diligence of the boy made the so 
 ciety willing to do him good. He appeared very ambitious to 
 learn to write ; and one of the attorneys got a board knocked up 
 at a window on the top of a stair-case ; and that was his desk, 
 where he sat and wrote after copies of court and other hands 
 the clerks gave him. He made himself so expert a writer that 
 he took in business, and earned some pence by hackney-writing. 
 And thus by degrees he pushed his faculties, and fell to forms, 
 and, by books that were lent him, became an exquisite entering 
 clerk ; and, by the same course of improvement of himself, an 
 able counsel, first in special pleading, then at large ; and after 
 he was called to the bar, had practice in the King s Bench court 
 equal to any there. As to his person he was very corpulent and 
 beastly ; a mere lump of morbid flesh. He used to say, " By 
 his troggs" (such a humorous way of talking he affected), " none 
 could say he wanted issue of his body, for he had nine in his 
 back." He was a fetid mass, that offended his neighbors at the 
 bar in the sharpest degree. Those, whose ill-fortune it was to 
 stand near him, were confessors, and, in summer-time, almost 
 martyrs. This hateful decay of his carcass came upon him by 
 continual sottishness ; for to say nothing of brandy, he was sel 
 dom without a pot of ale at his nose, or near him. That exer 
 cise was all he used ; the rest of his life was sitting at his desk 
 or piping at home ; and that home was a tailor s house in 
 Butcher Row, called his lodging, and the man s wife was his 
 nurse or worse ; but by virtue of his money, of which he made 
 little account, though he got a great deal, he soon became mas 
 ter of the family ; and, being no changeling, he never removed, 
 
 * Edit. 1826, vol. ii. p. 41. Ed. 
 
ESSAY II. 831 
 
 but was true to his friends, and they to him, to the last hour of 
 his life. 
 
 So much for his person and education. As for his parts, none 
 had them more lively than he. Wit and repartee in an affected 
 rusticity were natural to him. He was ever ready, and never at 
 a loss ; and none came so near as he to he a match for Serjeant 
 Maynard. His great dexterity was in the art of special pleading, 
 and he would lay snares that often caught his superiors who 
 were not aware of his traps. And he was so fond of success for 
 his clients, that, rather than fail, he would set the court hard 
 with a trick : for which he met sometimes with a reprimand, 
 which he would wittily ward off, so that no one was much of 
 fended with him. But Hale could not bear his irregularity of 
 ife ; and for that, and suspicion of his tricks, used to bear hard 
 upon him in the court. But no ill usage from the bench was 
 too hard for his hold of business, being such as scarce any could 
 do but himself. With all this, he had a goodness of nature and 
 disposition in so great a degree, that he may be deservedly styled 
 a philanthrope. He was a very Silenus to the boys, as, in this 
 place I may term the students of the law, to make them merry 
 whenever they had a mind to it. He had nothing of rigid or 
 austere in him. If any near him at the bar grumbled at his 
 stench, he ever converted the complaint into content and laugh 
 ing with the abundance of his wit. As to his ordinary dealing, 
 he was as honest as the driven snow was white ; and why not, 
 having no regard for money, or desire to be rich ? And for good 
 nature and condescension, there was not his fellow. I have seen 
 him for hours and half-hours together, before the court sat, stand 
 at the bar with an audience of students over against him, put 
 ting of cases and debating so as suited their capacities, and en 
 couraged their industry. And so in the Temple, he seldom moved 
 without a parcel of youths hanging about him, and he merry 
 and jesting with them. 
 
 It will be readily conceived that this man was never cut out 
 to be a presbyter, or any thing that is severe and crabbed. In 
 no time did he lean to faction, but did his business without of 
 fence to any. He put off officious talk of government or politics 
 with jests, and so made his wit a catholicon or shield, to cover all 
 his weak places or infirmities. When the court fell into a steady 
 course of using the law against all kinds of offenders, this man 
 
332 SECOND LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 was taken into the king s business ; and had the part of draw 
 ing and perusal of almost all indictments and informations that 
 were then to be prosecuted, with the pleadings thereon, if any 
 were special ; and he had the settling of the large pleadings in 
 the quo warranto against London. His Lordship had no sort of 
 conversation with him but in the way of business and at the bar ; 
 but once, after he was in the king s business, he dined with His 
 Lordship, and no more. And there he showed another qualifi 
 cation he had acquired, and that was to play jigs upon a harpsi 
 chord ; having taught himself with the opportunity of an old 
 virginal of his landlady s ; but in such a manner, not for defect, 
 but figure, as to see him were a jest. The king, observing him 
 to be of a free disposition, loyal, friendly, and without greediness 
 or guile, thought of him to be the chief justice of the King s 
 Bench at that nice time. And the ministry could not but ap 
 prove of it. So great a weight was then at stake, as could not 
 be trusted to men of doubtful principles, or such as any thing 
 might tempt to desert them. While he sat in the court of King s 
 Bench, he gave the rule to the general satisfaction of the law 
 yers. But his course of life was so different from what it had 
 been, his business incessant, and withal crabbed, and his diet and 
 exercise changed, that the constitution of his body, or head rath 
 er, could not sustain it, and he fell into an apoplexy and palsy, 
 which numbed his parts ; and he never recovered the strength of 
 them. He outlived the judgment in the quo ivarranto ; but was 
 not present otherwise than by sending his opinion by one of the 
 judges, to be for the king, who at the pronouncing of the judg 
 ment, declared it to the court accordingly, which is frequently 
 done in like cases. 
 
ESSAY III. 
 
 Proinde si vidt bilur, fingant isti me latrunculis interim animi causa lu- 
 sisse, aut si malint, equitasse in arundine longa. Nam qucK tandem est ini- 
 quitas, cum omni vita instituto suos hisus concedamus, studiis nullum orn- 
 nino lusum permittere : maxime si nugce scria diicant, atque ita tractentur 
 ludicra, ut ex his aliquanto plus frugis referat lector non omnino naris 
 obcsa quam ex quorundam tetricis ac splendidis argumentis? ERASMUS.* 
 
 They may pretend, if they like, that I amuse myself with playing at fox 
 and goose, or, if they prefer it, that I ride the cock-horse on my grandani s 
 crutch. For is it not, I ask, very unfair, when every trade and profession 
 is allowed its own sport and travesty, not to extend the same permission to 
 literature ; especially if trifles are so handled, that a reader of tolerable 
 quickness may occasionally derive from them more food for profitable re 
 flection than from many a work of grand or gloomy argument ? 
 
 IRUS, the forlorn Irus, whose nourishment consisted in bread 
 and water, whose clothing was of one tattered mantle, and whose 
 bed of an armful of straw, this same Irus, by a rapid transition 
 of fortune, became the most prosperous mortal under the sun. 
 It pleased the gods to snatch him at once out of the dust and to 
 place him by the side of princes. He beheld himself in the pos 
 session of incalculable treasures. His palace excelled even the 
 temple of the gods in the pomp of its ornaments ; his least sump 
 tuous clothing was of purple and gold, and his table might well 
 have been named the compendium of luxury, the summary of all 
 that the voluptuous ingenuity of men had invented for the grati 
 fication of the palate. A numerous train of admiring dependents 
 followed him at every step ; those to whom he vouchsafed a gra 
 cious look were esteemed already in the high road of fortune, and 
 the favored individual who was permitted to kiss his hand ap 
 peared to be the object of common envy. The name of Irus 
 sounding in his ears an unwelcome memento and perpetual re 
 proach of his former poverty, he for this reason named himself 
 
 * Prof, ad Moria Encom. 
 
834 SECOND LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 Ceraunius, or the Lightning-flasher, and the whole people cele 
 brated this splendid change of title by public rejoicings. The 
 poet, who a few years ago had personified poverty itself under 
 his former name of Irus, now made a discovery which had till 
 that moment remained a profound secret, but was now received 
 by all with implicit faith and warmest approbation. Jupiter, 
 forsooth, had become enamored of the mother of Ceraunius, arid 
 assumed the ibrm of a mortal in order to enjoy her love. Hence 
 forward they erected altars to him, they swore by his name, and 
 the priests discovered in the entrails of the sacrificial victim, that 
 the great Ceraunius, this worthy son of Jupiter, was the sole pil 
 lar of the western world. Toxaris, his former neighbor, a man 
 whom good fortune, unwearied industry, and rational frugality, 
 had placed among the richest citizens, became the first victim of 
 the pride of this new demi-god. In the time of his poverty Irus 
 had repined at his luck and prosperity, and irritable from distress 
 and envy, had conceived that Toxaris had looked contemptuously 
 on him ; and now was the time that Ceraunius would make him 
 feel the power of him, whose father grasped the thunderbolt. 
 Three advocates, newly admitted into the recently established 
 order of the Cygnet, gave evidence that Toxaris had denied the 
 gods, committed peculations on the sacred treasury, and in 
 creased his treasures by acts of sacrilege. He was hurried off to 
 prison and sentenced to an ignominious death, and his wealth 
 confiscated to the use of Ceraunius, the earthly representative of 
 the deities. Ceraunius now found nothing wanting to his felicity 
 but a bride worthy of his rank and blooming honors. The most 
 illustrious of the land were candidates for his alliance. Euphor 
 bia, the daughter of the noble Austrius, was honored with his 
 final choice. To nobility of birth nature had added for Euphor 
 bia, a rich dowry of beauty, a nobleness both of look and stature. 
 The flowing ringlets of her hair, her lofty forehead, her brilliant 
 eyes, her stately figure, her majestic gait, had enchanted the 
 haughty Ceraunius : and all the bards told what the inspiring 
 Muses had revealed to them, that Venus more than once had 
 pined with jealousy at the sight of her superior charms. The 
 day of espousal arrived, and the illustrious son of Jove was pro 
 ceeding in pomp to the temple, when the anguish-stricken wife 
 of Toxaris, with his innocent children, suddenly threw them 
 selves at his feet, and with loud lamentations entreated him to 
 
ESSAY III. 335 
 
 spare the life of her husband. Enraged by this interruption, 
 Ceraunius spurned her from him with his feet and Irus awoke, 
 and found himself lying on the same straw on which he had lain 
 down, and with his old tattered mantle spread over him. With 
 his returning reason, conscience too returned. He praised the 
 gods and resigned himself to his lot. Ceraunius indeed had van 
 ished, but the innocent Toxaris was still alive, and Irus poor yet 
 guiltless. 
 
 Can my reader recollect no individual now on earth, who some 
 time or oilier will awake from his dream of empire, poor as Irus, 
 with all the guilt and impiety of Ceraunius ?* 
 
 The reader will bear in mind, that this fable was written and 
 first published, at the close of 1809 : 
 
 6f. re 
 
 CHRISTMAS WITHIN BOOKS, IN THE NORTH OF GERMANY. 
 
 RATZEBUKG, 1799. 
 
 There is a Christmas custom here which pleased and inter 
 ested me. The children make little presents to their parents, 
 and to each other ; and the parents to the children. For three 
 or four months before Christmas the girls are all busy, and the 
 boys save up their pocket-money, to make or purchase these pres 
 ents. What the present is to be is cautiously kept secret, and 
 the girls have a world of contrivances to conceal it such as 
 working when they are out on visits and the others are not with 
 them ; getting up in the morning before daylight, arid the like. 
 Then on the evening before Christmas-day, one of the parlors is 
 lighted up by the children, into which the parents must not go. 
 A great yew bough is fastened on the table at a little distance 
 from the wall, a multitude of little tapers are fastened in the 
 bough, but so as not to catch it till they are nearly burnt out, 
 and colored paper hangs and nutters from the twigs. Under this 
 bough the children lay out in great order the presents they mean 
 for their parents, still concealing in their pockets what they in 
 tend for each other. Then the parents are introduced, and each 
 presents his little gift, and then bring out the rest one by one 
 from their pockets, and present them with kisses and embraces. 
 * BoBBparte. Ed. 
 
336 SECOND LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 Where I witnessed this scene, there were eight or nine children, 
 and the eldest daughter and the mother wept aloud for joy and 
 tenderness ; and the tears ran down the face of the father, and 
 he clasped all his children so tight to his breast, it seemed as if 
 he did it to stifle the sob that was rising within him. *l was 
 very much affected. The shadow of the bough and its appenda 
 ges on the wall, and arching over on the ceiling, made a pretty 
 picture ; and then the raptures of the very little ones, when at 
 last the twigs and their needles began to take fire and snap ! 
 it was a delight for them ! On the next day, in the great par 
 lor, the parents lay out on the table the presents for the children : 
 a scene of more sober joy succeeds, as on this day, after an old 
 sustom, the mother says privately to each of her daughters, and 
 the father to his sons, that which he has observed most praise 
 worthy and that which was most faulty in their conduct. For 
 merly, and still in all the smaller towns and villages throughout 
 North Germany, these presents were sent by all the parents to 
 Korne one fellow, who in high buskins, a white robe, a mask, and 
 an enormous flax wig, personates Knecht Rupert, the servant 
 Rupert. On Christmas night he goes round to every house and 
 says, that Jesus Christ his master sent him thither ; the parents 
 and elder children receive him with great pomp of reverence, 
 while the little ones are most terribly frightened. He then in 
 quires for the children, and according to the character which he 
 hears from the parent, he gives them the intended present, as if 
 they came out of heaven from Jesus Christ. Or, if they should 
 have been bad children, he gives the parents a rod, and in the 
 1 name of his master recommends them to use it frequently. About 
 seven or eight years old the children are let into the secret, and 
 it is curious to observe how faithfully they keep it. 
 
 CHRISTMAS OUT OF DOORS. 
 
 The whole lake of Ratzeburg is one mass of thick transparent 
 ice, a spotless mirror of nine miles in extent. The lowness of 
 the hills, which rise from the shores of the lake, precludes the 
 awful sublimity of Alpine landscape, yet compensates for the 
 want of it by beauties, of which this very lowness is a necessary 
 condition. Ycster-morning I saw the lesser lake completely hid 
 den by mist ; but the moment the sun peeped over the hill, the 
 
ESSAY III. 337 
 
 mist broke in the middle, and in a few seconds stood divided, 
 leaving a broad road all across the lake ; and between these two 
 walls of mist the sunlight burnt upon the ice, forming a road of 
 golden fire, intolerably bright, and the mist-walls themselves par 
 took of the blaze in a multitude of shining colors. This is our 
 second frost. About a month ago, before the thaw came on, there 
 was a storm of wind ; and during the whole night, such were the 
 thunders and howlings of the breaking ice, that they have left a 
 conviction on my mind, that there are sounds more sublime than 
 any sight can be, more absolutely suspending the power of com 
 parison, and more utterly absorbing the mind s self-consciousness 
 in its total attention to the object working upon it. Part of the 
 ice which the vehemence of the wind had shattered, was driven 
 shoreward and froze anew. On the evening of the next day, at 
 sunset, the shattered ice thus frozen, appeared of a deep blue, and. 
 in shape like an agitated sea ; beyond this, the water that ran up 
 between the great islands of ice which had preserved their masses 
 entire and smooth, shone of a yellow green ; but all these scat 
 tered ice-klands, themselves, were of an intensely bright blood 
 color, they seemed blood and light in union. On some of the 
 largest of these islands, the fishermen stood pulling out their im 
 mense nets through the holes made in the ice for this purpose, 
 arid the men, their net-poles, and their huge nets, were a part of 
 the glory ; say rather, it appeared as if the rich crimson light had 
 shaped itself into these forms, figures, and attitudes, to make a 
 glorious vision in mockery of earthly things. 
 
 The lower lake is now all alive with skaters, and with ladies 
 driven onward by them in their ice cars. Mercury, surely, was 
 the first maker of skates, and the wings at his feet are symbols 
 of the invention. In skating there are three pleasing circum 
 stances ; the infinitely subtle particles of ice which the skate cuts 
 up, and which creep and run before the skate like a low mist, 
 and in sunrise or sunset become colored ; second, the shadow of 
 the skater in the water, seen through the transparent ice ; and 
 third, the melancholy undulating sound from the skate, not with 
 out variety ; and when very many are skating together, the sounds 
 and the noises give an impulse to the icy trees, and the woods all 
 round the lake tinkle. 
 
 Here I stop, having in truth transcribed the preceding in great 
 measure, in order to present the lovers of poetry with a descrip- 
 
 VOL. n. P 
 
338 SECONJO LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 tive passage, extracted with the "author s permission, from an un 
 published poem on the growth and revolutions of an individual 
 mind by Wordsworth : 
 
 an Orphic tale indeed, 
 A tale divine of high and passionate thoughts 
 To their own music chanted 1* 
 
 GROWTH OF GENIUS FROM THE INFLUENCES OF NATURAL OBJECTS OS 
 THE IMAGINATION IN BOYHOOD AND EARLY YOUTH. 
 
 Wisdom acd spirit of the universe ! 
 
 Thou soul, that art the eternity of thought ! 
 
 And giv st to forms and images- a breath 
 
 And everlasting motion ! not in vain, 
 
 By day or star -light, thus from my first dawn 
 
 Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me 
 
 The passions that build up our human soul, 
 
 Nor with the mean and vulgar works of man*, 
 
 But with high objects, with enduring things, 
 
 With life and nature : purifying thus 
 
 The elements of feeling and of thought, 
 
 And sanctifying by such discipline 
 
 Both pain and fear, until we recognize 
 
 A grandeur in the beatings of the heart. 
 
 Nor was this fellowship vouchsaf d to me 
 With stinted kindness. In November days 
 When vapors rolling down the valleys made 
 A lonely scene more lonesome ; among woods 
 At noon, and mid the calm of summer nights, 
 When by the margin of the trembling lake, 
 Beneath the gloomy hills I homeward went 
 In solitude, such intercourse Avas mine ; 
 Twas mine among the fields both day and night, 
 And by the waters all the summer long. 
 
 And in the frosty season when the sun 
 Was set, and, visible for many a mile 
 The cottage windows through the twilight blazed, 
 I heeded not the summons : happy time 
 It was indeed for all of us, to me 
 It was a time of rapture : clear and loud 
 The village clock toll d six ; I wheel d about 
 Proud and exulting, like an untir d horse 
 That car d not for its home. All shod with steel 
 We hiss d along the polish d ice, in games 
 
 * Poetical Works, VII. p. 159. Ed. 
 
ESSAY III. 339 
 
 Confederate, imitative of the chase 
 
 And woodland pleasures, the resounding horn, 
 
 The pack loud bellowing, and the hunted hare. 
 
 So through the darkness and the cold we flew, 
 
 And not a voice was idle : with the din 
 
 Meanwhile the precipices rang aloud, 
 
 The leafless trees and every icy crag 
 
 Tinkled like iron, while the distant hills 
 
 Into the tumult sent an alien sound 
 
 Of melancholy not unnoticed, while the stars, 
 
 Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west 
 
 The orange sky of evening died away. 
 
 Not seldom from the uproar I retired 
 Into a silent bay or sportively 
 Glanc d sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng, 
 To cut across the image of a star 
 That gleam d upon the ice : and oftentimes 
 "When we had given our bodies to the wind, 
 And all the shadowy banks on either side 
 Came sweeping through the darkness spitming still 
 The rapid line of motion, then at once 
 Have I reclined back upon my heels 
 Stopp d short : yet still the solitary cliffs 
 Wheel d by me even as if the earth had roll d 
 "With visible motion her diurnal round : 
 Behind me did they stretch in solemn train 
 Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watch d 
 Till all was tranquil as a summer sea. 
 
ESSAY IV. 
 
 Es ist fast traurig zu sehen, wie man vou der Ifebraischcn Qucllcn so ganz 
 sick abgewendct hat. In ^Egyptens selbzt dimkeln unentrdthselbaren Hie- 
 roglyphen hat man den Schlilssel alter Weishcit suchen wollcn ; jetzt ist von 
 nichts als Indicns Sprache und Wcisheit die Rede ; aber die Rabbinische 
 Schriften liegen unerforscht. SCHELLING. 
 
 It is mournful to observe, tow entirely we have turned our backs on the 
 Hebrew sources. In the obscure, insolvable riddles of the Egyptian hiero 
 glyphics the learned have been hoping to find the key of ancient doctrine, 
 and now we hear of nothing but the language and wisdom of India, while 
 the writings and traditions of the Rabbins are consigned to neglect without 
 examination. 
 
 THE LORD HELPETH MAN AND BEAST. 
 
 DURING his march to conquer the world, Alexander the Mace 
 donian came to a people in Africa, who dwelt, in a remote and 
 secluded corner, in peaceful huts, and knew neither war nor con 
 queror. They led him to the hut of their chief, who received 
 him hospitably, and placed before him golden dates, golden figs, 
 and bread of gold. " Do fou eat gold in this country ?" said 
 Alexander. " I take it for granted," replied the chief, " that thou 
 wast able to find eatable food in thine own country. For what 
 reason then art thou come among us ?" " Your gold has not 
 tempted me hither," said Alexander, " but I would willingly be 
 come acquainted with your manners and customs." " So be it," 
 rejoined the other ; " sojourn among us as long as it pleaseth 
 thee." At the close of this conversation two citizens entered as 
 into their court of justice. The plaintiff said, " I bought of this 
 man a piece of land, and as I was making a deep drain through 
 it I found a treasure. This is not mine, for I only bargained for 
 the land, and not for any treasure that might be concealed be 
 neath it : and yet the former owner of the land will not receive 
 it." The defendant answered : "I hope I have a conscience as 
 
ESSAY IV. 341 
 
 well as my fellow-citizen. I sold him the land with all its con 
 tingent, as well as existing advantages, and consequently the 
 treasure inclusively." 
 
 The chief, who was at the same time their supreme judge, 
 recapitulated their words, in order that the parties might see 
 whether or no he understood them aright. Then after some re 
 flection, said : " Thou hast a son, friend, I believe ?" " Yes !" 
 " And thou" (addressing the other) " a daughter ?" " Yes !" 
 " Well, then, let thy son marry thy daughter, and bestow the 
 treasure on the young couple for their marriage portion." Alex 
 ander seemed surprised and perplexed. " Think you my sentence 
 unjust ?" the chief asked him. " no," replied Alexander, "but 
 it astonishes me." " And how, then," rejoined the chief, 
 would the case have been decided in your country ?" " To 
 confess the truth," said Alexander, " we should have taken both 
 parties into custody, and have seized the treasure for the king s 
 use." " For the king s use !" exclaimed the chief, now in his 
 turn astonished. "Does the sun shine on that country ?" " 
 yes !" " Does it rain there ?" " Assuredly." " Wonderful ! 
 but are there tame animals in the country that live on the grass 
 and green herbs ?" " Very many, and of many kinds." " Ay, 
 that must be the cause," said the chief: " for the sake of those 
 innocent animals the all-gracious Being continues to let the sun 
 shine and the rain drop down on your country." 
 
 WHOSO HATH FOUND A VIRTUOUS WIFE HATH A GREATER 
 TREASURE THAN COSTLY PEARLS. 
 
 Such a treasure had the celebrated teacher HABBI MEIR found. 
 He sat during the whole of one Sabbath day in the public school, 
 and instructed the people. During his absence from his house 
 his two sons died, both of them of uncommon beauty and enlight 
 ened in the law. His wife bore them to her bed-chamber, laid 
 them upon the marriage-bed, and spread a white covering over 
 their bodies. In the evening Rabbi Meir came home. " Where 
 are my two sons," he asked, " that I may give them my bless 
 ing ?" " They are gone to the school," was the answer. " I 
 repeatedly looked round the school," he replied, " and I did not 
 see them there." She reached to him a goblet, he praised the 
 Lord at the going out of the Sabbath, drank, and again asked : 
 
342 SECOND LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 " "Where are my .sons, that they too may drink of the cup of bless 
 ing ?" " They will not be far off," she said, and placed food be 
 fore him that he might eat. He was in a gladsome and genial 
 .mood, and when he had said grace after the meal, she thus ad 
 dressed him : " Rabbi, with thy permission I would fain propose 
 to thee one question." "Ask it then, my love !" he replied. 
 " A few days ago, a person intrusted some jewels to my custody, 
 and now he demands them : should I give them back ?" . This 
 is a question," said Rabbi Meir, " which my wife should not have 
 thought it necessary to ask. "What, wouldst thou hesitate or be 
 reluctant to restore to everyone his ow r ii ?" " No," she replied ; 
 " but yet I thought it best not to restore them without acquaint 
 ing thee therewith." She then led him to their chamber, and 
 stepping to the bed, took the white covering from the dead bodies. 
 " Ah, my sons, my sons," thus loudly lamented the father, "my sons, 
 the light of mine eyes, and the light of my understanding. I was 
 your father, but ye were my teachers in the law." The mother 
 turned away and w r ept bitterly. At length she took her husband 
 by the hand, and said, " Rabbi, didst thou not teach me that we 
 must not be reluctant to restore that which w r as intrusted to our 
 keeping ? See, the Lord gave, the Lord hath taken away, and 
 blessed be the name of the Lord !" " Blessed be the name of 
 the Lord !" echoed Rabbi Meir, " and blessed be his name for 
 thy sake too ! For well it is written : Whoso hath found a vir 
 tuous wife hath a greater treasure than costly pearls : she open- 
 eth her mouth ivith ivisdmn, and in her tongue is the law of 
 kindness."* 
 
 CONVERSATION OF A PHILOSOPHER WITH A RABBI. 
 
 " Your God in his book calls himself a jealous God, who can 
 endure no other god beside himself, and on all occasions makes 
 manifest his abhorrence of idolatry. How conies it then that he 
 threatens and seems to hate the worshipers of false gods more 
 than the false gods themselves." " A certain king," replied the 
 Rabbi, " had a disobedient son. Among other worthless tricks 
 of various kinds, he had the baseness to give his dogs his father s 
 names and titles. Should the king show his anger on the prince 
 or the dogs ?" " "Well turned," rejoined the philosopher: "but 
 * Prov. xxxi. 26. Ed. 
 
ESSAY IV. 343 
 
 if your God destroyed the objects of idolatry he would take away 
 the temptation to it." " Yea," retorted the Rabbi, " if the fools 
 worshiped such things only as were of no further use than that 
 to which their folly applied them, if the idol were always as 
 worthless as the idolatry is contemptible. But they worship the 
 sun, the moon, the host of heaven, the rivers, the sea, fire, air, 
 and what not ? Would you that the Creator, for the sake of 
 these fools, should ruin his own works, and disturb the laws ap 
 pointed to nature by his own wisdom ? If a man steals grain 
 and sows it, should the seed s not shoot up out of the earth, be 
 cause it was stolen ? no ! the wise Creator lets nature run 
 her own course : for her course is his own appointment. And 
 what if the children of folly abuse it to evil ? The day of reck 
 oning is not far off, and men will then learn that human actions 
 likewise re-appear in their consequences by as certain a law as 
 the green blade rises up out of the buried corn-seed."^ 
 
 * See Pi-oben Rabbinischer Weisheit. Engel s Schriften, BcL I. s. 297- 
 306. Atn. Ed* 
 
THE FRIEND, 
 
 SECTION THE SECOND. 
 
 ON THE GROUNDS OF MORALS AND RELIGION, AND THE 
 
 DISCIPLINE OF THE MIND REQUISITE FOR A TRUE 
 
 UNDERSTANDING OF THE SAME. 
 
I know, the seeming and self-pleasing wisdom of our times consists much 
 in cavilling and unjustly carping at all things that see light, and that there 
 are many who earnestly hunt after the publike fame of learning and judg^ 
 ment by this easily trod and despicable path, which, notwithstanding, they 
 tread with as much confidence as folly : for that, oftimes, which they vainly 
 and unjustly brand with opprobrie, outlives their fate, and flourisheth when it 
 is forgot that ever any such as they had being. Dedication to Lord Herbert 
 of Ambrose Parey s Works by Thomas Johnson, the Translator, 1634. 
 
THE FRIEND. 
 
 INTBODUCTTON. 
 
 llapti, L^TOV - TIJV Zvvoiav TOV Kara <j>vaiv yv, Kal TO ve/uvov aT 
 - CJ^E K.o7a.K.eia<; pv Kaaqg TrpoatjVE^epav elvai rf/v 6/u.Mav avrov, aldeai- 
 litjrarov 6i; Trap avrov EKEIVOV rov ttaipov elvai Kal lifta plv drradS^arov elvai, 
 ufia <5 tyi"ho~opy6rarov Kal TO idetv uvdpuirov aa<pu .%u%i$ ov TU>V 
 jj-yov/jLEvov rrjv avTov Tro%.v[ia6t7]v. M. 
 
 From Sextus, and from the contemplation of his chai acter, I learned 
 what it was to live a life in harmony with nature ; and that secmliness 
 and dignity of deportment, which insured the profoundest reverence at the 
 very same time that his company was more winning than all the flattery 
 in the world. To him I owe likewise that I have known a man at once the 
 most dispassionate, and the most affectionate, and who of all his attractions 
 set the least value on the multiplicity of his literary acquisitions. 
 
 TO THE EDITOR OF THE FRIEND. 
 SIR, 
 
 I hope you will not ascribe to presumption the liberty I take 
 in addressing you on the subject of your work. I feel deeply 
 interested in the cause you have undertaken to support ; and my 
 object in writing this letter is to describe to you, in part from my 
 own feelings, what I conceive to be the state of many minds, 
 which may derive important advantage from your instructions. 
 
 I speak, Sir, of those who, though bred up under our unfavor 
 able system of education, have yet held at times some intercourse 
 with nature, and with those great minds whose works have been 
 moulded by the spirit of nature ; who, therefore, when they pass 
 from the seclusion and constraint of early study, bring with them 
 into the new scene of the world much of the pure sensibility 
 which is the spring of all that is greatly good in thought and ac- 
 
 * L. I. 9. But the passage is made up from, rather than found in, An 
 toninus. Ed. 
 
348 " HE FBIEM. 
 
 i 
 
 tion. To such the season of that entrance into the world is a 
 season of fearful importance ; not for the seduction of its passions, 
 but of its opinions. "Whatever be their intellectual powers, un 
 less extraordinary circumstances in their lives have been so fa 
 vorable to the growth of meditative genius, that their speculative 
 opinions must spring out of their early feelings, their minds are 
 still at the mercy of fortune : they have no inward impulse 
 steadily to propel them : and must trust to the chances of the 
 world for a guide. And such is our present moral arid intellec 
 tual state, that these chances are little else than variety of dan 
 ger. There w r ill be a thousand causes conspiring to complete 
 the work of a false education, and by inclosing the mind on 
 every side from the influences of natural feeling, to degrade its 
 inborn dignity, and finally bring the heart itself under subjection 
 to a corrupted understanding. I am anxious to describe to yo-u 
 Avhat I have experienced or seen of the dispositions and feelings, 
 that will aid every other cause of danger, and tend to lay the 
 mind open to the infection of all those falsehoods in opinion and 
 sentiment, which constitute the degeneracy of the age. 
 
 Though it would not be difficult to prove, that the mind of 
 the country is much enervated since the days of her strength, 
 and brought down from its moral dignity, it is not yet so forlorn 
 of all good, there is nothing in the face of the times so dark 
 and saddening and repulsive as to shock the first feelings of a 
 generous spirit, and drive it at once to seek refuge in the elder 
 ages of our greatness. There yet survives so much of the char 
 acter bred up through long years of liberty, danger, and glory, 
 that even what this age produces bears traces of those that are 
 past, and it still yields enough of beautiful, and splendid, and 
 bold, to captivate an ardent but untutored imagination. And in 
 this real excellence is the beginning of danger : for it is the first 
 spring of that excessive admiration of the age which at last 
 brings down to its own level a mind born above it. If there ex 
 isted only the general disposition of all who are formed with a 
 high capacity for good, to be rather credulous of excellence than 
 suspiciously arid severely just, the error would not be carried far : 
 but there are, to a young mind, in this country and at this time, 
 numerous powerful causes concurring to inflame his disposition, 
 till the excess of the affection above the worth of its object is 
 beyond all computation. To trace these causes it will be neces- 
 
INTRODUCTION. , 849 
 
 sary to follow the history of a pure and noble mind from the 
 first moment of that critical passage from seclusion to the world, 
 which changes all the circumstances of its intellectual existence, 
 shows it for the first time the real scene of living men, and calls 
 up the new feeling of numerous relations by which it is to be 
 connected with them. 
 
 To the young adventurer in life, who enters upon his course 
 with such a mind, every thing seems made for delusion. He 
 comes with a spirit the dearest feelings and highest thoughts of 
 which have sprung up under the influences of nature. He 
 transfers to the realities of life the high wild fancies of visionary 
 boyhood : he brings with him into ..the world the passions of 
 solitary and untamed imagination, and hopes which he has 
 learned from dreams. Those dreams have been of the great and 
 wonderful and lovely, of all which in these has yet been dis 
 closed to him : his thoughts have dwelt among the wonders of 
 nature, and among the loftiest spirits of men, heroes, and sages, 
 and saints ; those whose deeds, and thoughts, and hopes, were 
 high above ordinary mortality, have been the familiar compan 
 ions of his soul. To love and to admire has been the joy of his 
 existence. Love and admiration are the pleasures he will de 
 mand of the world. For these he has searched eagerly into the 
 ages that are gone ; but with more ardent and peremptory ex 
 pectation he requires them of that in which his own lot is cast : 
 for to look on life with hopes of happiness is a necessity of his 
 nature, and to him there is no happiness but such as is sur 
 rounded with excellence. 
 
 See first how this spirit will affect his judgment of moral char 
 acter, in those with whom chance may connect him in the com 
 mon relations of life. It is of those with whom he is to live, 
 that his soul first demands this food of her desires. From their 
 conversation, their looks, their actions, their lives, she asks for 
 excellence. To ask from all and to ask in vain, would be too 
 dismal to bear : it would disturb him too deeply with doubt and 
 perplexity and fear. In this hope, and in the revolting of his 
 thoughts from the possibility of disappointment, there is a 
 preparation for self-delusion : there is an unconscious determina 
 tion that his soul shall be satisfied ; an obstinate will to find 
 good everywhere. And thus his first study of mankind is a 
 continued effort to read in them the expression of his own feel- 
 
350 THE FRIEND. 
 
 ings. He catches at every uncertain show and shadowy resem 
 blance of Avhat he seeks ; and unsuspicious in innocence, he is 
 first won with those appearances of good which are in fact only 
 false pretensions. But this error is not carried far : for there is 
 a sort of instinct of rectitude, which, like the pressure of a talis 
 man given to baffle the illusions of enchantment, warns a pure 
 mind against hypocrisy. There is another delusion more diffi 
 cult to resist and more slowly dissipated. It is when he finds, 
 as he often will, some of the real features of excellence in the 
 purity of their native form. For then his rapid imagination 
 will gather round them all the kindred features that are wanting 
 to, perfect beauty ; and make for him, where he could not find, 
 the moral creature of his expectation ; peopling, even from this 
 human world, his little circle of affection with forms as fair as 
 his heart desired for its love. 
 
 But when, from the eminence of life which he has reached, 
 he lifts up his eyes, and sends out his spirit to range over the 
 great scene that is opening before him find around him, the 
 whole prospect of civilized life so Avide and so magnificent ; 
 when he begins to contemplate, in their various stations of power 
 or splendor, the leaders of mankind, those men on whose wisdom 
 are hung the fortunes of nations, those whose genius and valor 
 wield the heroism of a people ; or those, in no inferior pride of 
 place, whose sway is over the mind of society, chiefs in the 
 realm of imagination, interpreters of the secrets of nature, rulers 
 of human opinion ; what wonder when he looks on all this liv 
 ing scene, that his heart should burn with strong affection, that 
 he should feel that his own happiness will be forever interwoven 
 with the interests of mankind ? Here then the sanguine hope 
 with which he looks on life, will again be blended with his pas 
 sionate desire of excellence ; and he will still be impelled to 
 single out some, on whom his imagination and his hopes may 
 repose. To whatever department of human thought or action 
 his mind is turned with interest, either by the sway of public 
 passion or by its own impulse, among statesmen, and warriors, 
 and philosophers, and poets, he will distinguish some favored 
 names on which he may satisfy his admiration. And there, just 
 as in the little circle of his own acquaintance, seizing eagerly on 
 every merit they possess, he will supply more from his own 
 credulous hope, completing real with imagined excellence, till 
 
INTRODUCTION. 351 
 
 living men, with all their imperfections, become to him the rep 
 resentatives of his perfect ideal creation ; till, multiplying his 
 objects of reverence, as he enlarges his prospect of life, he will 
 have surrounded himself with idols of his own hands, and his 
 imagination will seem to discern a glory in the countenance of 
 the age, which is but the reflection of its own effulgence . 
 
 He will possess, therefore, in the creative power of generous 
 hope, a preparation for illusory and exaggerated admiration of 
 the age in which he lives : and this predisposition will meet with 
 many favoring circumstances, when he has grown up under a 
 system of education like ours, which (as perhaps all education 
 must that is placed in. the hands of a distinct and embodied class, 
 who therefore bring to it the peculiar and hereditary prejudices 
 of their order) has controlled his imagination to a reverence of 
 former times, with an unjust contempt of his own. For no sooner 
 does he break loose from this control, and begin to feel, as he con 
 templates the world for himself, how much there is surrounding 
 him on all sides, that gratifies his noblest desires, than there 
 springs up in him an indignant sense of injustice, both to the age 
 and to his own mind ; arid he is impelled warmly and eagerly to 
 give loose to the feelings that have been held in bondage, to seek 
 out and to deJight in finding excellence that will vindicate the in 
 sulted world, while it- justifies, too, his resentment of his own un 
 due subjection, and exalts the value of his new found liberty. 
 
 Add to this,jthat secluded as he has been from knowledge, and, 
 in the imprisoning circle of one system of ideas, cut off from his 
 share in the thoughts and feelings that are stirring among men, 
 he finds himself, at the first steps of his liberty, in a new intellec 
 tual world. Passions and powers which he knew not of start up 
 in his soul. The human mind, which he had seen but under one 
 aspect, noV presents to him a thousand unknown and beautiful 
 forms. He sees it, in its varying powers, glancing over nature 
 with restless curiosity, and with impetuous energy striving for 
 ever against the barriers which she has placed around it ; sees it 
 with divine power creating from dark materials living beauty, 
 and fixing all its high and transported fancies in imperishable 
 forms. In the world of knowledge, and science, and art, and 
 genius, he treads as a stranger : in the confusion of new sensa 
 tions, bewildered in delights, all seems beautiful ; all seems ad 
 mirable. And therefore he engages eagerly in the pursuit of false 
 
352 THE FRIEND. 
 
 or insufficient philosophy ; he is won by the allurements of licen 
 tious art ; he follows with wonder the irregular transports of un 
 disciplined imagination. Nor, where the objects of his admira 
 tion are worthy, is he yet skilful to distinguish between the ac 
 quisitions which the age has made for itself, and that large pro 
 portion of its wealth which it has only inherited : but in his de 
 light of discovery and growing knowledge, all that is new to his 
 own mind seems to him newborn to the world. To himself every 
 fresh idea appears instruction ; every new exertion, acquisition 
 of power : he seems just called to the consciousness of himself, 
 and to his true place in the intellectual world ; and gratitude and 
 reverence towards those to whom he owes this recovery of his 
 dignity, tend much to subject him to the dominion of minds that 
 were not formed by nature to be the leaders of opinion. 
 
 "All the tumult and glow of thought and imagination, which 
 seize on a mind of power in such a scene, tend irresistibly to bind 
 it by stronger attachment of love and admiration to its own age. 
 And there is one^ among the new emotions which belong to its 
 entrance on the world, one almost the noblest of all, in which this 
 exaltation of the age is essentially mingled. The faith in the 
 perpetual progression of human nature towards perfection gives 
 birth to such lofty dreams, as secure to it the devout assent of the 
 imagination ; and it will be yet more grateful to a heart just 
 opening to hope, flushed with the consciousness of new strength, 
 and exulting in the prospect of destined achievements. There is, 
 therefore, almost a compulsion on generous and enthusiastic 
 spirits, as they trust that the future shall transcend the present, 
 to believe that the present transcends the past. . It is only on an 
 undue love and admiration of their own age that they can build 
 their confidence in the melioration of the human race. Nor is 
 this faith, which, in some shape, will always be the creed of vir 
 tue, without apparent reason, even in the erroneous form in which 
 the young adopt it. For there is a perpetual acquisition of 
 knowledge and art, an unceasing progress in many of the modes 
 of exertion of the human mind, a perpetual unfolding of virtues 
 with the changing manners of society : and it is not for a young 
 mind to compare what is- gained with what has passed away ; to 
 discern that amidst the incessant intellectual activity of the race, 
 the intellectual power of individual minds may be falling off; 
 and that amidst accumulating knowledge lofty science may dis- 
 
INTRODUCTION. 353 
 
 appear ; and still less, to judge, in the more complicated moral 
 character of a people, what is progression, and what is decline. 
 
 Into a mind possessed with this persuasion of the perpetual 
 progress of man, there may even imperceptibly steal both from 
 the belief itself, and from many of the views on which it rests, 
 something like a distrust of the wisdom of great men of former 
 ages, and with the reverence, which no delusion will ever over 
 power in a pure mind, for their greatness, a fancied discernment 
 of imperfection and of incomplete excellence, which wanted for 
 its accomplishment the advantages of later improvements : there 
 will be a surprise that so much should have been possible in 
 times so ill prepared ; and even the study of their works may be 
 sometimes rather the curious research of a speculative inquirer, 
 than the devout contemplation of an enthusiast, the watchful 
 and obedient heart of a disciple listening to the inspiration of his 
 master. 
 
 Here then is the power of delusion that will gather round the 
 first steps of a youthful spirit, and throw enchantment over the 
 world in which it is to dwell ; hope realizing its own dreams ; 
 ignorance dazzled and ravished with sudden sunshine ; power 
 awakened and rejoicing in its own consciousness ; enthusiasm 
 kindling among multiplying images of greatness and beauty, and 
 enamored, above all, of one splendid error ; and, springing from 
 all these, such a rapture of life and hope, and joy, that the soul, 
 in the power of its happiness, transmutes things essentially repug 
 nant to it, into the excellence of its own nature : these are the 
 spells that cheat the eye of the mind with illusion. It is under 
 these influences that a young man of ardent spirit gives all his 
 love, and reverence, and zeal, to productions of art, to theories 
 of science, to opinions, to systems of feeling, and to characters 
 distinguished in the world, that are far beneath his own original 
 dignity. 
 
 Now as this delusion springs not from his worse but his better 
 nature, it seems as if there could be no warning to him from 
 within of his danger : for even the impassioned joy which he 
 draws at times from the works of nature, and from those of her 
 mightier sons, and which would startle him from a dream of un 
 worthy passion, serves only to fix the infatuation : for those deep 
 emotions, proving to him that his heart is uncorrupted, justify to 
 him all its workings, and his mind, confiding and delighting in 
 
854 THE FRIEND. 
 
 itself, yields to the guidance of its own blind impulses of pleasure. 
 His chance, therefore, of security is the chance that the greater 
 number of objects occurring to attract his honorable passions 
 may be worthy of them. But we have seen that the whole 
 power of circumstances is collected to gather round him such ob 
 jects and influences as will bend his high passions to unworthy 
 enjoyment. He engages in it with a heart and understanding 
 unspoiled : but they can not long be misapplied with impunity. 
 They are drawn gradually into closer sympathy with the false 
 hoods they have adopted, till, his very nature seeming to change 
 under the corruption, there disappears from it the capacity of 
 those higher perceptions and pleasures to which he was born : 
 and he is cast off from the communion of exalted minds, to live 
 and to" perish with the age to which he has surrendered himself. 
 
 If minds under these circumstances of danger are preserved 
 from decay and overthrow, it can seldom. I think, be to them 
 selves that they owe their deliverance. It must be to a fortunate 
 chance which places them under the influence of some more en 
 lightened mind, from which they may first gain suspicion and 
 afterwards wisdom. There is a philosophy, which, leading them 
 by the light of their best emotions to the principles which should 
 give life to thought and law to genius, will discover to them in 
 clear and perfect evidence, the falsehood of the errors that have 
 misled them, and restore them to themselves. And this philoso 
 phy they will be willing to hear and wise to understand ; but 
 they must be led into its mysteries by some guiding hand ; for 
 they want the impulse or the power to penetrate of themselves 
 the recesses. 
 
 If a superior mind should assume the protection of others just 
 beginning to move among the dangers I have described, it would 
 probably be found, that delusions springing from their own vir 
 tuous activity were not the only difficulties to be encountered. 
 Even after suspicion is awakened, the subjection to falsehood 
 may be prolonged and deepened by many weaknesses both of the 
 intellectual and moral nature ; weaknesses that will sometimes 
 shake the authority of acknowledged truth. There may be intel 
 lectual indolence ; an indisposition in the mind to the effort of 
 combining the ideas it actually possesses, and bringing into dis 
 tinct form the knowledge, which in its elements is already its 
 own : there may be, where the heart resists the sway of opinion, 
 
INTRODUCTION. 355 
 
 misgivings and modest self-mistrust in him who sees that, if he 
 trusts his heart, he must slight the judgment of all around him : 
 there may be too habitual yielding to authority, consisting, 
 more than in indolence or diffidence, in a conscious helplessness 
 and incapacity of the mind to maintain itself in its own place 
 against the weight of general opinion ; and there may be too 
 indiscriminate, too undisciplined, a sympathy with others, which 
 by the mere infection of feeling will subdue the reason. There 
 must be a weakness in dejection to him who thinks with sadness, 
 if his faith be pure, how gross is the error of the multitude, and 
 that multitude how vast ; a reluctance to embrace a creed that 
 excludes so many whom he loves, so many whom his youth has 
 revered ; a difficulty to his understanding to believe that those 
 whom he knows to be, in much that is good and honorable, his 
 superiors, can be beneath him in this which is the most impor 
 tant of all ; a sympathy pleading importunately at his heart to 
 descend to the fellowship of his brothers, and to take their faith 
 and wisdom for his own. How often, when under the impulses 
 of those solemn hours, in which he has felt with clearer insight 
 and deeper faith his sacred truths, he labors to win to his own 
 belief those whom he loves, will he be checked by their indiffer 
 ence or their laughter ! And will he not bear back to his medi 
 tations a painful and disheartening sorrow, a gloomy dlfcontent 
 in that faith which takes in but a portion of those whom he 
 wishes to include in all his blessings ? Will he not be enfeebled 
 by a distraction of inconsistent desires, when he feels so strongly 
 that the faith which fills his heart, the circle within which he 
 would embrace all he loves would repose all his wishes and hopes 
 and enjoyments is yet .incommensurate with his affections? 
 
 Even when the mind, strong in reason and just feeling united, 
 and relying on its strength, has attached itself to truth, how much 
 is there in the course and accidents of life that is forever silently 
 at work for its degradation. There are pleasures deemed harm 
 less, that lay asleep the recollections of innocence : there are pur 
 suits held honorable, or imposed by duty, that oppress the moral 
 spirit : above all there is that perpetual connection with ordinary 
 minds in the common intercourse of society ; that restless activity 
 of frivolous conversation, where men of all characters and all 
 pursuits mixing together, nothing may be talked of that is not 
 of common interest to all ; nothing, therefore, but those obvious 
 
856 THE FRIEND. 
 
 thoughts and feelings that float over the surface of things ; and 
 all which is drawn from the depth of nature, all which impas 
 sioned feeling has made original in thought, would be misplaced 
 and obtrusive. The talent that is allowed to show itself is that 
 which can repay admiration by furnishing entertainment ; and 
 the display to which it is invited is that which flatters the vulgar 
 pride of society, by abasing what is too high in excellence for its 
 sympathy. A dangerous seduction to talents, which would make 
 language, given to exalt the soul by the fervid expression of its 
 pure emotions, the instrument of its degradation. And even 
 when there is, as in the instance I have supposed, too much up 
 rightness to choose so dishonorable a triumph, there is a neces 
 sity of manners, by which every one must be controlled who 
 mixes much in society, not to offend those with whom he con 
 verses by his superiority ; and whatever be the native -spirit of a 
 mind, it is evident that this perpetual adaptation of itself to 
 others, this watchfulness against its own rising feelings, this 
 studied sympathy with mediocrity, must pollute and impoverish 
 the sources of its strength. 
 
 From much of its own weakness, and from all the errors of its 
 misleading activities, *may generous youth be rescued by the in 
 terposition of an enlightened mind ; and in some degree it may 
 be guarded by instruction against the injuries to Avhich it is ex 
 posed in the world. His lot is happy who owes this protection 
 to friendship ; who has found in a friend the watchful guardian 
 of his mind. He will not be deluded, having that light to guide ; 
 he will not slumber with that voice to inspire ; he will not 
 be desponding or dejected, with that bosom to lean on. But 
 how many must there be whom Heaven has left unprovided, 
 except in their own strength ; who must maintain themsel^M, 
 unassisted and solitary, against their own infirmities and the op 
 position of the world ! For such there may yet be a protector. 
 If a teacher should stand up in their generation, conspicuous 
 above the multitude in superior power, and still more in the as 
 sertion and proclamation of disregarded truth ; to him, to his 
 cheering or summoning voice, all those would turn, whose deep 
 sensibility has been oppressed by the indifference, or misled by 
 the seduction of the times. Of one such teacher who has been 
 given to our own age you have described the power when you 
 said, that in his annunciation of truths he seemed to speak in 
 
INTRODUCTION. 357 
 
 thunders. I believe that mighty voice has not been poured out 
 in vain ; that there are hearts that have received into their in 
 most depths all its varying tones ; and that even now, there are 
 many to whom the name of Wordsworth calls up the recollection 
 of their weakness and the consciousness of their strength. 
 
 To give to the reason and eloquence of one man this complete 
 control over the minds of others, it is necessary, I think, that he 
 should be born in their own times. For thus whatever false 
 opinion of pre-eminence is attached to the age becomes at once a 
 title of reverence to him ; and when with distinguished powers 
 he sets himself apart from the age, and above it, as the teacher 
 of high but ill-understood truths, he will appear at once to a 
 generous imagination in the dignity of one whose superior mind 
 outsteps the rapid progress of society, and will derive from illu 
 sion itself the power to disperse illusions. It is probable too, that 
 he who labors under the errors I have described, might feel the 
 power of truth in a writer of another age, yet fail in applying the 
 full force of his principles to his own times ; but when he re 
 ceives them from a living teacher, there is no room for doubt or 
 misapplication. It is the errors of his own generation that are 
 denounced ; and whatever authority he may acknowledge in the 
 instructions of his master, strikes, with inevitable force, at his 
 veneration for the opinions and characters of his own times. And 
 finally there will be gathered round a living teacher, who speaks 
 to the deeper soul, many feelings of human love that will place 
 the infirmities of the heart peculiarly under his control ; at the 
 same time that they blend with and animate the attachment to 
 his cause. So that there will flow from him something of the 
 peculiar influence of a friend : while his doctrines will be em 
 braced and asserted and vindicated with the ardent zeal of a dis 
 ciple, such as can scarcely be carried back to distant times, or con 
 nected with voices that speak only from the grave. 
 
 I have done what I proposed. I have related to you as much 
 as I have had opportunities of knowing of the difficulties from 
 within and from without, which may oppose the natural devel 
 opment of true feeling and right opinion in a mind formed with 
 some capacity for good ; and the resources which such a mind 
 may derive from an enlightened contemporary writer. If what I 
 have said be just, it is certain that this influence will be felt 
 more particularly in a work, adapted by its mode of publication 
 
358 * THE FRIEND. 
 
 to address the feelings of the time, and to bring to its readers re 
 peated admonition and repeated consolation. 
 
 I have, perhaps, presumed too far in trespassing on your atten 
 tion, and in giving way to my own thoughts ; but I was unwil 
 ling to leave any thing unsaid which might induce you to con 
 sider with favor the request I was anxious to make, in the name 
 of all whose state of mind I have described, that you would at 
 times regard us more particularly in your instructions. I can 
 not judge to what degree it may be in your power to give the 
 truth you teach a control over understandings that have matured 
 their strength in error ; but in our class I am sure you will have 
 docile learners. 
 
 MATHETES.^ 
 
 The Friend might rest satisfied that his exertions thus far have 
 not been wholly unprofitable, if no other proof had been given of 
 their influence, than that of having called forth the foregoing 
 letter, with which he has been so much interested, that he could 
 not deny himself the pleasure of communicating it to his readers. 
 In answer to his correspondent, it need scarcely here be repeated, 
 that one of the main purposes of his work is to weigh, honestly 
 and thoughtfully, the moral worth and intellectual power of the 
 age in which we live ; to ascertain our gain and our loss ; to 
 determine what we are in ourselves positively, and what we are 
 compared with our ancestors ; and thus, and by every other 
 means within his power, to discover what may be hoped for fu 
 ture times, what and how lamentable are the evils to be feared, 
 and how far there is cause for fear. If this attempt should not 
 be made wholly in vain, my ingenious correspondent, and all who 
 are in a state of mind resembling that of which he gives so lively 
 a picture, will be enabled more readily and surely to distinguish 
 false from legitimate objects of admiration : and thus may the 
 personal errors, which he would guard against be more effectually 
 prevented or removed by the development of general truth for a 
 general purpose, than by instructions specifically adapted to him 
 self or to the class of which he is the able representative. There 
 is a life and spirit in knowledge which we extract from truths 
 scattered for the benefit of all, and which the mind by its own 
 
 * This letter was, as the Editor is informed, the joint composition of the 
 present Professor Wilson and his friend, Mr. Alexander Blair. Ed. 
 
INTRODUCTION. 359 
 
 activity, has appropriated to itself, a life and spirit, which is 
 seldom found in knowledge communicated by formal and direct 
 precepts, even when they are exalted and endeared by reverence 
 and iove for the teacher. 
 
 Nevertheless, though I trust that the assistance which my cor 
 respondent has done me the honor to request, will in course of 
 time floAv naturally from my labors, in a manner that will best 
 serve him, I can not resist the inclination to connect, at present, 
 wiih his letter a few remarks of direct application to the subject 
 of it ; remarks, I say, for to such I shall confine myself, inde 
 pendent of the main point out of which his complaint and request 
 both proceed ; I mean the assumed inferiority of the present age 
 in moral dignity and intellectual power to those which have pre 
 ceded it. For if the fact were true, that we had even surpassed 
 our ancestors in the best of what is good, the main part of the 
 dangers and impediments which my correspondent has feelingly 
 portrayed, could not cease to exist for minds like his, nor indeed 
 would they be much diminished ; as they arise out of the consti 
 tution of things, from the nature of youth, from the laws that 
 govern the growth of the faculties, and from the necessary condi 
 tion of the great body of mankind. Let us throw ourselves back 
 to the age of Elizabeth, and call up to mind the heroes, the war 
 riors, the statesmen, the poets, the divines, and the moral phi 
 losophers, with which the reign of the virgin queen was illus 
 trated. Or if we be more strongly attracted by the moral purity 
 and greatness, and that sanctity of civil and religious duty, with 
 which the tyranny of Charles 1. was struggled against, let us 
 cast our eyes, in the hurry of admiration, round that circle of 
 glorious patriots : but do not let us be persuaded, that each of 
 these, in his course of discipline, was uniformly helped forward 
 by those with whom he associated, or by those whose care it 
 was to direct him. Then, as now, existed objects to which the 
 wisest attached undue importance ; then, as now, judgment was 
 misled by factions and parties, time wasted in controversies fruit 
 less, except as far as they quickened the faculties ; then, as now, 
 minds were venerated or idolized, which owed their influence to 
 the weakness of their contemporaries rather than to their own 
 power. Then, though great actions were wrought, and great 
 works in literature and science produced, yet the general taste 
 was capricious, fantastical, or grovelling ; and in this point, as 
 
360 THE FRIEND. 
 
 in all others, was youti. subject to delusion, frequent in propor 
 tion to the liveliness of the sensibility, and strong as the strength 
 of the imagination. Every age hath abounded in instances of 
 parents, kindred, and friends, who, by indirect influence of exam 
 ple, or by positive injunction and exhortation, have diverted or 
 discouraged the youth, who, in the simplicity and purity of na 
 ture, had determined to follow his intellectual genius through 
 good and through evil, and had devoted himself to knowledge, to 
 the practice of virtue and the preservation of integrity, in slight 
 of temporal rewards. Above all, have not the common duties 
 and cares of common life at all times exposed men to* injury from 
 causes the action of which is the more fatal from being silent and 
 unremitting, and which, wherever it was not jealously watched 
 and steadily opposed, must have pressed upon and consumed the 
 diviner spirit ? 
 
 There are two errors into which we easily slip when thinking 
 of past times. One lies in forgetting in the excellence of what 
 remains the large overbalance of worthlessness that has been 
 swept away. Ranging over the wide tracts of antiquity, the 
 situation of the mind may be likened to that of a traveller^ in 
 some unpeopled part of America, w r ho is attracted to the burial- 
 place of one of the primitive inhabitants. It is conspicuous upon 
 an eminence, " a mount upon a mount !" He digs into it, and 
 finds that it contains the bones of a man of mighty stature ; and 
 he is tempted to give way to a belief, that as there were giants in 
 those dfays, so all men were giants. But a second and wiser 
 thought may suggest to him that this tomb would never have 
 forced itself upon his notice, if it had not contained a body that 
 was distinguished from others, that of a man who had been se 
 lected as a chieftain or ruler for the very reason that he surpassed 
 the rest of his tribe in stature, and who now lies thus conspicu 
 ously inhumed upon the mountain-top, while the bones of his 
 followers are laid unobtrusively together in their burrows upon 
 the plain below. The second habitual error is, that in this com 
 parison of ages we divide time merely into past and present, and 
 place these in the balance to be weighed against each other ; not 
 considering that the present is in our estimation not more than a 
 period of thirty years, or half a century at most, and that the past 
 is a mighty accumulation of many such periods, perhaps the 
 * See Ashe s Travels in America 
 
INTRODUCTION". 361 
 
 whole of recorded time, or at least the whole of that portion of it 
 in which our own country has been distinguished. We may il 
 lustrate this by the familiar use of the words ancient and modern, 
 when applied to poetry. What can be more inconsiderate or 
 unjust than to compare a few existing writers with the whole 
 succession of their progenitors ? The delusion, from the moment 
 that our thoughts are directed to it, seems too gross to deserve 
 mention ; yet men Avill talk for hours upon poetry, balancing 
 against each other the words ancient and modern, and be uncon 
 scious that they have fallen into it. 
 
 These observations are not made as implying a dissent from 
 the belief of my correspondent, that the moral spirit and intel 
 lectual powers of this country are declining ; but to guard against 
 unqualified admiration, even in cases where admiration has been 
 rightly fixed, and to prevent that depression which must neces 
 sarily follow, where the notion of the peculiar unfavorableness of 
 the present times to dignity of mind has been carried too far. For 
 in proportion as we imagine obstacles to exist out of ourselves to 
 retard our progress, will, in fact, our progress be retarded. Deem 
 ing, then, that in all ages an ardent mind will be baffled and led 
 astray in the manner under contemplation, though in various de 
 grees, I shall at present content myself with a few practical and 
 desultory comments upon some of those general causes, to which 
 my correspondent justly attributes the errors in opinion; and the 
 lowering or deadening of sentiment, to which ingenuous and as 
 piring youth is exposed. And first, for the heart-cheering belief 
 in the perpetual progress of the species towards a point of unat 
 tainable perfection. If the present age do indeed transcend the 
 past in what is most beneficial and honorable, he that perceives 
 this, being in no error, has no cause for complaint ; but if it be 
 not so, a youth of genius might, it should seem, be preserved from 
 any wrong influence of this faith by an insight into a simple 
 truth, namely, that it is riot necessary, in order to satisfy the de 
 sires of our nature, or to reconcile us to the economy of provi 
 dence, that there should be at all times a continuous advance in 
 what is of highest worth. In fact it is not, as a writer of the 
 present day has admirably observed, in the power of fiction to 
 portray in words, or of the imagination to conceive in spirit, ac 
 tions or characters of more exalted virtue, than those which 
 thousands of years ago have existed upon earth, as we know 
 
 TOL. II. Q 
 
362 THE FKIEND. 
 
 from the records of authentic history. Such is the inherent dig 
 nity of human nature, that there belong to it sublimities of vir 
 tues which all men may attain, and which no man can tran 
 scend : and though this be not true in an equal degree of intel 
 lectual power, yet in the persons of Plato, Demosthenes, and 
 Homer, and in those of Shakspeare, Milton, and Lord Bacon, 
 were enshrined as much of the divinity of intellect as the inhab 
 itants of this planet can hope will ever take up its abode among 
 them. But the question is not of the pow r er or worth of individ 
 ual minds, but of the general moral or intellectual merits of an 
 age, or a people, or of the human race. Be it so. Let us allow 
 and believe that there is a progress in the species towards unat 
 tainable perfection, or whether this be so or not, that it is a ne 
 cessity of a good and greatly-gifted nature to believe it ; surely 
 it does not follow that this progress should be constant "in those 
 virtues and intellectual qualities, and in those departments of 
 knowledge, which in themselves absolutely considered are of 
 most value, things independent and in their degree indispensa 
 ble. The progress of the species neither is nor can be like that 
 
 / of a Roman road in a right line. It may be more justly com 
 pared to that of a river, which, both in its smaller reaches and 
 larger turnings, is frequently forced back towards its fountains by 
 objects which can not otherwise be eluded or overcome ; yet with 
 an accompanying impulse that will insure its advancement here 
 after, it is either gaining strength every hour, or conquering in 
 secret some difficulty, by a labor that contributes as effectually 
 to further it in its course, as when it moves forward uninter 
 rupted in a line, direct as that of the Roman road with which I 
 began the comparison. 
 
 It suffices to content the mind, though there may be an appa 
 rent stagnation, or a retrograde movement in the species, that 
 something is doing which is necessary to be done, and the effects 
 of which will in due time appear ; that something is unremit 
 tingly gaining, either in secret preparation or in open and trium 
 phant progress. But in fact here, as everywhere, we are deceived 
 by creations which the mind is compelled to make for itself; we 
 speak of the species not as an aggregate, but as endued with the 
 form and separate life of an individual. But human kind, what 
 
 .J is it else than myriads of rational beings in various degrees obe 
 dient to their reason ; some torpid, some aspiring ; some in eager 
 
INTRODUCTION. 363 
 
 chase to the right hand, some to the left ; these wasting down 
 their moral nature, and these feeding it for immortality ? A 
 whole generation may appear even to sleep, or may be exaspe 
 rated with rage, they that compose it, tearing each other to 
 pieces with more than brutal fury. It is enough for complacency 
 and hope, that scattered and solitary minds are always laboring 
 somewhere in the service of truth and virtue ; and that by the 
 sleep of the multitude the energy of the multitude may be pre 
 pared ; and that by the fury of the people the chains of the peo 
 ple may be broken. Happy moment was it for England when 
 her Chaucer, who has rightly been called the morning-star of her 
 literature, appeared above the horizon ; when her WiclifTe, like 
 the sun, shot orient beams through the night of Romish super 
 stition ! Yet may the darkness and the desolating hurricane 
 which immediately followed in the wars of York" and Lancaster, 
 be deemed in their turn a blessing, with which the land has 
 been visited. 
 
 May I return to the thought of progress, of accumulation, of 
 increasing light, or of any other image by which it may please 
 us to represent the improvement of the species ? The hundred 
 years that followed the usurpation of Henry IV., were a hurling- 
 back of the mind of the country, a dilapidation, an extinction ; 
 yet institutions, laws, customs, and habits, were then broken 
 down, which would not have been so readily, nor perhaps so 
 thoroughly destroyed by the gradual influence of increasing 
 knowledge ; and under the oppression of which, if they had con 
 tinued to exist, the virtue and intellectual prowess of the suc 
 ceeding century could not have appeared at all, much less could 
 they have displayed themselves with that eager haste, and with 
 those beneficent triumphs, which will to the end of time be 
 looked back upon with admiration and gratitude. 
 
 If the foregoing obvious distinctions be once clearly perceived, 
 and steadily kept in view, I do not see why a belief in the prog 
 ress of human nature towards perfection should dispose a youth 
 ful mind, however enthusiastic, to an undue admiration of his 
 own age, and thus tend to degrade that mind. 
 
 But let me strike at once at the root of the evil complained 
 of in my correspondent s letter. Protection from any fatal effect 
 of seductions and hindrances which opinion may throw in the 
 way of pure and high-minded youth, can only be obtained with 
 
364 THE FKIEND. 
 
 certainty at the same price by which every thing great and good 
 is obtained, namely, steady dependence upon voluntary and self- 
 originating effort, and upon the practice of self-examination, sin 
 cerely aimed at and rigorously enforced. But how is this to be 
 expected from youth ? Is it not to demand the fruit when the 
 blossom is barely put forth, and is hourly at the mercy of frosts 
 arid winds ? To expect from youth these virtues and habits, in 
 that degree of excellence to which in mature years they may be 
 carried, would indeed be preposterous. Yet has youth many 
 helps and aptitudes for the discharge of these difficult duties, 
 which are withdrawn for the most part from the more advanced 
 stages of life. For youth has its own wealth and independence ; 
 it is rich in health of body and animal spirits, in its sensibility to 
 the impressions of the natural universe, in the conscious growth 
 of knowledge, in lively sympathy and familiar communion with 
 the generous actions recorded in history, and with the high pas 
 sions of poetry ; and, above all, youth is rich in the pos 
 session of time, and the accompanying consciousness of freedom 
 and power. The young man feels that he stands at a distance 
 from the season when his harvest is to be reaped ; that he has 
 leisure and may look around, and may defer both the choice and 
 the execution of his purposes. If he makes an attempt and 
 shall fail, new hopes immediately rush in, and new promises. 
 Hence, in the happy confidence of his feelings, and in the elas 
 ticity of his spirit, neither worldly ambition, nor the love of praise, 
 nor dread of censure, nor the necessity of worldly maintenance, 
 nor any of those causes which tempt or compel the mind habitu 
 ally to look out of itself for support ; neither these, nor the pas 
 sions of envy, fear, hatred, despondency, and the rankling of dis 
 appointed hopes (all which in after-life give birth to, and regu 
 late, the efforts of men and determine their opinions), have power 
 to preside over the choice of the young, if the disposition be not 
 naturally bad, or the circumstances have not been in an uncom 
 mon degree unfavorable. 
 
 In contemplation, then, of this disinterested and free condition 
 of the youthful mind, I deem it in many points peculiarly capable 
 of searching into itself, and of profiting by a few simple questions, 
 such as these that follow. Am I chiefly gratified by the exertion 
 of my power from the pure pleasure of intellectual activity, and 
 from the knowledge thereby acquired ? In other words, to what 
 
INTRODUCTION. 365 
 
 degree do I value my faculties and my attainments for their own 
 sakes ? or arc they chiefly prized by rne on account of the dis 
 tinction which they confer, or the superiority which they give 
 me over others ? Am I aware that immediate influence and a 
 general acknowledgment of merit are no necessary adjuncts of 
 a successful adherence to study and meditation in those depart 
 ments of knowledge which are of most value to mankind ; that 
 a recompense of honors and emoluments is far less to be expect 
 ed ; in fact, that there is little natural connection between them ? 
 Have I perceived this truth ; and, perceiving it, does the coun 
 tenance of philosophy continue to appear as bright and beautiful 
 in my eyes ? Has no haze bedimmed it ? Has no cloud passed 
 over and hidden from me that look which was before so encour 
 aging ? Knowing that it is my duty, and feeling that it is i$y 
 inclination, to mingle as a social being with my fellow-men ; pre 
 pared also to submit cheerfully to the necessity that will prob 
 ably exist of relinquishing, for the purpose of gaining a liveli 
 hood, the greatest portion of my time to employments where I 
 shall have little or no choice how or when I am to act ; have I, 
 at this moment, w r heii I stand as it were upon the threshold of 
 the busy world, a clear intuition of that pre-eminence in which 
 virtue and truth (involving in this latter word the sanctities of 
 religion) sit enthroned above all denominations and dignities 
 which, in various degrees of exaltation, rule over the desires of 
 men ? Do I feel that, if their solemn mandates shall be forgot 
 ten, or disregarded, or denied the obedience due to them when 
 opposed to others, I shall not only have lived for no good pur 
 pose, but that I shall have sacrificed my birth-right as a rational 
 being ; and that every other acquisition will be a bane and a 
 disgrace to me ? This is not spoken with reference to such sac 
 rifices as present themselves to the youthful imagination in the 
 shape of crimes, acts by which the conscience is violated ; such 
 a thought, I know, would be recoiled from at once, not without 
 indignation ; but I write in the spirit of the ancient fable of 
 Prodicus, representing the choice of Hercules. Here is the World, 
 a female figure approaching at the head of a train of willing or 
 giddy followers : her air and deportment are at once careless, re 
 miss, self-satisfied, and haughty : and there is Intellectual Prow 
 ess, with a pale cheek and serene brow, leading in chains Truth, 
 her beautiful and modest captive. The one makes her salutation 
 
366 THE FRIEND. 
 
 with a discourse of ease, pleasure, freedom, and domestic tran 
 quillity ; or, if she invite to labor, it is labor in the busy and 
 beaten tract, with assurance of the complacent regards of parents, 
 friends, arid of those with whom we associate. The promise also 
 may be upon her lip of the huzzas of the multitude, of the smile 
 of kings, and the munificent rewards of senates. The other docs 
 not venture to hold forth any of these allurements ; she does not 
 conceal from him whom she addresses the impediments, the dis 
 appointments, the ignorance and prejudice which her follower 
 will have to encounter, if devoted, when duty calls, to active life ; 
 and if to contemplative, she lays nakedly before him a scheme 
 of solitary and unremitting labor, a life of entire neglect perhaps, 
 or assuredly a life exposed to scorn, insult, persecution, and 
 hatred ; but cheered by encouragement from a grateful few, by 
 applauding conscience, and by a prophetic anticipation, perhaps, 
 of fame a late, though lasting consequence. Of these two, 
 each in this manner soliciting you to become her adherent, you 
 doubt not which to prefer ; but oh ! the thought of moment is 
 not preference, but the degree of preference ; the passionate and 
 pure choice, the inward sense of absolute and unchangeable de 
 votion. 
 
 I spoke of a few simple questions. The question involved in 
 this deliberation is simple, but at the same time it is high and 
 awful ; and I would gladly know whether an answer can be re 
 turned satisfactory to the mind. We will for a moment suppose 
 that it can not ; that there is a startling and a hesitation. Are 
 we then to- despond, to retire from all contest, and to reconcile 
 ourselves at once to cares without a generous hope, and to efforts 
 in which there is no more moral life than that which is found in 
 the business arid labors of the unfavored and unaspiring many ? 
 No. But if the inquiry have not been on just grounds satisfac 
 torily answered, M-e may refer confidently our youth to that na 
 ture of which he deems himself an enthusiastic follower, and one 
 who wishes to continue 110 less faithful and enthusiastic. We 
 would tell him that there are paths which he has not trodden ; 
 recesses which he has not penetrated ; that there is a beauty 
 which he has not seen, a pathos which he has not felt, a sub 
 limity to which he hath not been raised. If he have trembled 
 because there has occasionally taken place in him a lapse of which 
 he is conscious ; if he foresee open or secret attacks, which he has 
 
INTRODUCTION. 367 
 
 had intimations that he will neither be strong enough .to resist, 
 nor watchful enough to elude, let him not hastily ascribe this 
 weakness, this deficiency, and the painful apprehensions accom 
 panying them, in any degree to the virtues or noble qualities with 
 which youth by nature is furnished ; but let him first be assured, 
 before he looks about for the means of attaining the insight, the 
 discriminating powers, and the confirmed wisdom of manhood, 
 that his soul has more to demand of the appropriate excellencies 
 of youth, than youth has yet supplied to it ; that the, evil under 
 which he labors is not a superabundance of the instincts and the 
 animating spirit of that age, but a falling short, or a failure. 
 But what can he gain from this admonition ? He can not recall 
 past time ; he can not begin his journey afresh ; he can not un 
 twist the links by which, in no undelightful harmony, images and 
 sentiments are wedded in his mind. Granted that the sacred 
 light of childhood is and must be for him no more than a remem 
 brance. He may, notwithstanding, be remanded to nature, and 
 with trustworthy hopes, founded less upon his sentient than upon 
 his intellectual being ; to nature, as leading on insensibly to the 
 society of reason, but to reason and will, as leading back to the 
 wisdom of nature. A. re-union, in this order accomplished, will 
 bring reformation and timely support ; and the two powers of 
 reason and nature, thus reciprocally teacher and taught, may ad 
 vance together in a track to which there is no limit. 
 We have been discoursing (by implication at least) t)f infancy, 
 childhood, boyhood, and youth, of pleasures lying upon the un 
 folding intellect plenteously as morning dew-drops, of knowledge 
 inhaled insensibly like the fragrance, of dispositions stealing into 
 the spirit like music from unknown quarters, of images uncalled 
 for and rising up like exhalations, of hopes plucked like beauti 
 ful wild flowers from the ruined tombs that border the highways 
 of antiquity, to make a garland for a living forehead ; in a 
 word, we have been treating of nature as a teacher of truth 
 through joy and through gladness, and as a creatress of the facul 
 ties by a process of smoothness and delight. We have made no 
 mention of fear, shame, sorrow, nor of ungovernable and vexing 
 thoughts ; because, although these have been and have done 
 mighty service, they are overlooked in that stage of life when 
 youth is passing into manhood overlooked, or forgotten. We 
 now apply for the succor which we need to a faculty that works 
 
368 THE FRIEND. 
 
 after a different course ; that faculty is reason ; she gives more 
 spontaneously, but she seeks for more ; she works by thought 
 through feeling ; yet in thoughts she begins and ends. 
 
 A familiar incident may elucidate this contrast in the opera 
 tions of nature, may render plain the manner in which a process 
 of intellectual improvements, the reverse of that which nature 
 pursues, is by reason introduced. There never perhaps existed a 
 school-boy, who, having, when he retired to rest, carelessly blown 
 out his candle, and having chanced to notice, as he lay upon his 
 bed in the ensuing darkness, the sullen light w r hich had survived 
 the extinguished flame, -did not, at some time or other, watch 
 that light as if his mind Avere bound to it by a spell. It fades 
 and revives, gathers to a point, seems as if it would go out in a 
 moment, again recovers its strength, nay becomes brighter than 
 before : it continues to shine with an endurance, which in its 
 apparent weakness is a mystery ; it protracts its existence so 
 long, clinging to the power which supports it, that the observer, 
 who had lain down in his bed so easy- minded, becomes sad and 
 melancholy ; his sympathies are touched ; it is to him an intima 
 tion and an image of departing human life ; the thought comes 
 nearer to him ; it is the life of a venerated parent, of a beloved 
 brother or sister, or of an aged domestic, who are gone to the 
 grave, or whose destiny it soon may be thus to linger, thus to 
 hang upon the last point of mortal existence, thus finally to de 
 part and be seen no more. This is nature teaching seriously and 
 sweetly through the affections, melting the heart, and, through 
 that instinct of tenderness, developing the understanding. In 
 this instance the object of solicitude is the bodily life of another. 
 Let us accompany this same boy to that period between youth 
 and manhood, when a solicitude may be awakened for the moral 
 life of himself. Are there any powers by which, beginning with 
 a sense of inward decay that affects not however the natural life, 
 he could call to mind the same image and hang over it with an 
 equal interest as a visible type of his own perishing spirit ? Oh ! 
 surely, if the being of the individual be under his own care, if it 
 be his first care, if duty begin from the point of accountableness 
 to our conscience, and, through that, to God and human nature ; 
 if without such primary sense of duty, all secondary care of 
 teacher, of friend, or parent, must be baseless and fruitless ; if, 
 lastly, the motions of the soul transcend in worth those of the 
 
INTRODUCTION. 369 
 
 animal functions, nay, give to them their sole value ; then truly 
 are there such powers ; and the image of the dying taper maybe 
 recalled and contemplated, though with no sadness in the nerves, 
 no disposition to tears, no unconquerable sighs, yet with a melan 
 choly in the soul, a sinking inward into ourselves from thought to 
 thought, a steady remonstrance, and a high resolve. Let then 
 the youth go back, as occasion will permit, to nature and to soli 
 tude, thus admonished by reason, and relying upon this newly 
 acquired support. A world of fresh sensations will gradually 
 open upon him as his mind puts off its infirmities, and as instead 
 of being propelled restlessly towards others in admiration, or too 
 hasty love, he makes it his prime business to understand himself. 
 New sensations, I affirm, will be opened out, pure, and sanctioned 
 by that reason which is their original author ; and precious feel 
 ings of disinterested, that is self-disregarding, joy and love may 
 be regenerated and restored ; and, in this sense, he may be said 
 to measure back the track of life he has trodden. 
 
 In such disposition of mind let the youth return to the visible 
 universe, and to conversation with ancient books, and to those, 
 if such there be, which in the present day breathe the ancient 
 spirit ; and let him feed upon that beauty which unfolds itself, 
 not to his eye as it sees carelessly the things which can not possi 
 bly go unseen, and are remembered or not as accident shall de 
 cide, but to the thinking mind, which searches, discovers, and 
 treasures up, infusing by meditation into the objects with which 
 it converses an intellectual life, whereby they remain planted in 
 the memory, now and forever. Hitherto the youth, I suppose, 
 has been content for the most part to look at his own mind, after 
 the manner in which he ranges along the stars in the firmament 
 with naked unaided sight : let him now apply the telescope of 
 art, to call the invisible stars out of their hiding-places ; and let 
 him endeavor to look through the system of his being, with the 
 organ of reason, summoned to penetrate, as far as it has power, 
 in discovery of the impelling forces and the governing laws. 
 
 These expectations are not immoderate ; they demand nothing 
 more than the perception of a few plain truths ; namely, that 
 knowledge, efficacious for the production of virtue, is the ultimate 
 end of all effort, the sole dispenser of complacency and repose 
 A perception also is implied of the inherent superiority of con 
 templation to action. The Friend does not in this contradict his 
 
 Q* 
 
870 THE FRIEND. 
 
 own words, where he has said heretofore, that doubtless to act 
 is nobler than to think. * In those words, it was his purpose to 
 censure that barren contemplation, which rests satisfied with 
 itself in cases where the thoughts are of such quality that they 
 may, and ought to, be embodied in action. But he speaks now 
 of the general superiority of thought to action ; as proceeding 
 and governing all action that moves to salutary purposes ; and, 
 secondly, as leading to elevation, the absolute possession of the 
 individual mind, and to a consistency or harmony of the being 
 within itself, which no outward agency can reach to disturb or 
 to impair ; and lastly, as producing works of pure science ; or of 
 the combined faculties of imagination, feeling, and reason ; works 
 which, both from their independence in their origin upon acci 
 dent, their nature, their duration, and the wide spread of their 
 influence, are entitled rightly to take place of the noblest and most 
 beneficent deeds of heroes, statesmen, legislators, or warriors. 
 
 Yet, beginning from the perception of this established superior 
 ity, we do not suppose that the youth, w r hom we wish to guide 
 and encourage, is to be insensible to those influences of wealth, 
 or rank, or station, by which the bulk of mankind are swayed. 
 Our eyes have not been fixed upon virtue which lies apart from 
 human nature, or transcends it. In fact there is no such virtue. 
 "We neither suppose nor wish him to undervalue or slight these 
 distinctions as modes of power, things that may enable him to be 
 more useful to his contemporaries ; nor as gratifications that may 
 confer dignity upon his living person, and, through him, upon 
 those who love him ; nor as they may connect his name, through 
 a family to be founded by his success, in a closer chain of grati 
 tude with some portion of posterity, who shall speak of him as 
 among their ancestry, with a more tender interest than the mere 
 general bond of patriotism or humanity would supply. We sup 
 pose no indifference to, much less a contempt of, these rewards ; 
 but let them have their due place ; let it be ascertained, when 
 the soul is searched into, that they are only an auxiliary motive 
 to exertion, never the principal or originating force. If. this be 
 too much to expect from a youth who, I take for granted, pos 
 sesses no ordinary endowments, and whom circumstances with 
 respect to the more dangerous passions have favored, then, indeed, 
 must the noble spirit of the country be wasted away ; then would 
 * Ante, p. 172. Ed. 
 
INTRODUCTION, 871 
 
 our institutions be deplorable, and the education prevalent among 
 us utterly vile and debasing 1 . 
 
 But my correspondent, who drew forth these thoughts, has said 
 rightly, that the character of the age may not without injustice 
 be thus branded. He will not deny that, without speaking of 
 other countries, there is in these islands, in the departments of 
 natural philosophy, of mechanic ingenuity, in the general activi 
 ties of the country, and in the particular excellence of individual 
 minds, in high stations civil or military, enough to excite admira 
 tion and love in the sober-minded, and more than enough to in 
 toxicate the youthful and inexperienced. I will compare, then, 
 an aspiring youth, leaving the schools in which he has been 
 disciplined, and preparing to bear a part in the concerns of the 
 world, I will compare him in this season, of eager admiration, to 
 a newly-invested knight appearing with his blank unsignalized 
 shield, upon some day of solemn tournament, at the court of the 
 Faery-queen, as that sovereignty w r as conceived to exist by the 
 moral and imaginative genius of our divine Spenser. He does 
 not himself immediately enter the lists as a combatant ; but he 
 looks round him with a beating heart, dazzled by the gorgeous 
 pageantry, the banners, the impresses, the ladies of overcoming 
 beauty, the persons of the knights, now first seen by him, the 
 fame of whose actions is carried by the traveller, like merchan 
 dise, through the world, and resounded upon the harp of the 
 minstrel. But I am not at liberty to make this comparison. If 
 a youth M r ere to begin his career in such an assemblage, with 
 such examples to guide and to animate, it will be pleaded, there 
 would be no cause for apprehension ; he could not falter, he could 
 not be misled. But ours is, notwithstanding its manifold excel 
 lences, a degenerate age ; and recreant knights are among us far 
 outnumbering the true. A false Grloriaria in these days imposes 
 worthless services, which they who perform them, in their blind 
 ness, know not to be such ; and which are recompensed by re 
 wards as worthless, yet eagerly grasped at, as if they were the 
 immortal guerdon of virtue. 
 
 I have in this declaration insensibly overstepped the limits 
 which I had determined not to pass : let me be forgiven ; for it 
 is hope which hath carried rne forward. In such a mixed as 
 semblage as our age presents, with its genuine merit and its 
 largo overbalance of alloy, I may boldly ask into what errors, 
 
372 THE FRIEND. 
 
 either with respect to person or thing, could a young" man fall, 
 who had sincerely entered upon the course of moral discipline 
 which has been recommended, and to which the condition of 
 youth, it has been proved, is favorable ? His opinions could no 
 where deceive him beyond the point up to which, after a season, 
 he would find that it was salutary for him to have be en deceived. 
 For as that man can not set a right value upon health who has 
 never known sickness, nor feel the blessing of ease who has been 
 through his life a stranger to pain, so can there be no confirmed 
 and passionate love of truth for him who has not experienced the 
 hollowness of error. Range against each other as advocates, op 
 pose as combatants, two several intellects, each strenuously as 
 serting doctrines which he sincerely believes ; but the one con 
 tending for the worth and beauty of that garment which the 
 other has outgrown and cast away. Mark the superiority, the 
 ease, the dignity, on the side of the more advanced mind, how 
 he overlooks his subject, commands it from centre to circumfer 
 ence, and hath the same thorough knowledge of the tenets which 
 his adversary, with impetuous zeal, but in confusion also, and 
 thrown off his guard at every turn of the argument, is laboring 
 to maintain. If it beji , ^uestiou-jof .. the_fine arts (jxjetry for in 
 stance) the riper mind not only sees that his opponent is de 
 ceived ; but, what is of far more importance, sees how he is de 
 ceived. The imagination stands before him with all its imper 
 fections laid open ; as duped by shows, enslaved by words, cor 
 rupted by mistaken delicacy and false refinement, as not having 
 even attended with care to the reports of the senses, and there 
 fore deficient grossly in the rudiments of its own power. He has 
 noted how, as a supposed necessary condition, the understanding 
 sleeps in order that the fancy may dream. Studied in the history 
 of society, and versed in the secret laws of thought, he can pass 
 regularly through all the gradations, can pierce infallibly all the 
 windings, which false taste through ages has pursued, from the 
 very time when first, through inexperience, heedlessness, or af 
 fectation, the imagination took its departure from the side of 
 truth, its original parent. Can a disputant thus accoutred be 
 withstood ? one to whom, further, every movement in the 
 thoughts of his antagonist is revealed by the light of his own ex 
 perience ; who, therefore, sympathizes with weakness gently, and 
 wins his way by forbearance ; and hath, when needful, an irre- 
 
INTRODUCTION. 373 
 
 sistible power of onset, arising from gratitude to the truth which 
 he vindicates, not merely as a positive good for mankind, but as 
 his own especial rescue and redemption. 
 
 I might here conclude : hut my correspondent towards the close 
 of his letter, has written so feelingly upon the advantages to he 
 derived, in his estimation, from a living instructor, that I must 
 not leave this part of the subject without a word of direct notice. 
 The Friend cited, some time ago,* a passage from the prose 
 works of Milton, eloquently describing the manner in which good 
 and evil grow up together in the field of the world almost in 
 separably ; and insisting, consequently, upon the knowledge and 
 survey of vice as necessary to the constituting of human virtue, 
 and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth. 
 
 If this be so, and I have been reasoning to the same effect in 
 the preceding paragraph, the fact, and the thoughts which it 
 may suggest, will, if rightly applied, tend to moderate an anxiety 
 for the guidance of a more experienced or superior mind. The 
 advantage, where it is possessed, is far from being an absolute 
 good : nay, such a preceptor, ever at hand, might prove an op 
 pression not to be thrown off, and a fatal hindrance. Grant that 
 in the general tenor of his intercourse with his pupil he is for 
 bearing and circumspect, inasmuch as he is rich in that knowl 
 edge (above all other necessary for a teacher) which can not ex 
 ist without a liveliness of memory, preserving for him an un 
 broken image of the winding, excursive, and often retrograde 
 course, along which his own intellect has passed. Grant that, 
 furnished with these distinct remembrances, he wishes that the 
 mind of his pupil should.be free to luxuriate in the enjoyments, 
 loves, and admirations appropriated to its age ; that he is not in 
 haste to kill what he knows will in due time die of itself; or be 
 transmuted, and put on a nobler form and higher faculties other 
 wise unattainable. In a word, that the teacher is governed ha 
 bitually by the wisdom of patience waiting with pleasure. Yet 
 perceiving how much the outward help of art can facilitate the 
 progress of nature, he may be betrayed into many unnecessary or 
 pernicious mistakes where he deems his interference warranted, 
 by substantial experience. And in spite of all his caution, re 
 marks may drop insensibly from him which shall wither in the 
 mind of his pupil a generous sympathy, destroy a sentiment of 
 * Ante, p. 77. Ed. 
 
374 THE FRIEXD. 
 
 approbation or dislike, not merely innocent but salutary ; and for 
 the inexperienced disciple how many pleasures may be thus cut 
 off, what joy, what admiration, and what love ! While in their 
 stead are introduced into the ingenuous mind misgivings, a mis 
 trust of its own evidence, dispositions to affect to feel where there 
 can be no real feeling, indecisive judgments, a superstructure of 
 opinions that has no base to support it, and words uttered by rote 
 with the impertinence of a parrot or a mocking-bird, yet which 
 may not be listened to with the same indifference, as they can 
 not be heard without some feeling of moral disapprobation. 
 
 These results, I contend, whatever may be the benefit to be 
 derived from such an enlightened teacher, are in their degree in 
 evitable. And by this process, humility and docile dispositions 
 may exist towards the master, endued as he is with the power 
 which personal preference confers ; but at the same time they 
 will be liable to overstep their due bounds, and to degenerate 
 into passiveness and prostration of mind. This towards him ; 
 while, with respect to other living men, nay even to the mighty 
 spirits of past times, there may be associated with such weak 
 ness a want of modesty and humility. Insensibly may steal in 
 presumption and a habit of sitting in judgment in cases where 
 no sentiment ought to have existed by diffidence or veneration. 
 Such virtues are the sacred attributes of youth ; its appropriate 
 calling is riot to distinguish in the fear of being deceived or de 
 graded, riot to analyze with scrupulous minuteness, but to accu 
 mulate in genial confidence ; its instinct, its safety, its benefit, 
 its glory, is to love, to admire, to feel, and to labor. Nature has 
 irrevocably decreed, that our prime dependence in all stages of 
 life after infancy and childhood have been passed through (nor do 
 I know that this latter ought to be excepted) must be upon our 
 own minds ; and that the way to knowledge shall be long, diffi 
 cult, winding, and oftentimes returning upon itself. 
 
 What has been said is a mere sketch, and that only of a part 
 of the interesting country into which we have been led ; but 
 my correspondent will be able to enter the paths that have been 
 pointed out. Should he do this and advance steadily for a w r hile, 
 he needs not fear any deviations from the truth which will be 
 finally injurious to him. He will not long have his admiration 
 fixed upon unworthy objects ; he will neither be clogged nor 
 drawn aside by the love of friends or kindred, betraying his un- 
 
INTRODUCTION. 375 
 
 derstanding through his affections ; he will neither be bowed 
 down by conventional arrangements of manners producing too 
 often a lifeless decency ; nor will the rock of his spirit wear 
 away in the endless beating of the waves of the world ; neither 
 will that portion of his own time, which he must surrender to 
 labors by which his livelihood is to be earned or his social duties 
 performed, be unprofitable to himself indirectly, while it is 
 directly useful to others ; for that time has been primarily sur 
 rendered through an act of obedience to a moral law established 
 by himself, and therefore he moves then also along the orbit of 
 perfect liberty. 
 
 Let it be remembered, that the advice requested does not re 
 late to the government of the more dangerous passions, or to the 
 fundamental principles of right and wrong as acknowledged by 
 the universal conscience of mankind. I may therefore assure 
 my youthful correspondent, if he will endeavor to look into him 
 self in the manner which I have exhorted him to do, that in him 
 the wish will be realized, to him in due time the prayer granted, 
 which was uttered by that living teacher of whom he speaks 
 with gratitude as of a benefactor, when in his character of philo 
 sophical poet, having thought of morality as implying in its es 
 sence voluntary obedience, and producing the eflect of order, he 
 transfers in the transport of imagination, the law of moral to 
 physical natures, and having contemplated, through the medium 
 of .that order, all modes of existence as subservient to one spirit, 
 concludes his address to the power of duty in the following 
 words : 
 
 To humbler functions, awful power ! 
 
 I call thee : I myself commend 
 
 Unto thy guidance from this hour ; 
 
 Oh, let my weakness have an end ! 
 
 Give unto me, made lowly wise, 
 
 The spirit of self-sacrifice ; 
 
 The confidence of reason give, 
 
 And in the light of truth thy bondman let me live !* 
 
 This reply to Mathetes was written by Mr. Wordsworth. Ed. 
 

 THE FRIEND, 
 
 ESSAY I. 
 
 We can not but look up with reverence to the advanced natures of the 
 naturalists and moralists in highest repute amongst us, and wish they had 
 been heightened by a more noble principle, which had crowned all their va 
 rious sciences with the principal science, and in their brave strayings after 
 truth helpt them to better fortune than only to meet with her handmaids, 
 and kept them from the fate of Ulysses, who wandering through the shades 
 met all the ghosts, yet could not see the queen. /. H. (JOHN HALL?) his 
 Motion to the Parliament of England concerning the Advancement of 
 Learning. 
 
 THE preceding section, ending with the second Landing Place, 
 had for its express object the principles of our duty as citizens, or 
 morality as applied to politics. According to his scheme there re 
 mained for The Friend first, to treat of the principles of morality 
 generally, and then of those of religion. But since the commence 
 ment of this edition,* the question has repeatedly arisen in my 
 mind, whether morality can be said to have any principle distin 
 guishable from religion, or religion any substance divisible from 
 morality. Or should 1 attempt to distinguish them by their ob 
 jects, so that morality were the religion which we owe to things 
 and persons of this life, and religion our morality toward God 
 and the permanent concerns of our own souls, and those of our 
 brethren ; yet it would be evident, that the latter must involve 
 the former, while any pretence to the former without the latter 
 would be as bold a mockery as, if having withholden an estate 
 from the rightful owner, we should seek to appease our conscience 
 by the plea, that we had not failed to bestow alms on him in his 
 beggary. It was never my purpose, and it does not appear the 
 want of the age, to bring together -the rules and inducements of 
 * The second. Ed. 
 
ESSAY I. 377 
 
 worldly prudence. But to substitute these for the laws of reason 
 and conscience, or even to confound them under one name, is a 
 prejudice, say rather a profanation, which I became more and 
 more reluctant to flatter by even an appearance of assent, though 
 it were only in a point of form and technical arrangement. 
 
 At a time, when my thoughts were thus employed, I met with 
 a volume of old tracts, published during the interval from the 
 captivity of Charles I. to the restoration of his son. Since my 
 earliest manhood it had been among my fondest regrets, that a 
 more direct and frequent reference had not been made by our his 
 torians to the books, pamphlets, and flying sheets of that momen 
 tous period, during which all the possible forms of truth and error 
 (the latter being themselves for the greater part caricatures of 
 truth) bubbled up on the surface of the public mind, as in the 
 ferment of a chaos. It would be difficult to conceive a notion or 
 a fancy, in politics, ethics, theology, or even in physics and physi 
 ology, not anticipated by the men of that age ; in this as in most 
 other respects sharply contrasted with the products of the French 
 revolution, which was scarcely more characterized by its sangui 
 nary and sensual abominations than (to borrow the words of an 
 eminent living poet) by 
 
 A dreary want at once of books and men.* 
 
 The parliament s army was not wholly composed of mere fanat 
 ics. There was no mean proportion of enthusiasts ; and that en 
 thusiasm must have been of no ordinary grandeur, which could 
 draw from a common soldier, in an address to his comrades, such 
 a dissuasive from acting in the cruel spirit of fear, and such senti 
 ments, as are contained in the following passage, which I would 
 rescue from oblivion,! both for the honor of our forefathers, and 
 in proof of the difference between the republicans of that period, 
 and the democrats, or rather demagogues; of the present. It is 
 as follows : 
 
 " I judge it ten times more honorable for a single person, in 
 
 * Wordsworth. 
 
 f The more so because every year consumes its quota. The late Sir Wil 
 fred Luwson s predecessor, from some pique or other, left a large and unique 
 collection of the pamphlets published from the commencement of the civil 
 war to the Restoration to his butler, and it supplied the chandlers and drug 
 gists shops of Penrith and Kendal for many years. 
 
378 THE FRIEND. 
 
 witnessing- a truth to oppose the world in its power, wisdom, and 
 authority, this standing in its full strength, and he singly and 
 nakedly, than fighting many battles by force of arms, and gain 
 ing them all. I have no life but truth ; and if truth be advanced 
 by my suffering, then my life also. If truth live, I live ; if 
 justice live, I live ; and these can not die, but by any man s 
 suffering for them are enlarged, enthroned. Death can not hurt 
 me. I sport with him, am above his reach. I live an immortal 
 life. What we have within, that only can we see without. I 
 can not see death ; and he that hath not this freedom is a slave. 
 He is in .the arms of that, the phantom of which he beholdeth 
 and seemeth to himself to flee from. Thus, you see that the 
 king hath a will to redeem his present loss. You see it by means 
 of the lust after power in your own hearts. For my part I con 
 demn his unlawful seeking after it. I condemn his falsehood and 
 indirectness therein. But if he should not endeavor the restoring 
 of the kingliness to the realm, and the dignity of its kings, he 
 were false to his trust, false to the majesty of God that he is in 
 trusted with. The desire of recovering his loss is justifiable. 
 Yea, I should condemn him as unbelieving and pusillanimous, if 
 he should not hope for it. But here is his misery and yours too at 
 present, that ye are unbelieving and pusillanimous, and are, both 
 alike, pursuing things of hope in the spirit of fear. Thus you 
 condemn the parliament for acknowledging the king s power so 
 far as to seek to him by a treaty ; while by taking such pains 
 against him you manifest your own belief that he hath a great 
 power ; which is a wonder, that a prince despoiled of all his 
 authority, naked, a prisoner, destitute of all friends and helps, 
 wholly at the disposal of others, tied and bound too with all obli 
 gations that a parliament can imagine to hold him, should yet be 
 such a terror to you, and fright you into such a large remon 
 strance, and such perilous proceedings to save yourselves from 
 him. Either there is some strange power in him, or you are full 
 of fear that are so affected with a shadoAV. 
 
 " But as you give testimony to his power, so you take a course 
 to advance it ; for there is nothing that hath any spark of God in 
 it, but the more it is suppressed, the more it rises. If you did 
 indeed believe, that the original of power were in the people, you 
 would believe likewise that the concessions extorted from the king 
 would rest with you. And, doubtless, such of them as in right- 
 
ESSAY I. 379 
 
 eousness ought to have been given would do so, but that your 
 violent courses disturb the natural order of things, in which they 
 still tend to their centre. These courses, therefore, so far from 
 being the way to secure what we have got, are the way to lose 
 them, and (for a time at least) to set up princes in a higher form 
 than ever. For all things by force compelled from their nature 
 will fly back with the greater earnestness on the removal of that 
 force ; and this, in the present case, must soon weary itself out, 
 and hath no less an enemy in its own satiety than in the disap 
 pointment of the people. 
 
 " Again, you speak of the king s reputation, and do not con 
 sider that the more you crush him, the sweeter the fragrance 
 that comes from him. While he suffers, the spirit of God arid 
 glory rests upon him. There is a glory and a freshness spark 
 ling in him by suffering, an excellency that was hidden, and 
 which you have drawn out. And naturally men are ready to 
 pity sufferers. When nothing will gain me, affliction will. I 
 confess his sufferings make me a royalist, who never cared for 
 him. He that doth and can suffer shall have my heart ; you 
 had it while you suffered. But now your severe punishment of 
 him for his abuses in government, and your own usurpations, 
 will not only win the hearts of the people to the oppressed suf 
 fering king, but provoke them to rage against you, as having 
 robbed them of the interest which they had in his royalty. For 
 the king is in the people, and the people in the king. The king s 
 being is not solitary, but as he is in union with his people, who 
 are his strength in which he lives ; and the people s being is not 
 naked, but an interest in the greatness and wisdom of the king 
 who is their honor which lives in them. And though you will 
 disjoin yourselves from kings, God will not, neither will I. God 
 is king of kings, kings and princes God, as well as people s, 
 theirs as well as ours, and theirs eminently (as the speech en 
 forces, God of Israel, that is, Israel s God above all other nations, 
 and so king of kings), by a near and special kindred and commu 
 nion. Kingliness agrees with all Christians, who are indeed 
 Christians. For they are themselves of a royal nature, made 
 kings with Christ, and can not but be friends to it, being of kin 
 to it ; and if there were not kings to honor, they would want one 
 of the appointed objects whereon to bestow that fulness of honor 
 which is in their breasts. A virtue would lie unemployed within 
 
380 THE FRIEND. 
 
 them, and in prison, pining and restless from the want of its out 
 ward correlative. It is a bastard religion, that is inconsistent 
 with the majesty and the greatness of the most splendid monarch. 
 Such spirits are strangers from the kingdom of heaven. Either 
 they know not the glory in which God lives ; or they are of nar 
 row minds that are corrupt themselves, and not able to bear 
 greatness, and so think that God will not, or can not, qualify 
 men for such high places with correspondent and proportionable 
 power and goodness. Is it not enough to have removed the ma 
 lignant bodies which eclipsed the royal sun, and mixed their bad 
 influences with his, and would you extinguish the sun itself to 
 secure yourselves ? ! this is the spirit of bondage to fear, and 
 not of love and a sound mind. To assume the office and the 
 name of champions for the common interest, and of Christ s sol 
 diers, and yet to act for self-safety is so poor and mean a thing 
 that it must needs produce most vile and absurd actions, the scorn 
 of the old pagans, but for Christians who in all things are to love 
 their neighbor as themselves, and God above both, it is of all af 
 fections the unworthiest. Let me be a fool and boast, if so I may 
 show you, while it is yet time, a little of that rest and security 
 which I and those of the same spirit enjoy, and w T hich you have 
 turned your backs upon ; self, like a banished thing, wandering 
 in strange ways. First, then, I fear no party, or interest, for I , 
 love all, I am reconciled to all, and therein I find all reconciled 
 to me. I have enmity to none but the son of perdition. It is 
 enmity begets insecurity : and while men live in the flesh, and 
 in enmity to any party, or interest, in a private, divided, and 
 self good, there will be, there can not but be, perpetual wars ; 
 except that one particular should quite ruin all other parts and 
 live alone, which the universal must not, will not, suffer. For 
 to admit a part to devour and absorb the others, were to destroy 
 the whole, which is God s presence therein ; and such a mind in 
 any part doth not only fight with another part, but against the 
 whole. Every faction of men, therefore, striving to make them 
 selves absolute, and to owe their safety to their strength, and not 
 to their sympathy, do directly war against God who is love, peace, 
 and a general good,- gives being to all and cherishes all, and, 
 therefore, can have neither peace nor security. But we being 
 enlarged into the largeness of God, and comprehending all things 
 in our bosoms by the divine spirit, are at rest with all, and de- 
 
ESSAY I. 381 
 
 light in all ; for we know nothing but what is, in its essence, in 
 our own hearts. Kings, nobles, are much beloved of us, because 
 they are in us. of us, one with us, we as Christians being kings 
 and lords by the anointing of God." 
 
 But such sentiments, it will be said, are the flights of specula 
 tive minds. Be it so ; yet to soar is nobler than to creep. We 
 attach, likewise, some value to a thing for its mere infrequency. 
 And speculative minds, alas ! have been rare, though not equally 
 rare, in all ages and countries of civilized men. With us the 
 very word seems to have abdicated its legitimate sense. Instead 
 of designating a mind so constituted and disciplined as to find in 
 its own wants and instincts an interest in truths for their truth s 
 sake, it is now used to signify a practical sthemer, one who ven 
 tures beyond the bounds of experience in the formation and adop 
 tion of new ways and means for the attainment of wealth or 
 power. To possess the end in the means, as it is essential to 
 morality in the moral world, and the contra-distinction of good 
 ness from mere prudence, so is it, in the intellectual world, the 
 moral constituent of genius, and that by which true genius is 
 contra-distinguished from mere talent.* 
 
 The man of talent, who is, if not exlusively, yet chiefly and 
 characteristically a man of talent, seeks and values the means 
 wholly in relation to some object not therein contained. His 
 means may be peculiar ; but his ends are conventional, and com 
 mon to the mass of mankind. Alas ! in both cases alike, in .that 
 of genius, as well as in that of talent, it too often happens, that 
 this diversity in the quality of their several intellects, extends to 
 the feelings and impulses properly and directly moral, to their 
 dispositions, habits, and maxims of conduct. It characterizes not 
 the intellect alone, but the whole man. The one substitutes pru 
 dence for virtue, legality in act and demeanor for warmth and 
 purity of heart, and too frequently becomes jealous, envious, a 
 coveter of other men s good gifts, and a detractor from their 
 merits, openly or secretly, as his fears or his passions chance to 
 preponderate.! 
 
 * See the note to this essay, p. 384. Ed. 
 
 f According to the principles of Spurzkeim s cranioscopy (a scheme, the 
 indicative or gnomonic parts of which have a stronger support in facts than 
 the theory in reason or common sense) we should find in the skull of such an 
 individual the organs of circumspection and appropriation disproportion- 
 
382 THE FRIEND. 
 
 The other, on the contrary, might remind us of the zealots for 
 legitimate succession after the decease of our sixth Edward, who 
 not content with having placed the rightful sovereign on the 
 throne, would wreak their vengeance on " the meek usurper," 
 who had been seated on it hy a will against which she had her 
 self been the first to remonstrate. For with that urihealthful 
 preponderance of impulse over motive, which, though no part of 
 genius, is too often its accompaniment, he lives in continued hos 
 tility to prudence, or banishes it altogether ; and thus deprives 
 virtue of her guide and guardian, her prime functionary, yea, the 
 very organ of her outward life. Hence a benevolence that squan 
 ders its shafts and still misses its aim, or resembles the charmed 
 bullet that, levelled at "the wolf, brings down the shepherd. Hence 
 desultoriness, extremes, exhaustion 
 
 And thereof cometh in the end despondency and madness !* 
 
 Let it not be forgotten, however, that these evils are the disease 
 of the man, while the records of biography furnish ample proof, 
 that genius, in the higher degree, acts as a preservative against 
 them ; more remarkably, and in more frequent instances, when 
 the imagination and preconstructive power have taken a scientific 
 or philosophic direction ; as in Plato, indeed in almost all the first- 
 rate philosophers, _in Kepler, Milton, Boyle, Newton, Leibnitz, and 
 Berkeley. At all events, a certain number of speculative minds 
 is necessary to a cultivated state of society, as a condition of its 
 progressiveness ; and nature herself has provided against any too 
 great increase in this class of her productions. As the gifted 
 masters of the divining rod to the ordinary miners, and as the 
 miners of a country to the husbandmen, mechanics, and artisans, 
 such is the proportion of the trismegisti to the sum total of specu 
 lative minds, even of those, I mean, that are truly such ; and of 
 
 ately large and prominent compared with those of ideality and benevolence. 
 It is certain that the organ of appropriation, or (more correctly) the part 
 of the skull asserted to be significant of that tendency and correspondent 
 to the organ, is strikingly large in a cast of the head of the famous Dr. 
 Dodd ; and it was found of equal dimensions in a literary man, whose skull 
 puzzled the cranioscopist more than it did me. Nature, it should seem, 
 makes no distinction between manuscripts and money -drafts, though the law 
 does. 
 
 * Wordsworth. 
 
ESSAY I. 383 
 
 these again, to the remaining mass of useful laborers and opera 
 tives in science, literature, and the learned professions. 
 
 .This train of thought brings to my recollection a conversation 
 Avith a friend of my youth, an old man of humble estate ; but in 
 whose society I had great pleasure. The reader will, I hope, 
 pardon me if I embrace the opportunity of recalling old affections, 
 afforded me by its fitness to illustrate the present subject. A se 
 date man he was, and had been a miner from his boyhood. Well 
 did he represent the olden time, when every trade Avas a mystery 
 and had its own guardian saint ; Avhen the sense of self-impor 
 tance was gratified at home, and ambition had a hundred several 
 lotteries, in one or other of which every freeman had a ticket, and 
 the only blanks were drawn by sloth, intemperance, or inevitable 
 calamity ; when the detail of each art and trade (like the oracles 
 of the prophets, interpretable in a double sense) was ennobled in 
 the eyes of its professors by being spiritually improved into sym 
 bols and mementos of all doctrines and all duties, and every 
 craftsman had, as it were, two versions of his Bible, one in the 
 common language of the country, another in the acts, objects, and 
 products of his own particular craft. There are not many things 
 in our elder popular literature, more interesting to -me than those 
 contests, or eclogues, between workmen for the superior worth 
 and dignity of their several callings, which used to be sold at our 
 village-fairs, in stitched sheets, neither untitled nor uiidecorated, 
 though without the superfluous cost of a separate title-page. 
 
 With this good old miner I was once walking through a corn 
 field at harvest-time, when that part of the conversation, to which 
 I have alluded, took place. " At times," said I, " when you 
 were delving in the bowels of the arid mountain or foodless rock, 
 it must have occurred to your mind as a pleasant thought, that 
 in providing the scythe and the sword you were virtually reaping 
 the harvest and protecting the harvest-man." " Ah !" he replied 
 with a sigh, that gave a fuller meaning to his smile, " out of all 
 earthly things there come both good and evil ; the good through 
 God, and the evil from the evil heart. From the look and weight 
 of the ore I learned to make a near guess, how much iron it would 
 yield ; but neither its heft, nor its hues, nor its breakage would 
 prophesy to me, whether it was to become a thievish pick-lock, a 
 murderer s dirk, a slave s collar, or the woodman s axe, the feed 
 ing plough-share, the defender s sword, or the mechanic s tool. 
 
384 THE FRIEND. 
 
 So, perhaps, my young friend, I have cause to be thankful, that 
 the opening upon a fresh vein gives me a delight so full as to 
 allow no room for other fancies, and leaves behind it a hope a^id 
 a love that support me in my labor, even for the labor s sake." 
 
 As, according to the eldest philosophy, life being in its own 
 nature aeriform, is under the necessity of renewing itself by in 
 haling the connatural, arid therefore assimilable, air, so is it with 
 the intelligential soul with respect to truth ; for it is itself of the 
 nature of truth, revon^vi] ex &ew()iug t xal ^eu^ua delov^ cpvatv 
 s%eif <pdo&8&uoi>ct tind.Qxei* But the occasion and brief history 
 of the decline of true speculative philosophy, with the origin of 
 the separation of ethics from religion, I. must defer to the follow 
 ing number. 
 
 NOTE. 
 
 As I see many good, and can anticipate no ill consequences in 
 the attempt to give distinct and appropriate meanings to words 
 hitherto synonymous, or at least of indefinite and fluctuating ap 
 plication, if only the proposed sense be not passed upon the reader 
 as the existing and authorized one, I shall make no other apology 
 for the use of the word, Talent, in this preceding essay arid / else 
 where in my works than by annexing the following explanation. 
 
 I have been in the habit of considering the qualities of intellect, 
 the comparative eminence in which characterizes individuals and 
 even countries, under four kinds Genius, Talent, Sense, and 
 Cleverness. The first I use in the sense of most general accept-,, 
 ance, as the faculty which adds to the existing stock of power and 
 knowledge by new views, new combinations ; by discoveries not 
 accidental but anticipated, or resulting from anticipation. In 
 short, I define Genius, as originality in intellectual Construction ; 
 the moral accompaniment, and actuating principle of which con 
 sists, perhaps, in the carrying on of the freshness and feelings of 
 childhood into the powers of manhood. 
 
 By Talent, on the other hand, I mean the comparative facility 
 of acquiring, arranging, and applying the stock furnished by others, 
 and already existing in books or other conservatories of intellect. 
 
 By Sense I understand that just balance of the faculties which 
 is to the judgment what health is to the body. The mind seems 
 to act at once and altogether by a synthetic rather than an ana- 
 
 * Plotinus. Ennead. III. 1. 8. s. 3, slightly altered. Ed. 
 
ESSAY I. 385 
 
 lytic process : even as the outward senses, from which the meta 
 phor is taken, perceive immediately, each as it were by a peculiar 
 tact or intuition, without any consciousness of the mechanism by 
 which the perception is realized. This is often exemplified in 
 well-bred, unaffected, and innocent women. I know a lady, on 
 whose judgment, from constant experience of its rectitude, I could 
 rely almost as on an oracle. But when she has sometimes pro 
 ceeded to a detail of the grounds and reasons for her opinion, then, 
 led by similar experience, I have been tempted to interrupt her 
 with" I will take your advice," or, "I shall act on your opin 
 ion ; for I am sure you are in the right. But as to the fors and 
 becauses, leave them to me to find out." The general accompani 
 ment of sense is a disposition to avoid extremes, whether in theory 
 or in practice, with a desire to remain in sympathy with the 
 general mind of the age or country, and a feeling of the necessity 
 and utility of compromise. If genius be the initiative, and talent 
 the administrative, sense is the conservative, branch in the intel 
 lectual republic. 
 
 By Cleverness (which I dare not with Dr. Johnson call a low 
 word, while there is a sense to be expressed which it alone ex 
 presses) I mean a comparative readiness in the invention and use 
 of means, for the realizing of objects and ideas often of such 
 ideas, which the man of genius only could have originated, and 
 which the clever man perhaps neither fully comprehends nor 
 adequately appreciates, even at the moment that he is prompting 
 or executing the machinery of their accomplishment. In short, 
 cleverness, is a sort of genius for instrumentality. It is the brain 
 in the hand. In literature, cleverness is more frequently accom 
 panied by wit, genius and sense by humor. 
 
 If I take the three great countries of Europe, in respect of in 
 tellectual character, namely, Germany, England, and France, I 
 should characterize them in the following way ; premising only 
 that in the first line of the first two tables I mean to imply that 
 genius, rare in all countries, is equal in both of these, the instances 
 equally numerous ; not, therefore, contra-distinguishing either 
 from the other, but both from the third country. We can 
 scarcely avoid considering a Cervantes and Calderon as in some 
 sort characteristic of the nation which produced them. In the 
 last war we felt it in the hope, which the recollection of these 
 names inspired. But yet it can not, equally with the qualities 
 
 VOL. II. R 
 
386 THE FEIEND. 
 
 placed as second and third in each table, be called a national 
 characteristic ; though, in the appropriation of these likewise, we 
 refer exclusively to the intellectual portion of each country. 
 
 GERMANY. 
 Genius, 
 Talent, 
 Fancy .* 
 
 ENGLAND. 
 Genius, 
 Sense, 
 Humor. 
 
 FRANCE. 
 
 Cleverness, 
 
 Talent, 
 
 Wit. 
 
 So again with regard to the forms and effects, in which the 
 qualities manifest themselves intellectually. 
 
 GERMANY. 
 
 Idea, or law anticipated,! 
 Totality, $ 
 Distinctness. 
 
 ENGLAND. 
 
 Law discovered, 
 
 Selection, 
 
 Clearness. 
 
 * The latter chiefly as exhibited in wild combination and in pomp of or 
 nament. Imagination is implied in genius. 
 
 j- This, as co-ordinate with genius in the first table, applies likewise to 
 the few only ; and conjoined with the two following qualities, as more gen 
 eral characteristics of German intellect, includes or supposes, as its conse 
 quences and accompaniments, speculation, system, method ; which in a some 
 what lower class of minds appear as nationality (or a predilection for nou- 
 mena, mundus intelligibiUs, as contra-distinguished from phenomena, or 
 mundus sensibilis), scheme, arrangement, orderliness. 
 
 :f In totality I imply encyclopaedic learning, exhaustion of the subject 
 treated of, and the passion for completion and the love of the complete. 
 
 It might have been expressed ; the contemplation of ideas objectively, 
 as existing powers, while the German of equal genius is predisposed to 
 contemplate law subjectively, with anticipation of a correspondent in nature. 
 
ESSAY I. 387 
 
 FRANCE. 
 
 Theory invented, 
 
 Particularity,* 
 
 Palpability. 
 
 Lastly, we might exhibit the same qualities in their moral, re 
 ligious, and political manifestations : in the cosmopolitism of Ger 
 many, the contemptuous nationality of the Englishman, and the 
 ostentatious and boastful nationality of the Frenchman. The 
 craving of sympathy marks the German ; inward pride the Eng 
 lishman ; vanity the Frenchman. So again, enthusiasm, vision- 
 ariness seems the tendency of the German ; zeal, zealotry of the 
 English ; fanaticism of the French. But the thoughtful reader 
 will find these and many other characteristic points contained in, 
 and deducible from, the relations which the mind of the three 
 countries bears to time. 
 
 GERMANY. 
 
 Past and Future. 
 
 ENGLAND. 
 
 Past and Present. 
 
 FRANCE. 
 
 The Present. 
 
 A whimsical friend of mine, of more genius than discretion, 
 characterizes the Scotchman of literature (confining his remark, 
 however, to the period since the union) as a dull Frenchman and 
 a superficial German. But when I recollect the splendid excep- 
 
 * Tendency to individualize, embody, insulate, as instanced in the advo 
 cacy of the vitreous and the resinous fluids instead of the positive and nega 
 tive forces of the power of electricity. Thus, too, it was not sufficient that 
 oxygen was the principal, and with one exception, the only then known 
 acidifying substance ; the power and principle of acidification must be em 
 bodied, and as it were impersonated and hypostasized in this gas. Hence 
 the idolism of the French, here expressed in one of its results, namely, pal 
 pability. Ideas and a Frenchman are incompatible terms ; but I confine 
 the remark to the period from the latter half of the reign of Louis XIV. 
 Ideas, I say, are here out of the question ; but even the conceptions of a 
 Frenchman; whatever he admits to be conceivable must be likewise,. ac 
 cording to him, imageable, and the imageable must be fancied tangible the 
 non-apparcncy of either or both being accounted for by the disproportion 
 of our senses, not by the nature of the objects. 
 
388 THE FRIEND. 
 
 tions of Hume, Robertson, Smollett, Reid, Thomson (if this last 
 instance be not objected to as favoring of geographical pedantry, 
 that truly amiable man and genuine poet having been born but 
 a few furlongs from the English border), Dugald Stewart, Burns, 
 Walter Scott, Hogg, and Campbell not to mention the very nu 
 merous physicians and prominent dissenting ministers, born or 
 bred beyond the Tweed ; I hesitate in recording so wild an opin 
 ion, which derives its plausibility, chiefly from the circumstance 
 so honorable to our northern sister, that Scotchmen generally have 
 more, and a more learned, education than the same ranks in other 
 countries, below the first class ; but in part likewise, from the 
 common mistake of confounding the general character of an 
 emigrant, whose objects are in one place and his best affections 
 in another, with the particular character of a Scotchman : to 
 which we may add, perhaps, the clannish spirit of provincial 
 literature, fostered undoubtedly by the peculiar relations of Scot 
 land, and of which therefore its metropolis may be a striking, but 
 is far from being a solitary instance. 
 
 ESSAY II. 
 
 H 0(5of KUTO). 
 
 The road downward. HERACLIT. Fragment. 
 
 AMOUR de moi-meme, mais bien calcule was the motto and 
 maxim of a French philosopher. Our fancy inspirited by the 
 more imaginative powers of hope and fear enables us to present 
 to ourselves the future as the present, and thence to accept a 
 scheme of self-love for a system of morality. And doubtless, an 
 enlightened self-interest would recommend the same course of 
 outward conduct, as the sense of duty would do ; even though the 
 motives in the former case had respect to this life exclusively. 
 But to show the desirableness of an object, or the contrary, is one 
 thing ; to excite the desire, to constitute the aversion, is another : 
 the one being to the other as a common guide-post to the " chariot 
 instinct with spirit," which at once directs and conveys ; or em 
 ploying a- more familiar image, we may compare the rule of self- 
 
ESSAY II. 389 
 
 interest to a watch with an excellent hour-plate, hand, and regu 
 lator, but without its spring and wheel-work. Nay, where its 
 sufficiency and exclusive validity are adopted as the maxim 
 (regula maxima) of morality, it would be a fuller and fairer com 
 parison to say, that the maxim of self-interest stands in a familiar 
 relation to the law of conscience or universal selfless reason, as 
 the dial to the sun, which indicates its path by intercepting its 
 radiance.* 
 
 But let it be granted, that in certain individuals from a happy 
 evenness of nature, formed into aTiabit by the strength of educa 
 tion, the influence of example, and by favorable circumstances in 
 general, the actions diverging from self-love as their centre should 
 be precisely the same as those produced from the Christian prin 
 ciple, which requires of us that we should place our self and our 
 neighbor at an equal distance, and love both alike as modes in 
 which we realize and exhibit the love of God above all ; wherein 
 would the difference be then ? I answer boldly, even in that, 
 for which all actions have their whole worth and their main 
 value, in the agents themselves. So much indeed is this of the 
 very substance of genuine morality, that wherever the latter has 
 given way in the general opinion to a scheme of ethics founded 
 on utility, its place is soon challenged by the spirit of honor. 
 Paley, who degrades the spirit of honor into a mere club-law 
 among the higher classes originating in selfish convenience, and 
 enforced by the penalty of excommunication from the society 
 which habit had rendered indispensable to the happiness of the 
 individuals, has misconstrued it not less than Shaftesbury, who 
 extols it as the noblest influence of noble natures. The spirit of 
 honor is more indeed than a mere conventional substitute for hon 
 esty. For to take the word in a sense, which no man of honor 
 would acknowledge, may be allowed to the writer of satires, but 
 not to the moral . philosopher. But, on the other hand, instead 
 of being a finer form of moral life, it may be more truly de- 
 
 * Here are two syllogisms, having equivalent practical conclusions, yet 
 not only different, but even contradistinguished. I. It is my duty to love 
 all men : but I am myself a man : ergo, it is my duty to love myself equally 
 with others. II. It is my nature to love myself : but I can not realize this 
 impulse of nature, without acting to others as if I loved them equally with 
 myself: ergo, it is my duty to love myself by acting towards others as if I 
 loved them equally with myself. Dec. 1820. 
 
390 THE FRIEND. 
 
 scribed as the shadow or ghost of virtue deceased. Honor im 
 plies a reverence for the invisible arid supersensual in our nature, 
 and so far it is virtue ; but it is a virtue that neither understands 
 itself nor its true source, and is therefore often unsubstantial, not 
 seldom fantastic, and always more or less capricious. Abstract 
 the notion from the lives of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, or Henry 
 IV. of France ; and then compare it with the 1 Cor. xiii. and the 
 epistle to Philemon, or rather with the realization of this fair 
 ideal in the character of St. Paul* himself. I know not a better 
 test. Nor can I think of any investigation, that would be more 
 instructive where it would be safe, but none likewise of greater 
 delicacy from the probability of misinterpretation, than a history 
 of the rise of honor in the European monarchies as connected 
 with the corruptions of Christianity, and an inquiry into the 
 specific causes of the inefficacy which has attended the combined 
 efforts of divines and moralists against the practice and obligation 
 of duelling. 
 
 Of a widely different character from this moral afoecrjg, yet as 
 a derivative from the same root, we may contemplate the here 
 sies of the Gnostics in the early ages of the church, and of the 
 
 * This has struck the better class even of infidels. Collins, one of the 
 most learned of our English deists, is said to have declared, that contradic 
 tory as miracles appeared to his reason, lie would believe in them notwith 
 standing, if it could be proved to him that St. Paul had asserted any one as 
 having been worked by himself in the modern sense of the word, miracle ; 
 adding, " St. Paul was so perfect a gentleman and a man of honor !" When 
 I call duelling, and similar aberrations of honor, a moi al heresy, I refer to 
 the force of the Greek aipeai^, as signifying a principle or opinion taken up 
 by the will for the will s sake, as a proof and pledge to itself of its own 
 power of self-determination, independent of all other .motives. In tho 
 gloomy gratification derived or anticipated from the exercise of this awful 
 power, the condition of all moral good while it is latent and hidden, as it 
 were in the centre, but the essential cause of fiendish guilt, when it makes 
 itself existential and peripheric, si quando in circumferentiam erumpat ; (in 
 both cases I have purposely adopted the language of the old mystic theoso- 
 phers) I find the only explanation of a moral phenomenon not very uncom 
 mon in the last moments of condemned felons ; namely, the obstinate denial, 
 not of the main guilt, which might be accounted for by ordinary motives, 
 but of some particular act, which had been proved beyond all possibility of 
 doubt, and attested bj the criminal s own accomplices and fellow-sufferers 
 in their last confessions ; and this too an act, the n/>n-perpetration of which, 
 if believed, could neither mitigate the sentence of the law, nor even the 
 opinions of men after the sentence had been carried into execution. 
 
ESSAY II. 891 
 
 
 
 family of love, with other forms of Antinomianism, since the 
 Reformation to the present day. But lest in uttering truth I 
 should convey falsehood and fall myself into the error which it 
 is my object to expose, it will be requisite to distinguish an ap 
 prehension of the whole of a truth, even where that apprehen 
 sion is dim and indistinct, from a partial perception of the same 
 rashly assumed as a perception of the whole. The first is ren 
 dered inevitable in many things for many, in some points for all. 
 men from the progressiveness no less than from the imperfection of 
 humanity, which itself dictates and enforces the precept, Believe 
 that thou mayest understand.* The most knowing must at 
 times be content with the facit of a sum too complex or subtle 
 for us to follow nature through the antecedent process. Hence 
 in subjects not under the cognizance of the senses wise men have 
 always attached a high value to general and long-continued as 
 sent, as a presumption of truth. After all the subtle reasonings 
 and fair analogies which logic and induction could supply to a 
 mighty intellect, it is yet on this ground that the Socrates of 
 Plato mainly rests his faith in the immortality of the soul, and 
 the moral government of the universe. It had been holden by 
 all nations in all ages, but with deepest conviction by the best 
 and wisest men, as a belief connatural with goodness and akin 
 to prophecy. The same argument is adopted by Cicero, as the 
 principal ground of his adherence to divination. Gentem quidem 
 nulfam video, neque tain kumanam atque doctam, neque tarn 
 immanem tamque barbaram, qucz non significari futura, et a 
 quibusdam intelligi pradiciqzie j^osse censeat.^ I confess, I can 
 
 * The Greek verb, avvievai, which we render by the word, understand, 
 is literally the same as our own idiomatic phrase, to go along with. 
 
 f De Divinat. Lib. I. s. i. I find indeed no people or nation, however 
 civilized and cultivated, or however wild and barbarous, who have not 
 deemed that there are antecedent signs of future events, and some men 
 capable of understanding and predicting them. 
 
 I am tempted to add a passage from my own translation of Schiller s 
 Wallenstein, the more so that the work has been long ago used up, as 
 " winding sheets for pilchards," or extant only by (as I would fain flatter 
 myself) the kind partiality of the trunk-makers : though with exception of 
 works for which public admiration supersedes or includes individual com 
 mendations, I scarce remember a book that has been more honored by the 
 express attestations in its favor of eminent and even of popular literati, 
 among whom I take this opportunity of expressing my acknowledgments 
 to the author of Wavcrley, Guy Manuering, <tc. How (asked Ulysses, ad- 
 
392 THE FRIEND. 
 
 
 
 never read the De Divinatione of this great orator, statesman, 
 and patriot, without feeling myself inclined to consider this opin 
 ion as an instance of the second class, namely, of fractional 
 truths integrated by fancy, passion, accident, and that prepon 
 derance of the positive over the negative in the memory, which 
 makes it no less tenacious of coincidences than forgetful of fail 
 ures. Still I should not fear to be its advocate under the fol 
 lowing limitation ; non nisi de rebus divinis datur divinatio. 
 
 I am indeed firmly persuaded, that no doctrine was ever 
 widely diffused among various nations through successive ages, 
 
 dressing his guardian goddess) shall I be able to recognize Proteus in the 
 swallow that skims round our houses, whom I have been accustomed to 
 behold as a swan of Phccbus, measuring his movements to a celestial music ? 
 In both alike, she replied, thou canst recognize the god. 
 
 So supported, I dare avow that I have thought my translation worthy 
 of a more favorable reception from the public and its literary guides and 
 purveyors. But when I recollect that a much better and very far more 
 valuable work, Mr. Gary s incomparable translation of Dante, had very 
 nearly met with the same fate, I lose all right, and I trust, all inclination, 
 to complain ; an inclination, which the mere sense of its folly and useless- 
 ness will not always suffice to preclude. (1817. Ed.} 
 
 COUNTESS. What dost thou not believe, that oft in dreams 
 A voice of warning speaks prophetic to us ? 
 
 WALLEXSTEIN. There is no doubt that there exist such voices ; 
 Yet I would not call them 
 Voices of warning, that announce to us 
 Only the inevitable. As the sun, 
 Ere it is risen, sometimes paints its image 
 In the atmosphere, so often do the spirits 
 Of great events stride on before the events, 
 And in to-day already walks to-morrow. 
 That which we read of the Fourth Henry s death 
 Did ever vex and haunt me, like a tale 
 Of my own future destiny. The king 
 Felt in his breast the phantom of the knife, 
 Long ere Ravaillac arm d himself therewith. 
 His quiet mind forsook him : the phantasma 
 Started him in his Louvre, chas d him forth 
 Into the open air. Like funeral knells 
 Sounded that coronation festival ; 
 And still with boding sense he heard the tread 
 Of those feet, that even then were seeking him 
 Throughout the streets of Paris. Death of Wallenstein, act v. se. i. 
 
 Poetical Works, VII. p. 667, 
 
ESSAY II. 893 
 
 and under different religions (such, for instance, as the tenets of 
 original sin and redemption, those fundamental articles of every 
 known religion professing to have been revealed), which is not 
 founded either in the nature of things, or in the necessities of 
 human nature. Nay, the more strange and irreconcilable such 
 a doctrine may appear to the understanding, the judgments of 
 which are grounded on general rules abstracted from the world 
 of the senses, the stronger is the presumption in its favor. For 
 whatever satirists may say, or sciolists imagine, the human mind 
 has no predilection for absurdity. I would even extend the prin 
 ciple (proportionately I mean) to sundry tenets, that from their 
 stangeness or dangerous tendency appear only to be generally rep 
 robated, as eclipses, in the belief of barbarous tribes, are to be 
 frightened away by noises and execrations ; but which rather 
 resemble the luminary itself in this one respect, that after a 
 longer or shorter interval of occultation, they are still found to 
 re-emerge. It is these, the re-appearance of which (nomine tan- 
 turn mutato) from age to age gives to ecclesiastical history a 
 deeper interest than that of romance and scarcely less wild for 
 every philosophic mind. I am far from asserting that such a 
 doctrine (the Antinornian, for instance, or that of a latent mys 
 tical sense in the words of Scripture and the works of nature, 
 according to Origen and Emanuel Swedenborg) shall be always 
 the best possible, or not a distorted and dangerous, as well as 
 partial, representation of the truth on which it is founded. For 
 the same body casts strangely different shadows in different posi 
 tions and different degrees of light. But I dare, and do, affirm 
 that it always does shadow out some important truth, and from 
 it derives its main influence over the faith of its adherents, ob 
 scure as their perception of this truth may be, and though they 
 may themselves attribute their belief to the supernatural gifts of 
 the founder, or the miracles by which his preaching had been 
 accredited. See Wesley s Journal for proofs. But we have the 
 highest possible authority, that of Scripture itself, to justify us 
 in putting the question, whether miracles can, of themselves, 
 work a true conviction in the mind. There are spiritual truths 
 which must derive their evidence from within, which whoever 
 rejects, neither will he believe though a man were to rise from 
 the dead to confirm them. And under the Mosaic law a miracle 
 in attestation of a false doctrine subjected the miracle-worker to 
 
 R* 
 
394 THE FRIEND. 
 
 death ; and whether the miracle was really or only seemingly 
 supernatural, makes no difference in the present argument, its 
 power of convincing, whatever that power may be, whether 
 great or small, depending on the fulness of the belief in its 
 miraculous nature. Est quibus esse videtur. Or rather, that I 
 may express the same position in a form less likely to offend, is 
 not a true efficient conviction of a moral truth, is not the creat 
 ing of a neiv heart, which collects the energies of a man s whole 
 being in the focus of the conscience, the one essential miracle, 
 the same and of the same evidence to the ignorant and the 
 learned, which no superior skill can counterfeit, human or de 
 moniacal ? Is it not emphatically that leading of the Father, 
 without which no man can come to Christ ? Is it not that im 
 plication of doctrine in the miracle and of miracle in the doc 
 trine, which is the bridge of communication between the senses 
 and the soul ; that predisposing warmth Avhich renders the 
 understanding susceptible of the specific impression from the 
 historic, and from all other outward, seals of testimony ? Is not 
 this the one infallible criterion of miracles, by which a man can 
 know whether they be of God ? The abhorrence in which the 
 most savage or barbarous tribes hold witchcraft, in which how 
 ever their belief is so intense* as even to control the springs of 
 life, is not this abhorrence of witchcraft under so full a convic 
 tion of its reality a proof, how little of divine, how little fitting 
 to our nature, a miracle is, when insulated from spiritual truths, 
 and disconnected from religion as its end ? What then can we 
 think of a theological theory, which adopting a scheme of pru 
 dential legality, common to it with " the sty of Epicurus," as far 
 at least as the springs of moral action are concerned, makes its 
 whole religion consist in the belief Vf miracles ! As well might 
 the poor African prepare for himself a fetisch by plucking out 
 the eyes from the eagle or the lynx, and enshrining the same, 
 worship in them the power of vision. As the tenet of professed 
 Christians (I speak of the principle not of the men, whose hearts 
 will always more or less correct the errors of their understand 
 ings) it is even more absurd, and the pretext for such a religion 
 more inconsistent than the religion itself. For they profess to 
 
 * I refer the reader to Hearu s Travels among 1 the Copper Indians, and 
 to Bryan Edward s account of the Oby in the West Indies, grounded on 
 judicial documents and personal observation. 
 
ESSAY II. 390 
 
 derive from it their whole faith in that futurity, which if they 
 had not previously believed on the evidence of their own con 
 sciences, of Moses and the Prophets, they are assured by the 
 great Founder and Object of Christianity, that neither will they 
 believe it, in any spiritual and profitable sense, though a man 
 should rise from the dead. 
 
 For myself, I can not resist the conviction, built on particular 
 and general history, that the extravagances of Antinomianism 
 and Solifidianism are little more than the counteractions to this 
 Christian paganism ; the play, as it were, of antagonist muscles. 
 The feelings will set up their standard against the understanding, 
 whenever the understanding has renounced its allegiance to the 
 reason : and what is faith, but the personal realization of the 
 reason by its union with the will ? If we would drive out the 
 demons of fanaticism from the people, we must begin by exercis 
 ing the spirit of Epicureanism in the higher ranks, and restore to 
 their teachers the true Christian enthusiasm,* the vivifying in 
 fluences of the altar, the censer, and the sacrifice. They must 
 neither be ashamed of, nor disposed to explain away, the articles 
 of prevenient and auxiliary grace, nor the necessity of being born 
 again to the life from which our nature had become apostate.f 
 They must administer indeed the necessary medicines to the sick, 
 the motives of fear as well as of hope ; but they must not with 
 hold from them the idea of health, or conceal from them that the 
 medicines for the sick are not the diet of the healthy. ^Nay, they 
 must make it apart of the curative process to induce the patient, 
 on the first symptoms of recovery, to look forward with prayer 
 and aspiration to that state, in which perfect love shutteth out 
 fear. Above all, they must not seek to make the mysteries of 
 faith wHat the w r orld calls rational by theories of original sin and 
 redemption borrowed analogically from the imperfection of human 
 law-courts arid the coarse contrivances of state expedience. 
 
 Among the numerous examples with which I might enforce 
 
 * The original meaning of the Greek, favOovotafffidc is, the influence of 
 the divinity such as was supposed to take possession of the priest during 
 the performance of the services at the altar. 
 
 ov 1/^7/f o^erov, vOev ?/ rivi ruijsi 
 rL 67]-vcrac, em ru!-iv dfy // 
 
 Zoroastr. Oracnla Initio. Edit. Opanpfd. 1599. Ed. 
 
396 THE FKIEND. 
 
 this warning 1 , I refer, not without reluctance, to the most eloquent 
 and one of the most learned of our divines ; a rigorist, indeed, 
 concerning- the authority of the Church, "but a Latitudinarian in 
 the articles of its faith ; who stretched the latter almost to the ad 
 vanced posts of Socinianism, and strained the former to a hazar 
 dous conformity with the assumptions of the Roman hierarchy. 
 With what emotions must not a pious mind peruse such passages 
 as the following 1 : " It (death) reigned upon them whose sins 
 therefore would not he so imputed as Adam s was ; hecause there 
 was no lav/ with an express threatening given to them as was to 
 Adam ; but although it was not wholly imputed upon their own 
 account, yet it was imputed upon their s arid Adam s. For God 
 was so exasperated with mankind, that being angry he would 
 still continue that punishment to lesser sins and sinners, which he 
 only had first threatened to Adam ; and so Adam brought it upon 
 them. * * * * The case is this. Jonathan and Michal were 
 Saul s children. It came to pass, that seven of Saul s issue were 
 to be hanged ; all equally innocent, equally culpable.* David 
 took the five sons of Michal, for she had left him unhandsomely. 
 Jonathan was his friend, and therefore he spared his son Mephi- 
 bosheth. Here it was indifferent as to the guilt of the persons" 
 (observe, no guilt was attached to either of them) " whether David 
 should take the sons of Michal or of Jonathan ; but it is likely 
 that, as upon the kindness which David had to Jonathan, he 
 spared his son, so upon the just provocation of Michal, he made 
 that evil to fall upon them, of which they were otherwise capa 
 ble ; which, it may be, they should not have suffered, if their 
 mother had been kind. Adam was to God, as Michal to David. "f 
 And this, with many passages equally gross, occurs in a refuta 
 tion of the doctrine of original sin, on the ground of its incongrui 
 ty with reason, and its incompatibility with God s justice ! 
 " Exasperated" with those Avhom the Bishop has elsewhere, in 
 the same treatise, declared - to have been " innocent and most 
 unfortunate" the two things that most conciliate love and pity ! 
 Or, if they did not remain innocent, yet, those whose abandon 
 ment to a mere nature, while they were subjected to a law above 
 
 * These two words are added without the least ground in Scripture, ac 
 cording to which (2 Samuel, xxi.) no charge was laid to them but that they 
 were the children of Saul, and sacrificed to a point of state expedience. 
 
 | Jeremy Taylor s Doctrine and Practice of Repentance, c. vi. s. 1. Ed. 
 
ESSAY III, 397 
 
 nature, he affirms to be the irresistible cause that they, one and 
 all, did sin ; and this at once illustrated and justified by one of 
 the worst actions of an imperfect mortal ! So far could the re 
 solve to coerce all doctrines within the limits of the individual s 
 power of comprehension, arid the prejudices of an Arminian 
 against the Calvinist preachers, carry a highly-gifted and exem 
 plary divine. Let us be on our guard, lest similar effects should 
 result from the zeal, however well-grounded in some respects, 
 against the Church Calvinists of our days. My own belief is, 
 perhaps, equi-distant from that of both parties, the Grotian and 
 the Genevan. But, confining my remark exclusively to the doc 
 trines and the practical deductions from them, I could never read 
 Bishop Taylor s Tract on the doctrine and practice of Repentance, 
 without being tempted to characterize high Calvinism as (com 
 paratively) a lamb in wolfs skin, and strict Arminianism as ap 
 proaching to the reverse. 
 
 Actuated by these motives, I have devoted the following essay 
 to a brief history of the rise and occasion of the Latitudinarian 
 system in its birth-place in Greece, and to a faithful exhibition 
 both of its parentage and its offspring. The reader will find it 
 strictly correspondent to the motto of both essays, ^ 080$ xtirw 
 the way downwards. 
 
 ESSAY III. 
 
 ON THE ORIGIN ^AND PROGRESS OF THE SECT OF 
 SOPHISTS IN GREECE. 
 
 H ocJof /curcr 
 
 The road downwards. HERACLIT. Fragment. 
 
 As Pythagoras, declining the title of the wise man, is said to 
 have first named himself philosopher, or lover of wisdom, so 
 Protagoras, followed by Gorgias, Prodicus, and others, found even 
 the former word too narrow for his own opinion of himself, and 
 first assumed the title of sophist ; this word originally signifying 
 one who possesses the power of making others wise, a wholesale 
 
898 THE FRIEND. 
 
 and retail dealer in wisdom ; a wisdom-monger, in the same 
 sense as we say, an iron-monger. In this, and not in their abuse 
 of the arts of reasoning, have Plato and Aristotle placed the es 
 sential of the sophistic character. Their sophisms were indeed 
 its natural products and accompaniments, but must yet be dis 
 tinguished from it, as the fruits from the tree. "Eftno^s * S 
 xtirtrjloz JU fiadfaaTtx neoi&yiav xuru TU, mUe/s, xl rroMor * ?*? 
 xi Komi]\evovtGg a vender, a market-man, in moral and intel 
 lectual knowledges (connoissances) one who hires himself out 
 or puts himself up at auction, as a carpenter and upholsterer 
 to the heads and hearts of his customers such are the phrases 
 by which Plato at once describes and satirizes the proper sophist.* 
 Nor does the Stagyrite fall short of his great master and rival 
 in the reprobation of these professors of wisdom, or differ from 
 him in the grounds of it. He, too, gives the baseness of the mo 
 tives joined with the impudence and delusive nature of the pre 
 tence, as the generic character.! 
 
 Next to this pretence of. selling wisdom and eloquence, they 
 were distinguished by their itinerancy. Athens was, indeed, 
 their great emporium and place of resort, but by no means their 
 domicile. Such were Protagoras, Gorgias, Prodicus, Hippias, Po- 
 lus, Callicles, Thrasymachus, and a whole host of sophists mino- 
 rum gentium : and though many of the tribe, like the Euthy- 
 demus and Dionysodorus, so dramatically portrayed by Plato, 
 were mere empty disputants, sleight-of-word jugglers, this was far 
 from being their common character. Both Plato and Aristotle 
 repeatedly admit the brilliancy of their talents and the extent 
 of their acquirements. The following passage from the TimaBus 
 of the former w r ill be my best commentary as well as authority. 
 " The race of sophists, again, I acknowledge for men of no com 
 mon powers, and of eminent skill and experience in many and 
 various kinds of knowledge, and these too not seldom truly fair 
 and ornamental of our nature ; but I fear that somehow, as being- 
 itinerants from city- to city, loose from all permanent ties of house 
 and home, and everywhere aliens, they shoot wide of the proper 
 
 * See the Protagoras, B. 12; and the 
 TTU^IKOV -yevoc, of the Sophistes, s. 21. Ed. 
 
 f- See Aristot. De Rcprehensione Sophist. "Karl yap ?/ oatyiariK?/, (fiaivo- 
 H&VT] Gofyia ovaa 8 /U.T/ KO.I 6 aotytarTjc, xpiypuiTiaTfyf UTTO 
 a/U OIIA- ovcr/c. Ib. c. 2. Ed. 
 
ESSAY III. 809 
 
 aim of man, whether as philosopher or as citizen." The few re 
 mains of Zeno the Eleatic, his paradoxes against the reality of 
 motion, are mere identical propositions spun out into a sort of 
 whimsical conundrums, as in the celebrated paradox entitled 
 Achilles and the Tortoise, the whole plausibility of which rests 
 on the trick of assuming a minimum of time while no minimum 
 is allowed to space, joined with that of exacting from intclligi- 
 bilia, vovpevu, the conditions peculiar to objects of the senses 
 tpatvouFva or uia&ai oui-vn.^ The passages still extant from the 
 works of Gorgias, on the other hand, want nothing but the formf 
 of a premiss to undermine by a legitimate deduclio ad absurdum 
 all the philosophic systems that had been hitherto advanced, with 
 
 * Place a tortoise 20 paces before Achilles, and suppose the fleetness of 
 Achilles to that of the tortoise to be as 20 to 1. Whilst Achilles moves 20 
 paces, the tortoise moves 1 ; \vhilst he moves the 21st pace, she gains the 
 20th part of the 22d pace ; whilst he gains this 20th part of the 22d pace, 
 she gains the 20th part of the next 20th part of the same 22d pace; and so 
 on in infinitum. See Aristotle s solution, or attempt at it, in the Physics 
 VI. c. 9, which consists chiefly in applying an infinite divisibility of the mo 
 ments of time to the assumed infinite divisibility of the parts of matter. 
 ToiJro tit! tan Tpevdoc ov yap GvyKEtrat, 6 %p6vo e/< rdv vvv ovruv adiatpsrcov 
 uarrep ov6 uAAo [tsyedoc oixJev. Ib. 
 
 " I had remarked to him" (Mr. Coleridge), says Mr. De Quincey, " that 
 the sophism, as it is usually called,- but the difficulty, as it should be called, 
 of Achilles and the Tortoise, which had puzzled all the sages of Greece, was, 
 in fact, merely another form of the perplexity which besets decimal frac 
 tions ; that, for example, if you throw f into a decimal form, it will never 
 terminate, but be 666666, &c., ad infinitum. Yes, Coleridge replied ; the 
 apparent absurdity in the Grecian problem arises thus, because it assumes 
 the infinite divisibility of space, but drops out of view the corresponding 
 infinity of time. There was a flash of lightning, which illuminated a dark 
 ness that had existed for twenty-three centuries." Tait s Mag. Sept. 1834, 
 p. 514. 
 
 I apprehend, however, that this part of the solution, such as it is, is sub 
 stantially what Aristotle means in his remark on the Zenonian paradox ; 
 but the latter part, namely, the detection of the sophism of applying to an 
 idea conditions only properly applicable to sensuous p/uenomena, belongs to 
 Mr. Coleridge himself. Ed. [The solution is given by Leibnitz ; also in a 
 Letter to Mr. Foucher. Opp. ed. Erdmann, I. p. 115. S. C.] 
 
 f Namely, if either the world itself as an animated whole, according to 
 the Italian school ; or if atoms, according to Deniocritus ; or any one pri 
 mal element, as water or fire, according to Thales or Empedoclcs ; or if a 
 nous, as explained by Anaxagoras ; be assumed as the absolutely first ; 
 then, (fcc. 
 
400 THE FRIEND. 
 
 the exception of the Heraclitic, and of that too as it was genei- 
 ally understood and interpreted. Yet Zeno s name was, and ever 
 will be holden in reverence by philosophers ; for his object was 
 as grand as his motives were honorable, that of assigning 
 limits to the claims of the senses, and subordinating them to the 
 pure reason ; while Gorgias will ever be cited as an instance 
 of prostituted genius from the immoral nature of his object and 
 the baseness of his motives. These, and not his sophisms, con 
 stituted him a sophist, a sophist whose eloquence and logical 
 skill rendered him only the more pernicious. 
 
 Soon after the repulse of the Persian invaders, and as a heavy 
 counterbalance to the glories of Marathon and Platsea, we may 
 date the commencement of that corruption first in private and 
 next in public life, which displayed itself more or less in all the 
 free states and communities of Greece, but most of all in Athens. 
 The causes are obvious, and such as in popular republics have 
 always followed, and are themselves the effects of, that passion 
 for military glory and political preponderance, which may well 
 be called the bastard and the parricide of liberty. In reference 
 to the fervid but light and sensitive Athenians, we may enumer 
 ate, as the most operative, the giddiness of sudden aggrandize 
 ment ; the more intimate connection and frequent intercourse 
 with the Asiatic states ; the intrigues with the court of Persia ; 
 the intoxication of the citizens at large, sustained and increased 
 by the continued allusions to their recent exploits, in the flatte 
 ries of the theatre, and the funeral panegyrics ; the rage for 
 amusement and public shows ; and lastly the destruction of the 
 Athenian constitution by the ascendency of its democratic ele 
 ment. During the operation of these causes at an early period 
 of the process, and no unimportant part of it, the sophists made 
 their first appearance. Some of these applied the lessons of their 
 art in their own persons, and traded for gain and gainful influ 
 ence in the character of demagogues and public orators ; but the 
 greater number offered themselves as instructors, in the arts of 
 persuasion and temporary impression, to as many as could come 
 up to the high prices, at which they rated their services. NPQV 
 irhovaiuv 6/ /pa aotyiariKij* (these are Plato s words) hireling 
 hunters of the young and rich, they offered to the vanity of 
 youth and the ambition of wealth a substitute for that authority, 
 * Sophist.es ; s. 17. Ed. 
 
ESSAY III. 401 
 
 which by the institutions of Solon had been attached to high 
 birth and property, or rather to the moral discipline, the habits, 
 attainments, and directing motives, on which the great legislator 
 had calculated (not indeed as necessary or constant accompani 
 ments, but yet) as the regular and ordinary results of compara 
 tive opulence and renowned ancestry. 
 
 The loss of this stable and salutary influence was to be supplied 
 by the arts of popularity. But in order to the success of this 
 scheme, it was necessary that the people themselves should be 
 degraded into a populace. The cupidity for dissipation and sen 
 sual pleasure in all ranks had kept pace with the increasing ine 
 quality in the means of gratifying it. The restless spirit of re 
 publican ambition, engendered by their success in a just war, 
 and by the romantic character of that success, had already 
 formed a close alliance with luxury ; with luxury, too, in its 
 early and most vigorous state, when it acts as an appetite to en 
 kindle, and before it has exhausted and dulled the vital energies 
 by the habit of enjoyment. But this corruption was now to be 
 introduced into the citadel of the moral being, and to be openly 
 defended by the very arms and instruments, which had been 
 given for the purpose of preventing or chastising its approach. 
 The understanding was to be corrupted by the perversion of the 
 reason, and the feelings through the medium of the understand 
 ing. For this purpose all fixed principles, whether grounded on 
 reason, religion, law, or antiquity, were to be undermined, and 
 then, as now, chiefly by the sophistry of submitting all positions 
 alike, however heterogeneous, to the criterion of the mere under 
 standing ; the sophists meantime disguising or concealing the 
 fact, that the rules which alone they applied were abstracted 
 from the objects of the senses, and applicable exclusively to 
 things of quantity and relation. At all events, the minds of men 
 were to be sensualized ; and even if the arguments themselves 
 failed, yet the principles so attacked were to be brought into 
 doubt by the mere frequency of hearing all things doubted, and 
 the most sacred of all now openly denied, and now insulted by 
 sneer arid ridicule. For by the constitution of our nature, as far 
 as it is human nature, so awful is truth, that as long as we have 
 faith in its attainability and hopes of its attainment, there exists 
 no bribe strong enough to tempt us wholly and permanently from 
 our allegiance. 
 
402 THE FRIEND. 
 
 Religion, in its widest sense, signifies the act and habits of 
 reverencing the invisible, as the highest both in ourselves and in 
 nature. To this the senses and their immediate objects are to 
 be made subservient, the one as its organs, the other as its expo 
 nents ; and as such, therefore, having on their own account no 
 true value, because no inherent worth. They are, in short, a 
 language ; and taken independently of their representative func 
 tion, from words they become mere empty sounds, and differ from, 
 noise only by exciting expectations which they can not gratify 
 fit ingredients of the idolatrous charm, the potent abracadabra, 
 of a sophisticated race, who had sacrificed the religion of faith to 
 the superstition of the senses, a race of animals, in whom the 
 presence of reason is manifested solely by the absence of instinct. 
 
 The same principle, which in its application to the whole of 
 our being becomes religion, considered speculatively is the basis 
 of metaphysical science, that, namely, which requires an evidence 
 beyond that of sensible concretes, which latter the ancients gen 
 eralized in the word, physica, and therefore, prefixing the prepo 
 sition ^ueicc, beyond or transcending, named the superior science, 
 metaphysics. The invisible was assumed as the supporter of the 
 apparent, t&v yatvofttvuv as their substance, a term which, in 
 any other interpretation, expresses only the striving of the imagi 
 native power under conditions that involve the necessity of its 
 frustration. If the invisible be denied, or (which is equivalent) 
 considered invisible from the defect of the senses and not in its 
 own nature, the sciences even of observation and experiment lose 
 their essential copula. The component parts can never be re 
 duced into an harmonious whole, but must owe their systematic 
 arrangement to the accidents of an ever-shifting perspective. 
 Much more then must this apply to the moral world disjoined 
 from religion. Instead of morality, we can at best have only a 
 scheme of prudence, and this too a prudence fallible and short 
 sighted ; for were it of such a kind as to be dona fide coincident 
 with morals in reference to the agent as well as to the outward 
 action, its first act would be that of abjuring its own usurped pri 
 macy. By celestial observations alone can even terrestrial charts 
 be constructed scientifically. 
 
 The first attempt, therefore, of the sophists was to separate 
 ethics from the faith in the invisible, and to stab morality through 
 the side of religion ; an attempt to which the idolatrous polythe- 
 
ESSAY III. 403 
 
 ism of Greece furnished too many facilities. To the zeal with 
 which he counteracted this plan by endeavors to purify and en 
 noble that popular belief, which, from obedience to the laws, he 
 did not deem himself permitted to subvert, Socrates owed his 
 martyr-cup of hemlock. Still while any one principle of morality 
 remained, religion in some form or other must remain inclusively. 
 Therefore, as they commenced by assailing the former through 
 the latter, so did they continue their warfare by reversing the 
 operation. The principle was confounded with the particular 
 acts, in which under the guidance of the understanding or judg 
 ment it was to manifest itself. 
 
 Thfls the rule of expediency, which properly belonged to one 
 and the lower part of morality, was made to be the whole. And 
 so far there was at. least a consistency in this ; for in two ways 
 only could it subsist. It must either be the mere servant of re 
 ligion, or its usurper and substitute. Viewed as principles, they 
 were so utterly heterogeneous, that by no grooving could the two 
 be fitted into each other ; by no intermediate could they be pre 
 served in lasting adhesion. The one or the other was sure to 
 decompose the cement. We can not have a stronger historical 
 authority for the truth of this statement than the words of Poly- 
 bius, in which he attributes the ruin of the Greek states to the 
 frequency of perjury, which they had learned from the sophists 
 to laugh at as a trifle that broke no bones, nay, as in some cases, 
 an expedient and justifiable exertion of the powers given us by 
 nature over our own words, without which no man could have a 
 secret that might riot be extorted from him by the will of others. 
 In the same spirit the sage arid observant historian attributes the 
 growth and strength of the Roman republic to the general rever 
 ence of the invisible powers, and the consequent horror in which 
 the breaking of an oath was holden. This he states as the causa 
 causarum, as the ultimate and inclusive cause, of Iloman 
 grandeur. 
 
 Under such convictions, therefore, as the sophists labored with 
 such fatal success to produce, it needed nothing but the excite 
 ment of the passions under circumstances of public discord to turn 
 the arguments of expedience and self-love against the whole 
 scheme of morality founded on them, and to procure a favorable 
 hearing for the doctrines, which Plato attributes to the sophist 
 
404 THE FRIEND. 
 
 Callicles.* The passage is curious, and might be entitled, a 
 Jacobin head, a genuine antique, in high preservation. " By 
 nature," exclaims this Napoleon of old, " the worse off is always 
 the more infamous, that, namely, which suffers wrong ; but ac 
 cording to the law it is the doing of wrong. For no man of 
 noble spirit will let himself be wronged ; this a slave only en 
 dures, who is not worth the life he has, and under injuries and 
 insults can neither help himself nor those that belong to him. 
 Those, who first made the laws, were, in my opinion, feeble 
 creatures, which in fact the greater number of men are ; or they 
 would not remain entangled in these spider-webs. Such, how 
 ever, being the case, laws, honor, and ignominy were all calcu 
 lated for the advantage of the law-makers. But in order to 
 frighten away the stronger, whom they could not coerce by fair 
 contest, and to secure greater advantages for themselves than 
 their feebleness could otherwise have procured, they preached up 
 the doctrine, that it was base and contrary to right to wish to 
 have any thing beyond others ; and that in this wish consisted 
 the essence of injustice. Doubtless it was very agreeable to them, 
 if being creatures of a meaner class they were allowed to share 
 equally with their natural superiors. But nature dictates plainly 
 enough another code of right, namely, that the nobler and 
 stronger should possess more than the weaker and more pusillani 
 mous. Where the power is, there lies the substantial right. The 
 whole realm of animals, nay the human race itself as collected in 
 independent states and nations, demonstrates that the stronger 
 has a right to control the weaker for his own advantage. As 
 suredly, they have the genuine notion of right, and follow the 
 law of nature, though truly not that which is holden valid in our 
 governments. But the minds of our youths are preached away 
 from them by declamations on the beauty and fitness of letting 
 themselves be mastered, till by these verbal conjurations the 
 noblest nature is tamed and cowed, like a young lion born and 
 bred in a cage. Should a man with full untamed force but once 
 step forward, he would break all jour spells and conjurations, 
 trample your contra-natural laws under his feet, vault into the 
 seat of supreme power, and in a splendid style make the right of 
 nature be valid among you." 
 
 * See the speech of Callicles in the Gorgias : <j>vaei juv yap T 
 
 i<JTLV 5 TTEp KOt KUKiOV, 7T. T. A. Ed. 
 
ESSAY III. 405 
 
 It would have been well for mankind, if such had always been 
 the language of sophistry. A selfishness, that excludes partner 
 ship, all men have an. interest in repelling. Yet the principle is 
 the same : and if ibr power we substitute pleasure and the means 
 of pleasure, it is easy to construct a system well fitted to corrupt 
 natures, and the more mischievous in proportion as it is less 
 alarming. As long as the spirit of philosophy reigns in the 
 learned and highest class, and that of religion in all classes, a 
 tendency to blend and unite will be found in all objects of pur 
 suit, and the whole discipline of mind and manners will be cal 
 culated in relation to the worth of the agents. With the prev 
 alence of sophistry, when the pure will (if indeed the existence 
 of a will be admitted in any other sense than as the temporary 
 main current in the wide gust-eddying stream of our desires and 
 aversions) with this prevalence of sophistry, when the pure will 
 is ranked among the means to an alien end, instead of being 
 itself the one absolute end, in the participation of which all other 
 things are worthy to be called good, commences the epoch of 
 division and separation. Things are rapidly improved, persons 
 as rapidly deteriorated ; and for an indefinite period the powers 
 of the aggregate increase, as the strength of the individual de 
 clines. Still, however, sciences may be estranged from philoso 
 phy, the practical from the speculative, and one of the two at 
 least may remain. Music may be divided from poetry, and both 
 may continue to exist, though with diminished influence. But 
 religion and morals cannot be disjoined without the destruction 
 of both : and that this does not take place to the full extent, we 
 owe to the frequency with which both take shelter in the heart, 
 and that men are always better or worse than the maxims which 
 they adopt or concede. 
 
 To demonstrate the hollowness of the present system, and to 
 deduce the truth from its sources, is not possible for me without 
 a previous agreement as to the principles of reasoning in general. 
 The attempt could neither be made within the limits of the pres 
 ent work, nor would its success greatly affect the immediate 
 moral interests of the majority of the readers for whom this work 
 was especially written. For as sciences are systems on princi 
 ples, so in the life of practice is morality a principle without a 
 system. Systems of morality are in truth nothing more than the 
 old books of casuistry generalized, even of that casuistry, which 
 
406 THE FRIEND. 
 
 the genius of Protestantism gradually worked off from itself like 
 a heterogeneous humor, together with the practice of auricular 
 confession ; a fact the more striking, because in both instances 
 it was against the intention of the first teachers of the Reforma 
 tion ; and the revival of both was not only urged, but provided 
 for, though in vain, by no less men than Bishops Saunderson and 
 Jeremy Taylor. 
 
 But there is yet another prohibitory reason ; and this I can not 
 convey more effectually than in the words of Plato to Dionysius : 
 
 TTOIOV n /ur/v TOVT" i?iv, w ndi kiovvoiov Kdl Aopidoc, TO 
 b TcdvTuv aiTiov i?i rcaKuv ; [iahhov dt: i] rrepl TOVTOV tides iv Ty ipv^y eyyiy- 
 el JUT/ ng %aipe6/]aTat, r//f dhtfdetac OVTU$ ov fzrjrro 
 
 But what a question is this, which you propose, O, son of Dionysius and 
 Doris ! what is the origin and cause of all evil ? But rather is the dark 
 ness and travail concerning this that thorn in the soul, which unless a 
 man shall have had removed, never can he partake of the truth that is 
 verily and indeed truth. 
 
 Yet that I may fulfil the original scope of The Friend, I shall 
 attempt to provide the preparatory steps for such an investigation 
 in the following essays on the principles of method common to all 
 investigations ; which I here present, as the basis of my future 
 philosophical and theological writings, and as the necessary in 
 troduction to the same. And in addition to this, I can conceive 
 no object of inquiry more appropriate, none which, commencing 
 with the most familiar truths, with facts of hourly experience, 
 and gradually winning its way to positions the most compre 
 hensive and sublime, will more aptly prepare the mind for the 
 reception of specific knowledge, than the full exposition of a prin 
 ciple which is the condition of all intellectual progress, and which 
 may be said even to constitute the science of education, alike in 
 the narrowest and in the most extensive sense of the word. Yet 
 as it is but fair to let the public know beforehand, what the ge 
 nius of my philosophy is, and in what spirit it will be applied by 
 me, whether in politics or religion, I conclude with the following 
 brief history of the last hundred and thirty years by a lover of 
 Old England. 
 
 Wise and necessitated confirmation and explanation of the law 
 of England, erroneously entitled The English Revolution of 
 
 * Epist. Dionysio. II. Ed. 
 
ESSAY III. 407 
 
 1688 ; mechanical philosophy, hailed as a kindred movement, 
 and espoused, as a Common cause, Iby the partisans of the revo 
 lution in the state. 
 
 The consequence is, or was, a system of natural rights instead 
 of social and hereditary privileges ; acquiescence in historic testi 
 mony substituted for faith, and yet the true historical feeling, the 
 feeling of being an historical people, generation linked to genera 
 tion by ancestral reputation, by tradition, by heraldry, this no 
 ble feeling, I say, openly stormed or perilously undermined. 
 
 Imagination excluded from poesy, and fancy paramount in 
 physics ; the eclipse of the ideal by the mere shadow of the sen 
 sible ; subfiction for supposition. Plebs pro senatu popidoque ; 
 the wealth of nations for the well-being of nations, and of man. 
 
 Anglo-mania in France followed by revolution in America ; 
 constitution of America appropriate, perhaps, to America, but 
 elevated from a particular experiment to a universal model. 
 The word constitution altered to mean a capitulation, a treaty, 
 imposed by the people on their own government, as on a con 
 quered enemy ; hence giving sanction to falsehood and univer 
 sality to anomaly. 
 
 Despotism, despotism, despotism, of finance in statistics, of van 
 ity in social converse, of presumption and overweening contempt 
 of the ancients in individuals. 
 
 French Revolution ; pauperism, revenue laws, government by 
 clubs, committees, societies, reviews, and newspapers. 
 
 Thus it is that a nation first sets fire to a neighboring nation ; 
 then catches fire and burns backward. 
 
 Statesmen should know that a learned class is an essential ele 
 ment of a state, at least of a Christian state. But you wish for 
 general illumination ! You begin with the attempt to popular 
 ize learning and philosophy ; but you will end in the plebifica- 
 tion of knowledge. A true philosophy in the learned class is 
 essential to a true religious feeling in all classes. 
 
 In fine, religion, true or false, is and ever has been the moral 
 centre of gravity in Christendom, to which all other things must 
 and will accommodate themselves. 
 
ESSAY IV. 
 
 6 fj.era ravra SIKOIOV i~i Troielv, a/cove, Iva COL Kal dTroKpivcjftai o ad 
 j- xprj KXKIV k^ Kal o Tcpbe a^^Aouf. Et [tv o/lwf 0tAoffo0mf 
 KaTaTCE<pp6v7jKa, eav %aipetv et, 6e Trap erepov a/c///coaf f) avrbq /3e A,Tiova 
 
 TUV Trap t/uoi, eitelva ripa el 6 apa rd Trap f][j.tiv 001 apea/cei, 
 Kal EJ.& j.uAts a. PLATO.* 
 
 Hear then what ai e the terms on which you and I ought to stand toward 
 each other. If you hold philosophy altogether in contempt, bid it farewell 
 Or if you have heard from any other person, or have yourself found out a 
 better than mine, then give honor to that, whichever it be. But if the 
 doctrine taught in these our works please you, then it is but just that you 
 should honor me too in the same proportion. 
 
 WHAT is that which first strikes us, and strikes us at once, in 
 a man of education, and which, among educated men, so in 
 stantly distinguishes the man of superior mind, that (as was ob 
 served with eminent propriety of the late Edmund Burke) "we 
 can not stand under the same archway during a shower of rain, 
 without finding him out ?" Not the weight or novelty of his re 
 marks ; not any unusual interest of facts communicated by him ; 
 for we may suppose both the one and the other precluded by the 
 shortness of our intercourse, and the triviality of the subjects. 
 The difference will be impressed and felt, though the conversa 
 tion should be confined to the state of the weather or the pave 
 ment. Still less will it arise from any peculiarity in his words 
 and phrases. For if he be, as we now assume, a well-educated 
 man as well as a man of superior powers, he will not fail to fol 
 low the golden rule of Julius Caesar, insolens verbum, tanquam 
 scopulum, evitare. Unless where new things necessitate new 
 terms, he will avoid an unusual word as a rock. It must have 
 been among the earliest lessons of his youth, that the breach of 
 this precept, at all times hazardous, becomes ridiculous in the 
 topics of ordinary conversation. There remains but one other 
 
 * Epist. Dlonysio. II. Ed. 
 
ESSAY IV. 409 
 
 point of distinction possible ; and this must be, and in i act is, the 
 true cause of the impression made on us. It is the unpremedi 
 tated and evidently habitual arrangement of his words, grounded 
 on the habit of foreseeing, in each integral part, or (more plainly) 
 in every sentence, the whole that he then intends to communi 
 cate. However irregular and desultory his talk, there is method 
 in the fragments. 
 
 Listen, on the other hand, to an ignorant man, though perhaps 
 shrewd arid able in his particular calling, whether he be describ 
 ing or relating. We immediately perceive, that his memory alone 
 is called into action ; and that the objects and events recur in the 
 narration in the same order, and 
 
 however accidental or impertinent, in which they had first oc 
 curred jo^the narrator. The necessity of taking breath, the efforts 
 of recollection, and the abrupt rectification of its failures, produce 
 alHiis pauses ; and with ^xc^piiflruo4lie " aridjhcn," the "_and 
 there," and the still less significant, " and so," they constitute 
 likewise all his "connections. 
 
 Our discussion, however, is confined to method as employed in 
 the formation of the understanding, and in the constructions of 
 science and literature. It would indeed be superfluous to at 
 tempt a proof of its importance in the business and economy of 
 active or domestic life. From the cotter s hearth or the work 
 shop of the artisan to the palace or the arsenal, the first merit, 
 that which admits neither substitute nor equivalent, is, that 
 everything be in its place. Where this charm is wanting, every 
 other merit either loses its name, or becomes an additional 
 ground of accusation and regret. Of one, by whom it is emi 
 nently possessed, we say proverbially, he is like clock-work. The 
 resemblance extends beyond the point of regularity, and yet falls 
 short of the truth. Both do, indeed, at once divide and announce 
 the silent and otherwise indistinguishable lapse of time. But the 
 man of methodical industry and honorable pursuits does more ; 
 he realizes its ideal divisions, and gives a character and individ 
 uality to its moments. If the idle are described as killing time, 
 he may be justly said to call it into life and moral being, while 
 he makes it the distinct object not only of the consciousness, but 
 of the conscience. He organizes the hours, and gives them a 
 soul ; and that, the very essence of which is to fleet away, and 
 evermore to have been, he takes up iiito^ his own permanence 
 
 VOL. n. S 
 
410 THE FKIEND. 
 
 and communicates to it the impcrishablenesB of a spiritual na 
 ture. Of the good and faithful servant, whose energies, thus 
 directed, are thus methodized, it is less truly affirmed, that he 
 lives in time, than that time lives in him. His days, months, 
 and years, as the stops and punctual marks in the records of du 
 ties performed, will survive the wreck of worlds, and remain ex 
 tant when time itself shall be no more. 
 
 But as the importance of method in the duties of social life is 
 incomparably greater, so are its practical elements proportionally 
 obvious, and such as relate to the will far more than to the un 
 derstanding. Henceforward, therefore, we contemplate its bear 
 ings on the latter. 
 
 The difference between the products of a well-disciplined and 
 those of an uncultivated understanding, in relation to what we 
 will now venture to call the science ot method, is olten and ad 
 mirably exhibited by our great jlrjurjatist I scarcely need refer 
 my readers tothe Clown s evidence, in the first scene of the sec 
 ond act of Measure for Measure, or to the Nurse in Romeo and 
 Juliet. But not to leave the position, without an instance to 
 illustrate it, I will take the easy-yielding Mrs. duickly s relation 
 of the circumstances of Sir John Falstaff s debt to her : 
 
 FALSTAFF. "What is the gross sum that I owe thee ? 
 
 HOST. Marry, if thou wert an honest man, thyself and the money too. 
 Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet, sitting in my Dolphin 
 chamber, at the round table, by a sea-coal fire, upon Wednesday in Whitsun 
 week, when the prince broke thy head for liking his father to a singing- 
 man of Windsor ; thou didst swear to me then, as I was washing thy wound, 
 to marry me and make me my lady thy wife. Canst thou deny it ? Did 
 not goodwife Keech, the butcher s wife, come in then and call me gossip 
 Quickly ? coming in to borrow a mess of vinegar ; telling us she had a good 
 dish of prawns ; whereby thou didst desire to eat some ; whereby I told 
 thee they were ill for a green wound, <fcc.* 
 
 And this, be it observed, is so far from being carried beyond 
 the bounds of a fair imitation, that_the poor soul s thoughts and 
 sentences are more closely interlinked than the truth of . nature 
 would have required, but that the connections and sequence, 
 which the habit of method can alone give, have in this instance 
 a substitute in the fusion of passion. For the absence of method, 
 which characterizes the uneducated, is occasioned by an habitual 
 ivTPtTlL act ii. sc. I. Ed 
 
ESSAY IV. 411 
 
 submission of the understanding to mere events and images as 
 such, and independent of any power in the mind to classify or 
 appropriate them. The general accompaniments of time and 
 place are the only relations which persons of his class appear to 
 regard in their statements. As this constitutes their leading 
 feature, the contrary excellence, as distinguishing the well-edu 
 cated man, must be referred to the contrary habit. Method, 
 therefore, becomes natural to the mind which has been accus- 
 tomed to contemplate qiotjthings only, or for their own sake alone, 
 but likewise and chiefly the relations ot things, either their rela- 
 tions to each~other, or to tne observer, or to me state and appre- 
 hension of the_hearers. To enumerate and analyze these rela 
 tions, with the conditions under which alone they are discover 
 able, is to teach the science of method. 
 
 The enviable results of this science, when knowledge has been 
 ripened into those habits which at once secure and evince its pos 
 session, can scarcely be exhibited more forcibly as well as more 
 pleasingly, than by contrasting with the former extract from 
 Shakspeare the narration given by Hamlet to Horatio of the oc 
 currences during his proposed transportation to England, and J-ho 
 events that interrupted his voyage : 
 
 HAM. Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting 
 That would not let me sleep : methought, I lay 
 Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly, 
 
 And praised be rashness for it Let us know, 
 
 Our indiscretion sometimes serve us well, 
 
 When our deep plots do fail : and that should teach us, 
 
 There s a divinity that shapes our ends, 
 
 Rough-hew them how we will 
 
 HOR. That is most certain. 
 
 HAM. Up from my cabin, 
 My sea-gown scarf d about me, in the dark 
 Grop d I to find out them ; had my desire ; 
 Finger d their packet ; and, in fine, withdrew 
 To my own room again : making so bold, 
 My fears forgetting manners, to unseal 
 Their grand commission ; where I found, Horatio, 
 A royal knavery ; an exact command 
 Larded with many several sorts of reasons, 
 Importing Denmark s health, and England s too, 
 With, ho ! such bugs and goblins in my life 
 That on the supervise, no leisure bated, 
 
412 THE FRIEND. 
 
 No, not to stay the grinding of the axe, 
 My head should be struck offl 
 
 Hou Is t possible ? 
 
 HAM. Here s the commission; read it at more leisure.* 
 
 Here the events, with the circumstances of time and place, are 
 all stated with equal compression and rapidity, not one introduced 
 which could have been omitted without injury to the intelligibil- 
 ity of the whole process. If any tendency is discoverable, as far 
 as the mere facts are in question, it is the tendency to omission : 
 and, accordingly, the reader will observe in the following quota 
 tion that the attention of the narrator is called back to one ma 
 terial circumstance, which he was hurrying by, by a direcj: ques 
 tion from the friend_to_whorn jthe storyis^comniunicated, " How 
 was this sealed?" But by a trait which is indeed peculiarly 
 characteristic of Hamlet s mind, ever disposed to generalize, and 
 meditative if to excess (but which, with due abatement and re 
 duction, is distinctive of every powerful and methodizing intellect), 
 all the digressions and enlargements consist of reflections, truths, 
 and principles of general and permanent interest, either directly 
 expressed or disguised in playful satire. 
 
 I sat me down ; 
 
 Devis d a new commission ; wrote it fair. 
 I once did hold it, as our statists do, 
 A baseness to write fair, and labored much 
 How to forget that learning ; but, sir, now 
 It did me yeoman s service. Wilt thou know 
 The effect of what I wrote ? 
 
 Hon. Ay, good my lord. 
 
 HAM. An earnest conjuration from the king, 
 As England was his faithful tributary ; 
 As love between them, like the palm, might flourish ; 
 As peace should still her wheaten garland wear, 
 And stand a comma tween their amities, 
 And many such like ases of great charge 
 That on the view and knowing of their contents, 
 Without debatement further, more or less, 
 He should the bearers put to sudden death, 
 No shriving time allowed. 
 
 HOR. How was this seal d ? 
 
 HAM. Why, even in that was heaven ordinant. 
 I had my father s signet in my purse, 
 
 * Act v. sc. 2. 
 
ESSAY IV. 413 
 
 "Which was the model of that Danish seal : 
 Folded the writ up in the form of the other ; 
 Subscribed it ; gave t the impression ; placed it safely, 
 The changeling never known. Now, the next day 
 Was our sea-fight ; and what to this was sequent, 
 Thou know st already. 
 
 HOR. So Guildenstern and Rosencrantz go to t ? 
 
 HAM. Why, man, they did make love to this employment. 
 They are not near my conscience : their defeat 
 Doth by their own insinuation grow. 
 Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes 
 Between the pass and fell incensed points 
 Of mighty opposites.* 
 
 It would, perhaps, be sufficient to remark of the preceding pas 
 sage, in connection with the humorous specimen of narration, 
 
 Fermenting o er with frothy circumstance, 
 
 in Henry IV., that if, overlooking the different value of the mat 
 ter in each, -we considered the form alone, we should find both 
 immethodical, Hamlet from the excess, Mrs. Q,uickly from the 
 want, of reflection and generalization ; ami that methocL,~there- 
 fore, must result from the due niean or balance between our pas- 
 sive impressions amJ_JjTe^ mind s own rp-np.tinn on the same. \ 
 Whether this re-action do not suppose or imply a primary act ! 
 positively originating in the mind itself, and prior to the object in 
 order of nature, though co-instantaneous with it in its manifesta 
 tion, will be hereafter discussed. But I had a further purpose in 
 thus contrasting these extracts from our myriad-minded bard, 
 pvQiotovs &vr t Q. I wished to bring forward, each for itself, these 
 two elements of method, or, to adopt an arithmetical term, its 
 two main factors. 
 
 Instances of the want of generalization are of no rare occur 
 rence in real life : and the narrations of Shakspeare s Hostess and 
 the Tapster differ from those of the ignorant and unthinking in 
 general by their superior humor, the poet s own gift and infusion, 
 not by their want of method, which is not greater than we often 
 meet with in~~that class^ of which they are the~3ramatic repre- / 
 sentatives. Instances of the opposite fault, arising from the ex 
 cess of generalization and reflection in minds of the opposite class, 
 will, like the minds themselves, occur less frequently in the course 
 * Act v. sc. 2. 
 
414 THE FRIEND. 
 
 of our own personal experience. Yet they will not have been 
 wanting to our readers, nor will they have passed unobserved, 
 though the great poet himself (6 T^ ( V kaviov yvxty &aei tU;y tivct 
 aauuarov juogcpulg noixikotlg /uogcpdaas*} has more conveniently 
 supplied the illustrations. To complete, therefore, the purpose 
 aforementioned, that of presenting each of the two components as 
 separately as possible, I chose an instance in which, by the sur 
 plus of its own activity, Hamlet s mind disturbs the arrangement, 
 of which that very activity had been the cause and impulse. f 
 
 Thus exuberance of mind, nn t.hft OT^ hand, interferes with the 
 forms of method ; but sterility of mind, on the other, wantirig the 
 spring and ipri1g^j-n ynmifnl g^-i m^ ia wholly destrnctivft of 
 method itself. "Form attending too exclusively to the relations 
 which the past or passing events and objects bear to general 
 truth, and the moods of his own thought, the most intelligent 
 man is sometimes in danger of overlooking that other relation, in 
 which they are likewise to be placed to the apprehension and 
 sympathies of his hearers. His discourse appears like soliloquy 
 intermixed with dialogue. But the uneducated and unreflecting 
 talker overlooks all mental relations, both logical and psychologi 
 cal ; and consequently precludes all method which is not purely 
 accidental. Hence the nearer the things and incidents in time 
 and place, the more distant, disjointed, and impertinent to each 
 other, and to any common purpose, will they appear in his nar 
 ration : and this from the want of a staple, or starting-post, in 
 the narrator himself; from the absence of the leading thought, 
 which, borrowing a phrase from the nomenclature of legislation, 
 I may not inaptly call the initiative. On the contrary, where 
 the habit of method is present and effective, things the most re 
 mote and diverse in time, place, and outward circumstance, are 
 brought into mental contiguity and succession, the more striking 
 as the less expected. But while I would impress the necessity of 
 this habit, the illustrations adduced give proof that in undue pre 
 ponderance, and when the prerogative of the mind is stretched 
 into despotism, the discourse may degenerate into the grotesque 
 or the fantastical. 
 
 * He that moulded his own soul, as some incorporeal material, into vari 
 ous forms. THEMISTIUS. 
 
 f See the criticism on the character of Hamlet in the Lectures upon 
 Shakspeare and other Dramatists. IV". p. 144. Ed. 
 
ESSAY IV. 415 
 
 With what a profound insight into the constitution of the hu 
 man soul is this exhibited to us in the character of the Prince^of 
 Denmark, where flying from the sense of reality, and seeking a 
 reprieve from the pressure of ITs duties in that ideal activity, the 
 overbalance of which, with the consequent indisposition to action, 
 is his disease, he compels~tFe reluctant good sense ol the High yet 
 healthful-minded Horatio to follow him in his wayward medita 
 tion amid the graves ! 
 
 HAM. To what base uses we may return, Horatio ! Why may not im 
 agination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bung- 
 bole ? 
 
 Hon. Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so. 
 
 HAM. 2fo, faith, not a jot ; but to follow him thither with modesty 
 enough, and likelihood to lead it : As thus ; Alexander died, Alexander was 
 buried, Alexander returneth to dust ; the dust is earth ; of earth we make 
 loam : And why of that loam whereto he was converted, might they not 
 stop a beer-barrel ? 
 
 Imperious Caesar, dead, and turn d to clay, 
 Might stop a hole to keep the wind away 1* 
 
 But let it not escape our recollection, that when the objects 
 thus connected are proportionate to the connecting energy, rela 
 tively to the real, or at least to the desirable, sympathies of man 
 kind ; it is from the same character that we derive the genial 
 method in the famous soliloquy, " To be, or not to be"f which, 
 admired as it is, and has been, has yet received only the first-fruits 
 of the admiration due to it. 
 
 We have seen that from the confluence of innumerable im 
 pressions in each moment of time the mere passive memoryjnust 
 needs tend to confusion. ; a rule, the "seeming exceptions^ to which^ 
 (the thunder- bursts in Lear, for instance) are really_coriBrmations 
 of its trutnT^Fbr, in many instances, the predominance of some 
 mighty passion takes the place of the guiding thought^jind theje- 
 sult presents the method of nature,~rather than tfiehabit of the 
 individualT For thought, imagination (and I may add, passion), 
 are, in their very essence, the first, connective, the latter co- 
 adunative : and it has been shown, that if the excess lead to 
 method misapplied, and to connections of the moment, the ab 
 sence, or marked deficiency, eithcr_precludcs method altogether, 
 both form and substance^ or (as_the following extract will exem- 
 plify) retains the outwardJorrn-Giily. 
 
 * Act v. sc. 1. f Act iii. sc. 1. 
 
416 THE FRIEND. 
 
 My liege and Madam, to expostulate 
 
 What majesty should be, what duty is, 
 
 Why day is day, night night, and time is time, 
 
 Were nothing but to waste night, day and time. 
 
 Therefore since brevity is the souLof wit, 
 
 And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,- 
 
 I will be brief. Your noble son is mad : 
 
 Mad call I it ; for to define true madness, 
 
 What is t, but to be nothing else but mad 1 
 
 But let that go. 
 
 QUEEN. More matter with les^arj. 
 
 POL. Madam, I wear, I Tise~noart at all. 
 That he is mad, tis true : tis true, tis pity : 
 And pity tis, tis true : a foolish figure ; 
 But farewell it, for I will use no art. 
 Mad let us grant him then : and now remains, 
 That we find out the cause of this effect, 
 Or rather say the cause of this defect : 
 For this effect defective comes by cause. 
 Thus it remains, and the remainder thus 
 Perpend* 
 
 Does not the irresistible sense of the ludicrous in this flourish 
 of the soul-surviving body of old Polonius s intellect, not less than 
 in the endless confirmations and most undeniable matters of fact 
 of Tapster Pompey or the hostess of the tavern prove to our feel 
 ings, even before the word is found which presents the truth to 
 our understandings, that confusion and formality are but the op 
 posite poles of the same null -point ? 
 
 It is Shakspeare s peculiar excellence, that throughout the 
 whole of his splendid piqtjirn-gg.lTf^^ijiftrftgj^ will pymisft the 
 acknowledge^Tmadeguacy of .this metaphor), we find individual 
 ity every_where, mere portrait nowhere. In all his various char 
 acters, we still i eel ourselves communing with the same nature, 
 which is everywhere present as the vegetable sap in the 
 branches, sprays, leaves, buds, blossoms, and fruits, their shapes, 
 tastes, and odors. Speaking of the effect, that is, his works them 
 selves, we may define the excellence~of their method as consist 
 ing in that just proportion, that union and interpenetration, of 
 * the universal ajJ(T the particular, which must ever pervade all 
 works of decided genius and true science. For method implies a 
 progressive tr^jisilJLcav-^uiilJt js_th meaning of the word in the 
 original language. The Greek /utdodog is literally a wajTor path 
 - ... * Act ii. sc. 2. 
 
ESSAY V. 417 
 
 of transit. Thus we extol the Elements of Euclid, or Socrates 
 discourse with the slave in the Menon of Plato,* as methodical, 
 a term which 110 one who holds himself bound to think or speak 
 correctly, would apply to the alphabetical order or arrangement 
 of a common dictionary. But^as without continuous transition 
 there can be no method, so without a preconception there can be 
 no transition with continuity. The terrr^rnethod, can not there- 
 ibre, otherwise than T>y abuse, be applied to a mere dead ar 
 rangement, co^ainmgjnjljse]jiQ^^ 
 
 ESSAY Y. 
 
 Scientiis idem quod planlis. Si planta aliqua uti in animo habeas, de 
 radice quid fiat, nil refert : si vero transferre cupias in aliud solum, tutiits 
 est radicibus uti quant surculis. Sic traditio, quce nunc in usu est, exhibet 
 plane tanquam francos (pulchros illos quidem) scientiarum ; sed tamen abs- 
 que radicibus fabro lignario certe commodos, at plantatori inutiles. Quod 
 si, disciplines ut crescant, tibi cordi sit, de truncis minus sis solicitus : ad id 
 curam adhibe, ut radices illcesce, etiam cum aliquantulo terrce adhcerentis, 
 cxtrahantur : dummodo hoc pacto et scientiam propriam revisers, vestigiaque 
 cognitionis tuce remetiri possis ; et earn sic transplantare in animum alie- 
 num, sicut crevit in tuo. BACON. \ 
 
 It is with sciences as with trees. If it be your purpose to make some 
 particular use of the tree, you need not concern yourself about the roots. 
 But if you wish to transfer it into another soil, it is then safer to employ 
 the roots than the scions. Thus the mode of teaching most common at 
 present exhibits clearly enough the trunks, as it were, of the sciences, and 
 those too of handsome growth ; but nevertheless, without the roots, valua 
 ble and convenient as they undoubtedly are to the carpenter, they are use 
 less to the planter. But if you have at heart the advancement of educa 
 tion, as that which proposes to itself the general discipline of the mind for 
 its end and aim, be less anxious concerning the trunks, and let it be your 
 care, that the roots should be extracted entire, even though a small portion 
 of the soil should adhere to them : so that at all events you may be able, by 
 this mean, both to review your own scientific acquirements, re-measuring 
 
 * Aeye ydp UOL cv ov TO [itv TerpuTrovv TOVTO jj/ilv earl %uptov ; /c. r. 7i. Ed 
 \ De Augment. Scient. vi. c. 2, with some verbal alterations and trans 
 position. Ed, 
 
418 THE FRIEND. 
 
 aa it were the steps of your knowledge for your own satisfaction, and at the 
 same time to transplant it into the minds of others, just as it grew in your 
 own. 
 
 IT lias been observed, in a preceding page, that the relations 
 6"f objects are prime materials of method, and that the contem 
 plation of relations is the indispensable condition of thinking me 
 thodically. It becomes necessary therefore to add, that there are 
 two kinds of relation, in which objects of mind may be contem 
 plated. The first is that of law, which, in its absolute perfec 
 tion, is conceivable only of the Supreme Being; whose creative 
 idea not only appoints to each thing its position, but in that po 
 sition, and in consequence of that position, gives it its qualities, 
 yea, gives it its very existence, as that particular thing. Yet in 
 whatever science the relation of the parts to each other and to 
 the whole is predetermined by a truth originating in the mind, 
 and not abstracted or generalized from observation of the parts, 
 there we affirm the presence of a law, if we are speaking of the 
 physical sciences, as of astronomy for instance ; or the presence 
 of fundamental ideas, if our discourse be upon those sciences, the 
 truths of which, as truths absolute, not merely have an indepen 
 dent origin in the mind, but continue to exist in and for the mind 
 alone.* Such, for instance, is geometry, and such are the ideas 
 of a perfect circle, of asymptotes, and the like. 
 
 I have thus assigned the first place in the science of method to 
 law ; and first of the first, to law, as the absolute kind which, 
 comprehending in itself the substance of every possible degree, 
 precludes from its conception all degree, not by generalization, 
 but by its own plenitude. As such, therefore, and as the suf 
 ficient cause of the reality correspondent thereto, I contemplate 
 it as exclusively an attribute of the Supreme Being, inseparable 
 from the idea of God ; adding, however, that from the contem 
 plation of law in this its only perfect form, must be derived all 
 true insight into all other grounds and principles necessary to 
 method, as the science common to all sciences, which in each, in 
 the words of Plato, Tu^/d^et ov aUo avi^s TTJ ^marify/J??. Alienated 
 from this intuition or steadfast faith, ingenious men may produce 
 
 * Here I have fallen into an error. The terms, idea and law, are always 
 correlative. Instead of geometrical ideas, I ought to have said theorems ; 
 not theories ;but 6eup?/juara, the intelligible products of contemplation, in 
 tellectual objects in the mind, and of and for the mind exclusively. 1829. 
 
KSSAY V. 419 
 
 
 
 schemes conducive to the peculiar purposes of particular sciences, 
 but no scientific system. 
 
 But though I can not enter on the proof of this assertion, 1 
 dare not remain exposed to the suspicion of having obtruded a 
 mere private opinion, as a fundamental truth. The authorities 
 are such, that my only difficulty is occasioned by their number. 
 The following extract from Aristotle s (preserved with other in 
 teresting fragments of the same writer by Eusebius of Csesarea). 
 is as explicit as peremptory. EfpikoaoyTjas Jt n\<jt.-iwv-, el xal jig 
 TUV TKUTrore, yvrjalwg v.<tl rekeiug. //t ou ds ^ur) dvv&o&ut, 
 
 And Plato himself in his Republic, happily still extant, evidently 
 alludes to the same doctrine. For personating Socrates in the 
 discussion of a most important problem, namely, whether political 
 justice is or is not the same as private honesty, after many induc 
 tions, and much analytic reasoning, he breaks off with these 
 words xi ei) y i a&i, o> rkavy.wv , &g i^ ^t] d6*a, uxu/?(oc pev TOUTO 
 ix joioviujv [ieOodtov^ oi uig *\>v ev rolg Aoyo/c xow/xt.Ou, oti ^UTJ nois 
 iu^wei" aAA, y&() t uakQOie()(x xai Tflelwv odbg i] tnl rovio ^youaaf 
 not however, he adds, precluding the former (the analytic and 
 inductive, to wit) which have their place likewise, in which (but 
 as subordinate to the other) they are both useful and requisite. 
 If any doubt could be entertained as to the purport of these words, 
 it would be removed by the fact stated by Aristotle, $ that Plato 
 had discussed the problem, whether in order to scientific ends we 
 must set out from principles or ascend towards them : in other 
 words, whether the synthetic or analytic be the right method. 
 But as no such question is directly discussed in the published 
 
 * Praparat. Evangel xi. c. 3. Ed, Plato, who philosophized legiti 
 mately and perfectivelj, if ever any man did in any age, held it for an 
 axiom, that it is not possible for us to have an insight into things human 
 (that is, the nature and relations of man, and the objects presented by na 
 ture for his investigation,) without a previous contemplation or intellectual 
 vision of things divine ; that is, of truths that are to be affirmed concern 
 ing the absolute, as far as they can be made known to us. 
 
 f De Republica, iv. But know well, Glaucon, as my firm persuasion, 
 that by such methods, as we have hitherto used in this inquisition, we can 
 never attain to a satisfactory insight : for it is a longer and ampler way that 
 conducts to this. 
 
 Eu <ip not IIAarwv ijiropei TOVTO Kal &TEI, Trorepov <i~b TUV ap^wv, $ 
 xuc, &GTCV T) 6J6f. Ethic. Nicom. I. c. 3. Ed. 
 
420 THE FKIEND. 
 
 works of the great master, Aristotle must either have received it 
 orally from Plato himself, or have found it in the ftyguyx* Jo^ara, 
 the private text-hooks or manuals constructed by his select dis 
 ciples, and intelligible to those only who like themselves had been 
 intrusted with the esoteric, or interior and unveiled, doctrines of 
 Platonism. Comparing this therefore with the writings, which 
 he held it safe or not profane *o make public, we may safely con- 
 elude, that Plato considered the investigation of truth a posteriori 
 as that which is employed in explaining the results of a more 
 scientific process to those, for whom the knowledge of the results 
 was alone requisite and sufficient ; or in preparing the mind for 
 legitimate method, by exposing the insufficiency or self-contradic 
 tions of the proofs and results obtained by the contrary process. 
 Hence, therefore, the earnestness with which the genuine Pla- 
 tonists afterwards opposed the doctrine (that all demonstration 
 consists of identical propositions) advanced by Stilpo, and main 
 tained by the Megaric school, who denied the synthesis, and, like 
 Hume and others in recent times, held geometry itself to be merely 
 analytical. 
 
 The grand problem, the solution of which forms, according to 
 Plato, the final object and distinctive character of philosophy, is 
 this : for all that exists conditionally (that is, the existence of 
 which is inconceivable except under the condition of its depen 
 dency on some other as its antecedent) to find a ground that is 
 unconditional and absolute, and thereby to reduce the aggregate 
 of human knowledge to a system. For the relation common to 
 all being known, the appropriate orbit of each becomes discover 
 able, together with its peculiar relations to its concentrics in the 
 common sphere of subordination. Thus the centrality of the 
 sun having been established, and the law of the distances of the 
 planets from the sun having been determined, we possess the 
 means of calculating the distance of each from the other. But 
 as all objects of sense are in continual flux, and as the notices 
 of them by the senses must, as far as they are true notices, change 
 with them, while scientific principles or laws are no otherwise 
 principles of science than as they are permanent and always the 
 saxraev fhe latter were appropriated to the pure reason, either as 
 its products or as^ implanted in it. And now the remarkable 
 
 * "Which of these two doctrines was Plato s own opinion, it is hard to 
 say. In many passages of his works, the latter (that is, the doctrine of in- 
 
ESSAY V. 421 
 
 lact forces itself on our attention, namely, that the material world 
 is found to ohey the same laws as had been deduced indepen 
 dently from the reason ; and that the masses act by a force, 
 which can not be conceived to result from the component parts, 
 known or imaginable. In magnetism, electricity, galvanism, and 
 in chemistry generally, the mind is led instinctively, as it were, 
 to regard the working powers as conducted, transmitted, or accu 
 mulated by the sensible bodies, and not as inherent. This fact 
 has, at all times, been the stronghold alike of the materialists and 
 of the spiritualists, equally solvable by the two contrary hypothe 
 ses, and fairly solved by neither. In the clear and masterly* re- 
 
 nate, or rather of connate, ideas) seems to be it ; but from the character 
 and avowed purpose of these works, as addressed to a promiscuous pub 
 lic, therefore preparatory, and for the discipline of the mind*, rather than 
 directly doctrinal, it is not improbable that Plato chose it as the more 
 popular representation, and as belonging to the poetic drapery of his 
 pkilosophemata. 
 
 * I can conceive no better remedy for the overweening self-compla 
 cency of modern philosophy than the annulment of its pretended origi 
 nality. The attempt has been made by Dutens (Recherches sur Vorigine des 
 dccouvertes attributes aux Modernes. 1166. Ed.}, but he failed in it^by fly 
 ing to the opposite extreme. When he should have confined himself to 
 the philosophies, he extended his attack to the sciences, and even to the 
 main discoveries of later times ; and thus instead of vindicating the an 
 cients, he became the calumniator of the moderns ; as far at least as de 
 traction is calumny. A splendid and most instructive course of lectures 
 might be given, comprising the origin and progress, the fates and fortunes 
 of philosophy from Pythagoras to Locke, with the lives and succession of 
 the philosophers in each sect ; tracing the progress of speculative science 
 chiefly in relation to the gradual development of the human mind, but 
 without omitting the favorable or inauspicious influence of circumstances 
 and the accidents of individual genius. The main divisions would be, 1. 
 From Thales and Pythagoras to the appearance of the Sophists : 2. And 
 of Socrates ; the character and effects of Socrates life and doctrines 
 illustrated in the instances of Xenophon, as his most faithful repre 
 sentative, and of Antisthenes or the Cynic sect as the one partial view 
 of his philosophy, and of Aristippus or the Cyrenaic sect as the other and 
 opposite extreme : 3. Plato, and Platonism : 4. Aristotle and the Peripa 
 tetic school : 5. Zeno and Stoicism, Epicurus and Epicureanism, with the 
 effects of these in the Roman republic and empire : 6. The rise of the Ec 
 lectic or Alexandrian philosophy, the attempt to set up a pseudo-Platonic 
 polytheism against Christianity, the degradation of philosophy itself into 
 mysticism and magic, and its final disappearance, as philosophy, under Jus 
 tinian : 7. The resumption of the Aristotelian philosophy in the thirteenth 
 
4-22 THE FRIEND. 
 
 view of the elder philosophies, which must be ranked among 
 the most splendid proofs of his judgment no less than of his 
 genius, and more expressly in the critique on the atomic or 
 corpuscular doctrine of Dernocritus and his followers as the one 
 extreme, and in that of the pure rationalism of Zeno the Eleatic 
 as the other, Plato has proved incontrovertibly that in Loth alike 
 the basis is too narrow to support the superstructure ; that the 
 grounds of both are false or disputable ; and that, if these were 
 conceded, yet neither the one nor the other scheme is adequate 
 to the solution of the problem, namely, wha^t is the ground of 
 the coincidence between reason and experience ; or between the 
 laws of matter and the ideas of the pure intellect. The only 
 answer which Plato deemed the question capable of receiving, 
 compels the reason to pass out of itself and seek the ground of 
 this agreement in a supersensual essence, which being at once 
 the ideal of the reason and the cause of the material world, is 
 the pre-establisher of the harmony in and between both. Re 
 ligion therefore is the ultimate aim of philosophy, in consequence 
 of which philosophy itself becomes the supplement of the sciences, 
 both as the convergence of all to the common end, namely wis 
 dom;, and as supplying the copula, which, modified in each in 
 the comprehension of its parts in one whole, is hi its principles 
 common to all, as integral parts of one system. And this is 
 method, itself a distinct science, the immediate offspring of 
 philosophy, and the link or mordant by which philosophy be 
 comes scientific, and the sciences philosophical. 
 
 ESSAY VI. 
 
 * 
 fy)TSvT "koyov t^odev dvaipSci "koyov. 
 
 THE second relation is that of theory, in which the existing 
 forms and qualities of objects, discovered by observation or exper 
 iment, suggest a given arrangement of many under one point of 
 view ; and this not merely or principally in order to facilitate the 
 
 century, and the successive re-appearance of the different ancient sects 
 from the restoration of literature to our own times. 
 
ESSAY VI. 423 
 
 remembrance, recollection, or communication of the same ; but 
 for the purposes of understanding, and in most instances of con 
 trolling them. In other words, all theory supposes the general 
 idea, of cause and effect. The scientific arts of medicine, chem 
 istry, and physiology in general, are examples of a method hith 
 erto founded on this second sort of relation. 
 
 Between these two lies the method in the fine arts, which be 
 longs indeed to this second or external relation, because the effect 
 and position of the parts is always moretor less influenced by the 
 knowledge and experience of their previous qualities ; but which, 
 nevertheless, constitutes a link connecting the second form of re 
 lation with the first. For in all that truly merits the name of 
 poetry in its most comprehensive sense, there is a necessary pre 
 dominance of the ideas, that is, of that which originates in the 
 artist himself, and a comparative indifference of the materials. 
 A true musical taste is soon dissatisfied with the harmonica or 
 any similar instrument of glass or steel, because the body of the 
 sound (as the Italians phrase it), or that effect which is derived 
 from the materials, encroaches too far on the effect from the pro 
 portions of the notes, or that which is given to music by the 
 mind. To prove the high value as well as the superior dignity 
 of the first relation, and to evince, that on this alone a perfect 
 method can be grounded, and that the methods attainable by the 
 second are at best but approximations to the first, or tentative 
 exercises in the hope of discovering it, forms the first object of 
 the present disquisition. 
 
 These truths I have (as the most pleasing and popular)mode 
 of introducing the subject) hitherto illustrated from Shakspeare. 
 But the same truths, namely the necessity of a mental initiative 
 to all method, as well as a careful attention to the conduct of the 
 mind in the exercise of method itself, may be equally, and here, 
 perhaps, more characteristically, proved from the most familiar 
 of the sciences. We may draw our elucidation even from those 
 which are at present fashionable among us ; from botany or from 
 chemistry. In the lowest attempt at a methodical arrangement 
 of the former science, that of artificial classification for the pre 
 paratory purpose of nomenclature, some antecedent must have 
 been contributed by the mind itself; some purpose must be in 
 view ; or some question at least must have been proposed to na- 
 ture, grounded, as all questions are, upon some idea of the 
 
424 THE FRIEND. 
 
 answer ; as for instance, the assumption that " two great sexes 
 animate the world."* For no man can confidently conceive a 
 fact to be universally true who does not with equal confidence 
 anticipate its necessity, and who does not believe that necessity 
 to be demonstrable by an insight into its nature, whenever and 
 wherever such insight can be obtained. We acknowledge, we 
 reverence, the obligations of botany to Linnaeus, who, adopting 
 from Bartholinus, Sebastian Vaillant, and others, the sexuality of 
 plants, grounded there&n a scheme of classific and distinctive 
 marks, by which one man s experience may be communicated to 
 others, and the objects safely reasoned on while absent, and rec 
 ognized as soon as and wherever they are met with. He in 
 vented a universal character for the language of botany charge 
 able with no greater imperfections than are to be found in the 
 alphabets of every particular language. As for the study of the 
 ancients, so for that of the works of nature, an accidence and a 
 dictionary are the first and indispensable requisites ; and to the 
 illustrious Swede, botany is indebted for both. But neither was 
 the central idea of vegetation itself, by the light of which we 
 might have seen the collateral relations of the vegetable to the in 
 organic and to the animal world, nor the constitutive nature arid 
 inner necessity of sex itself, revealed to Linnams. f Hence, as in 
 
 * Par. Lost, viii. 151. Ed. 
 
 f The word nature has been used in two senses, actively and passively ; 
 energetic, or forma formans, and material, or forma formata. In the first 
 (the sense in which the word is used in the text) it signifies the inward 
 principle of whatever is requisite for the reality of a thing, as existent : 
 while the essence or essential property, signifies the inner principle of all 
 that appertains to the possibility of a thing. Hence, in accurate language, 
 we say the essence of a mathematical circle or other geometrical figure, not 
 the nature ; because in the conception of forms purely geometrical there is 
 no expression or implication of their real existence. In the second or mate 
 rial sense of the word nature, we mean by it the sum total of all things, as 
 far as they are objects of our senses, and consequently of possible experi 
 ence ; the aggregate of phenomena, whether existing for our outward 
 senses, or for our inner sense. The doctrine concerning material nature 
 would therefore (the word physiology being both ambiguous in itself, and 
 already otherwise appropriated) be more properly entitled phsenomenol- 
 ogy, distinguished into its two grand divisions, somatology and psychology. 
 The doctrine concerning energetic nature is comprised in the science of dy 
 namics ; the union of which with phenomenology, and the alliance of both 
 with the sciences of the possible, or of the conceivable, namely, logic and 
 mathematics, constitute natural philosophy. 
 
ESSAY VI. 425 
 
 all other cases where the master light is missing 1 , so in this, the re 
 flective mind avoids Scylla only to lose itself in CharjjDdis. If we 
 adhere to the general notion of sex, as abstracted from the more ob 
 vious modes and forms in which the sexual relation manifests itself, 
 we soon meet with whole classes of plants to which it is found in 
 applicable. If arbitrarily, we give it indefinite extension, it is dis 
 sipated into the barren truism, that all specific products suppose 
 specific means of production. Thus a growth and a birth are dis 
 tinguished by the mere verbal definition, that the latter is a whole 
 in itself, the former not : and when we would apply even this to 
 nature, we are baffled by objects (the flower polypus, for example, 
 and many others) in which each is the other. All that can be 
 done by the most patient and active industry, by the widest and 
 most continuous researches ; all that the amplest survey of the 
 vegetable realm, brought under immediate contemplation by the 
 most stupendous collections of species and varieties, can suggest ; 
 all that minutest dissection and exactest chemical analysis, can 
 
 Having thus explained the term nature, I now more especially entreat 
 the reader s attention to the sense in which here, and everywhere through 
 this essay, I use the word idea. I assert, that the very impulse to univer 
 salize any phenomenon involves the prior assumption of some efficient law 
 in nature, which in a thousand different forms is evermore one and the 
 same, entire in each, yet comprehending all, and incapable of being ab 
 stracted or generalized from any number of phenomena, because it is itself 
 pre-supposed in each and all as their common ground and condition, and be-* 
 cause every definition of a genus is the adequate definition of the lowest 
 species alone, while the efficient law must contain the ground of all in all. 
 It is attributed, never derived. The utmost we ever venture to say is, that 
 the falling of an apple suggested the law of gravitation to Sir I. Newton. 
 Now a law and an idea are correlative terms, and differ only as object and 
 subject, as being and truth. 
 
 Such is the doctrine of the Novum Organum of Lord Bacon, agreeing (as 
 I shall more largely show in the text) in all essential points with the true 
 doctrine of Plato, the apparent differences being for the greater part occa 
 sioned by the Grecian sage having applied his principles chiefly to the in 
 vestigation of the mind, and the method of evolving its powers, and the 
 English philosopher to the development of nature. That our great coun 
 tryman speaks too often detractingly of the divine philosopher must be ex 
 plained, partly by the tone given to thinking minds by the Reformation, the 
 founders and fathers of which saw in the Aristotelians, or schoolmen, the 
 antagonists of Protestantism, and in the Italian Platonists the despisers and 
 secret enemies of Christianity itself; and partly, by his having formed his 
 notions of Plato s doctrine from the absurdities and phantasms of his misin- 
 terpreters, rather than from an unprejudiced study of the original works. 
 
426 THE FRIEND. 
 
 unfold ; all that varied experiment and the position of plants and 
 of their component parts in every conceivable relation to light, 
 heat (and whatever else we distinguish as imponderable sub 
 stances), to earth, air, water, to the supposed constituents of air 
 and water, separate and in all proportions in short, all that 
 chemical agents and re-agents can disclose or adduce ; all these 
 have been brought, as conscripts, into the field, with the com- 
 pletest accoutrement, in the best discipline, under the ablest com 
 manders. Yet after all that was effected by Linna3us himself, 
 not to mention the labors of Gesner,^ Ca3salpinus,f Ray,$ Tourne- 
 fort, and the other heroes who preceded the general adoption of 
 the sexual system, as the basis of artificial arrangement ; after 
 all the successive toils and enterprises of Hedwig,H Jussieu, Mir- 
 bel,U Sir James Smith, Knight, Ellis, and others, what is bot 
 any at this present hour ? Little more than an enormous nomen 
 clature ; a huge catalogue, well arranged, and yearly and monthly 
 augmented, in various editions, each with its own scheme of 
 technical memory and its own conveniences of reference. A dic 
 tionary in which (to carry on the metaphor) an Ainsworth ar 
 ranges the contents by the initials ; a Walker by the endings ; a 
 Scapula by the radicals ; and a Cominius by the similarity of 
 the uses and purposes. The terms system, method, science, are 
 mere improprieties of courtesy, when applied to a mass enlarging 
 *by endless appositions, but without a nerve that oscillates, or a 
 pulse that throbs, in sign of growth or inward sympathy. The 
 innocent amusement, the healthful occupation, the ornamental 
 accomplishment of amateurs (most honorable indeed and deserv 
 ing of all praise as a preventive substitute for the stall, the ken 
 nel, and the subscription-room), it has yet to expect the devotion 
 and energies of the philosopher. 
 
 * Conrad G-. who died in 1568. See his Letters. Ed. 
 
 \ Libri xv. De Plantis. Ed. 
 
 \MethodusPlantarum nova. 1682. Historia Plantarum. 1686-7-1704. 
 Ed. 
 
 % Element de Botanique ; ou, Methode pour connaitre les Plantes. 1694. 
 Ed. 
 
 || Theoria generations* el fructificationis plantarum cryptogamtcarum 
 Linnai. 1784-. Cryptogamia. 1787. Ed. 
 
 ^f Histoire generate et particuliere des plantes ; ou, Traite de physiologie 
 vegetale. Exposition de la theorie de T organisation vegetale. 1 805. Ele- 
 vnens de physiologie vegetale et de botanique. 1815. Ed. 
 
ESSAY VI. 427 
 
 So long back as the first appearance of Dr. Darwin s PTiyto- 
 logia, I, then* in earliest manhood, presumed to hazard the opin 
 ion, that the physiological botanists were hunting in a false 
 direction, and sought for analogy where they should have looked 
 for antithesis. I saw, or thought I saw, that the harmony be 
 tween the vegetable and animal world, was not a harmony of 
 resemblance, but of contrast ; and that their relation to each 
 other was that of corresponding opposites. They seemed to rne, 
 whose mind had been formed by observation, unaided, but at the 
 same time unenthralled, by partial experiment, as two streams 
 from the same fountain indeed, but flowing the one due west, 
 and the other direct east, and that consequently, the resemblance 
 would be as the proximity, greatest in the first and rudimental pro 
 ducts of vegetable and animal organization. Whereas, accord 
 ing to the received notion, the highest and most perfect vege 
 table, and the lowest and rudest animal forms, ought to have 
 seemed the links of the two systems, which is contrary to fact. 
 Since that time, the same idea has dawned in the minds of philos 
 ophers capable of demonstrating its objective truth by induction 
 of facts in an unbroken series of correspondences in nature. 
 From these men, or from minds enkindled by their labors, we 
 may hope hereafter to receive it, or rather the yet higher idea to 
 which it refers us, matured into laws of organic nature, and 
 thence to have one other splendid proof, that with the knowl 
 edge of law alon e dwell power and prophecy, decisive experi 
 ment, and, lastly, a scientific method, that dissipating with its 
 earliest rays the gnomes of hypothesis and the rnists of theory 
 may, within a single generation, open out on the philosophic seer 
 discoveries that had baffled the gigantic, but blind and guideless, 
 industry of ages. 
 
 Such, too, is the case with the assumed indecomponible sub 
 stances of the laboratory. They are the symbols of elementary 
 powers, and the exponents of a law, which, as the root of all 
 these powers, the chemical philosopher, whatever his theory 
 may be, is instinctively laboring to extract. This instinct, again, 
 is itself but the form, in which the idea, the mental correlative 
 of the law, first announces its incipient germination in his own 
 mind : and hence proceeds the striving after unity of principle 
 through all the diversity of forms, with a feeling resembling that 
 * 1801. JheZoonomia was published in 1793. Ed. 
 
428 THE FRIEND. 
 
 which accompanies our endeavors to recollect a forgotten name ; 
 when we seem at once to have and not to have it ; which the 
 memory feels but can not find. Thus, as " the lunatic, the lover, 
 and the poet,"* suggest each the other to Shakspeare s Theseus, 
 as soon as his thoughts present to him the one form, of which 
 they are but varieties ; so water and flame, the diamond, the 
 charcoal, and the mantling champagne, with its ebullient spar 
 kles, are convoked and fraternized by the theory of the chemist. 
 This is, in truth, the first charm of chemistry, and the secret of 
 the almost universal interest excited by its discoveries. The 
 serious complacency which is afforded by the sense of truth, 
 utility, performance, and progression, blends with and ennobles 
 the exhilarating surprise and the pleasurable sting of curiosity, 
 which accompany the propounding and the solving of an enigma. 
 It is the sense of a principle of connection given by the mind, 
 and sanctioned by the correspondency of nature. Hence the 
 strong hold which in all ages chemistry has had on the imagina 
 tion. If in Shakspeare we find nature idealized into poetry, 
 through the creative power of a profound yet observant medita 
 tion, so through the meditative observation of a Davy, a Wollas- 
 ton, or a Hatchett ; 
 
 By some connatural force, 
 
 Powerful at greatest distance to unite 
 With secret amity things of like kind, 
 
 we find poetry, as it were, substantiated and realized in nature, 
 
 yea, nature itself disclosed to us, geminam istam naturam, quce 
 
 fit etfacit, et creat et creatur, as at once the poet and the poem. 
 
 * Mids. Night s Dream, act v. sc. 1. Ed. 
 
ESSAY VII. 
 
 Tavry TOIVVV dtaipu x&P l C f* v > ^f v ^ v ^ e^eyef <j>i%o6ed/Ltovd(; re, not 
 , KO.} x^P L ^ a v KEpt ^ v o Aoyof, ovg fiovovg dv Tig 
 
 g fj.lv -ytyvcjaKovrag, rivoq e?iv Ktc?j/ 
 TVOVTUV TUV tTUfrfauv, 6 ruy^avet ov a/t/lo avr?^ Tr/g ^rtf^^f PLATO. 
 
 In the following then I distinguish, first, those whom you indeed may 
 call philotheorists, or philotechnists, or practicians, and secondly those 
 whom alone you may rightly denominate philosophers, as knowing what 
 the science of all these branches of science is, which may prove to be some 
 thing more than the mere aggregate of the knowledge in any particular 
 
 FROM Shakspeare to Plato, from the philosophic poet to the 
 poetic philosopher, the transition is easy, and the road is crowded 
 with illustrations of our present subject. For of Plato s works, 
 the larger and more valuable portion have all one common end, 
 which comprehends and shines through the particular purpose of 
 each several dialogue ; and this is to establish the sources, to 
 evolve the principles, and exemplify the art of method. This is 
 the clue, without which it would be difficult to exculpate the 
 noblest productions of the divine philosopher from the charge of 
 being tortuous and labyrinthine in their progress, and unsatisfac 
 tory in their ostensible results. The latter indeed appear not 
 seldom to have been drawn for the purpose of starting a new 
 problem, rather than that of solving the one proposed as the sub 
 ject of the previous discussion. But with the clear insight that 
 the purpose of the writer is not so much to establish any particu 
 lar truth, as to remove the obstacles, the continuance of which is 
 preclusive of all truth, the whole scheme assumes a different as 
 pect, and justifies itself in all its dimensions. We see, that to 
 open anew a well of springing water, not to cleanse the stagnant 
 tank, or fill, bucket by bucket, the leaden cistern ; that the educa 
 tion of the intellect, by awakening the principle and method pf 
 
430 THE FKIEND. 
 
 self-development, was his proposed object, not any specific infor 
 mation that can be conveyed into it from without ; not to assist 
 in. storing the passive mind with the various sorts of knowledge 
 most in request, as if the human soul were a mere repository or 
 baiiqueting-room, but to place it in such relations of circumstance 
 as should gradually excite the germinal power that craves no 
 knowledge but what it can take up into itself, what it can appro 
 priate, and reproduce in fruits of its own. To shape, to dye, to 
 paint over, and to mechanize the mind, he resigned, as their 
 proper trade, to the sophists, against whom he waged open and 
 unremitting war. For the ancients, as well as the moderns, had 
 their machinery for the extemporaneous mintage of intellects, by 
 means of which, off-hand, as it were, the scholar was enabled to 
 make a figure on any and all subjects, on any and all occasions. 
 They too had their glittering vapors, which (as the comic poet 
 tells us) fed a host of sophists 
 
 deal dvdpdoiv dpyolf, 
 alirep yvuftqv, Kal 6idhe%iv, not vovv fjfuv 
 not repareiav, not Trepihegtv, not Kpovaiv, nac /cara/l7?i/w.* 
 
 Great goddesses are they to lazy folks, 
 Who pour down on us gifts of fluent speech, 
 Sense most sententious, wonderful fine effect, 
 And how to talk about it and about it, 
 Thoughts brisk as bees, and pathos soft and thawy. 
 
 In fine, as improgressive arrangement is not method, so neither 
 is a mere mode or set fashion of doing a thing. Are further facts 
 required ? I appeal to the notorious fact that zoology, soon after 
 the commencement of the latter half of the last century, was 
 falling abroad, weighed down and crushed, as it were, by the in 
 ordinate number and manifoldness of facts and phenomena ap 
 parently separate, without evincing the least promise of systema 
 tizing itself by any inward combination, any vital interdependence, 
 of its parts. John Hunter, who appeared at times almost a stran 
 ger to the grand conception, which yet never ceased to work in 
 him as his genius and governing spirit, rose at length in the hori 
 zon of physiology and comparative anatomy. In his printed 
 wodts, the one directing thought seems evermore to flit before 
 him, twice or thrice only to have been seized, and after a momen- 
 
 * Aristoph. Nubes. 316, &c.Ed. 
 
ESSAY VII. 431 
 
 tary detention to have been again let go : as if the words of the 
 charm had been incomplete, and it had appeared at its own will 
 only to mock his calling. At -length, in the astonishing prepara 
 tions for his museum, he constructed it for the scientific appre 
 hension out of the unspoken alphabet of nature. Yet notwith 
 standing the imperfection in the annunciation of the idea, how 
 exhilarating have been the results ! I dare appeal to* Aber- 
 nethy, to Everard Home, to Hatchett, whose communication to 
 Sir Everard on the egg and its analogies, in a recent paper of the 
 latter (itself of high excellence) in the Philosophical Transactions, 
 1 may point out as being, in the proper sense of the term, the de 
 velopment of a fact in the history of physiology, and to which I 
 refer as exhibiting a luminous instance of what I mean by the 
 discovery of a central phenomenon. To these I appeal, whether 
 whatever is grandest in the views of Cuvier be not either a reflec 
 tion of this light or a continuation of its rays, well and wisely 
 directed through fit media to the appropriate object, f 
 
 We have seen that a previous act and conception of the mind 
 is indispensable even to the mere semblances of method ; that 
 neither fashion, mode, nor orderly arrangement can be produced 
 without a prior purpose, and a pre-cogitation ad intentioncm cjus 
 quod quceritur, though this purpose may have been itself excited, 
 and this pre-cogitation itself abstracted from the perceived like 
 nesses and differences of the objects to be arranged. But it has 
 likewise been shown, that fashion, mode, ordonnance, are not 
 method, inasmuch as all method supposes a principle of unity 
 with progression ; in other words, progressive transition without 
 breach of continuity. But such a principle, it has been proved, 
 
 * Since this was written, Mr. Abernethy has realized this anticipation, 
 dictated solely by my wishes, and at the time justified only by my general 
 admiration of Mr. A. s talents and principles, and composed without the 
 least knowledge that he was then actually engaged in proving the assertion 
 here hazarded, at large and in detail. See his eminent Treatise on Physi 
 ology, 1821. 
 
 f Nor should it be wholly unnoticed, that Cuvier, who, I understand, 
 was not born in France, and is not of unmixed French extraction, had pre 
 pared himself for his illustrious labors (as I learn from a reference *in the 
 first chapter of his great work, and should have concluded from the general 
 style of thinking, though the language betrays suppression, as of one who 
 doubted the sympathy of his readers or audience) in a very different school 
 of methodology and philosophy than any which Paris could have afforded. 
 

 432 THE FRIEND. 
 
 can never in the sciences of experiment or in those of observation 
 be adequately supplied by a theory built on generalization. For 
 what shall determine the mind to abstract and generalize one 
 common point rather than another ; and within what limits", 
 from what number of individual objects, shall the generalization 
 be made ? The theory must still require a prior theory for its 
 own legitimate construction. With the mathematician the defi-> 
 nition makes the object, and pre-establishes the terms which, 
 and which alone, can occur in the after-reasoning. If a circle 
 be found not to have the radii from the centre to the circumfer 
 ence perfectly equal, which in fact it would be absurd to expect 
 of any material circle, it follows only that it was not a circle ; 
 and the tranquil geometrician would content himself with smil 
 ing at the quid pro quo of the simple objector. A mathemat 
 ical thcoria seu contemplatio may therefore be perfect. For the 
 mathematician can be certain that he has contemplated all that 
 appertains to his proposition. The celebrated Euler, treating on 
 some point respecting arches, makes this curious remark : " All 
 experience is in contradiction to this; sed potius fidendum est 
 analyst ; but this is no reason for doubting the analysis." The 
 words sound paradoxical ; but in truth mean no more than this, 
 that the properties of space are not less certainly the properties 
 of space because they can never be entirely transferred to mate- 
 rial bodies. But in physics, that is, in all the sciences which 
 have for their objects the things of nature, and not the entia ra- 
 tionis more philosophically, intellectual acts and the products 
 of those acts, existing exclusively in and for the intellect itself 
 the definition must follow, and not precede, the reasoning. It is 
 representative not constitutive, and is indeed little more than an 
 abbreviature of the preceding observation, and the deductions 
 therefrom. But as the observation, though aided by experiment, 
 is necessarily limited and imperfect, the definition must be equally 
 so. The history of theories, and the frequency of their subver 
 sion by the discovery of a single new fact, supply the best illus 
 trations of this truth.* 
 
 * The following extract from a most respectable scientific Journal con 
 tains an exposition of the impossibility of a perfect theory in physics, the 
 more striking because it is directly against the purpose and intention of 
 the writer. I content myself with one question, what if Kepler, what if 
 Newton in his investigations concerning the tides, had holden themselves 
 
ESSAY VII. -433 
 
 As little can a true scientific method be grounded on an hy 
 pothesis, unless where the hypothesis is an exponential image or 
 picture-language of an idea which is contained in it more or less 
 clearly ; or the symbol of an undiscovered law, like the charac 
 ters of unknown quantities in algebra, for the purpose of submit 
 ting the phenomena to a scientific calculus. In all other in 
 stances, it is itself a real or supposed phenomenon, and there 
 fore a part of the problem which it is to solve. It may be 
 among the foundation-stones of the edifice, but can never be the 
 ground. 
 
 But in experimental philosophy, it may be said how much do 
 we not owe to accident ? Doubtless : but let it not be forgotten, 
 that if the discoveries so made stop there ; if they do not excite 
 some master idea ; if they do riot lead to some law (in whatever 
 dress of theory or hypothesis the fashions and prejudices of the 
 time may disguise or disfigure it) ; the discoveries may remain 
 for ages limited in their uses, insecure and unproductive. How 
 many centuries, we might have said millennia, have passed, since 
 the first accidental discovery of the attraction and repulsion of 
 
 bound to this canon, and, instead of propounding a law, had employed 
 themselves exclusively in collecting materials for a theory ? 
 
 " The magnetic influence has long been known to have a variation which 
 is constantly changing ; but that change is so slow, and at the same time so 
 different in various parts of the world, that it would be in vain to seek for 
 the means of reducing it to established rules, until all its local and particu 
 lar circumstances are clearly ascertained and recorded by accurate observa 
 tions made in various parts of the globe. The necessity and importance 
 of such observations are now pretty generally understood, and they have 
 been actually carrying on for some years past ; but these (and by parity of 
 reason the incomparably greater number that remain to be made) must be 
 collected, collated, proved, and afterwards brought together into one focus 
 before ever a foundation can be formed upon which any thing like a sound 
 and stable theory can be constituted for the explanation of such changes." 
 Journal of Science and the Arts, No. vii. p. 103. 
 
 An intelligent friend, on reading the words " into one focus," observed : 
 " But what and where is the lens ?" I however fully agree with the writer. 
 All this and much more must have been achieved before " a sound and sta 
 ble theory" could be " constituted ;" which even then (except as far as it 
 might occasion the discovery of a law) might possibly explain (ex plicis 
 plana reddere), but never account for, the facts in question. But the most 
 satisfactory comment on these and similar assertions would be afforded by 
 a matter of fact history of the rise and progress, the accelerating and re 
 tarding momtnta, of science in the civilized world. 
 
 VOL. II. T 
 
434: THE FRIEND. 
 
 light bodies by rubbed amber ! Compare the interval with the 
 progress made within less than a century, after the discovery of 
 the phenomena that led immediately to a theory of electricity. 
 That here as in many other instances, the theory was supported 
 by insecure hypotheses ; that by one theorist two heterogeneous 
 fluids are assumed, the vitreous and the resinous ; by another, a 
 plus and minus of the same fluid ; that a third considers it a 
 mere modification of light ; while a fourth composes the electri 
 cal aura of oxygen, hydrogen, and caloric ; this does but place 
 the truth we have been evolving in a stronger and clearer light. 
 For abstract from all these suppositions, or rather imaginations, 
 that which is common to, and involved in, them all ; and we shall 
 have neither notional fluid or fluids, nor chemical compounds, nor 
 elementary matter, but the idea of two opposite forces, tend 
 ing to rest by equilibrium. These are the sole factors of the cal 
 culus, alike in all the theories. These give the law, and in it the 
 method, both of arranging the phenomena and of substantiating 
 appearances into facts of science ; with a success proportionate to 
 the clearness or confusedness of the insight into the law. For 
 this, reason, I anticipate the greatest improvements in the 
 method, the nearest approaches to a system of electricity, from 
 these philosophers, who have presented the law most purely, and 
 the correlative idea as an idea ; those, namely, who, since the 
 year 1798, in the true spirit of experimental dynamics, rejecting 
 the imagination of any material substrate, simple or compound, 
 contemplate in the phenomena of electricity the operation of a 
 law which reigns through all nature, the law of polarity, or the 
 manifestation of one power by opposite forces ; who trace in 
 these appearances, as the most obvious and striking of its innu 
 merable forms, the agency of the positive and negative poles of a 
 power essential to all material construction ; the second, namely, 
 of the three primary principles, for which the beautiful and most 
 appropriate symbols are given by the mind in the three ideal di 
 mensions of space.* 
 
 The time is, perhaps, nigh at hand, when the same comparison 
 between the results of two unequal periods, the interval be 
 tween the knowledge of a fact, and that from the discovery of 
 
 * " Perhaps the attribution or analogy may seem fanciful at first sight, 
 but I am in the habit of realizing to myself magnetism as length, electricity 
 as breadth, and galvanism as depth." Table Talk, VI. 284. ^i 
 
ESSAY VII. 435 
 
 the law, will be applicable to the sister science of magnetism. 
 But how great the contrast between magnetism and electricity at 
 the present moment ! From remotest antiquity, the attraction of 
 iron by the magnet was known and noticed ; but, century aftei 
 century, it remained the undisturbed property of poets and ora 
 tors. The fact of the magnet and the fable of the phoenix stood 
 on the same scale of utility. In the thirteenth century, or per 
 haps earlier, the polarity of the magnet, and its communicability 
 to iron, were discovered ; and soon suggested a purpose so grand 
 and important, that it may well be deemed the proudest trophy 
 ever raised by accident* in the service of mankind, the inven 
 tion of the compass. But it led to no idea, to no law, and con 
 sequently to no method : though a variety of phcenomena, as 
 startling as they are mysterious, have forced on us a presentiment 
 of its intimate connection with all the great agencies of nature ; 
 of a revelation, in ciphers, the key to which is still wanting. I 
 can recall no event of human history that impresses the imagina 
 tion more deeply than the moment when Columbus,! on an un- 
 
 * If accident it were ; if the compass did not obscurely travel to us from 
 the remotest east ; if its existence there does not point to an age and a race, 
 to which scholars of highest rank in the world of letters, Sir "W. Jones, 
 Builly, Schlegel have attached faith. That it was known before the aera 
 generally assumed for its invention, and not spoken of as a novelty, has been 
 proved by Mr. South ey and others : (See the Omniana, vol. i. p. 210. No. 
 108, where Mr. Southey quotes a passage from the Partidas (1250-7), 
 very distinctly referring to the mariner s needle. Ed.} 
 
 f It can not be deemed alien from the purposes of this disquisition, if I 
 am anxious to attract the attention of my readers to the importance of 
 speculative meditation, even for the worldly interests of mankind ; and to 
 that concurrence of nature and historic event with the great revolutionary 
 movements of individual genius, of which so many instances occur in the 
 study of history ; to point out how nature, or that which in nature itself 
 is more than nature, seems to come forward in order to meet, to aid, and to 
 reward every idea excited by a contemplation of her methods in the spirit 
 of filial care, and with the humility of love. It is with this view that I ex 
 tract the following lines from an ode of Chiabrera s, which, in the strength 
 of the thought and the lofty majesty of the poetry, has but " few peers in 
 ancient or in modern song." 
 
 Cerlo da cor, ch" alto destin non scelse, 
 
 Son F imprese magnanime neglette ; 
 
 Ma le belV alme allc beW opre elette 
 
 Sanno gioir nellc fatiche eccelse ; 
 
 Ne biasmo popolar, frale catena, 
 
 Spirto d onore, il sno cammin raffrena. 
 
436 THE FRIEND. 
 
 known ocean, first perceived one of these startling facts, the 
 change of the magnetic needle. 
 
 In what shall we seek the cause of this contrast between the 
 rapid progress of electricity and the stationary condition of mag 
 netism ? As many theories, as many hypotheses, have been ad 
 vanced in the latter science as in the former. But the theories 
 and fictions of the electricians contained an idea, and all the same 
 idea, which has necessarily led to method ; implicit indeed, and 
 only regulative hitherto, but which requires little more than the 
 dismission of the imagery to become constitutive like the ideas 
 of the geometrician. On the contrary, the assumptions of the 
 magnetists (as for instance, the hypothesis that the planet itself is 
 one vast magnet, or that an immense magnet is concealed within 
 it, or that of a concentric globe within the earth, revolving on its 
 own independent axis), are but repetitions of the same fact or 
 phenomenon looked at through a magnifying glass ; the reitera 
 tion of the problem, not its solution. The naturalist, who can 
 not or will not see, that one fact is often worth a thousand, as in 
 cluding them all in itself, and that it first makes all the other 
 facts, who has not the head to comprehend, the soul to rev 
 erence, a central experiment or observation (what the Greeks 
 would perhaps have called a protophanomenon), will never re 
 ceive an auspicious answer from the oracle of nature. 
 
 Cost lunga stagion per modi indegni 
 
 E liropa disprezzo Vinclita speme, 
 
 Schernendo il vulgo e seco i regi insieme, 
 
 Nudo nocchier promcttitor di regni ; 
 
 Ma per le sconosciute onde marine 
 
 L invitta prora ei pur sospinse alfine. 
 Qual uom, che torni alia gentil consorte, 
 
 Tal ei da sua magion spiego Vantenne ; 
 
 Ij ocean corse, e i turbini sostenne, 
 
 Vinse le crude immagini di morte ; 
 
 Poscia, delV arnpio mar spenta la guerra, 
 
 Scorse la dianzi favolosa terra. 
 Allor dal cavo pin scende veloce, 
 
 E di grand orma il nuovo mondo imprime ; 
 
 Ne men ratio per Taria erge sublime. 
 
 Segno del del, Pinsuperabil croce ; 
 
 E porge umile escmpio, onde adorarla 
 
 Debba sua genie. CHIABEEEA, P. L 12. 
 
ESSAY VIII. 
 
 The soul dotli give 
 
 Brightness to the eye : aud some say, that the sun 
 If uot enlighten d by th Intelligence 
 That dotli inhabit it, would shine no more 
 Than a dull clod of earth. 
 
 CABTWBIGHT S Lady-Errant, act iii. sc. iv. 
 
 IT is strange, yet characteristic of the spirit that was at work 
 during the latter half of the last century, and of which the 
 French revolution was, I hope, the closing monsoon, that the 
 writings of Plato should be accused of estranging the mind from 
 sober experience and substantial matter of fact, and of debauching 
 it by fictions and generalities ; Plato, whose method is induct 
 ive throughout, who argues on all subjects not only from, but in 
 and by, inductions of facts ; who warns us indeed against that 
 usurpation of the senses, which quenching the lumen siccum of 
 the mind, sends it astray after individual cases for their own 
 sakes against that tenuem ct manipularem experientiam, which 
 remains ignorant even of the transitory relations, to which the 
 pauca particularia of its idolatry not seldom owe their fluxional 
 existence ; but who so far oftener, and with such unmitigated 
 hostility, pursues the assumptions, abstractions, generalities, and 
 verbal legerdemain of the sophists ! Strange, but still more 
 strange, that a notion so groundless should be entitled to plead 
 in its behalf the authority of Lord Bacon, from whom the Latin 
 words in the preceding sentence are taken, and whose scheme of 
 logic, as applied to the contemplation of nature, is Platonic 
 throughout, and differing only in the mode, which in Lord Bacon 
 is dogmatic, that is, assertory, in Plato tentative, arid (to adopt 
 the Socratic phrase) obstetric. I am not the first, or even among 
 the first, who have considered Bacon s studied depreciation of the 
 ancients, with his silence, or worse than silence, concerning the 
 merits of his contemporaries, as the least amiable, the least ex- 
 
438 THE FRIEND. 
 
 hilarating, side in the character of our illustrious countryman. 
 His detractions from the divine Plato it is more easy to explain 
 than to justify or even to palliate ; and that he has merely re 
 taliated Aristotle s own unfair treatment of his predecessors and 
 contemporaries, may lessen the pain, but should not blind us to 
 the injustice of the aspersions on the name and works of that 
 philosopher. The most eminent of our recent zoologists and 
 mineralogists have acknowledged with respect, and even with 
 expressions of wonder, the performances of Aristotle, as the first 
 clearer and breaker-up of the ground in natural history. It is 
 indeed scarcely possible to peruse the treatise on colors,* falsely 
 ascribed to Theophrastus, the scholar and successor of Aristotle, 
 after a due consideration of the state and means of science at 
 that time, without resenting the assertion, that he had utterly 
 enslaved his investigations in natural history to his own system 
 " of logic (logiccB sucz prorsus mancipavit.)^ Nor let it be for 
 gotten that the sunny side of Lord Bacon s character is to be 
 found neither in his inductions, nor in the application of his own 
 method to particular phenomena or particular classes of physi 
 cal facts, which are at least as crude* for the age of Gilbert, $ 
 Galileo, and Kepler, as Aristotle s for that of Philip and Alexan 
 der. Nor is it to be found in his recommendation (which is 
 wholly independent of his inestimable principles of scientific 
 method) of tabular collections of particulars. Let any unpreju 
 diced naturalist turn to Lord Bacon s questions and proposals for 
 the investigation of single problems ; to his Discourse on the 
 Winds ; or to the almost comical caricature of this scheme in the 
 Method of improving Natural Philosophy, by Robert Hooke (the 
 history of w r hose multifold inventions, and indeed of his whole 
 philosophical life, is the best answer to the scheme, if a scheme 
 so palpably impracticable needs any answer), and put it to his 
 conscience, whether any desirable end could be hoped for from 
 such a process; or inquire of his own experience, or historical 
 recollections, whether any important discovery was ever made in 
 this way. For though Bacon never so far deviates from his 
 
 * The Ilepl Xpw/zarwv is not now, I believe, considered genuine. Ed. 
 
 f Nov. Org. Aph. LIV. 
 
 j William Gilbert died in 1603. His works are De Magnete, <fec. 1600, 
 and De Mundo, &G. U5l.Ed. 
 
 I refer the reader to Hooke s Posthumous Works (Hooke died in 1702. 
 Ed.) published under the auspices of the Royal Society, by their Secre- 
 
ESSAY VIII. 439 
 
 own principles, as not to admonish the reader that the particu 
 lars are to be thus collected, only that by careful selection they 
 may be concentrated into universals ; yet so immense is their 
 number, and so various and almost endless the relations in which 
 each is to be separately considered, that the life of an antedilu 
 vian patriarch would have been expended, and his strength and 
 spirits wasted, in merely polling- the votes, and long before he 
 could have commenced the process of simplification, or have ar 
 rived in sight of the law which was to reward the toils of the 
 over -tasked Psyche.*" 
 
 tary, Richard Waller, and especially to the pages from p. 22 to 42 inclu 
 sive, as containing tke preliminary knowledge requisite or desirable for the 
 naturalist, before he can form " even a foundation upon which any thing 
 like a sound and stable theory can be constituted." As a small specimen 
 of this appalling catalogue of preliminaries with which he is to make him 
 self conversant, take the following : The history of potters, tobacco-pipe- 
 makers, glaziers, glass-grinders, looking-glass-makers or foilers, spectacle- 
 makers and optie-glass-makers, makers of counterfeit pearl and precious 
 stones, bugle-makers, lamp-blowers, color-makers, color-grinders, glass- 
 painters, enamellers, varnishers, color -sellers, painters, limners, picture- 
 drawers, makers of baby -heads, of little bowling-stones or marbles, fustian- 
 makers (quccre whether poets are included in this trade) music-masters, 
 tinsey-makere, and taggers ; the history of schoolmasters, writing-masters, 
 printers, book-binders, stage-players, dancing-masters, and vaulters, apothe 
 caries, chirurgeons, seamsters, butchers, barbers, laundresses, and cosmetics, 
 <fce. (the true nature of which being actually determined) will hugely facili 
 tate our inquiries in philosophy. 
 
 As a summary of Dr. R. Hooke s multifarious recipe for the growth of 
 science may be fairly placed that of the celebrated Dr. Watts for the im 
 provement of the mind, which was thought by Dr. Knox to be worthy of 
 insertion in the Elegant Extracts, voL ii. p. 456, under the head of 
 
 DIRECTIONS CONCERNING OUR IDEAS. 
 
 " Furnish yourselves with a rich variety of ideas. Acquaint yourselves 
 with things ancient and modern ; things natural, civil, and religious ; things 
 of your native land, and of foreign countries ; things domestic and national ; 
 things present, past, and future ; and above all, be well acquainted with 
 God and yourselves ; with animal nature, ami the workings of your own 
 spirits. Such a general acquaintance with things will be of very great 
 advantage." 
 
 * See the beautiful allegoric tale of Cupid and Psyche, in the original 
 of Apuleius, (De Asino aureo, L. iv. v. vi. Ed.) The tasks imposed on her 
 by the jealousy of her mother-in-law, and the agency by which they are at 
 length self-performed, arc noble instances of that bidden wisdom, "where 
 more is meant than meets the ear," 
 
440 THE FRIEND. 
 
 I yield to none in grateful veneration of Lord Bacon s philo 
 sophical writings. I. am proud of his very name, as a lover of 
 knowledge ; and as an Englishman, I am almost vain of it. 
 But I may not permit the honest workings of national attach 
 ment to degenerate into the jealous and indiscriminate partiality 
 of clanship. Unawed by such as praise and abuse by wholesale, 
 I dare avow that there are points in the character of our Veru- 
 lam, from which I turn to the life and labors of John Kepler,* a^s 
 from gloom to sunshine. The beginning and the close of his life 
 were clouded by poverty and domestic troubles, while the inter 
 mediate years were comprised within the most tumultuous period 
 of the history of his country, when the furies of religious and po 
 litical discord had left neither eye, ear, nor heart for the muses. 
 But Kepler seemed bom to prove that true genius can overpower 
 all obstacles. If he gives an account of his modes of proceeding, 
 and of the views under which they first occurred to his mind, 
 how unostentatiously and in transitu, as it were, does he intro 
 duce himself to our notice ; and yet never fails to present the 
 living germ out of which the genuine method, as the inner form 
 of the tree of science, springs up ! With what affectionate rever 
 ence does he express himself of his master and immediate prede 
 cessor, Tycho Brahe ; with what zeal does he vindicate his ser 
 vices against posthumous detraction ! How often and how glad 
 ly does he speak of Copernicus ; and with what fervent tones 
 of faith and consolation does he proclaim the historic fact that 
 the great men of all ages have prepared the way for each other, 
 as pioneers and hqralds ! Equally just to the ancients and to 
 his contemporaries, how circumstantially, and with what exact 
 ness of detail, does Kepler demonstrate that Euclid Copernicizes 
 &s TTQO KoTisQi ixov xoTtsQivxi ^ei EvxXsidrjg, how elegant the com 
 pliments which he addresses to Porta, and with what cordiality 
 he thanks him for the invention of the camera obscura, as en 
 larging his views into the laws of vision ! But while I can not 
 avoid contrasting this generous enthusiasm with Lord -Bacon s 
 cold and invidious treatment of Gilbert, and his assertion that the 
 works of Plato and Aristotle had been carried down the stream 
 of time, like straws, by their levity alone, when things of weight 
 and worth had sunk to the bottom ; still in the founder of a rev- 
 
 * Born 1571, ten years after Lord Bacon: died 1630, four years after 
 the death of Bacon. 
 
ESSAY VIII. 441 
 
 olution, scarcely less important for the scientific, and even for 
 the commercial, world than that of Luther for the world of reli 
 gion and politics, we must allow much to the heat of protesta 
 tion, much to the vehemence of hope, and much to the vividness 
 of novelty. Still more must we attribute to the then existing 
 and actual state of the Platonic and Peripatetic philosophies, or 
 rather to the dreams or verbiage which then passed current as 
 such. Had Bacon but attached to their proper authors the 
 schemes and doctrines which he condemns, our illustrious coun 
 tryman would, in this point, at least, have needed no apology. 
 And surely no lovor of truth, conversant with the particulars of 
 Lord Bacon s life, with the very early, almost boyish, age at 
 which he quitted the university, and the manifold occupations 
 and anxieties in which his public and professional duties engaged, 
 and his courtly, alas ! his servile, prostitute, and mendicant 
 ambition entangled him, in his after-years, Avill be either sur 
 prised or offended, though I should avow my conviction, that he 
 had derived his opinions of Plato and Aristotle from any source, 
 rather than from a dispassionate and patient study of the origi 
 nals themselves. At all events it will be no easy task to recon 
 cile many passages in the De Augmentis, and the Redargutio 
 Philosophiarum, with the author s own fundamental principles, 
 as established in his Novum Organum ; if we attach to the 
 words the meaning which they may bear, or even, in some in 
 stances, the meaning which might appear to us, in the present 
 age, more obvious ; instead of the sense in which they were em 
 ployed by the professors, whose false premises and barren meth 
 ods Bacon was at that time controverting. And this historical 
 interpretation is rendered the more necessary by his fondness for 
 point and antithesis in his style, where we must often disturb the 
 sound in order to arrive at the sense. But with these precau 
 tions ; and if, in collating the philosophical works of Lord Ba 
 con with those of Plato, we, in both cases alike, separate the 
 grounds and essential principles of their philosophic systems from 
 the inductions themselves ; no inconsiderable portion of which, 
 in the British sage, as well as in the divine Athenian, is neither 
 more nor less crude and erroneous than might be anticipated 
 from the infant state of natural history, chemistry, and physiol 
 ogy, in their several ages; and if we moreover separate the 
 principles from their practical application, which in both is not 
 
 T * 
 
442 THE FRIEND. 
 
 seldom impracticable, and, in our countryman, not always recon 
 cilable with the principles themselves ; we shall not only ex 
 tract that from each which is for all ages, and which constitutes 
 their true systems of philosophy, but shall convince ourselves that 
 they are radically one and the same system ; in that, namely, 
 which is of universal and imperishable worth, the science of 
 method, and the grounds and conditions of the science of method. 
 
 ESSAY IX. 
 
 A great authority may be a poor proof, but it is an excellent presump 
 tion : and few things give a wise man a truer delight than to reconcile two 
 great authorities, that had been commonly but falsely held to be dissonant. 
 
 STAPYLTON. 
 
 UNDER a deep impression of the importance of the truths I 
 have essayed to develop, I would fain remove every prejudice 
 that does not originate in the heart rather than in the understand 
 ing. For truth, says the wise man, will not enter a malevolent 
 spirit. 
 
 To offer or to receive names in lieu of sound arguments, is only 
 less reprehensible than an ostentatious contempt of the great men 
 of former ages ; but we may well and wisely avail ourselves of 
 authorities, in confirmation of truth, and above all, in the removal 
 of prejudices founded on imperfect information. I do not see, 
 therefore, how I can more appropriately conclude this first, ex 
 planatory and controversial section of the inquiry, than by a 
 brief statement of our renowned countryman s own principles of 
 method, conveyed for the greater part in his own words. Nor 
 do I see, in what more precise form I can recapitulate the sub 
 stance of the doctrines asserted and vindicated in the preceding 
 pages. For I rest my strongest pretensions to a calm and respect 
 ful perusal, in the first instance, on. the fact, that I have only re- 
 proclaimed the coinciding prescripts of the Athenian Verulam, 
 arid the British Plato genuinam scilicet Platonis dialecticcm, 
 et methodologiam principialem. 
 
ESSAY IX. 443 
 
 FRANC ISC t DE VERULAMIO. 
 
 Ill the first instance, Lord Bacon equally with myself demands 
 what I have ventured to call the intellectual or mental initia 
 tive, as the. motive and guide of every philosophical experiment ; 
 some well-grounded purpose, some distinct impression of the 
 probable results, some self-consistent anticipation as the ground 
 of the prudcns quccstio, the forethoughtful query, which he 
 affirms to be the prior half of the knowledge sought, dimidium 
 scientice. With him, therefore, as with me, an idea is an experi 
 ment proposed, an experiment is an idea realized. For so, 
 though in other words, he himself informs us : ncquc id molimur 
 tarn instrumentis quani experimentis ; ctenim expcrimentorum 
 longe major cst subtilitas quam sensus ipaius, licet instruments 
 exquisitis adjuti. De Us loquimur experimentis, quce ad inten- 
 tionem ejus quod quceritur perite et sccundum artem excogitata et 
 apposita sunt. Itaque perceptions sensus immediatce ac pi opria 
 -non midtum tribuimus : sed eo rein deducimus, ut sensus tantum 
 de expcrimento, cxperimentum de re, judicet. This last sentence 
 is, as the attentive reader will have himself detected, one 6f those 
 faulty verbal antitheses not unfrequent in Lord Bacon s writings. 
 Pungent antitheses, and the analogies of wit in which the resem 
 blance is too often more indebted to the double or equivocal 
 sense of a word, than to any real conformity* in the thing or 
 image, form the didcia vitia of his style, the Dalilahs of our 
 philosophical Samson. But in this instance, as indeed throughout 
 all his works, the meaning is clear and evident ; namely, that 
 the sense can apprehend, through the organs of sense, only the 
 plucnomcim evoked by the experiment : vis vero mentis ea, quce 
 experimentum excogitaverat, de re judicet : that is, that power, 
 which out of its ow r n conceptions had shaped the experiment, 
 must alone determine the true import of the pli&nomena. If 
 again we ask, what it is which gives birth to the question, and 
 then ad intentioncm qucestionis suce experimentum cxcogitat, 
 undede re judicet, the answer is, luxintellcctus, lumen siccum, 
 the pure and impersonal reason, freed from all the various idols 
 
 * Thus (to take the first instance that occurs), Bacon says, that some 
 knowledges, like the stars, are so high that they give no light. Where the 
 word, " high," means " deep or sublime," in the one case, and " distant" in 
 the other. 
 
444 THE FRIEND. 
 
 enumerated by our great legislator of science (idola trifrus, specus, 
 fori, thcatri) ; that is, freed from the limits, the passions, the 
 prejudices, the peculiar habits of the human . understanding, 
 natural or acquired ; but above all, pure from the arrogance, 
 which leads man to take the forms and mechanism of his own 
 mere reflective faculty, as the measure of nature and of Deity. 
 In this indeed we find the great object both of Plato s and of Lord 
 Bacon s labors. They both saw that there could be no hope of 
 any fruitful and secure method, while forms, merely subjective, 
 were presumed as the true and proper moulds of objective truth. 
 This is the sense in which Lord Bacon uses the phrases, intellec- 
 tus hum anus, mem hominis, so profoundly and justly char 
 acterized in the preliminary essay to the Novum Organum.* 
 And with all right and propriety did he so apply them : for 
 this was, in fact, the sense in which the phrases were applied by 
 the teachers, whom he is controverting ; by the doctors of the 
 schools, and the visionaries of the laboratory. To adopt the bold 
 but happy phrase of a late ingenious French writer, it is the 
 homme particuli&r, as contrasted with Vliomme general, against 
 which,. Heraclitus and Plato, among the ancients, and among the 
 moderns, Bacon and Stewart (rightly understood), warn and pre- 
 admonish the sincere inquirer. Most truly, and in strict conso 
 nance with his two great predecessors, does our immortal Yeru- 
 lam teach, that the human understanding, even independently 
 of the causes that always, previously to its purification by philos 
 ophy, render it more or less turbid or uneven, sicut speculum 
 inccquale rerum radios ex figura et sectione propria immutat ;f 
 that our understanding not only reflects the objects subjectively, 
 that is, substitutes for the inherent laws and properties of the ob 
 jects the relations which the objects bear to its own particular 
 constitution ; but that in all its conscious presentations and re 
 flexes, it is itself only a pJicenomcnon of the inner sense, and re 
 quires the same corrections as the appearances transmitted by the 
 outward senses. But that there is potentially, ilftot actually, in 
 every rational being, a somewhat, call it what you will, the pure 
 reason, the spirit, lumen siccum, vovg, q>w$ roegov, intellectual 
 intuition, or the like, and that in this are to be found the indis 
 pensable conditions of all science, and scientific research, whether 
 meditative, contemplative, or experimental, is often expressed, 
 * Distributio Operis. Ed. } Nov. Org. Distrib. Operis. Ed. 
 
ESSAY IX. 445 
 
 and everywhere supposed, by Lord Bacon. And that this is not 
 only the right but the possible nature of the human mind, to 
 which it is capable of being restored, is implied in the various 
 remedies prescribed by him for its diseases, and in the various 
 means of neutralizing or converting into useful instrumentality 
 the imperfections which can not be removed. There is a sublime 
 truth contained in his favorite phrae, idola intcllectus. He thus 
 tells us, that the mind of man is an edifice not built with human 
 hands, which needs only be purged of its idols and idolatrous ser 
 vices to become the temple of the true and living Light. Nay, 
 he has^hown and established the true criterion between the ideas 
 and the idola of the mind ; namely, that the former are mani 
 fested by their adequacy to those ideas in nature, which in and 
 through them are contemplated. Non leve quiddam interest 
 inter humana mentis idola et divines mentis ideas, hoc est, in 
 ter placita qucedam inania et veras signaturas atque impres- 
 sionesfactas in creaturis, prout inveniuntur .* Thus the dif 
 ference, or rather distinction, between Plato and Lord Bacon is 
 simply this : that philosophy being necessarily bipolar, Plato 
 treats principally of the truth, as it manifests itself at the ideal 
 pole, as the science of intellect (de mundo intclligibili) ; while 
 Bacon confines himself, for the most part, to the same truth, as 
 it is manifested at the other or material pole, as the science of 
 nature (de mundo sensibili). It is as necessary, therefore, that 
 Plato should direct his inquiries chiefly to those objective truths 
 that exist in and for the intellect alone, the images and represen 
 tatives of which we construct for ourselves by figure, number, 
 and word ; as that. Lord Bacon should attach his main concern 
 to the truths which have their signatures in nature, and which 
 (as he himself plainly and often asserts) may indeed be revealed 
 to us through and with, but never by the senses, or the faculty 
 of sense. Otherwise, indeed, instead of being more objective than 
 the former (which they are not in any sense, both being in this 
 respect the same), they would be less so; and, in fact, incapable 
 of being insulated from the idola tribus (qucz) snnt fundata in 
 ipsa natura humana, atque in ipsa tribu seu gente hominum. 
 Falso enim asseritur sensum humanum esse mensuram rerum ; 
 quin contra, omnes perceptiones tarn senszts quam mentis, sunt 
 
 * Nov. Org. P. II. Summ. 2B.M. 
 
446 THE FRIEND. 
 
 ex analogia hominis, non ex analogia universi.* Hence too, it 
 will not surprise us, that Plato so often calls ideas living laws, in 
 which the mind has its whole true being and permanence ; or 
 that Bacon, vice versa, names the laws of nature ideas ; and 
 represents what I have in a former part of this disquisition called 
 facts of science and central ph&nomena, as signatures, impres 
 sions, and symbols of ideas. A distinguishable power self-af 
 firmed, and seen in its unity with the Eternal Essence, is, ac 
 cording to Plato, an idea : and the discipline, by which the hu 
 man mind is purified from its idols (ettfwAa), and raised to the 
 contemplation of ideas, and thence to the secure and ever-pro 
 gressive, though never-ending, investigation of truth and reality 
 by scientific method, comprehends what the same philosopher so 
 highly extols under the title of dialectic. According to Lord Ba 
 con, as describing the same truth seen from the opposite point, 
 and applied to natural philosophy, an idea would be defined as 
 intuitlo sive inventio, quce in perceptions sensus non est (ut quce 
 puree et sicci luminis intellectioni est propria) idearum divines, 
 mentis, prout in creaturis per signaturas suas sese patefaciant. 
 " That (saith the judicious Hooker) which doth assign unto each 
 thing the kind, that which doth moderate the force and power, 
 that which doth appoint the form and measure, of working, the 
 same we term a law."f 
 
 We can now, as men furnished with fit and respectable cre 
 dentials, proceed to the historic importance and practical appli 
 cation of method, under the deep and solemn conviction, that 
 without this guiding light neither can the sciences attain to their 
 full evolution, as the organs of one vital and harmonious body, 
 nor that most weighty and concerning of all sciences, the science 
 of education, be understood in its first elements, much less dis 
 play its powers, as the nisus formativus$ of social man, as the 
 
 * Nov. Org. P. II. Summ. M.Ed. 
 
 \ Eccl Pol B. I. 2. Ed. 
 
 \ So our medical writers commonly translate Professor Blumenbach s 
 Bildunystrieb, the vis plastica, or vis vitce formatrix, of the elder physiolo 
 gists, and the life or living principle of John Hunter, the profoundest, I 
 had almost said the only, physiological philosopher of the latter half of 
 the preceding century. For in what other sense can we understand his as 
 sertion, that this principle or agent is independent of organization, which 
 yet it animates, sustains, and repairs, or the purport of that magnificent 
 commentary on his system, the Hunterian Museum ? The Hunterian idea 
 
ESSAY IX. 447 
 
 appointed protoplast of true humanity. Never can society com 
 prehend fully, and in its whole practical extent, the permanent 
 distinction, and the occasional contrast, between cultivation and 
 civilization ; never can it attain to a due insight into the mo 
 mentous fact, fearfully as it has been, and even now is, exem 
 plified in a neighbor country, that a nation can never be a too 
 cultivated, but may easily become an over-civilized race : never, 
 I repeat, can this sanative and preventive knowledge take up its 
 
 of a life or vital principle independent of the organization, yet in each or 
 gan working instinctively towards its preservation, as the ants or termites 
 in repairing the nests of their own fabrication, demonstrates that John Hun 
 ter did not, as Stahl and others had done, individualize, or make an hypos- 
 tasis of the principles of life, as a something manifestable per se, and conse 
 quently itself a phenomenon ; the latency of which was to be attributed to 
 accidental, or at least contingent causes, as for example, the limits or imper 
 fection of our senses, or the inaptness of the media ; but that herein he 
 philosophized in the spirit of the purest Newtonians, who in like manner 
 refused to hypostasize the law of gravitation into an ether, which even if 
 its existence were conceded, would need another gravitation for itself. 
 The Hunteriau position is a genuine pliilosophic idea, the negative test of 
 which, as of all ideas is, that it is equi-distaut from an ens logicum or ab 
 straction, an ens reprtescntativum or generalization, and an ens phantasticum 
 or imaginary thing or pliccnomenon.* 
 
 Is not the progressive enlargement, the boldness without temerity, of 
 chirurgical views and chirurgical practice since Hunter s time to the pres 
 ent day, attributable, in almost every instance, to his substitution of what 
 may perhaps be called experimental dynamics, for the mechanical notions, 
 or the less injurious traditional empiricism, of his predecessors ? And 
 this, too, though the light is still struggling through a cloud, and though it 
 is shed on many who see either dimly or not at all the idea from which it 
 is eradiated ? Willingly would I designate, what I have elsewhere called 
 the mental initiative, by some term less obnoxious to the anti-Platonic 
 reader, than this of idea obnoxious, I mean, as soon as any precise and pe 
 culiar sense is attached to the sound. Willingly would I exchange the term, 
 might it be done without sacrifice of the import : and did I not see, too, 
 clearly, that it is the meaning, not the word, which is the object of that 
 aversion, which, fleeing from inward alarm, tries to shelter itself in outward 
 contempt ; which is at once folly and a stumbling-block to the partisans of 
 a crass and sensual materialism, the advocates of the nihil nisi ab extra : 
 
 They shrink in, as moles, 
 
 Nature s mute monks, live mandrakes of the ground, 
 Creep back from light, then listen for its sound ; 
 See but to dread, and dread they know not why, 
 The natural alien of their negative eye ! 
 
 Poet. Works, VII. p. 190. 
 * Theory of Life, I. App. C. Am. Ed. 
 
448 THE FRIEND. 
 
 abode among us, while we oppose ourselves voluntarily to that 
 grand prcrogative of our nature, a hungering and thirsting after 
 truth, as the appropriate end of our intelligential, and its point 
 of union with our moral nature ; but therefore after truth, that 
 must be found within us before it can be intelligibly reflected 
 back on the mind from without, and a religious regard to which 
 is indispensable, both as guide and object to the just formation of 
 the human being, poor and rich : while, in a word, we are blind 
 to the master-light, which I have already presented in various 
 points of view, and recommended by whatever is of highest au 
 thority with the venerators of the ancient, and the adherents of 
 modern philosophy. 
 
 ESSAY X. 
 
 voov ov diduaitei. TS,lvat -yap ev TO aofybv, im 
 tyre yKvj3epvfjoi Truvra dia. TTUVTUV. HERACLITUS.* 
 
 The effective education of the reason is not to be supplied by multifa 
 rious acquirements : for there is but one knowledge that merits to be called 
 wisdom, a knowledge that is one with a law which shall govern all in and 
 through all. 
 
 HISTORICAL AND ILLUSTKATIVE. 
 
 THERE is still preserved in the Royal Observatory at Richmond 
 the model of a bridge, constructed by the late justly celebrated 
 Mr. Atwood (at that time, however, in the decline of life), in the 
 confidence that he had explained the wonderful properties of the 
 arch as resulting from the compound action of simple wedges, or 
 of the rectilinear solids of which the material arch was com 
 posed ; and of which supposed- discovery, his model was to ex 
 hibit ocular proof. Accordingly, he took a sufficient number of 
 wedges of brass highly polished. Arranging these at first on a 
 skeleton arch of wood, he then removed this scaffolding or sup 
 port ; and the bridge not only stood firm, without any cement 
 between the squares, but he could take away any given portion 
 of them, as a third or a half, and appending a correspondent 
 * Diogen. Laert. ix. c. 1, s. 2. Ed. 
 
ESSAy X. 449 
 
 weight, at either side, the remaining part stood as before. Our 
 venerable sovereign, who is known to have had a particular in 
 terest and pleasure in all works and discoveries of mechanic 
 science or ingenuity, looked at it for awhile steadfastly, and, as 
 his manner was, with quick and broken expressions of praise 
 and courteous approbation, in the form of answers to his own 
 questions. At length, turning to the constructor, he said, " But, 
 Mr. Atwood, you have presumed the figure. You have put the 
 arch first in this wooden skeleton. Can you build a bridge of 
 the same wedges in any other figure ? A strait bridge, or with 
 two lines touching at the apex ? If not, is it not evident, that 
 the bits of brass derive their continuance in the present position 
 from the property of the arch, and not the arch from the property 
 of the wedge ? The objection was fatal, the justice of the re 
 mark not to be resisted ; and I have ever deemed it a forcible 
 illustration of the Aristotelian axiom, with respect to all just 
 reasoning, that the whole is of necessity prior to its parts ; nor 
 can I conceive a more apt illustration of the scientific principles 
 I have already laid down. 
 
 All method supposes a union of several things to a common 
 end, either by disposition, as in the works of man ; or by conver 
 gence, as in the operations and products of nature. That we ac 
 knowledge a method, even in the latter, results from the religious 
 instinct which bids us " find tongues in trees ; books in the run 
 ning streams ; sermons in stones ; and good (that is, some useful 
 end answering to some good purpose) in every thing." In a self- 
 conscious and thence reflecting being, no instinct can exist with 
 out engendering the belief of an object corresponding to it, either 
 present or future, real or capable of being realized ; much less the 
 instinct, in which humanity itself is grounded ; that by which, 
 in every act of conscious perception, we at once identify our being 
 with that of the world without us, and yet place ourselves in 
 contra-distinction to that world. Least of all can this mysterious 
 pre-disposition exist without evolving a belief that the productive 
 power,* which in nature acts as nature, is essentially one (that 
 
 * Obscure from too great compression. The sense is, that the productive 
 power, or vis naturans, which in the sensible world, or natura naturata, is 
 what we mean by tlie word, nature, when we speak of the same as an agent, 
 is essentially one, <tc. In other words, idea and law are the subjective and 
 objective poles of the same magnet, that is, of the same living and euergiz- 
 
450 THE FRIEND. 
 
 is, of one kind) with the intelligence, which is in the human mind 
 above nature ; however disfigured this belief may become by ac 
 cidental forms or accompaniments, and though like heat in the 
 thawing of ice, it may appear only in its effects. So universally 
 has this conviction leavened the very substance of all discourse, 
 that there is no language on earth in which a man can abjure it 
 as a prejudice, without employing terms and conjunctions that 
 suppose its reality, with a feeling very different from that which 
 accompanies a figurative or metaphorical use of words. In all 
 aggregates of construction therefore, which we contemplate as 
 wholes, whether as integral parts or as a system, we assume an 
 intention, as the initiative, of which the end is the correlative. 
 
 Hence proceeds the introduction of final causes in the works 
 of nature equally as in those of man. Hence their assumption, 
 as constitutive and explanatory, by the mass of mankind ; and 
 the employment of the presumption, as an auxiliary and regula 
 tive principle, by the enlightened naturalist, whose office it is to 
 seek, discover, and investigate the efficient causes. Without de 
 nying, that to resolve the efficient into the final may be the ulti 
 mate aim of philosophy, he, of good right, resists the substitution 
 of the latter for the former, as premature, presumptuous, and 
 preclusive of all science ; well aware, that those sciences have 
 been most progressive, in which this confusion has been either 
 precluded by the nature of the science itself, as in pure mathe 
 matics, or avoided by the good sense of its cultivator. Yet even 
 he admits a teleological ground in physics arid physiology ; that 
 is, the presumption of a something analogous to the casualty of 
 the human will, by which, without assigning to nature, as na 
 ture, a conscious purpose, he may yet distinguish her agency 
 from a blind and lifeless mechanism. Even he admits its use, 
 
 % 
 
 ing reason. What an idea is in the subject, that is, in the mind, is a law in 
 the object, that is, in nature. But throughout these essays, the want of il 
 lustrative examples, and varied exposition is, I am conscious, the main de 
 fect, and it was occasioned by the haunting Jread of being tedious. But O ! 
 the cold water that was thrown on me, chiefly from those from whom I 
 ought to have received warmth and encouragement ! " Who, do you ex 
 pect, will read this," <fec. But, vanity as it may appear, it is nevertheless 
 true, and uttered with feelings the most unlike those of self-conceit, that it 
 lias been my mistake through life to be looking up to those whom I ought 
 to have been looking at, nay (in some instances) down upon. June 23d, 
 1829. 
 
ESSAY X. 451 
 
 and, in many instances, its necessity, as a regulative principle ; 
 as a ground of anticipation, for the guidance of his judgment and 
 for the direction of his observation and experiment ; briefly in 
 all that preparatory process, which the French language so hap 
 pily expresses by s orienter, to find out the east for one s self. 
 When the naturalist contemplates the structure of a bird, for in 
 stance, the hollow cavity of the bones, the position of the wings 
 for motion, and of the tail for steering its course, and the like, he 
 knows indeed that there must be a correspondent mechanism, as 
 the nexus efectivus ; but he knows, likewise, that this will 110 
 more explain the particular existence of the bird, than the prin 
 ciples of cohesion could inform him why of two buildings one is a 
 palace and the other a church. Nay, it must not be overlooked, 
 that the assumption of the nexus cjfectivus itself originates in the 
 mind, as one of the laws under which alone it can reduce the 
 manifold of the impression from without into unity, and thus 
 contemplate it as one thing ; and could never (as hath been 
 clearly proved by Mr. Hume) have been derived from outward 
 experience, in which it is indeed presupposed as a necessary con 
 dition. Notio nexus causalis non oritur, sed supponitur, a sen- 
 sibus. Between, the purpose and the end the component parts are 
 included, arid thence receive their position and character as 
 means, that is, parts contemplated as parts. It is in this sense, 
 that I will affirm that the parts, as means to an end, derive their 
 position, and therein their qualities (or character) nay, I dare 
 add, their very existence, as particular things, from the ante 
 cedent method, or self-organizing purpose ; upon which therefore 
 I have dwelt so long. 
 
 I am aware that it is with our cognitions as with our children. 
 There is a period in which, the method of nature is working for 
 them ; a period of aimless activity and unregulated accumulation, 
 during which it is enough if we can preserve them in health and 
 out of harm s w r ay. Again, there is a period of orderliness, of 
 circumspection, of discipline, in which we purify, separate, define, 
 select, arrange, and settle the nomenclature of communication. 
 There is also a period of dawning and twilight, a period of antici 
 pation, affording trials of strength. And all these, both in the 
 growth of the sciences arid in the mind of a rightly-educated in 
 dividual, will precede the attainment of a scientific method. But, 
 notwithstanding this, unless the importance of the latter be felt 
 
452 THE FRIEND. 
 
 and acknowledged, unless its attainment be looked forward to and 
 from the very beginning prepared for, there is little hope and 
 small chance that any education will be conducted aright ; or 
 will ever prove in reality worth the name. 
 
 Much labor, much wealth may have been expended, yet the 
 final result will too probably warrant the sarcasm of the Scythian 
 traveller : V& ! quantum nihili ! and draw from a wise man 
 the earnest recommendation of a full draught from Lethe, as the 
 first and indispensable preparative for the waters of the true Heli 
 con. Alas ! how many examples are now present to my mem 
 ory, of young men the most anxiously and expensively be-school- 
 mastered, be-tutored, be-lectured, any thing but educated ; who 
 have received arms and ammunition, instead of skill, strength, 
 and courage ; varnished rather than polished ; perilously over- 
 civilized, and most pitiably uncultivated ! And all from inatten 
 tion to the method dictated by nature herself, to the simple truth, 
 that as the forms in all organized existence, so must all true and 
 living knowledge proceed from within ; that it may be trained, 
 supported, fed, excited, but can never be infused, or impressed. 
 
 Look back on the history of the sciences. Review the method 
 in which providence has brought the more favored portion of 
 mankind to their present state. Lord Bacon has justly remarked, 
 antiquitas sceculi juventus tnundi* antiquity of time is the 
 youth of the world and of science. In the childhood of the 
 human race, its education commenced with the cultivation of the 
 moral sense ; the object proposed being such as the mind only 
 could apprehend, and the principle of obedience being placed in 
 the will. The appeal in both was made to the inward man. 
 Through faith we imderstand that the worlds ivere framed by 
 the word of God ; so that things which are seen were not made 
 of things which do appear. The solution of phenomena can 
 never be derived from phenomena. Upon this ground the 
 writer of the epistle to the Hebrews (c. xi.) is not less philosoph 
 ical than eloquent. The aim, the method throughout was, in the 
 first place, to awaken, to cultivate, and to mature the truly 
 human in human nature, in arid through itself, or as independ 
 ently as possible of the notices derived from sense, and of the 
 motives that had reference to the sensations ; till the time should 
 arrive when the senses themselves might be allowed to present 
 * Advancement of Learning, B. i. Ed. 
 
ESSAY X. 453 
 
 symbols and attestations of truths, learnt previously from deeper 
 and inner sources. Thus the first period of the education of our 
 race was evidently assigned to the cultivation of humanity itself, 
 or of that in man, which of all known embodied creatures he 
 alone possesses, the pure reason, as designed to regulate the will. 
 And by what method was this done ? First, by the excitement 
 of the idea of their Creator as a spirit, of an idea which they were 
 strictly forbidden to realize to themselves under any image ; and 
 secondly, by the injunction of obedience to the will of a super- 
 sensual Being. Nor did the method stop here. For, unless we 
 are equally to contradict Moses and the New Testament, in com 
 pliment to the paradox of a Warburton, the rewards of their obe 
 dience were placed at a distance. For the time present they 
 equally with us were to endure, as seeing him who is invisible. 
 Their bodies they were taught to consider as fleshly tents, which 
 as pilgrims they were bound to pitch wherever the invisible Di 
 rector of their route should appoint, however barren or thorny the 
 spot might appear. Few and evil have the days of the years 
 of my life been* says the aged Israel. But that life was but 
 his pilgrimage, and he trusted in the promises. 
 
 Thus were the very first lessons in the divine school assigned 
 to the cultivation of the reason and of the will ; or rather of both 
 as united in faith. The common and ultimate object of the will 
 and of the reason was purely spiritual, and to be present in the 
 mind of the disciple ftovov lv idea, jLtr^ccfii] etdwhx&g, that is, in 
 the idea alone, and never as an image or imagination. The 
 means too, by which the idea was to be excited, as well as the 
 symbols by which it was to be communicated, were to be, as far 
 as possible, intellectual. 
 
 Those, on the contrary, who wilfully chose a mode opposite to 
 this method, who determined to shape their convictions and de 
 duce their knowledge from without, by exclusive observation of 
 outward and sensible things as the only realities, became, it ap 
 pears, rapidly civilized. They built cities, invented musical in 
 struments, were artificers in brass and in iron, and refined on the 
 means of sensual gratification, and the conveniencies of courtly in 
 tercourse. They became the great masters of the agreeable, which 
 fraternized readily with cruelty and rapacity ; these being, 
 indeed, but alternate moods of the same sensual selfishness. 
 * Gen. xlvii. 9. 
 
454 THE FRIEND. 
 
 Thus, both before and after the flood, the vicious of mankind re 
 ceded from all true cultivation, as they hurried towards civiliza 
 tion. Finally, as it was not in their power to make themselves 
 wholly beasts, or to remain without a semblance of religion ; and 
 yet continuing faithful to their original maxim, and determined to 
 receive nothing as true, but what they derived, or believed them 
 selves to derive from their senses, or (in modern phrase) what 
 they could prove a posteriori, they became idolaters of the heav 
 ens and the material elements. From the harmony of operation 
 they concluded a certain unity of nature and design, but were in 
 capable of finding in the facts any proof of a unity of person. 
 They did not, in this respect, pretend to find what they must 
 themselves have first assumed. Having thrown away the clus 
 ters, which had grown in the vineyard of revelation, they could 
 not, as later reasoncrs, by being born in a Christian country, have 
 been enabled to do, hang the grapes on thorns, and then pluck 
 them as the native growth of the bushes. But the men of sense 
 of the patriarchal times, neglecting reason and having rejected 
 faith, adopted what the facts seemed to involve and the most ob 
 vious analogies to suggest. They acknowledged a whole bee 
 hive of natural gods : but while they were employed in building 
 a temple^ consecrated to the material heavens, it pleased divine 
 wisdom to send on them a confusion of lip accompanied with the 
 usual embitterment of controversy, where all parties are in the 
 wrong, and the grounds of quarrel are equally plausible on all 
 sides. As the modes of error are endless, the hundred forms of 
 polytheism had each its group of partisans who, hostile or alien 
 ated, thenceforward formed separate tribes kept aloof from each 
 
 * I am far from being a Hutchinsonian, nor have I found much to respect 
 in the twelve volumes of Hutchinson s works, either as biblical comment or 
 natural philosophy ; though I give him credit for orthodoxy and good in 
 tentions. But his interpretation of the first nine verses of Genesis xi. seems 
 not only rational in itself, and consistent with after accounts of the sacred 
 historian, but proved to be the literal sense of the Hebrew text. His ex 
 planation of the cherubim is pleasing and plausible : I dare not say more. 
 Those who would wish to learn the most important points of the Hutchin- 
 souian doctrine in the most favorable form, and in the shortest possible 
 space, I can refer to Duncan Forbes s Letter to a Bishop. If my own judg 
 ment did not withhold my assent, I should never be ashamed of a conviction 
 holden, professed, and advocated by so good and wise a man as Duncan 
 Forbes. 
 
ESSAY X, 455 
 
 other by their ambitious leaders. Hence arose, in the course of 
 a few centuries, the diversity of languages, which has sometimes 
 been confounded Avith the miraculous event that was indeed its 
 first and principal, though remote, cause. 
 
 Following next, and as the representative of the youth and 
 approaching manhood of the human intellect, we have ancient 
 Greece, from* Orpheus, Linus, Musseus, and the other mythologi 
 cal bards, or perhaps the brotherhoods impersonated under those 
 names,* to the time when the republics lost their independence, 
 and their learned men sank into copyists and commentators of 
 the works of their forefathers. That I include these as educated 
 under a distinct providential, though not miraculous, dispensa 
 tion, will surprise no one, who reflects that in whatever has a 
 permanent operation on the destinies and intellectual condition 
 of mankind at large that in all which has been manifestly em 
 ployed as a co-agent in the mightiest revolution of the moral 
 world, the propagation of the gospel ; and in the intellectual 
 progress of mankind, in the restoration of philosophy, science, and 
 the ingenuous arts it were irreligion not to acknowledge the 
 hand of Divine providence. The periods, too, join on to each 
 other. The earliest Greeks took up the religious and lyrical 
 poetry of the Hebrews ; and the schools of the prophets were, 
 however partially and imperfectly, represented by the mysteries, 
 derived through the corrupt channel of the Phoenicians. With 
 these secret schools of physiological theology the mythical poets 
 were doubtless in connection ; and it was these schools, which 
 prevented polytheism from producing all its natural barbarizing 
 effects. The mysteries and the mythical hymns and pseans 
 shaped themselves gradually into epic poetry and history on the 
 one hand, and into the ethical tragedy and philosophy on the 
 other. Under their protection, and that of a youthful liberty 
 secretly controlled by a species of internal theocracy, the sciences 
 
 * " I have no doubt whatever that Homer is a mere concrete name for 
 the rhapsodies of the Iliad. Of course there was a Homer, and twenty be 
 sides. * * I have the firmest conviction that Homer is a mere 
 traditional synonyme with, or figure for, the Iliad. You can not conceive 
 for a moment, any thing about the poet, as you call him, apart from that 
 poem. Difference in men there was in degree, but not in kind ; one man 
 was, perhaps, a better poet than another ; but he was a poet upon the 
 same ground and with the same feelings as the rest." Table Talk, VI. pp. 
 312, 400. Ed. 
 
456 THE FRIEND. 
 
 and the sterner kinds of the fine arts, namely, architecture and 
 statuary, grew up together ; followed, indeed, by painting, but 
 a statuesque and austerely idealized painting, which did not de 
 generate into mere copies of the sense, till the process, for which 
 Greece existed, had been completed. Contrast the rapid pro 
 gress and perfection of all the products, which owe their exist 
 ence and character to the mind s own acts, intellectual or imagi 
 native, with the rudeness of their application to the investigation 
 of physical laws and phenomena : then contemplate the Greeks 
 (r^aiot (ist naldsgj as representing a portion only of the education 
 of man ; and the conclusion is inevitable. 
 
 In the education of the mind of the race, as in that of the in 
 dividual, each different age and purpose requires different objects 
 and different means ; though all dictated by the same principle, 
 tending toward the same end, and forming consecutive parts of 
 the same method. But if the scale taken be sufficiently large to 
 neutralize or render insignificant the disturbing forces of accident, 
 the degree of success is the best criterion by which to appreciate 
 both the wisdom of the general principle, and the fitness of the 
 particular objects to the given epoch or period. Now it is a fact, 
 for the greater part of universal acceptance, and attested as to 
 the remainder by all that is of highest fame and authority, by 
 the great, wise, and good, during a space of at least seventeen 
 centuries weighed against whom the opinions of a few distin 
 guished individuals, or the fashion of a single age, must be holden 
 light in the balance, it is a fact, I say, that whatever could be 
 educed by the mind out of its own essence, by attention to its 
 own acts and laws of action, or as the products of the same ; and 
 whatever likewise could be reflected from material masses trans 
 formed as it were into mirrors, the excellence of which is to re 
 veal, in the least possible degree, their own original forms and 
 natures ; all these, whether arts or sciences, the ancient Greeks 
 carried to an almost ideal perfection : while in the application 
 of their skill and science to the investigation of the laws of the 
 sensible world, and the qualities and composition of material con 
 cretes, chemical, mechanical, or organic, their essays were crude 
 and improsperous, compared with those of the moderns during 
 the early morning of their strength, and even at the first re-as 
 cension of the light. But still more striking will the difference 
 appear, if we contrast the physiological schemes and fancies of 
 
ESSAY X. 457 
 
 the Greeks with their own discoveries in the region of the pure 
 intellect, and with their still unrivalled success in the arts of 
 imagination. In the aversion of their great men from any prac 
 tical use of their philosophic discoveries, as in the well-known 
 instance of Archimedes, the soul of the world was at work ; and 
 the few exceptions w^ere but a rush of billows driven shoreward 
 by some chance gust before the hour of tide, instantly retracted, 
 and leaving the sands bare and soundless long after the momen 
 tary glitter had been lost in evaporation. 
 
 The third period, that of the Romans, was devoted to the 
 preparations for preserving, propagating, and realizing the labors 
 of the preceding ; to war, empire, law. To this we may refer 
 the defect of all originality in the Latin poets arid philosophers, on 
 the one hand, and on the other, the predilection of the Romans 
 for astrology, magic, divination in all its forms. It was the Ro 
 man instinct to appropriate by conquest and to give fixure by 
 legislation. And it was the bewilderment arid prematurity of 
 the same instinct which restlessly impelled them to materialize 
 the ideas of the Greek philosophers, and to render them practical 
 by superstitious uses. 
 
 Thus the Hebrews may be regarded as the fixed mid point of 
 the living line, toward which the Greeks as the ideal pole, and 
 the Romans as the material, were eVer approximating ; till the 
 coincidence and final synthesis took place in Christianity, of 
 which the Bible is the law, and Christendom the phenomenon. 
 So little confirmation from history, from the process of education 
 planned and conducted by unerring Providence, do those theorists 
 receive, who would at least begin (too many, alas ! both begin 
 and end) with the objects of the senses ; as if nature herself had 
 not abundantly performed this part of the task, by continuous, 
 irresistible enforcements of attention to her presence, to the direct 
 beholding, to the apprehension and observation, of the objects 
 that stimulate the senses ; as if the cultivation of the mental 
 powers, by methodical exercise of their own forces, were not the 
 securest means of forming the true correspondents to them in 
 the functions of comparison, judgment, and interpretation. 
 
 VOL. II. U 
 
ESSAY XL 
 
 Sapiinus animo, fmimur anima : sine animo animo cst debilis. 
 
 L. Accii Fragments 
 
 As there are two wants connatural to man, so are there two 
 main directions of human activity, pervading in modern times 
 the whole civilized world ; and constituting and sustaining that 
 nationality which yet it is their tendency, and, more or less, 
 their effect, to transcend and to moderate, trade and literature. 
 These were they, which, after the dismemberment of the old 
 Roman world, gradually reduced the conquerors and the con 
 quered at once into several nations and a common Christendom. 
 The natural law of increase and the instincts of family may pro 
 duce tribes, and, under rare and peculiar circumstances, settle 
 ments and neighborhoods ; and conquest may form empires. 
 But without trade and literature, mutually commingled, there 
 can be*no nation; without commerce and science, no bond of 
 nations. As the one hath for its object the wants of the body, 
 real or artificial, the desires for which are for the greater part, 
 nay, as far as the origination of trade and commerce is concerned, 
 altogether excited from without ; so the other has for its origin, 
 as well as for its object, the wants of the mind, the gratification 
 of which is a natural and necessary condition of its growth and 
 sanity. And the man (or the nation, considered according to its 
 predominant character as one man) may be regarded under these 
 circumstances, as acting in two forms of method, inseparably co 
 existent, yet producing very different effects accordingly as one 
 or the other obtains the primacy ; the senses, the memory, and 
 the understanding (that is, the retentive, reflective, and judicial 
 functions of his mind) being common to both methods. As is 
 the rank assigned to each in the theory and practice of the gov 
 erning classes, and, according to its prevalence in forming the 
 foundation of their public habits and opinions, so will be the 
 
ESSAY XI. 459 
 
 outward and inward life of the people at large : such will the 
 nation be. In tracing the epochs, and alternations of their rela 
 tive sovereignty or subjection, consists the philosophy of history. 
 In the power of distinguishing and appreciating their several 
 results consists the historic sense. And that under the ascend 
 ency of the mental and moral character the commercial relations 
 may thrive to the utmost desirable point, while the reverse is 
 ruinous to both, and sooner or later effectuates the fall or debase 
 ment of the country itself this is the richest truth obtained lor 
 mankind by historic research ; though unhappily it is the truth, 
 to which a rich and commercial nation listens with most reluc 
 tance and receives with least faith. Where the brain and the 
 immediate conductors of its influence remain healthy and vigor 
 ous, the defects and diseases of the eye will most often admit 
 either of a cure or a substitute. And so is it with the outward 
 prosperity of a state, where the well-being of the people pos 
 sesses the primacy in the aims of the governing classes, and in 
 the public feeling. But what avails the perfect state of the eye, 
 
 Though clear 
 To outward view of blemish or of spot,* 
 
 where the optic nerve is paralyzed by a pressure on the brain ? 
 And even so is it not only with the well-being, but ultimately 
 with the prosperity of a people, where the former is considered 
 (if it be considered at all) as subordinate and secondary to wealth 
 and revenue. 
 
 In the pursuits of commerce the man is called into action 
 from without, in order to appropriate the outward world, as far 
 as he can bring it within his reach, to the purposes of his senses 
 and sensual nature. His ultimate end is appearance and enjoy 
 ment. Where on the other hand the nurture and evolution of 
 humanity is the final aim, there will soon be seen a general 
 tendency toward, an earnest seeking after, some ground common 
 to the world and to man, therein to find the one principle of per 
 manence and identity, the rock of strength and refuge, to which 
 the soul may cling amid the fleeting surge-like objects of the 
 senses. Disturbed as by the obscure quickening of an inward 
 birth ; made restless by swarming thoughts, that, like bees when 
 they first miss the queen and mother of the hive, with vain dis- 
 * Miltoii, Sonnet to Cyriack Skinner. Ed. 
 
460 THE FRIEND. 
 
 cursion seek each in the other what is the common need of all ; 
 man sallies forth into nature in nature, as in the shadows and 
 reflections of a clear river, to discover the originals of the forms 
 presented to him in his own intellect. Over these shadows, as 
 if they were the substantial po\vers and presiding spirits of the 
 stream, Narcissus-like, he hangs delighted : till finding nowhere 
 a representative of that free agency which yet is a fact of im 
 mediate consciousness sanctioned and made fearfully significant 
 by his prophetic conscience, he learns at last that what he seeks 
 he has left behind, and that he but lengthens the distance as he 
 prolongs the search. Under the tutorage of scientific analysis, 
 haply first given to him by express revelation, 
 
 E coclo descendit, Tvtidt ceavrbv,* 
 
 he separates the relations that are wholly the creatures of his own 
 abstracting and comparing intellect, and at once discovers and re 
 coils from the discovery, that the reality, the objective truth, of 
 the objects he has been adoring, derives its whole and sole evi 
 dence from an obscure sensation, which he is alike unable to re 
 sist or to comprehend, which compels him to contemplate as 
 without and independent of himself what yet he could not con 
 template at all, were it not a modification of his own being. 
 
 Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own ; 
 Yearnings she hath iu her own natural kind, 
 And, even with something of a mother s mind, 
 
 And no unworthy aim 
 The homely nurse doth all she can 
 To make her foster-child, her inmate man, 
 
 Forget the glories he hath known, 
 And that imperial palace whence he came. 
 
 ******* 
 
 O joy ! that in our embers 
 
 Is something that doth live, 
 
 That nature yet remembers 
 
 What was so fugitive ! 
 
 The thought of our past years in me doth breed 
 Perpetual benedictions : not indeed 
 For that which is most worthy to be blest ; 
 Delight and liberty, the simple creed 
 Of childhood, whether busy or at rest, 
 With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast : 
 
 * Juv. xi. M.JEd. 
 
ESSAY XI. 4(51 
 
 Not for these I raise 
 The song of thanks and praise ; 
 But for those obstinate questionings 
 Of sense and outward things, 
 Fallings from us, vanishings ; 
 Blank misgivings of a creature 
 Moving about in -worlds not realized, 
 High instincts, before which our mortal nature 
 Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised ! 
 .But for those first affections, 
 Those shadowy recollections, 
 
 Which, be they what they may, 
 Are yet the fountain light of all our day, 
 Are yet a master light of all our seeing ; 
 
 Uphold us cherish and have power to make 
 Our noisy years seem moments in the being 
 Of the eternal silence : truths that wake, 
 
 To perish never ; 
 Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor, 
 
 Nor man nor boy, 
 Nor all that is at enmity with joy, 
 Can utterly abolish or destroy ! 
 
 Hence, in a season of calm weather, 
 
 Though inland far we be, 
 Our souls have sight of that immortal sea 
 
 Which brought us hither ; 
 Can in a moment travel thither 
 And see the children sport upon the shore, 
 And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore. 
 
 WORDSWORTH.* 
 
 Long indeed will man strive to satisfy the inward querist with 
 the phrase, laws of nature. But though the individual may rest 
 content Arith the syemly metaphor, the race can not. If a law 
 
 * Intimations of immortality from recollections of early childhood. Ed. 
 During my residence in Rome I had the pleasure of reciting this sublime 
 ode to the illustrious Baron Von Humboldt, then the Prussian minister at 
 the papal court, and now at the court of St. James. By those who knew 
 and honored both the brothers, the talents of the ambassador were con 
 sidered equal to those of the scientific traveller, his judgment superior. I 
 can only say, that I know few Englishmen, whom I could compare with him 
 in the extensive knowledge and just appreciation of English literature and 
 its various epochs. He listened to the ode with evident delight, and as evi 
 dently not without surprise, and at the close of the recitation exclaimed, 
 " And is this the work of a living English poet ? I should have attributed 
 it to the age of Elizabeth, not that I recollect any writer, whose style it 
 resembles ; but rather with wonder, that so great and original a poet should 
 
462 THE FRIEND. 
 
 of nature be a mere generalization, it is included in the above as 
 an act of the mind. But if it be other and more, and yet mani 
 festable only in and to an intelligent spirit, it must in act and 
 substance be itself spiritual : for things utterly heterogeneous can 
 have no intercommunion. In order therefore to the recognition 
 of himself in nature man must first learn to comprehend nature 
 in himself, arid its laws in the ground of his own existence. 
 Then only can he reduce phenomena to principles ; then only 
 will he have achieved the method, the self-unravelling clue, 
 which alone can securely guide him to the. conquest of the 
 former ; when he has discovered in the basis of their union the 
 necessity of their differences, in the principle of their continuance 
 the solution of their changes. It is the idea alone of the common 
 centre, of the universal law, by which all power manifests itself 
 in opposite yet interdependent forces (>? y&g dvug ueJ nagu juov&dt, 
 X&&IJTCXI, xal voBQoiCs uggunTEi roualg) which enlightening in 
 quiry, multiplying experiment, and at once inspiring humility and 
 perseverance will lead him to comprehend gradually and pro 
 gressively the relation of each to the other, of each to all, and of 
 all to each. 
 
 Imagine the unlettered African, or rude yet musing Indian, 
 poring over an illuminated manuscript of the inspired volume, 
 with the vague yet deep impression that his fates and fortunes 
 are in some unknown manner connected with its contents. 
 Every tint, every group of characters, has its several dream. Say 
 that after long and dissatisfying toils, he begins to sort, first the 
 paragraphs that appear to resemble each other, then the lines, 
 the words nay, that he has at length discovered that the whole 
 is formed by the recurrence and interchanges of a limited number 
 of ciphers, letters, marks, and points, which, however, in the 
 very height and utmost perfection of his attainment, he makes 
 twentyfold more numerous than they are, by classing every differ 
 ent form of the same character, intentional or accidental, as a 
 separate element. And the whole is without soul or substance, 
 a talisman of superstition, a mockery of science : or employed 
 
 have escaped iny notice." Often as I repeat passages from it to myself, I 
 recur to the words of Dante : 
 
 Canzon ! io credo, che saranno radi 
 Color die tua ragion intendan bene : 
 Tanto lor parli faticoso ed alto. 
 
ESSAY XI. 463 
 
 perhaps at last to feather the arrows of death, or to shine and 
 flutter amid the plumes of savage vanity. The poor Indian too 
 truly represents the state of learned and systematic ignorance 
 arrangement guided by the light of no leading idea, mere order 
 liness without method. 
 
 But see ! the friendly missionary arrives. He explains to him 
 the nature of written words, translates them for him into his na 
 tive sounds, and thence into the thoughts of his heart how many 
 of these thoughts then first evolved into consciousness, which yet 
 the awakening disciple receives, and not as aliens ! Hencefor 
 ward, the book is unsealed for him ; the depth is opened out ; he 
 communes with the spirit of the volume as with a living oracle. 
 The words become transparent, and he sees them as though he 
 saw them not. 
 
 I have thus delineated the two great directions of man and so 
 ciety with their several objects and ends. Concerning the con 
 ditions and principles of method appertaining to each, I have 
 affirmed (for the facts hitherto adduced have been rather for illus 
 tration than for evidence, to make the position distinctly under 
 stood rather than to enforce the conviction of its truth) ; that in 
 both there must be a mental antecedent ; but that in the one it 
 may be an image or conception received through the senses, and 
 originating from without, the inspiriting passion or desire being 
 alone the immediate and proper offspring of the mind ; while in 
 the other the initiative thought, the intellectual seed, must itself 
 have its birth-place within, whatever excitement from without 
 may be necessary for its germination. Will the soul thus 
 awakened neglect or undervalue the outward and conditional 
 causes of her growth ? Far rather, might I dare borrow a wild 
 fancy from the Mantuan bard, or the poet of Arno,*vill it be with 
 her, as if a stem or trunk, suddenly endued with sense and reflec 
 tion, should contemplate its green shoots, their leafits and bud 
 ding blossoms, wondered at as then first noticed, but welcomed 
 nevertheless as its own growth : while yet with undiminished 
 gratitude, and a deepened sense of dependency, it would bless the 
 dews and the sunshine from without, deprived of the awakening 
 and fostering excitement of which, its own productivity would 
 have remained forever hidden from itself, or felt only as the ob 
 scure trouble of a baffled instinct. 
 
 Hast thou ever raised thy mind to the consideration of exist- 
 
464 ^ THE FHIEISTD. 
 
 ence, in and by itself, as the mere act of existing ? Hast thou 
 ever said to thyself thoughtfully, It is ! heedless in that moment, 
 whether it were a man before thee, or a flower, or a grain of 
 sand, without reference, in short, to this or that particular mode 
 or form of existence ? If thou hast indeed attained to this, thou 
 wilt have felt the presence of a mystery, which must have fixed 
 thy spirit in awe and wonder. The very words, there is noth 
 ing ! or, There was a time, when there was nothing ! are self- 
 contradictory. There is that within us which repels the propo 
 sition with as full and instantaneous a light, as if it bore evidence 
 against the fact in the right of its own eternity. 
 
 Not to be, then, is impossible : to be, incomprehensible. If 
 thou hast mastered this intuition of absolute existence, thou wilt 
 have learnt likewise, that it was this, and no other, which in the 
 earlier ages seized the nobler minds, the elect among men, with 
 a sort of sacred horror. This it was which first caused them to 
 feel within themselves a something ineffably greater than their 
 own individual nature. It was this which, raising them aloft, 
 and projecting them to an ideal distance from themselves, pre 
 pared them to become the lights and awakening voices of other 
 men, the founders of law and religion, the educators and foster- 
 gods of mankind. The power, which evolved this idea of being, 
 being in its essence, being limitless, comprehending its own 
 limits in its dilatation, and condensing itself into its own appa 
 rent mounds how shall we name it ? The idea itself, which 
 like a mighty billow at once over\vhelms and bears aloft what 
 is it ? Whence did it come ? In vain would we derive it from 
 the organs of sense : for these supply only surfaces, undulations, 
 phantoms. In vain from the instruments of sensation : for these 
 furnish only the chaos, the shapeless elements of sense. And 
 least of all may we hope to find its origin, or sufficient cause, in 
 the moulds and mechanism of the understanding, the whole pur 
 port and functions of which consist in individualization, in out 
 lines and differencings by quantity and relation. It were wiser 
 to seek substance in shadow, than absolute fulness in mere ne 
 gation. 
 
 I have asked then for its birth-place in all that constitutes our rel 
 ative individuality, in all that each man calls exclusively himself. 
 It is an alien of which they know not : and for them the ques 
 tion itself is purposeless, and the very words that convey it are as 
 
ESSAY XI. 465 
 
 sounds in an unknown language, or as the vision of heaven and 
 earth expanded by the rising sun, which falls but as warmth on 
 the eyelids of the blind. To no class of plic&nomena or particu 
 lars can it be referred, itself being none ; therefore, to no faculty 
 by which these alone are apprehended. As little dare we refer 
 it to any form of abstraction or generalization ; for it has neither 
 co-ordinate nor analogon ; it is absolutely one ; and that it is, 
 and affirms itself to be, is its only predicate. And yet this 
 power, nevertheless, is ; in supremacy of being it is ;* and he 
 for whom it manifests itself in its adequate idea, dare as little ar 
 rogate it to himself as his own, can as little appropriate it either 
 totally or by partition, as he can claim ownership in the breath 
 ing air, or make an inclosure in the cope of heaven. f He bears 
 witness of it to his own mind, even as he describes life and light : 
 and, with the silence of light, it describes itself and dwells in us 
 only as far as we dwell in it. The truths which it manifests are 
 such as it alone can manifest, and in all truth it manifests itself. 
 By what name then canst thou call a truth so manifested ? Is 
 it not revelation ? Ask thyself whether thou canst attach to 
 that latter word any consistent meaning not included in the 
 idea of the former. And the manifesting power, the source and 
 the correlative of the idea thus manifested is it not God ? 
 Either thou knowest it to be God, or thou hast called an idol by 
 that awful name. Therefore in the most appropriate, no less 
 than in the highest, sense of the word were the earliest teachers 
 
 * To affirm that reason is, is the same as to affirm that reason is being, 
 or that the true being is reason, O Aoyof. Hence, the reason or law of a 
 thing constitutes its actual being, the ground of its reality. 1829. 
 
 f And yet this same is, is the essential predicate of the correspondent 
 object of this power. What must we infer ? Even this ; that the object 
 and subject are one; that the reason is being; the supreme reason the 
 supreme Being ; and that the antithesis of truth and being is but the result 
 of the polarizing property of all finite mind, for which unity is manifested 
 only by correspondent opposites. Here do we stop ? Woe to us, if we do ! 
 Better that we had never begun. A deeper yet must be sought forj even 
 the absolute Will, the Good, the superessential source of being, and in the 
 eternal act of self-affirmation, the I Am, the Father who with the only- 
 begotten Logos (word, idea, supreme mind, pleroma, the word containing, 
 every word that proceedeth from the mouth of the Most Highest) and with 
 the Spirit proceeding, is the one only God from everlasting to everlasting. 
 1829. 
 
466 THE FRIEND. 
 
 of humanity inspired. They alone were the true seers of God, 
 and therefore prophets of the human race. 
 
 Look round you, and you behold everywhere an adaptation of 
 means to ends. Meditate on the nature of a being whose ideas 
 are creative, and consequently more real, more substantial than 
 the things that, at the height of their creaturely state, are but 
 their dim reflexes ;* and the intuitive conviction will arise that 
 in such a being there could exist no motive to the creation of a 
 machine for its own sake ; that, therefore, the material world 
 must have been made for the sake of man, at once the high- 
 priest and representative of the Creator, as far as he partakes of 
 that reason in which the essences of all things co-exist in all their 
 distinctions yet as one and indivisible. But I speak of man in his 
 idea, and as subsumed in the divine humanity, in whom alone 
 G-od loved the world. 
 
 In all inferior things from the grass on the house-top to the 
 giant tree of the forest ; from the gnats that swarm in its shade, 
 and the mole that burrows amid its roots to the eagle which 
 builds in its summit, and the elephant which browses on its 
 branches, we behold first, a subjection to universal laws by 
 which each thing belongs to the whole, as interpenetrated by the 
 powers of the whole ; and, secondly, the intervention of particu 
 lar laws by which the universal laws are suspended or tempered 
 for the weal and sustenance of each particular class. Hence and 
 thus we see too that each species, and each individual of every 
 species, becomes a system, a world of its own. If then we behold 
 this economy everywhere in the irrational creation, shall we not 
 hold it probable that by some analogous intervention a similar 
 temperament will have been effected for the rational arid moral ? 
 
 * If I may not rather resemble them to the resurgent ashes, with which 
 (according to the tales of the later alchemists) the substantial forms of bird 
 and flower made themselves visible as, 
 ril /c 
 
 And. let me be permitted to add, in especial reference to this passage, a 
 premonition quoted from the same work (Zoroastris Oracula Magica), 
 
 "A No>f heyei, rti VOOVVTI 6r/ rca Uyet. 
 
 Of the flower apparitions so solemnly affirmed by Sir K. Digby, Kercher, 
 Helmont, and others, see a full and most interesting account in Southey s 
 Omniana (vol. ii. p. 82. Spectral Flowers. Ed.}, with a probable solution 
 of this chemical marvel. 
 
ESSAY XI. 467 
 
 Are we not entitled to expect some appropriate agency in behalf 
 of the presiding and alone* progressive creature ? To presume 
 some especial provision for the permanent interest of the crea 
 ture destined to move and grow towards that divine humanity 
 which we have learnt to contemplate as the final cause of all 
 creation, and the centre in which all its lines converge ? 
 
 To discover the mode of intervention requisite for man s devel 
 opment and progression, we must seek then for some general law, 
 by the untempered and uncounteracted action of which man s 
 development and progression would be prevented and endangered. 
 But this we shall find in that law of his understanding and fancy, 
 by which he is impelled to abstract the changes and outward re 
 lations of matter and to arrange them under the form of causes 
 and effects. And this was necessary, as the condition under 
 which alone experience and intellectual growth are possible. 
 But, on the other hand, by the same law he is inevitably tempt 
 ed to misinterpret a constant precedence into positive causation, 
 and thus to break and scatter the one divine and invisible life of 
 nature into countless idols of the sense ; and falling prostrate 
 before lifeless images, the creatures of his own abstraction, is 
 himself sensualized, and becomes a slave to the things of which 
 he was formed to be the conqueror and sovereign. From the 
 fetisch of the imbruted African to the soul-debasing errors of the 
 proud fact-hunting materialist we may trace the various ceremo 
 nials of the same idolatry, and shall find selfishness, hate, and 
 servitude as the results. If therefore by the overruling and sus 
 pension of the phantom-cause of this superstition ; if by separat 
 ing effects from their natural antecedents ; if by presenting the 
 phenomena of time (as far as is possible) in the absolute forms 
 of eternity ; the nursling of experience should, in the early period 
 of his pupilage, be compelled by a more impressive experience to 
 seek in the invisible life alone for the true cause and invisible 
 nexus of the things that are seen, we shall not demand the evi 
 dences of ordinary experience for that which, if it ever existed, 
 existed as its antithesis and for its counteraction. Was it an a];-. 
 propriate mean to a necessary end ? Has it been attested by 
 lovers of truth ; has it been believed by lovers of wisdom ? Do 
 we see throughout all nature the occasional intervention of par 
 ticular agencies in counter-check of universal laws ? (And of 
 what other definition is a miracle susceptible ?) These are the 
 
468 THE FKIEND. 
 
 questions : and if to these our answers must be affirmative, then 
 we too will acquiesce in the traditions of humanity, and yielding 
 as to a high interest of our own being, will discipline ourselves 
 to the reverential and kindly faith, that the guides and teachers 
 of mankind were the hands of power, no less than the voices of 
 inspiration : and little anxious concerning the particular forms, 
 proofs, and circumstances of each manifestation we will give an 
 historic credence to the historic fact, that men sent by God have 
 come with signs and wonders on the earth. 
 
 If it be objected, that in nature, as distinguished from man, 
 this intervention of particular laws is, or with the increase of 
 science will be, resolvable into the universal laws which they 
 had appeared to counterbalance, we will reply : Even so it may 
 be in the case of miracles ; but wisdom forbids her children to 
 antedate their knowledge, or to act and feel otherwise or further 
 than they know. But should that time arrive, the sole differ 
 ence, that could result from such an enlargement of our view, 
 would be this ; that what we now consider as miracle s in op 
 position to ordinary experience, we should then reverence with a 
 yet higher devotion as harmonious parts of one great complex 
 miracle", when the antithesis between experience and belief would 
 itself be taken up into unity of intuitive reason. 
 
 And what purpose of philosophy can this acquiescence answer ? 
 A gracious purpose, a most valuable end ; if it prevent the ener 
 gies of philosophy from being idly wasted, by removing the con 
 trariety without confounding the distinction between philosophy 
 and faith. The philosopher will remain a man in sympathy 
 with his fellow-men. The head will not be disjoined from the 
 heart, nor will speculative truth be alienated from practical wis 
 dom. And vainly without the union of both shall we expect an 
 opening of the inward eye to the glorious vision of that existence 
 which admits of no question out of itself, acknowledges no predi 
 cate but the I AM IN THAT I AM ! Oavf.t^oyTsg <filoao<pov[ABV cpdo- 
 (.TO(fr\aa^TBg -d^ajLi^ov^sv. In wonder (TU> ^av/ud^eiv^ says Aristotle, 
 does philosophy begin ; and in astoundment (TO> tfapfielv) says 
 Plato, does all true philosophy finish. As every faculty, with every 
 the minutest organ of our nature, owes its whole reality and com- 
 prehensibility to an existence incomprehensible and groundless, 
 because the ground of all comprehension ; not without the union 
 of all that is essential in all the functions of our spirit, not with- 
 
ESSAY XI. 469 
 
 out an emotion tranquil from its very intensity, shall we worthily 
 contemplate in the magnitude and integrity of the world that 
 life-ebullient stream which breaks through every momentary 
 embankment, again, indeed, and evermore to embank itself, but 
 within no banks to stagnate or be imprisoned. 
 
 But here it behooves us to bear in mind, that all true reality 
 has both its ground and its evidence in the will, without which 
 as its complement science itself is but an elaborate game of shad 
 ows, begins in abstractions and ends in perplexity^ For consid 
 ered merely intellectually, individuality, as individuality,, is only 
 conceivable as with and in the universal and infinite, neither be 
 fore nor after it. No transition is possible from one to the other, 
 as from the architect to the house, or the watch to its maker. 
 The finite form can neither be laid hold of by, nor can it appear 
 to, the mere speculative intellect as any thing of itself real, but 
 merely as an apprehension, a frame- work which the human 
 imagination forms by its own limits, as the foot measures itself 
 on the snow ; and the sole truth of which we must again refer to 
 the divine imagination,. in virtue of its omniformity. For even 
 as thou art capable of beholding the transparent air as little dur 
 ing the absence as during the presence of light, so canst thou be 
 hold the finite things as actually existing neither with nor with 
 out the substance. Not without, for then the forms cease to 
 be, and are lost in night : not with it, for it is the light, the 
 substance shining through it, which thou canst alone real]y see. 
 
 The ground-work, therefore, of all pure speculation is the full 
 apprehension of the difference between the contemplation of rea 
 son, namely, that intuition of things which arises when we pos 
 sess ourselves, as one with the whole, which is substantial 
 knowledge, and that which presents itself when transferring re 
 ality to the negations of reality, to the ever-varying frame-work 
 of the uniform life, we think of ourselves as separated beings, and 
 place nature in antithesis to the mind, as object to subject, thing 
 to thought, death to life. This is abstract knowledge, or the 
 science of the mere understanding. By the former, we know 
 that existence is its own predicate, self-affirmation, the one attri 
 bute in which all others areNymtained, not as parts, but as man 
 ifestations. It is an eternal and infinite self-rejoicing, self-loving, 
 with a joy unfathomable, with a love all-comprehensive. It is 
 absolute ; and the absolute is neither singly that which affirms, 
 
470 THE FRIEND. 
 
 nor that which is affirmed ; but the identity and living copula 
 of both. 
 
 On the other hand, by the abstract knowledge which belongs 
 to us as finite beings, and which leads to a science of delusion, 
 then only, when it would exist for itself instead of being the in 
 strument of the former (even as the former is equally ho] low 
 and yet more perilously delusive, where it is not radicated in a 
 deeper ground) when it would itself, I say, be its own life and 
 verity, instead of being, as it were, a translation of the living 
 word into a dead language, for the purposes of memory, arrange 
 ment, and general communication, it is by this abstract knowl 
 edge that the understanding distinguishes the affirmed from the 
 affirming. Well if it distinguish without dividing ! Well if by 
 distinction it add clearness to fulness, and prepare for the intel 
 lectual re-union of the all in one in that eternal Reason whose 
 fulness hath no opacity, whose transparency hath no vacuum. 
 
 If we thoughtfully review the three preceding paragraphs, we 
 shall find the conclusion to be ; that the dialectic intellect by 
 the exertion of its own powers exclusively can lead us to a gen 
 eral affirmation of the supreme reality of an absolute being. But 
 here it stops. It is utterly incapable of communicating insight 
 or conviction concerning the existence or possibility of the world, 
 as different from Deity. It finds itself constrained to identify, 
 more truly to confound, the Creator with the aggregate of his 
 creature, and, cutting the knot which it can not untwist, to deny 
 altogether the reality of all finite existence, and then to shelter 
 itself from its own dissatisfaction, its own importunate queries, in 
 the wretched evasion that of nothings, no solution can be required ; 
 till pain haply, and anguish, and remorse, with bitter scoff and 
 moody laughter inquire ; Are we then indeed nothings ? till 
 through every organ of sense nature herself asks ; How and 
 whence did this sterile and pertinacious nothing acquire its plural 
 number ? Unde quceso, hcec nihili in nihila tain portentosa 
 transnihilatio ? and lastly ; What is that inward mirror, in 
 which these nothings have at least relative existence ? The in 
 evitable result of all consequent reasoning, in which the intel 
 lect refuses to acknowledge a higher or deeper ground than it 
 can itself supply, and weens to possess within itself the centre 
 of its own system, is and from Zeno the Eleatic to Spinosa, and 
 from Spinosa to the Schellings, Okens and their adherents, of the 
 
ESSAY XI. 471 
 
 present day, ever has been pantheism under one or other of its 
 modes, the least repulsive of which differs from the rest, not in 
 its consequences, which are one and the same in all, and in all 
 alike are practically atheistic, but only as it may express the 
 striving of the philosopher himself to hide these consequences 
 from his own mind. This, therefore, I repeat, is the final con 
 clusion. All speculative disquisition must begin with postulates, 
 which the conscience alone can at once authorize and substan 
 tiate : and from whichever point the reason may start, from the 
 things which are seen to the one invisible, or from the idea of the 
 absolute one to the things that are seen, it will find a chasm, 
 which the moral being only, which the spirit and religion of man 
 alone, can fill up. 
 
 Thus I prefaced my inquiry into the science of method with a 
 principle deeper than science, more certain than demonstration. 
 For that the very ground, saith Aristotle, is groundless or self- 
 grounded, is an identical proposition. From the indemonstrable 
 flows the sap that circulates through every branch and spray of 
 the demonstration. To this principle I referred the choice of the 
 final object, the control over time, or, to comprise all in one, the 
 method of the will. From this I started, or rather seemed to 
 start ; for it still moved before me, as an invisible guardian and 
 guide, and it is this the re-appearance of which announces the 
 conclusion of the circuit, and welcomes me at the goal. Yea 
 (saith an enlightened physician), there is but one principle, which 
 alone reconciles the man with himself, with others, and with the 
 world ; which regulates all relations, tempers all passions, gives 
 power to overcome or support all suffering, and which is not to 
 be shaken by aught earthly, for it belongs not to the earth ; 
 namely, the principle of religion, the living and substantial faith 
 which passeth all under standing, as the cloud-piercing rock, 
 which overhangs the stronghold of which it had been the quarry 
 and remains the foundation. This elevation of the spirit above 
 the semblances of custom and the senses to a world of spirit, this 
 life in the idea, even in the supreme and godlike, which alone 
 merits the name of life, and without which our organic life is but 
 a state of somnambulism ; this it is which affords the sole sure 
 anchorage in the storm, and at the same time the substantiating 
 principle of all true wisdom, the satisfactory solution of all the 
 contradictions of human nature, of the whole riddle of the world. 
 
472 THE FKIEND. 
 
 This alone belongs to and speaks intelligibly to all alike, the 
 learned and the ignorant, if but the heart listens. For alike 
 present in all, it may be awakened, but it can not be given. But 
 let it riot be supposed, that it is a sort of knowledge : no ! it is a 
 form of BEING, or indeed it is the only knowledge that truly is, 
 and all other science is real only so far as it is symbolical of this. 
 The material universe, saith a Greek philosopher, is but one vast 
 complex mythus, that is, symbolical representation, and mythol 
 ogy the apex and complement of all genuine physiology. But as 
 this principle can not be implanted by the discipline of logic, so 
 neither can it be excited or evolved by the arts of rhetoric. For 
 it is an immutable truth, that what comes from the heart, that 
 alone goes to the heart ; what proceeds from a divine impulse, 
 that the godlike alone can awaken. 
 
THE THIRD LANDING-PLACE; 
 
 OR 
 
 ESSAYS MISCELLANEOUS. 
 
 Etiam a Musis si quando animum paulisper abducamus, apud Musas 
 nihilo minus feriamur; at reclines quidem, at otiosas, at de his et illis inter 
 se libere colloqiientes. 
 
THE THIRD LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 ESSAY I. 
 
 Fortuna plerutngue cst veluti galaxia quarundam obscurarum virtutum 
 sine nomine. BACON. 
 
 Fortune is for the most part but a galaxy or milky-way, as it were, of 
 certain obscure virtues without a name. 
 
 DOES fortune favor fools ? Or how do you explain the origin 
 of the proverb, which, differently worded, is to be found in all 
 the languages of Europe ? 
 
 This proverb admits of various explanations according to the 
 mood of mind in which it is used. It may arise from pity, and 
 the soothing persuasion that Providence is eminently watchful 
 over the helpless, and extends an especial cafe to those who are 
 not capable of caring for themselves. So used, it breathes the same 
 feeling as God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb or the 
 more sportive adage, that the fairies take care of children and 
 tipsy folk. The persuasion itself, in. addition to the general re 
 ligious feeling of mankind, and the scarcely less general love of 
 the marvellous, may be accounted for from our tendency to ex 
 aggerate all effects that seem disproportionate to their visible 
 cause and all circumstances that are in any way strongly contrast 
 ed with our notions of the persons under them. Secondly, it 
 arises from the safety and success which an ignorance of danger 
 arid difficulty sometimes actually assists in. procuring ; inasmuch 
 as it precludes the despondence, which might have kept the more 
 foresighted from undertaking the enterprise, the depression which 
 would retard its progress, and those overwhelming influences of 
 terror in cases where the vivid perception of the danger consti 
 tutes the greater part of the danger itself. Thus men are said to 
 have swooned and even died at the sight of a narrow bridge, over 
 
476 THIRD LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 which they had ridden the night before in perfect safety ; or at 
 tracing their footmarks along the edge of a precipice which the 
 darkness had concealed from them. A more obscure cause, yet 
 not wholly to be omitted, is afforded by the undoubted fact, that 
 the exertion of the reasoning faculties tends to extinguish or be 
 dim those mysterious instincts of skill, which, though for the most 
 part latent, we nevertheless possess in common with other animals. 
 
 Or the proverb may be used invidiously : and folly in the vo 
 cabulary of envy or baseness may signify courage and magnanimi 
 ty. Hardihood and fool-hardiness are indeed as different as green 
 and yellow, yet will appear the same to the jaundiced eye. 
 Courage multiplies the chances of success by sometimes making 
 opportunities, and always availing itself of them ; and in this 
 sense fortune may be said to favor fools by those, who, however 
 prudent in their own opinion, are deficient in valor and enter 
 prise. Again : an eminently good and wise man, for whom the 
 praises of the judicious have procured a high reputation even 
 with the world at large, proposes to himself certain objects, and 
 adapting the right means to the right end attains them : but his 
 objects not being what the world calls fortune, neither money nor 
 artificial rank, his admitted inferiors in moral and intellectual 
 worth, but more prosperous in their worldly concerns, are said to 
 have been favored by fortune, and he slighted : although the 
 fools did the same in their line as the wise man in his : they 
 adapted the appropriate means to the desired end and so suc 
 ceeded. In this sense the proverb is current by a misuse, or a 
 catachresis at least, of both the words, fortune and fools. 
 
 But, lastly, there is, doubtless, a true meaning attached to for 
 tune, distinct both from prudence and from courage ; and distinct 
 too from that absence of depressing or bewildering passions, which 
 (according to my favorite proverb, extremes meet, ) the fool not 
 seldom obtains in as great perfection by his ignorance, as the 
 wise man by the highest energies of thought and self-discipline. 
 Luck has a real existence in human affairs from the infinite 
 number of powers that are in action at the same time, and from 
 the co-existence of things contingent and accidental (such as to 
 us at least are accidental) with the regular appearances and 
 general laws of nature. A familiar instance will make these 
 words intelligible. The moon waxes and wanes according to a 
 necessary law. The clouds likewise, and all the manifold ap- 
 
ESSAY I. 477 
 
 pearances connected with them, are governed by certain laws no 
 less than the phases of the moon. But the laws which determine 
 the latter are known and calculable, while those of the former 
 are hidden from us. At all events, the number and variety of 
 their effects baffle our powers of calculation ; and that the sky is 
 clear or obscured at any particular time, we speak of, in common 
 language, as a matter of accident. Well ! at the time of the 
 full moon, but when the sky is completely covered with black 
 clouds, I am walking on in the dark, aware of no particular dan 
 ger : a sudden gust of wind rends the cloud for a moment, and 
 the moon emerging discloses to me a chasm or precipice, to the 
 very brink of which I had advanced my foot. This is what is 
 meant by luck, and according to the more or less serious mood or 
 habit of our mind we exclaim, how lucky ! or, how providential ! 
 The co-presence of numberless pliainomena, which from the com 
 plexity or subtlety of their determining causes are called contin 
 gencies, and the co-existence of these with any regular or necessary 
 phenomenon (as the clouds with the moon for instance) occasion 
 coincidences, which, when they are attended by any advantage 
 or injury, and are at the same time incapable of being calculated 
 or foreseen by human prudence, form good or ill luck. On a hot 
 sunshiny afternoon came on a sudden storm and spoilt the 
 farmer s hay : and this is called ill luck. We will suppose the 
 same event to take place, when meteorology shall have been per 
 fected into a science, provided with unerring instruments ; but 
 which the farmer had neglected to examine. This is no longer 
 ill luck, but imprudence. Now apply this to our proverb. Un 
 foreseen coincidences may have greatly helped a man, yet if they 
 have done for him only what possibly from his own abilities he 
 might have effected for himself, his good luck will excite less at 
 tention and the instance be less remembered. That clever men 
 should attain their objects seems natural, and we neglect the cir 
 cumstances that perhaps produced that success of themselves 
 without the intervention of skill or foresight ; but we dwell on 
 the fact and remember it as something strange, when the same 
 happens to a weak or ignorant man. So. too, though the latter 
 should fail in his undertakings from concurrences that might have 
 happened to the wisest man, yet his failure being no more than 
 might have been expected and accounted for from his folly, it lays 
 no hold on our attention, but fleets away among the other distin- 
 
478 THIRD LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 guished waves in which the stream of ordinary life murmurs by 
 us, and is forgotten. Had it been as true as it was notoriously 
 false, that those all-embracing discoveries, which have shed a 
 dawn of science on the art of chemistry, and give no obscure 
 promise of some one great constitutive law, in the light of which 
 dwell dominion and the power of prophecy ; if these discoveries, 
 instead of having been as they really were, preconcerted by 
 meditation, and evolved out of his own intellect, had occurred by 
 a set of lucky accidents to the illustrious father and founder of 
 philosophic alchemy : if they had presented themselves to Davy 
 exclusively in consequence of his luck in possessing a particular 
 galvanic battery ; if this battery, as far as Davy was concerned, 
 had itself been an accident, and not (as in point of fact it was) 
 desired and obtained by him for the purpose of insuring the testi 
 mony of experience to his principles, and in order to bind down 
 material nature under the inquisition of reason, and force from 
 her, as by torture, unequivocal answers to prepared and precon 
 ceived questions ; yet still they would not have been talked of or 
 described, as instances of luck, but as the natural results of his 
 admitted genius and known skill. But should an accident have 
 disclosed similar discoveries to a mechanic at Birmingham or 
 Sheffield, and if the man should grow rich in consequence, and 
 partly by the envy of his neighbors, and partly with good reason, 
 be considered by them as a man below par in the general powers 
 of his understanding ; then, " what a lucky fellow ! Well, 
 Fortune does favor fools that s certain! It is always so!" 
 And forthwith the exclaimer relates half a dozen similar instan 
 ces. Thus accumulating the one sort of facts and never collect 
 ing the other, we do, as poets in their diction, and quacks of all 
 denominations do in their reasoning, put a part for the whole, and 
 at once soothe our envy and gratify our love of the marvellous, by 
 the sweeping proverb, Fortune favors fools. 
 
ESSAY II. 
 
 Quod me non movct astimatione : 
 
 Vcrum cst [ivrijwavvov mci sodalis. CATULLUS.* 
 
 It interests me not by any conceit of its value ; but it is a remembrance 
 of my honored friend. 
 
 THE philosophic ruler, who secured the favors of fortune by 
 seeking wisdom and knowledge in preference to them, has pa 
 thetically observed The heart knoweth its own bitterness ; and 
 there is a joy in which the stranger intermeddleth not. A simple 
 question founded on a trite proverb, with a discursive answer to 
 it, would scarcely suggest to an indifferent person any other no 
 tion than that of a mind at ease, amusing itself with its own ac 
 tivity. Once before (I believe about this time last year) I had 
 taken up the old memorandum-book, from which I transcribed 
 the preceding essay, and it had then attracted my notice by the 
 name of the illustrious chemist mentioned in the last illustration. 
 Exasperated by the base and cowardly attempt which had been 
 made to detract from the honors due to his astonishing genius, I 
 had slightly altered the concluding sentences, substituting the 
 more recent for his earlier discoveries ; and without the most 
 distant intention of publishing what I then wrote, I had express 
 ed my own convictions for the gratification of my own feelings, 
 and finished by tranquilly paraphrasing into a chemical allegory 
 the Homeric adventure of Menelaus with Proteus. Oh ! with 
 what different feelings, with what a sharp and sudden emotion 
 did I re-peruse the same question yester-morning, having by ac 
 cident opened the book at the page upon which it was written. 
 I was moved : for it was Admiral Sir Alexander Ball who first 
 proposed the question to me, and the particular satisfaction which 
 he exprdised, had occasioned me to note down the substance of my 
 reply. I was moved : because to this conversation I was in 
 debted for the friendship and confidence with which he after- 
 * XILEd. 
 
480 THIRD LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 wards honored me ; and because it recalled the memory of one 
 of the most delightful mornings I ever passed ; when, as we were 
 riding together, the same person related to me the principal events 
 of his own life, and introduced them by adverting to this conver 
 sation. It recalled, too, the deep impression left on my mind 
 by that narrative, the impression, that I had never known any 
 analogous instance, in which a man so successful had been so 
 little indebted to fortune, or lucky accidents, or so exclusively 
 both the architect and builder of his own success. The sum of 
 his history may be comprised in this one sentence : Ucec, sub 
 numine nobismet fecimus, sapientia duce, fortuna permittente. 
 (These things, under God, we have done for ourselves, through 
 the guidance of wisdom, and with the permission of fortune.) 
 Luck gave him nothing : in her most generous moods, she only 
 worked with him as with a friend, not for him as for a fondling ; 
 but more often she simply stood neuter, and suffered him to work 
 for himself. Ah ! how could I be otherwise than affected by 
 whatever reminded me of that daily and familiar intercourse with 
 him, which made the fifteen months from May 1804, to October 
 1805, in many respects, the most memorable and instructive pe 
 riod of my life ? Ah ! how could I be otherwise than most deeply 
 affected, when there was still lying on my table the paper which, 
 the day before, had conveyed to me the unexpected and most 
 awful tidings of this man s death, his death in the fulness of 
 all his powers, in the rich autumn of ripe yet undecaying man 
 hood ? I once knew a lady, who after the loss of a lovely child 
 continued for several days in a state of seeming indifference, the 
 weather, at the same time, as if in unison with her, being calm, 
 though gloomy ; till one morning a burst of sunshine breaking 
 in upon her, and suddenly lighting up the room where she was 
 sitting, she dissolved at once into tears, and wept passionately. 
 In no very dissimilar manner did the sudden gleam of recollection 
 at the sight of this memorandum act on myself. I had been 
 stunned by the intelligence, as by an outward blow, till this tri 
 fling incident startled and disentranced me ; the sudden pang 
 shivered through my whole frame ; and if I repressed the out 
 ward shows of sorrow, it was by force that I repressed tkem, and 
 because it is not by tears that I ought to mourn for the loss of 
 Sir Alexander Ball, 
 
 He was a man above his age : but for that very reason the 
 
ESSAY II. 481 
 
 age has the more need to have the master-features of his char 
 acter portrayed and preserved. This I feel it my duty to at 
 tempt, and this alone : for having received neither instructions 
 iior permission from the family of the deceased, I can not think 
 myself allowed to enter into the particulars of his private his 
 tory, strikingly as many of them Avould illustrate the elements 
 and composition of his rnind. For he was indeed a living con 
 futation of the assertion attributed to the Prince of Conde, that 
 no man appeared great to his valet dc ch-ambre a saying which, 
 I suspect, owes its currency less to its truth, than to the envy of 
 mankind and the misapplication of the word, great, to actions 
 unconnected with reason and free will. It will be sufficient for 
 my purpose to observe that the purity and strict propriety of his 
 conduct, which precluded rather than silenced calumny, the 
 evenness of his temper and his attentive and affectionate man 
 ners, in private life, greatly aided and increased his public utility : 
 and, if it should please Providence, that a portion of his spirit 
 should descend with his mantle, the virtues of Sir Alexander 
 Ball, as a master, a husband, and a parent, will form a no less 
 remarkable epoch in the moral history of the Maltese than his 
 wisdom, as a governor, has made in that of their outward cir 
 cumstances. That the private and personal qualities of a first 
 magistrate should have political effects, will appear strange to 
 n-o reflecting Englishman, who has attended to the workings of 
 men s minds during the first ferment of revolutionary principles, 
 and must therefore have witnessed the influence of our own 
 sovereign s domestic character in counteracting them. But in 
 Malta there were circumstances w r hich rendered such an example 
 peculiarly requisite and beneficent. The very existence, for so 
 many generations, of an order of lay celibates in that island, 
 who abandoned even the outward shows of an adherence to their 
 vow of chastity, must have had .pernicious effects on the morals 
 of the inhabitants. But when it is considered too that the 
 knights of Malta had been for the last fifty years or more a set 
 of useless idlers, generally illiterate,* for they thought litera- 
 
 * The personal effects of every knight were, after his death, appropri 
 ated to the Order, and his books, if he had any, devolved to the public 
 library. This library therefore, which has been accumulating from the 
 time of their first settlement in the island, is a fair criterion* of the nature 
 and degree of their literary studies, as an average. Even in respect to 
 
 VOL. II. X 
 
482 THIRD LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 ture no part of a soldier s excellence ; and yet effeminate, for 
 they were soldiers in name only : when it is considered, that 
 they were, moreover, all of them aliens, who looked upon them 
 selves not merely as of a superior rank to the native nobles, but 
 as beings of a different race (I had almost said, species), from 
 the Maltese collectively ; and finally that these men possessed 
 exclusively the government of the island ; it may be safely con 
 cluded that they were little better than a perpetual influenza, 
 relaxing and diseasing the hearts of all the families within their 
 sphere of influence. Hence the peasantry, who fortunately were 
 below their reach, notwithstanding the more than .childish igno 
 rance in which they were kept by their priests, yet compared 
 with the middle and higher classes, were both in mind and body 
 as ordinary men compared with dwarfs. Every respectable 
 family had some one knight for their patron, as a matter of 
 course ; and to him the honor of a sister or a daughter was sac 
 rificed, equally as a matter of course.* 1 But why should I thus 
 disguise the truth ? Alas ! in nine instances out of ten, this pa 
 tron was the common paramour of every woman in the family, 
 Were I composing a state-memorial, I should abstain from all 
 allusion to moral good or evil, as not having now first to learn, 
 that with diplomatists and with practical statesmen of every de 
 nomination, it Avould preclude all attention to its other contents, 
 and have no result but that of securing for its author s name the 
 official private mark of exclusion or dismission, as a weak or 
 suspicious person. But among those for whom I am now writ 
 ing, there are, I. trust, many who will think it not the feeblest 
 reason for rejoicing in our possession of Malta, and not the least 
 worthy motive for wishing its retention, that one source of 
 human misery and corruption has been dried up. Such persons 
 will hear the name of Sir Alexander Ball with additional rever 
 ence, as of one who has made the protection of Great Britain a 
 double blessing to the Maltese, and broken the bonds of iniquity, 
 as well as unlocked the fetters of political oppression. 
 
 When we are praising the departed by our own fire-sides, we 
 dwell most fondly on those qualities which had won our personal 
 
 works of military science, it is contemptible as the sole public library of 
 so numerous and opulent an order, most contemptible and in all other de 
 partments of literature it is below contempt. 
 * See Table Talk, VI. p. 509. Ed. 
 
ESSAY II. 483 
 
 affection, and which sharpen our individual regrets. But when 
 impelled by a loftier and more meditative sorrow, we would raise 
 a public monument to their memory, we praise them appropri 
 ately when we relate their actions faithfully ; and thus preserving 
 their example for the imitation of the living, alleviate the loss, 
 while we demonstrate its magnitude. My funeral eulogy of Sir 
 Alexander Ball must therefore be a narrative of his life ; and this 
 friend of mankind will be defrauded of honor in proportion as that 
 narrative is deficient and fragmentary. It shall, however, be as 
 complete as my information enables, and as prudence and a 
 proper respect for the feelings of the living permit, me to render it. 
 His fame (I adopt the words of our elder writers) is so great 
 throughout the world that he stands in no need of an encomium ; 
 and yet his worth is much greater than his fame. It is impossi 
 ble not to speak great things of him, and yet it will be very diffi 
 cult to speak what he deserves. But custom requires that some 
 thing should be said ; it is a duty and a debt which we owe to 
 ourselves and to mankind, not less than to his memory ; and I 
 hope his great soul, if it hath any knowledge of what is done 
 here below, will not be offended at the smallness even of my offering. 
 Ah ! how little, when among the subjects of The Friend I 
 promised " characters met with in real life," did I anticipate the 
 sad event, which compels me to weave on a cypress branch those 
 sprays of laurel which I had destined for his bust, not his monu 
 ment ! He lived as we should all live ; and, I doubt not, left 
 the world as we should all wish to leave it. Such is the power 
 of dispensing blessings, which Providence has. attached to the 
 truly great and good, that they can not even die without ad 
 vantage to their fellow-creatures ; for death consecrates their ex 
 ample ; and the wisdom, which might have been slighted at the 
 council-table, becomes oracular from the shrine. Those rare ex 
 cellencies, which make our grief poignant, make it likewise profit 
 able ; and the tears, which wise men shed for the departure of 
 the wise, are among those that are preserved in heaven. It is the 
 fervent aspiration of my spirit, that I may so perform the task 
 which private gratitude, and public duty impose on me, that, " as 
 God hath cut this tree of paradise down from its seat of earth, the 
 dead trunk may yet support a part of the declining temple, or at 
 least serve to kindle the fire on the altar."* 1 
 * Jer. Taylor. 
 
ESSAY III. 
 
 Si partem tacuisse velim, quodcumque relinquam, 
 
 Majus erit. Vetcres actus, primamque juvcntarn 
 
 Prosequar? Ad sese mentem prcesentia, ducunt. 
 
 Narrem justitiam ? Resplendet gloria Martis. 
 
 Armati referam vires ? Plus egit inermis. CLAUDIAX.* 
 
 If I desire to pass over a part in silence, whatever I omit, will seem the 
 most worthy to have been recorded. Shall I pursue his old exploits and 
 early youth ? His recent merits recall the mind to themselves. Shall I 
 dwell on his justice ? The glory of the warrior rises before me resplendent. 
 Shall I relate his strength in arms ? He performed yet greater things un 
 armed. 
 
 " THERE is something," says Harrington,! " first in the making 
 of a commonwealth, then in the governing of -it, and last of all in the 
 leading of its armies, which, though there be great divines, great 
 laAvyers, great men in all ranks of life, seems to be peculiar only to 
 the genius of a gentleman. For so it is in the universal series of 
 story, that if any man has founded a commonwealth, he was first 
 a gentleman." Such also, he adds, as have got any fame as civil 
 governors, have been gentlemen, or persons of known descents. 
 Sir Alexander Ball was a gentleman by birth ; a younger brother 
 of an old and respectable family in Gloucestershire. He went 
 into the navy at an early age from his choice, and as he himself 
 told me, in consequence of the deep impression and vivid images 
 left on his mind by the perusal of Hobinson Crusoe. It is not my 
 intention to detail the steps of his promotion, or the services in 
 which he was engaged as a subaltern. I recollect many partic 
 ulars indeed, but not the dates, with such distinctness as would 
 enable me to state them (as it would be necessary to do if 1 
 stated them at all) in the order of time. These dates might, 
 perhaps, have been procured from other sources ; but incidents 
 that are neither characteristic nor instructive, even such as would 
 
 * De Laud. Stilic. i. 13. Ed. f Preliminaries to Oceana, p. i. Ed. 
 
ESSAY III. 485 
 
 be expected with reason in a regular life, are no part of my plan ; 
 while those which are both interesting and illustrative I have 
 been precluded from mentioning, some from motives which have 
 been already explained, and others from still higher considera 
 tions. The most important of these may be deduced from a re 
 flection with which he himself once concluded a long and affect 
 ing narration ; namely, that no body of men can for any length 
 of time be safely treated otherwise than as rational beings ; and 
 that, therefore, the education of the lower classes was of the ut 
 most consequence to the permanent security of the empire, even 
 for the sake of our navy. The dangers, apprehended from the 
 education of the lower classes, arose (he said)"entirely from its not 
 being universal, and from the unusualness in the lowest classes 
 of those accomplishments, which he, like Dr. Bell, regarded as one 
 of the means of education, and not as education itself* If, he ob 
 served, the lower classes in general possessed but one eye or one arm, 
 the few who were so fortunate as to possess two would naturally 
 become vain and restless, and consider themselves as entitled to a 
 higher situation. He illustrated this by the faults attributed to 
 learned women, and that the same objections were formerly made to 
 educating women at all ; namely, that their knowledge made them 
 vain, affected, and neglectful of their proper duties. Now that 
 all women of condition arc well-educated, we hear no more of 
 these apprehensions, or observe any instances to justify them. 
 Yet if a lady understood the Greek one-tenth part as well as the 
 whole circle of her acquaintances understood the French lan 
 guage, it would not surprise us to find her less pleasing from the 
 consciousness of her superiority in the possession of an unusual 
 advantage. Sir Alexander Ball quoted the speech of an old ad 
 miral, one of whose two great wishes was to have a ship s crew 
 composed altogether of serious Scotchmen. He spoke with great 
 reprobation of the vulgar notion, the worse man, the better sailor. 
 Courage, he said, was the natural product of familiarity with 
 danger, which thoughtlessness would oftentimes turn into fool- 
 hardiness ; arid that he had always found the most usefully brave 
 
 * "Which consists in educing, or to adopt Dr. Bell s own expression, elicit 
 ing the faculties of the human mind, and at the same time subordinating 
 them to the reason and conscience ; varying the means of this common end 
 according to the sphere and particular mode, in which the individual is 
 likely to act and become useful. 
 
486 THIRD LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 sailors the gravest and most rational of his crew. The best sailor 
 he had ever had, first attracted his notice by the anxiety which 
 he expressed concerning the means of remitting some money 
 which he had received in the West Indies to his sister in Eng 
 land ; and this man, without any tinge of method ism, was never 
 heard to swear an oath, and was remarkable for the firmness 
 with w^hich he devoted a part of every Sunday to the reading of 
 his Bible. I record this with satisfaction as a testimony of great 
 weight, and in all respects unexceptionable ; for Sir Alexander 
 Ball s opinions throughout life remained unwarped by zealotry, 
 and were those of a mind seeking after truth in calmness and 
 complete self-possession. He was much pleased with an unsus 
 picious testimony furnished by Dampier. " I have particularly 
 observed," writes this famous old navigator,* " there and in 
 other places, that such as had been well-bred, were generally 
 most careful to improve their time, and would be very industrious 
 and frugal where there was any probability of considerable gain ; 
 but on the contrary, such as had been bred up in ignorance and 
 hard labor, when they carne to have plenty would extravagantly 
 squander away their time and money in drinking and making a 
 bluster." Indeed, it is a melancholy proof, how strangely power 
 warps the minds of ordinary men, that there can be a doubt on 
 this subject among persons who have been themselves educated. 
 It tempts a suspicion, that unknown to themselves they find a 
 comfort in the thought that their inferiors are something less than 
 men : or that they have an uneasy half-consciousness that, if this 
 were not the case, they would themselves have no claim to be 
 their superior. For a sober education naturally inspires self-re 
 spect. But he who respects himself will respect others ; and he 
 who respects both himself and others, -must of necessity be a brave 
 man. The great importance of this subject, arid the increasing 
 interest which good men of all denominations feel in the bringing 
 about of a national education, must be my excuse for having en 
 tered so minutely into Sir Alexander Ball s opinions on this head, 
 in which, however, I am the more excusable, being now ori that 
 part of his life which I am obliged to leave almost a blank. 
 
 During his lieutenancy, and after he had perfected himself in 
 the knowledge and duties of a practical sailor, he was compelled 
 by the state of his health to remain in England for a considerable 
 * Vol. II. P. ii. p. 89. .EW. 
 
ESSAY III. 487 
 
 length of time. Of this he industriously availed himself for the 
 acquirement of suhstaiitial knowledge from books ; and during 
 his whole life afterwards, he considered those as his happiest 
 hours, which, without any neglect of official or professional duty, 
 he could devote to reading. He preferred, indeed he almost con 
 fined himself to, history, political economy, voyages and travels, 
 natural history, and latterly agricultural works : in short, to such 
 books as contain specific facts, or practical principles capable of 
 specific application. His active life, and the particular objects 
 of immediate utility, some one of which he had always in his 
 view, precluded a taste for works of pure speculation and ab 
 stract science, though he highly honored those who were emi 
 nent in these respects, and considered them as the benefactors 
 of mankind, no less than those who afterwards discovered the 
 mode of applying their principles, or who realized them in prac 
 tice. Works of amusement, as novels, plays, and the like did not 
 appear even to amuse him ; and the only poetical composition, 
 of which I have ever heard him speak, was a manuscript^ poem 
 written by one of my friends, which I read to his lady in his 
 presence. To my surprise he afterwards spoke of this with 
 warm interest ; but it was evident to me, that it was not so 
 much the poetic merit of the composition that had interested 
 him, as the truth and psychological insight with which it repre 
 sented the practicability of rc ibrming the most hardened minds, 
 and the various accidents which may awaken the most brutal 
 ized person to a recognition of his nobler being. I will add one 
 remark of his own knowledge acquired from books, which appears 
 to me both just and valuable. The prejudice against such 
 knowledge, he said, and the custom of opposing it to that which 
 is learnt by practice, originated in those times when books were 
 almost confined to theology and to logical and metaphysical 
 subtleties ; but that at present there is scarcely any practical 
 knowledge, which is not to be found in books : the press is the 
 means by which intelligent men now converse with each other, 
 and persons of all classes and all pursuits convey, each the con 
 tribution of his individual experience. It was therefore, he- said. 
 as absurd to hold book-knowledge at present in contempt, as it 
 would be for a man to avail himself only of his own eyes and 
 
 * Though it remains, I believe, unpublished, I can not resist the ternpta- 
 tion of recording that it was Mr. Wordsworth s Peter Bell. 1817. 
 
,488 THJK1) LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 ears, and to aim at nothing which could not be performed ex 
 clusively by his own arms. The use and necessity of personal 
 experience consisted in the power of choosing and applying Avhat 
 had been read, and of discriminating by the light of analogy the 
 practicable from the impracticable, and probability from mere 
 plausibility. Without a judgment matured and steadied by ac 
 tual experience, a man would read to little or perhaps to bad 
 purpose ; but yet that experience, which in exclusion of all other 
 knowledge has been derived from one man s life, is in the present 
 day scarcely worthy of the name at least for those who are to 
 act in the higher and wider spheres of duty. An ignorant gen 
 eral, he said, inspired him with terror ; for if he were too proud 
 to take advice he would ruin himself by his own blunders ; and 
 if he were not, by adopting the worst that was offered. A great 
 genius may indeed form an exception ; but we do not lay down 
 rules in expectation of wonders. A similar remark I remember 
 to have heard from an officer, who to eminence in professional 
 science arid the gallantry of a tried soldier, adds all the accom 
 plishments of a sound scholar and the powers of a man of genius. 
 One incident, which happened at this period of Sir Alexander s 
 life, is so illustrative of his character, and furnishes so strong a 
 presumption that the thoughtful humanity by which he was dis 
 tinguished w r as not wholly the growth of his latter years, that, 
 though it may appear to some trifling in itself, I will insert it in 
 this place, with the occasion on which it w r as communicated to 
 me. In a*large party at the Grand Master s palace, I had ob 
 served a naval officer of distinguished merit listening to Sir 
 Alexander Ball, whenever he joined in the conversation, with so 
 marked a pleasure, that it seemed as if his very voice, inde 
 pendently of what Ire said, had been delightful to him : and once 
 as he fixed his eyes on Sir Alexander Ball, I could not but notice 
 the mixed expression of awe and affection, which gave a more 
 than common interest to so manly a countenance. During his 
 stay in the island, this officer honored me not unfrequently with 
 his visits ; and at the conclusion of my last conversation with 
 him, in which I had dwelt on the wisdom of the Governor s* 1 
 
 * Such Sir Alexander Ball was in reality, and such was his general ap 
 pellation in the .Mediterranean: I adopt this title, therefore, to avoid the 
 ungraceful repetition of his own name on the one hand, and on the other 
 the confusion which might arise from the use of his real title, namely, " His 
 
ESSAY TIT. 489 
 
 conduct in a recent and difficult emergency, he told me that he 
 considered himself as indebted to the same excellent person for 
 that which was dearer to him than his life. " Sir Alexander 
 Ball," said he, "has (I dare say) forgotten the circumstance; 
 but when he was Lieutenant Ball, he was the officer whom I 
 accompanied in my first boat-expedition, being then a midship 
 man and only in my fourteenth year. As we Avere rowing up to 
 the vessel which we were to attack, amid a discharge of mus 
 ketry, I was overpowered by fear, my knees trembled under me, 
 and I seemed on the point of fainting away. Lieutenant Ball, 
 who saw the condition I was in, placed himself close beside me, 
 and still keeping his countenance directed toward the enemy, 
 took hold of my hand, and pressing it in the most friendly man 
 ner, said in a low voice, Courage, my dear boy ! don t be afraid 
 of yourself ! you will recover in a minute or so I Avas just the 
 same, when I first went out in this way. Sir," added the offi 
 cer to me, " it was as if an. angel had put a new soul into me. 
 With the feeling, that I was not yet dishonored, the Avhole bur 
 then of agony Avas removed ; and from that moment I Avas as 
 fearless and forward as the oldest of the boat s creAV, and on our 
 return the lieutenant spoke highly of me to our captain. I am 
 scarcely less convinced of my own being, than that I should haA r e 
 been what I tremble to think of, if, instead of his humane en 
 couragement, he had at that moment scoffed, threatened, or rc- 
 A r i]ed me. And this was the more kind in him, because, as I 
 afterAvards understood, his OAVU conduct in his first trial had 
 evinced to all appearances the greatest fearlessness, and that he 
 said this therefore only to give me heart, and restore me to my 
 OAVII good opinion." This anecdote, I trust, will have some 
 weight Avith those Avho may have lent an ear to any of those 
 vague calumnies from which 110 naval commander can secure his 
 good name, Avho, knowing the paramount necessity of regularity 
 and strict discipline in a ship of Avar, adopts an appropriate plan 
 
 Majesty s civil Commissioner for the island of Malta and its Dependencies ; 
 and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Order of St. John." This is not the 
 place to expose the timid and unsteady policy which continued the latter 
 title, or the petty jealousies which interfered to prevent Sir Alexander 
 Bull from having the title of Governor, from one of the very causes which 
 rendered him fittest for the office. 
 
 (See Table Talk, VI. p. 507. E<1) 
 x* 
 
490 THIRD LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 for the attainment of these objects, and remains constant and 
 immutable in the execution. To an Athenian, who, in praising 
 a public functionary, had said that every one either applauded 
 him or left him without censure, a philosopher replied " How 
 seldom then must he have done his duty !" 
 
 Of Sir Alexander Ball s character, as Captain Ball, of his 
 measures as a disciplinarian, and of the wise and dignified prin 
 ciple on which he grounded those measures, I have already spo 
 ken in a former part of this work,* 1 and must content myself 
 therefore with entreating the reader to re-peruse that passage as 
 belonging to this place, and as a part of the present narration. 
 Ah ! little did I expect at the time I wrote that account, that 
 the motives of delicacy, which then impelled me to withhold the 
 name, would so soon be exchanged for the higher duty which 
 now justifies me in adding it ! At the thought of such events 
 the language of a tender superstition is the voice of nature it 
 self, and those facts alone presenting themselves to our memory 
 which had left an impression on our hearts, we assent to and 
 adopt the poet s pathetic complaint : 
 
 0, Sir ! the good die first, 
 
 And those whose hearts are dry as summer dust, 
 Burn to the socket.f 
 
 Thus that the humane plan described in the pages now re 
 ferred to, a system in pursuance of which the captain of a man 
 of war uniformly regarded his sentences not as dependent on his 
 own will, or to be affected by the state of his feelings at the mo 
 ment, but as the pre-established determinations of known laws, 
 and himself as the voice of the law in pronouncing the sentence, 
 arid its delegate in enforcing the execution, could not but furnish 
 occasional food to the spirit of detraction, must be evident to 
 every reflecting mind. It is indeed little less than impossible, 
 that he, who in order to be effectively humane determines to be 
 inflexibly just, and who is inexorable to his own feelings when 
 they would interrupt the course of justice ; who looks at each 
 particular act by the light of all its consequences, and as the rep 
 resentative of ultimate good or evil, should not sometimes be 
 charged with tyranny by weak minds. And it is too certain 
 that the calumny will be willingly believed and eagerly propa- 
 * Essay p. 157. Ed. f Excursion, B. I. Ed. 
 
ESSAY IV. 491 
 
 gated by all those, who should shun the presence of an eye keen 
 in the detection of imposture, incapacity, and misconduct, and of 
 a resolution as steady in their exposure. We soon hate the man 
 whose qualities we dread, and thus have a double interest, an in 
 terest of passion as well as of policy, in decrying and defaming 
 him. But good men will rest satisfied with the promise made to 
 them by the Divine Comforter, that by her children shall wis 
 dom be justified. 
 
 ESSAY IV. 
 
 the generous spirit, who, when brought 
 
 Among the tasks of real life, hath wrought 
 
 Upon the plan that pleased his childish thought ; 
 
 Whose high endeavors are an inward light 
 
 That make the path before him always bright ; 
 
 Who doomed to go in company with pain, 
 
 And fear and bloodshed, miserable train ! 
 
 Turns his necessity to glorious gain ; 
 
 By objects, which might force the soul to abate 
 
 Her feeling, rendered more compassionate. WORDSWORTH.* 
 
 AT the close of the American war, Captain Ball was intrusted 
 with the protection and convoying of an immense mercantile fleet 
 to America, and by his great prudence and unexampled attention 
 to the interests of all arid each, he endeared his name to the 
 American merchants, and laid the foundation of that high re 
 spect and predilection which both the Americans and their gov 
 ernment ever afterwards entertained for him. My recollection 
 does not enable me to attempt any accuracy in the date or cir 
 cumstances, or to add the particulars, of his services in the West 
 Indies and on the coast of America. I now therefore merely al 
 lude to the fact with a prospective reference to opinions and cir 
 cumstances, which I shall have to mention hereafter. Shortly 
 after the general peace was established, Captain Ball, who was 
 now a married man, passed some time with his lady in France, 
 and, if I mistake not, at Xantes. At the same lime, and in the 
 * The Christian Warrior. Ed. 
 
492 .THIRD LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 same town, among the other English visitors, Lord (then Captain) 
 Nelson happened to be one. In consequence of some punctilio, as 
 to whose business it was to paf the compliment of the first call, 
 they never met, and this trifling affair occasioned a coldness be 
 tween the two naval commanders, or in truth a mutual prejudice 
 against each other. Some years after, both their ships being to 
 gether close ofT Minorca and near Port Mahon, a violent storm 
 nearly disabled Nelson s vessel, and in addition to the fury of the 
 wind, it was night-time and the thickest darkness. Captain Ball, 
 however, brought his vessel at length to Nelson s assistance, took 
 his ship in tow, and used his best endeavors to bring her and his 
 own vessel into Port Mahon. The difficulties and the dangers 
 increased. Nelson considered the case of his own ship as despe 
 rate, and that unless she was immediately left to her own fate, 
 both vessels would inevitably be lost. He, therefore, with the 
 generosity natural to him, repeatedly requested Captain Ball to 
 let him loose ; and on Ball s refusal he became impetuous, and 
 enforced his demand with passionate threats. Ball then himself 
 took the speaking-trumpet, which the fury of the wind and waves 
 rendered necessary, and with great solemnity and without the 
 least disturbance of temper, called out in reply, " I feel confident 
 that I can bring you in safe ; I therefore must not, and, by the 
 help of Almighty God ! I will not leave you !" What he prom 
 ised he performed ; and after they were safely anchored, Nelson 
 came on board of Ball s ship, and embracing him with all the ar 
 dor of acknowledgment, exclaimed " a friend in need is a friend 
 indeed !" At this time and on this occasion commenced that firm 
 and perfect friendship between these two great men, which was 
 interrupted only by the death of the former. The pleasing task 
 of dwelling on this mutual attachment I defer to that part of the 
 present sketch which will relate to Sir Alexander Ball s opinions 
 of men and things. It will be sufficient for the present to say, 
 that the two men, whom Lord Nelson especially honored, were 
 Sir Thomas Troubridge and Sir Alexander Ball ; and once, when 
 they were both present, on some allusion made to the loss of his 
 arm, he replied, "Who shall dare tell me that I want an arm, 
 when I have three right arms this (putting forward his own 
 left one) and Ball and Troubridge ?" 
 
 In the plan of the battle of the Nile it was Lord Nelson s de 
 sign, that Captains Troubridge and Ball should have led up the 
 
ESSAY IV. 493 
 
 attack. The former was stranded ; and the latter, by accident 
 of the wind, could not bring his ship into the line of battle till 
 some time after the engagement had become general. "With his 
 characteristic forecast and activity of (what may not improperly 
 be called) practical imagination, he had made arrangements to 
 meet every probable contingency. All the shrouds and sails of 
 the ship, not absolutely necessary for its immediate management, 
 were thoroughly wetted and so rolled up, that they were as hard 
 and as little inflammable as so many solid cylinders of wood ; 
 every sailor had his appropriate place and function, and a certain 
 number were appointed as the firemen, whose sole duty it was to 
 be on the watch if any part of the vessel should take fire : and 
 to these men exclusively the charge of extinguishing it was com 
 mitted. It was already dark when he brought his ship into ac 
 tion, and laid her along-side the French _L Orient. One particu 
 lar only I shall add to the known account of the memorable en 
 gagement between these ships, and this I received from Sir 
 Alexander Ball himself. He had previously made a combustible 
 preparation, but which, from the nature of the engagement to be 
 expected, he had purposed to reserve for the last emergency. But 
 jwst at the time when, from several symptoms, he had every 
 reason to believe that the enemy would soon strike to him, one 
 of the lieutenants, without his knowledge, threw in the combus 
 tible matter ; and this it was that occasioned the tremendous ex 
 plosion of that vessel, which, with the deep silence and interrup 
 tion of the engagement which succeeded to it, has been justly 
 deemed the sublirnest war incident recorded in history. Yet the 
 incident which followed, and which has not, I believe, been pub 
 licly made known, is scarcely less impressive, though its sublimity 
 is of a different character. At the renewal of the battle, Cap 
 tain Ball, though his ship was then on fire in three different 
 parts, laid her along-side a French eighty-four ; and a second 
 longer obstinate contest began. The firing on the part of the 
 French ship having at length for some time slackened, and then 
 altogether ceased, and yet no sign given of surrender, the first 
 lieutenant came to Captain Ball and informed, him that the hearts 
 of his men were as good as ever, but that they were so completely 
 exhausted, that they were scarcely capable of lifting an arm. 
 He asked, therefore, whether, as the enemy had now ceased firing, 
 the men might be permitted to lie down by their guns for a short 
 
494 THIRD LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 time. After some reflection, Sir Alexander acceded to the pro 
 posal, taking of course the proper precautions to rouse them again 
 at the moment he thought requisite. Accordingly, with the ex 
 ception of himself, his officers, arid the appointed watch, the 
 ship s crew lay down, each in the place to which he was stationed, 
 and slept for twenty minutes. They were then roused ; and 
 started up, as Sir Alexander expressed it, more like men out of 
 an ambush than from sleep, so co-instantaneously did they all 
 obey the summons ! They recommenced their fire, and in a few 
 minutes the enemy surrendered ; and it was soon after discovered, 
 that during that interval, and almost immediately after the French 
 ship had first ceased firing, the crew had sunk down by their 
 guns, and there slept, almost by the side, as it were, of their 
 sleeping enemy. 
 
 ESSAY V. 
 
 Whose powers shed round him in the common strife 
 
 Or mild concerns of ordinary life 
 
 A constant influence, a peculiar grace ; 
 
 But who if he be called upon to face 
 
 Some awful moment, to which heaven has join d 
 
 Great issues, good or bad for human kind, 
 
 Is happy as a lover, is attired 
 
 "With sudden brightness like a man inspired ; 
 
 And through the heat of conflict keeps the law 
 
 In calmness made, and sees what he foresaw. 
 
 WORDSWORTH.* 
 
 AN accessibility to the sentiments of others on subjects of im 
 portance often accompanies feeble minds, yet it is not the less a 
 true arid constituent part of practical greatness, when it exists 
 wholly free from that passiveness to impression which renders 
 counsel itself injurious to certain characters, and from that weak 
 ness of heart which, in the literal sense of the word, is always 
 craving advice. Exempt from all such imperfections, say rather 
 in perfect harmony with the excellencies that preclude them, this 
 openness to the influxes of good sense and information, from 
 * The Christian Warrior. Ed. 
 
ESSAY V. 495 
 
 whatever quarter they might come, equally characterized Lord 
 Nelson and Sir Alexander Ball, though each displayed it in the 
 way hest suited to his natural temper. The former with easy 
 hand collected, as it passed by him, whatever could add to his 
 own stores, appropriated what he could assimilate, and levied 
 subsidies of knowledge from all the accidents of social life arid 
 familiar intercourse. Even at the jovial board, and in the height 
 of unrestrained merriment, a casual suggestion, that flashed a 
 new light on his mind, changed the boon-companion into the hero 
 and the man of genius ; and with the most graceful transition he 
 would make his company as serious as himself. When the taper 
 of his genius seemed extinguished, it was still surrounded by an 
 inflammable atmosphere of its own, and rekindled at the first ap 
 proach of light, and not seldom at a distance which made it seem 
 to flame up self-revived. In Sir Alexander Ball, the same excel 
 lence was more an affair of system : and he would listen even to 
 weak men, with a patience, which, in so careful an economist of 
 time, always demanded my admiration, and not seldom excited 
 my wonderT It was one of his maxims, thiffa man may suggest 
 what he can not give : adding, that a wild or silly plan had 
 more than once, from the vivid sense and distinct perception of 
 its folly, occasioned him to see what ought to be done in a new 
 light, or with a clearer insight. There is, indeed, a hopeless 
 sterility, a mere negation of sense and thought, which, suggesting 
 neither difference nor contrast, can not even furnish hints for 
 recollection. But on the other hand, there are minds so whim 
 sically constituted, that they may sometimes be profitably inter 
 preted by contraries, a process of which the great T,jjpho Brahe 
 is said to have availed himself in the case of the little lackwit, 
 who used to sit and mutter at his feet while he was studying. 
 A mind of this sort we may compare to a magnetic needle, the 
 poles of which had been suddenly reversed by a flash of lightning, 
 or other more obscure accident of nature. It may be safely con 
 cluded, that to those whose judgment or information he respected, 
 Sir Alexander Ball did not content nimself with giving access and 
 attention. No ! he seldom failed of consulting them whenever 
 the subject permitted any disclosure ; and where secrecy was 
 necessary, he well knew how to acquire their opinion without ex 
 citing even a conjecture concerning his immediate object. 
 
 Yet, with all this readiness of attention, and with all this zeal 
 
496 THIRD LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 in collecting the sentiments of the well-informed, never was a 
 man more completely uninfluenced by authority than Sir Alex 
 ander Ball, never one who sought less to tranquillize his own 
 doubts by the mere suffrage and coincidence of others. The 
 ablest suggestions had no conclusive weight with him, till he had 
 abstracted the opinion from its author, till he had reduced it into 
 a part of his own mind. The thoughts of others were always 
 acceptable, as affording him at least a chance of adding to his 
 materials for reflection ; but they never directed his judgment, 
 much less superseded it. He even made a point of guarding 
 against additional confidence in the suggestions of his own mind, 
 from finding that a person of talents had formed the same con 
 viction, unless the person, at the same time, furnished some new 
 argument, or had arrived at the same conclusion by a different 
 road. On the latter circumstance he set an especial value and, 
 I may almost say, courted the company and conversation of those, 
 whose pursuits had least resembled his own, if he thought them 
 men of clear and comprehensive faculties. During the period of 
 our intimacy, scarcely a week passed, in which he dio 1 not desire 
 me to think on some particular subject, and to give him the re 
 sult in writing. Most frequently by the time I had fulfilled his 
 request, he v/ould have written down his own thoughts, and then, 
 with the true simplicity of a great mind, as free from ostentation 
 as it was above jealousy, he would collate the two papers in my 
 presence, and never expressed more pleasure than in the few in 
 stances, in which I had happened to light on all the arguments 
 and points of view which had occurred to himself, with some ad 
 ditional masons which had escaped him. A single new argu 
 ment delighted him more than the most perfect coincidence, un 
 less, as before stated, the train of thought had been very different 
 from his own, and yet just and logical. He had one quality of 
 mind, which I have heard attributed to the late Mr. Fox, that 
 of deriving a keen pleasure from clear and powerful reasoning 
 for its own sake, a quality iiW;he intellect which is nearly con 
 nected with veracity and alove of justice in the moral character.* 
 
 * It may not be amiss to add, that tlie pleasure from the perception of 
 truth "was so well poised and regulated by the equal or greater delight in 
 utility, that his love of real accuracy was accompanied with a proportionate 
 dislike of that hollow appearance of it, which may be produced by turns of 
 phrase, words placed in balanced antithesis, and those epigrammatic points 
 
ESSAY V. 49V 
 
 Valuing in others merits which he himself possessed, Sir Alex- 
 der Ball felt no jealous apprehension of great talent. Unlike 
 those vulgar functionaries, whose place is too big for them, a 
 truth which they attempt to disguise from themselves, and yet 
 feel, he was under no necessity of arming himself against the nat 
 ural superiority of genius by factitious contempt and an indus 
 trious association of extravagance arid impracticability with every 
 deviation from the ordinary routine ; as the geographers in the 
 middle ages used to designate, on their meagre maps, the greater 
 part of the world, as deserts or wildernesses inhabited by griffins 
 and chimseras. Competent to weigh each system or project by 
 its own arguments, he did not need these preventive charms and 
 cautionary amulets against delusion. He endeavored to make 
 talent instrumental to his purposes in whatever shape it ap 
 peared, and with whatever imperfections it might be accompa 
 nied ; but wherever talent was blended with moral worth, he 
 sought it out, loved and cherished it. If it had pleased Provi 
 dence to preserve his life, and to place him on the same course 
 on which Nelson ran his race of glory, there are two points in 
 which Sir Alexander Ball would most closely have resembled his 
 illustrious friend. The first is, that in his enterprises and en 
 gagements he would have thought nothing done, till all had 
 been done that was possible : 
 
 -A~/7 action reputans, si quid supcressct agendum. 
 
 The second, that he would have called forth all the talent and 
 virtue that existed within his sphere of influence, and created a 
 band of heroes, a gradation of officers, strong in head and strong 
 in heart, worthy to have been his companions and his successors 
 in fame and public usefulness. 
 
 Never was greater discernment shown in the selection of a fit 
 
 that pass for subtle and luminous distinctions with ordinary readers, but 
 are most commonly translatable into mere truisms or trivialities, if indeed 
 they contain any meaning at all. Having observed in some casual conver 
 sation, that though there were doubtless masses of matter unorganized, I 
 saw no ground for asserting a mass of unorganized matter ; Sir A. B. 
 paused, and then said to me, with that frankness of manner which made his 
 very rebukes gratifying, " The distinction is just, and, now I understand 
 you, abundantly obvious ; but hardly worth the trouble of your inventing 9 
 puzzle of words to make it appear otherwise." I trust the rebuke was not 
 lost on me. 
 
498 THIRD LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 agent, than when Sir Alexander Ball was stationed o/F the coast 
 of Malta to intercept the supplies destined for the French garri 
 son, and to watch the movements of the French commanders, 
 and those of the inhabitants who had been so basely betrayed 
 into their power. Encouraged by the well-timed promises of the 
 English captain, the Maltese rose through all their casals (or 
 country towns) and themselves commenced the work of their 
 emancipation, by storming the citadel at Citta Vecchia, the an 
 cient metropolis of Malta, and the central height of the island. 
 Without discipline, without a military leader, and almost with 
 out arms, these brave peasants succeeded, and destroyed the 
 French garrison by throwing them over the battlements into the 
 trench of the citadel. In the course of this blockade, and of the 
 tedious siege of Yaletta, Sir Alexander Ball displayed all that 
 strength of character, that variety and versatility of talent, and 
 that sagacity, derived in part from habitual circumspection, but 
 which, when the occasion demanded it, appeared intuitive and 
 like an instinct ; at the union of which, in the same man, one of 
 our oldest naval commanders once told me, " he could never ex 
 haust his wonder." The citizens of Yaletta were fond of relat 
 ing their astonishment, arid that of the French, at Captain Ball s 
 ship wintering at anchor out of the reach of the guns, in a depth 
 of fathom unexampled, on the assured impracticability of which 
 the garrison had rested their main hope of regular supplies. Nor 
 can I forget, or remember, without some portion of my original 
 feeling, the solemn enthusiasm with which a venerable old man, 
 belonging to one of the distant casals, showed me the sea coomb, 
 where their father Ball (for so they commonly called him), first 
 landed ; and afterwards pointed out the very place, on which he 
 first stepped on their island, while the countenances of his town s- 
 men, who accompanied him, gave lively proofs that the old 
 "man s enthusiasm was the representative of the common feeling. 
 There is no reason to suppose, that Sir Alexander Ball was 
 at any time chargeable with that weakness so frequent in Eng 
 lishmen, and so injurious to our interests abroad, of despising the 
 inhabitants of other countries, of losing all their good qualities 
 in their vices, of making no allowance for those vices, from their 
 religious or political impediments, and still more of mistaking 
 for vices a mere difference of manners and customs. But if ever 
 he had any of this erroneous feeling, he completely freed himself 
 
ESSAY V. 499 
 
 from it by living 1 among the Maltese during their arduous trials, 
 as long as the French continued masters of the capital. He wit 
 nessed their virtues, and learned to understand in what various 
 shapes and even disguises the valuable parts of human nature 
 may exist. In many individuals, whose littleness and meanness 
 in the common intercourse of life would have stamped them at 
 once as contemptible and worthless with ordinary Englishmen, 
 he had found such virtues of disinterested patriotism, fortitude, 
 and self-denial, as would have done honor to an ancient Roman. 
 There exists in England a gentlemanly character, a gentle 
 manly feeling-, very different even from that which is the most 
 like it, the character of a well-born Spaniard, and unexampled in 
 the rest of Europe. .This feeling probably originated in the for 
 tunate circumstance, that the titles of our English nobility fol 
 low the law of their property, and are inherited by the eldest 
 sons only. From this source, under the influences of our constitu 
 tion and of our astonishing trade, it has diffused itself in different 
 modifications through the whole country. The uniformity of our 
 dress amonsf all classes above that of the day-laborer, while it 
 has authorized all classes to assume the appearance of a gentle 
 man, has at the same time inspired the wish to conform their 
 manners, and still more their ordinary actions in. social intercourse, 
 to their notions of the gentlemanly, the most commonly received 
 attribute of which character is a certain generosity in trifles. On 
 the other hand, the encroachments of the lower classes on the. 
 higher, occasioned and favored by this resemblance in exteriors, 
 by this absence of any cognizable marks of distinction, have ren 
 dered each class more reserved and jealous in their general com 
 munion, and far more than our climate, or natural temper, have 
 caused that haughtiness and reserve in our outward demeanor, 
 which is so generally complained of among foreigners. Far be 
 it from me to depreciate the value of this gentlemanly feeling ; 
 I respect it in all its forms and varieties, from the House of Com 
 mons to the gentlemen in the one shilling gallery. It is always 
 the ornament of virtue, and oftentimes a support ; but it is a 
 wretched substitute for it. Its worth, as a moral good, is by no 
 means in proportion to its value, as a social advantage. These 
 observations are not irrelevant : for to the want of reflection, that 
 this diffusion, of gentlemanly feeling among us is not the growth 
 of our moral excellence, but the effect of various accidental ad- 
 
500 THIRD LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 vantages peculiar to England ; to our not considering that it is 
 unreasonable and uncharitable to expect the same consequences, 
 where the same causes have not existed to produce them ; and, 
 lastly, to our proneness to regard the absence of this character 
 (which, as I have before said, does, for the greater part, and, in 
 the common apprehension, consist in a certain frankness and gen 
 erosity in the detail of action) as decisive against the sum total 
 of personal or national worth ; we must, I am convinced, at 
 tribute a large portion of that conduct, which in many instances 
 has left the inhabitants of countries conquered or appropriated 
 by Great Britain, doubtful whether the various solid advantages 
 which they derived from our protection and just government were 
 not bought dearly by the wounds inflicted on their feelings and 
 prejudices, by the contemptuous and insolent demeanor of the 
 English as individuals. The reader who bears this remark in 
 mind, will meet, in the course of this narrative, more than one 
 passage that will serve as its comment and illustration. 
 
 It was, I know, a general opinion among the English in the 
 Mediterranean, that Sir Alexander Ball thought too well of the 
 Maltese, and did not share in the enthusiasm of Britons concern 
 ing their own superiority. To the former part of the charge, I 
 shall only reply at present, that a more venial and almost desir 
 able fault could scarcely be attributed to a governor, than that of 
 a strong attachment to the people whom he was sent to govern 
 The latter part of the charge is^false, if we are to understand by 
 it, that he did not think his countrymen superior on the whole to 
 the other nations of Europe ; but it is tme, as far as relates, to 
 his belief, that the English thought themselves still better than 
 they are ; that they dwelt on, and exaggerated their national 
 virtues, and weighed them by the opposite vices of foreigners, in 
 stead of the virtues which those foreigners possessed, and they 
 themselves wanted. Above all, as statesmen, we must consider 
 qualities by their practical uses. Thus he entertained no doubt 
 that the English were superior to all others in the kind and the 
 degree of their courage, which is marked by far greater enthu 
 siasm than the courage of the Germans and northern nations, and 
 by a far greater steadiness and self-subsistency than that of the 
 French. It is more closely connected with the character of the 
 individual. The courage of an English army (he used to say) is 
 the sum total of the courage which the individual soldiers bring 
 
ESSAY V. 501 
 
 with. them to it, rather than of that which they derive from it. 
 This remark of Sir Alexander s was forcibly recalled to my mind 
 when I was at Naples. A Russian and an English regiment 
 were drawn up together in the same square : " See," said a 
 Neapolitan to me, who had mistaken me for one of his country 
 men, " there is but one face in that whole regiment, while in 
 that" (pointing to the English) " every soldier has a face of his 
 own." On the other hand, there are qualities scarcely less re 
 quisite to the completion of the military character, in which Sir 
 A. did not hesitate to think the English inferior to the conti 
 nental nations ; as for instance, both in the power and the dis 
 position to endure privations ; in the friendly temper neces 
 sary, when troops of different nations are to act in concert ; in 
 their obedience to the regulations of their commanding officers, 
 respecting the treatment of the inhabitants of the countries 
 through which they are marching, as well as in many other 
 points, not immediately connected with their conduct in the field ; 
 and, above all, in sobriety and temperance. During the siege of 
 Valetta, especially during the sore distress to which the besiegers 
 were for some time exposed from the failure of provision, Sir 
 Alexander Ball had an ample opportunity of observing and weigh 
 ing the separate merits and demerits of the native and of the 
 English troops ; and surely since the publication of Sir John 
 Moore s campaign, there can be no just oflence taken, though I 
 should say, that before the walls of Valetta, as well as in the 
 plains of Galicia, an indignant commander might, with too great 
 propriety, have addressed the English soldiery in the words of an 
 old dramatist 
 
 Will you still owe your virtues to youi bellies ? 
 And only then think nobly when y are full ? 
 Doth fodder keep you honest ? Are you bad 
 When out of flesh ? And think you t an excuse 
 Of vile and ignominious actions, that 
 Y are lean and out of liking ?* 
 
 From the first insurrectionary movement to the final departure 
 of the French from the island, though the civil and military 
 powers and the whole of the island, save Valetta, were in the 
 hands of the peasantry, not a single act of excess can be charged 
 against the Maltese, if we except the razing of one house at 
 * Cart-wright, Love s Convert, act i. sc. 1. 
 
502 THIED LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 Cittct Vecehia belonging to a notorious and abandoned traitor, 
 the creature and hireling of the French. In no instance, did 
 they injure, insult, or plunder, any one of the native nobility, or 
 employ even the appearance of force toward them, except in the 
 collection of the lead and iron from their houses and gardens, in 
 order to supply themselves with bullets : and this very appear 
 ance was assumed from the generous wish to shelter the nobles 
 from the resentment of the French, should the patriotic efforts of 
 the peasantry prove unsuccessful. At the dire command of 
 famine the Maltese troops did indeed once force their way to the 
 ovens, in which the bread for the British soldiery was baked, and 
 were clamorous that an equal division should be made. I men 
 tion this unpleasant circumstance, because it brought into proof 
 the firmness of Sir Alexander Ball s character, his presence of 
 mind, and generous disregard of danger and personal responsibili 
 ty, where the slavery or emancipation, the misery or the happi 
 ness, of an innocent and patriotic people were involved ; and be 
 cause his conduct in this exigency evinced that his general habits 
 of circumspection and deliberation were the results of wisdom and 
 complete self-possession, and not the easy virtues of a spirit con 
 stitutionally timorous and hesitating. He was sitting at a table 
 with the principal British officers, when a certain general ad 
 dressed him in strong and violent terms concerning this outrage 
 of the Maltese, reminding him of the necessity of exerting his 
 commanding influence in the present case, or the consequences 
 must be taken. "What," replied Sir Alexander Ball, "would 
 you have us do ? Would you have us threaten death to men 
 dying with famine ? Can you suppose that the hazard of being 
 shot will weigh with whole regiments acting under a common 
 necessity ? Does not the extremity of hunger take away all 
 difference between men and animals ? and is it not as absurd to 
 appeal to the prudence of a body of men starving, as to a herd of 
 famished wolves ? No, general, I will not degrade myself or 
 outrage humanity by menacing famine with massacre ! More 
 effectual means must be taken." With these words he rose and 
 left the room, and having first consulted with Sir Thomas Trou- 
 bridge, he determined at his own risk on a step, which the ex 
 treme necessity warranted, and which the conduct of the IvTeapoli- 
 tan court amply justified. For this court, though terror-striken 
 by the French, was still actuated by hatred to the English and a 
 
ESSAY V. 503 
 
 jealousy of tlieir power in the Mediterranean ; and this in so 
 strange and senseless a manner, that we must join the extremes 
 of imbecility and treachery in the same cabinet, in order to find 
 it comprehensible.* Though the very existence of Naples and 
 Sicily, as a nation, depended wholly and exclusively on British 
 support ; though the royal family owed their personal safety to 
 the British fleet ; though not only their dominions and their rank, 
 but the liberty and even the lives of Ferdinand and his family, 
 were interwoven Avith our success : yet with an infatuation 
 scarcely credible, the most affecting representations of the distress 
 of the besiegers, and of the utter insecurity of Sicily if the French 
 remained possessors of Malta, were treated with neglect ; and ur 
 gent remonstrances for the permission of importing corn from 
 Messina were . answered only by sanguinary edicts precluding all 
 supply. Sir Alexander Ball sent for his first lieutenant, and gave 
 him orders to proceed immediately to the port of Messina, and 
 there to seize and bring with him to Malta the ships laden with 
 corn, of the number of which Sir Alexander had received accu 
 rate information. These orders were executed without delay, to 
 the great delight and profit of the ship owners and proprietors ; 
 the necessity of raising the siege was removed ; and the author 
 of the measure waited in calmness for the consequences that 
 might result to himself personally. But not a complaint, not a 
 murmur, proceeded from the court of Naples. The sole result 
 was, that the governor of Malta became an especial object of its 
 hatred, its fear,- and its respect. 
 
 The whole of this tedious siege, from its commencement to the 
 
 * It can not he doubted, that the sovereign himself was kept in a state 
 of delusion. Both his understanding and his moral principles are far better 
 than could reasonably be expected from the infamous mode of his education : 
 if indeed the systematic preclusion of all knowlndge, and the unrestrained 
 indulgence of his passions, adopted by the Spanish court for the purposes 
 of preserving him dependent, can be called by the name of education. Of 
 the other influenciug persons in the Neapolitan government, Mr. Lcckie has 
 given us a true and lively account. It will be greatly to the advantage of 
 the present narrative, if the reader should have previously perused Mr. 
 Lcckie s pamphlet on the state of Sicily : the facts which I shall have oc 
 casion to mention hereafter will reciprocally confirm and be confirmed by 
 the documents furnished in that most interesting work ; in which I see but 
 one blemish of importance, namely, that the author appears too frequently 
 to consider justice and true policy as capable of being contradistinguished. 
 
504 THIRD LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 signing of the capitulation, called forth into constant activity the 
 rarest and most difficult virtues of a commanding- mind ; virtues 
 of no show or splendor in the vulgar apprehension, yet more in 
 fallible characteristics of true greatness than the most unequivo 
 cal displays of enterprise and active daring. Scarcely a day 
 passed, in which Sir Alexander Ball s patience, forbearance, and 
 inflexible constancy, were not put to the severest trial. He had 
 not only to remove the misunderstandings that arose between the 
 Maltese and their allies, to settle the differences among the Mal 
 tese themselves, and to organize their efforts :" he was likewise 
 engaged in the more difficult and unthankful task of counteract 
 ing the weariness, discontent, and despondency, of his own coun 
 trymen ; a task, however, which he accomplished by manage 
 ment and address, and an alternation of real firmness with appa 
 rent yielding. During many months he remained the only 
 Englishman who did not think the siege hopeless, and the object 
 worthless. He often spoke of the time in which he resided at 
 the country seat of the grand master at St. Antonio, four miles 
 from Valetta, as perhaps the most trying period of his life. For 
 some w r eeks Captain Vivian was his sole English companion, of 
 whom, as his partner in anxiety, he always expressed himself 
 with affectionate esteem. ir Alexander Ball s presence was ab 
 solutely necessary to the Maltese, who, accustomed to be gov 
 erned by him, became incapable of acting in concert without his 
 immediate influence. In the outburst of popular emotion, the 
 impulse, which produces an insurrection, is for a brief while its 
 sufficient pilot ; the attraction constitutes the cohesion, and the 
 common provocation, supplying an immediate object, not only 
 unites, but directs, the multitude. But this first impulse had 
 passed away, and Sir Alexander Ball was the one individual who 
 possessed the general confidence. On him they relied with im 
 plicit faith : and even after they had long enjoyed the blessings 
 of British government and protection, it was still remarkable 
 with what childlike helplessness they were in the habit of apply 
 ing to him, even in their private concerns. It seemed as if they 
 thought him made on purpose to think for them all. Yet his sit 
 uation at St. Antonio was one of great peril : and he attributed 
 his preservation to the dejection, which had now begun to prey 
 on the spirits of the French garrison, and which rendered them 
 unenterprising and almost passive, aided by the dread which the 
 
ESSAY V. 505 
 
 nature of the country inspired. For subdivided as it was into 
 small fields, scarcely larger than4fci cottage-garden, and each of 
 these little squares of land inclosed with substantial stone walls ; 
 these too from the necessity of having the fields perfectly level, 
 rising in tiers above each other ; the whole of the inhabited part 
 of the island was an effective fortification for all the purposes of 
 annoyance and offensive warfare. Sir Alexander Ball exerted 
 himself successfully in procuring information respecting the state 
 and temper of the garrison, and by the assistance of the clergy 
 and the almost universal fidelity of the Maltese, contrived that 
 the spies in the pay of the French should be in truth his own 
 most confidential agents. He had already given splendid proofs 
 that he could outfight them ; but here, and in his after diplo 
 matic intercourse previously to the recommencement of the war, 
 he likewise out-witted them. He once told me with a smile, as 
 we were conversing on the practice of laying wagers, that he 
 was sometimes inclined to think that the final perseverance in 
 the siege was not a little due to several valuable bets of his own, 
 he well knowing at the time, and from information which him 
 self alone possessed, that he should certainly lose them. Yet this 
 artifice had a considerable effect in suspending the impatience of 
 the officers, and in supplying topics for dispute and conversation. 
 At length, however, the two French frigates, the sailing of which 
 had been the subject of these wagers, left the great harbor on 
 the 24th of August, 1800, with a part of the garrison ; and one 
 of them soon became a prize to the English. Sir Alexander Ball 
 related to me the circumstances which occasioned the escape of 
 the other ; but I do not recollect them with sufficient accuracy 
 to dare repeat them in this place. On the 15th of September 
 following, the capitulation was signed, and after a blockade of 
 two years the English obtained possession of Valetta, and re 
 mained masters of the whole island and its dependencies. 
 
 Anxious not to give offence, but more anxious to communicate 
 the truth, it is not without pain that I find myself under the 
 moral obligation of remonstrating against the silence concerning 
 Sir Alexander Ball s services or the transfer of them to others. 
 More than once has the latter roused my indignation in the re 
 ported speeches of the House of Commons ; and as to the former, 
 I need only state that in Rees s Encyclopaedia there is an histor 
 ical article of considerable length under the word Malta, in which 
 
 VOL. n. Y 
 
506 THIRD LANDING-PLACE, 
 
 Sir Alexander s name does not once occur ! During" a residence 
 of eighteen months in that island, I possessed and availed myself 
 of the best possible means of information, not only. from eye-wit 
 nesses, but likewise from the principal agents themselves. And 
 I now thus publicly and unequivocally assert, that to Sir A. Ball 
 pre-eminently and if I had said, to Sir A. Ball alone, the ordi 
 nary use of the word under such circumstances would bear me 
 out the capture and the preservation of Malta were owing, with 
 every blessing that a powerful rnind and a wise heart could con 
 fer on its docile and grateful inhabitants. With a similar pain I 
 proceed to avow my sentiments on this capitulation, by which 
 Malta was delivered up to his Britannic Majesty and his allies, 
 without the least mention made of the Maltese. With a warmth 
 honorable both to his head and his heart, Sir Alexander Ball 
 pleaded, as not less a point of sound policy than of plain justice, 
 that the Maltese, by some representative, should be made a party 
 in the capitulation, and a joint subscriber in the signature. They 
 had never been the slaves or the property of the Knights of St. 
 John, but freemen and the true landed proprietors of the country, 
 the civil and military government of which, under certain restric 
 tions, had been vested in that order , yet checked by the rights 
 and influences of the clergy and the native nobility, and by the 
 customs and ancient laws of the island. This trust the Knights 
 had, with the blackest treason and the most profligate perjury, 
 betrayed and abandoned. The right of government of course re 
 verted to the landed proprietors and the clergy. Animated by 
 a just sense of this right, the Maltese had risen of their own ac 
 cord, had contended for it in defiance of death and danger, had 
 fought bravely, and endured patiently. Without undervaluing 
 the military assistance afterwards furnished by Great Britain 
 (though how scanty this was before the arrival of General Pigot 
 is well known), it remained undeniable, that the Maltese had 
 taken the greatest share both in the fatigues and in the priva 
 tions consequent on the siege ; and that had not the greatest vir 
 tues and the most exemplary fidelity been uniformly displayed by 
 them, the English troops (they not being more numerous than 
 they had been for the greater part of the two years) could not 
 possibly have remained before the fortifications of Yaletta, de 
 fended as that city was by a French garrison which greatly out 
 numbered the British besiegers. Still less could there have been 
 
ESSAY* V. 507 
 
 the least hope of ultimate success ; as if any part of the Maltese 
 peasantry had been friendly to the French, or even indifferent, 
 if they had not all indeed been most zealous and persevering in 
 their hostility towards them, it would have been impracticable so 
 to blockade that island as to have precluded the arrival of sup 
 plies. If the siege had proved unsuccessful, the Maltese were 
 well aware that they should be exposed to all the horrors which 
 revenge and wounded pride could dictate to an unprincipled, ra 
 pacious, and sanguinary soldiery ; and now that success had 
 crowned their efforts, was this to be their reward, that their own 
 allies were to bargain for them with the French as for a herd of 
 slaves, whom the French had before purchased from a former 
 proprietor ? If it be urged, reasoned Sir A. B., that there is no 
 established government in Malta, is it not equally true that 
 through the whole population of the island there is not a single 
 dissentient ; and thus that the chief inconvenience, which an 
 established authority is to obviate, is virtually removed by the 
 admitted fact of their unanimity ? And have they not a bishop 
 and a dignified clergy, their judges and municipal magistrates, 
 who were at all times sharers in the power of the government, 
 and now, supported by the unanimous suffrage of the inhabitants, 
 have a rightful claim to be considered as its representatives ? 
 Will it not be oftener said than answered, that the main differ 
 ence between French and English injustice rests in this point 
 alone, that the French seized on the ^Ealtese without any previ 
 ous pretences of friendship, while the English procured possession 
 of the island by means of their friendly promises, and by the co 
 operation of the natives afforded in confident reliance on these 
 promises ? The impolicy of refusing the signature on the part 
 of the Maltese was equally evident ; since such refusal could an 
 swer no one purpose but that of alienating their affections by a 
 wanton insult to their feelings. For the Maltese were not only 
 ready but desirous and eager to place themselves at the same 
 time under British protection, to take the oath of loyalty as sub 
 jects of the British crown, and to acknowledge their island to be- 
 long to it. These representations, however, were overruled : and 
 I dare affirm, from my own experience in the Mediterranean, that 
 our conduct in this instance aggravated the impression which had 
 been made at Corsica, Minorca, and elsewhere, and was often 
 referred to by men of reflection in Sicily, who have more than 
 
508 THIRD LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 once said to me, " a connection with Great Britain, with the 
 consequent extension and security of our commerce, are indeed 
 great blessings : but who can rely on their permanence ; or that 
 we shall not be made to pay bitterly for our zeal as partisans of 
 England, whenever it shall suit its plans to deliver us back to 
 our old oppressors ? 
 
 ESSAY VI. 
 
 The way of ancient ordnance, though it winds, 
 
 Is yet no devious way. Straight forward goes 
 
 The lightning s path ; and straight the fearful path 
 
 Of the cannon-ball. Direct it flies and rapid, 
 
 Shattering that it may reach, and shattering what it reaches 
 
 My son ! the road the human being travels, 
 
 That, on which blessing comes and goes, doth follow 
 
 The river s course, the valley s playful windings, 
 
 Curves round the corn-field and the hill of vines, 
 
 Honoring the holy bounds of property 1 
 
 There exists 
 
 A higher than the warrior s excellence. WALLENSTEIX.* 
 
 CAPTAIN BALL S services in Malta were honored with his 
 sovereign s approbation, transmitted in a letter from the secretary 
 Dundas, and with a baronetcy. A thousand poundsf were at 
 
 * Part I. act 1. sc. 4. Ed. 
 
 f I scarce know whether it be worth mentioning, that this sum remained 
 undemanded till the spring of the year 1805 : at which time, during an ex 
 amination of the treasury accounts, I observed the circumstance and noticed 
 it to the governor, who had suffered it to escape altogether from his 
 memory, for the latter years at least. The value attached to the present 
 by the receiver, must have depended on his construction of its purpose and 
 meaning : for, in a pecuniary point of view, the sum was not a moiety of 
 what Sir Alexander had expended from his private fortune during the 
 blockade. His immediate appointment to the government of the island, so 
 earnestly prayed for by the Maltese, would doubtless have furnished a less 
 questionable proof that his services were as highly estimated by the min 
 istry as they were graciously accepted by his sovereign. But this was 
 withholden as long as it remained possible to doubt, whether great talents, 
 joined to local experience, and the confidence and affection of the inhabi- 
 
ESSAY VI. 509 
 
 the same time directed to be paid him from the Maltese treasury. 
 The best and most appropriate addition to the applause of his 
 king and his country, Sir Alexander Ball found in the feelings 
 and faithful affection of the Maltese. The enthusiasm manifest 
 ed in reverential gestures and shouts of triumph whenever their 
 friend and deliverer appeared in public, was the utterance of a 
 deep feeling, and in nowise the mere ebullition of animal sen 
 sibility ; which is not indeed a part of the Maltese character. 
 The truth of this observation will not be doubted by any person, 
 who has witnessed the religious processions in honor of the fa 
 vorite saints, both at Valetta and at Messina or Palermo, and 
 who must have been struck with the contrast between the ap 
 parent apathy, or at least the perfect sobriety, of the Maltese, 
 and the fanatical agitations of the Sicilian populace. Among 
 the latter, each man s soul seems hardly containable in his body, 
 like a prisoner, whose jail is on fire, flying madly from one barred 
 outlet to another ; while the former might suggest the suspicion, 
 that their bodies were on the point of sinking into the same 
 slumber with their understandings. But their political deliver 
 ance was a thing that came nome to their hearts, and intertwined 
 itself with their most impassioned recollections, personal and 
 patriotic. To Sir Alexander Ball exclusively the Maltese them 
 selves attributed their emancipation : on him too they rested 
 their hopes of the future. Whenever he appeared in Valetta, 
 the passengers on each side, through the whole length of the 
 street, stopped, and remained uncovered till he had passed : the 
 very clamors of the market-place were hushed at his entrance, 
 and then exchanged for shouts of joy and welcome. Even after 
 the lapse of. years he never appeared in any of their casals,* 
 which did not lie in the direct road between Valetta and St. An 
 tonio, his summer residence, but the women and children, with 
 
 tants, might not be dispensed with in the person intrusted with that gov 
 ernment. Crimen ingrati animi quod inagnis ingeniis hand raro objtcitur 
 scvpius nil aliud est quarn perspicacia quondam in causam beneficii collati. 
 
 * It was the governor s custom to visit every casal throughout the is 
 land once, if not twice, in the course of each summer ; and during my resi 
 dence there, I had the honor of being his constant, and most often his only 
 companion, in these rides ; to Vhich I owe some of the happiest and most 
 instructive hours of my life. In the poorest Louse of the most distant 
 casal two rude paintings were sure to be found : a picture of the Virgin 
 and Child ; and a portrait of Sir Alexander Ball. 
 
610 THIRD LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 such of the men who were not at labor in their fields, fell into 
 ranks, and followed or preceded him, singing the Maltese song 
 which had been made in his honor, and which was scarcely less 
 familiar to the inhabitants of Malta and Gozo, than God save 
 the King to Britons. W^Jicn he tcent to the gate through the 
 city, the young men refrained talking ; and the aged arose 
 and stood up. When the ear heard, then it blessed him; and 
 when the eye saw him., it gave witness to him ; because he de 
 livered the poor that cried, and the fatJierless, and those tliat had 
 none to help them. The blessing of them that ivcre ready to 
 perish came upon him ; and he caused the ividow s heart to 
 sing for joy. 
 
 These feelings were afterwards amply justified by his admin 
 istration of the government ; and the very excesses of their grati 
 tude on their first deliverance proved, in the end, only to be ac 
 knowledgments antedated. For some time after the departure 
 of the French, the distress was so general and so severe, that a 
 large portion of the lower classes became mendicants, and one of 
 the greatest thoroughfares of Valetta still retains the name of 
 " Nix Mangiare Stairs," from the crowd who used there to as 
 sail the ears of the passengers with the cries of " nix mangiare," 
 or " nothing to eat," the former word nix being the low German 
 pronunciation of nichts, nothing. By what means it was intro 
 duced into Malta, I know not ; but it became the common 
 vehicle both of solicitation and refusal, the Maltese thinking it an 
 English word, and the English supposing it to be Maltese. I 
 often felt it as a pleasing remembrancer of the evil day gone by, 
 when a tribe of little children, quite naked, as is the custom of 
 that climate, and each with a pair of gold ear-rings in its ears, 
 and all fat and beautifully proportioned, would suddenly leave 
 their play, and, looking round to see that their parents were not 
 in sight, change their shouts of merriment for "nix mangiare /" 
 awkwardly imitating the plaintive tones of mendicancy ; while 
 the white teeth in their little swarthy faces gave a splendor to 
 the happy and confessing laugh, with which they received the 
 good-humored rebuke or refusal, and ran back to their former 
 sport. 
 
 In the interim between the capitulation of the French garri 
 son and Sir Alexander Ball s appointment as his Majesty s civil 
 commissioner for Malta, his zeal for the Maltese was neither sus- 
 
ESSAY VI. 511 
 
 pendod, nor unproductive of important benefits. He was enabled 
 to remove many prejudices and misunderstandings ; and to per 
 sons of no inconsiderable influence gave juster notions of the 
 true importance of the island to Great Britain. He displayed 
 the magnitude of the trade of the Mediterranean in its existing 
 state ; showed the immense extent to which it might be carried, 
 and the hollowness of the opinion, that this trade was attached 
 to the south of France by any natural or indissoluble bond of 
 connection. I have some reason likewise for believing, that his 
 wise and patriotic representations prevented Malta from being 
 made the seat of, and pretext for, a numerous civil establishment, 
 in hapless imitation of Corsica, Ceylon, and the Cape of Good 
 Hope. It was at least generally rumored, that it had been in 
 the contemplation of the ministry to appoint Sir Ralph Aber- 
 crombie as governor, with a salary of 10,000 a year, and to 
 reside in England, while one of his countrymen was to be the 
 lieutenant-governor, at 5,000 a year; to which w,ere to be ad 
 ded a long et cetera of other offices and places of proportional 
 emolument. This threatened appendix to the state calendar 
 may have existed only in the imagination of the reporters, yet 
 inspired some uneasy apprehensions- in the minds of many well- 
 wishers to the Maltese, who knew that for a foreign settlement 
 at least, and one too possessing in all the ranks arid functions of 
 society an ample population of its own such a stately and wide- 
 branching tree of patronage, though delightful to the individuals 
 who are to pluck its golden apples, sheds, like the manchineel, 
 imwholesome and corrosive dews on the multitude who are to 
 rest beneath its shade. It need not, however, be doubted, that 
 Sir Alexander Ball would exert himself to preclude any such in 
 tention, by stating and evincing the extreme impolicy and injus 
 tice of the plan, as well as its utter inutility, in the case of 
 Malta. With the exception of the governor and of the public 
 secretary, both of whom undoubtedly should be natives of Great 
 Britain and appointed by the British government, there was no 
 civil office that could be of the remotest advantage to the island 
 which was not already filled by the natives, and the functions 
 of which none could perform so well as they. The number of 
 inhabitants (he would state) was prodigious compared with the 
 extent of the island, though from the fear of the Moors one 
 fourth of its surface remained unpeopled and uncultivated. To 
 
512 THIRD LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 deprive, therefore, the middle and lower classes of such places as 
 they had heen accustomed to hold, would be cruel ; while the 
 places holden by the nobility were, for the greater part, such as 
 none but natives could perform the duties of. By any innovation 
 we should affront the higher classes and alienate the affections 
 of all, not only without any imaginable advantage but with the 
 certainty of great loss. Were Englishmen to be employed, the 
 salaries must be increased four-fold, and would yet be scarcely 
 worth acceptance ; and in higher offices, such as those of the 
 civil and criminal judges, the salaries must be augmented more 
 than ten-fold. For, greatly to the credit of their patriotism and 
 moral character, the Maltese gentry sought these places as honor 
 able distinctions, which endeared them to their fellow-country 
 men, and at the same time rendered the yoke of the order some 
 what less grievous and galling. "With the exception of the 
 Maltese secretary, w r hose situation was one of incessant labor, 
 and who at the same time performed the duties of law counsellor 
 to the government, the highest salaries scarcely exceeded <lOG 
 a year, and were barely sufficient to defray the increased ex 
 penses of the functionaries for an additional equipage, or one of 
 more imposing appearance. Besides, it was of importance that 
 the person placed at the head of that government should be 
 looked up to by the natives, and possess the means of distinguish 
 ing and rewarding those who had been most faithful arid zealous 
 in their attachment to Great Britain, and hostile to their former 
 tyrants. The number of the employments to be conferred would 
 give considerable influence to his Majesty s civil representative, 
 while the trifling amount of the emolument attached to each 
 precluded all temptation of abusing it. 
 
 Sir Alexander Ball would likewise, it is probable, urge, that 
 the commercial advantages of Malta, which were most intelli 
 gible to the English public, and best fitted to render our retention 
 of the island popular, must necessarily be of very slow growth, 
 though finally they would become great, and of an extent not to 
 be calculated. For this reason, therefore, it was highly desirable 
 that the possession should be, arid appear to be, at least inex 
 pensive. After the British Government had made one advance 
 for a stock of corn sufficient to place the island a year before 
 hand, the sum total drawn from Great Britain need not exceed 
 25, or at most .30,000 annually ; excluding of coiirse the ex- 
 
ESSAY VI. 513 
 
 penditure connected with our own military and navy, and the 
 repair of the fortifications, which latter expense ought to be 
 much less than at Gibraltar, from the multitude and low wages 
 of the laborers in Malta, and from the softness arid admirable 
 quality of the stone. Indeed much more might safely be prom 
 ised on the assumption that a wise and generous system of policy 
 would be adopted and persevered in. The monopoly of the 
 Maltese corn-trade by the government formed an exception to a 
 general rule, and by a strange, yet valid, anomaly in the opera 
 tions of political economy, was riot more necessary than advan 
 tageous to the inhabitants. The chief reason is, that the produce 
 of the island itself barely suffices for one fourth of its inhabitants, 
 although fruits and vegetables form so large a part of their nour 
 ishment. Meantime the harbors of Malta, and its equi-distance 
 from Europe, Asia, and Africa, gave it a vast and unnatural im 
 portance in the present relations of the great European powers, 
 and imposed on its government, whether native or dependent, 
 the necessity of considering the whole island as a single garrison, 
 the provisioning of which could not be trusted to the casualties 
 of ordinary commerce. "What is actually necessary is seldom in 
 jurious. Thus in Malta bread is better and cheaper on an 
 average than in Italy or the coast of Barbary : while a similar 
 interference with the corn-trade in Sicily impoverishes the in 
 habitants and keeps the agriculture in a state of barbarism. 
 But the point in question is the expense to Great Britain. 
 Whether the monopoly be good or evil in itself, it remains true, 
 that in this established usage, and in the gradual inclosure of 
 the uncultivated district, such resources exist as without the 
 least oppression might render the civil government in Valetta 
 independent of the Treasury at home, finally taking upon itself 
 even the repair of the fortifications, and thus realize one instance 
 of an important possession that costs the country nothing. 
 
 But now the time arrived, which threatened to frustrate the 
 patriotism of the Maltese themselves and all the zealous efforts 
 of their disinterested friend. Soon after the war had for the first 
 time become indisputably just and necessary, the people at large, 
 and a majority of independent senators, incapable, as it might 
 seem, of translating their fanatical anti-Jacobinism into a well- 
 grounded, yet equally impassioned, ariti-Gallicanism, grew impa 
 tient for peace, or rather for a name, under which the most ter- 
 
 Y* 
 
614 THIRD LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 rifle of all wars would be incessantly waged against us. Our 
 conduct was not much wiser than that of the weary traveller, 
 who having proceeded half-way on his journey, procured a short 
 rest for himself by getting up behind a chaise which was going 
 the contrary road. In the strange treaty of Amiens, in which 
 we neither recognized our former relations with France, nor with 
 the other European powers, nor formed any new ones, the com 
 promise concerning Malta formed the prominent feature : and its 
 nominal re-delivery to the Order of St. John was authorized in 
 the minds of the people by Lord Nelson s opinion of its worth- 
 lessness to Great Britain in a political or naval view. It is a 
 melancholy fact, and one that must often sadden a reflective and 
 philanthropic mind, how little moral considerations weigh even 
 with the noblest nations, how vain are the strongest appeals to 
 justice, humanity, and national honor unless when the public 
 mind is under the immediate influence of the cheerful or vehe 
 ment passions, indignation or avaricious hope. In the whole 
 class of human infirmities there is none, that makes such loud ap 
 peals to prudence, and yet so frequently outrages its plainest dic 
 tates, as the spirit of fear. The worst cause conducted in hope 
 is an overmatch for the noblest managed by despondence : in 
 both cases an unnatural conjunction that recalls the old fable of 
 Love and Death, taking each the arrows of the other by mistake. 
 When islands that had courted British protection in reliance upon 
 British honor, are with their inhabitants and proprietors aban 
 doned to the resentment which we had tempted them to provoke, 
 what wonder, if the opinion becomes general, that alike to Eng 
 land as to France, the fates and fortunes of other nations are 
 but the counters, with which the bloody game of war is played : 
 and that notwithstanding the great and acknowledged difference 
 between the two governments during possession, yet the protection 
 of France is more desirable because it is more likely to endure ? for 
 what the French take, they keep. Often both in Sicily and Malta 
 have I heard the case of Minorca referred to, where a considerable 
 portion of the most respectable gentry and merchants (no pro 
 vision having been made for their protection on the re-delivery 
 of that island to Spain) expiated in dungeons the warmth and 
 forwardness of their predilection for Great Britain. 
 
 It has been by some persons imagined that Lord Nelson was 
 considerably influenced, in his public declaration concerning the 
 
ES3AY VL 515 
 
 value of Malta, by ministerial flattery, and his own sense of the 
 great serviceableness of that opinion to the persons in office. This 
 supposition is, however, wholly false and groundless. His lord 
 ship s opinion was indeed greatly shaken afterwards, if not 
 changed ; but at that time he spoke in strictest correspondence 
 with his existing convictions. He said no more than he had 
 often previously declared to his private friends : it was the point 
 on which, after some amicable controversy, his lordship and Sir 
 Alexander Ball had " agreed to differ." Though the opinion it 
 self may have lost the greatest part of its interest, and except for 
 the historian is, as it were, superannuated ; yet the grounds and. 
 causes of it, as far as they arose out of Lord Nelson s particular 
 character, and may perhaps tend to re-enliven our recollection of 
 a hero so deeply and justly beloved, will forever possess an inter 
 est of their own. In an essay, too, which purports to be no more 
 than a series of sketches and fragments, the reader, it is hoped, 
 will readily excuse an occasional digression, and a more desultory 
 style of narration than could be tolerated in a work of regular 
 biography. 
 
 Lord Nelson was an admiral every inch of him. He looked at 
 everything, not merely in its possible relations to the naval 
 service in general, but in its immediate bearings on his own 
 squadron ; to his officers, his men, to the particular ships them 
 selves his affections were as strong and ardent as those of a lover. 
 Hence though his temper was constitutionally irritable and un 
 even, -yet never was a commander so enthusiastically loved by 
 men of all ranks from the captain of the fleet to the youngest 
 sliip-boy. Hence too the unexampled harmony which reigned in 
 his fleet year after year, under circumstances that might well 
 have undermined the patience of the best balanced dispositions, 
 much more of men with the impetuous character of British 
 sailors. Year after year, the same dull duties of a wearisome 
 blockade and of doubtful policy ; little if any opportunity of 
 making prizes ; and the few prizes, which accident might throw 
 in the way, of little or no value ; and when at last the occasion 
 presented itself which would have compensated for all, then a 
 disappointment as sudden and unexpected as it was unjust and 
 cruel, and the cup dashed from their lips ! Add to these trials 
 the sense of enterprises checked by feebleness and timidity else 
 where, not omitting the tiresomeness of the Mediterranean sea, sky, 
 
516 THIRD LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 and climate ; and the unj airing and cheerful spirit of affectionate 
 brotherhood, which linked together the hearts of that whole squad 
 ron, will appear not less wonderful to us than admirable and affect 
 ing. When the resolution was taken of commencing hostilities 
 against Spain, before any intelligence was sent to Lord Nelson, 
 another admiral, with two or three ships of the line, was sent 
 into the Mediterranean, and stationed before Cadiz, for the ex 
 press purpose of intercepting the Spanish prizes. The admiral 
 despatched on this lucrative service gave no information to Lord 
 Nelson of his arrival in the same sea, and five weeks elapsed be 
 fore his lordship became acquainted with the circumstance. The 
 prizes thus taken were immense. A month or two sufficed to 
 enrich the commander and officers of this small arid highly-fa 
 vored squadron : while to Nelson and his fleet the sense of hav 
 ing done their duty, and the consciousness of the glorious services 
 which they had performed were considered, it must be presumed, 
 as an abundant remuneration for all their toils and long-suffering ! 
 It was indeed an unexampled circumstance, that a small squad 
 ron should be sent to the station which had been long occupied 
 by a large fleet, commanded by the dating of the navy, and the 
 glory of the British empire, to the station where this fleet had for 
 years been wearing away in the most barren, repulsive, and 
 spirit-trying service, in which the navy can be employed ; and 
 that this minor squadron should be sent independently of, and 
 without any communication with, the commander of the former 
 fleet, for the express and solitary purpose of stepping between it 
 and the Spanish prizes, and as soon as this short and pleasant 
 service was performed, of bringing home the unshared booty with 
 all possible caution, and despatch. The substantial advantages 
 of naval service were perhaps deemed of too gross a nature for 
 men already rewarded with the grateful affections of their own 
 countrymen, and the admiration of the whole world. They were 
 to be awarded, therefore, on a principle of compensation to a com 
 mander less rich in fame, and whose laurels, though not scanty, 
 were not yet sufficiently luxuriant to hide the golden crown which 
 is the appropriate ornament of victory in the bloodless war of 
 commercial capture. Of all the wounds which were ever in 
 flicted on Nelson s feelings (and there were not a few), this was 
 the deepest this rankled most. " I had thought," (said the 
 gallant man, in a letter written in the first sense of the affront) 
 
ESSAY VI. 617 
 
 " I fancied but nay, it must have been a dream, an idle dream 
 yet J confess it, I did fancy, that I had done my country ser 
 vice ; and thus they use me. It was not enough to have robbed 
 me once before of my West-Indian harvest ; now they have taken 
 away the Spanish ; and under what circumstances, and with 
 what pointed aggravations ! Yet, if I know my own thoughts, it 
 is not for myself, or on my own account chiefly, that I feel the 
 sting and the disappointment. No ! it is for my brave officers ; 
 for my noble-minded friends and comrades such a gallant set 
 of fellows ! such a band of brothers ! My heart swells at the 
 
 thought of them !" 
 
 This strong attachment of the heroic admiral to his fleet, faith 
 fully repaid by an equal attachment on their part to their admi 
 ral, had no little influence in attuning their hearts to each other ; 
 and when he died it seemed as if no man . was a stranger to 
 another : for all were made acquaintances by the rights of a com 
 mon anguish. In the fleet itself, many a private quarrel was 
 forgotten, no more to be remembered ; many, who had been alien 
 ated, became once more good friends ; yea, many a one was re 
 conciled to his very enemy, .and loved, and (as it were) thanked 
 him, for the bitterness of his grief, as if it had been an act of 
 consolation to himself in an intercourse of private sympathy. The 
 tidings arrived at Naples on the day that I returned to that city 
 from Calabria : and never can I forget the sorrow and consterna 
 tion that lay on every countenance. Even to this day there are 
 times when I seem to see, as in a vision, separate groups and in 
 dividual faces of the picture. Numbers stopped and shook hands 
 with me, because they had seen the tears on my cheek, and con- 
 .jectured that I was an Englishman; and several, as they held 
 my hand, burst themselves into tears. And though it may ex 
 cite a smile, yet it pleased and affected me, as a proof of the good 
 ness of the human heart struggling to exercise its kindness in 
 spite of prejudices the most obstinate, and eager to carry on its 
 love and honor into the life beyond life, that it was whispered 
 about Naples that Lord Nelson had become a good Catholic be 
 fore his death. The absurdity of the fiction is a sort of measure 
 ment of the fond and affectionate esteem which had ripened the 
 pious wish of some kind individual, through all the gradations of 
 possibility and probability, into a confident assertion believed and 
 affirmed by hundreds. The feelings of Great Britain on this 
 
518 THIRD LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 awful event have been described well and worthily by a living 
 poet, who has happily blended the passion and wild transitions 
 of lyric song with the swell and solemnity of epic narration : 
 
 Thou art full n ; fall n, in the lap 
 
 Of victory. To thy country thou cam st back, 
 Thou, conqueror, to triumphal Albion cam st 
 A corse ! I saw before thy hearse pass on 
 The comrades of thy perils and renown. 
 The frequent tear upon their dauntless breasts 
 Fell. I beheld the pomp thick gather d round 
 The trophied car that bore thy grac d remains 
 Thro* arm d ranks, and a nation gazing on. 
 Bright glow d the sun and not a cloud distaiu d 
 Heaven s arch of gold, but all was gloom beneath. 
 A holy and unutterable pang 
 Thrill d on the soul. Awe and mute anguish fell 
 On all. Yet high the public bosom throbb d 
 With triumph. And if one, mid that vast pomp, 
 If but the voice of one had shouted forth 
 The name of Nelson, thou hadst pass d along, 
 Thou in thy hearse to burial pass d, as oft 
 Before the van of battle, proudly rode 
 Thy prow, down Britain s line, shout after shout 
 Rending the air with triumph, ere thy hand 
 Had lanc d the bolt of victory.* 
 
 I introduced this digression with an apology, yet have extended 
 it so much further than I had designed, that I must once more 
 request my reader to excuse me. It was to be expected (I have 
 said) that Lord Nelson would appreciate the isle of Malta from its 
 relations to the British fleet on the Mediterranean station. It was 
 the fashion of the day to style Egypt the key of India, and Malta 
 the key of Egypt. Nelson saw the hollowness of this metaphor ; 
 or if he only doubted its applicability in the former instance, he 
 was sure that it was false in the latter. Egypt might or might 
 not be the key of India ; but Malta was certainly riot the key of 
 Egypt. It was not intended to keep constantly two distinct fleets 
 in that sea ; and the largest naval force at Malta would not 
 supersede the necessity of a squadron off Toulon. Malta does 
 not lie in the direct course from Toulon to Alexandria : and from 
 the nature of the winds (one time taken with another) the com 
 parative length of the voyage to the latter port will be found far 
 
 * Sotheby s Saul. .Etf. 
 
ESSAY VI. 619 
 
 less than a view of the map would suggest, and in truth of little 
 practical importance. If it were the object of the French fleet 
 to avoid Malta in its passage to Egypt, the port-admiral of Va- 
 letta would in all probability receive his first intelligence of its 
 course from Minorca or the squadron ofF Toulon, instead of com 
 municating it. In what regarded the re-fitting and provisioning 
 of the fleet, either on ordinary or extraordinary occasions, Malta 
 was as inconvenient as Minorca was advantageous, not only from 
 its distance (which yet was sufficient to render it almost useless 
 in cases of the most pressfng necessity, as after a severe action or 
 injuries of tempest) but likewise from the extreme difficulty, if 
 not impracticability, of leaving the harbor of Valetta with a N. W. 
 wind, which often lasts for weeks together. In all these points 
 his lordship s observations were perfectly just ; and it must be 
 conceded by all persons acquainted with the situation and circum 
 stances of Malta, that its importance, as a British possession, if 
 not exaggerated on the whole, was unduly magnified in several 
 important particulars. Thus Lord Minto, in a speech delivered 
 at a country meeting and afterwards published, affirmed, that 
 upon the supposition (which no one could consider as unlikely to 
 take place) that the court of Naples should be compelled to act 
 under the influence of France, and that the Barbary powers were 
 unfriendly to us, either in consequence of French intrigues or from 
 their own caprice and insolence, there would not be a single port, 
 harbor, bay, creek, or road-stead in the whole Mediterranean, 
 from which our men of war could obtain a single ox or a hogshead 
 of fresh water, unless Great Britain retained possession of 
 Malta. The noble speaker seems not to have been aware, .that 
 under the circumstances supposed by him, Odessa too being closed 
 against us by a Russian war, the island of Malta itself would be 
 no better than a vast almshouse of 75,000 persons, exclusively 
 of the British soldiers, all of whom must be regularly supplied 
 with corn and salt meat from Great Britain or Ireland. The 
 population of Malta and Gozo exceeds 100,000 ; while the food 
 of all kinds produced on the two islands would barely suffice for 
 one-fourth of that number. The deficiency is supplied by the 
 growth and spinning of cotton, for which corn could not be sub 
 stituted from the nature of the soil, or were it attempted, would 
 produce but a small proportion of the quantity which the cotton 
 
520 THIRD LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 raised on the same fields and spun* into thread, enables the 
 Maltese to purchase ; not to mention that the substitution of 
 grain for cotton would leave half of the inhabitants without em 
 ployment. As to live stock, it is quite out of the question, if we 
 except the pigs and goats, which perform the office of scavengers 
 in the streets of Valetta and the towns on the other side of the 
 Porto Grande. 
 
 Against these latter arguments Sir A. Ball placed the follow 
 ing considerations. It had been long his conviction, that the 
 Mediterranean squadron should be supplied by regular store-ships, 
 the sole business of which should be that of carriers for the fleet. 
 This he recommended as by far the most economic plan, in the 
 first instance. Secondly, beyond any other it would secure a sys 
 tem and regularity in the arrival of supplies. And, lastly, it 
 would conduce to the discipline of the navy, and prevent both 
 ships and officers from being out of the way on any sudden 
 emergence. If this system were introduced, the objections to 
 Malta, from its great distance, and the like, would have little 
 force. On the other hand, ^e objections to Minorca he deemed 
 irremovable. The same disadvantages which attended the getting 
 out of the harbor of Yaletta, applied to vessels getting into Port 
 Mahon ; but while fifteen hundred or two thousand British troops 
 might be safely intrusted with the preservation of Malta, the 
 troops for the defence of Minorca must ever be in proportion to 
 those which the enemy may be supposed likely to send against it. 
 It is so little favored by nature or by art, that the possessors stand 
 merely on the level with the invaders. Cceteris paribus, if 
 there were 12,000 of the enemy landed, there must be an equal 
 number to repel them ; nor could the garrison, or any part of it 
 be spared for any sudden emergence without risk of losing the 
 
 * The Maltese cotton is naturally of a deep buff, or dusky orange color, 
 and, by the laws of the island, must be spun before it can be exported. I 
 have heard it asserted by persons apparently well informed on the subject, 
 that the raw material would fetch as high a price as the thread, weight for 
 weight ; the thread from its coarseness being applicable to few purposes. 
 It is manufactured likewise for the use of the natives themselves into a 
 coarse nankin, which never loses its color by washing and is durable beyond 
 any clothing I have ever known or heard of. The cotton seed is used as a 
 food for the cattle that are not immediately wanted for the market: it is 
 very nutritious, but changes the fat of the animal into a kind of suet, con 
 gealing quickly, and of an adhesive substance. 
 
ESSAY VI. 521 
 
 island. Previously to the battle of Marengo, the most earnest 
 representations were made to the governor and commander at 
 Minorca by the British admiral, who offered to take on himself 
 the whole responsibility of the measure, if he would permit the 
 troops at Minorca to join our allies. The governor felt himself 
 compelled to refuse his assent. Doubtless, he acted wisely, for 
 responsibility is not transferable. The fact is introduced in proof 
 of the defenceless state of Minorca, and its constant liability to 
 attack. If the Austrian army had stood in the same relation to 
 eight or nine thousand British soldiers at Malta, a single regiment 
 would have precluded all alarms, as to the island itself, and the 
 remainder have perhaps changed the destiny of Europe. What 
 might not, almost I would say, what must not eight thousand 
 Britons have accomplished at the battle of Marengo, nicely poised 
 as the fortunes of the two armies are now known to have been ? 
 Minorca too is alone useful or desirable during a war, and on the 
 supposition of a fleet off Toulon. The advantages of Malta are 
 permanent and national. As a second Gibraltar, it must tend to 
 secure Gibraltar itself; for if by the loss of that one place we 
 could be excluded from the Mediterranean, it is difficult to say 
 what sacrifices of blood and treasure the enemy would deem too 
 high a price for its conquest. "Whatever Malta may or may not 
 be respecting Egypt, its high importance to the independence of 
 Sicily can not be doubted, or its advantages, ao a central station, 
 for any portion of our disposable force. Neither is the influence 
 which it will enable us to exert on the Barbary powers to be 
 wholly neglected. I shall only add, that during the plague at 
 Gibraltar, Lord Nelson himself acknowledged that he began to 
 see the possession of Malta in a different light. 
 
 Sir Alexander Ball looked forward to future contingencies as 
 likely to increase the value of Malta to Great Britain. He fore 
 saw that the whole of Italy would become a French province, and 
 he knew that the French government had been long intriguing on 
 the coast of Barbary. The Dey of Algiers was believed to have 
 accumulated a treasure of fifteen millions sterling, and Bonaparte 
 had actually duped him into a treaty, by which the French were 
 to be permitted to erect a fort on the very spot where the ancient 
 Hippo stood, the choice between which and the Hellespont as the 
 site of New Rome is said to have perplexed the judgment of 
 Constantino. To this he added an additional point of connection 
 
522 "THIRD LANDING-PLACE. 
 
 with Russia, by means of Odessa, and on the supposition of a war 
 in the Baltic, a still more interesting relation to Turkey, and the 
 Morea, and the Greek islands. It had been repeatedly signified 
 to the British government, that from the Morea and the countries 
 adjacent, a considerable supply of ship timber arid naval stores 
 might be obtained, such as would at least greatly lessen the pres 
 sure of a Russian war. The agents of France were .in full ac 
 tivity in the Morea and the Greek islands, the possession of which 
 by that government would augment the naval resources of the 
 French to a degree of which few are aware, who have not made 
 the present state of commerce of the Greeks an object of particu 
 lar attention. In short, if the possession of Malta were advanta 
 geous to England solely as a convenient watch-tower, as a centre 
 of intelligence, its importance would be undeniable. 
 
 Although these suggestions did not prevent the signing away 
 of Malta at the peace of Amiens, they doubtless were not with 
 out effect, when the ambition of Bonaparte had given a full. and 
 final answer to the grand question : can we remain in peace with 
 France ? I have likewise reason to believe, that Sir Alexander 
 Ball baffled by exposure an insidious proposal of the French gov 
 ernment, during the negotiations that preceded the recommence 
 ment of the war that the fortifications of Malta should be en 
 tirely dismantled, and the island left to its inhabitants. Without 
 dwelling on the obvious inhumanity and flagitious injustice of 
 exposing the Maltese to certain pillage and slavery from their 
 old and inveterate enemies the Moors, he showed that the plan 
 would promote the interests of Bonaparte even more than his 
 actual possession of the island, which France had no possible 
 interest in desiring, except as the means of keeping it out of the 
 hands of Great Britain. 
 
 But Sir Alexander Ball is no more. I still cling to the hope 
 that I may yet be enabled to record his good deeds more fully 
 and regularly ; that then, with a sense of comfort not without a 
 subdued exultation, I may raise heaven-ward from his honored 
 tomb the glistening eye of a humble but ever grateful friend. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 A. 
 
 PROSPECTUS OF THE FRIEND, (EXTRACTED FEOM A LETTER TO A 
 CORRESPONDENT;.) 
 
 IT is not unknown to you, that I have employed almost the whole 
 of my life in acquiring, or endeavoring to acquire, useful knowledge 
 by study, reflection, observation, and by cultivating the society of my 
 superiors in intellect, both at home and in foreign countries. You 
 know, too, that at different periods of my life I have not only planned, 
 but collected the materials for, many works on various and important 
 subjects ; so many indeed, that the number of my unrealized schemes 
 and the mass of my miscellaneous fragments have often furnished my 
 friends with a subject of raillery, and sometimes of regret and reproof. 
 Waiving the mention of all private and accidental hinderances, I am 
 inclined to believe that this want of perseverance has been produced 
 in the main by an over-activity of thought, modified by a constitu 
 tional indolence, which made it more pleasant to me to continue ac 
 quiring, than to reduce what I had acquired to a regular form. Add, 
 too, that almost daily throwing oft* my notices or reflections in desul 
 tory fragments, I was still tempted onward by an increasing sense of 
 the imperfection of my knowledge, and by the conviction that, in or 
 der fully to comprehend and develop any one subject, it was neces 
 sary that I should make myself master of some other, which again as 
 regularly involved a third, and so on with an ever-widening horizon. 
 Yet one habit, formed during long absences from those with whom I 
 could converse with full sympathy, has been of advantage to me, 
 that of daily noting down in my memorandum or common-place 
 books both incidents and observations ; whatever had occurred to 
 me from without, and all the flux and reflux of my mind within itself. 
 The number of these notices and their tendency, miscellaneous as 
 they were, to one common end (quid sumus et quid futuri gigni- 
 mur. what we are and what w r e are born to become ; and thus from 
 
526 APPENDIX A. 
 
 the end of our being to deduce its proper objects) first encouraged 
 me to undertake the weekly essay, of which you will consider this 
 letter as the prospectus. 
 
 Not only did the plan seem to accord better than any other with 
 the nature of my own mind, both in its strength and in its weakness ; 
 but, conscious that in upholding some principles both of taste and 
 philosophy, adopted by the great men of Europe, from the middle of 
 the fifteenth till toward the close of the seventeenth century, I must 
 run counter to many prejudices of many of my readers (for old faith 
 is often modern heresy), I perceived too in a periodical essay the most 
 likely means of winning instead of forcing my way. The truth sup 
 posed on my side, the shock of the first day might be so far lessened 
 by the reflections of succeeding days, as to procure for my next week s 
 essay a less hostile reception than it would have met with had it been 
 only the next chapter of a present volume. I hoped to disarm the 
 mind of those feelings, which preclude conviction by contempt, and, 
 as it were, fling the door in* the face of reasoning by a presumption 
 of its absurdity. A motive too for honorable ambition was supplied 
 by the fact, that every periodical paper of the kind now attempted, 
 which had been conducted with zeal and ability, was not only well 
 received at the time, but has become permanently, and in the best 
 sense of the word, popular. By honorable ambition I mean the 
 strong desire to be useful, aided by the wish to be generally acknowl 
 edged to have been so. As I feel myself actuated in no ordinary de 
 gree by this desire, so the hope of realizing it appears less and less 
 presumptuous to me since I have received from men of highest rank 
 and established character in the republic of letters, not only strong 
 encouragements as to my own fitness for the undertaking, but like 
 wise promises of support from their own stores. 
 
 The object of The Friend, briefly and generally expressed, is to up 
 hold those truths and those merits, which are founded in the nobler 
 and permanent parts of our nature, against the caprices of fashion and 
 such pleasures as either depend on transitory and accidental causes, 
 or are pursued from less worthy impulses. The chief subjects of my 
 own essays will be : 
 
 The true and sole ground of morality or virtue, as distinguished 
 from prudence : 
 
 The origin and growth of moral impulses, as distinguished from ex 
 ternal and immediate motives : 
 
 The necessary dependence of taste on moral impulses and habits, 
 and the nature of taste (relative to judgment in general and to genius) 
 defined, illustrated, and applied. Under this head I comprise the sub 
 stance of the Lectures given, and intended to have been given, at the 
 Royal Institution on the distinguished English poets, in illustration of 
 the general principles of poetry ; together with suggestions concern- 
 
APPENDIX A. 527 
 
 ing the affinity of the fine arts to each other, and the principles com- 
 \ mon to them all ; architecture ; gardening ; dress ; music ; painting ; 
 poetry : 
 
 The opening out of new objects of just admiration in our own laii- 
 ;guage, and information as to the present state and past history of 
 Swedish, Danish, German, and Italian literature, to which, but as 
 supplied by a friend, I may add the Spanish, Portuguese, and French 
 as far as the same has not been already given to English readers, 
 or is not to be found in common French authors : 
 
 Characters met with in real life ; anecdotes and resulte of my own 
 life and travels, as tar as they are illustrative of general moral laws, 
 and have no direct bearing on personal or immediate politics : 
 
 Education in its widest sense, private and national : 
 
 Sources of consolation to the afflicted in misfortune, or disease, or 
 dejection of mind, from the exertion and right application of the rea 
 son, the imagination, and the moral sense ; and new sources of enjoy 
 ment opened out, or an attempt (as an illustrious friend once ex 
 pressed the thought to me) to add sunshine to daylight, by making 
 the happy more happy. In the words u Dejection of mind" I refer 
 particularly to doubt or disbelief of the moral government of the 
 world, and the grounds and arguments for the religious hopes of hu 
 man nature. , 
 
 Such are the chief subjects in the development of which I hope to 
 realize, to a certain extent, the great object of my essays. It will 
 assuredly be my endeavor, by as much variety as is consistent with 
 that object, to procure entertainment for my readers as well as in 
 struction : yet I feel myself compelled to hazard the confession, that 
 such of my readers as make the latter the paramount motive for their 
 encouragement of The Friend, will receive the largest portion of the 
 former. I have heard it said of a young lady, "if you are told, 
 before you see her, that she is handsome, you will think her ordi 
 nary ; if that she is ordinary, you will think her handsome." I may 
 perhaps apply this remark to my own essays. If instruction and the 
 increase of honorable motives and virtuous impulses be chiefly ex 
 pected, there will, I would fain hope, be felt no deficiency of amuse 
 ment ; but I must submit to be thought dull by those who seek 
 amusement only. The Friend will be distinguished from its cele 
 brated predecessors, the Spectator and the like, as to its plan, chiefly 
 by the greater length of the separate essays, by their closer connec 
 tion with each other, and by the predominance of one object, and the 
 common bearing of all to one end. 
 
 It would be superfluous to state, that I shall receive with gratitude 
 any communications addressed to me : but it may be proper to say, 
 that all remarks and criticisms in praise or dispraise of my contem 
 poraries (to which, however, nothing but a strong sense of moral in- 
 
528 APPENDIX B. 
 
 terest will ever lead me) will be written by myself only ; both be 
 cause I can not have the same certainty concerning the motives of 
 others, and because I deem it fit, that such strictures should always 
 be attended by the name of their author, and that one and the same 
 person should be solely responsible for the insertion as well as compo 
 sition of the same. 
 
 B. 
 
 COMMENCEMENT OF NO. I. 
 
 IF it be usual with writers in general to find the first paragraph 
 of their works that which has given them the most trouble with the 
 least satisfaction, The Friend may be allowed to feel the difficulties 
 and anxiety of a first introduction in a more than ordinary degree. 
 He is embarrassed by the very circumstances that discriminate the 
 plan and purposes of the present weekly paper from those of its 
 periodical brethren, as well as from its more dignified literary rela 
 tions, which come forth at once and in full growth from their parents. 
 If it had been my ambition to have copied its whole scheme and 
 fashion from the great founders of the race, the Tatler and Spectator, 
 I should, indeed have exposed my essays to a greater hazard of un 
 kind comparison. An imperfect imitation is often felt as a contrast. 
 On the other hand, however, the very names and descriptions of the 
 fictitious characters, which I had proposed to assume in the course 
 of my work, would have put me at once in possession of the stage 5 
 and my first act have opened with a procession of masks. Again, if 
 I were composing one work on one given object, the same acquaint 
 ance with its grounds and bearings, which had authorized me to pub 
 lish my opinions, would, with its principles or fundamental facts, 
 have supplied me with my best and most appropriate commence 
 ment. More easy still would my task have been, had I planned The 
 Friend chiefly as a vehicle for a weekly descant on public characters 
 and political parties. My perfect freedom from all warping influ 
 ences ; the distance which permitted a distinct view of the game, 
 yet secured me from its passions ; the liberty of the press ; and its 
 especial importance at the present period from whatever event or 
 topic might happen to form the great interest of the day ; in short, 
 the recipe was ready to my hand, and it was framed so skilfully, and 
 has been practised with such constant effect, that it would have been 
 affectation to have deviated from it. For originality for its own sake 
 merely is idle at the best, and sometimes monstrous. Excuse me, 
 
APPENDIX B. 529 
 
 therefore, gentle reader ! if borrowing from my title a right of an 
 ticipation, I avail myself of the privileges of a friend before I have 
 earned them ; and waiving the ceremony of a formal introduction, 
 permit me to proceed at once to the subject, trite indeed and familiar 
 as the first lessons of childhood ; which yet must be the foundation 
 of my future superstructure with all its ornaments, the hidden root 
 of the tree, I am attempting to rear, with all its branches and boughs. 
 But if from it I have deduced my strongest moral motives for this 
 undertaking, it has at the same time been applied in suggesting the 
 most formidable obstacle to my success, as far, I mean, as my plan 
 alone is concerned, and not the talents necessary for its completion. 
 
 Conclusions drawn from facts which subsist in perpetual flux, with 
 out definite place or fixed quantity, must always be liable to plausible 
 objections, nay, often to unanswerable difficulties ; and yet, having 
 their foundation in uncorrupted feeling, are assented to by mankind 
 at large, and in all ages, as undoubted truths. As our notions con 
 cerning them are almost equally obscure, so are our convictions 
 almost equally vivid, with those of our life and individuality. Re 
 garded with awe as guiding principles by the founders of law and 
 religion, they are the favorite objects of attack with mock philoso 
 phers, and the demagogues in church, state, and literature ; and the 
 denial of them has in all times, though at various intervals, formed 
 heresies and systems, which, after their day of wonder, are regularly 
 exploded, and again as regularly revived when they have re-acquired 
 novelty by courtesy of oblivion. 
 
 Among these universal persuasions we must place the sense of a 
 selt-contradicting principle in our nature, or a disharmony in the dif 
 ferent impulses that constitute it ; of a something which essentially 
 distinguishes man both from all other animals that are known to 
 exist, and from the idea of his own nature, or conception of the 
 original man. In health and youth we may indeed connect the glow 
 and buoyance of our bodily sensations with the words of a theory, 
 and imagine that we hold it with a firm belief. The pleasurable heat 
 which the blood or the breathing generates, the sense of external re 
 ality which comes with the strong grasp of the hand, or the vigor 
 ous tread of the foot, may indifferently become associated with the 
 rich eloquence of a Shaftesbury, imposing on us man s possible per 
 fections for his existing nature ; or with the cheerless and hardier 
 impieties of a Hobbes, while cutting the Gordian knot he denies the 
 reality of either vice or virtue, and explains away the mind s self- 
 reproach into a distempered ignorance, an epidemic affection of the 
 human nerves and their habits of motion. 
 
 " Vain wisdom all, and false philosophy!" 
 
 I shall hereafter endeavor to prove, how distinct and different the 
 
 VOL. H. Z 
 
530 APPENDIX B. 
 
 sensation of positiveness is from the sense of certainty; the tur 
 bulent heat of temporary fermentation from the mild warmth of 
 essential life. Suffice it for the present to affirm, to declare it at 
 least, as my own creed, that whatever humbles the heart, and forces 
 the mind inward, whether it be sickness, or grief, or remorse, or the 
 deep yearnings of love [and there have been children of affliction for 
 whom all these have met and made up one complex suffering], in 
 proportion as it acquaints us with the thing we are, renders us docile 
 to the concurrent testimony of our fellow-men in all ages and in all 
 nations. From Pascal in his closet resting the arm, which supports 
 his thoughtful brow, on a pile of demonstrations, to the poor pensive 
 Indian that seeks the missionary in the American wilderness, the 
 humiliated self-exaniinant feels that there is evil in our nature as 
 well as good ; an evil and a good, for a just analogy to which he 
 questions all other natures in vain. It is still the great definition of 
 humanity, that w r e have a conscience, which no mechanic compost, 
 no chemical combination of mere appetence, memory and under 
 standing, can solve ; which is indeed an element of our being ; a 
 conscience, unrelenting yet not absolute ; which we may stupefy but 
 can not delude ; which we may suspend but can not annihilate ; 
 although we may perhaps find a treacherous counterfeit in the very 
 quiet which we derive from its slumber, or its enhancement. 
 
 Of so mysterious a pJicBiwrnenon we might expect a cause as mysteri 
 ous. Accordingly, we find this [cause be it, or condition, or necessary 
 accompaniment] involved and implied in the fact, which it alone can 
 explain. Tor if our permanent consciousness did not reveal to us our 
 free-agency, we should yet be obliged to deduce it, as a necessary in 
 ference, from the fact of our conscience : or rejecting both the one 
 and the other, as mere illusions of internal feelings, forfeit all. power 
 of thinking consistently with our actions, or acting consistently with 
 our thought, for any single hour during our whole lives. But I am 
 proceeding farther than I had wished or intended. It will be long 
 ere I shall dare flatter myself that I have won the confidence of my 
 reader sufficiently to require of him that effort of attention, which the 
 regular establishment of this truth would require. 
 
 After the brief season of youthful hardihood, and the succeeding 
 years of unceasing fluctuation, after long-continued and patient study 
 of the most celebrated works in the languages of ancient and modern 
 Europe, in defence or denial of this prime article of human faith, 
 which (save to the trifler or the worldling) no frequency of discussion 
 can superannuate, I at length satisfied my own mind by arguments, 
 which placed me on firm land. This one conviction, determined, as 
 in a mould, the form and feature of my whole system in religion and 
 morals, and e.Yen in literature^. These arguments were not suggested 
 to me by books, but forced on me by reflection on my own being, and 
 
APPENDIX B. 531 
 
 observation of the ways of those about me, especially of little children. 
 And as they had the power of fixing the same persuasion in some 
 valuable minds, much interested, and not unversed in the controversy, 
 and from the manner probably rather than the substance, appeared to 
 them in some sort original [for oldest reasons will put on an impres 
 sive semblance of novelty, if they have indeed been drawn from the 
 fountain-head of genuine self-research] and since the arguments are 
 neither abstruse, nor dependent on a long chain of deductions, nor such 
 as suppose previous habits of metaphysical disquisition; I shall deem 
 it my duty to state them with what skill I can, at a fitting oppor 
 tunity, though rather as the biographer of my own sentiments than a 
 legislator of the opinions of other men. 
 
 At present, however, I give it merely as an article of my own faith, 
 closely connected with all my hopes of melioration in man, and lead 
 ing to the methods by which alone I hold any fundamental or perma 
 nent melioration practicable ; that there is evil distinct from error 
 and from pain, an evil in human nature which is not wholly grounded 
 in the limitation of our understandings. And this, too, I believe to 
 operate equally in subjects of taste, as in the higher concerns of 
 morality. Were it my conviction, that our follies, vice, and misery, 
 have their entire origin in miscalculation from ignorance, I should act 
 irrationally in attempting other task than that of adding new lights to 
 the science of moral arithmetic, or new facility to its acquirement. 
 In other words, it would have been my worthy business to have set 
 forth, if it were in my power, an improved system of book-keeping 
 for the ledgers of calculating self-love. If, on the contrary, I believed 
 our nature fettered to all its wretchedness of head and heart, by an 
 absolute and innate necessity, at least by a necessity which no human 
 power, no efforts of reason or eloquence could remove or lessen [no, 
 nor even prepare the way for such removal or diminution] ; I should 
 then yield myself at once to the admonitions of one of my correspon 
 dents [unless, indeed, it should better suit my humor to do nothing 
 than nothings, nihil quam nikili], and deem it even presumptuous to 
 aim at other or higher object than that of amusing, during some ten 
 minutes in every week, a small portion of the reading public. 
 
 CONCLUSION OF NO. I. 
 
 Previously to my ascent of Etna, as likewise of the Brocken in 
 North-Germany, I remember to have amused myself with examining 
 the album or manuscript, presented to travellers at the first stage of 
 the mountain, in which, on their return, their fore-runners had some 
 times left their experience, and more often- disclosed or betrayed their 
 own characters. Something like this I have endeavored to do rela 
 tively to my great predecessors in periodical literature, from the 
 
532 APPENDIX B. 
 
 Spectator to the Mirror, or whatever later work of excellence there 
 may be. But the distinction between my proposed plan and all and 
 each of theirs, I must defer to a future essay. From all other works 
 The Friend is sufficiently distinguished, either by the very form and 
 intervals of its publication, or by its avowed exclusion of the events 
 of the day, and of all personal politics. 
 
 For a detail of the principal subjects, which I have proposed to 
 myself to treat in the course of this work, I must refer to the Pros- 
 jicctus, printed at the end of this sheet. But I own I am anxious 
 to explain myself more fully on the delicate subjects of religion and 
 politics. Of the former perhaps it may, for the present, be enough to 
 say that I have confidence in myself, that I shall neither directly nor 
 indirectly attack its doctrines or mysteries, much less attempt basely 
 to undermine them by allusion, or tale, or anecdote. What more I 
 might dare promise of myself, I reserve for another occasion. Of 
 politics, however, I have many motives to declare my intentions more 
 explicitly. It is my object to refer men to principles in all things ; 
 in literature, in the fine arts, in morals, in legislation, in religion. 
 Whatever, therefore, of a politic nature may be reduced to general 
 principles, necessarily, indeed, dependent on the circumstances of a 
 nation internal and external, yet not especially connected with this 
 year or the preceding this I do not exclude from my scheme. 
 Thinking it a sort of duty to place my readers in full possession, both 
 of my opinions and the only method in which I can permit myself to 
 recommend them, and aware, too, of many calumnious accusations, 
 as well as gross misapprehensions of my political creed, I shall dedi 
 cate my second number entirely to the views, which a British subject, 
 in the present state of his country, ought to entertain of its actual and 
 existing constitution of government. If I can do no positive good, I 
 may perhaps aid in preventing others from doing harm. But all in 
 tentional allusions to particular persons, all support of, or hostility 
 to, particular parties or factions, I now and forever utterly disclaim. 
 My principles command this abstinence, my tranquillity requires it : 
 
 Tranquillity ! thou better name 
 Than all the family of fame, &c. 
 
 ***** 
 
 But I have transgressed a rule, which I had intended to have 
 established for myself, that of never troubling my readers with my 
 own verses : 
 
 he hinc Cam&nce ! vos quoque, ite, suaves, 
 J)ulces CamcRna ! JVam (fatebimur vcruni) 
 Dulces fuistis : et tamen meas chartas 
 Revisitote ; sed pudenter et raro. 
 
 I shall, indeed, very rarely and cautiously, avail myself of this 
 privilege. For long and early habits of exerting my intellect in met 
 rical composition have not so enslaved me, but that for some years 
 
APPENDIX C. 533 
 
 I have felt, and deeply felt, that the poet s high functions were not 
 my proper assignment; that many may be worthy to listen to the 
 strains of Apollo, neighbors of the sacred choir, and able to discrimi 
 nate, and feel and love its genuine harmonies ; yet not therefore 
 called to receive the harp in their OAvn hands, and join in the concert. 
 I am content and gratified, that Spenser, Shakspeare, Milton, have 
 not been born in vain for me : and I feel it as a blessing, that even 
 among my contemporaries I know one at least, who has been deemed 
 worthy of the gift ; who has received the harp with reverence, and 
 struck it with the hand of power. 
 
 C. 
 
 COMMENCEMENT OF NO. 11. 
 
 CONSCIOUS that I am about to deliver my sentiments on a subject 
 of the utmost delicacy, to walk 
 
 per igncs 
 Suppositos cincri doloso, 
 
 I have been tempted by my fears to preface them with a motto of 
 unusual length, from an authority equally respected by both of the 
 opposite parties. I have selected it from an orator, whose eloquence 
 has taken away for Englishmen all cause of humiliation from the 
 names of Demosthenes and Cicero : from a statesman, who has left 
 to our language a bequest of glory unrivalled, and all his own, in the 
 keen-eyed, yet far-sighted genius, with which he has almost uni 
 formly made the most original and profound general principles of 
 political wisdom, and even recondite laws of human passions, bear 
 upon particular measures and events. While of the harangues of 
 Pitt, Fox, and their elder compeers, on the most important occur 
 rences, we retain a few unsatisfactory fragments alone, the very flies 
 and weeds of Burke shine to us through the purest amber, imperish- 
 ably enshrined, and valuable from the precious material of their 
 embalmment. I have extracted the passage from that Burke whose 
 latter exertions have rendered his works venerable, as oracular voices 
 from the sepulchre of a patriarch, to the upholders of government 
 and society in their existing state and order ; but from a speech de 
 livered by him while he was the most beloved, the proudest name 
 with the more anxious friends of liberty (I distinguish them in 
 courtesy by the name of their own choice, not as implying any en 
 mity to true freedom in the characters of their opponents) ; while he 
 was the darling of those, who, believing mankind to have been im- 
 
534 APPENDIX C. 
 
 proved, aro desirous to give to forms of government a similar 
 progression. 
 
 From the same anxiety, I have been led to introduce my opinions 
 on this most hazardous subject by a preface of a somewhat personal 
 character. And though the title of my address is general, yet, I own, 
 I direct myself more particularly to those among my readers, who, 
 from various printed and imprinted calumnies, have judged most un 
 favorably of my political tenets ; and to those, whose favor I have 
 chanced to win in consequence of a similar, though not equal, mis 
 take. To both I affirm, that the opinions and arguments I am about 
 to detail, have been the settled convictions of my mind for the last 
 ten or twelve years, with some brief intervals of fluctuation, and 
 those only in lesser points, and known only to the companions of my 
 fireside. From both and from all my readers, I solicit a gracious 
 attention to the following explanations; first, on the congruity of this 
 number with the general plan and object of The Friend, and secondly 
 on the charge of arrogance, which may be adduced against the author 
 for the freedom with which, in this number, and in others that will 
 follow, on other subjects, he presumes to dissent from men of estab 
 lished reputation, or even to doubt of the justice with which the 
 public laurel crown, as symbolical of the first class of genius and 
 intellect, has been awarded to sundry writers since the Revolution, 
 and permitted to wither around the brows of our elder benefactors, 
 from Hooker to Sir Philip Sidney, and from Sir Philip Sidney to Jer 
 emy Taylor and Stillingfleet. 
 
 First, then, as to the consistency of the subject of the following 
 essay with the proposed plan of my work, let something be allowed 
 to honest personal motives, a justifiable solicitude to stand well with 
 my contemporaries in those points, in which I have remained unre- 
 proached by my own conscience. Des aliquid famce. A reason of 
 far greater importance is derived from the well-grounded complaint 
 of sober minds, concerning the mode by which political opinions of 
 greatest hazard have been, of late years, so often propagated. This 
 evil can not be described in more just and lively language than in the 
 words of Paley, which, though by him applied to infidelity, hold 
 equally true of the turbulent errors of political heresy. They are 
 " served up in every shape that is likely to allure, surprise, or beguile 
 the imagination ; in a fable, a tale, a novel, a poem ; in interspersed 
 and broken hints ; remote and oblique surmises ; in books of travels, 
 of philosophy, of natural history ; in a word, in any form, rather than 
 the right one, that of a professed and regular disquisition."* Now, 
 in claiming for The Friend a fair chance of unsuspected admission 
 into the families of Christian believers and quiet subjects, I can not 
 but deem it incumbent on me to accompany my introduction with a 
 * Moral and Polit, Philosophy, B. V. c. 9. Ed. 
 
APPENDIX C. 535 
 
 fall and fair statement of my own political system ; not that any 
 considerable portion of my essays will be devoted to politics in any 
 shape, for rarely shall I recur to them, except as far as they may 
 happen to be involved in some point of private morality ; but that 
 the encouragers of this work may possess grounds of assurance, that 
 no tenets of a different tendency from these I am preparing to state, 
 will be met in it. I would fain hope, that even those persons to 
 whose political opinions I may run counter, will not be displeased at 
 seeing the possible objections to their creed calmly set forth by one 
 who, equally with themselves, considers the love of true liberty as a 
 part both of religion and morality, as a necessary condition of their 
 general predominance, and ministering to the same blessed purposes. 
 The development of my persuasions, relatively to religion in its great 
 essentials, will occupy a following number, in which, and throughout 
 these essays, my aim will be, seldom, indeed, to enter the temple of 
 revelation (much less of positive institution), but to lead my readers 
 to its threshold, and to remove the prejudices with which the august 
 edifice may have been contemplated from ill chosen and unfriendly 
 points of view. 
 
 But, independently of this motive, I deem the subject of politics, so 
 treated as I intend to treat it, strictly congruous with my general plan. 
 For it was and is my prime object to refer men in all their actions, 
 opinions, and even enjoyments, to an appropriate rule, and to aid 
 them with all the means I possess, by the knowledge of the facts on 
 which such rule grounds itself. The rules of political prudence do, 
 indeed, depend on local and temporary circumstances in a much greater 
 degree than those of morality, or even those of taste. Still, however, 
 the circumstances being known, the deductions obey the same law, 
 and must be referred to the same arbiter. In a late summary repe- 
 rusal of our more celebrated periodical essays, by the contemporaries 
 of Addison and those of Johnson, it appeared to me that the objects 
 of the writers were, either to lead the reader from gross enjoyments 
 and boisterous amusements, by gradually familiarizing them with more 
 quiet and refined pleasures ; or to make the habits of domestic life 
 and public demeanor more consistent with decorum and good sense, 
 by laughing away the lesser follies and freaks of self-vexation, or to 
 arm the yet virtuous mind with horror of the direr crimes and vices, 
 by exemplifying their origin, progress, and results, in affecting tales 
 and true or fictitious biography ; or where, as in the Rambler, it is 
 intended to strike a yet deeper note, to support the cause 6f religion 
 and morality by eloquent declamation and dogmatic precept, such as 
 may with propriety be addressed to those, who require to be awaken 
 ed rather than convinced, whose conduct is incongruous with their 
 own sober convictions ; in short, to practical not speculative heretics. 
 Revered forever be the names of these great and good men ! Im- 
 
536 APPENDIX C. 
 
 mortal be their fame ; and may love, and honor, and docility of heart 
 in their readers constitute its essentials ! iSTot without cruel injustice 
 should I be accused or suspected of a wish to underrate their merits, 
 because, in journeying toward the same end, I have chosen a dhTerent 
 road. Is ot wantonly, however, have I ventured even on this varia 
 tion. I have decided on it in consequence of all the observations 
 which I have made on my fellow-creatures, since I have been able to 
 observe in calmness the present age, and to compare its phenomena 
 with the best indications we possess of the character of the ages be 
 fore us. 
 
 My time since earliest manhood has been pretty equally divided be 
 tween deep retirement, with little other society than that of one fam 
 ily, and my library, and the occupations and intercourse of [compara 
 tively at least] public life both abroad and in the British metropolis. 
 But in fact the deepest retirement, in which a well-educated English 
 man of active feelings, and no misanthrope, can live at present, sup 
 poses few of the disadvantages and negations, which a similar place 
 of residence would have involved a century past. Independently of 
 the essential knowledge to be derived from books, children, house 
 mates, and neighbors, however few and humble, newspapers, their 
 advertisements, speeches in parliament, law courts, and public meet 
 ings, reviews, magazines, obituaries, and [as affording occasional 
 commentaries on all these] the diffusion of uniform opinions, beha 
 vior, and appearance, of fashions in things external and internal, 
 have combined to diminish, and often to render eyanescent, the dis 
 tinctions between the enlightened inhabitants of the great city, and 
 the scattered hamlet. From all the facts, however, that have occur 
 red as subjects of reflection within the sphere of my experience, be 
 they few or numerous, I have fully persuaded my own mind, that for 
 merly men were worse than their principles, but that at present the 
 principles are worse than the men. For the former half of the 
 proposition I might, among a thousand other more serious and Un 
 pleasant proofs, appeal even to the Spectators and Tatlers. It would 
 not be easy, perhaps, to detect in them any great corruption or de 
 basement of the main foundations of truth and goodness ; yet a man 
 I will not say of delicate mind and pure morals, but of common 
 good manners, who means to read an essay, which he has opened upon 
 at hazard in these volumes to a mixed company, will find it necessary 
 to take a previous survey of its contents. If stronger illustration be 
 required, I would refer to one of Shadwell s comedies, in connection 
 with its dedication to the Duchess of Newcastle, encouraged as he 
 says, by the high delight Avith which her Grace had listened to the 
 author s private recitation of the manuscript in her closet. A writer 
 of the present day, who should dare address such a composition to a 
 virtuous matron of high rank, would secure general infamy, and run 
 
APPENDIX C. 537 
 
 no small risk of Bridewell or the pillory. "Why need I add the plays 
 and poems of Dryden, contrasted with his serious prefaces and decla 
 rations of his own religious and moral opinions ? Why the little suc 
 cess, except among the heroes and heroines of fashionable life, of the 
 two or three living writers of prurient love-odes [if I may be forgiven 
 for thus profaning the word love] an<J novels, at once terrific and 
 libidinous ? These gentlemen erred both in place and time, and have 
 understood the temper of their age and country as ill as the precepts 
 of that Bible, which, notwithstanding the atrocious blasphemy of one 
 of them, the great majority of their countrymen peruse with safety to 
 their morals, if not improvement. 
 
 The truth of the latter half of the proposition in its favorable part 
 is evidenced by the general anxiety on the subject of education, the 
 solicitous attention paid to several late works on its general princi 
 ples, and the unexpected sale of the very numerous large and small 
 volumes, published for the use of parents and instructors, and for 
 the children given or intrusted to their charge. The first ten or twelve 
 leaves of our old almanac books, and the copper-plates of old ladies 
 magazines, and similar publications, will afford, in the fashions and 
 head-dresses of our grandmothers, contrasted with the present simple 
 ornaments of women in general, a less important, but not less striking 
 elucidation of my meaning. The wide diffusion of moral information, 
 in no slight degree owing to the volumes of our popular essayists, 
 has undoubtedly been on the whole beneficent. But above all, the 
 recent events [say, rather, tremendous explosions], the thunder and 
 earthquakes, and deluge of the political world, have forced habits of 
 great thoughtfulness on the minds of men ; particularly in our own 
 island, where the instruction has been acquired without the stupefy 
 ing influences of terror or actual calamity. We have been compelled 
 to acknowledge [what our fathers would have perhaps called it Avant 
 of liberality to assert], the close connection between private libertin 
 ism and national subversion. To those familiar with the state and 
 morals, and the ordinary subjects of after-dinner conversation, at 
 least among the young men in Oxford and Cambridge, only twenty 
 or twenty-five years back, I might with pleasure point out, in sup 
 port of my thesis, the present state of our two universities, which 
 has rather superseded, than been produced by any additional vigi 
 lance or austerity of discipline. 
 
 The unwelcome remainder of the proposition, the " feet of iron and 
 clay," the unsteadiness, or falsehood, or abasement of the principles, 
 which are taught and received by the existing generation, it is the 
 chief purpose and general business of The Friend to examine, to evince, 
 and [as far as my own forces extend, increased by the contingents 
 which, I flatter myself, will be occasionally furnished by abler patrons 
 of the same cause] to remedy or alleviate. That my efforts will effect 
 
 z* 
 
538 APPENDIX D. 
 
 little, I am fully conscious ; but by no means admit, that little is to 
 be effected. The squire of low degree may announce the approach 
 of puissant knight, yea, the giant may even condescend to lift up the 
 feeble dwarf, and permit it to blow the horn of defiance on his shoul 
 ders. 
 
 Principles, therefore, their subordination, their connection, and 
 their application, in all the divisions of our duties and of our pleas 
 ures this is my chapter of contents. May I not hope for a candid 
 interpretation of my motive, if I again recur to the possible apprehen 
 sion on the part of my readers, that The Friend, 
 
 O erlaid with black, staid wisdom s hue, 
 
 with eye fixed in abstruse research, and brow of perpetual wrinkle, is 
 to frown away the light-hearted graces, and unreproved pleasures; or 
 invite his guests to a dinner of herbs in a hermit s cell; if I affirm, that 
 inyplan does not in itself exclude either impassioned style or interest 
 ing narrative, tale, or allegory, or anecdote; and that the defect will 
 originate in my abilities, not in my wishes or efforts, if I fail to bring 
 forward, 
 
 Due at my hour prepared 
 For dinner savory fruits, of taste to please 
 True appetite 
 e In order, so contrived as not to mix 
 
 Tastes, not well joined, inelegant, hut bring 
 Taste after taste upheld with kindliest change.* 
 
 FO. v. 
 
 THE comparison of the English with the Anglo-American news 
 papers will best evince the difference between a lawless press [law 
 less, at least, in practice and by connivance], and a press at once pro 
 tected and restrained by law. 
 
 IBID. 
 
 Chrysippus, in one of his Stoical Aphorisms, presented by Cicero, t 
 says : Nature has given to the hog a soul instead of salt, in order to 
 keep it from putrefying. This holds equally true of man considered 
 as an animal. Modern physiologists have substituted the words vital 
 power [vis mtai\ for that of soul, and not without good reason : for, 
 from the effect we may fairly deduce the inherence of a power pro- 
 
 * Par. Lost, V. 303, 333. Ed. t De Natura, Deorum, TT. s. 64. Ed. 
 
APPENDIX D. 539 
 
 ducing it, but are not entitled to hypostasise this power, that is, to 
 affirm it to be an individual substance, any more than the steam in 
 the steam-engine, the power of gravitation in the watch, or the mag 
 netic influence in the lodestone. If the machine consist of parts mu 
 tually dependent, as in the time-piece or the hog, we can not dispart 
 without destroying it: if otherwise, as in a mass of lodestone and in 
 the polypus, the power is equally divisible with the substance. The 
 most approved definition of a living substance is, that its vitality con 
 sists in the susceptibility of being acted upon by external stimulants, 
 joined to the necessity of reaction, and in the due balance of this ac 
 tion and reaction, the healthy state of life consists. We must, how 
 ever, further add the power of acquiring habits, and facilities by repe 
 tition. This being the generical idea of life, is common to all living 
 beings: but taken exclusively, it designates the lowest class, plants 
 and plant-animals. An addition to the mechanism gives locomotion. 
 A still costlier and more complex apparatus diversely organizes the 
 impressions received from the external powers, that fall promiscu 
 ously on the whole surface. The light shines on the whole face, but 
 it receives form and relation only in the eyes ; in them it is organ 
 ized. To these organs of sense we suppose, by analogy from our own 
 experience, sensation attached, and these sensuous impressions acting 
 on other parts of the machine framed for other stimulants included in 
 the machine itself, namely, the organs of appetite ; and these again 
 working on the instruments of locomotion, and on those by which 
 the external substances corresponding to the sensuous impressions can 
 be acted upon [the mouth, teeth, talons, and the like], constitute our 
 whole idea of the perfect animal. More than this Des Cartes denied 
 to all other animals but man, and to man himself as an animal : for 
 that this truly great man considered animals insensible, or rather in 
 sensitive, machines, though commonly asserted, and that in books of 
 highest authority, is an error, and the charge was repelled with dis 
 dain by himself, in a letter to Dr. Henry More, which, if T mistake 
 not, is annexed to the small edition of More s Ethics. 
 
 The strict analogy, however, between certain actions of sundry ani 
 mals and those of mankind, forces upon us the belief that they possess 
 some share of a higher faculty ; which, however closely united with 
 life in one person, can yet never be educed out of the mere idea of 
 vital power. Indeed, if we allow any force to the universal opinion, 
 and almost instinct, concerning the difference between plants and ani 
 mals, we must hold even sensation as a fresh power added to his vis 
 rita?, unless we would make an end of philosophy, by comprising all 
 things in each thing, and thus denying that any one power of the uni 
 verse can be affirmed to be itself and not another. However this may 
 be, the understanding or regulative faculty is manifestly distinct from 
 life and sensation ; its junction being to take up the passive affections 
 
540 APPENDIX E. 
 
 into distinct thought of the sense, according to its own essential 
 forms.* These forms, however, as they are first awakened by im 
 pressions from the senseSj so have they no substance or meaning un 
 less in their application to objects of the senses : and if we Avould re 
 move from them, by careful abstraction, all the influences and inter 
 mixtures of a yet far higher faculty [self-consciousness, for instance], 
 it would be difficult, if at all possible, to distinguish its functions from 
 those of instinct, of which it would be no inapt definition, that it is a 
 more or less limited understanding without self-consciousness, or 
 spontaneous origination. Besides this, the understanding with all its 
 axioms of sense, its anticipations of apperception, and its analogies of 
 experience, has no appropriate object, but the material world in rela~ 
 tion to our worldly interests. The far-sighted prudence of man, and 
 the more narrow, but at the same time far more certain and effectual, 
 cunning of the fox, are both no other than a nobler substitute for salt, 
 in order that the hog may not putrefy before its destined hour. 
 
 E. 
 
 NO. XII. 
 
 He who taketh the side of justice maketh the land prosperous: he who withdraweth 
 from the same is an accomplice in its destruction. 
 
 RABBI Assi was sick, lay on his bed surrounded by his disciples, and 
 prepared himself for death. His nephew came unto him, and found 
 him weeping. " Wherefore weepest thou, Rabbi ?" he asked. " Must 
 not every look which thou castest back on thy past life, bring a 
 thought of joy to thee? Hast thou not then sufficiently studied, not 
 sufficiently taught the sacred law ? Lo ! thy disciples here are proofs 
 of the contrary. Hast thou then been backward in practising the 
 works of righteousness ? Every man is satisfied that thou hast not. 
 And thy humility was the crown of all thy virtues ! Never wouldst 
 thou suffer thyself to be elected the judge of the district, anxiously 
 as the whole district wished it." " It is even this, my son," answered 
 
 * Aristotle, the first systematic anatomist of the mind, constructed the first numeration 
 table of these innate forms or faculties (not innate ideas or notions) under the names of 
 Categories : which table, though both incomplete and erroneous, remains an unequivocal 
 proof of his penetration and philosophical genius. The best and most orderly arrange 
 ment of the original forms of the understanding, the moulds as it were both of our notions 
 and judgments concerning, the notices of the senses, is that of quantity, quality, relation, 
 and mode, each consisting of three kinds. There is but one possible way of making an 
 enumeration of them interesting or even endurable to the general reader : the history of 
 the origin of certain useful inventions in machinery in the minds of the inventors. 
 
APPENDIX F. 641 
 
 Rabbi Assi, " which now troubles me. I had it in my power to 
 exercise right and justice among the children of men, and out of 
 mistaken humility, I did not avail myself thereof. Whoso withdraw- 
 eth himself from justice is an accomplice in the ruin of the land." 
 
 F. 
 
 NO. XI Y. 
 
 my second term at Cambridge, I had for my own amuse 
 ment commenced a work on the plan of the well-known Miseries of 
 Human Life, at least with the same title ; for by its title only, and 
 the pleasure expressed by all who have spoken to me of it, am I ac 
 quainted with that publication. But at the same time I had meant 
 to add, as an appendix, a catalogue raisonne of the sights, incidents, 
 and employments, that leave us better men than they found us ; or, 
 to use my original phrase, of the things that do a man s heart good. 
 If the seventeen or eighteen years that have elapsed since that period, 
 would enable me greatly to extend and diversify the former list, the 
 latter, as more properly the offspring of experience and reflection, 
 would be augmented in a still larger proportion. Among the addenda 
 to this second catalogue I should rank foremost, a long winter evening 
 devoted, to the re-perusal of the letters of far-distant, or deceased 
 friends. I suppose the person so employed to be one, whose time 
 is seldom at his own disposal, and that he finds himself alone in a 
 quiet house, the other inmates of which are absent on some neigh 
 borly visit. I have been led to this observation by the numerous let 
 ters (many of which had all the pleasure of novelty for me, joined 
 with the more tender charm of awakened recollection) from The 
 Friend, with a slight sketch of whose character I have introduced the 
 present number under the name, which he went by among his friends 
 and familiars, of Satyrane,* the Idoloclast, or breaker of idols. 
 
 A few seasons ago, I made the tour of the northern counties with 
 him and three other companions. His extensive erudition, his en 
 ergetic and all too subtle intellect, the opulence of his imagination, 
 and above all, his inexhaustible store of anecdotes, which always ap 
 peared to us the most interesting when of himself, and his passionate 
 love of mountain imagery, which often gave an eloquence to his 
 looks and made his very silence intelligible, will forever endear the 
 
 * The attentive reader will of courso see that Sutyrane is the author himself, und that 
 this extract contains one of the many sketches of his own character, scattered through 
 out his writings. 
 
542 APPENDIX F. 
 
 remembrance of that tour to the survivors. Various were our dis 
 cussions, most often with him, but sometimes [when we had split our 
 party for a few hours] concerning him and his opinions ; not a few 
 of which appeared, to some of us at least, sufficiently paradoxical, 
 though there was nothing which lie bore with less patience than the 
 hearing them thus characterized. Many and various were our topics, 
 often suggested by the objects and occurrences of the moment, and 
 often occasioned by the absence of other interest. O Satyrane ! who. 
 would not have lost the sense of time and fatigue in thy company ? 
 How often, after a walk of fifteen or twenty miles, on rough roads 
 and through a dreary or uninteresting country, have we seen our pro 
 posed resting-place with a sort of pleasant surprise, all joining in the 
 same question " Who would have thought we had walked so far ?" 
 And then, perhaps, we examined our watches, as if half in doubt, or 
 perhaps to contrast the length of time which had thus slipped away 
 from us, with our own little sense of its lapse. These discussions, 
 and the marked difference of our several characters (though we wereX 
 all old acquaintances, and, with one exception, all of us fellow-Can- 
 tabs), suggested to us the plan of a joint work, to be entitled, " Travel 
 ling Conversations." Since that time I have often renewed this 
 scheme in my mind, and pleased myself with the thought of realizing ^ 
 it. Independently of the delightful recollections, the lively portrai 
 ture and inward music, which would enliven my own fancy during 
 the composition, it appeared to me to possess the merit of harmoniz 
 ing an indefinite variety of matter by that unity of interest, which 
 would arise from the characters remaining the same throughout, while 
 the tour itself would supply the means of introducing the most differ 
 ent topics by the most natural connections. We had agreed to call 
 each other by the names of our walking-sticks, each of whielj hap 
 pened to be of a different wood ; Satyrane, however, excepted, who 
 was well pleased to be called among us by his old college name, and 
 not displeased with his learned agnomen, when we used with mock 
 solemnity to entreat a short reprieve for our prejudices from him, 
 under the lofty title of " Puissant and most redoubtable Idoloclastes." 
 I flatter myself that the readers of The Friend will consent to travel 
 over the same road with the same fellow-tourist. High, indeed, will 
 be my gratification, if they should hereafter think of the walk and 
 talk with The Friend s Satyrane, Holly, Larch, Hickory and Sycamore, 
 with a small portion of the delight with which they have accompanied 
 the Spectator to his club, and made acquaintance with Will Honey 
 comb, and the inimitable Sir Roger deACoverley. From any imita- 
 lion, indeed, I am precluded by the nature and object of my work ; 
 and for many reasons, the persons whom I introduce, must be dis 
 tinguished by their sentiments, their different kinds of information, 
 and their different views of life and society, rather than by ,any promi- 
 
APPENDIX F. 543 
 
 nent individuality of humor in their personal characters. What they 
 were to myself they will be to my reader ; glasses of different colors 
 and various degrees of power, through which truth and error, happi 
 ness and misery, may be contemplated. * 
 
 From his earliest youth, Satyrane had derived his highest pleasures 
 from the admiration of moral grandeur and intellectual energy ; and, 
 during the whole of his short life, he had a greater and more heart 
 felt delight in the superiority of other men to himself, than men in 
 general derive from the belief of their own. His readiness to imagine 
 a superiority where it did not exist, was, indeed, for many years, his 
 predominant weakness. His pain from the perception of inferiority 
 in others, whom he had heard spoken of with any respect, was un 
 feigned and involuntary, and perplexed him, as a something which 
 he did not comprehend. In the child-like simplicity of his nature, he 
 talked to all men as if they were, at least, his equals in knowledge 
 and talents ; and his familiars record many a whimsical anecdote, and 
 many a ludicrous incident, connected with this habit of his of scatter 
 ing the good seed on unreceiving soils. When he was at length com 
 pelled to see and acknowledge the true state of the morals and intel 
 lect of his contemporaries, his disappointment was severe, and his 
 minji, always thoughtful, became pensive and almost gloomy : for to 
 love and sympathize with mankind was a necessity of his nature. 
 Hence, as if he sought a refuge from his own sensibility, he attached 
 himself to the most abstruse researches, and seemed to derive his 
 "purest delight from subjects that exercised the strength and subtlety 
 of his understanding, without awakening the feelings of his heart. 
 When I first knew him, and for many years after, this was all other 
 wise. The sun never shone on a more joyous being. The Letters of 
 earliest date, which I possess of his, were written to a common friend, 
 and contain the accounts of his first travels. That I may introduce 
 him to my readers in his native and original character, I now placo 
 before them his first letter, written on his arrival at Hamburgh.* I 
 have only to premise, that Satyrane was incapable of ridiculing a 
 foreigner merely for speaking English imperfectly ; but the extrava 
 gant vanity that could prompt a manj so speaking and pronouncing, 
 to pride^ himself on his excellence as a linguist, is as honest a subject 
 of light satire, as an old coquette, or as a beau of threescore and ten, 
 exposing the infirmities of old age in a reel on his wedding-day. 
 
 * The Letter here alluded -to was published in the author s " Literary Life." 
 
544 APPENDIX G. 
 
 G. 
 
 ~ PEELIMINAET TO NO. XXI. 
 
 Ante quod est in me^ postque 
 
 ****** 
 
 Omnis habct gcminas, hinc atque At nc, janua f routes^ 
 
 E quibus hose poptdum special ; at ilia larem. 
 Utque scdens vester primi prope limina tecti 
 
 Janitor egressus introitusque videt ; 
 Sic ego OVID.* 
 
 j> I HAVE always looked forward to the present number of The 
 Friend as its first proper starting post; for the twenty numbers pre 
 ceding I regarded as a preparatory heat, in order to determine 
 whether or no I should be admitted, as a candidate, on that longer 
 course, on which alone the speed and strength of the racer can be 
 fairly proved. 
 
 * * * # * * 
 
 I was not so ignorant of mankind as to expect that my essays 
 would be found interesting in the hurry and struggle of active life. 
 All the passions w T hich are there at work it was my object to pre- 
 elude : and I distinctly foresaw, that by rejecting all appeals to per 
 sonal passions, and party spirit, and all interest grounded wholly on 
 the cravings of curiosity, and the love of novelty for its own sake, I 
 at the same time precluded three fourths of the ordinary readers of 
 periodical publications, whether reviews, magazines, or newspapers. 
 I might, however, find dispersedly what I could . not hope to meet 
 with collectively. I thought it not improbable, that there might be 
 individuals, scattered throughout the kingdom, to whom the very 
 absence of such stimulants would prove a recommendation to the 
 work ; and that, when the existence of such a work was generally 
 known, a sufficient number of persons, able and willing to patronize 
 it, might gradually be collected. 
 
 * ***** 
 
 I ought to have made it a condition, that a notice of six weeks 
 should be given of the intention to discontinue the work ; but this 
 I neglected from unwise delicacy, an habitual turning away from all 
 thoughts relating to money, and, from a self-flattering persuasion that 
 those, who, after the perusal of my Prospectus, had determined on 
 giving the work a trial, would be sensible of the difficulties it had to 
 struggle with, and whether satisfied or not with its style of execu 
 tion, yet for the earnest wish of The Friend, not only to please them, 
 
 * Fast. I. 114, 135, &c.-Ed. 
 
 t The following passages are extracted from an address by Mr. Coleridge to his sub 
 scribers, and to the readers of The Friend in general. Ed. 
 
APPENDIX G. 545 
 
 but to please them in such a way as might leave them permanently 
 better pleased Avith themselves, would be disposed rather to lessen 
 than increase them. 
 
 ****** 
 Among other things of the kind, a person, signing himself " Oar- 
 lyol," has addressed a threatening and abusive letter to me from 
 Dover. I shall not tell him that such an act was ungentlemanly, un 
 manly, and unchristian, for this would be to him the same " learned 
 mmsenee and unintelligible j&rgin" for which he abuses me ; but some 
 other points I may venture to press on his attention. First, that it 
 was a lack of common honesty in hn to write a letter with a ficti 
 tious signature, and not pay the . postage : secondly, that it was in 
 judicious to address the letter to me, as the editor of the Courier is 
 alone responsible for the appearance of the passages which have 
 offended him, and the other admirers of Bonaparte in that paper : 
 thirdly, that there is one branch of learning without which learning 
 itself can not be railed at with common decency, namely, spelling : 
 and lastly, that unintelligibility is a very equivocal charge. It cer 
 tainly may arise from the author, especially if he should chance to 
 be deficient in that branch of erudition last mentioned ; but it may 
 likewise, and often does, arise from the reader, and this from more 
 than one cause. He may have an idiotic understanding, and what is 
 far more common, as well as incomparably more lamentable, he may 
 have an idiotic heart. To this last cause must we attribute the com 
 mission of such crimes as provoke the vengeance of the law, by men 
 who can not but have heard from the pulpit truths and warnings, 
 which, though evident to their understandings, were, unhappily for 
 them, religious nonsense and unintelligible jargon to their bad hearts. 
 And I feel it my duty to press on my correspondent s reflection the 
 undoubted fact, that a man may be quite fool enough to be a rogue, 
 and yet not appear foei enough to save him from the legal conse 
 quences of his roguery. 
 
 IBID. 
 
 During the composition of this last paragraph,* I have been aware 
 that I shall appear to have been talking arrogantly, and with an un 
 warrantable assumption of superiority; but a moment s reflection 
 will enable my reader to acquit me of this charge, as far as it is, or 
 ought to be a charge. He will recollect that I have been giving the 
 history of my own mind ; and that, if it had been my duty to believe, 
 that the main obstacle to the success of my undertaking existed not 
 in the minds of others, but in my own insufficiency and inferiority, I 
 ought not to have undertaken it at all. To a sincere and sensible 
 * On thought and attention contained in Essay 2, p. 27. Ed. 
 
546 APPENDIX G. 
 
 mind it can not but be disgusting, to find an author writing on sub 
 jects, to the investigation of which he professes to have devoted the 
 greater portion of his life, and yet appealing to all his readers promis 
 cuously, as his full and competent judges, and thus soliciting their 
 favor by a mock modesty, which either convicts him of gross hypoc 
 risy, or the most absurd presumption. For what can be conceived 
 at once more absurd and psesumptuous, than for a man to write and 
 publish books for the instruction of those who are wiser than him 
 self, more learned, and more judicious? Humility, like all other vir 
 tues, must exist in harmony with truth. My heart bears me witness 
 that I would gladly give up all the pleasures which T can ever derive 
 from literary reputation, could I receive instead of them a deep con 
 viction, that The Friend has failed in pleasing no one, whose own 
 superiority had not rendered the essays tiresome, because superfluous. 
 And why should that be deemed a mark of self-sufficiency in an 
 author, which would be thought only common sense in a musician or 
 a painter, namely, the supposition that he understands and can prac 
 tise those arts, to which he has devoted his best faculties- during life, 
 in consequence of a particular predilection for them, better than the 
 mass of mankind, who have given their time and thoughts to other 
 pursuits ? There is one species of presumption among authors which 
 is truly hateful, and which betrays itself, when writers, who, in their 
 prefaces, have prostrated themselves before the superiority of their 
 readers as supreme judges, will yet, in their works, pass judgments on 
 Plato, Milton, Shakspeare, Spenser, and their compeers, in blank as 
 sertions and a peremptory ipse-dixi, and with a grossness of censure, 
 which a sensible schoolmaster would not apply to the exercises of 
 the youths in his upper forms. I need no outward remembrances of 
 my own inferiority, but I possess them on almost every shelf of my 
 library ; and the very book which I am now using as my writing- 
 desk (Lord Bacon s Novum Organum) inspire^ an awe and heartfelt 
 humility, which I would not exchange for all the delight which 
 Bonaparte can enjoy at, the moment that his crowned courtiers hail 
 him emperor of emperors, and lord paramount of the "West. 
 
 As the week, which is to decide on the continuance of The Friend, 
 coincides with the commencement of the new year, the present ad 
 dress has not inappropriately taken its character from the two-faced 
 god to whom the first month is indebted for its name ; it being in 
 part retrospective, and in part prospective. Among the various 
 reasons which Ovid, in the passage from which I have taken my 
 motto, has made Janus himself assign for his bifront appearance, he 
 has omitted the most obvious intention of the emblem, that of in 
 structing his worshipers to commence the new year with a religious, 
 as well as prudential, review of their own conduct, and its conse 
 quences during the past year ; and thus to look onward to the year 
 
APPENDIX G. 547 
 
 before them with wiser plans, and with strengthened or amended 
 resolutions. I will apply this to my own conduct as far as it con 
 cerns the present publication; and having already sufficiently in 
 formed the reader of the general plan which I had proposed to my 
 self, I will now, with the same simplicity, communicate my own 
 calm judgment on the manner in which that plan has been- so far 
 realized and the outline filled up. My first number bears marks of 
 the effort and anxiety with which it was written, and is composed 
 less happily than I could wish. It assuredly had not the cheerful 
 winning aspect, which a door-keeper, presenting the bill of fare, 
 ought to possess. Its object, however, was so far answered, as it 
 announced distinctly the fundamental position or grand postulate on 
 which the whole superstructure, with all its supporting beams and 
 pillars, was to rest. I call it a postulate, not only because I deferred 
 the proofs, but because, in strictness, it was not susceptible of any 
 proof from without. The sole possible question was Is it, or is it 
 not, a fact ? and for the answer every human being must be referred, 
 to his own consciousness. 
 
 * . * * * * * 
 
 If man be a free agent, his good and evil must not be judged ac 
 cording to the nature of his outward actions, or tlie mere legality of 
 his conduct, but by the final motive and intention of the mind. Now 
 the final motive of an intelligent will is a principle : and consequently 
 to refer the opinions of men to principles (that is to absolute and 
 necessary, instead of secondary and contingent, grounds) is the best 
 and only secure way of referring the feelings of men to their proper 
 objects. In the union of both consists the perfection of the human 
 character. 
 
 The same subject was illustrated in my second essay, and reasons 
 assigned from the peculiar circumstances of the age, and the present 
 state of the minds of men, for giving this particular direction to their 
 serious studies, instead of the more easy and attractive mode of in 
 struction adapted by my illustrious predecessors in periodical litera 
 ture. At the same time, being conscious how many authorities of 
 recent, but for that reason more influential reputation I must of ne 
 cessity contravene in the support and application of my principles, 
 both in criticism and philosophy, I thought it requisite to state the 
 true nature of presumption and arrogance, and thus, if it were possi 
 ble, preclude the charge in cases where I had not committed the 
 offence. The object of the next four numbers was to demonstrate the 
 innoxiousness of truth, if only the conditions were preserved which 
 the reason and conscience dictated ; to show at large what those con 
 ditions were which ought to regulate the conduct of the individual in 
 the communication of truth ; and by what principles the civil law 
 ought to be governed in the punishment of libels. Throughout the 
 
548 APPENDIX G. 
 
 whole of these numbers, and more especially in the latter two, I 
 again, and again recalled the attention of the reader to the paramount 
 importance of principles, alike for their moral and their intellectual, 
 for their private and national, consequences ; the importance, I say, 
 of principles of reason, as distinct from, and paramount to, the max 
 ims of prudence, even for prudence sake. Some of my readers will 
 probably have seen this subject supported by other and additional ar 
 guments in my seventh letter, On the grounds of hope for a people 
 warring against Armies, published during the last month, in the 
 Courier. 
 
 In the mean time I was aware, that in thus grounding my opinions 
 in literature, morals and religion, I should frequently use the same or 
 similar language, as had been applied by Rousseau, the French physio- 
 cratic philosophers, and their followers in England, to the nature and 
 rightful origin of civil government. The remainder of my work, 
 therefore, hitherto has been devoted to the purpose of averting this 
 mistake, as far as I have not been compelled by the general taste of 
 my readers to interrupt tne systematic progress of the plan by essays 
 of a lighter kind, or which at least required a less effort of attention. 
 In truth, since my twelfth number, I have not had courage to renew 
 any subject which did require attention. The way to be admired is 
 to tell the reader what he knew before, but clothed in a statelier 
 phraseology, and embodied in apt and lively illustrations. To attempt 
 to make a man wiser is of necessity to remind him of his ignorance, 
 and in the majority of instances, the pain actually felt is so much 
 greater than the pleasure anticipated, that it is natural that men 
 should attempt to shelter themselves from it by contempt or neglect. 
 For a living writer is yet sub judice : anil if we can not follow his 
 conceptions or enter into his feelings, it is more consoling to our 
 pride, as well as more agreeable to our indolence, to consider him as 
 lost beneath, than as soaring out of our sight above us. Itaque ad 
 agitur, ut ignorantia etiam cib ignominia liberetur. Happy is that 
 man, who can truly say, with Giordano Bruno, and whose circum 
 stances at the same time permit him to act on the sublime feeling; 
 
 Procedat nudus^ qucm non ornant nubile.) 
 Sol : non conveniunt quadrupedum phalerm 
 Humano dorso. Porro vcri species 
 Qucesita, inventa, ct patefacta, me rfferat, 
 
 Etsi nullus intelligat) 
 Si cum natura sap>o ct sub numine, 
 
 Id vere plusquam satis est. 
 
 Should the number of subscribers remaining on my list be sufficient 
 barely to pay the expenses of the publication, I shall assuredly pro 
 ceed in the present form, at least till I have concluded all the subjects 
 which have been left imperfect in the preceding essays. And this, as 
 far as I car* at present calculate, will extend the present volume to 
 
APPENDIX G. 549 
 
 the twenty-eighth or perhaps thirtieth number. The first place will 
 be given to Fragments and sketches of the life of the late Admiral 
 Sir Alexander Ball. I shall next finish the important subject left in 
 complete at the ninth number, and demonstrate that despotism and 
 barbarism are the natural result of a national attempt to realize anti- 
 feudalism, or the system of philosophical jacobinism. This position 
 will be illustrated and exemplified at each step by the present state 
 of France ; and the essay will conclude with a detailed analysis of the 
 character of Bonaparte, promised by the author so many years ago in 
 the Morning Post, as a companion to the character of Mr. Pitt, which 
 I have been requested by men of the highest reputation in the philo 
 sophical and literary world, to republish in a more permanent form. 
 In the third place, I shall conduct the subject of taxation to a conclu 
 sion, my essay on which has been grossly misunderstood. These 
 misconceptions and misrepresentations I shall use rny best efforts to 
 remove ; and then develop the influences of taxation and a national 
 debt, on the foreign trade of Great Britain: and lastly [the only 
 mournful part of. the tale], on the principles and intellectual habits of 
 the country. And the volume, whether it be destined to stand alone 
 or as the first of a series, will conclude with a philosophical examina 
 tion of the British constitution in all its branches, separately and col 
 lectively. To the next, or twenty-first number, I shall annex a note 
 of explanation requested by many intelligent readers, concerning my 
 use of the words reason 1 and understanding, as far as is requisite 
 for the full comprehension of the political essays from the seventh to 
 the eleventh numbers. But as I am not likely to receive back my list 
 of subscribers from London within less than ten days, and must till 
 then remain ignorant of the names of those who may have given 
 orders for the discontinuance of The Friend, I am obliged to suspend 
 the publication for one week. I can not conclude this address with 
 out expressions of gratitude to those who have written me letters of 
 encouragement and respect ; but at the same time entreat, that in 
 their friendly efforts to serve the work by procuring new names for 
 it, they will apply to such only as, they have cause to believe, will bo 
 actually pleased with a work of this kind. Such only can be of real 
 advantage to The Friend : and even if it were otherwise, he ought not 
 "to wish it. An author s success should always depend on feelings in 
 spired exclusively by his writings, and on the sense of their having 
 been useful to the person who recommends them. On this supposi 
 tion, and on this only, such recommendation becomes a duty. 
 
550 APPENDIX H. 
 
 IBID. 
 
 NO. XXI. 
 
 As to myself, and my own present attempt to record the life and 
 character of the late Admiral Sir Alexander Ball, I have already 
 stated that I consider myself as debarred from all circumstances, not 
 appertaining to his conduct or character as a public functionary that 
 involve the names of the living for good or for evil. Whatever facts 
 and incidents I relate of a private nature, must for the most part con 
 cern Sir Alexander Ball exclusively, und as an insulated individual. 
 But I needed not this restraint. It will be enough for me, still as I 
 write, to recollect the form and character of Sir Alexander Ball him 
 self, to represent to my own feelings the inward contempt, with which 
 he would have abstracted his mind from worthless anecdotes and 
 petty personalities ; a contempt rising into indignation, if ever an 
 illustrious name were used as the thread to string them upon. If 
 this recollection be my Socratic demon to warn and to check me, I 
 shall on the other hand derive encouragement from the remembrance 
 of the tender patience, the sweet gentleness, with which he was wont 
 to tolerate the tediousness of well-meaning men ; and the inexhausti 
 ble attention, the unfeigned interest, with which he would listen for 
 hours, where the conversation appealed to reason, and like the bee 
 made honey while it murmured. 
 
 H. 
 
 NO. XXII. 
 
 To the doctrine of retribution after death the philosopher made 
 the following objection. u When the soul is disunited from the body, 
 to which will belong the guilt of the offences committed during life ? 
 Certainly not to the body ; for this, when the soul takes its departure, 
 lies like a clod of earth, and without the soul would never have been 
 capable of offending : and as little would the soul have defiled itself 
 with sin but for its union with the flesh. Which of the two then is 
 the proper object of the divine justice?" " God s wisdom only," an 
 swered the Eabbi, " fully comprehends the way of his justice. Yet 
 the mortal may without offence, if with humility, strive to render 
 the same intelligible to himself and his fellows. A householder had 
 in his fruit garden two servants, the one lame and the other blind. 
 Yonder, said the lame man to the blind, on those trees I see most 
 
APPENDIX H. 551 
 
 delicious fruit hang, take me on thy shoulders and we will pluck 
 thereof. This they did, and thus robbed their benefactor who had 
 maintained them, as unprofitable servants, out of his mere goodness 
 and compassion. The master discovered the theft, and called the two 
 ingrates to account. Each threw off the blame from himself, the one 
 urging in his defence his incapability of seeing the fruit, and the other 
 the want of power to get at it. What did the master of the house 
 do ? lie placed the lame man upon the blind, and punished them in 
 the same posture in which they had committed the offence. So will 
 the Judge of the world do with the soul and body of man." 
 
 
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