_Growth of the House of Commons._--The House of Commons was the power of
the purse, and what gave its emphasis to that power? Simply the growing
necessity of standing forces, and the growing increase of war, so that
now out of twenty millions, fifteen are applied to army and navy.
One great evil, as in practice it had begun to show itself, pressed with
equal injustice on the party who suffered from it (viz., the nation),
and the party who seemed to reap its benefit. This was the fact that as
yet no separation had taken place between the royal peculiar revenue,
and that of the nation. The advance of the nation was now (1603, 1st of
James I.) approaching to the point which made the evil oppression, and
yet had not absolutely reached the point at which it could be undeniably
perceived. Much contest and debate divided the stage of incipient evil
from the stage of confessed grievance. In spending £100,000 upon a
single fête, James I. might reasonably allege that he misapplied, at any
rate, his own funds. Wise or not, the act concerned his own private
household. Yet, on the other hand, in the case of money _really_ public,
the confusion of the two expenditures invited and veiled the transfer
of much from national objects that could wait, and were, at any rate,
hidden from effectual scrutiny to the private objects which tempted the
king's profusion. When Mr. Macaulay speaks so often of England sinking
under this or that Stuart to a third-rate power, he is anachronizing.
There was no scale of powers. Want of roads and intercommunication
forbade it. And hence until the Thirty Years' War there was no general
war. Austria, as by fiction the Roman Empire, and always standing
awfully near to North Italy, had a natural relation and gravitation
towards Rome. France, by vainglory and the old literary pretensions of
Anjou, had also a balancing claim upon Italy. Milanese formed indeed (as
Flanders afterwards) the rendezvous for the two powers. Otherwise, only
Austria and Spain (and Spain not till joined to Austria) and France--as
great powers that touched each other in many points--had ever formed a
warlike trio. No quadrille had existed until the great civil war for
life and death between Popery and Protestantism. It was another great
evil that the functions towards which, by inevitable instincts and
tendency of progress, the House of Commons was continually
travelling,--not, I repeat, through any encroaching spirit as the Court
and that House of Commons itself partially fancied,--were not yet
developed: false laws of men, _i.e._, laws framed under theories
misunderstood of rights and constitutional powers, having as much
distorted the true natural play of the organic manifestation and
tendency towards a whole, as ever a dress too tight, or a flower-pot too
narrow, impeded the development of child or plant. Queen Elizabeth,
therefore, always viewed the House of Commons as a disturber of the
public peace, as a mutineer and insurrectionist, when any special
accident threw it upon its natural function; she spoke of State
affairs, and especially of foreign affairs, as beyond their
'_capacity_,' which expression, however, must in charity be interpreted
philosophically as meaning the range of comprehension consistent with
their _total_ means of instruction and preparation, including,
therefore, secret information, knowledge of disposable home resources as
known to the official depositaries of State secrets, etc., and not, as
the modern reader will understand it, simply and exclusively the
intellectual power of appreciation. Since, with all her disposition to
exalt the qualities of princely persons, she could not be so absurdly
haughty as to claim for princes and the counsellors whom interest or
birth had suggested to them a precedency in pure natural endowments.
Charles was a sincere believer but not an earnest believer of the Roman
Catholic faith. James was both sincere and preternaturally earnest.
_The Reformation._--This seems to show two things: 1st, that a deep
searching and 'sagacious-from-afar' spirit of morality can mould itself
under the prompting of Christianity, such as could not have grown up
under Paganism. For it was the abominations in point of morality (_en
fait de moralité?_)--indulgences, the confessional, absolution, the
prevalence of a mere ritual--the usurpation of forms--these it was which
Rome treated violently; and if she draw in her horns for the present,
still upon any occasion offering, upon the cloud of peril passing away,
clearly she would renew her conduct. It was a tendency violently and
inevitably belonging to the Roman polity combined with the Roman
interest, unless, perhaps, as permanently controlled by a
counter-force. 2ndly, the synthesis of this curative force is by
apposition of parts separately hardly conscious of the danger or even of
their own act. For we cannot suppose the vast body of opposition put
forward was so under direct conscious appreciation of the evil and by an
adequate counter-action--doubtless it was by sympathy with others having
better information. These last burned more vividly as the evil was
fiercer. That more vivid sympathy drew increase of supporters.
_Memorandum._--In my historical sketches not to forget the period of
woe, _anterior_ to the Siege of Jerusalem, which Josephus describes as
occurring in all the Grecian cities, but which is so unaccountably
overlooked by historians.
The rule is to speak like the foolish, and think like the wise, and
therefore I agree to call our worthy old mother 'little'--our 'little
island'--as that seems to be the prevailing notion; otherwise I myself
consider Great Britain rather a tall island. A man is not called short
because some few of his countrymen happen to be a trifle taller; and
really I know but of two islands, among tens of thousands counted up by
gazetteers on our planet, that are taller; and I fancy, with such
figures as theirs, they are neither of them likely to think of any
rivalship with our dear old mother. What island, for instance, would
choose to be such a great fat beast as Borneo, as broad as she is long,
with no apology for a waist? Talk of lacing too tight, indeed! I'm sure
Borneo does not injure herself in that way. Now our mother, though she's
old, and has gone through a world of trouble in her time, is as jimp
about the waist as a young lass of seventeen. Look at her on any map of
Europe, and she's quite a picture. It's an old remark that the general
outline of the dear creature exactly resembles a lady sitting. She turns
her back upon the Continent, no doubt, and that's what makes those
foreigneering rascals talk so much of her pride. But she _must_ turn her
back upon somebody, and who is it that should have the benefit of her
countenance, if not those people in the far West that are come of her
own blood? They say she's 'tetyy' also. Well, then, if she is, you let
her alone, good people of the Continent. She'll not meddle with you if
you don't meddle with her. She's kind enough, and, as to her person, I
do maintain that she's quite tall enough, rather thin, it's true, but,
on the whole, a bonny, elegant, dear old fighting mamma.
_Mora Alexandrina._--Note on Middleton's affected sneer. A villa of
Cicero's, where probably the usual sound heard would be the groans of
tormented slaves, had been changed for the cells of Christian monks. Now
mark: what the hound Middleton means is, how shocking to literary
sensibilities that where an elegant master of Latinity had lived, there
should succeed dull, lazy monks, writing (if they wrote at all) in a
barbarous style, and dreaming away their lives in torpor. Now permit me
to pause a little. This is one of those sneers which Paley[38] and
Bishop Butler[39] think so unanswerable, that we must necessarily lie
down and let the sneer ride rough-shod over us all. Let us see, and for
this reason, reader, do not grudge a little delay, especially as you may
'skip' it.
Dr. Conyers ought to have remembered, in the first place, that the villa
could not long remain in the hands of Cicero. Another owner would
succeed, and then the chances would be that the sounds oftenest
ascending in the hour of sunset or in the cool of the dawn would be the
shrieks of slaves under torture. By their own poor miserable fare
contrasted with the splendour reeking around them, these slaves had a
motive, such as our tenderly-treated (often pampered) servants can never
know the strength of, for breaking the seal of any wine cask. From the
anecdote told of his own mother by the wretched Quintus Cicero, the foul
brother of Marcus, it appears that generally there was some
encouragement to do this, on the chance of 'working down' on the master
that the violated seal had been amongst the casks legitimately opened.
For it seems that old Mrs. Cicero's housewifely plan was to seal up all
alike, empty and not empty. Consequently with her no such excuse could
avail. Which proves that often it _did_ avail, since her stratagem is
mentioned as a very notable artifice. What follows? Why, that the slave
was doubly tempted: 1st, by the luxury he witnessed; 2ndly, by the
impunity on which he might calculate. Often he escaped by sheer weight
of metal in lying. Like Chaucer's miller, he swore, when charged with
stealing flour, that it was not so. But this very prospect and
likelihood of escape was often the very snare for tempting to excesses
too flagrant or where secret marks had been fixed. Besides, many other
openings there were, according to the individual circumstances, but this
was a standing one, for tempting the poor unprincipled slave into
trespass that irritated either the master or the mistress. And then came
those periodical lacerations and ascending groans which Seneca mentions
as the best means of telling what o'clock it was in various households,
since the punishments were going on just at that hour.
After, when the gracious revolution of Christianity had taught us, and
by a memento so solemn and imperishable, no longer to pursue our human
wrath, that hour of vesper sanctity had come, which, by the tendency of
the Christian law and according to the degree in which it is observed,
is for us a type and a symbol and a hieroglyphic of wrath extinguished,
of self-conquest, of charity in heaven and on earth.
Now, the monks, it is supposable, might be commonplace drones. Often,
however, they would be far other, transmitters by their copying toils of
those very Ciceronian works which, but for them, would have perished.
And pausing duly here, what sense, what propriety would there be in
calling on the reader to notice with a shock the profanation of
classical ground in such an example as this: 'Mark the strange
revolutions of ages; there, where once the divine Plato's Academus
stood, now rises a huge printing-house chiefly occupied for the last two
years in reprinting Plato's works.' Why, really Plato himself would look
graciously on that revolution, Master Conyers. But next, the dullest of
these monks would hear the Gloria in Excelsis.
Oh, how pitiful it is to hear B---- alleging against Mahomet that he had
done no public miracles. What? Would it, then, alter your opinion of
Mahomet if he _had_ done miracles? What a proof, how full, how perfect!
That Christianity, in spirit, in power, in simplicity, and in truth, had
no more hold over B---- than it had over any Pagan Pontiff in Rome, is
clear to me from that. So, then, the argument against Mahomet is not
that he wants utterly the meekness--wants? wants? No, that he utterly
hates the humility, the love that is stronger than the grave, the purity
that cannot be imagined, the holiness as an ideal for man that cannot be
approached, the peace that passeth all understanding, that power which
out of a little cloud no bigger than a man's hand grows for ever and
ever until it will absorb the world and all that it inherit, that first
of all created the terror of death and the wormy grave; but that first
and last she might triumph over time--not these, it seems by B----, are
the arguments against Mahomet, but that he did not play legerdemain
tricks, that he did not turn a cow into a horse!
In which position B---- is precisely on a level with those Arab Sheikhs,
or perhaps Mamelukes, whom Napoleon so foolishly endeavoured to surprise
by Chinese tricks: 'Aye, all this is very well, but can you make one to
be in Cairo and in Damascus at the same moment?' demanded the poor
brutalized wretches. And so also for B---- it is nothing. Oh, blind of
heart not to perceive that the defect was entirely owing to the age.
Mahomet came to a most sceptical region. There was no semblance or
shadow among the Arabs of that childish credulity which forms the
atmosphere for miracle. On the contrary, they were a hard, fierce
people, and in that sense barbarous; but otherwise they were sceptical,
as is most evident from all that they accomplished, which followed the
foundation of Islamism. Here lies the delusion upon that point. The
Arabs were evidently like all the surrounding nations. They were also
much distinguished among all Oriental peoples for courage. This fact has
been put on record in (1) the East Indies, where all the Arab troops
have proved themselves by far more formidable than twelve times the
number of effeminate Bengalese and Mahrattas, etc. (2) At Aden, where as
rude fighters without the science of war they have been most ugly
customers. (3) In Algeria, where the French, with all advantage of
discipline, science, artillery, have found it a most trying and
exhausting war. Well, as they are now, so they were before Mahomet, and
just then they were ripe for conquest. But they wanted a _combining_
motive and a _justifying_ motive. Mahomet supplied both these. Says he,
'All nations are idolaters; go and thrust them into the mill that they
may be transformed to our likeness.'
Consequently, the great idea of the truth, of a truth transcending all
available rights on the other side, was foreign to Mahometanism, and any
glimmering of this that may seem to be found in it was borrowed, was
filched from Christianity.