BLACKWOOD'S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
NO. CCCCII. APRIL, 1849. VOL. LXV.
CONTENTS.
MACAULAY'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND, 383
JOHNSTON'S PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY, 406
THE CAXTONS. PART XII., 420
ANCIENT PRACTICE OF PAINTING, 436
TENNYSON'S POEMS, 453
ARISTOCRATIC ANNALS, 468
THE LIFE OF THE SEA. BY B. SIMMONS, 482
LONDON CRIES. BY B. SIMMONS, 484
CLAUDIA AND PUDENS, 487
SIR ASTLEY COOPER. PART I. 491
EDINBURGH:
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, 45, GEORGE STREET;
AND 37, PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON.
_To whom all Communications (post paid) must be addressed._
SOLD BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.
BLACKWOOD'S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
NO. CCCCII. APRIL, 1849. VOL. LXV.
MACAULAY'S HISTORY OF ENGLAND.
The historical and critical essay is a species of literary composition
which has arisen, and been brought to perfection, in the lifetime of a
single generation. Preceding writers, indeed, had excelled in detached
pieces of a lighter and briefer kind; and in the whole annals of
thought there is nothing more charming than some of those which graced
the age of Queen Anne, and the reigns of the first Georges. But though
these delightful essays remain, and will ever remain, models of the
purest and most elegant composition, and are always distinguished by
just and moral reflections, yet their influence has sensibly declined;
and they are turned to, now, rather from the felicity of the expression
by which they are graced, than either the information which they
contain, the originality by which they are distinguished, or the depth
of the views which they unfold. It is still true that "he who would
attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant without
being ostentatious, must give his days and his nights to the study of
Addison." It is not less true, that he who would appreciate the force
of which the English language is capable, and acquire the condensed
vigour of expression which enters so largely into the highest kind of
composition, will ever study the prose of Johnson; as much as the poet,
for similar excellencies, will recur to the Vanity of Human Wishes, or
the epistles and satires of Pope.
But, with the advent of the French Revolution, the rise of fiercer
passions, and the collision of dearer interests, the elegant and
amusing class of essays rendered so popular by Addison and his
followers passed away. The incessant recurrence of moralising, the
frequent use of allegory, the constant straining after conceits, which
appear even in the pages of the _Spectator_ and the _Rambler_, are
scarcely redeemed by the taste of Addison, the fancy of Steele, or the
vigour of Johnson. In inferior hands they became insupportable. Men
whose minds were stimulated by the Rights of Man--who were entranced
by the eloquence of Pitt--who followed the career of Wellington--who
were stunned by the thunderbolts of Nelson--could not recur to the
Delias, the Chloes, or the Phillises of a slumbering and pacific age.
The proclamation of war to the palace, and peace to the cottage, sent
the stories of the coquette, the prude, and the woman of sense to the
right-about. What was now required was something which could minister
to the cravings of an excited and enthusiastic age; which should
support or combat the new ideas generally prevalent; which should bring
the experience of the past to bear on the visions of the present, and
tell men, from the recorded events of history, what they had to hope,
and what to fear, from the passion for innovation which had seized
possession of so large a portion of the active part of mankind.
The _Edinburgh Review_ was the first journal which gave a decided
indication of this change in the temper of the public mind. From the
very outset it exhibited that vigour of thought, fearlessness of
discussion, and raciness of expression, which bespoke the prevalence
of independent feeling, novel yearnings, and original ideas, among the
people. There was something refreshing and exhilarating in the change.
Its success was immediate and immense. The long-slumbering dominion
of the monthly and other reviews, which then had possession of the
sceptre of criticism, was at once destroyed. Mediocrity fell into the
shade when the light of genius appeared; criticism assumed a bolder and
more decided character. Men rejoiced to see the pretensions of authors
levelled, their vanity mortified, their errors exposed, their pride
pulled down, by the stern hand of the merciless reviewer. The practical
application of the maxim, "Judex damnatur cum nocens absolvitur," gave
universal satisfaction. Every one felt his own consequence increased,
his personal feelings soothed, his vanity flattered, when the
self-constituted teachers of mankind were pulled down from their lofty
pinnacle.
But it was not merely in literary criticism that the _Edinburgh Review_
opened a new era in our periodical literature. To its early supporters
we owe the introduction of the CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL ESSAY,
which was an entirely new species of composition, and to the frequent
use of which the rapid success of that journal is mainly to be
ascribed. The essay always had the name of a book prefixed to it: it
professed to be a review. But it was generally a review only in name.
The author was frequently never once mentioned in its whole extent.
His work was made use of merely as a peg on which to hang a long
disquisition on the subject of which it treated. This disquisition was
not, like the essays of Addison or Johnson, the work of a few hours'
writing, and drawn chiefly from the fancy or imagination of the author:
it was the elaborate production of a mind imbued with the subject, and
the fruit of weeks or months of careful composition. It was sometimes
founded on years of previous and laborious study. Thence its great and
obvious value. It not only enlarged the circle of our ideas; it added
to the stock of our knowledge. Men came to study a paper on a subject
in a review, as carefully as they did a regular work of a known and
respectable author: they looked to it not only for amusement, but for
information. It had this immense advantage--it was shorter than a
book, and often contained its essence. It was distilled thought; it
was abbreviated knowledge. To say that many of these elaborate and
attractive treatises were founded in error--that they were directed to
objects of the moment, not of durable interest, and that their authors
too often
"To party gave up what was meant for mankind"--
is no impeachment either of the ability with which they were executed,
or denial of the beneficial ends to which they ultimately became
subservient. What though great part of the talents with which they
were written is now seen to have been misdirected--of the views they
contained to have been erroneous. It was that talent which raised the
counter spirit that righted the public mind; it was those views which
ultimately led to their own correction. In an age of intelligence and
mental activity, no dread need be entertained of the ultimate sway of
error. Experience, the great assertor of truth, is ever at hand to
scatter its assailants. It is in an age of mental torpor and inactivity
that the chains of falsehood, whether in religion or politics, are
abidingly thrown over the human mind.
But, from this very cause, the political essays of the _Edinburgh
Review_ have been left behind by the march of the world; they have been
stranded on the shoals of time; they have almost all been disproved by
the event. Open one of the political essays in the Blue-and-yellow,
which were read and admired by all the world thirty or forty years ago,
and what do you find? Loud declamations against the continuance of the
war, and emphatic assertions of the inability of England to contend at
land with the conqueror of continental Europe; continual reproaches
of incapacity against the ministry, who were preparing the liberation
of Spain and the battle of Waterloo; ceaseless assertions that the
misery of Ireland was entirely owing to misgovernment--that nothing
but Catholic emancipation, and the curtailment of the Protestant
church, were required to make that island the most happy, loyal, and
contented realm, and its Celtic inhabitants the most industrious and
well-conditioned in Europe; loud denunciations that the power of the
crown "had increased, was increasing, and ought to be diminished;"
lamentations on the evidently approaching extinction of the liberties
of England, under the combined action of a gigantic war expenditure
and a corrupt selfish oligarchy; strong recommendations of the speedy
abolition of slavery in our West India colonies, as the only mode of
enabling our planters to compete with the efforts of the slave-sugar
states. Time has enabled the world to estimate these doctrines at their
true value. It is not surprising that the _political_ essays of a
journal, professing such principles, have, amidst great efforts towards
bolstering up, and ceaseless strains of party laudation, been quietly
consigned by subsequent times to the vault of all the Capulets.
It is on its literary, critical, and historical essays, therefore,
that the reputation of the journal now almost entirely rests. No
bookseller has yet ventured on the hazardous step of publishing its
political essays together. They will not supplant those of Burke. But
it is otherwise with its literary lucubrations. The publication of
the collected works of its leading contributors, in a separate form,
has enabled the world to form a tolerably correct opinion of their
respective merits and deficiencies. Without taking upon ourselves the
office of critics, and fully aware of the delicacy which one periodical
should feel in discussing the merits of another, we may be permitted
to present, in a few words, what appear to us to be the leading
characteristics of the principal and well-known contributors to that
far-famed journal. This is the more allowable, as some of them have
paid the debt of nature, while others are reposing under the shadow of
their well-earned laurels, far removed from the heat and bustle of the
day. Their names are familiar to every reader; their works have taken
a lasting place in English as well as American literature; and their
qualities and excellencies are so different as at once to invite and
suggest critical discrimination.
The great characteristic of LORD JEFFREY is, with some
striking exceptions, the fairness and general justice of the criticism
which his works exhibit, the kindly feeling which they evince, and
the lively illustrations with which they abound. He had vast powers
of application. When in great practice at the bar, and deservedly a
leading counsel in jury cases, he contrived to find time to conduct
the _Edinburgh Review_, and to enrich its pages by above a hundred
contributions. There is no great extent of learning in them, few
original ideas, and little of that earnestness of expression which
springs from strong internal conviction, and is the chief fountain
of eloquent and overpowering oratory. He rarely quotes classical or
Italian literature, and his writings give no token of a mind stored
with their imagery. He seldom gives you the feeling that he is serious,
or deeply impressed with his subject. He seldom strikes with force,
but very often touches with felicity. The feeling which pervades his
writings is always excellent, often generous; his taste is correct, his
criticism in general just; and it is impossible not to admire the light
and airy hand with which he treats of the most difficult subjects, and
the happy expressions with which he often illustrates the most abstruse
ideas. He deals more in Scotch metaphysics than suits the present
age: he made some signal and well-known mistakes in the estimation of
contemporary poetry; and laboured, without effect, to _write up_ Ford,
Massinger, and the old dramatists, whom their inveterate indecency has
justly banished from general popularity. But these faults are amply
redeemed by the attractions of his essays in other respects. There are
no more charming reviews in our language than some which his collected
papers contain: and no one can rise from their perusal with any
surprise that the accomplished author of works containing so much just
and kindly criticism should deservedly be a most popular and respected
judge.
It is impossible to imagine a more thorough contrast to Lord Jeffrey
than the writings of SIDNEY SMITH exhibit. Though a reverend
and pious divine, the prebendary of St Paul's had very little of the
sacerdotal character in him. His conversational talents were great, his
success in the highest London society unbounded; but this intoxicating
course neither relaxed the vigour of his application, nor deadened
the warmth of his feelings. His powers, and they were of no ordinary
kind, were always directed, though sometimes with mistaken zeal, to
the interests of humanity. His sayings, like those of Talleyrand, were
repeated from one end of the empire to the other. These brilliant and
sparkling qualities are conspicuous in his writings, and have mainly
contributed to their remarkable success both in this country and
America. There is scarcely any scholarship, and little information,
to be met with in his works. Few take them up to be instructed; many
to be amused. He has little of the equanimity of the judge about him,
but a great deal of the wit and jocularity of the pleader. He would
have made a first-rate jury counsel, for he would alternately have
driven them by the force of his arguments, and amused them by the
brilliancy of his expressions. There is no more vigorous and forcible
diatribe in our language than his celebrated letter on North American
repudiation, which roused the attention, and excited the admiration,
of the repudiators themselves. He has expressed in a single line a
great truth, applicable, it is to be feared, to other nations besides
the Americans: "They preferred any load of infamy, however great,
to any burden of taxation, however light." But Sidney Smith's blows
were expended, and wit lavished, in general, on subjects of passing
or ephemeral interest: they were not, like the strokes of Johnson,
levelled at the universal frailties and characteristics of human
nature. On this account, though their success hitherto has been
greater, it is doubtful whether his essays will take so high a lasting
place in English literature as those of Lord Jeffrey, which in general
treat of works of permanent interest.
SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH differs as widely from the original
pillars of the _Edinburgh Review_ as they do from each other. The
publication of his collected essays, with the historical sketch and
fragment which he has left, enables us now to form a fair estimate of
his powers. That they were great, no one can doubt; but they are of a
different kind from what was at first anticipated. Not a shadow of a
doubt can now remain, that, though his noble mind had not been in a
great degree swallowed up as it was in the bottomless gulf of London
society, and he had spent his whole forenoons for the last fifteen
years of his life in writing his history, instead of conversing with
fashionable or literary ladies, his labours would have terminated in
disappointment. The beginning of a history which he has left, is a
sufficient proof of this: it is learned, minute, and elaborate, but
dull. The Whigs, according to their usual practice with all writers of
their own party, hailed its appearance with a flourish of trumpets; but
we doubt whether many of them have yet read it through. He had little
dramatic power; his writings exhibit no traces of a pictorial eye, and
though he had much poetry in his mind, they are not imbued with the
poetic character. These deficiencies are fatal to the _popularity_ of
any historian: no amount of learning or philosophical acuteness can
supply their want in the _narrative_ of events. Guizot is a proof of
this: he is, perhaps, one of the greatest writers on the philosophy
of history that ever lived; but his history of the English Revolution
is lifeless beside the pages of Livy or Gibbon. Sir James Mackintosh
was fitted to have been the Guizot of English history. His mind was
essentially didactic. Reflection, not action, was both the bent of
his disposition and the theatre of his glory. His History of England,
written for Lardner's _Encyclopedia_, can scarcely be called a history;
it is rather a series of essays on history. It treats so largely of
some events, so scantily of others, that a reader not previously
acquainted with the subject, might rise from its perusal with scarcely
any idea of the thread of English story. But no one who was already
informed on it can do so, without feeling his mind stored with original
and valuable reflection, just and profound views. His collected essays
from the _Edinburgh Review_, lately put together, are not so discursive
as those of Lord Jeffrey, nor so amusing as those of Sidney Smith; but
they are much more profound than either, and treat of subjects more
permanently interesting to the human race. Many of them, particularly
that on representative governments, abound with views equally just and
original. It is impossible not to regret, that a mind so richly stored
with historical knowledge, and so largely endowed with philosophic
penetration, should have left so few lasting monuments of its great and
varied powers.
Much as these very eminent men differ from each other, Mr
MACAULAY is, perhaps, still more clearly distinguished from
either. Both his turn of mind and style of writing are peculiar, and
exhibit a combination rarely if ever before witnessed in English, or
even modern literature. Unlike Lord Jeffrey, he is deeply learned in
ancient and modern lore; his mind is richly stored with the poetry
and history both of classical and Continental literature. Unlike
Mackintosh, he is eminently dramatic and pictorial; he alternately
speaks poetry to the soul and pictures to the eye. Unlike Sidney Smith,
he has avoided subjects of party contention and passing interest, and
grappled with the great questions, the immortal names, which will for
ever attract the interest and command the attention of man. Milton,
Bacon, Machiavelli, first awakened his discriminating and critical
taste; Clive, Warren Hastings, Frederick the Great, called forth his
dramatic and historic powers. He has treated of the Reformation and the
Catholic reaction in his review of Ranke; of the splendid despotism of
the Popedom in that of Hildebrand; of the French Revolution in that of
Barère. There is no danger of his essays being forgotten, like many of
those of Addison; nor of pompous uniformity of style being complained
of, as in most of those of Johnson. His learning is prodigious; and
perhaps the chief defects of his composition arise from the exuberant
riches of the stores from which they are drawn. When warmed in his
subject he is thoroughly in earnest, and his language, in consequence,
goes direct to the heart. In many of his writings--and especially the
first volume of his history, and his essay on the Reformation--there
are reflections equally just and original, which never were surpassed
in the philosophy of history. That he is imbued with the soul of poetry
need be told to none who have read his Battle of the Lake Regillus;
that he is a great biographer will be disputed by none who are
acquainted with the splendid biographies of Clive and Hastings, by much
the finest productions of the kind in the English language.
Macaulay's style, like other original things, has already produced
a school of imitators. Its influence may distinctly be traced,
both in the periodical and daily literature of the day. Its great
characteristic is the shortness of the sentences, which often equals
that of Tacitus himself, and the rapidity with which new and distinct
ideas or facts succeed each other in his richly-stored pages. He is
the Pope of English prose: he often gives two sentiments and facts in
a single line. No preceding writer in prose, in any modern language
with which we are acquainted, has carried this art of abbreviation,
or rather cramming of ideas, to such a length; and to its felicitous
use much of the celebrity which he has acquired is to be ascribed.
There is no doubt that it is a most powerful engine for the stirring
of the mind, and when not repeated too often, or carried too far,
has a surprising effect. Its introduction forms an era in historical
composition. To illustrate our meaning, and at the same time adorn our
pages with passages of exquisite, almost redundant beauty, we gladly
transcribe two well-known ones, taken from the most perfect of his
historical essays. Of Lord Clive he says--
"From Clive's second visit to India dates the political
ascendency of the English in that country. His dexterity and
resolution realised, in the course of a few months, more
than all the gorgeous visions which had floated before the
imagination of Dupleix. Such an extent of cultivated territory,
such an amount of revenue, such a multitude of subjects, was
never added to the dominion of Rome by the most successful
proconsul. Nor were such wealthy spoils ever borne under arches
of triumph, down the Sacred Way, and through the crowded
forum, to the threshold of Tarpeian Jove. The fame of those
who subdued Antiochus and Tigranes grows dim, when compared
with the splendour of the exploits which the young English
adventurer achieved, at the head of an army not equal in
numbers to one-half of a Roman legion. From Clive's third visit
to India, dates the purity of the administration of our eastern
empire. He first made dauntless and unsparing war on that
gigantic system of oppression, extortion, and corruption, which
had previously prevailed in India. In that war he manfully put
to hazard his ease, his fame, and his splendid fortune. The
same sense of justice which forbids us to conceal or extenuate
the faults of his earlier days, compels us to admit that those
faults were nobly repaired. If the reproach of the Company
and its servants has been taken away; if in India the yoke
of foreign masters, elsewhere the heaviest of all yokes, has
been found lighter than that of any native dynasty; if to that
gang of public robbers which formerly spread terror through
the whole of Bengal, has succeeded a body of functionaries not
more highly distinguished by ability and diligence, than by
integrity, disinterestedness, and public spirit; if we now see
such men as Munro, Elphinstone, and Metcalfe, after leading
victorious armies, after making and deposing kings, return
proud of their honourable poverty from a land which once held
to every greedy factor the hope of boundless wealth,--the
praise is in no small degree due to Clive. His name stands high
on the roll of conquerors; but it is found in a better list--in
the list of those who have done and suffered much in the cause
of mankind. To the warrior, history will assign a place in the
same rank with Lucullus and Trajan; nor will she deny to the
reformer a share of that veneration with which France cherishes
the memory of Turgot, and with which the latest generation
of Hindoos will contemplate the statue of Lord William
Bentinck."[1]
[1] _Critical and Miscellaneous Essays_, iii. 205, 206.
The well-known description of Hastings' trial is as follows:--
"The place was worthy of such a trial. It was the great hall of
William Rufus--the hall which had resounded with acclamations
at the inauguration of thirty kings; the hall which had
witnessed the just sentence of Bacon, and the just absolution
of Somers; the hall where the eloquence of Strafford had for
a moment awed and melted a victorious party, inflamed with
just resentment; the hall where Charles had confronted the
High Court of Justice with the placid courage which has half
redeemed his fame. Neither military nor civil pomp was wanting.
The avenues were lined with grenadiers; the streets were kept
clear by cavalry; the peers, robed in gold and ermine, were
marshalled by the heralds, under the Garter king-at-arms. The
judges, in their vestments of state, attended to give advice on
points of law. Near a hundred and seventy lords, three-fourths
of the Upper House, as the Upper House then was, walked in
solemn order from their usual place of assembling to the
tribunal. The junior baron present led the way--George Eliott,
Lord Heathfield, recently ennobled for his memorable defence
of Gibraltar against the fleets and armies of France and
Spain. The long procession was closed by the Duke of Norfolk,
earl-marshal of the realm, by the great dignitaries, and by the
brothers and sons of the king. Last of all came the Prince of
Wales, conspicuous by his fine person and noble bearing. The
gray old walls were hung with scarlet. The long galleries were
crowded by an audience, such as has rarely excited the fears
or the emulation of an orator. There were gathered together,
from all parts of a great, free, enlightened, and prosperous
empire, grace and female loveliness, wit and learning, the
representatives of every science and of every art. There were
seated round the queen the fair-haired young daughters of the
house of Brunswick. There the ambassadors of great kings and
commonwealths gazed with admiration on a spectacle which no
other country in the world could present. There Siddons, in the
prime of her majestic beauty, looked with emotion on a scene
surpassing all the imitations of the stage. There the historian
of the Roman Empire thought of the days when Cicero pleaded
the cause of Sicily against Verres, and when, before a senate
which still retained some show of freedom, Tacitus thundered
against the oppressor of Africa. There were seen, side by side,
the greatest painter and the greatest scholar of the age.
The spectacle had allured Reynolds from that easel which has
preserved to us the thoughtful foreheads of so many writers
and statesmen, and the sweet smiles of so many noble matrons.
It had induced Parr to suspend his labours in that dark and
profound mine from which he had extracted a vast treasure of
erudition--a treasure too often buried in the earth, too often
paraded with injudicious and inelegant ostentation, but still
precious, massive, and splendid. There appeared the voluptuous
charms of her to whom the heir of the throne had in secret
plighted his faith. There, too, was she, the beautiful mother
of a beautiful race,the Saint Cecilia whose delicate features,
lighted up by love and music, art has rescued from the common
decay. There were the members of that brilliant society which
quoted, criticised, and exchanged repartees under the rich
peacock hangings of Mrs Montague. And there the ladies, whose
lips, more persuasive than those of Fox himself, had carried
Westminster against Palace and Treasury, shone round Georgiana
Duchess of Devonshire."[2]
[2] _Critical and Historical Essays_, iii. 446, 447.
As a contrast to these splendid pictures, we subjoin the portrait of
the Black Hole of Calcutta, which proves that, if the author is in
general endowed with the richness of Ariosto's imagination, he can,
when necessary, exhibit the terrible powers of Dante.
"Then was committed that great crime--memorable for its
singular atrocity, memorable for the tremendous retribution
by which it was followed. The English captives were left at
the mercy of the guards, and the guards determined to secure
them for the night in the prison of the garrison, a chamber
known by the fearful name of the Black Hole. Even for a single
European malefactor that dungeon would, in such a climate,
have been too close and narrow. The space was only twenty feet
square. The air-holes were small and obstructed. It was the
summer solstice--the season when the fierce heat of Bengal can
scarcely be rendered tolerable to natives of England by lofty
halls, and by the constant waving of fans. The number of the
prisoners was 146. When they were ordered to enter the cell,
they imagined that the soldiers were joking; and, being in high
spirits on account of the promise of the nabob to spare their
lives, they laughed and jested at the absurdity of the notion.
They soon discovered their mistake. They expostulated, they
entreated, but in vain. The guards threatened to cut all down
who hesitated. The captives were driven into the cell at the
point of the sword, and the door was instantly shut and locked
upon them.
"Nothing in history or fiction--not even the story which
Ugolino told in the sea of everlasting ice, after he had wiped
his bloody lips on the scalp of his murderer--approaches the
horrors which were recounted by the few survivors of that
night. They cried for mercy; they strove to burst the door.
Holwell, who even in that extremity retained some presence of
mind, offered large bribes to the gaolers. But the answer was,
that nothing could be done without the nabob's orders; that the
nabob was asleep, and that he would be angry if anybody woke
him. Then the prisoners went mad with despair. They trampled
each other down, fought for the places at the windows--fought
for the pittance of water with which the cruel mercy of the
murderers mocked their agonies--raved, prayed, blasphemed,
implored the guards to fire among them. The gaolers, in the
meantime, held lights to the bars, and shouted with laughter
at the frantic struggles of the victims. At length the tumult
died away in low gaspings and moanings. The day broke. The
nabob had slept off his debauch, and permitted the door to be
opened; but it was some time before the soldiers could make a
lane for the survivors, by piling up on each side the heaps
of corpses on which the burning climate had already begun to
do its loathsome work. When, at length, a passage was made,
twenty-three ghastly figures, such as their own mothers would
not have known, came forth alive. A pit was instantly dug: the
dead bodies, a hundred and twenty-three in number, were flung
into it promiscuously, and covered up."[3]
[3] _Ibid._, iii. 144-146.
This style does admirably well for short biographies, such as those
of Warren Hastings or Clive, in the _Edinburgh Review_, in which the
object is to condense the important events of a whole lifetime into
comparatively few pages, and fascinate the reader by as condensed and
brilliant a picture as it is possible to present, of the most striking
features of their character and story. But how will it answer for a
lengthened history, such as Macaulay's great work promises to be,
extending to twelve or fifteen volumes? How will it do to make the
"extreme medicine of the constitution its daily bread?" Ragouts and
French dishes are admirable at a feast, or on particular occasions, but
what should we say to a diet prescribed of such highly seasoned food
every day? It is true, there are not many such brilliant and striking
passages as those we have quoted. The subject, of course, would not
admit of, the mind of the reader would sink under, the frequent
repetition of such powerful emotion. But the style is generally the
same. It almost always indicates a crowd of separate ideas, facts, or
assertions, in such close juxtaposition that they literally seem wedged
together. Such is the extent of the magazine of reading and information
from which they are drawn, that they come tumbling out, often without
much order or arrangement, and generally so close together that it is
difficult for a person not previously acquainted with the subject to
tell which are of importance and which are immaterial.
This tendency, when as confirmed and general as it has now become,
we consider by far the most serious fault in Mr Macaulay's style;
and it is not less conspicuous in his general history than in his
detached biographies. Indeed, its continuance in the former species of
composition is mainly owing to the brilliant success with which it has
been attended in the latter. In historical essays it is not a blemish,
it is rather a beauty; because, in such miniature portraits or cabinet
pieces, minuteness of finishing and crowding of incidents in a small
space are among the principal requisites we desire, the chief charm we
admire. But the style of painting which we justly admire in Albano and
Vanderwerf, would be misplaced in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,
or even the extended canvass of the Transfiguration. We do not object
to such elaborate finishing, such brevity of sentences, such crowding
of facts and ideas, in the delineation of the striking incidents or
principal characters of the work; what we object to is its continuance
on ordinary occasions, in the drawing of inconsiderable characters,
and in what should be the simple thread of the story. Look how easy
Hume is in his ordinary narrative--how unambitious Livy, in the greater
part of his history. We desiderate such periods of relaxation and
repose in Macaulay. We there always discover learning, genius, power;
but the prodigal display of these powers often mars their effect. We
see it not only in delineating the immortal deeds of heroes, or the
virtues of princesses, but in portraying the habits of serving-women or
the frailties of maids of honour. With all its elevated and poetical
qualities, the mind of Macaulay occasionally gives token of its descent
from our common ancestress, Eve, in an evident fondness for gossip.
It would perhaps be well for him to remember that the scandal of our
great great-grandmothers is not generally interesting, or permanently
edifying; and that he is not to measure the gratification it will give
to the world in general, by the avidity with which it is devoured
among the titled descendants of the fair sinners in the Whig coteries.
There is often a want of breadth and keeping in his pictures. To
resume our pictorial metaphor, Macaulay's pages often remind us of the
paintings of Bassano, in which warriors and pilgrims, horses and mules,
dromedaries and camels, sheep and lambs, Arabs and Ethiopians, shining
armour and glistening pans, spears and pruning-hooks, scimitars and
shepherds' crooks, baskets, tents, and precious stuffs, are crammed
together without mercy, and with an equal light thrown on the most
insignificant as the most important parts of the piece.
When he is engaged in a subject, however, in which minute painting is
not misplaced, and the condensation of striking images is a principal
charm, Mr Macaulay's pictorial eye and poetical powers appear in
their full lustre. We observe with pleasure that he has not forgotten
the example and precept of Herodotus, who considered geography as a
principal part of history; and that, in the description of countries,
he has put forth the whole vigour of his mind with equal correctness
of drawing and brilliancy of colouring. As a specimen, we subjoin the
admirable picture of the plain of Bengal, in the life of Clive:--
"Of the provinces which had been subject to the house of
Tamerlane, the wealthiest was Bengal. No part of India
possessed such natural advantages, both for agriculture and for
commerce. The Ganges, rushing through a hundred channels to the
sea, has formed a vast plain of rich mould, which, even under
the tropical sky, rivals the verdure of an English April. The
rice-fields yield an increase such as is elsewhere unknown.
Spices, sugar, vegetable oils, are produced with marvellous
exuberance. The rivers afford an inexhaustible supply of fish.
The desolate islands along the sea-coast, overgrown by noxious
vegetation, and swarming with deer and tigers, supply the
cultivated districts with abundance of salt. The great stream
which fertilises the soil is, at the same time, the chief
highway of Eastern commerce. On its banks, and on those of its
tributary waters, are the wealthiest marts, the most splendid
capitals, and the most sacred shrines of India. The tyranny
of man had for ages struggled in vain against the overflowing
bounty of nature. In spite of the Mussulman despot, and of
the Mahratta freebooter, Bengal was known through the East
as the garden of Eden, as the rich kingdom. Its population
multiplied exceedingly. Distant provinces were nourished from
the overflowing of its granaries; and the noble ladies of
London and Paris were clothed in the delicate produce of its
looms. The race by whom this rich tract was peopled, enervated
by a soft climate, and accustomed to peaceful avocations,
bore the same relation to other Asiatics which the Asiatics
generally bear to the bold and energetic children of Europe.
The Castilians have a proverb, that in Valencia the earth is
water, and the men women; and the description is at least
equally applicable to the vast plain of the lower Ganges.
Whatever the Bengalee does he does languidly. His favourite
pursuits are sedentary. He shrinks from bold exertion; and
though voluble in dispute, and singularly pertinacious in the
war of chicane, he seldom engages in a personal conflict, and
scarcely ever enlists as a soldier. We doubt whether there be a
hundred Bengalees in the whole army of the East India Company.
There never, perhaps, existed a people so thoroughly fitted by
nature and by habit for a foreign yoke."[4]
[4] _Critical and Historical Essays_, iii. 141, 142.
The talent of military description, and the picture of battle, is
one of a very peculiar kind, which is often wholly awanting in
historians of a very high character in other respects. It is a common
observation, that all battles in history are like each other--a sure
proof that their authors did not understand the subject; for every
battle, fought from the beginning of time, in reality differs from
another as much as every countenance. In his previous writings, Mr
Macaulay had enjoyed few opportunities of exhibiting his strength in
this important particular; though it might have been anticipated, from
the brilliancy of his imagination, and the powerful pictures in his
_Lays of Rome_, that he would not be inferior in this respect to what
he had proved himself to be in other parts of history. But the matter
has now been put to the test; and it gives us the highest satisfaction
to perceive, from the manner in which he has treated a comparatively
trifling engagement, that he is fully qualified to portray the
splendid victories of Marlborough, the bold intrepidity of Hawke, and
the gallant daring of Peterborough. It would be difficult to find in
history a more spirited and graphic description than he has given in
his great work of the battle of Sedgemoor, with the scene of which he
seems, from early acquaintance, to be peculiarly familiar:--
"Monmouth was startled at finding that a broad and profound
trench lay between him and the camp he had hoped to surprise.
The insurgents halted on the edge of the hollow, and fired.
Part of the royal infantry, on the opposite bank, returned the
fire. During three quarters of an hour the roar of musketry
was incessant. The Somersetshire peasants behaved as if they
had been veteran soldiers, save only that they levelled their
pieces too high. But now the other divisions of the royal
army were in motion. The Life Guards and Blues, came pricking
up from Weston Zoyland, and scattered, in an instant, some
of Grey's horse, who had attempted to rally. The fugitives
spread a panic among the fugitives in the rear, who had charge
of the ammunition. The waggoners drove off at full speed,
and never stopped till they were some miles from the field
of battle. Monmouth had hitherto done his part like a stout
and able warrior. He had been seen on foot, pike in hand,
encouraging his infantry by voice and example. But he was too
well acquainted with military affairs not to know that all
was over. His men had lost the advantage which surprise and
darkness had given them. They were deserted by the horse and
by the ammunition waggons. The king's forces were now united,
and in good order. Feversham had been awakened by the firing,
had adjusted his cravat, had looked himself well in the glass,
and had come to see what his men were doing. What was of much
more consequence, Churchill (Marlborough) had rapidly made
an entirely new disposition of the royal infantry. The day
had begun to break. The event of a conflict on an open plain
by broad sunlight could not be doubtful. Yet Monmouth should
have felt that it was not for him to fly, while thousands,
whom affection for him had hurried to destruction, were still
fighting manfully in his cause. But vain hopes, and the intense
love of life, prevailed. He saw that, if he tarried, the royal
cavalry would soon be in his rear: he mounted, and rode off
from the field.
Yet his foot, though deserted, made a gallant stand. The Life
Guards attacked them on the right, the Blues on the left; but
these Somerset clowns, with their scythes and the but-ends
of their muskets, faced the royal horse like old soldiers.
Oglethorpe made a vigorous attempt to break them, and was
manfully repulsed. Sarsfield, a brave Irish officer, whose name
afterwards obtained a melancholy celebrity, charged on the
other flank. His men were beaten back: he himself was struck to
the ground, and lay, for a time, as one dead. But the struggle
of the hardy rustics could not last; their powder and ball
were spent. Cries were heard of, "Ammunition! for God's sake,
ammunition!" But no ammunition was at hand. And now the king's
artillery came up. Even when the guns had arrived, there was
such a want of gunners, that a sergeant of Dumbarton's regiment
had to take upon himself the management of several pieces. The
cannon, however, though ill served, brought the engagement to
a speedy close. The pikes of the rebel battalions began to
shake--the ranks broke. The king's cavalry charged again, and
bore down everything before them. The king's infantry came
pouring across the ditch. Even in that extremity, the Mendip
miners stood bravely to their arms, and sold their lives
dearly. But the rout was in a few minutes complete; three
hundred of the soldiers had been killed or wounded. Of the
rebels, more than a thousand lay dead on the moor."[5]
[5] _History_, i. 610, 611.
We have dwelt so long on the general characteristics and peculiar
excellencies of Mr Macaulay's compositions, that we have hardly left
ourselves sufficient space to enter so fully as we could wish into the
merits of the great work on which he has staked his reputation with
future times. It was looked forward to with peculiar, and we may say
unexampled interest, both from the known celebrity and talents of the
author--not less as a parliamentary orator than a practised critic--and
the importance of the blank which he was expected to fill up in English
literature. He has contracted an engagement with the public, to give
the _History of England_ during the last century; to fill up the void
from the English to the French Revolution. He came after Hume, whose
simple and undying narrative will be coeval with the long and eventful
thread of English story. He has undertaken the history of the glorious
age of Queen Anne, and the era of the first Georges--of the victories
of Marlborough, and the disasters of North--of the energy of Chatham,
and the brilliancy of Bolingbroke; he has to recount equally the
chivalrous episode of Charles Edward and the heroic death of Wolfe--the
inglorious capitulation of Cornwallis, and the matchless triumphs of
Clive. That the two first volumes of his work have not disappointed the
public expectation is proved by the fact, that, before two months had
elapsed from publication, they had already reached a third edition.
We shall not, in treating of the merits of this very remarkable
production, adopt the not uncommon practice of reviewers on such
occasions. We shall not pretend to be better informed on the details
of the subject than the author. We shall not set up the reading of a
few weeks or months against the study of half a lifetime. We shall
not imitate certain critics who look at the bottom of the pages
for the authorities of the author, and, having got the clue to the
requisite information, proceed to examine with the utmost minuteness
every particular of his narrative, and make in consequence a vast
display of knowledge wholly derived from the reading which he has
suggested. We shall not be so deluded as to suppose we have made a
great discovery in biography, because we have ascertained that some
Lady Caroline of the last generation was born on the 7th October 1674,
instead of the 8th February 1675, as the historian, with shameful
negligence, has affirmed; nor shall we take credit to ourselves for
a journey down to Hampshire to consult the parish register on the
subject. As little shall we in future accuse Macaulay of inaccuracy in
describing battles, because on referring, without mentioning it, to
the military authorities he has quoted, and the page he has referred
to, we have discovered that at some battle, as Malplaquet, Lottum's
men stood on the right of the Prince of Orange, when he says they
stood on the left; or that Marlborough dined on a certain day at one
o'clock, when in point of fact he did not sit down, as is proved by
incontestable authority, till half-past two. We shall leave such minute
and Lilliputian criticisms to the minute and Lilliputian minds by
whom alone they are ever made. Mr Macaulay can afford to smile at all
reviewers who affect to possess more than his own gigantic stores of
information.
In the first place, we must bestow the highest praise on the general
sketch of English history which he has given down to the period of
Charles. Such a _precis_ forms the most appropriate introduction to
his work, and it is done with a penetration and justice which leaves
nothing to be desired. Several of his remarks are equally original and
profound, and applicable--not only to a right understanding of the
thread of former events, but to the social questions with which the
nation is engaged at the present moment. We allude in particular to the
observations that the spread of the Reformation has been everywhere
commensurate with that of the Teutonic race, and that it has never
been able to take root among those of Celtic descent; that, in modern
times, the spread of intelligence and the vigour of the human mind,
has been coextensive with the establishment of the Reformed opinions,
while despotism in governments, and slumber in their subjects, has
characterised, with certain brilliant exceptions of infidel passion,
those in which the ancient faith is still prevalent; and that the
Romish belief and observances were the greatest blessing to humanity,
during the violence and barbarism of the middle ages, but the
reverse among enlightened nations of modern times. It is refreshing
to see opinions of this obviously just and important kind advanced,
and distinctions drawn, by a writer of the high celebrity and vast
knowledge of Mr Macaulay. It is still more important when we have only
just emerged from an age in which the admission of the Roman Catholics
into parliament was so strenuously recommended, as the greatest boon
which could possibly be conferred on society--and are entering on
another, in which its ceremonies and excitements have become the refuge
of so many even in this country, at least of the softer sex, and in
the highest ranks, with whom the usual attractions of the world have
begun to fail or become insipid--to see the evident tendency of the
Romish faith characterised in a manner equally removed from the bigoted
prejudices of the Puritans, and the blind passion of modern Catholic
proselytism, by an author bred up amid the din of Roman Catholic
Emancipation, and a distinguished contributor to the _Edinburgh Review_.
We wish we could bestow equal praise on the justice of the views, and
impartiality of the delineation of character, in the critical period of
the Great Rebellion, which Mr Macaulay treats more at length; and lest
he should fear that our praise will be valueless, as being that of a
panegyric, we shall be proud to give him fierce battle on that point.
We thank God we are not only old Tories, but, as the Americans said of
a contemporary historian, the "_oldest of Tories_;" and we are weak
enough to be confirmed in our opinions by the evident fact that they
are those of a small minority of the present age. It is not likely,
therefore, that we should not find an opportunity to break a lance with
our author in regard to Charles I. and the Great Rebellion. We must
admit, however, that Mr Macaulay is much more impartial in his estimate
of that event, than he was in some of his previous essays; that he
gives with anxious fairness the arguments on the opposite side of the
question; and that he no longer represents the royal victim as now a
favourite only with women--and that because his countenance is pacific
and handsome on the canvass of Vandyke, and he took his son often on
his knee, and kissed him.
Mr Macaulay represents the Great Rebellion as a glorious and salutary
struggle for the liberties of England;--a struggle to the success of
which, against the tyranny of the Stuarts, the subsequent greatness of
England is mainly to be ascribed. The trial and execution of Charles
I. he describes as an event melancholy, and to be deplored; but
unavoidable and necessary, in consequence of the perfidy and deceit of
a "man whose whole life had been a series of attacks on the liberties
of England." He does full justice to the courage and dignity with which
he met his fate, but holds that he was deservedly destroyed, though in
a most violent and illegal manner, in consequence of his flatteries and
machinations.[6] "There never," says he, "was a politician to whom so
many frauds and falsehoods were brought home by undeniable evidence."
We take a directly opposite view of the question. We consider the
resistance of the Long Parliament to Charles as a series of selfish and
unprincipled acts of treason against a lawful sovereign; not less fatal
to the liberties of the country at the time, than they were calculated
in the end to have proved to its independence, and which would long
ere this have worked out its ruin, if another event had not, in a way
which its author did not intend, worked out a cure for the disease. We
consider the civil war as commenced from blind selfishness, "ignorant
impatience of taxation," and consummated under the combined influence
of hypocritical zeal and guilty ambition. We regard the death of
Charles as an atrocious and abominable murder, vindicated by no reasons
of expedience, authorised by no principle of justice, which has lowered
for ever England to the level of the adjoining nations in the scale
of crime; and which, had it not been vindicated by subsequent loyalty
and chivalrous feeling, in the better part of the people, would long
since have extinguished alike its liberties and its independence. Even
Hume has represented the conduct and motives of the leaders of the
Long Parliament in too favourable a light--and it is no wonder he did
so, for it is only since his time that the selfish Passions have been
brought into play on the political theatre--which at once explains the
difficulties with which Charles had to struggle, and put in a just
light his tragic fate.
[6] Vol. i. p. 127, 128.
Mr Hume represents the Long Parliament, in the commencement of the
contest with the king, as influenced by a generous desire to secure
and extend the liberties of their country, and as making use of the
constitutional privilege of giving or withholding supplies for that
important object. If this was really their object, we should at once
admit they acted the part of true patriots, and are entitled to the
lasting gratitude of their country and the world. But, admitting this
was what they professed, that this was their stalking-horse, in what
respect did their conduct correspond with such patriotic declarations?
Did they use either their legitimate or usurped power for the
purpose of extending and confirming the liberties of their country,
or even diminishing the weight of the public burdens which pressed
most severely on the people? So far from doing so, they multiplied
these burdens fiftyfold; they levied them, not by the authority of
parliament, but by the terrors of military execution; and while they
refused to the entreaties of the king the pittance of a few hundred
thousand pounds, to put the coasts in a state of defence, and protect
the commerce of his subjects, they levied of their own authority,
and without parliamentary sanction, no less than _eighty-four
millions_ sterling, between 1640 and 1659, in the form of military
contributions--levied for no other purpose but to deluge the kingdom
with blood, destroy its industry, and subject its liberties to the ruin
of military oppression. True, Charles I. dissolved many parliaments,
was often hasty and intemperate in the mode of doing so; for eleven
years reigned without a House of Commons, and brought on the collision
by his attempt to levy ship-money, for the protection of the coasts,
of his own authority. But why did he do so? Why did he endeavour to
dispense with the old and venerable name of parliament, and incur the
odium, and run the risk, of governing alone in a country where the
hereditary revenue was so scanty, and the passion for freedom so strong
that, even with all the aids from parliament, he had never enjoyed so
large an income as two millions a-year? Simply because he was driven to
it by necessity; because he found it was absolutely impossible to get
on with parliaments which obstinately refused to discharge their first
of duties--that of providing for the public defence--or discharge his
duties as chief magistrate of the realm, in conformity either with his
coronation oath or the plain necessities and obligations of his office,
from the invincible resistance which the House of Commons, on every
occasion, made to parting with money.
Their conduct was regulated by a very plain principle--it was perfectly
consistent, and such as, under the existing constitution, could not
fail very soon to bring government to a dead-lock, and compel the
sovereign either at once to abdicate his authority, or barter it away
piecemeal against small grants of money, reluctantly, and in the most
parsimonious spirit, granted by his subjects. They said, "Govern any
way you please, defend the country the best way you can, get out of
your difficulties as you think fit, but do not come to us for money.
Anything but that. It is your business to defend us, it is not ours to
contribute to our defence. Let our coasts be insulted by the French, or
pillaged by the Dutch; let our trade be ruined, and even our fishermen
chased into their harbours, by the Continental privateers; but don't
come to us for money. If we give you anything, it will be as little as
we can in decency offer; and, in return for such liberal concessions,
you must on every occasion surrender an important part of the
prerogative of the crown." The king did this for some years after he
came to the throne, always trusting that his concessions would secure
at length a liberal supply of money, for the public defence, from the
House of Commons. He said, and said with truth, that he had conceded
more to his subjects than any monarch that ever sat on the throne of
England. The Petition of Rights, granted early in his reign, proved
this: it contained nearly all the guarantees since desired or obtained
for English freedom. But all was unavailing. The Commons would give no
money, or they would give it only in exchange for the most essential
prerogatives of the crown, without which public defence was impossible,
and anarchy must have usurped its place.
They began the civil war at length, and handed the nation over to the
horrors of domestic slaughter and military despotism, because the
king would not consent to part with the command of the armed force--a
requisition so monstrous that it plainly amounted to an abrogation
of the royal authority, and has never, since the Restoration, been
seriously contended for by Radicals, Repealers, or Chartists, even in
the worst periods of the Irish Rebellion or French Revolution. It is
not surprising that subsequent times for long mistook the real nature
of the king's situation, and threw on him blame for events of which, in
reality, he was blameless. Mankind were not then so well acquainted as
they have since become, with the strength of an ignorant impatience of
taxation. Since then, they have seen it divide the greatest empires,
ruin the most celebrated commonwealths, disgrace the most famed
republics, paralyse the most powerful states. It has broken down the
central authority, and divided into separate kingdoms the once puissant
German empire; it has ruined and brought partition on the gallant
Polish democracy; it induced on France the horrors of the Revolution,
and permanently destroyed its liberties by causing the Notables to
refuse Calonne's proposition for equal taxation; it has disgraced
the rise of American freedom, by the selfishness of repudiation
and the cupidity of conquest. These were the evils, and this the
disgrace, which Charles I. strove to avert in his contest with the
Long Parliament; these the evils, and this the disgrace, which their
leaders strove to impose on this country. We have only to look at the
Free-trade Hall at Manchester, at this time re-echoing with applause at
proposals to disband our army and sell our ships, in order to be able
to sell cotton goods a halfpenny per pound cheaper than at present, to
see what was the spirit with which Charles I. had to contend during the
Great Rebellion.
Historians have often expressed their surprise at the vigour of
the rule of Cromwell, and the energetic manner in which he caused
the national flag to be respected by foreign states. But, without
detracting from the well-earned fame of the Protector in this
respect, it may safely be affirmed, that the main cause of his
success in foreign transactions was, that he had got the means of
making the English pay taxes. He levied them with the sabre and the
bayonet. Between contributions, sequestrations, and impositions, his
commissioners contrived to wrench enormous sums, for those days, out
of the country. He raised the revenue from £2,000,000 a-year to nearly
£6,000,000. He got quit of the disagreeable burden of parliamentary
grants. He found his troops much more effectual tax-gatherers. He did
what, by gentler means, and in a less oppressive way, Charles had tried
to do. He levied sums from the nation adequate for the public defence,
and which enabled it to take the place to which it was entitled in the
scale of nations. Had the original leaders of the Long Parliament not
been superseded by his iron hand, they would have left England as much
exposed to foreign insult, as much in peril of foreign invasion, as
Poland proved from the triumph of the same selfish principles.
It is true Charles at length became a dissembler, and made many
promises which were afterwards broken. But why did he become a
dissembler? How did it happen that his nature, originally open,
unreserved, and chivalrous, even to a fault, became at length cautious,
and marked by dissimulation? Simply because he was assailed on all
sides by dissemblers and dissimulators. He was driven to it by stern
necessity in his own defence, and as the only way of carrying on the
government. The whole conduct of his parliaments to him was one tissue
of falsehood and deceit. They constantly professed loyalty with their
lips, while they were thinking only of treason in their hearts; they
were loud in their protestations of zeal for the public service, when
they were thinking only of keeping close their purse-strings, and
shaking off every imaginable tax levied for the public defence. Like
their descendants in Transatlantic realms, they, "preferred any load
of infamy, however great, to any burden of taxation, however light."
It was only by fair words, by promising more than he was able to
perform, by bartering the prerogative of the crown for parsimonious
grants--£200,000 one year, £300,000 another--that he was able to
provide, in the most penurious way, for the public service. His
faithful Commons were impressed with the idea, and proceeded on the
principle, that the monarch was an enemy cased in armour, and that it
was their business to strip him of every article he possessed, so as
to leave him entirely at their mercy, and reduce the government to a
pure untaxed democracy. They first got the shield; they next seized the
helmet; the breast-plate could not long be withheld; and at last they
began to fight for the sword. Was consistency, or perfect sincerity of
conduct, practicable with such men? Have not the English, in their wars
in the East, been under the necessity of borrowing from their opponents
much of their vigour and violence, and not unfrequently their ambition
and dissimulation? Let us figure to ourselves Queen Victoria, without
a national debt or parliamentary influence, going to Mr Cobden and the
Commons in Free-Trade Hall, Manchester, and asking for funds to support
the army and navy in a defensive war, which promised no extension
of the market for cotton goods; or the president of the American
republic proposing a direct income-tax of five per cent on his faithful
repudiators, to support a war which held out a prospect neither of
Mexican silver nor Californian gold, and we shall have some idea of
the difficulties with which the unhappy Charles had to contend in his
parliamentary struggles, and appreciate the stern necessity which
turned even his noble and chivalrous character to temporary shifts, and
sometimes discreditable expedients.
Again, as to the death of Charles, can it be regarded in any other
light but as a foul and atrocious murder? He was tried neither by
the Peers nor the Commons--neither by the courts of law, nor a
national convention--but by a self-constituted junto of military
officers, rebels to his government, traitors to their country, who,
having exhausted in their remorseless career every imaginable crime
of robbery, rape, arson, assault, and treason, now added WILFUL
MURDER--cold-blooded murder, to the number. However it is viewed,
the crime was equally unpardonable and inexpedient. If the country
was still to be regarded as a monarchy, though torn by intestine
divisions, then were Cromwell and all his brother regicides not only
murderers, but traitors, for they put to death their lawful sovereign.
If the bonds of allegiance are to be held as having been broken in
the preceding convulsions, and the contest considered as that of one
state with another--which is the most favourable view to adopt for the
regicides--then Charles, when he fell into their hands, was a prisoner
of war; and it was as much murder to put him to death as it would have
been in the English, if they had slain Napoleon when he came on board
the Bellerophon, or in Charles V., if he had despatched Francis I. when
he became his prisoner after the battle of Pavia. The immediate object
at issue when the civil war began--the right claimed by the Commons of
appointing officers to the militia--was one in which they were clearly
and confessedly in the wrong, and one which, if granted by Charles,
as all the previous demands of the Commons had been, would infallibly
have landed the nation in the bottomless pit of an untaxed, unbridled,
and senseless democracy, as incapable of self-defence as Poland, as
regardless of external rights as Rome in ancient, or America in modern
times.
The extreme peril to English liberties and independence which arose
from the exorbitant pretensions and disastrous success of the Long
Parliament, with their canting military successors, distinctly appears
in the deplorable state and disgraceful situation of England from the
Restoration in 1661 to the Revolution in 1688. Notwithstanding all
their professions of regard for freedom, and their anxiety to secure
the liberties of the subject, the Long Parliament had done nothing
for either in future times, while they had destroyed both in present.
They had not even introduced a _habeas corpus_ act to guard against
arbitrary imprisonment. They had not given life appointments to the
judges. They had made no provision for the impartial selection of
juries. They had left the courts of law what, till the Revolution, they
had ever been in English history--the arena in which the contending
factions in the state alternately overthrew or murdered each other.
They were too decided tyrants in their hearts to part with any of the
weapons of tyranny in their hands. They had made no permanent provision
for the support of the crown, or the maintenance of a force by sea and
land adequate to the public defence; but left their sovereign at the
mercy of a parliament of Cavaliers eager for vengeance, thirsting for
blood, but nearly as indisposed to make any suitable grants for the
public service as any of their predecessors had been. The "ignorant
impatience of taxation" was as conspicuous in the parsimony of their
supplies as it had been in those of Charles's parliament. But such was
the strength of the reaction in favour of monarchy and royal authority,
in consequence of the intensity of the evils which had been suffered
from democratic and parliamentary government, that there was scarcely
any sacrifice of public liberties that the royalist parliaments were
not at first disposed to have made, provided it could be done without
trenching on their pecuniary resources. An _untaxed despotism_ was
their idea of the perfection of government, as an untaxed republic had
been the bright vision of the parliamentary leaders. Had Charles II.
been a man of as much vigour and perseverance as he was of quickness
and talent, and had his abilities, which were wasted in the boudoirs
of the Duchess of Portsmouth or the Countess of Castlemaine, been
devoted, like those of Louis XI. or Cardinal Richelieu, to a systematic
attack on the public liberties, he might, without difficulty, have
subverted the freedom of England, and left, as a legacy of the Long
Parliament, to future times, not only the murder of their sovereign,
but the final ruin of the national liberties.
Mr Macaulay has done one essential service to the cause of truth by the
powerful and graphic, and, we doubt not, correct account he has given
in his first volume of the desperate feuds of the rival parties with
each other during this reign, and the universal prostitution of the
forms of justice, and the sanctity of courts of law, to the most cruel
and abominable purposes. There is no picture of human iniquity and
cruelty more revolting than is presented in the alternate triumphs of
the Whig and Tory parties, from the excitement produced by the Popish
and Ryehouse plots, and the noble blood which was shed alternately
by both parties in torrents on the scaffold, to allay the terrors of
insensate folly, or satiate the revenge of aroused indignation. The
hideous iniquity of the courts of law during those disastrous days, and
the entire concurrence of the ruling majority of the moment in their
atrocious proceedings, demonstrate how lamentably the Long Parliament
had failed in erecting any bulwarks for the public liberties, or
strengthening the foundations of public virtue. At the same time, the
disgraceful spectacle of our fleets swept from the Channel, or burnt
in their harbours by the Dutch, proves how wretched a provision the
Great Rebellion had made for the lasting defence of the realm. Nor was
private morality, either in high or low places, on a better footing.
The king and all his ministers received the pensions of Louis XIV.;
the whole leaders of the patriots, from Algernon Sidney downwards,
with the exception of Lord Russell, followed his example. The ladies
of the metropolis, as well as the court, were intent only on intrigue.
The licentiousness of the stage was such as almost exceeds belief.
Nothing was thought of in the House of Commons but saving money, or
satisfying revenge. Such was the parsimony of parliament, whether the
majority was Whig or Royalist, that the most necessary expenses of
the royal household could only be defrayed by pensions from France.
French mistresses directed the king's councils, and almost exclusively
occupied his time; French alliance misdirected the national forces;
French manners entirely subverted the national morals. England, from
its vacillation in foreign policy, had forfeited all the respect of
foreign nations, while, from the general selfishness and corruption
which prevailed, it had lost all respect for itself. The Long
Parliament and Great Rebellion, from the necessary reaction, to which
they gave rise, of loyalty against treason, and of the thirst for
pleasure against the cant of hypocrisy, had all but ruined England;
for they had exchanged its liberties for tyranny, its morals for
licentiousness.
In truth England _was ruined_, both externally and internally, from
these causes, had it not been for one of those events by which
Providence at times confounds the counsels of men, and changes the
destiny of nations. The accession of James II., and the systematic
attack which, in concert with Louis XIV., he made on the Protestant
faith, at length united all England against the fatal attempt. The
spectacle of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in France, in
November 1605, showed the Protestants what they had to expect from the
measures simultaneously adopted, and in virtue of a secret compact,
by James II. in England. The Treaty of Augsburg in 1686, by which the
Protestant states of the Continent were united in a league against this
Roman Catholic invasion, and to which William III. on the Revolution,
immediately got England to accede, was the foundation of the grand
alliance which secured independence to the Reformed faith, and liberty
to Europe, as effectually as the grand alliance in 1813 rescued it
from the tyranny of Napoleon. We go along entirely with Mr Macaulay's
admirable account of the causes which led to the general coalition of
parties against James--the abominable cruelty of Jeffrey's campaign
in the west, after the suppression of Monmouth's rebellion, and the
evident determination the monarch evinced to force the slavery and
absurdities of the Romish faith on a nation too generally enlightened
to submit to either. It is refreshing to see these just and manly
sentiments, so long the glory of England, coming from a man of his
weight and learning, after the sickly partiality for Roman Catholic
agitators which, for the purposes of faction, have so long pervaded
many of his party, and the inexplicable return to the sway of priests
and confessors which has recently appeared among some of our women of
fashion. We hold that James justly forfeited his crown for his share in
these atrocious proceedings, and entirely concur with Mr Macaulay in
regarding the Revolution as the turning-point of English history--the
_terminus a quo_, from which we are to date its celebrity in arms
and literature, its mighty advance in strength and power, and the
establishment of its liberties on a lasting foundation. We congratulate
the country that the task of recording the circumstances, and tracing
the consequences of this great event, has fallen into the hands of
a gentleman so singularly qualified to do it justice, and sincerely
wish him a long lease of life and health to bring his noble work to a
conclusion.
If we were disposed to criticise at all the manner in which he has
executed the part of this great work hitherto presented to the public,
we should say that, in the tracing the causes of events, he ascribes
too much to domestic, and too little to foreign influences; and that in
the delineation of character, though he never advances what is false,
he not unfrequently conceals, or touches but lightly, on what is true.
He represents England as almost entirely regulated in its movements
by internal agitation or parliamentary contests; forgetting that that
agitation, and these contests, were in general themselves, in great
part, produced by the simultaneous changes going on in opinion and
external relations on the Continent. His history, as yet at least, is
too exclusively English, not sufficiently European. Thus he mentions
only incidentally, and in three lines, the treaty of Augsburg in 1686,
which bound Protestant Europe against France, and entirely regulated
the external policy and internal thought of England for the next
century. So also in the delineation of character: we can never fall to
admire what he has done, but we have sometimes cause to regret what he
has left undone. He has told us, what is undoubtedly true, that James
II. did not, after the struggle began in England, evince the courage,
he had previously shown in action with the Dutch; but he has not told
us what is equally true, that in those actions he had fought as often,
and evinced heroism as great, as either Nelson or Collingwood. He has
told us that James sedulously attended to the royal navy, and was
successful because he was the only honest man in his dockyards; but he
has not told us what is equally true, that it was that attention to the
navy, and the effort to raise funds for it, which the Long Parliament
from selfish parsimony positively refused to grant, which cost
Charles I. his throne and life, and, now renewed by his son, laid the
foundation of the navy which gained the battle of La Hogue, 1692, broke
the naval power of Louis XIV., and for the next century determined the
maritime struggle between France and England.
He has told us sufficiently often, that the beginning of the Duke
of Marlborough's fortunes was the gift of £5000, which he received
from the beautiful mistress of the king, Lady Castlemaine. This is
undoubtedly true; and he has added what we have no doubt is equally
so, that on one occasion he was so near being caught with her ladyship
that he only escaped by leaping out of the window. He has added,
also, that whenever he was going to do anything particularly base,
Marlborough always began speaking about his conscience, and the
Protestant faith. We have no objection to the leaping the window, for
it is very probable, and at all events _piquant_--and _se non e vero e
ben trovato_; but we object vehemently to his protestations in favour
of the Reformed religion being set down as a hypocritical cover for
base and selfish designs, for that is imputing motives--a mode of
proceeding never allowed in the humblest court of justice, and in an
especial manner reprehensible in a firstrate historian, who is painting
a character for the instruction and consideration of future times.
And since Mr Macaulay has so prominently brought forward what is to be
blamed in Marlborough's career, (and no one can condemn more severely
than we do his treachery to James, though it has been so long praised
by Whig writers,) we hope he will record with equal accuracy, and
tell as often, that he refused repeatedly the offer of the government
of the Low Countries, with its magnificent appointment of £60,000
a-year, made to him by the Emperor after the battle of Ramilies, lest
by accepting it he should induce dissension in the alliance; that his
private correspondence with the duchess evinces throughout the war
the most anxious desire for its termination; and that, at the time
when the factious Tory press represented him as prolonging hostilities
for his own sordid purposes, he was anxiously endeavouring to effect
a general pacification at the conferences of Gertruydenberg, and
writing a private and very earnest letter to his nephew, the Duke of
Berwick, then at the head of the French army, urging him to use his
influence with Louis XIV. in order to bring about a peace. We would
strongly recommend Mr Macaulay to consider the advice we have heard
given to a historian in the delineation of character: "Make it a point
of conscience to seek out, and give with full force, all authentic
_favourable_ anecdotes of persons whom you _dislike_, or to whose
opinions you are _opposed_. As to those whom you like, or who are of
your own party, you may exercise your own discretion."
Cordially concurring, however, as we do with Mr Macaulay, in his
estimate of the beneficial effects of the Revolution of 1688, there is
one peculiar benefit which he may possibly not bring so prominently
forward as its importance deserves, and which, therefore, we are
anxious to impress upon the public mind. It is true that it purified
the bench, confirmed the Habeas Corpus Act, closed the human shambles
which the Court of King's Bench had been, pacified Scotland, and for
above a century effected the prodigy of keeping Ireland quiet. But did
yet greater things than these; and the era of the Revolution is chiefly
remarkable for the new dynasty having taught the government _how to
raise taxes in the country_, and thus brought England to take the
place to which she was entitled in the scale of nations, by bringing
the vast national resources to bear upon the national struggles.
Charles I. had lost his crown and his head in the attempt to raise
money--first legally, and then, when he failed in that, illegally--in
the realm, adequate to the national defence. Cromwell had asserted the
national dignity in an honourable way, only because his troops gave
him the means of levying sufficient supplies, for the first time in
English history, at the point of the bayonet. But with the termination
of his iron rule, and the restoration of constitutional sway at
the Restoration, the old difficulty about supplies returned, and
government, to all practical purpose,was nearly brought to a dead-lock.
The Commons, now Royalist, would vote nothing, or next to nothing, in
the way of money; and the nation was defeated and disgraced, from the
impossibility of discovering any way of making it vote money for its
own defence. But that which the Stuarts could never effect by appeals
to honour, spirit, or patriotism, William III. and Anne soon found the
means of accomplishing, by bringing into play, and enlisting on their
side, different and less creditable motives. They did not oppose honour
and patriotism to interest, but they contrived to rear up one set of
interests to combat another. They brought with them from Holland,
where it had been long practised, and was perfectly understood, the
art of managing public assemblies. They no longer bullied the House of
Commons--_they bribed it_; and, strange to say, it is to the entire
success of the gigantic system of borrowing, expending, and corrupting,
which they introduced, and which their successors so faithfully
followed, that the subsequent greatness of England is mainly to be
ascribed.
William III., on his accession, immediately joined the league of
Augsburg against France--a league obviously rendered necessary by the
exorbitant ambition and priest-ridden tyranny of Louis XIV.; and the
contest, brought to a glorious termination by the treaty of Ryswick
in 1697, was but a prelude to the triumphant War of the Succession,
abruptly closed by the discreditable peace of Utrecht in 1714. That
England was the life and soul of this alliance, and that Marlborough
was the right arm which won its glorious victories, is universally
acknowledged; but it is not equally known, what is not less true, that
it was the system of managing the House of Commons by means of loans,
good places, and bribes, which alone provided the sinews of war, and
prepared the triumphs of Blenheim and Ramilies. It is true the nation
was, at first at least, hearty and unanimous in the contest, both from
religious zeal for the Reformation and national rivalry with France;
but experience had shown that, when the prospect of private plunder,
as in the wars of the Edwards and Henrys, did not arouse the national
strength, it was a matter of absolute impossibility to get the House
of Commons to vote the necessary supplies for any time together. No
necessity, however urgent, no danger, however pressing,--no claims of
justice, no considerations of expedience, no regard for their children,
no consideration for themselves, could induce the English of those days
to vote anything like an adequate amount of taxes. As this was the
state of matters in this country at the time when the whole resources
of the neighbouring kingdoms were fully drawn forth by despotic power,
and Louis XIV. had two hundred thousand gallant soldiers under arms,
and sixty sail of the line afloat, it is evident that, unless some
method of conquering this reluctance had been devised, England must
speedily have been conquered and partitioned, or have sunk into the
rank of a third-rate power like Sweden. But William III., before the
Protestant zeal cooled, and the old love of money returned, provided
a new and all-powerful agent to combat it. He founded the national
debt! He and Anne raised it, between 1688 and 1708, from £661,000 to
£54,000,000. He tripled the revenue, and gave so much of it to the
House of Commons that they cordially agreed to the tripling. He spent
largely; he corrupted still more largely. He no longer attacked in
front the battery; he turned it, got into the redoubt by the gorge, and
directed its guns upon the enemy. He made the national interests in
support of taxation more powerful than those operating to resist it.
Thence the subsequent greatness and glory of England--for by no other
possible method could the impatience of taxation, so strongly rooted
in the nation, have been overcome, or the national armaments have been
placed on the footing rendered necessary, either for securing the
national defence, or asserting the national honour.
The whole Whig Ministers, from the Revolution to 1762, when they were
dispossessed of power by George III. and Lord Bute, acted on this
system of government by influence and corruption. Mr Macaulay's ample
acquaintance with the memoirs, published and unpublished, of that
period, will doubtless enable him to give numerous anecdotes on the
subject, as true and as amusing as Marlborough's leaping from Lady
Castlemaine's window, or James II.'s thraldom to Catherine Sedley. The
memoirs on the subject that have recently come out, give details of
corruption so barefaced and gross that they would exceed belief, if
their frequency, and the testimony to their authenticity from different
quarters, did not defy disbelief. It is now known that, when Sir Robert
Walpole's parliamentary supporters were invited to his ministerial
dinner, each of them found a £500 note under his napkin.
We do not blame the Whigs for this wholesale system of influence and
corruption, which pervaded every class of society, and regulated the
disposal of every office, from the humblest exciseman to the prime
minister. There was no other way of doing. But for it, government
would, a century and a half ago, have been brought to a stand, and the
nation defeated and subjugated. We are no supporters of corruption, or
the influence of money, if higher and nobler principles of action can
be brought into play, and rejoice that it has now for nearly a century
been exchanged for the less offensive and demoralising, but not less
effectual system of influence and patronage. But, though much higher
motives are sometimes most powerful on extraordinary occasions, all
experience proves that, at ordinary times, and in the long run, it is
in vain to attempt to combat one interest but by another interest. If
any man doubts it, let him try to persuade the free-trade audiences
at Manchester to agree to a duty on cotton goods to uphold the navy,
or the Irish in Ulster to agree to a rate to save their countrymen in
Connaught from dying of famine, or the Scotch lairds to agree to a tax
for a rural police, to save themselves from robbery and murder. We
should rejoice if men, as a body, could be brought to act only from
pure and honourable motives; but, taking them as they are, we are
thankful for any system which brings the selfish motives round to the
side of patriotism, and causes parliamentary influence to save us from
the Russian knout or French requisitions.
One of the most interesting and original parts of Mr Macaulay's work
is the account he has given, in the first volume, of the manners
and customs, habits of the people, and state of society in England,
prior to the Revolution, compared with what now exists. In doing so,
he has only exemplified what, in his admirable essay on history in
the _Edinburgh Review_, he has described as a leading object in that
species of composition; and it must be confessed that his example tends
greatly to show the truth of his precept. This part of his work is
learned, laborious, elaborate, and in the highest degree amusing. It is
also in many respects, and in no ordinary degree, instructive. But it
has the same fault as the other parts of his work--it is _one-sided_.
It exhibits, in the highest degree, the skill of the pleader, the
brilliancy of the painter, the power of the rhetorician; but it does
not equally exhibit the reflection of the sage, or the impartiality
of the judge. It savours too much of a brilliant party essay in the
_Edinburgh Review_. Mr Macaulay's object is to _write up_ the present
times and _write down_ the past; and we fully admit he has done so with
the greatest ability. But we are thoroughly convinced his picture,
how graphic soever, is in great part deceptive. It tells the truth,
but not the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It represents the
ludicrous and extreme features of society as its real and average
characteristics; it bears, we are convinced, the same relation, in
many respects, to the real aspect of times of which it treats, which
the burlesques of Mrs Trollope do to the actual and entire features of
Transatlantic society. These burlesques are very amusing; they furnish
diverting drawing-room reading; but would a subsequent historian be
justified in assuming them as the text-work of a grave and serious
description of America in the nineteenth century? We have no doubt
Mr Macaulay could produce an authority from a comedy, a tract, or a
satire, for every fact he advances; but we have just as little doubt
that hundreds of other facts, equally authentic and true, might
be adduced of an opposite tendency, of which he says nothing; and
therefore his charge to the jury, how able soever, is all on one side.
His object is to show that, in _every_ respect, the present age is
incomparably happier and more virtuous than those which have preceded
it--a doctrine which has descended to him, in common with the whole
liberal party of the world, from the visions of Rousseau. We, who
have a firm belief in human corruption, alike from revelation and
experience, believe such visions to be a perfect chimera, and that,
after a certain period of efflorescence, decay and degradation are as
inevitable to societies as to individual men. There can be no doubt
that, in many respects, Mr Macaulay is right. The present age is far
richer, more refined, and more luxurious than any which has preceded
it. In a material view, the higher and middle classes enjoy advantages,
and are habituated to comforts, unknown in any former age. The chances
of life have increased over the whole population twenty-five, in the
higher classes at least forty per cent. Humanity has made a most
cheering progress: the barbarity of former days is not only unknown,
but seems inconceivable. A British tradesman is better clothed, fed,
and lodged, than a Plantagenet baron. So far all is true; but _audi
alteram partem_. Are we equally disinterested, magnanimous, and brave,
with the nations or ages which have preceded us? Are the generous
affections equally victorious over the selfish? Are the love of gain,
the thirst for pleasure, the passion for enjoyment, such very weak
passions amongst us, that they could be readily supplanted by the
ardour of patriotism, the self-denial of virtue, the heroism of duty?
Would modern England have engaged in a crusade for the deliverance of
the holy sepulchre? Would the merchants of London set fire to their
stock-exchange and capital, as those of Numantia or Saguntum did, to
save it from the spoiler? Will Free-trade Hall ever overflow with
patriotic gifts, as the Bourse at Moscow did in 1812? We have laid out
a hundred and fifty millions on railways, in the hope of getting a
good dividend in this world: would we lay out one million in building
another York Cathedral, or endowing another Greenwich Hospital? Have we
no experience of an age
"When wealth accumulates and men decay?"
These are the questions an impartial judge will ask himself after
reading Mr Macaulay's brilliant diatribe on the past, in his first
volume.
He tells us that the country gentlemen, before the Revolution were
mere ignorant country bumpkins, few of whom could read or write, and
who, when they for once in their lives came up to London, went staring
about on Holborn or Ludgate Hill, till a spout of water from some
impending roof fell into their mouths, while a thief was fumbling in
their pockets, or a painted denizen from some of the neighbouring
purlieus decoyed him into her bower. Be it so. It was these country
bumpkins who gained the battles of Cressy, Poitiers, Azincour, and
Flodden; they built York Cathedral and St Paul's; their sons gained
the victories of Sluys and La Hogue, of Ramilies and Blenheim; they
were ennobled by the devotion and sufferings of the cavaliers. We hope
their well-fed, long-lived, and luxurious descendants would rise from
their beds of down to do the same. He tells us the clergy of the age
of Charles II. were almost all drawn from the very humblest classes,
that their education was very imperfect, and that they occupied so low
a place in society that no lady's-maid, who had hopes of the steward,
would look at them; and that they were often glad to take up with a
damsel whose character had been blown upon by the young squire. Be it
so: that age produced the Clarkes and the Cudworths, the Barrows and
the Tillotsons, the Taylors and the Newtons, the Halls and the Hookers,
of the Church of England; and their efforts stemmed the torrent of
licentiousness which, in reaction against the cant of the Covenanters,
deluged the country on the accession of Charles II. The schools and
colleges in which they were bred had produced Milton and Spencer,
Shakspeare and Bacon, John Locke and Sir Isaac Newton. We hope that the
labours of their "honourable and reverend" successors, who have been so
highly educated at Oxford and Cambridge, may be equally successful in
eradicating the prevailing vices of the present age, and that, after
the lapse of a century and a half, their works will occupy as high
place in general estimation.
To illustrate our meaning, we shall extract two paragraphs from a
manuscript work on Contemporary History, which recently passed through
our hands, and ask Mr Macaulay himself whether he can gainsay any fact
it advances, and yet whether he will admit the justice of the picture
which it draws.
"The British empire, from 1815 to 1848, exhibited the most
extraordinary social and political features that the world had ever
seen. No former period had presented so complete a commentary on the
maxim, 'extremes meet.' It immediately succeeded the termination of a
desperate and costly war, in the course of which the most herculean
efforts for the national defence and the interests of the empire had
been made; and it witnessed the abandonment of them all. Twenty years
of desperate hostility had bequeathed to it untouched a sinking fund
of fifteen millions annually; thirty-five years of unbroken peace saw
that sinking fund extinguished. Protection to industry--support of
the colonies--upholding of the navy, had been the watchwords of the
nation during the war. Free trade, disregard of the colonies, cheap
freights, became the ruling maxims during the peace which it had
purchased. The only intelligible principle of action in the people
seemed to be to change everything, and undo all that had been done.
The different classes of society, during this divergence, became as
far separated in station and condition as in opinion. The rich were
every day growing richer, the poor poorer. The wealth of London, and of
a few great houses in the country, exceeded all that the imagination
of the East had conceived in the _Arabian Nights_: the misery of
Ireland, and of the manufacturing towns, outstripped all that the
imagination of Dante had figured of the terrible. The first daily
exhibited, during the season, all the marvels of Aladdin's palace;
the last, at the same period, presented all the horrors of Ugolino's
prison. Undeniable statistics proved the reality and universality of
this extraordinary state of things, which had become so common as to
cease to attract attention. The income-tax returns established the
existence of £200,000,000 annual income above £150, in Great Britain
alone, by far the greater part of which was the produce of realised
wealth; while the poor-law returns exhibited, in the two islands, four
millions of paupers, or a full seventh of the population subsisting
on public charity. The burden of the poor-rates in the two islands
rose, before the close of the period, to £8,000,000 a-year, besides
£1,300,000 for county rates. Population had increased fast, but crime
far faster: it had, during forty years, advanced _ten times_ as fast
as the numbers of the people. General distress prevailed during the
period among the working classes, interrupted only by occasional and
deceptive gleams of sunshine. So acute did it become in 1847 that a
noble grant of £10,000,000 from the British parliament alone prevented
two millions of Irish dying of famine; as it was, 250,000 in that
single year perished from starvation, and as many, in that year and
the next, were driven into exile from the United Kingdom. The people
in Liverpool returned thanks to God when the inundation of Irish
paupers sank to 2000 a-week. Glasgow, for two years, suffered under an
infliction of above a thousand weekly, which in that short time raised
its poor-rates from £20,000 to £200,000 a-year. During this protracted
period of suffering, the feeling of the different classes of society
became as much alienated as their interests had been. Rebellion broke
out in Ireland; the West Indies were ruined, and the Chartists numbered
their millions in England. The Treasury shared in the general distress.
It had become impossible to raise funds from the nation adequate to its
necessary expenses; and, at length, so pressing did the clamour for
a reduction of taxation become, that it was seriously proposed, and
loudly approved by a large and influential portion of the community,
to sell our ships of war, disband our troops, and surrender ourselves
unarmed to the tender mercies of the adjoining nations, when war with
unwonted fierceness was raging both on the continent of Europe and in
our Eastern dominions.
"Nor was the aspect of society more satisfactory in its social
condition--the manners of the higher, or the habits of the lower
orders. Intoxication, seemingly purposely encouraged by government by
a large reduction of the duties on spirits, spread the most frightful
demoralisation through our great towns. Licentiousness spread to an
unparalleled extent in the metropolis, and all the principal towns;
and the amount of female corruption on the streets, and at the
theatres, exceeded anything ever witnessed since the days of Messalina
or Theodora. The drama was ruined: it was supplanted, as always
occurs in the decay of nations, by the melodrama; the theatre by the
amphitheatre. Drury Lane was turned into an arena for wild beasts,
Covent Garden into an Italian Opera. The, magnificent attractions of
the opera exceeded anything ever witnessed before; the warmth of its
scenes, and the liberal display of the charms of the _danseuses_,
did not prevent it from being nightly crowded by the whole rank and
fashion of the metropolis. A universal thirst for gain or excitement
had seized the nation. No danger, however great, no immorality, however
crying, was able to stop them, when there was the prospect of a good
dividend. At one period, a hundred and fifty millions were wasted in
loans to "healthy young republics," as the Foreign Secretary himself
admitted in parliament; at another, a still larger sum was laid out on
domestic railways, not one half of which could ever produce anything.
Three guineas a-night were habitually given for a single stall-seat
at the Opera, to hear a Swedish singer, during the railway mania: but
then the occupant was indifferent--he put it down to the railway, and
came there, reeling from the champagne and hock drank at a neighbouring
hotel, at its expense. Most of these railways were mere bubbles, never
meant to go on; when the fortunate projectors had got the shares landed
at a premium in the hands of the widow and the orphan, they let it go
to the bottom. There was a great talk about religion, but the talkers
were not always exclusively set on things above. Fine ladies sometimes
asked a sly question on coming out of their third service on Sunday,
or their second on Friday, what was the price of Great Westerns, or
whether the broad or the narrow gauge was likely to carry the day.
The reading of men was chiefly confined to the newspapers; of women
to novels, or occasional morsels of scandal from scandalous trials.
There was great talk about the necessity of keeping up the tone of
public morality; but it was appearances, not realities, which were
chiefly aimed at. 'Not to leave undone, but to keep unknown,' was
the maxim of the London, as it had been of the Venetian dames; the
delinquents who were punished were chastised, like the Spartan youths,
not for what they had done, but for what they had let be discovered.
So capricious was public opinion in this particular, in the very
highest circles, that it was stated by the most popular author of the
day, in the _Edinburgh Review_, that the English women wakened every
seven years, and massacred some unfortunate detected delinquent: they
then fell asleep, satisfied with the sacrifice to propriety, for seven
years, when they slaughtered another, and again sunk into a third
septennial torpor. Meanwhile the morals of the manufacturing districts
were daily getting worse; millions existed there who did not attend
divine service on Sunday; hundreds of thousands who had never been in
a church; thousands who had never heard the name of Jesus but in an
oath. A hideous mass of heathen profligacy had arisen in the heart of a
Christian land. From it thousands of both sexes were annually sent up
to the metropolis to feed its insatiable passions, or sacrifice their
souls and bodies on the altar of Moloch."
So far our unpublished manuscript. Mr Macaulay is too well acquainted
with passing events not to know that every word in the preceding
picture is true, and too candid not to admit that all these
observations are just. But he knows there is something to be said on
the other side. He is familiar with a counter set of facts; and he
could in half-an-hour write two paragraphs on the state of the country
during the same period, equally true and striking, which would leave on
the mind of the reader an impression of a directly opposite character.
Where is the truth to be found between such opposite statements, both
true in regard to the same period? In the _combination of both_, and an
impartial summing up by the historian of the inferences deducible from
_both sets of facts_, equally clearly and forcibly given. It is this
statement of the facts on both sides which, amidst all our admiration
for his genius, we often desiderate in Mr Macaulay; and nothing but the
adoption of it, and taking his seat on the _Bench instead of the Bar
of History_, is required to render his noble work as weighty as it is
able, and as influential in forming the opinion of future ages, as it
unquestionably will be in interesting the present.
JOHNSTON'S PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY.[7]
[7] _The Physical Atlas: A series of Maps and Notes on the Geographical
Distribution of Natural Phenomena._ By ALEXANDER KEITH
JOHNSTON, Geographer in Ordinary to Her Majesty, &c. Folio.
In this age of scientific illustration, no more splendid work has been
produced than the one of which we now give some general notice to our
readers. It is not our purpose to panegyrise either the work or the
author; but it is only justice to say, that no work more distinguished
by completeness of knowledge on its subject--by the novelty, variety,
and depth of its researches--by the skill of its arrangement, and by
the beauty of its engravings and typography--has ever appeared in this
country, or in any other. It is a magnificent tribute to the science
and to the skill of England.
The author, in his desire to acknowledge his obligations, by stating
that his work is founded on the _Physical Atlas_ of Professor Berghaus,
has done himself injustice. His volume, though naturally availing
itself of all contemporary knowledge, exhibits all the originality
which can make it his own.
Of all modern sciences, the science of the globe has made the most
rapid, the most remarkable, and the most important progress. Bacon
makes the fine remark, that while the works of man advance by
successive additions, the works of Nature all go on at once: thus the
machinist adds wheel to wheel, and spring to spring, but the earth
produces the tree, branch and bark, trunk and leaf, together. There is
something analogous to this combined operation in physical geography: a
whole crowd of remarkable discoveries seem to have burst on us at once,
expressly designed to invigorate and impel our progress in geographical
science. Thus, our century has witnessed new phenomena of magnetism,
new laws of heat and refrigeration, new laws even of the tempest, new
rules of the tides, new expedients for the preservation of health at
sea, new arrangements for the supply of fresh food, and even for the
supply of fresh water by distillation, and all tending to the same
object--the knowledge of the globe.
The use of steam, to which modern mechanism has given almost a new
existence, and certainly a new power--the conquest of wind and wave by
the steam-ship, and the almost miraculous saving of time and space by
the steam-carriage; the new necessity of remote enterprise, originating
in the urgency of commercial and manufacturing difficulties; the
opening of the thousand islands of the Indian Archipelago, till now
known to us as scarcely more than the seat of savage life, or the scene
of Oriental fable; the breaking down of that old and colossal barrier
of restrictions and prejudices, which, more than the wall of China,
excluded England from intercourse with a population amounting to a
third of mankind; and most of all, those vast visitations of apparent
evil, which the great Disposer of things is evidently transmuting, year
by year, into real good, by propelling the impoverished multitudes of
Europe into the wildernesses of the world--all exhibiting a stupendous
combination of simple means, and a not less astonishing convergency
to the one high purpose, the mastery of the globe--place Physical
Geography at the head of the sciences essential to the happiness and
power of humankind.
In the glance which we shall give at this great science, we look only
to the external structure of the earth; briefly protesting against all
those theories which refer its origin to an earlier period, or a longer
process, than the "six days" of Scripture. It is true, that Moses may
not have been a philosopher, though the man "learned in all the wisdom
of the Egyptians" may have known more than many a philosopher of later
days. It is equally true, that the object of the Book of Genesis was
not to give a treatise on geology. But Moses was a historian--it is
the express office of a historian to state _facts_; and if Moses
stated the "heavens and the earth, and all that therein is," to have
been created and furnished in "six days," we must either receive the
statement as true, or give up the historian as a fabricator. But if we
believe, in compliance with the Divine word, that "all Scripture is by
inspiration of God," by what subterfuge can we escape the conclusion,
that the narrative of Genesis is divine? Or if, in the childish
scepticism of the German school, we require a more positive testimony,
what can be more positive than the declaration of the commandment of
the Sabbath, "that in six days God made heaven and earth;" founding
also upon this declaration the Sabbath--an institution meant for
every age, and for the veneration and sanctification of every race of
mankind? If such a declaration can be false, what can be true? If ever
words were plain, those are the words of plainness. The law of Sinai
was delivered with all the solemnities of a law forming the foundation
of every future law of earth. It would have been as majestic, and as
miraculous, to have fixed the creation at a million of years before the
being of Adam. But we can discover no possible reason for the history,
but that it was the truth. That truth is divine.
If the geologist shall persist in repeating, that the phenomena are
incompatible with the history, our reply is, "Your science is still in
its infancy--a science of a day, feebly beginning to collect facts, and
still so weak as to enjoy the indulgence of extravagant conclusions.
There have been a thousand theories of creation--each popular,
arrogant, and self-satisfied, in its own time; each swept away by
another equally popular, arrogant, and self-satisfied, and all equally
deserving of rejection by posterity. You must acquire _all_ the facts,
before you _can_ be qualified to theorise. The last and most consummate
work of genius, and of centuries, is a true theory."
But, without dwelling further on this high subject, we must observe,
that there is one inevitable fact, for which the modern geologist makes
no provision whatever; and that fact is, that the beginning of things
on the globe _must_ have been totally different from the processes
going on before our eyes. For instance, Adam must have been created in
the full possession of manhood; for, if he had been formed an infant,
he must have perished through mere helplessness. When God looked on
this world, and pronounced all to be "very good"--which implies the
completion of his purpose, and the perfection of his work--is it
possible to conceive, that he looked only on the germs of production,
on plains covered with eggs, or seas filled with spawn, or forests
still buried in the capsules of seeds; on a creation utterly shapeless,
lifeless, and silent, instead of the myriads of delighted existence,
all enjoying the first sense of being?
But, if the first formation of the world of life _must_ have been
the act of a vast principle, to which we have no resemblance in the
subsequent increase and continuance of being, what ground have we for
arguing, that the common processes of material existence in our day
must have been the same in the origin of things? On the whole, we
regard the declaration--"In six days God made the heavens, and the
earth, the sea, and all that in them is," as an _insuperable bar_ to
all the modern fantasies of the geologist, as a direct rebuke to his
profaneness, and as a solemn judgment against his presumption.
The whole surface of the globe gives striking evidence of design,
and of design contemplating the service of man. But one of the most
remarkable evidences of that design is given in the _Mountain Map_ of
the globe. Variety of temperature, the supply of water, and the change
of level, are essential to variety of production, to fertility of
soil, and to the vigour and health of the human frame--the expedient
to meet them all is provided in the mountain districts of the great
continents. A mountain chain girdles the whole of the mass of land from
the Atlantic to the Sea of Kamchatka. Minor chains, some parallel,
some branching from the great northern chain, and some branches of
those branches, intersect every region of the globe. The whole bears
a remarkable resemblance to the position of the spine in the human
frame, with its collateral muscular and venous connexion with the
body. An outline view of the mountains of our hemisphere would be
strikingly like a sketch of the human anatomy. The general formation of
the countries north and south of those chains is early the same--vast
plains, extending to the sea, or traversed and closed in by a bordering
chain. The great Tartarian desert is a plain extending, under various
names, five thousand miles from west to east.
Spain is a country of mountains, or rather a vast table-land,
intersected by six ranges of lofty, rugged, and barren hills. Northern
Africa is a basin of plains, surrounded by vast ridges. Morocco,
Algiers, and Tunis, find in those hills at once their frontiers and
their fertility. The Pyrenees form a chain of nearly three hundred
miles long, and upwards of fifty broad--a province of mountains,
intersected by valleys of romantic beauty and exuberant fertility. But
the Alps, from their position between the two most brilliant nations
of the Continent--France and Italy--and from the extraordinary series
of memorable events of which they have been the theatre, since the
earliest periods of European history, are the most celebrated range
of mountains in the world. The higher Alps, beginning at the Gulf of
Genoa, and extending north and east through the Grisons and the Tyrol,
stretch between four and five hundred miles. They then divide into two
branches, one of which reaches even to the Euxine. The breadth of the
great range is, on an average, a hundred and fifty miles.
The Apennines, another memorable chain, also beginning at the Gulf of
Genoa, strike direct through the heart of Italy, and end in Calabria--a
line of eight hundred miles. Dalmatia and Albania are _knots_ of hills;
Pindus, and the mountains of Northern Greece, are bold offsets from the
Eastern Alps.
Among those wonderful arrangements, the table-lands are perhaps the
most wonderful. In the midst of countries where everything seemed to
tend to the mountainous form, we find vast plains raised almost to a
mountainous height, yet retaining their level. This form peculiarly
occurs in latitudes of high temperature. The centre of Spain is a
table-land of more than ninety-two thousand square miles--one half of
the area of Spain.
The country between the two ranges of the Atlas is a table-land,
exhibiting the richest products, and possessing the finest climate,
of Northern Africa. Equatorial Africa is one immense table-land, of
which, however, we can only conjecture the advantages. Whether from
the difficulty of approach, the distance, or the diversion of the
current of adventure to other quarters of the world, this chief portion
of the African continent continues almost unknown to Europeans. The
central region is a blank in our maps, but occasional tales reach us
of the plenty, the pomp, and even of the civilisation and industry of
the table-land. The centre of India is a table-land, possessing, in
that region of fire and fever, a bracing air, and a productive, though
rugged soil.
The table-lands of Asia partake of the characteristic magnitude which
belongs to that mighty quarter of the globe. That of Persia has an area
of more than a million and a half of square miles. That of Tibet has
an area of six times the extent, with a still greater elevation above
the level of the sea--its general altitude being about the height of
Mont Blanc, and, in some instances, two thousand feet higher. The mean
altitude of the Persian plateau is not above four thousand feet.
We have adverted to those formations of vast elevated plains in the
midst of countries necessarily exposed to extreme heat, as one of the
remarkable instances of providential contrivance, if we must use that
familiar word in such mighty instances of design, for the comfort of
animated being. We thus find, in the latitudes exposed to the fiercest
heat of the sun, a provision for a temperature consistent with the
health, activity, and industry of man. Persia, which, if on the
level of the sea, would be a furnace, is thus reduced to comparative
coolness; Tibet, which would be a boundless plain of fiery sand,
exhibits that sternness of climate which makes the northern Asiatic
bold, healthy, and hardy.
If the Tartar ranger over those lofty plains is not a model of European
virtue, he at least has not sunk to the Asiatic slave; he is bold,
active, and has been, and may be again, an universal conqueror. The
same qualities have always distinguished the man of the table-land,
wherever he has found a leader. The soldiery of Mysore no sooner
appeared in the field, than they swept all Hindostan before them; the
Persians, scarcely two centuries since, ravaged the sovereignty of the
Mogul; and the tribes of the Atlas, even in our own day, made a more
daring defence of their country, than all the disciplined forces of the
Continent against Napoleon.
The two most remarkable ranges of Asia are, the Caucasus, extending
seven hundred miles from west to east, with branches shooting north
and south; and the Himalaya, a mountain chain of nearly three thousand
miles in length, uniting with the Hindoo Coosh and the mountains of
Assam. This range is probably the loftiest on the globe, averaging
eighteen thousand feet--several of the summits rising above twenty-five
thousand. Many of the _passes_ are above the summit of Mont Blanc, and
the whole constitutes a scene of indescribable grandeur, a throne of
the solitary majesty of Nature.
But, another essential use of the mountain chains is their supply of
water--the fluid most necessary to the existence of the animal and
vegetable world,--and this is done by an expedient the most simple, but
the most admirable. If the surcharge of the clouds, dashing against the
mountain pinnacles, were to be poured down at once, it must descend
with the rapidity of a torrent, and deluge the plains. But, those
surcharges first take a form by which their deposit is gradual and
safe, and then assume a second form, by which their transmission to the
plains is gradual and unintermitting. They descend on the summits in
snow, and are retained on the sides in ice. The snow feeds the glacier;
the glacier feeds the river. It is calculated that, without reckoning
the glaciers of the Grisons, there are fifteen hundred square miles of
glacier in the Alps alone, from a hundred to six hundred feet deep. The
glacier is constantly melting, from the mere temperature of the earth;
but, as if this process were too slow for its use, it is constantly
moving downwards, at a certain number of feet a-year, and thus bringing
the great body of ice more within the limit of liquefaction. All the
chief rivers of Europe and Asia have their rise in the deposits of the
mountain glaciers.
In addition to all these important uses, the mountains assist in
forming the character of man. The mountaineer is generally free from
the vices of the plain. He is hardy and adventurous, yet attached to
home; bold, and yet simple; independent, and yet unambitious of the
wealth or the distinctions of mankind. Whether shepherd or hunter, he
generally dies as he lived; and, though daring in defence of his hills,
he has seldom strayed beyond them for the disturbance of mankind.
The Swiss may form an exception; but their hireling warfare is not
ambition, but trade. Their nation is pacific, while the individuals
let themselves out to kill, or be killed. The trade is infamous
and irreligious, offensive to human feeling, and contrary to human
duty; but it has no more reference to the habits of the mountaineer
than the emigration to California has to the habits of the clown of
Massachusets; the stimulant only is the same--the love of gold.
We have adverted to the mountain system of the globe, from its giving
a remarkable illustration of the Divine expediency. We judge of power
by the magnitude of its effects, and of wisdom by the simplicity of its
means. In this instance the whole of the results seem to arise from
the single and simple act of raising portions of the earth's surface
above the general level. Yet from this one act, what a multitude of
the most important conditions follow!--variety of climate, variety of
production, the temperature of Europe introduced into the tropics,
health to man and the inferior animals, the irrigation of the globe,
the defence of nations, and the actual enlargement of the habitable
spaces of the globe, by the elevated surface of the hills--not to
mention the beauty and sublimity of the landscape, which depend wholly
on the colours, the forms, and the diversity of mountains.
An interesting note on this subject says, "It appears probable, that
a legitimate way is now opening towards the solution of the ultimate
problem of the upheaving force. The agreement of deductions from the
scientific hypothesis goes far to establish, that all dislocations of
strata, and the accompanying mountain chains, have resulted from the
upheaval of large portions of the earth's surface by a diffused and
equable energy--an energy concentrated in one point or district, only
when it has produced craters of elevation. Accepting instruction from
the surface of the moon, we have certain lights also respecting the
history of the development of this force; for, while its concentrated
action, with its varied and remarkable craters, has evolved nearly
all the mountain forms in that luminary, even as we find it among the
almost obliterated ancient forms of the earth, its operation in raising
extensive zones, now so frequently and characteristically exhibited in
our own planet, has yet scarcely appeared in the moon. The time will
doubtless come, when, viewing it as a great cosmical agency, all such
specialities belonging to this yet hidden power shall receive their
solution."
THE OCEAN.--The next most important portion of the globe
to man is that mighty reservoir of water which surrounds the land,
penetrates into every large portion of it, supplies the moisture
without which all life must rapidly perish, and forms the great means
of intercourse, without which one-half of the globe would be ignorant
of the existence of the other.
In the ocean, we have the complete contrast to the land, the whole
giving an extraordinary evidence of that extreme diversity of means,
which the Creator wills to exercise for every purpose of his creation.
The land is all variety, the ocean is a plain of millions of square
miles. The land never moves, the ocean is in perpetual movement. Below
the surface of the land, all animal life dies; the ocean is inhabited
through a great portion of its depth, and perhaps through its whole
depth. The temperature of the land is as varying as its surface;
the temperature of the ocean is confined within a few degrees. The
temperature of the earth appears to increase with the depth to which
man can descend; the temperature of the ocean, at a certain depth,
seems always the same.
Even in that relation to beauty and grandeur, which evidently forms a
part of the providential design, the sources of enjoyment to the human
eye, in the land and the ocean, are strikingly different. On land,
the sublime and the beautiful depend on variety of form--the mountain
shooting to the skies, the valley deepening beneath the eye, the rush
of the cataract, the sharp and lofty precipice, the broad majesty of
the river, the rich and coloured culture of the distant landscape.
In the ocean, the sublime arises from total uniformity. An unbroken
surface, stretching round, as far as the eye can gaze, forms the
grandeur; the clouds and colours of the sky, reflected on its surface,
form the beauty. Even when the phenomena are most similar, the effect
is different: the sunset of land and sea are equally magnificent; but
the sunset on land is lovelier, from its inlaying of gold and purple
light on the diversities of hill and valley, forest and field: at sea,
it is merely one gorgeous blaze--splendour on cloud above and wave
below. But moonlight at sea is lovelier than on land. Beautiful as it
is, even on the imperfect outlines of trees and hills, a large portion
of the lustre is broken and lost by the obstacles and varieties of
the landscape. But at sea there is no obstruction; its lustre falls
on a mighty mirror; all around is light, all above is majesty: the
absence of all the sights and sounds of life deepens the sense of calm
admiration, and the impression almost amounts to a feeling of the holy.
The ocean covers three-fourths of the globe, yet even this enormous
extent has not been sufficient for the providential object of human
intercourse. The Divine expedient was the formation of inland seas.
Nothing in the distribution of land and sea is more remarkable, than
the superior magnitude of the world of waters to the world of land,
in a globe whose chief purpose was evidently the support of man. The
Pacific alone is larger than all the land. From the west coast of
America, to the eastern coast of Africa, spreads one sheet of water--a
traverse of sixteen thousand miles. The valley of the Atlantic has a
breadth of five thousand miles, while its length reaches from pole to
pole--its surface is an area of more than twenty millions of square
miles.
Yet, it is perfectly possible that this proportion was once of a
different order. As we know nothing of the antediluvian world but by
the Mosaic history, and as that history has not revealed the original
boundaries of the land and sea, no positive conclusion can be obtained.
Yet, from the deposits of marine products in the existing soil, it has
been conclusively conjectured, that the land has been once the bed of
the ocean, while the present bed of the ocean has been the land. The
almost total absence of the human skeleton among fossils, and some old
and dim traditions of a continent submerged, where the waters of the
Atlantic now roll, may add to the conjecture. The globe _then_ would
have afforded room for a population threefold that which it is now
destined to contain. If it is now capable of supporting sixteen times
its present number, as has been calculated, it would then have been
equal to the sustenance of little less than fifty thousand millions.
Yet, what would be even that space to the magnitude of Jupiter; or that
number to the beings of flesh and blood, however differing from man,
which may at this moment, in that most magnificent planet, be enjoying
the bounty of Providence, and replenishing a circumference of two
hundred and forty thousand miles!
Uniform as the ocean is, it is a vast theatre of contrivances. To
prevent the impurity which must arise from the decay of the millions
of fish, and perhaps of quadruped and reptile life, constantly dying
in its depths,--it is saline. To prevent the stagnation of its waters,
which would reinforce the corruption, it is constantly impelled by
currents, by the trade-wind, and by the universal tide. At the equator
the tide moves with a rapidity which would shatter the continents; but
it is met by shallows, by ridges of rock, and by islands; a vast system
of natural breakwaters which modify its force, and reduce it to an
impulse compatible with safety.
The water of the sea retains its fluidity down to four degrees below
the freezing point of fresh water; the object is, perhaps, the
preservation of the millions of animated beings contained in the
waters; but as, in the tropic latitudes, its exposure to the sun might
engender disease, or create tempests, vast refrigeratories are provided
at both the poles, which are constantly sending down huge masses of
ice to cool the ocean. Some of those floating masses are from ten
to twelve miles long, and a hundred feet high above the water, with
probably three hundred feet below. They have been met with two thousand
miles on their way to the equator, and have sensibly cooled the sea
for fifty miles round, until they wholly dissolved. Of course, on
subjects of this order, human observation can do little more than note
the principal effects--the rest can be only probable conjecture. It
may be, that human sagacity has never ascertained the hundredth part
of the purposes of any one of the great agents of nature. Still, it is
the business of science to inquire, as it is the dictate of experience
to acknowledge, that every addition to discovery gives only additional
proof of the sleepless vigilance, boundless resources, and practical
benevolence of the great Ruler of all.
The variety of uses derived from a single principle is a constant,
and a most admirable, characteristic of nature. The primary purpose
of the ocean is probably, to supply the land with the moisture
necessary to production. But, the collateral effects of the mighty
reservoir are felt in results of the first importance, yet of a wholly
distinct order. The ocean refreshes the atmosphere, to a certain
degree renews its motion, and obviously exerts a powerful agency in
preventing alike excessive heat and excessive cold. The tides, which
prevent its stagnation--a stagnation which would cover the earth with
pestilence--also largely assist navigation in the estuaries, in the
lower parts of the great rivers, and in all approaches to the shore.
The currents, a portion of this great agency, (still perhaps to give us
new sources of wonder,) fulfil at least the triple office of agitating
the mass of ocean, of speeding navigation, and of equalising or
softening the temperature of the shores along which they pass, in all
directions. They seem equivalent to the system of high-roads and cross
roads in a great country. It had been said of rivers, that "they are
roads which travel;" but their difficulty is, that they travel only one
way. The currents of the ocean obviate the difficulty, by travelling
all ways. And, perhaps, we may look forward to a time when, by the
command of wind and wave given by the steamboat, and by our increased
knowledge of "ocean topography," if we may use the phrase; a ship may
make its way across the ocean without ever being out of a current; a
result which would be obviously a most important accession, if not to
the speed, at least to the security of navigation.
Those ocean traversers evidently belong to a _system_. Some are
permanent, some are periodical, and some are casual. The permanent
arise chiefly from the effect of the flow from the poles to the
equator. Descending from the poles in the first instance, they pour
north and south. They gradually feel the earth's rotation; but on
their arrival at the tropics, being still inferior in velocity to the
equatorial sea, they seem to roll backwards; in other words, they form
a current from east to west. This current is farther impelled by the
trade-winds.
The progress of this great perpetual current includes almost every part
of the ocean. In going westward, it necessarily rushes against the
coast of America, where it divides into two vast branches, one running
south with great force, and the other north-west. A succession of
currents, all connected, obviously form a "moving power" to prevent the
stagnation of the ocean, and, by their branches, visit every shore of
the globe.
Some of those currents are of great breadth, but they generally move
slow. Humboldt calculates that a boat, carried _only_ by the current
from the Canaries to Caraccas, would take _thirteen months_ for the
voyage. Still there would be obvious advantages to navigation in moving
along a district of ocean in which all the speed, such as it was,
furthered the movement of the vessel, and which offered none of the
common sources of hindrance.
But another curious effect of the Atlantic currents is to be
commemorated, as giving us probably the first knowledge of the western
world. "Two corpses, the features of which indicated a race of unknown
men, were thrown on the coast of the Azores, towards the end of the
fifteenth century. Nearly at the same period the brother-in-law of
Columbus, Pedro Correa, governor of Porto Santo, found on the strand of
the island pieces of bamboo of an extraordinary size, brought thither
by the western currents."
Those coincidences might have confirmed the idea of the great
navigator. But Columbus still deserves all the glory. A thousand
conjectures may be formed, and a thousand confirmations given, and yet
all be lost to the world. The true discoverer is the man of practice.
Columbus was _that_ man; and we are to remember also his indefatigable
labour in realising that practice, the unexhausted resolution with
which he struggled against the penury and neglect of the Continental
courts, his noble scorn of the sneers of European ignorance, and the
heroic patience with which he sustained the murmuring of his crews, and
asked "but one day more." The world has never seen a man more equal to
his great purpose; if he was not a direct instrument appointed to the
noblest discovery of man.
But those evidences of connexion are not unfrequently given to our more
observant time. "When the wind has been long from the west, a branch
of the Gulf Stream runs with considerable force in a north-easterly
direction towards the coasts of Europe. By this the fruit of trees
belonging to the torrid zone of America is annually cast ashore on the
western coasts of Ireland and Norway. Pennant observes, that the seeds
of plants which grow in Jamaica, Cuba, and the adjacent countries, are
collected on the shores of the Hebrides. Thither also barrels of French
wine, the remains of vessels wrecked in the West Indian seas, have
been carried. In 1809, H.M.S. Little Belt was dismasted at Halifax,
Nova Scotia, and her bowsprit was found, eighteen months after, in the
Basque Roads. The mainmast of the Tilbury, burned off Hispaniola, in
the Seven Years' War, was brought to our shores.
"To the Gulf Stream, England and Ireland are partially indebted for the
mildness of their climate. The prevailing winds are the south-west.
Coming over a vast space of the comparatively heated ocean, it is
calculated, that if those winds were so constant as to bring us all
the heat which they are capable of conveying, they would raise the
column of air over Great Britain and France, in winter, at once to the
temperature of summer."
But interesting as it might be thus to range through the great
phenomena of the globe, and demonstrate its abundant and astonishing
adaptation to the purposes of living existence, our more immediate
object is to mark to the reader the materials of this noble volume.
The especial sciences of which it treats are, geology, hydrography,
meteorology, and natural history, with their several subdivisions; the
whole delivered in the most intelligible form of modern knowledge,
and with the fullest information acquired by modern research; and
illustrated by maps, the skill of whose execution can have been
equalled only by the labour of their formation.
The volume commences with the geological structure of the globe in
all its branches, and with separate articles given to the mountain
chains of Asia, Africa, Europe, and America, all illustrated by maps:
then follow the glaciers and glacial phenomena, with maps; then the
phenomena of the volcanoes and volcanic regions, developed by charts
and descriptions,--this department closing with that most curious, most
disputed, and still most obscure of all subjects, the Palæontology of
the British Isles.
The second division--hydrography, commences with charts of the ocean,
and with charts of those wondrous, and still comparatively obscure,
agencies, the eleven currents which intersect it in all quarters. Then
follow charts of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, now forming such new
and interesting objects to the navigator and the philanthropist. We
then have maps of the tides and river systems.
The Indian Ocean, now scarcely more than beginning to be the subject
of scientific inquiry, will probably assist us effectively in the
discoveries of those most important agents, the winds. The monsoon
and the typhoon of those seas exhibit characters apparently almost
exclusive. To ascertain their general direction, and their especial
limits, must be a great boon to the commerce which is now directing
itself, with such renewed vigour, to those tempting regions. The lights
which have been thrown on the use of the barometer, and on the rise
and direction of the West Indian storms, have already given a species
of guidance to this important investigation; and if the theory of the
hurricane can never render its power harmless, it may, at least, make
human precaution more vigilant, and, of course, more successful.
Those investigations are naturally followed by the third great division
of the work--meteorology. The value of exact observations on wind and
weather must have been felt from the beginning of the world; but,
until our day, it was little more than the science of the shepherd,
who foretold a high wind or a shower, generally when both had already
come. The barometer and thermometer, though both well known, and both
admirable, had done but little for a science, which, without exactness
of practice and connexion of causes, is nothing.
Humboldt, by his attempt to trace lines of temperature on the map of
the globe, first raised those scattered conceptions into the shape
of a science. Yet Humboldt was not the original inventor of the
inquiry into the mean temperatures. Meyer of Gottingen first threw the
observations on this important and evasive subject into the well-known
formula, which made the temperature depend on the square of the cosine
of the latitude. Playfair followed, by including in his formula the
elevation of the place and the season. The object of Humboldt was, to
determine, by a series of curves on the earth's surface,the points at
which--however the temperature differed from time to time--the average
annually was the same. On this important subject we are now furnished
with a map of striking detail and execution.
The late magnetic researches pursued round the globe may, at no remote
period, establish a connexion between the revolution of the magnetic
poles and the isothermal lines, as had been long since conjectured.
But, as practical science advances, we shall probably see all the
great agencies of nature combined,--if not all shown to be but the
modifications of _one_.
The Hyetographic or rain chart of this volume gives a most complete and
minute detail of a most important subject. It exhibits the rains of the
globe, in their constant gradation from the equator to the pole, in
their influence on the seasons, and in their degrees from the plains
to the summit of the hills. A map is added, on the polarisation of the
atmosphere--almost a new science--with an explanatory article by Sir
David Brewster.
The fourth division is Natural History; itself divided into Phytology,
Zoology, and Ethnography. This division abounds in maps, and in these
departments they are obviously of the most necessary use. In the
description of plants and animals, the pencil must speak, the tongue
loses its faculty; a sketch, executed at the moment, will give a
fuller explanation than any dexterity or copiousness of language can.
We accordingly have here charts of all the geographical positions
of the plants important to the food of man, and of the geographical
distribution of plants on the surface of the globe.
The Zoological charts give the regions, the habitats, and the
characters of all the diversities of animal life on the land--from the
mammalia to the birds and reptiles.
The Ethnographical portion, or view of the general position and
races of the European nations, commences with a fine map, by Kombst,
exhibiting a view of all its varieties, with reference to birth,
language, religion, and forms of government. Having thus glanced at
the scientific contents of this noble volume, we propose to give some
sketches of those portions of the globe which, within the last half
century, have become the refuge or the property of the emigration from
the British shores.
Australia, the _fifth_ continent, is nearly as large as Europe. Divided
by the tropic, it is capable of producing the chief plants of both the
temperate and the tropical zones. Its principal geological feature is
a mountain chain, which, extending through its whole length on its
eastern coast, runs on the north into New Guinea, and on the south into
Van Diemen's Land. From its immense size, (two thousand four hundred
miles from east to west, and one thousand seven hundred from north
to south,) and from the savage state of its native population, the
exact nature of its central portion is yet only to be conjectured. But
conjecture has been busy; and by some it is held, that the centre is
a Mediterranean, from the direction of some of the rivers; by others,
that it is a huge Sahara, from the hot winds which often blow towards
the coast. But two late expeditions, sent from Sydney, have passed,
without difficulty, the one as far as Torres Strait, and the other
almost to the head of the Gulf of Carpentaria. It is true, that neither
of those was towards the centre; but they had the wiser practical
object, of ascertaining the nature of the country most important to
the British settler--that great tract lying between the mountains of
the cast coast and the sea. And that country they found to be fair
and fertile, temperate and easily accessible. The whole expedition
of Colonel Mitchel, the surveyor-general, has almost the air of
romance. He describes the country, in the latter half of his advance
to the north, as not only of remarkable richness, but of singularly
picturesque beauty; the latter a quality of the most unusual order in
Australia. To the customary complaint of want of water in the interior,
Colonel Mitchel answers, that Australia, to remedy this defect, wants
nothing but labour; that it has rivers which supply water in the rainy
season sufficient for the use of the year; that the formation of the
land everywhere suggests the idea of vast reservoirs; and that man has
only to complete what nature has begun. The British settlements in the
south and west will probably soon bring these resources into action.
Large deposits of minerals are already beginning to bring wealth to
the settlers. Coal has been found. The tide of emigration which some
years ago was checked, has suddenly flowed with increased force to
Australia; and the vigour of the English character, the only character
in the world _capable_ of effective colonisation, has already made
Sidney a flourishing metropolis, and before another century (a moment
in the life of nations) will exhibit to Europe an English empire at the
antipodes! And this is the history of a land which, though coasted by
the celebrated Cook in 1770, was never trod by a colonist till nearly
twenty years after. This wonder has been wrought within the lifetime of
one generation.
Van Diemen's Land affords a striking evidence of the variety in which
nature seems to delight. It forms a contrast in everything to its huge
neighbour: it is small, it is a mass of mountains, it is well watered,
it is rainy, it is agricultural, and it abounds in fine harbours.
On the whole, it bears the same relation to Australia which Ireland
might bear to England, if England were united to the Continent. It is
also about the size of Ireland--Van Diemen's Land containing nearly
twenty-eight thousand square miles, Ireland perhaps thirty thousand.
In Europe, the continent is richer than the islands; at the antipodes,
the islands are richer than the continent. New Zealand, the last
colony of England, promises to be one of the noblest of the British
possessions. It may either be regarded as _one_ island, fifteen
hundred miles long, or as three, divided by boisterous channels, and
lashed everywhere by a roaring ocean. It has remarkable advantages for
colonisation--a fertile soil, boundless forests, beds of minerals,
and picturesque beauty. The mountains in its interior have all the
grandeur of the Alps, with more than their forest clothing, and (more
picturesque than all) with the volcano, which is wanting to the
supremacy of the Alps. It has table-lands for the agriculturist, sites
on a luxuriant coast for cities, fine harbours for commerce, copious
rivers for communication, and mountains of from twelve to fourteen
thousand feet high, to irrigate the soil, and supply the heated regions
with the luxury of perpetual ice. The climate seems to be healthy; and
the country, by its boldness, storms, varying temperature, and even by
the roughness of the billows which toss for ever on its shore, appears
destined for the school of Englishmen and English constitutions.
To the north of Australia, and almost within sight--another vast and
lovely region, and another contrast to the great continent--lies
New Guinea, fourteen hundred miles long, and two hundred broad. Its
appearance from the sea is magnificent--an immense undulation of
luxuriance covering the coasts, and rising up the sides of mountain
ranges loftier than Mont Blanc. But the tropical excess of vegetation
may render it dangerous to European life: at all events, it will
be only wisdom to people Australia before we intrude on the naked
foresters, and do battle against the more fatal enemy, the swamps of
New Guinea.
Borneo, which has so lately become an object of English interest, by
the settlement of Sir James Brooke, is also a large and noble island;
it has the bold mountain interior, the table-lands, the rivers, and the
harbours, which belong to New Guinea. The English settlement, and the
presence of British ships, may introduce such imperfect civilisation
as the Oriental savage can ever receive; piracy may be partially put
down, and even honesty may be partially introduced. But there is this
great drawback to the success of English colonisation--that the land is
already peopled, and that the strangers are more likely to fall into
the indolent habits and luxurious vice of the native, than the native
ever to rise to the manly habits of the Englishman.
The Indian Archipelago is almost a new world to the European. Though
known to the Dutch soon after the decay of that empire which the
Portuguese secured by the discoveries of de Gama, and occasionally
touched upon by English commerce, it had been almost forgotten among
the stirring scenes in which Europe was involved in the last three
centuries. Our conquests in Hindostan, our possession of Ceylon, the
capture of the Dutch colonies in the French war, and, later still, our
establishment at Singapore, and the opening of China, have turned the
eyes of England to those exuberant countries; and we shall now probably
reunite them to the world of Europe.
But we must hope that, beyond commerce, and the communication of the
comforts and intelligence of English life, our ambition will not
extend. Those climates are generally hazardous to European life; they
are not less hazardous to the manliness and vigour of English habits,
and even to the force of the English character. It has been said that,
if the first generation of colonists are English to the grave, the
second are Indian from the cradle. They contract the lassitude of the
tropics; they become incapable of effort: dissipation is the natural
resource of opulent idleness; they linger through life from excess to
excess; and, unless a revolution of the hardier native drives them out,
or an emigration of their hardier countrymen keeps them in, the colony
sinks into the ground.
The new impulse reserved for our century is Colonisation. Always
existing, even from the earliest ages of mankind, it had hitherto
scarcely deserved the name. The French colonisation of Canada had
not advanced, in a century, beyond the nook where they first nestled
themselves, and where the most absurd of all policies--that of allowing
them to place their language on a footing with the manlier tongue
of their conquerors--has perpetuated them as a separate race, with
all their absurdities, all their prejudices, and even with all their
hostility to the British name. The Spanish colonisation of South
America amounted to scarcely more than settling the descendants of the
Spanish garrisons, of the Spanish refugees, and of the attendants on
the viceroys.
The only true _colonists_ were the English of North America; who, for
a hundred years, poured a feeble stream towards the prairies of the
Mississippi, recruited and stained by the vagabondage of Europe. But
no great impulse of national necessity gave depth and force to the
current. But within these two years a more powerful impression has
been made by necessity. The Irish famine of 1846, and the following
year, drove multitudes to seek for bread on the shores of America.
Some hundred thousands probably have left Europe behind for ever, and
are now delving and woodcutting in the forests of the western world. A
German emigration, though of a more tardy order, has followed, from a
pressure, if not of direct famine, yet of difficulty. And within the
last year a powerful impulse has been also made in the direction of
Australia, of all countries the one which offers the fairest prospect
for the Englishman. The success of these emigrations will naturally
tend to continue the outpourings of Europe. The emigrants, once settled
and successful, will encourage the movement of those whom they have
left behind, as much embarrassed as they themselves originally were;
and the comforts which come into the possession of industry, in a land
of cheap purchase--unburthened with taxes, and unburthened with the
still heavier taxes which the vanities of old countries lay on the
myriads of middle life--must form a strong temptation, or rather a
rational inducement, to seek independence at the antipodes.
But the sudden discovery of the Californian gold-country has given a
still more determined urgency to emigration. That a vast territory,
which, if we are to rely on the reports of its labourers, is a sheet
of gold, should have lain for three hundred years in the hands of
the Spaniards, wholly unknown to a people always hungry for gold, is
among the wonders which sometimes strike across us in the history
of nations. But its immediate effect is, unquestionably, to aid the
general tendency. It is already drawing thousands from every part of
the world towards California. Columns of men, followed by their trains
of oxen and wains of merchandise, are already pouring over every
track of the West. In a few years, the desert will probably be filled
with population; and when the mines are exhausted, or taken into the
possession of the government, the more valuable mine will remain, in
the existence of a new nation, in the commerce of the Pacific, and in
the richness of a soil unploughed since the Deluge.
The effect of this emigration, for the moment, is obviously to
assist the reception of the multitudes from Europe. It is thinning
the population of the United States, carrying off the labourers,
and turning every unoccupied eye in the direction of the west. The
drudgery of Ireland, the skilled labour of England, and the patient and
not unintelligent toil of Germany, will daily find the mart more open;
and thus even the mania of gold-digging will have its effect on the
sober welfare of mankind.
But a still more important effect, though more remote, may follow
from the Californian mines. The celebrated Burke, sixty years ago,
predicted that the new population on the plains of the Mississippi
would extinguish the power, if not the existence, of the cities on
the coast, and that when those "English Tartars," as he imaginatively
described them, once poured down on the New Yorks, Bostons, and
Philadelphias, they would turn them into warehouses, and their sites
into watering-places. They would have fulfilled his prophecy long
since, but for the boundless expanse of territory which lay behind this
"Tartar" region. Their discontents evaporated into the wilderness; the
provincial who looked with a jealous eye on the man of cities, found it
easier to travel than to make war; and he forthwith set up a state for
himself in the boundless prairie. A Californian republic may erect a
formidable balance to the domination of the old States. Washington will
no longer be the capital of America, and the north of the New World may
yet have a stronger resemblance to Europe--with its great kingdoms,
its little princes, and its commercial cities--than the anomalous
government of the Stripes and Stars.
But the noblest of all the projects which have ever excited the
curiosity of the world is still to be consummated--the communication
between the Atlantic and the Pacific--a canal across the Isthmus of
Darien. That isthmus is but twenty miles broad, but a passage across
it would shorten the voyage to China, perhaps to six weeks, instead
of four months; annihilate, the perils of the navigation round South
America, and bring Europe into rapid contact with Australia, India,
and the unexplored glories and exhaustless opulence of the finest
archipelago in the ocean.
The project is so natural that it had been a hundred times conceived;
but the perpetual wars of Europe, the angry jealousy of Spain, and,
in later years, the disturbances of the native governments, have
wholly obstructed the mightiest benefit ever offered to the progress
of civilisation. The enterprise of the Americans had not overlooked
this key to both hemispheres, and, some years since, a compact was
entered into with a company headed by the American Biddle. But it was
suffered to die away; other contracts succeeded, equally abortive,
the government on the spot demanding terms of such exorbitance that
it was impossible to carry the work into execution. With the usual
short-sightedness of the foreigner, they had placed all their profit
on the rent and tolls of the canal, foolishly forgetting that their
_real_ profit was to be found in the wealth which the intercourse of
all nations must bring into their country.
Two projects are now said to be under consideration--a railroad, which
would be exclusively for the benefit of the Americans; and a canal
capable of carrying large vessels across the Isthmus, and which would
be open to all nations. There can be no question as to the superior
benefits of the latter to mankind.
Of the five routes, four are exposed to obstacles arising from
elevation of ground, (the track to Panama rises a thousand feet,)
from insalubrity, and from other circumstances of the soil and the
locality. The fifth, by the river of Nicaragua, evidently deserves the
preference. It lies through a fine river, reaching from the Atlantic
to a central lake, and thence descends through a second river to the
Pacific. The whole distance would be but two hundred and seventy-eight
miles, which would require locks and other works, (the rivers being at
intervals interrupted by rapids,) but this portion would amount to but
eighty-two miles. The lake-sailing would be a hundred and twenty-five
miles. The whole expense, estimating it at the prices of Europe, would
be less than four millions sterling. Sanguine calculators value the
profits at twelve per cent. But whatever might be the smallness of the
dividends in the first instance, there can be no imaginable doubt that,
with fair dealing on the part of the local government, the Isthmus
would soon be worth all the mines of Peru, with all the gold-washings
of California besides.
The next great enterprise would be the junction of the Mediterranean
and the Red Sea, by a passage across the Isthmus of Suez. There is
already a road, but the passage is slow and difficult, from the heat,
the soil, and the imperfect conveyance. Two proposals have been long
since made, the one for a canal and the other for a railroad. To the
canal there seem to be insuperable objections, the shallowness of the
sea at Suez, the shifting nature of the sands on the way, which would
soon fill up the canal, and the difficulty of water for its supply. It
has been also ascertained by the survey of the French engineers that
the Red Sea is about thirty feet higher than the Mediterranean.
The railroad is obviously not merely the true expedient, but the only
one. But it is almost impossible to deal the foreigner on any subject
of prospective profit. The habit of living but for the day deteriorates
all the movements of national progress. Unless he can grasp his profit
at once, it exists no longer to his eye. With the man of the East, the
grasp is eager and avaricious. Mehemet Ali might have brought millions
of wealth into Egypt by a railroad, while he was wasting thousands in
paltry contrivances to make a royal revenue for himself, out of the
contending bargains of English and French engineers. The result is,
that except a miserable canal between Alexandria and the Nile, dry
half the year, and scarcely navigable during the other half, nothing
has been done; and the journey across the isthmus occupies nearly two
days, gives infinite trouble, and makes money only for donkey-boys and
tavern-keepers, which, by a railroad, might be effected luxuriously in
three hours.
The Ethnography of this volume forms the material of a treatise, which
might itself be expanded into a volume. Some years ago the population
of the globe was computed at 860 millions; but, from the accelerated
rapidity of increase, year by year, we should suppose it to be now
900 millions; and even that, a number which, unless some great human
catastrophe should arrive, would speedily increase to 1000 millions!
The laws of population are yet imperfectly comprehended; but, like all
the other great problems of nature, they are given for our inquiry, and
will ultimately yield to our inquiry.
The chief obstacle to population is evidently neither poverty, nor
general discomfort of living, nor inferiority of food. Under all these
circumstances, population accumulates in an extraordinary degree.
The population of Ireland is a case in point. War seems to exercise
but a slight check on population. Barrenness of soil must have its
effect, for where men cannot eat, they, of course, cannot live; but
insecurity of property, implied in tyrannical government, is the great
depopulator. Men will not labour, where they cannot be certain of
the fruits of their labour; they sink into lassitude, indolence, and
beggary. The actual power of life departs from them, and they either
perish by the first pressure of famine, sink under the first attack
of disease, or emigrate, to make the experiment of renewing their
existence in a freer soil. But the subject is still equally obscure,
boundless, and interesting.
Till within these few years, French and German scepticism, always
hostile to the Mosaic revelation, had adopted the opinion that the
races of mankind were of different parentage, and thus that the
scriptural account was _untrue_. But the manlier research and honester
philosophy of Dr Pritchard, and others, in this country, have proved
the assertion to be as unfaithful to facts, as the argument was
sophistical. Whatever may be the external differences in the five great
races of the earth--the Circassian, the Mongolian, the Malayan, the
Ethiopian, and the American--all are fully capable of being accounted
for by the accidents of climate, food, temperature, and position, while
the internal configuration of all is the same. There is still the more
convincing similitude in their faculties, affections, intelligence,
passions, and language. All that constitutes the class "Mankind" is the
_same_, from the mountaineer of Circassia, the finest, and probably the
original, type of the human form, to the Esquimaux, probably the most
degraded. Even evidences of relationship in higher things might be
given. All, in various degrees, acknowledge a Supreme Ruler of earth
and heaven, admit the necessity of worship, retain some traditions of
paradise, recognise the general morals of life, have impressions of
justice, temperance, and truth, however often forgotten. All look to a
future state of being!
But we must now close our remarks on the volume, which Mr Johnston
has thus contributed to the knowledge, and, we will believe, to the
admiration of his time. The mere circumstance of its appearing under
the auspices of its present publishers, has not in the slightest
degree coloured our necessarily rapid and cursory criticism. If we
had found the volume in the dust of a monkish library, we should have
pronounced it a masterly performance; if we were about to offer a gift
to the rising intelligence of our age, there is none which we should
offer in preference. So ample, so definite, and yet so comprehensive
are the stores of information presented by this admirable digest of
physical science--of all that we know regarding the structure of the
great globe we inhabit, and regarding whatever lives and moves on
its surface, together with the laws that regulate the whole--and, at
the same time, so absolutely necessary is that information for the
proper culture of the mind, that we must confess it was with a sigh
of regret, while turning over the leaves of the magnificent folio,
that we felt that such a work could only be destined for the wealthy
and for the privileged class who have access to public libraries, but
that it was likely to remain "a book sealed" to the great bulk of
general inquirers. Our fears, however, on this subject, we rejoice to
be informed, are groundless; and, since commencing this paper, we have
learned that a reduced edition is on the eve of publication. As was
also to have been desired, this is to appear in a serial form, so as to
render it accessible to every class of readers, and at only one-fifth
of the original cost.
This is as it should be. To the scholar, to the student, and to the
already large yet daily increasing multitude of inquirers who cultivate
natural science, the _Physical Atlas_ is a treasure of incalculable
value. It brings before the mind's eye, in one grand panoramic view,
and in a form clear, definite, and easily comprehensible, all the facts
at present known relative to the great subjects of which it treats, and
may be regarded as a lucid epitome of a thousand scattered volumes,
more or less intrinsically valuable, of which it contains the heart and
substance.
From this time henceforward an acquaintance with physical geography
must form the basis of educational knowledge, and on no basis so
adequate can the superstructure of general scholarship be reared.
History, without such an acquirement previously made, can only be half
understood; and, in ignorance of it, the works of creation are, at
best, but a maze without a plan. If we were called on to give proof to
the world of the combination of vigorous diligence, manly acquirement,
clear reasoning, and philosophical conception of which the British
mind is capable, we should lay on the table this noble volume of Mr
Johnston. Indeed, if we might hazard a prediction, the future is not
far distant when such a work must be indispensably requisite to every
educational establishment, and be found in the hands of every scholar.
THE CAXTONS.--PART XII.
Chapter LIX.
The Hegira is completed--we have all taken roost in the old tower. My
father's books have arrived by the waggon, and have settled themselves
quietly in their new abode--filling up the apartment dedicated to their
owner, including the bed-chamber and two lobbies. The duck also has
arrived, under wing of Mrs Primmins, and has reconciled herself to the
old stewpond; by the side of which my father has found a walk that
compensates for the peach wall--especially as he has made acquaintance
with sundry respectable carps, who permit him to feed them after he has
fed the duck --a privilege of which (since, if any one else approaches,
the carps are off in an instant) my father is naturally vain. All
privileges are valuable in proportion to the exclusiveness of their
enjoyment.
Now, from the moment the first carp had eaten the bread my father threw
to it, Mr Caxton had mentally resolved, that a race so confiding should
never be sacrificed to Ceres and Primmins. But all the fishes on my
uncle's property were under the special care of that Proteus Bolt--and
Bolt was not a man likely to suffer the carps to earn their bread
without contributing their full share to the wants of the community.
But, like master, like man! Bolt was an aristocrat fit to be hung _à
la lanterne_. He out-Rolanded Roland in the respect he entertained for
sounding names and old families; and by that bait my father caught him
with such skill that you might see that, if Austin Caxton had been an
angler of fishes, he could have filled his basket full any day, shine
or rain.
"You observe, Bolt," said my father, beginning artfully, "that those
fishes, dull as you may think them, are creatures capable of a
syllogism; and if they saw that, in proportion to their civility to me,
they were depopulated by you, they would put two and two together, and
renounce my acquaintance."
"Is that what you call being silly Jems, sir?" said Bolt; "faith, there
is many a good Christian not half so wise!"
"Man," answered my father thoughtfully, "is an animal less
syllogistical, or more silly-Jemmical than many creatures popularly
esteemed his inferiors. Yes, let but one of those Cyprinidæ, with his
fine sense of logic, see that, if his fellow-fishes eat bread, they are
suddenly jerked out of their element, and vanish forever; and though
you broke a quartern loaf into crumbs, he would snap his tail at you
with enlightened contempt. If," said my father soliloquising, "I had
been as syllogistic as those scaly logicians, I should never have
swallowed that hook, which--hum! there--least said soonest mended. But,
Mr Bolt, to return to the Cyprinidæ."
"What's the hard name you call them 'ere carp, your honour?" asked Bolt.
"Cyprinidæ, a family of the section Malacoptergii Abdominales," replied
Mr Caxton; "their teeth are generally confined to the Pharyngeans,
and their branchiostegous rays are but few--marks of distinction from
fishes vulgar and voracious."
"Sir," said Bolt, glancing to the stewpond, "if I had known they had
been a family of such importance, I am sure I should have treated them
with more respect."
"They are a very old family, Bolt, and have been settled in England
since the fourteenth century. A younger branch of the family has
established itself in a pond in the gardens of Peterhoff, (the
celebrated palace of Peter the Great, Bolt--an emperor highly respected
by my brother, for he killed a great many people very gloriously in
battle, besides those whom he sabred for his own private amusement.)
And there is an officer or servant of the imperial household, whose
task it is to summon those Russian Cyprinidæ to dinner by ringing
a bell, shortly after which, you may see the emperor and empress,
with all their waiting, ladies and gentlemen, coming down in their
carriages to see the Cyprinidæ eat in state. So you perceive, Bolt,
that it would be a republican, Jacobinical proceeding to stew members
of a family so intimately associated with royalty."
"Dear me, sir!" said Bolt, "I am very glad you told me. I ought to have
known they were genteel fish, they are so mighty shy--as all your real
quality are."
My father smiled, and rubbed his hands gently; he had carried his
point, and henceforth the Cyprinidæ of the section Malacoptergii
Abdominales were as sacred in Bolt's eyes as cats and ichneumons were
in those of a priest in Thebes.
My poor father! with what true and unostentatious philosophy thou didst
accommodate thyself to the greatest change thy quiet, harmless life
had known, since it had passed out of the brief burning cycle of the
passions. Lost was the home, endeared to thee by so many noiseless
victories of the mind--so many mute histories of the heart--for
only the scholar knoweth how deep a charm lies in monotony, in the
old associations, the old ways, and habitual clockwork of peaceful
time. Yet, the home maybe replaced--thy heart built its home round
it everywhere--and the old tower might supply the loss of the brick
house, and the walk by the duck-pond become as dear as the haunts by
the sunny peach wall. But what shall replace to thee the bright dream
of thine innocent ambition,--that angel-wing which had glittered
across thy manhood, in the hour between its noon and its setting?
What replace to thee the Magnum Opus--the Great Book?--fair and
broadspreading tree--lone amidst the sameness of the landscape--now
plucked up by the roots! The oxygen was subtracted from the air of
thy life. For be it known to ye, O my compassionate readers, that
with the death of the Anti-Publisher Society the blood-streams of
the Great Book stood still--its pulse was arrested--its full heart
beat no more. Three thousand copies of the first seven sheets in
quarto, with sundry unfinished plates, anatomical, architectural, and
graphic, depicting various developments of the human skull, (that
temple of Human Error), from the Hottentot to the Greek; sketches of
ancient buildings, Cyclopean and Pelasgic; Pyramids, and Pur-tors,
all signs of races whose handwriting was on their walls; landscapes
to display the influence of Nature upon the customs, creeds, and
philosophy of men--here showing how the broad Chaldean wastes led to
the contemplation of the stars, and illustrations of the Zodiac, in
elucidation of the mysteries of symbol-worship; fantastic vagaries of
earth fresh from the Deluge, tending to impress on early superstition
the awful sense of the rude powers of nature; views of the rocky
defiles of Laconia; Sparta, neighboured by the "silent Amyclæ,"
explaining, as it were, geographically, the iron customs of the
warrior colony, (arch Tories, amidst the shift and roar of Hellenic
democracies,) contrasted by the seas, and coasts, and creeks of Athens
and Ionia, tempting to adventure, commerce, and change. Yea, my father,
in his suggestions to the artist of those few imperfect plates, had
thrown as much light on the infancy of earth and its tribes as by the
"shining words" that flowed from his calm starry knowledge! Plates
and copies, all rested now in peace and dust--"housed with darkness
and with death" on the sepulchral shelves of the lobby to which they
were consigned--rays intercepted--worlds incompleted. The Prometheus
was bound, and the fire he had stolen from heaven lay embedded in the
flints of his rock. For so costly was the mould in which Uncle Jack
and the Anti-Publisher Society had contrived to cast this Exposition
of Human Error, that every bookseller shyed at its very sight, as an
owl blinks at daylight, or human error at truth. In vain Squills and I,
before we left London, had carried a gigantic specimen of the Magnum
Opus into the back-parlours of firms the most opulent and adventurous.
Publisher after publisher started, as if we had held a blunderbuss
to his ear. All Paternoster Row uttered a "Lord deliver us." Human
Error found no man so egregiously its victim as to complete those two
quartos, with the prospect of two others, at his own expense. Now, I
had earnestly hoped that my father, for the sake of mankind, would
be persuaded to risk some portion,--and that, I own, not a small
one--of his remaining capital on the conclusion of an undertaking so
elaborately begun. But there my father was obdurate. No big words about
mankind, and the advantage to unborn generations, could stir him an
inch. "Stuff!" said Mr Caxton peevishly. "A man's duties to mankind
and posterity begin with his own son; and having wasted half your
patrimony, I will not take another huge slice out of the poor remainder
to gratify my vanity, for that is the plain truth of it. Man must atone
for sin by expiation. By the book I have sinned, and the book must
expiate it. Pile the sheets up in the lobby, so that at least one man
may be wiser and humbler by the sight of Human Error, every time he
walks by so stupendous a monument of it."
Verily, I know not how my father could bear to look at those dumb
fragments of himself--strata of the Caxtonian conformation lying
layer upon layer, as if packed up and disposed for the inquisitive
genius of some moral Murchison or Mantell. But, for my part, I never
glanced at their repose in the dark lobby, without thinking, "Courage,
Pisistratus, courage! there's something worth living for; work hard,
grow rich, and the Great Book shall come out at last."
Meanwhile, I wandered over the country, and made acquaintance with
the farmers, and with Trevanion's steward--an able man, and a great
agriculturist--and I learned from them a better notion of the nature of
my uncle's domains. Those domains covered an immense acreage, which,
save a small farm, was of no value at present. But land of the same
kind had been lately redeemed by a simple kind of draining, now well
known in Cumberland; and with capital, Roland's barren moors might
become a noble property. But capital, where was that to come from?
Nature gives us all except the means to turn her into marketable
account. As old Plautus saith so wittily, "Day, night, water, sun, and
moon, are to be had gratis; for everything else--down, with your dust!"