“But wild Ambition loves to slide, not stand,
And Fortune’s ice prefers to Virtue’s land.”
The circumstance is the more remarkable, because Drvden has
really no couplet which would seem to a good critic more
intensely Drydenian, both in thought and expression, than
this, of which the whole thought, and almost the whole
expression, are stolen.
As we are on this subject, we cannot refrain from observing
that Mr. Courtenay has done Drvden injustice, by
inadvertently attributing to him some feeble lines which are
in Tate’s part of Absalom and Ahithophel.
{85}The dates of the two poems will, we think, explain this discrepancy.
The third part of Hudibras appeared in 1678, when the character of
Shaftesbury had as yet but imperfectly developed itself. He had,
indeed, been a traitor to every party in the State; but his treasons had
hitherto prospered. Whether it were accident or sagacity, he had timed
his desertions in such a manner that fortune seemed to go to and fro
with him from side to side. The extent of his perfidy was known; but it
was not till the Popish Plot furnished him with a machinery which seemed
sufficiently powerful for all his purposes, that the audacity of his
spirit, and the fierceness of his malevolent passions, became fully
manifest. His subsequent conduct showed undoubtedly great ability, but
not ability of the sort for which he had formerly been so eminent. He
was now headstrong, sanguine, full of impetuous confidence in his own
wisdom and his own good luck. He, whose fame as a political tactician
had hitherto rested chiefly on his skilful retreats, now set himself
to break down all the bridges behind him. His plans were castles in the
air: his talk was rodomontade. He took no thought for the morrow: he
treated the Court as if the King were already a prisoner in his hands:
he built on the favour of the multitude, as if that favour were not
proverbially inconstant. The signs of the coming reaction were discerned
by men of far less sagacity than his, and scared from his side men
more consistent than he had ever pretended to be. But on him they were
{86}lost. The counsel of Ahithopliel, that counsel which was as if a man
had inquired of the oracle of God, was turned into foolishness. He who
had become a byword, for the certainty with which he foresaw and the
suppleness with which he evaded danger, now, when beset on every side
with snares and death, seemed to be smitten with a blindness as strange
as his former clear-sightedness, and, turning neither to the right nor
to the left, strode straight on with desperate hardihood to his doom.
Therefore, after having early acquired and long preserved the reputation
of infallible wisdom and invariable success, he lived to see a mighty
ruin wrought by his own ungovernable passions, to see the great party
which he had led vanquished, and scattered, and trampled down, to see
all his own devilish enginery of lying witnesses, partial sheriffs,
packed juries, unjust judges, bloodthirsty mobs, ready to be employed
against himself and his most devoted followers, to fly from that proud
city whose favour had almost raised him to be Mayor of the Palace,
to hide himself in squalid retreats, to cover his grey head with
ignominious disguises; and he died in hopeless exile, sheltered, by the
generosity of a State which he had cruelly injured and insulted, from
the vengeance of a master whose favour he had purchased by one series of
crimes, and forfeited by another.
Halifax had, in common with Shaftesbury, and with almost all the
politicians of that age, a very loose morality where the public was
concerned; but in Halifax the prevailing infection was modified by
a very peculiar constitution both of heart and head, by a temper
singularly free from gall, and by a refining and sceptical
understanding. He changed his course as often as Shaftesbury; but he
did not change it to the same {87}extent, or in the same direction.
Shaftesbury was the very reverse of a trimmer. His disposition led
him generally to do his utmost to exalt the side which was up, and to
depress the side which was down. His transitions were from extreme to
extreme. While he stayed with a party he went all lengths for it: when
he quitted it he went all lengths against it. Halifax was emphatically
a trimmer; a trimmer both by intellect and by constitution. The name was
fixed on him by his contemporaries; and he was so far from being ashamed
of it that he assumed it as a badge of honour. He passed from faction
to faction. But, instead of adopting and inflaming the passions of those
whom he joined, he tried to diffuse among them something of the spirit
of those whom he had just left. While he acted with the Opposition he
was suspected of being a spy of the Court; and when he had joined the
Court all the Tories were dismayed by his Republican doctrines.
He wanted neither arguments nor eloquence to exhibit what was commonly
regarded as his wavering policy in the fairest light. He trimmed,
he said, as the temperate zone trims between intolerable heat and
intolerable cold, as a good government trims between despotism and
anarchy, as a pure church trims between the errors of the Papist and
those of the Anabaptist. Nor was this defence by any means without
weight; for, though there is abundant proof that his integrity was
not of strength to withstand the temptations by which his cupidity
and vanity were sometimes assailed, yet his dislike of extremes, and a
forgiving and compassionate temper which seems to have been natural to
him, preserved him from all participation in the worst crimes of his
time. If both parties accused him of deserting {88}them, both were
compelled to admit that they had great obligations to his humanity, and
that, though an uncertain friend, he was a placable enemy. He voted in
favour of Lord Stafford, the victim of the Whigs; he did his utmost to
save Lord Russell, the victim of the Tories; and, on the whole, we
are inclined to think that his public life, though far indeed from
faultless, has as few great stains as that of any politician who took an
active part in affairs during the troubled and disastrous period of ten
years which elapsed between the fall of Lord Danby and the Revolution.
His mind was much less turned to particular observations, and much more
to general speculations, than that of Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury knew the
King, the Council, the Parliament, the city, better than Halifax; but
Halifax would have written a far better treatise on political science
than Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury shone more in consultation, and Halifax in
controversy: Shaftesbury was more fertile in expedients, and Halifax in
arguments. Nothing that remains from the pen of Shaftesbury will bear a
comparison with the political tracts of Halifax. Indeed, very little
of the prose of that age is so well worth reading as the Character of a
Trimmer and the Anatomy of an Equivalent. What particularly strikes
us in those works is the writer’s passion for generalisation. He was
treating of the most exciting subjects in the most agitated times: he
was himself placed in the very thick of the civil conflict; yet there is
no acrimony, nothing inflammatory, nothing personal. He preserves an
air of cold superiority, a certain philosophical serenity, which is
perfectly marvellous. He treats every question as an abstract question,
begins with the widest propositions, argues those propositions on
general grounds, and often, when he has {89}brought out his theorem,
leaves the reader to make tie application, without adding an allusion
to particular men or to passing events. This speculative turn of mind
rendered him a bad adviser in cases which required celerity. He brought
forward, with wonderful readiness and copiousness, arguments, replies to
those arguments, rejoinders to those replies, general maxims of policy,
and analogous cases from history. But Shaftesbury was the man for a
prompt decision. Of the parliamentary eloquence of these celebrated
rivals, we can judge only by report; and, so judging, we should be
inclined to think that, though Shaftesbury was a distinguished speaker,
the superiority belonged to Halifax. Indeed the readiness of Halifax in
debate, the extent of his knowledge, the ingenuity of his reasoning, the
liveliness of his expression, and the silver clearness and sweetness
of his voice, seem to have made the strongest impression on his
contemporaries. By Dryden he is described as
“of piercing wit and pregnant thought,