Produced by Mike Alder and Sue Asscher
THE MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS AND SPEECHES OF LORD MACAULAY.
Contributions To The Encyclopaedia Britannica And Miscellaneous Poems,
Inscriptions, Etc.
By Thomas Babington Macaulay
VOLUME III.
CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA
AND
MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, INSCRIPTIONS, ETC.
CONTENTS.
CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA.
Francis Atterbury. (December 1853)
John Bunyan. (May 1854)
Oliver Goldsmith. (February 1856)
Samuel Johnson. (December 1856)
William Pitt. (January 1859)
MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, INSCRIPTIONS, ETC.
Epitaph on Henry Martyn. (1812)
Lines to the Memory of Pitt. (1813)
A Radical War Song. (1820)
The Battle of Moncontour. (1824)
The Battle of Naseby, by Obadiah
Bind-their-kings-in-chains-and-their-nobles-with-links-of-iron, Serjeant
in Ireton's Regiment. (1824)
Sermon in a Churchyard. (1825)
Translation of a Poem by Arnault. (1826)
Dies Irae. (1826)
The Marriage of Tirzah and Ahirad. (1827)
The Country Clergyman's Trip to Cambridge. An Election Ballad. (1827)
Song. (1827)
Political Georgics. (March 1828)
The Deliverance of Vienna. (1828)
The Last Buccaneer. (1839)
Epitaph on a Jacobite. (1845)
Lines Written in August, 1847.
Translation from Plautus. (1850)
Paraphrase of a Passage in the Chronicle of the Monk of St Gall. (1856)
Inscription on the Statue of Lord Wm. Bentinck, at Calcutta. (1835)
Epitaph on Sir Benjamin Heath Malkin, at Calcutta. (1837)
Epitaph on Lord Metcalfe. (1847)
CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA.
FRANCIS ATTERBURY. (December 1853.)
Francis Atterbury, a man who holds a conspicuous place in the political,
ecclesiastical, and literary history of England, was born in the year
1662, at Middleton in Buckinghamshire, a parish of which his father was
rector. Francis was educated at Westminster School, and carried thence
to Christchurch a stock of learning which, though really scanty, he
through life exhibited with such judicious ostentation that superficial
observers believed his attainments to be immense. At Oxford, his parts,
his taste, and his bold, contemptuous, and imperious spirit, soon
made him conspicuous. Here he published at twenty, his first work,
a translation of the noble poem of Absalom and Achitophel into Latin
verse. Neither the style nor the versification of the young scholar
was that of the Augustan age. In English composition he succeeded much
better. In 1687 he distinguished himself among many able men who wrote
in defence of the Church of England, then persecuted by James II., and
calumniated by apostates who had for lucre quitted her communion. Among
these apostates none was more active or malignant than Obadiah Walker,
who was master of University College, and who had set up there, under
the royal patronage, a press for printing tracts against the established
religion. In one of these tracts, written apparently by Walker himself,
many aspersions were thrown on Martin Luther. Atterbury undertook to
defend the great Saxon Reformer, and performed that task in a manner
singularly characteristic. Whoever examines his reply to Walker will be
struck by the contrast between the feebleness of those parts which are
argumentative and defensive, and the vigour of those parts which are
rhetorical and aggressive. The Papists were so much galled by the
sarcasms and invectives of the young polemic that they raised a cry of
treason, and accused him of having, by implication, called King James a
Judas.
After the Revolution, Atterbury, though bred in the doctrines of
non-resistance and passive obedience, readily swore fealty to the
new government. In no long time he took holy orders. He occasionally
preached in London with an eloquence which raised his reputation, and
soon had the honour of being appointed one of the royal chaplains.
But he ordinarily resided at Oxford, where he took an active part
in academical business, directed the classical studies of the
undergraduates of his college, and was the chief adviser and assistant
of Dean Aldrich, a divine now chiefly remembered by his catches,
but renowned among his contemporaries as a scholar, a Tory, and a
high-churchman. It was the practice, not a very judicious practice, of
Aldrich to employ the most promising youths of his college in editing
Greek and Latin books. Among the studious and well-disposed lads who
were, unfortunately for themselves, induced to become teachers of
philology when they should have been content to be learners, was Charles
Boyle, son of the Earl of Orrery, and nephew of Robert Boyle, the great
experimental philosopher. The task assigned to Charles Boyle was to
prepare a new edition of one of the most worthless books in existence.
It was a fashion, among those Greeks and Romans who cultivated rhetoric
as an art, to compose epistles and harangues in the names of eminent
men. Some of these counterfeits are fabricated with such exquisite taste
and skill that it is the highest achievement of criticism to distinguish
them from originals. Others are so feebly and rudely executed that they
can hardly impose on an intelligent schoolboy. The best specimen which
has come down to us is perhaps the oration for Marcellus, such an
imitation of Tully's eloquence as Tully would himself have read with
wonder and delight. The worst specimen is perhaps a collection of
letters purporting to have been written by that Phalaris who governed
Agrigentum more than 500 years before the Christian era. The evidence,
both internal and external, against the genuineness of these letters is
overwhelming. When, in the fifteenth century, they emerged, in company
with much that was far more valuable, from their obscurity, they were
pronounced spurious by Politian, the greatest scholar of Italy, and
by Erasmus, the greatest scholar on our side of the Alps. In truth,
it would be as easy to persuade an educated Englishman that one of
Johnson's Ramblers was the work of William Wallace as to persuade a
man like Erasmus that a pedantic exercise, composed in the trim and
artificial Attic of the time of Julian, was a despatch written by a
crafty and ferocious Dorian, who roasted people alive many years before
there existed a volume of prose in the Greek language. But, though
Christchurch could boast of many good Latinists, of many good English
writers, and of a greater number of clever and fashionable men of the
world than belonged to any other academic body, there was not then in
the college a single man capable of distinguishing between the infancy
and the dotage of Greek literature. So superficial indeed was the
learning of the rulers of this celebrated society that they were charmed
by an essay which Sir William Temple published in praise of the ancient
writers. It now seems strange that even the eminent public services, the
deserved popularity, and the graceful style of Temple should have saved
so silly a performance from universal contempt. Of the books which he
most vehemently eulogised his eulogies proved that he knew nothing.
In fact, he could not read a line of the language in which they were
written. Among many other foolish things, he said that the letters
of Phalaris were the oldest letters and also the best in the world.
Whatever Temple wrote attracted notice. People who had never heard of
the Epistles of Phalaris began to inquire about them. Aldrich, who knew
very little Greek, took the word of Temple who knew none, and desired
Boyle to prepare a new edition of these admirable compositions which,
having long slept in obscurity, had become on a sudden objects of
general interest.
The edition was prepared with the help of Atterbury, who was Boyle's
tutor, and of some other members of the college. It was an edition such
as might be expected from people who would stoop to edite such a book.
The notes were worthy of the text; the Latin version worthy of the Greek
original. The volume would have been forgotten in a month, had not a
misunderstanding about a manuscript arisen between the young editor and
the greatest scholar that had appeared in Europe since the revival of
letters, Richard Bentley. The manuscript was in Bentley's keeping. Boyle
wished it to be collated. A mischief-making bookseller informed him that
Bentley had refused to lend it, which was false, and also that Bentley
had spoken contemptuously of the letters attributed to Phalaris, and of
the critics who were taken in by such counterfeits, which was perfectly
true. Boyle, much provoked, paid, in his preface, a bitterly ironical
compliment to Bentley's courtesy. Bentley revenged himself by a short
dissertation, in which he proved that the epistles were spurious, and
the new edition of them worthless: but he treated Boyle personally with
civility as a young gentleman of great hopes, whose love of learning was
highly commendable, and who deserved to have had better instructors.
Few things in literary history are more extraordinary than the storm
which this little dissertation raised. Bentley had treated Boyle with
forbearance; but he had treated Christchurch with contempt; and the
Christchurch-men, wherever dispersed, were as much attached to their
college as a Scotchman to his country, or a Jesuit to his order. Their
influence was great. They were dominant at Oxford, powerful in the Inns
of Court and in the College of Physicians, conspicuous in Parliament and
in the literary and fashionable circles of London. Their unanimous
cry was, that the honour of the college must be vindicated, that the
insolent Cambridge pedant must be put down. Poor Boyle was unequal to
the task, and disinclined to it. It was, therefore, assigned to his
tutor, Atterbury.
The answer to Bentley, which bears the name of Boyle, but which was,
in truth, no more the work of Boyle than the letters to which the
controversy related were the work of Phalaris, is now read only by the
curious, and will in all probability never be reprinted again. But it
had its day of noisy popularity. It was to be found, not only in the
studies of men of letters, but on the tables of the most brilliant
drawing-rooms of Soho Square and Covent Garden. Even the beaus and
coquettes of that age, the Wildairs and the Lady Lurewells, the
Mirabells and the Millaments, congratulated each other on the way in
which the gay young gentleman, whose erudition sate so easily upon him,
and who wrote with so much pleasantry and good breeding about the Attic
dialect and the anapaestic measure, Sicilian talents and Thericlean
cups, had bantered the queer prig of a doctor. Nor was the applause of
the multitude undeserved. The book is, indeed, Atterbury's masterpiece,
and gives a higher notion of his powers than any of those works to
which he put his name. That he was altogether in the wrong on the main
question, and on all the collateral questions springing out of it, that
his knowledge of the language, the literature, and the history of Greece
was not equal to what many freshmen now bring up every year to Cambridge
and Oxford, and that some of his blunders seem rather to deserve a
flogging than a refutation, is true; and therefore it is that his
performance is, in the highest degree, interesting and valuable to a
judicious reader. It is good by reason of its exceeding badness. It is
the most extraordinary instance that exists of the art of making much
show with little substance. There is no difficulty, says the steward
of Moliere's miser, in giving a fine dinner with plenty of money: the
really great cook is he who can set out a banquet with no money at all.
That Bentley should have written excellently on ancient chronology and
geography, on the development of the Greek language, and the origin of
the Greek drama, is not strange. But that Atterbury should, during some
years, have been thought to have treated these subjects much better than
Bentley is strange indeed. It is true that the champion of Christchurch
had all the help which the most celebrated members of that society could
give him. Smalridge contributed some very good wit; Friend and others
some very bad archaeology and philology. But the greater part of the
volume was entirely Atterbury's: what was not his own was revised and
retouched by him: and the whole bears the mark of his mind, a mind
inexhaustibly rich in all the resources of controversy, and familiar
with all the artifices which make falsehood look like truth, and
ignorance like knowledge. He had little gold; but he beat that little
out to the very thinnest leaf, and spread it over so vast a surface that
to those who judged by a glance, and who did not resort to balances and
tests, the glittering heap of worthless matter which he produced seemed
to be an inestimable treasure of massy bullion. Such arguments as he had
he placed in the clearest light. Where he had no arguments, he resorted
to personalities, sometimes serious, generally ludicrous, always clever
and cutting. But, whether he was grave or merry, whether he reasoned or
sneered, his style was always pure, polished, and easy.
Party spirit then ran high; yet, though Bentley ranked among Whigs, and
Christchurch was a stronghold of Toryism, Whigs joined with Tories in
applauding Atterbury's volume. Garth insulted Bentley, and extolled
Boyle in lines which are now never quoted except to be laughed at.
Swift, in his "Battle of the Books," introduced with much pleasantry
Boyle, clad in armour, the gift of all the gods, and directed by Apollo
in the form of a human friend, for whose name a blank is left which may
easily be filled up. The youth, so accoutred, and so assisted, gains
an easy victory over his uncourteous and boastful antagonist. Bentley,
meanwhile, was supported by the consciousness of an immeasurable
superiority, and encouraged by the voices of the few who were really
competent to judge the combat. "No man," he said, justly and nobly, "was
ever written down but by himself." He spent two years in preparing a
reply, which will never cease to be read and prized while the literature
of ancient Greece is studied in any part of the world. This reply
proved, not only that the letters ascribed to Phalaris were spurious,
but that Atterbury, with all his wit, his eloquence, his skill in
controversial fence, was the most audacious pretender that ever wrote
about what he did not understand. But to Atterbury this exposure was
matter of indifference. He was now engaged in a dispute about matters
far more important and exciting than the laws of Zaleucus and the laws
of Charondas. The rage of religious factions was extreme. High church
and Low church divided the nation. The great majority of the clergy were
on the high-church side; the majority of King William's bishops were
inclined to latitudinarianism. A dispute arose between the two parties
touching the extent of the powers of the Lower House of Convocation.
Atterbury thrust himself eagerly into the front rank of the
high-churchmen. Those who take a comprehensive and impartial view of his
whole career will not be disposed to give him credit for religious zeal.
But it was his nature to be vehement and pugnacious in the cause
of every fraternity of which he was a member. He had defended the
genuineness of a spurious book simply because Christchurch had put forth
an edition of that book; he now stood up for the clergy against the
civil power, simply because he was a clergyman, and for the priests
against the episcopal order, simply because he was as yet only a priest.
He asserted the pretensions of the class to which he belonged in several
treatises written with much wit, ingenuity, audacity, and acrimony. In
this, as in his first controversy, he was opposed to antagonists whose
knowledge of the subject in dispute was far superior to his; but in
this, as in his first controversy, he imposed on the multitude by bold
assertion, by sarcasm, by declamation, and, above all, by his peculiar
knack of exhibiting a little erudition in such a manner as to make it
look like a great deal. Having passed himself off on the world as a
greater master of classical learning than Bentley, he now passed himself
off as a greater master of ecclesiastical learning than Wake or Gibson.
By the great body of the clergy he was regarded as the ablest and
most intrepid tribune that had ever defended their rights against the
oligarchy of prelates. The lower House of Convocation voted him thanks
for his services; the University of Oxford created him a doctor of
divinity; and soon after the accession of Anne, while the Tories still
had the chief weight in the government, he was promoted to the deanery
of Carlisle.
Soon after he had obtained this preferment, the Whig party rose to
ascendency in the state. From that party he could expect no favour. Six
years elapsed before a change of fortune took place. At length, in
the year 1710, the prosecution of Sacheverell produced a formidable
explosion of high-church fanaticism. At such a moment Atterbury could
not fail to be conspicuous. His inordinate zeal for the body to which
he belonged, his turbulent and aspiring temper, his rare talents for
agitation and for controversy, were again signally displayed. He bore a
chief part in framing that artful and eloquent speech which the accused
divine pronounced at the bar of the Lords, and which presents a singular
contrast to the absurd and scurrilous sermon which had very unwisely
been honoured with impeachment. During the troubled and anxious months
which followed the trial, Atterbury was among the most active of those
pamphleteers who inflamed the nation against the Whig ministry and the
Whig parliament. When the ministry had been changed and the parliament
dissolved, rewards were showered upon him. The Lower House of
Convocation elected him prolocutor. The Queen appointed him Dean of
Christchurch on the death of his old friend and patron Aldrich. The
college would have preferred a gentler ruler. Nevertheless, the new
head was received with every mark of honour. A congratulatory oration in
Latin was addressed to him in the magnificent vestibule of the hall; and
he in reply professed the warmest attachment to the venerable house in
which he had been educated, and paid many gracious compliments to those
over whom he was to preside. But it was not in his nature to be a mild
or an equitable governor. He had left the chapter of Carlisle distracted
by quarrels. He found Christchurch at peace; but in three months his
despotic and contentious temper did at Christchurch what it had done
at Carlisle. He was succeeded in both his deaneries by the humane and
accomplished Smalridge, who gently complained of the state in which both
had been left. "Atterbury goes before, and sets everything on fire.
I come after him with a bucket of water." It was said by Atterbury's
enemies that he was made a bishop because he was so bad a dean.
Under his administration Christchurch was in confusion, scandalous
altercations took place, opprobrious words were exchanged; and there
was reason to fear that the great Tory college would be ruined by the
tyranny of the great Tory doctor. He was soon removed to the bishopric
of Rochester, which was then always united with the deanery of
Westminster. Still higher dignities seemed to be before him. For, though
there were many able men on the episcopal bench, there was none who
equalled or approached him in parliamentary talents. Had his party
continued in power, it is not improbable that he would have been raised
to the archbishopric of Canterbury. The more splendid his prospects,
the more reason he had to dread the accession of a family which was
well-known to be partial to the Whigs. There is every reason to believe
that he was one of those politicians who hoped that they might be able,
during the life of Anne, to prepare matters in such a way that at her
decease there might be little difficulty in setting aside the Act of
Settlement and placing the Pretender on the throne. Her sudden death
confounded the projects of these conspirators. Atterbury, who wanted no
kind of courage, implored his confederates to proclaim James III., and
offered to accompany the heralds in lawn sleeves. But he found even
the bravest soldiers of his party irresolute, and exclaimed, not, it is
said, without interjections which ill became the mouth of a father of
the church, that the best of all causes and the most precious of all
moments had been pusillanimously thrown away. He acquiesced in what he
could not prevent, took the oaths to the House of Hanover, and at the
coronation officiated with the outward show of zeal, and did his best to
ingratiate himself with the royal family. But his servility was requited
with cold contempt. No creature is so revengeful as a proud man who
has humbled himself in vain. Atterbury became the most factious and
pertinacious of all the opponents of the government. In the House of
Lords his oratory, lucid, pointed, lively, and set off with every grace
of pronunciation and of gesture, extorted the attention and admiration
even of a hostile majority. Some of the most remarkable protests which
appear in the journals of the peers were drawn up by him; and in some of
the bitterest of those pamphlets which called on the English to stand up
for their country against the aliens who had come from beyond the seas
to oppress and plunder her, critics easily detected his style. When the
rebellion of 1715 broke out, he refused to sign the paper in which the
bishops of the province of Canterbury declared their attachment to the
Protestant succession. He busied himself in electioneering, especially
at Westminster, where, as dean, he possessed great influence; and
was, indeed, strongly suspected of having once set on a riotous mob to
prevent his Whig fellow-citizens from polling.
After having been long in indirect communication with the exiled family,
he, in 1717, began to correspond directly with the Pretender. The first
letter of the correspondence is extant. In that letter Atterbury boasts
of having, during many years past, neglected no opportunity of serving
the Jacobite cause. "My daily prayer," he says, "is that you may have
success. May I live to see that day, and live no longer than I do what
is in my power to forward it." It is to be remembered that he who wrote
thus was a man bound to set to the church of which he was overseer an
example of strict probity; that he had repeatedly sworn allegiance to
the House of Brunswick; that he had assisted in placing the crown on
the head of George I., and that he had abjured James III., "without
equivocation or mental reservation, on the true faith of a Christian."
It is agreeable to turn from his public to his private life. His
turbulent spirit, wearied with faction and treason, now and then
required repose, and found it in domestic endearments, and in the
society of the most illustrious of the living and of the dead. Of his
wife little is known: but between him and his daughter there was an
affection singularly close and tender. The gentleness of his manners
when he was in the company of a few friends was such as seemed hardly
credible to those who knew him only by his writings and speeches. The
charm of his "softer hour" has been commemorated by one of those friends
in imperishable verse. Though Atterbury's classical attainments were not
great, his taste in English literature was excellent; and his admiration
of genius was so strong that it overpowered even his political and
religious antipathies. His fondness for Milton, the mortal enemy of the
Stuarts and of the church, was such as to many Tories seemed a crime. On
the sad night on which Addison was laid in the chapel of Henry VII., the
Westminster boys remarked that Atterbury read the funeral service with a
peculiar tenderness and solemnity. The favourite companions, however,
of the great Tory prelate were, as might have been expected, men whose
politics had at least a tinge of Toryism. He lived on friendly terms
with Swift, Arbuthnot, and Gay. With Prior he had a close intimacy,
which some misunderstanding about public affairs at last dissolved.
Pope found in Atterbury, not only a warm admirer, but a most faithful,
fearless, and judicious adviser. The poet was a frequent guest at the
episcopal palace among the elms of Bromley, and entertained not the
slightest suspicion that his host, now declining in years, confined to
an easy chair by gout, and apparently devoted to literature, was deeply
concerned in criminal and perilous designs against the government.
The spirit of the Jacobites had been cowed by the events of 1715. It
revived in 1721. The failure of the South Sea project, the panic in the
money market, the downfall of great commercial houses, the distress
from which no part of the kingdom was exempt, had produced general
discontent. It seemed not improbable that at such a moment an
insurrection might be successful. An insurrection was planned. The
streets of London were to be barricaded; the Tower and the Bank were
to be surprised; King George, his family, and his chief captains and
councillors, were to be arrested; and King James was to be proclaimed.
The design became known to the Duke of Orleans, regent of France, who
was on terms of friendship with the House of Hanover. He put the English
government on its guard. Some of the chief malecontents were committed
to prison; and among them was Atterbury. No bishop of the Church of
England had been taken into custody since that memorable day when the
applauses and prayers of all London had followed the seven bishops to
the gate of the Tower. The Opposition entertained some hope that it
might be possible to excite among the people an enthusiasm resembling
that of their fathers, who rushed into the waters of the Thames to
implore the blessing of Sancroft. Pictures of the heroic confessor in
his cell were exhibited at the shop windows. Verses in his praise were
sung about the streets. The restraints by which he was prevented from
communicating with his accomplices were represented as cruelties worthy
of the dungeons of the Inquisition. Strong appeals were made to the
priesthood. Would they tamely permit so gross an insult to be offered to
their cloth? Would they suffer the ablest, the most eloquent member of
their profession, the man who had so often stood up for their rights
against the civil power, to be treated like the vilest of mankind?
There was considerable excitement; but it was allayed by a temperate
and artful letter to the clergy, the work, in all probability, of Bishop
Gibson, who stood high in the favour of Walpole, and shortly after
became minister for ecclesiastical affairs.
Atterbury remained in close confinement during some months. He had
carried on his correspondence with the exiled family so cautiously that
the circumstantial proofs of his guilt, though sufficient to produce
entire moral conviction, were not sufficient to justify legal
conviction. He could be reached only by a bill of pains and penalties.
Such a bill the Whig party, then decidedly predominant in both houses,
was quite prepared to support. Many hot-headed members of that party
were eager to follow the precedent which had been set in the case of
Sir John Fenwick, and to pass an act for cutting off the bishop's head.
Cadogan, who commanded the army, a brave soldier, but a headstrong
politician, is said to have exclaimed with great vehemence: "Fling him
to the lions in the Tower." But the wiser and more humane Walpole
was always unwilling to shed blood; and his influence prevailed.
When Parliament met, the evidence against the bishop was laid before
committees of both houses. Those committees reported that his guilt
was proved. In the Commons a resolution, pronouncing him a traitor, was
carried by nearly two to one. A bill was then introduced which provided
that he should be deprived of his spiritual dignities, that he should
be banished for life, and that no British subject should hold any
intercourse with him except by the royal permission.
This bill passed the Commons with little difficulty. For the bishop,
though invited to defend himself, chose to reserve his defence for the
assembly of which he was a member. In the Lords the contest was
sharp. The young Duke of Wharton, distinguished by his parts, his
dissoluteness, and his versatility, spoke for Atterbury with great
effect; and Atterbury's own voice was heard for the last time by that
unfriendly audience which had so often listened to him with mingled
aversion and delight. He produced few witnesses; nor did those witnesses
say much that could be of service to him. Among them was Pope. He was
called to prove that, while he was an inmate of the palace at Bromley,
the bishop's time was completely occupied by literary and domestic
matters, and that no leisure was left for plotting. But Pope, who
was quite unaccustomed to speak in public, lost his head, and, as he
afterwards owned, though he had only ten words to say, made two or three
blunders.
The bill finally passed the Lords by eighty-three votes to forty-three.
The bishops, with a single exception, were in the majority. Their
conduct drew on them a sharp taunt from Lord Bathurst, a warm friend
of Atterbury and a zealous Tory. "The wild Indians," he said, "give
no quarter, because they believe that they shall inherit the skill and
prowess of every adversary whom they destroy. Perhaps the animosity of
the right reverend prelates to their brother may be explained in the
same way."
Atterbury took leave of those whom he loved with a dignity and
tenderness worthy of a better man. Three fine lines of his favourite
poet were often in his mouth:--
"Some natural tears he dropped, but wiped them soon:
The world was all before him, where to chuse
His place of rest, and Providence his guide."
At parting he presented Pope with a Bible, and said, with a
disingenuousness of which no man who had studied the Bible to much
purpose would have been guilty: "If ever you learn that I have any
dealings with the Pretender, I give you leave to say that my punishment
is just." Pope at this time really believed the bishop to be an injured
man. Arbuthnot seems to have been of the same opinion. Swift, a few
months later, ridiculed with great bitterness, in the "Voyage to
Laputa," the evidence which had satisfied the two Houses of Parliament.
Soon, however, the most partial friends of the banished prelate ceased
to assert his innocence, and contented themselves with lamenting and
excusing what they could not defend. After a short stay at Brussels, he
had taken up his abode at Paris, and had become the leading man among
the Jacobite refugees who were assembled there. He was invited to Rome
by the Pretender, who then held his mock court under the immediate
protection of the Pope. But Atterbury felt that a bishop of the Church
of England would be strangely out of place at the Vatican, and declined
the invitation. During some months, however, he might flatter himself
that he stood high in the good graces of James. The correspondence
between the master and the servant was constant. Atterbury's merits were
warmly acknowledged; his advice was respectfully received; and he was,
as Bolingbroke had been before him, the prime minister of a king without
a kingdom. But the new favourite found, as Bolingbroke had found before
him, that it was quite as hard to keep the shadow of power under
a vagrant and mendicant prince as to keep the reality of power at
Westminster. Though James had neither territories nor revenues, neither
army nor navy, there was more faction and more intrigue among his
courtiers than among those of his successful rival. Atterbury soon
perceived that his counsels were disregarded, if not distrusted. His
proud spirit was deeply wounded. He quitted Paris, fixed his residence
at Montpellier, gave up politics, and devoted himself entirely to
letters. In the sixth year of his exile he had so severe an illness that
his daughter, herself in very delicate health, determined to run all
risks that she might see him once more. Having obtained a licence from
the English Government, she went by sea to Bordeaux, but landed there
in such a state that she could travel only by boat or in a litter. Her
father, in spite of his infirmities, set out from Montpellier to meet
her; and she, with the impatience which is often the sign of approaching
death, hastened towards him. Those who were about her in vain implored
her to travel slowly. She said that every hour was precious, that
she only wished to see her papa and to die. She met him at Toulouse,
embraced him, received from his hand the sacred bread and wine, and
thanked God that they had passed one day in each other's society before
they parted forever. She died that night.
It was some time before even the strong mind of Atterbury recovered from
this cruel blow. As soon as he was himself again he became eager
for action and conflict; for grief, which disposes gentle natures to
retirement, to inaction, and to meditation, only makes restless spirits
more restless. The Pretender, dull and bigoted as he was, had found out
that he had not acted wisely in parting with one who, though a heretic,
was, in abilities and accomplishments, the foremost man of the Jacobite
party. The bishop was courted back, and was without much difficulty
induced to return to Paris and to become once more the phantom minister
of a phantom monarchy. But his long and troubled life was drawing to a
close. To the last, however, his intellect retained all its keenness
and vigour. He learned, in the ninth year of his banishment, that he had
been accused by Oldmixon, as dishonest and malignant a scribbler as any
that has been saved from oblivion by the Dunciad, of having, in
concert with other Christchurchmen, garbled Clarendon's History of the
Rebellion. The charge, as respected Atterbury, had not the slightest
foundation: for he was not one of the editors of the History, and never
saw it till it was printed. He published a short vindication of himself,
which is a model in its kind, luminous, temperate, and dignified. A copy
of this little work he sent to the Pretender, with a letter singularly
eloquent and graceful. It was impossible, the old man said, that he
should write anything on such a subject without being reminded of the
resemblance between his own fate and that of Clarendon. They were the
only two English subjects that had ever been banished from their
country and debarred from all communication with their friends by act of
parliament. But here the resemblance ended. One of the exiles had been
so happy as to bear a chief part in the restoration of the Royal house.
All that the other could now do was to die asserting the rights of that
house to the last. A few weeks after this letter was written Atterbury
died. He had just completed his seventieth year.
His body was brought to England, and laid, with great privacy, under the
nave of Westminster Abbey. Only three mourners followed the coffin. No
inscription marks the grave. That the epitaph with which Pope honoured
the memory of his friend does not appear on the walls of the great
national cemetery is no subject of regret: for nothing worse was ever
written by Colley Cibber.
Those who wish for more complete information about Atterbury may easily
collect it from his sermons and his controversial writings, from the
report of the parliamentary proceedings against him, which will be found
in the State Trials, from the five volumes of his correspondence, edited
by Mr Nichols, and from the first volume of the Stuart papers, edited
by Mr Glover. A very indulgent but a very interesting account of the
bishop's political career will be found in Lord Mahon's valuable History
of England.
*****
JOHN BUNYAN. (May 1854.)
John Bunyan, the most popular religious writer in the English language,
was born at Elstow, about a mile from Bedford, in the year 1628. He
may be said to have been born a tinker. The tinkers then formed an
hereditary caste, which was held in no high estimation. They were
generally vagrants and pilferers, and were often confounded with the
gipsies, whom in truth they nearly resembled. Bunyan's father was more
respectable than most of the tribe. He had a fixed residence, and was
able to send his son to a village school where reading and writing were
taught.
The years of John's boyhood were those during which the puritan spirit
was in the highest vigour all over England; and nowhere had that spirit
more influence than in Bedfordshire. It is not wonderful, therefore,
that a lad to whom nature had given a powerful imagination, and
sensibility which amounted to a disease, should have been early haunted
by religious terrors. Before he was ten, his sports were interrupted by
fits of remorse and despair; and his sleep was disturbed by dreams
of fiends trying to fly away with him. As he grew older, his mental
conflicts became still more violent. The strong language in which
he described them has strangely misled all his biographers except Mr
Southey. It has long been an ordinary practice with pious writers to
cite Bunyan as an instance of the supernatural power of divine grace to
rescue the human soul from the lowest depths of wickedness. He is called
in one book the most notorious of profligates; in another, the brand
plucked from the burning. He is designated in Mr Ivimey's History of the
Baptists as the depraved Bunyan, the wicked tinker of Elstow. Mr Ryland,
a man once of great note among the Dissenters, breaks out into the
following rhapsody:--"No man of common sense and common integrity can
deny that Bunyan was a practical atheist, a worthless contemptible
infidel, a vile rebel to God and goodness, a common profligate, a
soul-despising, a soul-murdering, a soul-damning, thoughtless wretch as
could exist on the face of the earth. Now be astonished, O heavens, to
eternity! and wonder, O earth and hell! while time endures. Behold
this very man become a miracle of mercy, a mirror of wisdom, goodness,
holiness, truth, and love." But whoever takes the trouble to examine the
evidence will find that the good men who wrote this had been deceived by
a phraseology which, as they had been hearing it and using it all their
lives, they ought to have understood better. There cannot be a greater
mistake than to infer, from the strong expressions in which a devout man
bemoans his exceeding sinfulness, that he has led a worse life than his
neighbours. Many excellent persons, whose moral character from
boyhood to old age has been free from any stain discernible to their
fellow-creatures, have, in their autobiographies and diaries, applied to
themselves, and doubtless with sincerity, epithets as severe as could be
applied to Titus Oates or Mrs Brownrigg. It is quite certain that
Bunyan was, at eighteen, what, in any but the most austerely puritanical
circles, would have been considered as a young man of singular gravity
and innocence. Indeed, it may be remarked that he, like many other
penitents who, in general terms, acknowledged themselves to have been
the worst of mankind, fired up and stood vigorously on his defence,
whenever any particular charge was brought against him by others. He
declares, it is true, that he had let loose the reins on the neck of his
lusts, that he had delighted in all transgressions against the divine
law, and that he had been the ringleader of the youth of Elstow in
all manner of vice. But, when those who wished him ill accused him of
licentious amours, he called on God and the angels to attest his purity.
No woman, he said, in heaven, earth, or hell, could charge him with
having ever made any improper advances to her. Not only had he been
strictly faithful to his wife; but he had even before his marriage, been
perfectly spotless. It does not appear from his own confessions, or from
the railings of his enemies, that he ever was drunk in his life. One
bad habit he contracted, that of using profane language; but he tells
us that a single reproof cured him so effectually that he never offended
again. The worst that can be laid to the charge of this poor youth,
whom it has been the fashion to represent as the most desperate of
reprobates, as a village Rochester, is that he had a great liking for
some diversions, quite harmless in themselves, but condemned by the
rigid precisians among whom he lived, and for whose opinion he had a
great respect. The four chief sins of which he was guilty were dancing,
ringing the bells of the parish church, playing at tipcat, and reading
the history of Sir Bevis of Southampton. A rector of the school of Laud
would have held such a young man up to the whole parish as a model. But
Bunyan's notions of good and evil had been learned in a very different
school; and he was made miserable by the conflict between his tastes and
his scruples.
When he was about seventeen, the ordinary course of his life was
interrupted by an event which gave a lasting colour to his thoughts.
He enlisted in the parliamentary army, and served during the decisive
campaign of 1645. All that we know of his military career is that, at
the siege of Leicester, one of his comrades, who had taken his post, was
killed by a shot from the town. Bunyan ever after considered himself as
having been saved from death by the special interference of Providence.
It may be observed that his imagination was strongly impressed by the
glimpse which he had caught of the pomp of war. To the last he loved to
draw his illustrations of sacred things from camps and fortresses, from
guns, drums, trumpets, flags of truce, and regiments arrayed, each under
its own banner. His Greatheart, his Captain Boanerges, and his Captain
Credence, are evidently portraits, of which the originals were among
those martial saints who fought and expounded in Fairfax's army.
In a few months Bunyan returned home and married. His wife had some
pious relations, and brought him as her only portion some pious books.
And now his mind, excitable by nature, very imperfectly disciplined
by education, and exposed, without any protection, to the infectious
virulence of the enthusiasm which was then epidemic in England, began
to be fearfully disordered. In outward things he soon became a strict
Pharisee. He was constant in attendance at prayers and sermons. His
favourite amusements were one after another relinquished, though not
without many painful struggles. In the middle of a game at tipcat he
paused, and stood staring wildly upwards with his stick in his hand. He
had heard a voice asking him whether he would leave his sins and go
to heaven, or keep his sins and go to hell; and he had seen an awful
countenance frowning on him from the sky. The odious vice of bellringing
he renounced; but he still for a time ventured to go to the church tower
and look on while others pulled the ropes. But soon the thought struck
him that, if he persisted in such wickedness, the steeple would fall
on his head; and he fled in terror from the accursed place. To give up
dancing on the village green was still harder; and some months elapsed
before he had the fortitude to part with this darling sin. When this
last sacrifice had been made, he was, even when tried by the maxims of
that austere time, faultless. All Elstow talked of him as an eminently
pious youth. But his own mind was more unquiet than ever. Having nothing
more to do in the way of visible reformation, yet finding in religion
no pleasures to supply the place of the juvenile amusements which he
had relinquished, he began to apprehend that he lay under some special
malediction; and he was tormented by a succession of fantasies which
seemed likely to drive him to suicide or to Bedlam.
At one time he took it into his head that all persons of Israelite blood
would be saved, and tried to make out that he partook of that blood; but
his hopes were speedily destroyed by his father, who seems to have had
no ambition to be regarded as a Jew.
At another time Bunyan was disturbed by a strange dilemma: "If I have
not faith, I am lost; if I have faith, I can work miracles." He was
tempted to cry to the puddles between Elstow and Bedford, "Be ye dry,"
and to stake his eternal hopes on the event.
Then he took up a notion that the day of grace for Bedford and the
neighbouring villages was past: that all who were to be saved in that
part of England were already converted; and that he had begun to pray
and strive some months too late.
Then he was harassed by doubts whether the Turks were not in the right,
and the Christians in the wrong. Then he was troubled by a maniacal
impulse which prompted him to pray to the trees, to a broom-stick, to
the parish bull. As yet, however, he was only entering the Valley of the
Shadow of Death. Soon the darkness grew thicker. Hideous forms floated
before him. Sounds of cursing and wailing were in his ears. His way ran
through stench and fire, close to the mouth of the bottomless pit. He
began to be haunted by a strange curiosity about the unpardonable sin,
and by a morbid longing to commit it. But the most frightful of all the
forms which his disease took was a propensity to utter blasphemy, and
especially to renounce his share in the benefits of the redemption.
Night and day, in bed, at table, at work, evil spirits, as he imagined,
were repeating close to his ear the words, "Sell him, sell him." He
struck at the hobgoblins; he pushed them from him; but still they were
ever at his side. He cried out in answer to them, hour after hour:
"Never, never; not for thousands of worlds, not for thousands." At
length, worn out by this long agony, he suffered the fatal words to
escape him, "Let him go, if he will." Then his misery became more
fearful than ever. He had done what could not be forgiven. He had
forfeited his part of the great sacrifice. Like Esau, he had sold his
birthright; and there was no longer any place for repentance. "None," he
afterwards wrote, "knows the terrors of those days but myself." He has
described his sufferings with singular energy, simplicity, and pathos.
He envied the brutes; he envied the very stones in the street, and the
tiles on the houses. The sun seemed to withhold its light and warmth
from him. His body, though cast in a sturdy mould, and though still in
the highest vigour of youth, trembled whole days together with the fear
of death and judgment. He fancied that this trembling was the sign set
on the worst reprobates, the sign which God had put on Cain. The unhappy
man's emotion destroyed his power of digestion. He had such pains
that he expected to burst asunder like Judas, whom he regarded as his
prototype.
Neither the books which Bunyan read, nor the advisers whom he consulted,
were likely to do much good in a case like his. His small library had
received a most unseasonable addition, the account of the lamentable
end of Francis Spira. One ancient man of high repute for piety, whom the
sufferer consulted, gave an opinion which might well have produced fatal
consequences. "I am afraid," said Bunyan, "that I have committed the sin
against the Holy Ghost." "Indeed," said the old fanatic, "I am afraid
that you have."