This is no idle menace. She soon brings a letter addressed to

his rival,--orders him to read it,--asks him whether he thinks it

sufficiently tender,--and finally commands him to carry it himself. Such

tyranny as this, it may be thought, would justify resistance. Arimant

does indeed venture to remonstrate:--

“This fatal paper rather let me tear,

Than, like Bellerophon, my sentence bear."

The answer of the lady is incomparable:--

“You may; but ’twill not be your best advice;

Twill only give me pains of writing twice.

You know you must obey me, soon or late.

Why should you vainly struggle with your fate?"

{358}Poor Arimant seems to be of the same opinion. He mutters something

about fate and free-will, and walks off with the billet-doux.

In the Indian Emperor, Montezuma presents Alméria with a garland as a

token of his love, and offers to make her his queen. She replies:--

“I take this garland, not as given by you;

But as my merit’s and my beauty’s due;

As for the crown which you, my slave, possess,

To share it with you would but make me less."

In return for such proofs of tenderness as these, her admirer consents

to murder his two sons and a benefactor to whom he feels the warmest

gratitude. Lyndaraxa, in the Conquest of Granada, assumes the same lofty

tone with Abdelmelech. He complains that she smiles upon his rival.

“Lynd. And when did I my power so far resign,

That you should regulate each look of mine?

Abdel. Then, when you gave your love, you gave that power.

Lynd.’Twas during pleasure--’tis revoked this hour.

Abdel. I’ll hate you, and this visit is my last.

Lynd. Do, if you can: you know I hold you fast."

That these passages violate all historical propriety, that sentiments to

which nothing similar was ever even affected except by the cavaliers of

Europe, are transferred to Mexico and Agra, is a light accusation. We

have no objection to a conventional world, an Illyrian puritan, or a

Bohemian sea-port. While the faces are good, we care little about the

back-ground. Sir Joshua Reynolds says that the curtains and hangings

in a historical painting ought to be, not velvet or cotton, but merely

drapery. The same principle should be applied to poetry and romance. The

truth of character is the first object; the truth of place and time is

to be considered only in the second place. Puff himself could tell the

actor to turn out his toes, and remind him that {359}Keeper Hatton was

a great dancer. We wish that, in our own time, a writer of a very

different order from Puff had not too often forgotten human nature in

the niceties of upholstery, millinery, and cookery.

We blame Dryden, not because the persons of his dramas are not Moors or

Americans, but because they are not men and women;--not because love,

such as he represents it, could not exist in a harem or in a wigwam, but

because it could not exist anywhere. As is the love of his heroes, such

are all their other emotions. All their qualities, their courage, their

generosity, their pride, are on the same colossal scale. Justice and

prudence are virtues which can exist only in a moderate degree, and

which change their nature and their name if pushed to excess. Of justice

and prudence, therefore, Dryden leaves his favourites destitute. He

did not care to give them what he could not give without measure. The

tyrants and ruffians are merely the heroes altered by a few touches,

similar to those which transformed the honest face of Sir Roger de

Coverley into the Saracen’s head. Through the grin and frown the

original features are still perceptible.

It is in the tragi-comedies that these absurdities strike us most.

The two races of men, or rather the angels and the baboons, are there

presented to us together. We meet in one scene with nothing but

gross, selfish, unblushing, lying libertines of both sexes, who, as

a punishment, we suppose, for their depravity, are condemned to talk

nothing but prose. But, as soon as we meet with people who speak in

verse, we know that we are in society which would have enraptured the

Cathos and Madelon of Moliere, in society for which Croondates would

have too little of the lover, and Clelia too much of the coquette.

{360}As Dryden was unable to render his plays interesting by means of

that which is the peculiar and appropriate excellence of the drama,

it was necessary that he should find some substitute for it. In his

comedies he supplied its place, sometimes by wit, but more frequently

by intrigue, by disguises, mistakes of persons, dialogues at cross

purposes, hair-breadth escapes, perplexing concealments, and surprising

disclosures. He thus succeeded at least in making these pieces very

amusing.

In his tragedies he trusted, and not altogether without reason, to

his diction and his versification. It was on this account, in all

probability, that he so eagerly adopted, and so reluctantly abandoned,

the practice of rhyming in his plays. What is unnatural appears less

unnatural in that species of verse than in fines which approach more

nearly to common conversation; and in the management of the heroic

couplet Dryden has never been equalled. It is unnecessary to urge any

arguments against a fashion now universally condemned. But it is worthy

of observation, that, though Dryden was deficient in that talent which

blank verse exhibits to the greatest advantage, and was certainly the

best writer of heroic rhyme in our language, yet the plays which have,

from the time of their first appearance, been considered as his best,

are in blank verse. No experiment can be more decisive.

It must be allowed that the worst even of the rhyming tragedies contains

good description and magnificent rhetoric. But, even when we forget that

they are plays, and, passing by their dramatic improprieties, consider

them with reference to the language, we are perpetually disgusted by

passages which it is difficult to conceive how any author could have

written, or any {361}audience have tolerated, rants in which the raving

violence of the manner forms a strange contrast with the abject tameness

of the thought. The author laid the whole fault on the audience, and

declared that, when he wrote them, he considered them bad enough to

please. This defence is unworthy of a man of genius, and, after all, is

no defence. Otway pleased without rant; and so might Dryden have done,

if he had possessed the powers of Otway. The fact is, that he had a

tendency to bombast, which, though subsequently corrected by time

and thought, was never wholly removed, and which showed itself in

performances not designed to please the rude mob of the theatre.

Some indulgent critics have represented this failing as an indication

of genius, as the profusion of unlimited wealth, the wantonness of

exuberant vigour. To us it seems to bear a nearer affinity to the

tawdriness of poverty, or the spasms and convulsions of weakness. Dryden

surely had not more imagination than Homer, Dante, or Milton, who

never fall into this vice. The swelling diction of Æschylus and Isaiah

resembles that of Almanzor and Maximin no more than the tumidity of a

muscle resembles the tumidity of a boil. The former is symptomatic

of health and strength, the latter of debility and disease. If ever

Shakspeare rants, it is not when his imagination is hurrying him along,

but when he is hurrying his imagination along,--when his mind is for a

moment jaded,--when, as was said of Euripides, he resembles a lion, who

excites his own fury by lashing himself with his tail. What happened

to Shakspeare from the occasional suspension of his powers happened

to Dryden from constant impotence. He, like his confederate Lee, had

judgment enough to appreciate the great poets of the preceding age,

but not {362}judgment enough to shun competition with them. He felt and

admired their wild and daring sublimity. That it belonged to another age

than that in which he lived and required other talents than those which

he possessed, that, in aspiring to emulate it, he was wasting, in

a hopeless attempt, powers which might render him pre-eminent in a

different career, was a lesson which he did not learn till late. As

those knavish enthusiasts, the French prophets, courted inspiration by

mimicking the writhings, swoonings, and gaspings which they considered

as its symptoms, he attempted, by affected fits of poetical fury,

to bring on a real paroxysm; and, like them, he got nothing but his

distortions for his pains.

Horace very happily compares those who, in his time, imitated Pindar

to the youth who attempted to fly to heaven on waxen wings, and who

experienced so fatal and ignominious a fall. His own admirable good

sense preserved him from this error, and taught him to cultivate a

style in which excellence was within his reach. Dryden had not the same

self-knowledge. He saw that the greatest poets were never so successful

as when they rushed beyond the ordinary bounds, and that some

inexplicable good fortune preserved them from tripping even when they

staggered on the brink of nonsense. He did not perceive that they were

guided and sustained by a power denied to himself. They wrote from

the dictation of the imagination; and they found a response in the

imaginations of others. He, on the contrary, sat down to work himself,

by reflection and argument, into a deliberate wildness, a rational

frenzy.

In looking over the admirable designs which accompany the Faust, we have

always been much struck by {363}one which represents the wizard and the

tempter riding at full speed. The demon sits on his furious horse as

heedlessly as if he were reposing on a chair. That he should keep his

saddle in such a posture, would seem impossible to any who did not

know that he was secure in the privileges of a superhuman nature. The

attitude of Faust, on the contrary, is the perfection of horsemanship.

Poets of the first order might safely write as desperately as

Mephistophiles rode. But Dryden, though admitted to communion with

higher spirits, though armed with a portion of their power, and

intrusted with some of their secrets, was of another race. What they

might securely venture to do, it was madness in him to attempt. It

was necessary that taste and critical science should supply his

deficiencies.

We will give a few examples. Nothing can be finer than the description

of Hector at the Grecian wall:--

[Illustration: 0411]

What daring expressions! Yet how significant! How picturesque! Hector

seems to rise up in his strength and fury. The gloom of night in his

frown,--the fire burning in his eyes,--the javelins and the

blazing armour,--the mighty rush through the gates and down

the battlements,--the trampling and the infinite roar of the

multitude,--everything is with us; everything is real. {364}Dryden has

described a very similar event in Maximin, and has done his best to he

sublime, as follows:--

“There with a forest of their darts he strove,

And stood like Capaneus defying Jove;

With his broad sword the boldest beating down,

Till Fate grew pale, lest he should win the town,

And turned the iron leaves of its dark book

To make new dooms, or mend what it mistook."

How exquisite is the imagery of the fairy songs in the Tempest and in

the Midsummer Night’s Dream; Ariel riding through the twilight on the

bat, or sucking in the bells of flowers with the bee; or the little

bower-women of Titania, driving the spiders from the couch of the Queen!

Dryden truly said, that

“Shakspeare’s magic could not copied be:

Within that circle none durst walk but he."

It would have been well if he had not himself dared to step within

the enchanted line, and drawn on himself a fate similar to that

which, according to the old superstition, punished such presumptuous

interference. The following lines are parts of the song of his

fairies:--

“Merry, merry, merry, we sail from the East,

Half-tippled at a rainbow feast.

In the bright moonshine, while winds whistle loud,

Tivv, tivy, tivy, we mount and we fly,

All racking along in a downy white cloud;

And lest our leap from the sky prove too far,

We slide on the back of a new falling star,

And drop from above

In a jelly of love."

These are very favourable instances. Those who wish for a bad one may

read the dying speeches of Maximin, and may compare them with the last

scenes of Othello and Lear.

If Dryden had died before the expiration of the first of the periods

into which we have divided his literary {365}life, he would have left

a reputation, at best, little higher than that of Lee or Davenant. He

would have been known only to men of letters; and by them he would have

been mentioned as a writer who threw away, on subjects which he was

incompetent to treat, powers which, judiciously employed, might have

raised him to eminence; whose diction and whose numbers had sometimes

very high merit; but all whose works were blemished by a false taste,

and by errors of gross negligence. A few of his prologues and epilogues

might perhaps still have been remembered and quoted. In these little

pieces he early showed all the powers which afterwards rendered him the

greatest of modern satirists. But, during the latter part of his

life, he gradually abandoned the drama. His plays appeared at longer

intervals. He renounced rhyme in tragedy. His language became less

turgid--his characters less exaggerated. He did not indeed produce

correct representations of human nature; but he ceased to daub such

monstrous chimeras as those which abound in his earlier pieces. Here and

there passages occur worthy of the best ages of the British stage. The

style which the drama requires changes with every change of character

and situation. He who can vary his manner to suit the variation is the

great dramatist; but he who excels in one manner only will, when that

manner happens to be appropriate, appear to be a great dramatist; as the

hands of a watch which does not go point right once in the twelve hours.

Sometimes there is a scene of solemn debate. This a mere rhetorician may

write as well as the greatest tragedian that ever lived. We confess

that to us the speech of Sempronius in Cato seems very nearly as good

as Shakspeare could have made it. But when the senate breaks up,

and {366}we find that the lovers and their mistresses, the hero, the

villain, and the deputy-villain, all continue to harangue in the same

style, we perceive the difference between a man who can write a play

and a man who can write a speech. In the same manner, wit, a talent

for description, or a talent for narration, may, for a time, pass for

dramatic genius. Dryden was an incomparable reasoned in verse. He was

conscious of his power; he was proud of it; and the authors of

the Rehearsal justly charged him with abusing it. His warriors and

princesses are fond of discussing points of amorous casuistry, such

as would have delighted a Parliament of Love. They frequently go still

deeper, and speculate on philosophical necessity and the origin of evil.

There were, however, some occasions which absolutely required this

peculiar talent. Then Dryden was indeed at home. All his best scenes are

of this description. They are all between men; for the heroes of Dryden,

like many other gentlemen, can never talk sense when ladies are in

company. They are all intended to exhibit the empire of reason

over violent passion. We have two interlocutors, the one eager and

impassioned, the other high, cool, and judicious. The composed and

rational character gradually acquires the ascendency. His fierce

companion is first inflamed to rage by his reproaches, then overawed

by his equanimity, convinced by his arguments, and soothed by his

persuasions. This is the case in the scene between Hector and Troilus,

in that between Antony and Ventidius, and in that between Sebastian and

Dorax. Nothing of the same kind in Shakspeare is equal to them, except

the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius, which is worth them all three.

{367}Some years before his death, Dryden altogether ceased to write for

the stage. He had turned his powers in a new direction, with success

the most splendid and decisive. His taste had gradually awakened his

creative faculties. The first rank in poetry was beyond his reach; but

he challenged and secured the most honorable place in the second. His

imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run,

though not to soar. When he attempted the highest flights, he became

ridiculous; but, while he remained in a lower region, he outstripped all

competitors.

All his natural and all his acquired powers fitted him to found a good

critical school of poetry. Indeed he carried his reforms too far for

his age. After his death, our literature retrograded: and a century was

necessary to bring it back to the point at which he left it. The general

soundness and healthfulness of his mental constitution, his information

of vast superficies though of small volume, his wit scarcely inferior to

that of the most distinguished followers of Donne, his eloquence, grave,

deliberate, and commanding, could not save him from disgraceful failure

as a rival of Shakspeare, but raised him far above the level of Boileau.

His command of language was immense. With him died the secret of the

old poetical diction of England,--the art of producing rich effects by

familiar words. In the following century, it was as completely lost as

the Gothic method of painting glass, and was but poorly supplied by

the laborious and tesselated imitations of Mason and Gray. On the

other hand, he was the first writer under whose skilful management the

scientific vocabulary fell into natural and pleasing verse. In this

department, he succeeded as completely as his contemporary Gibbons

succeeded in the similar {368}enterprise of carving the most delicate

flowers from heart of oak. The toughest and most knotty parts of

language became ductile at his touch. His versification in the same

manner, while it gave the first model of that neatness and precision

which the following generation esteemed so highly, exhibited, at the

same time, the last examples of nobleness, freedom, variety of pause,

and cadence. His tragedies in rhyme, however worthless in themselves,

had at least served the purpose of nonsense-verses; they had taught him

all the arts of melody which the heroic couplet admits. For bombast, his

prevailing vice, his new subjects gave little opportunity; his better

taste gradually discarded it.

He possessed, as we have said, in a pre-eminent degree, the power of

reasoning in verse; and this power was now peculiarly useful to him. His

logic is by no means uniformly sound. On points of criticism, he always

reasons ingeniously; and, when he is disposed to be honest, correctly.

But the theological and political questions which he undertook to treat

in verse were precisely those which he understood least. His arguments,

therefore, are often worthless. But the manner in which they are stated

is beyond all praise. The style is transparent. The topics follow each

other in the happiest order. The objections are drawn up in such a

manner that the whole fire of the reply may be brought to bear on them.

The circumlocutions which are substituted for technical phrases are

clear, neat, and exact. The illustrations at once adorn and elucidate

the reasoning. The sparkling epigrams of Cowley, and the simple

garrulity of the buidesque poets of Italy, are alternately employed, in

the happiest manner, to give effect to what is obvious, or clearness

to what is obscure. {369}His literary creed was catholic, even

to latitudinarianism; not from any want of acuteness, but from a

disposition to be easily satisfied. He was quick to discern the smallest

glimpse of merit; he was indulgent even to gross improprieties, when

accompanied by any redeeming talent. When he said a severe thing, it

was to serve a temporary purpose,--to support an argument, or to tease a

rival. Never was so able a critic so free from fastidiousness. He loved

the old poets, especially Shakspeare. He admired the ingenuity which

Donne and Cowley had so wildly abused. He did justice, amidst the

general silence, to the memory of Milton. He praised to the skies the

school-boy lines of Addison. Always looking on the fair side of every

object, he admired extravagance on account of the invention which he

supposed it to indicate; he excused affectation in favour of wit; he

tolerated even tameness for the sake of the correctness which was its

concomitant.

It was probably to this turn of mind, rather than to the more

disgraceful causes which Johnson has assigned, that we are to attribute

the exaggeration which dis-’figures the panegyrics of Dryden. No writer,

it must be owned, has carried the flattery of dedication to a greater

length. But this was not, we suspect, merely interested servility: it

was the overflowing of a mind singularly disposed to admiration,--of a

mind which diminished vices, and magnified virtues and obligations. The

most adulatory of his addresses is that in which he dedicates the State

of Innocence to Mary of Modena. Johnson thinks it strange that any

man should use such language without self-detestation. But he has not

remarked that to the very same work is prefixed an eulogium on Milton,

which certainly could not have {370}been acceptable at the court of

Charles the Second. Many years later, when Whig principles were in a

great measure triumphant, Sprat refused to admit a monument of John

Philips into Westminster Abbey--because, in the epitaph, the name of

Milton incidently occurred. The walls of his church, he declared, should

not be polluted by the name of a republican! Dryden was attached, both

by principle and interest, to the Court. But nothing could deaden his

sensibility to excellence. We are unwilling to accuse him severely,

because the same disposition, which prompted him to pay so generous a

tribute to the memory of a poet whom his patrons detested, hurried him

into extravagance when he described a princess distinguished by the

splendour of her beauty and the graciousness of her manners.

This is an amiable temper; but it is not the temper of great men. Where

there is elevation of character, there will be fastidiousness. It

is only in novels and on tombstones that we meet with people who are

indulgent to the faults of others, and unmerciful to their own; and

Dry den, at all events, was not one of these paragons. His charity was

extended most liberally to » others; but it certainly began at home. In

taste he was by no means deficient. His critical work! are, beyond all

comparison, superior to any which had, till then, appeared in England.

They were generally intended as apologies for his own poems, rather than

as expositions of general principles; he, therefore, often attempts

to deceive the reader by sophistry which could scarcely have

deceived himself. His dicta are the dicta, not of a judge, but of an

advocate;--often of an advocate in an unsound cause. Yet, in the very

act of misrepresenting the laws of composition, he shows how {371}well

he understands them. But he was perpetually acting against his better

knowledge. His sins were sins against light. He trusted that what was

bad would be pardoned for the sake of what was good. What was good, he

took no pains to make better. He was not, like most persons who rise to

eminence, dissatisfied even with his best productions. He had set up no

unattainable standard of perfection, the contemplation of which might

at once improve and mortify him. His path was not attended by an

unapproachable mirage of excellence, for ever receding, and for ever

pursued. He was not disgusted by the negligence of others; and he

extended the same toleration to himself. His mind was of a slovenly

character,--fond of splendour, but indifferent to neatness. Hence most

of his writings exhibit the sluttish magnificence of a Russian noble,

all vermin and diamonds, dirty linen and inestimable sables. Those

faults which spring from affectation, time and thought in a great

measure removed from his poems. But his carelessness he retained to the

last. If towards the close of his life he less frequently went wrong

from negligence, it was only because long habits of composition

rendered it more easy to go right. In his best pieces we find false

rhymes,--triplets, in which the third line appears to be a mere

intruder, and, while it breaks the music, adds nothing to the

meaning,--gigantic Alexandrines of fourteen and sixteen syllables,

and truncated verses for which he never troubled himself to find a

termination or a partner.

Such are the beauties and the faults which may be found in profusion

throughout the later works of Dry-den. A more just and complete estimate

of his natural and acquired powers,--of the merits of his style and of

its blemishes,--may be formed from the Hind and {372}Panther, than from

any of his other writings. As a didactic poem, it is far superior to

the Religio Laici. The satirical parts, particularly the character

of Burnet, are scarcely inferior to the best passages in Absalom and

Achitophel. There are, moreover, occasional touches of a tenderness

which effects us more, because it is decent, rational, and manly, and

reminds us of the best scenes in his tragedies. His versification sinks

and swells in happy unison with the subject; and his wealth of

language seems to be unlimited. Yet, the carelessness with which he has

constructed his plot, and the innumerable inconsistencies into which

he is every moment falling, detract much from the pleasure which such

various excellence affords.

In Absalom and Achitophel he hit upon a new and rich vein, which he

worked with signal success. The ancient satirists were the subjects of

a despotic government. They were compelled to abstain from political

topics, and to confine their attention to the frailties of private life.

They might, indeed, sometimes venture to take liberties with public men,

“Quorum Flaminia tegitur cinis atque Latina.”

Thus Juvenal immortalised the obsequious senators who met to decide the

fate of the memorable turbot. His fourth satire frequently reminds us of

the great political poem of Dryden; but it was not written till Domitian

had fallen: and it wants something of the peculiar flavour which belongs

to contemporary invective alone. His anger has stood so long that,

though the body is not impaired, the effervescence, the first cream,

is gone. Boileau lay under similar restraints; and, if he had been free

from all restraint, would have been no match for our countryman.

The advantages which Dryden derived from the nature {373}of his subject

he improved to the very utmost. His maimer is almost perfect. The style

of Horace and Boileau is fit only for light subjects. The Frenchman

did indeed attempt to turn the theological reasonings of the Provincial

Letters into verse, but with very indifferent success. The glitter of

Pope is cold. The ardour of Persius is without brilliancy. Magnificent

versification and ingenious combinations rarely harmonise with the

expression of deep feeling. In Juvenal and Dryden alone we have the

sparkle and the heat together. Those great satirists succeeded in

communicating; the fervour of their feelings to materials the most

incombustible, and kindled the whole mass into a blaze, at once dazzling

and destructive. We cannot, indeed, think, without regret, of the part

which so eminent a writer as Dryden took in the disputes of that period.

There was, no doubt, madness and wickedness on both sides. But there was

liberty on the one, and despotism on the other. On this point, however,

we will not dwell. At Talavera the English and French troops for a

moment suspended their conflict, to drink of a stream which flowed

between them. The shells were passed across from enemy to enemy without

apprehension or molestation. We, in the same manner, would rather

assist our political adversaries to drink with us of that fountain of

intellectual pleasure, which should be the common refreshment of both

parties, than disturb and pollute it with the havock of unseasonable

hostilities.

Macflenoe is inferior to Absalom and Achitophel, only in the subject.

In the execution it is even superior. But the greatest work of Dryden

was the last, the Ode on Saint Cecilia’s day. It is the master-piece

of the second class of poetry, and ranks but just below {374}the great

models of the first. It reminds us of the Pedasus of Achilles.

By comparing it with the impotent ravings of the heroic tragedies,

we may measure the progress which the mind of Dryden had made. He had

learned to avoid a too audacious competition with higher natures, to

keep at a distance from the verge of bombast or nonsense, to venture

on no expression which did not convey a distinct idea to his own mind.

There is none of that “darkness visible” of style which he had formerly

affected, and in which the greatest poets only can succeed. Everything

is definite, significant, and picturesque. His early writings resembled

the gigantic works of those Chinese gardeners who attempt to rival

nature herself, to form cataracts of terrific height and sound, to

raise precipitous ridges of mountains, and to imitate in artificial

plantations the vastness and the gloom of some primeval forest. This

manner he abandoned; nor did he ever adopt the Dutch taste which Pope

affected, the trim parterres, and the rectangular walks. He rather

resembled our Kents and Browns, who, imitating the great features of

landscape without emulating them, consulting the genius of the place,

assisting nature and carefully disguising their art, produced, not a

Chainouni or a Niagara, but a Stowe or a Hagley.

We are, on the whole, inclined to regret that Dryden did not accomplish

his purpose of writing an epic poem. It certainly would not have been

a work of the highest rank. It would not have rivalled the Iliad, the

Odyssey, or the Paradise Lost; but it would have been superior to the

productions of Apollonius, Lucan, or Statius, and not inferior to

the Jerusalem Delivered. {375}It would probably have been a vigorous

narrative, animated with something of the spirit of the old romances,

enriched with much splendid description, and interspersed with fine

declamations and disquisitions. The danger of Dryden would have been

from aiming too high; from dwelling too much, for example, on his angels

of kingdoms, and attempting a competition with that great writer who

in his own time had so incomparably succeeded in representing to us the

sights and sounds of another world. To Milton, and to Milton alone,

belonged the secrets of the great deep, the beach of sulphur, the ocean

of fire, the palaces of the fallen dominations, glimmering through the

everlasting shade, the silent wilderness of verdure and fragrance where

armed angels kept watch over the sleep of the first lovers, the portico

of diamond, the sea of jasper, the sapphire pavement empurpled with

celestial roses, and the infinite ranks of the Cherubim, blazing with

adamant and gold. The council, the tournament, the procession, the

crowded cathedral, the camp, the guardroom, the chase, were the proper

scenes for Dryden.

But we have not space to pass in review all the works which Dryden

wrote. We, therefore, will not speculate longer on those which he might

possibly have written. He may, on the whole, be pronounced to have been

a man possessed of splendid talents, which he often abused, and of a

sound judgment, the admonitions of which he often neglected; a man who

succeeded only in an inferior department of his art, but who, in that

department, succeeded pre-eminently; and who, with a more independent

spirit, a more anxious desire of excellence, and more respect for

himself, would, in his own walk, have attained to absolute perfection.

HISTORY. (1)

{376}(_Edinburgh Review_, May 1828.)

To write history respectably--that is, to abbreviate despatches, and

make extracts from speeches, to intersperse in due proportion epithets

of praise and abhorrence, to draw up antithetical characters of great

men, setting forth how many contradictory virtues and vices they united,

and abounding in _withs_ and _withouts_--all this is very easy. But

to be a really great historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual

distinctions. Many scientific works are, in their kind, absolutely

perfect. There are poems which we should be inclined to designate as

faultless, or as disfigured only by blemishes which pass unnoticed in

the general blaze of excellence. There are speeches, some speeches of

Demosthenes particularly, in which it would be impossible to alter a

word without altering it for the worse. But we are acquainted with

no history which approaches to our notion of what a history ought to

be--with no history which does not widely depart, either on the right

hand or on the left, from the exact line.

The cause may easily be assigned. This province of literature is a

debatable land. It lies on the confines of two distinct territories. It

is under the

(1) _The Romance of History. England_. By Henry Neete.

London, 1828.

jurisdiction {377}of two hostile powers; and, like other districts

similarly situated, it is ill-defined, ill cultivated, and ill

regulated. Instead of being equally shared between its two rulers, the

Reason and the Imagination, it falls alternately under the sole and

absolute dominion of each. It is sometimes fiction. It is sometimes

theory.

History, it has been said, is philosophy teaching by examples.

Unhappily, what the philosophy gains in soundness and depth the examples

generally lose in vividness. A perfect historian must possess an

imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and

picturesque. Yet he must control it so absolutely as to content himself

with the materials which he finds, and to refrain from supplying

deficiencies by additions of his own. He must be a profound and

ingenious reasoner. Yet he must possess sufficient self-command to

abstain from casting his facts in the mould of his hypothesis. Those who

can justly estimate these almost insuperable difficulties will not think

it strange that every writer should have failed, either in the narrative

or in the speculative department of history.

It may be laid down as a general rule, though subject to considerable

qualifications and exceptions, that _history begins in novel and ends

in essay_. Of the romantic historians Herodotus is the earliest and the

best. His animation, his simple-hearted tenderness, his wonderful talent

for description and dialogue, and the pure sweet flow of his language,

place him at the head of narrators. He reminds us of a delightful child.

There is a grace beyond the reach of affectation in his awkwardness, a

malice in his innocence, an intelligence in his nonsense, an insinuating

eloquence in his lisp. We know of no writer who makes such {378}interest

for himself and his hook in the heart of the reader. At the distance

of three-and-twenty centuries, we feel for him the same sort of pitying

fondness which Fontaine and Gay are said to have inspired in society.

He has written an incomparable book. He has written something better

perhaps than the best history; but he has not written a good history;

he is, from the first to the last chapter, an inventor. We do not here

refer merely to those gross fictions with which he has been reproached

by the critics of later times. We speak of that colouring which is

equally diffused over his whole narrative, and which perpetually leaves

the most sagacious reader in doubt what to reject and what to receive.

The most authentic parts of his work bear the same relation to his

wildest legends which Henry the Fifth bears to the Tempest. There was

an expedition undertaken by Xerxes against Greece; and there was an

invasion of France. There was a battle at Platæa; and there was a battle

at Agincourt. Cambridge and Exeter, the Constable and the Dauphin,

were persons as real as Demaratus and Pausa-nias. The harangue of the

Archbishop on the Salic Law and the Book of Numbers differs much less

from the orations which have in all ages proceeded from the right

reverend bench than the speeches of Mardonius and Artabanus from those

which were delivered at the council-board of Susa. Shakspeare gives us

enumerations of armies, and returns of killed and wounded, which are

not, we suspect, much less accurate than those of Herodotus. There are

passages in Herodotus nearly as long as acts of Shakspeare, in which

everything is told dramatically, and in which the narrative serves only

the purpose of stage-directions. It is possible, no doubt, that the

substance of some real conversations{379} may have been reported to the

historian. But events, which, if they ever happened, happened in ages

and nations so remote that the particulars could never have been known

to him, are related with the greatest minuteness of detail. We have all

that Candaules said to Gyges, and all that passed between Astyages and

Harpagus. We are, therefore, unable to judge whether, in the account

which he gives of transactions respecting which he might possibly have

been well informed, we can trust to anything beyond the naked outline;

whether, for example, the answer of Gelon to the ambassadors of the

Grecian confederacy, or the expressions which passed between Aristides

and Themistocles at their famous interview, have been correctly

transmitted to us. The great events, are, no doubt, faithfully related.

So, probably, are many of the slighter circumstances; but which of them

it is impossible to ascertain. The fictions are so much like the facts,

and the facts so much like the fictions, that, with respect to many most

interesting particulars, our belief is neither given nor withheld, but

remains in an uneasy and interminable state of abeyance. We know that

there is truth; but we cannot exactly decide where it lies.

The faults of Herodotus are the faults of a simple and imaginative

mind. Children and servants are remarkably Herodotean in their style of

narration. They tell everything dramatically. Their _says hes_ and _says

shes_ are proverbial. Every person who has had to settle their disputes

knows that, even when they have no intention to deceive, their reports

of conversation always require to be carefully sifted. If an educated

man were giving an account of the late change of administration, he

would say--“Lord Goderich resigned; {380}and the King, in consequence,

sent for the Duke of Wellington.” A porter tells the story as if he

had been hid behind the curtains of the royal bed at Windsor: “So Lord

Goderich says, ‘I cannot manage this business; I must go out.’ So

the King says,--says he, ‘Well, then, I must send for the Duke of

Wellington--that’s all.’” This is in the very manner of the father of

history.

Herodotus wrote as it was natural that he should write. He wrote for a

nation susceptible, curious, lively, insatiably desirous of novelty

and excitement; for a nation in which the fine arts had attained their

highest excellence, but in which philosophy was still in its infancy.

His countrymen had but recently begun to cultivate prose composition.

Public transactions had generally been recorded in verse. The first

historians might, therefore, indulge without fear of censure in the

license allowed to their predecessors the bards. Books were few. The

events of former times were learned from tradition and from popular

ballads; the manners of foreign countries from the reports of

travellers. It is well known that the mystery which overhangs what is

distant, either in space or time, frequently prevents us from censuring

as unnatural what we perceive to be impossible. We stare at a dragoon

who has killed three French cuirassiers, as a prodigy; yet we read,

without the least disgust, how Godfrey slew his thousands, and Rinaldo

his ten thousands. Within the last hundred years, stories about China

and Bantam, which ought not to have imposed on an old nurse, were

gravely laid down as foundations of political theories by eminent

philosophers. What the time of the Crusades is to us, the generation of

Croesus and Solon was to the Greeks of the time of Herodotus. Babylon

{381}was to them what Pekin was to the French academicians of the last

century.

For such a people was the book of Herodotus composed; and, if we may

trust to a report, not sanctioned indeed by writers of high authority,

but in itself not improbable, it was composed, not to be read, but to

be heard. It was not to the slow circulation of a few copies, which the

rich only could possess, that the aspiring author looked for his reward.

The great Olympian festival,--the solemnity which collected multitudes,

proud of the Grecian name, from the wildest mountains of Doris, and the

remotest colonies of Italy and Libya,--was to witness his triumph. The

interest of the narrative, and the beauty of the style, were aided

by the imposing effect of recitation,--by the splendour of the

spectacle,--by the powerful influence of sympathy. A critic who could

have asked for authorities in the midst of such a scene must have been

of a cold and sceptical nature; and few such critics were there: As was

the historian, such were the auditors,--inquisitive, credulous, easily

moved by religious awe or patriotic enthusiasm. They were the very

men to hear with delight of strange beasts, and birds, and trees,--of

dwarfs, and giants, and cannibals,--of gods, whose very names it was

impiety to utter,--of ancient dynasties, which had left behind them

monuments surpassing all the works of later times,--of towns like

provinces,--of rivers like seas,--of stupendous walls, and temples, and

pyramids,--of the rites which the Magi performed at daybreak on the tops

of the mountains,--of the secrets inscribed on the eternal obelisks of

Memphis. With equal delight they would have listened to the

graceful romances of their own country. They now heard of the exact

{382}accomplishment of obscure predictions, of the punishment of crimes

over which the justice of heaven had seemed to slumber,--of dreams,

omens, warnings from the dead,--of princesses, for whom noble suitors

contended in every generous exercise of strength and skill,--of infants,

strangely preserved from the dagger of the assassin, to fulfil high

destinies.

As the narrative approached their own times, the interest became still

more absorbing. The chronicler had now to tell the story of that

great conflict from which Europe dates its intellectual and political

supremacy,--a story which, even at this distance of time, is the most

marvellous and the most touching in the annals of the human race,--a

story abounding with all that is wild and wonderful, with all that is

pathetic and animating; with the gigantic caprices of infinite wealth

and despotic power--with the mightier miracles of wisdom, of virtue,

and of courage. He told them of rivers dried up in a day,--of

provinces famished for a meal,--of a passage for ships hewn through the

mountains,--of a road for armies spread upon the waves,--of monarchies

and commonwealths swept away,--of anxiety, of terror, of confusion, of

despair!--and then of proud and stubborn hearts tried in that extremity

of evil, and not found wanting,--of resistance long maintained against

desperate odds,--of lives dearly sold, when resistance could be

maintained no more,--of signal deliverance, and of unsparing revenge.

Whatever gave a stronger air of reality to a narrative so well

calculated to inflame the passions, and to flatter national pride, was

certain to be favourably received.

Between the time at which Herodotus is said to have composed his

history, and the close of the Peloponnesian {383}war, about forty years

elapsed,--forty years, crowded with great military and political events.

The circumstances of that period produced a great effect on the

Grecian character; and nowhere was this effect so remarkable as in the

illustrious democracy of Athens. An Athenian, indeed, even in the

time of Herodotus, would scarcely have written a book so romantic and

garrulous as that of Herodotus. As civilisation advanced, the citizens

of that famous republic became still less visionary, and still less

simple-hearted. They aspired to know where their ancestors had been

content to doubt; they began to doubt where their ancestors had thought

it their duty to believe. Aristophanes is fond of alluding to this

change in the temper of his countrymen. The father and son, in the

Clouds, are evidently representatives of the generations to which they

respectively belonged. Nothing more clearly illustrates the nature of

this moral revolution than the change which passed upon tragedy. The

wild sublimity of Æschylus became the scoff of every young Phidippides.

Lectures on abstruse points of philosophy, the fine distinctions of

casuistry, and the dazzling fence of rhetoric, were substituted for

poetry. The language lost something of that infantine sweetness which

had characterised it. It became less like the ancient Tuscan, and more

like the modern French.

The fashionable logic of the Greeks, was, indeed, far from strict. Logic

never can be strict where books are scarce, and where information is

conveyed orally. We are all aware how frequently fallacies, which, when

set down on paper, are at once detected, pass for unanswerable arguments

when dexterously and volubly urged in Parliament, at the bar, or in

private conversation. The reason is evident. We cannot inspect {384}them

closely enough to perceive their inaccuracy. We cannot readily compare

them with each other. We lose sight of one part of the subject before

another, which ought to be received in connection with it, comes before

us; and, as there is no immutable record of what has been admitted and

of what has been denied, direct contradictions pass muster with little

difficulty. Almost all the education of a Greek consisted in talking and

listening. His opinions on government were picked up in the debates of

the assembly. If he wished to study metaphysics, instead of shutting

himself up with a book, he walked down to the market-place to look for

a sophist. So completely were men formed to these habits, that even

writing acquired a conversational air. The philosophers adopted the form

of dialogue, as the most natural mode of communicating knowledge. Their

reasonings have the merits and the defects which belong to that species

of composition, and are characterised rather by quickness and subtilty

than by depth and precision. Truth is exhibited in parts, and by

glimpses. Innumerable clever hints are given; but no sound and durable

system is erected. The _argumentum ad hominem_, a kind of argument most

efficacious in debate, but utterly useless for the investigation of

general principles, is among their favourite resources. Hence, though

nothing can be more admirable than the skill which Socrates displays in

the conversations which Plato has reported or invented, his victories,

for the most part, seem to us unprofitable. A trophy is set up; but no

new province is added to the dominions of the human mind.

Still, where thousands of keen and ready intellects were constantly

employed in speculating on the qualities {385}of actions and on the

principles of government, it was impossible that history should retain

its old character. It became less gossiping and less picturesque; but

much more accurate, and somewhat more scientific.

The history of Thucydides differs from that of Herodotus as a portrait

differs from the representation of an imaginary scene; as the Burke or

Fox of Reynolds differs from his Ugolino or his Beaufort. In the

former ease, the archetype is given: in the latter, it is created. The

faculties which are required for the latter purpose are of a higher

and rarer order than those which suffice for the former, and indeed

necessarily comprise them. He who is able to paint what he sees with the

eye of the mind will surely be able to paint what he sees with the eye

of the body. He who can invent a story, and tell it well, will also

be able to tell, in an interesting manner, a story which he has not

invented. If, in practice, some of the best writers of fiction have been

among the worst writers of history, it has been because one of their

talents had merged in another so completely that it could not be

severed; because, having long been habituated to invent and narrate at

the same time, they found it impossible to narrate without inventing.

Some capricious and discontented artists have affected to consider

portrait-painting as unworthy of a man of genius. Some critics have

spoken in the same contemptuous manner of history. Johnson puts the case

thus: The historian tells either what is false or what is true: in the

former case he is no historian: in the latter he has no opportunity for

displaying his abilities: for truth is one: and all who tell the truth

must tell it alike.

It is not difficult to elude both the horns of this {386}dilemma. We

will recur to the analogous art of portrait-painting. Any man with eyes

and hands may be taught to take a likeness. The process, up to a certain

point, is merely mechanical. If this were all, a man of talents might

justly despise the occupation. But we could mention portraits which are

resemblances,--but not mere resemblances; faithful,--but much more than

faithful; portraits which condense into one point of time, and exhibit,

at a single glance, the whole history of turbid and eventful lives--in

which the eye seems to scrutinise us, and the mouth to command us--in

which the brow menaces, and the lip almost quivers with scorn--in which

every wrinkle is a comment on some important transaction. The account

which Thucydides has given of the retreat from Syracuse is, among

narratives, what Vandyk’s Lord Strafford is among paintings.

Diversity, it is said, implies error: truth is one, and admits of no

degrees. We answer, that this principle holds good only in abstract

reasonings. When we talk of the truth of imitation in the fine arts, we

mean an imperfect and a graduated truth. No picture is exactly like

the original; nor is a picture good in proportion as it is like the

original. When Sir Thomas Lawrence paints a handsome peeress, he does

not contemplate her through a powerful microscope, and transfer to the

canvas the pores of the skin, the blood-vessels of the eye, and all the

other beauties which Gulliver discovered in the Brobdignaggian maids

of honour. If he were to do this, the effect would not merely be

unpleasant, but, unless the scale of the picture were proportionably

enlarged, would be absolutely _false_. And, after all, a microscope

of greater power than that which he had employed would convict him of

innumerable {387}omissions. The same may be said of history. Perfectly

and absolutely true it cannot be: for, to be perfectly and absolutely

true, it ought to record _all_ the slightest particulars of the

slightest transactions--all the things done and all the words uttered

during the time of which it treats. The omission of any circumstance,

however insignificant, would be a defect. If history were written thus,

the Bodleian library would not contain the occurrences of a week. What

is told in the fullest and most accurate annals bears an infinitely

small proportion to what is suppressed. The difference between the

copious work of Clarendon and the account of the civil wars in the

abridgment of Goldsmith vanishes when compared with the immense mass of

facts respecting which both are equally silent.

No picture, then, and no history, can present us with the whole truth:

but those are the best pictures and the best histories which exhibit

such parts of the truth as most nearly produce the effect of the whole.

He who is deficient in the art of selection may, by showing nothing

but the truth, produce all the effect of the grossest falsehood. It

perpetually happens that one writer tells less truth than another,

merely because he tells more truths. In the imitative arts we constantly

see this. There are lines in the human face, and objects in landscape,

which stand in such relations to each other, that they ought either to

be all introduced into a painting together or all omitted together. A

sketch into which none of them enters may be excellent; but, if some

are given and others left out, though there are more points of likeness,

there is less likeness. An outline scrawled with a pen, which seizes the

marked features of a countenance, will give a much stronger idea of it

than a bad painting in oils. Yet {388}the worst painting in oils

that ever hung at Somerset House resembles the original in many more

particulars. A bust of white marble may give an excellent idea of a

blooming face. Colour the lips and cheeks of the bust, leaving the hair

and eyes unaltered, and the similarity, instead of being; more striking,

will be less so.

History has its foreground and its background: and it is principally in

the management of its perspective that one artist differs from another.

Some events must be represented on a large scale, others diminished; the

great majority will be lost in the dimness of the horizon; and a general

idea of their joint effect will be given by a few slight touches.

In this respect no writer has ever equalled Thucydides. He was a perfect

master of the art of gradual diminution. His history is sometimes as

concise as a chronological chart; yet it is always perspicuous. It

is sometimes as minute as one of Lovelace’s letters; yet it is never

prolix. He never fails to contract and to expand it in the right place.

Thucydides borrowed from Herodotus the practice of putting speeches of

his own into the mouths of his characters. In Herodotus this usage is

scarcely censurable. It is of a piece with his whole manner. But it is

altogether incongruous in the work of his successor, and violates, not

only the accuracy of history, but the decencies of fiction. When once

we enter into the spirit of Herodotus, we find no inconsistency. The

conventional probability of his drama is preserved from the beginning

to the end. The deliberate orations, and the familiar dialogues are

in strict keeping with each other. But the speeches of Thucydides are

neither preceded nor followed by anything with which they harmonise.

They give to the whole book something {389}of the grotesque character of

those Chinese pleasure-grounds in which perpendicular rocks of granite

start up in the midst of a soft green plain. Invention is shocking where

truth is in such close juxtaposition with it.

Thucydides honestly tells us that some of these discourses are purely

fictitious. He may have reported the substance of others correctly. But

it is clear from the internal evidence that he has preserved no more

than the substance. His own peculiar habits of thought and expression

are everywhere discernible. Individual and national peculiarities are

seldom to be traced in the sentiments, and never in the diction. The

oratory of the Corinthians and Thebans is not less Attic, either in

matter or in manner, than that of the Athenians. The style of Cleon is

as pure, as austere, as terse, and as significant, as that of Pericles.

In spite of this great fault, it must be allowed that Thucydides has

surpassed all his rivals in the art of historical narration, in the

art of producing an effect on the imagination, by skilful selection

and disposition, without indulging in the license of invention. But

narration, though an important part of the business of a historian, is

not the whole. To append a moral to a work of fiction is either useless

or superfluous. A fiction may give a more impressive effect to what

is already known; but it can teach nothing new. If it presents to us

characters and trains of events to which our experience furnishes

us with nothing similar, instead of deriving instruction from it, we

pronounce it unnatural. We do not form our opinions from it; but we

try it by our preconceived opinions. Fiction, therefore, is essentially

imitative. Its merit consists in its resemblance to a model with which

we are al ready {390}familiar, or to which at least we can instantly

refer. Hence it is that the anecdotes which interest us most strongly in

authentic narrative are offensive when introduced into novels; that what

is called the romantic part of history is in fact the least romantic. It

is delightful as history, because it contradicts our previous notions

of human nature, and of the connection of causes and effects. It is, on

that very account, shocking and incongruous in fiction. In fiction,

the principles are given, to find the facts: in history, the facts are

given, to find the principles; and the writer who does not explain the

phenomena as well as state them performs only one half of his office.

Facts are the mere dross of history. It is from the abstract truth which

interpenetrates them, and lies latent among them like gold in the ore,

that the mass derives its whole value: and the precious particles are

generally combined with the baser in such a manner that the separation

is a task of the utmost difficulty.

Here Thucydides is deficient: the deficiency, indeed, is not

discreditable to him. It was the inevitable effect of circumstances. It

was in the nature of things necessary that, in some part of its progress

through political science, the human mind should reach that point which

it attained in his time. Knowledge advances by steps, and not by leaps.

The axioms of an English debating club would have been startling and

mysterious paradoxes to the most enlightened statesmen of Athens. But

it would be as absurd to speak contemptuously of the Athenian on this

account as to ridicule Strabo for not having given us an account of

Chili, or to talk of Ptolemy as we talk of Sir Richard Phillips. Still,

when we wish for solid geographical information, we must prefer the

solemn coxcombry of {391}Pinkerton to the noble work of Strabo. If we

wanted instruction respecting the solar system, we should consult the

silliest girl from a boarding school, rather than Ptolemy.

Thucydides was undoubtedly a sagacious and reflecting man. This clearly

appears from the ability with which he discusses practical questions.

But the talent of deciding on the circumstances of a particular case is

often possessed in the highest perfection by persons destitute of

the power of generalisation. Men skilled in the military tactics

of civilised nations have been amazed at the far-sightedness and

penetration which a Mohawk displays in concerting his stratagems, or in

discerning those of his enemies. In England, no class possesses so much

of that peculiar ability which is required for constructing ingenious

schemes, and for obviating remote difficulties, as the thieves and the

thief-takers. Women have more of this dexterity than men. Lawyers have

more of it than statesmen: statesmen have more of it than philosophers.

Monk had more of it than Harrington and all his club. Walpole had more

of it than Adam Smith or Beccaria. Indeed, the species of discipline

by which this dexterity is acquired tends to contract the mind, and to

render it incapable of abstract reasoning.

The Grecian statesmen of the age of Thucydides were distinguished by

their practical sagacity, their insight into motives, their skill in

devising means for the attainment of their ends. A state of society in

winch the rich were constantly planning the oppression of the poor,

and the poor the spoliation of the rich, in which the ties of party

had superseded those of country, in which revolutions and counter

revolutions were events of daily occurrence, was naturally prolific

{392}in desperate and crafty political adventurers. This was the very

school in which men were likely to acquire the dissimulation of Mazarin,

the judicious temerity of Richelieu, the penetration, the exquisite

tact, the almost instinctive presentiment of approaching events which

gave so much authority to the counsel of Shaftesbury that “it was as

if a man had inquired of the oracle of God.” In this school Thucydides

studied; and his wisdom is that which such a school would naturally

afford. He judges better of circumstances than of principles. The more

a question is narrowed, the better he reasons upon it. His work suggests

many most important considerations respecting the first principles

of government and morals, the growth of factions, the organisation of

armies, and the mutual relations of communities. Yet all his general

observations on these subjects are very superficial. His most judicious

remarks differ from the remarks of a really philosophical historian,

as a sum correctly cast up by a book-keeper from a general expression

discovered by an algebraist. The former is useful only in a single

transaction; the latter may be applied to an infinite number of cases.

This opinion will, we fear, be considered as heterodox. For, not to

speak of the illusion which the sight of a Greek type, or the sound of

a Greek dip-thong, often produces, there are some peculiarities in the

manner of Thucydides which in no small degree have tended to secure to

him the reputation of profundity. His book is evidently the book of a

man and a statesman; and in this respect presents a remarkable contrast

to the delightful childishness of Herodotus. Throughout it there is

an air of matured power, of grave and melancholy reflection, of

impartiality and {393}habitual self-command. His feelings are rarely

indulged, and speedily repressed. Vulgar prejudices of every kind,

and particularly vulgar superstitions, he treats with a cold and

sober disdain peculiar to himself. His style is weighty, condensed,

antithetical, and not unfrequently obscure. But, when we look at his

political philosophy, without regard to these circumstances, we find

him to have been, what indeed it would have been a miracle if he had not

been, simply an Athenian of the fifth century before Christ.

Xenophon is commonly placed, but we think without much reason, in the

same rank with Herodotus and Thucydides. He resembles them, indeed,

in the purity and sweetness of his style; but, in spirit, he rather

resembles that later school of historians, whose works seem to be fables

composed for a moral, and who, In their eagerness to give us warnings

and examples, forget to give us men and women. The Life of Cyrus,

whether we look upon it as a history or as a romance, seems to us a

very wretched performance. The expedition of the Ten Thousand, and the

History of Grecian Affairs, are certainly pleasant reading; but they

indicate no great power of mind. In truth, Xenophon, though his taste

was elegant, his disposition amiable, and his intercourse with the world

extensive, had, we suspect, rather a weak head. Such was evidently the

opinion of that extraordinary man to whom he early attached himself,

and for whose memory he entertained an idolatrous veneration. He came in

only for the milk with which Socrates nourished his babes in philosophy.

A few saws of morality, and a few of the simplest doctrines of natural

religion, were enough for the good young man. The strong meat, the bold

speculations on physical and metaphysical science, were {394}reserved

for auditors of a different description. Even the lawless habits of

a captain of mercenary troops could not change the tendency which the

character of Xenophon early acquired. To the last, he seems to have

retained a sort of heathen Puritanism. The sentiments of piety and

virtue which abound in his works are those of a well-meaning man,

somewhat timid and narrow-minded, devout from constitution rather than

from rational conviction. He was as superstitious as Herodotus, but in

a way far more offensive. The very peculiarities which charm us in

an infant, the toothless mumbling, the stammering, the tottering, the

helplessness, the causeless tears and laughter, are disgusting in

old age. In the same manner, the absurdity which precedes a period

of general intelligence is often pleasing; that which follows it is

contemptible. The nonsense of Herodotus is that of a baby. The nonsense

of Xenophon is that of a dotard. His stories about dreams, omens, and

prophecies, present a strange contrast to the passages in which the

shrewd and incredulous Thucydides mentions the popular superstitions.

It is not quite clear that Xenophon was honest in his credulity;’ his

fanaticism was in some degree politic. He would have made an excellent

member of the Apostolic Camarilla. An alarmist by nature, an aristocrat

by party, he carried to an unreasonable excess his horror of popular

turbulence. The quiet atrocity of Sparta did not shock him in the same

manner; for he hated tumult more than crimes. He was desirous to find

restraints which might curb the passions of the multitude; and he

absurdly fancied that he had found them in a religion without

evidences or sanction, precepts or example, in a frigid system of

rheophilanthropy, supported by nursery tales. {395}Polybius and Arrian

have given us authentic accounts of facts; and here their merit ends.

They were not men of comprehensive minds; they had not the art of

telling a story in an interesting manner. They have in consequence been

thrown into the shade by writers who, though less studious of truth than

themselves, understood far better the art of producing effect,--by Livy

and Quintus Curtius.

Yet Polybius and Arrian deserve high praise when compared with the

writers of that school of which Plutarch may be considered as the head.

For the historians of this class we must confess that we entertain a

peculiar aversion. They seem to have been pedants, who, though destitute

of those valuable qualities which are frequently found in conjunction

with pedantry, thought themselves great philosophers and great

politicians. They not only mislead their readers in every page, as to

particular facts, but they appear to have altogether misconceived the

whole character of the times of which they write. They were inhabitants

of an empire bounded by the Atlantic Ocean and the Euphrates, by the

ice of Scythia and the sands of Mauritania; composed of nations whose

manners, whose languages, whose religion, whose countenances and

complexions, were widely different; governed by one mighty despotism,

which had risen on the ruins of a thousand commonwealths and kingdoms.

Of liberty, such as it is in small democracies, of patriotism, such as

it is in small independent communities of any kind, they had, and they

could have, no experimental knowledge. But they had read of men who

exerted themselves in the cause of their country with an energy unknown

in later times, who had violated the dearest of domestic charities, or

voluntarily devoted themselves to death, {396}for the public good;

and they wondered at the degeneracy of their contemporaries. It never

occurred to them that the feelings which they so greatly admired

sprung from local and occasional causes; that they will always grow up

spontaneously in small societies; and that, in large empires, though

they may be forced into existence for a short time by peculiar

circumstances, they cannot be general or permanent. It is impossible

that any man should feel for a fortress on a remote frontier as he

feels for his own house; that he should grieve for a defeat in which ten

thousand people whom he never saw have fallen as he grieves for a defeat

which has half unpeopled the street in which he lives; that he should

leave his home for a military expedition in order to preserve the

balance of power, as cheerfully as he would leave it to repel invaders

who had begun to burn all the corn fields in his neighbourhood.

The writers of whom we speak should have considered this. They should

have considered that in patriotism, such as it existed amongst the

Greeks, there was nothing essentially and eternally good; that an

exclusive attachment to a particular society, though a natural,

and, under certain restrictions, a most useful sentiment, implies

no extraordinary attainments in wisdom or virtue; that, where it has

existed in an intense degree, it has turned states into gangs of robbers

whom their mutual fidelity has rendered more dangerous, has given a

character of peculiar atrocity to war, and has generated that worst of

all political evils, the tyranny of nations over nations.

Enthusiastically attached to the name of liberty, these historians

troubled themselves little about its definition. The Spartans, tormented

by ten thousand absurd restraints, unable to please themselves in the

{397}choice of their wives, their suppers, or their company, compelled

to assume a peculiar manner, and to talk in a peculiar style, gloried

in their liberty. The aristocracy of Rome repeatedly made liberty a plea

for cutting off the favourites of the people. In almost all the little

commonwealths of antiquity, liberty was used as a pretext for measures

directed against everything which makes liberty valuable, for measures

which stifled discussion, corrupted the administration of justice, and

discouraged the accumulation of property. The writers, whose works we

are considering, confounded the sound with the substance, and the

means with the end. Their imaginations were inflamed by mystery. They

conceived of liberty as monks conceive of love, as cockneys conceive of

the happiness and innocence of rural life, as novel-reading sempstresses

conceive of Almack’s and Grosvenor Square, accomplished Marquesses and

handsome Colonels of the Guards. In the relation of events, and the

delineation of characters, they have paid little attention to facts,

to the costume of the times of which they pretend to treat, or to the

general principles of human nature. They have been faithful only to

their own puerile and extravagant doctrines. Generals and statesmen are

metamorphosed into magnanimous coxcombs, from whose fulsome virtues we

turn away with disgust. The fine sayings and exploits of their heroes

remind us of the insufferable perfections of Sir Charles Grandison, and

affect us with a nausea similar to that which we feel when an actor,

in one of Morton’s or Kotzebue’s plays, lays his hand on his heart,

advances to the ground-lights, and mouths a moral sentence for the

edification of the gods.

These writers, men who knew not what it was to have a country, men

who had never enjoyed political {398}rights, brought into fashion an

offensive cant about patriotism and zeal for freedom. What the English

Puritans did for the language of Christianity, what Scuderi did for

the language of love, they did for the language of public spirit. By

habitual exaggeration they made it mean. By monotonous emphasis they

made it feeble. They abused it till it became scarcely possible to use

it with effect.

Their ordinary rules of morality are deduced from extreme cases. The

common regimen which they prescribe for society is made up of those

desperate remedies which only its most desperate distempers require.

They look with peculiar complacency on actions which even those

who approve them consider as exceptions to laws of almost universal

application--which bear so close an affinity to the most atrocious

crimes that, even where it may be unjust to censure them, it is unsafe

to praise them. It is not strange, therefore, that some flagitious

instances of perfidy and cruelty should have been passed unchallenged in

such company, that grave moralists, with no personal interest at stake,

should have extolled, in the highest terms, deeds of which the

atrocity appalled even the infuriated factions in whose cause they were

perpetrated. The part which Timoleon took in the assassination of his

brother shocked many of his own partisans. The recollection of it preyed

long on his own mind. But it was reserved for historians who lived some

centuries later to discover that his conduct was a glorious display of

virtue, and to lament that, from the frailty of human nature, a man who

could perform so great an exploit could repent of it.

The writings of these men, and of their modern imitators, have produced

effects which deserve some notice. {399}The English have been so long

accustomed to political speculation, and have enjoyed so large a measure

of practical liberty, that such works have produced little effect on

their minds. We have classical associations and great names of our own

which we can confidently oppose to the most splendid of ancient times.

Senate has not to our ears a sound so venerable as Parliament. We

respect the Great Charter more than the laws of Solon. The Capitol and

the Forum impress us with less awe than our own Westminster Hall and

Westminster Abbey, the place where the great men of twenty generations

have contended, the place where they sleep together! The list of

warriors and statesmen by whom our constitution was founded or

preserved, from De Montfort down to Fox, may well stand a comparison

with the Fasti of Rome. The dying thanksgiving of Sydney is as noble as

the libation which Thrasea poured to Liberating Jove: and we think

with far less pleasure of Cato tearing out his entrails than of Russell

saying, as he turned away from his wife, that the bitterness of death

was past. Even those parts of our history over which, on some accounts,

we would gladly throw a veil may be proudly opposed to those on which

the moralists of antiquity loved most to dwell. The enemy of English

liberty was not murdered by men whom he had pardoned and loaded with

benefits. He was not stabbed in the back by those who smiled and cringed

before his face. He was vanquished on fields of stricken battle; he was

arraigned, sentenced, and executed in the face of heaven and earth. Our

liberty is neither Greek nor Roman; but essentially English. It has

a character of its own,--a character which has taken a tinge from the

sentiments of the chivalrous ages, and which accords with {400}the

peculiarities of our manners and of our insular situation. It has a

language, too, of its own, and a language singularly idiomatic, full of

meaning to ourselves, scarcely intelligible to strangers.

Here, therefore, the effect of books such as those which we have been

considering has been harmless. They have, indeed, given currency to

many very erroneous opinions with respect to ancient history. They

have heated the imaginations of boys. They have misled the judgment and

corrupted the taste of some men of letters, such as Akenside and Sir

William Jones. But on persons engaged in public affairs they have had

very little influence. The foundations of our constitution were laid

by men who knew nothing of the Greeks but that they denied the orthodox

procession and cheated the Crusaders; and nothing of Rome, but that

the Pope lived there. Those who followed, contented themselves with

improving on the original plan. They found models at home; and therefore

they did not look for them abroad. But, when enlightened men on the

Continent began to think about political reformation, having no patterns

before their eyes in their domestic history, they naturally had

recourse to those remains of antiquity, the study of which is considered

throughout Europe as an important part of education. The historians of

whom we have been speaking had been members of large communities, and

subjects of absolute sovereigns. Hence it is, as we have already said,

that they commit such gross errors in speaking of the little republics

of antiquity. Their works were now read in the spirit in which they

had been written. They were read by men placed in circumstances closely

resembling their own, unacquainted with the real nature of liberty, but

{401}inclined to believe everything good which could be told respecting

it. How powerfully these books impressed these speculative reformers, is

well known to all who have paid any attention to the French literature

of the last century. But, perhaps, the writer on whom they produced the

greatest effect was Vittorio Alfieri. In some of his plays, particularly

in Virginia, Timoleon, and Brutus the Younger, he has even caricatured

the extravagance of his masters.

It was not strange that the blind, thus led by the blind, should

stumble. The transactions of the French Revolution, in some measure,

took their character from these works. Without the assistance of these

works, indeed, a revolution would have taken place,--a revolution

productive of much good and much evil, tremendous but shortlived, evil

dearly purchased, but durable good. But it would not have been exactly

such a revolution. The style, the accessories, would have been in many

respects different. There would have been less of bombast in language,

less of affectation in manner, less of solemn trifling and ostentatious

simplicity. The acts of legislative assemblies, and the correspondence

of diplomatists, would not have been disgraced by rants worthy only of a

college declamation. The government of a great and polished nation would

not have rendered itself ridiculous by attempting to revive the usages

of a world which had long passed away, or rather of a world which

had never existed except in the description of a fantastic school of

writers. These second-hand imitations resembled the originals about as

much as the classical feast with which the Doctor in Peregrine Pickle

turned the stomachs of all his guests resembled one of the suppers of

Lucullus in the Hall of Apollo. {402}These were mere follies. But the

spirit excited by these writers produced more serious effects. The

greater part of the crimes which disgraced the revolution sprung indeed

from the relaxation of law, from popular ignorance, from the remembrance

of past oppression, from the fear of foreign conquest, from rapacity,

from ambition, from party-spirit. But many atrocious proceedings must,

doubtless, be ascribed to heated imagination, to perverted principle,

to a distaste for what was vulgar in morals, and a passion for what was

startling and dubious. Mr. Burke has touched on this subject with great

felicity of expression: “The gradation of their republic,” says he, “is

laid in moral paradoxes. All those instances to be found in history,

whether real or fabulous, of a doubtful public spirit, at which morality

is perplexed, reason is staggered, and from which affrighted nature

recoils, are their chosen and almost sole examples for the instruction

of their youth.” This evil, we believe, is to be directly ascribed to

the influence of the historians whom we have mentioned, and their modern

imitators.

Livy had some faults in common with these writers. But on the whole he

must be considered as forming a class by himself: no historian with whom

we are acquainted has shown so complete an indifference to truth. He

seems to have cared only about the picturesque effect of his book, and

the honour of his country. On the other hand, we do not know, in the

whole range of literature, an instance of a bad thing so well done. The

painting of the narrative is beyond description vivid and graceful. The

abundance of interesting sentiments and splendid imagery in the speeches

is almost miraculous. His mind is a soil which is never overturned, a

fountain which never seems to trickle. {403}It pours forth profusely;

yet it gives no sign of exhaustion. It was probably to this exuberance

of thought and language, always fresh, always sweet, always pure, no

sooner yielded than repaired, that the critics applied that expression

which has been so much discussed, _lactea ubertas_.

All the merits and all the defects of Livy take a colouring from the

character of his nation. He was a writer peculiarly Roman; the proud

citizen of a commonwealth which had indeed lost the reality of liberty,

but which still sacredly preserved its forms--in fact the subject of an

arbitrary prince, but in his own estimation one of the masters of the

world, with a hundred kings below him, and only the gods above him. He,

therefore, looked back on former times with feelings far different from

those which were naturally entertained by his Greek contemporaries, and

which at a later period became general among men of letters throughout

the Roman Empire. He contemplated the past with interest and delight,

not because it furnished a contrast to the present, but because it

had led to the present. He recurred to it, not to lose in proud

recollections the sense of national degradation, but to trace the

progress of national glory. It is true that his veneration for antiquity

produced on him some of the effects which it produced on those who

arrived at it by a very different road. He has something of their

exaggeration, something of their cant, something of their fondness for

anomalies and _lusus naturo_ in morality. Yet even here we perceive

a difference. They talk rapturously of patriotism and liberty in the

abstract. He does not seem to think any country but Rome deserving of

love: nor is it for liberty as liberty, but for liberty as a part of the

Roman institutions, that he is zealous. {404}Of the concise and elegant

accounts of the campaigns of Caesar little can be said. They are

incomparable models for military despatches. But histories they are not,

and do not pretend to be.

The ancient critics placed Sallust in the same rank with Livy; and

unquestionably the small portion of his works which has come down to us

is calculated to give a high opinion of his talents. But his style

is not very pleasant: and his most powerful work, the account of the

Conspiracy of Catiline, has rather the air of a clever party pamphlet

than that of a history. It abounds with strange inconsistencies, which,

unexplained as they are, necessarily excite doubts as to the fairness

of the narrative. It is true, that many circumstances now forgotten may

have been familiar to his contemporaries, and may have rendered passages

clear to them which to us appear dubious and perplexing. But a great

historian should remember that he writes for distant generations, for

men who will perceive the apparent contradictions, and will possess no

means of reconciling them. We can only vindicate the fidelity of Sallust

at the expense of his skill. But in fact all the information which we

have from contemporaries respecting this famous plot is liable to the

same objection, and is read by discerning men with the same incredulity.

It is all on one side. No answer has reached our times. Yet, on the

showing of the accusers, the accused seem entitled to acquittal.

Catiline, we are told, intrigued with a Vestal virgin, and murdered his

own son. His house was a den of gamblers and debauchees. No young man

could cross his threshold without danger to his fortune and reputation.

Yet this is the man with whom Cicero was willing to coalesce in a

contest for the first magistracy of the republic; {405}and whom he

described, long after the fatal termination of the conspiracy, as an

accomplished hypocrite, by whom he had himself been deceived, and who

had acted with consummate skill the character of a good citizen and a

good friend. We are told that the plot was the most wicked and desperate

ever known, and, almost in the same breath, that the great body of the

people, and many of the nobles, favoured it; that the richest citizens

of Rome were eager for the spoliation of all property, and its highest

functionaries for the destruction of all order; that Crassus, Cæsar,

the Praetor Lentulus, one of the consuls of the year, one of the consuls

elect, were proved or suspected to be engaged in a scheme for subverting

institutions to which they owed the highest honours, and introducing

universal anarchy. We are told that a government, which knew all this,

suffered the conspirator, whose rank, talents, and courage, rendered

him most dangerous, to quit Rome without molestation. We are told that

bondmen and gladiators were to be armed against the citizens. Yet we

find that Catiline rejected the slaves who crowded to enlist in his

army, lest, as Sallust himself expresses it, “he should seem to identify

their cause until that of the citizens.” Finally, we are told that the

magistrate, who was universally allowed to have saved all classes of

his countrymen from conflagration and massacre, rendered himself so

unpopular by his conduct that a marked insult was offered to him at

the expiration of his office, and a severe punishment inflicted on him

shortly after.

Sallust tells us, what, indeed, the letters and speeches of Cicero

sufficiently prove, that some persons considered the shocking and

atrocious part of the plot as mere inventions of the government,

designed to excuse {406}its unconstitutional measures. We must confess

ourselves to be of that opinion. There was, undoubtedly, a strong party

desirous to change the administration. While Pompey held the command of

an army, they could not effect their purpose without preparing means for

repelling force, if necessary, by force. In all this there is nothing

different from the ordinary practice of Roman factions. The other

charges brought against the conspirators are so inconsistent and

improbable, that we give no credit whatever to them. If our readers think

this scepticism unreasonable, let them turn to the contemporary accounts

of the Popish plot. Let them look over the votes of Parliament, and the

speeches of the king; the charges of Scroggs, and the harangues of

the managers employed against Strafford. A person who should form his

judgment from these pieces alone would believe that London was set on

fire by the Papists, and that Sir Edmondbury Godfrey was murdered for

his religion. Yet these stories are now altogether exploded. They have

been abandoned by statesmen to aldermen, by aldermen to clergymen, by

clergymen to old women, and by old women to Sir Harcourt Lees.

Of the Latin historians, Tacitus was certainly the greatest. His

style, indeed, is not only faulty in itself, but is, in some respects,

peculiarly unfit for historical composition. He carries his love of

effect far beyond the limits of moderation. He tells a fine story

finely: but he cannot tell a plain story plainly. He stimulates till

stimulants lose their power. Thucydides, as we have already observed,

relates ordinary transactions with the unpretending clearness and

succinctness of a gazette. His great powers of painting he reserves

for events of which the slightest details are interesting. {407}The

simplicity of the setting gives additional lustre to the brilliants.

There are passages in the narrative of Tacitus superior to the best

which can be quoted from Thucydides. But they are not enchased and

relieved with the same skill. They are far more striking when extracted

from the body of the work to which they belong than when they occur in

their place, and are read in connection with what precedes and follows.

In the delineation of character, Tacitus is unrivalled among historians,

and has very few superiors among dramatists and novelists. By the

delineation of character, we do not mean the practice of drawing up

epigrammatic catalogues of good and had qualities, and appending them

to the names of eminent men. No writer, indeed, has done this more

skilfully than Tacitus; but this is not his peculiar glory. All the

persons who occupy a large space in his works have an individuality of

character which seems to pervade all their words and actions. We know

them as if we had lived with them. Claudius, Nero, Otho, both the

Agrippinas, are master-pieces. But Tiberius is a still higher miracle of

art. The historian undertook to make us intimately acquainted with a man

singularly dark and inscrutable,--with a man whose real disposition long

remained swathed up in intricate folds of factitious virtues, and over

whose actions the hypocrisy of his youth, and the seclusion of his old

age, threw a singular my story. He was to exhibit the specious qualities

of the tyrant in a light which might render them transparent, and enable

us at once to perceive the covering and the vices which it concealed. He

was to trace the gradations by which the first magistrate of a republic,

a senator mingling freely in debate, a noble associating with his

brother nobles, was transformed into an {408}Asiatic sultan; he was

to exhibit a character, distinguished by courage, self-command, and

profound policy, yet defiled by all

“th’ extravagancy

And crazy ribaldry of fancy."

He was to mark the gradual effect of advancing age and approaching death

on this strange compound of strength and weakness; to exhibit the old

sovereign of the world sinking into a dotage which, though it rendered

his appetites eccentric, and his temper savage, never impaired the

powers of his stern and penetrating mind--conscious of failing strength,

raging with capricious sensuality, yet to the last the keenest of

observers, the most artful of dissemblers, and the most terrible of

masters. The task was one of extreme difficulty. The execution is almost

perfect.

The talent which is required to write history thus bears a considerable

affinity to the talent of a great dramatist. There is one obvious

distinction. The dramatist creates; the historian only disposes.

The difference is not in the mode of execution, but in the mode of

conception.. Shakspeare is guided by a model which exists in his

imagination; Tacitus, by a model furnished from without. Hamlet is to

Tiberius what the Laocoon is to the Newton of Roubilliac.

In this part of his art Tacitus certainly had neither equal nor second

among the ancient historians. Herodotus, though he wrote in a dramatic

form, had little of dramatic genius. The frequent dialogues which he

introduces give vivacity and movement to the narrative, but are not

strikingly characteristic. Xenophon is fond of telling his readers, at

considerable length, what he thought of the persons whose adventures

he relates. But he does not show them the men, and {409}enable them to

judge for themselves. The heroes of Livy are the most insipid of all

beings, real or imaginary, the heroes of Plutarch always excepted.

Indeed, the manner of Plutarch in this respect reminds us of the cookery

of those continental inns, the horror of English travellers, in which

a certain nondescript broth is kept constantly boiling, and copiously

poured, without distinction, over every dish as it comes up to table.

Thucydides, though at a wide interval, comes next to Tacitus.

His Pericles, his Nieias, his Cleon, his Brasidas, are happily

discriminated. The lines are few, the colouring faint; but the general

air and expression is caught.

We begin, like the priest in Don Quixote’s library, to be tired with

taking down books one after another for separate judgment, and feel

inclined to pass sentence on them in masses. We shall therefore,

instead of pointing out the defects and merits of the different modern

historians, state generally in what particulars they have surpassed

their predecessors, and in what we conceive them to have failed.

They have certainly been, in one sense, far more strict in their

adherence to truth than most of the Greek and Roman writers. They do

not think themselves entitled to render their narrative interesting by

introducing descriptions, conversations, and harangues which have no

existence but in their own imagination. This improvement was gradually

introduced. History commenced among the modern nations of Europe, as it

had commenced among the Greeks, in romance. Froissart was our Herodotus.

Italy was to Europe what Athens was to Greece. In Italy, therefore,

a more accurate and manly mode of narration was early introduced.

Machiavelli and Guicciardini, in imitation {410}of Livy and Thucydides,

composed speeches for their historical personages. But, as the classical

enthusiasm which distinguished the age of Lorenzo and Leo gradually

subsided, this absurd practice was abandoned. In France, we fear, it

still, In some degree, keeps its ground. In our own country, a writer

who should venture on it would be laughed to scorn. Whether the

historians of the last two centuries tell more truth than those of

antiquity, may perhaps be doubted. But it is quite certain that they

tell fewer falsehoods.

In the philosophy of history, the moderns have very far surpassed the

ancients. It is not, indeed, strange that the Greeks and Romans should

not have carried the science of government, or any other experimental

science, so far as it has been carried in our time; for the experimental

sciences are generally in a state of progression. They were better

understood in the seventeenth century than in the sixteenth, and in

the eighteenth century than in the seventeenth. But this constant

improvement, this natural growth of knowledge, will not altogether

account for the immense superiority of the modern writers. The

difference is a difference not in degree but of kind. It is not merely

that new principles have been discovered, but that new faculties seem to

be exerted. It is not that at one time the human intellect should have

made but small progress, and at another time have advanced far; but

that at one time it should have been stationary, and at another time

constantly proceeding. In taste and imagination, in the graces of style,

in the arts of persuasion, in the magnificence of public works, the

ancients were at least our equals. They reasoned as justly as ourselves

on subjects which required pure demonstration. But in the moral sciences

they made scarcely {411}any advance. During the long period which

elapsed between the fifth century before the Christian era and the

fifth century after it little perceptible progress was made. All the

metaphysical discoveries of all the philosophers, from the time of

Socrates to the northern invasion, are not to be compared in importance

with those which have been made in England every fifty years since the

time of Elizabeth. There is not the least reason to believe that the

principles of government, legislation, and political economy, were

better understood in the time of Augustus Cæsar than in the time

of Pericles. In our own country, the sound doctrines of trade and

jurisprudence have been, within the lifetime of a single generation,

dimly hinted, boldly propounded, defended, systematised, adopted by

all reflecting men of all parties, quoted in legislative assemblies,

incorporated into laws and treaties.

To what is this change to be attributed? Partly, no doubt, to the

discovery of printing, a discovery which has not only diffused knowledge

widely, but, as we have already observed, has also introduced into

reasoning a precision unknown in those ancient communities, in which

information was, for the most part, conveyed orally. There was, we

suspect, another cause, less obvious, but still more powerful.

The spirit of the two most famous nations of antiquity was remarkably

exclusive. In the time of Homer the Greeks had not begun to consider

themselves as a distinct race. They still looked with something of

childish wonder and awe on the riches and wisdom of Sidon and Egypt.

From what causes, and by what gradations, their feelings underwent a

change, it is not easy to determine. Their history, from the Trojan to

the Persian war, is covered with an obscurity broken {412}only by dim

and scattered gleams of truth. But it is certain that a great alteration

took place. They regarded themselves as a separate people. They had

common religious rites, and common principles of public law, in which

foreigners had no part. In all their political systems, monarchical,

aristocratical, and demo-cratical, there was a strong family likeness.

After the retreat of Xerxes and the fall of Mardonius, national pride

rendered the separation between the Greeks and the barbarians complete.

The conquerors considered themselves men of a superior breed, men who,

in them intercourse with neighbouring nations, were to teach, and not to

learn. They looked for nothing out of themselves. They borrowed nothing.

They translated nothing. We cannot call to mind a single expression of

any Greek writer earlier than the age of Augustus, indicating an opinion

that anything worth reading could be written in any language except his

own. The feelings which sprung from national glory were not altogether

extinguished by national degradation. They were fondly cherished through

ages of slavery and shame. The literature of Rome herself was regarded

with contempt by those who had fled before her arms, and who bowed

beneath her fasces. Voltaire says, in one of his six thousand pamphlets,

that lu was the first person who told the French that England had

produced eminent men besides the Duke of Marlborough. Down to a

very late period, the Greeks seem to have stood in need of similar

information with respect to their masters. With Paulus Æmilius,

Sylla, and Cæsar they were well acquainted. But the notions which they

entertained respecting Cicero and Virgil were, probably, not unlike

those which Boileau may have formed about Shakspeare. Dionysius lived

{413}in the most splendid age of Latin poetry and eloquence. He was a

critic, and, after the manner of his age, an able critic. He studied

the language of Rome, associated with its learned men, and compiled its

history. Yet he seems to have thought its literature valuable only for

the purpose of illustrating its antiquities. His reading appears to have

been confined to its public records, and to a few old annalists. Once,

and but once, if we remember rightly, he quotes Ennius, to solve a

question of etymology. He has written much on the art of oratory: yet he

has not mentioned the name of Cicero.

The Romans submitted to the pretensions of a race which they despised.

Their epic poet, while he claimed for them pre-eminence in the arts of

government and war, acknowledged their inferiority in taste, eloquence,

and science. Men of letters affected to understand the Greek language

better than their own. Pomponius preferred the honour of becoming an

Athenian, by intellectual naturalisation, to all the distinctions which

were to be acquired in the political contests of Rome. His great

friend composed Greek poems and memoirs. It is well known that Petrarch

considered that beautiful language in which his sonnets are written,

as a barbarous jargon, and intrusted his fame to those wretched Latin

hexameters which, during the last four centuries, have scarcely found

four readers. Many eminent Romans appear to have felt the same contempt

for their native tongue as compared with the Greek. The prejudice

continued to a very late period. Julian was as partial to the Greek

language as Frederic the Great to the French: and it seems that he could

not express himself with elegance in the dialect of the state which

he ruled. {414}Even those Latin writers who did not carry this

affectation so far looked on Greece as the only fount of knowledge. From

Greece they derived the measures of their poetry, and, indeed, all of

poetry that can be imported. From Greece they borrowed the principles

and the vocabulary of their philosophy. To the literature of other

nations they do not seem to have paid the slightest attention. The

sacred books of the Hebrews, for example, books which, considered merely

as human compositions, are invaluable to the critic, the antiquarian,

and the philosopher, seem to have been utterly unnoticed by them.

The peculiarities of Judaism, and the rapid growth of Christianity,

attracted their notice. They made war against the Jews. They made

laws against the Christians. But they never opened the books of Moses.

Juvenal quotes the Pentateuch with censure. The author of the treatise

on “the Sublime” quotes it with praise: but both of them quote it

erroneously. When we consider what sublime poetry, what curious history,

what striking and peculiar views of the Divine nature and of the

social duties of men, are to be found in the Jewish scriptures, when

we consider that two sects on which the attention of the government was

constantly fixed appealed to those scriptures as the rule of their faith

and practice, this indifference is astonishing. The fact seems to be,

that the Greeks admired only themselves, and that the Romans admired

only themselves and the Greeks. Literary men turned away with disgust

from modes of thought and expression so widely different from all

that they had been accustomed to admire. The effect was narrowness and

sameness of thought. Their minds, if we may so express ourselves,

bred in and in, and were accordingly cursed with barrenness {415}and

degeneracy. No extraneous beauty or vigour was engrafted on the decaying

stock. By an exclusive attention to one class of phenomena, by an

exclusive taste for one species of excellence, the human intellect

was stunted. Occasional coincidences were turned into general rules.

Prejudices were confounded with instincts. On man, as he was found in

a particular state of society--on government, as it had existed in a

particular corner of the world, many just observations were made; but

of man as man, or government as government, little was known. Philosophy

remained stationary. Slight changes, sometimes for the worse and

sometimes for the better, were made in the superstructure. But nobody

thought of examining the foundations.

The vast despotism of the Cæsars, gradually effacing all national

peculiarities, and assimilating the remotest provinces of the empire to

each other, augmented the evil. At the close of the third century after

Christ, the prospects of mankind were fearfully dreary. A system of

etiquette, as pompously frivolous as that of the Escurial, had been

established. A sovereign almost invisible; a crowd of dignitaries

minutely distinguished by badges and titles; rhetoricians who said

nothing but what had been said ten thousand times; schools in ‘which

nothing was taught but what had been known for ages: such was the

machinery provided for the government and instruction of the most

enlightened part of the human race. That great community was then in

danger of experiencing a calamity far more terrible than any of

the quick, inflammatory, destroying maladies, to which nations are

liable,--a tottering, drivelling, paralytic longevity, the immortality

of the Struldbrugs, a Chinese civilisation. It would be easy to indicate

many points of resemblance {416}between the subjects of Diocletian

and the people of that Celestial Empire, where, during many centuries,

nothing has been learned or unlearned: where government, where

education, where the whole system of life, is a ceremony; where

knowledge forgets to increase and multiply, and, like the talent buried

in the earth, or the pound wrapped up in the napkin, experiences neither

waste nor augmentation.

The torpor was broken by two great revolutions, the one moral, the other

political, the one from within, the other from without. The victory of

Christianity over Paganism, considered with relation to this subject

only, was of great importance. It overthrew the old system of morals;

and with it much of the old system of metaphysics. It furnished the

orator with new topics of declamation, and the logician with new points

of controversy. Above all, it introduced a new principle, of which the

operation was constantly felt in every part of society. It stirred the

stagnant mass from the inmost depths. It excited all the passions of a

stormy democracy in the quiet and listless population of an overgrown

empire. The fear of heresy did what the sense of oppression could not

do; it changed men, accustomed to be turned over like sheep from tyrant

to tyrant, into devoted partisans and obstinate rebels. The tones of an

eloquence which had been silent for ages resounded from the pulpit of

Gregory. A spirit which had been extinguished on the plains of Philippi

revived in Athanasius and Ambrose.

Yet even this remedy was not sufficiently violent for the disease. It

did not prevent the empire of Constantinople from relapsing, after a

short paroxysm of excitement, into a state of stupefaction, to

which history furnishes scarcely any parallel. We there find that a

{417}polished society, a society in which a most intricate and elaborate

system of jurisprudence was established, in which the arts of luxury

were well understood, in which the works of the great ancient writers

were preserved and studied, existed for nearly a thousand years without

making one great discovery in science, or producing one book which

is read by any but curious inquirers. There were tumults, too, and

controversies, and wars in abundance: and these things, bad as they are

in themselves, have generally been favourable to the progress of the

intellect. But here they tormented without stimulating. The waters were

troubled; but no healing influence descended. The agitations resembled

the grinnings and writhings of a galvanised corpse, not the struggles of

an athletic man.

From this miserable state the Western Empire was saved by the fiercest

and most destroying visitation with which God has ever chastened

his creatures--the invasion of the Northern nations. Such a cure was

required for such a distemper. The fire of London, it has been observed,

was a blessing. It burned down the city; but it burned out the plague.

The same may be said of the tremendous devastation of the Roman

dominions. It annihilated the noisome recesses in which lurked the seeds

of great moral maladies; it cleared an atmosphere fatal to the health

and vigour of the human mind. It cost Europe a thousand years of

barbarianism to escape the fate of China.

At length the terrible purification was accomplished; and the second

civilisation of mankind commenced, under circumstances which afforded a

strong security that it would never retrograde and never pause. Europe

was now a great federal community. Her numerous states were united by

the easy ties of international law {418}and a common religion.

Their institutions, their languages, their manners, their tastes in

literature, their modes of education, were widely different. Their

connection was close enough to allow of mutual observation and

improvement, yet not so close as to destroy the idioms of national

opinion and feeling.