Subscriptions are advertised for the purpose of raising monuments
to Sir Robert Peel; and a motion has been made in Parliament for
one in Westminster Abbey at the public expense, Whatever may be the
precedents, surely the house of God should contain no object but
such as may remind us of His presence and our duty to Him. Long ago I
proposed that ranges of statues and busts should commemorate the great
worthies of our country. All the lower part of our National Gallery
might be laid open for this purpose. Even the best monuments in
Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's are deformities to the edifice. Let
us not continue this disgrace. Deficient as we are in architects,
we have many good statuaries, and we might well employ them on the
statues of illustrious commanders, and the busts of illustrious
statesmen and writers. Meanwhile our cities, and especially the
commercial, would, I am convinced, act more wisely, and more
satisfactorily to the relict of the deceased, if, instead of statues,
they erected schools and almshouses, with an inscription to his
memory.
We glory in about sixty whose busts and statues may occupy what are
now the "deep solitudes and awful cells" in our national gallery. Our
literary men of eminence are happily more numerous than the political
or the warlike, or both together. There is only one class of them
which might be advantageously excluded, namely, the theological; and
my reasons are these. First, their great talents were chiefly employed
on controversy; secondly, and consequently, their images would excite
dogmatical discord. Every sect of the Anglican Church, and every
class of dissenters, complaining of undue preferences. Painture and
sculpture lived in the midst of corruption, lived throughout it, and
seemed indeed to draw vitality from it, as flowers the most delicate
from noxious air; but they collapsed at the searching breath of free
inquiry, and could not abide persecution. The torch of Philosophy
never kindled the suffocating fagot, under whose smoke Theology was
mistaken for Religion. Theology had, until now, been speculative
and quiescent: she abandoned to Philosophy these humbler qualities:
instead of allaying and dissipating, as Philosophy had always done,
she excited and she directed animosities. Oriental in her parentage,
and keeping up her wide connections in that country, she acquired
there all the artifices most necessary to the furtherance of her
designs: among the rest was ventriloquism, which she quite perfected,
making her words seem to sound from above and from below and from
every side around. Ultimately, when men had fallen on their faces at
this miracle, she assumed the supreme power. Kings were her lackeys,
and nations the dust under her palfrey's hoof. By her sentence Truth
was gagged, scourged, branded, cast down on the earth in manacles; and
Fortitude, who had stood at Truth's side, was fastened with nails and
pulleys to the stake. I would not revive by any images, in the abode
of the graceful and the gentle Arts, these sorrowful reminiscences.
The vicissitudes of the world appear to be bringing round again the
spectral Past. Let us place great men between it and ourselves: they
all are tutelar: not the warrior and the statesman only; not only the
philosopher; but also the historian who follows them step by step, and
the poet who secures us from peril and dejection by his counter-charm.
Philosophers in most places are unwelcome: but there is no better
reason why Shaftesbury and Hobbes should be excluded from our
gallery, than why Epicurus should have been from Cicero's or Zeno from
Lucullus's. Of our sovereigns, I think Alfred, Cromwell, and William
III alone are eligible; and they, because they opposed successfully
the subverters of the laws. Three viceroys of Ireland will deservedly
be placed in the same receptacle; Sir John Perrot, Lord Chesterfield,
and (in due time) the last Lord-Deputy. One Speaker, one only, of the
Parliament; he without whom no Parliament would be now existing;
he who declared to Henry IV. that until all public grievances were
removed, no subsidy should be granted. The name of this Speaker may be
found in Rapin; English historians talk about facts, forgetting men.
Admirals and generals are numerous and conspicuous. Drake, Blake,
Rodney, Jervis, Nelson, Collingwood; the subduer of Algiers beaten
down for the French to occupy: and the defender of Acre, the first who
defeated, discomfited, routed, broke, and threw into shameful flight,
Bonaparte. Our generals are Marlborough, Peterborough, Wellington, and
that successor to his fame in India, who established the empire that
was falling from us, who achieved in a few days two arduous victories,
who never failed in any enterprise, who accomplished the most
difficult with the smallest expenditure of blood, who corrected
the disorders of the military, who gave the soldier an example of
temperance, the civilian of simplicity and frugality, and whose sole
(but exceedingly great) reward, was the approbation of our greatest
man.
With these come the statesmen of the Commonwealth, the students of
Bacon, the readers of Philip Sidney, the companions of Algernon, the
precursors of Locke and Newton. Opposite to them are Chaucer, Spenser,
Shakspeare, Milton; lower in dignity, Dryden, Pope, Gray, Goldsmith,
Cowper, Scott, Burns, Shelley, Southey, Byron, Wordsworth; the author
of _Hohenlinden_ and the _Battle of the Baltic_; and the glorious
woman who equaled these, two animated works in her _Ivan_ and
_Casabianca_. Historians have but recently risen up among us: and long
be it before, by command of Parliament, the chisel grates on the brow
of a Napier, a Grote, and Macaulay!