CHAPTER I.

Anne Soulard, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

MEMORIALS, AND OTHER PAPERS, VOL. I.

BY THOMAS DE QUINCEY

FROM THE AUTHOR, TO THE AMERICAN EDITOR OF HIS WORKS.

These papers I am anxious to put into the hands of your house, and, so

far as regards the U.S., of your house exclusively; not with any view

to further emolument, but as an acknowledgment of the services which

you have already rendered me; namely, first, in having brought together

so widely scattered a collection--a difficulty which in my own hands by

too painful an experience I had found from nervous depression to be

absolutely insurmountable; secondly, in having made me a participator

in the pecuniary profits of the American edition, without solicitation

or the shadow of any expectation on my part, without any legal claim

that I could plead, or equitable warrant in established usage, solely

and merely upon your own spontaneous motion. Some of these new papers,

I hope, will not be without their value in the eyes of those who have

taken an interest in the original series. But at all events, good or

bad, they are now tendered to the appropriation of your individual

house, the Messrs. TICKNOR & FIELDS, according to the amplest extent of

any power to make such a transfer that I may be found to possess by law

or custom in America.

I wish this transfer were likely to be of more value. But the veriest

trifle, interpreted by the spirit in which I offer it, may express my

sense of the liberality manifested throughout this transaction by your

honorable house.

Ever believe me, my dear sir,

Your faithful and obliged,

THOMAS DE QUINCEY.

CONTENTS OF VOLUME I.

EXPLANATORY NOTICES

THE ORPHAN HEIRESS.

VISIT TO LAXTON

THE PRIORY

OXFORD

THE PAGAN ORACLES

THE REVOLUTION OF GREECE

EXPLANATORY NOTICES.

Many of the papers in my collected works were originally written under

one set of disadvantages, and are now revised under another. They were

written generally under great pressure as to time, in order to catch

the critical periods of monthly journals; written oftentimes at a

distance from the press (so as to have no opportunity for correction);

and always written at a distance from libraries, so that very many

statements, references, and citations, were made on the authority of my

unassisted memory. Under such circumstances were most of the papers

composed; and they are now reissued in a corrected form, sometimes even

partially recast, under the distraction of a nervous misery which

embarrasses my efforts in a mode and in a degree inexpressible by

words. Such, indeed, is the distress produced by this malady, that, if

the present act of republication had in any respect worn the character

of an experiment, I should have shrunk from it in despondency. But the

experiment, so far as there was any, had been already tried for me

vicariously amongst the Americans; a people so nearly repeating our own

in style of intellect, and in the composition of their reading class,

that a success amongst them counts for a success amongst ourselves. For

some few of the separate papers in these volumes I make pretensions of

a higher cast. These pretensions I will explain hereafter. All the rest

I resign to the reader's unbiased judgment, adding here, with respect

to four of them, a few prefatory words--not of propitiation or

deprecation, but simply in explanation as to points that would

otherwise be open to misconstruction.

1. The paper on "Murder as one of the Fine Arts" [Footnote: Published

in the "Miscellaneous Essays."] seemed to exact from me some account of

Williams, the dreadful London murderer of the last generation; not

only because the amateurs had so much insisted on his merit as the

supreme of artists for grandeur of design and breadth of style; and

because, apart from this momentary connection with my paper, the man

himself merited a record for his matchless audacity, combined with so

much of snaky subtlety, and even insinuating amiableness, in his

demeanor; but also because, apart from the man himself, the works of

the man (those two of them especially which so profoundly impressed the

nation in 1812) were in themselves, for dramatic effect, the most

impressive on record. Southey pronounced their preeminence when he said

to me that they ranked amongst the few domestic events which, by the

depth and the expansion of horror attending them, had risen to the

dignity of a _national_ interest. I may add that this interest

benefited also by the mystery which invested the murders; mystery as to

various points but especially as respected one important question, Had

the murderer any accomplice? [Footnote: Upon a large overbalance of

probabilities, it was, however, definitively agreed amongst amateurs

that Williams must have been alone in these atrocities. Meantime,

amongst the colorable presumptions on the other side was this:--Some

hours after the last murder, a man was apprehended at Barnet (the first

stage from London on a principal north road), encumbered with a

quantity of plate. How he came by it, or whither he was going, he

steadfastly refused to say. In the daily journals, which he was allowed

to see, he read with eagerness the police examinations of Williams; and

on the same day which announced the catastrophe of Williams, he also

committed suicide in his cell.] There was, therefore, reason enough,

both in the man's hellish character, and in the mystery which

surrounded him, for a Postscript [Footnote: Published in the "Note

Book."] to the original paper; since, in a lapse of forty-two years,

both the man and his deeds had faded away from the knowledge of the

present generation; but still I am sensible that my record is far too

diffuse. Feeling this at the very time of writing, I was yet unable to

correct it; so little self-control was I able to exercise under the

afflicting agitations and the unconquerable impatience of my nervous

malady.

2. "War." [Footnote: Published in "Narrative and Miscellaneous

Essays."]--In this paper, from having faultily adjusted its proportions

in the original outline, I find that I have dwelt too briefly and too

feebly upon the capital interest at stake. To apply a correction to

some popular misreadings of history, to show that the criminal (because

trivial) occasions of war are not always its trifle causes, or to

suggest that war (if resigned to its own natural movement of

progress) is cleansing itself and ennobling itself constantly and

inevitably, were it only through its connection with science ever more

and more exquisite, and through its augmented costliness,--all this may

have its use in offering some restraint upon the levity of action or of

declamation in Peace Societies. But all this is below the occasion. I

feel that far grander interests are at stake in this contest. The Peace

Societies are falsely appreciated, when they are described as merely

deaf to the lessons of experience, and as too "_romantic_" in

their expectations. The very opposite is, to _my_ thinking, their

criminal reproach. He that is romantic errs usually by too much

elevation. He violates the standard of reasonable expectation, by

drawing too violently upon the nobilities of human nature. But, on the

contrary, the Peace Societies would, if their power kept pace with

their guilty purposes, work degradation for man by drawing upon his

most effeminate and luxurious cravings for ease. Most heartily, and

with my profoundest sympathy, do I go along with Wordsworth in his

grand lyrical proclamation of a truth not less divine than it is

mysterious, not less triumphant than it is sorrowful, namely, that

amongst God's holiest instruments for the elevation of human nature is

"mutual slaughter" amongst men; yes, that "Carnage is God's daughter."

Not deriving my own views in this matter from Wordsworth,--not knowing

even whether I hold them on the same grounds, since Wordsworth has left

_his_ grounds unexplained,--nevertheless I cite them in honor, as

capable of the holiest justification. The instruments rise in grandeur,

carnage and mutual slaughter rise in holiness, exactly as the motives

and the interests rise on behalf of which such awful powers are

invoked. Fighting for truth in its last recesses of sanctity, for human

dignity systematically outraged, or for human rights mercilessly

trodden under foot--champions of such interests, men first of all

descry, as from a summit suddenly revealed, the possible grandeur of

bloodshed suffered or inflicted. Judas and Simon Maccabæus in days of

old, Gustavus Adolphus [Footnote: The Thirty Years' War, from 1618 to

the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, was notoriously the last and the

decisive conflict between Popery and Protestantism; the result of that

war it was which finally enlightened all the Popish princes of

Christendom as to the impossibility of ever suppressing the antagonist

party by mere force of arms. I am not meaning, however, to utter any

opinion whatever on the religious position of the two great parties. It

is sufficient for entire sympathy with the royal Swede, that he fought

for the freedom of conscience. Many an enlightened Roman Catholic,

supposing only that he were not a Papist, would have given his hopes

and his confidence to the Protestant king.] in modern days, fighting

for the violated rights of conscience against perfidious despots and

murdering oppressors, exhibit to us the incarnations of Wordsworth's

principle. Such wars are of rare occurrence. Fortunately they are so;

since, under the possible contingencies of human strength and weakness,

it might else happen that the grandeur of the principle should suffer

dishonor through the incommensurate means for maintaining it. But such

cases, though emerging rarely, are always to be reserved in men's minds

as ultimate appeals to what is most divine in man. Happy it is for

human welfare that the blind heart of man is a thousand times wiser

than his understanding. An _arrière pensée_ should lie hidden in

all minds--a holy reserve as to cases which _may_ arise similar to

such as HAVE arisen, where a merciful bloodshed [Footnote: "_Merciful

bloodshed_"--In reading either the later religious wars of the

Jewish people under the Maccabees, or the earlier under Joshua, every

philosophic reader will have felt the true and transcendent spirit of

mercy which resides virtually in such wars, as maintaining the unity of

God against Polytheism and, by trampling on cruel idolatries, as

indirectly opening the channels for benign principles of morality

through endless generations of men. Here especially he will have read

one justification of Wordsworth's bold doctrine upon war. Thus far he

will destroy a wisdom working from afar, but, as regards the immediate

present, he will be apt to adopt the ordinary view, namely, that in the

Old Testament severity prevails approaching to cruelty. Yet, on

consideration, he will be disposed to qualify this opinion. He will

have observed many indications of a relenting kindness and a tenderness

of love in the Mosaical ordinances. And recently there has been

suggested another argument tending to the same conclusion. In the last

work of Mr. Layard ('Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon,

1853') are published some atrocious monuments of the Assyrian cruelty

in the treatment of military captives. In one of the plates of Chap

xx., at page 456, is exhibited some unknown torture applied to the

head, and in another, at page 458, is exhibited the abominable process,

applied to two captives, of flaying them alive. One such case had been

previously recorded in human literature, and illustrated by a plate. It

occurs in a Dutch voyage to the islands of the East. The subject of the

torment in that case as a woman who had been charged with some act of

infidelity to her husband. And the local government, being indignantly

summoned to interfere by some Christian strangers, had declined to do

so, on the plea that the man was master within his own house. But the

Assyrian case was worse. This torture was there applied, not upon a

sudden vindictive impulse, but in cold blood, to a simple case

apparently of civil disobedience or revolt. Now, when we consider how

intimate, and how ancient, was the connection between Assyria and

Palestine, how many things (in war especially) were transferred

mediately through the intervening tribes (all habitually cruel), from

the people on the Tigris to those on the Jordan, I feel convinced that

Moses must have interfered most peremptorily and determinately, and not

merely by verbal ordinances, but by establishing counter usages against

this spirit of barbarity, otherwise it would have increased

contagiously, whereas we meet with no such hellish atrocities amongst

the children of Israel. In the case of one memorable outrage by a

Hebrew tribe, the national vengeance which overtook it was complete and

tearful beyond all that history has recorded] has been authorized by

the express voice of God. Such a reserve cannot be dispensed with. It

belongs to the principle of progress in man that he should forever keep

open a secret commerce in the last resort with the spirit of martyrdom

on behalf of man's most saintly interests. In proportion as the

instruments for upholding or retrieving such saintly interests should

come to be dishonored or less honored, would the inference be valid

that those interests were shaking in their foundations. And any

confederation or compact of nations for abolishing war would be the

inauguration of a downward path for man.

A battle is by possibility the grandest, and also the meanest, of human

exploits. It is the grandest when it is fought for godlike truth, for

human dignity, or for human rights; it is the meanest when it is fought

for petty advantages (as, by way of example, for accession of territory

which adds nothing to the security of a frontier), and still more when

it is fought simply as a gladiator's trial of national prowess. This is

the principle upon which, very naturally, our British school-boys value

a battle. Painful it is to add, that this is the principle upon which

our adult neighbors the French seem to value a battle.

To any man who, like myself, admires the high-toned, martial gallantry

of the French, and pays a cheerful tribute of respect to their many

intellectual triumphs, it is painful to witness the childish state of

feeling which the French people manifest on every possible question

that connects itself at any point with martial pretensions. A battle is

valued by them on the same principles, not better and not worse, as

govern our own schoolboys. Every battle is viewed by the boys as a test

applied to the personal prowess of each individual soldier; and,

naturally amongst boys, it would be the merest hypocrisy to take any

higher ground. But amongst adults, arrived at the power of reflecting

and comparing, we look for something nobler. We English estimate

Waterloo, not by its amount of killed and wounded, but as the battle

which terminated a series of battles, having one common object, namely,

the overthrow of a frightful tyranny. A great sepulchral shadow rolled

away from the face of Christendom as that day's sun went down to his

rest; for, had the success been less absolute, an opportunity would

have offered for negotiation, and consequently for an infinity of

intrigues through the feuds always gathering upon national jealousies

amongst allied armies. The dragon would soon have healed his wounds;

after which the prosperity of the despotism would have been greater

than before. But, without reference to Waterloo in particular,

_we_, on _our_ part, find it impossible to contemplate any memorable

battle otherwise than according to its tendency towards some

commensurate object. To the French this must be impossible, seeing that

no lofty (that is, no disinterested) purpose has ever been so much as

counterfeited for a French war, nor therefore for a French battle.

Aggression, cloaked at the very utmost in the garb of retaliation for

counter aggressions on the part of the enemy, stands forward uniformly

in the van of such motives as it is thought worth while to plead. But

in French casuistry it is not held necessary to plead _any_thing;

war justifies itself. To fight for the experimental purpose of trying

the proportions of martial merit, but (to speak frankly) for the

purpose of publishing and renewing to Europe the proclamation of French

superiority--_that_ is the object of French wars. Like the Spartan

of old, the Frenchman would hold that a state of peace, and not a state

of war, is the state which calls for apology; and that already from the

first such an apology must wear a very suspicious aspect of paradox.

3. "The English Mail-Coach." [Footnote: Published in the "Miscellaneous

Essays."]--This little paper, according to my original intention,

formed part of the "Suspiria de Profundis," from which, for a momentary

purpose, I did not scruple to detach it, and to publish it apart, as

sufficiently intelligible even when dislocated from its place in a

larger whole. To my surprise, however, one or two critics, not

carelessly in conversation, but deliberately in print, professed their

inability to apprehend the meaning of the whole, or to follow the links

of the connection between its several parts. I am myself as little able

to understand where the difficulty lies, or to detect any lurking

obscurity, as those critics found themselves to unravel my logic.

Possibly I may not be an indifferent and neutral judge in such a case.

I will therefore sketch a brief abstract of the little paper according

to my own original design, and then leave the reader to judge how far

this design is kept in sight through the actual execution.

Thirty-seven years ago, or rather more, accident made me, in the dead

of night, and of a night memorably solemn, the solitary witness to an

appalling scene, which threatened instant death, in a shape the most

terrific, to two young people, whom I had no means of assisting, except

in so far as I was able to give them a most hurried warning of their

danger; but even _that_ not until they stood within the very

shadow of the catastrophe, being divided from the most frightful of

deaths by scarcely more, if more at all, than seventy seconds.

Such was the scene, such in its outline, from which the whole of this

paper radiates as a natural expansion. The scene is circumstantially

narrated in Section the Second, entitled, "The Vision of Sudden Death."

But a movement of horror and of spontaneous recoil from this dreadful

scene naturally carried the whole of that scene, raised and idealised,

into my dreams, and very soon into a rolling succession of dreams. The

actual scene, as looked down upon from the box of the mail, was

transformed into a dream, as tumultuous and changing as a musical

fugue. This troubled Dream is circumstantially reported in Section the

Third, entitled, "Dream-Fugue upon the Theme of Sudden Death." What I

had beheld from my seat upon the mail,--the scenical strife of action

and passion, of anguish and fear, as I had there witnessed them moving

in ghostly silence; this duel between life and death narrowing itself

to a point of such exquisite evanescence as the collision neared,--all

these elements of the scene blended, under the law of association, with

the previous and permanent features of distinction investing the mail

itself, which features at that time lay--1st, in velocity

unprecedented; 2dly, in the power and beauty of the horses: 3dly, in

the official connection with the government of a great nation; and,

4thly, in the function, almost a consecrated function, of publishing

and diffusing through the land the great political events, and

especially the great battles during a conflict of unparalleled

grandeur. These honorary distinctions are all described

circumstantially in the FIRST or introductory section ("The Glory of

Motion"). The three first were distinctions maintained at all times;

but the fourth and grandest belonged exclusively to the war with

Napoleon; and this it was which most naturally introduced Waterloo into

the dream. Waterloo, I understood, was the particular feature of the

"Dream-Fugue" which my censors were least able to account for. Yet

surely Waterloo, which, in common with every other great battle, it had

been our special privilege to publish over all the land, most naturally

entered the Dream under the license of our privilege. If not--if there

be anything amiss--let the Dream be responsible. The Dream is a law to

itself; and as well quarrel with a rainbow for showing, or for

_not_ showing, a secondary arch. So far as I know, every element

in the shifting movements of the Dream derived itself either primarily

from the incidents of the actual scene, or from secondary features

associated with the mail. For example, the cathedral aisle derived

itself from the mimic combination of features which grouped themselves

together at the point of approaching collision, namely, an arrow-like

section of the road, six hundred yards long, under the solemn lights

described, with lofty trees meeting overhead in arches. The guard's

horn, again--a humble instrument in itself--was yet glorified as the

organ of publication for so many great national events. And the

incident of the Dying Trumpeter, who rises from a marble bas-relief,

and carries a marble trumpet to his marble lips for the purpose of

warning the female infant, was doubtless secretly suggested by my own

imperfect effort to seize the guard's horn, and to blow a warning

blast. But the Dream knows best; and the Dream, I say again, is the

responsible party.

4. "The Spanish Nun." [Footnote: Published in "Narrative and

Miscellaneous Essays."]--There are some narratives, which, though pure

fictions from first to last, counterfeit so vividly the air of grave

realities, that, if deliberately offered for such, they would for a

time impose upon everybody. In the opposite scale there are other

narratives, which, whilst rigorously true, move amongst characters and

scenes so remote from our ordinary experience, and through, a state of

society so favorable to an adventurous cast of incidents, that they

would everywhere pass for romances, if severed from the documents which

attest their fidelity to facts. In the former class stand the admirable

novels of De Foe; and, on a lower range, within the same category, the

inimitable "Vicar of Wakefield;" upon which last novel, without at all

designing it, I once became the author of the following instructive

experiment. I had given a copy of this little novel to a beautiful girl

of seventeen, the daughter of a statesman in Westmoreland, not

designing any deception (nor so much as any concealment) with respect

to the fictitious character of the incidents and of the actors in that

famous tale. Mere accident it was that had intercepted those

explanations as to the extent of fiction in these points which in this

case it would have been so natural to make. Indeed, considering the

exquisite verisimilitude of the work meeting with such absolute

inexperience in the reader, it was almost a duty to have made them.

This duty, however, something had caused me to forget; and when next I

saw the young mountaineer, I forgot that I _had_ forgotten it.

Consequently, at first I was perplexed by the unfaltering gravity with

which my fair young friend spoke of Dr. Primrose, of Sophia and her

sister, of Squire Thornhill, &c., as real and probably living

personages, who could sue and be sued. It appeared that this artless

young rustic, who had never heard of novels and romances as a bare

possibility amongst all the shameless devices of London swindlers, had

read with religious fidelity every word of this tale, so thoroughly

life-like, surrendering her perfect faith and her loving sympathy to

the different persons in the tale, and the natural distresses in which

they are involved, without suspecting, for a moment, that by so much as

a breathing of exaggeration or of embellishment the pure gospel truth

of the narrative could have been sullied. She listened, in a kind of

breathless stupor, to my frank explanation--that not part only, but the

whole, of this natural tale was a pure invention. Scorn and indignation

flashed from her eyes. She regarded herself as one who had been hoaxed

and swindled; begged me to take back the book; and never again, to the

end of her life, could endure to look into the book, or to be reminded

of that criminal imposture which Dr. Oliver Goldsmith had practised

upon her youthful credulity.

In that case, a book altogether fabulous, and not meaning to offer

itself for anything else, had been read as genuine history. Here, on

the other hand, the adventures of the Spanish Nun, which in every

detail of time and place have since been sifted and authenticated,

stood a good chance at one period of being classed as the most lawless

of romances. It is, indeed, undeniable, and this arises as a natural

result from the bold, adventurous character of the heroine, and from

the unsettled state of society at that period in Spanish America, that

a reader the most credulous would at times be startled with doubts upon

what seems so unvarying a tenor of danger and lawless violence. But, on

the other hand, it is also undeniable that a reader the most

obstinately sceptical would be equally startled in the very opposite

direction, on remarking that the incidents are far from being such as a

romance-writer would have been likely to invent; since, if striking,

tragic, and even appalling, they are at times repulsive. And it seems

evident that, once putting himself to the cost of a wholesale fiction,

the writer would have used his privilege more freely for his own

advantage. Whereas the author of these memoirs clearly writes under the

coercion and restraint of a _notorious reality_, that would not

suffer him to ignore or to modify the leading facts. Then, as to the

objection that few people or none have an experience presenting such

uniformity of perilous adventure, a little closer attention shows that

the experience in this case is _not_ uniform; and so far otherwise,

that a period of several years in Kate's South American life is

confessedly suppressed; and on no other ground whatever than that

this long parenthesis is _not_ adventurous, not essentially

differing from the monotonous character of ordinary Spanish life.

Suppose the case, therefore, that Kate's memoirs had been thrown upon

the world with no vouchers for their authenticity beyond such internal

presumptions as would have occurred to thoughtful readers, when

reviewing the entire succession of incidents, I am of opinion that the

person best qualified by legal experience to judge of evidence would

finally have pronounced a favorable award; since it is easy to

understand that in a world so vast as the Peru, the Mexico, the Chili,

of Spaniards during the first quarter of the seventeenth century, and

under the slender modification of Indian manners as yet effected by the

Papal Christianization of those countries, and in the neighborhood of a

river-system so awful, of a mountain-system so unheard-of in Europe,

there would probably, by blind, unconscious sympathy, grow up a

tendency to lawless and gigantesque ideals of adventurous life; under

which, united with the duelling code of Europe, many things would

become trivial and commonplace experiences that to us home-bred English

("_qui musas colimus severiores_") seem monstrous and revolting.

Left, therefore, to itself, _my_ belief is, that the story of the

Military Nun would have prevailed finally against the demurs of the

sceptics. However, in the mean time, all such demurs were suddenly and

_officially_ silenced forever. Soon after the publication of Kate's

memoirs, in what you may call an early stage of her _literary_

career, though two centuries after her _personal_ career had closed, a

regular controversy arose upon the degree of credit due to these

extraordinary confessions (such they may be called) of the poor

conscience-haunted nun. Whether these in Kate's original MS.

were entitled "Autobiographic Sketches," or "Selections Grave and

Gay," from the military experiences of a Nun, or possibly "The

Confessions of a Biscayan Fire-Eater," is more than I know. No matter:

confessions they were; and confessions that, when at length published,

were absolutely mobbed and hustled by a gang of misbelieving (that is,

_miscreant_) critics. And this fact is most remarkable, that the

person who originally headed the incredulous party, namely, Senor de

Ferrer, a learned Castilian, was the very same who finally

authenticated, by _documentary_ evidence, the extraordinary

narrative in those parts which had most of all invited scepticism. The

progress of the dispute threw the decision at length upon the archives

of the Spanish Marine. Those for the southern ports of Spain had been

transferred, I believe, from Cadiz and St. Lucar to Seville; chiefly,

perhaps, through the confusions incident to the two French invasions of

Spain in our own day [1st, that under Napoleon; 2dly, that under the

Due d'Angoulême]. Amongst these archives, subsequently amongst those of

Cuzco, in South America; 3dly, amongst the records of some royal courts

in Madrid; 4thly, by collateral proof from the Papal Chancery; 5thly,

from Barcelona--have been drawn together ample attestations of all the

incidents recorded by Kate. The elopement from St. Sebastian's, the

doubling of Cape Horn, the shipwreck on the coast of Peru, the rescue

of the royal banner from the Indians of Chili, the fatal duel in the

dark, the astonishing passage of the Andes, the tragical scenes at

Tucuman and Cuzco, the return to Spain in obedience to a royal and a

papal summons, the visit to Rome and the interview with the Pope--

finally, the return to South America, and the mysterious disappearance

at Vera Cruz, upon which no light was ever thrown--all these capital

heads of the narrative have been established beyond the reach of

scepticism: and, in consequence, the story was soon after adopted as

historically established, and was reported at length by journals of the

highest credit in Spain and Germany, and by a Parisian journal so

cautious and so distinguished for its ability as the _Revue des Deux

Mondes_.

I must not leave the impression upon my readers that this complex body

of documentary evidences has been searched and appraised by myself.

Frankly I acknowledge that, on the sole occasion when any opportunity

offered itself for such a labor, I shrank from it as too fatiguing--and

also as superfluous; since, if the proofs had satisfied the compatriots

of Catalina, who came to the investigation with hostile feelings of

partisanship, and not dissembling their incredulity,--armed also (and

in Mr. de Ferrer's case conspicuously armed) with the appropriate

learning for giving effect to this incredulity,--it could not become a

stranger to suppose himself qualified for disturbing a judgment that

had been so deliberately delivered. Such a tribunal of native Spaniards

being satisfied, there was no further opening for demur. The

ratification of poor Kate's memoirs is now therefore to be understood

as absolute, and without reserve.

This being stated,--namely, such an attestation from competent

authorities to the truth of Kate's narrative as may save all readers

from my fair Westmoreland friend's disaster,--it remains to give such

an answer, as without further research _can_ be given, to a

question pretty sure of arising in all reflective readers' thoughts--

namely, does there anywhere survive a portrait of Kate? I answer--and

it would be both mortifying and perplexing if I could _not_--

_Yes_. One such portrait there is confessedly; and seven years ago

this was to be found at Aix-la-Chapelle, in the collection of Herr

Sempeller. The name of the artist I am not able to report; neither can

I say whether Herr Sempeller's collection still remains intact, and

remains at Aix-la-Chapelle.

But inevitably to most readers who review the circumstances of a case

so extraordinary, it will occur that beyond a doubt _many_ portraits

of the adventurous nun must have been executed. To have affronted

the wrath of the Inquisition, and to have survived such an audacity,

would of itself be enough to found a title for the martial nun

to a national interest. It is true that Kate had not taken the

veil; she had stopped short of the deadliest crime known to the

Inquisition; but still her transgressions were such as to require a

special indulgence; and this indulgence was granted by a Pope to the

intercession of a king--the greatest then reigning. It was a favor that

could not have been asked by any greater man in this world, nor granted

by any less. Had no other distinction settled upon Kate, this would

have been enough to fix the gaze of her own nation. But her whole life

constituted Kate's supreme distinction. There can be no doubt,

therefore, that, from the year 1624 (that is, the last year of our

James I.), she became the object of an admiration in her own country

that was almost idolatrous. And this admiration was not of a kind that

rested upon any partisan-schism amongst her countrymen. So long as it

was kept alive by her bodily presence amongst them, it was an

admiration equally aristocratic and popular,--shared alike by the rich

and the poor, by the lofty and the humble. Great, therefore, would be

the demand for her portrait. There is a tradition that Velasquez, who

had in 1623 executed a portrait of Charles I. (then Prince of Wales),

was amongst those who in the three or four following years ministered

to this demand. It is believed, also, that, in travelling from Genoa

and Florence to Rome, she sat to various artists, in order to meet the

interest about herself already rising amongst the cardinals and other

dignitaries of the Romish church. It is probable, therefore, that

numerous pictures of Kate are yet lurking both in Spain and Italy, but

not known as such. For, as the public consideration granted to her had

grown out of merits and qualities purely personal, and was kept alive

by no local or family memorials rooted in the land, or surviving

herself, it was inevitable that, as soon as she herself died, all

identification of her portraits would perish: and the portraits would

thenceforwards be confounded with the similar memorials, past all

numbering, which every year accumulates as the wrecks from household

remembrances of generations that are passing or passed, that are fading

or faded, that are dying or buried. It is well, therefore, amongst so

many irrecoverable ruins, that, in the portrait at Aix-la-Chapelle, we

still possess one undoubted representation (and therefore in some

degree a means for identifying _other_ representations) of a

female so memorably adorned by nature; gifted with capacities so

unparalleled both of doing and suffering; who lived a life so stormy,

and perished by a fate so unsearchably mysterious.

THE ORPHAN HEIRESS

I.

VISIT TO LAXTON.

My route, after parting from Lord Westport at Birmingham, lay, as I

have mentioned in the "Autobiographic Sketches," through Stamford to

Laxton, the Northamptonshire seat of Lord Carbery. From Stamford, which

I had reached by some intolerable old coach, such as in those days too

commonly abused the patience and long-suffering of Young England, I

took a post-chaise to Laxton. The distance was but nine miles, and the

postilion drove well, so that I could not really have been long upon

the road; and yet, from gloomy rumination upon the unhappy destination

which I believed myself approaching within three or four months, never

had I weathered a journey that seemed to me so long and dreary. As I

alighted on the steps at Laxton, the first dinner-bell rang; and I was

hurrying to my toilet, when my sister Mary, who had met me in the

portico, begged me first of all to come into Lady Carbery's [Footnote:

Lady Carbery.--"To me, individually, she was the one sole friend that

ever I could regard as entirely fulfilling the offices of an honest

friendship. She had known me from infancy; when I was in my first year

of life, she, an orphan and a great heiress, was in her tenth or

eleventh."--See closing pages of "_Autobiographic Sketches_."]

dressing-room, her ladyship having something special to communicate,

which related (as I understood her) to one Simon. "What Simon? Simon

Peter?"--O, no, you irreverend boy, no Simon at all with an S, but

Cymon with a C,--Dryden's Cymon,--

"That whistled as he went for want of thought.'"

This one indication was a key to the whole explanation that followed.

The sole visitors, it seemed, at that time to Laxton, beside my sister

and myself, were Lord and Lady Massey. They were understood to be

domesticated at Laxton for a very long stay. In reality, my own private

construction of the case (though unauthorized by anything ever hinted

to me by Lady Carbery) was, that Lord Massey might probably be under

some cloud of pecuniary embarrassments, such as suggested prudentially

an absence from Ireland. Meantime, what was it that made him an object

of peculiar interest to Lady Carbery? It was the singular revolution

which, in one whom all his friends looked upon as sold to

constitutional torpor, suddenly, and beyond all hope, had kindled a new

and nobler life. Occupied originally by no shadow of any earthly

interest, killed by _ennui_, all at once Lord Massey had fallen

passionately in love with a fair young countrywoman, well connected,

but bringing him no fortune (I report only from hearsay), and endowing

him simply with the priceless blessing of her own womanly charms, her

delightful society, and her sweet, Irish style of innocent gayety. No

transformation that ever legends or romances had reported was more

memorable. Lapse of time (for Lord Massey had now been married three or

four years), and deep seclusion from general society, had done nothing,

apparently, to lower the tone of his happiness. The expression of this

happiness was noiseless and unobtrusive; no marks were there of vulgar

uxoriousness--nothing that could provoke the sneer of the worldling;

but not the less so entirely had the society of his young wife created

a new principle of life within him, and evoked some nature hitherto

slumbering, and which, no doubt, would else have continued to slumber

till his death, that, at moments when he believed himself unobserved,

he still wore the aspect of an impassioned lover.

"He beheld

A vision, and adored the thing he saw.

Arabian fiction never filled the world

With half the wonders that were wrought for _him_.

Earth breathed in one great presence of the spring

Her chamber window did surpass in glory

The portals of the dawn."

And in no case was it more literally realized, as daily almost I

witnessed, that

"All Paradise

Could, by the simple opening of a door,

Let itself in upon him."

[Footnote: Wordsworth's "Vandracour and Julia."]

For never did the drawing-room door open, and suddenly disclose the

beautiful figure of Lady Massey, than a mighty cloud seemed to roll

away from the young Irishman's brow. At this time it happened, and

indeed it often happened, that Lord Carbery was absent in Ireland. It

was probable, therefore, that during the long couple of hours through

which the custom of those times bound a man to the dinner-table after

the disappearance of the ladies, his time would hang heavily on his

hands. To me, therefore, Lady Carbery looked, having first put me in

possession of the case, for assistance to her hospitality, under the

difficulties I have stated. She thoroughly loved Lady Massey, as,

indeed, nobody could help doing; and for _her_ sake, had there

been no separate interest surrounding the young lord, it would have

been most painful to her that through Lord Carbery's absence a periodic

tedium should oppress her guest at that precise season of the day which

traditionally dedicated itself to genial enjoyment. Glad, therefore,

was she that an ally had come at last to Laxton, who might arm her

purposes of hospitality with some powers of self-fulfilment. And yet,

for a service of that nature, could she reasonably rely upon me? Odious

is the hobble-de-hoy to the mature young man. Generally speaking, that

cannot be denied. But in me, though naturally the shyest of human

beings, intense commerce with men of every rank, from the highest to

the lowest, had availed to dissipate all arrears of _mauvaise

honte_; I could talk upon innumerable subjects; and, as the readiest

means of entering immediately upon business, I was fresh from Ireland,

knew multitudes of those whom Lord Massey either knew or felt an

interest in, and, at that happy period of life, found it easy, with

three or four glasses of wine, to call back the golden spirits which

were now so often deserting me. Renovated, meantime, by a hot bath, I

was ready at the second summons of the dinner-bell, and descended a new

creature to the drawing-room. Here I was presented to the noble lord

and his wife. Lord Massey was in figure shortish, but broad and stout,

and wore an amiable expression of face. That I could execute Lady

Carbery's commission, I felt satisfied at once. And, accordingly, when

the ladies had retired from the dining-room, I found an easy opening,

in various circumstances connected with the Laxton stables, for

introducing naturally a picturesque and contrasting sketch of the stud

and the stables at Westport. The stables and everything connected with

the stables at Laxton were magnificent; in fact, far out of symmetry

with the house, which, at that time, was elegant and comfortable, but

not splendid. As usual in English establishments, all the appointments

were complete, and carried to the same point of exquisite finish. The

stud of hunters was first-rate and extensive; and the whole scene, at

closing the stables for the night, was so splendidly arranged and

illuminated, that Lady Carbery would take all her visitors once or

twice a week to admire it. On the other hand, at Westport you might

fancy yourself overlooking the establishment of some Albanian Pacha.

Crowds of irregular helpers and grooms, many of them totally

unrecognized by Lord Altamont, some half countenanced by this or that

upper servant, some doubtfully tolerated, some _not_ tolerated,

but nevertheless slipping in by postern doors when the enemy had

withdrawn, made up a strange mob as regarded the human element in this

establishment. And Dean Browne regularly asserted that five out of six

amongst these helpers he himself could swear to as active boys from

Vinegar Hill. Trivial enough, meantime, in our eyes, was any little

matter of rebellion that they might have upon their consciences. High

treason we willingly winked at. But what we could _not_ wink at

was the systematic treason which they committed against our comfort,

namely, by teaching our horses all imaginable tricks, and training them

up in the way along which they should _not_ go, so that when they

were old they were very little likely to depart from it. Such a set of

restive, hard-mouthed wretches as Lord Westport and I daily had to

bestride, no tongue could describe. There was a cousin of Lord

Westport's, subsequently created Lord Oranmore, distinguished for his

horsemanship, and always splendidly mounted from his father's stables

at Castle M'Garret, to whom our stormy contests with ruined tempers and

vicious habits yielded a regular comedy of fun; and, in order to

improve it, he would sometimes bribe Lord Westport's treacherous groom

into misleading us, when floundering amongst bogs, into the interior

labyrinths of these morasses. Deep, however, as the morass, was this

man's remorse when, on leaving Westport, I gave him the heavy golden

perquisite, which my mother (unaware of the tricks he had practised

upon me) had by letter instructed me to give. He was a mere savage boy

from the central bogs of Connaught, and, to the great amusement of Lord

Westport, he persisted in calling me "your majesty" for the rest of

that day; and by all other means open to him he expressed his

penitence. But the dean insisted that, no matter for his penitence in

the matter of the bogs, he had certainly carried a pike at Vinegar

Hill; and probably had stolen a pair of boots at Furnes, when he kindly

made a call at the Deanery, in passing through that place to the field

of battle. It is always a pleasure to see the engineer of mischief

"hoist with his own petard;" [Footnote: "Hamlet," but also "Ovid:"--

"Lex nec justior ulla est, **Quam necis artifices arte perire sua."]

and it happened that the horses assigned to draw a post-chariot

carrying Lord Westport, myself, and the dean, on our return journey to

Dublin, were a pair utterly ruined by a certain under-postilion, named

Moran. This particular ruin did Mr. Moran boast to have contributed as

his separate contribution to the general ruinations of the stables. And

the particular object was, that _his_ horses, and consequently

himself, might be left in genial laziness. But, as Nemesis would have

it, Mr. Moran was the charioteer specially appointed to this particular

service. We were to return by easy journeys of twenty-five miles a day,

or even less; since every such interval brought us to the house of some

hospitable family, connected by friendship or by blood with Lord

Altamont. Fervently had Lord Westport pleaded with his father for an

allowance of four horses; not at all with any foolish view to fleeting

aristocratic splendor, but simply to the luxury of rapid motion. But

Lord Altamont was firm in resisting this petition at that time. The

remote consequence was, that by way of redressing the violated

equilibrium to our feelings, we subscribed throughout Wales to extort

six horses from the astonished innkeepers, most of whom declined the

requisition, and would furnish only four, on the plea that the leaders

would only embarrass the other horses; but one at Bangor, from whom we

coolly requested eight, recoiled from our demand as from a sort of

miniature treason. How so? Because in this island he had always

understood eight horses to be consecrated to royal use. Not at all, we

assured him; Pickford, the great carrier, always horsed his wagons with

eight. And the law knew of no distinction between wagon and post-

chaise, coach-horse or cart-horse. However, we could not compass this

point of the eight horses, the double _quadriga_, in one single

instance; but the true reason we surmised to be, not the pretended

puritanism of loyalty to the house of Guelph, but the running short of

the innkeeper's funds. If he had to meet a daily average call for

twenty-four horses, then it might well happen that our draft upon him

for eight horses at one pull would bankrupt him for a whole day.

But I am anticipating. Returning to Ireland and Mr. Moran, the vicious

driver of vicious horses, the immediate consequence to _him_ of

this unexpected limitation to a pair of horses was, that all his

knavery in one hour recoiled upon himself. The horses whom he had

himself trained to vice and restiveness, in the hope that thus his own

services and theirs might be less in request, now became the very curse

of his life. Every morning, duly as an attempt was made to put them in

motion, they began to back, and no arts, gentle or harsh, would for a

moment avail to coax or to coërce them into the counter direction.

Could retrogression by any metaphysics have been translated into

progress, we excelled in that; it was our _forte_; we could have

backed to the North Pole. That might be the way to glory, or at least

to distinction--_sic itur ad astra_; unfortunately, it was not the

way to Dublin. Consequently, on _every_ day of our journey--and

the days were ten--not once, but always, we had the same deadly

conflict to repeat; and this being always unavailing, found its

solution uniformly in the following ultimate resource. Two large-boned

horses, usually taken from the plough, were harnessed on as leaders. By

main force they hauled our wicked wheelers into the right direction,

and forced them, by pure physical superiority, into working. We

furnished a joyous and comic spectacle to every town and village

through which we passed. The whole community, men and children, came

out to assist at our departure; and all alike were diverted, but not

the less irritated, by the demoniac obstinacy of the brutes, who seemed

under the immediate inspiration of the fiend. Everybody was anxious to

share in the scourging which was administered to them right and left;

and once propelled into a gallop (or such a gallop as our Brobdignagian

leaders could accomplish), they were forced into keeping it up. But,

without rehearsing all the details of the case, it may be readily

conceived that the amount of trouble distributed amongst our whole

party was enormous. Once or twice the friends at whose houses we slept

were able to assist us. But generally they either had no horses, or

none of the commanding power demanded. Often, again, it happened, as

our route was very circuitous, that no inns lay in our neighborhood;

or, if there _were_ inns, the horses proved to be of too slight a

build. At Ballinasloe, and again at Athlone, half the town came out to

help us; and, having no suitable horses, thirty or forty men, with

shouts of laughter, pulled at ropes fastened to our pole and splinter-

bar, and compelled the snorting demons into a flying gallop. But,

naturally, a couple of miles saw this resource exhausted. Then came the

necessity of "drawing the covers," as the dean called it; that is,

hunting amongst the adjacent farmers for powerful cattle. This labor

(O, Jupiter, thanks be for _that_!) fell upon Mr. Moran. And

sometimes it would happen that the horses, which it had cost him three

or four hours to find, could be spared only for four or five miles.

Such a journey can rarely have been accomplished. Our zigzag course had

prolonged it into from two hundred and thirty to two hundred and fifty

miles; and it is literally true that, of this entire distance from

Westport House to Sackville-street, Dublin, not one furlong had been

performed under the spontaneous impulse of our own horses. Their

diabolic resistance continued to the last. And one may venture to hope

that the sense of final subjugation to man must have proved penally

bitter to the horses. But, meantime, it vexes one that such wretches

should be fed with good old hay and oats; as well littered down also in

their stalls as a prebendary; and by many a stranger, ignorant of their

true character, should have been patted and caressed. Let us hope that

a fate, to which more than once they were nearly forcing _us_,

namely, regress over a precipice, may ultimately have been their own.

Once I saw such another case dramatically carried through to its

natural crisis in the Liverpool Mail. It was on the stage leading into

Lichfield; there was no conspiracy, as in our Irish case; one horse

only out of the four was the criminal; and, according to the queen's

bench (Denman, C. J.), there is no conspiracy competent to one agent;

but he was even more signally under a demoniac possession of mutinous

resistance to man. The case was really a memorable one. If ever there

was a distinct proclamation of rebellion against man, it was made by

that brutal horse; and I, therefore, being a passenger on the box, took

a note of the case; and on a proper occasion I may be induced to

publish it, unless some Houynhm should whinny against me a chancery

injunction.

From these wild, Tartar-like stables of Connaught, how vast was the

transition to that perfection of elegance, and of adaptation between

means and ends, that reigned from centre to circumference through the

stables at Laxton! _I_, as it happened, could report to Lord Massey

their earlier condition; he to me could report their immediate

changes. I won him easily to an interest in my own Irish experiences,

so fresh, and in parts so grotesque, wilder also by much in Connaught

than in Lord Massey's county of Limerick; whilst he (without affecting

any delight in the hunting systems of Northamptonshire and

Leicestershire) yet took pleasure in explaining to me those

characteristic features of the English midland hunting as centralized

at Melton, which even then gave to it the supreme rank for brilliancy

and unity of effect amongst all varieties of the chase. [Footnote: If

mere names were allowed to dazzle the judgment, how magnificent to a

gallant young Englishman of twenty seems at first the _tiger-

hunting_ of India, which yet (when examined searchingly) turns out

the meanest and most _cowardly_ mode of hunting known to human

experience. _Buffalo-hunting_ is much more dignified as regards

the courageous exposure of the hunter; but, from all accounts, its

excitement is too momentary and evanescent; one rifle-shot, and the

crisis is past. Besides that, the generous and honest character of the

buffalo disturbs the cordiality of the sport. The very opposite reason

disturbs the interest of _lion-hunting, especially at the Cape. The

lion is everywhere a cowardly wretch, unless when sublimed into courage

by famine; but, in southern Africa, he is the most currish of enemies.

Those who fancied so much adventurousness in the lion conflicts of Mr.

Gordon Cumming appear never to have read the missionary travels of Mr.

Moffat. The poor missionary, without any arms whatever, came to think

lightly of half a dozen lions seen drinking through the twilight at the

very same pond or river as himself. Nobody can have any wish to

undervalue the adventurous gallantry of Mr. G. Cumming. But, in the

single case of the Cape lion, there is an unintentional advantage taken

from the traditional name of lion, as though the Cape lion were such as

that which ranges the torrid zone.]

Horses had formed the natural and introductory topic of conversation

between us. What we severally knew of Ireland, though in different

quarters,--what we both knew of Laxton, the barbaric splendor, and the

civilized splendor,--had naturally an interest for us both in their

contrasts (at one time so picturesque, at another so grotesque), which

illuminated our separate recollections. But my quick instinct soon made

me aware that a jealousy was gathering in Lord Massey's mind around

such a topic, as though too ostentatiously levelled to his particular

knowledge, or to his _animal_ condition of taste. But easily I

slipped off into another key. At Laxton, it happened that the library

was excellent. Founded by whom, I never heard; but certainly, when used

by a systematic reader, it showed itself to have been systematically

collected; it stretched pretty equably through two centuries,--namely,

from about 1600 to 1800,--and might, perhaps, amount to seventeen

thousand volumes. Lord Massey was far from illiterate; and his interest

in books was unaffected, if limited, and too often interrupted, by

defective knowledge. The library was dispersed through six or seven

small rooms, lying between the drawing-room in one wing, and the

dining-room in the opposite wing. This dispersion, however, already

furnished the ground of a rude classification. In some one of these

rooms was Lord Massey always to be found, from the forenoon to the

evening. And was it any fault of _his_ that his daughter, little

Grace, about two years old, pursued him down from her nursery every

morning, and insisted upon seeing innumerable pictures, lurking (as she

had discovered) in many different recesses of the library? More and

more from this quarter it was that we drew the materials of our daily

after-dinner conversation. One great discouragement arises commonly to

the student, where the particular library in which he reads has been so

disordinately collected that he cannot _pursue_ a subject once

started. Now, at Laxton, the books had been so judiciously brought

together, so many hooks and eyes connected them, that the whole library

formed what one might call a series of _strata_, naturally allied,

through which you might quarry your way consecutively for many months.

On rainy days, and often enough one had occasion to say through rainy

weeks, what a delightful resource did this library prove to both of us!

And one day it occurred to us, that, whereas the stables and the

library were both jewels of attraction, the latter had been by much the

least costly. Pretty often I have found, when any opening has existed

for making the computation, that, in a library containing a fair

proportion of books illustrated with plates, about ten shillings a

volume might be taken as expressing, upon a sufficiently large number

of volumes, small and great, the fair average cost of the whole. On

this basis, the library at Laxton would have cost less than nine

thousand pounds. On the other hand, thirty-live horses (hunters,

racers, roadsters, carriage-horses, etc.) might have cost about eight

thousand pounds, or a little more. But the library entailed no

permanent cost beyond the annual loss of interest; the books did not

eat, and required no aid from veterinary [Footnote: "_Veterinary_."--By

the way, whence comes this odd-looking word? The word _veterana_ I

have met with in monkish writers, to express _domesticated quadrupeds_;

and evidently from that word must have originated the word _veterinary_.

But the question is still but one step removed; for, how came _veterana_

by that acceptation in rural economy?] surgeons; whereas, for the

horses, not only such ministrations were intermittingly required,

but a costly permanent establishment of grooms and helpers. Lord

Carbery, who had received an elaborate Etonian education, was even

more earnestly a student than his friend Lord Massey, who had probably

been educated at home under a private tutor. He read everything

connected with general politics (meaning by _general_ not personal

politics) and with social philosophy. At Laxton, indeed; it was that

I first saw Godwin's "Political Justice;" not the second and emasculated

edition in _octavo_, but the original _quarto_ edition, with all its virus

as yet undiluted of raw anti-social Jacobinism.

At Laxton it was that I first saw the entire aggregate labors,

brigaded, as it were, and paraded as if for martial review, of that

most industrious benefactor to the early stages of our English

historical literature, Thomas Hearne. Three hundred guineas, I believe,

had been the price paid cheerfully at one time for a complete set of

Hearne. At Laxton, also, it was that first I saw the total array of

works edited by Dr. Birch. It was a complete _armilustrium_, a

_recognitio_, or mustering, as it were, not of pompous Praetorian

cohorts, or unique guardsmen, but of the yeomanry, the militia, or

what, under the old form of expression, you might regard as the

_trained bands_ of our literature--the fund from which ultimately,

or in the last resort, students look for the materials of our vast and

myriad-faced literature. A French author of eminence, fifty years back,

having occasion to speak of our English literature collectively, in

reference to the one point of its _variety_, being also a man of

honor, and disdaining that sort of patriotism which sacrifices the

truth to nationality, speaks of our pretensions in these words: _Les

Anglois qui ont une littérature infiniment plus variée que la

nôtre_. This fact is a feature in our national pretensions that

could ever have been regarded doubtfully merely through insufficient

knowledge. Dr. Johnson, indeed, made it the distinguishing merit of the

French, that they "have a book upon every subject." But Dr. Johnson was

not only capricious as regards temper and variable humors, but as

regards the inequality of his knowledge. Incoherent and unsystematic

was Dr. Johnson's information in most cases. Hence his extravagant

misappraisement of Knolles, the Turkish historian, which is exposed so

severely by Spittler, the German, who, again, is himself miserably

superficial in his analysis of English history. Hence the feeble

credulity which Dr. Johnson showed with respect to the forgery of De

Foe (under the masque of Captain Carleton) upon the Catalonian campaign

of Lord Peterborough. But it is singular that a literature, so

unrivalled as ours in its compass and variety, should not have produced

any, even the shallowest, manual of itself. And thus it happens, for

example, that writers so laborious and serviceable as Birch are in any

popular sense scarcely known. I showed to Lord Massey, among others of

his works, that which relates to Lord Worcester's (that is, Lord

Glamorgan's) negotiations with the Papal nuncio in Ireland, about the

year 1644, &c. Connected with these negotiations were many names

amongst Lord Massey's own ancestors; so that here he suddenly alighted

upon a fund of archæologic memorabilia, connecting what interested him

as an Irishman in general with what most interested him as the head of

a particular family. It is remarkable, also, as an indication of the

_general_ nobility and elevation which had accompanied the revolution

in his life, that concurrently with the constitutional torpor

previously besetting him, had melted away the intellectual torpor

under which he had found books until recently of little practical

value. Lady Carbery had herself told me that the two revolutions

went on simultaneously. He began to take an interest in literature

when life itself unfolded a new interest, under the companionship

of his youthful wife. And here, by the way, as subsequently

in scores of other instances, I saw broad evidences of the credulity

with which we have adopted into our grave political faith the

rash and malicious sketches of our novelists. With Fielding commenced

the practice of systematically traducing our order of country

gentlemen. His picture of Squire Western is not only a malicious, but

also an incongruous libel. The squire's ordinary language is

impossible, being alternately bookish and absurdly rustic. In reality,

the conventional dialect ascribed to the rustic order in general--to

peasants even more than to gentlemen--in our English plays and novels,

is a childish and fantastic babble, belonging to no form of real

breathing life; nowhere intelligible; not in _any_ province;

whilst, at the same time, all provinces--Somersetshire, Devonshire,

Hampshire--are confounded with our midland counties; and positively the

diction of Parricombe and Charricombe from Exmoor Forest is mixed up

with the pure Icelandic forms of the English lakes, of North Yorkshire,

and of Northumberland. In Scotland, it needs but a slight intercourse

with the peasantry to distinguish various dialects--the Aberdonian and

Fifeshire, for instance, how easily distinguished, even by an English

alien, from the western dialects of Ayrshire, &c.! And I have heard it

said, by Scottish purists in this matter, that even Sir Walter Scott is

chargeable with considerable licentiousness in the management of his

colloquial Scotch. Yet, generally speaking, it bears the strongest

impress of truthfulness. But, on the other hand, how false and

powerless does this same Sir Walter become, when the necessities of his

tale oblige him at any time to come amongst the English peasantry! His

magic wand is instantaneously broken; and he moves along by a babble of

impossible forms, as fantastic as any that our London theatres have

traditionally ascribed to English rustics, to English sailors, and to

Irishmen universally. Fielding is open to the same stern criticism, as

a deliberate falsehood-monger; and from the same cause--want of energy

to face the difficulty of mastering a real living idiom. This defect in

language, however, I cite only as one feature in the complex falsehood

which disfigures Fielding's portrait of the English country gentleman.

Meantime the question arises, Did he mean his Squire Western for a

_representative_ portrait? Possibly not. He might design it expressly

as a sketch of an individual, and by no means of a class. And

the fault may be, after all, not in _him_, the writer, but in

_us_, the falsely interpreting readers. But, be that as it may,

and figure to ourselves as we may the rustic squire of a hundred to a

hundred and fifty years back (though manifestly at utter war, in the

portraitures of our novelists, with the realities handed down to us by

our Parliamentary annals), on that _arena_ we are dealing with

objects of pure speculative curiosity. Far different is the same

question, when practically treated for purposes of present legislation

or philosophic inference. One hundred years ago, such was the

difficulty of social intercourse, simply from the difficulty of

locomotion (though even then this difficulty was much lowered to the

English, as beyond comparison the most equestrian of nations), that it

is possible to imagine a shade of difference as still distinguishing

the town-bred man from the rustic; though, considering the multiplied

distribution of our assize towns, our cathedral towns, our sea-ports,

and our universities, all so many recurring centres of civility, it is

not very easy to imagine such a thing in an island no larger than ours.

But can any human indulgence be extended to the credulity which assumes

the same possibility as existing for us in the very middle of the

nineteenth century? At a time when every week sees the town banker

drawn from our rural gentry; railway directors in every quarter

transferring themselves indifferently from town to country, from

country to town; lawyers, clergymen, medical men, magistrates, local

judges, &c., all shifting in and out between town and country; rural

families all intermarrying on terms of the widest freedom with town

families; all again, in the persons of their children, meeting for

study at the same schools, colleges, military academies, &c.; by what

furious forgetfulness of the realities belonging to the case, has it

been possible for writers in public journals to persist in arguing

national questions upon the assumption of a bisection in our

population--a double current, on the one side steeped to the lips in

town prejudices, on the other side traditionally sold to rustic views

and doctrines? Such double currents, like the Rhone flowing through the

Lake of Geneva, and yet refusing to intermingle, probably _did_

exist, and had an important significance in the Low Countries of the

fifteenth century, or between the privileged cities and the

unprivileged country of Germany down to the Thirty Years' War; but, for

us, they are in the last degree fabulous distinctions, pure fairy

tales; and the social economist or the historian who builds on such

phantoms as that of a rustic aristocracy still retaining any

substantial grounds of distinction from the town aristocracies,

proclaims the hollowness of any and all his doctrines that depend upon

such assumptions. Lord Carbery was a thorough fox-hunter. The fox-

hunting of the adjacent county of Leicestershire was not then what it

is now. The state of the land was radically different for the foot of

the horse, the nature and distribution of the fences was different; so

that a class of horses thoroughly different was then required. But

then, as now, it offered the finest exhibition of the fox-chase that is

known in Europe; and then, as now, this is the best adapted among all

known varieties of hunting to the exhibition of adventurous and skilful

riding, and generally, perhaps, to the development of manly and

athletic qualities. Lord Carbery, during the season, might be

immoderately addicted to this mode of sporting, having naturally a

pleasurable feeling connected with his own reputation as a skilful and

fearless horseman. But, though the chases were in those days longer

than they are at present, small was the amount of time really

abstracted from that which he had disposable for general purposes;

amongst which purposes ranked foremost his literary pursuits. And,

however much he transcended the prevailing conception of his order, as

sketched by satiric and often ignorant novelists, he might be regarded,

in all that concerned the liberalization of his views, as pretty fairly

representing that order. Thus, through every _real_ experience,

the crazy notion of a rural aristocracy flowing apart from the urban

aristocracy, and standing on a different level of culture as to

intellect, of polish as to manners, and of interests as to social

objects, a notion at all times false as a fact, now at length became

with all thoughtful men monstrous as a possibility.

Meantime Lord Massey was reached by reports, both through Lady Carbery

and myself, of something which interested him more profoundly than all

earthly records of horsemanship, or any conceivable questions connected

with books. Lady Carbery, with a view to the amusement of Lady Massey

and my sister, for both of whom youth and previous seclusion had

created a natural interest in all such scenes, accepted two or three

times in every week dinner invitations to all the families on her

visiting list, and lying within her winter circle, which was measured,

by a radius of about seventeen miles. For, dreadful as were the roads

in those days, when the Bath, the Bristol, or the Dover mail was

equally perplexed oftentimes to accomplish Mr. Palmer's rate of seven

miles an hour, a distance of seventeen was yet easily accomplished in

one hundred minutes by the powerful Laxton horses. Magnificent was the

Laxton turn-out; and in the roomy travelling coach of Lady Carbery,

made large enough to receive upon occasion even a bed, it would have

been an idle scruple to fear the crowding a party which mustered only

three besides myself. For Lord Massey uniformly declined joining us; in

which I believe that he was right. A schoolboy like myself had

fortunately no dignity to lose. But Lord Massey, a needy Irish peer

(or, strictly speaking, since the Union no peer at all, though still an

hereditary lord), was bound to be trebly vigilant over his surviving

honors. This he owed to his country as well as to his family. He

recoiled from what he figured to himself (but too often falsely

figured) as the haughty and disdainful English nobility---all so rich,

all so polished in manner, all so punctiliously correct in the ritual

of _bienséance_. Lord Carbery might face them gayly and boldly:

for _he_ was rich, and, although possessing Irish estates and an

Irish mansion, was a thorough Englishman by education and early

association. "But I," said Lord Massey, "had a careless Irish

education, and am never quite sure that I may not be trespassing on

some mysterious law of English good-breeding." In vain I suggested to

him that most of what passed amongst foreigners and amongst Irishmen

for English _hauteur_ was pure reserve, which, among all people

that were bound over by the inevitable restraints of their rank

(imposing, it must be remembered, jealous duties as well as

privileges), was sure to become the operative feeling. I contended that

in the English situation there was no escaping this English reserve,

except by great impudence and defective sensibility; and that, if

examined, reserve was the truest expression of respect towards those

who were its objects. In vain did Lady Carbery back me in this

representation. He stood firm, and never once accompanied us to any

dinner-party. Northamptonshire, I know not why, is (or then was) more

thickly sown with aristocratic families than any in the kingdom. Many

elegant and pretty women there naturally were in these parties; but

undoubtedly our two Laxton baronesses shone advantageously amongst

them. A boy like myself could lay no restraint upon the after-dinner

feelings of the gentlemen; and almost uniformly I heard such verdicts

passed upon the personal attractions of both, but especially Lady

Massey, as tended greatly to soothe the feelings of Lord Massey. It is

singular that Lady Massey universally carried off the palm of unlimited

homage. Lady Carbery was a regular beauty, and publicly known for such;

both were fine figures, and apparently not older than twenty-six; but

in her Irish friend people felt something more thoroughly artless and

feminine--for the masculine understanding of Lady Carbery in some way

communicated its commanding expression to her deportment. I reported to

Lord Massey, in terms of unexceptionable decorum, those flattering

expressions of homage, which sometimes from the lips of young men,

partially under the influence of wine, had taken a form somewhat too

enthusiastic for a literal repetition to a chivalrous and adoring

husband.

Meantime, the reader has been kept long enough at Laxton to warrant me

in presuming some curiosity or interest to have gathered within his

mind about the mistress of the mansion. Who was Lady Carbery? what was

her present position, and what had been her original position, in

society? All readers of Bishop Jeremy Taylor [Footnote: The Life of

Jeremy Taylor, by Reginald Heber, Bishop of Calcutta, is most

elaborately incorrect. From want of research, and a chronology in some

places thoroughly erroneous, various important facts are utterly

misstated; and what is most to be regretted, in a matter deeply

affecting the bishop's candor and Christian charity, namely, a

controversial correspondence with a Somersetshire Dissenting clergyman,

the wildest misconception has vitiated the entire result. That

fractional and splintered condition, into which some person had cut up

the controversy with a view to his own more convenient study of its

chief elements, Heber had misconceived as the actual form in which

these parts had been originally exchanged between the disputants--a

blunder of the worst consequence, and having the effect of translating

general expressions (such as recorded a moral indignation against

ancient fallacies or evasions connected with the dispute) into direct

ebullitions of scorn or displeasure personally against his immediate

antagonist. And the charge of intolerance and defective charity becomes

thus very much stronger against the poor bishop, because it takes the

shape of a confession extorted by mere force of truth from an else

reluctant apologist, that would most gladly have denied everything that

he _could_ deny. The Life needs more than ever to be accurately

written, since it has been thus chaotically mis-narrated by a prelate

of so much undeniable talent. I once began a very elaborate life

myself, and in these words: "Jeremy Taylor, the most eloquent and the

subtlest of Christian philosophers, was the son of a barber, and the

son-in-law of a king,"--alluding to the tradition (imperfectly

verified, I believe) that he married an illegitimate daughter of

Charles I. But this sketch was begun more than thirty years ago; and I

retired from the labor as too overwhelmingly exacting in all that

related to the philosophy and theology of that man 80 "myriad-minded,"

and of that century so anarchical.] must be aware of that religious

Lady Carbery, who was the munificent (and, for her kindness, one might

say the filial) patroness of the all-eloquent and subtle divine. She

died before the Restoration, and, consequently, before her spiritual

director could have ascended the Episcopal throne. The title of Carbery

was at that time an earldom; the earl married again, arid his second

countess was also a devout patroness of Taylor. Having no peerage at

hand, I do not know by what mode of derivation the modern title of the

nineteenth century had descended from the old one of the seventeenth. I

presume that some collateral branch of the original family had

succeeded to the barony when the limitations of the original settlement

had extinguished the earldom. But to me, who saw revived another

religious Lady Carbery, distinguished for her beauty and

accomplishments, it was interesting to read of the two successive

ladies who had borne that title one hundred and sixty years before, and

whom no reader of Jeremy Taylor is ever allowed to forget, since almost

all his books are dedicated to one or other of the pious family that

had protected him. Once more there was a religious Lady Carbery,

supporting locally the Church of England, patronizing schools,

diffusing the most extensive relief to every mode of indigence or

distress. A century and a half ago such a Lady Carbery was in South

Wales, at the "Golden Grove;" now such another Lady Carbery was in

central England, at Laxton. The two cases, divided by six generations,

interchanged a reciprocal interest, since in both cases it was young

ladies, under the age of thirty, that originated the movement, and in

both cases these ladies bore the same title; and I will therefore

retrace rapidly the outline of that contemporary case so familiarly

known to myself.

Colonel Watson and General Smith had been amongst the earliest friends

of my mother's family. Both served for many years in India: the first

in the Company's army, the other upon the staff of the king's forces in

that country. Each, about the same time, made a visit to England, and

each of them, I believe, with the same principal purpose of providing

for the education of his daughter; for each happened to have one sole

child, which child, in each case, was a girl of singular beauty; and

both of these little ladies were entitled to very large fortunes. The

colonel and the general, being on brotherly terms of intimacy, resolved

to combine their plans for the welfare of their daughters. What they

wanted was, not a lady that could teach them any special arts or

accomplishments--all these could be purchased;--but the two

qualifications indispensable for the difficult situation of lady-

superintendent over two children so singularly separated from all

relatives whatever, were, in the first place, knowledge of the world,

and integrity for keeping at a distance all showy adventurers that

might else offer themselves, with unusual advantages, as suitors for

the favor of two great heiresses; and, secondly, manners exquisitely

polished. Looking to that last requisition, it seems romantic to

mention, that the lady selected for the post, with the fullest

approbation of both officers, was one who began life as the daughter of

a little Lincolnshire farmer. What her maiden name had been, I do not

at this moment remember; but this name was of very little importance,

being soon merged in that of Harvey, bestowed on her at the altar by a

country gentleman. The squire--not very rich, I believe, but rich

enough to rank as a matrimonial prize in the lottery of a country girl,

whom one single step of descent in life might have brought within sight

of menial service--had been captivated by the young woman's beauty; and

this, at that period, when accompanied by the advantages of youth, must

have been resplendent. I, who had known her all my life, down to my

sixteenth year (during which year she died), and who naturally,

therefore, referred her origin back to some remote ancestral

generation, nevertheless, in her sole case, was made to feel that there

might be some justification for the Church of England discountenancing

in her Liturgy, "marriage with your great-grandmother; neither shalt

thou marry thy great-grandfather's widow." She, poor thing! at that

time was thinking little of marriage; for even then, though known only

to herself and her _femme de chambre_, that dreadful organic malady

(cancer) was raising its adder's crest, under which finally she

died. But, in spite of languor interchanging continually with

disfiguring anguish, she still impressed one as a regal beauty. Her

person, indeed, and figure, _would_ have tended towards such a

standard; but all was counteracted, and thrown back into the mould of

sweet natural womanhood, by the cherubic beauty of her features. These

it was--these features, so purely childlike--that reconciled me in a

moment of time to great-grandmotherhood. The stories about Ninon de

l'Enclos are French fables--speaking plainly, are falsehoods; and sorry

I am that a nation so amiable as the French should habitually disregard

truth, when coming into collision with their love for the extravagant.

But, if anything could reconcile me to these monstrous old fibs about

Ninon at ninety, it would be the remembrance of this English

enchantress on the high-road to seventy. Guess, reader, what she must

have been at twenty-eight to thirty-two, when she became the widow of

the Gerenian horseman, Harvey. How bewitching she must have looked in

her widow's caps! So had once thought Colonel Watson, who happened to

be in England at that period; and to the charming widow this man of war

propounded his hand in marriage. This hand, this martial hand, for

reason inexplicable to me, Mrs. Harvey declined; and the colonel

bounced off in a rage to Bengal. There were others who saw young Mrs.

Harvey, as well as Colonel Watson. And amongst them was an ancient

German gentleman, to what century belonging I do not know, who had

every possible bad quality known to European experience, and a solitary

good one, namely, eight hundred thousand pounds sterling. The man's

name was Schreiber. Schreiber was an aggregate resulting from the

conflux of all conceivable bad qualities. That was the elementary base

of Schreiber; and the superstructure, or Corinthian decoration of his

frontispiece, was, that Schreiber cultivated one sole science, namely,

the science of taking snuff. Here were two separate objects for

contemplation: one, bright as Aurora--that radiant Koh-i-noor, or

mountain of light--the eight hundred thousand pounds; the other, sad,

fuscous, begrimed with the snuff of ages, namely, the most ancient

Schreiber. Ah! if they _could_ have been divided--these twin yoke-

fellows--and that ladies might have the privilege of choosing between

them! For the moment there was no prudent course open to Mrs. Harvey,

but that of marrying Schreiber (which she did, and survived); and,

subsequently, when the state of the market became favorable to such

"conversions" of stock, then the new Mrs. Schreiber parted from

Schreiber, and disposed of her interest in Schreiber at a settled rate

in three per cent. consols and terminable annuities; for every

_coupon_ of Schreiber receiving a _bonus_ of so many thousand pounds,

paid down according to the rate agreed on by the lawyers of the

two parties; or, strictly speaking, _quarrelled on_ between the

adverse factions; for agreement it was hard to effect upon any point.

The deadly fear which had been breathed into him by Mrs. Schreiber's

scale of expenditure in a Park Lane house proved her most salutary

ally. Coerced by this horrid vision, Schreiber consented (which else he

never would have done) to grant her an allowance, for life, of about

two thousand per annum. Could _that_ be reckoned an anodyne for

the torment connected with a course of Schreiber? I pretend to no

opinion.

Such were the facts: and exactly at this point in her career had Mrs.

Schreiber arrived, when, once more, Colonel Watson and General Smith

were visiting England, and for the last time, on the errand of settling

permanently some suitable establishment for their two infant daughters.

The superintendence of this they desired to devolve upon some lady,

qualified by her manners and her connections for introducing the young

ladies, when old enough, into general society. Mrs. Schreiber was the

very person required. Intellectually she had no great pretensions; but

these she did not need: her character was irreproachable, her manners

were polished, and her own income placed her far above all mercenary

temptations. She had not thought fit to accept the station of Colonel

Watson's wife, but some unavowed feeling prompted her to undertake,

with enthusiasm, the duties of a mother to the colonel's daughter.

Chiefly on Miss Watson's account it was at first that she extended her

maternal cares to General Smith's daughter; but very soon so sweet and

winning was the disposition of Miss Smith that Mrs. Schreiber

apparently loved _her_ the best.

Both, however, appeared under a combination of circumstances too

singularly romantic to fail of creating an interest that was universal.

Both were solitary children, unchallenged by any relatives. Neither had

ever known what it was to taste of love, paternal or maternal. Their

mothers had been long dead--not consciously seen by either; and their

fathers, not surviving their last departure from home long enough to

see them again, died before returning from India. What a world of

desolation seemed to exist for them! How silent was every hall into

which, by natural right, they should have had entrance! Several people,

kind, cordial people, men and women, were scattered over England, that,

during their days of infancy, would have delighted to receive them;

but, by some fatality, when they reached their fifteenth year, and

might have been deemed old enough to undertake visits, all of these

paternal friends, except two, had died; nor had they, by that time, any

relatives at all that remained alive, or were eligible as associates.

Strange, indeed, was the contrast between the silent past of their

lives and that populous future to which their large fortunes would

probably introduce them. Throw open a door in the rear that should lay

bare the long vista of chambers through which their childhood might

symbolically be represented as having travelled--what silence! what

solemn solitude! Open a door in advance that should do the same

figurative office for the future--suddenly what a jubilation! what a

tumult of festal greetings!

But the succeeding stages of life did not, perhaps, in either case

fully correspond to the early promise. Rank and station the two young

ladies attained; but rank and station do not always throw people upon

prominent stages of action or display. Many a family, possessing both

rank and wealth, and not undistinguished possibly by natural endowments

of an order fitted for brilliant popularity, never emerge from

obscurity, or not into any splendor that can be called national;

sometimes, perhaps, from a temper unfitted for worthy struggles in the

head of the house; possibly from a haughty, possibly a dignified

disdain of popular arts, hatred of petty rhetoric, petty sycophantic

courtships, petty canvassing tricks; or again, in many cases, because

accidents of ill-luck have intercepted the fair proportion of success

due to the merits of the person; whence, oftentimes, a hasty self-

surrender to impulses of permanent disgust. But, more frequently than

any other cause, I fancy that impatience of the long struggle required

for any distinguished success interferes to thin the ranks of

competitors for the prizes of public ambition. Perseverance is soon

refrigerated in those who fall back under any result, defeated or not

defeated, upon splendid mansions and luxuries of every kind, already

far beyond their needs or their wishes. The soldier described by the

Roman satirist as one who had lost his purse, was likely enough, under

the desperation of his misfortune, to see nothing formidable in any

obstacle that crossed his path towards another supplementary purse;

whilst the very same obstacle might reasonably alarm one who, in

retreating, fell back under the battlements of twenty thousand per

annum. In the present case, there was nothing at all to move wonder in

the final result under so continual a siege of temptation from the

seductions of voluptuous ease; the only wonder is, that one of the

young ladies, namely, Miss Watson, whose mind was masculine, and in

some directions aspiring, should so readily have acquiesced in a result

which she might have anticipated from the beginning.

Happy was the childhood, happy the early dawn of womanhood, which these

two young ladies passed under the guardianship of Mrs. Schreiber.

Education in those days was not the austere old lady that she is now.

At least, in the case of young ladies, her exactions were merciful and

considerate. If Miss Smith sang pretty well, and Miss Watson

_very_ well, and with the power of singing difficult _part_ music

at sight, they did so for the same reason that the lark sings,

and chiefly under the same gentle tuition--that of nature, glad

almighty nature, breathing inspiration from her Delphic tripod of

happiness, and health, and hope. Mrs. Schreiber pretended to no

intellectual gifts whatever; and yet, practically, she was wiser than

many who have the greatest. First of all other tasks which she imposed

upon her wards, was that of daily exercise, and exercise carried to

_excess_. She insisted upon four hours' exercise daily; and, as

young ladies walk fast, _that_ would have yielded, at the rate of

three and a half miles per hour, thirteen plus one third miles. But

only two and a half hours were given to walking; the other one and a

half to riding. No day was a day of rest; absolutely none. Days so

stormy that they "kept the raven to her nest," snow the heaviest, winds

the most frantic, were never listened to as any ground of reprieve from

the ordinary exaction. I once knew (that is, not personally, for I

never saw her, but through the reports of her many friends) an intrepid

lady, [Footnote: If I remember rightly, some account is given of this

palæstric lady and her stern Pædo-gymnastics, in a clever book on

household medicine and surgery under circumstances of inevitable

seclusion from professional aid, written about the year 1820-22, by Mr.

Haden, a surgeon of London.] living in the city of London (that is,

technically the _city_, as opposed to Westminster, etc., Mary-le-

bone, etc.), who made a point of turning out her newborn infants for a

pretty long airing, even on the day of their birth. It made no

difference to her whether the month were July or January; good,

undeniable air is to be had in either month. Once only she was baffled,

and most indignant it made her, because the little thing chose to be

born at half-past nine P. M.; so that, by the time its toilet was

finished, bonnet and cloak all properly adjusted, the watchman was

calling "Past eleven, and a cloudy night;" upon which, most

reluctantly, she was obliged to countermand the orders for that day's

exercise, and considered herself, like the Emperor Titus, to have lost

a day. But what came of the London lady's or of Mrs. Schreiber's

Spartan discipline? Did the little blind kittens of Gracechurch-street,

who were ordered by their penthesiléan mamma, on the very day of their

nativity, to face the most cruel winds--did _they_, or did Mrs.

Schreiber's wards, justify, in after life, this fierce discipline, by

commensurate results of hardiness? In words written beyond all doubt by

Shakspeare, though not generally recognized as his, it might have been

said to any one of this Amazonian brood,--

"Now mild may be thy life;

For a more blust'rous birth had never babe.

Quiet and gentle be thy temperature;

For thou'rt the rudeliest welcomed to this world

That e'er was woman's child. Happy be the sequel!

Thou hast as chiding a nativity

As fire, air, water, earth, and heaven, can make,

To herald thee from darkness!"--_Pericles, Act III._

As to the city kittens, I heard that the treatment prospered; but the

man who reported this added, that by original constitution they were as

strong as Meux's dray-horses; and thus, after all, they may simply

illustrate the old logical _dictum_ ascribed to some medical man,

that the reason why London children of the wealthier classes are

noticeable even to a proverb for their robustness and bloom, is because

none but those who are already vigorous to excess, and who start with

advantages of health far beyond the average scale, have much chance of

surviving that most searching quarantine, which, in such [Footnote: For

myself, meantime, I am far from assenting to all the romantic abuse

applied to the sewerage and the church-yards of London, and even more

violently to the river Thames. As a tidal river, even: beyond the

metropolitan bridges, the Thames undoubtedly does much towards

cleansing the atmosphere, whatever may be the condition of its waters.

And one most erroneous postulate there is from which the _Times_

starts in all its arguments, namely, this, that supposing the Thames to

be even a vast sewer, in short, the _cloaca maxima_ of London,

there is in that arrangement of things any special reproach applying to

our mighty English capital. On the contrary, _all_ great cities

that ever were founded have sought out, as their first and elementary

condition, the adjacency of some great cleansing river. In the long

process of development through which cities pass, commerce and other

functions of civilization come to usurp upon the earlier functions of

such rivers, and sometimes (through increasing efforts of luxurious

refinement) may come entirely to absorb them. But, in the infancy of

every great city, the chief function for which she looks to her river

is that of purification. Be thou my huge _cloaca_, says infant

Babylon to the Euphrates, says infant Nineveh to the Tigris, says

infant Rome to the Tiber. So far is that reproach from having any

special application to London. Smoke is not unwholesome; in many

circumstances it is salubrious, as a counter-agent to worse influences.

Even sewerage is chiefly insalubrious from its moisture, and not, in

any degree yet demonstrated, from its odor.] an atmosphere, they are

summoned to weather at starting. Coming, however, to the special case

of Mrs. Schreiber's household, I am bound to report that in no instance

have I known young ladies so thoroughly steeled against all the

ordinary host of petty maladies which, by way of antithesis to the

capital warfare of dangerous complaints, might be called the

_guerilla_ nosology; influenza, for instance, in milder forms,

catarrh, headache, toothache, dyspepsia in transitory shapes, etc.

Always the spirits of the two girls were exuberant; the enjoyment of

life seemed to be intense, and never did I know either of them to

suffer from _ennui_. My conscious knowledge of them commenced when

I was about two years old, they being from ten to twelve years older.

Mrs. Schreiber had been amongst my mother's earliest friends as Mrs.

Harvey, and in days when my mother had opportunities of doing her

seasonable services. And as there were three special advantages which

adorned my mother, and which ranked in Mrs. Schreiber's estimate as the

highest which earth could show, namely: 1°, that she spoke and wrote

English with singular elegance; 2°, that her manners were eminently

polished; and 3°, that, even in that early stage of my mother's life, a

certain tone of religiosity, and even of ascetic devotion, was already

diffused as a luminous mist that served to exalt the coloring of her

morality. To this extent Mrs. Schreiber approved of religion; but

nothing of a sectarian cast could she have tolerated; nor had she

anything of that nature to apprehend from my mother. Viewing my mother,

therefore, as a pure model of an English matron, and feeling for her,

besides, a deeper sentiment of friendship and affection than for

anybody else on her visiting list, it was natural enough that she

should come with her wards on an annual visit to "The Farm" (a pretty,

rustic dwelling occupied by my father in the neighborhood of

Manchester), and subsequently (when _that_ arose) to Greenhay.

[Footnote: "_Greenhay_."--As this name might, under a false

interpretation, seem absurd as including incongruous elements, I ought,

in justification of my mother, who devised the name, to have mentioned

that _hay_ was meant for the old English word (derived from the

old French word _haie_) indicating a rural enclosure. Conventionally,

a _hay_ or _haie_ was understood to mean a country-house within a

verdant ring-fence, narrower than a park: which word park, in Scotch

use, means any enclosure whatever, though not twelve feet square; but

in English use (witness Captain Burt's wager about Culloden parks)

means an enclosure measured by square miles, and usually accounted to

want its appropriate furniture, unless tenanted by deer. By the way, it

is a singular illustration of a fact illustrated in one way or other

every hour, namely, of the imperfect knowledge which England possesses

of England, that, within these last eight or nine months, I saw in the

_Illustrated London News_ an article assuming that the red deer was

unknown in England. Whereas, if the writer had ever been at the English

lakes during the hunting season, he might have seen it actually hunted

over Martindale forest and its purlieus. Or, again, in Devonshire and

Cornwall, over Dartmoor, etc., and, I believe, in many other regions,

though naturally narrowing as civilization widens. The writer is

equally wrong in supposing the prevailing deer of our parks to be the

_roe_ deer, which are very little known. It is the _fallow_ deer that

chiefly people our parks. Red deer were also found at Blenheim, in

Oxfordshire, when it was visited by Dr. Johnson, as may be seen in

"Boswell."] As my father always retained a town-house in Manchester

(somewhere in Fountain-street), and, though a plain, unpretending man,

was literary to the extent of having written a book, all things were so

arranged that there was no possibility of any commercial mementos ever

penetrating to the rural retreat of his family; such mementos, I mean,

as, by reviving painful recollections of that ancient Schreiber, who

was or ought to be by this time extinct, would naturally be odious and

distressing. Here, therefore, liberated from all jealousy of

overlooking eyes, such as haunted persons of their expectations at

Brighton, Weymouth, Sidmouth, or Bath, Miss Smith and Miss Watson used

to surrender themselves without restraint to their glad animal impulses

of girlish gayety, like the fawns of antelopes when suddenly

transferred from tiger-haunted thickets to the serene preserves of

secluded rajahs. On these visits it was, that I, as a young pet whom

they carried about like a doll from my second to my eighth or ninth

year, learned to know them; so as to take a fraternal interest in the

succeeding periods of their lives. Their fathers I certainly had not

seen; nor had they, consciously. These two fathers must both have died

in India, before my inquiries had begun to travel in that direction.

But, as old acquaintances of my mother's, both had visited The Farm

before I was born; and about General Smith, in particular, there had

survived amongst the servants a remembrance which seemed to us (that is

to them and to myself) ludicrously awful, though, at that time, the

practice was common throughout our Indian possessions. He had a Hindoo

servant with him; and this servant every night stretched himself along

the "sill" or outer threshold of the door; so that he might have been

trodden on by the general when retiring to rest; and from this it was

but a moderate step in advance to say that he _was_ trodden on. Upon

which basis many other wonders were naturally reared. Miss Smith's

father, therefore, furnished matter for a not very amiable tradition;

but Miss Smith herself was the sweetest-tempered and the loveliest of

girls, and the most thoroughly English in the style of her beauty. Far

different every way was Miss Watson. In person she was a finished

beauty of the very highest pretensions, and generally recognized as

such; that is to say, her figure was fine and queenly; her features

were exquisitely cut, as regarded their forms and the correspondences

of their parts; and usually by artists her face was said to be Grecian.

Perhaps the nostrils, mouth, and forehead, might be so; but nothing

could be less Grecian, or more eccentric in form and position, than the

eyes. They were placed obliquely, in a way that I do not remember to

have seen repeated in any other face whatever. Large they were, and

particularly long, tending to an almond-shape; equally strange, in

fact, as to color, shape, and position: but the remarkable position of

these eyes would have absorbed your gaze to the obliteration of all

other features or peculiarities in the face, were it not for one other

even more remarkable distinction affecting her complexion: this lay in

a suffusion that mantled upon her cheeks, of a color amounting almost

to carmine. Perhaps it might be no more than what Pindar meant by the

_porphyreon phos erotos_, which Gray has falsely [Footnote: Falsely,

because poxphuxeos rarely, perhaps, means in the Greek use what we mean

properly by _purple_, and _could_ not mean it in the Pindaric passage;

much oftener it denotes some shade of _crimson_, or else of _puniceus_,

or blood-red. Gibbon was never more mistaken than when he argued that

all the endless disputing about the _purpureus_ of the ancients might

have been evaded by attending to its Greek designation, namely,

_porphyry_-colored: since, said he, porphyry is always of the same

color. Not at all. Porphyry, I have heard, runs through as large a

gamut of hues as marble; but, if this should be an exaggeration, at all

events porphyry is far from being so monochromatic as Gibbon's argument

would presume. The truth is, colors were as loosely and

latitudinarially distinguished by the Greeks and Romans as degrees of

affinity and consanguinity are everywhere. _My son-in-law_, says a

woman, and she means _my stepson._ _My cousin_, she says, and she means

any mode of relationship in the wide, wide world. _Nos neveux_, says a

French writer, and means not _our nephews_, but _our grandchildren_,

or more generally _our descendants_.] translated as "the bloom of

young desire, and PURPLE light of love." It was not unpleasing, and

gave a lustre to the eyes, but it added to the eccentricity of the

face; and by all strangers it was presumed to be an artificial color,

resulting from some mode of applying a preparation more brilliant than

rouge. But to us children, so constantly admitted to her toilet, it was

well known to be entirely natural. Generally speaking, it is not likely

to assist the effect of a young woman's charms, that she presents any

such variety in her style of countenance as could naturally be called

_odd_. But Miss Watson, by the somewhat scenical effect resulting

from the harmony between her fine figure and her fine countenance,

triumphed over all that might else have been thought a blemish; and

when she was presented at court on occasion of her marriage, the king

himself pronounced her, to friends of Mrs. Schreiber, the most splendid

of all the brides that had yet given lustre to his reign. In such cases

the judgments of rustic, undisciplined tastes, though marked by

narrowness, and often by involuntary obedience to vulgar ideals (which,

for instance, makes them insensible to all the deep sanctities of

beauty that sleep amongst the Italian varieties of the Madonna face),

is not without its appropriate truth. Servants and rustics all thrilled

in sympathy with the sweet English loveliness of Miss Smith; but all

alike acknowledged, with spontaneous looks of homage, the fine presence

and finished beauty of Miss Watson. Naturally, from the splendor with

which they were surrounded, and the notoriety of their great

expectations,--so much to dazzle in one direction, and, on the other

hand, something for as tender a sentiment as pity, in the fact of both

from so early an age having been united in the calamity of orphanage,--

go where they might, these young women drew all eyes upon themselves;

and from the _audible_ comparisons sometimes made between them, it

might be imagined that if ever there were a situation fitted to nourish

rivalship and jealousy, between two girls, here it might be anticipated

in daily operation. But, left to themselves, the yearnings of the

female heart tend naturally towards what is noble; and, unless where it

has been tried too heavily by artificial incitements applied to the

pride, I do not believe that women generally are disposed to any

unfriendly jealousy of each other. Why should they? Almost every woman,

when strengthened in those charms which nature has given to her by such

as she can in many ways give to herself, must feel that she has her own

separate domain of empire unaffected by the most sovereign beauty upon

earth. Every man that ever existed has probably his own peculiar talent

(if only it were detected), in which he would be found to excel all the

rest of his race. And in every female face possessing any attractions

at all, no matter what may be her general inferiority, there lurks some

secret peculiarity of expression--some mesmeric individuality--which is

valid within its narrower range--limited superiority over the supreme

of beauties within a narrow circle. It is unintelligibly but

mesmerically potent, this secret fascination attached to features

oftentimes that are absolutely plain; and as one of many cases within

my own range of positive experience, I remember in confirmation, at

this moment, that in a clergyman's family, counting three daughters,

all on a visit to my mother, the youngest, Miss F---- P----, who was

strikingly and memorably plain, never walked out on the Clifton Downs

unattended, but she was followed home by a crowd of admiring men,

anxious to learn her rank and abode; whilst the middle sister,

eminently handsome, levied no such _visible_ tribute of admiration

on the public.

I mention this fact, one of a thousand similar facts, simply by way of

reminding the reader of what he must himself have often witnessed;

namely, that no woman is condemned by nature to any ignoble necessity

of repining against the power of other women; her own may be far more

confined, but within its own circle may possibly, measured against that

of the haughtiest beauty, be the profounder. However, waiving the

question thus generally put here, and as it specially affected these

two young women that virtually were sisters, any question of precedency

in power or display, when brought into collision with sisterly

affection, had not a momentary existence. Each had soon redundant

proofs of her own power to attract suitors without end; and, for the

more or the less, _that_ was felt to be a matter of accident.

Never, on this earth, I am satisfied, did that pure sisterly love

breathe a more steady inspiration than now into the hearts and through

the acts of these two generous girls; neither was there any sacrifice

which either would have refused _to_ or _for_ the other. The

period, however, was now rapidly shortening during which they would

have any opportunity for testifying this reciprocal love. Suitors were

flocking around them, as rank as cormorants in a storm. The grim old

chancellor (one, if not both, of the young ladies having been a ward in

Chancery) had all his legal jealousies awakened on their behalf. The

worshipful order of _adventurers_ and _fortune-hunters_, at that

time chiefly imported from Ireland, as in times more recent from

Germany, and other moustachoed parts of the continent, could not live

under the raking fire of Mrs. Schreiber, on the one side, with her

female tact and her knowledge of life, and of the chancellor, with his

huge discretional power, on the other. That particular chancellor, whom

the chronology of the case brought chiefly into connection with Miss

Watson's interests, was (if my childish remembrances do not greatly

mislead me) the iracund Lord Thurlow. Lovers and wooers this grim

lawyer regarded as the most impertinent order of animals in universal

zoology; and of these, in Miss Watson's case, he had a whole menagerie

to tend. Penelope, according to some school-boy remembrance of mine,

had one hundred and eighteen suitors. These young ladies had almost as

many. Heavens! I what a crew of Comus to follow or to lead! And what a

suitable person was this truculent old lord on the woolsack to enact

the part of shepherd--Corydon, suppose, or Alphesibæus--to this goodly

set of lambs! How he must have admired the hero of the "Odyssey," who

in one way or other accounted for all the wooers that "sorned" upon his

house, and had a receipt for their bodies from the grave-digger of

Ithaca! But even this wily descendant of Sisyphus would have found it

no such easy matter to deal with the English suitors, who were not the

feeble voluptuaries of the Ionian Islands, that suffered themselves to

be butchered as unresistingly as sheep in the shambles--actually

standing at one end of a banqueting-room to be shot at with bows and

arrows, not having pluck enough to make a rush--but were _game_

men; all young, strong, rich, and in most cases technically "noble;"

all, besides, contending for one or other of two prizes a thousand

times better fitted to inspire romantic ardor than the poor, withered

Penelope. One, by the way, amongst these suitors (I speak of those who

addressed Miss Watson), merits a separate commemoration, as having

drawn from Sheridan his very happiest _impromptu_--and an _impromptu_

that was really such--(the rarest of all things from Sheridan).

This was Lord Belgrave, eldest son of Lord Grosvenor—then an

earl, but at some period, long subsequent to this, raised to the

Marquisate of Westminster, a title naturally suggesting in itself a

connection with the vast Grosvenor property, sweeping across the whole

area of that most aristocratic region in the metropolis now called

_Belgravia_, which was then a name unknown; and this Hesperian

region had as yet no architectural value, and consequently no ground-

rent value, simply because the world of fashion and distinction had as

yet not expanded itself in that direction. In those days the

territorial importance of this great house rested exclusively upon its

connection with the county of Chester. In this connection it was that

the young Viscount Belgrave had been introduced, by his family

interest, into the House of Commons; he had delivered his maiden speech

with some effect; and had been heard favorably on various subsequent

occasions; on one of which it was that, to the extreme surprise of the

house, he terminated his speech with a passage from Demosthenes--not

presented in English, but in sounding Attic Greek. Latin is a

privileged dialect in parliament. But Greek! It would not have been at

all more startling to the usages of the house, had his lordship quoted

Persic or Telinga. Still, though felt as something verging on the

ridiculous, there was an indulgent feeling to a young man fresh from

academic bowers, which would not have protected a mature man of the

world. Everybody bit his lips, and as yet did _not_ laugh. But the

final issue stood on the edge of a razor. A gas, an inflammable

atmosphere, was trembling sympathetically through the whole excited

audience; all depended on a match being applied to this gas whilst yet

in the very act of escaping. Deepest silence still prevailed; and, had

any commonplace member risen to address the house in an ordinary

business key, all would have blown over. Unhappily for Lord Belgrave,

in that critical moment up rose the one solitary man, to wit, Sheridan,

whose look, whose voice, whose traditional character, formed a prologue

to what was coming. Here let the reader understand that, throughout the

"Iliad," all speeches or commands, questions or answers, are introduced

by Homer under some peculiar formula. For instance, replies are usually

introduced thus:

"_But him answering thus addressed the sovereign Agamemnon;_"

or; in sonorous Greek:

"Ton d' apameibomenos prosephé kreion Agamemnon;"

or, again, according to the circumstances:

"But him sternly surveying saluted the swift-footed Achilles;"

"Ton d'ar', upodra idon, prosephé podas okus Achilleus."

This being premised, and that every one of the audience, though

pretending to no Greek, yet, from his school-boy remembrances, was as

well acquainted with these _formulæ_ as with the scriptural

formula of _Verily, verily, I say unto you, &c._, Sheridan,

without needing to break its force by explanations, solemnly opened

thus:

"Ton d' apameibomenos prosephé Sheridanios heros."_

Simply to have commenced his answer in Greek would have sufficiently

met the comic expectation then thrilling the house; but, when it

happened that this Greek (so suitable to the occasion) was also the one

sole morsel of Greek that everybody in that assembly understood, the

effect, as may be supposed, was overwhelming, and wrapt the whole house

in what might be called a fiery explosion of laughter. Meantime, as

prizes in the matrimonial lottery, and prizes in all senses, both young

ladies were soon carried off. Miss Smith, whose expectations I never

happened to hear estimated, married a great West India proprietor; and

Miss Watson, who (according to the popular report) would succeed to six

thousand a year on her twenty-first birthday, married Lord Carbery.

Miss Watson inherited also from her father something which would not

generally be rated very highly, namely, a chancery lawsuit, with the

East India Company for defendant. However, if the company is a potent

antagonist, thus far it is an eligible one, that, in the event of

losing the suit, the honorable company is solvent; and such an event,

after some nine or ten years' delay, did really befall the company. The

question at issue respected some docks which Colonel Watson had built

for the company in some Indian port. And in the end this lawsuit,

though so many years doubtful in its issue, proved very valuable to

Miss Watson; I have heard (but cannot vouch for it) not less valuable

than that large part of her property which had been paid over without

demur upon her twenty-first birth-day. Both young ladies married

happily; but in marriage they found their separation, and in that

separation a shock to their daily comfort which was never replaced to

either. As to Miss Smith's husband, I did not know him; but Lord

Carbery was every way an estimable man; in some things worthy of

admiration; and his wife never ceased to esteem and admire him. But she

yearned for the society of her early friend; and this being placed out

of her reach by the accidents of life, she fell early into a sort of

disgust with her own advantages of wealth and station, which, promising

so much, were found able to perform nothing at all in this first and

last desire of her heart. A portrait of her friend hung in the drawing-

room; but Lady Carbery did not willingly answer the questions that were

sometimes prompted by its extraordinary loveliness. There are women to

whom a female friendship is indispensable, and cannot be supplied by

any companion of the other sex. That blessing, therefore, of her golden

youth, turned eventually into a curse for her after-life; for I believe

that, through one accident or another, they never met again after they

became married women. To me, as one of those who had known and loved

Miss Smith, Lady Carbery always turned the more sunny side of her

nature; but to the world generally she presented a chilling and

somewhat severe aspect--as to a vast illusion that rested upon pillars

of mockery and frauds. Honors, beauty of the first order, wealth, and

the power which follows wealth as its shadow--what could these do? what

_had_ they done? In proportion as they had settled heavily upon

herself, she had found them to entail a load of responsibility; and

those claims upon her she had labored to fulfil conscientiously; but

else they had only precipitated the rupture of such tics as had given

sweetness to her life.

From the first, therefore, I had been aware, on this visit to Laxton,

that Lady Carbery had changed, and was changing. She had become

religious; so much I knew from my sister's letters. And, in fact, this

change had been due to her intercourse with my mother. But, in reality,

her premature disgust with the world would, at any rate, have made her

such; and, had any mode of monastic life existed for Protestants, I

believe that she would before this have entered it, supposing Lord

Carbery to have consented. People generally would have stated the case

most erroneously; they would have said that she was sinking into gloom

under religious influences; whereas the very contrary was the truth;

namely, that, having sunk into gloomy discontent with life, and its

miserable performances as contrasted with its promises, she sought

relief and support to her wounded feelings from religion.

But the change brought with it a difficult trial to myself. She

recoiled, by natural temperament and by refinement of taste, from all

modes of religious enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is a large word, and in many

cases I could not go along with her; but _canting_ of all descriptions

was odious to both of us alike. To cultivate religious knowledge in an

intellectual way, she very well understood that she must study

divinity. And she relied upon me for assisting her. Not that she made

the mistake of ascribing to me any knowledge on that subject; but I

could learn; and, whatsoever I _had_ learned, she knew, by experience,

that I could make abundantly plain to her understanding. Wherever I did

_not_ understand, I was far too sincere to dissemble that fact. Where I

_did_ understand, I could enable _her_ to understand.

On the subject of theology, it was not easy indeed for anybody, man or

boy, to be more ignorant than myself. My studies in that field had been

none at all. Nor was this any subject for wonder, or (considering my

age) for blame. In reality, to make theology into a captivating study

for the young, it must be translated into controversial theology. And

in what way could such a polemic interest be evoked except through

political partisanship? But such partisanship connects itself naturally

with the irritability of sectarianism, and but little with the majestic

repose of a church such as the Romish or the Anglican, founded upon the

broad basis of national majorities, and sheltered from danger, or the

sense of danger, by state protection. Dissenters stand upon another

footing. The Dissenter from the national church, whether in England or

in France, is reminded by his own distinguishing religious opinions of

the historic struggles through which those opinions have travelled. The

doctrines which give to his own sect a peculiar denomination are also

those which record its honorable political conflicts; so that his own

connection, through his religious brotherhood, with the civil history

of his country, furnishes a standing motive of pride for some

acquaintance more or less with divinity; since it is by deviating

painfully, conscientiously, and at some periods dangerously, from the

established divinity, that his fathers have achieved their station in

the great drama of the national evolution.

But, whilst I was ignorant of theology, as a direct and separate branch

of study, the points are so many at which theology inosculates with

philosophy, and with endless casual and random suggestions of the self-

prompted reason, that inevitably from that same moment in which I began

to find a motive for directing my thoughts to this new subject, I

wanted not something to say that might have perplexed an antagonist, or

(in default of such a vicious associate) that might have amused a

friend, more especially a friend so predisposed to a high estimate of

myself as Lady Carbery. Sometimes I did more than amuse her; I startled

her, and I even startled myself, with distinctions that to this hour

strike me as profoundly just, and as undeniably novel. Two out of many

I will here repeat; and with the more confidence, that in these two I

can be sure of repeating the exact thoughts; whereas, in very many

other cases, it would not be so certain that they might not have been

insensibly modified by cross-lights or disturbing shadows from

intervening speculations.

1. Lady Carbery one day told me that she could not see any reasonable

ground for what is said of Christ, and elsewhere of John the Baptist,

that he opened his mission by preaching "repentance." Why "repentance"?

Why then, more than at any other time? Her reason for addressing this

remark to me was, that she fancied there might be some error in the

translation of the Greek expression. I replied that, in my opinion,

there was; and that I had myself always been irritated by the entire

irrelevance of the English word, and by something very like cant, on

which the whole burden of the passage is thrown. How was it any natural

preparation for a vast spiritual revolution, that men should first of

all acknowledge any special duty of repentance? The repentance, if any

movement of that nature could intelligibly be supposed called for,

should more naturally _follow_ this great revolution--which, as

yet, both in its principle and in its purpose, was altogether

mysterious--than herald it, or ground it. In my opinion, the Greek word

_metanoia_ concealed a most profound meaning--a meaning of prodigious

compass--which bore no allusion to any ideas whatever of repentance.

The _meta_ carried with it an emphatic expression of its original

idea--the idea of transfer, of translation, of transformation; or,

if we prefer a Grecian to a Roman apparelling, the idea of a

_metamorphosis_. And this idea, to what is it applied? Upon

what object is this idea of spiritual transfiguration made to

bear? Simply upon the _noetic_ or intellectual faculty--the

faculty of shaping and conceiving things under their true relations.

The holy herald of Christ, and Christ himself the finisher of prophecy,

made proclamation alike of the same mysterious summons, as a baptism or

rite of initiation; namely, _Metanoei_. Henceforth transfigure

your theory of moral truth; the old theory is laid aside as infinitely

insufficient; a new and spiritual revelation is established.

_Metanoeite_--contemplate moral truth as radiating from a new

centre; apprehend it under transfigured relations.

John the Baptist, like other earlier prophets, delivered a message

which, probably enough, he did not himself more than dimly understand,

and never in its full compass of meaning. Christ occupied another

station. Not only was he the original Interpreter, but he was himself

the Author--Founder, at once, and Finisher--of that great

transfiguration applied to ethics, which he and the Baptist alike

announced as forming the code for the new and revolutionary era now

opening its endless career. The human race was summoned to bring a

transfiguring sense and spirit of interpretation (_metanoia_) to a

transfigured ethics--an altered organ to an altered object. This is by

far the grandest miracle recorded in Scripture. No exhibition of blank

power--not the arresting of the earth's motion--not the calling back of

the dead unto life, can approach in grandeur to this miracle which we

all daily behold; namely, the inconceivable mystery of having written

and sculptured upon the tablets of man's heart a new code of moral

distinctions, all modifying--many reversing--the old ones. What would

have been thought of any prophet, if he should have promised to

transfigure the celestial mechanics; if he had said, I will create a

new pole-star, a new zodiac, and new laws of gravitation; briefly, I

will make new earth and new heavens? And yet a thousand times more

awful it was to undertake the writing of new laws upon the spiritual

conscience of man. _Metanoeite_ (was the cry from the wilderness),

wheel into a new centre your moral system; _geocentric_ has that

system been up to this hour--that is, having earth and the earthly for

its starting-point; henceforward make it _heliocentric_ (that is,

with the sun, or the heavenly for its principle of motion).

2. A second remark of mine was, perhaps, not more important, but it

was, on the whole, better calculated to startle the prevailing

preconceptions; for, as to the new system of morals introduced by

Christ, generally speaking, it is too dimly apprehended in its great

differential features to allow of its miraculous character being

adequately appreciated; one flagrant illustration of which is furnished

by our experience in Affghanistan, where some officers, wishing to

impress Akhbar Khan with the beauty of Christianity, very judiciously

repeated to him the Lord's Prayer and the Sermon on the Mount, by both

of which the Khan was profoundly affected, and often recurred to them;

but others, under the notion of conveying to him a more

_comprehensive_ view of the Scriptural ethics, repeated to him the

Ten Commandments; although, with the sole exception of the two first,

forbidding idolatry and Polytheism, there is no word in these which

could have displeased or surprised a Pagan, and therefore nothing

characteristic of Christianity. Meantime my second remark was

substantially this which follows: What is a religion? To Christians it

means, over and above a mode of worship, a dogmatic (that is, a

doctrinal) system; a great body of doctrinal truths, moral and

spiritual. But to the ancients (to the Greeks and Romans, for

instance), it meant nothing of the kind. A religion was simply a

_cultus_, a _thræskeia_, a mode of ritual worship, in which

there might be two differences, namely: 1. As to the particular deity

who furnished the motive to the worship; 2. As to the ceremonial, or

mode of conducting the worship. But in no case was there so much as a

pretence of communicating any religious truths, far less any moral

truths. The obstinate error rooted in modern minds is, that, doubtless,

the moral instruction was bad, as being heathen; but that still it was

as good as heathen opportunities allowed it to be. No mistake can be

greater. Moral instruction had no existence even in the plan or

intention of the religious service. The Pagan priest or flamen never

dreamed of any function like that of _teaching_ as in any way

connected with his office. He no more undertook to teach morals than to

teach geography or cookery. He taught nothing. What he undertook was,

simply to _do_: namely, to present authoritatively (that is,

authorized and supported by some civil community, Corinth, or Athens,

or Rome, which he represented) the homage and gratitude of that

community to the particular deity adored. As to morals or just opinions

upon the relations to man of the several divinities, all this was

resigned to the teaching of nature; and for any polemic functions the

teaching was resigned to the professional philosophers--academic,

peripatetic, stoic, etc. By religion it was utterly ignored.

The reader must do me the favor to fix his attention upon the real

question at issue. What I say--what then I said to Lady Carbery--is

this: that, by failing to notice as a _differential_ feature of

Christianity this involution of a doctrinal part, we elevate Paganism

to a dignity which it never dreamed of. Thus, for instance, in the

Eleusinian mysteries, what was the main business transacted? I, for my

part, in harmony with my universal theory on this subject,--namely,

that there could be no doctrinal truth delivered in a Pagan religion,--

have always maintained that the only end and purpose of the mysteries

was a more solemn and impressive worship of a particular goddess.

Warburton, on the other hand, would insist upon it that some great

affirmative doctrines, interesting to man, such as the immortality of

the soul, a futurity of retribution, &c., might be here commemorated.

And now, nearly a hundred years after Warburton, what is the opinion of

scholars upon this point? Two of the latest and profoundest I will

cite:--1. Lobeck, in his "Aglaophamus," expressly repels all such

notions; 2. Otfried Mueller, in the twelfth chapter, twenty-fourth

section, of his "Introduction to a System of Mythology," says: "I have

here gone on the assumption which I consider unavoidable, that there

was no regular instruction, no dogmatical communication, connected with

the Grecian worship in general. _There could be nothing_ of the

kind introduced into the public service from the way in which it was

conducted, for the priest _did not address the people at all_."

These opinions, which exactly tallied with my own assertion to Lady

Carbery, that all religion amongst the Pagans resolved itself into a

mere system of ceremonial worship, a pompous and elaborate

_cultus_, were not brought forward in Germany until about ten or

twelve years ago; whereas, my doctrine was expressly insisted on in

1800; that is, forty years earlier than any of these German writers had

turned their thoughts in that direction.

Had I, then, really all that originality on this subject which for many

years I secretly claimed? Substantially I had, because this great

distinction between the modern (or Christian) idea of "a religion" and

the ancient (or Pagan) idea of "a religion," I had nowhere openly seen

expressed in words. To myself exclusively I was indebted for it.

Nevertheless, it is undeniable that this conception must have been long

ago germinating in the world, and perhaps bearing fruit. This is past

all denial, since, about thirteen or fourteen years ago, I read in some

journal (a French journal, I think) this statement: namely, that some

oriental people--Turks, according to my present impression, but it

might have been Arabs--make an old traditional distinction (so said the

French journal) between what they call "religions of the book" and all

other religions. The religions of the book, according to them, are

three, all equally founded upon written and producible documents,

namely: first, the Judaic system, resting upon the Pentateuch, or more

truly, I should imagine, upon the Law and the Prophets; secondly, the

Christian system, resting upon the Old and New Testaments; thirdly, the

Mahometan system, resting confessedly upon the Koran. The very meaning,

therefore, of styling these systems, by way of honorable distinction,

_religions of the book_, is, not that accidentally they had

written vouchers for their creed, whereas the others had only oral

vouchers, but that they severally offer to men's acceptance a large

body of philosophic truth, such as requires and presupposes a book.

Whereas the various religions contradistinguished from these three--

namely, the whole body of Pagan idolatries--are mere forms of adoration

addressed to many different divinities; and the brief reason why they

are essentially opposed to religions of the book is, not that they

_have_ not, but logically that they _cannot_ have, books or

documents, inasmuch as they have no truths to deliver. They do not

profess to teach anything whatsoever. What they profess, as their

justifying distinction, is, to adore a certain deity, or a certain

collective Pantheon, according to certain old authorized forms--

authorized, that is to say, by fixed, ancient, and oftentimes local

traditions.

What was the great practical inference from the new distinction which I

offered? It was this: that Christianity (which included Judaism as its

own germinal principle, and Islamism as its own adaptation to a

barbarous and imperfect civilization) carried along with itself its own

authentication; since, whilst other religions introduced men simply to

ceremonies and usages, which could furnish no aliment or material for

their intellect, Christianity provided an eternal _palæstra_ or

place of exercise for the human understanding vitalized by human

affections: for every problem whatever, interesting to the human

intellect, provided only that it bears a _moral_ aspect, immediately

passes into the field of religious speculation. Religion had thus

become the great organ of human culture. Lady Carbery advanced

half-way to meet me in these new views, finding my credentials as a

theologian in my earnestness and my sincerity. She herself was

painfully and sorrowfully in earnest. She had come at this early age of

seven or eight and twenty, to the most bitter sense of hollowness, and

(in a philosophic sense) of _treachery_ as under-lying all things

that stood round her; and she sought escape, if escape there were,

through religion. Religion was to be sought in the Bible. But was the

Bible intelligible at the first glance? Far from it. Search the

Scriptures, was the cry in Protestant lands amongst all people, however

much at war with each other. But I often told her that this was a vain

pretence, without some knowledge of Greek. Or perhaps not always and

absolutely a pretence; because, undoubtedly, it is true that oftentimes

mere ignorant simplicity may, by bringing into direct collision

passages that are reciprocally illustrative, restrain an error or

illuminate a truth. And a reason, which I have since given in print (a

reason additional to Bentley's), for neglecting the thirty thousand

various readings collected by the diligence of the New Testament

collators, applied also to this case, namely: That, first, the

transcendent nature, and, secondly, the _recurrent_ nature, of

Scriptural truths cause them to surmount verbal disturbances. A

doctrine, for instance, which is sowed broadcast over the Scriptures,

and recurs, on an average, three times in every chapter, cannot be

affected by the casual inaccuracy of a phrase, since the phrase is

continually varied. And, therefore, I would not deny the possibility of

an effectual searching by very unlearned persons. Our authorized

translators of the Bible in the Shakspearian age were not in any

exquisite sense learned men; they were very able men, and in a better

sense able than if they had been philologically profound scholars,

which at that time, from the imperfect culture of philology, they could

not easily have been; men they were whom religious feeling guided

correctly in choosing their expressions, and with whom the state of the

language in some respects cooperated, by furnishing a diction more

homely, fervent, and pathetic, than would now be available. For their

apostolic functions English was the language most in demand. But in

polemic or controversial cases Greek is indispensable. And of this Lady

Carbery was sufficiently convinced by my own demur on the word

_metanoia_. If I were right, how profoundly wrong must those have

been whom my new explanation superseded. She resolved, therefore,

immediately on my suggesting it, that she would learn Greek; or, at

least, that limited form of Greek which was required for the New

Testament. In the language of Terence, dictum factum--no sooner said

than done. On the very next morning we all rode in to Stamford, our

nearest town for such a purpose, and astounded the bookseller's

apprentice by ordering four copies of the Clarendon Press Greek

Testament, three copies of Parkhurst's Greek and English Lexicon, and

three copies of some grammar, but what I have now forgotten. The books

were to come down by the mail-coach without delay. Consequently, we

were soon at work. Lady Massey and my sister, not being sustained by

the same interest as Lady Carbery, eventually relaxed in their

attention. But Lady Carbery was quite in earnest, and very soon became

expert in the original language of the New Testament.

I wished much that she should have gone on to the study of Herodotus.

And I described to her the situation of the vivacious and mercurial

Athenian, in the early period of Pericles, as repeating in its main

features, for the great advantage of that Grecian Froissart, the

situation of Adam during his earliest hours in Paradise, himself being

the describer to the affable archangel. The same genial climate there

was; the same luxuriation of nature in her early prime; the same

ignorance of his own origin in the tenant of this lovely scenery; and

the same eager desire to learn it. [Footnote: "About me round I saw

Hill, dale, and shady woods, and sunny plains,

And liquid lapse of murmuring streams; by these

Creatures that lived and moved, and walked or flew;

Birds on the branches warbling; all things smiled;

With fragrance and with joy my heart o'erflowed.

Myself I then perused, and limb by limb

Surveyed, and sometimes went, and sometimes ran

With supple joints, as lively vigor led;

_But who I was or where, or from what cause_,

Knew not."--_Paradise Lost_, Book viii.

The _who_, the _where_ (in any extended sense, that is, as

regarded the _external_ relations of his own country), and the

_from what cause_--all these were precisely what the Grecian did

_not_ know, and first learned from Herodotus.] The very truth, and

mere facts of history, reaching Herodotus through such a haze of remote

abstraction, and suffering a sort of refraction at each translation

from atmosphere to atmosphere, whilst continually the uninteresting

parts dropped away as the whole moved onwards, unavoidably assumed the

attractions of romance. And thus it has happened that the air of

marvellousness, which seems connected with the choice and preferences

of Herodotus, is in reality the natural gift of his position. Culling

from a field of many nations and many generations, reasonably he

preferred such narratives as, though possible enough, wore the coloring

of romance. Without any violation of the truth, the mere extent of his

field as to space and time gave him great advantages for the wild and

the marvellous. Meantime, this purpose of ours with regard to Herodotus

was defeated. Whilst we were making preparations for it, suddenly one

morning from his Limerick estate of Carass returned Lord Carbery. And,

by accident, his welcome was a rough one; for, happening to find Lady

Carbery in the breakfast-room, and naturally throwing his arm about her

neck to kiss her, "Ruffian," a monster of a Newfoundland dog,

singularly beautiful in his coloring, and almost as powerful as a

leopard, flew at him vindictively as at a stranger committing an

assault, and his mistress had great difficulty in calling him off. Lord

Carbery smiled a little at our Greek studies; and, in turn, made us

smile, who knew the original object of these studies, when he suggested

mildly that three or four books of the "Iliad" would have been as

easily mastered, and might have more fully rewarded our trouble. I

contented myself with replying (for I knew how little Lady Carbery

would have liked to plead the _religious_ motive to her husband),

that Parkhurst (and there was at that time no other Greek-

_English_ Lexicon) would not have been available for Homer;

neither, it is true, would he have been available for Herodotus. But,

considering the simplicity and uniformity of style in both these

authors, I had formed a plan (not very hard of execution) for

interleaving Parkhurst with such additional words as might have been

easily mustered from the special dictionaries (Græco-Latin) dedicated

separately to the service of the historian and of the poet. I do not

believe that more than fifteen hundred _extra_ words would have

been required; and these, entered at the rate of twenty per hour, would

have occupied only ten days, for seven and a half hours each. However,

from one cause or other, this plan was never brought to bear. The

preliminary labor upon the lexicon always enforced a delay; and any

delay, in such case, makes an opening for the irruption of a thousand

unforeseen hindrances, that finally cause the whole plan to droop

insensibly. The time came at last for leaving Laxton, and I did not see

Lady Carbery again for nearly an entire year.

In passing through the park-gates of Laxton, on my departure northward,

powerfully, and as if "with the might of waters," my mind turned round

to contemplate that strange enlargement of my experience which had

happened to me within the last three months. I had seen, and become

familiarly acquainted with, a young man, who had in a manner died to

every object around him, had died an intellectual death, and suddenly

had been called back to life and real happiness--had been, in effect,

raised from the dead--by the accident of meeting a congenial female

companion. But, secondly, that very lady from whose lips I first heard

this remarkable case of blight and restoration, had herself passed

through an equal though not a similar blight, and was now seeking

earnestly, though with what success I could never estimate, some

similar restoration to some new mode of hopeful existence, through

intercourse with religious philosophy. What vast revolutions (vast for

the individual) within how narrow a circle! What blindness to

approaching catastrophes, in the midst of what nearness to the light!

And for myself, whom accident had made the silent observer of these

changes, was it not likely enough that I also was rushing forward to

court and woo some frantic mode of evading an endurance that by

patience might have been borne, or by thoughtfulness might have been

disarmed? Misgivingly I went forwards, feeling forever that, through

clouds of thick darkness, I was continually nearing a danger, or was

myself perhaps wilfully provoking a trial, before which my

constitutional despondency would cause me to lie down without a

struggle.

II.

THE PRIORY.

To teach is to learn: according to an old experience, it is the very

best mode of learning--the surest, and the shortest. And hence,

perhaps, it may be, that in the middle ages by the monkish word

_scholaris_ was meant indifferently he that learned and he that

taught. Never in any equal number of months had my understanding so

much expanded as during this visit to Laxton. The incessant demand made

upon me by Lady Carbery for solutions of the many difficulties

besetting the study of divinity and the Greek Testament, or for such

approximations to solutions as my resources would furnish, forced me

into a preternatural tension of all the faculties applicable to that

purpose. Lady Carbery insisted upon calling me her "Admirable

Crichton;" and it was in vain that I demurred to this honorary title

upon two grounds: first, as being one towards which I had no natural

aptitudes or predisposing advantages; secondly (which made her stare),

as carrying with it no real or enviable distinction. The splendor

supposed to be connected with the attainments of Crichton I protested

against, as altogether imaginary. How far that person really had the

accomplishments ascribed to him, I waived as a question not worth

investigating. My objection commenced at an earlier point: real or not

real, the accomplishments were, as I insisted, vulgar and trivial.

Vulgar, that is, when put forward as exponents or adequate expressions

of intellectual grandeur. The whole rested on a misconception; the

limitary idea of knowledge was confounded with the infinite idea of

power. To have a quickness in copying or mimicking other men, and in

learning to do dexterously what _they_ did clumsily,--ostentatiously

to keep glittering before men's eyes a thaumaturgic versatility

such as that of a rope-dancer, or of an Indian juggler, in petty

accomplishments,--was a mode of the very vulgarest ambition: one

effort of productive power,--a little book, for instance, which should

impress or should agitate several successive generations of men, even

though far below the higher efforts of human creative art--as, for

example, the "De Imitatione Christi," or "The Pilgrim's Progress," or"

Robinson Crusoe," or "The Vicar of Wakefield,"--was worth any

conceivable amount of attainments when rated as an evidence of anything

that could justly denominate a man "admirable." One felicitous ballad

of forty lines might have enthroned Crichton as really admirable,

whilst the pretensions actually put forward on his behalf simply

install him as a cleverish or dexterous ape. However, as Lady Carbery

did not forego her purpose of causing me to shine under every angle, it

would have been ungrateful in me to refuse my cooperation with her

plans, however little they might wear a face of promise. Accordingly I

surrendered myself for two hours daily to the lessons in horsemanship

of a principal groom who ranked as a first-rate rough-rider; and I

gathered manifold experiences amongst the horses--so different from the

wild, hard-mouthed horses at Westport, that were often vicious, and

sometimes trained to vice. Here, though spirited, the horses were

pretty generally gentle, and all had been regularly broke. My education

was not entirely neglected even as regarded sportsmanship; that great

branch of philosophy being confided to one of the keepers, who was very

attentive to me, in deference to the interest in myself expressed by

his idolized mistress, but otherwise regarded me probably as an object

of mysterious curiosity rather than of sublunary hope.

Equally, in fact, as regarded my physics and my metaphysics,--in short,

upon all lines of advance that interested my ambition,--I was going

rapidly ahead. And, speaking seriously, in what regarded my

intellectual expansion, never before or since had I been so distinctly

made aware of it. No longer did it seem to move upon the hour-hand,

whose advance, though certain, is yet a pure matter of inference, but

upon the seconds'-hand, which _visibly_ comes on at a trotting

pace. Everything prospered, except my own present happiness, and the

possibility of any happiness for some years to come. About two months

after leaving Laxton, my fate in the worst shape I had anticipated was

solemnly and definitively settled. My guardians agreed that the most

prudent course, with a view to my pecuniary interests, was to place me

at the Manchester Grammar School; not with a view to further

improvement in my classical knowledge, though the head-master was a

sound scholar, but simply with a view to one of the school

_exhibitions_. [Footnote: "_Exhibitions_."--This is the technical

name in many cases, corresponding to the _bursæ_ or _bursaries_

of the continent; from which word bursæ is derived, I believe,

the German term _Bursch_,--that is, a bursarius, or student, who

lives at college upon the salary allowed by such a bursary.

Some years ago the editor of a Glasgow daily paper called upon

Oxford and Cambridge, with a patronizing flourish, to imitate some one

or more of the Scottish universities in founding such systems of

aliment for poor students otherwise excluded from academic advantages.

Evidently he was unaware that they had existed for centuries before the

state of civilization in Scotland had allowed any opening for the

foundation of colleges or academic life. Scottish bursaries, or

exhibitions (a term which Shakspeare uses, very near the close of the

first act in the "Two Gentlemen of Verona," as the technical expression

in England), were few, and not generally, I believe, exceeding ten

pounds a-year. The English were many, and of more ancient standing, and

running from forty pounds to one hundred pounds a-year. Such was the

simple difference between the two countries: otherwise they agreed

altogether.] Amongst the countless establishments, scattered all over

England by the noble munificence of English men and English women in

past generations, for connecting the provincial towns with the two

royal universities of the land, this Manchester school was one; in

addition to other great local advantages (namely, _inter alia_, a

fine old library and an ecclesiastical foundation, which in this

present generation has furnished the materials for a bishopric of

Manchester, with its deanery and chapter), this noble foundation

secured a number of exhibitions at Brasenose College, Oxford, to those

pupils of the school who should study at Manchester for three

consecutive years. The pecuniary amount of these exhibitions has since

then increased considerably through the accumulation of funds, which

the commercial character of that great city had caused to be neglected.

At that time, I believe each exhibition yielded about forty guineas a-

year, and was legally tenable for seven successive years. Now, to me

this would have offered a most seasonable advantage, had it been

resorted to some two years earlier. My small patrimonial inheritance

gave to me, as it did to each of my four brothers, exactly one hundred

and fifty pounds a-year: and to each of my sisters exactly one hundred

pounds a-year. The Manchester exhibition of forty guineas a-year would

have raised this income for seven years to a sum close upon two hundred

pounds a-year. But at present I was half-way on the road to the

completion of my sixteenth year. Commencing my period of pupilage from

that time, I should not have finished it until I had travelled half-way

through my nineteenth year. And the specific evil that already weighed

upon me with a sickening oppression was the premature expansion of my

mind; and, as a foremost consequence, intolerance of boyish society. I

ought to have entered upon my _triennium_ of school-boy servitude

at the age of thirteen. As things were,--a delay with which I had

nothing to do myself,--this and the native character of my mind had

thrown the whole arrangement awry. For the better half of the three

years I endured it patiently. But it had at length begun to eat more

corrosively into my peace of mind than ever I had anticipated. The

head-master was substantially superannuated for the duties of his

place. Not that intellectually he showed any symptoms of decay: but in

the spirits and physical energies requisite for his duties he did: not

so much age, as disease, it was that incapacitated him. In the course

of a long day, beginning at seven A. M. and stretching down to five P.

M., he succeeded in reaching the further end of his duties. But how?

Simply by consolidating pretty nearly into one continuous scene of

labor the entire ten hours. The full hour of relaxation which the

traditions of this ancient school and the by-laws had consecrated to

breakfast was narrowed into ten, or even seven minutes. The two hours'

interval, in like manner prescribed by the old usages from twelve to

two P. M., was pared down to forty minutes, or less. In this way he

walked conscientiously through the services of the day, fulfilling to

the letter every section the minutest of the traditional rubric. But he

purchased this consummation at the price of all comfort to himself:

and, having done _that_, he felt himself the more entitled to

neglect the comfort of others. The case was singular: he neither showed

any indulgence to himself more than to others (which, however, could do

nothing towards indemnifying others for the severe confinement which

his physical decay inflicted upon them--a point wholly forgotten by

him); nor, secondly, in thus tenaciously holding on to his place did he

(I am satisfied) govern himself by any mercenary thought or wish, but

simply by an austere sense of duty. He discharged his public functions

with constant fidelity, and with superfluity of learning; and felt,

perhaps not unreasonably, that possibly the same learning united with

the same zeal might not revolve as a matter of course in the event of

his resigning the place. I hide from myself no part of the honorable

motives which might (and probably _did_) exclusively govern him in

adhering to the place. But not by one atom the less did the grievous

results of his inability to grapple with his duties weigh upon all

within his sphere, and upon myself, by cutting up the time available

for exercise, most ruinously.

Precisely at the worst crisis of this intolerable darkness (for such,

without exaggeration, it was in its effects upon my spirits) arose, and

for five or six months steadily continued, a consolation of that nature

which hardly in dreams I could have anticipated. For even in dreams

would it have seemed reasonable, or natural, that Laxton, with its

entire society, should transfer itself to Manchester? Some mighty

caliph, or lamp-bearing Aladdin, might have worked such marvels: but

else who, or by what machinery? Nevertheless, without either caliph or

Aladdin, and by the most natural of mere human agencies, this change

was suddenly accomplished.

Mr. White, whom I have already had occasion to mention elsewhere, was

in those days the most eminent surgeon by much in the north of England.

He had by one whole generation run before the phrenologists and

craniologists,--having already measured innumerable skulls amongst the

omnigenous seafaring population of Liverpool, illustrating all the

races of men,--and was in society a most urbane and pleasant companion.

On my mother's suggestion, he had been summoned to Laxton, in the hope

that he might mitigate the torments of Mrs. Schreiber's malady. If I am

right in supposing that to have been cancer, I presume that he could

not have added much to the prescriptions of the local doctor. And yet,

on the other hand, it is a fact--so slowly did new views travel in

those days, when scientific journals were few, and roads were heavy--

that ten years later than this period I knew a case, namely, the case

of a butcher's wife in Somersetshire who had never enjoyed the benefit

of hemlock in relieving the pangs of a cancerous complaint, until an

accident brought Mr. Hey, son to the celebrated Hey of Leeds, into the

poor woman's neighborhood.

What might be the quality or the extent of that relief with which Mr.

White was able to crown the expectations of poor Mrs. Schreiber, I do

not know; but that the relief could not have been imaginary is certain,

for he was earnestly invited to repeat his visits, costly as

unavoidably they were. Mrs. Schreiber did not reside at Laxton.

Tenderly as she loved Lady Carbery, it did not seem consistent with her

dignity that she should take a station that might have been grossly

misinterpreted; and accordingly she bought or hired a miniature kind of

villa, called _Tixover_, distant about four miles from Laxton. A

residence in such a house, so sad and silent at this period of

affliction for its mistress, would have offered too cheerless a life to

Mr. White. He took up his abode, therefore, at Laxton during his

earliest visit; and this happened to coincide with that particular

visit of my own during which I was initiating Lady Carbery into the

mysteries of New Testament Greek. Already as an infant I had known Mr.

White; but now, when daily riding over to Tixover in company, and daily

meeting at breakfast and dinner, we became intimate. Greatly I profited

by this intimacy; and some part of my pleasure in the Laxton plan of

migration to Manchester was drawn from the prospect of renewing it.

Such a migration was suggested by Mr. White himself; and fortunately he

_could_ suggest it without even the appearance of any mercenary

views. His interest lay the other way. The large special retainer,

which it was felt but reasonable to pay him under circumstances so

peculiar, naturally disturbed Mr. White; whilst the benefits of visits

so discontinuous became more and more doubtful. He proposed it,

therefore, as a measure of prudence, that Mrs. Schreiber should take up

her abode in Manchester. This counsel was adopted; and the entire

Laxton party in one week struck their Northamptonshire tents, dived, as

it were, into momentary darkness, by a loitering journey of stages,

short and few, out of consideration for the invalid, and rose again in

the gloomy streets of Manchester.

Gloomy they were at that time--mud below, smoke above--for no torch of

improvement had yet explored the ancient habitations of this Lancashire

capital. Elsewhere I have expressed the inexhaustible admiration which

I cherish for the _moral_ qualities, the unrivalled energy and

perseverance, of that native Lancashire population, as yet not much

alloyed with Celtic adulteration. My feelings towards them are the same

as were eloquently and impressively avowed by the late eminent Dr.

Cooke Taylor, after an _official_ inquiry into their situation.

But in those days the Manchester people realized the aspiration of the

noble Scythian; not the place it was that glorified _them_, but

they that glorified the place. No great city (which technically it then

was not, but simply a town or large village) could present so repulsive

an exterior as the Manchester of that day. Lodgings of _any_ sort

could with difficulty be obtained, and at last only by breaking up the

party. The poor suffering lady, with her two friends, Lady Carbery and

my mother, hired one house, Lord and Lady Massey another, and two

others were occupied by attendants--all the servants, except one

lady's-maid, being every night separated by a quarter of a mile from

their mistresses. To me, however, all these discomforts were scarcely

apparent in the prodigious revolution for the better which was now

impressed upon the tenor of my daily life. I lived in the house of the

head-master; but every night I had leave to adjourn for four or five

hours to the drawing-room of Lady Carbery. Her anxiety about Mrs.

Schreiber would not allow of her going abroad into society, unless upon

the rarest occasions. And I, on my part, was too happy in her

conversation--so bold, so novel, and so earnest--voluntarily to have

missed any one hour of it.

Here, by the way, let me mention that on this occasion arose a case of

pretended "_tuft-hunting_," which I, who stood by a silent

observer, could not but feel to involve a malicious calumny. Naturally

it happened that coroneted carriages, superb horses, and numerous

servants, in a town so unostentatious and homely as the Manchester of

that day, drew the public gaze, and effectually advertised the visit of

the Laxton ladies. Respect for the motive which had prompted this visit

coöperated with admiration for the distinguished personal qualities of

Lady Carbery, to draw upon her from several leading families in the

town such little services and attentions as pass naturally, under a

spontaneous law of courtesy, between those who are at home and those

who suffer under the disadvantages of _strangership_. The Manchester

people, who made friendly advances to Lady Carbery, did so, I am

persuaded, with no ulterior objects whatsoever of pressing into

the circle of an aristocratic person; neither did Lady Carbery herself

interpret their attentions in any such ungenerous spirit, but accepted

them cordially, as those expressions of disinterested goodness which I

am persuaded that in reality they were. Amongst the families that were

thus attentive to her, in throwing open for her use various local

advantages of baths, libraries, picture-galleries, etc., were the wife

and daughters of Mr. White himself. Now, one of these daughters was

herself the wife of a baronet, Sir Richard Clayton, who had honorably

distinguished himself in literature by translating and _improving_

the work of Tenhove the Dutchman (or Belgian?) upon the house of the

_De' Medici_--a work which Mr. Roscoe considered "the most engaging

work that has, perhaps, ever appeared on a subject of literary

history." Introduced as Lady Clayton had been amongst the elite of our

aristocracy, it could not be supposed that she would be at all

solicitous about an introduction to the wife of an Irish nobleman,

simply _as_ such, and apart from her personal endowments. Those

endowments, it is true,--namely, the beauty and the talents of Lady

Carbery, made known in Manchester through Mr. White's report of them,

and combined with the knowledge of her generous devotion to her dying

friend, secluding her steadily from all society through a period of

very many months,--did, and reasonably might, interest many Manchester

people on her behalf. In all this there was nothing to be ashamed of;

and, judging from what personally I witnessed, this seems to have been

the true nature and extent of the "tuft-hunting;" and I have noticed it

at all simply because there is a habit almost national growing up

amongst us of imputing to each other some mode of unmanly prostration

before the aristocracy, but with as little foundation for the charge

generally, I believe, as I am satisfied there was in this particular

instance.

Mr. White possessed a museum--formed chiefly by himself, and

originally, perhaps, directed simply to professional objects, such as

would have little chance for engaging the attention of females. But

surgeons and speculative physicians, beyond all other classes of

intellectual men, cultivate the most enlarged and liberal curiosity; so

that Mr. White's museum furnished attractions to an unusually large

variety of tastes. I had myself already seen it; and it struck me that

Mr. White would be gratified if Lady Carbery would herself ask to see

it; which accordingly she did; and thus at once removed the painful

feeling that he might be extorting from her an expression of interest

in his collection which she did not really feel.

Amongst the objects which gave a scientific interest to the collection,

naturally I have forgotten one and all--first, midst, and last; for

this is one of the cases in which we all felicitate ourselves upon the

art and gift of forgetting; that art which the great Athenian

[Footnote: "The great Athenian"--Themistocles.] noticed as amongst the

_desiderata_ of human life--that gift which, if in some rare cases

it belongs only to the regal prerogatives of the grave, fortunately in

many thousands of other cases is accorded by the treachery of a human

brain. Heavens! what a curse it were, if every chaos, which is stamped

upon the mind by fairs such as that London fair of St. Bartholomew in

years long past, or by the records of battles and skirmishes through

the monotonous pages of history, or by the catalogues of libraries

stretching over a dozen measured miles, could not be erased, but

arrayed itself in endless files incapable of obliteration, as often as

the eyes of our human memory happened to throw back their gaze in that

direction! Heaven be praised, I have forgotten everything; all the

earthly trophies of skill or curious research; even the ærolithes, that

might possibly _not_ be earthly, but presents from some superior

planet. Nothing survives, except the _humanities_ of the collection;

and amongst these, two only I will molest the reader by noticing.

One of the two was a _mummy;_ the other was a _skeleton_. I,

that had previously seen the museum, warned Lady Carbery of both; but

much it mortified us that only the skeleton was shown. Perhaps

the mummy was too closely connected with the personal history

of Mr. White for exhibition to strangers; it was that of a lady

who had been attended medically for some years by Mr. White, and had

owed much alleviation of her sufferings to his inventive skill. She

had, therefore, felt herself called upon to memorialize her gratitude

by a very large bequest--not less (I have heard) than twenty-five

thousand pounds; but with this condition annexed to the gift--that she

should be embalmed as perfectly as the resources in that art of London

and Paris could accomplish, and that once a year Mr. White, accompanied

by two witnesses of credit, should withdraw the veil from her face. The

lady was placed in a common English clock-case, having the usual glass

face; but a veil of white velvet obscured from all profane eyes the

silent features behind. The clock I had myself seen, when a child, and

had gazed upon it with inexpressible awe. But, naturally, on my report

of the case, the whole of our party were devoured by a curiosity to see

the departed fair one. Had Mr. White, indeed, furnished us with the key

of the museum, leaving us to our own discretion, but restricting us

only (like a cruel Bluebeard) from looking into any ante-room, great is

my fear that the perfidious question would have arisen amongst us--what

o'clock it was? and all possible ante-rooms would have given way to the

just fury of our passions. I submitted to Lady Carbery, as a liberty

which might be excused by the torrid extremity of our thirst after

knowledge, that she (as our leader) should throw out some angling

question moving in the line of our desires; upon which hint Mr. White,

if he had any touch of indulgence to human infirmity--unless Mount

Caucasus were his mother, and a she-wolf his nurse--would surely

relent, and act as his conscience must suggest. But Lady Carbery

reminded me of the three Calendars in the "Arabian Nights," and argued

that, as the ladies of Bagdad were justified in calling upon a body of

porters to kick those gentlemen into the street, being people who had

abused the indulgences of hospitality, much more might Mr. White do so

with us; for the Calendars were the children of kings (Shahzades),

which we were not; and had found their curiosity far more furiously

irritated; in fact, Zobeide had no right to trifle with any man's

curiosity in that ferocious extent; and a counter right arose, as any

chancery of human nature would have ruled, to demand a solution of what

had been so maliciously arranged towards an anguish of insupportable

temptation. Thus, however, it happened that the mummy, who left such

valuable legacies, and founded such bilious fevers of curiosity, was

not seen by us; nor even the miserable clock-case.

The mummy, therefore, was not seen; but the skeleton was. Who was he?

It is not every day that one makes the acquaintance of a skeleton; and

with regard to such a thing--thing, shall one say, or person?--there is

a favorable presumption from beforehand; which is this: As he is of no

use, neither profitable nor ornamental to any person whatever,

absolutely _de trop_ in good society, what but distinguished merit

of some kind or other could induce any man to interfere with that

gravitating tendency that by an eternal _nisus_ is pulling him

below ground? Lodgings are dear in England. True it is that, according

to the vile usage on the continent, one room serves a skeleton for bed-

room and sitting-room; neither is his expense heavy, as regards wax-

lights, fire, or "bif-steck." But still, even a skeleton is chargeable;

and, if any dispute should arise about his maintenance, the parish will

do nothing. Mr. White's skeleton, therefore, being costly, was

presumably meritorious, before we had seen him or heard a word in his

behalf. It was, in fact, the skeleton of an eminent robber, or perhaps

of a murderer. But I, for my part, reserved a faint right of suspense.

And as to the profession of robber in those days exercised on the roads

of England, it was a liberal profession, which required more

accomplishments than either the bar or the pulpit: from the beginning

it presumed a most bountiful endowment of heroic qualifications--

strength, health, agility, and exquisite horsemanship, intrepidity of

the first order, presence of mind, courtesy, and a general

ambidexterity of powers for facing all accidents, and for turning to a

good account all unlooked-for contingencies. The finest men in England,

physically speaking, throughout the eighteenth century, the very

noblest specimens of man considered as an animal, were beyond a doubt

the mounted robbers who cultivated their profession on the great

leading roads, namely, on the road from London to York (technically

known as "the great north road"); on the road west to Bath, and thence

to Exeter and Plymouth; north-westwards from London to Oxford, and

thence to Chester; eastwards to Tunbridge; southwards by east to Dover;

then inclining westwards to Portsmouth; more so still, through

Salisbury to Dorsetshire and Wilts. These great roads were farmed out

as so many Roman provinces amongst pro-consuls. Yes, but with a

difference, you will say, in respect of moral principles. Certainly

with a difference; for the English highwayman had a sort of conscience

for gala-days, which could not often be said of the Roman governor or

procurator. At this moment we see that the opening for the forger of

bank-notes is brilliant; but practically it languishes, as being too

brilliant; it demands an array of talent for engraving, etc., which,

wherever it exists, is sufficient to carry a man forward upon

principles reputed honorable. Why, then, should _he_ court danger

and disreputability? But in that century the special talents which led

to distinction upon the high road had oftentimes no career open to them

elsewhere. The mounted robber on the highways of England, in an age

when all gentlemen travelled with fire-arms, lived in an element of

danger and adventurous gallantry; which, even from those who could

least allow him any portion of their esteem, extorted sometimes a good

deal of their unwilling admiration. By the necessities of the case, he

brought into his perilous profession some brilliant qualities--

intrepidity, address, promptitude of decision; and, if to these he

added courtesy, and a spirit (native or adopted) of forbearing

generosity, he seemed almost a man that merited public encouragement;

since very plausibly it might be argued that his profession was sure to

exist; that, if he were removed, a successor would inevitably arise,

and that successor might or might _not_ carry the same liberal and

humanizing temper into his practice. The man whose skeleton was now

before us had ranked amongst the most chivalrous of his order, and was

regarded by some people as vindicating the national honor in a point

where not very long before it had suffered a transient eclipse. In the

preceding generation, it had been felt as throwing a shade of disgrace

over the public honor, that the championship of England upon the high

road fell for a time into French hands; upon French prowess rested the

burden of English honor, or, in Gallic phrase, of English _glory_.

Claude Duval, a French man of undeniable courage, handsome, and noted

for his chivalrous devotion to women, had been honored, on his

condemnation to the gallows, by the tears of many ladies who attended

his trial, and by their sympathizing visits during his imprisonment.

But the robber represented by the skeleton in Mr. White's museum (whom

let us call X, since his true name has perished) added to the same

heroic qualities a person far more superb. Still it was a dreadful

drawback from his pretensions, if he had really practised as a

murderer. Upon what ground did that suspicion arise? In candor (for

candor is due even to a skeleton) it ought to be mentioned that the

charge, if it amounted to so much, arose with a lady from some part of

Cheshire--the district of Knutsford, I believe;--but, wherever it was,

in the same district, during the latter part of his career, had resided

our X. At first he was not suspected even as a robber--as yet not so

much as suspected of being suspicious; in a simple rustic neighborhood,

amongst good-natured peasants, for a long time he was regarded with

simple curiosity, rather than suspicion; and even the curiosity pointed

to his horse more than to himself. The robber had made himself popular

amongst the kind-hearted rustics by his general courtesy. Courtesy and

the spirit of neighborliness go a great way amongst country people; and

the worst construction of the case was, that he might be an embarrassed

gentleman from Manchester or Liverpool, hiding himself from his

creditors, who are notoriously a very immoral class of people. At

length, however, a violent suspicion broke loose against him; for it

was ascertained that on certain nights, when, perhaps, he had

_extra_ motives for concealing the fact of having been abroad, he

drew woollen stockings over his horse's feet, with the purpose of

deadening the sound in riding up a brick-paved entry, common to his own

stable and that of a respectable neighbor. Thus far there was a

reasonable foundation laid for suspicion; but suspicion of what?

Because a man attends to the darning of his horse's stockings, why must

he be meditating murder? The fact is--and known from the very first to

a select party of amateurs--that X, our superb-looking skeleton, did,

about three o'clock on a rainy Wednesday morning, in the dead of

winter, ride silently out of Knutsford; and about forty-eight hours

afterwards, on a rainy Friday, silently and softly did that same superb

blood-horse, carrying that same blood-man, namely, our friend the

superb skeleton, pace up the quiet brick entry, in a neat pair of

socks, on his return.

During that interval of forty-eight hours, an atrocious murder was

committed in the ancient city of Bristol. By whom? That question is to

this day unanswered. The scene of it was a house on the west side of

the College Green, which is in fact that same quadrangle planted with

trees, and having on its southern side the Bristol Cathedral, up and

down which, early in the reign of George III., Chatterton walked in

jubilant spirits with fair young women of Bristol; up and down which,

some thirty years later, Robert Southey and S. T. C. walked with young

Bristol belles from a later generation. The subjects of the murder were

an elderly lady bearing some such name as Rusborough, and her female

servant. Mystery there was none as to the motive of the murder--

manifestly it was a hoard of money that had attracted the assassin; but

there was great perplexity as to the agent or agents concerned in the

atrocious act, and as to the mode by which an entrance, under the known

precautions of the lady, could have been effected. Because a thorough-

bred horse could easily have accomplished the distance to and fro (say

three hundred miles) within the forty-eight hours, and because the two

extreme dates of this forty-eight hours' absence tallied with the

requisitions of the Bristol tragedy, it did not follow that X must have

had a hand in it. And yet, had these coincidences _then_ been

observed, they would certainly--now that strong suspicions had been

directed to the man from the extraordinary character of his nocturnal

precautions--not have passed without investigation. But the remoteness

of Bristol, and the rarity of newspapers in those days, caused these

indications to pass unnoticed. Bristol knew of no such Knutsford

highwayman--Knutsford knew of no such Bristol murder. It is singular

enough that these earlier grounds of suspicion against X were not

viewed as such by anybody, until they came to be combined with another

and final ground. Then the presumptions seemed conclusive. But, by that

time, X himself had been executed for a robbery; had been manufactured

into a skeleton by the famous surgeon, Cruickshank, assisted by Mr.

White and other pupils. All interest in the case had subsided in

Knutsford, that could now have cleared up the case satisfactorily; and

thus it happened that to this day the riddle, which was read pretty

decisively in a northern county, still remains a riddle in the south.

When I saw the College Green house in 1809-10, it was apparently empty,

and, as I was told, had always been empty since the murder: forty years

had not cicatrized the bloody remembrance; and, to this day, perhaps,

it remains amongst the gloomy traditions of Bristol.

But whether the Bristol house has or has not shaken off that odor of

blood which offended the nostrils of tenants, it is, I believe, certain

that the city annals have not shaken off the mystery: which yet to

certain people in Knutsford, as I have said, and to us the spectators

of the skeleton, immediately upon hearing one damning fact from the

lips of Mr. White, seemed to melt away and evaporate as convincingly as

if we had heard the explanation issuing in the terms of a confession

from the mouth of the skeleton itself. What, then, _was_ the fact?

With pain, and reluctantly, we felt its force, as we looked at the

royal skeleton, and reflected on the many evidences which he had given

of courage, and perhaps of other noble qualities. The ugly fact was

this: In a few weeks after the College Green tragedy, Knutsford, and

the whole neighborhood as far as Warrington (the half-way town between

Liverpool and Manchester), were deluged with gold and silver coins,

moidores, and dollars, from the Spanish mint of Mexico, etc. These,

during the frequent scarcities of English silver currency, were

notoriously current in England. Now, it is an unhappy fact, and

subsequently became known to the Bristol and London police, that a

considerable part of poor Mrs. Rusborough's treasure lay in such coins,

gold and silver, from the Spanish colonial mints.

Lady Carbery at this period made an effort to teach me Hebrew, by way

of repaying in _kind_ my pains in teaching Greek to _her_. Where,

and upon what motive, she had herself begun to learn Hebrew, I

forget: but in Manchester she had resumed this study with energy on a

casual impulse derived from a certain Dr. Bailey, a clergyman of this

city, who had published a Hebrew Grammar. The doctor was the most

unworldly and guileless of men. Amongst his orthodox brethren he was

reputed a "Methodist;" and not without reason; for some of his Low-

Church views he pushed into practical extravagances that looked like

fanaticism, or even like insanity. Lady Carbery wished naturally to

testify her gratitude for his services by various splendid presents:

but nothing would the good doctor accept, unless it assumed a shape

that might be available for the service of the paupers amongst his

congregation. The Hebrew studies, however, notwithstanding the personal

assistance which we drew from the kindness of Dr. Bailey, languished.

For this there were several reasons; but it was enough that the

systematic vagueness in the pronunciation of this, as of the other

Oriental languages, disgusted both of us. A word which could not be

pronounced with any certainty, was not in a true sense possessed. Let

it be understood, however, that it was not the correct and original

pronunciation that we cared for--_that_ has perished probably

beyond recall, even in the case of Greek, in spite of the Asiatic and

the Insular Greeks--what we demanded in vain was any pronunciation

whatever that should be articulate, apprehensible, and intercommunicable,

such as might differentiate the words: whereas a system of mere vowels

too inadequately strengthened by consonants, seemed to leave all words

pretty nearly alike. One day, in a pause of languor amongst these arid

Hebrew studies, I read to her, with a beating heart, "The Ancient

Mariner." It had been first published in 1798; and, about this time

(1801), was re-published in the first _two_-volume edition of "The

Lyrical Ballads." Well I knew Lady Carbery's constitutional inaptitude

for poetry; and not for the world would I have sought sympathy from her

or from anybody else upon that part of the L. B. which belonged to

Wordsworth. But I fancied that the wildness of this tale, and the triple

majesties of Solitude, of Mist, and of the Ancient Unknown Sea, might

have won her into relenting; and, in fact, she listened with gravity

and deep attention. But, on reviewing afterwards in conversation such

passages as she happened to remember, she laughed at the finest parts,

and shocked me by calling the mariner himself "an old quiz;" protesting

that the latter part of his homily to the wedding guest clearly pointed

him out as the very man meant by Providence for a stipendiary curate to

the good Dr. Bailey in his over-crowded church. [Footnote: St. James',

according to my present recollection.] With an albatross perched on his

shoulder, and who might be introduced to the congregation as the immediate

organ of his conversion, and supported by the droning of a bassoon, she

represented the mariner lecturing to advantage in English; the doctor

overhead in the pulpit enforcing it in Hebrew. Angry I was, though

forced to laugh. But of what use is anger or argument in a duel with

female criticism? Our ponderous masculine wits are no match for the

mercurial fancy of women. Once, however, I had a triumph: to my great

surprise, one day, she suddenly repeated by heart, to Dr. Bailey, the

beautiful passage--

"It ceased, yet still the sails made on," &c.

asking what he thought of _that?_ As it happened, the simple,

childlike doctor had more sensibility than herself; for, though he had

never in his whole homely life read more of poetry than he had drunk of

Tokay or Constantia,--in fact, had scarcely heard tell of any poetry

but Watts' Hymns,--he seemed petrified: and at last, with a deep sigh,

as if recovering from the spasms of a new birth, said, "I never heard

anything so beautiful in my whole life."

During the long stay of the Laxton party in Manchester, occurred a

Christmas; and at Christmas--that is, at the approach of this great

Christian festival, so properly substituted in England for the Pagan

festival of January and the New Year--there was, according to ancient

usage, on the breaking up for the holidays, at the Grammar School, a

solemn celebration of the season by public speeches. Among the six

speakers, I, of course (as one of the three boys who composed the head

class), held a distinguished place; and it followed, also, as a matter

of course, that all my friends congregated on this occasion to do me

honor. What I had to recite was a copy of Latin verses (Alcaics) on the

recent conquest of Malta. _Melite Britannis Subacta_--this was the

title of my worshipful nonsense. The whole strength of the Laxton party

had mustered on this occasion. Lady Carbery made a point of bringing in

her party every creature whom she could influence. And, probably, there

were in that crowded audience many old Manchester friends of my father,

loving his memory, and thinking to honor it by kindness to his son.

Furious, at any rate, was the applause which greeted me: furious was my

own disgust. Frantic were the clamors as I concluded my nonsense.

Frantic was my inner sense of shame at the childish exhibition to

which, unavoidably, I was making myself a party. Lady Carbery had, at

first, directed towards me occasional glances, expressing a comic

sympathy with the thoughts which she supposed to be occupying my mind.

But these glances ceased; and I was recalled by the gloomy sadness in

her altered countenance to some sense of my own extravagant and

disproportionate frenzy on this occasion: from the indulgent kindness

with which she honored me, her countenance on this occasion became a

mirror to my own. At night she assured me, when talking over the case,

that she had never witnessed an expression of such settled misery, and

also (so she fancied) of misanthropy, as that which darkened my

countenance in those moments of apparent public triumph, no matter how

trivial the occasion, and amidst an uproar of friendly felicitation. I

look back to that state of mind as almost a criminal reproach to

myself, if it were not for the facts of the case. But, in excuse for

myself, this fact, above all others, ought to be mentioned--that, over

and above the killing oppression to my too sensitive system of the

monotonous school tasks, and the ruinous want of exercise, I had fallen

under medical advice the most misleading that it is possible to

imagine. The physician and the surgeon of my family were men too

eminent, it seemed to me, and, consequently, with time too notoriously

bearing a high pecuniary value, for any school-boy to detain them with

complaints. Under these circumstances, I threw myself for aid, in a

case so simple that any clever boy in a druggist's shop would have

known how to treat it, upon the advice of an old, old apothecary, who

had full authority from my guardians to run up a most furious account

against me for medicine. This being the regular mode of payment,

inevitably, and unconsciously, he was biased to a mode of treatment;

namely, by drastic medicines varied without end, which fearfully

exasperated the complaint. This complaint, as I now know, was the

simplest possible derangement of the liver, a torpor in its action that

might have been put to rights in three days. In fact, one week's

pedestrian travelling amongst the Caernarvonshire mountains effected a

revolution in my health such as left me nothing to complain of.

An odd thing happened by the merest accident. I, when my Alcaics had

run down their foolish larum, instead of resuming my official place as

one of the trinity who composed the head class, took a seat by the side

of Lady Carbery. On the other side of her was seated a stranger: and

this stranger, whom mere chance had thrown next to her, was Lord

Belgrave, her old and at one time (as some people fancied) favored

suitor. In this there was nothing at all extraordinary. Lord Grey de

Wilton, an old _alumnus_ of this Manchester Grammar School, and an

_alumnus_ during the early reign of this same _Archididascalus_,

made a point of showing honor to his ancient tutor, especially now when

reputed to be decaying; and with the same view he brought Lord

Belgrave, who had become his son-in-law after his rejection

by Lady Carbery. The whole was a very natural accident. But

Lady Carbery was not sufficiently bronzed by worldly habits to treat

this accident with _nonchalance_. She did not _to the public

eye_ betray any embarrassment; but afterwards she told me that no

incident could have been more distressing to her.

Some months after this, the Laxton party quitted Manchester, having no

further motive for staying. Mrs. Schreiber was now confessedly dying:

medical skill could do no more for her; and this being so, there was no

reason why she should continue to exchange her own quiet little

Rutlandshire cottage for the discomforts of smoky lodgings. Lady

Carbery retired like some golden pageant amongst the clouds; thick

darkness succeeded; the ancient torpor reestablished itself; and my

health grew distressingly worse. Then it was, after dreadful self-

conflicts, that I took the unhappy resolution of which the results are

recorded in the "Opium Confessions." At this point, the reader must

understand, comes in that chapter of my life; and for all which

concerns that delirious period I refer him to those "Confessions." Some

anxiety I had, on leaving Manchester, lest my mother should suffer too

much from this rash step; and on that impulse I altered the direction

of my wanderings; not going (as I had originally planned) to the

English Lakes, but making first of all for St. John's Priory, Chester,

at that time my mother's residence. There I found my maternal uncle,

Captain Penson, of the Bengal establishment, just recently come home on

a two years' leave of absence; and there I had an interview with my

mother. By a temporary arrangement I received a weekly allowance, which

would have enabled me to live in _any_ district of Wales, either

North or South; for Wales, both North and South, is (or at any rate

_was_) a land of exemplary cheapness. For instance, at Talyllyn,

in Merionethshire, or anywhere off the line of tourists, I and a

lieutenant in our English navy paid sixpence uniformly for a handsome

dinner; sixpence, I mean, apiece. But two months later came a golden

blockhead, who instructed the people that it was "sinful" to charge

less than three shillings. In Wales, meantime, I suffered grievously

from want of books; and fancying, in my profound ignorance of the

world, that I could borrow money upon my own expectations, or, at

least, that I could do so with the joint security of Lord Westport (now

Earl of Altamont, upon his father's elevation to the Marquisate of

Sligo), or (failing _that_) with the security of his amiable and

friendly cousin, the Earl of Desart, I had the unpardonable folly to

quit the deep tranquillities of North Wales for the uproars, and

perils, and the certain miseries, of London. I had borrowed ten guineas

from Lady Carbery; and at that time, when my purpose was known to

nobody, I might have borrowed any sum I pleased. But I could never

again avail myself of that resource, because I must have given some

address, in order to insure the receipt of Lady Carbery's answer; and

in that case, so sternly conscientious was she, that, under the notion

of saving me from ruin, my address would have been immediately

communicated to my guardians, and by them would have been confided to

the unrivalled detective talents, in those days, of Townsend, or some

other Bow-street officer.

* * * * *

That episode, or impassioned parenthesis in my life, which is

comprehended in "The Confessions of the Opium-Eater," had finished;

suppose it over and gone, and once more, after the storms of London,

suppose me resting from my dreadful remembrances, in the deep monastic

tranquillity, of St. John's Priory; and just then, by accident, with no

associates except my mother and my uncle. What was the Priory like? Was

it young or old, handsome or plain? What was my uncle the captain like?

Young or old, handsome or plain? Wait a little, my reader; give me

time, and I will tell you all. My uncle's leave of absence from India

had not expired; in fact, it had nine or ten months still to run; and

this accident furnished us all with an opportunity of witnessing his

preternatural activity. One morning early in April of the year 1803, a

gentleman called at the Priory, and mentioned, as the news of the

morning brought down by the London mail, that there had been a very hot

and very sudden "press" along the Thames, and simultaneously at the

outports. Indeed, before this the spiteful tone of Sebastiani's Report,

together with the arrogant comment in the _Moniteur_ on the

supposed inability of Great Britain to contend "single-handed" with

France; and, finally, the public brutality to our ambassador, had

prepared us all for war. But, then, might not all this blow over? No;

apart from any choice or preference of war on the part of Napoleon, his

very existence depended upon war. He lived by and through the army.

Without a succession of wars and martial glories in reserve for the

army, what interest had _they_ in Napoleon? This was obscurely

acknowledged by everybody. More or less consciously perceived, a

feeling deep and strong ran through the nation that it was vain to seek

expedients or delays; a mighty strife had to be fought out, which could

not be evaded. Thence it was that the volunteer system was so rapidly

and earnestly developed. As a first stage in the process of national

enthusiasm, this was invaluable. The first impulse drew out the

material.

Next, as might have been foreseen, came an experience which taught us

seasonably that these redundant materials, crude and miscellaneous,

required a winnowing and sifting, which very soon we had; and the

result was, an incomparable militia. Chester shone conspicuously in

this noble competition. But here, as elsewhere, at first there was no

cavalry. Upon that arose a knot of gentlemen, chiefly those who hunted,

and in a very few hours laid the foundation of a small cavalry force.

Three troops were raised in the _city_ of Chester, one of the

three being given to my uncle. The whole were under the command of

Colonel Dod, who had a landed estate in the county, and who (like my

uncle) had been in India. But Colonel Dod and the captains of the two

other troops gave comparatively little aid. The whole working

activities of the system rested with my uncle. Then first I saw energy:

then first I knew what it meant. All the officers of the three troops

exchanged dinner-parties with each other; and consequently they dined

at the Priory often enough to make us acquainted with their

characteristic qualities. That period had not yet passed away, though

it was already passing, when gentlemen did not willingly leave the

dinner-table in a state of absolute sobriety. Colonel Dod and my uncle

had learned in Bengal, under the coërcion of the climate, habits of

temperance. But the others (though few, perhaps, might be systematic

drinkers) were careless in this respect, and drank under social

excitement quite enough to lay bare the ruling tendencies of their

several characters. Being English, naturally the majority were

energetic, and beyond all things despised dreaming _fainéans_

(such, for instance, as we find the politicians, or even the

conspirators, of Italy, Spain, and Germany, whose whole power of action

evaporates in talking, and histrionically gesticulating). Yet still the

best of them seemed inert by comparison with my uncle, and to regard

_his_ standard of action and exertion as trespassing to a needless

degree upon ordinary human comfort.

Commonplace, meantime, my uncle was in the character of his intellect;

there he fell a thousand leagues below my mother, to whom he looked up

with affectionate astonishment. But, as a man of action, he ran so far

ahead of men generally, that he ceased to impress one as commonplace.

He, if any man ever did, realized the Roman poet's description of being

_natus rebus agendis_--sent into this world not for talking, but

for doing; not for counsel, but for execution. On that field he was a

portentous man, a monster; and, viewing him as such, I am disposed to

concede a few words to what modern slang denominates his "antecedents."

Two brothers and one sister (namely, my mother) composed the household

choir of children gathering round the hearth of my maternal grand-

parents, whose name was Penson. My grandfather at one time held an

office under the king; how named, I once heard, but have forgotten;

only this I remember, that it was an office which conferred the title

of _Esquire;_ so that upon each and all of his several coffins,

lead, oak, mahogany, he was entitled to proclaim himself an

_Armiger;_ which, observe, is the newest, oldest, most classic

mode of saying that one is privileged to bear arms in a sense

intelligible only to the Herald's College. This _Armiger_, this

undeniable Squire, was doubly distinguished: first, by his iron

constitution and impregnable health; which were of such quality, and

like the sword of Michael, the warrior-angel ("Paradise Lost," B. vi.),

had "from the armory of God been given him tempered so," that no

insurance office, trafficking in life-annuities, would have ventured to

look him in the face. People thought him good, like a cat, for eight or

nine generations; nor did any man perceive at what avenue death could

find, or disease could force, a practicable breach; and yet, such

anchorage have all human hopes, in the very midst of these windy

anticipations, this same granite grandpapa of mine, not yet very far

ahead of sixty, being in fact three-score years and none, suddenly

struck his flag, and found himself, in his privileged character of

_Armiger_, needing those door (coffin-door) plates, which all

reasonable people had supposed to be reserved for the manufacturing

hands of some remote century. "_Armiger_, pack up your traps"--

"Collige sarcinas"--"Squire, you're wanted:" these dreadful citations

were inevitable; come they must; but surely, as everybody thought, not

in the eighteenth, or, perhaps, even the nineteenth century. _Diis

aliter visum._ My grandfather, built for an _Æonian_ duration,

did not come within hail of myself; whilst his gentle partner, my

grandmother, who made no show of extra longevity, lived down into my

period, and had the benefit of my acquaintance through half a dozen

years. If she turned this piece of good fortune to no great practical

account, that (you know) was no fault of mine. Doubtless, I was ready

with my advice, freely and gratuitously, if she had condescended to ask

for it. Returning to my grandfather: the other distinguishing

endowment, by which he was so favorably known and remembered amongst

his friends, was the magical versatility of his talents, and his power

of self-accommodation to all humors, tempers, and ages.

"Omnis Aristippum decuit color, et status, et res."

And in allusion to this line from Horace it was, that amongst his

literary friends he was known familiarly by the name of Aristippus. His

sons, Edward and Thomas, resembled him, by all accounts, in nothing;

neither physically, nor in moral versatility. These two sons of the

Squire, Edward and Thomas, through some traditional prejudice in the

family, had always directed their views to the military profession. In

such a case, the king's army is naturally that to which a young man's

expectations turn. But to wait, and after all by possibility to wait in

vain, did not suit my fiery grandfather. The interest which he could

put into motion was considerable; but it was more applicable to the

service of the East India Company than to any branch of the home

service. This interest was so exerted that in one day he obtained a

lieutenantcy in the Company's service for each of his sons. About 1780

or 1781, both young men, aged severally sixteen and seventeen years,

went out to join their regiments, both regiments being on the Bengal

establishment. Very different were their fates; yet their

qualifications ought to have been the same, or differing only as

sixteen differs from seventeen; and also as sixteen overflowing with

levity differs from seventeen prematurely thoughtful. Edward Penson was

early noticed for his high principle, for his benignity, and for a

thoughtfulness somewhat sorrowful, that seemed to have caught in

childhood some fugitive glimpse of his own too brief career. At

noonday, in some part of Bengal, he went out of doors bareheaded, and

died in a few hours.

In 1800-1801, my mother had become dissatisfied with Bath as a

residence; and, being free from all ties connecting her with any one

county of England rather than another, she resolved to traverse the

most attractive parts of the island, and, upon personal inspection, to

select a home; not a ready-built home, but the ground on which she

might herself create one; for it happened that amongst the few

infirmities besetting my mother's habits and constitution of mind, was

the costly one of seeking her chief intellectual excitement in

architectural creations. She individually might be said to have built

Greenhay; since to _her_ views of domestic elegance and propriety

my father had resigned _almost_ everything. This was her _coup-

d'essai_; secondly, she built the complement to the Priory in

Cheshire, which cost about one thousand pounds; thirdly, Westhay, in

Somersetshire, about twelve miles from Bristol, which, including the

land attached to the house, cost twelve thousand five hundred pounds,

not including subsequent additions; but this was built at the cost of

my uncle; finally, Weston Lea, close to Bath, which being designed

simply for herself in old age, with a moderate establishment of four

servants (and some reasonable provision of accommodations for a few

visitors), cost originally, I believe, not more than one thousand

pounds--excluding, however, the cost of all after alterations.

It may serve to show how inevitably an amateur architect, without

professional aid and counsel, will be defrauded, that the first of

these houses, which cost six thousand pounds, sold for no more than

twenty-five hundred pounds, and the third for no more than five

thousand pounds. The person who superintended the workmen, and had the

whole practical management of one amongst these four houses, was a

common builder, without capital or education, and the greatest knave

that personally I have known. It may illustrate the way in which lady

architects, without professional aid, are and ever will be defrauded,

that, after all was finished, and the entire wood-work was to be

measured and valued, each party, of course, needing to be represented

by a professional agent, naturally the knavish builder was ready at

earliest dawn with _his_ agent; but, as regarded my mother's

interest, the task of engaging such an agent had been confided to a

neighboring clergyman,--"evangelical," of course, and a humble

sycophant of Hannah More, but otherwise the most helpless of human

beings, baptized or infidel. He contented himself with instructing a

young gentleman, aged about fifteen, to take his pony and ride over to

a distant cathedral town, which was honored by the abode of a virtuous

though drunken surveyor. This respectable drunkard he was to engage,

and also with obvious discretion to fee beforehand. All which was done:

the drunken surveyor had a sort of fits, it was understood, that always

towards sunset inclined him to assume the horizontal posture.

Fortunately, however, for that part of mankind whom circumstances had

brought under the necessity of communicating with him, these fits were

intermitting; so that, for instance, in the present case, upon a severe

call arising for his pocketing the fee of ten guineas, he astonished

his whole household by suddenly standing bolt upright as stiff as a

poker; his sister remarking to the young gentleman that he (the

visitor) was in luck that evening: it wasn't everybody that could get

that length in dealing with Mr. X. O. However, it is distressing to

relate that the fits immediately returned; and, with that degree of

exasperation which made it dangerous to suggest the idea of a receipt;

since that must have required the vertical attitude. Whether that

attitude ever was recovered by the unfortunate gentleman, I do not

know. Forty-and-four years have passed since then. Almost everybody

connected with the case has had time to assume permanently the

horizontal posture,--namely, that knave of a builder, whose knaveries

(gilded by that morning sun of June) were controlled by nobody; that

sycophantish parson; that young gentleman of fifteen (now, alas! fifty-

nine), who must long since have sown his wild oats; that unhappy pony

of eighteen (now, alas! sixty-two, if living; ah! venerable pony, that

must (or mustest) now require thy oats to be boiled); in short, one and

all of these venerabilities--knaves, ponies, drunkards, receipts--have

descended, I believe, to chaos or to Hades, with hardly one exception.

Chancery itself, though somewhat of an Indian juggler, could not play

with such aerial balls as these.

On what ground it was that my mother quarrelled with the advantages of

Bath, so many and so conspicuous, I cannot guess. At that time, namely,

the opening of the nineteenth century, the old traditionary custom of

the place had established for young and old the luxury of sedan-chairs.

Nine tenths, at least, of the colds and catarrhs, those initial stages

of all pulmonary complaints (the capital scourge of England), are

caught in the transit between the door of a carriage and the genial

atmosphere of the drawing-room. By a sedan-chair all this danger was

evaded: your two chairmen marched right into the hall: the hall-door

was closed; and not until then was the roof and the door of your chair

opened: the translation was--from one room to another. To my mother,

and many in her situation, the sedan-chair recommended itself also by

advantages of another class. Immediately on coming to Bath her carriage

was "laid up in ordinary." The trifling rent of a coach-house, some

slight annual repairs, and the tax, composed the whole annual cost. At

that time, and throughout the war, the usual estimate for the cost of a

close carriage in London was three hundred and twenty pounds; since, in

order to have the certain services of two horses, it was indispensable

to keep three. Add to this the coachman, the wear-and-tear of harness,

and the duty; and, even in Bath, a cheaper place than London, you could

not accomplish the total service under two hundred and seventy pounds.

Now, except the duty, all this expense was at once superseded by the

sedan-chair--rarely costing you above ten shillings a week, that is,

twenty-five guineas a year, and liberating you from all care or

anxiety. The duty on four wheels, it is true, was suddenly exalted by

Mr. Pitt's triple assessment from twelve guineas to thirty-six; but

what a trifle by comparison with the cost of horses and coachman! And,

then, no demands for money were ever met so cheerfully by my mother as

those which went to support Mr. Pitt's policy against Jacobinism and

Regicide. At present, after five years' sinecure existence, unless on

the rare summons of a journey, this dormant carriage was suddenly

undocked, and put into commission. Taking with her two servants, and

one of my sisters, my mother now entered upon a _periplus_, or

systematic circumnavigation of all England; and in England only--

through the admirable machinery matured for such a purpose, namely,

inns, innkeepers, servants, horses, all first-rate of their class--it

was possible to pursue such a scheme in the midst of domestic comfort.

My mother's resolution was--to see all England with her own eyes, and

to judge for herself upon the qualifications of each county, each town

(not being a bustling seat of commerce), and each village (having any

advantages of scenery), for contributing the main elements towards a

home that might justify her in building a house. The qualifications

insisted on were these five: good medical advice somewhere in the

neighborhood; first-rate means of education; elegant (or, what most

people might think, aristocratic) society; agreeable scenery: and so

far the difficulty was not insuperable in the way of finding all the

four advantages concentrated. But my mother insisted on a fifth, which

in those days insured the instant shipwreck of the entire scheme; this

was a church of England parish clergyman, who was to be strictly

orthodox, faithful to the articles of our English church, yet to these

articles as interpreted by Evangelical divinity. My mother's views were

precisely those of her friend Mrs. Hannah More, of Wilberforce, of

Henry Thornton, of Zachary Macaulay (father of the historian), and

generally of those who were then known amongst sneerers as "the Clapham

saints." This one requisition it was on which the scheme foundered. And

the fact merits recording as an exposition of the broad religious

difference between the England of that day and of this. At present, no

difficulty would be found as to this fifth requisition. "Evangelical"

clergymen are now sown broad-cast; at that period, there were not, on

an average, above six or eight in each of the fifty-two counties.

The conditions, as a whole, were in fact incapable of being realized;

where two or three were attained, three or two failed. It was too much

to exact so many advantages from any one place, unless London; or

really, if any other place could be looked to with hope in such a

chase, that place was Bath--the very city my mother was preparing to

leave. Yet, had this been otherwise, and the prospect of success more

promising, I have not a doubt that the pretty gem, which suddenly was

offered at a price unintelligibly low, in the ancient city of Chester,

would have availed (as instantly it _did_ avail, and, perhaps,

ought to have availed) in obscuring those five conditions of which else

each separately for itself had seemed a _conditio sine qua non_.

This gem was an ancient house, on a miniature scale, called the

_Priory_; and, until the dissolution of religious houses in the

earlier half of the sixteenth century, had formed part of the Priory

attached to the ancient church (still flourishing) of St. John's.

Towards the end of the sixteenth and through the first quarter of the

seventeenth century, this Priory had been in the occupation of Sir

Robert Cotton, the antiquary, the friend of Ben Jonson, of Coke, of

Selden, etc., and advantageously known as one of those who applied his

legal and historical knowledge to the bending back into constitutional

moulds of those despotic twists which new interests and false counsels

had developed in the Tudor and Stuart dynasties. It was an exceedingly

pretty place; and the kitchen, upon the ground story, which had a noble

groined ceiling of stone, indicated, by its disproportionate scale, the

magnitude of the establishment to which once it had ministered.

Attached to this splendid kitchen were tributary offices, etc. On the

upper story were exactly five rooms: namely, a servants' dormitory,

meant in Sir Robert's day for two beds [Footnote: The contrivance

amongst our ancestors, even at haughty Cambridge and haughtier Oxford,

was, that one bed rising six inches from the floor ran (in the day-

time) under a loftier bed; it ran upon castors or little wheels. The

learned word for a little wheel is _trochlea_; from which Grecian

and Latin term comes the English word _truckle_-bed.] at the

least; and a servants' sitting-room. These were shut off into a

separate section, with a little staircase (like a ship's companion-

ladder) and a little lobby of its own. But the principal section on

this upper story had been dedicated to the use of Sir Robert, and

consisted of a pretty old hall, lighted by an old monastic-painted

window in the door of entrance; secondly, a rather elegant dining-room;

thirdly, a bed-room. The glory of the house internally lay in the

monastic kitchen; and, secondly, in what a Frenchman would have called,

properly, Sir Robert's own _apartment_ [Footnote: _Apartment_.--

Our English use of the word "apartment" is absurd, since it leads to

total misconceptions. We read in French memoirs innumerable of _the

king's apartment_, of _the queen's apartment_, etc., and for us English

the question arises, How? Had the king, had her majesty, only one room?

But, my friend, they might have a thousand rooms, and yet have only one

apartment. An apartment means, in the continental use, a section or

_compartment_ of an edifice.] of three rooms; but, thirdly and chiefly,

in a pile of ruined archways, most picturesque so far as they went, but

so small that Drury Lane could easily have found room for them on its

stage. These stood in the miniature pleasure-ground, and were

constantly resorted to by artists for specimens of architectural

decays, or of nature working for the concealment of such decays by her

ordinary processes of gorgeous floral vegetation. Ten rooms there may

have been in the Priory, as offered to my mother for less than five

hundred pounds. A drawing-room, bed-rooms, dressing-rooms, etc., making

about ten more, were added by my mother for a sum under one thousand

pounds. The same miniature scale was observed in all these additions.

And, as the Priory was not within the walls of the city, whilst the

river Dee, flowing immediately below, secured it from annoyance on one

side, and the church, with its adjacent church-yard, insulated it from

the tumults of life on all the other sides, an atmosphere of conventual

stillness and tranquillity brooded over it and all around it forever.

Such was the house, such was the society, in which I now found myself;

and upon the whole I might describe myself as being, according to the

modern phrase, "in a false position." I had, for instance, a vast

superiority, as was to have been expected, in bookish attainments, and

in adroitness of logic; whilst, on the other hand, I was ridiculously

short-sighted or blind in all fields of ordinary human experience. It

must not be supposed that I regarded my own particular points of

superiority, or that I used them, with any vanity or view to present

advantages. On the contrary, I sickened over them, and labored to

defeat them. But in vain I sowed errors in my premises, or planted

absurdities in my assumptions. Vainly I tried such blunders as putting

four terms into a syllogism, which, as all the world knows, ought to

run on three; a tripod it ought to be, by all rules known to man, and,

behold, I forced it to become a quadruped. Upon my uncle's military

haste, and tumultuous energy in pressing his opinions, all such

delicate refinements were absolutely thrown away. With disgust _I_

saw, with disgust _he_ saw, that too apparently the advantage lay

with me in the result; and, whilst I worked like a dragon to place

myself in the wrong, some fiend apparently so counterworked me, that

eternally I was reminded of the Manx half-pennies, which lately I had

continually seen current in North Wales, bearing for their heraldic

distinction three human legs in armor, but so placed in relation to

each other that always one leg is vertical and mounting guard on behalf

of the other two, which, therefore, are enabled to sprawl aloft in the

air--in fact, to be as absurdly negligent as they choose, relying upon

their vigilant brother below, and upon the written legend or motto,

STABIT QUOCUNQUE JECERIS (Stand it will upright, though you should

fling it in any conceivable direction). What gave another feature of

distraction and incoherency to my position was, that I still occupied

the position of a reputed boy, nay, a child, in the estimate of my

audience, and of a child in disgrace. Time enough had not passed since

my elopement from school to win for me, in minds so fresh from that

remembrance, a station of purification and assoilment. Oxford might

avail to assoil me, and to throw into a distant retrospect my boyish

trespasses; but as yet Oxford had not arrived. I committed, besides, a

great fault in taking often a tone of mock seriousness, when the

detection of the playful extravagance was left to the discernment or

quick sympathy of the hearer; and I was blind to the fact, that neither

my mother nor my uncle was distinguished by any natural liveliness of

vision for the comic, or any toleration for the extravagant. My mother,

for example, had an awful sense of conscientious fidelity in the

payment of taxes. Many a respectable family I have known that would

privately have encouraged a smuggler, and, in consequence, were beset

continually by mock smugglers, offering, with airs of affected mystery,

home commodities liable to no custom-house objections whatsoever, only

at a hyperbolical price. I remember even the case of a duke, who bought

in Piccadilly, under laughable circumstances of complex disguise, some

silk handkerchiefs, falsely pretending to be foreign, and was so

incensed at finding himself to have been committing no breach of law

whatever, but simply to have been paying double the ordinary shop

price, that he pulled up the _soi-disant_ smuggler to Bowstreet,

even at the certain price of exposure to himself. The charge he alleged

against the man was the untenable one of _not_ being a smuggler.

My mother, on the contrary, pronounced all such attempts at cheating

the king, or, as I less harshly termed it, cheating the tax-gatherer,

as being equal in guilt to a fraud upon one's neighbor, or to direct

appropriation of another man's purse. I, on my part, held, that

government, having often defrauded me through its agent and creature

the post-office, by monstrous over-charges on letters, had thus created

in my behalf a right of retaliation. And dreadfully it annoyed my

mother, that I, stating this right in a very plausible rule-of-three

form--namely, As is the income of the said fraudulent government to my

poor patrimonial income of one hundred and fifty pounds per annum, so

is any one special fraud (as, for instance, that of yesterday morning,

amounting to thirteen pence upon a single letter) to that equitable

penalty which I am entitled to recover upon the goods and chattels

(wherever found) of the ill-advised Britannic government. During the

war with Napoleon, the income of this government ran, to all amounts,

between fifty and seventy millions pounds sterling. Awful, therefore,

seemed the inheritance of retaliation, inexhaustible the fund of

reprisals, into which I stepped. Since, even a single case of robbery,

such as I could plead by dozens, in the course of a few years, though

no more than thirteen pence, yet multiplied into seventy million times

two hundred and forty pence, _minus_ one hundred and fifty pounds,

made a very comfortable property. The right was clear; and the sole

difficulty lay in asserting it; in fact, that same difficulty which

beset the philosopher of old, in arguing with the Emperor Hadrian;

namely, the want of thirty legions for the purpose of clearly pointing

out to Cæsar where it was that the truth lay; the secret truth; that

rarest of all "nuggets."

This counter-challenge of government, as the first mover in a system of

frauds, annoyed, but also perplexed my mother exceedingly. For an

argument that shaped itself into a rule-of-three illustration seemed

really to wear too candid an aspect for summary and absolute rejection.

Such discussions wore to me a comic shape. But altogether serious were

the disputes upon INDIA--a topic on separate grounds equally

interesting to us all, as the mightiest of English colonies, and the

superbest monument of demoniac English energy, revealing itself in such

men as Clive, Hastings, and soon after in the two Wellesleys. To my

mother, as the grave of one brother, as the home of another, and as a

new centre from which Christianity (she hoped) would mount like an

eagle; for just about that time the Bible Society was preparing its

initial movements; whilst to my uncle India appeared as the

_arena_ upon which his activities were yet to find their adequate

career. With respect to the Christianization of India, my uncle assumed

a hope which he did not really feel; and in another point, more trying

to himself personally, he had soon an opportunity for showing the

sincerity of this deference to his spiritual-minded sister. For, very

soon after his return to India, he received a civil appointment

(_Superintendent of Military Buildings in Bengal_), highly

lucrative, and the more so as it could be held conjointly with his

military rank; but a good deal of its pecuniary advantages was said to

lie in fees, or perquisites, privately offered, but perfectly regular

and official, which my mother (misunderstanding the Indian system)

chose to call "bribes." A very ugly word was _that_; but I argued

that even at home, even in the courts at Westminster, in the very

fountains of justice, private fees constituted one part of the

salaries--a fair and official part, so long as Parliament had not made

such fees illegal by commuting them for known and fixed equivalents.

It was mere ignorance of India, as I dutifully insisted against

"Mamma," that could confound these regular oriental "nuzzers" with the

clandestine wages of corruption. The _pot-de-vin_ of French

tradition, the pair of gloves (though at one time very costly gloves)

to an English judge of assize on certain occasions, never was offered

nor received in the light of a bribe. And (until regularly abolished by

the legislature) I insisted--but vainly insisted--that these and

similar _honoraria_ ought to be accepted, because else you were

lowering the prescriptive rights and value of the office, which you--a

mere _locum tenens_ for some coming successor--had no right to do

upon a solitary scruple or crotchet, arising probably from dyspepsia.

Better men, no doubt, than ever stood in _your_ stockings, had

pocketed thankfully the gifts of ancient, time-honored custom. My

uncle, however, though not with the carnal recusancy which besieged the

spiritual efforts of poor Cuthbert Headrigg, that incorrigible

worldling, yet still with intermitting doubts, followed my mother's

earnest entreaties, and the more meritoriously (I conceive), as he

yielded, in a point deeply affecting his interest, to a system of

arguments very imperfectly convincing to his understanding. He held the

office in question for as much (I believe) as eighteen or nineteen

years; and, by knowing old bilious Indians, who laughed immoderately at

my uncle and my mother, as the proper growth of a priory or some such

monastic establishment, I have been assured that nothing short of two

hundred thousand pounds ought, under the long tenure of office, to have

been remitted to England. But, then, said one of these gentlemen, if

your uncle lived (as I have heard that he did) in Calcutta and Meer-ut,

at the rate of four thousand pounds a year, _that_ would account

for a considerable share of a mine which else would seem to have been

worked in vain. Unquestionably, my uncle's system of living was under

no circumstances a self-denying one. To enjoy, and to make others

enjoy--_that_ was his law of action. Indeed, a more liberal creature,

or one of more princely munificence, never lived.

It might seem useless to call back any fragment of conversations

relating to India which passed more than fifty years ago, were it not

for two reasons: one of which is this,--that the errors (natural at

that time) which I vehemently opposed, not from any greater knowledge

that I had, but from closer reflection, are even now the prevailing

errors of the English people. My mother, for instance, uniformly spoke

of the English as the subverters of ancient thrones. I, on the

contrary, insisted that nothing political was ancient in India. Our own

original opponents, the Rajahs of Oude and Bengal, had been all

upstarts: in the Mysore, again, our more recent opponents, Hyder, and

his son Tippoo, were new men altogether, whose grandfathers were quite

unknown. Why was it that my mother, why is it that the English public

at this day, connect so false an image--that of high, cloudy antiquity

--with the thrones of India? It is simply from an old habit of

associating the spirit of change and rapid revolution with the

activities of Europe; so that, by a natural reaction of thought, the

Orient is figured as the home of motionless monotony. In things

religious, in habits, in costume, it _is_ so. But so far otherwise

in things political, that no instance can be alleged of any dynasty or

system of government that has endured beyond a century or two in the

East. Taking India in particular, the Mogul dynasty, established by

Baber, the great-grandson of Timour, did not subsist in any vigor for

two centuries; and yet this was by far the most durable of all

established princely houses. Another argument against England urged by

my mother (but equally urged by the English people at this day) was,

that she had in no eminent sense been a benefactress to India; or,

expressing it in words of later date, that the only memorials of our

rule, supposing us suddenly ejected from India, would be vast heaps of

champagne-bottles. I, on the other hand, alleged that our benefits,

like all truly great and lasting benefits (religious benefits, for

instance), must not be sought in external memorials of stone and

masonry. Higher by far than the Mogul gifts of mile-stones, or

travelling stations, or even roads and tanks, were the gifts of

security, of peace, of law, and settled order. These blessings were

travelling as fast as our rule advanced. I could not _then_ appeal

to the cases of Thuggee extirpated, of the Pindanees (full fifteen

thousand bloody murderers) forever exterminated, or of the Marhattas

bridled forever--a robber nation that previously had descended at

intervals with a force of sometimes one hundred and fifty thousand

troopers upon the afflicted province of Bengal, and Oude its neighbor;

because these were events as yet unborn. But they were the natural

extensions of that beneficent system on which I rested my argument. The

two terrors of India at that particular time were Holkar and Scindiah

(pronounced _Sindy_), who were soon cut short in their career by

the hostilities which they provoked with us, but would else have

proved, in combination, a deadlier scourge to India than either Hyder

or his ferocious son. My mother, in fact, a great reader of the poet

Cowper, drew from _him_ her notions of Anglo-Indian policy and its

effects. Cowper, in his "Task," puts the question,--

"Is India free? and does she wear her plumed

And jewelled turban with a smile of peace,

Or do we grind her still?"

Pretty much the same authority it is which the British public of this

day has for its craze upon the subject of English oppression amongst

the Hindoos.

My uncle, meantime, who from his Indian experience should reasonably

have known so much better, was disposed, from the mere passive habits

of hearing and reading unresistingly so many assaults of this tone

against our Indian policy, to go along with my mother. But he was too

just, when forced into reflection upon the subject, not to bend at

times to my way of stating the case for England. Suddenly, however, our

Indian discussions were brought to a close by the following incident.

My uncle had brought with him to England some Arabian horses, and

amongst them a beautiful young Persian mare, called Sumroo, the

gentlest of her race. Sumroo it was that he happened to be riding, upon

a frosty day. Unused to ice, she came down with him, and broke his

right leg. This accident laid him up for a month, during which my

mother and I read to him by turns. One book, which one day fell to my

share by accident, was De Foe's "Memoirs of a Cavalier." This book

attempts to give a picture of the Parliamentary war; but in some places

an unfair, and everywhere a most superficial account. I said so; and my

uncle, who had an old craze in behalf of the book, opposed me with

asperity; and, in the course of what he said, under some movement of

ill-temper, he asked me, in a way which I felt to be taunting, how I

could consent to waste my time as I did. Without any answering warmth,

I explained that my guardians, having quarrelled with me, would not

grant for my use anything beyond my school allowance of one hundred

pounds per annum. But was it not possible that even this sum might by

economy be made to meet the necessities of the case? I replied that,

from what I had heard, very probably it was. Would I undertake an

Oxford life upon such terms? Most gladly, I said. Upon that opening he

spoke to my mother; and the result was, that, within seven days from

the above conversation, I found myself entering that time-honored

university.

OXFORD.

I.

OXFORD.

It was in winter, and in the wintry weather of the year 1803, that I

first entered Oxford with a view to its vast means of education, or

rather with a view to its vast advantages for study. A ludicrous story

is told of a young candidate for clerical orders--that, being asked by

the bishop's chaplain if he had ever "been to Oxford," as a colloquial

expression for having had an academic education, he replied, "No: but

he had twice been to Abingdon:" Abingdon being only seven miles

distant. In the same sense I might say that once before I had been at

Oxford: but _that_ was as a transient visitor with Lord W----,

when we were both children. Now, on the contrary, I approached these

venerable towers in the character of a student, and with the purpose of

a long connection; personally interested in the constitution of the

university, and obscurely anticipating that in this city, or at least

during the period of my nominal attachment to this academic body, the

remoter parts of my future life would unfold before me. All hearts were

at this time occupied with the public interests of the country. The

"sorrow of the time" was ripening to a second harvest. Napoleon had

commenced his Vandal, or rather Hunnish War with Britain, in the spring

of this year, about eight months before; and profound public interest

it was, into which the very coldest hearts entered, that a little

divided with me the else monopolizing awe attached to the solemn act of

launching myself upon the world. That expression may seem too strong as

applied to one who had already been for many months a houseless

wanderer in Wales, and a solitary roamer in the streets of London. But

in those situations, it must be remembered, I was an unknown,

unacknowledged vagrant; and without money I could hardly run much risk,

except of breaking my neck. The perils, the pains, the pleasures, or

the obligations, of the world, scarcely exist in a proper sense for him

who has no funds. Perfect weakness is often secure; it is by imperfect

power, turned against its master, that men are snared and decoyed. Here

in Oxford I should be called upon to commence a sort of establishment

upon the splendid English scale; here I should share in many duties and

responsibilities, and should become henceforth an object of notice to a

large society. Now first becoming separately and individually

answerable for my conduct, and no longer absorbed into the general unit

of a family, I felt myself, for the first time, burthened with the

anxieties of a man, and a member of the world.

Oxford, ancient mother! hoary with ancestral honors, time-honored, and,

haply, it may be, time-shattered power--I owe thee nothing! Of thy vast

riches I took not a shilling, though living amongst multitudes who owed

to thee their daily bread. Not the less I owe thee justice; for that is

a universal debt. And at this moment, when I see thee called to thy

audit by unjust and malicious accusers--men with the hearts of

inquisitors and the purposes of robbers--I feel towards thee something

of filial reverence and duty. However, I mean not to speak as an

advocate, but as a conscientious witness in the simplicity of truth;

feeling neither hope nor fear of a personal nature, without fee, and

without favor.

I have been assured from many quarters that the great body of the

public are quite in the dark about the whole manner of living in our

English universities; and that a considerable portion of that public,

misled by the totally different constitution of universities in

Scotland, Ireland, and generally on the continent, as well as by the

different arrangements of collegiate life in those institutions, are in

a state worse than ignorant (that is, more unfavorable to the truth)--

starting, in fact, from prejudices, and absolute errors of fact, which

operate most uncharitably upon their construction of those insulated

statements, which are continually put forward by designing men. Hence,

I can well believe that it will be an acceptable service, at this

particular moment, when the very constitution of the two English

universities is under the unfriendly revision of Parliament, when some

roving commission may be annually looked for, under a contingency which

I will not utter in words (for I reverence the doctrine of

_euphæmismos_), far worse than Cromwellian, that is, merely

personal, and to winnow the existing corporation from disaffection to

the state--a Henry the Eighth commission of sequestration, and levelled

at the very integrity of the institution--under such prospects, I can

well believe that a true account of Oxford _as it is_ (which will

be valid also for Cambridge) must be welcome both to friend and foe.

And instead of giving this account didactically, or according to a

logical classification of the various items in the survey, I will give

it historically, or according to the order in which the most important

facts of the case opened themselves before myself, under the accidents

of my own personal inquiry. No situation could be better adapted than

my own for eliciting information; for, whereas most young men come to

the university under circumstances of absolute determination as to the

choice of their particular college, and have, therefore, no cause for

search or inquiry, I, on the contrary, came thither in solitary self-

dependence, and in the loosest state of indetermination.

Though neither giving nor accepting invitations for the first two years

of my residence, never but once had I reason to complain of a sneer, or

indeed any allusion whatever to habits which might be understood to

express poverty. Perhaps even then I had no reason to complain, for my

own conduct in that instance was unwise; and the allusion, though a

personality, and so far ill-bred, might be meant in real kindness. The

case was this: I neglected my dress in one point habitually; that is, I

wore clothes until they were threadbare--partly in the belief that my

gown would conceal their main defects, but much more from carelessness

and indisposition to spend upon a tailor what I had destined for a

bookseller. At length, an official person, of some weight in the

college, sent me a message on the subject through a friend. It was

couched in these terms: That, let a man possess what talents or

accomplishments he might, it was not possible for him to maintain his

proper station, in the public respect, amongst so many servants and

people, servile to external impressions, without some regard to the

elegance of his dress.

A reproof so courteously prefaced I could not take offence at; and at

that time I resolved to spend some cost upon decorating my person. But

always it happened that some book, or set of books,--that passion being

absolutely endless, and inexorable as the grave,--stepped between me

and my intentions; until one day, upon arranging my toilet hastily

before dinner, I suddenly made the discovery that I had no waistcoat

(or _vest_, as it is now called, through conceit or provincialism),

which was not torn or otherwise dilapidated; whereupon, buttoning up my

coat to the throat, and drawing my gown as close about me as possible,

I went into the public "hall" (so is called in Oxford the public

eating-room) with no misgiving. However, I was detected; for a

grave man, with a superlatively grave countenance, who happened on

that day to sit next me, but whom I did not personally know, addressing

his friend sitting opposite, begged to know if he had seen the last

Gazette, because he understood that it contained an order in council

laying an interdict upon the future use of waistcoats. His friend

replied, with the same perfect gravity, that it was a great

satisfaction to his mind that his majesty's government should have

issued so sensible an order; which he trusted would be soon followed up

by an interdict on breeches, they being still more disagreeable to pay

for. This said, without the movement on either side of a single muscle,

the two gentlemen passed to other subjects; and I inferred, upon the

whole, that, having detected my manoeuvre, they wished to put me on my

guard in the only way open to them. At any rate, this was the sole

personality, or equivocal allusion of any sort, which ever met my ear

during the years that I asserted my right to be as poor as I chose.

And, certainly, my censors were right, whatever were the temper in

which they spoke, kind or unkind; for a little extra care in the use of

clothes will always, under almost any extremity of poverty, pay for so

much extra cost as is essential to neatness and decorum, if not even to

elegance. They were right, and I was wrong, in a point which cannot be

neglected with impunity.

But, to enter upon my own history, and my sketch of Oxford life.--Late

on a winter's night, in the latter half of December, 1803, when a snow-

storm, and a heavy one, was already gathering in the air, a lazy

Birmingham coach, moving at four and a half miles an hour, brought me

through the long northern suburb of Oxford, to a shabby coach-inn,

situated in the Corn Market. Business was out of the question at that

hour. But the next day I assembled all the acquaintances I had in the

university, or had to my own knowledge; and to them, in council

assembled, propounded my first question: What college would they, in

their superior state of information, recommend to my choice? This

question leads to the first great characteristic of Oxford, as

distinguished from most other universities. Before me at this moment

lie several newspapers, reporting, at length, the installation in

office (as Chancellor) of the Duke of Wellington. The original Oxford

report, having occasion to mention the particular college from which

the official procession moved, had said, no doubt, that the gates of

University, the halls of University, &c., were at such a point of time

thrown open. But most of the provincial editors, not at all

comprehending that the reference was to an individual college, known by

the name of University College, one of twenty-five such establishments

in Oxford, had regularly corrected it into "gates of the University,"

&c. Here is the first misconception of all strangers. And this feature

of Oxford it is which has drawn such exclamations of astonishment from

foreigners. Lipsius, for example, protested with fervor, on first

seeing this vast establishment of Oxford, that one college of this

university was greater in its power and splendor, that it glorified and

illustrated the honors of literature more conspicuously by the pomps

with which it invested the ministers and machinery of education, than

any entire university of the continent.

What is a university almost everywhere else? It announces little more,

as respects the academic buildings, than that here is to be found the

place of rendezvous--the exchange, as it were, or, under a different

figure, the _palæstra_ of the various parties connected with the

prosecution of liberal studies. This is their "House of Call," their

general place of muster and parade. Here it is that the professors and

the students converge, with the certainty of meeting each other. Here,

in short, are the lecture-rooms in all the faculties. Well: thus far we

see an arrangement of convenience--that is, of convenience for one of

the parties, namely, the professors. To them it spares the disagreeable

circumstances connected with a private reception of their students at

their own rooms. But to the students it is a pure matter of

indifference. In all this there is certainly no service done to the

cause of good learning, which merits a state sanction, or the aid of

national funds. Next, however, comes an academic library, sometimes a

good one; and here commences a real use in giving a national station to

such institutions, because their durable and monumental existence,

liable to no flux or decay from individual caprice, or accidents of

life, and their authentic station, as expressions of the national

grandeur, point them out to the bequests of patriotic citizens. They

fall also under the benefit of another principle--the conservative

feeling of amateurship. Several great collections have been bequeathed

to the British Museum, for instance--not chiefly _as_ a national

institution, and under feelings of nationality, but because, being

such, it was also permanent; and thus the painful labors of collecting

were guaranteed from perishing. Independently of all this, I, for my

part, willingly behold the surplus of national funds dedicated to the

consecration, as it were, of learning, by raising temples to its honor,

even where they answer no purpose of direct use. Next, after the

service of religion, I would have the service of learning externally

embellished, recommended to the affections of men, and hallowed by the

votive sculptures, as I may say, of that affection, gathering in amount

from age to age. _Magnificabo apostolatum meum_ is a language

almost as becoming to the missionaries and ministers of knowledge, as

to the ambassadors of religion. It is fit that by pompous architectural

monuments, that a voice may forever be sounding audibly in human ears

of homage to these powers, and that even alien feelings may be

compelled into secret submission to their influence. Therefore, amongst

the number of those who value such things, upon the scale of direct

proximate utility, rank not me: that _arithmetica officina_ is in

my years abominable. But still I affirm that, in our analysis of an

ordinary university, or "college" as it is provincially called, we have

not yet arrived at any element of service rendered to knowledge or

education, large enough to call for very extensive national aid. Honor

has thus far been rendered to the good cause by a public attestation,

and that is well: but no direct promotion has been given to that cause,

no impulse communicated to its progress, such that it can be held out

as a result commensurate to the name and pretensions of a university.

As yet there is nothing accomplished which is beyond the strength of

any little commercial town. And as to the library in particular,

besides that in all essential departments it might be bought, to order,

by one day's common subscription of Liverpool or Glasgow merchants,

students very rarely indeed have admission to its free use.

What other functions remain to a university? For those which I have

mentioned of furnishing a point of rendezvous to the great body of

professors and students, and a point of concentration to the different

establishments of implements and machinery for elaborate researches

[as, for instance, of books and MSS., in the first place; secondly, of

maps, charts, and globes; and, thirdly, perhaps of the costly apparatus

required for such studies as Sideral astronomy, galvanic chemistry or

physiology, &c.]; all these are uses which cannot be regarded in a

higher light than as conveniences merely incidental and collateral to

the main views of the founders. There are, then, two much loftier and

more commanding ends met by the idea and constitution of such

institutions, and which first rise to a rank of dignity sufficient to

occupy the views of a legislator, or to warrant a national interest.

These ends are involved: 1st, in the practice of conferring

_degrees_, that is, formal attestations and guarantees of competence

to give advice, instruction, or aid, in the three great branches

of liberal knowledge applicable to human life; 2d, in that

appropriation of fixed funds to fixed professorships, by means of which

the uninterrupted succession of public and authorized teachers is

sustained in all the higher branches of knowledge, from generation to

generation, and from century to century. By the latter result it is

secured that the great well-heads of liberal knowledge and of severe

science shall never grow dry. By the former it is secured that this

unfailing fountain shall be continually applied to the production and

to the _tasting_ of fresh labors in endless succession for the

public service, and thus, in effect, that the great national fountain

shall not be a stagnant reservoir, but, by an endless _derivation_

(to speak in a Roman metaphor!), applied to a system of national

irrigation. These are the two great functions and qualifications of a

collegiate incorporation: one providing to each separate generation its

own separate rights of heirship to all the knowledge accumulated by its

predecessors, and converting a mere casual life-annuity into an estate

of inheritance--a mere fleeting _agonisma_ into a _ktæma es æi_; the

other securing for this eternal dowry as wide a distribution as

possible: the one function regarding the dimension of _length_ in the

endless series of ages through which it propagates its gifts; the other

regarding the dimension of _breadth_ in the large application

throughout any one generation of these gifts to the public service.

Here are grand functions, high purposes; but neither one nor the other

demands any edifices of stone and marble; neither one nor the other

presupposes any edifice at all built with human hands. A collegiate

incorporation, the church militant of knowledge, in its everlasting

struggle with darkness and error, is, in this respect, like the

church of Christ--that is, it is always and essentially invisible

to the fleshly eye. The pillars of this church are human champions; its

weapons are great truths so shaped as to meet the shifting forms of

error; its armories are piled and marshalled in human memories; its

cohesion lies in human zeal, in discipline, in childlike docility; and

all its triumphs, its pomps, and glories, must forever depend upon

talent, upon the energies of the will, and upon the harmonious

cooperation of its several divisions. Thus far, I say, there is no call

made out for _any_ intervention of the architect.

Let me apply all this to Oxford. Among the four functions commonly

recognized by the founders of universities, which are--1st, to find a

set of halls or places of meeting; 2d, to find the implements and

accessaries of study; 3d, to secure the succession of teachers and

learners; 4th, to secure the profitable application of their

attainments to the public service. Of these four, the two highest need

no buildings; and the other two, which are mere collateral functions of

convenience, need only a small one. Wherefore, then, and to what end,

are the vast systems of building, the palaces and towers of Oxford?

These are either altogether superfluous, mere badges of ostentation and

luxurious wealth, or they point to some fifth function not so much as

contemplated by other universities, and, at present, absolutely and

chimerically beyond their means of attainment. Formerly we used to hear

attacks upon the Oxford discipline as fitted to the true

_intellectual_ purposes of a modern education. Those attacks, weak

and most uninstructed in facts, false as to all that they challenged,

and puerile as to what implicitly they propounded for homage, are

silent. But, of late, the battery has been pointed against the Oxford

discipline in its _moral_ aspects, as fitted for the government

and restraint of young men, or even as at all contemplating any such

control. The Beverleys would have us suppose, not only that the great

body of the students are a licentious crew, acknowledging no discipline

or restraints, but that the grave elders of the university, and those

who wield the nominal authority of the place, passively resign the very

shows of power, and connive at general excesses, even when they do not

absolutely authorize them in their personal examples. Now, when such

representations are made, to what standard of a just discipline is it

that these writers would be understood as appealing? Is it to some

ideal, or to some existing and known reality? Would they have England

suppose that they are here comparing the actual Oxford with some

possible hypothetic or imaginable Oxford,--with some ideal case, that

is to say, about which great discussions would arise as to its

feasibility,--or that they are comparing it with some known standard of

discipline actually realized and sustained for generations, in Leipsic,

suppose, or Edinburgh, or Leyden, or Salamanca? This is the question of

questions, to which we may demand an answer; and, according to that

answer, observe the dilemma into which these furciferous knaves must

drop. If they are comparing Oxford simply with some ideal and better

Oxford, in some ideal and better world, in that case all they have

said--waiving its falsehoods of fact--is no more than a flourish of

rhetoric, and the whole discussion may be referred to the shadowy

combats of scholastic declamation-mongers--those mock gladiators, and

_umbratiles doctores_. But if, on the other hand, they pretend to

take their station upon the known basis of some existing institution,--

if they will pretend that, in this impeachment of Oxford, they are

proceeding upon a silent comparison with Edinburgh, Glasgow, Jena,

Leipsic, Padua, &c.,--then are they self-exposed, as men not only

without truth, but without shame. For now comes in, as a sudden

revelation, and as a sort of _deus ex machina_, for the vindication

of the truth, the simple answer to that question proposed above,

Wherefore, and to what end, are the vast edifices of Oxford? A

university, as universities are in general, needs not, I have shown, to

be a visible body--a building raised with hands. Wherefore, then, is

the _visible_ Oxford? To what _fifth_ end, refining upon the

ordinary ends of such institutions, is the far-stretching system of

Oxford _hospitia_, or monastic hotels, directed by their founders,

or applied by their present possessors? Hearken, reader, to the answer:

These vast piles are applied to an end, absolutely indispensable to any

even tolerable system of discipline, and yet absolutely unattainable

upon any commensurate scale in any other university of Europe. They are

applied to the personal settlement and domestication of the students

within the gates and walls of that college to whose discipline they are

amenable. Everywhere else the young men live _where_ they please

and _as_ they please; necessarily distributed amongst the towns-

people; in any case, therefore, liable to no control or supervision

whatever; and in those cases where the university forms but a small

part of a vast capital city, as it does in Paris, Edinburgh, Madrid,

Vienna, Berlin, and Petersburg, liable to every mode of positive

temptation and distraction, which besiege human life in high-viced and

luxurious communities. Here, therefore, it is a mockery to talk of

discipline; of a nonentity there can be no qualities; and we need not

ask for the description of the discipline in situations where

discipline there can be none. One slight anomaly I have heard of as

varying _pro tanto_ the uniform features of this picture. In

Glasgow I have heard of an arrangement by which young academicians are

placed in the family of a professor. Here, as members of a private

household, and that household under the presiding eye of a

conscientious, paternal, and judicious scholar, doubtless they would

enjoy as absolute a shelter from peril and worldly contagion as parents

could wish; but not _more_ absolute, I affirm, than belongs,

unavoidably, to the monastic seclusion of an Oxford college--the gates

of which open to no egress after nine o'clock at night, nor after

eleven to any ingress which is not regularly reported to a proper

officer of the establishment. The two forms of restraint are, as

respects the effectual amount of control, equal; and were they equally

diffused, Glasgow and Oxford would, in this point, stand upon the same

level of discipline. But it happens that the Glasgow case was a

personal accident; personal, both as regarded him who volunteered the

exercise of this control, and those who volunteered to appropriate its

benefits; whereas the Oxford case belongs to the very system, is

coextensive with the body of undergraduates, and, from the very

arrangement of Oxford life, is liable to no decay or intermission.

Here, then, the reader apprehends the first great characteristic

distinction of Oxford--that distinction which extorted the rapturous

admiration of Lipsius as an exponent of enormous wealth, but which I

now mention as applying, with ruinous effect, to the late calumnies

upon Oxford, as an inseparable exponent of her meritorious discipline.

She, most truly and severely an "Alma Mater" gathers all the juvenile

part of her flock within her own fold, and beneath her own vigilant

supervision. In Cambridge there is, so far, a laxer administration of

this rule, that, when any college overflows, undergraduates are allowed

to lodge at large in the town. But in Oxford this increase of peril and

discretionary power is thrown by preference upon the senior graduates,

who are seldom below the age of twenty-two or twenty-three; and the

college accommodations are reserved, in almost their whole extent, for

the most youthful part of the society. This extent is prodigious. Even

in my time, upwards of two thousand persons were lodged within the

colleges; none having fewer than two rooms, very many having three, and

men of rank, or luxurious habits, having often large suites of rooms.

But that was a time of war, which Oxford experience has shown to have

operated most disproportionably as a drain upon the numbers disposable

for liberal studies; and the total capacity of the university was far

from being exhausted. There are now, I believe, between five and six

thousand names upon the Oxford books; and more than four thousand, I

understand, of constant residents. So that Oxford is well able to

lodge, and on a very sumptuous scale, a small army of men; which

expression of her great splendor I now mention (as I repeat) purely as

applying to the question of her machinery for enforcing discipline.

This part of her machinery, it will be seen, is unique, and absolutely

peculiar to herself. Other universities, boasting no such enormous

wealth, cannot be expected to act upon her system of seclusion.

Certainly, I make it no reproach to other universities, that, not

possessing the means of sequestering their young men from worldly

communion, they must abide by the evils of a laxer discipline. It is

their misfortune, and not their criminal neglect, which consents to so

dismal a relaxation of academic habits. But let them not urge this

misfortune in excuse at one time, and at another virtually disavow it.

Never let _them_ take up a stone to throw at Oxford, upon this

element of a wise education; since in them, through that original vice

in their constitution, the defect of all means for secluding and

insulating their society, discipline is abolished by anticipation--

being, in fact, an impossible thing; for the walls of the college are

subservient to no purpose of life, but only to a purpose of

convenience; they converge the students for the hour or two of what is

called lecture; which over, each undergraduate again becomes _sui

juris_, is again absorbed into the crowds of the world, resorts to

whatsoever haunts he chooses, and finally closes his day at----if, in

any sense, at home--at a home which is not merely removed from the

supervision and control, but altogether from the bare knowledge, of his

academic superiors. How far this discipline is well administered in

other points at Oxford, will appear from the rest of my account. But,

thus far, at least, it must be conceded, that Oxford, by and through

this one unexampled distinction--her vast disposable fund of

accommodations for junior members within her own private cloisters--

possesses an advantage which she could not forfeit, if she would,

towards an effectual knowledge of each man's daily habits, and a

control over him which is all but absolute.

This knowledge and this control is much assisted and concentrated by

the division of the university into separate colleges. Here comes

another feature of the Oxford system. Elsewhere the university is a

single college; and this college is the university. But in Oxford the

university expresses, as it were, the army, and the colleges express

the several brigades, or regiments.

To resume, therefore, my own thread of personal narration. On the next

morning after my arrival in Oxford, I assembled a small council of

friends to assist me in determining at which of the various separate

societies I should enter, and whether as a "commoner," or as a

"gentleman commoner." Under the first question was couched the

following latitude of choice: I give the names of the colleges, and the

numerical account of their numbers, as it stood in January, 1832; for

this will express, as well as the list of that day, (which I do not

accurately know), the _proportions_ of importance amongst them.

Mem.

1. University College ................. 207

2. Balliol " ................. 257

3. Merton " ................. 124

4. Exeter " ................. 299

5. Oriel " ................. 293

6. Queen's " ................. 351

7. New " ................. 157

8. Lincoln " ................. 141

9. All Souls' " ................. 98

10. Magdalene " ................. 165

11. Brazennose " ................. 418

12. Corpus Christi " ................. 127

13. Christ Church " ................. 949

14. Trinity " ................. 259

15. St. John's " ................. 218

16. Jesus " ................. 167

17. Wadham " ................. 217

18. Pembroke " ................. 189

19. Worcester " ................. 231

Then, besides these colleges, five _Halls_, as they are technically

called, (the term _Hall_ implying chiefly that they are societies not

endowed, or not endowed with fellowships as the colleges are), namely:

Mem.

1. St. Mary Hall. .............. 83

2. Magdalen " .............. 178

3. New Inn " .............. 10

4. St. Alban " .............. 41

5. St. Edmund " .............. 96

Such being the names, and general proportions on the scale of local

importance, attached to the different communities, next comes the very

natural question, What are the chief determining motives for guiding

the selection amongst them? These I shall state. First of all, a man

not otherwise interested in the several advantages of the colleges has,

however, in all probability, some choice between a small society and a

large one; and thus far a mere ocular inspection of the list will serve

to fix his preference. For my part, supposing other things equal, I

greatly preferred the most populous college, as being that in which any

single member, who might have reasons for standing aloof from the

general habits of expense, of intervisiting, etc., would have the best

chance of escaping a jealous notice. However, amongst those "other

things" which I presumed equal, one held a high place in my estimation,

which a little inquiry showed to be very far from equal. All the

colleges have chapels, but all have not organs; nor, amongst those

which have, is the same large use made of the organ. Some preserve the

full cathedral service; others do not. Christ Church, meantime,

fulfilled _all_ conditions: for the chapel here happens to be the

cathedral of the diocese; the service, therefore, is full and

ceremonial; the college, also, is far the most splendid, both in

numbers, rank, wealth, and influence. Hither I resolved to go; and

immediately I prepared to call on the head.

The "head," as he is called generically, of an Oxford college (his

_specific_ appellation varies almost with every college--

principal, provost, master, rector, warden, etc.), is a greater man

than the uninitiated suppose. His situation is generally felt as

conferring a degree of rank not much less than episcopal; and, in fact,

the head of Brazennose at that time, who happened to be the Bishop of

Bangor, was not held to rank much above his brothers in office. Such

being the rank of heads generally, _a fortiori_, that of Christ

Church was to be had in reverence; and this I knew. He is always, _ex

officio_, dean of the diocese; and, in his quality of college head,

he only, of all deans that ever were heard of, is uniformly considered

a greater man than his own diocesan. But it happened that the present

dean had even higher titles to consideration. Dr. Cyril Jackson had

been tutor to the Prince of Wales (George IV.); he had repeatedly

refused a bishopric; and _that_, perhaps, is entitled to place a

man one degree above him who has accepted one. He was also supposed to

have made a bishop, and afterwards, at least, it is certain that lie

made his own brother a bishop. All things weighed, Dr. Cyril Jackson

seemed so very great a personage that I now felt the value of my long

intercourse with great Dons in giving me confidence to face a lion of

this magnitude.

Those who know Oxford are aware of the peculiar feelings which have

gathered about the name and pretensions of Christ Church; feelings of

superiority and leadership in the members of that college, and often

enough of defiance and jealousy on the part of other colleges. Hence it

happens that you rarely find yourself in a shop, or other place of

public resort, with a Christ-Church man, but he takes occasion, if

young and frivolous, to talk loudly of the Dean, as an indirect

expression of his own connection with this splendid college; the title

of _Dean_ being exclusively attached to the headship of Christ

Church. The Dean, as may be supposed, partakes in this superior dignity

of his "House;" he is officially brought into connection with all

orders of the British aristocracy--often with royal personages; and

with the younger branches of the aristocracy his office places him in a

relation of authority and guardianship--exercised, however, through

inferior ministry, and seldom by direct personal interference. The

reader must understand that, with rare exceptions, all the princes and

nobles of Great Britain, who choose to benefit by an academic

education, resort either to Christ Church College in Oxford, or to

Trinity College in Cambridge; these are the alternatives. Naturally

enough, my young friends were somewhat startled at my determination to

call upon so great a man; a letter, they fancied, would be a better

mode of application. I, however, who did not adopt the doctrine that no

man is a hero to his valet, was of opinion that very few men indeed are

heroes to themselves. The cloud of external pomp, which invests them to

the eyes of the _attoniti_ cannot exist to their own; they do not,

like Kehama, entering the eight gates of Padalon at once, meet and

contemplate their own grandeurs; but, more or less, are conscious of

acting a part. I did not, therefore, feel the tremor which was expected

of a novice, on being ushered into so solemn a presence.

II.

OXFORD.

The Dean was sitting in a spacious library or study, elegantly, if not

luxuriously furnished. Footmen, stationed as repeaters, as if at some

fashionable rout, gave a momentary importance to my unimportant self,

by the thundering tone of their annunciations. All the machinery of

aristocratic life seemed indeed to intrench this great Don's

approaches; and I was really surprised that so very great a man should

condescend to rise on my entrance. But I soon found that, if the Dean's

station and relation to the higher orders had made him lofty, those

same relations had given a peculiar suavity to his manners. Here,

indeed, as on other occasions, I noticed the essential misconception,

as to the demeanor of men of rank, which prevails amongst those who

have no personal access to their presence. In the fabulous pictures of

novels (such novels as once abounded), and in newspaper reports of

conversations, real or pretended, between the king and inferior

persons, we often find the writer expressing _his_ sense of

aristocratic assumption, by making the king address people without

their titles. The Duke of Wellington, for instance, or Lord Liverpool,

figures usually, in such scenes, as "Wellington," or "Arthur," and as

"Liverpool." Now, as to the private talk of George IV. in such cases, I

do not pretend to depose; but, speaking generally, I may say that the

practice of the highest classes takes the very opposite course. Nowhere

is a man so sure of his titles or official distinctions as amongst

_them_; for, it is upon giving to every man the very extreme

punctilio of his known or supposed claims, that they rely for the due

observance of their own. Neglecting no form of courtesy suited to the

case, they seek, in this way, to remind men unceasingly of what they

expect; and the result is what I represent--that people in the highest

stations, and such as bring them continually into contact with

inferiors, are, of all people, the least addicted to insolence or

defect of courtesy. Uniform suavity of manner is indeed rarely found,

except in men of high rank. Doubtless this may arise upon a motive of

self-interest, jealous of giving the least opening or invitation to the

retorts of ill-temper or low breeding. But, whatever be its origin,

such I believe to be the fact. In a very long conversation of a general

nature upon the course of my studies, and the present direction of my

reading, Dr. Cyril Jackson treated me just as he would have done his

equal in station and in age. Coming, at length, to the particular

purpose of my visit at this time to himself, he assumed a little more

of his official stateliness. He condescended to say that it would have

given him pleasure to reckon me amongst his flock; "But, sir," he said,

in a tone of some sharpness, "your guardians have acted improperly. It

was their duty to have given me at least one year's notice of their

intention to place you at Christ Church. At present I have not a dog-

kennel in my college untenanted." Upon this, I observed that nothing

remained for me to do but to apologize for having occupied so much of

his time; that, for myself, I now first heard of this preliminary

application; and that, as to my guardians, I was bound to acquit them

of all oversight in this instance, they being no parties to my present

scheme. The Dean expressed his astonishment at this statement. I, on my

part, was just then making my parting bows, and had reached the door,

when a gesture of the Dean's, courteously waving me back to the sofa I

had quitted, invited me to resume my explanations; and I had a

conviction at the moment that the interview would have terminated in

the Dean's suspending his standing rule in my favor. But, just at that

moment, the thundering heralds of the Dean's hall announced some man of

high rank: the sovereign of Christ Church seemed distressed for a

moment; but then recollecting himself, bowed in a way to indicate that

I was dismissed. And thus it happened that I did not become a member of

Christ Church.

A few days passed in thoughtless indecision. At the end of that time, a

trivial difficulty arose to settle my determination. I had brought

about fifty guineas to Oxford; but the expenses of an Oxford inn, with

almost daily entertainments to young friends, had made such inroads

upon this sum, that, after allowing for the contingencies incident to a

college initiation, enough would not remain to meet the usual demand

for what is called "caution money." This is a small sum, properly

enough demanded of every student, when matriculated, as a pledge for

meeting any loss from unsettled arrears, such as his sudden death or

his unannounced departure might else continually be inflicting upon his

college. By releasing the college, therefore, from all necessity for

degrading vigilance or persecution, this demand does, in effect,

operate beneficially to the feelings of all parties. In most colleges

it amounts to twenty-five pounds: in one only it was considerably less.

And this trifling consideration it was, concurring with a reputation

_at that time_ for relaxed discipline, which finally determined me

in preferring W--- College to all others. This college had the capital

disadvantage, in my eyes, that its chapel possessed no organ, and no

musical service. But any other choice would have driven me to an

instant call for more money--a measure which, as too flagrantly in

contradiction to the whole terms on which I had volunteered to

undertake an Oxford life, I could not find nerves to face.

At W---- College, therefore, I entered: and here arises the proper

occasion for stating the true costs of an Oxford education. First comes

the question of _lodging_. This item varies, as may be supposed;

but my own case will place on record the two extremes of cost in one

particular college, nowadays differing, I believe, from the general

standard. The first rooms assigned me, being small and ill-lighted, as

part of an old Gothic building, were charged at four guineas a year.

These I soon exchanged for others a little better, and for them I paid

six guineas. Finally, by privilege of seniority, I obtained a handsome

set of well-proportioned rooms, in a modern section of the college,

charged at ten guineas a year. This set was composed of three rooms;

namely, an airy bedroom, a study, and a spacious room for receiving

visitors. This range of accommodation is pretty general in Oxford, and,

upon the whole, may be taken perhaps as representing the average amount

of luxury in this respect, and at the average amount of cost. The

furniture and the fittings up of these rooms cost me about twenty-five

guineas; for the Oxford rule is, that if you take the rooms (which is

at your own option), in that case, you _third_ the furniture and

the embellishments--that is, you succeed to the total cost diminished

by one third. You pay, therefore, two guineas out of each three to your

_immediate_ predecessor. But, as he also may have succeeded to the

furniture upon the same terms, whenever there happens to have been a

rapid succession of occupants, the original cost to a remote

predecessor is sometimes brought down, by this process of diminution,

to a mere fraction of the true value; and yet no individual occupant

can complain of any heavy loss. Whilst upon this subject, I may observe

that, in the seventeenth century, in Milton's time, for example (about

1624), and for more than sixty years after that era, the practice of

_chumship_ prevailed: every set of chambers was possessed by two

cooccupants; they had generally the same bed-room, and a common study;

and they were called _chums_. This practice, once all but universal, is

now entirely extinct; and the extinction serves to mark the advance of

the country, not so much in luxury as in refinement.

The next item which I shall notice is that which in college bills is

expressed by the word _Tutorage_. This is the same in all colleges,

I believe, namely, ten guineas per annum. And this head suggests

an explanation which is most important to the reputation of Oxford,

and fitted to clear up a very extensive delusion. Some years ago,

a most elaborate statement was circulated of the number and costly

endowment of the Oxford professorships. Some thirty or more there were,

it was alleged, and five or six only which were not held as absolute

sinecures. Now, this is a charge which I am not here meaning to

discuss. Whether defensible or not, I do not now inquire. It is the

practical interpretation and construction of this charge which I here

wish to rectify. In most universities, except those of England, the

professors are the body on whom devolves the whole duty and burthen of

teaching; they compose the sole fountains of instruction; and if these

fountains fail, the fair inference is, that the one great purpose of

the institution is defeated. But this inference, valid for all other

places, is not so for Oxford and Cambridge. And here, again, the

difference arises out of the peculiar distribution of these bodies into

separate and independent colleges. Each college takes upon itself the

regular instruction of its separate inmates--of these and of no others;

and for this office it appoints, after careful selection, trial, and

probation, the best qualified amongst those of its senior members who

choose to undertake a trust of such heavy responsibility. These

officers are called Tutors; and they are connected by duties and by

accountability, not with the university at all, but with their own

private colleges. The professors, on the other hand, are _public_

functionaries, not connected (as respects the exercise of their duties)

with any college whatsoever--not even with their own--but altogether

and exclusively with the whole university. Besides the public tutors

appointed in each college, on the scale of one to each dozen or score

of students, there are also tutors strictly private, who attend any

students in search of special and extraordinary aid, on terms settled

privately by themselves. Of these persons, or their existence, the

college takes no cognizance; but between the two classes of tutors, the

most studious young men--those who would be most likely to avail

themselves of the lectures read by the professors--have their whole

time pretty severely occupied: and the inference from all this is, not

only that the course of Oxford education would suffer little if no

professors at all existed, but also that, if the existing professors

were _ex abundanti_ to volunteer the most exemplary spirit of

exertion, however much this spectacle of conscientious dealing might

edify the university, it would contribute but little to the promotion

of academic purposes. The establishment of professors is, in fact, a

thing of ornament and pomp. Elsewhere, they are the working servants;

but, in Oxford, the ministers corresponding to them bear another

name,--they are called _Tutors_. These are the working agents in the

Oxford system; and the professors, with salaries in many cases merely

nominal, are persons sequestered, and properly sequestered, to the

solitary cultivation and advancement of knowledge, which a different

order of men is appointed to communicate.

Here let us pause for one moment, to notice another peculiarity in the

Oxford system, upon the tendency of which I shall confidently make my

appeal to the good sense of all unprejudiced readers. I have said that

the _tutors_ of Oxford correspond to the _professors_ of

other universities. But this correspondence, which is absolute and

unquestionable as regards the point then at issue,--namely, where we

are to look for that limb of the establishment on which rests the main

teaching agency,--is liable to considerable qualification, when we

examine the mode of their teaching. In both cases, this is conveyed by

what is termed "lecturing;"--but what is the meaning of a lecture in

Oxford and elsewhere? Elsewhere, it means a solemn dissertation, read,

or sometimes histrionically declaimed, by the professor. In Oxford, it

means an exercise performed orally by the students, occasionally

assisted by the tutor, and subject, in its whole course, to his

corrections, and what may be called his _scholia_, or collateral

suggestions and improvements. Now, differ as men may as to other

features of the Oxford, compared with the hostile system, here I

conceive that there is no room for doubt or demur. An Oxford lecture

imposes a real, _bona fide_ task upon the student; it will not

suffer him to fall asleep, either literally or in the energies of his

understanding; it is a real drill, under the excitement, perhaps, of

personal competition, and under the review of a superior scholar. But,

in Germany, under the declamations of the professor, the young men are

often literally sleeping; nor is it easy to see how the attention can

be kept from wandering, on this plan, which subjects the auditor to no

risk of sudden question or personal appeal. As to the prizes given for

essays, etc., by the professors, these have the effect of drawing forth

latent talent, but they can yield no criterion of the attention paid to

the professor; not to say that the competition for these prizes is a

matter of choice. Sometimes it is true that examinations take place;

but the Oxford lecture is a daily examination; and, waiving _that_,

what chance is there (I would ask) for searching examinations, for

examinations conducted with the requisite _auctoritas_ (or weight of

influence derived from personal qualities), if--which may Heaven

prevent!--the German tenure of professorships were substituted for our

British one: that is, if for independent and liberal teachers were

substituted poor mercenary haberdashers of knowledge--cap in hand to

opulent students--servile to their caprices--and, at one blow,

degrading the science they profess, the teacher, and the pupil? Yet I

hear that such advice _was_ given to a Royal Commission, sent to

investigate one or more of the Scottish universities. In the German

universities, every professor holds his situation, not in his good

behavior, but on the capricious pleasure of the young men who resort to

his market. He opens a shop, in fact: others, without limit, generally

men of no credit or known respectability, are allowed to open rival

shops; and the result is, sometimes, that the whole kennel of scoundrel

professors ruin one another; each standing with his mouth open, to leap

at any bone thrown amongst them, from the table of the "Burschen;" all

hating, fighting, calumniating each other, until the land is sick of

its base knowledge-mongers, and would vomit the loathsome crew, were

any natural channel open to their instincts of abhorrence. The most

important of the Scottish professorships--those which are fundamentally

morticed to the moral institutions of the land--are upon the footing of

Oxford tutorships, as regards emoluments; that is, they are not

suffered to keep up a precarious mendicant existence, upon the alms of

the students, or upon their fickle admirations. It is made imperative

upon a candidate for admission into the ministry of the Scottish Kirk,

that he shall show a certificate of attendance through a given number

of seasons at given lectures.

The next item in the quarterly (or, technically, the _term_) bills

of Oxford is for servants. This, in my college, and, I believe, in all

others, amounted, nominally, to two guineas a year. That sum, however,

was paid to a principal servant, whom, perhaps, you seldom or never

saw; the actual attendance upon yourself being performed by one of his

deputies; and to this deputy--who is, in effect, a _factotum_,

combining in his single person all the functions of chambermaid, valet,

waiter at meals, and porter or errand-boy--by the custom of the place

and your own sense of propriety, you cannot but give something or other

in the shape of perquisites. I was told, on entering, that half a

guinea a quarter was the customary allowance,--the same sum, in fact,

as was levied by the college for his principal; but I gave mine a

guinea a quarter, thinking that little enough for the many services he

performed; and others, who were richer than myself, I dare say, often

gave much more. Yet, sometimes, it struck me, from the gratitude which

his looks testified, on my punctual payment of this guinea,--for it was

the only bill with regard to which I troubled myself to practise any

severe punctuality,--that perhaps some thoughtless young man might give

him less, or might even forget to give anything; and, at all events, I

have reason to believe that half that sum would have contented him.

These minutiae I record purposely; my immediate object being to give a

rigorous statement of the real expenses incident to an English

university education, partly as a guide to the calculations of parents,

and partly as an answer to the somewhat libellous exaggerations which

are current on this subject, in times like these, when even the truth

itself, and received in a spirit of candor the most indulgent, may be

all too little to defend these venerable seats of learning from the

ruin which seems brooding over them. Yet, no! Abominable is the

language of despair even in a desperate situation. And, therefore,

Oxford, ancient mother! and thou, Cambridge, twin-light of England! be

vigilant and erect, for the enemy stands at all your gates! Two

centuries almost have passed since the boar was within your vineyards,

laying waste and desolating your heritage. Yet that storm was not

final, nor that eclipse total. May this also prove but a trial and a

shadow of affliction! which affliction, may it prove to you, mighty

incorporations, what, sometimes, it is to us, poor, frail

_homunculi_--a process of purification, a solemn and oracular

warning! And, when that cloud is overpast, then, rise, ancient powers,

wiser and better--ready, like the _lampudæphoroi_ of old, to enter

upon a second _stadium_, and to transmit the sacred torch through

a second period of twice [Footnote: Oxford may confessedly claim a

duration of that extent; and the pretensions of Cambridge, in that

respect, if less aspiring, are, however, as I believe, less accurately

determined.] five hundred years. So prays a loyal _alumnus_, whose

presumption, if any be, in taking upon himself a monitory tone, is

privileged by zeal and filial anxiety.

To return, however, into the track from which I have digressed. The

reader will understand that any student is at liberty to have private

servants of his own, as many and of what denomination he pleases. This

point, as many others of a merely personal bearing, when they happen to

stand in no relation to public discipline, neither the university nor

the particular college of the student feels summoned or even authorized

to deal with. Neither, in fact, does any other university in Europe;

and why, then, notice the case? Simply thus: if the Oxford discipline,

in this particular chapter, has nothing special or peculiar about it,

yet the case to which it applies _has_, and is almost exclusively

found in our universities. On the continent it happens most rarely that

a student has any funds disposable for luxuries so eminently such as

grooms or footmen; but at Oxford and Cambridge the case occurs often

enough to attract notice from the least vigilant eye. And thus we find

set down to the credit account of other universities the non-existence

of luxury in this or other modes, whilst, meantime, it is well known to

the fair inquirer that each or all are indulgences, not at all or so

much as in idea proscribed by the sumptuary edicts of those

universities; but, simply, by the lower scale of their general

revenues. And this lower scale, it will be said--how do you account for

that? I answer, not so much by the general inferiority of continental

Europe to Great Britain in _diffusive_ wealth (though that argument

goes for something, it being notorious that, whilst immoderate

wealth, concentrated in a small number of hands, exists in various

continental states upon a larger scale than with us, moderately large

estates, on the other hand, are, with them, as one to two hundred, or

even two hundred and fifty, in comparison of ours), but chiefly upon

this fact, which is too much overlooked, that the foreign universities

are not peopled from the wealthiest classes, which are the class either

already noble, or wishing to become such. And why is that? Purely from

the vicious constitution of society on the continent, where all the

fountains of honor lie in the military profession or in the diplomatic.

We English, haters and revilers of ourselves beyond all precedent,

disparagers of our own eminent advantages beyond all sufferance of

honor or good sense, and daily playing into the hands of foreign

enemies, who hate us out of mere envy or shame, have amongst us some

hundreds of writers who will die or suffer martyrdom upon this

proposition--that aristocracy, and the spirit and prejudices of

aristocracy, are more operative (more effectually and more extensively

operative) amongst ourselves, than in any other known society of men.

Now, I, who believe all errors to arise in some narrow, partial, or

angular view of truth, am seldom disposed to meet any sincere

affirmation by a blank, unmodified denial. Knowing, therefore, that

some acute observers do really believe this doctrine as to the

aristocratic forces, and the way in which they mould English society, I

cannot but suppose that some symptoms do really exist of such a

phenomenon; and the only remark I shall here make on the case is this,

that, very often, where any force or influence reposes upon deep

realities, and upon undisturbed foundations, _there_ will be the

least heard of loquacious and noisy expressions of its power; which

expressions arise most, not where the current is most violent, but

where (being possibly the weakest) it is most fretted with resistance.

In England, the very reason why the aristocratic feeling makes itself

so sensibly felt and so distinctly an object of notice to the

censorious observer is, because it maintains a troubled existence

amongst counter and adverse influences, so many and so potent. This

might be illustrated abundantly. But, as respects the particular

question before me, it will be sufficient to say this: With us the

profession and exercise of knowledge, as a means of livelihood, is

honorable; on the continent it is not so. The knowledge, for instance,

which is embodied in the three learned professions, does, with us, lead

to distinction and civil importance; no man can pretend to deny this;

nor, by consequence, that the professors personally take rank with the

highest order of gentlemen. Are they not, I demand, everywhere with us

on the same footing, in point of rank and consideration, as those who

bear the king's commission in the army and navy? Can this be affirmed

of the continent, either generally, or, indeed, partially? I say,

_no_. Let us take Germany, as an illustration. Many towns (for

anything I know, all) present us with a regular bisection of the

resident _notables_, or wealthier class, into two distinct (often

hostile) coteries: one being composed of those who are "_noble_;"

the other, of families equally well educated and accomplished, but

_not_, in the continental sense, "noble." The meaning and value of

the word is so entirely misapprehended by the best English writers,

being, in fact, derived from our own way of applying it, that it

becomes important to ascertain its true value. A "nobility," which is

numerous enough to fill a separate ball-room in every sixth-rate town,

it needs no argument to show, cannot be a nobility in any English

sense. In fact, an _edelmann_ or nobleman, in the German sense, is

strictly what we mean by a _born gentleman_; with this one only

difference, that, whereas, with us, the rank which denominates a man

such passes off by shades so insensible, and almost infinite, into the

ranks below, that it becomes impossible to assign it any strict

demarkation or lines of separation; on the contrary, the continental

noble points to certain fixed barriers, in the shape of privileges,

which divide him, _per saltum_, from those who are below his own

order. But were it not for this one legal benefit of accurate

circumscription and slight favor, the continental noble, whether Baron

of Germany, Count of France, or Prince of Sicily and of Russia, is

simply on a level with the common landed _esquire_ of Britain, and

_not_ on a level in very numerous cases.

Such being the case, how paramount must be the spirit of aristocracy in

continental society! Our _haute noblesse_--our genuine nobility,

who are such in the general feeling of their compatriots--will do

_that_ which the phantom of nobility of the continent will not:

the spurious nobles of Germany will not mix, on equal terms, with their

untitled fellow-citizens, living in the same city and in the same style

as themselves; they will not meet them in the same ball or concert-

room. Our great territorial nobility, though sometimes forming

exclusive circles (but not, however, upon any principle of high birth),

do so daily. They mix as equal partakers in the same amusements of

races, balls, musical assemblies, with the baronets (or _elite_ of

the gentry); with the landed esquires (or middle gentry); with the

superior order of tradesmen (who, in Germany, are absolute ciphers, for

political weight, or social consideration, but, with us, constitute the

lower and broader stratum of the nobilitas, [Footnote: It may be

necessary to inform some readers that the word _noble_, by which

so large a system of imposition and fraud, as to the composition of

foreign society, has long been practised upon the credulity of the

British, corresponds to our word _gentlemanly_ (or, rather, to the

vulgar word _genteel_, if that word were ever used legally, or

_extra gradum_), not merely upon the argument of its _virtual_

and operative value in the general estimate of men (that is,

upon the argument that a count, baron, &c., does not, _qua_

such, command any deeper feeling of respect or homage than a British

esquire), but also upon the fact, that, originally, in all English

registers, as, for instance, in the Oxford matriculation registers, all

the upper gentry (knights, esquires, &c.) are technically designated by

the word _nobiles_.--_See Chambeilayuc_, &c.] or gentry). The

obscure baronage of Germany, it is undeniable, insist upon having "an

atmosphere of their own;" whilst the Howards, the Stanleys, the

Talbots, of England; the Hamiltons, the Douglases, the Gordons, of

Scotland, are content to acknowledge a sympathy with the liberal part

of their untitled countrymen, in that point which most searchingly

tries the principle of aristocratic pride, namely, in their pleasures.

To have the same pursuits of business with another, may be a result of

accident or position; to have the same pleasures, being a matter of

choice, argues a community of nature in the _moral_ sensibilities,

in that part of our constitution which differences one man from another

in the capacities of greatness and elevation. As with their amusements,

so with their graver employments; the same mutual repulsion continues

to divide the two orders through life.

The nobles either live in gloomy seclusion upon their private funds,

wherever the privilege of primogeniture has enabled them to do so; or,

having no funds at all (the case of ninety-nine in one hundred), they

go into the army; that profession, the profession of arms, being

regarded as the only one compatible with an _edelmann's_ pretensions.

Such was once the feeling in England; such is still the feeling

on the continent. It is a prejudice naturally clinging to a

semi-barbarous (because growing out of a barbarous) state, and, in its

degree, clinging to every stage of imperfect civilization; and, were

there no other argument, this would be a sufficient one, that England,

under free institutions, has outrun the continent, in real

civilization, by a century; a fact which is concealed by the forms of

luxurious refinement in a few exclusive classes, too often usurping the

name and honors of radical civilization.

From the super-appreciation of the military profession arises a

corresponding contempt of all other professions whatsoever _paid by

fellow-citizens_, and not by the king or the state. The clerical

profession is in the most abject degradation throughout Southern

Germany; and the reason why this forces itself less imperiously upon

the public notice is, that, in rural situations, from the absence of a

resident gentry (speaking generally), the pastor is brought into rare

collision with those who style themselves _noble_; whilst, in

towns, the clergy find people enough to countenance those who, being in

the same circumstances as to comfort and liberal education, are also

under the same ban of rejection from the "nobility," or born gentry.

The legal profession is equally degraded; even a barrister or advocate

holds a place in the public esteem little differing from that of an Old

Bailey attorney of the worst class. And this result is the less liable

to modification from personal qualities, inasmuch as there is no great

theatre (as with us) for individual display. Forensic eloquence is

unknown in Germany, as it is too generally on the continent, from the

defect of all popular or open judicatures. A similar defect of

deliberative assemblies--such, at least, as represent any popular

influences and debate with open doors--intercepts the very possibility

of senatorial eloquence. [Footnote: The subject is amusingly

illustrated by an anecdote of Goethe, recorded by himself in his

autobiography. Some physiognomist, or phrenologist, had found out, in

Goethe's structure of head, the sure promise of a great orator.

"Strange infatuation of nature!" observes Goethe, on this assurance,

"to endow me so richly and liberally for that particular destination

which only the institutions of my country render impossible. Music for

the deaf! Eloquence without an audience!"] That of the pulpit only

remains. But even of this--whether it be from want of the excitement

and contagious emulation from the other fields of oratory, or from the

peculiar genius of Lutheranism--no models have yet arisen that could,

for one moment, sustain a comparison with those of England or France.

The highest names in this department would not, to a foreign ear, carry

with them any of that significance or promise which surrounds the names

of Jeremy Taylor or Barrow, Bossuet or Bourdaloue, to those even who

have no personal acquaintance with their works. This absence of all

fields for gathering public distinctions cooperates, in a very powerful

way, with the contempt of the born gentry, to degrade these

professions; and this double agency is, a third time, reinforced by

those political arrangements which deny every form of state honor or

conspicuous promotion to the very highest description of excellence,

whether of the bar, the pulpit, or the civic council. Not "the fluent

Murray," or the accomplished Erskine, from the English bar--not

Pericles or Demosthenes, from the fierce democracies of Greece--not

Paul preaching at Athens--could snatch a wreath from public homage, nor

a distinction from the state, nor found an influence, nor leave behind

them an operative model, in Germany, as now constituted. Other walks of

emolument are still more despised. Alfieri, a continental "noble," that

is, a born gentleman, speaks of bankers as we in England should of a

Jewish usurer, or tricking money-changer. The liberal trades, such as

those which minister to literature or the fine arts, which, with us,

confer the station of gentleman upon those who exercise them, are, in

the estimate of a continental "noble," fitted to assign a certain rank

or place in the train and equipage of a gentleman, but not to entitle

their most eminent professors to sit down, except by sufferance, in his

presence. And, upon this point, let not the reader derive his notions

from the German books: the vast majority of German authors are not

"noble;" and, of those who are, nine tenths are liberal in this

respect, and speak the language of liberality, not by sympathy with

their own order, or as representing _their_ feelings, but in virtue

of democratic or revolutionary politics.

Such as the rank is, and the public estimation of the leading

professions, such is the natural condition of the universities which

rear them. The "nobles" going generally into the army, or leading lives

of indolence, the majority by far of those who resort to universities

do so as a means of future livelihood. Few seek an academic life in

Germany who have either money to throw away on superfluities and

external show, or who have such a rank to support as might stimulate

their pride to expenses beyond their means. Parsimony is, therefore, in

these places, the governing law; and pleasure, not less fervently wooed

than at Oxford or at Cambridge, putting off her robes of elegance and

ceremony, descends to grossness, and not seldom to abject brutality.

The sum of my argument is--that, because, in comparison of the army, no

other civil profession is, in itself, held of sufficient dignity; and

not less, perhaps, because, under governments essentially unpopular,

none of these professions has been so dignified artificially by the

state, or so attached to any ulterior promotion, either through the

state or in the state, as to meet the demands of aristocratic pride--

none of them is cultivated as a means of distinction, but originally as

a means of livelihood; that the universities, as the nurseries of these

unhonored professions, share naturally in _their_ degradation; and

that, from this double depreciation of the place and its final objects,

few or none resort thither who can be supposed to bring any extra funds

for supporting a system of luxury; that the general temperance, or

sobriety of demeanor, is far enough, however, from keeping pace with

the absence of costly show; and that, for this absence even, we are to

thank their poverty rather than their will. It is to the great honor,

in my opinion, of our own country, that those often resort to her

fountains who have no motive but that of disinterested reverence for

knowledge; seeking, as all men perceive, neither emolument directly

from university funds, nor knowledge as the means of emolument.

Doubtless, it is neither dishonorable, nor, on a large scale, possible

to be otherwise, that students should pursue their academic career

chiefly as ministerial to their capital object of a future livelihood.

But still I contend that it is for the interest of science and good

letters that a considerable body of volunteers should gather about

their banners, without pay or hopes of preferment. This takes place on

a larger scale at Oxford and Cambridge than elsewhere; and it is but a

trivial concession in return, on the part of the university, that she

should allow, even if she had the right to withhold, the privilege of

living within her walls as they would have lived at their fathers'

seats; with one only reserve, applied to all modes of expense that are,

in themselves, immoral excesses, or occasions of scandal, or of a

nature to interfere too much with the natural hours of study, or

specially fitted to tempt others of narrower means to ruinous

emulation.

Upon these principles, as it seems to me, the discipline of the

university is founded. The keeping of hunters, for example, is

unstatutable. Yet, on the other hand, it is felt to be inevitable that

young men of high spirit, familiar with this amusement, will find means

to pursue it in defiance of all the powers, however exerted, that can

properly be lodged in the hands of academic officers. The range of the

proctor's jurisdiction is limited by positive law; and what should

hinder a young man, bent upon his pleasure, from fixing the station of

his hunter a few miles out of Oxford, and riding to cover on a hack,

unamenable to any censure? For, surely, in this age, no man could

propose so absurd a thing as a general interdiction of riding. How, in

fact, does the university proceed? She discountenances the practice;

and, if forced upon her notice, she visits it with censure, and that

sort of punishment which lies within her means. But she takes no pains

to search out a trespass, which, by the mere act of seeking to evade

public display in the streets of the university, already tends to limit

itself; and which, besides, from its costliness, can never become a

prominent nuisance. This I mention as illustrating the spirit of her

legislation; and, even in this case, the reader must carry along with

him the peculiar distinction which I have pressed with regard to

English universities, in the existence of a large volunteer order of

students seeking only the liberalization, and not the profits, of

academic life. In arguing upon their case, it is not the fair logic to

say: These pursuits taint the decorum of the studious character; it is

not fair to calculate how much is lost to the man of letters by such

addiction to fox-hunting; but, on the contrary, what is gained to the

fox-hunter, who would, at any rate, be such, by so considerable a

homage paid to letters, and so inevitable a commerce with men of

learning. Anything whatsoever attained in this direction, is probably

so much more than would have been attained under a system of less

toleration. _Lucro ponamus_, we say, of the very least success in

such a case. But, in speaking of toleration as applied to acts or

habits positively against the statutes, I limit my meaning to those

which, in their own nature, are morally indifferent, and are

discountenanced simply as indirectly injurious, or as peculiarly open

to excess. Because, on graver offences (as gambling, &c.), the

malicious impeachers of Oxford must well have known that no toleration

whatsoever is practised or thought of. Once brought under the eye of

the university in a clear case and on clear evidence, it would be

punished in the most exemplary way open to a limited authority; by

_rustication_, at least--that is, banishment for a certain number

of terms, and consequent loss of these terms--supposing the utmost

palliation of circumstances; and, in an aggravated case, or in a second

offence, most certainly by final expulsion.

But it is no part of duty to serve the cause even of good morals by

impure means; and it is as difficult beforehand to prevent the

existence of vicious practices so long as men have, and ought to have,

the means of seclusion liable to no violation, as it is afterwards

difficult, without breach of honor, to obtain proof of their existence.

Gambling has been known to exist in some dissenting institutions; and,

in my opinion, with no blame to the presiding authorities. As to Oxford

in particular, no such habit was generally prevalent in my time; it is

not an English vice; nor did I ever hear of any great losses sustained

in this way. But, were it otherwise, I must hold, that, considering the

numbers, rank, and great opulence, of the students, such a habit would

impeach the spirit and temper of the age rather than the vigilance or

magisterial fidelity of the Oxford authorities. They are limited, like

other magistrates, by honor and circumstances, in a thousand ways; and

if a knot of students will choose to meet for purposes of gaming, they

must always have it in their power to baffle every honorable or

becoming attempt at detecting them. But upon this subject I shall make

two statements, which may have some effect in moderating the

uncharitable judgments upon Oxford discipline. The first respects the

age of those who are the objects of this discipline; on which point a

very grave error prevails. In the last Parliament, not once, but many

times over, Lord Brougham and others assumed that the students of

Oxford were chiefly _boys_; and this, not idly or casually, but

pointedly, and with a view to an ulterior argument; for instance, by

way of proving how little they were entitled to judge of those thirty-

nine articles to which their assent was demanded. Now, this argued a

very extraordinary ignorance; and the origin of the error showed the

levity in which their legislation was conducted. These noble lords had

drawn their ideas of a university exclusively from Glasgow. Here, it is

well known, and I mention it neither for praise nor blame, that

students are in the habit of coming at the early age of fourteen. These

may allowably be styled _boys_. But, with regard to Oxford,

eighteen is about the _earliest_ age at which young men begin

their residence: twenty and upwards is, therefore, the age of the

majority; that is, twenty is the _minimum_ of age for the vast

majority; as there must always be more men of three years' standing,

than of two or of one. Apply this fact to the question of discipline:

young men beyond twenty, generally,--that is to say, of the age which

qualifies men for seats in the national council,--can hardly, with

decency, either be called or treated as boys; and many things become

impossible as applied to _them_, which might be of easy imposition

upon an assemblage _really_ childish. In mere justice, therefore,

when speculating upon this whole subject of Oxford discipline, the

reader must carry along with him, at every step, the recollection of

that signal difference as to age, which I have now stated, between

Oxonians and those students whom the hostile party contemplate in their

arguments. [Footnote: Whilst I am writing, a debate of the present

Parliament, reported on Saturday, March 7, 1835, presents us with a

determinate repetition of the error which I have been exposing; and,

again, as in the last Parliament, this error is not _inert_, but

is used for a hostile (apparently a malicious) purpose; nay, which is

remarkable, it is the _sole_ basis upon which the following

argument reposes. Lord Radnor again assumes that the students of Oxford

are "boys;" he is again supported in this misrepresentation by Lord

Brougham; and again the misrepresentation is applied to a purpose of

assault upon the English universities, but especially upon Oxford. And

the nature of the assault does not allow any latitude in construing the

word _boys_, nor any room for evasion as respects the total

charge, except what goes the length of a total retraction. The charge

is, that, in a requisition made at the very threshold of academic life,

upon the under standing and the honor of the students, the university

burdens their consciences to an extent, which, in after life, when

reflection has enlightened them to the meaning of their engagements,

proves either a snare to those who trifle with their engagements, or an

insupportable burden to those who do not. For the inculpation of the

party imposing such oaths, it is essential that the party taking them

should be in a childish condition of the moral sense, and the sense of

responsibility; whereas, amongst the Oxonian _under_-graduates, I

will venture to say that the number is larger of those who rise above

than of those who fall below twenty; and, as to sixteen (assumed as the

representative age by Lord Radnor), in my time, I heard of only one

student, amongst, perhaps, sixteen hundred, who was so young. I grieve

to see that the learned prelate, who replied to the assailants, was so

much taken by surprise; the defence might have been made triumphant.

With regard to oaths incompatible with the spirit of modern manners,

and yet formally unrepealed--_that_ is a case of neglect and

indolent oversight. But the _gravamen_ of that reproach does not

press exclusively upon Oxford; all the ancient institutions of Europe

are tainted in the same way, more especially the monastic orders of the

Romish church.] Meantime, to show that, even under every obstacle

presented by this difference of age, the Oxford authorities do,

nevertheless, administer their discipline with fidelity, with

intrepidity, and with indifference as respects the high and the low, I

shall select from a crowd of similar recollections two anecdotes, which

are but trifles in themselves, and yet are not such to him who

recognizes them as expressions of a uniform system of dealing.

A great whig lord (Earl C----) happened (it may be ten years ago) to

present himself one day at Trinity (the leading college of Cambridge),

for the purpose of introducing Lord F----ch, his son, as a future

member of that splendid society. Possibly it mortified his aristocratic

feelings to hear the head of the college, even whilst welcoming the

young nobleman in courteous terms, yet suggesting, with some solemnity,

that, before taking any final resolution in the matter, his lordship

would do well to consider whether he were fully prepared to submit

himself to college discipline; for that, otherwise, it became his own

duty frankly to declare that the college would not look upon his

accession to their society as any advantage. This language arose out of

some recent experience of refractory and turbulent conduct upon the

part of various young men of rank; but it is very possible that the

noble earl, in his surprise at a salutation so uncourtly, might regard

it, in a tory mouth, as having some lurking reference to his own whig

politics. If so, he must have been still more surprised to hear of

another case, which would meet him before he left Cambridge, and which

involved some frank dealing as well as frank speaking, when a privilege

of exception might have been presumed, if tory politics, or services

the most memorable, could ever create such a privilege. The Duke of W--

--had two sons at Oxford. The affair is now long past; and it cannot

injure either of them to say, that one of the brothers trespassed

against the college discipline, in some way, which compelled (or was

thought to compel) the presiding authorities into a solemn notice of

his conduct. Expulsion appeared to be the appropriate penalty of his

offences: but, at this point, a just hesitation arose. Not in any

servile spirit, but under a proper feeling of consideration for so

eminent a public benefactor as this young nobleman's father, the rulers

paused--and at length signified to him that he was at liberty to

withdraw himself privately from the college, but also, and at the same

time, from the university. He did so; and his brother, conceiving him

to have been harshly treated, withdrew also; and both transferred

themselves to Cambridge. That could not be prevented: but there they

were received with marked reserve. One was _not_ received, I

believe, in a technical sense; and the other was received

conditionally; and such restrictions were imposed upon his future

conduct as served most amply, and in a case of great notoriety, to

vindicate the claims of discipline, and, in an extreme case, a case so

eminently an extreme one that none like it is ever likely to recur, to

proclaim the footing upon which the very highest rank is received at

the English universities. Is that footing peculiar _to them_? I

willingly believe that it is not; and, with respect to Edinburgh and

Glasgow, I am persuaded that their weight of dignity is quite

sufficient, and would be exerted to secure the same subordination from

men of rank, if circumstances should ever bring as large a number of

that class within their gates, and if their discipline were equally

applicable to the habits of students not domiciled within their walls.

But, as to the smaller institutions for education within the pale of

dissent, I feel warranted in asserting, from the spirit of the

anecdotes which have reached me, that they have not the

_auctoritas_ requisite for adequately maintaining their dignity.

So much for the aristocracy of our English universities: their glory

is, and the happiest application of their vast influence, that they

have the power to be republican, as respects their internal condition.

Literature, by substituting a different standard of rank, tends to

republican equality; and, as one instance of this, properly belonging

to the chapter of _servants_, which originally led to this

discussion, it ought to be known that the class of "servitors," once a

large body in Oxford, have gradually become practically extinct under

the growing liberality of the age. They carried in their academic dress

a mark of their inferiority; they waited at dinner on those of higher

rank, and performed other menial services, humiliating to themselves,

and latterly felt as no less humiliating to the general name and

interests of learning. The better taste, or rather the relaxing

pressure of aristocratic prejudice, arising from the vast diffusion of

trade and the higher branches of mechanic art, have gradually caused

these functions of the order (even where the law would not permit the

extinction of the order) to become obsolete. In my time, I was

acquainted with two servitors: but one of them was rapidly pushed

forward into a higher station; and the other complained of no

degradation, beyond the grievous one of exposing himself to the notice

of young women in the streets, with an untasselled cap; but this he

contrived to evade, by generally going abroad without his academic

dress. The _servitors_ of Oxford are the _sizars_ of Cambridge; and I

believe the same changes [Footnote: These changes have been

accomplished, according to my imperfect knowledge of the case, in

two ways: first, by dispensing with the services whenever that could be

done; and, secondly, by a wise discontinuance of the order itself in

those colleges which were left to their own choice in this matter.]

have taken place in both.

One only account with the college remains to be noticed; but this is

the main one. It is expressed in the bills by the word _battels_,

derived from the old monkish word _patella_ (or batella), a plate;

and it comprehends whatsoever is furnished for dinner and for supper,

including malt liquor, but not wine, as well as the materials for

breakfast, or for any casual refreshment to country visitors, excepting

only groceries. These, together with coals and fagots, candles, wine,

fruit, and other more trifling _extras_, which are matters of

personal choice, form so many private accounts against your name, and

are usually furnished by tradesmen living near to the college, and

sending their servants daily to receive orders. Supper, as a meal not

universally taken, in many colleges is served privately in the

student's own room; though some colleges still retain the ancient

custom of a public supper. But dinner is, in all colleges, a public

meal, taken in the refectory or "hall" of the society; which, with the

chapel and library, compose the essential public _suite_ belonging

to every college alike. No absence is allowed, except to the sick, or

to those who have formally applied for permission to give a dinner-

party. A fine is imposed on all other cases of absence. Wine is not

generally allowed in the public hall, except to the "high table," that

is, the table at which the fellows and some other privileged persons

are entitled to dine. The head of the college rarely dines in public.

The other tables, and, after dinner, the high table, usually adjourn to

their wine, either upon invitations to private parties, or to what are

called the "common rooms" of the several orders--graduates and

undergraduates, &c. The dinners are always plain, and without

pretensions--those, I mean, in the public hall; indeed, nothing

_can_ be plainer in most colleges--a simple choice between two or

three sorts of animal food, and the common vegetables. No fish, even as

a regular part of the fare; no soups, no game; nor, except on some very

rare festivity, did I ever see a variation from this plain fare at

Oxford. This, indeed, is proved sufficiently by the average amount of

the _battels_. Many men "battel" at the rate of a guinea a week: I

did so for years: that is, at the rate of three shillings a day for

everything connected with meals, excepting only tea, sugar, milk, and

wine. It is true that wealthier men, more expensive men, and more

careless men, often "battelled" much higher; but, if they persisted in

this excess, they incurred censures, more and more urgent, from the

head of the college.

Now, let us sum up; premising that the extreme duration of residence in

any college at Oxford amounts to something under thirty weeks. It is

possible to keep "short terms," as the phrase is, by a residence of

thirteen weeks, or ninety-one days; but, as this abridged residence is

not allowed, except in here and there a college, I shall assume--as

something beyond the strict _maximum_ of residence--thirty weeks

as my basis. The account will then stand thus:

1. Rooms,......................................... £10 10 0

2. Tutorage,................ ..................... 10 10 0

3. Servants (subject to the explanations made above),

say........................................... 5 5 0

4. Battels (allowing one shilling a day beyond what

I and others spent in much dearer times; that is,

allowing twenty-eight shillings weekly), for

thirty weeks,.................................. 40 4 0

--------

£66 9 0

This will be a liberal calculation for the college bill. What remains?

1. Candles, which the reader will best calculate upon the standard of

his own general usage in this particular. 2. Coals, which are

remarkably dear at Oxford--dearer, perhaps, than anywhere else in the

island; say, three times as dear as at Edinburgh. 3. Groceries. 4.

Wine. 5. Washing. This last article was, in my time, regulated by the

college, as there were certain privileged washer-women, between whom

and the students it was but fair that some proper authority should

interfere to prevent extortion, in return for the monopoly granted. Six

guineas was the regulated sum; but this paid for everything,--table-

linen, &c., as well as for wearing apparel; and it was understood to

cover the whole twenty-eight or thirty weeks. However, it was open to

every man to make his own arrangements, by insisting on a separate

charge for each separate article. All other expenses of a merely

personal nature, such as postage, public amusements, books, clothes,

&c., as they have no special connection with Oxford, but would,

probably, be balanced by corresponding, if not the very same, expenses

in any other place or situation, I do not calculate. What I have

specified are the expenses which would accrue to a student in

consequence of leaving his father's house. The rest would, in these

days, be the same, perhaps, everywhere. How much, then, shall we assume

as the total charge on account of Oxford? Candles, considering the

quantity of long days amongst the thirty weeks, may be had for one

shilling and sixpence a week; for few students--unless they have lived

in India, after which a physical change occurs in the sensibility of

the nostrils--are finical enough to burn wax-lights. This will amount

to two pounds, five shillings. Coals, say sixpence a day; for

threepence a day will amply feed one grate in Edinburgh; and there are

many weeks in the thirty which will demand no fire at all. Groceries

and wine, which are all that remain, I cannot calculate. But suppose we

allow for the first a shilling a day, which will be exactly ten guineas

for thirty weeks; and for the second, nothing at all. Then the extras,

in addition to the college bills, will stand thus:

Washing for thirty weeks, at the privileged rate, .. £6 6 0

Candles, ........................................... 2 5 0

Fire, .............................................. 5 5 0

Groceries, ......................................... 10 10 0

---------

Total, ..... £24 6 0

The college bills, therefore, will be sixty-six pounds, nine shillings;

the extras, not furnished by the college, will be about twenty-four

pounds, six shillings,--making a total amount of ninety pounds, fifteen

shillings. And for this sum, annually, a man may defray _every_

expense incident to an Oxford life, through a period of weeks (namely,

thirty) something more than he will be permitted to reside. It is true,

that, for the _first_ year, there will be, in addition to this,

his outfit: and for _every_ year there will be his journeys. There

will also be twenty-two weeks uncovered by this estimate; but for these

it is not my business to provide, who deal only with Oxford.

That this estimate is true, I know too feelingly. Would that it were

_not_! would that it were false! Were it so, I might the better

justify to myself that commerce with fraudulent Jews which led me so

early to commence the dilapidation of my small fortune. It _is_

true; and true for a period (1804-8) far dearer than this. And to any

man who questions its accuracy I address this particular request--that

he will lay his hand upon the special item which he disputes. I

anticipate that he will answer thus: "I dispute none: it is not by

positive things that your estimate errs, but by negations. It is the

absence of all allowance for indispensable items that vitiates the

calculation." Very well: but to this, as to other things, we may apply

the words of Dr. Johnson--"Sir, the reason I drink no wine, is because

I can practise abstinence, but not temperance." Yes: in all things,

abstinence is easier than temperance; for a little enjoyment has

invariably the effect of awaking the sense of enjoyment, irritating it,

and setting it on edge. I, therefore, recollecting my own case, have

allowed for _no_ wine-parties. Let our friend, the abstraction we

are speaking of, give breakfast-parties, if he chooses to give any; and

certainly to give none at all, unless he were dedicated to study, would

seem very churlish. Nobody can be less a friend than myself to monkish

and ascetic seclusion, unless it were for twenty-three hours out of the

twenty-four.

But, however this be settled, let no mistake be made; nor let that be

charged against the system which is due to the habits of individuals.

Early in the last century, Dr. Newton, the head of a college in Oxford,

wrote a large book against the Oxford system, as ruinously expensive.

But then, as now, the real expense was due to no cause over which the

colleges could exercise any effectual control. It is due exclusively to

the habits of social intercourse amongst the young men; from which

_he_ may abstain who chooses. But, for any academic authorities to

interfere by sumptuary laws with the private expenditure of grown men,

many of them, in a legal sense, _of age_, and all near it, must

appear romantic and extravagant, for this (or, indeed, any) stage of

society. A tutor being required, about 1810, to fix the amount of

allowance for a young man of small fortune, nearly related to myself,

pronounced three hundred and twenty pounds little enough. He had this

allowance, and was ruined in consequence of the credit which it

procured for him, and the society it connected him with. The majority

have two hundred pounds a year: but my estimate stands good, for all

that.

Having stated, generally, the expenses of the Oxford system, I am

bound, in candor, to mention one variety in the mode of carrying this

system into effect, open to every man's adoption, which confers certain

privileges, but, at the same time (by what exact mode, I know not),

considerably increases the cost, and in that degree disturbs my

calculation. The great body of undergraduates, or students, are divided

into two classes--_Commoners_, and _Gentlemen Commoners_. Perhaps

nineteen out of twenty belong to the former class; and it is

for that class, as having been my own, that I have made my estimate.

The other class of _Gentlemen Commoners_ (who, at Cambridge, bear

the name of _Fellow Commoners_) wear a peculiar dress, and have

some privileges which naturally imply some corresponding increase of

cost; but why this increase should go to the extent of doubling the

total expense, as it is generally thought to do, or how it _can_

go to that extent, I am unable to explain. The differences which attach

to the rank of "Gentlemen Commoners" are these: At his entrance he pays

double "caution money;" that is, whilst Commoners in general pay about

twenty-five guineas, he pays fifty; but this can occur only once; and,

besides, in strict point of right, this sum is only a deposit, and is

liable to be withdrawn on leaving the university, though it is commonly

enough finally presented to the college in the shape of plate. The next

difference is, that, by comparison with the Commoner, he wears a much

more costly dress. The Commoner's gown is made of what is called

_prince's stuff_; and, together with the cap, costs about five

guineas. But the Gentleman Commoner has two gowns--an undress for the

morning, and a full dress-gown for the evening; both are made of silk,

and the latter is very elaborately ornamented. The cap also is more

costly, being covered with velvet instead of cloth. At Cambridge,

again, the tassel is made of gold fringe or bullion, which, in Oxford,

is peculiar to the caps of noblemen; and there are many other varieties

in that university, where the dress for "pensioners" (that is, the

Oxford "Commoners") is specially varied in almost every college; the

object being, perhaps, to give a ready means to the academic officers

for ascertaining, at a glance, not merely the general fact that such or

such a delinquent is a gownsman (which is all that can be ascertained

at Oxford), but also the particular college to which he belongs.

Allowance being made for these two items of "dress" and "caution-

money," both of which apply only to the original outfit, I know of no

others in which the expenditure of a Gentleman Commoner ought to

exceed, or could with propriety exceed, those of a Commoner. He has,

indeed, a privilege as regards the choice of rooms; he chooses first,

and probably chooses those rooms which, being best, are dearest; that

is, they are on a level with the best; but usually there are many sets

almost equally good; and of these the majority will be occupied by

Commoners. So far, there is little opening for a difference. More

often, again, it will happen that a man of this aristocratic class

keeps a private servant; yet this happens also to Commoners, and is,

besides, no properly college expense. Tutorage is charged double to a

Gentleman Commoner--namely, twenty guineas a year: this is done upon a

fiction (as it sometimes turns out) of separate attention, or aid given

in a private way to his scholastic pursuits. Finally, there arises

naturally another and peculiar source of expense to the "Gentleman

Commoner," from a fact implied in his Cambridge designation of

"_Fellow_ Commoner," _commensalis_--namely, that he associates

at meals with the "fellows" and other authorities of the college.

Yet this again expresses rather the particular shape which his

expenditure assumes than any absolute increase in its amount. He

subscribes to a regular mess, and pays, therefore, whether present or

not; but so, in a partial sense, does the Commoner, by his forfeits for

"absent commons." He subscribes also to a regular fund for wine; and,

therefore, he does not enjoy that immunity from wine-drinking which is

open to the Commoner. Yet, again, as the Commoner does but rarely avail

himself of this immunity, as he drinks no less wine than the Gentleman

Commoner, and, generally speaking, wine not worse in quality, it is

difficult to see any ground for a regular assumption of higher

expenditure in the one class than the other. However, the universal

impression favors that assumption. All people believe that the rank of

Gentleman Commoner imposes an expensive burden, though few people ever

ask why. As a matter of fact, I believe it to be true that Gentlemen

Commoners spend more by a third, or a half, than any equal number of

Commoners, taken without selection. And the reason is obvious: those

who become Gentlemen Commoners are usually determined to that course by

the accident of having very large funds; they are eldest sons, or only

sons, or men already in possession of estates, or else (which is as

common a case as all the rest put together) they are the heirs of

newly-acquired wealth--sons of the _nouveaux riches_--a class

which often requires a generation or two to rub off the insolence of a

too conscious superiority. I have called them an "aristocratic" class;

but, in strictness, they are not such; they form a privileged class,

indeed, but their privileges are few and trifling, not to add that

these very privileges are connected with one or two burdens, more than

outweighing them in the estimate of many; and, upon the whole, the

chief distinction they enjoy is that of advertising themselves to the

public as men of great wealth, or great expectations; and, therefore,

as subjects peculiarly adapted to fraudulent attempts. Accordingly, it

is not found that the sons of the nobility are much inclined to enter

this order: these, if they happen to be the eldest sons of earls, or of

any peers above the rank of viscount, so as to enjoy a title themselves

by the courtesy of England, have special privileges in both

universities as to length of residence, degrees, &c.; and their rank is

ascertained by a special dress. These privileges it is not usual to

forego; though sometimes that happens, as, in my time, in the instance

of Lord George Grenville (now Lord Nugent); he neither entered at the

aristocratic college (Christ Church), nor wore the dress of a nobleman.

Generally, however, an elder son appears in his true character of

nobleman; but the younger sons rarely enter the class of Gentlemen

Commoners. They enter either as "Commoners," or under some of those

various designations ("scholars," "demies," "students," "junior

fellows") which imply that they stand upon the foundation of the

college to which they belong, and are aspirants for academic

emoluments.

Upon the whole, I am disposed to regard this order of Gentlemen

Commoners as a standing temptation held out by authority to expensive

habits, and a very unbecoming proclamation of honor paid to the

aristocracy of wealth. And I know that many thoughtful men regard it in

the same light with myself, and regret deeply that any such

distribution of ranks should be authorized, as a stain upon the

simplicity and general manliness of the English academic laws. It is an

open profession of homage and indulgence to wealth, _as_ wealth--

to wealth disconnected from everything that might ally it to the

ancestral honors and heraldries of the land. It is also an invitation,

or rather a challenge, to profuse expenditure. Regularly, and by law, a

Gentleman Commoner is liable to little heavier burdens than a Commoner;

but, to meet the expectations of those around him, and to act up to the

part he has assumed, he must spend more, and he must be more careless

in controlling his expenditure, than a moderate and prudent Commoner.

In every light, therefore, I condemn the institution, and give it up to

the censures of the judicious. So much in candor I concede. But, to

show equal candor on the other side, it must be remembered that this

institution descends to us from ancient times, when wealth was not so

often divided from territorial or civic honors, conferring a real

precedency.

III.

OXFORD.

There was one reason why I sought solitude at that early age, and

sought it in a morbid excess, which must naturally have conferred upon

my character some degree of that interest which belongs to all

extremes. My eye had been couched into a secondary power of vision, by

misery, by solitude, by sympathy with life in all its modes, by

experience too early won, and by the sense of danger critically

escaped. Suppose the case of a man suspended by some colossal arm over

an unfathomed abyss,--suspended, but finally and slowly withdrawn,--it

is probable that he would not smile for years. That was my case: for I

have not mentioned, in the "Opium Confessions," a thousandth part of

the sufferings I underwent in London and in Wales; partly because the

misery was too monotonous, and, in that respect, unfitted for

description; but, still more, because there is a mysterious sensibility

connected with real suffering which recoils from circumstantial

rehearsal or delincation, as from violation offered to something

sacred, and which is, or should be, dedicated to privacy. Grief does

not parade its pangs, nor the anguish of despairing hunger willingly

count again its groans or its humiliations. Hence it was that Ledyard,

the traveller, speaking of his Russian experiences, used to say that

some of his miseries were such, that he never _would_ reveal them.

Besides all which, I really was not at liberty to speak, without many

reserves, on this chapter of my life, at a period (1821) not twenty

years removed from the actual occurrences, unless I desired to court

the risk of crossing at every step the existing law of libel, so full

of snares and man-traps, to the careless equally with the conscientious

writer. This is a consideration which some of my critics have lost

sight of in a degree which surprises me. One, for example, puts it to

his readers whether any house such as I describe as the abode of my

money-lending friend could exist "_in_ Oxford-street;" and, at the

same time, he states, as circumstances drawn from my description, but,

in fact, pure coinages of his own, certain romantic impossibilities,

which, doubtless, could as little attach to a house in Oxford-street as

they could to a house in any other quarter of London. Meantime, I had

sufficiently indicated that, whatsoever street _was_ concerned in

that affair, Oxford-street was _not_; and it is remarkable enough,

as illustrating this amiable reviewer's veracity, that no one street in

London was absolutely excluded but one; and that one, Oxford-street.

For I happened to mention that, on such a day (my birth-day), I had

turned aside _from_ Oxford-street to look at the house in question.

I will now add that this house was in Greek-street: so much it

may be safe to say. But every candid reader will see that both

prudential restraints, and also disinterested regard to the feelings of

possibly amiable descendants from a vicious man, would operate with any

thoughtful writer, in such a case, to impose reserve upon his pen. Had

my guardians, had my money-lending friend of Jewry, and others

concerned in my memoirs, been so many shadows, bodiless abstractions,

and without earthly connections, I might readily have given my own

names to my own creations, and have treated them as unceremoniously as

I pleased. Not so under the real circumstances of the case. My chief

guardian, for instance, though obstinate to a degree which risked the

happiness and the life of his ward, was an upright man otherwise; and

his children are entitled to value his memory.

Again, my Greek-street _trapexitæs_, the "_foenerator Alpheus_,"

who delighted to reap where he had not sown, and too often (I fear)

allowed himself in practices which not impossibly have long

since been found to qualify him for distant climates and "Botanic"

regions,--even he, though I might truly describe him as a mere

highwayman, whenever he happened to be aware that I had received a

friendly loan, yet, like other highwaymen of repute, and "gentle

thieves," was not inexorable to the petitions of his victim: he would

sometimes toss back what was required for some instant necessity of the

road; and at _his_ breakfast-table it was, after all, as elsewhere

recorded, that I contrived to support life; barely, indeed, and most

slenderly, but still with the final result of escaping absolute

starvation. With that recollection before me, I could not allow myself

to probe his frailties too severely, had it even been certainly safe to

do so. But enough; the reader will understand that a year spent either

in the valleys of Wales, or upon the streets of London, a wanderer, too

often houseless in both situations, might naturally have peopled the

mind of one constitutionally disposed to solemn contemplations with

memorials of human sorrow and strife too profound to pass away for

years.

Thus, then, it was--past experience of a very peculiar kind, the

agitations of many lives crowded into the compass of a year or two, in

combination with a peculiar structure of mind--offered one explanation

of the very remarkable and unsocial habits which I adopted at college;

but there was another not less powerful, and not less unusual. In

stating this, I shall seem, to some persons, covertly designing an

affront to Oxford. But that is far from my intention. It is noways

peculiar to Oxford, but will, doubtless, be found in every university

throughout the world, that the younger part of the members--the

undergraduates, I mean, generally, whose chief business must have lain

amongst the great writers of Greece and Rome--cannot have found leisure

to cultivate extensively their own domestic literature. Not so much

that time will have been wanting; but that the whole energy of the

mind, and the main course of the subsidiary studies and researches,

will naturally have been directed to those difficult languages amongst

which lie their daily tasks. I make it no subject of complaint or

scorn, therefore, but simply state it as a fact, that few or none of

the Oxford undergraduates, with whom parity of standing threw me into

collision at my first outset, knew anything at all of English

literature. The _Spectator_ seemed to me the only English book of

a classical rank which they had read; and even this less for its

inimitable delicacy, humor, and refined pleasantry in dealing with

manners and characters, than for its insipid and meagre essays, ethical

or critical. This was no fault of theirs: they had been sent to the

book chiefly as a subject for Latin translations, or of other

exercises; and, in such a view, the vague generalities of superficial

morality were more useful and more manageable than sketches of manner

or character, steeped in national peculiarities. To translate the terms

of whig politics into classical Latin, would be as difficult as it

might be for a whig himself to give a consistent account of those

politics from the year 1688. Natural, however, and excusable, as this

ignorance might be, to myself it was intolerable and incomprehensible.

Already, at fifteen, I had made myself familiar with the great English

poets. About sixteen, or not long after, my interest in the story of

Chatterton had carried me over the whole ground of the Rowley

controversy; and that controversy, by a necessary consequence, had so

familiarized me with the "Black Letter," that I had begun to find an

unaffected pleasure in the ancient English metrical romances; and in

Chaucer, though acquainted as yet only with part of his works, I had

perceived and had felt profoundly those divine qualities, which, even

at this day, are so languidly acknowledged by his unjust countrymen.

With this knowledge, and this enthusiastic knowledge of the elder

poets--of those most remote from easy access--I could not well be a

stranger in other walks of our literature, more on a level with the

general taste, and nearer to modern diction, and, therefore, more

extensively multiplied by the press.

Yet, after all--as one proof how much more commanding is that part of a

literature which speaks to the elementary affections of men, than that

which is founded on the mutable aspects of manners--it is a fact that,

even in our elaborate system of society, where an undue value is

unavoidably given to the whole science of social intercourse, and a

continual irritation applied to the sensibilities which point in that

direction; still, under all these advantages, Pope himself is less

read, less quoted, less thought of, than the elder and graver section

of our literature. It is a great calamity for an author such as Pope,

that, generally speaking, it requires so much experience of life to

enjoy his peculiar felicities as must argue an age likely to have

impaired the general capacity for enjoyment. For my part, I had myself

a very slender acquaintance with this chapter of our literature; and

what little I had was generally, at that period of my life, as, with

most men, it continues to be to the end of life, a reflex knowledge,

acquired through those pleasant miscellanies, half gossip, half

criticism--such as Warton's Essay on Pope, Boswell's Johnson, Mathias'

Pursuits of Literature, and many scores beside of the same

indeterminate class; a class, however, which do a real service to

literature, by diffusing an indirect knowledge of fine writers in their

most effective passages, where else, in a direct shape, it would often

never extend.

In some parts, then, having even a profound knowledge of our

literature, in all parts having some, I felt it to be impossible that I

should familiarly associate with those who had none at all; not so much

as a mere historical knowledge of the literature in its capital names

and their chronological succession. Do I mention this in disparagement

of Oxford? By no means. Among the undergraduates of higher standing,

and occasionally, perhaps, of my own, I have since learned that many

might have been found eminently accomplished in this particular. But

seniors do not seek after juniors; they must be sought; and, with my

previous bias to solitude, a bias equally composed of impulses and

motives, I had no disposition to take trouble in seeking any man for

any purpose.

But, on this subject, a fact still remains to be told, of which I am

justly proud; and it will serve, beyond anything else that I can say,

to measure the degree of my intellectual development. On coming to

Oxford, I had taken up one position in advance of my age by full thirty

years: that appreciation of Wordsworth, which it has taken full thirty

years to establish amongst the public, I had already made, and had made

operative to my own intellectual culture in the same year when I

clandestinely quitted school. Already, in 1802, I had addressed a

letter of fervent admiration to Mr. Wordsworth. I did not send it until

the spring of 1803; and, from misdirection, it did not come into his

hands for some months. But I had an answer from Mr. Wordsworth before I

was eighteen; and that my letter was thought to express the homage of

an enlightened admirer, may be inferred from the fact that his answer

was long and full. On this anecdote I do not mean to dwell; but I

cannot allow the reader to overlook the circumstances of the case. At

this day, it is true, no journal can be taken up which does not

habitually speak of Mr. Wordsworth as of a great if not _the_

great poet of the age. Mr. Bulwer, living in the intensest pressure of

the world, and, though recoiling continually from the judgments of the

world, yet never in any violent degree, ascribes to Mr. Wordsworth (in

his _England and the English_, p. 308) "an influence of a more

noble and purely intellectual character, than _any_ writer of our

age or nation has exercised." Such is the opinion held of this great

poet in 1835; but what were those of 1805-15,--nay, of 1825? For twenty

years after the date of that letter to Mr. Wordsworth above referred

to, language was exhausted, ingenuity was put on the rack, in the

search after images and expressions vile enough--insolent enough--to

convey the unutterable contempt avowed for all that he had written, by

the fashionable critics. One critic--who still, I believe, edits a

rather popular journal, and who belongs to that class, feeble,

fluttering, ingenious, who make it their highest ambition not to lead,

but, with a slave's adulation, to obey and to follow all the caprices

of the public mind--described Mr. Wordsworth as resembling, in the

quality of his mind, an old nurse babbling in her paralytic dotage to

sucking babies. If this insult was peculiarly felt by Mr. Wordsworth,

it was on a consideration of the unusual imbecility of him who offered

it, and not because in itself it was baser or more insolent than the

language held by the majority of journalists who then echoed the public

voice. _Blackwood's Magazine_ (1817) first accustomed the public

ear to the language of admiration coupled with the name of Wordsworth.

This began with Professor Wilson; and well I remember--nay, the proofs

are still easy to hunt up--that, for eight or ten years, this

singularity of opinion, having no countenance from other journals, was

treated as a whim, a paradox, a bold extravagance, of the

_Blackwood_ critics. Mr. Wordsworth's neighbors in Westmoreland,

who had (generally speaking) a profound contempt for him, used to rebut

the testimony of _Blackwood_ by one constant reply--"Ay, _Blackwood_

praises Wordsworth, but who else praises him?" In short, up to 1820,

the name of Wordsworth was trampled under foot; from 1820 to 1830, it

was militant; from 1830 to 1835, it has been triumphant. In 1803, when

I entered at Oxford, that name was absolutely unknown; and the finger

of scorn, pointed at it in 1802 by the first or second number of the

_Edinburgh Review_, failed to reach its mark from absolute defect of

knowledge in the public mind. Some fifty beside myself knew who was

meant by "that poet who had cautioned his friend against growing

double," etc.; to all others it was a profound secret.

These things must be known and understood properly to value the

prophetic eye and the intrepidity of two persons, like Professor Wilson

and myself, who, in 1802-3, attached themselves to a banner not yet

raised and planted; who outran, in fact, their contemporaries by one

entire generation; and did _that_ about 1802 which the rest of the

world are doing in chorus about 1832.

Professor Wilson's period at Oxford exactly coincided with my own; yet,

in that large world, we never met. I know, therefore, but little of his

policy in regard to such opinions or feelings as tended to dissociate

him from the mass of his coevals. This only I know, that he lived as it

were in public; and must, therefore, I presume, have practised a

studied reserve as to his deepest admirations; and, perhaps, at that

day (1803-8) the occasions would be rare in which much dissimulation

would be needed. Until Lord Byron had begun to pilfer from Wordsworth

and to abuse him, allusions to Wordsworth were not frequent in

conversation; and it was chiefly on occasion of some question arising

about poetry in general, or about the poets of the day, that it became

difficult to dissemble. For my part, hating the necessity for

dissimulation as much as the dissimulation itself, I drew from this

peculiarity also of my own mind a fresh reinforcement of my other

motives for sequestering myself; and, for the first two years of my

residence in Oxford, I compute that I did not utter one hundred words.

I remember distinctly the first (which happened also to be the last)

conversation that I ever held with my tutor. It consisted of three

sentences, two of which fell to his share, one to mine. On a fine

morning, he met me in the Quadrangle, and, having then no guess of the

nature of my pretensions, he determined (I suppose) to probe them.

Accordingly, he asked me, "What I had been lately reading?" Now, the

fact was, that I, at that time immersed in metaphysics, had really been

reading and studying very closely the _Parmenides_, of which

obscure work some Oxford men, early in the last century, published a

separate edition. Yet, so profound was the benignity of my nature,

that, in those days, I could not bear to witness, far less to cause,

the least pain or mortification to any human being. I recoiled, indeed,

from the society of most men, but not with any feelings of dislike. On

the contrary, in order that I _might_ like all men, I wished to

associate with none. Now, then, to have mentioned the _Parmenides_

to one who, fifty thousand to one, was a perfect stranger to its whole

drift and purpose, looked too _méchant_, too like a trick of

malice, in an age when such reading was so very unusual. I felt that it

would be taken for an express stratagem for stopping my tutor's mouth.

All this passing rapidly through my mind, I replied, without

hesitation, that I had been reading Paley. My tutor's rejoinder I have

never forgotten: "Ah! an excellent author; excellent for his matter;

only you must be on your guard as to his style; he is very vicious

_there_." Such was the colloquy; we bowed, parted, and never more

(I apprehend) exchanged one word. Now, trivial and trite as this

comment on Paley may appear to the reader, it struck me forcibly that

more falsehood, or more absolute falsehood, or more direct inversion of

the truth, could not, by any artifice of ingenuity, have been crowded

into one short sentence. Paley, as a philosopher, is a jest, the

disgrace of the age; and, as regards the two universities, and the

enormous responsibility they undertake for the books which they

sanction by their official examinations for degrees, the name of Paley

is their great opprobrium. But, on the other hand, for style, Paley is

a master. Homely, racy, vernacular English, the rustic vigor of a style

which intentionally foregoes the graces of polish on the one hand, and

of scholastic precision on the other--that quality of merit has never

been attained in a degree so eminent. This first interchange of thought

upon a topic of literature did not tend to slacken my previous

disposition to retreat into solitude; a solitude, however, which at no

time was tainted with either the moroseness or the pride of a cynic.

Neither must the reader suppose that, even in that day, I belonged to

the party who disparage the classical writers, or the classical

training of the great English schools. The Greek drama I loved and

revered. But, to deal frankly, because it is a subject which I shall

hereafter bring before the public, I made great distinctions. I was not

that indiscriminate admirer of Greek and Roman literature, which those

too generally are who admire it at all. This protesting spirit, against

a false and blind idolatry, was with me, at that time, a matter of

enthusiasm--almost of bigotry. I was a bigot against bigots. Let us

take the Greek oratory, for example:--What section of the Greek

literature is more fanatically exalted, and studiously in depreciation

of our own? Let us judge of the sincerity at the base of these hollow

affectations, by the downright facts and the producible records. To

admire, in any sense which can give weight and value to your

admiration, presupposes, I presume, some acquaintance with its object.

As the earliest title to an opinion, one way or other, of the Greek

eloquence, we ought to have studied some of its most distinguished

artists; or, say _one_, at least; and this one, we may be sure,

will be, as it ought to be, Demosthenes. Now, it is a fact, that all

the copies of Demosthenes sold within the last hundred years would not

meet the demand of one considerable town, were that orator a subject of

study amongst even classical scholars. I doubt whether, at this day,

there exist twenty men in Europe who can be said to have even once read

Demosthenes; and, therefore, it was that, when Mr. Mitford, in his

"History of Greece," took a new view of this orator's political

administration--a view which lowered his character for integrity--he

found an unresisting acceder to his doctrines in a public having no

previous opinion upon the subject, and, therefore, open to any casual

impression of malice or rash judgment. Had there been any acquaintance

with the large remains which we still possess of this famous orator, no

such wrong could have been done. I, from my childhood, had been a

reader, nay, a student of Demosthenes; and, simply, for this reason,

that, having meditated profoundly on the true laws and philosophy of

diction, and of what is vaguely denominated style, and finding nothing

of any value in modern writers upon this subject, and not much as

regards the grounds and ultimate principles even in the ancient

rhetoricians, I have been reduced to collect my opinions from the great

artists and practitioners, rather than from the theorists; and, among

those artists, in the most plastic of languages, I hold Demosthenes to

have been the greatest.

The Greek is, beyond comparison, the most plastic of languages. It was

a material which bent to the purposes of him who used it beyond the

material of other languages; it was an instrument for a larger compass

of modulations; and it happens that the peculiar theme of an orator

imposes the very largest which is consistent with a prose diction. One

step further in passion, and the orator would become a poet. An orator

can exhaust the capacities of a language--an historian, never.

Moreover, the age of Demosthenes was, in my judgment, the age of

highest development for arts dependent upon social refinement. That

generation had fixed and ascertained the use of words; whereas, the

previous generation of Thucydides, Xenophon, Plato, &c., was a

transitional period: the language was still moving, and tending to a

meridian not yet attained; and the public eye had been directed

consciously upon language, as in and for itself an organ of

intellectual delight, for too short a time, to have mastered the whole

art of managing its resources. All these were reasons for studying

Demosthenes, as the one great model and standard of Attic prose; and,

studied him I _had_, more than any other prose writer whatever.

_Paripassu_, I had become sensible that others had _not_ studied

him. One monotonous song of applause I found raised on every side;

something about being "like a torrent, that carries everything

before it." This original image is all we get in the shape of

criticism; and never any attempt even at illustrating what is greatest

in him, or characterizing what is most peculiar. The same persons who

discovered that Lord Brougham was the modern Bacon have also

complimented him with the title of the English Demosthenes. Upon this

hint, Lord Brougham, in his address to the Glasgow students, has

deluged the great Athenian with wordy admiration. There is an obvious

prudence in lodging your praise upon an object from which you count

upon a rebound to yourself. But here, as everywhere else, you look in

vain for any marks or indications of a personal and _direct_

acquaintance with the original orations. The praise is built rather

upon the popular idea of Demosthenes, than upon the real Demosthenes.

And not only so, but even upon style itself, and upon the art of

composition _in abstracto_, Lord Brougham does not seem to have

formed any clear conceptions--principles he has none. Now, it is

useless to judge of an artist until you have some principles on the

art. The two capital secrets in the art of prose composition are these:

1st, The philosophy of transition and connection, or the art by which

one step in an evolution of thought is made to arise out of another:

all fluent and effective composition depends on the _connections_;

--2dly, The way in which sentences are made to modify each other; for,

the most powerful effects in written eloquence arise out of

this reverberation, as it were, from each other in a rapid

succession of sentences; and, because some limitation is necessary to

the length and complexity of sentences, in order to make this

interdependency felt, hence it is that the Germans have no eloquence.

The construction of German prose tends to such immoderate length of

sentences, that no effect of intermodification can ever be apparent.

Each sentence, stuffed with innumerable clauses of restriction, and

other parenthetical circumstances, becomes a separate section--an

independent whole. But, without insisting on Lord Brougham's

oversights, or errors of defect, I will digress a moment to one

positive caution of his, which will measure the value of his philosophy

on this subject. He lays it down for a rule of indefinite application,

that the Saxon part of our English idiom is to be favored at the

expense of that part which has so happily coalesced with the language

from the Latin or Greek. This fancy, often patronized by other writers,

and even acted upon, resembles that restraint which some metrical

writers have imposed upon themselves--of writing a long copy of verses,

from which some particular letter, or from each line of which some

different letter, should be carefully excluded. What followed? Was the

reader sensible, in the practical effect upon his ear, of any beauty

attained? By no means; all the difference, sensibly perceived, lay in

the occasional constraints and affectations to which the writer had

been driven by his self-imposed necessities. The same chimera exists in

Germany; and so much further is it carried, that one great puritan in

this heresy (Wolf) has published a vast dictionary, the rival of

Adelung's, for the purpose of expelling every word of foreign origin

and composition out of the language, by assigning some equivalent term

spun out from pure native Teutonic materials. _Bayonet_, for

example, is patriotically rejected, because a word may be readily

compounded tantamount to _musket-dirk_; and this sort of

composition thrives showily in the German, as a language running into

composition with a fusibility only surpassed by the Greek.

But what good purpose is attained by such caprices? In three sentences

the sum of the philosophy may be stated. It has been computed (see

_Duclos_) that the Italian opera has not above six hundred words

in its whole vocabulary: so narrow is the range of its emotions, and so

little are these emotions disposed to expand themselves into any

variety of thinking. The same remark applies to that class of simple,

household, homely passion, which belongs to the early ballad poetry.

Their passion is of a quality more venerable, it is true, and deeper

than that of the opera, because more permanent and coextensive with

human life; but it is not much wider in its sphere, nor more apt to

coalesce with contemplative or philosophic thinking. Pass from these

narrow fields of the intellect, where the relations of the objects are

so few and simple, and the whole prospect so bounded, to the

immeasurable and sea-like arena upon which Shakspeare careers--co-

infinite with life itself--yes, and with something more than life. Here

is the other pole, the opposite extreme. And what is the choice of

diction? What is the _lexis_? Is it Saxon exclusively, or is it

Saxon by preference? So far from that, the Latinity is intense--not,

indeed, in his construction, but in his choice of words; and so

continually are these Latin words used, with a critical respect to

their earliest (and, where _that_ happens to have existed, to

their unfigurative) meaning, that, upon this one argument I would rely

for upsetting the else impregnable thesis of Dr. Farmer as to

Shakspeare's learning. Nay, I will affirm that, out of this regard to

the Latin acceptation of Latin words, may be absolutely explained the

Shakspearian meaning of certain words, which has hitherto baffled all

his critics. For instance, the word _modern_, of which Dr. Johnson

professes himself unable to explain the _rationale_ or principle

regulating its Shakspearian use, though he felt its value, it is to be

deduced thus: First of all, change the pronunciation a little, by

substituting for the short _o_, as we pronounce it in _modern_, the

long _o_, as heard in _modish_, and you will then, perhaps, perceive

the process of analogy by which it passed into the Shakspearian use.

The _matter_ or substance of a thing is, usually, so much more

important than its fashion or _manner_, that we have hence adopted, as

one way for expressing what is important as opposed to what is trivial,

the word _material_. Now, by parity of reason, we are entitled to

invert this order, and to express what is unimportant by some word

indicating the mere fashion or external manner of an object as opposed

to its substance. This is effected by the word _modal_ or _modern_, as

the adjective from _modus_, a fashion or manner; and in that sense

Shakspeare employs the word. Thus, Cleopatra, undervaluing to Caesar's

agent the bijouterie which she has kept back from inventory, and which

her treacherous steward had betrayed, describes them as mere trifles

"Such gifts as we greet modern friends withal;"

where all commentators have _felt_ that modern must form the

position, mean, slight, arid inconsiderable, though perplexed to say

how it came by such a meaning. A _modern_ friend is, in the

Shakspearian sense, with relation to a real and serviceable friend,

that which the fashion of a thing is, by comparison with its substance.

But a still better illustration may be taken from a common line, quoted

every day, and ludicrously misinterpreted. In the famous picture of

life--"All the world's a stage"--the justice of the piece is described

as

"Full of wise saws and modern instances;"

which (_horrendum dictu!_) has been explained, and, I verily

believe, is generally understood to mean, _full of wise sayings and

modern illustrations_. The true meaning is--full of proverbial

maxims of conduct and of trivial arguments; that is, of petty

distinctions, or verbal disputes, such as never touch the point at

issue. The word _modern_ I have already deduced; the word

_instances_ is equally Latin, and equally used by Shakspeare in

its Latin sense. It is originally the word _instantia_, which, by

the monkish and scholastic writers, is uniformly used in the sense of

an argument, and originally of an argument urged in objection to some

previous argument. [Footnote: I cannot for a moment believe that the

original and most eloquent critic in _Blackwood_ is himself the

dupe of an argument, which he has alleged against this passage, under

too open a hatred of Shakspeare, as though it involved a contradiction

to common sense, by representing _all_ human beings of such an age

as school-boys, all of such another age as soldiers, of such another as

magistrates, &c. Evidently the logic of the famous passage is this

that whereas every age has its peculiar and appropriate temper, that

profession or employment is selected for the exemplification which

seems best fitted, in each case, to embody the characteristic or

predominating quality. Thus, because impetuosity, self-esteem, and

animal or irreflective courage, are qualities most intense in youth,

next it is considered in what profession those qualities find their

most unlimited range; and because that is obviously the military

profession, therefore it is that the soldier is selected as the

representative of young men. For the same reason, as best embodying the

peculiar temper of garrulous old age, the magistrate comes forward as

supporting the part of that age. Not that old men are not also

soldiers; but that the military profession, so far from strengthening,

moderates and tempers the characteristic temper of old age.]

I affirm, therefore, that Lord Brougham's counsel to the Glasgow

students is not only bad counsel,--and bad counsel for the result, as

well as for the grounds, which are either capricious or nugatory,--but

also that, in the exact proportion in which the range of thought

expands, it is an impossible counsel, an impracticable counsel--a

counsel having for its purpose to embarrass and lay the mind in

fetters, where even its utmost freedom and its largest resources will

be found all too little for the growing necessities of the intellect.

"Long-tailed words in _osity_ and _ation_!" What does _that_

describe? Exactly the Latin part of our language. Now, those

very terminations speak for themselves:--All high abstractions

end in _ation_; that is, they are Latin; and, just in proportion

as the abstracting power extends and widens, do the circles of thought

widen, and the horizon or boundary (contradicting its own Grecian name)

melts into the infinite. On this account it was that Coleridge

(_Biographia Literaria_) remarks on Wordsworth's philosophical

poetry, that, in proportion as it goes into the profound of passion and

of thought, do the words increase which are vulgarly called

"_dictionary_ words." Now, these words, these "dictionary" words,

what are they? Simply words of Latin or Greek origin: no other words,

no Saxon words, are ever called by illiterate persons dictionary words.

And these dictionary words are indispensable to a writer, not only in

the proportion by which he transcends other writers as to extent and as

to subtility of thinking, but also as to elevation and sublimity.

Milton was not an extensive or discursive thinker, as Shakspeare was;

for the motions of his mind were slow, solemn, sequacious, like those

of the planets; not agile and assimilative; not attracting all things

within its own sphere; not multiform: repulsion was the law of his

intellect--he moved in solitary grandeur. Yet, merely from this quality

of grandeur, unapproachable grandeur, his intellect demanded a larger

infusion of Latinity into his diction.

For the same reason (and, without such aids, he would have had no

proper element in which to move his wings) he enriched his diction with

Hellenisms and with Hebraisms; [Footnote: The diction of Milton is a

case absolutely unique in literature: of many writers it has been said,

but of him only with truth, that he created a peculiar language. The

value must be tried by the result, not by inferences from _a

priori_ principles; such inferences might lead us to anticipate an

unfortunate result; whereas, in fact, the diction of Milton is such

that no other could have supported his majestic style of thinking. The

final result is a _transcendant_ answer to all adverse criticism;

but still it is to be lamented that no man properly qualified has

undertaken the examination of the Miltonic diction as a separate

problem. Listen to a popular author of this day (Mr. Bulwer). He,

speaking on this subject, asserts (_England and the English_, p.

329), that, "_There is scarcely an English idiom which Milton has not

violated, or a foreign one which he has not borrowed._" Now, in

answer to this extravagant assertion, I will venture to say that the

two following are the sole cases of questionable idiom throughout

Milton:--1st, "Yet virgin of Proserpine from Jove;" and, in this case,

the same thing might be urged in apology which Aristotle urges in

another argument, namely, that _anonymon to pathos_, the case is

unprovided with _any_ suitable expression. How would it be

possible to convey in good English the circumstances here indicated--

namely, that Ceres was yet in those days of maiden innocence, when she

had borne no daughter to Jove? Second, I will cite a case which, so far

as I remember, has been noticed by no commentator; and, probably,

because they have failed to understand it. The case occurs in the

"Paradise Regained;" but where I do not at this moment remember. "Will

they _transact_ with God?" This is the passage; and a most flagrant

instance it offers of pure Latinism. _Transigere_, in the language

of the civil law, means to make a compromise; and the word

_transact_ is here used in that sense--a sense utterly unknown to

the English language. This is the worst case in Milton; and I do not

know that it has been ever noticed. Yet even here it may be doubted

whether Milton is not defensible; asking if they proposed to terminate

their difference with God after the fashion in use amongst courts of

law, he points properly enough to these worldly settlements by the

technical term which designated them. Thus, might a divine say: Will he

arrest the judgments of God by a _demurrer_? Thus, again, Hamlet

apostrophizes the lawyer's skull by the technical terms used in actions

for assault, &c. Besides, what proper term is there in English for

expressing a compromise? Edmund Burke, and other much older authors,

express the idea by the word _temperament_; but that word, though

a good one, was at one time considered an exotic term--equally a

Gallicism and a Latinism.] but never, as could be easy to show, without

a full justification in the result. Two things may be asserted of all

his exotic idioms--1st, That they express what could not have been

expressed by any native idiom; 2d, That they harmonize with the English

language, and give a coloring of the antique, but not any sense of

strangeness to the diction. Thus, in the double negative, "Nor did they

not perceive," &c., which is classed as a Hebraism--if any man fancy

that it expresses no more than the simple affirmative, he shows that he

does not understand its force; and, at the same time, it is a form of

thought so natural and universal, that I have heard English people,

under corresponding circumstances, spontaneously fall into it. In

short, whether a man differ from others by greater profundity or by

greater sublimity, and whether he write as a poet or as a philosopher,

in any case, he feels, in due proportion to the necessities of his

intellect, an increasing dependence upon the Latin section of the

English language; and the true reason why Lord Brougham failed to

perceive this, or found the Saxon equal to his wants, is one which I

shall not scruple to assign, inasmuch as it does not reflect personally

on Lord Brougham, or, at least, on him exclusively, but on the whole

body to which he belongs. That thing which he and they call by the

pompous name of statesmanship, but which is, in fact, _statescraft_--

the art of political intrigue--deals (like the opera) with ideas so few

in number, and so little adapted to associate themselves with other

ideas, that, possibly, in the one case equally as in the other, six

hundred words are sufficient to meet all their demands.

I have used my privilege of discursiveness to step aside from

Demosthenes to another subject, no otherwise connected with the Attic

orator than, first, by the common reference of both subjects to

rhetoric; but, secondly, by the accident of having been jointly

discussed by Lord Brougham in a paper, which (though now forgotten)

obtained, at the moment, most undue celebrity. For it is one of the

infirmities of the public mind with us, that whatever is said or done

by a public man, any opinion given by a member of Parliament, however

much out of his own proper jurisdiction and range of inquiry, commands

an attention not conceded even to those who speak under the known

privilege of professional knowledge. Thus, Cowper was not discovered to

be a poet worthy of any general notice, until Charles Fox, a most

slender critic, had vouchsafed to quote a few lines, and that, not so

much with a view to the poetry, as to its party application. But now,

returning to Demosthenes, I affirm that his case is the case of nearly

all the classical writers,--at least, of all the prose writers. It is,

I admit, an extreme one; that is, it is the general case in a more

intense degree. Raised almost to divine honors, never mentioned but

with affected rapture, the classics of Greece and Rome are seldom read,

most of them never; are they, indeed, the closet companions of any man?

Surely it is time that these follies were at an end; that our practice

were made to square a little better with our professions; and that our

pleasures were sincerely drawn from those sources in which we pretend

that they lie.

The Greek language, mastered in any eminent degree, is the very rarest

of all accomplishments, and precisely because it is unspeakably the

most difficult. Let not the reader dupe himself by popular cant. To be

an accomplished Grecian, demands a very peculiar quality of talent; and

it is almost inevitable that one who is such should be vain of a

distinction which represents so much labor and difficulty overcome. For

myself, having, as a school-boy, attained to a very unusual mastery

over this language, and (though as yet little familiar with the

elaborate science of Greek metre) moving through all the obstacles and

resistances of a Greek book with the same celerity and ease as through

those of the French and Latin, I had, in vanquishing the difficulties

of the language, lost the main stimulus to its cultivation. Still, I

read Greek daily; but any slight vanity which I might connect with a

power so rarely attained, and which, under ordinary circumstances, so

readily transmutes itself into a disproportionate admiration of the

author, in me was absolutely swallowed up in the tremendous hold taken

of my entire sensibilities at this time by our own literature. With

what fury would I often exclaim: He who loveth not his brother whom he

hath seen, how shall he love God whom he hath not seen? You, Mr. A, L,

M, O, you who care not for Milton, and value not the dark sublimities

which rest ultimately (as we all feel) upon dread realities, how can

you seriously thrill in sympathy with the spurious and fanciful

sublimities of the classical poetry--with the nod of the Olympian Jove,

or the seven-league strides of Neptune? Flying Childers had the most

prodigious stride of any horse on record; and at Newmarket that is

justly held to be a great merit; but it is hardly a qualification for a

Pantheon. The parting of Hector and Andromache--that is tender,

doubtless; but how many passages of far deeper, far diviner tenderness,

are to be found in Chaucer! Yet in these cases we give our antagonist

the benefit of an appeal to what is really best and most effective in

the ancient literature. For, if we should go to Pindar, and some other

great names, what a revelation of hypocrisy as respects the _fade_

enthusiasts for the Greek poetry!

Still, in the Greek tragedy, however otherwise embittered against

ancient literature by the dismal affectations current in the scenical

poetry, at least I felt the presence of a great and original power. It

might be a power inferior, upon the whole, to that which presides in

the English tragedy; I believed that it was; but it was equally

genuine, and appealed equally to real and deep sensibilities in our

nature. Yet, also, I felt that the two powers at work in the two forms

of the drama were essentially different; and without having read a line

of German at that time, or knowing of any such controversy, I began to

meditate on the elementary grounds of difference between the Pagan and

the Christian forms of poetry. The dispute has since been carried on

extensively in France, not less than in Germany, as between the

_classical_ and the _romantic_. But I will venture to assert

that not one step in advance has been made, up to this day. The shape

into which I threw the question it may be well to state; because I am

persuaded that out of that one idea, properly pursued, might be evolved

the whole separate characteristics of the Christian and the antique:

Why is it, I asked, that the Christian idea of _sin_ is an idea

utterly unknown to the Pagan mind? The Greeks and Romans had a clear

conception of a moral ideal, as we have; but this they estimated by a

reference to the will; and they called it virtue, and the antithesis

they called vice. The _lacheté_ or relaxed energy of the will, by

which it yielded to the seductions of sensual pleasure, that was vice;

and the braced-up tone by which it resisted these seductions was

virtue. But the idea of holiness, and the antithetic idea of sin, as a

violation of this awful and unimaginable sanctity, was so utterly

undeveloped in the Pagan mind, that no word exists in classical Greek

or classical Latin which approaches either pole of this synthesis;

neither the idea of _holiness_, nor of its correlate, _sin_,

could be so expressed in Latin as at once to satisfy Cicero and a

scientific Christian. Again (but this was some years after), I found

Schiller and Goethe applauding the better taste of the ancients, in

symbolizing the idea of death by a beautiful youth, with a torch

inverted, &c., as compared with the Christian types of a skeleton and

hour-glasses, &c. And much surprised I was to hear Mr. Coleridge

approving of this German sentiment. Yet, here again I felt the peculiar

genius of Christianity was covertly at work moving upon a different

road, and under opposite ideas, to a just result, in which the harsh

and austere expression yet pointed to a dark reality, whilst the

beautiful Greek adumbration was, in fact, a veil and a disguise. The

corruptions and the other "dishonors" of the grave, and whatsoever

composes the sting of death in the Christian view, is traced up to sin

as its ultimate cause. Hence, besides the expression of Christian

humility, in thus nakedly exhibiting the wrecks and ruins made by sin,

there is also a latent profession indicated of Christian hope. For the

Christian contemplates steadfastly, though with trembling awe, the

lowest point of his descent; since, for him, that point, the last of

his fall, is also the first of his reäscent, and serves, besides, as an

exponent of its infinity; the infinite depth becoming, in the rebound,

a measure of the infinite reäscent. Whereas, on the contrary, with the

gloomy uncertainties of a Pagan on the question of his final

restoration, and also (which must not be overlooked) with his utter

perplexity as to the nature of his restoration, if any were by accident

in reserve, whether in a condition tending downwards or upwards, it was

the natural resource to consult the general feeling of anxiety and

distrust, by throwing a thick curtain and a veil of beauty over the

whole too painful subject. To place the horrors in high relief, could

here have answered no purpose but that of wanton cruelty; whereas, with

the Christian hopes, the very saddest memorials of the havocs made by

death are antagonist prefigurations of great victories in the rear.

These speculations, at that time, I pursued earnestly; and I then

believed myself, as I yet do, to have ascertained the two great and

opposite laws under which the Grecian and the English tragedy has each

separately developed itself. Whether wrong or right in that belief,

sure I am that those in Germany who have treated the case of classical

and romantic are not entitled to credit for any discovery at all. The

Schlegels, who were the hollowest of men, the windiest and wordiest (at

least, Frederic was so), pointed to the distinction; barely indicated

it; and that was already some service done, because a presumption arose

that the antique and the modern literatures, having clearly some

essential differences, might, perhaps, rest on foundations originally

distinct, and obey different laws. And hence it occurred that many

disputes, as about the unities, etc., might originate in a confusion of

these laws. This checks the presumption of the shallow criticism, and

points to deeper investigations. Beyond this, neither the German nor

the French disputers on the subject have talked to any profitable

purpose.

I have mentioned Paley as accidentally connected with my _début_

in literary conversation; and I have taken occasion to say how much I

admired his style and its unstudied graces, how profoundly I despised

his philosophy. I shall here say a word or two more on that subject. As

respects his style, though secretly despising the opinion avowed by my

tutor (which was, however, a natural opinion for a stiff lover of the

artificial and the pompous), I would just as unwillingly be supposed to

adopt the extravagant opinions, in the other extreme, of Dr. Parr and

Mr. Coleridge. These two gentlemen, who privately hated Paley, and,

perhaps, traduced him, have hung like bees over one particular

paragraph in his Evidences, as though it were a flower transplanted

from Hymettus. Dr. Parr pronounced it the finest sentence in the

English language. It is a period (that is, a cluster of sentences)

moderately well, but not _too_ well constructed, as the German

nurses are accustomed to say. Its felicity depends on a trick easily

imitated--on a balance happily placed (namely, "_in which the wisest

of mankind would rejoice to find an answer to their doubts, and rest to

their inquiries_"). As a _bravura_, or _tour de force_, in

the dazzling fence of rhetoric, it is surpassed by many hundreds of

passages which might be produced from rhetoricians; or, to confine

myself to Paley's contemporaries, it is very far surpassed by a

particular passage in Burke's letter upon the Duke of Bedford's base

attack upon him in the House of Lords; which passage I shall elsewhere

produce, because I happen to know, on the authority of Burke's

executors, that Burke himself considered it the finest period which he

had ever written. At present, I will only make one remark, namely, that

it is always injudicious, in the highest degree, to cite for admiration

that which is not a _representative_ specimen of the author's

manner. In reading Lucian, I once stumbled on a passage of German

pathos, and of German effect. Would it have been wise, or would it have

been intellectually just, to quote this as the text of an eulogium on

Lucian? What false criticism it would have suggested to every reader!

what false anticipations! To quote a formal and periodic pile of

sentences, was to give the feeling that Paley was what the regular

rhetorical artists designate as a periodic writer, when, in fact, no

one conceivable character of style more pointedly contradicted the true

description of his merits.

But, leaving the style of Paley, I must confess that I agree with Mr.

Bulwer (_England and the English_) in thinking it shocking and

almost damnatory to an English university, the great well-heads of

creeds, moral and evangelical, that authors such in respect of doctrine

as Paley and Locke should hold that high and influential station as

teachers, or rather oracles of truth, which has been conceded to them.

As to Locke, I, when a boy, had made a discovery of one blunder full of

laughter and of fun, which, had it been published and explained in

Locke's lifetime, would have tainted his whole philosophy with

suspicion. It relates to the Aristotelian doctrine of syllogism, which

Locke undertook to ridicule. Now, a flaw, a hideous flaw, in the

_soi-disant_ detecter of flaws, a ridicule in the exposer of the

ridiculous--_that_ is fatal; and I am surprised that Lee, who

wrote a folio against Locke in his lifetime, and other examiners,

should have failed in detecting this. I shall expose it elsewhere; and,

perhaps, one or two other exposures of the same kind will give an

impetus to the descent of this falling philosophy. With respect to

Paley, and the naked _prudentialism_ of his system, it is true

that in a longish note Paley disclaims that consequence. But to this we

may reply, with Cicero, _Non quoero quid neget Epicurus, sed quid

congruenter neget_. Meantime, waiving all this as too notorious, and

too frequently denounced, I wish to recur to this trite subject, by way

of stating an objection made to the Paleyan morality in my seventeenth

year, and which I have never since seen reason to withdraw. It is

this:--I affirm that the whole work, from first to last, proceeds upon

that sort of error which the logicians call _ignoratio elenchi_,

that is, ignorance of the very question concerned--of the point at

issue. For, mark, in the very vestibule of ethics, two questions

arise--two different and disconnected questions, A and B; and Paley has

answered the wrong one. Thinking that he was answering A, and meaning

to answer A, he has, in fact, answered B. One question arises thus:

Justice is a virtue; temperance is a virtue; and so forth. Now, what is

the common principle which ranks these several species under the same

genus? What, in the language of logicians, is the common differential

principle which determines these various aspects of moral obligation to

a common genius? Another question, and a more interesting question to

men in general, is this,--What is the motive to virtue? By what

impulse, law, or motive, am I impelled to be virtuous rather than

vicious? Whence is the motive derived which should impel me to one line

of conduct in preference to the other? This, which is a practical

question, and, therefore, more interesting than the other, which is a

pure question of speculation, was that which Paley believed himself to

be answering. And his answer was,--That utility, a perception of the

resulting benefit, was the true determining motive. Meantime, it was

objected that often the most obvious results from a virtuous action

were far otherwise than beneficial. Upon which, Paley, in the long note

referred to above, distinguished thus: That whereas actions have many

results, some proximate, some remote, just as a stone thrown into the

water produces many concentric circles, be it known that he, Dr. Paley,

in what he says of utility, contemplates only the final result, the

very outermost circle; inasmuch as he acknowledges a possibility that

the first, second, third, including the penultimate circle, may all

happen to clash with utility; but then, says he, the outermost circle

of all will never fail to coincide with the absolute maximum of

utility. Hence, in the first place, it appears that you cannot apply

this test of utility in a practical sense; you cannot say, This is

useful, _ergo_, it is virtuous; but, in the inverse order, you

must say, This is virtuous, _ergo_, it is useful. You do not rely

on its usefulness to satisfy yourself of its being virtuous; but, on

the contrary, you rely on its virtuousness, previously ascertained, in

order to satisfy yourself of its usefulness. And thus the whole

practical value of this test disappears, though in that view it was

first introduced; and a vicious circle arises in the argument; as you

must have ascertained the virtuousness of an act, in order to apply the

test of its being virtuous. But, _secondly_, it now comes out that

Paley was answering a very different question from that which he

supposed himself answering. Not any practical question as to the motive

or impelling force in being virtuous, rather than vicious,--that is, to

the _sanctions_ of virtue,--but a purely speculative question, as

to the issue of virtue, or the common _vinculum_ amongst the

several modes or species of virtue (justice, temperance, etc.)--this

was the real question which he was answering. I have often remarked

that the largest and most subtle source of error in philosophic

speculations has been the confounding of the two great principles so

much insisted on by the Leibnitzians, namely, the _ratio

cognoscendi_ and the _ratio essendi_. Paley believed himself to

be assigning--it was his full purpose to assign--the _ratio

cognoscendi_; but, instead of that, unconsciously and surreptitiously,

he has actually assigned the _ratio essendi_; and, after all, a false

and imaginary _ratio essendi_.

THE PAGAN ORACLES

It is remarkable--and, without a previous explanation, it might seem

paradoxical to say it--that oftentimes under a continual accession of

light important subjects grow more and more enigmatical. In times when

nothing was explained, the student, torpid as his teacher, saw nothing

which called for explanation--all appeared one monotonous blank. But no

sooner had an early twilight begun to solicit the creative faculties of

the eye, than many dusky objects, with outlines imperfectly defined,

began to converge the eye, and to strengthen the nascent interest of

the spectator. It is true that light, in its final plenitude, is

calculated to disperse all darkness. But this effect belongs to its

consummation. In its earlier and _struggling_ states, light does

but reveal darkness. It makes the darkness palpable and "visible." Of

which we may see a sensible illustration in a gloomy glass-house, where

the sullen lustre from the furnace does but mass and accumulate the

thick darkness in the rear upon which the moving figures are relieved.

Or we may see an intellectual illustration in the mind of the savage,

on whose blank surface there exists no doubt or perplexity at all, none

of the pains connected with ignorance; he is conscious of no darkness,

simply because for _him_ there exists no visual ray of speculation--no

vestige of prelusive light.

Similar, and continually more similar, has been the condition of

ancient history. Once yielding a mere barren crop of facts and dates,

slowly it has been kindling of late years into life and deep interest

under superior treatment. And hitherto, as the light has advanced,

_pari passu_ have the masses of darkness strengthened. Every

question solved has been the parent of three new questions unmasked.

And the power of breathing life into dry bones has but seemed to

multiply the skeletons and lifeless remains; for the very natural

reason--that these dry bones formerly (whilst viewed as incapable of

revivification) had seemed less numerous, because everywhere confounded

to the eye with stocks and stones, so long as there was no motive of

hope for marking the distinction between them.

Amongst all the illustrations which might illuminate this truth, none

is so instructive as the large question of PAGAN ORACLES. Every part,

indeed, of the Pagan religion, the course, geographically or

ethnographically, of its traditions, the vast labyrinth of its

mythology, the deductions of its contradictory genealogies, the

disputed meaning of its many secret "mysteries" [_teletai_--

symbolic rites or initiations], all these have been submitted of late

years to the scrutiny of glasses more powerful, applied under more

combined arrangements, and directed according to new principles more

comprehensively framed. We cannot in sincerity affirm--always with

immediate advantage. But even where the individual effort may have been

a failure as regarded the immediate object, rarely, indeed, it has

happened but that much indirect illumination has resulted--which,

afterwards entering into combination with other scattered currents of

light, has issued in discoveries of value; although, perhaps, any one

contribution, taken separately, had been, and would have remained,

inoperative. Much has been accomplished, chiefly of late years; and,

confining our view to ancient history, almost exclusively amongst the

Germans--by the Savignys, the Niebuhrs, the Otfried Muellers. And, if

that _much_ has left still more to do, it has also brought the

means of working upon a scale of far accelerated speed.

The books now existing upon the ancient oracles, above all, upon the

Greek oracles, amount to a small library. The facts have been collected

from all quarters,--examined, sifted, winnowed. Theories have been

raised upon these facts under every angle of aspect; and yet, after

all, we profess ourselves to be dissatisfied. Amongst much that is

sagacious, we feel and we resent with disgust a taint of falsehood

diffused over these recent speculations from vulgar and even

counterfeit incredulity; the one gross vice of German philosophy, not

less determinate or less misleading than that vice which, heretofore,

through many centuries, had impoverished this subject, and had stopped

its discussion under the anile superstition of the ecclesiastical

fathers.

These fathers, both Greek and Latin, had the ill fortune to be

extravagantly esteemed by the church of Rome; whence, under a natural

reaction, they were systematically depreciated by the great leaders of

the Protestant Reformation. And yet hardly in a corresponding degree.

For there was, after all, even among the reformers, a deep-seated

prejudice in behalf of all that was "primitive" in Christianity; under

which term, by some confusion of ideas, the fathers often benefited.

Primitive Christianity was reasonably venerated; and, on this argument,

that, for the first three centuries, it was necessarily more sincere.

We do not think so much of that sincerity which affronted the fear of

persecution; because, after all, the searching persecutions were rare

and intermitting, and not, perhaps, in any case, so fiery as they have

been represented. We think more of that gentle but insidious

persecution which lay in the solicitations of besieging friends, and

more still of the continual temptations which haunted the irresolute

Christian in the fascinations of the public amusements. The theatre,

the circus, and, far beyond both, the cruel amphitheatre, constituted,

for the ancient world, a passionate enjoyment, that by many authors,

and especially through one period of time, is described as going to the

verge of frenzy. And we, in modern times, are far too little aware in

what degree these great carnivals, together with another attraction of

great cities, the pomps and festivals of the Pagan worship, broke the

monotony of domestic life, which, for the old world, was even more

oppressive than it is for us. In all principal cities, so as to be

within the reach of almost all provincial inhabitants, there was a

hippodrome, often uniting the functions of the circus and the

amphitheatre; and there was a theatre. From all such pleasures the

Christian was sternly excluded by his very profession of faith. From

the festivals of the Pagan religion his exclusion was even more

absolute; against them he was a sworn militant protester from the hour

of his baptism. And when these modes of pleasurable relaxation had been

subtracted from ancient life, what could remain? Even less, perhaps,

than most readers have been led to consider. For the ancients had no

such power of extensive locomotion, of refreshment for their wearied

minds, by travelling and change of scene, as we children of modern

civilization possess. No ships had then been fitted up for passengers,

nor public carriages established, nor roads opened extensively, nor

hotels so much as imagined hypothetically; because the relation of

_xenia_, or the obligation to reciprocal hospitality, and latterly

the Roman relation of patron and client, had stifled the first motions

of enterprise of the ancients; in fact, no man travelled but the

soldier, and the man of political authority. Consequently, in

sacrificing public amusements, the Christians sacrificed _all_

pleasure whatsoever that was not rigorously domestic; whilst in facing

the contingencies of persecutions that might arise under the rapid

succession of changing emperors, they faced a perpetual _anxiety_

more trying to the fortitude than any fixed and measurable evil. Here,

certainly, we have a guarantee for the deep faithfulness of early

Christians, such as never can exist for more mixed bodies of

professors, subject to no searching trials.

Better the primitive Christians were (by no means individually better,

but better on the total body), yet they were not in any intellectual

sense wiser. Unquestionably the elder Christians participated in the

local follies, prejudices, superstitions, of their several provinces

and cities, except where any of these happened to be too conspicuously

at war with the spirit of love or the spirit of purity which exhaled at

every point from the Christian faith; and, in all intellectual

features, as were the Christians generally, such were the fathers.

Amongst the Greek fathers, one might be unusually learned, as Clement

of Alexandria; and another might be reputed unusually eloquent, as

Gregory Nazianzen, or Basil. Amongst the Latin fathers, one might be a

man of admirable genius, as far beyond the poor, vaunted Rousseau in

the impassioned grandeur of his thoughts, as he was in truth and purity

of heart; we speak of St. Augustine (usually called St. Austin), and

many might be distinguished by various literary merits. But could these

advantages anticipate a higher civilization? Most unquestionably some

of the fathers were the _élite_ of their own age, but not in

advance of their age. They, like all their contemporaries, were

besieged by errors, ancient, inveterate, traditional; and accidentally,

from one cause special to themselves, they were not merely liable to

error, but usually prone to error. This cause lay in the _polemic_

form which so often they found a necessity, or a convenience, or a

temptation for assuming, as teachers or defenders of the truth.

He who reveals a body of awful truth to a candid and willing auditory

is content with the grand simplicities of truth in the quality of his

proofs. And truth, where it happens to be of a high order, is generally

its own witness to all who approach it in the spirit of childlike

docility. But far different is the position of that teacher who

addresses an audience composed in various proportions of sceptical

inquirers, obstinate opponents, and malignant scoffers. Less than an

apostle is unequal to the suppression of all human reactions incident

to wounded sensibilities. Scorn is too naturally met by retorted scorn:

malignity in the Pagan, which characterized all the known cases of

signal opposition to Christianity, could not but hurry many good men

into a vindictive pursuit of victory. Generally, where truth is

communicated _polemically_ (this is, not as it exists in its own

inner simplicity, but as it exists in external relation to error), the

temptation is excessive to use those arguments which will tell at the

moment upon the crowd of bystanders, by preference to those which will

approve themselves ultimately to enlightened disciples. Hence it is,

that, like the professional rhetoricians of Athens, not seldom the

Christian fathers, when urgently pressed by an antagonist equally

mendacious and ignorant, could not resist the human instinct for

employing arguments such as would baffle and confound the unprincipled

opponent, rather than such as would satisfy the mature Christian. If a

man denied himself all specious arguments, and all artifices of

dialectic subtlety, he must renounce the hopes of a _present_

triumph; for the light of absolute truth on moral or on spiritual

themes is too dazzling to be sustained by the diseased optics of those

habituated to darkness. And hence we explain not only the many gross

delusions of the fathers, their sophisms, their errors of fact and

chronology, their attempts to build great truths upon fantastic

etymologies, or upon popular conceits in science that have long since

exploded, but also their occasional unchristian tempers. To contend

with an unprincipled and malicious liar, such as Julian the Apostate,

in its original sense the first deliberate _miscreant_, offered a

dreadful snare to any man's charity. And he must be a furious bigot who

will justify the rancorous lampoons of Gregory Nazianzen. Are we, then,

angry on behalf of Julian? So far as _he_ was interested, not for

a moment would we have suspended the descending scourge. Cut him to the

bone, we should have exclaimed at the time! Lay the knout into every

"raw" that can be found! For we are of opinion that Julian's duplicity

is not yet adequately understood. But what was right as regarded the

claims of the criminal, was _not_ right as regarded the duties of

his opponent. Even in this mischievous renegade, trampling with his

orangoutang hoofs the holiest of truths, a Christian bishop ought still

to have respected his sovereign, through the brief period that he

_was_ such, and to have commiserated his benighted brother,

however wilfully astray, and however hatefully seeking to quench that

light for other men, which, for his own misgiving heart, we could

undertake to show that he never _did_ succeed in quenching. We do

not wish to enlarge upon a theme both copious and easy. But here, and

everywhere, speaking of the fathers as a body, we charge them with

anti-christian practices of a two-fold order: sometimes as supporting

their great cause in a spirit alien to its own, retorting in a temper

not less uncharitable than that of their opponents; sometimes, again,

as adopting arguments that are unchristian in their ultimate grounds;

resting upon errors the reputation of errors; upon superstitions the

overthrow of superstitions; and drawing upon the armories of darkness

for weapons that, to be durable, ought to have been of celestial

temper. Alternately, in short, the fathers trespass against those

affections which furnish to Christianity its moving powers, and against

those truths which furnish to Christianity its guiding lights. Indeed,

Milton's memorable attempt to characterize the fathers as a body,

contemptuous as it is, can hardly be challenged as overcharged.

Never in any instance were these aberrations of the fathers more

vividly exemplified than in their theories upon the Pagan Oracles. On

behalf of God, they were determined to be wiser than God; and, in

demonstration of scriptural power, to advance doctrines which the

Scriptures had nowhere warranted. At this point, however, we shall take

a short course; and, to use a vulgar phrase, shall endeavor to "kill

two birds with one stone." It happens that the earliest book in our

modern European literature, which has subsequently obtained a station

of authority on the subject of the ancient Oracles, applied itself

entirely to the erroneous theory of the fathers. This is the celebrated

_Antonii Van Dale, "De Ethnicorum Oraculis Dissertationes_," which

was published at Amsterdam _at least_ as early as the year 1682;

that is, one hundred and sixty years ago. And upon the same subject

there has been no subsequent book which maintains an equal rank. Van

Dale might have treated his theme simply with a view to the

investigation of the truth, as some recent inquirers have preferred

doing; and, in that case, the fathers would have been noticed only as

incidental occasions might bring forward their opinions--true or false.

But to this author the errors of the fathers seemed capital; worthy, in

fact, of forming his _principal_ object; and, knowing their great

authority in the Papal church, he anticipated, in the plan of attaching

his own views to the false views of the fathers, an opening to a double

patronage--that of the Protestants, in the first place, as interested

in all doctrines seeming to be anti-papal; that of the sceptics, in the

second place, as interested in the exposure of whatever had once

commanded, but subsequently lost, the superstitious reverence of

mankind. On this policy, he determined to treat the subject

polemically. He fastened, therefore, upon the fathers with a deadly

_acharnement_, that evidently meant to leave no arrears of work

for any succeeding assailant; and it must be acknowledged that, simply

in relation to this purpose of hostility, his work is triumphant. So

much was not difficult to accomplish; for barely to enunciate the

leading doctrine of the fathers is, in the ear of any chronologist, to

overthrow it. But, though successful enough in its functions of

destruction, on the other hand, as an affirmative or constructive work,

the long treatise of Van Dale is most unsatisfactory. It leaves us with

a hollow sound ringing in the ear, of malicious laughter from gnomes

and imps grinning over the weaknesses of man--his paralytic facility in

believing--his fraudulent villany in abusing this facility--but in no

point accounting for those real effects of diffusive social benefits

from the Oracle machinery, which must arrest the attention of candid

students, amidst some opposite monuments of incorrigible credulity, or

of elaborate imposture.

As a book, however, belonging to that small cycle (not numbering,

perhaps, on _all_ subjects, above three score), which may be said

to have moulded and controlled the public opinion of Europe through the

last five generations, already for itself the work of Van Dale merits a

special attention. It is confessedly the _classical_ book--the

original _fundus_ for the arguments and facts applicable to this

question; and an accident has greatly strengthened its authority.

Fontenelle, the most fashionable of European authors, at the opening of

the eighteenth century, writing in a language at that time even more

predominant than at present, did in effect employ all his advantages to

propagate and popularize the views of Van Dale. Scepticism naturally

courts the patronage of France; and in effect that same remark which a

learned Belgian (Van Brouwer) has found frequent occasion to make upon

single sections of Fontenelle's work, may be fairly extended into a

representative account of the whole--"_L'on trouve les mêmes

arguments chez Fontenelle, mais dégagés des longueurs du savant Van

Dale, et exprimés avec plus d'élégance._" This _rifaccimento_

did not injure the original work in reputation: it caused Van Dale to

be less read, but to be more esteemed; since a man confessedly

distinguished for his powers of composition had not thought it beneath

his ambition to adopt and recompose Van Dale's theory. This important

position of Van Dale with regard to the effectual creed of Europe--so

that, whether he were read directly or were slighted for a more

fashionable expounder, equally in either case it was _his_ doctrines

which prevailed--must always confer a circumstantial value upon the

original dissertations, "_De Ethnicorum Oraculis_."

This original work of Van Dale is a book of considerable extent. But,

in spite of its length, it divides substantially into two great

chapters, and no more, which coincide, in fact, with the two separate

dissertations. The first of these dissertations, occupying one hundred

and eighty-one pages, inquires into the failure and extinction of the

Oracles; when they failed, and under what circumstances. The second of

these dissertations inquires into the machinery and resources of the

Oracles during the time of their prosperity. In the first dissertation,

the object is to expose the folly and gross ignorance of the fathers,

who insisted on representing the history of the case roundly in this

shape--as though all had prospered with the Oracles up to the nativity

of Christ; but that, after his crucifixion, and simultaneously with the

first promulgation of Christianity, all Oracles had suddenly drooped;

or, to tie up their language to the rigor of their theory, had suddenly

expired. All this Van Dale peremptorily denies; and, in these days, it

is scarcely requisite to add, triumphantly denies; the whole hypothesis

of the fathers having literally not a leg to stand upon; and being, in

fact, the most audacious defiance to historical records that, perhaps,

the annals of human folly present.

In the second dissertation, Van Dale combats the other notion of the

fathers--that, during their prosperous ages, the Oracles had moved by

an agency of evil spirits. He, on the contrary, contends that, from the

first hour to the last of their long domination over the minds and

practice of the Pagan world, they had moved by no agencies whatever,

but those of human fraud, intrigue, collusion, applied to human

blindness, credulity, and superstition.

We shall say a word or two upon each question. As to the first, namely,

_when_ it was that the Oracles fell into decay and silence, thanks

to the headlong rashness of the Fathers, Van Dale's assault cannot be

refused or evaded. In reality, the evidence against them is too

flagrant and hyperbolical. If we were to quote from Juvenal--"Delphis

et Oracula cessant," in that case, the fathers challenge it as an

argument on _their_ side, for that Juvenal described a state of

things immediately posterior to Christianity; yet even here the word

_cessant_ points to a distinction of cases which already in itself

is fatal to their doctrine. By _cessant_ Juvenal means evidently

what we, in these days, should mean in saying of a ship in action that

her fire was slackening. This powerful poet, therefore, wiser so far

than the Christian fathers, distinguishes two separate cases: first,

the state of torpor and languishing which might be (and in fact was)

the predicament of many famous Oracles through centuries not fewer than

five, six, or even eight; secondly, the state of absolute dismantling

and utter extinction which, even before his time, had confounded

individual Oracles of the inferior class, not from changes affecting

religion, whether true or false, but from political revolutions. Here,

therefore, lies the first blunder of the fathers, that they confound

with total death the long drooping which befell many great Oracles from

languor in the popular sympathies, under changes hereafter to be

noticed; and, consequently, from revenues and machinery continually

decaying. That the Delphic Oracle itself--of all oracles the most

illustrious--had not expired, but simply slumbered for centuries, the

fathers might have been convinced themselves by innumerable passages in

authors contemporary with themselves; and that it was continually

throwing out fitful gleams of its ancient power, when any very great

man (suppose a Caesar) thought fit to stimulate its latent vitality, is

notorious from such cases as that of Hadrian. He, in his earlier days,

whilst yet only dreaming of the purple, had not found the Oracle

superannuated or palsied. On the contrary, he found it but too clear-

sighted; and it was no contempt in him, but too ghastly a fear and

jealousy, which labored to seal up the grander ministrations of the

Oracle for the future. What the Pythia had foreshown to himself, she

might foreshow to others; and, when tempted by the same princely

bribes, she might authorize and kindle the same aspiring views in other

great officers. Thus, in the new condition of the Roman power, there

was a perpetual peril, lest an oracle, so potent as that of Delphi,

should absolutely create rebellions, by first suggesting hopes to men

in high commands. Even as it was, all treasonable assumptions of the

purple, for many generations, commenced in the hopes inspired by

auguries, prophecies, or sortileges. And had the great Delphic Oracle,

consecrated to men's feelings by hoary superstition, and _privileged

by secrecy_, come forward to countersign such hopes, many more would

have been the wrecks of ambition, and even bloodier would have been the

blood-polluted line of the imperial successions. Prudence, therefore,

it was, and state policy, not the power of Christianity, which gave the

_final_ shock (of the _original_ shock we shall speak elsewhere)

to the grander functions of the Delphic Oracle. But, in the mean

time, the humbler and more domestic offices of this oracle, though

naturally making no noise at a distance, seem long to have survived its

state relations. And, apart from the sort of galvanism notoriously

applied by Hadrian, surely the fathers could not have seen Plutarch's

account of its condition, already a century later than our Saviour's

nativity. The Pythian priestess, as we gather from _him_, had by

that time become a less select and dignified personage; she was no

longer a princess in the land--a change which was proximately due to

the impoverished income of the temple; but she was still in existence;

still held in respect; still trained, though at inferior cost, to her

difficult and showy ministrations. And the whole establishment of the

Delphic god, if necessarily contracted from that scale which had been

suitable when great kings and commonwealths were constant suitors

within the gates of Delphi, still clung (like the Venice of modern

centuries) to her old ancestral honors, and kept up that decent

household of ministers which corresponded to the altered ministrations

of her temple. In fact, the evidences on behalf of Delphi as a princely

house, that had indeed partaken in the decaying fortunes of Greece, but

naturally was all the prouder from the irritating contrast of her great

remembrances, are so plentifully dispersed through books, that the

fathers must have been willingly duped. That in some way they

_were_ duped is too notorious from the facts, and might be suspected

even from their own occasional language; take, as one instance, amongst

a whole _harmony_ of similar expressions, this short passage from

Eusebius--_hoi Hellenes homologentes ekleloipenai auton ta chresteria_:

the Greeks admitting that their Oracles have failed. (There is,

however, a disingenuous vagueness in the very word _ekleloipenai_),

_ed' allote pote ex aionos_--and when? why, at no other crisis through

the total range of their existence--_e kata tes chrones tes euangelikes

didaskalias_--than precisely at the epoch of the evangelical

dispensation, etc. Eusebius was a man of too extensive reading to be

entirely satisfied with the Christian representations upon this point.

And in such indeterminate phrases as _kata tes chrones_ (which might

mean indifferently the entire three centuries then accomplished from

the first promulgation of Christianity, or specifically that narrow

punctual limit of the earliest promulgation), it is easy to trace an

ambidextrous artifice of compromise between what would satisfy his own

brethren, on the one hand, and what, on the other hand, he could hope

to defend against the assaults of learned Pagans.

In particular instances it is but candid to acknowledge that the

fathers may have been misled by the remarkable tendencies to error

amongst the ancients, from their want of public journals, combined with

territorial grandeur of empire. The greatest possible defect of harmony

arises naturally in this way amongst ancient authors, locally remote

from each other; but more especially in the post-christian periods,

when reporting any aspects of change, or any results from a revolution

variable and advancing under the vast varieties of the Roman empire.

Having no newspapers to effect a level amongst the inequalities and

anomalies of their public experience in regard to the Christian

revolution, when collected from innumerable tribes so widely differing

as to civilization, knowledge, superstition, &c.; hence it happened

that one writer could report with truth a change as having occurred

within periods of ten to sixty years, which for some other province

would demand a circuit of six hundred. For example, in Asia Minor, all

the way from the sea coast to the Euphrates, towns were scattered

having a dense population of Jews. Sometimes these were the most

malignant opponents of Christianity; that is, wherever they happened to

rest in the _letter_ of their peculiar religion. But, on the other

hand, where there happened to be a majority (or, if not numerically a

majority, yet influentially an overbalance) in that section of the Jews

who were docile children of their own preparatory faith and discipline,

no bigots, and looking anxiously for the fulfilment of their prophecies

(an expectation at that time generally diffused),--under those

circumstances, the Jews were such ready converts as to account

naturally for sudden local transitions, which in other circumstances or

places might not have been credible.

This single consideration may serve to explain the apparent

contradictions, the irreconcilable discrepancies, between the

statements of contemporary Christian bishops, locally at a vast

distance from each other, or (which is even more important) reporting

from communities occupying different stages of civilization. There was

no harmonizing organ of interpretation, in Christian or in Pagan

newspapers, to bridge over the chasms that divided different provinces.

A devout Jew, already possessed by the purest idea of the Supreme

Being, stood on the very threshold of conversion: he might, by one

hour's conversation with an apostle, be transfigured into an

enlightened Christian; whereas a Pagan could seldom in one generation

pass beyond the infirmity of his novitiate. His heart and affections,

his will and the habits of his understanding, were too deeply diseased

to be suddenly transmuted. And hence arises a phenomenon, which has too

languidly arrested the notice of historians; namely, that already, and

for centuries before the time of Constantine, wherever the Jews had

been thickly sown as colonists, the most potent body of Christian zeal

stood ready to kindle under the first impulse of encouragement from the

state; whilst in the great capitals of Rome and Alexandria, where the

Jews were hated and neutralized politically by Pagan forces, not for a

hundred years later than Constantine durst the whole power of the

government lay hands on the Pagan machinery, except with timid

precautions, and by graduations so remarkably adjusted to the

circumstances, that sometimes they wear the shape of compromises with

idolatry. We must know the ground, the quality of the population,

concerned in any particular report of the fathers, before we can judge

of its probabilities. Under local advantages, insulated cases of

Oracles suddenly silenced, of temples and their idol-worship

overthrown, as by a rupture of new-born zeal, were not less certain to

arise as rare accidents from rare privileges, or from rare coincidences

of unanimity in the leaders of the place, than on the other hand they

were certain _not_ to arise in that unconditional universality

pretended by the fathers. Wheresoever Paganism was interwoven with the

whole moral being of a people, as it was in Egypt, or with the

political tenure and hopes of a people, as it was in Rome, _there_

a long struggle was inevitable before the revolution could be effected.

Briefly, as against the fathers, we find a sufficient refutation in

what _followed_ Christianity. If, at a period five, or even six

hundred years after the birth of Christ, you find people still

consulting the local Oracles of Egypt, in places sheltered from the

point-blank range of the state artillery,--there is an end, once and

forever, to the delusive superstition that, merely by its silent

presence in the world, Christianity must instantaneously come into

fierce activity as a reägency of destruction to all forms of idolatrous

error. That argument is multiplied beyond all power of calculation; and

to have missed it is the most eminent instance of wilful blindness

which the records of human folly can furnish. But there is another

refutation lying in an opposite direction, which presses the fathers

even more urgently in the rear than this presses them in front; any

author posterior to Christianity, who should point to the decay of

Oracles, they would claim on their own side. But what would they have

said to Cicero,--by what resource of despair would they have parried

his authority, when insisting (as many times he does insist), forty and

even fifty years before the birth of Christ, on the languishing

condition of the Delphic Oracle? What evasion could they imagine here?

How could that languor be due to Christianity, which far anticipated

the very birth of Christianity? For, as to Cicero, who did not "far

anticipate the birth of Christianity." we allege _him_ rather

because his work _De Divinatione_ is so readily accessible, and

because his testimony on any subject is so full of weight, than because

other and much older authorities cannot be produced to the same effect.

The Oracles of Greece had lost their vigor and their palmy pride full

two centuries before the Christian era. Historical records show this

_à posteriori_, whatever were the cause; and the cause, which we

will state hereafter, shows it _à priori_, apart from the records.

Surely, therefore, Van Dale needed not to have pressed his victory over

the helpless fathers so unrelentingly, and after the first ten pages by

cases and proofs that are quite needless and _ex abundanti_;

simply the survival of any one distinguished Oracle upwards of four

centuries _after_ Christ--that is sufficient. But if with this

fact we combine the other fact, that all the principal Oracles had

already begun to languish, more than two centuries _before_

Christianity, there can be no opening for a whisper of dissent upon any

real question between Van Dale and his opponents; namely, both as to

the possibility of Christianity coexisting with such forms of error,

and the possibility that oracles should be overthrown by merely Pagan,

or internal changes. The less plausible, however, that we find this

error of the fathers, the more curiosity we naturally feel about the

source of that error; and the more so, because Van Dale never turns his

eyes in that direction.

This source lay (to speak the simple truth) in abject superstition. The

fathers conceived of the enmity between Christianity and Paganism, as

though it resembled that between certain chemical poisons and the

Venetian wine-glass, which (according to the belief [Footnote: Which

belief we can see no reason for rejecting so summarily as is usually

done in modern times. It would be absurd, indeed, to suppose a kind of

glass qualified to expose all poisons indifferently, considering the

vast range of their chemical differences. But, surely, as against that

one poison then familiarly used for domestic murders, a chemical

reagency might have been devised in the quality of the glass. At least,

there is no _prima facie_ absurdity in such a supposition.] of

three centuries back) no sooner received any poisonous fluid, than

immediately it shivered into crystal splinters. They thought to honor

Christianity, by imaging it as some exotic animal of more powerful

breed, such as we English have witnessed in a domestic case, coming

into instant collision with the native race, and exterminating it

everywhere upon the first conflict. In this conceit they substituted a

foul fiction of their own, fashioned on the very model of Pagan

fictions, for the unvarying analogy of the divine procedure.

Christianity, as the last and consummate of revelations, had the high

destination of working out its victory through what was greatest in a

man--through his reason, his will, his affections. But, to satisfy the

fathers, it must operate like a drug--like sympathetic powders--like an

amulet--or like a conjurer's charm. Precisely the monkish effect of a

Bible when hurled at an evil spirit--not the true rational effect of

that profound oracle read, studied, and laid to heart--was that which

the fathers ascribed to the mere proclamation of Christianity, when

first piercing the atmosphere circumjacent to any oracle; and, in fact,

to their gross appreciations, Christian truth was like the scavenger

bird in Eastern climates, or the stork in Holland, which signalizes its

presence by devouring all the native brood of vermin, or nuisances, as

fast as they reproduce themselves under local distemperatures of

climate or soil.

It is interesting to pursue the same ignoble superstition, which, in

fact, under Romish hands, soon crept like a parasitical plant over

Christianity itself, until it had nearly strangled its natural vigor,

back into times far preceding that of the fathers. Spite of all that

could be wrought by Heaven, for the purpose of continually confounding

the local vestiges of popular reverence which might have gathered round

stocks and stones, so obstinate is the hankering after this mode of

superstition in man that his heart returns to it with an elastic recoil

as often as the openings are restored. Agreeably to this infatuation,

the temple of the true God--even its awful _adytum_--the holy of

holies--or the places where the ark of the covenant had rested in its

migrations--all were conceived to have an eternal and a self-

vindicating sanctity. So thought man: but God himself, though to man's

folly pledged to the vindication of his own sanctities, thought far

otherwise; as we know by numerous profanations of all holy places in

Judea, triumphantly carried through, and avenged by no plausible

judgments. To speak only of the latter temple, three men are memorable

as having polluted its holiest recesses: Antiochus Epiphanes, Pompey

about a century later, and Titus pretty nearly by the same exact

interval later than Pompey. Upon which of these three did any judgment

descend? Attempts have been made to impress that coloring of the sequel

in two of these cases, indeed, but without effect upon _any_ man's

mind. Possibly in the case of Antiochus, who seems to have moved under

a burning hatred, not so much of the insurgent Jews as of the true

faith which prompted their resistance, there is some colorable argument

for viewing him in his miserable death as a monument of divine wrath.

But the two others had no such malignant spirit; they were tolerant,

and even merciful; were authorized instruments for executing the

purposes of Providence; and no calamity in the life of either can be

reasonably traced to his dealings with Palestine. Yet, if Christianity

could not brook for an instant the mere coëxistence of a Pagan oracle,

how came it that the Author of Christianity had thus brooked (nay, by

many signs of coöperation, had promoted) that ultimate desecration,

which planted "the abomination of desolation" as a victorious crest of

Paganism upon his own solitary altar? The institution of the Sabbath,

again--what part of the Mosaic economy could it more plausibly have

been expected that God should vindicate by some memorable interference,

since of all the Jewish institutions it was that one which only and

which frequently became the occasion of wholesale butchery to the pious

(however erring) Jews? The scruple of the Jews to fight, or even to

resist an assassin, on the Sabbath, was not the less pious in its

motive because erroneous in principle; yet no miracle interfered to

save them from the consequences of their infatuation. And this seemed

the more remarkable in the case of their war with Antiochus, because

_that_ (if any that history has recorded) was a holy war. But,

after one tragical experience, which cost the lives of a thousand

martyrs, the Maccabees--quite as much on a level with their scrupulous

brethren in piety as they were superior in good sense--began to reflect

that they had no shadow of a warrant from Scripture for counting upon

any miraculous aid; that the whole expectation, from first to last, had

been human and presumptuous; and that the obligation of fighting

valiantly against idolatrous compliances was, at all events, paramount

to the obligation of the Sabbath. In one hour, after unyoking

themselves from this monstrous millstone of their own forging, about

their own necks, the cause rose buoyantly aloft as upon wings of

victory; and, as their very earliest reward--as the first fruits from

thus disabusing their minds of windy presumptions--they found the very

case itself melting away which had furnished the scruple; since their

cowardly enemies, now finding that they would fight on all days alike,

had no longer any motive for attacking them on the Sabbath; besides

that their own astonishing victories henceforward secured to them often

the choice of the day not less than of the ground.

But, without lingering on these outworks of the true religion, namely,

1st, the Temple of Jerusalem; 2dly, the Sabbath,--both of which the

divine wisdom often saw fit to lay prostrate before the presumption of

idolatrous assaults, on principles utterly irreconcilable with the

Oracle doctrine of the fathers,--there is a still more flagrant

argument against the fathers, which it is perfectly confounding to find

both them and their confuter overlooking. It is this. Oracles, take

them at the very worst, were no otherwise hostile to Christianity than

as a branch of Paganism. If, for instance, the Delphic establishment

were hateful (as doubtless it was) to the holy spirit of truth which

burned in the mind of an apostle, _why_ was it hateful? Not

primarily in its character of Oracle, but in its universal character of

Pagan temple; not as an authentic distributor of counsels adapted to

the infinite situations of its clients--often very wise counsels; but

as being ultimately engrafted on the stem of idolatrous religion--as

deriving, in the last resort, their sanctions from Pagan deities, and,

therefore, as sharing _constructively_ in all the pollutions of

that tainted source. Now, therefore, if Christianity, according to the

fancy of the fathers, could not tolerate the co-presence of so much

evil as resided in the Oracle superstition,--that is, in the

derivative, in the secondary, in the not unfrequently neutralized or

even redundantly compensated mode of error,--then, _à fortiori_,

Christianity could not have tolerated for an hour the parent

superstition, the larger evil, the fontal error, which diseased the

very organ of vision--which not merely distorted a few objects on the

road, but spread darkness over the road itself. Yet what is the fact?

So far from any mysterious repulsion _externally_ between

idolatrous errors and Christianity, as though the two schemes of belief

could no more coexist in the same society than two queen-bees in a

hive,--as though elementary nature herself recoiled from the abominable

_concursus_,--do but open a child's epitome of history, and you

find it to have required four entire centuries before the destroyer's

hammer and crowbar began to ring loudly against the temples of

idolatrous worship; and not before five, nay, locally six, or even

seven centuries had elapsed, could the better angel of mankind have

sung gratulations announcing that the great strife was over--that man

was inoculated with the truth; or have adopted the impressive language

of a Latin father, that "the owls were to be heard in _every_

village hooting from the dismantled fanes of heathenism, or the gaunt

wolf disturbing the sleep of peasants as he yelled in winter from the

cold, dilapidated altars." Even this victorious consummation was true

only for the southern world of civilization. The forests of Germany,

though pierced already to the south in the third and fourth centuries

by the torch of missionaries,--though already at that time illuminated

by the immortal Gothic version of the New Testament preceding Ulppilas,

and still surviving,--sheltered through ages in the north and east vast

tribes of idolaters, some awaiting the baptism of Charlemagne in the

eighth century and the ninth, others actually resuming a fierce

countenance of heathenism for the martial zeal of crusading knights in

the thirteenth and fourteenth. The history of Constantine has grossly

misled the world. It was very early in the fourth century (313 A. D.)

that Constantine found himself strong enough to take his _earliest_

steps for raising Christianity to a privileged station; which

station was not merely an effect and monument of its progress,

but a further cause of progress. In this latter light, as a power

advancing and moving, but politically still militant, Christianity

required exactly one other century to carry out and accomplish even its

eastern triumph. Dating from the era of the very inaugurating and

merely local acts of Constantine, we shall be sufficiently accurate in

saying that the corresponding period in the fifth century (namely, from

about 404 to 420 A. D.) first witnessed those uproars of ruin in Egypt

and Alexandria--fire racing along the old carious timbers, battering-

rams thundering against the ancient walls of the most horrid temples--

which rang so searchingly in the ears of Zosimus, extorting, at every

blow, a howl of Pagan sympathy from that ignorant calumniator of

Christianity. So far from the fact being, according to the general

prejudice, as though Constantine had found himself able to destroy

Paganism, and to replace it by Christianity; on the contrary, it was

both because he happened to be far too weak, in fact, for such a mighty

revolution, and because he _knew_ his own weakness, that he fixed

his new capital, as a preliminary caution, upon the Propontis.

There were other motives to this change, and particularly (as we have

attempted to show in a separate dissertation) motives of high political

economy, suggested by the relative conditions of land and agriculture

in Thrace and Asia Minor, by comparison with decaying Italy; but a

paramount motive, we are satisfied, and the earliest motive, was the

incurable Pagan bigotry of Rome. Paganism for Rome, it ought to have

been remembered by historians, was a mere necessity of her Pagan

origin. Paganism was the fatal dowry of Rome from her inauguration; not

only she had once received a retaining fee on behalf of Paganism, in

the mysterious _Ancile_, supposed to have fallen from heaven, but

she actually preserved this bribe amongst her rarest jewels. She

possessed a palladium, such a national amulet or talisman as many

Grecian or Asiatic cities had once possessed--a _fatal_ guarantee

to the prosperity of the state. Even the Sibylline books, whatever

ravages they might be supposed by the intelligent to have sustained in

a lapse of centuries, were popularly believed, in the latest period of

the Western empire, to exist as so many charters of supremacy. Jupiter

himself in Rome had put on a peculiar Roman physiognomy, which

associated him with the destinies of the gigantic state. Above all, the

solemn augury of the twelve vultures, so memorably passed downwards

from the days of Romulus, through generations as yet uncertain of the

event, and, therefore, chronologically incapable of participation in

any fraud--an augury _always_ explained as promising twelve

centuries of supremacy to Rome, from the year 748 or 750 B. C.--

coöperated with the endless other Pagan superstitions in anchoring the

whole Pantheon to the Capitol and Mount Palatine. So long as Rome had a

worldly hope surviving, it was impossible for her to forget the Vestal

Virgins, the College of Augurs, or the indispensable office and the

_indefeasible_ privileges of the _Pontifex Maximus_, which

(though Cardinal Baronius, in his great work, for many years sought to

fight off the evidences for that fact, yet afterwards partially he

confessed his error) actually availed--historically and _medallically_

can be demonstrated to have availed--for the temptation of Christian

Cæsars into collusive adulteries with heathenism. Here, for instance,

came an emperor that timidly recorded his scruples--feebly protested,

but gave way at once as to an ugly necessity. There came another, more

deeply religious, or constitutionally more bold, who fought long and

strenuously against the compromise. "What! should he, the delegate of

God, and the standard-bearer of the true religion, proclaim himself

officially head of the false? No; that was too much for his

conscience." But the fatal meshes of prescription, of superstitions

ancient and gloomy, gathered around him; he heard that he was no

perfect Cæsar without this office, and eventually the very same reason

which had obliged Augustus not to suppress, but himself to assume, the

tribunitian office, namely, that it was a popular mode of leaving

democratic organs untouched, whilst he neutralized their democratic

functions by absorbing them into his own, availed to overthrow all

Christian scruples of conscience, even in the most Christian of the

Cæsars, many years _after_ Constantine. The pious Theodosius found

himself literally compelled to become a Pagan pontiff. A _bon mot_

[Footnote: "A _bon mot_."--This was built on the accident that a

certain _Maximus_ stood in notorious circumstances of rivalship to the

emperor [Theodosius]: and the bitterness of the jest took this turn—

that if the emperor should persist in declining the office of _Pont.

_Maximus_, in that case, "erit Pontifex Maximus;" that is, Maximus (the

secret aspirant) shall be our Pontifex. _So_ the words sounded to those

in the secret [_synetoisi_], whilst to others they seemed to have no

meaning at all.] circulating amongst the people warned him that, if he

left the cycle of imperial powers incomplete, if he suffered the

galvanic battery to remain imperfect in its circuit of links, pretty

soon he would tempt treason to show its head, and would even for the

present find but an imperfect obedience. Reluctantly therefore the

emperor gave way: and perhaps soothed his fretting conscience, by

offering to heaven, as a penitential litany, that same petition which

Naaman the Syrian offered to the prophet Elijah as a reason for a

personal dispensation. Hardly more possible it was that a camel should

go through the eye of a needle, than that a Roman senator should

forswear those inveterate superstitions with which his own system of

aristocracy had been riveted for better and worse. As soon would the

Venetian senator, the gloomy "magnifico" of St. Mark, have consented to

Renounce the annual wedding of his republic with the Adriatic, as the

Roman noble, whether senator, or senator elect, or of senatorial

descent, would have dissevered his own solitary stem from the great

forest of his ancestral order; and this he must have done by doubting

the legend of Jupiter Stator, or by withdrawing his allegiance from

Jupiter Capitolinus. The Roman people universally became agitated

towards the opening of the fifth century after Christ, when their own

twelfth century was drawing near to its completion. Rome had now

reached the very condition of Dr. Faustus--having originally received a

known term of prosperity from some dark power; but at length hearing

the hours, one after the other, tolling solemnly from the church-tower,

as they exhausted the waning minutes of the very final day marked down

in the contract. The more profound was the faith of Rome in the flight

of the twelve vultures, once so glorious, now so sad, an augury, the

deeper was the depression as the last hour drew near that had been so

mysteriously prefigured. The reckoning, indeed, of chronology was

slightly uncertain. The Varronian account varied from others. But these

trivial differences might tell as easily against them as for them, and

did but strengthen the universal agitation. Alaric, in the opening of

the fifth century [about 4l0]--Attila, near the middle [445]--already

seemed prelusive earthquakes running before the final earthquake. And

Christianity, during this era of public alarm, was so far from assuming

a more winning aspect to Roman eyes, as a religion promising to survive

their own, that already, under that character of reversionary triumph,

this gracious religion seemed a public insult, and this meek religion a

perpetual defiance; pretty much as a king sees with scowling eyes, when

revealed to him in some glass of Cornelius Agrippa, the portraits of

that mysterious house which is destined to supplant his own.

Now, from this condition of feeling at Rome, it is apparent not only as

a fact that Constantine did not overthrow Paganism, but as a

possibility that he could not have overthrown it. In the fierce

conflict he would probably have been overthrown himself; and, even for

so much as he _did_ accomplish, it was well that he attempted it

at a distance from Rome. So profoundly, therefore, are the fathers in

error, that instead of that instant victory which they ascribe to

Christianity, even Constantine's revolution was merely local. Nearly

five centuries, in fact, it cost, and not three, to Christianize even

the entire Mediterranean empire of Rome; and the premature effort of

Constantine ought to be regarded as a mere _fluctus decumanus_ in

the continuous advance of the new religion,--one of those ambitious

billows which sometimes run far ahead of their fellows in a tide

steadily gaining ground, but which inevitably recede in the next

moment, marking only the strength of that tendency which sooner or

later is destined to fill the whole capacity of the shore.

To have proved, therefore, if it could have been proved, that

Christianity had been fatal in the way of a magical charm to the

Oracles of the world, would have proved nothing but a perplexing

inconsistency, so long as the fathers were obliged to confess that

Paganism itself, as a gross total, as the parent superstition (sure to

reproduce Oracles faster than they could be extinguished), had been

suffered to exist for many centuries concurrently with Christianity,

and had finally been overthrown by the simple majesty of truth that

courts the light, as matched against falsehood that shuns it.

As applied, therefore, to the first problem in the whole question upon

Oracles,--_When, and under what circumstances, did they cease?_--

the _Dissertatio_ of Van Dale, and the _Histoire des Oracles_

by Fontenelle, are irresistible, though not written in a proper spirit

of gravity, nor making use of that indispensable argument which we have

ourselves derived from the analogy of all scriptural precedents.

But the case is far otherwise as concerns the second problem,--_How,

and by what machinery, did the Oracles, in the days of their

prosperity, conduct their elaborate ministrations?_ To this problem

no justice at all is done by the school of Van Dale. A spirit of

mockery and banter is ill applied to questions that at any time have

been centres of fear, and hope, and mysterious awe, to long trains of

human generations. And the coarse assumption of systematic fraud in the

Oracles is neither satisfactory to the understanding, as failing to

meet many important aspects of the case, nor is it at all countenanced

by the kind of evidences that have been hitherto alleged. The fathers

had taken the course--vulgar and superstitious--of explaining

everything sagacious, everything true, everything that by possibility

could seem to argue prophetic functions in the greater Oracles, as the

product indeed of inspiration, but of inspiration emanating from an

evil spirit. This hypothesis of a diabolic inspiration is rejected by

the school of Van Dale. Both the power of at all looking into the

future, and the fancied source of that power, are dismissed as

contemptible chimeras. Upon the first of these dark pretensions we

shall have occasion to speak at another point. Upon the other we agree

with Van Dale. Yet, even here, the spirit of triumphant ridicule,

applied to questions not wholly within the competence of human

resources, is displeasing in grave discussions: grave they are by

necessity of their relations, howsoever momentarily disfigured by

levity and the unseasonable grimaces of self-sufficient "philosophy."

This temper of mind is already advertised from the first to the

observing reader of Van Dale by the character of his engraved

frontispiece. Men are there exhibited in the act of juggling, and still

more odiously as exulting over their juggleries by gestures of the

basest collusion, such as protruding the tongue, inflating one cheek by

means of the tongue, grinning, and winking obliquely. These vilenesses

are so ignoble, that for his own sake a man of honor (whether as a

writer or a reader) shrinks from dealing with any case to which they do

really adhere; such a case belongs to the province of police courts,

not of literature. But, in the ancient apparatus of the Oracles

although frauds and _espionage_ did certainly form an occasional

resource, the artifices employed were rarely illiberal in their mode,

and always ennobled by their motive. As to the mode, the Oracles had

fortunately no temptation to descend into any tricks that could look

like "thimble-rigging;" and as to the motive, it will be seen that this

could never be dissociated from some regard to public or patriotic

objects in the first place; to which if any secondary interest were

occasionally attached, this could rarely descend so low as even to an

ordinary purpose of gossiping curiosity, but never to a base, mercenary

purpose of fraud. Our views, however, on this phasis of the question,

will speedily speak for themselves.

Meantime, pausing for one moment to glance at the hypothesis of the

fathers, we confess ourselves to be scandalized by its unnecessary

plunge into the ignoble. Many sincere Christian believers have doubted

altogether of any evil spirits, as existences, warranted by Scripture,

that is, as beings whose principle was evil ["evil, be thou my good:"

P. L.]; others, again, believing in the possibility that spiritual

beings had been (in ways unintelligible to us) seduced from their state

of perfection by temptations analogous to those which had seduced man,

acquiesced in the notion of spirits tainted with evil, but not

therefore (any more than man himself) essentially or causelessly

malignant. Now, it is well known, and, amongst others, Eichhorn

_(Einletung in das alte Testament) has noticed the fact, which will

be obvious, on a little reflection, to any even unlearned student of

the Scriptures who can throw his memory back through a real familiarity

with those records, that the Jews derived their obstinate notions of

fiends and demoniacal possessions (as accounting even for bodily

affections) entirely from their Chaldean captivity. Not before that

great event in Jewish history, and, therefore, in consequence of that

event, were the Jews inoculated with this Babylonian, Persian, and

Median superstition. Now, if Eichhorn and others are right, it follows

that the elder Scriptures, as they ascend more and more into the purer

atmosphere of untainted Hebrew creeds, ought to exhibit an increasing

freedom from all these modes of demoniacal agency. And accordingly so

we find it. Messengers of God are often concerned in the early records

of Moses; but it is not until we come down to Post-Mosaical records,

Job, for example (though that book is doubtful as to its chronology),

and the chronicles of the Jewish kings (_Judaic or Israelitish)_,

that we first find any allusion to malignant spirits. As against

Eichhorn, however, though readily conceding that the agency is not

often recognized, we would beg leave to notice, that there is a three-

fold agency of evil, relatively to man, ascribed to certain spirits in

the elder Scriptures, namely: 1, of _misleading_ (as in the case

of the Israelitish king seduced into a fatal battle by a falsehood

originating with a spiritual being); 2, of _temptation_; 3, of

calumnious _accusation_ directed against absent parties. It is not

absolutely an untenable hypothesis, that these functions of malignity

to man, as at first sight they appear, may be in fact reconcilable with

the general functions of a being not malignant, and not evil in any

sense, but simply obedient to superior commands: for none of us

supposes, of course, that a "destroying angel" must be an evil spirit,

though sometimes appearing in a dreadful relation of hostility to

_all_ parties (as in the case of David's punishment). But, waiving

all these speculations, one thing is apparent, that the negative

allowance, the toleration granted to these later Jewish modes of belief

by our Saviour, can no more be urged as arguing any positive sanction

to such existences (to _demons_ in the bad sense), than his

toleration of Jewish errors and conceits in questions of science. Once

for all, it was no purpose of his mission to expose errors in matters

of pure curiosity, and in speculations _not_ moral, but exclusively

intellectual. And, besides the ordinary argument for rejecting

such topics of teaching, as not necessarily belonging to any known

purpose of the Christian revelation (which argument is merely

negative, and still leaves it open to have regarded such communications

as a possible _extra_ condescension, as a _lucro ponatur_,

not absolutely to have been expected, but if granted as all the more

meritorious in Christianity), we privately are aware of an argument,

far more rigorous and coërcive, which will place this question upon

quite another basis. This argument, which, in a proper situation, and

with ampler disposable space, we shall expose in its strength, will

show that it was not that neutral possibility which men have supposed,

for the founder of our faith to have granted light, casually or

indirectly, upon questions of curiosity. One sole revelation was made

by Him, as to the nature of the intercourse and the relations in

another world; but _that_ was for the purpose of forestalling a

vile, unspiritual notion, already current amongst the childish Jews,

and sure to propagate itself even to our own days, unless an utter

_averruncatio_ were applied to it. This was its purpose, and not

any purpose of gratification to unhallowed curiosity; we speak of the

question about the reversionary rights of marriage in a future state.

This memorable case, by the way, sufficiently exposes the gross,

infantine sensualism of the Jewish mind at that period, and throws an

indirect light on their creed as to demons. With this one exception,

standing by itself and self-explained, there never was a gleam of

revelation granted by any authorized prophet to speculative curiosity,

whether pointing to science, or to the mysteries of the spiritual

world. And the true argument on this subject would show that this

abstinence was not accidental; was not merely on a motive of

convenience, as evading any needless extension of labors in teaching,

which is the furthest point attained by any existing argument; but, on

the contrary, that there was an obligation of consistency, stern,

absolute, insurmountable, which made it _essential_ to withhold

such revelations; and that had but one such condescension, even to a

harmless curiosity, been conceded, there would have arisen instantly a

rent--a fracture--a schism--in another vast and collateral purpose of

Providence.

From all considerations of the Jewish condition at the era of

Christianity, the fathers might have seen the license for doubt as to

the notions of a diabolic inspiration. Why must the prompting spirits,

if really assumed to be the efficient agency behind the Oracles, be

figured as holding any relation at all to moral good or moral evil? Why

not allow of demoniac powers, excelling man in beauty, power,

prescience, but otherwise neutral as to all purposes of man's moral

nature? Or, if revolting angels were assumed, why degrade their agency

in so vulgar and unnecessary a way, by adopting the vilest relation to

man which can be imputed to a demon--his function of secret

_calumnious accusation_; from which idea, lowering the Miltonic

"archangel ruined" into the assessor of thieves, as a private slanderer

(_diabolos_), proceeds, through the intermediate Italian _diavolo_,

our own grotesque vulgarism of the _devil_; [Footnote: But, says an

unlearned man, Christ uses the word _devil_. Not so. The word used is

_diabolos_. Translate v. g. "The accuser and his angels."] an idea

which must ever be injurious, in common with all base conceptions, to a

grand and spiritual religion. If the Oracles _were_ supported by

mysterious agencies of spiritual beings, it was still open to have

distinguished between mere modes of power or of intelligence, and modes

of illimitable evil. The _results_ of the Oracles were beneficent: that

was all which the fathers had any right to know: and their unwarranted

introduction of wicked or rebel angels was as much a surreptitious

fraud upon their audiences, as their neglect to distinguish between the

conditions of an extinct superstition and a superstition dormant or

decaying.

To leave the fathers, and to state our own views on the final question

argued by Van Dale--"What was the essential machinery by which the

Oracles moved?"--we shall inquire,

1. What was the relation of the Oracles (and we would wish to be

understood as speaking particularly of the Delphic Oracle) to the

credulity of Greece?

2. What was the relation of that same Oracle to the absolute truth?

3. What was its relation to the public welfare of Greece?

Into this trisection we shall decompose the coarse unity of the

question presented by Van Dale and his Vandals, as though the one sole

"issue," that could be sent down for trial before a jury, were the

likelihoods of fraud and gross swindling. It is not with the deceptions

or collusions of the Oracles, as mere matters of fact, that we in this

age are primarily concerned, but with those deceptions as they affected

the contemporary people of Greece. It is important to know whether the

general faith of Greece in the mysterious pretensions of Oracles were

unsettled or disturbed by the several agencies at work that naturally

tended to rouse suspicion; such, for instance, as these four which

follow:--1. Eminent instances of scepticism with regard to the oracular

powers, from time to time circulating through Greece in the shape of

_bon mots_; or, 2, which silently amounted to the same virtual

expression of distrust, Refusals (often more speciously wearing the

name of _neglects_) to consult the proper Oracle on some hazardous

enterprize of general notoriety and interest; 3. Cases of direct

failure in the event, as understood to have been predicted by the

Oracle, not unfrequently accompanied by tragical catastrophes to the

parties misled by this erroneous construction of the Oracle; 4. (which

is, perhaps, the climax of the exposures possible under the

superstitions of Paganism), A public detection of known oracular

temples doing business on a considerable scale, as accomplices with

felons.

Modern appraisers of the oracular establishments are too commonly in

all moral senses anachronists. We hear it alleged with some

plausibility against Southey's portrait of Don Roderick, though

otherwise conceived in a spirit proper for bringing out the whole

sentiment of his pathetic situation, that the king is too Protestant,

and too evangelical, after the model of 1800, in his modes of

penitential piety. The poet, in short, reflected back upon one who was

too certain in the eighth century to have been the victim of dark

popish superstitions, his own pure and enlightened faith. But the

anachronistic spirit in which modern sceptics react upon the Pagan

Oracles is not so elevating as the English poet's. Southey reflected

his own superiority upon the Gothic prince of Spain. But the sceptics

reflect their own vulgar habits of mechanic and compendious office

business upon the large institutions of the ancient Oracles. To satisfy

them, the Oracle should resemble a modern coach-office--where

undoubtedly you would suspect fraud, if the question "How far to

Derby?" were answered evasively, or if the grounds of choice between

two roads were expressed enigmatically. But the _to loxon_, or

mysterious indirectness of the Oracle, was calculated far more to

support the imaginative grandeur of the unseen God, and was designed to

do so, than to relieve the individual suitor in a perplexity seldom of

any capital importance. In this way every oracular answer operated upon

the local Grecian neighborhood in which it circulated as one of the

impulses which, from time to time, renewed the sense of a mysterious

involution in the invisible powers, as though they were incapable of

direct correspondence or parallelism with the monotony and slight

compass of human ideas. As the symbolic dancers of the ancients, who

narrated an elaborate story, _Saltando Hecubam_, or _Saltando

Loadamiam_, interwove the passion of the advancing incidents into

the intricacies of the figure--something in the same way, it was

understood by all men, that the Oracle did not so much evade the

difficulty by a dark form of words, as he revealed his own hieroglyphic

nature. All prophets, the true equally with the false, have felt the

instinct for surrounding themselves with the majesty of darkness. And

in a religion like the Pagan, so deplorably meagre and starved as to

most of the draperies connected with the mysterious and sublime, we

must not seek to diminish its already scanty wardrobe. But let us pass

from speculation to illustrative anecdotes. We have imagined several

cases which might seem fitted for giving a shock to the general Pagan

confidence in Oracles. Let us review them.

The first is the case of any memorable scepticism published in a

pointed or witty form; as Demosthenes avowed his suspicions "that the

Oracle was _Philippizing_." This was about 344 years B.C. Exactly

one hundred years earlier, in the 444th year B.C., or the _locus_

of Pericles, Herodotus (then forty years old) is universally supposed

to have read, which for _him_ was publishing, his history. In this

work two insinuations of the same kind occur: during the invasion of

Darius the Mede (about 490 B.C.) the Oracle was charged with

_Medizing_; and in the previous period of Pisistratus (about 555

B.C.) the Oracle had been almost convicted of _Alcmœonidizing_.

The Oracle concerned was the same,--namely, the Delphic,--in all three

cases. In the case of Darius, fear was the ruling passion; in the

earlier case, a near self-interest, but not in a base sense selfish.

The Alemœonidae, an Athenian house hostile to Pisistratus, being

exceedingly rich, had engaged to rebuild the ruined temple of the

Oracle; and had fulfilled their promise with a munificence outrunning

the letter of their professions, particularly with regard to the

quality of marble used in facing or "veneering" the front elevation.

Now, these sententious and rather witty expressions gave wings and

buoyancy to the public suspicions, so as to make them fly from one end

of Greece to the other; and they continued in lively remembrance for

centuries. Our answer we reserve until we have illustrated the other

heads.

In the second case, namely, that of sceptical slights shown to the

Oracle, there are some memorable precedents on record. Everybody knows

the ridiculous stratagem of Crœsus, the Lydian king, for trying the

powers of the Oracle, by a monstrous culinary arrangement of pots and

pans, known (as he fancied) only to himself. Generally the course of

the Delphic Oracle under similar insults was--warmly to resent them.

But Crœsus, as a king, a foreigner, and a suitor of unexampled

munificence, was privileged, especially because the ministers of the

Delphic temple had doubtless found it easy to extract the secret by

bribery from some one of the royal mission. A case, however, much more

interesting, because arising between two leading states of Greece, and

in the century subsequent to the ruder age of Crœsus (who was about

coeval with Pisistratus, 555 B. C.), is reported by Xenophon of the

Lacedæmonians and Thebans. They concluded a treaty of peace without any

communication, not so much as a civil notification to the Oracle; _to

men Teo ouden ekoinosanto, hopis hæ eirpnp genoito_--to the god (the

Delphic god) they made no communication at all as to the terms of the

peace; _outoi de ebeleuonto_, but they personally pursued their

negotiations in private. That this was a very extraordinary reach of

presumption, is evident from the care of Xenophon in bringing it before

his readers; it is probable, indeed, that neither of the high

contracting parties had really acted in a spirit of religious

indifference, though it is remarkable of the Spartans, that of all

Greek tribes they were the most facile and numerous delinquents under

all varieties of foreign temptations to revolt from their hereditary

allegiance--a fact which measures the degree of unnatural constraint

and tension which the Spartan usages involved; but in this case we

rather account for the public outrage to religion and universal usage,

by a strong political jealousy lest the provisions of the treaty should

transpire prematurely amongst states adjacent to Bœotia.

Whatever, meantime, were the secret motive to this policy, it did not

fail to shock all Greece profoundly. And, in a slighter degree, the

same effect upon public feeling followed the act of Agesipolis, who,

after obtaining an answer from the Oracle of Delphi, carried forward

his suit to the more awfully ancient Oracle of Dodona; by way of

trying, as he alleged, "whether the child agreed with its papa." These

open expressions of distrust were generally condemned; and the

irresistible proof that they were, lies in the fact that they led to no

imitations. Even in a case mentioned by Herodotus, when a man had the

audacity to found a colony without seeking an oracular sanction, no

precedent was established; though the journey to Delphi must often have

been peculiarly inconvenient to the founders of colonies moving

westwards from Greece; and the expenses of such a journey, with the

subsequent offerings, could not but prove unseasonable at the moment

when every drachma was most urgently needed. Charity begins at home,

was a thought quite as likely to press upon a Pagan conscience, in

those circumstances, as upon our modern Christian consciences under

heavy taxation; yet, for all that, such was the regard to a pious

inauguration of all colonial enterprises, that no one provision or

pledge of prosperity was held equally indispensable by all parties to

such hazardous speculations. The merest worldly foresight, indeed, to

the most irreligious leader, would suggest this sanction as a

necessity, under the following reason:--colonies the most enviably

prosperous upon the whole, have yet had many hardships to contend with

in their noviciate of the first five years; were it only from the

summer failure of water under circumstances of local ignorance, or from

the casual failure of crops under imperfect arrangements of culture.

Now, the one great qualification for wrestling strenuously with such

difficult contingencies in solitary situations, is the spirit of

cheerful hope; but, when any room had been left for apprehending a

supernatural curse resting upon their efforts--equally in the most

thoughtfully pious man and the most crazily superstitious--all spirit

of hope would be blighted at once; and the religious neglect would,

even in a common human way, become its own certain executor, through

mere depression of spirits and misgiving of expectations. Well,

therefore, might Cicero in a tone of defiance demand, "Quam vero Græcia

coloniam misit in Ætoliam, Ioniam, Asiam, Siciliam, Italiam, sine

Pythio (the Delphic), aut Dodonseo, aut Hammonis oraculo?" An oracular

sanction must be had, and from a leading oracle--the three mentioned by

Cicero were the greatest; [Footnote: To which at one time must be

added, as of equal rank, the Oracle of the Branchides, in Asia Minor.

But this had been destroyed by the Persians, in retaliation of the

Athenian outrages at Sardis.] and, if a minor oracle could have

satisfied the inaugurating necessities of a regular colony, we may be

sure that the Dorian states of the Peloponnesus, who had twenty-five

decent oracles at home (that is, within the peninsula), would not so

constantly have carried their money to Delphi. Nay, it is certain that

even where the colonial counsels of the greater oracles seemed

extravagant, though a large discretion was allowed to remonstrance, and

even to very homely expostulations, still, in the last resort, no

doubts were felt that the oracle must be right. Brouwer, the Belgic

scholar, who has so recently and so temperately treated these subjects

(Histoire de la Civilisation Morale et Religieuse chez les Grecs: 6

tomes: Groningue--1840), alleges a case (which, however, we do not

remember to have met) where the client ventured to object:--"_Mon roi

Apollon, je crois que tu es fou._" But cases are obvious which look

this way, though not going so far as to charge lunacy upon the lord of

prophetic vision. Battus, who was destined to be the eldest father of

Cyrene, so memorable as the first ground of Greek intercourse with the

African shore of the Mediterranean, never consulted the Delphic Oracle

in reference to his eyes, which happened to be diseased, but that he

was admonished to prepare for colonizing Libya.--"Grant me patience,"

would Battus reply; "here am I getting into years, and never do I

consult the Oracle about my precious sight, but you, King Phœbus, begin

your old yarn about Cyrene. Confound Cyrene! Nobody knows where it is.

But, if you are serious, speak to my son--he's a likely young man, and

worth a hundred of old rotten hulks, like myself." Battus was provoked

in good earnest; and it is well known that the whole scheme went to

sleep for several years, until King Phoebus sent in a gentle refresher

to Battus and his islanders, in the shape of failing crops, pestilence,

and his ordinary chastisements. The people were roused--the colony was

founded--and, after utter failure, was again re-founded, and the

results justified the Oracle. But, in all such cases, and where the

remonstrances were least respectful, or where the resistance of

_inertia_ was longest, we differ altogether from M. Brouwer in his

belief, that the suitors fancied Apollo to have gone distracted. If

they ever said so, this must have been merely by way of putting the

Oracle on its mettle, and calling forth some _plainer_--not any

essentially different--answer from the enigmatic god; for there it was

that the doubts of the clients settled, and on that it was the

practical demurs hinged. Not because even Battus, vexed as he was about

his precious eyesight, distrusted the Oracle, but because he felt sure

that the Oracle had not spoken out freely; therefore, had he and many

others in similar circumstances presumed to delay. A second edition was

what they waited for, corrected and _enlarged_. We have a memorable

instance of this policy in the Athenian envoys, who, upon receiving a

most ominous doom, but obscurely expressed, from the Delphic Oracle,

which politely concluded by saying, "And so get out, you vagabonds,

from my temple--don't cumber my decks any longer;" were advised to

answer sturdily--"No!--we shall _not_ get out--we mean to sit here

forever, until you think proper to give us a more reasonable reply."

Upon which spirited rejoinder, the Pythia saw the policy of revising

her truly brutal rescript as it had stood originally.

The necessity, indeed, was strong for not acquiescing in the Oracle,

until it had become clearer by revision or by casual illustrations, as

will be seen even under our next head. This head concerns the case of

those who found themselves deceived by the _event_ of any oracular

prediction. As usual, there is a Spartan case of this nature. Cleomenes

complained bitterly that the Oracle of Delphi had deluded him by

holding out as a possibility, and under given conditions as a

certainty, that he should possess himself of Argos. But the Oracle was

justified: there was an inconsiderable place outside the walls of Argos

which bore the same name. Most readers will remember the case of

Cambyses, who had been assured by a legion of oracles that he should

die at Ecbatana. Suffering, therefore, in Syria from a scratch

inflicted upon his thigh by his own sabre, whilst angrily sabring a

ridiculous quadruped whom the Egyptian priests had put forward as a

god, he felt quite at his ease so long as he remembered his vast

distance from the mighty capital of Media, to the eastward of the

Tigris. The scratch, however, inflamed, for his intemperance had

saturated his system with combustible matter; the inflammation spread;

the pulse ran high: and he began to feel twinges of alarm. At length

mortification commenced: but still he trusted to the old prophecy about

Ecbatana, when suddenly a horrid discovery was made--that the very

Syrian village at his own head-quarters was known by the pompous name

of Ecbatana. Josephus tells a similar story of some man contemporary

with Herod the Great. And we must all remember that case in Shakspeare,

where the first king of the _red_ rose, Henry IV., had long

fancied his destiny to be that he should meet his death in Jerusalem;

which naturally did not quicken his zeal for becoming a crusader. "All

time enough," doubtless he used to say; "no hurry at all, gentlemen!"

But at length, finding himself pronounced by the doctor ripe for dying,

it became a question whether the prophet were a false prophet, or the

doctor a false doctor. However, in such a case, it is something to have

a collision of opinions--a prophet against a doctor. But, behold, it

soon transpired that there was no collision at all. It was the

Jerusalem chamber, occupied by the king as a bed-room, to which the

prophet had alluded. Upon which his majesty reconciled himself at once

to the ugly necessity at hand

"In that Jerusalem shall Harry die."

The last case--that of oracular establishments turning out to be

accomplices of thieves--is one which occurred in Egypt on a scale of

some extent; and is noticed by Herodotus. This degradation argued great

poverty in the particular temples: and it is not at all improbable

that, amongst a hundred Grecian Oracles, some, under a similar

temptation, would fall into a similar disgrace. But now, as regards

even this lowest extremity of infamy, much more as regards the

qualified sort of disrepute attending the three minor cases, one single

distinction puts all to rights. The Greeks never confounded the temple,

and household of officers attached to the temple service, with the dark

functions of the presiding god. In Delphi, besides the Pythia and

priests, with their train of subordinate ministers directly billeted on

the temple, there were two orders of men outside, Delphic citizens, one

styled _Arizeis_, the other styled _Hosioi_,--a sort of honorary

members, whose duty was probably _inter alia_, to attach themselves

to persons of corresponding rank in the retinues of the envoys

or consulting clients, and doubtless to collect from them, in

convivial moments, all the secrets or general information which the

temple required for satisfactory answers. If they personally went too

far in their intrigues or stratagems of decoy, the disgrace no more

recoiled on the god, than, in modern times, the vices or crimes of a

priest can affect the pure religion at whose altars he officiates.

Meantime, through these outside ministers--though unaffected by their

follies or errors as trepanners--the Oracle of Delphi drew that vast

and comprehensive information, from every local nook or recess of

Greece, which made it in the end a blessing to the land. The great

error is, to suppose the majority of cases laid before the Delphic

Oracle strictly questions for _prophetic_ functions. Ninety-nine

in a hundred respected marriages, state-treaties, sales, purchases,

founding of towns or colonies, &c., which demanded no faculty whatever

of divination, but the nobler faculty (though unpresumptuous) of

sagacity, that calculates the natural consequences of human acts,

cooperating with elaborate investigation of the local circumstances.

If, in any paper on the general civilization of Greece (that great

mother of civilization for all the world), we should ever attempt to

trace this element of Oracles, it will not be difficult to prove that

Delphi discharged the office of a central _bureau d'administration_,

a general depot of political information, an organ of universal

combination for the counsels of the whole Grecian race. And that which

caused the declension of the Oracles was the loss of political

independence and autonomy. After Alexander, still more after the Roman

conquest, each separate state, having no powers and no motive for

asking counsel on state measures, naturally confined itself more and

more to its humbler local interests of police, or even at last to its

family arrangements.

THE REVOLUTION OF GREECE.

[1833.]

It is falsely charged upon itself by this age, in its character of

_censor morum_, that effeminacy in a practical sense lies either

amongst its full-blown faults, or amongst its lurking tendencies. A

rich, a polished, a refined age, may, by mere necessity of inference,

be presumed to be a luxurious one; and the usual principle, by which

moves the whole trivial philosophy which speculates upon the character

of a particular age or a particular nation, is first of all to adopt

some one central idea of its characteristics, and then without further

effort to pursue its integration; that is, having assumed (or, suppose

even having demonstrated) the existence of some great influential

quality in excess sufficient to overthrow the apparent equilibrium

demanded by the common standards of a just national character, the

speculator then proceeds, as in a matter of acknowledged right, to push

this predominant quality into all its consequences, and all its closest

affinities. To give one illustration of such a case, now perhaps

beginning to be forgotten: Somewhere about the year 1755, the once

celebrated Dr. Brown, after other little attempts in literature and

paradox, took up the conceit that England was ruined at her heart's

core by excess of luxury and sensual self-indulgence. He had persuaded

himself that the ancient activities and energies of the country were

sapped by long habits of indolence, and by a morbid plethora of

enjoyment in every class. Courage, and the old fiery spirit of the

people, had gone to wreck with the physical qualities which had

sustained them. Even the faults of the public mind had given way under

its new complexion of character; ambition and civil dissension were

extinct. It was questionable whether a good hearty assault and battery,

or a respectable knock-down blow, had been dealt by any man in London

for one or two generations. The doctor carried his reveries so far,

that he even satisfied himself and one or two friends (probably by

looking into the parks at hours propitious to his hypothesis) that

horses were seldom or ever used for riding; that, in fact, this

accomplishment was too boisterous or too perilous for the gentle

propensities of modern Britons; and that, by the best accounts, few men

of rank or fashion were now seen on horseback. This pleasant collection

of dreams did Doctor Brown solemnly propound to the English public, in

two octavo volumes, under the title of "An Estimate of the Manners and

Principles of the Times;" and the report of many who lived in those

days assures us that for a brief period the book had a prodigious run.

In some respects the doctor's conceits might seem too startling and

extravagant; but, to balance _that_, every nation has some pleasure

in being heartily abused by one of its own number; and the English

nation has always had a special delight in being alarmed, and in

being clearly convinced that it is and ought to be on the brink of

ruin. With such advantages in the worthy doctor's favor, he might have

kept the field until some newer extravaganza had made his own obsolete,

had not one ugly turn in political affairs given so smashing a

refutation to his practical conclusions, and called forth so sudden a

rebound of public feeling in the very opposite direction, that a bomb-

shell descending right through the whole impression of his book could

not more summarily have laid a chancery "injunction" upon its further

sale. This arose under the brilliant administration of the first Mr.

Pitt: England was suddenly victorious in three quarters of the globe;

land and sea echoed to the voice of her triumphs; and the poor Doctor

Brown, in the midst of all this hubbub, cut his own throat with his own

razor. Whether this dismal catastrophe were exactly due to his

mortification as a baffled visionary, whose favorite conceit had

suddenly exploded like a rocket into smoke and stench, is more than we

know. But, at all events, the sole memorial of his hypothesis which now

reminds the English reader that it ever existed is one solitary notice

of good-humored satire pointed at it by Cowper. [Footnote: "The

Inestimable Estimate of Brown."] And the possibility of such exceeding

folly in a man otherwise of good sense and judgment, not depraved by

any brain-fever or enthusiastic infatuation, is to be found in the

vicious process of reasoning applied to such estimates; the doctor,

having taken up one novel idea of the national character, proceeded

afterwards by no tentative inquiries, or comparison with actual facts

and phenomena of daily experience, but resolutely developed out of his

one idea all that it appeared analytically to involve; and postulated

audaciously as a solemn fact whatsoever could be exhibited in any

possible connection with his one central principle, whether in the way

of consequence or of affinity.

Pretty much upon this unhappy Brunonian mode of deducing our national

character, it is a very plausible speculation, which has been and will

again be chanted, that we, being a luxurious nation, must by force of

good logical dependency be liable to many derivative taints and

infirmities which ought of necessity to besiege the blood of nations in

that predicament. All enterprise and spirit of adventure, all heroism

and courting of danger for its own attractions, ought naturally to

languish in a generation enervated by early habits of personal

indulgence. Doubtless they _ought; a priori_, it seems strictly

demonstrable that such consequences should follow. Upon the purest

forms of inference in _Barbara_ or _Celarent_, it can be shown

satisfactorily that from all our tainted classes, _a fortiori_

then from our most tainted classes--our men of fashion and of

opulent fortunes--no description of animal can possibly arise but

poltroons and _fainéans_. In fact, pretty generally, under the

known circumstances of our modern English education and of our social

habits, we ought, in obedience to all the _precognita_ of our

position, to show ourselves rank cowards; yet, in spite of so much

excellent logic, the facts are otherwise. No age has shown in its young

patricians a more heroic disdain of sedentary ease; none in a martial

support of liberty or national independence has so gayly volunteered

upon services the most desperate, or shrunk less from martyrdom on the

field of battle, whenever there was hope to invite their disinterested

exertions, or grandeur enough in the cause to sustain them. Which of us

forgets the gallant Mellish, the frank and the generous, who reconciled

himself so gayly to the loss of a splendid fortune, and from the very

bosom of luxury suddenly precipitated himself upon the hardships of

Peninsular warfare? Which of us forgets the adventurous Lee of Lime,

whom a princely estate could not detain in early youth from courting

perils in Nubia and Abyssinia, nor (immediately upon his return) from

almost wooing death as a volunteer aide-de-camp to the Duke of

Wellington at Waterloo? So again of Colonel Evans, who, after losing a

fine estate long held out to his hopes, five times over put himself at

the head of _forlorn hopes_. Such cases are memorable, and were

conspicuous at the time, from the lustre of wealth and high connections

which surrounded the parties; but many thousand others, in which the

sacrifices of personal ease were less noticeable from their narrower

scale of splendor, had equal merit for the cheerfulness with which

those sacrifices were made. [Footnote: History of the Greek Revolution,

by Thomas Gordon.] Here, again, in the person of the author before us,

we have another instance of noble and disinterested heroism, which,

from the magnitude of the sacrifices that it involved, must place him

in the same class as the Mellishes and the Lees. This gallant Scotsman,

who was born in 1788, or 1789, lost his father in early life.

Inheriting from him a good estate in Aberdeenshire, and one more

considerable in Jamaica, he found himself, at the close of a long

minority, in the possession of a commanding fortune. Under the vigilant

care of a sagacious mother, Mr. Gordon received the very amplest

advantages of a finished education, studying first at the University of

Aberdeen, and afterwards for two years at Oxford; whilst he had

previously enjoyed as a boy the benefits of a private tutor from

Oxford. Whatever might be the immediate result from this careful

tuition, Mr. Gordon has since completed his own education in the most

comprehensive manner, and has carried his accomplishments as a linguist

to a point of rare excellence. Sweden and Portugal excepted, we

understand that he has personally visited every country in Europe. He

has travelled also in Asiatic Turkey, in Persia, and in Barbary. From

this personal residence in foreign countries, we understand that Mr.

Gordon has obtained an absolute mastery over certain modern languages,

especially the French, the Italian, the modern Greek, and the

Turkish.[Footnote: Mr. Gordon is privately known to be the translator

of the work written by a Turkish minister, "_Tchebi Effendi_"

published in the Appendix to Wilkinson's Wallachia, and frequently

referred to by the _Quarterly Review_ in its notices of Oriental

affairs.] Not content, however, with this extensive education in a

literary sense, Mr. Gordon thought proper to prepare himself for the

part which he meditated in public life, by a second, or military

education, in two separate services;--first, in the British, where he

served in the Greys, and in the forty-third regiment; and subsequently,

during the campaign of 1813, as a captain on the Russian staff.

Thus brilliantly accomplished for conferring lustre and benefit upon

any cause which he might adopt amongst the many revolutionary movements

then continually emerging in Southern Europe, he finally carried the

whole weight of his great talents, prudence, and energy, together with

the unlimited command of his purse, to the service of Greece in her

heroic struggle with the Sultan. At what point his services and his

countenance were appreciated by the ruling persons in Greece, will be

best collected from the accompanying letter, translated from the

original, in modern Greek, addressed to him by the provisional

government of Greece, in 1822. It will be seen that this official

document notices with great sorrow Mr. Gordon's absence from Greece,

and with some surprise, as a fact at that time unexplained and

mysterious; but the simple explanation of this mystery was, that Mr.

Gordon had been brought to the very brink of the grave by a contagious

fever, at Tripolizza, and that his native air was found essential to

his restoration. Subsequently, however, he returned, and rendered the

most powerful services to Greece, until the war was brought to a close,

as much almost by Turkish exhaustion, as by the armed interference of

the three great conquerors of Navarino.

"The government of Greece to the SIGNOR GORDON, a man worthy of all

admiration, and a friend of the Grecians, health and prosperity.

"It was not possible, most excellent sir, nor was it a thing endurable

to the descendants of the Grecians, that they should be deprived any

longer of those imprescriptible rights which belong to the inheritance

of their birth--rights which a barbarian of a foreign soil, an anti-

christian tyrant, issuing from the depths of Asia, seized upon with a

robber's hand, and, lawlessly trampling under foot, administered up to

this time the affairs of Greece, after his own lust and will. Needs it

was that we, sooner or later, shattering this iron and heavy sceptre,

should recover, at the price of life itself (if _that_ were found

necessary), our patrimonial heritage, that thus our people might again

be gathered to the family of free and self-legislating states. Moving,

then, under such impulses, the people of Greece advanced with one

heart, and perfect unanimity of council, against an oppressive

despotism, putting their hands to an enterprise beset with

difficulties, and hard indeed to be achieved, yet, in our present

circumstances, if any one thing in this life, most indispensable. This,

then, is the second year which we are passing since we have begun to

move in this glorious contest, once again struggling, to all

appearance, upon unequal terms, but grasping our enterprise with the

right hand and the left, and with all our might stretching forward to

the objects before us.

"It was the hope of Greece that, in these seasons of emergency, she

would not fail of help and earnest resort of friends from the Christian

nations throughout Europe. For it was agreeable neither to humanity nor

to piety, that the rights of nations, liable to no grudges of malice or

scruples of jealousy, should be surreptitiously and wickedly filched

away, or mocked with outrage and insult; but that they should be

settled firmly on those foundations which Nature herself has furnished

in abundance to the condition of man in society. However, so it was,

that Greece, cherishing these most reasonable expectations, met with

most unmerited disappointments.

"But you, noble and generous Englishman, no sooner heard the trumpet of

popular rights echoing melodiously from the summits of Taygetus, of

Ida, of Pindus, and of Olympus, than, turning with listening ears to

the sound, and immediately renouncing the delights of country, of

family ties, and (what is above all) of domestic luxury and ease, and

the happiness of your own fireside, you hurried to our assistance. But

suddenly, and in contradiction to the universal hope of Greece, by

leaving us, you have thrown us all into great perplexity and amazement,

and that at a crisis when some were applying their minds to military

pursuits, some to the establishment of a civil administration, others

to other objects, but all alike were hurrying and exerting themselves

wherever circumstances seemed to invite them.

"Meantime, the government of Greece having heard many idle rumors and

unauthorized tales disseminated, but such as seemed neither in

correspondence with their opinion of your own native nobility from rank

and family, nor with what was due to the newly-instituted

administration, have slighted and turned a deaf ear to them all, coming

to this resolution--that, in absenting yourself from Greece, you are

doubtless obeying some strong necessity; for that it is not possible

nor credible of a man such as you displayed yourself to be whilst

living amongst us, that he should mean to insult the wretched--least of

all, to insult the unhappy and much-suffering people of Greece. Under

these circumstances, both the deliberative and the executive bodies of

the Grecian government, assembling separately, have come to a

resolution, without one dissentient voice, to invite you back to

Greece, in order that you may again take a share in the Grecian

contest--a contest in itself glorious, and not alien from your

character and pursuits. For the liberty of any one nation cannot be a

matter altogether indifferent to the rest, but naturally it is a common

and diffusive interest; and nothing can be more reasonable than that

the Englishman and the Grecian, in such a cause, should make themselves

yoke-fellows, and should participate as brothers in so holy a struggle.

Therefore, the Grecian government hastens, by this present

distinguished expression of its regard, to invite you to the soil of

Greece, a soil united by such tender memorials with yourself; confident

that you, preferring glorious poverty and the hard living of Greece to

the luxury and indolence of an obscure seclusion, will hasten your

return to Greece, agreeably to your native character, restoring to us

our valued English connection. Farewell!

"The Vice-president of the Executive,

"ATHANASIUS KANAKARES.

"The Chief-Secretary, Minister of Foreign Relations, NEGENZZ."

Since then, having in 1817 connected himself in marriage with a

beautiful young lady of Armenian Greek extraction, and having purchased

land and built a house in Argos, Mr. Gordon may be considered in some

sense as a Grecian citizen. Services in the field having now for some

years been no longer called for, he has exchanged his patriotic sword

for a patriotic pen--judging rightly that in no way so effectually can

Greece be served at this time with Western Europe, as by recording

faithfully the course of her revolution, tracing the difficulties which

lay or which arose in her path, the heroism with which she surmounted

them, and the multiplied errors by which she raised up others to

herself. Mr. Gordon, of forty authors who have partially treated this

theme, is the first who can be considered either impartial or

comprehensive; and upon his authority, not seldom using his words, we

shall now present to our readers the first continuous abstract of this

most interesting and romantic war:

GREECE, in the largest extent of that term, having once belonged to the

Byzantine empire, is included, by the misconception of hasty readers,

in the great wreck of 1453. They take it for granted that, concurrently

with Constantinople, and the districts adjacent, these provinces passed

at that disastrous era into the hands of the Turkish conqueror; but

this is an error. Parts of Greece, previously to that era, had been

dismembered from the Eastern empire;--other parts did not, until long

_after_ it, share a common fate with the metropolis. Venice had a

deep interest in the Morea; _in_ that, and _for_ that, she fought with

various success for generations; and it was not until the year 1717,

nearly three centuries from the establishment of the crescent in

Europe, that "the banner of St. Mark, driven finally from the Morea and

the Archipelago," was henceforth exiled (as respected Greece) to the

Ionian Islands.

In these contests, though Greece was the prize at issue, the children

of Greece had no natural interest, whether the cross prevailed or the

crescent; the same, for all substantial results, was the fate which

awaited themselves. The Moslem might be the more intolerant by his

maxims, and he might be harsher in his professions; but a slave is not

the less a slave, though his master should happen to hold the same

creed with himself; and towards a member of the Greek church one who

looked westward to Rome for his religion was likely to be little less

of a bigot than one who looked to Mecca. So that we are not surprised

to find a Venetian rule of policy recommending, for the daily allowance

of these Grecian slaves, "a _little_ bread, and a liberal application

of the cudgel"! Whichever yoke were established was sure to be hated;

and, therefore, it was fortunate for the honor of the Christian name,

that from the year 1717 the fears and the enmity of the Greeks were to

be henceforward pointed exclusively towards _Mahometan_ tyrants.

To be hated, however, sufficiently for resistance, a yoke must have

been long and continuously felt. Fifty years might be necessary to

season the Greeks with a knowledge of Turkish oppression; and less than

two generations could hardly be supposed to have manured the whole

territory with an adequate sense of the wrongs they were enduring, and

the withering effects of such wrongs on the sources of public

prosperity. Hatred, besides, without hope, is no root out of which an

effective resistance can be expected to grow; and fifty years almost

had elapsed before a great power had arisen in Europe, having in any

capital circumstance a joint interest with Greece, or specially

authorized, by visible right and power, to interfere as her protector.

The semi-Asiatic power of Russia, from the era of the Czar Peter the

Great, had arisen above the horizon with the sudden sweep and splendor

of a meteor. The arch described by her ascent was as vast in compass as

it was rapid; and, in all history, no political growth, not that of our

own Indian empire, had travelled by accelerations of speed so

terrifically marked. Not that even Russia could have really grown in

strength according to the _apparent_ scale of her progress. The

strength was doubtless there, or much of it, before Peter and

Catherine; but it was latent: there had been no such sudden growth as

people fancied; but there had been a sudden evolution. Infinite

resources had been silently accumulating from century to century; but,

before the Czar Peter, no mind had come across them of power sufficient

to reveal their situation, or to organize them for practical effects.

In some nations, the manifestations of power are coincident with its

growth; in others, from vicious institutions, a vast crystallization

goes on for ages blindly and in silence, which the lamp of some

meteoric mind is required to light up into brilliant display. Thus it

had been in Russia; and hence, to the abused judgment of all

Christendom, she had seemed to leap like Pallas from the brain of

Jupiter--gorgeously endowed, and in panoply of civil array, for all

purposes of national grandeur, at the _fiat_ of one coarse

barbarian. As the metropolitan home of the Greek church, she could not

disown a maternal interest in the humblest of the Grecian tribes,

holding the same faith with herself, and celebrating their worship by

the same rites. This interest she could, at length, venture to express

in a tone of sufficient emphasis; and Greece became aware that she

could, about the very time when Turkish oppression had begun to unite

its victims in aspirations for redemption, and had turned their eyes

abroad in search of some great standard under whose shadow they could

flock for momentary protection, or for future hope. What cabals were

reared upon this condition of things by Russia, and what premature

dreams of independence were encouraged throughout Greece in the reign

of Catherine II., may be seen amply developed, in the once celebrated

work of Mr. William Eton.

Another great circumstance of hope for Greece, coinciding with the dawn

of her own earliest impetus in this direction, and travelling _puri

passu_ almost with the growth of her mightiest friend, was the

advancing decay of her oppressor. The wane of the Turkish crescent had

seemed to be in some secret connection of fatal sympathy with the

growth of the Russian cross. Perhaps the reader will thank us for

rehearsing the main steps by which the Ottoman power had flowed and

ebbed. The foundations of this empire were laid in the thirteenth

century, by Ortogrul, the chief of a Turkoman tribe, residing in tents

not far from Dorylæum, in Phrygia (a name so memorable in the early

crusades), about the time when Jenghiz had overthrown the Seljukian

dynasty. His son Osman first assumed the title of Sultan; and, in 1300,

having reduced the city of Prusa, in Bithynia, he made it the capital

of his dominions. The Sultans who succeeded him for some generations,

all men of vigor, and availing themselves not less of the decrepitude

which had by that time begun to palsy the Byzantine sceptre, than of

the martial and religious fanaticism which distinguished their own

followers, crossed the Hellespont, conquering Thrace and the countries

up to the Danube. In 1453, the most eminent of these Sultans, Mahomet

II., by storming Constantinople, put an end to the Roman empire; and

before his death he placed the Ottoman power in Europe pretty nearly on

that basis to which it had again fallen back by 1821. The long interval

of time between these two dates involved a memorable flux and reflux of

power, and an oscillation between two extremes of panic-striking

grandeur, in the ascending scale (insomuch that the Turkish Sultan was

supposed to be charged in the Apocalypse with the dissolution of the

Christian thrones), and in the descending scale of paralytic dotage

tempting its own instant ruin. In speculating on the causes of the

extraordinary terror which the Turks once inspired, it is amusing, and

illustrative of the revolutions worked by time, to find it imputed, in

the first place, to superior discipline; for, if their discipline was

imperfect, they had, however, a _standing_ army of Janissaries,

whilst the whole of Christian Europe was accustomed to fight merely

summer campaigns with hasty and untrained levies; a second cause lay in

their superior finances, for the Porte had a regular revenue, when the

other powers of Europe relied upon the bounty of their vassals and

clergy; and, thirdly, which is the most surprising feature of the whole

statement, the Turks were so far ahead of others in the race of

improvement, that to them belongs the credit of having first adopted

the extensive use of gunpowder, and of having first brought battering-

trains against fortified places. To his artillery and his musketry it

was that Selim the Ferocious (grandson of that Sultan who took

Constantinople) was indebted for his victories in Syria and Egypt.

Under Solyman the Magnificent (the well-known contemporary of the

Emperor Charles Y.) the crescent is supposed to have attained its

utmost altitude; and already for fifty years the causes had been in

silent progress which were to throw the preponderance into the

Christian scale. In the reign of his son, Selim the Second, this crisis

was already passed; and the battle of Lepanto, in 1571, which crippled

the Turkish navy in a degree never wholly recovered, gave the first

overt signal to Europe of a turn in the course of their prosperity.

Still, as this blow did not equally affect the principal arm of their

military service, and as the strength of the German empire was too much

distracted by Christian rivalship, the _prestige_ of the Turkish

name continued almost unbroken until their bloody overthrow in 1664, at

St. Gothard, by the imperial General Montecuculi. In 1673 they received

another memorable defeat from Sobieski, on which occasion they lost

twenty-five thousand men. In what degree, however, the Turkish Samson

had been shorn of his original strength, was not yet made known to

Europe by any adequate expression, before the great catastrophe of

1683. In that year, at the instigation of the haughty vizier, Kara

Mustafa, the Turks had undertaken the siege of Vienna; and great was

the alarm of the Christian world. But, on the 12th of September, their

army of one hundred and fifty thousand men was totally dispersed by

seventy thousand Poles and Germans, under John Sobieski--"He conquering

_through_ God, and God by him." [Footnote: See the sublime Sonnet

of Chiabrora on this subject, as translated by Mr. Wordsworth.] Then

followed the treaty of Carlovitz, which stripped the Porte of Hungary,

the Ukraine, and other places; and "henceforth" says Mr. Gordon,

"Europe ceased to dread the Turks; and began even to look upon their

existence as a necessary element of the balance of power among its

states." Spite of their losses, however, during the first half of the

eighteenth century, the Turks still maintained a respectable attitude

against Christendom. But the wars of the Empress Catherine II., and the

French invasion of Egypt, demonstrated that either their native vigor

was exhausted and superannuated, or, at least, that the institutions

were superannuated by which their resources had been so long

administered. Accordingly, at the commencement of the present century,

the Sultan Selim II. endeavored to reform the military discipline; but

in the first collision with the prejudices of his people, and the

interest of the Janissaries, he perished by sedition. Mustafa, who

succeeded to the throne, in a few months met the same fate. But then

(1808) succeeded a prince formed by nature for such struggles,--cool,

vigorous, cruel, and intrepid. This was Mahmoud the Second. He

perfectly understood the crisis, and determined to pursue the plans of

his uncle Selim, even at the hazard of the same fate. Why was it that

Turkish soldiers had been made ridiculous in arms, as often as they had

met with French troops, who yet were so far from being the best in

Christendom, that Egypt herself, and the beaten Turks, had seen

_them_ in turn uniformly routed by the British? Physically, the

Turks were equal, at the very least, to the French. In what lay their

inferiority? Simply in discipline, and in their artillery. And so long

as their constitution and discipline continued what they had been,

suited (that is) to centuries long past and gone, and to a condition of

Christendom obsolete for ages, so long it seemed inevitable that the

same disasters should follow the Turkish banners. And to this point,

accordingly, the Sultan determined to address his earliest reforms. But

caution was necessary; he waited and watched. He seized all

opportunities of profiting by the calamities or the embarrassments of

his potent neighbors. He put down all open revolt. He sapped the

authority of all the great families in Asia Minor, whose hereditary

influence could be a counterpoise to his own. Mecca and Medina, the

holy cities of his religion, he brought again within the pale of his

dominions. He augmented and fostered, as a counterbalancing force to

the Janissaries, the corps of the Topjees or artillery-men. He amassed

preparatory treasures. And, up to the year 1820, "his government," says

Mr. Gordon, "was highly unpopular; but it was strong, stern, and

uniform; and he had certainly removed many impediments to the execution

of his ulterior projects."

Such was the situation of Turkey at the moment when her Grecian vassal

prepared to trample on her yoke. In her European territories she

reckoned, at the utmost, eight millions of subjects. But these, besides

being more or less in a semi-barbarous condition, and scattered over a

very wide surface of country, were so much divided by origin, by

language, and religion, that, without the support of her Asiatic arm,

she could not, according to the general opinion, have stood at all. The

rapidity of her descent, it is true, had been arrested by the energy of

her Sultans during the first twenty years of the nineteenth century.

But for the last thirty of the eighteenth she had made a headlong

progress downwards. So utterly, also, were the tables turned, that,

whereas in the fifteenth century her chief superiority over Christendom

had been in the three points of artillery, discipline, and fixed

revenue, precisely in these three she had sunk into utter

insignificance, whilst all Christendom had been continually improving.

Selim and Mahmoud indeed had made effectual reforms in the corps of

gunners, as we have said, and had raised it to the amount of sixty

thousand men; so that at present they have respectable field-artillery,

whereas previously they had only heavy battering-trains. But the

defects in discipline cannot be remedied, so long as the want of a

settled revenue obliges the Sultan to rely upon hurried levies from the

provincial militias of police. Turkey, however, might be looked upon as

still formidable for internal purposes, in the haughty and fanatical

character of her Moslem subjects. And we may add, as a concluding

circumstance of some interest, in this sketch of her modern condition,

that pretty nearly the same European territories as were assigned to

the eastern Roman empire at the time of its separation from the

western, [Footnote: "The vitals of the monarchy lay within that vast

triangle circumscribed by the Danube, the Save, the Adriatic, Euxine,

and Egean Seas, whose altitude may be computed at five hundred, and the

length of its base at seven hundred geographical miles."--GORDON. ]

were included within the frontier line of Turkey, on the first of

January, 1821.

Precisely in this year commenced the Grecian revolution. Concurrently

with the decay of her oppressor the Sultan, had been the prodigious

growth of her patron the Czar. In what degree she looked up to that

throne, and the intrigues which had been pursued with a view to that

connection, may be seen (as we have already noticed) in Eton's Turkey--

a book which attracted a great deal of notice about thirty years ago.

Meantime, besides this secret reliance on Russian countenance or aid,

Greece had since that era received great encouragement to revolt from

the successful experiment in that direction made by the Turkish

province of Servia. In 1800, Czerni George came forward as the asserter

of Servian independence, and drove the Ottomans out of that province.

_Personally_ he was not finally successful. But his example

outlived him; and, after fifteen years' struggle, Servia (says Mr.

Gordon) offered "the unwonted spectacle of a brave and armed Christian

nation living under its own laws in the heart of Turkey," and retaining

no memorial of its former servitude, but the payment of a slender and

precarious tribute to the Sultan, with a _verbal_ profession of

allegiance to his sceptre. Appearances were thus saved to the pride of

the haughty Moslem by barren concessions which cost no real sacrifice

to the substantially victorious Servian.

Examples, however, are thrown away upon a people utterly degraded by

long oppression. And the Greeks were pretty nearly in that condition.

"It would, no doubt," says Mr. Gordon, "be possible to cite a more

_cruel_ oppression than that of the Turks towards their Christian

subjects, but none _so fitted to break men's spirit_." The Greeks,

in fact (under which name are to be understood, not only those who

speak Greek, but the Christian Albanians of Roumelia and the Morea,

speaking a different language, but united with the Greeks in spiritual

obedience to the same church), were, in the emphatic phrase of Mr.

Gordon, "the slaves of slaves:" that is to say, not only were they

liable to the universal tyranny of the despotic Divan, but "throughout

the empire they were in the habitual intercourse of life subjected to

vexations, affronts, and exactions, from Mahometans of every rank.

Spoiled of their goods, insulted in their religion and domestic honor,

they could rarely obtain justice. The slightest flash of courageous

resentment brought down swift destruction on their heads; and cringing

humility alone enabled them to live in ease, or even in safety."

Stooping under this iron yoke of humiliation, we have reason to wonder

that the Greeks preserved sufficient nobility of mind to raise so much

as their wishes in the direction of independence. In a condition of

abasement, from which a simple act of apostasy was at once sufficient

to raise them to honor and wealth, "and from the meanest serfs gathered

them to the caste of oppressors," we ought not to wonder that some of

the Greeks should be mean, perfidious, and dissembling, but rather that

any (as Mr. Gordon says) "had courage to adhere to their religion, and

to eat the bread of affliction." But noble aspirations are fortunately

indestructible in human nature. And in Greece the lamp of independence

of spirit had been partially kept alive by the existence of a native

militia, to whom the Ottoman government, out of mere necessity, had

committed the local defence. These were called _Armatoles_ (or

Gendarmerie); their available strength was reckoned by Pouqueville (for

the year 1814) at ten thousand men; and, as they were a very effectual

little host for maintaining, from age to age, the "true faith militant"

of Greece, namely, that a temporary and a disturbed occupation of the

best lands in the country did not constitute an absolute conquest on

the part of the Moslems, most of whom flocked for security with their

families into the stronger towns; and, as their own martial appearance,

with arms in their hands, lent a very plausible countenance to their

insinuations that they, the Christian Armatoles, were the true _bona

fide_ governors and possessors of the land under a Moslem Suzerain;

and, as the general spirit of hatred to Turkish insolence was not

merely maintained in their own local stations, [Footnote: Originally,

it seems, there were fourteen companies (or _capitanerias_)

settled by imperial diplomas in the mountains of Olympus, Othryx,

Pindus, and Œta; and distinct appropriations were made by the Divan for

their support. _Within_ the Morea, the institution of the

Armatoles was never tolerated; but there the same spirit was kept alive

by tribes, such as the Mainatts, whose insurmountable advantages of

natural position enabled them eternally to baffle the most powerful

enemy.] but also propagated thence with activity to every part of

Greece;--it may be interesting to hear Mr. Gordon's account of their

peculiar composition and habits.

"The Turks," says he, "from the epoch of Mahommed the Second, did not

(unless in Thessaly) generally settle there. Beyond Mount Œta, although

they seized the best lands, the Mussulman inhabitants were chiefly

composed of the garrisons of towns with their families. Finding it

impossible to keep in subjection with a small force so many rugged

cantons, peopled by a poor and hardy race, and to hold in check the

robbers of Albania, the Sultans embraced the same policy which has

induced them to court the Greek hierarchy, and respect ecclesiastical

property,--by enlisting in their service the armed bands that they

could not destroy. When wronged or insulted, these Armatoles threw off

their allegiance, infested the roads, and pillaged the country; while

such of the peasants as were driven to despair by acts of oppression

joined their standard; the term Armatole was then exchanged for that of

Klefthis [_Kleptæs_] or Thief, a profession esteemed highly

honorable, when it was exercised sword in hand at the expense of the

Moslems. [Footnote: And apparently, we may add, when exercised at the

expense of whomsoever at sea. The old Grecian instinct, which

Thucydides states so frankly, under which all seafarers were dedicated

to spoil as people who courted attack, seems never to have been fully

rooted out from the little creeks and naval fastnesses of the Morea,

and of some of the Egean islands. Not, perhaps, the mere spirit of

wrong and aggression, but some old traditionary conceits and maxims,

brought on the great crisis of piracy, which fell under no less terrors

than of the triple thunders of the great allies.] Even in their

quietest mood, these soldiers curbed Turkish tyranny; for, the captains

and Christian primates of districts understanding each other, the

former, by giving to some of their men a hint to desert and turn

Klefts, could easily circumvent Mahometans who came on a mission

disagreeable to the latter. The habits and manners of the Armatoles,

living among forests and in mountain passes, were necessarily rude and

simple: their magnificence consisted in adorning with silver their

guns, pistols, and daggers; their amusements, in shooting at a mark,

dancing, and singing the exploits of the most celebrated chiefs.

Extraordinary activity, and endurance of hardships and fatigue, made

them formidable light troops in their native fastnesses; wrapped in

shaggy cloaks, they slept on the ground, defying the elements; and the

pure mountain air gave them robust health. Such were the warriors that,

in the very worst times, kept alive a remnant of Grecian spirit."

But all these facts of history, or institutions of policy, nay, even

the more violent appeals to the national pride in such memorable

transactions as the expatriation of the illustrious Suliotes (as also

of some eminent predatory chieftains from the Morea), were, after all,

no more than indirect excitements of the insurrectionary spirit. If it

were possible that any adequate occasion should arise for combining the

Greeks in one great movement of resistance, such continued irritations

must have the highest value, as keeping alive the national spirit,

which must finally be relied on to improve it and to turn it to

account; but it was not to be expected that any such local irritations

could ever of themselves avail to create an occasion of sufficient

magnitude for imposing silence on petty dissensions, and for organizing

into any unity of effort a country so splintered and naturally cut into

independent chambers as that of Greece. That task, transcending the

strength (as might seem) of any real agencies or powers then existing

in Greece, was assumed by a mysterious, [Footnote: Epirus and

Acarnania, etc., to the north-west; Roumelia, Thebes, Attica, to the

east; the Morea, or Peloponnesus, to the south-west; and the islands so

widely dispersed in the Egean, had from position a separate interest

over and above their common interest as members of a Christian

confederacy. And in the absence of some great representative society,

there was no voice commanding enough to merge the local interest in the

universal one of Greece. The original (or _Philomuse_ society),

which adopted literature for its ostensible object, as a mask to its

political designs, expired at Munich in 1807; but not before it had

founded a successor more directly political. Hence arose a confusion,

under which many of the crowned heads in Europe were judged

uncharitably as dissemblers or as traitors to their engagements. They

had subscribed to the first society; but they reasonably held that this

did not pledge them to another, which, though inheriting the secret

purposes of the first, no longer masked or disavowed them.] and, in

some sense, a fictitious society of corresponding members, styling

itself the _Hetæria_. A more astonishing case of mighty effects

prepared and carried on to their accomplishment by small means,

magnifying their own extent through great zeal and infinite

concealment, and artifices the most subtle, is not to be found in

history. The _secret tribunal_ of the middle ages is not to be

compared with it for the depth and expansion of its combinations, or

for the impenetrability of its masque. Nor is there in the whole annals

of man a manoeuvre so admirable as that, by which this society,

silently effecting its own transfiguration, and recasting as in a

crucible its own form, organs, and most essential functions, contrived,

by mere force of seasonable silence, or by the very pomp of mystery, to

carry over from the first or innoxious model of the Hetæria, to its new

organization, all those weighty names of kings or princes who would not

have given their sanction to any association having political objects,

however artfully veiled. The early history of the Hetæria is shrouded

in the same mystery as the whole course of its political movements.

Some suppose that Alexander Maurocordato, ex-Hospodar of Wallachia,

during his long exile in Russia, founded it for the promotion of

education, about the beginning of the present century. Others ascribe

it originally to Riga. At all events, its purposes were purely

intellectual in its earliest form. In 1815, in consequence chiefly of

the disappointment which the Greeks met with in their dearest hopes

from the Congress of Vienna, the Hetæria first assumed a political

character under the secret influence of Count Capodistria, of Corfu,

who, having entered the Russian service as mere private secretary to

Admiral Tchitchagoff, in 1812, had, in a space of three years,

insinuated himself into the favor of the Czar, so far as to have become

his private secretary, and a cabinet minister of Russia. He, however,

still masked his final objects under plans of literature and scientific

improvement. In deep shades he organized a vast apparatus of agents and

apostles; and then retired behind the curtain to watch or to direct the

working of his blind machine. It is an evidence of some latent nobility

in the Greek character, in the midst of that levity with which all

Europe taxes it, that never, except once, were the secrets of the

society betrayed; nor was there the least ground for jealousy offered

either to the stupid Moslems, in the very centre of whom, and round

about them, the conspiracy was daily advancing, or even to the rigorous

police of Moscow, where the Hetæria had its head-quarters. In the

single instance of treachery which occurred, it happened that the

Zantiote, who made the discovery to Ali Pacha on a motion of revenge,

was himself too slenderly and too vaguely acquainted with the final

purposes of the Hetæria for effectual mischief, having been fortunately

admitted only to its lowest degree of initiation; so that all passed

off without injury to the cause, or even personally to any of its

supporters. There were, in fact, five degrees in the Hetæria. A

candidate of the lowest class (styled _Adelphoi_, or brothers),

after a minute examination of his past life and connections, and after

taking a dreadful oath, under impressive circumstances, to be faithful

in all respects to the society and his afflicted country, and even to

assassinate his nearest and dearest relation, if detected in treachery,

was instructed only in the general fact that a design was on foot to

ameliorate the condition of Greece. The next degree of _Systimenoi_,

or bachelors, who were selected with more anxious discrimination,

were informed that this design was to move towards its object

_by means of a revolution_. The third class, called _Priests

of Eleusis_, were chosen from the aristocracy; and to them it

was made known that _this revolution was near at hand_; and,

also, that there were in the society higher ranks than their own.

The fourth class was that of the _prelates_; and to this order,

which never exceeded the number of one hundred and sixteen, and

comprehended the leading men of the nation, the most unreserved

information was given upon all the secrets of the Hetæria; after which

they were severally appointed to a particular district, as

superintendent of its interests, and as manager of the whole

correspondence on its concerns with the Grand Arch. This, the crowning

order and key-stone of the society, was reputed to comprehend sixteen

"mysterious and illustrious names," amongst which were obscurely

whispered those of the Czar, the Crown Prince of Bavaria and of

Wurtemburg, of the Hospodar of Wallachia, of Count Capodistria, and

some others. The orders of the Grand Arch were written in cipher, and

bore a seal having in sixteen compartments the same number of initial

letters. The revenue which it commanded must have been considerable;

for the lowest member, on his noviciate, was expected to give at least

fifty piastres (at this time about two pounds sterling); and those of

the higher degrees gave from three hundred to one thousand each. The

members communicated with each other, in mixed society, by masonic

signs.

It cannot be denied that a secret society, with the grand and almost

awful purposes of the Hetæria, spite of some taint which it had

received in its early stages from the spirit of German mummery, is

fitted to fill the imagination, and to command homage from the coldest.

Whispers circulating from mouth to mouth of some vast conspiracy mining

subterraneously beneath the very feet of their accursed oppressors;

whispers of a great deliverer at hand, whose mysterious _Labarum_,

or mighty banner of the Cross, was already dimly descried through

northern mists, and whose eagles were already scenting the carnage and

"savor of death" from innumerable hosts of Moslems; whispers of a

revolution which was again to call, as with the trumpet of

resurrection, from the grave, the land of Timoleon and Epaminondas;

such were the preludings, low and deep, to the tempestuous overture of

revolt and patriotic battle which now ran through every nook of Greece,

and caused every ear to tingle.

The knowledge that this mighty cause must be sowed in dishonor,--

propagated, that is, in respect to the knowledge of its plans, by

redoubled cringings to their brutal masters, in order to shield it from

suspicion,--but that it would probably be reaped in honor; the belief

that the poor Grecian, so abject and trampled under foot, would soon

reappear amongst the nations who had a name, in something of his

original beauty and power; these dim but elevating perceptions, and

these anticipations, gave to every man the sense of an ennobling secret

confided to his individual honor, and, at the same time, thrilled his

heart with sympathetic joy, from approaching glories that were to prove

a personal inheritance to his children. Over all Greece a sense of

power, dim and vast, brooded for years; and a mighty phantom, under the

mysterious name of _Arch_, in whose cloudy equipage were descried,

gleaming at intervals, the crowns and sceptres of great potentates,

sustained, whilst it agitated their hearts. _London_ was one of

the secret watchwords in their impenetrable cipher; _Moscow_ was a

countersign; Bavaria and Austria bore mysterious parts in the drama;

and, though no sound was heard, nor voice given to the powers that were

working, yet, as if by mere force of secret sympathy, all mankind who

were worthy to participate in the enterprise seemed to be linked in

brotherhood with Greece. These notions were, much of them, mere

phantasms and delusions; but they were delusions of mighty efficacy for

arming the hearts of this oppressed country against the terrors that

must be faced; and for the whole of them Greece was indebted to the

Hetæria, and to its organized agency of apostles (as they were

technically called), who compassed land and sea as pioneers for the

coming crusade. [Footnote: Considering how very much the contest did

finally assume a religious character (even Franks being attached, not

as friends of Greece, but simply as Christians), one cannot but wonder

that this romantic term has not been applied to the Greek war in

Western Europe.]

By 1820 Greece was thoroughly inoculated with the spirit of resistance;

all things were ready, so far, perhaps, as it was possible that they

should ever be made ready under the eyes and scimitars of the enemy.

Now came the question of time,--_when_ was the revolt to begin?

Some contend, says Mr. Gordon, that the Hetæria should have waited for

a century, by which time they suppose that the growth of means in favor

of Greece would have concurred with a more than corresponding decay in

her enemy. But, to say nothing of the extreme uncertainty which attends

such remote speculation, and the utter impossibility of training men

with no personal hopes to labor for the benefit of distant generations,

there was one political argument against that course, which Mr. Gordon

justly considers unanswerable. It is this: Turkey in Europe has been

long tottering on its basis. Now, were the attempt delayed until Russia

had displaced her and occupied her seat, Greece would then have

received her liberty as a boon from the conqueror; and the construction

would have been that she held it by sufferance, and under a Russian

warrant. This argument is conclusive. But others there were who fancied

that 1825 was the year at which all the preparations for a successful

revolt could have been matured. Probably some gain in such a case would

have been balanced against some loss. But it is not necessary to

discuss that question. Accident, it was clear, might bring on the first

hostile movement at any hour, when the _minds_ of all men were

prepared, let the means in other respects be as deficient as they

might. Already, in 1820, circumstances made it evident that the

outbreak of the insurrection could not long be delayed. And,

accordingly, in the following year all Greece was in flames.

This affair of 1820 has a separate interest of its own, connected with

the character of the very celebrated person to whom it chiefly relates;

but we notice it chiefly as the real occasion, the momentary spark,

which, alighting upon the combustibles, by this time accumulated

everywhere in Greece, caused a general explosion of the long-hoarded

insurrectionary fury. Ali Pacha, the far-famed vizier of Yannina, had

long been hated profoundly by the Sultan, who in the same proportion

loved and admired his treasures. However, he was persuaded to wait for

his death, which could not (as it seemed) be far distant, rather than

risk anything upon the chances of war. And in this prudent resolution

he would have persevered, but for an affront which he could not

overlook. An Albanian, named Ismael Pasho Bey, once a member of Ali's

household, had incurred his master's deadly hatred; and, flying from

his wrath to various places under various disguises, had at length

taken refuge in Constantinople, and there sharpened the malice of Ali

by attaching himself to his enemies. Ali was still further provoked by

finding that Ismael had won the Sultan's favor, and obtained an

appointment in the palace. Mastered by his fury, Ali hired assassins to

shoot his enemy in the very midst of Constantinople, and under the very

eyes of imperial protection. The assassins failed, having only wounded

him; they were arrested, and disclosed the name of their employer.

Here was an insult which could not be forgiven: Ali Pacha was declared

a rebel and a traitor; and solemnly excommunicated by the head of the

Mussulman law. The Pachas of Europe received orders to march against

him; and a squadron was fitted out to attack him by sea.

In March, 1820, Ali became acquainted with these strong measures; which

at first he endeavored to parry by artifice and bribery. But, finding

_that_ mode of proceeding absolutely without hope, he took the

bold resolution of throwing himself, in utter defiance, upon the native

energies of his own ferocious heart. Having, however, but small

reliance on his Mahometan troops in a crisis of this magnitude, he

applied for Christian succors, and set himself to _court_ the

Christians generally. As a first step, he restored the Armatoles--that

very body whose suppression had been so favorite a measure of his

policy, and pursued so long, so earnestly, and so injuriously to his

credit amongst the Christian part of the population. It happened, at

the first opening of the campaign, that the Christians were equally

courted by the Sultan's generalissimo, Solyman, the Pacha of Thessaly.

For this, however, that Pacha was removed and decapitated; and a new

leader was now appointed in the person of that very enemy, Ismael

Pasho, whose attempted murder had brought the present storm upon Ali.

Ismael was raised to the rank of Serasker (or generalissimo), and was

also made Pacha of Yannina and Del vino. Three other armies, besides a

fleet under the Captain Bey, advanced upon Ali's territories

simultaneously from different quarters. But at that time, in defiance

of these formidable and overwhelming preparations, bets were strongly

in Ali's favor amongst all who were acquainted with his resources: for

he had vast treasures, fortresses of great strength, inexhaustible

supplies of artillery and ammunition, a country almost inaccessible,

and fifteen thousand light troops, whom Mr. Gordon, upon personal

knowledge, pronounces "excellent."

Scarcely had the war commenced, when Ali was abandoned by almost the

whole of his partisans, in mere hatred of his execrable cruelty and

tyrannical government. To Ali, however, this defection brought no

despondency; and with unabated courage he prepared to defend himself to

the last, in three castles, with a garrison of three thousand men. That

he might do so with entire effect, he began by destroying his own

capital of Yannina, lest it should afford shelter to the enemy. Still

his situation would have been most critical, but for the state of

affairs in the enemy's camp. The Serasker was attended by more than

twenty other Pashas. But they were all at enmity with each other. One

of them, and the bravest, was even poisoned by the Serasker. Provisions

were running short, in consequence of their own dissensions. Winter was

fast approaching; the cannonading had produced no conspicuous effect;

and the soldiers were disbanding. In this situation, the Sultan's

lieutenants again saw the necessity of courting aid from the Christian

population of the country. Ali, on his part, never scrupled to bid

against them at any price; and at length, irritated by the ill-usage of

the Turks on their first entrance, and disgusted with the obvious

insincerity of their reluctant and momentary kindness, some of the

bravest Christian tribes (especially the celebrated Suliotes) consented

to take Ali's bribes, forgot his past outrages and unnumbered

perfidies, and, reading his sincerity in the extremity of his peril,

these bravest of the brave ranged themselves amongst the Sultan's

enemies. During the winter they gained some splendid successes; other

alienated friends came back to Ali; and even some Mahometan Beys were

persuaded to take up arms in his behalf. Upon the whole, the Turkish

Divan was very seriously alarmed; and so much so, that it superseded

the Serasker Ismael, replacing him with the famous Kourshid Pacha, at

that time viceroy of the Morea. And so ended the year 1820.

This state of affairs could not escape the attention of the vigilant

Hetæria. Here was Ali Pacha, hitherto regarded as an insurmountable

obstacle in their path, absolutely compelled by circumstances to be

their warmest friend. The Turks again, whom no circumstances could

entirely disarm, were yet crippled for the time, and their whole

attention preoccupied by another enemy, most alarming to their policy,

and most tempting to their cupidity. Such an opportunity it seemed

unpardonable to neglect. Accordingly, it was resolved to begin the

insurrection. At its head was placed Prince Alexander Ypsilanti, a son

of that Hospodar of Wallachia whose deposition by the Porte had

produced the Russian war of 1806. This prince's qualifications

consisted in his high birth, in his connection with Russia (for he had

risen to the rank of major-general in that service), and, finally (if

such things can deserve a mention), in an agreeable person and manners.

For all other and higher qualifications he was wholly below the

situation and the urgency of the crisis. His first error was in the

choice of his ground. For some reasons, which are not sufficiently

explained,--possibly on account of his family connection with those

provinces,--he chose to open the war in Moldavia and Wallachia. This

resolution he took in spite of every warning, and the most intelligent

expositions of the absolute necessity that, to be at all effectual, the

first stand should be made in Greece. He thought otherwise; and,

managing the campaign after his own ideas, he speedily involved himself

in quarrels, and his army, through the perfidy of a considerable

officer, in ruinous embarrassments. This unhappy campaign is

circumstantially narrated by Mr. Gordon in his first book; but, as it

never crossed the Danube, and had no connection with Greece except by

its purposes, we shall simply rehearse the great outline of its course.

The signal for insurrection was given in January, 1821; and Prince

Ypsilanti took the field, by crossing the Pruth in March. Early in

April he received a communication from the Emperor of Russia, which at

once prostrated his hopes before an enemy was seen. He was formally

disavowed by that prince, erased from his army-list, and severely

reproached for his "_folly and ingratitude_," in letters from two

members of the Russian cabinet; and on the 9th of April this fact was

publicly notified in Yassy, the capital of Moldavia, by the Russian

consul-general. His army at this time consisted of three thousand men,

which, however, was afterwards reinforced, but with no gunpowder except

what was casually intercepted, and no lead except some that had been

stripped from the roof of an ancient cathedral. On the 12th of May the

Pacha of Ibrail opened the campaign. A few days after, the Turkish

troops began to appear in considerable force; and on the 8th of June an

alarm was suddenly given "that the white turbans were upon them." In

the engagement which followed, the insurgent army gave way; and, though

their loss was much smaller than that of the Turks, yet, from the many

blunders committed, the consequences were disastrous; and, had the

Turks pursued, there would on that day have been an end of the

insurrection. But far worse and more decisive was the subsequent

disaster of the 17th. Ypsilanti had been again reinforced; and his

advanced guard had surprised a Turkish detachment of cavalry in such a

situation that their escape seemed impossible. Yet all was ruined by

one officer of rank, who got drunk, and advanced with an air of

bravado--followed, on a principle of honor, by a sacred battalion

[_hieros lochos_], composed of five hundred Greek volunteers, of

birth and education, the very _élite_ of the insurgent infantry.

The Turks gave themselves up for lost; but, happening to observe that

this drunkard seemed unsupported by other parts of the army, they

suddenly mounted, came down upon the noble young volunteers before they

could even form in square; and nearly the whole, disdaining to fly,

were cut to pieces on the ground. An officer of rank, and a brave man,

appalled by this hideous disaster, the affair of a few moments, rode up

to the spot, and did all he could to repair it. But the cowardly

drunkard had fled at the first onset, with all his Arnauts; panic

spread rapidly; and the whole force of five thousand men fled before

eight hundred Turks, leaving four hundred men dead on the field, of

whom three hundred and fifty belonged to the sacred battalion.

The Turks, occupied with gathering a trophy of heads, neglected to

pursue. But the work was done. The defeated advance fell back upon the

main body; and that same night the whole army, panic-struck, ashamed,

and bewildered, commenced a precipitate retreat. From this moment

Prince Ypsilanti thought only of saving himself. This purpose he

effected in a few days, by retreating into Austria, from which

territory he issued his final order of the day, taxing his army, in

violent and unmeasured terms, with cowardice and disobedience. This was

in a limited sense true; many distinctions, however, were called for in

mere justice; and the capital defects, after all, were in himself. His

plan was originally bad; and, had it been better, he was quite unequal

to the execution of it. The results were unfortunate to all concerned

in it. Ypsilanti himself was arrested by Austria, and thrown into the

unwholesome prison of Mongatz, where, after languishing for six years,

he perished miserably. Some of the subordinate officers prolonged the

struggle in a guerilla style for some little time; but all were finally

suppressed. Many were put to death; many escaped into neutral ground;

and it is gratifying to add, that of two traitors amongst the higher

officers, one was detected and despatched in a summary way of vengeance

by his own associates; the other, for some unexplained reason, was

beheaded by his Turkish friends at the very moment when he had put

himself into their power, in fearless obedience to their own summons to

_come and receive his well-merited reward_, and under an express

assurance from the Pacha of Silistria that he was impatiently waiting

to invest him with a pelisse of honor. Such faith is kept with

traitors; such faith be ever kept with the betrayers of nations and

their holiest hopes! Though in this instance the particular motives of

the Porte are still buried in mystery.

Thus terminated the first rash enterprise, which resulted from the too

tempting invitation held out in the rebellion then agitating Epirus,

locking up, as it did, and neutralizing, so large a part of the

disposable Turkish forces. To this we return. Kourshid Pacha quitted

the Morea with a large body of troops, in the first days of January,

1821, and took the command of the army already before Yannina. But,

with all his great numerical superiority to the enemy with whom he

contended, and now enjoying undisturbed union in his own camp, he found

it impossible to make his advances rapidly. Though in hostility to the

Porte, and though now connected with Christian allies, Ali Pacha was

yet nominally a Mahometan. Hence it had been found impossible as yet to

give any color of an anti-Christian character to the war; and the

native Mahometan chieftains had therefore no scruple in coalescing with

the Christians of Epirus, and making joint cause with Ali. Gradually,

from the inevitable vexations incident to the march and residence of a

large army, the whole population became hostile to Kourshid; and their

remembrance of Ali's former oppressions, if not effaced, was yet

suspended in the presence of a nuisance so immediate and so generally

diffused; and most of the Epirots turned their arms against the Porte.

The same feelings which governed _them_ soon spread to the provinces

of Etolia and Acarnania; or rather, perhaps, being previously ripe

for revolt, these provinces resolved to avail themselves of the

same occasion. Missolonghi now became the centre of rebellion; and

Kourshid's difficulties were daily augmenting. In July of this year

(1821) these various insurgents, actively cooperating, defeated the

Serasker in several actions, and compelled a Pacha to lay down his arms

on the road between Yannina and Souli. It was even proposed by the

gallant partisan, Mark Bozzaris, that all should unite to hem in the

Serasker; but a wound, received in a skirmish, defeated this plan. In

September following, however, the same Mark intercepted and routed

Hassan Pacha in a defile on his march to Yannina; and in general the

Turks were defeated everywhere except at the headquarters of the

Serasker, and with losses in men enormously disproportioned to the

occasions. This arose partly from the necessity under which they lay of

attacking expert musketeers under cover of breastworks, and partly from

their own precipitance and determination to carry everything by summary

force; "whereas," says Mr. Gordon, "a little patience would surely have

caused them to succeed, and at least saved them much dishonor, and

thousands of lives thrown away in mere wantonness." But, in spite of

all blunders, and every sort of failure elsewhere, the Serasker was

still advancing slowly towards his main objects--the reduction of Ali

Pacha. And by the end of October, on getting possession of an important

part of Ali's works, he announced to the Sultan that he should soon be

able to send him the traitor's head, for that he was already reduced to

six hundred men. A little before this, however, the celebrated

Maurocordato, with other persons of influence, had arrived at

Missolonghi with the view of cementing a general union of Christian and

Mahometan forces against the Turks. In this he was so far successful,

that in November a combined attack was made upon Ismael, the old enemy

of Ali, and three other Pachas, shut up in the town of Arta. This

attack succeeded partially; but it was attempted at a moment

dramatically critical, and with an effect ruinous to the whole

campaign, as well as that particular attack. The assailing party, about

thirty-four hundred men, were composed in the proportion of two

Christians to one Mahometan. They had captured one half of the town;

and, Mark Bozzaris having set this on fire to prevent plundering, the

four Pachas were on the point of retreating under cover of the smoke.

At that moment arrived a Mahometan of note, instigated by Kourshid, who

was able to persuade those of his own faith that the Christians were

not fighting with any sincere views of advantage to Ali, but with

ulterior purposes hostile to Mahometanism itself. On this, the

Christian division of the army found themselves obliged to retire

without noise, in order to escape their own allies, now suddenly united

with the four Pachas. Nor, perhaps, would even this have been effected,

but for the precaution of Mark Bozzaris in taking hostages from two

leading Mahometans. Thus failed the last diversion in favor of Ali

Pacha, who was henceforward left to his own immediate resources. All

the Mahometan tribes now ranged themselves on the side of Kourshid; and

the winter of 1821-2 passed away without further disturbance in Epirus.

Meantime, during the absence of Kourshid Pacha from the Morea, the

opportunity had not been lost for raising the insurrection in that

important part of Greece. Kourshid had marched early in January, 1821;

and already in February symptoms of the coming troubles appeared at

Patrass, "the most flourishing and populous city of the Peloponnesus,

the emporium of its trade, and residence of the foreign consuls and

merchants." Its population was about eighteen thousand, of which number

two thirds were Christian. In March, when rumors had arrived of the

insurrection beyond the Danube, under Alexander Ypsilanti, the

fermentation became universal; and the Turks of Patrass hastily

prepared for defence. By the twenty-fifth, the Greeks had purchased all

the powder and lead which could be had; and about the second of April

they raised the standard of the Cross. Two days after this, fighting

began at Patrass. The town having been set on fire, "the Turkish castle

threw shot and shells at random; the two parties fought amongst the

ruins, and massacred each other without mercy; the only prisoners that

were spared owed their lives to fanaticism; some Christian youths being

circumcised by the Mollahs, and some Turkish boys baptized by the

priests."

"While the commencement of the war," says Mr. Gordon, "was thus

signalized by the ruin of a flourishing city, the insurrection gained

ground with wonderful rapidity; and from mountain to mountain, and

village to village, propagated itself to the furthest corner of the

Peloponnesus. Everywhere the peasants flew to arms; and those Turks who

resided in the open country or unfortified towns were either cut to

pieces, or forced to fly into strongholds." On the second of April, the

flag of independence was hoisted in Achaia. On the ninth, a Grecian

senate met at Calamata, in Messenia, having for its president

Mavromichalis, Prince or Bey of Maina, a rugged territory in the

ancient Sparta, famous for its hardy race of robbers and pirates.

[Footnote: These Mainates have been supposed to be of Sclavonian

origin; but Mr. Gordon, upon the authority of the Emperor Constantine

Porphyrogenitos, asserts that they are of pure Laconian blood, and

became Christians in the reign of that emperor's grandfather, Basil the

Macedonian. They are, and over have been, robbers by profession;

robbers by land, pirates by sea; for which last branch of their mixed

occupation they enjoy singular advantages in their position at the

point of junction between the Ionian and Egean seas. To illustrate

their condition of perpetual warfare, Mr. Gordon mentions that there

were very lately individuals who had lived for twenty years in towers,

not daring to stir out lest their neighbors should shoot them. They

were supplied with bread and cartridges by their wives; for the persons

of women are sacred in Maina. Two other good features in their

character are their hospitality and their indisposition to bloodshed.

They are in fact _gentle thieves_--the Robin Hoods of Greece.]

On the sixth of April, the insurrection had spread to the narrow

territory of Megaris, situated to the north of the isthmus. The

Albanian population of this country, amounting to about ten thousand,

and employed by the Porte to guard the defiles of the entrance into

Peloponnesus, raised the standard of revolt, and marched to invest the

Acrocorinthus. In the Messenian territory, the Bishop of Modon, having

made his guard of Janissaries drunk, cut the whole of them to pieces;

and then encamping on the heights of Navarin, his lordship blockaded

that fortress. The abruptness of these movements, and their almost

simultaneous origin at distances so considerable, sufficiently prove

how ripe the Greeks were for this revolt as respected temper; and in

other modes of preparation they never _could_ have been ripe

whilst overlooked by Turkish masters. That haughty race now retreated