The learned Professor makes too little account of the German philosopher

Kant, whose maxim that ‘the mind alone is formative,’ is the only lever

by which the modern philosophy can be overturned. He has indeed overlaid

this simple principle by his logical technicalities, his categories and

stuff, as Locke has confounded all common sense with his ideas of

sensation and ideas of reflection. Nothing can be done towards a true

theory of the mind, till philosophers are convinced that all ideas are

ideas of the understanding; and that it requires all the same faculties

to have the _idea_ of the stud of a brass nail in an old arm-chair, that

is, the perception of connection, limits, form, difference, aye, and of

abstraction, in this simple object, as in the highest speculations of

theological or metaphysical science. The modern philosophers contend

that the mind has no idea of any thing but sensible images: the way to

turn the tables upon them is then to prove, that in the idea of every

one of these sensible objects, there is necessarily involved the

exercise of all those faculties, of which they deny the existence, and

which are exerted, only in a different degree, in the most simple or the

most refined operations of the understanding.

SHAKESPEAR’S FEMALE CHARACTERS

_The Examiner._] [_July 28, 1816._

Shakespear’s women (we mean those who were his favourites, and whom he

intended to be the favourites of the reader) exist almost entirely in

the relations and charities of domestic life. They are nothing in

themselves, but every thing in their attachment to others. We think as

little of their persons as they do themselves, because we are let into

the secrets of their hearts, which are more important. We are too much

interested in their affairs to stop to look at their faces, except by

stealth and at intervals. We catch their beauties only sideways as in a

glass, but we everywhere meet their hearts coming at us,—_full butt_, as

_Miss Peggy_ meets her husband in the Park. No one ever hit the true

perfection of the female character, the sense of weakness leaning on the

strength of its affections for support, so well as Shakespear—no one

ever so well painted natural tenderness free from all affectation and

disguise, that

‘Calls true love acted simple modesty’—

no one else ever so well shewed how delicacy and timidity, urged to an

extremity, grow romantic and extravagant, for the romance of his

heroines (in which they abound) is only an excess of the common

prejudices of their sex, scrupulous of being false to their vows, truant

to their affections, and taught by the force of their feelings when to

forego the forms of propriety for the essence of it. His women are in

this respect exquisite logicians, for they argue from what they feel,

and that is a sure game, when the stake is deep. They know their own

minds exactly. High imagination springs from deep habit; and

Shakespear’s women only followed up the idea of what they liked, of what

they had sworn to with their tongues, and what was engraven on their

hearts, into its untoward consequences. They were the prettiest little

set of martyrs and confessors on record.

We have almost as great an affection for _Imogen_ as she had for

_Posthumus_; and she deserves it rather better. Of all Shakespear’s

women she is perhaps the most touching, the most tender, and the most

true. As to _Desdemona_, who was alone a match for her in good faith and

heroic self-devotion, she had her faults, and she suffered for them.

_Imogen’s_ incredulity as to her husband’s infidelity is much the same

as _Desdemona’s_ backwardness to believe Othello’s jealousy. Her answer

to the most distressing part of the picture is only, ‘my Lord, I fear,

has forgot Britain.’ Her readiness to pardon _Iachimo’s_ falsehoods, and

his designs upon her virtue, is a good lesson to prudes; and shews (as

perhaps Shakespear intended it, or nature for him) that where there is a

strong attachment to virtue, it has no need to bolster itself up with an

outrageous or affected antipathy to vice. The morality of Shakespear in

this way is great; but it is not to be found in the four last lines of

his plays, in the form of extreme unction. The scene in which _Pisanio_

gives _Imogen_ her husband’s letter accusing her of incontinency, is as

fine as anything could be:—

‘_Pisanio._ What cheer, Madam?

_Imogen._ False to his bed! What is it to be false?

To lie in watch there, and to think on him?

To weep ’twixt clock and clock! If sleep charge nature,

To break it with a fearful dream of him,

And cry myself awake? That’s false to ’s bed, is it?

_Pisanio._ Alas, good lady!

_Imogen._ I false? thy conscience witness, Iachimo,

Thou didst accuse him of incontinency,

Thou then look’dst like a Villain: Now methinks,

Thy favour’s good enough. Some Jay of Italy,

Whose mother was her painting, hath betrayed him:

Poor I am stale, a garment out of fashion,

And for I am richer than to hang by th’ walls,

I must be ript; to pieces with me. Oh,

Men’s vows are women’s traitors. All good seeming

By thy revolt, oh Husband, shall be thought

Put on for villainy: not born where ‘t grows,

But worn a bait for Ladies.

_Pisanio._ Good Madam, hear me—

_Imogen._ Talk thy tongue weary, speak:

I have heard I am a strumpet, and mine ear,

Therein false struck, can take no greater wound,

Nor tent to bottom that.’——

When _Pisanio_, who had been charged to kill his mistress, puts her in a

way to live, she says—

‘Why, good fellow,

What shall I do the while? Where bide? How live?

Or in my life what comfort, when I am

Dead to my Husband?’

Yet when he advises her to disguise herself in boy’s clothes, and

suggests ‘a course pretty and full in view,’ by which she may ‘happily

be near the residence of _Posthumus_,’ she exclaims—

‘Oh, for such means,

Though peril to my modesty, not death on ‘t,

I would adventure.’

And when _Pisanio_, enlarging on the consequences, tells her she must

change—

——‘Fear and niceness,

The handmaids of all women, or more truly,

Woman its pretty self, into a waggish courage,

Ready in gibes, quick answer’d, saucy, and

As quarellous as the weazel’—

She interrupts him hastily:—

‘Nay, be brief:

I see unto thy end, and am almost

A man already.’

In her journey thus disguised to Milford-Haven, she loses her guide and

her way; and unbosoming her complaints, says beautifully,—

——‘My dear Lord,

Thou art one of the false ones: now I think on thee,

My hunger’s gone; but even before, I was

At point to sink for food.’

She afterwards finds, as she thinks, the dead body of _Posthumus_, and

engages herself as a foot-boy to serve a Roman Officer, when she has

done all due obsequies to him whom she calls her former master:

——‘And when

With wild wood-leaves and weeds I ha’ strewed his grave,

And on it said a century of pray’rs,

Such as I can, twice o’er, I’ll weep and sigh,

And leaving so his service, follow you,

So please you entertain me.’

Now this is the very religion of love. Is it not? All this, which is the

essence of the character, is free from every thing like personal

flattery or laboured description. She relies little on her personal

charms, which she fears may have been eclipsed by some painted jay of

Italy; she relies only on her merit, and her merit is in the depth of

her love, her truth and constancy. Our admiration of her beauty is

excited as it were with as little consciousness as possible on her part.

There are two delicious descriptions given of her, one when she is

asleep, and one when she is supposed dead. _Arviragus_ thus addresses

her:

——‘With fairest flowers,

While summer lasts, and I live here, Fidele,

I’ll sweeten thy sad grave; thou shalt not lack

The flow’r that’s like thy face, pale primrose, nor

The azure’d hare-bell, like thy veins, no, nor

The leaf of eglantine, which not to slander,

Out-sweeten’d not thy breath.’

The yellow _Iachimo_ gives another thus, when he steals into her

bed-chamber:

——‘Cytherea,

How bravely thou becom’st thy bed! Fresh lily,

And whiter than the sheets! That I might touch—

But kiss, one kiss—’Tis her breathing that

Perfumes the chamber thus: the flame o’ th’ taper

Bows toward her, and would under-peep her lids

To see th’ enclosed lights now canopied

Under the windows, white and azure, laced

With blue of Heav’n’s own tinct—on her left breast

A mole cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops

I’ th’ bottom of a cowslip.’

There is a moral sense in the proud beauty of this last image, a rich

surfeit of the fancy,—as that well-known passage beginning, ‘Me of my

lawful pleasure she restrained, and prayed me oft forbearance,’ sets a

keener edge upon it by the inimitable picture of modesty and

self-denial. _Desdemona_ is another instance (almost to a proverb) of

the devotedness of the sex to a favourite object. She is ‘subdued even

to the very quality of her lord,’ and to _Othello’s_ ‘honours and his

valiant parts her soul and fortunes consecrates.’ The lady protests as

much herself, and she is as good as her word. There is not a set

description of her in any part of the play; and the only thing that

tends that way is the equivocal and somewhat luscious dialogue that

takes place between _Iago_ and _Cassio_ as an accompaniment to the

ceremonies of the wedding-night. We see her visage in her mind: her

character every where predominates over her person:

‘A maiden, never bold;

Of spirit so still and quiet, that her motion

Blush’d at itself.’

She is not a painted idol, carved out of the poet’s brain, but is

herself a worshipper at the shrine of duty. As Milton dashes the

luxurious effect of his descriptions by a moral, Shakespear qualifies it

by the interest of the story, as in the scene where _Othello_ takes

_Desdemona_ by the hand. The truth of conception, with which timidity

and boldness are united in the same character, is marvellous. The

extravagance of her actions, the pertinacity of her affections, in a

manner arises out of the gentleness of her nature. It is an unreserved

reliance on the purity of her intentions, a surrender of her fears to

her love, a knitting of herself (heart and soul) to the fate of another.

Bating the commencement of her passion, which is a little fantastical

and self-willed (though that may be accounted for in the same way from

an inability to resist a rising inclination) her whole character

consists in having no will of her own, no prompter but her obedience.

Her romantic turn is only a consequence of the domestic and practical

part of her disposition; and instead of following _Othello_ to Cyprus,

she would rather have remained at home, ‘a moth of peace,’ if her

husband could have staid with her. Her resignation and angelic sweetness

of nature do not desert her at the last. The scenes in which she laments

and tries to account for _Othello’s_ harsh usage of her are exquisitely

managed. After he has struck her and called her names, she says:

——‘Alas, Iago,

What shall I do to win my lord again?

Good friend, go to him; for by this light of Heaven,

I know not how I lost him. Here I kneel;

If e’er my will did trespass ’gainst his love,

Either in discourse, or thought, or actual deed,

Or that mine eyes, mine ears, or any sense

Delighted them on any other form;

Or that I do not, and ever did,

And ever will, though he do shake me off

To beggarly divorcement, love him dearly,

Comfort forswear me. Unkindness may do much,

And his unkindness may defeat my life,

But never taint my love....

_Iago._ I pray you be content: ’tis but his humour.

The business of the state does him offence.

_Desdemona._ If ’twere no other.’——

The scene which follows with her maid and the song of the Willow are

equally beautiful, and shew Shakespear’s extreme power of varying the

expression of passion, in all its moods and in all circumstances.

One of the finest passages in Mr. Wordsworth’s poems is that where he

has given us his opinion of _Desdemona_:

‘Books, dreams, are each a world; and books, we know,

Are a substantial world, both pure and good,

Round which, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,

Our pastime and our happiness may grow;

· · · · ·

Matter wherein right voluble I am,

Two let me mention dearer than the rest,

The gentle lady wedded to the Moor,

And heavenly Una with her milk-white lamb.’

We have said enough to explain our idea of the general turn of

Shakespear’s female characters. We need not mention _Ophelia_ or

_Cordelia_, both of which admit of little external decoration, and which

it would seem impossible to treat in any other way than as Shakespear

has represented them, abstracted from every thing but their

heart-breaking ties to others, if Tate had not adorned the person of

_Cordelia_ with a number of beauties, and finished her story with a

lover. _Cleopatra_, who has certainly a personal identity of her own,

and who is described in all the glowing pomp of eastern luxury, is not

an exception to what we have said, for she is not intended as a model of

her sex. What we best recollect of _Cressida_, is _Pandarus’s_

description of her after bringing her to the tent, where he says,—‘And

her heart beats like a new-ta’en sparrow’—which must be allowed to be

quite Shakesperian. _Miranda_ appears to be the most conscious of her

charms of any of his favourites (perhaps from the very solitude in which

she had lived), a sort of miracle of her father’s island, and the

goddess of her new-found lover’s idolatry. _Perdita_ is a very pretty

low-born lass, the Queen of curds and cream—but she makes us think of

other things more than of her face. There is one passage in which the

poet has, we suspect, very artfully rallied the indifference of the sex

to abstract reasoning:

‘_Perdita._ Sir, the fairest flowers o’ th’ season

Are our carnations, and streak’d gilly-flowers,

Which some call Nature’s bastards: of that kind

Our rustic garden’s barren, and I care not

To get slips of them.

_Polixenes._ Wherefore, gentle maiden,

Do you neglect them?

_Perdita._ For I have heard it said,

There is an art which, in their piedness shares

With great creating nature.

_Polixenes._ Say, there be,

Yet nature is made better by no mean,

But nature makes that mean; so o’er that art

Which you say adds to nature, is an art

That nature makes: you see, sweet maid, we marry

A gentler scyon to the wildest stock,

And make conceive a bark of baser kind

By bud of nobler race. This is an art

Which does mend nature, change it rather; but

The art itself is nature.

_Perdita._ So it is.

_Polixenes._ Then make your garden rich in gilly-flowers,

And do not call them bastards.

_Perdita._ _I’ll not put

The dibble in earth, to set one slip of them_,’ etc.

Here the lady gives up the argument, but keeps her opinion. We had

forgot one charming instance to our purpose, which is the character of

_Helen_ in _All’s Well that Ends Well_; and this also puts us in mind

that Shakespear probably borrowed his female characters from the Italian

novelists, and not from English women.

MISS O’NEILL’S WIDOW CHEERLY

_The Examiner._] [_January 12, 1817._

We have few idols, and those few we do not like to lose. But the warmth

of our idolatry of Miss O’Neill will be brought to a much lower

temperature if she goes on playing comedy at this rate. We cannot form

any compromise in our imagination between _Belvidera_ and the _Widow

Cheerly_. To speak our minds plainly, Miss O’Neill is by far the best

tragic actress we ever saw, with one great exception, and she is the

worst comic actress we remember, without any exception at all. Her

comedy is cast in lead, and sad _doleful dumps_ she makes of it. It is

tragedy in low-heeled shoes. Her spirit is boisterousness; her

playfulness languid affectation; her familiarity oppressive; her gaiety

lamentable. There never was such labour in vain. A smile trickles down

her cheek like a tear, and her voice whines through a repartee in as

many winding bouts of mawkish insinuation as through the most pathetic

address. We cannot bear all this evident condescension; it overpowers

us. In one scene she was very much applauded: it is that in which the

_Widow Cheerly_ gives a characteristic description of her former

husband’s introduction of her to his bottle-companions: ‘This is _my_

wife,’ etc. Now it cannot be denied that she mimicked the airs and

manner of the fox-hunting squire very well, and her voice fairly gave

the house a box on the ear. But we do not wish to see Miss O’Neill in

the part of _Squire Western_. We conceive that this delightful actress

cannot descend lower than the soldier’s daughter, except by playing the

sailor’s daughter, and giving the word of command in a striped blue

jacket and trowsers instead of a striped green gown. In these tom-boy

hectoring heroines Mrs. Charles Kemble, whom, to the best of our belief,

she imitates, beats her out and out; and Mrs. Mardyn, besides being

taller and handsomer, has really more of the _vis comica_. But we will

have done with this ungrateful subject. The comedy itself, of _The

Soldier’s Daughter_, is the _beau ideal_ of modern comedy. It contains

the whole theory and practice of sentimentality, of which a bank-note

offered and declined is the circulating medium, and a white cambric

pocket-handkerchief, that catches the crystal tear in the eye of

sensibility ere it falls, the visible emblem. _Mr._ and _Mrs. Melford_

are an amiable young couple in lodgings and in great distress, but you

do not learn how they got into one any more than the other. They utter

their complaints, but are too delicate to touch upon the cause, and you

sympathise with their sorrows, not with their misfortunes. They have a

little girl, who has a little doll, which she christens ‘Miss Good

Gentleman,’ after a person whose name she does not know. This is a very

palpable hit, and tells amazingly. The unknown benefactor of these

unfortunates _incognito_ is a young _Mr. Heartall_, a wild, giddy

character, that is, in the modern sense, a person who never stands still

on the stage—who is always running into scrapes, which he walks out of

without leaving any apology or account behind him. Then there is the

_Widow Cheerly_, in the same house with the _Melfords_, whose heart and

whose _ridicule_ are ever open to the distressed, and who makes a match

with _Young Heartall_, because he makes her an offer, it not being

consistent with the gallantry of a soldier’s daughter to decline a

challenge of that sort. Then there is _Old Heartall_, uncle to _Young

Heartall_, and an East Indian Governor, who says one thing and does

another; calls his nephew a scoundrel, and throws his arms round his

neck. He is not a character, but a contradiction. Then there is a Mr.

Ferret, who commits all sorts of unaccountable villainies through the

piece, without any ostensible motives, and at the end of it you find

that he has acted upon an abstract principle of avarice.

‘If,’ he says, ‘there had been no such thing as avarice, I had not been

a villain.’ This is a very edifying confession of faith; and so not

finding this principle answer, he repents upon an abstract principle of

repentance, and also at the instigation of his old benefactor, (just

arrived from the East and accordingly a great moralist), who reads him a

great moral lecture, and advises him to give up his ill-gotten gains. As

_Mr. Ferret_ submits to his advice backed by the law, _Old Heartall_ is

prevailed on to forgive his designs upon the lives, characters, and

fortunes of his acquaintance, from an amiable weakness of heart, and

because the _Widow Cheerly_, who intercedes for him, ‘has roguish eyes.’

Mr. Liston plays a foolish servant in the _Heartall_ family, whose name

is _Timothy_. The name of _Timothy_ is one of the jokes of this part:

Mr. Liston’s face is the other, and the best of the two.

The whole tone of this play reminded us strongly of a very excellent

criticism which we had read a short time before on the _cant_ of Modern

Comedy, in one of the notes to Mr. Lamb’s Specimens of Early Dramatic

Poetry:—

‘The insipid levelling morality to which the modern stage is tied down

would not admit of such admirable passions as these scenes are filled

with. A puritanical obtuseness of sentiment, a stupid infantile

goodness, is creeping among us, instead of the vigorous passions, and

virtues clad in flesh and blood, with which the old dramatists present

us. Those noble and liberal casuists could discern in the differences,

the quarrels, the animosities of men, a beauty and truth of moral

feeling, no less than in the iteratively inculcated duties of

forgiveness and atonement. With us, all is hypocritical meekness. A

reconciliation scene (let the occasion be never so absurd and unnatural)

is always sure of applause. Our audiences come to the theatre to be

complimented on their goodness. They compare notes with the amiable

characters in the play, and find a wonderful similarity of disposition

between them. We have a common stock of dramatic morality, out of which

a writer may be supplied, without the trouble of copying it from

originals within his own breast. To know the boundaries of honour—to be

judiciously valiant—to have a temperance which shall beget a smoothness

in the angry swellings of youth—to esteem life as nothing when the

sacred reputation of a parent is to be defended, yet to shake and

tremble under a pious cowardice when that ark of an honest confidence is

found to be frail and tottering—to feel the true blows of a real

disgrace blunting that sword which the imaginary strokes of a supposed

false imputation had put so keen an edge upon but lately—to do, or to

imagine this done in a feigned story, asks something more of a moral

sense, somewhat a greater delicacy of perception in questions of right

and wrong, than goes to the writing of two or three hackneyed sentences

about the laws of honour as opposed to the laws of the land or a

common-place against duelling. Yet such things would stand a writer now

a days in far better stead than Captain Ager and his conscientious

honour; and he would be considered as a far better teacher of morality

than old Rowley or Middleton, if they were living.’

PENELOPE AND THE DANSOMANIE.

_The Examiner._] [_January 19, 1817._

KING’S THEATRE.

This theatre was opened for the present season under very favourable

auspices; and we congratulate the public on the prospect of the

continuance of this addition to the stock of elegant amusement. Though

the opera is not among the ordinary resources of the lovers of the

drama, it is a splendid object in the _vista_ of a winter’s evening, and

we should be sorry to see it mouldering into decay, its graceful columns

and Corinthian capitals fallen, and its glory buried in Chancery. We

rejoice when the Muses escape out of the fangs of the law, nor do we

like to see the Graces arrested—in a _pas de trois_. We do not ‘like to

see the unmerited fall of what has long flourished in splendour; any

void produced in the imagination; any ruin on the face of Art.’ At

present we hope better things from the known tastes and talents of the

gentleman who is understood to have undertaken the management of the

principal department, and from what we have seen of the performances

with which the company have commenced their career. The pieces on

Saturday and Tuesday were the Opera of _Penelope_ by Cimarosa, and the

inimitable comic Ballet, _The Dansomanie_. The first is, what it

professes to be, a Grand Serious Opera: but it is somewhat heavy and

monotonous. It introduced to the English Stage several actors of

considerable eminence abroad. The principal were Mad. Camporese as

_Penelope_, Madame Pasta as _Telemachus_, and Signor Crivelli as

_Ulysses_. The last of these appears to be as good an actor as a singer.

His gestures have considerable appropriateness and expression, besides

having that sustained dignity and studied grace, which are essential to

the harmony of the Opera; and his tones in singing are full, clear, and

so articulate, that any one at all imbued with the Italian language can

follow the words with ease. Madame Camporese performed _Penelope_, and

drew down the frequent plaudits of the house by the sweetness of her

voice, and the flexibility of execution which she manifested in some of

the most difficult and impassioned passages. If we were to express our

opinion honestly, we should say that we received most pleasure from

Madame Pasta’s _Telemachus_. There is a natural eloquence about her

singing which we feel, and therefore understand. Her dress and figure

also answered to the classical idea we have of the youthful

_Telemachus_. Her voice is good, her action is good: she has a handsome

face, and _very_ handsome legs. The ladies, we know, think otherwise:

this is the only subject on which we think ourselves better judges than

they.—Of the _Dansomanie_ we will say nothing, lest we should be

supposed to have caught the madness which it ridicules so sportively and

gracefully. The whole is excellent, but the Minuet de la Cour is

sublime: and the Gavot which succeeds it, is as good. Madame Leon was

exquisite, and she had a partner worthy of her.

‘Such were the joys of our dancing days.’

Really when we see these dances, and hear the music, which our old

fantastical dancing master used to scrape upon his kit, played in full

orchestra, we do not know what to make of it; we wish we were old

dancing-masters, or learning to dance; or that we had lived in the time

of Henry IV. The tears do not come in our eyes; that source is dry: but

we exclaim with the Son of Fingal,

‘Roll on, ye dark-brown years! ye bring no joy on your wing to Ossian.’

OROONOKO.

_The Examiner._] [_January 26, 1817._

DRURY-LANE.

Southern’s tragedy of _Oroonoko_, which has not been acted, we believe,

for some years, has been brought forward here to introduce Mr. Kean as

the Royal Slave. It was well thought of. We consider it as one of his

best parts. It is also a proof to us of what we have always been

disposed to think, that Mr. Kean, when he fully gives up his mind to it,

is as great in pure pathos as in energy of action or discrimination of

character. In general, he inclines to the violent and muscular

expression of passion, rather than to that of its deep, involuntary,

heart-felt workings. If he does this upon any theory of the former style

of expression being more striking and calculated to produce an immediate

effect, we think the success of his _Richard II._ and of this play alone

(not to mention innumerable fine passages in his other performances),

might convince him of the perfect safety with which he may trust himself

in the hands of the audience, whenever he chuses to indulge in ‘the

melting mood.’ We conceive that the range of his powers is greater in

this respect than he has yet ventured to display, and that if the taste

of the town is not yet ripe for the change, he has genius enough to lead

it, wherever truth and nature point the way. His performance of

_Oroonoko_ was for the most part decidedly of a mild and sustained

character; yet it was highly impressive throughout, and most so, where

it partook least of violence or effort. The strokes of passion which

came unlooked for and seemed to take the actor by surprise, were those

that took the audience by surprise, and only found relief in tears. Of

this kind was the passage in which, after having been harrowed up to the

last degree of agony and apprehension at the supposed dishonourable

treatment of his wife, and being re-assured on that point, he falls upon

her neck with sobs of joy and broken laughter, saying, ‘I knew they

could not,’ or words to that effect. The first meeting between him and

_Imoinda_ was also very affecting; and the transition to tenderness and

love in it was even finer than the expression of breathless eagerness

and surprise. There were many other passages in which the feelings,

conveyed by the actor, seemed to gush from his heart, as if its inmost

veins had been laid open. In a word, Mr. Kean gave to the part that

glowing and impetuous, and at the same time deep and full expression,

which belongs to the character of that burning zone, which ripens the

souls of men, as well as the fruits of the earth! The most striking part

in the whole performance was in the uttering of a single word.

_Oroonoko_, in consequence of his gentle treatment, and the flattering

promises that are held out to him of safe conduct to his own country, of

the restoration of his liberty and his beloved _Imoinda_, thinks well of

the persons into whose hands he has fallen; and it is in vain that

_Aboam_ (Mr. Rae) tries to work him up to suspicion and revenge by

general descriptions of the sufferings of his countrymen, or of the

cruelty and treachery of their white masters: but at the suggestion of

the thought, that if they remain where they are, _Imoinda_ will become

the mother, and himself, a prince and a hero, the father of a race of

slaves, he starts and the manner in which he utters the ejaculation

‘Hah!’ at the world of thought which is thus shewn to him, like a

precipice at his feet, resembles the first sound that breaks from a

thunder-cloud, or the hollow roar of a wild beast, roused from its lair

by hunger and the scent of blood. It is a pity that the catastrophe does

not answer to the grandeur of the menace; and that this gallant

vindicator of himself and his countrymen fails in his enterprise,

through the treachery and cowardice of those whom he attempts to set

free, but ‘who were by nature slaves!’ The story of this _servile war_

is not without a parallel elsewhere: it reads ‘a great moral lesson’ to

Europe, only changing _black_ into _white_; and the manner in which

_Oroonoko_ is prevailed on to give up his sword, and his treatment

afterwards, by a man in British uniform, seems to have been the model of

the Convention of Paris. It only required one thing to have made it

complete, that the Governor, who is expected in the island, should have

arrived in time to break the agreement, and save the credit of his

subaltern. The political allusions throughout, that is, the appeals to

common justice and humanity, against the most intolerable cruelty and

wrong, are so strong and palpable, that we wonder the piece is not

prohibited. There is that black renegade _Othman_, who betrays his

country in the hopes of promotion, and the favour of his betters: how

like he is to many a white-faced loon, but that ‘the devil has not

damned them black!’ Politics apart—_Oroonoko_ is a very interesting

moral play. It is a little tedious sometimes, and a little common-place

at all times, but it has feeling and nature to supply what it wants in

other respects. The negroes in it (we could wish them out of it, but

then there would be no play) are very _ugly customers_ upon the stage.

One blackamoor in a picture is an ornament, but a whole cargo of them is

more than enough. This play puts us out of conceit with both colours,

theirs and our own; the sooty slave’s, and his cold, sleek, smooth-faced

master’s.—Miss Somerville was a great relief to the natural and moral

deformity of the scene. She looked like the _idea_ of the poet’s mind.

Her resigned, pensive, unconscious look and attitude, at the moment she

is about to be restored to the rapturous embrace of her lover, was a

beautiful dramatic picture. She is an acquisition to the milder parts of

tragedy. She interests on the stage, for she is interesting in herself.

She cannot help being a heroine, if she but shews herself. She was as

elegantly dressed in _Imoinda_, for an Indian maid, in light, flowered

drapery, as she was in _Imogine_, for a lady of old romance, in trains

of lead-coloured satin. Her voice is sweet, but lost in its own

sweetness; and we who hear her at some distance, can only catch ‘the

music of her honey-vows,’ like the indistinct murmur of a hive of bees.

Mr. Bengough does not improve upon us by acquaintance. All that we have

of late discovered in him is that he has grey eyes. Little Smith made an

excellent representative of the coasting Guinea captain. John Bull could

not desire to have better justice done to his mind or his

body.—Southern, the author of _Oroonoko_, was also the author of

_Isabella, or the Fatal Marriage_, in both of which ‘he often has

beguiled us of our tears.’ He died at the age of eighty-six, in 1746.

Gray, the poet, speaks thus of him in a letter, dated from Burnham, in

Buckinghamshire, 1737. ‘We have here old Mr. Southern, at a gentleman’s

house a little way off: he is now seventy-seven years old, and has

almost wholly lost his memory: but is as agreeable as an old man can be:

at least I persuade myself so, when I look at him, and think of

_Isabella_ and _Oroonoko_.’

‘THE PANNEL’ AND ‘THE RAVENS’

_The Examiner._] [_February 2, 1817._

There has been little new this week. A new after-piece or melo-drame has

been brought forward at Covent-garden, and the old farce of the _Pannel_

revived at Drury-Lane. We can say but little in praise of the former,

except the excellence of the acting and the manner in which it is got

up. The strength of the house is mustered in a second-rate production,

and from the list of names in the play-bills, the public go to see the

performers, if not the performance, and come away at least half

satisfied. They manage these things differently at Drury-lane, and not

so well. We deny that the comic strength of the two houses is so unequal

as is sometimes supposed. For instance, at Drury-lane, they have Munden,

Dowton, Oxberry, and Knight; Harley is droll too; and in women, they

beat them out and out, for they have Miss Kelly. To be sure, they have

not Liston; so they must kick the beam. Mr. Liston is the greatest comic

genius of the age. If we were very dull and sad indeed, we should avoid

going to any farce or comedy in which he did not appear, as only

tantalising to our feelings, and promising relief without affording it:

but we must be dull indeed, if we did not bite at the bait of Mr.

Liston’s _Lubin Log_. His comic humour is a sort of oil or ‘balsam of

fierabras’ for all imaginary wounds that are not a foot deep. His laugh

might tickle royalty itself after the howling of the rabble, or make one

of the wax figures at Mrs. Salmon’s relax from the inflexibility of its

state. Then there is Miss Stephens at Covent-garden, and there are the

three Miss Dennets—like ‘Circe and the Sirens three.’ We always see the

Miss Dennets at the theatre, and they sometimes glide before our

imagination at other times; but we seldom hear Miss Stephens now. We

want to see her again in _Mandane_, in which we have seen her eight

times already, and to hear her sing _If o’er the cruel tyrant Love_,

which we could hear her sing for ever. We want to see her in _Polly_ for

the seventh time, and in _Rosetta_ for the fifth, we believe it will be,

when we see her in it again, which will be when she next plays in it.

Pray how long will it be first, Mr. Fawcett? We suppose not till Miss

O’Neill is tired of tiring the audience in _Mrs. Oakley_, or ‘the ravens

are hoarse that croak over Mr. Emery’s head’ in the Pangs of Conscience.

_Something new, always something new._ That is the taste of Covent

Garden, and the town. It is not our’s. We are for something old.

_Toujours perdrix._ We like to read the same books, and to see the same

plays, and the same faces over again—_always provided_ we liked them at

first. Now there is one face which we never liked, and never shall like,

which is the face of Tyranny, and the older it gets, the uglier it gets

in our eyes, and in this, as a matter of taste, we differ entirely with

Mr. Canning, though he has been declared by a classical authority to be

‘the most elegant mind since Virgil.’ We differ with him

notwithstanding.—_The Ravens, or the Pangs of Conscience_, is a

melo-drame taken from the French, of the same breed, but an inferior

specimen, as the _Maid and Magpie_, and the _Family of Anglade_. It is a

kind of renewal of the age of augury adapted to the modern theories of

probability, by being reduced within the limits of natural history.

These pieces take for their text the lines,

‘And choughs and magpies shall bring forth

The secret’st man of blood.’

In the _Pangs of Conscience_, as in the _Maid of Palisseau_, there is a

robbery, a trial of persons innocently suspected of it, and a discovery

of the real perpetrators, just at the critical moment, by the

intervention of two of the feathered creation. Just as sentence has been

pronounced on the supposed criminals (Terry and Blanchard) by the Judge,

(Barrymore, who really performed this character admirably) two Ravens

fly in upon the stage, the same who had hovered over the scene of the

murder and robbery in the adjacent forest, and by their silent but

dreadful appeal to the conscience of _Jacques du Noir_ (Emery), who is

not like his cousin _Bruno du Noir_ (poor Farley) a hardened, but a

conscientious villain, reveal the mystery of the whole transaction, by

which the guilty are punished, and the innocent miraculously

escape.—There was some fine and powerful acting by Emery in the part of

the repentant assassin. _Bruno_ in vain endeavours to appease and quiet

him, but he still roars out lustily to give vent both to the pangs of

his conscience and the ‘grief of a wound’ which he has got in the

encounter from an old rusty fowling-piece of Fawcett’s, whom they

plunder and kill. The greatest part of this romantic fiction is tedious,

and the whole of it improbable, but from the goodness of the acting, and

some strokes of interest in the situations, it went off with applause.

Of the _Pannel_, we have only room to add that we think _Beatrice_, who

is the subordinate heroine of the piece, the best specimen of Mrs.

Alsop’s acting. We saw it from a remote part of the house, and her

_voice and manner_ at this distance sometimes reminded us of her

mother’s.

JOHN GILPIN

_The Examiner._] [_May 4, 1817._

DRURY-LANE.

When Mr. Dowton advertised for his benefit that he was to appear in the

after-piece as _John Gilpin_, and to ride for that night only, we

immediately felt tempted to go as the self-appointed executors and

residuary legatees of the original author of the story, who concludes

his account with these two lines—

‘And when he next does ride abroad,

May we be there to see.’

So we took upon us to fulfil Cowper’s wish, and went to see, not _John

Gilpin_, nor, as we are credibly informed, even Mr. Dowton, but

something very laughable, and still more absurd, which had however a

certain charm about it, from the very name of the hero of the piece. We

have an interest in _John Gilpin_; aye, almost as great an interest as

we have in ourselves; for we remember him almost as long. We remember

the prints of him and his travels hung round a little parlour where we

used to visit when we were children—just about the time of the beginning

of the French Revolution. While the old ladies were playing at whist,

and the young ones at forfeits, we crept about the sides of the room and

tracked _John Gilpin_ from his counter to his horse, from his own door

to the turnpike, and far beyond the turnpike gate and the bell at

Edmonton, with loss of wig and hat, but with an increasing _impetus_ and

reputation, the farther he went from home.

‘The turnpike men their gates wide open threw,

He carries weight, he rides a race,

’Tis for a thousand pounds.’

What an impression was here made, never to be effaced! What a thing it

is to be an author, and how much better a thing it is to be a reader,

with all the pleasure and without any of the trouble—but without any of

the fame, you will say. That is not worth two-pence. And yet true fame

is something, the fame, for instance, of Cowper or of Thomson—not to

live in the mouths of pedants, and coxcombs, and professional men, but

in the heart and soul of every living being, to mingle with every

thought, to beat in every pulse, to be hailed with transport by those

who are young, and to be remembered with regret by those who are old, to

be ‘first, last, and midst’ in the minds of others. True fame is like a

Lapland sun, that never goes down; it rises with us in the morning, and

rolls round and round till our night of life. Why, look here, what a

thing it is to be an author! _John Gilpin_ delighted us when we were

children, and were we to die to-morrow, the name of _John Gilpin_ would

excite a momentary sense of pleasure. The same feeling of delight, with

which at ten years old we read the story, makes us thirty years after

go, laughing, to see the play. In all that time, the remembrance has

been cherished at the heart, like the pulse that sustains our life.

‘That ligament, fine as it was, was never broken!’ and yet it was nearly

broken the other night, in the after-piece of this name, and would have

been quite so for the evening, if it had not been for Mr. Munden, who,

as a subordinate agent, prevented Mr. Dowton from breaking his neck in

the principal character. We differed from the audience on this occasion,

who did not much relish Mr. Munden in his part of a cockney: we relished

him altogether and mightily. His speech, his countenance, and his dress,

were in high costume and keeping. There was a greatness of gusto about

_Timothy Brittle_, _Mrs. Gilpin’s_ favourite but unfortunate son-in-law.

It might be said of Mr. Munden in this character, that not only did his

dress appear to have come fresh from the shop-board, his coat, his

pantaloons, his waistcoat—but his speech was clipped and snipped as with

a pair of sheers, and his face looked just as if the tailor’s goose had

gone over it. It was a fine and inimitable piece of acting, but it was

damned.—Dowton, in _The Rivals_, played _Mrs. Malaprop_, and Mrs. Sparks

played _Sir Anthony Absolute_. We cannot say much of these

transformations, for the performers themselves remained just the same,

breeches and petticoats out of the question; nothing was transformed or

ridiculous but their dress. Dowton was as blunt and bluff, and Mrs.

Sparks was as keen, querulous, and scolding, as in any of their usual

characters. The effect was flat after the first _entrée_, and the whole

play was, in other respects, very poorly got up;—quite in the comic

_negligé_ of _Drury-lane_.—We ought to say something of Mrs. Hill, who

came out on Tuesday evening as _Lady Macbeth_. She is neither a good nor

a bad actress. She has, however, a sentimental drawl in her voice and

manner which is very little to our taste, and not at all in character as

_Lady Macbeth_. The King never dies. Why should Mrs. Siddons ever die?

Why, because Kings are fictions in law: Mrs. Siddons was one of nature’s

greatest works.

DON GIOVANNI AND KEAN’S EUSTACE DE ST. PIERRE

_The Examiner._] [_May 18, 1817._

The last time we saw the Opera of _Don Giovanni_ was from a distant part

of the house: we saw it the other evening near; and as the impression

was somewhat different, we wish to correct one or two things in our

former statement. Madame Fodor sings and acts the part of _Zerlina_ as

charmingly as ever, but she does not _look_ it so well near as at a

greater distance. She has too much _em bon point_, is too broad-set for

the idea of a young and beautiful country girl: her mouth is laughing

and good-natured, but does not answer to Spenser’s description of

_Belphebe_,—and it cannot be concealed that _Zerlina_, the delightful

Zerlina, has a cast in her eyes. Her singing, however, made us forget

all these defects, and after the second line of _La ci darem_, we had

quite recovered from our disappointment. On the whole, we at present

prefer the air of _Vedrai Carino_, which she sings to _Masetto_ to

comfort him, even to the duet with _Don Giovanni_. There was some

uncertainty about _encoring_ her in this song,—not, we apprehend,

because the audience were afraid of tiring the actress, but because they

were tired themselves. Madame Fodor was _encored_ in all her songs

throughout the piece.—This might be thought hard upon her; we dare say

she would have thought it harder if she had not. Signor Ambrogetti’s

acting as _Don Giovanni_ improves upon a nearer acquaintance. There is a

softness approaching to effeminacy in the expression of his face, which

accords well with the character, and an insinuating archness in his eye,

which takes off from the violent effect of his action. The serenade of

_Don Giovanni_ was omitted. As to Naldi, he is in too confirmed

possession of the stage to be corrigible to advice. He is one of those

old birds that are not to be caught with chaff. The sly rogue,

_Leporello_, seems to have grown grey in the service of iniquity, and

hangs his nose over the stage with a formidable _bravura_ aspect, as if

he could suspend the orchestra from it. Angrisani is an admirable, and

we might say, first-rate comic actor. He has fine features; a manly,

rustic voice; and we never saw disdain, impatience, the resentment and

relenting of the jealous lover, better expressed than in the scene

between him and Madame Fodor, where she makes that affecting appeal to

his forgiveness in the song of _Batte, Batte, Masetto_. It was

inimitably acted on both sides.

DRURY-LANE.

Mr. Kean has appeared in _Eustace de St. Pierre_ in the _Surrender of

Calais_. He has little to do in it; and he might as well not have

appeared in the character, for he does not look well in it. He was badly

dressed in a doublet of green baize, and in villainous yellow hose. It

was like the player’s description of Hecuba—

‘A clout upon that head

Where late the diadem stood: and for a robe

A blanket, in the alarm of fear caught up.’

But we shall not, ‘though we have seen this, with tongue in venom

steep’d, pronounce treason against fortune’s state,’ or against the

Managers of Drury-lane. Mr. Kean shewed his usual talents in this part;

but it afforded less scope and fewer opportunities for them than any

part in which we have ever seen him. We are not sorry, however, that he

has got into the part, as a kind of truce with tragedy. Why should he

not, like other actors, sometimes have a part to walk through? Must we

for ever be expecting from him, as if he were a little _Jupiter tonans_,

‘thunder, nothing but thunder?’ It is too much for any mortal to play

_Othello_ and _Sir Giles_ in the same week—we mean, as Mr. Kean plays

them. He is, we understand, to appear in a new character, and sing a new

song, for his benefit to-morrow week.

CHARACTER OF THE COUNTRY PEOPLE

_The Examiner._] [_July 18, 1819._

‘Here be truths.’—_Dogberry._

First, there is an old woman in the neighbouring village, fifty-six

years old, with a wooden leg, who never saw a leg of mutton roasted, or

a piece of beef put into the pot; and who regards any person who has not

lived all his life on rusty bacon as a non-descript or ‘mountain

foreigner.’ Yet this venerable matron, who now officiates as cook to a

lady ‘retired from public haunts’ into a remote part of the country,

kept her father’s house, who was a little farmer, for twenty years; so

that she ranks, in the scale of rural existence, above her neighbours.

What then must the notions of most of them be of the _savoir vivre_? Is

this the sum and substance of all our boasts of the roast-beef of old

England?—The truth is, that the people in this part of the country (I do

not know how it is in others) have neither food nor cloathing wherewith

to be content; nor are they content without them, nor with those that

have them. Any one dressed in a plain broad-cloth coat is in their eyes

a sophisticated character, as outlandish a figure as my _Lord

Foppington_. A smock-frock, and shoes with hob-nails in them, are an

indispensable part of country etiquette; and they hoot at or pelt any

one, who is presumptuous enough to depart from this appropriate costume.

This, if we may believe a philosophical poet of the present day, is the

meaning of the phrase in Shakespear, ‘pelting villages,’ he having been

once set upon in this manner by ‘a crew of patches, rude mechanicals,’

who disliked him for the fantastic strangeness of his appearance. Even

their tailors (of whom you might expect better things) hate decency, and

will spoil you a suit of clothes, rather than follow your directions.

One of them, the little hunch-backed tailor of P—tt—n, with the handsome

daughter, whose husband ran away from her and went to sea, was ordered

to make a pair of brown or snuff-coloured breeches for my friend C——

L——;—instead of which the pragmatical old gentleman (having an opinion

of his own) brought him home a pair of ‘lively Lincoln-green,’ in which

I remember he rode in triumph in Johnny Tremain’s cross-country caravan

through Newberry, and entered Oxford, ‘fearing no colours,’ the abstract

idea of the jest of the thing prevailing in his mind (as it always does)

over the sense of personal dignity.

If a stranger comes to live among country people, they have a bad

opinion of him at first; and all he can do to overcome their dislike,

only confirms them in it. It is in vain to attempt to conciliate them:

the more you strive to persuade them that you mean them no harm, the

more they are determined not to be convinced. They attribute any

civility or kindness you shew them to a design to cajole them. They are

not to be taken in by appearances. They are _feræ naturæ_, and not to be

tamed by art. In proportion as you give them no cause of offence, they

summon their whole stock of prejudice, impudence, and cunning, to aid

their tottering opinion; and hate you the more for the injustice they

seem to do you. They had rather you did them an injury that they might

keep their original opinion of you. If there is the smallest

circumstance or insinuation to your prejudice, their rancour against

you, and self-complacency in their own sagacity, eagerly seizes hold of

it; fans their suspicions into a flame, and breaks out into open insult

and all the triumph of brutal derision. On the contrary, if they find

you, after all, a quiet, inoffensive person, they think you a fool, and

so have you that way. Used to contempt, they have not much respect to

spare for other people. Finding themselves none the better for them,

they have not much faith in your demonstrations of good-will towards

them. Prepared for repulses and hard treatment, the expression of their

gratitude is not very spontaneous or sincere.—An aged Sybil of this

place, having gone to a lady, who had just settled here, with a doleful

tale of distress, and an empty bottle, received a shilling instead of

having her bottle replenished with liquor; when being met on her return

by one of her gossips coming on the same errand, and being asked her

success, she held up her empty bottle in sign of scorn, saying, ‘Look

here!’ Such is the _beau ideal_ of unsophisticated human nature in her

obscure retreats, about which there have been so many ‘songs of delight

and rustical roundelays.’

Is it strange that these people who know nothing, hate all that they do

not understand? Their rudeness, intolerance, and conceit, are in exact

proportion to their ignorance: for as they never saw or scarcely heard

of any thing out of their own village, every thing else appears to them

odd and unaccountable, and they cannot suspect that their own notions

are wrong, when they are totally unacquainted with any others. We

naturally despise whatever baffles our comprehension, and dislike what

contradicts our prejudices, till we are taught better by a liberal

course of study; but these people are no better taught than fed. It is a

rule which they act upon as self-evident, and from which you will not

get them to flinch in a hurry—to scout every proceeding which differs

from their own, and to consider every person, of whose birth, parentage,

and education, they do not know the several particulars, as a suspicious

character. They have no knowledge of literature or the fine arts; which,

if once banished from the city and the court, would soon ‘be trampled in

the mire under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.’ A mischievous wag of

the present day undertook to read some pastoral and lyrical effusions,

(remarkable for their simplicity) to a collection of Cumberland

peasants, to see if they would recognise the sentiments put into their

mouths; and they only (which was what he expected) laughed at him for

his pains. ‘The spinsters and the knitters in the sun, and the free

maids that weave their thread with bones,’ may indeed relieve the

welcome pedlar of his wares, his laces, his true love-knots, or

penny-Ballads, but they will have nothing to say to the Lyrical ballads,

nor will the united counties of Westmorland, Cumberland, and Durham,

subscribe to lighten the London warehouses of a single copy of the

_Excursion_. The hewers of wood and drawers of water know nothing of

poetry, and they hate the very look of a poet. They like a painter as

little. An artist who was making a sketch of a fine old yew tree in a

romantic situation, was asked by a _knowing hand_, if he could tell how

many foot of timber it contained? _Falstaff_ asks as a question not to

be answered—‘May I not take mine ease at mine inn?’ But this was in

East-Cheap. I cannot do so in the country; for while I am writing this,

I hear a fellow disputing in the kitchen, whether a person ought to live

(as he expresses it) by pen and ink; and the landlord the other day (in

order, I suppose, the better to prepare himself for such controversies)

asked me if I had any object in reading through all those books which I

had brought with me, meaning a few odd volumes of old plays and novels.

The people born here cannot tell how an author gets his living or passes

his time; and would fain hunt him out of the place as they do a strange

dog, or as they formerly did a conjuror or a witch. Ask the first

country clown you meet, if he ever heard of Shakespear or Newton, and he

will stare in your face: and I remember our laughing a good deal at

W——’s old Molly, who had never heard of the French Revolution, ten years

after it happened. Oh worse than Gothic ignorance!

They have no books, nor ever feel the want of them. How indeed should

they?[33] They have no works of poetry or fiction, to ‘fleet the golden

time carelessly;’ but they do not therefore want for fabulous resources.

Necessity is the mother of invention; and their talent for lying and

scandal is nourished by the very lack of materials.[34] They live not by

bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of their mouths. They

are employed, like the Athenians of old, in hearing or telling some new

thing. The draw-well is the source from which they pump up idle rumours,

and the blacksmith’s shop is the place at which they forge the proofs,

and turn them to shape, ‘giving to airy nothing a local habitation and a

name.’ They lie like devils through thick and thin. They tell and

believe all incredible things; and the greater the improbability, the

more readily and greedily is it swallowed, for it imposes more on the

imagination. _To elevate and surprise_ is the great rule for producing a

theatrical or pastoral effect. People in a state of nature believe any

thing for want of something to divert the mind, as they plot mischief

for want of better employment. Credulity and imposture are two of the

strongest propensities of the human mind. Men are as prone to deceive

themselves as others, without any other temptation than the exercise it

affords to the imagination. It is a false test of historical evidence,

that it is necessary to assign a motive why men should consent to be

dupes or undertake to be cheats. Curiosity is the source of

superstition; for we must have objects to occupy the attention, and fill

up the craving void of knowledge; and in the absence of truth, falsehood

is called in to supply its place, and with the gross and ignorant,

supplies it much better. To ask why the untutored savage believes every

marvellous story that is told him, in the dearth of all real knowledge,

is to ask why he slakes his thirst at the first fountain that he meets,

or devours the prey he has just taken. With all their tendency to

bigotry and superstition, country people have scarcely any idea of

religion. They have as little divine as human learning. The Bible is the

only book they have, but that they do not read, except with spectacles,

when they grow old and half-blind. They are to a man and woman of _Mrs.

Quickly’s_ opinion—‘But I told him a’ should not think of God yet.’ They

go to church, to be sure, as a matter of course, and from not knowing

what else to do with themselves on Sundays; but they never think of what

they hear, from one week’s end to another. Heaven and Hell are

out-of-the-way places, not accessible to the apprehensions of those

whose ideas cannot get beyond the parish where they were born; and their

joys or sorrows indifferent to an imagination, taken up with the wants

of the belly. An old woman, who lived in a cottage by herself, on

hearing the account of the Crucifixion, said it was a sad thing, but she

hoped it was not true, as it happened so far off and such a long time

ago. A servant girl, hearing a Sermon read in which there was a striking

account of the Resurrection and the Day of Judgment, was very much

alarmed, and said she hoped it would not be in her time. The Decalogue

has no terrors, and the Book of Revelations no charms for them. They

will be damned, but they will steal and lie, and bear false witness

against each other; or if they do not, it is the fear of being hanged,

or whipped, or summoned before the Justice of the Peace, and not of

being called to account in another world, that prevents them. They are

of the earth, earthy. They take thought only for the morrow; or rather,

conform to the text—‘Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof.’ There

is not a greater mistake, or a more wilful fallacy, than the common

observation, that the lower orders are kept in order (and can only be

so) by their faith in religion. They have no more belief in it

practically than most of their betters, who propose to keep them in

order by it, have speculatively. The ignorant and destitute are

restrained from certain things by the fear of the law, or of what will

be said of them by their neighbours; and as to other things which are

denounced by Scripture, but to which no penalty attaches here, they

think if they have a mind to do them, and chuse to go to hell for it,

they have a right to do so. That is their phrase. It is nobody’s

business but their own. It is (generally speaking) the absence of

temptation or opportunity, and not an excess of religious apprehension,

that keeps them within the pale of salvation. Their self-will balances

their fear of the Devil, and when it comes to the push, the present

motive turns the scale, and the flesh proves too hard for the spirit.

Burns’s old man in the _Cottar’s Saturday Night_ must pass for a very

poetical character, at least in this part of the country. We see

constant accounts in the papers, in the case of malefactors that have

come to an untimely end, that it was owing in the first instance to the

want of religion, to the habit of swearing and Sabbath-breach. The same

account would hold equally true of those who are not hanged: for if all

but the godly and sober among the lower classes came to the gallows, the

population would soon be thinned to a surprising degree.

‘’Twould thin the land

Such numbers to string on Tyburn tree.’

As to the regular church-going peasantry, there can be no great

difference as to religious light and feelings between them and their

forefathers in the time of Popery, when the service was performed in

Latin, as it is at present in most foreign countries. The only religious

people (except as a matter of outward shew and ceremony) are sectaries;

for the instant religion becomes a subject for serious thought and

private reflection, it produces differences of opinion, which branch out

into as many speculative fancies and forms of worship, as there are

differences of temper or accidents of education.[35] This, however, is

the exception, not the rule, in the present state of things—now that

zeal is no longer kindled at the fires of persecution, and that Acts of

Uniformity no longer throw the whole country into a ferment of

opposition. The missionaries and fanatics sometimes indeed set up a

methodist chapel, where the staid inhabitants go in an evening to spite

the parson of the parish, or to while away an hour or so; or perhaps a

melancholy mechanic has a serious call and holds forth, or a pining

spinster, moved by the spirit to listen to him—

‘Anon as patient as the female dove,

The whilst her golden couplets are disclos’d,

Awhile sits drooping:’

but the younger and healthier sort make a sport of it as of any other

fantastical innovation; throw owls and skeletons of kites and carrion

crows into the place of worship; and make a violent noise all the time

the parson is preaching, to drown the nasal twang of evangelical

glad-tidings, and the comfortable groans of the faithful.—All this while

there is no end of the bastard-getting and swearing: and a girl, after

having had three or four children by the same man, or by different men

(as it happens), and who is as big as she can tumble again, is at length

asked in church, without much scandal or offence to the community. It is

a new topic for the village, and is excused on that account. It is,

besides, an evidence quashed; and whatever others may take it into their

heads to do, she need not talk. Liberality flourishes; a good example is

set; and the species is propagated with as little trouble and formality

as possible. The parson gets something by the christening, and the

apothecary has a finger in the pie. This is a state of things which

ought to be reformed—but how or when?

MR. MACREADY’S MACBETH.

_The Examiner._] [_June 25, 1820._

Mr. Macready’s _Macbeth_, which he had for his benefit, and which he has

played once or twice since, is a judicious and spirited performance. But

we are not in the number of those who think it his finest character.

Sensibility, not imagination, is his _forte_. Natural expression, human

feeling, seems to woo him like a bride; but the _ideal_ and

preternatural beckon him only at a distance and mock his embraces. He

sees no dim, portentous visions in his mind’s eye; his acting has no

shadowy landscape back-ground to surround it; he is not waited on by

spirits of the deep or of the air; neither fate nor metaphysical aid are

in league with him; he is prompter to himself, and treads within the

circle of the human heart. The machinery in _Macbeth_ is so far lost

upon him: there is no secret correspondence between him and the Weird

Sisters. The poet has put a fruitless sceptre in his hand,—a curtain is

between him and the ‘air-drawn dagger with its gouts of blood’; he does

not cower under the traditions of the age, or startle at ‘thick-coming

fancies.’ He is more like a man debating the reality, or questioning the

power of the grotesque and unimaginable forms that hover round him, than

one hurried away by his credulous hopes, or shrinking from intolerable

fears. There is not a weight of superstitious terror loading the

atmosphere and hanging over the stage when Mr. Macready plays the part.

He has cast the cumbrous slough of Gothic tragedy, and comes out a mere

modern, agitated by common means and intelligible motives. The

preternatural agency is no more than an accompaniment, the pretended

occasion, not the indispensable and all-powerful cause. It appears to us

then, that this excellent and able actor, _struck short_ of the higher

and imaginative part of the character, and consequently was deficient in

the human passion, which is the mighty appendage to it. We thought Mr.

Macready in a manner conscious of this want of entire possession of the

character. He was looking out for new readings, transposing attitudes

and stage effects, trying substitutes and experiments, studying passages

instead of reciting them, rehearsing _Macbeth_, not _being_ it. His

performance of it was critical and fastidious: you would say that he was

considering how he should act the part, so as to avoid certain errors or

produce certain effects—not that he ever flung himself into the subject,

and swam to shore, safe from carping objection, and above the reach of

all praise. Mr. Macready does not often imitate other actors, but he

endeavours not to imitate them, and that’s almost as bad. He should

think of nothing but his part, and rely on nothing but his own powers.

Singularity is not excellence. If to follow in the track of others shews

a servile genius and pitiful ambition, neither is it right to go out of

the strait road merely because others travel in it—‘but still to follow

nature is the rule’—John Kemble was the best _Macbeth_ (upon the whole)

that we have seen. There was a stiff, horror-stricken stateliness in his

person and manner, like a man bearing up against supernal influences;

and a bewildered distraction, a perplexity and at the same time a

rigidity of purpose, like one who had been stunned by a blow from fate.

Mr. Kean is great only in one scene, that after the murder of _Duncan_;

his acting also consists only in the direct embodying of human passion,

and is entirely ‘docked and curtailed’ of the sweeping train of poetical

imagination. On the evening we saw Mr. Macready’s _Macbeth_ Mrs. Faucit

played _Lady Macbeth_, and acted up to that arduous part with great

spirit and self-possession; and Mr. Terry was the representative of

_Macduff_. The only fault of this gentleman’s acting is its slowness.

The words fall from his lips, like pendent drops from icicles. A speech,

as he gives it, is equal to ‘twa lang Scotch miles.’ This not only

causes a stagnation and heaviness in the sentiments, but often cuts the

sense in two. Thus in the exclamation which _Macduff_ utters on hearing

of the slaughter of his children, ‘Oh Hell-Kite, all?’ Mr. Terry paused

at the hyphen, as if to take time to think, and by this means made it

like an apostrophe to ‘Hell,’ adding the other syllable of the word,

which determined the meaning and direction of his thoughts, afterwards.

Mr. Egerton as usual played _Banquo_, and makes as solid a Ghost as we

would wish to encounter of a winter’s eve.

David Rizzio we have not been able to get a peep at: but a friend

whispered us that it was poor, and we see it is praised in the _New

Times_!

On Friday Miss Stephens had a bumper for her benefit. The entertainments

were the _Lord of the Manor_, a Concert, and the _Libertine_. In the

first, Mr. Duruset from indisposition, and after making one feeble

effort, omitted the songs, by the indulgence of the audience; after

that, we do not see why he should be required to go through the rest of

the part, for he has not ‘a speaking face.’ Jones’s _Mr. Contrast_ is a

striking, fulsome fop. But he makes foppery not only an object of

laughter, but of disgust; and perhaps this is going beyond the mark

intended. We would recommend to our readers to go and see Mr. Liston’s

_Moll Flagon_ by all means. It is irresistible. We may say of it with

the poet—

‘Let those laugh now who never laugh’d before,

And those who still have laugh’d now laugh the more.’

Mrs. Salmon’s singing in the Concert was ‘d’une pathétique à faire

fendre les rochers,’—and Miss Stephens’s Echo song seemed sung by a

Spirit or an enchantress. We were glad to hear it, for we have an

attachment to Miss Stephens on account of ‘auld lang syne’ (we like old

friendships better than new), and do not wish that little murmuring

syren Miss Tree to wean us from our old and artless favourite.—Those

were happy days when first Miss Stephens began to sing! When she came

out in _Mandane_, in _Polly_, and in _Rosetta_ in _Love in a Village_!

She came upon us by surprise, but it was to delight and charm us. There

was a new sound in the air, like the voice of Spring; it was as if Music

had become young again, and was resolved to try the power of her

softest, simplest, sweetest notes. Love and Hope listened, as her clear,

liquid throat poured its delicious warblings on the ear, and at the

close of every strain, still called on Echo to prolong the sound. They

were the sweetest notes we ever heard, and almost the last we ever heard

with pleasure! For since then, other events not to be named lightly

here, but ‘thoughts of which can never from the heart’—‘with other notes

than to the Orphean lyre,’ have stopped our ears to the voice of the

charmer. But since the voice of Liberty has risen once more in Spain,

its grave and its birth place, and like a babbling hound has wakened the

echos in Galicia, in the Asturias, in Castile and Leon, and Estremadura,

why, we feel as if we ‘had three ears again’ and the heart to use them,

and as if we could once more write with the same feelings (the tightness

removed from the breast, and the pains smoothed from the brow) as we did

when we gave the account of Miss Stephens’s first appearance in the

_Beggar’s Opera_. Life might then indeed ‘know the return of

spring,’—and end, as it began, with faith in human kind!—

GUY FAUX

_The Examiner._] [_November 11, 1821._

Guy Faux is made into the figure of a scare-crow, a fifth of November

bugbear, in our history. Now that Mr. Hogg’s _Jacobite Relics_ have

dissipated the remains of an undue horror at Popery, it may seem the

time to undertake the defence of so illustrious a character, who has

hitherto been the victim of party-prejudice and national spite. Guy Faux

was a Popish Priest in the reign of James I., and for his unsuccessful

attempt to set fire to the House of Lords, and blow up the English

Monarchy, the Protestant Religion, and himself, at one stroke, has had

the honour to be annually paraded through the streets, and burnt in

effigy in every town and village in England from that time to this—that

is, for the space of two hundred years and upwards. It is sometimes

doubtful, indeed, from the coincidence of dates and other circumstances,

whether this annual ceremony, accompanied as it is with the ringing of

bells, the firing of guns, and the preaching of sermons, is intended

more to revive the formidable memory of ‘poor Guy,’ or in celebration of

the glorious landing of William III., who came to deliver us from Popery

and Slavery a hundred years afterwards—two things which Mr. Hogg treats

as mere _bagatelles_ in his _Jacobite Relics_, though they do not appear

so in the History of England; and to which the same writer assures us,

as an agreeable piece of court-news that the present Family are by no

means averse in their hearts!

Guy Faux was a fanatic, but he was no hypocrite. He ranks among _good

haters_. He was cruel, bloody-minded, reckless of all considerations but

those of an infuriated and bigotted faith; but he was a true son of the

Catholic Church, a martyr and a confessor, for all that. He who can

prevail upon himself to devote his life for a cause, however we may

condemn his opinions or abhor his actions, vouches at least for the

honesty of his principles and the disinterestedness of his motives. He

may be guilty of the worst practices, but he is capable of the greatest.

He is no longer a slave, but free. The contempt of death is the

beginning of virtue. The hero of the Gun-Powder Plot was, if you will, a

fool, a madman, an assassin; call him what names you please: still he

was neither knave nor coward. He did not propose to blow up the

Parliament and come off, scot-free, himself: he shewed that he valued

his own life no more than theirs in such a cause—where the integrity of

the Catholic faith and the salvation of perhaps millions of souls was at

stake. He did not call it a murder, but a sacrifice which he was about

to achieve: he was armed with the Holy Spirit and with fire: he was the

Church’s chosen servant and her blessed martyr. He comforted himself as

‘the best of cut-throats.’ How many wretches are there that would have

undertaken to do what he intended for a sum of money, if they could have

got off with impunity! How few are there who would have put themselves

in Guy Faux’s situation to save the universe! Yet in the latter case we

affect to be thrown into greater consternation than at the most

unredeemed acts of villany, as if the absolute disinterestedness of the

motive doubled the horror of the deed! The cowardice and selfishness of

mankind are in fact shocked at the consequences to themselves (if such

examples are held up for imitation,) and they make a fearful outcry

against the violation of every principle of morality, lest they too

should be called on for any such tremendous sacrifices—lest they in

their turn should have to go on the forlorn hope of extra-official duty.

_Charity begins at home_, is a maxim that prevails as well in the courts

of conscience as in those of prudence. We would be thought to shudder at

the consequences of crime to others, while we tremble for them to

ourselves. We talk of the dark and cowardly assassin; and this is well,

when an individual shrinks from the face of an enemy, and purchases his

own safety by striking a blow in the dark: but how the charge of

cowardly can be applied to the public assassin, who, in the very act of

destroying another, lays down his life as a pledge and forfeit of his

sincerity and boldness, I am at a loss to devise. There may be barbarous

prejudice, rooted hatred, unprincipled treachery, in such an act; but he

who resolves to take all the danger and odium upon himself, can no more

be branded with cowardice, than Regulus devoting himself for his

country, or Codrus leaping into the fiery gulf. A wily Father

Inquisitor, coolly and with plenary authority condemning hundreds of

helpless and unoffending victims to the flames or to the horrors of a

living tomb, while he himself would not suffer a hair of his head to be

hurt, is to me a character without any qualifying trait in it. Again;

the Spanish conqueror and hero, the favourite of his monarch, who

enticed thirty thousand poor Mexicans into a large open building, under

promise of strict faith and cordial good-will, and then set fire to it,

making sport of the cries and agonies of these deluded creatures, is an

instance of uniting the most hardened cruelty with the most heartless

selfishness. His plea was keeping no faith with heretics: this was Guy

Faux’s too; but I am sure at least that the latter kept faith with

himself: he was in earnest in his professions. _His_ was not gay,

wanton, unfeeling depravity; he did not murder in sport; it was serious

work that he had taken in hand. To see this arch-bigot, this heart-whole

traitor, this pale miner in the infernal regions, skulking in his

retreat with his cloak and dark lanthorn, moving cautiously about among

his barrels of gunpowder, loaded with death, but not yet ripe for

destruction, regardless of the lives of others, and more than

indifferent to his own, presents a picture of the strange infatuation of

the human understanding, but not of the depravity of the human will,

without an equal. There were thousands of pious Papists privy to and

ready to applaud the deed when done:—there was no one but our old

fifth-of-November friend, who still flutters in rags and straw on the

occasion, that had the courage to attempt it. In him stern duty and

unshaken faith prevailed over natural frailty. A man to undertake and

contemplate with gloomy delight this desperate task, could not certainly

in the first instance, be a man of tender sensibility, or over-liable to

‘the compunctious visitings of nature’; but he would so far only be on a

level with many others, and he would be distinguished from them by a

high principle of enthusiasm, and a disinterested zeal for truth.

Greater love than this has no one, that he shall give up his life for

the truth. We have no Guy Fauxes now:—not that we have not numbers in

whom ‘the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.’ We talk indeed of

flinging the keys of the House of Commons into the Thames, by way of a

little unmeaning splutter, and a little courting of popularity and

persecution; but to fling ourselves into the gap, and blow up the system

and our own bodies to atoms at once, upon an abstract principle of

right, does not suit the _radical_ scepticism of the age!

I like the spirit of martyrdom, I confess: I envy an age that had virtue

enough in it to produce the mischievous fanaticism of a Guy Faux. A

man’s marching up to a masked-battery for the sake of company, is

nothing: but a man’s going resolutely to the stake rather than surrender

his opinion, is a serious matter. It shews that in the public mind and

feeling there is something better than life; that there is a belief of

something in the universe and the order of nature, to which it is worth

while to sacrifice this poor brief span of existence. To have an object

always in view dearer to one than one’s-self, to cling to a principle in

contempt of danger, of interest, of the opinion of the world,—this is

the true _ideal_, the high and heroic state of man. It is in fact to

have a standard of absolute and implicit faith in the mind, that admits

neither of compromise, degree, nor exception. The path of duty is one,

the grounds of encouragement are fixed and invariable. Perhaps it is

hardly possible to have such a standard, but where the certain prospect

of another world absolves us from a miserly compact with this, and the

contemplation of infinity forms an habitual counterpoise to the

illusions of time and sense. An object of the highest conceivable

greatness leads to unmingled devotion: the belief in eternal truth

embodies itself on practical principles of strict rectitude, or of

obstinate, but noble-minded error.

There was an instance that happened a little before the time of Guy

Faux, which, in a different way, has something of the same character,

with a more pleasing conclusion. I mean the story of Margaret Lambrun;

and as it is but little known, I shall here relate it as I find it:—

‘Margaret Lambrun was a Scotchwoman, and one of the retinue of Mary

Queen of Scots; as was also her husband, who dying of grief for the

tragical end of that princess, his wife took up a resolution of

revenging the death of both upon Queen Elizabeth. For that purpose she

put on a man’s habit; and assuming the name of Anthony Sparke,

repaired to the Court of the Queen of England, always carrying with

her a brace of pistols, one to kill Elizabeth, and the other to shoot

herself, in order to avoid the hands of justice; but her design

happened to miscarry by an accident, which saved the Queen’s life. One

day, as she was pushing through the crowd to come up to her Majesty,

who was then walking in her garden, she chanced to drop one of the

pistols. This being seen by the guards, she was seized in order to be

sent immediately to prison; but the Queen, not suspecting her to be

one of her own sex, had a mind first to examine her. Accordingly,

demanding her name, country, and quality, Margaret replied with an

unmoved steadiness,—“Madam, though I appear in this habit, I am a

woman; my name is Margaret Lambrun; I was several years in the service

of Queen Mary, my mistress, whom you have so unjustly put to death;

and by her death you have also caused that of my husband, who died of

grief to see so innocent a queen perish so iniquitously. Now, as I had

the greatest love and affection for both these persons, I resolved at

the peril of my life to revenge their death by killing you, who are

the cause of both.”—The Queen pardoned her, and granted her a safe

conduct till she should be set upon the coast of France.’

Fanaticism expires with philosophy, and heroism with refinement. There

can be no mixture of scepticism in the one, nor any distraction of

interest in the other. That blind attachment to individuals or to

principles, which is necessary to make us stake our all upon a single

die, wears out with the progress of society. Sandt—(the last of that

school)—was a religious fanatic—a reader of the book of Maccabees, a

repeater of the story of Jael and Sisera, a chaunter of the song of

Deborah. What lighted up the dungeon-gloom in which Guy Faux buried

himself alive? The face of Heaven open to receive him. What cheered his

undivided solitude? The full assembly of Just Men made perfect, the

Glorious Company of Apostles, the Noble Army of Martyrs, the expecting

Conclave of Sainted Popes, of Canonized Priests and Cardinals. What

nerved his steady hand, and prepared it, with temperate, even pulse, to

apply the fatal spark? The Hand of the Most High stretched out to meet

him and to welcome him into the abodes of the blest—‘Well done, thou

good and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of thy Lord!’ In his

face we see an anticipated triumph that ‘no dim doubts alloy’; he hears

with no mortal ears the recording angels ‘quiring to the young-eyed

cherubim’; a light flashes round him, a beatific vision, from the wings

of the Shining Ones: he sits, wreathed and radiant, in the real

presence! What need he fear what men can do unto him? To a hope like

his, swallowed up in fruition, the shock that is soon to shatter his

mortal frame plays harmless as the summer-lightning: the flames that

threaten to envelope him are the wedding-garment of the Spouse. ‘This

night thou shalt sup with me in Paradise’—rings in his sleepless ears.

On this rock he builds his faith, and the gates of Hell shall not

prevail against it!—Guy Faux (poor wretch!) was as sure within himself

of the reward of his crime in the eternal salvation of his soul, as of

his intention to commit it: he no more doubted of another world than he

doubted of his own existence. A question whether his whole creed might

not be a delusion had never once crossed his mind. How should it? He had

never once heard it called in question. He believed in it as he believed

in all he had ever seen or heard, or thought or felt, or been told by

others—he believed in a future state as he believed in this, with his

senses and his understanding, and with all his heart. Poor Guy—that

miserable fifth-of-November scare-crow, that stuffed straw figure,

flaunting its own periodical disgrace—never once dreamt (oh! glorious

inheritance!) that he should die like a dog. Otherwise, James and his

parliament would have been in no jeopardy from him. He was not a person

of that refinement. He thought for certain that he would go to Heaven or

Hell; and he played a bold, but (as he fancied) a sure game, for the

former. With such objects at stake, and with his own blinded reason, and

a stifled conscience, and implicit faith, and vowed obedience, and holy

Mother Church on his side, and a fixed hatred of heresy and of all that

belonged to it, as of a strange birth in nature, that made his flesh

creep and his brain reel, and a disregard of his own person, as ‘dross

compared to the glory hereafter to be revealed,’ he acted up to his

belief: the man was what he preached to others to be—no better, no

worse. Without this belief supporting him, what would he have been? Like

the wretched straw figure, the automaton we see representing him,

‘disembowelled of his natural entrails, without a real heart of flesh

and blood beating in his bosom,’ a modern time-server, an unimpassioned

slave, a canting Jesuit, a petty, cautious, meddling priest, a safe,

underhand persecutor, an anonymous slanderer, a cringing sycophant,

promoting his own interest by taking the bread out of honest mouths, a

mercenary malignant coward, a Clerical Magistrate, a Quarterly Reviewer,

a Member of the Constitutional Association, the concealed Editor of

_Blackwood’s Magazine_!

THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED

_The Examiner._] [_November 18, 1821._

The diffusion of knowledge, of inquiry, of doubt (or what Lord Bacon

calls ‘the infinite agitation of wit’) puts an end to ‘the soul of

goodness’ that there is in bigotry and superstition, and should to its

evil spirit at the same time. There is nothing so intolerable as the

union (which we see so common in modern times) of religious hypocrisy

with literary scepticism. The real bigot is a respectable as well as

enviable character. Not so the affected one. Downright, rooted,

rancorous prejudices are honest, hearty, wholesome things. They keep the

mind _in breath_. Not so the whining, hollow, designing cant, which

echoes without feeling them. The barbarous cruelties of savage tribes

are partly atoned for by the keen appetite for revenge in which they

originate: but we do not extend the same excuse to those who poison for

hire. The fires of Smithfield were kindled by a zeal that burnt as

bright and fierce as they. Our contemporaries who are in the habit of

throwing firebrands and death, do it without malice; and laugh at those

who do not understand the jest. The multiplication of sects dissipates

and tames down the rage of martyrdom. The first grand defection indeed

from an established and universal faith, creates a shock and is assailed

with a violence proportioned to the firmness with which the

parent-belief has been rooted in the public mind: but the subsequent

ramification of different schisms and modes of faith from the first

enormous heresy, tires out and neutralises the spirit of both

persecution and fanaticism. Religious controversy is a war of words, and

no longer a war of extermination. There may be the same heart-burnings,

the same jealousies of difference of opinion; but they do not lead to

the same fatal catastrophes or the same heroic sacrifices. We cannot

burn or hang one another for differing from the Catholic faith as a

crime of the most dreadful import, when hardly any two men can be found

to agree in the interpretation of the same text. All opinions, by

constant collision and attrition, become, if not equally probable,

equally familiar. Men’s minds are slowly weaned from blind idolatrous

bigotry and intolerant zeal, by the continually increasing number of

points of controversy and the frequency of dispute. Then comes the

general question as to the grounds and reasonableness of the doctrines

of religion itself; and a sceptical, dispassionate, Epicurean work, like

_Bayle’s Dictionary_ or _Hume’s Essays_, gives the finishing blow to

what little remains of dogmatical faith in established systems. After

that, a zealot is another name for an imposter. The reasons for belief

may be as good or stronger than ever; but the belief itself, as it is

more rational, is less gross and headstrong. The closest deductions of

the understanding do not act like an instinct, or warrant a mortal

antipathy; and let the philosophical believer’s convictions be what they

will, he cannot affect an ignorance that it is possible for others to

differ with him. A violent and overstrained affectation of Orthodoxy is,

after a certain time, a sure sign of insincerity: the only zeal that can

claim to be ‘according to knowledge,’ is refined, calm, and considerate.

I do not speak of this sort of mitigated, sceptical, liberalised,

enlightened belief, as ‘a consummation devoutly to be wished:’ (in my

own particular, I would rather have held opinion with Guy Faux, and have

gone or sent others to the Devil for that opinion)—I speak of the common

course of human affairs. I remember once observing to Wilkie, the

celebrated artist, that Dr. Chalmers (his old friend and schoolfellow)

had started an objection to the Christian religion, in order to have the

credit of answering it. The Scottish Teniers said, that if the answer

was a good one, he thought him right in bringing forward the objection.

I did not think this remark savoured of the acuteness one would expect

from such a man as Wilkie, and only said, I apprehended those opinions

were the strongest which had been never called in question. _Reasoning

is not believing_—whatever _seeing_ may be, according to the proverb.

A devoted and incorrigible attachment to individuals, as well as to

doctrines, is weakened by the progress of knowledge and civilization. A

spirit of scepticism, of inquiry, of comparison, is introduced there

too, by the course of reading, observation, and reflection, which

strikes at the root of our disproportionate idolatry. Margaret Lambrun

did not think there was such another woman in the world as her mistress,

Queen Mary; nor could she, after her death, see any thing in it worth

living for. Had she had access to a modern circulating library, she

would have read of a hundred such heroines, all peerless alike; and

would have consoled herself for the death of them all, one after

another, pretty much in the same manner. Margaret was not one of those

who argue, according to Mr. Burke’s improved political catechism, that

‘a king is but a king; a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal;

and that not an animal of the highest order.’ She had more respect of

persons than this. The truth is, she had never seen such another woman

as her mistress, and she had no means, by books or otherwise, of forming

an idea of any thing but what she saw. In that isolated state of

society, people grew together like trees, and clung round the strongest

for support, ‘as the vine curls its tendrils.’ They became devoted to

others with the same violence of attachment as they were to themselves.

Novels, plays, magazines, treatises of philosophy, Monthly Museums, and

_Belles Assemblées_, did not fly in numbers about the country and

‘through the airy region stream so bright,’ as to blot out the

impression of all real forms. The effects of habit, of sense, of

service, of affection, did not find an ideal level in general literature

and artificial models. The heart made its election once, and was fixed

till death: the eyes doated on fancied perfection, and were divorced

from every other object afterwards. There was not the same communication

of ideas; there was not the same change of place or acquaintance. The

prejudices of rank, of custom, strengthened the bias of individual

admiration; and it is no wonder, where all these circumstances were

combined, that the presence of a person, whom we had loved and served,

became a feeling, an appetite, and a passion in the mind, almost

necessary to existence. The taking our idol away (and by cruel and

treacherous means) would be taking away the prop that sustained life,

and on which all the pride of the affections leant. Its loss would be

the loss of another self; and a double loss of this kind (as in the

instance alluded to) could seek for no solace but in the death of her

who had caused it. Where the mind had become rivetted to a certain

object, where it had embarked its all in the sacred cause of friendship

and inviolable fidelity, it would be in vain to offer the consolations

of philosophy when the heart owned none. Other scenes, new friends,

fresh engagements, might be proper for others; but Margaret Lambrun’s

wounded spirit could find no relief but in looking forward to a full

revenge for a murdered mistress and husband. You might as well think of

wedding the soul to another body, as of inspiring her with other hopes

and thoughts than those which she had lost for ever:—she could not live

without those whom she had loved so well and long, and she was ready to

die for them. Life becomes indifferent to a mind haunted by a passion of

this sort. Death is not then a choice, but rather a necessity. We cannot

live, and have the desire nearest to our souls. To play the hero, it is

only necessary to be wound up to such an unavoidable interest in any

thing, as reflection, prudence, natural instinct, have no power over. To

be a hero, is, in other words, to lose the sense of our personal

identity in some object dearer to us than ourselves. He may purchase any

thing he pleases, who is ready to part with his life for it. Wherever

there is a passion or belief strong enough to blind us to consequences,

there the mind is capable of any sacrifice and of any undertaking.

The heroical is the fanaticism of common life: it is the contempt of

danger, of pain, of death, in the pursuit of a favourite idea. The rule

of honour, as of conscience, is to contemplate things in the abstract,

and never as affecting or reacting upon yourself; the hero is an

instrument in the hands of fate, as is himself impassive to its blows. A

man in a passion, or who is worked up to a certain pitch of enthusiasm,

minds nothing else. The fear of death, the love of self, is but an idea

or motive with a certain habitual strength. Raise any other idea or

feeling to a greater habitual or momentary height, and it will supplant

or overrule the first. Courage is sometimes the effect of despair.

Women, in a fit of romance, or on some sudden emergency, have been known

to perform feats of heroic daring, from which men of the stoutest nerves

might shrink with dismay. Maternal tenderness is heroic. Affection of

any kind, that doats upon a particular object, and absorbs every other

consideration in that, is in its nature heroic.[36] Passion is the great

ingredient in heroism. He who stops to reflect, to balance one thing

against another, is a coward. The better part of valour is indiscretion.

All passion is a short-lived madness, or state of intoxication, in which

some present impulse or prevailing idea gets uncontrouled possession of

the mind, and lords it there at will. A man may be (almost literally)

drunk with choler, with love, with jealousy, with revenge, as he may

with wine or strong drink. Any of these will overpower his reason and

senses, and put him beyond himself. The master-feeling will prevail,

whatever it is, and when it once gets the upper hand, will rage the more

violently in proportion to the obstacles it has to encounter. Women who

associate with robbers are cruel, as soon as they get over their first

repugnance: some of the bravest officers have been the greatest

Martinets. A man who is afraid of a blow, or tender of his person, will

yet, on being struck, feel nothing but the mortification of the affront,

and the fear of discomfiture. The pain that is inflicted, after his

blood is once up, will only aggravate his resentment, and be diverted

from the channels of fear into those of rage and shame. He whose will is

roused and holds out in this way, whose tenaciousness of purpose and

inflammability of spirit are proof against the extremity of pain, of

fatigue, and disaster, is said to have _pluck_. So a man may not be able

to reason himself into coolness at the commencement of a battle; but a

ball whizzing near him does it, by abstracting his imagination from a

thousand idle fears, and fixing it on his immediate situation and duty.

The novice in an engagement, that before was motionless with

apprehension or trembling like a leaf, after being hit, loses the sense

of possible contingencies in the grief of his wound, and fights like a

devil incarnate. He is thenceforward too busy to think of himself. He

rushes fearlessly on danger and on death. A man in a battle is indeed

emphatically _beside himself_. He ‘bears a charmed life,’ that in fancy

disarms cannon-balls and bullets of their power to hurt. They are mere

names and apparitions from which astonishment and necessity have taken

out the sting: the sense of feeling is seared and dead for the time to

‘all mortal consequences.’ The mind is sublimated to a disregard of

whatever can happen, and tempted to rush without provocation on its

fate, purely out of bravado, and as the triumph of its paramount

feeling, an exasperation of its temporary insanity. Courage is in many

such cases only a violent effort to shake off fear, a determination of

the imagination to seize on any object that may divert its present

dread. A soldier is a perfect hero but that he is a mere machine. He is

drilled into disinterestedness, and beaten into courage. He is a very

patriotic and romantic automaton. He has lost all regard for himself and

concern for others. His life, his limbs, his soul and body, are obedient

only to the word of command. ‘Set duty in one eye and death in the

other, and he can look on death indifferently.’

‘Set but a Scotsman on a hill,

Say such is royal George’s will,

And there’s the foe:

His only thought is how to kill

Twa’ at a blow.’—_Burns._

They then go at it with bayonets fixed, eyes inflamed, and tongues

lolling out with heat and rage, like wild beasts or mad dogs panting for

blood, and from the madman to Mr. Wordsworth’s ‘happy warrior’ there is

but one step.—The true hero devotes himself in the same way, but he does

it of his own accord, and from an inward sentiment. The service on which

he is bound is perfect freedom. He is not a machine, but a free agent.

He knows his cue without a prompter. Not servile duty—

‘Within his bosom reigns another lord,

Honour, sole judge and umpire of itself.’

THE SAME SUBJECT CONCLUDED

_The Examiner_] [_November 25, 1821._

Thus a knight-errant going on adventures, and following out the fine

idea of love and gallantry in his own mind, without once thinking of

himself but as a vessel dedicated to virtue and honour, is one of the

most enviable fictions in the whole world. Don Quixote, in the midst of

its comic irony, is the finest serious developement to be found of this

character. The account of the Cid, the famous Spanish hero, of which Mr.

Southey has given an admirable prose-translation where scarcely a word

could be changed or transposed without injuring the force and clear

simplicity of the antique style he has adopted, abounds with instances

to the same purpose. His taking back the lion to its den, his bringing

his father ‘the herb that would cure him,’ his enemy’s head, and his

manner of reclaiming a recreant knight from his cowardice by heaping the

rewards and distinctions of courage upon him, are some of those that I

remember as the most striking. Perhaps the reader may not have the book

by him; yet they are worth turning to, both for the sentiment and the

expression. The first then in order is the following:—

‘At this time it came to pass that there was strife between Count Don

Gomez the Lord of Gormaz, and Diego Laynez the father of Rodrigo (the

Cid); and the Count insulted Diego and gave him a blow. Now Diego was

a man in years, and his strength had passed from him, so that he could

not take vengeance, and he retired to his home to dwell there in

solitude and lament over his dishonour. And he took no pleasure in his

food, neither could he sleep by night, nor would he lift up his eyes

from the ground, nor stir out of his house, nor commune with his

friends, but turned from them in silence as if the breath of his shame

would taint them. Rodrigo was yet but a youth, and the Count was a

mighty man in arms, one who gave his voice first in the Cortez, and

was held to be the best in the war, and so powerful, that he had a

thousand friends among the mountains. Howbeit, all these things

appeared as nothing to Rodrigo, when he thought of the wrong done to

his father, the first which had ever been offered to the blood of Layn

Calvo. He asked nothing but justice of Heaven, and of man he asked

only a fair field; and his father seeing of how good heart he was,

gave him his sword and his blessing. The sword had been the Sword of

Mudarra in former times, and when Rodrigo held its cross in its hand,

he thought within himself that his arm was not weaker than Mudarra’s.

And he went out and defied the Count and slew him, and smote off his

head, and carried it home to his father. The old man was sitting at

table, the food lying before him untasted, when Rodrigo returned, and

pointing to the head which hung from the horse’s collar, dropping

blood, he bade him look up, for there was the herb which would restore

to him his appetite; the tongue, quoth he, which insulted[37] you, is

no longer a tongue, and the hand which wronged you is no longer a

hand. And the old man arose and embraced his son and placed him above

him at the table; saying that he who brought home that head should be

the head of the house of Layn Calvo.’—_Chronicle of the Cid_, _p. 4_.

The next is of Martin Pelaez, whom the Cid made of a notable coward a

redoubtable hero:—

‘Here the history relates, that at this time Martin Pelaez the Asturian

came with a convoy of laden beasts, carrying provision to the hosts of

the Cid; and as he passed near the town, the Moors sallied out in great

numbers against him; but he, though he had few with him, defended the

convoy right well, and did great hurt to the Moors, slaying many of

them, and drove them into the town. This Martin Pelaez, who is here

spoken of, did the Cid make a right good knight of a coward, as ye shall

hear. When the Cid first began to lay siege to the City of Valencia,

this Martin Pelaez came unto him: he was a knight, a native of

Santillance in Asturias, a hidalgo, great of body and strong of limb, a

well-made man and of goodly semblance, but withal a right coward at

heart, which he had shown in many places where he was among feats of

arms. And the Cid was sorry when he came unto him, though he would not

let him perceive this; for he knew he was not fit to be of his company.

Howbeit, he thought that since he was come, he would make him brave

whether he would or not. And when the Cid began to war upon the town,

and sent parties against it twice and thrice a day, as ye have heard,

for the Cid was always upon the alert, there was fighting and tourneying

every day. One day it fell out that the Cid and his kinsmen and friends

and vassals were engaged in a great encounter, and this Martin Pelaez

was well armed; and when he saw that the Moors and Christians were at

it, he fled and betook himself to his lodging, and there hid himself

till the Cid returned to dinner. And the Cid saw what Martin Pelaez did,

and when he had conquered the Moors, he returned to his lodging to

dinner. Now it was the custom of the Cid to eat at a high table, seated

on his bench at the head. And Don Alvar Fannez and Pero Bermudez and

other precious knights ate in another part, at high tables full

honourably, and none other knights whatsoever dared to take their seats

with them, unless they were such as deserved to be there; and the others

who were not so approved in arms ate upon _estradas_, at tables with

cushions. This was the order in the house of the Cid, and every one knew

the place where he was to sit at meat, and every one strove all he could

to gain the honour of sitting to eat at the table of Don Alvar Fannez

and his companions, by strenuously behaving himself in all feats of

arms; and thus the honour of the Cid was advanced. This Martin Pelaez,

thinking that none had seen his badness, washed his hands in turn with

the other knights, and would have taken his place among them. And the

Cid went unto him and took him by the hand and said, You are not such a

one as deserves to sit with these, for they are worth more than you or

than me, but I will have you with me; and he seated him with himself at

table. And he, for lack of understanding, thought that the Cid did this

to honour him above all the others. On the morrow the Cid and his

company rode towards Valencia, and the Moors came out to the tourney;

and Martin Pelaez went out well armed, and was among the foremost who

charged the Moors, and when he was in among them he turned the reins,

and went back to his lodging; and the Cid took heed to all that he did,

and saw that though he had done badly, he had done better than the first

day. And when the Cid had driven the Moors into the town, he returned to

his lodging, and as he sate down to meat, he took this Martin Pelaez by

the hand, and seated him with himself, and bade him eat with him in the

same dish, for he had deserved more that day than he had the first. And

the knight gave heed to that saying, and was abashed; howbeit, he did as

the Cid commanded him: and after he had dined, he went to his lodging

and began to think upon what the Cid had said unto him, and perceived

that he had seen all the baseness which he had done; and then he

understood that for this cause he would not let him sit at board with

the other knights who were precious in arms, but had seated him with

himself, more to affront him than to do him honour, for there were other

knights there better than he, and he did not show them that honour. Then

resolved he in his heart to do better than he had done hitherto. Another

day the Cid and his company and Martin Pelaez rode towards Valencia, and

the Moors came out to the tourney full resolutely, and Martin Pelaez was

among the first, and charged them right boldly; and he smote down and

slew presently a good knight, and he lost there all the bad fear which

he had had, and was that day one of the best knights there: and as long

as the tourney lasted, there he remained fighting and slaying and

overthrowing the Moors, till they were driven within the gates, in such

manner that the Moors marvelled at him, and asked where that Devil came

from, for they had never seen him before. And the Cid was in a place

where he could see all that was going on, and he gave good heed to him,

and had great pleasure in beholding him, to see how well he had

forgotten the great fear which he was wont to have. And when the Moors

were shut up within the town, the Cid and all his people returned to

their lodging, and Martin Pelaez full leisurely and quietly went to his

lodging also, like a good knight. And when it was the hour of eating,

the Cid waited for Martin Pelaez, and when he came and they had washed,

the Cid took him by the hand, and said, My friend, you are not such a

one as deserves to sit with me henceforth, but sit you here with Don

Alvar Fannez, and with these other good knights, for the good feats

which you have done this day have made you a companion for them; and

from the day forward he was placed in the company of the good.’—p. 199.

* * * * *

‘There was a lion in the house of the Cid, who had grown a large one,

and strong, and was full nimble; three men had the keeping of this lion,

and they kept him in a den which was in a courtyard, high up in the

palace; and when they cleansed the court, they were wont to shut him up

in his den, and afterwards to open the door that he might come out and

eat: the Cid kept him for his pastime, that he might take pleasure with

him when he was minded so to do. Now it was the custom of the Cid to

dine every day with his company, and after he had dined, he was wont to

sleep awhile upon his seat. And one day when he had dined, there came a

man and told him that a great fleet was arrived in the port of Valencia,

wherein there was a great power of the Moors, whom King Bucar had

brought over, the sons of the Miramamolin of Morocco. And when the Cid

heard this, his heart rejoiced and he was glad, for it was nigh three

years since he had had a battle with the Moors. Incontinently he ordered

a signal to be made, that all the honourable men who were in the city

should assemble together. And when they were all assembled in the

Alcazar, and his sons-in-law with them, the Cid told them the news, and

took counsel with them in what manner they should go out against this

great power of the Moors. And when they had taken counsel, the Cid went

to sleep upon his seat, and the Infantes and the others sate playing at

tables and chess. Now at this time the men who were keepers of the lion

were cleaning out the court, and when they heard the cry that the Moors

were coming, they opened the den, and came down into the palace where

the Cid was, and left the door of the court open. And when the lion had

ate his meat, and saw that the door was open, he went out of the court

and came down into the palace even into the hall where they all were:

and when they who were there saw him, there was a great stir among them:

but the Infantes of Carrion showed greater cowardice than all the rest.

Ferrando Gonzalez having no shame, neither for the Cid nor for the

others who were present, crept under the seat whereon the Cid was

sleeping, and in his haste he burst his mantle and his doublet also at

the shoulders. And Diego Gonzalez, the other, ran to a postern door,

crying, I shall never see Carrion again! This door opened upon a

courtyard, where there was a wine-press, and he jumped out, and by

reason of the great height could not keep his feet, but fell among the

lees and defiled himself therewith. And all the others who were in the

hall wrapt their cloaks around their arms, and stood round about the

seat whereon the Cid was sleeping, that they might defend him. The noise

which they made awakened the Cid, and he saw the lion coming towards

him, and he lifted up his hand and said, What is this!... and the lion

hearing his voice stood still: and he rose up and took him by the mane,

as if he had been a gentle mastiff, and led him back to the court where

he was before, and ordered his keepers to look better to him for the

time to come. And when he had done this, he returned to the hall and

took his seat again; and all they who beheld it were greatly

astonished.’—p. 251.

The presence of mind, the manly confidence, the faith in virtue, the

lofty bearing and picturesque circumstances in all these stories, are as

fine as any thing can well be imagined.—The last of them puts me in

mind, that that heroic little gentleman, Mr. Kean, who is a Cid too in

his way, keeps a lion ‘for his pastime, that he may take pleasure with

him when he is minded so to do.’ It is, to be sure, an American lion, a

puma, a sort of a great dog. But still it shews the nature of the man,

and the spirited turn of his genius. Courage is the great secret of his

success. His acting is, if not classical, heroical. To dare and to do

are with him the same thing. ‘Masterless passion sways him to the mood

of what it likes or loaths.’ He may be sometimes wrong, but he is

decidedly wrong, and does not betray himself by paltry doubts and fears.

He takes the lion by the mane. He gains all by hazarding all. He throws

himself into the breach, and fights his way through as well as he can.

He leaves all to his feelings, and goes where they lead him; and he

finds his account in this method, and brings rich ventures home.

In reading the foregoing accounts of the Spanish author, it seems that

in those times killing was no murder. Slaughter was the order of the

day. The blood of Moors and Christians flows through the page as so much

water. The proverb uppermost in their minds was, that a man could die

but once, and the inference seemed to be, the sooner the better. In

these more secure and civilized times (individually and as far as it

depends upon ourselves) we are more chary of our lives. We are

(ordinarily) placed out of the reach of ‘the shot of accident and dart

of chance’; and grow indolent, tender, and effeminate in our notions and

habits. Books do not make men valiant,—not even the reading the

chronicle of the Cid. The police look after all breaches of the peace

and resorts of suspicious characters, so that we need not buckle on our

armour to go to the succour of distressed damsels, or to give battle to

giants and enchanters. Instead of killing some fourteen before

breakfast, like _Hotspur_, we are contented to read of these things in

the newspapers, or to see them performed on the stage. We enjoy all the

dramatic interest of such scenes, without the tragic results. Regnault

de St. Jean Angely rode like a madman through the streets of Paris, when

from the barricades he saw the Prussians advancing. We love, fight, and

are slain by proxy—live over the adventures of a hundred heroes and die

their deaths—and the next day are as well as ever, and ready to begin

again. This is a gaining concern, and an improvement on the

old-fashioned way of risking life and limb in good earnest, as a cure

for _ennui_. It is a bad speculation to come to an untimely end by way

of killing time. Now, like the heroic personages in _Tom Thumb_, we

spread a white pocket-handkerchief to prepare our final catastrophe, and

act the _sentiment_ of death with all the impunity to be desired. Men,

the more they cultivate their intellect, become more careful of their

persons. They would like to think, to read, to dream on for ever,

without being liable to any worldly annoyance. ‘Be mine to read eternal

new romances, of Marivaux and Crebillon,’ cries the insatiable adept in

this school. Art is long, and they think it hard that life should be so

short. Their existence has been chiefly theatrical, ideal, a tragedy

rehearsed in print—why should it receive its _denouement_ in their

proper persons, in _corpore vili_?—In another point of view, sedentary,

studious people live in a world of thought—in a world out of

themselves—and are not very well prepared to scuffle in this. They lose

the sense of personal honour on questions of more general interest, and

are not inclined to individual sacrifices that can be of no service to

the cause of letters. They do not see how any speculative truth can be

proved by their being run through the body; nor does your giving them

the lie alter the state of any one of the great leading questions in

policy, morals, or criticism. Philosophers might claim the privileges of

divines for many good reasons; among these, according to Spenser,

exemption from worldly care and peril was not the least in monkish lore:

‘From worldly care himself he did esloine,

And greatly shunned manly exercise:

For every work he challenged essoine,

For contemplation-sake.’