91. Locke, after acutely remarking that the common arguments for the

power of a father over his children would extend equally to the

mother, so that it should be called parental power, reverts to the

train of reasoning in the first book of this treatise against the

regal authority of fathers. What they possess is not derived from

generation, but from the care they necessarily take of the infant

child, and during his minority; the power then terminates, though

reverence, support, and even compliance are still due. Children are

also held in subordination to their parents by the institutions of

property, which commonly make them dependent both as to maintenance

and succession. But Locke, which is worthy to be remarked, inclines to

derive the origin of civil government from the patriarchal authority;

one not strictly coercive, yet voluntarily conceded by habit and

family consent. “Thus the natural fathers of families, by an

insensible change, became the politic monarchs of them too; and as

they chanced to live long, and leave worthy and able heirs for several

successions or otherwise, so they laid the foundations of hereditary

or elective kingdoms.”[951]

[951] C. 6.

92. The necessity that man should not live alone, produced the primary

society of husband and wife, parent and children, to which that of

master and servant was early added; whether of freemen engaging their

service for hire, or of slaves taken in just war, who are by the right

of nature subject to the absolute dominion of the captor. Such a

family may sometimes resemble a little commonwealth by its numbers,

but is essentially distinct from one, because its chief has no

imperial power of life and death except over his slaves, nature having

given him none over his children, though all men have a right to

punish breaches of the law of nature in others according to the

offence. But this natural power they quit and resign into the hands of

the community, when civil society is instituted; and it is in this

union of the several rights of its members that the legislative right

of the commonwealth consists, whether this be done by general consent

at the first formation of government, or by the adhesion which any

individual may give to one already established. By either of these

ways men pass from a state of nature to one of political society, the

magistrate having now that power to redress injuries, which had

previously been each man’s right. Hence, absolute monarchy, in Locke’s

opinion, is no form of civil government; for there being no common

authority to appeal to, the sovereign is still in a state of nature

with regard to his subjects.[952]

93. A community is formed by the unanimous consent of any body of men;

but when thus become one body, the determination of the majority must

bind the rest, else it would not be one. Unanimity, after a community

is once formed, can no longer be required; but this consent of men to

form a civil society is that which alone did or could give beginning

to any lawful government in the world. It is idle to object that we

have no records of such an event; for few commonwealths preserve the

tradition of their own infancy; and whatever we do know of the origin

of particular states gives indications of this mode of union. Yet he

again inclines to deduce the usual origin of civil societies from

imitation of patriarchal authority, which having been recognised by

each family in the arbitration of disputes and even punishment of

offences, was transferred with more readiness to some one person, as

the father and representative head of the infant community. He even

admits that this authority might tacitly devolve upon the eldest son.

Thus the first governments were monarchies, and those with no express

limitations of power, till exposure of its abuse gave occasion to

social laws, or to co-ordinate authority. In all this he follows

Hooker, from the first book of whose Ecclesiastical Polity he quotes

largely in his notes.[953]

[952] C. 7.

[953] C. 8.

94. A difficulty commonly raised against the theory of compact is,

that all men being born under some government, they cannot be at

liberty to erect a new one, or even to make choice whether they will

obey or no. This objection Locke does not meet, like Hooker and the

jurists, by supposing the agreement of a distant ancestor to oblige

all his posterity. But explicitly acknowledging that nothing can bind

freemen to obey any government save their own consent, he rests the

evidence of a tacit consent, on the enjoyment of land, or even on mere

residence within the dominions of the community; every man

being at liberty to relinquish his possessions, or change his

residence, and either incorporate himself with another commonwealth,

or, if he can find an opportunity, set up for himself in some

unoccupied part of the world. But nothing can make a man irrevocably a

member of one society, except his own voluntary declaration; such

perhaps as the oath of allegiance, which Locke does not mention, ought

to be reckoned.[954]

[954] C. 8.

95. The majority having, in the first constitution of a state, the

whole power, may retain it themselves, or delegate it to one or more

persons.[955] And the supreme power is, in other words, the

legislature sacred and unalterable in the hands where the community

have once placed it, without which no law can exist, and in which all

obedience terminates. Yet this legislative authority itself is not

absolute or arbitrary over the lives and fortunes of its subjects. It

is the joint power of individuals surrendered to the state; but no man

has power over his own life or his neighbour’s property. The laws

enacted by the legislature must be conformable to the will of God, or

natural justice. Nor can it take any part of the subject’s property

without his own consent, or that of the majority. “For if any one

shall claim a power to lay and levy taxes on the people by his own

authority, and without such consent of the people, he thereby invades

the fundamental law of property, and subverts the end of government.

For what property have I in that which another may by right take, when

he pleases, to himself?” Lastly, the legislative power is inalienable;

being but delegated from the people, it cannot be transferred to

others.[956] This is the part of Locke’s treatise which has been open

to most objection, and which in some measure seems to charge with

usurpation all the established governments of Europe. It has been a

theory fertile of great revolutions, and perhaps pregnant with more.

In some part of this chapter also, though by no means in the most

practical corollaries, the language of Hooker has led onward his more

hardy disciple.

[955] C. 10.

[956] C. 11.

96. Though the legislative power is alone supreme in the constitution,

it is yet subject to the people themselves, who may alter it whenever

they find that it acts against the trust reposed in it; all power

given in trust for a particular end being evidently forfeited when

that end is manifestly disregarded or obstructed. But while the

government subsists the legislature is alone sovereign, though it may

be the usage to call a single executive magistrate sovereign, if he

has also a share in legislation. Where this is not the case, the

appellation is plainly improper. Locke has in this chapter a

remarkable passage, one perhaps of the first declarations in favour of

a change in the electoral system of England. “To what gross

absurdities the following of custom, when reason has left it, may

lead, we may be satisfied when we see the bare name of a town, of

which there remains not so much as the ruins, where scarce so much

housing as a sheep-cot, or more inhabitants than a shepherd is to be

found, send as many representatives to the grand assembly of

law-makers as a whole county, numerous in people and powerful in

riches. This strangers stand amazed at, and every one must confess

needs a remedy, though most think it hard to find one, because the

constitution of the legislative being the original and supreme act of

the society, antecedent to all positive laws in it, and depending

wholly on the people, no inferior power can alter it.” But Locke is

less timid about a remedy, and suggests that the executive magistrate

might regulate the number of representatives, not according to old

custom but reason, which is not setting up a new legislature, but

restoring an old one. “Whatsoever, shall be done manifestly for the

good of the people and the establishing the government on its true

foundation, is, and always will be, just prerogative;”[957] a maxim of

too dangerous latitude for a constitutional monarchy.

[957] C. 13.

97. Prerogative he defines to be “a power of acting according to

discretion for the public good without the prescription of the law,

and sometimes even against it.” This however is not by any means a

good definition in the eyes of a lawyer; and the word, being merely

technical, ought not to have been employed in so partial if not so

incorrect a sense. Nor is it very precise to say, that in England the

prerogative was always largest in the hands of our wisest and best

princes, not only because the fact is otherwise, but because he

confounds the legal prerogative with its actual exercise. This chapter

is the most loosely reasoned of any in the treatise.[958]

[958] C. 14.

98. Conquest, in an unjust war, can give no right at all, unless

robbers and pirates may acquire a right. Nor is anyone bound by

promises which unjust force extorts from him. If we are not strong

enough to resist, we have no remedy save patience; but our children

may appeal to Heaven, and repeat their appeals till they recover their

ancestral rights, which was to be governed by such a legislation as

themselves approve. He that appeals to Heaven must be sure that he has

right on his side, and right too that is worth the trouble and cost of

his appeal, as he will answer at a tribunal that cannot be deceived.

Even just conquest gives no further right than to reparation of

injury; and the posterity of the vanquished, he seems to hold, can

forfeit nothing by their parent’s offence, so that they have always a

right to throw off the yoke. The title of prescription, which has

commonly been admitted to silence the complaints, if not to heal the

wounds, of the injured, finds no favour with Locke.[959] And hence, it

seems that no state composed, as most have been, out of the spoils of

conquest, can exercise a legitimate authority over the latest

posterity of those it has incorporated. Wales, for instance, has an

eternal right to shake off the yoke of England; for what Locke says of

consent to laws by representatives, is of little weight when these

must be out-numbered in the general legislature of both countries; and

indeed the first question for the Cambro-Britons would be to determine

whether they would form part of such a common legislation.

[959] C. 16.

99. Usurpation, which is a kind of domestic conquest, gives no more

right to obedience than unjust war; it is necessary that the people

should both be at liberty to consent, and have actually consented to

allow and confirm a power which the constitution of their commonwealth

does not recognise.[960] But tyranny may exist without usurpation,

whenever the power reposed in anyone’s hands for the people’s benefit

is abused to their impoverishment or slavery. Force may never be

opposed but to unjust and unlawful force; in any other case, it is

condemned before God and man. The king’s person is in some countries

sacred by law; but this, as Locke thinks, does not extend to the case

where, by putting himself in a state of war with his people, he

dissolves the government.[961] A prince dissolves the government by

ruling against law, by hindering the regular assembly of the

legislature, by changing the form of election, or by rendering the

people subject to a foreign power. He dissolves it also by neglecting

or abandoning it, so that the laws cannot be put into execution. The

government is also dissolved by breach of trust in either the

legislature or the prince; by the former when it usurps an arbitrary

power over the lives, liberties, and fortunes of the subject; by the

latter, when he endeavours to corrupt the representatives or to

influence the choice of the electors. If it be objected that no

government will be able long to subsist, if the people may set up a

new legislature whenever they take offence at the old one, he replies

that mankind are too slow and averse to quit their old institutions

for this danger to be apprehended. Much will be endured from rulers

without mutiny or murmur. Nor is anything more likely to restrain

governments than this doctrine of the right of resistance. It is as

reasonable to tell men they should not defend themselves against

robbers, because it may occasion disorder, as to use the same argument

for passive obedience to illegal dominion. And he observes, after

quoting some other writers, that Hooker alone might be enough to

satisfy those who rely on him for their ecclesiastical polity.[962]

[960] C. 17.

[961] C. 18.

[962] C. 19.

|Observations on this Treatise.|

100. Such is, in substance, the celebrated treatise of Locke on civil

government, which, with the favour of political circumstances, and the

authority of his name, became the creed of a numerous party at home;

while silently spreading the fibres from its root over Europe and

America, it prepared the way for theories of political society, hardly

bolder in their announcement, but expressed with more passionate

ardour, from which the great revolutions of the last and present age

have sprung. But as we do not launch our bark upon a stormy sea, we

shall merely observe that neither the Revolution of 1688, nor the

administration of William III., could have borne the test by which

Locke has tried the legitimacy of government. There was certainly no

appeal to the people in the former, nor would it have been convenient

for the latter to have had the maxim established, that an attempt to

corrupt the legislature entails a forfeiture of the entrusted power.

Whether the opinion of Locke, that mankind are slow to political

change, be conformable to an enlarged experience, must be judged by

everyone according to his reading and observation; it is, at least,

very different from that which Hooker, to whom he defers so greatly in

most of his doctrine, has uttered in the very first sentence of his

Ecclesiastical Polity. For my own part, I must confess, that in these

latter chapters of Locke on Government I see, what sometimes

appears in his other writings, that the influence of temporary

circumstances on a mind a little too susceptible of passion and

resentment, had prevented that calm and patient examination of all the

bearings of this extensive subject which true philosophy requires.

101. But whatever may be our judgment of this work, it is equally true

that it opened a new era of political opinion in Europe. The earlier

writings on the side of popular sovereignty, whether those of Buchanan

and Languet, of the Jesuits, or of the English republicans, had been

either too closely dependent on temporary circumstances, or too much

bound up with odious and unsuccessful factions, to sink very deep into

the hearts of mankind. Their adversaries, with the countenance of

every government on their side, kept possession of the field; and

neither jurist, nor theologian, nor philosopher on the Continent,

while they generally followed their predecessors in deriving the

origin of civil society from compact, ventured to meet the delicate

problem of resistance to tyranny, or of the right to reform a

constitution, except in the most cautious and indefinite language. We

have seen this already in Grotius and Puffendorf. But the success of

the English Revolution; the necessity which the powers allied against

France found of maintaining the title of William; the peculiar

interest of Holland and Hanover, states at that time very strong in

the literary world, in our new scheme of government, gave a weight and

authority to principles which, without some such application, it might

still have been thought seditious to propound. Locke too, long an

exile in Holland, was intimate with Le Clerc, who exerted a

considerable influence over the protestant part of Europe. Barbeyrac,

some time afterwards, trod nearly in the same steps, and without going

all the lengths of Locke, did not fail to take a very different tone

from the two older writers, upon whom he has commented.

|Avis aux Refugiéz, perhaps by Bayle.

102. It was very natural that the French protestants, among whom

traditions of a turn of thinking not the most favourable to kings may

have been preserved, should, in the hour of severe persecution, mutiny

in words and writings against the despotism that oppressed them. Such,

it appears, had been the language of those exiles, as it is of all

exiles, when an anonymous tract, entitled Avis aux Refugiéz, was

published with the date of Amsterdam in 1690. This, under pretext of

giving advice, in the event of their being permitted to return home,

that they should get rid of their spirit of satire, and of their

republican theories, is a bitter and able attack on those who had

taken refuge in Holland. It asserts the principle of passive

obedience, extolling also the king of France and his government, and

censuring the English Revolution. Public rumour ascribed this to

Bayle; it has usually passed for his, and is even inserted in the

collection of his miscellaneous works. Some, however, have ascribed it

to Pelisson, and others to Larroque; one already, and the other soon

after, proselytes to the church of Rome. Basnage thought it written by

the latter, and published by Bayle, to whom he ascribed the preface.

This is, apparently, in a totally opposite strain, but not without

strong suspicion of irony or ill faith. The style and manner

throughout appear to suggest Bayle; and though the supposition is very

discreditable to his memory, the weight of presumption seems much to

incline that way.

|Political economists.|

103. The separation of political economy from the general science,

which regards the well-being of communities, was not so strictly made

by the earlier philosophers as in modern times. It does not follow

that national wealth engaged none of their attention. Few, on the

contrary, of those who have taken comprehensive views, could have

failed to regard it. In Bodin, Botero, Bacon, Hobbes, Puffendorf,

Locke, we have already seen proofs of this. These may be said to have

discussed the subject, not systematically, nor always with thorough

knowledge, but with acuteness and in a philosophical tone. Others

there were of a more limited range, whose habits of life and

experience led them to particular departments of economical inquiry,

especially as to commerce, the precious metals, and the laws affecting

them. The Italians led the way; Serra has been mentioned in our last

volume, and a few more might find a place in this. De Witt’s Interest

of Holland can hardly be reckoned among economical writings; and it is

said by Morhof, that the Dutch were not fond of promulgating their

commercial knowledge;[963] little, at least, was contributed from that

country, even at a later period, towards the theory of becoming rich.

But England now took a large share in this new literature. Free,

inquisitive, thriving rapidly in commerce, so that her progress even

in the nineteenth century has hardly been in a greater ratio than

before, and after the middle of the seventeenth, if we may trust the

statements of contemporaries, she produced some writers who, though

few of them merit the name of philosophers, may not yet here be

overlooked, on account of their influence, their reputation, or their

position as links in the chain of science.

[963] Polyhistor, part iii., lib. iii., § 3.

|Mun on Foreign Trade.|

|Child on Trade.|

104. The first of these was Thomas Mun, an intelligent merchant in the

earlier part of the century, whose posthumous treatise, England’s

Treasure by Foreign Trade, was published in 1664, but seems to have

been written soon after the accession of Charles I.[964] Mun is

generally reckoned the founder of what has been called the mercantile

system. His main position is that “the ordinary means to increase our

wealth and treasure is by foreign trade, wherein we must ever observe

this rule to sell more to strangers yearly than we consume of theirs

in value.”[965] We must therefore sell as cheap as possible; it was by

underselling the Venetians of late years, that we had exported a great

deal of cloth to Turkey.[966] It is singular that Mun should not have

perceived the difficulty of selling very cheap the productions of a

country’s labour, whose gold and silver were in great abundance. He

was, however, too good a merchant not to acknowledge the inefficacy

and impolicy of restraining by law the exportation of coin, which is

often a means of increasing our treasure in the long run; advising

instead a due regard to the balance of trade, or general surplus of

exported goods, by which we shall infallibly obtain a stock of gold

and silver. These notions have long since been covered with ridicule;

and it is plain that, in a merely economical view, they must always be

delusive. Mun, however, looked to the accumulation of a portion of

this imported treasure by the state; a resource in critical

emergencies which we have now learned to despise, since others have

been at hand, but which, in reality, had made a great difference in

the events of war, and changed the balance of power between many

commonwealths. Mun was followed, about 1670, by Sir Josiah Child, in a

discourse on Trade, written on the same principles of the mercantile

system, but more copious and varied. The chief aim of Child is to

effect a reduction of the legal interest of money, from six to four

per cent., drawing an erroneous inference from the increase of wealth

which had followed similar enactments.

[964] Mr. Maculloch says (Introductory Discourse to Smith’s

Wealth of Nations), it had most probably been written about 1635

or 1640. I remarked some things which serve to carry it up a

little higher.

[965] P. 11 (edit. 1664).

[966] P. 18.

|Locke on the Coin.|

105. Among the many difficulties with which the government of

William III. had to contend, one of the most embarrassing was the

scarcity of the precious metals and depreciated condition of the coin.

This opened the whole field of controversy in that province of

political economy; and the bold spirit of inquiry, unshackled by

prejudice in favour of ancient custom, which, in all respects, was

characteristic of that age, began to work by reasonings on general

theorems, instead of collecting insulated and inconclusive details.

Locke stood forward on this, as on so many subjects, with his

masculine sense and habitual closeness of thinking. His

“Considerations of the Consequences of lowering Interest, and raising

the Value of Money” were published in 1691. Two further treatises are

in answer to the pamphlets of Lowndes. These economical writings of

Locke are not in all points conformable to the modern principles of

the science. He seems to incline rather too much towards the

mercantile theory, and to lay too much stress on the possession of the

precious metals. From his excellent sense, however, as well as from

some expressions, I should conceive that he only considers them, as

they doubtless are, a portion of the exchangeable wealth of the

nation, and by their inconsumable nature, as well as by the constancy

of the demand for them, one of the most important. “Riches do not

consist,” he says, “in having more gold and silver, but in having more

in proportion than the rest of the world or than our neighbours,

whereby we are enabled to procure to ourselves a greater plenty of the

conveniences of life.”

106. Locke had the sagacity to perceive the impossibility of

regulating the interest of money by law. It was an empirical

proposition at that time, as we have just seen in Sir Josiah Child, to

render loans more easy to the borrower by reducing the legal rate to

four per cent. The whole drift of his reasoning is against any

limitation, though, from fear of appearing too paradoxical, he does

not arrive at that inference. For the reasons he gives in favour of a

legal limit of interest, namely, that courts of law may have some rule

where nothing is stipulated in the contract, and that a few

money-lenders in the metropolis may not have the monopoly of all loans

in England, are, especially the first, so trifling, that he could not

have relied upon them; and, indeed, he admits that, in other

circumstances, there would be no danger from the second. But his

prudence having restrained him from speaking out, a famous writer,

almost a century afterwards, came forward to assert a paradox, which

he loved the better for seeming such, and, finally, to convince the

thinking part of mankind.

107. Laws fixing the value of silver Locke perceived to be nugatory,

and is averse to prohibit its exportation. The value of money, he

maintains, does not depend on the rate of interest, but on its plenty

relatively to commodities. Hence, the rate of interest, he thinks,

but, perhaps, erroneously, does not govern the price of land; arguing

from the higher rate of land relatively to money, that is, the worse

interest it gave, in the reigns of Elizabeth and James, than in his

own time. But one of Locke’s positions, if generally received, would

alone have sufficed to lower the value of land. “It is in vain,” he

says, “in a country whose great fund is land, to hope to lay the

public charges of the government on anything else; there, at last, it

will terminate.” The legislature soon proceeded to act on this

mistaken theory in the annual land tax; an impost of tremendous

severity at that time, the gross unfairness, however, of which has

been compensated in later times by the taxes on personal succession.

108. In such a monetary crisis as that of his time, Locke was

naturally obliged to consider the usual resource of raising the

denomination of the coin. This, he truly says, would be to rob all

creditors of such a proportion of their debts. It is probable that his

influence, which was very considerable, may have put a stop to the

scheme. He contends in his Further Considerations, in answer to a

tract by Lowndes, that clipped money should go only by weight. This

seems to have been agreed by both parties; but Lowndes thought the

loss should be defrayed by a tax; Locke that it should fall on the

holders. Honourably for the government, the former opinion prevailed.

|Statistical tracts.|

109. The Italians were the first who laid anything like a foundation

for statistics or political arithmetic; that which is to the political

economist what general history is to the philosopher. But their

numerical reckonings of population, houses, value of lands or stock,

and the like, though very curious, and sometimes taken from public

documents, were not always more than conjectural, nor are they so full

and minute as the spirit of calculation demands. England here again

took the lead, in Graunt’s Observations on the Bills of Mortality,

1661, in Petty’s Political Arithmetic (posthumous in 1691), and other

treatises of the same ingenious and philosophical person, and, we may

add, in the Observations of Gregory King on the Natural and Political

State of England; for, though these were not published till near the

end of the eighteenth century, the manuscripts had fallen into the

hands of Dr. Charles Davenant, who has made extracts from them in his

own valuable contributions to political arithmetic. King seems to have

possessed a sagacity which has sometimes brought his conjectures

nearer to the mark than, from the imperfection of his data, it was

reasonable to expect. Yet he supposes that the population of England,

which he estimated, perhaps rightly, at five millions and a half,

would not reach the double of that number before A.D. 2300. Sir

William Petty, with a mind capable of just and novel theories, was

struck by the necessary consequences of an uniformly progressive

population. Though the rate of movement seemed to him, as in truth it

was, much slower than we have latterly found it, he clearly saw that

its continuance would, in an ascertainable length of time, overload

the world. “And then, according to the prediction of the Scriptures,

there must be wars and great slaughter.” He conceived that, in the

ordinary course of things, the population of a country would be

doubled in two hundred years; but the whole conditions of the problem

were far less understood than at present. Davenant’s Essay on Ways and

Means, 1693, gained him a high reputation which he endeavoured to

augment by many subsequent works, some falling within the seventeenth

century. He was a man of more enlarged reading than his predecessors,

with the exception of Petty, and of close attention to the statistical

documents which were now more copiously published than before; but he

seldom launches into any extensive theory, confining himself rather to

the accumulation of facts and to the immediate inferences, generally

for temporary purposes, which they supplied.

SECT. III.

ON JURISPRUDENCE.

|Works of Leibnitz on Roman Law.|

110. In 1667, a short book was published at Frankfort, by a young man

of twenty-two years, entitled Methodi Novæ discendæ docendæque

Jurisprudentiæ. The science which of all had been deemed to require

the most protracted labour, the ripest judgment, the most experienced

discrimination, was, as it were, invaded by a boy, but by one who had

the genius of an Alexander, and for whom the glories of an Alexander

were reserved. This is the first production of Leibnitz; and it is

probably in many points of view the most remarkable work that has

prematurely united erudition and solidity. We admire in it the vast

range of learning (for though he could not have read all the books he

names, there is evidence of his acquaintance with a great number, and

at least with a well-filled chart of literature), the originality of

some ideas, the commanding and comprehensive views he embraces, the

philosophical spirit, the compressed style in which it is written, the

entire absence of juvenility, of ostentatious paradox,[967] of

imagination, ardour, and enthusiasm, which, though Leibnitz did not

always want them, would have been wholly misplaced on such a subject.

Faults have been censured in this early performance, and the author

declared himself afterwards dissatisfied with it.[968]

[967] I use the epithet ostentatious, because some of his

original theories are a little paradoxical; thus, he has a

singular notion that the right of bequeathing property by

testament is derived from the immortality of the soul; the living

heirs being as it were the attorneys of those we suppose to be

dead. Quia mortui revera adhuc vivunt, ideo manent domini rerum,

quos vero hæredes reliquerunt, concipiendi sunt ut procuratores

in rem suam. In our own discussions on the law of entail, I am

not aware that this argument has ever been explicitly urged,

though the advocates of perpetual control seem to have none

better.

[968] This tract, and all the other works of Leibnitz on

jurisprudence, will be found in the fourth volume of his works by

Dutens. An analysis by Bon, professor of law at Turin, is

prefixed to the Methodi Novæ, and he has pointed out a few

errors. Leibnitz says in a letter, about 1676, that his book was

effusus potius quam scriptus, in itinere, sine libris, &c., and

that it contained some things he no longer would have said,

though there were others of which he did not repent. Lerminier,

Hist. du Droit, p. 150.

111. Leibnitz was a passionate admirer of the Roman jurisprudence; he

held the great lawyers of antiquity second only to the best geometers

for strong and subtle and profound reasoning; not even acknowledging,

to any considerable degree, the contradictions (antinomiæ juris),

which had perplexed their disciples in later times, and on which many

volumes had been written. But the arrangement of Justinian he entirely

disapproved; and in another work, Corporis Juris reconcinnandi Ratio,

published in 1668, he pointed out the necessity and what he deemed the

best method of a new distribution. This appears to be not quite like

what he had previously sketched, and which was rather a philosophical

than a very convenient method;[969] in this new arrangement, he

proposes to retain the texts of the Corpus Juris Civilis, but in a

form rather like that of the Pandects than of the Institutes; to the

latter of which, followed as it has been among us by Hale and

Blackstone, he was very averse.

[969] In this Methodi Novæ he divides law, in the didactic part,

according to the several sources of rights--namely, 1. Nature,

which gives us right over res nullius, things where there is no

prior property. 2. Succession. 3. Possession. 4. Contract. 5.

Injury, which gives right to reparation.

112. There was only one man in the world who could have left so noble

a science as philosophical jurisprudence for pursuits of a still more

exalted nature, and for which he was still more fitted; and that man

was Leibnitz himself. He passed onward to reap the golden harvests of

other fields. Yet the study of law has owed much to him; he did much

to unite it with moral philosophy on the one hand, and with history on

the other; a great master of both, he exacted perhaps a more

comprehensive course of legal studies than the capacity of ordinary

lawyers could grasp. In England also, its conduciveness to

professional excellence might be hard to prove. It is however certain

that, in Germany at least, philology, history, and philosophy have

more or less since the time of Leibnitz marched together under the

robe of law. “He did but pass over that kingdom,” says Lerminier, and

he has reformed and enlarged it.”[970]

[970] Biogr. Univ. Lerminier, Hist. du Droit, p. 142.

|Civil Jurists--Godefroy--Domat.|

|Noodt on Usury.|

113. James Godefroy was thirty years engaged on an edition of the

Theodosian Code, published, several years after his death, in 1665. It

is by far the best edition of that body of laws, and retains a

standard value in the historical department of jurisprudence. Domat, a

French lawyer, and one of the Port-Royal connection, in his

Loix Civiles dans leur Ordre Naturel, the first of five volumes of

which appeared in 1689, carried into effect the project of Leibnitz,

by re-arranging the laws of Justinian, which, especially the Pandects,

are well known to be confusedly distributed, in a more regular method,

prefixing a book of his own on the nature and spirit of law in

general. This appears to be an useful digest or abridgment, something

like those made by Viner and earlier writers of our own texts, but

perhaps with more compression and choice; two editions of an English

translation were published. Domat’s Public Law, which might, perhaps,

in our language, have been called constitutional, since we generally

confine the epithet public to the law of nations, forms a second part

of the same work, and contains a more extensive system wherein

theological morality, ecclesiastical ordinances, and the fundamental

laws of the French monarchy are reduced into method. Domat is much

extolled by his countryman; but in philosophical jurisprudence, he

seems to display little force or originality. Gravina, who obtained a

high name in this literature at the beginning of the next century, was

known merely as a professor at the close of this; but a Dutch jurist,

Gerard Noodt, may deserve mention for his treatise on usury, in 1698,

wherein he both endeavours to prove its natural and religious

lawfulness, and traces its history through the Roman law. Several

other works of Noodt on subjects of historical jurisprudence seem to

fall within this century, though I do not find their exact dates of

publication.

|Law of Nations.--Puffendorf.|

114. Grotius was the acknowledged master of all who studied the theory

of international right. It was, perhaps, the design of Puffendorf, as

we may conjecture by the title of his great work on the Law of Nature

and Nations, to range over the latter field with as assiduous

diligence as the former. But from the length of his prolix labour on

natural law and the rights of sovereigns, he has not more than one

twentieth of the whole volume to spare for international questions;

and this is in great measure copied or abridged from Grotius. In some

instances he disagrees with his master. Puffendorf singularly denies

that compacts made during war are binding by the law of nature, but

for weak and unintelligible reasons.[971] Treaties of peace extorted

by unjust force, he denies with more reason to be binding; though

Grotius had held the contrary.[972] The inferior writers on the law of

nations, or those who, like Wicquefort in his Ambassador, confined

themselves to merely conventional usages, it is needless to mention.

[971] B. viii., chap. 7.

[972] Chap. 8.

CHAPTER XXXI.

HISTORY OF POETRY FROM 1650 TO 1700.

SECT. I.

ON ITALIAN POETRY.

_Filicaja--Guidi--Menzini--Arcadian Society._

|Improved tone of Italian poetry.|

1. The imitators of Marini, full of extravagant metaphors, and the

false thoughts usually called _concetti_, were in their vigour at

the commencement of this period. But their names are now obscure, and

have been overwhelmed by the change of public taste which has

condemned and proscribed what it once most applauded. This change came

on long before the close of the century, though not so decidedly but

that some traces of the former manner are discoverable in the majority

of popular writers. The general characteristics, however, of Italian

poetry became a more masculine tone, a wider reach of topics, and a

selection of the most noble, an abandonment, except in the lighter

lyrics, of amatory strains, and especially of such as were languishing

and querulous, an anticipation, in short, as far as the circumstances

of the age would permit, of that severe and elevated style which has

been most affected for the last fifty years. It would be futile to

seek an explanation of this manlier spirit in any social or political

causes; never had Italy, in these respects, been so lifeless; but the

world of poets is often not the world around them, and their stream of

living waters may flow, like that of Arethusa, without imbibing much

from the surrounding brine. Chiabrera had led the way by the Pindaric

majesty of his odes, and had disciples of at least equal name with

himself.

|Filicaja.|

2. Florence was the mother of one who did most to invigorate Italian

poetry, Vincenzo Filicaja; a man gifted with a serious, pure, and

noble spirit, from which congenial thoughts spontaneously arose, and

with an imagination rather vigorous than fertile. The siege of Vienna

in 1683, and its glorious deliverance by Sobieski, are the subjects of

six odes. The third of these, addressed to the king of Poland himself,

is generally most esteemed, though I do not perceive that the first or

second are inferior. His ode to Rome, on Christina’s taking up her

residence there, is in many parts highly poetical; but the flattery of

representing this event as sufficient to restore the eternal city from

decay is too gross. It is not on the whole so successful as those on

the siege of Vienna. A better is that addressed to Florence on leaving

her for a rural solitude, in consequence of his poverty and the

neglect he had experienced. It breathes an injured spirit, something

like the complaint of Cowley, with which posterity are sure to

sympathize. The sonnet of Filicaja, “Italia mia,” is known by every

one who cares for this poetry at all. This sonnet is conspicuous for

its depth of feeling, for the spirit of its commencement, and above

all, for the noble lines with which it ends; but there are surely

awkward and feeble expressions in the intermediate part. _Armenti_ for

regiments of dragoons could only be excused by frequent usage in

poetry, which, I presume, is not the case, though we find the same

word in one of Filicaja’s odes. A foreigner may venture upon this kind

of criticism.

3. Filicaja was formed in the school of Chiabrera; but, with his pomp

of sound and boldness of imagery, he is animated by a deeper sense

both of religion and patriotism. We perceive more the language of the

heart; the man speaks in his genuine character, not with assumed and

mercenary sensibility, like that of Pindar and Chiabrera. His genius

is greater than his skill; he abandons himself to an impetuosity which

he cannot sustain, forgetful of the economy of strength and breath, as

necessary for a poet as a race-horse. He has rarely or never any

conceits or frivolous thoughts; but the expression is sometimes rather

feeble. There is a general want of sunshine in Filicaja’s poetry;

unprosperous himself, he views nothing with a worldly eye; his notes

of triumph are without brilliancy, his predictions of success are

without joy. He seems also deficient in the charms of grace and

felicity. But his poetry is always the effusion of a fine soul; we

venerate and love Filicaja as a man, but we also acknowledge that he

was a real poet.

|Guidi.|

4. Guidi, a native of Pavia, raised himself to the highest point that

any lyric poet of Italy has attained. His odes are written at Rome,

from about the year 1685 to the end of the century. Compared with

Chiabrera or even Filicaja, he may be allowed the superiority; if he

never rises to a higher pitch than the latter, if he has never chosen

subjects so animating, if he has never displayed so much depth and

truth of feeling, his enthusiasm is more constant, his imagination

more creative, his power of language more extensive and more

felicitous. “He falls sometimes,” says Corniani, “into extravagance,

but never into affectation.... His peculiar excellence is poetical

expression, always brilliant with a light of his own. The magic of his

language used to excite a lively movement among the hearers when he

recited his verses in the Arcadian society.” Corniani adds, that he is

sometimes exuberant in words and hyperbolical in images.[973]

[973] Vol. viii., p. 224.

5. The ode of Guidi on Fortune, appears to me, at least, equal to any

in the Italian language. If it has been suggested by that of Celio

Magno, entitled Iddio, the resemblance does not deserve the name of

imitation; a nobleness of thought, imagery, and language, prevails

throughout. But this is the character of all his odes. He chose better

subjects than Chiabrera; for the ruins of Rome are more glorious than

the living house of Medici. He resembles him, indeed, rather than any

other poet, so that it might not always be easy to discern one from

the other in a single stanza; but Guidi is a bolder, a more

imaginative, a more enthusiastic poet. Both adorn and amplify a little

to excess; and it may be imputed to Guidi that he has abused an

advantage which his native language afforded. The Italian is rich in

words, where the sound so well answers to the meaning, that it is

hardly possible to hear them without an associated sentiment; their

effect is closely analogous to musical expression. Such are the

adjectives denoting mental elevation, as _superbo_, _altiero_,

_audace_, _gagliardo_, _indomito_, _maestoso_. These recur in the

poems of Guidi with every noun that will admit of them; but sometimes

the artifice is a little too transparent, and though the meaning is

not sacrificed to sound, we feel that it is too much enveloped in it,

and are not quite pleased that a great poet should rely so much on a

resource which the most mechanical slave of music can employ.

|Menzini.|

6. The odes of Benedetto Menzini are elegant and in poetical language,

but such as does not seem very original, nor do they strike us by much

vigour or animation of thought. The allusions to mythology which we

never find in Filicaja, and rarely in Guidi, are too frequent. Some

are of considerable beauty, among which we may distinguish that

addressed to Magalotti, beginning, “Un verde ramuscello in piaggia

aprica.” Menzini was far from confining himself to this species of

poetry; he was better known in others. As an Anacreontic poet, he

stands, I believe, only below Chiabrera and Redi. His satires have

been preferred by some to those of Ariosto; but neither Corniani nor

Salfi acquiesce in this praise. Their style is a mixture of obsolete

phrases from Dante, with the idioms of the Florentine populace; and

though spirited in substance, they are rather full of common-place

invective. Menzini strikes boldly at priests and governments, and,

what was dangerous to Orpheus, at the whole sex of women. His Art of

Poetry, in five books, published in 1681, deserves some praise. As his

atrabilious humour prompted, he inveighs against the corruption of

contemporary literature, especially on the stage, ridiculing also the

Pindaric pomp that some affected, not, perhaps, without allusion to

his enemy Guidi. His own style is pointed, animated, sometimes

poetical, where didactic verse will admit of such ornament, but a

little too diffuse and minute in criticism.

|Salvator Rosa--Redi.|

7. These three are the great restorers of Italian poetry after the

usurpation of false taste. And it is to be observed, that they

introduced a new manner, very different from that of the sixteenth

century. Several others deserve to be mentioned, though we can only do

so briefly. The Satires of Salvator Rosa, full of force and vehemence,

more vigorous than elegant, are such as his ardent genius and rather

savage temper would lead us to expect. A far superior poet was a man

not less eminent than Salvator, the philosophical and every way

accomplished Redi. Few have done so much, in any part of science, who

have also shone so brightly in the walks of taste. The sonnets of Redi

are esteemed; but his famous dithyrambic, Bacco in Toscana, is

admitted to be the first poem of that kind in modern language, and is

as worthy of Monte Pulciano wine, as the wine is worthy of it.

|Other poets.|

8. Maggi and Lemene bore an honourable part in the restoration of

poetry, though neither of them is reckoned altogether to have purified

himself from the infection of the preceding age. The sonnet of

Pastorini on the imagined resistance of Genoa to the oppression of

Louis XIV., in 1684, though not borne out by historical truth, is one

of those breathings of Italian nationality which we always admire, and

which had now become more common than for a century before. It must be

confessed, in general, that when the protestations of a people against

tyranny become loud enough to be heard, we may suspect that the

tyranny has been relaxed.

|Christina’s patronage of letters.|

|Society of Arcadians.|

9. Rome was to poetry in this age what Florence had once been, though

Rome had hitherto done less for the Italian muses than any other great

city. Nor was this so much due to her bishops and cardinals, as to a

stranger and a woman. Christina finally took up her abode there in

1688. Her palace became the resort of all the learning and genius she

could assemble round her; a literary academy was established, and her

revenue was liberally dispensed in pensions. If Filicaja and Guidi,

both sharers of her bounty, have exaggerated her praises, much may be

pardoned to gratitude, and much also to the natural admiration which

those who look up to power must feel for those who have renounced it.

Christina died in 1690, and her own academy could last no longer; but

a phœnix sprang at once from its ashes. Crescimbeni, then young, has

the credit of having planned the Society of Arcadians, which began in

1690, and has eclipsed in celebrity most of the earlier academies of

Italy. Fourteen, says Corniani, were the original founders of this

society; among whom were Crescimbeni and Gravina and Zappi. In course

of time the Arcadians vastly increased, and established colonies in

the chief cities of Italy. They determined to assume every one a

pastoral name and a Greek birthplace, to hold their meetings in some

verdant meadow, and to mingle with all their compositions, as far as

possible, images from pastoral life; images always agreeable, because

they recall the times of primitive innocence. This poetical tribe

adopted as their device the pipe of seven reeds bound with laurel, and

their president or director was denominated general shepherd or keeper

(custode generale).[974] The fantastical part of the Arcadian society

was common to them with all similar institutions; and mankind has

generally required some ceremonial follies to keep alive the wholesome

spirit of association. Their solid aim was to purify the national

taste. Much had been already done, and in great measure by their own

members, Menzini and Guidi; but their influence, which was, of course,

more felt in the next century, has always been reckoned both important

and auspicious to Italian literature.

[974] Corniani, viii., 301. Tiraboschi, xi., 43. Crescimbeni,

Storia d’Arcadia (reprinted by Mathias.)

SECT. II.

ON FRENCH POETRY.

_Fontaine--Boileau--Minor French Poets._

|La Fontaine.|

10. We must pass over Spain and Portugal as absolutely destitute of

any name which requires commemoration. In France it was very different

if some earlier periods had been not less rich in the number of

versifiers, none had produced poets who have descended with so much

renown to posterity. The most popular of these was La Fontaine. Few

writers have left such a number of verses which, in the phrase of his

country, have made their fortune, and been like ready money, always at

hand for prompt quotation. His lines have at once a proverbial truth

and a humour of expression which render them constantly applicable.

This is chiefly true of his Fables; for his Tales, though no one will

deny that they are lively enough, are not reckoned so well written,

nor do they supply so much for general use.

|Character of his Fables.|

11. The models of La Fontaine’s style were partly the ancient

fabulists whom he copied, for he pretends to no originality; partly

the old French poets, especially Marot. From the one he took the real

gold of his fables themselves, from the other he caught a peculiar

archness and vivacity, which some of them had possessed, perhaps, in

no less degree, but which becomes more captivating from his

intermixture of a solid and serious wisdom. For notwithstanding the

common anecdotes, sometimes, as we may suspect, rather exaggerated, of

La Fontaine’s simplicity, he was evidently a man who had thought and

observed much about human nature, and knew a little more of the world

than he cared to let the world perceive. Many of his Fables are

admirable; the grace of the poetry, the happy inspiration that seems

to have dictated the turns of expression, place him in the first rank

among fabulists. Yet the praise of La Fontaine should not be

indiscriminate. It is said that he gave the preference to Phædrus and

Æsop above himself, and some have thought that in this he could not

have been sincere. It was at least a proof of his modesty. But, though

we cannot think of putting Phædrus on a level with La Fontaine, were

it only for this reason, that in a work designed for the general

reader, and surely fables are of this description, the qualities that

please the many are to be valued above those that please the few, yet

it is true that the French poet might envy some talents of the Roman.

Phædrus, a writer scarcely prized enough, because he is an early

school-book, has a perfection of elegant beauty which very few have

rivalled. No word is out of its place, none is redundant, or could be

changed for a better; his perspicuity and ease make everything appear

unpremeditated, yet everything is wrought by consummate art. In many

fables of La Fontaine this is not the case; he beats round the

subject, and misses often before he hits. Much, whatever La Harpe may

assert to the contrary, could be retrenched; in much the exigencies of

rhyme and metre are too manifest.[975] He has, on the other

hand, far more humour than Phædrus; and, whether it be praise or not,

thinks less of his fable and more of its moral. One pleases by

enlivening, the other pleases, but does not enliven; one has more

felicity, the other more skill; but in such skill there is felicity.

[975] Let us take, for example, the first lines of L’Homme et la

Couleuvre.

Un homme vit une couleuere.

Ah méchante, dit-il, je m’en vais faire un œuvre

Agréable à tout l’univers!

A ces mots l’animal pervers

(C’est le serpent que je veux dire,

_Et non l’homme, on pourroit aisément s’y tromper_)

A ces motes le serpent se laissant attrapper

Est pris, mis en un sac; et, ce qui fut le pire,

On resolut sa mort, _fût il coupable ou non_.

None of these lines appear to me very happy; but there can be no

doubt about that in Italics, which spoils the effect of the

preceding, and is feebly redundant. The last words are almost

equally bad; no question could arise about the serpent’s guilt,

which had been assumed before. But these petty blemishes are

abundantly redeemed by the rest of the fable, which is beautiful

in choice of thoughts and language, and may be classed with the

best in the collection.

|Boileau.--His epistles.|

12. The first seven satires of Boileau appeared in 1666; and these,

though much inferior to his later productions, are characterised by La

Harpe as the earliest poetry in the French language where the

mechanism of its verse was fully understood, where the style was

always pure and elegant, where the ear was uniformly gratified. The

Art of Poetry was published in 1673, the Lutrin in 1674; the Epistles

followed at various periods. Their elaborate though equable strain, in

a kind of poetry which, never requiring high flights of fancy, escapes

the censure of mediocrity and monotony which might sometimes fall upon

it, generally excites more admiration in those who have been

accustomed to the numerous defects of less finished poets, than it

retains in a later age, when others have learned to emulate and

preserve the same uniformity. The fame of Pope was transcendant for

this reason, and Boileau is the analogue of Pope in French literature.

|His Art of Poetry.|

13. The Art of Poetry has been the model of the Essay on Criticism;

few poems more resemble each other. I will not weigh in opposite

scales two compositions, of which one claims an advantage from its

originality, the other from the youth of its author. Both are uncommon

efforts of critical good sense, and both are distinguished by their

short and pointed language, which remains in the memory. Boileau has

very well incorporated the thoughts of Horace with his own, and given

them a skilful adaptation to his own times. He was a bolder critic of

his contemporaries than Pope. He took up arms against those who shared

the public favour, and were placed by half Paris among great

dramatists and poets, Pradon, Desmarests, Brebœuf. This was not true

of the heroes of the Dunciad. His scorn was always bitter and probably

sometimes unjust; yet posterity has ratified almost all his judgments.

False taste, it should be remembered, had long infected the poetry of

Europe; some steps had been lately taken to repress it, but

extravagance, affectation, and excess of refinement, are weeds that

can only be eradicated by a thorough cleansing of the soil, by a

process of burning and paring which leaves not a seed of them in the

public mind. And when we consider the gross blemishes of this

description that deform the earlier poetry of France, as of other

nations, we cannot blame the severity of Boileau, though he may

occasionally have condemned in the mass what contained some

intermixture of real excellence. We have become of late years in

England so enamoured of the beauties of our old writers, and certainly

they are of a superior kind, that we are sometimes more than a little

blind to their faults.

|Comparison with Horace.|

14. By writing satires, epistles, and an art of poetry, Boileau has

challenged an obvious comparison with Horace. Yet they are very

unlike; one easy, colloquial, abandoning himself to every change that

arises in his mind, the other uniform as a regiment under arms, always

equal, always laboured, incapable of a bold neglect. Poetry seems to

have been the delight of one, the task of the other. The pain that

Boileau must have felt in writing communicates itself in some measure

to the reader; we are fearful of losing some point, of passing over

some epithet without sufficiently perceiving its selection; it is as

with those pictures which are to be viewed long and attentively, till

our admiration of detached proofs of skill becomes wearisome by

repetition.

|The Lutrin.|

15. The Lutrin is the most popular of the poems of Boileau. Its

subject is ill chosen; neither interest nor variety could be given to

it. Tassoni and Pope have the advantage in this respect; if there

leading theme is trifling, we lose sight of it in the gay liveliness

of description and episode. In Boileau, after we have once been told

that the canons of a church spend their lives in sleep and eating, we

have no more to learn, and grow tired of keeping company with a race

so stupid and sensual. But the poignant wit and satire, the elegance

and correctness, of numberless couplets, as well as the ingenious

adaptation of classical passages, redeem this poem, and confirm its

high place in the mock-heroic line.

|General character of his poetry.|

16. The great deficiency of Boileau is insensibility. Far below Pope

or even Dryden in this essential quality, which the moral epistle or

satire not only admits but requires, he rarely quits two paths, those

of reason and of raillery. His tone on moral subjects is firm and

severe, but not very noble; a trait of pathos, a single touch of pity

or tenderness, will rarely be found. This of itself serves to gives a

dryness to his poetry, and it may be doubtful, though most have read

Boileau, whether many have read him twice.

|Lyric poetry lighter than before.|

17. The pompous tone of Ronsard and Du Bartas had become ridiculous in

the reign of Louis XIV. Even that of Malherbe was too elevated for the

public taste; none at least imitated that writer, though the critics

had set the example of admiring him. Boileau, who had done much to

turn away the world from imagination to plain sense, once attempted to

emulate the grandiloquent strains of Pindar in an ode on the taking of

Namur, but with no such success as could encourage himself or others

to repeat the experiment. Yet there was no want of gravity or

elevation in the prose writers of France, nor in the tragedies of

Racine. But the French language is not very well adapted for the

higher kind of lyric poetry, while it suits admirably the lighter

forms of song and epigram. And their poets, in this age, were almost

entirely men living at Paris, either in the court, or at least in a

refined society, the most adverse of all to the poetical character.

The influence of wit and politeness is generally directed towards

rendering enthusiasm or warmth of fancy ridiculous; and without these

no great energy of genius can be displayed. But, in their proper

department, several poets of considerable merit appeared.

|Benserade.|

|Chaulieu.|

18. Benserade was called peculiarly the poet of the court; for twenty

years it was his business to compose verses for the ballets

represented before the king. His skill and tact were shown in delicate

contrivances to make those who supported the characters of gods and

goddesses in these fictions, being the nobles and ladies of the court,

betray their real inclinations, and sometimes their gallantries. He

even presumed to shadow in this manner the passion of Louis for

Mademoiselle La Vallière, before it was publicly acknowledged.

Benserade must have had no small ingenuity and adroitness; but his

verses did not survive those who called them forth. In a different

school, not essentially, perhaps, much more vicious than the court,

but more careless of appearances, and rather proud of an immorality

which it had no interest to conceal, that of Ninon l’Enclos, several

of higher reputation grew up; Chapelle (whose real name was

L’Huillier), La Fare, Bachaumont, Lainez, and Chaulieu. The first,

perhaps, and certainly the last of these, are worthy to be remembered.

La Harpe has said, that Chaulieu alone retains a claim to be read in a

style where Voltaire has so much left all others behind, that no

comparison with him can ever be admitted. Chaulieu was an original

genius, his poetry has a marked character, being a happy mixture of a

gentle and peaceable philosophy with a lively imagination. His verses

flow from his soul, and though often negligent through indolence, are

never in bad taste or affected. Harmony of versification, grace and

gaiety, with a voluptuous and Epicurean, but mild and benevolent turn

of thought, belong to Chaulieu, and these are qualities which do not

fail to attract the majority of readers.[976]

[976] La Harpe. Bouterwek, vi. 127. Biogr. Univ.

|Pastoral poetry.|

|Segrais.|

|Deshoulières.|

|Fontenelle.|

19. It is rather singular that a style so uncongenial to the spirit of

the age as pastoral poetry appears was quite as much cultivated as

before. But it is still true that the spirit of the age gained the

victory, and drove the shepherds from their shady bowers, though

without substituting anything more rational in the fairy tales which

superseded the pastoral romance. At the middle of the century, and

partially till near its close, the style of D’Urfé and Scudery

retained its popularity. Three poets of the age of Louis were known in

pastoral; Segrais, Madame Deshoulières, and Fontenelle. The first

belongs most to the genuine school of modern pastoral; he is elegant,

romantic, full of complaining love; the Spanish and French romances

had been his model in invention, as Virgil was in style. La Harpe

allows him nature, sweetness, and sentiment, but he cannot emulate the

vivid colouring of Virgil, and the language of his shepherds, though

simple, wants elegance and harmony. The tone of his pastorals seems

rather insipid, though La Harpe has quoted some pleasing lines. Madame

Deshoulières, with a purer style than Segrais, according to the same

critic, has less genius. Others have thought her Idylls the best in

the language.[977] But these seem to be merely trivial moralities

addressed to flowers, brooks, and sheep, sometimes expressed in a

manner both ingenious and natural, but on the whole, too feeble to

give much pleasure. Bouterwek observes that her poetry is to be

considered as that of a woman, and that its pastoral morality would be

somewhat childish in the mouth of man; whether this says more for the

lady, or against her sex, I must leave to the reader. She has

occasionally some very pleasing and even poetical passages.[978] The

third among these poets of the pipe is Fontenelle. But his pastorals,

as Bouterwek says, are too artificial for the ancient school, and too

cold for the romantic. La Harpe blames, besides this general fault,

the negligence and prosaic phrases of his style. The best is that

entitled Ismene. It is in fact a poem for the world; yet as love and

its artifices are found everywhere, we cannot censure anything as

absolutely unfit for pastoral, save a certain refinement which

belonged to the author in everything, and which interferes with our

sense of rural simplicity.

[977] Biogr. Univ.

[978] Bouterwek, vi. 152.

|Bad epic poems.|

20. In the superior walks of poetry France had nothing of which she

has been inclined to boast. Chapelain, a man of some credit as a

critic, produced his long-laboured epic, La Pucelle, in 1656, which is

only remembered by the insulting ridicule of Boileau. A similar fate

has fallen on the Clovis of Desmarests, published in 1684, though the

German historian of literature has extolled the richness of

imagination it shows, and observed that if those who saw nothing but a

fantastic writer in Desmarests had possessed as much fancy, the

national poetry would have been of a higher character.[979] Brebœuf’s

translation of the Pharsalia is spirited, but very extravagant.

[979] Bouterwek, vi. 157.

|German Poetry.|

21. The literature of Germany was now more corrupted by bad taste than

ever. A second Silesian school, but much inferior to that of Opitz,

was founded by Hoffmanswaldau and Lohenstein. The first had great

facility, and imitated Ovid and Marini with some success. The second,

with worse taste, always tumid and striving at something elevated, so

that the Lohenstein swell became a by-word with later critics, is

superior to Hoffmanswaldau in richness of fancy, in poetical

invention, and in warmth of feeling for all that is noble and great.

About the end of the century arose a new style, known by the unhappy

name spiritless (geistlos), which, avoiding the tone of Lohenstein,

became wholly tame and flat.[980]

[980] Id. vol. x., p. 288. Heinsius. iv. 287. Eichhorn,

Geschichte der Cultur, iv. 776.

SECT. III.

ON ENGLISH POETRY.

_Waller--Butler--Milton--Dryden--The Minor Poets._

|Waller.|

22. We might have placed Waller in the former division of the

seventeenth century, with no more impropriety than we might have

reserved Cowley for the latter; both belong by the date of their

writings to the two periods. And perhaps the poetry of Waller bears

rather the stamp of the first Charles’s age than of that which ensued.

His reputation was great, and somewhat more durable than that of

similar poets have generally been; he did not witness its decay in his

own protracted life, nor was it much diminished at the beginning of

the next century. Nor was this wholly undeserved. Waller has a more

uniform elegance, a more sure facility and happiness of expression,

and, above all, a greater exemption from glaring faults, such as

pedantry, extravagance, conceit, quaintness, obscurity, ungrammatical

and unmeaning constructions, than any of the Caroline era with whom he

would naturally be compared. We have only to open Carew or Lovelace to

perceive the difference; not that Waller is wholly without some of

these faults, but that they are much less frequent. If others may have

brighter passages of fancy or sentiment, which is not difficult, he

husbands better his resources, and though left behind in the beginning

of the race, comes sooner to the goal. His Panegyric on Cromwell was

celebrated. “Such a series of verses,” it is said by Johnson, “had

rarely appeared before in the English language. Of these lines some

are grand, some are graceful, and all are musical. There is now and

then a feeble verse, or a trifling thought; but its great fault is the

choice of its hero.” It may not be the opinion of all, that Cromwell’s

actions were of that obscure and pitiful character which the majesty

of song rejects, and Johnson has before observed, that Waller’s choice

of encomiastic topics in this poem is very judicious. Yet his

deficiency in poetical vigour will surely be traced in this

composition; if he rarely sinks, he never rises very high, and we find

much good sense and selection, much skill in the mechanism of language

and metre, without ardour and without imagination. In his amorous

poetry, he has little passion or sensibility; but he is never free and

petulant, never tedious, and never absurd. His praise consists much in

negations; but in a comparative estimate, perhaps negations ought to

count for a good deal.

|Butler’s Hudibras.|

23. Hudibras was incomparably more popular than Paradise Lost; no poem

in our language rose at once to greater reputation. Nor can this be

called ephemeral, like that of most political poetry. For at least

half a century after its publication it was generally read, and

perpetually quoted. The wit of Butler has still preserved many lines;

but Hudibras now attracts comparatively few readers. The eulogies of

Johnson seem rather adapted to what he remembered to have been the

fame of Butler, than to the feelings of the surrounding generation;

and since his time, new sources of amusement have sprung up, and

writers of a more intelligible pleasantry have superseded those of the

seventeenth century. In the fiction of Hudibras there was never much

to divert the reader, and there is still less left at present. But

what has been censured as a fault, the length of dialogue, which puts

the fiction out of sight, is, in fact, the source of all the pleasure

that the work affords. The sense of Butler is masculine, his wit

inexhaustible, and it is supplied from every source of reading and

observation. But these sources are often so unknown to the reader that

the wit loses its effect through the obscurity of its allusions, and

he yields to the bane of wit, a purblind mole-like pedantry. His

versification is sometimes spirited, and his rhymes humorous; yet he

wants that ease and flow which we require in light poetry.

|Paradise Lost--Choice of subject.|

24. The subject of Paradise Lost is the finest that has ever been

chosen for heroic poetry; it is also managed by Milton with remarkable

skill. The Iliad wants completeness; it has an unity of its own, but

it is the unity of a part where we miss the relation to a whole. The

Odyssey is perfect enough in this point of view; but the subject is

hardly extensive enough for a legitimate epic. The Æneid is spread

over too long a space, and perhaps the latter books have not that

intimate connection with the former that an epic poem requires. The

Pharsalia is open to the same criticism as the Iliad. The Thebaid is

not deficient in unity or greatness of action; but it is one that

possesses no sort of interest in our eyes. Tasso is far superior both

in choice and management of his subject to most of these. Yet the Fall

of Man has a more general interest than the Crusade.

|Open to some difficulties.|

25. It must be owned, nevertheless, that a religious epic labours

under some disadvantages; in proportion as it attracts those who hold

the same tenets with the author, it is regarded by those who dissent

from him with indifference or aversion. It is said that the discovery

of Milton’s Arianism, in this rigid generation, has already impaired

the sale of Paradise Lost. It is also difficult to enlarge or adorn

such a story by fiction. Milton has done much in this way; yet he was

partly restrained by the necessity of conforming to Scripture.

|Its arrangement.|

26. The ordonnance or composition of the Paradise Lost is admirable;

and here we perceive the advantage which Milton’s great familiarity

with the Greek theatre, and his own original scheme of the poem had

given him. Every part succeeds in an order, noble, clear, and natural.

It might have been wished, indeed, that the vision of the eleventh

book had not been changed into the colder narration of the twelfth.

But what can be more majestic than the first two books, which open

this great drama? It is true that they rather serve to confirm the

sneer of Dryden that Satan is Milton’s hero; since they develop a plan

of action in that potentate, which is ultimately successful; the

triumph that he and his host must experience in the fall of man being

hardly compensated by their temporary conversion into serpents; a

fiction rather too grotesque. But it is, perhaps, only pedantry to

talk about the hero, as if a high personage were absolutely required

in an epic poem to predominate over the rest. The conception of Satan

is doubtless the first effort of Milton’s genius. Dante could not have

ventured to spare so much lustre for a ruined archangel, in an age

when nothing less than horns and a tail were the orthodox creed.[981]

[981] Coleridge has a fine passage which I cannot resist my

desire to transcribe. “The character of Satan is pride and

sensual indulgence, finding in itself the motive of action. It is

the character so often seen in little on the political stage. It

exhibits all the restlessness, temerity, and cunning which have

marked the mighty hunters of mankind from Nimrod to Napoleon. The

common fascination of man is that these great men, as they are

called, must act from some great motive. Milton has carefully

marked in his Satan the intense selfishness, the alcohol of

egotism, which would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven.

To place this lust of self in opposition to denial of self or

duty, and to show what exertions it would make, and what pains

endure, to accomplish its end, is Milton’s particular object in

the character of Satan. But around this character he has thrown a

singularity of daring, a grandeur of sufferance, and a ruined

splendour, which constitute the very height of poetic sublimity.”

Coleridge’s Remains, p. 176.

In reading such a paragraph as this, we are struck by the vast

improvement of the highest criticism, the philosophy of

æsthetics, since the days of Addison. His papers in the Spectator

on Paradise Lost were, perhaps, superior to any criticism that

had been written in our language; and we must always acknowledge

their good sense, their judiciousness, and the vast service they

did to our literature, in settling the Paradise Lost on its

proper level. But how little they satisfy us, even in treating of

the _natura naturata_, the poem itself! and how little

conception they show of the _natura naturans_, the

individual genius of the author! Even in the periodical criticism

of the present day, in the midst of much that is affected, much

that is precipitate, much that is written for mere display, we

find occasional reflections of a profundity and discrimination

which we should seek in vain through Dryden or Addison, or the

two Wartons, or even Johnson, though much superior to the rest.

Hurd has perhaps the merit of being the first who in this country

aimed at philosophical criticism; he had great ingenuity, a good

deal of reading, and a facility in applying it; but he did not

feel very deeply, was somewhat of a coxcomb, and having always

before his eyes a model neither good in itself, nor made for him

to emulate, he assumes a dogmatic arrogance, which, as it always

offends the reader, so for the most part stands in the way of the

author’s own search for truth.

|Characters of Adam and Eve.|

27. Milton has displayed great skill in the delineations of Adam and

Eve; he does not dress them up, after the fashion of orthodox

theology, which had no spell to bind his free spirit, in the fancied

robes of primitive righteousness. South, in one of his sermons, has

drawn a picture of unfallen man, which is even poetical; but it might

be asked by the reader, Why then did he fall? The first pair of Milton

are innocent of course, but not less frail than their posterity; nor

except one circumstance, which seems rather physical intoxication than

anything else, do we find any sign of depravity super-induced upon

their transgression. It might even be made a question for profound

theologians whether Eve, by taking amiss what Adam had said, and by

self-conceit, did not sin before she tasted the fatal apple. The

necessary paucity of actors in Paradise Lost is perhaps the apology of

Sin and Death; they will not bear exact criticism, yet we do not wish

them away.

|He owes less to Homer than the tragedians.|

28. The comparison of Milton with Homer has been founded on the

acknowledged pre-eminence of each in his own language, and on the lax

application of the word epic to their great poems. But there was not

much in common either between their genius or its products; and Milton

has taken less in direct imitation from Homer than from several other

poets. His favourites had rather been Sophocles and Euripides; to them

he owes the structure of his blank verse, his swell and dignity of

style, his grave enunciation of moral and abstract sentiment, his tone

of description, neither condensed like that of Dante, nor spread out

with the diffuseness of the other Italians and of Homer himself. Next

to these Greek tragedians, Virgil seems to have been his model; with

the minor Latin poets, except Ovid, he does not, I think, show any

great familiarity; and though abundantly conversant with Ariosto,

Tasso, and Marini, we cannot say that they influenced his manner,

which, unlike theirs, is severe and stately, never light, nor in the

sense we should apply the words to them, rapid and animated.[982]

[982] The solemnity of Milton is striking in those passages where

some other poets would indulge a little in voluptuousness, and

the more so, because this is not wholly uncongenial to him. A few

lines in Paradise Lost are rather too plain, and their gravity

makes them worse.

|Compared with Dante.|

29. To Dante, however, he bears a much greater likeness. He has, in

common with that poet, an uniform seriousness, for the brighter

colouring of both is but the smile of a pensive mind, a fondness for

argumentative speech, and for the same strain of argument. This,

indeed, proceeds in part from the general similarity, the religious

and even theological cast of their subjects; I advert particularly to

the last part of Dante’s poem. We may almost say, when we look to the

resemblance of their prose writings, in the proud sense of being born

for some great achievement, which breathes through the Vita Nuova, as

it does through Milton’s earlier treatises, that they were twin

spirits, and that each might have animated the other’s body, that each

would, as it were, have been the other, if he had lived in the other’s

age. As it is, I incline to prefer Milton, that is, the Paradise Lost,

both because the subject is more extensive, and because the resources

of his genius are more multifarious. Dante sins more against good

taste, but only, perhaps, because there was no good taste in his time;

for Milton has also too much a disposition to make the grotesque

accessory to the terrible. Could Milton have written the lines on

Ugolino? Perhaps he could. Those on Francesca? Not, I think, every

line. Could Dante have planned such a poem as Paradise Lost? Not

certainly, being Dante in 1300; but, living when Milton did, perhaps

he could. It is, however, useless to go on with questions that no one

can fully answer. To compare the two poets, read two or three cantos

of the Purgatory or Paradise, and then two or three hundred lines of

Paradise Lost. Then take Homer, or even Virgil, the difference will be

striking. Yet, notwithstanding this analogy of their minds, I have not

perceived that Milton imitates Dante very often, probably from having

committed less to memory while young (and Dante was not the favourite

poet of Italy when Milton was there), than of Ariosto and Tasso.

30. Each of these great men chose the subject that suited his natural

temper and genius. What, it is curious to conjecture, would have been

Milton’s success in his original design, a British story? Far less

surely than in Paradise Lost; he wanted the rapidity of the common

heroic poem, and would always have been sententious, perhaps arid and

heavy. Yet, even as religious poets, there are several remarkable

distinctions between Milton and Dante. It has been justly observed

that, in the Paradise of Dante, he makes use of but three leading

ideas, light, music, and motion, and that Milton has drawn Heaven in

less pure and spiritual colours.[983] The philosophical imagination of

the former, in this third part of his poem, almost defecated from all

sublunary things by long and solitary musing, spiritualizes all it

touches. The genius of Milton, though itself subjective, was less so

than that of Dante; and he has to recount, to describe, to bring deeds

and passions before the eye. And two peculiar causes may be assigned

for this difference in the treatment of celestial things between the

Divine Comedy and the Paradise Lost; the dramatic form which Milton

had originally designed to adopt, and his own theological bias towards

anthropomorphitism, which his posthumous treatise on religion has

brought to light. This was, no doubt, in some measure inevitable in

such a subject as that of Paradise Lost; yet much that is ascribed to

God, sometimes with the sanction of Scripture, sometimes without it,

is not wholly pleasing; such as “the oath that shook Heaven’s vast

circumference,” and several other images of the same kind, which bring

down the Deity in a manner not consonant to philosophical religion,

however it may be borne out by the sensual analogies, or mythic

symbolism of Oriental writing.[984]

[983] Quarterly Review, June, 1825. This article contains some

good and some questionable remarks on Milton; among the latter I

reckon the proposition, that his contempt for women is shown in

the delineation of Eve; an opinion not that of Addison or of many

others who have thought her exquisitely drawn. It is true that,

if Milton had made her a wit or a _blue_, the fall would have

been accounted for with as little difficulty as possible, and

spared the serpent his trouble.

[984] Johnson thinks that Milton should have secured the

consistency of this poem by keeping immateriality out of sight,

and enticing his reader to drop it from his thoughts. But here

the subject forbade him to preserve consistency, if, indeed,

there be inconsistency in supposing a rapid assumption of form by

spiritual beings. For, though the instance that Johnson alleges

of inconsistency in Satan’s animating a toad was not necessary,

yet his animation of the serpent was absolutely indispensable.

And the same has been done by other poets, who do not scruple to

suppose their gods, their fairies or devils, or their allegorical

personages, inspiring thoughts, and even uniting themselves with

the soul, as well as assuming all kinds of form, though their

natural appearance is almost always anthropomorphic. And, after

all, Satan does not animate a real toad, but takes the shape of

one. “Squat like a toad close by the ear of Eve.” But he does

enter a real serpent, so that the instance of Johnson is ill

chosen. If he had mentioned the serpent, everyone would have seen

that the identity of the animal serpent with Satan is part of the

original account.

|Elevation of his style.|

31. We rarely meet with feeble lines in Paradise Lost,[985] though

with many that are hard, and, in a common use of the word, might be

called prosaic. Yet few are truly prosaic; few wherein the tone is not

some way distinguished from prose. The very artificial style of

Milton, sparing in English idiom, and his study of a rhythm, not

always the most grateful to our ears, but preserving his blank verse

from a trivial flow, is the cause of this elevation. It is, at least,

more removed from a prosaic cadence than the slovenly rhymes of such

contemporary poets as Chamberlayne. His versification is entirely his

own, framed on a Latin and chiefly a Virgilian model, the pause less

frequently resting on the close of the line than in Homer, and much

less than in our own dramatic poets. But it is also possible that the

Italian and Spanish blank verse may have had some effect upon his ear.

[985] One of the few exceptions is in the sublime description of

Death, where a wretched hemistich, “Fierce as ten furies,” stands

as an unsightly blemish.

|His blindness.|

32. In the numerous imitations, and still more numerous traces of

older poetry which we perceive in Paradise Lost, it is always to be

kept in mind that he had only his recollection to rely upon.[986] His

blindness seems to have been complete before 1654; and I scarcely

think that he had begun his poem, before the anxiety and trouble into

which the public strife of the commonwealth and the restoration had

thrown him, gave leisure for immortal occupations. Then the

remembrance of early reading came over his dark and lonely path like

the moon emerging from the clouds. Then it was that the muse was truly

his; not only as she poured her creative inspiration into his mind,

but as the daughter of Memory, coming with fragments of ancient

melodies, the voice of Euripides and Homer and Tasso; sounds that he

had loved in youth, and treasured up for the solace of his age. They

who, though not enduring the calamity of Milton, have known what it

is, when afar from books, in solitude, or in travelling, or in the

intervals of worldly care, to feed on poetical recollections, to

murmur over the beautiful lines whose cadence has long delighted their

ear, to recall the sentiments and images which retain by association

the charm that early years once gave them--they will feel the

inestimable value of committing to the memory, in the prime of its

power, what it will easily receive and indelibly retain. I know not,

indeed, whether an education that deals much with poetry, such as is

still usual in England, has any more solid argument among many in its

favour, than that it lays the foundation of intellectual pleasures at

the other extreme of life.

[986] I take this opportunity of mentioning, on the authority of

Mr. Todd’s Inquiry into the Origin of Paradise Lost (edit. of

Milton, vol. ii., p. 229), that Lauder, whom I have taxed with

ignorance, Vol. III., p. 522, really published the poem of Barlæus

on the nuptials of Adam and Eve.

|His passion for music.|

|Faults in Paradise Lost.|

33. It is owing, in part, to his blindness, but more, perhaps, to his

general residence in a city, that Milton, in the words of Coleridge,

is “not a picturesque but a musical poet;” or, as I would prefer to

say, is the latter more of the two. He describes visible things, and

often with great powers of rendering them manifest, what the Greeks

called εναργεια [enargeia], though seldom with so much circumstantial

exactness of observation, as Spenser or Dante; but he feels music. The

sense of vision delighted his imagination, but that of sound wrapped

his whole soul in ecstacy. One of his trifling faults may be connected

with this, the excessive passion he displays for stringing together

sonorous names, sometimes so obscure that the reader associates

nothing with them, as the word Namancos in Lycidas, which long baffled

the commentators. Hence, his catalogues, unlike those of Homer and

Virgil, are sometimes merely ornamental and misplaced. Thus, the names

of unbuilt cities come strangely forward in Adam’s vision,[987] though

he has afterwards gone over the same ground with better effect in

Paradise Regained. In this there was also a mixture of his pedantry.

But, though he was rather too ostentatious of learning, the nature of

his subject demanded a good deal of episodical ornament. And this,

rather than the precedents he might have alledged from the Italians

and others, is, perhaps, the best apology for what some grave critics

have censured, his frequent allusions to fable and mythology. These

give much relief to the severity of the poem, and few readers would

dispense with them. Less excuse can be made for some affectation of

science which has produced hard and unpleasing lines; but he had been

born in an age when more credit was gained by reading much than by

writing well. The faults, however, of Paradise Lost are, in general,

less to be called faults than necessary adjuncts of the qualities we

most admire, and idiosyncrasies of a mighty genius. The verse of

Milton is sometimes wanting in grace, and almost always in ease; but

what better can be said of his prose? His foreign idioms are too

frequent in the one; but they predominate in the other.

[987] Par. Lost, xi., 386.

|Its progress to fame.|

34. The slowness of Milton’s advance to glory is now generally owned

to have been much exaggerated; we might say that the reverse was

nearer the truth. “The sale of 1,300 copies in two years,” says

Johnson, “in opposition to so much recent enmity, and to a style of

versification new to all and disgusting to many, was an uncommon

example of the prevalence of genius. The demand did not immediately

increase; for many more readers than were supplied at first the nation

did not afford. Only 3,000 were sold in eleven years.” It would hardly

however be said, even in this age, of a poem 3,000 copies of which had

been sold in eleven years, that its success had been small; and I have

some few doubts, whether Paradise Lost, published eleven years since,

would have met with a greater demand. There is sometimes a want of

congeniality in public taste which no power of genius will overcome.

For Milton it must be said by every one conversant with the literature

of the age that preceded Addison’s famous criticism, from which some

have dated the reputation of Paradise Lost, that he took his place

among great poets from the beginning. The fancy of Johnston that few

dared to praise it, and that “the revolution put an end to the secrecy

of love,” is without foundation; the government of Charles II. was not

so absurdly tyrannical, nor did Dryden, the court’s own poet,

hesitate, in his preface to the State of Innocence, published soon

after Milton’s death, to speak of its original, Paradise Lost, as

“undoubtedly one of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime poems

which either this age or nation has produced.”

|Paradise Regained.|

35. The neglect which Paradise Lost never experienced, seems to have

been long the lot of Paradise Regained. It was not popular with the

world; it was long believed to manifest a decay of the poet’s genius,

and, in spite of all the critics have written, it is still but the

favourite of some whose predilections for the Miltonic style are very

strong. The subject is so much less capable of calling forth the vast

powers of his mind, that we should be unfair in comparing it

throughout with the greater poem; it has been called a model of the

shorter epic, an action comprehending few characters and a brief space

of time.[988] The love of Milton for dramatic dialogue, imbibed from

Greece, is still more apparent than in Paradise Lost; the whole poem,

in fact, may almost be accounted a drama of primal simplicity, the

narrative and descriptive part serving rather to diversify and relieve

the speeches of the actors, than their speeches, as in the legitimate

epic, to enliven the narration. Paradise Regained abounds with

passages equal to any of the same nature in Paradise Lost; but the

argumentative tone is kept up till it produces some tediousness, and

perhaps, on the whole, less pains have been exerted to adorn and

elevate even that which appeals to the imagination.

[988] Todd’s Milton, vol. v., p. 308.

|Samson Agonistes.|

36. Samson Agonistes is the latest of Milton’s poems; we see in it,

perhaps, more distinctly than in Paradise Regained, the ebb of a

mighty tide. An air of uncommon grandeur prevails throughout; but the

language is less poetical than in Paradise Lost; the vigour of thought

remains, but it wants much of its ancient eloquence. Nor is the lyric

tone well kept up by the chorus; they are too sententious, too slow in

movement, and, except by the metre, are not easily distinguishable

from the other personages. But this metre is itself infelicitous; the

lines being frequently of a number of syllables, not recognised in the

usage of English poetry, and, destitute of rhythmical language, fall

into prose. Milton seems to have forgotten that the ancient chorus had

a musical accompaniment.

37. The style of Samson, being essentially that of Paradise Lost, may

show us how much more the latter poem is founded on the Greek

tragedians than on Homer. In Samson we have sometimes the pompous tone

of Æschylus, more frequently the sustained majesty of Sophocles; but

the religious solemnity of Milton’s own temperament, as well as the

nature of the subject, have given a sort of breadth, an unbroken

severity, to the whole drama. It is, perhaps, not very popular even

with the lovers of poetry; yet, upon close comparison, we should find

that it deserves a higher place than many of its prototypes. We might

search the Greek tragedies long for a character so powerfully

conceived and maintained as that of Samson himself; and it is only

conformable to the sculptural simplicity of that form of drama which

Milton adopted, that all the rest should be kept in subordination to

it. “It is only,” Johnson says, “by a blind confidence in the

reputation of Milton, that a drama can be praised in which the

intermediate parts have neither cause nor consequence, neither hasten

nor retard the catastrophe.” Such a drama is certainly not to be

ranked with Othello and Macbeth, or even with the Œdipus or the

Hippolytus; but a similar criticism is applicable to several famous

tragedies in the less artificial school of antiquity, to the

Prometheus and the Persæ of Æschylus, and if we look strictly, to not

a few of the two other masters.

|Dryden. His earlier poems.|

38. The poetical genius of Dryden came slowly to perfection. Born in

1631, his first short poems, or, as we might rather say, copies of

verses, were not written till he approached thirty; and though some of

his dramas, not indeed of the best, belong to the next period of his

life, he had reached the age of fifty, before his high rank as

a poet had been confirmed by indubitable proof. Yet he had manifested

a superiority to his immediate contemporaries; his Astræa Redux, on

the Restoration, is well versified; the lines are seldom weak, the

couplets have that pointed manner which Cowley and Denham had taught

the world to require; they are harmonious, but not so varied as the

style he afterwards adopted. The Annus Mirabilis, in 1667, is of a

higher cast; it is not so animated as the later poetry of Dryden,

because the alternate quatrain, in which he followed Davenant’s

Gondibert, is hostile to animation; but it is not less favourable to

another excellence, condensed and vigorous thought. Davenant, indeed,

and Denham may be reckoned the models of Dryden, so far as this can be

said of a man of original genius, and one far superior to theirs. The

distinguishing characteristic of Dryden, it has been said by Scott,

was the power of reasoning and expressing the result in appropriate

language. This, indeed, was the characteristic of the two we have

named, and so far as Dryden has displayed it, which he eminently has

done, he bears a resemblance to them. But it is insufficient praise

for this great poet. His rapidity of conception and readiness of

expression are higher qualities. He never loiters about a single

thought or image, never labours about the turn of a phrase. The

impression upon our minds that he wrote with exceeding ease, is

irresistible, and I do not know that we have any evidence to repel it.

The admiration of Dryden gains upon us, if I may speak from my own

experience, with advancing years, as we become more sensible of the

difficulty of his style, and of the comparative facility of that which

is merely imaginative.

|Absalom and Achitophel.|

39. Dryden may be considered as a satirical, a reasoning, a

descriptive and narrative, a lyric poet, and as a translator. As a

dramatist, we must return to him again. The greatest of his satires is

Absalom and Achitophel, that work in which his powers became fully

known to the world, and which, as many think, he never surpassed. The

admirable fitness of the English couplet for satire had never been

shown before; in less skilful hands it had been ineffective. He does

not frequently, in this poem, carry the sense beyond the second line,

which, for the most part, enfeebles the emphasis; his triplets are

less numerous than usual, but energetic. The spontaneous ease of

expression, the rapid transitions, the general elasticity and movement

have never been excelled. It is superfluous to praise the

discrimination and vivacity of the chief characters, especially

Shaftesbury and Buckingham. Satire, however, is so much easier than

panegyric, that with Ormond, Ossory, and Mulgrave, he has not been

quite so successful. In the second part of Absalom and Achitophel,

written by Tate, one long passage alone is inserted by Dryden. It is

excellent in its line of satire, but the line is less elevated; the

persons delineated are less important, and he has indulged more his

natural proneness to virulent ribaldry. This fault of Dryden’s

writings, it is just to observe, belonged less to the man than to the

age. No libellous invective, no coarseness of allusion, had ever been

spared towards a private or political enemy. We read with nothing but

disgust the satirical poetry of Cleveland, Butler, Oldham, and

Marvell, or even of men whose high rank did not soften their style,

Rochester, Dorset, Mulgrave. In Dryden there was, for the first time,

a poignancy of wit which atones for his severity, and a discretion

even in his taunts which made them more cutting.

|Mac Flecknoe.|

40. The Medal, which is in some measure a continuation of Absalom and

Achitophel, as it bears wholly on Shaftesbury, is of unequal merit,

and on the whole falls much below the former. In Mac Flecknoe, his

satire on his rival Shadwell, we must allow for the inferiority of the

subject, which could not bring out so much of Dryden’s higher powers

of mind; but scarcely one of his poems is more perfect. Johnson, who

admired Dryden almost as much as he could anyone, has yet, from his

proneness to critical censure, very much exaggerated the poet’s

defects. “His faults of negligence are beyond recital. Such is the

unevenness of his compositions, that ten lines are seldom found

together without something of which the reader is ashamed.” This might

be true, or more nearly true, of other poets of the seventeenth

century. Ten good consecutive lines will, perhaps, rarely be found,

except in Denham, Davenant and Waller. But it seems a great

exaggeration as to Dryden. I would particularly instance Mac Flecknoe

as a poem of about four hundred lines, in which no one will be

condemned as weak or negligent, though three or four are rather too

ribaldrous for our taste. There are also passages, much exceeding ten

lines, in Absalom and Achitophel, as well as in the later works, the

Fables, which excite in the reader none of the shame for the poet’s

carelessness, with which Johnson has furnished him.

|The Hind and Panther.|

41. The argumentative talents of Dryden appear, more or less, in the

greater part of his poetry; reason in rhyme was his peculiar delight,

to which he seems to escape from the mere excursions of fancy. And it

is remarkable that he reasons better and more closely in poetry than

in prose. His productions more exclusively reasoning are the Religio

Laici and the Hind and Panther. The latter is every way an

extraordinary poem. It was written in the hey-day of exultation, by a

recent proselyte to a winning side, as he dreamed it to be, by one who

never spared a weaker foe, nor repressed his triumph with a dignified

moderation. A year was hardly to elapse before he exchanged this

fulness of pride for an old age of disappointment and poverty. Yet

then too his genius was unquenched, and even his satire was not less

severe.

|Its singular fable.|

42. The first lines in the Hind and Panther are justly reputed among

the most musical in our language; and perhaps we observe their rhythm

the better because it does not gain much by the sense; for the

allegory and the fable are seen, even in this commencement, to be

awkwardly blended. Yet, notwithstanding their evident incoherence,

which sometimes leads to the verge of absurdity, and the facility they

give to ridicule, I am not sure that Dryden was wrong in choosing this

singular fiction. It was his aim to bring forward an old argument in

as novel a style as he could; a dialogue between a priest and a parson

would have made but a dull poem, even if it had contained some of the

excellent paragraphs we read in the Hind and Panther. It is the

grotesqueness and originality of the fable that give this poem its

peculiar zest, of which no reader, I conceive, is insensible; and it

is also by this means that Dryden has contrived to relieve his

reasoning by short but beautiful touches of description, such as the

sudden stream of light from heaven which announces the conception of

James’s unfortunate heir near the end of the second book.

|Its reasoning.|

43. The wit in the Hind and Panther is sharp, ready, and pleasant, the

reasoning is sometimes admirably close and strong; it is the energy of

Bossuet in verse. I do not know that the main argument of the Roman

church could be better stated; all that has been well said for

tradition and authority, all that serves to expose the inconsistencies

of a vacillating protestantism, is in the Hind’s mouth. It is such an

answer as a candid man should admit to any doubts of Dryden’s

sincerity. He who could argue as powerfully as the Hind may well be

allowed to have thought himself in the right. Yet he could not forget

a few bold thoughts of his more sceptical days, and such is his bias

to sarcasm that he cannot restrain himself from reflections on kings

and priests when he is most contending for them.[989]

[989]

By education most have been misled;

So they believe because they so were bred.

The priest continues what the nurse began,

And thus the child imposes on the man.

Part. iii.

“Call you this backing of your friends?” his new allies might

have said.

|The Fables.|

44. The Fables of Dryden, or stories modernised from Boccaccio and

Chaucer, are at this day probably the most read and the most popular

of Dryden’s poems. They contain passages of so much more impressive

beauty, and are altogether so far more adapted to general sympathy

than those we have mentioned, that I should not hesitate to concur in

this judgment. Yet Johnson’s accusation of negligence is better

supported by these than by the earlier poems. Whether it were that age

and misfortune, though they had not impaired the poet’s vigour, had

rendered its continual exertion more wearisome, or, as is perhaps the

better supposition, he reckoned an easy style, sustained above prose,

in some places, rather by metre than expression, more fitted to

narration, we find much which might appear slovenly to critics of

Johnson’s temper. He seems, in fact, to have conceived, like Milton, a

theory that good writing, at least in verse, is never either to follow

the change of fashion, or to sink into familiar phrase, and that any

deviation from this rigour should be branded as low and colloquial.

But Dryden wrote on a different plan. He thought, like Ariosto, and

like Chaucer, whom he had to improve, that a story, especially when

not heroic, should be told in easy and flowing language, without too

much difference from that of prose, relying on his harmony, his

occasional inversions, and his concealed skill in the choice of words,

for its effect on the reader. He found also a tone of popular idiom,

not perhaps old English idiom, but such as had crept into society,

current among his contemporaries; and though this has in many cases

now become insufferably vulgar, and in others looks like affectation,

we should make some allowance for the times in condemning it. This

last blemish, however, is not much imputable to the Fables. Their

beauties are innumerable; yet few are very well chosen; some, as

Guiscard and Sigismunda, he has injured through coarseness of mind,

which neither years nor religion had purified; and we want in all the

power over emotion, the charm of sympathy, the skilful arrangement and

selection of circumstance, which narrative poetry claims as its

highest graces.

|His Odes--Alexander’s Feast.|

45. Dryden’s fame as a lyric poet depends a very little on his Ode on

Mrs. Killigrew’s death, but almost entirely on that song for St.

Cecilia’s Day, commonly called Alexander’s Feast. The former, which is

much praised by Johnson, has a few fine lines, mingled with a far

greater number ill conceived and ill expressed; the whole composition

has that spirit which Dryden hardly ever wanted, but it is too faulty

for high praise. The latter used to pass for the best work of Dryden

and the best ode in the language. Many would now agree with me that it

is neither one nor the other and that it was rather over-rated during

a period when criticism was not at a high point. Its excellence indeed

is undeniable; it has the raciness, the rapidity, the mastery of

language which belong to Dryden; the transitions are animated, the

contrasts effective. But few lines are highly poetical, and some sink

to the level of a common drinking song. It has the defects, as well as

the merits of that poetry which is written for musical accompaniment.

|His translation of Virgil.|

46. Of Dryden as a translator it is needless to say much. In some

instances, as in an ode of Horace, he has done extremely well; but his

Virgil is, in my apprehension, the least successful of his chief

works. Lines of consummate excellence are frequently shot, like

threads of gold, through the web; but the general texture is of an

ordinary material. Dryden was little fitted for a translator of

Virgil; his mind was more rapid and vehement than that of his

original, but by far less elegant and judicious. This translation

seems to have been made in haste; it is more negligent than any of his

own poetry, and the style is often almost studiously, and as it were

spitefully, vulgar.

|Decline of poetry from the Restoration.|

|Some minor poets enumerated.|

47. The supremacy of Dryden from the death of Milton in 1674 to his

own in 1700 was not only unapproached by any English poet, but he held

almost a complete monopoly of English poetry. This latter period of

the seventeenth century, setting aside these two great names, is one

remarkably sterile in poetical genius. Under the first Stuarts, men of

warm imagination and sensibility, though with deficient taste and

little command of language, had done some honour to our literature;

though once neglected, they have come forward again in public esteem,

and if not very extensively read, have been valued by men of kindred

minds full as much as they deserve. The versifiers of Charles II. and

William’s days have experienced the opposite fate; popular for a time,

and long so far known at least by name as to have entered rather

largely into collections of poetry, they are now held in no regard,

nor do they claim much favour from just criticism. Their object in

general was to write like men of the world; with ease, wit, sense, and

spirit, but dreading any soaring of fancy, any ardour of moral

emotion, as the probable source of ridicule in their readers. Nothing

quenches the flame of poetry more than this fear of the prosaic

multitude, unless it is the community of habits with this very

multitude; a life such as these poets generally led, of taverns and

brothels, or, what came much to the same, of the court. We cannot say

of Dryden, that “he bears no traces of those sable streams;” they

sully too much the plumage of that stately swan, but his indomitable

genius carries him upwards to a purer empyrean. The rest are just

distinguishable from one another, not by any high gifts of the muse,

but by degrees of spirit, of ease, of poignancy, of skill and harmony

in versification, of good sense and acuteness. They may easily be

disposed of. Cleveland is sometimes humorous, but succeeds only in the

lightest kinds of poetry. Marvell wrote sometimes with more taste and

feeling than was usual, but his satires are gross and stupid. Oldham,

far superior in this respect, ranks perhaps next to Dryden; he is

spirited and pointed, but his versification is too negligent, and his

subjects temporary. Roscommon, one of the best for harmony and

correctness of language, has little vigour, but he never offends, and

Pope has justly praised his “unspotted bays.” Mulgrave affects ease

and spirit, but his Essay on Satire belies the supposition that Dryden

had any share in it. Rochester, with more considerable and varied

genius, might have raised himself to a higher place than he holds. Of

Otway, Duke, and several more, it is not worth while to give any

character, The Revolution did nothing for poetry; William’s reign,

always excepting Dryden, is our _nadir_ in works of imagination. Then

came Blackmore with his epic poems of Prince Arthur and King Arthur,

and Pomfret with his Choice, both popular in their own age, and both

intolerable by their frigid and tame monotony in the next. The lighter

poetry, meantime, of song and epigram did not sink along with the

serious; the state of society was much less adverse to it. Rochester,

Dorset, and some more whose names are unknown, or not easily traced,

do credit to the Caroline period.

48. In the year 1699, a poem was published, Garth’s Dispensary, which

deserves attention, not so much for its own merit, though it comes

nearest to Dryden, at whatever interval, as from its indicating a

transitional state in our versification. The general structure of the

couplet through the seventeenth century may be called abnormous; the

sense is not only often carried beyond the second line, which the

French avoid, but the second line of one couplet and the first of the

next are not seldom united in a single sentence or a portion of one,

so that the two, though not rhyming, must be read as a couplet. The

former, when as dexterously managed as it was by Dryden, adds much to

the beauty of the general versification; but the latter, a sort of

adultery of the lines already wedded to other companions at rhyme’s

altar, can scarcely ever be pleasing, unless it be in narrative

poetry, where it may bring the sound nearer to prose. A tendency,

however, to the French rule of constantly terminating the sense with

the couplet, will be perceived to have increased from the Restoration.

Roscommon seldom deviates from it, and in long passages of Dryden

himself there will hardly be found an exception. But, perhaps, it had

not been so uniform in any former production as in the Dispensary. The

versification of this once famous mock-heroic poem is smooth and

regular, but not forcible; the language clear and neat; the parodies

and allusions happy. Many lines are excellent in the way of pointed

application, and some are remembered and quoted, where few call to

mind the author. It has been remarked that Garth enlarged and altered

the Dispensary in almost every edition, and what is more uncommon,

that every alteration was for the better. This poem may be called an

imitation of the Lutrin, inasmuch as but for the Lutrin, it might

probably not have been written, and there are even particular

resemblances. The subject, which is a quarrel between the physicians

and apothecaries of London, may vie with that of Boileau in want of

general interest; yet it seems to afford more diversity to the

satirical poet. Garth, as has been intimated, is a link of transition

between the style and turn of poetry under Charles and William, and

that we find in Addison, Prior, Tickell, and Pope, in the reign of

Anne.

SECT. IV.

ON LATIN POETRY.

|Latin poets of Italy.|

|Ceva.|

|Sergardi.|

49. The Jesuits were not unmindful of the credit their Latin verses

had done them in periods more favourable to that exercise of taste

than the present. Even in Italy, which had ceased to be a very genial

soil, one of their number, Ceva, may deserve mention. His Jesus Puer

is a long poem, not inelegantly written, but rather singular in some

of its descriptions, where the poet has been more solicitous to adorn

his subject than attentive to its proper character; and the same

objection might be made to some of its episodes. Ceva wrote also a

philosophical poem, extolled by Corniani, but which has not fallen

into my hands.[990] Averani, a Florentine of various erudition,

Cappellari, Strozzi, author of a poem on chocolate, and several

others, both within the order of Loyola and without it, cultivated

Latin poetry with some success.[991] But, though some might be

superior as poets, none were more remarkable or famous than Sergardi,

best known by some biting satires under the name of Q. Sectanus, which

he levelled at his personal enemy Gravina. The reputation, indeed, of

Gravina with posterity has not been affected by such libels; but they

are not wanting either in poignancy and spirit, or in a command of

Latin phrase.[992]

[990] Corniani, viii., 214. Salfi, xiv., 257.

[991] Bibl. Choisie, vol. xxii. Salfi, xiv., 238, et post.

[992] Salfi, xiv., 299. Corniani, viii., 280.

|Of France--Quillet.|

50. The superiority of France in Latin verse was no longer contested

by Holland or Germany. Several poets of real merit belong to this

period. The first in time was Claude Quillet, who, in his Callipædia,

bears the Latinised name of Leti. This is written with much elegance

of style and a very harmonious versification. No writer has a more

Virgilian cadence. Though inferior to Sammarthanus, he may be reckoned

high among the French poets. He has been reproached with too open an

exposition of some parts of his subject; which applies only to the

second book.

|Menage.|

51. The Latin poems of Menage are not unpleasing; he has, indeed, no

great fire or originality, but the harmonious couplets glide over the

ear, and the mind is pleased to recognise the tesselated fragments

of Ovid and Tibullus. His affected passion for Mademoiselle Lavergne,

and lamentations about her cruelty are ludicrous enough, when we

consider the character of the man, as Vadius in the Femmes Savantes of

Molière. They are perfect models of want of truth; but it is a want of

truth to nature, not to the conventional forms of modern Latin verse.

|Rapin on gardens.|

52. A far superior performance is the poem on gardens, by the Jesuit,

Réné Rapin. For skill in varying and adorning his subject, for a truly

Virgilian spirit in expression, for the exclusion of feeble, prosaic,

or awkward lines, he may, perhaps, be equal to any poet, to

Sammarthanus, or to Sannazarius himself. His cadences are generally

very gratifying to the ear, and in this respect he is much above

Vida.[993] But his subject, or his genius, has prevented him from

rising very high; he is the poet of gardens, and what gardens are to

nature, that is he to mightier poets. There is also too monotonous a

repetition of nearly the same images, as in his long enumeration of

flowers in the first book; the descriptions are separately good, and

great artifice is shown in varying them; but the variety could not be

sufficient to remove the general sameness that belongs to a

horticultural catalogue. Rapin was a great admirer of box and all

topiary works, or trees cut into artificial forms.

[993] As the poem of Rapin is not in the hands of everyone who

has taste for Latin poetry, I will give as a specimen the

introduction to the second book:--

Me nemora atque omnis nemorum pulcherrimus ordo,

Et spatia umbrandum latè fundanda per hortum

Invitant; hortis nam si florentibus umbra

Abfuerit, reliquo deerit sua gratia ruri.

Vos grandes luci et silvæ aspirate canenti;

Is mihi contingat vestro de munere ramus,

Unde sacri quando velant sua tempora vates,

Ipse et amem meritam capiti imposuisse coronam.

Jam se cantanti frondosa cacumina quercus

Inclinant, plauduntque comis nemora alta coruscis.

Ipsa mihi læto fremitu, assensuque secundo

E totis plausum responsat Gallia silvis.

Nec me deinde suo teneat clamore Cithæron,

Mænalaque Arcadicis toties lustrata deabus.

Non Dodonæi saltus, silvæque Molorchi,

Aut nigris latè ilicibus nemorosa Calydne,

Et quos carminibus celebravit fabula lucos:

Una meos cantus tellus jam Franca moretur,

Quæ tot nobilibus passim lætissima silvis,

Conspicienda sui latè miracula ruris

Ostendit, lucisque solum commendat amœnis.

One or two words in these lines are not strictly correct; but

they are highly Virgilian, both in manner and rhythm.

53. The first book of the Gardens of Rapin is on flowers, the second

on trees, the third on waters, and the fourth on fruits. The poem is

of about 3,000 lines, sustained with equable dignity. All kinds of

graceful associations are mingled with the description of his flowers,

in the fanciful style of Ovid and Darwin; the violet is Ianthis, who

lurked in valleys to shun the love of Apollo, and stained her face

with purple to preserve her chastity; the rose is Rhodanthe, proud of

her beauty, and worshipped by the people in the place of Diana, but

changed by the indignant Apollo to a tree, while the populace, who had

adored her, are converted into her thorns, and her chief lovers into

snails and butterflies. A tendency to conceit is perceived in Rapin,

as in the two poets to whom we have just compared him. Thus, in some

pretty lines, he supposes Nature to have “tried her ‘prentice hand” in

making a convolvulus before she ventured upon a lily.[994]

[994]

Et tu rumpis humum et multo te flore profundis,

Qui riguas inter serpis, convolvule, valles;

Dulce rudimentum meditantis lilia quondam

Naturæ, cum sese opera ad majora pararet.

54. In Rapin there will generally be remarked a certain redundancy,

which fastidious critics might call tautology of expression. But this

is not uncommon in Virgil. The Georgics have rarely been more happily

imitated, especially in their didactic parts, than by Rapin in the

Gardens; but he has not the high flights of his prototype; his

digressions are short and belong closely to the subject; we have no

plague, no civil war, no Eurydice. If he praises Louis XIV., it is

more as the founder of the garden of Versailles, than as the conqueror

of Flanders, though his concluding lines emulate, with no unworthy

spirit, those of the last Georgic.[995] It may be added, that

some French critics have thought the famous poem of Delille on the

same subject inferior to that of Rapin.

[995]

Hæc magni insistens vestigia sacra Maronis,

Re super hortensi, Claro de monte canebam,

Lutetia in magna; quo tempore Francica tellus

Rege beata suo, rebusque superba secundis,

Et sua per populos latè dare jura volentes

Cæperat, et toti jam morem imponere mundo.

|Santeul.|

55. Santeul (or Santolius) has been reckoned one of the best Latin

poets whom France ever produced. He began by celebrating the victories

of Louis and the virtues of contemporary heroes. A nobleness of

thought and a splendour of language distinguish the poetry of Santeul,

who furnished many inscriptions for public monuments. The hymns which

he afterwards wrote for the breviary of the church of Paris have been

still more admired, and at the request of others he enlarged his

collection of sacred verse. But I have not read the poetry of Santeul,

and give only the testimony of French critics.[996]

[996] Baillet. Biogr. Universelle.

|Latin Poetry in England.|

56. England might justly boast, in the earlier part of the century,

her Milton; nay, I do not know that, with the exception of a

well-known and very pleasing poem, though perhaps hardly of classical

simplicity, by Cowley on himself, Epitaphium Vivi Auctoris, we can

produce anything equally good in this period. The Latin verse of

Barrow is forcible and full of mind, but not sufficiently redolent of

antiquity.[997] Yet versification became, about the time of the

Restoration, if not the distinctive study, at least the favourite

exercise, of the university of Oxford. The collection entitled Musæ

Anglicanæ, published near the end of the century, contains little from

any other quarter. Many of these relate to the political themes of the

day, and eulogise the reigning king, Charles, James, or William;

others are on philosophical subjects, which they endeavour to decorate

with classical phrase. The character of this collection does not, on

the whole, pass mediocrity; they are often incorrect and somewhat

turgid, but occasionally display a certain felicity in adapting

ancient lines to their subject, and some liveliness of invention. The

golden age of Latin verse in England was yet to come.

[997] Walker’s Memoir on Italian Tragedy, p. 201. Salfi, xii. 57.

CHAPTER XXXII.

HISTORY OF DRAMATIC LITERATURE FROM 1650 TO 1700.