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The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay
[Encyclopaedia Britannica, Poems, etc.]

Volume III.

May, 2000 [Etext #2169]


Project Gutenberg Etext The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches
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THE MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS AND SPEECHES

OF

LORD MACAULAY.


VOLUME III.


CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA

AND

MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, INSCRIPTIONS, ETC.




CONTENTS.


CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA.

Francis Atterbury.  (December 1853)

John Bunyan.  (May 1854)

Oliver Goldsmith.  (February 1856)

Samuel Johnson.  (December 1856)

William Pitt.  (January 1859)


MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, INSCRIPTIONS, ETC.

Epitaph on Henry Martyn.  (1812)

Lines to the Memory of Pitt.  (1813)

A Radical War Song.  (1820)

The Battle of Moncontour.  (1824)

The Battle of Naseby, by Obadiah Bind-their-kings-in-chains-and-
their-nobles-with-links-of-iron, Serjeant in Ireton's Regiment. 
(1824)

Sermon in a Churchyard.  (1825)

Translation of a Poem by Arnault.  (1826)

Dies Irae.  (1826)

The Marriage of Tirzah and Ahirad.  (1827)

The Country Clergyman's Trip to Cambridge.  An Election Ballad.
(1827)

Song.  (1827)

Political Georgics.  (March 1828)

The Deliverance of Vienna.  (1828)

The Last Buccaneer.  (1839)

Epitaph on a Jacobite.  (1845)

Lines Written in August, 1847.

Translation from Plautus.  (1850)

Paraphrase of a Passage in the Chronicle of the Monk of St Gall.
(1856)

Inscription on the Statue of Lord Wm. Bentinck, at Calcutta. 
(1835)

Epitaph on Sir Benjamin Heath Malkin, at Calcutta.  (1837)

Epitaph on Lord Metcalfe.  (1847)



FRANCIS ATTERBURY.

(December 1853.)

Francis Atterbury, a man who holds a conspicuous place in the
political, ecclesiastical, and literary history of England, was
born in the year 1662, at Middleton in Buckinghamshire, a parish
of which his father was rector.  Francis was educated at
Westminster School, and carried thence to Christchurch a stock of
learning which, though really scanty, he through life exhibited
with such judicious ostentation that superficial observers
believed his attainments to be immense.  At Oxford, his parts,
his taste, and his bold, contemptuous, and imperious spirit, soon
made him conspicuous.  Here he published at twenty, his first
work, a translation of the noble poem of Absalom and Achitophel
into Latin verse.  Neither the style nor the versification of the
young scholar was that of the Augustan age.  In English
composition he succeeded much better.  In 1687 he distinguished
himself among many able men who wrote in defence of the Church of
England, then persecuted by James II., and calumniated by
apostates who had for lucre quitted her communion.  Among these
apostates none was more active or malignant than Obadiah Walker,
who was master of University College, and who had set up there,
under the royal patronage, a press for printing tracts against
the established religion.  In one of these tracts, written
apparently by Walker himself, many aspersions were thrown on
Martin Luther.  Atterbury undertook to defend the great Saxon
Reformer, and performed that task in a manner singularly
characteristic.  Whoever examines his reply to Walker will be
struck by the contrast between the feebleness of those parts
which are argumentative and defensive, and the vigour of those
parts which are rhetorical and aggressive.  The Papists were so
much galled by the sarcasms and invectives of the young polemic
that they raised a cry of treason, and accused him of having, by
implication, called King James a Judas.

After the Revolution, Atterbury, though bred in the doctrines of
non-resistance and passive obedience, readily swore fealty to the
new government.  In no long time he took holy orders.  He
occasionally preached in London with an eloquence which raised
his reputation, and soon had the honour of being appointed one of
the royal chaplains.  But he ordinarily resided at Oxford, where
he took an active part in academical business, directed the
classical studies of the undergraduates of his college, and was
the chief adviser and assistant of Dean Aldrich, a divine now
chiefly remembered by his catches, but renowned among his
contemporaries as a scholar, a Tory, and a high-churchman.  It
was the practice, not a very judicious practice, of Aldrich to
employ the most promising youths of his college in editing Greek
and Latin books.  Among the studious and well-disposed lads who
were, unfortunately for themselves, induced to become teachers of
philology when they should have been content to be learners, was
Charles Boyle, son of the Earl of Orrery, and nephew of Robert
Boyle, the great experimental philosopher.  The task assigned to
Charles Boyle was to prepare a new edition of one of the most
worthless books in existence.  It was a fashion, among those
Greeks and Romans who cultivated rhetoric as an art, to compose
epistles and harangues in the names of eminent men.  Some of
these counterfeits are fabricated with such exquisite taste and
skill that it is the highest achievement of criticism to
distinguish them from originals.  Others are so feebly and rudely
executed that they can hardly impose on an intelligent schoolboy. 
The best specimen which has come down to us is perhaps the
oration for Marcellus, such an imitation of Tully's eloquence as
Tully would himself have read with wonder and delight.  The worst
specimen is perhaps a collection of letters purporting to have
been written by that Phalaris who governed Agrigentum more than
500 years before the Christian era.  The evidence, both internal
and external, against the genuineness of these letters is
overwhelming.  When, in the fifteenth century, they emerged, in
company with much that was far more valuable, from their
obscurity, they were pronounced spurious by Politian, the
greatest scholar of Italy, and by Erasmus, the greatest scholar
on our side of the Alps.  In truth, it would be as easy to
persuade an educated Englishman that one of Johnson's Ramblers
was the work of William Wallace as to persuade a man like Erasmus
that a pedantic exercise, composed in the trim and artificial
Attic of the time of Julian, was a despatch written by a crafty
and ferocious Dorian, who roasted people alive many years before
there existed a volume of prose in the Greek language.  But,
though Christchurch could boast of many good Latinists, of many
good English writers, and of a greater number of clever and
fashionable men of the world than belonged to any other academic
body, there was not then in the college a single man capable of
distinguishing between the infancy and the dotage of Greek
literature.  So superficial indeed was the learning of the rulers
of this celebrated society that they were charmed by an essay
which Sir William Temple published in praise of the ancient
writers.  It now seems strange that even the eminent public
services, the deserved popularity, and the graceful style of
Temple should have saved so silly a performance from universal
contempt.  Of the books which he most vehemently eulogised his
eulogies proved that he knew nothing.  In fact, he could not read
a line of the language in which they were written.  Among many
other foolish things, he said that the letters of Phalaris were
the oldest letters and also the best in the world.  Whatever
Temple wrote attracted notice.  People who had never heard of the
Epistles of Phalaris began to inquire about them.  Aldrich, who
knew very little Greek, took the word of Temple who knew none,
and desired Boyle to prepare a new edition of these admirable
compositions which, having long slept in obscurity, had become on
a sudden objects of general interest.

The edition was prepared with the help of Atterbury, who was
Boyle's tutor, and of some other members of the college.  It was
an edition such as might be expected from people who would stoop
to edite such a book.  The notes were worthy of the text; the
Latin version worthy of the Greek original.  The volume would
have been forgotten in a month, had not a misunderstanding about
a manuscript arisen between the young editor and the greatest
scholar that had appeared in Europe since the revival of letters,
Richard Bentley.  The manuscript was in Bentley's keeping.  Boyle
wished it to be collated.  A mischief-making bookseller informed
him that Bentley had refused to lend it, which was false, and
also that Bentley had spoken contemptuously of the letters
attributed to Phalaris, and of the critics who were taken in by
such counterfeits, which was perfectly true.  Boyle, much
provoked, paid, in his preface, a bitterly ironical compliment to
Bentley's courtesy.  Bentley revenged himself by a short
dissertation, in which he proved that the epistles were spurious,
and the new edition of them worthless:  but he treated Boyle
personally with civility as a young gentleman of great hopes,
whose love of learning was highly commendable, and who deserved
to have had better instructors.

Few things in literary history are more extraordinary than the
storm which this little dissertation raised.  Bentley had treated
Boyle with forbearance; but he had treated Christchurch with
contempt; and the Christchurch-men, wherever dispersed, were as
much attached to their college as a Scotchman to his country, or
a Jesuit to his order.  Their influence was great.  They were
dominant at Oxford, powerful in the Inns of Court and in the
College of Physicians, conspicuous in Parliament and in the
literary and fashionable circles of London.  Their unanimous cry
was, that the honour of the college must be vindicated, that the
insolent Cambridge pedant must be put down.  Poor Boyle was
unequal to the task, and disinclined to it.  It was, therefore,
assigned to his tutor, Atterbury.

The answer to Bentley, which bears the name of Boyle, but which
was, in truth, no more the work of Boyle than the letters to
which the controversy related were the work of Phalaris, is now
read only by the curious, and will in all probability never be
reprinted again.  But it had its day of noisy popularity.  It was
to be found, not only in the studies of men of letters, but on
the tables of the most brilliant drawing-rooms of Soho Square and
Covent Garden.  Even the beaus and coquettes of that age, the
Wildairs and the Lady Lurewells, the Mirabells and the
Millaments, congratulated each other on the way in which the gay
young gentleman, whose erudition sate so easily upon him, and who
wrote with so much pleasantry and good breeding about the Attic
dialect and the anapaestic measure, Sicilian talents and
Thericlean cups, had bantered the queer prig of a doctor.  Nor
was the applause of the multitude undeserved.  The book is,
indeed, Atterbury's masterpiece, and gives a higher notion of his
powers than any of those works to which he put his name.  That he
was altogether in the wrong on the main question, and on all the
collateral questions springing out of it, that his knowledge of
the language, the literature, and the history of Greece was not
equal to what many freshmen now bring up every year to Cambridge
and Oxford, and that some of his blunders seem rather to deserve
a flogging than a refutation, is true; and therefore it is that
his performance is, in the highest degree, interesting and
valuable to a judicious reader.  It is good by reason of its
exceeding badness.  It is the most extraordinary instance that
exists of the art of making much show with little substance. 
There is no difficulty, says the steward of Moliere's miser, in
giving a fine dinner with plenty of money:  the really great cook
is he who can set out a banquet with no money at all.  That
Bentley should have written excellently on ancient chronology and
geography, on the development of the Greek language, and the
origin of the Greek drama, is not strange.  But that Atterbury
should, during some years, have been thought to have treated
these subjects much better than Bentley is strange indeed.  It is
true that the champion of Christchurch had all the help which the
most celebrated members of that society could give him. 
Smalridge contributed some very good wit; Friend and others some
very bad archaeology and philology.  But the greater part of the
volume was entirely Atterbury's:  what was not his own was
revised and retouched by him:  and the whole bears the mark of
his mind, a mind inexhaustibly rich in all the resources of
controversy, and familiar with all the artifices which make
falsehood look like truth, and ignorance like knowledge.  He had
little gold; but he beat that little out to the very thinnest
leaf, and spread it over so vast a surface that to those who
judged by a glance, and who did not resort to balances and tests,
the glittering heap of worthless matter which he produced seemed
to be an inestimable treasure of massy bullion.  Such arguments
as he had he placed in the clearest light.  Where he had no
arguments, he resorted to personalities, sometimes serious,
generally ludicrous, always clever and cutting.  But, whether he
was grave or merry, whether he reasoned or sneered, his style was
always pure, polished, and easy.

Party spirit then ran high; yet, though Bentley ranked among
Whigs, and Christchurch was a stronghold of Toryism, Whigs joined
with Tories in applauding Atterbury's volume.  Garth insulted
Bentley, and extolled Boyle in lines which are now never quoted
except to be laughed at.  Swift, in his "Battle of the Books,"
introduced with much pleasantry Boyle, clad in armour, the gift
of all the gods, and directed by Apollo in the form of a human
friend, for whose name a blank is left which may easily be filled
up.  The youth, so accoutred, and so assisted, gains an easy
victory over his uncourteous and boastful antagonist.  Bentley,
meanwhile, was supported by the consciousness of an immeasurable
superiority, and encouraged by the voices of the few who were
really competent to judge the combat.  "No man," he said, justly
and nobly, "was ever written down but by himself."  He spent two
years in preparing a reply, which will never cease to be read and
prized while the literature of ancient Greece is studied in any
part of the world.  This reply proved, not only that the letters
ascribed to Phalaris were spurious, but that Atterbury, with all
his wit, his eloquence, his skill in controversial fence, was the
most audacious pretender that ever wrote about what he did not
understand.  But to Atterbury this exposure was matter of
indifference.  He was now engaged in a dispute about matters far
more important and exciting than the laws of Zaleucus and the
laws of Charondas.  The rage of religious factions was extreme. 
High church and Low church divided the nation.  The great
majority of the clergy were on the high-church side; the majority
of King William's bishops were inclined to latitudinarianism.  A
dispute arose between the two parties touching the extent of the
powers of the Lower House of Convocation.  Atterbury thrust
himself eagerly into the front rank of the high-churchmen.  Those
who take a comprehensive and impartial view of his whole career
will not be disposed to give him credit for religious zeal.  But
it was his nature to be vehement and pugnacious in the cause of
every fraternity of which he was a member.  He had defended the
genuineness of a spurious book simply because Christchurch had
put forth an edition of that book; he now stood up for the clergy
against the civil power, simply because he was a clergyman, and
for the priests against the episcopal order, simply because he
was as yet only a priest.  He asserted the pretensions of the
class to which he belonged in several treatises written with much
wit, ingenuity, audacity, and acrimony.  In this, as in his first
controversy, he was opposed to antagonists whose knowledge of the
subject in dispute was far superior to his; but in this, as in
his first controversy, he imposed on the multitude by bold
assertion, by sarcasm, by declamation, and, above all, by his
peculiar knack of exhibiting a little erudition in such a manner
as to make it look like a great deal.  Having passed himself off
on the world as a greater master of classical learning than
Bentley, he now passed himself off as a greater master of
ecclesiastical learning than Wake or Gibson.  By the great body
of the clergy he was regarded as the ablest and most intrepid
tribune that had ever defended their rights against the oligarchy
of prelates.  The lower House of Convocation voted him thanks for
his services; the University of Oxford created him a doctor of
divinity; and soon after the accession of Anne, while the Tories
still had the chief weight in the government, he was promoted to
the deanery of Carlisle.

Soon after he had obtained this preferment, the Whig party rose
to ascendency in the state.  From that party he could expect no
favour.  Six years elapsed before a change of fortune took place. 
At length, in the year 1710, the prosecution of Sacheverell
produced a formidable explosion of high-church fanaticism.  At
such a moment Atterbury could not fail to be conspicuous.  His
inordinate zeal for the body to which he belonged, his turbulent
and aspiring temper, his rare talents for agitation and for
controversy, were again signally displayed.  He bore a chief part
in framing that artful and eloquent speech which the accused
divine pronounced at the bar of the Lords, and which presents a
singular contrast to the absurd and scurrilous sermon which had
very unwisely been honoured with impeachment.  During the
troubled and anxious months which followed the trial, Atterbury
was among the most active of those pamphleteers who inflamed the
nation against the Whig ministry and the Whig parliament.  When
the ministry had been changed and the parliament dissolved,
rewards were showered upon him.  The Lower House of Convocation
elected him prolocutor.  The Queen appointed him Dean of
Christchurch on the death of his old friend and patron Aldrich. 
The college would have preferred a gentler ruler.  Nevertheless,
the new head was received with every mark of honour.  A
congratulatory oration in Latin was addressed to him in the
magnificent vestibule of the hall; and he in reply professed the
warmest attachment to the venerable house in which he had been
educated, and paid many gracious compliments to those over whom
he was to preside.  But it was not in his nature to be a mild or
an equitable governor.  He had left the chapter of Carlisle
distracted by quarrels.  He found Christchurch at peace; but in
three months his despotic and contentious temper did at
Christchurch what it had done at Carlisle.  He was succeeded in
both his deaneries by the humane and accomplished Smalridge, who
gently complained of the state in which both had been left. 
"Atterbury goes before, and sets everything on fire.  I come
after him with a bucket of water."  It was said by Atterbury's
enemies that he was made a bishop because he was so bad a dean. 
Under his administration Christchurch was in confusion,
scandalous altercations took place, opprobrious words were
exchanged; and there was reason to fear that the great Tory
college would be ruined by the tyranny of the great Tory doctor. 
He was soon removed to the bishopric of Rochester, which was then
always united with the deanery of Westminster.  Still higher
dignities seemed to be before him.  For, though there were many
able men on the episcopal bench, there was none who equalled or
approached him in parliamentary talents.  Had his party continued
in power, it is not improbable that he would have been raised to
the archbishopric of Canterbury.  The more splendid his
prospects, the more reason he had to dread the accession of a
family which was well-known to be partial to the Whigs.  There is
every reason to believe that he was one of those politicians who
hoped that they might be able, during the life of Anne, to
prepare matters in such a way that at her decease there might be
little difficulty in setting aside the Act of Settlement and
placing the Pretender on the throne.  Her sudden death confounded
the projects of these conspirators.  Atterbury, who wanted no
kind of courage, implored his confederates to proclaim James
III., and offered to accompany the heralds in lawn sleeves.  But
he found even the bravest soldiers of his party irresolute, and
exclaimed, not, it is said, without interjections which ill
became the mouth of a father of the church, that the best of all
causes and the most precious of all moments had been
pusillanimously thrown away.  He acquiesced in what he could not
prevent, took the oaths to the House of Hanover, and at the
coronation officiated with the outward show of zeal, and did his
best to ingratiate himself with the royal family.  But his
servility was requited with cold contempt.  No creature is so
revengeful as a proud man who has humbled himself in vain. 
Atterbury became the most factious and pertinacious of all the
opponents of the government.  In the House of Lords his oratory,
lucid, pointed, lively, and set off with every grace of
pronunciation and of gesture, extorted the attention and
admiration even of a hostile majority.  Some of the most
remarkable protests which appear in the journals of the peers
were drawn up by him; and in some of the bitterest of those
pamphlets which called on the English to stand up for their
country against the aliens who had come from beyond the seas to
oppress and plunder her, critics easily detected his style.  When
the rebellion of 1715 broke out, he refused to sign the paper in
which the bishops of the province of Canterbury declared their
attachment to the Protestant succession.  He busied himself in
electioneering, especially at Westminster, where, as dean, he
possessed great influence; and was, indeed, strongly suspected of
having once set on a riotous mob to prevent his Whig fellow-
citizens from polling.

After having been long in indirect communication with the exiled
family, he, in 1717, began to correspond directly with the
Pretender.  The first letter of the correspondence is extant.  In
that letter Atterbury boasts of having, during many years past,
neglected no opportunity of serving the Jacobite cause.  "My
daily prayer," he says, "is that you may have success.  May I
live to see that day, and live no longer than I do what is in my
power to forward it."  It is to be remembered that he who wrote
thus was a man bound to set to the church of which he was
overseer an example of strict probity; that he had repeatedly
sworn allegiance to the House of Brunswick; that he had assisted
in placing the crown on the head of George I., and that he had
abjured James III., "without equivocation or mental reservation,
on the true faith of a Christian."

It is agreeable to turn from his public to his private life.  His
turbulent spirit, wearied with faction and treason, now and then
required repose, and found it in domestic endearments, and in the
society of the most illustrious of the living and of the dead. 
Of his wife little is known:  but between him and his daughter
there was an affection singularly close and tender.  The
gentleness of his manners when he was in the company of a few
friends was such as seemed hardly credible to those who knew him
only by his writings and speeches.  The charm of his "softer
hour" has been commemorated by one of those friends in
imperishable verse.  Though Atterbury's classical attainments
were not great, his taste in English literature was excellent;
and his admiration of genius was so strong that it overpowered
even his political and religious antipathies.  His fondness for
Milton, the mortal enemy of the Stuarts and of the church, was
such as to many Tories seemed a crime.  On the sad night on which
Addison was laid in the chapel of Henry VII., the Westminster
boys remarked that Atterbury read the funeral service with a
peculiar tenderness and solemnity.  The favourite companions,
however, of the great Tory prelate were, as might have been
expected, men whose politics had at least a tinge of Toryism.  He
lived on friendly terms with Swift, Arbuthnot, and Gay.  With
Prior he had a close intimacy, which some misunderstanding about
public affairs at last dissolved.  Pope found in Atterbury, not
only a warm admirer, but a most faithful, fearless, and judicious
adviser.  The poet was a frequent guest at the episcopal palace
among the elms of Bromley, and entertained not the slightest
suspicion that his host, now declining in years, confined to an
easy chair by gout, and apparently devoted to literature, was
deeply concerned in criminal and perilous designs against the
government.

The spirit of the Jacobites had been cowed by the events of 1715. 
It revived in 1721.  The failure of the South Sea project, the
panic in the money market, the downfall of great commercial
houses, the distress from which no part of the kingdom was
exempt, had produced general discontent.  It seemed not
improbable that at such a moment an insurrection might be
successful.  An insurrection was planned.  The streets of London
were to be barricaded; the Tower and the Bank were to be
surprised; King George, his family, and his chief captains and
councillors, were to be arrested; and King James was to be
proclaimed.  The design became known to the Duke of Orleans,
regent of France, who was on terms of friendship with the House
of Hanover.  He put the English government on its guard.  Some of
the chief malecontents were committed to prison; and among them
was Atterbury.  No bishop of the Church of England had been taken
into custody since that memorable day when the applauses and
prayers of all London had followed the seven bishops to the gate
of the Tower.  The Opposition entertained some hope that it might
be possible to excite among the people an enthusiasm resembling
that of their fathers, who rushed into the waters of the Thames
to implore the blessing of Sancroft.  Pictures of the heroic
confessor in his cell were exhibited at the shop windows.  Verses
in his praise were sung about the streets.  The restraints by
which he was prevented from communicating with his accomplices
were represented as cruelties worthy of the dungeons of the
Inquisition.  Strong appeals were made to the priesthood.  Would
they tamely permit so gross an insult to be offered to their
cloth?  Would they suffer the ablest, the most eloquent member of
their profession, the man who had so often stood up for their
rights against the civil power, to be treated like the vilest of
mankind?  There was considerable excitement; but it was allayed
by a temperate and artful letter to the clergy, the work, in all
probability, of Bishop Gibson, who stood high in the favour of
Walpole, and shortly after became minister for ecclesiastical
affairs.

Atterbury remained in close confinement during some months.  He
had carried on his correspondence with the exiled family so
cautiously that the circumstantial proofs of his guilt, though
sufficient to produce entire moral conviction, were not
sufficient to justify legal conviction.  He could be reached only
by a bill of pains and penalties.  Such a bill the Whig party,
then decidedly predominant in both houses, was quite prepared to
support.  Many hot-headed members of that party were eager to
follow the precedent which had been set in the case of Sir John
Fenwick, and to pass an act for cutting off the bishop's head. 
Cadogan, who commanded the army, a brave soldier, but a
headstrong politician, is said to have exclaimed with great
vehemence:  "Fling him to the lions in the Tower."  But the wiser
and more humane Walpole was always unwilling to shed blood; and
his influence prevailed.  When Parliament met, the evidence
against the bishop was laid before committees of both houses. 
Those committees reported that his guilt was proved.  In the
Commons a resolution, pronouncing him a traitor, was carried by
nearly two to one.  A bill was then introduced which provided
that he should be deprived of his spiritual dignities, that he
should be banished for life, and that no British subject should
hold any intercourse with him except by the royal permission.

This bill passed the Commons with little difficulty.  For the
bishop, though invited to defend himself, chose to reserve his
defence for the assembly of which he was a member.  In the Lords
the contest was sharp.  The young Duke of Wharton, distinguished
by his parts, his dissoluteness, and his versatility, spoke for
Atterbury with great effect; and Atterbury's own voice was heard
for the last time by that unfriendly audience which had so often
listened to him with mingled aversion and delight.  He produced
few witnesses; nor did those witnesses say much that could be of
service to him.  Among them was Pope.  He was called to prove
that, while he was an inmate of the palace at Bromley, the
bishop's time was completely occupied by literary and domestic
matters, and that no leisure was left for plotting.  But Pope,
who was quite unaccustomed to speak in public, lost his head,
and, as he afterwards owned, though he had only ten words to say,
made two or three blunders.

The bill finally passed the Lords by eighty-three votes to forty-
three.  The bishops, with a single exception, were in the
majority.  Their conduct drew on them a sharp taunt from Lord
Bathurst, a warm friend of Atterbury and a zealous Tory.  "The
wild Indians," he said, "give no quarter, because they believe
that they shall inherit the skill and prowess of every adversary
whom they destroy.  Perhaps the animosity of the right reverend
prelates to their brother may be explained in the same way."

Atterbury took leave of those whom he loved with a dignity and
tenderness worthy of a better man.  Three fine lines of his
favourite poet were often in his mouth:--

"Some natural tears he dropped, but wiped them soon:
The world was all before him, where to chuse
His place of rest, and Providence his guide."

At parting he presented Pope with a Bible, and said, with a
disingenuousness of which no man who had studied the Bible to
much purpose would have been guilty:  "If ever you learn that I
have any dealings with the Pretender, I give you leave to say
that my punishment is just."  Pope at this time really believed
the bishop to be an injured man.  Arbuthnot seems to have been of
the same opinion.  Swift, a few months later, ridiculed with
great bitterness, in the "Voyage to Laputa," the evidence which
had satisfied the two Houses of Parliament.  Soon, however, the
most partial friends of the banished prelate ceased to assert his
innocence, and contented themselves with lamenting and excusing
what they could not defend.  After a short stay at Brussels, he
had taken up his abode at Paris, and had become the leading man
among the Jacobite refugees who were assembled there.  He was
invited to Rome by the Pretender, who then held his mock court
under the immediate protection of the Pope.  But Atterbury felt
that a bishop of the Church of England would be strangely out of
place at the Vatican, and declined the invitation.  During some
months, however, he might flatter himself that he stood high in
the good graces of James.  The correspondence between the master
and the servant was constant.  Atterbury's merits were warmly
acknowledged; his advice was respectfully received; and he was,
as Bolingbroke had been before him, the prime minister of a king
without a kingdom.  But the new favourite found, as Bolingbroke
had found before him, that it was quite as hard to keep the
shadow of power under a vagrant and mendicant prince as to keep
the reality of power at Westminster.  Though James had neither
territories nor revenues, neither army nor navy, there was more
faction and more intrigue among his courtiers than among those of
his successful rival.  Atterbury soon perceived that his counsels
were disregarded, if not distrusted.  His proud spirit was deeply
wounded.  He quitted Paris, fixed his residence at Montpellier,
gave up politics, and devoted himself entirely to letters.  In
the sixth year of his exile he had so severe an illness that his
daughter, herself in very delicate health, determined to run all
risks that she might see him once more.  Having obtained a
licence from the English Government, she went by sea to Bordeaux,
but landed there in such a state that she could travel only by
boat or in a litter.  Her father, in spite of his infirmities,
set out from Montpellier to meet her; and she, with the
impatience which is often the sign of approaching death, hastened
towards him.  Those who were about her in vain implored her to
travel slowly.  She said that every hour was precious, that she
only wished to see her papa and to die.  She met him at Toulouse,
embraced him, received from his hand the sacred bread and wine,
and thanked God that they had passed one day in each other's
society before they parted forever.  She died that night.

It was some time before even the strong mind of Atterbury
recovered from this cruel blow.  As soon as he was himself again
he became eager for action and conflict; for grief, which
disposes gentle natures to retirement, to inaction, and to
meditation, only makes restless spirits more restless.  The
Pretender, dull and bigoted as he was, had found out that he had
not acted wisely in parting with one who, though a heretic, was,
in abilities and accomplishments, the foremost man of the
Jacobite party.  The bishop was courted back, and was without
much difficulty induced to return to Paris and to become once
more the phantom minister of a phantom monarchy.  But his long
and troubled life was drawing to a close.  To the last, however,
his intellect retained all its keenness and vigour.  He learned,
in the ninth year of his banishment, that he had been accused by
Oldmixon, as dishonest and malignant a scribbler as any that has
been saved from oblivion by the Dunciad, of having, in concert
with other Christchurchmen, garbled Clarendon's History of the
Rebellion.  The charge, as respected Atterbury, had not the
slightest foundation:  for he was not one of the editors of the
History, and never saw it till it was printed.  He published a
short vindication of himself, which is a model in its kind,
luminous, temperate, and dignified.  A copy of this little work
he sent to the Pretender, with a letter singularly eloquent and
graceful.  It was impossible, the old man said, that he should
write anything on such a subject without being reminded of the
resemblance between his own fate and that of Clarendon.  They
were the only two English subjects that had ever been banished
from their country and debarred from all communication with their
friends by act of parliament.  But here the resemblance ended. 
One of the exiles had been so happy as to bear a chief part in
the restoration of the Royal house.  All that the other could now
do was to die asserting the rights of that house to the last.  A
few weeks after this letter was written Atterbury died.  He had
just completed his seventieth year.

His body was brought to England, and laid, with great privacy,
under the nave of Westminster Abbey.  Only three mourners
followed the coffin.  No inscription marks the grave.  That the
epitaph with which Pope honoured the memory of his friend does
not appear on the walls of the great national cemetery is no
subject of regret:  for nothing worse was ever written by Colley
Cibber.

Those who wish for more complete information about Atterbury may
easily collect it from his sermons and his controversial
writings, from the report of the parliamentary proceedings
against him, which will be found in the State Trials, from the
five volumes of his correspondence, edited by Mr Nichols, and
from the first volume of the Stuart papers, edited by Mr Glover. 
A very indulgent but a very interesting account of the bishop's
political career will be found in Lord Mahon's valuable History
of England.

...


JOHN BUNYAN.

(May 1854.)


John Bunyan, the most popular religious writer in the English
language, was born at Elstow, about a mile from Bedford, in the
year 1628.  He may be said to have been born a tinker.  The
tinkers then formed an hereditary caste, which was held in no
high estimation.  They were generally vagrants and pilferers, and
were often confounded with the gipsies, whom in truth they nearly
resembled.  Bunyan's father was more respectable than most of the
tribe.  He had a fixed residence, and was able to send his son to
a village school where reading and writing were taught.

The years of John's boyhood were those during which the puritan
spirit was in the highest vigour all over England; and nowhere
had that spirit more influence than in Bedfordshire.  It is not
wonderful, therefore, that a lad to whom nature had given a
powerful imagination, and sensibility which amounted to a
disease, should have been early haunted by religious terrors. 
Before he was ten, his sports were interrupted by fits of remorse
and despair; and his sleep was disturbed by dreams of fiends
trying to fly away with him.  As he grew older, his mental
conflicts became still more violent.  The strong language in
which he described them has strangely misled all his biographers
except Mr Southey.  It has long been an ordinary practice with
pious writers to cite Bunyan as an instance of the supernatural
power of divine grace to rescue the human soul from the lowest
depths of wickedness.  He is called in one book the most
notorious of profligates; in another, the brand plucked from the
burning.  He is designated in Mr Ivimey's History of the Baptists
as the depraved Bunyan, the wicked tinker of Elstow.  Mr Ryland,
a man once of great note among the Dissenters, breaks out into
the following rhapsody:--"No man of common sense and common
integrity can deny that Bunyan was a practical atheist, a
worthless contemptible infidel, a vile rebel to God and goodness,
a common profligate, a soul-despising, a soul-murdering, a soul-
damning, thoughtless wretch as could exist on the face of the
earth.  Now be astonished, O heavens, to eternity! and wonder, O
earth and hell! while time endures.  Behold this very man become
a miracle of mercy, a mirror of wisdom, goodness, holiness,
truth, and love."  But whoever takes the trouble to examine the
evidence will find that the good men who wrote this had been
deceived by a phraseology which, as they had been hearing it and
using it all their lives, they ought to have understood better. 
There cannot be a greater mistake than to infer, from the strong
expressions in which a devout man bemoans his exceeding
sinfulness, that he has led a worse life than his neighbours. 
Many excellent persons, whose moral character from boyhood to old
age has been free from any stain discernible to their fellow-
creatures, have, in their autobiographies and diaries, applied to
themselves, and doubtless with sincerity, epithets as severe as
could be applied to Titus Oates or Mrs Brownrigg.  It is quite
certain that Bunyan was, at eighteen, what, in any but the most
austerely puritanical circles, would have been considered as a
young man of singular gravity and innocence.  Indeed, it may be
remarked that he, like many other penitents who, in general
terms, acknowledged themselves to have been the worst of mankind,
fired up and stood vigorously on his defence, whenever any
particular charge was brought against him by others.  He
declares, it is true, that he had let loose the reins on the neck
of his lusts, that he had delighted in all transgressions against
the divine law, and that he had been the ringleader of the youth
of Elstow in all manner of vice.  But, when those who wished him
ill accused him of licentious amours, he called on God and the
angels to attest his purity.  No woman, he said, in heaven,
earth, or hell, could charge him with having ever made any
improper advances to her.  Not only had he been strictly faithful
to his wife; but he had even before his marriage, been perfectly
spotless.  It does not appear from his own confessions, or from
the railings of his enemies, that he ever was drunk in his life. 
One bad habit he contracted, that of using profane language; but
he tells us that a single reproof cured him so effectually that
he never offended again.  The worst that can be laid to the
charge of this poor youth, whom it has been the fashion to
represent as the most desperate of reprobates, as a village
Rochester, is that he had a great liking for some diversions,
quite harmless in themselves, but condemned by the rigid
precisians among whom he lived, and for whose opinion he had a
great respect.  The four chief sins of which he was guilty were
dancing, ringing the bells of the parish church, playing at
tipcat, and reading the history of Sir Bevis of Southampton.  A
rector of the school of Laud would have held such a young man up
to the whole parish as a model.  But Bunyan's notions of good and
evil had been learned in a very different school; and he was made
miserable by the conflict between his tastes and his scruples.

When he was about seventeen, the ordinary course of his life was
interrupted by an event which gave a lasting colour to his
thoughts.  He enlisted in the parliamentary army, and served
during the decisive campaign of 1645.  All that we know of his
military career is that, at the siege of Leicester, one of his
comrades, who had taken his post, was killed by a shot from the
town.  Bunyan ever after considered himself as having been saved
from death by the special interference of Providence.  It may be
observed that his imagination was strongly impressed by the
glimpse which he had caught of the pomp of war.  To the last he
loved to draw his illustrations of sacred things from camps and
fortresses, from guns, drums, trumpets, flags of truce, and
regiments arrayed, each under its own banner.  His Greatheart,
his Captain Boanerges, and his Captain Credence, are evidently
portraits, of which the originals were among those martial saints
who fought and expounded in Fairfax's army.

In a few months Bunyan returned home and married.  His wife had
some pious relations, and brought him as her only portion some
pious books.  And now his mind, excitable by nature, very
imperfectly disciplined by education, and exposed, without any
protection, to the infectious virulence of the enthusiasm which
was then epidemic in England, began to be fearfully disordered. 
In outward things he soon became a strict Pharisee.  He was
constant in attendance at prayers and sermons.  His favourite
amusements were one after another relinquished, though not
without many painful struggles.  In the middle of a game at
tipcat he paused, and stood staring wildly upwards with his stick
in his hand.  He had heard a voice asking him whether he would
leave his sins and go to heaven, or keep his sins and go to hell;
and he had seen an awful countenance frowning on him from the
sky.  The odious vice of bellringing he renounced; but he still
for a time ventured to go to the church tower and look on while
others pulled the ropes.  But soon the thought struck him that,
if he persisted in such wickedness, the steeple would fall on his
head; and he fled in terror from the accursed place.  To give up
dancing on the village green was still harder; and some months
elapsed before he had the fortitude to part with this darling
sin.  When this last sacrifice had been made, he was, even when
tried by the maxims of that austere time, faultless.  All Elstow
talked of him as an eminently pious youth.  But his own mind was
more unquiet than ever.  Having nothing more to do in the way of
visible reformation, yet finding in religion no pleasures to
supply the place of the juvenile amusements which he had
relinquished, he began to apprehend that he lay under some
special malediction; and he was tormented by a succession of
fantasies which seemed likely to drive him to suicide or to
Bedlam.

At one time he took it into his head that all persons of
Israelite blood would be saved, and tried to make out that he
partook of that blood; but his hopes were speedily destroyed by
his father, who seems to have had no ambition to be regarded as a
Jew.

At another time Bunyan was disturbed by a strange dilemma:  "If I
have not faith, I am lost; if I have faith, I can work miracles." 
He was tempted to cry to the puddles between Elstow and Bedford,
"Be ye dry," and to stake his eternal hopes on the event.

Then he took up a notion that the day of grace for Bedford and
the neighbouring villages was past:  that all who were to be
saved in that part of England were already converted; and that he
had begun to pray and strive some months too late.

Then he was harassed by doubts whether the Turks were not in the
right, and the Christians in the wrong.  Then he was troubled by
a maniacal impulse which prompted him to pray to the trees, to a
broom-stick, to the parish bull.  As yet, however, he was only
entering the Valley of the Shadow of Death.  Soon the darkness
grew thicker.  Hideous forms floated before him.  Sounds of
cursing and wailing were in his ears.  His way ran through stench
and fire, close to the mouth of the bottomless pit.  He began to
be haunted by a strange curiosity about the unpardonable sin, and
by a morbid longing to commit it.  But the most frightful of all
the forms which his disease took was a propensity to utter
blasphemy, and especially to renounce his share in the benefits
of the redemption.  Night and day, in bed, at table, at work,
evil spirits, as he imagined, were repeating close to his ear the
words, "Sell him, sell him."  He struck at the hobgoblins; he
pushed them from him; but still they were ever at his side.  He
cried out in answer to them, hour after hour:  "Never, never; not
for thousands of worlds, not for thousands."  At length, worn out
by this long agony, he suffered the fatal words to escape him,
"Let him go, if he will."  Then his misery became more fearful
than ever.  He had done what could not be forgiven.  He had
forfeited his part of the great sacrifice.  Like Esau, he had
sold his birthright; and there was no longer any place for
repentance.  "None," he afterwards wrote, "knows the terrors of
those days but myself."  He has described his sufferings with
singular energy, simplicity, and pathos.  He envied the brutes;
he envied the very stones in the street, and the tiles on the
houses.  The sun seemed to withhold its light and warmth from
him.  His body, though cast in a sturdy mould, and though still
in the highest vigour of youth, trembled whole days together with
the fear of death and judgment.  He fancied that this trembling
was the sign set on the worst reprobates, the sign which God had
put on Cain.  The unhappy man's emotion destroyed his power of
digestion.  He had such pains that he expected to burst asunder
like Judas, whom he regarded as his prototype.

Neither the books which Bunyan read, nor the advisers whom he
consulted, were likely to do much good in a case like his.  His
small library had received a most unseasonable addition, the
account of the lamentable end of Francis Spira.  One ancient man
of high repute for piety, whom the sufferer consulted, gave an
opinion which might well have produced fatal consequences.  "I am
afraid," said Bunyan, "that I have committed the sin against the
Holy Ghost."  "Indeed," said the old fanatic, "I am afraid that
you have."

At length the clouds broke; the light became clearer and clearer;
and the enthusiast, who had imagined that he was branded with the
mark of the first murderer, and destined to the end of the arch
traitor, enjoyed peace and a cheerful confidence in the mercy of
God.  Years elapsed, however, before his nerves, which had been
so perilously overstrained, recovered their tone.  When he had
joined a Baptist society at Bedford, and was for the first time
admitted to partake of the Eucharist, it was with difficulty that
he could refrain from imprecating destruction on his brethren
while the cup was passing from hand to hand.  After he had been
some time a member of the congregation, he began to preach; and
his sermons produced a powerful effect.  He was indeed
illiterate; but he spoke to illiterate men.  The severe training
through which he had passed had given him such an experimental
knowledge of all the modes of religious melancholy as he could
never have gathered from books; and his vigorous genius, animated
by a fervent spirit of devotion, enabled him, not only to
exercise a great influence over the vulgar, but even to extort
the half contemptuous admiration of scholars.  Yet it was long
before he ceased to be tormented by an impulse which urged him to
utter words of horrible impiety in the pulpit.

Counter-irritants are of as great use in moral as in physical
diseases.  It should seem that Bunyan was finally relieved from
the internal sufferings which had embittered his life by sharp
persecution from without.  He had been five years a preacher,
when the Restoration put it in the power of the Cavalier
gentlemen and clergymen all over the country to oppress the
Dissenters; and of all the Dissenters whose history is known to
us, he was perhaps the most hardly treated.  In November 1660, he
was flung into Bedford gaol; and there he remained, with some
intervals of partial and precarious liberty, during twelve years. 
His persecutors tried to extort from him a promise that he would
abstain from preaching; but he was convinced that he was divinely
set apart and commissioned to be a teacher of righteousness; and
he was fully determined to obey God rather than man.  He was
brought before several tribunals, laughed at, caressed, reviled,
menaced, but in vain.  He was facetiously told that he was quite
right in thinking that he ought not to hide his gift; but that
his real gift was skill in repairing old kettles.  He was
compared to Alexander the coppersmith.  He was told that, if he
would give up preaching, he should be instantly liberated.  He
was warned that, if he persisted in disobeying the law, he would
be liable to banishment, and that, if he were found in England
after a certain time his neck would be stretched.  His answer
was, "If you let me out to-day, I will preach again to-morrow." 
Year after year he lay patiently in a dungeon, compared with
which the worse prison now to be found in the island is a palace. 
His fortitude is the more extraordinary, because his domestic
feelings were unusually strong.  Indeed, he was considered by his
stern brethren as somewhat too fond and indulgent a parent.  He
had several small children, and among them a daughter who was
blind, and whom he loved with peculiar tenderness.  He could not,
he said, bear even to let the wind blow on her; and now she must
suffer cold and hunger; she must beg; she must be beaten; "yet,"
he added, "I must, I must do it."  While he lay in prison he
could do nothing in the way of his old trade for the support of
his family.  He determined, therefore, to take up a new trade. 
He learned to make long tagged thread laces; and many thousands
of these articles were furnished by him to the hawkers.  While
his hands were thus busied, he had other employment for his mind
and his lips.  He gave religious instruction to his fellow-
captives, and formed from among them a little flock, of which he
was himself the pastor.  He studied indefatigably the few books
which he possessed.  His two chief companions were the Bible and
Fox's Book of Martyrs.  His knowledge of the Bible was such that
he might have been called a living concordance; and on the margin
of his copy of the Book of Martyrs are still legible the ill
spelt lines of doggrel in which he expressed his reverence for
the brave sufferers, and his implacable enmity to the mystical
Babylon.

At length he began to write; and though it was some time before
he discovered where his strength lay, his writings were not
unsuccessful.  They were coarse, indeed; but they showed a keen
mother wit, a great command of the homely mother tongue, an
intimate knowledge of the English Bible, and a vast and dearly-
bought spiritual experience.  They therefore, when the corrector
of the press had improved the syntax and the spelling, were well
received by the humbler class of Dissenters.

Much of Bunyan's time was spent in controversy.  He wrote sharply
against the Quakers, whom he seems always to have held in utter
abhorrence.  It is, however, a remarkable fact that he adopted
one of their peculiar fashions:  his practice was to write, not
November or December, but eleventh month and twelfth month.

He wrote against the liturgy of the Church of England.  No two
things, according to him, had less affinity than the form of
prayer and the spirit of prayer.  Those, he said with much point,
who have most of the spirit of prayer are all to be found in
gaol; and those who have most zeal for the form of prayer are all
to be found at the alehouse.  The doctrinal articles, on the
other hand, he warmly praised, and defended against some Arminian
clergymen who had signed them.  The most acrimonious of all his
works is his answer to Edward Fowler, afterwards Bishop of
Gloucester, an excellent man, but not free from the taint of
Pelagianism.

Bunyan had also a dispute with some of the chiefs of the sect to
which he belonged.  He doubtless held with perfect sincerity the
distinguishing tenet of that sect; but he did not consider that
tenet as one of high importance, and willingly joined in
communion with quiet Presbyterians and Independents.  The sterner
Baptists, therefore, loudly pronounced him a false brother.  A
controversy arose which long survived the original combatants. 
In our own time the cause which Bunyan had defended with rude
logic and rhetoric against Kiffin and Danvers was pleaded by
Robert Hall with an ingenuity and eloquence such as no polemical
writer has ever surpassed.

During the years which immediately followed the Restoration,
Bunyan's confinement seems to have been strict.  But, as the
passions of 1660 cooled, as the hatred with which the Puritans
had been regarded while their reign was recent gave place to
pity, he was less and less harshly treated.  The distress of his
family, and his own patience, courage, and piety softened the
hearts of his persecutors.  Like his own Christian in the cage,
he found protectors even among the crowd of Vanity Fair.  The
bishop of the Diocese, Dr Barlow, is said to have interceded for
him.  At length the prisoner was suffered to pass most of his
time beyond the walls of the gaol, on condition, as it should
seem, that he remained within the town of Bedford.

He owed his complete liberation to one of the worst acts of one
of the worst governments that England has ever seen.  In 1671 the
Cabal was in power.  Charles II. had concluded the treaty by
which he bound himself to set up the Roman Catholic religion in
England.  The first step which he took towards that end was to
annul, by an unconstitutional exercise of his prerogative, all
the penal statutes against the Roman Catholics; and, in order to
disguise his real design, he annulled at the same time the penal
statutes against Protestant nonconformists.  Bunyan was
consequently set at large.  In the first warmth of his gratitude
he published a tract in which he compared Charles to that humane
and generous Persian king who, though not himself blest with the
light of the true religion, favoured the chosen people, and
permitted them after years of captivity, to rebuild their beloved
temple.  To candid men, who consider how much Bunyan had
suffered, and how little he could guess the secret designs of the
court, the unsuspicious thankfulness with which he accepted the
precious boon of freedom will not appear to require any apology.

Before he left his prison he had begun the book which has made
his name immortal.  The history of that book is remarkable.  The
author was, as he tells us, writing a treatise, in which he had
occasion to speak of the stages of the Christian progress.  He
compared that progress, as many others had compared it, to a
pilgrimage.  Soon his quick wit discovered innumerable points of
similarity which had escaped his predecessors.  Images came
crowding on his mind faster than he could put them into words,
quagmires and pits, steep hills, dark and horrible glens, soft
vales, sunny pastures, a gloomy castle of which the courtyard was
strewn with the skulls and bones of murdered prisoners, a town
all bustle and splendour, like London on the Lord Mayor's Day,
and the narrow path, straight as a rule could make it, running on
up hill and down hill, through city and through wilderness, to
the Black River and the Shining Gate.  He had found out, as most
people would have said, by accident, as he would doubtless have
said, by the guidance of Providence, where his powers lay.  He
had no suspicion, indeed, that he was producing a masterpiece. 
He could not guess what place his allegory would occupy in
English literature; for of English literature he knew nothing. 
Those who suppose him to have studied the Fairy Queen might
easily be confuted, if this were the proper place for a detailed
examination of the passages in which the two allegories have been
thought to resemble each other.  The only work of fiction, in all
probability, with which he could compare his Pilgrim, was his old
favourite, the legend of Sir Bevis of Southampton.  He would have
thought it a sin to borrow any time from the serious business of
his life, from his expositions, his controversies, and his lace
tags, for the purpose of amusing himself with what he considered
merely as a trifle.  It was only, he assures us, at spare moments
that he returned to the House Beautiful, the Delectable
Mountains, and the Enchanted Ground.  He had no assistance. 
Nobody but himself saw a line, till the whole was complete.  He
then consulted his pious friends.  Some were pleased.  Others
were much scandalised.  It was a vain story, a mere romance,
about giants, and lions, and goblins, and warriors, sometimes
fighting with monsters and sometimes regaled by fair ladies in
stately palaces.  The loose atheistical wits at Will's might
write such stuff to divert the painted Jezebels of the court: 
but did it become a minister of the gospel to copy the evil
fashions of the world?  There had been a time when the cant of
such fools would have made Bunyan miserable.  But that time was
passed; and his mind was now in a firm and healthy state.  He saw
that, in employing fiction to make truth clear and goodness
attractive, he was only following the example which every
Christian ought to propose to himself; and he determined to
print.

The "Pilgrim's Progress" stole silently into the world.  Not a
single copy of the first edition is known to be in existence. 
The year of publication has not been ascertained.  It is probable
that, during some months, the little volume circulated only among
poor and obscure sectaries.  But soon the irresistible charm of a
book which gratified the imagination of the reader with all the
action and scenery of a fairy tale, which exercised his ingenuity
by setting him to discover a multitude of curious analogies,
which interested his feelings for human beings, frail like
himself, and struggling with temptations from within and from
without, which every moment drew a smile from him by some stroke
of quaint yet simple pleasantry, and nevertheless left on his
mind a sentiment of reverence for God and of sympathy for man,
began to produce its effect.  In puritanical circles, from which
plays and novels were strictly excluded, that effect was such as
no work of genius, though it were superior to the Iliad, to Don
Quixote, or to Othello, can ever produce on a mind accustomed to
indulge in literary luxury.  In 1678 came forth a second edition
with additions; and then the demand became immense.  In the four
following years the book was reprinted six times.  The eighth
edition, which contains the last improvements made by the author,
was published in 1682, the ninth in 1684, the tenth in 1685.  The
help of the engraver had early been called in; and tens of
thousands of children looked with terror and delight on execrable
copper plates, which represented Christian thrusting his sword
into Apollyon, or writhing in the grasp of Giant Despair.  In
Scotland, and in some of the colonies, the Pilgrim was even more
popular than in his native country.  Bunyan has told us, with
very pardonable vanity, that in New England his dream was the
daily subject of the conversation of thousands, and was thought
worthy to appear in the most superb binding.  He had numerous
admirers in Holland, and among the Huguenots of France.  With the
pleasures, however, he experienced some of the pains of eminence. 
Knavish booksellers put forth volumes of trash under his name;
and envious scribblers maintained it to be impossible that the
poor ignorant tinker should really be the author of the book
which was called his.

He took the best way to confound both those who counterfeited him
and those who slandered him.  He continued to work the gold-field
which he had discovered, and to draw from it new treasures, not
indeed with quite such ease and in quite such abundance as when
the precious soil was still virgin, but yet with success which
left all competition far behind.  In 1684 appeared the second
part of the "Pilgrim's Progress."  It was soon followed by the
"Holy War," which, if the "Pilgrim's Progress" did not exist,
would be the best allegory that ever was written.

Bunyan's place in society was now very different from what it had
been.  There had been a time when many Dissenting ministers, who
could talk Latin and read Greek, had affected to treat him with
scorn.  But his fame and influence now far exceeded theirs.  He
had so great an authority among the Baptists that he was
popularly called Bishop Bunyan.  His episcopal visitations were
annual.  From Bedford he rode every year to London, and preached
there to large and attentive congregations.  From London he went
his circuit through the country, animating the zeal of his
brethren, collecting and distributing alms, and making up
quarrels.  The magistrates seem in general to have given him
little trouble.  But there is reason to believe that, in the year
1685, he was in some danger of again occupying his old quarters
in Bedford gaol.  In that year the rash and wicked enterprise of
Monmouth gave the Government a pretext for persecuting the
Nonconformists; and scarcely one eminent divine of the
Presbyterian, Independent, or Baptist persuasion remained
unmolested.  Baxter was in prison:  Howe was driven into exile: 
Henry was arrested.  Two eminent Baptists, with whom Bunyan had
been engaged in controversy, were in great peril and distress. 
Danvers was in danger of being hanged; and Kiffin's grandsons
were actually hanged.  The tradition is that, during those evil
days, Bunyan was forced to disguise himself as a waggoner, and
that he preached to his congregation at Bedford in a smoke-frock,
with a cart-whip in his hand.  But soon a great change took
place.  James the Second was at open war with the Church, and
found it necessary to court the Dissenters.  Some of the
creatures of the government tried to secure the aid of Bunyan. 
They probably knew that he had written in praise of the
indulgence of 1672, and therefore hoped that he might be equally
pleased with the indulgence of 1687.  But fifteen years of
thought, observation, and commerce with the world had made him
wiser.  Nor were the cases exactly parallel.  Charles was a
professed Protestant:  James was a professed Papist.  The object
of Charles's indulgence was disguised; the object of James's
indulgence was patent.  Bunyan was not deceived.  He exhorted his
hearers to prepare themselves by fasting and prayer for the
danger which menaced their civil and religious liberties, and
refused even to speak to the courtier who came down to remodel
the corporation of Bedford, and who, as was supposed, had it in
charge to offer some municipal dignity to the Bishop of the
Baptists.

Bunyan did not live to see the Revolution.  In the summer of 1688
he undertook to plead the cause of a son with an angry father,
and at length prevailed on the old man not to disinherit the
young one.  This good work cost the benevolent intercessor his
life.  He had to ride through heavy rain.  He came drenched to
his lodgings on Snow Hill, was seized with a violent fever, and
died in a few days.  He was buried in Bunhill Fields; and the
spot where he lies is still regarded by the Nonconformists with a
feeling which seems scarcely in harmony with the stern spirit of
their theology.  Many Puritans, to whom the respect paid by Roman
Catholics to the reliques and tombs of saints seemed childish or
sinful, are said to have begged with their dying breath that
their coffins might be placed as near as possible to the office
of the author of the "Pilgrim's Progress."

The fame of Bunyan during his life, and during the century which
followed his death, was indeed great, but was almost entirely
confined to religious families of the middle and lower classes. 
Very seldom was he during that time mentioned with respect by any
writer of great literary eminence.  Young coupled his prose with
the poetry of the wretched D'Urfey.  In the Spiritual Quixote,
the adventures of Christian are ranked with those of Jack the
Giant-Killer and John Hickathrift.  Cowper ventured to praise the
great allegorist, but did not venture to name him.  It is a
significant circumstance that, till a recent period, all the
numerous editions of the "Pilgrim's Progress" were evidently
meant for the cottage and the servants' hall.  The paper, the
printing, the plates, were all of the meanest description.  In
general, when the educated minority and the common people differ
about the merit of a book, the opinion of the educated minority
finally prevails.  The "Pilgrim's Progress" is perhaps the only
book about which, after the lapse of a hundred years, the
educated minority has come over to the opinion of the common
people.

The attempts which have been made to improve and to imitate this
book are not to be numbered.  It has been done into verse:  it
has been done into modern English.  "The Pilgrimage of Tender
Conscience,"  "The Pilgrimage of Good Intent,"  "The Pilgrimage
of Seek Truth,"  "The Pilgrimage of Theophilus,"  "The Infant
Pilgrim,"  "The Hindoo Pilgrim," are among the many feeble copies
of the great original.  But the peculiar glory of Bunyan is that
those who most hated his doctrines have tried to borrow the help
of his genius.  A Catholic version of his parable may be seen
with the head of the Virgin in the title-page.  On the other
hand, those Antinomians for whom his Calvinism is not strong
enough may study the pilgrimage of Hephzibah, in which nothing
will be found which can be construed into an admission of free
agency and universal redemption.  But the most extraordinary of
all the acts of Vandalism by which a fine work of art was ever
defaced was committed so late as the year 1853.  It was
determined to transform the "Pilgrim's Progress" into a
Tractarian book.  The task was not easy:  for it was necessary to
make the two sacraments the most prominent objects in the
allegory; and of all Christian theologians, avowed Quakers
excepted, Bunyan was the one in whose system the sacraments held
the least prominent place.  However, the Wicket Gate became a
type of Baptism, and the House Beautiful of the Eucharist.  The
effect of this change is such as assuredly the ingenious person
who made it never contemplated.  For, as not a single pilgrim
passes through the Wicket Gate in infancy, and as Faithful
hurries past the House Beautiful without stopping, the lesson
which the fable in its altered shape teaches, is that none but
adults ought to be baptised, and that the Eucharist may safely be
neglected.  Nobody would have discovered from the original
"Pilgrim's Progress" that the author was not a Paedobaptist.  To
turn his book into a book against Paedobaptism was an achievement
reserved for an Anglo-Catholic divine.  Such blunders must
necessarily be committed by every man who mutilates parts of a
great work, without taking a comprehensive view of the whole.

...


OLIVER GOLDSMITH.

(February 1856.)

Oliver Goldsmith, one of the most pleasing English writers of the
eighteenth century.  He was of a Protestant and Saxon family
which had been long settled in Ireland, and which had, like most
other Protestant and Saxon families, been, in troubled times,
harassed and put in fear by the native population.  His father,
Charles Goldsmith, studied in the reign of Queen Anne at the
diocesan school of Elphin, became attached to the daughter of the
schoolmaster, married her, took orders, and settled at a place
called Pallas in the county of Longford.  There he with
difficulty supported his wife and children on what he could earn,
partly as a curate and partly as a farmer.

At Pallas Oliver Goldsmith was born in November 1728.  That spot
was then, for all practical purposes, almost as remote from the
busy and splendid capital in which his later years were passed,
as any clearing in Upper Canada or any sheep-walk in Australasia
now is.  Even at this day those enthusiasts who venture to make a
pilgrimage to the birthplace of the poet are forced to perform
the latter part of their journey on foot.  The hamlet lies far
from any high road, on a dreary plain which, in wet weather, is
often a lake.  The lanes would break any jaunting car to pieces;
and there are ruts and sloughs through which the most strongly
built wheels cannot be dragged.

While Oliver was still a child, his father was presented to a
living worth about 200 pounds a year, in the county of Westmeath. 
The family accordingly quitted their cottage in the wilderness
for a spacious house on a frequented road, near the village of
Lissoy.  Here the boy was taught his letters by a maid-servant,
and was sent in his seventh year to a village school kept by an
old quartermaster on half-pay, who professed to teach nothing but
reading, writing, and arithmetic, but who had an inexhaustible
fund of stories about ghosts, banshees, and fairies, about the
great Rapparee chiefs, Baldearg O'Donnell and galloping Hogan,
and about the exploits of Peterborough and Stanhope, the surprise
of Monjuich, and the glorious disaster of Brihuega.  This man
must have been of the Protestant religion; but he was of the
aboriginal race, and not only spoke the Irish language, but could
pour forth unpremeditated Irish verses.  Oliver early became, and
through life continued to be, a passionate admirer of the Irish
music, and especially of the compositions of Carolan, some of the
last notes of whose harp he heard.  It ought to be added that
Oliver, though by birth one of the Englishry, and though
connected by numerous ties with the Established Church, never
showed the least sign of that contemptuous antipathy with which,
in his days, the ruling minority in Ireland too generally
regarded the subject majority.  So far indeed was he from sharing
in the opinions and feelings of the caste to which he belonged,
that he conceived an aversion to the Glorious and Immortal
Memory, and, even when George the Third was on the throne,
maintained that nothing but the restoration of the banished
dynasty could save the country.

From the humble academy kept by the old soldier Goldsmith was
removed in his ninth year.  He went to several grammar schools,
and acquired some knowledge of the ancient languages.  His life
at this time seems to have been far from happy.  He had, as
appears from the admirable portrait of him at Knowle, features
harsh even to ugliness.  The small-pox had set its mark on him
with more than usual severity.  His stature was small, and his
limbs ill put together.  Among boys little tenderness is shown to
personal defects; and the ridicule excited by poor Oliver's
appearance was heightened by a peculiar simplicity and a
disposition to blunder which he retained to the last.  He became
the common butt of boys and masters, was pointed at as a fright
in the play-ground, and flogged as a dunce in the school-room. 
When he had risen to eminence, those who had once derided him
ransacked their memory for the events of his early years, and
recited repartees and couplets which had dropped from him, and
which, though little noticed at the time, were supposed, a
quarter of a century later, to indicate the powers which produced
the "Vicar of Wakefield" and the "Deserted Village."

In his seventeenth year Oliver went up to Trinity College,
Dublin, as a sizar.  The sizars paid nothing for food and
tuition, and very little for lodging; but they had to perform
some menial services from which they have long been relieved. 
They swept the court:  they carried up the dinner to the fellows'
table, and changed the plates and poured out the ale of the
rulers of the society.  Goldsmith was quartered, not alone, in a
garret, on the window of which his name, scrawled by himself, is
still read with interest.  (The glass on which the name is
written has, as we are informed by a writer in "Notes and
Queries" (2d. S. ix. p. 91), been inclosed in a frame and
deposited in the Manuscript Room of the College Library, where it
is still to be seen.)  From such garrets many men of less parts
than his have made their way to the woolsack or to the episcopal
bench.  But Goldsmith, while he suffered all the humiliations,
threw away all the advantages, of his situation.  He neglected
the studies of the place, stood low at the examinations, was
turned down to the bottom of his class for playing the buffoon in
the lecture-room, was severely reprimanded for pumping on a
constable, and was caned by a brutal tutor for giving a ball in
the attic story of the college to some gay youths and damsels
from the city.

While Oliver was leading at Dublin a life divided between squalid
distress and squalid dissipation, his father died, leaving a mere
pittance.  The youth obtained his bachelor's degree, and left the
university.  During some time the humble dwelling to which his
widowed mother had retired was his home.  He was now in his
twenty-first year; it was necessary that he should do something;
and his education seemed to have fitted him to do nothing but to
dress himself in gaudy colours, of which he was as fond as a
magpie, to take a hand at cards, to sing Irish airs, to play the
flute, to angle in summer, and to tell ghost stories by the fire
in winter.  He tried five or six professions in turn without
success.  He applied for ordination; but, as he applied in
scarlet clothes, he was speedily turned out of the episcopal
palace.  He then became tutor in an opulent family, but soon
quitted his situation in consequence of a dispute about play. 
Then he determined to emigrate to America.  His relations, with
much satisfaction, saw him set out for Cork on a good horse with
thirty pounds in his pocket.  But in six weeks he came back on a
miserable hack, without a penny, and informed his mother that the
ship in which he had taken his passage, having got a fair wind
while he was at a party of pleasure, had sailed without him. 
Then he resolved to study the law.  A generous kinsman advanced
fifty pounds.  With this sum Goldsmith went to Dublin, was
enticed into a gaming house, and lost every shilling.  He then
thought of medicine.  A small purse was made up; and in his
twenty-fourth year he was sent to Edinburgh.  At Edinburgh he
passed eighteen months in nominal attendance on lectures, and
picked up some superficial information about chemistry and
natural history.  Thence he went to Leyden, still pretending to
study physic.  He left that celebrated university, the third
university at which he had resided, in his twenty-seventh year,
without a degree, with the merest smattering of medical
knowledge, and with no property but his clothes and his flute. 
His flute, however, proved a useful friend.  He rambled on foot
through Flanders, France, and Switzerland, playing tunes which
everywhere set the peasantry dancing, and which often procured
for him a supper and a bed.  He wandered as far as Italy.  His
musical performances, indeed, were not to the taste of the
Italians; but he contrived to live on the alms which he obtained
at the gates of the convents.  It should, however, be observed
that the stories which he told about this part of his life ought
to be received with great caution; for strict veracity was never
one of his virtues; and a man who is ordinarily inaccurate in
narration is likely to be more than ordinarily inaccurate when he
talks about his own travels.  Goldsmith, indeed, was so
regardless of truth as to assert in print that he was present at
a most interesting conversation between Voltaire and Fontenelle,
and that this conversation took place at Paris.  Now it is
certain that Voltaire never was within a hundred leagues of Paris
during the whole time which Goldsmith passed on the Continent.

In 1756 the wanderer landed at Dover, without a shilling, without
a friend, and without a calling.  He had, indeed, if his own
unsupported evidence may be trusted, obtained from the University
of Padua a doctor's degree; but this dignity proved utterly
useless to him.  In England his flute was not in request:  there
were no convents; and he was forced to have recourse to a series
of desperate expedients.  He turned strolling player; but his
face and figure were ill suited to the boards even of the
humblest theatre.  He pounded drugs and ran about London with
phials for charitable chemists.  He joined a swarm of beggars,
which made its nest in Axe Yard.  He was for a time usher of a
school, and felt the miseries and humiliations of this situation
so keenly that he thought it a promotion to be permitted to earn
his bread as a bookseller's hack; but he soon found the new yoke
more galling than the old one, and was glad to become an usher
again.  He obtained a medical appointment in the service of the
East India Company; but the appointment was speedily revoked. 
Why it was revoked we are not told.  The subject was one on which
he never liked to talk.  It is probable that he was incompetent
to perform the duties of the place.  Then he presented himself at
Surgeon's Hall for examination, as mate to a naval hospital. 
Even to so humble a post he was found unequal.  By this time the
schoolmaster whom he had served for a morsel of food and the
third part of a bed was no more.  Nothing remained but to return
to the lowest drudgery of literature.  Goldsmith took a garret in
a miserable court, to which he had to climb from the brink of
Fleet Ditch by a dizzy ladder of flagstones called Breakneck
Steps.  The court and the ascent have long disappeared; but old
Londoners will remember both.  (A gentleman, who states that he
has known the neighbourhood for thirty years, corrects this
account, and informs the present publisher that the Breakneck
Steps, thirty-two in number, divided into two flights, are still
in existence, and that, according to tradition, Goldsmith's house
was not on the steps, but was the first house at the head of the
court, on the left hand, going from the Old Bailey.  See "Notes
and Queries" (2d. S. ix. 280).)  Here, at thirty, the unlucky
adventurer sat down to toil like a galley slave.

In the succeeding six years he sent to the press some things
which have survived and many which have perished.  He produced
articles for reviews, magazines, and newspapers; children's books
which, bound in gilt paper and adorned with hideous woodcuts,
appeared in the window of the once far-famed shop at the corner
of Saint Paul's Churchyard; "An Inquiry into the State of Polite
Learning in Europe," which, though of little or no value, is
still reprinted among his works; a "Life of Beau Nash," which is
not reprinted, though it well deserves to be so (Mr Black has
pointed out that this is inaccurate:  the life of Nash has been
twice reprinted; once in Mr Prior's edition (vol. iii. p. 249),
and once in Mr Cunningham's edition (vol. iv. p. 35).); a
superficial and incorrect, but very readable, "History of
England," in a series of letters purporting to be addressed by a
nobleman to his son; and some very lively and amusing "Sketches
of London Society," in a series of letters purporting to be
addressed by a Chinese traveller to his friends.  All these works
were anonymous; but some of them were well-known to be
Goldsmith's; and he gradually rose in the estimation of the
booksellers for whom he drudged.  He was, indeed, emphatically a
popular writer.  For accurate research or grave disquisition he
was not well qualified by nature or by education.  He knew
nothing accurately:  his reading had been desultory; nor had he
meditated deeply on what he had read.  He had seen much of the
world; but he had noticed and retained little more of what he had
seen than some grotesque incidents and characters which had
happened to strike his fancy.  But, though his mind was very
scantily stored with materials, he used what materials he had in
such a way as to produce a wonderful effect.  There have been
many greater writers; but perhaps no writer was ever more
uniformly agreeable.  His style was always pure and easy, and, on
proper occasions, pointed and energetic.  His narratives were
always amusing, his descriptions always picturesque, his humour
rich and joyous, yet not without an occasional tinge of amiable
sadness.  About everything that he wrote, serious or sportive,
there was a certain natural grace and decorum, hardly to be
expected from a man a great part of whose life had been passed
among thieves and beggars, street-walkers and merry andrews, in
those squalid dens which are the reproach of great capitals.

As his name gradually became known, the circle of his
acquaintance widened.  He was introduced to Johnson, who was then
considered as the first of living English writers; to Reynolds,
the first of English painters; and to Burke, who had not yet
entered parliament, but had distinguished himself greatly by his
writings and by the eloquence of his conversation.  With these
eminent men Goldsmith became intimate.  In 1763 he was one of the
nine original members of that celebrated fraternity which has
sometimes been called the Literary Club, but which has always
disclaimed that epithet, and still glories in the simple name of
The Club.

By this time Goldsmith had quitted his miserable dwelling at the
top of Breakneck Steps, and had taken chambers in the more
civilised region of the Inns of Court.  But he was still often
reduced to pitiable shifts.  Towards the close of 1764 his rent
was so long in arrear that his landlady one morning called in the
help of a sheriff's officer.  The debtor, in great perplexity,
despatched a messenger to Johnson; and Johnson, always friendly,
though often surly, sent back the messenger with a guinea, and
promised to follow speedily.  He came, and found that Goldsmith
had changed the guinea, and was railing at the landlady over a
bottle of Madeira.  Johnson put the cork into the bottle, and
entreated his friend to consider calmly how money was to be
procured.  Goldsmith said that he had a novel ready for the
press.  Johnson glanced at the manuscript, saw that there were
good things in it, took it to a bookseller, sold it for 60
pounds, and soon returned with the money.  The rent was paid; and
the sheriff's officer withdrew.  According to one story,
Goldsmith gave his landlady a sharp reprimand for her treatment
of him; according to another, he insisted on her joining him in a
bowl of punch.  Both stories are probably true.  The novel which
was thus ushered into the world was the "Vicar of Wakefield."

But, before the "Vicar of Wakefield" appeared in print, came the
great crisis of Goldsmith's literary life.  In Christmas week,
1764, he published a poem, entitled the "Traveller."  It was the
first work to which he had put his name; and it at once raised
him to the rank of a legitimate English classic.  The opinion of
the most skilful critics was, that nothing finer had appeared in
verse since the fourth book of the "Dunciad."  In one respect the
"Traveller" differs from all Goldsmith's other writings.  In
general his designs were bad, and his execution good.  In the
"Traveller," the execution, though deserving of much praise, is
far inferior to the design.  No philosophical poem, ancient or
modern, has a plan so noble, and at the same time so simple.  An
English wanderer, seated on a crag among the Alps, near the point
where three great countries meet, looks down on the boundless
prospect, reviews his long pilgrimage, recalls the varieties of
scenery, of climate, of government, of religion, of national
character, which he has observed, and comes to the conclusion
just or unjust, that our happiness depends little on political
institutions, and much on the temper and regulation of our own
minds.

While the fourth edition of the "Traveller" was on the counters
of the booksellers, the "Vicar of Wakefield" appeared, and
rapidly obtained a popularity which has lasted down to our own
time, and which is likely to last as long as our language.  The
fable is indeed one of the worst that ever was constructed.  It
wants, not merely that probability which ought to be found in a
tale of common English life, but that consistency which ought to
be found even in the wildest fiction about witches, giants, and
fairies.  But the earlier chapters have all the sweetness of
pastoral poetry, together with all the vivacity of comedy.  Moses
and his spectacles, the vicar and his monogamy, the sharper and
his cosmogony, the squire proving from Aristotle that relatives
are related, Olivia preparing herself for the arduous task of
converting a rakish lover by studying the controversy between
Robinson Crusoe and Friday, the great ladies with their scandal
about Sir Tomkyn's amours and Dr Burdock's verses, and Mr
Burchell with his "Fudge," have caused as much harmless mirth as
has ever been caused by matter packed into so small a number of
pages.  The latter part of the tale is unworthy of the beginning. 
As we approach the catastrophe, the absurdities lie thicker and
thicker; and the gleams of pleasantry become rarer and rarer.

The success which had attended Goldsmith as a novelist emboldened
him to try his fortune as a dramatist.  He wrote the "Goodnatured
Man," a piece which had a worse fate than it deserved.  Garrick
refused to produce it at Drury Lane.  It was acted at Covent
Garden in 1768, but was coldly received.  The author, however,
cleared by his benefit nights, and by the sale of the copyright,
no less than 500 pounds, five times as much as he had made by the
"Traveller" and the "Vicar of Wakefield" together.  The plot of
the "Goodnatured Man" is, like almost all Goldsmith's plots, very
ill constructed.  But some passages are exquisitely ludicrous;
much more ludicrous, indeed, than suited the taste of the town at
that time.  A canting, mawkish play, entitled "False Delicacy,"
had just had an immense run.  Sentimentality was all the mode. 
During some years, more tears were shed at comedies than at
tragedies; and a pleasantry which moved the audience to anything
more than a grave smile was reprobated as low.  It is not
strange, therefore, that the very best scene in the "Goodnatured
Man," that in which Miss Richland finds her lover attended by the
bailiff and the bailiff's follower in full court dresses, should
have been mercilessly hissed, and should have been omitted after
the first night.

In 1770 appeared the "Deserted Village."  In mere diction and
versification this celebrated poem is fully equal, perhaps
superior, to the "Traveller;" and it is generally preferred to
the "Traveller" by that large class of readers who think, with
Bayes in the "Rehearsal," that the only use of a plan is to bring
in fine things.  More discerning judges, however, while they
admire the beauty of the details, are shocked by one unpardonable
fault which pervades the whole.  The fault we mean is not that
theory about wealth and luxury which has so often been censured
by political economists.  The theory is indeed false:  but the
poem, considered merely as a poem, is not necessarily the worse
on that account.  The finest poem in the Latin language, indeed
the finest didactic poem in any language, was written in defence
of the silliest and meanest of all systems of natural and moral
philosophy.  A poet may easily be pardoned for reasoning ill; but
he cannot be pardoned for describing ill, for observing the world
in which he lives so carelessly that his portraits bear no
resemblance to the originals, for exhibiting as copies from real
life monstrous combinations of things which never were and never
could be found together.  What would be thought of a painter who
should mix August and January in one landscape, who should
introduce a frozen river into a harvest scene?  Would it be a
sufficient defence of such a picture to say that every part was
exquisitely coloured, that the green hedges, the apple-trees
loaded with fruit, the waggons reeling under the yellow sheaves,
and the sun-burned reapers wiping their foreheads, were very
fine, and that the ice and the boys sliding were also very fine? 
To such a picture the "Deserted Village" bears a great
resemblance.  It is made up of incongruous parts.  The village in
its happy days is a true English village.  The village in its
decay is an Irish village.  The felicity and the misery which
Goldsmith has brought close together belong to two different
countries; and to two different stages in the progress of
society.  He had assuredly never seen in his native island such a
rural paradise, such a seat of plenty, content, and tranquillity,
as his "Auburn."  He had assuredly never seen in England all the
inhabitants of such a paradise turned out of their homes in one
day and forced to emigrate in a body to America.  The hamlet he
had probably seen in Kent; the ejectment he had probably seen in
Munster:  but, by joining the two, he has produced something
which never was and never will be seen in any part of the world.

In 1773 Goldsmith tried his chance at Covent Garden with a second
play, "She Stoops to Conquer."  The manager was not without great
difficulty induced to bring this piece out.  The sentimental
comedy still reigned; and Goldsmith's comedies were not
sentimental.  The "Goodnatured Man" had been too funny to
succeed; yet the mirth of the "Goodnatured Man" was sober when
compared with the rich drollery of "She Stoops to Conquer," which
is, in truth, an incomparable farce in five acts.  On this
occasion, however, genius triumphed.  Pit, boxes, and galleries,
were in a constant roar of laughter.  If any bigoted admirer of
Kelly and Cumberland ventured to hiss or groan, he was speedily
silenced by a general cry of "turn him out," or "throw him over." 
Two generations have since confirmed the verdict which was
pronounced on that night.

While Goldsmith was writing the "Deserted Village," and "She
Stoops to Conquer," he was employed on works of a very different
kind, works from which he derived little reputation but much
profit.  He compiled for the use of schools a "History of Rome,"
by which he made 300 pounds, a "History of England," by which he
made 600 pounds, a "History of Greece," for which he received 250
pounds, a "Natural History," for which the booksellers covenanted
to pay him 800 guineas.  These works he produced without any
elaborate research, by merely selecting, abridging, and
translating into his own clear, pure, and flowing language what
he found in books well-known to the world, but too bulky or too
dry for boys and girls.  He committed some strange blunders; for
he knew nothing with accuracy.  Thus in his "History of England,"
he tells us that Naseby is in Yorkshire; nor did he correct this
mistake when the book was reprinted.  He was very nearly hoaxed
into putting into the "History of Greece" an account of the
battle between Alexander the Great and Montezuma.  In his
"Animated Nature" he relates, with faith and with perfect
gravity, all the most absurd lies which he could find in books of
travels about gigantic Patagonians, monkeys that preach sermons,
nightingales that repeat long conversations.  "If he can tell a
horse from a cow," said Johnson, "that is the extent of his
knowledge of zoology."  How little Goldsmith was qualified to
write about the physical sciences is sufficiently proved by two
anecdotes.  He on one occasion denied that the sun is longer in
the northern than in the southern signs.  It was vain to cite the
authority of Maupertuis.  "Maupertuis!" he cried, "I understand
those matters better than Maupertuis."  On another occasion he,
in defiance of the evidence of his own senses, maintained
obstinately, and even angrily, that he chewed his dinner by
moving his upper jaw.

Yet, ignorant as Goldsmith was, few writers have done more to
make the first steps in the laborious road to knowledge easy and
pleasant.  His compilations are widely distinguished from the
compilations of ordinary book-makers.  He was a great, perhaps an
unequalled, master of the arts of selection and condensation.  In
these respects his histories of Rome and of England, and still
more his own abridgements of these histories, well deserve to be
studied.  In general nothing is less attractive than an epitome: 
but the epitomes of Goldsmith, even when most concise, are always
amusing; and to read them is considered by intelligent children,
not as a task, but as a pleasure.

Goldsmith might now be considered as a prosperous man.  He had
the means of living in comfort, and even in what to one who had
so often slept in barns and on bulks must have been luxury.  His
fame was great and was constantly rising.  He lived in what was
intellectually far the best society of the kingdom, in a society
in which no talent or accomplishment was wanting, and in which
the art of conversation was cultivated with splendid success. 
There probably were never four talkers more admirable in four
different ways than Johnson, Burke, Beauclerk, and Garrick; and
Goldsmith was on terms of intimacy with all the four.  He aspired
to share in their colloquial renown; but never was ambition more
unfortunate.  It may seem strange that a man who wrote with so
much perspicuity, vivacity, and grace, should have been, whenever
he took a part in conversation, an empty, noisy, blundering
rattle.  But on this point the evidence is overwhelming.  So
extraordinary was the contrast between Goldsmith's published
works and the silly things which he said, that Horace Walpole
described him as an inspired idiot.  "Noll," said Garrick, "wrote
like an angel, and talked like poor Poll."  Chamier declared that
it was a hard exercise of faith to believe that so foolish a
chatterer could have really written the "Traveller."  Even
Boswell could say, with contemptuous compassion, that he liked
very well to hear honest Goldsmith run on.  "Yes, sir," said
Johnson, "but he should not like to hear himself."  Minds differ
as rivers differ.  There are transparent and sparkling rivers
from which it is delightful to drink as they flow; to such rivers
the minds of such men as Burke and Johnson may be compared.  But
there are rivers of which the water when first drawn is turbid
and noisome, but becomes pellucid as crystal, and delicious to
the taste, if it be suffered to stand till it has deposited a
sediment; and such a river is a type of the mind of Goldsmith. 
His first thoughts on every subject were confused even to
absurdity; but they required only a little time to work
themselves clear.  When he wrote they had that time; and
therefore his readers pronounced him a man of genius:  but when
he talked he talked nonsense, and made himself the laughing-stock
of his hearers.  He was painfully sensible of his inferiority in
conversation; he felt every failure keenly; yet he had not
sufficient judgment and self-command to hold his tongue.  His
animal spirits and vanity were always impelling him to try to do
the one thing which he could not do.  After every attempt he felt
that he had exposed himself, and writhed with shame and vexation;
yet the next moment he began again.

His associates seem to have regarded him with kindness, which, in
spite of their admiration of his writings, was not unmixed with
contempt.  In truth, there was in his character much to love, but
very little to respect.  His heart was soft even to weakness:  he
was so generous that he quite forgot to be just:  he forgave
injuries so readily that he might be said to invite them; and was
so liberal to beggars that he had nothing left for his tailor and
his butcher.  He was vain, sensual, frivolous, profuse,
improvident.  One vice of a darker shade was imputed to him,
envy.  But there is not the least reason to believe that this bad
passion, though it sometimes made him wince and utter fretful
exclamations, ever impelled him to injure by wicked arts the
reputation of any of his rivals.  The truth probably is, that he
was not more envious, but merely less prudent, than his
neighbours.  His heart was on his lips.  All those small
jealousies, which are but too common among men of letters, but
which a man of letters who is also a man of the world does his
best to conceal, Goldsmith avowed with the simplicity of a child. 
When he was envious, instead of affecting indifference, instead
of damning with faint praise, instead of doing injuries slily and
in the dark, he told everybody that he was envious.  "Do not,
pray, do not talk of Johnson in such terms," he said to Boswell;
"you harrow up my very soul."  George Steevens and Cumberland
were men far too cunning to say such a thing.  They would have
echoed the praises of the man whom they envied, and then have
sent to the newspapers anonymous libels upon him.  Both what was
good and what was bad in Goldsmith's character was to his
associates a perfect security that he would never commit such
villany.  He was neither ill natured enough, nor long headed
enough, to be guilty of any malicious act which required
contrivance and disguise.

Goldsmith has sometimes been represented as a man of genius,
cruelly treated by the world, and doomed to struggle with
difficulties which at last broke his heart.  But no
representation can be more remote from the truth.  He did,
indeed, go through much sharp misery before he had done anything
considerable in literature.  But, after his name had appeared on
the title-page of the "Traveller," he had none but himself to
blame for his distresses.  His average income, during the last
seven years of his life, certainly exceeded 400 pounds a year;
and 400 pounds a year ranked, among the incomes of that day, at
least as high as 800 pounds a year would rank at present.  A
single man living in the Temple with 400 pounds a year might then
be called opulent.  Not one in ten of the young gentlemen of good
families who were studying the law there had so much.  But all
the wealth which Lord Clive had brought from Bengal, and Sir
Lawrence Dundas from Germany, joined together, would not have
sufficed for Goldsmith.  He spent twice as much as he had.  He
wore fine clothes, gave dinners of several courses, paid court to
venal beauties.  He had also, it should be remembered, to the
honour of his heart, though not of his head, a guinea, or five or
ten, according to the state of his purse, ready for any tale of
distress, true or false.  But it was not in dress or feasting, in
promiscuous amours or promiscuous charities, that his chief
expense lay.  He had been from boyhood a gambler, and at once the
most sanguine and the most unskilful of gamblers.  For a time he
put off the day of inevitable ruin by temporary expedients.  He
obtained advances from booksellers, by promising to execute works
which he never began.  But at length this source of supply
failed.  He owed more than 2000 pounds; and he saw no hope of
extrication from his embarrassments.  His spirits and health gave
way.  He was attacked by a nervous fever, which he thought
himself competent to treat.  It would have been happy for him if
his medical skill had been appreciated as justly by himself as by
others.  Notwithstanding the degree which he pretended to have
received at Padua, he could procure no patients.  "I do not
practise," he once said; "I make it a rule to prescribe only for
my friends."  "Pray, dear Doctor," said Beauclerk, "alter your
rule; and prescribe only for your enemies."  Goldsmith now, in
spite of this excellent advice, prescribed for himself.  The
remedy aggravated the malady.  The sick man was induced to call
in real physicians; and they at one time imagined that they had
cured the disease.  Still his weakness and restlessness
continued.  He could get no sleep.  He could take no food.  "You
are worse," said one of his medical attendants, "than you should
be from the degree of fever which you have.  Is your mind at
ease?"  "No, it is not," were the last recorded words of Oliver
Goldsmith.  He died on the third of April 1774, in his forty-
sixth year.  He was laid in the churchyard of the Temple; but the
spot was not marked by any inscription, and is now forgotten. 
The coffin was followed by Burke and Reynolds.  Both these great
men were sincere mourners.  Burke, when he heard of Goldsmith's
death, had burst into a flood of tears.  Reynolds had been so
much moved by the news that he had flung aside his brush and
palette for the day.

A short time after Goldsmith's death, a little poem appeared,
which will, as long as our language lasts, associate the names of
his two illustrious friends with his own.  It has already been
mentioned that he sometimes felt keenly the sarcasm which his
wild blundering talk brought upon him.  He was, not long before
his last illness, provoked into retaliating.  He wisely betook
himself to his pen; and at that weapon he proved himself a match
for all his assailants together.  Within a small compass he drew
with a singularly easy and vigorous pencil the characters of nine
or ten of his intimate associates.  Though this little work did
not receive his last touches, it must always be regarded as a
masterpiece.  It is impossible, however, not to wish that four or
five likenesses which have no interest for posterity were wanting
to that noble gallery; and that their places were supplied by
sketches of Johnson and Gibbon, as happy and vivid as the
sketches of Burke and Garrick.

Some of Goldsmith's friends and admirers honoured him with a
cenotaph in Westminster Abbey.  Nollekens was the sculptor; and
Johnson wrote the inscription.  It is much to be lamented that
Johnson did not leave to posterity a more durable and a more
valuable memorial of his friend.  A life of Goldsmith would have
been an inestimable addition to the Lives of the Poets.  No man
appreciated Goldsmith's writings more justly than Johnson; no man
was better acquainted with Goldsmith's character and habits; and
no man was more competent to delineate with truth and spirit the
peculiarities of a mind in which great powers were found in
company with great weaknesses.  But the lists of poets to whose
works Johnson was requested by the booksellers to furnish
prefaces ended with Lyttleton, who died in 1773.  The line seems
to have been drawn expressly for the purpose of excluding the
person whose portrait would have most fitly closed the series. 
Goldsmith, however, has been fortunate in his biographers. 
Within a few years his life has been written by Mr Prior, by Mr
Washington Irving, and by Mr Forster.  The diligence of Mr Prior
deserves great praise; the style of Mr Washington Irving is
always pleasing; but the highest place must, in justice, be
assigned to the eminently interesting work of Mr Forster.

...


SAMUEL JOHNSON.

(December 1856.)

Samuel Johnson, one of the most eminent English writers of the
eighteenth century, was the son of Michael Johnson, who was, at
the beginning of that century, a magistrate of Lichfield, and a
bookseller of great note in the midland counties.  Michael's
abilities and attainments seem to have been considerable.  He was
so well acquainted with the contents of the volumes which he
exposed to sale, that the country rectors of Staffordshire and
Worcestershire thought him an oracle on points of learning. 
Between him and the clergy, indeed, there was a strong religious
and political sympathy.  He was a zealous churchman, and, though
he had qualified himself for municipal office by taking the oaths
to the sovereigns in possession, was to the last a Jacobite in
heart.  At his house, a house which is still pointed out to every
traveller who visits Lichfield, Samuel was born on the 18th of
September 1709.  In the child, the physical, intellectual, and
moral peculiarities which afterwards distinguished the man were
plainly discernible; great muscular strength accompanied by much
awkwardness and many infirmities; great quickness of parts, with
a morbid propensity to sloth and procrastination; a kind and
generous heart, with a gloomy and irritable temper.  He had
inherited from his ancestors a scrofulous taint, which it was
beyond the power of medicine to remove.  His parents were weak
enough to believe that the royal touch was a specific for this
malady.  In his third year he was taken up to London, inspected
by the court surgeon, prayed over by the court chaplains, and
stroked and presented with a piece of gold by Queen Anne.  One of
his earliest recollections was that of a stately lady in a
diamond stomacher and a long black hood.  Her hand was applied in
vain.  The boy's features, which were originally noble and not
irregular, were distorted by his malady.  His cheeks were deeply
scarred.  He lost for a time the sight of one eye; and he saw but
very imperfectly with the other.  But the force of his mind
overcame every impediment.  Indolent as he was, he acquired
knowledge with such ease and rapidity that at every school to
which he was sent he was soon the best scholar.  From sixteen to
eighteen he resided at home, and was left to his own devices.  He
learned much at this time, though his studies were without
guidance and without plan.  He ransacked his father's shelves,
dipped into a multitude of books, read what was interesting, and
passed over what was dull.  An ordinary lad would have acquired
little or no useful knowledge in such a way:  but much that was
dull to ordinary lads was interesting to Samuel.  He read little
Greek:  for his proficiency in that language was not such that he
could take much pleasure in the masters of Attic poetry and
eloquence.  But he had left school a good Latinist; and he soon
acquired, in the large and miscellaneous library of which he now
had the command, an extensive knowledge of Latin literature. 
That Augustan delicacy of taste which is the boast of the great
public schools of England he never possessed.  But he was early
familiar with some classical writers who were quite unknown to
the best scholars in the sixth form at Eton.  He was peculiarly
attracted by the works of the great restorers of learning.  Once,
while searching for some apples, he found a huge folio volume of
Petrarch's works.  The name excited his curiosity; and he eagerly
devoured hundreds of pages.  Indeed, the diction and
versification of his own Latin compositions show that he had paid
at least as much attention to modern copies from the antique as
to the original models.

While he was thus irregularly educating himself, his family was
sinking into hopeless poverty.  Old Michael Johnson was much
better qualified to pore upon books, and to talk about them, than
to trade in them.  His business declined; his debts increased; it
was with difficulty that the daily expenses of his household were
defrayed.  It was out of his power to support his son at either
university; but a wealthy neighbour offered assistance; and, in
reliance on promises which proved to be of very little value,
Samuel was entered at Pembroke College, Oxford.  When the young
scholar presented himself to the rulers of that society, they
were amazed not more by his ungainly figure and eccentric manners
than by the quantity of extensive and curious information which
he had picked up during many months of desultory but not
unprofitable study.  On the first day of his residence he
surprised his teachers by quoting Macrobius; and one of the most
learned among them declared that he had never known a freshman of
equal attainments.

At Oxford, Johnson resided during about three years.  He was
poor, even to raggedness; and his appearance excited a mirth and
a pity which were equally intolerable to his haughty spirit.  He
was driven from the quadrangle of Christ Church by the sneering
looks which the members of that aristocratical society cast at
the holes in his shoes.  Some charitable person placed a new pair
at his door; but he spurned them away in a fury.  Distress made
him, not servile, but reckless and ungovernable.  No opulent
gentleman commoner, panting for one-and-twenty, could have
treated the academical authorities with more gross disrespect. 
The needy scholar was generally to be seen under the gate of
Pembroke, a gate now adorned with his effigy, haranguing a circle
of lads, over whom, in spite of his tattered gown and dirty
linen, his wit and audacity gave him an undisputed ascendency. 
In every mutiny against the discipline of the college he was the
ringleader.  Much was pardoned, however, to a youth so highly
distinguished by abilities and acquirements.  He had early made
himself known by turning Pope's Messiah into Latin verse.  The
style and rhythm, indeed, were not exactly Virgilian; but the
translation found many admirers, and was read with pleasure by
Pope himself.

The time drew near at which Johnson would, in the ordinary course
of things, have become a Bachelor of Arts:  but he was at the end
of his resources.  Those promises of support on which he had
relied had not been kept.  His family could do nothing for him. 
His debts to Oxford tradesmen were small indeed, yet larger than
he could pay.  In the autumn of 1731, he was under the necessity
of quitting the university without a degree.  In the following
winter his father died.  The old man left but a pittance; and of
that pittance almost the whole was appropriated to the support of
his widow.  The property to which Samuel succeeded amounted to no
more than twenty pounds.

His life, during the thirty years which followed, was one hard
struggle with poverty.  The misery of that struggle needed no
aggravation, but was aggravated by the sufferings of an unsound
body and an unsound mind.  Before the young man left the
university, his hereditary malady had broken forth in a
singularly cruel form.  He had become an incurable hypochondriac.
He said long after that he had been mad all his life, or at least
not perfectly sane; and, in truth, eccentricities less strange
than his have often been thought grounds sufficient for absolving
felons, and for setting aside wills.  His grimaces, his gestures,
his mutterings, sometimes diverted and sometimes terrified people
who did not know him.  At a dinner table he would, in a fit of
absence, stoop down and twitch off a lady's shoe.  He would amaze
a drawing-room by suddenly ejaculating a clause of the Lord's
Prayer.  He would conceive an unintelligible aversion to a
particular alley, and perform a great circuit rather than see the
hateful place.  He would set his heart on touching every post in
the streets through which he walked.  If by any chance he missed
a post, he would go back a hundred yards and repair the omission. 
Under the influence of his disease, his senses became morbidly
torpid, and his imagination morbidly active.  At one time he
would stand poring on the town clock without being able to tell
the hour.  At another, he would distinctly hear his mother, who
was many miles off, calling him by his name.  But this was not
the worst.  A deep melancholy took possession of him, and gave a
dark tinge to all his views of human nature and of human destiny. 
Such wretchedness as he endured has driven many men to shoot
themselves or drown themselves.  But he was under no temptation
to commit suicide.  He was sick of life; but he was afraid of
death; and he shuddered at every sight or sound which reminded
him of the inevitable hour.  In religion he found but little
comfort during his long and frequent fits of dejection; for his
religion partook of his own character.  The light from heaven
shone on him indeed, but not in a direct line, or with its own
pure splendour.  The rays had to struggle through a disturbing
medium; they reached him refracted, dulled and discoloured by the
thick gloom which had settled on his soul; and, though they might
be sufficiently clear to guide him, were too dim to cheer him.

With such infirmities of body and mind, this celebrated man was
left, at two-and-twenty, to fight his way through the world.  He
remained during about five years in the midland counties.  At
Lichfield, his birthplace and his early home, he had inherited
some friends and acquired others.  He was kindly noticed by Henry
Hervey, a gay officer of noble family, who happened to be
quartered there.  Gilbert Walmesley, registrar of the
ecclesiastical court of the diocese, a man of distinguished
parts, learning, and knowledge of the world, did himself honour
by patronising the young adventurer, whose repulsive person,
unpolished manners, and squalid garb moved many of the petty
aristocracy of the neighbourhood to laughter or to disgust.  At
Lichfield, however, Johnson could find no way of earning a
livelihood.  He became usher of a grammar school in
Leicestershire; he resided as a humble companion in the house of
a country gentleman; but a life of dependence was insupportable
to his haughty spirit.  He repaired to Birmingham, and there
earned a few guineas by literary drudgery.  In that town he
printed a translation, little noticed at the time, and long
forgotten, of a Latin book about Abyssinia.  He then put forth
proposals for publishing by subscription the poems of Politian,
with notes containing a history of modern Latin verse:  but
subscriptions did not come in; and the volume never appeared.

While leading this vagrant and miserable life, Johnson fell in
love.  The object of his passion was Mrs Elizabeth Porter, a
widow who had children as old as himself.  To ordinary
spectators, the lady appeared to be a short, fat, coarse woman,
painted half an inch thick, dressed in gaudy colours, and fond of
exhibiting provincial airs and graces which were not exactly
those of the Queensberrys and Lepels.  To Johnson, however, whose
passions were strong, whose eyesight was too weak to distinguish
ceruse from natural bloom, and who had seldom or never been in
the same room with a woman of real fashion, his Titty, as he
called her, was the most beautiful, graceful, and accomplished of
her sex.  That his admiration was unfeigned cannot be doubted;
for she was as poor as himself.  She accepted, with a readiness
which did her little honour, the addresses of a suitor who might
have been her son.  The marriage, however, in spite of occasional
wranglings, proved happier than might have been expected.  The
lover continued to be under the illusions of the wedding-day till
the lady died in her sixty-fourth year.  On her monument he
placed an inscription extolling the charms of her person and of
her manners; and when, long after her decease, he had occasion to
mention her, he exclaimed, with a tenderness half ludicrous, half
pathetic, "Pretty creature!"

His marriage made it necessary for him to exert himself more
strenuously than he had hitherto done.  He took a house in the
neighbourhood of his native town, and advertised for pupils.  But
eighteen months passed away; and only three pupils came to his
academy.  Indeed, his appearance was so strange, and his temper
so violent, that his schoolroom must have resembled an ogre's
den.  Nor was the tawdry painted grandmother whom he called his
Titty well qualified to make provision for the comfort of young
gentlemen.  David Garrick, who was one of the pupils, used, many
years later, to throw the best company of London into convulsions
of laughter by mimicking the endearments of this extraordinary
pair.

At length Johnson, in the twenty-eighth year of his age,
determined to seek his fortune in the capital as a literary
adventurer.  He set out with a few guineas, three acts of the
tragedy of Irene in manuscript, and two or three letters of
introduction from his friend Walmesley.

Never, since literature became a calling in England, had it been
a less gainful calling than at the time when Johnson took up his
residence in London.  In the preceding generation a writer of
eminent merit was sure to be munificently rewarded by the
government.  The least that he could expect was a pension or a
sinecure place; and, if he showed any aptitude for politics, he
might hope to be a member of parliament, a lord of the treasury,
an ambassador, a secretary of state.  It would be easy, on the
other hand, to name several writers of the nineteenth century of
whom the least successful has received forty thousand pounds from
the booksellers.  But Johnson entered on his vocation in the most
dreary part of the dreary interval which separated two ages of
prosperity.  Literature had ceased to flourish under the
patronage of the great, and had not begun to flourish under the
patronage of the public.  One man of letters, indeed, Pope, had
acquired by his pen what was then considered as a handsome
fortune, and lived on a footing of equality with nobles and
ministers of state.  But this was a solitary exception.  Even an
author whose reputation was established, and whose works were
popular, such an author as Thomson, whose Seasons were in every
library, such an author as Fielding, whose Pasquin had had a
greater run than any drama since The Beggar's Opera, was
sometimes glad to obtain, by pawning his best coat, the means of
dining on tripe at a cookshop underground, where he could wipe
his hands, after his greasy meal, on the back of a Newfoundland
dog.  It is easy, therefore, to imagine what humiliations and
privations must have awaited the novice who had still to earn a
name.  One of the publishers to whom Johnson applied for
employment measured with a scornful eye that athletic though
uncouth frame, and exclaimed, "You had better get a porter's
knot, and carry trunks."  Nor was the advice bad; for a porter
was likely to be as plentifully fed, and as comfortably lodged,
as a poet.

Some time appears to have elapsed before Johnson was able to form
any literary connection from which he could expect more than
bread for the day which was passing over him.  He never forgot
the generosity with which Hervey, who was now residing in London,
relieved his wants during this time of trial.  "Harry Hervey,"
said the old philosopher many years later, "was a vicious man;
but he was very kind to me.  If you call a dog Hervey I shall
love him."  At Hervey's table Johnson sometimes enjoyed feasts
which were made more agreeable by contrast.  But in general he
dined, and thought that he dined well, on sixpenny worth of meat,
and a pennyworth of bread, at an alehouse near Drury Lane.

The effect of the privations and sufferings which he endured at
this time was discernible to the last in his temper and his
deportment.  His manners had never been courtly.  They now became
almost savage.  Being frequently under the necessity of wearing
shabby coats and dirty shirts, he became a confirmed sloven. 
Being often very hungry when he sat down to his meals, he
contracted a habit of eating with ravenous greediness.  Even to
the end of his life, and even at the tables of the great, the
sight of food affected him as it affects wild beasts and birds of
prey.  His taste in cookery, formed in subterranean ordinaries
and alamode beefshops, was far from delicate.  Whenever he was so
fortunate as to have near him a hare that had been kept too long,
or a meat pie made with rancid butter, he gorged himself with
such violence that his veins swelled, and the moisture broke out
on his forehead.  The affronts which his poverty emboldened
stupid and low-minded men to offer to him would have broken a
mean spirit into sycophancy, but made him rude even to ferocity. 
Unhappily the insolence which, while it was defensive, was
pardonable, and in some sense respectable, accompanied him into
societies where he was treated with courtesy and kindness.  He
was repeatedly provoked into striking those who had taken
liberties with him.  All the sufferers, however, were wise enough
to abstain from talking about their beatings, except Osborne, the
most rapacious and brutal of booksellers, who proclaimed
everywhere that he had been knocked down by the huge fellow whom
he had hired to puff the Harleian Library.

About a year after Johnson had begun to reside in London, he was
fortunate enough to obtain regular employment from Cave, an
enterprising and intelligent bookseller, who was proprietor and
editor of the "Gentleman's Magazine."  That journal, just
entering on the ninth year of its long existence, was the only
periodical work in the kingdom which then had what would now be
called a large circulation.  It was, indeed, the chief source of
parliamentary intelligence.  It was not then safe, even during a
recess, to publish an account of the proceedings of either House
without some disguise.  Cave, however, ventured to entertain his
readers with what he called "Reports of the Debates of the Senate
of Lilliput."  France was Blefuscu; London was Mildendo:  pounds
were sprugs:  the Duke of Newcastle was the Nardac secretary of
State:  Lord Hardwicke was the Hurgo Hickrad:  and William
Pulteney was Wingul Pulnub.  To write the speeches was, during
several years, the business of Johnson.  He was generally
furnished with notes, meagre indeed, and inaccurate, of what had
been said; but sometimes he had to find arguments and eloquence
both for the ministry and for the opposition.  He was himself a
Tory, not from rational conviction--for his serious opinion was
that one form of government was just as good or as bad as
another--but from mere passion, such as inflamed the Capulets
against the Montagues, or the Blues of the Roman circus against
the Greens.  In his infancy he had heard so much talk about the
villanies of the Whigs, and the dangers of the Church, that he
had become a furious partisan when he could scarcely speak. 
Before he was three he had insisted on being taken to hear
Sacheverell preach at Lichfield Cathedral, and had listened to
the sermon with as much respect, and probably with as much
intelligence, as any Staffordshire squire in the congregation. 
The work which had been begun in the nursery had been completed
by the university.  Oxford, when Johnson resided there, was the
most Jacobitical place in England; and Pembroke was one of the
most Jacobital colleges in Oxford.  The prejudices which he
brought up to London were scarcely less absurd than those of his
own Tom Tempest.  Charles II. and James II. were two of the best
kings that ever reigned.  Laud, a poor creature who never did,
said, or wrote anything indicating more than the ordinary
capacity of an old woman, was a prodigy of parts and learning
over whose tomb Art and Genius still continued to weep.  Hampden
deserved no more honourable name than that of "the zealot of
rebellion."  Even the ship money, condemned not less decidedly by
Falkland and Clarendon than by the bitterest Roundheads, Johnson
would not pronounce to have been an unconstitutional impost. 
Under a government, the mildest that had ever been known in the
world--under a government, which allowed to the people an
unprecedented liberty of speech and action--he fancied that he
was a slave; he assailed the ministry with obloquy which refuted
itself, and regretted the lost freedom and happiness of those
golden days in which a writer who had taken but one-tenth part of
the license allowed to him would have been pilloried, mangled
with the shears, whipped at the cart's tail, and flung into a
noisome dungeon to die.  He hated dissenters and stockjobbers,
the excise and the army, septennial parliaments, and continental
connections.  He long had an aversion to the Scotch, an aversion
of which he could not remember the commencement, but which, he
owned, had probably originated in his abhorrence of the conduct
of the nation during the Great Rebellion.  It is easy to guess in
what manner debates on great party questions were likely to be
reported by a man whose judgment was so much disordered by party
spirit.  A show of fairness was indeed necessary to the
prosperity of the Magazine.  But Johnson long afterwards owned
that, though he had saved appearances, he had taken care that the
Whig dogs should not have the best of it; and, in fact, every
passage which has lived, every passage which bears the marks of
his higher faculties, is put into the mouth of some member of the
opposition.

A few weeks after Johnson had entered on these obscure labours,
he published a work which at once placed him high among the
writers of his age.  It is probable that what he had suffered
during his first year in London had often reminded him of some
parts of that noble poem in which Juvenal had described the
misery and degradation of a needy man of letters, lodged among
the pigeons' nests in the tottering garrets which overhung the
streets of Rome.  Pope's admirable imitations of Horace's Satires
and Epistles had recently appeared, were in every hand, and were
by many readers thought superior to the originals.  What Pope had
done for Horace, Johnson aspired to do for Juvenal.  The
enterprise was bold and yet judicious.  For between Johnson and
Juvenal there was much in common, much more certainly than
between Pope and Horace.

Johnson's London appeared without his name in May 1738.  He
received only ten guineas for this stately and vigorous poem; but
the sale was rapid, and the success complete.  A second edition
was required within a week.  Those small critics who are always
desirous to lower established reputations ran about proclaiming
that the anonymous satirist was superior to Pope in Pope's own
peculiar department of literature.  It ought to be remembered, to
the honour of Pope, that he joined heartily in the applause with
which the appearance of a rival genius was welcomed.  He made
inquiries about the author of London.  Such a man, he said, could
not long be concealed.  The name was soon discovered; and Pope
with great kindness, exerted himself to obtain an academical
degree and the mastership of a grammar school for the poor young
poet.  The attempt failed; and Johnson remained a bookseller's
hack.

It does not appear that these two men, the most eminent writer of
the generation which was going out, and the most eminent writer
of the generation which was coming in, ever saw each other.  They
lived in very different circles, one surrounded by dukes and
earls, the other by starving pamphleteers and index makers. 
Among Johnson's associates at this time may be mentioned Boyse,
who, when his shirts were pledged, scrawled Latin verses sitting
up in bed with his arms through two holes in his blanket; who
composed very respectable sacred poetry when he was sober; and
who was at last run over by a hackney coach when he was drunk: 
Hoole, surnamed the metaphysical tailor, who, instead of
attending to his measures, used to trace geometrical diagrams on
the board where he sate cross-legged; and the penitent impostor,
George Psalmanazar, who, after poring all day, in a humble
lodging, on the folios of Jewish rabbis and Christian fathers,
indulged himself at night with literary and theological
conversation at an alehouse in the city.  But the most remarkable
of the persons with whom at this time Johnson consorted was
Richard Savage, an earl's son, a shoemaker's apprentice, who had
seen life in all its forms, who had feasted among blue ribands in
Saint James's Square, and had lain with fifty-pounds' weight of
iron on his legs in the condemned ward of Newgate.  This man had,
after many vicissitudes of fortune, sunk at last into abject and
hopeless poverty.  His pen had failed him.  His patrons had been
taken away by death, or estranged by the riotous profusion with
which he squandered their bounty, and the ungrateful insolence
with which he rejected their advice.  He now lived by begging. 
He dined on venison and champagne whenever he had been so
fortunate as to borrow a guinea.  If his questing had been
unsuccessful, he appeased the rage of hunger with some scraps of
broken meat, and lay down to rest under the Piazza of Covent
Garden in warm weather, and, in cold weather, as near as he could
get to the furnace of a glass house.  Yet, in his misery, he was
still an agreeable companion.  He had an inexhaustible store of
anecdotes about that gay and brilliant world from which he was
now an outcast.  He had observed the great men of both parties in
hours of careless relaxation, had seen the leaders of opposition
without the mask of patriotism, and had heard the prime minister
roar with laughter and tell stories not over decent.  During some
months Savage lived in the closest familiarity with Johnson; and
then the friends parted, not without tears.  Johnson remained in
London to drudge for Cave.  Savage went to the West of England,
lived there as he had lived everywhere, and in 1743, died,
penniless and heart-broken, in Bristol gaol.

Soon after his death, while the public curiosity was strongly
excited about his extraordinary character, and his not less
extraordinary adventures, a life of him appeared widely different
from the catchpenny lives of eminent men which were then a staple
article of manufacture in Grub Street.  The style was indeed
deficient in ease and variety; and the writer was evidently too
partial to the Latin element of our language.  But the little
work, with all its faults, was a masterpiece.  No finer specimen
of literary biography existed in any language, living or dead;
and a discerning critic might have confidently predicted that the
author was destined to be the founder of a new school of English
eloquence.

The life of Savage was anonymous; but it was well known in
literary circles that Johnson was the writer.  During the three
years which followed, he produced no important work, but he was
not, and indeed could not be, idle.  The fame of his abilities
and learning continued to grow.  Warburton pronounced him a man
of parts and genius; and the praise of Warburton was then no
light thing.  Such was Johnson's reputation that, in 1747,
several eminent booksellers combined to employ him in the arduous
work of preparing a Dictionary of the English language, in two
folio volumes.  The sum which they agreed to pay him was only
fifteen hundred guineas; and out of this sum he had to pay
several poor men of letters who assisted him in the humbler parts
of his task.

The prospectus of the Dictionary he addressed to the Earl of
Chesterfield.  Chesterfield had long been celebrated for the
politeness of his manners, the brilliancy of his wit, and the
delicacy of his taste.  He was acknowledged to be the finest
speaker in the House of Lords.  He had recently governed Ireland,
at a momentous conjuncture, with eminent firmness, wisdom, and
humanity; and he had since become Secretary of State.  He
received Johnson's homage with the most winning affability, and
requited it with a few guineas, bestowed doubtless in a very
graceful manner, but was by no means desirous to see all his
carpets blackened with the London mud, and his soups and wines
thrown to right and left over the gowns of fine ladies and the
waistcoats of fine gentlemen, by an absent, awkward scholar, who
gave strange starts and uttered strange growls, who dressed like
a scarecrow, and ate like a cormorant.  During some time Johnson
continued to call on his patron, but after being repeatedly told
by the porter that his lordship was not at home, took the hint,
and ceased to present himself at the inhospitable door.

Johnson had flattered himself that he should have completed his
Dictionary by the end of 1750; but it was not till 1755 that he
at length gave his huge volumes to the world.  During the seven
years which he passed in the drudgery of penning definitions and
making quotations for transcription, he sought for relaxation in
literary labour of a more agreeable kind.  In 1749 he published
the Vanity of Human Wishes, an excellent imitation of the Tenth
Satire of Juvenal.  It is in truth not easy to say whether the
palm belongs to the ancient or to the modern poet.  The couplets
in which the fall of Wolsey is described, though lofty and
sonorous, are feeble when compared with the wonderful lines which
bring before us all Rome in tumult on the day of the fall of
Sejanus, the laurels on the doorposts, the white bull stalking
towards the Capitol, the statues rolling down from their
pedestals, the flatterers of the disgraced minister running to
see him dragged with a hook through the streets, and to have a
kick at his carcase before it is hurled into the Tiber.  It must
be owned too that in the concluding passage the Christian
moralist has not made the most of his advantages, and has fallen
decidedly short of the sublimity of his Pagan model.  On the
other hand, Juvenal's Hannibal must yield to Johnson's Charles;
and Johnson's vigorous and pathetic enumeration of the miseries
of a literary life must be allowed to be superior to Juvenal's
lamentation over the fate of Demosthenes and Cicero.

For the copyright of the Vanity of Human Wishes Johnson received
only fifteen guineas.

A few days after the publication of this poem, his tragedy, begun
many years before, was brought on the stage.  His pupil, David
Garrick, had, in 1741, made his appearance on a humble stage in
Goodman's Fields, had at once risen to the first place among
actors, and was now, after several years of almost uninterrupted
success, manager of Drury Lane Theatre.  The relation between him
and his old preceptor was of a very singular kind.  They repelled
each other strongly, and yet attracted each other strongly. 
Nature had made them of very different clay; and circumstances
had fully brought out the natural peculiarities of both.  Sudden
prosperity had turned Garrick's head.  Continued adversity had
soured Johnson's temper.  Johnson saw with more envy than became
so great a man the villa, the plate, the china, the Brussels
carpet, which the little mimic had got by repeating, with
grimaces and gesticulations, what wiser men had written; and the
exquisitely sensitive vanity of Garrick was galled by the thought
that, while all the rest of the world was applauding him, he
could obtain from one morose cynic, whose opinion it was
impossible to despise, scarcely any compliment not acidulated
with scorn.  Yet the two Lichfield men had so many early
recollections in common, and sympathised with each other on so
many points on which they sympathised with nobody else in the
vast population of the capital, that, though the master was often
provoked by the monkey-like impertinence of the pupil, and the
pupil by the bearish rudeness of the master, they remained
friends till they were parted by death.  Garrick now brought
Irene out, with alterations sufficient to displease the author,
yet not sufficient to make the piece pleasing to the audience. 
The public, however, listened with little emotion, but with much
civility, to five acts of monotonous declamation.  After nine
representations the play was withdrawn.  It is, indeed,
altogether unsuited to the stage, and, even when perused in the
closet, will be found hardly worthy of the author.  He had not
the slightest notion of what blank verse should be.  A change in
the last syllable of every other line would make the
versification of the Vanity of Human Wishes closely resemble the
versification of Irene.  The poet, however, cleared, by his
benefit nights, and by the sale of the copyright of his tragedy,
about three hundred pounds, then a great sum in his estimation.

About a year after the representation of Irene, he began to
publish a series of short essays on morals, manners, and
literature.  This species of composition had been brought into
fashion by the success of the Tatler, and by the still more
brilliant success of the Spectator.  A crowd of small writers had
vainly attempted to rival Addison.  The Lay Monastery, the
Censor, the Freethinker, the Plain Dealer, the Champion, and
other works of the same kind, had had their short day.  None of
them had obtained a permanent place in our literature; and they
are now to be found only in the libraries of the curious.  At
length Johnson undertook the adventure in which so many aspirants
had failed.  In the thirty-sixth year after the appearance of the
last number of the Spectator appeared the first number of the
Rambler.  From March 1750 to March 1752 this paper continued to
come out every Tuesday and Saturday.

From the first the Rambler was enthusiastically admired by a few
eminent men.  Richardson, when only five numbers had appeared,
pronounced it equal, if not superior, to the Spectator.  Young
and Hartley expressed their approbation not less warmly.  Bubb
Doddington, among whose many faults indifference to the claims of
genius and learning cannot be reckoned, solicited the
acquaintance of the writer.  In consequence probably of the good
offices of Doddington, who was then the confidential adviser of
Prince Frederic, two of his Royal Highness's gentlemen carried a
gracious message to the printing office, and ordered seven copies
for Leicester House.  But these overtures seem to have been very
coldly received.  Johnson had had enough of the patronage of the
great to last him all his life, and was not disposed to haunt any
other door as he had haunted the door of Chesterfield.

By the public the Rambler was at first very coldly received. 
Though the price of a number was only twopence, the sale did not
amount to five hundred.  The profits were therefore very small. 
But as soon as the flying leaves were collected and reprinted
they became popular.  The author lived to see thirteen thousand
copies spread over England alone.  Separate editions were
published for the Scotch and Irish markets.  A large party
pronounced the style perfect, so absolutely perfect that in some
essays it would be impossible for the writer himself to alter a
single word for the better.  Another party, not less numerous,
vehemently accused him of having corrupted the purity of the
English tongue.  The best critics admitted that his diction was
too monotonous, too obviously artificial, and now and then turgid
even to absurdity.  But they did justice to the acuteness of his
observations on morals and manners, to the constant precision and
frequent brilliancy of his language, to the weighty and
magnificent eloquence of many serious passages, and to the solemn
yet pleasing humour of some of the lighter papers.  On the
question of precedence between Addison and Johnson, a question
which, seventy years ago, was much disputed, posterity has
pronounced a decision from which there is no appeal.  Sir Roger,
his chaplain and his butler, Will Wimble and Will Honeycomb, the
Vision of Mirza, the Journal of the Retired Citizen, the
Everlasting Club, the Dunmow Flitch, the Loves of Hilpah and
Shalum, the Visit to the Exchange, and the Visit to the Abbey,
are known to everybody.  But many men and women, even of highly
cultivated minds, are unacquainted with Squire Bluster and Mrs
Busy, Quisquilius and Venustulus, the Allegory of Wit and
Learning, the Chronicle of the Revolutions of a Garret, and the
sad fate of Aningait and Ajut.

The last Rambler was written in a sad and gloomy hour.  Mrs
Johnson had been given over by the physicians.  Three days later
she died.  She left her husband almost broken-hearted.  Many
people had been surprised to see a man of his genius and learning
stooping to every drudgery, and denying himself almost every
comfort, for the purpose of supplying a silly, affected old woman
with superfluities, which she accepted with but little gratitude. 
But all his affection had been concentrated on her.  He had
neither brother nor sister, neither son nor daughter.  To him she
was beautiful as the Gunnings, and witty as Lady Mary.  Her
opinion of his writings was more important to him than the voice
of the pit of Drury Lane Theatre or the judgment of the Monthly
Review.  The chief support which had sustained him through the
most arduous labour of his life was the hope that she would enjoy
the fame and the profit which he anticipated from his Dictionary. 
She was gone; and in that vast labyrinth of streets, peopled by
eight hundred thousand human beings, he was alone.  Yet it was
necessary for him to set himself, as he expressed it, doggedly to
work.  After three more laborious years, the Dictionary was at
length complete.

It had been generally supposed that this great work would be
dedicated to the eloquent and accomplished nobleman to whom the
prospectus had been addressed.  He well knew the value of such a
compliment; and therefore, when the day of publication drew near,
he exerted himself to soothe, by a show of zealous and at the
same time of delicate and judicious kindness, the pride which he
had so cruelly wounded.  Since the Ramblers had ceased to appear,
the town had been entertained by a journal called the World, to
which many men of high rank and fashion contributed.  In two
successive numbers of the World the Dictionary was, to use the
modern phrase, puffed with wonderful skill.  The writings of
Johnson were warmly praised.  It was proposed that he should be
invested with the authority of a Dictator, nay, of a Pope, over
our language, and that his decisions about the meaning and the
spelling of words should be received as final.  His two folios,
it was said, would of course be bought by everybody who could
afford to buy them.  It was soon known that these papers were
written by Chesterfield.  But the just resentment of Johnson was
not to be so appeased.  In a letter written with singular energy
and dignity of thought and language, he repelled the tardy
advances of his patron.  The Dictionary came forth without a
dedication.  In the preface the author truly declared that he
owed nothing to the great, and described the difficulties with
which he had been left to struggle so forcibly and pathetically
that the ablest and most malevolent of all the enemies of his
fame, Horne Tooke, never could read that passage without tears.

The public, on this occasion, did Johnson full justice, and
something more than justice.  The best lexicographer may well be
content if his productions are received by the world with cold
esteem.  But Johnson's Dictionary was hailed with an enthusiasm
such as no similar work has ever excited.  It was indeed the
first dictionary which could be read with pleasure.  The
definitions show so much acuteness of thought and command of
language, and the passages quoted from poets, divines, and
philosophers are so skilfully selected, that a leisure hour may
always be very agreeably spent in turning over the pages.  The
faults of the book resolve themselves, for the most part, into
one great fault.  Johnson was a wretched etymologist.  He knew
little or nothing of any Teutonic language except English, which
indeed, as he wrote it, was scarcely a Teutonic language; and
thus he was absolutely at the mercy of Junius and Skinner.

The Dictionary, though it raised Johnson's fame, added nothing to
his pecuniary means.  The fifteen hundred guineas which the
booksellers had agreed to pay him had been advanced and spent
before the last sheets issued from the press.  It is painful to
relate that, twice in the course of the year which followed the
publication of this great work, he was arrested and carried to
spunging-houses, and that he was twice indebted for his liberty
to his excellent friend Richardson.  It was still necessary for
the man who had been formally saluted by the highest authority as
Dictator of the English language to supply his wants by constant
toil.  He abridged his Dictionary.  He proposed to bring out an
edition of Shakspeare by subscription; and many subscribers sent
in their names and laid down their money; but he soon found the
task so little to his taste that he turned to more attractive
employments.  He contributed many papers to a new monthly
journal, which was called the Literary Magazine.  Few of these
papers have much interest; but among them was the very best thing
that he ever wrote, a masterpiece both of reasoning and of
satirical pleasantry, the review of Jenyn's Inquiry into the
Nature and Origin of Evil.

In the spring of 1758 Johnson put forth the first of a series of
essays, entitled the Idler.  During two years these essays
continued to appear weekly.  They were eagerly read, widely
circulated, and indeed, impudently pirated, while they were still
in the original form, and had a large sale when collected into
volumes.  The Idler may be described as a second part of the
Rambler, somewhat livelier and somewhat weaker than the first
part.

While Johnson was busied with his Idlers, his mother, who had
accomplished her ninetieth year, died at Lichfield.  It was long
since he had seen her; but he had not failed to contribute
largely, out of his small means, to her comfort.  In order to
defray the charges of her funeral, and to pay some debts which
she had left, he wrote a little book in a single week, and sent
off the sheets to the press without reading them over.  A hundred
pounds were paid him for the copyright; and the purchasers had
great cause to be pleased with their bargain; for the book was
Rasselas.

The success of Rasselas was great, though such ladies as Miss
Lydia Languish must have been grievously disappointed when they
found that the new volume from the circulating library was little
more than a dissertation on the author's favourite theme, the
Vanity of Human Wishes; that the Prince of Abyssinia was without
a mistress, and the princess without a lover; and that the story
set the hero and the heroine down exactly where it had taken them
up.  The style was the subject of much eager controversy.  The
Monthly Review and the Critical Review took different sides. 
Many readers pronounced the writer a pompous pedant, who would
never use a word of two syllables where it was possible to use a
word of six, and who could not make a waiting woman relate her
adventures without balancing every noun with another noun, and
every epithet with another epithet.  Another party, not less
zealous, cited with delight numerous passages in which weighty
meaning was expressed with accuracy and illustrated with
splendour.  And both the censure and the praise were merited.

About the plan of Rasselas little was said by the critics; and
yet the faults of the plan might seem to invite severe criticism. 
Johnson has frequently blamed Shakspeare for neglecting the
proprieties of time and place, and for ascribing to one age or
nation the manners and opinions of another.  Yet Shakspeare has
not sinned in this way more grievously than Johnson.  Rasselas
and Imlac, Nekayah and Pekuah, are evidently meant to be
Abyssinians of the eighteenth century:  for the Europe which
Imlac describes is the Europe of the eighteenth century; and the
inmates of the Happy Valley talk familiarly of that law of
gravitation which Newton discovered, and which was not fully
received even at Cambridge till the eighteenth century.  What a
real company of Abyssinians would have been may be learned from
Bruce's Travels.  But Johnson, not content with turning filthy
savages, ignorant of their letters, and gorged with raw steaks
cut from living cows, into philosophers as eloquent and
enlightened as himself or his friend Burke, and into ladies as
highly accomplished as Mrs Lennox or Mrs Sheridan, transferred
the whole domestic system of England to Egypt.  Into a land of
harems, a land of polygamy, a land where women are married
without ever being seen, he introduced the flirtations and
jealousies of our ball-rooms.  In a land where there is boundless
liberty of divorce, wedlock is described as the indissoluble
compact.  "A youth and maiden meeting by chance, or brought
together by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities,
go home, and dream of each other.  Such," says Rasselas, "is the
common process of marriage."  Such it may have been, and may
still be, in London, but assuredly not at Cairo.  A writer who
was guilty of such improprieties had little right to blame the
poet who made Hector quote Aristotle, and represented Julio
Romano as flourishing in the days of the oracle of Delphi.

By such exertions as have been described, Johnson supported
himself till the year 1762.  In that year a great change in his
circumstances took place.  He had from a child been an enemy of
the reigning dynasty.  His Jacobite prejudices had been exhibited
with little disguise both in his works and in his conversation. 
Even in his massy and elaborate Dictionary, he had, with a
strange want of taste and judgment, inserted bitter and
contumelious reflections on the Whig party.  The excise, which
was a favourite resource of Whig financiers, he had designated as
a hateful tax.  He had railed against the commissioners of excise
in language so coarse that they had seriously thought of
prosecuting him.  He had with difficulty been prevented from
holding up the Lord Privy Seal by name as an example of the
meaning of the word "renegade."  A pension he had defined as pay
given to a state hireling to betray his country; a pensioner as a
slave of state hired by a stipend to obey a master.  It seemed
unlikely that the author of these definitions would himself be
pensioned.  But that was a time of wonders.  George the Third had
ascended the throne; and had, in the course of a few months,
disgusted many of the old friends and conciliated many of the old
enemies of his house.  The city was becoming mutinous.  Oxford
was becoming loyal.  Cavendishes and Bentincks were murmuring. 
Somersets and Wyndhams were hastening to kiss hands.  The head of
the treasury was now Lord Bute, who was a Tory, and could have no
objection to Johnson's Toryism.  Bute wished to be thought a
patron of men of letters; and Johnson was one of the most eminent
and one of the most needy men of letters in Europe.  A pension of
three hundred a year was graciously offered, and with very little
hesitation accepted.

This event produced a change in Johnson's whole way of life.  For
the first time since his boyhood he no longer felt the daily goad
urging him to the daily toil.  He was at liberty, after thirty
years of anxiety and drudgery, to indulge his constitutional
indolence, to lie in bed till two in the afternoon, and to sit up
talking till four in the morning, without fearing either the
printer's devil or the sheriff's officer.

One laborious task indeed he had bound himself to perform.  He
had received large subscriptions for his promised edition of
Shakspeare; he had lived on those subscriptions during some
years:  and he could not without disgrace omit to perform his
part of the contract.  His friends repeatedly exhorted him to
make an effort; and he repeatedly resolved to do so.  But,
notwithstanding their exhortations and his resolutions, month
followed month, year followed year, and nothing was done.  He
prayed fervently against his idleness; he determined, as often as
he received the sacrament, that he would no longer doze away and
trifle away his time; but the spell under which he lay resisted
prayer and sacrament.  His private notes at this time are made up
of self-reproaches.  "My indolence," he wrote on Easter Eve in
1764, "has sunk into grosser sluggishness.  A kind of strange
oblivion has overspread me, so that I know not what has become of
the last year."  Easter 1765 came, and found him still in the
same state.  "My time," he wrote, "has been unprofitably spent,
and seems as a dream that has left nothing behind.  My memory
grows confused, and I know not how the days pass over me." 
Happily for his honour, the charm which held him captive was at
length broken by no gentle or friendly hand.  He had been weak
enough to pay serious attention to a story about a ghost which
haunted a house in Cock Lane, and had actually gone himself with
some of his friends, at one in the morning, to St John's Church,
Clerkenwell, in the hope of receiving a communication from the
perturbed spirit.  But the spirit, though adjured with all
solemnity, remained obstinately silent; and it soon appeared that
a naughty girl of eleven had been amusing herself by making fools
of so many philosophers.  Churchill, who, confidant in his
powers, drunk with popularity, and burning with party spirit, was
looking for some man of established fame and Tory politics to
insult, celebrated the Cock Lane Ghost in three cantos, nicknamed
Johnson Pomposo, asked where the book was which had been so long
promised and so liberally paid for, and directly accused the
great moralist of cheating.  This terrible word proved effectual;
and in October 1765 appeared, after a delay of nine years, the
new edition of Shakspeare.

This publication saved Johnson's character for honesty, but added
nothing to the fame of his abilities and learning.  The preface,
though it contains some good passages, is not in his best manner. 
The most valuable notes are those in which he had an opportunity
of showing how attentively he had during many years observed
human life and human nature.  The best specimen is the note on
the character of Polonius.  Nothing so good is to be found even
in Wilhelm Meister's admirable examination of Hamlet.  But here
praise must end.  It would be difficult to name a more slovenly,
a more worthless edition of any great classic.  The reader may
turn over play after play without finding one happy conjectural
emendation, or one ingenious and satisfactory explanation of a
passage which had baffled preceding commentators.  Johnson had,
in his prospectus, told the world that he was peculiarly fitted
for the task which he had undertaken, because he had, as a
lexicographer, been under the necessity of taking a wider view of
the English language than any of his predecessors.  That his
knowledge of our literature was extensive is indisputable.  But,
unfortunately, he had altogether neglected that very part of our
literature with which it is especially desirable that an editor
of Shakspeare should be conversant.  It is dangerous to assert a
negative.  Yet little will be risked by the assertion, that in
the two folio volumes of the English Dictionary there is not a
single passage quoted from any dramatist of the Elizabethan age,
except Shakspeare and Ben.  Even from Ben the quotations are few. 
Johnson might easily, in a few months, have made himself well
acquainted with every old play that was extant.  But it never
seems to have occurred to him that this was a necessary
preparation for the work which he had undertaken.  He would
doubtless have admitted that it would be the height of absurdity
in a man who was not familiar with the works of Aeschylus and
Euripides to publish an edition of Sophocles.  Yet he ventured to
publish an edition of Shakspeare, without having ever in his
life, as far as can be discovered, read a single scene of
Massinger, Ford, Decker, Webster, Marlow, Beaumont, or Fletcher.
His detractors were noisy and scurrilous.  Those who most loved
and honoured him had little to say in praise of the manner in
which he had discharged the duty of a commentator.  He had,
however, acquitted himself of a debt which had long lain on his
conscience; and he sank back into the repose from which the sting
of satire had roused him.  He long continued to live upon the
fame which he had already won.  He was honoured by the University
of Oxford with a Doctor's degree, by the Royal Academy with a
professorship, and by the King with an interview, in which his
Majesty most graciously expressed a hope that so excellent a
writer would not cease to write.  In the interval, however,
between 1765 and 1775 Johnson published only two or three
political tracks, the longest of which he could have produced in
forty-eight hours, if he had worked as he worked on the life of
Savage and on Rasselas.

But, though his pen was now idle, his tongue was active.  The
influence exercised by his conversation, directly upon those with
whom he lived, and indirectly on the whole literary world, was
altogether without a parallel.  His colloquial talents were
indeed of the highest order.  He had strong sense, quick
discernment, wit, humour, immense knowledge of literature and of
life, and an infinite store of curious anecdotes.  As respected
style, he spoke far better than he wrote.  Every sentence which
dropped from his lips was as correct in structure as the most
nicely balanced period of the Rambler.  But in his talk there was
no pompous triads, and little more than a fair proportion of
words in "osity" and "ation".  All was simplicity, ease, and
vigour.  He uttered his short, weighty, and pointed sentences
with a power of voice, and a justness and energy of emphasis, of
which the effect was rather increased than diminished by the
rollings of his huge form, and by the asthmatic gaspings and
puffings in which the peals of his eloquence generally ended. 
Nor did the laziness which made him unwilling to sit down to his
desk prevent him from giving instruction or entertainment orally. 
To discuss questions of taste, of learning, casuistry, in
language so exact and so forcible that it might have been printed
without the alteration of a word, was to him no exertion, but a
pleasure.  He loved, as he said, to fold his legs and have his
talk out.  He was ready to bestow the overflowings of his full
mind on anybody who would start a subject, on a fellow-passenger
in a stage coach, or on the person who sate at the same table
with him in an eating-house.  But his conversation was nowhere so
brilliant and striking as when he was surrounded by a few
friends, whose abilities and knowledge enabled them, as he once
expressed it, to send him back every ball that he threw.  Some of
these, in 1764, formed themselves into a club, which gradually
became a formidable power in the commonwealth of letters.  The
verdicts pronounced by this conclave on new books were speedily
known over all London, and were sufficient to sell off a whole
edition in a day, or to condemn the sheets to the service of the
trunk-maker and the pastry-cook.  Nor shall we think this strange
when we consider what great and various talents and acquirements
met in the little fraternity.  Goldsmith was the representative
of poetry and light literature, Reynolds of the arts, Burke of
political eloquence and political philosophy.  There, too, were
Gibbon, the greatest historian, and Jones, the greatest linguist,
of the age.  Garrick brought to the meetings his inexhaustible
pleasantry, his incomparable mimicry, and his consummate
knowledge of stage effect.  Among the most constant attendants
were two high-born and high-bred gentlemen, closely bound
together by friendship, but of widely different characters and
habits; Bennet Langton, distinguished by his skill in Greek
literature, by the orthodoxy of his opinions, and by the sanctity
of his life; and Topham Beauclerk, renowned for his amours, his
knowledge of the gay world, his fastidious taste, and his
sarcastic wit.  To predominate over such a society was not easy. 
Yet even over such a society Johnson predominated.  Burke might
indeed have disputed the supremacy to which others were under the
necessity of submitting.  But Burke, though not generally a very
patient listener, was content to take the second part when
Johnson was present; and the club itself, consisting of so many
eminent men, is to this day popularly designated as Johnson's
Club.

Among the members of this celebrated body was one to whom it has
owed the greater part of its celebrity, yet who was regarded with
little respect by his brethren, and had not without difficulty
obtained a seat among them.  This was James Boswell, a young
Scotch lawyer, heir to an honourable name and a fair estate. 
That he was a coxcomb and a bore, weak, vain, pushing, curious,
garrulous, was obvious to all who were acquainted with him.  That
he could not reason, that he had no wit, no humour, no eloquence,
is apparent from his writings.  And yet his writings are read
beyond the Mississippi, and under the Southern Cross, and are
likely to be read as long as the English exists, either as a
living or as a dead language.  Nature had made him a slave and an
idolater.  His mind resembles those creepers which the botanists
call parasites, and which can subsist only by clinging round the
stems and imbibing the juices of stronger plants.  He must have
fastened himself on somebody.  He might have fastened himself on
Wilkes, and have become the fiercest patriot in the Bill of
Rights Society.  He might have fastened himself on Whitfield, and
have become the loudest field preacher among the Calvinistic
Methodists.  In a happy hour he fastened himself on Johnson.  The
pair might seem ill matched.  For Johnson had early been
prejudiced against Boswell's country.  To a man of Johnson's
strong understanding and irritable temper, the silly egotism and
adulation of Boswell must have been as teasing as the constant
buzz of a fly.  Johnson hated to be questioned; and Boswell was
eternally catechising him on all kinds of subjects, and sometimes
propounded such questions as "What would you do, sir, if you were
locked up in a tower with a baby?"  Johnson was a water drinker;
and Boswell was a wine-bibber, and indeed little better than a
habitual sot.  It was impossible that there should be perfect
harmony between two such companions.  Indeed, the great man was
sometimes provoked into fits of passion in which he said things
which the small man, during a few hours, seriously resented. 
Every quarrel, however, was soon made up.  During twenty years
the disciple continued to worship the master:  the master
continued to scold the disciple, to sneer at him, and to love
him.  The two friends ordinarily resided at a great distance from
each other.  Boswell practised in the Parliament House of
Edinburgh, and could pay only occasional visits to London. 
During those visits his chief business was to watch Johnson, to
discover all Johnson's habits, to turn the conversation to
subjects about which Johnson was likely to say something
remarkable, and to fill quarto note books with minutes of what
Johnson had said.  In this way were gathered the materials out of
which was afterwards constructed the most interesting
biographical work in the world.

Soon after the club began to exist, Johnson formed a connection
less important indeed to his fame, but much more important to his
happiness, than his connection with Boswell.  Henry Thrale, one
of the most opulent brewers in the kingdom, a man of sound and
cultivated understanding, rigid principles, and liberal spirit,
was married to one of those clever, kind-hearted, engaging, vain,
pert young women, who are perpetually doing or saying what is not
exactly right, but who, do or say what they may, are always
agreeable.  In 1765 the Thrales became acquainted with Johnson;
and the acquaintance ripened fast into friendship.  They were
astonished and delighted by the brilliancy of his conversation. 
They were flattered by finding that a man so widely celebrated,
preferred their house to any other in London.  Even the
peculiarities which seemed to unfit him for civilised society,
his gesticulations, his rollings, his puffings, his mutterings,
the strange way in which he put on his clothes, the ravenous
eagerness with which he devoured his dinner, his fits of
melancholy, his fits of anger, his frequent rudeness, his
occasional ferocity, increased the interest which his new
associates took in him.  For these things were the cruel marks
left behind by a life which had been one long conflict with
disease and with adversity.  In a vulgar hack writer such
oddities would have excited only disgust.  But in a man of
genius, learning, and virtue their effect was to add pity to
admiration and esteem.  Johnson soon had an apartment at the
brewery in Southwark, and a still more pleasant apartment at the
villa of his friends on Streatham Common.  A large part of every
year he passed in those abodes, abodes which must have seemed
magnificent and luxurious indeed, when compared with the dens in
which he had generally been lodged.  But his chief pleasures were
derived from what the astronomer of his Abyssinian tale called
"the endearing elegance of female friendship."  Mrs Thrale
rallied him, soothed him, coaxed him, and, if she sometimes
provoked him by her flippancy, made ample amends by listening to
his reproofs with angelic sweetness of temper.  When he was
diseased in body and in mind, she was the most tender of nurses. 
No comfort that wealth could purchase, no contrivance that
womanly ingenuity, set to work by womanly compassion, could
devise, was wanting to his sick-room.  He requited her kindness
by an affection pure as the affection of a father, yet delicately
tinged with a gallantry, which, though awkward, must have been
more flattering than the attentions of a crowd of the fools who
gloried in the names, now obsolete, of Buck and Maccaroni.  It
should seem that a full half of Johnson's life, during about
sixteen years, was passed under the roof of the Thrales.  He
accompanied the family sometimes to Bath, and sometimes to
Brighton, once to Wales, and once to Paris.  But he had at the
same time a house in one of the narrow and gloomy courts on the
north of Fleet Street.  In the garrets was his library, a large
and miscellaneous collection of books, falling to pieces and
begrimed with dust.  On a lower floor he sometimes, but very
rarely, regaled a friend with a plain dinner, a veal pie, or a
leg of lamb and spinage, and a rice pudding.  Nor was the
dwelling uninhabited during his long absences.  It was the home
of the most extraordinary assemblage of inmates that ever was
brought together.  At the head of the establishment Johnson had
placed an old lady named Williams, whose chief recommendations
were her blindness and her poverty.  But, in spite of her murmurs
and reproaches, he gave an asylum to another lady who was as poor
as herself, Mrs Desmoulins, whose family he had known many years
before in Staffordshire.  Room was found for the daughter of Mrs
Desmoulins, and for another destitute damsel, who was generally
addressed as Miss Carmichael, but whom her generous host called
Polly.  An old quack doctor named Levett, who bled and dosed
coal-heavers and hackney coachmen, and received for fees crusts
of bread, bits of bacon, glasses of gin, and sometimes a little
copper, completed this strange menagerie.  All these poor
creatures were at constant war with each other, and with
Johnson's negro servant Frank.  Sometimes, indeed, they
transferred their hostilities from the servant to the master,
complained that a better table was not kept for them, and railed
or maundered till their benefactor was glad to make his escape to
Streatham, or to the Mitre Tavern.  And yet he, who was generally
the haughtiest and most irritable of mankind, who was but too
prompt to resent anything which looked like a slight on the part
of a purse-proud bookseller, or of a noble and powerful patron,
bore patiently from mendicants, who, but for his bounty, must
have gone to the workhouse, insults more provoking than those for
which he had knocked down Osborne and bidden defiance to
Chesterfield.  Year after year Mrs Desmoulins, Polly, and Levett,
continued to torment him and to live upon him.

The course of life which has been described was interrupted in
Johnson's sixty-fourth year by an important event.  He had early
read an account of the Hebrides, and had been much interested by
learning that there was so near him a land peopled by a race
which was still as rude and simple as in the middle ages.  A wish
to become intimately acquainted with a state of society so
utterly unlike all that he had ever seen frequently crossed his
mind.  But it is not probable that his curiosity would have
overcome his habitual sluggishness, and his love of the smoke,
the mud, and the cries of London, had not Boswell importuned him
to attempt the adventure, and offered to be his squire.  At
length, in August 1773, Johnson crossed the Highland line, and
plunged courageously into what was then considered, by most
Englishmen, as a dreary and perilous wilderness.  After wandering
about two months through the Celtic region, sometimes in rude
boats which did not protect him from the rain, and sometimes on
small shaggy ponies which could hardly bear his weight, he
returned to his old haunts with a mind full of new images and new
theories.  During the following year he employed himself in
recording his adventures.  About the beginning of 1775, his
Journey to the Hebrides was published, and was, during some
weeks, the chief subject of conversation in all circles in which
any attention was paid to literature.  The book is still read
with pleasure.  The narrative is entertaining; the speculations,
whether sound or unsound, are always ingenious; and the style,
though too stiff and pompous, is somewhat easier and more
graceful than that of his early writings.  His prejudice against
the Scotch had at length become little more than matter of jest;
and whatever remained of the old feeling had been effectually
removed by the kind and respectful hospitality with which he had
been received in every part of Scotland.  It was, of course, not
to be expected that an Oxonian Tory should praise the
Presbyterian polity and ritual, or that an eye accustomed to the
hedgerows and parks of England should not be struck by the
bareness of Berwickshire and East Lothian.  But even in censure
Johnson's tone is not unfriendly.  The most enlightened
Scotchmen, with Lord Mansfield at their head, were well pleased. 
But some foolish and ignorant Scotchmen were moved to anger by a
little unpalatable truth which was mingled with much eulogy, and
assailed him whom they chose to consider as the enemy of their
country with libels much more dishonourable to their country than
anything that he had ever said or written.  They published
paragraphs in the newspapers, articles in the magazines, sixpenny
pamphlets, five-shilling books.  One scribbler abused Johnson for
being blear-eyed; another for being a pensioner; a third informed
the world that one of the Doctor's uncles had been convicted of
felony in Scotland, and had found that there was in that country
one tree capable of supporting the weight of an Englishman. 
Macpherson, whose Fingal had been proved in the Journey to be an
impudent forgery, threatened to take vengeance with a cane.  The
only effect of this threat was that Johnson reiterated the charge
of forgery in the most contemptuous terms, and walked about,
during some time, with a cudgel, which, if the impostor had not
been too wise to encounter it, would assuredly have descended
upon him, to borrow the sublime language of his own epic poem,
"like a hammer on the red son of the furnace."

Of other assailants Johnson took no notice whatever.  He had
early resolved never to be drawn into controversy; and he adhered
to his resolution with a steadfastness which is the more
extraordinary, because he was, both intellectually and morally,
of the stuff of which controversialists are made.  In
conversation, he was a singularly eager, acute, and pertinacious
disputant.  When at a loss for good reasons, he had recourse to
sophistry; and, when heated by altercation, he made unsparing use
of sarcasm and invective.  But, when he took his pen in his hand,
his whole character seemed to be changed.  A hundred bad writers
misrepresented him and reviled him; but not one of the hundred
could boast of having been thought by him worthy of a refutation,
or even of a retort.  The Kenricks, Campbells, MacNicols, and
Hendersons, did their best to annoy him, in the hope that he
would give them importance by answering them.  But the reader
will in vain search his works for any allusion to Kenrick or
Campbell, to MacNicol or Henderson.  One Scotchman, bent on
vindicating the fame of Scotch learning, defied him to the combat
in a detestable Latin hexameter.

"Maxime, si tu vis, cupio contendere tecum."

But Johnson took no notice of the challenge.  He had learned,
both from his own observation and from literary history, in which
he was deeply read, that the place of books in the public
estimation is fixed, not by what is written about them, but by
what is written in them; and that an author whose works are
likely to live is very unwise if he stoops to wrangle with
detractors whose works are certain to die.  He always maintained
that fame was a shuttlecock which could be kept up only by being
beaten back, as well as beaten forward, and which would soon fall
if there were only one battledore.  No saying was oftener in his
mouth than that fine apophthegm of Bentley, that no man was ever
written down but by himself.

Unhappily, a few months after the appearance of the Journey to
the Hebrides, Johnson did what none of his envious assailants
could have done, and to a certain extent succeeded in writing
himself down.  The disputes between England and her American
colonies had reached a point at which no amicable adjustment was
possible.  Civil war was evidently impending; and the ministers
seem to have thought that the eloquence of Johnson might with
advantage be employed to inflame the nation against the
opposition here, and against the rebels beyond the Atlantic.  He
had already written two or three tracts in defence of the foreign
and domestic policy of the government; and those tracts, though
hardly worthy of him, were much superior to the crowd of
pamphlets which lay on the counters of Almon and Stockdale.  But
his Taxation No Tyranny was a pitiable failure.  The very title
was a silly phrase, which can have been recommended to his choice
by nothing but a jingling alliteration which he ought to have
despised.  The arguments were such as boys use in debating
societies.  The pleasantry was as awkward as the gambols of a
hippopotamus.  Even Boswell was forced to own that, in this
unfortunate piece, he could detect no trace of his master's
powers.  The general opinion was that the strong faculties which
had produced the Dictionary and the Rambler were beginning to
feel the effect of time and of disease, and that the old man
would best consult his credit by writing no more.

But this was a great mistake.  Johnson had failed, not because
his mind was less vigorous than when he wrote Rasselas in the
evenings of a week, but because he had foolishly chosen, or
suffered others to choose for him, a subject such as he would at
no time have been competent to treat.  He was in no sense a
statesman.  He never willingly read or thought or talked about
affairs of state.  He loved biography, literary history, the
history of manners; but political history was positively
distasteful to him.  The question at issue between the colonies
and the mother country was a question about which he had really
nothing to say.  He failed, therefore, as the greatest men must
fail when they attempt to do that for which they are unfit; as
Burke would have failed if Burke had tried to write comedies like
those of Sheridan; as Reynolds would have failed if Reynolds had
tried to paint landscapes like those of Wilson.  Happily, Johnson
soon had an opportunity of proving most signally that his failure
was not to be ascribed to intellectual decay.

On Easter Eve 1777, some persons, deputed by a meeting which
consisted of forty of the first booksellers in London, called
upon him.  Though he had some scruples about doing business at
that season, he received his visitors with much civility.  They
came to inform him that a new edition of the English poets, from
Cowley downwards, was in contemplation, and to ask him to furnish
short biographical prefaces.  He readily undertook the task, a
task for which he was pre-eminently qualified.  His knowledge of
the literary history of England since the Restoration was
unrivalled.  That knowledge he had derived partly from books, and
partly from sources which had long been closed; from old Grub
Street traditions; from the talk of forgotten poetasters and
pamphleteers who had long been lying in parish vaults; from the
recollections of such men as Gilbert Walmesley, who had conversed
with the wits of Button; Cibber, who had mutilated the plays of
two generations of dramatists; Orrery, who had been admitted to
the society of Swift; and Savage, who had rendered services of no
very honourable kind to Pope.  The biographer therefore sate down
to his task with a mind full of matter.  He had at first intended
to give only a paragraph to every minor poet, and only four or
five pages to the greatest name.  But the flood of anecdote and
criticism overflowed the narrow channel.  The work, which was
originally meant to consist only of a few sheets, swelled into
ten volumes, small volumes, it is true, and not closely printed. 
The first four appeared in 1779, the remaining six in 1781.

The Lives of the Poets are, on the whole, the best of Johnson's
works.  The narratives are as entertaining as any novel.  The
remarks on life and on human nature are eminently shrewd and
profound.  The criticisms are often excellent, and, even when
grossly and provokingly unjust, well deserve to be studied.  For,
however erroneous they may be, they are never silly.  They are
the judgments of a mind trammelled by prejudice and deficient in
sensibility, but vigorous and acute.  They therefore generally
contain a portion of valuable truth which deserves to be
separated from the alloy; and, at the very worst, they mean
something, a praise to which much of what is called criticism in
our time has no pretensions.

Savage's Life Johnson reprinted nearly as it had appeared in
1744.  Whoever, after reading that life, will turn to the other
lives will be struck by the difference of style.  Since Johnson
had been at ease in his circumstances he had written little and
had talked much.  When, therefore, he, after the lapse of years,
resumed his pen, the mannerism which he had contracted while he
was in the constant habit of elaborate composition was less
perceptible than formerly; and his diction frequently had a
colloquial ease which it had formerly wanted.  The improvement
may be discerned by a skilful critic in the Journey to the
Hebrides, and in the Lives of the Poets is so obvious that it
cannot escape the notice of the most careless reader.

Among the lives the best are perhaps those of Cowley, Dryden, and
Pope.  The very worst is, beyond all doubt, that of Gray.

This great work at once became popular.  There was, indeed, much
just and much unjust censure:  but even those who were loudest in
blame were attracted by the book in spite of themselves.  Malone
computed the gains of the publishers at five or six thousand
pounds.  But the writer was very poorly remunerated.  Intending
at first to write very short prefaces, he had stipulated for only
two hundred guineas.  The booksellers, when they saw how far his
performance had surpassed his promise, added only another
hundred.  Indeed, Johnson, though he did not despise, or affect
to despise, money, and though his strong sense and long
experience ought to have qualified him to protect his own
interests, seems to have been singularly unskilful and unlucky in
his literary bargains.  He was generally reputed the first
English writer of his time.  Yet several writers of his time sold
their copyrights for sums such as he never ventured to ask.  To
give a single instance, Robertson received four thousand five
hundred pounds for the History of Charles V.; and it is no
disrespect to the memory of Robertson to say that the History of
Charles V. is both a less valuable and a less amusing book than
the Lives of the Poets.

Johnson was now in his seventy-second year.  The infirmities of
age were coming fast upon him.  That inevitable event of which he
never thought without horror was brought near to him; and his
whole life was darkened by the shadow of death.  He had often to
pay the cruel price of longevity.  Every year he lost what could
never be replaced.  The strange dependents to whom he had given
shelter, and to whom, in spite of their faults, he was strongly
attached by habit, dropped off one by one; and, in the silence of
his home, he regretted even the noise of their scolding matches. 
The kind and generous Thrale was no more; and it would have been
well if his wife had been laid beside him.  But she survived to
be the laughing-stock of those who had envied her, and to draw
from the eyes of the old man who had loved her beyond anything in
the world tears far more bitter than he would have shed over her
grave.  With some estimable and many agreeable qualities, she was
not made to be independent.  The control of a mind more steadfast
than her own was necessary to her respectability.  While she was
restrained by her husband, a man of sense and firmness, indulgent
to her taste in trifles, but always the undisputed master of his
house, her worst offences had been impertinent jokes, white lies,
and short fits of pettishness ending in sunny good humour.  But
he was gone; and she was left an opulent widow of forty, with
strong sensibility, volatile fancy, and slender judgment.  She
soon fell in love with a music-master from Brescia, in whom
nobody but herself could discover anything to admire.  Her pride,
and perhaps some better feelings, struggled hard against this
degrading passion.  But the struggle irritated her nerves, soured
her temper, and at length endangered her health.  Conscious that
her choice was one which Johnson could not approve, she became
desirous to escape from his inspection.  Her manner towards him
changed.  She was sometimes cold and sometimes petulant.  She did
not conceal her joy when he left Streatham; she never pressed him
to return; and, if he came unbidden, she received him in a manner
which convinced him that he was no longer a welcome guest.  He
took the very intelligible hints which she gave.  He read, for
the last time, a chapter of the Greek testament in the library
which had been formed by himself.  In a solemn and tender prayer
he commended the house and its inmates to the Divine protection,
and, with emotions which choked his voice and convulsed his
powerful frame, left for ever that beloved home for the gloomy
and desolate house behind Fleet Street, where the few and evil
days which still remained to him were to run out.  Here, in June
1783, he had a paralytic stroke, from which, however, he
recovered, and which does not appear to have at all impaired his
intellectual faculties.  But other maladies came thick upon him. 
His asthma tormented him day and night.  Dropsical symptoms made
their appearance.  While sinking under a complication of
diseases, he heard that the woman whose friendship had been the
chief happiness of sixteen years of his life had married an
Italian fiddler; that all London was crying shame upon her; and
that the newspapers and magazines were filled with allusions to
the Ephesian matron, and the two pictures in Hamlet.  He
vehemently said that he would try to forget her existence.  He
never uttered her name.  Every memorial of her which met his eye
he flung into the fire.  She meanwhile fled from the laughter and
hisses of her countrymen and countrywomen to a land where she was
unknown, hastened across Mount Cenis, and learned, while passing
a merry Christmas of concerts and lemonade parties at Milan, that
the great man with whose name hers is inseparably associated had
ceased to exist.

He had, in spite of much mental and much bodily affliction, clung
vehemently to life.  The feeling described in that fine but
gloomy paper which closes the series of his Idlers seemed to grow
stronger in him as his last hour drew near.  He fancied that he
should be able to draw his breath more easily in a southern
climate, and would probably have set out for Rome and Naples, but
for his fear of the expense of the journey.  That expense,
indeed, he had the means of defraying; for he had laid up about
two thousand pounds, the fruit of labours which had made the
fortune of several publishers.  But he was unwilling to break in
upon this hoard; and he seems to have wished even to keep its
existence a secret.  Some of his friends hoped that the
government might be induced to increase his pension to six
hundred pounds a year:  but this hope was disappointed; and he
resolved to stand one English winter more.  That winter was his
last.  His legs grew weaker; his breath grew shorter; the fatal
water gathered fast, in spite of incisions which he, courageous
against pain, but timid against death, urged his surgeons to make
deeper and deeper.  Though the tender care which had mitigated
his sufferings during months of sickness at Streatham was
withdrawn, he was not left desolate.  The ablest physicians and
surgeons attended him, and refused to accept fees from him. 
Burke parted from him with deep emotion.  Windham sate much in
the sick room, arranged the pillows, and sent his own servant to
watch a night by the bed.  Frances Burney, whom the old man had
cherished with fatherly kindness, stood weeping at the door;
while Langton, whose piety eminently qualified him to be an
adviser and comforter at such a time, received the last pressure
of his friend's hand within.  When at length the moment, dreaded
through so many years, came close, the dark cloud passed away
from Johnson's mind.  His temper became unusually patient and
gentle; he ceased to think with terror of death, and of that
which lies beyond death; and he spoke much of the mercy of God,
and of the propitiation of Christ.  In this serene frame of mind
he died on the 13th of December 1784.  He was laid, a week later,
in Westminster Abbey, among the eminent men of whom he had been
the historian,--Cowley and Denham, Dryden and Congreve, Gay,
Prior, and Addison.

Since his death the popularity of his works--the Lives of the
Poets, and, perhaps, the Vanity of Human Wishes, excepted--has
greatly diminished.  His Dictionary has been altered by editors
till it can scarcely be called his.  An allusion to his Rambler
or his Idler is not readily apprehended in literary circles.  The
fame even of Rasselas has grown somewhat dim.  But, though the
celebrity of the writings may have declined, the celebrity of the
writer, strange to say, is as great as ever.  Boswell's book has
done for him more than the best of his own books could do.  The
memory of other authors is kept alive by their works.  But the
memory of Johnson keeps many of his works alive.  The old
philosopher is still among us in the brown coat with the metal
buttons and the shirt which ought to be at wash, blinking,
puffing, rolling his head, drumming with his fingers, tearing his
meat like a tiger, and swallowing his tea in oceans.  No human
being who has been more than seventy years in the grave is so
well known to us.  And it is but just to say that our intimate
acquaintance with what he would himself have called the
anfractuosities of his intellect and of his temper serves only to
strengthen our conviction that he was both a great and a good
man.

...



WILLIAM PITT.

(January 1859.)

William Pitt, the second son of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham,
and of Lady Hester Granville, daughter of Hester Countess Temple,
was born on the 28th of May 1759.  The child inherited a name
which, at the time of his birth, was the most illustrious in the
civilised world, and was pronounced by every Englishman with
pride, and by every enemy of England with mingled admiration and
terror.  During the first year of his life, every month had its
illuminations and bonfires, and every wind brought some messenger
charged with joyful tidings and hostile standards.  In Westphalia
the English infantry won a great battle which arrested the armies
of Louis the Fifteenth in the midst of a career of conquest;
Boscawen defeated one French fleet on the coast of Portugal;
Hawke put to flight another in the Bay of Biscay; Johnson took
Niagara; Amherst took Ticonderoga; Wolfe died by the most
enviable of deaths under the walls of Quebec; Clive destroyed a
Dutch armament in the Hooghly, and established the English
supremacy in Bengal; Coote routed Lally at Wandewash, and
established the English supremacy in the Carnatic.  The nation,
while loudly applauding the successful warriors, considered them
all, on sea and on land, in Europe, in America, and in Asia,
merely as instruments which received their direction from one
superior mind.  It was the great William Pitt, the great
commoner, who had vanquished French marshals in Germany, and
French admirals on the Atlantic; who had conquered for his
country one great empire on the frozen shores of Ontario, and
another under the tropical sun near the mouths of the Ganges.  It
was not in the nature of things that popularity such as he at
this time enjoyed should be permanent.  That popularity had lost
its gloss before his children were old enough to understand that
their father was a great man.  He was at length placed in
situations in which neither his talents for administration nor
his talents for debate appeared to the best advantage.  The
energy and decision which had eminently fitted him for the
direction of war were not needed in time of peace.  The lofty and
spirit-stirring eloquence which had made him supreme in the House
of Commons often fell dead on the House of Lords.  A cruel malady
racked his joints, and left his joints only to fall on his nerves
and on his brain.  During the closing years of his life, he was
odious to the court, and yet was not on cordial terms with the
great body of the opposition.  Chatham was only the ruin of Pitt,
but an awful and majestic ruin, not to be contemplated by any man
of sense and feeling without emotions resembling those which are
excited by the remains of the Parthenon and of the Coliseum.  In
one respect the old statesman was eminently happy.  Whatever
might be the vicissitudes of his public life, he never failed to
find peace and love by his own hearth.  He loved all his
children, and was loved by them; and, of all his children, the
one of whom he was fondest and proudest was his second son.

The child's genius and ambition displayed themselves with a rare
and almost unnatural precocity.  At seven, the interest which he
took in grave subjects, the ardour with which he pursued his
studies, and the sense and vivacity of his remarks on books and
on events, amazed his parents and instructors.  One of his
sayings of this date was reported to his mother by his tutor.  In
August 1766, when the world was agitated by the news that Mr Pitt
had become Earl of Chatham, little William exclaimed, "I am glad
that I am not the eldest son.  I want to speak in the House of
Commons like papa."  A letter is extant in which Lady Chatham, a
woman of considerable abilities, remarked to her lord, that their
younger son at twelve had left far behind him his elder brother,
who was fifteen.  "The fineness," she wrote, "of William's mind
makes him enjoy with the greatest pleasure what would be above
the reach of any other creature of his small age."  At fourteen
the lad was in intellect a man.  Hayley, who met him at Lyme in
the summer of 1773, was astonished, delighted, and somewhat
overawed, by hearing wit and wisdom from so young a mouth.  The
poet, indeed, was afterwards sorry that his shyness had prevented
him from submitting the plan of an extensive literary work, which
he was then meditating, to the judgment of this extraordinary
boy.  The boy, indeed, had already written a tragedy, bad of
course, but not worse than the tragedies of his friend.  This
piece is still preserved at Chevening, and is in some respects
highly curious.  There is no love.  The whole plot is political;
and it is remarkable that the interest, such as it is, turns on a
contest about a regency.  On one side is a faithful servant of
the Crown, on the other an ambitious and unprincipled
conspirator.  At length the King, who had been missing,
reappears, resumes his power, and rewards the faithful defender
of his rights.  A reader who should judge only by internal
evidence would have no hesitation in pronouncing that the play
was written by some Pittite poetaster at the time of the
rejoicings for the recovery of George the Third in 1789.

The pleasure with which William's parents observed the rapid
development of his intellectual powers was alloyed by
apprehensions about his health.  He shot up alarmingly fast; he
was often ill, and always weak; and it was feared that it would
be impossible to rear a stripling so tall, so slender, and so
feeble.  Port wine was prescribed by his medical advisers:  and
it is said that he was, at fourteen, accustomed to take this
agreeable physic in quantities which would, in our abstemious
age, be thought much more than sufficient for any full-grown man. 
This regimen, though it would probably have killed ninety-nine
boys out of a hundred, seems to have been well suited to the
peculiarities of William's constitution; for at fifteen he ceased
to be molested by disease, and, though never a strong man,
continued, during many years of labour and anxiety, of nights
passed in debate and of summers passed in London, to be a
tolerably healthy one.  It was probably on account of the
delicacy of his frame that he was not educated like other boys of
the same rank.  Almost all the eminent English statesmen and
orators to whom he was afterwards opposed or allied, North, Fox,
Shelburne, Windham, Grey, Wellesley, Grenville, Sheridan,
Canning, went through the training of great public schools.  Lord
Chatham had himself been a distinguished Etonian:  and it is
seldom that a distinguished Etonian forgets his obligations to
Eton.  But William's infirmities required a vigilance and
tenderness such as could be found only at home.  He was therefore
bred under the paternal roof.  His studies were superintended by
a clergyman named Wilson; and those studies, though often
interrupted by illness, were prosecuted with extraordinary
success.  Before the lad had completed his fifteenth year, his
knowledge both of the ancient languages and of mathematics was
such as very few men of eighteen then carried up to college.  He
was therefore sent, towards the close of the year 1773, to
Pembroke Hall, in the university of Cambridge.  So young a
student required much more than the ordinary care which a college
tutor bestows on undergraduates.  The governor, to whom the
direction of William's academical life was confided, was a
bachelor of arts named Pretyman, who had been senior wrangler in
the preceding year, and who, though not a man of prepossessing
appearance or brilliant parts, was eminently acute and laborious,
a sound scholar, and an excellent geometrician.  At Cambridge,
Pretyman was, during more than two years, the inseparable
companion, and indeed almost the only companion of his pupil.  A
close and lasting friendship sprang up between the pair.  The
disciple was able, before he completed his twenty-eighth year, to
make his preceptor Bishop of Lincoln and Dean of St Paul's; and
the preceptor showed his gratitude by writing a life of the
disciple, which enjoys the distinction of being the worst
biographical work of its size in the world.

Pitt, till he graduated, had scarcely one acquaintance, attended
chapel regularly morning and evening, dined every day in hall,
and never went to a single evening party.  At seventeen, he was
admitted, after the bad fashion of those times, by right of
birth, without any examination, to the degree of the Master of
Arts.  But he continued during some years to reside at college,
and to apply himself vigorously, under Pretyman's direction, to
the studies of the place, while mixing freely in the best
academic society.

The stock of learning which Pitt laid in during this part of his
life was certainly very extraordinary.  In fact, it was all that
he ever possessed; for he very early became too busy to have any
spare time for books.  The work in which he took the greatest
delight was Newton's Principia.  His liking for mathematics,
indeed, amounted to a passion, which, in the opinion of his
instructors, themselves distinguished mathematicians, required to
be checked rather than encouraged.  The acuteness and readiness
with which he solved problems was pronounced by one of the ablest
of the moderators, who in those days presided over the
disputations in the schools, and conducted the examinations of
the Senate House, to be unrivalled in the university.  Nor was
the youth's proficiency in classical learning less remarkable. 
In one respect, indeed, he appeared to disadvantage when compared
with even second-rate and third-rate men from public schools.  He
had never, while under Wilson's care, been in the habit of
composing in the ancient languages:  and he therefore never
acquired that knack of versification which is sometimes possessed
by clever boys whose knowledge of the language and literature of
Greece and Rome is very superficial.  It would have been utterly
out of his power to produce such charming elegiac lines as those
in which Wellesley bade farewell to Eton, or such Virgilian
hexameters as those in which Canning described the pilgrimage to
Mecca.  But it may be doubted whether any scholar has ever, at
twenty, had a more solid and profound knowledge of the two great
tongues of the old civilised world.  The facility with which he
penetrated the meaning of the most intricate sentences in the
Attic writers astonished veteran critics.  He had set his heart
on being intimately acquainted with all the extant poetry of
Greece, and was not satisfied till he had mastered Lycophron's
Cassandra, the most obscure work in the whole range of ancient
literature.  This strange rhapsody, the difficulties of which
have perplexed and repelled many excellent scholars, "he read,"
says his preceptor, "with an ease at first sight, which, if I had
not witnessed it, I should have thought beyond the compass of
human intellect."

To modern literature Pitt paid comparatively little attention. 
He knew no living language except French; and French he knew very
imperfectly.  With a few of the best English writers he was
intimate, particularly with Shakspeare and Milton.  The debate in
Pandemonium was, as it well deserved to be, one of his favourite
passages; and his early friends used to talk, long after his
death, of the just emphasis and the melodious cadence with which
they had heard him recite the incomparable speech of Belial.  He
had indeed been carefully trained from infancy in the art of
managing his voice, a voice naturally clear and deep-toned.  His
father, whose oratory owed no small part of its effect to that
art, had been a most skilful and judicious instructor.  At a
later period, the wits of Brookes's, irritated by observing,
night after night, how powerfully Pitt's sonorous elocution
fascinated the rows of country gentlemen, reproached him with
having been "taught by his dad on a stool."

His education, indeed, was well adapted to form a great
parliamentary speaker.  One argument often urged against those
classical studies which occupy so large apart of the early life
of every gentleman bred in the south of our island is, that they
prevent him from acquiring a command of his mother tongue, and
that it is not unusual to meet with a youth of excellent parts,
who writes Ciceronian Latin prose and Horatian Latin Alcaics, but
who would find it impossible to express his thoughts in pure,
perspicuous, and forcible English.  There may perhaps be some
truth in this observation.  But the classical studies of Pitt
were carried on in a peculiar manner, and had the effect of
enriching his English vocabulary, and of making him wonderfully
expert in the art of constructing correct English sentences.  His
practice was to look over a page or two of a Greek or Latin
author, to make himself master of the meaning, and then to read
the passage straightforward into his own language.  This
practice, begun under his first teacher Wilson, was continued
under Pretyman.  It is not strange that a young man of great
abilities, who had been exercised daily in this way during ten
years, should have acquired an almost unrivalled power of putting
his thoughts, without premeditation, into words well selected and
well arranged.

Of all the remains of antiquity, the orations were those on which
he bestowed the most minute examination.  His favourite
employment was to compare harangues on opposite sides of the same
question, to analyse them, and to observe which of the arguments
of the first speaker were refuted by the second, which were
evaded, and which were left untouched.  Nor was it only in books
that he at this time studied the art of parliamentary fencing. 
When he was at home, he had frequent opportunities of hearing
important debates at Westminster; and he heard them, not only
with interest and enjoyment, but with a close scientific
attention resembling that with which a diligent pupil at Guy's
Hospital watches every turn of the hand of a great surgeon
through a difficult operation.  On one of these occasions, Pitt,
a youth whose abilities were as yet known only to his own family
and to a small knot of college friends, was introduced on the
steps of the throne in the House of Lords to Fox, who was his
senior by eleven years, and who was already the greatest debater,
and one of the greatest orators, that had appeared in England. 
Fox used afterwards to relate that, as the discussion proceeded,
Pitt repeatedly turned to him, and said, "But surely, Mr Fox,
that might be met thus;" or, "Yes; but he lays himself open to
this retort."  What the particular criticisms were Fox had
forgotten; but he said that he was much struck at the time by the
precocity of the lad who, through the whole sitting, seemed to be
thinking only how all the speeches on both sides could be
answered.

One of the young man's visits to the House of Lords was a sad and
memorable era in his life.  He had not quite completed his
nineteenth year, when, on the 7th of April 1778, he attended his
father to Westminster.  A great debate was expected.  It was
known that France had recognised the independence of the United
States.  The Duke of Richmond was about to declare his opinion
that all thought of subjugating those states ought to be
relinquished.  Chatham had always maintained that the resistance
of the colonies to the mother country was justifiable.  But he
conceived, very erroneously, that on the day on which their
independence should be acknowledged the greatness of England
would be at an end.  Though sinking under the weight of years and
infirmities, he determined, in spite of the entreaties of his
family, to be in his place.  His son supported him to a seat. 
The excitement and exertion were too much for the old man.  In
the very act of addressing the peers, he fell back in
convulsions.  A few weeks later his corpse was borne, with gloomy
pomp, from the Painted Chamber to the Abbey.  The favourite child
and namesake of the deceased statesman followed the coffin as
chief mourner, and saw it deposited in the transept where his own
was destined to lie.

His elder brother, now Earl of Chatham, had means sufficient, and
barely sufficient, to support the dignity of the peerage.  The
other members of the family were poorly provided for.  William
had little more than three hundred a year.  It was necessary for
him to follow a profession.  He had already begun to eat his
terms.  In the spring of 1780 he came of age.  He then quitted
Cambridge, was called to the bar, took chambers in Lincoln's Inn,
and joined the western circuit.  In the autumn of that year a
general election took place; and he offered himself as a
candidate for the university; but he was at the bottom of the
poll.  It is said that the grave doctors, who then sate robed in
scarlet, on the benches of Golgotha, thought it great presumption
in so young a man to solicit so high a distinction.  He was,
however, at the request of a hereditary friend, the Duke of
Rutland, brought into Parliament by Sir James Lowther for the
borough of Appleby.

The dangers of the country were at that time such as might well
have disturbed even a constant mind.  Army after army had been
sent in vain against the rebellious colonists of North America. 
On pitched fields of battle the advantage had been with the
disciplined troops of the mother country.  But it was not on
pitched fields of battle that the event of such a contest could
be decided.  An armed nation, with hunger and the Atlantic for
auxiliaries, was not to be subjugated.  Meanwhile the House of
Bourbon, humbled to the dust a few years before by the genius and
vigour of Chatham, had seized the opportunity of revenge.  France
and Spain were united against us, and had recently been joined by
Holland.  The command of the Mediterranean had been for a time
lost.  The British flag had been scarcely able to maintain itself
in the British Channel.  The northern powers professed
neutrality; but their neutrality had a menacing aspect.  In the
East, Hyder had descended on the Carnatic, had destroyed the
little army of Baillie, and had spread terror even to the
ramparts of Fort Saint George.  The discontents of Ireland
threatened nothing less than civil war.  In England the authority
of the government had sunk to the lowest point.  The King and the
House of Commons were alike unpopular.  The cry for parliamentary
reform was scarcely less loud and vehement than in the autumn of
1830.  Formidable associations, headed, not by ordinary
demagogues, but by men of high rank, stainless character, and
distinguished ability, demanded a revision of the representative
system.  The populace, emboldened by the impotence and
irresolution of the government, had recently broken loose from
all restraint, besieged the chambers of the legislature, hustled
peers, hunted bishops, attacked the residences of ambassadors,
opened prisons, burned and pulled down houses.  London had
presented during some days the aspect of a city taken by storm;
and it had been necessary to form a camp among the trees of Saint
James's Park.

In spite of dangers and difficulties abroad and at home, George
the Third, with a firmness which had little affinity with virtue
or with wisdom, persisted in his determination to put down the
American rebels by force of arms; and his ministers submitted
their judgment to his.  Some of them were probably actuated
merely by selfish cupidity; but their chief, Lord North, a man of
high honour, amiable temper, winning manners, lively wit, and
excellent talents both for business and for debate, must be
acquitted of all sordid motives.  He remained at a post from
which he had long wished and had repeatedly tried to escape, only
because he had not sufficient fortitude to resist the entreaties
and reproaches of the King, who silenced all arguments by
passionately asking whether any gentleman, any man of spirit,
could have the heart to desert a kind master in the hour of
extremity.

The opposition consisted of two parties which had once been
hostile to each other, and which had been very slowly, and, as it
soon appeared, very imperfectly reconciled, but which at this
conjuncture seemed to act together with cordiality.  The larger
of these parties consisted of the great body of the Whig
aristocracy.  Its head was Charles, Marquess of Rockingham, a man
of sense and virtue, and in wealth and parliamentary interest
equalled by very few of the English nobles, but afflicted with a
nervous timidity which prevented him from taking a prominent part
in debate.  In the House of Commons, the adherents of Rockingham
were led by Fox, whose dissipated habits and ruined fortunes were
the talk of the whole town, but whose commanding genius, and
whose sweet, generous, and affectionate disposition, extorted the
admiration and love of those who most lamented the errors of his
private life.  Burke, superior to Fox in largeness of
comprehension, in extent of knowledge, and in splendour of
imagination, but less skilled in that kind of logic and in that
kind of rhetoric which convince and persuade great assemblies,
was willing to be the lieutenant of a young chief who might have
been his son.

A smaller section of the opposition was composed of the old
followers of Chatham.  At their head was William, Earl of
Shelburne, distinguished both as a statesman and as a lover of
science and letters.  With him were leagued Lord Camden, who had
formerly held the Great Seal, and whose integrity, ability, and
constitutional knowledge commanded the public respect; Barre, an
eloquent and acrimonious declaimer; and Dunning, who had long
held the first place at the English bar.  It was to this party
that Pitt was naturally attracted.

On the 26th of February 1781, he made his first speech, in favour
of Burke's plan of economical reform.  Fox stood up at the same
moment, but instantly gave way.  The lofty yet animated
deportment of the young member, his perfect self-possession, the
readiness with which he replied to the orators who had preceded
him, the silver tones of his voice, the perfect structure of his
unpremeditated sentences, astonished and delighted his hearers. 
Burke, moved even to tears, exclaimed, "It is not a chip of the
old block; it is the old block itself."  "Pitt will be one of the
first men in Parliament," said a member of the opposition to Fox. 
"He is so already," answered Fox, in whose nature envy had no
place.  It is a curious fact, well remembered by some who were
very recently living, that soon after this debate Pitt's name was
put up by Fox at Brookes's.

On two subsequent occasions during that session Pitt addressed
the House, and on both fully sustained the reputation which he
had acquired on his first appearance.  In the summer, after the
prorogation, he again went the western circuit, held several
briefs, and acquitted himself in such a manner that he was highly
complimented by Buller from the bench, and by Dunning at the bar.

On the 27th of November the Parliament reassembled.  Only forty-
eight hours before had arrived tidings of the surrender of
Cornwallis and his army; and it had consequently been necessary
to rewrite the royal speech.  Every man in the kingdom, except
the King, was now convinced that it was mere madness to think of
conquering the United States.  In the debate on the report of the
address, Pitt spoke with even more energy and brilliancy than on
any former occasion.  He was warmly applauded by his allies; but
it was remarked that no person on his own side of the house was
so loud in eulogy as Henry Dundas, the Lord Advocate of Scotland,
who spoke from the ministerial ranks.  That able and versatile
politician distinctly foresaw the approaching downfall of the
government with which he was connected, and was preparing to make
his own escape from the ruin.  From that night dates his
connection with Pitt, a connection which soon became a close
intimacy, and which lasted till it was dissolved by death.

About a fortnight later, Pitt spoke in the committee of supply on
the army estimates.  Symptoms of dissension had begun to appear
on the Treasury bench.  Lord George Germaine, the Secretary of
State, who was especially charged with the direction of the war
in America, had held language not easily to be reconciled with
declarations made by the First Lord of the Treasury.  Pitt
noticed the discrepancy with much force and keenness.  Lord
George and Lord North began to whisper together; and Welbore
Ellis, an ancient placeman who had been drawing salary almost
every quarter since the days of Henry Pelham, bent down between
them to put in a word.  Such interruptions sometimes discompose
veteran speakers.  Pitt stopped, and, looking at the group, said,
with admirable readiness, "I shall wait till Nestor has composed
the dispute between Agamemnon and Achilles."

After several defeats, or victories hardly to be distinguished
from defeats, the ministry resigned.  The King, reluctantly and
ungraciously, consented to accept Rockingham as first minister. 
Fox and Shelburne became Secretaries of State.  Lord John
Cavendish, one of the most upright and honourable of men, was
made Chancellor of the Exchequer.  Thurlow, whose abilities and
force of character had made him the dictator of the House of
Lords, continued to hold the great seal.

To Pitt was offered, through Shelburne, the Vice-Treasurership of
Ireland, one of the easiest and most highly paid places in the
gift of the crown; but the offer was, without hesitation,
declined.  The young statesman had resolved to accept no post
which did not entitle him to a seat in the cabinet:  and, in a
few days later, he announced that resolution in the House of
Commons.  It must be remembered that the cabinet was then a much
smaller and more select body than at present.  We have seen
cabinets of sixteen.  In the time of our grandfathers a cabinet
of ten or eleven was thought inconveniently large.  Seven was an
usual number.  Even Burke, who had taken the lucrative office of
paymaster, was not in the cabinet.  Many therefore thought Pitt's
declaration indecent.  He himself was sorry that he had made it. 
The words, he said in private, had escaped him in the heat of
speaking; and he had no sooner uttered them than he would have
given the world to recall them.  They, however, did him no harm
with the public.  The second William Pitt, it was said, had shown
that he had inherited the spirit, as well as the genius, of the
first.  In the son, as in the father, there might perhaps be too
much pride; but there was nothing low or sordid.  It might be
called arrogance in a young barrister, living in chambers on
three hundred a year, to refuse a salary of five thousand a year,
merely because he did not choose to bind himself to speak or vote
for plans which he had no share in framing; but surely such
arrogance was not very far removed from virtue.

Pitt gave a general support to the administration of Rockingham,
but omitted, in the meantime, no opportunity of courting that
Ultra-Whig party which the persecution of Wilkes and the
Middlesex election had called into existence, and which the
disastrous events of the war, and the triumph of republican
principles in America, had made formidable both in numbers and in
temper.  He supported a motion for shortening the duration of
Parliaments.  He made a motion for a committee to examine into
the state of the representation, and, in the speech, by which
that motion was introduced, avowed himself the enemy of the close
boroughs, the strongholds of that corruption to which he
attributed all the calamities of the nation, and which, as he
phrased it in one of those exact and sonorous sentences of which
he had a boundless command, had grown with the growth of England
and strengthened with her strength, but had not diminished with
her diminution or decayed with her decay.  On this occasion he
was supported by Fox.  The motion was lost by only twenty votes
in a house of more than three hundred members.  The reformers
never again had so good a division till the year 1831.

The new administration was strong in abilities, and was more
popular than any administration which had held office since the
first year of George the Third, but was hated by the King,
hesitatingly supported by the Parliament, and torn by internal
dissensions.  The Chancellor was disliked and distrusted by
almost all his colleagues.  The two Secretaries of State regarded
each other with no friendly feeling.  The line between their
departments had not been traced with precision; and there were
consequently jealousies, encroachments, and complaints.  It was
all that Rockingham could do to keep the peace in his cabinet;
and, before the cabinet had existed three months, Rockingham
died.

In an instant all was confusion.  The adherents of the deceased
statesman looked on the Duke of Portland as their chief.  The
King placed Shelburne at the head of the Treasury.  Fox, Lord
John Cavendish, and Burke, immediately resigned their offices;
and the new prime minister was left to constitute a government
out of very defective materials.  His own parliamentary talents
were great; but he could not be in the place where parliamentary
talents were most needed.  It was necessary to find some member
of the House of Commons who could confront the great orators of
the opposition; and Pitt alone had the eloquence and the courage
which were required.  He was offered the great place of
Chancellor of the Exchequer; and he accepted it.  He had scarcely
completed his twenty-third year.

The Parliament was speedily prorogued.  During the recess, a
negotiation for peace which had been commenced under Rockingham
was brought to a successful termination.  England acknowledged
the independence of her revolted colonies; and she ceded to her
European enemies some places in the Mediterranean and in the Gulf
of Mexico.  But the terms which she obtained were quite as
advantageous and honourable as the events of the war entitled her
to expect, or as she was likely to obtain by persevering in a
contest against immense odds.  All her vital parts, all the real
sources of her power, remained uninjured.  She preserved even her
dignity:  for she ceded to the House of Bourbon only part of what
she had won from that House in previous wars.  She retained her
Indian empire undiminished; and, in spite of the mightiest
efforts of two great monarchies, her flag still waved on the rock
of Gibraltar.  There is not the slightest reason to believe that
Fox, if he had remained in office, would have hesitated one
moment about concluding a treaty on such conditions.  Unhappily
that great and most amiable man was, at this crisis, hurried by
his passions into an error which made his genius and his virtues,
during a long course of years, almost useless to his country.

He saw that the great body of the House of Commons was divided
into three parties, his own, that of North, and that of
Shelburne; that none of those three parties was large enough to
stand alone; that, therefore, unless two of them united, there
must be a miserably feeble administration, or more probably, a
rapid succession of miserably feeble administrations, and this at
a time when a strong government was essential to the prosperity
and respectability of the nation.  It was then necessary and
right that there should be a coalition.  To every possible
coalition there were objections.  But, of all possible
coalitions, that to which there were the fewest objections was
undoubtedly a coalition between Shelburne and Fox.  It would have
been generally applauded by the followers of both.  It might have
been made without any sacrifice of public principle on the part
of either.  Unhappily, recent bickerings had left in the mind of
Fox a profound dislike and distrust of Shelburne.  Pitt attempted
to mediate, and was authorised to invite Fox to return to the
service of the Crown.  "Is Lord Shelburne," said Fox, "to remain
prime minister?"  Pitt answered in the affirmative.  "It is
impossible that I can act under him," said Fox.  "Then
negotiation is at an end," said Pitt; "for I cannot betray him." 
Thus the two statesmen parted.  They were never again in a
private room together.

As Fox and his friends would not treat with Shelburne, nothing
remained to them but to treat with North.  That fatal coalition
which is emphatically called "The Coalition" was formed.  Not
three quarters of a year had elapsed since Fox and Burke had
threatened North with impeachment, and had described him, night
after night, as the most arbitrary, the most corrupt, the most
incapable of ministers.  They now allied themselves with him for
the purpose of driving from office a statesman with whom they
cannot be said to have differed as to any important question. 
Nor had they even the prudence and the patience to wait for some
occasion on which they might, without inconsistency, have
combined with their old enemies in opposition to the government. 
That nothing might be wanting to the scandal, the great orators,
who had, during seven years, thundered against the war,
determined to join with the authors of that war in passing a vote
of censure on the peace.

The Parliament met before Christmas 1782.  But it was not till
January 1783 that the preliminary treaties were signed.  On the
17th of February they were taken into consideration by the House
of Commons.  There had been, during some days, floating rumours
that Fox and North had coalesced; and the debate indicated but
too clearly that those rumours were not unfounded.  Pit was
suffering from indisposition:  he did not rise till his own
strength and that of his hearers were exhausted; and he was
consequently less successful than on any former occasion.  His
admirers owned that his speech was feeble and petulant.  He so
far forgot himself as to advise Sheridan to confine himself to
amusing theatrical audiences.  This ignoble sarcasm gave Sheridan
an opportunity of retorting with great felicity.  "After what I
have seen and heard to-night," he said, "I really feel strongly
tempted to venture on a competition with so great an artist as
Ben Jonson, and to bring on the stage a second Angry Boy."  On a
division, the address proposed by the supporters of the
government was rejected by a majority of sixteen.

But Pitt was not a man to be disheartened by a single failure, or
to be put down by the most lively repartee.  When a few days
later, the opposition proposed a resolution directly censuring
the treaties, he spoke with an eloquence, energy, and dignity
which raised his fame and popularity higher than ever.  To the
coalition of Fox and North he alluded in language which drew
forth tumultuous applause from his followers.  "If," he said,
"this ill-omened and unnatural marriage be not yet consummated, I
know of a just and lawful impediment; and, in the name of the
public weal, I forbid the banns."

The ministers were again left in a minority; and Shelburne
consequently tendered his resignation.  It was accepted; but the
King struggled long and hard before he submitted to the terms
dictated by Fox, whose faults he detested, and whose high spirit
and powerful intellect he detested still more.  The first place
at the board of Treasury was repeatedly offered to Pitt; but the
offer, though tempting, was steadfastly declined.  The young man,
whose judgment was as precocious as his eloquence, saw that his
time was coming, but was not come, and was deaf to royal
importunities and reproaches.  His Majesty, bitterly complaining
of Pitt's faintheartedness, tried to break the coalition.  Every
art of seduction was practised on North, but in vain.  During
several weeks the country remained without a government.  It was
not till all devices had failed, and till the aspect of the House
of Commons became threatening, that the King gave way.  The Duke
of Portland was declared First Lord of the Treasury.  Thurlow was
dismissed.  Fox and North became Secretaries of State, with power
ostensibly equal.  But Fox was the real prime minister.

The year was far advanced before the new arrangements were
completed; and nothing very important was done during the
remainder of the session.  Pitt, now seated on the opposition
bench, brought the question of parliamentary reform a second time
under the consideration of the Commons.  He proposed to add to
the House at once a hundred county members and several members
for metropolitan districts, and to enact that every borough of
which an election committee should report that the majority of
voters appeared to be corrupt should lose the franchise.  The
motion was rejected by 293 votes to 149.

After the prorogation, Pitt visited the Continent for the first
and last time.  His travelling companion was one of his most
intimate friends, a young man of his own age, who had already
distinguished himself in Parliament by an engaging natural
eloquence, set off by the sweetest and most exquisitely modulated
of human voices, and whose affectionate heart, caressing manners,
and brilliant wit, made him the most delightful of companions,
William Wilberforce.  That was the time of Anglomania in France;
and at Paris the son of the great Chatham was absolutely hunted
by men of letters and women of fashion, and forced, much against
his will, into political disputation.  One remarkable saying
which dropped from him during this tour has been preserved.  A
French gentleman expressed some surprise at the immense influence
which Fox, a man of pleasure, ruined by the dice-box and the
turf, exercised over the English nation.  "You have not," said
Pitt, "been under the wand of the magician."

In November 1783 the Parliament met again.  The government had
irresistible strength in the House of Commons, and seemed to be
scarcely less strong in the House of Lords, but was, in truth,
surrounded on every side by dangers.  The King was impatiently
waiting for the moment at which he could emancipate himself from
a yoke which galled him so severely that he had more than once
seriously thought of retiring to Hanover; and the King was
scarcely more eager for a change than the nation.  Fox and North
had committed a fatal error.  They ought to have known that
coalitions between parties which have long been hostile can
succeed only when the wish for coalition pervades the lower ranks
of both.  If the leaders unite before there is any disposition to
union among the followers, the probability is that there will be
a mutiny in both camps, and that the two revolted armies will
make a truce with each other, in order to be revenged on those by
whom they think that they have been betrayed.  Thus it was in
1783.  At the beginning of that eventful year, North had been the
recognised head of the old Tory party, which, though for a moment
prostrated by the disastrous issue of the American war, was still
a great power in the state.  To him the clergy, the universities,
and that large body of country gentlemen whose rallying cry was
"Church and King," had long looked up with respect and
confidence.  Fox had, on the other hand, been the idol of the
Whigs, and of the whole body of Protestant dissenters.  The
coalition at once alienated the most zealous Tories from North,
and the most zealous Whigs from Fox.  The University of Oxford,
which had marked its approbation of North's orthodoxy by electing
him chancellor, the city of London, which had been during two and
twenty years at war with the Court, were equally disgusted. 
Squires and rectors, who had inherited the principles of the
cavaliers of the preceding century, could not forgive their old
leader for combining with disloyal subjects in order to put a
force on the sovereign.  The members of the Bill of Rights
Society and of the Reform Associations were enraged by learning
that their favourite orator now called the great champion of
tyranny and corruption his noble friend.  Two great multitudes
were at once left without any head, and both at once turned their
eyes on Pitt.  One party saw in him the only man who could rescue
the King; the other saw in him the only man who could purify the
Parliament.  He was supported on one side by Archbishop Markham,
the preacher of divine right, and by Jenkinson, the captain of
the Praetorian band of the King's friends; on the other side by
Jebb and Priestley, Sawbridge and Cartwright, Jack Wilkes and
Horne Tooke.  On the benches of the House of Commons, however,
the ranks of the ministerial majority were unbroken; and that any
statesman would venture to brave such a majority was thought
impossible.  No prince of the Hanoverian line had ever, under any
provocation, ventured to appeal from the representative body to
the constituent body.  The ministers, therefore, notwithstanding
the sullen looks and muttered words of displeasure with which
their suggestions were received in the closet, notwithstanding
the roar of obloquy which was rising louder and louder every day
from every corner of the island, thought themselves secure.

Such was their confidence in their strength that, as soon as the
Parliament had met, they brought forward a singularly bold and
original plan for the government of the British territories in
India.  What was proposed was that the whole authority, which
till that time had been exercised over those territories by the
East India Company, should be transferred to seven Commissioners
who were to be named by Parliament, and were not to be removable
at the pleasure of the Crown.  Earl Fitzwilliam, the most
intimate personal friend of Fox, was to be chairman of this
board; and the eldest son of North was to be one of the members.

As soon as the outlines of the scheme were known, all the hatred
which the coalition had excited burst forth with an astounding
explosion.  The question which ought undoubtedly to have been
considered as paramount to every other was, whether the proposed
change was likely to be beneficial or injurious to the thirty
millions of people who were subject to the Company.  But that
question cannot be said to have been even seriously discussed. 
Burke, who, whether right or wrong in the conclusions to which he
came, had at least the merit of looking at the subject in the
right point of view, vainly reminded his hearers of that mighty
population whose daily rice might depend on a vote of the British
Parliament.  He spoke, with even more than his wonted power of
thought and language, about the desolation of Rohilcund, about
the spoliation of Benares, about the evil policy which had
suffered the tanks of the Carnatic to go to ruin; but he could
scarcely obtain a hearing.  The contending parties, to their
shame it must be said, would listen to none but English topics. 
Out of doors the cry against the ministry was almost universal. 
Town and country were united.  Corporations exclaimed against the
violation of the charter of the greatest corporation in the
realm.  Tories and democrats joined in pronouncing the proposed
board an unconstitutional body.  It was to consist of Fox's
nominees.  The effect of his bill was to give, not to the Crown,
but to him personally, whether in office or in opposition, an
enormous power, a patronage sufficient to counterbalance the
patronage of the Treasury and of the Admiralty, and to decide the
elections for fifty boroughs.  He knew, it was said, that he was
hateful alike to King and people; and he had devised a plan which
would make him independent of both.  Some nicknamed him Cromwell,
and some Carlo Khan.  Wilberforce, with his usual felicity of
expression, and with very unusual bitterness of feeling,
described the scheme as the genuine offspring of the coalition,
as marked by the features of both its parents, the corruption of
one and the violence of the other.  In spite of all opposition,
however, the bill was supported in every stage by great
majorities, was rapidly passed and was sent up to the Lords.  To
the general astonishment, when the second reading was moved in
the Upper House, the opposition proposed an adjournment, and
carried it by eighty-seven votes to seventy-nine.  The cause of
this strange turn of fortune was soon known.  Pitt's cousin, Earl
Temple, had been in the royal closet, and had there been
authorised to let it be known that His Majesty would consider all
who voted for the bill as his enemies.  The ignominious
commission was performed; and instantly a troop of Lords of the
Bedchamber, of Bishops who wished to be translated, and of Scotch
peers who wished to be re-elected, made haste to change sides. 
On a later day, the Lords rejected the bill.  Fox and North were
immediately directed to send their seals to the palace by their
Under Secretaries; and Pitt was appointed First Lord of the
Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer.

The general opinion was, that there would be an immediate
dissolution.  But Pitt wisely determined to give the public
feeling time to gather strength.  On this point he differed from
his kinsman Temple.  The consequence was, that Temple, who had
been appointed one of the Secretaries of State, resigned his
office forty-eight hours after he had accepted it, and thus
relieved the new government from a great load of unpopularity;
for all men of sense and honour, however strong might be their
dislike of the India Bill, disapproved of the manner in which
that bill had been thrown out.  Temple carried away with him the
scandal which the best friends of the new government could not
but lament.  The fame of the young prime minister preserved its
whiteness.  He could declare with perfect truth that, if
unconstitutional machinations had been employed, he had been no
party to them.

He was, however, surrounded by difficulties and dangers.  In the
House of Lords, indeed, he had a majority; nor could any orator
of the opposition in that assembly be considered as a match for
Thurlow, who was now again Chancellor, or for Camden, who
cordially supported the son of his old friend Chatham.  But in
the other House there was not a single eminent speaker among the
official men who sate round Pitt.  His most useful assistant was
Dundas, who, though he had not eloquence, had sense, knowledge,
readiness, and boldness.  On the opposite benches was a powerful
majority, led by Fox, who was supported by Burke, North, and
Sheridan.  The heart of the young minister, stout as it was,
almost died within him.  He could not once close his eyes on the
night which followed Temple's resignation.  But, whatever his
internal emotions might be, his language and deportment indicated
nothing but unconquerable firmness and haughty confidence in his
own powers.  His contest against the House of Commons lasted from
the 17th of December 1783, to the 8th of March 1784.  In sixteen
divisions the opposition triumphed.  Again and again the King was
requested to dismiss his ministers.  But he was determined to go
to Germany rather than yield.  Pitt's resolution never wavered. 
The cry of the nation in his favour became vehement and almost
furious.  Addresses assuring him of public support came up daily
from every part of the kingdom.  The freedom of the city of
London was presented to him in a gold box.  He went in state to
receive this mark of distinction.  He was sumptuously feasted in
Grocers' Hall; and the shopkeepers of the Strand and Fleet Street
illuminated their houses in his honour.  These things could not
but produce an effect within the walls of Parliament.  The ranks
of the majority began to waver; a few passed over to the enemy;
some skulked away; many were for capitulating while it was still
possible to capitulate with the honours of war.  Negotiations
were opened with the view of forming an administration on a wide
basis; but they had scarcely been opened when they were closed. 
The opposition demanded, as a preliminary article of the treaty,
that Pitt should resign the Treasury; and with this demand Pit
steadfastly refused to comply.  While the contest was raging, the
Clerkship of the Pells, a sinecure place for life, worth three
thousand a year, and tenable with a seat in the House of Commons,
became vacant.  The appointment was with the Chancellor of the
Exchequer:  nobody doubted that he would appoint himself; and
nobody could have blamed him if he had done so:  for such
sinecure offices had always been defended on the ground that they
enabled a few men of eminent abilities and small incomes to live
without any profession, and to devote themselves to the service
of the state.  Pitt, in spite of the remonstrances of his
friends, gave the Pells to his father's old adherent, Colonel
Barre, a man distinguished by talent and eloquence, but poor and
afflicted with blindness.  By this arrangement a pension which
the Rockingham administration had granted to Barre was saved to
the public.  Never was there a happier stroke of policy.  About
treaties, wars, expeditions, tariffs, budgets, there will always
be room for dispute.  The policy which is applauded by half the
nation may be condemned by the other half.  But pecuniary
disinterestedness everybody comprehends.  It is a great thing for
a man who has only three hundred a year to be able to show that
he considers three thousand a year as mere dirt beneath his feet,
when compared with the public interest and the public esteem. 
Pitt had his reward.  No minister was ever more rancorously
libelled; but, even when he was known to be overwhelmed with
debt, when millions were passing through his hands, when the
wealthiest magnates of the realm were soliciting him for
marquisates and garters, his bitterest enemies did not dare to
accuse him of touching unlawful gain.

At length the hard fought fight ended.  A final remonstrance,
drawn up by Burke with admirable skill, was carried on the 8th of
March by a single vote in a full House.  Had the experiment been
repeated, the supporters of the coalition would probably have
been in a minority.  But the supplies had been voted; the Mutiny
Bill had been passed; and the Parliament was dissolved.

The popular constituent bodies all over the country were in
general enthusiastic on the side of the new government.  A
hundred and sixty of the supporters of the coalition lost their
seats.  The First Lord of the Treasury himself came in at the
head of the poll for the University of Cambridge.  His young
friend, Wilberforce, was elected knight of the great shire of
York, in opposition to the whole influence of the Fitzwilliams,
Cavendishes, Dundases, and Saviles.  In the midst of such
triumphs Pitt completed his twenty-fifth year.  He was now the
greatest subject that England had seen during many generations. 
He domineered absolutely over the cabinet, and was the favourite
at once of the Sovereign, of the Parliament, and of the nation. 
His father had never been so powerful, nor Walpole, nor
Marlborough.

This narrative has now reached a point, beyond which a full
history of the life of Pitt would be a history of England, or
rather of the whole civilised world; and for such a history this
is not the proper place.  Here a very slight sketch must suffice;
and in that sketch prominence will be given to such points as may
enable a reader who is already acquainted with the general course
of events to form a just notion of the character of the man on
whom so much depended.

If we wish to arrive at a correct judgment of Pitt's merits and
defects, we must never forget that he belonged to a peculiar
class of statesmen, and that he must be tried by a peculiar
standard.  It is not easy to compare him fairly with such men as
Ximenes and Sully, Richelieu and Oxenstiern, John de Witt, and
Warren Hastings.  The means by which those politicians governed
great communities were of quite a different kind from those which
Pitt was under the necessity of employing.  Some talents, which
they never had any opportunity of showing that they possessed,
were developed in him to an extraordinary degree.  In some
qualities, on the other hand, to which they owe a large part of
their fame, he was decidedly their inferior.  They transacted
business in their closets, or at boards where a few confidential
councillors sate.  It was his lot to be born in an age and in a
country in which parliamentary government was completely
established.  His whole training from infancy was such as fitted
him to bear a part in parliamentary government; and, from the
prime of his manhood to his death, all the powers of his vigorous
mind were almost constantly exerted in the work of parliamentary
government.  He accordingly became the greatest master of the
whole art of parliamentary government that has ever existed, a
greater than Montague or Walpole, a greater than his father
Chatham, or his rival Fox, a greater than either of his
illustrious successors, Canning and Peel.

Parliamentary government, like every other contrivance of man,
has its advantages and disadvantages.  On the advantages there is
no need to dilate.  The history of England during the hundred and
seventy years which have elapsed since the House of Commons
became the most powerful body in the state, her immense and still
growing prosperity, her freedom, her tranquillity, her greatness
in arts, in sciences, and in arms, her maritime ascendency, the
marvels of her public credit, her American, her African, her
Australian, her Asiatic empires, sufficiently prove the
excellence of her institutions.  But those institutions, though
excellent, are assuredly not perfect.  Parliamentary government
is government by speaking.  In such a government, the power of
speaking is the most highly prized of all the qualities which a
politician can possess:  and that power may exist, in the highest
degree, without judgment, without fortitude, without skill in
reading the characters of men or the signs of the times, without
any knowledge of the principles of legislation or of political
economy, and without any skill in diplomacy or in the
administration of war.  Nay, it may well happen that those very
intellectual qualities which give a peculiar charm to the
speeches of a public man may be incompatible with the qualities
which would fit him to meet a pressing emergency with promptitude
and firmness.  It was thus with Charles Townshend.  It was thus
with Windham.  It was a privilege to listen to those accomplished
and ingenious orators.  But in a perilous crisis they would have
been found far inferior in all the qualities of rulers to such a
man as Oliver Cromwell, who talked nonsense, or as William the
Silent, who did not talk at all.  When parliamentary government
is established, a Charles Townshend or a Windham will almost
always exercise much greater influence than such men as the great
Protector of England, or as the founder of the Batavian
commonwealth.  In such a government, parliamentary talent, though
quite distinct from the talents of a good executive or judicial
officer, will be a chief qualification for executive and judicial
office.  From the Book of Dignities a curious list might be made
out of Chancellors ignorant of the principles of equity, and
First Lords of the Admiralty ignorant of the principles of
navigation, of Colonial ministers who could not repeat the names
of the Colonies, of Lords of the Treasury who did not know the
difference between funded and unfunded debt, and of Secretaries
of the India Board who did not know whether the Mahrattas were
Mahometans or Hindoos.  On these grounds, some persons, incapable
of seeing more than one side of a question, have pronounced
parliamentary government a positive evil, and have maintained
that the administration would be greatly improved if the power,
now exercised by a large assembly, were transferred to a single
person.  Men of sense will probably think the remedy very much
worse than the disease, and will be of opinion that there would
be small gain in exchanging Charles Townshend and Windham for the
Prince of the Peace, or the poor slave and dog Steenie.

Pitt was emphatically the man of parliamentary government, the
type of his class, the minion, the child, the spoiled child, of
the House of Commons.  For the House of Commons he had a
hereditary, an infantine love.  Through his whole boyhood, the
House of Commons was never out of his thoughts, or out of the
thoughts of his instructors.  Reciting at his father's knee,
reading Thucydides and Cicero into English, analysing the great
Attic speeches on the Embassy and on the Crown, he was constantly
in training for the conflicts of the House of Commons.  He was a
distinguished member of the House of Commons at twenty-one.  The
ability which he had displayed in the House of Commons made him
the most powerful subject in Europe before he was twenty-five. 
It would have been happy for himself and for his country if his
elevation had been deferred.  Eight or ten years, during which he
would have had leisure and opportunity for reading and
reflection, for foreign travel, for social intercourse and free
exchange of thought on equal terms with a great variety of
companions, would have supplied what, without any fault on his
part, was wanting to his powerful intellect.  He had all the
knowledge that he could be expected to have; that is to say, all
the knowledge that a man can acquire while he is a student at
Cambridge, and all the knowledge that a man can acquire when he
is First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer. 
But the stock of general information which he brought from
college, extraordinary for a boy, was far inferior to what Fox
possessed, and beggarly when compared with the massy, the
splendid, the various treasures laid up in the large mind of
Burke.  After Pitt became minister, he had no leisure to learn
more than was necessary for the purposes of the day which was
passing over him.  What was necessary for those purposes such a
man could learn with little difficulty.  He was surrounded by
experienced and able public servants.  He could at any moment
command their best assistance.  From the stores which they
produced his vigorous mind rapidly collected the materials for a
good parliamentary case; and that was enough.  Legislation and
administration were with him secondary matters.  To the work of
framing statutes, of negotiating treaties, of organising fleets
and armies, of sending forth expeditions, he gave only the
leavings of his time and the dregs of his fine intellect.  The
strength and sap of his mind were all drawn in a different
direction.  It was when the House of Commons was to be convinced
and persuaded that he put forth all his powers.

Of those powers we must form our estimate chiefly from tradition;
for of all the eminent speakers of the last age Pitt has suffered
most from the reporters.  Even while he was still living, critics
remarked that his eloquence could not be preserved, that he must
be heard to be appreciated.  They more than once applied to him
the sentence in which Tacitus describes the fate of a senator
whose rhetoric was admired in the Augustan age:  "Haterii canorum
illud et profluens cum ipso simul exstinctum est."  There is,
however, abundant evidence that nature had bestowed on Pitt the
talents of a great orator; and those talents had been developed
in a very peculiar manner, first by his education, and secondly
by the high official position to which he rose early, and in
which he passed the greater part of his public life.

At his first appearance in Parliament he showed himself superior
to all his contemporaries in command of language.  He could pour
forth a long succession of round and stately periods, without
premeditation, without ever pausing for a word, without ever
repeating a word, in a voice of silver clearness, and with a
pronunciation so articulate that not a letter was slurred over. 
He had less amplitude of mind and less richness of imagination
than Burke, less ingenuity than Windham, less wit than Sheridan,
less perfect mastery of dialectical fence, and less of that
highest sort of eloquence which consists of reason and passion
fused together, than Fox.  Yet the almost unanimous judgment of
those who were in the habit of listening to that remarkable race
of men placed Pitt, as a speaker, above Burke, above Windham,
above Sheridan, and not below Fox.  His declamation was copious,
polished, and splendid.  In power of sarcasm he was probably not
surpassed by any speaker, ancient or modern; and of this
formidable weapon he made merciless use.  In two parts of the
oratorical art which are of the highest value to a minister of
state he was singularly expert.  No man knew better how to be
luminous or how to be obscure.  When he wished to be understood,
he never failed to make himself understood.  He could with ease
present to his audience, not perhaps an exact or profound, but a
clear, popular, and plausible view of the most extensive and
complicated subject.  Nothing was out of place; nothing was
forgotten; minute details, dates, sums of money, were all
faithfully preserved in his memory.  Even intricate questions of
finance, when explained by him, seemed clear to the plainest man
among his hearers.  On the other hand, when he did not wish to be
explicit,--and no man who is at the head of affairs always wishes
to be explicit,--he had a marvellous power of saying nothing in
language which left on his audience the impression that he had
said a great deal.  He was at once the only man who could open a
budget without notes, and the only man who, as Windham said,
could speak that most elaborately evasive and unmeaning of human
compositions, a King's speech, without premeditation.

The effect of oratory will always to a great extent depend on the
character of the orator.  There perhaps never were two speakers
whose eloquence had more of what may be called the race, more of
the flavour imparted by moral qualities, than Fox and Pitt.  The
speeches of Fox owe a great part of their charm to that warmth
and softness of heart, that sympathy with human suffering, that
admiration for everything great and beautiful, and that hatred of
cruelty and injustice, which interest and delight us even in the
most defective reports.  No person, on the other hand, could hear
Pitt without perceiving him to be a man of high, intrepid, and
commanding spirit, proudly conscious of his own rectitude and of
his own intellectual superiority, incapable of the low vices of
fear and envy, but too prone to feel and to show disdain.  Pride,
indeed, pervaded the whole man, was written in the harsh, rigid
lines of his face, was marked by the way in which he walked, in
which he sate, in which he stood, and, above all, in which he
bowed.  Such pride, of course, inflicted many wounds.  It may
confidently be affirmed that there cannot be found, in all the
ten thousand invectives written against Fox, a word indicating
that his demeanour had ever made a single personal enemy.  On the
other hand, several men of note who had been partial to Pitt, and
who to the last continued to approve his public conduct and to
support his administration, Cumberland, for example, Boswell, and
Matthias, were so much irritated by the contempt with which he
treated them, that they complained in print of their wrongs.  But
his pride, though it made him bitterly disliked by individuals,
inspired the great body of his followers in Parliament and
throughout the country with respect and confidence.  They took
him at his own valuation.  They saw that his self-esteem was not
that of an upstart, who was drunk with good luck and with
applause, and who, if fortune turned, would sink from arrogance
into abject humility.  It was that of the magnanimous man so
finely described by Aristotle in the Ethics, of the man who
thinks himself worthy of great things, being in truth worthy.  It
sprang from a consciousness of great powers and great virtues,
and was never so conspicuously displayed as in the midst of
difficulties and dangers which would have unnerved and bowed down
any ordinary mind.  It was closely connected, too, with an
ambition which had no mixture of low cupidity.  There was
something noble in the cynical disdain with which the mighty
minister scattered riches and titles to right and left among
those who valued them, while he spurned them out of his own way. 
Poor himself, he was surrounded by friends on whom he had
bestowed three thousand, six thousand, ten thousand a year. 
Plain Mister himself, he had made more lords than any three
ministers that had preceded him.  The garter, for which the first
dukes in the kingdom were contending, was repeatedly offered to
him, and offered in vain.

The correctness of his private life added much to the dignity of
his public character.  In the relations of son, brother, uncle,
master, friend, his conduct was exemplary.  In the small circle
of his intimate associates, he was amiable, affectionate, even
playful.  They loved him sincerely; they regretted him long; and
they would hardly admit that he who was so kind and gentle with
them could be stern and haughty with others.  He indulged,
indeed, somewhat too freely in wine, which he had early been
directed to take as a medicine, and which use had made a
necessary of life to him.  But it was very seldom that any
indication of undue excess could be detected in his tones or
gestures; and, in truth, two bottles of port were little more to
him than two dishes of tea.  He had, when he was first introduced
into the clubs of Saint James's Street, shown a strong taste for
play; but he had the prudence and the resolution to stop before
this taste had acquired the strength of habit.  From the passion
which generally exercises the most tyrannical dominion over the
young he possessed an immunity, which is probably to be ascribed
partly to his temperament and partly to his situation.  His
constitution was feeble; he was very shy; and he was very busy. 
The strictness of his morals furnished such buffoons as Peter
Pindar and Captain Morris with an inexhaustible theme for
merriment of no very delicate kind.  But the great body of the
middle class of Englishmen could not see the joke.  They warmly
praised the young statesman for commanding his passions, and for
covering his frailties, if he had frailties, with decorous
obscurity, and would have been very far indeed from thinking
better of him if he had vindicated himself from the taunts of his
enemies by taking under his protection a Nancy Parsons or a
Marianne Clark.

No part of the immense popularity which Pitt long enjoyed is to
be attributed to the eulogies of wits and poets.  It might have
been naturally expected that a man of genius, of learning, of
taste, an orator whose diction was often compared to that of
Tully, the representative, too, of a great university, would have
taken a peculiar pleasure in befriending eminent writers, to
whatever political party they might have belonged.  The love of
literature had induced Augustus to heap benefits on Pompeians,
Somers to be the protector of nonjurors, Harley to make the
fortunes of Whigs.  But it could not move Pitt to show any favour
even to Pittites.  He was doubtless right in thinking that, in
general, poetry, history, and philosophy ought to be suffered,
like calico and cutlery, to find their proper price in the
market, and that to teach men of letters to look habitually to
the state for their recompense is bad for the state and bad for
letters.  Assuredly nothing can be more absurd or mischievous
than to waste the public money in bounties for the purpose of
inducing people who ought to be weighing out grocery or measuring
out drapery to write bad or middling books.  But, though the
sound rule is that authors should be left to be remunerated by
their readers, there will, in every generation, be a few
exceptions to this rule.  To distinguish these special cases from
the mass is an employment well worthy of the faculties of a great
and accomplished ruler; and Pitt would assuredly have had little
difficulty in finding such cases.  While he was in power, the
greatest philologist of the age, his own contemporary at
Cambridge, was reduced to earn a livelihood by the lowest
literary drudgery, and to spend in writing squibs for the
"Morning Chronicle" years to which we might have owed an all but
perfect text of the whole tragic and comic drama of Athens.  The
greatest historian of the age, forced by poverty to leave his
country, completed his immortal work on the shores of Lake Leman. 
The political heterodoxy of Porson, and the religious heterodoxy
of Gibbon, may perhaps be pleaded in defence of the minister by
whom those eminent men were neglected.  But there were other
cases in which no such excuse could be set up.  Scarcely had Pitt
obtained possession of unbounded power when an aged writer of the
highest eminence, who had made very little by his writings, and
who was sinking into the grave under a load of infirmities and
sorrows, wanted five or six hundred pounds to enable him, during
the winter or two which might still remain to him, to draw his
breath more easily in the soft climate of Italy.  Not a farthing
was to be obtained; and before Christmas the author of the
English Dictionary and of the Lives of the Poets had gasped his
last in the river fog and coal smoke of Fleet Street.  A few
months after the death of Johnson appeared the Task, incomparably
the best poem that any Englishman then living had produced--a
poem, too, which could hardly fail to excite in a well
constituted mind a feeling of esteem and compassion for the poet,
a man of genius and virtue, whose means were scanty, and whom the
most cruel of all the calamities incident to humanity had made
incapable of supporting himself by vigorous and sustained
exertion.  Nowhere had Chatham been praised with more enthusiasm,
or in verse more worthy of the subject, than in the Task.  The
son of Chatham, however, contented himself with reading and
admiring the book, and left the author to starve.  The pension
which, long after, enabled poor Cowper to close his melancholy
life, unmolested by duns and bailiffs, was obtained for him by
the strenuous kindness of Lord Spencer.  What a contrast between
the way in which Pitt acted towards Johnson and the way in which
Lord Grey acted towards his political enemy Scott, when Scott,
worn out by misfortune and disease, was advised to try the effect
of the Italian air!  What a contrast between the way in which
Pitt acted towards Cowper and the way in which Burke, a poor man
and out of place, acted towards Crabbe!  Even Dundas, who made no
pretensions to literary taste, and was content to be considered
as a hardheaded and somewhat coarse man of business, was, when
compared with his eloquent and classically educated friend, a
Maecenas or a Leo.  Dundas made Burns an exciseman, with seventy
pounds a year; and this was more than Pitt, during his long
tenure of power, did for the encouragement of letters.  Even
those who may think that it is, in general, no part of the duty
of a government to reward literary merit will hardly deny that a
government, which has much lucrative church preferment in its
gift, is bound, in distributing that preferment, not to overlook
divines whose writings have rendered great service to the cause
of religion.  But it seems never to have occurred to Pitt that he
lay under any such obligation.  All the theological works of all
the numerous bishops whom he made and translated are not, when
put together, worth fifty pages of the Horae Paulinae, of the
Natural Theology, or of the View of the Evidences of
Christianity.  But on Paley the all-powerful minister never
bestowed the small benefice.  Artists Pitt reasoned as
contemptuously as writers.  For painting he did simply nothing. 
Sculptors, who had been selected to execute monuments voted by
Parliament, had to haunt the ante-chambers of the Treasury during
many years before they could obtain a farthing from him.  One of
them, after vainly soliciting the minister for payment during
fourteen years, had the courage to present a memorial to the
King, and thus obtained tardy and ungracious justice.  Architects
it was absolutely necessary to employ; and the worst that could
be found seem to have been employed.  Not a single fine public
building of any kind or in any style was erected during his long
administration.  It may be confidently affirmed that no ruler
whose abilities and attainments would bear any comparison with
his has ever shown such cold disdain for what is excellent in
arts and letters.

His first administration lasted seventeen years.  That long
period is divided by a strongly marked line into two almost
exactly equal parts.  The first part ended and the second began
in the autumn of 1792.  Throughout both parts Pitt displayed in
the highest degree the talents of a parliamentary leader.  During
the first part he was a fortunate and, in many respects, a
skilful administrator.  With the difficulties which he had to
encounter during the second part he was altogether incapable of
contending: but his eloquence and his perfect mastery of the
tactics of the House of Commons concealed his incapacity from the
multitude.

The eight years which followed the general election of 1784 were
as tranquil and prosperous as any eight years in the whole
history of England.  Neighbouring nations which had lately been
in arms against her, and which had flattered themselves that, in
losing her American colonies, she had lost a chief source of her
wealth and of her power, saw, with wonder and vexation, that she
was more wealthy and more powerful than ever.  Her trade
increased.  Her manufactures flourished.  Her exchequer was full
to overflowing.  Very idle apprehensions were generally
entertained, that the public debt, though much less than a third
of the debt which we now bear with ease, would be found too heavy
for the strength of the nation.  Those apprehensions might not
perhaps have been easily quieted by reason.  But Pitt quieted
them by a juggle.  He succeeded in persuading first himself, and
then the whole nation, his opponents included, that a new sinking
fund, which, so far as it differed from former sinking funds,
differed for the worse, would, by virtue of some mysterious power
of propagation belonging to money, put into the pocket of the
public creditor great sums not taken out of the pocket of the
tax-payer.  The country, terrified by a danger which was no
danger, hailed with delight and boundless confidence a remedy
which was no remedy.  The minister was almost universally
extolled as the greatest of financiers.  Meanwhile both the
branches of the House of Bourbon found that England was as
formidable an antagonist as she had ever been.  France had formed
a plan for reducing Holland to vassalage.  But England
interposed; and France receded.  Spain interrupted by violence
the trade of our merchants with the regions near the Oregon.  But
England armed; and Spain receded.  Within the island there was
profound tranquillity.  The King was, for the first time,
popular.  During the twenty-three years which had followed his
accession he had not been loved by his subjects.  His domestic
virtues were acknowledged.  But it was generally thought that the
good qualities by which he was distinguished in private life were
wanting to his political character.  As a Sovereign, he was
resentful, unforgiving, stubborn, cunning.  Under his rule the
country had sustained cruel disgraces and disasters; and every
one of those disgraces and disasters was imputed to his strong
antipathies, and to his perverse obstinacy in the wrong.  One
statesman after another complained that he had been induced by
royal caresses, intreaties, and promises, to undertake the
direction of affairs at a difficult conjuncture, and that, as
soon as he had, not without sullying his fame, and alienating his
best friends, served the turn for which he was wanted, his
ungrateful master began to intrigue against him, and to canvass
against him.  Grenville, Rockingham, Chatham, men of widely
different characters, but all three upright and high-spirited,
agreed in thinking that the Prince under whom they had
successively held the highest place in government was one of the
most insincere of mankind.  His confidence was reposed, they
said, not in those known and responsible counsellors to whom he
had delivered the seals of office, but in secret advisers who
stole up the back stairs into his closet.  In Parliament his
ministers, while defending themselves against the attacks of the
opposition in front, were perpetually, at his instigation,
assailed on the flank or in the rear by a vile band of
mercenaries who called themselves his friends.  These men
constantly, while in possession of lucrative places in his
service, spoke and voted against bills which he had authorised
the First Lord of the Treasury or the Secretary of State to bring
in.  But from the day on which Pitt was placed at the head of
affairs there was an end of secret influence.  His haughty and
aspiring spirit was not to be satisfied with the mere show of
power.  Any attempt to undermine him at Court, any mutinous
movement among his followers in the House of Commons, was certain
to be at once put down.  He had only to tender his resignation;
and he could dictate his own terms.  For he, and he alone, stood
between the King and the Coalition.  He was therefore little less
than Mayor of the Palace.  The nation loudly applauded the King
for having the wisdom to repose entire confidence in so excellent
a minister.  His Majesty's private virtues now began to produce
their full effect.  He was generally regarded as the model of a
respectable country gentleman, honest, good-natured, sober,
religious.  He rose early:  he dined temperately:  he was
strictly faithful to his wife:  he never missed church; and at
church he never missed a response.  His people heartily prayed
that he might long reign over them; and they prayed the more
heartily because his virtues were set off to the best advantage
by the vices and follies of the Prince of Wales, who lived in
close intimacy with the chiefs of the opposition.

How strong this feeling was in the public mind appeared signally
on one great occasion.  In the autumn of 1788 the King became
insane.  The opposition, eager for office, committed the great
indiscretion of asserting that the heir apparent had, by the
fundamental laws of England, a right to be Regent with the full
powers of royalty.  Pitt, on the other hand, maintained it to be
the constitutional doctrine that, when a Sovereign is, by reason
of infancy, disease, or absence, incapable of exercising the
regal functions, it belongs to the Estates of the realm to
determine who shall be the vicegerent and with what portion of
the executive authority such vicegerent shall be entrusted.  A
long and violent contest followed, in which Pitt was supported by
the great body of the people with as much enthusiasm as during
the first months of his administration.  Tories with one voice
applauded him for defending the sick-bed of a virtuous and
unhappy Sovereign against a disloyal faction and an undutiful
son.  Not a few Whigs applauded him for asserting the authority
of Parliaments and the principles of the Revolution, in
opposition to a doctrine which seemed to have too much affinity
with the servile theory of indefeasible hereditary right.  The
middle class, always zealous on the side of decency and the
domestic virtues, looked forward with dismay to a reign
resembling that of Charles II.  The palace, which had now been,
during thirty years, the pattern of an English home, would be a
public nuisance, a school of profligacy.  To the good King's
repast of mutton and lemonade, despatched at three o'clock, would
succeed midnight banquets, from which the guests would be carried
home speechless.  To the backgammon board at which the good King
played for a little silver with his equerries, would succeed faro
tables from which young patricians who had sate down rich would
rise up beggars.  The drawing-room, from which the frown of the
Queen had repelled a whole generation of frail beauties, would
now be again what it had been in the days of Barbara Palmer and
Louisa de Querouaille.  Nay, severely as the public reprobated
the Prince's many illicit attachments, his one virtuous
attachment was reprobated more severely still.  Even in grave and
pious circles his Protestant mistresses gave less scandal than
his Popish wife.  That he must be Regent nobody ventured to deny. 
But he and his friends were so unpopular that Pitt could, with
general approbation, propose to limit the powers of the Regent by
restrictions to which it would have been impossible to subject a
Prince beloved and trusted by the country.  Some interested men,
fully expecting a change of administration, went over to the
opposition.  But the majority, purified by these desertions,
closed its ranks, and presented a more firm array than ever to
the enemy.  In every division Pitt was victorious.  When at
length, after a stormy interregnum of three months, it was
announced, on the very eve of the inauguration of the Regent,
that the King was himself again, the nation was wild with
delight.  On the evening of the day on which His Majesty resumed
his functions, a spontaneous illumination, the most general that
had ever been seen in England, brightened the whole vast space
from Highgate to Tooting, and from Hammersmith to Greenwich.  On
the day on which he returned thanks in the cathedral of his
capital, all the horses and carriages within a hundred miles of
London were too few for the multitudes which flocked to see him
pass through the streets.  A second illumination followed, which
was even superior to the first in magnificence.  Pitt with
difficulty escaped from the tumultuous kindness of an innumerable
multitude which insisted on drawing his coach from Saint Paul's
Churchyard to Downing Street.  This was the moment at which his
fame and fortune may be said to have reached the zenith.  His
influence in the closet was as great as that of Carr or Villiers
had been.  His dominion over the Parliament was more absolute
than that of Walpole of Pelham had been.  He was at the same time
as high in the favour of the populace as ever Wilkes or
Sacheverell had been.  Nothing did more to raise his character
than his noble poverty.  It was well-known that, if he had been
dismissed from office after more than five years of boundless
power, he would hardly have carried out with him a sum sufficient
to furnish the set of chambers in which, as he cheerfully
declared, he meant to resume the practice of the law.  His
admirers, however, were by no means disposed to suffer him to
depend on daily toil for his daily bread.  The voluntary
contributions which were awaiting his acceptance in the city of
London alone would have sufficed to make him a rich man.  But it
may be doubted whether his haughty spirit would have stooped to
accept a provision so honourably earned and so honourably
bestowed.

To such a height of power and glory had this extraordinary man
risen at twenty-nine years of age.  And now the tide was on the
turn.  Only ten days after the triumphal procession to Saint
Paul's, the States-General of France, after an interval of a
hundred and seventy-four years, met at Versailles.

The nature of the great Revolution which followed was long very
imperfectly understood in this country.  Burke saw much further
than any of his contemporaries:  but whatever his sagacity
descried was refracted and discoloured by his passions and his
imagination.  More than three years elapsed before the principles
of the English administration underwent any material change. 
Nothing could as yet be milder or more strictly constitutional
than the minister's domestic policy.  Not a single act indicating
an arbitrary temper or a jealousy of the people could be imputed
to him.  He had never applied to Parliament for any extraordinary
powers.  He had never used with harshness the ordinary powers
entrusted by the constitution to the executive government.  Not a
single state prosecution which would even now be called
oppressive had been instituted by him.  Indeed, the only
oppressive state prosecution instituted during the first eight
years of his administration was that of Stockdale, which is to be
attributed not to the government, but to the chiefs of the
opposition.  In office Pitt had redeemed the pledges which he
had, at his entrance into public life, given to the supporters of
parliamentary reform.  He had, in 1785, brought forward a
judicious plan for the improvement of the representative system,
and had prevailed on the King, not only to refrain from talking
against that plan, but to recommend it to the Houses in a speech
from the throne.  (The speech with which the King opened the
session of 1785, concluded with an assurance that His Majesty
would heartily concur in every measure which could tend to secure
the true principles of the constitution.  These words were at the
time understood to refer to Pitt's Reform Bill.)  This attempt
failed; but there can be little doubt that, if the French
Revolution had not produced a violent reaction of public feeling,
Pitt would have performed, with little difficulty and no danger,
that great work which, at a later period, Lord Grey could
accomplish only by means which for a time loosened the very
foundations of the commonwealth.  When the atrocities of the
slave trade were first brought under the consideration of
Parliament, no abolitionist was more zealous than Pitt.  When
sickness prevented Wilberforce from appearing in public, his
place was most efficiently supplied by his friend the minister. 
A humane bill, which mitigated the horrors of the middle passage,
was, in 1788, carried by the eloquence and determined spirit of
Pitt, in spite of the opposition of some of his own colleagues;
and it ought always to be remembered to his honour that, in order
to carry that bill, he kept the Houses sitting, in spite of many
murmurs, long after the business of the government had been done,
and the Appropriation Act passed.  In 1791 he cordially concurred
with Fox in maintaining the sound constitutional doctrine, that
an impeachment is not terminated by a dissolution.  In the course
of the same year the two great rivals contended side by side in a
far more important cause.  They are fairly entitled to divide the
high honour of having added to our statute-book the inestimable
law which places the liberty of the press under the protection of
juries.  On one occasion, and one alone, Pitt, during the first
half of his long administration, acted in a manner unworthy of an
enlightened Whig.  In the debate on the Test Act, he stooped to
gratify the master whom he served, the university which he
represented, and the great body of clergymen and country
gentlemen on whose support he rested, by talking, with little
heartiness, indeed, and with no asperity, the language of a Tory. 
With this single exception, his conduct from the end of 1783 to
the middle of 1792 was that of an honest friend of civil and
religious liberty.

Nor did anything, during that period, indicate that he loved war,
or harboured any malevolent feeling against any neighbouring
nation.  Those French writers who have represented him as a
Hannibal sworn in childhood by his father to bear eternal hatred
to France, as having by mysterious intrigues and lavish bribes,
instigated the leading Jacobins to commit those excesses which
dishonoured the Revolution, as having been the real author of the
first coalition, know nothing of his character or of his history. 
So far was he from being a deadly enemy to France, that his
laudable attempts to bring about a closer connection with that
country by means of a wise and liberal treaty of commerce brought
on him the severe censure of the opposition.  He was told in the
House of Commons that he was a degenerate son, and that his
partiality for the hereditary foes of our island was enough to
make his great father's bones stir under the pavement of the
Abbey.

And this man, whose name, if he had been so fortunate as to die
in 1792, would now have been associated with peace, with freedom,
with philanthropy, with temperate reform, with mild and
constitutional administration, lived to associate his name with
arbitrary government, with harsh laws harshly executed, with
alien bills, with gagging bills, with suspensions of the Habeas
Corpus Act, with cruel punishments inflicted on some political
agitators, with unjustifiable prosecutions instituted against
others, and with the most costly and most sanguinary wars of
modern times.  He lived to be held up to obloquy as the stern
oppressor of England, and the indefatigable disturber of Europe. 
Poets, contrasting his earlier with his later years, likened him
sometimes to the apostle who kissed in order to betray, and
sometimes to the evil angels who kept not their first estate.  A
satirist of great genius introduced the fiends of Famine,
Slaughter, and Fire, proclaiming that they had received their
commission from One whose name was formed of four letters, and
promising to give their employer ample proofs of gratitude. 
Famine would gnaw the multitude till they should rise up against
him in madness.  The demon of slaughter would impel them to tear
him from limb to limb.  But Fire boasted that she alone could
reward him as he deserved, and that she would cling round him to
all eternity.  By the French press and the French tribune every
crime that disgraced and every calamity that afflicted France was
ascribed to the monster Pitt and his guineas.  While the Jacobins
were dominant, it was he who had corrupted the Gironde, who had
raised Lyons and Bordeaux against the Convention, who had
suborned Paris to assassinate Lepelletier, and Cecilia Regnault
to assassinate Robespierre.  When the Thermidorian reaction came,
all the atrocities of the Reign of Terror were imputed to him. 
Collet D'Herbois and Fouquier Tinville had been his pensioners. 
It was he who had hired the murderers of September, who had
dictated the pamphlets of Marat and the Carmagnoles of Barere,
who had paid Lebon to deluge Arras with blood, and Carrier to
choke the Loire with corpses.

The truth is, that he liked neither war nor arbitrary government. 
He was a lover of peace and freedom, driven, by a stress against
which it was hardly possible for any will or any intellect to
struggle, out of the course to which his inclinations pointed,
and for which his abilities and acquirements fitted him, and
forced into a policy repugnant to his feelings and unsuited to
his talents.

The charge of apostasy is grossly unjust.  A man ought no more to
be called an apostate because his opinions alter with the
opinions of the great body of his contemporaries than he ought to
be called an oriental traveller because he is always going round
from west to east with the globe and everything that is upon it. 
Between the spring of 1789 and the close of 1792, the public mind
of England underwent a great change.  If the change of Pitt's
sentiments attracted peculiar notice, it was not because he
changed more than his neighbours; for in fact he changed less
than most of them; but because his position was far more
conspicuous than theirs, because he was, till Bonaparte appeared,
the individual who filled the greatest space in the eyes of the
inhabitants of the civilised world.  During a short time the
nation, and Pitt, as one of the nation, looked with interest and
approbation on the French Revolution.  But soon vast
confiscations, the violent sweeping away of ancient institutions,
the domination of clubs, the barbarities of mobs maddened by
famine and hatred, produced a reaction here.  The court, the
nobility, the gentry, the clergy, the manufacturers, the
merchants, in short, nineteen-twentieths of those who had good
roofs over their heads and good coats on their backs, became
eager and intolerant Antijacobins.  This feeling was at least as
strong among the minister's adversaries as among his supporters. 
Fox in vain attempted to restrain his followers.  All his genius,
all his vast personal influence, could not prevent them from
rising up against him in general mutiny.  Burke set the example
of revolt; and Burke was in no long time joined by Portland,
Spencer, Fitzwilliam, Loughborough, Carlisle, Malmesbury,
Windham, Elliot.  In the House of Commons, the followers of the
great Whig statesman and orator diminished from about a hundred
and sixty to fifty.  In the House of Lords he had but ten or
twelve adherents left.  There can be no doubt that there would
have been a similar mutiny on the ministerial benches if Pitt had
obstinately resisted the general wish.  Pressed at once by his
master and by his colleagues, by old friends and by old
opponents, he abandoned, slowly and reluctantly, the policy which
was dear to his heart.  He laboured hard to avert the European
war.  When the European war broke out, he still flattered himself
that it would not be necessary for this country to take either
side.  In the spring of 1792 he congratulated the Parliament on
the prospect of long and profound peace, and proved his sincerity
by proposing large remissions of taxation.  Down to the end of
that year he continued to cherish the hope that England might be
able to preserve neutrality.  But the passions which raged on
both sides of the Channel were not to be restrained.  The
republicans who ruled France were inflamed by a fanaticism
resembling that of the Mussulmans who, with the Koran in one hand
and the sword in the other, went forth, conquering and
converting, eastward to the Bay of Bengal, and westward to the
Pillars of Hercules.  The higher and middle classes of England
were animated by zeal not less fiery than that of the Crusaders
who raised the cry of Deus vult at Clermont.  The impulse which
drove the two nations to a collision was not to be arrested by
the abilities or by the authority of any single man.  As Pitt was
in front of his fellows, and towered high above them, he seemed
to lead them.  But in fact he was violently pushed on by them,
and, had he held back but a little more than he did, would have
been thrust out of their way or trampled under their feet.

He yielded to the current:  and from that day his misfortunes
began.  The truth is that there were only two consistent courses
before him.  Since he did not choose to oppose himself, side by
side with Fox, to the public feeling, he should have taken the
advice of Burke, and should have availed himself of that feeling
to the full extent.  If it was impossible to preserve peace, he
should have adopted the only policy which could lead to victory.
He should have proclaimed a Holy War for religion, morality,
property, order, public law, and should have thus opposed to the
Jacobins an energy equal to their own.  Unhappily he tried to
find a middle path; and he found one which united all that was
worst in both extremes.  He went to war:  but he would not
understand the peculiar character of that war.  He was
obstinately blind to the plain fact, that he was contending
against a state which was also a sect, and that the new quarrel
between England and France was of quite a different kind from the
old quarrels about colonies in America and fortresses in the
Netherlands.  He had to combat frantic enthusiasm, boundless
ambition, restless activity, the wildest and most audacious
spirit of innovation; and he acted as if he had to deal with the
harlots and fops of the old Court of Versailles, with Madame de
Pompadour and the Abbe de Bernis.  It was pitiable to hear him,
year after year, proving to an admiring audience that the wicked
Republic was exhausted, that she could not hold out, that her
credit was gone, and her assignats were not worth more than the
paper of which they were made; as if credit was necessary to a
government of which the principle was rapine, as if Alboin could
not turn Italy into a desert till he had negotiated a loan at
five per cent., as if the exchequer bills of Attila had been at
par.  It was impossible that a man who so completely mistook the
nature of a contest could carry on that contest successfully. 
Great as Pitt's abilities were, his military administration was
that of a driveller.  He was at the head of a nation engaged in a
struggle for life and death, of a nation eminently distinguished
by all the physical and all the moral qualities which make
excellent soldiers.  The resources at his command were unlimited. 
The Parliament was even more ready to grant him men and money
than he was to ask for them.  In such an emergency, and with such
means, such a statesman as Richelieu, as Louvois, as Chatham, as
Wellesley, would have created in a few months one of the finest
armies in the world, and would soon have discovered and brought
forward generals worthy to command such an army.  Germany might
have been saved by another Blenheim; Flanders recovered by
another Ramilies; another Poitiers might have delivered the
Royalist and Catholic provinces of France from a yoke which they
abhorred, and might have spread terror even to the barriers of
Paris.  But the fact is, that, after eight years of war, after a
vast destruction of life, after an expenditure of wealth far
exceeding the expenditure of the American war, of the Seven
Years' War, of the war of the Austrian Succession, and of the war
of the Spanish Succession, united, the English army, under Pitt,
was the laughing-stock of all Europe.  It could not boast of one
single brilliant exploit.  It had never shown itself on the
Continent but to be beaten, chased, forced to re-embark, or
forced to capitulate.  To take some sugar island in the West
Indies, to scatter some mob of half-naked Irish peasants, such
were the most splendid victories won by the British troops under
Pitt's auspices.

The English navy no mismanagement could ruin.  But during a long
period whatever mismanagement could do was done.  The Earl of
Chatham, without a single qualification for high public trust,
was made, by fraternal partiality, First Lord of the Admiralty,
and was kept in that great post during two years of a war in
which the very existence of the state depended on the efficiency
of the fleet.  He continued to doze away and trifle away the time
which ought to have been devoted to the public service, till the
whole mercantile body, though generally disposed to support the
government, complained bitterly that our flag gave no protection
to our trade.  Fortunately he was succeeded by George Earl
Spencer, one of those chiefs of the Whig party who, in the great
schism caused by the French Revolution, had followed Burke.  Lord
Spencer, though inferior to many of his colleagues as an orator,
was decidedly the best administrator among them.  To him it was
owing that a long and gloomy succession of days of fasting, and,
most emphatically, of humiliation, was interrupted, twice in the
short space of eleven months, by days of thanksgiving for great
victories.

It may seem paradoxical to say that the incapacity which Pitt
showed in all that related to the conduct of the war is, in some
sense, the most decisive proof that he was a man of very
extraordinary abilities.  Yet this is the simple truth.  For
assuredly one-tenth part of his errors and disasters would have
been fatal to the power and influence of any minister who had not
possessed, in the highest degree, the talents of a parliamentary
leader.  While his schemes were confounded, while his predictions
were falsified, while the coalitions which he had laboured to
form were falling to pieces, while the expeditions which he had
sent forth at enormous cost were ending in rout and disgrace,
while the enemy against whom he was feebly contending was
subjugating Flanders and Brabant, the Electorate of Mentz, and
the Electorate of Treves, Holland, Piedmont, Liguria, Lombardy,
his authority over the House of Commons was constantly becoming
more and more absolute.  There was his empire.  There were his
victories, his Lodi and his Arcola, his Rivoli and his Marengo. 
If some great misfortune, a pitched battle lost by the allies,
the annexation of a new department to the French Republic, a
sanguinary insurrection in Ireland, a mutiny in the fleet, a
panic in the city, a run on the bank, had spread dismay through
the ranks of his majority, that dismay lasted only till he rose
from the Treasury bench, drew up his haughty head, stretched his
arm with commanding gesture, and poured forth, in deep and
sonorous tones, the lofty language of inextinguishable hope and
inflexible resolution.  Thus, through a long and calamitous
period, every disaster that happened without the walls of
Parliament was regularly followed by a triumph within them.  At
length he had no longer an opposition to encounter.  Of the great
party which had contended against him during the first eight
years of his administration more than one half now marched under
his standard, with his old competitor the Duke of Portland at
their head; and the rest had, after many vain struggles, quitted
the field in despair.  Fox had retired to the shades of St Anne's
Hill, and had there found, in the society of friends whom no
vicissitude could estrange from him, of a woman whom he tenderly
loved, and of the illustrious dead of Athens, of Rome, and of
Florence, ample compensation for all the misfortunes of his
public life.  Session followed session with scarcely a single
division.  In the eventful year 1799, the largest minority that
could be mustered against the government was twenty-five.

In Pitt's domestic policy there was at this time assuredly no
want of vigour.  While he offered to French Jacobinism a
resistance so feeble that it only encouraged the evil which he
wished to suppress, he put down English Jacobinism with a strong
hand.  The Habeas Corpus Act was repeatedly suspended.  Public
meetings were placed under severe restraints.  The government
obtained from parliament power to send out of the country aliens
who were suspected of evil designs; and that power was not
suffered to be idle.  Writers who propounded doctrines adverse to
monarchy and aristocracy were proscribed and punished without
mercy.  It was hardly safe for a republican to avow his political
creed over his beefsteak and his bottle of port at a chop-house. 
The old laws of Scotland against sedition, laws which were
considered by Englishmen as barbarous, and which a succession of
governments had suffered to rust, were now furbished up and
sharpened anew.  Men of cultivated minds and polished manners
were, for offences which at Westminster would have been treated
as mere misdemeanours, sent to herd with felons at Botany Bay. 
Some reformers, whose opinions were extravagant, and whose
language was intemperate, but who had never dreamed of subverting
the government by physical force, were indicted for high treason,
and were saved from the gallows only by the righteous verdicts of
juries.  This severity was at the time loudly applauded by
alarmists whom fear had made cruel, but will be seen in a very
different light by posterity.  The truth is, that the Englishmen
who wished for a revolution were, even in number, not formidable,
and in everything but number, a faction utterly contemptible,
without arms, or funds, or plans, or organisation, or leader. 
There can be no doubt that Pitt, strong as he was in the support
of the great body of the nation, might easily have repressed the
turbulence of the discontented minority by firmly yet temperately
enforcing the ordinary law.  Whatever vigour he showed during
this unfortunate part of his life was vigour out of place and
season.  He was all feebleness and langour in his conflict with
the foreign enemy who was really to be dreaded, and reserved all
his energy and resolution for the domestic enemy who might safely
have been despised.

One part only of Pitt's conduct during the last eight years of
the eighteenth century deserves high praise.  He was the first
English minister who formed great designs for the benefit of
Ireland.  The manner in which the Roman Catholic population of
that unfortunate country had been kept down during many
generations seemed to him unjust and cruel; and it was scarcely
possible for a man of his abilities not to perceive that, in a
contest against the Jacobins, the Roman Catholics were his
natural allies.  Had he been able to do all that he wished, it is
probable that a wise and liberal policy would have averted the
rebellion of 1798.  But the difficulties which he encountered
were great, perhaps insurmountable; and the Roman Catholics were,
rather by his misfortune than by his fault, thrown into the hands
of the Jacobins.  There was a third great rising of the Irishry
against the Englishry, a rising not less formidable than the
risings of 1641 and 1689.  The Englishry remained victorious, and
it was necessary for Pitt, as it had been necessary for Oliver
Cromwell and William of Orange before him, to consider how the
victory should be used.  It is only just to his memory to say
that he formed a scheme of policy, so grand and so simple, so
righteous and so humane, that it would alone entitle him to a
high place among statesmen.  He determined to make Ireland one
kingdom with England, and, at the same time, to relieve the Roman
Catholic laity from civil disabilities, and to grant a public
maintenance to the Roman Catholic clergy.  Had he been able to
carry these noble designs into effect, the Union would have been
an Union indeed.  It would have been inseparably associated in
the minds of the great majority of Irishmen with civil and
religious freedom; and the old Parliament in College Green would
have been regretted only by a small knot of discarded jobbers and
oppressors, and would have been remembered by the body of the
nation with the loathing and contempt due to the most tyrannical
and the most corrupt assembly that had ever sate in Europe.  But
Pitt could execute only one half of what he had projected.  He
succeeded in obtaining the consent of the Parliaments of both
kingdoms to the Union; but that reconciliation of races and
sects, without which the Union could exist only in name, was not
accomplished.  He was well aware that he was likely to find
difficulties in the closet.  But he flattered himself, that by
cautious and dexterous management, those difficulties might be
overcome.  Unhappily, there were traitors and sycophants in high
place who did not suffer him to take his own time, and his own
way, but prematurely disclosed his scheme to the King, and
disclosed it in the manner most likely to irritate and alarm a
weak and diseased mind.  His Majesty absurdly imagined that his
Coronation oath bound him to refuse his assent to any bill for
relieving Roman Catholics from civil disabilities.  To argue with
him was impossible.  Dundas tried to explain the matter, but was
told to keep his Scotch metaphysics to himself.  Pitt, and Pitt's
ablest colleagues, resigned their offices.  It was necessary that
the King should make a new arrangement.  But by this time his
anger and distress had brought back the malady which had, many
years before, incapacitated him for the discharge of his
functions.  He actually assembled his family, read the Coronation
oath to them, and told them that, if he broke it, the Crown would
immediately pass to the House of Savoy.  It was not until after
an interregnum of several weeks that he regained the full use of
his small faculties, and that a ministry after his own heart was
at length formed.

The materials out of which he had to construct a government were
neither solid nor splendid.  To that party, weak in numbers, but
strong in every kind of talent, which was hostile to the domestic
and foreign policy of his late advisers, he could not have
recourse.  For that party, while it differed from his late
advisers on every point on which they had been honoured with his
approbation, cordially agreed with them as to the single matter
which had brought on them his displeasure.  All that was left to
him was to call up the rear ranks of the old ministry to form the
front rank of a new ministry.  In an age pre-eminently fruitful
of parliamentary talents, a cabinet was formed containing hardly
a single man who, in parliamentary talents, could be considered
as even of the second rate.  The most important offices in the
state were bestowed on decorous and laborious mediocrity.  Henry
Addington was at the head of the Treasury.  He had been an early,
indeed a hereditary, friend of Pitt, and had by Pitt's influence
been placed, while still a young man, in the chair of the House
of Commons.  He was universally admitted to have been the best
speaker that had sate in that chair since the retirement of
Onslow.  But nature had not bestowed on him very vigorous
faculties; and the highly respectable situation which he had long
occupied with honour had rather unfitted than fitted him for the
discharge of his new duties.  His business had been to bear
himself evenly between contending factions.  He had taken no part
in the war of words; and he had always been addressed with marked
deference by the great orators who thundered against each other
from his right and from his left.  It was not strange that, when,
for the first time, he had to encounter keen and vigorous
antagonists, who dealt hard blows without the smallest ceremony,
he should have been awkward and unready, or that the air of
dignity and authority which he had acquired in his former post,
and of which he had not divested himself, should have made his
helplessness laughable and pitiable.  Nevertheless, during many
months, his power seemed to stand firm.  He was a favourite with
the King, whom he resembled in narrowness of mind, and to whom he
was more obsequious than Pitt had ever been.  The nation was put
into high good humour by a peace with France.  The enthusiasm
with which the upper and middle classes had rushed into the war
had spent itself.  Jacobinism was no longer formidable. 
Everywhere there was a strong reaction against what was called
the atheistical and anarchical philosophy of the eighteenth
century.  Bonaparte, now First Consul, was busied in constructing
out of the ruins of old institutions a new ecclesiastical
establishment and a new order of knighthood.  That nothing less
than the dominion of the whole civilised world would satisfy his
selfish ambition was not yet suspected; nor did even wise men see
any reason to doubt that he might be as safe a neighbour as any
prince of the House of Bourbon had been.  The treaty of Amiens
was therefore hailed by the great body of the English people with
extravagant joy.  The popularity of the minister was for the
moment immense.  His want of parliamentary ability was, as yet,
of little consequence:  for he had scarcely any adversary to
encounter.  The old opposition, delighted by the peace, regarded
him with favour.  A new opposition had indeed been formed by some
of the late ministers, and was led by Grenville in the House of
Lords, and by Windham in the House of Commons.  But the new
opposition could scarcely muster ten votes, and was regarded with
no favour by the country.  On Pitt the ministers relied as on
their firmest support.  He had not, like some of his colleagues,
retired in anger.  He had expressed the greatest respect for the
conscientious scruple which had taken possession of the royal
mind; and he had promised his successors all the help in his
power.  In private his advice was at their service.  In
Parliament he took his seat on the bench behind them; and, in
more than one debate, defended them with powers far superior to
their own.  The King perfectly understood the value of such
assistance.  On one occasion, at the palace, he took the old
minister and the new minister aside.  "If we three," he said,
"keep together, all will go well."

But it was hardly possible, human nature being what it is, and,
more especially, Pitt and Addington being what they were, that
this union should be durable.  Pitt, conscious of superior
powers, imagined that the place which he had quitted was now
occupied by a mere puppet which he had set up, which he was to
govern while he suffered it to remain, and which he was to fling
aside as soon as he wished to resume his old position.  Nor was
it long before he began to pine for the power which he had
relinquished.  He had been so early raised to supreme authority
in the state, and had enjoyed that authority so long, that it had
become necessary to him.  In retirement his days passed heavily. 
He could not, like Fox, forget the pleasures and cares of
ambition in the company of Euripides or Herodotus.  Pride
restrained him from intimating, even to his dearest friends, that
he wished to be again minister.  But he thought it strange,
almost ungrateful, that his wish had not been divined, that it
had not been anticipated, by one whom he regarded as his deputy.

Addington, on the other hand, was by no means inclined to descend
from his high position.  He was, indeed, under a delusion much
resembling that of Abon Hassan in the Arabian tale.  His brain
was turned by his short and unreal Caliphate.  He took his
elevation quite seriously, attributed it to his own merit, and
considered himself as one of the great triumvirate of English
statesmen, as worthy to make a third with Pitt and Fox.

Such being the feelings of the late minister and of the present
minister, a rupture was inevitable; and there was no want of
persons bent on making that rupture speedy and violent.  Some of
these persons wounded Addington's pride by representing him as a
lacquey, sent to keep a place on the Treasury bench till his
master should find it convenient to come.  Others took every
opportunity of praising him at Pitt's expense.  Pitt had waged a
long, a bloody, a costly, an unsuccessful war.  Addington had
made peace.  Pitt had suspended the constitutional liberties of
Englishmen.  Under Addington those liberties were again enjoyed. 
Pitt had wasted the public resources.  Addington was carefully
nursing them.  It was sometimes but too evident that these
compliments were not unpleasing to Addington.  Pitt became cold
and reserved.  During many months he remained at a distance from
London.  Meanwhile his most intimate friends, in spite of his
declarations that he made no complaint, and that he had no wish
for office, exerted themselves to effect a change of ministry. 
His favourite disciple, George Canning, young, ardent, ambitious,
with great powers and great virtues, but with a temper too
restless and a wit too satirical for his own happiness, was
indefatigable.  He spoke; he wrote; he intrigued; he tried to
induce a large number of the supporters of the government to sign
a round robin desiring a change; he made game of Addington and of
Addington's relations in a succession of lively pasquinades.  The
minister's partisans retorted with equal acrimony, if not with
equal vivacity.  Pitt could keep out of the affray only by
keeping out of politics altogether; and this it soon became
impossible for him to do.  Had Napoleon, content with the first
place among the Sovereigns of the Continent, and with a military
reputation surpassing that of Marlborough or of Turenne, devoted
himself to the noble task of making France happy by mild
administration and wise legislation, our country might have long
continued to tolerate a government of fair intentions and feeble
abilities.  Unhappily, the treaty of Amiens had scarcely been
signed, when the restless ambition and the insupportable
insolence of the First Consul convinced the great body of the
English people that the peace, so eagerly welcomed, was only a
precarious armistice.  As it became clearer and clearer that a
war for the dignity, the independence, the very existence of the
nation was at hand, men looked with increasing uneasiness on the
weak and languid cabinet which would have to contend against an
enemy who united more than the power of Louis the Great to more
than the genius of Frederick the Great.  It is true that
Addington might easily have been a better war minister than Pitt,
and could not possibly have been a worse.  But Pitt had cast a
spell on the public mind.  The eloquence, the judgment, the calm
and disdainful firmness, which he had, during many years,
displayed in Parliament, deluded the world into the belief that
he must be eminently qualified to superintend every department of
politics, and they imagined, even after the miserable failures of
Dunkirk, of Quiberon, and of the Helder, that he was the only
statesman who could cope with Bonaparte.  This feeling was
nowhere stronger than among Addington's own colleagues.  The
pressure put on him was so strong that he could not help yielding
to it; yet, even in yielding, he showed how far he was from
knowing his own place.  His first proposition was, that some
insignificant nobleman should be First Lord of the Treasury and
nominal head of the administration, and that the real power
should be divided between Pitt and himself, who were to be
secretaries of state.  Pitt, as might have been expected, refused
even to discuss such a scheme, and talked of it with bitter
mirth.  "Which secretaryship was offered to you?" his friend
Wilberforce asked.  "Really," said Pitt, "I had not the curiosity
to inquire."  Addington was frightened into bidding higher.  He
offered to resign the Treasury to Pitt, on condition that there
should be no extensive change in the government.  But Pitt would
listen to no such terms.  Then came a dispute such as often
arises after negotiations orally conducted, even when the
negotiators are men of strict honour.  Pitt gave one account of
what had passed; Addington gave another:  and though the
discrepancies were not such as necessarily implied any
intentional violation of truth on either side, both were greatly
exasperated.

Meanwhile the quarrel with the First Consul had come to a crisis. 
On the 16th of May, 1803, the King sent a message calling on the
House of Commons to support him in withstanding the ambitious and
encroaching policy of France; and, on the 22d, the House took the
message into consideration.

Pitt had now been living many months in retirement.  There had
been a general election since he had spoken in Parliament; and
there were two hundred members who had never heard him.  It was
known that on this occasion he would be in his place; and
curiosity was wound up to the highest point.  Unfortunately the
short-hand writers were, in consequence of some mistake, shut out
on that day from the gallery, so that the newspapers contained
only a very meagre report of the proceedings.  But several
accounts of what passed are extant; and of those accounts the
most interesting is contained in an unpublished letter, written
by a very young member, John William Ward, afterwards Earl of
Dudley.  When Pitt rose, he was received with loud cheering.  At
every pause in his speech there was a burst of applause.  The
peroration is said to have been one of the most animated and
magnificent ever heard in Parliament.  "Pitt's speech," Fox wrote
a few days later, "was admired very much, and very justly.  I
think it was the best he ever made in that style."  The debate
was adjourned; and on the second night Fox replied in an oration
which, as the most zealous Pittites were forced to acknowledge,
left the palm of eloquence doubtful.  Addington made a pitiable
appearance between the two great rivals; and it was observed that
Pitt, while exhorting the Commons to stand resolutely by the
executive government against France, said not a word indicating
esteem or friendship for the Prime Minister.

War was speedily declared.  The first consul threatened to invade
England at the head of the conquerors of Belgium and Italy, and
formed a great camp near the Straits of Dover.  On the other side
of those Straits the whole population of our island was ready to
rise up as one man in defence of the soil.  At this conjuncture,
as at some other great conjunctures in our history, the
conjuncture of 1660, for example, and the conjuncture of 1688,
there was a general disposition among honest and patriotic men to
forget old quarrels, and to regard as a friend every person who
was ready, in the existing emergency, to do his part towards the
saving of the state.  A coalition of all the first men in the
country would, at that moment, have been as popular as the
coalition of 1783 had been unpopular.  Alone in the kingdom the
King looked with perfect complacency on a cabinet in which no man
superior to himself in genius was to be found, and was so far
from being willing to admit all his ablest subjects to office
that he was bent on excluding them all.

A few months passed before the different parties which agreed in
regarding the government with dislike and contempt came to an
understanding with each other.  But in the spring of 1804 it
became evident that the weakest of ministries would have to
defend itself against the strongest of oppositions, an opposition
made up of three oppositions, each of which would, separately,
have been formidable from ability, and which, when united, were
also formidable from number.  The party which had opposed the
peace, headed by Grenville and Windham, and the party which had
opposed the renewal of the war, headed by Fox, concurred in
thinking that the men now in power were incapable of either
making a good peace or waging a vigorous war.  Pitt had, in 1802,
spoken for peace against the party of Grenville, and had, in
1803, spoken for war against the party of Fox.  But of the
capacity of the cabinet, and especially of its chief, for the
conduct of great affairs, he thought as meanly as either Fox or
Grenville.  Questions were easily found on which all the enemies
of the government could act cordially together.  The unfortunate
First Lord of the Treasury, who had, during the earlier months of
his administration, been supported by Pitt on one side, and by
Fox on the other, now had to answer Pitt, and to be answered by
Fox.  Two sharp debates, followed by close divisions, made him
weary of his post.  It was known, too, that the Upper House was
even more hostile to him than the Lower, that the Scotch
representative peers wavered, that there were signs of mutiny
among the bishops.  In the cabinet itself there was discord, and,
worse than discord, treachery.  It was necessary to give way: 
the ministry was dissolved; and the task of forming a government
was entrusted to Pitt.

Pitt was of opinion that there was now an opportunity, such as
had never before offered itself, and such as might never offer
itself again, of uniting in the public service, on honourable
terms, all the eminent talents of the kingdom.  The passions to
which the French revolution had given birth were extinct.  The
madness of the innovator and the madness of the alarmist had
alike had their day.  Jacobinism and anti-Jacobinism had gone out
of fashion together.  The most liberal statesman did not think
that season propitious for schemes of parliamentary reform; and
the most conservative statesman could not pretend that there was
any occasion for gagging bills and suspensions of the Habeas
Corpus Act.  The great struggle for independence and national
honour occupied all minds; and those who were agreed as to the
duty of maintaining that struggle with vigour might well postpone
to a more convenient time all disputes about matters
comparatively unimportant.  Strongly impressed by these
considerations, Pitt wished to form a ministry including all the
first men in the country.  The Treasury he reserved for himself;
and to Fox he proposed to assign a share of power little inferior
to his own.

The plan was excellent; but the King would not hear of it.  Dull,
obstinate, unforgiving, and, at that time half mad, he positively
refused to admit Fox into his service.  Anybody else, even men
who had gone as far as Fox, or further than Fox, in what his
Majesty considered as Jacobinism, Sheridan, Grey, Erskine, should
be graciously received; but Fox never.  During several hours Pitt
laboured in vain to reason down this senseless antipathy.  That
he was perfectly sincere there can be no doubt:  but it was not
enough to be sincere; he should have been resolute.  Had he
declared himself determined not to take office without Fox, the
royal obstinacy would have given way, as it gave way, a few
months later, when opposed to the immutable resolution of Lord
Grenville.  In an evil hour Pitt yielded.  He flattered himself
with the hope that, though he consented to forego the aid of his
illustrious rival, there would still remain ample materials for
the formation of an efficient ministry.  That hope was cruelly
disappointed.  Fox entreated his friends to leave personal
considerations out of the question, and declared that he would
support, with the utmost cordiality, an efficient and patriotic
ministry from which he should be himself excluded.  Not only his
friends, however, but Grenville, and Grenville's adherents,
answered, with one voice, that the question was not personal,
that a great constitutional principle was at stake, and that they
would not take office while a man eminently qualified to render
service to the commonwealth was placed under a ban merely because
he was disliked at Court.  All that was left to Pitt was to
construct a government out of the wreck of Addington's feeble
administration.  The small circle of his personal retainers
furnished him with a very few useful assistants, particularly
Dundas, who had been created Viscount Melville, Lord Harrowby,
and Canning.

Such was the inauspicious manner in which Pitt entered on his
second administration.  The whole history of that administration
was of a piece with the commencement.  Almost every month brought
some new disaster or disgrace.  To the war with France was soon
added a war with Spain.  The opponents of the minister were
numerous, able, and active.  His most useful coadjutors he soon
lost.  Sickness deprived him of the help of Lord Harrowby.  It
was discovered that Lord Melville had been guilty of highly
culpable laxity in transactions relating to public money.  He was
censured by the House of Commons, driven from office, ejected
from the Privy Council, and impeached of high crimes and
misdemeanours.  The blow fell heavy on Pitt.  It gave him, he
said in Parliament, a deep pang; and, as he uttered the word
pang, his lip quivered, his voice shook, he paused, and his
hearers thought that he was about to burst into tears.  Such
tears shed by Eldon would have moved nothing but laughter.  Shed
by the warm-hearted and open-hearted Fox, they would have moved
sympathy, but would have caused no surprise.  But a tear from
Pitt would have been something portentous.  He suppressed his
emotion, however, and proceeded with his usual majestic self-
possession.

His difficulties compelled him to resort to various expedients. 
At one time Addington was persuaded to accept office with a
peerage; but he brought no additional strength to the government. 
Though he went through the form of reconciliation, it was
impossible for him to forget the past.  While he remained in
place he was jealous and punctilious; and he soon retired again. 
At another time Pitt renewed his efforts to overcome his master's
aversion to Fox; and it was rumoured that the King's obstinacy
was gradually giving way.  But, meanwhile, it was impossible for
the minister to conceal from the public eye the decay of his
health, and the constant anxiety which gnawed at his heart.  His
sleep was broken.  His food ceased to nourish him.  All who
passed him in the Park, all who had interviews with him in
Downing Street, saw misery written in his face.  The peculiar
look which he wore during the last months of his life was often
pathetically described by Wilberforce, who used to call it the
Austerlitz look.

Still the vigour of Pitt's intellectual faculties, and the
intrepid haughtiness of his spirit, remained unaltered.  He had
staked everything on a great venture.  He had succeeded in
forming another mighty coalition against the French ascendency. 
The united forces of Austria, Russia, and England might, he
hoped, oppose an insurmountable barrier to the ambition of the
common enemy.  But the genius and energy of Napoleon prevailed. 
While the English troops were preparing to embark for Germany,
while the Russian troops were slowly coming up from Poland, he,
with rapidity unprecedented in modern war, moved a hundred
thousand men from the shores of the Ocean to the Black Forest,
and compelled a great Austrian army to surrender at Ulm.  To the
first faint rumours of this calamity Pitt would give no credit. 
He was irritated by the alarms of those around him.  "Do not
believe a word of it," he said:  "It is all a fiction."  The next
day he received a Dutch newspaper containing the capitulation. 
He knew no Dutch.  It was Sunday; and the public offices were
shut.  He carried the paper to Lord Malmesbury, who had been
minister in Holland; and Lord Malmesbury translated it.  Pitt
tried to bear up; but the shock was too great; and he went away
with death in his face.

The news of the battle of Trafalgar arrived four days later, and
seemed for a moment to revive him.  Forty-eight hours after that
most glorious and most mournful of victories had been announced
to the country came the Lord Mayor's day; and Pitt dined at
Guildhall.  His popularity had declined.  But on this occasion
the multitude, greatly excited by the recent tidings, welcomed
him enthusiastically, took off his horses in Cheapside, and drew
his carriage up King Street.  When his health was drunk, he
returned thanks in two or three of those stately sentences of
which he had a boundless command.  Several of those who heard him
laid up his words in their hearts; for they were the last words
that he ever uttered in public:  "Let us hope that England,
having saved herself by her energy, may save Europe by her
example."

This was but a momentary rally.  Austerlitz soon completed what
Ulm had begun.  Early in December Pitt had retired to Bath, in
the hope that he might there gather strength for the approaching
session.  While he was languishing there on his sofa arrived the
news that a decisive battle had been fought and lost in Moravia,
that the coalition was dissolved, that the Continent was at the
feet of France.  He sank down under the blow.  Ten days later he
was so emaciated that his most intimate friends hardly knew him. 
He came up from Bath by slow journeys, and, on the 11th of
January 1806, reached his villa at Putney.  Parliament was to
meet on the 21st.  On the 20th was to be the parliamentary dinner
at the house of the First Lord of the Treasury in Downing Street;
and the cards were already issued.  But the days of the great
minister were numbered.  The only chance for his life, and that a
very slight chance, was that he should resign his office, and
pass some months in profound repose.  His colleagues paid him
very short visits, and carefully avoided political conversation. 
But his spirit, long accustomed to dominion, could not, even in
that extremity, relinquish hopes which everybody but himself
perceived to be vain.  On the day on which he was carried into
his bedroom at Putney, the Marquess Wellesley, whom he had long
loved, whom he had sent to govern India, and whose administration
had been eminently able, energetic, and successful, arrived in
London after an absence of eight years.  The friends saw each
other once more.  There was an affectionate meeting, and a last
parting.  That it was a last parting Pitt did not seem to be
aware.  He fancied himself to be recovering, talked on various
subjects cheerfully, and with an unclouded mind, and pronounced a
warm and discerning eulogium on the Marquess's brother Arthur. 
"I never," he said, "met with any military man with whom it was
so satisfactory to converse."  The excitement and exertion of
this interview were too much for the sick man.  He fainted away;
and Lord Wellesley left the house, convinced that the close was
fast approaching.

And now members of Parliament were fast coming up to London.  The
chiefs of the opposition met for the purpose of considering the
course to be taken on the first day of the session.  It was easy
to guess what would be the language of the King's speech, and of
the address which would be moved in answer to that speech.  An
amendment condemning the policy of the government had been
prepared, and was to have been proposed in the House of Commons
by Lord Henry Petty, a young nobleman who had already won for
himself that place in the esteem of his country which, after the
lapse of more than half a century, he still retains.  He was
unwilling, however, to come forward as the accuser of one who was
incapable of defending himself.  Lord Grenville, who had been
informed of Pitt's state by Lord Wellesley, and had been deeply
affected by it, earnestly recommended forbearance; and Fox, with
characteristic generosity and good nature, gave his voice against
attacking his now helpless rival.  "Sunt lacrymae rerum," he
said, "et mentem mortalia tangunt."  On the first day, therefore,
there was no debate.  It was rumoured that evening that Pitt was
better.  But on the following morning his physicians pronounced
that there were no hopes.  The commanding faculties of which he
had been too proud were beginning to fail.  His old tutor and
friend, the Bishop of Lincoln, informed him of his danger, and
gave such religious advice and consolation as a confused and
obscured mind could receive.  Stories were told of devout
sentiments fervently uttered by the dying man.  But these stories
found no credit with anybody who knew him.  Wilberforce
pronounced it impossible that they could be true.  "Pitt," he
added, "was a man who always said less than he thought on such
topics."  It was asserted in many after-dinner speeches, Grub
Street elegies, and academic prize poems and prize declamations,
that the great minister died exclaiming, "Oh my country!"  This
is a fable; but it is true that the last words which he uttered,
while he knew what he said, were broken exclamations about the
alarming state of public affairs.  He ceased to breathe on the
morning of the 23rd of January, 1806, the twenty-fifth
anniversary of the day on which he first took his seat in
Parliament.  He was in his forty-seventh year, and had been,
during near nineteen years, First Lord of the Treasury, and
undisputed chief of the administration.  Since parliamentary
government was established in England, no English statesman has
held supreme power so long.  Walpole, it is true, was First Lord
of the Treasury during more than twenty years:  but it was not
till Walpole had been some time First Lord of the Treasury that
he could be properly called Prime Minister.

It was moved in the House of Commons that Pitt should be honoured
with a public funeral and a monument.  The motion was opposed by
Fox in a speech which deserves to be studied as a model of good
taste and good feeling.  The task was the most invidious that
ever an orator undertook:  but it was performed with a humanity
and delicacy which were warmly acknowledged by the mourning
friends of him who was gone.  The motion was carried by 288 votes
to 89.

The 22d of February was fixed for the funeral.  The corpse having
lain in state during two days in the Painted Chamber, was borne
with great pomp to the northern transept of the Abbey.  A
splendid train of princes, nobles, bishops, and privy councillors
followed.  The grave of Pitt had been made near to the spot where
his great father lay, near also to the spot where his great rival
was soon to lie.  The sadness of the assistants was beyond that
of ordinary mourners.  For he whom they were committing to the
dust had died of sorrows and anxieties of which none of the
survivors could be altogether without a share.  Wilberforce, who
carried the banner before the hearse, described the awful
ceremony with deep feeling.  As the coffin descended into the
earth, he said, the eagle face of Chatham from above seemed to
look down with consternation into the dark house which was
receiving all that remained of so much power and glory.

All parties in the House of Commons readily concurred in voting
forty thousand pounds to satisfy the demands of Pitt's creditors. 
Some of his admirers seemed to consider the magnitude of his
embarrassments as a circumstance highly honourable to him; but
men of sense will probably be of a different opinion.  It is far
better, no doubt, that a great minister should carry his contempt
of money to excess than that he should contaminate his hands with
unlawful gain.  But it is neither right nor becoming in a man to
whom the public has given an income more than sufficient for his
comfort and dignity to bequeath to that public a great debt, the
effect of mere negligence and profusion.  As first Lord of the
Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer, Pitt never had less
than six thousand a year, besides an excellent house.  In 1792 he
was forced by his royal master's friendly importunity to accept
for life the office of Warden of the Cinque Ports, with near four
thousand a year more.  He had neither wife nor child; he had no
needy relations:  he had no expensive tastes:  he had no long
election bills.  Had he given but a quarter of an hour a week to
the regulation of his household, he would have kept his
expenditure within bounds.  Or, if he could not spare even a
quarter of an hour a week for that purpose, he had numerous
friends, excellent men of business, who would have been proud to
act as his stewards.  One of those friends, the chief of a great
commercial house in the city, made an attempt to put the
establishment in Downing Street to rights; but in vain.  He found
that the waste of the servants' hall was almost fabulous.  The
quantity of butcher's meat charged in the bills was nine
hundredweight a week.  The consumption of poultry, of fish, and
of tea was in proportion.  The character of Pitt would have stood
higher if with the disinterestedness of Pericles and of De Witt,
he had united their dignified frugality.

The memory of Pitt has been assailed, times innumerable, often
justly, often unjustly; but it has suffered much less from his
assailants than from his eulogists.  For, during many years, his
name was the rallying cry of a class of men with whom, at one of
those terrible conjunctures which confound all ordinary
distinctions, he was accidentally and temporarily connected, but
to whom, on almost all great questions of principle, he was
diametrically opposed.  The haters of parliamentary reform called
themselves Pittites, not choosing to remember that Pitt made
three motions for parliamentary reform, and that, though he
thought that such a reform could not safely be made while the
passions excited by the French revolution were raging, he never
uttered a word indicating that he should not be prepared at a
more convenient season to bring the question forward a fourth
time.  The toast of Protestant ascendency was drunk on Pitt's
birthday by a set of Pittites who could not but be aware that
Pitt had resigned his office because he could not carry Catholic
emancipation.  The defenders of the Test Act called themselves
Pittites, though they could not be ignorant that Pitt had laid
before George the Third unanswerable reasons for abolishing the
Test Act.  The enemies of free trade called themselves Pittites,
though Pitt was far more deeply imbued with the doctrines of Adam
Smith than either Fox or Grey.  The very negro-drivers invoked
the name of Pitt, whose eloquence was never more conspicuously
displayed than when he spoke of the wrongs of the negro.  This
mythical Pitt, who resembles the genuine Pitt as little as
Charlemagne of Ariosto resembles the Charlemagne of Eginhard, has
had his day.  History will vindicate the real man from calumny
disguised under the semblance of adulation, and will exhibit him
as what he was, a minister of great talents, honest intentions,
and liberal opinions, pre-eminently qualified, intellectually and
morally, for the part of a parliamentary leader, and capable of
administering with prudence and moderation the government of a
prosperous and tranquil country, but unequal to surprising and
terrible emergencies, and liable, in such emergencies, to err
grievously, both on the side of weakness and on the side of
violence.

...


MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, INSCRIPTIONS, ETC.


EPITAPH ON HENRY MARTYN.

(1812.)

Here Martyn lies.  In Manhood's early bloom
The Christian Hero finds a Pagan tomb.
Religion, sorrowing o'er her favourite son,
Points to the glorious trophies that he won.
Eternal trophies! not with carnage red,
Not stained with tears by hapless captives shed,
But trophies of the Cross! for that dear name,
Through every form of danger, death, and shame,
Onward he journeyed to a happier shore,
Where danger, death, and shame assault no more.

...


LINES TO THE MEMORY OF PITT.

(1813.)

Oh Britain! dear Isle, when the annals of story
Shall tell of the deeds that thy children have done,
When the strains of each poet shall sing of their glory,
And the triumphs their skill and their valour have won.

When the olive and palm in thy chaplet are blended,
When thy arts, and thy fame, and thy commerce increase,
When thy arms through the uttermost coasts are extended,
And thy war is triumphant, and happy thy peace;

When the ocean, whose waves like a rampart flow round thee,
Conveying thy mandates to every shore,
And the empire of nature no longer can bound thee,
And the world be the scene of thy conquests no more:

Remember the man who in sorrow and danger,
When thy glory was set, and thy spirit was low,
When thy hopes were o'erturned by the arms of the stranger,
And thy banners displayed in the halls of the foe,

Stood forth in the tempest of doubt and disaster,
Unaided, and single, the danger to brave.
Asserted thy claims, and the rights of his master,
Preserved thee to conquer, and saved thee to save.

...


A RADICAL WAR SONG.

(1820.)

Awake, arise, the hour is come,
For rows and revolutions;
There's no receipt like pike and drum
For crazy constitutions.
Close, close the shop!  Break, break the loom,
Desert your hearths and furrows,
And throng in arms to seal the doom
Of England's rotten boroughs.

We'll stretch that tort'ring Castlereagh
On his own Dublin rack, sir;
We'll drown the King in Eau de vie,
The Laureate in his sack, sir,
Old Eldon and his sordid hag
In molten gold we'll smother,
And stifle in his own green bag
The Doctor and his brother.

In chains we'll hang in fair Guildhall
The City's famed recorder,
And next on proud St Stephen's fall,
Though Wynne should squeak to order.
In vain our tyrants then shall try
To 'scape our martial law, sir;
In vain the trembling Speaker cry
That "Strangers must withdraw," sir.

Copley to hang offends no text;
A rat is not a man, sir:
With schedules, and with tax bills next
We'll bury pious Van, sir.
The slaves who loved the income Tax,
We'll crush by scores, like mites, sir,
And him, the wretch who freed the blacks,
And more enslaved the whites, sir.

The peer shall dangle from his gate,
The bishop from his steeple,
Till all recanting, own, the State
Means nothing but the People.
We'll fix the church's revenues
On Apostolic basis,
One coat, one scrip, one pair of shoes
Shall pay their strange grimaces.

We'll strap the bar's deluding train
In their own darling halter,
And with his big church bible brain
The parson at the altar.
Hail glorious hour, when fair Reform
Shall bless our longing nation,
And Hunt receive commands to form
A new administration.

Carlisle shall sit enthroned, where sat
Our Cranmer and our Secker;
And Watson show his snow-white hat
In England's rich Exchequer.
The breast of Thistlewood shall wear
Our Wellesley's star and sash, man:
And many a mausoleum fair
Shall rise to honest Cashman.

Then, then beneath the nine-tailed cat
Shall they who used it writhe, sir;
And curates lean, and rectors fat,
Shall dig the ground they tithe, sir.
Down with your Bayleys, and your Bests,
Your Giffords, and your Gurneys:
We'll clear the island of the pests,
Which mortals name attorneys.

Down with your sheriffs, and your mayors,
Your registrars, and proctors,
We'll live without the lawyer's cares,
And die without the doctor's.
No discontented fair shall pout
To see her spouse so stupid;
We'll tread the torch of Hymen out,
And live content with Cupid.

Then, when the high-born and the great
Are humbled to our level,
On all the wealth of Church and State,
Like aldermen, we'll revel.
We'll live when hushed the battle's din,
In smoking and in cards, sir,
In drinking unexcised gin,
And wooing fair Poissardes, sir.

...


THE BATTLE OF MONCONTOUR.

(1824.)

Oh, weep for Moncontour!  Oh! weep for the hour,
When the children of darkness and evil had power,
When the horsemen of Valois triumphantly trod
On the bosoms that bled for their rights and their God.

Oh, weep for Moncontour!  Oh! weep for the slain,
Who for faith and for freedom lay slaughtered in vain;
Oh, weep for the living, who linger to bear
The renegade's shame, or the exile's despair.

One look, one last look, to our cots and our towers,
To the rows of our vines, and the beds of our flowers,
To the church where the bones of our fathers decayed,
Where we fondly had deemed that our own would be laid.

Alas! we must leave thee, dear desolate home,
To the spearmen of Uri, the shavelings of Rome,
To the serpent of Florence, the vulture of Spain,
To the pride of Anjou, and the guile of Lorraine.

Farewell to thy fountains, farewell to thy shades,
To the song of thy youths, and the dance of thy maids,
To the breath of thy gardens, the hum of thy bees,
And the long waving line of the blue Pyrenees.

Farewell, and for ever.  The priest and the slave
May rule in the halls of the free and the brave.
Our hearths we abandon; our lands we resign;
But, Father, we kneel to no altar but thine.

...


THE BATTLE OF NASEBY,

BY OBADIAH BIND-THEIR-KINGS-IN-CHAINS-AND-THEIR-NOBLES-WITH-
LINKS-OF-IRON, SERJEANT IN IRETON'S REGIMENT.  (1824.)

Oh! wherefore come ye forth, in triumph from the North,
With your hands, and your feet, and your raiment all red?
And wherefore doth your rout send forth a joyous shout?
And whence be the grapes of the wine-press which ye tread?

Oh evil was the root, and bitter was the fruit,
And crimson was the juice of the vintage that we trod;
For we trampled on the throng of the haughty and the strong,
Who sate in the high places, and slew the saints of God.

It was about the noon of a glorious day of June,
That we saw their banners dance, and their cuirasses shine,
And the Man of Blood was there, with his long essenced hair,
And Astley, and Sir Marmaduke, and Rupert of the Rhine.

Like a servant of the Lord, with his Bible and his sword,
The General rode along us to form us to the fight,
When a murmuring sound broke out, and swell'd into a shout,
Among the godless horsemen upon the tyrant's right.

And hark! like the roar of the billows on the shore,
The cry of battle rises along their charging line!
For God! for the Cause! for the Church! for the Laws!
For Charles King of England and Rupert of the Rhine!

The furious German comes, with his clarions and his drums,
His bravoes of Alsatia, and pages of Whitehall;
They are bursting on our flanks.  Grasp your pikes, close your
ranks;
For Rupert never comes but to conquer or to fall.

They are here!  They rush on!  We are broken!  We are gone!
Our left is borne before them like stubble on the blast.
O Lord, put forth thy might!  O Lord, defend the right!
Stand back to back, in God's name, and fight it to the last.

Stout Skippon hath a wound; the centre hath given ground:
Hark! hark!--What means the trampling of horsemen on our rear?
Whose banner do I see, boys?  'Tis he, thank God, 'tis he, boys,
Bear up another minute:  brave Oliver is here.

Their heads all stooping low, their points all in a row,
Like a whirlwind on the trees, like a deluge on the dykes,
Our cuirassiers have burst on the ranks of the Accurst,
And at a shock have scattered the forest of his pikes.

Fast, fast, the gallants ride, in some safe nook to hide
Their coward heads, predestined to rot on Temple Bar;
And he--he turns, he flies:--shame on those cruel eyes
That bore to look on torture, and dare not look on war.

Ho! comrades, scour the plain; and, ere ye strip the slain,
First give another stab to make your search secure,
Then shake from sleeves and pockets their broad-pieces and
lockets,
The tokens of the wanton, the plunder of the poor.

Fools! your doublets shone with gold, and your hearts were gay
and bold,
When you kissed your lily hands to your lemans to-day;
And to-morrow shall the fox, from her chambers in the rocks,
Lead forth her tawny cubs to howl above the prey.

Where be your tongues that late mocked at heaven and hell and
fate,
And the fingers that once were so busy with your blades,
Your perfum'd satin clothes, your catches and your oaths,
Your stage-plays and your sonnets, your diamonds and your spades?

Down, down, for ever down with the mitre and the crown,
With the Belial of the Court and the Mammon of the Pope;
There is woe in Oxford halls:  there is wail in Durham's Stalls:
The Jesuit smites his bosom:  the Bishop rends his cope.

And She of the seven hills shall mourn her children's ills,
And tremble when she thinks on the edge of England's sword;
And the Kings of earth in fear shall shudder when they hear
What the hand of God hath wrought for the Houses and the Word.

...


SERMON IN A CHURCHYARD.

(1825.)

Let pious Damon take his seat,
With mincing step and languid smile,
And scatter from his 'kerchief sweet,
Sabaean odours o'er the aisle;
And spread his little jewelled hand,
And smile round all the parish beauties,
And pat his curls, and smooth his band,
Meet prelude to his saintly duties.

Let the thronged audience press and stare,
Let stifled maidens ply the fan,
Admire his doctrines, and his hair,
And whisper, "What a good young man!"
While he explains what seems most clear,
So clearly that it seems perplexed,
I'll stay and read my sermon here;
And skulls, and bones, shall be the text.

Art thou the jilted dupe of fame?
Dost thou with jealous anger pine
Whene'er she sounds some other name,
With fonder emphasis than thine?
To thee I preach; draw near; attend!
Look on these bones, thou fool, and see
Where all her scorns and favours end,
What Byron is, and thou must be.

Dost thou revere, or praise, or trust
Some clod like those that here we spurn;
Some thing that sprang like thee from dust,
And shall like thee to dust return?
Dost thou rate statesmen, heroes, wits,
At one sear leaf, or wandering feather?
Behold the black, damp narrow pits,
Where they and thou must lie together.

Dost thou beneath the smile or frown
Of some vain woman bend thy knee?
Here take thy stand, and trample down
Things that were once as fair as she.
Here rave of her ten thousand graces,
Bosom, and lip, and eye, and chin,
While, as in scorn, the fleshless faces
Of Hamiltons and Waldegraves grin.

Whate'er thy losses or thy gains,
Whate'er thy projects or thy fears,
Whate'er the joys, whate'er the pains,
That prompt thy baby smiles and tears;
Come to my school, and thou shalt learn,
In one short hour of placid thought,
A stoicism, more deep, more stern,
Than ever Zeno's porch hath taught.

The plots and feats of those that press
To seize on titles, wealth, or power,
Shall seem to thee a game of chess,
Devised to pass a tedious hour.
What matters it to him who fights
For shows of unsubstantial good,
Whether his Kings, and Queens, and Knights,
Be things of flesh, or things of wood?

We check, and take; exult, and fret;
Our plans extend, our passions rise,
Till in our ardour we forget
How worthless is the victor's prize.
Soon fades the spell, soon comes the night:
Say will it not be then the same,
Whether we played the black or white,
Whether we lost or won the game?

Dost thou among these hillocks stray,
O'er some dear idol's tomb to moan?
Know that thy foot is on the clay
Of hearts once wretched as thy own.
How many a father's anxious schemes,
How many rapturous thoughts of lovers,
How many a mother's cherished dreams,
The swelling turf before thee covers!

Here for the living, and the dead,
The weepers and the friends they weep,
Hath been ordained the same cold bed,
The same dark night, the same long sleep;
Why shouldest thou writhe, and sob, and rave
O'er those with whom thou soon must be?
Death his own sting shall cure--the grave
Shall vanquish its own victory.

Here learn that all the griefs and joys,
Which now torment, which now beguile,
Are children's hurts, and children's toys,
Scarce worthy of one bitter smile.
Here learn that pulpit, throne, and press,
Sword, sceptre, lyre, alike are frail,
That science is a blind man's guess,
And History a nurse's tale.

Here learn that glory and disgrace,
Wisdom and folly, pass away,
That mirth hath its appointed space,
That sorrow is but for a day;
That all we love, and all we hate,
That all we hope, and all we fear,
Each mood of mind, each turn of fate,
Must end in dust and silence here.

...


TRANSLATION FROM A.V. ARNAULT.

"Fables":  Livre v. "Fable" 16.

(1826.)

Thou poor leaf, so sear and frail,
Sport of every wanton gale,
Whence, and whither, dost thou fly,
Through this bleak autumnal sky?
On a noble oak I grew,
Green, and broad, and fair to view;
But the Monarch of the shade
By the tempest low was laid.
From that time, I wander o'er
Wood, and valley, hill, and moor,
Wheresoe'er the wind is blowing,
Nothing caring, nothing knowing:
Thither go I, whither goes,
Glory's laurel, Beauty's rose.

...

--De ta tige detachee,
Pauvre feuille dessechee
Ou vas tu?--Je n'en sais rien.
L'orage a frappe le chene
Qui seul etait mon soutien.
De son inconstante haleine,
Le zephyr ou l'aquilon
Depuis ce jour me promene
De la foret a la plaine,
De la montagne au vallon.
Je vais ou le vent me mene,
Sans me plaindre ou m'effrayer,
Je vais ou va toute chose
Ou va la feuille de rose
Et la feuille de laurier.

...


DIES IRAE.

(1826.)

On that great, that awful day,
This vain world shall pass away.
Thus the sibyl sang of old,
Thus hath holy David told.
There shall be a deadly fear
When the Avenger shall appear,
And unveiled before his eye
All the works of man shall lie.
Hark! to the great trumpet's tones
Pealing o'er the place of bones:
Hark! it waketh from their bed
All the nations of the dead,--
In a countless throng to meet,
At the eternal judgment seat.
Nature sickens with dismay,
Death may not retain its prey;
And before the Maker stand
All the creatures of his hand.
The great book shall be unfurled,
Whereby God shall judge the world;
What was distant shall be near,
What was hidden shall be clear.
To what shelter shall I fly?
To what guardian shall I cry?
Oh, in that destroying hour,
Source of goodness, Source of power,
Show thou, of thine own free grace,
Help unto a helpless race.
Though I plead not at thy throne
Aught that I for thee have done,
Do not thou unmindful be,
Of what thou hast borne for me:
Of the wandering, of the scorn,
Of the scourge, and of the thorn.
JESUS, hast THOU borne the pain,
And hath all been borne in vain?
Shall thy vengeance smite the head
For whose ransom thou hast bled?
Thou, whose dying blessing gave
Glory to a guilty slave:
Thou, who from the crew unclean
Didst release the Magdalene:
Shall not mercy vast and free,
Evermore be found in thee?
Father, turn on me thine eyes,
See my blushes, hear my cries;
Faint though be the cries I make,
Save me for thy mercy's sake,
From the worm, and from the fire,
From the torments of thine ire.
Fold me with the sheep that stand
Pure and safe at thy right hand.
Hear thy guilty child implore thee,
Rolling in the dust before thee.
Oh the horrors of that day!
When this frame of sinful clay,
Starting from its burial place,
Must behold thee face to face.
Hear and pity, hear and aid,
Spare the creatures thou hast made.
Mercy, mercy, save, forgive,
Oh, who shall look on thee and live?

...


THE MARRIAGE OF TIRZAH AND AHIRAD.

(1827.)

GENESIS VI. 3.   

It is the dead of night:
Yet more than noonday light
Beams far and wide from many a gorgeous hall.
Unnumbered harps are tinkling,
Unnumbered lamps are twinkling,
In the great city of the fourfold wall.
By the brazen castle's moat,
The sentry hums a livelier note.
The ship-boy chaunts a shriller lay
From the galleys in the bay.
Shout, and laugh, and hurrying feet
Sound from mart and square and street,
From the breezy laurel shades,
From the granite colonnades,
From the golden statue's base,
From the stately market-place,
Where, upreared by captive hands,
The great Tower of Triumph stands,
All its pillars in a blaze
With the many-coloured rays,
Which lanthorns of ten thousand dyes
Shed on ten thousand panoplies.
But closest is the throng,
And loudest is the song,
In that sweet garden by the river side,
The abyss of myrtle bowers,
The wilderness of flowers,
Where Cain hath built the palace of his pride.
Such palace ne'er shall be again
Among the dwindling race of men.
From all its threescore gates the light
Of gold and steel afar was thrown;
Two hundred cubits rose in height
The outer wall of polished stone.
On the top was ample space
For a gallant chariot race,
Near either parapet a bed
Of the richest mould was spread,
Where amidst flowers of every scent and hue
Rich orange trees, and palms, and giant cedars grew.

In the mansion's public court
All is revel, song, and sport;
For there, till morn shall tint the east,
Menials and guards prolong the feast.
The boards with painted vessels shine;
The marble cisterns foam with wine.
A hundred dancing girls are there
With zoneless waists and streaming hair;
And countless eyes with ardour gaze,
And countless hands the measure beat,
As mix and part in amorous maze
Those floating arms and bounding feet.
But none of all the race of Cain,
Save those whom he hath deigned to grace
With yellow robe and sapphire chain,
May pass beyond that outer space.
For now within the painted hall
The Firstborn keeps high festival.
Before the glittering valves all night
Their post the chosen captains hold.
Above the portal's stately height
The legend flames in lamps of gold:
"In life united and in death
"May Tirzah and Ahirad be,
"The bravest he of all the sons of Seth,
"Of all the house of Cain the loveliest she."

Through all the climates of the earth
This night is given to festal mirth.
The long continued war is ended.
The long divided lines are blended.
Ahirad's bow shall now no more
Make fat the wolves with kindred gore.
The vultures shall expect in vain
Their banquet from the sword of Cain.
Without a guard the herds and flocks
Along the frontier moors and rocks
From eve to morn may roam:
Nor shriek, nor shout, nor reddened sky,
Shall warn the startled hind to fly
From his beloved home.
Nor to the pier shall burghers crowd
With straining necks and faces pale,
And think that in each flitting cloud
They see a hostile sail.
The peasant without fear shall guide
Down smooth canal or river wide
His painted bark of cane,
Fraught, for some proud bazaar's arcades,
With chestnuts from his native shades,
And wine, and milk, and grain.
Search round the peopled globe to-night,
Explore each continent and isle,
There is no door without a light,
No face without a smile.
The noblest chiefs of either race,
From north and south, from west and east,
Crowd to the painted hall to grace
The pomp of that atoning feast.
With widening eyes and labouring breath
Stand the fair-haired sons of Seth,
As bursts upon their dazzled sight
The endless avenue of light,
The bowers of tulip, rose, and palm,
The thousand cressets fed with balm,
The silken vests, the boards piled high
With amber, gold, and ivory,
The crystal founts whence sparkling flow
The richest wines o'er beds of snow,
The walls where blaze in living dyes
The king's three hundred victories.
The heralds point the fitting seat
To every guest in order meet,
And place the highest in degree
Nearest th' imperial canopy.
Beneath its broad and gorgeous fold,
With naked swords and shields of gold,
Stood the seven princes of the tribes of Nod.
Upon an ermine carpet lay
Two tiger cubs in furious play,
Beneath the emerald throne where sat the signed of God.

Over that ample forehead white
The thousandth year returneth.
Still, on its commanding height,
With a fierce and blood-red light,
The fiery token burneth.
Wheresoe'er that mystic star
Blazeth in the van of war,
Back recoil before its ray
Shield and banner, bow and spear,
Maddened horses break away
From the trembling charioteer.
The fear of that stern king doth lie
On all that live beneath the sky:
All shrink before the mark of his despair,
The seal of that great curse which he alone can bear.
Blazing in pearls and diamonds' sheen.
Tirzah, the young Ahirad's bride,
Of humankind the destined queen,
Sits by her great forefather's side.
The jetty curls, the forehead high,
The swan like neck, the eagle face,
The glowing cheek, the rich dark eye,
Proclaim her of the elder race.
With flowing locks of auburn hue,
And features smooth, and eye of blue,
Timid in love as brave in arms,
The gentle heir of Seth askance
Snatches a bashful, ardent glance
At her majestic charms;
Blest when across that brow high musing flashes
A deeper tint of rose,
Thrice blest when from beneath the silken lashes
Of her proud eye she throws
The smile of blended fondness and disdain
Which marks the daughters of the house of Cain.

All hearts are light around the hall
Save his who is the lord of all.
The painted roofs, the attendant train,
The lights, the banquet, all are vain.
He sees them not.  His fancy strays
To other scenes and other days.
A cot by a lone forest's edge,
A fountain murmuring through the trees,
A garden with a wildflower hedge,
Whence sounds the music of the bees,
A little flock of sheep at rest
Upon a mountain's swarthy breast.
On his rude spade he seems to lean
Beside the well remembered stone,
Rejoicing o'er the promised green
Of the first harvest man hath sown.
He sees his mother's tears;
His father's voice he hears,
Kind as when first it praised his youthful skill.
And soon a seraph-child,
In boyish rapture wild,
With a light crook comes bounding from the hill,
Kisses his hands, and strokes his face,
And nestles close in his embrace.
In his adamantine eye
None might discern his agony;
But they who had grown hoary next his side,
And read his stern dark face with deepest skill,
Could trace strange meanings in that lip of pride,
Which for one moment quivered and was still.
No time for them to mark or him to feel
Those inward stings; for clarion, flute, and lyre,
And the rich voices of a countless quire,
Burst on the ear in one triumphant peal.
In breathless transport sits the admiring throng,
As sink and swell the notes of Jubal's lofty song.

"Sound the timbrel, strike the lyre,
Wake the trumpet's blast of fire,
Till the gilded arches ring.
Empire, victory, and fame,
Be ascribed unto the name
Of our father and our king.
Of the deeds which he hath done,
Of the spoils which he hath won,
Let his grateful children sing.
When the deadly fight was fought,
When the great revenge was wrought,
When on the slaughtered victims lay
The minion stiff and cold as they,
Doomed to exile, sealed with flame,
From the west the wanderer came.
Six score years and six he strayed
A hunter through the forest shade.
The lion's shaggy jaws he tore,
To earth he smote the foaming boar,
He crushed the dragon's fiery crest,
And scaled the condor's dizzy nest;
Till hardy sons and daughters fair
Increased around his woodland lair.
Then his victorious bow unstrung
On the great bison's horn he hung.
Giraffe and elk he left to hold
The wilderness of boughs in peace,
And trained his youth to pen the fold,
To press the cream, and weave the fleece.
As shrunk the streamlet in its bed,
As black and scant the herbage grew,
O'er endless plains his flocks he led
Still to new brooks and postures new.
So strayed he till the white pavilions
Of his camp were told by millions,
Till his children's households seven
Were numerous as the stars of heaven.
Then he bade us rove no more;
And in the place that pleased him best,
On the great river's fertile shore,
He fixed the city of his rest.
He taught us then to bind the sheaves,
To strain the palm's delicious milk,
And from the dark green mulberry leaves
To cull the filmy silk.
Then first from straw-built mansions roamed
O'er flower-beds trim the skilful bees;
Then first the purple wine vats foamed
Around the laughing peasant's knees;
And olive-yards, and orchards green,
O'er all the hills of Nod were seen.

"Of our father and our king
Let his grateful children sing.
From him our race its being draws,
His are our arts, and his our laws.
Like himself he bade us be,
Proud, and brave, and fierce, and free.
True, through every turn of fate,
In our friendship and our hate.
Calm to watch, yet prompt to dare;
Quick to feel, yet firm to bear;
Only timid, only weak,
Before sweet woman's eye and cheek.
We will not serve, we will not know,
The God who is our father's foe.
In our proud cities to his name
No temples rise, no altars flame.
Our flocks of sheep, our groves of spice,
To him afford no sacrifice.
Enough that once the House of Cain
Hath courted with oblation vain
The sullen power above.
Henceforth we bear the yoke no more;
The only gods whom we adore
Are glory, vengeance, love.

"Of our father and our king
Let his grateful children sing.
What eye of living thing may brook
On his blazing brow to look?
What might of living thing may stand
Against the strength of his right hand?
First he led his armies forth
Against the Mammoths of the north,
What time they wasted in their pride
Pasture and vineyard far and wide.
Then the White River's icy flood
Was thawed with fire and dyed with blood,
And heard for many a league the sound
Of the pine forests blazing round,
And the death-howl and trampling din
Of the gigantic herd within.
From the surging sea of flame
Forth the tortured monsters came;
As of breakers on the shore
Was their onset and their roar;
As the cedar-trees of God
Stood the stately ranks of Nod.
One long night and one short day
The sword was lifted up to slay.
Then marched the firstborn and his sons
O'er the white ashes of the wood,
And counted of that savage brood
Nine times nine thousand skeletons.

"On the snow with carnage red
The wood is piled, the skins are spread.
A thousand fires illume the sky;
Round each a hundred warriors lie.
But, long ere half the night was spent,
Forth thundered from the golden tent
The rousing voice of Cain.
A thousand trumps in answer rang
And fast to arms the warriors sprang
O'er all the frozen plain.
A herald from the wealthy bay
Hath come with tidings of dismay.
From the western ocean's coast
Seth hath led a countless host,
And vows to slay with fire and sword
All who call not on the Lord.
His archers hold the mountain forts;
His light armed ships blockade the ports;
His horsemen tread the harvest down.
On twelve proud bridges he hath passed
The river dark with many a mast,
And pitched his mighty camp at last
Before the imperial town.

"On the south and on the west,
Closely was the city prest.
Before us lay the hostile powers.
The breach was wide between the towers.
Pulse and meal within were sold
For a double weight of gold.
Our mighty father had gone forth
Two hundred marches to the north.
Yet in that extreme of ill
We stoutly kept his city still;
And swore beneath his royal wall,
Like his true sons to fight and fall.

"Hark, hark, to gong and horn,
Clarion, and fife, and drum,
The morn, the fortieth morn,
Fixed for the great assault is come.
Between the camp and city spreads
A waving sea of helmed heads.
From the royal car of Seth
Was hung the blood-reg flag of death:
At sight of that thrice-hallowed sign
Wide flew at once each banner's fold;
The captains clashed their arms of gold;
The war cry of Elohim rolled
Far down their endless line.
On the northern hills afar
Pealed an answering note of war.
Soon the dust in whirlwinds driven,
Rushed across the northern heaven.
Beneath its shroud came thick and loud
The tramp as of a countless crowd;
And at intervals were seen
Lance and hauberk glancing sheen;
And at intervals were heard
Charger's neigh and battle word.

"Oh what a rapturous cry
From all the city's thousand spires arose,
With what a look the hollow eye
Of the lean watchman glared upon the foes,
With what a yell of joy the mother pressed
The moaning baby to her withered breast;
When through the swarthy cloud that veiled the plain
Burst on his children's sight the flaming brow of Cain!"

There paused perforce that noble song;
For from all the joyous throng,
Burst forth a rapturous shout which drowned
Singer's voice and trumpet's sound.
Thrice that stormy clamour fell,
Thrice rose again with mightier swell.
The last and loudest roar of all
Had died along the painted wall.
The crowd was hushed; the minstrel train
Prepared to strike the chords again;
When on each ear distinctly smote
A low and wild and wailing note.
It moans again.  In mute amaze
Menials, and guests, and harpers gaze.
They look above, beneath, around,
No shape doth own that mournful sound.
It comes not from the tuneful quire;
It comes not from the feasting peers.
There is no tone of earthly lyre
So soft, so sad, so full of tears.
Then a strange horror came on all
Who sate at that high festival.
The far famed harp, the harp of gold,
Dropped from Jubal's trembling hold.
Frantic with dismay the bride
Clung to her Ahirad's side.
And the corpse-like hue of dread
Ahirad's haughty face o'erspread.
Yet not even in that agony of awe
Did the young leader of the fair-haired race
From Tirzah's shuddering grasp his hand withdraw,
Or turn his eyes from Tirzah's livid face.
The tigers to their lord retreat,
And crouch and whine beneath his feet.
Prone sink to earth the golden shielded seven.
All hearts are cowed save his alone
Who sits upon the emerald throne;
For he hath heard Elohim speak from heaven.
Still thunders in his ear the peal;
Still blazes on his front the seal:
And on the soul of the proud king
No terror of created thing
From sky, or earth, or hell, hath power
Since that unutterable hour.

He rose to speak, but paused, and listening stood,
Not daunted, but in sad and curious mood,
With knitted brow, and searching eye of fire.
A deathlike silence sank on all around,
And through the boundless space was heard no sound,
Save the soft tones of that mysterious lyre.
Broken, faint, and low,
At first the numbers flow.
Louder, deeper, quicker, still
Into one fierce peal they swell,
And the echoing palace fill
With a strange funereal yell.
A voice comes forth.  But what, or where?
On the earth, or in the air?
Like the midnight winds that blow
Round a lone cottage in the snow,
With howling swell and sighing fall,
It wails along the trophied hall.
In such a wild and dreary moan
The watches of the Seraphim
Poured out all night their plaintive hymn
Before the eternal throne.
Then, when from many a heavenly eye
Drops as of earthly pity fell
For her who had aspire too high,
For him who loved too well.
When, stunned by grief, the gentle pair
From the nuptial garden fair,
Linked in a sorrowful caress,
Strayed through the untrodden wilderness;
And close behind their footsteps came
The desolating sword of flame,
And drooped the cedared alley's pride,
And fountains shrank, and roses died.

"Rejoice, O Son of God, rejoice,"
Sang that melancholy voice,
"Rejoice, the maid is fair to see;
The bower is decked for her and thee;
The ivory lamps around it throw
A soft and pure and mellow glow.
Where'er the chastened lustre falls
On roof or cornice, floor or walls,
Woven of pink and rose appear
Such words as love delights to hear.
The breath of myrrh, the lute's soft sound,
Float through the moonlight galleries round.
O'er beds of violet and through groves of spice,
Lead thy proud bride into the nuptial bower;
For thou hast bought her with a fearful price,
And she hath dowered thee with a fearful dower.
The price is life.  The dower is death.
Accursed loss!  Accursed gain!
For her thou givest the blessedness of Seth,
And to thine arms she brings the curse of Cain.

Round the dark curtains of the fiery throne
Pauses awhile the voice of sacred song:
From all the angelic ranks goes forth a groan,
'How long, O Lord, how long?'
The still small voice makes answer, 'Wait and see,
Oh sons of glory, what the end shall be.'

"But, in the outer darkness of the place
Where God hath shown his power without his grace,
Is laughter and the sound of glad acclaim,
Loud as when, on wings of fire,
Fulfilled of his malign desire,
From Paradise the conquering serpent came.
The giant ruler of the morning star
From off his fiery bed
Lifts high his stately head,
Which Michael's sword hath marked with many a scar.
At his voice the pit of hell
Answers with a joyous yell,
And flings her dusky portals wide
For the bridegroom and the bride.

"But louder still shall be the din
In the halls of Death and Sin,
When the full measure runneth o'er,
When mercy can endure no more,
When he who vainly proffers grace,
Comes in his fury to deface
The fair creation of his hand;
When from the heaven streams down amain
For forty days the sheeted rain;
And from his ancient barriers free,
With a deafening roar the sea
Comes foaming up the land.
Mother, cast thy babe aside:
Bridegroom, quit thy virgin bride:
Brother, pass thy brother by:
'Tis for life, for life, ye fly.
Along the drear horizon raves
The swift advancing line of waves.
On:  on:  their frothy crests appear
Each moment nearer, and more near.
Urge the dromedary's speed;
Spur to death the reeling steed;
If perchance ye yet may gain
The mountains that o'erhang the plain.

"Oh thou haughty land of Nod,
Hear the sentence of thy God.
Thou hast said, 'Of all the hills
Whence, after autumn rains, the rills
In silver trickle down,
The fairest is that mountain white
Which intercepts the morning light
From Cain's imperial town.
On its first and gentlest swell
Are pleasant halls where nobles dwell;
And marble porticoes are seen
Peeping through terraced gardens green.
Above are olives, palms, and vines;
And higher yet the dark-blue pines;
And highest on the summit shines
The crest of everlasting ice.
Here let the God of Abel own
That human art hath wonders shown
Beyond his boasted paradise.'

"Therefore on that proud mountain's crown
Thy few surviving sons and daughters
Shall see their latest sun go down
Upon a boundless waste of waters.
None salutes and none replies;
None heaves a groan or breathes a prayer
They crouch on earth with tearless eyes,
And clenched hands, and bristling hair.
The rain pours on:  no star illumes
The blackness of the roaring sky.
And each successive billow booms
Nigher still and still more nigh.
And now upon the howling blast
The wreaths of spray come thick and fast;
And a great billow by the tempest curled
Falls with a thundering crash; and all is o'er.
In what is left of all this glorious world?
A sky without a beam, a sea without a shore.

"Oh thou fair land, where from their starry home
Cherub and seraph oft delight to roam,
Thou city of the thousand towers,
Thou palace of the golden stairs,
Ye gardens of perennial flowers,
Ye moted gates, ye breezy squares;
Ye parks amidst whose branches high
Oft peers the squirrel's sparkling eye;
Ye vineyards, in whose trellised shade
Pipes many a youth to many a maid;
Ye ports where rides the gallant ship,
Ye marts where wealthy burghers meet;
Ye dark green lanes which know the trip
Of woman's conscious feet;
Ye grassy meads where, when the day is done,
The shepherd pens his fold;
Ye purple moors on which the setting sun
Leaves a rich fringe of gold;
Ye wintry deserts where the larches grow;
Ye mountains on whose everlasting snow
No human foot hath trod;
Many a fathom shall ye sleep
Beneath the grey and endless deep,
In the great day of the revenge of God."

...


THE COUNTRY CLERGYMAN'S TRIP TO CAMBRIDGE.

AN ELECTION BALLAD.

(1827.)

As I sate down to breakfast in state,
At my living of Tithing-cum-Boring,
With Betty beside me to wait,
Came a rap that almost beat the door in.
I laid down my basin of tea,
And Betty ceased spreading the toast,
"As sure as a gun, sir," said she,
"That must be the knock of the post."

A letter--and free--bring it here--
I have no correspondent who franks.
No!  Yes!  Can it be?  Why, my dear,
'Tis our glorious, our Protestant Bankes.
"Dear sir, as I know you desire
That the Church should receive due protection,
I humbly presume to require
Your aid at the Cambridge election.

"It has lately been brought to my knowledge,
That the Ministers fully design
To suppress each cathedral and college,
And eject every learned divine.
To assist this detestable scheme
Three nuncios from Rome are come over;
They left Calais on Monday by steam,
And landed to dinner at Dover.

"An army of grim Cordeliers,
Well furnished with relics and vermin,
Will follow, Lord Westmoreland fears,
To effect what their chiefs may determine.
Lollard's bower, good authorities say,
Is again fitting up for a prison;
And a wood-merchant told me to-day
'Tis a wonder how faggots have risen.

"The finance scheme of Canning contains
A new Easter-offering tax;
And he means to devote all the gains
To a bounty on thumb-screws and racks.
Your living, so neat and compact--
Pray, don't let the news give you pain!--
Is promised, I know for a fact,
To an olive-faced Padre from Spain."

I read, and I felt my heart bleed,
Sore wounded with horror and pity;
So I flew, with all possible speed,
To our Protestant champion's committee.
True gentlemen, kind and well-bred!
No fleering! no distance! no scorn!
They asked after my wife who is dead,
And my children who never were born.

They then, like high-principled Tories,
Called our Sovereign unjust and unsteady,
And assailed him with scandalous stories,
Till the coach for the voters was ready.
That coach might be well called a casket
Of learning and brotherly love:
There were parsons in boot and in basket;
There were parsons below and above.

There were Sneaker and Griper, a pair
Who stick to Lord Mulesby like leeches;
A smug chaplain of plausible air,
Who writes my Lord Goslingham's speeches.
Dr Buzz, who alone is a host,
Who, with arguments weighty as lead,
Proves six times a week in the Post
That flesh somehow differs from bread.

Dr Nimrod, whose orthodox toes
Are seldom withdrawn from the stirrup;
Dr Humdrum, whose eloquence flows,
Like droppings of sweet poppy syrup;
Dr Rosygill puffing and fanning,
And wiping away perspiration;
Dr Humbug who proved Mr Canning
The beast in St John's Revelation.

A layman can scarce form a notion
Of our wonderful talk on the road;
Of the learning, the wit, and devotion,
Which almost each syllable showed:
Why divided allegiance agrees
So ill with our free constitution;
How Catholics swear as they please,
In hope of the priest's absolution;

How the Bishop of Norwich had bartered
His faith for a legate's commission;
How Lyndhurst, afraid to be martyr'd,
Had stooped to a base coalition;
How Papists are cased from compassion
By bigotry, stronger than steel;
How burning would soon come in fashion,
And how very bad it must feel.

We were all so much touched and excited
By a subject so direly sublime,
That the rules of politeness were slighted,
And we all of us talked at a time;
And in tones, which each moment grew louder,
Told how we should dress for the show,
And where we should fasten the powder,
And if we should bellow or no.

Thus from subject to subject we ran,
And the journey passed pleasantly o'er,
Till at last Dr Humdrum began;
From that time I remember no more.
At Ware he commenced his prelection,
In the dullest of clerical drones;
And when next I regained recollection
We were rambling o'er Trumpington stones.

...


SONG.

(1827.)

O stay, Madonna! stay;
'Tis not the dawn of day
That marks the skies with yonder opal streak:
The stars in silence shine;
Then press thy lips to mine,
And rest upon my neck thy fervid cheek.

O sleep, Madonna! sleep;
Leave me to watch and weep
O'er the sad memory of departed joys,
O'er hope's extinguished beam,
O'er fancy's vanished dream;
O'er all that nature gives and man destroys.

O wake, Madonna! wake;
Even now the purple lake
Is dappled o'er with amber flakes of light;
A glow is on the hill;
And every trickling rill
In golden threads leaps down from yonder height.

O fly, Madonna! fly,
Lest day and envy spy
What only love and night may safely know:
Fly, and tread softly, dear!
Lest those who hate us hear
The sounds of thy light footsteps as they go.

...


POLITICAL GEORGICS.

(MARCH 1828.)

"Quid faciat laetas segetes," etc.

How cabinets are formed, and how destroy'd,
How Tories are confirmed, and Whigs decoy'd,
How in nice times a prudent man should vote,
At what conjuncture he should turn his coat,
The truths fallacious, and the candid lies,
And all the lore of sleek majorities,
I sing, great Premier.  Oh, mysterious two,
Lords of our fate, the Doctor and the Jew,
If, by your care enriched, the aspiring clerk
Quits the close alley for the breezy park,
And Dolly's chops and Reid's entire resigns
For odorous fricassees and costly wines;
And you, great pair, through Windsor's shades who rove,
The Faun and Dryad of the conscious grove;
All, all inspire me, for of all I sing,
Doctor and Jew, and M--s and K--g.
Thou, to the maudlin muse of Rydal dear;
Thou more than Neptune, Lowther, lend thine ear.
At Neptune's voice the horse, with flowing mane
And pawing hoof, sprung from the obedient plain;
But at thy word the yawning earth, in fright,
Engulf'd the victor steed from mortal sight.
Haste from thy woods, mine Arbuthnot, with speed,
Rich woods, where lean Scotch cattle love to feed:
Let Gaffer Gooch and Boodle's patriot band,
Fat from the leanness of a plundered land,
True Cincinnati, quit their patent ploughs,
Their new steam-harrows, and their premium sows;
Let all in bulky majesty appear,
Roll the dull eye, and yawn th' unmeaning cheer.
Ye veteran Swiss, of senatorial wars,
Who glory in your well-earned sticks and stars;
Ye diners-out from whom we guard our spoons;
Ye smug defaulters; ye obscene buffoons;
Come all, of every race and size and form,
Corruption's children, brethren of the worm;
From those gigantic monsters who devour
The pay of half a squadron in an hour,
To those foul reptiles, doomed to night and scorn,
Of filth and stench equivocally born;
From royal tigers down to toads and lice;
From Bathursts, Clintons, Fanes, to H-- and P--;
Thou last, by habit and by nature blest
With every gift which serves a courtier best,
The lap-dog spittle, the hyaena bile,
The maw of shark, the tear of crocodile,
Whate'er high station, undetermined yet,
Awaits thee in the longing Cabinet,--
Whether thou seat thee in the room of Peel,
Or from Lord Prig extort the Privy Seal,
Or our Field-marshal-Treasurer fix on thee,
A legal admiral, to rule the sea,
Or Chancery-suits, beneath thy well known reign,
Turn to their nap of fifty years again;
(Already L--, prescient of his fate,
Yields half his woolsack to thy mightier weight;)
Oh! Eldon, in whatever sphere thou shine,
For opposition sure will ne'er be thine,
Though scowls apart the lonely pride of Grey,
Though Devonshire proudly flings his staff away,
Though Lansdowne, trampling on his broken chain,
Shine forth the Lansdowne of our hearts again,
Assist me thou; for well I deem, I see
An abstract of my ample theme in thee.
Thou, as thy glorious self hath justly said,
From earliest youth, wast pettifogger bred,
And, raised to power by fortune's fickle will,
Art head and heart a pettifogger still.
So, where once Fleet-ditch ran confessed, we vie
A crowded mart and stately avenue;
But the black stream beneath runs on the same,
Still brawls in W--'s key,--still stinks like H--'s name.

...


THE DELIVERANCE OF VIENNA.

TRANSLATED FROM VINCENZIO DA FILICAIA.

(Published in the "Winter's Wreath," Liverpool, 1828.)

"Le corde d'oro elette," etc.

The chords, the sacred chords of gold,
Strike, O Muse, in measure bold;
And frame a sparkling wreath of joyous songs
For that great God to whom revenge belongs.
Who shall resist his might,
Who marshals for the fight
Earthquake and thunder, hurricane and flame?
He smote the haughty race
Of unbelieving Thrace,
And turned their rage to fear, their pride to shame.
He looked in wrath from high,
Upon their vast array;
And, in the twinkling of an eye,
Tambour, and trump, and battle-cry,
And steeds, and turbaned infantry,
Passed like a dream away.
Such power defends the mansions of the just:
But, like a city without walls,
The grandeur of the mortal falls
Who glories in his strength, and makes not God his trust.
The proud blasphemers thought all earth their own;
They deemed that soon the whirlwind of their ire
Would sweep down tower and palace, dome and spire,
The Christian altars and the Augustan throne.
And soon, they cried, shall Austria bow
To the dust her lofty brow.
The princedoms of Almayne
Shall wear the Phrygian chain;
In humbler waves shall vassal Tiber roll;
And Rome a slave forlorn,
Her laurelled tresses shorn,
Shall feel our iron in her inmost soul.
Who shall bid the torrent stay?
Who shall bar the lightning's way?
Who arrest the advancing van
Of the fiery Ottoman?

As the curling smoke-wreaths fly
When fresh breezes clear the sky,
Passed away each swelling boast
Of the misbelieving host.
From the Hebrus rolling far
Came the murky cloud of war,
And in shower and tempest dread
Burst on Austria's fenceless head.
But not for vaunt or threat
Didst Thou, O Lord, forget
The flock so dearly bought, and loved so well.

Even in the very hour
Of guilty pride and power
Full on the circumcised Thy vengeance fell.
Then the fields were heaped with dead,
Then the streams with gore were red,
And every bird of prey, and every beast,
From wood and cavern thronged to Thy great feast.

What terror seized the fiends obscene of Nile!
How wildly, in his place of doom beneath,
Arabia's lying prophet gnashed his teeth,
And cursed his blighted hopes and wasted guile!
When, at the bidding of Thy sovereign might,
Flew on their destined path
Thy messages of wrath,
Riding on storms and wrapped in deepest night.
The Phthian mountains saw,
And quaked with mystic awe:
The proud Sultana of the Straits bowed down
Her jewelled neck and her embattled crown.
The miscreants, as they raised their eyes
Glaring defiance on Thy skies,
Saw adverse winds and clouds display
The terrors of their black array;--
Saw each portentous star
Whose fiery aspect turned of yore to flight
The iron chariots of the Canaanite
Gird its bright harness for a deadlier war.

Beneath Thy withering look
Their limbs with palsy shook;
Scattered on earth the crescent banners lay;
Trembled with panic fear
Sabre and targe and spear,
Through the proud armies of the rising day.
Faint was each heart, unnerved each hand;
And, if they strove to charge or stand
Their efforts were as vain
As his who, scared in feverish sleep
By evil dreams, essays to leap,
Then backward falls again.
With a crash of wild dismay,
Their ten thousand ranks gave way;
Fast they broke, and fast they fled;
Trampled, mangled, dying, dead,
Horse and horsemen mingled lay;
Till the mountains of the slain
Raised the valleys to the plain.
Be all the glory to Thy name divine!
The swords were our's; the arm, O Lord, was Thine.
Therefore to Thee, beneath whose footstool wait
The powers which erring man calls Chance and Fate,
To Thee who hast laid low
The pride of Europe's foe,
And taught Byzantium's sullen lords to fear,
I pour my spirit out
In a triumphant shout,
And call all ages and all lands to hear.
Thou who evermore endurest,
Loftiest, mightiest, wisest, purest,
Thou whose will destroys or saves,
Dread of tyrants, hope of slaves,
The wreath of glory is from Thee,
And the red sword of victory.

There where exulting Danube's flood
Runs stained with Islam's noblest blood
From that tremendous field,
There where in mosque the tyrants met,
And from the crier's minaret
Unholy summons pealed,
Pure shrines and temples now shall be
Decked for a worship worthy Thee.
To Thee thy whole creation pays
With mystic sympathy its praise,
The air, the earth, the seas:
The day shines forth with livelier beam;
There is a smile upon the stream,
An anthem on the breeze.
Glory, they cry, to Him whose might
Hath turned the barbarous foe to flight,
Whose arm protects with power divine
The city of his favoured line.
The caves, the woods, the rocks, repeat the sound;
The everlasting hills roll the long echoes round.

But, if Thy rescued church may dare
Still to besiege Thy throne with prayer,
Sheathe not, we implore Thee, Lord,
Sheathe not Thy victorious sword.
Still Panonia pines away,
Vassal of a double sway:
Still Thy servants groan in chains,
Still the race which hates Thee reigns:
Part the living from the dead:
Join the members to the head:
Snatch Thine own sheep from yon fell monster's hold;
Let one kind shepherd rule one undivided fold.

He is the victor, only he
Who reaps the fruits of victory.
We conquered once in vain,
When foamed the Ionian waves with gore,
And heaped Lepanto's stormy shore
With wrecks and Moslem slain.
Yet wretched Cyprus never broke
The Syrian tyrant's iron yoke.
Shall the twice vanquished foe
Again repeat his blow?
Shall Europe's sword be hung to rust in peace?
No--let the red-cross ranks
Of the triumphant Franks
Bear swift deliverance to the shrines of Greece
And in her inmost heart let Asia feel
The avenging plagues of Western fire and steel.

Oh God! for one short moment raise
The veil which hides those glorious days.
The flying foes I see Thee urge
Even to the river's headlong verge.

Close on their rear the loud uproar
Of fierce pursuit from Ister's shore
Comes pealing on the wind;
The Rab's wild waters are before,
The Christian sword behind.
Sons of perdition, speed your flight,
No earthly spear is in the rest;
No earthly champion leads to fight
The warriors of the West.
The Lord of Host asserts His old renown,
Scatters, and smites, and slays, and tramples down.
Fast, fast beyond what mortal tongue can say,
Or mortal fancy dream,
He rushes on his prey:
Till, with the terrors of the wondrous theme
Bewildered, and appalled, I cease to sing,
And close my dazzled eye, and rest my wearied wing.

...


THE LAST BUCCANEER.

(1839.)

The winds were yelling, the waves were swelling,
The sky was black and drear,
When the crew with eyes of flame brought the ship without a name
Alongside the last Buccaneer.

"Whence flies your sloop full sail before so fierce a gale,
When all others drive bare on the seas?
Say, come ye from the shore of the holy Salvador,
Or the gulf of the rich Caribbees?"

"From a shore no search hath found, from a gulf no line can
sound,
Without rudder or needle we steer;
Above, below, our bark, dies the sea-fowl and the shark,
As we fly by the last Buccaneer.

"To-night there shall be heard on the rocks of Cape de Verde,
A loud crash, and a louder roar;
And to-morrow shall the deep, with a heavy moaning, sweep
The corpses and wreck to the shore."

The stately ship of Clyde securely now may ride,
In the breath of the citron shades;
And Severn's towering mast securely now flies fast,
Through the sea of the balmy Trades.

From St Jago's wealthy port, from Havannah's royal fort,
The seaman goes forth without fear;
For since that stormy night not a mortal hath had sight
Of the flag of the last Buccaneer.

...


EPITAPH ON A JACOBITE.

(1845.)

To my true king I offered free from stain
Courage and faith; vain faith, and courage vain.
For him, I threw lands, honours, wealth, away.
And one dear hope, that was more prized than they.
For him I languished in a foreign clime,
Grey-haired with sorrow in my manhood's prime;
Heard on Lavernia Scargill's whispering trees,
And pined by Arno for my lovelier Tees;
Beheld each night my home in fevered sleep,
Each morning started from the dream to weep;
Till God who saw me tried too sorely, gave
The resting place I asked, an early grave.
Oh thou, whom chance leads to this nameless stone,
From that proud country which was once mine own,
By those white cliffs I never more must see,
By that dear language which I spake like thee,
Forget all feuds, and shed one English tear
O'er English dust.  A broken heart lies here.

...


LINES WRITTEN IN AUGUST.

(1847.)

The day of tumult, strife, defeat, was o'er;
Worn out with toil, and noise, and scorn, and spleen,
I slumbered, and in slumber saw once more
A room in an old mansion, long unseen.

That room, methought, was curtained from the light;
Yet through the curtains shone the moon's cold ray
Full on a cradle, where, in linen white,
Sleeping life's first soft sleep, an infant lay.

Pale flickered on the hearth the dying flame,
And all was silent in that ancient hall,
Save when by fits on the low night-wind came
The murmur of the distant waterfall.

And lo! the fairy queens who rule our birth
Drew nigh to speak the new-born baby's doom:
With noiseless step, which left no trace on earth,
From gloom they came, and vanished into gloom.

Not deigning on the boy a glance to cast
Swept careless by the gorgeous Queen of Gain;
More scornful still, the Queen of Fashion passed,
With mincing gait and sneer of cold disdain.

The Queen of Power tossed high her jewelled head,
And o'er her shoulder threw a wrathful frown;
The Queen of Pleasure on the pillow shed
Scarce one stray rose-leaf from her fragrant crown.

Still Fay in long procession followed Fay;
And still the little couch remained unblest:
But, when those wayward sprites had passed away,
Came One, the last, the mightiest, and the best.

Oh glorious lady, with the eyes of light
And laurels clustering round thy lofty brow,
Who by the cradle's side didst watch that night,
Warbling a sweet, strange music, who wast thou?

"Yes, darling; let them go;" so ran the strain:
"Yes; let them go, gain, fashion, pleasure, power,
And all the busy elves to whose domain
Belongs the nether sphere, the fleeting hour.

"Without one envious sigh, one anxious scheme,
The nether sphere, the fleeting hour resign.
Mine is the world of thought, the world of dream,
Mine all the past, and all the future mine.

"Fortune, that lays in sport the mighty low,
Age, that to penance turns the joys of youth,
Shall leave untouched the gifts which I bestow,
The sense of beauty and the thirst of truth.

"Of the fair brotherhood who share my grace,
I, from thy natal day, pronounce thee free;
And, if for some I keep a nobler place,
I keep for none a happier than for thee.

"There are who, while to vulgar eyes they seem
Of all my bounties largely to partake,
Of me as of some rival's handmaid deem
And court me but for gain's, power's, fashion's sake.

"To such, though deep their lore, though wide their fame,
Shall my great mysteries be all unknown:
But thou, through good and evil, praise and blame,
Wilt not thou love me for myself alone?

"Yes; thou wilt love me with exceeding love;
And I will tenfold all that love repay,
Still smiling, though the tender may reprove,
Still faithful, though the trusted may betray.

"For aye mine emblem was, and aye shall be,
The ever-during plant whose bough I wear,
Brightest and greenest then, when every tree
That blossoms in the light of Time is bare.

"In the dark hour of shame, I deigned to stand
Before the frowning peers at Bacon's side:
On a far shore I smoothed with tender hand,
Through months of pain, the sleepless bed of Hyde:

"I brought the wise and brave of ancient days
To cheer the cell where Raleigh pined alone:
I lighted Milton's darkness with the blaze
Of the bright ranks that guard the eternal throne.

"And even so, my child, it is my pleasure
That thou not then alone shouldst feel me nigh,
When in domestic bliss and studious leisure,
Thy weeks uncounted come, uncounted fly;

"Not then alone, when myriads, closely pressed
Around thy car, the shout of triumph raise;
Nor when, in gilded drawing rooms, thy breast
Swells at the sweeter sound of woman's praise.

"No:  when on restless night dawns cheerless morrow,
When weary soul and wasting body pine,
Thine am I still, in danger, sickness, sorrow,
In conflict, obloquy, want, exile, thine;

"Thine, where on mountain waves the snowbirds scream,
Where more than Thule's winter barbs the breeze,
Where scarce, through lowering clouds, one sickly gleam
Lights the drear May-day of Antarctic seas;

"Thine, when around thy litter's track all day
White sandhills shall reflect the blinding glare;
Thine, when, through forests breathing death, thy way
All night shall wind by many a tiger's lair;

"Thine most, when friends turn pale, when traitors fly,
When, hard beset, thy spirit, justly proud,
For truth, peace, freedom, mercy, dares defy
A sullen priesthood and a raving crowd.

"Amidst the din of all things fell and vile,
Hate's yell, and envy's hiss, and folly's bray,
Remember me; and with an unforced smile
See riches, baubles, flatterers, pass away.

"Yes:  they will pass away; nor deem it strange:
They come and go, as comes and goes the sea:
And let them come and go:  thou, through all change,
Fix thy firm gaze on virtue and on me."

...


TRANSLATION FROM PLAUTUS.

(1850.)

[The author passed a part of the summer and autumn of 1850 at
Ventnor, in the Isle of Wight.  He usually, when walking alone,
had with him a book.  On one occasion, as he was loitering in the
landslip near Bonchurch, reading the Rudens of Plautus, it struck
him that it might be an interesting experiment to attempt to
produce something which might be supposed to resemble passages in
the lost Greek drama of Diphilus, from which the Rudens appears
to have been taken.  He selected one passage in the Rudens, of
which he then made the following version, which he afterwards
copied out at the request of a friend to whom he had repeated
it.]

Act IV. Sc. vii.

DAEMONES:
O Gripe, Gripe, in aetate hominum plurimae
Fiunt transennae, ubi decipiuntur dolis;
Atque edepol in eas plerumque esca imponitur.
Quam si quis avidus pascit escam avariter,
Decipitur in transenna avaritia sua.
Ille, qui consulte, docte, atque astute cavet,
Diutine uti bene licet partum bene.
Mi istaec videtur praeda praedatum irier:
Ut cum majore dote abeat, quam advenerit.
Egone ut, quod ad me adlatum esse alienum sciam,
Celem?  Minime istuc faciet noster Daemones.
Semper cavere hoc sapientes aequissimum est,
Ne conscii sint ipsi maleficiis suis.
Ego, mihi quum lusi, nil moror ullum lucrum.

GRIPUS:
Spectavi ego pridem Comicos ad istum modum
Sapienter dicta dicere, atque iis plaudier,
Quum illos sapientis mores monstrabant poplo;
Sed quum inde suam quisque ibant diversi domum,
Nullus erat illo pacto, ut illi jusserant.

DAIM:
O Gripe, Gripe, pleista pagidon schemata
idoi tis an pepegmen en thneton bio,
kai pleist ep autois deleath, on epithumia
oregomenos tis en kakois alisketai
ostis d apistei kai sophos phulattetai
kalos apolauei ton kalos peporismenon.
arpagma d ouch arpagm o larvax outosi,
all autos, oimai, mallon arpaxei tina.
tond andra kleptein tallotri--euphemei, talan
tauten ye me mainoito manian Daimones.
tode gar aei sophoisin eulabeteon,
me ti poth eauto tis adikema sunnoe
kerde d emoige panth osois euphrainomai,
kerdos d akerdes o toumon algunei kear.

GRIP:
kago men ede komikon akekoa
semnos legonton toiade, tous de theomenous
krotein, mataiois edomenous sophismasin
eith, os apelth ekastos oikad, oudeni
ouden paremeine ton kalos eiremenon.

...


PARAPHRASE OF A PASSAGE IN THE CHRONICLE OF THE MONK OF ST GALL.

[In the summer of 1856, the author travelled with a friend
through Lombardy.  As they were on the road between Novara and
Milan, they were conversing on the subject of the legends
relating to that country.  The author remarked to his companion
that Mr Panizzi, in the Essay on the Romantic Narrative Poetry of
the Italians, prefixed to his edition of Bojardo, had pointed out
an instance of the conversion of ballad poetry into prose
narrative which strongly confirmed the theory of Perizonius and
Niebuhr, upon which "The Lays of Ancient Rome" are founded; and,
after repeating an extract which Mr Panizzi has given from the
chronicle of "The Monk of St Gall," he proceeded to frame a
metrical paraphrase.  The note in Mr Panizzi's work (volume i.
page 123, note b) is here copied verbatim.]

"The monk says that Oger was with Desiderius, King of Lombardy,
watching the advance of Charlemagne's army.  The king often asked
Oger where was Charlemagne.  Quando videris, inquit, segetem
campis inhorrescere, ferreum Padum et Ticinum marinis fluctibus
ferro nigrantibus muros civitatis inundantes, tunc est spes
Caroli venientis.  His nedum expletis primum ad occasum Circino
vel Borea coepit apparere, quasi nubes tenebrosa, quae diem
clarissimam horrentes convertit in umbras.  Sed propiante
Imperatore, ex armorum splendore, dies omni nocte tenebrosior
oborta est inclusis.  Tunc visus est ipse ferreus Carolus ferrea
galea cristatus, ferreis manicis armillatus, etc., etc.  His
igitur, quae ego balbus et edentulus, non ut debui circuitu
tardiore diutius explicare tentavi, veridicus speculator Oggerus
celerrimo visu contuitus dixit ad Desiderium:  Ecce, habes quem
tantopere perquisisti.  Et haec dicens, pene exanimis cecidit.--
"Monach. Sangal." de Reb. Bel. Caroli Magni. lib. ii. para xxvi. 
Is this not evidently taken from poetical effusions?"

PARAPHRASE.

To Oggier spake King Didier:
"When cometh Charlemagne?
We looked for him in harvest:
We looked for him in rain.
Crops are reaped; and floods are past;
And still he is not here.
Some token show, that we may know
That Charlemagne is near."

Then to the King made answer
Oggier, the christened Dane:
"When stands the iron harvest,
Ripe on the Lombard plain,
That stiff harvest which is reaped
With sword of knight and peer,
Then by that sign ye may divine
That Charlemagne is near.

"When round the Lombard cities
The iron flood shall flow,
A swifter flood than Ticin,
A broader flood than Po,
Frothing white with many a plume,
Dark blue with many a spear,
Then by that sign ye may divine
That Charlemagne is near."

...


INSCRIPTION ON THE STATUE OF LORD WM. BENTINCK.

AT CALCUTTA.  (1835.)

To
WILLIAM CAVENDISH BENTINCK,
Who, during seven years, ruled India with eminent
Prudence, Integrity, and Benevolence:
Who, placed at the head of a great
Empire, never laid aside
The simplicity and moderation of a private citizen:
Who infused into Oriental despotism the spirit of British
Freedom:
Who never forgot that the end of Government is
The happiness of the Governed:
Who abolished cruel rites:
Who effaced humiliating distinctions:
Who gave liberty to the expression of public opinion:
Whose constant study it was, to elevate the intellectual
And moral character of
The Nations committed to his charge:
This Monument
Was erected by men,
Who, differing in Race, in
Manners, in Language, and in Religion,
Cherish, with equal veneration and gratitude,
The memory of his wise, upright, and Paternal Administration.

...


EPITAPH ON SIR BENJAMIN HEATH MALKIN.

AT CALCUTTA.  (1837.)

This monument
Is sacred to the memory
of
SIR BENJAMIN HEATH MALKIN, Knight,
One of the Judges of
The Supreme Court of Judicature:
A man eminently distinguished
By his literary and scientific attainments,
By his professional learning and ability,
By the clearness and accuracy of his intellect,
By diligence, by patience, by firmness, by love of truth,
By public spirit, ardent and disinterested,
Yet always under the guidance of discretion,
By rigid uprightness, by unostentatious piety,
By the serenity of his temper,
And by the benevolence of his heart.

He was born on the 29th September 1797.
He died on the 21st October 1837.

...


EPITAPH ON LORD METCALFE.

(1847.)

Near this stone is laid
CHARLES, LORD METCALFE,
A Statesman tried in many high offices,
And difficult conjunctures,
And found equal to all.
The three greatest Dependencies of the British Crown
Were successively entrusted to his care.
In India, his fortitude, his wisdom,
His probity, and his moderation,
Are held in honourable remembrance
By men of many races, languages, and religions.
In Jamaica, still convulsed by a social revolution,
His prudence calmed the evil passions
Which long suffering had engendered in one class
And long domination in another.
In Canada, not yet recovered from the calamities of civil war,
He reconciled contending factions to each other,
And to the Mother Country.
Costly monuments in Asiatic and American cities
Attest the gratitude of the nations which he ruled.
This tablet records the sorrow and the pride
With which his memory is cherished by his family.





End of Project Gutenberg Etext The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches
of Lord Macaulay, Volume 3 [Encyclopaedia Britannica, Poems, etc.]