demur of Joab, who in his respectful remonstrance said in effect that, when the whole strength of the nation was known in sum—meaning from the ordinary state returns—what need was there to search more inquisitively into the special details? Where all were ready to fight cheerfully, why seek for separate minutiae as to each particular class? Those general returns had regard only to the ordinary causa belli—a hostile invasion. And, then, all nations alike, rude or refined, have gone upon the same general outline of computation—that, subtracting the females from the males, this, in a gross general way, would always bisect the total return of the population. And, then, to make a second bisection of the male half would subtract one quarter from the entire people as too young or too old, or otherwise as too infirm for warlike labours, leaving precisely one quarter of the nation—every fourth head—as available for war. This process for David's case would have yielded perhaps about 1,100,000 fighting men throughout Palestine. But this unwieldy pospolite was far from meeting David's secret anxieties. He had remarked the fickle and insurrectionary state of the people. Even against himself how easy had it been found to organize a sudden rebellion, and to conceal it so prosperously that he and his whole court saved themselves from capture only by a few hours' start of the enemy, and through the enemy's want of cavalry. This danger meantime having vanished, it might be possible that for David personally no other great conspiracy should disturb his seat upon the throne. None of David's sons approached to Absalom in popularity; and yet the subsequent attempt of Adonijah showed that the revolutionary temper was still awake in that quarter. But what David feared, in a further-looking spirit, was the tenure by which his immediate descendants would maintain their title. The danger was this: over and above the want of any principle for regulating the succession, and this want operating in a state of things far less determined than amongst monogamous nations—one son pleading his priority of birth; another, perhaps, his mother's higher rank, a third pleading his very juniority, inasmuch as this brought him within the description of porphyrogeniture, or royal birth, which is often felt as transcendent as primogeniture—even the people, apart from the several pretenders to the throne, would create separate interests as grounds for insurrection or for intestine feuds. There seems good reason to think that already the ten tribes, Israel as opposed to Judah, looked upon the more favoured and royal tribe of Judah, with their supplementary section of Benjamin, as unduly favoured in the national economy. Secretly there is little doubt that they murmured even against God for ranking this powerful tribe as the prerogative tribe. The jealousy had evidently risen to a great height; it was suppressed by the vigilant and strong government of Solomon; but at the outset of his son's reign it exploded at once, and the Scriptural account of the case shows that it proceeded upon old grievances. The boyish rashness of Rehoboam might exasperate the leaders, and precipitate the issue; but very clearly all had been prepared for a revolt. And I would remark that by the 'young men' of Rehoboam are undoubtedly meant the soldiers—the body-guards whom the Jewish kings now retained as an element of royal pomp. This is the invariable use of the term in the East. Even in Josephus the term for the military by profession is generally 'the young men'; whilst 'the elders' mean the councilors of state. David saw enough of the popular spirit to be satisfied that there was no political reliance on the permanence of the dynasty; and even at home there was an internal source of weakness. The tribe of Benjamin were mortified and incensed at the deposition of Saul's family and the bloody proscription of that family adopted by David. One only, a grandson of Saul, he had spared out of love to his friend Jonathan. This was Mephibo-sheth; but he was incapacitated for the throne by lameness. And how deep the resentment was amongst the Benjamites is evident from the insulting advantage taken of his despondency in the day of distress by Shimei. For Shimei had no motive for the act of coming to the roadside and cursing the king beyond his attachment to the house of Saul. Humanly speaking, David's prospect of propagating his own dynasty was but small. On the other hand, God had promised him His support. And hence it was that his crime arose, viz., upon his infidelity, in seeking to secure the throne by a mere human arrangement in the first place; secondly, by such an arrangement as must disorganize the existing theocratic system of the Jewish people. Upon this crime followed his chastisement in a sudden pestilence. And it is remarkable in how significant a manner God manifested the nature of the trespass, and the particular course through which He had meant originally, and did still mean, to counteract the worst issue of David's apprehensions. It happened that the angel of the pestilence halted at the threshing-floor of Araunah; and precisely that spot did God by dreams to David indicate as the site of the glorious Temple. Thus it seemed as though in so many words God had declared: 'Now that all is over, your crime and its punishment, understand that your fears were vain. I will continue the throne in your house longer than your anxieties can personally pursue its descent. And with regard to the terrors from Israel, although this event of a great schism is inevitable and essential to My councils, yet I will not allow it to operate for the extinction of your house. And that very Temple, in that very place where My angel was commissioned to pause, shall be one great means and one great pledge to you of My decree in favour of your posterity. For this house, as a common sanctuary to all Jewish blood, shall create a perpetual interest in behalf of Judah amongst the other tribes, even when making war upon Jerusalem.' Witness if it were but that one case where 200,000 captives of Judah were restored without ransom, were clothed completely, were fed, by the very men who had just massacred their fighting relatives.

FOOTNOTES:

[7] Even in Rome, where the purple (whatever colour that might have been) is usually imagined to be the symbol of regal state—and afterwards their improved arts of dyeing, and improved materials, became so splendid that it was made so—white had always been the colour of a monarchy. ['A white linen band was the simple badge of Oriental royalty' (Merivale's 'History of Rome,' ii., p. 468).—ED.]

[8] This was the case even with the Homeric Greeks. Mr. Gladstone makes a point of this (see 'Juventus Mundi,' p. 429): 'The privates of the army are called by the names of laos, the people; demos, the community; and plethūs, the multitude. But no notice is taken throughout the poem of the exploits of any soldier below the rank of an officer. Still, all attend the Assemblies. On the whole, the Greek host is not so much an army, as a community in arms.' Even the common people, not only in cities but in camps, assembled to hear the deliberations of the chiefs.—ED.



VII. THE JEWS AS A SEPARATE PEOPLE.

The argument for the separation and distinct current of the Jews, flowing as they pretend of the river Rhone through the Lake of Geneva—never mixing its waters with those which surround it—has been by some infidel writers defeated and evaded by one word; and here, as everywhere else, an unwise teacher will seek to hide the answer. Yet how infinitely better to state it fully, and then show that the evasion has no form at all; but, on the contrary, powerfully argues the inconsistency and incapacity of those who urge it. For instance, I remember Boulanger, a French infidel, whose work was duly translated by a Scotchman, answers it thus: What is there miraculous in all this? he demands. Listen to me, and I will show you in two minutes that it rests upon mere show and pure delusion. How is it, why is it, that the Jews have remained a separate people? Simply from their usages, in the first place; but, secondly, still more from the fact that these usages, which with other peoples exist also in some representative shape, with them modify themselves, shift, alter, adapt themselves to the climate or to the humour or accidents of life amongst those amidst whom chance has thrown them; whereas amongst the Jews every custom, the most trivial, is also part of their legislation; and their legislation is also their religion. (Boulanger, by the way, is far from expressing that objection so clearly as I have here done; but this is his drift and purpose, so far as he knew how to express it.) Take any other people—Isaurians, Athenians, Romans, Corinthians—doubtless all these and many others have transmitted their blood down to our ages, and are now living amongst us by representation. But why do we not perceive this? Why do the Athenians seem to have perished utterly? Simply for this reason: they were a plastic, yielding, unobstinate race. An Athenian lived in a port of Italy, married an Italian woman; thence threw out lines of descent to Milan, thence to Paris; and because his Attic usages were all local, epichorial, and tied to a particular mythology which has given way, or to a superstition which is defunct, or to a patriotic remembrance which has vanished with the land and the sympathy that supported it; hence, and upon other similar arguments, the Athenian has long since melted into the mass with which he was intermixed; he was a unit attached to a vast overpowering number from another source, and into that number he has long since been absorbed; he was a drop in a vast ocean, and long ago he has been confounded with the waters that did not differ, except numerically, from his own. But the Jews are an obstinate, bigoted people; and they have maintained their separation, not by any overruling or coercing miracle, but in a way perfectly obvious and palpable to themselves—obvious by its operation, obvious in its remedy. They would not resign their customs. Upon these ordinances, positive and negative, commanding and forbidding many peculiar rites, consecrating and desecrating many common esculent articles, these Jews have laid the stress and emphasis of religion. They would not resign them; they did not expect others to adopt them—not in any case; a fortiori not from a degraded people. And hence, not by any mysterious operation of Providential control, arose their separation, their resolute refusal to blend with other races.

This is the infidel's attempt to rebut, to defeat, utterly to confound, the argumentative force of this most astonishing amongst all historical pictures that the planet presents.

The following is the answer:

It is forgotten that along with the Jews there is another people concerned as illustrations of the same prophetic fatality—of that same inevitable eye, that same perspective of vision, which belonged to those whose eyes God had opened. The Arabs, as children of a common ancestor, ought not to be forgotten in this sentence upon their brother nation. They through Ishmael, the Jews through Isaac, and more immediately through Israel the son of Isaac, were two diverging branches of one original stem; and to both was pronounced a corresponding doom—a sentence which argued in both a principle of duration and self-propagation, that is memorable in any race. The children of Ishmael are the Arabs of the desert. Their destiny as a roving robber nation, and liable to all men's hands, as they indifferently levied spoil on all, was early pronounced. And here, again, we see at once how it will be evaded: it is the desert, it is the climate, it is the solemnity of that unchanging basis, which will secure the unchanging life of its children. But it is remarkable enough that Gibbon and other infidels, kicking violently against this standing miracle (because, if not so in itself, yet, according to Bishop Butler's just explanation concerning miraculous per de-rivationem as recording a miraculous power of vision), have by oscillation clung to the fixture of basis, and rejected it; for now Gibbon denies that the Arabs have held this constant tenor of life; they have changed it, he asserts, in large and notorious cases. Well, then, if they have, then at once falls to the ground this alleged overruling coercion a priori of the climate and the desert. Climate and desert do not necessarily coerce them, if in large and notorious cases they have failed to do so. So feels Gibbon; and, by an instinct of timidity, back he flies to the previous evasion—to the natural controlling power of climate and soil, admitting the Scriptural fact, but seeking for it an unscriptural ground, as before he had flown in over-precipitate anxiety to the denial of the Scriptural fact, but in that denial involving a withdrawal of the unscriptural ground.

The sceptics in that instance show their secret sense of a preference from the distracted eagerness with which they fly backwards and forwardwise between two reciprocally hostile evasions.

The answer I reserve, and meantime I remark:

Secondly, that, supposing this answer to have any force, still it meets only one moiety of the Scriptural fatality; viz., the dispersion of the Jews—the fact that, let them be gathered in what numbers they might, let them even be concentrated by millions, therefore in the literal sense not dispersed, yet in the political sense universally understood, they would be dispersed, because never, in no instance, rising to be a people, sui juris, a nation, a distinct community, known to the public law of Europe as having the rights of peace and war, but always a mere accident and vagrant excess amongst nations, not having the bare rights of citizenship; so far from being a nation, not being an acknowledged member of any nation. This exquisite dispersion—not ethnographic only, but political—is that half of the Scriptural malediction which the Boulanger answer attempts to meet; but the other half—that they should be 'a byword, an astonishment,' etc.—is entirely blinked. Had the work even prospered, it would still have to recommence. The Armenians are dispersed through all Eastern lands, so are the Arabs; even the descendants of Ali are found severed from their natal soil; but they are not therefore dispersed: they have endured no general indignities.

Thirdly, it does not meet the fact of the Jewish existence in any shape, whether as a distinct or an amalgamated people. There is no doubt that many races of men, as of brute animals, have been utterly extinguished. In cases such as those of the Emim, or Rethinim, a race distinguished by peculiar size, so as to be monstrous in comparison with other men, this extinction could more readily be realized; or in the case of a nation marked, as Herodotus records, by a slighter texture of scale, the extinction might be ascertained by the physiologist; but no doubt it has often occurred, precisely as a family is extinguished, or as certain trees (for example, the true golden pippin) are observed to die off, not by local influences only, but by a decay attacking the very principle of their existence. Of many ancient races it is probable enough that no blood directly traced from them could at this day be searched by the eye of God. Families arise amongst the royal lineage of Europe that suddenly, like a lamp fitfully glowing up just the moment before it expires, throw off, as by some final effort, a numerous generation of princes and princesses; then suddenly all contract as rapidly into a single child, which perishing, the family is absolutely extinct. And so must many nations have perished, and so must the Jews have been pre-eminently exposed to perish, from the peculiar, fierce, and almost immortal, persecutions which they have undergone, and the horrid frenzies of excited mobs in cruel cities of which they have stood the brunt.



VIII. 'WHAT IS TRUTH?' THE JESTING PILATE SAID—A FALSE GLOSS.

It is true that Pilate could not be expected fully to comprehend an idea which was yet new to man; Christ's words were beyond his depth. But, still, his natural light would guide him thus far—that, although he had never heard of any truth which rose to that distinction, still, if any one class of truth should in future come to eclipse all other classes of truth immeasurably, as regarded its practical results, as regarded some dark dependency of human interests, in that case it would certainly merit the distinctive name of 'The Truth.' The case in which such a distinction would become reasonable and available was one utterly unrealized to his experience, not even within the light of his conjectures as to its special conditions; but, still, as a general possibility it was conceivable to his understanding; though not comprehensible, yet apprehensible. And in going on to the next great question, to the inevitable question, 'What is the truth?' Pilate had no thought of jesting. Jesting was the last thing of which his impassioned mood in that great hour was capable. Roman magistrates of supreme rank were little disposed to jesting on the judgment-seat amongst a refractory and dangerous people; and of Pilate in particular, every word, every effort, every act, demonstrate that he was agitated with new instincts and misgivings of some shadowy revelation opening upon man, that his heart was convulsed with desponding anxiety in the first place to save the man who appeared the depositary of this revelation, but who, if, after all, only a sublime lunatic, was, at the very least, innocent of all offence. It must have struck all close observers of early Christianity how large a proportion of the new converts lay amongst Roman officers, or (to speak more adequately) amongst Romans of high rank, both men and women. And for that there was high reason. In the advance of civilization, and in the corresponding decay of idolatrous religions, there was fast arising a new growth of cravings amongst men. Mythological and desperately immoral religions, that spoke only to the blind sense of power, had been giving way through the three previous centuries to a fearful extent. They had receded from the higher natures of both Greece and Rome as the sea has locally receded from many shores of the earth. Such natures were left 'miserably bare'; the sense of dependency by any tie upon the invisible world, or at least upon the supernatural world, had decayed, and unless this painful void were filled up by some supplementary bond in the same direction, a condition of practical atheism must take place, such as could not but starve and impoverish in human nature those yearnings after the infinite which are the pledges of all internal grandeur. But this dependency could not be replaced by one of the same vicious nature. Into any new dependency a new element must be introduced. The sense of insufficiency would be renewed in triple strength if merely the old relations of weakness to power, of art to greater art, of intellect to higher intellect, of less to more within the same exact limits as to kind of excellence, should be rehearsed under new names or improved theogonies. Hitherto, no relation of man to divine or demoniac powers had included the least particle or fraction or hint of any moral element; nor was such an element possible in that dependency, for profound reasons.



IX. WHAT SCALIGER SAYS ABOUT THE EPISTLE TO JUDE.

Before any canon was settled, many works had become current in Christian circles whose origin was dubious. The traditions about them varied locally. Some, it is alleged, that would really have been entitled to a canonical place, had been lost by accident; to some, which still survived, this place had been refused upon grounds that might not have satisfied us of this day, if we had the books and the grounds of rejection before us; and, finally, others, it is urged, have obtained this sacred distinction with no right to it. In particular, the Second Epistle of St. Peter, the Second of St. Jude, the Epistle of St. James, and the three of St. John, are denounced as supposititious in the 'Scaligerana.' But the writer before us is wrong in laying any stress on the opinions there expressed. They bear the marks of conversational haste and of Scaligeran audacity. What is the objection made, for instance, to 'in quibus sunt mira, quae non videntur esse Apostolica'? That is itself more strange as a criticism than anything in the epistles can be for its doctrine. The only thing tending to a reason for the summary treatment is that the Eastern Church does not acknowledge them for canonical. But opinions quoted from ana are seldom of any authority; indeed, I have myself too frequently seen the unfaithfulness of such reports. The reporter, as he cannot decently be taking notes at the time of speaking, endeavours afterwards to recall the most interesting passages by memory. He forgets the context; what introduced—what followed to explain or modify the opinions. He supplies a conjectural context of his own, and the result is a romance. But if the reporter were even accurate, so much allowance must be made for the license of conversation—its ardour, its hurry, and its frequent playfulness—that when all these deductions are made, really not a fraction remains that one can honestly carry to account. Besides, the elder Scaliger was drunk pretty often, and Joe seems rather 'fresh' at times.

Upon consideration, it may be as well to repeat what it is that Scaliger is reported to have said:

'The Epistle of Jude is not his, as neither is that of James, nor the second of Peter, in all which are strange things that seem (seem—mark that!) far enough from being Apostolical. The three Epistles of John are not from John the Apostle. The second of Peter and Jude belong to a later age. The Eastern Church does not own them, neither are they of evangelical authority. They are unlearned, and offer no marks of Gospel majesty. As regards their internal value, believe them I may say that I do, but it is because they are in no ways hostile to us.'

Now, observe, the grounds of objection are purely aesthetical, except in the single argument from the authority of the Eastern Church. What does he mean by 'unlearned,' or wanting 'majesty,' or containing 'strange things'? Were ever such vague puerilities collected into one short paragraph? This is pure impertinence, and Phil. deserves to be privately reprimanded for quoting such windy chaff without noting and protesting it as colloquial. But what I wish the reader to mark—the [Greek: tho hepimhythion]—is, that suppose the two Scaligers amongst the Christian Fathers engaged in fixing the canon: greater learning you cannot have; neither was there, to a dead certainty, one tenth part as much amongst the canon-settlers. Yet all this marvellous learning fumes away in boyish impertinence. It confounds itself. And every Christian says, Oh, take away this superfluous weight of erudition, that, being so rare a thing, cannot be wanted in the broad highways of religion. What we do want is humility, docility, reverence for God, and love for man. These are sown broadcast amongst human hearts. Now, these apply themselves to the sense of Scripture, not to its grammatical niceties. But if so, even that case shows indirectly how little could depend upon the mere verbal attire of the Bible, when the chief masters of verbal science were so ready to go astray—riding on the billows so imperfectly moored. In the ideas of Scripture lies its eternal anchorage, not in its perishable words, which are shifting for ever like quicksands, as the Bible passes by translation successively into every spoken language of the earth.

What then?—'What then?' retorts the angry reader after all this, 'why then, perhaps, there may be a screw loose in the Bible.' True, there may, and what is more, some very great scholars take upon them to assert that there is. Yet, still, what then? The two possible errors open to the Fathers of our canon, to the men upon whom rested the weighty task of saying to all mankind what should be Bible, and what should be not Bible, of making and limiting that mighty world, are—that they may have done that which they ought not to have done, and, secondly, left undone that which they ought to have done. They may have admitted writers whom they ought to have excluded; and they may have excluded writers whom they ought to have admitted. This is the extent of their possible offences, and they are supposed by some critics to have committed both. But suppose that they have, still I say—what then? What is the nature of the wrong done to us by the worst mistake ascribed to them? Let us consider. It is supposed by some scholars that we have in the New Testament as it now stands a work written by Apollos, viz., the Epistle to the Romans. Yet, if so, the error amounts only to a misnomer. On the other hand, there are Epistles on which has been charged the same error in relation to the name of the author, and the more important error of thoughts unbecoming to a Christian in authority: for instance, the Epistle of St. James. This charge was chiefly urged by a very intemperate man, and in a very intemperate style. I notice it as being a case which Phil. has noticed. But Phil. merits a gentle rap on his knuckles for the inconsideration with which he has cited a charge made and reported with so much levity. He quotes it from the 'Scaligerana.' Now, what right upon such a subject has any man to quote such an authority? The reasons against listening with much attention to the 'Scaligerana' are these:

First, the Scaligers, both father and son, were the two most impudent men that ever walked the planet. I should be loath to say so ill-natured a thing as that their impudence was equal to their learning, because that forces every man to say, 'Ah, then, what impudent fellows they must have been!' It is kinder and juster to say that their learning was at least equal to their impudence, for that will force every man to exclaim, 'Ah, if so, what prodigies of learning they must have been!' Yes, they were—absolute monsters of learning, learned monsters. But as much learning often makes men mad, still more frequently it makes them furious for assault and battery; to use the American phrase, they grow 'wolfy about the shoulders,' from a periodical itchiness for fighting. Other men being shy of attacking the Scaligers, it was no fault of theirs, you know, but a necessity, to attack other men—unless you expected them to have no fighting at all. It was always a reason with them for trying a fall with a writer, if they doubted much whether they had any excuse for hanging a quarrel on.

Secondly, all ana whatever are bad authorities. Supposing the thing really said, we are to remember the huge privilege of conversation, how immeasurable is that! You yourself, reader, I presume, when talking, will say more in an hour than you will stand to in a month. I'm sure I do. When the reins are put into my hands I stick at nothing—headlong I drive like a lunatic, until the very room in which we are talking, with all that it inherits, seems to spin round with absolute vertigo at the extravagances I utter.

Thirdly, but again, was the thing really said? For, as another censure upon the whole library of ana, I can assert—that, if the license of conversation is enormous, to that people who inhale that gas of colloquial fermentation seldom mean much above one part in sixty of what they say, on the other hand the license of reporters is far greater. To forget the circumstances under which a thing was said is to alter the thing, to have lost the context, the particular remark in which your own originated, the mitigations of a harsh sentiment from playfulness of manner; in short, to drop the setting of the thoughts is oftentimes to falsify the tendency and value of those thoughts.

NOTE BY THE EDITOR.—The Phil. here referred to is the Philoleutheros Anglicanus of the essay on 'Protestantism,' as shortened by De Quincey, and with whom De Quincey, in that essay, deals very effectively and wittily on occasion.



X. MURDER AS A FINE ART.

(SOME NOTES FOR A NEW PAPER.)

A new paper on Murder as a Fine Art might open thus: that on the model of those Gentlemen Radicals who had voted a monument to Palmer, etc., it was proposed to erect statues to such murderers as should by their next-of-kin, or other person interested in their glory, make out a claim either of superior atrocity, or, in equal atrocity, of superior neatness, continuity of execution, perfect preparation or felicitous originality, smoothness or curiosa felicitas (elaborate felicity). The men who murdered the cat, as we read in the Newgate Calendar, were good, but Williams better who murdered the baby. And perhaps (but the hellish felicity of the last act makes us demur) Fielding was superior. For you never hear of a fire swallowing up a fire, or a rain stopping a deluge (for this would be a reign of Kilkenny cats); but what fire, deluge, or Kilkenny cats could not do, Fielding proposed, viz., to murder the murderers, to become himself the Nemesis. Fielding was the murderer of murderers in a double sense—rhetorical and literal. But that was, after all, a small matter compared with the fine art of the man calling himself Outis, on which for a moment we must dwell. Outis—so at all events he was called, but doubtless he indulged in many aliases—at Nottingham joined vehemently and sincerely, as it seemed, in pursuit of a wretch taxed with having murdered, twelve years previously, a wife and two children at Halifax, which wretch (when all the depositions were before the magistrate) turned out to be the aforesaid Mr. Outis. That suggests a wide field of speculation and reference.[9]

Note the power of murderers as fine-art professors to make a new start, to turn the corner, to retreat upon the road they have come, as though it were new to them, and to make diversions that disarm suspicion. This they owe to fortunate obscurity, which attests anew the wonderful compensations of life; for celebrity and power combine to produce drawbacks.

A foreigner who lands in Calcutta at an hour which nobody can name, and endeavours to effect a sneaking entrance at the postern-gate[10] of the governor-general's palace, may be a decent man; but this we know, that he has cut the towing-rope which bound his own boat to the great ark of his country. It may be that, in leaving Paris or Naples, he was simply cutting the connection with creditors who showed signs of attachment not good for his health. But it may also be that he ran away by the blaze of a burning inn, which he had fired in order to hide three throats which he had cut, and nine purses which he had stolen. There is no guarantee for such a man's character. Have we, then, no such vauriens at home? No, not in the classes standing favourably for promotion. The privilege of safe criminality, not liable to exposure, is limited to classes crowded together like leaves in Vallombrosa; for them to run away into some mighty city, Manchester or Glasgow, is to commence life anew. They turn over a new leaf with a vengeance. Many are the carpenters, bricklayers, bakers' apprentices, etc., who are now living decently in Bristol, Newcastle, Hull, Liverpool, after marrying sixteen wives, and leaving families to the care of twelve separate parishes. That scamp is at this moment circulating and gyrating in society, like a respectable te-totum, though we know not his exact name, who, if he were pleased to reveal himself in seventeen parts of this kingdom, where (to use the police language) he has been 'wanted' for some years, would be hanged seventeen times running, besides putting seventeen Government rewards into the pockets of seventeen policemen. Oh, reader, you little know the unutterable romances perpetrated for ever in our most populous empire, under cloud of night and distance and utter poverty, Mark that—of utter poverty. Wealth is power; but it is a jest in comparison of poverty. Splendour is power; but it is a joke to obscurity. To be poor, to be obscure, to be a baker's apprentice or a tailor's journeyman, throws a power about a man, clothes him with attributes of ubiquity, really with those privileges of concealment which in the ring of Gyges were but fabulous. Is it a king, is it a sultan, that such a man rivals? Oh, friend, he rivals a spiritual power.

Two men are on record, perhaps many more might have been on that record, who wrote so many books, and perpetrated so many pamphlets, that at fifty they had forgotten much of their own literary villainies, and at sixty they commenced with murderous ferocity a series of answers to arguments which it was proved upon them afterwards that they themselves had emitted at thirty—thus coming round with volleys of small shot on their own heads, as the Whispering Gallery at St. Paul's begins to retaliate any secrets you have committed to its keeping in echoing thunders after a time, or as Sir John Mandeville under Arctic skies heard in May all those curses thawing, and exploding like minute-guns, which had been frozen up in November. Even like those self-replying authors, even like those self-reverberators in St. Paul's, even like those Arctic practitioners in cursing, who drew bills and post obits in malediction, which were to be honoured after the death of winter, many men are living at this moment in merry England who have figured in so many characters, illustrated so many villages, run away from so many towns, and performed the central part in so many careers, that were the character, the village, the town, the career, brought back with all its circumstances to their memories, positively they would fail to recognise their own presence or incarnation in their own acts and bodies.

We have all read the story told by Addison of a sultan, who was persuaded by a dervish to dip his head into a basin of enchanted water, and thereupon found himself upon some other globe, a son in a poor man's family, married after certain years the woman of his heart, had a family of seven children whom he painfully brought up, went afterwards through many persecutions, walked pensively by the seashore meditating some escape from his miseries, bathed in the sea as a relief from the noon-day heat, and on lifting up his head from the waves found himself lifting up his head from the basin into which that cursed dervish had persuaded him to dip. And when he would have cudgelled the holy man for that long life of misery which had, through his means, been inflicted upon himself, behold! the holy man proved by affidavit that, in this world, at any rate (where only he could be punishable), the life had lasted but thirty-three seconds. Even so do the dark careers of many amongst our obscure and migratory villains from years shrink up to momentary specks, or, by their very multitude, altogether evanesce. Burke and Hare, it is well known, had lost all count of their several murders; they no more remembered, or could attempt to remember, their separate victims, than a respectable old banker of seventy-three can remember all the bills with their indorsements made payable for half-a-century at his bank; or than Foote's turnpike-keeper, who had kept all the toll-bar tickets to Kensington for forty-eight years, pretended to recollect the features of all the men who had delivered them at his gate. For a time, perhaps, Burke (who was a man of fine sensibility) had a representative vision of spasms, and struggles, and convulsions, terminating in a ten-pound note indorsed by Dr. ——. Hare, on the other hand, was a man of principle, a man that you could depend upon—order a corpse for Friday, and on Friday you had it—but he had no feeling whatever. Yet see the unity of result for him and Burke. For both alike all troublesome recollections gathered into one blue haze of heavenly abstractions: orders executed with fidelity, cheques on the bankers to be crossed and passed and cashed, are no more remembered. That is the acme of perfection in our art.

* * * * *

One great class of criminals I am aware of in past times as having specially tormented myself—the class who have left secrets, riddles, behind them. What business has any man to bequeath a conundrum to all posterity, unless he leaves in some separate channel the solution? This must have been done in malice, and for the purpose of annoying us, lest we should have too much proper enjoyment of life when he should have gone. For nobody knows whether the scoundrel could have solved it himself—too like in that respect to some charades which, in my boyish days (but then I had the excuse of youth, which they had not), I not unfrequently propounded to young ladies. Take this as a specimen: My first raises a little hope; my second very little indeed; and my whole is a vast roar of despair. No young lady could ever solve it; neither could I. We all had to give it up. A charade that only needs an answer, which, perhaps, some distant generation may supply, is but a half and half, tentative approach to this. Very much of this nature was the genius or Daimon (don't say Demon) of Socrates. How many thousands of learned writers and printers have gone to sleep over too profound attempts to solve that, which Socrates ought to have been able to solve at sight. I am myself of opinion that it was a dram-bottle, which someone raised a ghost to explain. Then the Entelecheia of Aristotle; did you ever read about that, excellent reader? Most people fancy it to have meant some unutterable crotchet in metaphysics, some horrible idea (lest the police should be after it) without a name; that is, until the Stagyrite repaired the injustice of his conduct by giving it a pretty long one. My opinion now, as you are anxious to know it, is, that it was a lady, a sweetheart of Aristotle's; for what was to hinder Aristotle having a sweetheart? I dare say Thomas Aquinas, dry and arid as he was, raised his unprincipled eyes to some Neapolitan beauty, began a sonnet to some lady's eyebrow, though he might forget to finish it. And my belief is that this lady, ambitious as Semele, wished to be introduced as an eternal jewel into the great vault of her lover's immortal Philosophy, which was to travel much farther and agitate far longer than his royal pupil's conquests. Upon that Aristotle, keeping her hand, said: 'My love, I'll think of it.' And then it occurred to him, that in the very heavens many lovely ladies, Andromeda, Cassiopeia, Ariadne, etc., had been placed as constellations in that map which many chronologists suppose to have been prepared for the use of the ship Argo, a whole generation before the Trojan war. Berenice, though he could not be aware of that, had interest even to procure a place in that map for her ringlets; and of course for herself she might have. Considering which, Aristotle said: 'Hang me! if I don't put her among the ten Categories!' On after thoughts he put her higher, for an Entelecheia is as much above a Category as our Padishah Victoria is above a Turkish sultan. 'But now, Stag,' said the lady (privileged as a sweetheart she called him Stag, though everybody else was obliged to call him Stagyrite), 'how will they know it's meant for me, Stag?' Upon which I am sorry to say the philosopher fell to cursing and swearing, bestowing blessings on his own optics and on posterity's, meaning yours and mine, saying: 'Let them find it out.' Well, now, you see I have found it out. But that is more than I hope for my crypto-criminals, and therefore I take this my only way of giving them celebration and malediction in one breath.

FOOTNOTES:

[9] Notwithstanding what he had written in the essay on the 'Essenes,' no doubt De Quincey, if he had completed this paper, could not have escaped characteristic, and perhaps grimly humorous, references of his own to the Sicarii, of whom Josephus has a good deal to tell in his 'Jewish War'; for it seems to us his thoughts were bearing directly that way. Josephus says of the Sicarii: 'In these days there arose another sort of robbers in Jerusalem, who were named Sicarii, who slew men in the day-time and in the middle of the city, more especially at the festivals. There they mixed with the multitude, and having concealed little daggers under their garments, with these they stabbed those that were their enemies; and when any fell down dead, the murderers joined the bystanders in expressing their indignation; so that from their plausibilities they could by no means be discovered. The first man that was slain by them was Jonathan the high-priest, after which many were slain every day.'—ED.

[10] 'Postern-gate.' See the legend of Sir Eustace the Crusader, and the good Sir Hubert, who 'sounded the horn which he alone could sound,' as told by Wordsworth.



XI. ANECDOTES—JUVENAL.

All anecdotes, as I have often remarked in print, are lies. It is painful to use harsh words, and, knowing by my own feelings how much the reader is shocked by this rude word lies, I should really be much gratified if it were possible to supplant it by some gentler or more courteous word, such as falsehoods, or even fibs, which dilutes the atrocity of untruth into something of an amiable weakness, wrong, but still venial, and natural (and so far, therefore, reasonable). Anything for peace: but really in this instance I cannot indulge the reader. The instincts of morality will not allow of it, and still less the passion which made Juvenal a poet,[11] viz., the passion of enormous and bloody indignation. From the beginning of this century, with wrath continually growing, I have laid it down as a rule, and if the last year of it, viz., A. D. 1900, should overhear my voice amongst the babblings that will then be troubling the atmosphere—in that case it will hear me still reaffirming, with an indignation still gathering strength, and therefore approaching ever nearer and nearer to a Juvenalian power of versification, so that perhaps I shall then speak in rhymed couplets—that all anecdotes pretending to be smart, but to a dead certainty if they pretend to be epigrammatic, are and must be lies. There is, in fact, no security for the truth of an anecdote, no guarantee whatever, except its intense stupidity. If a man is searched at a police-office, on the ground that he was caught trying the window-shutters of silversmiths; then, if it should happen that in his pockets is found absolutely nothing at all except one solitary paving-stone, in that case Charity, which believeth all things (in fact, is credulous to an anile degree), will be disposed to lock up the paving-stone, and restore it to the man on his liberation as if it were really his own, though philosophy mutters indignantly, being all but certain that the fellow stole it. And really I have been too candid a great deal in admitting that a man may appropriate an anecdote, and establish his claim to it by pleading its awful stupidity. That might be the case, and I believe it was, when anecdotes were many and writers were few. But things are changed now. Fifty years ago, if a man were seen running away with the pace of a lunatic, and you should sing out, 'Stop that fellow; he is running off with the shin-bone of my great-grandmother!' all the people in the street would have cried out in reply, 'Oh, nonsense! What should he want with your great-grandmother's shin-bone?' and that would have seemed reasonable. But now, to see how things are altered, any man of sense would reply, 'What should he want with my great-grandmother's shin-bone? Why, he'll grind it, and then he'll mix it with guano.' This is what he and the like of him have actually done by shiploads of people far more entitled to consideration than any one of my four great-grandmothers (for I had four, with eight shin-bones amongst them). It is well known that the field of Waterloo was made to render up all its bones, British or French, to certain bone-mills in agricultural districts. Borodino and Leipzig, the two bloodiest of modern battlefields, are supposed between them—what by the harvest of battle, what by the harvest of neighbouring hospitals—to be seized or possessed of four hundred thousand shin-bones, and other interesting specimens to match. Negotiations have been proceeding at various times between the leading bone-mills in England and the Jews in Dresden or in Moscow. Hitherto these negotiations have broken down, because the Jews stood out for 37 per shent., calculated upon the costs of exhumation. But of late they show a disposition to do business at 33 per shent.: the contract will therefore move forwards again; it will go ahead; and the dust of the faithful armies, together with the dust of their enemies, will very soon be found, not in the stopper of a bunghole (as Prince Hamlet conceived too prematurely), but in an unprecedented crop of Swedish turnips.

Bones change their value, it seems thus clearly; and anecdotes change their value; and in that proportion honesty, as regards one or the other, changes the value of its chances. But what has all this to do with 'Old Nick'? Stop: let me consider. That title was placed at the head of this article, and I admit that it was placed there by myself. Else, whilst I was wandering from my text, and vainly endeavouring to recollect what it was that I had meant by this text, a random thought came over me (immoral, but natural), that I would charge the heading of Old Nick upon the compositor, asserting that he had placed it there in obstinate defiance of all the orders to the contrary, and supplications to the contrary, that I had addressed to him for a month; by which means I should throw upon him the responsibility of accounting for so portentous an ensign.

* * * * *

EDITOR'S NOTE.—It is evident that De Quincey meditated a much longer essay on anecdotes as false, in which Niccolo Machiavelli would have come in for notice—hence the playful references in the close.

FOOTNOTES:

[11] 'The passion which made Juvenal a poet.' The scholar needs no explanation; but the reader whose scholarship is yet amongst his futurities (which I conceive to be the civilest way of describing an ignoramus) must understand that Juvenal, the Roman satirist, who was in fact a predestined poet in virtue of his ebullient heart, that boiled over once or twice a day in anger that could not be expressed upon witnessing the enormities of domestic life in Rome, was willing to forego all pretensions to natural power and inspiration for the sake of obtaining such influence as would enable him to reprove Roman vices with effect.



XII. ANNA LOUISA.

SPECIMEN TRANSLATION FROM VOSS IN HEXAMETERS, WITH LETTER TO PROFESSOR W. ('CHRISTOPHER NORTH').

DR. NORTH,

Doctor, I say, for I hear that the six Universities of England and Scotland have sent you a doctor's degree, or, if they have not, all the world knows they ought to have done; and the more shame for them if they keep no 'Remembrancer' to put them in mind of what they must allow to be amongst their most sacred duties. But that's all one. I once read in my childhood a pretty book, called 'Wilson's Account of the Pelew Islands,' at which islands, you know, H.M.S. Antelope was wrecked—just about the time, I fancy, when you, Doctor, and myself were in long petticoats and making some noise in the world; the book was not written by Captain Wilson, but by Keates, the sentimentalist. At the very end, however, is an epitaph, and that was written by the captain and ship's company:

'Stop, reader, stop, let nature claim a tear; A prince of mine, Lee Boo, lies buried here.'

This epitaph used often to make me cry, and in commemoration of that effect, which (like that of all cathartics that I know of, no matter how drastic at first) has long been growing weaker and weaker, I propose (upon your allowing me an opportunity) to superscribe you in any churchyard you will appoint:

'Stop, reader, stop, let genius claim a tear; A doct'r of mine, Lee Kit, lies buried here.'

'Doct'r of' you are to read into a dissyllable, and pretty much like Boney's old friend on the road from Moscow, General Doct'roff, who 'doctor'd them off,' as the Laureate observes, and prescribed for the whole French army gratis. But now to business.

For your information, Doctor, it cannot be necessary, but on account of very many readers it will be so, to say that Voss's 'Luise' has long taken its place in the literature of Germany as a classical work—in fact, as a gem or cabinet chef d'oeuvre; nay, almost as their unique specimen in any national sense of the lighter and less pretending muse; less pretending, I mean, as to the pomp or gravity of the subject, but on that very account more pretending as respects the minuter graces of its execution. In the comparative estimate of Germans, the 'Luise' holds a station corresponding to that of our 'Rape of the Lock,' or of Gresset's 'Vert-vert'—corresponding, that is, in its degree of relative value. As to its kind of value, some notion may be formed of it even in that respect also from the 'Rape of the Lock,' but with this difference, that the scenes and situations and descriptions are there derived from the daily life and habits of a fashionable belle and the fine gentlemen who surround her, whereas in the 'Luise' they are derived exclusively from the homelier and more patriarchal economy of a rural clergyman's household; and in this respect the 'Luise' comes nearest by much, in comparison of any other work that I know of, to our own 'Vicar of Wakefield.' Like that delightful portrait of rural life in a particular aspect, or idyll as it might be called, the 'Luise' aims at throwing open for our amusement the interior of a village parsonage (Scotice, 'manse'); like that in its earlier half (for the latter half of the 'Vicar' is a sad collapse from the truth and nature of the original conception into the marvellous of a commonplace novel), the 'Luise' exhibits the several members of a rustic clergyman's family according to their differences of sex, age, and standing, in their natural, undisguised features, all unconsciously marked by characteristic foibles, all engaged in the exercise of their daily habits, neither finer nor coarser than circumstances naturally allow, and all indulging in such natural hopes or fictions of romance as grow out of their situation in life. The 'Luise,' in short, and the 'Vicar of Wakefield' are both alike a succession of circumstantial delineations selected from mere rustic life, but rustic life in its most pure and intellectual form; for as to the noble countess in the 'Luise,' or the squire and his uncle, Sir William, in the 'Vicar of Wakefield,' they do not interfere sufficiently to disturb the essential level of the movement as regards the incidents, or to colour the manners and the scenery. Agreeing, however, in this general purpose, the two works differ in two considerable features; one, that the 'Vicar of Wakefield' describes the rural clergyman of England, 'Luise' the rural clergyman of North Germany; the other, that the English idyll is written in prose, the German in verse—both of which differences, and the separate peculiarities growing out of them, will, it may perhaps be thought, require a few words of critical discussion.

There has always existed a question as to the true principles of translation when applied, not to the mere literature of knowledge (because there it is impossible that two opinions can arise, by how much closer the version by so much the better), but to the literature of power, and to such works—above all, to poems—as might fairly be considered works of art in the highest sense. To what extent the principle of compensation might reasonably be carried, the license, that is, of departing from the strict literal forms of the original writer, whether as to expressions, images, or even as to the secondary thoughts, for the sake of reproducing them in some shape less repellent to a modern ear, and therefore virtually sustaining the harmony of the composition by preventing the attention from settling in a disproportionate degree upon what might have a startling effect to a taste trained under modern discipline—this question has always been pending as a question open to revision before the modern courts of criticism; as surely to you, Dr. North, one of the chief 'swells' on that bench, I need not say. But, for the sake of accurate thinking, it is worth while observing that formerly this question was moved almost exclusively with a view to the Latin and Greek classics; and that circumstance gave a great and a very just bias to the whole dispute. For the difference with regard to any capital author of ancient days, as compared with modern authors, is this, that here we have a twofold interest—an interest with work, and a separate interest in the writer. Take the 'Prometheus Desmotes' of AEschylus, and suppose that a translator should offer us an English 'Prometheus,' which he acknowledged to be very free, but at the same time contended that his variations from the Greek were so many downright improvements, so that, if he had not given us the genuine 'Prometheus,' he had given us something better. In such a case we should all reply, but we do not want something better. Our object is not the best possible drama that could be produced on the fable of 'Prometheus'; what we want is the very 'Prometheus' that was written by AEschylus, the very drama that was represented at Athens. The Athenian audience itself, and what pleased its taste, is already one subject of interest. AEschylus on his own account is another. These are collateral and alien subjects of interest quite independent of our interest in the drama, and for the sake of these we wish to see the real original 'Prometheus'—not according to any man's notion of improvement, but such as came from a sublime Grecian poet, such as satisfied a Grecian audience, more than two thousand years ago. We wish, in fact, for the real AEschylus, 'unhousel'd, unaneal'd,' with all his imperfections on his head.

Such was the way, and the just way, of arguing the point when the application was limited to a great authentic classic of the Antique; nor was the case at all different where Ariosto or any other illustrious Italian classic was concerned. But a new sort of casuistry in this question has arisen in our own times, and by accident chiefly in connection with German literature; but it may well be, Dr. North, that you will be more diverted by a careful scrutiny of my metres after Voss in illustration, than by any further dissertation on my part on a subject that you know so well.

Believe me, Always yours admiringly, X. Y. Z.

The Parson's Dinner.

In the month of leafy June, beneath celestial azure Of skies all cloudless, sate the aged Rector of Esthwaite Dining amidst his household; but not the meridian ardour Of sunbeams fierce he felt; him the shady veranda With vine-clad trellis defends: beyond a pendulous awning Of boughs self-wreath'd from limes (whose mighty limbs overarching Spanned the low roof of the house) spreads far effectual umbrage For young and old alike; noontide awfully breathless Settled in deepest silence on the woods and valley of Esthwaite. Yet not the less there would rise, after stillest interval often, 10 Low whispering gales that stole, like sobbing murmur of infant Dreaming in arms maternal, into the heart o' the youngest: Gales that at most could raise a single ringlet of auburn As it pencill'd the noble brow of the youthful Anna Louisa— Sole child that survived to thee, oh, aged pastor of Esthwaite. Clad in his morning gown, the reverend priest at a table Of sculptur'd stone was seated; and his seat was a massy but easy Settle of oak, which in youth his ancient servitor, Isaac, Footman, sexton, and steward, butler and gardener also, Carved by the winter fire in nights of gloomy November, And through many a long, long night of many a dark December. 21 The good man's heart was glad, and his eyes were suffus'd with a rapture Of perfect love as they settled on her—that pulse of his heart's blood, The one sole prop of his house, the beautiful Anna Louisa. By the side of himself sate his wife, that ancient tamer of housemaids,[12] Yet kind of heart as a dove, and with matron graces adorning Her place as she sate dispensing hospitality boundless To the strangers within her gates; for, lo! two strangers on one side Sate of the long stone table; yet strangers by manner or action One would not suppose them; nor were they, but guests ever honour'd, 30 And dear to each heart in the house of th' ancient Rector of Esthwaite. The elder of them was called Augustus Harry Delancey, And he rode as a cornet of horse in the mighty imperial army. Him had the parents approved (and those were melodious accents, The sweetest he ever had heard) as suitor of Anna Louisa. But from lips more ruby far—far more melodious accents Had reach'd his ears since then; for she, the daughter, her own self, Had condescended at last to utter sweet ratification Of all his hopes; low whisp'ring the 'yes'—celestial answer That raised him to paradise gates on pinion[13] of expectation. 40 Over against his beloved he sate—the suitor enamour'd: And God He knows that indeed should it prove an idolatrous error To look in the eyes of a lady till you feel a dreamy devotion, I fear for the health of your soul that day, oh, Harry Delancey! Next to Delancey there sate his pupil, Magnus Adolphus, A fair-haired boy of ten, half an orphan, a count of the empire— Magnus Adolphus of Arnstein, that great Bavarian earldom. Him had his widowed mother, the noble Countess of Arnstein, Placed with Delancey betimes, as one in knightly requirements Skilful and all-accomplished, that he the 'youthful idea'[14] 50 Might 'teach how to shoot' (with a pistol, videlicet),—horses To mount and to manage with boldness, hounds to follow in hunting The fox, the tusky boar, the stag with his beautiful antlers: Arts, whether graceful or useful, in arms or equestrian usage, Did Augustus impart to his pupil, the youthful earl of the empire. To ride with stirrups or none, to mount from the near-side or off-side (Which still is required in the trooper who rides in the Austrian army), To ride with bridle or none, on a saddle Turkish or English, To force your horse to curvet, pirouette, dance on his haunches, And whilst dancing to lash with his feet, and suggest an effectual hinting 60 To the enemy's musqueteers to clear the road for the hinter: Or again, if you want a guide by night, in a dangerous highway Beset with the enemies' marksmen and swarming with murderous ambush, To train your horse in the art of delicate insinuation, Gently raising a hoof to tap at the door o' the woodsman. But, if he persists in snoring, or pretending to snore, or is angry At your summons to leave his lair in the arms of his wife or his infants, To practise your horse in the duty of stormy recalcitration, Wheeling round to present his heels, and in mid caracoling To send the emperor's greeting smack through the panel of oakwood[15] 70 That makes the poor man so hard of hearing imperial orders. Arts such as these and others, the use of the sabre on horseback, All modes of skill gymnastic, modes whether forceful or artful, Of death-grapple if by chance a cannon-shot should un-horse you, All modes of using the limbs with address, with speed, or enormous Effort of brutal strength, all this did Harry Delancey Teach to his docile pupil: and arts more nobly delightful, Arts of the head or the heart, arts intellectual; empire Over dead men's books, over regions of high meditation, Comparative tactics, warfare as then conducted in ages When powder was none, nor cannon, but brute catapultae, 81 Blind rams, brainless wild asses, the stony slinger of huge stones.[16] Iron was lord of the world; iron reigned, man was his engine; But now the rule is reversed, man binds and insults over iron. Together did they, young tutor, young pupil, Augustus, Adolphus, Range over history martial, or read strategical authors, Xenophon, Arrian, old Polybius, old Polyaenus (Think not these Polys, my boy, were blooming Pollies of our days!), And above all others, they read the laurel'd hero of heroes, Thrice kingly Roman Julius, sun-bright leader of armies, Who planted his god-like foot on the necks of a whole generation. 91 Such studies, such arts were those by which young Harry Delancey Sought to discharge the trust which to him the Lady of Arnstein Confided with hopes maternal; thus trained, he hoped that Adolphus Would shine in his native land, for high was his place in the empire.

EDITOR'S NOTE.—This was, of course, written for Blackwood's Magazine; but it never appeared there.

FOOTNOTES:

[12] 'That tamer of housemaids': [Greek: Hektoros ippodamoio]—of Hector, the tamer of horses ('Iliad').

[13] 'On pinion of expectation.' Here I would request the reader to notice that it would have been easy for me to preserve the regular dactylic close by writing 'pinion of anticipation;' as also in the former instance of 'many a dark December' to have written 'many a rainy December.' But in both cases I preferred to lock up by the massy spondaic variety; yet never forgetting to premise a dancing dactyle—'many a'—and 'pinion of.' Not merely for variety, but for a separate effect of peculiar majesty.

[14] Alluding to a ridiculous passage in Thomson's 'Seasons':

'Delightful task! to teach the young idea how to shoot.'

[15] All these arts, viz., teaching the horse to fight with his forelegs or lash out with his hind-legs at various angles in a general melee of horse and foot, but especially teaching him the secret of 'inviting' an obstinate German boor to come out and take the air strapped in front of a trooper, and do his duty as guide to the imperial cavalry, were imported into the Austrian service by an English riding-master about the year 1775-80. And no doubt it must have been horses trained on this learned system of education from which the Highlanders of Scotland derived their terror of cavalry.

[16] 'Blind rams, brainless wild asses,' etc. The 'arietes,' or battering-rams with iron-bound foreheads, the 'onagri,' or wild asses, etc., were amongst the poliorcetic engines of the ancients, which do not appear to have received any essential improvement after the time of the brilliant Prince Demetrius, the son of Alexander's great captain, Antigonus.



XIII. SOME THOUGHTS ON BIOGRAPHY.

We have heard from a man who witnessed the failure of Miss Baillie's 'De Montford,' notwithstanding the scenic advantages of a vast London theatre, fine dresses, fine music at intervals, and, above all, the superb acting of John Kemble, supported on that occasion by his incomparable sister, that this unexpected disappointment began with the gallery, who could not comprehend or enter into a hatred so fiendish growing out of causes so slight as any by possibility supposable in the trivial Rezenvelt. To feel teased by such a man, to dislike him, occasionally to present him with your compliments in the shape of a duodecimo kick—well and good, nothing but right. And the plot manifestly tended to a comic issue. But murder!—a Macbeth murder!—not the injury so much as the man himself was incommensurate, was too slight by a thousand degrees for so appalling a catastrophe. It reacts upon De Montford, making him ignoble that could be moved so profoundly by an agency so contemptible.

Something of the same disproportion there is, though in a different way, between any quarrel that may have divided us from a man in his life-time and the savage revenge of pursuing the quarrel after his death through a malicious biography. Yet, if you hated him through no quarrel, but simply (as we all hate many men that died a thousand years ago) for something vicious, or which you think vicious, in his modes of thinking, why must you, of all men, be the one to undertake an edition of his works, 'with a life of the author'? Leave that to some neutral writer, who neither loves nor hates. And whilst crowds of men need better biographical records whom it is easy to love and not difficult to honour, do not you degrade your own heart or disgust your readers by selecting for your exemplification not a model to be imitated, but a wild beast to be baited or a criminal to be tortured? We privately hate Mr. Thomas Hobbes, of Malmsbury; we know much evil of him, and we could expose many of his tricks effectually. We also hate Dean Swift, and upon what we think substantial arguments. Some of our own contemporaries we hate particularly; Cobbett, for instance, and other bad fellows in fustian and corduroys. But for that very reason we will not write their lives. Or, if we should do so, only because they might happen to stand as individuals in a series, and after warning the reader of our own bias. For it is too odious a spectacle to imprison a fellow-creature in a book, like a stag in a cart, and turn him out to be hunted through all his doubles for a day's amusement. It too much resembles that case of undoubted occurrence both in France and Germany, where 'respectable' individuals, simply as amateurs, and not at all with any view to the salary or fees of operating, have come forward as candidates for the post of public executioner. What is every man's duty is no man's duty by preference. And unless where a writer is thrust upon such a duty by an official necessity (as, if he contracts for a 'Biographia Britannica,' in that case he is bound by his contract to go through with the whole series—rogues and all), it is too painful to see a human being courting and wooing the task of doing execution upon his brother in his grave. Nay, even in the case where this executioner's task arises spontaneously out of some duty previously undertaken without a thought of its severer functions, we are still shocked by any exterminating vengeance too rancorously pursued. Every reader must have been disgusted by the unrelenting persecution with which Gifford, a deformed man, with the spiteful nature sometimes too developed in the deformed, had undertaken 'for our fathers in the Row' an edition of Massinger. Probably he had not thought at the time of the criminals who would come before him for judgment. But afterwards it did not embitter the job that these perquisites of office accrued, lucro ponatur, that such offenders as Coxeter, Mr. Monck Mason, and others were to be 'justified' by course of law. Could he not have stated their errors, and displaced their rubbish, without further personalities? However, he does not, but makes the air resound with his knout, until the reader wishes Coxeter in his throat, and Monck Mason, like 'the cursed old fellow' in Sinbad, mounted with patent spurs upon his back.

We shall be interrupted, however, and that we certainly foresee, by the objection—that we are fighting with shadows, that neither the eloge in one extreme, nor the libel in the other extreme, finds a place in our literature. Does it not? Yes, reader, each of these biographical forms exists in favour among us, and of one it is very doubtful indeed whether it ought not to exist. The eloge is found abundantly diffused through our monumental epitaphs in the first place, and there every man will countersign Wordsworth's judgment (see 'The Excursion' and also Wordsworth's prose Essay on Epitaphs), that it is a blessing for human nature to find one place in this world sacred to charitable thoughts, one place at least offering a sanctuary from evil speaking. So far there is no doubt. But the main literary form, in which the English eloge presents itself, is the Funeral Sermon. And in this also, not less than in the churchyard epitaph, kind feeling ought to preside; and for the same reasons, the sanctity of the place where it is delivered or originally published, and the solemnity of the occasion which has prompted it; since, if you cannot find matter in the departed person's character fertile in praise even whilst standing by the new-made grave, what folly has tempted you into writing an epitaph or a funeral sermon? The good ought certainly to predominate in both, and in the epitaph nothing but the good, because were it only for a reason suggested by Wordsworth, viz., the elaborate and everlasting character of a record chiselled out painfully in each separate letter, it would be scandalous to confer so durable an existence in stone or marble upon trivial human infirmities, such as do not enter into the last solemn reckoning with the world beyond the grave; whilst, on the other hand, all graver offences are hushed into 'dread repose,' and, where they happen to be too atrocious or too memorable, are at once a sufficient argument for never having undertaken any such memorial. These considerations privilege the epitaph as sacred to charity, and tabooed against the revelations of candour. The epitaph cannot open its scanty records to any breathing or insinuation of infirmity. But the Funeral Sermon, though sharing in the same general temper of indulgence towards the errors of the deceased person, might advantageously be laid open to a far more liberal discussion of those personal or intellectual weaknesses which may have thwarted the influence of character otherwise eminently Christian. The Oraison Funebre of the French proposes to itself by its original model, which must be sought in the Epideictic or panegyrical oratory of the Greeks, a purpose purely and exclusively eulogistic: the problem supposed is to abstract from everything not meritorious, to expand and develop the total splendour of the individual out of that one centre, that main beneficial relation to his own age, from which this splendour radiated. The incidents of the life, the successions of the biographical detail, are but slightly traced, no farther, in fact, than is requisite to the intelligibility of the praises. Whereas, in the English Funeral Sermon, there is no principle of absolute exclusion operating against the minutest circumstantiations of fact which can tend to any useful purpose of illustrating the character. And what is too much for the scale of a sermon literally preached before a congregation, or modelled to counterfeit such a mode of address, may easily find its place in the explanatory notes. This is no romance, or ideal sketch of what might be. It is, and it has been. There are persons of memorable interest in past times, of whom all that we know is embodied in a funeral sermon. For instance, Jeremy Taylor in that way, or by his Epistles Dedicatory, has brought out the characteristic features in some of his own patrons, whom else we should have known only as nominis umbras. But a more impressive illustration is found in the case of John Henderson, that man of whom expectations so great were formed, and of whom Dr. Johnson and Burke, after meeting and conversing with him, pronounced (in the Scriptural words of the Ethiopian queen applied to the Jewish king, Solomon) 'that the half had not been told them.' For this man's memory almost the sole original record exists in Aguttar's funeral sermon; for though other records exist, and one from the pen of a personal friend, Mr. Joseph Cottle, of Bristol, yet the main substance of the biography is derived from the fundus of this one sermon.[17] And it is of some importance to cases of fugitive or unobtrusive merit that this more quiet and sequestered current of biography should be kept open. For the local motives to an honorary biographical notice, in the shape of a Funeral Sermon, will often exist, when neither the materials are sufficient, nor a writer happens to be disposable, for a labour so serious as a regular biography.

Here then, on the one side, are our English eloges. And we may add that amongst the Methodists, the Baptists, and other religious sectaries, but especially among the missionaries of all nations and churches, this class of eloges is continually increasing. Not unfrequently men of fervent natures and of sublime aspirations are thus rescued from oblivion, whilst the great power of such bodies as the Methodists, their growing wealth, and consequent responsibility to public opinion, are pledges that they will soon command all the advantages of colleges and academic refinement; so that if, in the manner of these funeral eloges, there has sometimes been missed that elegance which should have corresponded to the weight of the matter, henceforwards we may look to see this disadvantage giving way before institutions more thoroughly matured. But if these are our eloges, on the other hand, where are our libels?

This is likely to be a topic of offence, for many readers will start at hearing the upright Samuel Johnson and the good-humoured, garrulous Plutarch denounced as traffickers in libel. But a truth is a truth. And the temper is so essentially different in which men lend themselves to the propagation of defamatory anecdotes, the impulses are so various to an offence which is not always consciously perceived by those who are parties to it, that we cannot be too cautious of suffering our hatred of libel to involve every casual libeller, or of suffering our general respect for the person of the libeller to exonerate him from the charge of libelling. Many libels are written in this little world of ours unconsciously, and under many motives. Perhaps we said that before, but no matter. Sometimes a gloomy fellow, with a murderous cast of countenance, sits down doggedly to the task of blackening one whom he hates worse 'than toad or asp.' For instance, Procopius performs that 'labour of hate' for the Emperor Justinian, pouring oil into his wounds, but, then (as Coleridge expresses it in a 'neat' sarcasm), oil of vitriol. Nature must have meant the man for a Spanish Inquisitor, sent into the world before St. Dominic had provided a trade for him, or any vent for his malice—so rancorous in his malignity, so horrid and unrelenting the torture to which he subjects his sovereign and the beautiful Theodora. In this case, from the withering scowl which accompanies the libels, we may be assured that they are such in the most aggravated form—not malicious only, but false. It is commonly said, indeed, in our courts, that truth it is which aggravates the libel. And so it is as regards the feelings or the interests of the man libelled. For is it not insufferable that, if a poor man under common human infirmity shall have committed some crime and have paid its penalty, but afterwards reforming or out-growing his own follies, seeks to gain an honest livelihood for his children in a place which the knowledge of his past transgression has not reached, then all at once he is to be ruined by some creature purely malignant who discovers and publishes the secret tale? In such a case most undoubtedly it is the truth of the libel which constitutes its sting, since, if it were not true or could be made questionable, it would do the poor man no mischief. But, on the other hand, it is the falsehood of the libel which forms its aggravation as regards the publisher. And certain we are, had we no other voucher than the instinct of our hatred to Procopius, that his disloyal tales about his great lord and lady are odiously overcharged, if not uniformly false. Gibbon, however, chooses to gratify his taste for the luxury of scandal by believing at once in the perfect malice of the slanderer, and the perfect truth of his slanders.

Here then, in this Procopius, is an instance of the gloomy libeller, whose very gloom makes affidavit of his foul spirit from the first. There is also another form, less odious, of the hostile libeller: it occurs frequently in cases where the writer is not chargeable with secret malice, but is in a monstrous passion. A shower-bath might be of service in that case, whereas in the Procopius case nothing but a copious or a Procopius application of the knout can answer. We, for instance, have (or had, for perhaps it has been stolen) a biography of that same Parker, afterwards Bishop of Oxford, with whom Andrew Marvell 'and others who called Milton friend' had such rough-and-tumble feuds about 1666, and at whose expense it was that Marvell made the whole nation merry in his 'Rehearsal Transprosed.' This Parker had a 'knack' at making himself odious; he had a curiosa felicitas in attracting hatreds, and wherever he lodged for a fortnight he trailed after him a vast parabolic or hyperbolic tail of enmity and curses, all smoke and fire and tarnish, which bore the same ratio to his small body of merit that a comet's tail, measuring billions of miles, does to the little cometary mass. The rage against him was embittered by politics, and indeed sometimes by knavish tricks; the first not being always 'confounded,' nor the last 'frustrated.' So that Parker, on the whole, was a man whom it might be held a duty to hate, and therefore, of course, to knout as often as you could persuade him to expose a fair extent of surface for the action of the lash. Many men purchased a knout for his sake, and took their chance for getting a 'shy' at him, as Parker might happen to favour their intentions. But one furious gentleman, who is resolved to 'take his full change' out of Parker, and therefore to lose no time, commences operations in the very first words of his biography: 'Parker,' says he, 'the author of ——, was the spawn of Samuel Parker.' His rage will not wait for an opportunity; he throws off a torrent of fiery sparks in advance, and gives full notice to Parker that he will run his train right into him, if he can come up with his rear. This man is not malicious, but truculent; like the elder Scaliger, of whom it was observed that, having been an officer of cavalry up to his fortieth year (when he took to learning Greek), he always fancied himself on horseback, charging, and cutting throats in the way of professional duty, as often as he found himself summoned to pursue and 'cut up' some literary delinquent. Fire and fury, 'bubble and squeak,' is the prevailing character of his critical composition. 'Come, and let me give thee to the fowls of the air,' is the cry with which the martial critic salutes the affrighted author. Yet, meantime, it is impossible that he can entertain any personal malice, for he does not know the features of the individual enemy whom he is pursuing. But thus far he agrees with the Procopian order of biographers—that both are governed, in whatever evil they may utter, by a spirit of animosity: one by a belligerent spirit which would humble its enemy as an enemy in a fair pitched battle, the other by a subtle spirit of malice, which would exterminate its enemy not in that character merely, but as an individual by poison or by strangling.

Libels, however, may be accredited and published where there is no particle of enmity or of sudden irritation. Such were the libels of Plutarch and Dr. Johnson. They are libels prompted by no hostile feelings at all, but adopted by mere blind spirit of credulity. In this world of ours, so far as we are acquainted with its doings, there are precisely four series—four aggregate bodies—of Lives, and no more, which you can call celebrated; which have had, and are likely to have, an extensive influence—each after its own kind. Which be they? To arrange them in point of time, first stand Plutarch's lives of eminent Greeks and Romans; next, the long succession of the French Memoirs, beginning with Philippe de Commines, in the time of Louis XI. or our Edward IV., and ending, let us say, with the slight record of himself (but not without interest) of Louis XVIII.; thirdly, the Acta Sanctorum of the Bollandists; fourthly, Dr. Johnson's 'Lives of the Poets.' The third is a biographical record of the Romish saints, following the order of the martyrology as it is digested through the Roman calendar of the year; and, as our own 'Biographia Britannica' has only moved forwards in seventy years to the letter 'H,' or thereabouts (which may be owing to the dissenting blight of Dr. Kippis), pari passu, the Acta Sanctorum will be found not much farther advanced than the month of May—a pleasant month certainly, but (as the Spectator often insinuates) perilous to saintship. Laying this work out of consideration, as being chiefly employed in eulogy such as could not be extravagant when applied to the glorious army of martyrs (although here also, we doubt not, are many libels against men concerning whom it matters little whether they were libelled or not), all the rest of the great biographical works are absolutely saturated with libels. Plutarch may be thought to balance his extravagant slanders by his impossible eulogies. He sees nothing wonderful in actions that were far beyond the level of any motives existing under pagan moralities; and, on the other hand, he traduces great men like Caesar, whose natures were beyond his scale of measurement, by tracing their policy to petty purposes entirely Plutarchian. But he was a Greekling in a degenerate age of Grecians. As to the French Memoirs, which are often so exceedingly amusing, they purchase their liveliness by one eternal sacrifice of plain truth. Their repartees, felicitous propos, and pointed anecdotes are but one rolling fire of falsehoods. And, generally, it may be laid down as a rule, that all collectors of happy retorts and striking anecdotes are careless of truth. Louis XIV. does seem to have had a natural gift of making brilliant compliments and happy impromptus; and yet the very best of his reputed mots were spurious. Some may be traced to Cicero, Hierocles, Diogenes; and some to his modern predecessors. That witty remark ascribed to him about the disposition of Fortune, as being a lady, to withdraw her favours from old men like himself and the Marechal Boufflers, was really uttered nearly two centuries before by the Emperor Charles V., who probably stole it from some Spanish collection of jests. And so of fifty in every hundred beside. And the French are not only apt beyond other nations to abuse the license of stealing from our predecessor quod licuit semperque licebit, but also, in a degree peculiar to themselves, they have a false de-naturalized taste in the humorous, and as to the limits of the extravagant. We have formerly illustrated this point, and especially we noticed it as a case impossible to any nation but the French to have tolerated the pretended 'absences' of La Fontaine—as, for instance, his affecting to converse with his own son as an entire stranger, and asking the lady who had presented him what might be the name of that amiable young man. The incredulus odi faces one in every page of a French memoir; veracity is an unknown virtue, and, wherever that is the taste, look for libels by wholesale. Too often even the unnatural and the monstrous is courted, rather than miss the object of arresting and startling. Now, Dr. Johnson's calumnies or romances were not of that order. He had a healthy spirit of reverence for truth; but he was credulous to excess, and he was plagued by an infirmity not uncommon amongst literary men who have no families of young people growing up around their hearth—the hankering after gossip. He was curious about the domestic habits of his celebrated countrymen; inquisitive in a morbid degree about their pecuniary affairs: 'What have you got in that pocket which bulges out so prominently?' 'What did your father do with that hundred guineas which he received on Monday from Jacob Jonson?' And, as his 'swallow' was enormous—as the Doctor would believe more fables in an hour than an able-bodied liar would invent in a week—naturally there was no limit to the slanders with which his 'Lives of the Poets' are overrun.

Of the four great biographical works which we have mentioned, we hold Dr. Johnson's to be by far the best in point of composition. Even Plutarch, though pardonably overrated in consequence of the great subjects which he treats (which again are 'great' by benefit of distance and the vast abstracting process executed by time upon the petty and the familiar), is loose and rambling in the principles of his nexus; and there lies the great effort for a biographer, there is the strain, and that is the task—viz., to weld the disconnected facts into one substance, and by interfusing natural reflections to create for the motions of his narrative a higher impulse than one merely chronologic. In this respect, the best of Dr. Johnson's 'Lives' are undoubtedly the very best which exist. They are the most highly finished amongst all masterpieces of the biographic art, and, as respects the Doctor personally, they are, beyond comparison, his best work. It is a great thing in any one art or function, even though it were not a great one, to have excelled all the literature of all languages. And if the reader fancies that there lurks anywhere a collection of lives, or even one life (though it were the 'Agricola' of Tacitus), which as a work of refined art and execution can be thought equal to the best of Dr. Johnson's, we should be grateful to him if he would assign it in a letter to Mr. Blackwood:

'And though the night be raw, We'll see it too, the first we ever saw.'

We say nothing of the Calmuck Tartars; they hold (see Bergmann's 'Streifereien') that their 'Dschangariade' is the finest of all epic poems, past or coming; and, therefore, the Calmuck Lives of the Poets will naturally be inimitable. But confining our view to the unhappy literatures of Europe, ancient or modern, this is what we think of Dr. Johnson's efforts as a biographer. Consequently, we cannot be taxed with any insensibility to his merit. And as to the critical part of his Lives, if no thoughtful reader can be expected to abide by his haughty decisions, yet, on the other hand, every man reads his opinions with pleasure, from the intellectual activity and the separate justice of the thoughts which they display. But as to his libellous propensity, that rests upon independent principles; for all his ability and all his logic could not elevate his mind above the region of gossip.

Take his 'Life of Savage.' This was the original nest-egg, upon which, as a basis, and perhaps as the occasional suggestion of such an enterprise, all the rest—allow us a pompous word—supervened. It was admirably written, because written con amore, and also because written con odio; and under either impulse is it possible to imagine grosser delusions? Johnson persuaded himself that Savage was a fine gentleman (a role not difficult to support in that age, when ceremony and a gorgeous costume were amongst the auxiliary distinctions of a gentleman), and also that he was a man of genius. The first claim was necessarily taken upon trust by the Doctor's readers; the other might have been examined; but after a few painful efforts to read 'The Wanderer' and other insipid trifles, succeeding generations have resolved to take that upon trust also; for in very truth Savage's writings are of that order which 'do not let themselves be read.' Why, then, had publishers bought them? Publishers in those days were mere tradesmen, without access to liberal society. Even Richardson, though a man of great genius, in his publisher's character was an obsequious, nay, servile, admirer of the fine gentleman who wore a sword, embroidered clothes, and Mechlin ruffles about his wrists; above all things, he glorified and adored a Lovelace, with a fine person, who sang gaily to show his carelessness of low people, never came abroad except in a sedan-chair, and liberally distributed his curses to the right and the left in all respectable men's shops. This temper, with her usual sagacity, Lady M. Wortley Montagu could detect in Richardson, and for this she despised him. But this it was, and some little vision of possible patronage from Lord Tyrconnel, which had obtained any prices at all for Savage from such knowing publishers as were then arising; but generally Savage had relied upon subscriptions, which were still common, and, in his case, as a man supposed unfortunate, were given purely as charity. With what astonishment does a literary foreigner of any judgment find a Savage placed amongst the classics of England! and from the scale of his life reasonably he must infer that he is ranked amongst the leaders, whilst the extent in which his works are multiplied would throw him back upon the truth—that he is utterly unknown to his countrymen. These, however, were the delusions of good nature. But what are we to think of Dr. Johnson's abetting that monstrous libel against Lady Macclesfield? She, unhappily, as a woman banished without hope from all good society by her early misconduct as a wife (but, let it not be forgotten, a neglected wife), had nobody to speak a word on her behalf: all evil was believed of one who had violated her marriage vows. But had the affair occurred in our days, the public journals would have righted her. They would have shown the folly of believing a vain, conceited man like Savage and his nurse, with no vouchers whatever, upon a point where they had the deepest interest at stake; whilst on the opposite side, supposing their story true, spoke for them the strongest of all natural instincts—the pleading of the maternal heart, combated by no self-interest whatever. Surely if Lady Macclesfield had not been supported by indignation against an imposture, merely for her own ease and comfort, she would have pensioned Savage, or have procured him some place under Government—not difficult in those days for a person with her connections (however sunk as respected female society) to have obtained for an only son. In the sternness of her resistance to all attempts upon her purse we read her sense of the fraud. And, on the other hand, was the conduct of Savage that of a son? He had no legal claims upon her, consequently no pretence for molesting her in her dwelling-house. And would a real son—a great lubberly fellow, well able to work as a porter or a footman—however wounded at her obstinate rejection, have been likely, in pursuit of no legal rights, to have alarmed her by threatening letters and intrusions, for no purpose but one confessedly of pecuniary extortion? From the very mode of pursuing his claim it is plain that Savage felt it to be a false one. It seems, also, to be forgotten by most readers, that at this day real sons—not denied to be such—are continually banished, nay, ejected forcibly by policemen, from the paternal roof in requital of just such profligate conduct as Savage displayed; so that, grant his improbable story, still he was a disorderly reprobate, who in these days would have been consigned to the treadmill. But the whole was a hoax.

Savage, however, is but a single case, in relation to which Dr. Johnson stood in a special position, that diseased his judgment. But look at Pope's life, at Swift's, at Young's—at all the lives of men contemporary with himself: they are overrun with defamatory stories, or traits of that order which would most have stung them, had they returned to life. But it was an accident most beneficial to Dr. Johnson that nearly all these men left no near relatives behind to call him to account. The public were amused, as they always are by exhibitions of infirmity or folly in one whom otherwise they were compelled to admire; that was a sort of revenge for them to set off against a painful perpetuity of homage. Thus far the libels served only as jests, and, fortunately for Dr. Johnson, there arose no after-reckoning. One period, in fact, of thirty years had intervened between the last of these men and the publication of the Lives; it was amongst the latest works of Dr. Johnson: thus, and because most of them left no descendants, he escaped. Had the ordinary proportion of these men been married, the result would have been different; and whatever might have been thought of any individual case amongst the complaints, most undoubtedly, from the great number to which the Doctor had exposed himself, amongst which many were not of a nature to be evaded by any vouchers whatsoever, a fatal effect would have settled on the Doctor's moral reputation. He would have been passed down to posterity as a dealer in wholesale scandal, who cared nothing for the wounded feelings of relatives. It is a trifle after that to add that he would frequently have been cudgelled.

This public judgment upon Dr. Johnson and these cudgellings would have been too severe a chastisement for the offences, which, after all, argued no heavier delinquency than a levity in examining his chance authorities, and a constitutional credulity. Dr. Johnson's easiness of faith for the supernatural, the grossness of his superstition in relation to such miserable impostures as the Cock Lane ghost, and its scratchings on the wall, flowed from the same source; and his conversation furnishes many proofs that he had no principle of resistance in his mind, no reasonable scepticism, when any disparaging anecdote was told about his nearest friends. Who but he would have believed the monstrous tale: that Garrick, so used to addressing large audiences extempore, so quick and lively in his apprehensions, had absolutely been dismissed from a court of justice as an idiot—as a man incapable of giving the court information even upon a question of his own profession? As to his credulity with respect to the somewhat harmless forgeries of Psalmanazer, and with respect to the villainous imposture of Lander, we imagine that other causes co-operated to those errors beyond mere facility of assenting. In the latter case we fear that jealousy of Milton as a scholar, a feeling from which he never cleansed himself, had been the chief cause of his so readily delivering himself a dupe to allegations not specious, backed by forgeries that were anything but ingenious. Dr. Johnson had a narrow escape on that occasion. Had Dr. Douglas fastened upon him as the collusive abettor of Lander, as the man whose sanction had ever won even a momentary credit for the obscure libeller, and as the one beyond all others of the age whose critical occupation ought most to have secured him against such a delusion, the character of Johnson would have suffered seriously. Luckily, Dr. Douglas spared him; and Johnson, seeing the infamy of the hoax, and the precipice near which he stood, hastened to separate himself from Lander, and to offer such reparation as he could, by dictating that unhappy letter of recantation. Lander must have consented to this step from hopes of patronage; and perhaps the obscure place of slave-driver in the West Indies, in which he died (after recanting his recantation), might be the unsatisfactory bait of his needy ambition. But assuredly Lander could have made out a better case for himself than that which, under his name, the Doctor addressed to the Bishop; it was a dark spot in Dr. Johnson's life. A Scotsman, said he, must be a strange one who would not tell a falsehood in a case where Scotland was concerned; and we fear that any fable of defamation must have been gross indeed which Dr. Johnson would not have countenanced against Milton. His 'Life of Milton,' as it now stands, contains some of the grossest calumnies against that mighty poet which have ever been hazarded; and some of the deepest misrepresentations are coloured, to the unsuspecting reader, by an affectation of merriment. But in his 'heart of hearts' Dr. Johnson detested Milton. Gray, even though, as being little of a meddler with politics, he furnished no handle to the Doctor for wrath so unrelenting, was a subject of deep jealousy from his reputed scholarship. Never did the spite of the Doctor more emblazon itself than in his review of Gray's lyrical compositions; the very affectation of prefacing his review by calling the two chief odes 'the wonderful wonder of wonders' betrays a female spite; and never did the arrogance of Dr. Johnson's nature flame out so conspicuously as in some of the phrases used on this occasion. Perhaps it is an instance of self-inflation absolutely unique where he says, 'My kindness for a man of letters'; this, it seems, caused him to feel pain at seeing Gray descending to what he, the Doctor (as a one-sided opinion of his own), held to be a fantastic foppery. The question we point at is not this supposed foppery—was it such or not? Milton's having cherished that 'foppery' was a sufficient argument for detesting it. What we fix the reader's eye upon is, the unparalleled arrogance of applying to Gray this extreme language of condescending patronage. He really had 'a kindness' for the little man, and was not ashamed, as some people would be, to own it; so that it shocked him more than else it would have done, to see the man disgracing himself in this way.