4 and bold career; as he learned rough lessons in the camp, and imbued himself with the cold sagacity which the diplomatic intrigues he shared both required and taught, he was slowly hoarding that mass of observation, that wonderful intuition into the true spirit of facts, that power of seeing at a glance the improbable, and through its clouds and darkness seizing at once upon the truth, which characterise the fragments of his great history, and elevate, what in other hands would have been but a collection of military bulletins, into so inestimable a manual for the statesman and the civilian. And when we glance over the life of the far greater Roman, we see no less palpably how much the wisdom of the closet was won by the stern nature of those fields of action in which he who had witnessed the reign of a Domitian was cast. When we grow chained to his page by the gloomy intenseness of his colourings-when crime after crime, in all the living blackness of those fearful days, arises before us-when in his grasping apothegms the fierce secrets of kings lie bared before us-when in every sentence we shudder at a record-in every character we mark a portent, yet a mirror of the times, we feel at once how necessary to that force and fidelity must have been the severity and darkness of his experience. Through action, toil, public danger, and public honours, he sought his road to philosophy,* a road beset with rapine and slaughter; every slave that fell graved in his heart a warning, every horror he experienced animated and armed his genius. Saturate with the spirit of his age, his page has made it incarnate for posterity— actual, vivified, consummate, and entire. If, indeed, it be dread and ghastly, it is the dread and ghastliness of an unnatural life. Time has not touched it with a charnel touch. The magician has preserved the race in their size and posture, motionless, breathless; in all else, unchanged as in life. A. It is a great loss to our language that Bolingbroke never fulfilled what seems to have been the intention of his life and the expectation of his friends-viz. the purpose so often alluded to in his Letters, of writing a History. L. Yes; from all he has left us, he seems to have been pre-eminently qualified for the task: his thoughts so just, yet so noble; his penetration into men so keen; his discernment of true virtue so exact! A. He gave, certainly, its loftiest shape to the doctrine of Utility, and is the real father of that doctrine in England.+ L. Returning from these criticisms on historians to the effect which History produces, I cannot but think that its general effect tends rather to harden the heart against mankind. Its experience, so long, so consistent, so unvarying, seems a silent and irresistible accuser of the human species. Men have taken the greatest care to preserve their most unanswerable vilifier. All forms of government, however hostile to each other, are alike in one effect-the general baseness of the governed. What differs the boasted Greece from the contemned Persia?-the former produces some hundred names which the latter It is a great proof of the wisdom the world had taught him, that though he differed with Pliny on all political and public views, the difference never impaired their private friendship. + The Utilitarians have quite overlooked their obligations to Lord Bolingbroke :-they do not seem to be aware with what a life and majesty he transferred their doctrine from morals to politics. cannot equal. True! But what are a few atoms culled from the sea-sands?—what a few great men to the happiness of the herd? Are not the Greek writers, the Greek sages, more than all others, full of contempt for the mass around them?-the fraud, the ingratitude, the violence, the meanness, the misery of their fellow-beings-do not these make the favourite subject of ancient satire and ancient declamation? And even among their great men, how few on whose merits History can at once decide!-how few unsullied, even by the condemnation of their own time. Plutarch says that the good citizens of Athens were the best men the world ever produced; but that her bad citizens were unparalleled for their atrocities, their impiety, their perfidy. Let us look over even the good citizens Plutarch would select, and, judging them by the rules of their age, how much have the charitable still left to forgive! Were I to select a personation of the Genius of Athens, I would choose Themistocles; a great warrior and a wise man, resolute in adversity, accomplished in expedients, consummate in address. Reverse the portrait: he begins his career by the most unbridled excesses; he turns from them, it is said—to what? -to the grossest flattery of the multitude: the people he adulates at first, he continues to rule by deceiving; he has recourse to the tricks. and arts of superstition to serve the designs and frauds of ambition.* He governs professedly as a quack. He thinks first of destroy-. ing his allies, and, baffled in that, contents himself with plundering them. Not naturally covetous, he yet betrays his host (Timocreon, the Rhodian) for money. Vain, as well as rapacious, he lavishes in ostentation what he gains by meanness. Lastly-" linking one: virtue with a thousand crimes"-he completes his own character, and consummates the illustration he affords of the spirit of his country, by preserving to the last (in spite of his hollow promises of aid to the Barbarian, in spite of his resentment) his love to his native citya passion that did not prevent error, nor baseness, nor crime, exerted in her cause-but prevented all hostility against her. The most selfish, the most crafty, the most heartless of men, destroyed himself, rather than injure Greece. 4. Leaving his life a proof that patriotism is a contracted and unphilosophical feeling; it embraces but a segment of morals. Philanthropy is the only consistent species of public love. A patriot may be honest in one thing, yet a knave in all else—a philanthropist sees and seizes the whole of virtue. L. And it is by philanthropy, perhaps, (a modern affection,) that we may yet add a more pleasing supplement to the histories of the past. This hope can alone correct the feeling of despair for human amendment, which history otherwise produces: we can, alas! only counteract the When he was chosen admiral by the Athenians, he put off all affairs public and private, to the day that he was about to embark, in order that he might appear, in having a great deal of business to transact, with a greater dignity and importance (Plutarch). It is quite clear that all the business thus deferred, must have been very badly done, and thus a trick to preserve power was nobler and better in his eyes than a care for the public advantage. As an evidence how little the wisdom of the chiefs had descended to the deliberations of the people, viz.-how little the majority profited by their form of Government-we find that when an Athenian orator argued a certain point too closely with Themistocles -the people stoned him, and the women stoned his wife. So much for free discussion among the ancients. influence of past facts by recurring to the dreams of enthusiasts for the future; by clinging to some one or other of those dreams; and by a hope that, if just, is at least unfounded by any example in gone ages: that by the increase of knowledge, men will approach to that political perfection, which does not depend alone on the triumphs of art, or the advance of sciences-which does not depend alone on palaces, and streets, and temples, and a few sounding and solemn names, but which shall be felt by the common herd, viz. by the majority of the people: felt by them in improved comfort; in enlightened minds; in consistent virtues; in effects; we must add, which no causes have hitherto produced. For why study the mysteries of Legislation and Government? Why ransack the past, and extend our foresight to distant ages? if our skill can only improve, as hitherto it has only improved, the condition of oligarchies; if it can only give the purple and the palace to the few-if it must leave in every state the degraded many to toil, to sweat, to consume the day in a harsh and sterile conflict with circumstance for a bare subsistence; their faculties dormant; their energies stifled in the cradle; strangers to all that ennobles, refines; exalts, if at every effort to rise, they are encountered by a law, and every enterprise darkens with them into a crime; if, when we cast our eyes among the vast plains of life, we see but one universal arena of labour, bounded on all sides by the gibbet, the hulks, the wheel, the prison; all ignorance, prejudice, bloodshed, sin;-if this state is to endure for ever on earth, why struggle for a freedom which a few only can enjoy-for an enlightenment, which can but call forth a few luminous sparks from an atmosphere of gloom: for a political prosperity which props a throne, and gives steeds to a triumphal car, and animates the winged words of eloquence, or the golden tomes of verse, or the lofty speculation of science- and yet leaves these glories and effects but as fractions that weigh not one moment against the incalculable sum of human miseries? Alas! if this be the eternal doom of mortality, let us close our books, let us shut the avenues to our minds and hearts, let us despise benevolence as a vanity, and speculation as a dream. Let us play the Teian with life, think only of the Rose and Vine, and since our most earnest endeavours can effect so little to others, let us not extend our hopes and our enjoyments beyond the small and safe circle of Self! No: man must either believe in the perfectibility of his species, or virtue and the love of others, are but a heated and objectless enthusiasm. A. And this hope, whether false or true, gains ground daily. L. I must own that until it broke upon me, I saw nothing in learning but despondency and gloom. As clouds across the Heaven, darkening the light, and fading one after the other into air, seemed the fleeting shadows which Philosophy had called forth between the Earth and Sun. If, day after day, in my solitary retreat, I pondered over the old aspirations of sages, with the various jargon with which, in pursuit of truth, they have disguised error, I felt that it was not to teach myself to be wise, but to learn to despair of wisdom. What a waste of our power-what a mockery of our schemes-seemed the fabrics they had erected-the Pythagorean unity, and the Heraclitan fire, to which that philosopher of woe, reduced the origin of all things. And the "Homoomeria" and primitive "intelligence" of Anaxagoras; and the affinity and discord of Empedocles, and the atoms of Epicurus, and the bipart and pre-existent soul which was evoked by Plato: was there not something mournful in the wanderings and chimeras of these lofty natures?-fed as they were in caves and starry solitudes, and winged by that intense and august contemplation, which they of the antique world were alone able to endure. And when, by a sounder study, or a more fortunate train of conjecture, the erratic enterprise of their knowledge approached the truth-when Democritus, for a moment, and at intervals, eyes by a glimmering light the true courses of the Heavenly Host-or when Aristippus, amid the roseate and sparkling errors of his creed, yet catches a glimpse of the true doctrine of morals and the causes of human happiness,- -or when the lofty Zeno and the sounder Epicurus, differing in the path, meet at length at the true goal-and then again start forth into delusion, their very approach to truth so momentary and partial, only mocks the more the nature of human wanderings," caput ac fontem ignorant, divinant, ac delirant omnes." Couple then the records of Philosophy with those of History; couple the fallacies of the wise with the sorrow and the sufferings of the herd, and how dark and mournful is our knowledge of the past, and therefore our prospects of the future! And how selfish does this sentiment render our ambition for the present! How vain seem the mighty struggle and small fruit of those around us! Look at this moment at the agitation and ferment of the world-with what pretence can they who believe that the past is the mirror of the future, lash themselves into interest for any cause or principle, save that immediately profitable to self! To them, if deeply and honestly acquainted with history and the progress of knowledge-to them how vain must seem the struggles and aspirations of the crowd! Why do the people imagine a vain thing? Why the hope and the strife of the rejoicing Gaul; or the slow murmur, that foretells irruption through the bright lands of Italy? Why should there be blood spilt in the Vistula? or why should the armed Belgian dispute for governments and Kings? Why agitate ourselves for a name-an ideal good? These orations, and parchments, and meetings, and threats, and prayers-this clamour for "reform,"-how miserable a delusion must it seem to him who believes that the mass of men must for ever be "the hewers of wood and diggers of water!" To them no change raises the level of existence; famine still urges on to labour-want still forbids knowledge. What matters whether this law be passed, or that fleet be launched, or that palace built, their condition is the same; the happiest concurrence of accident and wisdom brings them but a greater certainty of labour. A free state does not redeem them from toil, nor a despotism increase it. So long as the sun rises and sets, so long must their bread be won with travail, and their life "be rounded" with the temptation to crime. It seems, therefore, to me, impossible for a wise and well-learned man to feel sincerely, and without self-interest, for the public good, unless he believe that laws and increased knowledge will at length, however gradually, • Erasmi Colloquia; Hedonius et Spudæus. April.-VOL. XXXI. NO. CXXIV. X devise some method of raising the great multitude to a nearer equality of comfort and intelligence with the few; that human nature is capable of a degree of amelioration that it seems never hitherto to have reached; and that the amelioration will be felt from the surface to the depth of the great social waters, over which the spirit shall move. The Republics of old never effected this object. To expect it, society must be altered as well as legislation. It is for this reason that I feel glad with an ingenious and admirable writer,* that even theory is at work: I am glad that inquiry wanders, even to the fallacies of Owen, or the chimeras of St. Simon. Out of that inquiry good may yet come; and some future Bacon overturn the axioms of an old school, polluted, not redeemed, by every new disciple. To the man who finds it possible to entertain this hope, how different an aspect the world wears! Casting his glance forward, how wondrous a light rests upon the future! the farther he extends his vision, the brighter the light. Animated by a hope more sublime than wishes bounded to earth ever before inspired, he feels armed with the courage to oppose surrounding prejudice, and the warfare of hostile customs. No sectarian advantage, no petty benefit is before him; he sees but the regeneration of mankind. It is with this object that he links his ambition, that he unites his efforts and his name! From the disease, and the famine, and the toil around, his spirit bursts into prophecy, and dwells among future ages; even if in error, he luxuriates through life in the largest benevolence, and dies-if a visionary -the visionary of the grandest dream.t THE LAMENT FOR SHUIL DONALD'S DAUGHTER. The spring shall come to other hearts with breezes and with showers, And he long, long, at even-tide, when sunset rays are gleaming, Desolate, desolate shall sit, and muse with idle dreaming On days when her returning step came quick across the moor. * The Author of Essays on the Publication of Opinion, &c. N. + To be continued. |