out in all their force, clearness, and precision, and not to blend them
into a vague, vapid, nondescript _ideal_ conception, which pretends to
unite, but in reality destroys. Sir Joshua's theory limits nature and
paralyses art. According to him, the middle form or the average of
our various impressions is the source from which all beauty, pleasure,
interest, imagination springs. I contend, on the contrary, that this
very variety is good in itself, nor do I agree with him that the whole
of nature as it exists in fact is stark naught, and that there is
nothing worthy of the contemplation of a wise man but that _ideal
perfection_ which never existed in the world nor even on canvas. There
is something fastidious and sickly in Sir Joshua's system. His code
of taste consists too much of negations, and not enough of positive,
prominent qualities. It accounts for nothing but the beauty of the
common Antique, and hardly for that. The merit of Hogarth, I grant, is
different from that of the Greek statues; but I deny that Hogarth is
to be measured by this standard or by Sir Joshua's middle forms: he
has powers of instruction and amusement that, 'rising from a different
point, naturally move in a different direction,' and completely attain
their end. It would be just as reasonable to condemn a comedy for not
having the pathos of a tragedy or the stateliness of an epic poem. If
Sir Joshua Reynolds's theory were true, Dr. Johnson's _Irene_ would be a
better tragedy than any of Shakespear's.

The reasoning of the _Discourses_ is, I think, then, deficient in the
following particulars:

1. It seems to imply that general effect in a picture is produced by
leaving out the details, whereas the largest masses and the grandest
outline are consistent with the utmost delicacy of finishing in the
parts.

2. It makes no distinction between beauty and grandeur, but refers both
to an _ideal_ or middle form, as the centre of the various forms of
the species, and yet inconsistently attributes the grandeur of Michael
Angelo's style to the superhuman appearance of his prophets and
apostles.

3. It does not at any time make mention of power or magnitude in an
object as a distinct source of the sublime (though this is acknowledged
unintentionally in the case of Michael Angelo, etc.), nor of softness
or symmetry of form as a distinct source of beauty, independently of,
though still in connection with another source arising from what we are
accustomed to expect from each individual species.

4. Sir Joshua's theory does not leave room for character, but rejects it
as an anomaly.

5. It does not point out the source of expression, but considers it
as hostile to beauty; and yet, lastly, he allows that the middle form,
carried to the utmost theoretical extent, neither defined by character,
nor impregnated by passion, would produce nothing but vague, insipid,
unmeaning generality.

In a word, I cannot think that the theory here laid down is clear and
satisfactory, that it is consistent with itself, that it accounts for
the various excellences of art from a few simple principles, or that the
method which Sir Joshua has pursued in treating the subject is, as he
himself expresses it, 'a plain and honest method.' It is, I fear, more
calculated to baffle and perplex the student in his progress than to
give him clear lights as to the object he should have in view, or to
furnish him with strong motives of emulation to attain it.

NOTES to ESSAY XIV

(1) The Fifth Discourse.

(2) These are Sir Joshua's words.

(3) I do not know that; but I do not think the two passions could be
expressed by expressing neither or something between both.

ESSAY XV. ON PARADOX AND COMMON-PLACE

I have been sometimes accused of a fondness for paradoxes, but I cannot
in my own mind plead guilty to the charge. I do not indeed swear by
an opinion because it is old; but neither do I fall in love with every
extravagance at first sight because it is new. I conceive that a
thing may have been repeated a thousand times without being a bit more
reasonable than it was the first time: and I also conceive that an
argument or an observation may be very just, though it may so happen
that it was never stated before: but I do not take it for granted that
every prejudice is ill-founded; nor that every paradox is self-evident,
merely because it contradicts the vulgar opinion. Sheridan once said of
some speech in his acute, sarcastic way, that 'it contained a great deal
both of what was new and what was true: but that unfortunately what was
new was not true, and what was true was not new.' This appears to me
to express the whole sense of the question. I do not see much use in
dwelling on a common-place, however fashionable or well established:
nor am I very ambitious of starting the most specious novelty, unless
I imagine I have reason on my side. Originality implies independence of
opinion; but differs as widely from mere singularity as from the tritest
truism. It consists in seeing and thinking for one's-self: whereas
singularity is only the affectation of saying something to contradict
other people, without having any real opinion of one's own upon the
matter. Mr. Burke was an original, though an extravagant writer: Mr.
Windham was a regular manufacturer of paradoxes.

The greatest number of minds seem utterly incapable of fixing on any
conclusion, except from the pressure of custom and authority: opposed to
these there is another class less numerous but pretty formidable, who
in all their opinions are equally under the influence of novelty and
restless vanity. The prejudices of the one are counterbalanced by the
paradoxes of the other; and folly, 'putting in one scale a weight of
ignorance, in that of pride,' might be said to 'smile delighted with the
eternal poise.' A sincere and manly spirit of inquiry is neither blinded
by example nor dazzled by sudden flashes of light. Nature is always the
same, the storehouse of lasting truth, and teeming with inexhaustible
variety; and he who looks at her with steady and well-practised eyes
will find enough to employ all his sagacity, whether it has or has not
been seen by others before him. Strange as it may seem, to learn what an
object is, the true philosopher looks at the object itself, instead of
turning to others to know what they think or say or have heard of it,
or instead of consulting the dictates of his vanity, petulance, and
ingenuity to see what can be said against their opinion, and to prove
himself wiser than all the rest of the world. For want of this the real
powers and resources of the mind are lost and dissipated in a conflict
of opinions and passions, of obstinacy against levity, of bigotry
against self-conceit, of notorious abuses against rash innovations, of
dull, plodding, old-fashioned stupidity against new-fangled folly,
of worldly interest against headstrong egotism, of the incorrigible
prejudices of the old and the unmanageable humours of the young; while
truth lies in the middle, and is overlooked by both parties. Or as
Luther complained long ago, 'human reason is like a drunken man
on horseback: set it up on one side, and it tumbles over on the
other.'--With one sort, example, authority, fashion, ease, interest,
rule all: with the other, singularity, the love of distinction, mere
whim, the throwing off all restraint and showing an heroic disregard
of consequences, an impatient and unsettled turn of mind, the want
of sudden and strong excitement, of some new play-thing for the
imagination, are equally 'lords of the ascendant,' and are at every step
getting the start of reason, truth, nature, common sense, and feeling.
With one party, whatever is, is right: with their antagonists, whatever
is, is wrong. These swallow every antiquated absurdity: those catch
at every new, unfledged project--and are alike enchanted with
the velocipedes or the French Revolution. One set, wrapped up in
impenetrable forms and technical traditions, are deaf to everything that
has not been dinned in their ears, and in those of their forefathers,
from time immemorial: their hearing is _thick_ with the same old saws,
the same unmeaning form of words, everlastingly repeated: the others
pique themselves on a jargon of their own, a Babylonish dialect, crude,
unconcocted, harsh, discordant, to which it is impossible for any one
else to attach either meaning or respect. These last turn away at
the mention of all usages, creeds, institutions of more than a day's
standing as a mass of bigotry, superstition, and barbarous ignorance,
whose leaden touch would petrify and benumb their quick, mercurial,
'apprehensive, forgetive' faculties. The opinion of to-day supersedes
that of yesterday: that of to-morrow supersedes, by anticipation, that
of to-day. The wisdom of the ancients, the doctrines of the learned, the
laws of nations, the common sentiments of morality, are to them like a
bundle of old almanacs. As the modern politician always asks for this
day's paper, the modern sciolist always inquires after the latest
paradox. With him instinct is a dotard, nature a changeling, and common
sense a discarded by-word. As with the man of the world, what everybody
says must be true, the citizen of the world has quite a different notion
of the matter. With the one, the majority; 'the powers that be' have
always been in the right in all ages and places, though they have been
cutting one another's throats and turning the world upside down with
their quarrels and disputes from the beginning of time: with the other,
what any two people have ever agreed in is an error on the face of
it. The credulous bigot shudders at the idea of altering anything in
'time-hallowed' institutions; and under this cant phrase can bring
himself to tolerate any knavery or any folly, the Inquisition, Holy Oil,
the Right Divine, etc.;--the more refined sceptic will laugh in your
face at the idea of retaining anything which has the damning stamp of
custom upon it, and is for abating all former precedents, 'all trivial,
fond records,' the whole frame and fabric of society as a nuisance in
the lump. Is not this a pair of wiseacres well matched? The one stickles
through thick and thin for his own religion and government: the other
scouts all religions and all governments with a smile of ineffable
disdain. The one will not move for any consideration out of the broad
and beaten path: the other is continually turning off at right
angles, and losing himself in the labyrinths of his own ignorance and
presumption. The one will not go along with any party: the other
always joins the strongest side. The one will not conform to any common
practice: the other will subscribe to any thriving system. The one is
the slave of habit: the other is the sport of caprice. The first is like
a man obstinately bed-rid: the last is troubled with St. Vitus's dance.
He cannot stand still, he cannot rest upon any conclusion. 'He never
is--but always to be _right.'_

The author of the Prometheus Unbound (to take an individual instance
of the last character) has a fire in his eye, a fever in his blood, a
maggot in his brain, a hectic flutter in his speech, which mark out the
philosophic fanatic. He is sanguine-complexioned and shrill-voiced. As
is often observable in the case of religious enthusiasts, there is a
slenderness of constitutional stamina, which renders the flesh no match
for the spirit. His bending, flexible form appears to take no strong
hold of things, does not grapple with the world about him, but slides
from it like a river--

 And in its liquid texture mortal wound
 Receives no more than can the fluid air.

The shock of accident, the weight of authority make no impression on his
opinions, which retire like a feather, or rise from the encounter
unhurt through their own buoyancy. He is clogged by no dull system of
realities, no earth-bound feelings, no rooted prejudices, by nothing
that belongs to the mighty trunk and hard husk of nature and habit, but
is drawn up by irresistible levity to the regions of mere speculation
and fancy, to the sphere of air and fire, where his delighted spirit
floats in 'seas of pearl and clouds of amber.' There is no _caput
mortuum_ of worn-out, threadbare experience to serve as ballast to his
mind; it is all volatile intellectual salt of tartar, that refuses
to combine its evanescent, inflammable essence with anything solid or
anything lasting. Bubbles are to him the only realities:--touch them,
and they vanish. Curiosity is the only proper category of his mind,
and though a man in knowledge, he is a child in feeling. Hence he puts
everything into a metaphysical crucible to judge of it himself and
exhibit it to others as a subject of interesting experiment, without
first making it over to the ordeal of his common sense or trying it on
his heart. This faculty of speculating at random on all questions may
in its overgrown and uninformed state do much mischief without intending
it, like an overgrown child with the power of a man. Mr. Shelley has
been accused of vanity--I think he is chargeable with extreme levity;
but this levity is so great that I do not believe he is sensible of its
consequences. He strives to overturn all established creeds and systems;
but this is in him an effect of constitution. He runs before the most
extravagant opinions; but this is because he is held back by none of
the merely mechanical checks of sympathy and habit. He tampers with all
sorts of obnoxious subjects; but it is less because he is gratified
with the rankness of the taint than captivated with the intellectual
phosphoric light they emit. It would seem that he wished not so much
to convince or inform as to shock the public by the tenor of his
productions; but I suspect he is more intent upon startling himself with
his electrical experiments in morals and philosophy; and though they
may scorch other people, they are to him harmless amusements, the
coruscations of an Aurora Borealis, that 'play round the head, but do
not reach the heart.' Still I could wish that he would put a stop to
the incessant, alarming whirl of his voltaic battery. With his zeal, his
talent, and his fancy, he would do more good and less harm if he were
to give, up his wilder theories, and if he took less pleasure in feeling
his heart flutter in unison with the panic-struck apprehensions of his
readers. Persons of this class, instead of consolidating useful and
acknowledged truths, and thus advancing the cause of science and virtue,
are never easy but in raising doubtful and disagreeable questions, which
bring the former into disgrace and discredit. They are not contented to
lead the minds of men to an eminence overlooking the prospect of social
amelioration, unless, by forcing them up slippery paths and to the
utmost verge of possibility, they can dash them down the precipice the
instant they reach the promised Pisgah. They think it nothing to hang up
a beacon to guide or warn, if they do not at the same time frighten the
community like a comet. They do not mind making their principles odious,
provided they can make themselves notorious. To win over the public
opinion by fair means is to them an insipid, common-place mode of
popularity: they would either force it by harsh methods, or seduce it
by intoxicating potions. Egotism, petulance, licentiousness, levity of
principle (whatever be the source) is a bad thing in any one, and most
of all in a philosophical reformer. Their humanity, their wisdom,
is always 'at the horizon.' Anything new, anything remote, anything
questionable, comes to them in a shape that is sure of a cordial
welcome--a welcome cordial in proportion as the object is new, as it
is apparently impracticable, as it is a doubt whether it is at all
desirable. Just after the final failure, the completion of the last act
of the French Revolution, when the legitimate wits were crying out, 'The
farce is over, now let us go to supper,' these provoking reasoners got
up a lively hypothesis about introducing the domestic government of the
Nayrs into this country as a feasible set-off against the success of the
Borough-mongers. The practical is with them always the antipodes of the
ideal; and like other visionaries of a different stamp, they date the
Millennium or New Order of Things from the Restoration of the Bourbons.
'Fine words butter no parsnips,' says the proverb. 'While you are
talking of marrying, I am thinking of hanging,' says Captain Macheath.
Of all people the most tormenting are those who bid you hope in the
midst of despair, who, by never caring about anything but their own
sanguine, hair-brained Utopian schemes, have at no time any particular
cause for embarrassment and despondency because they have never the
least chance of success, and who by including whatever does not hit
their idle fancy, kings, priests, religion, government, public abuses or
private morals, in the same sweeping clause of ban and anathema, do all
they can to combine all parties in a common cause against them, and to
prevent every one else from advancing one step farther in the career of
practical improvement than they do in that of imaginary and unattainable
perfection.

Besides, all this untoward heat and precocity often argues rottenness
and a falling-off. I myself remember several instances of this sort of
unrestrained license of opinion and violent effervescence of sentiment
in the first period of the French Revolution. Extremes meet: and the
most furious anarchists have since become the most barefaced apostates.
Among the foremost of these I might mention the present poet-laureate
and some of his friends. The prose-writers on that side of the
question--Mr. Godwin, Mr. Bentham, etc.--have not turned round in this
extraordinary manner: they seem to have felt their ground (however
mistaken in some points), and have in general adhered to their first
principles. But 'poets (as it has been said) have _such seething
brains,_ that they are disposed to meddle with everything, and mar all.
They make bad philosophers and worse politicians.(1) They live, for the
most part, in an ideal world of their own; and it would perhaps be
as well if they were confined to it. Their flights and fancies are
delightful to themselves and to everybody else: but they make strange
work with matter of fact; and if they were allowed to act in public
affairs, would soon turn the world the wrong side out. They indulge only
their own flattering dreams or superstitious prejudices, and make idols
or bugbears of whatever they please, caring as little for history or
particular facts as for general reasoning. They are dangerous leaders
and treacherous followers. Their inordinate vanity runs them into all
sorts of extravagances; and their habitual effeminacy gets them out of
them at any price. Always pampering their own appetite for excitement,
and wishing to astonish others, their whole aim is to produce a dramatic
effect, one way or other--to shock or delight the observers; and they
are apparently as indifferent to the consequences of what they write as
if the world were merely a stage for them to play their fantastic
tricks on, and to make their admirers weep. Not less romantic in their
servility than their independence, and equally importunate candidates
for fame or infamy, they require only to be distinguished, and are
not scrupulous as to the means of distinction. Jacobins or
Anti-Jacobins--outrageous advocates for anarchy and licentiousness, or
flaming apostles of political persecution--always violent and vulgar in
their opinions, they oscillate, with a giddy and sickening motion,
from one absurdity to another, and expiate the follies of youth by the
heartless vices of advancing age. None so ready as they to carry every
paradox to its most revolting and ridiculous excess--none so sure
to caricature, in their own persons, every feature of the prevailing
philosophy! In their days of blissful innovation, indeed, the
philosophers crept at their heels like hounds, while they darted on
their distant quarry like hawks; stooping always to the lowest game;
eagerly snuffing up the most tainted and rankest scents; feeding their
vanity with a notion of the strength of their digestion of poisons, and
most ostentatiously avowing whatever would most effectually startle
the prejudices of others.(2) Preposterously seeking for the stimulus
of novelty in abstract truth, and the eclat of theatrical exhibition in
pure reason, it is no wonder that these persons at last became disgusted
with their own pursuits, and that, in consequence of the violence of the
change, the most inveterate prejudices and uncharitable sentiments have
rushed in to fill up the void produced by the previous annihilation of
common sense, wisdom, and humanity!'

I have so far been a little hard on poets and reformers. Lest I should
be thought to have taken a particular spite to them, I will try to make
them the _amende honorable_ by turning to a passage in the writings of
one who neither is nor ever pretended to be a poet or a reformer, but
the antithesis of both, an accomplished man of the world, a courtier,
and a wit, and who has endeavoured to move the previous question on all
schemes of fanciful improvement, and all plans of practical reform, by
the following declaration. It is in itself a finished _common-place;_
and may serve as a test whether that sort of smooth, verbal reasoning
which passes current because it excites no one idea in the mind, is much
freer from inherent absurdity than the wildest paradox.

'My lot,' says Mr. Canning in the conclusion of his Liverpool speech,
'is cast under the British Monarchy. Under that I have lived; under that
I have seen my country flourish;(3) under that I have seen it enjoy as
great a share of prosperity, of happiness, and of glory as I believe any
modification of human society to be capable of bestowing; and I am not
prepared to sacrifice or to hazard the fruit of centuries of experience,
of centuries of struggles, and of more than one century of liberty,
as perfect as ever blessed any country upon the earth, for visionary
schemes of ideal perfectibility, for doubtful experiments even of
possible improvement.'(4)

Such is Mr. Canning's common-place; and in giving the following answer
to it, I do not think I can be accused of falling into that extravagant
and unmitigated strain of paradoxical reasoning with which I have
already found so much fault.

The passage, then, which the gentleman here throws down as an effectual
bar to all change, to all innovation, to all improvement, contains at
every step a refutation of his favourite creed. He is not 'prepared
to sacrifice or to hazard the fruit of centuries of experience, of
centuries of struggles, and of one century of liberty, for visionary
schemes of ideal perfectibility.' So here are centuries of experience
and centuries of struggles to arrive at one century of liberty; and
yet, according to Mr. Canning's general advice, we are never to make any
experiments or to engage in any struggles either with a view to future
improvement, or to recover benefits which we have lost. Man (they repeat
in our cars, line upon line, precept upon precept) is always to turn his
back upon the future, and his face to the past. He is to believe that
nothing is possible or desirable but what he finds already established
to his hands in time-worn institutions or inveterate abuses. His unde
to be made into a political automaton, a go-cart of superstition and
prejudice, never stirring hand or foot but as he is pulled by the
wires and strings of the state-conjurers, the legitimate managers and
proprietors of the show. His powers of will, of thought, and action
are to be paralysed in him, and he is to be told and to believe that
whatever is, must be. Perhaps Mr. Canning will say that men were to make
experiments and to resolve upon struggles formerly, but that now they
are to surrender their understandings and their rights into his keeping.
But at what period of the world was the system of political wisdom
_stereotyped,_ like Mr. Cobbett's _Gold against Paper,_ so as to admit
of no farther alterations or improvements, or correction of errors
of the press? When did the experience of mankind become stationary or
retrograde, so that we must act from the obsolete inferences of past
periods, not from the living impulse of existing circumstances, and the
consolidated force of the knowledge and reflection of ages up to the
present instant, naturally projecting us forward into the future, and
not driving us back upon the past? Did Mr. Canning never hear, did he
never think, of Lord Bacon's axiom, 'That those times are the ancient
times in which we live, and not those which, counting backwards from
ourselves, _ordine retrogrado,_ we call ancient'? The latest periods
must necessarily have the advantage of the sum-total of the experience
that has gone before them, and of the sum-total of human reason exerted
upon that experience, or upon the solid foundation of nature and
history, moving on in its majestic course, not fluttering in the empty
air of fanciful speculation, nor leaving a gap of centuries between us
and the long-mouldered grounds on which we are to think and act. Mr.
Canning cannot plead with Mr. Burke that no discoveries, no improvements
have been made in political science and institutions; for he says we
have arrived through centuries of experience and of struggles at one
century of liberty. Is the world, then, at a stand? Mr. Canning knows
well enough that it is in ceaseless progress and everlasting change, but
he would have it to be the change from liberty to slavery, the progress
of corruption, not of regeneration and reform. Why, no longer ago than
the present year, the two epochs of November and January last presented
(he tells us in this very speech) as great a contrast in the state of
the country as any two periods of its history the most opposite or most
remote. Well then, are our experience and our struggles at an end?
No, he says, 'the crisis is at hand for every man to take part for or
against the institutions of the British Monarchy.' His part is taken:
'but of this be sure, to do aught good will never be his task!' He will
guard carefully against all possible improvements, and maintain all
possible abuses sacred, impassive, immortal. He will not give up the
fruit of centuries of experience, of struggles, and of one century
at least of liberty, since the Revolution of 1688, for any doubtful
experiments whatever. We are arrived at the end of our experience, our
struggles, and our liberty--and are to anchor through time and eternity
in the harbour of passive obedience and non-resistance. We (the
people of England) will tell Mr. Canning frankly what we think of his
magnanimous and ulterior resolution. It is our own; and it has been the
resolution of mankind in all ages of the world. No people, no age,
ever threw away the fruits of past wisdom, or the enjoyment of present
blessings, for visionary schemes of ideal perfection. It is the
knowledge of the past, the actual infliction of the present, that has
produced all changes, all innovations, and all improvements--not (as is
pretended) the chimerical anticipation of possible advantages, but the
intolerable pressure of long-established, notorious, aggravated, and
growing abuses. It was the experience of the enormous and disgusting
abuses and corruptions of the Papal power that produced the Reformation.
It was the experience of the vexations and oppressions of the feudal
system that produced its abolition after centuries of sufferings and
of struggles. It was the experience of the caprice and tyranny of the
Monarch that extorted _Magna Charta_ at Runnymede. It was the experience
of the arbitrary and insolent abuse of the prerogative in the reigns of
the Tudors and the first Stuarts that produced the resistance to it in
the reign of Charles I. and the Grand Rebellion. It was the experience
of the incorrigible attachment of the same Stuarts to Popery and
Slavery, with their many acts of cruelty, treachery, and bigotry, that
produced the Revolution, and set the House of Brunswick on the Throne.
It was the conviction of the incurable nature of the abuse, increasing
with time and patience, and overcoming the obstinate attachment to old
habits and prejudices,--an attachment not to be rooted out by fancy
or theory, but only by repeated, lasting, and incontrovertible
proofs,--that has abated every nuisance that ever was abated, and
introduced every innovation and every example of revolution and reform.
It was the experience of the abuses, licentiousness, and innumerable
oppressions of the old Government in France that produced the French
Revolution. It was the experience of the determination of the British
Ministry to harass, insult, and plunder them, that produced the
Revolution of the United States. Away then with this miserable cant
against fanciful theories, and appeal to acknowledged experience! Men
never act against their prejudices but from the spur of their feelings,
the necessity of their situations--their theories are adapted to their
practical convictions and their varying circumstances. Nature has
ordered it so, and Mr. Canning, by showing off his rhetorical paces, by
his 'ambling and lisping and nicknaming God's creatures,' cannot invert
that order, efface the history of the past, or arrest the progress of
the future.--Public opinion is the result of public events and public
feelings; and government must be moulded by that opinion, or maintain
itself in opposition to it by the sword. Mr. Canning indeed will not
consent that the social machine should in any case receive a different
direction from what it has had, 'lest it should be hurried over the
precipice and dashed to pieces.' These warnings of national ruin and
terrific accounts of political precipices put one in mind of Edgar's
exaggerations to Gloster; they make one's hair stand on end in the
perusal but the poor old man, like poor old England, could fall no lower
than he was. Mr. Montgomery, the ingenious and amiable poet, after
he had been shut up in solitary confinement for a year and a half for
printing the Duke of Richmond's Letter on Reform, when he first walked
out into the narrow path of the adjoining field, was seized with an
apprehension that he should fall over it, as if he had trod on the brink
of an abrupt declivity. The author of the loyal Speech at the Liverpool
Dinner has been so long kept in the solitary confinement of his
prejudices, and the dark cells of his interest and vanity, that he is
afraid of being dashed to pieces if he makes a single false step, to the
right or the left, from his dangerous and crooked policy. As to himself,
his ears are no doubt closed to any advice that might here be offered
him; and as to his country, he seems bent on its destruction. If,
however, an example of the futility of all his projects and all his
reasonings on a broader scale, 'to warn and scare, be wanting,' let him
look at Spain, and take leisure to recover from his incredulity and
his surprise. Spain, as Ferdinand, as the Monarchy, has fallen from its
pernicious height, never to rise again: Spain, as Spain, as the Spanish
people, has risen from the tomb of liberty, never (it is to be hoped) to
sink again under the yoke of the bigot and the oppressor!

NOTES to ESSAY XV

(1) As for politics, I think poets are _tories_ by nature, supposing
them to be by nature poets. The love of an individual person or family,
that has worn a crown for many successions, is an inclination greatly
adapted to the fanciful tribe. On the other hand, mathematicians,
abstract reasoners of no manner of attachment to persons, at least
to the visible part of them, but prodigiously devoted to the ideas
of virtue, liberty, and so forth, are generally _whigs._ It happens
agreeably enough to this maxim, that the whigs are friends to that wise,
plodding, unpoetical people, the Dutch.'--_Shenstone's Letters,_ p. 105.

(2) To give the modern reader _un petit apercu_ of the tone of literary
conversation about five or six and twenty years ago, I remember being
present in a large party composed of men, women, and children, in which
two persons of remarkable candour and ingenuity were labouring (as hard
as if they had been paid for it) to prove that all prayer was a mode of
dictating to the Almighty, and an arrogant assumption of superiority. A
gentleman present said, with great simplicity and _naivete,_ that there
was one prayer which did not strike him as coming exactly under
this description, and being asked what that was made answer, 'The
Samaritan's--"Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner!"' This appeal by no
means settled the sceptical dogmatism of the two disputants, and soon
after the proposer of the objection went away; on which one of them
observed with great marks of satisfaction and triumph--'I am afraid we
have shocked that gentleman's prejudices.' This did not appear to me at
that time quite the thing and this happened in the year 1794.--Twice has
the iron entered my soul. Twice have the dastard, vaunting, venal Crew
gone over it: once as they went forth, conquering and to conquer,
with reason by their side, glittering like a falchion, trampling on
prejudices and marching fearlessly on in the work of regeneration;
once again when they returned with retrograde steps, like Cacus's oxen
dragged backward by the heels, to the den of Legitimacy, 'rout on rout,
confusion worse confounded,' with places and pensions and the _Quarterly
Review_ dangling from their pockets, and shouting, 'Deliverance for
mankind,' for 'the worst, the second fall of man.' Yet I have endured
all this marching and countermarching of poets, philosophers, and
politicians over my head as well as I could, like 'the camomile that
thrives, the more 'tis trod upon.' By Heavens, I think, I'll endure it
no longer!

(3) _Troja fuit._

(4) _Mr. Canning's Speech at the Liverpool Dinner, given in celebration
of his Re-election,_ March 18, 1820. Fourth edition, revised and
corrected.

ESSAY XVI. ON VULGARITY AND AFFECTATION

Few subjects are more nearly allied than these two--vulgarity and
affectation. It may be said of them truly that 'thin partitions do their
bounds divide.' There cannot be a surer proof of a low origin or of an
innate meanness of disposition than to be always talking and thinking
of being genteel. One must feel a strong tendency to that which one is
always trying to avoid: whenever we pretend, on all occasions, a mighty
contempt for anything, it is a pretty clear sign that we feel ourselves
very nearly on a level with it. Of the two classes of people, I hardly
know which is to be regarded with most distaste, the vulgar aping the
genteel, or the genteel constantly sneering at and endeavouring to
distinguish themselves from the vulgar. These two sets of persons are
always thinking of one another; the lower of the higher with envy, the
more fortunate of their less happy neighbours with contempt. They
are habitually placed in opposition to each other; jostle in their
pretensions at every turn; and the same objects and train of thought
(only reversed by the relative situation of either party) occupy
their whole time and attention. The one are straining every nerve, and
outraging common sense, to be thought genteel; the others have no other
object or idea in their heads than not to be thought vulgar. This is
but poor spite; a very pitiful style of ambition. To be merely not that
which one heartily despises is a very humble claim to superiority: to
despise what one really is, is still worse. Most of the characters in
Miss Burney's novels--the Branghtons, the Smiths, the Dubsters, the
Cecilias, the Delvilles, etc.--are well met in this respect, and much of
a piece: the one half are trying not to be taken for themselves, and the
other half not to be taken for the first. They neither of them have any
pretensions of their own, or real standard of worth. 'A feather will
turn the scale of their avoirdupois'; though the fair authoress was
not aware of the metaphysical identity of her principal and subordinate
characters. Affectation is the master-key to both.

Gentility is only a more select and artificial kind of vulgarity. It
cannot exist but by a sort of borrowed distinction. It plumes itself up
and revels in the homely pretensions of the mass of mankind. It judges
of the worth of everything by name, fashion, and opinion; and hence,
from the conscious absence of real qualities or sincere satisfaction
in itself, it builds its supercilious and fantastic conceit on the
wretchedness and wants of others. Violent antipathies are always
suspicious, and betray a secret affinity. The difference between the
'Great Vulgar and the Small' is mostly in outward circumstances. The
coxcomb criticises the dress of the clown, as the pedant cavils at
the bad grammar of the illiterate, or the prude is shocked at the
backslidings of her frail acquaintance. Those who have the fewest
resources in themselves naturally seek the food of their self-love
elsewhere. The most ignorant people find most to laugh at in strangers:
scandal and satire prevail most in country-places; and a propensity to
ridicule every the slightest or most palpable deviation from what
we happen to approve, ceases with the progress of common sense and
decency.(1) True worth does not exult in the faults and deficiencies
of others; as true refinement turns away from grossness and deformity,
instead of being tempted to indulge in an unmanly triumph over it.
Raphael would not faint away at the daubing of a signpost, nor Homer
hold his head the higher for being in the company of a Grub Street bard.
Real power, real excellence, does not seek for a foil in inferiority;
nor fear contamination from coming in contact with that which is coarse
and homely. It reposes on itself, and is equally free from spleen and
affectation. But the spirit of gentility is the mere essence of spleen
and affectation; of affected delight in its own would-be qualifications,
and of ineffable disdain poured out upon the involuntary blunders
or accidental disadvantages of those whom it chooses to treat as its
inferiors. Thus a fashionable Miss titters till she is ready to burst
her sides at the uncouth shape of a bonnet or the abrupt drop of a
curtsey (such as Jeanie Deans would make) in a country-girl who comes
to be hired by her Mamma as a servant; yet to show how little foundation
there is for this hysterical expression of her extreme good opinion of
herself and contempt for the untutored rustic, she would herself the
next day be delighted with the very same shaped bonnet if brought her by
a French milliner and told it was all the fashion, and in a week's time
will become quite familiar with the maid, and chatter with her (upon
equal terms) about caps and ribbons and lace by the hour together. There
is no difference between them but that of situation in the kitchen or
in the parlour: let circumstances bring them together, and they fit
like hand and glove. It is like mistress, like maid. Their talk, their
thoughts, their dreams, their likings and dislikes are the same. The
mistress's head runs continually on dress and finery, so does the
maid's: the young lady longs to ride in a coach and six, so does the
maid, if she could; Miss forms a _beau-ideal_ of a lover with black eyes
and rosy cheeks, which does not differ from that of her attendant; both
like a smart man, the one the footman and the other his master, for the
same reason; both like handsome furniture and fine houses; both apply
the terms shocking and disagreeable to the same things and persons; both
have a great notion of balls, plays, treats, song-books, and love-tales;
both like a wedding or a christening, and both would give their little
fingers to see a coronation--with this difference, that the one has a
chance of getting a seat at it, and the other is dying with envy that
she has not. Indeed, this last is a ceremony that delights equally the
greatest monarch and the meanest of his subjects--the vilest of the
rabble. Yet this which is the height of gentility and consummation of
external distinction and splendour, is, I should say, a vulgar ceremony.
For what degree of refinement, of capacity, of virtue is required in
the individual who is so distinguished, or is necessary to his enjoying
this idle and imposing parade of his person? Is he delighted with the
stage-coach and gilded panels? So is the poorest wretch that gazes at
it. Is he struck with the spirit, the beauty, and symmetry of the eight
cream-coloured horses? There is not one of the immense multitude who
flock to see the sight from town or country, St. Giles's or Whitechapel,
young or old, rich or poor, gentle or simple, who does not agree to
admire the same object. Is he delighted with the yeomen of the guard,
the military escort, the groups of ladies, the badges of sovereign
power, the kingly crown, the marshal's truncheon and the judge's robe,
the array that precedes and follows him, the crowded streets, the
windows hung with eager looks? So are the mob, for they 'have eyes and
see them!' There is no one faculty of mind or body, natural or acquired,
essential to the principal figure in this procession more than is common
to the meanest and most despised attendant on it. A waxwork figure would
answer the same purpose: a Lord Mayor of London has as much tinsel to be
proud of. I would rather have a king do something that no one else has
the power or magnanimity to do, or say something that no one else has
the wisdom to say, or look more handsome, more thoughtful, or benign
than any one else in his dominions. But I see nothing to raise one's
idea of him in his being made a show of: if the pageant would do as well
without the man, the man would do as well without the pageant! Kings
have been declared to be 'lovers of low company'; and this maxim,
besides the reason sometimes assigned for it, viz. that they meet with
less opposition to their wills from such persons, will I suspect be
found to turn at last on the consideration I am here stating, that they
also meet with more sympathy in their tastes. The most ignorant and
thoughtless have the greatest admiration of the baubles, the outward
symbols of pomp and power, the sound and show, which are the habitual
delight and mighty prerogative of kings. The stupidest slave worships
the gaudiest tyrant. The same gross motives appeal to the same gross
capacities, flatter the pride of the superior and excite the servility
of the dependant; whereas a higher reach of moral and intellectual
refinement might seek in vain for higher proofs of internal worth and
inherent majesty in the object of its idolatry, and not finding the
divinity lodged within, the unreasonable expectation raised would
probably end in mortification on both sides!--There is little to
distinguish a king from his subjects but the rabble's shout--if he loses
that and is reduced to the forlorn hope of gaining the suffrages of the
wise and good, he is of all men the most miserable.--But enough of this.

'I like it,' says Miss Branghton(2) in _Evelina_ (meaning the opera),
'because it is not vulgar.' That is, she likes it, not because there
is anything to like in it, but because other people are prevented from
liking or knowing anything about it. Janus Weathercock, Esq., laugheth
to scorn and spitefully entreateth and hugely condemneth my dramatic
criticisms in the _London,_ for a like exquisite reason. I must
therefore make an example of him _in terrorem_ to all such hypercritics.
He finds fault with me and calls my taste vulgar, because I go to
Sadler's Wells ('a place he has heard of'--O Lord, sir!)--because
I notice the Miss Dennetts, 'great favourites with the Whitechapel
orders'--praise Miss Valancy, 'a bouncing Columbine at Ashley's and them
there places, as his barber informs him' (has he no way of establishing
himself in his own good opinion but by triumphing over his barber's bad
English?)--and finally, because I recognised the existence of the Coburg
and the Surrey theatres, at the names of which he cries 'Faugh' with
great significance, as if he had some personal disgust at them, and yet
he would be supposed never to have entered them. It is not his cue as a
well-bred critic. _C'est beau ca._ Now this appears to me a very crude,
unmeaning, indiscriminate, wholesale, and vulgar way of thinking.
It is prejudicing things in the lump, by names and places and classes,
instead of judging of them by what they are in themselves, by their real
qualities and shades of distinction. There is no selection, truth, or
delicacy in such a mode of proceeding. It is affecting ignorance, and
making it a title to wisdom. It is a vapid assumption of superiority.
It is exceeding impertinence. It is rank coxcombry. It is nothing in the
world else. To condemn because the multitude admire is as essentially
vulgar as to admire because they admire. There is no exercise of taste
or judgment in either case: both are equally repugnant to good sense,
and of the two I should prefer the good-natured side. I would as soon
agree with my barber as differ from him; and why should I make a point
of reversing the sentence of the Whitechapel orders? Or how can it
affect my opinion of the merits of an actor at the Coburg or the Surrey
theatres, that these theatres are in or out of the Bills of Mortality?
This is an easy, short-hand way of judging, as gross as it is
mechanical. It is not a difficult matter to settle questions of taste
by consulting the map of London, or to prove your liberality by
geographical distinctions. Janus jumbles things together strangely. If
he had seen Mr. Kean in a provincial theatre, at Exeter or Taunton, he
would have thought it vulgar to admire him; but when he had been stamped
in London, Janus would no doubt show his discernment and the subtlety
of his tact for the display of character and passion by not being behind
the fashion. The Miss Dennetts are 'little unformed girls,' for no other
reason than because they danced at one of the minor theatres: let them
but come out on the opera boards, and let the beauty and fashion of the
season greet them with a fairy shower of delighted applause, and they
would outshine Milanie 'with the foot of fire.' His gorge rises at the
mention of a certain quarter of the town: whatever passes current in
another, he 'swallows total grist unsifted, husks and all.' This is not
taste, but folly. At this rate, the hackney-coachman who drives him, or
his horse Contributor whom he has introduced as a select personage to
the vulgar reader, knows as much of the matter as he does.--In a word,
the answer to all this in the first instance is to say what vulgarity
is. Now its essence, I imagine, consists in taking manners, actions,
words, opinions on trust from others, without examining one's own
feelings or weighing the merits of the case. It is coarseness or
shallowness of taste arising from want of individual refinement,
together with the confidence and presumption inspired by example and
numbers. It may be defined to be a prostitution of the mind or body to
ape the more or less obvious defects of others, because by so doing
we shall secure the suffrages of those we associate with. To affect
a gesture, an opinion, a phrase, because it is the rage with a large
number of persons, or to hold it in abhorrence because another set
of persons very little, if at all, better informed cry it down to
distinguish themselves from the former, is in either case equal
vulgarity and absurdity. A thing is not vulgar merely because it is
common. 'Tis common to breathe, to see, to feel, to live. Nothing is
vulgar that is natural, spontaneous, unavoidable. Grossness is not
vulgarity, ignorance is not vulgarity, awkwardness is not vulgarity;
but all these become vulgar when they are affected and shown off on the
authority of others, or to fall in with _the fashion_ or the company we
keep. Caliban is coarse enough, but surely he is not vulgar. We might as
well spurn the clod under our feet and call it vulgar. Cobbett is coarse
enough, but he is not vulgar. He does not belong to the herd. Nothing
real, nothing original, can be vulgar; but I should think an imitator
of Cobbett a vulgar man. Emery's Yorkshireman is vulgar, because he is a
Yorkshireman. It is the cant and gibberish, the cunning and low life
of a particular district; it has 'a stamp exclusive and provincial.' He
might 'gabble most brutishly' and yet not fall under the letter of the
definition; but 'his speech bewrayeth him,' his dialect (like the jargon
of a Bond Street lounger) is the damning circumstance. If he were a mere
blockhead, it would not signify; but he thinks himself a _knowing hand,_
according to the notions and practices of those with whom he was brought
up, and which he thinks _the go_ everywhere. In a word, this character
is not the offspring of untutored nature but of bad habits; it is made
up of ignorance and conceit. It has a mixture of _slang_ in it. All
slang phrases are for the same reason vulgar; but there is nothing
vulgar in the common English idiom. Simplicity is not vulgarity; but the
looking to affectation of any sort for distinction is. A cockney is a
vulgar character, whose imagination cannot wander beyond the suburbs
of the metropolis; so is a fellow who is always thinking of the High
Street, Edinburgh. We want a name for this last character. An opinion is
vulgar that is stewed in the rank breath of the rabble; nor is it a bit
purer or more refined for having passed through the well-cleansed teeth
of a whole court. The inherent vulgarity is in having no other feeling
on any subject than the crude, blind, headling, gregarious notion
acquired by sympathy with the mixed multitude or with a fastidious
minority, who are just as insensible to the real truth, and as
indifferent to everything but their own frivolous and vexatious
pretensions. The upper are not wiser than the lower orders because they
resolve to differ from them. The fashionable have the advantage of
the unfashionable in nothing but the fashion. The true vulgar are the
_servum pecus imitatorum_--the herd of pretenders to what they do not
feel and to what is not natural to them, whether in high or low life.
To belong to any class, to move in any rank or sphere of life, is not a
very exclusive distinction or test of refinement. Refinement will in all
classes be the exception, not the rule; and the exception may fall out
in one class as well as another. A king is but an hereditary title. A
nobleman is only one of the House of Peers. To be a knight or alderman
is confessedly a vulgar thing. The king the other day made Sir Walter
Scott a baronet, but not all the power of the Three Estates could make
another Author of _Waverley_. Princes, heroes, are often commonplace
people: Hamlet was not a vulgar character, neither was Don Quixote. To
be an author, to be a painter, is nothing. It is a trick, it is a trade.

 An author! 'tis a venerable name:
 How few deserve it, yet what numbers claim!

Nay, to be a Member of the Royal Academy or a Fellow of the Royal
Society is but a vulgar distinction; but to be a Virgil, a Milton, a
Raphael, a Claude, is what fell to the lot of humanity but once! I do
not think they were vulgar people; though, for anything I know to the
contrary, the first Lord of the Bedchamber may be a very vulgar man; for
anything I know to the contrary, he may not be so.--Such are pretty much
my notions of gentility and vulgarity.

There is a well-dressed and an ill-dressed mob, both which I hate. _Odi
profanum vulgus, et arceo._ The vapid affectation of the one to me is
even more intolerable than the gross insolence and brutality of the
other. If a set of low-lived fellows are noisy, rude, and boisterous to
show their disregard of the company, a set of fashionable coxcombs are,
to a nauseous degree, finical and effeminate to show their thorough
breeding. The one are governed by their feelings, however coarse and
misguided, which is something; the others consult only appearances,
which are nothing, either as a test of happiness or virtue. Hogarth in
his prints has trimmed the balance of pretension between the downright
blackguard and the _soi-disant_ fine gentleman unanswerably. It does not
appear in his moral demonstrations (whatever it may do in the genteel
letter-writing of Lord Chesterfield or the chivalrous rhapsodies of
Burke) that vice by losing all its grossness loses half its evil. It
becomes more contemptible, not less disgusting. What is there in common,
for instance, between his beaux and belles, his rakes and his coquettes,
and the men and women, the true heroic and ideal characters in Raphael?
But his people of fashion and quality are just upon a par with the low,
the selfish, the _unideal_ characters in the contrasted view of human
life, and are often the very same characters, only changing places. If
the lower ranks are actuated by envy and uncharitableness towards the
upper, the latter have scarcely any feelings but of pride, contempt, and
aversion to the lower. If the poor would pull down the rich to get
at their good things, the rich would tread down the poor as in a
wine-press, and squeeze the last shilling out of their pockets and the
last drop of blood out of their veins. If the headstrong self-will and
unruly turbulence of a common alehouse are shocking, what shall we
say to the studied insincerity, the insipid want of common sense, the
callous insensibility of the drawing-room and boudoir? I would rather
see the feelings of our common nature (for they are the same at bottom)
expressed in the most naked and unqualified way, than see every feeling
of our nature suppressed, stifled, hermetically sealed under the smooth,
cold, glittering varnish of pretended refinement and conventional
politeness. The one may be corrected by being better informed; the other
is incorrigible, wilful, heartless depravity. I cannot describe the
contempt and disgust I have felt at the tone of what would be thought
good company, when I have witnessed the sleek, smiling, glossy,
gratuitous assumption of superiority to every feeling of humanity,
honesty, or principle, as a part of the etiquette, the mental and moral
_costume_ of the table, and every profession of toleration or favour for
the lower orders, that is, for the great mass of our fellow-creatures,
treated as an indecorum and breach of the harmony of well-regulated
society. In short, I prefer a bear-garden to the adder's den; or, to put
this case in its extremest point of view, I have more patience with men
in a rude state of nature outraging the human form than I have with apes
'making mops and mows' at the extravagances they have first provoked.
I can endure the brutality (as it is termed) of mobs better than the
inhumanity of courts. The violence of the one rages like a fire; the
insidious policy of the other strikes like a pestilence, and is more
fatal and inevitable. The slow poison of despotism is worse than the
convulsive struggles of anarchy. 'Of all evils,' says Hume, 'anarchy is
the shortest lived.' The one may 'break out like a wild overthrow'; but
the other from its secret, sacred stand, operates unseen, and undermines
the happiness of kingdoms for ages, lurks in the hollow cheek, and
stares you in the face in the ghastly eye of want and agony and woe.
It is dreadful to hear the noise and uproar of an infuriated multitude
stung by the sense of wrong and maddened by sympathy; it is more
appalling to think of the smile answered by other gracious smiles, of
the whisper echoed by other assenting whispers, which doom them first to
despair and then to destruction. Popular fury finds its counterpart in
courtly servility. If every outrage is to be apprehended from the one,
every iniquity is deliberately sanctioned by the other, without regard
to justice or decency. The word of a king, 'Go thou and do likewise,'
makes the stoutest heart dumb: truth and honesty shrink before it.(3) If
there are watchwords for the rabble, have not the polite and fashionable
their hackneyed phrases, their fulsome, unmeaning jargon as well? Both
are to me anathema!

To return to the first question, as it regards individual and private
manners. There is a fine illustration of the effects of preposterous and
affected gentility in the character of Gertrude, in the old comedy
of _Eastward Hoe,_ written by Ben Jonson, Marston, and Chapman in
conjunction. This play is supposed to have given rise to Hogarth's
series of prints of the Idle and Industrious Apprentice; and there
is something exceedingly Hogarthian in the view both of vulgar and of
genteel life here displayed. The character of Gertrude, in particular,
the heroine of the piece, is inimitably drawn. The mixture of vanity and
meanness, the internal worthlessness and external pretence, the rustic
ignorance and fine lady-like airs, the intoxication of novelty and
infatuation of pride, appear like a dream or romance, rather than
anything in real life. Cinderella and her glass slipper are common-place
to it. She is not, like Millamant (a century afterwards), the
accomplished fine lady, but a pretender to all the foppery and finery of
the character. It is the honeymoon with her ladyship, and her folly
is at the full. To be a wife, and the wife of a knight, are to her
pleasures 'worn in their newest gloss,' and nothing can exceed her
raptures in the contemplation of both parts of the dilemma. It is not
familiarity, but novelty, that weds her to the court. She rises into
the air of gentility from the ground of a city life, and flutters
about there with all the fantastic delight of a butterfly that has just
changed its caterpillar state. The sound of My Lady intoxicates her
with delight, makes her giddy, and almost turns her brain. On the bare
strength of it she is ready to turn her father and mother out of doors,
and treats her brother and sister with infinite disdain and judicial
hardness of heart. With some speculators the modern philosophy has
deadened and distorted all the natural affections; and before abstract
ideas and the mischievous refinements of literature were introduced,
nothing was to be met with in the primeval state of society but
simplicity and pastoral innocence of manners--

 And all was conscience and tender heart

This historical play gives the lie to the above theory pretty broadly,
yet delicately. Our heroine is as vain as she is ignorant, and as
unprincipled as she is both, and without an idea or wish of any kind but
that of adorning her person in the glass, and being called and thought
a lady, something superior to a citizen's wife.(4) She is so bent on
finery that she believes in miracles to obtain it, and expects the
fairies to bring it her.(5) She is quite above thinking of a settlement,
jointure, or pin-money. She takes the will for the deed all through the
piece, and is so besotted with this ignorant, vulgar notion of rank and
title as a real thing that cannot be counterfeited that she is the
dupe of her own fine stratagems, and marries a gull, a dolt, a broken
adventurer for an accomplished and brave gentleman. Her meanness is
equal to her folly and her pride (and nothing can be greater), yet she
holds out on the strength of her original pretensions for a long time,
and plays the upstart with decency and imposing consistency. Indeed,
her infatuation and caprices are akin to the flighty perversity of a
disordered imagination; and another turn of the wheel of good or
evil fortune would have sent her to keep company with Hogarth's
_Merveilleuses_ in Bedlam, or with Decker's group of coquettes in the
same place.--The other parts of the play are a dreary lee-shore, like
Cuckold's Point on the coast of Essex, where the preconcerted shipwreck
takes place that winds up the catastrophe of the piece. But this is
also characteristic of the age, and serves as a contrast to the airy and
factitious character which is the principal figure in the plot. We had
made but little progress from that point till Hogarth's time, if Hogarth
is to be believed in his description of city manners. How wonderfully we
have distanced it since!

Without going into this at length, there is one circumstance 1 would
mention in which I think there has been a striking improvement in
the family economy of modern times--and that is in the relation of
mistresses and servants. After visits and finery, a married woman of the
old school had nothing to do but to attend to her housewifery. She had
no other resource, no other sense of power, but to harangue and lord
it over her domestics. Modern book-education supplies the place of the
old-fashioned system of kitchen persecution and eloquence. A
well-bred woman now seldom goes into the kitchen to look after the
servants:--formerly what was called a good manager, an exemplary
mistress of a family, did nothing but hunt them from morning to night,
from one year's end to another, without leaving them a moment's rest,
peace, or comfort. Now a servant is left to do her work without this
suspicious and tormenting interference and fault-finding at every step,
and she does it all the better. The proverbs about the mistress's eye,
etc., are no longer held for current. A woman from this habit, which at
last became an uncontrollable passion, would scold her maids for fifty
years together, and nothing could stop her: now the temptation to read
the last new poem or novel, and the necessity of talking of it in the
next company she goes into, prevent her--and the benefit to all parties
is incalculable.

NOTES to ESSAY XVI

(1) If a European, when he has cut off his beard and put false hair on
his head, or bound up his own natural hair in regular hard knots, as
unlike nature as he could possibly make it; and after having rendered
them immovable by the help of the fat of hogs, has covered the whole
with flour, laid on by a machine with the utmost regularity; if when
thus attired he issues forth, and meets with a Cherokee Indian, who has
bestowed as much time at his toilet, and laid on with equal care and
attention his yellow and red oker on particular parts of his forehead
or cheeks, as he judges most becoming; whoever of these two despises the
other for this attention to the fashion of his country, whichever
first feels himself provoked to laugh, is the barbarian.'--Sir Joshua
Reynolds's _Discourses,_ vol. i. pp. 231, 232.

(2) This name was originally spelt Braughton in the manuscript, and was
altered to Branghton by a mistake of the printer. Branghton, however,
was thought a good name for the occasion and was suffered to stand. 'Dip
it in the ocean,' as Sterne's barber says of the buckle, 'and it will
stand!'

(3) A lady of quality, in allusion to the gallantries of a reigning
prince, being told, 'I suppose it will be your turn next?' said, 'No, I
hope not; for you know it is impossible to refuse!'

(4) '_Gertrude._ For the passion of patience, look if Sir Petronel
approach. That sweet, that fine, that delicate, that--for love's sake,
tell me if he come. Oh, sister Mill, though my father be a low-capt
tradesman, yet I must be a lady, and I praise God my mother must call me
madam. Does he come? Off with this gown for shame's sake, off with this
gown! Let not my knight take me in the city cut, in any hand! Tear't!
Pox on't (does he come?), tear't off! _Thus while she sleeps, I sorrow
for her sake._ (Sings.)

_Mildred._ Lord, sister, with what an immodest impatiency and
disgraceful scorn do you put off your city-tire! I am sorry to think you
imagine to right yourself in wronging that which hath made both you and
us.

_Ger._ I tell you, I cannot endure it: I must be a lady: do you wear
your quoiff with a London licket! your stamel petticoat with two guards!
the buffin gown with the tuftafitty cap and the velvet lace! I must be a
lady, and I will be a lady. I like some humours of the city dames well;
to eat cherries only at an angel a pound; good: to dye rich scarlet
black; pretty: to line a grogram gown clean through with velvet;
tolerable: their pure linen, their smocks of three pound a smock, are
to be borne withal: but your mincing niceries, taffity pipkins, durance
petticoats, and silver bodkins--God's my life! as I shall be a lady, I
cannot endure it.

_Mil._ Well, sister, those that scorn their nest oft fly with a sick
wing.

_Ger._ Bow-bell! Alas! poor Mill, when I am a lady, I'll pray for thee
yet i'faith; nay, and I'll vouchsafe to call thee sister Mill still; for
thou art not like to be a lady as I am, yet surely thou art a creature
of God's making, and may'st peradventure be saved as soon as I (does he
come?). _And ever and anon she doubled in her song._

_Mil._ Now (lady's my comfort), what a profane ape's here!

Enter SIR PETRONEL FLASH, MR. TOUCHSTONE, and MRS. TOUCHSTONE.

_Ger._ Is my knight come? O the lord, my band! Sister, do my cheeks look
well? Give me a little box o' the ear, that I may seem to blush. Now,
now! so, there, there! here he is! O my dearest delight! Lord, lord! and
how does my knight?

_Touchstone._ Fie, with more modesty.

_Ger._ Modesty! why, I am no citizen now. Modesty! am I not to be
married? You're best to keep me modest, now I am to be a lady.

_Sir Petronel._ Boldness is a good fashion and court-like.

_Ger._ Aye, in, a country lady I hope it is, as I shall be. And how
chance ye came no sooner, knight?

_Sir Pet._ Faith, I was so entertained in the progress with one Count
Epernoun, a Welch knight: we had a match at baloon too with my Lord
Whackum for four crowns.

_Ger._ And when shall's be married, my knight?

_Sir Pet._ I am come now to consummate: and your father may call a poor
knight son-in-law.

_Mrs. Touchstone._ Yes, that he is a knight: I know where he had money
to pay the gentlemen ushers and heralds their fees. Aye, that he is a
knight: and so might you have been too, if you had been aught else but
an ass, as well as some of your neighbours. An I thought you would
not ha' been knighted, as I am an honest woman, I would ha' dubbed you
myself. I praise God, I have wherewithal. But as for you, daughter--

_Ger._ Aye, mother, I must be a lady to-morrow; and by your leave,
mother (I speak it not without my duty, but only in the right of my
husband), I must take place of you, mother.

_Mrs. Touch._ That you shall, lady-daughter; and have a coach as well as
I.

_Ger._ Yes, mother; but my coach-horses must take the wall of your
coach-horses.

_Touch._ Come, come, the day grows low; 'tis supper time: and, sir,
respect my daughter; she has refused for you wealthy and honest matches,
known good men.

_Ger._ Body o' truth, citizen, citizens! Sweet knight, as soon as
ever we are married, take me to thy mercy, out of this miserable city.
Presently: carry me out of the scent of Newcastle coal and the hearing
of Bow-bell, I beseech thee; down with me, for God's sake.'-Act I. Scene
i.

This dotage on sound and show seemed characteristic of that age (see
_New Way to Pay Old Debts,_ etc.)--as if in the grossness of sense,
and the absence of all intellectual and abstract topics of thought and
discourse (the thin, circulating medium of the present day) the mind was
attracted without the power of resistance to the tinkling sound of
its own name with a title added to it, and the image of its own person
tricked out in old-fashioned finery. The effect, no doubt, was also more
marked and striking from the contrast between the ordinary penury and
poverty of the age and the first and more extravagant demonstrations of
luxury and artificial refinement.

(5) _'Gertrude._ Good lord, that there are no fairies nowadays, Syn.

_Syndefy._ Why, Madam?

_Ger._ To do miracles, and bring ladies money. Sure, if we lay in a
cleanly house, they would haunt it, Synne? I'll sweep the chamber soon
at night, and set a dish of water o' the hearth. A fairy may come and
bring a pearl or a diamond. We do not know, Synne: or there may be a pot
of gold hid in the yard, if we had tools to dig for't. Why may not we
two rise early i' the morning, Synne, afore anybody is up, and find
a jewel i' the streets worth a hundred pounds? May not some great
court-lady, as she comes from revels at midnight, look out of her coach,
as 'tis running, and lose such a jewel, and we find it? ha!

_Syn._ They are pretty waking dreams, these.

_Ger._ Or may not some old usurer be drunk overnight with a bag of
money, and leave it behind him on a stall? For God's sake, Syn, let's
rise to-morrow by break of day, and see. I protest, la, if I had as much
money as an alderman, I would scatter some on't i' the streets for poor
ladies to find when their knights were laid up. And now I remember my
song of the Golden Shower, why may not I have such a fortune? I'll sing
it, and try what luck I shall have after it.'--Act V. Scene i.'

VOLUME II

ESSAY I. ON A LANDSCAPE OF NICOLAS POUSSIN

 And blind Orion hungry for the morn.

Orion, the subject of this landscape, was the classical Nimrod; and is
called by Homer, 'a hunter of shadows, himself a shade.' He was the son
of Neptune; and having lost an eye in some affray between the Gods
and men, was told that if he would go to meet the rising sun he would
recover his sight. He is represented setting out on his journey, with
men on his shoulders to guide him, a bow in his hand, and Diana in the
clouds greeting him. He stalks along, a giant upon earth, and reels and
falters in his gait, as if just awakened out of sleep, or uncertain of
his way;--you see his blindness, though his back is turned. Mists rise
around him, and veil the sides of the green forests; earth is dank and
fresh with dews, the 'gray dawn and the Pleiades before him dance,' and
in the distance are seen the blue hills and sullen ocean. Nothing
was ever more finely conceived or done. It breathes the spirit of the
morning; its moisture, its repose, its obscurity, waiting the miracle of
light to kindle it into smiles; the whole is, like the principal figure
in it, 'a forerunner of the dawn.' The same atmosphere tinges and imbues
every object, the same dull light 'shadowy sets off' the face of nature:
one feeling of vastness, of strangeness, and of primeval forms pervades
the painter's canvas, and we are thrown back upon the first integrity of
things. This great and learned man might be said to see nature through
the glass of time; he alone has a right to be considered as the painter
of classical antiquity. Sir Joshua has done him justice in this respect.
He could give to the scenery of his heroic fables that unimpaired look
of original nature, full, solid, large, luxuriant, teeming with life and
power; or deck it with all the pomp of art, with tempyles and towers,
and mythologic groves. His pictures 'denote a foregone conclusion.' He
applies Nature to his purposes, works out her images according to
the standard of his thoughts, embodies high fictions; and the first
conception being given, all the rest seems to grow out of and be
assimilated to it, by the unfailing process of a studious imagination.
Like his own Orion, he overlooks the surrounding scene, appears to 'take
up the isles as a very little thing, and to lay the earth in a balance.'
With a laborious and mighty grasp, he puts nature into the mould of the
ideal and antique; and was among painters (more than any one else) what
Milton was among poets. There is in both something of the same pedantry,
the same stiffness, the same elevation, the same grandeur, the same
mixture of art and nature, the same richness of borrowed materials, the
same unity of character. Neither the poet nor the painter lowered the
subjects they treated, but filled up the outline in the fancy, and added
strength and reality to it; and thus not only satisfied, but surpassed
the expectations of the spectator and the reader. This is held for the
triumph and the perfection of works of art. To give us nature, such as
we see it, is well and deserving of praise; to give us nature, such
as we have never seen, but have often wished to see it, is better, and
deserving of higher praise. He who can show the world in its first naked
glory, with the hues of fancy spread over it, or in its high and palmy
state, with the gravity of history stamped on the proud monuments of
vanished empire,--who, by his 'so potent art,' can recall time past,
transport us to distant places, and join the regions of imagination (a
new conquest) to those of reality,--who shows us not only what Nature
is, but what she has been, and is capable of,--he who does this, and
does it with simplicity, with truth, and grandeur, is lord of Nature and
her powers; and his mind is universal, and his art the master-art!

There is nothing in this 'more than natural,' if criticism could
be persuaded to think so. The historic painter does not neglect or
contravene Nature, but follows her more closely up into her fantastic
heights or hidden recesses. He demonstrates what she would be in
conceivable circumstances and under implied conditions. He 'gives to
airy nothing a local habitation,' not 'a name.' At his touch, words
start up into images, thoughts become things. He clothes a dream, a
phantom, with form and colour, and the wholesome attributes of reality.
_His_ art is a second nature; not a different one. There are those,
indeed, who think that not to copy nature is the rule for attaining
perfection. Because they cannot paint the objects which they have they
have, they fancy themselves qualified to paint the ideas which they have
not seen. But it is possible to fail in this latter and more difficult
style of imitation, as well as in the former humbler one. The detection,
it is true, is not so easy, because the objects are not so nigh at hand
to compare, and therefore there is more room both for false pretension
and for self-deceit. They take an epic motto or subject, and conclude
that the spirit is implied as a thing of course. They paint inferior
portraits, maudlin lifeless faces, without ordinary expression, or one
look, feature, or particle of nature in them, and think that this is
to rise to the truth of history. They vulgarise and degrade whatever is
interesting or sacred to the mind, and suppose that they thus add to the
dignity of their profession. They represent a face that seems as if no
thought or feeling of any kind had ever passed through it, and would
have you believe that this is the very sublime of expression, such as
it would appear in heroes, or demigods of old, when rapture or agony was
raised to its height. They show you a landscape that looks as if the sun
never shone upon it, and tell you that it is not modern--that so earth
looked when Titan first kissed it with his rays. This is not the true
ideal. It is not to fill the moulds of the imagination, but to deface
and injure them; it is not to come up to, but to fall short of the
poorest conception in the public mind. Such pictures should not be hung
in the same room with that of Orion.(1)

Poussin was, of all painters, the most poetical. He was the painter of
ideas. No one ever told a story half so well, nor so well knew what was
capable of being told by the pencil. He seized on, and struck off with
grace and precision, just that point of view which would be likely to
catch the reader's fancy. There is a significance, a consciousness in
whatever he does (sometimes a vice, but oftener a virtue) beyond any
other painter. His Giants sitting on the tops of craggy mountains, as
huge themselves, and playing idly on their Pan's-pipes, seem to have
been seated there these three thousand years, and to know the beginning
and the end of their own story. An infant Bacchus or Jupiter is big with
his future destiny. Even inanimate and dumb things speak a language of
their own. His snakes, the messengers of fate, are inspired with human
intellect. His trees grow and expand their leaves in the air, glad of
the rain, proud of the sun, awake to the winds of heaven. In his Plague
of Athens, the very buildings seem stiff with horror. His picture of the
Deluge is, perhaps, the finest historical landscape in the world. You
see a waste of waters, wide, interminable the sun is labouring, wan and
weary, up the sky the clouds, dull and leaden, lie like a load upon the
eye, and heaven and earth seem commingling into one confused mass! His
human figures are sometimes 'o'erinformed' with this kind of feeling.
Their actions have too much gesticulation, and the set expression of the
features borders too much on the mechanical and caricatured style. In
this respect they form a contrast to Raphael's, whose figures never
appear to be sitting for their pictures, or to be conscious of a
spectator, or to have come from the painter's hand. In Nicolas Poussin,
on the contrary, everything seems to have a distinct understanding with
the artist; 'the very stones prate of their whereabout'; each object has
its part and place assigned, and is in a sort of compact with the
rest of the picture. It is this conscious keeping, and, as it were,
_internal_ design, that gives their peculiar character to the works of
this artist. There was a picture of Aurora in the British Gallery a year
or two ago. It was a suffusion of golden light. The Goddess wore her
saffron-coloured robes, and appeared just risen from the gloomy bed of
old Tithonus. Her very steeds, milk-white, were tinged with the yellow
dawn. It was a personification of the morning. Poussin succeeded better
in classic than in sacred subjects. The latter are comparatively heavy,
forced, full of violent contrasts of colour, of red, blue, and black,
and without the true prophetic inspiration of the characters. But in his
pagan allegories and fables he was quite at home. The native gravity and
native levity of the Frenchman were combined with Italian scenery and
an antique gusto, and gave even to his colouring an air of learned
indifference. He wants, in one respect, grace, form, expression; but
he has everywhere sense and meaning, perfect costume and propriety.
His personages always belong to the class and time represented, and are
strictly versed in the business in hand. His grotesque compositions
in particular, his Nymphs and Fauns, are superior (at least, as far
as style is concerned) even to those of Rubens. They are taken more
immediately out of fabulous history. Rubens' Satyrs and Bacchantes have
a more jovial and voluptuous aspect, are more drunk with pleasure,
more full of animal spirits and riotous impulses; they laugh and bound
along--

 Leaping like wanton kids in pleasant spring:

but those of Poussin have more of the intellectual part of the
character, and seem vicious on reflection, and of set purpose. Rubens'
are noble specimens of a class; Poussin's are allegorical abstractions
of the same class, with bodies less pampered, but with minds more
secretly depraved. The Bacchanalian groups of the Flemish painter were,
however, his masterpieces in composition. Witness those prodigies of
colour, character, and expression at Blenheim. In the more chaste and
refined delineation of classic fable, Poussin was without a rival.
Rubens, who was a match for him in the wild and picturesque, could not
pretend to vie with the elegance and purity of thought in his picture of
Apollo giving a poet a cup of water to drink, nor with the gracefulness
of design in the figure of a nymph squeezing the juice of a bunch of
grapes from her fingers (a rosy wine-press) which falls into the mouth
of a chubby infant below. But, above all, who shall celebrate, in terms
of fit praise, his picture of the shepherds in the Vale of Tempe going
out in a fine morning of the spring, and coming to a tomb with this
inscription: ET EGO IN ARCADIA VIXI! The eager curiosity of some, the
expression of others who start back with fear and surprise, the clear
breeze playing with the branches of the shadowing trees, 'the valleys
low, where the mild zephyrs use,' the distant, uninterrupted, sunny
prospect speak (and for ever will speak on) of ages past to ages yet to
come!(2)

Pictures are a set of chosen images, a stream of pleasant thoughts
passing through the mind. It is a luxury to have the walls of our rooms
hung round with them, and no less so to have such a gallery in the mind,
to con over the relies of ancient art bound up 'within the book and
volume of the brain, unmixed (if it were possible) with baser matter!' A
life passed among pictures, in the study and the love of art, is a happy
noiseless dream: or rather, it is to dream and to be awake at the same
time; for it has all 'the sober certainty of waking bliss,' with the
romantic voluptuousness of a visionary and abstracted being. They are
the bright consummate essences of things, and 'he who knows of these
delights to taste and interpose them oft, is not unwise!'--The Orion,
which I have here taken occasion to descant upon, is one of a collection
of excellent pictures, as this collection is itself one of a series from
the old masters, which have for some years back embrowned the walls of
the British Gallery, and enriched the public eye. What hues (those of
nature mellowed by time) breathe around as we enter! What forms are
there, woven into the memory! What looks, which only the answering looks
of the spectator can express! What intellectual stores have been yearly
poured forth from the shrine of ancient art! The works are various,
but the names the same--heaps of Rembrandts frowning from the darkened
walls, Rubens' glad gorgeous groups, Titians more rich and rare, Claudes
always exquisite, sometimes beyond compare, Guido's endless cloying
sweetness, the learning of Poussin and the Caracci, and Raphael's
princely magnificence crowning all. We read certain letters and
syllables in the Catalogue, and at the well-known magic sound a miracle
of skill and beauty starts to view. One might think that one year's
prodigal display of such perfection would exhaust the labours of one
man's life; but the next year, and the next to that, we find another
harvest reaped and gathered in to the great garner of art, by the same
immortal hands--

 Old GENIUS the porter of them was;
 He letteth in, he letteth out to wend.--

Their works seem endless as their reputation--to be many as they are
complete--to multiply with the desire of the mind to see more and more
of them; as if there were a living power in the breath of Fame, and in
the very names of the great heirs of glory 'there were propagation to
year; to have one last, lingering look yet to come. Pictures are
scattered like stray gifts through the world; and while they remain,
earth has yet a little gilding left, not quite rubbed off, dishonoured,
and defaced. There are plenty of standard works still to be found in
this country, in the collections at Blenheim, at Burleigh, and in those
belonging to Mr. Angerstein, Lord Grosvenor, the Marquis of Stafford,
and others, to keep up this treat to the lovers of art for many years;
and it is the more desirable to reserve a privileged sanctuary of
this sort, where the eye may dote, and the heart take its fill of
such pictures as Poussin's Orion, since the Louvre is stripped of its
triumphant spoils, and since he who collected it, and wore it as a
rich jewel in his Iron Crown, the hunter of greatness and of glory, is
himself a shade!

NOTES to ESSAY I

(1) Everything tends to show the manner in which a great artist
is formed. If any person could claim an exemption from the careful
imitation of individual objects, it was Nicolas Poussin. He studied
the antique, but he also studied nature. 'I have often admired,' says
Vignuel do Marville, who knew him at a late period of his life, 'the
love he had for his art. Old as he was, I frequently saw him among the
ruins of ancient Rome, out in the Campagna, or along the banks of the
Tyber, sketching a scene that had pleased him; and I often met him with
his handkerchief full of stones, moss, or flowers, which he carried
home, that he might copy them exactly from nature. One day I asked him
how he had attained to such a degree of perfection as to have gained
so high a rank among the great painters of Italy? He answered, "I HAVE
NEGLECTED NOTHING."'--_See his Life lately published._ It appears from
this account that he had not fallen into a recent error, that Nature
puts the man of genius out. As a contrast to the foregoing description,
I might mention, that I remember an old gentleman once asking Mr. West
In the British Gallery if he had ever been at Athens? To which the
President made answer, No; nor did he feel any great desire to go; for
that he thought he had as good an idea of the place from the Catalogue
as he could get by living there for any number of years. What would he
have said, if any one had told him he could get as good an idea of the
subject of one of his great works from reading the Catalogue of it, as
from seeing the picture itself? Yet the answer was characteristic of the
genius of the painter.

(2) Poussin has repeated this subject more than once, and appears to
have revelled in its witcheries. I have before alluded to it, and may
again. It is hard that we should not be allowed to dwell as often as we
please on what delights us, when things that are disagreeable recur so
often against our will.

ESSAY II. ON MILTON'S SONNETS

The great object of the Sonnet seems to be, to express in musical
numbers, and as it were with undivided breath, some occasional thought
or personal feeling, 'some fee-grief due to the poet's breast.' It is
a sigh uttered from the fulness of the heart, an involuntary aspiration
born and dying in the same moment. I have always been fond of Milton's
Sonnets for this reason, that they have more of this personal and
internal character than any others; and they acquire a double value when
we consider that they come from the pen of the loftiest of our poets.
Compared with _Paradise_ Lost, they are like tender flowers that adorn
the base of some proud column or stately temple. The author in the one
could work himself up with unabated fortitude 'to the height of his
great argument'; but in the other he has shown that he could condescend
to men of low estate, and after the lightning and the thunderbolt of
his pen, lets fall some drops of natural pity over hapless infirmity,
mingling strains with the nightingale's, 'most musical, most
melancholy.' The immortal poet pours his mortal sorrows into our
breasts, and a tear falls from his sightless orbs on the friendly
hand he presses. The Sonnets are a kind of pensive record of past
achievements, loves, and friendships, and a noble exhortation to himself
to bear up with cheerful hope and confidence to the last. Some of them
are of a more quaint and humorous character; but I speak of those only
which are intended to be serious and pathetical.--I do not know indeed
but they may be said to be almost the first effusions of this sort of
natural and personal sentiment in the language. Drummond's ought
perhaps to be excepted, were they formed less closely on the model
of Petrarch's, so as to be often little more than translations of
the Italian poet. But Milton's Sonnets are truly his own in allusion,
thought, and versification. Those of Sir Philip Sydney, who was a
great transgressor in his way, turn sufficiently on himself and his own
adventures; but they are elaborately quaint and intricate, and more like
riddles than sonnets. They are 'very tolerable and not to be endured.'
Shakespear's, which some persons better informed in such matters than I
can pretend to be, profess to cry up as 'the divine, the matchless, what
you will,'--to say nothing of the want of point or a leading, prominent
idea in most of them, are I think overcharged and monotonous, and as to
their ultimate drift, as for myself, I can make neither head nor tail
of it. Yet some of them, I own, are sweet even to a sense of faintness,
luscious as the woodbine, and graceful and luxuriant like it. Here is
one:

 From you have I been absent in the spring,
 When proud-pied April, dress'd in all his trim,
 Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing;
 That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him.
 Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell
 Of different flowers in odour and in hue,
 Could make me any summer's story tell,
 Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew:
 Nor did I wonder at the lilies white,
 Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
 They were but sweet, but figures of delight,
 Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
 Yet seem'd it winter still, and you away,
 As with your shadow, I with these did play.

I am not aware of any writer of Sonnets worth mentioning here till long
after Milton, that is, till the time of Warton and the revival of a
taste for Italian and for our own early literature. During the rage
for French models the Sonnet had not been much studied. It is a mode of
composition that depends entirely on _expression,_ and this the French
and artificial style gladly dispenses with, as it lays no particular
stress on anything--except vague, general common-places. Warton's
Sonnets are undoubtedly exquisite, both in style and matter; they are
poetical and philosophical effusions of very delightful sentiment;
but the thoughts, though fine and deeply felt, are not, like Milton's
subjects, identified completely with the writer, and so far want a more
individual interest. Mr. Wordsworth's are also finely conceived and
high-sounding Sonnets. They mouth it well, and are said to be sacred to
Liberty. Brutus's exclamation, 'Oh Virtue, I thought thee a substance,
but I find thee a shadow,' was not considered as a compliment, but as a
bitter sarcasm. The beauty of Milton's Sonnets is their sincerity, the
spirit of poetical patriotism which they breathe. Either Milton's or
the living bard's are defective in this respect. There is no Sonnet of
Milton's on the Restoration of Charles II. There is no Sonnet of Mr.
Wordsworth's corresponding to that of 'the poet blind and bold' 'On
the late Massacre in Piedmont.' It would be no niggard praise to Mr.
Wordsworth to grant that he was either half the man or half the poet
that Milton was. He has not his high and various imagination, nor his
deep and fixed principle. Milton did not worship the rising sun, nor
turn his back on a losing and fallen cause.

 Such recantation had no charms for him!

Mr. Southey has thought proper to put the author of _Paradise Lost_ into
his late Heaven, on the understood condition that he is 'no longer to
kings and to hierarchs hostile.' In his lifetime he gave no sign of such
an alteration; and it is rather presumptuous in the poet-laureate to
pursue the deceased antagonist of Salmasius into the other world to
compliment him with his own infirmity of purpose. It is a wonder he did
not add in a note that Milton called him aside to whisper in his ear
that he preferred the new English hexameters to his own blank verse!

Our first of poets was one of our first of men. He was an eminent
instance to prove that a poet is not another name for the slave of power
and fashion, as is the case with painters and musicians--things without
an opinion--and who merely aspire to make up the pageant and show of the
day. There are persons in common life who have that eager curiosity and
restless admiration of bustle and splendour, that sooner than not be
admitted on great occasions of feasting and luxurious display, they will
go in the character of livery-servants to stand behind the chairs of the
great. There are others who can so little bear to be left for any length
of time out of the grand carnival and masquerade of pride and folly,
that they will gain admittance to it at the expense of their characters
as well as of a change of dress. Milton was not one of these. He had too
much of the _ideal_ faculty in his composition, a lofty contemplative
principle, and consciousness of inward power and worth, to be tempted
by such idle baits. We have plenty of chanting and chiming in among some
modern writers with the triumphs over their own views and principles;
but none of a patient resignation to defeat, sustaining and nourishing
itself with the thought of the justice of their cause, and with
firm-fixed rectitude. I do not pretend to defend the tone of Milton's
political writings (which was borrowed from the style of controversial
divinity), or to say that he was right in the part he took,--I say that
he was consistent in it, and did not convict himself of error: he was
consistent in it in spite of danger and obloquy, 'on evil days though
fallen, and evil tongues,' and therefore his character has the salt of
honesty about it. It does not offend in the nostrils of posterity. He
had taken his part boldly and stood to it manfully, and submitted to the
change of times with pious fortitude, building his consolations on the
resources of his own mind and the recollection of the past, instead
of endeavouring to make himself a retreat for the time to come. As an
instance of this we may take one of the best and most admired of these
Sonnets, that addressed to Cyriac Skinner, on his own blindness:--

 Cyriac, this three years' day, these eyes, though clear,
 To outward view, of blemish or of spot,
 Bereft of light their seeing have forgot,
 Nor to their idle orbs doth sight appear
 Of sun or moon or stars throughout the year,
 Or man or woman.  Yet I argue not
 Against Heav'n's hand or will, nor bate a jot
 Of heart or hope; but still bear up and steer
 Right onward.  What supports me, dost thou ask?
 The conscience, Friend, to have lost them overply'd
 In liberty's defence, my noble task,
 Of which all Europe talks from side to side.
 This thought might lead me through the world's vain mask,
 Content though blind, had I no better guide.

Nothing can exceed the mild, subdued tone of this Sonnet, nor the
striking grandeur of the concluding thought. It is curious to remark
what seems to be a trait of character in the two first lines. From
Milton's care to inform the reader that 'his eyes wore still clear, to
outward view, of spot or blemish,' it would be thought that he had not
yet given up all regard to personal appearance; a feeling to which his
singular beauty at an earlier age might be supposed naturally enough
to lead. Of the political or (what may be called) his _State-Sonnets,_
those to Cromwell, to Fairfax, and to the younger Vane are full of
exalted praise and dignified advice. They are neither familiar nor
servile. The writer knows what is due to power and to fame. He feels
the true, unassumed equality of greatness. He pays the full tribute of
admiration for great acts achieved, and suggests becoming occasion to
deserve higher praise. That to Cromwell is a proof how completely our
poet maintained the erectness of his understanding and spirit in his
intercourse with men in power. It is such a compliment as a poet might
pay to a conqueror and head of the state without the possibility of
self-degradation:

 Cromwell, our chief of men, who through a cloud,
 Not of war only, but detractions rude,
 Guided by faith and matchless fortitude,
 To peace and truth thy glorious way hast plough'd,
 And on the neck of crowned fortune proud
 Hast rear'd God's trophies and his work pursued
 While Darwen stream with blood of Scots imbrued,
 And Dunbar field resounds thy praises loud,
 And Worcester's laureat wreath.  Yet much remains
 To conquer still; peace hath her victories
 No less renown'd than war: new foes arise
 Threatening to bind our souls with secular chains;
 Help us to save free conscience from the paw
 Of hireling wolves, whose gospel is their maw.

The most spirited and impassioned of them all, and the most inspired
with a sort of prophetic fury, is the one entitled, 'On the late
Massacre in Piedmont.'

 Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughter'd saints, whose bones
 Lie scatter'd on the Alpine mountains cold;
 Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
 When all our fathers worshipp'd stocks and stones,
 Forgot not: in thy book record their groans
 Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
 Slain by the bloody Piedmontese that roll'd
 Mother with infant down the rocks.  Their moans
 The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
 To Heav'n.  Their martyr'd blood and ashes sow
 O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway
 The triple Tyrant; that from these may grow
 A hundred fold, who having learn'd thy way
 Early may fly the Babylonian woe.

In the Nineteenth Sonnet, which is also 'On his blindness,' we see the
jealous watchfulness of his mind over the use of his high gifts, and the
beautiful manner in which he satisfies himself that virtuous thoughts
and intentions are not the least acceptable offering to the Almighty:

 When I consider how my light is spent
 Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
 And that one talent which is death to hide,
 Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent,
 To serve therewith my Maker, and present
 My true account, lest he returning chide;
 Doth God exact day-labour, light denied,
 I fondly ask: But patience to prevent
 That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need
 Either man's work or his own gifts; who best
 Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best; his state
 Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed,
 And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
 They also serve who only stand and wait.

Those to Mr. Henry Lawes _on his Airs,_ and to Mr. Lawrence, can never
be enough admired. They breathe the very soul of music and friendship.
Both have a tender, thoughtful grace; and for their lightness, with a
certain melancholy complaining intermixed, might be stolen from the harp
of Aeolus. The last is the picture of a day spent in social retirement
and elegant relaxation from severer studies. We sit with the poet at
table and hear his familiar sentiments from his own lips afterwards:--

 Lawrence, of virtuous father virtuous son,
 Now that the fields are dank and ways are mire,
 Where shall we sometimes meet, and by the fire
 Help waste a sullen day, what may be won
 From the hard season gaining? Time will run
 On smoother, till Favonius re-inspire
 The frozen earth, and clothe in fresh attire
 The lily and rose, that neither sow'd nor spun.
 What neat repast shall feast us, light and choice,
 Of Attic taste, with wine, whence we may rise
 To hear the lute well-touched, or artful voice
 Warble immortal notes and Tuscan air?
 He who of these delights can judge, and spare
 To interpose them oft, is not unwise.

In the last, 'On his deceased Wife,' the allusion to Alcestis is
beautiful, and shows how the poet's mind raised and refined his thoughts
by exquisite classical conceptions, and how these again were enriched
by a passionate reference to actual feelings and images. It is this rare
union that gives such voluptuous dignity and touching purity to Milton's
delineation of the female character:--

 Methought I saw my late espoused saint
 Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave,
 Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave,
 Rescued from death by force, though pale and faint.
 Mine, as whom wash'd from spot of child-bed taint
 Purification in the old law did save,
 And such, as yet once more I trust to have
 Full sight of her in Heav'n without restraint,
 Came vested all in white, pure as her mind:
 Her face was veil'd, yet to my fancied sight
 Love, sweetness, goodness in her person shined
 So clear, as in no face with more delight:
 But O as to embrace me she inclined,
 I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.

There could not have been a greater mistake or a more unjust piece of
criticism than to suppose that Milton only shone on great subjects, and
that on ordinary occasions and in familiar life his mind was unwieldy,
averse to the cultivation of grace and elegance, and unsusceptible
of harmless pleasures. The whole tenor of his smaller compositions
contradicts this opinion, which, however, they have been cited to
confirm. The notion first got abroad from the bitterness (or vehemence)
of his controversial writings, and has been kept up since with little
meaning and with less truth. His Letters to Donatus and others are not
more remarkable for the display of a scholastic enthusiasm than for that
of the most amiable dispositions. They are 'severe in youthful virtue
unreproved.' There is a passage in his prose-works (the Treatise on
Education) which shows, I think, his extreme openness and proneness to
pleasing outward impressions in a striking point of view. 'But to return
to our own institute,' he says, 'besides these constant exercises at
home, there is another opportunity of gaining experience to be won from
pleasure itself abroad. _In those vernal seasons of the year, when
the air is calm and pleasant, it were an injury and sullenness against
Nature not to go out and see her riches, and partake in her rejoicing
with Heaven and earth._ I should not therefore be a persuader to them
of studying much then, but to ride out in companies with prudent
and well-staid guides, to all quarters of the land,' etc. Many
other passages might be quoted, in which the poet breaks through the
groundwork of prose, as it were, by natural fecundity and a genial,
unrestrained sense of delight. To suppose that a poet is not easily
accessible to pleasure, or that he does not take an interest in
individual objects and feelings, is to suppose that he is no poet; and
proceeds on the false theory, which has been so often applied to poetry
and the Fine Arts, that the whole is not made up of the particulars. If
our author, according to Dr. Johnson s account of him, could only have
treated epic, high-sounding subjects, he would not have been what he
was, but another Sir Richard Blackmore.--I may conclude with observing,
that I have often wished that Milton had lived to see the Revolution of
1688. This would have been a triumph worthy of him, and which he would
have earned by faith and hope. He would then have been old, but would
not have lived in vain to see it, and might have celebrated the event in
one more undying strain!

NOTES to ESSAY II

No notes for this essay

ESSAY III. ON GOING A JOURNEY

One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey; but I
like to go by myself. I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors,
nature is company enough for me. I am then never less alone than when
alone.

 The fields his study, nature was his book.

I cannot see the wit of walking and talking at the same time. When I
am in the country I wish to vegetate like the country. I am not for
criticising hedge-rows and black cattle. I go out of town in order to
forget the town and all that is in it. There are those who for this
purpose go to watering-places, and carry the metropolis with them. I
like more elbow-room and fewer encumbrances. I like solitude, when I
give myself up to it, for the sake of solitude; nor do I ask for

 A friend in my retreat,
 Whom I may whisper solitude is sweet.

The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel,
do, just as one pleases. We go a journey chiefly to be free of all
impediments and of all inconveniences; to leave ourselves behind much
more to get rid of others. It is because I want a little breathing-space
to muse on indifferent matters, where Contemplation

 May plume her feathers and let grow her wings,
 That in the various bustle of resort
 Were all too ruffled, and sometimes impair'd,

that I absent myself from the town for a while, without feeling at a
loss the moment I am left by myself. Instead of a friend in a postchaise
or in a Tilbury, to exchange good things with, and vary the same stale
topics over again, for once let me have a truce with impertinence. Give
me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet,
a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner--and
then to thinking! It is hard if I cannot start some game on these lone
heaths. I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy. From the point of yonder
rolling cloud I plunge into my past being, and revel there, as the
sun-burnt Indian plunges headlong into the wave that wafts him to his
native shore. Then long-forgotten things, like 'sunken wrack and sumless
treasuries,' burst upon my eager sight, and I begin to feel, think, and
be myself again. Instead of an awkward silence, broken by attempts at
wit or dull common-places, mine is that undisturbed silence of the heart
which alone is perfect eloquence. No one likes puns, alliterations,
antitheses, argument, and analysis better than I do; but I sometimes had
rather be without them. 'Leave, oh, leave me to my repose!' I have just
now other business in hand, which would seem idle to you, but is with
me 'very stuff o' the conscience.' Is not this wild rose sweet without
a comment? Does not this daisy leap to my heart set in its coat of
emerald? Yet if I were to explain to you the circumstance that has so
endeared it to me, you would only smile. Had I not better then keep it
to myself, and let it serve me to brood over, from here to yonder craggy
point, and from thence onward to the far-distant horizon? I should be
but bad company all that way, and therefore prefer being alone. I have
heard it said that you may, when the moody fit comes on, walk or ride on
by yourself, and indulge your reveries. But this looks like a breach of
manners, a neglect of others, and you are thinking all the time that you
ought to rejoin your party. 'Out upon such half-faced fellowship,' say
I. I like to be either entirely to myself, or entirely at the disposal
of others; to talk or be silent, to walk or sit still, to be sociable or
solitary. I was pleased with an observation of Mr. Cobbett's, that 'he
thought it a bad French custom to drink our wine with our meals, and
that an Englishman ought to do only one thing at a time.' So I cannot
talk and think, or indulge in melancholy musing and lively conversation
by fits and starts. 'Let me have a companion of my way,' says Sterne,
'were it but to remark how the shadows lengthen as the sun declines.'
It is beautifully said; but, in my opinion, this continual comparing
of notes interferes with the involuntary impression of things upon the
mind, and hurts the sentiment. If you only hint what you feel in a kind
of dumb show, it is insipid: if you have to explain it, it is making a
toil of a pleasure. You cannot read the book of nature without being
perpetually put to the trouble of translating it for the benefit of
others. I am for this synthetical method on a journey in preference to
the analytical. I am content to lay in a stock of ideas then, and to
examine and anatomise them afterwards. I want to see my vague notions
float like the down of the thistle before the breeze, and not to have
them entangled in the briars and thorns of controversy. For once, I like
to have it all my own way; and this is impossible unless you are alone,
or in such company as I do not covet. I have no objection to argue a
point with any one for twenty miles of measured road, but not for
pleasure. If you remark the scent of a bean-field crossing the road,
perhaps your fellow-traveller has no smell. If you point to a distant
object, perhaps he is short-sighted, and has to take out his glass to
look at it. There is a feeling in the air, a tone in the colour of a
cloud, which hits your fancy, but the effect of which you are unable to
account for. There is then no sympathy, but an uneasy craving after it,
and a dissatisfaction which pursues you on the way, and in the end
probably produces ill-humour. Now I never quarrel with myself, and take
all my own conclusions for granted till I find it necessary to defend
them against objections. It is not merely that you may not be of accord
on the objects and circumstances that present themselves before you--
these may recall a number of objects, and lead to associations too
delicate and refined to be possibly communicated to others. Yet these I
love to cherish, and sometimes still fondly clutch them, when I can
escape from the throng to do so. To give way to our feelings before
company seems extravagance or affectation; and, on the other hand, to
have to unravel this mystery of our being at every turn, and to make
others take an equal interest in it (otherwise the end is not answered),
is a task to which few are competent. We must 'give it an understanding,
but no tongue.' My old friend Coleridge, however, could do both. He
could go on in the most delightful explanatory way over hill and dale a
summer's day, and convert a landscape into a didactic poem or a Pindaric
ode. 'He talked far above singing.' If I could so clothe my ideas in
sounding and flowing words, I might perhaps wish to have some one with
me to admire the swelling theme; or I could be more content, were it
possible for me still to hear his echoing voice in the woods of
All-Foxden.(1) They had 'that fine madness in them which our first poets
had'; and if they could have been caught by some rare instrument, would
have breathed such strains as the following:--

 Here be woods as green
 As any, air likewise as fresh and sweet
 As when smooth Zephyrus plays on the fleet
 Face of the curled streams, with flow'rs as many
 As the young spring gives, and as choice as any;
 Here be all new delights, cool streams and wells,
 Arbours o'ergrown with woodbines, caves and dells;
 Choose where thou wilt, whilst I sit by and sing,
 Or gather rushes to make many a ring
 For thy long fingers; tell thee tales of love,
 How the pale Phoebe, hunting in a grove,
 First saw the boy Endymion, from whose eyes
 She took eternal fire that never dies;
 How she convey'd him softly in a sleep,
 His temples bound with poppy, to the steep
 Head of old Latmos, where she stoops each night,
 Gilding the mountain with her brother's light,
 To kiss her sweetest.(2)

Had I words and images at command like these, I would attempt to wake
the thoughts that lie slumbering on golden ridges in the evening clouds:
but at the sight of nature my fancy, poor as it is, droops and closes up
its leaves, like flowers at sunset. I can make nothing out on the spot:
I must have time to collect myself.

In general, a good thing spoils out-of-door prospects: it should be
reserved for Table-talk. Lamb is for this reason, I take it, the worst
company in the world out of doors; because he is the best within. I
grant there is one subject on which it is pleasant to talk on a journey,
and that is, what one shall have for supper when we get to our inn
at night. The open air improves this sort of conversation or friendly
altercation, by setting a keener edge on appetite. Every mile of the
road heightens the flavour of the viands we expect at the end of it. How
fine it is to enter some old town, walled and turreted, just at approach
of nightfall, or to come to some straggling village, with the lights
streaming through the surrounding gloom; and then, after inquiring for
the best entertainment that the place affords, to 'take one's ease
at one's inn'! These eventful moments in our lives' history are too
precious, too full of solid, heartfelt happiness to be frittered and
dribbled away in imperfect sympathy. I would have them all to myself,
and drain them to the last drop: they will do to talk of or to write
about afterwards. What a delicate speculation it is, after drinking
whole goblets of tea--

 The cups that cheer, but not inebriate--

and letting the fumes ascend into the brain, to sit considering what we
shall have for supper--eggs and a rasher, a rabbit smothered in onions,
or an excellent veal-cutlet! Sancho in such a situation once fixed on
cow-heel; and his choice, though he could not help it, is not to be
disparaged. Then, in the intervals of pictured scenery and Shandean
contemplation, to catch the preparation and the stir in the kitchen
(getting ready for the gentleman in the parlour). _Procul, O procul
este profani!_ These hours are sacred to silence and to musing, to be
treasured up in the memory, and to feed the source of smiling thoughts
hereafter. I would not waste them in idle talk; or if I must have the
integrity of fancy broken in upon, I would rather it were by a stranger
than a friend. A stranger takes his hue and character from the time and
place; he is a part of the furniture and costume of an inn. If he is a
Quaker, or from the West Riding of Yorkshire, so much the better. I do
not even try to sympathise with him, and he breaks no squares. (How I
love to see the camps of the gypsies, and to sigh my soul into that sort
of life. If I express this feeling to another, he may qualify and
spoil it with some objection.) I associate nothing with my travelling
companion but present objects and passing events. In his ignorance of me
and my affairs, I in a manner forget myself. But a friend reminds one
of other things, rips up old grievances, and destroys the abstraction
of the scene. He comes in ungraciously between us and our imaginary
character. Something is dropped in the course of conversation that gives
a hint of your profession and pursuits; or from having some one with
you that knows the less sublime portions of your history, it seems that
other people do. You are no longer a citizen of the world; but your
'unhoused free condition is put into circumspection and confine.' The
incognito of an inn is one of its striking privileges--'lord of one's
self, uncumbered with a name.' Oh! it is great to shake off the trammels
of the world and of public opinion--to lose our importunate, tormenting,
everlasting personal identity in the elements of nature, and become the
creature of the moment, clear of all ties--to hold to the universe
only by a dish of sweetbreads, and to owe nothing but the score of the
evening--and no longer seeking for applause and meeting with contempt,
to be known by no other title than _the Gentleman in the parlour!_
One may take one's choice of all characters in this romantic state
of uncertainty as to one's real pretensions, and become indefinitely
respectable and negatively right-worshipful. We baffle prejudice and
disappoint conjecture; and from being so to others, begin to be
objects of curiosity and wonder even to ourselves. We are no more those
hackneyed common-places that we appear in the world; an inn restores us
to the level of nature, and quits scores with society! I have certainly
spent some enviable hours at inns--sometimes when I have been left
entirely to myself, and have tried to solve some metaphysical problem,
as once at Witham Common, where I found out the proof that likeness is
not a case of the association of ideas--at other times, when there have
been pictures in the room, as at St. Neot's (I think it was), where
I first met with Gribelin's engravings of the Cartoons, into which I
entered at once, and at a little inn on the borders of Wales, where
there happened to be hanging some of Westall's drawings, which I
compared triumphantly (for a theory that I had, not for the admired
artist) with the figure of a girl who had ferried me over the Severn,
standing up in a boat between me and the twilight--at other times I
might mention luxuriating in books, with a peculiar interest in
this way, as I remember sitting up half the night to read _Paul and
Virginia,_ which I picked up at an inn at Bridgewater, after being
drenched in the rain all day; and at the same place I got through two
volumes of Madame D'Arblay's _Camilla._ It was on the 10th of April
1798 that I sat down to a volume of the _New Eloise,_ at the inn at
Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a cold chicken. The letter I
chose was that in which St. Preux describes his feelings as he first
caught a glimpse from the heights of the Jura of the Pays de Vaud, which
I had brought with me as a _bon bouche_ to crown the evening with. It
was my birthday, and I had for the first time come from a place in the
neighbourhood to visit this delightful spot. The road to Llangollen
turns off between Chirk and Wrexham; and on passing a certain point
you come all at once upon the valley, which opens like an amphitheatre,
broad, barren hills rising in majestic state on either side, with 'green
upland swells that echo to the bleat of flocks' below, and the river
Dee babbling over its stony bed in the midst of them. The valley at this
time 'glittered green with sunny showers,' and a budding ash-tree dipped
its tender branches in the chiding stream. How proud, how glad I was
to walk along the high road that overlooks the delicious prospect,
repeating the lines which I have just quoted from Mr. Coleridge's poems!
But besides the prospect which opened beneath my feet, another also
opened to my inward sight, a heavenly vision, on which were written,
in letters large as Hope could make them, these four words, LIBERTY,
GENIUS, LOVE, VIRTUE; which have since faded into the light of common
day, or mock my idle gaze.

The beautiful is vanished, and returns not.

Still I would return some time or other to this enchanted spot; but I
would return to it alone. What other self could I find to share that
influx of thoughts, of regret, and delight, the fragments of which I
could hardly conjure up to myself, so much have they been broken and
defaced. I could stand on some tall rock, and overlook the precipice of
years that separates me from what I then was. I was at that time going
shortly to visit the poet whom I have above named. Where is he now? Not
only I myself have changed; the world, which was then new to me, has
become old and incorrigible. Yet will I turn to thee in thought, O
sylvan Dee, in joy, in youth and gladness as thou then wert; and thou
shalt always be to me the river of Paradise, where I will drink of the
waters of life freely!

There is hardly anything that shows the short-sightedness or
capriciousness of the imagination more than travelling does. With change
of place we change our ideas; nay, our opinions and feelings. We can by
an effort indeed transport ourselves to old and long-forgotten scenes,
and then the picture of the mind revives again; but we forget those
that we have just left. It seems that we can think but of one place at
a time. The canvas of the fancy is but of a certain extent, and if we
paint one set of objects upon it, they immediately efface every other.
We cannot enlarge our conceptions, we only shift our point of view. The
landscape bares its bosom to the enraptured eye, we take our fill of it,
and seem as if we could form no other image of beauty or grandeur. We
pass on, and think no more of it: the horizon that shuts it from our
sight also blots it from our memory like a dream. In travelling through
a wild barren country I can form no idea of a woody and cultivated one.
It appears to me that all the world must be barren, like what I see
of it. In the country we forget the town, and in town we despise
the country. 'Beyond Hyde Park,' says Sir Topling Flutter, 'all is a
desert.' All that part of the map that we do not see before us is blank.
The world in our conceit of it is not much bigger than a nutshell. It is
not one prospect expanded into another, county joined to county, kingdom
to kingdom, land to seas, making an image voluminous and vast; the mind
can form no larger idea of space than the eye can take in at a
single glance. The rest is a name written in a map, a calculation of
arithmetic. For instance, what is the true signification of that immense
mass of territory and population known by the name of China to us? An
inch of pasteboard on a wooden globe, of no more account than a China
orange! Things near us are seen of the size of life: things at a
distance are diminished to the size of the understanding. We measure the
universe by ourselves, and even comprehend the texture of our being only
piecemeal. In this way, however, we remember an infinity of things and
places. The mind is like a mechanical instrument that plays a great
variety of tunes, but it must play them in succession. One idea recalls
another, but it at the same time excludes all others. In trying to renew
old recollections, we cannot as it were unfold the whole web of our
existence; we must pick out the single threads. So in coming to a
place where we have formerly lived, and with which we have intimate
associations, every one must have found that the feeling grows more
vivid the nearer we approach the spot, from the mere anticipation of the
actual impression: we remember circumstances, feelings, persons, faces,
names that we had not thought of for years; but for the time all the
rest of the world is forgotten!--To return to the question I have
quitted above:

I have no objection to go to see ruins, aqueducts, pictures, in company
with a friend or a party, but rather the contrary, for the former reason
reversed. They are intelligible matters, and will bear talking about.
The sentiment here is not tacit, but communicable and overt. Salisbury
Plain is barren of criticism, but Stonehenge will bear a discussion
antiquarian, picturesque, and philosophical. In setting out on a party
of pleasure, the first consideration always is where we shall go to: in
taking a solitary ramble, the question is what we shall meet with by the
way. 'The mind is its own place'; nor are we anxious to arrive at the
end of our journey. I can myself do the honours indifferently well to
works of art and curiosity. I once took a party to Oxford with no mean
eclat--showed them that seat of the Muses at a distance,

 With glistering spires and pinnacles adorn'd--

descanted on the learned air that breathes from the grassy quadrangles
and stone walls of halls and colleges--was at home in the Bodleian; and
at Blenheim quite superseded the powdered Cicerone that attended us, and
that pointed in vain with his wand to commonplace beauties in matchless
pictures. As another exception to the above reasoning, I should not
feel confident in venturing on a journey in a foreign country without
a companion. I should want at intervals to hear the sound of my own
language. There is an involuntary antipathy in the mind of an Englishman
to foreign manners and notions that requires the assistance of social
sympathy to carry it off. As the distance from home increases, this
relief, which was at first a luxury, becomes a passion and an appetite.
A person would almost feel stifled to find himself in the deserts of
Arabia without friends and countrymen: there must be allowed to be
something in the view of Athens or old Rome that claims the utterance
of speech; and I own that the Pyramids are too mighty for any single
contemplation. In such situations, so opposite to all one's ordinary
train of ideas, one seems a species by one's-self, a limb torn off from
society, unless one can meet with instant fellowship and support. Yet I
did not feel this want or craving very pressing once, when I first
set my foot on the laughing shores of France. Calais was peopled with
novelty and delight. The confused, busy murmur of the place was like oil
and wine poured into my ears; nor did the mariners' hymn, which was
sung from the top of an old crazy vessel in the harbour, as the sun
went down, send an alien sound into my soul. I only breathed the air of
general humanity. I walked over 'the vine-covered hills and gay regions
of France,' erect and satisfied; for the image of man was not cast
down and chained to the foot of arbitrary thrones: I was at no loss for
language, for that of all the great schools of painting was open to me.
The whole is vanished like a shade. Pictures, heroes, glory, freedom,
all are fled: nothing remains but the Bourbons and the French
people!--There is undoubtedly a sensation in travelling into foreign
parts that is to be had nowhere else; but it is more pleasing at the
time than lasting. It is too remote from our habitual associations to be
a common topic of discourse or reference, and, like a dream or another
state of existence, does not piece into our daily modes of life.
It is an animated but a momentary hallucination.  It demands an effort
to exchange our actual for our ideal identity; and to feel the pulse of
our old transports revive very keenly, we must 'jump' all our present
comforts and connections. Our romantic and itinerant character is not to
be domesticated. Dr. Johnson remarked how little foreign travel added
to the facilities of conversation in those who had been abroad. In
fact, the time we have spent there is both delightful, and in one sense
instructive; but it appears to be cut out of our substantial, downright
existence, and never to join kindly on to it. We are not the same, but
another, and perhaps more enviable individual, all the time we are out
of our own country. We are lost to ourselves, as well as our friends. So
the poet somewhat quaintly sings:

 Out of my country and myself I go.

Those who wish to forget painful thoughts, do well to absent themselves
for a while from the ties and objects that recall them; but we can
be said only to fulfil our destiny in the place that gave us birth. I
should on this account like well enough to spend the whole of my life
in travelling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend
afterwards at home!

NOTES to ESSAY III

(1) Near Nether-Stowey, Somersetshire, where the author of this Essay
visited Coleridge in 1798. He was there again in 1803.

(2) Fletcher's 'Faithful Shepherdess,' i. 3 (Dyce's _Beaumont and
Fletcher,_ ii. 38, 39).

ESSAY IV. ON COFFEE-HOUSE POLITICIANS

There is a set of people who fairly come under this denomination. They
spend their time and their breath in coffee-houses and other places
of public resort, hearing or repeating some new thing. They sit with a
paper in their hands in the morning, and with a pipe in their mouths in
the evening, discussing the contents of it. The _Times,_ the _Morning
Chronicle,_ and the _Herald_ are necessary to their existence: in
them 'they live and move and have their being.' The Evening Paper is
impatiently expected and called for at a certain critical minute:
the news of the morning becomes stale and vapid by the dinner-hour.
A fresher interest is required, an appetite for the latest-stirring
information is excited with the return of their meals; and a glass of
old port or humming ale hardly relishes as it ought without the infusion
of some lively topic that had its birth with the day, and perishes
before night. 'Then come in the sweets of the evening':--the Queen, the
coronation, the last new play, the next fight, the insurrection of the
Greeks or Neapolitans, the price of stocks, or death of kings, keep them
on the alert till bedtime. No question comes amiss to them that is quite
new--none is ever heard of that is at all old.

 That of an hour's age doth hiss the speaker.

The World before the Flood or the Intermediate State of the Soul are
never once thought of--such is the quick succession of subjects, the
suddenness and fugitiveness of the interest taken in them, that the
_Twopenny Post Bag_ would be at present looked upon as an old-fashioned
publication; and the Battle of Waterloo, like the proverb, is somewhat
musty. It is strange that people should take so much interest at one
time in what they so soon forget;--the truth is, they feel no interest
in it at any time, but it does for something to talk about. Their ideas
are served up to them, like their bill of fare, for the day; and the
whole creation, history, war, politics, morals, poetry, metaphysics,
is to them like a file of antedated newspapers, of no use, not even for
reference, except the one which lies on the table! You cannot take any
of these persons at a greater disadvantage than before they are provided
with their cue for the day. They ask with a face of dreary vacuity,
'Have you anything new?'--and on receiving an answer in the negative,
have nothing further to say. (They are like an oyster at the ebb of the
tide, gaping for fresh _tidings._) Talk of the Westminster Election, the
Bridge Street Association, or Mr. Cobbett's Letter to John Cropper of