total, viewed as elements tending to a common unity, unless previously
this unity has been preconceived, because the elements are not elements,
viz., original constituents of a representative whole (a series tending
to a summation), unless that which is constituted--that whole--is
previously given in idea. Since A and B and C could not be viewed as
tending to a unity, having no existence except through them, unless
previously that unity had existed for the regulation and eduction of its
component elements. And this unity in the case of misery never could
have been given unless far higher functions than any which could endure
Paganism, or which Paganism could endure. Until the sad element of a
diseased will is introduced, until the affecting notion is developed of
a fountain in man himself welling up the misery for ever, no idea of
misery could arise. Suffering is limited and transitory. What pain is
permanent in man? Even the deepest laceration of the human heart, that
which is inflicted by the loss of those who were the pulses of our
hearts, is soothed (if never wholly healed) by time. One agency of time
would avail for this effect were there no other. The features of the
individual whom we mourn grow dimmer and dimmer as time advances; and,
_pari passu_, the features of places and collateral objects and
associated persons from whom reverberated these afflicting reminiscences
of the lost object.

I return: Deliverer from what? From suffering or misery. But that was
not acknowledged, nor could have been, we could see no misery as a
hypothesis except in these two modes: First, as a radication in man by
means of something else, some third thing. Secondly, as a synthesis--as
a gathering under a principle which must act prior to the gathering in
order to provoke it. (The synthesis must be rendered possible and
challenged by the _à priori_ unity which otherwise constitutes that
unity.) As a metaphysical possibility evil was recognised through its
unfathomable nature. But this was because such a nature already
presupposed a God's nature, realizing his own ends, stepped in with
effect. For the highest form--the normal or transcendent form--of virtue
to a Pagan, was in the character of citizen. Indeed, the one sole or
affirmative form of virtue lay in this sole function, viz., of public,
of patriotic virtue. Since here only it was possible to introduce an
_additional_ good to the world. All other virtue, as of justice between
individual and individual, did but redress a previous error, sometimes
of the man himself, sometimes of social arrangement, sometimes of
accident. It was a _plus_ which balanced and compensated a pre-existing
_minus_--an action _in regressu_, which came back with prevailing power
upon an action _in progressu_. But to be a patriot was to fulfil a call
of the supererogatory heart--a great nisus of sympathy with the one sole
infinite, the sole practical infinite that man pre-Christian ever could
generate for his contemplation. Now, therefore, it followed that the
idea of virtue here only found its realization. Virtue, in fact, was not
derivatively or consequentially connected with patriotism, it was
_immanent_; not transitively associated by any links whatever, but
immanently intertwisted, indwelling in the idea. Therefore it happened
that a man, however heartsick of this tumid, bladdery delusion, although
to him it was a balloon, by science punctured, lacerated, collapsing,
trailed through ditch and mud under the rough handling and the fearful
realities of life, yet he durst not avow his private feelings. That
would have been even worse than with us: it would have been to proclaim
virtue and vice mere bubbles and chimeras. He who really thinks so even
we reasonably suspect of _practical_ indifference unless when we believe
him to speak as a misanthrope.

The question suppose to commence as to the divine mission of Christ. And
the feeble understanding is sure to think this will be proved best by
proving the subject of this doubt to have been a miracle-working power.
And of all miracles, to have mastered (not merely escaped or evaded)
death will be in his opinion the greatest. So that if Christ could be
proved to have absolutely conquered death, _i.e._, to have submitted to
death, but only to recoil from his power and overthrow it, to have died
and subsequently to have risen again, will, _à fortiori_, prove Him to
have been sent of God.

Not so. All and every basis of credibility must be laid in the _moral_
nature, where the thing to be believed is important, _i.e._, moral. And
I therefore open with this remark absolutely _zermalmende_ to the common
intellect: That from a holy faith you may infer a power of resurrection,
but not from a power of resurrection fifty times repeated can we infer a
holy faith. What in the last result is the thing to be proved? Why, a
holy revelation, not of knowledge, but of things practical; of agenda,
not scienda. It is essential that this holy should also be _new_,
_original_, _revelatum_. Because, else, the divinest things which are
_connata_ and have been common to all men, point to no certain author.
They belong to the dark foundations of our being, and cannot challenge a
trust, faith, or expectation as suspended upon any particular individual
man whatever.

Here, then, arises the [Greek: prôtontokinon]. Thick darkness sits on
every man's mind as to Christ's revelation. He fancies that it amounts
to this: 'Do what is good. Do your duty. Be good.' And with this vague
notion of the doctrine, natural is it that he should think it as old as
the hills. The first step to a saner view is, to understand--if a man
has sense enough to reach so high--that the subtlest discoveries ever
made by man, all put together, do not make one wave of that Atlantic as
to novelty and originality which lies in the moral scheme of
Christianity. I do not mean in the total scheme of Christianity,
redemption, etc. No, but in the ethics.

All ethics that ever Greece refined or Rome illustrated, was, and could
be, only the same universal system of social ethics--ethics proper and
exclusive to man and man _inter se_, with no glimpse of any upward
relationship.

Now Christianity looks upward for the first time. This in the first
place. Secondly, out of that upward look Christianity looks secondarily
down again, and reacts even upon the social ethics in the most
tremendous way.

_For my Book on the Relations of Christianity to Man._--S. T. C. cites
Jeremy Taylor, etc., for horrible passages on the gloomy state of the
chances for virtuous Pagans. S. T. C. in a more liberal generation is
shocked; and of course in his readers as in himself secretly, he
professes more liberal ideas. Aye, but how is he entitled to these
ideas? For, on further consideration, it is not Cicero only, or
Epictetus only, that would suffer under this law of Christianity viewed
in its reagency, but also Abraham, David, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Hezekiah.
Because, how could they benefit by a Redeemer not yet revealed--nay, by
a Redeemer not even existing? For it is not the second person in the
Trinity--not He separately and abstractedly--that is the Redeemer, but
that second person incarnated. St. Paul apparently wished to smuggle
this tremendous question into a fraudulent solution, by mixing up
Abraham (with others pre-Christian and Christian) into the long array of
those whose _Faith_ had saved them. But faith in whom? General faith in
God is not the thing, it is faith in Jesus Christ; and we are solemnly
told in many shapes that no other name was given on earth through which
men could be delivered. Indeed, if not, how is the Messiah of such
exclusive and paramount importance to man? The Messiah was as yet (viz.,
in Abraham's time) a prophecy--a dim, prophetic outline of one who
_should_ be revealed. But if Abraham and many others could do without
Him, if this was a dispensable idea, how was it in any case, first or
last, indispensable? Besides, recur to the theory of Christianity. Most
undeniably it was this, that neither of the two elements interested in
man could save him; not God; He might have power, but His purity
revolted. Power (or doubtfully so), but no will. Not man--for he, having
the will, had no power. God was too holy; manhood too _un_holy. Man's
gifts, applicable, but insufficient. God's sufficient, but
inapplicable. Then came the compromise. How if man could be engrafted
upon God? Thus only, and by such a synthesis, could the ineffable
qualities of God be so co-ordinated with those of man.

Suppose even that a verbal inspiration could have been secured--secured,
observe, against _gradual_ changes in language and against the
reactionary corruption of concurrent versions, which it would be
impossible to guarantee as also enjoying such an inspiration (since, in
that case, _what_ barrier would divide mine or anybody's wilfully false
translations from that pretending to authority? I repeat _what_? None is
conceivable, since what could you have beyond the assurance of the
translator, even which could only guarantee his intentions)--here is a
cause of misinterpretation amounting to ruin, viz., after being read for
centuries as if practically meant for our guidance, such and such a
chapter (_e.g._, Jael and Sisera), long proscribed by the noble as a
record of abominable perfidy, has at length been justified on the ground
that it was never meant for anything else. Thus we might get rid of
David, etc., were it not that for his flexible obedience to the _clerus_
he has been pronounced the man after God's own heart.

Is it not dreadful that at the very vestibule of any attempt to execute
the pretended law of God and its sentences to hell we are interrupted by
one case in every three as exceptional? Of the deaths, one in three are
of children under five. Add to these surely _very_ many up to twelve or
thirteen, and _many_ up to eighteen or twenty, then you have a law which
suspends itself for one case in every two.

_Note in the argument drawn from perishableness of language._ Not only
(which I have noted) is any language, _ergo_ the original, Chaldæan,
Greek, etc., perishable even for those who use it, but also the vast
openings to error which all languages open to translators form a separate
source of error in translators, viz.:

1. The old one on my list that for them the guidance of inspiration has
ceased, else, if not, you must set up an inspiration separately to
translators, since, if you say--No, not at all, why, which then?

2. The uncertainty of a foreign language even in a day contemporary with
the original writer, and therefore over and above what arises from lapse
of time and gradual alterations.

_On Human Progress._--Oftentimes it strikes us all that this is so
insensible as to elude observation the very nicest. Five years add
nothing, we fancy. Now invert your glass. In 1642 Englishmen are
fighting for great abstract principles. In 1460-83 (_i.e._, 100 + 17 +
42 years before, or 159 years) they are fighting for persons, for rival
candidates. In 1460 they could not have conceived more than an Esquimaux
can entertain a question about the constitution of lyric poetry, or the
differential principles of English and Greek tragedy, the barest
approximation to questions that in 1642 are grounds of furious quarrel,
of bloody quarrel, of extermination. Now then, looking forward, you
would see from year to year little if any growth; but inverting your
glass, looking back from the station of 1642 to 1460, you see a progress
that if subdivided amongst all the 159 years would give to each _x_/0 as
its quota, _i.e._ infinity. In fact, it is like the progression from
nothing to something. It is--creation.

All the body of the Christian world would fly out in a rage if you
should say that Christianity required of you many things that were easy,
but one thing that was _not_. Yet this is undoubtedly true; it requires
you to _believe_, and even in the case where you know what it is to
believe, and so far are free from perplexity, you have it not in your
own power to ensure (though you can influence greatly) your own power to
believe. But also great doubt for many (and for all that are not
somewhat metaphysical) attends the knowledge of what is believing.

As to my mother's fancy that Sir W. Jones had found in the East proofs
of Christianity, having gone out an infidel.

To do her justice, never once after she had adopted a theory of
Christianity did she inquire or feel anxious about its proof. But to
review the folly of this idea.

1. That Christianity there where it reigned and was meant to reign
should be insufficient in its proofs; but that in a far distant land,
lurking in some hole or corner, there should be proofs of its truth,
just precisely where these proofs were not wanted. And again, that these
should be reserved for one scholar rambling into a solitary path, where
in a moral sense _nobody_ could follow him (for it _is_ nobody--this or
that oriental scholar). And we are sure that his proof was not of that
order to shine by its own light, else it would have resounded through
England.

2. That for many hundreds of years Christianity should have been
received, generation after generation should have lived under its vital
action, upon no sufficient argument, and suddenly such an argument
should turn up as a reward to a man in a country not Christian for being
more incredulous than his neighbours; how impossible!

That fraudulent argument which affects to view the hardships of an
adventurous life and its perils as capable of one sole impression--that
of repulsion--and secondly as the sole circumstances about such
adventures, injures from the moment when it is perceived: not

1. The writer only; no matter for him, worthless liar, how much he sinks
in the opinion of his readers: but

2. The Apostles. Now see the injury of falsehood. Suddenly it snaps, and
with a great reaction causes a jar to the whole system, which in
ordinary minds it is never likely to recover. The reason it is not
oftener perceived is that people read such books in a somnolent,
inactive state of mind, one-tenth coming to a subject on which they have
already made up their minds, and open to no fresh impressions, the other
nine-tenths caring not one straw about the matter, as reading it in an
age of irreflectiveness and purely through an act of obedience to their
superiors, else not only does this hypocritical attempt to varnish give
way all at once, and suddenly (with an occasion ever after of doubt, and
causing a reflection to any self-sufficient man, suddenly coming to
perceive that he has been cheated, and with some justification for
jealousy thenceforwards to the maker up of a case), but also it robs the
Apostles of the human grace they really possessed. For if we suppose
them armed against all temptations, snares, seductions, by a
supernatural system of endowments, this is but the case of an
angel--nay, not of an angel, for it is probable that when an angel
incarnated himself, or one of the Pagan deities, who was obliged first
to incarnate himself before he could act amongst men, or so much as be
seen by men, he was bound by all the defects of man, _i.e._, he could
choose only an ideal, so far ideal as to elude the worst effects from
vice, intemperance, etc. The angel who wrestled with Jacob probably did
his best; he was a stout fellow, but so was the patriarch. The very
condition of incarnation, and this because the mere external form
already includes limitations (as of a fish, not to fly; of a man, not to
fly, etc.) probably includes as a _necessity_, not as a choice, the
adoption of all evils connected with the nature assumed. Even the Son of
God, once incarnated, was not exempted from any evil of flesh; He grew,
passed through the peculiar infirmities of every stage up to mature
life; would have grown old, infirm, weak, had He lived longer; was
liable to death, the worst of all human evils, and was not, we may be
sure, exempted from any one fleshly desire with regard to sex, or
enemies, or companions, but because that divine principle, which also
_is in man_, yes, in every man the foulest and basest--this light which
the darkness comprehended not, and which in some is early extinguished,
but in _all_ fights fitfully with the winds and storms of this human
atmosphere, in Him was raised to a lustre unspeakable by His pure and
holy will.

If the Apostles were more celestially armed in any other sense than as
we are all armed from above by calling forth our better natures, if in
any other sense than as sorrow arms us by purifying our natures, as
sorrowful reflection, as meditation and earnest endeavours to resist our
angry instincts (which, on the contrary, how often do men _obey_ under
the vile pretence of being put by conscience on a painful duty), then, I
say, what were the Apostles to us? Why should we admire them? How can we
make them models of imitation? It is like that case of Anarcharsis the
Scythian.

It does certainly incense a Christian to think that stupid Mahommedans
should impute to us such _childish_ idolatries as that of God having a
son and heir--just as though we were barbarous enough to believe that
God was liable to old age--that the time was coming, however distant,
when somebody would say to him, 'Come, Sir,' or 'Come, my Lord, really
you are not what you were. It's time you gave yourself some ease
([Greek: euphêmi], time, indeed, that you resigned the powers to which
you are unequal), and let a younger man take the reins.' None but a
filthy barbarian could carry forward his thoughts so little as not to
see that this son in due time would find himself in the same
predicament.

Now mark how Christian lands would enforce this doctrine of unity by
horrid coercions. They hang, drown, burn, crucify those who deny it. So
that, be assured you are planting your corner-stone on the most windy of
delusions. You yourselves do not ascribe any merit to Mahommed separate
from that of revealing the unity of God. Consequently, if that is a
shaken craze arising from mere inability on his part, a little, a very
little information would have cut up by the very roots the whole
peculiarity of Islam. For if a wise man could have assembled these
conceited Arabians and told them: Great thieves, you fancy yourselves to
have shot far ahead of the Christians as to the point of unity, and if
you had I would grant that you had made a prodigious advance. But you
are deceiving quarrellers. It is all a word--mere smoke, that blinds
you. The Christian seems to affirm three Gods, and even to aggravate
this wickedness by calling one of them 'a Son,' thus seeming to accept
that monstrous notion that God is liable to old age and decrepitude, so
as to provide wisely against His own dotage. But all this is an error:
these three apparent Gods are but one, and in the most absolute sense
one.

The most shockingly searching, influential, and permanent blunder that
ever has affected the mind of man has been the fancy that a religion
includes a creed as to its [Greek: aporrhêta], and a morality; in short,
that it was doctrinal by necessity, enactory, and (which has been the
practical part of the blunder) therefore exclusive, because:

1. With our notion of a religion as essentially doctrinal, the very
first axiom about it is, that being true itself it makes all others
false. Whereas, the capital distinction of the Pagan was--that given,
supposing to be assumed, 10,000 religions--all must be true
simultaneously, all equally. When a religion includes any distinct
propositions offered to the understanding (that is, I think, resting
upon a principle or tendency to a consequence by way of differencing
from facts which also are for the understanding, but then barely to
contemplate not with a power of reacting on the understanding, for every
principle introduces into the mind that which may become a modification,
a restraint; whereas, a fact restrains nothing in the way of thought
unless it includes a principle), it would rise continually in its
exclusive power according to the number of those propositions. At first
it might exclude all but ten, eight, seven, and so on; finally, as
integrated it would exclude all.

2. If you ask on what principle a Pagan believed his religion, the
question to him was almost amusing and laughable. I will illustrate the
case. A man meets you who inquires in a hurried, suppose even in an
agitated way, whether you met a tall man, blind of one eye, dressed in
such a coloured dress, etc. Now, does it ever occur to you that the
inquirer is lying? Lying! Wherefore should he lie? Or again, if you say
that your house stands under a hill, that three out of four chimneys
smoke, and that you must indeed try some of the inventions for remedying
this annoyance, would any man in his senses think of speculating on the
possibility that all this should be a romance? Or, to come nearer in the
kind of fact, if a man represented his family fortune as having been
bequeathed by a maiden aunt in the last generation, would any man say
otherwise than that doubtless the man knew his own benefactors and
relatives best? On this same principle, when Christ was mentioned as the
divinity adored by a certain part of the Jews who were by way of
distinction called Christians, why should a Roman object? What motive
could he have for denying the existence or the divine existence of
Christ? Even the idea of dissent or schism, some Jews worshipping, some
protesting, would not much puzzle him. Something like it had occurred in
Pagan lands. Neptune and Athene had contended for Attica. And under the
slight inquiry which he would ever make, or listen to when made by
others, he might wonder at the rancour displayed by the protesting
party, but he would take it for granted that a divinity of some local
section had been unduly pushed into pre-eminence over a more strictly
epichorial divinity. He would go off with this notion, that whereas, the
elder Jews insisted on paying vows, etc., to a God called Jehovah, a
section sought to transfer that allegiance to a divinity called Christ.
If he were further pressed on the subject, he would fancy that very
possibly, as had been thought, found or imagined in the case of Syrian
deities or Egyptian, etc., that perhaps Christ might correspond to
Apollo, as Astarte to Diana, Neptune of Latium to the Poseidôn of
Greece. But if not, that would cause no scruple at all. Thus far it was
by possibility a mere affair of verbal difference. But suppose it
ascertained that in no point of the symbols surrounding the worship of
Christ, or the conception of His person, He could be identified with any
previously-known Pagan God--that would only introduce Him into the
matricula of Gods as a positive novelty. Nor would it have startled a
Roman to hear that in India or any country large enough there should be
a separate Pantheon of many thousand deities, _plus_ some other Pantheon
of divinities corresponding to their own. For Syria--but still more in
one section of Syrian Palestine--this would surprise him _quoad_ the
degree, not _quoad_ the principle. The Jew had a separate or peculiar
God, why not? No nation could exist without Gods: the very separate
existence of a people, trivial as it might be in power and wealth,
argued a tutelary God, but, of course, proportioned to the destinies at
least (and in part to the present size) of the country. Thus far no
difficulties at all. But the morality! Aye, but that would never be
accounted a part of religion. As well confound a science with religion.
Aye, but the [Greek: aporrhêta]. These would be viewed as the rites of
Adonis, or of Ceres; you could not warn him from his preconception that
these concerned only Jews. Where, therefore, lodged the offence? Why
here, as personalities--for such merely were all religions--the God must
be measured by his nation. So some Romans proposed to introduce Christ
into the Roman Pantheon. But what first exploded as a civil offence was
the demand of supremacy and the inconceivable principle set up of
incompatibility. This was mere folly.

A much more solemn, significant and prophetic meaning than the common
one may be secured to the famous passage in St. Matthew--'And thou shalt
call His name _Jesus_.' This injunction wears the most impressive
character belonging to heavenly adjuration, when it is thus confided to
the care and custody of a special angel, and in the very hour of
inauguration, and amongst the very birth-throes of Christianity. For in
two separate modes the attention is secretly pointed and solicited to
the grand serpentine artifice, which met and confronted the almost
insurmountable difficulty besetting Christianity on its very threshold:
First, by the record of the early _therapeutic_ miracles, since in that
way only, viz., by a science of healing, which the philosopher equally
with the populace recognised as resting upon inspiration from God, could
the magistrate and civil authority have been steadily propitiated;
secondly, by the very verbal suggestion couched in the name _Jesus_, or
_Healer_. At the most critical of moments an angel reveals himself, for
the purpose of saying '_Thou shalt call His name Jesus_'--and why Jesus?
Because, says the angel, 'He shall heal or cleanse His people from sin
as from a bodily disease.' Thus, in one and the same moment is suggested
prospectively to the early Christian, who is looking forward in search
of some adequate protection against the civil magistrate, and
theoretically and retrospectively is suggested to the Christian of our
own philosophizing days, that admirable resource of what by a shorthand
expression I will call _Hakimism_. The _Hakim_, the _Jesus_, the
_Healer_, comes from God. Mobs must not be tolerated. But neither must
the deep therapeutic inspirations of God be made of none effect, or
narrowed in their applications. And thus in one moment was the panic
from disease armed against the panic from insurgent mobs; the privileged
Hakim was marshalled against the privileged magistrate; and the deep
superstition, which saw, and not unreasonably, a demon raging in a
lawless mob, saw also a demon not less blind or cruel in the pestilence
that walked in darkness. And, as one magnet creates other magnets, so
also the Hakim, once privileged, could secretly privilege others. And
the physical Hakim could by no test or shibboleth be prevented from
silently introducing the spiritual Hakim. And thus, whilst thrones and
councils were tumultuating in panic, behold! suddenly the Christian
soldier was revealed amongst them as an armed man.

'_Écrasez l'infâme_,' I also say: and who is he? It would be mere
insanity to suppose that it could be _any_ teacher of moral truths. Even
I, who so much despise Socrates, could not reasonably call him
_l'infâme_.

But who, then, is _l'infâme_? It is he who, finding in those great ideas
which I have noticed as revelations from God, and which throw open to
the startled heart the heaven of heavens, in the purity, the holiness,
the peace which passeth all understanding, finding no argument of
divinity, then afterwards _does_ find it in the little tricks of
legerdemain, in conjuring, in præstigia. But here, though perhaps roused
a little to see the baseness of relying on these miracles, and also in
the rear a far worse argument against them, he still feels uncomfortable
at such words applied to things which Christ did. Christ could not
make, nor wished to make, that great which was inherently mean; that
relevant, which was originally irrelevant. If He did things in
themselves mean, it was because He suited Himself to mean minds,
incapable of higher views; wretches such as exist amongst us of modern
days by millions, on whom all His Divine words were thrown away,
wretches deaf and blind and besotted, to whom it was said in vain: 'He
that looketh upon a woman,' and what follows, creating by a rod of
divinity in man's heart a far superior ideal of the moral; who heard
with indifference His 'Bless those who persecute you;' yes, listened
unmoved to His 'Suffer little children to come unto Me;' who heard with
anger His 'In heaven there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage;'
who abhorred His great doctrine that the counsels of God were not read
in the events of things[31]; who slighted as trivial that prayer which a
wise man might study with profit for a thousand years; beasts, wretches,
that turned away deaf and blind, even as their sons turn away, from
these arguments of a truth far transcending all that yet had come
amongst men; but whilst trampling with their brutal hoofs upon such
flowers of Paradise, turned in stupid wonderment to some mere
legerdemain or jugglery.

_The Truth._--But what tongue can express, what scale can measure, the
awful change in man's relations to the unseen world? Where there had
been a blank not filled by anything, not by any smoke or dusky tarnish
of suspicion, not filled by so much as any shadowy outline or vague
phantom of possibility, _there_ was now seen rising, 'like Teneriffe or
Atlas'--say rather, by symbolizing the greatest of human interests by
the greatest of human visual objects, like the snowy peaks of the
Himalaya, peaks that by men's feelings are referred to the heavens
rather than to the earth; to the beings 'whose dwelling is no thick
flesh,' rather than to men who have in no age succeeded in scaling them;
and who in their steps to those mighty thrones have heard nothing but
dread crashes of sound--again to fade or vanish, the colossal form,
never the mighty idea of 'The Truth.'[32] Where there had been nothing,
a blank, a chasm, there stood in solemn proportions a new object for
man, called The Truth. Why was it called _The_ Truth? How could such an
idea arise? Many persons will be weak enough to fancy that, as [Greek:
hopoêtês] was sometimes an artifice of rhetoric for expressing the
exclusive supremacy of Homer, and as by a pure affectation and movement
of dissimulation a man was called by the title of _The Orator_, his own
favourite Greek or Roman thus affecting for the moment to know of no
other (for all such emphatic and exclusive uses of _the_ imply a
momentary annihilation of the competitors, as though in comparison of
the ideal exemplification these minor and approximating forms had no
existence--or at least, not _quoad hunc locum_--as 'the mountain in
Sicily' would rightly indicate Etna), on the same artificial principle
they may imagine rhetoricians to have denominated (or if not, to have
had it in their power to denominate) some one department of truth which
they wished to favour as _the_ truth. But this conventional denomination
would not avail, and for two reasons: First, that rival modes of truth
(physics against mathematics, rhetoric against music) would contest the
title, and no such denomination would have a basis of any but a sort of
courtesy or vicarious harmonious reality from the very first. Secondly,
that, standing in no relation whatever to God, every mode, form,
division or subdivision of truth merely intellectual would gain nothing
at all by such ostentatious arts. Algebra has been distinguished by
glorious names; so has the fancied knowledge of transmutation applied to
the metals; so, doubtless, has many a visionary speculation of magic;
so, again, has the ridiculous schwermerey of the Rabbis in particular
ages. But those are as transient and even for the moment as partial
titles as the titles of Invincible or Seraphic applied to scholastic
divines. Out of this idea the truth grew, next (suppose _x_) another
_Martyrdom_.

The difference between all human doctrines and this is as between a
marble statue and a quick thing. The statue may be better, and it may be
of better material; it may be of ivory, of marble, and amongst marbles
known to the ancient sculptors of several different kinds the most
prized; of silver gilt, of hollow gold, of massy gold, and in all
degrees of skill; but still one condition applies to all--whatever the
material, whoever the artist, the statue is inanimate, the breath of
life is not within its nostrils. Motion, spontaneity, action and
antagonist action, the subtle watch-work of the brain, the mighty
laboratory of the heart, vision, sensibility, self-propagated warmth,
pleasure, hope, memory, thought, liberty--not one of these divine gifts
does it possess. It is cold, icy, senseless, dull, inert matter. Let
Phidias have formed the statue, it is no better. Let the purest gold be
its material, it is no worthier than the meanest model in clay to the
valuation of the philosopher. And here, as in so many cases, the great
philosopher meets with the labouring man; both meet with the little
innocent child. All have the same undervaluation of the statue. And if
any man values it preposterously, it will be neither a great
philosopher, nor a labouring man with horny fists, nor a little innocent
and natural child. It will be some crazy simpleton, who dignifies
himself as a man of taste, as _elegans formarum spectator_, as one
having a judicious eye for the distinctions of form. But now, suddenly,
let one of the meanest of these statues begin to stir and shiver with
the mystery of life, let it be announced that something 'quick' is in
the form, let the creeping of life, the suffusion of sensibility, the
awful sense of responsibility and accountability ripen themselves, what
a shock--what a panic! What an interest--how profound--would diffuse
itself in every channel. Such is the ethics of God as contrasted with
the ethics of Greek philosophers. The only great thing ever done by
Greece or by Greek philosophers was the ethics. Yet, after all, these
were but integrations of the natural ethics implanted in each man's
heart. Integrations they were, but rearrangements--redevelopments from
some common source.

It is remarkable that the Scriptures, valuing clearness and fencing
against misunderstandings above all things, never suspend--there is no
[Greek: epochê] in the scriptural style of the early books. And,
therefore, when I first came to a text, 'If when,' I was thunderstruck,
and I found that this belongs to the more cultivated age of Hebrew
literature.

'_And the swine because it divideth the hoof, yet cheweth not the cud,
it is unclean unto you_' (Deut. xiv. 8). Now the obvious meaning is,
_primâ facie_, that the ground of its uncleanness was its dividing the
hoof. Whereas, so far from this, to divide the hoof is a ground of
cleanness. It is a fact, a _sine quâ non_--that is, a negative condition
of cleanness; but not, therefore, taken singly the affirmative or
efficient cause of cleanness. It must in addition to this chew the
cud--it must ruminate. Which, again, was but a _sine quâ non_--that is,
a negative condition, indispensable, indeed; whose absence could not be
tolerated in any case, but whose presence did not therefore, and as a
matter of course, avail anything. For the reverse case occurred in the
camel, hare, and rabbit. They _do_ chew the cud, the absence of which
habit caused the swine to be rejected, but then they 'divide not the
hoof.' Accordingly they were equally rejected as food with the swine.

We see the great Jewish lawgiver looking forward to cases which actually
occurred nearly five hundred years after, as demanding a king, and again
looking still farther to cases eight hundred and a thousand years
after--their disobedience and rebellion to God. Now, many will think
that it must have been an easy thing for any people, when swerving from
their law, and especially in that one great fundamental article of
idolatry as the Jews so continually did, and so naturally when the case
is examined, to always have an easy retreat: the plagues and curses
denounced would begin to unfold themselves, and then what more easy than
to relinquish the idolatrous rites or customs, resuming with their old
rituals to God their old privileges? But this was doubly impossible.
First, because men utterly misconceive the matter when they suppose that
with direct consecutive succession the judgment would succeed the
trespass. Large tracts of time would intervene. Else such direct
clockwork as sin and punishment, repentance and relief, would dishonour
God not less than they would trivialize the people. God they would
offend by defeating all His purposes; the people they would render vile
by ripening into mechanic dissimulation. The wrath of God slept often
for a long season; He saw as one who saw not. And by the time that His
large councils had overtaken them, and His judgments were fast coming up
with the offenders, they had so hardened themselves in error that a
whole growth of false desires had sprung up, and of false beliefs, blind
maxims, bad habits, bad connections, and proverbs, which found out a
reconciliation of that irreconcilable truth with the foulest pollutions.
The victims of temptation had become slow even to suspect their own
condition. And, if some more enlightened did so, the road of existence
was no longer easy. Error had woven chains about them. They were
enmeshed. And it is but a faint emblem of their situation to say, that
as well may a man commence a habit of intoxication for the purpose of
having five years' pleasure, and then halting in his career, as the Jews
may contaminate themselves tentatively with idolatrous connections under
the delusion that it would always be time enough for untreading their
steps when these connections had begun to produce evil. For they could
not recover the station from which they swerved. They that had now
realized the _casus foederis_, the case in which they had covenanted
themselves to desist from idolatry, were no longer the men who had made
that covenant. They had changed profoundly and imperceptibly. So that
the very vision of truth was overcast with carnal doubts; the truth
itself had retired to a vast distance and shone but feebly for them, and
the very will was palsied in its motions of recovery.

In such a state, suppose it confirmed and now threatening towards a
total alienation from the truth once delivered, what could avail to save
them? Nothing but affliction in the heaviest form. Vain it was now to
hope for a cheaper restoration, since the very first lightening of their
judicial punishment would seem to them a reason for relapsing, by
seeming to argue that there had been two principles. It was but a false
alarm, they would say, after all. Affliction, therefore, was past all
substitution or remedy. Yet even this case, this prostration to the
ground, had been met for a thousand years by God's servants.

If I have shown that quickening spirit which, diffusing itself through
all thoughts, schemata, possible principles, motives of sensibility, and
forms of taste, has differenced the pre-Christian man from the
post-Christian; if I have detected that secret word which God subtly
introduced into this world, kept in a state of incubation for two
millennia, then with the flames and visible agency of a volcanic
explosion forced into infinite disruption, caused to kindle into a
general fire--that word by which sadness is spread over the face of
things, but also infinite grandeur--then may I rightly lay this as one
chapter of my Emendation of Human Knowledge.

The same thing precisely takes place in literature as in spiritual
things. When a man is entangled and suffocated in business, all relating
to that which shrinks up to a point--and observe, I do not mean that
being conceived as a tent above his head it contracts, but that, viewed
as a body at a distance, it shrinks up to a point, and really vanishes
as a real thing--when this happens, having no subjective existence at
all, but purely and intensely objective, he misconceives it just in the
same way as a poor ignorant man misconceives learning or knowledge;
fancying, _e.g._, like Heylius senior, that he ought to know the road
out of the wood in which they were then entangled.

It is probable that Adam meant only the unity of man as to his nature,
which also is meant by making all men of one blood. Similarly
Boeckh--[Greek: en genei]--which does not mean that Gods _and_ men are
the same, but that of each the separate race has unity in itself. So the
first man, Adam, will mean the earliest race of men, perhaps spread
through thousands of years.

It is a violent case of prejudice, this ordinary appeal of Bossuet,
'Qu'ont gagné les philosophes avec leurs discours pompeux?' (p. 290).
Now how _should_ that case have been tried thoroughly before the
printing of books? Yet it may be said the Gospel _was_ so tried. True,
but without having the power of fully gratifying itself through the
whole range of its capability. That was for a later time, hence a new
proof of its reality.

_An Analogy._--1. I have somewhere read that a wicked set of Jews,
probably, when rebuked for wickedness, replied, 'What! are we not the
peculiar people of God? Strange, then, if we may not have a privilege
more than others to do wrong!' The wretches fancied that to be the
people of God--the chosen people--implied a license to do wrong, and had
a man told them, No, it was just the other way; they were to be better
than others, absolutely, they would have trembled with wrath.

2. Precisely the same idea, I am sure, lurks in many minds as to
repentance. It is odious to think of, this making God the abettor and
encourager of evil; but I am sure it is so, viz., that, because God has
said He will have mercy on the penitent, they fancy that, as the chief
consequence from that doctrine, they may commit sins without anxiety;
though others, not under the Christian privilege, would be called to
account for the same sin, penitent or not penitent. But they--such is
their thought--are encouraged to sin by the assurance that repentance
will always be open to them, and this they may pursue at leisure.

Now, if a man should say: 'But, my friends, this means _real
penitence_;' they would reply, 'Oh, but we mean _real penitence_.'
'Well, if you do, you must know that that is not always possible.' 'Not
possible!' Then make them understand that; they will roar with wrath,
and protest against it as no privilege at all.

The literal interpretation of the Mosaic Cosmogony is the very
expression of a barbarian mind and people, relying so far on magic as to
make all natural process of generation or production impossible, relying
so far on natural processes as to make the fiat of supreme power
evidently inapplicable. It is exactly the Minerva of the Pagans draggled
in her skirts.

_Idolatry._--It is not only a mere blind crotchet of Isaiah's
(Jeremiah's?) to ridicule idols--utterly wide of any real imperfection,
but also it misses all that really might be bad. The true evil is not to
kindle the idea of Apollo by an image or likeness, but to worship
Apollo, _i.e._, a god to be in some sense false--belonging to a system
connected with evil. That may be bad; but there can be no separate evil
in reanimating the idea of this Apollo by a picture.

I have observed many times, but never could understand in any rational
sense, the habit of finding a confirmation of the Bible in mere
archæologic facts occasionally brought to light and tallying with the
Biblical records. As in the Pharaonic and Egyptian usages, and lately in
the case of Nimrod, a great collateral confirmation of Ezekiel has been
fancied. But how? Supposing Ezekiel to have recited accurately the
dimensions of Nineveh, how should _that_ make him a true prophet? Or
supposing him a false one, what motive should that furnish for
mismeasuring Nineveh? The Gospels appear to have been written long after
the events, and when controversies or variations had arisen about them,
they have apparently been modified and shaped to meet those disputes.

_The sun stands still._ I am persuaded that this means no such
incredible miracle as is ordinarily imagined. The interpretation arises
from misconceiving an Oriental expression, and a forcible as well as
natural one. Of all people the Jews could least mistake the nature of
the sun and moon, as though by possibility they could stand in a
relation to a particular valley: that the sun could have stood still in
Gibeon, and the moon in Ajalon. Since they viewed sun and moon as two
great lights, adequated and corresponding to day and night, that alone
shows that they did not mean any objective solstice of the hour, for
else why in Ajalon? Naturally it would be a phenomenon chiefly made
known to the central sanctity of that God whose miraculous interposition
had caused so unknown an arrest of ordinary nature; Jerusalem was not
then known, it was Jebus, a city of Jebusites; and the fact which
subsequently created its sanctity did not occur till more than four
centuries afterwards (viz., on the threshing-floor of Araunah). But
Shiloh existed, and Horeb, and Sinai, and the graves of the Patriarchs.
And all those places would have expounded the reference of the miracle,
would have traced it to the very source of its origin; so as to show not
then only, not to the contemporaries only, but (which would be much more
important) to after generations, who might suspect some mistake in their
ancestors as explaining their meaning, or in themselves as understanding
it. What it really means, I am persuaded, is merely to express that the
day was, of all historical days, the most important. What! do people
never reflect on the [Greek: to] positive of their reading? If they
_did_, they would remember that the very idea of a great cardinal event,
as of the foundation of the Olympiads, was as an arrest, a pausing, of
time; causing you to hang and linger on that time. And the grandeur of
this Jewish Waterloo in which God established possessions for His people
and executed an earthly day of judgment on the ancient polluters
(through perhaps a thousand years) of the sacred land (already sacred as
the abode and burying-place of His first servants under a covenant) was
expressed by saying that the day lingered, arrested itself by a burthen
of glorious revolution so mighty as this great day of overthrow. For
remember this: Would not God have changed Pharaoh's heart, so
intractable, by such a miracle, had it been at all open to His eternal
laws? Whereas, if you say, Aye, but on that account why grant even so
much distinction to the day as your ancestor does? answer, it was the
_final-cause_ day.

The English Church pretends to give away the Bible without note or
comment, or--which, in fact, is the meaning--any impulse or bias to the
reader's mind. The monstrous conceit of the Protestant Churches, viz.,
the right of private judgment (which is, in effect, like the right to
talk nonsense, or the right to criticise Sir John Herschel's books
without mathematics), is thus slavishly honoured. Yet all is deception.
Already in the translation at many hundred points she has laid a
restraining bias on the reader, already by the division of verses,
already by the running abstracts over the Prophets, she has done this.

Can the power adequated to a generation of minds, or to a succession of
many generations, find its comprehension in an individual? Can the might
which overflows the heaven of heavens be confined within a local
residence like that which twice reared itself by its foundations, and
three times by its battlements, above the threshing-floor of
Araunah?[33] Of that mystery, of that local circumscription--in what
sense it was effected, in what sense not effected, we know nothing. But
this by mere human meditation, this profound difficulty we may humanly
understand and measure, viz., the all but impossibility of reaching the
man who stands removed to an extent of fifteen centuries. But here comes
in the unspiritual mind which thinks only of facts--yet mark me so far,
Rome by an augury of wicked gods stretched to a period of 1,200 years.
Yet how open to doubt in one sense! Not, I am sure, in any sense
understood by man, but I doubt not in the ominous sense intended.
Changed in all things essential, she was yet a mighty sceptered potentate
for the world until her dependency on Attila's good-will and
forbearance. 444 after Christ added to 752 B. C. complete the period.
But period for what? For whom? For a great idea that could not be lost.
The conception could not perish if the execution perished. But, next
think of the temptation to _mythus_. And, finally, of God's plan
unrealized, His conceptions unanswered. We should remember that by the
confusion introduced into the economy of internal Divine operations
there is a twofold difficulty placed between the prayer and the
attainment of the prayer. 1st, the deflection, slight though it may seem
to the man, from the state of perfect simplicity and of natural desire;
2ndly, the deflection of the object desired from the parallelism with
the purposes _now_ became necessary to God in order to remedy
_abnormous_ shifting of the centre by man. And again, in the question of
the language of Scripture, I see the same illustration. Sir William
Jones, in a fit of luxurious pleasure-giving, like Gibbons' foolish
fit[34] as to the Archbishop of Carthagena, praises the language of
Scripture as unattainable. I say, No. This is hypocrisy. It is no
dishonour if we say of God that, in the sense meant by Sir William
Jones, it is not possible for Him to speak better than powerful writers
can speak. They have the same language as their instrument, and as
impossible would it be for Apollonius or Sir William Jones to perform a
simple process of addition better than an ordinary keeper of a shop. In
the schemata, because in the original ideas, God says indeed what man
cannot, for these are peculiar to God; but who before myself has shown
what they were? As to mere language, however, and its management, we
have the same identically. And when a language labours under an
infirmity, as all do, not God Himself could surmount it! He is
compromised, coerced, by the elements of language; but what of that? It
is an element of man's creating. And just as in descending on man by His
answers God is defeated or distorted many times by the foul atmosphere
in which man has thrown himself, so in descending upon the mind (unless
by dreams, or some language that he may have kept pure), God is thwarted
and controlled by the imperfections of human language. And, apart from
the ideas, I myself could imitate the Scriptural language--I know its
secret, its principle of movement which lies chiefly in high
abstractions--far better than is done in most parts of the Apocrypha.

The power lies in the spirit--the animating principle; and verily such a
power seems to exist. And the fact derived from the holiness, the
restraints even upon the Almighty's power through His own holiness,
goodness, and wisdom, are so vast that, instead of the unlimited power
which hypocritical glorifiers ascribe to Him by way of lip-honour, in
reaching man _ex-abundantibus_ in so transcendent a way that mere excess
of means would have perplexed a human choice, on the contrary, I am
persuaded that besides the gulf of 1,500 years so as to hold on, so as
to hold hard, and to effect the translation of His will unaltered,
uncorrupted, through the violent assaults of idolatries all round, and
the perverse, headstrong weakness of a naturally unbelieving people,[35]
down to the time of Christ from the time of Moses--there was the labour
hardly to be effected; and why? I have always been astonished at men
treating such a case as a simple _original_ problem as to God. But far
otherwise. It was a problem secondary to a change effected by man. His
rays, His sun, still descended as ever; but when they came near to the
foul atmosphere of man, no ray could pierce unstained, unrefracted, or
even untwisted. It was distorted so as to make it hardly within the
limits of human capacity (observe, the difficulty was in the human power
to receive, to sustain, to comprehend--not in the Divine power to
radiate, to receive what was directed to it). Often I have reflected on
the tremendous gulf of separation placed between man, by his own act,
and all the Divine blessings which could visit him. (This is illustrated
by prayer; for, while we think it odd that so many prayers of good men
for legitimate objects of prayer should seem to be unanswered, we
nevertheless act as to our prayers in a kind of unconscious hypocrisy,
as though to our sense they had been answered in some ineffable way, and
all the while our conduct, to speak strictly, lies outside all this, and
remains wholly uninfluenced by it).

These ideas of God have life only by their own inherent power: yet what
risk that Jews should lapse into supposing themselves separately a
favoured people? By this very error they committed the rebellion against
which they had been warned--in believing that they only were concerned
in receiving a supernatural aid of redemption: thus silently
substituting their own merits for the Divine purposes. All which did in
fact happen. But their errors were overruled, else how could the human
race be concerned in their offences, errors, or ministries? The Jews
forgot what we moderns forget, that they were no separate objects of
favour with God, but only a means of favour.

What occasion to 'argal-bargal' about why God did not sooner accomplish
the scheme of Christianity? For besides that, 1st, possibly the scheme
in its expansion upon earth required a corresponding expansion
elsewhere; 2ndly, it is evident even to our human sense that none but
the most childish eudamonist, whose notion of happiness is that of lazy
luxury, would think of cramming men, bidding them open their mouths, and
at once drugging them with a sensual opium (as all blessing must be
without previous and commensurate elevation to the level of that
blessing); 3rdly, the physical nature of the evil to be undone was such
as would not have _been_ (_objectively_ would not have been, but still
less could it _subjectively_ have been) for the conception of man that
dreadful mystery which it really is, had the awful introversion been
measured back by fewer steps; 4thly, and finally, it seems at first
sight shocking to say of God that He cannot do this and this, but it is
not so. Without adverting to the dark necessities that compass our
chaotic sense when we ascend by continual abstraction to the _absolute_,
without entangling ourselves vainly in those wildernesses that no
created intellect can range or measure--even one sole attribute of God,
His holiness, makes it as impossible for Him to proceed except by
certain steps as it would be impossible for a man, though a free agent,
and apparently master, as he feels and thinks, of his own life, to cut
his throat while in a state of pleasurable health both of mind and
body.

5.--Political, etc.

Sir Robert Walpole, as to patriots, was like a man who has originally,
from his nursery up, been thoroughly imbued with the terror of ghosts,
which by education and example afterwards he has been encouraged to
deny. Half he does disbelieve, and, under encouraging circumstances, he
does disbelieve it stoutly. But at every fresh plausible alarm his early
faith intrudes with bitter hatred against a class of appearances that,
after all, he is upon system pledged to hold false. Nothing can be more
ludicrous than his outcry, and his lashing of his own tail to excite his
courage and his wrath and his denial--than his challenge of the lurking
patriots in what he conceives the matter of frauds on the revenue. He
assaults them as if he saw them standing in a row behind the door, and
yet he pummels them for being mere men of the shades--horrible
mockeries. Had there been any truth in their existence, surely, so
strongly as they muster by their own report, some one or other of this
fact should have given me warning--should have exposed the frauds. But
no, all are silent as the grave. But here Sir Robert Walpole is as much
wrong as if, doubting the value or power of Methodist preachers, he
should make it the test of their useful existence that, as often as a
highwayman, a footpad, started out of the wayside, from the other side
should start a Methodist preacher to reason with him and to convert
him.

Are the Whigs less aristocratic than the Tories? Not at all. In tendency
by principle they are the same. The real difference is not in the creed,
in the groundwork, but in certain points of practice and method.

'He took his stand upon the truth'--said by me of Sir Robert Peel--might
seem to argue a lower use of '_the_ truth,' but in fact it is as happens
to the article _the_ itself: you say _the_ guard, speaking of a coach;
_the_ key, speaking of a trunk or watch, _i.e._, _the_ as by usage
appropriated to every coach, watch, trunk. So here the truth, namely, of
the particular perplexity.

The Sepoy mutiny will be best understood if you suppose the Roman
emperors, from Romulus to Augustus, from the Alban Fathers down to the
Ostrogoths--the whole line of a thousand years crowded into two.

Trunkmakers may be great men: they clearly have the upper hand of
authors whom all the world admits to be great men. For the trunkmaker is
the _principal_ in the concern--he makes the trunk, whereas the author,
quite a secondary artist, furnishes only the linings.

_Case of Casuistry._--Wraxall justly notices that errors like Prince
Rupert's from excess of courage, however ruinous, are never resented by
a country. _Ergo_ the inference that prudence would be, always if in
Byng's or Lord St. German's cases, in a matter of doubt held to be bold
fighting; and yet in morals is that an allowable position?

6.--Personal Confessions, etc.

Avaunt, ye hypocrites! who make a whining pretence, according to a fixed
rule, of verbally uttering thanks to God for every chastisement, and who
say this is good for you. So do not I, being upright, and God seeing my
heart, who also sees that I murmur not; but if it were not good in the
end, yet I submit. He is not offended that with upright sincerity I give
no thanks for it. And I say that, unless a man perceives the particular
way in which it has been good for him, he cannot sincerely, truly, or so
as not to mock God with his lips, give thanks simply on an _à priori_
principle, though, of course, he may submit in humbleness.

I do not believe that the faith of any man in the apparent fact that he
will never again see such a person (_i.e._, by being removed by death)
is real. I believe that the degree of faith in this respect is regulated
by an original setting or fixing of our nature quite unconscious to
ourselves. So, again, I believe that hope is never utterly withdrawn,
despair is never absolute. And again, I believe that, at the lowest
nadir, the resource of dying as a means of escape and translation to new
chances and openings is lodged in every man far down below the
sunlights of consciousness. He feels that his death is not final; were
it otherwise he could not rush at the escape so lightly. Indeed, were
his fate fixed immutably, I feel that it would not have been left
possible for him to commit suicide.

_Justice._--You say in the usual spirit of vanity, Y or X has the same
degree of the spirit of justice as V. This is easily said, but the test
is, what will he _do_ for it? Suppose a man to propose rewards
exclusively to those who assisted at a fire, then X and Y, suppose, have
equally seen that many did _not_ assist, even refused to do so. But X
perhaps will shrink from exposing them; V will encounter any hatred for
truth and justice by exposing the undeserving.

It is a foolish thing to say 'Hard words break no bones.' How impossible
to call up from the depths of forgotten times all the unjust or shocking
insinuations, all the scornful refusals to understand one aright, etc.
But surely an injury is nothing to them; for that may be measured, made
sensible, and cannot be forgotten, whereas the other case is like the
dispute, 'Is he wrong as a _poet_?' compared with this, 'Is he wrong as
a _geometrician_?' There need be no anger with the latter dispute; it is
capable of decision.

Then, again, a heart so lacerated is required by Christianity to forgive
the lacerator. Hard it is to do, and imperfectly it is ever done, except
through the unbuckling of human nature under higher inspirations
_working together with time_.

Instead of being any compliment it is the most profound insult, the
idea one can write something rapidly. It is no homage to the writer; it
is villainous insensibility to the written.

Two subjects of stories occur to me. 1. For my Arabian tales, founded on
the story of the Minyas Treasure-House at Orchomenus. 2. Another of an
abbess, who was such by dispensation, but had been married; her
accomplished son succeeds in carrying off a nun. She labours for the
discovery and punishment of the unknown criminal, till she learns who he
is; then parting from him for ever in the early dawn, she, sacrificing
to a love that for her was to produce only hatred and the total
destruction of the total hopes of her ageing life. Splendide Mendax! and
the more angel she.

I find the double effect as the reason of my now reading again with
profit every book, however often read in earlier times, that by and
through my greater knowledge and the more numerous questions growing out
of that knowledge, I have deeper interest, and by and through this
deeper interest I have a value put upon those questions, and I have
other questions supervening through the interest alone. The interest is
incarnated in the wider knowledge; the knowledge is incarnated in the
interest, or at least the curiosity and questions.

Upon trying to imprint upon my memory that at such a period the Argives
ceased to be called Pelasgi, and were henceforward called Danai, I felt
how impracticable (and doubtless in their degree injurious, for though
an infinitesimal injury only as regards any single act doubtless, yet,
_per se_, by tendency doubtless all blank efforts of the memory
unsupported by the understanding are bad), must be any violent efforts
of the memory not falling in with a previous preparedness.

_Music._--I am satisfied that music involves a far greater mystery than
we are aware of. It is that universal language which binds together all
creatures, and binds them by a profounder part of their nature than
anything merely intellectual ever could.

It is remarkable (as proving to me the delibility of caste) that the
Sudras of Central India, during its vast confusions under the Mahrattas
have endeavoured to pass themselves for descendants of the Kshatriyas
(or warrior caste) by assuming the sacred thread, also assumed by the
Rajpoots, and also by some of the Sikhs.

I never see a vast crowd of faces--at theatres, races, reviews--but one
thing makes them sublime to me: the fact that all these people have to
die. Strange it is that this multitude of people, so many of them
intellectually, but also (which is worse) morally, blind, are without
forethought or sense of the realities of life.

Though I love fun, eternal jesting, buffoonery, punning absolutely kills
me. Such things derive all their value from being made to intervene well
with other things.

This is curious:

    Shame, pain, and poverty shall I endure,
    When ropes or opium can my ease procure?

This offends nobody, not till you say, 'I'll buy a rope.' But now:

    When money's gone, and I no debts can pay,
    _Self-murder_ is an honourable way--

though the same essentially, this shocks all men.

I have in the course of my misfortunes fasted for thirty years: a
dreadful fate, if it had been to come. But, being past, it is lawful to
regard it with satisfaction, as having, like all fasting and
mortification, sharpened to an excruciating degree my intellectual
faculties. Hence my love and even furor now for mathematics, from which
in my youth I fled.

The _Arrow Ketch_, six guns, is recorded in the _Edinburgh Advertiser_
for June 14th, 1844, as having returned home (to Portsmouth) on
Thursday, June 7th, 'after six years and upwards in commission,' most of
it surveying the Falkland Islands; 'has lost only two men during this
long service, and those from natural causes;' 'never lost a spar, and
has ploughed the ocean for upwards of 100,000 miles.'

Anecdotes from _Edinburgh Advertiser_, for June and May. The dog of a
boy that died paralytic from grief. Little child run over by railway
waggon and horse, clapping its hands when the shadow passed away,
leaving it unhurt. Little girl of six committing suicide from fear of a
stepmother's wrath.

To note the dire reactions (?) of evils: young thieves growing to old
ones, no sewers, damp, famine-engendering, desolating and wasting
plagues or typhus fever, want of granaries or mendacious violence
destroying food, civil feuds coming round in internecine wars, and
general desolations, and, as in Persia, eight millions occupying the
homesteads of three hundred millions. Here, if anywhere, is seen the
almighty reactions through which the cycle of human life, oscillating,
moves.

In the speech of the Lord Provost of Edinburgh (reported on June 14th,
1844), it is recited that boys 'left to stroll about the streets and
closes,' acquire habits so fixed, if not of vice, at least of idleness,
that in consequence of their not being trained to some kind of
discipline in their early years, the habit of vagabondizing acquires
such power that it is uncontrollable. And how apt and forcible was that
quotation in the place assigned it: 'If thou forbear to deliver them
that are drawn unto death, and those that are ready to be slain; if thou
sayest, _Behold, we knew it not_, doth not He that pondereth the heart,
consider it?'--consider it, regard it, make account of it.

_Manners._--The making game of a servant before company--a thing
impossible to well-bred people. Now observe how this is illustrative of
H---- Street.

I confess myself wholly at a loss to comprehend the objections of the
Westminster reviewer and even of my friend Dr. Nichol, to my commentary
on the strange appearance in Orion. The reviewer says that this
appearance (on which he seems to find my language incomprehensible) had
been dispersed by Lord Rosse's telescope. True, or at least so I hear.
But for all this, it was originally created by that telescope. It was
in the interval between the first report and the subsequent reports
from Lord Rosse's telescope that I made my commentary. But in the case
of contradiction between two reports, more accurate report I have not.
As regards the reviewer, there had been no time for this, because the
book, which he reviews, is a simple reprint in America, which he knows I
had had no opportunity of revising. But Dr. Nichol perplexes me. That a
new stage of progress had altered the appearances, as doubtless further
stages will alter them, concerns me nothing, though referring to a
coming republication; for both alike apparently misunderstood the case
as though it required a _real_ phenomenon for its basis. To understand
the matter as it really is, I beg to state this case. Wordsworth in at
least four different places (one being in the fourth book of 'The
Excursion,' three others in Sonnets) describes most impressive
appearances amongst the clouds: a monster, for instance, with a
bell-hanging air, a dragon agape to swallow a golden spear, and various
others of affecting beauty. Would it have been any just rebuke to
Wordsworth if some friend had written to him: 'I regret most sincerely
to say that the dragon and the golden spear had all vanished before nine
o'clock'? So, again, of Hawthorne's face on a rock. The very beauty of
such appearances is in part their evanescence.

To be or _not_ to be. 'Not to be, by G----' said Garrick. This is to be
cited in relation to Pope's--

    'Man never is, but always to be blessed.'

_Political Economy._--Which of these two courses shall I take? 1. Shall
I revise, extend, condense my logic of Political Economy, embodying
every doctrine (and numbering them) which I have amended or
re-positioned, and introduce them thus in a letter to the
Politico-Economical Society: 'Gentlemen, certain ideas fundamental to
Political Economy I presented in a book in the endeavour to effect a
certain purpose. These were too much intermingled with less elementary
ideas in consequence of my defective self-command from a dreadful
nervous idea, and thus by interweaving they were overlapped and lost.
But I am not disposed to submit to that wrong. I affirm steadily that
the foundations of Political Economy are rotten and crazy. I defy, and
taking up my stand as a scholar of Aristotle, I defy all men to gainsay
the following exposures of folly, one or any of them. And when I show
the darkness all round the very base of the hill, all readers may judge
how great is that darkness.' Or, 2. Shall I introduce them as a chapter
in my Logic?

7.--PAGAN LITERATURE.

We must never forget, that it is not _impar_ merely, but also _dispar_.
And such is its value in this light, that I protest five hundred kings'
ransoms, nay, any sum conceivable as a common contribution from all
nations would not be too much for the infinite treasure of the Greek
tragic drama alone. Is it superior to our own? No, nor (so far as
capable of collation) not by many degrees approaching to it. And were
the case, therefore, one merely of degrees, there would be no room for
the pleasure I express. But it shows us the ultimatum of the human mind
mutilated and castrated of its infinities, and (what is worse) of its
moral infinities.

You must imagine not only everything which there is dreadful in fact,
but everything which there is mysterious to the imagination in the
pariah condition, before you can approach the Heracleidæ. Yet, even with
this pariah, how poorly do most men conceive it as nothing more than a
civil, a police, an economic affair!

Valckenaer, an admirable Greek scholar, was not a man of fine
understanding; nor, to say the truth, was Porson. Indeed, it is
remarkable how mean, vulgar, and uncapacious has been the range of
intellect in many first-rate Grecians; though, on the other hand, the
reader would deeply deceive himself if he should imagine that Greek is
an attainment other than difficult, laborious, and requiring exemplary
talents. Greek taken singly is, to use an indispensable Latin word,
_instar_, the knowledge of all other languages. But men of the highest
talents have often beggarly understandings. Hence, in the case of
Valckenaer, we must derive the contradictions in his diatribe. He
practises this intolerable artifice; he calls himself [Greek:
philenripideios]; bespeaks an unfair confidence from the reader; he
takes credit for being once disposed to favour and indulge Euripides. In
this way he accredits to the careless reader all the false charges or
baseless concessions which he makes on any question between Euripides
and his rivals. Such men as Valckenaer it is who are biased and
inflected beforehand, without perceiving it, by all the commonplaces of
criticism. These, it is true, do not arise out of mere shadows. Usually
they have a foundation in some fact or modification. What they fail in
is, in the just interpretation of these truths, and in the reading of
their higher relations. 'The Correggiosity of Correggio' was precisely
meant for Valckenaer. The Sophocleity of Sophocles he is keen to
recognise, and the superiority of Sophocles as an artist is undeniable;
nor is it an advantage difficult to detect. On the other hand, to be
more Homeric than Homer is no praise for a tragic poet. It is far more
just, pertinent praise, it is a ground of far more interesting praise,
that Euripides is granted by his undervalues to be the most _tragic_
([Greek: tragichotatos]) of tragic poets. After that he can afford to
let Sophocles be '[Greek: Homerichôtos], who, after all, is not '[Greek:
Homerichôtutos], so long as Æschylus survives. But even so far we are
valuing Euripides as a poet. In another character, as a philosopher, as
a large capacious thinker, as a master of pensive and sorrow-tainted
wisdom, as a large reviewer of human life, he is as much beyond all
rivalship from his scenic brethren as he is below one of them as a
scenic artist.

Is the Nile ancient? So is Homer. Is the Nile remote and hiding its head
in fable? So is Homer. Is the Nile the diffusive benefactor of the
world? So is Homer.[36]

_The Æneid._--It is not any supposed excellence that has embalmed this
poem; but the enshrining of the differential Roman principle (the grand
aspiring character of resolution), all referred to the central principle
of the aggrandizement of Rome.

The sublime of wrath is nowhere exhibited so well as in Juvenal. Yet in
Juvenal pretty glimpses of rural rest--

    '... infans cum collusore catello.'[37]

That is pretty! There is another which comes to my mind and suggests his
rising up and laying aside, etc., and shows it to be an _occasional_
act, and, _ergo_, his garden is but a relaxation, amusement.

Glances which the haughty eyes of Rome threw sometimes gently and
relentingly aside on man or woman, children or the flowers.

Herodotus is as sceptical as Plutarch is credulous. How often is _now_
and _at this time_ applied to the fictitious present of the author,
whilst a man arguing generally beforehand would say that surely a man
could always distinguish between _now_ and _then_.

8.--HISTORICAL, ETC.

_Growth of the House of Commons._--The House of Commons was the power of
the purse, and what gave its emphasis to that power? Simply the growing
necessity of standing forces, and the growing increase of war, so that
now out of twenty millions, fifteen are applied to army and navy.

One great evil, as in practice it had begun to show itself, pressed with
equal injustice on the party who suffered from it (viz., the nation),
and the party who seemed to reap its benefit. This was the fact that as
yet no separation had taken place between the royal peculiar revenue,
and that of the nation. The advance of the nation was now (1603, 1st of
James I.) approaching to the point which made the evil oppression, and
yet had not absolutely reached the point at which it could be undeniably
perceived. Much contest and debate divided the stage of incipient evil
from the stage of confessed grievance. In spending £100,000 upon a
single fête, James I. might reasonably allege that he misapplied, at any
rate, his own funds. Wise or not, the act concerned his own private
household. Yet, on the other hand, in the case of money _really_ public,
the confusion of the two expenditures invited and veiled the transfer
of much from national objects that could wait, and were, at any rate,
hidden from effectual scrutiny to the private objects which tempted the
king's profusion. When Mr. Macaulay speaks so often of England sinking
under this or that Stuart to a third-rate power, he is anachronizing.
There was no scale of powers. Want of roads and intercommunication
forbade it. And hence until the Thirty Years' War there was no general
war. Austria, as by fiction the Roman Empire, and always standing
awfully near to North Italy, had a natural relation and gravitation
towards Rome. France, by vainglory and the old literary pretensions of
Anjou, had also a balancing claim upon Italy. Milanese formed indeed (as
Flanders afterwards) the rendezvous for the two powers. Otherwise, only
Austria and Spain (and Spain not till joined to Austria) and France--as
great powers that touched each other in many points--had ever formed a
warlike trio. No quadrille had existed until the great civil war for
life and death between Popery and Protestantism. It was another great
evil that the functions towards which, by inevitable instincts and
tendency of progress, the House of Commons was continually
travelling,--not, I repeat, through any encroaching spirit as the Court
and that House of Commons itself partially fancied,--were not yet
developed: false laws of men, _i.e._, laws framed under theories
misunderstood of rights and constitutional powers, having as much
distorted the true natural play of the organic manifestation and
tendency towards a whole, as ever a dress too tight, or a flower-pot too
narrow, impeded the development of child or plant. Queen Elizabeth,
therefore, always viewed the House of Commons as a disturber of the
public peace, as a mutineer and insurrectionist, when any special
accident threw it upon its natural function; she spoke of State
affairs, and especially of foreign affairs, as beyond their
'_capacity_,' which expression, however, must in charity be interpreted
philosophically as meaning the range of comprehension consistent with
their _total_ means of instruction and preparation, including,
therefore, secret information, knowledge of disposable home resources as
known to the official depositaries of State secrets, etc., and not, as
the modern reader will understand it, simply and exclusively the
intellectual power of appreciation. Since, with all her disposition to
exalt the qualities of princely persons, she could not be so absurdly
haughty as to claim for princes and the counsellors whom interest or
birth had suggested to them a precedency in pure natural endowments.

Charles was a sincere believer but not an earnest believer of the Roman
Catholic faith. James was both sincere and preternaturally earnest.

_The Reformation._--This seems to show two things: 1st, that a deep
searching and 'sagacious-from-afar' spirit of morality can mould itself
under the prompting of Christianity, such as could not have grown up
under Paganism. For it was the abominations in point of morality (_en
fait de moralité?_)--indulgences, the confessional, absolution, the
prevalence of a mere ritual--the usurpation of forms--these it was which
Rome treated violently; and if she draw in her horns for the present,
still upon any occasion offering, upon the cloud of peril passing away,
clearly she would renew her conduct. It was a tendency violently and
inevitably belonging to the Roman polity combined with the Roman
interest, unless, perhaps, as permanently controlled by a
counter-force. 2ndly, the synthesis of this curative force is by
apposition of parts separately hardly conscious of the danger or even of
their own act. For we cannot suppose the vast body of opposition put
forward was so under direct conscious appreciation of the evil and by an
adequate counter-action--doubtless it was by sympathy with others having
better information. These last burned more vividly as the evil was
fiercer. That more vivid sympathy drew increase of supporters.

_Memorandum._--In my historical sketches not to forget the period of
woe, _anterior_ to the Siege of Jerusalem, which Josephus describes as
occurring in all the Grecian cities, but which is so unaccountably
overlooked by historians.

The rule is to speak like the foolish, and think like the wise, and
therefore I agree to call our worthy old mother 'little'--our 'little
island'--as that seems to be the prevailing notion; otherwise I myself
consider Great Britain rather a tall island. A man is not called short
because some few of his countrymen happen to be a trifle taller; and
really I know but of two islands, among tens of thousands counted up by
gazetteers on our planet, that are taller; and I fancy, with such
figures as theirs, they are neither of them likely to think of any
rivalship with our dear old mother. What island, for instance, would
choose to be such a great fat beast as Borneo, as broad as she is long,
with no apology for a waist? Talk of lacing too tight, indeed! I'm sure
Borneo does not injure herself in that way. Now our mother, though she's
old, and has gone through a world of trouble in her time, is as jimp
about the waist as a young lass of seventeen. Look at her on any map of
Europe, and she's quite a picture. It's an old remark that the general
outline of the dear creature exactly resembles a lady sitting. She turns
her back upon the Continent, no doubt, and that's what makes those
foreigneering rascals talk so much of her pride. But she _must_ turn her
back upon somebody, and who is it that should have the benefit of her
countenance, if not those people in the far West that are come of her
own blood? They say she's 'tetyy' also. Well, then, if she is, you let
her alone, good people of the Continent. She'll not meddle with you if
you don't meddle with her. She's kind enough, and, as to her person, I
do maintain that she's quite tall enough, rather thin, it's true, but,
on the whole, a bonny, elegant, dear old fighting mamma.

_Mora Alexandrina._--Note on Middleton's affected sneer. A villa of
Cicero's, where probably the usual sound heard would be the groans of
tormented slaves, had been changed for the cells of Christian monks. Now
mark: what the hound Middleton means is, how shocking to literary
sensibilities that where an elegant master of Latinity had lived, there
should succeed dull, lazy monks, writing (if they wrote at all) in a
barbarous style, and dreaming away their lives in torpor. Now permit me
to pause a little. This is one of those sneers which Paley[38] and
Bishop Butler[39] think so unanswerable, that we must necessarily lie
down and let the sneer ride rough-shod over us all. Let us see, and for
this reason, reader, do not grudge a little delay, especially as you may
'skip' it.

Dr. Conyers ought to have remembered, in the first place, that the villa
could not long remain in the hands of Cicero. Another owner would
succeed, and then the chances would be that the sounds oftenest
ascending in the hour of sunset or in the cool of the dawn would be the
shrieks of slaves under torture. By their own poor miserable fare
contrasted with the splendour reeking around them, these slaves had a
motive, such as our tenderly-treated (often pampered) servants can never
know the strength of, for breaking the seal of any wine cask. From the
anecdote told of his own mother by the wretched Quintus Cicero, the foul
brother of Marcus, it appears that generally there was some
encouragement to do this, on the chance of 'working down' on the master
that the violated seal had been amongst the casks legitimately opened.
For it seems that old Mrs. Cicero's housewifely plan was to seal up all
alike, empty and not empty. Consequently with her no such excuse could
avail. Which proves that often it _did_ avail, since her stratagem is
mentioned as a very notable artifice. What follows? Why, that the slave
was doubly tempted: 1st, by the luxury he witnessed; 2ndly, by the
impunity on which he might calculate. Often he escaped by sheer weight
of metal in lying. Like Chaucer's miller, he swore, when charged with
stealing flour, that it was not so. But this very prospect and
likelihood of escape was often the very snare for tempting to excesses
too flagrant or where secret marks had been fixed. Besides, many other
openings there were, according to the individual circumstances, but this
was a standing one, for tempting the poor unprincipled slave into
trespass that irritated either the master or the mistress. And then came
those periodical lacerations and ascending groans which Seneca mentions
as the best means of telling what o'clock it was in various households,
since the punishments were going on just at that hour.

After, when the gracious revolution of Christianity had taught us, and
by a memento so solemn and imperishable, no longer to pursue our human
wrath, that hour of vesper sanctity had come, which, by the tendency of
the Christian law and according to the degree in which it is observed,
is for us a type and a symbol and a hieroglyphic of wrath extinguished,
of self-conquest, of charity in heaven and on earth.

Now, the monks, it is supposable, might be commonplace drones. Often,
however, they would be far other, transmitters by their copying toils of
those very Ciceronian works which, but for them, would have perished.
And pausing duly here, what sense, what propriety would there be in
calling on the reader to notice with a shock the profanation of
classical ground in such an example as this: 'Mark the strange
revolutions of ages; there, where once the divine Plato's Academus
stood, now rises a huge printing-house chiefly occupied for the last two
years in reprinting Plato's works.' Why, really Plato himself would look
graciously on that revolution, Master Conyers. But next, the dullest of
these monks would hear the Gloria in Excelsis.

Oh, how pitiful it is to hear B---- alleging against Mahomet that he had
done no public miracles. What? Would it, then, alter your opinion of
Mahomet if he _had_ done miracles? What a proof, how full, how perfect!
That Christianity, in spirit, in power, in simplicity, and in truth, had
no more hold over B---- than it had over any Pagan Pontiff in Rome, is
clear to me from that. So, then, the argument against Mahomet is not
that he wants utterly the meekness--wants? wants? No, that he utterly
hates the humility, the love that is stronger than the grave, the purity
that cannot be imagined, the holiness as an ideal for man that cannot be
approached, the peace that passeth all understanding, that power which
out of a little cloud no bigger than a man's hand grows for ever and
ever until it will absorb the world and all that it inherit, that first
of all created the terror of death and the wormy grave; but that first
and last she might triumph over time--not these, it seems by B----, are
the arguments against Mahomet, but that he did not play legerdemain
tricks, that he did not turn a cow into a horse!

In which position B---- is precisely on a level with those Arab Sheikhs,
or perhaps Mamelukes, whom Napoleon so foolishly endeavoured to surprise
by Chinese tricks: 'Aye, all this is very well, but can you make one to
be in Cairo and in Damascus at the same moment?' demanded the poor
brutalized wretches. And so also for B---- it is nothing. Oh, blind of
heart not to perceive that the defect was entirely owing to the age.
Mahomet came to a most sceptical region. There was no semblance or
shadow among the Arabs of that childish credulity which forms the
atmosphere for miracle. On the contrary, they were a hard, fierce
people, and in that sense barbarous; but otherwise they were sceptical,
as is most evident from all that they accomplished, which followed the
foundation of Islamism. Here lies the delusion upon that point. The
Arabs were evidently like all the surrounding nations. They were also
much distinguished among all Oriental peoples for courage. This fact has
been put on record in (1) the East Indies, where all the Arab troops
have proved themselves by far more formidable than twelve times the
number of effeminate Bengalese and Mahrattas, etc. (2) At Aden, where as
rude fighters without the science of war they have been most ugly
customers. (3) In Algeria, where the French, with all advantage of
discipline, science, artillery, have found it a most trying and
exhausting war. Well, as they are now, so they were before Mahomet, and
just then they were ripe for conquest. But they wanted a _combining_
motive and a _justifying_ motive. Mahomet supplied both these. Says he,
'All nations are idolaters; go and thrust them into the mill that they
may be transformed to our likeness.'

Consequently, the great idea of the truth, of a truth transcending all
available rights on the other side, was foreign to Mahometanism, and any
glimmering of this that may seem to be found in it was borrowed, was
filched from Christianity.

9.--LITERARY.

The three greatest powers which we know of in moulding human feelings
are, first, Christianity; secondly, the actions of men emblazoned by
history; and, in the third place, poetry. If the first were represented
to the imagination by the atmospheric air investing our planet, which we
take to be the most awful laboratory of powers--mysterious, unseen, and
absolutely infinite--the second might be represented by the winds, and
the third by lightning. Napoleon and Lord Byron have done more mischief
to the moral feelings, to the truth of all moral estimates, to the
grandeur and magnanimity of man, in this present generation, than all
other causes acting together. But how? Simply by throwing human feelings
into false combinations. Both of them linked the mean to the grand, the
base to the noble, in a way which often proves fatally inextricable to
the poor infirm mind of the ordinary spectator. Here is Napoleon, simply
because he wields a vast national machinery, throwing a magic of
celerity and power into a particular action which absolutely overpowers
the _genus attonitorum_, so that they are reconciled by the dazzle of a
splendour not at all _in_ Napoleon, to a baseness which really _is_ in
Napoleon. The man that never praised an enemy is shown to this vile mob
by the light thrown off from the radiant power of France as the greatest
of men; he is confounded with his supporting element, even as the
Jupiter Olympus of Phidias, that never spared a woman in his lust,
seemed the holiest of deities when his rottenness was concealed by ivory
and gold, and his libidinous head was lighted up by sunbeams from above.
Here is Lord Byron connecting, in the portrait of some poor melodramatic
hero possibly, some noble quality of courage or perseverance with scorn
the most puerile and senseless. Prone enough is poor degraded human
nature to find something grand in scorn; but, after this arbitrary
combination of Lord Byron's, never again does the poor man think of
scorn but it suggests to him moral greatness, nor think of greatness but
it suggests scorn as its indispensable condition.

Wordsworth is always recording phenomena as they are enjoyed; Coleridge
as they reconcile themselves with opposing or conflicting phenomena.

W. W.'s social philosophy is surely shallow. It is true the man who has
a shallow philosophy under the guidance of Christianity has a profound
philosophy. But this apart, such truths as 'He who made the creature
will allow for his frailties,' etc., are commonplace.

_Invention as a Characteristic of Poets._--I happened this evening
(Saturday, August 3rd, '44) to be saying of W. W. to myself: 'No poet is
so free from all cases like this, viz., where all the feelings and
spontaneous thoughts which they have accumulated coming to an end, and
yet the case seeming to require more to finish it, or bring it round,
like a peal of church bells, they are forced to invent, and form
descants on raptures never really felt. Suddenly this suggested that
invention, therefore, so far from being a differential quality of
poetry, was, in fact, the polar opposite, spontaneousness being the true
quality.

_Tragedy._--I believe it is a very useful thing to let young persons
cultivate their kind feelings by repeated indulgences. Thus my children
often asked when anything was to be paid or given to any person, that
they might have the satisfaction of giving it. So I see clearly that
young boys or girls allowed to carry abroad their infant brothers and
sisters, when the little creature feels and manifests a real dependence
upon them in every act and movement, which _matre præsente_ they would
not have done, which again seen and felt calls out every latent goodness
of the elder child's heart. So again (here I have clipped out the case).
However, feeding rabbits, but above all the action upon women's hearts
in the enormous expansion given by the relation to their own children,
develops a feeling of tenderness that afterwards sets the model for the
world, and would die away, or freeze, or degenerate, if it were
generally balked. Now just such an action has tragedy, and if the
sympathy with calamities caused to noble natures by ignobler, or by dark
fates, were never opened or moved or called out, it would slumber
inertly, it would rust, and become far less ready to respond upon any
call being made. Such sensibilities are not consciously known to the
possessor until developed.

_Punctuation._--Suppose an ordinary case where the involution of clauses
went three deep, and that each was equally marked off by commas, now I
say that so far from aiding the logic it would require an immense effort
to distribute the relations of logic. But the very purpose and use of
points is to aid the logic. If indeed you could see the points at all in
this relation

              strophe                     antistrophe
      1     2     3                    3     2    1
    ----, ----, ----,       apodosis ----, ----, ----,

then indeed all would be clear, but the six commas will and must be
viewed by every reader unversed in the logical mechanism of sentences as
merely a succession of ictuses, so many minute-guns having no internal
system of correspondence, but merely repeating and reiterating each
other, exactly as in men, guns, horses, timbrels, baggage-waggons,
standards.

_Sheridan's Disputatiousness._--I never heard of any case in the whole
course of my life where disputatiousness was the author of any benefit
to man or beast, excepting always one, in which it became a storm anchor
for poor Sheridan, saving him from sudden shipwreck. This may be found
in Mr. Moore's life, somewhere about the date of 1790, and in chapter
xiii. The book is thirty-seven miles off, which is too far to send for
water, or for scandal, or even for 'extract,' though I'm 'fond of
extract.' Therefore, in default of Mr. Moore's version, I give my own.
The situation was this: Sheridan had been cruising from breakfast to
dinner amongst Jews, Christians, and players (men, women, and
Herveys),[40] and constantly in the same hackney coach, so that the
freight at last settled like the sand-heap of an hour-glass into a
frightful record of costly moments. _Pereunt et imputantur_, say some
impertinent time-pieces, in speaking of the hours. They perish and are
debited to our account. Yes, and what made it worse, the creditor was an
inexorable old Jarvie, who, though himself a creditor, had never heard
the idea of credit. A guinea might be owing, and Sheridan, seldom
remembering his purse, had but a shilling, which even in a court of
Irish law seemed too small a compromise to offer. Black looked the
horizon, stormy the offing, and night was coming on, whilst the port of
consignment was now within thirty minutes' sail. Suddenly a sight of joy
was described. Driving before the wind, on bare poles, was a well-known
friend of Sheridan's, Richardson, famed for various talent, but also for
an invincible headlong necessity of disputing. To pull the check-string,
to take his friend on board, and to rush into fierce polemic
conversation was the work of a moment for Sheridan. He well understood
with this familiar friend how to bring on a hot dispute. In three
minutes it raged, yard-arm to yard-arm. Both grew warm. Sheridan grew
purple with rage. Violently interrupting Richardson, he said: 'And these
are your real sentiments?' Richardson with solemnity and artificial
restraint replied: 'Most solemnly they are.' 'And you stand to them, and
will maintain them?' 'I will,' said Richardson, with menacing solemnity
and even mournfulness. 'I will to my dying day.' 'Then,' said Sheridan
furiously, 'I'm hanged if I'll stay another minute with a man capable of
such abominable opinions!' Bang went the door, out he bounced, and
Richardson, keeping his seat, pursued him with triumphant explosions.
'Ah, wretch! what? you can't bear the truth. You're obliged to hate the
truth. That is why you cut and run before it. Huzza! Mr. Sheridan, M.
P. for Stafford, runs like a hare for fear that he should hear the
truth.' Precisely so, the truth it was that he ran from. The truth at
this particular moment was too painful to his heart. Sheridan had fled;
the awful truth amounted to eighteen shillings.

Yes, virtuous Richardson, you were right; truth it was that he fled
from; truth had just then become too painful to his infirm mind,
although it was useless to tell him so, as by this time he was out of
hearing. 'Yes,' said Richardson meditatively to himself, 'the truth has
at last become insupportable to this unhappy man.' Right, it _had_ so.
And in one minute more it became insupportable even to the virtuous
Richardson, when the coachman revealed the odious extent of the truth,
viz., that the fare now amounted to two-and-twenty shillings.

As I hate everything that the people love, and above all the odious
levity with which they adopt every groundless anecdote, especially where
it happens to be calumnious, I beg not to be supposed a believer in the
common stories current about Sheridan's carelessness of pecuniary
obligations. So far from 'never paying,' which is what public slander
has not ceased to report of him, he was (in Mr. Moore's language)
'_always_ paying;' and for once that he paid too little, a thousand
times he paid a great deal too much. Had, indeed, all his excesses of
payment been gathered into one fund, that fund would have covered his
deficits ten times over. It is, however, true that, whilst he was
continually paying the hundred-pound demands against him, with all their
Jewish accumulations of interest, he was continually unfurnished with
money for his 'menus plaisirs' and trifling personal expenses.

By strong natural tendency of disposition, Sheridan was a man of
peculiarly sensitive honour, and the irregularities into which he fell,
more conspicuously after the destruction of Drury Lane by fire, pained
nobody so much as himself. It is the sense of this fact, and the belief
that Sheridan was never a defaulter through habits of self-indulgence,
which call out in _my_ mind a reaction of indignation at the stories
current against him.

_Bookbinding and Book-Lettering._--Literature is a mean thing enough in
the ordinary way of pursuing it as what the Germans call a
_Brodstudium_; but in its higher relations it is so noble that it is
able to ennoble other things, supposing them in any degree ministerial
to itself. The paper-maker, ergo the rag-maker, ergo the linen
cloth-maker, is the true and original creator of the modern press, as
the Archbishop of Dublin long ago demonstrated. For the art of printing
had never halted for want of the typographic secret; _that_ was always
known, known and practised hundreds of years before the Christian era.
It halted for want of a material cheap enough and plentiful enough to
make types other than a most costly substitute for hand-copying. Do you
hear _that_, gentlemen blockheads, that seldom hear anything but
yourselves? Next after the paper-maker, who furnished the _sine quâ
non_, takes rank, not the engraver or illustrator (our modern novelist
cannot swim without this caricaturing villain as one of his bladders;
all higher forms of literature laugh at him), but the binder; for he, by
raising books into ornamental furniture, has given even to
non-intellectual people by myriads a motive for encouraging literature
and an interest in its extension.

Any specimen of Mr. Ferrar's binding I never saw, but by those who
_have_, it is said to have been magnificent. He and his family were
once, if not twice, visited by Charles I., and they presented to that
prince a most sumptuous Bible of their own binding; which Bible, a lady
once told me, was in that collection gradually formed by George III. at
Buckingham House, and finally presented to the nation by his son. I
should fear it must be in ruins as a specimen of the Little Gidding
workmanship. The man who goes to bed in his coffin dressed in a jewelled
robe and a diamond-hilted sword, is very liable to a visit from the
resurrection-man, who usually disarms and undresses him. The Bible that
has its binding inlaid with gold, sowed with Oriental pearl, and made
horrent with rubies, suggests to many a most unscriptural mode of
searching into its treasures, and too like the Miltonic Mammon's mode of
perusing the gorgeous floors of heaven. Besides that, if the Bible
escaped the Parliamentary War, the true _art_ of the Ferrar family would
be better displayed in a case of less cost and luxury. Certainly, in no
one art was the stupidity of Europe more atrociously recorded than in
this particular art practised by the Ferrars. Boundless was the field
for improvement. And in particular, I had myself drawn from this art, as
practised of old, one striking memorial of that remarkable genius for
stupidity, which in all ages alike seems to haunt man as by an
inspiration, unless he is roused out of it by panic. It is this. Look at
the lettering--that is, the labels lettered with the titles of books--in
all libraries that are not of recent date. No man would believe that the
very earliest attempt to impress a mark of ownership upon some bucket of
the Argonauts, or the rudest scrawl of Polyphemus in forging a tarry
brand upon some sheep which he had stolen, could be _so_ bad, _so_
staggering and illegible, as are these literary inscriptions. How much
better to have had a thin tablet or veneering of marble or iron adjusted
to the back of the book. A stone-cutter in a rural churchyard once told
me that he charged a penny _per_ letter. That may be cheap for a
gravestone, but it seems rather high for a book. _Plato_ would cost you
fivepence, _Aristotle_ would be shocking; and in decency you must put
him into Latin, which would add twopence more to every volume. On a
library like that of Dresden or the Vatican, it would raise a national
debt to letter the books.

_Cause of the Novel's Decline._--No man, it may be safely laid down as a
general rule, can obtain a strong hold over the popular mind without
more or less of real power. A reality there must be. The artifice, the
trickery, cannot arise in this first stage, as by any substitution of a
shadow for a reality. If the mass of readers _feel_ a power, and
acknowledge a power, in that case power there must be. It was the just
remark of Dr. Johnson that men do not deceive themselves in their
amusements. And amusement it is that the great public seek in
literature. The meaner and the more sensual the demands of a man are, so
much the less possible it becomes to cheat him. Seeking for warmth, he
cannot be wrong when he says that he has found it. Asking for _alcohol_,
he will never be cheated with water. His feelings in such a case, his
impressions, instantaneously justify themselves; that is, they bear
witness past all doubting to the certainty of what they report. So far
there is no opening to mistake. The error, the opening to the spurious
on the largest scale, arises first upon the _quality_ of the power.
Strength varies upon an endless scale, not merely by its own gradations,
but by the modes and the degrees in which it combines with other
qualities. And there are many combinations, cases of constant
recurrence, in which some natural vigour, but of no remarkable order,
enters into alliance with animal propensities; where a portentous
success will indicate no corresponding power in the artist, but only an
unusual insensibility to decency and the opinion of thoughtful persons.

Novels are the one sole class of books that ever interest the public,
that reach its heart, or even catch its eye. And the reason why novels
are becoming much more licentious, and much grosser in the arts by which
they court public favour, lies undoubtedly in the quality of that new
reading public which the extension of education has added to the old
one. An education miserably shallow, whilst unavailing for any purpose
of real elevation, lets in upon the theatre of what is called by
courtesy literature a vast additional audience that once would have been
excluded altogether. This audience, changed in no respect from its
former condition of intellect and manners and taste, bringing only the
single qualification of ability to read, is now strong enough in numbers
to impress a new character upon literature in so far as literature has a
motive for applying itself to _their_ wants. The consequences are
showing themselves, and _will_ show themselves more broadly. It is
difficult with proper delicacy to seek illustrations amongst our own
living writers. Illustrations were all too easily found did we care to
enter on the task.

It is true that, during the currency of any year, whilst the quantity
is liable to indeterminate augmentation, ballads will be rather looking
down in the market. But that is a shadow which settles upon every
earthly good thing. No Greek book, for instance, amongst the many that
have perished, would so much rejoice many of us by its resurrection as
the comedies of Menander. Yet, if a correspondent should write word from
Pompeii that twenty-five thousand separate dramas of Menander had been
found in good preservation, adding in a postscript that forty thousand
more had been impounded within the last two hours, and that there was
every prospect of bagging two hundred thousand more before morning, we
should probably petition Government to receive the importing vessels
with chain-shot. Not even Milton or Shakespeare could make head against
such a Lopez de Vega principle of ruinous superfluity. Allowing for this
one case of preternatural excess, assuming only that degree of
limitation which any absolute past must almost always create up to that
point, we say that there is no conceivable composition, or class of
compositions, which will not be welcomed into literature provided, as to
matter, that it shall embody some natural strain of feeling, and
provided, as to manner, that it illustrate the characteristic style of a
known generation.

It might suffice for our present purpose to have once firmly
distinguished between the two modes of literature. But it may be as well
to point out a few corollaries from this distinction, which will serve
at the same time to explain and to confirm it. For instance, first of
all, it has been abundantly insisted on in our modern times, that the
value of every literature lies in its characteristic part; a truth
certainly, but a truth upon which the German chanticleer would not have
crowed and flapped his wings so exultingly, had he perceived the
original and indispensable schism between the literature of knowledge
and the literature of power, because in this latter only can anything
characteristic of a man or of a nation be embodied. The science of no
man can be characteristic, no man can geometrize or chemically analyze
after a manner peculiar to himself. He may be the first to open a new
road, and in that meaning it may be called _his_ road; but _his_ it
cannot be by any such peculiarities as will found an _incommunicable_
excellence. In literature proper, viz., the literature of power, this is
otherwise. There may doubtless have been many imitative poets, wearing
little or nothing of a natural individuality; but of no poet, that ever
_led_ his own class, can it have been possible that he should have been
otherwise than strongly differenced by inimitable features and by traits
not transferable. Consequently the [Greek: to] characteristic, of which
in German cloudland so noisy a proclamation is made as of some
transcendental discovery, is a mere inference from the very idea of a
literature. For we repeat that in blank knowledge a separate peculiarity
marking the individual is not conceivable, whereas in a true literature
reflecting human nature, not as it represents, but as it wills, not as a
passive minor, but as a self-moving power, it is not possible to avoid
the characteristic except only in the degree by which the inspiring
nature happens to be feeble. The exorbitations that differentiate them
may be of narrow compass, but only where the motive power was originally
weak. And agreeably to this remark it may be asserted that in all
literature properly so-called genius, is always manifested, and talent
generally; but in the literature of knowledge it may be doubted very
seriously whether there is any opening for more than talent. Genius may
be defined in the severest manner as _that which is generally
characteristic_; but a thousand times we repeat that one man's mode of
knowing an object cannot differ from another man's. It _cannot_ be
characteristic, and its geniality cannot be externally manifested. To
have said, therefore, of the poetry surviving from ancient Latium, from
Castile, from England, that this is nationally characteristic, and
knowable apart by inalienable differences, is saying no more than
follows out of the very definition by which any and every literature
proper is limited and guarded as a mode of power.

Secondly, even in the exceptions and hesitations upon applying the
rigour of this distinction, we may read the natural recognition (however
latent or unconscious) of the rule itself. No man would think, for
example, of placing a treatise on surveying, on mensuration, on
geological stratifications, in any collection of his national
literature. He would be lunatic to do so. A Birmingham or Glasgow
Directory has an equal title to take its station in the national
literature. But he will hesitate on the same question arising with
regard to a history. Where upon examination the history turns out to be
a mere chronicle, or register of events chronologically arranged, with
no principle of combination pervading it, nor colouring from peculiar
views of policy, nor sympathy with the noble and impassioned in human
action, the decision will be universal and peremptory to cashier it from
the literature. Yet this case, being one of degree, ranges through a
large and doubtful gamut. A history like that of Froissart, or of
Herodotus, where the subjective from the writer blends so powerfully
with the gross objective, where the moral picturesque is so predominant,
together with freshness of sensation which belongs to 'blissful
infancy' in human life, or to a stage of society in correspondence to
it, cannot suffer a demur of jealousy as to its privilege of entering
the select fold of literature. But such advantages are of limited
distribution. And, to say the truth, in its own nature neither history
nor biography, unless treated with peculiar grace, and architecturally
moulded, has any high pretension to rank as an organic limb of
literature. The very noblest history, in much of its substance, is but
by a special indulgence within the privilege of that classification.
Biography stands on the same footing. Of the many memorials dedicated to
the life of Milton, how few are entitled to take their station in the
literature! And why? Not merely that they are disqualified by their
defective execution, but often that they necessarily record what has
become common property.

FOOTNOTES:

[29] Between the forms _modal_, _modish_, and _modern_, the difference
is of that slight order which is constantly occurring between the
Elizabethan age and our own. _Ish_, _ous_, _ful_, _some_, are
continually interchanging; thus, _pitiful_ for _piteous_, _quarrelous_
for _quarrelsome_.

[30] I deny that there is or could have been one truant fluttering
murmur of the heart against the reality of glory. And partly for these
reasons: 1st, That, _hoc abstracto_, defrauding man of this, you leave
him miserably bare--bare of everything. So that really and sincerely the
very wisest men may be seen clinging convulsively, and clutching with
their dying hands the belief that glory, that posthumous fame (which for
profound ends of providence has been endowed with a subtle power of
fraud such as no man can thoroughly look through; for those who, like
myself, despise it most completely, cannot by any art bring forward a
_rationale_, a theory of its hollowness that will give plenary
satisfaction except to those who are already satisfied). Thus Cicero,
feeling that if this were nothing, then had all his life been a
skirmish, one continued skirmish for shadows and nonentities; a feeling
of blank desolation, too startling--too humiliating to be faced. But
(2ndly), the unsearchable hypocrisy of man, that hypocrisy which even to
himself is but dimly descried, that latent hypocrisy which always does,
and most profitably, possess every avenue of every man's thoughts, hence
a man who should openly have avowed a doctrine that glory was a bubble,
besides that, instead of being prompted to this on a principle which so
far raised him above other men, must have been prompted by a principle
that sank him to the level of the brutes, viz., acquiescing in total
ventrine improvidence, imprescience, and selfish ease (if ease, a Pagan
must have it _cum dignitate_), but above all he must have made
proclamation that in his opinion all disinterested virtue was a chimera,
since all the quadrifarious virtue of the scholastic ethics was founded
either on personal self-sufficiency, on justice, moderation, etc., etc.,
or on direct personal and exclusive self-interest as regarded health and
the elements of pleasure.

[31] The tower of Siloam.

[32] Every definition is a syllogism. Now, because the minor proposition
is constantly false, this does not affect the case; each man is right to
fill up the minor with his own view, and essentially they do not
disagree with each other.

A (the subject of def.)is _x_. The Truth is the sum of Christianity.

But C is _x_. But my Baptist view is the sum of Christianity.

_Ergo_ C is A. _Ergo_ my Baptist view is the Truth.

[33] It seems that Herod made changes so vast--certainly in the
surmounting works, and _also_ probably in one place as to the
foundations, that it could not be called the same Temple with that of
the Captivity, except under an abuse of ideas as to matter and form, of
which all nations have furnished illustrations, from the ship _Argo_ to
that of old Drake, from Sir John Cutler's stockings to the Highlander's
(or Irishman's) musket.

[34] Just as if a man spending his life to show the folly of Methodism
should burst into maudlin tears at sight of John Wesley, and say, 'Oh,
if all men, my dear brothers, were but Methodists!'

[35] How so? If the Jews were naturally infidels, why did God select
them? But, first, they might have, and they certainly had, other
balancing qualities; secondly, in the sense here meant, all men are
infidels; and we ourselves, by the very nature of one object which I
will indicate, are pretty generally infidels in the same sense as they.
Look at our evidences; look at the sort of means by which we often
attempt to gain proselytes among the heathen and at home. Fouler
infidelities there are not. Special pleading, working for a verdict,
etc., etc.

[36] [This idea is expanded and followed out in detail in the opening of
'Homer and the Homeridæ;' but this is evidently the note from which that
grew, and is here given alike on account of its compactness and
felicity.--ED.]

[37] Satire ix., lines 60, 61.

[38] Who can answer a sneer?

[39] Butler--'unanswerable ridicule.'

[40] Said of members of the Bristol family.

_XXV. OMITTED PASSAGES AND VARIATIONS._

1.--THE RHAPSODOI.

The following on the 'Rhapsodoi' is a variation on that which appeared
in 'Homer and the Homeridæ,' with some quite additional and new thoughts
on the subject.

About these people, who they were, what relation they bore to Homer, and
why they were called 'Rhapsodoi,' we have seen debated in Germany
through the last half century with as much rabid ferocity as was ever
applied to the books of a fraudulent bankrupt. Such is the natural
impertinence of man. If he suspects any secret, or any base attempt to
hide and conceal things from himself, he is miserable until he finds out
the mystery, and especially where all the parties to it have been
defunct for 2,500 years. Great indignation seems reasonably to have been
felt by all German scholars that any man should presume to have called
himself a _rhapsodos_ at any period of Grecian history without sending
down a sealed letter to posterity stating all the reasons which induced
him to take so unaccountable a step. No possible solution, given to any
conceivable question bearing upon the 'Rhapsodoi,' seems by any tendency
to affect any question outstanding about Homer. And we do not therefore
understand the propriety of intermingling this dispute with the general
Homeric litigation. However, to comply with the practice of Germany, we
shall throw away a few sentences upon this, as a pure _ad libitum_
digression.

The courteous reader, whom we beg also to suppose the most ignorant of
readers, by way of thus founding a necessity and a case of philosophic
reasonableness for the circumstantiality of our own explanations, will
be pleased to understand that by ancient traditionary usage the word
_rhapsodia_ is the designation technically applied to the several books
or cantos of the 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey.' So the word _fytte_ has gained a
technical appropriation to our narrative poetry when it takes the ballad
form. Now, the Greek word _rhapsody_ is derived from a tense of the verb
_rhapto_, to sew as with a needle, to connect, and _ode_, a song, chant,
or course of singing. If, therefore, you conceive of a _rhapsodia_, not
as the _opera_, but as the _opus_ of a singer, not as the form, but as
the result of his official ministration, viz., as that section of a
narrative poem which forms an intelligible whole in itself, whilst in a
subordinate relation it is one part of a larger whole--this idea
represents accurately enough the use of the word _rhapsodia_ in the
latter periods of Greek literature. Suppose the word _canto_ to be taken
in its literal etymological sense, it would indicate a metrical
composition meant to be sung or chanted. But what constitutes the
complexity of the idea in the word _rhapsodia_ is that both its separate
elements, the poetry and the musical delivery, are equally essential;
neither is a casual, neither a subordinate, element.

Now, the 'Rhapsodoi,' as may be supposed, are the personal correlates of
the _rhapsodia._ This being the poem adapted to chanting, those were the
chanters. And the only important question which we can imagine to arise
is, How far in any given age we may presume the functions of the
poetical composer and the musical deliverer to have been united. We
cannot perceive that any possible relation between a rhapsody considered
as a section of a poem and the whole of that poem, or any possible
relation which this same rhapsody considered as a thing to be sung or
accompanied instrumentally could bear to the naked-speaking rehearsal of
the same poem or to the original text of that poem, ever can affect the
main question of Homer's integrity. The 'Rhapsodoi' come to be mentioned
at all simply as being one link in the transmission of the Homeric
poems. They are found existing before Pisistratus, they are found
existing after Pisistratus. And they declined exactly as the art of
reading became general. We can approximate pretty closely to the time
when the 'Rhapsodoi' ceased; but at what time they began we defy any man
to say. Plato (Rep. x.) represents them as going back into the days of
Homer; nay, according to Plato, Homer himself was a _rhapsodos_, and
itinerated in that character. So was Hesiod. And two remarkable lines,
ascribed to Hesiod by one of the Scholiasts upon Pindar, if we could be
sure that they were genuine, settle that question:

    [Greek: En Delo tote prôton ego xai Homeros aoidoi
    Melpomen, en nearois úmnois rapsantes aoidê.]

'Then, first of all,' says Hesiod, 'did I and Homer chant as bards in
Delos, laying the nexus of our poetic composition in proæmial hymns.' We
understand him to mean this: There were many singers and harpers who
sang or accompanied the words of others; perhaps ancient words--at all
events, not their own. Naturally he was anxious to have it understood
that he and Homer had higher pretensions. They killed their own mutton.
They composed the words as well as sang them. Where both functions were
so often united in one man's person, it became difficult to distinguish
them. Our own word _bard_ or _minstrel_ stood in the same ambiguity. You
could not tell in many cases whether the word pointed to the man's
poetic or musical faculty. Anticipating that doubt, Hesiod says that
they sang as original poets. For it is a remark of Suidas, which he
deduces laboriously, that poetry, being uniformly sung in the elder
Greece, acquired the name of [Greek: aoidê]. This term became
technically appropriated to the poetry, or substance of whatever was
sung, in contradistinction to the musical accompaniment. And the poet
was called [Greek: aoidos] So far Hesiod twice over secures the dignity
of their office from misinterpretation. And there, by the word [Greek:
raphantes] he indicates the sort of poetry which they cultivated, viz.,
that which was expanded into long heroic narratives, and naturally
connected itself both internally amongst its own parts, and externally
with other poems of the same class. Thus, having separated Homer and
himself from the mere musicians, next he separates them even as poets
from those who simply composed hymns to the Gods. These heroic legends
were known to require much more elaborate study and art. Yet, because a
critical reviewer might take occasion to tax his piety in thus composing
human legends in neglect of the Gods, Hesiod, forestalling him, replies:
'You're out there, my friend; we were both pious, and we put our piety
into hymns addressed to the Gods, which, with cabinetmakers' skill, we
used also as interludes of transition from one legend to another.' For
it is noticed frequently and especially by a Scholiast on Aristophanes
(Pac. 826), that generally speaking the _proæmia_ to the different parts
of narrative-poems were entirely detached, [Greek: kai ouden pros to
pragma dêlon], and explain nothing at all that concerns the business.

2.--Mrs. Evans and the 'Gazette.'

In his autobiographic sketch, 'Introduction to the World of Strife,' he
tells of his brother's enterprise in establishing the _Gazette_, which
was to record their doings, and also of Mrs. Evans's place on the
_Gazette_. The following is evidently a passage which was prepared for
that part of the article, but was from some cause or other omitted:

I suppose no creature ever led such a life as I led on the _Gazette_;
sometimes running up, like Wallenstein, to the giddiest pinnacles of
honour, then down again without notice or warning to the dust;
cashiered--rendered incapable of ever serving H. M. again; nay, actually
drummed out of the army, my uniform stripped off, and the 'rogue's
march' played after me. And all for what? I protest, to this hour, I
have no guess. If any person knows, that person is not myself; and the
reader is quite as well able to furnish guesses to me as I to him--to
enlighten _me_ upon the subject as I _him_.

Mrs. Evans was a very important person in the play; I don't suppose that
things could have gone on without _her_. For, as there was no writer in
the _Gazette_ but my brother, so there was no reader of it except Mrs.
Evans. And here came in a shocking annoyance to me that, as often as
any necessity occurred (which was every third day) for restoring me to
my rank, since my brother would not have it supposed that he could be
weak enough to initiate such an indulgence, the _Gazette_ threw the
_onus_ of this amiable weakness, and consequently of my gratitude, upon
Mrs. Evans, affirming that the major-general had received a pardon and
an amnesty for all his past atrocities at the request of 'a
distinguished lady,' who was obscurely indicated in a parenthesis as
'the truly honourable Mrs. Evans.' To listen to the _Gazette_ one would
have supposed that this woman, who so cordially detested me, spent her
whole time in going down on her knees and making earnest supplications
to the throne on my behalf. But what signified the representations of
the _Gazette_ if I knew them to be false? Aye, but I did not know that
they were false. It is true that my obligations to her were quite
aerial, and might, as the reader will think, have been supported without
any preternatural effort. But exactly these aerial burdens, whether of
gratitude or of honour, most oppressed me as being least tangible and
incapable of pecuniary or other satisfaction. No sinking fund could meet
them. And even the dull unimaginative woman herself, eternally held up
to admiration as my resolute benefactress, got the habit (I am sure) of
looking upon me as under nameless obligations to her. This raised my
wrath. It was not that to my feelings the obligations were really a mere
figment of pretence. On the contrary, according to my pains endured,
they towered up to the clouds. But I felt that nobody had any right to
load me with favours that I had never asked for, and without leave even
asked from me; and the more real were the favours, the deeper the wrong
done to me. I sought, therefore, for some means of retaliation. And it
is odd that it was not till thirty years after that I perceived one. It
then struck me that the eternal intercession might have been equally
odious to her. To find herself prostrate for ever, weeping like Niobe,
and, if the _Gazette_ was to be believed, refusing to raise herself from
the mud or the flinty pavement till I had been forgiven, and reinstated
in my rank--ah, how loathsome that must have been to her! Ah, how
loathsome the whole cycle of favours were to me, considering from whom
they came! Then we had effectually plagued each other. And it was not
without loud laughter, as of malice unexpectedly triumphant, that I
found one night thirty years after, on regretting my powerlessness of
vengeance, that, in fact, I had amply triumphed thirty years before. So,
undaunted Mrs. Evans, if you live anywhere within call, listen to the
assurance that all accounts are squared between us, and that we balanced
our mutual debts by mutual disgust; and that, if you plagued me
perversely, I plagued you unconsciously.

And though shot and bullets were forbidden fruit, yet something might be
done with hard wadding. A good deal of classical literature disappeared
in this way, which by one who valued no classics very highly might be
called the way of all flesh. The best of authors, he contended, had
better perish by this warlike consummation than by the inglorious enmity
of bookworms and moths--honeycombed, as most of the books had been which
had gone out to India with our two uncles. Even wadding, however, was
declared to be inadmissible as too dangerous, after wounds had been
inflicted more than once.

3.--A LAWSUIT LEGACY.

De Quincey, in his autobiographic sketch headed 'Laxton,' tells of the
fortune of Miss Watson, who afterwards became Lady Carbery, and also of
the legacy left to her in the form of a lawsuit by her father against
the East India Company; and among his papers we find the following
passage either overlooked or omitted, for some undiscoverable reason,
from that paper, though it has a value in its own way as expressing some
of De Quincey's views on law and equity; and it is sufficiently
characteristic to be included here:

In consequence of her long minority, Miss Watson must have succeeded at
once to six thousand a year on completing her twenty-first year; and she
also inherited a Chancery-suit, which sort of property is _now_ (1853)
rather at a discount in public estimation; but let the reader assure
himself that even the Court of Chancery is not quite so black as it is
painted; that the true ground for the delays and ruinous expenses in
ninety-nine out of one hundred instances is not legal chicanery, still
less the wilful circuitousness and wordiness of law processes, but the
great eternal fact that, what through lapse of time, decays of memory,
and loss of documents, and what through interested suppressions of
truth, and the dispersions of witnesses, and causes by the score
beside, the ultimate truth and equity of human disputes is a matter of
prodigious perplexity; neither is there any possibility that the mass of
litigations as to property ever _can_ be made cheap except in proportion
as it is made dismally imperfect.