MACKINTOSH, THE MAN OF PROMISE.
Part I.
FROM HIS YOUTH TO HIS APPOINTMENT IN INDIA.
Mackintosh’s character.—Character of men of his type.—Birth and parentage.—Starts as a physician, fails, and becomes a newspaper writer, and author of a celebrated pamphlet in answer to Burke’s “Thoughts on the French Revolution.”—Studies for the bar.—Becomes noted as a public character, violent on the Liberal side.—Becomes acquainted with Mr. Burke.—Modifies his opinions.—Gives lectures on public law, remarkable for their eloquence and their Conservative opinions.—Becomes the advocate of Peltier; makes a great speech, and shortly afterwards accepts an appointment in India.
I.
I still remember, amongst the memorable events of my early youth, an invitation to meet Sir James Mackintosh at dinner; and the eager and respectful attention with which this honoured guest was received. I still remember also my anxiety to learn the especial talents, or remarkable works, for which Sir James was distinguished, and the unsatisfactory replies which all my questions elicited. He was a writer, but many had written better; he was a speaker, but many had spoken better; he was a philosopher, but many had done far more for philosophy; and yet, though it was difficult to fix on any one thing in which he was first-rate, it was generally maintained that he was a first-rate man. There is, indeed, a class amongst mankind, a body numerous in all literary societies, who are far less valued for any precise thing they have done than according to a vague notion of what they are capable of doing. Mackintosh may be taken as a type of this class; not that he passed his life in the learned inactivity to which the resident members of our own universities sometimes consign their intellectual powers, but which more frequently characterizes the tranquil scholars, whose erudition is the boast of some small German or Italian city.
But though mixing in the action of a great and stirring community, a lawyer, an author, a member of parliament, Mackintosh never arrived at the eminence in law, in letters, or in politics, that satisfied the expectations of those who, living in his society, were impressed by his intellect and astonished at his acquirements.
If I were to sum up in a few words the characteristics of the persons who thus promise more than they ever perform, I should say that their powers of comprehension are greater than their powers either of creation or exposition; and that their energy, though capable of being roused occasionally to great exertions, can rarely be relied on for any continued effort.
They collect, sometimes in rather a sauntering manner, an immense store of varied information. But it is only by fits and starts that they are able to use it with effect, and at their happiest moments they rarely attain the simple grace and the natural vigour which give beauty and life to composition. Their deficiencies are inherent in their nature, and are never therefore entirely overcome. They have not in their minds the immortal spark of genius, but the faculty of comprehending genius may give them, in a certain degree, the power of imitating it; whilst ambition, interest, and necessity, will at times stimulate them to extraordinary exertions. As writers, they usually want originality, ease, and power; as men of action, tact, firmness, and decision. The works in which they most succeed are usually short, and written under temporary excitement; as statesmen, they at times attract attention and win applause, but rarely obtain authority or take and keep the lead in public affairs. In society, however, the mere faculty of remembering and comprehending a variety of things is quite sufficient to obtain a considerable reputation; whilst the world, when indulgent, often estimates the power of a man’s abilities by some transient and ephemeral display of them.
I will now turn from these general observations to see how far they are exemplified in the history of the person whose name is before me; a person who advanced to the very frontier of those lands which it was not given to him to enter; and who is not only a favourable specimen of his class, but who, as belonging to that class, represents in many respects a great portion of the public during that memorable period of our annals, which extends from the French Revolution of 1789 to the English Reform Bill in 1830.
II.
The father of Sir James was a Scotch country gentleman, who, having a small hereditary property, which he could neither part with nor live upon, entered the army early, and passed his life almost entirely with his regiment. Young Mackintosh was born on the 24th of October, 1765, in the county of Inverness, and was sent as soon as he could be to a school at Fortrose; where he fell in with two books which had a permanent influence on his future career. These books were “Plutarch’s Lives” and the “Roman History,” books which, by making him ambitious of public honours, rendered his existence a perpetual struggle between that which he desired to be and that for which he was best suited. At Aberdeen, then, where he was sent on quitting Fortrose, he was alike remarkable for his zeal in politics, and his love for metaphysics—that is, for his alternate coquetry between an active and a meditative life. At Edinburgh, also, where he subsequently went to study medicine, it was the same thing. In the evening he would go now and then to a “spouting” club and make speeches, while the greater part of his mornings was spent in poetical lucubrations. To the medical profession he paid little attention, till all of a sudden necessity aroused him. He then applied himself, with a start, to that which he was obliged to know; but his diligence was not of that resolute and steady kind which insures success as the consequence of a certain period of application; and after rushing into the novelties of the Brunonian System,[82] which promised knowledge with little labour, and then, rushing back again, he resolved on taking his countrymen’s short road to fortune, and set out for England. His journey, however, did not answer. He got a wife, but no patients; and on the failure of his attempts to establish himself at Salisbury and at Weymouth, retired to Brussels—ill, wearied, and disgusted. The Low Countries were at that time the theatre of a struggle between the Emperor Joseph and his subjects; the general convulsion which shortly afterwards took place throughout Europe was preparing, and the agitation of men’s minds was excessive. These exciting scenes called the disappointed physician back to the more alluring study of politics; and to this short visit to the Continent he owed a knowledge of its opinions and its public men, which first served him as the correspondent of a newspaper, The Oracle; and, subsequently, furnished him with materials for a pamphlet which in an instant placed him in the situation he so long occupied as one of the most promising men of his day. This celebrated pamphlet, published in 1791, and known under the name of “Vindiciæ Gallicæ,” whether we consider the circumstances under which it appeared, the opponent whom it combated, or the ability of the composition itself, merited all the attention it received, and was the more successful because it gave just the answer to Burke which Burke himself would have given to his own Reflections.
Thus, the club of Saint James’, the cloister of Trinity College, had a writer to quote, whose sentiments were in favour of liberty, and whose language, agreeable to the ear of the gentleman and the scholar, did not, in defending the patriots of France, advise their imitation or approve their excesses.
“Burke,” he says, “admires the Revolution of 1688; but we, who conceive that we pay the purest homage to the authors of that Revolution, not in contending for what they then did, but for what they would now do, can feel no inconsistency in looking on France—not to model our conduct, but to invigorate the spirit of freedom. We permit ourselves to imagine how Lord Somers, in the light and knowledge of the eighteenth century, how the patriots of France, in the tranquillity and opulence of England, would have acted.
“We are not bound to copy the conduct to which the last were driven by a bankrupt exchequer, and a dissolved government; nor to maintain the establishments which were spared by the first in a prejudiced and benighted age.
“Exact imitation is not necessary to reverence. We venerate the principles which presided in both, and we adapt to political admiration a maxim which has long been received in polite letters, that the only manly and liberal imitation is to speak as a great man would have spoken, had he lived in our times, and been placed in our circumstances.”
There is much even in this passage to show that the adversary was still the imitator, imbued with the spirit and under the influence of the genius of the very writer whom he was bold enough to attack. Many, nevertheless, who, taken by surprise, had surrendered to the magisterial eloquence of the master, were rescued by the elegant pleading of the scholar. Everywhere, then, might be heard the loudest applause, and an applause well merited. On the greatest question of the times, the first man of the times had been answered by a young gentleman aged twenty-six, and who, hitherto unknown, was appreciated by his first success.
The leaders of the Whig party sought him out; they paid him every attention. His opinions went further than theirs; for he was an advocate of universal suffrage, an abolitionist of all titles, an enemy to a senate or second assembly. No persons practically contending for power could say they exactly sanctioned such notions as these; but all praised the style in which they were put forth, and, allowing for the youth, lauded the talent, of the author. Indeed, “the love to hatred turned” ever repudiates moderation, and the antagonist of Burke was certain of the rapturous cheers of those whom that great but passionate man had deserted. In this manner Mackintosh (who was now preparing for the bar) became necessarily a party man, and a violent party man. Mr. Fox praised his abilities in Parliament; the famous Reform Association called the “Friends of the People” chose him for their honorary secretary. A great portion of the well-known declaration of this society was his composition; and in a letter to the Prime Minister of the day (Mr. Pitt), he abused that statesman with a fierceness and boldness of invective which even political controversy scarcely allowed.
Here was the great misfortune of his life. This fierceness and boldness were not in his nature; in becoming a man of action, he entered upon a part which was not suited to his character, and which it was certain therefore he would not sustain. The reaction soon followed. Amongst its first symptoms was a review of Mr. Burke’s “Regicide Peace.” The author of the review became known to the person whose writing was criticised: a correspondence ensued, very flattering to Mr. Mackintosh, who shortly afterwards spent a few days at Beaconsfield (1796).
It was usual for him to say, referring to this visit, that in half an hour Mr. Burke overturned the previous reflections of his whole life. There was some exaggeration, doubtless, in this assertion, but it is also likely that there was some truth in it. His opinions had begun to waver, and at that critical moment he came into personal contact with, and was flattered by, a man whom every one praised, and who praised few. At all events, he was converted, and not ashamed of his conversion, but, on the contrary, mounted with confidence a stage on which his change might be boldly justified.
The faults as well as the excellences of the English character arise from that great dislike to generalise which has made us the practical, and in many instances the prejudiced, people that we are. Abroad, a knowledge of general or natural law, of the foundations on which all laws are or ought to be based, enters as a matter of course into a liberal education. In England lawyers themselves disregard this study as useless or worse than useless.[83] They look, and they look diligently, into English law, such as it is, established by custom, precedent, or act of Parliament. They know all the nice points and proud formalities on which legal justice rests, or by which it may be eluded. The conflicting cases and opposing opinions, which may be brought to bear on an unsound horse, or a contested footpath, are deeply pondered over, carefully investigated. But the great edifice of general jurisprudence, though standing on his wayside, is usually passed by the legal traveller with averted eyes: the antiquary and the philosopher, indeed, may linger there; but the plodding man of business scorns to arrest his steps.
When, however, amidst the mighty crash of states and doctrines that followed the storm of 1791—when, amidst the birth of new empires and new legislatures, custom lost its sanctity, precedent its authority, and statute was made referable to common justice and common sense,—then, indeed, there uprose a strong and earnest desire to become acquainted with those general principles so often cited by the opponents of the past; to visit that armoury in which such terrible weapons had been found, and to see whether it could not afford means as powerful for defending what remained as it had furnished for destroying what had already been swept away.
III.
A course of Lectures on Public Law—about which the public knew so little, and were yet so curious—offered a road to distinction, which the young lawyer, confident in his own abilities and researches, had every temptation to tread. Private interest procured him the Hall at Lincoln’s Inn; but this was not sufficient; it was necessary that he should make the world aware of the talent, the knowledge, and the sentiments with which he undertook so great a task. He published his introductory essay—the only memorable record of the Lectures to which we are referring that now remains. The views contained in this essay may in many instances be erroneous; but its merits as a composition are of no common kind. Learned, eloquent, it excited nearly as much enthusiasm as the “Vindiciæ Gallicæ,” and deserved, upon the whole, a higher order of admiration.
But praise came this time from a different quarter. A few years before, and Mackintosh had spoken of Mr. Pitt as cold, stern, crafty, and ambitious; possessing “the parade without the restraint of morals;” the “most profound dissimulation with the utmost ardour of enterprise; prepared by one part of his character for the violence of a multitude, by another for the duplicity of a court.”[84]
It was under the patronage of this same Mr. Pitt that the hardy innovator now turned back to “the old ways,” proclaiming that “history was a vast museum, in which specimens of every variety of human nature might be studied. From these great occasions to knowledge,” he said, “lawgivers and statesmen, but more especially moralists and political philosophers, may reap the most important instruction. There, they may plainly discover, amid all the useful and beautiful variety of governments and institutions, and under all the fantastic multitude of usages and rites which ever prevailed among men, the same fundamental, comprehensive truths—truths which have ever been the guardians of society, recognised and revered (with very few and slight exceptions) by every nation upon earth, and uniformly taught, with still fewer exceptions, by a succession of wise men, from the first dawn of speculation down to the latest times.”
“See,” he continued, “whether from the remotest periods any improvement, or even any change, has been made in the practical rules of human conduct. Look at the code of Moses. I speak of it now as a mere human composition, without considering its sacred origin. Considering it merely in that light, it is the most ancient and the most curious memorial of the early history of mankind. More than 3000 years have elapsed since the composition of the Pentateuch; and let any man, if he is able, tell me in what important respects the rule of life has varied since that distant period. Let the institutes of Menu be explored with the same view; we shall arrive at the same conclusion. Let the books of false religion be opened; it will be found that their moral system is, in all its good features, the same. The impostors who composed them were compelled to pay this homage to the uniform moral sentiments of the world. Examine the codes of nations, those authentic depositories of the moral judgments of men: you everywhere find the same rules prescribed, the same duties imposed. Even the boldest of these ingenious sceptics who have attacked every other opinion, have spared the sacred and immortal simplicity of the rules of life. In our common duties, Bayle and Hume agree with Bossuet and Barrow. Such as the rule was at the first dawn of history, such it continues at the present day. Ages roll over mankind; mighty nations pass away like a shadow; virtue alone remains the same, immutable and unchangeable.”
The object of Mackintosh was to show that the instinct of man was towards society; that society could not be kept together except on certain principles; that these principles, therefore, from the nature of man—a nature predestined and fashioned by God—were at once universal and divine, and that societies would perish that ignored them;—a true and sublime theory; but with respect to which we must, if we desire to be practical, admit that variety of qualifications which different civilizations, different climates, accidental interests, and religious prescriptions interpose.
It may be said, for instance, that no society could exist if its institutions honoured theft as a virtue, and instructed parents to murder their children; but a great and celebrated society did exist in ancient Greece,—a society which outlived its brilliant contemporaries, and which sanctioned robbery, if not detected; and allowed parents to kill their children, if sickly. It is perfectly true that the ten commandments of the Jewish legislator are applicable to all mankind, and are as much revered by the people of the civilized world at the present day, as by the semi-barbarous people of Israel 3000 years ago. They are admitted as integrally into the religion taught by Christ, as they were into the religion taught by Moses. But how different the morality founded on them! How different the doctrine of charity and forgiveness from the retributive prescription of vindicative justice! Nay, how different the precepts taught by the various followers of Christ themselves, who draw those precepts from the same book!
If there is anything on which it is necessary for the interest and happiness of mankind to constitute a fixed principle of custom or of law, it is the position of woman. The social relationship of man with woman rules the destiny of both from the cradle to the grave; and yet, on this same relationship, what various notions, customs, and laws!
I make these observations, because it is well that we should see how much is left to the liberty of man, whilst we recognise the certain rules by which his caprice is limited: how much is to be learned from the past—how much is left open to the future!
But all argument at the time that Mackintosh opened his lectures consisted in the opposition of extremes. As the one party decried history altogether, so the other referred everything to history; as the former sect declared that no reverence was due to custom, so the latter announced that all upon which we valued ourselves most was traditional. Because those fanatics scoffed at the ideas and manners of the century that had just elapsed, these referred with exultation to the manners and ideas that prevailed some thousands of years before.
Mackintosh stood forth, confessedly, as History’s champion; and with the beautiful candour, which marked his modest and elevated frame of mind, confessed that the sight of those who surrounded his chair—the opinions he knew them to entertain—the longing after applause, for which every public speaker, whatever his theme, naturally thirsts—and also, he adds, “a proper repentance for former errors”—might all have heightened the qualities of the orator to the detriment of the lecturer, and carried him, “in the rebound from his original opinions, too far towards the opposite extreme.”[85]
IV.
We shall soon have to inquire what were the real nature and character of the change which he confessed that his language at this time exaggerated. Suffice it here to say that, amidst the sighs of his old friends, the applauses of his new, and the sneering murmurs and scornful remarks of the stupid and the envious of all parties, his eloquence (for he was eloquent as a professor) produced generally the most flattering effects. Statesmen, lawyers, men of letters, idlers, crowded with equal admiration round the amusing moralist, whose glittering store of knowledge was collected from the philosopher, the poet, the writer of romance and history.
“In mixing up the sparking julep,” says an eloquent though somewhat affected writer, “that by its potent application was to scour away the drugs and feculence and peccant humours of the body politic, he (Mackintosh) seemed to stand with his back to the drawers in a metaphysical dispensary, and to take out of them whatever ingredients suited his purpose.”[86]
In the meanwhile (having lost his first wife and married again) he pursued his professional course, though without doing anything as an advocate equal to his success as a professor.
M. Peltier’s trial, however, now took place. M. Peltier was an émigré, whom the neighbouring revolution had driven to our shores; a gentleman possessing some ability, and ardently attached to the royal cause.
He had not profited by the permission to return to France, which had been given to all French exiles, but carried on a French journal, which, finding its way to the Continent, excited the remarkable susceptibility of the first consul. This was just after the peace of Amiens. Urged by the French government, our own undertook the prosecution of M. Peltier’s paper. The occasion was an ode, in which the apotheosis of Bonaparte was referred to, and his assassination pretty plainly advocated. So atrocious a suggestion, however veiled, or however provoked, merited, no doubt, the reprobation of all worthy and high-minded men; but party spirit and national rancour ran high, and the defender of the prosecuted journalist was sure to stand before his country as the enemy of France and the advocate of freedom.
A variety of circumstances pointed out Mr. Mackintosh as the proper counsel to place in this position; and here, by a singular fortune, he was enabled to combine a hatred to revolutionary principles with an ardent admiration of that ancient spirit of liberty, which is embodied in the most popular institutions of England.
“Circumstanced as my client is,” he exclaimed, in his rather studied but yet powerful declamation, “the most refreshing object his eye can rest upon is an English jury; and he feels with me gratitude to the Ruler of empires, that after the wreck of everything else ancient and venerable in Europe, of all established forms and acknowledged principles, of all long-subsisting laws and sacred institutions, we are met here, administering justice after the manner of our forefathers in this her ancient sanctuary. Here these parties come to judgment; one, the master of the greatest empire on the earth; the other, a weak, defenceless fugitive, who waives his privilege of having half his jury composed of foreigners, and puts himself with confidence on a jury entirely English. Gentlemen, there is another view in which this case is highly interesting, important, and momentous, and I confess I am animated to every exertion that I can make, not more by a sense of my duty to my client, than by a persuasion that this cause is the first of a series of contests with the ‘freedom of the press.’ My learned friend, Mr. Perceval, I am sure, will never disgrace his magistracy by being instrumental to a measure so calamitous. But viewing this as I do, as the first of a series of contests between the greatest power on earth and the only press that is now free, I cannot help calling upon him and you to pause, before the great earthquake swallows up all the freedom that remains among men; for though no indication has yet been made to attack the freedom of the press in this country, yet the many other countries that have been deprived of this benefit must forcibly impress us with the propriety of looking vigilantly to ourselves. Holland and Switzerland are now no more, and near fifty of the imperial crowns in Germany have vanished since the commencement of this prosecution. All these being gone, there is no longer any control but what this country affords. Every press on the Continent, from Palermo to Hamburg, is enslaved; one place alone remains where the press is free, protected by our government and our patriotism. It is an awfully proud consideration that that venerable fabric, raised by our ancestors, still stands unshaken amidst the ruins that surround us. You are the advanced guard of liberty,” &c.
After the delivery of this speech, which, after being translated by Madame de Staël, was read with admiration not only in England, but also on the Continent, Mr. Mackintosh, though he lost his cause, was considered no less promising as a pleader, than after the publication of the “Vindiciæ Gallicæ” he had been considered as a pamphleteer. In both instances, however, the sort of effort he had made seemed to have exhausted him, and three months had not elapsed, when, with the plaudits of the public, and the praise of Erskine, still ringing in his ears, he accepted the Recordership of Bombay from Mr. Addington, and retired with satisfaction to the well-paid and knighted indolence of India. His objects in so doing were, he said, to make a fortune, and to write a work.
We shall thoroughly understand the man when we see what he achieved towards the attainment of these two objects. He did not make a fortune; he did not write a work. The greater part of his time seems to have been employed in a restless longing after society, and a perpetual dawdling over books; during the seven years he was absent, he speaks continually of his projected work as “always to be projected.” “I observe” he says, in one of his letters to Mr. Sharpe, “that you touch me once or twice with the spur about my books on Morals. I felt it gall me, for I have not begun.”
Part II.
HIS STAY IN INDIA AND HIS CAREER IN PARLIAMENT.
Goes to India.—Pursuits there.—Returns home dissatisfied with himself.—Enters Parliament on the Liberal side.—Reasons why he took it.—Fails in first speech.—Merits as an orator.—Extracts from his speeches.—Modern ideas.—Excessive punishments.—Mackintosh’s success as a law reformer.—General parliamentary career.
I.
Sir James Mackintosh, in accepting a place in India, abdicated the chances of a brilliant and useful career in England; still his presence in one of our great dependencies was not without its use—for his literary reputation offered him facilities in the encouragement of learned and scientific pursuits—which, when they tend to explore and illustrate the history and resources of a new empire, are, in fact, political ones; while his attempts to obtain a statistical survey, as well as to form different societies, the objects of which were the acquirement and communication of knowledge, though not immediately successful, did not fail to arouse in Bombay, and to spread much farther, a different and a far more enlightened spirit than that which had hitherto prevailed amongst our speculating settlers, or rather sojourners in the East. The mildness of his judicial sway, moreover, and a wish to return to Europe with, if possible, a “bloodless ermine,”[87] contributed not only to extend the views, but to soften the manners of the merchant conquerors, and to lay thereby something like a practical foundation for subsequent legislative improvement.
To himself, however, this distant scene seems to have possessed no interest, to have procured no advantage. Worn by the climate, wearied by a series of those small duties and trifling exertions which, unattended by fame, offer none of that moral excitement which overcomes physical fatigue; but little wealthier than when he undertook his voyage, having accomplished none of those works, and enjoyed little of that ease, the visions of which cheered him in undertaking it; a sick, a sad, and, so far as the acceptance of his judgeship was concerned, a repentant man, he (in 1810) took his way homewards.
“It has happened,” he observes in one of his letters—“it has happened by the merest accident that the ‘trial of Peltier’ is among the books in the cabin; and when I recollect the way in which you saw me opposed to Perceval on the 21st of February, 1803 (the day of the trial), and that I compare his present situation—whether at the head of an administration or an opposition—with mine, scanty as my stock is of fortune, health, and spirits, in a cabin nine feet square, on the Indian Ocean, I think it enough that I am free from the soreness of disappointment.”
There is, indeed, something melancholy in the contrast thus offered between a man still young, hopeful, rising high in the most exciting profession, just crowned with the honours of forensic triumph, and the man prematurely old, who in seven short years had become broken, dispirited, and was now under the necessity of beginning life anew, with wasted energies and baffled aspirations.
But Sir James Mackintosh deceived himself in thinking that if the seven years to which he alludes had been passed in England, they would have placed him in the same position as that to which Mr. Perceval had ascended within the same period. Had he remained at the bar, or entered Parliament instead of going to India, he might, indeed, have made several better speeches than Mr. Perceval, as he had already made one; but he would not always have been speaking well, like Mr. Perceval, nor have pushed himself forward in those situations, and at those opportunities, when a good speech would have been most wanted or most effective. At all events, his talents for active life were about to have a tardy trial; the object of his early dreams and hopes was about to be attained—a seat in the House of Commons. He took his place amongst the members of the Liberal opposition; and many who remembered the auspices under which he left England, were somewhat surprised at the banner under which he now enlisted.
II.
Here is the place at which it may be most convenient to consider Sir James Mackintosh’s former change; as well as the circumstances which led him back to his old connections. He had entered life violently democratical,—a strong upholder of the French Revolution; he became, so to speak, violently moderate, and a strong opponent of this same Revolution. He altered his politics, and this alteration was followed by his receiving an appointment.
Such is the outline which malignity might fill up with the darkest colours; but it would be unjustly. The machinery of human conduct is complex; and it would be absurd to say that a man’s interests are not likely to have an influence on his actions. But they who see more of our nature than the surface, know that our interests are quite as frequently governed by our character as our character is by our interests. The true explanation, then, of Mackintosh’s conduct is to be found in his order of intellect. His mind was not a mind led by its own inspirations, but rather a mind reflecting the ideas of other men, and of that class of men more especially to which he, as studious and speculative, belonged. The commencement of the French Revolution, the long-prepared work of the Encyclopedists, was hailed by such persons (we speak generally) as a sort of individual success. Burke did much to check this feeling; and subsequent events favoured Burke. But by far the greater number of those addicted to literary pursuits sympathized with the popular party in the States-General. Under this impulse the “Vindiciæ Gallicæ” was written. The exclusion of the eminent men of the National Assembly from power modified, the execution of the Girondists subdued, this impulse. At the fall of those eloquent Republicans the lettered usurpation ceased; and now literature, instead of being opposed to royalty, owed, like it, a debt of vengeance to that inexorable mob which had spared neither.
It was at the time, then, when everybody was recanting that Mackintosh made his recantation. Most men of his class and nature took the same part in the same events; for such men were delighted with the theories of freedom, but shocked at its excesses; and, indeed, it is difficult to conceive anything more abhorrent to the gentle dreams of a civilised philosophy than that wild hurricane of liberty which carried ruin and desolation over France in the same blast that spread the seeds of future prosperity.
We find, it is true, this beautiful passage in the “Vindiciæ Gallicæ:” “The soil of Attica was remarked by antiquity as producing at once the most delicious fruits and the most violent poisons. It is thus with the human mind; and to the frequency of convulsions in the commonwealths we owe those examples of sanguinary tumult and virtuous heroism which distinguish their history from the monotonous tranquillity of modern states.” But though these words were used by Mackintosh, they were merely transcribed by him; they belong to a deeper and more daring genius—they are almost literally the words of Machiavel, and were furnished by the reading, and not by the genuine reflections, of the youthful pamphleteer. He had not in rejoicing over the work of the Constituante anticipated the horrors of the Convention; the regret, therefore, that he expressed for what he condemned as his early want of judgment, was undoubtedly sincere; and no one can fairly blame him for accepting, under such circumstances, a post which was not political, and which removed him from the angry arena in which he would have had to combat with former friends, whose rancour may be appreciated by Dr. Parr’s brutal reply—when Mackintosh asked him, how Quigley, an Irish priest, executed for treason, could have been worse. “I’ll tell you, Jemmy—Quigley was an Irishman, he might have been a Scotchman; he was a priest, he might have been a lawyer; he was a traitor, he might have been an apostate.”
Thus much for the Bombay Recordership. But the feverish panic which the sanguinary government of Robespierre had produced—calmed by his fall, soothed by the feeble government which succeeded him, and replaced at last by the stern domination of a warrior who had at least the merit of restoring order and tranquillity to his country—died away.
A variety of circumstances—including the publication of the “Edinburgh Review,” which, conducted in a liberal and moderate spirit, made upon the better educated class of the British population a considerable impression—favoured and aided the reaction towards a more temperate state of thought. A new era began, in which the timid lost their fears, the factious their hopes. All question of the overthrow of the constitution and of the confiscation of property was at an end; and as politics thus fell back into more quiet channels, parties adopted new watchwords and new devices. The cry was no longer, “Shall there be a Monarchy or a Republic?” but, “Shall the Catholics continue proscribed as helots, or shall they be treated as free men?”
During the seven years which Sir James had passed in India, this was the turn that had been taking place in affairs and opinions. It is hardly possible to conceive any change more calculated to carry along with it a mild and intelligent philosopher, to whom fanaticism of all kinds was hateful.
Those whom he had left, under the standard of Mr. Pitt, contending against anarchical doctrines and universal conquest, were now for disputing one of Mr. Pitt’s most sacred promises, and refusing to secure peace to an empire, at the very crisis of its fortunes, by the establishment of a system of civil equality between citizens who thought differently on the somewhat abstruse subject of transubstantiation. Mr. Perceval, at the head of this section of politicians, was separated from almost every statesman who possessed any reputation as a scholar. Mr. Canning did not belong to his administration; Lord Wellesley was on the point of quitting it. There never was a government to which what may be called the thinking class of the country stood so opposed. Thus, the very same sort of disposition which had detached Sir James Mackintosh, some years ago, from his early friends, was now disposing him to rejoin them; and he moved backwards and forwards, I must repeat, in both instances—when he went to India a Tory,[88] and when he entered Parliament a Whig—with a considerable body of persons, who, though less remarked because less distinguished, honestly pursued the same conduct.
All the circumstances, indeed, which marked his conduct at this time do him honour. Almost immediately on his return to England, the premier offered him a seat in Parliament, and held out to him the hopes of the high and lucrative situation of President of the Board of Control. A poor man, and an ambitious man, equally anxious for place and distinction, he refused both; and this refusal, of which we have now the surest proof, was a worthy answer to the imputations which had attended the acceptance of his former appointment. Lord Abinger, who has since recorded the refusal of a seat from Mr. Perceval, was himself the bearer of a similar offer from Lord Cawdor;[89] and under the patronage of this latter nobleman Sir James Mackintosh first entered Parliament (1813) as the Member for Nairnshire, a representation the more agreeable, since it was that of his ancestral county, wherein he had inherited the small property which some years before he had been compelled to part with.[90]
III.
Any man entering the House of Commons for the first time late in life possesses but a small chance of attaining considerable parliamentary eminence. It requires some time to seize the spirit of that singular assembly, of which most novices are at first inclined to over-rate and then to under-rate the judgment.
A learned man is more likely to be wrong than any other. He fancies himself amidst an assembly of meditative and philosophic statesmen; he calls up all his deepest thoughts and most refined speculations; he is anxious to astonish by the profundity and extent of his views, the novelty and sublimity of his conceptions; as he commences, the listeners are convinced he is a bore, and before he concludes, he is satisfied that they are blockheads.
The orator, however, is far more out in his conjectures than the audience. The House of Commons consists of a mob of gentlemen, the greater part of whom are neither without talent nor information. But a mob of well-informed gentlemen is still a mob, requiring to be amused rather than instructed, and only touched by those reasons and expressions which, clear to the dullest as to the quickest intellect, vibrate through an assembly as if it had but one ear and one mind.
Besides, the House of Commons is a mob divided beneficially, though it requires some knowledge of the general genius and practical bearings of a representative government to see all the advantages of such a division, into parties. What such parties value is that which is done in their ranks, that which is useful to themselves, of advantage to a common cause; any mere personal exhibition is almost certain to be regarded by them with contempt or displeasure. Differing amongst themselves, indeed, in almost everything else—some being silent and fastidious, some bustling and loquacious, some indolent and looking after amusement, some incapable of being and yet desiring to appear to be men of business, some active, public-spirited, and ambitious—all agree in detecting the philosophic rhetorician. Anything in the shape of subtle refinement,—anything that borders on learned generalities, is sure to be out of place. Even supposing that the new member, already distinguished elsewhere although now at his maiden essay in this strange arena, has sufficient tact to see the errors into which he is likely to fall, he is still a suspected person, and will be narrowly watched as to any design of parading his own acquirements at the expense of other people’s patience.
How did Sir J. Mackintosh first appear amongst auditors thus disposed? Lord Castlereagh moved, on the 20th of December, 1814, for an adjournment to the 1st of March. At that moment the whole of Europe was pouring, in the full tide of victory, into France. Every heart thrilled with recent triumph and the anticipation of more complete success. The ministry had acquired popularity as the reflection of the talents of their general and the tardy good fortune of their allies. The demand for adjournment was the demand for a confidence which they had a right to expect, and which Mr. Whitbread and the leading Whigs saw it would be ungenerous and impolitic to refuse. They granted then what was asked; Mackintosh alone opposed it. His opposition was isolated, certain to be without any practical result, and could only be accounted for by the desire to make a speech!
Lord Castlereagh, who was by nature the man of action which Mackintosh was not, saw at once the error which the new Whig member had committed, and determined to add as much as possible to his difficulties. Instead, therefore, of making the statement which he knew was expected from him, and to which he presumed the orator opposite would affect to reply, he merely moved for the adjournment as a matter of course, which needed no justification. By this simple manœuvre all the formidable artillery which the profound reflector on foreign politics and the eloquent lecturer on the law of nations had brought into the field, was rendered useless. A fire against objects which were not in view, an answer to arguments which had never been employed, was necessarily a very tame exhibition, and indeed the new member was hardly able to get through the oration to which it was evident he had given no common care. In slang phrase, he “broke down.” Why was this? Sir James Mackintosh was not ignorant of the nature of the assembly he addressed; he could have explained to another all that was necessary to catch its ear; but, as I have said a few pages back, the character of a person governs his interests far more frequently than his interests govern his character; and the man I am speaking of was not the man whom a sort of instinct hurries into the heat and fervour of a real contest. To brandish his glittering arms was to him the battle. He therefore persuaded himself that what he did with satisfaction he should do with success. It was just this which made his failure serious to him.
The runner who trips in a race and loses it may win races for the rest of his life; but if he stops in the middle of his course, because he is asthmatic and cannot keep his breath, few persons would bet on him again. Now, the failure of Mackintosh was of this kind; it was not an accidental, but a constitutional one, arising from defects or peculiarities that were part of himself. He never, then, recovered from it. And yet it could not be said that he spoke ill; on the contrary, notwithstanding certain defects in manner, he spoke, after a little practice, well, and far above the ordinary speaking of learned men and lawyers. Some of his orations may be read with admiration, and were even received with applause.
IV.
Where shall we find a nobler tone of statesmanlike philosophy than in the following condemnation of that policy which attached Genoa to Piedmont[91]—a condemnation not the less remarkable for the orator’s not unskilful attempt to connect his former opposition to the French Revolution with the war he was then waging against the Holy Alliance?
“One of the grand and patent errors of the French Revolution was the fatal opinion, that it was possible for human skill to make a government. It was an error too generally prevalent not to be excusable. The American Revolution had given it a fallacious semblance of support, though no event in history more clearly showed its falsehood. The system of laws and the frame of society in North America remained after the Revolution, and remain to this day, fundamentally the same as they ever were.[92] The change in America, like the change in 1688, was made in defence of legal right, not in pursuit of political improvement; and it was limited by the necessity of defence which produced it. The whole internal order remained, which had always been Republican. The somewhat slender tie which loosely joined these Republics to a monarchy, was easily and without violence divided. But the error of the French Revolutionists was, in 1789, the error of Europe. From that error we have been long reclaimed by fatal experience.
“We now see, or rather we have seen and felt, that a government is not like a machine or a building, the work of man; that it is the work of nature, like the nobler productions of the vegetable or animal world, which man may improve and corrupt, and even destroy, but which he cannot create. We have long learned to despise the ignorance or the hypocrisy of those who speak of giving a free constitution to a people, and to exclaim, with a great living poet:
‘A gift of that which never can be given
By all the blended powers of earth and heaven!’
“Indeed, we have gone, perhaps as usual, too near to the opposite error, and not made sufficient allowances for those dreadful cases, which I must call desperate, where, in long-enslaved countries, it is necessary either humbly and cautiously to lay foundations from which liberty may slowly rise, or acquiesce in the doom of perpetual bondage on ourselves and our children.
“But though we no longer dream of making governments, the confederacy of kings seem to feel no doubt of their own power to make a nation. A government cannot be made, because its whole spirit and principles spring from the character of the nation. There would be no difficulty in framing a government, if the habits of a people could be changed by a lawgiver; if he could obliterate their recollections, transform their attachment and reverence, extinguish their animosities and correct those sentiments which, being at variance with his opinions of public interest, he calls prejudices. Now this is precisely the power which our statesmen at Vienna have arrogated to themselves. They not only form nations, but they compose them of elements apparently the most irreconcilable. They made one nation out of Norway and Sweden; they tried to make another out of Prussia and Saxony. They have, in the present case, forced together Piedmont and Genoa to form a nation which is to guard the avenues of Italy, and to be one of the main securities of Europe against universal monarchy.
“It was not the pretension of the ancient system to form states, to divide territory according to speculations of military convenience.
“The great statesmen of former times did not speak of their measures as the noble lord (Lord Castlereagh) did about the incorporation of Belgium with Holland (about which I say nothing), as a great improvement in the system of Europe. That is the language of those who revolutionize that system by a partition like that of Poland, by the establishment of the Federation of the Rhine at Paris, or by the creation of new states at Vienna. The ancient principle was to preserve all those States which had been founded by Time and Nature, the character of which was often maintained, and the nationality of which was sometimes created by the very irregularities of frontier and inequalities of strength, of which a shallow policy complains; to preserve all such States down to the smallest, first by their own national spirit, and secondly by that mutual jealousy which makes every great power the opponent of the dangerous ambition of every other; to preserve nations, living bodies, produced by the hand of Nature—not to form artificial dead machines, called nations, by the words and parchment of a diplomatic act—was the ancient system of our wiser forefathers, &c. &c.…”
V.
There is also a noble strain of eloquence in the following short defence of the slave-treaty with Spain:
“I feel pride in the British flag being for this object subjected to foreign ships. I think it a great and striking proof of magnanimity that the darling point of honour of our country, the British flag itself, which for a thousand years has braved the battle and the breeze, which has defied confederacies of nations, to which we have clung closer and closer as the tempest roared around us, which has borne us through all perils and raised its head higher as the storm has assailed us more fearfully, should now bend voluntarily to the cause of justice and humanity—should now lower itself, never having been brought low by the mightiest, to the most feeble and defenceless—to those who, far from being able to return the benefits we would confer upon them, will never hear of those benefits, will never know, perhaps, even our name.”
By far the most effective of Sir James Mackintosh’s speeches in Parliament, however, was one that he delivered (June, 1819) against “The Foreign Enlistment Bill,” a measure which was intended to prevent British subjects from aiding the South American colonies in the struggle they were then making for independence. No good report of this oration remains, but even our parliamentary records are sufficient to show that it possessed many of the rarer attributes of eloquence, and moving with a rapidity and a vigour (not frequent in Sir James’s efforts), prevented his language from seeming laboured or his learning tedious.
It contained, doubtless, other passages more striking in the delivery, but the one which follows is peculiarly pleasing to me—considering the argument it answered and the audience to which it was addressed:
“Much has been said of the motives by which the merchants of England are actuated as to this question. A noble lord, the other night, treated these persons with great and unjust severity, imputing the solicitude which they feel for the success of the South American cause to interested motives. Without indulging in commonplace declamations against party men, I must considerately say that it is a question with me whether the interest of merchants do not more frequently coincide with the best interests of mankind than do the transient and limited views of politicians. If British merchants look with eagerness to the event of the struggle in America, no doubt they do so with the hope of deriving advantage from that event. But on what is such hope founded? On the diffusion of beggary, on the maintenance of ignorance, on the confirmation, on the establishment of tyranny in America? No; these are the expectations of Ferdinand. The British merchant builds his hopes of trade and profit on the progress of civilization and good government; on the successful assertion of freedom—of freedom, that parent of talent, that parent of heroism, that parent of every virtue. The fate of America can only be necessary to commerce as it becomes accessory to the dignity and the happiness of the race of man.”
VI.
As a parliamentary orator, Sir James Mackintosh never before or afterwards rose to so great a height as in this debate; but he continued at intervals, and on great and national questions, to deliver what may be called very remarkable essays up to the end of his career. I myself was present at his last effort of this description; and most interesting it was to hear the man who began his public life with the “Vindiciæ Gallicæ,” closing it with a speech in favour of the Reform Bill. During the interval, nearly half a century had run its course. The principles which, forty years before, had appeared amidst the storm and tempest of doubtful discussion, and which, since that period, had been at various times almost totally obscured, were now again on the horizon, bright in the steady sunshine of matured opinion. The distinguished person who was addressing his countrymen on a great historical question was himself a history,—a history of his own time, of which, with the flexibility of an intelligent but somewhat feeble nature, he had shared the enthusiasm, the doubt, the despair, the hope, the triumph.
The speech itself was remarkable. Overflowing with thought and knowledge, containing sound general principles as to government, undisfigured by the violence of party spirit, it pleased and instructed those who took the pains to listen to it attentively; but it wanted the qualities which attract or command attention.
It were vain to seek in Mackintosh for the playful fancy of Canning, the withering invective of Brougham, the deep earnestness of Plunkett. The speaker’s person, moreover, was gaunt and ungainly, his accent Scotch, his voice monotonous, his action (the regular and graceless vibration of two long arms) sometimes vehement without passion, and sometimes almost cringing through good nature and civility. In short, his manner, wanting altogether the quiet concentration of self-possession, was peculiarly opposed to that dignified, simple, and straightforward style of public speaking, which may be characterised as “English.”
Still, it must be remembered that he was then at an advanced age, and deprived, in some degree, of that mental, and yet more of that physical, energy, which at an earlier period might possibly have concealed these defects. I have heard, indeed, that on previous occasions there had been moments when a temporary excitement gave a natural animation to his voice and gestures, and that then the excellence of his arguments was made strikingly manifest by an effective delivery.
His chief reputation in Parliament, nevertheless, is not as an orator, but as a person successfully connected with one of those great movements of opinion which are so long running their course, and which it is the fortune of a man’s life to encounter and be borne up upon when they are near their goal.
VII.
Sir Thomas More, in his “Utopia” (1520), says of thieving, that, “as the severity of the remedy is too great, so it is ineffectual.” In Erasmus, Raleigh, Bacon, are to be found almost precisely the same phrases and maxims that a few years ago startled the House of Commons as novelties. “What a lamentable case it is,” observes Sir Edward Coke (1620), “to see so many Christian men and women strangled on that cursed tree of the gallows, the prevention of which consisteth in three things:
‘Good education,
‘Good laws,
‘Rare pardons.’”
Evelyn, in his preface to “State Trials” (1730), observes, “that our legislation is very liberal of the lives of offenders, making no distinction between the most atrocious crimes and those of a less degree.”
“Experience,” says Montesquieu, “shows that in countries remarkable for the lenity of their laws, the spirit of its inhabitants is as much affected by slight penalties as in other countries by severe punishments.”[93]
This feeling became general amongst reflecting men in the middle and towards the end of the eighteenth century.
Johnson displays it in the “Rambler” (1751). Blackstone expressly declares that “every humane legislator should be extremely cautious of establishing laws which inflict the penalty of death, especially for slight offences.” Mr. Grose, in writing on the Criminal Laws of England (1769), observes: “The sanguinary disposition of our laws, besides being a national reproach, is, as it may appear, an encouragement instead of a terror to delinquents.”
At this time also appeared the pamphlet of “Beccaria” (1767), which was followed by an almost general movement in favour of milder laws throughout Europe. The Duke of Modena (1780) abolished the Inquisition in his states; the King of France, in 1781, the torture; in Russia, capital punishment—never used but in cases of treason—may be said, for all ordinary crimes, to have been done away with.
In England, where every doctrine is sure to find two parties, there was a contest between one set of men who wished our rigorous laws to be still more rigorously executed, and another that considered the rigour of those laws to be the main cause of their inefficiency. A pamphlet, called “Thoughts on Executive Justice,” which produced some sensation at the moment, represented the first class of malcontents, and the author declaimed vehemently against those juries, who acquitted capital offenders because it went against their conscience to take away men’s lives. Sir Samuel Romilly, then a very young man, replied to this pamphlet with its own facts, and contended that the way of insuring the punishment of criminals was to make that punishment more proportionate to their offences.
From this pamphlet dates the modern battle which the great lawyer, whose public career commenced with it, carried subsequently to the floor of the House of Commons.
His exertions, however, were less fortunate than they deserved to be. To him, indeed, we owe, in a great measure, the spreading of truths amongst the many which had previously been confined to the few; but he never enjoyed the substantial triumph of these truths, for the one or two small successes which he obtained are scarcely worth mentioning.
His melancholy death took place in 1819, and Sir James Mackintosh, who had just previously called the attention of Parliament to the barbarous extent to which executions for forgery had been carried, now came forward as the successor of Romilly in the general work of criminal law reformation.
In March, 1819, accordingly, he moved for a committee to inquire into the subject, and obtained, such being the result in a great measure of his own able and temperate manner, a majority of nineteen. Again, in 1822, though opposed by the ministers and law-officers of the Crown, he carried a motion which pledged the House to increase the efficiency by diminishing the rigour of our criminal jurisprudence; and, in 1823, he followed up this triumph by Nine Resolutions, which, had they been adopted, would have taken away the punishment of death in the case of larceny from shops, dwelling-houses, and on navigable rivers, and also in those of forgery, sheep-stealing, and other felonies, made capital by the “Marriage and Black Act;” in short, he proposed that sentences of death should only be pronounced when it was intended to carry them into execution. Mr. Peel, then home secretary, opposed these resolutions, and obtained a majority against them; but he pledged himself at the same time to undertake, on behalf of the government, a plan of law reform, which, although less comprehensive than that which Sir James Mackintosh contended for, was a great measure in itself, and an immense step towards further improvement.
Mackintosh’s success, throughout these efforts, was mainly due to the plain unpretending manner in which he stated his case. “I don’t mean,” he said, “to frame a new criminal code; God forbid I should have such an idle and extravagant pretension. I don’t mean to abolish the punishment of death; I believe that societies and individuals may use it as a legitimate mode of defence. Neither do I mean to usurp on the right of pardon now held by the Crown, which, on the contrary, I wish, practically speaking, to restore. I do not even hope that I shall be able to point out a manner in which the penalty of the law should always be inflicted and never remitted. But I find things in this condition—that the infliction of the law is the exception, and I desire to make it the rule. I find two hundred cases in which capital punishment is awarded by the statute-book, and only twenty-five in which, for seventy years, such punishment has been executed. Why is this? Because the code says one thing, and the moral feeling of your society another. All I desire is that the two should be analogous, and that our laws should award such punishments as our consciences permit us to inflict.”
It was this kind of tone which reassured the House that it was not perilling property by respecting life, and brought about more quickly than less prudent management would have done that reform to which the general spirit of the time was tending, and which must necessarily, a few years sooner or later, have arrived.
VIII.
Thus, Sir James Mackintosh not only delivered some remarkable speeches in Parliament, but he connected his name with a great and memorable parliamentary triumph; nor is this all, he was true to his party, opposing the government, though with some internal scruples, in 1820; supporting Mr. Canning in 1827; and going again into opposition, to the Duke of Wellington, in 1828. And yet, notwithstanding the ability usually displayed in his speeches, notwithstanding the result of his efforts in criminal law reform, and, more than all, notwithstanding the constancy during late years of his politics, he held but a third-rate place with the Whigs, and when they came into office in 1830, was only made secretary at that board of which he had been offered the presidency twenty years before. It is easy to say that this was because he had not aristocratical connections. Mr. Poulett Thompson was not more highly connected, and yet, though thirty years his junior, and far his inferior in knowledge and mental capacity, received at the time a higher office, and rose in ten years to the first places and honours of the State. The one had much the higher order of intelligence, the other the more resolute practical character. What you expected from the first, he did not perform; the other went beyond your expectations. For this is to be remarked: a man’s career is formed of the number of little things he is always doing, whereas your opinion of him is frequently derived, as I have already said, from something which, under a particular stimulus, he has done once or twice, and may do now and then.
The fact is that Mackintosh was not fit for the daily toil and struggle of Parliament; he had not the quickness, the energy, the hard and active nature of those who rise by constant exertions in popular assemblies. He did very well to come out like the State steed, on great and solemn occasions, with gorgeous caparison and prancing action, but he did not do as the every-day hack on a plain road. He was, moreover, inclined by his nature rather to repose than to strife; and that which we do by effort we cannot be doing for ever—nor even do frequently well. His reason, which was acute, told him what he should be; but he had not the energy to be it. For instance, on returning to England, he exclaimed: “It is time to be something decided, and I am resolved to exert myself to the utmost in public life, if I have a seat in Parliament, or to condemn myself to profound retirement if the doors of St. Stephen’s are barred to me.”[94]
He had not, however, been many years a member before he accepted a professorship (year 1818) at Haileybury College, because it left him in the House of Commons; and refused the chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh (1818), because, it would have withdrawn him from it. The great stream of public life thus passed for ever by him; he could neither commit himself to its waves nor yet avoid lingering on its shores. Now and then, in a moment of excitement, he would rush into it, but it was soon again to retire to some sunny reverie, or some shady regret, where he could quietly plot for the future, or mourn over the past, or indulge the scheme of lettered indolence which wooed him at the moment.
Part III.
MERITS AS A WRITER, DEATH, AND ESTIMATE OF GENERAL CAPACITY AND CHARACTER.
History of England.—Articles in “Edinburgh Review.”—Treatise on Ethical Philosophy.—Revolution of 1688.—Bentham’s system of morals and politics.—His own death.—Comparison with Montaigne.
I.
I have said that Sir James Mackintosh allowed himself to be lured from the strife of politics by the love of letters. And what was the species of learned labour on which his intervals of musing leisure were employed? He read at times—this he was always able and willing to do—for the future composition of a great historical work—the “History of England”—which his friends and the public, with a total ignorance of his sort of character and ability, always sighed that he should undertake, and considered that he would worthily accomplish. But while he read for the future composition of this work, he actually wrote but little for it. The little he did write was undertaken at the call of some particular impulse, and capable of being finished before that impulse was passed away. In such writings he followed the bent of his nature, and in them accordingly he best succeeded, as they who refer to his contributions to the “Edinburgh Review”[95] may be well disposed to acknowledge. At last, within a few yards of his grave, he made a start. Life was drawing to a close, the season for action was almost passed, and of all he had mused and read and planned for it, there existed nothing. This thought galled him to a species of exertion, and he is one of the very few men who, at an advanced age, crowded the most considerable and ambitious of their works into the last years of their life.
The volumes on “English History” brought out in Dr. Lardner’s “Encyclopædia,” the “Life of Sir Thomas More,” which appeared in the same publication, a “Treatise on Ethical Philosophy,” and a commencement of the “History of the Revolution of 1688,” delivered to the world after his death, are these works.
They all exhibit the author’s defects and merits; third-rate in themselves, and yet at various times persuading us that he who wrote them was a first-rate man. Let us take up, for instance, the volumes on “English History.” The narrative is languid, and interrupted by disquisitions: the style is in general prolix, cumbrous, cold, profuse; nevertheless, these volumes are full of thought and knowledge; they contain many curious anecdotes, many scattered observations of profound wisdom, while here and there burst upon us, by surprise it must be confessed, passages which, written under a temporary excitement, display remarkable spirit and power. Such is the description of Becket’s murder:
II.
“Provoked by these acts of extraordinary imprudence, Henry is said to have called out before an audience of lords, knights, and gentlemen, ‘To what a miserable state am I reduced, when I cannot be at rest in my own realm, by reason of only one priest; is there no one to deliver me from my troubles?’ Four knights of distinguished rank, William de Tracy, Hugh de Moreville, Richard Briths, and Reginald Fitz-Urse (December 28), interpreted the King’s complaints as commands. They repaired to Canterbury, confirmed in their purpose by finding that Becket had recommenced his excommunications by that of Robert de Broe, and that he had altered his course homeward to avoid the royalist bishops on their way to court, in Normandy; they instantly went to his house, and required him, not very mildly, to withdraw the censures of the prelates, and take the oath to his lord-paramount. He refused. John of Salisbury, his faithful and learned secretary, ventured at this alarming moment to counsel peace. The primate thought that nothing was left to him but a becoming death.
“The knights retired to put on their armour, and there seems to have been sufficient interval either for negotiation or escape. At that moment, indeed, measures were preparing for legal proceedings against him.
“But the visible approach of peril awakened his sense of dignity, and breathed an unusual decorum over his language and deportment. He went through the cloisters into the church, whither he was followed by his enemies, attended by a band of soldiers, whom they had hastily gathered together. They rushed into the church with drawn swords. Tracy cried out, ‘Where is the traitor? Where is the archbishop?’ Becket, who stood before the altar of St. Bennet, answered gravely, ‘Here am I, no traitor, but the archbishop.’ Tracy pulled him by the sleeve, saying: ‘Come hither, thou art a prisoner.’ He pulled back his arm with such force as to make Tracy stagger, and said: ‘What meaneth this, William? I have done thee many pleasures; comest thou with armed men into my church?’ ‘It is not possible that thou shouldst live any longer,’ called out Fitz-Urse. The intrepid primate replied: ‘I am ready to die for my God, in defence of the liberties of the Church.’
“At that moment, either by a relapse into his old disorders, or to show that his non-resistance sprung not from weakness, but from duty, he took hold of Tracy by the habergeon, or gorget, and flung him with such violence as had nearly thrown him to the ground. He then bowed his head, as if he would pray, and uttered his last words: ‘To God and St. Mary I commend my soul, and the cause of the Church!’ Tracy aimed a heavy blow at him, which fell on a bystander. The assassins fell on him with many strokes, and though the second brought him to the ground, they did not cease till his brains were scattered over the pavement.”[96]
III.
The characters of Alfred, of William I., of Henry VII., are superior to any sketches of the same persons with which I am acquainted. The summing up of events into pictures of certain epochs is frequently done with much skill, and I particularly remember a short description of the commencement of the Crusades, concluding with the capture of Jerusalem;—the state of Europe in the thirteenth century, comprising a large portion of history in two pages; and the death of Simon de Montfort, with the establishment of the English Constitution. In a true spirit of historical philosophy, Sir James Mackintosh says:
“The introduction of knights, citizens, and burgesses into the Legislature, by its continuance in circumstances so apparently inauspicious, showed how exactly it suited the necessities and demands of society at that moment. No sooner had events brought forward the measure, than its fitness to the state of the community became apparent. It is often thus that in the clamours of men for a succession of objects, society selects from among them the one that has an affinity with itself, and which most easily combines with its state at the time.”
The condition of Europe, also, just prior to the wars of the Roses, is rapidly, picturesquely, and comprehensively sketched.
“The historian who rests for a little space between the termination of the Plantagenet wars in France and the commencement of the civil wars of the two branches of that family in England, may naturally look around him, reviewing some of the more important events which had passed, and casting his eye onward to the preparations for the mighty changes which were to produce an influence on the character and lot of the human race. A very few particulars only can be selected as specimens from so vast a mass. The foundations of the political system of the European commonwealth were now laid. A glance over the map of Europe, in 1453, will satisfy an observer that the territories of different nations were then fast approaching to the shape and extent which they retain at this day. The English islanders had only one town of the continent remaining in their hands. The Mahometans of Spain were on the eve of being reduced under the Christian authority. Italy had, indeed, lost her liberty, but had yet escaped the ignominy of a foreign yoke. Moscovy was emerging from the long domination of the Tartars. Venice, Hungary, and Poland, three states now placed under foreign masters, guarded the eastern frontier of Christendom against the Ottoman barbarians, whom the absence of foresight, of mutual confidence, and a disregard of general safety and honour, disgraceful to the western governments, had just suffered to master Constantinople and to subjugate the eastern Christians. France had consolidated the greater part of her central and commanding territories. In the transfer of the Netherlands to the house of Austria originated the French jealousy of that power, then rising in South-Eastern Germany. The empire was daily becoming a looser confederacy under a nominal ruler, whose small remains of authority every day continued to lessen. The internal or constitutional history of the European nations threatened, in almost every continental country, the fatal establishment of an absolute monarchy, from which the free and generous spirit of the northern barbarians did not protect their degenerate posterity. In the Netherlands an ancient gentry, and burghers, enriched by traffic, held their still limited princes in check. In Switzerland, the patricians of a few towns, together with the gallant peasantry of the Alpine valleys, escaped a master. But Parliaments and Diets, States-General and Cortes, were gradually disappearing from view, or reduced from august assemblies to insignificant formalities, and Europe seemed on the eve of exhibiting nothing to the disgusted eye but the dead uniformity of imbecile despotism, dissolute courts, and cruelly oppressed nations.
“In the meantime the unobserved advancement and diffusion of knowledge were preparing the way for discoveries, of which the high result will be contemplated only by unborn ages. The mariner’s compass had conducted the Portuguese to distant points on the coast of Africa, and was about to lead them through the unploughed ocean to the famous regions of the East. Civilized men, hitherto cooped up on the shores of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, now visited the whole of their subject planet and became its undisputed sovereigns. The great adventurer[97] was then born, who, with two undecked boats and one frail sloop, containing with difficulty a hundred and twenty persons, dared to stretch across an untraversed ocean, which had hitherto bounded the imaginations as well as the enterprises of men; and who, instead of that India renowned in legend and in story, of which he was in quest, laid open a new world which, under the hands of the European race, was one day to produce governments, laws, manners, modes of civilization and states of society almost as different as its native plants and animals from those of ancient Europe.
“Who could then—who can even now—foresee all the prodigious effects of these discoveries on the fortunes of mankind?”
IV.
No one will deny that what I have just quoted might have been written by a great historian; yet no one will say that the work I quote from is a great history.
It is a series of parts, some excellent, some indifferent, but which altogether do not form a whole. The fragment of the Revolution, though a fragment, presents the same qualities and defects. The narrative is poor; some of the characters, such as those of Rochester, Sunderland, and Halifax—and some of the passages (that with which the work opens, for instance)—are excellent; but then, these fine figures of gold embroidery are worked here and there with care and toil, on an ordinary sort of canvas.
The “Life of Sir Thomas More” is the only complete performance; and this because it was a portrait which might have been taken at one sitting.
The “Treatise on Ethics,” first published in the supplement of the seventh edition of the “Encyclopædia Britannica,” and which has since appeared in a separate form under the auspices of Professor Whewell, is still more remarkable, both in its design and execution, as characterising the author. He seems here, indeed, to have been aware of his own capabilities, and to have accommodated his labours to them; for his work is conceived in separate and distinct portions, and he undertakes to write the course and progress of philosophy by descriptions of its most illustrious masters and professors; a plan gracefully imagined, as diffusing the charm of personal narrative over dry and speculative disquisition.
Nothing, accordingly, can be better executed than some of these pictures. It would be difficult to paint Hobbes, Leibnitz, Shaftesbury, more faithfully, or in more suitable colours; the contrast between the haughty Bossuet and the gentle Fénelon is perfectly sustained; while Berkeley the virtuous, the benevolent, the imaginative, is drawn with a pencil which would even have satisfied the admiration of his contemporaries:
V.
“Berkeley.—Ancient learning, exact science, polished society, modern literature, and the fine arts, contributed to adorn and enrich the mind of this accomplished man. All his contemporaries agreed with the satirist in ascribing
“‘To Berkeley every virtue under heaven!’
“Adverse factions and hostile wits concurred only in loving, admiring, and contributing to advance him. The severe sense of Swift endured his visions; the modest Addison endeavoured to reconcile Clarke to his ambitious speculations. His character converted the satire of Pope into fervid praise. Even the fastidious and turbulent Atterbury said, after an interview with him, ‘So much understanding, so much knowledge, so much innocence, and such humility, I did not think had been the portion of any but angels, till I saw this gentleman.’[98] ‘Lord Bathurst told me,’ says Warton, ‘that the members of the Scribblers’ Club being met at his house at dinner, they agreed to rally Berkeley, who was also his guest, on his scheme at Bermudas. Berkeley, having listened to the many lively things they had to say, begged to be heard in his turn, and displayed his plan with such an astonishing and animating force of eloquence and enthusiasm that they were struck dumb, and, after some pause, rose all up together, with earnestness exclaiming, “Let us set out with him immediately!”’[99] It was when thus beloved and celebrated that he conceived, at the age of forty-five, the design of devoting his life to reclaim and convert the natives of North America; and he employed as much influence and solicitation as common men do for their most prized objects, in obtaining leave to resign his dignities and revenues, to quit his accomplished and affectionate friends, and to bury himself in what must have seemed an intellectual desert. After four years’ residence at Newport, in Rhode Island, he was compelled, by the refusal of government to furnish him with funds for his college, to forego his work of heroic, or rather godlike benevolence, though not without some consoling forethought of the fortune of a country where he had sojourned:
“‘Westward the course of empire takes its way:
The first four acts already past,
A fifth shall close the drama with the day,
Time’s noblest offspring is its last.’
“Thus disappointed in his ambition of keeping a school for savage children, at a salary of a hundred pounds a year, he was received on his return with open arms by the philosophical Queen, at whose metaphysical parties he made one, with Sherlock, who, as well as Smallridge, was his supporter, and with Hoadley, who, following Clarke, was his antagonist. By her influence he was made Bishop of Cloyne. It is one of his greatest merits, that though of English extraction, he was a true Irishman, and the first eminent Protestant, after the unhappy contest at the Revolution, who avowed his love for all his countrymen;[100] and contributed, by a truly Christian address to the Roman Catholics of his diocese, to their perfect quiet during the rebellion of 1745. From the writings of his advanced years, when he chose a medical tract[101] to be the vehicle of philosophical reflections, though it cannot be said that he relinquished his early opinions, it is at least apparent that his mind had received a new bent, and was habitually turned from reasoning towards contemplation. His immaterialism, indeed, modestly appears, but only to purify and elevate our thoughts, and to fix them on mind, the paramount and primeval principle of all things. ‘Perhaps,’ says he, ‘the truths about innate ideas may be, that there are properly no ideas on passive objects in the mind but what are derived from sense, but that there are also, besides these, her own acts and operations—such are notions;’ a statement which seems once more to admit general conceptions, and which might have served, as well as the parallel passage of Leibnitz, as the basis of modern philosophy in Germany. From these compositions of his old age, he then appears to have recurred with fondness to Plato, and the later Platonists: writers from whose mere reasonings an intellect so acute could hardly hope for an argumentative satisfaction of all its difficulties, and whom he probably either studied as a means of inuring his mind to objects beyond the visible diurnal sphere, and of attaching it, through frequent meditation, to that perfect and transcendent goodness, to which his moral feelings always pointed, and which they incessantly strove to grasp. His mind, enlarging as it rose, at length receives every theist, however imperfect his belief, to a communion in its philosophic piety. ‘Truth,’ he beautifully concludes, ‘is the cry of all, but the game of few. Certainly, where it is the chief passion, it does not give way to vulgar cares, nor is it contented with a little ardour in the early time of life; active perhaps to pursue, but not so fit to weigh and revise. He that would make a real progress in knowledge, must dedicate his age as well as youth, the latter growth as well as first fruits, at the altar of truth.’ So did Berkeley, and such were almost his latest words.
“His general principles of ethics may be shortly stated by himself: ‘As God is a being of infinite goodness, His end is the good of His creatures. The general well-being of all men of all nations, of all ages of the world, is that which He designs should be procured by the concurring actions of each individual.’ Having stated that this end can be pursued only in one of two ways—either by computing the consequences of each action, or by obeying the rules which generally tend to happiness; and having shown the first to be impossible, he rightly infers, ‘That the end to which God requires the concurrence of human actions, must be carried on by the observation of certain determinate and universal rules, or moral precepts, which in their own nature have a necessary tendency to promote the well-being of mankind, taking in all nations and ages, from the beginning to the end of the world.’[102] A romance, of which a journey to an Utopia in the centre of Africa forms the chief part, called, ‘The adventures of Signor Gaudentio di Lucca,’ has been commonly ascribed to him; probably on no other ground than its union of pleasing invention with benevolence and elegance.”[103]
VI.
The following short description of the practical Paley comes aptly after that of this charming Utopian:
“Paley.—The natural frame of Paley’s understanding fitted it more for business and the world than for philosophy; and he accordingly enjoyed with considerable relish the few opportunities which the latter part of his life afforded, of taking a part in the affairs of his country, as a magistrate. Penetration and shrewdness, firmness and coolness, a vein of pleasantry, fruitful, though somewhat unrefined, with an original homeliness and significancy of expression, were perhaps more remarkable in his conversation than the restraints of authorship and profession allowed them to be in his writings. His taste for the common business and ordinary amusements of life, fortunately gave a zest to the company which his neighbourhood chanced to yield, without rendering him insensible to the pleasures of intercourse with more enlightened society. The practical bent of his nature is visible in the language of his writings, which, on practical matters, is as precise as the nature of the subject requires; but, in his rare and reluctant efforts to rise to first principles, becomes undeterminate and unsatisfactory, though no man’s composition was more free from the impediments which hinder a writer’s meaning from being quickly and clearly seen. He possessed that chastised acuteness of discrimination, exercised on the affairs of men, and habitually looking to a purpose beyond the mere increase of knowledge, which forms the character of a lawyer’s understanding, and which is apt to render a mere lawyer too subtle for the management of affairs, and yet too gross for the pursuit of general truths. His style is as near perfection, in its kind, as any in our language. Perhaps no words were ever more expressive and illustrative than those in which he represents the art of life to be that of rightly setting our habits.”—“Ethical Philosophy,” p. 274.
Such are the portraits in this work; the history of ancient ethics, and the vindication of the scholiasts also, are in themselves and as separate compositions of great merit; but when, after admiring these different fragments, we look at the plan, at the system which is to result from them, or endeavour to follow out the line of reasoning which is to bring them together—we quit the land of realities for that of shadows, and are obliged to confess that the author has barely sufficient vigour to make his meaning intelligible.
VII.
To give the history intended to be given by Sir James’s treatise, would be without the scope of the present sketch; but it may not be amiss to say something of the state of the philosophical opinions which existed at the time of its publication, and which, in fact, called it forth. Helvetius, the friend of Voltaire and Diderot—Helvetius, whose works have been considered as merely the record of those opinions which circulated around him—the most amusing, if not the most logical of metaphysicians, wrote that everything proceeded from the senses, and that man (for this was one of his favourite hypotheses) differed from a monkey mainly because his hands were tenderer and more soft.
The doctrine of sensation led necessarily to that of selfishness, since, owing what we think to what we feel, every idea is the consequence of some pain or pleasure, and our own pains and pleasures are thus the parents of all our emotions.
A strong reaction, however, took place in the beginning of the nineteenth against the eighteenth century; the original existence of certain sentiments or affections implanted by nature, was contended for, in Germany and in Scotland, under a variety of qualifications. The school, which said that the affections arose from this primary source, called them disinterested, as that which contended that they more or less directly proceeded from some cause which had reference to ourselves, called them interested. There was but one step easily made by both parties in carrying out their doctrines.
The philosophers who thought that self-interest, “through some certain strainers well refined,” was the cause of all our actions and ideas, maintained that utility was the only measure of virtue, or of greatness. The philosophers of the opposite faction argued on the contrary, that as many of our emotions were natural and involuntary, so there was also a sense of wrong and right, natural and involuntary, and connected with those emotions implanted in us.
Living in a retired part of London, visited only by his adorers and disciples, looking rarely beyond the confines of his early knowledge, and on the train of thinking it had inspired, an old and singular gentleman, with great native powers of mind, almost alone resisted the new impulse, and, classifying and extending the doctrines of the French philosophy, established a reputation and a school of his own. The charm of Mr. Bentham’s philosophy, however obscured by fanciful names and unnecessary subdivisions, is its apparent clearness and simplicity.
He considers with the disciples of Helvetius—1, that our ideas do come from our sensations, and that consequently we are selfish; 2, that man in doing what is most useful to himself does what is right.
Very strange and fantastical notions have been propagated against the philosopher by persons so egregiously mistaking him as to imagine that what he thus says of mankind generally—of man, meaning every man—is said of a man, of man separately; so that a murderer, pretend these commentators, has only to be sure that a second murder is useful to him by preventing the detection of the first, in order to be justified in committing it. It were useless to dwell upon this ridiculous construction. But in urging men to pursue the general interest of society at large, in telling them that to do what is most for that interest is to act usefully and thereby virtuously, Mr. Bentham found it necessary to explain how such interest was to be discovered.
Accordingly he has propounded that the general interest of a society must be considered to be the interest of the greatest number in that society, and that the greatest number in any society is the best judge of its interest. Moreover, in the further development of his doctrine, he contends that a majority would always, under natural circumstances, govern a minority, and that, therefore, there is a natural tendency, if not thwarted, towards the happiness and good government of mankind. This system of philosophy gained the more attention from its being also a system of politics. According to Mr. Bentham, that which was most important to men depended on maintaining what he considered the natural law, viz., governing the minority by the majority.
VIII.
Unfortunately for the destiny of mankind, and the soundness of the Benthamite doctrine, it is by no means certain that the majority in any community is the best judge of its interests; whilst it is even less certain, if it did know these interests, that it would necessarily and invariably follow them. In almost every collection of men the intelligent few know better what is for the common interest than the ignorant many; and it is rare indeed to see communities or individuals pursuing their interest steadily even when they perceive it clearly. It would, perhaps, be more reconcilable to reason to say that the intellect of a community should govern a community; but this assertion is also open to objection, since a small number of intelligent men might govern for their own interest, and not for the interest of the society they represented. In short, though it is easy to see that the science of government does not consist in giving power to the greatest number, but in giving it to the most intelligent, and making it for their interest to govern for the interest of the greatest number; still, every day teaches us that good government is rather a thing relative than a thing absolute; that all governments have good mixed with evil, and evil mixed with good; and that the statesman’s task, as is beautifully demonstrated by Montesquieu, is, not to destroy an evil combined with a greater good, nor to create a good accompanied with a greater evil; but to calculate how the greatest amount of good and the least amount of evil can be combined together. Hence it is, that the best governments with which we are acquainted seem rather to have been fashioned by the working hand of daily experience, than by the artistic fingers of philosophical speculation.
Nevertheless, the theory, that the good of the greatest number in any community ought to be the object which its government should strive to attain, and the maxim, that the interest and happiness of every unit in a community are to be treated as a portion of the interest and happiness of the whole community, are humanizing precepts, and have, through the influence of Mr. Bentham and of his disciples, produced, within my own memory, a considerable change in the public opinion of England.
Mr. Bentham’s name, then, is far more above the scoff of his antagonists than below the enthusiasm of his disciples; and it is in this spirit, and with a becoming respect, that Sir James Mackintosh treats the philosopher while he combats his philosophy.
IX.
In regard to the theory of Sir James himself, if I understand it rightly (and it is rather, as I have said, indistinctly expressed), he accepts neither the doctrine of innate ideas disinterestedly producing or ordering our actions, nor that of sense-derived ideas by which, with a concentrated regard to self, some suppose men to be governed—but imagines an association of ideas, naturally suggested by our human condition, which, according to a pre-ordinated state of the mind, produces, as in chemical processes, some emotion different from any of the combined elements or causes from which it springs.
This emotion, once existing, requires, without consideration or reflection, its gratification. In this manner the satisfaction of benevolence and pity springs as much from a spontaneous desire as the satisfaction of hunger; and man is unconsciously taught, through feelings necessary to him as man, to wish involuntarily for that which, on reflection and experience, he would find (such is the beautiful dispensation of Providence) most for his happiness and advantage.
The union, assemblage, or incorporation, if one may so speak, of these involuntary desires, affecting and affected by them all, becomes our universal moral sense or conscience, which in each of its propensities is gratified or mortified, according to our conduct.
X.
Here end my criticisms. They have passed rapidly in review the principal works and events of Sir James Mackintosh’s life;[104] and what have they illustrated? That, which I commenced by observing: that he had made several excellent speeches, that he had taken an active part in politics, that he had written ably upon history, that he had manifested a profound knowledge of philosophy; but that he had not been pre-eminent as an orator, as a politician, as an historian, as a philosopher.[105] It may be doubted whether any speech or book of his will long survive his time; but a very valuable work might be compiled from his writings and speeches. Indeed, there are hardly any books in our language more interesting or more instructive than the two volumes published by his son, and which display in every page the best qualities of an excellent heart and an excellent understanding, set off by the most amiable and remarkable simplicity. His striking, peculiar, and unrivalled merit, however, was that of a conversationalist. Great good-nature, great and yet gentle animation, much learning, and a sound, discriminating, and comprehensive judgment, made him this. He had little of the wit of words—brilliant repartées, caustic sayings, concentrated and epigrammatic turns of expression. But he knew everything and could talk of everything without being tedious. A lady of great wit, intellect, and judgment (Lady William Russell), in describing his soft Scotch voice, said to me—“Mackintosh played on your understanding with a flageolet, Macaulay with a trumpet.” Having lived much by himself and with books, and much also in the world and with men, he had the light anecdote and easy manner of society, and the grave and serious gatherings in of lonely hours. He added also to much knowledge considerable powers of observation; and there are few persons of whom he speaks, even at the dawn of their career, whom he has not judged with discrimination. His agreeableness, moreover, being that of a full mind expressed with facility, was the most translatable of any man’s, and he succeeded with foreigners, and in France, which he visited three times—once at the peace of Amiens, again in 1814, and again in 1824—quite as much as in his own country, and with his own countrymen. Madame de Staël and Benjamin Constant prized him not less than did Lord Dudley or Lord Byron. It was not only in England, then, but also on the Continent, where his early pamphlet and distinguished friendships had made him equally known—that he ever remained the man of promise; until, amidst hopes which his vast and various information, his wonderful memory, his copious elocution, and his transitory fits of energy, still nourished, he died, in the sixty-seventh year of his age, universally admired and regretted, though without a high reputation for any one thing, or the ardent attachment of any particular set of persons. His death, which took place the 30th of May, 1832, was occasioned by a small fragment of chicken-bone, which, having lacerated the trachea, created a wound that ultimately proved fatal. He met his end with calmness and resignation, expressing his belief in the Christian faith, and placing his trust in it.
XI.
No man doing so little ever went through a long life continually creating the belief that he would ultimately do so much. A want of earnestness, a want of passion, a want of genius, prevented him from playing a first-rate part amongst men during his day, and from leaving any of those monuments behind him which command the attention of posterity. A love of knowledge, an acute and capacious intelligence, an early and noble ambition, led him into literary and active life, and furnished him with the materials and at moments with the energy by which success in both is obtained. An amiable disposition, a lively flow of spirits, an extraordinary and varied stock of information made his society agreeable to the most distinguished persons of his age, and induced them, encouraged by some occasional displays of remarkable power, to consider his available abilities to be greater than they really were.
“What have you done,” he relates that a French lady once said to him, “that people should think you so superior?” “I was obliged,” he adds, “as usual, to refer to my projects.” For active life he was too much of the academic school:—believing nearly all great distinctions to be less than they were, and remaining irresolute between small ones. He passed, as he himself said, from Burke to Fox in half an hour, and remained weeks, as we learn from a friend (Lord Nugent), in determining whether he should employ “usefulness” or “utility” in some particular composition. Such is not the stuff out of which great leaders or statesmen are formed. His main error as a writer and as a speaker was his elaborate struggle against that easy idle way of delivering himself, which made the charm of his talk when he did not think of what he was saying. “The great fault of my manner,” he himself observes somewhere, “is that I overload.” And to many of his more finished compositions we might, indeed, apply the old saying of the critic, who on being asked whether he admired a certain tragedy of Dionysius, replied: “I have not seen it; it is obscured with language.” His early compositions had a sharper and terser style than his later ones, the activity of the author’s mind being greater, and his doubts and toils after perfection less; but even these were over-prepared. Can he be considered a failure? No; if you compare him with other men. Yes; if you compare him with the general idea entertained as to himself. The reputation he attained, however vague and uncertain, the writings that he left, though inferior to the prevalent notions as to his powers,—all placed him on a pedestal of conspicuous, though not of gigantic elevation amongst his contemporaries. The results of his life only disappointed when you measured them by the anticipations which his merits had excited—then he became “the man of promise.” Could he have arrived at greater eminence than that which he attained? if so, it must have been by a different road. I cannot repeat too often that no man struggles perpetually and victoriously against his own character; and one of the first principles of success in life, is so to regulate our career as rather to turn our physical constitution and natural inclinations to good account, than to endeavour to counteract the one or oppose the other.
There can be no general comparison between Montaigne and Mackintosh. The first was an original thinker, and the latter a combiner and retailer of the thoughts of others. But I have often pictured to myself the French philosopher lounging away the greatest portion of his life in the old square turret of his château, yielding to his laziness all that it exacted from him, and becoming, almost in spite of himself, the first magistrate of his town, and, though carelessly and discursively, the greatest writer of his time. He gave the rein to the idleness of his nature, and had reason to be satisfied with the employment of his life.
On the other hand, let us look at the accomplished Scotchman, constantly agitated by his aspirations after fame and his inclinations for repose; formed for literary ease, forcing himself into political conflict—dreaming of a long-laboured history, and writing a hasty article in a review; earnest about nothing, because the objects to which he momentarily directed his efforts were not likely to give the permanent distinction for which he pined; and thus, with a doubtful mind and a broken career, achieving little that was worthy of his abilities, or equal to the expectations of his friends. I have said there can be no general comparison between men whose particular faculties were no doubt of a very different order; yet, had the one mixed in contest with the bold and factious spirits of his day, he would have been but a poor “ligueur;” and had the other abstained from politics and renounced long and laborious compositions, merely writing under the stimulus of some accidental inspiration, it is probable that his name would have gone down to posterity as that of the most agreeable and instructive essayist of his remarkable epoch. But at all events that name is graven on the monument which commemorates more Christian manners and more mild legislation: and “Blessed shall he be,” as said our great lawyer, “who layeth the first stone of this building; more blessed he that proceeds in it; most of all he that finisheth it in the glory of God, and the honour of our king and nation.”