The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 03 (of 12)

by William Hazlitt

WHETHER THE FRIENDS OF FREEDOM CAN ENTERTAIN ANY SANGUINE HOPES OF THE FAVOURABLE RESULTS OF THE ENSUING CONGRESS?

Oct. 23, 1814.

An excellent article appeared in the Examiner of last week, giving a general outline of the views and principles which ought to actuate the allied powers at the approaching Congress, and of the leading arrangements with respect to the different subjects to be brought under consideration, which ought to follow from those principles. Cordially as we agree with this respectable writer in the several points which he has stated, we are, we confess, far from feeling any strong assurances that even any one of these points will be amicably adjusted. They are briefly these:—1. That Poland should be restored to her independence. 2. That the other powers of Europe should no longer co-operate with Sweden in the subjugation of Norway. 3. That the Slave Trade should be immediately and generally abolished. 4. That Saxony should not share a fate similar to that of Poland. 5. That Austria should relinquish her views of unjust aggrandisement in Italy. 6. and last, That some concessions should probably be made by England as to her exclusive claims to maritime supremacy, as far as those claims are found to be rather galling to the feelings of other nations, than essential to her own security. All of the objects here recommended are, we should imagine, every way practicable as well as desirable, if there were any thing like a hearty good-will to avail themselves of the present favourable situation of the world in those who have the power to decide its fate. Armed with sovereign authority, seconded by public opinion, with every obstacle removed from their dread of the overwhelming power of France, they have all the means at their disposal to rear a splendid, lofty, and lasting monument to justice, liberty, and humanity. Are the views then of the allied sovereigns solely directed to these objects? That is the simple question; and we are afraid it would be great presumption to answer it in the affirmative. It would be supposing that the late events have purified the hearts of princes and nations; that they have been taught wisdom by experience, and the love of justice from the sense of injury; that mutual confidence and good-will have succeeded to narrow prejudices and rankling jealousy; that the race of ambitious and unprincipled monarchs, of crafty politicians, and self-interested speculators is at an end; that the destructive rivalry between states has given way to liberal and enlightened views of general safety and advantage; and that the powers of Europe will in future unite with the same zeal and magnanimity for the common good, as when they were bound in a common cause against the common enemy. All this appears to us quite as Utopian as any other scheme which supposes that the human mind can change. Happy should we be, if instead of those magnificent and beneficial projects in which some persons seem still to indulge their imaginations as the results of this meeting, the whole should not turn out to be no better than a compromise of petty interests, of shallow policy, and flagrant injustice.

We forbore for a long time from saying any thing on this ungrateful subject: but our forbearance has not hitherto, at least, been rewarded. We shall therefore speak out plainly on the subject; as we should be sorry to be thought accomplices in a delusion, which can only end in disappointment. The professions of justice, moderation, and the love of liberty, made by the powers of Europe at the end of the last, and at the beginning of the present year, were certainly admirable: they were called for at the time, and were possibly sincere. But we are all of us apt to forego those good resolutions which are extorted from us by circumstances rather than from reason or habit, and to recant ‘vows made in pain as violent and void.’ Without meaning any indirect allusion to the person into whose mouth these words are put, we believe this, that princes are princes, and that men are men; and that to expect any great sacrifices of interest or passion from either in consequence of certain well-timed and well-sounding professions, drawn from them by necessity, when that necessity no longer exists, is to belie all our experience of human nature. We remember what modern courts and ministers were before the dreaded power of Bonaparte arose; and we conceive this to be the best and only ground to argue what they will be, now that that power has ceased. ‘Why so, being gone, they are themselves again.’ It appears to us, that some very romantic and extravagant expectations were entertained from the destruction of the tyranny of Bonaparte. It is true, his violence and ambition for a while suspended all other projects of the same kind. ‘The right divine of kings to govern wrong’ was wrested from the puny hands of its legitimate possessors, and strangely monopolized by one man. The regular professors of the regal art were set aside by the superior skill and prowess of an adventurer. They became in turn the tools, or the victims of the machinations of the maker and puller-down of kings. Instead of their customary employment of annoying their neighbours, or harassing their subjects, they had enough to do to defend their territories and their titles. The aggressions which they had securely meditated against the independence of nations, and their haughty contempt for the liberties of mankind, were retorted on their own heads. The poisoned chalice was returned to their own lips. They then first felt the sting of injustice, and the bitterness of scorn. They saw how weak and little they were in themselves. They were roused from the still life of courts, and forced to assume the rank of men. They appealed to their people to defend their thrones; they called on them to rally round the altar of their country; they invoked the name of liberty, and in that name they conquered. Plans of national aggrandisement or private revenge were forgotten in the intoxication of triumph, as they had been in the agony of despair. This sudden usurpation had so overpowered the imaginations of men, that they began to consider it as the only evil that had ever existed in the world, and that with it, all tyranny and ambition would cease. War was talked of as if it had been an invention of the modern Charlemagne, and the Golden age was to be restored with the Bourbons. But it is hard for the great and mighty to learn in the school of adversity: emperors and kings bow reluctantly to the yoke of necessity. When the panic is over, they will be glad to drink of the cup of oblivion. The false idols which had been set up to Liberty and Nature, to Genius and Fortune, are thrown down, and they have once more ‘all power given them upon earth.’ How they are likely to use it, whether for the benefit and happiness of mankind, or to gratify their own prejudices and passions, we have, in one or two instances, seen already. No one will in future look for ‘the milk of human kindness’ in the Crown Prince of Sweden, who is a monarch of the new school; nor for examples of romantic generosity and gratitude in Ferdinand of Spain, who is one of the old. A jackal or baboon, dandled in the paws of a royal Bengal tiger, may not be very formidable; but it would be idle to suppose, if they should providentially escape, that they would become tame, useful, domestic animals.

The King of Prussia has recovered the sword of the Great Frederick, his humane, religious, moral, and unambitious predecessor, only, as it appears, to unsheath it against the King of Saxony, his old companion in arms. The Emperor of Austria seems eager to catch at the iron crown of Italy, which has just fallen from the brows of his son-in-law. The King of France, our King of France, Louis the Desired, and who by the ‘all hail hereafter,’ is to receive the addition of Louis the Wise, has improved his reflections during a twenty years’ exile, into a humane and amiable sanction of the renewal of the Slave Trade for five years only. His Holiness the Pope, happy to have escaped from the clutches of the arch-tyrant and impostor, employs his leisure hours in restoring the order of the Jesuits, and persecuting the Freemasons. Ferdinand, the grateful and the enlightened, who has passed through the same discipline of humanity with the same effect, shuts up the doors of the Cortes, (as it is scandalously asserted, at the instigation of Lord Wellington), and throws open those of the Inquisition. At all this, the romantic admirers of patriot kings, who fondly imagined that the hatred of the oppressor was the same thing as the hatred of oppression, (among these we presume we may reckon the poet-laureat,) hang their heads, and live in hope of better times. To us it is all natural, and in order. From this grand gaol-delivery of princes and potentates, we could expect nothing else than a recurrence to their old habits and favourite principles. These observations have not been hastily or gratuitously obtruded: they have been provoked by a succession of disgusting and profligate acts of inconsistency and treachery, unredeemed by a single effort of heroic virtue or generous enthusiasm. Almost every principle, almost every profession, almost every obligation, has been broken. If any proof is wanting, look at Norway, look at Italy, look at Spain, look at the Inquisition, look at the Slave Trade. The mask of liberty has been taken off by most of the principal performers; the whining cant of humanity is no longer heard in The Courier and The Times. What then remains for us to build a hope upon, but the Whig principles of the Prince Regent, inherited from his ancestors, and the good nature of the Emperor of Russia, the merit of which is entirely his own? Of the former of these personages, our opinion is so well known, that we need not repeat it here. Again, of the good intentions of the last-mentioned sovereign, we declare that we have as full a persuasion. We believe him to be docile to instruction, inquisitive after knowledge, and inclined to good. But it has been said by those who have better means of information than ourselves, that he is too open to the suggestions of those about him; that, like other learners, he thinks the newest opinion the best, and that his real good-nature and want of duplicity render him not sufficiently proof against the selfish or sinister designs of others. He has certainly a character for disinterestedness and magnanimity to support in history: but history is a glass in which few minds fashion themselves. If in his late conduct there was any additional impulse given to the natural simplicity of his character, it probably arose from an obvious desire to furnish a contrast to the character of Bonaparte, and also to redeem the Russian character, hitherto almost another name for barbarity and ferociousness, in the eyes of civilized Europe. In this point of view, we should not despair that something may be attempted, at least with respect to Poland, by the present autocrat of all the Russias, to blot out certain stains on the reputation of his grand-mother, the Empress Catherine.

With regard to Norway, the only hope of the suspension of its fate seems to arise out of a very natural, if not laudable jealousy and distaste, which have been conceived by some of the old-standing sovereigns of Europe against the latest occupier and most forward pretender to thrones. An adventurer who has made a fortune by gaining a prize in the lottery, or by laying qui tam informations against his accomplices, cannot expect to be admitted, on an equality, into the company of persons of regular character and family estates. The Emperor of Austria, in particular, may have additional motives of dislike to Bernadotte, connected with late events; and we agree with the Examiner, that he may, in the end, ‘have to regret the length to which he was hurried against a man, who was the key-stone of all the new power which had been built on the ruin of thrones.’

As to any immediate adjustment of the maritime rights of this country, on general principles, satisfactory to all parties, we see no reason to expect it. We think the following paragraph justifies us in this opinion. ‘We are told,’ says the Morning Chronicle, ‘that on the day when the capture of the city of Washington, and the demolition of its public buildings reached Paris, the Duke of Wellington had a ball: not one public ambassador of the potentates of Europe, our good allies, presented himself to congratulate his grace on the event.’ We here see, on one side, the most absurd expectations of disinterested sympathy with our national feelings, and as little disposition to enter into them on the other. It is strange that the above paragraph should have found its way into a paper which makes an almost exclusive profession of liberal and comprehensive views.

Nor can we indulge in any serious expectations of ‘the immediate and general abolition of the Slave Trade.’ Africa has little to hope from ‘the prevailing gentle arts’ of Lord Castlereagh. However sturdy he may be in asserting our maritime rights, he will, we imagine, go to sleep over those of humanity, and waking from his doux sommeil, find that the dexterous prince of political jugglers has picked his pocket of his African petitions, if, indeed, he chuses to carry the credentials of his own disgrace about with him. There are two obstacles to the success of this measure. In the first place, France has received such forcible lessons from this country on the old virtues of patriotism and loyalty, that she must feel particularly unwilling to be dictated to on the new doctrines of liberality and humanity. Secondly, the abolition of the Slave Trade, on our part, was itself the act of Mr. Fox’s administration—an administration which we should suppose there is no very strong inclination to relieve from any part of the contempt or obloquy which it has been the fashion to pour upon it, by extending the benefit of its measures, or recommending the adoption of its principles.

There is another point, on which, though our doubts are by no means strong or lasting, we do not at all times feel the same absolute confidence—the continuance of the present order of things in France. The principles adhered to in the determination of some of the preceding arrangements, and the permanent views which shall appear to actuate the other powers of Europe, may have no inconsiderable influence on this great question. Whatever tends to allay the ferment in men’s minds, and to take away just causes of recrimination and complaint, must, of course, lessen the pretexts for change. We should not, however, be more disposed to augur such a change from the remaining attachment of individuals, or of the army, to Bonaparte, than from the general versatility and restlessness of the French character, and their total want of settled opinion, which might oppose a check to military enthusiasm. Even their present unqualified zeal, in the cause of the Bourbons, is ominous. How long this sudden fit of gratitude, for deliverance from evils certainly brought upon them by their slowness to admit the remedy, may continue, it is impossible to say. A want of keeping is the distinguishing quality of the French character. A people of this sort cannot be depended on for a moment. They are blown about like a weathercock, with every breath of caprice or accident, and would cry vive l’empereur to-morrow, with as much vivacity and as little feeling, as they do vive le roi to-day. They have no fixed principle of action. They are alike indifferent to every thing: their self-complacency supplies the place of all other advantages—of virtue, liberty, honour, and even of outward appearances. They are the only people who are vain of being cuckolded and being conquered.—A people who, after trampling over the face of Europe so long, fell down before their assailants without striking a blow, and who boast of their submission as a fine thing, are not a nation of men, but of women. The spirit of liberty, at the Revolution, gave them an impulse common to humanity; the genius of Bonaparte gave them the spirit of military ambition. Both of these gave an energy and consistency to their character, by concentrating their natural volatility on one great object. But when both of these causes failed, the Allies found that France consisted of nothing but ladies’ toilettes. The army are the muscular part of the state; mere patriotism is a pasteboard visor, which opposes no resistance to the sword. Whatever they determine will be done; an effeminate public is a non-entity. They will not relish the Bourbons long, if they remain at peace; and if they go to war, they will want a monarch who is also a general.

The Lay of the Laureate, Carmen Nuptiale, by Robert Southey, Esq., Poet-Laureate, Member of the Royal Spanish Academy, and of the Royal Spanish Academy of History.—London, Longmans, 1816.

Examiner, July 7, 1816.

The dog which his friend Launce brought as a present to Madam Silvia in lieu of a lap-dog, was something like ‘The Lay of the Laureate,’ which Mr. Southey has here offered to the Princess Charlotte for a Nuptial Song. It is ‘a very currish performance, and deserves none but currish thanks.’ Launce thought his own dog, Crab, better than any other; and Mr. Southey thinks his own praises the fittest compliment for a lady’s ear. His Lay is ten times as long, and he thinks it is therefore ten times better than an Ode of Mr. Pye’s.

Mr. Southey in this poem takes a tone which was never heard before in a drawing-room. It is the first time that ever a Reformist was made a Poet-laureate. Mr. Croker was wrong in introducing his old friend, the author of ‘Joan of Arc,’ at Carlton-House. He might have known how it would be. If we had doubted the good old adage before, ‘Once a Jacobin and always a Jacobin,’ since reading ‘The Lay of the Laureate,’ we are sure of it. A Jacobin is one who would have his single opinion govern the world, and overturn every thing in it. Such a one is Mr. Southey. Whether he is a Republican or a Royalist,—whether he hurls up the red cap of liberty, or wears the lily, stained with the blood of all his old acquaintance, at his breast,—whether he glories in Robespierre or the Duke of Wellington—whether he pays a visit to Old Sarum, or makes a pilgrimage to Waterloo,—whether he is praised by The Courier, or parodied by Mr. Canning,—whether he thinks a King the best or the worst man in his dominions,—whether he is a Theophilanthropist or a Methodist of the church of England,—whether he is a friend of Universal Suffrage and Catholic Emancipation, or a Quarterly Reviewer,—whether he insists on an equal division of lands, or of knowledge,—whether he is for converting infidels to Christianity, or Christians to infidelity,—whether he is for pulling down the kings of the East or those of the West,—whether he sharply sets his face against all establishments, or maintains that whatever is, is right,—whether he prefers what is old to what is new, or what is new to what is old,—whether he believes that all human evil is remediable by human means, or makes it out to himself that a Reformer is worse than a housebreaker,—whether he is in the right or the wrong, poet or prose-writer, courtier or patriot,—he is still the same pragmatical person—every sentiment or feeling that he has is nothing but the effervescence of incorrigible overweening self-opinion. He not only thinks whatever opinion he may hold for the time infallible, but that no other is even to be tolerated, and that none but knaves and fools can differ with him. ‘The friendship of the good and wise is his.’ If any one is so unfortunate as to hold the same opinions that he himself formerly did, this but aggravates the offence by irritating the jealousy of his self-love, and he vents upon them a double portion of his spleen. Such is the constitutional slenderness of his understanding, its ‘glassy essence,’ that the slightest collision of sentiment gives an irrecoverable shock to him. He regards a Catholic or a Presbyterian, a Deist or an Atheist, with equal repugnance, and makes no difference between the Pope, the Turk, and the Devil. He thinks a rival poet a bad man, and would suspect the principles, moral, political, and religious, of any one who did not spell the word laureate with an e at the end of it.—If Mr. Southey were a bigot, it would be well; but he has only the intolerance of bigotry. His violence is not the effect of attachment to any principles, prejudices, or paradoxes of his own, but of antipathy to those of others. It is an impatience of contradiction, an unwillingness to share his opinions with others, a captious monopoly of wisdom, candour, and common sense. He is not an enthusiast in religion, but he is an enemy to philosophers; he does not respect old establishments, but he hates new ones; he has no objection to regicides, but he is inexorable against usurpers; he will tell you that ‘the re-risen cause of evil’ in France yielded to ‘the Red Cross and Britain’s arm of might,’ and shortly after he denounces this Red Cross as the scarlet whore of Babylon, and warns Britain against her eternal malice and poisoned cup; he calls on the Princess Charlotte in the name of the souls of ten thousand little children, who are without knowledge in this age of light, ‘Save or we perish,’ and yet sooner than they should be saved by Joseph Fox or Joseph Lancaster, he would see them damned; he would go himself into Egypt and pull down ‘the barbarous kings’ of the East, and yet his having gone there on this very errand is not among the least of Bonaparte’s crimes; he would ‘abate the malice’ of the Pope and the Inquisition, and yet he cannot contain the fulness of his satisfaction at the fall of the only person who had both the will and the power to do this. Mr. Southey began with a decent hatred of kings and priests, but it yielded to his greater hatred of the man who trampled them in the dust. He does not feel much affection to those who are born to thrones, but that any one should gain a throne as he has gained the laureate-wreath, by superior merit alone, was the unpardonable sin against Mr. Southey’s levelling Muse!

The poetry of the Lay is beneath criticism; it has all sorts of obvious common-place defects, without any beauties either obvious or recondite. It is the Namby-Pamby of the Tabernacle; a Methodist sermon turned into doggrel verse. It is a gossipping confession of Mr. Southey’s political faith—the ‘Practice of Piety’ or the ‘Whole Duty of Man’ mixed up with the discordant slang of the metaphysical poets of the nineteenth century. Not only do his sentiments every where betray the old Jacobinical leaven, the same unimpaired desperate unprincipled spirit of partisanship, regardless of time, place, and circumstance, and of every thing but its own headstrong will; there is a gipsey jargon in the expression of his sentiments which is equally indecorous. Does our Laureate think it according to court-etiquette that he should be as old-fashioned in his language as in the cut of his clothes?—On the present occasion, when one might expect a truce with impertinence, he addresses the Princess neither with the fancy of the poet, the courtier’s grace, nor the manners of a gentleman, but with the air of an inquisitor or father-confessor. Geo. Fox, the Quaker, did not wag his tongue more saucily against the Lord’s Anointed in the person of Charles II., than our Laureate here assures the daughter of his Prince, that so shall she prosper in this world and the next, as she minds what he says to her. Would it be believed (yet so it is) that, in the excess of his unauthorized zeal, Mr. Southey in one place advises the Princess conditionally to rebel against her father? Here is the passage. The Angel of the English church thus addresses the Royal Bride:-

‘Bear thou that great Eliza in thy mind,

Who from a wreck this fabric edified;

And Her who to a nation’s voice resigned,

When Rome in hope its wiliest engines plied,

By her own heart and righteous Heaven approved,

Stood up against the Father whom she loved.’

This is going a good way. Is it meant, that if the Prince Regent, ‘to a nation’s voice resigned,’ should grant Catholic Emancipation in defiance of the ‘Quarterly Review,’ Mr. Southey would encourage the Princess in standing up against her father, in imitation of the pious and patriotic daughter of James II.?

This quaint effusion of poetical fanaticism is divided into four parts, the Proem, the Dream, the Epilogue, and L’Envoy. The Proem opens thus:—

‘There was a time when all my youthful thought

Was of the Muse; and of the Poet’s fame,

How fair it flourisheth and fadeth not, ...

Alone enduring, when the Monarch’s name

Is but an empty sound, the Conqueror’s bust

Moulders and is forgotten in the dust.’

This may be very true, but not so proper to be spoken in this place. Mr. Southey may think himself a greater man than the Prince Regent, but he need not go to Carlton-House to tell him so. He endeavours to prove that the Prince Regent and the Duke of Wellington (put together) are greater than Bonaparte, but then he is by his own rule greater than all three of them. We have here perhaps the true secret of Mr. Southey’s excessive anger at the late Usurper. If all his youthful thought was of his own inborn superiority to conquerors or kings, we can conceive that Bonaparte’s fame must have appeared a very great injustice done to his pretensions; it is not impossible that the uneasiness with which he formerly heard the names of Marengo, of Austerlitz, of Jena, of Wagram, of Friedland, and of Borodino, may account for the industrious self-complacency with which he harps upon those of Busaco, Vimiera, Salamanca, Vittoria, Thoulouse, and Waterloo; and that the Iron Crown of Italy must have pressed upon his (Mr. Southey’s) brows, with a weight most happily relieved by the light laureate-wreath! We are justified in supposing Mr. Southey capable of envying others, for he supposes others capable of envying him. Thus he sings of himself and his office:—

‘Yea in this now, while malice frets her hour,

Is foretaste given me of that meed divine;

Here undisturbed in this sequestered bower,

The friendship of the good and wise is mine;

And that green wreath which decks the Bard when dead,

That laureate garland crowns my living head.

That wreath which in Eliza’s golden days

My master dear, divinest Spenser, wore,

That which rewarded Drayton’s learned lays,

Which thoughtful Ben and gentle Daniel[^[17]] bore ...

Grin, Envy, through thy ragged mask of scorn!

In honour it was given, with honour it is worn!’

Now we do assure Mr. Southey, that we do not envy him this honour. Many people laugh at him, some may blush for him, but nobody envies him. As to Spenser, whom he puts in the list of great men who have preceded him in his office, his laureateship has been bestowed on him by Mr. Southey; it did not ‘crown his living head.’ We all remember his being refused the hundred pounds for his ‘Fairy Queen.’ Poets were not wanted in those days to celebrate the triumphs of princes over the people. But why does he not bring his list down nearer to his own time—to Pye and Whitehead and Colley Cibber? Does Mr. Southey disdain to be considered as the successor even of Dryden? That green wreath which decks our author’s living head, is so far from being, as he would insinuate, an anticipation of immortality, that it is no credit to any body, and least of all to Mr. Southey. He might well have declined the reward of exertions in a cause which throws a stigma of folly or something worse on the best part of his life. Mr. Southey ought not to have received what would not have been offered to the author of ‘Joan of Arc.’

Mr. Southey himself maintains that his song has still been ‘to Truth and Freedom true’; that he has never changed his opinions; that it is the cause of French liberty that has left him, not he the cause. That may be so. But there is one person in the kingdom who has, we take it, been at least as consistent in his conduct and sentiments as Mr. Southey, and that person is the King. Thus the Laureate emphatically advises the Princess:—

‘Look to thy Sire, and in his steady way,

As in his Father’s he, learn thou to tread.’

Now the question is, whether Mr. Southey agreed with his Majesty on the subject of the French Revolution when he published ‘Joan of Arc.’ Though Mr. Southey ‘as beseems him well’ congratulates the successes of the son, we do not recollect that he condoled with the disappointments of the father in the same cause. The King has not changed, therefore Mr. Southey has. The sun does not turn to the sun-flower; but the sun-flower follows the sun. Our poet has thoughtlessly committed himself in the above lines. He may be right in applauding that one sole purpose of his Majesty’s reign which he formerly condemned: that he can be consistent in applauding what he formerly condemned, is impossible. That his majesty King George III. should make a convert of Mr. Southey rather than Mr. Southey of George III. is probable for many reasons. The King by siding with the cause of the people could not, like King William, have gained a crown: Mr. Southey, by deserting it, has got a hundred pounds a-year. A certain English ambassador, who had a long time resided at the court of Rome, was on his return introduced at the levee of Queen Caroline. This lady, who was almost as great a prig as Mr. Southey, asked him why in his absence he did not try to make a convert of the Pope to the Protestant religion. He answered, ‘Madam, the reason was that I had nothing better to offer his Holiness than what he already has in his possession.’ The Pope would no doubt have been of the same way of thinking. This is the reason why kings, from sire to son, pursue ‘their steady way,’ and are less changeable than canting cosmopolites.

The Lay of the Laureate, Carmen Nuptiale, by Robert Southey, Esq. Poet-Laureate, Member of the Royal Spanish Academy, and of the Royal Spanish Academy of History.—London: Longmans, 1816.

(CONCLUDED.)

‘Queen. Hamlet, thou hast thy Father much offended.

‘Hamlet. Madam, you have my Father much offended.’

July 14, 1816.

Though we do not think Mr. Southey has been quite consistent, we do not think him a hypocrite. This poem proves it. How should he maintain the same opinion all his life, when he cannot maintain it for two stanzas together? The weakness of his reasoning shews that he is the dupe of it. He has not the faculty of perceiving contradictions. He is not accountable for his mistakes. There is not a single sentiment advanced in any part of the Lay, which is not flatly denied in some other part of it. Let us see:—

‘Proudly I raised the high thanksgiving strain

Of victory in a rightful cause achieved:

For which I long had looked and not in vain,

As one who with firm faith and undeceived,

In history and the heart of man could find

Sure presage of deliverance for mankind.’

Mr. Southey does not inform us in what year he began to look for this deliverance, but if he had looked for it long, he must have looked for it long in vain. Does our poet then find no presage of deliverance for ‘conquered France’ in the same principles that he found it for ‘injured Germany’? But he has no principles; or he does not himself know what they are. He praises Providence in this particular instance for having conformed to his hopes; and afterwards thus gives us the general results of his reading in history and the human heart. In the Dream he says, speaking of Charissa and Speranza—

‘This lovely pair unrolled before the throne

“Earth’s melancholy map,” whereon to sight

Two broad divisions at a glance were shown,

The empires these of darkness and of light.

Well might the thoughtful bosom sigh to mark

How wide a portion of the map was dark.

Behold, Charissa cried, how large a space

Of earth lies unredeemed! Oh grief to think

That countless myriads of immortal race

In error born, in ignorance must sink,

Trained up in customs which corrupt the heart

And following miserably the evil part!

Regard the expanded Orient from the shores

Of scorched Arabia and the Persian sea,

To where the inhospitable Ocean roars

Against the rocks of frozen Tartary;

Look next at those Australian isles which lie

Thick as the stars which stud the wintry sky.

Then let thy mind contemplative survey

That spacious region where in elder time

Earth’s unremembered conquerors held the sway

And Science trusting in her skill sublime,

With lore abstruse the sculptured walls o’erspread,

Its import now forgotten with the dead.

From Nile and Congo’s undiscovered springs

To the four seas which gird the unhappy land,

Behold it left a prey to barbarous Kings,

The Robber and the Trader’s ruthless hand;

Sinning and suffering, everywhere unblest,

Behold her wretched sons, oppressing and opprest!’

This is ‘a pretty picture’ to be drawn by one who finds in the past history of the world the sure presage of deliverance for mankind. We grant indeed that Mr. Southey was right in one thing, viz. in expecting from it that sort of ‘deliverance of mankind,’ bound hand and foot, into the power of Kings and Priests, which has actually come to pass, and which he has celebrated with so much becoming pomp, both here and elsewhere. The doctrine of ‘millions made for one’ has to be sure got a tolerable footing in the East. It has attained a very venerable old age there—it is mature even to rottenness, but without decay. ‘Old, old, Master Shallow,’ but eternal. It is transmitted down in unimpaired succession from sire to son. Snug’s the word. Legitimacy is not there militant, but triumphant, as the Editor of The Times would wish. It is long since the people had any thing to do with the laws but to obey them, or any laws to obey but the will of their taskmasters. This is the necessary end of legitimacy. The Princes and Potentates cut one another’s throats as they please, but the people have no hand in it. They have no French Revolutions there, no rights of man to terrify barbarous kings, no republicans or levellers, no weathercock deliverers and re-deliverers of mankind, no Mr. Southeys nor Mr. Wordsworths. In this they are happy. Things there are perfectly settled, in the state in which they should be,—still as death, and likely to remain so. Mr. Southey’s exquisite reason for supposing that a crusade to pull down divine right would succeed in the East, is that a crusade to prop it up has just succeeded in the West. That will never do. Besides, what security can he give, if he goes on improving in wisdom for the next five and twenty years as he has done for the last, that he would not in the end be as glad to see these ‘barbarous kings’ restored to their rightful thrones, as he is now anxious to see them tumbled from them? The doctrine of ‘divine right’ is of longer standing and more firmly established in the East than in the West, because the Eastern world is older than ours. We might say of it,

‘The wars it well remembers of King Nine,

Of old Assaracus and Inachus divine.’

It is fixed on the altar and the throne, safe, quite safe against Mr. Southey’s enthusiasm in its second spring, his Missionary Societies, and his Schools for All. It overlays that vast continent, like an ugly incubus, sucking the blood and stopping up the breath of man’s life. That detestable doctrine, which in England first tottered and fell headless to the ground with the martyred Charles; which we kicked out with his son James, and kicked twice back with two Pretenders, to make room for ‘Brunswick’s fated line,’ a line of our own chusing, and for that reason worth all Mr. Southey’s lines put together; that detestable doctrine, which the French, in 1793, ousted from their soil, thenceforward sacred in the eyes of humanity, which they ousted from it again in 1815, making it doubly sacred; and which (oh grief, oh shame) was borne into it once more on English shoulders, and thrust down their throats with English bayonets; this detestable doctrine, which would, of right and with all the sanctions of religion and morality, sacrifice the blood of millions to the least of its prejudices; which would make the rights, the happiness, and liberty of nations, from the beginning to the end of time, dependent on the caprice of some of the lowest and vilest of the species; which rears its bloated hideous form to brave the will of a whole people; that claims mankind as its property, and allows human nature to exist only upon sufferance; that haunts the understanding like a frightful spectre, and oppresses the very air with a weight that is not to be borne; this doctrine meets with no rubs, no reverses, no ups and downs, in the East. It is there fixed, immutable. The Jaggernaut there passes on with its ‘satiate’ scythe over the bleeding bodies of its victims, who are all as loyal, as pious, and as thankful as Mr. Southey. It meets with no opposition from any ‘re-risen cause of evil’ or of good. Mankind have there been delivered once for all!

In the passage above quoted, Mr. Southey founds his hope of the emancipation of the Eastern world from ‘the Robber and the Trader’s ruthless hand’ on our growing empire in India. This is a conclusion which nobody would venture upon but himself. His last appeal is to scripture, and still he is unfortunate:—

‘Speed thou the work, Redeemer of the World!

That the long miseries of mankind may cease!

Where’er the Red Cross banner is unfurled,

There let it carry truth, and light, and peace!

Did not the Angels who announced thy birth,

Proclaim it with the sound of Peace on Earth?’

From the length of time that this prediction has remained unfulfilled, Mr. Southey thinks its accomplishment must be near. His Odes will not hasten the event.

Again, we do not understand the use which Mr. Southey makes of Red Cross in this poem. For speaking of himself he says,

‘And when that last and most momentous hour

Beheld the re-risen cause of evil yield

To the Red Cross and England’s arm of power,

I sung of Waterloo’s unrivalled field,

Paying the tribute of a soul embued

With deepest joy, devout and awful gratitude.’

This passage occurs in the Proem. In the Dream the Angel of the English Church is made to warn the Princess—

‘Think not that lapse of ages shall abate

The inveterate malice of that Harlot old;

Fallen tho’ thou deemest her from her high estate,

She proffers still the envenomed cup of gold,

And her fierce Beast, whose names are blasphemy,

The same that was, is still, and still must be.’

It is extraordinary that both these passages relate to one and the same thing, namely, Popery, which our author in the first identifies with the Christian religion, thus invoking to his aid every pure feeling or pious prejudice in the minds of his readers, and in the last denounces as that Harlot old, ‘whose names are blasphemy,’ with all the fury of plenary inspiration. This is a great effort of want of logic. Mr. Southey will hardly sing or say that it was to establish Protestantism in France that England’s arm of power was extended on this occasion. Nor was it simply to establish Popery. That existed there already. It was to establish ‘the inveterate malice of that Harlot old,’ her ‘envenomed cup,’ to give her back her daggers and her fires, her mummeries, her holy oil, her power over the bodies and the minds of men, to restore her ‘the same that she was, is still, and still must be,’ that that celebrated fight was fought. The massacres of Nismes followed hard upon the triumph of Mr. Southey’s Red Cross. The blood of French Protestants began to flow almost before the wounds of the dying and the dead in that memorable carnage had done festering. This was the most crying injustice, the most outrageous violation of principle, that ever was submitted to. What! has John Bull nothing better to do now-a-days than to turn bottle-holder to the Pope of Rome, to whet his daggers for him, to light his fires, and fill his poisoned bowl; and yet, out of pure complaisance (a quality John has learnt from his new friends the Bourbons) not venture a syllable to say that we did not mean him to use them? It seems Mr. Southey did not think this a fit occasion for the interference of his Red Cross Muse. Could he not trump up a speech either for ‘divine Speranza,’ or ‘Charissa dear,’ to lay at the foot of the throne? Was the Angel of the English Church dumb too—‘quite chopfallen?’ Yet though our Laureate cannot muster resolution enough to advise the Prince to protect Protestants in France, he plucks up spirit enough to urge him to persecute Catholics in this country, and pretty broadly threatens him with the consequences, if he does not. “’Tis much,” as Christopher Sly says.

There is another subject on which Mr. Southey’s silence is still more inexcusable. It was understood to be for his exertions in the cause of Spanish liberty that he was made Poet-Laureate. It is then high time for him to resign. Why has he not written a single ode to a single Spanish patriot who has been hanged, banished, imprisoned, sent to the galleys, assassinated, tortured? It must be pleasant to those who are suffering under the thumb-screw to read Mr. Southey’s thoughts upon that ingenious little instrument of royal gratitude. Has he discovered that the air of a Court does not very well agree with remonstrances against acts of oppression and tyranny, when exercised by those who are born for no other purpose? Is his patriotism only a false cover, a Carlton-House convenience? His silence on this subject is not equivocal. Whenever Mr. Southey shews the sincerity of his former professions of zeal in behalf of Spanish liberty, by writing an elegy on the death of Porlier, or a review of the conduct of Ferdinand VII. (he is a subject worthy of Mr. Southey’s prose style), or by making the lame tailor of Madrid (we forget his name) the subject of an epic poem, we will retract all that we have said in disparagement of his consistency—But not till then.

We meant to have quoted several other passages, such as that in which old Praxis, that is, Experience, recommends it to the Princess to maintain the laws by keeping all that is old, and adding all that is new to them—that in which he regrets the piety and learning of former times, and then promises us a release from barbarism and brutishness by the modern invention of Sunday Schools—that in which he speaks of his own virtues and the wisdom of his friends—that in which he undertakes to write a martyrology.—But we are very tired of the subject, and the verses are not worth quoting. There is a passage in Racine which is; and with that, we take our leave of the Laureate, to whom it may convey some useful hints in explanation of his ardent desire for the gibbeting of Bonaparte and the burning of Paris:—

Nabal.—Que peut vous inspirer une haine si forte?

Est-ce que de Baal le zèle vous transporte?

Pour moi, vous le savez, descendu d’Ismaël,

Je ne sers ni Baal ni le Dieu d’Israel.

Mathan.—Ami, peux-tu penser que d’un zèle frivole

Je me laisse aveugler pour une vaine idole!

Né ministre du Dieu qu’en ce temple on adore,

Peut-être que Mathan le serviroit encore,

Si l’amour des grandeurs, la soif de commander,

Avec son joug étroit pouvoient s’accommoder.

Qu’est-il besoin, Nabal, qu’à tes yeux je rappelle

De Joad et de moi la fameuse querelle?

Vaincu par lui j’entrai dans une autre carrière,

Et mon âme à la cour s’attacha tout entière.

J’approchai par degrés l’oreille des rois;

Et bientôt en oracle on érigea ma voix.

J’étudiai leur cœur, je flattai leurs caprices,

Je leur semai de fleurs le bord des précipices:

Près de leurs passions rien ne me fut sacré;

De mesure et de poids je changeois à leur gré,

Autant que de Joad l’inflexible rudesse

De leur superbe oreille offensoit la mollesse;

Autant je les charmois par ma dextérité,

Dérobant à leurs yeux la triste vérité,

Prêtant à leur fureur des couleurs favorables,

Et prodigue surtout du sang des misérables.[^[18]]

---

Déserteur de leur loi, j’approuvai l’entreprise,

Et par là de Baal méritai la prêtrise;

Par là je me rendis terrible à mon rival,

Je ceignis la tiare, et marchai son égal.

Toutefois, je l’avoue, en ce comble de gloire,

De Dieu que j’ai quitté l’importune mémoire

Jette encore en mon âme un reste de terreur;

Et c’est ce qui redouble et nourrit ma fureur.

Heureux, si sur son temple achevant ma vengeance,

Je puis convaincre enfin sa haine d’impuissance,

Et parmi les débris, les ravages, et les morts,

A force d’attentats perdre tous mes remords.[^[19]]

TO THE EDITOR OF THE EXAMINER

Sir,—I hope you will not omit to notice two passages in Mr. Southey’s poem, in which, to try his talent at natural description, he gives an account of two of ‘the fearfullest wild-fowl living’—a British Lion and a Saxon one. Both are striking likenesses, and would do to hang on the outside of Exeter-‘Change to invite the curious. The former (presumed not to be indigenous) is described to be in excellent case, well-fed, getting in years and corpulent, with a high collar buried in the fat of the neck, false mane, large haunches (for which this breed is remarkable), paws like a shin of beef, large rolling eyes, a lazy, lounging animal, sleeping all day and roaring all night, a great devourer of carcases and breaker of bones, pleased after a full meal, and his keepers not then afraid of him. Inclined to be uxorious. Visited by all persons of distinction, from the highest characters abroad down to the lowest at home.—The other portrait of the Saxon Lion is a contrast to this. It is a poor lean starved beast, lord neither of men nor lands, galled with its chain, which it has broken, but has not got off from its neck. This portrait is, we understand, to be dedicated to Lord Castlereagh.—Your constant reader,

Ne Quid Nimis.

‘A new View of Society; or, Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character, and the Application of the Principle to Practice.’ Murray, 1816.—‘An Address to the Inhabitants of New Lanark, on opening an Institution for the Formation of Character.’ By Robert Owen, one of his Majesty’s Justices of the Peace for the County of Lanark.’—Hatchard, 1816.

[‘Dedicated to those who have no Private Ends to accomplish, who are honestly in search of Truth, for the purpose of ameliorating the Condition of Society, and who have the firmness to follow the Truth wherever it may lead, without being turned aside from the Pursuit by the Prepossessions or Prejudices of any part of Mankind;—to Mr. Wilberforce, the Prince Regent,’ &c.]

August 4, 1816.

‘A New View of Society’—No, Mr. Owen, that we deny. It may be true, but it is not new. It is not coeval, whatever the author and proprietor may think, with the New Lanark mills, but it is as old as the royal borough of Lanark, or as the county of Lanark itself. It is as old as the ‘Political Justice’ of Mr. Godwin, as the ‘Oceana’ of Harrington, as the ‘Utopia’ of Sir Thomas More, as the ‘Republic’ of Plato; it is as old as society itself, and as the attempts to reform it by shewing what it ought to be, or by teaching that the good of the whole is the good of the individual—an opinion by which fools and honest men have been sometimes deceived, but which has never yet taken in the knaves and knowing ones. The doctrine of Universal Benevolence, the belief in the Omnipotence of Truth, and in the Perfectibility of Human Nature, are not new, but ‘Old, old,’ Master Robert Owen;—why then do you say that they are new? They are not only old, they are superannuated, they are dead and buried, they are reduced to mummy, they are put into the catacombs at Paris, they are sealed up in patent coffins, they have been dug up again and anatomised, they have been drawn, quartered and gibbetted, they have become black, dry, parched in the sun, loose, and rotten, and are dispersed to all the winds of Heaven! The chain in which they hung up the murdered corse of human Liberty is all that remains of it, and my Lord Shallow keeps the key of it! If Mr. Owen will get it out of his hands, with the aid of Mr. Wilberforce and the recommendation of The Courier, we will ‘applaud him to the very echo, which shall applaud again.’ Till then, we must content ourselves with ‘chaunting remnants of old lauds’ in the manner of Ophelia:—

‘No, no, he is gone, and we cast away moan,

And will he not come again,

And will he not come again?’

Perhaps, one of these days, he may ... ‘like a cloud over the Caspian’: then if ever, and never till then, human nature will hold up its head again, and the holy and Triple Alliance will be dissolved. But as to this bald spectre of Liberty and Necessity conjured up by Mr. Owen from the falls of the Clyde, with a primer in one hand, and a spinning-jenny in the other, coming down from the Highlands in a Scotch mist, and discoverable only by second-sight, we may fairly say to it—

‘Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold;

Thou hast no speculation in those eyes,

Which thou dost glare with.’

Why does Mr. Owen put the word ‘New,’ in black-letter at the head of the advertisements of his plan of reform? In what does the New Lanark differ from the old Utopia? Is Scotland, after all, the true Lubber-land? Or must the whole world be converted into a cotton-factory? Does not Mr. Owen know that the same scheme, the same principles, the same philosophy of motives and actions, of causes and consequences, of knowledge and virtue, of virtue and happiness, were rife in the year 1793, were noised abroad then, were spoken on the house-tops, were whispered in secret, were published in quarto and duodecimo, in political treatises, in plays, poems, songs, and romances—made their way to the bar, crept into the church, ascended the rostrum, thinned the classes of the universities, and robbed ‘Durham’s golden stalls’ of their hoped-for ornaments, by sending our aspiring youth up to town to learn philosophy of the new teachers of philosophy; that these ‘New Views of Society’ got into the hearts of poets and the brains of metaphysicians, took possession of the fancies of boys and women, and turned the heads of almost the whole kingdom: but that there was one head which they never got possession of, that turned the heads of the whole kingdom round again, stopped the progress of philosophy and necessity by wondrous fortitude, and that ‘thus repelled, philosophy fell into a sadness, then into a fast, thence to a watching, then into a weakness, thence to a lightness, and by this declension, to the lamentable state wherein it now lies,’ hooted by the boys, laughed at by the women, spit at by fools, trod upon by knaves, damned by poet-laureates, whined over by maudlin metaphysicians, rhymed upon by mincing ballad-makers, ridiculed in romances, belied in histories and travels, pelted by the mob, sneered at by the court, driven from the country, kicked out of society, and forced to take refuge and to lie snug for twenty years in the New Lanark mills, with the connivance of the worthy proprietor, among the tow and spindles; from whence he lets us understand that it is coming up again to Whitehall-stairs, like a spring-tide with the full of the moon, and floating on the blood that has flowed for the restoration of the Bourbons, under the patronage of the nobility, the gentry, Mr. Wilberforce, and the Prince Regent, and all those who are governed, like these great personages, by no other principle than truth, and no other wish than the good of mankind! This puff will not take with us: we are old birds, not to be caught with chaff: we shall not purchase in this new lottery, where there are all prizes and no blanks! We are inclined to throw Mr. Owen’s ‘New View,’ behind the fire-place, as we believe most people do the letter they receive from the proprietors of the lucky lottery-office, informing them that their ticket was drawn a blank the first day, and in the postscript soliciting their future favours!

Mr. Owen may think that we have all this while been jesting, when we have been in sad and serious earnest. Well, then, we will give him the reason why we differ with him, out of ‘an old saw,’ as good as most ‘modern instances.’ It is contained in this sentence:—‘If to do were as easy as to teach others what were good to be done, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces.’ Our author has discovered no new theory; he has advanced no new reasons. The former reasons were never answered, but the plan did not succeed. Why then does he think his must? All that he has done has been to leave out the reasons for his paradoxes, and to give his conclusions in capitals. This may take for a time with Mr. Wilberforce and the Methodists, who like hieroglyphics, but it cannot last. Here is a plan, strange as it may seem, ‘a new View of Society,’ published by two of our most loyal booksellers, and what is still more extraordinary, puffed in The Courier as an extremely practical, practicable, solid, useful, and good sort of work, which proposes no less than to govern the world without religion and without law, by the force of reason alone! This project is in one of its branches dedicated to the Prince Regent, by which (if carried into effect) he would be stuck up in his life-time as ‘a useless piece of antiquity’; and in another part is dedicated to Mr. Wilberforce, though it would by the same rule convert that little vital member of the community into ‘a monkey preacher,’ crying in the wilderness with no one to hear him, and sneaking about between his character and his conscience, in a state of ludicrous perplexity, as indeed he always appears to be at present! What is most remarkable is, that Mr. Owen is the first philosopher we ever heard of, who recommended himself to the great by telling them disagreeable truths. A man that comes all the way from the banks of the Clyde acquires a projectile force that renders him irresistible. He has access, we understand, to the men in office, to the members of parliament, to lords and gentlemen. He comes to ‘pull an old house about their ears,’ to batter down all their establishments, new or old, in church or in state, civil, political, and military, and he quietly walks into their houses with his credentials in his pocket, and reconciles them to the prospect of the innumerable Houses of Industry he is about to erect on the site of their present sinecures, by assuring them of the certainty of his principles and the infallibility of his practice, in building up and pulling down. His predecessors were clumsy fellows; but he is an engineer, who will be sure to do their business for them. He is not the man to set the Thames on fire, but he will move the world, and New Lanark is the place he has fixed his lever upon for this purpose. To shew that he goes roundly to work with great people in developing his formidable system of the formation of character, he asks, p. 7 of the second Essay,—

‘How much longer shall we continue to allow generation after generation to be taught crime from their infancy, and when so taught, hunt them like beasts of the forest, until they are entangled beyond escape in the toils and nets of the law? When, if the circumstances from youth of these poor unpitied sufferers had been reversed with those who are even surrounded with the pomp and dignity of justice, these latter would have been at the bar of the culprit, and the former would have been in the judgment-seat.

‘Had the present Judges of these realms, whose conduct compels the admiration of surrounding states, been born and educated in St. Giles’s, or some similar situation, is it not reasonable to conclude, as they possess native energies and abilities, that ere this they would have been at the head of their then profession, and in consequence of that superiority and proficiency, have already suffered imprisonment, transportation, or death? Or can we for a moment hesitate to decide, that if some of those men whom our laws, dispensed by the present Judges, have doomed to suffer capital punishment, had been born, trained, and surrounded as these Judges were born, trained, and surrounded; that some of those so imprisoned, transported, or hanged, would have been the identical individuals who would have passed the same awful sentences on our present highly esteemed dignitaries of the law?’

This is a delicate passage. So then according to the author of the ‘New View of Society,’ the Prince Regent of these realms, instead of being at the head of the allied sovereigns of Europe, might, in other circumstances, have been at the head of a gang of bravoes and assassins; Lord Castlereagh, on the same principle, and by parity of reasoning, without any alteration in his nature or understanding, but by the mere difference of situation, might have been a second Count Fathom; Mr. Vansittart, the chancellor of the exchequer, might, if he had turned his hand that way in time, have succeeded on the snaffling lay, or as a pickpocket; Lord Wellington might have entered houses, instead of entering kingdoms, by force; the Lord-chancellor might have been a Jew-broker; the Marquis of —— or Lord —— a bawd, and their sons, tapsters and bullies at bagnios; the Queen (God bless her) might have been an old washer-woman, taking her snuff and gin among her gossips, and her daughters, if they had not been princesses, might have turned out no better than they should be! Here’s a levelling rogue for you! The world turned inside out, with a witness!—Such are Mr. Owen’s general principles, to which we have nothing to say, and such his mode of illustrating them in his prefaces and dedications, which we do not think the most flattering to persons in power. We do not, however, wish him to alter his tone: he goes swimmingly on at present, ‘with cheerful and confident thoughts.’ His schemes thus far are tolerated, because they are remote, visionary, inapplicable. Neither the great world nor the world in general care any thing about New Lanark, nor trouble themselves whether the workmen there go to bed drunk or sober, or whether the wenches are got with child before or after the marriage ceremony. Lanark is distant, Lanark is insignificant. Our statesmen are not afraid of the perfect system of reform he talks of, and, in the meantime, his cant against reform in parliament, and about Bonaparte, serves as a practical diversion in their favour. But let the good which Mr. Owen says he has done in one poor village be in danger of becoming general,—let his plan for governing men by reason, without the assistance of the dignitaries of the church and the dignitaries of the law, but once get wind and be likely to be put in practice, and his dreams of elevated patronage will vanish. Long before he has done as much to overturn bigotry and superstition in this country, as he says Bonaparte did on the continent, (though he thinks the restoration of what was thus overturned also a great blessing) Mr. Wilberforce will have cut his connection. When we see Mr. Owen brought up for judgment before Lord Ellenborough, or standing in the pillory, we shall begin to think there is something in this New Lanark Scheme of his. On the other hand, if he confines himself to general principles, steering clear of practice, the result will be the same, if ever his principles become sufficiently known and admired. Let his ‘New View of Society’ but make as many disciples as the ‘Enquiry concerning Political Justice,’ and we shall soon see how the tide will turn about. There will be a fine hue and cry raised by all the good and wise, by all ‘those acute minds’ who, Mr. Owen tells us, have not been able to find a flaw in his reasonings, but who will soon discover a flaw in his reputation. Dr. Parr will preach a Spital sermon against him; lectures will be delivered in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, to prove that a perfect man is such another chimera as a golden mountain; Mr. Malthus will set up his two checks of vice and misery as insuperable bars against him; Mr. Southey will put him into the ‘Quarterly Review’; his name will be up in the newspapers, The Times, The Courier, and The Morning Post; the three estates will set their faces against him; he will be marked as a Jacobin, a leveller, an incendiary, in all parts of the three kingdoms; he will be avoided by his friends, and become a bye-word to his enemies; his brother magistrates of the county of Lanark will refuse to sit on the bench with him; the spindles of his spinning-jennies will no longer turn on their soft axles; he will have gone out for wool, and will go home shorn; and he will find that it is not so easy or safe a task as he imagined to make fools wise, and knaves honest; in short, to make mankind understand their own interests, or those who govern them care for any interest but their own. Otherwise, all this matter would have been settled long ago. As it is, things will most probably go on as they have done, till some comet comes with its tail; and on the eve of some grand and radical reform, puts an end to the question.

The Speech of Charles C. Western, Esq. M.P. on the Distressed State of the Agriculture of the Country, delivered in the House of Commons, March 7, 1816.
The Speech of Henry Brougham, Esq. M.P. on the same subject, delivered in the same place, April 9, 1816.

This is a sore subject; and it is here handled with much tenderness and delicacy. It puts one in mind of the traveller’s nose, and the nuns of Strasburgh, in the tale of Slaukenbergius. ‘I will touch it, said one; I dare not touch it, said another; I wish I had touched it, said a third; let me touch it, said a fourth.’ While the gentlewomen were debating the point, the traveller with the great nose rode on. It would be no ungracious task to treat of the distresses of the country, if all were distressed alike; but that is not the case; nor is it possible to trace the necessities of one part of the community to their source, or to hint at a remedy, without glancing invidiously at the superfluities of others. ‘Aye, there’s the rub, that makes calamity of so long life.’ The speeches before us are to the subject what a veil is to a lady’s face, or a blind to a window. Almost all that has been said or written upon it is a palpable delusion—an attempt to speak out and say nothing; to oppose something that might be done, and propose something that cannot be done; to direct attention to the subject, and divert it from it; to do something and nothing; and to come to this potent conclusion, that while nothing is done, nothing can be done. ‘But have you then any remedy to propose instead?’ What sort of a remedy do you mean? ‘Oh, one equally safe and efficacious, that shall set every thing to rights, and leave every thing just as it is, that does not touch either the tythes or the national debt, nor places and pensions, nor property of any kind, except the poor’s fund; that you may take from them to make them independent of the rich, as you leave Lord Camden in possession of thirty thousand a year to make him independent of the poor.’—Why, then, what if the Lord Chancellor and the Chancellor of the Exchequer were to play a game at push-pin on the top of St. Paul’s; or if Mr. Brougham and Mr. Horner were to play at cat’s-cradle on the top of the Monument; or if the little garden between the Speaker’s house and the river-side were to be sown with pearls and cockle-shells? Or if——Pshaw! Patience, and shuffle the cards.

The great problem of our great problem-finders appears to be, to take nothing from the rich, and give it to the poor. That will never do. We find them and their schemes of diversion well described in Rabelais, book v. chap. xxii.

‘How Queen Whim’s Officers were employed, and how the said Lady retained us among her Abstractors.

‘I then saw a great number of the Queen’s officers, who made blackamoors white, as fast as hops, just rubbing their bellies with the bottom of a pannier.

‘Others, with three couples of foxes in one yoke, ploughed a sandy shore, and did not lose their seed.

‘Others washed burnt tiles, and made them lose their colour.

‘Others extracted water out of pumice-stones, braying them a good while in a mortar, and changed their substance.

‘Others sheered asses, and thus got long fleece wool.

‘Others gathered off of thorns grapes, and figs off of thistles.

‘Others stroked he-goats by the dugs, and saved their milk, and much they got by it.

‘Others washed asses’ heads, without losing their soap.

‘Others taught cows to dance, and did not lose their fiddling.

‘Others pitched nets to catch the wind, and took cock lobsters in them.

‘Others out of nothing made great things, and made great things return to nothing.

‘Others made a virtue of necessity, and the best of a bad market; which seemed to me a very good piece of work.

‘I saw two Gibroins by themselves, keeping watch on the top of a tower; and we were told they guarded the moon from the wolves.’

The war has cost the country five or six hundred millions of money. This has not been a nominal expense, a playing at ducks and drakes with the King’s picture on the water, or a manufacturing of bank-notes, and then lighting our pipes with them, but a real bonâ fide waste of the means, wealth, labour, produce, or resources of the country, in the carrying on of the war. About one hundred of these five or six hundred millions have been sent directly out of the country in loans to our Allies, from the year 1793 to the year 1815, inclusive, during which period there is not a single year in which we did not (from our desire of peace with the legitimate government of that country) subsidise one or all of the powers of Europe, to carry on war against the rebels, regicides, republicans, and usurpers of France. Now the interest of this money alone would be five millions yearly, which would be nearly enough to pay the amount of the poor-rates of the whole country, which is seven millions of our yearly taxes, or might at least be applied to mitigate the mild severity of Mr. Malthus’s sweeping clauses on that defenceless part of the subject. Here is a hundred millions then gone clean out of the country: there are four or five hundred millions more which have been sunk in the expenses of the war, and which might as well have been sunk in the sea; or what has been saved out of the wreck by those who have been most active in running the vessel aground, is in the hands of persons who are in no hurry that the public should go snacks with them in their excessive good fortune. In all three cases, and under each several head of loans, waste, or monopoly, John Bull pays the piper, or the interest of the whole money in taxes. He is just so many hundred millions the worse for the war, (whoever may be the better for it) not merely in paper, which would be nothing, nor in golden guineas, which would be something; but in what is better and more substantial than either, in goods and chattels, in the produce of the soil, and the work of his hands—in the difference between what the industry of man, left to itself, produces in time of peace for the benefit of man, and what the same industry, under the direction of government, produces in time of war for the destruction of others, without any benefit to himself, real, imaginary, or pretended; we mean in a physical and economical point of view, which is here the question—a question, which seems to last when the religion, politics, and morality of the affair are over. We have said that the expenses of the war might as well have been sunk in the sea; and so they might, for they have been sunk in unproductive labour, that is, in maintaining large establishments, and employing great numbers of men in doing nothing or mischief; for example, in making ships to destroy other ships, guns and gunpowder to blow out men’s brains, pikes and swords to run them through the body, drums and fifes to drown the noise of cannon and the whizzing of bullets; in making caps and coats to deck the bodies of those who live by killing others; in buying up pork and beef, butter and cheese, to enable them to do this with more effect: in barracks, in transport-ships, in baggage and baggage-waggons, in horses, bridles and saddles, in suttlers and followers of the camp, in chaplains of the regiment, in common trulls, and the mistresses of generals and commanders in chief; in contractors, in army and navy agents, their partners, clerks, relations, dependants, wives, families, servants in and out of livery, their town and country houses, coaches, curricles, parks, gardens, grottos, hot-houses, green-houses, pictures, statues, libraries; in treasury scribes, in secretaries and under-secretaries of state, of the foreign, colonial, and war departments, with their swarms of underlings, all of whom are maintained out of the labour and sweat of the country, and for all of whom, and for all that they do (put together) the country is not one pin the better, or at least, one penny more in pocket, than if they were at the bottom of the Channel. The present may have been the most just and necessary war, in a political, moral, and religious point of view, that ever was engaged in; but it has also been the most expensive; and what is worse, the expense remains just the same, though it may have been the most unjust and unnecessary in the world. We have paid for it, and we must pay for it equally in either case, and wholly out of our own pockets. The price of restoring the Pope, the Inquisition, the Bourbons, and the doctrine of Divine Right, is half of our nine hundred millions of debt. That is the amount of the government bill of costs, presented to John Bull for payment, not of the principal but the interest; that is what he has got by the war; the load of taxes at his back, with which he comes out of his glorious five and twenty years’ struggle, like Christian’s load of sins, which whether it will not fall off from his back like Christian’s, into the Slough of Despond, will be seen before long. The difference between the expense of a war or a peace establishment is just the difference between a state of productive and unproductive labour. Now this whole question, which from its complexity puzzles many people, and has given rise to a great deal of partly wilful and partly shallow sophistry,[^[20]] may be explained in two words.—Suppose I give a man five shillings a day for going out in a boat and catching fish for me. This is paying for productive labour: that is, I give him so much for what he does, or a claim upon so much of the public stock: but in taking so much from the stock by laying out his five shillings, he adds so much to it by his labour, or the disposal of his time in catching fish. But if I, having the money to do what I please with, give him five shillings a day for shooting at crows, he is paid equally for his trouble, and accordingly takes so much from the public stock, while he adds nothing to it but so much carrion. So if the government pay him so much a-day for shooting at Frenchmen and Republicans, this is a tax, a loss, a burthen to the country, without any thing got by it; for we cannot, after all, eat Frenchmen and Republicans when we have killed them. War in itself is a thriving, sensible traffic only to cannibals! Again—if I give a man five shillings for making a pair of shoes, this is paying for productive labour, viz. for labour that is useful, and that must be performed by some one; but if I give the same man five shillings for standing on his head or behind my chair while I am picking my teeth, or for running up a hill and down again for a wager—this is unproductive labour, nothing comes of it, and though the man who is thus idly employed lives by it, others starve, upon whose pittance and whose labour he lives through me. Such is the nature and effect of war; all the energies of which tend to waste, and to throw an additional and heavy burthen upon the country, in proportion to the extent and length of time that it is carried on. It creates so many useless members of the community: every man paid by the war out of the taxes paid by the people, is, in fact, a dead body fastened to a living one, that by its weight drags it to the earth. A five and twenty years’ war, and nine hundred millions of debt, are really a couple of millstones round the neck of a country, that must naturally press her down a little in the scale of prosperity. That seems to be no riddle. We defy any sophist to answer this statement of the necessary tendency of war in its general principle to ruin and impoverish a country. We are not to wonder, when it does so; but when other causes operate to counteract or retard this tendency. What is extraordinary in our own case is, that the pernicious effects of war have been delayed so long, not that they have come upon us at last.[^[21]]—That money laid out in war is thrown away is self-evident from this single circumstance, that government never refund. The reason is, because they never do any thing with their money that produces money again. They are the worst bankers in the world. The Exchequer is a true Sinking Fund. If you lend money to a farmer, a manufacturer, a merchant, he employs it in getting something done, for which others will pay, because it is useful; as in raising corn, in weaving cotton, in bringing home sugar or tobacco. But money sunk in a war brings in no returns—except of killed and wounded. What will any one give the government for the rotten bones that lie buried at Walcheren, or the dry ones at Waterloo? Not a six-pence. They cannot make a collection of wooden legs or dangling sleeves from the hospitals at Greenwich or Chelsea to set up a raffle or a lottery. They cannot bring the fruits of the war to auction, or put up the tottering throne of the Bourbons to the best bidder. They can neither bring back a drop of the blood that has been shed, nor recover a shilling of the treasure that has been wasted. If the expenses of the war are not a burden to the people, which must sink it according to their weight, why do not government take the whole of this thriving concern into their own hands, and pay the national debt out of the Droits of Admiralty? In short, the way to ascertain this point is, by the old method of reductio ad absurdum: Suppose we had to pay the expenses of such another peace-establishment and such another war. Who does not see that they would eat up the whole resources of the country, as the present peace-establishment and actual debt do just one half?

Speeches in Parliament on the Distresses of the Country, by Mr. Western and Mr. Brougham.

(CONCLUDED)

‘Come, let us leave off children’s play, and go to push-pin.’

Polite Conversation.

Aug. 18, 1816.

The war has wasted the resources of the country in foolery, which the country has now to pay for in a load of taxes on its remaining resources, its actual produce and labour. The tax-gatherer is a government-machine that takes sixty-five millions a-year from the bankrupt pockets of the nation, to give to those who have brought it into that situation; who takes so much from the necessaries of life belonging to the poor, to add to the superfluities of the rich; who adds so much to the hard labour of the working part of the community, to ‘relieve the killing languor and over-laboured lassitude of those who have nothing to do’; who, in short, out of the grinding poverty and ceaseless toil of those who pay the taxes, enables those who receive them to live in luxury and idleness.

Mr. Burke, whom we have just quoted, has said, that ‘if the poor were to cut the throats of the rich, they would not have a meal the more for it.’ First, (for truth is the first thing in our thoughts, and not to give offence the second) this is a falsehood; a greater one than the answer of a Bond-street lounger, who coming out of a confectioner’s shop, where he has had a couple of basons of turtle-soup, an ice, some jellies, and a quantity of pastry, as he saunters out picking his teeth and putting the change into his pocket, says to a beggar at the door, ‘I have nothing for you.’ We confess, we have always felt it an aukward circumstance to be accosted in this manner, when we have been caught in the act of indulging a sweet tooth, and it costs us an additional penny. The rich and poor may at present be compared to the two classes of frequenters of pastry-cooks’ shops, those on the outside and those on the in. We would seriously advise the latter, who see the gaunt faces staring at them through the glass-door, to recollect, that though custard is nicer than bread, bread is the greatest necessary of the two.—We had forgot Mr. Burke’s sophism, to which we reply in the second place, that the cutting of throats is a figure of speech, like the dagger which he produced in the House of Commons, not necessary to the speculative decision of the question. The most civil, peaceable, and complaisant way of putting it is this—whether if the rich were to give all that they are worth to the poor, the latter would be none the richer for it? If so, the rich would be none the poorer, and so far could be no losers on Mr. Burke’s own hypothesis, which supposes, with that magnanimity of contempt for plain matter of fact which distinguished the author’s theories, that the rich have nothing, and the poor have every thing? Had not Mr. Burke a pension of 4000l. a-year? Was this nothing? But even this is not the question neither. It is not, whether if the rich were to part with all they have to the poor (which is a mere absurdity) but whether if the rich do not take all they have left from the poor (which we humbly hope is a proposition that has common sense in it) the latter may not be the better off with something to live upon than with nothing? Whether, if the whole load of taxes could be taken off from them, it would not be a relief to them? Whether, if half the load of taxes were taken off from them, it would not be a relief to them? Whether, if any part of the load of taxes that can be taken off from them were taken off, it would not in the same proportion be a relief to them? We will venture to say, that no one will deny these propositions who does not receive so much a year for falsehood and impudence. The resistance which is made to the general or abstract principle is not intended to prevent the extreme sweeping application of that principle to the plundering or (as Mr. Burke will have it) to the cutting the throats of the rich, but it is a manœuvre, by getting rid of the general principle altogether, viz. that the extravagance and luxury of the rich, war, taxes, &c., have a tendency to increase the distresses of the poor, or measures of retrenchment and reform to lighten those distresses—to give carte-blanche to the government to squander the wealth, the blood, the happiness of the nation at pleasure; to grant jobs, places, pensions, sinecures, reversions without end, to grind down, to starve and impoverish the country with systematic impunity. It is a legerdemain trick played off by hireling politicians, to enable their patrons and employers to pick our pockets and laugh in our faces at the same time.

It has been said by such persons that taxes are not a burthen to the country; that the wealth collected in taxes returns through those who receive to those who pay them, only divided more equally and beneficially among all parties, just (they say) as the vapours and moisture of the earth collected in the clouds return to enrich the soil in soft and fertilizing showers. We shall set ourselves to shew that this is not true.

Suppose a society of ten persons, without taxes to pay, and who live on their own labour, on the produce of the ground, and the exchange of one commodity among themselves for another. Some of these persons will be naturally employed in tilling the ground, others in tending cattle, others, in making instruments of husbandry, others in weaving cloth, others in making shoes, others in building houses, others in making roads, others in buying and selling, others in fetching and carrying what the others want. All will be employed in something that they want themselves, or that others want. In such a state of society, nothing will be given for nothing. If a man has a bushel of wheat, and only wants half of it, he will give the other half to some one, for making him a coat or a pair of shoes. As every one will be paid for what he does out of the earnings of the labour of others, no one will waste his time or his strength in doing any thing that is not wanted by some one else, that is not as useful and necessary, to his subsistence and comfort, and more so, than the commodity which he gives in exchange for it. There will be no unproductive labour. What each person gets will be either in proportion to what he has done for himself, or what he has added to the comforts of others. Exchange there will be no robbery. The wealth of all will be the result of the exertions of each individual, and will circulate equally and beneficially, because those who produce that wealth will share it among themselves. This is an untaxed state of society, where wealth changes hands indeed, but finds its level, notwithstanding.—Now suppose two other individuals to be fastened upon this society of ten persons—a government-man and a fund-holder. They change the face of it in an instant. The equilibrium, the balance is upset. The amount of the wealth of the society before was a thousand pounds a-year, suppose. The two new-comers take a writ out of their pockets, by which they quietly lay hands on five hundred of it as their fair portion. Where are the ten persons now? Mr. Burke, Mr. Coleridge, Mr. Vansittart, The Courier, say—Just where they were before! We say, No such thing. For three reasons: 1. It cannot be denied that the interlopers, the government-man and his friend, the fund-holder, who has lent him money to sport with on all occasions, are substantial bonâ fide persons, like other men, who live by eating, drinking, &c., and who, if they only shared equally with the other ten what they had got amongst them, (for they add nothing to the common stock) must be a sufficient burthen upon the rest, that is, must diminish the comforts or increase the labour of each person one-fifth. To hear the other side talk, one would suppose that those who raise and are paid out of the taxes never touch a farthing of them, that they have no occasion for them, that they neither eat nor drink, nor buy clothing, or build houses with them; that they live upon air, or that harmless food, bank notes (a thing not to speak of), and that all the money they are so anxious to collect is distributed by them again for the sole benefit of others, or passes back through the Exchequer, as if it were a conduit-pipe or empty tunnel, into the hands of the original proprietors, without diminution or diversion. Now this is not so. 2. Not only do our government-man and his friend live like other people upon their means, but they live better than other people, for they have better means, that is, these two take half of what the other ten get. They would be fools if they gave it back to them; no, depend upon it, they lay out their five hundred a-year upon themselves, for their own sole use, benefit, pleasure, mirth, and pastime. For each of these gentlemen has just five times as much to spend as any of those that he lives upon at free cost, and he has nothing to do but to think how he shall spend it. He eats and drinks as much as he can, and always of the best and most costly. It is pretended that the difference in the consumption of the produce of the soil is little or nothing, for a poor man’s belly will hold as much as a rich man’s. But not if the one is full and the other empty. The man who lives upon the taxes, feasts upon venison and turtle, and crams himself to the throat with fish, flesh, and fowl; the man who pays the taxes, upon a crust of mouldy bread, and fat rusty bacon: the man who receives the taxes drinks rich and sparkling wines, hock and canary; the man who pays them, sour small beer. If the poor man gets drunk and leads an idle life, his family starve: the rich man drinks his three bottles a day and does nothing, while his family live on the fat of the land. If the poor man dies of hard labour and poor living, his family comes to the parish; if the rich man dies of hard living and want of exercise, he leaves his family to be provided for by the state. But, 3. All that the government-man and the fund-holder do not spend upon their bellies, in revelling and gormandising, they lay out upon their backs, their houses, their carriages, &c., in inordinate demands upon the labour of the former ten persons, who are now employed, not in working for one another, but in pampering the pride, ostentation, vanity, folly, or vices, of our two gentlemen comers. After glutting their physical appetites, they take care to apply all the rest to the gratification of their factitious, arbitrary, and fantastic wants, which are unlimited, and which the universe could not supply. ‘They toil not, neither do they spin, and yet even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these:’—while the poor are clothed in rags, and the dogs lick up their sores. The money that is taken from you and me, or the more industrious members of the community, and that we should have laid out in having snug, comfortable houses built for us all, or two bed-rooms for our families instead of one, is employed, now that it has got into the tax-gatherer’s hands, in hiring the same persons to build two enormous houses for the government-man and the fund-holder, who live in palaces while we live in hovels. What are we, the people, the original ten men, the better for that? The taxes enable those who receive them to pay our masons, carpenters, &c., for working for them. If we had not been forced to pay the money in taxes, the same persons would have been employed by us for our common benefit. Suppose the government-man takes it into his head to build a colossus, a rotunda, a pyramid, or anything else equally absurd and gigantic, it would, we say, be a nuisance in proportion to its size. It would be ten times as great a nuisance if it was ten times bigger. If it covered a whole county, it would ruin the landed interest. If it was spread over the whole country, the country must starve. When the government-man and the fund-holder have got their great houses built, they must next have them furnished with proportionable magnificence, and by the same means; with Persian and Turkey carpets, with Egyptian sofas, down beds, silk curtains, china vases, services of plate, tables, chairs, stoves, glasses, mirrors, chandeliers, paper hangings, pictures, busts, ornaments, kickshaws without number, while you and I live on a mud floor, with bare walls, stuck with a penny ballad, with a joint-stool to sit upon, a tea-pot without a tea-spout to drink out of, a truckle-bed or some straw and a blanket to lie upon! Yet Mr. Burke says, that if we were suddenly converted into state-pensioners with thirty-thousand a year, we could not furnish our houses a bit the better for it. This is like Lord Peter, in the Tale of a Tub. Then the government-man and his friend must have their train of coaches, horses, dogs, footmen dressed in blue, green, yellow, and red, lazy rascals, making work for the taylor, the hatter, the shoemaker, the button-maker, the hair-dresser, the gold and silver laceman, to powder, dress, and trick them out, that they may lounge behind their mistresses’ coaches, walk before their sedan chairs, help on their master’s stockings, block up his doors, and perform a variety of little nameless offices, much to the ease and satisfaction of the great, but not of the smallest benefit to any one else. With respect to the article of dogs and horses, a word in Mr. Malthus’s ear. They come under the head of consumption, and a swinging item they are. They eat up the food of the children of the poor. The pleasure and coach-horses kept in this kingdom consume as much of the produce of the soil as would maintain all the paupers in it. Let a tax be laid upon them directly, to defray the expense of the poor-rates, and to suspend the operation of Mr. Malthus’s geometrical and arithmetical ratios. We see no physical necessity why that ingenious divine should put a stop to the propagation of the species, that he may keep two sleek geldings in his stable. We have lately read Swift’s account of the Houynhyms and Yahoos. There is some truth in it; but still it has not reconciled us to Mr. Malthus’s proposal of starving the children of the poor to feed the horses of the rich. But no more of that! We have said enough at present to shew how the taxes fly away with the money of a nation; how they go into the hands of the government-man and the fund-holder, and do not return into the pockets of the people, who pay them. For the future, Mr. Burke’s assertion, that the taxes are like the vapours that ascend into the clouds and return to the earth in fertilizing showers, may pass for an agreeable metaphor, but for nothing more. A pretty joke truly, this, of the people’s receiving their taxes back again in payment for what the rich want of them. It is as if I should buy a pound of beef in a butcher’s shop, and take the money out of his own till to pay him! It is as if a bill is presented to me for payment, and I ask the notary for the money to take it up with! It is as if a Noble Earl was to win 50,000l. of a Noble Duke over-night, and offer to return it to him the next morning, for one of his estates! It is as if Mr. Burke had been robbed of a bond for 4000l. and the fortunate possessor had offered to restore it, on receiving in lieu his house and gardens at Beaconsfield! Having thus pointed out the nature of the distress, we need not inquire far for the remedy.

A Lay-Sermon on the Distresses of the Country, addressed to the Middle and Higher Orders. By S. T. Coleridge, Esq. Printed for Gale and Fenner, price 1s.[^[22]]

——‘Function

Is smother’d in surmise, and nothing is

But what is not.’

‘Or in Franciscan think to pass disguis’d.’

Sept. 8, 1816.

This Lay-Sermon puts us in mind of Mahomet’s coffin, which was suspended between heaven and earth, or of the flying island at Laputa, which hovered over the head of Gulliver. The ingenious author, in a preface, which is a masterpiece in its kind, having neither beginning, middle, nor end, apologizes for having published a work, not a line of which is written, or ever likely to be written. He has, it seems, resorted to this expedient as the only way of appearing before the public in a manner worthy of himself and his genius, and descants on the several advantages to be derived from this original mode of composition;—That as long as he does not put pen to paper, the first sentence cannot contradict the second; that neither his reasonings nor his conclusions can be liable to objection, in the abstract; that omne ignotum pro magnifico est, is an axiom laid down by some of the best and wisest men of antiquity; that hitherto his performance, in the opinion of his readers, has fallen short of the vastness of his designs, but that no one can find fault with what he does not write; that while he merely haunts the public imagination with obscure noises, or by announcing his spiritual appearance for the next week, and does not venture out in propria persona with his shroud and surplice on, the Cock-lane Ghost of mid-day, he may escape in a whole skin without being handled by the mob, or uncased by the critics; and he considers it the safest way to keep up the importance of his oracular communications, by letting them remain a profound secret both to himself and the world.

In this instance, we think the writer’s modesty has led him into a degree of unnecessary precaution. We see no sort of difference between his published and his unpublished compositions. It is just as impossible to get at the meaning of the one as the other. No man ever yet gave Mr. Coleridge ‘a penny for his thoughts.’ His are all maiden ideas; immaculate conceptions. He is the ‘Secret Tattle’ of the press. Each several work exists only in the imagination of the author, and is quite inaccessible to the understandings of his readers—‘Yet virgin of Proserpina from Jove.’—We can give just as good a guess at the design of this Lay-Sermon, which is not published, as of the Friend, the Preliminary Articles in the Courier, the Watchman, the Conciones ad Populum, or any of the other courtly or popular publications of the same author. Let the experiment be tried, and if, on committing the manuscript to the press, the author is caught in the fact of a single intelligible passage, we will be answerable for Mr. Coleridge’s loss of character. But we know the force of his genius too well. What is his Friend itself but an enormous title-page; the longest and most tiresome prospectus that ever was written; an endless preface to an imaginary work; a table of contents that fills the whole volume; a huge bill of fare of all possible subjects, with not an idea to be had for love or money? One number consists of a grave-faced promise to perform something impossible in the next; and the next is taken up with a long-faced apology for not having done it. Through the whole of this work, Mr. Coleridge appears in the character of the Unborn Doctor; the very Barmecide of knowledge; the Prince of preparatory authors!

‘He never is—but always to be wise.’

He is the Dog in the Manger of literature, an intellectual Mar-Plot, who will neither let any body else come to a conclusion, nor come to one himself.[^[23]] This gentleman belongs to the class of eclectic philosophers; but whereas they professed to examine different systems, in order to select what was good in each, our perverse critic ransacks all past or present theories, to pick out their absurdities, and to abuse whatever is good in them. He takes his notions of religion from the ‘sublime piety’ of Jordano Bruno, and considers a belief in a God as a very subordinate question to the worship of the Three Persons of the Trinity. The thirty-nine articles and St. Athanasius’s creed are, upon the same principle, much more fundamental parts of the Christian religion than the miracles or gospel of Christ. He makes the essence of devotion to consist in Atheism, the perfection of morality in a total disregard of consequences. He refers the great excellence of the British Constitution to the prerogative of the Crown, and conceives that the old French Constitution must have been admirably defended by the States-General, which never met, from the abuses of arbitrary power. He highly approves of ex officio informations and special juries, as the great bulwarks of the liberty of the press; taxes he holds to be a providential relief to the distresses of the people, and war to be a state of greater security than peace. He defines Jacobinism to be an abstract attachment to liberty, truth, and justice; and finding that this principle has been abused or carried to excess, he argues that Anti-jacobinism, or the abstract principles of despotism, superstition, and oppression, are the safe, sure, and undeniable remedy for the former, and the only means of restoring liberty, truth, and justice in the world. Again, he places the seat of truth in the heart, of virtue in the head; damns a tragedy as shocking that draws tears from the audience, and pronounces a comedy to be inimitable, if nobody laughs at it; labours to unsettle the plainest things by far-fetched sophistry, and makes up for the want of proof in matters of fact by the mechanical operations of the spirit. He judges of men as he does of things. He would persuade you that Sir Isaac Newton was a money-scrivener, Voltaire dull, Bonaparte a poor creature, and the late Mr. Howard a misanthrope; while he pays a willing homage to the Illustrious Obscure, of whom he always carries a list in his pocket. His creed is formed not from a distrust and disavowal of the exploded errors of other systems, but from a determined rejection of their acknowledged excellences. It is a transposition of reason and common sense. He adopts all the vulnerable points of belief as the triumphs of his fastidious philosophy, and holds a general retainer for the defence of all contradictions in terms and impossibilities in practice. He is at cross-purposes with himself as well as others, and discards his own caprices if ever he suspects there is the least ground for them. Doubt succeeds to doubt, cloud rolls over cloud, one paradox is driven out by another still greater, in endless succession. He is equally averse to the prejudices of the vulgar, the paradoxes of the learned, or the habitual convictions of his own mind. He moves in an unaccountable diagonal between truth and falsehood, sense and nonsense, sophistry and common-place, and only assents to any opinion when he knows that all the reasons are against it. A matter of fact is abhorrent to his nature: the very air of truth repels him. He is only saved from the extremities of absurdity by combining them all in his own person. Two things are indispensable to him—to set out from no premises, and to arrive at no conclusion. The consciousness of a single certainty would be an insupportable weight upon his mind. He slides out of a logical deduction by the help of metaphysics: and if the labyrinths of metaphysics did not afford him ‘ample scope and verge enough,’ he would resort to necromancy and the cabbala. He only tolerates the science of astronomy for the sake of its connection with the dreams of judicial astrology, and escapes from the Principia of Newton to the jargon of Lily and Ashmole. All his notions are floating and unfixed, like what is feigned of the first forms of things flying about in search of bodies to attach themselves to; but his ideas seek to avoid all contact with solid substances. Innumerable evanescent thoughts dance before him, and dazzle his sight, like insects in the evening sun. Truth is to him a ceaseless round of contradictions: he lives in the belief of a perpetual lie, and in affecting to think what he pretends to say. His mind is in a constant estate of flux and reflux: he is like the Sea-horse in the Ocean; he is the Man in the Moon, the Wandering Jew.—The reason of all this is, that Mr. Coleridge has great powers of thought and fancy, without will or sense. He is without a strong feeling of the existence of any thing out of himself; and he has neither purposes nor passions of his own to make him wish it to be. All that he does or thinks is involuntary; even his perversity and self-will are so. They are nothing but a necessity of yielding to the slightest motive. Everlasting inconsequentiality marks all that he attempts. All his impulses are loose, airy, devious, casual. The strongest of his purposes is lighter than the gossamer, ‘that wantons in the idle summer-air’: the brightest of his schemes a bubble blown by an infant’s breath, that rises, glitters, bursts in the same instant:—

‘Or like the Borealis race,

That flit ere you can mark their place:

Or like the snow falls in the river,

A moment white, then gone for ever.’

His mind has infinite activity, which only leads him into numberless chimeras; and infinite resources, which not being under the guidance of his will, only distract and perplex him. His genius has angel’s wings; but neither hands nor feet. He soars up to heaven, circles the empyrean, or dives to the centre of the earth, but he neither lays his hands upon the treasures of the one, nor can find a resting place for his feet in the other. He is no sooner borne to the utmost point of his ambition, than he is hurried away from it again by the same fantastic impulse, or his own specific levity. He has all the faculties of the human mind but one, and yet without that one, the rest only impede and interfere with each other—‘Like to a man on double business bound who both neglects.’ He would have done better if he had known less. His imagination thus becomes metaphysical, his metaphysics fantastical, his wit heavy, his arguments light, his poetry prose, his prose poetry, his politics turned—but not to account. He belongs to all parties and is of service to none. He gives up his independence of mind, and yet does not acquire independence of fortune. He offends others without satisfying himself, and equally by his servility and singularity, shocks the prejudices of all about him. If he had had but common moral principle, that is, sincerity, he would have been a great man; nor hardly, as it is, appears to us—

‘Less than arch-angel ruined, and the excess

Of glory obscur’d.’

We lose our patience when we think of the powers that he has wasted, and compare them and their success with those, for instance, of such a fellow as the ——, all whose ideas, notions, apprehensions, comprehensions, feelings, virtues, genius, skill, are comprised in the two words which Peachum describes as necessary qualifications in his gang, ‘To stand himself and bid others stand!’

When his six Irish friends, the six Irish gentlemen, Mr. Makins, Mr. Dunkley, Mr. Monaghan, Mr. Gollogher, Mr. Gallaspy, and Mr. O’Keeffe, after an absence of several years, discovered their old acquaintance John Buncle, sitting in a mixed company at Harrowgate Wells, they exclaimed with one accord—‘There he is—making love to the finest woman in the universe!’ So we may say at a venture of Mr. Coleridge—‘There he is, at this instant (no matter where) talking away among his gossips, as if he were at the Court of Semiramis, with the Sophi or Prestor John.’ The place can never reach the height of his argument. He should live in a world of enchantment, that things might answer to his descriptions. His talk would suit the miracle of the Conversion of Constantine, or Raphael’s Assembly of the Just. It is not short of that. His face would cut no figure there, but his tongue would wag to some purpose. He is fit to take up the deep pauses of conversation between Cardinals and Angels—his cue would not be wanting in presence of the beatific vision. Let him talk on for ever in this world and the next; and both worlds will be the better for it. But let him not write, or pretend to write, nonsense. Nobody is the better for it. It was a fine thought in Mr. Wordsworth to represent Cervantes at the day of judgment and conflagration of the world carrying off the romance of Don Quixote under his arm. We hope that Mr. Coleridge, on the same occasion, will leave ‘the Friend’ to take its chance, and his ‘Lay Sermon’ to get up into the Limbo of Vanity, how it can.

The Statesman’s Manual; or the Bible the best Guide to Political Skill and Foresight. A Lay Sermon, addressed to the Higher Classes of Society. By S. T. Coleridge, Esq. Gale and Fenner.

Dec. 29, 1816.

Here is the true Simon Pure. We have by anticipation given some account of this Sermon. We have only to proceed to specimens in illustration of what we have said.

It sets out with the following sentence:—

‘If our own knowledge and information concerning the Bible had been confined to the one fact of its immediate derivation from God, we should still presume that it contained rules and assistances for all conditions of men under all circumstances; and therefore for communities no less than for individuals.’

Now this is well said; ‘and ’tis a kind of good deed to say well.’ But why did not Mr. Coleridge keep on in the same strain to the end of the chapter, instead of himself disturbing the harmony and unanimity which he here very properly supposes to exist on this subject, or questioning the motives of its existence by such passages as the following, p. 23 of the Appendix:

‘Thank heaven! notwithstanding the attempts of Mr. Thomas Paine and his compeers, it is not so bad with us. Open infidelity has ceased to be a means even of gratifying vanity; for the leaders of the gang themselves turned apostates to Satan, as soon as the number of their proselytes became so large, that Atheism ceased to give distinction. Nay, it became a mark of original thinking to defend the Belief and the Ten Commandments; so the strong minds veered round, and religion came again into fashion.’

Now we confess we do not find in this statement much to thank heaven for; if religion has only come into fashion again with the strong minds—(it will hardly be denied that Mr. Coleridge is one of the number)—as a better mode of gratifying their vanity than ‘open infidelity.’ Be this as it may, Mr. Coleridge has here given a true and masterly delineation of that large class of Proselytes or their teachers, who believe any thing or nothing, just as their vanity prompts them. All that we have ever said of modern apostates is poor and feeble to it. There is however one error in his statement, inasmuch as Mr. Thomas Paine never openly professed Atheism, whatever some of his compeers might do.

It is a pity that with all that fund of ‘rules and assistances’ which the Bible contains for our instruction and reproof, and which the author in this work proposes to recommend as the Statesman’s Manual, or the best Guide to Political Skill and Foresight, in times like these, he has not brought forward a single illustration of his doctrine, nor referred to a single example in the Jewish history that bears at all, in the circumstances, or the inference, on our own, but one, and that one he has purposely omitted. Is this to be credited? Not without quoting the passage.

‘But do you require some one or more particular passage from the Bible that may at once illustrate and exemplify its application to the changes and fortunes of empires? Of the numerous chapters that relate to the Jewish tribes, their enemies and allies, before and after their division into two kingdoms, it would be more difficult to state a single one, from which some guiding light might not be struck.’ [Oh, very well, we shall have a few of them. The passage goes on.] ‘And in nothing is Scriptural history more strongly contrasted with the histories of highest note in the present age, than in its freedom from the hollowness of abstractions.’ [Mr. Coleridge’s admiration of the inspired writers seems to be very much mixed with a dislike of Hume and Gibbon.]—‘While the latter present a shadow-fight of Things and Quantities, the former gives us the history of Men, and balances the important influence of individual minds with the previous state of national morals and manners, in which, as constituting a specific susceptibility, it presents to us the true cause, both of the influence itself, and of the Weal or Woe that were its consequents. How should it be otherwise? The histories and political economy of the present and preceding century partake in the general contagion of its mechanic philosophy.’ [“still harping on my daughter”] ‘and are the product of an unenlivened generalizing understanding. In the Scriptures they are the living educts of the Imagination; of that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the reason in Images of the Sense, and organising (as it were) the flux of the Senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the Reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths, of which they are the conductors. These are the Wheels which Ezekiel beheld when the hand of the Lord was upon him, and he saw visions of God as he sat among the captives by the river of Chebar. Whither soever the Spirit was to go, the wheels went, and thither was their spirit to go; for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels also. The truths and the symbols that represent them move in conjunction, and form the living chariot that bears up (for us) the throne of the Divine Humanity. Hence by a derivative, indeed, but not a divided influence, and though in a secondary, yet in more than a metaphorical sense, the Sacred Book is worthily entitled the Word of God,’ p. 36.

So that, after all, the Bible is not the immediate word of God, except according to the German philosophy, and in something between a literal and metaphorical sense. Of all the cants that ever were canted in this canting world, this is the worst! The author goes on to add, that ‘it is among the miseries of the present age that it recognises no medium between literal and metaphorical,’ and laments that ‘the mechanical understanding, in the blindness of its self-complacency, confounds Symbols with Allegories.’—This is certainly a sad mistake, which he labours very learnedly to set right, ‘in a diagonal sidelong movement between truth and falsehood.’—We assure the reader that the passages which we have given above are given in the order in which they are strung together in the Sermon; and so he goes on for several pages, concluding his career where the Allies have concluded theirs, with the doctrine of Divine Right; which he does not however establish quite so successfully with the pen, as they have done with the sword. ‘Herein’ (says this profound writer) ‘the Bible differs from all the books of Greek philosophy, and in a two-fold manner. It doth not affirm a Divine Nature only, but a God; and not a God only, but the living God. Hence in the Scriptures alone is the Jus Divinum or direct Relation of the State and its Magistracy to the Supreme Being, taught as a vital and indispensable part of ALL MORAL AND ALL POLITICAL WISDOM, even as the Jewish alone was a true theocracy!’

Now it does appear to us, that as the reason why the Jus Divinum was taught in the Jewish state was, that that alone was a true theocracy, this is so far from proving this doctrine to be a part of all moral and all political wisdom, that it proves just the contrary. This may perhaps be owing to our mechanical understanding. Wherever Mr. C. will shew us the theocracy, we will grant him the Jus Divinum. Where God really pulls down and sets up kings, the people need not do it. Under the true Jewish theocracy, the priests and prophets cashiered kings; but our lay-preacher will hardly take this office upon himself as a part of the Jus Divinum, without having any thing better to shew for it than his profound moral and political wisdom. Mr. Southey hints at something of the kind in verse, and we are not sure that Mr. Coleridge does not hint at it in prose. For after his extraordinary career and interminable circumnavigation through the heaven of heavens, after being wrapt in the wheels of Ezekiel, and sitting with the captives by the river of Chebar, he lights once more on English ground, and you think you have him.

‘But I refer to the demand. Were it my object to touch on the present state of public affairs in this kingdom, or on the prospective measures in agitation respecting our Sister Island, I would direct your most serious meditations to the latter period of the reign of Solomon, and the revolutions in the reign of Rehoboam his son. But I tread on glowing embers. I will turn to a subject on which all men of reflection are at length in agreement—the causes of the Revolution and fearful chastisement of France.’—Here Mr. Coleridge is off again on the wings of fear as he was before on those of fancy.—This trifling can only be compared to that of the impertinent barber of Bagdad, who being sent for to shave the prince, spent the whole morning in preparing his razors, took the height of the sun with an astrolabe, sung the song of Zimri, and danced the dance of Zamtout, and concluded by declining to perform the operation at all, because the day was unfavourable to its success. As we are not so squeamish as Mr. Coleridge, and do not agree with him and all other men of reflection on the subject of the French Revolution, we shall turn back to the latter end of the reign of Solomon, and that of his successor Rehoboam, to find out the parallel to the present reign and regency which so particularly strikes and startles Mr. Coleridge.—Here it is for the edification of the curious, from the First Book of Kings:—

‘And the time that Solomon reigned over all Israel was forty years. And Solomon slept with his fathers, and was buried in the city of David his father: and Rehoboam his son reigned in his stead. And Rehoboam went to Shechem: for all Israel were come to Shechem to make him king.[^[24]] And Jeroboam and all the congregation of Israel came and spake unto Rehoboam, saying, Thy father (Solomon) made our yoke grievous; now, therefore, make thou the grievous service of thy father, and his heavy yoke which he put upon us, lighter, and we will serve thee. And he said unto them, Depart yet for three days, then come again to me. And the people departed. And King Rehoboam consulted with the old men that stood before Solomon his father while he yet lived, and said, How do ye advise, that I may answer this people? And they spake unto him, saying, If thou wilt be a servant unto this people this day, and wilt serve them, and answer them, and speak good words unto them, then they will be thy servants for ever. But he forsook the counsel of the old men, which they had given him, and consulted with the young men that were grown up with him, and which stood before him: And he said unto them, What counsel give ye, that we may answer this people, who have spoken to me, saying, Make the yoke which thy father did put upon us lighter? And the young men that were grown up with him spake unto him, saying, Thus shalt thou speak unto this people that spake unto thee, saying, Thy father made our yoke heavy, but make thou it lighter unto us; thus shalt thou say unto them, My little finger shall be thicker than my father’s loins. And now, whereas my father did lade you with a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke: my father hath chastised you with whips: but I will chastise you with scorpions. So Jeroboam and all the people came to Rehoboam the third day, as the king had appointed, saying, come to me again the third day. And the king answered the people roughly, and forsook the old men’s counsel that they gave him: And spake to them after the counsel of the young men, saying, My father made your yoke heavy, and I will add to your yoke; my father also chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions. Wherefore the king hearkened not unto the people; for the cause was from the Lord, that he might perform his saying which the Lord spake by Ahijah, the Shilonite, unto Jeroboam the son of Nebat.’ [We here see pretty plainly how the principle of ‘a true theocracy’ qualified the doctrine of Jus Divinum among the Jews; but let us mark the sequel.] ‘So when all Israel saw that the King hearkened not unto them, the people answered the king, saying, What portion have we in David: neither have we inheritance in the son of Jesse: to your tents, O Israel: now see to thine own house, David. So Israel departed unto their tents. Then king Rehoboam sent Adoram, who was over the tribute; and all Israel stoned him with stones that he died; therefore king Rehoboam made speed to get him up to his chariot to flee to Jerusalem. So Israel rebelled against the house of David unto this day. And it came to pass when all Israel heard that Jeroboam was come again, that they sent and called him unto the congregation, and made him king over all Israel.’

Here is the doctrine and practice of divine right, with a vengeance. We do not wonder Mr. Coleridge was shy of instances from his Statesman’s Manual, as the rest are like this. He does not say (neither shall we, for we are not salamanders any more than he, to tread on glowing embers) whether he approves of the conduct of all Israel in this case, or of the grand, magnificent, and gracious answer of the son of Solomon; but this we will say, that his bringing or alluding to a passage like this immediately after his inuendo (addressed to the higher classes) that the doctrine of divine right is contained par excellence in the Scriptures alone, is we should suppose, an instance of a power of voluntary self-delusion, and of a delight in exercising it on the most ticklish topics, greater than ever was or ever will be possessed by any other individual that ever did or ever will live upon the face of the earth. ‘Imposture, organised into a comprehensive and self-consistent whole, forms a world of its own, in which inversion becomes the order of nature.’ Compared with such powers of inconceivable mental refinement, hypocrisy is a great baby, a shallow dolt, a gross dunce, a clumsy devil!

Among other passages, unrivalled in style and matter by any other author, take the following:—

‘When I named this Essay a Sermon, I sought to prepare the inquirers after it for the absence of all the usual softenings suggested by worldly prudence, of all compromise between truth and courtesy. But not even as a Sermon would I have addressed the present Discourse to a promiscuous audience: and for this reason I likewise announced it in the title-page, as exclusively ad clerum, i.e. (in the old and wide sense of the word[^[25]]) to men of clerkly acquirements, of whatever profession.’ [All that we know is, that there is no such title-page to our copy.] ‘I would that the greater part of our publications could be thus directed, each to its appropriate class of readers. But this cannot be! For among other odd burs and kecksies, the misgrowth of our luxuriant activity, we have a Reading Public, as strange a phrase, methinks, as ever forced a splenetic smile on the staid countenance of meditation; and yet no fiction! For our readers have, in good truth, multiplied exceedingly, and have waxed proud. It would require the intrepid accuracy of a Colquhoun’—[Intrepid and accurate applied to a Colquhoun! It seems that whenever an objection in matter of fact occurs to our author’s mind, he instinctively applies the flattering unction of words to smooth it over to his conscience, as you apply a salve to a sore]—‘to venture at the precise number of that vast company only, whose heads and hearts are dieted at the two public ordinaries of literature, the circulating libraries and the periodical press. But what is the result? Does the inward man thrive on this regimen? Alas! if the average health of the consumers may be judged of by the articles of largest consumption’—[Is not this a side-blow at the Times and Courier?]—‘if the secretions may be conjectured from the ingredients of the dishes that are found best suited to their palates; from all that I have seen, either of the banquet or the guests, I shall utter my profaccia’—[‘Oh thou particular fellow!‘]—‘with a desponding sigh: From a popular philosophy, and philosophic populace, good sense deliver us!’

Why so, any more than from a popular religion or a religious populace, on Mr. Coleridge’s own principle, p. 12, ‘Reason and religion are their own evidence’? We should suspect that our unread author, the ‘Secret Tattle’ of the Press, is thus fastidious, because he keeps an ordinary himself which is not frequented. He professes to be select: but we all know the secret of ‘seminaries for a limited number of pupils.’ Mr. Coleridge addresses his Lay-Sermon ‘to the higher classes,’ in his printed title-page: in that which is not printed he has announced it to be directed ad clerum, which might imply the clergy, but no: he issues another EXTENT for the benefit of the Reading Public, and says he means by the annunciation ad clerum, all persons of clerkly acquirements, that is, who can read and write. What wretched stuff is all this! We well remember a friend of his and ours saying, many years ago, on seeing a little shabby volume of Thomson’s Seasons lying in the window of a solitary ale-house, at the top of a rock hanging over the British Channel,—‘That is true fame!’ If he were to write fifty Lay-Sermons, he could not answer the inference from this one sentence, which is, that there are books that make their way wherever there are readers, and that there ought every where to be readers for such books!

To the words Reading Public, in the above passage, is the following note, which in wit and humour does not fall short of Mr. Southey’s ‘Tract on the Madras System’:—

‘Some participle passive in the diminutive form, eruditorum natio for instance, might seem at first sight a fuller and more exact designation: but the superior force and humour of the former become evident whenever the phrase occurs, as a step or stair in the climax of irony.... Among the revolutions worthy of notice, the change in the introductory sentences and prefatory matter in serious books is not the least striking. The same gross flattery, which disgusts us in the dedications to individuals, in the elder writers, is now transferred to the nation at large, or the Reading Public; while the Jeremiads of our old moralists, and their angry denunciations against the ignorance, immorality, and irreligion of the people appear (mutatis mutandis, and with an appeal to the worst passions, envy, discontent, scorn, vindictiveness,[^[26]] &c.) in the shape of bitter libels on ministers, parliament, the clergy; in short, on the state and church, and all persons employed in them. Likewise, I would point out to the reader’s attention the marvellous predominance at present of the words, Idea and Demonstration. Every talker now-a-days has an Idea; aye, and he will demonstrate it too! A few days ago, I heard one of the Reading Public, a thinking and independent smuggler, euphonise the latter word with much significance, in a tirade against the planners of the late African expedition: “As to Algiers, any man that has half an Idea in his skull must know, that it has been long ago dey-monstered, I should say, dey-monstrified,” &c. But the phrase, which occasioned this note, brings to my mind the mistake of a lethargic Dutch traveller, who, returning highly gratified from a showman’s caravan, which he had been tempted to enter by the words Learned Pig, gilt on the pannels, met another caravan of a similar shape, with the Reading Fly on it, in letters of the same size and splendour. “Why, dis is voonders above voonders,” exclaims the Dutchman, takes his seat as first comer, and soon fatigued by waiting, and by the very hush and intensity of his expectation, gives way to his constitutional somnolence, from which he is roused by the supposed showman at Hounslow, with a “In what name, Sir, was your place taken? are you booked all the way for Reading?” Now a Reading Public is (to my mind) more marvellous still, and in the third tier of “Voonders above voonders.“‘

A public that could read such stuff as this with any patience would indeed be so. We do not understand how, with this systematic antipathy to the Reading Public, it is consistent in Mr. Coleridge to declare of ‘Dr. Bell’s original and unsophisticated plan,’ that he ‘himself regards it as an especial gift of Providence to the human race, as an incomparable machine, a vast moral steam-engine.’ Learning is an old University mistress, that he is not willing to part with, except for the use of the church of England; and he is sadly afraid she should be debauched by the ‘liberal ideas’ of Joseph Lancaster! As to his aversion to the prostitution of the word Idea to common uses and in common minds, it is no wonder, from the very exalted idea which he has given us of this term.

‘What other measures I had in contemplation it has been my endeavour to explain elsewhere.... O what treasures of practical wisdom would be once more brought into open day by the solution of this problem,’ to wit, ‘a thorough recasting of the moulds in which the minds of our gentry, the characters of our future land-owners, magistrates, and senators, are to receive their shape and fashion. Suffice it for the present to hint the master-thought. The first man, on whom the light of an Idea dawned did in that same moment receive the spirit and the credentials of a Lawgiver; and as long as man shall exist, so long will the possession of that antecedent knowledge which exists only in the power of an idea, be the one lawful qualification for all dominion in the world of the senses,’ p. 52. Now we do think this a shorter cut towards the undermining of the rotten boroughs, and ousting the present ministry, than any we have yet heard of. One of the most extraordinary ideas in this work is where the Author proves the doctrine of free will from the existence of property; and again, when he recommends the study of the Scriptures, from the example of Heraclitus and Horace. To conclude this most inconclusive piece of work, we find the distant hopes and doubtful expectations of the writer’s mind summed up in the following rare rhapsody. ‘Oh what a mine of undiscovered treasures, what a new world of power and truth would the Bible promise to our future meditation, if in some gracious moment one solitary text of all its inspired contents should but dawn upon us in the pure untroubled brightness of an IDEA, that most glorious birth of the godlike within us, which even as the light, its material symbol, reflects itself from a thousand surfaces, and flies homeward to its parent mind, enriched with a thousand forms, itself above form, and still remaining in its own simplicity and identity! O for a flash of that same light, in which the first position of geometric science that ever loosed itself from the generalizations of a groping and insecure experience, did for the first time reveal itself to a human intellect in all its evidence and in all its fruitfulness, Transparence without Vacuum, and Plenitude without Opacity! O! that a single gleam of our own inward experience would make comprehensible to us the rapturous Eureka, and the grateful hecatomb of the philosopher of Samos: or that vision which, from the contemplation of an arithmetical harmony, rose to the eye of Kepler, presenting the planetary world, and all their orbits in the divine order of their ranks and distances; or which, in the falling of an apple, revealed to the ethereal intuition of our own Newton the constructive principle of the material universe. The promises which I have ventured to hold forth concerning the hidden treasures of the Law and the Prophets will neither be condemned as paradox, or as exaggeration, by the mind that has learnt to understand the possibility that the reduction of the sands of the sea to number should be found a less stupendous problem by Archimedes than the simple conception of the Parmenidean One. What, however, is achievable by the human understanding without this light may be comprised in the epithet κενόσπουδοι and a melancholy comment on that phrase would the history of the human Cabinets and Legislatures for the last thirty years furnish! The excellent Barrow, the last of the disciples of Plato and Archimedes among our modern mathematicians, shall give the description and state the value; and, in his words, I shall conclude:—

‘Aliud agere, to be impertinently busy, doing that which conduceth to no good purpose, is, in some respect, worse than to do nothing. Of such industry we may understand that of the Preacher, “The labour of the foolish wearieth every one of them.”’

A better conclusion could not be found for this Lay-Sermon: for greater nonsense the author could not write, even though he were inspired expressly for the purpose.

MR. COLERIDGE’S LAY-SERMON
TO THE EDITOR OF THE EXAMINER

Jan. 12, 1817.

Sir,

Your last Sunday’s ‘Literary Notice’ has given me some uneasiness on two points.

It was in January, 1798, just 19 years ago, that I got up one morning before day-light to walk 10 miles in the mud, and went to hear a poet and a philosopher preach. It was the author of the ‘Lay-Sermon.’ Never, Sir, the longest day I have to live, shall I have such another walk as this cold, raw, comfortless one in the winter of the year 1798. Mr. Examiner, Il y a des impressions que ni le tems ni les circonstances peuvent effacer. Dusse-je vivre des siècles entiers, le doux tems de ma jeunesse ne peut renaître pour moi, ni s’effacer jamais dans ma mémoire. When I got there, Sir, the organ was playing the 100th psalm, and when it was done, Mr. C. rose and gave out his text, ‘And he went up into the mountain to pray, HIMSELF, ALONE. As he gave out this text, his voice ‘rose like a steam of rich distill’d perfumes,’ and when he came to the last two words, which he pronounced loud, deep, and distinct, it seemed to me, Sir, who was then young, as if the sounds had echoed from the bottom of the human heart, and as if that prayer might have floated in solemn silence through the universe. The idea of St. John came into my mind, ‘of one crying in the wilderness, who had his loins girt about, and whose food was locusts and wild honey.’ The preacher then launched into his subject, like an eagle dallying with the wind. That sermon, like this Sermon, was upon peace and war; upon church and state—not their alliance, but their separation—on the spirit of the world and the spirit of Christianity, not as the same, but as opposed to one another. He talked of those who had ‘inscribed the cross of Christ on banners dripping with human gore.’ He made a poetical and pastoral excursion,—and to shew the fatal effects of war, drew a striking contrast between the simple shepherd boy, driving his team afield, or sitting under the hawthorn, piping to his flock, as though he should never be old, and the same poor country-lad, crimped, kidnapped, brought into town, made drunk at an ale-house, turned into a wretched drummer-boy, with his hair sticking on end with powder and pomatum, a long cue at his back, and tricked out in the loathsome finery of the profession of blood.

‘Such were the notes our once-lov’d poet sung.’

And for myself, Sir, I could not have been more delighted if I had heard the music of the spheres. Poetry and Philosophy had met together, Truth and Genius had embraced, under the eye and with the sanction of Religion. This was even beyond my hopes. I returned home well satisfied. The sun that was still labouring pale and wan through the sky, obscured by thick mists, seemed an emblem of the good cause: and the cold dank drops of dew that hung half melted on the beard of the thistle, had something genial and refreshing in them; for there was a spirit of hope and youth in all nature, that turned everything into good. The face of nature had not then the brand of Jus Divinum on it;

‘Like to that sanguine flower inscrib’d with woe.’

Now, Sir, what I have to complain of is this, that from reading your account of the ‘Lay-Sermon,’ I begin to suspect that my notions formerly must have been little better than a deception: that my faith in Mr. Coleridge’s great powers must have been a vision of my youth, that, like other such visions, must pass away from me; and that all his genius and eloquence is vox et preterea nihil: for otherwise how is it so lost to all common sense upon paper?

Again, Sir, I ask Mr. Coleridge, why, having preached such a sermon as I have described, he has published such a sermon as you have described? What right, Sir, has he or any man to make a fool of me or any man? I am naturally, Sir, a man of a plain, dull, dry understanding, without flights or fancies, and can just contrive to plod on, if left to myself: what right, then has Mr. C., who is just going to ascend in a balloon, to offer me a seat in the parachute, only to throw me from the height of his career upon the ground, and dash me to pieces? Or again, what right has he to invite me to a feast of poets and philosophers, fruits and flowers intermixed,—immortal fruits and amaranthine flowers,—and then to tell me it is all vapour, and, like Timon, to throw his empty dishes in my face? No, Sir, I must and will say it is hard. I hope, between ourselves, there is no breach of confidence in all this; nor do I well understand how men’s opinions on moral, political, or religious subjects can be kept a secret, except by putting them in The Correspondent.[^[27]]

Semper Ego Auditor.

BONAPARTE AND MULLER
THE CELEBRATED HISTORIAN OF SWITZERLAND

[From Müller’s Posthumous Works.]

‘On the 19th May I was informed by the Minister Secretary of State, Maret, that at seven o’clock of the evening of the following day I must wait on the Emperor Napoleon. I waited accordingly on this Minister at the appointed hour, and was presented. The Emperor sat on a sofa: a few persons whom I did not know stood at some distance in the apartment. The Emperor began to speak of the History of Switzerland; told me that I ought to complete it; that even the more recent times had their interest. He came to the work of mediation, discovered a very good will, if we do not meddle with any thing foreign, and remain quietly in the interior. He proceeded from the Swiss to the old Greek Constitution and History, to the Theory of Constitutions, to the complete diversity of those of Asia, (and the causes of this diversity in the climate, polygamy, &c.) the opposite characters of the Arabian (which the Emperor highly extolled), and the Tartarian Races (which led to the irruptions that all civilization had always to dread from that quarter, and the necessity of a bulwark): the peculiar value of European culture (never greater freedom, security of property, humanity, and better laws in general, than since the 15th century); then how every thing was linked together, and in the inscrutable guidance of an invisible hand; and how he himself had become great through his enemies: the great confederation of nations, the idea of which Henry the Fourth never had: the foundation of all religion and its necessity; that man could not well bear completely clear truth, and required to be kept in order; the possibility, however, of a more happy condition, if the numerous feuds ceased, which were occasioned by too complicated constitutions (such as the German), and the intolerable burden suffered by States from excessive armies. A great deal more besides was said, and indeed we spoke of almost every country and nation. The Emperor spoke at first in his usual manner; but the more interesting our conversation became, he spoke in a lower and lower tone, so that I was obliged to bend myself quite down to his face; and no man can have understood what he said (and therefore many things I will not repeat).—I opposed him occasionally, and he entered into discussion. Quite impartially and truly, as before God, I must say, that the variety of his knowledge, the acuteness of his observations, the solidity of his understanding (not dazzling wit), his grand and comprehensive views, filled me with astonishment, and his manner of speaking to me, with love for him. A couple of Marshals, and also the Duke of Benevento, had entered in the mean time; he did not break off. After five quarters, or an hour, and an half, he allowed the concert to begin; and I know not, whether accidentally or from goodness, he desired pieces, which, one of them especially, had reference to pastoral life and the Swiss (Rans des Vaches). After this, he bowed in a friendly manner and left the room.—Since the audience with Frederick (1782), I never had a conversation on such a variety of subjects, at least with any Prince: if I can judge correctly from recollection, I must give the Emperor the preference in point of solidity and comprehension; Frederick was somewhat Voltairian. Besides, there is in his tone much firmness and vigour, but in his mouth something as attractive and fascinating as in Frederick. It was one of the most remarkable days of my life. By his genius and his disinterested goodness he has also conquered me.’

ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE TIMES NEWSPAPER
ON MODERN APOSTATES

—— —— ——‘Out of these convertites

There is much matter to be heard and learnt.’—As you like it.

Dec. 15, 1816.

This is an age in which, to hear some people talk, you would suppose there is no such thing as literary prostitution or political apostacy, in the sense in which those vices used formerly to be practised and condemned. We live in a liberal age; and a very different and much more liberal turn has been given to the whole matter. Men do indeed change sides, but then it is proper at present that they should. They go from one extreme to another, they proceed to the utmost lengths of violence and abuse, both against the principles they formerly held and the persons they formerly agreed with; but then this is entirely owing to the force of reason and honest conviction. ‘All honourable men’—no hypocrites amongst them—

‘But all is conscience and tender heart.’

They have deserted the cause of liberty in as far as it deserted them; but no farther. No sinister motives, no disappointed expectations from a new order of things, no places to be got under the old, no laureatships, no editorships, no popular odium to contend with, no court-smiles to inveigle, have had any weight with them, or can be supposed to have had any. They could not tolerate wrong on any side, on the side of kings, or of the people. That’s all. They have changed sides to preserve the integrity of their principles and the consistency of their characters. They have gone over to the strong side of the question, merely to shew the conscious purity of their motives; and they chose the moment of the total failure of all hopes from the weaker side to desert to the stronger, to put the matter out of all doubt. They are not only above corruption, but above suspicion. They have never once been at fault, have neither sneaked nor shuffled, botched or boggled, in their politics. They who were loud against the abuses of a principle which they set out with considering as sacred, the right of a people to chuse their own form of government, have not turned round to flatter and to screen, with the closeness of their fulsome embraces, the abuses of a power which they set out with treating as monstrous, the right of a discarded family to reign over a nation in perpetuity by the grace of God. They ‘whose love of liberty was of that dignity that it went hand in hand even with the vow they made this virgin bride,’ have not stooped to ‘commit whoredom greedily’ with that old harlot, Despotism. They ‘who struck the foremost man of all this world but for supporting robbers,’ have not contaminated their fingers with base bribes, nor turned receivers of stolen goods for paltry knaves and licensed freebooters. Nice, scrupulous, firm, inflexible, uncorrupted, incapable of injustice or disguise; patriots in 1793, and royalists in 1816; at all times extreme and at all times consistent in their opinions; converts to the cause of kings, only because kings were converts (unaccountable converts) to the cause of the people: they have not become, nor are they in danger of becoming, thorough-paced time-servers, regular-bred courtiers, trammelled tools of despotism, hired pimps and panders of power. Nothing of the sort. They have not been made (not they) the overweening dupes of their own conceit and cunning. These political innocents have not, like the two poor devils in the Recruiting Officer, been laid hold of, entrapped, kidnapped, by that fell serjeant, Necessity, and then, in the height of their admiration of ‘the wonderful works of nature’ and the King’s picture, been enlisted for life in his Majesty’s service, by some Court crimp, some Treasury scout in the shape of a well-bred baronet or booby Lord. Our maiden poets, patriots, and philanthropists, have not, it is to be hoped, like Miss Lucy Lockitt, been bilked of their virtue, ‘bamboozled and bit.’ They have got into a house of ill fame in the neighbourhood of Pall-Mall, like Miss Clarissa Harlowe, but they will defend their honour to the last gasp with their pens against that old bawd, Legitimacy, as she did hers with a pen-knife against the old Lady in Duke’s place; or if the opiates and provocatives unfairly administered, and almost unavoidable when people get into such company and such situations, should for an instant rob them of what they hold most dear, their immaculate purity, they will, like Richardson’s heroine, die a lingering death of grief and shame for the trick that has been played upon their unsuspecting credulity!—See, here comes one of them to answer for himself. It is the same person who in the year 1800 was for making an example of the whole House of Commons (in spite of the humble petition and remonstrance of the writer of this article in favour of a small minority), for being the echoes of the King’s speeches for carrying on the war against the French Revolution. What is that thing he has in his hand? It is not, nor it cannot be, a sonnet to the King, celebrating his ‘royal fortitude,’ in having brought that war to a successful close fourteen years after!

‘Such recantation had no charms for him,

‘Nor could he brook it.’

Nor is it the same consistent person whose deep-toned voice rebellows among the mountain echoes with peals of ideot rage and demon laughter—

‘Proud Glaramara northward caught the sound,

‘And Kirkstone tossed it from his misty head,

‘That there was strange commotion in the hills,’—

at the infamy and madness of Sir Robert Wilson’s gallant conduct in having rescued one of its victims from the fangs of that Bourbon despotism which that royal fortitude had restored.—Is not that Mr. Southey, with something of the glow on his cheek which he had in writing Joan of Arc, and with the beaked curl of his nose which provoked him to write the Inscription on Old Sarum, returning in disgrace from the Prince’s Levee, for having indignantly noticed in one of his Birth-day Odes, Ferdinand’s treatment of the Spanish Patriots?—Just yonder, at the corner of Paternoster-row, you may see Mr. Coleridge, the author of the eclogue called Fire, Famine, and Slaughter, who has been to his bookseller’s to withdraw his ‘Lay Sermon,’ or Statesman’s Manual in praise of Fire, Slaughter, and Famine! But who is he ‘whose grief

‘Bears such an emphasis, whose phrase of sorrow

‘Conjures the wandering stars, and makes them stand

‘Like wonder-wounded hearers?’

’Tis the editor of The Times, (poor man, his virtuous indignation must cost him a great deal of pains and trouble!) as hard at it as ever, about liberty and independence without respect of persons; in a most woundy passion, we warrant now, at finding legitimacy at some of its old tricks, caught flagranti delicto, so that the poor gentleman could not hush the matter up, if he would, and would not, if he could, he is a man of such a nice morality, and such high notions of honour;—thrown into daily and hourly cold sweats and convulsions at the mention of daily and hourly acts of tyranny and base submission to it; flying into the same heats and hysterics as ever, for he has all the reason now, that he used to say he had; laying it on, thick and threefold, upon the magnanimous deliverers of Europe; still in the old King Cambyses’ vein, ‘horrors on horror’s head accumulating’; heaping up epithets and compound epithets of abuse against his new friends, as he used to do against his old ones, till Mr. Koenig’s new press groans under the weight of both together; ordering in a new set of types with a new set of unheard-of nicknames to be applied everlastingly to the present candidates for newspaper fame, as the worn-out, feeble, and now insignificant ones of Monster, Tyrant, Fiend, Upstart, Usurper, Rebel, Regicide, Traitor, Wretch, Villain, Knave, Fool, Madman, Coward, Impostor, Unnatural Monster, Bloody Tyrant, Hellish Fiend, Corsican Upstart, Military Usurper, Wicked Rebel, Impious Regicide, Perfidious Traitor, Vile Wretch, Base Villain, Low-born Knave, Rank Fool, Egregious Madman, Notorious Coward, Detestable Impostor, were applied to the old; swearing as he picks his way to court along the streets, (so that the people ask who the honest, angry gentleman is) that Ferdinand alone has done more acts of baseness, treachery, cruelty, oppression, infamy, and ingratitude, in one year, than Napoleon did in his whole reign; teaching a parrot to call jade and rogue to all legitimate princes and princesses that deserve it, as he used himself to rail at all the illegitimate ones, whether they deserved it or not; repeating over and over, till he is black in the face, Dr. Slop’s curse upon the Allies and their proceedings; cursing them in Spain, cursing them in Italy, cursing them in Genoa, cursing them in Saxony, cursing them in Norway, cursing them in Finland, cursing them in Poland, cursing them in France, cursing them every where as they deserve, and as the people every where curse them; sending the Pope and the Inquisition to the Devil; swooning at the extinction of Spanish liberty under the beloved Ferdinand; going into a shivering fit at the roasting of Protestants under Louis the Desired; biting his lips at Lord Castlereagh’s Letter to Mon Prince; horror-struck at the transfer of so many thousand souls, like so many head of horned cattle, from one legitimate proprietor of the species to another, after all his vapouring about the liberties of the people and the independence of states; learned and lofty, sad and solemn, on the Convention of Paris; looking big at the imposing attitude of Russia, and going stark staring mad at the application of the torture and the thumb-screw to the brave Cortes; gnashing his teeth, rolling his eyes, and dashing his head against the wall, at the total falsification, and overthrow of every one of his hopes and his prognostics in every corner of Europe where the Allies have got footing, and there is no corner which they have not got under their feet, like a toad under a harrow; and roaring out like Perillus’s bull against the partitions and repartitions of the coalesced Sovereigns, their invasions, conquests, seizures, transfers of men and lands; the murders, massacres, imprisonments, pillagings, frauds, treacheries, breaches of written treaties and of verbal promises; usurpations, pretensions, and overt acts of legitimacy, since it was restored to itself, to one and the self-same tune that he used to lift up his voice, ‘his most sweet voice,’ against Bonaparte’s wars and conquests, till the Stock Exchange was stunned with the clamour, and Mr. Walter well-nigh fainted! The only fault of this account is, that not one word of it is true.

‘Thy stone, oh Sisyphus, stands still:

‘Ixion rests upon his wheel!’

Once a Jacobin and always a Jacobin, is a maxim, which, notwithstanding Mr. Coleridge’s see-saw reasoning to the contrary, we hold to be true, even of him to this day. Once an Apostate and always an Apostate, we hold to be equally true; and the reason why the last is true, is that the first is so. A person who is what is called a Jacobin (and we apply this term in its vulgarest sense to the persons here meant) that is, who has shaken off certain well known prejudices with respect to kings or priests, or nobles, cannot so easily resume them again, whenever his pleasure or his convenience may prompt him to attempt it. And it is because he cannot resume them again in good earnest, that he endeavours to make up for his want of sincerity by violence, either by canting till he makes your soul sicken, like the author of The Friend, or by raving like a Bedlamite, as does the Editor of The Times. Why does he abuse Bonaparte and call him an upstart? Because he is himself, if he is any thing at all, an upstart; and because Bonaparte having got the start of him one way, he turned back to gain the race another, by trying for a court-livery, and to recommend himself to the house of Brunswick, by proclaiming the principles of the house of Stuart. Why does he make such a route about Kings and Queens, and Dukes and Duchesses, and old women of all ages and both sexes? Because he cares no more for them in his heart than we do. How should he? ‘What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba?’ What motive has he, or what ground of passion, that he should

‘Cleave the general ear with horrid speech,

‘And, like a whore, unpack his heart with words!’

None in the world, any more than the poor player in Hamlet, who tried to ‘work his soul to his conceit, tears in his eyes, distraction in his looks,’ because it was his cue to do so. He blusters and hectors, and makes a noise to hide his want of consistency, as cowards turn bullies to hide their want of courage. He is virulent and vulgar in proportion as he is insincere; and yet it is the only way in which he can seem himself not to be a hypocrite. He has no blind prejudices to repose on; no unshaken principles to refer to; no hearty attachment to altars or to thrones. You see the Jacobinical leaven working in every line that he writes, and making strange havoc with his present professions. He would cashier Louis and Ferdinand, Alexander and Frederick, to-morrow, and hurl them headlong from their thrones with a stroke of his pen, for not complying with any one of his favourite dogmas. He has no regard for any thing but his own will; no feeling of any thing but of hatred to the cause he has deserted, and of the necessity of keeping from his mind, by every demonstration of outward scorn and horror, whatever might recal his old, unprofitable, exploded errors. His hatred and dread of the principles of others, proceeds from his greater hatred and dread of his own. The spectre of his former opinions glares perpetually near him, and provokes his frantic zeal. For close behind him stalks the ghost of the French Revolution, that unfortunate Miss Bailey of modern politicians, their mistress and their saint, what time

——‘Society became their glittering bride

‘And airy hopes their children,’—

which, if he was once to turn round, would stare him in the face with self-conviction, and make his pen drop from his hands. It is this morbid conflict with his own feelings that many persons do not know what to make of, and which gives such a tragic, and at the same time, ludicrous air to his writings. He is obliged to wink and shut his apprehension up, so that he is blind, stupidly blind to all that makes against him, and all that makes for him. His understanding seems to labour under a quinsy; and instead of the little bonnet rouge of 1793, wears a huge pair of Bourbon blinkers for 1816. Hence the endless inconsistencies in which he involves himself; and as it is his self-will that makes him insensible to all objections, it is the same headstrong obstinacy which makes him regardless of contradictions, and proof against conviction.

In a word, to conclude this part of the subject, the writer of The Times is governed entirely by his will; and this faculty is strong, and bears sway in him, as all other principles are weak. He asserts a fact the louder, as he suspects it to be without proof: and defends a measure the more lustily, as he feels it to be mischievous. He listens only to his passions and his prejudices, not to truth or reason. Prove to him that any thing is the most idle fiction that ever was invented, and he will swear to it: prove to him that it is fraught with destruction to the liberties of mankind in all places and in all time to come, and he is your own for ever. Sed hæc hactenus. Goethe has given to one of his heroes this motto—‘Mad but wise.’ We would give the following to the hero of The Times—Mad but not wise.

ILLUSTRATIONS OF ‘THE TIMES’ NEWSPAPER
ON MODERN LAWYERS AND POETS

—— —— ——‘Facilis descensus Averni;

Noctes atque dies patet atri janua Ditis;

Sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras,

Hoc opus, hic labor est.’

December 22, 1816.

The meaning of which passage is, that it is easier to sail with the stream, than to strive against it. Our classical reformers should have known this passage in Virgil. They should have known themselves too; but they did not. ‘Let no man go about to cozen honesty,’ or to be a knave by halves. The man, as well as the woman, who deliberates between his principle and the price of its sacrifice, is lost. The same rule holds with respect to literary as to any other kind of prostitution. It is the first false step that always costs the most; and which is, for that reason, always fatal. It requires an effort of resolution, or at least obstinate prejudice, for a man to maintain his opinions at the expense of his interest. But it requires a much greater effort of resolution for a man to give up his interest to recover his independence; because, with the consistency of his character, he has lost the habitual energy of his mind, and the indirect aid of prejudice and obstinacy, which are sometimes as useful to virtue as they are to vice. A man, in adhering to his principles in contradiction to the decisions of the world, has many disadvantages. He has nothing to support him but the supposed sense of right; and any defect in the justice of his cause, or the force of his conviction, must prey on his mind, in proportion to the delicacy and sensitiveness of its texture: he is left alone in his opinions; and, like Sam Sharpset, in Mr. Morton’s new comedy (when he gets into solitary confinement in the spunging-house,) grows nervous, melancholy, fantastical, and would be glad of somebody or anybody to sympathize with him; but when he has once gone over to the strong side of the question (perhaps from these very scruples of conscience, suggested by weakness and melancholy, as ‘the Devil is very potent with such spirits, and abuses them to damn them’) our wavering sceptic no longer finds the same scruples troublesome; the air of a court promotes their digestion wonderfully; the load on his conscience falls off at the foot of the throne. The poet-laureate, standing with his laurel-wreath amidst ‘Britain’s warriors, her statesmen, and her fair,’ thinks no more or says no more about the patriots of Spain pining in dungeons or consigned to the torture, though it was his zeal, his virtuous, patriotic, romantic, disinterested zeal for them, which brought them there, and him to court. His Prince’s smile soothes the involuntary pang of sympathy rising in his breast; and Mr. Croker’s whispers drown their agonizing shrieks. When we are at Rome, we must do as the people at Rome do. A man in a crowd must go along with the crowd, and cannot stop to pick his way; nor need he be so particular about it. He has friends to back him: appearances are for him; the world is on his side; his interest becomes surety for his honour, his vanity makes him blind to objections, or overrules them, and he is not so much ashamed of being in the wrong in such good company. It requires some fortitude to oppose one’s opinion, however right, to that of all the world besides; none at all to agree with it, however wrong. Nothing but the strongest and clearest conviction can support a man in a losing minority: any excuse or quibble is sufficient to salve his conscience, when he has made sure of the main chance, and his understanding has become the stalking-horse of his ambition. It is this single circumstance of not being answerable for one’s opinions one’s-self, but being able to put them off to other men’s shoulders in all crowds and collections of men, that is the reason of the violence of mobs, the venality of courts, and the corruption of all corporate bodies. It is also the reason of the degeneracy of modern apostates and reformed Jacobins, who find the applause of their king and country doubly cheering after being so long without it, and who go all lengths in adulation and servility, to make up for their former awkward singularity.

Many of the persons we have known, who have deserted the cause of the people to take a high tone against those who did not chuse to desert it, have been lawyers or poets. The last took their leave of it by a poetic license; the first slunk out of it by some loop-hole of the law. We shall say a word of each.

‘Our’s is an honest employment,’ says Peachum; ‘and so is a lawyer’s.’ It is a lawyer’s business to confound truth and falsehood in the minds of his hearers; and the natural consequence is, that he confounds them in his own. He takes his opinion of right and wrong from his brief: his soul is in his fee. His understanding is upon the town, and at the service of any cause that is paid for before-hand. He is not a hired suborner of facts, but of reasons; and though he would not violate the sacred obligation of an oath, as Lord Ellenborough calls it, by swearing that black is white, he holds himself at all times in readiness and bound in duty, to prove it so. He will not swear to an untruth to get himself hanged, but he will assert it roundly by the hour together to hang other persons, however innocent,—if he finds it in his retainer. We do not wish to say any thing illiberal of any profession or set of men in the abstract. But we think it possible, that they who are employed to argue away men’s lives at a venture in a court of justice, may be tempted to write them away deliberately in a newspaper. They who find it consistent with their honour to do this under the sanction of the court, may find it to their interest to do the same thing at the suggestion of a court. A lawyer is a sophist by profession; that is, a person who barters his opinion, and speaks what he knows to be false in defence of wrong, and to the prejudice of right. Not only the confirmed habit of looking at any side of a question with a view to make the worse appear the better reason, from a motive always foreign to the question itself, must make truth and falsehood sit loose upon him, and lead him to ‘look on both indifferently,’ as his convenience prompts; but the quibbles and quillets of the law give a handle to all that is petty and perverse in his understanding, and enable him to tamper with his principles with impunity. Thus the intricacy and verbal distinctions of the profession promote the practical duplicity of its professors; and folly and knavery become joint securities for one another. The bent of a lawyer’s mind is to pervert his talents, if he has any, and to keep down his feelings, if they are at all in his way. He lives by forging and uttering counterfeit pretexts; he says not what he believes to be true, but any thing that by any trick or sleight he can make others believe; and the more petty, artificial, and far-fetched the contrivance, the more low, contemptible, and desperate the shift, the more is he admired and cried up in his profession. A perfect lawyer is one whose understanding always keeps pace with the inability of words to keep pace with ideas: who by natural conformation of mind cannot get beyond the letter to the spirit of any thing; who, by a happy infirmity of soul, is sure never to lose the form in grasping at the substance. Such a one is sure to arrive at the head of his profession! Look at the lawyers in the House of Commons (of course at the head of their profession)—look at Garrow. We have heard him stringing contradictions there with the fluency of water, every third sentence giving the lie to the two former; gabbling folly as if it were the last opportunity he might ever have, and as regularly put down as he rose up—not for false statements, not for false reasoning, not for common-place absurdities or vulgar prejudices, (there is enough of these to be found there without going to the bar), but for such things as nobody but a lawyer could utter, and as nobody (not even a lawyer) could believe. The only thing that ever gave us a good opinion of the House of Commons was to see the contempt with which they treat lawyers there. The reason is, that no one there but a lawyer fancies himself holding a brief in his hand as a carte-blanche for vanity and impertinence—no one else thinks he has got an ad libitum right to express any absurd or nonsensical opinions he pleases, because he is not supposed to hold the opinions he expresses—no one else thinks it necessary to confound the distinctions of common-sense to subject them to those of the law (even Lord Castlereagh would never think of maintaining it to be lawful to detain a person kidnapped from France, on the special plea, that the law in that case not provided had not declared it lawful to detain persons so kidnapped, if not reclaimed by their own country)—no one else thinks of huddling contradictions into self-evident truths by legal volubility, or of sharpening nonsense into sense by legal acuteness, or of covering shallow assumptions under the solemn disguises of the long robe. The opinions of the gentlemen of the bar go for nothing in the House of Commons: but their votes tell; and are always sure—in the end! The want of principle makes up for the want of talent. What a tool in the hands of a minister is a whole profession, habitually callous to the distinctions of right and wrong, but perfectly alive to their own interest, with just ingenuity enough to be able to trump up some fib or sophistry for or against any measure, and with just understanding enough to see no more of the real nature or consequences of any measure than suits their own or their employer’s convenience! What an acquisition to ‘the tried wisdom of parliament’ in the approaching hard season!

But all this, though true, seems to fall short of the subject before us. The weak side of the professional character is rather an indifference to truth and justice, than an outrageous and inveterate hatred to them. They are chargeable, as a general class of men, with levity, servility, and selfishness; but it seems to be quite out of their character to commence furious and illiberal fanatics against those who have more principle than themselves. But not when this character is ingrafted on that of a true Jacobin renegado. Such a person (and no one else) would be fit to write the leading article in The Times. It is this union of rare accomplishments (there seems, after all, to be nothing contradictory in the coalition of the vices) that enables that nondescript person to blend the violence of the bravo with the subtlety of a pettifogging attorney—to interlard his furious appeals to the lowest passions of the middle and upper classes, with nice points of law, reserved for the opinion of the adepts in the profession—to appeal to the passions of his city readers when any thing wrong is to be done, and to their cooler and dispassionate judgments when any thing right is to be done—that makes him stick (spell-bound) to the letter of the law when it is in his favour, and set every principle of justice and humanity at defiance when it interferes with his pragmatical opinion—that makes him disregard all decency as well as reason out of ‘the lodged hatred’ he bears to the cause he has deserted, and to all who have not, like himself, deserted it—that made him urge the foul death of the brave Marshal Ney, by putting a legal interpretation on a military convention—that tempted him to make out his sanguinary list of proscribed rebels and regicides (he was not for making out any such list in the year 1793, nor long after the event he now deplores with such well-timed indignation)—that makes him desperately bent on hanging wretches at home in cobweb chains spun from his own brains—that makes him stake the liberty of nations or the independence of states on a nickname or a law-quillet, as his irritable humour or professional habits prevail—that sets him free from all restraints or deference to others in forming his own opinions, and which would induce him to subject all the rest of the world to his unprincipled and frantic dogmas, by entangling them in the quirks and technicalities of the law! No one else would heroically consign a whole continent to the most odious and despicable slavery in the world, on the strength of a flaw in a proclamation: or call that piece of diplomatic atrocity, the declaration of the 25th of March, a delicious declaration. Such a man might sell his country, or enslave his species, and justify it to his conscience and the world by some law-term! Such men are very dangerous, unless when they are tied up in the forms of a profession, where form is opposed to form, where no-meaning baffles want of sense, and where no great harm is done, because there is not much to do: but when chicane and want of principle are let loose upon the world, ‘with famine, sword, and fire at their heels, leashed in like hounds,’ when they have their prey marked out for them by the passions, when they are backed by force—when the pen of the Editor of The Times is seconded by eleven hundred thousand bayonets—then such men are very mischievous.

‘My soul, turn from them: turn we to survey’ where poetry, joined hand in hand with liberty, renews the golden age in 1793, during the reign of Robespierre, which was hardly thought a blot in their escutcheon, by those who said and said truly, for what we know, that he destroyed the lives of hundreds, to save the lives of thousands: (Mark; then, as now, ‘Carnage was the daughter of Humanity.’ It is true, these men have changed sides, but not parted with their principles, that is, with their presumption and egotism)—let us turn where Pantisocracy’s equal hills and vales arise in visionary pomp, where Peace and Truth have kissed each other ‘in Philarmonia’s undivided dale’; and let us see whether the fictions and the forms of poetry give any better assurance of political consistency than the fictions and forms of law.

The spirit of poetry is in itself favourable to humanity and liberty: but, we suspect, not in times like these—not in the present reign. The spirit of poetry is not the spirit of mortification or of martyrdom. Poetry dwells in a perpetual Utopia of its own, and is, for that reason, very ill calculated to make a Paradise upon earth, by encountering the shocks and disappointments of the world. Poetry, like the law, is a fiction; only a more agreeable one. It does not create difficulties where they do not exist; but contrives to get rid of them, whether they exist or not. It is not entangled in cobwebs of its own making, but soars above all obstacles. It cannot be ‘constrained by mastery.’ It has the range of the universe; it traverses the empyreum, and looks down on nature from a higher sphere. When it lights upon the earth, it loses some of its dignity and its use. Its strength is in its wings; its element the air. Standing on its feet, jostling with the crowd, it is liable to be overthrown, trampled on, and defaced; for its wings are of a dazzling brightness, ‘heaven’s own tinct,’ and the least soil upon them shews to disadvantage. Sunk, degraded as we have seen it, we shall not insult over it, but leave it to time to take out the stains, seeing it is a thing immortal as itself. ‘Being so majestical, we should do it wrong to offer it but the shew of violence.’ But the best things, in their abuse, often become the worst; and so it is with poetry when it is diverted from its proper end. Poets live in an ideal world, where they make every thing out according to their wishes and fancies. They either find things delightful, or make them so. They feign the beautiful and grand out of their own minds, and imagine all things to be, not what they are, but what they ought to be. They are naturally inventors, creators not of truth but beauty: and while they speak to us from the sacred shrine of their own hearts, while they pour out the pure treasures of thought to the world, they cannot be too much admired and applauded: but when, forgetting their high calling, and becoming tools and puppets in the hands of others, they would pass off the gewgaws of corruption and love-tokens of self-interest, as the gifts of the Muse, they cannot be too much despised and shunned. We do not like novels founded on facts, nor do we like poets turned courtiers. Poets, it has been said, succeed best in fiction: and they should for the most part stick to it. Invention, not upon an imaginary subject, is a lie: the varnishing over the vices or deformity of actual objects, is hypocrisy. Players leave their finery at the stage-door, or they would be hooted: poets come out into the world with all their bravery on, and yet they would pass for bonâ fide persons. They lend the colours of fancy to whatever they see: whatever they touch becomes gold, though it were lead. With them every Joan is a lady: and kings and queens are human. Matters of fact they embellish at their will, and reason is the plaything of their passions, their caprice, or interest. There is no practice so base of which they will not become the panders: no sophistry of which their understanding may not be made the voluntary dupe. Their only object is to please their fancy. Their souls are effeminate, half man and half woman: they want fortitude, and are without principle. If things do not turn out according to their wishes, they will make their wishes turn round to things. They can easily overlook whatever they do not approve, and make an idol of any thing they please. The object of poetry is to please: this art naturally gives pleasure, and excites admiration. Poets, therefore, cannot do well without sympathy and flattery. It is, accordingly, very much against the grain that they remain long on the unpopular side of the question. They do not like to be shut out when laurels are to be given away at court—or places under government to be disposed of, in romantic situations in the country. They are happy to be reconciled on the first opportunity to prince and people, and to exchange their principles for a pension. They have not always strength of mind to think for themselves; nor honesty enough to bear the unjust stigma of the opinions they have taken upon trust from others. Truth alone does not satisfy their pampered appetites, without the sauce of praise. To prefer truth to all other things, it requires that the mind should have been at some pains in finding it out, and that it should feel a severe delight in the contemplation of truth, seen by its own clear light, and not as it is reflected in the admiring eyes of the world. A philosopher may perhaps make a shift to be contented with the sober draughts of reason: a poet must have the applause of the world to intoxicate him. Milton was however a poet, and an honest man; he was Cromwell’s secretary.

We have here described the spirit of poetry when it comes in contact with the spirit of the world. Let us see what results from it when it comes in contact with the spirit of Jacobinism. The spirit of Jacobinism is essentially at variance with the spirit of poetry: it has ‘no figures nor no fantasies,’ which the prejudices of superstition or the world draw in the brains of men: ‘no trivial fond records’: it levels all distinctions of art and nature: it has no pride, pomp, or circumstance, belonging to it; it converts the whole principle of admiration in the poet (which is the essence of poetry) into admiration of himself. The spirit of Jacobin poetry is rank egotism. We know an instance. It is of a person who founded a school of poetry on sheer humanity, on ideot boys and mad mothers, and on Simon Lee, the old huntsman. The secret of the Jacobin poetry and the anti-jacobin politics of this writer is the same. His lyrical poetry was a cant of humanity about the commonest people to level the great with the small; and his political poetry is a cant of loyalty to level Bonaparte with kings and hereditary imbecility. As he would put up the commonest of men against kings and nobles, to satisfy his levelling notions, so for the same reason, he would set up the meanest of kings against the greatest of men, reposing once more on the mediocrity of royalty. This person admires nothing that is admirable, feels no interest in any thing interesting, no grandeur in any thing grand, no beauty in any thing beautiful. He tolerates nothing but what he himself creates; he sympathizes only with what can enter into no competition with him, with ‘the bare earth and mountains bare, and grass in the green field.’ He sees nothing but himself and the universe. He hates all greatness, and all pretensions to it but his own. His egotism is in this respect a madness; for he scorns even the admiration of himself, thinking it a presumption in any one to suppose that he has taste or sense enough to understand him. He hates all science and all art; he hates chemistry, he hates conchology; he hates Sir Isaac Newton; he hates logic, he hates metaphysics, which he says are unintelligible, and yet he would be thought to understand them; he hates prose, he hates all poetry but his own; he hates Shakespeare, or what he calls ‘those interlocutions between Lucius and Caius,’ because he would have all the talk to himself, and considers the movements of passion in Lear, Othello, or Macbeth, as impertinent, compared with the Moods of his own Mind; he thinks every thing good is contained in the ‘Lyrical Ballads,’ or, if it is not contained there, it is good for nothing; he hates music, dancing, and painting; he hates Rubens, he hates Rembrandt, he hates Raphael, he hates Titian, he hates Vandyke; he hates the antique; he hates the Apollo Belvidere; he hates the Venus de Medicis. He hates all that others love and admire but himself. He is glad that Bonaparte is sent to St. Helena, and that the Louvre is dispersed for the same reason—to get rid of the idea of any thing greater, or thought greater than himself. The Bourbons, and their processions of the Holy Ghost, give no disturbance to his vanity; and he therefore gives them none.

THE TIMES NEWSPAPER
ON THE CONNEXION BETWEEN TOAD-EATERS AND TYRANTS

‘Doubtless, the pleasure is as great

‘In being cheated as to cheat.’

Jan. 12, 1817.

We some time ago promised our friend, Mr. Robert Owen, an explanation of some of the causes which impede the natural progress of liberty and human happiness. We have in part redeemed this pledge in what we said about Coriolanus, and we shall try in this article to redeem it still more. We grant to our ingenious and romantic friend, that the progress of knowledge and civilization is in itself favourable to liberty and equality, and that the general stream of thought and opinion constantly sets in this way, till power finds the tide of public feeling becoming too strong for it, ready to sap its rotten foundations, and ‘bore through its castle-walls’; and then it contrives to turn the tide of knowledge and sentiment clean the contrary way, and either bribes human reason to take part against human nature, or knocks it on the head by a more summary process. Thus, in the year 1792, Mr. Burke became a pensioner for writing his book against the French Revolution, and Mr. Thomas Paine was outlawed for his Rights of Man. Since that period, the press has been the great enemy of freedom, the whole weight of that immense engine (for the purposes of good or ill) having a fatal bias given to it by the two main springs of fear and favour.

The weak sides of human intellect, by which power effects its conversion to the worst purposes, when it finds the exercise of free opinion inconsistent with the existence and uncontrouled exercise of arbitrary power, are these four, viz. the grossness of the imagination, which is seduced by outward appearances from the pursuit of real ultimate good; the subtlety of the understanding itself, which palliates by flimsy sophistry the most flagrant abuses; interest and advancement in the world; and lastly, the feuds and jealousies of literary men among one another. There is no class of persons so little calculated to act in corps as literary men. All their views are recluse and separate (for the mind acts by individual energy, and not by numbers): their motives, whether good or bad, are personal to themselves, their vanity exclusive, their love of truth independent; they exist not by the preservation, but the destruction of their own species; they are governed not by the spirit of unanimity, but of contradiction. They will hardly allow any thing to be right or any thing to be wrong, unless they are the first to find out that it is so; and are ready to prove the best things in the world the worst, and the worst the best, from the pure impulse of splenetic overweening self-opinion, much more if they are likely to be well paid for it—not that interest is their ruling passion, but still it operates, silent and unseen, with them as with other men, when it can make a compromise with their vanity. This part of the character of men of letters is so well known, that Shakespear makes Brutus protest against the fitness of Cicero to be included in their enterprize on this very principle:—

‘Oh, name him not: let us not break with him;

For he will never follow any thing,

That other men begin.’

The whole of Mr. Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution[^[28]] is but an elaborate and damning comment on this short text. He quarrelled with the French Revolution out of spite to Rousseau, the spark of whose genius had kindled the flame of liberty in a nation. He therefore endeavoured to extinguish the flame—to put out the light; and he succeeded, because there were others like himself, ready to sacrifice every manly and generous principle to the morbid, sickly, effeminate, little, selfish, irritable, dirty spirit of authorship. Not only did such persons, according to Mr. Coleridge’s valuable and competent testimony (see his Lay Sermon) make the distinction between Atheism and Religion a mere stalking-horse for the indulgence of their idle vanity, but they made the other questions of Liberty and Slavery, of the Rights of Man, or the Divine Right of Kings to rule millions of men as their Slaves for ever, they made these vital and paramount questions (which whoever wilfully and knowingly compromises, is a traitor to himself and his species), subordinate to the low, whiffling, contemptible gratification of their literary jealousy. We shall not go over the painful list of instances; neither can we forget them. But they all or almost all contrived to sneak over one by one to the side on which ‘empty praise or solid pudding’ was to be got; they could not live without the smiles of the great (not they), nor provide for an increasing establishment without a loss of character; instead of going into some profitable business and exchanging their lyres for ledgers, their pens for the plough (the honest road to riches), they chose rather to prostitute their pens to the mock-heroic defence of the most barefaced of all mummeries, the pretended alliance of kings and people! We told them how it would be, if they succeeded; it has turned out just as we said; and a pretty figure do these companions of Ulysses (Compagnons du Lys), these gaping converts to despotism, these well-fed victims of the charms of the Bourbons, now make, nestling under their laurels in the stye of Corruption, and sunk in torpid repose (from which they do not like to be disturbed by calling on their former names or professions), in lazy sinecures and good warm berths! Such is the history and mystery of literary patriotism and prostitution for the last twenty years.—Power is subject to none of these disadvantages. It is one and indivisible; it is self-centered, self-willed, incorrigible, inaccessible to temptation or entreaty; interest is on its side, passion is on its side, prejudice is on its side, the name of religion is on its side; the qualms of conscience it is not subject to, for it is iron-nerved; humanity it is proof against, for it sets itself up above humanity; reason it does not hearken to, except that reason which panders to its will and flatters its pride. It pursues its steady way, its undeviating everlasting course, ‘unslacked of motion,’ like that foul Indian idol, the Jaggernaut, and crushes poor upstart poets, patriots, and philosophers (the beings of an hour) and the successive never-ending generations of fools and knaves, beneath its feet; and mankind bow their willing necks to the yoke, and eagerly consign their children and their children’s children to be torn in pieces by its scythe, or trampled to death by the gay, gaudy, painted, bloodstained wheels of the grim idol of power!

Such is the state of the Eastern world, where the inherent baseness of man’s nature, and his tendency to social order, to tyrannize and to be tyrannized over, has had full time to develope itself. Our turn seems next. We are but just setting out, it is true, in this bye-nook and corner of the world—but just recovering from the effects of the Revolution of 1688, and the defeated Rebellions of the years 1715 and 1745, but we need hardly despair under the auspices of the Editor of The Times, and with the example of the defeat ‘of the last successful instance of a democratic rebellion,’ by the second restoration of the Bourbons, before our eyes and close under our noses. Mr. Owen may think the example of New Lanark more inviting, but the persons to whom he has dedicated his work turn their eyes another way![^[29]]

Man is a toad-eating animal. The admiration of power in others is as common to man as the love of it in himself: the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave. It is not he alone, who wears the golden crown, that is proud of it: the wretch who pines in a dungeon, and in chains, is dazzled with it; and if he could but shake off his own fetters, would care little about the wretches whom he left behind him, so that he might have an opportunity, on being set free himself, of gazing at this glittering gewgaw ‘on some high holiday of once a year.’ The slave, who has no other hope or consolation, clings to the apparition of royal magnificence, which insults his misery and his despair; stares through the hollow eyes of famine at the insolence of pride and luxury which has occasioned it, and hugs his chains the closer, because he has nothing else left. The French, under the old regime, made the glory of their Grand Monarque a set-off against rags and hunger, equally satisfied with shows or bread; and the poor Spaniard, delivered from temporary to permanent oppression, looks up once more with pious awe, to the time-hallowed towers of the Holy Inquisition. As the herd of mankind are stripped of every thing, in body and mind, so are they thankful for what is left; as is the desolation of their hearts and the wreck of their little all, so is the pomp and pride which is built upon their ruin, and their fawning admiration of it.

‘I’ve heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds

With coldness still returning:

Alas! the gratitude of men

Has oftener set me mourning.’[^[30]]

There is something in the human mind, which requires an object for it to repose on; and, driven from all other sources of pride or pleasure, it falls in love with misery, and grows enamoured of oppression. It gazes after the liberty, the happiness, the comfort, the knowledge, which have been torn from it by the unfeeling gripe of wealth and power, as the poor debtor gazes with envy and wonder at the Lord Mayor’s show. Thus is the world by degrees reduced to a spital or lazar-house, where the people waste away with want and disease, and are thankful if they are only suffered to crawl forgotten to their graves. Just in proportion to the systematic tyranny exercised over a nation, to its loss of a sense of freedom and the spirit of resistance, will be its loyalty; the most abject submission will always be rendered to the most confirmed despotism. The most wretched slaves are the veriest sycophants. The lacquey, mounted behind his master’s coach, looks down with contempt upon the mob, forgetting his own origin and his actual situation, and comparing them only with that standard of gentility which he has perpetually in his eye. The hireling of the press (a still meaner slave) wears his livery, and is proud of it. He measures the greatness of others by his own meanness; their lofty pretensions indemnify him for his servility; he magnifies the sacredness of their persons to cover the laxity of his own principles. He offers up his own humanity, and that of all men, at the shrine of royalty. He sneaks to court; and the bland accents of power close his ears to the voice of freedom ever after; its velvet touch makes his heart marble to a people’s sufferings. He is the intellectual pimp of power, as others are the practical ones of the pleasures of the great, and often on the same disinterested principle. For one tyrant, there are a thousand ready slaves. Man is naturally a worshipper of idols and a lover of kings. It is the excess of individual power, that strikes and gains over his imagination: the general misery and degradation which are the necessary consequences of it, are spread too wide, they lie too deep, their weight and import are too great, to appeal to any but the slow, inert, speculative, imperfect faculty of reason. The cause of liberty is lost in its own truth and magnitude; while the cause of despotism flourishes, triumphs, and is irresistible in the gross mixture, the Belle Alliance, of pride and ignorance.

Power is the grim idol that the world adore; that arms itself with destruction, and reigns by terror in the coward heart of man; that dazzles the senses, haunts the imagination, confounds the understanding, and tames the will, by the vastness of its pretensions, and the very hopelessness of resistance to them. Nay more, the more mischievous and extensive the tyranny—the longer it has lasted, and the longer it is likely to last—the stronger is the hold it takes of the minds of its victims, the devotion to it increasing with the dread. It does not satisfy the enormity of the appetite for servility, till it has slain the mind of a nation, and becomes like the evil principle of the universe, from which there is no escape. So in some countries, the most destructive animals are held sacred, despair and terror completely overpowering reason. The prejudices of superstition (religion is another name for fear) are always the strongest in favour of those forms of worship which require the most bloody sacrifices; the foulest idols are those which are approached with the greatest awe; for it should seem that those objects are the most sacred to passion and imagination, which are the most revolting to reason and common sense. No wonder that the Editor of The Times bows his head before the idol of Divine Right, or of Legitimacy, (as he calls it) which has had more lives sacrificed to its ridiculous and unintelligible pretensions, in the last twenty-five years, than were ever sacrificed to any other idol in all preceding ages. Never was there any thing so well contrived as this fiction of Legitimacy, to suit the fastidious delicacy of modern sycophants. It hits their grovelling servility and petulant egotism exactly between wind and water. The contrivers or re-modellers of this idol, beat all other idol-mongers, whether Jews, Gentiles or Christians, hollow. The principle of an idolatry is the same: it is the want of something to admire, without knowing what or why: it is the love of an effect without a cause; it is a voluntary tribute of admiration which does not compromise our vanity: it is setting something up over all the rest of the world, to which we feel ourselves to be superior, for it is our own handy-work; so that the more perverse the homage we pay to it, the more it pampers our self-will: the meaner the object, the more magnificent and pompous the attributes we bestow upon it; the greater the lie, the more enthusiastically it is believed and greedily swallowed:—

‘Of whatsoever race his godhead be,

Stock, stone, or other homely pedigree,

In his defence his servants are as bold

As if he had been made of beaten gold.’

In this inverted ratio, the bungling impostors of former times, and less refined countries, got no further than stocks and stones: their utmost stretch of refinement in absurdity went no further than to select the most mischievous animals or the most worthless objects for the adoration of their besotted votaries: but the framers of the new law-fiction of legitimacy have started a non-entity. The ancients sometimes worshipped the sun or stars, or deified heroes and great men: the moderns have found out the image of the divinity in Louis XVIII.! They have set up an object for their idolatry, which they themselves must laugh at, if hypocrisy were not with them the most serious thing in the world. They offer up thirty millions of men to it as its victims, and yet they know that it is nothing but a scare-crow to keep the world in subjection to their renegado whimsies and preposterous hatred of the liberty and happiness of mankind. They do not think kings gods, but they make believe that they do so, to degrade their fellows to the rank of brutes. Legitimacy answers every object of their meanness and malice—omne tulit punctum.—This mock-doctrine, this little Hunchback, which our resurrection-men, the Humane Society of Divine Right, have foisted on the altar of Liberty, is not only a phantom of the imagination, but a contradiction in terms; it is a prejudice, but an exploded prejudice; it is an imposture, that imposes on nobody; it is powerful only in impotence, safe in absurdity, courted from fear and hatred, a dead prejudice linked to the living mind; the sink of honour, the grave of liberty, a palsy in the heart of a nation; it claims the species as its property, and derives its right neither from God nor man; not from the authority of the Church, which it treats cavalierly, and yet in contempt of the will of the people, which it scouts as opposed to its own: its two chief supporters are, the sword of the Duke of Wellington and the pen of the Editor of The Times! The last of these props has, we understand, just failed it.

We formerly gave the Editor of The Times a definition of a true Jacobin, as one ‘who had seen the evening star set over a poor man’s cottage, and connected it with the hope of human happiness.’ The city-politician laughed this pastoral definition to scorn, and nicknamed the person who had very innocently laid it down, ‘the true Jacobin who writes in the Chronicle,’—a nickname by which we profited as little as he has by our Illustrations. Since that time our imagination has grown a little less romantic: so we will give him another, which he may chew the cud upon at his leisure. A true Jacobin, then, is one who does not believe in the divine right of kings, or in any other alias for it, which implies that they reign ‘in contempt of the will of the people’; and he holds all such kings to be tyrants, and their subjects slaves. To be a true Jacobin, a man must be a good hater; but this is the most difficult and the least amiable of all the virtues: the most trying and the most thankless of all tasks. The love of liberty consists in the hatred of tyrants. The true Jacobin hates the enemies of liberty as they hate liberty, with all his strength and with all his might, and with all his heart and with all his soul. His memory is as long, and his will as strong as theirs, though his hands are shorter. He never forgets or forgives an injury done to the people, for tyrants never forget or forgive one done to themselves. There is no love lost between them. He does not leave them the sole benefit of their old motto, Odia in longum jaciens quæ conderet auctaque promeret. He makes neither peace nor truce with them. His hatred of wrong only ceases with the wrong. The sense of it, and of the barefaced assumption of the right to inflict it, deprives him of his rest. It stagnates in his blood. It loads his heart with aspics’ tongues, deadly to venal pens. It settles in his brain—it puts him beside himself. Who will not feel all this for a girl, a toy, a turn of the dice, a word, a blow, for any thing relating to himself; and will not the friend of liberty feel as much for mankind? The love of truth is a passion in his mind, as the love of power is a passion in the minds of others. Abstract reason, unassisted by passion, is no match for power and prejudice, armed with force and cunning. The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves. The one is real; the other often but an empty dream. Hence the defection of modern apostates. While they are looking about, wavering and distracted, in pursuit of universal good or universal fame, the eye of power is upon them, like the eye of Providence, that neither slumbers nor sleeps, and that watches but for one object, its own good. They take no notice of it at first, but it is still upon them, and never off them. It at length catches theirs, and they bow to its sacred light; and like the poor fluttering bird, quail beneath it, are seized with a vertigo, and drop senseless into its jaws, that close upon them for ever, and so we see no more of them, which is well.

‘And we saw three poets in a dream, walking up and down on the face of the earth, and holding in their hands a human heart, which, as they raised their eyes to heaven, they kissed and worshipped; and a mighty shout arose and shook the air, for the towers of the Bastile had fallen, and a nation had become, of slaves, freemen; and the three poets, as they heard the sound, leaped and shouted, and made merry, and their voice was choked with tears of joy, which they shed over the human heart, which they kissed and worshipped. And not long after, we saw the same three poets, the one with a receipt-stamp in his hand, the other with a laurel on his head, and the third with a symbol which we could make nothing of, for it was neither literal nor allegorical, following in the train of the Pope and the Inquisition and the Bourbons, and worshipping the mark of the Beast, with the emblem of the human heart thrown beneath their feet, which they trampled and spit upon!’—This apologue is not worth finishing, nor are the people to whom it relates worth talking of. We have done with them.

Interesting Facts relating to the Fall and Death of Joachim Murat, King of Naples; the Capitulation of Paris in 1815; and the Second Restoration of the Bourbons: Original Letters from King Joachim to the Author, with some Account of the Author, and of his Persecution by the French Government. By Francis Macirone, late Aid-de-camp to King Joachim; Knight of the Order of the Two Sicilies, &c. &c. London: Ridgways, 1817.

‘Come, draw the curtain; shew the picture.’

February 2, 1817.

We have here a pretty peep behind ‘the dark blanket’ of Legitimacy. We thank Mr. Macirone for having introduced us once more to the old lady of that name in her dressing-room. What a tissue of patches and of paint! What a quantity of wrinkles and of proud flesh! What a collection of sickly perfumes and slow poisons, with her love-powders and the assassin’s knife placed side by side! What treacheries and lies upon her tongue! What meanness and malice in her heart! What an old hypocritical hag it is! What a vile canting, mumbling, mischievous witch! ‘Pah! and smells so.’ The very wind that kisses all it meets, stops the nose at her. We wonder how any prince should take a fancy to such an old rotten demirep! Yet this is the heroine of all heroines (Mr. Southey will tell you in hobbling illegitimate verse), a greater heroine than even his Joan of Arc—the heroine of Leipsic, of Saragossa, and of Waterloo! It is indeed the same. Look at her again, look at her well, look at her closely, and you will find that it is ‘that harlot old,’

‘The same that was, that is, and is to be;’—

the mother of abominations, the daughter of lies. Dig up the bones of a few of her wretched favourites you may, in Carmelite dresses or any other trumpery; but can you dig up the bones of the men that she has murdered, from the earliest time? can you collect the blood of the millions of men that she has sacrificed in the last twenty-five years alone, and pour it into the Thames, while our merchant-men ride freighted with gold upon the gory stream, and the Editor of The Times (without being called to account for it) applauds with the ‘sweet thunder’ of his pen the proud balance of our exports and our imports, blood and gold? or can you collect the sighs and dried-up tears of wretches that she, Legitimacy, has doomed to pine without a cause in dungeons, to prove that she is the dread sovereign of the human heart? or the groans and shrieks of victims stretched on the rack, or consumed by slow fire, to prove that the minds of men belong to her? or the cries of hunger and pinching cold, the sweat, the rags, the diseases, the emaciated wan looks, by which she proves that the bodies of men are her’s? or can you conjure up the wide spreading desolation which she breathes from her nostrils, the famine and pestilence which she scatters before her for her sport and wantonness, the ruins of cities and of countries which she makes her throne, and from which, amidst the groans of the dying and the dead, she utters, laughing, the sacred doctrine of ‘millions made for one!’—One thing contents us, and sits light upon our hearts, that we have always seen through her disguises: we have known her from first to last, though ‘she has changed shapes with Proteus,’ and now gone by the name of Religion, now of Social Order, now of Morality, now been personified at Guildhall as Trade and Commerce, or sat in the Speaker’s chair as the English Constitution (the most impudent trick of all)—under none of these respectable alias’s and swindling characters, nor when she towered above the conflagration of Moscow, dressed in a robe of flame-coloured taffeta, or sat perched as Victory on the crests of British soldiers, nor when she hovered over the frightened country as the harpy of Invasion; no, nor at any other time did we ever take her for any thing but what we knew she was, the patron-saint of tyrants and of slaves; an adulteress, an impostor, and a murderess. The world, whom she has juggled, begin to find her out too: it will hardly ‘stand now with her sorceries and her lies, and the blood of men, with which she has made herself drunk’; and we may yet live to see her carted for a bawd.

Having thus vented the overflowings of our gall against the old lady above-mentioned, we shall proceed to a detail of some of her fraudulent transactions, as they are stated with great clearness and command of temper, in Mr. Macirone’s ‘Interesting Facts.’ Interesting indeed! But no more comments for the present. We have not time to grace our narrative or confirm our doctrine of ‘the uses of legitimacy,’ by giving Mr. Macirone’s history of the treatment of his family by the Holy See, which brought his father to this country, and eventually led to his connexion with Murat. It appears that his grandfather, the head of a noble and wealthy family at Rome, was ruined in a large concern, and then robbed of his right by Monsignore Banchieri, treasurer to the Pope, a ‘gentleman and man of honour’ in those times; and that, though the tribunals awarded him reparation, the decisions in his favour were constantly defeated by the interposition of the papal power. The consequence was, that the elder Macirone, after a fruitless struggle of several years with legitimate power and injustice, died of grief and chagrin, and his family were dispersed in various directions: his eldest son came to England and married an English lady, of which union our author was the issue. This short episode shews what Legitimacy, that is, a power above the law, and accountable only to heaven for its exercise, its use or its abuse, always was, and always will be. These tricks were played long before the French revolution, and with a million other tricks of the same legitimate, that is, lawless kind, produced it.—We have here an account of some of the tricks resorted to by the wielders and abettors of mild paternal sway to restore the old right to do wrong with impunity, and to put down the principles and partizans of the revolution, as an example of successful rebellion against power held in contempt of the people, and exercised in disregard of law. Mr. Macirone, a native of England, went to Italy at the age of fifteen, and remained there from 1803 till 1812. Part of this time he was detained as an English prisoner. He was afterwards employed as an aid-de-camp to Murat, and gives the following narrative of his transactions with the Allies:—

1. A Treaty of Alliance, offensive and defensive, was signed between Austria and Naples, on the 11th of Jan. 1814, and the Austrian Plenipotentiary declared that England was ready to accede to a similar Treaty with King Joachim.—2. A Convention was signed by Lord William Bentinck with the Neapolitan Government, which opened the ports of Italy to the British fleet, and placed affairs on a footing of perfect peace.—3. Murat, on the strength of these engagements, opened the campaign in concert with the Allies, when instantly objections were made to the ratification of the Treaty with Austria, not by Austria, but by England, on some pretence of the territorial indemnifications to be granted to Murat at the expense of the Pope.—4. Murat assented to the proposed modifications, and Lord W. Bentinck declared, that the English Government now agreed entirely to the Treaty between Austria and Naples.—5. This declaration of Lord W. Bentinck was confirmed by a declaration of Lord Castlereagh, that it was only from motives of delicacy to the King of Sicily that the English Government delayed the conclusion of a special and separate Treaty with Naples, that a Treaty of Indemnities to the King of Sicily and of Peace with King Joachim might go hand in hand.—6. Murat now joined the campaign of 1814, and turned the scale against France and Napoleon.—In this state of things, Mr. Macirone observes,—

‘A variety of circumstances had now combined to induce the King to doubt the sincerity of the Allies. The Emperor of Austria had delayed for many days the transmission of the ratification of the Treaty of the 11th January. Ferdinand of Sicily had published an order of the day to some Sicilian troops about to land at Leghorn, in which they were informed that they were going to recover his kingdom of Naples, which he had never ceded, and never would cede. The English general, Lord William Bentinck, had landed with these troops, under instructions to excite a revolution in Italy, and had insisted on the maintenance of a position (Tuscany) which intercepted the communication between the Neapolitan army and Naples; propositions at the same time were made in a foreign camp to Neapolitan generals and other officers, for the expulsion of the then reigning dynasty from the throne of Naples. The doubts which these circumstances had excited were removed by a declaration of General Sir Robert Wilson, at Bologna; that he considered the letter of Lord Castlereagh, containing the promise of a formal treaty, as of equal value and force with a treaty already signed. And that neither the executive authority, nor the parliament, would hesitate to recognize the validity of such an engagement. Indeed, it was in his opinion more imperative, if possible, than a regular treaty, because it connected an appeal to honour with an obligation on good faith. From that moment the King again made the most zealous efforts in the common cause.’—p. 20.

Alas! Sir Robert, ‘How little knew’st thou of Calista!’ as a body may say. But you have in part redeemed your errors, and revenged the trick that was thus put upon your preux chevalier notions of honour!—One would think there was shuffling and paltering and evasion and cant and cunning enough in the foregoing part of this transaction. What follows is worse. After the campaigns which so providentially delivered France and Europe from the hands of illegitimate into those of legitimate power en plein droit, and while the immortal congress was yet assembled at Vienna, ‘Prince Talleyrand, on the part of King Louis,’ says Mr. Macirone, ‘was indefatigable in his exertions to induce the Austrian government to withdraw their alliance from the King of Naples, from whom the allied powers had so recently received the most efficient support. The Austrian government being warmly urged to undertake the holy war of legitimacy against its ally, the King of Naples, at length expressed its willingness to comply, but alleged the exhausted state of the finances of the country. This difficulty was, it is said, immediately removed by the British ministers, who offered to defray all the expense of the expedition, and moreover to furnish a British fleet, in preference to a French fleet, as proposed by Talleyrand in his famous note, which fleet should act in concert with and assist the movements of the Austrian forces.’

One would think that after this open and profligate breach of faith, the legitimates had made up their minds to keep no terms with illegitimacy. But, no: expediency turns round once more, and British honour, simplicity, and good faith, with it! Murat, in consequence of the preparations against him, attacked the Austrians ‘at the very moment, as it afterwards turned out, that the apprehensions of his union with Napoleon, who had just returned to France from Elba, had determined the British Cabinet to attend to the invocations of justice in his favour. Lord Castlereagh had written to the Duke of Wellington, who was at that time the plenipotentiary of the British court at Vienna, and informed him, that in consequence of the reappearance of Napoleon at the head of the French nation, the British ministers thought it adviseable to unite all the force they could collect, and had consequently come to a determination immediately to conclude a treaty of alliance with the King of Naples.’

Bravo, my Lord Castlereagh! you may one day find, after all, that honesty is the best policy; and we hope the Editor of The Times, in the next number of The Correspondent, will relieve his praises of the allies and his compliments to the Duke of Levis, by a criticism to prove that Jonathan Wild and Count Fathom were ‘gentlemen and men of honour!’

But the tale of blushing British honour is not ended. At the time when Murat was at the height of his success against the Austrians, ‘Colonel Dalrymple arrived at Bologna, King Joachim’s head-quarters, commissioned by Lord William Bentinck, to request that the territory of his Britannic majesty’s ally, the King of Sardinia, might not be violated by the Neapolitan army.’—In consequence of Murat’s polite attention to this delicate request, he lost his campaign, his crown, and his life; for no sooner was he defeated in his attempts to force the passage of the Po, which he might easily have effected, by infringing upon a small corner of the Piedmontese territory, than ‘he was surprized at receiving a notification from Lord William Bentinck, that his instructions were to join the Austrians against him.’—We know the consequences of this exquisite simplicity of proceeding on both sides. Poor Murat! he well deserved his fate, but not at the hands from which he received it. Foolish fellow! He did not know that legitimacy keeps no faith with illegitimacy. At present, we suppose that point is pretty well settled.

Murat was senseless enough to believe that he, who had been made a king by Bonaparte, would be cordially received in the list of kings by those who were so by divine right; and he was base enough to turn against his benefactor, his country, and the human race; but in himself he appears to have been a gallant, generous, and heroic-minded man. The account of his escape from the Austrians, and of his landing in France, is interesting:—

‘On the king’s approach to Naples with a small remnant of his army, six thousand of the national guard, with General Macdonald, minister of war, at their head, marched forth to meet him. They greeted his return in the most loyal and affectionate manner, exhorting him still to hope for success in the love and devotedness of his subjects, swearing that they were all ready to perish in defence of their king and country; but in consequence of the part England had taken against him, he declined making any further efforts, which would only tend to involve the brave and loyal in his own catastrophe.

‘He entered Naples unknown, in the evening of the 19th May, accompanied by his nephew, who was colonel of the 9th regiment of lancers, and four privates. He immediately proceeded to his palace, where he appeared before the queen, pale and emaciated, in the habit of a lancer; tenderly embracing her, he said, “All is lost, madam, but my life; that I have not been able to lose.”[^[31]]

‘Having taken farewell of his children, he caused his hair, which he had hitherto worn in long ringlets, to be cut short, and habited in a plain grey suit, accompanied by his nephew, the colonel, he proceeded on foot to the sea-shore, opposite to the island of Nisida. He there embarked in a little boat, and proceeded to the neighbouring island of Ischia. There he remained three days without being known, and on the fourth, as he was walking on the sea-shore on the southern side of the island, in company with the colonel, consulting about the means of effecting their escape to France, they discovered a small vessel to the east, in full sail, approaching the spot where they were standing.

‘The king immediately hailed the vessel, and getting into a fishing-boat which was on the shore, ordered the crew to row towards it, and, as soon as they were perceived, a boat was sent from the vessel to meet them. The feelings of all parties may easily be imagined, when, in one of the persons on board, the king recognized his attached and faithful servant the Duke of Roccaromana, to whom the vessel belonged, and who, in company with the Marquis Giuliano, the king’s aid-de-camp, had escaped from Naples, and was proceeding in this vessel in search of the king, under the greatest anxiety and apprehension, lest some accident might have befallen him, although, previously to quitting the palace, the king had divided with the duke and marquis a considerable sum in gold, and acquainted them with his plan of going to Ischia, accompanied only by his nephew, and of embarking from thence to France.

‘The duke could not succeed in effecting his escape from Naples until three days after the departure of the king. The enemy’s flag had been hoisted in Ischia; and it appeared highly improbable, under all circumstances, that the king could have remained there concealed for those three days. It was unsafe for the duke to attempt landing on the island, and yet there appeared no other means of ascertaining whether the king was there or had proceeded on his voyage. In this embarrassment, it happened that the duke, who was most anxiously examining the shore of the island with a glass, perceived and recognized the king. The rest of their voyage proved most prosperous and expeditious. They landed at Cannes the 27th or 28th of May.’—p. 30.

We shall in our next give the particulars of Mr. Macirone’s interviews with the Duke of Wellington, relating to the convention of Paris; and we shall be cautious what we say of his Grace’s observations and conduct on that occasion; for if we were to say what we think of that noble person, there might be some offence in it. But we cannot help having an opinion of him, which all that we hear of him confirms.

Interesting Facts relating to the Fall of Murat, &c.

By F. Macirone, &c.

(CONCLUDED.)

Sta viator, heroem calcas.

Feb. 9, 1817.

We proceed to Mr. Macirone’s account of the surrender of Paris. Let it speak for itself:—

‘Immediately after the battle of Waterloo, Napoleon returned to Paris, and abdicated the throne in favour of his son, who would have been accepted and proclaimed by the French people, but for the opposition of two celebrated individuals.

‘On this abdication, a commission of government, as it was called, was formed, consisting of Fouché, the president, Caulincourt, Carnot, Quinette, and Grenier.

‘On the 26th of June, I believe, the Duke of Wellington, at the head of his victorious army, reached Compeigne. In the course of the following night, a deputation of five persons was sent to him from Paris by the two Chambers, to solicit an armistice for a few days. The avowed purpose of this mission was to afford time for the return of another deputation, which had been despatched to the Allied Sovereigns, to assert the right of the French people to choose their own government, in conformity to the Declaration of the Allies, that they warred against the person of Napoleon only, and not against the French people, or to force upon them any particular government.

‘The Chamber of Deputies, the majority of the Commissioners of Government, and the Army, now in great strength in Paris, were determined to resist any attempt to force the Bourbons upon them; while the avowed opinion of Fouché and Caulincourt was, that such a determination could only lead to the destruction of Paris, and the loss of thousands of lives. They therefore sought the means of opening a communication with the Duke of Wellington, in which they might impart to him their views, and avert the calamity which they apprehended from the projects of the other parties. In the expediency of procuring an armistice for a few days, all parties concurred; and Fouché, who had become acquainted with me in my interviews with him respecting King Joachim, solicited me to undertake the task of carrying on a communication between him and the Duke of Wellington. It was sufficient for me to know that the service in which I was to be engaged had for its object the prevention of a sanguinary conflict, which an attempt to take Paris by force would have occasioned, and I therefore consented to be the bearer of Fouché’s message to the Duke.

‘My feelings as an Englishman entirely influenced my conduct in this instance. I exulted in the success of our army, and in the military glory which the English name had acquired; and it appeared to me, that whatever might tend to prevent the further effusion of blood, must be highly acceptable to my country; and to be selected as an instrument, by which so humane and desirable an object might be accomplished, was highly gratifying to my mind, and I should not have thought myself at liberty to refuse to engage in it, from any opinion I might entertain of the private views of the persons by whom I should be employed. Impressed with these sentiments, I left Paris at midnight. I proceeded to the Barriere de la Villette, where I found some difficulty in getting my carriage over the different entrenchments and abattis, but still more from the French officers, who evinced the greatest reluctance in permitting me to pass, observing that I was probably a person sent out to treat with the enemy, and to betray them; but on my assuring them that the purport of my mission was entirely analogous to their views and interests, I was suffered to proceed without a trumpet. Before I had got beyond the French lines, I was again stopped by a picquet of cuirassiers, who refused to let me pass without an order from the officer commanding the inner posts; and while I was asserting my right to proceed, a cuirassier fortunately happened to hold a light to my face, and very respectfully accosted me with the salutation of “bon voyage Major”: his comrades immediately asked him who I was? he answered, “it’s the Major of the 9th Hussars,” for whom I suppose he had mistaken me. This was instantly believed; and, greeted by the salutations and good wishes of the whole troop, I was allowed to continue my journey.

‘The Prussian advanced posts were at less than two miles distant, and I was consequently very soon stopped by a Prussian lancer, who, upon my telling him that I was an English officer, proceeding with dispatches to the Duke of Wellington, immediately accompanied me to the next post. Here I learnt with great pleasure, that this advanced guard of cavalry was commanded by Prince William of Prussia, whose first Aid-de-camp, Baron Rochow, was my particular friend.

‘I soon arrived at the spot where Prince William and his Staff were sleeping in a field, before a large fire, under some trees. I inquired for my friend, Baron Rochow. His name was called, and I immediately had the pleasure of seeing him. After a few urgent questions, he proposed to introduce me to Prince William, who by this time had raised himself upon his mattrass. The Prince received me with the greatest politeness, and directed that I should be presented with refreshments. On my taking leave, he ordered me to be furnished with an escort to General Baron Bulow. I arrived at this General’s quarters at break of day, and was soon after introduced to him. While I was at breakfast with him, he told me that he wished me to see Prince Blucher on my way to the Duke of Wellington; and added, that he would send his Aid-de-camp with me. He then ordered his servant to call his Aid-de-camp, Baron Echardstein, to whom I was also particularly known.

‘On our arrival at Prince Blucher’s, my companion, Baron Echardstein informed him that I was going on a mission from the French Government to the Duke of Wellington; this did not seem to please the Prince, who immediately retired to rest, and left me to converse with his Chef-d’etat-Major. This gentleman, whose name I believe was Gneisenau, was very indignant on being informed of the desire of the French to treat with the Duke of Wellington; and he completely lost his temper when he observed the coolness with which I listened to his indiscreet and authoritative language.

‘On my quitting this choleric soldier, my friend Echardstein thought it necessary to apologise to me for the indelicate behaviour of his countryman. I proceeded on my journey, and soon met numerous columns of English cavalry, and found the five French Deputies, waiting for the Duke’s arrival, at a village called Fresnoy. I thought it expedient to endeavour to see the Duke before the Deputies, and therefore passed them on the road. I shortly after met the Duke, and imparted to him the purport of my mission, and delivered to him also a sealed dispatch from Fouché, upon which he desired me to accompany him to the village where the Deputies were. He asked me if I was acquainted with the nature of the mission. I told him that I knew that one part of it, at least, was to request an armistice of some days, until news could arrive from other Deputies, who had been sent to treat with the united Sovereigns.

‘On the Duke’s arrival at the village of Fresnoy, he conferred with the Deputies for five hours. They adduced, in support of their missions, the solemn declaration of the British Ministers, “that it was not the intention of the Allies to force the Bourbons, or any other government, on the French people; that they had made war against Napoleon only, and not against the nation,” &c. Their mission failed. They received for answer, that the only thing left for the Chambers to do was to proclaim Louis 18th.

‘The Duke then proceeded to Plessis, the head-quarters for that day. The Deputies remained behind. I was desired by the Duke to accompany him to Plessis, where I dined with him, and during dinner conversed with him on the object I had to propose respecting an armistice. Before I took my leave of the Duke, I requested that he would give me some answer to the remonstrances of the Commission of Government, which stated, “that as the Allies had declared their hostility to be directed against the person of Napoleon only, it would be but just to await the result of the mission to the Sovereigns, before his Grace undertook to replace Louis 18th on the throne.” The Duke, in the presence of Lord March, Colonels Hervey, Freemantle, Abercromby, and several other officers, replied,—“I can give no other answer than that which you know I have just given to the Deputies. Tell them (the Commission of Government) that they had better immediately proclaim the King (Louis 18th). I cannot treat till then, nor upon any other condition. Their King is here at hand: let them send their submission to him.”

We are glad the Duke is not an Englishman?[^[32]]

‘The Duke was at this time in constant communication with King Louis and Talleyrand, who were together in the rear of the army; and I saw one of the messengers of Louis 18th at the Duke’s head-quarters.—I returned to Paris the next morning. Davoust had taken the chief command of the French army, and had fixed his head-quarters at the Barriere de la Villette, by which I entered Paris. On my being introduced to him, he demanded to know the object of my mission to the enemy, and said, that as he then held the supreme command, I must communicate to him any dispatches of which I might be the bearer? I answered him, that I had no written message; that my mission had been nearly similar to that of the Deputies; that I had been sent out by the Commission, and therefore thought it my duty to account with its members only for my proceedings. I could, however, inform him of the declaration, which, in common with the Deputies, I had received from the Duke of Wellington. Hereupon I reported to him the Duke’s sine qua non. He immediately declared that my intelligence was incredible, and expressed his disbelief of it in the strongest terms. Then, with the greatest emotion, and with uplifted hands and eyes, he called heaven to witness the perfidy and arrogant injustice of the English Ministry, and of the Allies. “The Duke of Wellington,” said he, “surely could never dare to make a declaration so directly contrary to the avowed and solemnly protested intentions of the British Ministry, and of the other Allies. Have not they sworn that they would not impose a sovereign on the French people? However, they will find to their cost, that we are unanimous in our resolution. Napoleon can no longer be the pretext for their hostilities. We will all perish rather than submit to the hateful yoke that Lord Castlereagh would impose upon us! —— is a traitor! he was about to compromise with the enemy—I have taken his command from him—he shall never again command a corporal’s guard—we are an independent nation—England should be the last power to tyrannize over us in our choice of a government.”—He then desired me to proceed to lay before the Commission at the Thuilleries the result of my mission, adding, “they know very well that I have now with me more than 100,000 men, with 500 pieces of cannon, and 25,000 cavalry.”

‘I proceeded to the palace of the Thuilleries, where I was introduced to the Commission. Carnot immediately asked, what my errand to the enemy had been? Fouché quickly answered, that he had sent me. Quinette and Grenier looked as if they were not satisfied with this answer. Carnot continued to address me, and asked whether I had seen the Deputies at the Duke of Wellington’s head-quarters? I answered in the affirmative, and that I could give him an account of the result of their mission: upon this they became attentive, and heard my account with dismay and indignation. Carnot expressed the same sentiments that Davoust had recently done; and added, rather roughly, that he could by no means give credit to my account, either as to the Duke of Wellington’s sine qua non, or as to the force of the enemy in the vicinity of Paris: he further said, with a sneer, “we shall have, I hope, a very different account on the return of the Deputies.” Fouché defended me, and reproved him for so uncivilly questioning my veracity, and assured him that he might put implicit confidence in me. Carnot and Grenier then took me to a topographical map, and questioned me as to the movements of the Duke of Wellington? I answered their interrogatories to the extent to which I thought myself warranted: and it appeared that I informed them of nothing with which they were not already acquainted. Carnot then, in a polite manner, told me I might retire.

‘It would appear, that in consequence of having learned from me the nature of the communication which the Deputies would have to make to the Chambers, and dreading its discouraging effects on the members, and on the people at large, their return to Paris had been prevented. Some private orders seem to have been given to that effect; for on the same day that I entered Paris by the Barriere de la Villette, the Deputies approached that part, preceded by Colonel Latour Maubourg, who was attached to their mission, when the French out-posts fired, killed the Prussian trumpeter’s horse, and a ball grazed the epaulette of the Colonel. The Deputies turned back, and attempted to enter by the Barriere de St. Dennis, but were refused. They there received fresh instructions to treat, and it was so managed, that they did not return to Paris till after the capitulation.

‘In the mean time Fouché and his coadjutors, who opposed the views of the other parties, were in great personal danger. The three other Members of the Commission more than suspected them of duplicity and treachery; and in consequence impeached them before the Chamber of Deputies. The Duke of Wellington being acquainted with these proceedings, sent a message to the Members of the Commission, as I was informed, assuring them that if any harm befel Fouché or Caulincourt, he would infallibly hang up the other three on his arrival in Paris.[^[33]]

‘It was proposed in the Chamber of Deputies, that its Members should quit Paris with the army, and rally round them all those who would oppose the enemy and the Bourbons. But this measure Fouché was particularly anxious to thwart, whilst Davoust feeling himself confident in the strength of his army, insisted on attacking Blucher and the Duke of Wellington before other reinforcements should arrive; but as I understood at the time, Fouché succeeded in somewhat softening and in giving a new direction to the policy of Carnot: and it is certain that he managed to gain over Davoust by urging the force of the enemy, and the dreadful consequences that would ensue if Paris should be taken by assault. He pleaded the reliance which might be placed on the faith of the English (for with the Prussians the French would not have treated on any terms). He therefore recommended Davoust to evacuate Paris, and not to listen to the desperate suggestions of the Chambers, observing, that so long as his army remained entire, he might obtain favourable terms for all parties.

‘The day before the capitulation of Paris (2d July), I repaired to the British camp with the following memorandum, as my instructions, from Fouché to the Duke of Wellington:—

‘“The army opposes, because uneasy—assure it, it will even become devoted.

‘“The Chambers are counter for the same reason. Assure every body you will have every body.

‘“The army sent away, the Chambers will agree, on according them the guarantee, as added to the charter and promised by the king. In order to be well understood, it is necessary to explain; therefore not to enter Paris before three days, and in the meantime every thing may be arranged.

‘“The Chambers will be gained, will believe in their independence, and will agree to every thing. Persuasion, not force, must be used with the Chambers.”

‘On my arrival at the British advanced posts, which, owing to the obstructions I met with from the French, I was not able to effect till early in the morning of the 3d July, I was informed that the most positive orders had been given by the duke, not to allow any messenger to pass from Paris without his special permission. I was therefore detained at the English advanced post of guards, commanded by Lord Saltown. I dined with the officers of the advanced piquet, among whom I well remember Captain Fairfield, of the foot guards. These gentlemen informed me that the Duke of Wellington was at Gonnesse, with Sir C. Stuart, Pozzo di Borgo, and Talleyrand. I wrote a letter to the duke, which was forwarded by Lord Saltown. In my letter, I entered into a detail of the line of conduct recommended by Fouché, and contained in the foregoing memorandum. On the receipt of my dispatch, the duke immediately proceeded to St. Cloud, General Blucher’s head-quarters; there the capitulation of Paris was signed. The duke returned to Gonnesse and dispatched Lord March to bring me to him: I arrived very early on the morning of the 4th, and found Sir C. Stuart, Talleyrand, and Pozzo di Borgo; they assembled in council, and my presence was required by the duke. Talleyrand observed to me, that this was already settled, and, turning to the Duke of Wellington, requested him to read to me the capitulation that they had just concluded. On my urging the adoption of the line of conduct which Fouché recommended towards the Chambers, the Duke of Wellington proceeded to give me his sentiments in writing, which were as follow:—

‘“Je pense, que les Allies ayant déclaré le Gouvernment de Napoleon une Usurpation et nonlégitime, toute autorité qui émane de lui, doit être regardée comme nulle et d’aucun pouvoir.[^[34]] Ainsi, ce qui reste à faire aux Chambres et à la commission, est, de donner de suite leur démission et de déclarer qu’ils n’ont pris sur eux les responsibilités de gouvernement, que pour assurer la tranquilité publique, et l’intégrité du royaume de S. M. Louis XVIII.”

‘Talleyrand, Sir Charles Stuart, and Pozzo di Borgo, each took a copy of this document, and each, by way of memorandum, put their names and mine to the paper, by way of recording, as I suppose, the parties present at the discussion.

‘I forthwith mounted my horse and returned to Paris; Lord March was appointed by the duke to accompany me. On our arrival at the Barriere de la Villette, we found the French soldiery perfectly frantic, and vociferating “Vive l’Empereur!” “A bas les Anglais!” “A bas les Bourbons!” They were on the point of firing at the Belgian trumpeter who preceded us: it was with the greatest difficulty that some French hussars, under whose escort we had approached the barriers, could prevent the soldiers from firing at Lord March as he was riding off. They were also obliged to exert themselves strenuously in my defence, as many of the infantry pointed their muskets at me, vociferating “Vive l’Empereur!” “Vive Napoleon!” “We are betrayed!” “We have been sold!” “We will fight to the last drop of our blood!” “Down with the Bourbons!” “Let us kill this traitor!” “He has assisted in selling us!” “We have seen him pass before!” The hussars took me between them, some of the infantry also assisted in parrying off the blows aimed at me, and turning aside the muzzles of the muskets. Thus, after great peril, I was fortunate enough to gain the quarters of a general officer, with only a sabre cut on my left leg. The general dispersed the men, and gave me a strong escort to conduct me to the Thuilleries.

‘In consequence of my communicating the documents and assurances I had received from Talleyrand and the Duke of Wellington, the commission of government abdicated its powers that evening; but the Chambers still refused to comply; they continued their sittings, which they declared should be permanent, till the morning of the 6th, when the doors of the Chamber were closed, and guarded by a party of the national guards.

‘On this, above one hundred and fifty of the deputies proceeded to the house of M. Lanjuinais, their president, and there framed a solemn protest against the arbitrary and illegal violence which had been used towards them, in violation of the most solemn declarations.

‘I have now no doubt that some extraordinary scheme had been contrived to seduce Napoleon into the measure of abdicating the throne in favour of his son. His resources were at that moment immense. The regular army in Paris alone, amounted to more than 80,000 men, every individual of which was animated with the most enthusiastic ardour. The national guard, above 30,000 strong, displayed the firmest resolution to obey the directions of the constituted authorities; numerous volunteers of all classes had taken up arms in the defence of their country. In the departments, the spirit of opposition to the invaders was still greater, particularly in the north, west, and east: in fine, Napoleon, who could not possibly be ignorant of the state of his resources, would never, I am convinced, have sheathed his sword, and abdicated the crown even in favour of his son, had he not been most confidently assured of the validity of the measure, and its being approved and supported by the French senate and people, and by at least some part of the coalition.

‘What were the precise representations by which Napoleon was influenced to take this step, is perhaps known only to its contrivers, and their victim. Some future historian may probably unfold this mystery. As far as regards the share I had in the negociations between the provisional government, the allied armies, and Talleyrand, as minister of Louis XVIII., I feel it due to myself to declare, that I had no suspicion of any deception or intended breach of engagements. I was requested to open a communication between Fouché and the Duke of Wellington, for the avowed purpose of negociating an armistice, as a preliminary measure to the capitulation of Paris; and it was obvious that such a negociation might save the lives of thousands of my countrymen.’

The Play is over, now let us go to Supper.

John Bull, John Bull, John Bull, read the above account twice over, think well of it, and then say why you should not wear the yoke, which you have put round the neck of others, round your own. Ah! John, thou art not a metaphysician: thou dost lack a concatenation of ideas!—We are not proud of the share which as Englishmen we had in the proceedings recorded by Mr. Macirone: but we have one consolation for our national pride, Fouché and Talleyrand are Frenchmen. These two pettifogging miscreants seem to have made themselves perfect in the advice of the fool in Lear: ‘Let go thy hold, when a great wheel runs down hill, lest it should break thy neck with following it: but the great one that goes upwards, let it draw thee after. When a wise man gives thee better counsel, give me mine again: I would have none but knaves follow it.’ The great wheel, however, in this instance, kicked off the two knaves, that followed the fool’s advice. One of these famous persons now writes letters of apology to the Duke of Wellington, and the other to Lord Castlereagh. They are not so well off as Murat and Berthier, one of whom was legitimately shot through the head, and the other legitimately thrown out of a window, if we are to believe Mr. Macirone, that he might die in the good cause—‘a master-leaver, and a fugitive.’

WAT TYLER; A Dramatic Poem.
THE QUARTERLY REVIEW: Article, ‘On Parliamentary Reform.’

‘So was it when my life began,

So is it now I am a man:

So shall it be when I grow old and die.

The child’s the father of the man:

Our years flow on

Link’d each to each by natural piety.’—Wordsworth.

March 9, 1817.

According to this theory of personal continuity, the author of the Dramatic Poem, to be here noticed, is the father of Parliamentary Reform in the Quarterly Review. It is said to be a wise child that knows its own father: and we understand Mr. Southey (who is in this case reputed father and son) utterly disclaims the hypostatical union between the Quarterly Reviewer and the Dramatic Poet, and means to enter an injunction against the latter, as a bastard and impostor. Appearances are somewhat staggering against the legitimacy of the descent, yet we perceive a strong family-likeness remaining, in spite of the lapse of years and alteration of circumstances. We should not, indeed, be able to predict that the author of Wat Tyler would ever write the article on Parliamentary Reform; nor should we, either at first or second sight, perceive that the Quarterly Reviewer had ever written a poem like that which is before us: but if we were told that both performances were literally and bonâ fide by the same person, we should have little hesitation in saying to Mr. Southey, ‘Thou art the man.’ We know no other person in whom ‘fierce extremes’ meet with such mutual self-complacency: whose opinions change so much without any change in the author’s mind; who lives so entirely in the ‘present ignorant thought,’ without the smallest ‘discourse of reason looking before or after.’ Mr. Southey is a man incapable of reasoning connectedly on any subject. He has not strength of mind to see the whole of any question; he has not modesty to suspend his judgment till he has examined the grounds of it. He can comprehend but one idea at a time, and that is always an extreme one; because he will neither listen to, nor tolerate any thing that can disturb or moderate the petulance of his self-opinion. The woman that deliberates is lost. So it is with the effeminate soul of Mr. Southey. Any concession is fatal to his consistency; and he can only keep out of one absurdity by the tenaciousness with which he stickles for another. He calls to the aid of his disjointed opinions a proportionate quantity of spleen; and regularly makes up for the weakness of his own reasons, by charging others with bad motives. The terms knave and fool, wise and good, have undergone a total change in the last twenty years: the former he applies to all those who agreed with him formerly—the latter to all those who agree with him now. His public spirit was then a prude and a scold; and ‘his poor virtue,’ turned into a literary prostitute, is grown more abusive than ever. Wat Tyler and the Quarterly Review are an illustration of these remarks. The author of Wat Tyler was an Ultra-jacobin; the author of Parliamentary Reform is an Ultra-royalist; the one was a frantic demagogue; the other is a servile court-tool: the one maintained second-hand paradoxes; the other repeats second-hand common-places: the one vented those opinions which gratified the vanity of youth; the other adopts those prejudices which are most conducive to the convenience of age: the one saw nothing but the abuses of power; the other sees nothing but the horrors of resistance to those abuses: the one did not stop short of general anarchy; the other goes the whole length of despotism; the one vilified kings, priests, and nobles; the other vilifies the people: the one was for universal suffrage and perfect equality; the other is for seat-selling, and the increasing influence of the Crown: the one admired the preaching of John Ball; the other recommends the Suspension of the Habeas Corpus, and the putting down of the Examiner by the sword, the dagger, or the thumb-screw; for the pen, Mr. Southey tells us, is not sufficient. We wonder that in all this contempt which our prose-poet has felt at different times for different persons and things, he has never felt any dissatisfaction with himself, or distrust of his own infallibility. Our differing from others sometimes staggers our confidence in our own conclusions: if we had been chargeable with as many contradictions as Mr. Southey, we suppose we should have had the same senseless self-sufficiency. A changeling is your only oracle. Those who have undergone a total change of sentiment on important questions, ought certainly to learn modesty in themselves, and moderation towards others; on the contrary, they are generally the most violent in their own opinions, and the most intolerant towards others; the reason of which we have shewn elsewhere, to the satisfaction of the proprietor of the Old Times. Before we have done, we shall, perhaps, do the same thing to the satisfaction of the publisher of the Quarterly Review; for the Mr. Murrays and the Mr. Walters, the patrons of the band of gentlemen-pensioners and servile authors, have ‘a sort of squint’ in their understanding, and look less to the dirty sacrifices of their drudges, or the dirtier they are ready to make, than to their standing well with that great keeper, the public, for purity and innocence. The band of gentlemen-pensioners and servile authors do not know what to make of this, and hardly believe it: we shall in time convince them.

But to proceed to our extracts:—

Morceau I.

Wat Tyler. Hob—I have only six groats in the world,

And they must soon by law be taken from me.

Hob. Curse on these taxes—one succeeds another—

Our ministers—panders of a king’s will—

Drain all our wealth away—waste it in revels—

And lure or force away our boys, who should be

The props of our old age!—to fill their armies,

And feed the crows of France! Year follows year,

And still we madly prosecute the war;—

Draining our wealth—distressing our poor peasants—

Slaughtering our youths—and all to crown our Chiefs

With glory!—I detest the hell-sprung name.

Tyler. What matters me who wears the crown of France?

Whether a Richard or a Charles possess it?

They reap the glory—they enjoy the spoil—

We pay—we bleed! The sun would shine as cheerly,

The rains of heaven as seasonably fall,

Tho’ neither of these royal pests existed.

Hob. Nay—as for that, we poor men should fare better!

No legal robbers then should force away

The hard-earn’d wages of our honest toil.

The Parliament for ever cries more money,

The service of the State demands more money.

Just heaven! of what service is the State?

Tyler. Oh! ’tis of vast importance! Who should pay for

The luxuries and riots of the court?

Who should support the flaunting courtier’s pride,

Pay for their midnight revels, their rich garments,

Did not the State enforce?—Think ye, my friend,

That I—a humble blacksmith, here at Deptford,

Would part with these six groats—earn’d by hard toil,

All that I have! to massacre the Frenchmen;

Murder as enemies men I never saw,

Did not the State compel me!

(Tax-gatherers pass by.) There they go,

Privileg’d r——s!

Morceau II.

Piers. Fare not the birds well, as from spray to spray

Blithsome they bound—yet find their simple food

Scattered abundantly?

Tyler. No fancied boundaries of mine and thine

Restrain their wanderings: Nature gives enough

For all; but Man, with arrogant selfishness,

Proud of his heaps, hoards up superfluous stores

Robb’d from his weaker fellows, starves the poor,

Or gives to pity what he owes to justice!

Piers. So I have heard our good friend John Ball preach.

Alice. My father, wherefore was John Ball imprisoned?

Was he not charitable, good, and pious?

I have heard him say that all mankind are brethren,

And that like brethren they should love each other;—

Was not that doctrine pious?

Tyler. Rank sedition—

High treason, every syllable, my child!

The priests cry out on him for heresy;

The nobles all detest him as a rebel;

And this good man, this minister of Christ,

This man, the friend and brother of mankind,

Lingers in the dark dungeon!

Morceau III.

Tyler. Piers, I have not been idle,

I never ate the bread of indolence—

Could Alice be more thrifty than her mother?

Yet but with one child, and that one, how good

Thou knowest; I scarcely can provide the wants

Of nature: look at these wolves of the law,

They come to drain me of my hard-earn’d wages.

I have already paid the heavy tax

Laid on the wool that clothes me—on my leather—

On all the needful articles of life!

And now three groats (and I work’d hard to earn them)

The Parliament demands—and I must pay them,

Forsooth, for liberty to wear my head.

Enter Tax-gatherers.

Collector. Three groats a-head for all your family.

Piers. Why is this money gathered?—’tis a hard tax

On the poor labourer!—it can never be

That government should thus distress the people.

Go to the rich for money—honest labour

Ought to enjoy its fruits.

Col. The State wants money.

War is expensive—’tis a glorious war,

A war of honour, and must be supported.—

Three groats a-head.

Tyler. There, three for my own head,

Three for my wife’s!—What will the State tax next?

Col. You have a daughter.

Tyler. She is below the age—not yet fifteen.

Col. You would evade the tax.—

Tyler. Sir Officer,

I have paid you fairly what the law demands.

[Alice and her Mother enter the Shop. The Tax-gatherers go to her. One of them lays hold of her. She screams. Tyler goes in.]

Col. You say she’s under age.

[Alice screams again. Tyler knocks out the Tax-gatherer’s brains. His Companions fly.]

Piers. A just revenge.

Tyler. Most just indeed; but in the eye of the law

’Tis murder—and the murderer’s lot is mine.

Morceau IV.—Song.

‘When Adam delv’d and Eve span,

‘Who was then the gentleman?’

Wretched is the infant’s lot,

Born within the straw-roof’d cot!

Be he generous, wise, or brave,

He must only be a slave,

Long, long labour, little rest,

Still to toil to be oppress’d;

Drain’d by taxes of his store,

Punish’d next for being poor;

That is the poor wretch’s lot,

Born within the straw-roof’d cot.

While the peasant works—to sleep;

What the peasant sows—to reap;

On the couch of ease to lie,

Rioting in revelry:

Be he villain, be he fool,

Still to hold despotic rule,

Trampling on his slaves with scorn;

This is to be nobly born.

‘When Adam delv’d and Eve span,

‘Who was then the gentleman?’

Morceau V.

John Ball. Friends! Brethren! for ye are my brethren all;

Englishmen met in arms to advocate

The cause of freedom! hear me! pause awhile

In the career of vengeance; it is true

I am a priest; but, as these rags may speak,

Not one who riots in the poor man’s spoil,

Or trades with his religion. I am one

Who preach the law of Christ, and in my life

Would practise what he taught. The Son of God

Came not to you in power:—humble in mien,

Lowly in heart, the man of Nazareth

Preach’d mercy, justice, love: ‘Woe unto ye,

Ye that are rich:—if that ye would be saved,

Sell that ye have, and give unto the poor.’

So taught the Saviour: oh, my honest friends!

Have ye not felt the strong indignant throb

Of justice in your bosoms, to behold

The lordly baron feasting on your spoils?

Have you not in your hearts arraign’d the lot

That gave him on the couch of luxury

To pillow his head, and pass the festive day

In sportive feasts, and ease, and revelry?

Have you not often in your conscience ask’d

Why is the difference, wherefore should that man

No worthier than myself, thus lord it over me,

And bid me labour, and enjoy the fruits?

The God within your breasts has argued thus!

The voice of truth has murmur’d; came he not

As helpless to the world?—shines not the sun

With equal ray on both?—do ye not feel

The self-same winds of heaven as keenly parch ye?

Abundant is the earth—the Sire of all

Saw and pronounced that it was very good.

Look round: the vernal fields smile with new flowers,

The budding orchard perfumes the soft breeze,

And the green corn waves to the passing gale.

There is enough for all, but your proud baron

Stands up, and, arrogant of strength, exclaims,

‘I am a lord—by nature I am noble:

These fields are mine, for I was born to them,

I was born in the castle—you, poor wretches,

Whelp’d in the cottage, are by birth my slaves.’

Almighty God! such blasphemies are uttered!

Almighty God! such blasphemies believ’d!

Tom Miller. This is something like a sermon.

Jack Straw. Where’s the bishop

Would tell you truths like these?

Hob. There was never a bishop among all the apostles.

John Ball. My brethren!

Piers. Silence, the good priest speaks.

John Ball. My brethren, these are truths, and weighty ones

Ye are all equal; nature made ye so.

Equality is your birthright;—when I gaze

On the proud palace, and behold one man

In the blood-purpled robes of royalty,

Feasting at ease, and lording over millions;

Then turn me to the hut of poverty,

And see the wretched labourer, worn with toil,

Divide his scanty morsel with his infants;

I sicken, and, indignant at the sight,

‘Blush for the patience of humanity.’

Jack Straw. We will assert our rights.

Morceau VI.

Tyler. King of England,

Petitioning for pity is most weak,

The sovereign people ought to demand justice.

I killed your officer, for his lewd hand

Insulted a maid’s modesty; your subjects

I lead to rebel against the Lord’s anointed,

Because his ministers have made him odious:

His yoke is heavy, and his burden grievous.

Why do we carry on this fatal war,

To force upon the French a king they hate;

Tearing our young men from their peaceful homes;

Forcing his hard-earn’d fruits from the honest peasant;

Distressing us to desolate our neighbours?

Why is this ruinous poll-tax imposed,

But to support your court’s extravagance,

And your mad title to the crown of France?

Shall we sit tamely down beneath these evils,

Petitioning for pity?

King of England!

Why are we sold like cattle in your markets—

Deprived of every privilege of man?

Must we lie tamely at our tyrant’s feet,

And, like your spaniels, lick the hand that beats us?

You sit at ease in your gay palaces,

The costly banquet courts your appetite,

Sweet music sooths your slumbers; we the while,

Scarce by hard toil can earn a little food,

And sleep scarce shelter’d from the cold night wind:

While your wild projects wrest the little from us

Which might have cheered the wintry hour of age:

The parliament for ever asks more money:

We toil and sweat for money for your taxes;

Where is the benefit, what food reap we

From all the councils of your government?

Think you that we should quarrel with the French?

What boots to us your victories, your glory?

We pay, we fight, you profit at your ease.

Do you not claim the country as your own?

Do you not call the venison of the forest,

The birds of heaven your own?—prohibiting us,

Even tho’ in want of food, to seize the prey

Which nature offers?—King! is all this just?

Think you we do not feel the wrongs we suffer?

The hour of retribution is at hand,

And tyrants tremble—mark me, King of England.

Morceau VII.

Hob. ’Twas well order’d,

I place but little trust in courtly faith.

John Ball. We must remain embodied; else the king

Will plunge again in royal luxury;

And when the storm of danger is past over,

Forget his promises.

Hob. Aye, like an aguish sinner,

He’ll promise to repent when the fit’s on him;

When well recover’d, laugh at his own terrors.

Piers. Oh! I am griev’d that we must gain so little!

Why are not all these empty ranks abolish’d,

King, slave, and lord, ‘ennobl’d into MAN?’

Are we not equal all?—have you not told me,

Equality is the sacred right of man,

Inalienable, tho’ by force withheld?

John Ball. Even so; but Piers, my frail and fallible judgment

Knows hardly to decide if it be right,

Peaceably to return, content with little,

With this half restitution of our rights,

Or boldly to proceed thro’ blood and slaughter,

Till we should all be equal and all happy.

I chose the milder way:—perhaps I erred.

Piers. I fear me—by the mass, the unsteady people

Are flocking homewards! how the multitude

Diminishes!

Morceau the Last.

John Ball. Why, be it so. I can smile at your vengeance:

For I am arm’d with rectitude of soul.

The truth, which all my life I have divulg’d,

And am now doom’d in torment to expire for,

Shall still survive—the destin’d hour must come,

When it shall blaze with sun-surpassing splendor,

And the dark mists of prejudice and falsehood

Fade in its strong effulgence. Flattery’s incense

No more shall shadow round the gore-dyed throne;

That altar of oppression, fed with rites

More savage than the priests of Moloch taught,

Shall be consumed amid the fire of Justice:

The ray of truth shall emanate around,

And the whole world be lighted!

This will do.