But the name of Mr. Isaac Gruter was not less comprehensive, and could be made to represent the whole triga in an emergency, as well as another; ['I take so great pleasure in being judged and known that it is almost indifferent to me in which of the two forms I am so'] though that does not hinder him from inviting Dr. Eawley to cast in his symbol, which was 'so considerable an appendage.' For though the very smallest circle sometimes represents it, it was none other than the symbol that gave name to the theatre in which the illustrated works of this school were first exhibited; the theatre which hung out for its sign on the outer wall, 'Hercules and his load too.' At a time when 'conceits' and 'devices in letters,' when anagrams and monograms, and charades, and all kinds of 'racking of orthography' were so much in use, not as curiosities merely, but to avoid another kind of 'racking,' a cipher referred to in this philosophy as the 'wheel cipher,' which required the letters of the alphabet to be written in a circle to serve as a key to the reading, supplies a clue to some of these symbols. The first three letters of the alphabet representing the whole in the circle, formed a character or symbol which was often made to stand as a 'token' for a proper name, easily spelt in that way, when phonography and anagrams were in such lively and constant use,—while it made, at the same time, a symbolical representation of the radical doctrine of the new school in philosophy,—a school then so new, that its 'Doctors' were compelled to 'pray in the aid of simile,' even in affixing their names to their own works, in some cases. And that same letter which was capable of representing in this secret language either the microcosm, or 'the larger whole,' as the case required (either with, or without the eye or I in it, sending rays to the circumference) sufficed also to spell the name of the Grand Master of this lodge,—'who also was a man, take him for all in all,'—the man who took two hemispheres for 'his symbol.' That was the so considerable appendage which his friend alludes to,—though 'the natural gaiety of disposition,' of which we have so much experience in other places, and which the gravity of these pursuits happily does not cloud, suggests a glance in passing at another signification, which we find alluded to also in another place in Mrs. Quickly's 'Latin.' Mere frivolities as these conceits and private and retired arts seem now, the Author of the Advancement of Learning tells us, that to those who have spent their labours and studies in them, they seem great matters, referring particularly to that cipher in which it is possible to write omnia per omnia, and stopping to fasten the key of it to his 'index' of 'the principal and supreme sciences,'—those sciences 'which being committed to faithful privacy, wait the time when they may safely see the light, and not be stifled in their birth.'
New constructions, according to true definitions, was the plan,—this triga was the initiative.
CHAPTER XII.
THE IGNORANT ELECTION REVOKED.—A WRESTLING INSTANCE.
'For as they were men of the best composition in the state of Rome, which, either being consuls, inclined to the people' ['If he would but incline to the people, there never was a worthier man'], 'or being tribunes, inclined to the senate, so, in the matter which we handle now [doctrine of Cure], they be the best physicians which, being learned, incline to the traditions of experience; or, being empirics, incline to the methods of learning.' Advancement of Learning.
But while the Man of Science was yet planning these vast scientific changes—vast, but noiseless and beautiful as the movements of God in nature—there was another kind of revolution brewing. All that time there was a cloud on his political horizon—'a huge one, a black one'—slowly and steadfastly accumulating, and rolling up from it, which he had always an eye on. He knew there was that in it which no scientific apparatus that could be put in operation then, on so short a notice, and when science was so feebly aided, would be able to divert or conduct entirely. He knew that so fearful a war-cloud would have to burst, and get overblown, before any chance for those peace operations, those operations of a solid and lasting peace, which he was bent on, could be had—before any space on the earth could be found broad enough for his Novum Organum to get to work on, before the central levers of it could begin to stir.
That revolution which 'was singing in the wind' then to his ear, was one which would have to come first in the chronological order; but it was easy enough to see that it was not going to be such a one, in all respects, as a man of his turn of genius would care to be out in with his works.
He knew well enough what there was in it. He had not been so long in such sharp daily collision with the elements of it—he had not been so long trying conclusions with them under such delicate conditions, conditions requiring so nice an observation—without arriving at some degree of assurance in regard to their main properties, without attaining, indeed, to what he calls knowledge on that subject—knowledge as distinguished from opinion—so as to be able to predict 'with a near aim' the results of the possible combinations. The conclusion of this observation was, that the revolutionary movements then at hand were not, on the whole, likely to be conducted throughout on rigidly scientific principles.
The spectacle of a people violently 'revoking their ignorant election,' and empirically seeking to better their state under such leaders as such a movement was likely to throw up, and that, too, when the old military government was still so strong in moral forces, so sure of a faction in the state—of a faction of the best, which would cleave the state to the centre, which would resist with the zealot's fire unto blood and desperation the unholy innovation—that would stand on the last plank of the wrecked order, and wade through seas of slaughter to restore it; the prospect of untried political innovation, under such circumstances, did not present itself to this Poet's imagination in a form so absolutely alluring, as it might have done to a philosopher of a less rigidly inductive, turn of mind.
His canvas, with its magic draught of the coming event, includes already some contingencies which the programme of the theoretical speculator in revolutions would have been far enough from including then, when such movements were yet untried in modern history, and the philosopher had to go back to mythical Rome to borrow an historical frame of one that would contain his piece. The conviction that the crash was, perhaps, inevitable, that the overthrow of the existing usurpation, and the restoration of the English subject to his rights,—a movement then already determined on,—would perhaps involve these so tragic consequences—the conviction that the revolution was at hand, was the conviction with which he made his arrangements for the future.