LETTER XVIII.
Laboured investigations to establish connections between the history of the ancient and business of the modern world, and virulent disputes about trifles of antiquity, such as in what year this place was built, or that great man was born, when and where Julius Cæsar landed in England, whether he passed this road or that, what route Hannibal took over the Alps, and such like, are so essentially uninteresting, useless and unimportant, so unprofitable, and, one would think, so painful too, that it is wonderful how so many men of great learning have been unwise enough to employ their lives in the research.
It does not follow, however, that when information that tends to recall to our minds the great men of antiquity is presented to us, we should reject it. A man of classical taste and education feels a delight in those little memorials of what gave him pleasure in his youth. I know a Gentleman, who, being at Seville, in Spain, travelled to Cordova, for no other purpose but to see the town where Lucan and Seneca were born: and I dare say, that if you were at Cologne, you would be much pleased to see the Town-house, a great Gothic building, which contains a variety of ancient inscriptions; the first to commemorate the kindness of Julius Cæsar to the Ubii, who inhabited this place, and of whom you have found mention made by him in his Commentaries, and also his building two wooden bridges over the Rhine: a second commemorates Augustus sending a colony here. There is also a cross-bow of whalebone, twelve feet long, eight broad, and four inches thick, which they who speak of it conjecture to have belonged to the Emperor Maximin’s. There are also some Roman inscriptions in the arsenal, the import of which I now forget.
It is very extraordinary, but certainly a fact, that there are, about Cologne, families yet existing, who indulge the senseless ambition of pretending to be descended from the ancient Romans, and who actually produce their genealogies, carried down from the first time this city was made a colony of the Roman Empire. Of all kinds of vanity, this is perhaps the most extravagant: for, if antiquity merely be the object, all are equally high, since all must have originated from the same stock; and if it be the pride of belonging to a particular family who were distinguished for valour or virtue, a claim which often only serves to prove the degeneracy of the claimant, it could not apply in the case of a whole People: but this is among the frailties of humanity; and we are often so dazzled with the splendour of terrestrial glory, that we endeavour to be allied to it even by the most remote and ridiculous connections. I heard of a man, whose pride and boast, when drunk, was, that Dean Swift had once thrown his mother’s oysters (she was an oyster-wench) about the street, and then gave her half a crown as an atonement for the injury. On the strength of this affinity did he call the Dean nothing but Cousin Jonathan, though the Dean was dead before he was born!
But of all the stories I have ever heard as illustrative of this strange ambition, that which the late Lord Anson has left us is the most striking. When that great man was travelling in the East, he hired a vessel to visit the island of Tenedos: his pilot, a modern Greek, pointing to a bay as they sailed along, exclaimed in great triumph, “There, ay, there it was that our fleet lay.”——“What fleet?” interrogated Anson——“Why, our Grecian fleet, at the siege of Troy,” returned the pilot.
While those doughty descendants of the ancient Romans indulge the cheerless idea of their great and illustrious line of ancient ancestry, the Prince who rules them felicitates himself with the more substantial dignities and emoluments of his modern offices. As Elector and Archbishop of Cologne, he has dominion over a large, fruitful and opulent country: he is the most powerful of the ecclesiastical Electors: he has many Suffragan Princes, lay and spiritual, under him; and he is Archchancellor of the Holy Roman Empire. The revenues of his Archbishopric amount annually to one hundred and thirty thousand pounds sterling; and as Elector, he is possessed of several other great benefices. I presume, because he is a Prince, that he is a man of sense; and, I will venture to say, that, as such, he would not barter those good things for the power to demonstrate that Lucretia was his aunt, Brutus his grandfather, and the great Julius Cæsar himself his cousin-german.
Christ chose his disciples out of fishermen. The Chapter of Cologne is, perhaps, on the contrary, the very most Aristocratic body existing, being composed of forty Canons, who are Princes or Counts of the Empire——Of those, twenty-five choose the Archbishop, and may advance one of their own body to that great and wealthy dignity, if they please.
From Cologne I proceeded to the town of Bonne, which is said to take its name from the pleasantness of its situation. Here the Elector resides, and has a very fine palace. The country around is extremely fruitful and pleasant, and is blessed with most of the good things which render the Rich magnificent and happy, and remind the Poor of their inferiority and wretchedness——particularly wine, which is here remarkably excellent. It contains Churches, Priests, Convents, Cloisters, &c.; but I need not mention them——what place could exist without them?
I should not forget to tell you, that, at this place, Julius Cæsar built one of his bridges across the Rhine——works which would have handed down to posterity the name of a common man, for the magnitude of the structure and ingenuity of the contrivance, but are lost in the crowd of astonishing talents which distinguished that brightest of mortals. The greatest Biographer of Antiquity says of him, that he was as great a General as Hannibal, as great an Orator as Cicero; and as great a Politician as Augustus; but it might be added, that he was among the first Poets of his day——that he was of the first mechanical genius, and the finest gentleman, in Rome.