These names are only selected because they afford well-known and easily verifiable instances, requiring neither pictorial nor biographical illustration. Energy may be equally conspicuous in any other department of life, and display itself as fully in the civilian as in the warrior. Two of the individuals adduced are striking instances of this:—Cato the Censor, and the Earl of Chatham. They were men of remarkable parallelism of character, and, though differing in other facial features, their Noses were very similar.
CATO THE CENSOR.
(From a gem in the Florentine Museum.)
The events of their early life—those events which always bear most clearly the impress of the mind, because actuated by choice, and not by present or future consequences—were almost identical. They both entered the army in youth, and both quitted it for the Senate. Here each displayed those powers of eloquence which raised them to the highest eminence, and will transmit their names to the latest posterity. Its peculiar feature was that energetic, powerful, and determined vehemence of language, which takes the mind prisoner, and carries the judgment with it by storm. It was irresistible. Before it all minds of less power, though of greater intellect and activity, recoiled. The orations of Cato are unhappily lost. But Cicero, a master of eloquence, and well enabled to compare them with similar compositions, passes upon them the highest eulogiums. The eloquence of Cato has been compared, for its force and energy, to the eloquence of that Demosthenes before whom Philip of Macedon quailed, and whose tremendous orations have given the name of Philippics to all sarcastic and vehement invectives. Of Chatham’s eloquence, it has been said by Wilkes: “Nothing could withstand the force of that contagion. The fluent Murray has faltered, and even Fox shrunk back appalled from an adversary ‘fraught with fire unquenchable,’ if I may borrow the expression of our great Milton. He had not the correctness of language so striking in the great Roman orator; but he had the verba ardentia, the bold, glowing words.”
Cato led victorious armies into the field, and proved himself an able general; for in Rome the functions of the general and the statesman were united in the person of the Consul.
It became not, however, the Secretary of State to lead armies in person; but while Chatham administered the affairs of this country, “victory crowned the British arms wherever they appeared, both on sea and land; and the four years of the second administration of Mr. Pitt are four of the most glorious years in the history of the eighteenth century.”[[10]]
In their retirement they were alike; for neither regarded with complacency the pursuits of literature: they required some physical activity in their very idleness, and gardening was the favourite occupation of both. Cato displayed his disregard and even hatred for literary refinement by advising the Senate to dismiss the Grecian Ambassador Carneades promptly, lest his eloquence should corrupt the Roman youth with a love for Greek learning and philosophy.
He cultivated his farm and garden with great skill, and wrote a work on the subject, entitled “De Rustica.” Chatham was a landscape-gardener of no mean pretensions. He assisted Lord Lyttelton in laying out the celebrated park and grounds at Hagley; and Bishop Warburton eulogizes his skill in gardening as inimitable, and far superior to that of the professor Capability Brown. Not even obedience to the king’s mandate could draw Chatham from his country retirement at Hayes.
Neither ever thought he had done serving his country while life lasted, even when bodily health and strength were gone. At eighty-four years of age Cato went on an embassy to Carthage; and Chatham, worn out by the gout and wrapped in flannels, never neglected to take his seat in the House and electrify it with his eloquence when any important question affecting the interests of the country or the liberty of the subject arose.
Notwithstanding their many virtues, they were both coarse-minded, violent men; proud, self-willed, and regardless of the common courtesies, and even decencies, of society. Both were perhaps indebted for some of their fame to the successful practice of the vice which has been happily designated as the deference paid to virtue.