My Lord Lauderdale, who thus far had been very attentive, at this showed some impatience.
Har.—“I say Aristotle says so; I have not said so much. And under what prince was it? Was it not under Alexander, the greatest prince in the world? Did Alexander hang up Aristotle, did he molest him?” And he proceeds with Livy, who wrote under Cæsar, and the commonwealth-man, Machiavel, under the Medici, unmolested.
“I wrote under an usurper, Oliver. He having started up into the throne, his officers kept a murmuring for a commonwealth. He told them that he knew not what they meant, but let any one show him that there was any such thing as a commonwealth, they should see that he sought not himself; the Lord knew he only sought to make good the cause. Upon this some sober men thought that if any in England could show what a commonwealth was, it was myself. I wrote, and after I had written, Oliver never answered his officers as he had done before; therefore I wrote not against the king’s government; and if the law could have punished me, Oliver had done it; therefore my writing was not obnoxious to the law. After Oliver, the parliament said they were a commonwealth; I said they were not; and proved it, insomuch that the parliament accounted me a cavalier, and one that had no other design in my writing than to bring in the king; and now the king, first of any man, makes me a Roundhead!”
Certainly no theoretical politician has ever more lucidly set before us the cruel dilemmas of speculative science.
The story of Harrington now becomes calamitous. In vain his sisters petitioned that the prisoner, for his justification, should be brought to trial,—no one dared to present the petition to parliament. He was suddenly carried off to St. Nicholas Island, near Plymouth, and by favour afterwards was lodged in Plymouth Castle, where the governor treated the state-prisoner with the kindness he had long wanted. His health gradually gave way; his mind fell into disorder; his high spirit and his heated brain could not brook this tormenting durance; his intellect was at times clouded by some singular delusions; and his family imagined that it was intended that he should never more write “Oceanas.” The physician of the castle had prescribed constant doses of guaiacum taken in coffee. At length, other physicians were despatched by his family; they found an emaciated patient deprived of sleep, and under their hands testified that the copious use of this deleterious beverage, with such drying drugs, was sufficient to occasion hypochondriasm, and even frenzy, in any one who had not even a predisposition. The surly physician of the state-prison insisted that Harrington counterfeited madness.
His delusions never left him, yet otherwise his faculties remained unaltered. He had strange fancies about the operations of the animal spirits, good and evil, and often alarmed his friends by his vivacious descriptions of these invisible agencies. “Nature,” he said, “which works under a veil, is the heart of God.” But how are we to account, in a mind otherwise sane, for his notion that his thoughts transpired from him, and took the shapes of flies or bees? Aubrey has given a gossiper’s account of this ludicrous hypochondriasm. Harrington had a summer-house revolving on a pivot, which he turned at will to face the sun; there sat the great author of “Oceana,” whisking a fox’s brush to disperse this annoyance of his transpired thoughts in the flies or bees, which, whenever they issued from crevices, he would appeal to those present, whether it was not evident to them that they had emerged from his brain? An eminent physician had flattered himself that he would be able to out-reason this delusion, by that force of argument and positive demonstration to which his illustrious patient only would attend; but the physician discovered that no argument could avail with the most invincible disputant in Europe. The sanity of the man only strengthened his insanity. Besides, our philosopher believed that he had discovered a new system of physiology, in what he called “The Mechanics of Nature.” Harrington declared that his fate was that of Democritus, who, having made a great discovery in anatomy, was deemed mad by his associates, till Hippocrates appeared, and attested the glorious truth, confounding the laughers for ever! He now resolved to prove against his doctors, that his notions were not, as they alleged, hypochondriacal whims, or fanciful delusions. Among his manuscripts was found this promised treatise, thus opening—“Having been for nine months, some say, in a disease, I in a cure, I have been the wonder of physicians, and they mine!” It is much to be regretted that the first part of this singular design has only reached us, wherein he has laid down his axioms, many of which are indisputable, coherent, and philosophical, however chimerical might have been their application to his particular notions. The narrative of his own disorder, which was to form the second part, would have been a great psychological curiosity, for the philosopher was there to have told us, how “he had felt and saw Nature; that is, how she came first into his senses, and by the senses into the understanding,” and “to speak to men that have had the same sensations as himself.” The logical deliriums of Harrington, it is not impossible, might have thrown a beam of light on “The Human Nature” of Hobbes, and “The Understanding” of Locke.
It is for the medical character to develop the mysteries of this condition of man; but this moral phenomenon of the partial delusions of the noblest intellect remains an enigma they have not yet solved. Harrington never recovered his physical energy, while his “Understanding” betrayed no symptoms of any decay in the exercise of his vigorous faculties.
There is one dark cloud which dusks the lustre of the name of Harrington. Opening the volume of his works, we are startled by an elaborate treatise on “The Grounds and Reasons of Monarchy.” It is not merely one of the most eloquent invectives against monarchical institutions, but it overflows with the most withering defamations, such as were prevalent at that distempered season, when the popular writers accumulated horrors on the memories of their late sovereigns, to metamorphose their monarchs into monsters. In this terrible state-libel, all kings are anathematised: James the First was the murderer of his son; Charles the First was a parricide. Of that “resolute tyrant Charles,” we have an allusion to “his actions of the day; his actions of the night;”—from which we must infer that they were equally criminal.
The reader, already acquainted with the intimate intercourse of our author with Charles the First, and with all his permanent emotions, which probably induced his mental disorder, must start at the disparity of the writing with the writer. A thorough-paced partisan has here acted on the base principle of reviling the individual, whom he privately acknowledged to be wholly of an opposite character. It would be a solecism in human nature, had Harrington sent forth an historical calumny, which only to have read must have inflicted a deep pang in his heart. He was a philosopher, who neither flattered nor vilified the prince nor the people; their common calamities he ascribes to inevitable causes, which had been long working those changes independent of either. In the reigns of James and Charles, according to his favourite principle, “The English Balance,” in favour of “popularity,” was “running like a bowl down hill.” He does justice to the sagacity of the indolent James, who, he tells us, “not seldom prophesied sad things to his successors;” and of Charles the First, on succeeding to his father, Harrington has expressed himself with the utmost political wisdom and felicity of illustration. “There remained nothing to the destruction of a monarchy, retaining but the name, more than a prince who, by contending, should make the people to feel those advantages which they could not see. And this happened to the next king (Charles), who, too secure in that undoubted right whereby he was advanced to the throne which had no foundation, dared to put this to an unseasonable trial, on whom, therefore, fell the tower in Silo. Nor may we think they on whom this tower fell were sinners above all men; but that we, unless we repent and look better to the true foundations, must likewise perish.”[4] All that our philosopher had to deliver to the world on the many contested points of that unhappy reign, was the illustration of his principle, and not the infamy of vulgar calumny. With the philosophic Harrington, Charles the First was but “a doomed man;” not more a sinner, because the tower of Silo had fallen upon his head, than those who stood without. This was true philosophy, the other was faction.