This is a most extraordinary and interesting work: extraordinary, not only from the wild strength of its fancy, and the extravagance of its conceptions, but from the bright light of scientific truth which is constantly shining through its metaphorical tissue, and irradiating its most shadowy imaginings. It may be compared to the tree of the lower regions in the Æneid, to every leaf of which was attached a dream; and yet, however wildly his fancy may dream, his philosophy never sleeps; and in his exit from the land of phantoms, the author can in no instance be accused of having mistaken the gate of ivory for that of horn. To the biographer, the work is of the highest interest and value, by confirming, in a remarkable manner, the opinion so frequently expressed in the course of these memoirs, with respect to the diversified talents of Sir Humphry Davy; and above all, by elucidating that rare combination of imagination with judgment, which imparted to his genius its more striking peculiarities.
The work consists of six Dialogues:—1. The Vision; 2. Discussions connected with the Vision in the Colosæum; 3. The Unknown; 4. The Proteus, or Immortality; 5. The Chemical Philosopher; and 6. Pola, or Time.
The interlocutors of the first dialogue are two intellectual Englishmen, one of whom the author calls Ambrosio; a man of highly cultivated taste, great classical erudition, and minute historical knowledge: a Catholic in religion, but so liberal in his sentiments, that in another age he might have been secretary to Ganganelli. The other friend, whom he calls Onuphrio, was a man of a very different character: belonging to the English aristocracy, he had some of the prejudices usually attached to birth and rank; but his manners were gentle, his temper good, and his disposition amiable. Having been partly educated at a northern university in Britain, he had adopted views in religion which went even beyond toleration, and which might be regarded as entering the verge of scepticism. For a patrician, he was very liberal in his political views. His imagination was poetical and discursive, his taste good, and his tact extremely fine,—so exquisite, indeed, that it sometimes approached to morbid sensibility, and disgusted him with slight defects, and made him keenly sensible of small perfections to which common minds have been indifferent.
The author, with these his two friends, makes an excursion to the Colosæum, and the conversation, which a view of those magnificent ruins produced, together with the account of a dream, or vision, which occurred to him while left alone amidst these mouldering monuments, forms the subject-matter of the first dialogue. It is impossible for any person of the least imagination to contemplate this decay of former magnificence without strong emotion; but the direction and tone of such feeling will be necessarily modified by the qualities of the mind in which it is excited; and the author has therefore very properly assigned to each of the dramatis personæ, such opinions as might best correspond with his character and temperament.
They are all represented as being struck with the transiency of human monuments; but Ambrosio views with triumph the sanctifying influence of a few crosses planted around the ruins, in arresting the farther decay of the pile. "Without the influence of Christianity," he exclaims, "these majestic ruins would have been dispersed or levelled to the dust. Plundered of their lead and iron by the barbarians, Goths and Vandals, and robbed even of their stones by Roman princes—the Barberini, they owe what remains of their relics to the sanctifying influence of that faith which has preserved for the world all that was worth preserving, not merely arts and literature, but likewise that which constitutes the progressive nature of intellect, and the institutions which afford to us happiness in this world, and hopes of a blessed immortality in the next." And he continues,—"What a contrast the present application of this building, connected with holy feelings and exalted hopes, is to that of the ancient one, when it was used for exhibiting to the Roman people the destruction of men by wild beasts, or of men more savage than wild beasts by each other, to gratify a horrible appetite for cruelty, founded upon a still more detestable lust, that of universal domination! And who would have supposed, in the time of Titus, that a faith, despised in its insignificant origin, and persecuted from the supposed obscurity of its founder and its principles, should have reared a dome to the memory of one of its humblest teachers, more glorious than was ever framed for Jupiter or Apollo in the ancient world, and have preserved even the ruins of the temples of the Pagan deities, and have burst forth in splendour and majesty, consecrating truth amidst the shrines of error, employing the idols of the Roman superstition for the most holy purposes, and rising a bright and constant light amidst the dark and starless night which followed the destruction of the Roman empire!"
It was not to be expected that Onuphrio, whose views are represented as verging upon scepticism, should have tacitly coincided in these opinions of Ambrosio. He admits, indeed, that some little of the perfect state in which these ruins exist may have been owing to the causes just described; but these causes, he maintains, have only lately begun to operate, and the mischief was done before Christianity was established at Rome. "Feeling differently on these subjects," says he, "I admire this venerable ruin rather as the record of the destruction of the power of the greatest people that ever existed, than as a proof of the triumph of Christianity; and I am carried forward, in melancholy anticipation, to the period when even the magnificent dome of St. Peter's will be in a similar state to that in which the Colosæum now is, and when its ruins may be preserved by the sanctifying influence of some new and unknown faith; when perhaps the statue of Jupiter, which at present receives the kiss of the devotee, as the image of St. Peter, may be employed for another holy use, as the personification of a future saint or divinity; and when the monuments of the Papal magnificence shall be mixed with the same dust as that which now covers the tombs of the Cæsars.
"Such, I am sorry to say, is the general history of all the works and institutions belonging to humanity. They rise, flourish, and then decay and fall; and the period of their decline is generally proportional to that of their elevation. In ancient Thebes or Memphis, the peculiar genius of the people has left us monuments from which we can judge of their arts, though we cannot understand the nature of their superstitions. Of Babylon and of Troy, the remains are almost extinct; and what we know of those famous cities is almost entirely derived from literary records. Ancient Greece and Rome we view in the few remains of their monuments; and the time will arrive when modern Rome shall be what ancient Rome now is; and ancient Rome and Athens will be what Tyre or Carthage now are, known only by coloured dust in the desert, or coloured sand, containing the fragments of bricks, or glass, washed up by the wave of a stormy sea."
For this desponding view of passing events, Onuphrio finds consolation in the evidences of revealed religion. In the origin, progress, elevation, decline, and fall of the empires of antiquity, he sees proofs that they were intended for a definite end in the scheme of human redemption; and he finds prophecies which have been amply verified. He regards the foundation or the ruin of a kingdom, which appears in civil history so great an event, as comparatively of small moment in the history of man and in his religious institutions. He considers the establishment of the worship of one God amongst a despised and contemned people, as the most important circumstance in the history of the early world. He regards the Christian dispensation as naturally arising out of the Jewish, and the doctrines of the Pagan nations all preparatory to the triumph and final establishment of a creed fitted for the most enlightened state of the human mind, and equally adapted to every climate and every people."
We cannot but regard these passages with great interest, as indicating the train of thought which must have occupied the mind of their author, and as proving that, in his latter days, he not only studied the doctrines of Christianity, but derived the greatest consolation from its tenets.
After some farther conversation, Onuphrio and Ambrosio leave their friend the author to pursue his meditations amidst the solitude of the ruins.