MEDON.
The anecdote is not new to me; but I was thinking, at the moment, of a pretty phrase in the letters of the Prince de Ligne, "la guerre—c'est un malheur—mais c'est le plus beau des malheurs."
ALDA.
O if there be any thing more terrific, more disgusting, than war and its consequences, it is that perversion of all human intellect—that depravation of all human feeling—that contempt or misconception of every Christian precept, which has permitted the great, and the good, and the tenderhearted, to admire war as a splendid game—a part of the poetry of life—and to defend it as a glorious evil, which the very nature and passions of man have ever rendered, and will ever render, necessary and inevitable. Perhaps the idea of human suffering—though when we think of it in detail it makes the blood curdle—is not so bad as the general loss to humanity, the interruption to the progress of thought in the destruction of the works of wisdom or genius. Listen to this magnificent sentence out of the volume now lying open before me—"Who kills a man, kills a reasonable creature—God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself. Many a man lives a burthen to the earth, but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. It is true, no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps there is no great loss: and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse; therefore we should be wary how we spill the seasoned life of man preserved and stored up in books."
MEDON.
"Methinks we do know the fine Roman hand." Milton, is it not?
ALDA.
Yes; and after this, think of Milton's Areopagitica, or his Paradise Lost, under the hoofs of Tilly's dragoon horses, or feeding the fishes in the Baltic! It might have happened had he written in Germany instead of England.
MEDON.
Do you forget that the cause of the thirty years war was a woman?