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                   _THE WORKS OF HENRY HALLAM._

                           INTRODUCTION

                              TO THE

                       LITERATURE OF EUROPE

                   IN THE FIFTEENTH, SIXTEENTH,

                                AND

                       SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES.

                                 BY

                      HENRY HALLAM, F.R.A.S.,

  CORRESPONDING MEMBER OF THE ACADEMY OF MORAL AND POLITICAL SCIENCES
                     IN THE FRENCH INSTITUTE.

                           _VOLUME II._

                         WARD, LOCK & CO.,

           LONDON: WARWICK HOUSE, SALISBURY SQUARE, E.C.
                      NEW YORK: BOND STREET.




                              CONTENTS.




                             CHAPTER I.

  ON THE GENERAL STATE OF LITERATURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES TO THE END
                     OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.

                                                                   Page
  Retrospect of Learning in Middle Ages Necessary                     1
  Loss of learning in Fall of Roman Empire                            1
  Boethius--his Consolation of Philosophy                             1
  Rapid Decline of Learning in Sixth Century                          2
  A Portion remains in the Church                                     2
  Prejudices of the Clergy against Profane Learning                   2
  Their Uselessness in preserving it                                  3
  First Appearances of reviving Learning in Ireland and England       3
  Few Schools before the Age of Charlemagne                           3
  Beneficial Effects of those Established by him                      4
  The Tenth Century more progressive than usually supposed            4
  Want of Genius in the Dark Ages                                     5
  Prevalence of bad Taste                                             5
  Deficiency of poetical Talent                                       5
  Imperfect State of Language may account for this                    6
  Improvement at beginning of Twelfth Century                         6
  Leading Circumstances in Progress of Learning                       6
  Origin of the University of Paris                                   6
  Modes of treating the Science of Theology                           6
  Scholastic Philosophy--its Origin                                   7
  Roscelin                                                            7
  Progress of Scholasticism; Increase of University of Paris          8
  Universities founded                                                8
  Oxford                                                              8
  Collegiate Foundations not derived from the Saracens                9
  Scholastic Philosophy promoted by Mendicant Friars                  9
  Character of this Philosophy                                       10
  It prevails least in Italy                                         10
  Literature in Modern Languages                                     10
  Origin of the French, Spanish, and Italian Languages               10
  Corruption of colloquial Latin in the Lower Empire                 11
  Continuance of Latin in Seventh Century                            12
  It is changed to a new Language in Eighth and Ninth                12
  Early Specimens of French                                          13
  Poem on Boethius                                                   13
  Provençal Grammar                                                  14
  Latin retained in use longer in Italy                              14
  French of Eleventh Century                                         14
  Metres of Modern Languages                                         15
  Origin of Rhyme in Latin                                           16
  Provençal and French Poetry                                        16
  Metrical Romances--Havelok the Dane                                18
  Diffusion of French Language                                       19
  German Poetry of Swabian Period                                    19
  Decline of German Poetry                                           20
  Poetry of France and Spain                                         21
  Early Italian Language                                             22
  Dante and Petrarch                                                 22
  Change of Anglo-Saxon to English                                   22
  Layamon                                                            23
  Progress of English Language                                       23
  English of the Fourteenth Century--Chaucer, Gower                  24
  General Disuse of French in England                                24
  State of European Languages about 1400                             25
  Ignorance of Reading and Writing in darker Ages                    25
  Reasons for supposing this to have diminished after 1100           26
  Increased Knowledge of Writing in Fourteenth Century               27
  Average State of Knowledge in England                              27
  Invention of Paper                                                 28
  Linen Paper when first used                                        28
  Cotton Paper                                                       28
  Linen Paper as old as 1100                                         28
  Known to Peter of Clugni                                           29
  And in Twelfth and Thirteenth Century                              29
  Paper of mixed Materials                                           29
  Invention of Paper placed by some too low                          29
  Not at first very important                                        30
  Importance of Legal Studies                                        30
  Roman Laws never wholly unknown                                    31
  Irnerius--his first Successors                                     31
  Their Glosses                                                      31
  Abridgements of Law--Accursius’s Corpus Glossatum                  31
  Character of early Jurists                                         32
  Decline of Jurists after Accursius                                 32
  Respect paid to him at Bologna                                     33
  Scholastic Jurists--Bartolus                                       33
  Inferiority of Jurists in Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries       34
  Classical Literature and Taste in dark Ages                        34
  Improvement in Tenth and Eleventh Centuries                        34
  Lanfranc and his Schools                                           35
  Italy--Vocabulary of Papias                                        36
  Influence of Italy upon Europe                                     36
  Increased copying of Manuscripts                                   36
  John of Salisbury                                                  36
  Improvement of Classical Taste in Twelfth Century                  37
  Influence of increased Number of Clergy                            38
  Decline of Classical Literature in Thirteenth Century              38
  Relapse into Barbarism                                             38
  No Improvement in Fourteenth Century--Richard of Bury              39
  Library formed by Charles V. at Paris                              39
  Some Improvement in Italy during Thirteenth Century                40
  Catholicon of Balbi                                                40
  Imperfection of early Dictionaries                                 40
  Restoration of Letters due to Petrarch                             40
  Character of his Style                                             41
  His Latin Poetry                                                   41
  John of Ravenna                                                    41
  Gasparin of Barziza                                                42


                             CHAPTER II.

           ON THE LITERATURE OF EUROPE FROM 1400 TO 1440.

  Zeal for Classical Literature in Italy                             42
  Poggio Bracciolini                                                 42
  Latin Style of that Age indifferent                                43
  Gasparin of Barziza                                                43
  Merits of his Style                                                43
  Victorin of Feltre                                                 44
  Leonard Aretin                                                     44
  Revival of Greek Language in Italy                                 44
  Early Greek Scholars of Europe                                     44
  Under Charlemagne and his Successors                               45
  In the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries                                45
  In the Twelfth                                                     46
  In the Thirteenth                                                  46
  Little Appearance of it in the Fourteenth Century                  47
  Some Traces of Greek in Italy                                      47
  Corruption of Greek Language itself                                47
  Character of Byzantine Literature                                  48
  Petrarch and Boccace learn Greek                                   48
  Few acquainted with the Language in their Time                     49
  It is taught by Chrysoloras about 1395                             49
  His Disciples                                                      49
  Translations from Greek into Latin                                 50
  Public Encouragement delayed                                       51
  But fully accorded before 1440                                     51
  Emigration of learned Greeks to Italy                              52
  Causes of Enthusiasm for Antiquity in Italy                        52
  Advanced State of Society                                          52
  Exclusive Study of Antiquity                                       53
  Classical Learning in France low                                   53
  Much more so in England                                            53
  Library of Duke of Gloucester                                      54
  Gerard Groot’s College at Deventer                                 54
  Physical Sciences in Middle Ages                                   55
  Arabian Numerals and Method                                        55
  Proofs of them in Thirteenth Century                               56
  Mathematical Treatises                                             56
  Roger Bacon                                                        57
  His Resemblance to Lord Bacon                                      57
  English Mathematicians of Fourteenth Century                       57
  Astronomy                                                          58
  Alchemy                                                            58
  Medicine                                                           58
  Anatomy                                                            58
  Encyclopædic Works of Middle Ages                                  58
  Vincent of Beauvais                                                59
  Berchorius                                                         59
  Spanish Ballads                                                    59
  Metres of Spanish Poetry                                           60
  Consonant and assonant Rhymes                                      60
  Nature of the Glosa                                                61
  The Cancionero General                                             61
  Bouterwek’s Character of Spanish Songs                             61
  John II.                                                           62
  Poets of his Court                                                 62
  Charles, Duke of Orleans                                           62
  English Poetry                                                     62
  Lydgate                                                            63
  James I. of Scotland                                               63
  Restoration of Classical Learning due to Italy                     63
  Character of Classical Poetry lost in Middle Ages                  64
  New School of Criticism in Modern Languages                        64
  Effect of Chivalry on Poetry                                       64
  Effect of Gallantry towards Women                                  64
  Its probable Origin                                                64
  It is shown in old Teutonic Poetry;
    but appears in the Stories of Arthur                             65
  Romances of Chivalry of two Kinds                                  65
  Effect of Difference of Religion upon Poetry                       66
  General Tone of Romance                                            66
  Popular Moral Fictions                                             66
  Exclusion of Politics from Literature                              67
  Religious Opinions                                                 67
  Attacks on the Church                                              67
  Three Lines of Religious Opinions in Fifteenth Century             67
  Treatise de Imitatione Christi                                     68
  Scepticism--Defences of Christianity                               69
  Raimond de Sebonde                                                 69
  His Views misunderstood                                            69
  His real Object                                                    70
  Nature of his Arguments                                            70


                            CHAPTER III.

         ON THE LITERATURE OF EUROPE FROM 1440 TO THE CLOSE
                      OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.

  The year 1440 not chosen as an Epoch                               71
  Continual Progress of Learning                                     71
  Nicolas V.                                                         71
  Justice due to his Character                                       72
  Poggio on the Ruins of Rome                                        72
  Account of the East, by Conti                                      72
  Laurentius Valla                                                   72
  His Attack on the Court of Rome                                    72
  His Treatise on the Latin Language                                 73
  Its Defects                                                        73
  Heeren’s Praise of it                                              73
  Valla’s Annotations on the New Testament                           73
  Fresh Arrival of Greeks in Italy                                   74
  Platonists and Aristotelians                                       74
  Their Controversy                                                  74
  Marsilius Ficinus                                                  75
  Invention of Printing                                              75
  Block Books                                                        75
  Gutenberg and Costar’s Claims                                      75
  Progress of the Invention                                          76
  First printed Bible                                                76
  Beauty of the Book                                                 77
  Early printed Sheets                                               77
  Psalter of 1547--Other early Books                                 77
  Bible of Pfister                                                   77
  Greek first taught at Paris                                        78
  Leave unwillingly granted                                          78
  Purbach--his Mathematical Discoveries                              78
  Other Mathematicians                                               78
  Progress of Printing in Germany                                    79
  Introduced into France                                             79
  Caxton’s first Works                                               79
  Printing exercised in Italy                                        79
  Lorenzo de’ Medici                                                 80
  Italian Poetry of Fifteenth Century                                80
  Italian Prose of same Age                                          80
  Giostra of Politian                                                80
  Paul II. persecutes the Learned                                    81
  Mathias Corvinus                                                   81
  His Library                                                        81
  Slight Signs of Literature in England                              81
  Paston Letters                                                     82
  Low Condition of Public Libraries                                  83
  Rowley                                                             83
  Clotilde de Surville                                               83
  Number of Books printed in Italy                                   83
  First Greek printed                                                84
  Study of Antiquities                                               84
  Works on that Subject                                              84
  Publications in Germany                                            85
  In France                                                          85
  In England, by Caxton                                              85
  In Spain                                                           85
  Translations of Scripture                                          85
  Revival of Literature in Spain                                     86
  Character of Labrixa                                               86
  Library of Lorenzo                                                 87
  Classics corrected and explained                                   87
  Character of Lorenzo                                               87
  Prospect from his Villa at Fiesole                                 87
  Platonic Academy                                                   88
  Disputationes Camaldulenses of Landino                             88
  Philosophical Dialogues                                            89
  Paulus Cortesius                                                   89
  Schools in Germany                                                 89
  Study of Greek at Paris                                            91
  Controversy of Realists and Nominalists                            91
  Scotus                                                             91
  Ockham                                                             92
  Nominalists in University of Paris                                 92
  Low State of Learning in England                                   92
  Mathematics                                                        93
  Regiomontanus                                                      93
  Arts of Delineation                                                93
  Maps                                                               94
  Geography                                                          94
  Greek printed in Italy                                             94
  Hebrew printed                                                     95
  Miscellanies of Politian                                           95
  Their Character, by Heeren                                         95
  His Version of Herodian                                            96
  Cornucopia of Perotti                                              96
  Latin Poetry of Politian                                           96
  Italian Poetry of Lorenzo                                          97
  Pulci                                                              97
  Character of Morgante Maggiore                                     97
  Platonic Theology of Ficinus                                       98
  Doctrine of Averroes on the Soul                                   98
  Opposed by Ficinus                                                 99
  Desire of Man to explore Mysteries                                 99
  Various Methods employed                                           99
  Reason and Inspiration                                             99
  Extended Inferences from Sacred Books                              99
  Confidence in Traditions                                          100
  Confidence in Individuals as inspired                             100
  Jewish Cabbala                                                    100
  Picus of Mirandola                                                101
  His Credulity in the Cabbala                                      101
  His Literary Performances                                         102
  State of Learning in Germany                                      102
  Agricola                                                          103
  Renish Academy                                                    103
  Reuchlin                                                          104
  French Language and Poetry                                        104
  European Drama                                                    104
  Latin                                                             104
  Orfeo of Politian                                                 105
  Origin of Dramatic Mysteries                                      105
  Their early Stage                                                 105
  Extant English Mysteries                                          105
  First French Theatre                                              106
  Theatrical Machinery                                              107
  Italian Religious Dramas                                          107
  Moralities                                                        107
  Farces                                                            107
  Mathematical Works                                                107
  Leo Baptista Alberti                                              108
  Lionardo da Vinci                                                 108
  Aldine Greek Editions                                             109
  Decline of Learning in Italy                                      110
  Hermolaus Barbarus                                                111
  Mantuan                                                           111
  Pontanus                                                          111
  Neapolitan Academy                                                112
  Boiardo                                                           112
  Francesco Bello                                                   113
  Italian Poetry near the End of the Century                        113
  Progress of Learning in France and Germany                        113
  Erasmus--his Diligence                                            114
  Budæus--his early Studies                                         114
  Latin not well written in France                                  115
  Dawn of Greek Learning in England                                 115
  Erasmus comes to England                                          116
  He publishes his Adages                                           116
  Romantic Ballads of Spain                                         116
  Pastoral Romances                                                 117
  Portuguese Lyric Poetry                                           117
  German popular Books                                              117
  Historical Works                                                  118
  Philip de Comines                                                 118
  Algebra                                                           118
  Events from 1490 to 1500                                          119
  Close of Fifteenth Century                                        119
  Its Literature nearly neglected                                   119
  Summary of its Acquisitions                                       119
  Their Imperfection                                                120
  Number of Books printed                                           120
  Advantages already reaped from Printing                           120
  Trade of Bookselling                                              121
  Books sold by Printers                                            121
  Price of Books                                                    122
  Form of Books                                                     122
  Exclusive Privileges                                              122
  Power of Universities over Bookselling                            123
  Restraints on Sale of Printed Books                               124
  Effect of Printing on the Reformation                             124


                             CHAPTER IV.

           ON THE LITERATURE OF EUROPE FROM 1500 TO 1520.

  Decline of Learning in Italy                                      125
  Press of Aldus                                                    125
  His Academy                                                       126
  Dictionary of Calepio                                             126
  Books printed in Germany                                          126
  First Greek Press at Paris                                        126
  Early Studies of Melanchthon                                      127
  Learning in England                                               127
  Erasmus and Budæus                                                128
  Study of Eastern Languages                                        128
  Dramatic Works                                                    128
  Calisto and Melibœa                                               128
  Its Character                                                     129
  Juan de la Enzina                                                 129
  Arcadia of Sanazzaro                                              129
  Asolani of Bembo                                                  130
  Dunbar                                                            130
  Anatomy of Zerbi                                                  130
  Voyages of Cadamosto                                              130
  Leo X., his Patronage of Letters                                  131
  Roman Gymnasium                                                   131
  Latin Poetry                                                      132
  Italian Tragedy                                                   132
  Sophonisba of Trissino                                            132
  Rosmunda of Rucellai                                              132
  Comedies of Ariosto                                               132
  Books printed in Italy                                            133
  Cælius Rhodiginus                                                 133
  Greek printed in France and Germany                               133
  Greek Scholars in these Countries                                 134
  College at Alcala and Louvain                                     134
  Latin Style in France                                             135
  Greek Scholars in England                                         135
  Mode of Teaching in Schools                                       136
  Few Classical Works printed here                                  137
  State of Learning in Scotland                                     137
  Utopia of More                                                    137
  Inconsistency in his Opinions                                     138
  Learning restored in France                                       138
  Jealousy of Erasmus and Budæus                                    138
  Character of Erasmus                                              139
  His Adages severe on Kings                                        139
  Instances in illustration                                         140
  His Greek Testament                                               142
  Patrons of Letters in Germany                                     142
  Resistance to Learning                                            143
  Unpopularity of the Monks                                         145
  The Book excites Odium                                            145
  Erasmus attacks the Monks                                         145
  Their Contention with Reuchlin                                    145
  Origin of the Reformation                                         146
  Popularity of Luther                                              147
  Simultaneous Reform by Zwingle                                    147
  Reformation prepared beforehand                                   147
  Dangerous Tenets of Luther                                        148
  Real Explanation of them                                          149
  Orlando Furioso                                                   150
  Its Popularity                                                    150
  Want of Seriousness                                               150
  A Continuation of Boiardo                                         150
  In some Points inferior                                           151
  Beauties of its Style                                             151
  Accompanied with Faults                                           151
  Its Place as a Poem                                               152
  Amadis de Gaul                                                    152
  Gringore                                                          152
  Hans Sachs                                                        152
  Stephen Hawes                                                     153
  Change in English Language                                        153
  Skelton                                                           154
  Oriental Languages                                                154
  Pomponatius                                                       155
  Raymond Lully                                                     155
  His Method                                                        155
  Peter Martyr’s Epistles                                           156


                             CHAPTER V.

      HISTORY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE IN EUROPE FROM 1520 TO 1550.

  Superiority of Italy in Taste                                     157
  Admiration of Antiquity                                           158
  Sadolet                                                           158
  Bembo                                                             159
  Ciceronianus of Erasmus                                           159
  Scaliger’s Invective against it                                   160
  Editions of Cicero                                                160
  Alexander ab Alexandro                                            160
  Works on Roman Antiquities                                        161
  Greek less Studied in Italy                                       161
  Schools of Classical Learning                                     161
  Budæus--his Commentaries on Greek                                 161
  Their Character                                                   162
  Greek Grammars and Lexicons                                       162
  Editions of Greek Authors                                         163
  Latin Thesaurus of R. Stephens                                    163
  Progress of Learning in France                                    164
  Learning in Spain                                                 165
  Effects of Reformation on Learning                                165
  Sturm’s Account of German Schools                                 165
  Learning in Germany                                               166
  In England--Linacre                                               166
  Lectures in the Universities                                      166
  Greek perhaps Taught to Boys                                      167
  Teaching of Smith at Cambridge                                    167
  Succeeded by Cheke                                                168
  Ascham’s Character of Cambridge                                   168
  Wood’s Account of Oxford                                          168
  Education of Edward and his Sisters                               169
  The Progress of Learning is still slow                            169
  Want of Books and Public Libraries                                169
  Destruction of Monasteries no Injury to Learning                  169
  Ravisius Textor                                                   170
  Conrad Gesner                                                     170


                             CHAPTER VI.

    HISTORY OF THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE IN EUROPE FROM 1520 TO 1550.

  Progress of the Reformation                                       171
  Interference of Civil Power                                       171
  Excitement of Revolutionary Spirit                                172
  Growth of Fanaticism                                              172
  Differences of Luther and Zwingle                                 172
  Confession of Augsburg                                            173
  Conduct of Erasmus                                                173
  Estimate of it                                                    174
  His Controversy with Luther                                       174
  Character of his Epistles                                         176
  His Alienation from the Reformers increases                       176
  Appeal of the Reformers to the Ignorant                           176
  Parallel of those Times with the Present                          177
  Calvin                                                            177
  His Institutes                                                    177
  Increased Differences among Reformers                             178
  Reformed Tenets spread in England                                 178
  In Italy                                                          178
  Italian Heterodoxy                                                179
  Its Progress in the Literary Classes                              180
  Servetus                                                          180
  Arianism in Italy                                                 181
  Protestants in Spain and Low Countries                            181
  Order of Jesuits                                                  181
  Their Popularity                                                  181
  Council of Trent                                                  182
  Its Chief Difficulties                                            182
  Character of Luther                                               182
  Theological Writings--Erasmus                                     183
  Melanchthon--Romish Writers                                       183
  This Literature nearly forgotten                                  184
  Sermons                                                           184
  Spirit of the Reformation                                         184
  Limits of Private Judgment                                        185
  Passions instrumental in Reformation                              185
  Establishment of new Dogmatism                                    186
  Editions of Scripture                                             186
  Translations of Scripture                                         186
  In English                                                        187
  In Italy and Low Countries                                        187
  Latin Translations                                                187
  French Translations                                               188


                            CHAPTER VII.

    HISTORY OF SPECULATIVE, MORAL, AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, AND OF
            JURISPRUDENCE, IN EUROPE, FROM 1520 TO 1550.

  Logic included under this head                                    188
  Slow Defeat of Scholastic Philosophy                              188
  It is sustained by the Universities and Regulars                  188
  Commentators on Aristotle                                         188
  Attack of Vives on Scholastics                                    189
  Contempt of them in England                                       189
  Veneration for Aristotle                                          189
  Melanchthon countenances him                                      189
  His own Philosophical Treatises                                   190
  Aristotelians of Italy                                            190
  University of Paris                                               190
  New Logic of Ramus                                                190
  It meets with unfair treatment                                    191
  Its Merits and Character                                          191
  Buhle’s account of it                                             191
  Paracelsus                                                        191
  His Impostures                                                    192
  And Extravagancies                                                192
  Cornelius Agrippa                                                 192
  His pretended Philosophy                                          193
  His Sceptical Treatise                                            193
  Cardan                                                            193
  Influence of Moral Writers                                        194
  Cortegiano of Castiglione                                         194
  Marco Aurelio of Guevara                                          194
  His Menosprecio di Corte                                          194
  Perez d’Oliva                                                     195
  Ethical Writings of Erasmus and Melanchthon                       195
  Sir T. Elyot’s Governor                                           195
  Severity of Education                                             196
  He seems to avoid Politics                                        196
  Nicholas Machiavel                                                196
  His motives in writing the Prince                                 197
  Some of his Rules not immoral                                     197
  But many dangerous                                                197
  Its only Palliation                                               198
  His Discourses on Livy                                            198
  Their leading Principles                                          198
  Their Use and Influence                                           199
  His History of Florence                                           199
  Treatises on Venetian Government                                  199
  Calvin’s Political Principles                                     199
  Jurisprudence confined to Roman Law                               200
  The Laws not well arranged                                        200
  Adoption of the entire System                                     200
  Utility of General Learning to Lawyers                            200
  Alciati--his Reform of Law                                        201
  Opposition to him                                                 201
  Agustino                                                          201


                            CHAPTER VIII.

    HISTORY OF THE LITERATURE OF TASTE IN EUROPE FROM 1520 TO 1550.

  Poetry of Bembo                                                   201
  Its Beauties and Defects                                          202
  Character of Italian Poetry                                       202
  Alamanni                                                          202
  Vittoria Colonna                                                  202
  Satires of Ariosto and Alamanni                                   203
  Alamanni                                                          203
  Rucellai                                                          203
  Trissino                                                          203
  Berni                                                             203
  Spanish Poets                                                     204
  Boscan and Garcilasso                                             204
  Mendoza                                                           204
  Saa di Miranda                                                    205
  Ribeyro                                                           205
  French Poetry                                                     205
  Marot                                                             206
  Its Metrical Structure                                            206
  German Poetry                                                     206
  Hans Sachs                                                        206
  German Hymn                                                       206
  Theuerdanks of Pfintzing                                          206
  English Poetry--Lyndsay                                           206
  Wyatt and Surrey                                                  207
  Dr. Nott’s Character of them                                      207
  Perhaps rather exaggerated                                        208
  Surrey improves our versification                                 208
  Introduces Blank Verse                                            208
  Dr. Nott’s Hypothesis as to his Metre                             208
  It seems too extensive                                            209
  Politeness of Wyatt and Surrey                                    209
  Latin Poetry                                                      210
  Sannazarius                                                       210
  Vida                                                              210
  Fracastorius                                                      210
  Latin Verse not to be disdained                                   210
  Other Latin Poets in Italy                                        211
  In Germany                                                        211
  Italian Comedy                                                    211
  Machiavel                                                         211
  Aretin                                                            211
  Tragedy                                                           212
  Sperone                                                           212
  Cinthio                                                           212
  Spanish Drama                                                     212
  Torres Naharro                                                    212
  Lope de Rueda                                                     212
  Gil Vicente                                                       213
  Mysteries and Moralities in France                                213
  German Theatre--Hans Sachs                                        213
  Moralities and Similar Plays in England                           214
  They are turned to religious Satire                               214
  Latin Plays                                                       214
  First English Comedy                                              215
  Romances of Chivalry                                              215
  Novels                                                            215
  Rabelais                                                          216
  Contest of Latin and Italian Languages                            216
  Influence of Bembo in this                                        217
  Apology for Latinists                                             217
  Character of the Controversy                                      217
  Life of Bembo                                                     217
  Character of Italian and Spanish Style                            218
  English Writers                                                   218
  More                                                              218
  Ascham                                                            218
  Italian Criticism                                                 218
  Bembo                                                             218
  Grammarians and Critics in France                                 219
  Orthography of Meigret                                            219
  Cox’s Art of Rhetoric                                             219


                             CHAPTER IX.

      ON THE SCIENTIFIC AND MISCELLANEOUS LITERATURE OF EUROPE
                         FROM 1520 TO 1550.

  Geometrical Treatises                                             220
  Fernel Rhœticus                                                   220
  Cardan and Tartaglia                                              220
  Cubic Equations                                                   220
  Beauty of the Discovery                                           221
  Cardan’s other Discoveries                                        221
  Imperfections of Algebraic Language                               222
  Copernicus                                                        222
  Revival of Greek Medicine                                         223
  Linacre and other Physicians                                      223
  Medical Innovators                                                224
  Paracelsus                                                        224
  Anatomy                                                           224
  Berenger                                                          224
  Vesalius                                                          224
  Portal’s Account of him                                           225
  His Human Dissections                                             225
  Fate of Vesalius                                                  225
  Other Anatomists                                                  225
  Imperfection of the Science                                       225
  Botany--Botanical Gardens                                         226
  Ruel                                                              226
  Fuchs                                                             226
  Matthioli                                                         226
  Low State of Zoology                                              226
  Agricola                                                          227
  Hebrew                                                            227
  Elias Levita--Pellican                                            227
  Arabic and Oriental Literature                                    227
  Geography of Grynæus                                              228
  Apianus                                                           228
  Munster                                                           228
  Voyages                                                           228
  Oviedo                                                            228
  Historical Works                                                  228
  Italian Academies                                                 229
  They pay regard to the Language                                   229
  Their fondness for Petrarch                                       229
  They become numerous                                              229
  Their Distinctions                                                230
  Evils connected with them                                         230
  They succeed less in Germany                                      230
  Libraries                                                         230


                             CHAPTER X.

      HISTORY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE IN EUROPE FROM 1550 TO 1600.

  Progress of Philology                                             231
  First Editions of Classics                                        231
  Change in Character of Learning                                   232
  Cultivation of Greek                                              232
  Principal Scholars--Turnebus                                      232
  Petrus Victorius                                                  233
  Muretus                                                           233
  Gruter’s Thesaurus Criticus                                       234
  Editions of Greek and Latin Authors                               235
  Tacitus of Lipsius                                                235
  Horace of Lambinus                                                235
  Of Cruquius                                                       236
  Henry Stephens                                                    236
  Lexicon of Constantin                                             237
  Thesaurus of Stephens                                             237
  Abridged by Scapula                                               238
  Hellenismus of Caninius                                           239
  Vergara’s Grammar                                                 239
  Grammars of Ramus and Sylburgius                                  239
  Camerarius--Canter--Robortellus                                   240
  Editions by Sylburgius                                            241
  Neander                                                           241
  Gesner                                                            241
  Decline of Taste in Germany                                       242
  German Learning                                                   242
  Greek Verses of Rhodomanu                                         242
  Learning Declines                                                 243
  Except in Catholic Germany                                        243
  Philological Works of Stephens                                    243
  Style of Lipsius                                                  244
  Minerva of Sanctius                                               244
  Orations of Muretus                                               244
  Panegyric of Ruhnkenius                                           244
  Defects of his Style                                              245
  Epistles of Manutius                                              245
  Care of the Italian Latinists                                     245
  Perpinianus--Osorius--Maphœus                                     246
  Buchanan--Haddon                                                  246
  Sigonius, De Consolatione                                         246
  Decline of Taste and Learning in Italy                            247
  Joseph Scaliger                                                   247
  Isaac Casaubon                                                    248
  General Result                                                    249
  Learning in England under Edward and Mary                         249
  Revival under Elizabeth                                           249
  Greek Lectures at Cambridge                                       250
  Few Greek Editions in England                                     250
  School Books enumerated                                           250
  Greek taught in Schools                                           251
  Greek better known after 1580                                     251
  Editions of Greek                                                 252
  And of Latin Classics                                             252
  Learning lower than in Spain                                      252
  Improvement at the End of the Century.                            253
  Learning in Scotland                                              253
  Latin little used in Writing                                      253
  Early Works on Antiquities                                        254
  P. Manutius on Roman Laws                                         254
  Manutius, De Civitate                                             254
  Panvinius--Sigonius                                               255
  Gruchius                                                          255
  Sigonius on Athenian Polity                                       256
  Patrizzi and Lipsius on Roman Militia                             256
  Lipsius and other Antiquaries                                     256
  Saville on Roman Militia                                          257
  Numismatics                                                       257
  Mythology                                                         257
  Scaliger’s Chronology                                             258
  Julian Period                                                     258


                             CHAPTER XI.

    HISTORY OF THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE IN EUROPE FROM 1550 TO 1600.

  Diet of Augsburg in 1555                                          259
  Progress of Protestantism                                         259
  Its Causes                                                        260
  Wavering of Catholic Princes                                      260
  Extinguished in Italy and Spain                                   260
  Reaction of Catholicity                                           260
  Especially in Germany                                             261
  Discipline of the Clergy                                          261
  Influence of Jesuits                                              261
  Their Progress                                                    262
  Their Colleges                                                    262
  Jesuit Seminary at Rome                                           262
  Patronage of Gregory XIII.                                        262
  Conversions in Germany and France                                 263
  Causes of this Reaction                                           263
  A rigid Party in the Church                                       264
  Its Efforts at Trent                                              264
  No Compromise in Doctrine                                         265
  Consultation of Cassander                                         265
  Bigotry of Protestant Churches                                    266
  Tenets of Melanchthon                                             266
  A Party hostile to him                                            267
  Form of Concord, 1576                                             267
  Controversy raised by Baius                                       267
  Treatise of Molina on Free will                                   268
  Protestant Tenets                                                 268
  Trinitarian Controversy                                           268
  Religious Intolerance                                             270
  Castalio                                                          270
  Answered by Beza                                                  271
  Aconcio                                                           271
  Minus Celsus, Koornhert                                           271
  Decline of Protestantism                                          272
  Desertion of Lipsius                                              272
  Jewell’s Apology                                                  272
  English Theologians                                               272
  Bellarmin                                                         273
  Topics of Controversy changed                                     273
  It turns on Papal Power                                           274
  This upheld by the Jesuits                                        274
  Claim to depose Princes                                           274
  Bull against Elizabeth                                            274
  And Henry IV.                                                     275
  Deposing Power owned in Spain                                     275
  Asserted by Bellarmin                                             275
  Methods of Theological Doctrine                                   275
  Loci Communes                                                     275
  In the Protestant and Catholic Church                             276
  Catharin                                                          276
  Critical and Expository Writings                                  276
  Ecclesiastical Historians                                         277
  Le Clerc’s Character of them                                      277
  Deistical Writers                                                 277
  Wierus, De Præstigiis                                             278
  Scot on Witchcraft                                                278
  Authenticity of Vulgate                                           278
  Latin Versions and Editions by Catholics                          278
  By Protestants                                                    279
  Versions into Modern Languages                                    279


                            CHAPTER XII.

         HISTORY OF SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY FROM 1550 TO 1600.

  Predominance of Aristotelian Philosophy                           279
  Scholastic and genuine Aristotelians                              280
  The former class little remembered                                280
  The others not much better known                                  280
  Schools of Pisa and Padua                                         280
  Cesalpini                                                         280
  Sketch of his System                                              280
  Cremonini                                                         281
  Opponents of Aristotle                                            281
  Patrizzi                                                          281
  System of Telesio                                                 281
  Jordano Bruno                                                     282
  His Italian Works--Cena de li Ceneri                              282
  Della Causa, Principio ed Uno                                     282
  Pantheism of Bruno                                                283
  Bruno’s other Writings                                            284
  General Character of his Philosophy                               285
  Sceptical Theory of Sanchez                                       286
  Logic of Aconcio                                                  286
  Nizolius on the Principles of Philosophy                          286
  Margarita Antoniana of Pereira                                    287
  Logic of Ramus--its Success                                       288


                            CHAPTER XIII.

    HISTORY OF MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND OF JURISPRUDENCE
                         FROM 1550 TO 1600.

  Soto, De Justitia                                                 289
  Hooker                                                            290
  His Theory of Natural Law                                         290
  Doubts felt by others                                             290
  Essays of Montaigne                                               290
  Their Characteristics                                             290
  Writers on Morals in Italy                                        293
  In England                                                        293
  Bacon’s Essays                                                    293
  Number of Political Writers                                       294
  Oppression of Governments                                         294
  And Spirit generated by it                                        294
  Derived from Classic History                                      294
  From their own and the Jewish                                     294
  Franco Gallia of Hossoman                                         295
  Vindiciæ of Languet                                               295
  Contr’Un of Boetie                                                295
  Buchanan, De Jure Regni                                           296
  Poynet, on Politique Power                                        296
  Its liberal Theory                                                296
  Argues for Tyrannicide                                            297
  The Tenets of Parties swayed by Circumstances                     297
  Similar Tenets among the Leaguers                                 298
  Rose on the Authority of Christian States over Kings              298
  Treatise of Boucher in the same Spirit                            299
  Answered by Barclay                                               299
  The Jesuits adopt these Tenets                                    299
  Mariana, De Rege                                                  299
  Popular Theories in England                                       300
  Hooker                                                            300
  Political Memoirs                                                 301
  La Noue                                                           301
  Lipsius                                                           301
  Botero                                                            301
  His Remarks on Population                                         301
  Paruta                                                            302
  Bodin                                                             302
  Analysis of his Treatise called the Republic                      302
  Authority of Heads of Families                                    302
  Domestic Servitude                                                303
  Origin of Commonwealths                                           303
  Privileges of Citizens                                            303
  Nature of Sovereign Power                                         304
  Forms of Government                                               304
  Despotism and Monarchy                                            304
  Aristocracy                                                       305
  Senates and Councils of State                                     305
  Duties of Magistrates                                             305
  Corporations                                                      305
  Slaves, part of the State                                         305
  Rise and Fall of States                                           306
  Causes of Revolution                                              306
  Astrological Fancies of Bodin                                     306
  Danger of sudden Changes                                          307
  Judicial Power of the Sovereign                                   307
  Toleration of Religions                                           307
  Influence of Climate on Government                                307
  Means of obviating Inequality                                     308
  Confiscations--Rewards                                            308
  Fortresses                                                        308
  Necessity of Good Faith                                           309
  Census of Property                                                309
  Public Revenues                                                   309
  Taxation                                                          309
  Adulteration of Coin                                              310
  Superiority of Monarchy                                           310
  Conclusion of the Work                                            310
  Bodin compared with Aristotle and Machiavel                       310
  And with Montesquieu                                              310
  Golden Age of Jurisprudence                                       311
  Cujacius                                                          311
  Eulogies bestowed upon him                                        311
  Cujacius, an Interpreter of Law rather than a Lawyer              312
  French Lawyers below Cujacius--Govca and others                   312
  Opponents of the Roman Law                                        313
  Faber of Savoy                                                    313
  Anti-Tribonianus of Hottoman                                      313
  Civil Law not countenanced in France                              314
  Turamini                                                          314
  Cau Law                                                           314
  Law of Nations; its early State                                   314
  Francis a Victoria                                                314
  His Opinions on Public Law                                        315
  Ayala, on the Rights of War                                       315
  Albericus Gentilis on Embassies                                   316
  His Treatise on the Rights of War                                 317


                            CHAPTER XIV.

                HISTORY OF POETRY FROM 1550 TO 1600.

  General Character of Italian Poets in this Age                    318
  Their usual Faults                                                318
  Their Beauties                                                    318
  Character given by Muratori                                       318
  Poetry of Casa                                                    318
  Of Costanzo                                                       319
  Baldi                                                             319
  Caro                                                              319
  Odes of Celio Magus                                               319
  Coldness of the Amatory Sonnets                                   320
  Studied Imitation of Petrarch                                     320
  Their Fondness for Description                                    320
  Judgment of Italian Critics                                       320
  Bernardino Rota                                                   320
  Gaspara Stampa; her Love for Collalto                             321
  Is ill-requited                                                   322
  Her Second Love                                                   322
  Style of Gaspara Stampa                                           322
  La Nautica of Baldi                                               322
  Amadigi of Bernardo Tasso                                         323
  Satirical and burlesque Poetry; Aretin                            323
  Other burlesque Writers                                           324
  Attempts at Latin Metres                                          324
  Poetical Translations                                             324
  Torquato Tasso                                                    324
  The Jerusalem excellent in Choice of Subject                      324
  Superior to Homer and Virgil in some Points                       324
  Its Characters                                                    325
  Excellence of its Style                                           325
  Some Faults in it                                                 325
  Defects of the Poem                                               326
  It indicates the peculiar Genius of Tasso                         326
  Tasso compared to Virgil                                          326
  To Ariosto                                                        326
  To the Bolognese Painters                                         327
  Poetry Cultivated under Charles and Philip                        327
  Luis de Leon                                                      328
  Herrera                                                           328
  General Tone of Castilian Poetry                                  329
  Castillejo                                                        329
  Araucana of Ercilla                                               329
  Many epic Poems in Spain                                          329
  Camœns                                                            330
  Defects of the Lusiad                                             330
  Its Excellencies                                                  330
  Mickle’s Translation                                              330
  Celebrated Passage in the Lusiad                                  331
  Minor Poems of Camœns                                             331
  Ferreira                                                          331
  Spanish Ballads                                                   331
  French Poets numerous                                             332
  Change in the Tone of French Poetry                               333
  Ronsard                                                           333
  Other French Poets                                                334
  Du Bartas                                                         334
  Pibrac; Desportes                                                 335
  French Metre and Versification                                    335
  General character of French Poetry                                335
  German Poetry                                                     336
  Paradise of Dainty Devices                                        336
  Character of this Collection                                      336
  Sackville’s Induction                                             336
  Inferiority of Poets in early years of Elizabeth                  337
  Gascoyne                                                          337
  Spenser’s Shepherd’s Kalendar                                     337
  Sydney’s Character of Contemporary Poets                          338
  Improvement soon after this Time                                  338
  Relaxation of Moral Austerity                                     339
  Serious Poetry                                                    339
  Poetry of Sydney                                                  339
  Epithalanium of Spenser                                           340
  Poems of Shakspeare                                               340
  Daniel and Drayton                                                340
  Nosce Teipsum of Davies                                           340
  Satires of Hall, Marston, and Donne                               341
  Modulation of English Verse                                       341
  Translations of Homer by Chapman                                  341
  Of Tasso by Fairfax                                               342
  Employment of Ancient Measures                                    342
  Number of Poets in this Age                                       342
  Scots and English Ballads                                         343
  The Faery Queen                                                   343
  Superiority of the First Book                                     343
  The succeeding Books                                              344
  Spenser’s Sense of Beauty                                         344
  Compared to Ariosto                                               344
  Style of Spenser                                                  345
  Inferiority of the latter Books                                   345
  Allegories of the Faery Queen                                     346
  Blemishes in the Diction                                          346
  Admiration of the Faery Queen                                     346
  General Parallel of Italian and English Poetry                    347
  Decline of Latin Poetry in Italy                                  347
  Compensated in other Countries                                    347
  Lotichius                                                         347
  Collections of Latin Poetry by Gruter                             348
  Characters of some Gallo-Latin Poets                              348
  Sammarthanus                                                      349
  Belgic Poets                                                      349
  Scots Poets--Buchanan                                             349


                             CHAPTER XV.

          HISTORY OF DRAMATIC LITERATURE FROM 1550 TO 1600.

  Italian Tragedy                                                   350
  Pastoral Drama                                                    351
  Aminta of Tasso                                                   351
  Pastor Fido of Guarini                                            352
  Italian Opera                                                     352
  The National Taste revives in the Spanish Drama                   353
  Lope de Vega                                                      353
  His Extraordinary Fertility                                       353
  His Versification                                                 354
  His Popularity                                                    354
  Character of his Comedies                                         354
  Tragedy of Don Sancho Ortiz                                       355
  His Spiritual Plays                                               356
  Numancia of Cervantes                                             356
  French Theatre--Jodelle                                           357
  Garnier                                                           357
  Comedies of Larivey                                               358
  Theatres in Paris                                                 358
  English Stage                                                     359
  Gammar Gurton’s Needle                                            359
  Gorboduc of Sackville                                             359
  Preference given to the Irregular Form                            359
  First Theatres                                                    360
  Plays of Whetstone and Others                                     360
  Marlowe and his Contemporaries                                    360
  Tamburlaine                                                       361
  Blank Verse of Marlowe                                            361
  Marlowe’s Jew of Malta                                            361
  And Faustus                                                       361
  His Edward II.                                                    361
  Plays whence Henry VI. was taken                                  361
  Peele                                                             362
  Greene                                                            362
  Other Writers of this Age                                         363
  Heywood’s Woman Killed with Kindness                              363
  William Shakspeare                                                364
  His First Writings for the Stage                                  364
  Comedy of Errors                                                  365
  Love’s Labour Lost                                                365
  Taming of the Shrew                                               365
  Midsummer Night’s Dream                                           365
  Its Machinery                                                     366
  Its Language                                                      366
  Romeo and Juliet                                                  366
  Its Plot                                                          367
  Its Beauties and Blemishes                                        367
  The Characters                                                    367
  The Language                                                      367
  Second Period of Shakspeare                                       368
  The Historical Plays                                              368
  Merchant of Venice                                                368
  As You Like It                                                    369
  Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour                                  369


                            CHAPTER XVI.

       HISTORY OF POLITE LITERATURE IN PROSE FROM 1550 TO 1600.

  Italian Writers                                                   369
  Casa                                                              369
  Tasso                                                             370
  Firenzuola                                                        370
  Character of Italian Prose                                        370
  Italian Letter Writers                                            370
  Davanzati’s Tacitus                                               371
  Jordano Bruno                                                     371
  French Writers--Amyot                                             371
  Montaigne; Du Vair                                                371
  Satire Menippée                                                   372
  English Writers                                                   372
  Ascham                                                            372
  Euphues of Lilly                                                  373
  Its Popularity                                                    373
  Sydney’s Arcadia                                                  374
  His Defence of Poesie                                             374
  Hooker                                                            374
  Character of Elizabethan Writers                                  374
  State of Criticism                                                375
  Scaliger’s Poetics                                                375
  His Preference of Virgil to Homer                                 375
  His Critique on Modern Latin Poets                                376
  Critical Influence of the Academics                               376
  Dispute of Caro and Castelvetro                                   377
  Castelvetro on Aristotle’s Poetics                                377
  Severity of Castelvetro’s Criticism                               377
  Ercolano of Varchi                                                378
  Controversy about Dante                                           378
  Academy of Florence                                               378
  Salviati’s Attack on Tasso                                        379
  Pinciano’s Art of Poetry                                          379
  French Treatises of Criticism                                     379
  Wilson’s Art of Rhetorique                                        379
  Gascoyne; Webbe                                                   380
  Puttenham’s Art of Poesie                                         380
  Sydney’s Defence of Poesy                                         380
  Novels of Bandello                                                380
  Of Cinthio                                                        381
  Of the Queen of Navarre                                           381
  Spanish Romances of Chivalry                                      381
  Diana of Monte-Mayor                                              382
  Novels in the Picaresque Style                                    382
  Guzman d’Alfarache                                                382
  Las Guerras de Granada                                            383
  Sydney’s Arcadia                                                  383
  Its Character                                                     383
  Inferiority of other English Fictions                             384


                            CHAPTER XVII.

  HISTORY OF PHYSICAL AND MISCELLANEOUS LITERATURE FROM 1500 TO 1600.

  Tartaglia and Cardan                                              385
  Algebra of Pelletier                                              385
  Record’s Whetstone of Wit                                         385
  Vieta                                                             385
  His Discoveries                                                   386
  Geometers of this Period                                          388
  Joachim Rhœticus                                                  388
  Copernican Theory                                                 388
  Tycho Brahe                                                       389
  His System                                                        389
  Gregorian Calendar                                                390
  Optics                                                            390
  Mechanics                                                         390
  Statics of Stevinus                                               391
  Hydrostatics                                                      392
  Gilbert on the Magnet                                             392
  Gesner’s Zoology                                                  392
  Its Character by Cuvier                                           392
  Gesner’s Arrangement                                              393
  His Additions to known Quadrupeds                                 393
  Belon                                                             394
  Salviani and Rondelet’s Ichthyology                               394
  Aldrovandus                                                       394
  Botany--Turner                                                    395
  Maranta--Botanical Gardens                                        395
  Gesner                                                            396
  Dodœns                                                            396
  Lobel                                                             396
  Clusius                                                           396
  Cæsalpin                                                          396
  Dalechamps--Bauhin                                                397
  Gerard’s Herbal                                                   397
  Anatomy--Fallopius                                                397
  Eustachius                                                        397
  Coiter                                                            398
  Columbus                                                          398
  Circulation of the Blood                                          398
  Medicinal Science                                                 398
  Syriac Version of New Testament                                   399
  Hebrew Critics                                                    399
  Its Study in England                                              399
  Arabic begins to be Studied                                       399
  Collection of Voyages by Ramusio                                  400
  Curiosity they awakened                                           400
  Other Voyages                                                     401
  Accounts of China                                                 401
  India and Russia                                                  401
  English Discoveries in the Northern Seas                          401
  Geographical Books--Ortelius                                      401
  Guicciardini                                                      402
  French Memoirs                                                    403
  Universities in Italy                                             403
  In other Countries                                                403
  Libraries                                                         403
  Collections of Antiquities in Italy                               404
  Pinelli                                                           404
  Italian Academies                                                 405
  Society of Antiquaries in England                                 405
  New Books and Catalogues of them                                  406
  Literary Correspondence                                           406
  Bibliographical Works                                             406
  Restraints on the Press                                           407
  Index Expurgatorius                                               407
  Its Effects                                                       407
  Restrictions in England                                           407
  Latin more employed on this account                               408
  Influence of Literature                                           408


                           CHAPTER XVIII.

      HISTORY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE IN EUROPE FROM 1600 TO 1650.

  Learning of 17th Century less Philological                        409
  Popularity of Comenius                                            409
  Decline of Greek Learning                                         410
  Casaubon                                                          410
  Viger de Idiotismis                                               411
  Weller’s Greek Grammar                                            411
  Labbe and Others                                                  411
  Salmasius de Lingua Hellenistica                                  412
  Greek Editions--Savile’s Chrysostom                               412
  Greek Learning in England                                         413
  Latin Editions--Torrentius                                        413
  Gruter                                                            413
  Heinsius                                                          413
  Grotius                                                           414
  Rutgersius--Reinesius--Barthius                                   414
  Other Critics--English                                            414
  Salmasius                                                         415
  Good Writers of Latin                                             415
  Scioppius                                                         416
  His Philosophical Grammar                                         416
  His Infamia Famiani                                               416
  Judicium de Stylo Historico                                       416
  Gerard Vossius, de Vitiis Sermonis                                417
  His Aristarchus                                                   417
  Progress of Latin Style                                           418
  Gruter’s Collection of Inscriptions                               418
  Assisted by Scaliger                                              419
  Works on Roman Antiquity                                          419
  Geography of Cluversius                                           420
  Meursius                                                          420
  Ubbo Emmius                                                       420
  Chronology of Lydiat--Calvisius                                   420
  Petavius                                                          421
  Character of this Work                                            421


                            CHAPTER XIX.

    HISTORY Of THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE IN EUROPE FROM 1600 TO 1650.

  Temporal Supremacy of Rome                                        422
  Contest with Venice                                               423
  Father Paul Sarpi                                                 423
  History of Council of Trent                                       424
  Gallican Liberties--Richter                                       424
  Perron                                                            425
  Decline of Papal Power                                            425
  Unpopularity of the Jesuits                                       426
  Richelieu’s Care of Gallican Liberties                            426
  Controversy of Catholics and Protestants                          426
  Increased respect for the Fathers                                 426
  Especially in England--Laud                                       427
  Defections to the Catholic Church                                 427
  Wavering of Casaubon                                              428
  And of Grotius                                                    429
  Calixtus                                                          434
  His Attempts at Concord                                           434
  High Church Party in England                                      435
  Daillé on the Right Use of the Fathers                            435
  Chillingworth’s Religion of Protestants                           436
  Character of this Work                                            436
  Hales on Schism                                                   438
  Controversies on Grace and Free will--Augustinian Scheme          438
  Semi-pelagian Hypothesis                                          439
  Tenets of the Reformers                                           439
  Rise of Arminianism                                               440
  Episcopius                                                        440
  His Writings                                                      440
  Their Spirit and Tendency                                         440
  Great Latitude allowed by them                                    441
  Progress of Arminianism                                           441
  Cameron                                                           441
  Rise of Jansenism                                                 441
  Socinus--Volkelius                                                442
  Crellius--Ruarus                                                  442
  Erastianism maintained by Hooker                                  443
  And Grotius                                                       444
  His Treatise on Ecclesiastical Power of the State                 444
  Remark upon this Theory                                           446
  Toleration of Religious Tenets                                    446
  Claimed by the Arminians                                          446
  By the Independents                                               447
  And by Jeremy Taylor                                              447
  His Liberty of Prophesying                                        447
  Boldness of his Doctrines                                         447
  His Notions of Uncertainty in Theological Tenets                  448
  His low Opinion of the Fathers                                    448
  Difficulty of Finding out Truth                                   449
  Grounds of Toleration                                             449
  Inconsistency of One Chapter                                      450
  His General Defence of Toleration                                 450
  Effect of this Treatise                                           451
  Its Defects                                                       451
  Great Erudition of this Period                                    452
  Usher--Petavius                                                   452
  Sacred Criticism                                                  452
  Grotius--Coccejus                                                 452
  English Commentators                                              453
  Style of Preaching                                                453
  English Sermons                                                   453
  Of Donne                                                          454
  Of Jeremy Taylor                                                  454
  Devotional Writings of Taylor and Hall                            454
  In the Roman                                                      455
  And Lutheran Church                                               455
  Infidelity of some Writers--Charron--Vanini                       455
  Lord Herbert of Cherbury                                          456
  Grotius de Veritate                                               457
  English Translation of the Bible                                  457
  Its Style                                                         457


                             CHAPTER XX.

        HISTORY OF SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY FROM 1600 TO 1650.

  Subjects of this Chapter                                          458
  Aristotelians and Ramists                                         458
  No improvement till near the End of the Century                   459
  Methods of the Universities                                       459
  Scholastic Writers                                                459
  Treatises on Logic                                                460
  Campanella                                                        460
  His Theory taken from Telesio                                     460
  Notion of Universal Sensibility                                   461
  His Imagination and Eloquence                                     461
  His Works Published by Admai                                      462
  Basson                                                            463
  Berigard                                                          463
  Magnen                                                            463
  Paracelsists                                                      463
  And Theosophists                                                  463
  Fludd                                                             464
  Jacob Behmen                                                      464
  Lord Herbert de Veritate                                          464
  His Axioms                                                        465
  Conditions of Truth                                               465
  Instinctive Truths                                                466
  Internal Perceptions                                              466
  Five Notions of Natural Religion                                  466
  Remarks of Gassendi on Herbert                                    467
  Gassendi’s Defence of Epicurus                                    468
  His chief Works after 1650                                        468
  Preparation for the Philosophy of Lord Bacon                      468
  His Plan of Philosophy                                            468
  Time of its Conception                                            469
  Instauratio Magna                                                 470
  First Part--Partitiones Scientiarum                               470
  Second Part--Novum Organum                                        470
  Third Part--Natural History                                       470
  Fourth Part--Scala Intellectûs                                    471
  Fifth Part--Anticipationes Philosophiæ                            471
  Sixth Part--Philosophia Secunda                                   471
  Course of studying Lord Bacon                                     472
  Nature of the Baconian Induction                                  472
  His Dislike of Aristotle                                          474
  His Method much required                                          474
  Its Objects                                                       474
  Sketch of the Treatise De Augmentis                               474
  History                                                           474
  Poetry                                                            475
  Fine Passage on Poetry                                            475
  Natural Theology and Metaphysics                                  475
  Form of Bodies might sometimes be inquired into                   475
  Final Causes too much slighted                                    476
  Man not included by him in Physics                                476
  Man--in Body and Mind                                             476
  Logic                                                             476
  Extent given it by Bacon                                          476
  Grammar and Rhetoric                                              477
  Ethics                                                            477
  Politics                                                          477
  Theology                                                          478
  Desiderata enumerated by him                                      478
  Novum Organum--First Book                                         478
  Fallacies--Idola                                                  478
  Confounded with Idols                                             478
  Second Book of Novum Organum                                      479
  Confidence of Bacon                                               479
  Almost justified of late                                          480
  But should be kept within Bounds                                  481
  Limits to our Knowledge by Sense                                  481
  Inductive Logic--whether confined to Physics                      481
  Baconian Philosophy built on Observation and Experiment           482
  Advantages of the latter                                          482
  Sometimes applicable to Philosophy of Human Mind                  483
  Less so to Politics and Morals                                    483
  Induction less conclusive on these Subjects                       483
  Reasons for this Difference                                       484
  Considerations on the other Side                                  484
  Result of the whole                                               485
  Bacon’s Aptitude for Moral Subjects                               486
  Comparison of Bacon and Galileo                                   487
  His Prejudice against Mathematics                                 488
  Bacon’s Excess of Wit                                             488
  Fame of Bacon on the Continent                                    489
  Early Life of Descartes                                           491
  His beginning to philosophise                                     491
  He retires to Holland                                             491
  His Publications                                                  492
  He begins by doubting all                                         492
  His First Step in Knowledge                                       492
  His Mind not Sceptical                                            493
  He arrives at more Certainty                                      493
  His Proof of a Deity                                              493
  Another Proof of it                                               494
  His Deductions from this                                          494
  Primary and Secondary Qualities                                   495
  Objections made to his Meditations                                495
  Theory of Memory and Imagination                                  496
  Seat of Soul in Pineal Gland                                      497
  Gassendi’s Attacks on the Meditations                             497
  Superiority of Descartes                                          497
  Stewart’s Remarks on Descartes                                    498
  Paradoxes of Descartes                                            499
  His Just Notions and Definitions                                  500
  His Notion of Substances                                          501
  Not Quite Correct                                                 501
  His Notions of Intuitive Truth                                    501
  Treatise on Art of Logic                                          502
  Merits of his Writings                                            502
  His Notions of Free will                                          502
  Fame of his System, and Attacks upon it                           503
  Controversy with Voet                                             503
  Charges of Plagiarism                                             504
  Recent Increase of his Fame                                       505
  Metaphysical Treatises of Hobbes                                  505
  His Theory of Sensation                                           506
  Coincident with Descartes                                         506
  Imagination and Memory                                            506
  Discourse or Train of Imagination                                 507
  Experience                                                        507
  Unconceivableness of Infinity                                     507
  Origin of Language                                                508
  His Political Theory interferes                                   508
  Necessity of Speech exaggerated                                   509
  Use of Names                                                      509
  Names Universal not Realities                                     509
  How imposed                                                       510
  The Subject continued                                             510
  Names differently imposed                                         511
  Knowledge                                                         511
  Reasoning                                                         512
  False Reasoning                                                   512
  Its frequency                                                     513
  Knowledge of Fact not derived from Reasoning                      514
  Belief                                                            514
  Chart of Science                                                  515
  Analysis of Passions                                              515
  Good and Evil relative Terms                                      515
  His Paradoxes                                                     515
  His Notion of Love                                                516
  Curiosity                                                         516
  Difference of Intellectual Capacities                             516
  Wit and Fancy                                                     517
  Differences in the Passions                                       517
  Madness                                                           517
  Unmeaning Language                                                517
  Manners                                                           517
  Ignorances and Prejudice                                          518
  His Theory of Religion                                            518
  Its supposed Sources                                              518


                            CHAPTER XXI.

     HISTORY OF MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND OF JURISPRUDENCE
                         FROM 1600 TO 1650.

  Casuistical Writers                                               521
  Importance of Confession                                          521
  Necessity of Rules for the Confessor                              521
  Increase of Casuistical Literature                                521
  Distinction of subjective and objective Morality                  522
  Directory Office of the Confessor                                 522
  Difficulties of Casuistry                                         522
  Strict and Lax Schemes of it                                      523
  Convenience of the latter                                         523
  Favoured by the Jesuits                                           523
  The Causes of this                                                523
  Extravagance of the strict Casuists                               524
  Opposite Faults of Jesuits                                        524
  Suarez, De Legibus                                                524
  Titles of his Ten Books                                           524
  Heads of the Second Book                                          525
  Character of such Scholastic Treatises                            525
  Quotations of Suarez                                              525
  His Definition of Eternal Law                                     526
  Whether God is a Legislator                                       526
  Whether God could permit or commend wrong Actions                 527
  English Casuists--Perkins--Hall                                   527
  Selden, De Jure Naturali Juxta Hebræos                            528
  Jewish Theory of Natural Law                                      528
  Seven Precepts of the Sons of Noah                                528
  Character of Selden’s Work                                        528
  Grotius and Hobbes                                                528
  Charron on Wisdom                                                 529
  La Mothe le Vayer--his Dialogues                                  529
  Bacon’s Essays                                                    529
  Their Excellence                                                  530
  Feltham’s Resolves                                                530
  Browne’s Religio Medici                                           531
  Selden’s Table Talk                                               532
  Osborn’s Advice to his Son                                        532
  John Valentine Andrax                                             532
  Abandonment of Anti-Monarchical Theories                          533
  Political Literature becomes historical                           533
  Bellenden De Statu                                                534
  Campanella’s Politics                                             534
  La Mothe le Vayer                                                 534
  Naude’s Coups d’Etat                                              534
  Patriarchal Theory of Government                                  534
  Refuted by Suarez                                                 535
  His Opinion of Law                                                535
  Bacon                                                             536
  Political Economy                                                 536
  Serra on the Means of obtaining Money without Mines               537
  His Causes of Wealth                                              537
  His Praise of Venice                                              537
  Low Rate of Exchange not essential to wealth                      587
  Hobbes.--His Political Works                                      538
  Analysis of his Three Treatises                                   538
  Civil Jurists of this period                                      543
  Suarez on Laws                                                    544
  Grotius--De Jure Belli et Pacis                                   544
  Success of this Work                                              544
  Its Originality                                                   545
  Its Motive and Object                                             545
  His Authorities                                                   545
  Foundation of Natural Law                                         546
  Positive Law                                                      546
  Perfect and Imperfect Rights                                      546
  Lawful Cases of War                                               546
  Resistance by Subjects unlawful                                   547
  All Men naturally have Right of War                               547
  Right of Self-Defence                                             548
  Its Origin and Limitations                                        548
  Right of Occupancy                                                549
  Relinquishment of it                                              549
  Right over Persons--By Generation                                 549
  By Consent                                                        549
  In Marriage                                                       549
  In Commonwealths                                                  549
  Right of Alienating Subjects                                      549
  Alienation by Testament                                           550
  Rights of Property by Positive Law                                550
  Extinction of Rights                                              550
  Some Casuistical Questions                                        550
  Promises                                                          550
  Contracts                                                         551
  Considered ethically                                              551
  Promissory Oaths                                                  552
  Engagements of Kings towards Subjects                             552
  Public Treaties                                                   552
  Their Interpretation                                              553
  Obligation to repair Injury                                       553
  Rights by Law of Nations                                          554
  Those of Ambassadors                                              554
  Right of Sepulture                                                554
  Punishments                                                       554
  Their Responsibility                                              555
  Insufficient Causes of War                                        556
  Duty of avoiding it                                               556
  And Expediency                                                    556
  War for the sake of other Subjects                                556
  Allies                                                            556
  Strangers                                                         556
  None to Serve in an Unjust War                                    556
  Rights in War                                                     557
  Use of Deceit                                                     557
  Rules and Customs of Nations                                      557
  Reprisals                                                         557
  Declarations of War                                               557
  Rights by law of nations over Enemies                             558
  Prisoners become Slaves                                           558
  Rights of Postliminium                                            558
  Moral Limitation of Rights in War                                 558
  Moderation required as to spoil                                   559
  And as to Prisoners                                               559
  Also in Conquest                                                  559
  And in Restitution to right Owners                                559
  Promises to Enemies and Pirates                                   559
  Treaties concluded by competent Authority                         560
  Matters relating to them                                          561
  Truces and Conventions                                            561
  Those of Private persons                                          561
  Objections to Grotius made by Paley unreasonable                  561
  Reply of Mackintosh                                               561
  Censures of Stewart                                               562
  Answer to them                                                    562
  Grotius vindicated against Rousseau                               565
  His Arrangement                                                   565
  His Defects                                                       565


                            CHAPTER XXII.

                HISTORY OF POETRY FROM 1600 TO 1650.

  Low Estimation of the Seicentisti                                 566
  Not quite so great as formerly                                    566
  Praise of them by Rubbi                                           566
  Also by Salfi                                                     566
  Adone of Marini                                                   567
  Its Character                                                     567
  And Popularity                                                    567
  Secchia Rapita of Tassoni                                         568
  Chiabrera                                                         569
  His Followers                                                     569
  The Styles of Spanish Poetry                                      570
  The Romances                                                      570
  The Brothers Argensola                                            570
  Villegas                                                          571
  Quevedo                                                           571
  Defects of Taste in Spanish Verse                                 571
  Pedantry and far-fetched Allusions                                572
  Gongora                                                           572
  The Schools formed by him                                         573
  Malherbe                                                          573
  Criticisms upon his Poetry                                        574
  Satires of Regnier                                                574
  Racan--Maynard                                                    574
  Voiture                                                           574
  Sarrasin                                                          575
  Low state of German Literature                                    575
  Literary Societies                                                575
  Opitz                                                             575
  His Followers                                                     576
  Dutch Poetry                                                      576
  Spiegel                                                           576
  Hooft-Cats-Vondel                                                 577
  Danish Poetry                                                     577
  English Poets numerous in this age                                577
  Phineas Fletcher                                                  577
  Giles Fletcher                                                    578
  Philosophical Poetry                                              578
  Lord Brooke                                                       578
  Denham’s Cooper’s Hill                                            579
  Poets called Metaphysical                                         579
  Donne                                                             580
  Crashaw                                                           580
  Cowley                                                            580
  Johnson’s Character of him                                        580
  Narrative Poets--Daniel                                           580
  Drayton’s Polyolbion                                              581
  Browne’s Britannia’s Pastorals                                    581
  Sir John Beaumont                                                 582
  Davenant’s Gondibert                                              582
  Sonnets of Shakspeare                                             582
  The person whom they address                                      583
  Sonnets of Drummond and others                                    584
  Carew                                                             584
  Ben Jonson                                                        585
  Wither                                                            585
  Habington                                                         585
  Earl of Pembroke                                                  585
  Suckling                                                          586
  Lovelace                                                          586
  Herrick                                                           586
  Milton                                                            586
  His Comus                                                         586
  Lycidas                                                           587
  Allegro and Penseroso                                             587
  Ode on the Nativity                                               588
  His Sonnets                                                       588
  Anonymous Poetry                                                  588
  Latin Poets of France                                             588
  In Germany and Italy                                              588
  In Holland--Heinsius                                              589
  Casimir Sarbievius                                                589
  Barlæus                                                           589
  Balde--Greek Poems of Heinsius                                    590
  Latin Poets of Scotland--Jonston’s Psalms                         590
  Owen’s Epigrams                                                   590
  Alabaster’s Roxana                                                590
  May’s Supplement to Lucan                                         590
  Milton’s Latin Poems                                              591


                           CHAPTER XXIII.

          HISTORY OF DRAMATIC LITERATURE FROM 1600 TO 1650.

  Decline of the Italian Theatre                                    591
  Filli de Sciro                                                    592
  Translations of Spanish Dramas                                    592
  Extemporaneous Comedy                                             593
  Spanish Stage                                                     593
  Calderon--Number of his Pieces                                    593
  His Comedies                                                      593
  La Vida es Sueno                                                  594
  A Secreto agravio secreta vengança                                595
  Style of Calderon                                                 595
  His Merits sometimes over-rated                                    596
  Plays of Hardy                                                    596
  The Cid                                                           597
  Style of Corneille                                                598
  Les Horaces                                                       598
  Cimia                                                             598
  Polyeucte                                                         599
  Rodogune                                                          599
  Pompey                                                            599
  Heraclius                                                         599
  Nicomède                                                          600
  Faults and Beauties of Corneille                                  600
  Le Menteur                                                        600
  Other French Tragedies                                            600
  Wenceslas of Rotron                                               600
  Popularity of the Stage under Elizabeth                           601
  Number of Theatres                                                601
  Encouraged by James                                               601
  General Taste for the Stage                                       601
  Theatres closed by the Parliament                                 602
  Shakspeare’s Twelfth Night                                        602
  Merry Wives of Windsor                                            603
  Measure for Measure                                               604
  Lear                                                              604
  Timon of Athens                                                   604
  Pericles                                                          605
  His Roman Tragedies--Julius Cæsar                                 606
  Antony and Cleopatra                                              606
  Coriolanus                                                        606
  His Retirement and Death                                          607
  Greatness of his Genius                                           607
  His Judgment                                                      607
  His Obscurity                                                     608
  His Popularity                                                    608
  Critics on Shakspeare                                             609
  Ben Jonson                                                        609
  The Alchemist                                                     609
  Volpone, or The Fox                                               610
  The Silent Woman                                                  610
  Sad Shepherd                                                      611
  Beaumont and Fletcher                                             611
  Corrupt State of their Text                                       611
  The Maid’s Tragedy                                                611
  Philaster                                                         612
  King and no King                                                  613
  The Elder Brother                                                 613
  The Spanish Curate                                                613
  The Custom of the Country                                         613
  The Loyal Subject                                                 613
  Beggar’s Bush                                                     613
  The Scornful Lady                                                 614
  Valentinian                                                       614
  The Two Noble Kinsmen                                             615
  The Faithful Shepherdess                                          615
  Rule a Wife, and have a Wife                                      616
  Some other Plays                                                  616
  Origin of Fletcher’s Plays                                        616
  Defects of their plots                                            616
  Their Sentiments and Style Dramatic                               617
  Their Characters                                                  617
  Their Tragedies                                                   617
  Inferior to their Comedies                                        618
  Their Female Characters                                           618
  Massinger--Nature of his Dramas                                   619
  His Delineations of Character                                     619
  His Subjects                                                      619
  Beauty of His Style                                               620
  Inferiority of his Comic Powers                                   620
  Some of his Tragedies particularized                              620
  And of his other Plays                                            620
  Ford                                                              621
  Shirley                                                           621
  Heywood                                                           622
  Webster                                                           622
  His Duchess of Malfy                                              622
  Vittoria Corombona                                                622


                            CHAPTER XXIV.

        HISTORY OF POLITE LITERATURE IN PROSE FROM 1600 TO 1650.

  Decline of Taste in Italy                                         623
  Style of Galileo                                                  624
  Bentivoglio                                                       624
  Boccalini’s News from Parnassus                                   624
  His Pietra del Paragone                                           625
  Terrante Pallavicino                                              625
  Dictionary Delia Crusca                                           625
  Grammatical Works--Buonmattei--Bartoli                            626
  Tassoni’s Remarks on Petrarch                                     626
  Galileo’s Remarks on Tasso                                        626
  Sforza Pallavicino                                                626
  And other Critical Writers                                        626
  Prolusiones of Strada                                             627
  Spanish Prose--Gracian                                            627
  French Prose--Du Vair                                             627
  Balzac                                                            628
  Character of his Writings                                         628
  His Letters                                                       628
  Voiture--Hotel Rambouillet                                        629
  Establishment of French Academy                                   630
  Its objects and Constitution                                      630
  It publishes a Critique on the Cid                                631
  Vaugelas’s Remarks on the French Language                         631
  La Mothe le Vayer                                                 632
  Legal Speeches of Patru                                           632
  And of Le Maistre                                                 632
  Improvement in English Style                                      633
  Earl of Essex                                                     633
  Knolles’s History of the Turks                                    634
  Raleigh’s History of the World                                    635
  Daniel’s History of England                                       635
  Bacon                                                             635
  Milton                                                            636
  Clarendon                                                         636
  The Icon Basilice                                                 636
  Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy                                    637
  Earle’s Characters                                                637
  Overbury’s Characters                                             637
  Jonson’s Discoveries                                              637
  Publication of Don Quixote                                        638
  Its Reputation                                                    638
  New Views of its Design                                           638
  Probably erroneous                                                638
  Difference between the two Parts                                  639
  Excellence of this Romance                                        639
  Minor Novels of Cervantes                                         639
  Other Novels--Spanish                                             639
  And Italian                                                       639
  French Romances--Astrée                                           639
  Heroic Romances--Gomberville                                      640
  Calprenède                                                        640
  Scuderi                                                           641
  Argenis of Barclay                                                641
  His Euphormis                                                     643
  Campanella’s City of the Sun                                      643
  Few Books of Fiction in England                                   643
  Mundus Alter et Idem of Hall                                      644
  Godwin’s Journey to the Moon                                      644
  Howell’s Dodona’s Grove                                           644
  Adventures of Baron de Fænesle                                    644


                            CHAPTER XXV.

    HISTORY OF MATHEMATICAL AND PHYSICAL SCIENCE FROM 1600 TO 1650.

  State of Science in 16th Century                                  645
  Tediousness of Calculations                                       645
  Napier’s Invention of Logarithms                                  645
  Their Nature                                                      645
  Property of Numbers discovered by Stifelius                       645
  Extended to Magnitudes                                            646
  By Napier                                                         646
  Tables of Napier and Briggs                                       646
  Kepler’s New Geometry                                             647
  Its Difference from the Ancient                                   647
  Adopted by Galileo                                                648
  Extended by Cavalieri                                             648
  Applied to the Ratios of Solids                                   648
  Problem of the Cycloid                                            648
  Progress of Algebra                                               649
  Briggs--Girard                                                    649
  Harriott                                                          649
  Descartes                                                         650
  His Application of Algebra to Curves                              650
  Suspected Plagiarism from Harriot                                 650
  Fermat                                                            651
  Algebraic Geometry not successful at first                        652
  Astronomy--Kepler                                                 652
  Conjectures as to Comets                                          652
  Galileo’s Discovery of Jupiter’s Satellites                       653
  Other Discoveries by him                                          653
  Spots of the Sun discovered                                       653
  Copernican System held by Galileo                                 654
  His Dialogues, and Persecution                                    654
  Descartes alarmed by this                                         655
  Progress of Copernican System                                     655
  Descartes denies General Gravitation                              655
  Cartesian Theory of the World                                     655
  Transits of Mercury and Venus                                     656
  Laws of Mechanics                                                 656
  Statics of Galileo                                                657
  His Dynamics                                                      657
  Mechanics of Descartes                                            658
  Law of Motion laid down by Descartes                              658
  Also those of Compound Forces                                     659
  Other Discoveries in Mechanics                                    659
  In Hydrostatics and Pneumatics                                    659
  Optics--Discoveries of Kepler                                     660
  Invention of the Telescope                                        660
  Of the Microscope                                                 660
  Antonio de Dominis                                                660
  Dioptrics of Descartes--Law of Refraction                         661
  Disputed by Fermat                                                661
  Curves of Descartes                                               661
  Theory of the Rainbow                                             661


                            CHAPTER XXVI.

   HISTORY OF SOME OTHER PROVINCES OF LITERATURE FROM 1600 TO 1650.

  Aldrovandus                                                       662
  Clusius                                                           662
  Rio and Marcgraf                                                  662
  Jonston                                                           662
  Fabricius on the Language of Brutes                               663
  Botany--Columna                                                   664
  John and Gaspar Bauhin                                            664
  Parkinson                                                         664
  Valves of the Veins discovered                                    665
  Theory of the Blood’s Circulation                                 665
  Sometimes ascribed to Servetus                                    665
  To Columbus                                                       666
  And to Cæsalpin                                                   666
  Generally unknown before Harvey                                   667
  His Discovery                                                     667
  Unjustly doubted to be Original                                   667
  Harvey’s Treatise on Generation                                   668
  Lacteals discovered by Asellius                                   668
  Optical Discoveries of Scheiner                                   669
  Medicine--Van Helmont                                             669
  Diffusion of Hebrew                                               669
  Language not studied in the best method                           669
  The Buxtorfs                                                      670
  Vowel Points rejected by Cappel                                   670
  Hebrew Scholars                                                   671
  Chaldee and Syriac                                                671
  Arabic                                                            671
  Erpenius                                                          671
  Golius                                                            671
  Other Eastern Languages                                           672
  Purchas’s Pilgrim                                                 672
  Olearius and Pietro della Valle                                   672
  Lexicon of Ferrari                                                672
  Maps of Blaew                                                     672
  Davila and Bentivoglio                                            673
  Mendoza’s Wars of Granada                                         673
  Mezeray                                                           673
  English Historians                                                673
  English Histories                                                 673
  Universities                                                      673
  Bodleian Library founded                                          674
  Casaubon’s Account of Oxford                                      674
  Catalogue of Bodleian Library                                     674
  Continental Libraries                                             675
  Italian Academies                                                 675
  The Lincei                                                        675
  Prejudice for Antiquity diminished                                676
  Browne’s Vulgar Errors                                            677
  Life and Character of Peiresc                                     677


                           CHAPTER XXVII.

      HISTORY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE IN EUROPE FROM 1650 TO 1700.

  James Frederic Gronovius                                          678
  James Gronovius                                                   679
  Grævius                                                           679
  Isaac Vossius                                                     679
  Decline of German Learning                                        679
  Spanheim                                                          679
  Jesuit Colleges in France                                         679
  Port-Royal Writers--Lancelot                                      679
  Latin Writers--Perizonius                                         680
  Delphin Editions                                                  680
  Le Fevre and the Daciers                                          680
  Henry Valois--Complaints of Decay of Learning                     680
  English Learning--Duport                                          681
  Greek not much studied                                            681
  Gataker’s Cinnus and Antoninus                                    681
  Stanley’sÆschylus                                                682
  Other English Philologers                                         682
  Bentley                                                           682
  His Epistle to Mill                                               682
  Dissertation on Phalaris                                          682
  Disadvantages of Scholars in that Age                             683
  Thesauri of Grævius and of Gronovius                              683
  Fabretti                                                          684
  Numismatics, Spanheim--Vaillant                                   684
  Chronology--Usher                                                 684
  Pezron                                                            685
  Marsham                                                           685


                           CHAPTER XXVIII.

        HISTORY OF THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE FROM 1650 TO 1700.

  Decline of Papal Influence                                        685
  Dispute of Louis XIV. with Innocent XI.                           686
  Four Articles of 1682                                             686
  Dupin on the ancient Discipline                                   686
  Dupin’s Ecclesiastical Library                                    687
  Fleury’s Ecclesiastical History                                   687
  His Dissertations                                                 687
  Protestant Controversy in France                                  688
  Bossuet’s Exposition of Catholic Faith                            688
  His Conference with Claude                                        688
  Correspondence with Molanus and Leibnitz                          689
  His Variations of Protestant Churches                             690
  Anglican Writings against Popery                                  690
  Taylor’s Dissuasive                                               690
  Barrow--Stillingfleet                                             690
  Jansenius                                                         691
  Condemnation of his Augustinus in France                          691
  And at Rome                                                       691
  The Jansenists take a Distinction                                 692
  And are Persecuted                                                692
  Progress of Arminianism                                           692
  Courcelles                                                        693
  Limborch                                                          693
  Le Clerc                                                          693
  Sancroft’s Fur Prædestinatus                                      693
  Arminianism in England                                            694
  Bull’s Harmonia Apostolica                                        694
  Hammond--Locke--Wilkins                                           694
  Socinians in England                                              695
  Bull’s Defensio Fidei Nicenæ                                      695
  Not Satisfactory to all                                           695
  Mystics                                                           696
  Fenelon                                                           696
  Change in the Character of Theological Literature                 696
  Freedom of many Writings                                          696
  Thoughts of Pascal                                                697
  Vindications of Christianity                                      699
  Progress of Tolerant Principles                                   700
  Bayle’s Philosophical Commentary                                  700
  Locke’s Letter on Toleration                                      700
  French Sermons                                                    701
  Bourdaloue                                                        701
  Compared with Bossuet                                             702
  Funeral Discourses of Bossuet                                     702
  Fléchier                                                          703
  English Sermons--Barrow                                           703
  South                                                             704
  Tillotson                                                         704
  Expository Theology                                               704
  Pearson on the Creed                                              704
  Simon’s Critical Histories                                        705


                            CHAPTER XXIX.

         HISTORY OF SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY FROM 1650 TO 1700.

  Aristotelian Metaphysics                                          705
  Their Decline. Thomas White                                       706
  Logic                                                             706
  Stanley’s History of Philosophy                                   707
  Gale’s Court of Gentiles                                          707
  Cudworth’s Intellectual System                                    707
  Its object                                                        708
  Sketch of it                                                      708
  His plastic nature                                                708
  His account of old Philosophy                                     708
  His Arguments against Atheism                                     709
  More                                                              709
  Gassendi                                                          710
  His Logic                                                         710
  His Theory of Ideas                                               710
  And of the Nature of the Soul                                     710
  Distinguishes Ideas of Reflection                                 711
  Also Intellect from Imagination                                   711
  His Philosophy misunderstood by Stewart                           712
  Bernier’s Epitome of Gassendi                                     713
  Process of Cartesian Philosophy                                   713
  La Forge--Regis                                                   714
  Huet’s Censure of Cartesianism                                    715
  Port-Royal Logic                                                  716
  Malebranche                                                       717
  His Style                                                         717
  Sketch of his Theory                                              717
  Character of Malebranche                                          724
  Compared with Pascal                                              724
  Arnauld on True and False ideas                                   725
  Norris                                                            725
  Pascal                                                            725
  Spinosa’s Ethics                                                  726
  Its general Originality                                           726
  View of his Metaphysical Theory                                   727
  Spinosa’s Theory of action and Passion                            731
  Character of Spinosism                                            732
  Glanvil’s Scepsis Scientifica                                     733
  His Plus Ultra                                                    734
  Dalgarno                                                          735
  Wilkins                                                           736
  Locke on Human Understanding                                      736
  Its merits                                                        736
  Its Defects                                                       737
  Origin of Ideas according to Locke                                737
  Vague Use of the Word Idea                                        738
  An Error as to Geometrical Figure                                 739
  His Notions as to the Soul                                        740
  And its Immateriality                                             740
  His Love of Truth and Originality                                 741
  Defended in two cases                                             742
  His View of Lunatic Ideas                                         742
  General Praise                                                    743
  Locke’s Conduct of Understanding                                  743


                            CHAPTER XXX.

    HISTORY OF MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND OF JURISPRUDENCE
                         FROM 1650 TO 1700.

  Casuistry of the Jesuits                                          744
  Pascal’s Provincial Letters                                       744
  Their Truth questioned by some                                    744
  Taylor’s Ductor Dubitantium                                       745
  Its Character and Defects                                         745
  Cudworth’s immutable Morality                                     745
  Nicole--La Placette                                               746
  Other Writers                                                     746
  Moral System of Spinosa                                           746
  Cumberland’s De Legibus Naturæ                                    747
  Analysis of Prolegomena                                           748
  His Theory expanded afterwards                                    749
  Remarks on Cumberland’s Theory                                    752
  Puffendorf’s Law of Nature and Nations                            753
  Analysis of this Work                                             754
  Puffendorf and Paley compared                                     757
  Rochefoucault                                                     757
  La Bruyère                                                        758
  Education--Milton’s Tractrate                                     758
  Locke on Education--Its merits                                    759
  And Defects                                                       759
  Fenelon on Female Education                                       761
  Puffendorf’s Theory of Politics                                   762
  Politics of Spinosa                                               764
  His Theory of a Monarchy                                          766
  Amelot de la Houssaye                                             766
  Harrington’s Oceana                                               766
  Patriarcha of Filmer                                              767
  Sydney’s Discourses on Government                                 767
  Locke on Government                                               768
  Observations on this Treatise                                     771
  Avis auz Refugiéz, perhaps by Bayle                               772
  Political Economist’s                                            772
  Mun on Foreign Trade                                              773
  Child on Trade                                                    773
  Locke on the Coin                                                 773
  Statistical Tracts                                                774
  Works of Leibnitz on Roman Law                                    775
  Civil Jurists--Godefroy--Domat                                    775
  Noodt of Usury                                                    776
  Law of Nations--Puffendorf                                        776


                            CHAPTER XXXI.

                 HISTORY OF POETRY FROM 1650 TO 1700.

  Improved Tone of Italian Poetry                                   776
  Filicaja                                                          777
  Guidi                                                             777
  Menzini                                                           778
  Salvator Rosa--Redi                                               778
  Other Poets                                                       778
  Christina’s Patronage of Letters                                  778
  Society of Arcadians                                              778
  La Fontaine                                                       779
  Character of his Fables                                           779
  Boileau: His Epistles                                             780
  His Art of Poetry                                                 780
  Comparison with Horace                                            780
  The Lutrin                                                        780
  General Character of his Poetry                                   780
  Lyric Poetry lighter than before                                  781
  Benserade                                                         781
  Chaulieu                                                          781
  Pastoral Poetry                                                   781
  Segrais                                                           781
  Deshouliéres                                                      781
  Fontenelle                                                        782
  Bad Epic Poems                                                    782
  German Poetry                                                     782
  Waller                                                            782
  Butler’s Hudibras                                                 783
  Paradise Lost--Choice of Subject                                  783
  Open to some Difficulties                                         783
  Its Arrangement                                                   783
  Characters of Adam and Eve                                        784
  He owes less to Homer than the Tragedians                         784
  Compared with Dante                                               784
  Elevation of his Style                                            785
  His Blindness                                                     786
  His Passion for Music                                             786
  Faults in Paradise Lost                                           786
  Its Progress to Fame                                              786
  Paradise Regained                                                 787
  Samson Agonistes                                                  787
  Dryden--His earlier Poems                                         787
  Absalom and Achitophel                                            788
  Mac Flecknoe                                                      788
  The Hind and Panther                                              789
  Its Singular Fable                                                789
  Its Reasoning                                                     789
  The Fables                                                        789
  His Odes--Alexander’s Feast                                       790
  His Translation of Virgil                                         790
  Decline of Poetry from the Restoration                            790
  Some Minor Poets enumerated                                       790
  Latin Poets of Italy                                              791
  Ceva                                                              791
  Sergardi                                                          791
  Of France--Quillet                                                791
  Menage                                                            792
  Rapin on Gardens                                                  792
  Santeul                                                           793
  Latin Poetry in England                                           793


                           CHAPTER XXXII.

          HISTORY OF DRAMATIC LITERATURE FROM 1650 TO 1700.

  Italian and Spanish Drama                                         793
  Racine’s first Tragedies                                          793
  Andromaque                                                        794
  Britannicus                                                       795
  Berenice                                                          795
  Bajazet                                                           795
  Mithridate                                                        796
  Iphigénie                                                         796
  Phèdre                                                            797
  Esther                                                            797
  Athalie                                                           797
  Racine’s Female Characters                                        798
  Racine compared with Corneille                                    798
  Beauty of his Style                                               798
  Thomas Corneille--His Ariane                                      799
  Manlius of La Fosse                                               799
  Molière                                                           799
  L’Avare                                                           799
  L’Ecole des Femmes                                                800
  Le Misanthrope                                                    800
  Les Femmes Savantes                                               801
  Tartuffe                                                          801
  Bourgeois Gentilhomme--George Dandin                              801
  Character of Molière                                              802
  Les Plaideurs of Racine                                           802
  Regnard--Le Joueur                                                802
  His Other Plays                                                   803
  Quinault--Boursault                                               803
  Dancourt                                                          803
  Brueys                                                            804
  Operas of Quinault                                                804
  Revival of the English Theatre                                    804
  Change of Public Taste                                            804
  Its Causes                                                        805
  Heroic Tragedies of Dryden                                        805
  His later Tragedies                                               805
  Don Sebastian                                                     806
  Spanish Friar                                                     806
  Otway                                                             806
  Southern                                                          807
  Lee                                                               807
  Congreve                                                          807
  Comedies of Charles II.’s Reign                                   807
  Wycherley                                                         808
  Improvement after the Revolution                                  808
  Congreve                                                          808
  Love for Love                                                     808
  His other Comedies                                                808
  Farquhar--Vanbrugh                                                809


                           CHAPTER XXXIII.

        HISTORY OF POLITE LITERATURE IN PROSE FROM 1650 TO 1700.

  Low State of Literature in Italy                                  809
  Crescimbeni                                                       810
  Age of Louis XIV. in France                                       810
  Fontenelle--his Character                                         810
  His Dialogues of the Dead                                         811
  Those of Fenelon                                                  811
  Fontenelle’s Plurality of Worlds                                  811
  His History of Oracles                                            811
  St. Evremond                                                      812
  Madame de Sevigné                                                 812
  The French Academy                                                812
  French Grammars                                                   813
  Bouhour’s Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène                         813
  Attacked by Barbier d’Ancour                                      814
  La Manière de Bien Penser                                         815
  Rapin’s Reflections on Eloquence and Poetry                       815
  His Parallel’s of Great Men                                       815
  Bossu on Epic Poetry                                              816
  Fontenelle’s Critical Writings                                    816
  Preference of French Language to Latin                            816
  General Superiority of Ancients disputed                          816
  Charles Perrault                                                  816
  Fontenelle                                                        817
  Boileau’s Defence of Antiquity                                    817
  First Reviews--Journal des Sçavans                                817
  Reviews Established by Bayle                                      818
  Reviews Established by Le Clerc                                   818
  Leipsic Acts                                                      819
  Bayle’s Thoughts on the Comet                                     819
  His Dictionary                                                    819
  Baillet--Morhof                                                   820
  The Ana                                                           820
  English Style in this Period                                      820
  Hobbes                                                            821
  Cowley                                                            821
  Evelyn                                                            821
  Dryden                                                            821
  His Essay on Dramatic Poesy                                       822
  Improvements in his Style                                         823
  His Critical Character                                            823
  Rymer on Tragedy                                                  823
  Sir William Temple’s Essays                                       824
  Style of Locke                                                    824
  Sir George Mackenzie’s Essays                                     824
  Andrew Fletcher                                                   824
  Walton’s Complete Angler                                          824
  Wilkins’ New World                                                824
  Antiquity defended by Temple                                      825
  Wotton’s Reflection’s                                             825
  Quevedo’s Visions                                                 825
  French Heroic Romances                                            826
  Novels of Madame La Fayette                                       826
  Scarron’s Roman Comique                                           826
  Cyrano de Bergerac                                                827
  Segrais                                                           827
  Perrault                                                          827
  Hamilton                                                          827
  Télémaque of Fenelon                                              827
  Deficiency of English Romances                                    828
  Pilgrim’s Progress                                                828
  Turkish Spy                                                       829
  Chiefly of English Origin                                         830
  Swift’s Tale of a Tub                                             831


                           CHAPTER XXXIV.

      HISTORY OF PHYSICAL AND OTHER LITERATURE FROM 1650 TO 1700.

  Reasons for omitting Mathematics                                  831
  Academy del Cimento                                               831
  Royal Society                                                     832
  Academy of Sciences at Paris                                      832
  State of Chemistry                                                832
  Becker                                                            833
  Boyle                                                             833
  His Metaphysical Works                                            833
  Extract from one of them                                          833
  His Merits in Physics and Chemistry                               834
  General Character of Boyle                                        834
  Of Hooke and Others                                               834
  Lemery                                                            835
  Slow Progress of Zoology                                          835
  Before Ray                                                        835
  His Synopsis of Quadrupeds                                        835
  Merits of this Work                                               835
  Redi                                                              836
  Swammerdam                                                        836
  Lister                                                            836
  Comparative Anatomy                                               836
  Botany                                                            837
  Jungius                                                           837
  Morison                                                           837
  Ray                                                               837
  Rivinus                                                           838
  Tournefort                                                        838
  Vegetable Physiology                                              839
  Grew                                                              839
  His Anatomy of Plants                                             840
  He discovers the Sexual System                                    840
  Camerarius confirms this                                          840
  Predecessors of Grew                                              840
  Malpighi                                                          840
  Early Notions of Geology                                          840
  Burnet’s Theory of Earth                                          840
  Other Geologists                                                  841
  Protogæa of Leibnitz                                              841
  Circulation of Blood Established                                  842
  Willis--Vieussens                                                 842
  Malpighi                                                          842
  Other Anatomists                                                  842
  Medical Theories                                                  843
  Polyglott of Walton                                               843
  Hottinger                                                         844
  Spencer                                                           844
  Bochart                                                           844
  Pococke                                                           844
  D’Herbelot                                                        844
  Hyde                                                              844
  Maps of the Sansons                                               844
  De Lisle’s Map of the World                                       845
  Voyages and Travels                                               845
  Historians                                                        845
  De Solis                                                          845
  Memoirs of De Retz                                                845
  Bossuet on Universal History                                      846
  English Historical Works                                          846
  Burnet                                                            846
  General Character of 17th Century                                 846
  Conclusion                                                        847




                           INTRODUCTION

                              TO THE

                       LITERATURE OF EUROPE

                 IN THE FIFTEENTH, SIXTEENTH, AND
                       SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES.


                          CHAPTER XVIII.

     HISTORY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE IN EUROPE, FROM 1600 TO 1650.


                             SECT. I.

_Decline of merely philological, especially Greek, Learning--Casaubon--
Viger--Editions of Greek and Latin Classics--Critical Writings--Latin
Style--Scioppius--Vossius--Successive Periods of modern Latinists._

|Learning of 17th century less philological.|

1. In every period of literary history, if we should listen to the
complaints of contemporary writers, all learning and science have been
verging towards extinction. None remain of the mighty, the race of
giants is no more; the lights that have been extinguished burn in no
other hands; we have fallen on evil days, when letters are no longer
in honour with the world, nor are they cultivated by those who deserve
to be honoured. Such are the lamentations of many throughout the whole
sixteenth century; and with such do Scaliger and Casaubon greet that
which opened upon them. Yet the first part of the seventeenth century
may be reckoned eminently the learned age; rather however in a more
critical and exact erudition with respect to historical fact, than in
what is strictly called philology, as to which we cannot, on the
whole, rank this so high as the preceding period. Neither Italy nor
Germany maintained its reputation, which, as it has been already
mentioned, had begun to wane towards the close of the sixteenth
century. The same causes were b work, the same preference of studies
very foreign to polite letters, metaphysical philosophy, dogmatic
theology, patristic or mediæval ecclesiastical history, or, in some
countries, the physical sciences, which were rapidly gaining ground.
And to these we must add a prevalence of bad taste, even among those
who had some pretensions to be reckoned scholars. Lipsius had set an
example of abandoning the purest models; and his followers had less
sense and taste than himself. They sought obsolete terms from Pacuvius
and Plautus, they affected pointed sentences, and a studied
conciseness of period, which made their style altogether dry and
jejune.[1] The universities, and even the gymnasia or schools of
Germany, grew negligent of all the beauties of language. Latin itself
was acquired in a slovenly manner, by help of modern books, which
spared the pains of acquiring any subsidiary knowledge of antiquity.
And this neglect of the ancient writers in education caused even
eminent scholars to write ill, as we perceive in the supplements of
Freinshemius to Curtius and Livy.[2]

     [1] Biogr. Univ. art. Grævius. Eichhorn, iii. 1. 320.

     [2] Eichhorn, 326.

|Popularity of Comenius.|

2. A sufficient evidence of this is found in the vast popularity which
the writings of Comenius acquired in Germany. This author, a man of
much industry, some ingenuity, and little judgment, made
himself a colossal reputation by his Orbis Sensualium Pictus, and
still more by his Janua Linguarum Reserata, the latter published in
1631. This contains, in 100 chapters subdivided into 1000 paragraphs,
more than 9300 Latin words, exclusive, of course, of such as recur.
The originality of its method consists in weaving all useful words
into a series of paragraphs, so that they may be learned in a short
time, without the tediousness of a nomenclature. It was also intended
to blend a knowledge of things with one of words.[3] The Orbis
Sensualium Pictus has the same end. This is what has since been so
continually attempted in books of education, that some may be
surprised to hear of its originality. No one, however, before Comenius
seems to have thought of this method. It must, unquestionably, have
appeared to facilitate the early acquirement of knowledge in a very
great degree; and even with reference to language, if a compendious
mode of getting at Latin words were the object, the works of Comenius
would answer the purpose beyond those of any classical author. In a
country where Latin was a living and spoken tongue, as was in some
measure the case with Germany, no great strictness in excluding
barbarous phrases is either practicable or expedient. But, according
to the received principles of philological literature, they are such
books as every teacher would keep out of the hands of his pupils. They
were, nevertheless, reprinted and translated in many countries; and
obtained a general reception, especially in the German empire, and
similarly circumstanced kingdoms.[4]

     [3] Biogr. Univ.

     [4] Baillet, Critiques Grammairiens, part of the Jugemens des
     Sçavans (whom I cite by the number or paragraph, on account of
     the different editions), No. 634, quotes Lancelot’s remark on the
     Janua Linguarum, that it requires a better memory than most boys
     possess to master it, and that commonly the first part is
     forgotten before the last is learned. It excites disgust in the
     scholar, because he is always in a new country, every chapter
     being filled with words he has not seen before; and the
     successive parts of the book have no connection with one another.

     Morhof, though he would absolutely banish the Janua Linguarum
     from all schools where good Latinity is required, seems to think
     rather better of the Orbis Sensualium Pictus, as in itself a
     happy idea, though the delineations are indifferent, and the
     whole not so well arranged as it might be. Polyhistor. lib. ii.
     c. 4.

|Decline of Greek learning.|

3. The Greek language, meantime, was thought unnecessary, and few,
comparatively speaking, continued to prosecute its study. In Italy it
can merely be said that there were still professors of it in the
universities; but no one Hellenist distinguishes this century. Most of
those who published editions of Greek authors in Germany, and they
were far from numerous, had been formed in the last age. The decline
was progressive; few scholars remained after 1620, and a long blank
ensued, until Fabricius and Kuster restored the study of Greek near
the end of the century. Even in France and Holland, where many were
abundantly learned, and some, as we shall see, accomplished
philologers, the Greek language seems to have been either less
regarded, or at least less promoted by eminent scholars, than in the
preceding century.[5]

     [5] Scaliger, even in 1602, says: Quis hodie nescit Græcè? sed
     quis est doctus Græcè? Non dubito esse aliquot, sed paucos, et
     quos non novi ne de nomine quidem. Te unum novi et memoriæ avorum
     et nostri sæculi Græcè doctissimum, qui unus in Græcis
     præstiteris, quæ post renatas apud nos bonas literas omnes
     nunquam præstare potuissent. He goes on to speak of himself, as
     standing next to Casaubon, and the only competent judge of the
     extent of his learning; qui de præstantia doctrinæ tuæ certo
     judicare possit, ego aut unicus sum, aut qui cæteros hac in re
     magno intervallo vinco. Scal. Epist. 72.

|Casaubon.|

4. Casaubon now stood on the pinnacle of critical renown. His Persius
in 1605, and his Polybius in 1609, were testimonies to his continued
industry in this province.[6] But with this latter edition the
philological labours of Casaubon came to an end. In 1610 he accepted
the invitation of James I., who bestowed upon him, though a layman, a
prebend in the church of Canterbury, and, as some, perhaps
erroneously, have said, another in that of Westminster.[7] He died in
England within four years after, having consumed the intermediate time
in the defence of his royal patron against the Jesuits, and in writing
Animadversions on the Annals of Baronius; works ill-suited to
his peculiar talent, and in the latter of which he is said to have had
but little success. He laments, in his epistles, the want of leisure
for completing his labours on Polybius; the king had no taste but for
theology, and he found no library in which he could pursue his
studies.[8] “I gave up,” he says, “at last, with great sorrow, my
commentary on Polybius, to which I had devoted so much time, but the
good king must be obeyed.”[9] Casaubon was the last of the great
scholars of the sixteenth century. Joseph Scaliger, who, especially in
his recorded conversation, was very sparing of praise, says expressly,
“Casaubon is the most learned man now living.” It is not impossible
that he meant to except himself; which would by no means be unjust, if
we take in the whole range of erudition; but in the exactly critical
knowledge of the Greek language, Casaubon had not even a rival in
Scaliger.

     [6] The translation that Casaubon has here given of Polybius has
     generally passed for excellent, though some have thought him a
     better scholar in Greek than in Latin, and consequently not
     always able to render the sense as well as he conceived it.
     Baillet, n. 902. Schweighauser praises the annotations, but not
     without criticism, for which a later editor generally finds room
     in an earlier. Reiske, he says, had pointed out many errors.

     [7] The latter is contradicted by Beloe, Anecdotes of Literature,
     vol. v., p. 126, on the authority of Le Neve’s Fasti Ecclesiæ
     Anglicanæ.

     [8] Jacent curæ Polybianæ, et fortasse æternum jacebunt, neque
     enim satis commodus ad illa studia est locus. Epist. 705. Plura
     adderem, nisi omni librorum præsidio meorum deficerer. Quare
     etiam de commentariis Polybianis noli meminisse, quando rationes
     priorum meorum studiorum hoc iter mirificè conturbavit, ut vix
     sine suspirio ejus incepti possim meminisse, quod tot vigiliis
     mihi constitit. Sed neque adest mea bibliotheca, neque ea studia
     multum sunt ad gustum illius, cujus solius, quamdiu hic sum
     futurus, habenda mihi ratio. Ep. 704 (Feb. 1611). Rex optimus
     atque ευσεβεστατος [eusebestatos] rebus theologicis ita
     delectatur, ut aliis curis literariis non multum operæ impendat.
     Ep. 872. Ego quid hic agam, si cupis scire, hoc unum respondebo,
     omnia priora studia mea funditus interiisse. Nam maximus rex et
     liberalissimus unico genere literarum sic capitur, ut suum et
     suorum ingenia in illo detineat. Ep. 753.

     [9] Decessi gemens a Polybiano commentario, quem tot laboribus
     concinnaveram; sed regi optimo parendum erat. Ep. 854. Feb. 1613.

|Viger de Idiotismis.|

5. A long period ensued, during which no very considerable progress
was made in Greek literature. Few books occur before the year 1650
which have obtained a durable reputation. The best known, and, as I
conceive, by far the best of a grammatical nature, is that of Viger de
Idiotismis præcipuis Græcæ Linguæ, which Hoogeveen and Zeunius
successively enlarged in the last century. Viger was a Jesuit of
Rouen, and the first edition was in 1632. It contains, even as it came
from the author, many valuable criticisms, and its usefulness to a
Greek scholar is acknowledged. But, in order to determine the place of
Viger among grammarians, we should ascertain by comparison with
preceding works, especially the Thesaurus of Stephens, for how much he
is indebted to their labours. He would probably, after all deductions,
appear to merit great praise. His arrangement is more clear, and his
knowledge of syntax more comprehensive, than that of Caninius or any
other earlier writer; but his notions are not unfrequently imperfect
or erroneous, as the succeeding editors have pointed out. In common
with many of the older grammarians, he fancied a difference of sense
between the two aorists, wherein even Zeunius has followed him.[10]

     [10] An earlier treatise on Greek particles by Devarius, a Greek
     of the Ionian Islands, might have been mentioned in the last
     volume. It was republished by Reusmann, who calls Devarius, homo
     olim haud ignobilis, at hodie pæne neglectus. He is thought too
     subtle in grammar, but seems to have been an excellent scholar. I
     do not perceive that Viger has borrowed from him.

|Weller’s Greek grammar.|

6. In a much lower rank, we may perhaps next place Weller, author of a
Greek grammar, published in 1638, of which its later editor, Fischer,
says that it has always stood in high repute as a school-book, and
been frequently reprinted; meaning, doubtless, in Germany. There is
nothing striking in Weller’s grammar; it may deserve praise for
clearness and brevity; but, in Vergara, Caninius, and Sylburgius,
there is much more instruction for those who are not merely
schoolboys. What is most remarkable is, that Weller claims as his own
the reduction of the declensions to three, and of the conjugations to
one; which, as has been seen in a former chapter,[11] is found in the
grammar of Sylburgius, and is probably due to Ramus. This is rather a
piece of effrontery, as he could scarcely have lighted by coincidence
on both these innovations. Weller has given no syntax; what is added
in Fischer’s edition is by Lambert Bos.

     [11] Page 239.

|Labbe and others.|

|Salmasius de Lingua Hellenistica.|

7. Philip Labbe, a French Jesuit, was a laborious compiler, among
whose numerous works not a few relate to the grammar of the Greek
language. He had, says Niceron, a wonderful talent in multiplying
title pages; we have fifteen or sixteen grammatical treatises from
him, which might have been comprised in two or three ordinary volumes.
Labbe’s Regulæ Accentuum, published in 1635, was once, I believe, of
some repute; but he has little or nothing of his own.[12] The Greek
grammars published in this age by Alexander Scot and others
are ill-digested, according to Lancelot, without order or principle,
and full of useless and perplexing things;[13] and that of Vossius, in
1642, which is only an improved edition of that of Clenardus, appears
to contain little which is not taken from others.[14] Erasmus Schmidt
is said by Eichhorn to be author of a valuable work on Greek
dialects;[15] George Pasor is better known by his writings on the
Hellenistic dialect, or that of the Septuagint and New Testament.
Salmasius, in his Commentarius de Hellenistica, (Leyden, 1643), has
gone very largely into this subject. This, he says, is a question
lately agitated, whether there be a peculiar dialect of the Greek
Scriptures; for, in the last age, the very name of Hellenistic was
unknown to scholars. It is not above half a century old. It was
supposed to be a Hebrew idiom in Greek words; which, as he argues
elaborately and with great learning, is not sufficient to constitute a
distinct dialect, none of the ancients having ever mentioned one by
this name. This is evidently much of a verbal dispute; since no one
would apply the word to the scriptural Greek, in the same sense that
he does to the Doric and Attic. Salmasius lays down two essential
characteristics of a dialect: one, that it should be spoken by people
differing in locality; another, that it should be distinguishable by
single words, not merely by idiom. A profusion of learning is
scattered all round, but not pedantically or impertinently; and this
seems a very useful book in Greek or Latin philology. He may perhaps
be thought to underrate the peculiarities of language in the Old and
New Testament, as if they were merely such as passed current among the
contemporary Greeks. The second part of this Commentary relates to the
Greek dialects generally, without reference to the Hellenistic. He
denies the name to what is usually called the common dialect, spoken,
or at least written, by the Greeks in general after the time of
Alexander. This also is of course a question of words; perhaps
Salmasius used a more convenient phraseology than what is often met
with in grammarians.

     [12] Niceron, vol. xxv.

     [13] Baillet, n. 706.

     [14] Id. n. 711.

     [15] Geschichte der Cultur, iii. 325.

|Greek editions--Savile’s Chrysostom.|

8. Editions of Greek classics are not so numerous as in the former
period. The Pindar of Erasmus Schmidt, in 1614, and the Aristotle
of Duval, in 1619, may be mentioned: the latter is still in request
as a convenient and complete edition. Meursius was reckoned a good
critical scholar, but his works as an editor are not very
important. The chief monument of his philological erudition is the
Lexicon Græco-Barbarum, a glossary of the Greek of the lower
empire. But no edition of a Greek author published in the first
part of the seventeenth century is superior, at least in
magnificence, to that of Chrysostom by Sir Henry Savile. This came
forth, in 1612, from a press established at Eton by himself,
provost of that college. He had procured types and pressmen in
Holland, and three years had been employed in printing the eight
volumes of this great work; one, which both in splendour of
execution, and in the erudition displayed in it by Savile, who had
collected several manuscripts of Chrysostom, leaves immeasurably
behind it every earlier production of the English press. The
expense, which is said to have been eight thousand pounds, was
wholly defrayed by himself, and the tardy sale of so voluminous a
work could not have reimbursed the cost.[16] Another edition, in
fact, by a Jesuit, Fronto Ducæus (Fronton le Duc), was published at
Paris within two years afterwards, having the advantage of a Latin
translation, which Savile had imprudently waived. It has even been
imputed to Ducæus, that, having procured the sheets of Savile’s
edition from the pressmen while it was under their hands, he
printed his own without alteration. But this seems an apocryphal
story.[17] Savile had the assistance, in revising the text,
of the most learned coadjutors he could find in England.

     [16] Beloe’s Anecdotes of Literature, vol. v., p. 103. The copies
     sold for 9_l_. each; a sum equal to nearly 30_l_. at present, and
     from the relative wealth of the country, to considerably more.
     What wonder that the sale was slow? Fuller, however, tells us,
     that when he wrote, almost half a century afterwards, the book
     was become scarce. Chrysostomus, says Casaubon, a Savilio editur
     privata impensa, animo regio. Ep. 738 (apud Beloe). The principal
     assistants of Savile were, Matthew Bust, Thomas Allen, and
     especially Richard Montagu, afterwards celebrated in our
     ecclesiastical history as bishop of Chichester, who is said to
     have corrected the text before it went to the press. As this is
     the first work of learning, on a great scale, published in
     England, it deserves the particular commemoration of those to
     whom we owe it.

     [17] It is told by Fuller, and I do not know that it has any
     independent confirmation. Savile himself says of Fronto Ducæus,
     “Vir doctissimus, et cui Chrysostomus noster plurimum debet.”
     Fuller, it may be observed, says that the Parisian edition
     followed Savile’s “in a few months,” whereas the time was two
     years; and, as Brunet (Manuel du Libraire) justly observes, there
     is no apparent necessity to suppose an unfair communication of
     the sheets, even if the text should be proved to be copied.

|Greek learning in England.|

9. A very few more Greek books were printed at Eton soon afterwards;
and though that press soon ceased, some editions of Greek authors,
generally for schools, appeared in England before 1650. One of these,
the Poetæ Minores of Winterton, is best known, and has sometimes been
reprinted; it does little credit to its original editor, the text
being exceedingly corrupt, and the notes very trifling. The Greek
language, however, was now much studied;[18] the age of James and
Charles was truly learned; our writers are prodigal of an abundant
erudition, which embraces a far wider range of authors than are now
read; the philosophers of every class, the poets, the historians and
orators of Greece, to whom few comparatively had paid regard in the
days of Elizabeth, seem as familiar to the miscellaneous writers of
her next successors, as the fathers of the church are to the
theologians. A few, like Jeremy Taylor, are equally copious in their
libations from both streams. But though thus deeply read in ancient
learning, our old scholars were not very critical in philology.

     [18] It might appear, at first sight, that Casaubon intended to
     send his son Meric to Holland, under the care of Heinsius,
     because he could not get a good classical education in England.
     Cupio in Græcis, Latinis, et Hebraicis literis ipsum serio
     exerceri. Hoc in Anglia posse fieri sperare non possumus: nam hic
     locupletissima sunt collegia, sed quorum ratio toto genere
     diversa est ab institutis omnium aliorum collegiorum. Ep. 962
     (1614). But possibly he meant that, on account of his son’s
     foreign birth, he could not be admitted on the foundation of
     English colleges, though the words do not clearly express this.
     At the king’s command, however, Meric was sent to Oxford. One of
     Casaubon’s sons went to Eton school; literis dat operam in
     gymnasio Etoniensi. Ep. 737 (apud Beloe’s Anecdotes; I had
     overlooked the passage). Theological learning, in the reign of
     James, opposed polite letters and philology, Est in Anglia, says
     Casaubon, theologorum ingens copia; eo enim fere omnes studia sua
     referunt. Ep. 762. Venio ex Anglia (Grotius writes in 1613),
     literarum ibi tenuis est merces; theologi regnant, leguleii rem
     faciunt; unus ferme Casaubonus habet fortunam satis faventem,
     sed, ut ipse judicat, minus certam. Ne huic quidem locus fuisset
     in Anglia ut literatori, theologum induere debuit. Epist. Grot.
     p. 751.

|Latin editions--Torrentius.|

10. In Latin criticism, the pretensions of the seventeenth century are
far more considerable than in Greek. The first remarkable edition,
however, that of Horace by Torrentius, a Belgian ecclesiastic, though
it appeared in 1602, being posthumous, belongs strictly to the
preceding age. It has been said that Dacier borrowed much for his own
notes from this editor; but Horace was so profusely illustrated in the
sixteenth century, that little has been left for later critics, except
to tamper, as they have largely done, with his text. This period is
not generally conspicuous for editions of Latin authors; but some
names of high repute in grammatical and critical lore belong to it.

|Gruter.|

11. Gruter, a native of Antwerp, who became a professor in several
German universities, and finally in that of Heidelberg, might have
been mentioned in our history of the sixteenth century, before the
expiration of which some of his critical labours had been
accomplished. Many more belong to the first twenty years of the
present. No more diligent and indefatigable critic ever toiled in that
quarry. His Suspiciones, an early work, in which he has explained and
amended miscellaneous passages, his annotations on the Senecas, on
Martial, on Statius, on the Roman historians, as well as another more
celebrated compilation which we shall have soon to mention, bear
witness to his immense industry. In Greek he did comparatively but
little; yet he is counted among good scholars in that language. All
others of his time, it has been said, appear mere drones in comparison
with him.[19] Scaliger indeed, though on intimate terms with Gruter,
in one of his usual fits of spleen, charges him with a tasteless
indifference to the real merit of the writers whom he explained, one
being as good as another for his purpose, which was only to produce a
book.[20] In this art Gruter was so perfect, that he never failed to
publish one every year, and sometimes every month.[21] His eulogists
have given him credit for acuteness and judgment, and even for
elegance and an agreeable variety; but he seems not to have preserved
much repute except for his laborious erudition.

     [19] Baillet, n. 483. Bayle. Niceron, vol. ix.

     [20] Non curat utrum charta sit cacata, modo libros multos
     excudat. Scalig. secunda.

     [21] Bayle, note i.

|Heinsius.|

12. Daniel Heinsius, conspicuous as secretary of the synod of Dort,
and a Latin poet of distinguished name, was also among the first
philologers of his age. Many editions of Greek and Latin writers, of
annotations upon them, Theocritus, Hesiod, Maximus Tyrius, Aristotle,
Horace, Terence, Silius, Ovid, attest his critical skill. He
is praised for a judicious reserve in criticism, avoiding the trifles
by which many scholars had wearied their readers, and attending only
to what really demanded the aid of a critic, as being corrupt or
obscure. His learning was very extensive and profound, so that in the
panegyrical tone of the times, he is set above all the living, and
almost above all the dead.[22]

     [22] Baillet, n. 517.

|Grotius.|

13. Grotius contributed much to ancient philology. His editions of
Aratus, Stobæus, the fragments of the lost Greek dramas, Lucan and
Tacitus are but a part of those which he published. In the power of
illustrating a writer by parallel or resembling passages from others,
however remote, his taste and fondness for poetry, as much as his vast
erudition, have made him remarkable. In mere critical skill, he was
not quite so great a master of the Greek as of the Latin language; nor
was he equal to restoring the text of the dramatic poets.

|Rutgersius, Reinesius, Barthius.|

14. The Variæ Lectiones of Rutgersius, in 1618, whose premature death
cut off a brilliant promise of erudition, are in six books, almost
entirely devoted to emendation of the text, in such a miscellaneous
and desultory series of criticisms, as the example of Turnebus and
other scholars had rendered usual.[23] Reinesius, a Saxon physician,
in 1640 put forth a book with the same title, a thick volume of about
700 pages, of multifarious learning, chiefly, but not exclusively,
classical. He is more interpretative, and less attentive to restore
corrupted texts than Rutgersius.[24] The Adversaria of Gaspar Barthius
are better known. This work is in 60 books, and extends to about 1500
pages in folio. It is exactly like those of Turnebus and Muretus, an
immense repertory of unconnected criticisms and other miscellaneous
erudition. The chapters exceed in number the pages, and each chapter
contains several articles. There is, however, more connection,
alphabetical or otherwise, than in Turnebus; and they are less
exclusively classical, many relating to mediæval and modern writers.
The sixtieth book is a commentary on a part of Augustin de Civitate
Dei. It is difficult to give a more precise notion of Barthius; he is
more _æsthetic_ than Turnebus, but less so than Muretus; he
explains and corrects fewer intricate texts than the former, but deals
more in parallel passages and excursive illustrations.[25] Though
Greek appears more than in Turnebus, by far the greater part of
Barthius’s Adversaria relates to Latin, in the proportion of at least
fifteen to one. A few small poems are printed from manuscripts for the
first time. Barthius, according to Morhof, though he sometimes
explains authors very well, is apt to be rash in his alterations,
hasty in his judgments, and has too much useless and frivolous matter.
Bayle is not more favourable. Barthius published an edition of
Statius, and another of Claudian.

     [23] “This work,” says Niceron (vol. xxxii.), “is in esteem: the
     style is neat and polite, the thoughts are just and refined; it
     has no more quotations than the subject requires.”

     [24] Bayle observes of the writings of Reinesius in general, that
     “good judges of literature have no sooner read some pages, but
     they place him above those philologers who have only a good
     memory, and rank him with critics who go beyond their reading and
     know more than books have taught them. The penetration of their
     understanding makes them draw consequences, and form conjectures,
     which lead them to discover hidden treasures. Reinesius was one
     of these, and made it his chief business to find out what others
     had not said.”

     [25] The following are the heads of the fourth chapter of the
     first book, which may serve as a specimen of the Adversaria: Ad
     Victoris Uticensis librum primum notæ et emendationes. Limites.
     Collimitia. Quantitas. H. Stephanus notatur. Impendere. Totum.
     Omnimodè. Dextrales. Asta. Francisii Balduini audacia castigatur.
     Tormenta antiqua. Liguamen Arx capitis. Memoriæ. Cruciari.
     Balduinus denuo aliquoties notatur. It is true that all this
     farrago arises out of one passage in Victor of Utica, and
     Barthius is far from being so desultory as Turnebus: but 3000
     columns of such notes make but a dictionary without the help of
     the alphabet. Barthius tells us himself that he had finished two
     other volumes of Adversaria, besides correcting the first. See
     the passage in Bayle, note K. But he does not stand on very high
     ground as a critic, on account of the rapidity with which he
     wrote, and, for the same reason, has sometimes contradicted
     himself. Bayle. Baillet, n. 528. Niceron, vol. vii. Morhof, lib.
     v. 1. 10.

|Other critics--English.|

15. Rigault, or Rigaltius, Petit, Thysius, and several more, do honour
to France and the Low countries during this period. Spain, though not
strong in classical philology, produced Ramiresius de Prado, whose
Πεντηκονταρχος [Pentêkontarchos], sive quinquaginta militum ductor,
1612, is but a book of criticism with a quaint title.[26] In Latin
Literature we can hardly say that England made herself more
conspicuous than in Greek. The notes of John Bond on Horace,
published in 1606, are properly a work of the age of Elizabeth: the
author was long a schoolmaster in that reign. These notes are only
little marginal scholia for the use of boys of no great attainments;
and in almost every instance, I believe, taken from Lambinus. This
edition of Horace, though Antony Wood calls the author a most noted
critic and grammarian, has only the merit of giving the observations
of another concisely and perspicuously. Thomas Farnaby is called by
Baillet one of the best scholiasts, who says hardly anything useless,
and is very concise.[27] He has left notes on several of the Latin
poets. It is possible that the notes are compiled, like those of Bond,
from the foreign critics. Farnaby also was a schoolmaster, and
schoolmasters do not write for the learned. He has however been
acknowledged on the continent for a diligent and learned man. Wood
says he was “the chief grammarian, rhetorician, poet, Latinist, and
Grecian of his time; and his school was so much frequented, that more
churchmen and statesmen issued thence than from any school taught by
one man in England.”[28]

     [26] This has been ascribed by some to his master Sanctius,
     author of the Minerva, Ramirez himself having been thought
     unequal to such remarks as we find in it. Baillet, n. 527.

     [27] N. 521.

     [28] Athenæ Oxonienses, vol. iii.

|Salmasius.|

16. But the greatest in this province of literature was Claude
Saumaise, best known in the Latin form Salmasius, whom the general
suffrage of his compeers placed at their head. An incredible
erudition, so that it was said, what Salmasius did not know, was
beyond the bounds of knowledge, a memory such as none but those great
scholars of former times seem to have possessed, a life passed,
naturally enough, in solitary labour, were sufficient to establish his
fame among the learned. His intellectual strength has been more
questioned; he wrote, it has been alleged, on many subjects that he
did not well understand, and some have reduced his merit to that of a
grammatical critic, without altogether rating this so highly as the
world has done.[29] Salmasius was very proud, self-confident,
disdainful, and has consequently fallen into many errors, and even
contradictions, through precipitancy. In his controversy with Milton,
for which he was little fitted, he is rather feeble, and glad to
escape from the severity of his antagonist by a defence of his own
Latinity.[30] The works of Salmasius are numerous, and on very
miscellaneous subjects; among the philological, his Annotations on the
Historiæ Augustæ Scriptores seem to deserve mention. But the most
remarkable, besides the Commentary on the Hellenistic Dialect, of
which an account has been given, is the Plinianæ Exercitationes,
published in 1629. These remarks, nominally on Pliny, are, in the
first instance, on Solinus. Salmasius tells us that he had spent much
time on Pliny; but finding it beyond the powers of one man to write a
commentary on the whole Natural History of that author, he had chosen
Solinus, who is a mere compiler from Pliny, and contains nothing from
any other source. The Plinianæ Exercitationes is a mass of learning on
the geography and natural history of Pliny in more than 900 pages,
following the text of the Polyhistor of Solinus.[31]

     [29] Baillet, n. 511, is excessively severe on Salmasius; but the
     homage due to his learning by such an age as that in which he
     lived cannot be extenuated by the censure of a man like Baillet,
     of extensive, but rather superficial attainments, and open to
     much prejudice.

     [30] Milton began the attack by objecting to the use of _persona_
     for an individual man; but in this mistaken criticism uttered
     himself the solecism _vapulandum_. See Johnson’s Lives of the
     Poets. This expression had previously been noticed by Vavasseur.

     [31] Nemo adeo ut propriam, suumque veluti regnum, sibi criticen
     vindicatum ivit, ac Claudius Salmasius, qui, quemadmodum nihil
     unquam scripsit, in quo non insignia multa artis criticæ vestigia
     deprehendas, ita imprimis, ut auctores cum notis et
     castigationibus absolutissimis editos taceamus, vasto illo
     Plinianarum Exercitationum opere, quantum in eo eruditionis
     genere valeret demonstratum dedit. Morhof. lib. v. c. 1. § 12.
     The Jesuits, Petavius and Harduin, who did not cordially praise
     any Protestant, charged this book with passing over real
     difficulties, while a mass of heterogeneous matter was foisted
     in. Le Clerc (or La Croze) vindicates Salmasius against some
     censures of Harduin in Bibl. Univ. vol. iv.

|Good writers of Latin.|

17. It had been the desire of those who aspired to reputation for
taste and eloquence to write well in Latin, the sole language, on this
side of the Alps and Pyrenees, to which the capacity of choice and
polished expression was conceded. But when the French tongue was more
cultivated and had a criticism of its own, this became the natural
instrument of polite writers in France, and the Latin fell to the
merely learned who neglected its beauties. In England it had never
been much studied for the purposes of style; and though neither in
Germany nor the Low Countries it was very customary to employ the
native language, the current Latin of literature was always careless
and often barbarous. Even in Italy the number of good writers in that
language was now very scanty. Two deserve to be commemorated
with praise, both historians of the same period. The History and
Annals of Grotius, in which he seems to have emulated, with more
discretion than some others, the nervous brevity of Tacitus, though
sometimes not free from a certain hardness and want of flow, nor
equal, consequently, in elegance to some productions of the sixteenth
century, may be deemed a monument of vigorous and impressive language.
The Decades of Famianus Strada, a Roman Jesuit, contain a history of
the Flemish war, not written certainly in imitation of Tacitus, whom
the author depreciated, but with more classical spirit than we usually
find in that age. Scarcely any Latin, however, of this period is equal
to that of Barclay in the Argenis and Euphormio. His style, though
rather diffuse, and more florid than that of the Augustan age, is
perhaps better suited to his subjects, and reminds us of Petronius
Arbiter, who was probably his model.

|Scioppius.|

|His Philosophical Grammar.|

18. Of the grammatical critics, whose attention was solely turned to
the purity of Latin style, two are conspicuous, Gaspar Scioppius and
Gerard Vossius. The first, one of those restless and angry spirits
whose hand is against all the world, lived a long life of controversy
and satire. His productions, as enumerated by Niceron, mostly
anonymous, are about one hundred; twenty-seven of which, according to
another list, are grammatical.[32] The Protestants, whom he had
abandoned, and the Jesuits whom he would not join, are equally the
objects of his anger. In literature, he is celebrated for the
bitterness of his attacks on Cicero, whom he spared as little as he
did his own contemporaries. But Scioppius was an admirable master of
the Latin language. All that is remembered of his multifarious
publications relates to this. We owe to him a much improved edition of
the Minerva of Sanctius. His own Grammatica Philosophica, (Milan,
1628,) notwithstanding its title, has no pretentions to be called
anything more than an ordinary Latin grammar. In this I observed
nothing remarkable but that he denies the gerund and supine to be
parts of the verb, considering the first as passive participles, and
the second as nouns substantive; a theory which seems erroneous.

     [32] Niceron, vol. xxxv. Biog. Univ.

|His Infamia Famiani.|

19. The Infamia Famiani of Scioppius was written against Famianus
Strada, whom he hated both as a Jesuit, and as one celebrated for the
beauty of his style. This book serves to show how far those who wrote
with some eloquence, as Strada certainly did, fell short of classical
purity. The faults pointed out are often very obvious to those who
have used good dictionaries. Scioppius is however so fastidious as to
reject words employed by Seneca, Tacitus, and even Phædrus, as of the
silver age; and sometimes probably is wrong in his dogmatic assertion
of a negative, that no good authority can be found.

|Judicium de Stylo Historico.|

20. But his most considerable work is one called Judicium de Stylo
Historico, subjoined to the last, and published after his death, in
1650. This treatise consists chiefly of attacks on the Latin style of
Thuanus, Lipsius, Casaubon, and other recent authors; but in the
course of it we find the remarks of a subtle and severe observer on
the ancients themselves. The _silver_ age he dates from the
latter years of Augustus, placing even Ovid within it. The
_brazen_ he carries up to Vespasian. In the silver period he
finds many single words as well as phrases not agreeable to the usage
of more ancient authors. As to the moderns the Transalpine writers, he
says, speaking as an Italian, are always deficient in purity; they
mingle the phraseology of different ages as preposterously as if they
were to write Greek in a confusion of dialects; they affect obscurity,
a broken structure of periods, a studied use of equivocal terms. This
is particularly perceived in the school of Lipsius, whose own faults,
however, are redeemed by many beauties even of style.[33] The
Italians, on the contrary, he proceeds to say, read nothing but what
is worthy of imitation, and shun every expression that can impair the
clearness and purity of a sentence. Yet even in Manutius and in the
Jesuit Maffei, he finds instances of barbarism, much more in the
French and German scholars of the sixteenth age; expressing contempt
upon this account for his old enemy, Joseph Scaliger. Thuanus, he
says, is full of modern idioms; a crime not quite unpardonable, when
we remember the immensity of his labour, and the greater importance of
other objects of it that he had in view.

     [33] Transalpinis hominibus ex quotidiano Latini sermonis inter
     ipsos usu, multa sive barbaræ, sive plebeiæ ac deterioris notæ,
     sic adhærescere solent, ut postea cum stylum arripuere, de
     Latinitate eorum dubitare nequaquam iis in mentem veniat. Inde
     fit ut scripta eorum plerumque minus puritatis habeant, quamvis
     gratia et venustas in iis minime desideretur. Nam hæc natura duce
     melius fiebant, quam arte aut studio. Accedit alia causa cur non
     æquè pura sit multorum Transalpinorum oratio, quod nullo ætatis
     discrimine ac delectu in autorum lectione versantur, et ex omnium
     commixtione varium quoddam ac multiforme pro suo quisque ingenio
     dicendi genus effingunt, contempto hoc Fabii monito: “Diu non
     nisi optimus quisque et qui credentem sibi minime fallat,
     legendus est, sed diligenter ac pæne ad scribendi solicitudinem;
     nec per partes modo scrutanda omnia, sed perlectus liber utique
     ex integro resumendus.” Itaque genus illud corruptæ orationis,
     seu κακοζηλιας [kakozêlias], effugere nequeunt, quod κοινισμον
     [koinismon] vocant, quæ est quædam mista ex variarum linguarum
     ratione oratio, ut si Atticis Dorica, Ionica, Æolica etiam dicta
     confundas; cui simile est si quis sublimia humilibus, vetera
     novis, poetica vulgaribus, Sallustiana Tullianis, æneæ et ferreæ
     ætatis vocabula aureis et argenteis misceat, qui Lipsio
     deductisque ab eo viris, solennis et jam olim familiaris, est
     morbus. In quibus hoc amplius, verba maxime impropria,
     comprehensionem obscuram, compositionem fractam, aut in frustula
     concisam, vocum similium aut ambiguarum puerilem captationem
     passim animadvertas. Magnis tamen, non nego, virtutibus vitia sua
     Lipsius redimit, imprimis acumine, venere, salibus (ut excellens
     viri ingenium ferebat) tum plurimis lectissimis verbis
     loquendique modis, ex quibus non tam facultatem bene scribendi,
     ejusque, quod melius est, intellectum ei deesse, quam voluntatem,
     quo minus rectiora malit, ambitiuscule, plaususque popularis
     studio præpediri intelligas. Italorum longè dispar ratio. Primum
     enim non nisi optimum legere et ad imitandum sibi proponere
     solent; quod judicio quo cæteras nationes omnium consensu
     superant, imprimis est consentaneum. Deinde nihil non faciunt, ut
     evitent omnia, unde aliquid injucundæ et contaminandæ orationis
     periculi ostenditur. Latinè igitur nunquam loquuntur, quod fieri
     vix posse persuasum habeant, quin quotidianus ejus linguæ usus ad
     instar torrentis lutulentus fluat, et cujusque modi verborum
     sordes secum rapiat, quæ postea quodam familiaritatis jure sic se
     scribentibus ingerant, ut etiam diligentissimos fallant, et haud
     dubie pro Latinis habeantur. Hoc eorum consilium cum non
     intelligant Transalpini, id eorum inscitiæ perperam assignant.
     Sic rectè Paulo Manutio usu venit, ut quoniam vix tria verba
     Latina in familiari sermone proferre poterat, eam Germani
     complures, qui loquentem audituri ad eum venerunt, vehementer præ
     se contemnerent. Huic tamen nemo qui sanus sit ad puritatis et
     elegantiæ Latinæ summam quicquid defuisse dixerit, p. 65.

|Gerard Vossius de Vitiis sermonis.|

21. Gerard Vossius, a far greater name in general literature than
Scioppius, contributed more essentially to these grammatical rules;
and to him, perhaps, rather than to any other one man, we may refer
the establishment of as much correctness of writing as is attainable
in a dead language. Besides several works on rhetoric and poetry,
which, as those topics were usually treated in ages of more erudition
than taste or philosophy, resolved themselves into philological
disquisitions, looking only to the language of the ancient writers, we
have several more strictly within that province. The long use of Latin
in writings on modern subjects, before the classical authors had been
studied, had brought in a host of barbarisms, that even yet were not
expelled. His treatise De Vitiis Sermonis et Glossematis
Latino-barbaris is in nine books; four published in 1645, during the
author’s life; five in 1685. The former are by far the most copious.
It is a very large collection of words in use among modern writers,
for which there is no adequate authority. Of these many are plainly
barbarous, and taken from the writers of the middle ages, or at best
from those of the fifth and sixth centuries. Few of such would be used
by any tolerable scholar. He includes some which, though in themselves
good, have a wrong sense given to them. Words however occur,
concerning which one might be ignorant without discredit, especially
before the publication of this treatise, which has been the means of
correcting the ordinary dictionaries.

22. In the five posthumous books, which may be mentioned in this
place, having probably been written before 1650, we find chiefly what
the author had forgotten to notice in the former, or had since
observed. But the most valuable part relates to the “falso suspecta,”
which fastidious critics have unreasonably rejected, generally because
they do not appear in the Augustan writers. Those whom he calls
“Nizoliani verius quam Ciceroniani,” disapproved of all words not
found in Cicero.[34] It is curious to perceive, as Vossius shows us,
how many apparently obvious words do not occur in Cicero; yet it would
be mere affectation to avoid them. This is perhaps the best part of
Vossius’s treatise.

     [34] Paulus Manutius scrupled to use words on the authority of
     Cicero’s correspondents, such as Cælius or Pollio; a ridiculous
     affectation, especially when we observe what Vossius has pointed
     out, that many common words do not occur in Cicero. It is amazing
     to see the objections of these Ciceronian critics.

|His Aristarchus.|

23. We are indebted to Vossius for a still more important work on
grammar, the Aristarchus, sive de Arte Grammatica, which first
appeared in 1635. This is in seven books; the first treats of grammar
in general, and especially of the alphabet; the second of
syllables, under which head he dwells at great length on prosody;[35]
the third (which, with all the following, is separately entitled De
vocum Analogia) of words generally, and of the genders, numbers, and
cases of nouns. The same subject occupies the fourth book. In the
fifth, he investigates verbs; and in the sixth, the remaining parts of
speech. The last book relates to syntax. This work is full of
miscellaneous observations, placed for the most part alphabetically
under each chapter. It has been said that Vossius has borrowed almost
everything in this treatise from Sanctius and Scioppius. If this be
true, we must accuse him of unfairness; for he never mentions the
Minerva. But the edition of this grammar by Scioppius was not
published till after the death of Vossius. Salmasius extolled that of
the latter above all which had been published.[36]

     [35] In this we find Vossius aware of the rule brought to light
     by Dawes, and now familiar, that a final vowel is rarely short
     before a word beginning with s and a mute consonant.

     [36] Tuum de grammatica à te accepi exactissimum in hoc genere
     opus, ac cui nullum priorum aut prisci ævi aut nostri possit
     comparari. Apud Blount in Vossio. Daunou says of the grammatical
     and rhetorical writings of Vossius: Ces livres se recommandent
     par l’exactitude, par la méthode, par une littérature très
     étendue. Gibert en convient, mais il trouve de la prolixité.
     D’autres pourraient n’y voir qu’une instruction sérieuse, souvent
     austère, et presque toujours profitable. Biogr. Univ.

|Progress of Latin Style.|

24. In later times the ambition of writing Latin with accuracy and
elegance has so universally declined, that the diligence of Scioppius
and Vossius has become hardly valuable except to schoolmasters. It is,
however, an art not contemptible, either in respect to the taste and
discernment for which it gives scope in composition, or for the
enhanced pleasure it reflects on the pages of ancient writers. We may
distinguish several successive periods in its cultivation since the
first revival of letters. If we begin with Petrarch, since before his
time there was no continuous imitation of classical models, the first
period will comprise those who desired much, but reached little, the
writers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, destitute of
sufficient aids, and generally incapable of clearly discriminating the
pure from the barbarous in Latin. A better æra may be dated from
Politian; the ancients were now fully known, and studied with intense
labour; the graces of style were frequently caught; yet something was
still wanting to its purity and elegance. At the end of a series of
improvements, a line marked by Bembus, Sadolet, and Longolius, we
arrive at a third period, which we may call that of Paulus Manutius,
the golden age of modern Latinity. The diligence in lexicography of
Robert Stephens, of Nizolius, of Manutius himself, and the
philological treatises of their times, gave a much greater nicety of
expression; while the enthusiasm with which some of the best writers
emulated the ancients inspired them with a sympathetic eloquence and
grace. But towards the end of the century, when Manutius, and Muretus,
and Maphæus, and others of that school had been removed by death, an
age of worse taste and perhaps of more negligence in grammar came on,
yet one of great scholars, and of men powerful even in language; the
age of Lipsius, of Scaliger, of Grotius. This may be called the fourth
period; and in this apparently the purity of the language, as well as
its beauty, rather declined. Finally, the publications of Scioppius
and Vossius mark the beginning of another period, which we may
consider as lasting to the present day. Grammatical criticism had
nearly reached the point at which it now stands; the additions, at
least, which later philologers, Perizonius, Burman, Bentley, and many
others have made, though by no means inconsiderable, seem hardly
sufficient to constitute a distinct period, even if we could refer
them properly to any single epoch. And the praise of eloquent
composition has been so little sought after the close of the years
passed in education, or attained only in short and occasional
writings, which have left no durable reputation behind, that we may
consider the Latin language, for this purpose, to have silently
expired in the regions of polite literature.


                             SECT. II.

   _Antiquities of Rome and Greece--Gruter--Meursius--Chronology._

|Gruter’s collection of inscriptions.|

25. The antiquities of Greece and Rome, though they did not occupy so
great a relative space in the literature of this period as of the
sixteenth century, were, from the general increase of erudition, not
less frequently the subject of books than before. This field indeed is
so vast, that its harvest had in many parts been scarcely touched, and
in others very imperfectly gathered by those we have already
commemorated, the Sigonii, the Manutii, the Lipsii, and their
fellow-labourers in ancient learning. The present century opened with
a great work, the Corpus Inscriptionum by Gruter. A few endeavours had
long before been made[37] to collect the ancient inscriptions, of
which the countries once Roman, and especially Italy, were full. The
best work hitherto was by Martin Smetius of Bruges, after whose death
his collection of inscriptions was published at Leyden in 1588, under
the superintendence of Dousa and Lipsius.

     [37] See p. 160.

|Assisted by Scaliger.|

26. Scaliger first excited his friend Gruter to undertake the task of
giving an enlarged edition of Smetius.[38] He made the index for this
himself, devoting the labour of the entire morning for ten months (a
summo mane ad tempus cœnæ) to an occupation from which so little glory
could accrue. “Who,” says Burman, “would not admire the liberal
erudition and unpretending modesty of the learned of that age, who,
worn as they were by those long and weary labours of which they freely
complain in their correspondence with each other, though they knew
that such occupations as these could gain for them no better name than
that of common clerks or mere drudges, yet hesitated not to abandon
for the advantage of the public those pursuits which a higher fame
might be expected to reward? Who in these times would imitate the
generosity of Scaliger, who, when he might have ascribed to himself
this addition to the work of Smetius, gave away his own right to
Gruter, and declined to let his name be prefixed either to the index
which he had wholly compiled, or to the many observations by which he
corrects and explains the inscriptions, and desired, in recompence for
the industry of Gruter, that he alone should pass with posterity as
the author of the work?”[39] Gruter, it is observed by Le Clerc, has
committed many faults: he often repeats the same inscriptions, and
still more frequently has printed them from erroneous copies; his
quotations from authors, in whom inscriptions are found, sometimes
want exactness; finally, for which he could not well be answerable, a
vast many have since been brought to light.[40] In consequence of the
publication of Gruter’s Inscriptions, the learned began with
incredible zeal to examine old marbles for inscriptions, and to insert
them in any work that had reference to antiquity. Reinesius collected
as many as make a respectable supplement.[41] But a sort of æra in
lapidary learning was made by Selden’s description, in 1629, of the
marbles, brought by the Earl of Arundel from Greece, and which now
belong to the university of Oxford. These contain a chronology of the
early times of Greece, on which great reliance has often been placed,
though their antiquity is not accounted very high in comparison with
those times.

     [38] Burman in Præfatione ad Gruteri Corpus Inscript. Several of
     Scaliger’s epistles prove this, especially the 405th addressed to
     Gruter.

     [39] Id. p. 6.

     [40] Bibl. Choisie, vol. xiv., p. 51. Burman, _ubi supra_, gives
     a strange reason for reprinting Gruter’s Inscriptions with all
     their blemishes, even the repetitions; namely, that it was
     convenient to preserve the number of pages which had been so
     continually referred to in all learned works, the simple
     contrivance of keeping the original numeration in the margin not
     having occurred to him.

     [41] Burman, _ubi supra_.

|Works on Roman antiquity.|

27. The Jesuit Donati published, in 1633, Roma vetus et nova, which is
not only much superior to anything previously written on the
antiquities of the city, but is preferred by some competent judges, to
the later and more known work of Nardini. Both these will be found,
with others of an earlier date, in the third and fourth volumes of
Grævius. The tenth volume of the same collection contains a
translation from the history of the Great Roads of the Roman Empire,
published in French by Nicolas Bergier in 1622; ill arranged, it has
been said, and diffuse, according to the custom of his age, but
inferior. Grævius declares, in variety of learning to no one work that
he has inserted in his numerous volumes. Guther, whose treatise on the
pontifical law of Rome appears in the fifth volume, was, says the
editor, “a man of various and extended reading, who had made extracts
from every class of writers, but had not always digested his learning
or weighed what he wrote. Hence much has been found open to criticism
in his writings, and there remains a sufficient harvest of the same
kind for any one who should care to undertake it.” The best work on
Roman dress is by Octavius Ferrarius, published partly in 1642, partly
in 1654. This has been called superficial by Spanheim; but Grævius,
and several other men of learning, bestow more praise.[42] The Isiac
tablet, covered with emblems of Egyptian antiquity, was illustrated by
Pignoria, in a work bearing different titles in the successive
editions from 1605; and his explanations are still considered
probable. Pignoria’s other writings were also in high esteem with the
antiquaries.[43] It would be tedious to enumerate the less important
productions of this kind. A minute and scrupulous criticism, it has
been said, distinguished the antiquaries of the seventeenth century.
Without, perhaps, the comprehensive views of Sigonius and Panvinius,
they were more severely exact. Hence forgery and falsehood stood a
much worse chance of success than before. Annius of Viterbo had
deceived half the scholars of the preceding age. But when Inghirami,
in 1637, published his Etruscarum Antiquitatum Fragmenta, monuments of
Etruscan antiquity, which he pretended to have discovered at Volterra,
the imposture was speedily detected.[44]

     [42] Niceron, v. 80. Tiraboschi, xi. 300.

     [43] Niceron, vol. xxi. Biogr. Univ.

     [44] Salfi, Continuation de Ginguéné xi. 358.

|Geography of Cluverius.|

28. The Germania Antiqua of Cluverius was published in 1616, and his
Italia Antiqua in 1624. These form a sort of epoch in ancient
geography. The latter, especially, has ever since been the great
repertory of classical illustration on this subject. Cluverius,
however, though a man of acknowledged ability and erudition, has been
thought too bold an innovator in his Germany, and to have laid down
much on his own conjecture.[45]

     [45] Blount. Niceron, vol. xxi. Biogr. Univ.

|Meursius.|

|Ubbo Emmius.|

29. Meursius, a native of Holland, began when very young, soon after
the commencement of the century, those indefatigable labours on
Grecian antiquity, by which he became to Athens and all Hellas what
Sigonius had been to Rome and Italy. Niceron has given a list of his
publications, sixty-seven in number, including some editions of
ancient writers, but for the most part confined to Illustrations of
Greek usages; some also treat of Roman. The Græcia feriata, on
festivals and games; the Orchestra, on dancing; the Eleusinia, on that
deeply interesting and in his time almost untouched subject, the
ancient mysteries, are collected in the works of this very learned
person, or scattered through the Thesaurus Antiquitatum Græcarum of
Gronovius. “Meursius,” says his editor, “was the true and legitimate
mystagogue to the sanctuarius of Greece.” But his peculiar attention
was justly shown to “the eye of Greece,” Athens. Nothing that bore on
her history, her laws and government, her manners and literature, was
left by him. The various titles of his works seem almost to exhaust
Athenian Antiquity: De Populis Atticæ--Athenæ Atticæ--Cecropia--Regnum
Atticum--Archontes Athenienses--Pisistratus--Fortuna Attica--Atticarum
Lectionum Libri IV.--Piraeus--Themis Attica--Solon--Areopagus--
Panathenæa--Eleusinia--Theseus--Æschylus--Sophocles et Euripides. It
is manifest that all later learning must have been built upon his
foundations. No one was equal to Meursius in this province; but the
second place is perhaps due to Ubbo Emmius, professor of Greek at
Groningen, for his Vetus Græcia Illustrata, 1626. The facilities of
elucidating the topography of that country were by no means such as
Cluverius had found for Italy; and in fact little was done in respect
to local investigation in order to establish a good ancient geography
till recent times. Samuel Petit, a man placed by some in the very
first list of the learned, published in 1635 a commentary on the
Athenian laws, which is still the chief authority on that subject.

30. In an age so peculiarly learned as this part of the seventeenth
century, it will be readily concluded that many books must have a
relation to the extensive subject of this section; though the stream
of erudition had taken rather a different course, and watered the
provinces of ecclesiastical and mediæval more than those of heathen
antiquity. But we can only select one or two which treat of
chronology, and that chiefly because we have already given a place to
the work of Scaliger.

|Chronology of Lydiat. Calvisius.|

31. Lydiat was the first who, in a small treatise on the various
calendars, 1605, presumed in several respects to differ from that of
the dictator of literature. He is in consequence reviled in Scaliger’s
Epistles as the most stupid and ignorant of the human race, a
portentous birth of England, or at best an ass and a beetle, whom it
is below the dignity of the author to answer.[46] Lydiat was however
esteemed a man of deep learning, and did not flinch from the
contest. His Emendatio Temporum, published in 1609, is a more general
censure of the Scaligerian chronology, but it is rather a short work
for the extent of the subject. A German, Seth Calvisius, on the other
hand, is extolled to the skies by Scaliger for a chronology founded on
his own principles. These are applied in it to the whole series of
history, and thus Calvisius may be said to have made an epoch in
historical literature. He made more use of eclipses than any preceding
writer; and his dates are reckoned as accurate in modern as in ancient
history.[47]

     [46] Ante aliquot dies tibi scripsi, ut scirem ex te quis sit
     Thomas Lydiat iste, quo monstro nullum portentosius in vestra
     Anglia natum puto; tanta est inscitia hominis et confidentia. Ne
     semel quidem illi verum dicere accidit. And again:--Non est
     similis morio in orbe terrarum. Paucis asinitatem ejus
     perstringam ut lector rideat. Nam in tam prodigiosè imperitum
     scarabæum scribere, neque nostræ dignitatis est, neque otii.
     Scalig. Epist. 291. Usher, nevertheless, if we may trust Wood,
     thought Scaliger worsted by Lydiat. Ath. Oxon. iii. 187.

     [47] Blount. Biogr. Univ.

|Petavius.|

32. Scaliger, nearly twenty years after his death, was assailed by an
adversary whom he could not have thought it unworthy of his name to
repel. Petau, or Petavius, a Jesuit of uncommon learning, devoted the
whole of the first of two large volumes, entitled Doctrina, Temporum,
1627, to a censure of the famous work De Emendatione Temporum. This
volume is divided into eight books; the first on the popular year of
the Greeks; the second on the lunar; the third on the Ægyptian,
Persian, and Armenian; the fourth on the solar year; the fifth treats
of the correction of the paschal cycle and the calendar; the sixth
discusses the principles of the lunar and solar cycles; the seventh is
entitled an introduction to computations of various kinds, among which
he reckons the Julian period; the eighth is on the true motions of the
sun and moon, and on their eclipses. In almost every chapter of the
first five books, Scaliger is censured, refuted, reviled. It was a
retribution upon his own arrogance; but published thus after his
death, with no justice done to his great learning and ability, and
scarcely the common terms of respect towards a mighty name, it is
impossible not to discern in Petavius both an envious mind, and a
partial desire to injure the fame of a distinguished protestant. His
virulence indeed against Scaliger becomes almost ridiculous. At the
beginning of each of the first five books, he lays it down as a
theorem to be demonstrated, that Scaliger is always wrong on the
particular subjects to which it relates; and at the close of each, he
repeats the same in geometrical form as having been proved. He does
not even give him credit for the invention of the Julian period,
though he adopts it himself with much praise, positively asserting
that it is borrowed from the Byzantine Greeks.[48] The second volume
is in five books, and is dedicated to the historical part of
chronology, and the application of the principles laid down before. A
third volume in 1630, relating to the same subjects, though bearing a
different title, is generally considered as part of the work.
Petavius, in 1633, published an abridgment of his chronological
system, entitled Rationarium Temporum, to which he subjoined a table
of events down to his own time, which in the larger work had only been
carried to the fall of the empire. This abridgment is better known,
and more generally useful than the former.

     [48] Lib. vii., c. 7.

|Character of this work.|

33. The merits of Petavius as a chronologer have been differently
appreciated. Many, of whom Huet is one, from religious prejudices
rejoiced in what they hoped to be a discomfiture of Scaliger, whose
arrogance had also made enemies of a large part of the literary world.
Even Vossius, after praising Petavius, declares that he is unwilling
to decide between men who have done for chronology more than any
others.[49] But he has not always been so favourably dealt with. Le
Clerc observes, that as Scaliger is not very perspicuous, and Petavius
has explained the former’s opinions before he proceeds to refute them,
those who compare the two will have this advantage, that they will
understand Scaliger better than before.[50] This is not very
complimentary to his opponent. A modern writer of respectable
authority gives us no reason to consider him victorious. “Though the
great work of Petavius on chronology,” says M. St. Martin, “is
certainly a very estimable production, it is not less certain that he
has in no degree contributed to enlarge the boundaries of the science.
The author shows too much anxiety to refute Scaliger, whether right or
wrong; his sole aim is to destroy the edifice, perhaps too boldly
elevated by his adversary. It is not unjust to say that Petavius has
literally done nothing for positive chronology; he has not even
determined with accuracy what is most incontestable in this science.
Many of the dates which he considers as well established, are still
subject to great doubt, and might be settled in a very different
manner. His work is clear and methodical; and, as it embraces the
whole of chronology, it might have become of great authority: but
these very qualities have rendered it injurious to the science. He
came to arrest the flight which, through the genius of Scaliger, it
was ready to take, nor has it made the least progress ever since; it
has produced nothing but conjectures, more or less showy, but with
nothing solid and undeniable for their basis.”[51]

     [49] Vossius apud Niceron, xxxvii. 111. Dionysius Petavius
     permaulta post Scaligerum optime observavit. Sed nolim judicium
     interponere inter eos, quorum uterque præclare adeo de
     chronologia meritus est, ut nullis plus hæc scientia debeat....
     Qui sine affectu ac partium studio conferre volet quæ de
     temporibus scripsere, conspiciet esse ubi Scaligero major laus
     debeatur, comperiet quoque ubi longe Petavio malit assentiri;
     erit etiam ubi ampliandum videatur; imo ubi nec facile veritas à
     quoquam possit indagari. The chronology of Petavius was
     animadverted upon by Salmasius with much rudeness, and by several
     other contemporaries engaged in the same controversy. If we were
     to believe Baillet, Petavius was not only the most learned of the
     order of Jesuits, but surpassed Salmasius himself _de plusieurs
     coudées_. Jugemens des Sçavans, n. 513. But to judge between
     giants we should be a little taller ourselves than most are.
     Baillet, indeed, quotes Henry Valois for this preference of
     Petavius to any other of his age, which, in other words, is much
     the same as to call him the most learned man that ever lived; and
     Valois was a very competent judge. The words, however, are found
     in a funeral panegyric.

     [50] Bibl. Choisie, ii. 186. A short abstract of the Petavian
     scheme of chronology will be found in this volume of Le Clerc.

     [51] Biogr. Univ. art. Petavius.




                           CHAPTER XIX.

   HISTORY OF THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE IN EUROPE, FROM 1600 TO 1650.

_Claim of Popes to temporal Power--Father Paul Sarpi--Gradual Decline
of papal Power--Unpopularity of Jesuits--Controversy of Catholics
and Protestants--Deference of some of the latter to Antiquity--
Wavering in Casaubon--Still more in Grotius--Calixtus--An opposite
School of Theologians--Daillé--Chillingworth--Hales--Rise of the
Arminian Controversy--Episcopius--Socinians--Question as to Rights
of Magistrates in Religion--Writings of Grotius on this Subject--
Question of Religious Toleration--Taylor’s Liberty of Prophesying--
Theological Critics and Commentators--Sermons on Donne--and
Taylor--Deistical Writers--English Translation of the Bible._


|Temporal supremacy of Rome.|

1. The claim of the Roman see to depose sovereigns was like the
retractile claws of some animals, which would be liable to injury were
they not usually sheathed. If the state of religion in England and
France towards the latter part of the sixteenth century required the
assertion of these pretended rights, it was not the policy of a court,
guided as often by prudence as by zeal or pride, to keep them for ever
before the eyes of the world. Clement VIII. wanted not these latter
qualities, but they were restrained by the former; and the
circumstances in which the new century opened, did not demand any open
collision with the civil power. Henry IV. had been received back into
the bosom of the church; he was now rather the ally, the favoured
child of Rome, than the object of proscription. Elizabeth again was
out of the reach of any enemy but death, and much was hoped from the
hereditary disposition of her successor. The temporal supremacy would
therefore have been left for obscure and unauthorised writers to
vindicate, if an unforeseen circumstance had not called out again its
most celebrated champions. After the detection of the gunpowder
conspiracy, an oath of allegiance was imposed in England, containing a
renunciation, in strong terms, of the tenet that princes
excommunicated by the pope might be deposed or murdered by their
subjects. None of the English catholics refused allegiance to James;
and most of them probably would have felt little scruple at taking the
entire oath, which their arch-priest, Blackwell, had approved. But the
see of Rome interfered to censure those who took the oath; and a
controversy singularly began with James himself in his “Apology for
the Oath of Allegiance.” Bellarmin answered, in 1610, under the name
of Matthew Tortus; and the duty of defending the royal author was
devolved on one of our most learned divines, Lancelot Andrews, who
gave to his reply the quaint title, Tortura Torti.[52] But
this favourite tenet of the Vatican was as ill fitted to please the
Gallican as the English church. Barclay, a lawyer of Scottish family,
had long defended the rights of the crown of France against all
opponents. His posthumous treatise on the temporal power of the pope
with respect to sovereign princes was published at London in 1609.
Bellarmin answered it next year in the ultra-montane spirit which he
had always breathed; the parliament of Paris forbade the circulation
of his reply.[53]

     [52] Biogr. Britann. art. Andrews. Collier’s Ecclesiastical
     History. Butler’s English Catholics, vol. i. Matthew Tortus was
     the almoner of Bellarmin, whose name he thought fit to assume as
     a very slight disguise.

     [53] Il pretesto, says Father Paul of Bellarmin’s book, è di
     scrivere contra Barclajo; ma il vero fine si vede esser per
     ridurre il papa al colmo dell omnipotente. In questo libro non si
     tratta altro, che il suddetto argumento, e più di venti cinque
     volte è replicato, che quando il papa giudica un principe indegno
     per sua colpa d’aver governo overo inetto, ò pur conosce, che per
     il bene della chiesa sia cosa utile, lo può privare. Dice più
     volte, che quando il papa comanda, che non sia ubbidito ad un
     principe privato da lui, non si può dire, che comandi che
     principe non sia ubbidito, ma che privata persona, perchè il
     principe privato dal papa non è più principe. E passa tanto
     inanzi, che viene à dire, il papa può disponere secondo che
     giudica ispediente de’ tutti i beni di qual sivoglia Christiano,
     ma tutto sarebbe niente, se solo dicesse che tale è la sua
     opinione; dice, ch’è un articolo della fede catholica, ch’è
     eretico, chi non sente così, e questo con tanta petulantia, che
     non vi si può aggiungere. Lettere di Sarpi, 50.

|Contest with Venice.|

|Father Paul Sarpi.|

2. Paul V. was a pope imbued with the arrogant spirit of his
predecessors, Paul IV. and Pius V.; no one was more prompt to exercise
the despotism which the Jesuits were ready to maintain. After some
minor disputes with the Italian states, he came, in 1605, to his
famous conflict with the republic of Venice, on the very important
question of the immunity of ecclesiastics from the civil tribunals.
Though he did not absolve the subjects of Venice from their
allegiance, he put the state under an interdict, forbidding the
celebration of divine offices throughout its territory. The Venetian
clergy, except the Jesuits and some other regulars, obeyed the senate
rather than the pope. The whole is matter of known history. In the
termination of this dispute, it has been doubted which party obtained
the victory; but in the ultimate result and effect upon mankind, we
cannot, it seems, well doubt that the see of Rome was the loser.[54]
Nothing was more worthy of remark, especially in literary history,
than the appearance of one great man, Fra Paolo Sarpi, the first who,
in modern times and in a Catholic country, shook the fabric not only
of papal despotism, but of ecclesiastical independence and power. For
it is to be observed that in the Venetian business, the pope was
contending for what were called the rights of the church, not for his
own supremacy over it. Sarpi was a man of extraordinary genius,
learning, and judgment: his physical and anatomical knowledge was such
as to have caused at least several great discoveries to be assigned to
him;[55] his reasoning was concise and cogent; his style perspicuous
and animated. A treatise “Delle Materie Beneficiarie,” in other words,
on the rights, revenues, and privileges, in secular matters, of the
ecclesiastical order, is a model in its way. The history is so short
and yet so sufficient, the sequence so natural and clear, the proofs
so judiciously introduced, that it can never be read without delight
and admiration of the author’s skill. And this is more striking to
those who have toiled at the verbose books of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, where tedious quotations, accumulated, not
selected, disguise the argument they are meant to confirm. Except the
first book of Machiavel’s History of Florence, I do not remember any
earlier summary of facts so lucid and pertinent to the object. That
object was, with Father Paul, neither more nor less than to represent
the wealth and power of the church as ill-gotten and excessive. The
Treatise on Benefices led the way, or rather was the seed thrown into
the ground that ultimately produced the many efforts both of the press
and of public authority to break down ecclesiastical privileges.[56]

     [54] Ranke is the best authority on this dispute, as he is on all
     other matters relating to the papacy in this age, vol. ii., p.
     324.

     [55] He was supposed to have discovered the valves of the veins,
     the circulation of the blood, the expansion and contraction of
     the pupil, the variation of the compass. A quo, says Baptista
     Porta of Sarpi, aliqua didicisse non solum fateri non
     erubescimus, sed gloriamur, cum eo doctiorem, subtiliorem,
     quotquot adhuc videre contigerit, neminem cognovimus ad
     encyclopædiam. Magia Naturalis, lib. vii., apud Ranke.

     [56] A long analysis of the Treatise on Benefices will be found
     in Dupin, who does not blame it very much. It is worth reading
     through, and has been commended by many good judges of history.

|History of Council of Trent.|

3. The other works of Sarpi are numerous, but none require our
present attention except the most celebrated, his History of the
Council of Trent. The manuscript of this having been brought to London
by Antonio de Dominis, was there published, in 1619, under the name of
Pietro Soave Polano, the anagram of Paolo Sarpi Veneto. It was quickly
translated into several languages, and became the textbook of
protestantism on the subject. Many incorrectnesses have been pointed
out by Pallavicini, who undertook the same task on the side of Rome;
but the general credibility of Father Paul’s history has rather gained
by the ordeal of hostile criticism. Dupin observes that the long list
of errors imputed by Pallavicini, which are chiefly in dates and such
trifling matters, make little or no difference as to the substance of
Sarpi’s history; but that its author is more blamable for a malicious
disposition to impute political motives to the members of the council,
and idle reasonings which they did not employ.[57] Ranke, who has
given this a more minute scrutiny than Dupin could have done, comes
nearly to the same result. Sarpi is not a fair, but he is, for those
times, a tolerably exact historian. His work exhibits the general
excellences of his manner; freedom from redundancy, a clear, full,
agreeable style; a choice of what is most pertinent and interesting in
his materials. Much has been disputed about the religious tenets of
Father Paul; it appears to me quite out of doubt, both by the tenor of
his history, and still more unequivocally, if possible, by some of his
letters, that he was entirely hostile to the church, in the usual
sense, as well as to the court of Rome, sympathising in affection, and
concurring generally in opinion, with the reformed denomination.[58]
But as he continued in the exercise of his functions as a Servite
monk, and has always passed at Venice more for a saint than a heretic,
some of the Gallican writers have not scrupled to make use of his
authority, and to extenuate his heterodoxy. There can be no question
but that he inflicted a severe wound on the spiritual power.

     [57] Hist. Eccles. Cent. 17.

     [58] The proofs of this it would be endless to adduce from the
     history: they strike the eye in every page, though it cannot be
     expected that he should declare his way of thinking in express
     terms. Even in his letters he does not this. They were printed,
     with the date, at least, of Verona, in 1673. Sully’s fall he
     laments, “having become partial to him on account of his firmness
     in religion.” Lett. 53. Of the republic of the United Provinces
     he says: La nascenza di quale si come Dio ha favorito con grazie
     inestimabili, così pare che la malizia del diavolo oppugni con
     tutte le arti. Lett. 23. After giving an account of one Marsilio,
     who seems to have been a Protestant, he adds: Credo se non fosse
     per ragion di stato, si trovarebbono diversi, che saltarebbono da
     questo fosso di Roma nella cima dell riforma; ma chi teme una
     cosa, chi un’altra. Dio però par che goda la più minima parte dei
     pensieri umani. So ch’ ella mi intende senza passar più oltre.
     Lett. 81., Feb., 1612. Sarpi speaks with great contempt of James
     I., who was occupied like a pedant about Vorstius and such
     matters. Se il re d’Inghilterra non fosse dottore, si potrebbe
     sperare qualche bene, e sarebbe un gran principio, perchè Spagna
     non si può vincere, se non levato il pretesto della religione, ne
     questo si leverà se non introducendo i reformati nell’Italia. E
     si il rè sapesse fare, sarebbe facile e in Torino, e quì. Lett.
     88. He wrote, however, a remarkable letter to Casaubon, much
     about this time, hinting at his wish to find an asylum in
     England, and using rather too different language about the king:
     In eo, rarum, cumulatæ virtutes principis ac viri. Regum idea
     est, ad quam forte ante actis sæculis nemo formatus fuit. Si ego
     ejus protectione dignus essem, nihil mihi deesse putarem ad
     mortalis vitæ felicitatem. Tu, vir præstantissime, nihil te
     dignius efficere potes, quam tanto principi mea studia
     commendare. Casaubon, Epist. 811. For _mea_ in another edition is
     read _tua_; but the former seems preferable. Casaubon replied,
     that the king wished Paul to be a light to his own country; but
     if anything should happen, he had written to his ambassador, ut
     nulla in re tibi desit.

|Gallican liberties. Richer.|

4. That power, predominant as it seemed in the beginning of the
seventeenth century, met with adversaries besides Sarpi. The French
nation, and especially the parliament of Paris, had always vaunted
what were called the liberties of the Gallican church; liberties,
however, for which neither the church itself, nor the king, the two
parties interested, were prone to display much regard. A certain
canonist, Richer, published in 1611 a book on ecclesiastical and
political power; in which he asserted the government of the church to
be a monarchy tempered with aristocracy; that is, that the authority
of the pope was limited in some respects by the rights of the bishop.
Though this has since become a fundamental principle among the
Cisalpine catholics, it did not suit the high notions of that age; and
the bishops were content to sacrifice their rights by joining in the
clamour of the papal party. A synod assembled by Cardinal du Perron,
archbishop of Sens, condemned the book of Richer, who was harassed for
the rest of his life by the persecution of those he had sought to
defend against a servitude which they seemed to covet. His
fame has risen in later times. Dupin concludes a careful analysis of
Richer’s treatise with a noble panegyric on his character and style of
writing.[59]

     [59] Hist. Eccles. Cent. 17. l. ii. c. 7. Niceron, vol. xxvii.
     The Biographie Universelle talks of the republican principles of
     Richer: it must be in an ecclesiastical sense, for nothing in the
     book, I think, relates to civil politics. Father Paul thought
     Richer’s scheme might lead to something better, but did not
     highly esteem it. Quella mistura del governo ecclesiastico di
     monarchio e aristocrazia mi pare una composizione di oglio e
     acqua, che non possono mai mischiarsi insieme. Lettere di Sarpi,
     109. Richer entirely denies the infallibility of the pope in
     matters of faith, and says there is no authority adduced for it
     but that of the popes themselves. His work is written on the
     principles of the Jansenizing Gallicans of the 18th century, and
     probably goes farther than Bossuet, or any who wished to keep on
     good terms with Rome would have openly approved. It is prolix,
     extending to two volumes 4to. Some account of Richer will be
     found in Histoire de la Mère et du Fils, ascribed to Mezeray, or
     Richelieu.

|Perron.|

5. The strength of the ultra-montane party in the Gallican church was
Perron, a man of great natural capacity, a prodigious memory, a vast
knowledge of ecclesiastical and profane antiquity, a sharp wit, a pure
and eloquent style, and such readiness in dispute, that few cared to
engage him.[60] If he did not always reason justly, or upon consistent
principles, these are rather failings in the eyes of lovers of truth,
than of those, and they are the many, who sympathize with the
dexterity and readiness of a partizan. He had been educated as a
Protestant, but, like half the learned of that religion, went over
from some motive or other to the victorious side. In the conference at
Fontainebleau with Du Plessis Mornay, it has been mentioned already
that he had a confessed advantage; but victory in debate follows the
combatant rather than the cause. The supporters of Gallican liberties
were discouraged during the life of this cardinal. He did not
explicitly set himself against them, or deny, perhaps, the principles
of the Council of Constance; but, by preventing any assertion of them,
he prepared the way, as it was hoped at Rome, for a gradual
recognition of the whole system of Bellarmin. Perron, however, was
neither a Jesuit, nor very favourable to that order. Even so late as
1638, a collection of tracts by the learned brothers DuPuy, on the
liberties of the church, was suppressed at the instance of the nuncio,
on the pretext that it had been published without permission. It was
reprinted some years afterwards, when the power of Rome had begun to
decline.[61]

     [60] Dupin.

     [61] Dupin 1. iii. c. 1. Grot. Epist. 1105. Liber de libertatibus
     ecclesiæ Gallicanæ ex actis desumptus publicis, quo regis
     regnique jura contra molitiones pontificias defenduntur ipsius
     regis jussu vendi est prohibitus. See also epist. 519.

|Decline of papal power.|

6. Notwithstanding the tone still held by the court of Rome and its
numerous partisans, when provoked by any demonstration of resistance,
they generally avoided aggressive proceedings, and kept in reserve the
tenets which could not be pleasing to any civil government. We should
doubtless find many assertions of the temporal authority of the pope
by searching into obscure theology during this period; but after
Bellarmin and Perron were withdrawn from the stage, no prominent
champions of that cause stood forth; and it was one of which great
talents and high station alone could overcome the intrinsic
unpopularity. Slowly and silently, the power of Rome had much receded
before the middle of the seventeenth century. Paul V. was the last of
the imperious pontiffs who exacted obedience as sovereigns of
Christendom. His successors have had recourse to gentler methods, to a
paternal rather than regal authority; they have appealed to the moral
sense, but have rarely or never alarmed the fears of their church. The
long pontificate of Urban VIII. was a period of transition from
strength to weakness. In his first years, this pope was not inactively
occupied in the great cause of subduing the Protestant heresy. It has
been lately brought to light, that soon after the accession of Charles
I., he had formed a scheme, in conjunction with France and Spain, for
conquering and partitioning the British islands: Ireland was to be
annexed to the ecclesiastical state, and governed by a viceroy of the
Holy See.[62] But he afterwards gave up these visionary projects, and
limited his ambition to more practicable views of aggrandizement in
Italy. It is certain that the temporal principality of the popes has
often been a useful diversion for the rest of Europe: the duchy of
Urbino was less in our notions of importance than Germany or Britain;
but it was quite as capable of engrossing the thoughts and passions of
a pope.

     [62] Ranke, ii. 518. It is not at all probable that France and
     Spain would have seriously coalesced for any object of this kind:
     the spoil could not have been safely divided. But the scheme
     serves to show the ambition, at that time, of the Roman See.

|Unpopularity of the Jesuits.|

7. The subsidence of catholic zeal before the middle of this
age deserves especially to be noted at a time when, in various
directions, that church is beginning to exalt her voice, if not to
rear her head, and we are ostentatiously reminded of the sudden
revival of her influence in the sixteenth century. It did undoubtedly
then revive; but it is equally manifest that it receded once more.
Among the leading causes of this decline in the influence, not only of
what are called ultra-montane principles, but of the zeal and faith
that had attended them, a change as visible, and almost as rapid as
the reaction in favour of them which we have pointed out in the latter
part of the sixteenth century, we must reckon the increasing
prejudices against the Jesuit order. Their zeal, union, indefatigable
devotion to the cause, had made them the most useful of allies, the
most formidable of enemies; but in these very qualities were involved
the seeds of public hatred and ultimate ruin. Obnoxious to Protestant
states for their intrigues, to the lawyers, especially in France, for
their bold theories of political power and encroaching spirit, to the
Dominicans for the favour they had won, they had become, long before
the close of this period, rather equivocal and dangerous supporters of
the See of Rome.[63] Their fate, in countries where the temper of
their order had displayed itself with less restraint, might have led
reflecting men to anticipate the consequences of urging too far the
patience of mankind by the ambition of an insulated order of priests.
In the first part of this century the Jesuits possessed an extensive
influence in Japan, and had re-united the kingdom of Abyssinia to the
Roman church. In the course of a few years more, they were driven out
from both; their intriguing ambition had excited an implacable
animosity against the church to which they belonged.

     [63] Clement VIII. was tired of the Jesuits, as we are told by
     Perron, who did not much love them. Perroniana, pp. 286, 288.

|Richelieu’s care of Gallican liberties.|

8. Cardinal Richelieu, though himself a theological writer, took great
care to maintain the liberties of the French crown and church. No
extravagance of Hildebrandic principles would find countenance under
his administration. Their partisans endeavoured sometimes to murmur
against his ecclesiastical measures; it was darkly rumoured that he
had a scheme of separating the Catholic church of France, something in
the manner of Henry VIII., from the supremacy of Rome, though not from
her creed; and one Hersent published, under the name of Optatus
Gallus, a book so rapidly suppressed, as to be of the greatest rarity,
the aim of which was to excite the public apprehension of this
schism.[64] It was in defence of the Gallican liberties, so far as it
was yet prudent to assert them, that De Marca was employed to write a
treatise, De Concordaniâ Sacerdotii et Imperii. This book was censured
at Rome; yet it does not by any means come up to the language
afterwards usual in the Gallican church; it belongs to its own age,
the transitional period in which Rome had just ceased to act, but not
to speak as a mistress. De Marca was obliged to make some concessions
before he could obtain the bulls for a bishopric. He rose however
afterwards to the see of Paris. The first part of his work appeared in
1641, the second after the death of the author.

     [64] Biogr. Univ.--Grot. epist. 982, 1354. By some other letters
     of Grotius, it appears that Richelieu tampered with those schemes
     of reconciling the different religions which were then afloat,
     and all which went on setting the Pope nearly aside. Ruarus
     intimates the same. Epist. Ruar. p. 401.

|Controversy of Catholics and Protestants.|

|Increased respect for the fathers.|

9. In this most learned period, according to the sense in which the
word was then taken, that Europe has ever seen, it was of course to be
expected that the studious ecclesiastics of both the Romish and
Protestant denomination would pour forth a prodigal erudition in their
great controversy. It had always been the aim of the former to give an
historical character to theological inquiry; it was their business to
ascertain the faith of the Catholic church as a matter of fact, the
single principle of its infallibility being assumed as the basis of
all investigation. But their opponents, though less concerned in the
issue of such questions, frequently thought themselves competent to
dispute the field; and conversant as they were with ecclesiastical
antiquity, found in its interminable records sufficient weapons to
protract the war, though not to subdue the foe. Hence, partly in the
last years of the sixteenth century, but incomparably more in the
present, we find an essential change in the character of theological
controversy. It became less reasoning, less scriptural, less general
and popular, but far more patristic, that is, appealing to the
testimonies of the fathers, and altogether more historical than
before. Several consequences of material influence on religious
opinion sprang naturally from this method of conducting the
defence of Protestantism. One was that it contracted very greatly the
circle of those who, upon any reasonable interpretation of the
original principle of personal judgment, could exercise it for
themselves; it became the privilege of the deeply learned alone.
Another that, from the real obscurity and incoherence of
ecclesiastical authorities, those who had penetrated farthest into
that province of learning were least able to reconcile them; and
however they might disguise it from the world, while the pen was in
their hands, were themselves necessarily left, upon many points, in an
embarrassing state of doubt and confusion. A third effect was, that
upon these controversies of Catholic tradition, the church of Rome had
very often the best of the argument; and this was occasionally
displayed in those wrestling matches between religious disputants,
which were held, publicly or privately, either with the vain hope of
coming to an agreement, or to settle the faith of the hearers. And
from the two last of these causes it arose, that many Protestants went
over to the church of Rome, and that a new theological system was
contrived to combine what had been deemed the incompatible tenets of
those who had burst from each other with such violence in the
preceding century.

|Especially in England. Laud.|

10. This retrocession, as it appeared, and as in spirit it was,
towards the system abandoned in the first impetuosity of the
Reformation, began in England about the conclusion of the sixteenth
century. It was evidently connected with the high notions of
ecclesiastical power, of an episcopacy by unbroken transmission from
the apostles, of a pompous ritual, which the rulers of the Anglican
church took up at that time in opposition to the puritans. It rapidly
gained ground in the reign of James, and still more of his son.
Andrews, a man far more learned in patristic theology than any of the
Elizabethan bishops, or perhaps than any of his English contemporaries
except Usher, was, if not the founder, the chief leader of this
school. Laud became afterwards, from his political importance, its
more conspicuous head; and from him it is sometimes styled. In his
conference with the Jesuit Fisher, first published in 1624, and
afterwards with many additions in 1639, we find an attempt not feeble,
and we may believe, not feigned, to vindicate the Anglican
Protestantism, such as he meant it to be, against the church of Rome,
but with much deference to the name of Catholic, and the authority of
the ancient fathers.[65] It is unnecessary to observe, that this was
the prevalent language of the English church in that period of forty
years, which was terminated by the civil war; and that it was
accompanied by a marked enhancement of religious ceremonies, as well
as by a considerable approximation to several doctrines and usages of
the Romanists.

     [65] Ce qu’il y a de particulier dans cette conférence, c’est
     qu’on y cite beaucoup plus les pères de l’église, que n’ont
     accoutumé de faire les Protestans de deça la mer. Comme l’église,
     Anglicane a une vénération toute particulière pour l’antiquité,
     c’est par là que les Catholiques Romains l’attaquent
     ordinairement. Bibl. Univ. i. 336. Laud, as well as Andrews,
     maintained “that the true and real body of Christ is in that
     blessed sacrament.” Conference with Fisher, p. 299. (edit. 1639.)
     And afterwards, “for the church of England, nothing is more plain
     than that it believes and teaches the true and real presence of
     Christ in the eucharist.” Nothing is more plain than the
     contrary, as Hall, who belonged to a different school of
     theology, though the friend of Laud, has in equivalent words
     observed. Hall’s works (Pratt’s edition), vol. ix., p. 374.

|Defections to the Catholic church.|

11. The progress of the latter church for the first thirty years of
the present century was as striking and uninterrupted as it had been
in the final period of the sixteenth. Victory crowned its banners on
every side. The signal defeats of the elector Palatine and the king of
Denmark, the reduction of Rochelle, displayed an evident superiority
in the ultimate argument to which the Protestants had been driven, and
which silences every other; while a rigid system of exclusion from
court favour and of civil discouragement, or even of banishment and
suppression of public worship, as in the Austrian dominions, brought
round the wavering and flexible to acquiesce with apparent willingness
in a despotism they could neither resist nor escape. The nobility,
both in France and Germany, who in the last age had been the first to
embrace a new faith, became afterwards the first to desert it. Many
also of the learned and able Protestants gave evidence of the jeopardy
of that cause by their conversion. It is not, however, just to infer
that they were merely influenced by this apprehension. Two other
causes mainly operated; one, to which we have above alluded, the
authority given to the traditions of the church, recorded by the
writers called fathers, and with which it was found very difficult to
reconcile all the protestant creed; another, the intolerance
of the reformed churches, both Lutheran and Calvinistic, which gave as
little latitude as that which they had quitted.

|Wavering of Casaubon.|

12. The defections, from whatever cause, are numerous in the
seventeenth century. But two, more eminent than any who actually
renounced the Protestant religion, must be owned to have given evident
signs of wavering, Casaubon and Grotius. The proofs of this are not
founded merely on anecdotes which might be disputed, but on their own
language.[66] Casaubon was staggered by the study of the fathers, in
which he discovered many things, especially as to the eucharist, which
he could not in any manner reconcile with tenets of the French
Hugonots.[67] Perron used to assail him with arguments he could not
parry. If we may believe this cardinal, he was on the point of
declaring publicly his conversion before he accepted the invitation of
James I. to England; and even while in England he promoted the
Catholic cause more than the world was aware.[68] This is more than we
can readily believe, and we know that he was engaged both in
maintaining the temporal rights of the crown against the school of
Bellarmin, and in writing animadversions on the ecclesiastical annals
of Baronius. But this opposition to the extreme line of the
ultra-montanists might be well compatible with a tendency towards much
that the reformers had denounced. It seemed in truth to disguise the
corruptions of the Catholic church by rendering the controversy almost
what we might call personal; as if Rome alone, either by usurping the
headship of the church, which might or might not have bad
consequences, or by its encroachments on the civil power which were
only maintained by a party, were the sole object of that religious
opposition, which had divided one half of Europe from the other. Yet
if Casaubon, as he had much inclination to do, being on ill terms with
some in England, and disliking the country,[69] had returned to
France, it seems probable that he would not long have continued in
what, according to the principles he had adopted, would appear a
schismatical communion.

     [66] In his correspondence with Scaliger, no indications of any
     vacillation as to religion appear. Of the unfortunate conference
     between Du Plessis Mornay and Du Perron, in the presence of Henry
     IV., where Casaubon himself had been one of the umpires, he
     speaks with great regret, though with a full acknowledgment that
     his champion had been worsted. Quod scribis de congressu Diomedis
     cum Glauco, sic est omnino, ut tu judicas rectè. Vir optimus, si
     eum sua prudentia orbi Gallico satis explorata non defecisset,
     nunquam ejus certaminis aleam subiisset. After much more he
     concludes: Equidem in lacrymas prope adducor, quoties subit animo
     tristissima illius diei species, cum de ingenua nobilitate, de
     excellenti ingenio, de ipsa denique veritate pompaticè adeo vidi
     triumphatum. Epist. 214. (Oct., 1600.) See also a letter to
     Heinsius on the same subject. Cassaub. Epist. 809. In a letter to
     Perron himself, in 1604, he professed to adhere to Scripture
     alone, against those who vetustatis auctoritatem pro ratione
     obtendunt. Epist. 417. A change however came gradually over his
     mind, and he grew fascinated by this very authority of antiquity.
     In 1609 he had, by the king’s command, a conference on religion
     with Du Perron, but very reluctantly, and, as his biographer
     owns, quibusdam visus est quodammodo cespitasse. Casaubon was,
     for several reasons, no match in such a disputation for Perron.
     In the first place, he was poor and weak, and the other powerful,
     which is a reason that might dispense with our giving any others;
     but secondly, he had less learning in the fathers; and thirdly,
     he was entangled by deference for these same fathers; finally, he
     was not a man of as much acuteness and eloquence as his
     antagonist. The issue of battle does not follow the better cause,
     but the sharper sword, especially when there is so much
     _ignoratio elenchi_ as in this case.

     [67] Perron continued to persecute Casaubon with argument,
     whenever he met him in the king’s library. Je vous confesse (the
     latter told Wytenbogart) qu’il m’a donné beaucoup des scrupules
     qui me restent, et auxquels je ne sais pas bien répondre ... il
     me fache de rougir. L’escapade que je prens est que je n’y puis
     répondre, mais que j’y penserai. Cassauboni Vita (ad edit.
     Epistolarum, 1709.). And in writing to the same Wytenbogart,
     Jan., 1610, we find similar signs of wavering. Me, ne quid
     dissimulem, hæc tanta diversitas a fide veteris ecclesiæ non
     parum turbat. Ne de aliis dicam, in re sacramentaria a majoribus
     discessit Lutherus, a Luthero Zuinglius, ab utroque Calvinus, a
     Calvino qui postea scripserunt. Nam constat mihi ac certissimum
     est, doctrinam Calvini de sacra eucharistia longe aliam esse ab
     ea quæ in libro observandi viri Molinæi nostri continetur, et quæ
     vulgo in ecclesiis nostris auditur. Itaque Molinæum qui
     oppugnant, Calvinum illi non minus objiciunt, quam aliquem è
     veteribus ecclesiæ doctoribus. Si sic pergimus, quis tandem erit
     exitus? Jam quod idem Molinæus, omnes veterum libros suæ doctrinæ
     contrarios respuit, ut ὑποβολιμαιους [hypobolimaious], cui
     mediocriter docto fidem faciet? Falsus illi Cyrillus,
     Hierosolymorum episcopus; falsus Gregorius Nyssenus, falsus
     Ambrosius, falsi omnes. Mihi liquet falli ipsum, et illa scripta
     esse verissima, quæ ille pronuntiat ψευδεπιγραφα.
     [pseudepigrapha]. Ep. 670. See also Epist. 1043, written from
     Paris in the same year. He came now to England, and to his great
     satisfaction found the church and its prelates exactly what he
     would wish. Illud solatio mihi est, quod in hoc regno speciem
     agnosco veteris ecclesiæ, quam ex patrum scriptis didici. Adde
     quod episcopis ὁσημεραι συνδιαγω [hosêmerai syndiagô]
     doctissimis, sapientissimis, ευσεβεστατοις [eusebestatois], et
     quod novum mihi est, priscæ ecclesiæ amantissimis. (Lond., 1611.)
     Ep. 703. His letters are full of similar language. See 743, 744,
     772, &c. He combined this inordinate respect for authority with
     its natural concomitant, a desire to restrain free inquiry.
     Though his patristic lore should have made him not unfavourable
     to the Arminians, he writes to Bertius, one of their number,
     against the liberty of conscience they required. Illa quam passim
     celebras, prophetandi libertas, bonis et piis hujus ecclesiæ
     viris mirum in modum suspecta res est et odiosa. Nemo enim
     dubitat de pietate Christiana actum esse inter vos, si quod
     videris agere, illustrissimis ordinibus fuerit semel persuasum,
     ut liberum unicuique esse velint, via regia relicta semitam ex
     animi libidine sibi aliisque aperire. Atqui veritas, ut scis, in
     omnibus rebus scientiis et disciplinis unica est, et το φωνειν
     ταυτο [to phônein tauto] inter ecclesiæ veræ notas, fateantur
     omnes, non est postrema. Ut nulli esse dubium possit, quin tot
     πολυσχιδεις [polyschideis] semitæ totidem sint errorum
     diverticula. Quod olim de politicis rebus prudentissimi
     philosophorum dixerunt, id mihi videtur multo etiam magis in
     ecclesiasticis locum habere, την αγαν ελευθεριαν εις δουλειαν εξ
     αναγκης τελευτᾶν, [tên agan eleutherian eis douleian ex anagkês
     teleutan], et πασαν τυραννιδα αναρχιας [pasan tyrannida
     anarchias] esse κρειττην [kreittên] [sic!] et optabiliorem....
     Ego qui inter pontificios diu sum in patria mea versatus, hoc
     tibi possum affirmare, nulla re magis stabiliri την τυραννιδα
     [tên tyrannida] του χξζ [tou chxz], quam dissentionibus nostris
     et dissidiis.

     Meric Casaubon’s “Pietas contra Maledicos Patrii Nominis ac
     Religionis Hostes,” is an elaborate vindication of his father
     against all charges alleged by his adversaries. The only one that
     presses is that of wavering in religion. And here Meric candidly
     owns that his father had been shaken by Perron about 1610. (See
     this tract subjoined to Almeloveen’s edition of the Epistles, p.
     89.) But afterwards, by dint of theological study, he got rid of
     the scruples the cardinal had infused into him, and became a
     Protestant of the new Anglican school, admiring the first six
     centuries, and especially the period after Constantine: Hoc
     sæculum cum duobus sequentibus ακμη της εκκλησιας [akmê tês
     ekklêsias], flos ipse ecclesiæ et ætas illius aurea queat
     nuncupari. Prolegomena in Exercitationes in Baronium. His friend
     Scaliger had very different notions of the fathers. The fathers,
     says he, in his blunt way, are very ignorant, know nothing of
     Hebrew, and teach us little in theology. Their interpretations of
     scripture are strangely perverse. Even Polycarp, who was a
     disciple of the apostles, is full of errors. It will not do to
     say that, because they were near the apostolic age, they are
     never wrong. Scaligerana Secunda. Le Clerc has some good remarks
     on the deference shown by Casaubon to the language held by the
     fathers about the eucharist, which shook his Protestantism. Bibl.
     Choisie, xix. 230.

     [68] Perroniana. Grot. Epist., pag. 939.

     [69] Several of his letters attest his desire for returning. He
     wrote to Thuanus imploring his recommendation to the queen
     regent. But he had given much offence by writing against
     Baronius, and had very little chance of an indemnity for his
     prebend of Canterbury, if he had given that up on leaving
     England. This country, however, though he sometimes calls it
     μακαρων νησος [makarôn nêsos], did not suit his disposition. He
     was never on good terms with Savile, the most presumptuous of the
     learned, according to him, and most scornful, whom he accused of
     setting on Montague to anticipate his animadversions on Baronius,
     with some suspicion, on Casaubon’s part, of stealing from him.
     Ep. 794, 848, 849. But he seems himself to have become generally
     unpopular, if we may trust his own account. Ego mores Anglorum
     non capio. Quoscunque habui notos priusquam huc venirem, jam ego
     illis sum ignotus, verè peregrinus, barbarus; nemo illorum me vel
     verbulo appellat; _appellatus silet_. Hoc quid sit, non scio.
     Hic---- [Henricus Wotton] vir doctissimus ante annos viginti
     mecum Genevæ vixit, et ex eo tempore literis amicitiam columius.
     Postquam ego e Galliis, ille Venetiis huc convenimus, desii esse
     illi notus; meæ quoque epistolæ responsum dedit nullum; an sit
     daturus nescio. Ep. 841. It seems difficult to account for so
     marked a treatment of Casaubon, except on the supposition that he
     was thought to pursue a course unfavourable to the Protestant
     interest. He charges the English with despising everyone but
     themselves; and ascribes this to the vast wealth of their
     universities; a very discreditable source of pride in our
     ancestors, if so it were. But Casaubon’s philological and
     critical skill passed for little in this country, where it was
     not known enough to be envied. In mere ecclesiastical learning he
     was behind some English scholars.

|And of Grotius.|

13. Grotius was from the time of his turning his mind to theology,
almost as much influenced as Casaubon by primitive authority, and
began, even in 1614, to commend the Anglican church for the respect it
showed, very unlike the rest of the reformed, to that standard. But
the ill-usage he sustained at the hands of those who boasted their
independence of papal tyranny, the caresses of the Gallican clergy
after he had fixed his residence at Paris, the growing dissensions and
virulence of the Protestants, the choice that seemed alone to be left
in their communion, between a fanatical anarchy, disintegrating
everything like a church on the one hand, and a domination of bigoted
and vulgar ecclesiastics on the other, made him gradually less and
less averse to the comprehensive and majestic unity of the Catholic
hierarchy, and more and more willing to concede some point of
uncertain doctrine, or some form of ambiguous expressive. This
is abundantly perceived, and has often been pointed out in his
Annotations on the Consultation of Cassander,[70] written in 1641, in
his Animadversion on Rivet, who had censured the former treatise as
inclining to Popery, in the Votum pro Pace Ecclesiasticâ and
in the Rivetiani Apologetici Discussio; all which are collected in the
fourth volume of the theological works of Grotius. These treatises
display an uniform and progressive tendency to defend the church of
Rome in everything that can be reckoned essential to her
creed; and, in fact, he will be found to go farther in this direction
than Cassander.

     [70] Casaubon himself hailed Grotius as in the right path. In
     hodiernis contentionibus in negotio religionis et doctè et piè
     judicat, et in veneratione antiquitatis cum iis sentit, qui
     optimè sentiunt. Epist. 883. See also 772, which is addressed to
     him. This high respect for the fathers and for the authority of
     the primitive church grew strongly upon him, and the more because
     he found they were hostile to the Calvinistic scheme. He was
     quite delighted at finding Jerome and Chrysostom on his side.
     Epist. 29. (1614). In the next year, writing to Vossius, he goes
     a great length. Cæterum ego reformatarum ecclesiarum miseriam in
     hoc maximè deploro, quod cum symbola condere catholicæ sit
     ecclesiæ, ipsis inter se nunquam eam in rem convenire sit datum,
     atque interim libelli apologetici ex re nata scripti ad
     imperatorem, reges, principes, aut ut in concilio œcumenico
     exhiberentur, trahi cœperint in usum longè alienum. Quid enim
     magis est alienum ab unitate catholica quam quod diversis in
     regionibus pastores diversa populo tradere coguntur? Quam mirata
     fuisset hoc prodigium pia antiquitas! Sed hæc aliaque multa
     mussitanda sunt nobis ob iniquitatem temporum. Epist. 66. He was
     at this time, as he continued till near the end of his life, when
     he moved on farther, highly partial to the Anglican church. He
     was, however, too Erastian for the English bishops of the reign
     of James, as appears by a letter addressed to him by Overall, who
     objected to his giving, in his treatise De Imperio circa Sacra, a
     definitive power in controversies of faith to the civil
     magistrate, and to his putting episcopacy among non-essentials,
     which the bishops held to be of divine right. Grotius adhered to
     his opinion, that episcopacy was not commanded as a perpetual
     institution, and thought, at that time, that there was no other
     distinction between bishops and priests than of precedency.
     Nusquam meminit, he says in one place, Clemens Romanus exsortis
     illius episcoporum auctoritatis, quæ ecclesiæ consuetudine post
     Marci mortem Alexandriæ, atque eo exemplo alibi, introduci cœpit,
     sed planè ut Paulus Apostolus, ostendit ecclesias communi
     presbyterorum, qui iidem omnes et episcopi ipsi Pauloque
     dicuntur, consilio fuisse gubernatas. Even in his latter writings
     he seems never to have embraced the notions of some Anglican
     divines on this subject, but contents himself, in his remarks on
     Cassander, who had said, singularly as it may be thought,
     Convenit _inter omnes_ olim Apostolorum ætate inter episcopos et
     presbyteros discrimen nullum fuisse, sed postmodum ordinis
     servandi et schismatis evitandi causa episcopum presbyteris
     fuisse præpositum, with observing, Episcopi sunt presbyterorum
     principes; et ista προστασια [prostasia] (præsidentia) à Christo
     præmonstrata est in Petro, ab Apostolis vero, ubicunque fieri
     poterat, constituta, et a Spiritu Sancto comprobata in
     Apocalypsi. Op. Theolog. iv. 579, 621.

     But to return from this digression to the more immediate purpose.
     Grotius for several years continued in this insulated state,
     neither approving of the Reformation nor the church of Rome. He
     wrote in 1622 to Episcopius against those whom he called
     Cassandrians, Qui etiam plerosque Romanæ ecclesiæ errores
     improbantibus auctores sunt, ne ab ejus communione discedant. Ep.
     181. He was destined to become Cassandrian himself, or something
     more. The infallibility of the church was still no doctrine of
     his. At illa auctoritas ecclesiæ αναμαρτητου [anamartêtou], quam
     ecclesiæ, et quidem suæ, Romanenses ascribunt, cum naturali
     ratione non sit evidens, nam ipsi fatentur Judaicam ecclesiam id
     privilegium non habuisse, sequitur ut adversus negantes probari
     debeat ex sacris literis. Epist. secunda series, p. 761 (1620).
     And again: Quæ scribit pater de restituendis rebus in eum statum,
     qui ante concilium Tridentinum fuerat, esset quidem hoc
     permultum; sed transubstantiatio et ei respondens adoratio pridem
     Lateranensi concilio definita est, et invocatio peculiaris
     sanctorum pridem in omnes liturgias recepta. P. 772 (1623).

     Grotius passed most of his latter years at Paris, in the
     honourable station of ambassador from the court of Sweden. He
     seems to have thought it a matter of boast that he did not live
     as a Protestant. See Ep. 196. The Hugonot ministers of Charenton
     requested him to communicate with them, which he declined, p.
     854, 856 (1635). He now was brooding over a scheme of union among
     Protestants: the English and Swedish churches were to unite, and
     to be followed by Denmark. Constituto semel aliquo tali
     ecclesiarum corpore, spes est subinde alios atque alios se
     aggregaturos. Est autem hæc res eo magis optanda protestantibus,
     quod quotidie multi eos deserunt et se cœtibus Romanensium
     addunt, non alia de causa, quam quod non unum est eorum corpus,
     sed partes distractæ, greges segreges, propria cuique sua
     sacrorum communio, ingens præterea maledidicendi certamen. Epist.
     866 (1637). See also p. 827 (1630). He fancied that by such a
     weight of authority, grounded on the ancient church, the exercise
     of private judgment, on which he looked with horror, might be
     overruled. Nisi interpretandi sacras literas, he writes to
     Calixtus, libertatem cohibemus intra lineas eorum, quæ omnes illæ
     non sanctitate minus quam primæva vetustate venerabiles ecclesiæ
     ex ipsa prædicatione scripturis ubique consentiente hauserint,
     diuque sub crucis maximè magisterio retinuerint, nisi deinde in
     iis quæ liberam habuere disputationem fraterna lenitate ferre
     alii alios discimus, quis erit litium sæpe in factiones, deinde
     in bella erumpentium finis? Ep. 674 (Oct., 1636). Qui illam
     optiman antiquitatem sequuntur ducem, quod te semper fecisse
     memini, iis non eveniet, ut multum sibi ipsis sint discolores. In
     Angliâ vides quam bene processerit dogmatum noxiorum repurgatio,
     hac maximè de causa quod qui id sanctissimum negotium procurandum
     suscepere nihil admiscuerunt novi, nihil sui, sed ad meliora
     sæcula intentam habuere oculorum aciem. Ep. 966 (1688).

     But he could not be long in perceiving that this union of
     Protestant churches was impossible from the very independence of
     their original constitution. He saw that there could be no
     practicable reunion except with Rome itself, nor that, except on
     an acknowledgment of her superiority. From the year 1640 his
     letters are full of sanguine hopes that this delusive vision
     would be realised. He still expected some concession on the other
     side; but, as usual, would have lowered his terms according to
     the pertinacity of his adversaries, if indeed they were still to
     be called his adversaries. He now published his famous
     annotations on Cassander, and the other tracts mentioned in the
     text, to which they gave rise. In these he defends almost
     everything we deem popery, such as transubstantiation (Opera
     Theologica, iv. 619), stooping to all the nonsensical evasions of
     a spiritual mutation of substance and the like; the authority of
     the pope (p. 642), the celibacy of the clergy (p. 645), the
     communion in one kind (ibid), and in fact is less of a Protestant
     than Cassander. In his epistles he declares himself decidedly in
     favour of purgatory, as at least a probable doctrine, p. 930. In
     these writings he seems to have had the countenance of Richelieu.
     Cardinalis quin ἑνωσεως [henôseôs] negotium in Gallia successurum
     sit, dubitare se negat. Epist. sec. series, p. 912. Cardinalis
     Ricelianus rem successuram putat. Ita certè loquitur multis.
     Archiepiscopus Cantuariensis pœnas dat honestissimi consilii,
     quod et aliis bonis sæpe evenit, p. 911. Grotius is now run away
     with by vanity, and fancies all will go according to his wish,
     showing much ignorance of the real state of things. He was left
     by some from whom he had entertained hopes, and thought the Dutch
     Arminians timid. Vossius ut video, præ metu, forte et ex Anglia
     sic jussus, auxilium suum mihi subtrahit, p. 908. Salmasius adhuc
     in consiliis fluctuat. Est in religionis rebus suæ parti
     addictior quam putabatur. P. 912. De Episcopio doleo; est vir
     magni ingenii et probus, sed nimium cupidus alendæ partis. But it
     is probable that he had misinterpreted some language of these
     great men, who contemplated with regret the course he was taking,
     which could be no longer a secret. De Grotii ad papam defectione,
     a French protestant of some eminence for learning writes, tanquam
     re certa, quod fama istuc distulit, verum non est. Sed non sine
     magno metu eum aliquid istiusmodi meditantem et conantem quotidie
     inviti videmus. Inter protestantes cujuslibet ordinis nomen ejus
     ascribi vetat, quod eos atrocius sugillavit in Appendice de
     Antichristo, et Annotatis ad Cassandri consultationem. Sarravii
     Epistolæ, p. 58 (1642). And again he expresses his strong
     disapprobation of one of the later treatises. Verissimè dixit
     ille qui primus dixit Grotium papissare. P. 196. See also pp. 31,
     53.

     In 1642 Grotius had become wholly averse to the Reformation. He
     thought it had done more harm than good, especially by the habit
     of interpreting everything on the papal side for the worse. Malos
     mores qui mansere corrigi æquum est. Sed an non hoc melius
     successurum fuerit, si quisque semet repurgans pro repurgatione
     aliorum preces ad Deum tulisset, et principes et episcopi
     correctionem desiderantes, non rupta compage, per concilia
     universalia in id laborassent. Dignum est de quo cogitetur, p.
     938. Auratus, as he calls him, that is, D’Or, a sort of chaplain
     to Grotius, became a Catholic about this time. The other only
     says--Quod Auratus fecit, idem fecit antehac vir doctissimus
     Petrus Pithæus; idem constituerat facere Casaubonus si in Gallia
     mansisset, affirmavit enim id inter alios etiam Cordesio. p. 939.
     Of Casaubon he says afterwards: Casaubonus multo saniores putabat
     Catholicos Galliæ quam Carentonianos. Anglos autem episcopos
     putabat a schismatis culpa posse absolvi, p. 940. Every
     successive year saw him now draw nearer to Rome. Reperio autem
     quicquid communiter ab ecclesia occidentali quæ Romanæ cohæret
     recipitur, idem reperiri apud Patres veteres Græcos et Latinos,
     quorum communionem retinendam esse vix quisquam neget. Si quid
     præter hoc est, id ad liberas doctorum opinationes pertinet; in
     quibus suum quis judicium sequi potest, et communionis jus non
     amittere, p. 958. Episcopius was for limiting articles of faith
     to the creed, but Grotius did not agree with this, and points out
     that it would not preserve uniformity. Quam multa jam sunt de
     sacramentis, de ecclesiarum regimine, in quibus, vel concordiæ
     causa, certi aliquid observari debet. Alioqui compages ecclesiæ
     tantopere nobis commendata retineri non potest, p. 941. It would
     be endless to quote every passage tending to the same result.
     Finally, in a letter to his brother in Holland, he expresses his
     hope that Wytenbogart, the respectable patriarch of Arminianism,
     would turn his attention to the means of restoring unity to the
     church. Velim D. Wytenbogardum, ubi permiserit valetudo, nisi id
     jam fecerit, scriptum aliquid facere de necessitate restituendæ
     in ecclesia unitatis, et quibus modis id fieri possit. Multi pro
     remedio monstrant, si necessaria a non necessariis separentur, in
     non necessariis sive creditu sive factu relinquatur libertas. At
     non minor est controversia, quæ sint necessaria, quam quæ sint
     vera. Indicia, aiunt, sunt in scripturis. At certè etiam circa
     illa loca variat interpretatio. Quare nondem video an quid sit
     melius, quam ea quæ ad fidem et bona opera nos ducunt retinere,
     ut sunt in ecclesia catholica; puto enim in iis esse quæ sunt
     necessaria ad salutem. In cæteris ea quæ conciliorum auctoritate,
     aut veturum consensu recepta sunt, interpretari eo modo quo
     interpretati sunt, illi qui commodissimè sunt locuti, quales
     semper aliqui in quaque materia facile reperientur. Si quis id a
     se impetrare non possit, ut taceat, nec propter res de quibus
     certus non est, sed opinationem tantum quandam habet turbet
     unitatem ecclesiæ necessariam, quæ nisi retinetur ubi est, et
     restituitur ubi non est, omnia ibunt in pejus, p. 960. (Nov.
     1648.) Wytenbogard replied very well: Si ita se res habet, ut
     indicia necessariorum et non necessariorum in scriptura reperiri
     nequeant, sed quæri debeant in auctoritate conciliorum aut
     veterum consensu, eo modo quo interpretati sunt illi, qui
     commodissimè locuti sunt, prout Excellentia tua videtur
     existimare, nescio an viginti quinque anni, etiamsi illi mihi
     adhuc restarent, omnesque exigui ingenii corporisque mei vires in
     mea essent potestate, sufficerent ut maturo cum judicio perlegam
     et expendam omnia quæ eo pertinent. This letter is in the Epistolæ
     præstantium et eruditorum virorum edited by Limborch in 1683, p.
     826. And Grotius’s answer is in the same collection. It is that
     of a man who throws off a mask he had reluctantly worn. There was
     in fact no other means of repelling Wytenbogard’s just
     observation on the moral impossibility of tracing for ourselves
     the doctrine of the Catholic church as an historical inquiry.
     Grotius refers him to a visible standard. Quare considerandum
     est, an nonfacilius et æquius sit, quoniam doctrina de gratia, de
     libero arbitrio, necessitate fidei bonorumque operum obtinuit in
     ecclesia quæ pro se habet universale regimen et ordinem
     successionis, privatos se in aliis accommodare, pacis causa, iis
     quæ universaliter sunt recepta, sive ea aptissimis
     explicationibus recipiendo, sive tacendo, quam corpus illud
     catholicum ecclesiæ se in articulo tolerantiæ accommodare debere
     uniuscujusque considerationibus et placitis. Exempli gratiâ:
     Catholica ecclesia nemini præscribit ut precetur pro mortuis, aut
     opem precum sanctorum vita hac defunctorum imploret: solummodo
     requirit, ne quis morem adeo antiquum et generalem condemnet. The
     church does, in fact, rather more than he insinuates, though less
     than Protestants generally fancy.

     I have trespassed on the patience of the general reader in this
     very long note, which may be thought a superfluous digression in
     a work of mere literature. But the epistles of Grotius are not
     much read; nor are they in many private libraries. The index is
     also very indifferent, so that without the trouble I have taken
     of going over the volume, it might be difficult to find these
     curious passages. I ought to mention that Burigny has given
     references to most of them, but with few quotations. Le Clerc, in
     the first volume of the Bibliothèque Universelle, reviewing the
     epistles of Grotius, slides very gently over his bias towards
     popery; and I have met with well-informed persons in England, who
     had no conception of the lengths to which this had led him. It is
     of far more importance, and the best apology I can offer for so
     prolix a note, to perceive by what gradual, but, as I think,
     necessary steps, he was drawn onward by his excessive respect for
     antiquity, and by his exaggerated notions of Catholic unity,
     preferring at last to err with the many, than to be right with
     the few. If Grotius had learned to look the hydra schism in the
     face, he would have had less fear of its many heads, and at least
     would have dreaded to cut them off at the neck, lest the source
     of life should be in one of them.

     That Grotius really thought as the fathers of Trent thought upon
     all points in dispute cannot be supposed. It was not in the power
     of a man of his learning and thoughtfulness to divest himself of
     his own judgment, unless he had absolutely subjugated his reason
     to religious awe, which was far from being the case. His aim was
     to search for subtle interpretations, by which he might profess
     to believe the words of the church, though conscious that his
     sense was not that of the imposers. It is needless to say that
     this is not very ingenuous; and even if it could be justifiable
     relatively to the person, would be an abandonment of the
     multitude to any superstition and delusion which might be put
     upon them. Via ad pacem expeditissima mihi videtur, si doctrina,
     communi consensu recepta, commodè explicetur, mores, sanæ
     doctrinæ adversantes, quantum fieri potest, tollantur, et in
     rebus mediis accommodet se pars ingenio totius. Epist., 1524.
     Peace was his main object; if toleration had been as well
     understood as it was afterwards, he would perhaps have
     compromised less.

     Baxter having published a Treatise of the Grotian Religion,
     wherein he imputed to Grotius this inclination towards the church
     of Rome, Archbishop Bramhall replied, after the Restoration, with
     a vindication of Grotius, in which he does not say much to the
     purpose, and seems ignorant of the case. The epistles indeed,
     were not then published.

     Besides the passages in these epistles above quoted, the reader
     who wishes to follow this up may consult Epist. 1108, 1460, 1561,
     1570, 1706 of the first series; and in the second series, p. 875,
     896, 940, 943, 958, 960, 975. But there are also many to which I
     have made no reference. I do not quote authorities for the design
     of Grotius to have declared himself a convert, if he had lived to
     return to France, though they are easily found; because the
     testimony of his writing is far stronger than any anecdote.

14. But if any one could put a different interpretation on these
works, which would require a large measure of prejudice, the epistles
of Grotius afford such evidence of his secession from the Protestant
side, as no reasonable understanding can reject. These are contained
in a large folio volume, published in 1687, and amount to 1766 of one
series, and 744 of another. I have quoted the former, for
distinction’s sake, by the number, and the latter by the page. Few, we
may presume, have taken the pains to go through them, in order to
extract all the passages that bear upon this subject. It will be found
that he began, as I have just said, by extolling the authority of the
Catholic or universal church, and its exclusive right to establish
creeds of faith. He some time afterwards ceased to frequent
the Protestant worship, but long kept his middle path, and thought it
enough to inveigh against the Jesuits and the exorbitancies of the see
of Rome. But his reverence for the writers of the fourth and fifth
centuries grew continually stronger; he learned to protest against the
privilege, claimed by the reformers, of interpreting Scripture
otherwise than the consent of the ancients had warranted; visions,
first of an union between the Lutheran and English churches, and then
of one with Rome itself, floated before his eyes; he sought religious
peace with the latter, as men seek it in opposition to civil
government, by the redress of grievances and the subsequent
restoration of obedience. But in proportion as he perceived how little
of concession was to be obtained, he grew himself more ready to
concede; and though at one time he seems to deny the infallibility of
the church, and at another would not have been content with placing
all things in the state they were before the council of Trent, he came
ultimately to think such a favourable sense might be put on all the
Tridentine decrees, as to render them compatible with the Confession
of Augsburg.

15. From the year 1640 his course seems to have been accelerated; he
intimates no disapprobation of those who went over to Rome; he found,
as he tells us, that whatever was generally received in the church of
Rome, had the authority of those Greek and Latin fathers, whose
communion no one would have refused; and at length, in a remarkable
letter to Wytenbogart, bearing date in 1644, he puts it as worthy to
be considered, whether it would not be more reasonable for private men
who find the most essential doctrines in a church of an universal
hierarchy and a legitimate succession, to wave their differences with
it for the sake of peace, by putting the best interpretations they
can, only keeping silence on their own opinions, than that the
Catholic church should accommodate itself to the separate judgment of
such men. Grotius had already ceased to speak of the Arminians as if
he was one of themselves, though with much respect for some of their
leaders.

16. Upon a dispassionate examination of all these testimonies, we can
hardly deem it an uncertain question whether Grotius, if his life had
been prolonged, would have taken the easy leap that still remained;
and there is some positive evidence of his design to do so. But, dying
on a journey and in a protestant country, this avowed declaration was
never made. Fortunately indeed for his glory, since his new friends
would speedily have put his conversion to the proof, and his latter
years might have been spent, like those of Lipsius, in defending
legendary miracles, or in waging war against the honoured dead of the
Reformation. He did not sufficiently remember that a silent neutrality
is never indulged to a suspicious proselyte.

17. It appears to me, nevertheless, that Grotius was very far from
having truly subjected his understanding to the church of Rome. The
whole bent of his mind was to effect an exterior union among
Christians; and for this end he did not hesitate to recommend
equivocal senses of words, convenient explanations, and respectful
silence. Listening attentively, if I may be allowed such a metaphor,
we hear the chaunt of the Æsculapian cock in all he has written for
the catholic church. He first took up his reverence for antiquity,
because he found antiquity unfavourable to the doctrine of Calvin. His
antipathy to this reformer and to his followers led him on to an
admiration of the episcopal succession, the organized hierarchy, the
ceremonial and liturgical institutions, the high notions of
sacramental rites, which he found in the ancient church, and which
Luther and Zuingle had cast away. He became imbued with the notion of
unity as essential to the catholic church; but he never seems to have
gone the length of abandoning his own judgment, or of asserting any
positive infallibility to the decrees of man. For it is manifest that,
if the councils of Nice or of Trent were truly inspired, it would be
our business to inquire what they meant themselves, not to put the
most convenient interpretations, nor to search out for some author or
another who may have strained their language to our own opinion. The
precedent of Grotius, therefore, will not serve those who endeavour to
bind the reason of the enlightened part of mankind, which he respected
like his own. Two predominant ideas seem to have swayed the mind of
this great man in the very gradual transition we have indicated; one,
his extreme reverence for antiquity and for the consent of the
catholic church; the other, his Erastian principles as to the
authority of the civil magistrate in matters of religion. Both
conspired to give him an abhorrence of the ‘liberty of prophesying,’
the right of private men to promulgate tenets inconsistent with
established faith. In friendly conversation or correspondence, even
perhaps; with due reserve, in Latin writings, much might be
indulged to the learned, room was to be found for an Erasmus and a
Cassander; or, if they would themselves consent, for an Episcopius and
a Wytenbogart, at least for a Montagu and a Laud; but no pretext was
ever to justify a separation. The scheme of Grotius is, in a modified
degree, much the same as that of Hobbes.

|Calixtus.|

18. In the Lutheran church we find an eminent contemporary of Grotius,
who may be reckoned his counterpart in the motives which influenced
him to seek for an entire union of religious parties, though
resembling him far more in his earlier opinions, than in those to
which he ultimately arrived. This was George Calixtus, of the
university of Helmstadt, a theologian, the most tolerant, mild, and
catholic in his spirit, whom the Confession of Augsburg had known
since Melanchthon. This university indeed, which had never subscribed
the Form of Concord, was already distinguished by freedom of inquiry,
and its natural concomitant, a large and liberal spirit. But in his
own church generally, Calixtus found as rigid schemes of orthodoxy,
and perhaps a more invidious scrutiny into the recesses of private
opinion, than in that of Rome, with a less extensive basis of
authority. The dream of good men in this age, the reunion of Christian
churches in a common faith, and, meanwhile, the tolerance of
differences, were ever the aim of Calixtus. But he fell, like the
Anglican divines, into high notions of primitive tradition, placing,
according to Eichhorn and Mosheim, the unanimity of the first six
centuries by the side of Scripture itself. He was assailed by the
adherents of the Form of Concord with aggravated virulence and
vulgarity; he was accused of being a papist and a Calvinist,
reproaches equally odious in their eyes, and therefore fit to be
heaped on his head; the inconsistency of calumnies being no good
reason with bigots against uttering them.[71]

     [71] Eichhorn, vol. vi., part ii., p. 20. Mosheim. Biogr. Univ.

|His attempts at concord.|

19. In the treatise, published long after his death, in 1697, De
tolerantia Reformatorum circa quæstiones inter ipsos et Augustanam
confessionem professes controversas consultatio, it is his object to
prove that the Calvinists held no such tenets as should exclude them
from Christian communion. He does not deny or extenuate the reality of
their differences from the Confession of Augsburg. The Lutherans,
though many of them, he says, had formerly maintained the absolute
decrees of predestination, were now come round to the doctrine of the
first four centuries.[72] And he admits that the Calvinists, whatever
phrases they may use, do not believe a true and substantial presence
in the Eucharist.[73] But neither of these errors if such they are, he
takes to be fundamental. In a shorter and more valuable treatise,
entitled Desiderium et studium concordiæ, ecclesiasticæ, Calixtus
proposes some excellent rules for allaying religious heats. But he
leans far too much towards the authority of tradition. Every church,
he says, which affirms what others deny, is bound to prove its
affirmation; first by Scripture, in which whatever is contained must
be out of controversy, and secondly (as Scripture bears witness to the
church that it is the pillar and foundation of truth, and especially
the primitive church which is called that of the saints and martyrs),
by the unanimous consent of the ancient church; above all, where the
debate is among learned men. The agreement of the church is therefore
a sufficient evidence of Christian doctrine, not that of individual
writers, who are to be regarded rather so far as they testify the
catholic doctrine, than as they propound their own.[74] This
deference to an imaginary perfection in the church of the fourth or
fifth century must have given a great advantage to that of Rome, which
is not always weak on such ground, and doubtless serves to account for
those frequent desertions to her banner, especially in persons of very
high rank, which afterwards occurred in Germany.

     [72] Nostri e quibus olim multi ibidem absolutum decretum
     approbarunt, paulatim ad sententiam primorum quatuor sæculorum,
     nempe decretum juxta præscientiam factum, receperunt. Qua in re
     multum egregiè laboravit Ægidius Hunnius. Difficile autem est
     hanc sententiam ita proponere, ne quid Pelagianismo habere affine
     videatur, p. 14.

     [73] Si tamen non tam quid loquantur quam quid sentiant
     attendimus, certum est eos veri corporis et sanguinis secundum
     substantiam acceptorum præsentiam non admittere. Rectius autem
     fuerit utramque partem simpliciter et ingenuè, quod sentit,
     profiteri, quam alteram alteri ambiguis loquendi formulis
     imponere. Qualem conciliandi rationem inierunt olim Philippus et
     Bucerus, nempe ut præscriberentur formulæ, quarum verba utraque
     pars amplecteretur, sed singulæ suo sensu acciperent ac
     interpretarentur. Quem conatum, quamvis ex pio eoque ingente
     concordiæ desiderio et studio profectum, nulla successûs
     felicitas excepit. p. 70. This observation is very just in the
     abstract; but in the early period of the reformation, there were
     strong reasons for evading points of difference, in the hope that
     the truth would silently prevail in the course of time. We,
     however, who come later, are to follow the advice of Calixtus,
     and, in judging as well as we can, of the opinions of men, must
     not altogether regard their words. Upon no theological
     controversy, probably, has there been so much of studied
     ambiguity as on that of the eucharist. Calixtus passes a similar
     censure on the equivocations of some great men of the preceding
     century in his other treatise mentioned in the text.

     [74] Consensu itaque primæ ecclesiæ ex symbolis et scriptis
     manifesto doctrina Christiana rectè confirmatur. Intelligimus
     autem doctrinam fundamentalem et necessariam, non quasvis
     appendices et quæstiones, aut etiam quorundam scripturæ locorum
     interpretationes. De talibus enim unanimis et universalis
     consensus non poterit erui vel proferri. Et magis apud plerosque
     spectandum est, quid tanquam communem ecclesiæ sententiam
     proponunt, quam quomodo eam confirmant aut demonstrant, p. 85. I
     have not observed in the little I know of Calixtus, any proof of
     his inclination toward the church of Rome.

     Gerard Vossius, as Episcopius wrote to Vorstius in 1615, declared
     in his inaugural lecture as professor of theology, his
     determination to follow the consent of antiquity, in explicatione
     Scripturarum et controversiarum diremtionibus diligenter
     examinare et expendere catholicum et antiquissimum consensum, cum
     sine dubio illud quod a pluribus et antiquissimis dictum est,
     verissimum sit. Epist. Virorum præstantium, p. 6.

|High-church party in England.|

20. The tenets of some of those who have been called High-church
Anglicans may in themselves be little different from those of Grotius
and Calixtus. But the spirit in which they have been conceived is
altogether opposite. The one is exclusive, intolerant, severe,
dogmatical, insisting on uniformity of faith as well as of exterior
observances; the other catholic in outward profession, charitable in
sentiment, and in fact one mode, though a mode as imprudent as it was
oblique, in which the latitudinarian principle was manifested. The
language both of Grotius and Calixtus bears this out, and this ought
closely to be observed, lest we confound the real laxity of one school
with the rigid orthodoxy of the other. One had it in view to reconcile
discordant communions by mutual concession, and either by such
explication of contrarieties as might make them appear less
incompatible with outward unity, or by an avowed tolerance of their
profession within the church; the other would permit nothing but
submission to its own authority: it loved to multiply rather than to
extinguish the risks of dissent, in order to crush it more
effectually; the one was a pacific negotiator, the other a conquering
tyrant.

|Daillé on the right use of the Fathers.|

21. It was justly alarming to sincere protestants, that so many
brilliant ornaments of their party should either desert to the hostile
side, or do their own so much injury by taking up untenable
ground.[75] Nothing, it appeared to reflecting men, could be trusted
to the argument from antiquity: whatever was gained in the controversy
on a few points was lost upon those of the first importance. It was
become the only secure course to overthrow the tribunal. Daillé,
himself one of the most learned in this patristic erudition whom the
French reformed church possessed, was the first who boldly attacked
the new school of historical theology in their own stronghold, not
occupying their fortress, but razing it to the ground. The design of
his celebrated Treatise concerning the right use of the Fathers,
published in 1628, is, in his own words, to show, “that they cannot be
the judges of the controversies in religion at this day between the
papist and the protestant,” nor, by parity of reasoning, of many
others; “1. Because it is, if not an impossible, yet at least a very
difficult thing to find out what their sense hath been touching the
same. 2. Because that their sense and judgment of these things,
supposing it to be certainly and clearly understood, not being
infallible, and without all danger of error, cannot carry with it a
sufficient authority for the satisfying the understanding.”

     [75] It was a poor consolation for so many losses, that the
     famous Antonio de Dominis, archbishop of Spoleto, came over to
     England, and by his books de Republica Ecclesiastica, as well as
     by his conversation, seemed an undisguised enemy to the church of
     Rome. The object of his work is to prove that the pope has no
     superiority over other bishops. James gave de Dominis the deanery
     of Windsor and a living; but whether he, strictly speaking,
     belonged to the church of England, I do not remember to have
     read. Preferments were bestowed irregularly in that age. He
     returned, however, to the ancient fold; but did not avoid
     suspicion, being thrown into prison at Rome; and after his death,
     the imputations of heresy against him so much increased that his
     body was dug up and burned. Neither party has been ambitious to
     claim this vain and insincere, though clever prelate.

22. The arguments adduced by Daillé in support of the former of these
two positions, and which occupy the first book of the treatise, are
drawn from the paucity of early Christian writers, from the nature of
the subjects treated by them having little relation to the present
controversies, from the suspicions of forgery and interpolation
affecting many of their works, the difficulty of understanding their
idioms and figurative expressions, the habit of some of the fathers to
say what they did not believe, their changes of mind, the peculiar and
individual opinions of some among them, affording little evidence of
the doctrine of the church; finally, the probability that many who
differed from those called the fathers, and whose writings have not
descended to us, may have been of as good authority as themselves.

23. In the second book, which in fact has been very much anticipated
in the first, he shows that neither the testimony nor the doctrine of
the fathers is infallible (by which word he must be understood to mean
that it raises but a slight presumption of truth), proving this by
their errors and contradictions. Thus he concludes that, though their
negative authority is considerable, since they cannot be presumed
ignorant of any material doctrine of religion, we are to be very slow
in drawing affirmative propositions from their writings, and much more
so in relying upon them as undoubted verities.

24. It has been said of this treatise on the right use of the fathers,
that its author had pretty well proved they were of no use at all.
This indeed is by no means the case, but it has certainly diminished
not only the deference which many have been wont to pay to the opinion
of the primitive writers, but what is still more contended for, the
value of their testimony, whether as to matters of fact, or as to the
prevailing doctrines of the Christian church. Nothing can be more
certain, though in the warmth of controversy men are apt to disregard
it, than that a witness, who deposes in any one case what can be
disproved, is not entitled to belief in other assertions which we have
no means of confuting, unless it be shown that the circumstances of
his evidence render it more trust-worthy in these points than we have
found it before. Hence, such writers as Justin and Irenæus ought not,
except with great precaution, to be quoted in proof at all, or at
least with confidence; their falsehood, not probably wilful, in
assertions that have been brought to a test rendering their testimony
very precarious upon any other points. Daillé, it may be added, uses
some circumspection, as the times, if not his own disposition,
required in handling this subject, keeping chiefly in view the
controversies between the Romish and protestant churches: nor does he
ever indulge in that tone of banter or acrimony which we find in
Whitby, Barbeyrac, Jortin, and Middleton; and which must be condemned
by every one who reflects that many of these writers exposed their
lives, and some actually lost them, in the maintenance and propagation
of Christianity.

|Chillingworth’s Religion of Protestants.|

25. This well-timed and important book met with a good reception from
some in England, though it must have been very uncongenial to the
ruling party. It was extolled and partly translated by Lord Falkland;
and his two distinguished friends, Chillingworth and Hales, found in
it the materials of their own bold revolt against church authority.
They were both Arminians, and, especially the former, averse in all
respects to the Puritan school. But like Episcopius, they scorned to
rely, as on these points they might have done, on what they deemed so
precarious and inconclusive as the sentiments of the fathers.
Chillingworth, as is well known, had been induced to embrace the
Romish religion, on the usual ground that a succession of infallible
pastors, that is, a collective hierarchy, by adhering to whom alone we
could be secure from error, was to be found in that church. He
returned again to the protestant religion on being convinced that no
such infallible society could be found. And a Jesuit, by name Knott,
having written a book to prove that unrepenting protestants could not
be saved, Chillingworth published, in 1637, his famous answer: The
Religion of Protestants a safe Way to Salvation. In this he closely
tracks the steps of his adversary, replying to every paragraph and
almost every sentence.

|Character of this work.|

26. Knott is by no means a despicable writer, he is concise, polished,
and places in an advantageous light the great leading arguments of his
church. Chillingworth, with a more diffuse and less elegant style, is
greatly superior in impetuosity and warmth. In his long parenthetical
periods, and in those of other old English writers, in his
copiousness, which is never empty or tautological, there is an
inartificial eloquence springing from strength of intellect and
sincerity of feeling, that cannot fail to impress the reader. But his
chief excellence is the close reasoning, which avoids every dangerous
admission and yields to no ambiguousness of language. He perceived and
maintained with great courage, considering the times in which he wrote
and the temper of those he was not unwilling to keep as
friends, his favourite tenet, that all things necessary to be believed
are clearly laid down in Scripture. Of tradition, which many of his
contemporary protestants were becoming as prone to magnify as their
opponents, he spoke very slightingly; not denying of course a maxim
often quoted from Vincentius Lirinensis, that a tradition strictly
universal and aboriginal must be founded in truth, but being assured
that no such could be shown; and that what came nearest, both in
antiquity and in evidence of catholic reception, to the name of
apostolical, were doctrines and usages rejected alike by all
denominations of the church in modern times.[76] It will be readily
conceived, that his method of dealing with the controversy is very
different from that of Laud in his treatise against Fisher; wherein we
meet chiefly with disputes on passages in the fathers, as to which,
especially when they are not quoted at length, it is impossible that
any reader can determine for himself. The work of Chillingworth may at
least be understood and appreciated without reference to any other;
the condition, perhaps, of real superiority in all productions of the
mind.

     [76] “If there were anything unwritten which had come down to us
     with as full and universal a tradition as the unquestioned books
     of canonical Scripture, that thing should I believe as well as
     the Scripture; but I have long sought for some such thing, and
     yet I am to seek; nay, I am confident no one point in controversy
     between papists and protestants can go in upon half so fair
     cards, for to gain the esteem of an apostolic tradition, as those
     things which are now decried on all hands; I mean the opinion of
     the Chiliasts and the communicating infants.” Chap. 3, § 82. He
     dilates upon this insecurity of tradition in some detached
     papers, subjoined to the best editions of his work. Chillingworth
     might have added an instance if he had been writing against
     Romanising Anglicans. Nothing can come so close to the foolish
     rule above-mentioned, as the observation of celibacy by bishops
     and priests, not being married before their ordination, which,
     till the time of Luther, was, as far as we have reason to
     believe, universally enjoined in the church; no one, at least,
     has ever alleged an authority to the contrary. Yet those who talk
     most of the rule of Vincentius Lirinensis set aside without
     compunction the only case in which we can truly say that it may
     with some show of probability be applied. Omnia vincit amor.

27. Chillingworth was, however, a man versed in patristical learning,
by no means less so, probably, than Laud. But he had found so much
uncertainty about this course of theological doctrine, seducing as it
generally is to the learned, “fathers,” as he expresses it, “being set
against fathers, and councils against councils,” that he declares, in
a well-known passage, the Bible exclusively to be the religion of
protestants; and each man’s own reason to be, as from the general
tenor of his volume it appears that he held it, the interpreter of the
Bible.[77] It was a natural consequence that he was a strenuous
advocate not so much for toleration of separate churches, as for such
an “ordering of the public service of God, that all who believe the
Scripture and live according to it, might, without scruple or
hypocrisy or protestation against any part, join in it;”[78] a scheme
when practicable, as it could not possibly be often rendered, far more
eligible than the separation of sects, and hence the favourite object
of Grotius and Taylor, as well as of Erasmus and Cassander. And in a
remarkable and eloquent passage, Chillingworth declares that
“protestants are inexcusable, if they did offer violence to other
men’s consciences;” which Knott had said to be notorious, as in fact
it was, and as Chillingworth ought more explicitly to have
admitted.[79] “Certainly,” he observes in another place, “if
protestants are faulty in this matter [of claiming authority], it is
for doing it too much and not too little. This presumptuous imposing
of the senses of men upon the words of God, the special senses of men
upon the general words of God, and laying them upon men’s consciences
together, under the equal penalty of death and damnation, this vain
conceit that we can speak of the things of God better than in the
words of God; this deifying our own interpretations and tyrannous
enforcing them upon others; this restraining of the word of God from
that latitude and generality, and the understandings of men from that
liberty wherein Christ and the apostles left them, is and hath been
the only fountain of all the schisms of the church, and that which
makes them immortal;[80] the common incendiary of Christendom,
and that which tears in pieces not the coat but the bowels and members
of Christ. Take away these walls of separation and all will quickly be
one. Take away this persecuting, burning, cursing, damning of men for
not subscribing the words of men as the words of God; require of
Christians only to believe Christ, and to call no man master but him
only; let those leave claiming infallibility that have no title to it,
and let them that in their words disclaim it, disclaim it also in
their actions. In a word, take away tyranny,” &c.[81]

     [77] This must always be understood with the condition, that the
     reason itself shall be competently enlightened: if Chillingworth
     meant more than this, he carried his principle too far, as others
     have done. The case is parallel in jurisprudence, medicine,
     mechanics, and every human science: any one man, primâ facie, may
     be a competent judge, but all men are not so. It is hard to prove
     that there is any different rule for theology; but parties will
     always contend for extremes; for the rights of bigots to think
     for others, and the rights of fools to think for themselves.

     [78] Chap. 3, § 81.

     [79] Chap. 5, § 96.

     [80] “This persuasion,” he says in a note, “is no singularity of
     mine, but the doctrine which I have learned from divines of great
     learning and judgment. Let the reader be pleased to peruse the
     7th book of Acontius de Stratagematibus Satanæ, and Zanchius his
     last oration delivered by him after the composing of the discord
     between him and Amerbachius, and he shall confess as much.”

     [81] Chap. 4, § 17.

28. It is obvious that in this passage, and indeed throughout the
volume, Chillingworth contravenes the prevailing theories of the
Anglican church, full as distinctly as those of the Roman. He escaped
however unscathed by the censure of that jealous hierarchy; his
private friendship with Laud, the lustre of his name, the absence of
factious and sectarian connections, and still more perhaps the rapid
gathering of the storms that swept both parties away, may be assigned
as his protection. In later times his book obtained a high reputation;
he was called the immortal Chillingworth; he was the favourite of all
the moderate and the latitudinarian writers, of Tillotson, Locke, and
Warburton. Those of opposite tenets, when they happen to have read his
book, can do nothing else but condemn its tendency.

|Hales on Schism.|

29. A still more intrepid champion in the same cause was John Hales;
for his little tract on Schism, not being in any part directed against
the church of Rome, could have nothing to redeem the strong
protestations against church authority, “which,” as he bluntly
expresses it, “is none;” words that he afterwards slightly qualified.
The aim of Hales, as well as of Grotius, Calixtus, and Chillingworth,
was to bring about a more comprehensive communion; but he went still
farther; his language is rough and audacious;[82] his theology in some
of his other writings has a scent of Racow; and though these crept
slowly to light, there was enough in the earliest to make us wonder at
the high name, the epithet Ever-memorable, which he obtained in the
English church.

     [82] “I must, for my own part, confess that councils and synods
     not only may and have erred, but considering the means how they
     are managed, it were a great marvel if they did not err, for what
     men are they of whom those great meetings do consist? Are they
     the best, the most learned, the most virtuous, the most likely to
     walk uprightly? No, the greatest, the most ambitious, and many
     times men of neither judgment nor learning; such are they of whom
     these bodies do consist. Are these men in common equity likely to
     determine for truth?”--Vol. i., p. 60, edit. 1765.

     “Universality is such a proof of truth as truth itself is ashamed
     of; for universality is but a quainter and a trimmer name to
     signify the multitude. Now human authority at the strongest is
     but weak, but the multitude is the weakest part of human
     authority; it is the great patron of error, most easily abused
     and most hardly disabused. The beginning of error may be and
     mostly is from private persons, but the maintainer and continuer
     of error is the multitude. Private persons first beget errors in
     the multitude and make them public; and publicness of them begets
     them again in private persons. It is a thing which our common
     experience and practice acquaints us with, that when some private
     persons have gained authority with the multitude, and infused
     some error into them and made it public, the publicness of the
     error gains authority to it, and interchangeably prevails with
     private persons to entertain it. The most singular and strongest
     part of human authority is properly in the wisest and most
     virtuous; and those I trow are not the most universal.”--iii.
     164.

     The treatise on Schism, from which these last passages are _not_
     extracted, was printed at Oxford in 1642, with some
     animadversions by the editor. Wood’s Athenæ, iii. 414.

|Controversies on grace and free will. Augustinian scheme.|

30. It is unnecessary to say that few disputes in theology have been
so eagerly conducted, so extensively ramified, as those which relate
to the free will of man, and his capacity of turning himself towards
God. In this place nothing more will be expected than a brief
statement of the principal question, doing no injustice by a tone of
partiality to either side. All shades of opinion, as it seems, may be
reduced to two, which have long divided and will long divide the
Christian world. According to one of these, the corrupt nature of man
is incapable of exerting any power towards a state of acceptance with
God, or even of willing it with an earnest desire, until excited by
preventing (præveniens) grace; which grace is vouchsafed to some only,
and is called free, because God is not limited by any respect
of those persons to whom he accords this gift. Whether those who are
thus called by the influence of the Spirit, are so irresistibly
impelled to it, that their perseverance in the faith and good works
which are the fruits of their election, may surely be relied upon, or,
on the other hand, may either at first obdurately resist the divine
impulses, or finally swerve from their state of grace, is another
question, upon which those who agree in the principal doctrine have
been at variance. It is also controverted among those who belong to
this class of theologians, whether the election thus freely made out
of mankind depends upon an eternal decree of predestination, or upon a
sentence of God following the fall of man. And a third difference
relates to the condition of man after he has been aroused by the
Spirit from a state of entire alienation from God; some holding that
the completion as well as commencement of the work of conversion is
wholly owing to the divine influence, while others maintain a
co-operation of the will, so that the salvation of a sinner may, in
some degree, be ascribed to himself. But the essential principle of
all whom we reckon in this category of divines is the necessity of
preventing grace, or, in other words, that it is not in the power of
man to do any act, in the first instance, towards his own salvation.
This, in some or other of its modifications, used to be deemed the
orthodox scheme of doctrine; it was established in the Latin church by
the influence of Augustin, it was generally held by the schoolmen, by
most of the early reformers, and seems to be inculcated by the decrees
of the council of Trent, as much as by the articles of the church of
England. In a loose and modern acceptation of the word, it often goes
by the name of Calvinism, which may perhaps be less improper, if we do
not use the term in an exclusive sense, but, if it is meant to imply a
particular relation to Calvin, leads to controversial chicane, and a
misstatement of the historical part of the question.

|Semi-pelagian hypothesis.|

31. An opposite class of theological reasoners belong to what is
sometimes called the Semi-pelagian school. These concur with the
former in the necessity of assistance from the Spirit to the
endeavours of man towards subduing his evil tendencies, and renewing
his heart in the fear and love of God, but conceive that every sinner
is capable of seeking this assistance, which will not be refused him,
and consequently of beginning the work of conversion by his own will.
They therefore either deny the necessity of preventing grace, except
such as is exterior, or, which comes effectively to the same thing,
assert that it is accorded in a sufficient measure to every one within
the Christian church, whether at the time of baptism, or by some other
means. They think the opposite opinion, whether founded on the
hypothesis of an eternal decree or not, irreconcilable with the moral
attributes of the Deity, and inconsistent with the general tenor of
Scripture. The Semi-pelagian doctrine is commonly admitted to have
been held by the Greek fathers; but the authority of Augustin, and the
decisions of the Western church caused it to assume the character of a
heresy. Some of the Scotists among the schoolmen appear to have made
an approach to it, by their tenet of grace ex congruo. They thought
that the human virtues and moral dispositions of unregenerate men were
the predisposing circumstances which, by a sort of fitness, made them
the objects of the divine goodness in according the benefits of his
grace. Thus their own free will, from which it was admitted that such
qualities and actions might proceed, would be the real, though
mediate, cause of their conversion. But this was rejected by the
greater part, who asserted the absolute irrespective freedom of grace,
and appealed to experience for its frequent efficacy over those who
had no inherent virtues to merit it.

|Tenets of the reformers.|

32. The early reformers, and none more than Luther, maintained the
absolute passiveness of the human will, so that no good actions, even
after conversion, could be ascribed in any proper sense to man, but
altogether to the operation of the Spirit. Not only, however,
Melanchthon espoused the Synergistic doctrine, but the Lutheran
church, not in any symbolic book, but in the general tenets of its
members, has been thought to have gone a good way towards
Semi-pelagianism, or what passed for such with the more rigid
party.[83] In the reformed church, on the contrary, the
Supra-lapsarian tenets of Calvin, or the immutable decrees of election
and reprobation from all eternity, were obviously incompatible
with any hypothesis that made the salvation of a sinner depend upon
himself. But towards the close of the sixteenth century, these severer
notions (which it may be observed by the way, had always been entirely
rejected by the Anabaptists, and by some of greater name, such as
Sebastian Castalio) began to be impugned by a few learned men. This
led in England to what are called the Lambeth articles, drawn up by
Whitgift, six of which assert the Calvinistic doctrine of
predestination, and three deny that of the Semi-pelagians. But these,
being not quite approved by the queen, or by Lord Burleigh, were never
received by authority in our church. There can nevertheless be no
reasonable or even sincere doubt that Calvinism, in the popular sense,
was at this time prevalent; even Hooker adopted the Lambeth articles
with verbal modifications that do not affect their sense.

     [83] Le Clerc says that the doctrine of Melanchthon, which
     Bossuet stigmatises as Semi-pelagian, is that of the council of
     Trent. Bibl. Choisie, v. 341. I should put a different
     construction upon the Tridentine canons; but of course my
     practice in these nice questions is not great.

|Rise of Arminianism.|

|Episcopius.|

33. The few who, in England or in the reformed churches upon the
Continent, embraced these novel and heterodox opinions, as they were
then accounted, within the sixteenth century, excited little attention
in comparison with James Arminius, who became professor of theology at
Leyden in 1604. The controversy ripened in a few years; it was
intimately connected, not, of course, in its own nature, but by some
of those collateral influences which have so often determined the
opinions of mankind, with the political relations between the Dutch
clergy and the States of Holland, as it was afterwards with the still
less theological differences of that government with its Stadtholder;
it appealed, on one side to reason, on the other to authority and to
force; an unequal conflict, till posterity restore the balance.
Arminius died in 1609; he has left works on the main topics of debate;
but in theological literature, the great chief of the Arminian or
Remonstrant church is Simon Episcopius. The principles of Episcopius
are more widely removed from those of the Augustinian school than the
five articles, so well known as the leading tenets of Arminius, and
condemned at the synod of Dort. Of this famous assembly it is
difficult to speak in a few words. The copious history of Brandt is
perhaps the best authority; though we must own that the opposite party
have a right to be heard. We are here, however, on merely literary
ground, and the proceedings of ecclesiastical synods are not strictly
within any province of literary history.

|His writings.|

34. The works of Episcopius were collectively published in 1650, seven
years after his death. They form two volumes in folio, and have been
more than once reprinted. The most remarkable are the Confessio
Remonstrantium, drawn up about 1624, the Apology for it against a
censure of the opposite party, and what seems to have been a later
work, and more celebrated, his Institutiones Theologicæ. These contain
a new scheme of religion, compared with that of the established
churches of Europe, and may justly be deemed the representative of the
liberal or latitudinarian theology. For though the writings of
Erasmus, Cassander, Castalio, and Acontius had tended to the same
purpose, they were either too much weakened by the restraints of
prudence, or too obscure and transitory, to draw much attention, or to
carry any weight against the rigid and exclusive tenets which were
sustained by power.

|Their spirit and tendency.|

35. The earlier treatises of Episcopius seem to speak on several
subjects less unequivocally than the Theological Institutions; a
reserve not perhaps to be censured, and which all parties have thought
themselves warranted to employ, so long as either the hope of
agreement with a powerful adversary, or of mitigating his severity,
should remain. Hence the Confession of the Remonstrants explicitly
states that they decline the Semi-pelagian controversy, contenting
themselves with asserting that sufficient grace is bestowed on all who
are called by the gospel, to comply with that divine call and obey its
precepts.[84] They used a form of words, which might seem equivalent
to the tenet of original sin, and they did not avoid or refuse that
term. But Episcopius afterwards denies it, at least in the extended
sense of most theologians, almost as explicitly as Jeremy Taylor.[85]
It was common in the seventeenth century to charge the Arminians, and
especially Episcopius, with Socinianism. Bossuet, who seems to have
quarrelled with all parties, and is neither Molinist nor Jansenist,
Calvinist nor Arminian, never doubting that there is a firm footing
between them, having attacked Episcopius and Grotius particularly for
Semi-pelagianism and Socinianism, Le Clerc entered on their defence.
But probably he would have passed with Bossuet, and hardly cared if he
did pass, for a heretic, at least of the former denomination
himself.[86]

     [84] Episcop. Opera, vol. i., p. 64. De eo nemini litem movent
     Remonstrantes. I am not sure that my translation is right; but I
     think it is what they meant. By prevenient grace they seemed to
     have meant only the exterior grace of the gospel’s promulgation,
     which is equivalent to the Semi-pelagian scheme, p. 189. Grotius
     latterly came into this opinion, though he had disclaimed
     everything of the kind in his first dealings with theology. I
     have found the same doctrine in Calixtus; but I have preserved no
     reference as to either.

     [85] Instit. Theolog., lib. iv., sect. v., c. 2. Corruptionis
     istius universalis nulla sunt indicia nec signa; imo non pauca
     sunt signa ex quibus colligitur naturam totam humanam sic
     corruptam non esse. The whole chapter, Ubi de peccato, quod
     vocant, originis agitur, et præcipua S. S. loca quibus inniti
     creditur, examinantur, appears to deny the doctrine entirely; but
     there may be some shades of distinction which have escaped me.
     Limborch (Theolog. Christiana lib. iii., c. 4.) allows it in a
     qualified sense.

     [86] Bibl. Choisie, vol. v.

|Great latitude allowed by them.|

36. But the most distinguishing peculiarity in the writings of
Episcopius was his reduction of the fundamental doctrines of
Christianity far below the multitudinous articles of the churches;
confining them to propositions which no Christian can avoid
acknowledging without manifest blame; such, namely, wherein the
subject, the predicate, and the connexion of the two are declared in
Scripture by express or equivalent words.[87] He laid little stress on
the authority of the church; notwithstanding the advantage he might
have gained by the Anti-Calvinistic tenets of the fathers, admitting
indeed the validity of the celebrated rule of Vincentius Lirinensis,
in respect of tradition, which the upholders of primitive authority
have always had in their mouths, but adding that it is utterly
impossible to find any instance wherein it can be usefully
applied.[88]

     [87] Necessaria quæ scripturis continentur talia esse omnia, ut
     sine manifesta hominis culpa ignorari, negari aut in dubium
     vocari nequeant; quia videlicet tum subjectum, tum prædicatum,
     tum subjecti cum prædicato connexio necessaria in ipsis
     scripturis est, aut expressè, aut æquipollenter. Inst. Theol.
     l. iv., c. 6.

     [88] Instit. Theolog. l. iv., sect. i., c. 15. Dupin says of
     Episcopius: Il n’a employé dans ses ouvrages que des passages de
     l’écriture sainte qu’il possédoit parfaitement. Il avoit aussi lu
     les Rabbins, mais on ne voit pas qu’il eût étudié les pères ni
     l’antiquité ecclésiastique. Il écrit nettement et méthodiquement,
     pose des principes, ne dissimule rien des objections qu’on peut
     faire contre, et y repond du mieux qu’il peut. On voit en lui une
     tolérance parfaite pour les Sociniens quoiqu’il se déclare contre
     eux; pour le parti d’Arminius, jamais il n’a eu de plus zélé et
     de plus habile défenseur, Bibliothèque des Auteurs séparés de
     l’Eglise Romaine, ii. 495.

     The life of Episcopius has been written by Limborch. Justice has
     been done to this eminent person and to the Arminian party which
     he led, in two recent English works, Nicholls’ Calvinism and
     Arminianism displayed, and Calder’s Life of Episcopius (1835).
     The latter is less verbose and more temperate than the former,
     and may be recommended, as a fair and useful production, to the
     general reader. Two theological parties in this country, though
     opposite in most things, are inveterately prejudiced against the
     Leyden school.

|Progress of Arminianism.|

|Cameron.|

37. The Arminian doctrine spread, as is well known, in despite of
obloquy and persecution, over much of the protestant region of Europe.
The Lutheran churches were already come into it; and in England there
was a predisposing bias in the rulers of the church towards the
authority of the primitive fathers, all of whom, before the age of
Augustin, and especially the Greek, are acknowledged to have been on
that side, which promoted the growth of this Batavian theology.[89]
Even in France, it was not without considerable influence. Cameron, a
divine of Saumur, one of the chief protestant seminaries, devised a
scheme of syncretism, which, notwithstanding much opposition, gained
ground in those churches. It was supported by some highly
distinguished for learning, Amyraut, Daillé, and Blondel. Of this
scheme it is remarkable, that while in its literal purport it can only
seem a modification of the Augustinian hypothesis, with an awkward and
feeble admixture of the other, yet its tendency was to efface the
former by degrees, and to slide into the Arminian hypothesis, which
ultimately became almost general in the reformed church.

     [89] General Vossius, in his Historia Pelagiana, the first
     edition of which, in 1618, was considerably enlarged afterwards,
     admitted that the first four centuries did not countenance the
     predestinarian scheme of Augustin. This gave offence in Holland;
     his book was publicly censured, he was excommunicated and
     forbidden to teach in public or private. Vossius, like others,
     remembered that he had a large family, and made, after some
     years, a sort of retractation, which, of course, did not express
     his real opinion. Le Clerc seems to doubt whether he acted from
     this motive or from what he calls simplicity, an expression for
     weakness. Vossius was, like his contemporary Usher, a man of much
     more learning than strength of intellect. Bibliothèque
     Universelle, xvii. 312, 329. Niceron, vol. xiii.

|Rise of Jansenism.|

38. These perplexities were not confined to protestant theology. The
church of Rome, strenuous to maintain the tenets of Augustin, and
yet to condemn those who did the same, has been charged with
exerting the plenitude of her infallibility to enforce the belief of
an incoherent syncretism. She had condemned Baius, as giving too much
efficacy to grace; she was on the point of condemning Molina for
giving too little. Both Clement VIII. and Paul V. leaned to the
Dominicans against the Jesuits in this controversy; but the great
services and influence of the latter order prevented a decision which
would have humbled them before so many adversaries. It may,
nevertheless be said that the Semi-pelagian, or Arminian doctrine,
though consonant to that of the Jesuits, was generally ill received in
the church of Rome, till the opposite hypothesis, that of Augustin and
Calvin, having been asserted by one man in more unlimited propositions
than had been usual, a reaction took place, that eventually both gave
an apparent triumph to the Molinist party, and endangered the church
itself by the schism to which the controversy gave rise. The
Augustinus of Jansenius, bishop of Ypres, was published in 1640, and
in the very next year was censured at Rome. But, as the great
controversy that sprung out of the condemnation of this book belongs
more strictly to the next period, we shall defer it for the present.

|Socinus. Volkelius.|

39. The Socinian academy at Racow which drew to itself several
proselytes from other countries, acquired considerable importance in
theological literature after the beginning of the century. It was not
likely that a sect, regarded with peculiar animosity, would escape in
the general disposition of the catholic party in Poland to oppress the
dissidents whom they had long feared; the Racovian institution was
broken up and dispersed in 1638, though some of its members continued
to linger in Poland for twenty years longer. The Bibliotheca Fratrum
Polonorum, published at Amsterdam (in the title-page, Irenopolis), in
1658, contains chiefly the works of Socinian theologians who belong to
this first part of the century. The Prælectiones Theologicæ of Faustus
Socinus himself, being published in 1609, after his death, fall within
this class. They contain a systematic theology according to his
scheme, and are praised by Eichhorn for the acuteness and depth they
often display.[90] In these, among his other deviations from the
general orthodoxy of Christendom, Socinus astonished mankind by
denying the evidences of natural religion, resolving our knowledge
even of a deity into revelation. This paradox is more worthy of those
who have since adopted it, than of so acute a reasoner as Socinus.[91]
It is, in fact, not very congenial to the spirit of his theology,
which, rejecting all it thinks incompatible with reason as to the
divine attributes, should at least have some established notions of
them upon rational principles. The later Socinians, even those nearest
to the time, did not follow their master in this part of his
tenets.[92] The treatise of Volkelius, son-in-law of Socinus, De vera
Religione, is chiefly taken from the latter. It was printed at Racow
in 1633, and again in Holland in 1641; but most of the latter
impression having been burned by order of the magistrates, it is a
very scarce book, and copies were formerly sold at great prices. But
the hangman’s bonfire has lost its charm, and forbidden books, when
they happen to occur, are no longer in much request. The first book
out of five in this volume of Volkelius, on the attributes of God, is
by Crellius.

     [90] Eichhorn, vi. part 1, p. 283. Simon, however, observes that
     Socinus knew little Greek or Hebrew, as he owns himself, though
     he pretends to decide questions which require a knowledge of
     these languages. I quote from Bibliothèque Universelle, vol.
     xxiii., p. 498.

     [91] Tillotson, in one of his sermons (I cannot give the
     reference, writing from memory), dissents, as might be expected,
     from this denial of natural religion, but with such encomiums on
     Socinus as some archbishops would have avoided.

     [92] Socinum sectæ ejus principes nuper Volkelius, nunc Ruarus
     non probant, in eo quod circa Dei cognitionem petita e natura
     rerum argumenta abdicaverit. Grot. Epist. 964. See too Ruari
     Epist., p. 210.

|Crellius. Ruarus.|

40. Crellius was, perhaps, the most eminent of the Racovian school in
this century.[93] Many of its members, like himself, were Germans,
their sect having gained ground in some of the Lutheran states about
this time, as it did also in the United Provinces. Grotius broke a
lance with him in his treatise De Satisfactione Christi, to which he
replied in another with the same title. Each retired from the field
with the courtesies of chivalry towards his antagonist. The Dutch
Arminians in general, though very erroneously, supposed to concur in
all the leading tenets of the Racovian theologians, treated them with
much respect.[94] Grotius was often reproached with the
intimacies he kept up among these obnoxious sectaries; and many of his
letters, as well as those of Curcellæus and other leading Arminians,
bear witness to the personal regard they felt for them.[95] Several
proofs of this will be also found in the epistles of Ruarus, a book
which throws much light on the theological opinions of the age. Ruarus
was a man of acuteness, learning, and piety, not wholly concurring
with the Racovians, but not far removed from them.[96] The
commentaries of Grotius on the Scriptures have been also charged with
Socinianism; but he pleaded that his interpretations were those of the
fathers.

     [93] Dupin praises Volkelius highly, but says of Crellius: il
     avoit beaucoup étudié, mais il n’étoit pas un esprit fort élevé.
     Bibl. des Auteurs separés, ii. 614 v. 628. Simon, on the
     contrary, (ubi suprà) praises Crellius highly, and says no other
     commentator of his party is comparable to him.

     [94] The Remonstrants refused to anathematize the Socinians,
     Episcopius says, on account of the apparent arguments in their
     favour, and the differences that have always existed on that
     head. Apologia Confessionis. Episc. Op. vol. i. His own tenets,
     were probably what some would call Arian; thus he says, personis
     his tribus divinitatem tribui, non collateraliter aut
     co-ordinatè, sed subordinatè. Inst. Theol. 1. iv., c. 2, 32.
     Grotius says, he finds the Catholics more _tractable_ about the
     Trinity than the Calvinists.

     [95] Grotius never shrunk from defending his intimacy with Ruarus
     and Crellius, and after praising the former, concludes, in one of
     his letters, with this liberal and honest sentiment. Ego vero
     ejus sum animi, ejusque instituti, ut mihi cum hominibus cunctis,
     præcipue cum Christianis quantumvis errantibus necessitudinis
     aliquid putem intercedere, idque me neque dictis neque factis
     pigeat demonstrare. Epist. 860. Hæretici nisi aliquid haberent
     veri ac nobiscum commune, jam hæretici non essent. 2da Series, p.
     873. Nihil veri eo factum est deterius, quod in id Socinus
     incidit. p. 880. This, he thought, was the case in some
     questions, where Socinus, without designing it, had agreed with
     antiquity. Neque me pudeat consentire Socino, si quando is in
     veram veteremque sententiam incidit, ut sanè fecit in
     controversia de justitia per fidem, et aliis nonnullis. Id. p.
     797. Socinus hoc non agens in atiquæ ecclesiæ sensus nonnunquam
     incidit, et eas partes, ut ingenio valebat, percoluit feliciter.
     Admiscuit alia quæ etiam vera dicenti auctoritatem detraxere.
     Epist. 966. Even during his controversy with Crellius he wrote to
     him in a very handsome manner. Bene autem in epistola tua, quæ
     mihi longè gratissimi advenit, de me judicas, non esse me eorum
     in numero, qui ob sententias salva pietate dissentientes, alieno
     a quoquam sim animo, aut boni alicujus amicitiam repudiare. Etiam
     in libro de vera religione, [Volkelii] quem jam percurri,
     relecturus et posthac, multa invenio summo cum judicio observata;
     illud vero sæculo gratulor, repertos homines, qui neutiquam in
     controversiis subtilibus tantum ponunt, quantum in vera vitæ
     emendatione, et quotidiano ad sanctitatem profectu. Epist. 280
     (1631). He wrote with kindness and regret on the breaking up of
     the establishment at Racow in 1638. Ep. 1006: Grotius has been as
     obnoxious on the score of Socinianism as of Popery. His
     Commentaries on the Scriptures are taxed with it, and in fact he
     is not in good odour with any but the Arminian divines, nor do
     they, we see, wholly agree with him.

     [96] Ruarus nearly agreed with Grotius as to the atonement; at
     least the latter thought so. De satisfactione ita mihi respondit,
     ut nihil admodum controversiæ relinqueretur. Grot. Epist. 2da
     series, p. 881. See also Ruari Epistolæ, p. 148, 282. He paid
     also more respect to the second century than some of his
     brethren, p. 100, 439, and even struggles to agree with the
     Ante-Nicene fathers, though he cannot come up to them, p. 275,
     296. But in answer to some of his correspondents who magnified
     primitive authority, he well replies: Deinde quæro quis illos
     fixit veritati terminos? quis duo illa prima sæcula ab omni
     errore absolvit? Annon ecclesiastica historia satis testatur,
     nonnullas opiniones portentosas jam tum inter eos qui nomen
     Christi dederant, invaluisse? Quin ut verum fatear, res ipsa
     docet nonnullos posterioris sevi acutius in enodandis Scripturis
     versatos; et ut de nostra ætate dicam, valde me pœniteret Calvini
     vestri ac Bezæ si nihilo solidius sacras literas
     interpretarentur, quam video illos ipsos, quos tu mihi obducis,
     fecisse, p. 183. He lamented the fatal swerving from
     protestantism into which reverence for antiquity was leading his
     friend Grotius: fortassis et antiquitatis veneratio, quæ gravibus
     quibusdam Pontificiorum erroribus præluxit, ultra lineam eum
     perduxit, p. 277 (1642); and in answer to Mersenne, who seems to
     have had some hopes of his conversion, and recommended to him the
     controversy of Grotius with Rivet, he plainly replies that the
     former had extenuated some things in the church of Rome which
     ought to be altered, p. 258. This he frequently laments in the
     course of his letters, but treats him with gentleness in
     comparison with some of the sterner Socinians. It is remarkable
     that even he and Crellius seem to have excluded the members of
     the church of Rome, except the “vulgus ineruditum et Cassandri
     gregales,” from salvation; and this while almost all churches
     were anathematizing themselves in the same way. Ruar. Epist., p.
     9 and p. 167.

     This book contains two centuries of epistles, the second of which
     is said to be very scarce, and I doubt whether many have read the
     first, which must excuse my quotations. The learning, sense, and
     integrity of Ruarus, as well as the high respect which Calixtus,
     Curcellæus, and other great men felt for him, render the book of
     some interest. He tells us that while he was in England, about
     1617, a professorship at Cambridge was offered to him, worth
     100_l_. per annum, besides as much more from private pupils, p.
     71. But he probably mistook the civil speeches of individuals for
     an offer: he was not eminent enough for such a proposal on the
     part of the university; and at least he must have been silent
     about his Socinianism. The morality of the early Socinians was
     very strict and even ascetic, proofs of which appear in these
     letters, p. 306 et alibi.

|Erastianism.|

41. Two questions of great importance which had been raised in the
preceding century, became still more interesting in the present, on
account of the more frequent occasion that the force of circumstances
gave for their investigation, and the greater names that were engaged
in it. Both of these arose out of the national establishment of
churches, and their consequent relation to the commonwealth. One
regarded the power of the magistrate over the church he recognized;
the other involved the right of his subjects to dissent from it by
non-conformity, or by a different mode of worship.

|Maintained by Hooker.|

|And Grotius.|

42. Erastus, by proposing to substitute for the ancient discipline of
ecclesiastical censures, and especially for excommunication, a
perpetual superintendence of the civil power over the faith and
practice of the church, had given name to a scheme generally
denominated Erastianism, though in some respects far broader than
anything he seems to have suggested. It was more elaborately
maintained by Hooker in his Ecclesiastical Polity, and had been, in
fact, that on which the English reformation under Henry was originally
founded. But as it was manifestly opposed to the ultra-montane
pretensions of the See of Rome, and even to the more moderate theories
of the catholic church, being, of course, destructive of her
independence, so did it stand in equal contradiction to the
Presbyterian scheme of Scotland and of the United Provinces. In the
latter country, the states of Holland had been favourable to the
Arminians, so far at least as to repress any violence against them;
the clergy were exasperated and intolerant; and this raised the
question of civil supremacy, in which Grotius, by one of his early
works entitled Pietas Ordinum Hollandiæ, published in 1613, sustained
the right of the magistrate to inhibit dangerous controversies.

|His Treatise on ecclesiastical power of the state.|

43. He returned, after the lapse of some years, to the same theme in a
larger and more comprehensive work, De Imperio Summarum Potestatum
circa Sacra. It is written upon the Anglican principles of regal
supremacy, which had, however, become far less popular with the rulers
of our church, than in the days of Cranmer, Whitgift, and Hooker.
After stating the question, and proving the ecclesiastical power of
the magistrate by natural law, Scripture, established usage, agreement
of Heathen and Christian writers, and the reason of the thing, he
distinguishes control over sacred offices from their exercise, and
proceeds to inquire whether the magistrate may take the latter on
himself; which, though practised in the early ages of the world, he
finds inconvenient at present, the manners required for the regal and
sacerdotal character being wholly different.[97]

     [97] Cap. 4.

44. Actions may be prescribed or forbidden by natural divine law,
positive divine law, or human law; the latter extending to nothing but
what is left indefinite by the other two. But though we are bound not
to act in obedience to human laws which contradict the divine, we are
also bound not forcibly to resist them. We may defend ourselves by
force against an equal, not against a superior, as he proves first
from the Digest, and secondly from the New Testament.[98] Thus the
rule of passive obedience is unequivocally laid down. He meets the
recent examples of resistance to sovereigns, by saying that they
cannot be approved where the kings have had an absolute power; but
where they are bound by compact or the authority of a senate or of
estates, since their power is not unlimited, they may be resisted on
just grounds by that authority.[99] “Which I remark,” he proceeds to
say, “lest any one, as I sometimes have known, should disgrace a good
cause by a mistaken defence.”

     [98] Cap. 3.

     [99] Sin alicubi reges tales fuere, qui pactis sive positivis
     legibus et senatus alicujus aut ordinum decretis adstringerentur,
     in hos, ut summum imperium non obtinent, arma ex optimatum
     tanquam superiorum sententia sumi justis de causis potuerunt.
     Ibid.

45. The magistrate can alter nothing which is definitely laid down by
the positive law of God; but he may regulate the circumstantial
observance even of such; and as to things undefined in Scripture he
has plenary jurisdiction; such as the temporalities of the church, the
convocation of synods, the election of pastors. The burthen of proof
lies on those who would limit the civil power by affirming anything to
be prescribed by the divine law.[100] The authority attributed in
Scripture to churches does not interfere with the power of the
magistrate, being persuasive and not coercive. The whole church has no
coercive power by divine right.[101] But since the visible church is a
society of divine institution, it follows that whatever is naturally
competent to a lawful society, is competent also to the
church, unless it can be proved to be withdrawn from it.[102] It has,
therefore, a legislative government (regimen constitutivum), of which
he gives the institution of the Lord’s day as an example. But this
does not impair the sovereign’s authority in ecclesiastical matters.
In treating of that supremacy, he does not clearly show what
jurisdiction he attributes to the magistrate; most of his instances
relating to the temporalities of the church, as to which no question
is likely to arise.[103] But, on the whole, he means undoubtedly to
carry the supremacy as far as is done in England.

     [100] Ibid.

     [101] Cap. 4.

     [102] Quandoquidem ecclesia cœtus est divina lege non permissus
     tantum sed et institutus, de aspectabili cœtu loquor, sequitur ea
     omnia quæ cœtibus legitimis naturaliter competunt, etiam ecclesiæ
     competere, quatenus adempta non probantur. Ibid.

     [103] Cap. 5.

46. In a chapter on the due exercise of the civil supremacy over the
church, he shows more of a protestant feeling than would have been
found in him when he approached the latter years of his life;[104] and
declares fully against submission to any visible authority in matters
of faith, so that sovereigns are not bound to follow the ministers of
the church in what they may affirm as doctrine. Ecclesiastical synods
he deems often useful, but thinks the magistrate is not bound to act
with their consent, and that they are sometimes pernicious.[105] The
magistrate may determine who shall compose such synods;[106] a strong
position which he endeavours to prove at great length. Even if the
members are elected by the church, the magistrate may reject those
whom he reckons unfit; he may preside in the assembly, confirm,
reject, annul its decisions. He may also legislate about the whole
organisation of the established church.[107] It is for him to
determine what form of religion shall be publicly exercised; an
essential right of sovereignty as political writers have laid it down.
And this is confirmed by experience; “for if any one shall ask why the
Romish religion flourished in England under Mary, the protestant under
Elizabeth, no cause can be assigned but the pleasure of these queens,
or, as some might say, of the queens and parliaments.” In this manner
Grotius disposes of a great question of casuistry by what has been
done; as if murder and adultery might not be established by the same
logic. Natural law would be resolved into history, were we always to
argue in a similar way. But this, as will appear more fully hereafter,
is not the usual reasoning of Grotius. To the objection from the
danger of abuse in conceding so much power to the sovereign, he
replies that no other theory will secure us better. On every
supposition the power must be lodged in men, who are all liable to
error. We must console ourselves by a trust in divine providence
alone.[108]

     [104] Cap. 6. He states the question to be this: An post
     apostolorum ætatem aut persona aut cœtus sit aliquis
     aspectabilis, de quâ quove certi esse possimus ac debeamus,
     quæcunque ab ipsis proponantur, esse indubitatæ veritatis. Negant
     hoc Evangelici; aiunt Romanenses.

     [105] Cap. 7.

     [106] Designare eos, qui ad synodum sunt venturi.

     [107] Cap. 8. Nulla in re magis elucescit vis summi imperii, quam
     quod in ejus arbitrio est quænam religio publicè exerceatur,
     idque præcipuum inter majestatis jura ponunt omnes qui politicè
     scripserunt. Docet idem experientia; si enim quæras cur in Anglia
     Maria regnante Romana religio, Elizabetha vero imperante,
     Evangelica viguerit, causa proxima reddi non poterit, nisi ex
     arbitrio reginarum, aut, ut quibusdam videtur, reginarum ac
     parlamenti, p. 242.

     [108] Cap. 8.

47. The sovereign may abolish false religions and punish their
professors, which no one else can. Here again we find precedents
instead of arguments; but he says that the primitive church
disapproved of capital punishments for heresy, which seems to be his
main reason for doing the same. The sovereign may also enjoin silence
in controversies, and inspect the conduct of the clergy without
limiting himself by the canons, though he will do well to regard them.
Legislation and jurisdiction, that is, of a coercive nature, do not
belong to the church, except as they may be conceded to it by the
civil power.[109] He fully explains the various kinds of
ecclesiastical law that have been gradually introduced. Even the power
of the keys, which is by divine right, cannot be so exercised as to
exclude the appellant jurisdiction of the sovereign; as he proves by
the Roman law, and by the usage of the parliament of Paris.[110]

     [109] Ibid.

     [110] Cap. 9.

48. The sovereign has a control (inspectionem cum imperio) over the
ordination of priests, and certainly possesses a right of
confirmation, that is, the assignment of an ordained minister to a
given cure.[111] And though the election of pastors belongs to the
church, this may, for good reasons, be taken into the hands of the
sovereign. Instances in point are easily found, and the
chapter upon the subject contains an interesting historical summary of
this part of ecclesiastical law. In every case, the sovereign has a
right of annulling an election, and also of removing a pastor from the
local exercise of his ministry.[112]

     [111] Cap. 10. Confirmationem hanc summæ potestati acceptam
     ferendam nemo sanus negaverit.

     [112] Cap. 10.

|Remark upon this theory.|

49. This is the full development of an Erastian theory, which Cranmer
had early espoused, and which Hooker had maintained in a less
extensive manner. Bossuet has animadverted upon it, nor can it appear
tolerable to a zealous churchman.[113] It was well received in England
by the lawyers, who had always been jealous of the spiritual
tribunals, especially of late years, when, under the patronage of
Laud, they had taken a higher tone than seemed compatible with the
supremacy of the common law. The scheme, nevertheless, is open to some
objections when propounded in so unlimited a manner, none of which is
more striking than that it tends to convert differences of religious
opinion into crimes against the state, and furnishes bigotry with new
arguments as well as new arms, in its conflict with the free exercise
of human reason. Grotius, however, feared rather that he had given too
little power to the civil magistrate than too much.[114]

     [113] See Le Clerc’s remarks on what Bossuet has said.
     Bibliothèque Choisie, v. 349.

     [114] Ego multo magis vereor, ne minus quam par est
     magistratibus, aut plusquam par est pastoribus tribuerim, quam ne
     in alteram partem iterum (?) excesserim, nec sic quidem illis
     satisfiet qui se ecclesiam vocant. Epist. 42. This was in 1614,
     after the publication of the Pietas Ordinum Hollandiæ. As he drew
     nearer to the church of Rome, or that of Canterbury, he must
     probably have somewhat modified his Erastianism. And yet he seems
     never to have been friendly to the temporal power of bishops. He
     writes in August, 1641, Episcopis Angliæ videtur mansurum nomen
     prope sine re, accisa et opulentia et auctoritate. Mihi non
     displicet ecclesiæ pastores et ab inani pompa et a curis
     sæcularium rerum sublevari, p. 1011. He had a regard for Laud, as
     the restorer of a reverence for primitive antiquity, and
     frequently laments his fate; but had said, in 1640, Doleo quod
     episcopi nimium intendendo potentiæ suæ nervos odium sibi potius
     quam amorem populorum pariunt. Ep. 1390.

|Toleration of religious tenets.|

50. Persecution for religious heterodoxy, in all its degrees, was in
the sixteenth century the principle, as well as the practice of every
church. It was held inconsistent with the sovereignty of the
magistrate to permit any religion but his own; inconsistent with his
duty to suffer any but the true. The edict of Nantes was a compromise
between belligerent parties; the toleration of the dissidents in
Poland was nearly of the same kind; but no state, powerful enough to
restrain its sectaries from the exercise of their separate worship,
had any scruples about the right and obligation to do so. Even the
writers of that century, who seemed most strenuous for toleration,
Castalio, Celso, and Koornhert, had confined themselves to denying the
justice of penal and especially of capital inflictions for heresy; the
liberty of public worship had but incidentally, if at all, been
discussed. Acontius had developed larger principles, distinguishing
the fundamental from the accessory doctrines of the gospel; which, by
weakening the associations of bigotry, prepared the way for a catholic
tolerance. Episcopius speaks in the strongest terms of the treatise of
Acontius, de Stratagematibus Satanæ, and says that the Remonstrants
trod closely in his steps, as would appear by comparing their
writings; so that he shall quote no passages in proof, their entire
books bearing witness to the conformity.[115]

     [115] Episcop. Opera, i. 301 (edit. 1665.)

|Claimed by the Arminians.|

51. The Arminian dispute led by necessary consequence to the question
of public toleration. They sought at first a free admission to the
pulpits, and in an excellent speech of Grotius, addressed to the
magistrates of Amsterdam in 1616, he objects to a separate toleration
as rending the bosom of the church. But it was soon evident that
nothing more could be obtained; and their adversaries refused this.
They were driven therefore to contend for religious liberty, and the
writings of Episcopius are full of this plea. Against capital
punishment for heresy he raises his voice with indignant severity, and
asserts that the whole Christian world abhorred the fatal precedent of
Calvin in the death of Servetus.[116] This indicates a remarkable
change already wrought in the sentiments of mankind. Certain it is
that no capital punishments for heresy were inflicted in protestant
countries after this time; nor were they as frequently or as
boldly vindicated as before.[117]

     [116] Calvinus signum primus extulit supra alios omnes, et
     exemplum dedit in theatro Gebennesi funestissimum, quodque
     Christianus orbis merito execratur et abominatur; nec hoc
     contentus tam atroci ficinore, cruento simul animo et calamo
     parentavit. Apologia pro Confess. Remonstrantium, c. 24, p. 241.
     The whole passage is very remarkable, as an indignant reproof of
     a party, who, while living under popish governments, cry out for
     liberty of conscience, and deny the right of punishing opinions;
     yet, in all their writings and actions when they have the power,
     display the very opposite principles.

     [117] De hæreticorum pœnis quæ scripsi, in iis mecum sentit
     Gallia et Germania, ut puto, omnis. Grot. Epist., p. 941 (1642.)
     Some years sooner there had been remains of the leaven in France.
     Adversus hæreticidia, he says, in 1626, satis ut arbitror plane
     locutus sum, certè ita ut hic multos ob id offenderim, p. 789.
     Our own Fuller, I am sorry to say, in his Church History, written
     about 1650, speaks with some disapprobation of the sympathy of
     the people with Legat and Wightman, burned by James I., in 1614;
     and this is the more remarkable, as he is a well-natured and not
     generally bigoted writer. I should think he was the latest
     protestant who has tarnished his name by such sentiments. James,
     who in some countries would have had certain reasons for dreading
     the fire himself, designed to have burned a third heretic, if the
     humanity of the multitude had not been greater than his own.

|By the independents.|

|And by Jeremy Taylor.|

52. The Independents claim to themselves the honour of having been the
first to maintain the principles of general toleration, both as to
freedom of worship, and immunity from penalties for opinion. But that
the Arminians were not as early promulgators of the same noble tenets,
seems not to have been proved. Crellius in his Vindiciæ pro Religionis
Libertate, 1636, contended for the Polish dissidents, and especially
for his own sect.[118] The principle is implied, if not expressed, in
the writings of Chillingworth, and still more of Hales; but the first
famous plea, in this country, for tolerance in religion, on a
comprehensive basis and on deep-seated foundations, was the liberty of
Prophesying by Jeremy Taylor. This celebrated work was written
according to Taylor’s dedication, during his retirement in Wales,
wither he was driven, as he expresses it, “by this great storm which
hath dashed the vessel of the church all in pieces,” and published in
1647. He speaks of himself as without access to books; it is evident,
however, from the abundance of his quotations, that he was not much in
want of them: and from this, as well as other strong indications, we
may reasonably believe, that a considerable part of this treatise had
been committed to paper long before.

     [118] This short tract, which will be found among the collected
     works of Crellius, in the Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum, contains
     a just and temperate pleading for religious liberty, but little
     which can appear very striking in modern times. It is said,
     nevertheless, to have been translated and republished by
     D’Holbach about 1760. This I have not seen, but there must, I
     presume, have been a good deal of _condiment_ added to make it
     stimulating enough for that school.

|His Liberty of Prophesying.|

53. The argument of this important book rests on one leading maxim,
derived from the Arminian divines, as it was in them from Erasmus and
Acontius, that the fundamental truths of Christianity are comprised in
narrow compass, not beyond the Apostles’ creed in its literal meaning;
that all the rest is matter of disputation, and too uncertain, for the
most part, to warrant our condemning those who differ from us, as if
their error must be criminal. This one proposition, much expanded,
according to Taylor’s diffuse style, and displayed in a variety of
language, pervades the whole treatise; a small part of which, in
comparison with the rest, bears immediately on the point of political
toleration, as a duty of civil governments and of churches invested
with power. In the greater portion, Taylor is rather arguing against
that dogmatism of judgment, which induces men, either singly or
collectively, to pronounce with confidence where only a varying
probability can be attained. This spirit is the religious, though not
entirely the political, motive of intolerance; and, by chasing this
from the heart, he inferred not that he should lay wide the door to
universal freedom, but dispose the magistrate to consider more
equitably the claims of every sect. “Whatsoever is against the
foundation of faith, or contrary to good life and the laws of
obedience, or destructive to human society and the public and just
interests of bodies politic, is out of the limits of my question, and
does not pretend to compliance or toleration; so that I allow no
indifferency, nor any countenance to those religions whose principles
destroy government, nor to those religions, if there be any such, that
teach ill life.”

|Boldness of his doctrines.|

54. No man, as Taylor here teaches, is under any obligation to believe
that in revelation, which is not so revealed, but that wise men and
good men have differed in their opinions about it. And the great
variety of opinions in churches, and even in the same church, “there
being none that is in prosperity,” as he, with rather a startling
boldness puts it, “but changes her doctrines every age, either by
bringing in new doctrines, or by contradicting her old,” shows that we
can have no term of union, but that wherein all agree, the creed of
the apostles.[119] And hence, though we may undoubtedly carry
on our own private inquiries as much farther as we see reason, none
who hold this fundamental faith are to be esteemed heretics, nor
liable to punishment. And here he proceeds to reprove all those
oblique acts which are not direct persecutions of men’s persons, the
destruction of books, the forbidding the publication of new ones, the
setting out fraudulent editions and similar acts of falsehood, by
which men endeavour to stifle or prevent religious inquiry. “It is a
strange industry and an importune diligence that was used by our
forefathers; of all those heresies which gave them battle and
employment, we have absolutely no record or monument, but what
themselves, who are adversaries, have transmitted to us; and we know
that adversaries, especially such who observed all opportunities to
discredit both the persons and doctrines of the enemy, are not always
the best records or witnesses of such transactions. We see it now in
this very age, in the present distemperatures, that parties are no
good registers of the actions of the adverse side; and, if we cannot
be confident of the truth of a story now, now I say that it is
possible for any man, and likely that the interested adversary will
discover the imposture, it is far more unlikely that after ages should
know any other truth, but such as serves the ends of the
representers.”[120]

     [119] “Since no churches believe themselves infallible, that only
     excepted which all other churches say is most of all deceived, it
     were strange if, in so many articles, which make up their several
     bodies of confessions, they had not mistaken, every one of them,
     in some thing or other.” This is Taylor’s fearless mode of
     grappling with his argument; and any other must give a church
     that claims infallibility the advantage.

     [120] Vol. vii, p. 424. Heber’s edition of Taylor.

|His notions of uncertainty in theological tenets.|

55. None were accounted heretics by the primitive church, who held by
the Apostles’ creed, till the council of Nice defined some things,
rightly indeed, as Taylor professes to believe, but perhaps with too
much alteration of the simplicity of ancient faith, so that “he had
need be a subtle man who understands the very words of the new
determinations.” And this was carried much farther by later councils,
and in the Athanasian creed, of which, though protesting his own
persuasion in its truth, he intimates not a little disapprobation. The
necessary articles of faith are laid down clearly in Scripture; but no
man can be secure, as to mysterious points, that he shall certainly
understand and believe them in their true sense. This he shows first
from the great discrepancy of reading in manuscripts, (an argument
which he over-states in a very uncritical and incautious manner);
next, from the different senses the words will bear, which there is no
certain mark to distinguish, the infinite variety of human
understandings, swayed, it may be, by interest, or determined by
accidental and extrinsical circumstances, and the fallibility of those
means, by which men hope to attain a clear knowledge of scriptural
truth. And after exposing, certainly with no extenuation, the
difficulties of interpretation, he concludes that since these ordinary
means of expounding Scripture are very dubious, “he that is the
wisest, and by consequence the likeliest to expound truest, in all
probability of reason, will be very far from confidence; and,
therefore, a wise man would not willingly be prescribed to by others;
and if he be also a just man, he will not impose upon others; for it
is best every man should be left in that liberty, from which no man
can justly take him, unless he could secure him from error; so here
there is a necessity to conserve the liberty of prophesying and
interpreting Scripture; a necessity derived from the consideration of
the difficulty of Scripture in questions controverted, and the
uncertainty of any internal medium of interpretation.”

|His low opinion of the fathers.|

56. Taylor would in much of this have found an echo in the advocates
of the church of Rome, and in some protestants of his own communion;
but he passed onward to assail their bulwarks. Tradition or the
testimony of the church, he holds insufficient and uncertain, for the
reasons urged more fully by Daillé; the authority of councils is
almost equally precarious, from their inconsistency, their liability
to factious passions, and the doubtful authenticity of some of their
acts; the pope’s claim to infallibility is combated on the usual
grounds; the judgment of the fathers is shown to be inconclusive by
their differences among themselves, and their frequent errors; and
professing a desire that “their great reputation should be preserved
as sacred as it ought,” he refers the reader to Daillé for other
things; and, “shall only consider that the writings of the fathers
have been so corrupted by the intermixture of heretics, so many false
books put forth in their names, so many of their writings lost which
would more clearly have explicated their sense, and, at last, an open
profession made and a trade of making the fathers speak not
what themselves thought, but what other men pleased, that it is a
great instance of God’s providence and care of his church, that we
have so much good preserved in the writings which we receive from the
fathers, and that all truth is not as clear gone as is the certainty
of their great authority and reputation.”[121]

     [121] It seems not quite easy to reconcile this with what Taylor
     has just before said of his desire to preserve the reputation of
     the fathers sacred. In no writer is it more necessary to observe
     the _animus_ with which he writes; for, giving way to his
     impetuosity, when he has said anything that would give offence,
     or which he thought incautious, it was not his custom, so far as
     we can judge, to expunge or soften it, but to insert something
     else of an opposite colour, without taking any pains to harmonize
     his context. He probably revised hardly at all what he had
     written before it went to the press. This makes it easy to quote
     passages, especially short ones, from Taylor, which do not
     exhibit his real way of thinking; if, indeed, his way of thinking
     itself did not vary with the wind that blew from different
     regions of controversy.

|Difficulty of finding out truth.|

57. The authority of the church cannot be any longer alleged when
neither that of popes and councils, nor of ancient fathers is
maintainable; since the diffusive church has no other means of
speaking, nor can we distinguish by any extrinsic test the greater or
better portion of it from the worse. And thus, after dismissing
respectfully the pretences of some to expound Scripture by the Spirit,
as impertinent to the question of dictating the faith of others, he
comes to the reason of each man, as the best judge for himself, of
religious controversies; reason, that may be exercised either in
choosing a guide, if it feel its own incompetency, or in examining the
grounds of belief. The latter has great advantages, and no man is
bound to know anything of that concerning which he is not able to
judge for himself. But reason may err, as he goes on to prove, without
being culpable; that which is plain to one understanding being obscure
to another, and among various sources of error which he enumerates as
incidental to mankind, that of education being “so great and
invincible a prejudice, that he who masters the inconvenience of it is
more to be commended than he can justly be blamed that complies with
it.” And thus not only single men but whole bodies take unhesitatingly
and unanimously opposite sides from those who have imbibed another
kind of instruction, and “it is strange that all the Dominicans should
be of one opinion in the matter of predestination and immaculate
conception, and all the Franciscans of the quite contrary, as if their
understandings were formed in a different mould and furnished with
various principles by their very rule.” These and the like prejudices
are not absolute excuses to every one, and are often accompanied with
culpable dispositions of mind; but the impossibility of judging others
renders it incumbent on us to be lenient towards all, and neither to
be peremptory in denying that those who differ from us have used the
best means in their power to discover the truth, nor to charge their
persons, whatever we may their opinions, with odious consequences
which they do not avow.

|Grounds of toleration.|

58. This diffuse and not very well arranged vindication of diversity
of judgment in religion, comprised in the first twelve sections of the
Liberty of Prophesying, is the proper basis of the second part, which
maintains the justice of toleration as a consequence from the former
principle. The general arguments, or prejudices, on which punishment
for religious tenets had been sustained, turned on their criminality
in the eyes of God, and the duty of the magistrate to sustain God’s
honour and to guard his own subjects from sin. Taylor, not denying
that certain and known idolatry, or any sort of practical impiety, may
be punished corporally, because it is matter of fact, asserts that no
matter of mere opinion, no errors that of themselves are not sins, are
to be persecuted or punished by death or corporal infliction. He
returns to his favourite position, that “we are not sure not to be
deceived;” mingling this, in that inconsequent allocation of his
proofs which frequently occurs in his writings, with other arguments
of a different nature. The governors of the church, indeed, may
condemn and restrain as far as their power extends, any false doctrine
which encourages evil life, or destroys the foundations of religion;
but if the church meddles farther with any matters of question, which
have not this tendency, so as to dictate what men are to believe, she
becomes tyrannical and uncharitable; the Apostles’ creed being
sufficient to conserve the peace of the church and the unity of her
doctrine. And, with respect to the civil magistrate, he concludes that
he is bound to suffer the profession of different opinions, which are
neither directly impious and immoral, nor disturb the public peace.

|Inconsistency of one chapter.|

59. The seventeenth chapter, in which Taylor professes to consider
which among the sects of Christendom are to be tolerated and
in what degree, is written in a tone not easily reconciled with that
of the rest. Though he begins by saying that diversity of opinions
does more concern public peace than religion, it certainly appears in
some passages, that on this pretext of peace, which with the
magistrate has generally been of more influence than that of
orthodoxy, he withdraws a great deal of that liberty of prophesying
which he has been so broadly asserting. Punishment for religious
tenets is doubtless not at all the same as restraint of separate
worship; yet we are not prepared for the shackles he seems inclined to
throw over the latter. Laws of ecclesiastical discipline, which, in
Taylor’s age, were understood to be binding on the whole community,
cannot, he holds, be infringed by those who take occasion to disagree,
without rendering authority contemptible; and if there are any as
zealous for obedience to the church, as others may be for their
opinions against it, the toleration of the latter’s disobedience may
give offence to the former: an argument strange enough in this
treatise! But Taylor is always more prone to accumulate reasons than
to sift their efficiency. It is indeed, he thinks, worthy to be
considered in framing a law of church discipline, whether it will be
disliked by any who are to obey it; but, after it is once enacted,
there seems no further indulgence practicable than what the governors
of the church may grant to particular persons by dispensation. The
laws of discipline are for the public good, and must not so far
tolerate a violation of themselves as to destroy the good that the
public ought to derive from them.[122]

     [122] This single chapter is of itself conclusive against the
     truth of Taylor’s own allegation that he wrote his Liberty of
     Prophesying in order to procure toleration for the episcopal
     church of England at the hands of those who had overthrown it. No
     one ever dreamed of refusing freedom of opinion to that church;
     it was only about public worship that any difficulty could arise.
     But, in truth, there is not one word in the whole treatise which
     could have been written with the view that Taylor pretends.

|His general defence of toleration.|

60. I am inclined to suspect that Taylor, for some cause, interpolated
this chapter after the rest of the treatise was complete. It has as
little bearing upon, and is as inconsistent in spirit with, the
following sections as with those that precede. To use a familiar
illustration, the effect it produces on the reader’s mind is like that
of coming on deck at sea, and finding that, the ship having put about,
the whole line of coast is reversed to the eye. Taylor, however, makes
but a short tack. In the next section, he resumes the bold tone of an
advocate for freedom; and, after discussing at great length the
leading tenet of the Anabaptists, concludes that, resting as it does
on such plausible, though insufficient grounds, we cannot exclude it
by any means from toleration, though they may be restrained from
preaching their other notions of the unlawfulness of war, or of oaths,
or of capital punishment; it being certain that no good religion
teaches doctrines whose consequences would destroy all government. A
more remarkable chapter is that in which Taylor concludes in favour of
tolerating the Romanists, except when they assert the pope’s power of
deposing princes, or of dispensing with oaths. The result of all, he
says, is this: “Let the prince and the secular power have a care the
commonwealth be safe. For whether such or such a sect of Christians be
to be permitted, is a question rather political than religious.”

61. In the concluding sections he maintains the right of particular
churches to admit all who profess the Apostles’ creed to their
communion, and of private men to communicate with different churches,
if they require no unlawful condition. But “few churches, that have
framed bodies of confession and articles, will endure any person that
is not of the same confession; which is a plain demonstration that
such bodies of confession and articles do much hurt.” “The guilt of
schism may lie on him who least thinks it; he being rather the
schismatic who makes unnecessary and inconvenient impositions, than he
who disobeys them, because he cannot do otherwise without violating
his conscience.”[123] The whole treatise on the Liberty of Prophesying
ends with the celebrated parable of Abraham, found, as Taylor says,
“in the Jews’ books,” but really in an Arabian writer. This story
Franklin, as every one now knows, rather unhandsomely appropriated to
himself; and it is a strange proof of the ignorance as to our earlier
literature which then prevailed, that for many years it continued to
be quoted with his name. It was not contained in the first
editions of the Liberty of Prophesying; and, indeed, the book from
which Taylor is supposed to have borrowed it was not published till
1641.

     [123] This is said also by Hales, in his tract on Schism, which
     was published some years before the Liberty of Prophesying. It
     is, however, what Taylor would have thought without a prompter.

62. Such is this great pleading for religious moderation; a production
not more remarkable in itself than for the quarter from which it came.
In the polemical writings of Jeremy Taylor we generally find a staunch
and uncompromising adherence to one party; and from the abundant use
he makes of authority, we should infer that he felt a great veneration
for it. In the Liberty of Prophesying, as has appeared by the general
sketch, rather than analysis we have just given, there is a prevailing
tinge of the contrary turn of mind, more striking than the comparison
of insulated passages can be. From what motives, and under what
circumstances, this treatise was written, is not easily discerned. In
the dedication to Lord Hatton of the collective edition of his
controversial writings after the Restoration, he declares that “when a
persecution did arise against the church of England, he intended to
make a reservative for his brethren and himself, by pleading for a
liberty to our consciences to persevere in that profession, which was
warranted by all the laws of God and our superiors.” It is with regret
we are compelled to confess some want of ingenuousness in this part of
Taylor’s proceedings. No one reading the Liberty of Prophesying can
perceive that it had the slightest bearing on any toleration that the
episcopal church, in the time of the civil war, might ask of her
victorious enemies. The differences between them were not on
speculative points of faith, nor turning on an appeal to fathers and
councils. That Taylor had another class of controversies in his mind
is sufficiently obvious to the attentive reader, and I can give no
proof in this place to any other.

|Effect of this treatise.|

63. This was the third blow that the new latitudinarian school of
Leyden had aimed in England at the positive dogmatists, who, in all
the reformed churches, as in that of Rome, laboured to impose
extensive confessions of faith, abounding in inferences of scholastic
theology, as conditions of exterior communion, and as peremptory
articles of faith. Chillingworth and Hales were not less decisive; but
the former had but in an incidental manner glanced at the subject, and
the short tract on Schism had been rather deficient in proof of its
hardy paradoxes. Taylor, therefore, may be said to have been the first
who sapped and shook the foundations of dogmatism and pretended
orthodoxy; the first who taught men to seek peace in unity of spirit
rather than of belief; and, instead of extinguishing dissent, to take
away its sting by charity, and by a sense of human fallibility. The
mind thus freed from bigotry is best prepared for the public
toleration of differences in religion; but certainly the despotic and
jealous temper of governments is not so well combated by Taylor as by
later advocates of religious freedom.

|Its defects.|

64. In conducting his argument, he falls not unfrequently into his
usual fault. Endowed with a mind of prodigious fertility, which a vast
erudition rendered more luxuriant he accumulates without selection
whatever presents itself to his mind; his innumerable quotations, his
multiplied reasonings, his prodigality of epithets and appositions,
are poured along the interminable periods of his writings, with a
frequency of repetition, sometimes of the same phrases, which leaves
us to suspect that he revised but little what he had very rapidly
composed. Certain it is that, in his different works, he does not
quite adhere to himself; and it would be more desirable to lay this on
the partial views that haste and impetuosity produce, than on a
deliberate employment of what he knew to be insufficient reasoning.
But I must acknowledge that Taylor’s fairness does not seem his
characteristic quality.

65. In some passages of the Liberty of Prophesying, he seems to
exaggerate the causes of uncertainty, and to take away from
ecclesiastical antiquity even that moderate probability of truth which
a dispassionate inquirer may sometimes assign to it. His suspicions of
spuriousness and interpolation are too vaguely sceptical, and come ill
from one who has no sort of hesitation, in some of his controversies,
to allege as authority what he here sets aside with little ceremony.
Thus, in the Defence of Episcopacy, published in 1642, he maintains
the authenticity of the first fifty of the apostolic canons, all of
which, in the Liberty of Prophesying, a very few years afterwards, he
indiscriminately rejects. But this line of criticism was not then in
so advanced a state as at present; and, from a credulous admission of
everything, the learned had come sometimes to more sweeping charges of
interpolation and forgery than would be sustained on a more searching
investigation. Taylor’s language is so unguarded that he seems to
leave the authenticity of all the fathers precarious. Doubtless there
is a greater want of security as to books written before the invention
of printing than we are apt to conceive, especially where independent
manuscripts have not been found; but it is the business of a sagacious
criticism, by the aid of internal or collateral evidence, to
distinguish, not dogmatically as most are wont, but with a rational,
though limited assent, the genuine remains of ancient writers from the
incrustations of blundering or of imposture.

|Great erudition of this period.|

|Usher, Fetavius.|

66. A prodigious reach of learning distinguishes the theologians of
these fifty years, far greater than even in the sixteenth century; and
also, if I am not mistaken, more critical and pointed, though in these
latter qualities it was afterwards surpassed. And in this erudition
the Protestant churches we may perhaps say, were upon the whole more
abundant than that of Rome. But it would be unprofitable to enumerate
works which we are incompetent to appreciate. Blondel, Daillé, and
Salmasius on the continent, Usher in England, are the most conspicuous
names. Blondel sustained the equality of the apostolic church both
against the primacy of Rome, and the episcopacy for which the
Anglicans contended; Salmasius and Daillé fought on the same side in
that controversy. The writings of our Irish primate, Usher, who
maintained the antiquity of his order, but not upon such ground as
many in England would have desired, are known for their extraordinary
learning, in which he has perhaps never been surpassed by an English
writer. But for judgment and calm appreciation of evidence, the name
of Usher has not been altogether so much respected by posterity, as it
was by his contemporaries. The church of Rome had its champions of
less eminent renown: Gretser, perhaps the first among them, is not
very familiar to our ears; but it is to be remembered, that some of
the writings of Bellarmin fall within this period. The Dogmata
Theologica of the jesuit Petavius, though but a compilation from the
fathers and ancient councils, and not peculiarly directed against the
tenets of the reformed, may deserve mention as a monument of useful
labour.[124] Labbe, Sirmond, and several others, appear to range more
naturally under the class of historical than theological writers. In
mere ecclesiastical history--the records of events rather than
opinions--this period was far more profound and critical than the
preceding. The annals of Baronius were abridged and continued by
Spondanus.

     [124] The Dogmata Theologica is not a complete work; it extends
     only at far as the head of free will. It belongs to the class of
     Loci Communes. Morhof, ii. 539.

|Sacred criticism.|

|Grotius, Coccejus.|

67. A numerous list of writers in sacred criticism might easily be
produced. Among the Romanists, Cornelius à Lapide has been extolled
above the rest by his fellow jesuit Andrès. His Commentaries,
published from 1617 to 1642, are reckoned by others too diffuse; but
he seems to have a fair reputation with protestant critics.[125] The
Lutherans extol Gerhard, and especially Glass, author of the
Philologia Sacra, in hermeneutical theology. Rivet was the highest
name among the Calvinists. Arminius, Episcopius, the Fratres Poloni,
and indeed almost every one who had to defend a cause, found no course
so ready, at least among protestants as to explain the Scriptures
consistently with his own tenets. Two natives of Holland, opposite in
character, in spirit, and principles of reasoning, and consequently
the founders of opposite schools of disciples, stand out from the
rest--Grotius and Coccejus. Luther, Calvin, and the generality of
protestant interpreters in the sixteenth century had, in most
instances, rejected with some contempt the allegorical and
multifarious senses of Scripture which had been introduced by the
fathers, and had prevailed through the dark ages of the church. This
adherence to the literal meaning was doubtless promoted by the tenet
they all professed, the facility of understanding Scripture. That
which was designed for the simple and illiterate, was not to require a
key to any esoteric sense. Grotius, however, in his Annotations on the
Old and New Testament, published in 1633--the most remarkable book of
this kind that had appeared, and which has had a more durable
reputation than any perhaps of its precursors--carried the system of
literal interpretation still farther, bringing great stores of
illustrative learning from profane antiquity, but merely to elucidate
the primary meaning, according to ordinary rules of criticism.
Coccejus followed a wholly opposite course. Every passage, in his
method, teemed with hidden senses; the narratives, least capable of
any ulterior application, were converted into typical allusions, so
that the Old Testament became throughout an enigmatical representation
of the New. He was also remarkable for having viewed, more than any
preceding writer, all the relations between God and man under the form
of covenants, and introduced the technical language of jurisprudence
into theology. This became a very usual mode of treating the subject
in Holland, and afterwards in England. The Coccejans were numerous in
the United Provinces, though not perhaps deemed quite so orthodox as
their adversaries, who, from Gisbert Voet, a theologian of the most
inflexible and polemical spirit, were denominated Voetians. Their
disputes began a little before the middle of the century, and lasted
till nearly its close.[126] The Summa Doctrinæ of Coccejus appeared in
1648, and the Dissertationes Theologicæ of Voet in 1649.

     [125] Andrès, Blount. Simon, however, says he is full of an
     erudition not to the purpose, which, as his Commentaries on the
     Scriptures run to twelve volumes, is not wonderful.

     [126] Eichhorn, vi. pt. i., p. 264. Mosheim.

|English Commentators.|

68. England gradually took a prominent share in this branch of sacred
literature. Among the divines of this period, comprehending the reigns
of James and Charles, we may mention Usher, Gataker, Mede, Lightfoot,
Jackson, Field, and Leigh.[127] Gataker stood, perhaps, next to Usher
in general erudition. The fame of Mede has rested, for the most part,
on his interpretations of the Apocalypse. This book had been little
commented upon by the reformers; but in the beginning of the
seventeenth century, several wild schemes of its application to
present or expected events had been broached in Germany. England had
also taken an active part, if it be true what Grotius tells us, that
eighty books on the prophecies had been published here before
1640.[128] Those of Mede have been received with favour by later
interpreters. Lightfoot, with extensive knowledge of the rabbinical
writers, poured his copious stores on Jewish antiquities, preceded in
this by a more obscure labourer in that region, Ainsworth. Jackson had
a considerable name, but is little read, I suppose, in the present
age. Field on the Church has been much praised by Coleridge; it is, as
it seemed to me, a more temperate work in ecclesiastical theory than
some have represented it to be, and written almost wholly against
Rome. Leigh’s Critica Sacra can hardly be reckoned, nor does it claim
to be, more than a compilation from earlier theologians: it is an
alphabetical series of words from the Hebrew and Greek Testaments, the
author candidly admitting that he was not very conversant with the
latter language.

     [127] “All confess,” says Selden, in the Table-talk, “there never
     was a more learned clergy--no man taxes them with ignorance.” In
     another place, indeed, he is represented to say, “The jesuits and
     the lawyers of France, and the Low Country-men have engrossed all
     learning; the rest of the world make nothing but homilies.” As
     far as these sentences are not owing to difference of humour in
     the time of speaking, he seems to have taken learning in a larger
     sense the second time than the first. Of learning, not
     theological the English clergy had no extraordinary portion.

     [128] Si qua in re libera esse debet sententia, certè in
     vaticiniis præsertim cum jam Protestantium libri prodierint fermè
     centum (in his octoginta in Anglia sola, ut mihi Anglici legati
     dixere,) super illis rebus, inter se plurimum discordes. Grot.
     Epist. 895.

|Style of preaching.|

|English sermons.|

69. The style of preaching before the Reformation had been often
little else than buffoonery, and seldom respectable. The German
sermons of Tauler, in the fourteenth century, are alone remembered.
For the most part, indeed, the clergy wrote in Latin what they
delivered to the multitude in the native tongue. A better tone began
with Luther. His language was sometimes rude and low, but persuasive,
artless, powerful. He gave many useful precepts, as well as examples,
for pulpit eloquence. Melanchthon and several others, both in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well in the Lutheran as the
reformed church, endeavoured, by systematic treatises, to guide the
composition of sermons. The former could not, however, withstand the
formal, tasteless, and polemical spirit that overspread their
theology. In the latter a superior tone is perceived. Of these,
according to Eichhorn, the Swiss preachers were most simple and
popular, the Dutch most learned and copious, the French had most taste
and eloquence, the English most philosophy.[129] It is more than
probable that in these characteristics he has meant to comprise the
whole of the seventeenth century. Few continental writers, as far as I
know, that belong to this its first moiety, have earned any remarkable
reputation in this province of theology. In England several might be
distinguished out of a large number. Sermons have been much more
frequently published here than in any other country; and, from the
beginning of the seventeenth century, form a large proportion of our
theological literature. But it is of course not requisite to mention
more than the very few which may be said to have a general
reputation.

     [129] Eichhorn, t. vi., part ii., p. 219, et post.

|Of Donne.|

70. The sermons of Donne have sometimes been praised in late times.
They are undoubtedly the productions of a very ingenious and a very
learned man; and two folio volumes by such a person may be expected to
supply favourable specimens. In their general character, they will not
appear, I think, much worthy of being rescued from oblivion. The
subtlety of Donne, and his fondness for such inconclusive reasoning,
as a subtle disputant is apt to fall into, runs through all of these
sermons at which I have looked. His learning he seems to have
perverted in order to cull every impertinence of the fathers and
schoolmen, their remote analogies, their strained allegories, their
technical distinctions; and to these he has added much of a similar
kind from his own fanciful understanding. In his theology, Donne
appears often to incline towards the Arminian hypotheses, which, in
the last years of James and the first of his son, the period in which
these sermons were chiefly preached, had begun to be accounted
orthodox at court; but I will not vouch for his consistency in every
discourse. Much, as usual in that age, is levelled against Rome: Donne
was conspicuously learned in that controversy; and though he talks
with great respect of antiquity, is not induced by it, like some of
his Anglican contemporaries, to make any concession to the
adversary.[130]

     [130] Donne incurred some scandal by a book entitled Biathanatos,
     and considered as a vindication of suicide. It was published long
     after his death, in 1651. It is a very dull and pedantic
     performance, without the ingenuity and acuteness of paradox;
     distinctions, objections, and quotations from the rabble of bad
     authors whom he used to read, fill up the whole of it. It is
     impossible to find a less clear statement of argument on either
     side. No one would be induced to kill himself by reading such a
     book, unless he were threatened with another volume.

|Of Jeremy Taylor.|

71. The sermons of Jeremy Taylor are of much higher reputation; far
indeed above any that had preceded them in the English church. An
imagination essentially poetical, and sparing none of the decorations
which, by critical rules, are deemed almost peculiar to verse; a warm
tone of piety, sweetness, and charity; an accumulation of
circumstantial accessories whenever he reasons, or persuades, or
describes; an erudition pouring itself forth in quotation, till his
sermons become in some places almost a garland of flowers from all
other writers, and especially from those of classical antiquity, never
before so redundantly scattered from the pulpit, distinguish Taylor
from his contemporaries by their degree, as they do from most of his
successors by their kind. His sermons on the Marriage Ring, on the
House of Feasting, on the Apples of Sodom, may be named without
disparagement to others, which perhaps ought to stand in equal place.
But they are not without considerable faults, some of which have just
been hinted. The eloquence of Taylor is great, but it is not eloquence
of the highest class; it is far too Asiatic, too much in the style of
Chrysostom and other declaimers of the fourth century, by the study of
whom he had probably vitiated his taste; his learning is ill placed,
and his arguments often as much so; not to mention that he has the
common defect of alleging nugatory proofs; his vehemence loses its
effect by the circuity of his pleonastic language; his sentences are
of endless length, and hence not only altogether unmusical, but not
always reducible to grammar. But he is still the greatest ornament of
the English pulpit up to the middle of the seventeenth century; and we
have no reason to believe, or rather much reason to disbelieve, that
he had any competitor in other languages.

|Devotional writings of Taylor.|

|And Hall.|

72. The devotional writings of Taylor, several of which belong to the
first part of the century, are by no means of less celebrity or less
value than his sermons. Such are the life of Christ, the Holy Living
and Dying, and the collections of meditations, called the Golden
Grove. A writer as distinguished in works of practical piety was Hall.
His Art of Divine Meditation, his Contemplations, and indeed many of
his writings, remind us frequently of Taylor. Both had equally pious
and devotional tempers; both were full of learning, both fertile of
illustration; both may be said to have had strong imagination and
poetical genius, though Taylor let his predominate a little more.
Taylor is also rather more subtle and argumentive; his copiousness has
more real variety. Hall keeps more closely to his subject, dilates
upon it sometimes more tediously, but more appositely. In his sermons
there is some excess of quotation and far-fetched illustration, but
less than in those of Taylor. These two great divines resemble each
other, on the whole, so much that we might for a short time not
discover which we were reading. I do not know that any third
writer comes close to either. The Contemplations of Hall are among his
most celebrated works. They are prolix, and without much of that
vivacity or striking novelty we meet with in the devotional writings
of his contemporary, but are perhaps more practical and generally
edifying.[131]

     [131] Some of the moral writings of Hall were translated into
     French by Chevreau in the seventeenth century, and had much
     success. Niceron, xi. 348.

|In the Roman.|

73. The religious treatises of this class, even those which by their
former popularity, or their merit, ought to be mentioned in a regular
history of theological literature, are too numerous for these pages. A
mystical and ascetic spirit diffused itself more over religion,
struggling sometimes, as in the Lutherans of Germany, against the
formal orthodoxy of the church, but more often in subordination to its
authority, and cooperating with its functions. The writings of St.
Francis de Sales, titular Bishop of Geneva, especially that on the
Love of God, published in 1616, make a sort of epoch in the devotional
theology of the church of Rome. Those of St. Teresa, in the Spanish
language, followed some years afterwards; they are altogether full of
a mystical theopathy. But De Sales included charity in his scheme of
divine love; and it is to him, as well as others of his age, that not
only a striking revival of religion in France, which had been
absolutely perverted or disregarded in the sixteenth century, was due,
but a reformation in the practices of monastic life, which became more
active and beneficent, with less of useless penance and asceticism
than before. New institutions sprung up with the spirit of
association, and all other animating principles of conventual orders,
but free from the formality and torpor of the old.[132]

     [132] Ranke, ii. 430.

|And Lutheran church.|

74. Even in the German churches, rigid as they generally were in their
adherence to the symbolical books, some voices from time to time were
heard for a more spiritual and effective religion. Arndt’s Treatise of
True Christianity, in 1605, written on ascetic and devotional
principles, and with some deviation from the tenets of the very
orthodox Lutherans may be reckoned one of the first protests against
their barren forms of Faith[133]; and the mystical theologians, if
they had not run into such extravagances as did dishonour to their
names would have been accessions to the same side. The principal
mystics or theosophists have generally been counted among
philosophers, and will therefore find their place in the next chapter.
The German nation is constitutionally disposed to receive those forms
of religion which address themselves to the imagination and the heart.
Much therefore of this character has always been written, and become
popular, in that language. Few English writings of the practical
class, except those already mentioned, can be said to retain much
notoriety. Those of George Herbert are best known; his Country Parson,
which seems properly to fall within this description, is on the whole
a pleasing little book; but the precepts are sometimes so
overstrained, as to give an air of affectation.

     [133] Eichhorn, v. part i., p. 355. Biogr. Univ. Chalmers.

|Infidelity of some writers. Charron.|

75. The disbelief in revelation, of which several symptoms had
appeared before the end of the sixteenth century, became more
remarkable afterwards both in France and England, involving several
names not obscure in literary history. The first of these, in point of
date, is Charron. The religious scepticism of this writer has not been
generally acknowledged, and indeed it seems repugnant to the fact of
his having written an elaborate defence of Christianity; yet we can
deduce no other conclusion from one chapter in his most celebrated
book, the Treatise on Wisdom. Charron is so often little else than a
transcriber, that we might suspect him in this instance also to have
drawn from other sources; which however would leave the same inference
as to his own tenets, and I think this chapter has an air of
originality.

|Vanini.|

76. The name of Charron, however, has not been generally associated
with the charge of irreligion. A more audacious, and consequently more
unfortunate writer was Lucilio Vanini, a native of Italy, whose book
De Admirandis Naturæ Reginæ Deæque Mortalium Arcanis, printed at Paris
in 1616, caused him to be burned at the stake by a decree of the
parliament of Toulouse in 1619. This treatise, as well as one that
preceded it, Amphitheatrum Æternæ Providentiæ, Lyons, 1615, is of
considerable rarity, so that there has been a question concerning the
atheism of Vanini, which some have undertaken to deny.[134] In the
Amphitheatrum I do not perceive anything which leads to such an
imputation, though I will not pretend to have read the whole
of a book full of the unintelligible metaphysics of the later
Aristotelians. It professes at least to be a vindication of the being
and providence of the Deity. But the later work, which is dedicated to
Bassompierre, and published with a royal privilege of exclusive sale
for six years, is of a very different complexion. It is in sixty
dialogues, the interlocutors being styled Alexander and Julius Cæsar,
the latter representing Vanini himself. The far greater part of these
dialogues relate to physical, but a few to theological subjects. In
the fiftieth, on the religion of the heathens, he avows his disbelief
of all religion, except such as nature, which is God, being the
principle of motion, has planted in the hearts of man; every other
being the figment of kings to keep their subjects in obedience, and of
priests for their own lucre and honour;[135] observing plainly of his
own Amphitheatrum, which is a vindication of providence, that he had
said many things in it which he did not believe.[136] Vanini was
infatuated with presumption, and, if he resembled Jordano Bruno in
this respect, fell very short of his acuteness and apparent integrity.
His cruel death, and perhaps the scarcity of his works, has given more
celebrity to his name in literary history than it would otherwise have
obtained.

     [134] Brucker, v. 678.

     [135] In quanam religione verè et piè Deum coli vetusti
     philosophi existimârunt? In unica Naturæ lege, quam ipsa Natura,
     quæ Deus est (est enim principium motûs), in omnium gentium
     animis inscripsit; cæteras vero leges non nisi figmenta et
     illusiones esse asserebant, non a cacodæmone aliquo inductas,
     fabulosum namque illorum genus dicitur a philosophis, sed a
     principibus ad subditorum pædagogiam excogitatas, et a
     sacrificulis ob honoris et auri aucupium confirmatas, non
     miraculis, sed scriptura, cujus nec originale ullibi adinvenitur,
     quæ miracula facta recitet, et bonarum ac malarum actionum
     repromissiones polliceatur, in futura tamen vita, ne fraus detegi
     possit, p. 366.

     [136] Multa in eo libro scripta sunt, quibus a me nulla præstatur
     fides. Così va il mondo.--ALEX. Non miror, nam ego crebris
     vernaculis hoc usurpo sermonibus: Questo mondo è una gabbia de’
     matti. Reges excipio et Pontifices. Nam de illis scriptum est:
     Cor Regis in manu Domini, &c. Dial. LVI., p. 428.

     The concluding pages are enough to show with what justice Buhle
     and Tennemann have gravely recorded Vanini among philosophers.
     Quæso, mi Juli, tuam de animæ immortalitate sententiam
     explices.--J. C. Excusatum me habeas rogo.--AL. Cur ita?--J. C.
     Vovi Deo meo quæstionem hanc me non pertractaturum, antequam
     senex dives et germanus evasero.--AL. Dii tibi Nestoreos pro
     literariæ reipublicæ emolumento dies impertiant: vix trigesimum
     nunc attigisti annum et tot præclaræ eruditionis monumenta
     admirabili cum laude edidisti.--J. C. Quid hæc mihi prosunt?--AL.
     Celebrem tibi laudem comparârunt.--J. C. Omnes famæ rumusculos
     cum uno amasiæ basiolo commutandos plerique philosophi
     suadent.--AL. At alter ea perfrui potest.--J. C. Quid inde
     adimit?...--AL. Uberrimos voluptaris fructus percepisti in Naturæ
     arcanis investigandis.--J. C. Corpus mihi est studiis enervatum
     exhaustumque; neque in hac humana caligine perfectam rerum
     cognitionem assequi possumus; cum ipsummet Aristotelem
     philosophorum Deum infinitis propemodum locis hallucinatum fuisse
     adverto, cumque medicam facultatem præ reliquis certissimam adhuc
     incertam et fallacem experior, subscribere cuperem Agrippæ
     libello quem de scientiarum vanitate conscripsit.--AL. Laborum
     tuorum præmium jam consecutus es; æternitati nomen jam
     consecrâsti. Quid jucundius in extremo tuæ ætatis curriculo
     accipere potes, quam hoc canticum? Et superest sine te nomen in
     orbe tuum.--J. C. Si animus meus una cum corpore, ut Athei
     fingunt, evanescat, quas ille ex fama post obitum delicias
     nanscisci poterit? Forsitan gloriolæ voculis, et fidiculis ad
     cadaveris domicilium pertrahatur? Si animus, ut credimus libenter
     et speramus, interitui non est obnoxius, et ad superos evolabit,
     tot ibi perfruetur cupediis et voluptatibus, ut illustres ac
     splendidas mundi pompas et laudationes nec pili faciat. Si ad
     purgatorias flammas descendet, gratior erit illi illius
     orationis, Dies iræ, dies illa, mulierculis gratissima recitatio,
     quam omnes Tulliani glossuli, dicendique lepores, quam
     subtilissimæ et pene divinæ Aristotelis ratiocinationes: si
     Tartareo, quod Deus avertat, perpetuo carceri emancipatur, nullum
     ibi solatium, nullam redemptionam inveniet.--AL. O utinam in
     adolescentiæ limine has rationas excepissem!--J. C. Prætorita
     mala ne cogites, futura ne cures, præsentia fugias.--AL. Ah!--J.
     C. Liberaliter inspiras.--AL. Illius versiculi recordor. Perduto
     è tutto il tempo, che in amor non si spende.--J. C. Eja quoniam
     inclinato jam die ad vesperam perducta est disputatio (cujus
     singula verba divino Romanæ ecclesiæ oraculo, infallibilis cujus
     interpres a Spiritu sancto modo constitutus est Paulus V.,
     serenissimæ Burghesiæ familiæ soboles, subjecta esse volumus, ita
     ut pro non dictis habeantur, si quæ forsitan sunt, quod vic
     crediderim, quæ illius placitis ad amussim non consentiant),
     laxemus paulisper animos, et a severitate ad hilaritatem risumque
     traducamus. Heus pueri! lusorias tabulas huc adferte. The
     wretched man, it seems, had not much reason to think himself a
     gainer by his speculations; yet he knew not that the worst was
     still behind.

|Lord Herbert of Cherbury.|

77. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, in his Treatise de Veritate, and still
more in that De Religione Gentilium, has been justly deemed inimical
to every positive religion. He admits indeed the possibility of
immediate revelation from heaven, but denies that any tradition from
others can have sufficient certainty. Five fundamental truths of
natural religion he holds to be such as all mankind are bound
to acknowledge, and damns those heathens who do not receive them as
summarily as any theologian.[137]

     [137] These five articles are--1. Esse Deum summum.--2. Coli
     debere.--3. Virtutem pietatemque esse præcipuas partes cultûs
     divini.--4. Dolendum esse ob peccata, ab iisque resipiscendum.--
     5. Dari ex bonitate justitiaque divina præmium vel pœnam tum in
     hac vita, tum post hanc vitam.... Hisce quippe ubi superstitiones
     figmentaque commiscuerint, vel animas suas criminibus quæ nulla
     satis eluat pœnitentia, commaculaverint, a seipsis perditio
     propria, Deo vero summo in æternum sit gloria. De Religione
     Gentilium, cap. 1.

|Grotius de Veritate.|

78. The progress of infidelity in France did not fail to attract
notice. It was popular in the court of Louis XIII., and, in a certain
degree, in that of Charles I. But this does not belong to the history
of literature. Among the writers who may have given some proofs of it
we may reckon La Mothe le Vayer, Naudé, and Guy Patin.[138] The
writings of Hobbes will be treated at length hereafter. It is probable
that this sceptical spirit of the age gave rise to those vindications
of revealed religion which were published in the present period. Among
these the first place is due to the well-known and extensively
circulated treatise of Grotius. This was originally sketched in Dutch
verse, and intended for the lower classes of his countrymen. It was
published in Latin in 1627.[139] Few, if any, books of the kind have
been so frequently reprinted; but some parts being not quite so close
and critical as the modern state of letters exacts, and the arguments
against Jews and Mahometans seeming to occupy too much space, it is
less read than formerly.

     [138] La Mothe le Vayer has frequently been reckoned among those
     who carried their general scepticism into religion. And this
     seems a fair inference, unless the contrary can be shown; for
     those who doubt of what is most evident, will naturally doubt of
     what is less so. In La Mothe’s fourth dialogue, under the name of
     Oratius Tubero, he pretends to speak of faith as a gift of God,
     and not founded on evidence; which was probably but the usual
     subterfuge. The Naudæana are full of broad intimations that the
     author was, as he expresses it, _bien déniaisé_; and Guy Patin’s
     letters, except those near the end of his life, lead to a similar
     conclusion. One of them has certainly the appearance of
     implicating Gassendi, and has been quoted as such by Sir James
     Mackintosh, in his Dissertation on Ethical Philosophy. Patin
     tells us, that Naudé, Gassendi, and he were to sup together the
     following Sunday. Ce sera une débauche, mais philosophique, et
     peut-être quelque chose d’avantage, pour être tous trois guéris
     du loup-garou, et être délivrés du mal des scrupules qui est le
     tyran des consciences, nous irons peut-être jusque fort près du
     sanctuaire. Je fis l’an passé ce voyage de Gentilly avec M.
     Naudé, moy seul avec luy, tête-à-tête; il n’y avoit point de
     témoins, aussi n’y en falloit-il point; nous y parlâmes fort
     librement de tout, sans que personne en ait été scandalizé, p.
     32. I should not, nevertheless, lay much stress on this letter in
     opposition to the many assertions of belief in religion which the
     writings of Gassendi contain. One of them, indeed, quoted by
     Dugald Stewart, in note Q. to his first Dissertation, is rather
     suspicious, as going too far into a mystical strain for his
     extremely cold temperament.

     [139] Niceron, vol. xix. Biogr. Univ.

|English translation of the Bible.|

79. This is not a period in which many editions or versions of the
Scriptures were published. The English translation of the Bible had
been several times revised, or re-made, since the first edition by
Tyndal and Coverdale. It finally assumed its present form under the
authority of James I. Forty-seven persons, in six companies, meeting
at Westminster, Oxford, and Cambridge, distributed the labour among
them; twenty-five being assigned to the Old Testament, fifteen to the
New, seven to the Apocrypha. The rules imposed for their guidance by
the king were designed, as far as possible, to secure the text against
any novel interpretation; the translation, called the Bishop’s Bible,
being established as the basis, as those still older had been in that;
and the work of each person or company being subjected to the review
of the rest. The translation, which was commenced in 1607, was
published in 1611.[140]

     [140] Fuller’s Church History.

|Its style.|

80. The style of this translation is in general so enthusiastically
praised, that no one is permitted either to qualify or even explain
the grounds of his approbation. It is held to be the perfection of our
English language. I shall not dispute this proposition; but one remark
as to a matter of fact cannot reasonably be censured, that, in
consequence of the principle of adherence to the original versions
which had been kept up ever since the time of Henry VIII., it is not
the language of the reign of James I. It may, in the eyes of many, be
a better English, but it is not the English of Daniel, or Raleigh, or
Bacon, as any one may easily perceive. It abounds, in fact, especially
in the Old Testament, with obsolete phraseology, and with single words
long since abandoned, or retained only in provincial use. On the more
important question, whether this translation is entirely, or
with very trifling exceptions, conformable to the original text, it
seems unfit to enter. It is one which is seldom discussed with all the
temper and freedom from oblique views which the subject demands, and
upon which, for this reason, it is not safe for those who have not had
leisure or means to examine it for themselves, to take upon trust the
testimony of the learned. A translation of the Old Testament was
published at Douay in 1609, for the use of the English Catholics.




                            CHAPTER XX.

        HISTORY OF SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY FROM 1600 TO 1650.


                             SECT. I.

_Aristotelian Logic--Campanella--Theosophists--Lord Herbert of
Cherbury--Gassendi’s Remarks upon him._

|Subjects of this chapter.|

1. In the two preceding volumes, we have had occasion to excuse the
heterogeneous character of the chapters that bear this title. The
present is fully as much open to verbal criticism; and perhaps it is
rather by excluding both moral and mathematical philosophy, that we
give it some sort of unity, than from any close connexion in all the
books that will come under our notice in the ensuing pages. But any
tabular arrangement of literature, such as has often been attempted
with no very satisfactory result, would be absolutely inappropriate to
such a work as the present, which has already to labour with the
inconvenience of more subdivisions than can be pleasing to the reader,
and would interfere too continually with that general regard to
chronology, without which the name of history seems incongruous. Hence
the metaphysical inquiries that are conversant with the human mind, or
with natural theology, the general principles of investigating truth,
the comprehensive speculations of theoretical physics, subjects very
distinct and not easily confounded by the most thoughtless, must fall,
with no more special distribution, within the contents of this
chapter. But since during the period which it embraces, men arose, who
have laid the foundations of a new philosophy, and thus have rendered
it a great epoch in the intellectual history of mankind, we shall not
very strictly, though without much deviation, follow a chronological
order, and after reviewing some of the less important labourers in
speculative philosophy, come to the names of three who have most
influenced posterity--Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbes.

|Aristotelians and Ramists.|

2. We have seen in a former chapter how little progress had been made
in this kind of philosophy during the sixteenth century. At its close
the schools of logic were divided, though by no means in equal
proportion, between the Aristotelians and the Ramists; the one
sustained by ancient renown, by civil, or at least academical power,
and by the common prejudice against innovation; the other deriving
some strength from the love of novelty, and the prejudice against
established authority, which the first age of the reformation had
generated, and which continued, perhaps, to preserve a certain
influence in the second. But neither from one nor the other had
philosophy, whether in material or intellectual physics, much to hope;
the disputations of the schools might be technically correct; but so
little regard was paid to objective truth, or at least so little pains
taken to ascertain it, that no advance in real knowledge signalised
either of these parties of dialecticians. According, indeed, to a
writer of this age, strongly attached to the Aristotelian party, Ramus
had turned all physical science into the domain of logic, and argued
from words to things still more than his opponents.[141] Lord Bacon,
in the bitterest language, casts on him a similar reproach.[142] It
seems that he caused this branch of philosophy to retrograde
rather than advance.

     [141] Keckermann, Præcognita Logica, p. 129. This writer charges
     Ramus with plagiarism from Ludovicus Vives, placing the passages
     in apposition, so as to prove his case. Ramus, he says, never
     alludes to Vives. He praises the former, however, for having
     attacked the scholastic party, being himself a genuine
     Aristotelian.

     [142] Ne vero, fili, cum hanc contra Aristotelem sententiam fero,
     me cum rebelli ejus quodam neoterico Petro Ramo conspirasse
     augurare. Nullum mihi commercium cum hoc ignorantiæ latibulo,
     perniciosissima literarum tinea, compendiorum patre, qui cum
     methodi suæ et compendii vinclis res torqueat et premat, res
     quidem, si qua fuit, elabitur protinus et exsilit; ipse vero
     aridas et desertissimas nugas stringit. Atque Aquinas quindam cum
     Scoto et sociis etiam in non rebus rerum varietatem effinxit, hic
     vero etiam in rebus non rerum solitudinem æquavit. Atque hoc
     hominis cum sit, humanos tamen usus in ore habet impudens, ut
     mihi etiam pro [præ?] sophistis prævaricari videatur Bacon de
     Interpretatione Naturæ.

|No improvement till near the end of the century.|

3. It was obvious at all events, that from the universities, or from
the church, in any country, no improvement in philosophy was to be
expected; yet those who had strayed from the beaten track, a
Paracelsus, a Jordan Bruno, even a Telesio, had but lost themselves in
irregular mysticism, or laid down theories of their own, as arbitrary
and destitute of proof as those they endeavoured to supersede. The
ancient philosophers, and especially Aristotle, were, with all their
errors and defects, far more genuine high-priests of nature than any
moderns of the sixteenth century. But there was a better prospect at
its close, in separate though very important branches of physical
science. Gilbert, Kepler, Galileo, were laying the basis of a true
philosophy; and they, who do not properly belong to this chapter,
laboured very effectually to put an end to all antiquated errors, and
to check the reception of novel paradoxes.

|Methods of the Universities.|

4. We may cast a glance, meantime, on those universities which still
were so wise in their own conceit, and maintained a kind of reputation
by the multitude of their disciples. Whatever has been said of the
scholastic metaphysicians of the sixteenth century, may be understood
as being applicable to their successors during the present period.
That method was by no means extinct, though the books which contain it
are forgotten. In all that part of Europe which acknowledged the
authority of Rome, and in all the universities which were swayed by
the orders of Franciscans, Dominicans, and Jesuits, the metaphysics of
the thirteenth century, the dialectics of the Peripatetic school, were
still taught. If new books were written, as was frequently the case,
they were written upon old systems. Brucker, who sometimes transcribes
Morhof word for word, but frequently expands with so much more
copiousness, that he may be presumed to have had a direct acquaintance
with many of the books he mentions, has gone most elaborately into
this subject.[143] The chairs of philosophy in Protestant German
universities, except where the Ramists had got possession of them,
which was not very common, especially after the first years of this
period, were occupied by avowed Aristotelians; so that if one should
enumerate the professors of physics, metaphysics, logic, and ethics,
down to the close of the century, he would be almost giving a list of
strenuous adherents to that system.[144] One cause of this was the
“Philippic method,” or course of instruction in the philosophical
books of Melanchthon, more clear and elegant, and better arranged than
that of Aristotle himself or his commentators. But this, which long
continued to prevail, was deemed by some too superficial, and tending
to set aside the original authority. Brucker however admits, what
seems at least to limit some of his expressions as to the prevalence
of Peripateticism, that many reverted to the scholastic metaphysics,
which raised its head about the beginning of the seventeenth century,
even in the protestant regions of Germany. The universities of Altdorf
and Helmstadt were the chief nurseries of the genuine Peripateticism.[145]

     [143] Morhof, vol. iii., l. 1. c. 13, 14. Brucker, iv.,
     cap. 2, 3.

     [144] Brucker, iv. 243.

     [145] Id. pp. 248-253.

|Scholastic Writers.|

5. Of the metaphysical writers whom the older philosophy brought forth
we must speak with much ignorance. Suarez of Granada is justly
celebrated for some of his other works; but of his Metaphysical
Disputations, published at Mentz, in 1614, in two folio volumes, and
several times afterwards, I find no distinct character in Morhof or
Brucker. They both, especially the former, have praised Lalemandet, a
Franciscan, whose Decisiones Philosophicæ, on logic, physics, and
metaphysics, appeared at Munich, in 1644 and 1645. Lalemandet, says
Morhof, has well stated the questions between the Nominalist and
Realist parties; observing that the difference between them is like
that of a man who casts up a sum of money by figures, and one who
counts the coins themselves.[146] This, however, seems no very happy
illustration of the essential points of controversy. Vasquez, Tellez,
and several more names, without going for the present below the middle
of the century, may be found in the two writers quoted. Spain was
peculiarly the nurse of these obsolete and unprofitable metaphysics.

     [146] Morhof, vol. ii., lib. i., cap. 14., sect. 15.
     Brucker, iv. 129.

6. The Aristotelian philosophy, unadulterated by the figments of the
schoolmen, had eminent upholders in the Italian universities,
especially in that of Padua. Cæsar Cremonini taught in that famous
city till his death in 1630. Fortunio Liceto, his successor, was as
staunch a disciple of the Peripatetic sect. We have a more full
account of these men from Gabriel Naudé, both in his recorded
conversation, the Naudæana, and in a volume of letters, than from any
other quarter. His twelfth letter, especially, enters into some detail
as to the state of the university of Padua, to which, for the purpose
of hearing Cremonini, he had repaired in 1625. He does not much extol
its condition; only Cremonini and one more were deemed by him safe
teachers: the rest were mostly of a common class; the lectures were
too few, and the vacations too long. He observes, as one might at this
day, the scanty population of the city compared with its size, the
grass growing and the birds singing in the streets, and, what we
should not find now to be the case, the “general custom of Italy,
which keeps women perpetually locked up in their chambers, like birds
in cages.”[147] Naudé in many of these letters speaks in the most
panegyrical terms of Cremonini,[148] and particularly for his standing
up almost alone in defence of the Aristotelian philosophy, when
Telesio, Patrizi, Bruno, and others had been propounding theories of
their own. Licetus, the successor of Cremonini, maintained, he
afterwards informs us, with little support the Peripatetic verity. It
is probable that, by this time, Galileo, a more powerful adversary
than Patrizi and Telesio, had drawn away the students of physical
philosophy from Aristotle; nor did Naudé himself long continue in the
faith he had imbibed from Cremonini. He became the intimate friend of
Gassendi, and embraced a better system without repugnance, though he
still kept up his correspondence with Licetus.

     [147] Naudæi Epistolæ, p. 52 (edit. 1667.)

     [148] P. 27, et alibi sæpius.

|Treatises on logic.|

7. Logic had never been more studied, according to a writer who has
given a sort of history of the science about the beginning of this
period, than in the preceding age; and in fact he enumerates above
fifty treatises on the subject, between the time of Ramus and his
own.[149] The Ramists, though of little importance in Italy, in Spain,
and even in France, had much influence in Germany, England, and
Scotland.[150] None however of the logical works of the sixteenth
century obtained such reputation as those by Smiglecius,
Burgersdicius, and our countryman Crakanthorp, all of whom flourished,
if we may use such a word for those who bore no flowers, in the
earlier part of the next age. As these men were famous in their
generation, we may presume that they at least wrote better than their
predecessors. But it is time to leave so jejune a subject, though we
may not yet be able to produce what is much more valuable.

     [149] Keckermann, Præcognita Logica, p. 110 (edit 1606.)

     [150] Id. p. 147.

|Campanella.|

8. The first name, in an opposite class, that we find in descending
from the sixteenth century, is that of Thomas Campanella, whose
earliest writings belong to it. His philosophy being wholly
dogmatical, must be classed with that of the paradoxical innovators
whom he followed and eclipsed. Campanella, a Dominican friar, and like
his master Telesio, a native of Cosenza, having been accused, it is
uncertain how far with truth, of a conspiracy against the Spanish
government of his country, underwent an imprisonment of twenty-seven
years; during which almost all his philosophical treatises were
composed and given to the world. Ardent and rapid in his mind, and, as
has just been seen, not destitute of leisure, he wrote on logic,
physics, metaphysics, morals, politics, and grammar. Upon all these
subjects his aim seems to have been to recede as far as possible from
Aristotle. He had early begun to distrust this guide, and had formed a
noble resolution to study all schemes of philosophy, comparing them
with their archetype, the world itself, that he might distinguish how
much exactness was to be found in those several copies, as they ought
to be, from one autograph of nature.[151]

     [151] Cypriani Vita Campanellæ, p. 7.

|His theory taken from Telesio.|

9. Campanella borrowed his primary theorems from Telesio, but enlarged
that Parmenidean philosophy by the invention of his own fertile and
imaginative genius. He lays down the fundamental principle, that the
perfectly wise and good Being has created certain signs and types
(statuas atque imagines) of himself, all of which, severally as well
as collectively, represent power, wisdom, and love, and the objects of
these namely, existence, truth, and excellence, with more or less
evidence. God first created space, the basis of existence, the primal
substance, an immovable and incorporeal capacity of receiving body.
Next he created matter without form or figure. In this corporeal mass
God called to being two workmen, incorporeal themselves, but
incapable of subsisting apart from body, the organs of no physical
forms, but of their maker alone. These are heat and cold, the active
principles diffused through all things. They were enemies from the
beginning, each striving to occupy all material substances itself;
each, therefore, always contending with the other, while God foresaw
the great good that their discord would produce.[152] The heavens, he
says in another passage, were formed by heat out of attenuated matter,
the earth by cold out of condensed matter; the sun, being a body of
heat, as he rolls round the earth, attacks the colder substance, and
converts part of it into air and vapour.[153] This last part of his
theory Campanella must have afterwards changed in words, when he
embraced the Copernican system.

     [152] In hac corporea mole tantæ materia statuæ, dixit Deus, ut
     nascerentur fabri duo incorporei, sed non potentes nisi a corpore
     subsistere, nullarum physicarum formarum organa, sed formatoris
     tantummodo. Id circo nati calor et frigus, principia activa
     principalia, ideoque suæ virtutis diffusiva. Statim inimici
     fuerunt mutuo, dum uterque cupit totam substantiam materialem
     occupare. Hinc contra se invicem pugnare cœperunt providente Deo
     ex hujusmodi discordia ingens bonum. Philosophia Realis
     Epilogistica (Frankfort, 1623), sect. 4.

     [153] This is in the Compendium de Rerum Natura pro Philosophia
     humana, published by Adami in 1617. In his Apology for Galileo,
     in 1632, Campanella defends the Copernican system, and says that
     the modern astronomers think they cannot construct good
     ephemerides without it.

|Notion of universal sensibility.|

10. He united to this physical theory another not wholly original, but
enforced in all his writings with singular confidence and pertinacity,
the sensibility of all created beings. All things, he says, feel; else
would the world be a chaos. For neither would fire tend upwards, nor
stones downwards, nor waters to the sea; but everything would remain
where it was, were it not conscious that destruction awaits it by
remaining amidst that which is contrary to itself, and that it can
only be preserved by seeking that which is of a similar nature.
Contrariety is necessary for the decay and reproduction of nature; but
all things strive against their contraries, which they could not do,
if they did not perceive what is their contrary.[154] God, who is
primal power, wisdom, and love, has bestowed on all things the power
of existence, and so much wisdom and love as is necessary for their
conversation during that time only for which his providence has
determined that they shall be. Heat, therefore, has power, and sense,
and desire of its own being; so have all other things seeking to be
eternal like God, and in God they are eternal, for nothing dies before
him, but is only changed.[155] Even to the world, as a sentient being,
the death of its parts is no evil, since the death of one is the birth
of many. Bread that is swallowed dies to revive as blood, and blood
dies, that it may live again in our flesh and bones; and thus as the
life of man is compounded out of the deaths and lives of all his
parts, so is it with the whole universe.[156] God said, Let all things
feel, some more, some less, as they have more or less necessity to
imitate my being. And let them desire to live in that which they
understand to be good for them, lest my creation should come to
nought.[157]

     [154] Omnia ergo sentiunt; alias mundus esset chaos. Ignis enim
     non sursum tenderet, nec aquæ in mare, nec lapides deorsum; sed
     res omnis ubi primo reperiretur, permaneret, cum non sentiret sui
     destructionem inter contraria nec sui conservationem inter
     similia. Non esset in mundo generatio et corruptio nisi esset
     contrarietas, sicut omnes physiologi affirmant. At si alteram
     contrarium non sentiret alterum sibi esse contrarium, contra
     ipsum non pugnaret. Sentiunt ergo singula. De Sensu Rerum, l. i.
     c. 4.

     [155] Igitur ipse Deus, qui est prima potentia, prima sapientia,
     primus amor, largitus est rebus omnibus potentiam vivendi, et
     sapientiam et amorem quantum sufficit conservationi ipsarum in
     tanto tempore necessariæ, quantum determinavit ejus mens pro
     rerum regimine in ipso ente, nec præteriri potest. Calor ergo
     potest, sentit, amat esse; ita et res omnis cupitque æternari
     sicut Deus, et Deo res nulla moritur, sed solummodo mutatur, &c.
     l. ii., c. 26.

     [156] Non est malus ignis in suo esse; terræ autem mams videtur,
     non autem mundo; nec vipera mala est, licet homini sit mala. Ita
     de omnibus idem prædico. Mors quoque rei unius si nativitas est
     multarum rerum, mala non est. Moritur panis manducatus, ut fiat
     sanguis, et sanguis moritur, ut in carnem nervos et ossa vertatur
     ac vivat; neque tamen hoc universo displicit animali, quamvis
     partibus mors ipsa, hoc est, transmutatio dolorifica sit,
     displiceatque. Ita utilis est mundo transmutatio eorum
     particularium noxia displicensque illis. Totus homo compositus
     est ex morte ac vita partialibus, quæ integrant vitam humanam.
     Sic mundus totus ex morticus ac vitibus compositus est, quæ
     totius vitam efficiunt. Philosop. Realis, c. 10.

     [157] Sentiant alia magis, alia minus, prout magis minusque opus
     habent, et me imitentur in essendo. Ibidem ament, omnia vivere in
     proprio esse præcognito ut bono, ne corruat factura mea. Id.
     c. 10.

|His imagination and eloquence.|

11. The strength of Campanella’s genius lay in his imagination, which
raises him sometimes to flights of impressive eloquence on
this favourite theme. The sky and stars are endowed with the keenest
sensibility; nor is it unreasonable to suppose that they signify their
mutual thoughts to each other by the transference of light, and that
their sensibility is full of pleasure. The blessed spirits that inform
such living and bright mansions behold all things in nature and in the
divine ideas; they have also a more glorious light than their own,
through which they are elevated to a supernatural beatific
vision.[158] We can hardly read this, without recollecting the most
sublime passage, perhaps, in Shakspeare:--

  “Sit, Jessica; look how the vault of heaven
  Is thick inlayed with patins of bright gold.
  There’s not the smallest orb, that thou behold’st,
  But in its motion like an angel sings,
  Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubim;
  Such harmony is in immortal souls.
  But while this muddy vesture of decay
  Does grossly close us in, we cannot hear it.”[159]

     [158] Animæ beatæ habitantes sic vivas lucidasque mansiones, res
     naturales vident omnes divinasque ideas, habent quoque lumen
     gloriosius quo elevantur ad visionem supernaturalem beatificam,
     et veluti apud nos luces plurimæ sese mutuo tangunt, intersecant,
     decussant, sentiuntque ita in cœlo luces distinguuntur, uniuntur,
     sentiunt. De Sensu Rerum, l. iii. c. 4.

     [159] Merchant of Venice, Act V.

12. The world is full of living spirits, he proceeds; and when the
soul shall be delivered from this dark cavern, we shall behold their
subtle essences. But now we cannot discern the forms of the air, and
the winds as they rush by us; much less the angels and dæmons who
people them. Miserable as we are, we recognise no other sensation than
that which we observe in animals and plants, slow and half
extinguished, and buried under a weight that oppresses it. We will not
understand that all our actions and appetites and motions and powers
flow from heaven. Look at the manner in which light is diffused over
the earth, penetrating every part of it with endless variety of
operation, which we must believe that it does not perform without
exquisite pleasure.[160] And hence there is no vacuum in nature,
except by violent means; since all bodies delight in mutual contact,
and the world no more desires to be rent in its parts than an animal.

     [160] Prætervolant in conspectu nostro venti et aer, at nihil eos
     videmus, multo minus videmus Angelos Dæmonasque, quorum plenus
     est mundus.

     Infelices qui sensum alium nullum agnoscimus, nisi obtusum
     animalium plantarumque, tardum, demortuum aggravatum; sepultum:
     nec quidem intelligere volumus omnem actionem nostram et
     appetitum et sensum et motum et vim a cœlo manare. Ecce lux
     quanto acutissimo expanditur sensu super terram, quo
     multiplicatur, generatur, amplificatur, idque non sine magna
     efficere voluptate existimanda est, l. iii. c. 5.

     Campanella used to hear, as he tells us, whenever any evil was
     impending, a voice calling him by his name, sometimes with other
     words; he doubted whether this were his proper Dæmon, or the air
     itself speaking. It is not wonderful that his imagination was
     affected by length of confinement.

13. It is almost a descent in Campanella from these visions of the
separate sensibility of nature in each particle, when he seizes hold
of some physical fact or analogy to establish a subordinate and less
paradoxical part of his theory. He was much pleased with Gilbert’s
treatise on the magnet, and thought it of course a proof of the
animation of the earth. The world is an animal, he says, sentient as a
whole, and enjoying life in all its parts.[161] It is not surprising
that he ascribes intelligence to plants; but he here remarks that we
find the male and female sexes in them, and that the latter cannot
fructify without the former. This is manifest in siliquose plants and
in palms (which on this account he calls in another place the wiser
plants, plantæ sapientiores), in which the two kinds incline towards
each other for the purpose of fructification.[162]

     [161] Mundum esse animal, totum sentiens, omnesque portiones ejus
     communi gaudere vita, l. i. c. 9.

     [162] Inveniemus in plantis sexum masculinum et fœmininum, ut in
     animalibus, et fœminam non fructificare sine masculi congressu.
     Hoc patet in siliquis et in palmis, quarum mas fœminaque
     inclinantur mutuo alter in alterum et sese osculantur, et fœmina
     impregnatur, nec fructificat sine mare; immo conspicitur dolens,
     squalida mortuaque, et pulvere illius et odore reviviscit.

|His works published by Adami.|

14. Campanella, when he uttered from his Neapolitan prison these
dulcet sounds of fantasy, had the advantage of finding a pious
disciple who spread them over other parts of Europe. This was Tobias
Adami, initiated, as he tells us, in the same mysteries as himself
(nostræ philosophiæ symmysta), who dedicated to the philosophers of
Germany his own Prodromus Philosophiæ Instauratio, prefixed to his
edition of Campanella’s Compendium de Rerum Natura, published at
Frankfort in 1617. Most of the other writings of the master seem to
have preceded this edition; for Adami enumerates them in his
Prodromus. Campanella did not fully obtain his liberty till 1629, and
died some years afterwards in France, where he had experienced
the kindness of Peiresc, and the patronage of Richelieu. His
philosophy made no very deep impression; it was too fanciful, too
arbitrary, too much tinctured with marks of an imagination rendered
morbid by solitude, to gain many proselytes in an age that was
advancing in severe science. Gassendi, whose good nature led him to
receive Campanella, oppressed by poverty and ill usage, with every
courteous attention, was of all men the last to be seduced by his
theories. No one, probably, since Campanella, aspiring to be reckoned
among philosophers, has ventured to assert so much on matters of high
speculative importance and to prove so little. Yet he seems worthy of
the notice we have taken of him, if it were only as the last of the
mere dogmatists in philosophy. He is doubtless much superior to
Jordano Bruno, and I should presume, except in mathematics, to
Cardan.[163]

     [163] Brucker (vol. v., p. 106-144) has given a laborious
     analysis of the philosophy of Campanella.

|Basson.|

15. A less important adversary of the established theory in physics
was Sebastian Basson, in his “Philosophiæ Naturalis adversus
Aristotelem libri XII., in quibus abstrusa veterum physiologia
restauratur, et Aristotelis errores solidis rationibus refelluntur.
Genevæ, 1621.” This book shows great animosity against Aristotle, to
whom, as Lord Bacon has himself insinuated, he allows only the credit
of having preserved fragments of the older philosophers, like pearls
in mud. It is difficult to give an account of this long work. In some
places we perceive signs of a just philosophy; but in general his
explanations of physical phænomena seem as bad as those of his
opponents, and he displays no acquaintance with the writings and the
discoveries of his great contemporaries. We find also some geometrical
paradoxes; and in treating of astronomy he writes as if he had never
heard of the Copernican system.

|Berigard.|

16. Claude Berigard, born at Moulins, became professor of natural
philosophy at Pisa and Padua. In his Circuli Pisani, published in
1643, he attempted to revive, as it is commonly said, the Ionic or
corpuscular philosophy of Anaxagoras, in opposition to the
Aristotelian. The book is rare; but Brucker, who had seen it, seems to
have satisfactorily repelled the charge of atheism, brought by some
against Berigard.[164]

     [164] Brucker, iv. 460. Niceron, xxxi., where he is inserted by
     the name of Beauregard, which is probably more correct, but
     against usage.

|Magnen.|

Another Frenchman domiciled in Italy, Magnen, trod nearly the same
path as Berigard, professing, however, to follow the modification of
the corpuscular theory introduced by Democritus.[165] It seems to be
observable as to these writers, Basson and the others, that, coming
with no sufficient knowledge of what had recently been discovered in
mathematical and experimental science, and following the bad methods
of the universities, even when they deviated from their usual
doctrines, dogmatizing and asserting when they should have proved,
arguing synthetically from axioms, and never ascending from particular
facts, they could do little good to philosophy, except by
contributing, so far as they might be said to have had any influence,
to shake the authority of Aristotle.

     [165] Brucker (p. 504) thinks that Magnen misunderstood
     the atomic theory of Democritus, and substituted one quite
     different in his Democritus reviviscens, published in 1646.

|Paracelsists.|

17. This authority, which at least required but the deference of
modest reason to one of the greatest of mankind, was ill exchanged, in
any part of science, for the unintelligible dreams of the school of
Paracelsus, which had many disciples in Germany, and a very few in
England. Germany indeed has been the native soil of mysticism in
Europe. The tendency to reflex observation of the mind, characteristic
of that people, has exempted them from much gross error, and given
them insight into many depths of truth, but at the expense of some
confusion, some liability to self-deceit, and to some want of
strictness in metaphysical reasoning. It was accompanied by a profound
sense of the presence of Deity; yet one which, acting on their
thoughtful spirits, became rather an impression than an intellectual
act, and settled into a mysterious indefinite theopathy, when it did
not even evaporate in pantheism.

|And Theosophists.|

18. The founder, perhaps, of this sect was Tauler of Strasburg, in the
fourteenth century, whose sermons in the native language, which,
however, are supposed to have been translated from Latin, are full of
what many have called by the vague word mysticism, an intense
aspiration for the union of the soul with God. An anonymous work
generally entitled The German Theology, written in the fifteenth
century, pursues the same track of devotional thought. It was
a favourite book with Luther, and was translated into Latin by
Castalio.[166] These indeed are to be considered chiefly as
theological; but the study of them led readily to a state of mental
emotion, wherein a dogmatic pseudo-philosophy, like that of
Paracelsus, abounding with assertions that imposed on the imagination,
and appealing frequently both to scriptural authority and the evidence
of inward light, was sure to be favourably received. The mystics,
therefore, and the theosophists belonged to the same class, and it is
not uncommon to use the names indifferently.

     [166] Episcopius places the author of the Theologia Germanica,
     with Henry Nicolas and David George, among mere enthusiasts.

|Fludd.|

19. It may appear not here required to dwell on a subject scarcely
falling under any province of literary history, but two writers within
this period have been sufficiently distinguished to deserve mention.
One of these was Robert Fludd, an English physician, who died in 1637;
a man of indefatigable diligence in collecting the dreams and follies
of past ages, blending them in a portentous combination with new
fancies of his own. The Rabbinical and Cabbalistic authors, as well as
the Paracelsists, the writers on magic, and whatever was most worthy
to be rejected and forgotten, form the basis of his creed. Among his
numerous works the most known was his “Mosaic Philosophy,” in which,
like many before his time as well as since, he endeavoured to build a
scheme of physical philosophy on the first chapters in Genesis. I do
not know whether he found there his two grand principles or forces of
nature: a northern force of condensation, and a southern force of
dilatation. These seem to be the Parmenidean cold and heat, expressed
in a jargon affected in order to make dupes. In peopling the universe
with dæmons, and in ascribing all phænomena to their invisible agency,
he pursued the steps of Agrippa and Paracelsus, or rather of the whole
school of fanatics and impostors called magical. He took also from
older writers the doctrine of a constant analogy between universal
nature, or the macrocosm, and that of man, or the microcosm; so that
what was known in one might lead us to what was unknown in the
other.[167] Fludd possessed, however, some acquaintance with science,
especially in chemistry and mechanics; and his rhapsodies were so far
from being universally contemned in his own age, that Gassendi thought
it not unworthy of him to enter into a prolix confutation of the
Fluddian philosophy.[168]

     [167] This was a favourite doctrine of Paracelsus. Campanella was
     much too fanciful not to embrace it. Mundus, he says, habet
     spiritum qui est cœlum, crassum corpus quod est terra, sanguinem
     qui est mare. Homo igitur compendium epilogusque mundi est. De
     Sensu Rerum, l. ii. c. 32.

     [168] Brucker, iv. 691. Buhle, iii. 157.

|Jacob Behmen.|

20. Jacob Behmen, or rather Boehm, a shoemaker of Gorlitz, is far more
generally familiar to our ears than his contemporary Fludd. He was,
however, much inferior to him in reading, and in fact seems to have
read little but the Bible and the writings of Paracelsus. He recounts
the visions and ecstasies during which a supernatural illumination had
been conveyed to him. It came indeed without the gift of transferring
the light to others; for scarce any have been able to pierce the
clouds in which his meaning has been charitably presumed to lie hid.
The chief work of Behmen is his Aurora, written about 1612, and
containing a record of the visions wherein the mysteries of nature
were revealed to him. It was not published till 1641. He is said to
have been a man of great goodness of heart, which his writings
display; but, in literature, this cannot give a sanction to the
incoherencies of madness. His language, as far as I have seen any
extracts from his works, is coloured with the phraseology of the
alchemists and astrologers; as for his philosophy, so to style it, we
find according to Brucker, who has taken some pains with the subject,
manifest traces of the system of emanation, so ancient and so
attractive; and from this and several other reasons, he is inclined to
think the unlearned shoemaker of Gorlitz must have had assistance from
men of more education in developing his visions.[169] But the
emanative theory is one into which a mind absorbed in contemplation
may very naturally fall. Behmen had his disciples, which such
enthusiasts rarely want; and his name is sufficiently known to justify
the mention of it even in philosophical history.

     [169] Brucker, iv. 698.

|Lord Herbert De Veritate.|

21. We come now to an English writer of a different class, little
known as such at present, but who, without doing much for the
advancement of metaphysical philosophy, had at least the merit of
devoting to it with a sincere and independent spirit the leisure of
high rank, and of a life not obscure in the world--Lord
Herbert of Cherbury. The principal work of this remarkable man is his
Latin treatise, published in 1624, “On truth as it is distinguished
from Revelation, from Probability, from Possibility, and from
Falsehood.” Its object is to inquire what are the sure means of
discerning and discovering truth. This, as, like other authors, he
sets out by proclaiming, had been hitherto done by no one, and he
treats both ancient and modern philosophers rather haughtily, as being
men tied to particular opinions, from which they dare not depart. “It
is not from an hypocritical or mercenary writer, that we are to look
for perfect truth. Their interest is not to lay aside their mask, or
think for themselves. A liberal and independent author alone will do
this.” [170] So general an invective, after Lord Bacon, and indeed
after others, like Campanella, who could not be charged with following
any conceits rather than their own, bespeaks either ignorance of
philosophical literature, or a supercilious neglect of it.

     [170] Non est igitur a larvatoaliquo vel stipendioso scriptore ut
     verum consummatum opperiaris: Illorum apprime interest ne
     personam deponant, vel aliter quidem sentiant. Ingenuus et sui
     arbitrii ista solummodo præstabit auctor. Epist. ad Lectorem.

|His axioms.|

22. Lord Herbert lays down seven primary axioms. 1. Truth exists: 2.
It is coeval with the things to which it relates: 3. It exists
everywhere: 4. It is self-evident:[171] 5. There are as many truths,
as there are differences in things: 6. These differences are made
known to us by our natural faculties: 7. There is a truth belonging to
these truths; “Est veritas quædam harum veritatum.” This axiom he
explains as obscurely, as it is strangely expressed. All truth he then
distinguishes into the truth of the thing or object, the truth of the
appearance, the truth of the perception, and the truth of the
understanding. The truth of the object is the inherent conformity of
the object with itself, or that which makes everything what it
is.[172] The truth of appearance is the conditional conformity of the
appearance with the object. The truth of perception is the conditional
conformity of our senses (facultates nostras prodromas) with the
appearances of things. The truth of understanding is the due
conformity between the aforesaid conformities. All truth, therefore,
is conformity, all conformity relation. Three things are to be
observed in every inquiry after truth; the thing or object, the sense
or faculty, and the laws or conditions by which its conformity or
relation is determined. Lord Herbert is so obscure, partly by not
thoroughly grasping his subject, partly by writing in Latin, partly
perhaps by the “sphalmata et errata in typographo, quædam fortasse in
seipso,” of which he complains at the end, that it has been necessary
to omit several sentences as unintelligible, though what I have just
given is far enough from being too clear.

     [171] Hæc veritas est in se manifesta. He observes that what are
     called false appearances, are true as such, though not true
     according to the reality of the object: sua veritas apparentiæ
     falsæ inest, verè enim ita apparebit, vera tamen ex veritate rei
     non erit.

     [172] Inhærens illa conformitas rei cum seipsa, sive illa ratio,
     ex qua res unaquæque sibi constant.

|Conditions of truth.|

23. Truth, he goes on to say, exists as to the object, or outward
thing itself, when our faculties are capable of determining everything
concerning it; but though this definition is exact, it is doubtful
whether any such truth exists in nature. The first condition of
discerning truth in things, is that they should have a relation to
ourselves; (ut intra nostram stet analogiam) since multitudes of
things may exist which the senses cannot discover. The three chief
conditions of this condition seem to be: 1. That it should be of a
proper size, neither immense, nor too small; 2. That it should have
its determining difference, or principle of individuation, to
distinguish it from other things; 3. That it should be accommodated to
some sense or perceptive faculty. These are the universally necessary
conditions of truth (that is of knowledge) as it regards the object.
The truth of appearance depends on others, which are more particular;
as that the object should be perceived for a sufficient time, through
a proper medium, at a due distance, in a proper situation.[173] Truth
of perception is conditional also, and its conditions are, that the
sense should be sound, and the attention directed towards it. Truth of
understanding depends on the κοιναι εννοιαι [koinai ennoiai], the
common notions possessed by every man of sane mind, and implanted by
nature. The understanding teaches us by means of these, that infinity
and eternity exist, though our senses cannot perceive them.
The understanding deals also with universals, and truth is known as to
universals, when the particulars are rightly apprehended.

     [173] Lord Herbert defines appearance, icetypum, seu forma
     vicaria rei, quæ sub conditionibus istis cum prototypo suo
     conformata, cum conceptu denuo sub conditionibus etiam suis,
     conformari et modo quodam spirituali, tanquam ab objecto decisa,
     etiam in objecti absentia conservari potest.

|Instinctive truths.|

24. Our faculties are as numerous as the differences of things; and
thus it is, that the world corresponds by perfect analogy to the human
soul, degrees of perception being as much distinct from one another as
different modes of it. All our powers may however be reduced to four
heads; natural instinct, internal perception, external sensation, and
reason. What is not known by one of these four means cannot be known
at all. Instinctive truths are proved by universal consent. Here he
comes to his general basis of religion, maintaining the existence of
κοιναι εννοιαι [koinai ennoiai] or common notions of mankind, on that
subject, principles against which no one can dispute, without
violating the laws of his nature.[174] Natural instinct he defines to
be an act of those faculties existing in every man of sane mind, by
which the common notions as to the relations of things not perceived
by the senses, (rerum internarum) and especially such as tend to the
conversation of the individual, of the species, and of the whole, are
formed without any process of reasoning. These common notions, though
excited in us by the objects of sense, are not conveyed to us by them;
they are implanted in us by nature, so that God seems to have imparted
to us not only a part of his image, but of his wisdom.[175] And
whatever is understood and perceived by all men alike deserves to be
accounted one of these notions. Some of them are instinctive, others
are deduced from such as are. The former are distinguishable by six
marks; priority, independence, universality, certainty; so that no man
can doubt them without putting off as it were his nature, necessity,
that is, usefulness for the preservation of man; lastly, intuitive
apprehension, for these common notions do not require to be
inferred.[176]

     [174] Principia illa sacrosancta, contra quæ disputare nefas.
     p. 44. I have translated this in the best sense I could give it;
     but to use _fas_ or _nefas_, before we have defined their
     meaning, or proved their existence, is but indifferent logic.

     [175] P. 48.

     [176] P. 60.

|Internal perceptions.|

25. Internal perceptions denote the conformity of objects with those
faculties existing in every man of sane mind, which, being developed
by his natural instinct, are conversant with the internal relations of
things, in a secondary and particular manner, and by means of natural
instinct.[177] By this ill-worded definition he probably intends to
distinguish the general power, or instinctive knowledge, from its
exercise and application in any instance. But I have found it very
difficult to follow Lord Herbert. It is by means, he says, of these
internal senses that we discern the nature of things in their
intrinsic relations, or hidden types of being.[178] And it is
necessary well to distinguish the conforming faculty in the mind or
internal perception, from the bodily sense. The cloudiness of his
expression increases as we proceed, and in many pages I cannot venture
to translate or abridge it. The injudicious use of a language in which
he did not write with facility, and which is not very well adapted, at
the best, to metaphysical disquisition, has doubtless increased the
perplexity into which he has thrown his readers.

     [177] Sensus interni sunt actus conformitatum objectorum cum
     facultatibus illis in omni homine sano et integro existentibus,
     quæ ab instinctu naturali expositæ, circa analogiam rerum
     internam, particulariter, secondario, et ratione instinctûs
     naturalis versantur. p. 66.

     [178] Circa analogiam rerum internam, sive signaturas et
     characteras rerum penitiores versantur. p. 68.

|Five natural notions of natural religion.|

26. In the conclusion of this treatise, Herbert lays down the five
common notions of natural religion, implanted, as he conceives, in the
breasts of all mankind. 1. That there is a God; 2. That he ought to be
worshipped; 3. That virtue and piety are the chief parts of worship;
4. That we are to repent and turn from our sins; 5. That they are
rewards and punishments in another life.[179] Nothing can be admitted
in religion which contradicts these primary notions; but if any one
has a revelation from heaven in addition to these, which may happen to
him sleeping or waking, he should keep it to himself, since nothing
can be of importance to the human race, which is not established by
the evidence of their common faculties. Nor can anything be known to
be revealed, which is not revealed to ourselves; all else being
tradition and historic testimony, which does not amount to knowledge.
The specific difference of man from other animals he makes not reason,
but the capacity of religion. It is a curious coincidence, that John
Wesley has said something of the same kind.[180] It is also
remarkable that we find in another work of Lord Herbert, De Religione
Gentilium, which dwells again on his five articles of natural
religion, essential, as he expressly lays it down, to salvation, the
same illustration of the being of a Deity from the analogy of a watch
or clock, which Paley has since employed. I believe that it occurs in
an intermediate writer.[181]

     [179] P. 222.

     [180] I have somewhere read a profound remark of Wesley, that,
     considering the sagacity which many animals display, we cannot
     fix upon reason as the distinction between them and man; the true
     difference is, that we are formed to know God, and they are not.

     [181] Et quidem si horologium per diem et noctem integram horas
     signanter indicans, viderit quispiam non mente captus, id
     consilio arteque summa factum judicaverit. Ecquis non planè
     demens, qui hanc mundi machinam non per viginti quatuor horas
     tantum, sed per tot sæcula circuitus suos obeuntem
     animadverterit, non id omne sapientissimo utique potentissimoque
     alicui autori tribuat? De Relig. Gentil., cap. xiii.

|Remarks of Gassendi on Herbert.|

27. Lord Herbert sent a copy of his treatise De Veritate several years
after its publication to Gassendi. We have a letter to the noble
author in the third volume of the works of that philosopher, showing,
in the candid and sincere spirit natural to him, the objections that
struck his mind in reading the book.[182] Gassendi observes that the
distinctions of four kinds of truth are not new; the veritas rei of
Lord Herbert being what is usually called substance, his veritas
apparentiæ no more than accident, and the other two being only sense
and reason. Gassendi seems not wholly to approve, but gives us the
best, a definition of truth little differing from Herbert’s, the
agreement of the cognizant intellect with the thing known:
“Intellectûs cognoscentis cum re cognita congruentia.” The obscurity
of the treatise De Veritate could ill suit an understanding like that
of Gassendi, always tending to acquire clear conceptions; and though
he writes with great civility, it is not without smartly opposing what
he does not approve. The aim of Lord Herbert’s work, he says, is that
the intellect may pierce into the nature of things, knowing them as
they are in themselves without the fallacies of appearance and sense.
But for himself he confesses that such knowledge he has always found
above him, and that he is in darkness when he attempts to investigate
the real nature of the least thing; making many of the observations on
this which we read also in Locke. And he well says that we have enough
for our use in the accidents or appearances of things without knowing
their substances, in reply to Herbert, who had declared that we should
be miserably deficient, if, while nature has given us senses to
discern sounds and colours and such fleeting qualities of things, we
had no sure road to eternal, and necessary truths.[183] The
universality of those innate principles, especially moral and
religious, on which his correspondent had built so much, is doubted by
Gassendi on the usual grounds, that many have denied, or been ignorant
of them. The letter is imperfect, some sheets of the autograph having
been lost.

     [182] Gassendi Opera, iii. 411.

     [183] Misere nobiscum actum esset, si ad percipiendos colores,
     sonos et qualitates cæteras caducas atque momentaneas subessent
     media, nulla autem ad veritates illas internas, æternas,
     necessarias sine errore superesset via.

28. Too much space may seem to have been bestowed on a writer who
cannot be ranked high among metaphysicians. But Lord Herbert was not
only a distinguished name, but may claim the precedence among those
philosophers in England. If his treatise De Veritate is not as an
entire work very successful, or founded always upon principles which
have stood the test of severe reflection, it is still a monument of an
original, independent thinker, without rhapsodies of imagination,
without pedantic technicalities, and above all, bearing witness to a
sincere love of the truth he sought to apprehend. The ambitious
expectation that the real essences of things might be discovered, if
it were truly his, as Gassendi seems to suppose, could not be
warranted by anything, at least within the knowledge of that age. But
from some expressions of Herbert I should infer that he did not think
our faculties competent to solve the whole problem of _quiddity_,
as the logicians called it, or the real nature of anything, at least,
objectively without us.[184] He is indeed so obscure, that I will not
vouch for his entire consistency. It has been an additional motive to
say as much as I have done concerning Lord Herbert, that I know not
where any account of his treatise De Veritate will be found. Brucker
is strangely silent about this writer, and Buhle has merely adverted
to the letter of Gassendi. Descartes has spoken of Lord Herbert’s book
with much respect, though several of their leading principles
were far from the same. It was translated into French in 1639, and
this translation he found less difficult than the original.[185]

     [184] Cum facultates nostræ ad analogiam propriam terminatæ
     quidditates rerum intimas non penetrent: ideo quid res naturalis
     in seipsa sit, tali ex analogia ad nos ut _sit_ constituta,
     perfecte sciri non potest, p. 165. Instead of _sit_, it might be
     better to read _est_. In another place he says, it is doubtful
     whether anything exists in nature, concerning which we have a
     complete knowledge. The eternal and necessary truths which
     Herbert contends for our knowing, seem to have been his communes
     notitiæ, subjectively understood, rather than such as relate to
     external objects.

     [185] Descartes, vol. viii., p. 138 and 168. J’y trouve plusieurs
     choses fort bonnes, _sed non publici saporis_; car il y a peu de
     personnes qui soient capables d’entendre la métaphysique. Et,
     pour le général du livre, il tient un chemin fort différent de
     celui que j’ai suivi.... Enfin, par conclusion, encore que je ne
     puisse m’accorder en tout aux sentimens de cet auteur, je ne
     laisse pas de l’estimer beaucoup au-dessus des esprits
     ordinaires.

|Gassendi’s defence of Epicurus.|

29. Gassendi himself ought, perhaps, to be counted wholly among the
philosophers of this period, since many of his writings were
published, and all may have been completed within it. They are
contained in six large folio volumes, rather closely printed. The
Exercitationes Paradoxicæ, published in 1624, are the earliest. These
contain an attack on the logic of Aristotle, the fortress that so many
bold spirits were eager to assail. But in more advanced life Gassendi
withdrew in great measure from this warfare, and his Logic, in the
Syntagma Philosophicum, the record of his latest opinions, is chiefly
modelled on the Aristotelian, with sufficient commendation of its
author. In the study of ancient philosophy, however, Gassendi was
impressed with an admiration of Epicurus. His physical theory, founded
on corpuscles and a vacuum, his ethics, in their principle and
precepts, his rules of logic and guidance of the intellect, seemed to
the cool and independent mind of the French philosopher more worthy of
regard than the opposite schemes prevailing in the schools, and not to
be rejected on account of any discredit attached to the name.
Combining with the Epicurean physics and ethics the religious element
which had been unnecessarily discarded from the philosophy of the
Garden, Gassendi displayed both in a form no longer obnoxious. The
Syntagma Philosophiæ Epicuri, published in 1649, is an elaborate
vindication of this system, which he had previously expounded in a
commentary on the tenth book of Diogenes Laertius. He had already
effaced the prejudices against Epicurus himself, whom he seems to have
regarded with the affection of a disciple, in a biographical treatise
on his life and moral character.

|His chief works after 1650.|

30. Gassendi died in 1656; the Syntagma Philosophicum, his greatest as
well as last work, in which it is natural to seek the whole scheme of
his philosophy, was published by his friend Sorbière in 1658. We may,
therefore, properly defer the consideration of his metaphysical
writings to the next period: but the controversy in which he was
involved with Descartes will render it necessary to bring his name
forward again before the close of this chapter.


                             SECT. II.

                _On the Philosophy of Lord Bacon._

|Preparation for the philosophy of.|

31. It may be judged from what has been said in a former volume, as
well as in our last pages, that at the beginning of the seventeenth
century, the higher philosophy which is concerned with general truth,
and the means of knowing it, had been little benefitted by the labours
of any modern inquirer. It was become indeed no strange thing, at
least out of the air of a college, to question the authority of
Aristotle; but his disciples pointed with scorn at the endeavours
which had as yet been made to supplant it, and asked whether the
wisdom so long reverenced was to be set aside for the fanatical
reveries of Paracelsus, the unintelligible chimæras of Bruno, or the
more plausible, but arbitrary, hypotheses of Telesio.

|Lord Bacon.|

32. Francis Bacon was born in 1561.[186] He came to years of manhood
at the time when England was rapidly emerging from ignorance and
obsolete methods of study, in an age of powerful minds, full himself
of ambition, confidence and energy. If we think on the public history
of Bacon, even during the least public portion of it, philosophy must
appear to have been but his amusement; it was by his hours of leisure,
by time hardly missed from the laborious study and practice of the law
and from the assiduities of a courtier’s life, that he became the
father of modern science. This union of an active with a reflecting
life had been the boast of some ancients, of Cicero and Antonine; but
what comparison, in depth and originality, between their philosophy
and that of Bacon?

     [186] Those who place Lord Bacon’s birth in 1560, as Mr. Montagu
     has done, must be understood to follow the old style, which
     creates some confusion. He was born the 22nd of January, and died
     the 9th of April, 1626, in the sixty-sixth year of his age, as we
     are told in his life by Rawley, the best authority we have.

|His plan of philosophy.|

33. This wonderful man, in sweeping round the champaign of universal
science with his powerful genius, found as little to praise in
the recent, as in the ancient methods of investigating truth. He liked
as little the empirical presumption of drawing conclusions from a
partial experience as the sophistical dogmatism which relied on
unwarranted axioms and verbal chicane. All, he thought, was to be
constructed anew; the investigation of facts, their arrangement for
the purposes of inquiry, the process of eliciting from them the
required truth. And for this he saw, that, above all, a thorough
purgation of the mind itself would be necessary, by pointing out its
familiar errors, their sources, and their remedies.

|Time of its conception.|

34. It is not exactly known at what age Bacon first conceived the
scheme of a comprehensive philosophy, but it was, by his own account,
very early in life.[187] Such noble ideas are most congenial to the
sanguine spirit of youth, and to its ignorance of the extent of labour
it undertakes. In the dedication of the Novum Organum to James in
1620, he says that he had been about some such work near thirty years,
“so as I made no haste.” “And the reason,” he adds, “why I have
published it now, specially being imperfect, is, to speak plainly,
because I number my days, and would have it saved. There is another
reason of my so doing, which is to try whether I can get help in one
intended part of this work, namely, the compiling of a natural and
experimental history, which must be the main foundation of a true and
active philosophy.” He may be presumed at least to have made a very
considerable progress in his undertaking, before the close of the
sixteenth century. But it was first promulgated to the world by the
publication of his Treatise on the Advancement of Learning in 1605. In
this, indeed, the whole of the Baconian philosophy may be said to be
implicitly contained, except perhaps the second book of the Novum
Organum. In 1623, he published his more celebrated Latin translation
of this work, if it is not rather to be deemed a new one, entitled, De
Augmentis Scientiarum. I find, upon comparison, that more than two
thirds of this treatise are a version, with slight interpolation or
omission, from the Advancement of Learning, the remainder being new
matter.

     [187] In a letter to Father Fulgentio, which bears no date in
     print, but must have been written about 1624, he refers to a
     juvenile work about forty years before, which he had confidently
     entitled The Greatest Birth of Time. Bacon says: Equidem memini
     me quadraginta abhinc annis juvenile opusculum circa has res
     confecisse, quod magna prorsus fiducia et magnifico titulo,
     “Temporis partum maximum” inscripsi. The apparent vain-glory of
     this title is somewhat extenuated by the sense he gave to the
     phrase Birth of Time. He meant that the lapse of time and long
     experience were the natural sources of a better philosophy, as he
     says in his dedication of the Instauratio Magna: Ipse certè, ut
     ingenue fateor, soleo, æstimare hoc opus magis pro partu temporis
     quam ingenii. Illud enim in eo solummodo mirabile est, initia rei
     et tantas de iis quæ invaluerunt suspiciones, alicui in mentem
     venire potuisse. Cætera non illibenter sequuntur.

     No treatise with this precise title appears. But we find prefixed
     to some of the short pieces a general title, Temporis Partus
     Masculus, sive Instauratio Magna Imperii Universi in Humanum.
     These treatises, however, though earlier than his great works,
     cannot be referred to so juvenile a period as his letter to
     Fulgentio intimates, and I should rather incline to suspect that
     the _opusculum_ to which he there refers, has not been
     preserved. Mr. Montagu is of a different opinion. See his Note I.
     to the life of Bacon in vol. xvi. of his edition. The Latin tract
     De Interpretatione Naturæ Mr. M. supposes to be the germ of the
     Instauratio, as the Cogitata et Visa are of the Novum Organum. I
     do not dissent from this; but the former bears marks of having
     been written after Bacon had been immersed in active life. The
     most probable conjecture appears to be that he very early
     perceived the meagreness and imperfection of the academical
     course of philosophy, and of all others which fell in his way,
     and formed the scheme of affording something better from his own
     resources: but that he did not commit _much_ to paper, nor
     had planned his own method till after he was turned thirty, which
     his letter to the King intimates.

     In a recent and very brilliant sketch of the Baconian philosophy
     (Edinb. Review, July, 1837), the two leading principles that
     distinguish it throughout all its parts, are justly denominated
     _utility_ and _progress_. To do good to mankind, and do
     more and more good, are the ethics of its inductive method. We
     may only regret that the ingenious author of this article has
     been hurried sometimes into the low and contracted view of the
     deceitful word _utility_, which regards rather the
     enjoyments of physical convenience, than the general well-being
     of the individual and the species. If Bacon looked more
     frequently to the former, it was because so large a portion of
     his writings relates to physical observation and experiment. But
     it was far enough from his design to set up physics in any sort
     of opposition to ethics, much less in a superior light. I dissent
     also from some of the observations in this article, lively as
     they are, which tend to depreciate the originality and importance
     of the Baconian methods. The reader may turn to a note on this
     subject by Dugald Stewart, at the end of the present section.

|Instauratio Magna.|

35. The Instauratio Magna had been already published in 1620, while
Lord Bacon was still chancellor. Fifteen years had elapsed
since he gave to the world his Advancement of Learning, the first
fruits of such astonishing vigour of philosophical genius, that,
inconceivable as the completion of the scheme he had even then laid
down in prospect for his new philosophy by any single effort must
appear, we may be disappointed at the great deficiencies which this
latter work exhibits, and which he was not destined to fill up. But he
had passed the interval in active life, and in dangerous paths,
deserting, as in truth he had all along been prone enough to do, the
“shady spaces of philosophy,” as Milton calls them, for the court of a
sovereign, who with some real learning, was totally incapable of
sounding the depths of Lord Bacon’s mind, or even of estimating his
genius.

|First Part: Partitiones Scientiarum.|

36. The Instauratio Magna, dedicated to James, is divided, according
to the magnificent groundplot of its author, into six parts. The first
of these he entitles Partitiones Scientiarum, comprehending a general
summary of that knowledge which mankind already possess; yet not
merely treating this affirmatively, but taking special notice of
whatever should seem deficient or imperfect; sometimes even supplying,
by illustration or precept, these vacant spaces of science. This first
part he declares to be wanting in the Instauratio. It has been chiefly
supplied by the treatise De Augmentis Scientiarum; yet perhaps even
that does not fully come up to the amplitude of his design.

|Second part: Novum Organum.|

37. The second part of the Instauratio was to be, as he expresses it
“the science of a better and more perfect use of reason in the
investigation of things, and of the true aids of the understanding,”
the new logic, or inductive method, in which what is eminently styled
the Baconian philosophy consists. This, as far as he completed it, is
known to all by the name of the Novum Organum. But he seems to have
designed a fuller treatise in place of this; the aphorisms into which
he has digested it being rather the heads or theses of chapters, at
least in many places, that would have been further expanded.[188] And
it is still more important to observe, that he did not achieve the
whole of this summary that he had promised; but out of nine divisions
of his method we only possess the first, which he denominates
prærogative instantiarum. Eight others, of exceeding importance in
logic, he has not touched at all, except to describe them by name and
to promise more. “We will speak,” he says, “in the first place, of
prerogative instances; secondly, of the aids of induction; thirdly, of
the rectification of induction; fourthly, of varying the investigation
according to the nature of the subject; fifthly, of prerogative
natures (or objects), as to investigation, or the choice of what shall
be first inquired into; sixthly, of the boundaries of inquiry, or the
synoptical view of all natures in the world; seventhly, on the
application of inquiry to practice, and what relates to man; eighthly,
on the preparations (parascevis) for inquiry; lastly, on the ascending
and descending scale of axioms.”[189] All these, after the first, are
wanting, with the exception of some slightly handled in separate parts
of Bacon’s writings; and the deficiency, which is so important, seems
to have been sometimes overlooked by those who have written about the
Novum Organum.

     [188] It is entitled by himself, Partis secundæ Summa, digesta in
     aphorismos.

     [189] Dicemus itaque primo loco de prærogativis instantiarum;
     secundo, de adminiculis inductiones; tertio, de rectificatione
     inductionis; quarto, de variatione inquisitionis pro natura
     subjecti; quinto, de prærogativis naturarum quatenus ad
     inquisitionem, sive de eo quod inquirendum est prius et
     posterius; sexto, de terminis inquisitionis, sive de synopsi
     omnium naturarum in universo; septimo, de deductione ad praxin,
     sive de eo quod est in ordine ad hominem; octavo, de parascevis
     ad inquisitionem; postremo autem, de scala ascensoria et
     descensoria axiomatum, lib. ii. 22.

|Third part: Natural History.|

38. The third part of the Instauratio Magna was to comprise an entire
natural history, diligently and scrupulously collected from experience
of every kind; including under that name of natural history everything
wherein the art of man has been employed on natural substances either
for practice or experiment; no method of reasoning being sufficient to
guide us to truth as to natural things, if they are not themselves
clearly and exactly apprehended. It is unnecessary to observe that
very little of this immense chart of nature could be traced by the
hand of Bacon, or in his time. His Centuries of Natural History,
containing about one thousand observed facts and experiments, are a
very slender contribution towards such a description of universal
nature as he contemplated; these form no part of the Instauratio
Magna, and had been compiled before. But he enumerates one hundred and
thirty particular histories which ought to be drawn up for his great
work. A few of these he has given in a sort of skeleton, as
samples rather of the method of collecting facts, than of the facts
themselves; namely, the History of Winds, of Life and Death, of
Density and Rarity, of Sound and Hearing.

|Fourth part: Scala Intellectûs.|

39. The fourth part, called Scala Intellectûs, is also wanting with
the exception of a very few introductory pages. “By these tables,”
says Bacon, “we mean not such examples as we subjoin to the several
rules of our method, but types and models, which place before our eyes
the entire process of the mind in the discovery of truth, selecting
various and remarkable instances.”[190] These he compares to the
diagrams of geometry, by attending to which the steps of the
demonstration become perspicuous. Though the great brevity of his
language in this place renders it rather difficult to see clearly what
he understood by these models, some light appears to be thrown on this
passage by one in the treatise De Augmentis, where he enumerates among
the desiderata of logic what he calls traditio lampadis, or a delivery
of any science or particular truth according to the order wherein it
was discovered.[191] “The methods of geometers,” he there says, “have
some resemblance to this art;” which is not, however, the case as to
the synthetical geometry with which we are generally conversant. It is
the history of analytical investigation, and many beautiful
illustrations of it have been given since the days of Bacon in all
subjects to which that method of inquiry has been applied.

     [190] Neque de iis exemplis loquimur, quæ singulis præceptis ac
     regulis illustrandi gratia adjiciuntur, hoc enim in secunda
     operis parte abunde præstitimus, sed plane typos intelligimus ac
     plasmata, quæ universum mentis processum atque inveniendi
     continuatam fabricam et ordinem in certis subjectis, iisque
     variis et insignibus tanquam sub oculos ponant. Etenim nobis
     venit in mentem in mathematicis, astente machina, sequi
     demonstrationem facilem et perspicuam; contra absque hac
     commoditate omnia videri involuta et quam revera sunt subtiliora.

     [191] Lib. vi. cap. 2. Scientia quæ aliis tanquam tela pertexendo
     traditur, eadem methodo, si fieri possit, animo alterius est
     insinuanda, qua primitus inventa est. Atque hoc ipsum fieri sane
     potest in scientia per inductionem acquisita: sed in anticipata
     ista et præmatura scientia, qua utimur, non facile dicat quis quo
     itinere ad eam quam nactus est scientiam pervenerit. Attamen sane
     secundum majus et minus possit quis scientiam propriam revisere,
     et vestigia suæ cognitionis simul et consensûs remetiri; atque
     hoc facto scientiam sic transplantare in animum alienum, sicut
     crevit in suo.... Cujus quidem generis traditionis, methodus
     mathematicorum in eo subjecto similitudinem quandam habet. I do
     not well understand the words, in eo subjecto; he may possibly
     have referred to analytical processes.

|Fifth part: Anticipationes Philosophiæ.|

|Sixth part: Philosophia Secunda.|

40. In the fifth part of the Instauratio Magna, Bacon had designed to
give a specimen of the new philosophy which he hoped to raise after a
due use of his natural history and inductive method, by way of
anticipation or sample of the whole. He calls it Prodromi, sive
Anticipationes Philosophiæ Secundæ. And some fragments of this part
are published by the names Cogitata et Visa, Cogitationes de Natura
Rerum, Filum Labyrinthi, and a few more, being as much, in all
probability, as he had reduced to writing. In his own metaphor, it was
to be like the payment of interest, till the principal could be
raised; tanquam fœnus reddatur, donec sors haberi possit. For he
despaired of ever completing the work by a sixth and last portion,
which was to display a perfect system of philosophy, deduced and
confirmed by a legitimate, sober, and exact inquiry according to the
method which he had invented and laid down. “To perfect this last part
is above our powers and beyond our hopes. We may, as we trust, make no
despicable beginnings, the destinies of the human race must complete
it; in such a manner, perhaps, as men, looking only at the present,
would not readily conceive. For upon this will depend not only a
speculative good, but all the fortunes of mankind, and all their
power.” And with an eloquent prayer that his exertions may be rendered
effectual to the attainment of truth and happiness, this introductory
chapter of the Instauratio, which announces the distribution of its
portions, concludes. Such was the temple, of which Bacon saw in vision
before him the stately front and decorated pediments, in all their
breadth of light and harmony of proportion, while long vistas of
receding columns and glimpses of internal splendour revealed a glory
that it was not permitted him to comprehend. In the treatise De
Augmentis Scientiarum, and in the Novum Organum, we have less, no
doubt, than Lord Bacon, under different conditions of life, might have
achieved; he might have been more emphatically the high-priest of
nature, if he had not been the chancellor of James I.; but no one man
could have filled up the vast outline which he alone, in that stage of
the world, could have so boldly sketched.

|Course of studying Lord Bacon.|

41. The best order of studying the Baconian philosophy would be to
read attentively the Advancement of Learning; next, to take the
treatise De Augmentis, comparing it all along with the former, and
afterwards to proceed to the Novum Organum. A less degree of regard
has usually been paid to the Centuries of Natural History, which are
the least important of his writings, or even to the other
philosophical fragments, some of which contain very excellent
passages; yet such, in great measure, as will be found substantially
in other parts of his works. The most remarkable are the Cogitata et
Visa. It must be said, that one who thoroughly venerates Lord Bacon
will not disdain his repetitions, which sometimes, by variations of
phrase, throw light upon each other. It is generally supposed that the
Latin works were translated by several assistants, among whom Herbert
and Hobbes have been named, under the author’s superintendence.[192]
The Latin style of these writings is singularly concise, energetic and
impressive, but frequently crabbed, uncouth and obscure; so that we
read with more admiration of the sense than delight in the manner of
delivering it. But Rawley, in his Life of Bacon, informs us that he
had seen about twelve autographs of the Novum Organum, wrought up and
improved year by year, till it reached the shape in which it was
published, and he does not intimate that these were in English, unless
the praise he immediately afterwards bestows on his English style may
be thought to warrant that supposition.[193] I do not know that we
have evidence as to any of the Latin works being translations from
English, except the treatise De Augmentis.

     [192] The translation was made, as Archbishop Tenison informs us,
     “by Mr. Herbert and some others, who were esteemed masters in the
     Roman eloquence.”

     [193] Ipse reperi in archivis dominationis suæ, autographa plus
     minus duodecim Organi Novi de anno in annum elaborati, et ad
     incudem revocati, et singulis annis, ulteriore lima subinde
     politi et castigati, donec in illud tandem corpus adoleverat, quo
     in lucem editum fuit; sicut multa ex animalibus fœtus lambere
     consuescunt usque quo ad membrorum firmitudinem eos perducant. In
     libris suis componendis verborum vigorem et perspicuitatem
     præcipuè sectabatur, non elegantiam aut concinnitatem sermonis,
     et inter scribendum aut dictandum sæpe interrogavit, num sensus
     ejus clare admodum et perspicuè redditus esset? Quippe qui sciret
     æquum esse ut verba famularentur rebus, non res verbis. Et si in
     stylum forsitan politiorem incidisset, siquidem apud nostrates
     eloquii Anglicani artifex habitus est, id evenit, quia evitare
     arduum ei erat.

42. The leading principles of the Baconian philosophy are contained in
the Advancement of Learning. These are amplified, corrected,
illustrated, and developed in the treatise De Augmentis Scientiarum,
from the fifth book of which, with some help from other parts, is
taken the first book of the Novum Organum, and even a part of the
second. I use this phrase, because, though earlier in publication, I
conceive that the Novum Organum was later in composition. All the very
important part of this fifth book which relates to Experientia
Litterata, or Venatio Panis, as he calls it, and contains excellent
rules for conducting experiments in natural philosophy, is new, and
does not appear in the Advancement of Learning, except by way of
promise of what should be done in it. Nor is this, at least so fully
and clearly, to be found in the Novum Organum. The second book of this
latter treatise he professes not to anticipate. De Novo Organo
silemus, he says, neque de eo quicquam prælibamus. This can only apply
to the second book, which he considered as the real exposition of his
method, after clearing away the fallacies which form the chief subject
of the first. Yet what is said of Topica particularis, in this fifth
book De Augmentis (illustrated by “articles of inquiry concerning
gravity and levity”), goes entirely on the principles of the second
book of the Novum Organum.

|Nature of the Baconian Induction.|

43. Let us now see what Lord Bacon’s method really was. He has given
it the name of induction, but carefully distinguishes it from what
bore that name in the old logic, that is, an inference from a perfect
enumeration of particulars to a general law of the whole. For such an
enumeration, though of course conclusive, is rarely practicable in
nature, where the particulars exceed our powers of numbering.[194] Nor
again is the Baconian method to be confounded with the less
complete form of the inductive process, namely, inferences from
partial experience in similar circumstances; though this may be a very
sufficient ground for practical, which is probable knowledge. His own
method rests on the same general principle, namely, the uniformity of
the laws of nature, so that in certain conditions of phænomena the
same effects or the same causes may be assumed; but it endeavours to
establish these laws on a more exact and finer process of reasoning
than partial experience can effect. For the recurrence of antecedents,
and consequents does not prove a necessary connection between them,
unless we can exclude the presence of all other conditions which may
determine the event. Long and continued experience of such a
recurrence, indeed, raises a high probability of a necessary
connexion; but the aim of Bacon was to supersede experience in this
sense, and to find a shorter road to the result; and for this his
methods of exclusion are devised. As complete and accurate a
collection of facts, connected with the subject of inquiry, as
possible is to be made out by means of that copious natural history
which he contemplated, or from any other good sources. These are to be
selected, compared, and scrutinized, according to the rules of natural
interpretation delivered in the second book of the Novum Organum, or
such others as he designed to add to them; and if experiments are
admissible, these are to be conducted according to the same rules.
Experience and observation are the guides through the Baconian
philosophy, which is the handmaid and interpreter of nature. When Lord
Bacon seems to decry experience, which in certain passages he might be
thought to do, it is the particular and empirical observation of
individuals, from which many rash generalisations had been drawn, as
opposed to that founded on an accurate natural history. Such hasty
inferences he reckoned still more pernicious to true knowledge
than the sophistical methods of the current philosophy; and, in a
remarkable passage, after censuring this precipitancy of empirical
conclusions in the chemists, and in Gilbert’s Treatise on the Magnet,
utters a prediction that if ever mankind, excited by his counsels,
should seriously betake themselves to seek the guidance of experience
instead of relying on the dogmatic schools of the sophists, the
proneness of the human mind to snatch at general axioms would expose
them to much risk of error from the theories of this superficial class
of philosophers.[195]

     [194] Inductio quæ procedit per enumerationem simplicem, res
     puerilis est, et precario concludit, et periculo exponitur ab
     instantia contradictoria, et plerumque secundum pauciora quam par
     est, et ex his tantummodo quæ præsto sunt, pronuntiat. At
     inductio quæ ad inventionem et demonstrationem scientiarum et
     artium erit utilis, naturam separare debet, per rejectiones et
     exclusiones debitas; ac deinde post negativas tot quot
     sufficiunt, super affirmativas concludere; quod adhuc factum non
     est, nec tentatum certe, nisi tantummodo a Platone, qui ad
     excutiendas definitiones et ideas, hac certe forma inductionis
     aliquatenus utitur. Nov. Org. i. 105. In this passage Bacon seems
     to imply that the enumeration of particulars in any induction is
     or may be imperfect. This is certainly the case in the plurality
     of physical inductions; but it doss not appear that the logical
     writers looked upon this as the primary and legitimate sense.
     Induction was distinguished into the complete and incomplete.
     “The word,” says a very moderate writer, “is perhaps unhappy, as
     indeed it is taken in several vague senses; but to abolish it is
     impossible. It is the Latin translation of επαγωγη [epagôgê],
     which word is used by Aristotle as a counterpart to συλλογισμος
     [sullogismos]. He seems to consider it in a perfect, or
     dialectic, and in an imperfect or rhetorical sense. Thus, if a
     genus (G.) contained four species (A. B. C. D.), syllogism would
     argue, that what is true of G. is true of any one of the four;
     but perfect induction would reason, that what we can prove true
     of A. B. C. D. separately, we may properly state as true of G.,
     the whole genus. This is evidently a formal argument, as
     demonstrative as syllogism. But the imperfect or rhetorical
     induction will perhaps enumerate three only of the species, and
     then draw the conclusion concerning G., which virtually includes
     the fourth, or what is the same thing, will argue, that what is
     true of the three is to be believed true likewise of the fourth.”
     Newman’s Lectures on Logic, p. 73 (1837). The same distinction
     between perfect and imperfect induction is made in the
     Encyclopédie Françoise, art. Induction, and apparently on the
     authority of the ancients.

     It may be observed, that this imperfect induction may be put in a
     regular logical form, and is only vicious in syllogistic
     reasoning when the conclusion asserts a higher probability than
     the premises. If, for example, we reason thus: Some serpents are
     venomous--This unknown animal is a serpent-Therefore, this is
     venomous; we are guilty of an obvious paralogism. If we infer
     only, This may be venomous, our reasoning is perfectly valid in
     itself, at least in the common apprehension of all mankind,
     except dialecticians, but not regular in form. The only means
     that I perceive of making it so, is to put it in some such phrase
     as the following: All unknown serpents are affected by a certain
     probability of being venomous: This animal, &c. It is not
     necessary, of course, that the probability should be capable of
     being estimated, provided we mentally conceive it to be no other
     in the conclusion than in the major term. In the best treatises
     on the strict or syllogistic method, as far as I have seen, there
     seems a deficiency in respect to _probable_ conclusions,
     which may have arisen from the practice of taking instances from
     universal or necessary, rather than contingent truths, as well as
     from the contracted views of reasoning which the Aristotelian
     school have always inculcated. No sophisms are so frequent in
     practice as the concluding generally from a partial induction, or
     assuming (most commonly tacitly) by what Archbishop Whateley
     calls “a kind of logical fiction,” that a few individuals are
     “adequate samples or representations of the class they belong
     to.” These sophisms cannot, in the present state of things, be
     practised largely in physical science or natural history; but in
     reasonings on matter of fact they are of incessant occurrence.
     The “logical fiction” may indeed frequently be employed, even on
     subjects unconnected with the physical laws of nature; but to
     know when this may be, and to what extent, is just that which,
     far more than any other skill, distinguishes what is called a
     good reasoner from a bad one. This note will not, by an attentive
     reader, be thought inapposite to the text, or to some passages
     that will follow in the present chapter.

     [195] Nov. Organ. lib. i. 64. It may be doubted whether Bacon did
     full justice to Gilbert.

|His dislike of Aristotle.|

44. The indignation, however, of Lord Bacon is more frequently
directed against the predominant philosophy of his age, that of
Aristotle and the schoolmen. Though he does justice to the great
abilities of the former, and acknowledges the exact attention to facts
displayed in his History of Animals, he deems him one of the most
eminent adversaries to the only method that can guide us to the real
laws of nature. The old Greek philosophers, Empedocles, Leucippus,
Anaxagoras, and others of their age, who had been in the right track
of investigation, stood much higher in his esteem than their
successors, Plato, Zeno, Aristotle, by whose lustre they had been so
much superseded, that both their works have perished and their tenets
are with difficulty collected. These more distinguished leaders of the
Grecian schools were in his eyes little else than disputatious
professors (it must be remembered that Bacon had in general only
physical science in his view) who seemed to have it in common with
children, “ut ad garriendum prompti sint, generare non possint;” so
wordy and barren was their miscalled wisdom.

|His method much required.|

45. Those who object to the importance of Lord Bacon’s precepts in
philosophy that mankind have practised, many of them immemorially, are
rather confirming their utility than taking off much from their
originality in any fair sense of that term. Every logical method is
built on the common faculties of human nature, which have been
exercised since the creation in discerning, better or worse, truth
from falsehood, and inferring the unknown from the known. That men
might have done this more correctly, is manifest from the quantity of
error into which, from want of reasoning well on what came before
them, they have habitually fallen. In experimental philosophy, to
which the more special rules of Lord Bacon are generally referred,
there was a notorious want of that very process of reasoning which he
has supplied. It is probable, indeed, that the great physical
philosophers of the seventeenth century would have been led to employ
some of his rules, had he never promulgated them; but I believe they
had been little regarded in the earlier period of science.[196] It is
also a very defective view of the Baconian method to look only at the
experimental rules given in the Novum Organum. The preparatory steps
of completely exhausting the natural history of the subject of inquiry
by a patient and sagacious consideration of it in every light, are at
least of equal importance, and equally prominent in the inductive
philosophy.

     [196] It has been remarked, that the famous experiment of Pascal
     on the barometer, by carrying it to a considerable elevation, was
     “a _crucial instance_, one of the first, if not the very first on
     record in physics.” Herschel, p. 229.

|Its objects.|

46. The first object of Lord Bacon’s philosophical writings is to
prove their own necessity, by giving an unfavourable impression as to
the actual state of most sciences, in consequence of the prejudices of
the human mind, and of the mistaken methods pursued in their
cultivation. The second was to point out a better prospect for the
future. One of these occupies the treatise De Augmentis, and the first
book of the Novum Organum. The other, besides many anticipations in
these, is partially detailed in the second book, and would have been
more thoroughly developed in those remaining portions which the author
did not complete. We shall now give a very short sketch of these two
famous works, which comprise the greater part of the Baconian
philosophy.

|Sketch of the treatise De Augmentis.|

|History.|

|Poetry.|

47. The Advancement of Learning is divided into two books only; the
treatise De Augmentis into nine. The first of these, in the latter, is
introductory, and designed to remove prejudices against the search for
truth, by indicating the causes which had hitherto obstructed it. In
the second book, he lays down his celebrated partition of human
learning into history, poetry, and philosophy, according to the
faculties of the mind respectively concerned in them, the memory,
imagination and reason. History is natural or civil, under the latter
of which ecclesiastical and literary histories are comprised.
These again fall into regular subdivisions; all of which he treats in
summary manner, and points out the deficiencies which ought to be
supplied in many departments of history. Poetry succeeds in the last
chapter of the same book, but by confining that name to fictitious
narrative, except as to the ornaments of style, which he refers to a
different part of his subject, he much limited his views of that
literature; even if it were true, as it certainly is not, that the
imagination alone, in any ordinary use of the word, is the medium of
poetical emotion. The word emotion indeed is sufficient to show that
Bacon should either have excluded poetry altogether from his
enumeration of sciences and learning, or taken into consideration
other faculties of the soul than those which are merely intellectual.

|Fine passage on poetry.|

48. Stewart has praised with justice a short but beautiful paragraph
concerning poetry (under which title may be comprehended all the
various creations of the faculty of imagination) wherein Bacon “has
exhausted everything that philosophy and good sense have yet had to
offer on the subject of what has since been called the _beau
idéal_.” The same eminent writer and ardent admirer of Bacon
observes that D’Alembert improved on the Baconian arrangement by
classing the fine arts with poetry. Injustice had been done to
painting and music, especially the former, when, in the fourth book De
Augmentis, they were counted as mere “artes voluptariæ,” subordinate
to a sort of Epicurean gratification of the senses, and only somewhat
more liberal than cookery or cosmetics.

|Natural Theology and Metaphysics.|

|Form of bodies.|

49. In the third book, science having been divided into theological
and philosophical, and the former, or what regards revealed religion,
being postponed for the present, he lays it down that all philosophy
relates to God, to nature, or to man. Under natural theology, as a
sort of appendix, he reckons the doctrine of angels and superhuman
spirits; a more favourite theme, especially as treated independently
of revelation, in the ages that preceded Lord Bacon, than it has been
since. Natural philosophy is speculative or practical; the former
divided into physics, in a particular sense, and metaphysics; “one of
which enquireth and handleth the material and efficient causes; the
other handleth the formal and final causes.” Hence, physics dealing
with particular instances, and regarding only the effects produced, is
precarious in its conclusions, and does not reach the stable
principles of causation.

  Limus ut hic durescit, et hæc ut cera liquescit
  Uno eodemque igni.

Metaphysics, to which word he gave a sense as remote from that which
it bore in the Aristotelian schools, as from that in which it is
commonly employed at present, had for its proper object the
investigation of forms. It was “a generally received and inveterate
opinion, that the inquisition of man is not competent to find out
essential forms or true differences.” Formæ inventio, he says in
another place, habetur pro desperata. The word _form_ itself,
being borrowed from the old philosophy, is not immediately
intelligible to every reader. “In the Baconian sense,” says Playfair,
“form differs only from cause in being permanent, whereas, we apply
cause to that which exists in order of time.” Form (_natura
naturans_, as it was barbarously called) is the general law, or
condition of existence, in any substance or quality (_natura
naturata_), which is wherever its form is.[197] The conditions of a
mathematical figure, prescribed in its definition, might in this sense
be called its form, if it did not seem to be Lord Bacon’s intention to
confine the word to the laws of particular sensible existences. In
modern philosophy, it might be defined to be that particular
combination of forces, which impresses a certain modification upon
matter subjected to their influence.

     [197] Licet enim in natura nihil vere existat præter corpora
     individua, edentia actus puros individuos ex lege, in doctrinis
     tamen illa ipsa lex, ejusque inquisitio, et inventio atque
     explicatio pro fundamento est tam ad sciendum quam operandum. Eam
     autem legem ejusque paragraphos, Formarum nomine intelligimus;
     præsertim cum hoc vocabulum invaluerit et familiariter occurrat.
     Nov. Org. ii. 2.

|Might sometimes be inquired into.|

50. To a knowledge of such forms, or laws of essence and existence, at
least in a certain degree, it might be possible, in Bacon’s sanguine
estimation of his own logic, for man to attain. Not that we could hope
to understand the forms of complex beings, which are almost infinite
in variety, but the simple and primary natures, which are combined in
them. “To inquire the form of a lion, of an oak, of gold, nay of
water, of air, is a vain pursuit; but to inquire the forms of sense,
of voluntary motion, of vegetation, of colours, of gravity and
levity, of density and tenuity, of heat, of cold, and all other
natures and qualities, which, like an alphabet, are not many, and of
which the essences, upheld by matter, of all creatures do consist; to
inquire, I say, the true forms of these is that part of metaphysic
which we now define of.”[198] Thus, in the words he soon afterwards
uses, “of natural philosophy, the basis is natural history; the stage
next the basis is physic; the stage next the vertical point is
metaphysic. As for the vertical point, ‘Opus quod operatur Deos a
principio usque ad finem,’ the summary law of nature, we know not
whether man’s inquiry can attain unto it.”[199]

     [198] In the Novum Organum he seems to have gone a little beyond
     this, and to have hoped that the form itself of concrete things
     might be known. Datæ autem naturæ formam, sive differentiam
     veram, sive naturam naturantem, sive fontem emanationis (ista
     enim vocabula habemus, quæ ad indicationem rei proxime accedunt),
     invenire opus et intentio est Humanæ Scientiæ. Lib. ii. 1.

     [199] Advancement of Learning, book ii. This sentence he has
     scarcely altered in the Latin.

|Final causes too much slighted.|

51. The second object of metaphysics, according to Lord Bacon’s notion
of the word, was the investigation of final causes. It is well known
that he has spoken of this with unguarded disparagement.[200] “Like a
virgin consecrated to God, it bears nothing;” one of those witty
conceits that sparkle over his writings, but will not bear a severe
examination. It has been well remarked that almost at the moment he
published this, one of the most important discoveries of his age, the
circulation of the blood, had rewarded the acuteness of Harvey in
reasoning on the final cause of the valves in the veins.

     [200] Causa finalis tantum abest ut prosit, ut etiam scientias
     corrumpat, nisi in hominis actionibus. Nov. Org. ii. 2. It must
     be remembered that Bacon had good reason to deprecate the
     admixture of theological dogmas with philosophy, which had been,
     and has often since been, the absolute perversion of all
     legitimate reasoning in science. See what Stewart has said upon
     Lord Bacon’s objection to reasoning from final causes in
     _physics_. Philosophy of the Active and Moral Powers, book iii.,
     chap. 2, sect. 4.

|Man not included by him in physics.|

52. Nature, or physical philosophy, according to Lord Bacon’s
partition, did not comprehend the human species. Whether this be not
more consonant to popular language, adopted by preceding systems of
philosophy, than to a strict and perspicuous arrangement, may by some
be doubted; though a very respectable authority, that of Dugald
Stewart, is opposed to including man in the province of physics. For
it is surely strange to separate the physiology of the human body, as
quite a science of another class, from that of inferior animals; and
if we place this part of our being under the department of physical
philosophy, we shall soon be embarrassed by what Bacon has called the
“doctrina de fœdere,” the science of the connection between the soul
of man and his bodily frame, a vast and interesting field, even yet
very imperfectly explored.

|Man, in body and mind.|

|Logic.|

53. It has pleased, however, the author to follow his own arrangement.
The fourth book relates to the constitution, bodily and mental, of
mankind. In this book he has introduced several subdivisions which,
considered merely as such, do not always appear the most
philosophical; but the pregnancy and acuteness of his observations
under each head silences all criticism of this kind. This book has
nearly double the extent of the corresponding pages in the Advancement
of Learning. The doctrine as to the substance of the thinking
principle having been very slightly touched, or rather passed over,
with two curious disquisitions on divination and fascination, he
advances in four ensuing books to the intellectual and moral
faculties, and those sciences which immediately depend upon them.
Logic and Ethics are the grand divisions, co-relative to the reason
and the will of man. Logic, according to Lord Bacon, comprizes the
sciences of inventing, judging, retaining, and delivering the
conceptions of the mind. We invent, that is, discover new arts or new
arguments; we judge by induction or by syllogism; the memory is
capable of being aided by artificial methods. All these processes of
the mind are the subjects of several sciences, which it was the
peculiar aim of Bacon, by his own logic, to place on solid
foundations.

|Extent given it by Bacon.|

54. It is here to be remarked, that the sciences of logic and ethics,
according to the partitions of Lord Bacon, are far more extensive than
we are accustomed to consider them. Whatever concerned the human
intellect came under the first; whatever related to the will and
affections of the mind fell under the head of ethics. Logica de
intellectu et ratione, ethica de voluntate appetitu et affectibus
disserit; altera decreta, altera actiones progignit. But it
has been usual to confine logic to the methods of guiding the
understanding in the search for truth; and some, though, as it seems
to me, in a manner not warranted by the best usage of philosophers,[201]
have endeavoured to exclude everything but the syllogistic mode of
reasoning from the logical province. Whether again the nature and
operations of the human mind, in general, ought to be reckoned a part
of physics, has already been mentioned as a disputable question.

     [201] In altera philosophiæ parte, quæ est _quærendi_ ac
     disserendi, quæ λογικη [logikê] dicitur. Cic. de Fin. i. 14.

|Grammar and Rhetoric.|

55. The science of delivering our own thoughts to others, branching
into grammar and rhetoric, and including poetry, so far as its proper
vehicles, metre and diction, are concerned, occupies the sixth book.
In all this he finds more desiderata than from the great attention
paid to these subjects by the ancients could have been expected. Thus,
his ingenious collection of antitheta, or common places in rhetoric,
though mentioned by Cicero as to the judicial species of eloquence, is
first extended by Bacon himself to the deliberative or political
orations. I do not, however, think it probable that this branch of
topics could have been neglected by antiquity, though the writings
relating to it may not have descended to us; nor can we by any means
say there is nothing of the kind in Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Whether the
utility of these common places, when collected in books, be very
great, is another question. And a similar doubt might be suggested
with respect to the elenchs, or refutations, of rhetorical sophisms,
“colores boni et mali,” which he reports as equally deficient, though
a commencement had been made by Aristotle.

|Ethics.|

|Politics.|

|Theology.|

56. In the seventh book we come to ethical science. This he deems to
have been insufficiently treated. He would have the different tempers
and characters of mankind first considered, then their passions and
affections (neither of which, as he justly observes, finds a place in
the Ethics of Aristotle, though they are sometimes treated, not so
appositely, in his Rhetoric); lastly, the methods of altering and
affecting the will and appetite, such as custom, education, imitation,
or society. “The main and primitive division of moral knowledge
seemeth to be into the exemplar or platform of good, and the regiment
or culture of the mind; the one describing the nature of good, the
other presenting rules how to subdue, apply and accommodate the will
of man thereunto.” This latter he also calls “the Georgics of the
mind.” He seems to place “the platform or essence of good” in seeking
the good of the whole, rather than that of the individual, applying
this to refute the ancient theories as to the summum bonum. But
perhaps Bacon had not thoroughly disentangled this question, and
confounds, as is not unusual, the _summum bonum_, or personal
felicity, with the object of moral action, or _commune bonum_. He
is right, however, in preferring, morally speaking, the active to the
contemplative life against Aristotle and other philosophers. This part
is translated in De Augmentis, with little variation, from the
Advancement of Learning; as is also what follows on the Georgics, or
culture, of the mind. The philosophy of civil life, as it relates both
to the conduct of men in their mutual intercourse, which is properly
termed prudence, and to that higher prudence, which is concerned with
the administration of communities, fills up the chart of the Baconian
ethics. In the eighth book, admirable reflections on the former of
these subjects occur at almost every sentence. Many, perhaps most of
these, will be found in the Advancement of Learning. But in this, he
had been, for a reason sufficiently obvious and almost avowed,
cautiously silent upon the art of government--the craft of his king.
The motives for silence were still so powerful, that he treats only in
the De Augmentis, of two heads in political science; the methods of
enlarging the boundaries of the state, which James I. could hardly
resent as an interference with his own monopoly, and one of far more
importance to the well-being of mankind, the principles of universal
jurisprudence, or rather of universal legislation, according to which
standard all laws ought to be framed. These he has sketched in
ninety-seven aphorisms, or short rules, which, from the great
experience of Bacon in the laws, as his peculiar vocation towards that
part of philosophy, deserve to be studied at this day. Upon such
topics, the progressive and innovating spirit of his genius was less
likely to be perceived; but he is, perhaps, equally free from what he
has happily called in one of his essays, the “froward retention of
custom,” the prejudice of mankind, like that of perverse children,
against what is advised to them for their real good, and what
they cannot deny to be conducive to it. This whole eighth book is
pregnant with profound and original thinking. The ninth and last,
which is short, glances only at some desiderata in theological
science, and is chiefly remarkable as it displays a more liberal and
catholic spirit than was often to be met with in a period signalized
by bigotry and ecclesiastical pride. But as the abjuration of human
authority is the first principle of Lord Bacon’s philosophy, and the
preparation for his logic, it was not expedient to say too much of its
usefulness in the theological pursuits.

|Desiderata enumerated by him.|

57. At the conclusion of the whole, we may find a summary catalogue of
the deficiencies which, in the course of this ample review, Lord Bacon
had found worthy of being supplied by patient and philosophical
inquiry. Of these desiderata, few, I fear, have since been filled up,
at least in a collective and systematic manner, according to his
suggestions. Great materials, useful intimations, and even partial
delineations, are certainly to be found, as so many of the rest, in
the writings of those who have done honour to the last two centuries.
But with all our pride in modern science, very much even of what, in
Bacon’s time, was perceived to be wanting, remains for the diligence
and sagacity of those who are yet to come.

|Novum Organum: first book.|

58. The first book of the Novum Organum, if it is not better known
than any other part of Bacon’s philosophical writings, has at least
furnished more of those striking passages which shine in quotation. It
is written in detached aphorisms; the sentences, even where these
aphorisms are longest, not flowing much into one another, so as to
create a suspicion, that he had formed adversaria, to which he
committed his thoughts as they arose. It is full of repetitions; and
indeed this is so usual with Lord Bacon, that whenever we find an
acute reflection or brilliant analogy, it is more than an even chance
that it will recur in some other place. I have already observed that
he has hinted the Novum Organum to be a digested summary of his
method, but not the entire system as he designed to develop it, even
in that small portion which he has handled at all.

|Fallacies. Idola.|

59. Of the splendid passages in the Novum Organum none are perhaps so
remarkable as his celebrated division of fallacies, not such as the
dialecticians had been accustomed to refute, depending upon equivocal
words, or faulty disposition of premises, but lying far deeper in the
natural or incidental prejudices of the mind itself. These are four in
number: _idola tribûs_, to which from certain common weaknesses of
human nature we are universally liable; _idola specûs_, which from
peculiar dispositions and circumstances of individuals mislead them in
different manners; _idola fori_, arising from the current usage of
words which represent things much otherwise than as they really are;
and _idola theatri_, which false systems of philosophy and erroneous
methods of reasoning have introduced. Hence, as the refracted ray
gives us a false notion as to the place of the object whose image it
transmits, so our own minds are a refracting medium to the objects of
their own contemplation, and require all the aid of a well-directed
philosophy either to rectify the perception, or to make allowances for
its errors.

|Confounded with idols.|

60. These idola, ειδωλα [eidôla], images, illusions, fallacies, or, as
Lord Bacon calls them in the Advancement of Learning, false
appearances, have been often named in English _idols_ of the tribe, of
the den, of the market place. But it seems better, unless we retain
the Latin name, to employ one of the synonymous terms given above. For
the use of idol in this sense is unwarranted by the practice of the
language, nor is it found in Bacon himself; but it has misled a host
of writers, whoever might be the first that applied it, even among
such as are conversant with the Novum Organum. “Bacon proceeds,” says
Playfair, “to enumerate the causes of error, the _idols_ as he calls
them, or false divinities to which the mind had so long been
accustomed to bow.” And with a similar misapprehension of the meaning
of the word, in speaking of the _idola specûs_, he says: “besides the
causes of error which are common to all mankind, each individual,
according to Bacon, has his own dark cavern or den, into which the
light is imperfectly admitted, and obscurity of which a tutelary idol
lurks, at whose shrine the truth is often sacrificed.”[202] Thus also
Dr. Thomas Brown; “in the inmost sanctuaries of the mind were all the
idols which he overthrew;” and a later author on the Novum Organum
fancies that Bacon “strikingly, though in his usual quaint style,
calls the prejudices that check the progress of the mind by the name
of idols, because mankind are apt to pay homage to these
instead of regarding truth.”[203] Thus too in the translation of the
Novum Organum, published in Mr. Basil Montagu’s edition, we find
_idola_ rendered by idols, without explanation. We may in fact say
that this meaning has been almost universally given by the later
writers. By whom it was introduced, I am not able to say. Cudworth, in
a passage where he glances at Bacon, has said, “it is no _idol of the
den_, to use that affected language.” But, in the pedantic style of
the seventeenth century, it is not impossible that idol may here have
been put as a mere translation of the Greek ειδωλον [eidôlon], and in
the same general sense of an idea or intellectual image.[204] Although
the popular sense would not be inapposite to the general purpose of
Bacon in this first part of the Novum Organum, it cannot be reckoned
so exact and philosophical an illustration of the sources of human
error as the unfaithful image, the shadow of reality, seen through a
refracting surface, or reflected from an unequal mirror, as in the
Platonic hypothesis of the cave, wherein we are placed with our backs
to the light, to which he seems to allude in his _idola specûs_.[205]
And as this is also plainly the true meaning, as a comparison with the
parallel passages in the Advancement of Learning demonstrates, there
can be no pretence for continuing to employ a word which has served to
mislead such men as Brown and Playfair.

     [202] Preliminary Dissertation to Encyclopædia.

     [203] Introduction to the Novum Organum, published by the Society
     for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Even Stewart seems to have
     fallen into the same error. “While these idols of the den
     maintain their authority, the cultivation of the philosophical
     spirit is impossible; or rather it is in a renunciation of his
     idolatry that the philosophical spirit essentially consists.”
     Dissertation, &c.--The observation is equally true, whatever
     sense we may give to _idol_.

     [204] In Todd’s edition of Johnson’s Dictionary this sense is not
     mentioned. But in that of the Encyclopædia Metropolitana we have
     these words: “An _idol_ or image is also opposed to a reality:
     thus Lord Bacon (see the quotation from him) speaks of idols or
     false appearances.” The quotation is from the translation of one
     of his short tracts, which is not made by himself. It is however
     a proof that the word _idol_ was once at least used in this
     sense.

     [205] Quisque ex phantasiæ suæ cellulis, tanquam ex specu
     Platonis, philosophatur; Historia Naturalis, in præfatione
     Coleridge has some fine lines in allusion to this hypothesis in
     that magnificent effusion of his genius, the introduction to the
     second book of Joan of Arc, but withdrawn, after the first
     edition, from that poem; where he describes us as “Placed with
     our backs to bright reality.” I am not however certain that Bacon
     meant this. See De Augmentis, lib. v. c. 4.

|Second book of Novum Organum.|

61. In the second book of the Novum Organum, we come at length to the
new logic, the interpretation of nature, as he calls it, or the rules
for conducting inquiries in natural philosophy according to his
inductive method. It is, as we have said, a fragment of his entire
system, and is chiefly confined to the “prerogative instances,”[206]
or phænomena which are to be selected, for various reasons, as most
likely to aid our investigations of nature. Fifteen of these are used
to guide the intellect, five to assist the senses, seven to correct
the practice. This second book is written with more than usual want of
perspicuity, and though it is intrinsically the Baconian philosophy in
a pre-eminent sense, I much doubt whether it is very extensively read,
though far more so than it was fifty years since. Playfair, however,
has given an excellent abstract of it in his Preliminary Dissertation
to the Encyclopædia Britannica, with abundant and judicious
illustrations from modern science. Sir John Herschel, in his admirable
Discourse on Natural Philosophy, has added a greater number from still
more recent discoveries, and has also furnished such a luminous
development of the difficulties of the Novum Organum, as had been
vainly hoped in former times. The commentator of Bacon should be
himself of an original genius in philosophy. These novel illustrations
are the more useful, because Bacon himself, from defective knowledge
of natural phænomena, and from what, though contrary to his precepts,
his ardent fancy could not avoid, a premature hastening to explain the
essences of things instead of their proximate causes, has frequently
given erroneous examples. It is to be observed on the other hand, that
he often anticipates with marvellous sagacity the discoveries of
posterity, and that his patient and acute analysis of the phænomena of
heat has been deemed a model of his own inductive reasoning. “No one,”
observes Playfair, “has done so much in such circumstances.” He was
even ignorant of some things that he might have known; he wanted every
branch of mathematics; and placed in this remote corner of
Europe, without many kindred minds to animate his zeal for physical
science, seems hardly to have believed the discoveries of Galileo.

     [206] The allusion in “prærogativæ instantiarum” is not to the
     English word prerogative, as Sir John Herschel seems to suppose
     (Discourse on Natural Philosophy, p. 182), but to the prærogativa
     centuria in the Roman comitia, which being first called, though
     by lot, was generally found, by some prejudice or superstition,
     to influence the rest, which seldom voted otherwise. It is rather
     a forced analogy, which is not uncommon with Bacon.

|Confidence of Bacon.|

62. It has happened to Lord Bacon, as it has to many other writers,
that he has been extolled for qualities by no means characteristic of
his mind. The first aphorism of the Novum Organum, so frequently
quoted, “Man, the servant and interpreter of nature, performs and
understands so much as he has collected concerning the order of nature
by observation or reason, nor do his power or his knowledge extend
farther,” has seemed to bespeak an extreme sobriety of imagination, a
willingness to acquiesce in registering the phænomena of nature
without seeking a revelation of her secrets. And nothing is more true
than that such was the cautious and patient course of inquiry
prescribed by him to all the genuine disciples of his inductive
method. But he was far from being one of those humble philosophers who
would limit human science to the enumeration of particular facts. He
had, on the contrary, vast hopes of the human intellect under the
guidance of his new logic. The Latens Schematismus, or intrinsic
configuration of bodies, the Latens processus ad formam, or
transitional operation through which they pass from one form, or
condition of nature, to another, would one day, as he hoped, be
brought to light; and this not, of course, by simple observation of
the senses, nor even by assistance of instruments, concerning the
utility of which he was rather sceptical, but by a rigorous
application of exclusive and affirmative propositions to the actual
phænomena by the inductive method. “It appears,” says Playfair, “that
Bacon placed the ultimate object of philosophy too high, and too much
out of the reach of man, even when his exertions are most skilfully
conducted. He seems to have thought, that by giving a proper direction
to our researches, and carrying them on according to the inductive
method, we should arrive at the knowledge of the essences of the
powers and qualities residing in bodies; that we should, for instance,
become acquainted with the essence of heat, of cold, of colour, of
transparency. The fact however is that, in as far as science has yet
advanced, no one essence has been discovered, either as to matter in
general, or as to any of its more extensive modifications. We are yet
in doubt whether heat is a peculiar motion of the minute parts of
bodies, as Bacon himself conceived it to be, or something emitted or
radiated from their surfaces, or, lastly, the vibrations of an elastic
medium by which they are penetrated and surrounded.”

|Almost justified of late.|

63. It requires a very extensive survey of the actual dominion of
science, and a great sagacity to judge, even in the loosest manner,
what is beyond the possible limits of human knowledge. Certainly,
since the time when this passage was written by Playfair, more steps
have been made towards realising the sanguine anticipations of Bacon
than in the two centuries that had elapsed since the publication of
the Novum Organum. We do not yet _know_ the real nature of heat,
but few would pronounce it impossible or even unlikely that we may
know it, in the same sense that we know other physical realities not
immediately perceptible, before many years shall have expired. The
atomic theory of Dalton, the laws of crystalline substances discovered
by Häuy, the development of others still subtler by Mitscherlich,
instead of exhibiting, as the older philosophy had done, the idola
rerum, the sensible appearances of concrete substance, radiations from
the internal glory, admit us, as it were, to stand within the
vestibule of nature’s temple, and to gaze on the very curtain of the
shrine. If indeed we could know the internal structure of one primary
atom, and could tell, not of course by immediate testimony of sense,
but by legitimate inference from it, through what constant laws its
component molecules, the atoms of atoms, attract, retain, and repel
each other, we should have before our mental vision not only the
Latens Schematismus, the real configuration of substances, but their
_form_, or efficient nature, and could give as perfect a
definition of any one of them, of gold for example, as we can of a
cone or parallelogram. The recent discoveries of animal and vegetable
development, and especially the happy application of the microscope to
observing chemical and organic changes in their actual course, are
equally remarkable advances towards a knowledge of the Latens
processus ad formam, the corpuscular motions by which all change must
be accomplished, and are in fact a great deal more than Bacon himself
would have deemed possible.[207]

     [207] By the Latens processus, he meant only what is the natural
     operation by which one form or condition of being is induced upon
     another. Thus, when the surface of iron becomes rusty, or when
     water is converted into steam some change has taken place, a
     _latent_ _progress_ from one form to another. This, in numberless
     cases, we can now answer, at least to a very great extent, by the
     science of chemistry.

|But should be kept within bounds.|

64. These astonishing revelations of natural mysteries, fresh tidings
of which crowd in upon us every day, may be likely to overwhelm all
sober hesitation as to the capacities of the human mind, and to bring
back that confidence which Bacon, in so much less favourable
circumstances, has ventured to feel. There seem, however, to be good
reasons for keeping within bounds this expectation of future
improvement, which, as it has sometimes been announced in unqualified
phrases, is hardly more philosophical than the vulgar supposition that
the capacities of mankind are almost stationary. The phænomena of
nature indeed, in all their possible combinations, are so infinite, in
a popular sense of the word, that during no period, to which the human
species can be conceived to reach, would they be entirely collected
and registered. The case is still stronger as to the secret agencies
and processes by means of which their phænomena are displayed. These
have as yet, in no one instance, so far as I know, been fully
ascertained. “Microscopes,” says Herschel, “have been constructed
which magnify more than one thousand times in linear dimension, so
that the smallest visible grain of sand may be enlarged to the
appearance of one million times more bulky; yet the only impression we
receive by viewing it through such a magnifier is that it reminds us
of some vast fragment of a rock; while the intimate structure on which
depends its colour, its hardness, and its chemical properties, remains
still concealed; we do not seem to have made even an approach to a
closer analysis of it by any such scrutiny.”[208]

     [208] Discourse on Nat. Philos., p. 191.

|Limits to our knowledge by sense.|

65. The instance here chosen is not the most favourable for the
experimental philosopher. He might perhaps hope to gain more knowledge
by applying the best microscope to a regular crystal or to an
organised substance. And it is impossible not to regret that the great
discovery of the solar microscope has been either so imperfectly
turned to account by philosophers, or has disappointed their hopes of
exhibiting the mechanism of nature with the distinctness they require.
But there is evidently a fundamental limitation of physical science,
arising from those of the bodily senses and of muscular motions. The
nicest instruments must be constructed and directed by the human hand;
the range of the finest glasses must have a limit not only in their
own natural structure but in that of the human eye. But no theory in
science will be acknowledged to deserve any regard, except as it is
drawn immediately, and by an exclusive process, from the phænomena
which our senses report to us. Thus, the regular observation of
definite proportions in chemical combination has suggested the atomic
theory; and even this has been sceptically accepted by our cautious
school of philosophy. If we are ever to go farther into the molecular
analysis of substances, it must be through the means and upon the
authority of new discoveries exhibited to our senses in experiment.
But the existing powers of exhibiting or compelling nature by
instruments, vast as they appear to us, and wonderful as has been
their efficacy in many respects, have done little for many years past
in diminishing the number of substances reputed to be simple; and with
strong reasons to suspect that some of these, at least, yield to the
crucible of nature, our electric batteries have up to this hour played
innocuously round their heads.

66. Bacon has thrown out, once or twice, a hint at a single principle,
a summary law of nature, as if all subordinate causes resolved
themselves into one great process, according to which God works his
will in the universe: Opus quod operatur Deus a principio usque ad
finem. The natural tendency towards simplification, and what we
consider as harmony, in our philosophical systems, which Lord Bacon
himself reckons among the _idola tribûs_, the fallacies incident
to the species, has led some to favour this unity of physical law.
Impact and gravity have each had their supporters. But we are as yet
at a great distance from establishing such a generalization, nor does
it appear by any means probable that it will ever assume any simple
form.

|Inductive logic; whether confined to physics.|

67. The close connexion of the inductive process recommended by Bacon
with natural philosophy in the common sense of that word, and the
general selection of his examples for illustration from that science,
have given rise to a question, whether he comprehended metaphysical
and moral philosophy within the scope of his inquiry.[209] That they
formed a part of the Instauration of Sciences, and therefore
of the Baconian philosophy in the fullest sense of the word, is
obvious from the fact that a large proportion of the treatise De
Augmentis Scientiarum is dedicated to those subjects; and it is not
less so that the _idola_ of the Novum Organum are at least as apt
to deceive us in moral as in physical argument. The question,
therefore, can only be raised as to the peculiar method of conducting
investigations, which is considered as his own. This would, however,
appear to have been decided by himself in very positive language. “It
may be doubted, rather than objected, by some, whether we look to the
perfection, by means of our method, of natural philosophy alone, or of
the other sciences also, of logic, of ethics, of politics. But we
certainly mean what has here been said, to be understood as to them
all; and as the ordinary logic, which proceeds by syllogism, does not
relate to physical only, but to every other science; so ours, which
proceeds by induction, comprizes them all. For we as much collect a
history and form tables concerning anger, fear, shame and the like,
and also concerning examples from civil life, and as much concerning
the intellectual operations of memory, combination and partition,
judgment and the others, as concerning heat and cold, or light, or
vegetation, or such things.”[210] But he proceeds to intimate, as far
as I understand the next sentence, that, although his method or logic,
strictly speaking, is applicable to other subjects, it is his
immediate object to inquire into the properties of natural things, or
what is generally meant by physics. To this indeed the second book of
the Novum Organum, and the portions that he completed of the remaining
parts of the Instauratio Magna bear witness.

     [209] This question was discussed some years since by the late
     editor of the Edinburgh Review on one side, and by Dugald Stewart
     on the other. See Edinburgh Review, vol. iii., p. 273, and the
     Preliminary Dissertation to Stewart’s Philosophical Essays.

     [210] Etiam dubitabit quispiam potius quam objiciet, utrum nos de
     naturali tantum philosophia, an etiam de scientiis reliquis,
     logicis, ethicis, politicis, secundum viam nostram perficiendis
     loquamur. At nos certè de universis hæc, quæ dictasunt,
     intelligimus; atque quemadmodum vulgaris logica, quæ regit res
     per syllogismum, non tantum ad naturales, sed ad omnes scientias
     pertinet, ita et nostra, quæ procedit per inductionem, omnia
     complectitur. Tam enim Historiam et Tabulas Inveniendi conficimus
     de ira, metu et verecundia et similibus, ac etiam de exemplis
     rerum civilium; nec minùs de motibus mentalibus memoriæ,
     compositionis et divisionis, judicii et reliquorum, quam de
     calido et frigido, aut luce, aut vegetatione aut similibus. Sed
     tamen cum nostra ratio interpretandi, post historiam præparatam
     et ordinatam, non mentis tantum motus et discursus, ut logica
     vulgaris, sed et rerum naturam intueatur, ita mentem regimus ut
     ad rerum naturam se aptis per omnia modis applicare possit. Atque
     propterea multa et diversa in doctrina interpretationis
     præcipimus. quæ ad subjecti, de quo inquirimus, qualitatem et
     conditionem modum inveniendi nonnulla ex parte applicent. Nov.
     Org. i. 127.

|Baconian philosophy built on observation and experiment.|

68. It by no means follows, because the leading principles of the
inductive philosophy are applicable to other topics of inquiry than
what is usually comprehended under the name of physics, that we can
employ all the prærogativæ instantiarum, and still less the peculiar
rules for conducting experiments which Bacon has given us, in moral,
or even psychological disquisitions. Many of them are plainly
referrible to particular manipulations, or at most to limited subjects
of chemical theory. And the frequent occurrence of passages which show
Lord Bacon’s fondness for experimental processes, seem to have led
some to consider his peculiar methods as more exclusively related to
such modes of inquiry than they really are. But when the Baconian
philosophy is said to be experimental, we are to remember that
experiment is only better than what we may call passive observation,
because it enlarges our capacity of observing with exactness and
expedition. The reasoning is grounded on observation in both cases. In
astronomy, where nature remarkably presents the objects of our
observation without liability to error or uncertain delay, we may
reason on the inductive principle as well as in sciences that require
tentative operations. The inference drawn from the difference of time
in the occultation of the satellites of Jupiter at different seasons,
in favour of the Copernican theory and against the instantaneous
motion of light, is an induction of the same kind with any that could
be derived from an _experimentum crucis_. It is an exclusion of
those hypotheses which might solve many phænomena, but fail to explain
those immediately observed.

|Advantages of the latter.|

69. But astronomy, from the comparative solitariness, if we may so
say, of all its phænomena, and the simplicity of their laws, has an
advantage that is rarely found in sciences of mere observation. Bacon
justly gave to experiment, or the interrogation of nature, compelling
her to give up her secrets, a decided preference whenever it can be
employed; and it is unquestionably true that the inductive method is
tedious, if not uncertain, when it cannot resort to so compendious a
process. One of the subjects selected by Bacon in the third part of
the Instauration as specimens of the method by which an inquiry into
nature should be conducted, the History of Winds, does not greatly
admit of experiments; and the very slow progress of meteorology, which
has yet hardly deserved the name of a science, when compared with that
of chemistry or optics, will illustrate the difficulties of employing
the inductive method without their aid. It is not, therefore, that
Lord Bacon’s method of philosophising is properly experimental, but
that by experiment it is most successfully displayed.

|Sometimes applicable to philosophy of human mind.|

|Less so to politics and morals.|

70. It will follow from hence that in proportion as, in any matter of
inquiry, we can separate, in what we examine, the determining
conditions, or law of form, from everything extraneous, we shall be
more able to use the Baconian method with advantage. In metaphysics,
or what Stewart would have called the philosophy of the human mind,
there seems much in its own nature capable of being subjected to the
inductive reasoning. Such are those facts which, by their intimate
connection with physiology, or the laws of the bodily frame, fall
properly within the province of the physician. In these, though exact
observation is chiefly required, it is often practicable to shorten
its process by experiment. And another important illustration may be
given from the education of children, considered as a science of rules
deduced from observation; wherein also we are frequently more able to
substitute experiment for mere experience, than with mankind in
general, whom we may observe at a distance, but cannot control. In
politics, as well as in moral prudence, we can seldom do more than
this. It seems however practicable to apply the close attention
enforced by Bacon, and the careful arrangement and comparison of
phænomena, which are the basis of his induction, to these subjects.
Thus, if the circumstances of all popular seditions recorded in
history were to be carefully collected with great regard to the
probability of evidence, and to any peculiarity that may have affected
the results, it might be easy to perceive such a connection of
antecedent and subsequent events in the great plurality of instances,
as would reasonably lead us to form probable inferences as to similar
tumults when they should occur. This has sometimes been done, with
less universality, and with much less accuracy than the Baconian
method requires, by such theoretical writers on politics as Machiavel
and Bodin. But it has been apt to degenerate into pedantry, and to
disappoint the practical statesman, who commonly rejects it with
scorn; partly because civil history is itself defective, seldom giving
a just view of events, and still less frequently of the motives of
those concerned in them; partly because the history of mankind is far
less copious than that of nature, and in much that relates to
politics, has not yet had time to furnish the groundwork of a
sufficient induction; but partly also from some distinctive
circumstances, which affect our reasonings in moral far more than in
physical science, and which deserve to be considered, so far at least
as to sketch the arguments that might be employed.

|Induction less conclusive in these subjects.|

71. The Baconian logic, as has been already said, deduces universal
principles from select observation, that is, from particular, and, in
some cases of experiment, from singular instances. It may easily
appear to one conversant with the syllogistic method less legitimate
than the old induction which proceeded by an exhaustive enumeration of
particulars, and at most warranting but a probable conclusion. The
answer to this objection can only be found in the acknowledged
uniformity of the laws of nature, so that whatever has once occurred
will, under absolutely similar circumstances, always occur again. This
may be called the suppressed premise of every Baconian enthymem, every
inference from observation of phænomena, which extends beyond the
particular case. When it is once ascertained that water is composed of
one proportion of oxygen to one of hydrogen, we never doubt but that
such are its invariable constituents. We may repeat the experiment to
secure ourselves against the risk of error in the operation or of some
unperceived condition that may have affected the result; but when a
sufficient number of trials has secured us against this, an invariable
law of nature is inferred from the particular instance; nobody
conceives that one pint of pure water _can_ be of a different
composition from another. All men, even the most rude, reason upon
this primary maxim; but they reason inconclusively from
misapprehending the true relations of cause and effect in the
phænomena to which they direct their attention. It is by the
sagacity and ingenuity with which Bacon has excluded the various
sources of error, and disengaged the true cause, that this method is
distinguished from that which the vulgar practise.

|Reasons for this difference.|

72. It is required, however, for the validity of this method, first
that there should be a strict uniformity in the general laws of
nature, from which we can infer that what has been will, in the same
conditions, be again; and secondly, that we shall be able to perceive
and estimate all the conditions with an entire and exclusive
knowledge. The first is granted in all physical phænomena; but in
those which we cannot submit to experiment, or investigate by some
such method as Bacon has pointed out, we often find our philosophy at
fault for want of the second. Such is at present the case with respect
to many parts of chemistry; for example, that of organic substances,
which we can analyse, but as yet can in very few instances recompose.
We do not know, and, if we did know, could not perhaps command, the
entire conditions of organic bodies (even structurally, not as
living), the _form_, as Bacon calls it, of blood, or milk, or oak
galls. But in attempting to subject the actions of men to this
inductive philosophy, we are arrested by the want of both the
necessary requisitions. Matter can only be diverted from its obedience
to unvarying laws by the control of mind; but we have to inquire
whether mind is equally the passive instrument of any law. We have to
open the great problem of human liberty, and must deny even a
disturbing force to the will before we can assume that all actions of
mankind must, under given conditions, preserve the same necessary
train of sequences as a molecule of matter. But if this be answered
affirmatively, we are still almost as far removed from a conclusive
result as before. We cannot without contradicting every day
experience, maintain that all men are determined alike by the same
exterior circumstances; we must have recourse to the differences of
temperament, of physical constitution, of casual or habitual
association. The former alone, however, are, at the best, subject to
our observation, either at the time, or, as is most common, through
testimony; of the latter, no being, which does not watch the movements
of the soul itself, can reach more than a probable conjecture. Sylla
resigned the dictatorship, therefore all men, in the circumstances of
Sylla, will do the same, is an argument false in one sense of the word
circumstances, and useless at least in any other. It is doubted by
many, whether meteorology will ever be well understood, on account of
the complexity of the forces concerned, and their remoteness from the
apprehension of the senses. Do not the same difficulties apply to
human affairs? And while we reflect on these difficulties, to which we
must add those which spring from the scantiness of our means of
observation, the defectiveness and falsehood of testimony, especially
what is called historical, and a thousand other errors to which the
various “idola of the world and the cave” expose us, we shall rather
be astonished that so many probable rules of civil prudence have been
treasured up and confirmed by experience than disposed to give them a
higher place in philosophy than they can claim.

|Considerations on the other side.|

73. It might be alleged in reply to these considerations, that
admitting the absence of a strictly scientific certainty in moral
reasoning, we have yet, as seems acknowledged on the other side, a
great body of probable inferences, in the extensive knowledge and
sagacious application of which most of human wisdom consists. And all
that is required of us in dealing either with moral evidence or with
the conclusions we draw from it, is to estimate the probability of
neither too high; an error from which the severe and patient
discipline of the inductive philosophy is most likely to secure us. It
would be added by some, that the theory of probabilities deduces a
wonderful degree of certainty from things very uncertain, when a
sufficient number of experiments can be made; and thus, that events
depending upon the will of mankind, even under circumstances the most
anomalous and apparently irreducible to principles, may be calculated
with a precision inexplicable to any one who has paid little attention
to the subject. This, perhaps, may appear rather a curious application
of mathematical science, than one from which our moral reasonings are
likely to derive much benefit, especially as the conditions under
which a very high probability can mathematically be obtained, involve
a greater number of trials than experience will generally furnish. It
is, nevertheless, a field that deserves to be more fully explored: the
success of those who have attempted to apply analytical processes to
moral probabilities has not hitherto been very encouraging, inasmuch
as they have often come to results falsified by experience; but a more
scrupulous regard to all the conditions of each problem may
perhaps obviate many sources of error.[211]

     [211] A calculation was published not long since, said to be on
     the authority of an eminent living philosopher, according to
     which, granting a moderate probability that each of twelve jurors
     would decide rightly, the chances in favour of the rectitude of
     their unanimous verdict were made something extravagantly high, I
     think about 8000 to 1. It is more easy to perceive the the
     fallacies of this pretended demonstration, than to explain how a
     man of great acuteness should have overlooked them. One among
     many is that it assumes the giving a verdict at all to be
     voluntary, whereas, in practice, the jury must decide one way or
     the other. We must deduct, therefore, a fraction expressing the
     probability that some of the twelve have wrongly conceded their
     opinions to the rest. One danger of this rather favourite
     application of mathematical principles to moral probabilities, as
     indeed it is of statistical tables (a remark of far wider
     extent), is that, by considering mankind merely as units, it
     practically habituates the mind to a moral and social levelling,
     as inconsistent with a just estimate of men as it is
     characteristic of the present age.

|Result of the whole.|

74. It seems upon the whole that we should neither conceive the
inductive method to be useless in regard to any subject but physical
science, nor deny the peculiar advantages it possesses in those
inquiries rather than others. What must in all studies be important,
is the habit of turning round the subject of our investigation in
every light, the observation of everything that is peculiar, the
exclusion of all that we find on reflection to be extraneous. In
historical and antiquarian researches, in all critical examination
which turns upon facts, in the scrutiny of judicial evidence, a great
part of Lord Bacon’s method, not, of course, all the experimental
rules of the Novum Organum, has, as I conceive, a legitimate
application.[212] I would refer any one who may doubt this to his
History of Winds, as one sample of what we mean by the Baconian
method, and ask whether a kind of investigation, analogous to
what is therein pursued for the sake of eliciting physical truths,
might not be employed in any analytical process where general or even
particular facts are sought to be known. Or if an example is required
of such an investigation, let us look at the copious induction from
the past and actual history of mankind upon which Malthus established
his general theory of the causes which have retarded the natural
progress of population. Upon all these subjects before-mentioned,
there has been an astonishing improvement in the reasoning of the
learned, and perhaps of the world at large since the time of Bacon,
though much remains very defective. In what degree it may be owing to
the prevalence of a physical philosophy founded upon his inductive
logic, it might not be uninteresting to inquire.[213]

     [212] The _principle_ of Bacon’s prerogative instances, and
     perhaps in some cases a very analogous application of them,
     appear to hold in our inquiries into historical evidence. The
     fact sought to be ascertained in the one subject corresponds to
     the physical law in the other. The testimonies, as we, though
     rather laxly, call them, or passages in books from which we infer
     the fact, correspond to the observations or experiments from
     which we deduce the law. The necessity of a sufficient induction
     by searching for all proof that may bear on the question, is as
     manifest in one case as in the other. The exclusion of precarious
     and inconclusive evidence is alike indispensable in both. The
     selection of prerogative instances, or such as carry with them
     satisfactory conviction, requires the same sort of inventive and
     reasoning powers. It is easy to illustrate this by examples.
     Thus, in the controversy concerning the Icon Basilike, the
     admission of Gauden’s claim by Lord Clarendon is in the nature of
     a _prerogative instance_; it renders the supposition of the
     falsehood of that claim highly improbable. But the many second
     hand and hearsay testimonies which may be alleged on the other
     side, to prove that the book was written by King Charles, are not
     prerogative instances, because their falsehood will be found to
     involve very little improbability. So, in a different
     controversy, the silence of some of the fathers as to the text,
     commonly called, of the three heavenly witnesses, even while
     expounding the context of the passage, is a _quasi-prerogative
     instance_; a decisive proof that they did not know it, or did not
     believe it genuine; because if they did, no motive can be
     conceived for the omission. But the silence of Laurentius Valla
     as to its absence from the manuscripts on which he commented, is
     no prerogative instance to prove that it was contained in them;
     because it is easy to perceive that he might have motives for
     saying nothing; and, though the negative argument, as it is
     called, or inference that a fact is not true, because such and
     such persons have not mentioned it, is, taken generally, weaker
     than positive testimony, it will frequently supply prerogative
     instances where the latter does not. Launoy, in a little
     treatise, De Auctoritate Negantis Argumenti, which displays more
     plain sense than ingenuity or philosophy, lays it down that a
     fact of a public nature, which is not mentioned by any writer
     within 200 years of the time, supposing, of course, that there is
     extant a competent number of writers who would naturally have
     mentioned it, is not to be believed. The period seems rather
     arbitrary, and was possibly so considered by himself; but the
     general principle is of the highest importance in historical
     criticism. Thus, in the once celebrated question of Pope Joan,
     the silence of all writers near the time as to so wonderful a
     fact, was justly deemed a kind of _prerogative_ argument, when
     set in opposition to the many repetitions of the story in later
     ages. But the silence of Gildas and Bede as to the victories of
     Arthur is no such argument against their reality, because they
     were not under an historical obligation, or any strong motive,
     which would prevent their silence. Generally speaking, the more
     anomalous and interesting an event is, the stronger is the
     argument against its truth from the silence of contemporaries, on
     account of the propensity of mankind to believe and recount the
     marvellous; and the weaker is the argument from the testimony of
     later times for the same reason. A similar analogy holds also in
     jurisprudence. The principle of our law, rejecting hearsay and
     secondary evidence, is founded on the Baconian rule. Fifty
     persons may depose that they have heard of a fact or of its
     circumstances; but the eye-witness is the prerogative instance.
     It would carry us too far to develop this at length, even if I
     were fully prepared to do so; but this much may lead us to think,
     that whoever shall fill up that lamentable _desideratum_, the
     logic of evidence, ought to have familiarised himself with the
     Novum Organum.

     [213] “The effects which Bacon’s writings have hitherto produced,
     have indeed been far more conspicuous in physics than in the
     science of mind. Even here, however, they have been great and
     most important, as well as in some collateral branches of
     knowledge, such as natural jurisprudence, political economy,
     criticism and morals, which spring up from the same root, or
     rather which are branches of that tree of which the science of
     mind is the trunk.” Stewart’s Philosophical Essays, Prelim.
     Dissertation. The principal advantage, perhaps, of those habits
     of reasoning which the Baconian methods, whether learned directly
     or through the many disciples of that school, have a tendency to
     generate, is that they render men cautious and painstaking in the
     pursuit of truth, and therefore restrain them from deciding too
     soon. Nemo reperitur qui in rebus ipsis et experientia moram
     fecerit legitimam. These words are more frequently true of moral
     and political reasoners than of any others. Men apply historical
     or personal experience, but they apply it hastily, and without
     giving themselves time for either a copious or an exact
     induction; the great majority being too much influenced by
     passion, party-spirit, or vanity, or perhaps by affections
     morally right, but not the less dangerous in reasoning, to
     maintain the patient and dispassionate suspense of judgment
     (ακαταληψια [akatalêpsia]), which ought to be the condition of
     our enquiries.

|Bacon’s aptitude for moral subjects.|

75. It is probable that Lord Bacon never much followed up in his own
mind that application of his method to psychological, and still less
to moral and political subjects, which he has declared himself to
intend. The distribution of the Instauratio Magna, which he has
prefixed to it, relates wholly to physical science. He has in no one
instance given an example, in the Novum Organum, from moral
philosophy, and one only, that of artificial memory, from what he
would have called logic.[214] But we must constantly remember that the
philosophy of Bacon was left exceedingly incomplete. Many lives would
not have sufficed for what he had planned, and he gave only the
_horæ subsecivæ_ of his own. It is evident that he had turned his
thoughts to physical philosophy rather for an exercise of his
reasoning faculties, and out of his insatiable thirst for knowledge,
than from any peculiar aptitude for their subjects, much less any
advantage of opportunity for their cultivation. He was more eminently
the philosopher of human, than of general nature. Hence, he is exact
as well as profound in all his reflections on civil life and mankind,
while his conjectures in natural philosophy, though often very acute,
are apt to wander far from the truth in consequence of his defective
acquaintance with the phænomena of nature. His Centuries of Natural
History give abundant proof of this. He is, in all these inquiries,
like one doubtfully, and by degrees, making out a distant prospect,
but often deceived by the haze. But if we compare what may be found in
the sixth, seventh, and eighth books De Augmentis, in the Essays, the
History of Henry VII., and the various short treatises contained in
his works, on moral and political wisdom, and on human nature, from
experience of which all such wisdom is drawn, with the Rhetoric,
Ethics, and Politics of Aristotle, or with the historians most
celebrated for their deep insight into civil society and human
character, with Thucydides, Tacitus, Philip de Comines, Machiavel,
Davila, Hume, we shall, I think, find that one man may almost be
compared with all of these together. When Galileo is named as equal to
Bacon, it is to be remembered that Galileo was no moral or political
philosopher, and in this department Leibnitz certainly falls very
short of Bacon. Burke, perhaps, comes, of all modern writers, the
nearest to him; but though Bacon may not be more profound than Burke,
he is still more copious and comprehensive.

     [214] Nov. Organ. ii. 26. It may however be observed, that we
     find a few passages in the ethical part of De Augmentis, lib.
     vii. cap. 3, which show that he had some notions of moral
     induction germinating in his mind.

|Comparison of Bacon and Galileo.|

76. The comparison of Bacon and Galileo is naturally built upon the
influence which, in the same age they exerted in overthrowing the
philosophy of the schools, and in founding that new discipline
of real science which has rendered the last centuries glorious. Hume
has given the preference to the latter, who made accessions to the
domain of human knowledge so splendid, so inaccessible to cavil, so
unequivocal in their results, that the majority of mankind would
perhaps be carried along with this decision. There seems however to be
no doubt that the mind of Bacon was more comprehensive and profound.
But these comparisons are apt to involve _incommensurable_
relations. In their own intellectual characters, they bore no great
resemblance to each other. Bacon had scarce any knowledge of geometry,
and so far ranks much below not only Galileo, but Descartes, Newton,
and Leibnitz, all signalised by wonderful discoveries in the science
of quantity, or in that part of physics which employs it. He has, in
one of the profound aphorisms of the Novum Organum, distinguished the
two species of philosophical genius, one more apt to perceive the
differences of things, the other their analogies. In a mind of the
highest order neither of these powers will be really deficient, and
his own inductive method is at once the best exercise of both, and the
best safeguard against the excess of either. But upon the whole, it
may certainly be said, that the genius of Lord Bacon was naturally
more inclined to collect the resemblances of nature than to note her
differences. This is the case with men like him of sanguine temper,
warm fancy, and brilliant wit; but it is not the frame of mind which
is best suited to strict reasoning.

77. It is no proof of a solid acquaintance with Lord Bacon’s
philosophy, to deify his name as the ancient schools did those of
their founders, or even to exaggerate the powers of his genius. Powers
they were surprisingly great, yet limited in their range, and not in
all respects equal; nor could they overcome every impediment of
circumstance. Even of Bacon it may be said, that he attempted more
than he has achieved, and perhaps more than he clearly apprehended.
His objects appear sometimes indistinct, and I am not sure that they
are always consistent. In the Advancement of Learning, he aspired to
fill up, or at least to indicate, the deficiencies in every department
of knowledge, he gradually confined himself to philosophy, and at
length to physics. But few of his works can be deemed complete, not
even the treatise De Augmentis, which comes nearer to it than most of
the rest. Hence, the study of Lord Bacon is difficult and not, as I
conceive, very well adapted to those who have made no progress
whatever in the exact sciences, nor accustomed themselves to
independent thinking. They have never been made a textbook in our
universities; though after a judicious course of preparatory studies,
by which I mean a good foundation in geometry and the philosophical
principles of grammar, the first book of the Novum Organum might be
very advantageously combined with the instruction of an enlightened
lecturer.[215]

     [215] It by no means is to be inferred, that because the actual
     text of Bacon is not always such as can be well understood by
     very young men, I object to their being led to the real
     principles of inductive philosophy, which alone will teach them
     to think, firmly but not presumptuously, for themselves. Few
     defects, on the contrary, in our system of education are more
     visible than the want of an adequate course of logic; and this is
     not likely to be rectified so long as the Aristotelian methods
     challenge that denomination exclusively of all other aids to the
     reasoning faculties. The position that nothing else is to be
     called logic, were it even agreeable to the derivation of the
     word, which it is not, or to the usage of the ancients, which is
     by no means uniformly the case, or to that of modern philosophy
     and correct language, which is certainly not at all the case, is
     no answer to the question, whether what we call logic does not
     deserve to be taught at all.

     A living writer of high reputation, who has at least fully
     understood his own subject, and illustrated it better than his
     predecessors from a more enlarged reading and thinking, wherein
     his own acuteness has been improved by the writers of the
     Baconian school, has been unfortunately instrumental, by the very
     merits of his treatise on Logic, in keeping up the prejudices on
     this subject, which have generally been deemed characteristic of
     the university to which he belonged. All the reflection I have
     been able to give to the subject has convinced me of the
     inefficacy of the syllogistic art in enabling us to think rightly
     for ourselves, or, which is part of thinking rightly, in
     detecting those fallacies of others which might impose on our
     understanding before we have acquired that art. It has been often
     alleged, and, as far as I can judge, with perfect truth, that no
     man, who can be worth answering, ever commits, except through
     mere inadvertence, any paralogisms which the common logic serves
     to point out. It is easy enough to construct syllogisms which sin
     against its rules; but the question is, by whom they were
     employed. It is not uncommon, as I am aware, to represent an
     adversary as reasoning illogically; but this is generally
     effected by putting his argument into our own words. The great
     fault of all, over-induction, or the assertion of a general
     premise upon an insufficient examination of particulars, cannot
     be discovered or cured by any _logical_ skill; and this is
     the error into which men really fall, not that of omitting to
     _distribute the middle_ term, though it comes in effect, and
     often in appearance, to the same thing. I do not contend that the
     rules of syllogism, which are very short and simple, ought not to
     be learned; or that there may not be some advantage in
     occasionally stating our own argument, or calling on another to
     state his, in a regular form (an advantage, however, rather
     dialectical, which is, in other words, rhetorical, than one which
     affects the reasoning faculties themselves): nor do I deny that
     it is philosophically worth while to know that all _general
     reasoning by words_ may be reduced into syllogism, as it is to
     know that most of geometry may be resolved into the superposition
     of equal triangles; but to represent this portion of logical
     science as the whole, appears to me almost like teaching the
     scholar Euclid’s axioms, and the axiomatic theorem to which I
     have alluded, and calling this the science of geometry. The
     following passage from the Port-Royal logic is very judicious and
     candid, giving as much to the Aristotelian system as it deserves:
     “Cette partie, que nous avons maintenant à traiter, qui comprend
     les règles du raisonnement, est estimée la plus importante de la
     logique, et c’est presque l’unique qu’on y traite avec quelque
     soin; mais il y a sujet de douter si elle est aussi utile qu’on
     se l’imagine. La plupart des erreurs des hommes, comme nous avons
     déjà dit ailleurs, viennent bien plus de ce qu’ils raisonnent sur
     de faux principes, que non pas de ce qu’ils raisonnent mal
     suivant leurs principes. Il arrive rarement qu’on se laisse
     tromper par des raisonnemens qui ne soient faux que parce que la
     conséquence en est mal tirée; et ceux qui ne seroient pas
     capables d’en reconnoître la fausseté par la seule lumière de la
     raison, ne le seroient pas ordinairement d’entendre les règles
     que l’on en donne, et encore moins de les appliquer. Néanmoins,
     quand on ne considéreroit ces règles que comme des vérités
     spéculatives, elles serviroient toujours à exercer l’esprit; et
     de plus, on ne peut nier qu’elles n’aient quelque usage en
     quelques rencontres, et à l’égard de quelques personnes, qui,
     étant d’un naturel vif et pénétrant, ne se laissent quelquefois
     tromper par des fausses conséquences, que faute d’attention, à
     quoi la réflexion qu’ils feroient sur ces règles, seroit capable
     de remédier.” Art de Penser, part iii. How different is this
     sensible passage from one quoted from some anonymous writer in
     Whateley’s Logic, p. 34. “A fallacy consists of an ingenious
     mixture of truth and falsehood so entangled, so intimately
     blended, that the fallacy is, in the chemical phrase, held in
     solution _one drop of sound logic_ is that test which
     immediately disunites them, makes the foreign substance visible,
     and precipitates it to the bottom.” One fallacy, it might be
     answered, as common as any, is the _false analogy_ the
     misleading the mind by a comparison, where there is no real
     proportion or resemblance. The chemist’s test is the
     _necessary_ means of detecting the foreign substance; if the
     “drop of sound logic” be such, it is strange that lawyers,
     mathematicians, and mankind in general, should so sparingly
     employ it; the fact being notorious, that those most eminent for
     strong reasoning powers are rarely conversant with the
     syllogistic method. It is also well known, that these “intimately
     blended mixtures of truth and falsehood” deceive no man of plain
     sense. So much for the _test_.

|His prejudice against mathematics.|

78. The ignorance of Bacon in mathematics, and, what was much worse,
his inadequate notions of their utility, must be reckoned among the
chief defects in his philosophical writings. In a remarkable passage
of the Advancement of Learning, he held mathematics to be a part of
metaphysics; but the place of this is altered in the Latin, and they
are treated as merely auxiliary or instrumental to physical inquiry.
He had some prejudice against pure mathematics, and thought they had
been unduly elevated in comparison with the realities of nature. “I
know not,” he says, “how it has arisen that mathematics and logic,
which ought to be the serving-maids of physical philosophy, yet
affecting to vaunt the certainty that belongs to them, presume to
exercise a dominion over her.” It is surely very erroneous to speak of
geometry, which relates to the objective realities of space, and to
natural objects so far as extended, as a mere handmaid of physical
philosophy, and not rather a part of it. Playfair has made some good
remarks on the advantages derived to experimental philosophy itself
from the mere application of geometry and algebra. And one of the
reflections which this ought to excite is, that we are not to
conceive, as some hastily do, that there can be no real utility to
mankind, even of that kind of utility which consists in multiplying
the conveniences and luxuries of life, springing from theoretical and
speculative inquiry. The history of algebra, so barren in the days of
Tartaglia and Vieta, so productive of _wealth_, when applied to
dynamical calculations in our own, may be a sufficient answer.

|Bacon’s excess of wit.|

79. One of the petty blemishes which, though lost in the splendour of
Lord Bacon’s excellencies, it is not unfair to mention, is connected
with the peculiar characteristics of his mind; he is sometimes too
metaphorical and witty. His remarkable talent for discovering
analogies seems to have inspired him with too much regard to them as
arguments, even when they must appear to any common reader
fanciful and far-fetched. His terminology, chiefly for the same
reason, is often a little affected, and, in Latin, rather barbarous.
The divisions of his prerogative instances in the Novum Organum are
not always founded upon intelligible distinctions. And the general
obscurity of the style, neither himself nor his assistants being good
masters of the Latin language, which at the best is never flexible or
copious enough for our philosophy, renders the perusal of both his
great works too laborious for the impatient reader. Brucker has well
observed that the Novum Organum has been neglected by the generality,
and proved of far less service than it would otherwise have been in
philosophy, in consequence of these very defects, as well as the real
depths of the author’s mind.[216]

     [216] Legenda ipsa nobilissima tractatio ab illis est, qui in
     rerum naturalium inquisitione feliciter progredi cupiunt. Quæ si
     paulo plus luminis et perspicuitatis haberet, et novorum
     terminorum et partitionum artificio lectorem non remoraretur,
     longè plura, quam factum est, contulisset ad philosophiæ
     emendationem. His enim obstantibus a plerisque hoc organum
     neglectum est. Hist. Philos. v. 99.

|Fame of Bacon on the Continent.|

80. What has been the fame of Bacon, “the wisest, greatest, of
mankind,” it is needless to say. What has been his real influence over
mankind, how much of our enlarged and exact knowledge may be
attributed to his inductive method, what of this again has been due to
a thorough study of his writings, and what to an indirect and
secondary acquaintance with them, are questions of another kind, and
less easily solved. Stewart, the philosopher who has dwelt most on the
praises of Bacon, while he conceives him to have exercised a
considerable influence over the English men of science in the
seventeenth century, supposes, on the authority of Montucla, that he
did not “command the general admiration of Europe,” till the
publication of the preliminary discourse to the French Encyclopædia by
Diderot and D’Alembert. This, however, is by much too precipitate a
conclusion. He became almost immediately known on the continent.
Gassendi was one of his most ardent admirers. Descartes mentions him,
I believe, once only, in a letter to Mersenne, in 1632;[217] but he
was of all men the most unwilling to praise a contemporary. It may be
said that these were philosophers, and that their testimony does not
imply the admiration of mankind. But writers of a very different
character mention him in a familiar manner. Richelieu is said to have
highly esteemed Lord Bacon.[218] And it may in some measure be due to
this, that in the Sentimens de l’Académie Français sur le Cid, he is
alluded to, simply by the name Bacon, as one well known.[219] Voiture,
in a letter to Costar, about the same time, bestows high eulogy on
some passages of Bacon which his correspondent had sent to him, and
observes that Horace would have been astonished to hear a barbarian
Briton discourse in such a style. The treatise De Augmentis was
republished in France in 1624, the year after its appearance in
England. It was translated into French as early as 1632; no great
proofs of neglect. Editions came out in Holland, 1645, 1652, and
1662.[220] Even the Novum Organum, which, as has been said, never
became so popular as his other writings, was thrice printed in
Holland, in 1645, 1650, and 1660.[221] Leibnitz and Puffendorf are
loud in their expressions of admiration, the former ascribing to him
the revival of true philosophy as fully as we can at present.[222] I
should be more inclined to doubt whether he were adequately valued by
his countrymen in his own time, or in the immediately subsequent
period. Under the first Stuarts, there was little taste among studious
men but for theology, and chiefly for a theology which,
proceeding with an extreme deference to authority, could not but
generate a disposition of mind, even upon other subjects, alien to the
progressive and inquisitive spirit of the inductive philosophy.[223]
The institution of the Royal Society, or rather the love of physical
science out of which that institution arose, in the second part of the
seventeenth century, made England resound with the name of her
illustrious chancellor. Few now spoke of him without a kind of homage
that only the greatest men receive. Yet still, it was by natural
philosophers alone that the writings of Bacon were much studied. The
editions of his works, except the Essays, were few; the Novum Organum
never came separately from the English press.[224] They were not even
much quoted; for I believe it will be found that the fashion of
referring to the brilliant passages of the De Augmentis and the Novum
Organum, at least in books designed for the general reader, is not
much older than the close of the last century. Scotland has the merit
of having led the way; Reid, Stewart, Robison, and Playfair turned
that which had been a blind veneration into a rational worship; and I
should suspect that more have read Lord Bacon within these thirty
years than in the two preceding centuries. It may be an usual
consequence of the enthusiastic panegyrics lately poured upon his
name, that a more positive efficacy has sometimes been attributed to
his philosophical writings than they really possessed, and it might be
asked whether Italy, where he was probably not much known, were not
the true school of experimental philosophy in Europe, whether his
methods of investigation were not chiefly such as men of sagacity and
lovers of truth might simultaneously have devised. But, whatever may
have been the case with respect to actual discoveries in science, we
must give to written wisdom its proper meed; no books prior to those
of Lord Bacon carried mankind so far on the road to truth; none have
obtained so thorough a triumph over arrogant usurpation without
seeking to substitute another; and he may be compared with those
liberators of nations, who have given them laws by which they might
govern themselves, and retained no homage but their gratitude.[225]

     [217] Vol. vi., p. 210, edit. Cousin.

     [218] The only authority that I can now quote for this is not
     very good, that of Aubery’s Manuscripts, which I find in Seward’s
     Anecdotes, iv. 328. But it seems not improbable. The same book
     quotes Balzac as saying: “Croyons donc, pour l’amour du
     Chancelier Bacon, que toutes les folies des anciens sont sages;
     et tous leurs songes mystères, et de celles-là qui sont estimées
     pures fables, il n’y en a pas une, quelque bizarre et
     extravagante qu’elle soit, qui n’ait son fondement dans
     l’histoire, _si l’on en veut croire Bacon_, et qui n’ait été
     déguisée de la sorte par les sages du vieux temps, pour la rendre
     plus utile aux peuples.

     [219] P. 44 (1633).

     [220] J’ai trouvé parfaitement beau tout ce que vous me
     mandez de Bacon. Mais ne vous semble t’il pas qu’Horace qui
     disoit, Visam Britannos hospitibus feros, seroit bien étonné
     d’entendre un barbare discourir comme cela? Costar is said by
     Bayle to have borrowed much from Bacon. La Mothe le Vayer
     mentions him in his Dialogues; in fact, instances are numerous.

     [221] Montagu’s Life of Bacon, p. 407. He has not
     mentioned an edition at Strasburg, 1635, which is in the British
     Museum.

     There is also an edition, without time or place, in the catalogue
     of the British Museum.

     [222] Brucker, v. 95. Stewart says that “Bayle does not
     give above twelve lines to Bacon;” but he calls him one of the
     greatest men of his age, and the length of an article in Bayle
     was never designed to be a measure of the merit of its subject.

     [223] It is not uncommon to meet with persons,
     especially who are or have been engaged in teaching others
     dogmatically what they have themselves received in the like
     manner, to whom the inductive philosophy appears a mere school of
     scepticism, or at best wholly inapplicable to any subjects which
     require entire conviction. A certain deduction from certain
     premises is the only reasoning they acknowledge. This is
     peculiarly the case with theologians, but it is also extended to
     everything which is taught in a synthetic manner. Lord Bacon has
     a remarkable passage on this in the 9th book De Augmentis.
     Postquam articuli et principia religionis jam in sedibus suis
     fuerint locata, ita ut a rationis examine penitus eximantur, tum
     demum conceditur ab illis illationes derivare ac deducere,
     secundum analogiam ipsorum. In rebus quidem naturalibus hoc non
     tenet. Nam et ipsa principia examini subjiciuntur; per
     inductionem, inquam, licet minime per syllogismum. Atque eadem
     illa nullam habent cum ratione repugnantiam, ut ab eodem fonte
     cum primæ propositiones, tum mediæ, deducantur. Aliter fit in
     religione; ubi et primæ propositiones authopystatæ sunt, atque
     per se subsistentes; et rursus non reguntur ab illa ratione quæ
     propositiones consequentes deducit. Neque tamen hoc fit in
     religione sola, sed etiam in aliis scientiis, tam gravioribus,
     quam levioribus, ubi scilicet propositiones humanæ placita sunt,
     non posita; siquidem et in illis rationis usus absolutus esse non
     potest. Videmus enim in ludis, puta schaccorum, aut similibus,
     priores ludi normas et leges merè positivas esse, et ad placitum;
     quas recipi, non in disputationem vocari, prorsus oporteat; ut
     vero vincas, et peritè lusum instituas, id artificiosum est et
     rationale. Eodem modo fit et in legibus humanis; in quibus haud
     paucæ sunt maximæ, ut loquuntur, hoc est, placita mera juris, quæ
     auctoritate magis quam ratione nituntur, neque in disceptationem
     veniunt. Quid vero sit justissimum, non absolutè, sed relativè,
     hoc est ex analogiâ illarum maximarum, id demum rationale est, et
     latum disputationi campum præbet. This passage, well weighed, may
     show us where, why, and by whom the synthetic and syllogistic
     methods have been preferred to the inductive and analytical.

     [224] The De Augmentis was only once published after the
     first edition, in 1638. An indifferent translation, by Gilbert
     Watts, came out in 1640. No edition of Bacon’s Works was
     published in England before 1730; another appeared in 1740, and
     there have been several since. But they had been printed at
     Frankfort in 1665. It is unnecessary to observe, that many copies
     of the foreign editions were brought to this country. This is
     mostly taken from Mr. Montague’s account.

     [225] I have met, since this passage was written, with
     one in Stewart’s Life of Reid, which seems to state the
     _effects_ of Bacon’s philosophy in a just and temperate
     spirit, and which I rather quote, because this writer has, by his
     eulogies on that philosophy, led some to an exaggerated notion.
     “The influence of Bacon’s genius on the subsequent progress of
     physical discovery has been seldom duly appreciated: by some
     writers almost entirely overlooked, and by others considered as
     the sole cause of the reformation in science which has since
     taken place. Of these two extremes, the latter certainly is the
     least wide of the truth: for in the whole history of letters no
     other individual can be mentioned whose exertions have had so
     indisputable an effect in forwarding the intellectual progress of
     mankind. On the other hand, it must be acknowledged that before
     the era when Bacon appeared, various philosophers in different
     parts of Europe had struck into the right path; and it may
     perhaps be doubted, whether any one important rule with respect
     to the true method of investigation be contained in his works, of
     which no hint can be traced in those of his predecessors. His
     great merit lay in concentrating their feeble and scattered
     lights; fixing the attention of philosophers on the
     distinguishing characteristics of true and of false science, by a
     felicity of illustration peculiar to himself, seconded by the
     commanding powers of a bold and figurative eloquence. The method
     of investigation which he recommended had been previously
     followed in every instance in which any solid discovery had been
     made with respect to the laws of nature; but it had been followed
     accidentally and without any regular preconceived design; and it
     was reserved for him to reduce to rule and method what others had
     effected, either fortuitously, or from some momentary glimpse of
     the truth. These remarks are not intended to detract from the
     just glory of Bacon; for they apply to all those, without
     exception, who have systematised the principles of any of the
     arts. Indeed, they apply less forcibly to him than to any other
     philosopher whose studies have been directed to objects analogous
     to his; inasmuch as we know of no art of which the rules have
     been reduced successfully into a didactic form, when the art
     itself was as much in infancy as experimental philosophy was when
     Bacon wrote.” Account of Life and writings of Reid sect. 2.


                            SECT. III.

_On the Metaphysical Philosophy of Descartes._

|Early life of Descartes.|

81. René Descartes was born in 1596 of an ancient family in Touraine.
An inquisitive curiosity into the nature and causes of all he saw is
said to have distinguished his childhood, and this was certainly
accompanied by an uncommon facility and clearness of apprehension. At
a very early age he entered the college of the Jesuits at La Fleche,
and passed through their entire course of literature and philosophy.
It was now, at the age of sixteen, as he tells us, that he began to
reflect, with little satisfaction, on his studies, finding his mind
beset with error, and obliged to confess that he had learned nothing
but the conviction of his ignorance. Yet he knew that he had been
educated in a famous school, and that he was not deemed behind his
contemporaries. The ethics, the logic, even the geometry of the
ancients, did not fill his mind with that clear stream of truth, for
which he was ever thirsting. On leaving La Fleche, the young Descartes
mingled for some years in the world, and served as a volunteer both
under Prince Maurice, and in the Imperial army. Yet during this period
there were intervals when he withdrew himself wholly from society, and
devoted his leisure to mathematical science. Some germs also of his
peculiar philosophy were already ripening in his mind.

|His beginning to philosophise.|

82. Descartes was twenty-three years old when, passing a solitary
winter in his quarters at Neuburg on the Danube, he began to resolve
in his mind the futility of all existing systems of philosophy, and
the discrepancy of opinions among the generality of mankind, which
rendered it probable that no one had yet found out the road to real
science. He determined, therefore, to set about the investigation of
truth for himself, erasing from his mind all preconceived judgments,
as having been hastily and precariously taken up. He laid down for his
guidance a few fundamental rules of logic, such as to admit nothing as
true which he did not clearly perceive, and to proceed from the
simpler notions to the more complex, taking the method of geometers,
by which they had gone so much farther than others, for the true art
of reasoning. Commencing, therefore, with the mathematical sciences,
and observing that, however different in their subjects, they treat
properly of nothing but the relations of quantity, he fell, almost
accidentally, as his words seem to import, on the great discovery that
geometrical curves may be expressed algebraically.[226] This gave him
more hope of success in applying his method to other parts of
philosophy.

     [226] Œuvres de Descartes, par Cousin, Paris, 1824, vol. i.,
     p. 143.

|He retires to Holland.|

83. Nine years more elapsed, during which Descartes, though he quitted
military service, continued to observe mankind in various parts of
Europe, still keeping his heart fixed on the great aim he had proposed
to himself, but, as he confesses, without having framed the scheme of
any philosophy beyond those of his contemporaries. He deemed his time
of life immature for so stupendous a task. But at the age of
thirty-three, with little notice to his friends, he quitted Paris,
convinced that absolute retirement was indispensable for that rigorous
investigation of first principles he now determined to institute, and
retired into Holland. In this country he remained eight years so
completely aloof from the distractions of the world, that he concealed
his very place of residence, though preserving an intercourse of
letters with many friends in France.

|His publications.|

84. In 1637 he broke upon the world with a volume containing the
Discourse upon Method, the Dioptrics, the Meteors, and the Geometry.
It is only with the first that we are for the present concerned.[227]
In this discourse, the most interesting perhaps of Descartes’
writings, on account of the picture of his life, and of the progress
of his studies that it furnishes, we find the Cartesian metaphysics,
which do not consist of many articles, almost as fully detailed as in
any of his later works. In the Meditationes de Prima Philosophia,
published in Latin, 1641, these fundamental principles are laid down
again more at length. He invited the criticism of philosophers on
these famous Meditations. They did not refuse the challenge; and seven
sets of objections, from as many different quarters, with seven
replies from Descartes himself, are subjoined to the later editions of
the Meditations. The Principles of Philosophy, published in Latin in
1644, contains what may be reckoned the final statement, which
occupies most of the first book, written with uncommon conciseness and
precision. The beauty of philosophical style which distinguished
Descartes is never more seen than in this first book of the Principia,
the translation of which was revised by Clerselier, an eminent friend
of the author. It is a contrast at once to the elliptical brevity of
Aristotle, who hints, or has been supposed to hint, the most important
positions in a short clause, and to the verbose, figurative
declamation of many modern metaphysicians. In this admirable
perspicuity Descartes was imitated by his disciples Arnaud and
Malebranche, especially the former. His unfinished posthumous
treatise, the “Inquiry after Truth by Natural Reason,” is not carried
farther than a partial development of the same leading principles of
Cartesianism. There is consequently a great deal of apparent
repetition in the works of Descartes, but such as on attentive
consideration will show, not perhaps much real variance, but some new
lights that had occurred to the author in the course of his
reflections.[228]

     [227] Id. p. 121-212.

     [228] A work has lately been published, Essais Philosophiques,
     suivis de la Métaphysique de Descartes resembleé et mise en
     ordre, par L. A. Gruyer, 4 vols. Bruxelles, 1832. In the fourth
     volume we find the metaphysical passages in the writings of
     Descartes, including his correspondence, arranged methodically in
     his own words, but with the omission of a large part of the
     objections to the Meditations and of his replies. I did not,
     however, see this work in time to make use of it.

|He begins by doubting all.|

85. In pursuing the examination of the first principles of knowledge,
Descartes perceived not only that he had cause to doubt of the various
opinions he had found current among men, from that very circumstance
of their variety, but that the sources of all that he had received for
truth themselves, namely, the senses, had afforded him no indisputable
certainty. He began to recollect how often he had been misled by
appearances, which had at first sight given no intimation of their
fallacy, and asked himself in vain, by what infallible test he could
discern the reality of external objects, or at least their conformity
to his idea of them. The strong impressions made in sleep led him to
inquire whether all he saw and felt might not be in a dream. It was
true that there seemed to be some notions more elementary than the
rest, such as extension, figure, duration, which could not be reckoned
fallacious; nor could he avoid owning that, if there were not an
existing triangle in the world, the angles of one conceived by the
mind, though it were in sleep, must appear equal to two right angles.
But even in this certitude of demonstration he soon found something
deficient; to err in geometrical reasoning is not impossible: why
might he not err in this; especially in a train of consequences, the
particular terms of which are not at the same instant present to the
mind. But above all, there might be a superior being, powerful enough
and willing to deceive him. It was no kind of answer to treat this as
improbable, or as an arbitrary hypothesis. He had laid down as a maxim
that nothing could be received as truth which was not demonstrable,
and in one place, rather hyperbolically, and indeed extravagantly in
appearance, says that he made little difference between merely
probable and false suppositions; meaning this, however, as we may
presume, in the sense of geometers, who would say the same thing.

|His first step in knowledge.|

86. But, divesting himself thus of all belief in what the world deemed
most unquestionable, plunged in an abyss, as it seemed for a
time, he soon found his feet on a rock, from which he sprang upwards
to an unclouded sun. Doubting all things, abandoning all things, he
came to the question, what is it that doubts and denies? Something it
must be; he might be deceived by a superior power, but it was he that
was deceived. He felt his own existence; the proof of it was that he
did feel it; that he had affirmed, that he now doubted, in a word,
that he was a thinking substance. _Cogito: Ergo sum_--this famous
enthymem of the Cartesian philosophy veiled in rather formal language,
that which was to him, and must be to us all, the eternal basis of
conviction, which no argument can strengthen, which no sophistry can
impair, the consciousness of a self within, a percipient indivisible
Ego.[229] The only proof of this is that it admits of no proof, that
no man can pretend to doubt of his own existence with sincerity, or to
express a doubt without absurd and inconsistent language.

     [229] This word, introduced by the Germans, or originally perhaps
     by the old Cartesians, is rather awkward, but far less so than
     the English pronoun I, which is also equivocal in sound. Stewart
     has adopted it as the lesser evil, and it seems reasonable not to
     scruple a word so convenient, if not necessary, to express the
     unity of the conscious principle. If it had been employed
     earlier, I am apt to think that some great metaphysical
     extravagances would have been avoided, and some fundamental
     truths more clearly apprehended. Fichte is well known to have
     made the grand division of _Ich_ and _Nicht Ich_, _Ego_ and _Non
     Ego_, the basis of his philosophy; in other words, the difference
     of subjective and objective reality.

|His mind.|

|Not sceptical.|

87. The scepticism of Descartes, it appears, which is merely
provisional, is not at all similar to that of the Pyrrhonists, though
some of his arguments may have been shafts from their quiver. Nor did
he make use, which is somewhat remarkable, of the reasonings
afterwards employed by Berkley against the material world, though no
one more frequently distinguished than Descartes between the objective
reality, as it was then supposed to be, of ideas in the mind, and the
external or sensible reality of things. Scepticism, in fact, was so
far from being characteristic of his disposition, that his errors
sprang chiefly from the opposite source, little as he was aware of it,
from an undue positiveness in theories which he could not demonstrate,
or even render highly probable.[230]

     [230] One of the rules Descartes lays down in his posthumous art
     of logic, is that we ought never to busy ourselves except about
     objects concerning which our understanding appears capable of
     acquiring an unquestionable and certain knowledge, vol. xi., p.
     204. This is at least too unlimited a proposition, and would
     exclude, not indeed all probability, but all inquiries which must
     by necessity end in nothing more than probability. Accordingly,
     we find in the next pages, that he made little account of any
     sciences but arithmetic and geometry, or such others as equal
     them in certainty. “From all this,” he concludes, “we may infer,
     not that arithmetic and geometry are the only sciences which we
     must learn, but that he who seeks the road to truth should not
     trouble himself with any object of which he cannot have as
     certain a knowledge, as of arithmetical and geometrical
     demonstrations.” It is unnecessary to observe what havoc this
     would make with investigations, even in physics, of the highest
     importance to mankind.

     Beattie, in the essay on Truth, part ii. chap. 2, has made some
     unfounded criticisms on the scepticism of Descartes, and
     endeavours to turn into ridicule his, Cogito; ergo sum. Yet if
     any one should deny his own, or our existence, I do not see how
     we could refute him, were he worthy of refutation, but by some
     such language; and, in fact, it is what Beattie himself says,
     more paraphrastically, in answering Hume.

|He arrives at more certainty.|

88. The certainty of an existing Ego easily led him to that of the
operations of the mind, called afterwards by Locke ideas of
reflection, the believing, doubting, willing, loving, fearing, which
he knew by consciousness, and indeed by means of which alone he knew
that the Ego existed. He now proceeded a step farther; and reflecting
on the simplest truths of arithmetic and geometry, saw that it was as
impossible to doubt of them as of the acts of his mind. But as he had
before tried to doubt even of these, on the hypothesis that he might
be deceived by a superior intelligent power, he resolved to inquire
whether such a power existed, and if it did, whether it could be a
deceiver. The affirmative of the former, and the negative of the
latter question Descartes established by that extremely subtle
reasoning so much celebrated in the seventeenth century, but which has
less frequently been deemed conclusive in later times. It is at least
that which no man, not fitted by long practise for metaphysical
researches, will pretend to embrace.

|His proof of a Deity.|

89. The substance of his argument was this. He found within himself
the idea of a perfect Intelligence, eternal, infinite, necessary. This
could not come from himself, nor from external things, because both
were imperfect, and there could be no more in the effect than there is
in the cause. And this idea requiring a cause, it could have
none but an actual being, not a possible being, which is
undistinguishable from mere non-entity. If, however, this should be
denied, he inquires whether he, with this idea of God, could have
existed by any other cause, if there were no God. Not, he argues, by
himself; for, if he were the author of his own being, he would have
given himself every perfection, in a word, would have been God. Not by
his parents, for the same might be said of them, and so forth, if we
remount to a series of productive beings. Besides this, as much power
is required to preserve as to create, and the continuance of existence
in the effect implies the continued operation of the cause.

|Another proof of it.|

90. With this argument, in itself sufficiently refined, Descartes
blended another still more distant from common apprehension. Necessary
existence is involved in the idea of God. All other beings are
conceivable in their essence, as things possible; in God alone his
essence and existence are inseparable. Existence is necessary to
perfection; hence, a perfect being, or God, cannot be conceived
without necessary existence. Though I do not know that I have
misrepresented Descartes in this result of his very subtle argument,
it is difficult not to treat it as a sophism. And it was always
objected by his adversaries, that he inferred the necessity of the
thing from the necessity of the idea, which was the very point in
question. It seems impossible to vindicate many of his expressions,
from which he never receded in the controversy to which his
meditations gave rise. But the long habit of repeating in his mind the
same series of reasonings gave Descartes, as it will always do, an
inward assurance of their certainty, which could not be weakened by
any objection. The former argument for the being of God, whether
satisfactory or not, is to be distinguished from the present.[231]

     [231] “From what is said already of the ignorance we are in of
     the essence of mind, it is evident that we are not able to know
     whether any mind be necessarily existent by a necessity à priori
     founded in its essence, as we have showed time and space to be.
     Some philosophers think that such a necessity may be demonstrated
     of God from the nature of perfection. For God being infinitely,
     that is, absolutely perfect, they say he must needs be
     necessarily existent; because, say they, necessary existence is
     one of the greatest of perfections. But I take this to be one of
     those false and imaginary arguments, that are founded in the
     abuse of certain terms; and of all others this word, perfection,
     seems to have suffered most this way. I wish I could clearly
     understand what these philosophers mean by the word perfection,
     when they thus say, that necessity of existence is perfection.
     Does perfection here signify the same thing that it does, when we
     say that God is infinitely good, omnipotent, omniscient? Surely
     perfections are properly asserted of the several powers that
     attend the essences of things, and not of anything else, but in a
     very unnatural and improper sense. Perfection is a term of
     relation, and its sense implies a fitness or agreement to some
     certain end, and most properly to some power in the thing that is
     denominated perfect. The term, as the etymology of it shows, is
     taken from the operation of artists. When an artist proposes to
     himself to make anything that shall be serviceable to a certain
     effect, his work is called more or less perfect, according as it
     agrees more or less with the design of the artist. From arts, by
     a similitude of sense, this word has been introduced into
     morality, and signifies that quality of an agent by which it is
     able to act agreeable to the end its actions tend to. The
     metaphysicians who reduce everything to transcendental
     considerations, have also translated this term into their
     science, and use it to signify the agreement that anything has
     with that idea, which it is required that thing should answer to.
     This perfection, therefore, belongs to those attributes that
     constitute the essence of a thing; and that being is properly
     called the most perfect which has all, the best, and each the
     completest in its kind of those attributes, which can be united
     in one essence. Perfection, therefore, belongs to the essence of
     things, and not properly to their existence; which is not a
     perfection of anything, no attribute of it, but only the mere
     constitution of it _in rerum natura_. Necessary existence,
     therefore, which is a mode of existence, is not a perfection, it
     being no attribute of the thing no more than existence is, which
     is a mode of it. But it may be said, that though necessary
     existence is not a perfection in itself, yet it is so in its
     cause, upon account of that attribute of the entity from whence
     it flows; that that attribute must of all others be the most
     perfect and most excellent, which necessary existence flows from,
     it being such as cannot be conceived otherwise than as existing.
     But what excellency, what perfection is there in all this? Space
     is necessarily existent on account of extension, which cannot be
     conceived otherwise than as existing. But what perfection is
     there in space upon this account, which can in no manner act on
     anything, which is entirely devoid of all power, wherein I have
     showed all perfections to consist? Therefore, necessary
     existence, abstractedly considered, is no perfection; and,
     therefore, the idea of infinite perfection does not include, and
     consequently not prove, God to be necessarily existence [sic]. If
     he be so, it is on account of those attributes of his essence
     which we have no knowledge of.”

     I have made this extract from a very short tract, called
     Contemplatio Philosophica, by Brook Taylor, which I found in an
     unpublished memoir of his life printed by the late Sir William
     Young, in 1793. It bespeaks the clear and acute understanding of
     this celebrated philosopher, and appears to me an entire
     refutation of the scholastic argument of Descartes; one more fit
     for the Anselms and such dealers in words, from whom it came,
     than for himself.

|His deductions from this.|

91. From the idea of a perfect being, Descartes immediately deduced
the truth of his belief in an external world, and in the inferences of
his reason. For to deceive his creatures would be an imperfection in
God; but God is perfect. Whatever, therefore, is clearly and
distinctly apprehended by our reason, must be true. We have only to be
on our guard against our own precipitancy and prejudice, or surrender
of our reason to the authority of others. It is not by our
understanding, such as God gave it to us, that we are deceived; but
the exercise of our free will, a high prerogative of our nature, is
often so incautious as to make us not discern truth from falsehood,
and affirm or deny, by a voluntary act, that which we do not
distinctly apprehend. The properties of quantity, founded on our ideas
of extension and number, are distinctly perceived by our minds, and
hence the sciences of arithmetic and geometry are certainly true. But
when he turns his thoughts to the phenomena of external sensation,
Descartes cannot wholly extricate himself from his original
concession, the basis of his doubt, that the senses do sometimes
deceive us. He endeavours to reconcile this with his own theory, which
had built the certainty of all that we clearly hold certain on the
perfect veracity of God.

|Primary and secondary qualities.|

92. It is in this inquiry that he reaches that important distinction
between the primary and secondary properties of matter, the latter
being modifications of the former, relative only to our apprehension,
but not inherent in things, which, without being wholly new,
contradicted the Aristotelian theories of the schools;[232] and he
remarked that we are never, strictly speaking, deceived by our senses,
but by the inferences which we draw from them.

     [232] See Stewart’s First Dissertation on the Progress of
     Philosophy. This writer has justly observed, that many persons
     conceive _colour_ to be inherent in the object, so that the
     censure of Reid on Descartes and his followers, as having
     pretended to discover what no one doubted, is at least
     unreasonable in this respect. A late writer has gone so far as to
     say: “Nothing at first can seem a more rational, obvious, and
     incontrovertible conclusion, than that the colour of a body is an
     inherent quality, like its weight, hardness, &c; and that to
     _see_ the object, and to see it of _its own colour_, when nothing
     intervenes between our eyes and it, are one and the same thing.
     Yet this is only a prejudice.” &c. Herschel’s Discourse on Nat.
     Philos., p. 82. I almost even suspect that the notion of sounds
     and smells being secondary or merely sensible qualities, is not
     distinct in all men’s minds. But after we are become familiar
     with correct ideas, it is not easy to revive prejudices in our
     imagination. In the same page of Stewart’s Dissertation, he has
     been led, by dislike of the university of Oxford, to misconceive,
     in an extraordinary manner, a passage of Addison in the Guardian,
     which is evidently a sportive ridicule of the Cartesian theory,
     and is absolutely inapplicable to the Aristotelian.

93. Such is nearly the substance, exclusive of a great variety of more
or less episodical theories, of the three metaphysical works of
Descartes, the history of the soul’s progress from opinion to doubt,
and from doubt to certainty. Few would dispute, at the present day,
that he has destroyed too much of his foundations to render his
superstructure stable; and to readers averse from metaphysical
reflection, he must seem little else than an idle theorist, weaving
cobwebs for pastime which common sense sweeps away. It is fair,
however, to observe, that no one was more careful than Descartes to
guard against any practical scepticism in the affairs of life. He even
goes so far as to maintain, that a man having adopted any practical
opinion on such grounds as seem probable should pursue it with as much
steadiness as if it were founded on demonstration; observing, however,
as a general rule, to choose the most moderate opinions among those
which he should find current in his own country.[233]

     [233] Vol. i., p. 147. Vol. iii., p. 64.

|Objections made to his Meditations.|

94. The objections adduced against the Meditations are in a series of
seven. The first are by a theologian named Caterus, the second by
Mersenne, the third by Hobbes, the fourth by Arnauld, the fifth by
Gassendi, the sixth by some anonymous writers, the seventh by a Jesuit
of the name of Bourdin. To all of these Descartes replied with spirit
and acuteness. By far the most important controversy was with
Gassendi, whose objections were stated more briefly, and I think with
less skill, by Hobbes. It was the first trumpet in the new philosophy
of an ancient war between the sensual and ideal schools of psychology.
Descartes had revived, and placed in a clearer light, the doctrine of
mind, as not absolutely dependent upon the senses, nor of the same
nature as their objects. Stewart does not acknowledge him as
the first teacher of the soul’s immateriality. “That many of the
schoolmen, and that the wisest of the ancient philosophers, when they
described the mind as a spirit, or as a spark of celestial fire,
employed these expressions, not with any intention to materialize its
essence, but merely from want of more unexceptionable language, might
be shown with demonstrative evidence, if this were the proper place
for entering into the discussion.”[234] But though it cannot be said
that Descartes was absolutely the first who maintained the strict
immateriality of the soul, it is manifest to any one who has read his
correspondence, that the tenet, instead of being general, as we are
apt to presume, was by no means in accordance with the common opinion
of his age. The fathers, with the exception, perhaps the single one,
of Augustin, had taught the corporeity of the thinking substance.
Arnauld seems to consider the doctrine of Descartes as almost a
novelty in modern times. “What you have written concerning the
distinction between the soul and body appears to me very clear, very
evident, and quite divine; and as nothing is older than truth, I have
had singular pleasure to see that almost the same things have formerly
been very perspicuously and agreeably handled by St. Augustin in all
his tenth book on the Trinity, but chiefly in the tenth chapter.”[235]
But Arnauld himself, in his objections to the Meditations, had put it
as at least questionable, whether that which thinks is not something
extended, which, besides the usual properties of extended substances,
such as mobility and figure, has also this particular virtue and power
of thinking.[236] The reply of Descartes removed the difficulty of the
illustrious Jansenist, who became an ardent and almost complete
disciple of the new philosophy. In a placard against the Cartesian
philosophy, printed in 1647, which seems to have come from Revius,
professor of theology at Leyden, it is said: “As far as regards the
nature of things, nothing seems to hinder but that the soul may be
either a substance, or a mode of corporeal substance.”[237] And More,
who had carried on a metaphysical correspondence with Descartes, whom
he professed to admire, at least at that time, above all philosophers
that had ever existed, without exception of his favourite Plato,
extols him after his death in a letter to Clerselier, as having best
established the foundations of religion. “For the peripatetics,” he
says, “pretend that there are certain substantial forms emanating from
matter, and so united to it that they cannot subsist without it, to
which class these philosophers refer the souls of almost all living
beings, even those to which they allow sensation and thought; while
the Epicureans, on the other hand, who laugh at substantial forms,
ascribe thought to matter itself, so that it is M. Descartes alone of
all philosophers, who has at once banished from philosophy all these
substantial forms or souls derived from matter, and absolutely
divested matter itself of the faculty of feeling and thinking.”[238]

     [234] Dissertation, ubi suprà.

     [235] Descartes, x. 138.

     [236] Id. ii 14.

     [237] Vol. x., p. 73.

     [238] Vol. x., p. 386. Even More seems to have been perplexed at
     one time by the difficulty of accounting for the knowledge and
     sentiment of disembodied souls, and almost inclined to admit
     their corporeity. “J’aimerois mieux dire avec les Platoniciens,
     les anciens pères, et presque tous les philosophes, que les âmes
     humaines, tous les génies tant bons que mauvais, sont corporels,
     et que par consequent ils ont un sentiment réel, c’est à dire,
     qui leur vient du corps dont ils sont revêtus.” This is in a
     letter to Descartes, in 1649, which I have not read in Latin
     (vol. x., p. 249). I do not quite understand whether he meant
     only that the soul, when separated from the gross body, is
     invested with a substantial clothing, or that there is what we
     may call an interior body, a supposed monad, to which the
     thinking principle is indissolubly united. This is what all
     materialists mean, who have any clear notions whatever; it is a
     possible, perhaps a plausible, perhaps even a highly probable,
     hypothesis, but one which will not prove their theory. The former
     seems almost an indispensable supposition, if we admit
     sensibility to phenomena at all in the soul after death; but it
     is rather, perhaps, a theological than a metaphysical speculation.

|Theory of memory and imagination.|

95. It must be owned that the firm belief of Descartes in the
immateriality of the Ego or thinking principle, was accompanied with
what in later times would have been deemed rather too great
concessions to the materialists. He held the imagination and the
memory to be portions of the brain, wherein the images of our
sensations are bodily preserved; and even assigned such a motive force
to the imagination, as to produce those involuntary actions which we
often perform, and all the movements of brutes. “This explains how all
the motions of all animals arise, though we grant them no knowledge of
things, but only an imagination entirely corporeal, and how all those
operations which do not require the concurrence of reason are produced
in us.” But the whole of his notions as to the connexion of
the soul and body, and indeed all his physiological theories, of which
he was most enamoured, do little credit to the Cartesian philosophy.
They are among those portions of his creed which have lain most open
to ridicule, and which it would be useless for us to detail. He seems
to have expected more advantage to psychology from anatomical
researches than in that state of the science, or even probably in any
future state of it, anatomy could afford. When asked once where was
his library, he replied, showing a calf he was dissecting, This is my
library.[239] His treatise on the passions, a subject so important in
the philosophy of the human mind, is made up of crude hypotheses, or
at best irrelevant observations, on their physical causes and
concomitants.

     [239] Descartes was very fond of dissection: C’est un exercise où
     je me suis souvent occupé depuis onze ans, et je crois qu’il n’y
     a guère de médecins qui y ait regardé de si près que moi. Vol.
     viii., p. 100., also p. 174 and 180.

|Seat of soul in pineal gland.|

96. It may be considered as a part of this syncretism, as we may call
it, of the material and immaterial hypothesis, that Descartes fixed
the seat of the soul in the conarion, or pineal gland, which he
selected as the only part of the brain which is not double. By some
mutual communication which he did not profess to explain, though later
metaphysicians have attempted to do so, the unextended intelligence,
thus confined to a certain spot, receives the sensations which are
immediately produced through impressions on the substance of the
brain. If he did not solve the problem, be it remembered that the
problem has never since been solved. It was objected by a nameless
correspondent, who signs himself Hyperaspistes, that the soul being
incorporeal could not leave by its operations a trace on the brain,
which his theory seemed to imply. Descartes answered, in rather a
remarkable passage, that as to things purely intellectual, we do not,
properly speaking, remember them at all, as they are equally original
thoughts every time they present themselves to the mind, except that
they are habitually joined as it were, and associated with certain
names, which being bodily, make us remember them.[240]

     [240] This passage I must give in French, finding it very
     obscure, and having translated more according to what I guess
     than literally. Mais pour ce qui est des choses purement
     intellectuelles, à proprement parler on n’en aucun ressouvenir;
     et la première fois qu’elles se présentent à l’esprit, on les
     pense aussi bien que la seconde, si ce n’est peut-être qu’elles
     ont coûtume d’être jointes et comme attachées a certains noms
     qui, étant corporels, font que nous nous ressouvenons aussi
     d’elles. Vol. viii., p. 271.

|Gassendi’s attacks on the Meditations.|

97. If the orthodox of the age were not yet prepared for a doctrine
which seemed so favourable at least to natural religion as the
immateriality of the soul, it may be readily supposed, that Gassendi,
like Hobbes, had imbibed too much of the Epicurean theory to acquiesce
in the spiritualising principles of his adversary. In a sportive
style, he addresses him, _O anima!_ and Descartes, replying more
angrily, retorts upon him the name _O caro!_ which he frequently
repeats. Though we may lament such unhappy efforts at wit in these
great men, the names do not ill represent the spiritual and carnal
philosophies; the school that produced Leibnitz, Kant, and Stewart,
contrasted with that of Hobbes, Condillac, and Cabanis.

|Superiority of Descartes.|

98. It was a matter of course that the vulnerable passages of the six
Meditations would not escape the spear of so skilful an antagonist as
Gassendi. But many of his objections appear to be little more than
cavils; and upon the whole, Descartes leaves me with the impression of
his great superiority in metaphysical acuteness. It was indeed
impossible that men should agree, who persisted in using a different
definition of the important word, _idea_; and the same source of
interminable controversy has flowed ever since for their disciples.
Gassendi adopting the scholastic maxim, “Nothing is in the
understanding, which has not been in the sense,” carried it so much
farther than those from whom it came that he denied anything to be an
idea but what was imagined by the mind. Descartes repeatedly desired
both him and Hobbes, whose philosophy was built on the same notion, to
remark that he meant by idea, whatever can be conceived by the
understanding, though not capable of being represented by the
imagination.[241] Thus we imagine a triangle, but we can only
conceive a figure of a thousand sides; we know its existence, and can
reason about its properties, but we have no image whatever in the
mind, by which we can distinguish such a polygon from one of a smaller
or greater number of sides. Hobbes, in answer to this, threw out a
paradox which he has not, at least in so unlimited a manner, repeated,
that by reason, that is, by the process of reasoning, we can infer
nothing as to the nature of things, but only as to their names.[242]
It is singular that a man conversant at least with the elements of
geometry should have fallen into this error. For it does not appear
that he meant to speak only of natural substances, as to which his
language might seem to be a bad expression of what was afterwards
clearly shown by Locke. That the understanding can conceive and reason
upon that which the imagination cannot delineate, is evident not only
from Descartes’ instance of a polygon, but more strikingly by the
whole theory of infinites, which are certainly somewhat more than bare
words, whatever assistance words may give us in explaining them to
others or to ourselves.[243]

     [241] Par le nom d’idée, il veut seulement qu’on entende ici les
     images des choses matérielles dépeintes en la fantaisie
     corporelle; et cela étant supposé, il lui est aisé de montrer
     qu’on ne peut avoir propre et véritable idée de Dieu ni d’un
     ange; mais j’ai souvent averti, et principalement en celui là
     même, que je prends le nom d’idée pour tout ce qui est conçu
     immédiatement par l’esprit; en sorte que, lorsque je veux et que
     je crains, parce que je conçois en même temps que je veux et que
     je crains, ce vouloir et cette crainte sont mis par moi en nombre
     des idées; et je me suis servi de ce mot, parce qu’il étoit déjà
     communément reçu par les philosophes pour signifier les formes
     des conceptions. de l’entendement divin, encore que nous ne
     reconnoissions en Dieu aucune fantaisie ou imagination
     corporelle, et je n’en savois point de plus propre. Et je pense
     avoir assez expliqué l’idée de Dieu pour ceux qui veulent
     concevoir les sens que je donne à mes paroles; mais pour ceux qui
     s’attachent à les entendre autrement que je ne fais, je ne le
     pourrais jamais assez. Vol. i., p. 404. This is in answer to
     Hobbes; the objections of Hobbes, and Descartes’ replies, turn
     very much on this primary difference between ideas and images,
     which alone our countrymen could understand, and ideas as
     intellections, conceptions, νοουμενα [nooumena], incapable of
     being imagined, but not less certainly known and reasoned upon.
     The French is a translation, but made by Clerselier under the eye
     of Descartes, so that it may be quoted as an original.

     [242] Que dirons nous maintenant si peut-être le raisonnement
     n’est rien autre chose qu’un assemblage et un enchaînement de
     noms par ce mot est? D’ou il s’ensuivroit que par la raison nous
     ne concluons rien de tout touchant la nature des choses, mais
     seulement touchant leurs appellations, c’est à dire que par elle
     nous voyons simplement si nous assemblons bien ou mal les noms
     des choses, selon les conventions que nous avons faites à notre
     fantaisie touchant leurs significations, p. 476. Descartes merely
     answered:--L’assemblage qui se fait dans le raisonnement n’est
     pas celui des noms, mais bien celui des choses signifiées par les
     noms; et je m’étonne que le contraire puisse venir en l’esprit de
     personne. Descartes treated Hobbes, whom he did not esteem, with
     less attention than his other correspondents. Hobbes could not
     understand what have been called ideas of reflection, such as
     fear, and thought it was nothing more than the idea of the object
     feared. “For what else is the fear of a lion,” he says, “than the
     idea of this lion, and the effect which it produces in the heart,
     which leads us to run away? But this running is not a thought; so
     that nothing of thought exists in fear but the idea of the
     object.” Descartes only replied, “it is self-evident that it is
     not the same thing to see a lion and fear him, that it is to see
     him only,” p. 483.

     [243] I suspect, from what I have since read, that Hobbes had a
     different, and what seems to me a very erroneous view of
     infinite, or infinitesimal quantities in geometry. For he answers
     the old sophism of Zeno, Quicquid dividi potest in partes
     infinitas est infinitum, in a manner which does not meet the real
     truth of the case: Dividi posse in partes infinitas nihil aliud
     est quam dividi posse in partes _quotcunque quis velit_. Logica
     sive Computatio, c. 5., p. 38 (edit. 1667).

|Stewart’s remarks on Descartes.|

99. Dugald Stewart has justly dwelt on the signal service rendered by
Descartes to psychological philosophy, by turning the mental vision
inward upon itself, and accustoming us to watch the operations of our
intellect, which, though employed upon ideas obtained through the
senses, are as distinguishable from them as the workman from his work.
He has given indeed to Descartes a very proud title, Father of the
experimental philosophy of the human mind, as if he were to man what
Bacon was to nature.[244] By patient observation of what
passed within him, by holding his soul as it were an object in a
microscope, which is the only process of a good metaphysician, he
became habituated to throw away those integuments of sense which hide
us from ourselves. Stewart has censured him for the paradox, as he
calls it, that the _essence_ of mind consists in thinking, and
that of matter in extension. That the act of thinking is as
inseparable from the mind as extension is from matter, cannot indeed
be proved; since, as our thoughts are successive, it is not
inconceivable that there may be intervals of duration between them;
but it can hardly be reckoned a paradox. But whoever should be led by
the word essence to suppose that Descartes confounded the percipient
thinking substance, the Ego, upon whose bosom, like that of the ocean,
the waves of perception are raised by every breeze of sense, with the
perception itself, or even, what is scarcely more tenable, with the
reflective action, or thought; that he anticipated this strange
paradox of Hume in his earliest work, from which he silently withdrew
in his Essays, would not only do great injustice to one of the acutest
understandings that ever came to the subject, but overlook several
clear assertions of the distinction, especially in his answer to
Hobbes. “The thought,” he says, “differs from that which thinks, as
the mode from the substance.”[245] And Stewart has in his earliest
work justly corrected Reid in this point as to the Cartesian
doctrine.[246]

     [244] Dissertation on Progress of Philosophy. The word experiment
     must be taken in the sense of observation. Stewart very early
     took up his admiration for Descartes. “He was the first
     philosopher who stated in a clear and satisfactory manner the
     distinction between mind and matter, and who pointed out the
     proper plan for studying the intellectual philosophy. It is
     chiefly in consequence of his precise ideas with respect to this
     distinction, that we may remark in all his metaphysical writings,
     a perspicuity which is not observable in those of any of his
     predecessors.” Elem. of Philos. of Human Mind, vol. i. (published
     in 1792) note A. “When Descartes,” he says in the dissertation
     before quoted, “established it as a general principle that
     _nothing conceivable by the power of imagination could throw any
     light on the operations of thought_, a principle which I consider
     as exclusively his own, he laid the foundations of the
     experimental philosophy of the human mind. That the same truth
     had been previously perceived more or less distinctly by Bacon
     and others, appears probable from the general complexion of their
     speculations; but which of them has expressed it with equal
     precision, or laid it down as a fundamental maxim in their
     logic?” The words which I have put in italics seem too vaguely
     and not very clearly expressed, nor am I aware that they are
     borne out in their literal sense, by any position of Descartes;
     nor do I apprehend the allusion to Bacon. But it is certain that
     Descartes, and still more his disciples Arnauld and Malebranche,
     take better care to distinguish what can be imagined from what
     can be conceived or understood, than any of the school of
     Gassendi in this or other countries. One of the great merits of
     Descartes as a metaphysical writer, not unconnected with this, is
     that he is generally careful to avoid figurative language in
     speaking of mental operations, wherein he has much the advantage
     over Locke.

     [245] Vol. i., p. 470. Arnauld objected, in a letter to
     Descartes, Comment se peut il faire que la pensée constitue
     l’essence de l’esprit, puisque l’esprit est une substance, et que
     la pensée semble n’en être qu’un mode? Descartes replied that
     thought in general, la pensée, ou la nature que pense, in which
     he placed the essence of the soul, was very different from such
     or such particular acts of thinking, vol. vi., p. 153-160.

     [246] Philosophy of Human Mind, vol. i., note A. See the
     Principia, § 63.

|Paradoxes of Descartes.|

100. Several singular positions which have led to an undue
depreciation of Descartes in general as a philosopher, occur in his
metaphysical writings. Such was his denial of thought, and, as is
commonly said, sensation to brutes, which he seems to have founded on
the mechanism of the bodily organs, a cause sufficient, in his
opinion, to explain all the phænomena of the motions of animals, and
to obviate the difficulty of assigning to them immaterial souls;[247]
his rejection of final causes in the explanation of nature, as
far above our comprehension, and unnecessary to those who had the
internal proof of God’s existence; his still more paradoxical tenet
that the truth of geometrical theorems, and every other axiom of
intuitive certainty, depended upon the will of God; a notion that
seems to be a relic of his original scepticism, but which he
pertinaciously defends throughout his letters.[248] From remarkable
errors, men of original and independent genius are rarely exempt;
Descartes had pulled down an edifice constructed by the labours of
near two thousand years, with great reason in many respects, yet
perhaps with too unlimited a disregard of his predecessors; it was his
destiny, as it had been theirs, to be sometimes refuted and
depreciated in his turn. But the single fact of his having first
established, both in philosophical and popular belief, the
immateriality of the soul, were we even to forget the other great
accessions which he made to psychology, would declare the influence he
has had on human opinion. From this immateriality, however, he did not
derive the tenet of its immortality. He was justly contented to say
that from the intrinsic difference between mind and body, the
dissolution of the one could not necessarily take away the existence
of the other, but that it was for God to determine whether it should
continue to exist; and this determination, as he thought, could only
be learned from his revealed will. The more powerful arguments,
according to general apprehension, which reason affords for the
sentient being of the soul after death, did not belong to the
metaphysical philosophy of Descartes, and would never have been very
satisfactory to his mind. He says, in one of his letters, that “laying
aside what faith assures us of, he owns that it is more easy to make
conjectures for our own advantage and entertain promising hopes, than
to feel any confidence in their accomplishment.”[249]

     [247] It is a common opinion that Descartes denied all life and
     sensibility to brutes. But this seems not so clear. Il faut
     remarquer, he says in a letter to More, where he has been arguing
     against the existence in brutes of any thinking principle, que je
     parle de la pensée, non de la vie, ou du sentiment; car je n’ôte
     la vie à aucun animal, ne la faisant consister que dans la seule
     chaleur du cœur. Je ne leur refuse pas même le sentiment autant
     qu’il dépend des organes du corps, vol. x., p. 208. In a longer
     passage, if he does not express himself very clearly, he admits
     passions in brutes, and it seems impossible that he could have
     ascribed passions to what has no sensation. Much of what he here
     says is very good. Bien que Montaigne et Charron aient dit, qu’il
     y a plus de différence d’homme à homme que d’homme à bête, il
     n’est toutefois jamais trouvé aucune bête si parfaite, qu’elle
     ait usé de quelque signe pour faire entendre à d’autres animaux
     quelque chose que n’eût point de rapport à ses passions; et il
     n’y a point d’homme si imparfait qu’il n’en use; en sorte que
     ceux qui sont sourds et muets inventent des signes particuliers
     par lesquels ils expriment leur pensées; ce qui me semble un très
     fort argument pour prouver que ce qui fait que les bêtes ne
     parlent point comme nous, est qu’elles n’ont aucune pensée, et
     non point que les organes leur manquent. Et on ne peut dire
     qu’elles parlent entre elles, mais que nous ne les entendons pas;
     car _comme les chiens et quelques autres animaux nous expriment
     leurs passions_, ils nous exprimeroient aussi bien leurs pensées
     s’ils en avoient. Je sais bien que les bêtes font beaucoup de
     choses mieux que nous, mais je ne m’en étonne pas; car cela même
     sert à prouver qu’elles agissent naturellement, et par ressorts,
     ainsi qu’un horloge; laquelle montre bien mieux l’heure qu’il
     est, que notre jugement nous l’enseigne.... On peut seulement
     dire que, bien que les bêtes ne fassent aucune action qui nous
     assure qu’elles pensent, toutefois, à cause que les organes de
     leurs corps ne sont pas fort differens des nôtres, on peut
     conjecturer qu’il y a quelque pensée jointe à ces organes, ainsi
     que nous experimentons en nous, bien que la leur soit beaucoup
     moins parfaite; à quoi je n’ai rien à répondre, si non que si
     elles pensoient aussi que nous, elles auroient une ame immortelle
     aussi bien que nous; ce qui n’est pas vraisemblable, à cause
     qu’il n’y a point de raison pour le croire de quelques animaux,
     sans le croire de tous, et qu’il y en a plusieurs trop imparfaits
     pour pouvoir croire cela d’eux, comme sont les huitres, les
     éponges, &c. Vol. ix., p. 425. I do not see the meaning of une
     ame immortelle in the last sentence; if the words had been une
     ame immatérielle, it would be to the purpose. More, in a letter
     to which this is a reply, had argued as if Descartes took brutes
     for insensible machines, and combats the paradox with the
     arguments which common sense furnishes. He would even have
     preferred ascribing immortality to them, as many ancient
     philosophers did. But surely Descartes, who did not acknowledge
     any proofs of the immortality of the human soul to be valid,
     except those founded on revelation, needed not to trouble himself
     much about this difficulty.

     [248] C’est en effet parler de Dieu comme d’un Jupiter ou d’un
     Saturne, et l’assujettir au Styx et aux destinées, que de dire
     que ces vérités sont indépendantes de lui. Ne craignez point, je
     vous prie, d’assurer et de publier partout que c’est Dieu qui a
     établi ces lois en la nature, ainsi qu’un roi établit les lois en
     son royaume. Vol. vi., p. 109. He argues as strenuously the same
     point in p. 132 and p. 307.

     [249] Vol. ix., p. 369.

|His just notion of definitions.|

101. Descartes was perhaps the first who saw that definitions of
words, already as clear as they can be made, are nugatory or
impenetrable. This alone would distinguish his philosophy from that of
the Aristotelians, who had wearied and confused themselves for twenty
centuries with unintelligible endeavours to grasp by definition what
refuses to be defined. “Mr Locke,” says Stewart, “claims this
improvement as entirely his own, but the merit of it unquestionably
belongs to Descartes, although it must be owned that he has not always
sufficiently attended to it in his researches.”[250] A still more
decisive passage to this effect, than that referred to by Stewart in
the Principia will be found in the posthumous dialogue on the Search
after Truth. It is objected by one of the interlocutors, as it had
actually been by Gassendi, that, to prove his existence by the act of
thinking, he should first know what existence and what thought is. “I
agree with you,” the representative of Descartes replies, “that it is
necessary to know what doubt is, and what thought is, before we can be
fully persuaded of this reasoning; I doubt, therefore I am, or what is
the same, I think, therefore I am. But do not imagine that for this
purpose you must torture your mind to find out the next genus, or the
essential differences, as the logicians talk, and so compose a regular
definition. Leave this to such as teach or dispute in the schools. But
whoever will examine things by himself, and judge of them according to
his understanding, cannot be so senseless as not to see clearly, when
he pays attention, what doubting, thinking, being, are, and as to have
any need to learn their distinctions. Besides, there are things which
we render more obscure, in attempting to define them, because, as they
are very simple and very clear, we cannot know and comprehend them
better than by themselves. And it should be reckoned among the
chief errors that can be committed in science for men to fancy that
they can define that which they can only conceive, and distinguish
what is clear in it from what is obscure, while they do not see the
difference between that which must be defined before it is understood
and that which can be fully known by itself. Now, among things which
can thus be clearly known by themselves, we must put doubting,
thinking, being. For I do not believe any one ever existed so stupid
as to need to know what being is before he could affirm that he is;
and it is the same of thought and doubt. Nor can he learn these things
except by himself, nor be convinced of them but by his own experience,
and by that consciousness and inward witness which every man finds in
himself when he examines the subject. And as we should define
whiteness in vain to a man who can see nothing, while one can open his
eyes and see a white object requires no more, so to know what doubting
is, and what thinking is, it is only necessary to doubt and to
think.”[251] Nothing could more tend to cut short the verbal cavils of
the schoolmen, than this limitation of their favourite exercise,
definition. It is due, therefore, to Descartes, so often accused of
appropriating the discoveries of others, that we should establish his
right to one of the most important that the new logic has to boast.

     [250] Dissertation, ubi, suprá, Stewart, in his Philosophical
     Essays, note A, had censured Reid for assigning this remark to
     Descartes and Locke, but without giving any better reason than
     that it is found in a work written by Lord Stair; earlier,
     certainly, than Locke, but not before Descartes. It may be
     doubtful, as we shall see hereafter, whether Locke has not gone
     beyond Descartes, or at least distinguished undefinable words
     more strictly.

     [251] Vol. xi., p. 369.

|His notion of substances.|

102. He seems, at one moment, to have been on the point of taking
another step very far in advance of his age. “Let us take,” he says,
“a piece of wax from the honey-comb; it retains some taste and smell,
it is hard, it is cold, it has a very marked colour, form, and size.
Approach it to the fire; it becomes liquid, warm, inodorous,
tasteless; its form and colour are changed, its size is increased.
Does the same wax remain after these changes? It must be allowed that
it does; no one doubts it, no one thinks otherwise. What was it then
that we so distinctly knew to exist in this piece of wax? Nothing
certainly that we observed by the senses, since all that the taste,
the smell, the sight, the touch reported to us has disappeared, and
still the same wax remains.” This something which endures under every
change of sensible qualities cannot be imagined; for the imagination
must represent some of these qualities, and none of them are essential
to the thing; it can only be conceived by the understanding.[252]

     [252] Méditation Seconde, i. 256.

|Not quite correct.|

103. It may seem almost surprising to us, after the writings of Locke
and his followers on the one hand, and the chemist with his crucible
on the other, have chased these abstract substances of material
objects from their sanctuaries, that a man of such prodigious
acuteness and intense reflection as Descartes should not have remarked
that the identity of wax after its liquefaction is merely nominal, and
depending on arbitrary language, which in many cases gives new
appellations to the same aggregation of particles after a change of
their sensible qualities; and that all we call substances are but
aggregates of resisting moveable corpuscles, which by the laws of
nature are capable of affecting our senses differently, according to
the combinations they may enter into, and the changes they may
successively undergo. But if he had distinctly seen this, which I do
not apprehend that he did, it is not likely that he would have
divulged the discovery. He had already given alarm to the jealous
spirit of orthodoxy by what now appears to many so self-evident, that
they have treated the supposed paradox as a trifling with words, the
doctrine that colour, heat, smell, and other secondary qualities, or
accidents of bodies, do not exist in them, but in our own minds, and
are the effects of their intrinsic or primary qualities. It was the
the tenet of the schools that these were sensible realities, inherent
in bodies; and the church held as an article of faith, that the
substance of bread being withdrawn from the consecrated wafer, the
accidents of that substance remained as before, but independent, and
not inherent in any other. Arnauld raised this objection, which
Descartes endeavoured to repel by a new theory of transubstantiation;
but it always left a shade of suspicion, in the Catholic church of
Rome, on the orthodoxy of Cartesianism.

|His notions of intuitive truth.|

104. “The paramount and indisputable authority which, in all our
reasonings concerning the human mind, he ascribes to the evidence of
consciousness” is reckoned by Stewart among the great merits of
Descartes. It is certain that there are truths which we know, as it is
called, intuitively, that is, by the mind’s immediate inward glance.
And reasoning would be interminable, if it did not find its ultimate
limit in truths which it cannot prove. Gassendi imputed to Descartes,
that, in his fundamental enthymem, Cogito, ergo sum, he supposed a
knowledge of the major premise, Quod cogitat, est. But Descartes
replied that it was a great error to believe that our knowledge of
particular propositions must always be deduced from universals,
according to the rules of logic; whereas, on the contrary, it is by
means of our knowledge of particulars that we ascend to generals,
though it is true that we descend again from them to infer other
particular propositions.[253] It is probable that Gassendi did not
make this objection very seriously.

     [253] Vol. ii., p. 305. See too the passage, quoted above, in his
     posthumous dialogue.

105. Thus the logic of Descartes, using that word for principles that
guide our reasoning, was an instrument of defence both against the
captiousness of ordinary scepticism, that of the Pyrrhonic school, and
against the disputatious dogmatism of those who professed to serve
under the banner of Aristotle. He who reposes on his own
consciousness, or who recurs to first principles of intuitive
knowledge, though he cannot be said to silence his adversary, should
have the good sense to be silent himself, which puts equally an end to
debate. But so far as we are concerned with the investigation of
truth, the Cartesian appeal to our own consciousness, of which Stewart
was very fond, just as it is in principle, _may_ end in an
assumption of our own prejudices as the standard of belief. Nothing
can be truly self-evident, but that which a clear, an honest, and an
experienced understanding in another man acknowledges to be so.

|Treatise on art of logic.|

106. Descartes has left a treatise highly valuable, but not very much
known, on the art of logic, or rules for the conduct of the
understanding.[254] Once only, in a letter, he has alluded to the name
of Bacon.[255] There are perhaps a few passages in this short tract
that remind us of the Novum Organum. But I do not know that the
coincidence is such as to warrant a suspicion that he was indebted to
it; we may reckon it rather a parallel, than a derivative logic;
written in the same spirit of cautious, inductive procedure, less
brilliant and original in its inventions, but of more general
application than the Novum Organum, which is with some difficulty
extended beyond the province of natural philosophy. Descartes is as
averse as Bacon to syllogistic forms. “Truth,” he says, “often escapes
from these fetters, in which those who employ them remain entangled.
This is less frequently the case with those who make no use of logic,
experience showing that the most subtle of sophisms cheat none but
sophists themselves, not those who trust to their natural reason. And
to convince ourselves how little this syllogistic art serves towards
the discovery of truth, we may remark that the logicians can form no
syllogism with a true conclusion, unless they are already acquainted
with the truth that the syllogism develops. Hence it follows that the
vulgar logic is wholly useless to him who would discover truth for
himself, though it may assist in explaining to others the truth he
already knows, and that it would be better to transfer it as a science
from philosophy to rhetoric.”[256]

     [254] M. Cousin has translated and republished two works
     of Descartes, which had only appeared in Opera Posthuma Cartesii,
     Amsterdam, 1701. Their authenticity, from external and intrinsic
     proofs, is out of question. One of these is that mentioned in the
     text; entitled “Rules for the Direction of the Understanding;”
     which, though logical in its subject, takes most of its
     illustrations from mathematics. The other is a dialogue, left
     imperfect, in which he sustains the metaphysical principles of
     his philosophy. Of these two little tracts, their editor has
     said, that “they equal in vigour and perhaps surpass in
     arrangement the Meditations and Discourse on Method. We see in
     these more unequivocally the main object of Descartes, and the
     spirit of the revolution which has created modern philosophy, and
     placed in the understanding itself the principle of all
     certainty, the point of departure for all legitimate inquiry.
     They might seem written but yesterday, and for the present age.”
     Vol. xi. preface, p. 1. I may add to this, that I consider the
     Rules for the direction of the Understanding as one of the best
     works on logic (in the enlarged sense) which I have ever read;
     more practically useful, perhaps, to young students than the
     Novum Organum; and though, as I have said, his illustrations are
     chiefly mathematical, most of his rules are applicable to the
     general discipline of the reasoning powers. It occupies little
     more than one hundred pages, and I think that I am doing a
     service in recommending it. Many of the rules will, of course, be
     found in later books; some possibly in earlier. This tract, as
     well as the dialogue which follows it, is incomplete, a portion
     being probably lost.

     [255] Si quelqu’un de cette humeur vouloit entreprendre
     d’écrire l’histoire des apparences célestes selon la méthode de
     Verulamius. Vol. vi., p. 210.

     [256] Vol. xi., p. 255.

|Merits of his writings.|

107. It would occupy too much space to point out the many profound and
striking thoughts which this treatise on the conduct of the
understanding, and indeed most of the writings of Descartes contain.
“The greater part of the questions on which the learned dispute are
but questions of words. These occur so frequently that, if
philosophers would agree on the signification of their words,
scarce any of their controversies would remain.” This has been
continually said since; but it is a proof of some progress in wisdom,
when the original thought of one age becomes the truism of the next.
No one had been so much on his guard against the equivocation of
words, or knew so well their relation to the operations of the mind.
And it may be said, generally, though not without exception of the
metaphysical writings of Descartes, that we find in them a perspicuity
which springs from his unremitting attention to the logical process of
inquiry, admitting no doubtful or ambiguous position, and never
requiring from his reader a deference to any authority but that of
demonstration. It is a great advantage in reading such writers that we
are able to discern when they are manifestly in the wrong. The
sophisms of Plato, of Aristotle, of the schoolmen, and of a great many
recent metaphysicians, are disguised by their obscurity; and while
they creep insidiously into the mind of the reader, are always denied
and explained away by partial disciples.

|His notions of free will.|

108. Stewart has praised Descartes for having recourse to the evidence
of consciousness in order to prove the liberty of the will. But he
omits to tell us that the notions entertained by this philosopher were
not such as have been generally thought compatible with free agency in
the only sense that admits of controversy. It was an essential part of
the theory of Descartes that God is the cause of all human actions.
“Before God sent us into the world,” he says in a letter, “he knew
exactly what all the inclinations of our will would be; it is he that
has implanted them in us; it is he also that has disposed all other
things, so that such or such objects should present themselves to us
at such or such times, by means of which he has known that our free
will would determine us to such or such actions, and he has willed
that it should be so; but he has not willed to compel us
thereto.”[257] “We could not demonstrate,” he says at another time,
“that God exists, except by considering him as a being absolutely
perfect; and he could not be absolutely perfect, if there could happen
anything in the world which did not spring entirely from him.... Mere
philosophy is enough to make us know that there cannot enter the least
thought into the mind of man, but God must will and have willed from
all eternity that it should enter there.”[258] This is in a letter to
his highly intelligent friend, the princess Palatine Elizabeth,
granddaughter of James I.; and he proceeds to declare himself strongly
in favour of predestination, denying wholly any particular providence,
to which she had alluded, as changing the decrees of God, and all
efficacy of prayer, except as one link in the chain of his
determinations. Descartes, therefore, whatever some of his disciples
may have become, was far enough from an Arminian theology. “As to free
will,” he says elsewhere, “I own that thinking only of ourselves we
cannot but reckon it independent, but when we think of the infinite
power of God we cannot but believe that all things depend on him, and
that consequently our free will must do so too.... But since our
knowledge of the existence of God should not hinder us from being
assured of our free will, because we feel and are conscious of it in
ourselves, so that if our free will should not make us doubt of the
existence of God. For the independence which we experience and feel in
ourselves, and which is sufficient to make our actions praiseworthy or
blameable, is not incompatible with a dependence of another nature,
according to which all things are subject to God.”[259]

     [257] Vol. ix., p. 374.

     [258] Id. p. 246.

     [259] Vol. ix., p. 368. This had originally been stated
     in the Principia with less confidence, the free will of man and
     predetermination of God being both asserted as true, but their
     co-existence incomprehensible. Vol. iii., p. 86.

|Fame of his system and attacks upon it.|

109. A system so novel, so attractive to the imagination by its bold
and brilliant paradoxes as that of Descartes, could not but excite the
attention of an age already roused to the desire of a new philosophy,
and to the scorn of ancient authority. His first treatises appeared in
French; and, though he afterwards employed Latin, his works were very
soon translated by his disciples, and under his own care. He wrote in
Latin with great perspicuity; in French with liveliness and elegance.
His mathematical and optical writings gave him a reputation which envy
could not take away, and secured his philosophy from that general
ridicule which sometimes overwhelms an obscure author. His very
enemies, numerous and vehement as they were, served to enhance the
celebrity of the Cartesian system, which he seems to have anticipated
by publishing their objections to his Meditations with his own
replies. In the universities, bigoted for the most part to
Aristotelian authority, he had no chance of public reception; but the
influence of the universities was much diminished in France,
and a new theory had perhaps better chances in its favour on account
of their opposition. But the Jesuits, a more powerful body, were in
general adverse to the Cartesian system, and especially some time
afterwards, when it was supposed to have the countenance of several
leading Jansenists. The Epicurean school, led by Gassendi and Hobbes,
presented a formidable phalanx; since it in fact comprehended the wits
of the world, the men of indolence and sensuality, quick to discern
the many weaknesses of Cartesianism, with no capacity for its
excellencies. It is unnecessary to say, how predominant this class was
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, both in France and
England.

|Controversy with Voet.|

110. Descartes was evidently in considerable alarm lest the church
should bear with its weight upon his philosophy.[260] He had the
censure on Galileo before his eyes, and certainly used some chicane of
words as to the earth’s movement upon this account. It was, however,
in the Protestant country, which he had chosen as his harbour of
refuge, that he was doomed to encounter the roughest storm. Gisbert
Voet, an eminent theologian in the university of Utrecht, and the head
of the party in the church of Holland, which had been victorious in
the synod of Dort, attacked Descartes with all the virulence and
bigotry characteristic of his school of divinity. The famous
demonstration of the being of God he asserted to be a cover for
atheism, and thus excited a flame of controversy, Descartes being not
without supporters in the university, especially Regius, professor of
medicine. The philosopher was induced by these assaults to change his
residence from a town in the province of Utrecht to Leyden. Voet did
not cease to pursue him with outrageous calumny, and succeeded in
obtaining decrees of the senate and university, which interdicted
Regius from teaching that “new and unproved (præsumpta) philosophy” to
his pupils. The war of libels on the Voetian side did not cease for
some years, and Descartes replied with no small acrimony against Voet
himself. The latter had recourse to the civil power, and instituted a
prosecution against Descartes, which was quashed by the interference
of the prince of Orange. But many in the university of Leyden, under
the influence of a notable theologian of that age, named Triglandius,
one of the stoutest champions of Dutch orthodoxy, raised a cry against
the Cartesian philosophy as being favourable to Pelagianism and
popery, the worst names that could be given in Holland; and it was
again through the protection of the prince of Orange that he escaped a
public censure. Regius, the most zealous of his original advocates,
began to swerve from the fidelity of a sworn disciple, and published a
book containing some theories of his own, which Descartes thought
himself obliged to disavow. Ultimately he found, like many benefactors
of mankind, that he had purchased reputation at the cost of peace;
and, after some visits to France, where, probably from the same cause,
he never designed to settle, found an honourable asylum and a
premature death at the court of Christina. He died in 1651, having
worked a more important change in speculative philosophy than any who
had preceded him since the revival of learning; for there could be no
comparison, in that age, between the celebrity and effect of his
writings and those of Lord Bacon. The latter had few avowed enemies,
till it was too late to avow enmity.[261]

     [260] On a tellement assujetti la théologie à Aristotle,
     qu’il est impossible d’expliquer une autre philosophie qu’il ne
     semble d’abord qu’elle soit contre la foi. Et à propos de ceci,
     je vous prie de me mander s’il n’y a rien de déterminé en la foi
     touchant l’étendue du monde: savoir s’il est fini ou plutôt
     infini, et si tout ce qu’on appelle espaces imaginaires soient
     des corps créés et véritables. Vol. vi., p. 73.

     [261] The life of Descartes was written, very fully and
     with the warmth of a disciple, by Baillet, in two volumes quarto,
     1691, of which he afterwards published an abridgment. In this we
     find at length the attacks made on him by the Voetian
     theologians. Brucker has given a long and valuable account of the
     Cartesian philosophy, but not favourable, and perhaps not quite
     fair. Vol. v., p. 200-334. Buhle is, as usual, much inferior to
     Brucker. But those who omit the mathematical portion will not
     find the original works of Descartes very long, and they are well
     worthy of being read.

|Charges of plagiarism.|

111. The prejudice against Descartes, especially in his own country,
was aggravated by his indiscreet and not very warrantable assumption
of perfect originality.[262] No one, I think, can fairly
refuse to own, that the Cartesian metaphysics, taken in their
consecutive arrangement, form truly an original system; and it would
be equally unjust to deny the splendid discoveries he developed in
algebra and optics. But upon every one subject which Descartes
treated, he has not escaped the charge of plagiarism; professing
always to be ignorant of what had been done by others, he falls
perpetually into their track; more, as his adversaries maintained,
than the chances of coincidence could fairly explain. Leibnitz has
summed up the claims of earlier writers to the pretended discoveries
of Descartes; and certainly it is a pretty long bill to be presented
to any author. I shall insert this passage in a note, though much of
it has no reference to this portion of the Cartesian philosophy.[263]
It may perhaps be thought by candid minds, that we cannot apply the
doctrine of chances to coincidence of reasoning in men of acute and
inquisitive spirits, as fairly as we may to that of style or imagery;
but, if we hold strictly that the older writer may claim the exclusive
praise of the philosophical discovery, we must regret to see such a
multitude of feathers plucked from the wing of an eagle.

     [262] I confess, he says in his logic, that I was born
     with such a temper, that the chief pleasure I find in study is
     not from the learning the arguments of others, but by inventing
     my own. This disposition alone impelled me in youth to the study
     of science; hence, whenever a new book promised by its title some
     new discovery, before sitting down to read it, I used to try
     whether my own natural sagacity could lead me to anything of the
     kind, and I took care not to lose this innocent pleasure by too
     hasty a perusal. This answered so often that I at length
     perceived that I arrived at truth, not as other men do after
     blind and precarious guesses, by good luck rather than skill, but
     that long experience had taught me certain fixed rules, which
     were of surprising utility, and of which I afterwards made use to
     discover more truths. Vol. xi., p. 252.

     [263] Dogmata ejus metaphysica, velut circa ideas a
     sensibus remotas, et animæ distinctionem a corpore, et fluxam per
     se rerum materialium fidem, prorsus Platonica sunt. Argumentum
     pro existentia Dei, ex eo, quod ens perfectissimum, vel quo majus
     intelligi non potest, existentiam includit, fuit Anselmi, et in
     libro “Contra insipientem” inscripto extat inter ejus opera,
     passimque a scholasticis examinatur. In doctrina de continuo,
     pleno et loco Aristotelem noster secutus est, Stoicosque in re
     morali penitus expressit, floriferis ut apes in saltibus omnia
     libant. In explicatione rerum mechina Leucippum et Democritum
     præeuntes habuit, qui et vortices ipsos jam docuerant. Jordanus
     Brunus easdem fere de magnitudine universi ideas habuisse
     dicitur, quemadmodum et notavit V. CC. Stephanus Spleissius, ut
     de Gilberto nil dicam, cujus magneticæ considerationes tum per
     se, tum ad systema universi applicatæ, Cartesio plurimum
     profuerunt. Explicationem gravitatis per materiæ solidioris
     rejectionem in tangente, quod in physica Cartesiana prope
     pulcherrimum est, didicit ex Keplero, qui similitudine palearum
     motu aquæ in vase gyrantis ad centrum contrusarum rem explicuit
     primus. Actionem lucis in distans, similitudine baculi pressi jam
     veteres adumbravere. Circa iridem a M. Antonio de Dominis non
     parum lucis accepit. Keplerum fuisse primum suum in dioptricis
     magistrum, et in eo argumento omnes ante se mortales longo
     intervallo antegressum, fatetur Cartesius in epistolis
     familiaribus; nam in scriptis, quæ ipse edidit, longè abest a
     tali confessione aut laude, tametsi illa ratio, quæ rationum
     dictionem explicat, et compositione nimirum duplicis conatûs
     perpendicularis ad superficiem et ad eandem paralleli, disertè
     apud Keplerum extet, qui eodem, ut Cartesius, modo æqualitatem
     angulorum incidentiæ et reflexionis hinc deducit. Idque gratam
     mentionem ideo merebatur, quod omnis prope Cartesii ratiocinatio
     huic innititur principio. Legem refractionis primum invenisse
     Willebroodum Snellium, Isaacus Vossius patefecit, quanquam non
     ideo negare ausim, Cartesium in eadem incidere potuisse de suo.
     Negavit in epistolis Vietam sibi lectum, sed Thomæ Harrioti Angli
     libros analyticos posthumos anno 1631 editos vidisse multi vix
     dubitant; usque adeo magnus est eorum consensus cum calculo
     geometriæ Cartesianæ. Sane jam Harriotus æquationem nihilo
     æqualem posuit, et hinc derivavit, quomodo oriatur æquatio ex
     multiplicatione radicum in se invicem, et quomodo radiorum
     auctione, diminutione, multiplicatione aut divisione variari
     æquatio possit, et quomodo proinde natura, et constitutio
     æquationem et radicum cognosci possit ex terminorum habitudine.
     Itaque narrat celeberrimus Wallisius, Robervalium, qui miratus
     erat, unde Cartesio in mentem venisset palmarium illud,
     æquationem ponere æqualem nihilo ad instar unius quantitatis,
     ostenso sibi a Domino de Cavendish libro Harrioti exclamasse, il
     l’a vu! il l’a vu! vidit, vidit. Reductionem quadratoquadratæ
     æquationis ad cubicam superiori jam sæculo invenit Ludovicus
     Ferrarius, cujus vitam reliquit Cardanus ejus familiaris. Denique
     fuit Cartesius, ut a viris doctis dudum notatum est, et ex
     epistolis nimium apparet, immodicus contemptor aliorum, et famæ
     cupiditate ab artificiis non abstinens, quæ parum generosa videri
     possunt. Atque hæc profecto non dico animo obtrectandi viro, quem
     mirificè æstimo, sed eo consilio, ut cuique suum tribuatur, nec
     unus omnium laudes absorbeat; justissimum enim est, ut
     inventoribus suus honos constet, nec sublatis virtutum præmiis
     præclara faciendi studium refrigescat. Leibnitz, apud Brucker, v.
     v. 255.

|Recent increase of his fame.|

112. The name of Descartes as a great metaphysical writer has revived
in some measure of late years; and this has been chiefly owing, among
ourselves, to Dugald Stewart; in France, to the growing disposition of
their philosophers to cast away their idols of the eighteenth century.
“I am disposed,” says our Scottish philosopher, “to date the origin of
the true philosophy of mind from the Principia (why not the earlier
works?) of Descartes, rather than from the Organum of Bacon,
or the Essays of Locke; without, however, meaning to compare the
French author with our two countrymen, either as a contributor to our
stock of _facts_ relating to the intellectual phænomena, or as
the author of any important conclusion concerning the general laws to
which they may be referred.” The excellent edition by M. Cousin, in
which alone the entire works of Descartes can be found, is a homage
that France has recently offered to his memory, and an important
contribution to the studious both of metaphysical and mathematical
philosophy. I have made use of no other, though it might be desirable
for the inquirer to have the Latin original at his side, especially in
those works which have not been seen in French by their author.


                             SECT. IV.

            _On the Metaphysical Philosophy of Hobbes._

|Metaphysical treatise of Hobbes.|

113. The metaphysical philosophy of Hobbes was promulgated in his
treatise on Human Nature, which appeared in 1650. This, with his other
works, De Cive, and De Corpore Politico, were fused into that great
and general system, which he published in 1651 with the title of
Leviathan. The first part of the Leviathan, “Of Man,” follows the
several chapters of the treatise on Human Nature with much regularity;
but so numerous are the enlargements or omissions, so great is the
variance with which the author has expressed the same positions, that
they should much rather be considered as two works, than as two
editions of the same. They differ more than Lord Bacon’s treatise, De
Augmentis Scientiarum, does from his Advancement of Learning. I shall,
however, blend the two in a single analysis, and this I shall
generally give, as far as is possible, consistently with my own
limits, in the very words of Hobbes. His language is so lucid and
concise, that it would be almost as improper to put an algebraical
process in different terms as some of his metaphysical paragraphs.
But, as a certain degree of abridgment cannot be dispensed with, the
reader must not take it for granted, even where inverted commas denote
a closer attention to the text, that nothing is omitted, although, in
such cases, I never hold it permissible to make any change.

|His theory of sensation.|

|Coincident with Descartes.|

114. All single thoughts, it is the primary tenet of Hobbes, are
representations or appearances of some quality of a body without us,
which is commonly called an object. “There is no conception in a man’s
mind, which hath not at first totally, or by parts, been begotten upon
the organs of sense. The rest are derived from that original.”[264] In
the treatise on Human Nature he dwells long on the immediate causes of
sensation; and if no alteration had been made in his manuscript since
he wrote his dedication to the Earl of Newcastle in 1640, he must be
owned to have anticipated Descartes in one of his most celebrated
doctrines. “Because the image in vision, consisting in colour and
shape, is the knowledge we have of the qualities of the object of that
sense, it is no hard matter for a man to fall into this opinion, that
the same colour and shape are the very qualities themselves; and for
the same, cause, that sound and noise are the qualities of the bell,
or of the air. And this opinion hath been so long received, that the
contrary must needs appear a great paradox; and yet the introduction
of species visible and intelligible (which is necessary for the
maintenance of that opinion), passing to and fro from the object, is
worse than any paradox, as being a plain impossibility. I shall,
therefore, endeavour to make plain these points: 1. That the subject
wherein colour and image are inherent, is not the object or thing
seen. 2. That there is nothing without us (really) which we call an
image or colour. 3. That the said image or colour is but an apposition
unto us of the motion, agitation, or alteration, which the object
worketh in the brain, or spirits, or some external substance of the
head. 4. That, as in vision, so also in conceptions that arise from
the other senses, the subject of their inherence is not the object,
but the sentiment.”[265] And this he goes on to prove. Nothing of this
will be found in the Discours sur la Méthode, the only work of
Descartes then published; and, even if we believe Hobbes to have
interpolated this chapter after he had read the Meditations, he has
stated the principle so clearly and illustrated it so copiously, that,
so far especially as Locke and the English metaphysicians took it up,
we may almost reckon him another original source.

     [264] Leviathan, c. 1.

     [265] Hum. Nat., c. 2.

|Imagination and memory.|

115. The second chapter of the Leviathan, “On Imagination,” begins
with one of those acute and original observations we often find in
Hobbes: “That when a thing lies still, unless somewhat else stir it,
it will lie still for ever, is a truth that no man doubts of.
But that when a thing is in motion, it will eternally be in motion,
unless somewhat stay it, though the reason be the same, namely, that
nothing can change itself, is not so easily assented to. For men
measure, not only other men, but all other things, by themselves; and
because they find themselves subject after motion to pain and
lassitude, think everything else grows weary of motion and seeks
repose of its own accord.” The physical principle had lately been
established, but the reason here given for the contrary prejudice,
though not the sole one, is ingenious and even true. Imagination he
defines to be “conception remaining, and by little and little decaying
after the act of sense.”[266] This he afterwards expressed less
happily, “the gradual decline of the motion in which sense consists;”
his phraseology becoming more and more tinctured with the materialism
he affected in all his philosophy. Neither definition seems at all
applicable to the imagination which calls up long past perceptions.
“This decaying sense, when we would express the thing itself (I mean
fancy itself), we call imagination, but when we would express the
decay, and signify that the sense is fading, old and past, it is
called memory. So that, imagination and memory are but one thing,
which for divers considerations hath divers names.”[267] It is,
however, evident that imagination and memory are distinguished by
something more than their names. The second fundamental error of
Hobbes in his metaphysics, his extravagant nominalism, if so it should
be called, appears in this sentence, as the first, his materialism,
does in that previously quoted.

     [266] Hum. Nat., c. 3.

     [267] Lev., c. 2.

116. The phænomena of dreaming and the phantasms of waking men are
considered in this chapter with the keen observation and cool reason
of Hobbes.[268] I am not sure that he has gone more profoundly into
psychological speculations in the Leviathan than in the earlier
treatise; but it bears witness more frequently to what had probably
been the growth of the intervening period, a proneness to political
and religious allusion, to magnify civil and to depreciate
ecclesiastical power. “If this superstitious fear of spirits were
taken away, and with its prognostics from dreams, false prophecies,
and many other things depending thereon, by which crafty and ambitious
persons abuse the simple people, men would be much more fitted than
they are for civil obedience. And this ought to be the work of the
schools; but they rather nourish such doctrine.”[269]

     [268] Hum. Nat., c. 3.

     [269] Id. ibid.

|Discourse or train of imagination.|

117. The fourth chapter on Human Nature, and the corresponding third
chapter of the Leviathan, entitled On Discourse, or the Consequence
and Train of Imagination, are among the most remarkable in Hobbes, as
they contain the elements of that theory of association, which was
slightly touched afterwards by Locke, but developed and pushed to a
far greater extent by Hartley. “The cause,” he says, “of the coherence
or consequence of one conception to another is their first coherence
or consequence at that time when they are produced by sense: As, for
instance, from St. Andrew the mind runneth to St. Peter, because their
names are read together; from St. Peter to a stone, from the same
cause; from stone to foundation, because we see them together; and for
the same cause from foundation to church, and from church to people,
and from people to tumult; and, according to this example, the mind
may run almost from anything to anything.”[270] This he illustrates in
the Leviathan by the well-known question suddenly put by one, in
conversation about the death of Charles I., “What was the value of a
Roman penny?” Of this _discourse_, as he calls it, in a larger
sense of the word than is usual with the logicians, he mentions
several kinds; and after observing that the remembrance of succession
of one thing to another, that is, of what was antecedent and what
consequent and what concomitant, is called an experiment, adds that
“to have had many experiments, is what we call experience, which is
nothing else but remembrance of what antecedents have been followed by
what consequents.”[271]

     [270] Hum. Nat. c. 4, § 2.

     [271] Id.

|Experience.|

118. “No man can have a conception of the future, for the future is
not yet, but of our conceptions of the past we make a future, or
rather call past future relatively.”[272] And again: “The present only
has a being in nature; things past have a being in the memory only;
but things to come have no being at all; the future being but a
fiction of the mind, applying the sequels of actions past to the
actions that are present, which with most certainty is done by him
that has most experience, but not with certainty enough. And though it
be called prudence, when the event answereth our expectation, yet in
its own nature it is but presumption.”[273] “When we have
observed antecedents and consequents frequently associated, we take
one for a sign of the other, as clouds foretell rain, and rain is a
sign there have been clouds. But signs are but conjectural, and their
assurance is never full or evident. For though a man have always seen
the day and night to follow one another hitherto, yet can he not
thence conclude they shall do so, or that they have done so,
eternally. Experience concludeth nothing universally. But those who
have most experience conjecture best, because they have most signs to
conjecture by; hence, old men, cæteris paribus, and men of quick
parts, conjecture better than the young or dull.”[274] “But experience
is not to be equalled by any advantage of natural and extemporary wit,
though perhaps many young men think the contrary.” There is a
presumption of the past as well as the future founded on experience,
as when from having often seen ashes after fire, we infer from seeing
them again that there has been fire. But this is as conjectural as our
expectations of the future.[275]

     [272] Human Nat. c. 4, § 7.

     [273] Lev., c. 3.

     [274] Hum. Nat.

     [275] Lev.

|Unconceivableness of infinity.|

119. In the last paragraph of the chapter in the Leviathan, he adds,
what is a very leading principle in the philosophy of Hobbes, but
seems to have no particular relation to what has preceded. “Whatsoever
we imagine is finite; therefore, there is no idea or conception of
anything we call infinite. No man can have in his mind an image of
infinite magnitude, nor conceive infinite swiftness, infinite time, or
infinite force, or infinite power. When we say anything is infinite,
we signify only that we are not able to conceive the ends and bounds
of the things named, having no conception of the thing, but of our own
inability. And therefore the name of God is used, not to make us
conceive him, for he is incomprehensible and his greatness and power
are inconceivable, but that we may honour him. Also, because
whatsoever, as I said before, we conceive, has been perceived first by
sense, either all at once, or by parts; a man can have no thought,
representing anything, not subject to sense. No man therefore can
conceive anything, but he must conceive it in some place, and indeed
with some determinate magnitude, and which may be divided into parts,
nor that anything is all in this place, and all in another place at
the same time, nor that two or more things can be in one and the same
place at once. For none of these things ever have, or can be incident
to sense, but are absurd speeches, taken upon credit without any
signification at all, from deceived philosophers, and deceived or
deceiving schoolmen.” This, we have seen in the last section, had been
already discussed with Descartes. The paralogism of Hobbes consists in
his imposing a limited sense on the word idea or conception, and
assuming that what cannot be conceived according to that sense has no
signification at all.

|Origin of language.|

120. The next chapter, being the fifth in one treatise, and the fourth
in the other, may be reckoned, perhaps, the most valuable as well as
original, in the writings of Hobbes. It relates to speech and
language. “The invention of printing,” he begins by observing, “though
ingenious, compared with the invention of letters, is no great
matter.... But the most noble and profitable invention of all others,
was that of speech, consisting of names or appellations, and their
connection, whereby men register their thoughts, recall them when they
are past, and also declare them one to another for mutual utility and
conversation; without which there had been amongst men neither
commonwealth, nor society, nor content nor peace, no more than among
lions, bears, and wolves. The first author of speech was God himself,
that instructed Adam how to name such creatures as he presented to his
sight; for the Scripture goeth no further in this matter. But this was
sufficient to direct him to add more names, as the experience and use
of the creatures should give him occasion, and to join them in such
manner by degrees, as to make himself understood; and so by succession
of time so much language might be gotten as he had found use for,
though not so copious as an orator or philosopher has need of.”[276]

     [276] Leviathan, c. 4.

|His political theory interferes.|

121. This account of the original of language appears in general as
probable as it is succinct and clear. But the assumption that there
could have been no society or mutual peace among mankind without
language, the ordinary instrument of contract, is too much founded
upon his own political speculations. Nor is it proved by the
comparison to lions, bears, and wolves, even if the analogy could be
admitted; since the state of warfare which he here intimates to be
natural to man, does not commonly subsist in these wild animals of the
same species. _Sævis inter se convenit_ _ursis_, is
an old remark. But taking mankind with as much propensity to violence
towards each other as Hobbes could suggest, is it speech, or reason
and the sense of self-interest, which has restrained this within the
boundaries imposed on it by civil society? The position appears to be,
that man, with every other faculty and attribute of his nature, except
language, could never have lived in community with his fellows. It is
manifest, that the mechanism of such a community would have been very
imperfect. But possessing his rational powers, it is hard to see why
he might not have devised signs to make known his special wants, or
why he might not have attained the peculiar prerogative of his species
and foundation of society, the exchange of what he liked less for what
he liked better.

|Necessity of speech exaggerated.|

122. This will appear more evident, and the exaggerated notions of the
school of Hobbes as to the absolute necessity of language to the
mutual relations of mankind will be checked by considering what was
not so well understood in his age as at present, the intellectual
capacities of those who are born deaf, and the resources which they
are able to employ. It can hardly be questioned, but that a number of
families thrown together in this unfortunate situation, without other
intercourse, could by the exercise of their natural reason, as well as
the domestic and social affections, constitute themselves into a sort
of commonwealth, at least as regular as that of ants and bees; and if
the want of language would deprive them of many advantages of polity,
it would also secure them from much fraud and conspiracy. But those
whom we have known to want the use of speech, have also wanted the
sense of hearing, and have thus been shut out from many assistances to
the reasoning faculties, which our hypothesis need not exclude. The
fair supposition is that of a number of persons merely dumb, and
although they would not have laws or learning, it does not seem
impossible they might maintain at least a patriarchal, if not a
political, society for many generations. Upon the lowest supposition,
they could not be inferior to the Chimpanzees, who are said to live in
communities in the forests of Angola.

|Use of names.|

123. The succession of conceptions in the mind depending wholly on
that they had one to another when produced by the senses, they cannot
be recalled at our choice and the need we have of them, “but as it
chanceth us to hear and see such things as shall bring them to our
mind. Hence, brutes are unable to call what they want to mind, and
often, though they hide food, do not know where to find it. But man
has the power to set up marks or sensible objects, and remember
thereby somewhat past. The most eminent of these are names of
articulate sounds, by which we recall some conception of things to
which we give those names; as the appellation white bringeth to
remembrance the quality of such objects as produce that colour or
conception in us. It is by names that we are capable of science, as
for instance that of number: for beasts cannot number for want of
words, and do not miss one or two out of their young, nor could a man
without repeating orally or mentally the words of number, know how
many pieces of money may be before him.”[277] We have here another
assumption, that the numbering faculty is not stronger in man than in
brutes, and also that the former could not have found out how to
divide a heap of coins into parcels without the use of words of
number. The experiment might be tried with a deaf and dumb child.

     [277] Hum. Nat., c. 5.

|Names universal not realities.|

124. Of names some are proper, and some common to many or universal,
there being nothing in the world universal but names, for the things
named are every one of them individual and singular. “One universal
name is imposed on many things for their similitude in some quality or
other accidents; and whereas a proper name bringeth to mind one thing
only, universals recall any one of those many.”[278] “The universality
of one name to many things hath been the cause that men think the
things are themselves universal, and so seriously contend that besides
Peter and John, and all the rest of the men that are, have been, or
shall be in the world, there is yet something else that we call
man--viz., man in general, deceiving themselves by taking the
universal or general appellation for the thing it signifieth.[279] For
if one should desire the painter to make him the picture of a
man, which is as much as to say, of a man in general, he meaneth no
more, but that the painter should chuse what man he pleaseth to draw,
which must needs be some of them that are, or have been, or may be,
none of which are universal. But when he would have him to draw the
picture of the king, or any particular person, he limiteth the painter
to that one person he chuseth. It is plain, therefore, that there is
nothing universal but names, which are therefore called
indefinite.”[280]

     [278] Lev. c. 4.

     [279] “An universal,” he says in his Logic, “is not a name of
     many things collectively, but of each taken separately
     (sigillatim sumptorum). Man is not the name of the human species,
     in general, but of each single man, Peter, John and the rest,
     separately. Therefore, this universal name is not the name of any
     thing existing in nature, nor of any idea or phantasm formed in
     the mind, but always of some word or name. Thus, when an animal,
     or a stone, or a ghost (spectrum) or anything else is called
     universal, we are not to understand that any man or stone or
     anything else was, or is, or can be an universal, but only that
     these words animal, stone, and the like are universal names, that
     is, names common to many things, and the conceptions
     corresponding to them in the mind are the images and phantasms of
     single animals or other things. And therefore we do not need, in
     order to understand what is meant by an universal, any other
     faculty than that of imagination, by which we remember that such
     words have excited the conception in our minds sometimes of one
     particular thing, sometimes of another.” Cap. 2, § 9. Imagination
     and memory are used by Hobbes almost as synonyms.

     [280] Hum. Nat., c. 5.

|How imposed.|

125. “By this imposition of names, some of larger, some of stricter
signification, we turn the reckoning of the consequences of things
imagined in the mind into a reckoning of the consequences of
appellations.”[281] Hence he thinks that though a man born deaf and
dumb might by meditation know that the angles of one triangle are
equal to two right ones, he could not, on seeing another triangle of
different shape, infer the same without a similar process. But by the
help of words, after having observed the equality is not consequent on
anything peculiar to one triangle, but on the number of sides and
angles which is common to all, he registers his discovery in a
proposition. This is surely to confound the antecedent process of
reasoning with what he calls the registry, which follows it. The
instance, however, is not happily chosen, and Hobbes has conceded the
whole point in question, by admitting that the truth of the
proposition could be observed, which cannot require the use of
words.[282] He expresses the next sentence with more felicity, “And
thus the consequence found in one particular comes to be registered
and remembered as an universal rule, and discharges our mental
reckoning of time and place; and delivers us from all labour of the
mind saving the first, and makes that which was found true here and
now to be true in all times and places.”[283]

     [281] It may deserve to be remarked that Hobbes himself,
     nominalist as he was, did not limit reasoning to comparison of
     proposition, as some later writers have been inclined to do, and
     as in his objections to Descartes, he might seem to do himself.
     This may be inferred from the sentence quoted in the text, and
     more expressly, though not quite perspicuously, from a passage in
     the Computatio, sive Logica, his Latin treatise published after
     the Leviathan. Quomodo autem animo _sine verbis tacita
     cogitatione ratiocinando addere et subtrahere solemus_ uno aut
     altero exemplo ostendendum est. Si quis ergo e longinquo aliquid
     obscurè videat, etsi nulla sint imposita vocabula, habet tamen
     ejus rei ideam eandem propter quam impositis nunc vocabulis dicit
     eam rem esse corpus. Postquam autem propius accesserit,
     videritque eandem rem certo quodam modo nunc uno, nunc alio in
     loco esse, habebit ejusdem ideam novam, propter quam nunc talem
     rem _animatam_ vocat, &c., p. 2.

     [282] The demonstration of the thirty-second proposition of
     Euclid could leave no one in doubt whether this property were
     common to all triangles, after it had been proved in a single
     instance. It is said, however, to be recorded by an ancient
     writer, that this discovery was first made as to equilateral,
     afterwards as to isosceles, and lastly as to other triangles.
     Stewart’s philosophy of Human Mind, vol. ii., chap., iv., sect. 2
     The mode of proof must have been different from that of Euclid.
     And this might possibly lead us to suspect the truth of the
     tradition. For if the equality of the angles of a triangle to two
     right angles admitted of any _elementary_ demonstration, such as
     might occur in the infancy of geometry, without making use of the
     property of parallel lines, assumed in the twelfth axiom of
     Euclid, the difficulties consequent on that assumption would
     readily be evaded. See the Note on Euclid, i. 29. in Playfair,
     who has given a demonstration of his own, but one which involves
     the idea of motion rather more than was usual with the Greeks in
     their elementary propositions.

     [283] Lev.

|The subject continued.|

126. The equivocal use of names makes it often difficult to recover
those conceptions for which they were designed “not only in the
language of others, wherein we are to consider the drift and occasion
and contexture of the speech, as well as the words themselves, but in
our own discourse, which, being derived from the custom and common use
of speech, representeth unto us not our own conceptions. It is,
therefore, a great ability in a man, out of the words, contexture and
other circumstances of language to deliver himself from equivocation,
and to find out the true meaning of what is said; and this is it we
call understanding.”[284] If speech be peculiar to man, as for aught I
know it is, then is understanding peculiar to him also; understanding
being nothing else but conception caused by speech.”[285] This
definition is arbitrary and not conformable to the usual sense. “True
and false,” he observes afterwards, “are attributes of speech not of
things; where speech is not, there is neither truth nor falsehood,
though there may be error. Hence, as truth consists in the right
ordering of names in our affirmations, a man that seeks precise truth
hath need to remember what every word he uses stands for and place it
accordingly. In geometry, the only science hitherto known, men begin
by definitions. And every man who aspires to true knowledge, should
examine the definitions of former authors, and either correct them or
make them anew. For the errors of definitions multiply themselves,
according as the reckoning proceeds, and lead men into absurdities,
which at last they see, but cannot avoid without reckoning anew from
the beginning in which lies the foundation of their errors.... In the
right definition of names, lies the first use of speech, which is the
acquisition of science. And in wrong or no definitions lies the first
abuse from which proceed all false and senseless tenets, which make
those men that take their instruction from the authority of books, and
not from their own meditation, to be as much below the condition of
ignorant men, as men endued with true science are above it. For
between true science and erroneous doctrine, ignorance is in the
middle. Words are wise men’s counters, they do but reckon by them; but
they are the money of fools.”[286]

     [284] Hum. Nat.

     [285] Lev.

     [286] Lev.

|Names differently imposed.|

127. “The names of such things as affect us, that is, which please and
displease us, because all men be not alike affected with the same
thing, nor the same man at all times, are in the common discourse of
men of inconstant signification. For seeing all names are imposed to
signify our conceptions, and all our affections are but conceptions,
when we conceive the same thoughts differently, we can hardly avoid
different naming of them. For though the nature of that we conceive be
the same, yet the diversity of our reception of it, in respect of
different constitutions of body and prejudices of opinion, gives
everything a tincture of our different passions. And therefore, in
reasoning, a man must take heed of words, which, besides the
signification of what we imagine of their nature, have a signification
also of the nature, disposition and interest of the speaker; such as
are the names of virtues and vices; for one man calleth wisdom what
another calleth fear, and one cruelty, what another justice; one
prodigality, what another magnanimity, and one gravity what another
stupidity, &c. And therefore such names can never be true grounds of
any ratiocination. No more can metaphors and tropes of speech, but
these are less dangerous, because they profess their inconstancy,
which the other do not.”[287] Thus ends this chapter of the Leviathan,
which, with the corresponding one in the Treatise of Human Nature,
are, notwithstanding what appear to be some erroneous principles, as
full, perhaps, of deep and original thoughts as any other pages of
equal length on the art of reasoning and philosophy of language. Many
have borrowed from Hobbes without naming him; and in fact he is the
founder of the nominalist school in England. He may probably have
conversed with Bacon on these subjects; we see much of that master’s
style of illustration. But as Bacon was sometimes too excursive to
sift particulars, so Hobbes has sometimes wanted a comprehensive view.

     [287] Lev.

|Knowledge.|

128. “There are,” to proceed with Hobbes, “two kinds of knowledge; the
one, sense, or knowledge original, and remembrance of the same; the
other, science, or knowledge of the truth of propositions, derived
from understanding. Both are but experience, one of things from
without, the other from the proper use of words in language, and
experience being but remembrance, all knowledge is remembrance.
Knowledge implies two things, truth and evidence; the latter is the
concomitance of a man’s conception with the words that signify such
conception in the act of ratiocination.” If a man does not annex a
meaning to his words, his conclusions are not evident to him.
“Evidence is to truth, as the sap to the tree, which, so far as it
creepeth along with the body and branches, keepeth them alive; when it
forsaketh them they die; for this evidence, which is meaning with our
words, is the life of truth.” “Science is evidence of truth, from some
beginning or principle of sense. The first principle of knowledge is
that we have such and such conceptions; the second that we have thus
and thus named the things whereof they are conceptions; the third is
that we have joined those names in such manner as to make true
propositions; the fourth and last is that we have joined these
propositions in such a manner as they be concluding, and the truth of
the conclusion said to be known.”[288]

     [288] Hum. Nat., c. 6.

|Reasoning.|

129. Reasoning is the addition or subtraction of parcels. “In whatever
matter there is room for addition and subtraction, there is room for
reason; and where these have no place, then reason has nothing at all
to do.”[289] This is neither as perspicuously expressed, nor as
satisfactorily illustrated, as is usual with Hobbes; but it is true
that all syllogistic reasoning is dependent upon quantity alone, and
consequently upon that which is capable of addition and subtraction.
This seems not to have been clearly perceived by some writers of the
old Aristotelian school, or perhaps by some others, who, as far as I
can judge, have a notion that the relation of a genus to a species, or
a predicate to its subject, considered merely as to syllogism or
deductive reasoning, is something different from that of a whole to
its parts; which would deprive that logic of its chief boast,
axiomatic evidence. But, as this would appear too dry to some readers,
I shall pursue it farther in a note.[290]

     [289] Lev. c. 5.

     [290] Dugald Stewart (Elements of Philosophy, &c. vol. ii., ch.
     ii., sect. 2) has treated this theory of Hobbes on reasoning, as
     well as that of Condillac, which seems much the same, with great
     scorn, as “too puerile to admit of (i.e. require) refutation.” I
     do not myself think the language of Hobbes either here, or as
     quoted by Stewart from his Latin treatise on Logic, so
     perspicuous as usual. But I cannot help being of opinion that he
     is substantially right. For surely, when we assert that A is B,
     we assert that all things which fall under the class B, taken
     collectively, comprehend A, or that B = A + X: B being here put,
     it is to be observed, not for the _res prædicata_ itself, but for
     the concrete, _de quibus prædicandum est_. I mention this,
     because this elliptical use of the word predicate seems to have
     occasioned some confusion in writers on logic. The predicate
     strictly taken, being an attribute or quality, cannot be said to
     include or contain the subject. But to return, when we say B = A
     + X, or B - X = A, since we do not compare, in such a
     proposition, as is here supposed, A with X, we only mean that A =
     A, or that a certain part of B is the same as itself. Again, in a
     particular affirmative, Some A is B, we assert that part of A, or
     A - Y is contained in B, or that B may be expressed by [A - Y]
     + X. So also when we say, Some A is not B, we equally divide the
     class or genus B into A - Y and X, or assert that B = [A - Y] +
     X; but, in this case, the subject is no longer A - Y, but the
     remainder, or other part of A, namely, Y; and this is not found
     in either term of the predicate. Finally, in the universal
     negative, No A (neither [A - Y] nor Y) is B, the [A - Y] of
     the predicate vanishes or has no value, and B becomes equal to X,
     which is incapable of measurement with A, and consequently with
     either A - Y or Y, which make up A. Now if we combine this with
     another proposition, in order to form a syllogism, and say that C
     is A, we find, as before, that A = C + Z; and substituting this
     value of A in the former proposition, it appears that B = C + Z +
     X. Then, in the conclusion, we have, C is B; that is C is a part
     of C + Z + X. And the same in the three other cases or moods of
     the figure. This seems to be, in plainer terms, what Hobbes means
     by addition or subtraction of parcels, and what Condillac means
     by rather a lax expression, that equations and propositions are
     at bottom the same, or, as he phrases it better, “l’evidence de
     raison consiste uniquement dans l’identité.” If we add to this,
     as he probably intended, non-identity, as a condition of all
     negative conclusions, it seems to be no more than is necessarily
     involved in the fundamental principle of syllogism, the _dictum
     de omni et nullo_; which may be thus reduced to its shortest
     terms; “Whatever can be divided into parts, includes all those
     parts, add nothing else.” This is not limited to mathematical
     quantity, but includes everything which admits of more or less.
     Hobbes has a good passage in his Logic on this; Non putandum est
     computationi, id est, ratiocinationi in numeris tantum locum
     esse, tanquam homo a cæteris animantibus, quod censuisse narratur
     Pythagoras, sola numerandi facultate distinctus esset; nam et
     magnitudo magnitudini, corpus corpori, motus motui, tempus
     tempori, gradus qualitatis gradui, actio actioni, conceptus
     conceptui, proportio proportioni, oratio orationi, nomen nomini,
     in quibus omne philosophiæ genus continetur, adjici adimique
     potest.

     But it does not follow by any means that we should assent to the
     strange passages quoted by Stewart from Condillac and Diderot,
     which reduce all _knowledge_ to identical propositions. Even
     in geometry, where the objects are strictly magnitudes, the
     countless variety in which their relations may be exhibited
     constitutes the riches of that inexhaustible science; and in
     moral or physical propositions, the relation of quantity between
     the subject and predicate, as concretes, which enables them to be
     compared, though it is the sole foundation of all _general
     deductive reasoning_ or syllogism, has nothing to do with the
     other properties or relations, of which we obtain a knowledge by
     means of that comparison. In mathematical reasoning, we infer as
     to quantity through the medium of quantity; in other reasoning,
     we use the same medium, but our inference is as to truths which
     do not lie within that category. Thus, in the hackneyed instance,
     All men are mortal; that is, mortal creatures include men and
     something more, it is absurd to assert, that we only know that
     men are men. It is true that our knowledge of the truth of the
     proposition comes by the help of this comparison of men in the
     subject with men in the predicate; but the very nature of the
     proposition discovers a constant relation between the individuals
     of the human species and that mortality which is predicated of
     them along with others; and it is to this, not in an identical
     equation, as Diderot seems to have thought, that our
     _knowledge_ consists.

     The remarks of Stewart’s friend. M. Prevost of Geneva, on the
     principle of identity as the basis of mathematical science, and
     which the former has candidly subjoined to his own volume, appear
     to me very satisfactory. Stewart comes to admit that the dispute
     is nearly verbal; but we cannot say that he originally treated it
     as such; and the principle itself, both as applied to geometry
     and to logic, is, in my opinion, of some importance to the
     clearness of our conceptions as to those sciences. It may be
     added, that Stewart’s objection to the principle of identity as
     the basis of geometrical reasoning is less forcible in its
     application to syllogism. He is willing to admit that magnitudes
     capable of coincidence by immediate superposition may be reckoned
     identical, but scruples to apply such a word to those which are
     dissimilar in figure, as the rectangles of the means and extremes
     of four proportional lines. Neither one nor the other are, in
     fact, identical as real quantities, the former being necessarily
     conceived to differ from each other by position in space, as much
     as the latter; so that the expression he quotes from Aristotle,
     εν τουτοις ἡ ισοτης ἑνοτης [en toutois hê isotês henotês], or any
     similar one of modern mathematicians, can only refer to the
     abstract magnitude of their areas, which being divisible into the
     same number of equal parts, they are called the same. And there
     seems no real difference in this respect between two circles of
     equal radii and two such rectangles as are supposed above, the
     identity of their magnitudes being a distinct truth, independent
     of any consideration either of their figure or their position.
     But however this may be, the identity of the subject with part of
     the predicate in an affirmative proposition is never fictitious,
     but real. It means that the persons or things in the one are
     strictly the same beings with the persons or things to which they
     are compared in the other, though, through some difference of
     relations, or other circumstance, they are expressed in different
     language. It is needless to give examples, as all those who can
     read this note at all will know how to find them.

     I will here take the liberty to remark, though not closely
     connected with the present subject, that Archbishop Whately seems
     not quite right in saying (Elements of Logic, p. 46), that in
     affirmative propositions the predicate is _never_
     distributed. Besides the numerous instances where this is, in
     point of fact, the case, all which he excludes, there are many in
     which it is involved in the very form of the proposition. Such
     are all those which assert identity or equality, and such also
     are all those particular affirmations which have previously been
     _converted_ from universals. Of the first sort are all the
     theorems in geometry, asserting an equality of magnitude or
     ratios, in which the subject and predicate may always change
     places. It is true that in the instance given in the work quoted,
     that equilateral triangles are equiangular, the converse requires
     a separate proof, and so in many similar cases. But in these the
     predicate is not distributed by the form of the proposition; they
     assert no quality of magnitude.

     The position, that where such equality is affirmed, the predicate
     is not _logically_ distributed, would lead to the
     consequence that it can only be _converted_ into a
     particular affirmation. Thus, after proving that the square of
     the hypothenuse, in all right-angled triangles, is equal to those
     of the sides, we could only infer that the squares of the sides
     are _sometimes_ equal to that of the hypothenuse, which
     could not be maintained without rendering the rules, of logic
     ridiculous. The most general mode of considering the question, is
     to say, as we have done above, that, in an universal affirmative,
     the predicate B (that is, the class of which B is predicated), is
     composed of A the subject, and X, an unknown remainder. But if,
     by the very nature of the proposition, we perceive that X is
     nothing, or has no value, it is plain that the subject measures
     the entire predicate, and vice versâ, the predicate measures the
     subject; in other words, each is taken universally, or
     distributed.

|False reasoning.|

130. A man may reckon without the use of words in particular things,
as in conjecturing from the sight of anything what is likely to
follow; and if he reckons wrong, it is error. But in reasoning
on general words, to fall on a false inference is not error, though
often so called, but absurdity.[291] “If a man should talk to me of a
round quadrangle, or accidents of bread in cheese, or immaterial
substances, or of a free subject, a free will, or any free, but free
from being hindered by opposition, I should not say he were in error,
but that his words were without meaning, that is to say, absurd;” Some
of these propositions, it will occur, are intelligible in a reasonable
sense, and not contradictory, except by means of an arbitrary
definition which he who employs them does not admit. It will be
observed here, as we have done before, that Hobbes does not confine
reckoning, or reasoning, to universals, or even to words.

     [291] Lev. c. 5.

|Its frequency.|

131. Man has the exclusive privilege of forming general theorems. But
this privilege is allayed by another, that is, by the privilege of
absurdity, to which no living creature is subject, but man only. And
of men those are of all most subject to it, that profess
philosophy.... For there is not one that begins his ratiocination from
the definitions or explications of the names they are to use, which is
a method used only in geometry, whose conclusions have thereby been
made indisputable. He then enumerates seven causes of absurd
conclusions; the first of which is the want of definitions, the others
are erroneous imposition of names. If we can avoid these errors, it is
not easy to fall into absurdity (by which he of course only means any
wrong conclusion) except perhaps by the length of a reasoning.
“For all men,” he says, “by nature reason alike, and well, when they
have good principles. Hence, it appears that reason is not as sense
and memory born with us, nor gotten by experience only, as prudence
is, but attained by industry, in apt imposing of names, and in getting
a good and orderly method of proceeding from the elements to
assertions, and so to syllogisms. Children are not endued with reason
at all till they have attained the use of speech, but are called
reasonable creatures, for the possibility of having the use of reason
hereafter. And reasoning serves the generality of mankind very little,
though with their natural prudence without science they are in better
condition than those who reason ill themselves, or trust those who
have done so.”[292] It has been observed by Buhle, that Hobbes had
more respect for the Aristotelian forms of logic than his master
Bacon. He has in fact written a short treatise, in his Elementa
Philosophiæ, on the subject; observing however therein, that a true
logic will be sooner learned by attending to geometrical
demonstrations than by drudging over the rules of syllogism, as
children learn to walk not by precept but by habit.[293]

     [292] Id. ibid.

     [293] Citius multo veram logicam discunt qui mathematicorum
     demonstrationibus, quam qui logicorum syllogizandi præceptis
     legendis tempus conterunt, haud aliter quam parvuli pueri gressum
     formare discunt non præceptis sed sæpe gradiendo. C. iv., p. 30.
     Atque hæc sufficiunt, (he says afterwards) de syllogismo, qui est
     tanquam gressus philosophiæ; nam et quantum necesse est ad
     cognoscendum unde vim suam habeat omnis argumentatio legitima,
     tantum diximus; et omnia accumulare quæ dici possunt, æque
     superfluum esset ac si quis ut dixi puerulo ad gradiendum
     præcepta dare velit; acquiritur enim ratiocinandi ars non
     præceptis sed usu et lectione eorum librorum in quibus omnia
     severis demonstrationibus transiguntur. C. v., p. 35.

|Knowledge of fact not derived from reasoning.|

132. “No discourse whatever,” he says truly in the seventh chapter of
the Leviathan, “can end in absolute knowledge of fact past or to come.
For as to the knowledge of fact, it is originally sense; and ever
after memory. And for the knowledge of consequence, which I have said
before, is called science, it is not absolute but conditional. No man
can know by discourse that this or that is, has been, or will be,
which is to know absolutely; but only that if this is, that is; if
this has been, that has been; if this shall be, that shall be; which
is to know conditionally, and that not the consequence of one thing to
another, but of one name of a thing to another name of the same thing.
And therefore when the discourse is put into speech and begins with
the definitions of words, and proceeds by connexion of the same into
general affirmations, and of those again into syllogisms, the end or
last sum is called the conclusion, and the thought of the mind by it
signified is that conditional knowledge of the consequence of words
which is commonly called science. But if the first ground of such
discourse be not definitions; or if definitions be not rightly joined
together in syllogisms, then the end or conclusion is again opinion,
namely, of the truth of somewhat said, though sometimes in absurd and
senseless words, without possibility of being understood.”[294]

     [294] Lev. c. 7.

|Belief.|

133. “Belief which is the admitting of propositions upon trust, in
many cases is no less free from doubt than perfect and manifest
knowledge; for as there is nothing whereof there is not some cause, so
when there is doubt, there must be some cause thereof conceived. Now
there be many things which we receive from the report of others, of
which it is impossible to imagine any cause of doubt; for what can be
opposed against the consent of all men, in things they can know and
have no cause to report otherwise than they are, such as is great part
of our histories, unless a man would say that all the world had
conspired to destroy him?”[295] Whatever we believe on the authority
of the speaker, he is the object of our faith. Consequently, when we
believe that the Scriptures are the word of God, having no immediate
revelation from God himself, our belief, faith, and trust is in the
church, whose word we take and acquiesce therein. Hence, all we
believe on the authority of men, whether they be sent from God or not,
is faith in men only.[296] We have no certain knowledge of the truth
of Scripture, but trust the holy men of God’s church succeeding one
another from the time of those who saw the wondrous works of God
Almighty in the flesh. And as we believe the Scriptures to be the word
of God on the authority of the church, the interpretation of the
Scripture in case of controversy ought to be trusted to the church
rather than private opinion.[297]

     [295] Hum. Nat. c. 6.

     [296] Lev. c. 7.

     [297] Lev. c. 9.

|Chart of science.|

134. The ninth chapter of the Leviathan contains a synoptical chart of
human science or “knowledge of consequences,” also called
philosophy. He divides it into natural and civil, the former into
consequences from accidents common to all bodies, quantity and motion,
and those from qualities, otherwise called physics. The first includes
astronomy, mechanics, architecture, as well as mathematics. The second
he distinguishes into consequences from qualities of bodies transient,
or meteorology, and from those of bodies permanent, such as the stars,
the atmosphere, or terrestrial bodies. The last are divided again into
those without sense, and those with sense; and these into animals and
men. In the consequences from the qualities of animals generally he
reckons optics and music; in those from men we find ethics, poetry,
rhetoric, and logic. These altogether constitute the first great head
of natural philosophy. In the second, or civil philosophy, he includes
nothing but the rights and duties of sovereigns and their subjects.
This chart of human knowledge is one of the worst that has been
propounded, and falls much below that of Bacon.[298]

     [298] Hum. Nat., c. 11.

|Analysis of passions.|

135. This is the substance of the philosophy of Hobbes, so far as it
relates to the intellectual faculties, and especially to that of
reasoning. In the seventh and two following chapters of the treatise
on Human Nature, in the ninth and tenth of the Leviathan, he proceeds
to the analysis of the passions. The motion in some internal substance
of the head, if it does not stop there, producing mere conceptions,
proceeds to the heart, helping or hindering the vital motions, which
he distinguishes from the voluntary, exciting in us pleasant or
painful affections, called passions. We are solicited by these to draw
near to that which pleases us, and the contrary. Hence, pleasure,
love, appetite, desire, are divers names for divers considerations of
the same thing. As all conceptions we have immediately by the sense
are delight or pain or appetite or fear, so are all the imaginations
after sense. But as they are weaker imaginations, so are they also
weaker pleasures, or weaker pains.[299] All delight is appetite and
presupposes a further end. There is no utmost end in this world, for
while we live we have desires, and desire presupposes a further end.
We are not, therefore, to wonder that men desire more, the more they
possess; for felicity, by which we mean continual delight, consists
not in having prospered, but in prospering.[300] Each passion, being,
as he fancies, a continuation of the motion which gives rise to a
peculiar conception, is associated with it. They all, except such as
are immediately connected with sense, consist in the conception of a
power to produce some effect. To honour a man, is to conceive that he
has an excess of power over some one with whom he is compared; hence,
qualities indicative of power, and actions significant of it are
honourable; riches are honoured as signs of power, and nobility is
honourable, as a sign of power in ancestors.[301]

     [299] Hum. Nat., c. 7.

     [300] Id. Lev., c. 11.

     [301] Hum. Nat., c. 8.

|Good and evil relative terms.|

136. “The constitution of man’s body is in perpetual mutation, and
hence it is impossible that all the same things should always cause in
him the same appetites and aversions; much less can all men consent in
the desire of any one object. But whatsoever is the object of any
man’s appetite or desire, that is it, which he for his part calls
good, and the object of his hate and aversion, evil, or of his
contempt, vile and inconsiderable. For these words of good, evil, and
contemptible, are ever used with relation to the person using them;
there being nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common rule of
good and evil, to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves,
but from the person of the man, where there is no commonwealth, or in
a commonwealth from the person that represents us, or from an
arbitrator or judge, whom men disagreeing shall by consent set up, and
make his sentence the rule thereof.”[302]

     [302] Lev. c., 6.

|His paradoxes.|

137. In prosecuting this analysis all the passions are resolved into
self-love, the pleasure we take in our own power, the pain we suffer
in wanting it. Some of his explications are very forced. Thus weeping
is said to be from a sense of our want of power. And here comes one of
his strange paradoxes. “Men are apt to weep that prosecute revenge,
when the revenge is suddenly stopped or frustrated by the repentance
of their adversary; _and such are the tears of reconciliation_.”[303]
So resolute was he to resort to anything the most preposterous, rather
than admit a moral feeling in human nature. His account of laughter is
better known, and perhaps more probable, though not explaining the
whole of the case. After justly observing that whatsoever it be that
moves laughter, it must be new and unexpected, he defines it to be “a
sudden glory arising from a sudden conception of some eminency in
ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own
formerly, for men laugh at the follies of themselves past.” It might
be objected, that those are most prone to laughter, who have least of
this glorying in themselves, or undervaluing of their neighbours.

     [303] Hum. Nat., c. 9. Lev., c. 6 and 10.

|His notion of love.|

138. “There is a great difference between the desire of a man when
indefinite, and the same desire limited to one person, and this is
that love which is the great theme of poets. But notwithstanding their
praises, it must be defined by the word need; for it is a conception a
man hath of his need of that one person desired.”[304] “There is yet
another passion, sometimes called love, but more properly good-will or
charity. There can be no greater argument to a man of his own power
than to find himself able not only to accomplish his own desires, but
also to assist other men in theirs; and this is that conception
wherein consists charity. In which first is contained that natural
affection of parents towards their children, which the Greeks call
στοργη [storgê], as also that affection wherewith men seek to assist
those that adhere unto them. But the affection wherewith men many
times bestow their benefits on strangers is not to be called charity,
but either contract, whereby they seek to purchase friendship, or fear
which makes them to purchase peace.”[305] This is equally contrary to
notorious truth, there being neither fear nor contract in generosity
towards strangers. It is, however, not so extravagant as a subsequent
position, that in beholding the danger of a ship in a tempest, though
there is pity, which is grief, yet “the delight in our own security is
so far predominant, that men usually are content in such a case to be
spectators of the misery of their friends.”[306]

     [304] Hum. Nat., c. 9.

     [305] Id. ibid.

     [306] Hum. Nat., c. 9. This is an exaggeration of some well-known
     lines of Lucretius, which are themselves exaggerated.

|Curiosity.|

139. As knowledge begins from experience, new experience is the
beginning of new knowledge. Whatever, therefore, happens new to a man,
gives him the hope of knowing somewhat he knew not before. This
appetite of knowledge is curiosity. It is peculiar to man; for beasts
never regard new things except to discern how far they may be useful,
while man looks for the cause and beginning of all he sees.[307] This
attribute of curiosity seems rather hastily denied to beasts. And as
men, he says, are always seeking new knowledge, so are they always
deriving some new gratification. There is no such thing as perpetual
tranquility of mind while we live here, because life itself is but
motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more
than without sense. “What kind of felicity God hath ordained to them
that devoutly honour him, a man shall no sooner know than enjoy, being
joys that now are as incomprehensible, as the word of schoolmen,
beatifical vision, is unintelligible.”[308]

     [307] Id. ibid.

     [308] Lev., c. 6 and c. 11.

|Difference of intellectual capacities.|

140. From the consideration of the passions, Hobbes advances to
inquire what are the causes of the difference in the intellectual
capacities and dispositions of men.[309] Their bodily senses are
nearly alike, whence he precipitately infers there can be no great
difference in the brain. Yet men differ much in their bodily
constitution, whence he derives the principal differences in their
minds; some being addicted to sensual pleasures are less curious as to
knowledge, or ambitious as to power. This is called dullness, and
proceeds from the appetite of bodily delight. The contrary to this is
a quick ranging of mind accompanied with curiosity in comparing things
that come into it, either as to unexpected similitude, in which fancy
consists, or dissimilitude in things appearing the same, which is
properly called judgment; “for to judge is nothing else, but to
distinguish and discern. And both fancy and judgment are commonly
comprehended under the name of wit, which seems to be a tenuity and
agility of spirits, contrary to that restiness of the spirits supposed
in those who are dull.”[310]

     [309] Hum. Nat., c. 10.

     [310] Hum. Nat.

141. We call it levity, when the mind is easily diverted, and the
discourse is parenthetical; and this proceeds from curiosity with too
much equality and indifference; for when all things make equal
impression and delight, they equally throng to be expressed. A
different fault is indocibility, or difficulty of being taught; which
must arise from a false opinion that men know already the truth of
what is called in question; for certainly they are not otherwise so
unequal in capacity as not to discern the difference of what is proved
and what is not, and therefore if the minds of men were all of white
paper, they would all most equally be disposed to acknowledge whatever
should be in right method, and by right ratiocination delivered to
them. But when men have once acquiesced in untrue opinions, and
registered them as authentical records in their minds, it is no less
impossible to speak intelligibly to such men, than to write legibly on
a paper already scribbled over. The immediate cause therefore of
indocibility is prejudice, and of prejudice false opinion of our own
knowledge.[311]

     [311] Hum. Nat.

|Wit and fancy.|

142. Intellectual virtues are such abilities as go by the name of a
good wit, which may be natural or acquired. “By natural wit,” says
Hobbes, “I mean not that which a man hath from his birth, for that is
nothing else but sense; wherein men differ so little from one another
and from brute beasts, as it is not to be reckoned among virtues. But
I mean that wit which is gotten by use only and experience, without
method, culture or instruction, and consists chiefly in celerity of
imagining and steady direction. And the difference in this quickness
is caused by that of men’s passions that love and dislike some one
thing, some another, and therefore some men’s thoughts run one way,
some another; and are held to, and observe differently the things that
pass through their imagination.” Fancy is not praised without judgment
and discretion, which is properly a discerning of times, places, and
persons; but judgment and discretion is commended for itself without
fancy: without steadiness and direction to some end, a great fancy is
one kind of madness, such as they have who lose themselves in long
digressions and parentheses. If the defect of discretion be apparent,
how extravagant soever the fancy be, the whole discourse will be taken
for a want of wit.[312]

     [312] Lev., c. 8.

|Differences in the passions.|

|Madness.|

143. The causes of the difference of wits are in the passions; and the
difference of passions proceeds partly from the different constitution
of the body and partly from different education. Those passions are
chiefly the desire of power, riches, knowledge, or honour; all which
may be reduced to the first, for riches, knowledge, and honour are but
several sorts of power. He who has no great passion for any of these,
though he may be so far a good man as to be free from giving offence,
yet cannot possibly have either a great fancy or much judgment. To
have weak passions is dullness, to have passions indifferently for
everything giddiness and distraction, to have stronger passions for
anything than others have is madness. Madness may be the excess of
many passions; and the passions themselves, when they lead to evil,
are degrees of it. He seems to have had some glimpse of Butler’s
hypothesis as to the madness of a whole people. “What argument for
madness can there be greater, than to clamour, strike, and throw
stones at our best friends? Yet this is somewhat less than such a
multitude will do. For they will clamour, fight against, and destroy
those by whom all their lifetime before they have been protected, and
secured from injury. And if this be madness in the multitude, it is
the same in every particular man.”[313]

     [313] Id.

|Unmeaning language.|

144. There is a fault in some men’s habit of discoursing which may be
reckoned a sort of madness, which is when they speak words with no
signification at all. “And this is incident to none but those that
converse in questions of matters incomprehensible as the schoolmen, or
in questions of abstruse philosophy. The common sort of men seldom
speak insignificantly, and are therefore by those other egregious
persons counted idiots. But to be assured their words are without
anything correspondent to them in the mind, there would need some
examples; which if any man require let him take a schoolman into his
hands, and see if he can translate any one chapter concerning any
difficult point as the Trinity, the Deity, the nature of Christ,
transubstantiation, free will, &c., into any of the modern tongues, so
as to make the same intelligible, or into any tolerable Latin, such as
they were acquainted with, that lived when the Latin tongue was
vulgar.” And after quoting some words from Suarez, he adds: “When men
write whole volumes of such stuff, are they not mad, or intend to make
others so?”[314]

     [314] Lev.

|Manners.|

145. The eleventh chapter of the Leviathan, on manners, by which he
means those qualities of mankind which concern their living together
in peace and unity, is full of Hobbes’s caustic remarks on human
nature. Often acute, but always severe, he ascribes overmuch to a
deliberate and calculating selfishness. Thus, the reverence of
antiquity is referred to “the contention men have with the living, not
with the dead, to these ascribing more than due that they may obscure
the glory of the other.” Thus “to have received from one to whom we
think ourselves equal, greater benefits than we can hope to requite,
disposes to counterfeit love, but really to secret hatred, and
puts a man into the estate of a desperate debtor, that in declining
the sight of his creditor, tacitly wishes him where he might never see
him more. For benefits oblige, and obligation is thraldom; and
unrequitable obligation perpetual thraldom, which is to one’s equal
hateful.” He owns, however, that to have received benefits from a
superior, disposes us to love him; and so it does where we can hope to
requite even an equal. If these maxims have a certain basis of truth
they have at least the fault of those of Rochefoucault; they are made
too generally characteristic of mankind.

|Ignorances and prejudice.|

146. Ignorance of the signification of words disposes men to take on
trust not only the truth they know not, but also errors and nonsense.
For neither can be detected without a perfect understanding of words.
“But ignorance of the causes and original constitution of right,
equity, law and justice disposes a man to make custom and example the
rule of his actions, in such manner as to think that unjust which it
has been the custom to punish, and that just, of the impunity and
approbation of which they can produce an example, or, as the lawyers
which only use this false measure of justice barbarously call it, a
precedent.” “Men appeal from custom to reason and from reason to
custom as it serves their turn, receding from custom when their
interest requires it, and setting themselves against reason, as oft as
reason is against them; which is the cause that the doctrine of right
and wrong is perpetually disputed both by the pen and the sword;
whereas the doctrine of lines and figures is not so, because men care
not in that subject what is truth, as it is a thing that crosses no
man’s ambition, profit, or lust. For I doubt not, but if it had been a
thing contrary to any man’s right of dominion, or to the interest of
men that have dominion, that the three angles of a triangle should be
equal to two angles of a square, that doctrine should have been if not
disputed, yet by the burning of all books of geometry, suppressed, as
far as he whom it concerned was able.”[315] This excellent piece of
satire has been often quoted, and sometimes copied, and does not
exaggerate the pertinacity of mankind in resisting the evidence of
truth, when it thwarts the interests and passions of any particular
sect or community. In the earlier part of the paragraph it seems not
so easy to reconcile what Hobbes has said with his general notions of
right and justice; since, if these resolve themselves, as is his
theory into mere force, there can be little appeal to reason, or to
anything else than custom and precedent, which are commonly the
exponents of power.

     [315] 1 Lev., c. 11.

|His theory of religion.|

147. In the conclusion of this chapter of the Leviathan as well as in
the next, he dwells more on the nature of religion than he had done in
the former treatise, and so as to subject himself to the imputation of
absolute atheism, or at least of a denial of most attributes which we
assign to the Deity. Curiosity about causes, he says, led men to
search out one after the other, till they came to this necessary
conclusion, that there is some eternal cause which men call God. But
they have no more idea of his nature, than a blind man has of fire,
though he knows that there is something that warms him. So by the
visible things of this world and their admirable order, a man may
conceive there is a cause of them, which men call God, and yet not
have an idea or image of him in his mind. And they that make little
inquiry into the natural causes of things, are inclined to feign
several kinds of powers invisible and to stand in awe of their own
imaginations. And this fear of things invisible is the natural seed of
that which every one in himself calleth religion, and in them that
worship or fear that power otherwise than they do, superstition.

148. As God is incomprehensible, it follows that we can have no
conception or image of the Deity; and consequently all his attributes
signify our inability or defect of power to conceive anything
concerning his nature, and not any conception of the same, excepting
only this, that there is a God. Men that by their own meditation
arrive at the acknowledgment of one infinite, omnipotent, and eternal
God, chuse rather to confess this is incomprehensible and above their
understanding, than to define his nature by spirit incorporeal, and
then confess their definition to be unintelligible.[316] For
concerning such spirits he holds that it is not possible by natural
means only to come to the knowledge of so much as that there are such
things.[317]

     [316] Lev., c. 12.

     [317] Hum. Nat., c. 11.

|Its supposed sources.|

149. Religion he derives from three sources, the desire of men to
search for causes, the reference of everything that has a beginning to
some cause, and the observation of the order and consequence of
things. But the two former lead to anxiety, for the knowledge
that there have been causes of the effects we see, leads us to
anticipate that they will in time be the causes of effects to come; so
that every man, especially such as are over-provident, is “like
Prometheus, the prudent man, as his name implies, who was bound to the
hill Caucasus, a place of large prospect, where an eagle feeding on
his liver devoured as much by day as was repaired by night; and so he
who looks too far before him, has his heart all day long gnawed by the
fear of death, poverty or other calamity, and has no repose nor pause
but in sleep.” This is an allusion made in the style of Lord Bacon.
The ignorance of causes makes men fear some invisible agent, like the
gods of the Gentiles; but the investigation of them leads us to a God
eternal, infinite, and omnipotent. This ignorance however, of second
causes, conspiring with three other prejudices of mankind, the belief
in ghosts, or spirits of subtile bodies, the devotion and reverence
generally shown towards what we fear as having power to hurt us, and
the taking of things casual for prognostics, are altogether the
natural seed of religion, which by reason of the different fancies,
judgments, and passions of several men hath grown up into ceremonies
so different that those which are used by one man are for the most
part ridiculous to another. He illustrates this by a variety of
instances from ancient superstitions. But the forms of religion are
changed when men suspect the wisdom, sincerity, or love of those who
teach it, or its priests.[318] The remaining portion of the Leviathan
relating to moral and political philosophy, must be deferred to our
next chapter.

     [318] Lev., c. 12.

150. The Elementa Philosophiæ were published by Hobbes, in 1655, and
dedicated to his constant patron the Earl of Devonshire. These are
divided into three parts; entitled De Corpore, De Homine, and De Cive.
And the first part has itself three divisions; Logic, the First
Philosophy, and Physics. The second part, De Homine, is neither the
treatise of Human Nature, nor the corresponding part of the Leviathan,
though it contains many things substantially found there. A long
disquisition on optics and the nature of vision, chiefly geometrical,
is entirely new. The third part, De Cive, is the treatise by that name
reprinted, as far as I am aware, without alteration.

151. The first part of the first treatise, entitled Computatio sive
Logica, is by no means the least valuable among the philosophical
writings of Hobbes. In forty pages the subject is very well and
clearly explained, nor do I know that the principles are better laid
down, or the rules more sufficiently given in more prolix treatises.
Many of his observations, especially as to words, are such as we find
in his English works, and perhaps his nominalism is more clearly
expressed than it is in them. Of the syllogistic method, at least for
the purpose of demonstration, or teaching others, he seems to have
entertained a favourable opinion, or even to have held it necessary
for real demonstration, as his definition shows. Hobbes appears to be
aware of what I do not remember to have seen put by others, that in
the natural process of reasoning, the minor premise commonly precedes
the major.[319] It is for want of attending to this, that syllogisms,
as usually stated, are apt to have so formal and unnatural a
construction. The process of the mind in this kind of reasoning is
explained, in general, with correctness, and, I believe, with
originality in the following passage, which I shall transcribe from
the Latin, rather than give a version of my own; few probably being
likely to read the present section, who are unacquainted with that
language. The style of Hobbes, though perspicuous, is concise,
and the original words will be more satisfactory than any translation.

     [319] In Whateley’s Logic, p. 90, it is observed, that “the
     _proper order_ is to place the major premise first, and the minor
     second; but this does not constitute the major and minor
     premises,” &c. It may be the proper order in one sense, as
     exhibiting better the foundation of syllogistic reasoning; but it
     is not that which we commonly follow, either in thinking, or in
     proving to others. In the rhetorical use of syllogism it can
     admit of no doubt, that the opposite order is the most striking
     and persuasive; such as in Cato, “If there be a God, he must
     delight in virtue; And that which he delights in must be happy.”
     In Euclid’s demonstrations this will be found the form usually
     employed. And, though the rules of grammar are generally
     illustrated by examples, which is beginning with the major
     premise, yet the process of reasoning which a boy employs in
     construing a Latin sentence is the reverse. He observes a
     nominative case, a verb in the third person, and then applies his
     general rule, or major, to the particular instance, or minor, so
     as to infer their agreement. In criminal jurisprudence, the Scots
     begin with the major premise, or relevancy of the indictment,
     when there is room for doubt; the English with the minor, or
     evidence of the fact, reserving the other for what we call motion
     in arrest of judgment. Instances of both orders are common, but
     by far the most frequent are of that which the Archbishop of
     Dublin reckons the less proper of the two. Those logicians who
     fail to direct the student’s attention to this, really do not
     justice to their own favourite science.

152. Syllogismo directo cogitatio in animo respondens est hujusmodi.
Primo concipitur phantasma rei nominatæ cum accidente sive affectu
ejus propter quem appellatur eo nomine quod est in minore propositione
subjectum; deinde animo occurrit phantasma ejusdem rei cum accidente
sive affectu propter quem appellatur, quod est in eadem propositione
prædicatum. Tertio redit cogitatio rursus ad rem nominatam cum affectu
propter quem eo nomine appellatur, quod est in prædicato propositionis
majoris. Postremo cum meminerit eos affectus esse omnes unius et
ejusdem rei, concludit tria illa nomina ejusdem quoque rei esse
nomina; hoc est, conclusionem esse veram. Exempli causa, quando fit
syllogismus hic, Homo est Animal, Animal est Corpus, ergo Homo est
Corpus, occurrit animo imago hominis loquentis vel differentis [sic,
sed lege disserentis], meminitque id quod sic apparet vocari hominem.
Deinde occurrit eadem imago ejusdem hominis sese moventis, meminitque
id quod sic apparet vocari animal. Tertio recurrit eadem imago hominis
locum aliquem sive spatium occupantis, meminitque id quod sic apparet
vocari corpus.[320] Postremo cum meminerit rem illam quæ et
extendebatur secundum locum, et loco movebatur, et oratione utebatur,
unam et eandem fuisse, concludit etiam nomina illa tria, Homo, Animal,
Corpus, ejusdem rei esse nomina, et proinde, Homo est Corpus, esse
propositionem veram. Manifestum hinc est conceptum sive cogitationem
quæ respondens syllogismo ex propositionibus universalibus in animo
existit, nullam esse in iis animalibus quibus deest usus nominum, cum
inter syllogizandum oporteat non modo de re sed etiam alternis vicibus
de diversis rei nominibus, quæ propter diversas de re cogitationes
adhibitæ sunt, cogitare.

     [320] This is the questionable part of Hobbes’s theory of
     syllogism. According to the common and obvious understanding, the
     mind, in the major premise, Animal est Corpus, does not reflect
     on the subject of the minor, Homo, as occupying space, but on the
     subject of the major, Animal, which includes indeed the former,
     but is mentally substituted for it. It may sometimes happen, that
     where this predicate of the minor term is _manifestly_ a
     collective word that comprehends the subject, the latter is not
     as it were absorbed in it, and may be contemplated by the mind
     distinctly in the major; as if we say, John is a man: a man
     feels; we may perhaps have no image in the mind of any man but
     John. But this is not the case where the predicated quality
     appertains to many things visibly different from the subject; as
     in Hobbes’s instance Animal est Corpus, we may surely consider
     other animals as being extended and occupying space besides men.
     It does not seem that otherwise there could be any ascending
     scale from particulars to generals, as far as the reasoning
     faculties, independent of words, are concerned. And if we begin
     with the major premise of the syllogism, this will be still more
     apparent.

153. The metaphysical philosophy of Hobbes, always bold and original,
often acute and profound, without producing an immediate school of
disciples like that of Descartes, struck, perhaps, a deeper root in
the minds of reflecting men, and has influenced more extensively the
general tone of speculation. Locke, who had not read much, had
certainly read Hobbes, though he does not borrow from him so much as
has sometimes been imagined. The French metaphysicians of the next
century found him nearer to their own theories than his more
celebrated rival in English philosophy. But the writer who has built
most upon Hobbes, and may be reckoned, in a certain sense, his
commentator, if he who fully explains and develops a system may
deserve that name, was Hartley. The theory of association is implied
and intimated in many passages of the elder philosopher, though it was
first expanded and applied with a diligent, ingenious and
comprehensive research, if sometimes in too forced a manner, by his
disciple. I use this word without particular inquiry into the direct
acquaintance of Hartley with the writings of Hobbes; the subject had
been frequently touched in intermediate publications, and, in matters
of reasoning, as I have intimated above, little or no presumption of
borrowing can be founded on coincidence. Hartley also resembles Hobbes
in the extreme to which he has pushed the nominalist theory, in the
proneness to materialize all intellectual processes, and either to
force all things mysterious to our faculties into something
imaginable, or to reject them as unmeaning, in the want, much
connected with this, of a steady perception of the difference between
the Ego and its objects, in an excessive love of simplifying and
generalizing, and in a readiness to adopt explanations neither
conformable to reason nor experience, when they fall in with some
single principle, the key that was to unlock every ward of the human
soul.

154. In nothing does Hobbes deserve more credit than in having set an
example of close observation in the philosophy of the human
mind. If he errs, he errs like a man who goes a little out of the
right track, not like one who has set out in a wrong one. The eulogy
of Stewart on Descartes, that he was the father of this experimental
psychology, cannot be strictly wrested from him by Hobbes, inasmuch as
the publications of the former are of an earlier date; but we may
fairly say that the latter began as soon, and prosecuted his inquiries
farther. It seems natural to presume that Hobbes, who is said to have
been employed by Bacon in translating some of his works into Latin,
had at least been led by him to the inductive process he has more than
any other employed. But he has seldom mentioned his predecessor’s
name; and indeed his mind was of a different stamp; less excursive,
less quick in discovering analogies, and less fond of reasoning from
them, but more close, perhaps more patient, and more apt to follow up
a predominant idea, which sometimes becomes one of the “idola specûs”
that deceive him.




                           CHAPTER XXI.

   HISTORY OF MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND OF JURISPRUDENCE,
                        FROM 1600 TO 1650.


                             SECT. I.

                       ON MORAL PHILOSOPHY.

_Casuists of the Roman Church--Suarez on Moral Law--Selden--Charron--
La Mothe le Vayer--Bacon’s Essays--Feltham--Browne’s Religio
Medici--Other Writers._

1. In traversing so wide a field as moral and political philosophy, we
must still endeavour to distribute the subject according to some order
of subdivision, so far at least as the contents of the books
themselves which come before us will permit. And we give the first
place to those which, relating to the moral law both of nature and
revelation, connect the proper subject of the present chapter with
that of the second and third.

|Casuistical writers.|

|Importance of confession.|

2. We meet here a concourse of volumes occupying no small space in old
libraries, the writings of the casuists, chiefly within the Romish
church. None perhaps in the whole compass of literature are more
neglected by those who do not read with what we may call a
professional view; but to the ecclesiastics of that communion they
have still a certain value, though far less than when they were first
written. The most vital discipline of that church, the secret of the
power of its priesthood, the source of most of the good and evil it
can work, is found in the confessional. It is there that the keys are
kept; it is there that the lamp burns whose rays diverge to every
portion of human life. No church that has relinquished this
prerogative can ever establish a permanent dominion over mankind; none
that retains it in effective use can lose the hope or the prospect of
being their ruler.

|Necessity of rules for the confessor.|

3. It is manifest that in the common course of this rite, no
particular difficulty will arise, nor is the confessor likely to weigh
in golden scales the scruples or excuses of ordinary penitents. But
peculiar circumstances might be brought before him, wherein there
would be a necessity for possessing some rule, lest by sanctioning the
guilt of the party before him he should incur as much of his own.
Treatises therefore of casuistry were written as guides to the
confessor, and became the text books in every course of ecclesiastical
education. These were commonly digested in a systematic order, and,
what is the unfailing consequence of system, or rather almost part of
its definition, spread into minute ramifications, and aimed at
comprehending every possible emergency. Casuistry is itself allied to
jurisprudence, especially to that of the canon law; and it was natural
to transfer the subtlety of distinction and copiousness of partition
usual with the jurists, to a science which its professors were apt to
treat upon very similar principles.

|Increase of casuistical literature.|

4. The older theologians seem, like the Greek and Roman moralists,
when writing systematically, to have made general morality their
subject, and casuistry but their illustration. Among the monuments of
their ethical philosophy, the Secunda Secundæ of Aquinas is
the most celebrated. Treatises however of casuistry, which is the
expansion and application of ethics, may be found both before and
during the sixteenth century; and while the confessional was actively
converted to so powerful an engine, they could not conveniently be
wanting. Casuistry indeed is not much required by the church in an
ignorant age; but the sixteenth century was not an age of ignorance.
Yet it is not till about the end of that period that we find
casuistical literature burst out, so to speak, with a profusion of
fruit. “Uninterruptedly afterwards,” says Eichhorn, “through the whole
seventeenth century, the moral and casuistical literature of the
church of Rome was immensely rich; and it caused a lively and
extensive movement in a province which had long been at peace. The
first impulse came from the Jesuits, to whom the Jansenists opposed
themselves. We must distinguish from both the theological moralists,
who remained faithful to their ancient teaching.”[321]

     [321] Geschichte der Cultur, vol. vi., part i, p. 390.

|Distraction of subjective and objective morality.|

5. We may be blamed, perhaps, for obtruding a pedantic terminology, if
we make the most essential distinction in morality, and one for want
of which, more than any other, its debatable controversies have
arisen, that between the subjective and objective rectitude of
actions; in clearer language, between the provinces of conscience and
of reason, between what is well meant, and what is well done. The
chief business of the priest is naturally with the former. The walls
of the confessional are privy to the whispers of self-accusing guilt.
No doubt can ever arise as to the subjective character of actions
which the conscience has condemned, and for which the penitent seeks
absolution. Were they even objectively lawful, they are sins in him,
according to the unanimous determination of casuists. But though what
the conscience reclaims against is necessarily wrong, relatively to
the agent, it does not follow that what it may fail to disapprove is
innocent. Chuse whatever theory we may please as to the moral standard
of actions, they must have an objective rectitude of their own,
independently of their agent, without which there could be no
distinction of right and wrong, or any scope for the dictates of
conscience. The science of ethics, as a science, can only be
conversant with objective morality. Casuistry is the instrument of
applying this science, which, like every other, is built on reasoning,
to the moral nature and volition of man. It rests for its validity on
the great principle, that it is our duty to know, as far as lies in
us, what is right as well as to do what we know to be such. But its
application was beset with obstacles; the extenuations of ignorance
and error were so various, the difficulty of representing the moral
position of the penitent to the judgment of the confessor by any
process of language so insuperable, that the most acute understanding
might be foiled in the task of bringing home a conviction of guilt to
the self-deceiving, sinner. Again, he might aggravate needless
scruples, or disturb the tranquil repose of innocence.

|Directory office of the confessor.|

6. But though past actions are the primary subject of auricular
confession, it was a necessary consequence that the priest would be
frequently called upon to advise as to the future, to bind or loose
the will in incomplete or meditated lines of conduct. And as all
without exception must come before his tribunal, the rich, the noble,
the counsellors of princes, and princes themselves, were to reveal
their designs, to expound their uncertainties, to call, in effect, for
his sanction in all they might have to do, to secure themselves
against transgression by shifting the responsibility on his head. That
this tremendous authority of direction, distinct from the rite of
penance, though immediately springing from it, should have produced a
no more overwhelming influence of the priesthood than it has actually
done, great as that has been, can only be ascribed to the reaction of
human inclinations which will not be controlled, and of human reason
which exerts a silent force against the authority it acknowledges.

|Difficulties of casuistry.|

7. In the directory business of the confessional, far more than in the
penitential, the priest must strive to bring about that union between
subjective and objective rectitude in which the perfection of a moral
act consists, without which in every instance, according to their
tenets, some degree of sinfulness, some liability to punishment
remains, and which must at least be demanded from those who have been
made acquainted with their duty. But when he came from the broad lines
of the moral law, from the decalogue and the Gospel, or even from the
ethical systems of theology, to the indescribable variety of
circumstance which his penitents had to recount, there arose a
multitude of problems, and such as perhaps would most command
his attention, when they involved the practice of the great, to which
he might hesitate to apply an unbending rule. The questions of
casuistry, like those of jurisprudence, were often found to turn on
the great and ancient doubt of both sciences, whether we should abide
by the letter of a general law, or let in an equitable interpretation
of its spirit. The consulting party would be apt to plead for the one;
the guide of conscience would more securely adhere to the other. But
he might also perceive the severity of those rules of obligation which
conduce, in the particular instance, to no apparent end, or even
defeat their own principle. Hence, there arose two schools of
casuistry: first in the practice of confession, and afterwards in the
books intended to assist it; one strict and uncomplying, the other
more indulgent and flexible to circumstances.

|Strict and lax schemes of it.|

8. The characteristics of these systems were displayed in almost the
whole range of morals. They were, however, chiefly seen in the rules
of veracity and especially in promissory obligations. According to the
fathers of the church, and to the rigid casuists in general, a lie was
never to be uttered, a promise was never to be broken. The precepts,
especially of revelation, notwithstanding their brevity and
figurativeness, were held complete and literal. Hence, promises
obtained by mistake, fraud, or force, and, above all, gratuitous vows,
where God was considered as the promisee, however lightly made, or
become intolerably onerous by supervenient circumstances, were
strictly to be fulfilled, unless the dispensing power of the church
might sometimes be sufficient to release them. Besides the respect due
to moral rules, and especially those of Scripture, there had been from
early times in the Christian church a strong disposition to the
ascetic scheme of religious morality; a prevalent notion of the
intrinsic meritoriousness of voluntary self-denial, which
discountenanced all regard in man to his own happiness, at least in
this life, as a sort of flinching from the discipline of suffering.
And this had doubtless its influence upon the severe casuists.

|Convenience of the latter.|

9. But there had not been wanting those who, whatever course they
might pursue in the confessional, found the convenience of an
accommodating morality in the secular affairs of the church. Oaths
were broken, engagements entered into without faith, for the ends of
the clergy, or of those whom they favoured in the struggles of the
world. And some of the ingenious sophistry, by which these breaches of
plain rules are usually defended, was not unknown before the
Reformation. But casuistical writings at that time were comparatively
few. The Jesuits have the credit of first rendering public a scheme of
false morals, which has been denominated from them, and enhanced the
obloquy that overwhelmed their order. Their volumes of casuistry were
exceedingly numerous; some of them belong to the last twenty years of
the sixteenth, but a far greater part to the following century.

|Favoured by the Jesuits.|

10. The Jesuits were prone for several reasons to embrace the laxer
theories of obligation. They were less tainted than the old monastic
orders with that superstition which had flowed into the church from
the east, the meritoriousness of self-inflicted suffering for its own
sake. They embraced a life of toil and danger, but not of habitual
privation and pain. Dauntless in death and torture, they shunned the
mechanical asceticism of the convent. And, secondly, their eyes were
bent on a great end, the good of the Catholic church, which they
identified with that of their own order. It almost invariably happens,
that men who have the good of mankind at heart, and actively prosecute
it, become embarrassed, at some time or other, by the conflict of
particular duties with the best method of promoting their object. An
unaccommodating veracity, an unswerving good faith, will often appear
to stand, or stand really, in the way of their ends; and hence the
little confidence we repose in enthusiasts, even when, in a popular
mode of speaking, they are most sincere; that is, most convinced of
the rectitude of their aim.

|The causes of this.|

11. The course prescribed by Loyola led his disciples not to solitude,
but to the world. They became the associates and counsellors, as well
as the confessors of the great. They had to wield the powers of the
earth for the service of heaven. Hence, in confession itself, they
were often tempted to look beyond the penitent, and to guide his
conscience rather with a view to his usefulness than his integrity. In
questions of morality, to abstain from action is generally the means
of innocence, but to act is indispensable for positive good. Thus
their casuistry had a natural tendency to become more objective, and
to entangle the responsibility of personal conscience in an
inextricable maze of reasoning. They had also to retain their
influence over men not wholly submissive to religious control, nor
ready to abjure the pleasant paths in which they trod; men of the
court and the city, who might serve the church though they did not
adorn it, and for whom it was necessary to make some compromise in
furtherance of the main design.

|Extravagance of the strict casuists.|

12. It must also be fairly admitted, that rigid casuists went to
extravagant lengths. Their decisions were often not only harsh, but
unsatisfactory; the reason demanded in vain a principle of their iron
law; and the common sense of mankind imposed the limitations, which
they were incapable of excluding by anything better than a dogmatic
assertion. Thus, in the cases of promissory obligation, they were
compelled to make some exceptions, and these left it open to rational
inquiry whether more might not be found. They diverged unnecessarily,
as many thought, from the principles of jurisprudence; for the jurists
built their determinations, or professed to do so on what was just and
equitable among men; and though a distinction, frequently very right,
was taken between the _forum exterius_ and _interius_, the
provinces of jurisprudence and casuistry, yet the latter could not, in
these questions of mutual obligation, rest upon wholly different
ground from the former.

|Opposite faults of Jesuits.|

13. The Jesuits, however, fell rapidly into the opposite extreme.
Their subtlety in logic, and great ingenuity in devising arguments,
were employed in sophisms that undermined the foundations of moral
integrity in the heart. They warred with these arms against the
conscience which they were bound to protect. The offences of their
casuistry, as charged by their adversaries, are very multifarious. One
of the most celebrated is the doctrine of equivocation; the innocence
of saying that which is true in a sense meant by the speaker, though
he is aware that it will be otherwise understood. Another is that of
what was called probability; according to which it is lawful, in
doubtful problems of morality, to take the course which appears to
ourselves least likely to be right, provided any one casuistical
writer of good repute has approved it. The multiplicity of books, and
want of uniformity in their decisions, made this a broad path for the
conscience. In the latter instance, as in many others, the
_subjective_ nature of moral obligation was lost sight of; and to
this the scientific treatment of casuistry inevitably contributed.

14. Productions so little regarded as those of the Jesuitical casuists
cannot be dwelt upon. Thomas Sanchez of Cordova, is author of a large
treatise on matrimony, published in 1592; the best, as far as the
canon law is concerned, which has yet been published. But in the
casuistical portion of this work, the most extraordinary indecencies
occur, such as have consigned it to general censure.[322] Some of
these, it must be owned, belong to the rite of auricular confession
itself, as managed in the church of Rome, though they give scandal by
their publication and apparent excess beyond the necessity of the
case. The Summa Casuum Conscientiæ of Toletus, a Spanish Jesuit and
cardinal, which, though published in 1602, belongs to the sixteenth
century, and the casuistical writings of Less, Busenbaum, and Escobar,
may just be here mentioned. The Medulla Casuum Conscientiæ of the
second (Munster, 1645), went through fifty-two editions, the Theologia
Moralis of the last (Lyon, 1646), through forty.[323] Of the
opposition excited by the laxity in moral rules ascribed to the
Jesuits, though it began in some manner during this period, we shall
have more to say in the next.

     [322] Bayle, art. Sanchez, expatiates on this, and condemns the
     Jesuit; Catilina Cethegum. The later editions of Sanchez De
     Matrimonia, are _castigate_.

     [323] Ranke, die Päpste, vol. iii.

|Suarez. De Legibus.|

15. Suarez of Granada, by far the greatest man in the department of
moral philosophy whom the order of Loyola produced in this age, or
perhaps in any other, may not improbably have treated of casuistry in
some part of his numerous volumes. We shall, however, gladly leave
this subject to bring before the reader a large treatise of Suarez, on
the principles of natural law, as well as of all positive
jurisprudence. This is entitled, Tractatus de legibus ac Deo
legislatore in decem libros distributus, utriusque fori hominibus non
minus utilis, quam necessarius. It might, with no great impropriety,
perhaps, be placed in any of the three sections of this chapter,
relating not only to moral philosophy, but to politics in some degree,
and to jurisprudence.

|Titles of his ten books.|

16. Suarez begins by laying down the position, that all legislative,
as well as all paternal, power is derived from God, and that the
authority of every law resolves itself into his. For either
the law proceeds immediately from God; or, if it be human, it proceeds
from man as his vicar and minister. The titles of the ten books of
this large treatise are as follows: 1. On the nature of law in
general, and on its causes and consequences; 2. On eternal, natural
law, and that of nations; 3. On positive human law in itself,
considered relatively to human nature, which is also called civil law;
4. On positive ecclesiastical law; 5. On the differences of human
laws, and especially of those that are penal, or in the nature of
penal; 6. On the interpretation, the alteration, and the abolition of
human laws; 7. On unwritten law, which is called custom; 8. On those
human laws which are called favourable, or privileges; 9. On the
positive divine law of the old dispensations; 10. On the positive
divine law of the new dispensation.

|Heads of the second book.|

17. This is a very comprehensive chart of general law, and entitles
Suarez to be accounted such a precursor of Grotius and Puffendorf as
occupied most of their ground, especially that of the latter, though
he cultivated it in a different manner. His volume is a closely
printed folio of 700 pages in double columns. The following heads of
chapters in the second book will show the questions in which Suarez
dealt, and in some degree his method of stating and conducting them.
1. Whether there be any eternal law, and what is its necessity; 2. On
the subject of eternal law, and on the acts it commands; 3. In what
act (actus, not actio, a scholastic term as I conceive), the eternal
law exists (existit), and whether it be one or many; 4. Whether the
eternal law be the cause of other laws, and obligatory through their
means; 5. In what natural law consists; 6. Whether natural law be a
preceptive divine law; 7. On the subject of natural law, and on its
precepts; 8. Whether natural law be one; 9. Whether natural law bind
the conscience; 10. Whether natural law obliges not only to the act
(actus) but to the mode (modum) of virtue. This obscure question seems
to refer to the subjective nature, or motive, of virtuous actions, as
appears by the next; 11. Whether natural law obliges us to act from
love or charity (ad modum operandi ex caritate); 12. Whether natural
law not only prohibits certain actions, but invalidates them when
done; 13. Whether the precepts of the law of nature are intrinsically
immutable; 14. Whether any human authority can alter or dispense with
the natural law; 15. Whether God by his absolute power can dispense
with the law of nature; 16. Whether an equitable interpretation can
ever be admitted in the law of nature; 17. Whether the law of nature
is distinguishable from that of nations; 18. Whether the law of
nations enjoins or forbids anything; 19. By what means we are to
distinguish the law of nature from that of nations; 20. Certain
corollaries; and that the law of nations is both just, and also
mutable.

|Character of such scholastic treatises.|

18. These heads may give some slight notion to the reader of the
character of the book, as the book itself may serve as a typical
instance of that form of theology, of metaphysics of ethics, of
jurisprudence, which occupies the unread and unreadable folios of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially those issuing from the
church of Rome, and may be styled generally the scholastic method. Two
remarkable characteristics strike us in these books, which are
sufficiently to be judged by reading their table of contents, and by
taking occasional samples of different parts. The extremely systematic
form they assume, and the multiplicity of divisions render this
practice more satisfactory than it can be in works of less regular
arrangement. One of these characteristics is that spirit of system
itself, and another is their sincere desire to exhaust the subject by
presenting it to the mind in every light, and by tracing all its
relations and consequences. The fertility of those men who, like
Suarez, superior to most of the rest, were trained in the scholastic
discipline, to which I refer the methods of the canonists and
casuists, is sometimes surprising; their views are not one-sided; they
may not solve objections to our satisfaction, but they seldom suppress
them; they embrace a vast compass of thought and learning; they write
less for the moment, and are less under the influence of local and
temporary prejudices than many who have lived in better ages of
philosophy. But, again, they have great defects; their distinctions
confuse instead of giving light; their systems being not founded on
clear principles become embarrassed and incoherent; their method is
not always sufficiently consecutive; the difficulties which they
encounter are too arduous for them; they labour under the multitude,
and are entangled by the discordance of their authorities.

|Quotations of Suarez.|

19. Suarez, who discusses all these important problems of his second
book with acuteness, and, for his circumstances, with an
independent mind, is weighed down by the extent and nature of his
learning. If Grotius quotes philosophers and poets too frequently,
what can we say of the perpetual reference to Aquinas, Cajetan, Soto,
Turrecremata, Vasquius, Isidore, Vincent of Beauvais or Alensis, not
to mention the canonists and fathers, which Suarez employs to prove or
disprove every proposition. The syllogistic forms are unsparingly
introduced. Such writers as Soto or Suarez held all sort of ornament
not less unfit for philosophical argument than it would be for
geometry. Nor do they ever appeal to experience or history for the
rules of determination. Their materials are nevertheless abundant,
consisting of texts of Scripture, sayings of the fathers and
schoolmen, established theorems in natural theology and metaphysics,
from which they did not find it hard to select premises which, duly
arranged, gave them conclusions.

|His definition of eternal law.|

20. Suarez, after a prolix discussion, comes to the conclusion, that
“eternal law is the free determination of the will of God, ordaining a
rule to be observed, either, first, generally by all parts of the
universe as a means of common good, whether immediately belonging to
it in respect of the entire universe or at least in respect of the
singular parts thereof; or, secondly, to be specially observed by
intellectual creatures in respect of their free operations.”[324] This
is not instantly perspicuous; but definitions of a complex nature
cannot be rendered such, and I do not know that it perplexes more at
first sight than the enunciation of the last proposition in the fifth
book of Simson’s Euclid, or many others in the conic sections and
other parts of geometry. It is, however, what the reader may think
curious, that this crabbed piece of scholasticism is nothing else, in
substance, than the celebrated sentence on law, which concludes the
first book of Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity. Whoever takes the pains
to understand Suarez, will perceive that he asserts exactly that which
is unrolled in the majestic eloquence of our countryman.

     [324] Legem æternam esse decretum liberum voluntatis Dei
     statuentis ordinem servandum, aut generaliter ab omnibus partibus
     universi in ordine ad commune bonum, vel immediatè illi
     conveniens ratione totius universi, vel saltem ratione singularum
     specierum ejus, aut specialiter servandum a creaturis
     intellectualibus quoad liberas operationes earum, c. 3, § 6.
     Compare with Hooker: Of Law no less can be said than that her
     throne is the bosom of God, &c.

21. By this eternal law God is not necessarily bound. But this seems
to be said rather for the sake of avoiding phrases which were
conventionally rejected by the scholastic theologians, since, in
effect, his theory requires the affirmative, as we shall soon
perceive; and he here says that the law is God himself (Deus ipse),
and is immutable. This eternal law is not immediately known to man in
this life, but either “in other laws, or through them,” which he thus
explains. “Men, while pilgrims here, (viatores homines), cannot learn
the divine will in itself, but only as much as by certain signs or
effects is proposed to them; and hence, it is peculiar to the blessed
in heaven that, contemplating the divine will, they are ruled by it as
by a direct law. The former know the eternal law, because they partake
of it by other laws, temporal and positive; for, as second causes
display the first, and creatures the Creator, so temporal laws (by
which he means laws respective of man on earth), being streams from
that eternal law, manifest the fountain whence they spring. Yet all do
not arrive even at this degree of knowledge, for all are not able to
infer the cause from the effect. And thus, though all men necessarily
perceive some participation of the eternal laws in themselves, since
there is no one endowed with reason who does not in some manner
acknowledge that what is morally good ought to be chosen, and what is
evil rejected, so that in this sense men have all some notion of the
eternal law, as St. Thomas, and Hales, and Augustin say; yet
nevertheless they do not all know it formally, nor are aware of their
participation of it, so that it may be said the eternal law is not
universally known in a direct manner. But some attain that knowledge,
either by natural reasoning, or more properly by revelation of faith;
and hence we have said that it is known by some only in the inferior
laws, but by others through the means of those laws.”[325]

     [325] Lib. ii., c. 4, § 9.

|Whether God is a legislator?|

22. In every chapter Suarez propounds the arguments of doctors on
either side of the problem, ending with his own determination, which
is frequently a middle course. On the question, Whether natural law is
of itself preceptive, or merely indicative of what is intrinsically
right or wrong, or, in other words, whether God, as to this law, is a
legislator, he holds this line with Aquinas and most theologians (as
he says), contending that natural law does not merely indicate
right and wrong, but commands the one and prohibits the other; though
this will of God is not the whole ground of the moral good and evil
which belongs to the observance or transgression of natural law,
inasmuch as it presupposes a certain intrinsic right and wrong in the
actions themselves, to which it superadds the special obligation of a
divine law. God, therefore, may be truly called a legislator in
respect of natural law.[326]

     [326] Hæc Dei voluntas, prohibitio aut præceptio non est
     tota ratio bonitatis et malitiæ quæ est in observatione vel
     transgressione legis naturalis, sed supponit in ipsis actubus
     necessariam quandam honestatem vel turpitudinem, et illis
     adjungit specialem legis divinæ obligationem, c. 6, § 11.

|Whether God could permit or commend wrong actions.|

23. He next comes to a profound but important inquiry, Whether God
could have permitted by his own law actions against natural reason?
Ockham and Gerson had resolved this in the affirmative, Aquinas the
contrary way. Suarez assents to the latter, and thus determines that
the law is strictly immutable. It must follow of course that the pope
cannot alter or dispense with the law of nature, and he might have
spared the fourteenth chapter, wherein he controverts the doctrine of
Sanchez and some casuists who had maintained so extraordinary a
prerogative.[327] This, however, is rather episodical. In the
fifteenth chapter he treats more at length the question, Whether God
can dispense with the law of nature? which is not, perhaps, at least
according to the notions of many, decided in denying his power to
repeal it. He begins by distinguishing three classes of moral laws.
The first are the most general, such as that good is to be done rather
than evil; and with these it is agreed that God cannot dispense. The
second is of such as the precepts of the decalogue, where the chief
difficulty had arisen. Ockham, Peter d’Ailly, Gerson, and others,
incline to say that he can dispense with all these, inasmuch as they
are only prohibitions which he has himself imposed. These were the
heads of the nominalist party; and their opinion might be connected,
though not necessarily, with the denial of the _reality_ of mixed
modes. This tenet, Suarez observes, is rejected by all other
theologians as false and absurd. He decidedly holds that there is an
intrinsic goodness or malignity in actions independent of the command
of God. Scotus had been of opinion that God might dispense with the
commandments of the second table, but not those of the first. Durand
seems to have thought the fifth commandment (our sixth) more
dispensable than the rest, probably on account of the case of Abraham.
But Aquinas, Cajetan, Soto, with many more, deny absolutely the
dispensability of the decalogue in any part. The Gordian knot about
the sacrifice of Isaac is cut by a distinction, that God did not act
here as a legislator, but in another capacity, as lord of life and
death, so that he only used Abraham as an instrument for that which he
might have done himself. The third class of moral precepts is of those
not contained in the decalogue, as to which he decides also that God
cannot dispense with them, though he may change the circumstances upon
which their obligation rests, as when he releases a vow.

     [327] Nulla potestas humana, etiamsi pontificia sit, potest
     proprium aliquod præceptum legis naturalis abrogare, nec illud
     proprie et in se minuere, neque in ipso dispensare, § 8.

|English Casuists--Perkins, Hall.|

24. The Protestant churches were not generally attentive to
casuistical divinity, which smelt too much of the opposite system.
Eichhorn observes that the first book of that class, published among
the Lutherans, was by a certain Baldwin of Wittenberg, in 1628.[328] A
few books of casuistry were published in England during this period,
though nothing, as well as I remember, that can be reckoned a system
or even a treatise of moral philosophy. Perkins, an eminent
Calvinistic divine of the reign of Elizabeth, is the first of these in
point of time. His Cases of Conscience appeared in 1606. Of this book
I can say nothing from personal knowledge. In the works of Bishop Hall
several particular questions of this kind are treated, but not with
much ability. His distinctions are more than usually feeble. Thus,
usury is a deadly sin, but it is very difficult to commit it unless we
love the sin for its own sake; for almost every possible case of
lending money will be found by his limitations of the rule to justify
the taking a profit for the loan.[329] His casuistry about selling
goods is of the same description: a man must take no advantage of the
scarcity of the commodity, unless there should be just reason to raise
the price, which he admits to be often the case in a scarcity. He
concludes by observing that, in this, as in other well ordered
nations, it would be a happy thing to have a regulation of prices. He
decides, as all the old casuists did, that a promise extorted by a
robber is binding. Sanderson was the most celebrated of the
English casuists. His treatise, De Juramenti Obligatione, appeared in
1647.

     [328] Vol. vi., part i., p. 346.

     [329] Hall’s Works (edit. Pratt), vol. viii., p. 375.

|Selden, De Jure Naturali juxta Hebræos.|

25. Though no proper treatise of moral philosophy came from any
English writer in this period, we have one which must be placed in
this class, strangely as the subject has been handled by its
distinguished author. Selden published in 1640 his learned work, De
Jure Naturali et Gentium juxta Disciplinam Ebræorum.[330] The object
of the author was to trace the opinions of the Jews on the law of
nature and nations, or of moral obligation, as distinct from the
Mosaic law; the former being a law to which they held all mankind to
be bound. This theme had been of course untouched by the Greek and
Roman philosophers, nor was much to be found upon it in modern
writers. His purpose is therefore rather historical than
argumentative; but he seems so generally to adopt the Jewish theory of
natural law that we may consider him the disciple of the rabbis as
much as their historian.

     [330] _Juxta_ for _secundum_, we need hardly say, is bad Latin: it
     was, however, very common, and is even used by Joseph Scaliger,
     as Vossius mentions in his treatise, De Vitiis Sermonis.

|Jewish theory of natural law.|

26. The origin of natural law was not drawn by the Jews, as some of
the jurists imagined it ought to be, from the habits and instincts of
all animated beings, quod natura omnia animalia docuit, according to
the definition of the Pandects. Nor did they deem, as many have done,
the consent of mankind and common customs of nations to be a
sufficient basis for so permanent and invariable a standard. Upon the
discrepancy of moral sentiments and practices among mankind Selden
enlarges in the tone which Sextus Empiricus had taught scholars, and
which the world had learned from Montaigne. Nor did unassisted reason
seem equal to determine moral questions, both from its natural
feebleness, and because reason alone does not create an obligation,
which depends wholly on the command of a superior.[331] But God, as
the ruler of the universe, has partly implanted in our minds, partly
made known to us by exterior revelation, his own will, which is our
law. These positions he illustrates with a superb display of
erudition, especially oriental, and certainly with more prolixity, and
less regard to opposite reasonings, than we should desire.

     [331] Selden says, in his Table Talk, that he can understand no
     law of nature but a law of God. He might mean this in the sense
     of Suarez, without denying an intrinsic distinction of right and
     wrong.

|Seven precepts of the sons of Noah.|

27. The Jewish writers concur in maintaining that certain short
precepts of moral duty were orally enjoined by God on the parent of
mankind, and afterwards on the sons of Noah. Whether these were simply
preserved by tradition, or whether, by an innate moral faculty,
mankind had the power of constantly discerning them, seems to have
been an unsettled point. The principal of these divine rules are
called, for distinction, The Seven Precepts of the Sons of Noah. There
appears, however, to be some variance in the lists, as Selden has
given them from the ancient writers. That most received consists of
seven prohibitions--namely, of idolatry, blasphemy, murder, adultery,
theft, rebellion, and cutting a limb from a living animal. The last of
these, the sense of which, however, is controverted, as well as the
third, but no other, are indicated in the ninth chapter of Genesis.

|Character of Selden’s work.|

28. Selden pours forth his unparalleled stores of erudition on all
these subjects, and upon those which are suggested in the course of
his explanations. These digressions are by no means the least useful
part of his long treatise. They elucidate some obscure passages of
Scripture. But the whole works belongs far more to theological than to
philosophical investigation; and I have placed it here chiefly out of
conformity to usage; for undoubtedly Selden, though a man of very
strong reasoning faculties, had not greatly turned them to the
principles of natural law. His reliance on the testimony of Jewish
writers, many of them by no means ancient, for those primæval
traditions as to the sons of Noah, was in the character of his times,
but it will scarcely suit the more rigid criticism of our own. His
book, however, is excellent for its proper purpose, that of
representing Jewish opinion, and is among the greatest achievements in
erudition that any English writer has performed.

|Grotius and Hobbes.|

29. The moral theories of Grotius and Hobbes are so much interwoven
with other parts of their philosophy, in the treatise De Jure Belli
and in the Leviathan, that it would be dissecting those works too
much, were we to separate what is merely ethical from what falls
within the provinces of politics and jurisprudence. The whole must
therefore be deferred to the ensuing sections of this chapter. Nor is
there much in the writings of Bacon or of Descartes which
falls, in the sense we have hitherto been considering it, under the
class of moral philosophy. We may therefore proceed to another
description of books, relative to the passions and manners of mankind,
rather than, in a strict sense, to their duties, though of course
there will frequently be some intermixture of subjects so intimately
allied.

|Charron on Wisdom.|

30. In the year 1601, Peter Charron, a French ecclesiastic, published
his Treatise on Wisdom. The reputation of this work has been
considerable; his countrymen are apt to name him with Montaigne; and
Pope has given him the epithet of “more wise” than his predecessor, on
account, as Warburton expresses it, of his “moderating everywhere the
extravagant Pyrrhonism of his friend.” It is admitted that he has
copied freely from the Essays of Montaigne, in fact, a very large
portion of the Treatise on Wisdom, not less, I should conjecture, than
one fourth, is extracted from them with scarce any verbal alteration.
It is not the case that he moderates the sceptical tone which he found
there; on the contrary, the most remarkable passages of that kind have
been transcribed; but we must do Charron the justice to say that he
has retrenched the indecencies, the egotism, and the superfluities.
Charron does not dissemble his debts. “This,” he says in his preface,
“is the collection of a part of my studies; the form and method are my
own. What I have taken from others, I have put in their words, not
being able to say it better than they have done.” In the political
part he has borrowed copiously from Lipsius and Bodin, and he is said
to have obligations to Duvair.[332] The ancients also must have
contributed their share. It becomes therefore difficult to estimate
the place of Charron as a philosopher, because we feel a good deal of
uncertainty whether any passage may be his own. He appears to have
been a man formed in the school of Montaigne, not much less bold in
pursuing the novel opinions of others, but less fertile in original
thoughts, so that he often falls into the common-places of ethics;
with more reading than his model, with more disciplined habits as well
of arranging and distributing his subject, as of observing the
sequence of an argument; but, on the other hand, with far less of
ingenuity in thinking and of sprightliness of language.

     [332] Biogr. Universelle.

|La Mothe le Vayer--His dialogues.|

31. A writer of rather less extensive celebrity than Charron belongs
full as much to the school of Montaigne, though he does not so much
pillage his Essays. This was La Mothe le Vayer, a man distinguished by
his literary character in the court of Louis XIII., and ultimately
preceptor both to the Duke of Orleans and the young king (Louis XIV.)
himself. La Mothe was habitually and universally a sceptic. Among
several smaller works we may chiefly instance his Dialogues published
many years after his death under the name of Horatius Tubero. They
must have been written in the reign of Louis XIII., and belong
therefore to the present period. In attacking every established
doctrine, especially in religion, he goes much farther than Montaigne,
and seems to have taken much of his metaphysical system immediately
from Sextus Empiricus. He is profuse of quotation, especially in a
dialogue entitled Le Banquet Sceptique, the aim of which is to show
that there is no uniform taste of mankind as to their choice of food.
His mode of arguing against the moral sense is entirely that of
Montaigne, or, if there be any difference, is more full of the two
fallacies by which that lively writer deceives himself--namely, the
accumulating examples of things arbitrary and fanciful, such as modes
of dress and conventional usages, with respect to which no one
pretends that any natural law can be found, and, when he comes to
subjects more truly moral, the turning our attention solely to the
external action, and not to the motive or principle, which under
different circumstances may prompt men to opposite courses.

32. These dialogues are not unpleasing to read, and exhibit a polite
though rather pedantic style not uncommon in the seventeenth century.
They are, however, very diffuse, and the sceptical paradoxes become
merely common-place by repetition. One of them is more grossly
indecent than any part of Montaigne. La Mothe le Vayer is not, on the
whole, much to be admired as a philosopher; little appears to be his
own and still less is really good. He contributed, no question, as
much as anyone to the irreligion and contempt for morality prevailing
in that court where he was in high reputation. Some other works of
this author may be classed under the same description.

|Bacon’s Essays.|

33. We can hardly refer Lord Bacon’s Essays to the school of
Montaigne, though their title may lead us to suspect that they were in
some measure suggested by that most popular writer. The first
edition, containing ten essays only, and those much shorter than as we
now possess them, appeared, as has been already mentioned, in 1597.
They were reprinted with very little variation in 1606. But the
enlarged work was published in 1612, and dedicated to Prince Henry. He
calls them, in this dedication, “certain brief notes, set down rather
significantly than curiously, which I have called Essays. The word is
late, but the thing is ancient; for Seneca’s Epistles to Lucilius, if
you mark them well, are but Essays, that is, dispersed meditations,
though conveyed in the form of epistles.” The resemblance, at all
events, to Montaigne is not greater than might be expected in two men
equally original in genius, and entirely opposite in their characters
and circumstances. One, by an instinctive felicity, catches some of
the characteristics of human nature; the other, by profound
reflection, scrutinizes and dissects it. One is too negligent for the
inquiring reader, the other too formal and sententious for one who
seeks to be amused. We delight in one, we admire the other; but this
admiration has also its own delight. In one we find more of the sweet
temper and tranquil contemplation of Plutarch, in the other more of
the practical wisdom and somewhat ambitious prospects of Seneca. It is
characteristic of Bacon’s philosophical writings, that they have in
them a spirit of movement, a perpetual reference to what man is to do
in order to an end, rather than to his mere speculation upon what is.
In his Essays, this is naturally still more prominent. They are, as
quaintly described in the title page of the first edition, “places
(loci) of persuasion and dissuasion;” counsels for those who would be
great as well as wise. They are such as sprang from a mind ardent in
two kinds of ambition, and hesitating whether to found a new
philosophy, or to direct the vessel of the state. We perceive,
however, that the immediate reward attending greatness, as is almost
always the case, gave it a preponderance in his mind; and hence, his
Essays are more often political than moral; they deal with mankind,
not in their general faculties or habits, but in their mutual strife,
their endeavours to rule others, or to avoid their rule. He is more
cautious and more comprehensive, though not more acute than Machiavel,
who often becomes too dogmatic through the habit of referring
everything to a particular aspect of political societies. Nothing in
the Prince or the Discourses on Livy is superior to the Essays on
Seditions, on Empire, on Innovations, or generally those which bear on
the dexterous management of a people by their rulers. Both these
writers have what to our more liberal age appears a counselling of
governors for their own rather than their subjects’ advantage; but, as
this is generally represented to be the best means, though not, as it
truly is, the real end, their advice tends on the whole to advance the
substantial benefits of government.

|Their excellence.|

34. The transcendent strength of Bacon’s mind is visible in the whole
tenor of these Essays, unequal as they must be from the very nature of
such compositions. They are deeper and more discriminating than any
earlier, or almost any later work in the English language, full of
recondite observation long matured and carefully sifted. It is true
that we might wish for more vivacity and ease; Bacon, who had much
wit, had little gaiety; his Essays are consequently stiff and grave,
where the subject might have been touched with a lively hand; thus it
is in those on Gardens and on Building. The sentences have sometimes
too apophthegmatic a form and want coherence; the historical
instances, though far less frequent than with Montaigne, have a little
the look of pedantry to our eyes. But it is from this condensation,
from this gravity, that the work derives its peculiar impressiveness.
Few books are more quoted, and, what is not always the case with such
books, we may add that few are more generally read. In this respect
they lead the van of our prose literature; for no gentleman is ashamed
of owning that he has not read the Elizabethan writers; but it would
be somewhat derogatory to a man of the slightest claim to polite
letters, were he unacquainted with the Essays of Bacon. It is indeed
little worth while to read this or any other book for reputation sake;
but very few in our language so well repay the pains, or afford more
nourishment to the thoughts. They might be judiciously introduced,
with a small number more, into a sound method of education, one that
should make wisdom, rather than mere knowledge, its object, and might
become a textbook of examination in our schools.

|Feltham’s Resolves.|

35. It is rather difficult to fix upon the fittest place for bringing
forward some books, which, though moral in their subject, belong to
the general literature of the age, and we might strip the province of
polite letters of what have been reckoned its chief ornaments.
I shall therefore select here such only, as are more worthy of
consideration for their matter than for the style in which it is
delivered. Several that might range, more or less, under the
denomination of moral essays, were published both in English and in
other languages. But few of them are now read, or even much known by
name. One, which has made a better fortune than the rest, demands
mention, the Resolves of Owen Feltham. Of this book, the first part of
which was published in 1627, the second not till after the middle of
the century, it is not uncommon to meet with high praises in those
modern writers, who profess a faithful allegiance to our older
literature. For myself, I can only say that Feltham appears not only a
laboured and artificial, but a shallow writer. Among his many faults
none strikes me more than a want of depth, which his pointed and
sententious manner renders more ridiculous. Sallust, among the
ancients, is a great dealer in such oracular truisms, a style of
writing that soon becomes disagreeable. There are certainly exceptions
to this vacuity of original meaning in Feltham; it would be possible
to fill a few pages with extracts not undeserving of being read, with
thoughts just and judicious, though never deriving much lustre from
his diction. He is one of our worst writers in point of style; with
little vigour, he has less elegance; his English is impure to an
excessive degree, and full of words unauthorised by any usage.
Pedantry, and the novel phrases which Greek and Latin etymology was
supposed to warrant, appear in most productions of this period; but
Feltham attempted to bend the English idiom to his own affectations.
The moral reflections of a serious and thoughtful mind are generally
pleasing, and to this perhaps is partly owing the kind of popularity
which the Resolves of Feltham have obtained; but they may be had more
agreeably and profitably in other books.[333]

     [333] This is a random sample of Feltham’s style: “Of all objects
     of sorrow a distressed king is the most pitiful, because it
     presents us most the frailty of humanity, and cannot but most
     _midnight_ the soul of him that is fallen. The sorrows of a
     deposed king are like the _distorquements_ of a _darted_
     conscience which none can know but he that hath lost a crown.”
     Cent. i. 61. We find not long after the following precious
     phrase: “The nature that is arted with the subtleties of time and
     practice.” I. 63. In one page we have _obnubilate_, _nested_,
     _parallel_ (as a verb), _fails_ (failings) _uncurtain_,
     _depraving_ (calumniating). I. 50. And we are to be disgusted
     with such vile English, or properly no English, for the sake of
     the sleepy saws of a trivial morality. Such defects are not
     compensated by the better and more striking thoughts we may
     occasionally light upon. In reading Feltham, nevertheless, I
     seemed to perceive some resemblance to the tone and way of
     thinking of the Turkish Spy, which is a great compliment to the
     former; for the Turkish Spy is neither disagreeable nor
     superficial. The resemblance must lie in a certain contemplative
     melancholy, rather serious than severe, in respect to the world
     and its ways; and as Feltham’s Resolves seem to have a charm, by
     the editions they have gone through, and the good name they have
     gained, I can only look for it in this.

|Browne’s Religo Medici.|

36. A superior genius to that of Feltham is exhibited in the Religio
Medici of Sir Thomas Browne. This little book made a remarkable
impression; it was soon translated into several languages, and is
highly extolled by Conringius and others, who could only judge through
these versions. Patin, though he rather slights it himself, tells us
in one of his letters that it was very popular at Paris. The character
which Johnson has given of the Religio Medici is well known; and,
though perhaps rather too favourable, appears in general just.[334]
The mind of Browne was fertile, and, according to the current use of
the word, ingenious: his analogies are original and sometimes
brilliant; and as his learning is also of things out of the beaten
path, this gives a peculiar and uncommon air to all his writings, and
especially to the Religio Medici. He was, however, far removed from
real philosophy, both by his turn of mind and by the nature of his
erudition; he seldom reasons, his thoughts are desultory, sometimes he
appears sceptical or paradoxical, but credulity and deference to
authority prevail. He belonged to the class, numerous at that time in
our church, who halted between popery and protestantism; and this
gives him, on all such topics, an appearance of vacillation and
irresoluteness which probably represents the real state of his mind.
His paradoxes do not seem very original, nor does he arrive at them by
any process of argument; they are more like traces of his reading
casually suggesting themselves, and supported by his own
ingenuity. His style is not flowing, but vigorous; his choice of words
not elegant, and even approaching to barbarism as English phrase; yet
there is an impressiveness, an air of reflection and sincerity in
Browne’s writings, which redeem many of their faults. His egotism is
equal to that of Montaigne, but with this difference, that it is the
egotism of a melancholy mind, which generally becomes unpleasing. This
melancholy temperament is characteristic of Browne. “Let’s talk of
graves and worms and epitaphs” seems his motto. His best written work,
the Hydriotaphia, is expressly an essay on sepulchral urns; but the
same taste for the circumstances of mortality leavens also the Religio
Medici.

     [334] “The Religio Medici was no sooner published that it excited
     the attention of the public by the novelty of paradoxes, the
     dignity of sentiment, the quick succession of images, the
     multitude of abstruse allusions, the subtlety of disquisition,
     and the strength of language.” Life of Browne (in Johnson’s
     Works, xii. 275).

|Selden’s Table Talk.|

37. The thoughts of Sir Walter Raleigh on moral prudence are few but
precious. And some of the bright sallies of Selden recorded in his
Table Talk are of the same description, though the book is too
miscellaneous to fall under any single head of classification. The
editor of this very short and small volume, which gives, perhaps, a
more exalted notion of Selden’s natural talents than any of his
learned writings, requests the reader to distinguish times, and “in
his fancy to carry along with him the when and the why many of these
things were spoken.” This intimation accounts for the different spirit
in which he may seem to combat the follies of the prelates at one
time, and of the presbyterians or fanatics at another. These sayings
are not always, apparently, well reported; some seem to have been
misunderstood, and in others the limiting clauses to have been
forgotten. But on the whole they are full of vigour, raciness, and a
kind of scorn of the half-learned, far less rude, but more cutting
than that of Scaliger. It has been said that the Table Talk of Selden
is worth all the Ana of the continent. In this I should be disposed to
concur; but they are not exactly works of the same class.

|Osborn’s Advice to his Son.|

38. We must now descend much lower, and could find little worth
remembering. Osborn’s Advice to his Son may be reckoned among the
moral and political writings of this period. It is not very far above
mediocrity, and contains a good deal that is common-place, yet with a
considerable sprinkling of sound sense and observation. The style is
rather apophthegmatic, though by no means more so than was then usual.

|John Valentine Andreæ.|

39. A few books, English as well as foreign, are purposely deferred
for the present; I am rather apprehensive that I shall be found to
have overlooked some not unworthy of notice. One written in Latin by a
German writer has struck me as displaying a spirit which may claim for
it a place among the livelier and lighter class, though with serious
intent, of moral essays. John Valentine Andreæ was a man above his
age, and a singular contrast to the narrow and pedantic herd of German
scholars and theologians. He regarded all things around him with a
sarcastic but benevolent philosophy, keen in exposing the errors of
mankind, yet only for the sake of amending them. It has been supposed
by many that he invented the existence of the famous Rosicrucian
society, not so much, probably, for the sake of mystification, as to
suggest an institution so praiseworthy and philanthropic as he
delineated for the imitation of mankind. This, however, is still a
debated problem in Germany.[335] But among his numerous writings, that
alone of which I know anything is entitled in the original Latin,
Mythologiæ Christianæ, sive Virtutum et Vitiorum Vitæ Humanæ Imaginum
Libri Tres. (Strasburg, 1618.) Herder has translated a part of this
book in the fifth volume of his Zerstreute Blätter; and it is here
that I have met with it. Andreæ wrote, I believe, solely in Latin, and
his works appear to be scarce, at least in England. These short
apologues, which Herder has called Parables, are written with uncommon
terseness of language, a happy and original vein of invention, and a
philosophy looking down on common life without ostentation and without
passion. He came too before Bacon, but he had learned to scorn the
disputes of the schools, and had sought for truth with an entire love,
even at the hands of Cardan and Campanella. I will give a specimen, in
a note, of the peculiar manner of Andreæ, but my translation does not,
perhaps, justice to that of Herder. The idea, it may be observed, is
now become more trite.[336]

     [335] Brucker, iv. 735. Biogr. Univ. art. Andreæ, et alibi.

     [336] “The Pen and the Sword strove with each other for
     superiority, and the voices of the judges were divided. The men
     of learning talked much and persuaded many; the men of arms were
     fierce and compelled many to join their side. Thus nothing could
     be determined; it followed that both were left to fight it out,
     and settle their dispute in single combat.

     “On one side books rustled in the libraries, on the other arms
     rattled in the arsenals; men looked on in hope and fear, and
     waited the end.

     “The Pen, consecrated to truth, was notorious for much falsehood;
     the Sword, a servant of God, was stained with innocent blood:
     both hoped for the aid of heaven, both found its wrath.

     “The State, which had need of both, and disliked the manners of
     both, would put on the appearance of caring for the weal and woe
     of neither. The Pen was weak, but quick, glib, well exercised,
     and very bold, when one provoked it. The Sword was stern,
     implacable, but less compact and subtle, so that on both sides
     the victory remained uncertain. At length for the security of
     both, the common weal pronounced that both in turn should stand
     by her side and bear with each other. For that only is a happy
     country where the Pen and the Sword are faithful servants, not
     where either governs by its arbitrary will and passion.”

     If the touches in this little piece are not always clearly laid
     on, it may be ascribed as much, perhaps, to their having passed
     through two translations, as to the fault of the excellent
     writer. But in this early age we seldom find the entire neatness
     and felicity which later times attained.


                              SECT. II.

                     ON POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.

_Change in the Character of political Writings--Bellenden and
others--Patriarchal Theory refuted by Suarez--Allhusius--Political
Economy of Serra--Hobbes--and Analysis of his political Treatises._

40. The recluse philosopher, who, like Descartes in his country-house
near Utrecht, investigates the properties of quantity, or the
operations of the human mind, while nations are striving for conquest
and factions for ascendancy, hears that tumultuous uproar but as the
dash of the ocean waves at a distance, and it may even serve, like
music that falls upon the poet’s ear, to wake in him some new train of
high thought, or at the least to confirm his love of the absolute and
the eternal, by comparison with the imperfection and error that besets
the world. Such is the serene temple of philosophy, which the Roman
poet has contrasted with the storm and the battle, with the passions
of the great and the many, the perpetual struggle of man against his
fellows. But if he who might dwell on this vantage-ground descends
into the plain, and takes so near a view of the world’s strife, that
he sees it as a whole very imperfectly, while the parts to which he
approaches are magnified beyond their proportion, if, especially, he
mingles with the combat, and shares its hopes and its perils, though
in many respects he may know more than those who keep aloof, he will
lose something of that faculty of equal and comprehensive vision, in
which the philosophical temper consists. Such has very frequently, or
more or less, perhaps, in almost every instance, been the fate of the
writer on general politics; if his pen has not been solely employed
with a view to the questions that engage attention in his own age, it
has generally been guided in a certain degree by regard to them.

|Abandonment of anti-monarchical theories.|

41. In the sixteenth century, we have seen that notions of popular
rights, and of the amissibility of sovereign power for misconduct,
were alternately broached by the two great religious parties of
Europe, according to the necessity in which they stood for such
weapons against their adversaries. Passive obedience was preached as a
duty by the victorious, rebellion was claimed as a right by the
vanquished. The history of France and England, and partly of other
countries, was the clue to these politics. But in the following
period, a more tranquil state of public opinion, and a firmer hand
upon the reigns of power, put an end to such books as those of
Languet, Buchanan, Rose, and Mariana. The last of these, by the
vindication of tyrannicide in his treatise De Rege, contributed to
bring about a reaction in political literature. The Jesuits in France,
whom Henry IV. was inclined to favour, publicly condemned the doctrine
of Mariana in 1606. A book by Becanus, and another by Suarez,
justifying regicide, were condemned by the parliament of Paris, in
1612.[337] The assassination indeed of Henry IV., committed by one,
not perhaps metaphysically speaking sane, but whose aberration of
intellect had evidently been either brought on or nourished by the
pernicious theories of that school, created such an abhorrence of the
doctrine, that neither the Jesuits nor others ventured afterwards to
teach it. Those also who magnified, as far as circumstances would
permit, the alleged supremacy of the See of Rome over temporal
princes, were little inclined to set up, like Mariana, a popular
sovereignty, a right of the multitude not emanating from the Church,
and to which the Church itself might one day be under the necessity of
submitting. This became therefore a period favourable to the theories
of absolute power; not so much shown by means of their positive
assertion through the press as by the silence of the press,
comparatively speaking, on all political theories whatever.

     [337] Mezeray, Hist. de la Mère et du Fils.

|Political literature becomes historical.|

42. The political writings of this part of the seventeenth century
assumed in consequence more of an historical, or, as we might
say, a statistical character. Learning was employed in systematic
analyses of ancient or modern forms of government, in dissertations
explanatory of institutions, in copious and exact statements of the
true, rather than arguments upon the right or the expedient. Some of
the very numerous works of Herman Conringius, a professor at
Helmstadt, seem to fall within this description. But none are better
known than a collection, made by the Elzevirs, at different times near
the middle of this century, containing accounts, chiefly published
before, of the political constitutions of European commonwealths. This
collection, which is in volumes of the smallest size, may be called
for distinction the Elzevir Republics. It is very useful in respect of
the knowledge of facts it imparts, but rarely contains anything of a
philosophical nature. Statistical descriptions of countries are much
allied to these last; some indeed are included in the Elzevir series.
They were as yet not frequent; but I might have mentioned in the last
volume one of the earliest, the Description of the Low Countries by
Ludovico Guicciardini, brother of the historian.

|Bellenden de Statu.|

43. Those, however, were not entirely wanting who took a more
philosophical view of the social relations of mankind. Among these a
very respectable place should be assigned to a Scotsman, by name
Bellenden, whose treatise De Statu, in three books, is dedicated to
Prince Charles in 1615. The first of these books is entitled De Statu
prisci orbis in religione, re politica et literis; the second,
Ciceronis Princeps, sive de statu principis et imperii; the third,
Ciceronis Consul, Senator, Senatusque Romanus, sive de statu
reipublicæ et urbis imperantis orbi. The first two books are, in a
general sense, political; the last relates entirely to the Roman
polity, but builds much political precept on this. Bellenden seems to
have taken a more comprehensive view of history in his first book, and
to have reflected more philosophically on it, than perhaps anyone had
done before; at least I do not remember any work of so early an age
which reminds me so much of Vico and the Grandeur et Decadence of
Montesquieu. We can hardly make an exception for Bodin, because the
Scot is so much more regularly historical, and so much more concise.
The first book contains little more than forty pages. Bellenden’s
learning is considerable and without that pedantry of quotation which
makes most books of the age intolerable. The latter parts have less
originality and reach of thought. This book was reprinted, as is well
known, in 1787; but the celebrated preface of the editor has had the
effect of eclipsing the original author; Parr was constantly read and
talked of, Bellenden never.

|Campanella’s Politics.|

|La Mothe le Vayer.|

44. The Politics of Campanella are warped by a desire to please the
court of Rome, which he recommends as fit to enjoy an universal
monarchy, at least by supreme control, and observes with some
acuteness, that no prince had been able to obtain an universal
ascendant over Christendom, because the presiding vigilance of the
Holy See has regulated their mutual contentions, exalting one and
depressing another, as seemed expedient for the good of religion.[338]
This book is pregnant with deep reflection on history, it is enriched,
perhaps, by the study of Bodin, but is much more concise. In one of
the Dialogues of La Mothe le Vayer, we find the fallacy of some
general maxims in politics drawn from a partial induction well
exposed, by showing the instances where they have wholly failed.
Though he pays high compliments to Louis XIII. and to Richelieu, he
speaks freely enough, in his sceptical way, of the general advantages
of monarchy.

     [338] Nullus hactenus Christianus princeps monarchiam super
     cunctos Christianos populos sibi conservare potuit. Quoniam papa
     præ est illis, et dissipat erigitque illorum conatus prout
     religioni expedit. C. 8.

|Naudé’s Coups d’Etat|

45. Gabriel Naudé, a man of extensive learning, acute understanding,
and many good qualities, but rather lax in religious and moral
principle, excited some attention by a very small volume, entitled
Considerations sur les coups d’état, which he wrote while young, at
Rome, in the service of the Cardinal de Bagne. In this he maintains
the bold contempt of justice and humanity in political emergencies
which had brought disgrace on the Prince of Machiavel, blaming those
who, in his own country, had abandoned the defence of the St.
Bartholomew massacre. The book is in general heavy and not well
written, but coming from a man of cool head, clear judgment and
considerable historical knowledge, it contains some remarks not
unworthy of notice.

|Patriarchal theory of government.|

46. The ancient philosophers, the civil lawyers, and by far the
majority of later writers had derived the origin of government from
some agreement, or tacit consent, of the community. Bodin,
explicitly rejecting this hypothesis, referred it to violent
usurpation. But, in England, about the beginning of the reign of
James, a different theory gained ground with the church; it was
assumed, for it did not admit of proof, that a patriarchal authority
had been transferred by primogeniture to the heir-general of the human
race; so that kingdoms were but enlarged families, and an indefeasible
right of monarchy was attached to their natural chief, which, in
consequence of the impossibility of discovering him, developed upon
the representative of the first sovereign who could be historically
proved to have reigned over any nation. This had not perhaps hitherto
been maintained at length in any published book, but will be found to
have been taken for granted in more than one. It was of course in
favour with James I., who had a very strong hereditary title; and it
might seem to be countenanced by the fact of Highland and Irish
clanship, which does really affect to rest on a patriarchal basis.

|Refuted by Suarez.|

47. This theory as to the origin of political society, or one akin to
it, appears to have been espoused by some on the Continent. Suarez, in
the second book of his great work on law, observes in a remarkable
passage, that certain canonists hold civil magistracy to have been
conferred by God on some prince, and to remain always in his heirs by
succession; but “that such an opinion has neither authority nor
foundation. For this power, by its very nature, belongs to no one man,
but to a multitude of men. This is a certain conclusion, being common
to all our authorities as we find by St. Thomas, by the civil laws,
and by the great canonists and casuists; all of whom agree that the
prince has that power of lawgiving which the people have given him.
And the reason is evident, since all men are born equal, and
consequently no one has a political jurisdiction over another, nor any
dominion; nor can we give any reason from the nature of the thing, why
one man should govern another rather than the contrary. It is true
that one might alledge the primacy which Adam at his creation
necessarily possessed, and hence deduce his government over all men,
and suppose that to be derived by some one, either through
primogenitary descent, or through the special appointment of Adam
himself. Thus Chrysostom has said that the descent of all men from
Adam signifies their subordination to one sovereign. But in fact we
could only infer from the creation and natural origin of mankind that
Adam possessed a domestic or patriarchal (œconomicam), not a political
authority; for he had power over his wife, and afterwards a paternal
power over his sons till they were emancipated; and he might even in
course of time have servants and a complete family, and that power in
respect of them which is called patriarchal. But after families began
to be multiplied, and single men who were heads of families to be
separated, they had each the same power with respect to their own
families. Nor did political power begin to exist till many families
began to be collected into one entire community. Hence, as that
community did not begin by Adam’s creation, nor by any will of his,
but by that of all who formed it, we cannot properly say, that Adam
had naturally a political headship in such a society; for there are no
principles of reason from which this could be inferred, since by the
law of nature it is no right of the progenitor to be even king of his
own posterity. And if this cannot be proved by the principles of
natural law, we have no ground for asserting that God has given such a
power by the special gift of providence, inasmuch as we have no
revelation or scripture testimony to the purpose.[339] So clear,
brief, and dispassionate a refutation might have caused our English
divines, who became very fond of this patriarchal theory, to blush
before the Jesuit of Granada.

     [339] Lib. ii., c. 2, § 3.

|His opinion of law.|

48. Suarez maintains it to be of the essence of a law that it be
exacted for the public good. An unjust law is no law, and does not
bind the conscience.[340] In this he breathes the spirit of Mariana.
But he shuns some of his bolder assertions. He denies the right of
rising in arms against a tyrant, unless he is an usurper; and though
he is strongly for preserving the concession made by the kings of
Spain to their people, that no taxes shall be levied without the
consent of the Cortes, does not agree with those who lay it down as a
general rule, that no prince can impose taxes on his people by his own
will.[341] Suarez asserts the direct power of the church over
heretical princes, but denies it as to infidels.[342] In this last
point, as has been seen, he follows the most respectable authorities
of his nation.

     [340] Lib. i., c. 7, and lib. iii., c. 22.

     [341] Lib. iii., c. 10.

     [342] Lib. v., c. 17.

49. Bayle has taken notice of a systematic treatise on Politics, by
John Althusius, a native of Germany. Of this I have only seen
an edition published at Groningen in 1615, and dedicated to the states
of West Friesland. It seems, however, from the article in Bayle, that
there was one printed at Herborn in 1603. Several German writers
inveigh against this work as full of seditious principles, inimical to
every government. It is a political system, taken chiefly from
preceding authors, and very freely from Bodin; with great learning,
but not very profitable to read. The ephori, as he calls them, by
which he means the estates of a kingdom, have the right to resist a
tyrant. But this right he denies to the private citizen. His chapter
on this subject is written more in the tone of the sixteenth than of
the seventeenth century, which indeed had scarcely commenced.[343] He
answers in it Albericus Gentilis, Barclay and others who had contended
for passive obedience, not failing to draw support from the canonists
and civilians whom he quotes. But the strongest passage is in his
dedication to the States of Friesland. Here he declares his principle,
that the supreme power or sovereignty (jus majestatis) does not reside
in the chief magistrate, but in the people themselves, and that no
other is proprietor or usufructuary of it, the magistrate being the
administrator of this supreme power, but not its owner, nor entitled
to use it for his benefit. And these rights of sovereignty are so much
confined to the whole community, that they can no more alienate them
to another, whether they will or not, than a man can transfer his own
life.[344]

     [343] Cap. 38. De tyrannide et ejus remediis.

     [344] Administratorem, procuratorem, gubernatorem jurium
     majestatis, principem agnosco. Proprietarium vero et
     usufructuarium majestatis nullum alium quam populum universum in
     corpus unum symbioticum ex pluribus minoribus consociationibus
     consociatum, &c.

50. Few, even among the Calvinists, whose form of government was in
some cases republican, would in the seventeenth century have approved
this strong language of Althusius. But one of their noted theologians,
Paræus, incurred the censure of the university of Oxford in 1623, for
some passages in his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans which
seemed to impugn their orthodox tenet of unlimited submission. He
merely holds that subjects, when not private men but inferior
magistrates, may defend themselves and the state and the true religion
even by arms against the sovereign under certain conditions; because,
these superior magistrates are themselves responsible to the laws of
God and of the state.[345] It was, in truth, impossible to deny the
right of resistance in such cases without “branding the unsmirched
brow” of protestantism itself; for by what other means had the
reformed religion been made to flourish in Holland and Geneva, or in
Scotland? But in England, where it had been planted under a more
auspicious star, there was little occasion to seek this vindication of
the protestant church, which had not, in the legal phrase, come in by
disseizin of the state, but had united with the state to turn out of
doors its predecessor. That the Anglican refugees under Mary were ripe
enough for resistance, or even regicide, has been seen in the last
volume by an extract from one of their most distinguished prelates.

     [345] Subditi non privati, sed in magistratu inferiori constituti
     adversus superiorem magistratum se et rempublicam et ecclesiam
     seu veram religionem etiam armis defendere jure possunt, his
     positis conditionibus: 1. Cum superior magistratus degenerat in
     tyrannum; 2. Aut ad manifestam idololatriam atque blasphemias
     ipsos vel subditos alios vult cogere; 3. Cum ipsis atrox infertur
     injuria; 4. Si aliter incolumes fortunis vita et conscientia esse
     non possint; 5. Ne prætextu religionis aut justitiæ sua quærant;
     6. Servata semper επιεικειᾳ [epieikeia] et moderamine inculpatæ
     tutelæ juxta leges. Paræus in Epist. ad Roman, col. 1350.

|Bacon.|

|Political œconomy.|

51. Bacon ought to appear as a prominent name in political philosophy,
if we had never met with it in any other. But we have anticipated much
of his praise on this score; and it is sufficient to repeat generally
that on such subjects he is among the most sagacious of mankind. It
would be almost ridiculous to descend from Bacon, even when his giant
shadow does but pass over our scene, to the feebler class of political
moralists, such as Saavedra, author of Idea di un principe politico, a
wretched effort of Spain in her degeneracy; but an Italian writer must
not be neglected, from the remarkable circumstance that he is esteemed
one of the first who have treated the science of political œconomy. It
must, however, be understood that, besides what may be found on the
subject in the ancients, many valuable observations which must be
referred to political œconomy occur in Bodin, that the Italians had,
in the sixteenth century, a few tracts on coinage, that Botero touches
some points of the science, and that in English there were, during the
same age, pamphlets on public wealth, especially one entitled,
A Brief Conceit of English Policy.[346]

     [346] This bears the initials of W. S., which some have
     idiotically taken for William Shakspeare. I have some reason to
     believe, that there was an edition considerably earlier than that
     of 1584, but, from circumstances unnecessary to mention, cannot
     produce the manuscript authority on which this opinion is
     founded. It has been reprinted more than once, if I mistake not,
     in modern times.

|Serra on the means of obtaining money without mines.|

52. The author to whom we allude is Antonio Serra, a native of
Cosenza, whose short treatise on the causes which may render gold and
silver abundant in countries that have no mines, is dedicated to the
Count de Lemos, “from the prison of Vicaria this tenth day of July,
1613.” It has hence been inferred, but without a shadow of proof, that
Serra had been engaged in the conspiracy of his fellow citizen
Campanella fourteen years before. The dedication is in a tone of great
flattery, but has no allusion to the cause of his imprisonment, which
might have been any other. He proposes, in his preface, not to discuss
political government in general, of which he thinks that the ancients
have treated sufficiently, if we well understood their works, and
still less to speak of justice and injustice, the civil law being
enough for this, but merely of what are the causes that render a
country destitute of mines abundant in gold and silver, which no one
has ever considered, though some have taken narrow views, and fancied
that a low rate of exchange is the sole means of enriching a country.

|His causes of wealth.|

53. In the first part of this treatise, Serra divides the causes of
wealth, that is, of abundance of money, into general and particular
accidents (accidenti communi e proprj), meaning by the former
circumstances which may exist in any country, by the latter such as
are peculiar to some. The common accidents are four: abundance of
manufactures, character of the inhabitants, extent of commerce, and
wisdom of government. The peculiar are, chiefly, the fertility of the
soil, and convenience of geographical position. Serra prefers
manufacture to agriculture; one of his reasons is their indefinite
capacity of multiplication; for no man whose land is fully cultivated
by sowing a hundred bushels of wheat, can sow with profit a hundred
and fifty; but in manufactures he may not only double the produce, but
do this a hundred times over, and that with less proportion of
expense. Though this is now evident, it is perhaps what had not been
much remarked before.

|His praise of Venice.|

54. Venice, according to Serra, held the first place as a commercial
city, not only in Italy, but Europe; “for experience demonstrates that
all the merchandizes which come from Asia to Europe pass through
Venice and thence are distributed to other parts.” But as this must
evidently exclude all the traffic by the Cape of Good Hope, we can
only understand Serra to mean the trade with the Levant. It is,
however, worthy of observation, that we are apt to fall into a vulgar
error in supposing that Venice was crushed, or even materially
affected, as a commercial city, by the discoveries of the Portuguese.
She was in fact more opulent, as her buildings of themselves may
prove, in the sixteenth century than in any preceding age. The French
trade from Marseilles to the Levant, which began later to flourish,
was what impoverished Venice, rather than that of Portugal with the
East Indies. This republic was the perpetual theme of admiration with
the Italians. Serra compares Naples with Venice; one, he says, exports
grain to a vast amount, the other imports its whole subsistence; money
is valued higher at Naples, so that there is a profit in bringing it
in, its export is forbidden; at Venice it is free; at Naples the
public revenues are expended in the kingdom; at Venice they are
principally hoarded. Yet Naples is poor and Venice rich. Such is the
effect of her commerce and of the wisdom of her government, which is
always uniform, while in kingdoms, and far more in vice-royalties, the
system changes with the persons. In Venice the method of choosing
magistrates is in such perfection, that no one can come in by
corruption or favour, nor can any one rise to high offices who has not
been tried in the lower.

|Low rate of exchange not essential to wealth.|

55. All causes of wealth, except those he has enumerated, Serra holds
to be subaltern or temporary; thus the low rate of exchange is subject
to the common accidents of commerce. It seems, however, to have been a
theory of superficial reasoners on public wealth, that it depended on
the exchanges far more than is really the case; and in the second part
of this treatise Serra opposes a particular writer, named De Santis,
who had accounted in this way alone for abundance of money in a state.
Serra thinks that to reduce the weight of coin may sometimes
be an allowable expedient, and better than to raise its denomination.
The difference seems not very important. The coin of Naples was
exhausted by the revenues of absentee proprietors, which some had
proposed to withhold: a measure to which Serra justly objects. This
book has been reprinted at Milan in the collection of Italian
œconomists, and as it anticipates the principles of what has been
called the mercantile theory, deserves some attention in following the
progress of opinion. The once celebrated treatise of Mun, England’s
Treasure by Foreign Trade, is supposed to have been written before
1640; but as it was not published till after the Restoration, we may
postpone it to the next period.

|Hobbes.--His political works.|

56. Last in time among political philosophers before the middle of the
century we find the greatest and most famous, Thomas Hobbes. His
treatise De Cive was printed in 1642 for his private friends. It
obtained however a considerable circulation and excited some
animadversion. In 1647, he published it at Amsterdam with notes to
vindicate and explain what had been censured. In 1650 an English
treatise, with the Latin title, De Corpore Politico, appeared; and in
1651 the complete system of his philosophy was given to the world in
the Leviathan. These three works bear somewhat the same relation to
one another as the Advancement of Learning does to the treatise de
Augmentis Scientiarum; they are in effect the same; the same order of
subjects, the same arguments, and in most places either the same words
or such variances as occurred to the second thoughts of the writer;
but much is more copiously illustrated and more clearly put in the
latter than in the former; while much also, from whatever cause, is
withdrawn or considerably modified. Whether the Leviathan is to be
reckoned so exclusively his last thoughts that we should presume him
to have retracted the passages that do not appear in it, is what every
one must determine for himself. I shall endeavour to present a
comparative analysis of the three treatises, with some preference to
the last.

|Analysis of his three treatises.|

57. Those, he begins by observing, who have hitherto written upon
civil polity have assumed that man is an animal framed for society; as
if nothing else were required for the institution of commonwealths
than that men should agree upon some terms of compact which they call
laws. But this is entirely false. That men do naturally seek each
other’s society, he admits in a note on the published edition of De
Cive; but political societies are not mere meetings of men, but unions
founded on the faith of covenants. Nor does the desire of men for
society imply that they are fit for it. Many may desire it who will
not readily submit to its necessary conditions.[347] This he left out
in the two other treatises, thinking it, perhaps, too great a
concession to admit any desire of society in man.

     [347] Societates autem civiles non sunt meri congressus, sed
     fœdera, quibus faciendis fides et pacta necessaria sunt.... Alia
     res est appetere, alia esse capacem. Appetunt enim illi qui tamen
     conditiones æquas, sine quibus societas esse non potest, accipere
     per superbiam non dignantur.

58. Nature has made little odds among men of mature age as to strength
or knowledge. No reason, therefore, can be given why one should by any
intrinsic superiority command others, or possess more than they. But
there is a great difference in their passions; some through vain glory
seeking pre-eminence over their fellows, some willing to allow
equality, but not to lose what they know to be good for themselves.
And this contest can only be decided by battle, showing which is the
stronger.

59. All men desire to obtain good and to avoid evil, especially death.
Hence, they have a natural right to preserve their own lives and
limbs, and to use all means necessary for this end. Every man is judge
for himself of the necessity of the means, and the greatness of the
danger. And hence, he has a right by nature to all things, to do what
he wills to others, to possess and enjoy all he can. For he is the
only judge whether they tend or not to his preservation. But every
other man has the same right. Hence, there can be no injury towards
another in a state of nature. Not that in such a state a man may not
sin against God, or transgress the laws of nature.[348] But injury,
which is doing anything without right, implies human laws that limit
right.

     [348] Non quod in tali statu peccare in Deum, aut leges naturales
     violare impossibile sit. Nam injustitia erga homines supponit
     leges humanas, quales in statu naturali nullæ sunt. De Cive, c.
     1. This he left out in the later treatises. He says afterwards
     (sect. 28), omne damnum homini illatum legis naturalis violatio
     atque in Deum injuria est.

60. Thus the state of man in natural liberty is a state of war, a war
of every man against every man, wherein the notions of right and
wrong, justice and injustice have no place. Irresistible might
gives of itself right, which is nothing but the physical liberty of
using our power as we will for our own preservation and what we deem
conducive to it. But as, through the equality of natural powers, no
man possesses this irresistible superiority, this state of universal
war is contrary to his own good which he necessarily must desire.
Hence, his reason dictates that he should seek peace as far as he can,
and strengthen himself by all the helps of war against those with whom
he cannot have peace. This, then, is the first fundamental law of
nature. For a law of nature is nothing else than a rule or precept
found out by reason for the avoiding what may be destructive to our
life.

61. From this primary rule another follows, that a man should be
willing, when others are so too, as far forth as for peace and defence
of himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down his right to all
things, and to be contented with so much liberty against other men, as
he would allow to other men against himself. This may be done by
renouncing his right to anything, which leaves it open to all, or by
transferring it specially to another. Some rights indeed, as those to
his life and limbs, are inalienable, and no man lays down the right of
resisting those who attack them. But, in general, he is bound not to
hinder those to whom he has granted or abandoned his own right, from
availing themselves of it; and such hindrance is injustice or injury;
that is, it is _sine jure_, his _jus_ being already gone.
Such injury may be compared to absurdity in argument, being in
contradiction to what he has already done, as an absurd proposition is
in contradiction to what the speaker has already allowed.

62. The next law of nature, according to Hobbes, is that men should
fulfil their covenants. What contracts and covenants are, he explains
in the usual manner. None can covenant with God, unless by special
revelation; therefore, vows are not binding, nor do oaths add anything
to the swearer’s obligation. But covenants entered into by fear he
holds to be binding in a state of nature, though they may be annulled
by the law. That the observance of justice, that is, of our covenants,
is never against reason, Hobbes labours to prove, for if ever its
violation may have turned out successful, this being contrary to
probable expectation ought not to influence us. “That which gives to
human actions the relish of justice, is a certain nobleness or
gallantness of courage rarely found; by which a man scorns to be
beholden for the contentment of his life to fraud or breach of
promise.”[349] A short gleam of something above the creeping
selfishness of his ordinary morality!

     [349] Leviathan, c. 15.

63. He then enumerates many other laws of nature, such as gratitude,
complaisance, equity, all subordinate to the main one of preserving
peace, by the limitation of the natural right, as he supposes, to
usurp all. These laws are immutable and eternal; the science of them
is the only true science of moral philosophy. For that is nothing but
the science of what is good and evil in the conversation and society
of mankind. In a state of nature private appetite is the measure of
good and evil. But all men agree that peace is good, and therefore the
means of peace, which are the moral virtues or laws of nature, are
good also, and their contraries evil. These laws of nature are not
properly called such, but conclusions of reason as to what should be
done or abstained from; they are but theorems concerning what conduces
to conservation and defence; whereas, law is strictly the word of him
that by right has command over others. But so far as these are enacted
by God in Scripture, they are truly laws.

64. These laws of nature, being contrary to our natural passions, are
but words of no strength to secure any one without a controlling
power. For till such a power is erected, every man will rely on his
own force and skill. Nor will the conjunction of a few men or families
be sufficient for security, nor that of a great multitude guided by
their own particular judgments and appetites. “For if we could suppose
a great multitude of men to consent in the observation of justice and
other laws of nature without a common power to keep them all in awe,
we might as well suppose all mankind to do the same, and then there
neither would be, nor need to be, any civil government or commonwealth
at all, because there would be peace without subjection.”[350] Hence,
it becomes necessary to confer all their power on one man, or assembly
of men, to bear their person or represent them; so that every one
shall own himself author of what shall be done by such representative.
It is a covenant of each with each, that he will be governed in such a
manner, if the other will agree to the same. This is the generation of
the great Leviathan, or mortal God, to whom, under the immortal God,
we owe our peace and defence. In him consists the essence of
the commonwealth, which is one person, of whose acts a great multitude
by mutual covenant have made themselves the authors.

     [350] Lev., c. 17.

65. This person (including of course an assembly as well as
individual) is the sovereign, and possesses sovereign power. And such
power may spring from agreement or from force. A commonwealth by
agreement or institution is when a multitude do agree and covenant one
with another that whatever the major part shall agree to represent
them, shall be the representative of them all. After this has been
done, the subjects cannot change their government without its consent,
being bound by mutual covenant to own its actions. If any one man
should dissent, the rest would break their covenant with him. But
there is no covenant with the sovereign. He cannot have covenanted
with the whole multitude, as one party, because it has no collective
existence till the commonwealth is formed; nor with each man
separately, because the acts of the sovereign are no longer his sole
acts, but those of the society, including him who would complain of
the breach. Nor can the sovereign act unjustly towards a subject; for
he who acts by another’s authority cannot be guilty of injustice
towards him; he may, it is true, commit iniquity, that is, violate the
laws of God and nature, but not injury.

66. The sovereign is necessarily judge of all proper means of defence,
of what doctrines shall be taught, of all disputes and complaints, of
rewards and punishments, of war and peace with neighbouring
commonwealths, and even of what shall be held by each subject in
property. Property, he admits in one place, existed in families before
the institution of civil society; but between different families there
was no meum and tuum. These are by the law and command of the
sovereign; and hence, though every subject may have a right of
property against his fellow, he can have none against the sovereign.
These rights are incommunicable, and inseparable from the sovereign
power; there are others of minor importance, which he may alienate;
but if anyone of the former is taken away from him he ceases to be
truly sovereign.

67. The sovereign power cannot be limited nor divided. Hence, there
can be but three simple forms of commonwealth; monarchy, aristocracy,
and democracy. The first he greatly prefers. The king has no private
interest apart from the people, whose wealth, honour, security from
enemies, internal tranquility, are evidently for his own good. But in
the other forms each man may have a private advantage to seek. In
popular assemblies, there is always an aristocracy of orators,
interrupted sometimes by the temporary monarchy of one orator. And
though a king may deprive a man of all he possesses to enrich a
flatterer or favourite, so may also a democratic assembly, where there
may be as many Neros as orators, each with the whole power of the
people he governs. And these orators are usually more powerful to hurt
others than to save them. A king may receive counsel of whom he will,
an assembly from those only who have a right to belong to it, nor can
their counsel be secret. They are also more inconstant both from
passion and from their numbers; the absence of a few often undoing all
that had been done before. A king cannot disagree with himself, but an
assembly may do so, even to producing civil war.

68. An elective or limited king is not the sovereign, but the
sovereign’s minister; nor can there be a perfect form of government,
where the present ruler has not power to dispose of the succession.
His power, therefore, is wholly without bounds, and correlative must
be the people’s obligation to obey. Unquestionably there are risks of
mischiefs and inconveniences attending a monarchy; but these are less
than in the other forms; and the worst of them is not comparable to
those of civil war, or the anarchy of a state of nature, to which the
dissolution of the commonwealth would reduce us.

69. In the exercise of government the sovereign is to be guided by one
maxim, which contains all his duty: Salus populi suprema lex. And in
this is to be reckoned not only the conservation of life, but all that
renders it happy. For this is the end for which men entered into civil
society, that they might enjoy as much happiness as human nature can
attain. It would be, therefore, a violation of the law of nature, and
of the trust reposed in them, if sovereigns did not study, as far as
by their power it may be, that their subjects should be furnished with
everything necessary, not for life alone but for the delights of life.
And even those who have acquired empire by conquest must desire to
have men fit to serve them, and should, in consistency with their own
aims, endeavour to provide what will increase their strength and
courage. Taxes, in the opinion of Hobbes, should be laid
equally, and rather on expenditure than on revenue; the prince should
promote agriculture, fisheries, and commerce, and in general whatever
makes men happy and prosperous. Many just reflections on the art of
government are uttered by Hobbes, especially as to the inexpediency of
interfering too much with personal liberty. No man, he observes in
another place, is so far free as to be exempted from the sovereign
power; but if liberty consists in the paucity of restraining laws, he
sees not why this may not be had in monarchy as well as in a popular
government. The dream of so many political writers, a wise and just
despotism, is pictured by Hobbes as the perfection of political
society.

70. But, most of all, is the sovereign to be without limit by the
power of the priesthood. This is chiefly to be dreaded, that he should
command anything under the penalty of death, and the clergy forbid it
under the penalty of damnation. The pretensions of the See of Rome, of
some bishops at home, and those of even the lowest citizens to judge
for themselves and determine upon public religion, are dangerous to
the state and the frequent cause of wars. The sovereign, therefore, is
alone to judge whether religions are safely to be admitted or not. And
it may be urged, that princes are bound to cause such doctrine as they
think conducive to their subject’s salvation to be taught, forbidding
every other, and that they cannot do otherwise in conscience. This,
however, he does not absolutely determine. But he is clearly of
opinion that, though it is not the case where the prince is
infidel,[351] the head of the state, in a Christian commonwealth, is
head also of the church; that he, rather than any ecclesiastics, is
the judge of doctrines; that a church is the same as a commonwealth
under the same sovereign, the component members of each being
precisely the same. This is not very far removed from the doctrine of
Hooker, and still less from the practice of Henry VIII.

     [351] Imperantibus autem non Christianis in temporalibus quidem
     omnibus eandem deberi obedientiam etiam a cive Christiano extra
     controversiam est: in spiritualibus vero, hoc est, in iis quæ
     pertinent ad modum colendi Dei Sequenda est ecclesia aliqua
     Christianorum. De Cive, c. 18, § 3.

71. The second class of commonwealths, those by forcible acquisition,
differ more in origin than in their subsequent character from such as
he has been discussing. The rights of sovereignty are the same in
both. Dominion is acquired by generation or by conquest; the one
parental, the other despotical. Parental power, however, he derives
not so much from having given birth to, as from having preserved, the
child, and, with originality and acuteness, thinks it belongs by
nature to the mother rather than to the father, except where there is
some contract between the parties to the contrary. The act of
maintenance and nourishment conveys, as he supposes, an unlimited
power over the child, extending to life and death, and there can be no
state of nature between parent and child. In his notion of patriarchal
authority he seems to go as far as Filmer; but, more acute than
Filmer, perceives that it affords no firm basis for political society.
By conquest and sparing the lives of the vanquished they become
slaves; and so long as they are held in bodily confinement, there is
no covenant between them and their master; but in obtaining corporal
liberty they expressly or tacitly covenant to obey him as their lord
and sovereign.

72. The political philosophy of Hobbes had much to fix the attention
of the world and to create a sect of admiring partizans. The
circumstances of the time, and the character of the passing
generation, no doubt powerfully conspired with its intrinsic
qualities; but a system so original, so intrepid, so disdainful of any
appeal but to the common reason and common interests of mankind, so
unaffectedly and perspicuously proposed, could at no time have failed
of success. From the two rival theories; on the one hand, that of
original compact between the prince and people, derived from
antiquity, and sanctioned by the authority of fathers and schoolmen;
on the other, that of an absolute patriarchal transmuted into an
absolute regal power, which had become prevalent among part of the
English clergy, Hobbes took as much as might conciliate a hearing from
both, an original covenant of the multitude, and an unlimited
authority of the sovereign. But he had a substantial advantage over
both these parties, and especially the latter, in establishing the
happiness of the community as the sole final cause of government, both
in its institution and its continuance; the great fundamental theorem
upon which all political science depends, but sometimes obscured or
lost in the pedantry of theoretical writers.

73. In the positive system of Hobbes we find less cause for praise. We
fall in at the very outset with a strange and indefensible
paradox; the natural equality of human capacities, which he seems to
have adopted rather in opposition to Aristotle’s notion of a natural
right in some men to govern, founded on their superior qualities, than
because it was at all requisite for his own theory. By extending this
alledged equality, or slightness of difference, among men to physical
strength, he has more evidently shown its incompatibility with
experience. If superiority in mere strength has not often been the
source of political power it is for two reasons: first, because,
though there is a vast interval between the strongest man and the
weakest, there is generally not much between the former and him who
comes next in vigour; and secondly, because physical strength is
multiplied by the aggregation of individuals, so that the stronger few
may be overpowered by the weaker many; while in mental capacity,
comprehending acquired skill and habit as well as natural genius and
disposition, both the degrees of excellence are removed by a wider
distance, and what is still more important, the aggregation of
individual powers does not regularly and certainly augment the value
of the whole. That the real or acknowledged superiority of one man to
his fellows has been the ordinary source of power is sufficiently
evident from what we daily see among children, and must, it should
seem, be admitted by all who derive civil authority from choice or
even from conquest, and therefore is to be inferred from the very
system of Hobbes.

74. That a state of nature is a state of war, that men, or at least a
very large proportion of men, employ force of every kind in seizing to
themselves what is in the possession of others is a proposition for
which Hobbes incurred as much obloquy as for anyone in his writings;
yet it is one not easy to controvert. But soon after the publication
of the Leviathan, a dislike of the Calvinistic scheme of universal
depravity as well as of his own, led many considerable men into the
opposite extreme of elevating too much the dignity of human nature, if
by that term they meant, and in no other sense could it be applicable
to this question, the real practical character of the majority of the
species. Certainly, the sociableness of man is as much a part of his
nature as his selfishness; but whether this propensity to society
would necessarily or naturally have led to the institution of
political communities, may not be very clear; while we have proof
enough in historical traditions and in what we observe of savage
nations, that mutual defence by mutual concession, the common
agreement not to attack the possessions of each other, or to permit
strangers to do so, has been the true basis, the final aim, of those
institutions, be they more or less complex, to which we give the
appellation of commonwealths.

75. In developing, therefore, the origin of civil society, Hobbes,
though not essentially differing from his predecessors, has placed the
truth in a fuller light. It does not seem equally clear, that his own
theory of a mutual covenant between the members of an unanimous
multitude to become one people and to be represented, in all time to
come, by such a sovereign government as the majority should determine,
affords a satisfactory groundwork for the rights of political society.
It is, in the first place, too hypothetical as a fact. That such an
agreement may have been sometimes made by independent families, in the
first coming together of communities, it would be presumptuous to
deny--it carries upon the face of it no improbability except as to the
design of binding posterity, which seems too refined for such a state
of mankind as we must suppose; but it is surely possible to account
for the general fact of civil government in a simpler way; and what is
most simple, though not always true, is on the first appearance most
probable. If we merely suppose an agreement, unanimous, of course, in
those who concur in it, to be governed by one man, or by one council
promising that they shall wield the force of the whole against anyone
who shall contravene their commands issued for the public good, the
foundation is as well laid, and the commonwealth as firmly
established, as by the double process of a mutual covenant to
constitute a people, and a popular determination to constitute a
government. It is true that Hobbes distinguishes a commonwealth by
institution, which he supposes to be founded on this unanimous
consent, from one by acquisition, for which force alone is required.
But as the force of one man goes but a little way towards compelling
the obedience of others, so as to gain the name of sovereign power,
unless it is aided by the force of many who voluntarily conspire to
its ends, this sort of commonwealth by conquest will be found to
involve the previous institution of the more peaceable kind.

76. This theory of a mutual covenant is defective also in a most
essential point. It furnishes no adequate basis for any
commonwealth beyond the lives of those who established it. The right
indeed of men to bind their children and through them a late posterity
is sometimes asserted by Hobbes, but in a very transient manner, and
as if he was aware of the weakness of his ground. It might be inquired
whether the force on which alone he rests the obligation of children
to obey, can give any right beyond its own continuance; whether the
absurdity he imputes to those who do not stand by their own
engagements is imputable to such as disregard the covenants of their
forefathers; whether, in short, any law of nature requires our
obedience to a government we deem hurtful, because in a distant age, a
multitude whom we cannot trace bestowed unlimited power on some
unknown persons from whom that government pretends to derive its
succession.

77. A better ground for the subsisting rights of his Leviathan, is
sometimes suggested, though faintly, by Hobbes himself. “If one refuse
to stand to what the major part shall ordain, or make protestation
against any of their decrees, he does contrary to his covenant, and
therefore unjustly: and whether he be of the congregation or not,
whether his consent be asked or not, he must either submit to their
decrees, or be left in the condition of war he was in before, wherein
he might without injustice be destroyed by any man whatsoever.”[352]
This renewal of the state of war which is the state of nature, this
denial of the possibility of doing an injury to anyone who does not
obey the laws of the commonwealth, is enough to silence the question
why we are obliged still to obey. The established government and those
who maintain it, being strong enough to wage war against gainsayers,
give them the option of incurring the consequences of such warfare, or
of complying with the laws. But it seems to be a corollary from this,
that the stronger part of a commonwealth, which may not always be the
majority, have not only a right to despise the wishes but the
interests of dissentients. Thus, the more we scrutinize the theories
of Hobbes, the more there appears a deficiency of that which only a
higher tone of moral sentiment can give, a security against the
appetites of others, and for them against our own. But it may be
remarked that his supposition of a state of war, not as a permanent
state of nature, but as just self-defence, is perhaps the best footing
on which we can place the right to inflict severe, and especially
capital, punishment upon offenders against the law.

     [352] Lev., c. 18.

78. The positions so dogmatically laid down as to the impossibility of
mixing different sorts of government were, even in the days of Hobbes,
contradicted by experience. Several republics had lasted for ages
under a mixed aristocracy and democracy; and there had surely been
sufficient evidence that a limited monarchy might exist, though, in
the revolution of ages, it might one way or other, pass into some new
type of polity. And these prejudices in favour of absolute power are
rendered more dangerous by paradoxes unusual from an Englishman, even
in those days of high prerogative when Hobbes began to write, that the
subject has no property relatively to the sovereign, and, what is the
fundamental error of his whole system, that nothing done by the prince
can be injurious to any one else. This is accompanied by the other
portents of Hobbism, scattered through these treatises, especially the
Leviathan, that the distinctions of right and wrong, moral good and
evil, are made by the laws, that no man can do amiss who obeys the
sovereign authority, that though private belief is of necessity beyond
the prince’s control, it is according to his will, and in no other
way, that we must worship God.

79. The political system of Hobbes, like his moral system, of which,
in fact, it is only a portion, sears up the heart. It takes away the
sense of wrong, that has consoled the wise and good in their dangers,
the proud appeal of innocence under oppression, like that of
Prometheus to the elements, uttered to the witnessing world, to coming
ages, to the just ear of Heaven. It confounds the principles of moral
approbation, the notions of good and ill desert, in a servile idolatry
of the monstrous Leviathan it creates, and after sacrificing all right
at the altar of power, denies to the Omnipotent the prerogative of
dictating the laws of his own worship.


                            SECT. III.

_Roman Jurisprudence--Grotius on the Laws of War and Peace--Analysis
of this Work--Defence of it against some Strictures._

|Civil jurists of this period.|

80. In the Roman jurisprudence we do not find such a cluster of
eminent men during this period as in the sixteenth century; and it
would of course be out of our province to search for names
little now remembered, perhaps, even in forensic practice. Many of the
writings of Fabre of Savoy, who has been mentioned in the last volume,
belong to the first years of this century. Farinacci, or Farinaceus, a
lawyer of Rome, obtained a celebrity, which, after a long duration,
has given way in the progress of legal studies, less directed than
formerly towards a superfluous erudition.[353] But the work of
Menochius de præsumptionibus, or, as we should say, on the rules of
evidence, is said to have lost none of its usefulness, even since the
decline of the civil law in France.[354] No book, perhaps, belonging
to this period is so generally known as the commentaries of Vinnius on
the Institutes, which, as far as I know, has not been superseded by
any of later date. Conringius of Helmstadt may be reckoned in some
measure among the writers on jurisprudence, though chiefly in the line
of historical illustration. The Elementa Juris Civilis, by Zouch, is a
mere epitome, but neatly executed, of the principal heads of the Roman
law, and nearly in its own words. Arthur Duck, another Englishman, has
been praised even by foreigners, for a succinct and learned, though
elementary and popular, treatise on the use and authority of the civil
law in different countries of Europe. This little book is not
disagreeably written; but it is not of course, from England that much
could be contributed towards Roman jurisprudence.

     [353] Biogr. Univ.

     [354] Id.

|Suarez on laws.|

81. The larger principles of jurisprudence, which link that science
with general morals, and especially such as relate to the intercourse
of nations, were not left untouched in the great work of Suarez on
laws. I have not, however, made myself particularly acquainted with
this portion of his large volume. Spain appears to have been the
country in which these questions were originally discussed upon
principles broader than precedent, as well as upon precedents
themselves; and Suarez, from the general comprehensiveness of his
views in legislation and ethics, is likely to have said well whatever
he may have said on the subject of international law. It does not
appear however that he is much quoted by later writers.

|Grotius De Jure Belli et Pacis.|

82. The name of Suarez is obscure in comparison of one who soon came
forward in the great field of natural jurisprudence. This was Hugo
Grotius, whose famous work, De Jure Belli et Pacis, was published at
Paris in 1625. It may be reckoned a proof of the extraordinary
diligence as well as quickness of parts which distinguished this
writer, that it had occupied a very short part of his life. He first
mentions, in a letter to the younger Thuanus, in August, 1623, that he
was employed in examining the principal questions which belong to the
law of nations.[355] In the same year he recommends the study of that
law to another of his correspondents in such terms as bespeak his own
attention to it.[356] According to one of his letters to Gassendi,
quoted by Stewart, the scheme was suggested to him by Peiresc.

     [355] Versor in examinandis controversiis præcipuis quæ ad jus
     gentium pertinent. Epist. 75. This is not from the folio
     collection of his epistles, so often quoted in the second chapter
     of this volume, but from one antecedently published in 1648, and
     entitled Grotii Epistolæ ad Gallos.

     [356] Hoc spatio exacto, nihil restat quod tibi æque commendem
     atque studium juris, non illius privati, ex quo leguleii et
     rabulæ victitant, sed gentium ac publici; quam præstabilem
     scientiam Cicero vocans consistere ait in fœderibus, pactionibus
     conditionibus populorum, regum, nationum, in omni denique jure
     belli et pacis. Hujus juris principia quomodo ex morali
     philosophia petenda sunt, monstrare poterunt Platonis ac
     Ciceronis de legibus liber. Sed Platonis summas aliquas legisse
     suffecerit. Neque pœniteat ex scholasticis Thomam Aquinatem, si
     non perlegere, saltem inspicere secunda parte secundæ partis
     libri, quem Summam Theologiæ inscripsit; præsertim ubi de
     justitia agit ac de legibus. Usum propius monstrabunt Pandectæ,
     libro primo atque ultimo; et codex Justinianeus, libro primo et
     tribus postremis. Nostri temporis juris consulti pauci juris
     gentium ac publici controversias attigere, eoque magis eminent,
     qui id fecere, Vasquius, Hottomannus, Gentilis. Epist. xvi. This
     passage is useful in showing the views Grotius himself
     entertained as to the subject and groundwork of his treatise.

|Success of this work.|

83. It is acknowledged by every one that the publication of this
treatise made an epoch in the philosophical and almost we might say in
the political history of Europe. Those who sought a guide to their own
conscience or that of others, those who dispensed justice, those who
appealed to the public sense of right in the intercourse of nations,
had recourse to its copious pages for what might direct or justify
their actions. Within thirty or forty years from its publication, we
find the work of Grotius generally received as authority by professors
of the continental universities, and deemed necessary for the student
of civil law, at least in the protestant countries of Europe.
In England, from the difference of laws and from some other causes
which might be assigned, the influence of Grotius was far slower, and
even ultimately much less general. He was, however, treated with great
respect as the founder of the modern law of nations, which is
distinguished from what formerly bore that name by its more continual
reference to that of nature. But when a book is little read it is
easily misrepresented; and as a new school of philosophers rose up,
averse to much of the principles of their predecessors, but, above all
things, to their tediousness, it became the fashion not so much to
dispute the tenets of Grotius, as to set aside his whole work, among
the barbarous and obsolete schemes of ignorant ages. For this purpose
various charges have been alledged against it by men of deserved
eminence, not, in my opinion, very candidly, or with much real
knowledge of its contents. They have had, however, the natural effect
of creating a prejudice, which, from the sort of oblivion fallen upon
the book, is not likely to die away. I shall, therefore, not think
myself performing an useless task in giving an analysis of the
treatise De Jure Belli et Pacis; so that the reader, having seen for
himself what it is, may not stand in need of any arguments or
testimony to refute those who have represented it as it is not.

|Its originality.|

84. The book may be considered as nearly original, in its general
platform, as any work of man in an advanced stage of civilization and
learning can be. It is more so, perhaps, than those of Montesquieu and
Smith. No one had before gone to the foundations of international law
so as to raise a complete and consistent superstructure; few had
handled even separate parts, or laid down any satisfactory rules
concerning it. Grotius enumerates a few preceding writers, especially
Ayala and Albericus Gentilis, but does not mention Soto in this place.
Gentilis, he says, is wont in determining controverted questions to
follow either a few precedents not always of the best description, or
even the authority of modern lawyers in their answers to cases, many
of which are written with more regard to what the consulting parties
desire, than to what real justice and equity demand.

|Its motive and object.|

85. The motive assigned for this undertaking is the noblest. “I saw,”
he says, “in the whole Christian world a licence of fighting, at which
even barbarians might blush, wars begun on trifling pretexts or none
at all, and carried on without reverence for any divine or human law,
as if that one declaration of war let loose every crime.” The sight of
such a monstrous state of things had induced some, like Erasmus, to
deny the lawfulness of any war to a christian. But this extreme, as he
justly observes, is rather pernicious than otherwise; for when a tenet
so paradoxical and impracticable is maintained, it begets a prejudice
against the more temperate course which he prepares to indicate. “Let,
therefore,” he says afterwards, “the laws be silent in the midst of
arms; but those laws only which belong to peace, the laws of civil
life and public tribunals, not such as are eternal, and fitted for all
seasons, unwritten laws of nature, which subsist in what the ancient
form of the Romans denominated ‘a pure and holy war.’”[357]

     [357] Eas res puro pioque duello repetundas censeo. It was a case
     prodigiously frequent in the opinion of the Romans.

|His authorities.|

86. “I have employed in confirmation of this natural and national law
the testimonies of philosophers, of historians, of poets, lastly even
of orators; not that we should indiscriminately rely upon them; for
they are apt to say what may serve their party, their subject, or
their cause; but because when many at different times and places
affirm the same thing for certain, we may refer this unanimity to some
general cause, which in such questions as these can be no other than
either a right deduction from some natural principle or some common
agreement. The former of these denotes the law of nature, the latter
that of nations; the difference whereof must be understood, not by the
language of these testimonies, for writers are very prone to confound
the two words, but from the nature of the subject. For whatever cannot
be clearly deduced from true premises, and yet appears to have been
generally admitted, must have had its origin in free consent.... The
sentences of poets and orators have less weight than those of history;
and we often make use of them not so much to corroborate what we say,
as to throw a kind of ornament over it.” “I have abstained,” he adds
afterwards, “from all that belongs to a different subject, as what is
expedient to be done; since this has its own science, that of
politics, which Aristotle has rightly treated by not intermingling
anything extraneous to it, while Bodin has confounded that science
with this which we are about to treat. If we sometimes allude
to utility, it is but in passing, and distinguishing it from the
question of justice.”[358]

     [358] Prolegomena in librum de Jure Belli.

|Foundation of natural law.|

87. Grotius derives the origin of natural law from the sociable
character of mankind. “Among things common to mankind is the desire of
society, that is, not of every kind of society, but of one that is
peaceable and ordered according to the capacities of his nature with
others of his species. Even in children before all instruction a
propensity to do good to others displays itself, just as pity in that
age is a spontaneous affection.” We perceive by this remark that
Grotius looked beyond the merely rational basis of natural law to the
moral constitution of human nature. The conservation of such a
sociable life is the source of that law which is strictly called
natural, which comprehends, in the first place, the abstaining from
all that belongs to others, and the restitution of it if by any means
in our possession, the fulfilment of promises, the reparation of
injury, and the right of human punishment. In a secondary sense,
natural law extends to prudence, temperance and fortitude, as being
suitable to man’s nature. And in a similar lax sense we have that kind
of justice itself called distributive (διανεμητικη [dianemêtikê]),
which prefers a better man to a worse, a relation to a stranger, a
poorer man to a richer, according to the circumstances of the party
and the case.[359] And this natural law is properly defined, “the
dictate of right reason, pointing out a moral guilt or rectitude to be
inherent in any action, on account of its agreement or disagreement
with our rational and social nature; and consequently that such an
action is either forbidden or enjoined by God the author of
nature.”[360] It is so immutable, that God himself cannot alter it; a
position which he afterwards limits by a restriction we have seen in
Suarez; that if God command anyone to be killed, or his goods to be
taken, this would not render murder or theft lawful, but being
commanded by the lord of life and all things, it would cease to be
murder or theft. This seems little better than a sophism unworthy of
Grotius; but he meant to distinguish between an abrogation of the law
of nature, and a dispensation with it in a particular instance. The
original position, in fact, is not stated with sufficient precision or
on a right principle.

     [359] Id. § 6-10.

     [360] Jus naturale est dictatum rectæ rationis, indicans actui
     alicui, ex ejus convenientia aut disconvenientia cum ipsa natura
     rationali ac sociali, inesse moralem turpitudinem aut
     necessitatem moralem, ac consequenter ab auctore naturæ Deo talem
     actum aut vetari aut præcipi. L. i., c. 1., § 10.

|Positive law.|

88. Voluntary, or positive law is either human or revealed. The former
is either that of civil communities, which are assemblages of freemen,
living in society for the sake of laws and common utility, or that of
nations, which derives its obligation from the consent of all or many
nations; a law which is to be proved, like all unwritten law, by
continual usage and the testimony of the learned. The revealed law he
divides in the usual manner, but holding that no part of the Mosaic,
so far as it is strictly a law, is at present binding upon us. But
much of it is confirmed by the Christian Scriptures, and much is also
obligatory by the law of nature. This last law is to be applied, _à
priori_, by the conformity of the act in question to the natural
and social nature of man; _à posteriori_, by the consent of
mankind; the latter argument, however, not being conclusive, but
highly probable, when the agreement is found in all, or in all the
more civilized nations.[361]

     [361] Lib. i., c. 1.

|Perfect and imperfect rights.|

89. Perfect rights, after the manner of the jurists, he distinguishes
from imperfect. The former are called sua, our own, properly speaking,
the objects of what they styled commutative justice; the latter are
denominated fitnesses, (aptitudines) such as equity, gratitude, or
domestic affection prescribe, but which are only the objects of
distributive or equitable justice. This distinction is of the highest
importance in the immediate subject of the work of Grotius; since it
is agreed on all hands, that no law gives a remedy for the denial of
these, nor can we justly, in the state of nature, have recourse to
arms in order to enforce them.[362]

     [362] Id. ibid.

|Lawful cases of war.|

90. War, however, as he now proceeds to show, is not absolutely
unlawful either by the law of nature or that of nations, or of
revelation. The proof is, as usual with Grotius, very diffuse; his
work being in fact a magazine of arguments and examples with rather a
supererogatory profusion.[363] But the Anabaptist and Quaker
superstition has prevailed enough to render some of his refutation not
unnecessary. After dividing war into public and private, and showing
that the establishment of civil justice does not universally put an
end to the right of private war, since cases may arise, when
the magistrate cannot be waited for, and others, where his
interference cannot be obtained, he shows that public war may be
either solemn and regular according to the law of nations, or less
regular on a sudden emergency of self-defence; classing also under the
latter any war, which magistrates not sovereign may in peculiar
circumstances levy.[364] And this leads him to inquire what
constitutes sovereignty; defining, after setting aside other
descriptions, that power to be sovereign, whose acts cannot be
invalidated at the pleasure of any other human authority, except one,
which, as in the case of a successor, has exactly the same sovereignty
as itself.[365]

     [363] C. 2.

     [364] C. 3.

     [365] Summa potestas illa dicitur, cujus actus alterius juri non
     subjacet, ita ut alterius voluntatis humanæ arbitrio irriti
     possint reddi. § 7.

|Resistance by subjects unlawful.|

91. Grotius rejects the opinion of those who hold the people to be
everywhere sovereign, so that they may restrain and punish kings for
misgovernment; quoting many authorities for the irresponsibility of
kings. Here he lays down the principles of non-resistance, which he
more fully inculcates in the next chapter. But this is done with many
distinctions as to the nature of the principality, which may be held
by very different conditions. He speaks of patrimonial kingdoms,
which, as he supposes, may be alienated like an inheritance. But where
the government can be traced to popular consent, he owns that this
power of alienation should not be presumed to be comprised in the
grant. Those, he says, are much deceived who think that in kingdoms
where the consent of a senate or other body is required for new laws,
the sovereignty itself is divided; for these restrictions must be
understood to have been imposed by the prince on his own will, least
he should be entrapped into something contrary to his deliberate
intention.[366] Among other things in this chapter, he determines that
neither an unequal alliance, that is, where one party retains great
advantages, nor a feudal homage take away the character of
sovereignty, so far at least as authority over subjects is concerned.

     [366] § 18.

92. In the next chapter, Grotius dwells more at length on the alledged
right of subjects to resist their governors, and altogether repels it,
with the exception of strict self-defence, or the improbable case of a
hostile spirit, on the prince’s part, extending to the destruction of
his people. Barclay, the opponent of Buchanan and the Jesuits, had
admitted the right of resistance against enormous cruelty. If the king
has abdicated the government, or manifestly relinquished it, he may,
after a time, be considered merely a private person. But mere
negligence in government is by no means to be reckoned a
relinquishment.[367] And he also observes, that if the sovereignty be
divided between a king and part of his subjects or the whole, he may
be resisted by force in usurping their share, because he is no longer
sovereign as to that; which he holds to be the case, even if the right
of war be in him, since that must be understood of a foreign war, and
it could not be maintained that those who partake the sovereignty have
not the right to defend it; in which predicament a king may lose even
his own share by the right of war. He proceeds to the case of
usurpation; not such as is warranted by long prescription, but while
the circumstances that led to the unjust possession subsist. Against
such an usurper he thinks it lawful to rebel, so long as there is no
treaty or voluntary act of allegiance, at least if the government de
jure sanctions the insurrection. But where there may be a doubt
whether the lawful ruler has not acquiesced in the usurpation, a
private person ought rather to stand by possession, than to take the
decision upon himself.[368]

     [367] Si rex aut alius quis imperium abdicavit, aut manifeste
     habet pro derelicto, in eum post id tempus omnia licent, quæ in
     privatum. Sed minimè pro derelicto habere rem censendus est, qui
     eam tractat negligentius. C. 4, § 9.

     [368] § 20.

|All men naturally have right of war.|

93. The right of war, which we must here understand in the largest
sense, the employment of force to resist force, though by private men,
resides in all mankind. Solon, he says, taught us that those
commonwealths would be happy, wherein each man thought the injuries of
others were like his own.[369] The mere sociability of human nature
ought to suggest this to us. And, though Grotius does not proceed with
this subject, he would not have doubted that we are even bound by the
law of nature, not merely that we have a right, to protect the lives
and goods of others against lawless violence, without the
least reference to positive law or the command of a magistrate. If
this has been preposterously doubted, or affected to be doubted, in
England of late years, it has been less owing to the pedantry which
demands an express written law upon the most pressing emergency, than
to lukewarmness, at the best, in the public cause of order and
justice. The expediency of vindicating these by the slaughter of the
aggressors must depend on the peculiar circumstances; but the right is
paramount to any positive laws, even if, which with us is not the
case, it were difficult to be proved from them.

     [369] Εν ᾑ των αδικουμενων ουχ ἡττον οἱ μη αδικουμενοι
     προβαλλονται και κολαζουσι τους αδικουντας. [En hê tôn
     adikoumenôn ouch hêtton hoi mê adikoumenoi proballontai kai
     kolazousi tous adikountas.] Ut cætera desint vincula, sufficit
     humanæ naturæ communio.

|Right of self-defence.|

94. We now arrive at the first and fundamental inquiry, what is the
right of self-defence, including the defence of what is our own. There
can, says Grotius, be no just cause of war (that is, of using force,
for he is now on the most general ground) but injury. For this reason
he will not admit of wars to preserve the balance of power. An
imminent injury to ourselves or our property renders repulsion of the
aggressor by force legitimate. But here he argues rather weakly and
inconsistently through excess of charity, and acknowledging the strict
right of killing one who would otherwise kill us, thinks it more
praiseworthy to accept the alternative.[370] The right of killing one
who inflicts a smaller personal injury he wholly denies; and with
respect to a robber, while he admits he may be slain by natural law,
is of opinion that the Gospel has greatly limited the privilege of
defending our property by such means. Almost all jurists and
theologians of his day, he says, carry it farther than he does.[371]
To public warfare he gives a greater latitude than to private
self-defence, but without assigning any satisfactory reason; the true
reason being that so rigid a scheme of ethics would have rendered his
book an Utopian theory, instead of a practicable code of law.

     [370] Lib. ii., c. 1., § 8. Gronovius observes pithily and truly
     on this: melius occidi quam occidere injuria; non melius occidi
     injuria quam occidere jure.

     [371] Hodie omnes ferme tam jurisconsulti quam theologi doceant
     recte homines a nobis interfici rerum defendendarum causa, § 13.

95. Injury to our rights, therefore, is a just cause of war. But what
are our rights? What is property? whence does it come? what may be its
subjects? in whom does it reside? Till these questions are determined,
we can have but crude and indefinite notions of injury, and
consequently of the rights we have to redress it. The disquisition is
necessary, but it must be long; unless indeed we acquiesce in what we
find already written, and seek for no stable principles upon which
this grand and primary question in civil society, the rights of
property and dominion, may rest. Here then begins what has seemed to
many the abandonment by Grotius of his general subject, and what
certainly suspends for a considerable time the inquiry into
international law, but still not, as it seems to me, an episodical
digression, at least for the greater part, but a natural and
legitimate investigation, springing immediately from the principal
theme of the work, connected with it more closely at several
intervals, and ultimately reverting into it. But of this the reader
will judge as we proceed with the analysis.

|Its origin and limitations.|

96. Grotius begins with rather too romantic a picture of the early
state of the world, when men lived on the spontaneous fruits of the
earth, with no property except in what each had taken from the common
mother’s lap. But this happy condition did not, of course, last very
long, and mankind came to separate and exclusive possession, each man
for himself and against the world. Original occupancy by persons, and
division of lands by the community, he rightly holds to be the two
sources of territorial propriety. Occupation is of two sorts, one by
the community (per universitatem), the other (per fundos) by several
possession. What is not thus occupied is still the domain of the
state. Grotius conceives that mankind have reserved a right of taking
what belongs to others in extreme necessity. It is a still more
remarkable limitation of the right of property, that he carries very
far his notions of that of transit, maintaining that not only rivers,
but the territory itself of a state may be peaceably entered, and that
permission cannot be refused, consistently with natural law, even in
the case of armies; nor is the apprehension of incurring the hostility
of the power who is thus attacked by the army passing through our
territory a sufficient excuse.[372] This of course must now be
exploded. Nor can, he thinks, the transit of merchandise be forbidden
or impeded by levying any farther tolls than are required for the
incident expenses. Strangers ought to be allowed to settle, on
condition of obeying the laws, and even to occupy any waste tracts in
the territory;[373] a position equally untenable. It is less
unreasonably that he maintains the general right of mankind to buy
what they want, if the other party can spare it; but he extends too
far his principle, that no nation can be excluded by another from
privileges which it concedes to the rest of the world. In all these
positions, however, we perceive the enlarged and philanthropic spirit
of the system of Grotius, and his disregard of the usages of mankind,
when they clashed with his Christian principles of justice. But as the
very contrary supposition has been established in the belief of the
present generation, it may be doubtful whether his own testimony will
be thought sufficient.

     [372] Sic etiam metus ab eo in quem bellum justum movet is qui
     transit, ad negandum transitum non valet. Lib. ii., c. 2, § 13.

     [373] 16, 17.

|Right of occupancy.|

97. The original acquisition of property was in the infancy of human
societies, by division or by occupancy; it is now by occupancy alone.
Paullus has reckoned as a mode of original acquisition, if we have
caused anything to exist, si quid ipsi, ut in rerum natura esset,
fecimus. This, though not well expressed, must mean the produce of
labour. Grotius observes, that this resolves itself into a continuance
of a prior right, or a new one by occupancy, and therefore no peculiar
mode of acquisition. In those things which naturally belong to no one,
there may be two sorts of occupation, dominion or sovereignty, and
property. And, in the former sense at least, rivers and bays of the
sea are capable of occupation. In what manner this may be done he
explains at length.[374] But those who occupy a portion of the sea
have no right to obstruct others in fishing. This had been the subject
of a controversy with Selden; the one in his Mare Liberum denying, the
other in his Mare Clausum sustaining, the right of England to exclude
the fishermen of Holland from the seas which she asserted to be her
own.

     [374] C. 3.

|Relinquishment of it.|

98. The right of occupancy exists as to things derelict or abandoned
by their owners. But it is of more importance to consider the
presumptions of such relinquishment by sovereign states, as
distinguished from mere prescription. The non-claim of the owner
during a long period seems the only means of giving a right where none
originally existed. It must be the silent acquiescence of one who
knows his rights and has his free will. But when this abandonment has
once taken place, it bars unborn claimants; for he who is not born,
Grotius says, has no rights; ejus qui nondum est natus nullum est
jus.[375]

     [375] C. 4.

|Right over persons. By generation.|

99. A right over persons may be acquired in three ways, by generation,
by their consent, by their crime. In children we are to consider three
periods: that of imperfect judgment, or infancy; that of adult age in
the father’s family; and that of emancipation or foris-familiation,
when they have ceased to form a part of it. In the first of these, a
child is capable of property in possession but not in enjoyment. In
the second, he is subject to the parent only in actions which affect
the family. In the third, he is wholly his own master. All beyond this
is positive law. The paternal power was almost peculiar to the Romans,
though the Persians are said to have had something of the same.
Grotius, we perceive, was no ally of those who elevated the
patriarchal power in order to found upon it a despotic polity; nor
does he raise it by any means so high as Bodin. The customs of Eastern
nations would, perhaps, have warranted somewhat more than he
concedes.[376]

     [376] C. 5.

|By consent. In marriage.|

100. Consent is the second mode of acquiring dominion. The
consociation of male and female is the first species of it, which is
principally in marriage, for which the promise of the woman to be
faithful is required. But he thinks that there is no mutual obligation
by the law of nature; which seems designed to save the polygamy of the
patriarchs. He then discusses the chief questions as to divorce,
polygamy, clandestine marriages, and incest; holding that no unions
are forbidden by natural law except in the direct line. Concubines, in
the sense of the Roman jurisprudence, are true Christian wives.[377]

     [377] Id.

|In commonwealths.|

101. In all other consociations except marriage, it is a rule that the
majority can bind the minority. Of these the principal is a
commonwealth. And here he maintains the right of every citizen to
leave his country, and that the state retains no right over those it
has banished. Subjection, which may arise from one kind of consent, is
either private or public; the former is of several species, among
which adoption, in the Roman sense, is the noblest, and servitude the
meanest. In the latter case, the master has not the right of life and
death over his servants, though some laws give him impunity. He is
perplexed about the right over persons born in slavery, since his
theory of its origin will not support it. But, in the case of public
subjection, where one state becomes voluntarily subject to
another, he finds no difficulty about the unborn, because the people
is the same, notwithstanding the succession of individuals; which
seems paying too much deference to a legal fiction.[378]

     [378] C. 5.

|Right of alienating subjects.|

|Alienation by testament.|

102. The right of alienating altogether the territory he grants to
patrimonial sovereigns. But he denies that a part can be separated
from the rest without its consent, either by the community or by the
sovereign, however large his authority may be. This he extends to
subjection of the kingdom to vassalage. The right of alienating
private property by testament is founded, he thinks in natural
law;[379] a position wherein I can by no means concur. In conformity
with this, he derives the right of succession by intestacy from the
presumed intention of the deceased, and proceeds to dilate on the
different rules of succession established by civil laws. Yet the rule
that paternal and maternal heirs shall take respectively what
descended from the ancestors on each side, he conceives to be founded
in the law of nature, though subject to the right of bequest.[380]

     [379] C. 6, § 14.

     [380] C. 7. In this chapter Grotius decides that parents are not
     bound by strict justice to maintain their children. The case is
     stronger the other way, in return for early protection. Barbeyrac
     thinks that aliment is due to children by strict right during
     infancy.

|Rights of property by positive law.|

103. In treating of the acquisition of property by the law of nations,
he means only the arbitrary constitutions of the Roman and other
codes. Some of these he deems founded in no solid reason, though the
lawgivers of every country have a right to determine such matters as
they think fit. Thus, the Roman law recognises no property in animals
_feræ naturæ_, which that of modern nations gives, he says, to
the owner of the soil where they are found, not unreasonably any more
than the opposite maxim is unreasonable. So of a treasure found in the
earth, and many other cases, wherein it is hard to say that the law of
nature and reason prescribes one rule more than another.[381]

     [381] § 8.

|Extinction of rights.|

104. The rights of sovereignty and property may terminate by
extinction of the ruling or possessing family without provision of
successors. Slaves then become free, and subjects their own masters.
For there can be no new right by occupancy in such. Even a people or
community may cease to exist, though the identity of persons or even
of race is not necessary for its continuance. It may expire by
voluntary dispersion, or by subjugation to another state. But mere
change of place by simultaneous emigration will not destroy a
political society, much less a change of internal government. Hence, a
republic becoming a monarchy, it stands in the same relation to other
communities as before, and in particular, is subject to all its former
debts.[382]

     [382] § 2. At the end of this chapter, Grotius unfortunately
     raises a question, his solution of which laid him open to
     censure. He inquires to whom the countries formerly subject to
     the Roman empire belong? And here he comes to the inconceivable
     paradox that that empire and the rights of the citizens of Rome
     still subsist. Gronovius bitterly remarks, in a note on this
     passage: Mirum est hoc loco summum virum, cum in præcipua
     questione non male sentiret, in tot salebras se conjecisse,
     totque monstra et chimæras confinxisse, ut aliquid novum diceret,
     et Germanis potius ludibrium deberet, quam Gallis et Papæ parum
     placeret. This, however, is very uncandid, as Barbeyrac truly
     points out; since neither of these could take much interest in a
     theory which reserved a supremacy over the world to the Roman
     people. It is probably the weakest passage in all the writings of
     Grotius, though there are too many which do not enhance his fame.

|Some casuistical questions.|

105. In a chapter on the obligations which the right of property
imposes on others than the proprietor, we find some of the more
delicate questions in the casuistry of natural law, such as relate to
the bonâ fide possessor of another’s property. Grotius, always siding
with the stricter moralists, asserts that he is bound not only to
restore the substance but the intermediate profits, without any claim
for the valuable consideration which he may have paid. His commentator
Barbeyrac, of a later and laxer school of casuistry, denies much of
this doctrine.[383]

     [383] C. 10. Our own jurisprudence goes upon the principles of
     Grotius, and even denies the possessor by a bad title, though
     bonâ fide, any indemnification for what he may have laid out to
     the benefit of the property, which seems hardly consonant to the
     strictest rules of natural law.

|Promises.|

106. That great branch of ethics which relates to the obligation of
promises has been so diffusely handled by the casuists, as well as
philosophers, that Grotius deserves much credit for the brevity with
which he has laid down the simple principles, and discussed some of
the more difficult problems. That mere promises, or nuda
pacta, where there is neither mutual benefit, nor what the jurists
call synallagmatic contract, are binding on the conscience, whatever
they may be, or ought to be, in law, is maintained against a
distinguished civilian, Francis Connan; nor does Barbeyrac seem to
dispute this general tenet of moral philosophers. Puffendorf, however,
says, that there is a tacit condition in promises of this kind, that
they can be performed without great loss to the promiser, and Cicero
holds them to be released, if their performance would be more
detrimental to one party, than serviceable to the other. This gives a
good deal of latitude; but, perhaps, they are in such cases open to
compensation without actual fulfilment. A promise given without
deliberation, according to Grotius himself, is not binding. Those
founded on deceit or error admit of many distinctions; but he
determines, in the celebrated question of extorted promises, that they
are valid by the natural, though their obligation may be annulled by
the civil law. But the promisee is bound to release a promise thus
unduly obtained.[384] Thus also the civil law may annul other
promises, which would naturally be binding, as one of prospective
marriage between persons already under that engagement towards
another. These instances are sufficient to show the spirit in which
Grotius always approaches the decision of moral questions; serious and
learned, rather than profound, in seeking a principle, or acute in
establishing a distinction. In the latter quality he falls much below
his annotator Barbeyrac, who had indeed the advantage of coming nearly
a century after him.

     [384] C. 11, § 7. It is not very probable that the promisee will
     fulfil this obligation in such a case; and the decision of
     Grotius, though conformable to that of the theological casuists
     in general, is justly rejected by Puffendorf and Barbeyrac, as
     well as by many writers of the last century. The principle seems
     to be, that right and obligation in matters of agreement are
     correlative, and where the first does not arise, the second
     cannot exist. Adam Smith and Paley incline to think the promise
     ought, under certain circumstances, to be kept; but the reasons
     they give are not founded on the _justitia expletrix_, which the
     proper obligation of promises, as such, requires. It is also a
     proof how little the moral sense of mankind goes along with the
     rigid casuists in this respect, that no one is blamed for
     defending himself against a bond given through duress or illegal
     violence, if the plea be a true one.

     In a subsequent passage, 1. iii., c. 19, § 4, Grotius seems to
     carry this theory of the duty of releasing an unjust promise so
     far, as to deny its obligation, and thus circuitously to agree
     with the opposite class of casuists.

|Contracts.|

107. In no part of his work has Grotius dwelt so much on the rules and
distinctions of the Roman law, as in his chapter on contracts, nor was
it very easy or desirable to avoid it.[385] The wisdom of those great
men, from the fragments of whose determinations the existing
jurisprudence of Europe, in subjects of this kind, has been chiefly
derived, could not be set aside without presumption, nor appropriated
without ingratitude. Less fettered, at least in the best age of Roman
jurisprudence, by legislative interference than our modern lawyers
have commonly been, they resorted to no other principles than those of
natural justice. That the Roman law, in all its parts, coincides with
the best possible platform of natural jurisprudence it would be
foolish to assert; but that in this great province, or rather demesne
land, of justice, the regulation of contracts between man and man, it
does not considerably deviate from the right line of reason, has never
been disputed by anyone in the least conversant with the Pandects.

     [385] C. 12.

|Considered ethically.|

108. It will be manifest, however, to the attentive reader of Grotius
in this chapter that he treats the subject of contract as a part of
ethics rather than of jurisprudence; and it is only by the frequent
parallelism of the two sciences that the contrary could be suspected.
Thus, he maintains that, equality being the principle of the contract
by sale, either party is forced to restore the difference arising from
a misapprehension of the other, even without his own fault, and this
whatever may be the amount, though the civil law gives a remedy only
where the difference exceeds one half of the price.[386] And in
several other places he diverges equally from that law. Not that he
ever contemplated what Smith seems to have meant by “natural
jurisprudence,” a theory of the principles which ought to run through
and to be the foundation of the laws of all nations. But he knew that
the judge in the tribunal, and the inward judge in the breast, even
where their subjects of determination appear essentially the same,
must have different boundaries to their jurisdiction; and that, as the
general maxims and inflexible forms of external law, in attempts to
accommodate themselves to the subtleties of casuistry, would become
uncertain and arbitrary, so the finer emotions of the conscience would
lose all their moral efficacy, by restraining the duties of justice to
that which can be enforced by the law. In the course of this twelfth
chapter we come to a question much debated in the time of Grotius, the
lawfulness of usury. After admitting, against the common opinion, that
it is not repugnant to the law of nature, he yet maintains the
prohibition in the Mosaic code to be binding on all mankind.[387] An
extraordinary position, it would seem, in one who had denied any part
of that system to be truly an universal law. This was, however, the
usual determination of casuists; but he follows it up, as was also
usual, with so many exceptions as materially relax and invalidate the
application of his rule.

     [386] C. 12, § 12.

     [387] § 20.

|Promissory oaths.|

109. The next chapter, on promissory oaths, is a corollary to the last
two. It was the opinion of Grotius, as it had been of all theologians,
and, in truth, of all mankind, that a promise or contract not only
becomes more solemn, and entails on its breach a severer penalty, by
means of this adjuration of the Supreme Being, but may even acquire a
substantial validity by it in cases where no prior obligation would
subsist.[388] This chapter is distinguished by a more than usually
profuse erudition. But notwithstanding the rigid observance of oaths
which he deems incumbent by natural and revealed law, he admits of a
considerable authority in the civil magistrate, or other superior, as
a husband or father, to annul the oaths of inferiors beforehand, or to
dispense with them afterwards; not that they can release a moral
obligation, but that the obligation itself is incurred under a tacit
condition of their consent. And he seems, in rather a singular manner,
to hint a kind of approval of such dispensations by the church.[389]

     [388] C. 13.

     [389] § 20. Ex hoc fundamento defendi possunt absolutiones
     juramentorum, quæ olim a principibus, nunc ipsorum principum
     voluntate, quo magis cautum sit pietati, ab ecclesiæ præsidibus
     exercentur.

|Engagements of kings towards subjects.|

110. Whatever has been laid down by Grotius in the last three chapters
as to the natural obligations of mankind, has an especial reference to
the main purport of this great work, the duties of the supreme power.
But the engagements of sovereigns give rise to many questions which
cannot occur in those of private men. In the chapter which ensues, on
the promises, oaths, and contracts of sovereigns, he confines himself
to those engagements which immediately affect their subjects. These it
is of great importance, in the author’s assumed province of the
general confessor or casuist of kings, to place on a right footing;
because they have never wanted subservient counsellors, who would
wrest the law of conscience, as well as that of the land, to the
interests of power. Grotius, in denying that the sovereign may revoke
his own contracts, extends this case to those made by him during his
minority, without limitation to such as have been authorised by his
guardians.[390] His contracts with his subjects create a true
obligation, of which they may claim, though not enforce, the
performance. He hesitates whether to call this obligation a civil, or
only a natural one; and, in fact, it can only be determined by
positive law.[391] Whether the successors of a sovereign are bound by
his engagements, must depend on the political constitution, and on the
nature of the engagement. Those of an usurper he determines not to be
binding, which should probably be limited to domestic contracts,
though his language seems large enough to comprise engagements towards
foreign states.[392]

     [390] C. 14, § 1.

     [391] § 6.

     [392] Contractibus vero eorum qui sine jure imperium invaserunt,
     non tenebuntur populi aut veri reges, nam hi jus obligandi
     populum non habuerunt. § 14.

|Public treaties.|

111. We now return from what, in strict language, may pass for a long
digression, though not a needless one, to the main stream of
international law. The title of the fifteenth chapter is on Public
Treaties. After several divisions, which it would at present be
thought unnecessary to specify so much at length, Grotius enters on a
question not then settled by theologians, whether alliances with
infidel powers were in any circumstances lawful. Francis I. had given
great scandal in Europe by his league with the Turk. And though
Grotius admits the general lawfulness of such alliances, it is under
limitations which would hardly have borne out the court of France in
promoting the aggrandizement of the common enemy of Christendom.
Another and more extensive head in the casuistry of nations relates to
treaties that have been concluded without the authority of the
sovereign. That he is not bound by these engagements is evident as a
leading rule; but the course which, according to natural law, ought to
be taken in such circumstances is often doubtful. The famous
capitulation of the Roman army at the Caudine Forks is in point.
Grotius, a rigid casuist, determines that the senate were not bound to
replace their army in the condition from which the treaty had
delivered them. And this seems to be a rational decision, though the
Romans have sometimes incurred the censure of ill faith for their
conduct. But if the sovereign has not only by silence acquiesced in
the engagement of his ambassador or general, which of itself,
according to Grotius, will not amount to an implied ratification, but
recognised it by some overt act of his own, he cannot afterwards plead
the defect of sanction.[393]

     [393] C. 15.

|Their interpretation.|

112. Promises consist externally in words, really in the intention of
the parties. But as the evidence of this intention must usually depend
on words, we should adapt our general rules to their natural meaning.
Common usage is to determine the interpretation of agreements, except
where terms of a technical sense have been employed. But if the
expressions will bear different senses, or if there is some apparent
inconsistency in different clauses, it becomes necessary to collect
the meaning conjecturally, from the nature of the subject, from the
consequences of the proposed interpretation, and from its bearing on
other parts of the agreement. This serves to exclude unreasonable and
unfair constructions from the equivocal language of treaties, such as
was usual in former times to a degree which the greater prudence of
contracting parties, if not their better faith, has rendered
impossible in modern Europe. Among other rules of interpretation,
whether in private or public engagements, he lays down one, familiar
to the jurists, but concerning the validity of which some have
doubted, that things favourable, as they style them, or conferring a
benefit, are to be construed largely; things odious, or onerous to one
party, are not to be stretched beyond the letter. Our own law, as is
well known, adopts this distinction between remedial and penal
statutes; and it seems (wherever that which is favourable in one
sense, is not odious in another) the most equitable principle in
public conventions. The celebrated question, the cause, or, as
Polybius more truly calls it, the pretext of the second Punic war,
whether the terms of a treaty binding each party not to attack the
allies of the other will comprehend those who had entered subsequently
into alliance, seems, but rather on doubtful grounds, to be decided in
the negative. Several other cases from history are agreeably
introduced in this chapter.[394]

     [394] C. 16.

113. It is often, he observes, important to ascertain, whether a
treaty be personal or real, that is, whether it affect only the
contracting sovereign or the state. The treaties of republics are
always real or permanent, even if the form of government should become
monarchical; but the converse is not true as to those of kings, which
are to be interpreted according to the probable meaning, where there
are no words of restraint or extension. A treaty subsists with a king,
though he may be expelled by his subjects; nor is it any breach of
faith to take up arms against an usurper with the lawful sovereign’s
consent. This is not a doctrine which would now be endured.[395]

     [395] C. 16, § 17.

114. Besides those rules of interpretation which depend on explaining
the words of an engagement, there are others which must sometimes be
employed to extend or limit the meaning beyond any natural
construction. Thus, in the old law-case, a bequest, in the event of
the testator’s posthumous son dying, was held valid, where none was
born, and instances of this kind are continual in the books of
jurisprudence. It is equally reasonable sometimes to restrain the
terms of a promise, where they clearly appear to go beyond the design
of the promiser, or where supervenient circumstances indicate an
exception which he would infallibly have made. A few sections in this
place seem, perhaps, more fit to have been inserted in the eleventh
chapter.

|Obligation to repair injury.|

115. There is a natural obligation to make amends for injury to the
natural rights of another, which is extended by means of the
establishment of property and of civil society to all which the laws
have accorded him.[396] Hence, a correlative right arises, but a right
which is to be distinguished from fitness or merit. The jurists were
accustomed to treat expletive justice, which consists in giving to
every one what is strictly his own, separately from attributive
justice, the equitable and right dispensation of all things according
to desert. With the latter Grotius has nothing to do; nor is he to be
charged with introducing the distinction of perfect and imperfect
rights, if indeed those phrases are as objectionable as some have
accounted them. In the far greater part of this chapter he
considers the principles of this important province of natural law,
the obligation to compensate damage, rather as it affects private
persons than sovereign states. As, in most instances, this falls
within the jurisdiction of civil tribunals, the rules laid down by
Grotius may, to a hasty reader, seem rather intended as directory to
the judge, than to the conscience of the offending party. This,
however, is not by any means the case; he is here, as almost
everywhere else, a master in morality and not in law. That he is not
obsequiously following the Roman law will appear by his determining
against the natural responsibility of the owner for injuries
committed, without his fault, by a slave or a beast.[397] But
sovereigns, he holds, are answerable for the piracies and robberies of
their subjects when they are able to prevent them. This is the only
case of national law which he discusses. But it is one of high
importance, being, in fact, one of the ordinary causes of public
hostility. This liability, however, does not exist where subjects,
having obtained a lawful commission by letters of marque, become
common pirates, and do not return home.

     [396] C. 17.

     [397] This is in the 8th title of the 4th book of the Institutes:
     Si quadrupes pauperiem fecerit. Pauperies means damnum sine
     injuria.

|Rights by law of nations.|

|Those of ambassadors.|

116. Thus far, the author begins in the eighteenth chapter, we have
treated of rights founded on natural law, with some little mixture of
the arbitrary law of nations. We come now to those which depend wholly
on the latter. Such are the rights of ambassadors. We have now,
therefore, to have recourse more to the usage of civilized people,
than to theoretical principles. The practice of mankind has, in fact,
been so much more uniform as to the privileges of ambassadors than
other matters of national intercourse, that they early acquired the
authority and denomination of public law. The obligation to receive
ambassadors from other sovereign states, the respect due to them,
their impunity in offences committed by their principals or by
themselves, are not indeed wholly founded on custom, to the exclusion
of the reason of the case, nor have the customs of mankind, even here,
been so unlike themselves as to furnish no contradictory precedents;
but they afford, perhaps, the best instance of a tacit agreement,
distinguishable both from moral right and from positive convention,
which is specifically denominated the law of nations. It may be
mentioned that Grotius determines in favour of the absolute impunity
of ambassadors, that is, their irresponsibility to the tribunals of
the country where they reside, in the case of personal crimes, and
even of conspiracy against the government. This, however, he founds
altogether upon what he conceives to have been the prevailing usage of
civilized states.[398]

     [398] C. 18.

|Right of Sepulture.|

|Punishments.|

117. The next chapter, on the right of sepulture, appears more
excursive than any other in the whole treatise. The right of sepulture
can hardly become a public question, except in time of war, and as
such it might have been shortly noticed in the third book. It supplies
Grotius, however, with a brilliant prodigality of classical
learning.[399] But the next is far more important. It is entitled On
Punishments. The injuries done to us by others give rise to our right
of compensation and to our right of punishment. We have to examine the
latter with the more care, that many have fallen into mistakes from
not duly apprehending the foundation and nature of punishment.
Punishment is, as Grotius rather quaintly defines it. Malum passionis,
quod infligitur ob malum actionis, evil inflicted on another for the
evil which he has committed. It is not a part of attributive, and
hardly of expletive justice, nor is it, in its primary design,
proportioned to the guilt of the criminal, but to the magnitude of the
crime. All men have naturally a right to punish crimes, except those
who are themselves equally guilty; but though the criminal would have
no ground to complain, the mere pleasure of revenge is not a
sufficient motive to warrant us; there must be an useful end to render
punishment legitimate. This end may be the advantage of the criminal
himself, or of the injured party, or of mankind in general. The
interest of the injured party here considered is not that of
reparation, which, though it may be provided for in punishment, is no
proper part of it, but security against similar offences of the guilty
party or of others. All men may naturally seek this security by
punishing the offender, and though it is expedient in civil society
that this right should be transferred to the judge, it is not taken
away, where recourse cannot be had to the law. Every man may even, by
the law of nature, punish crimes by which he has sustained no injury;
the public good of society requiring security against offenders, and
rendering them common enemies.[400]

     [399] C. 19.

     [400] C. 20.

118. Grotius next proceeds to consider whether these rights of
punishment are restrained by revelation, and concludes that a private
Christian is not at liberty to punish any criminal, especially with
death, for his own security or that of the public, but that the
magistrate is expressly empowered by Scripture to employ the sword
against malefactors. It is rather an excess of scrupulousness, that he
holds it unbecoming to seek offices which give a jurisdiction in
capital cases.[401]

     [401] Id.

119. Many things essentially evil are not properly punishable by human
laws. Such are thoughts and intentions, errors of frailty, or actions
from which, though morally wrong, human society suffers no mischief;
or the absence of such voluntary virtues as compassion and gratitude.
Nor is it always necessary to inflict lawful punishment, many
circumstances warranting its remission. The ground of punishment is
the guilt of the offender, its motive is the advantage expected from
it. No punishment should exceed what is deserved, but it may be
diminished according to the prospect of utility, or according to
palliating circumstances. But though punishments should bear
proportion to offences, it does not follow that the criminal should
suffer no more evil than he has occasioned, which would give him too
easy a measure of retribution. The general tendency of all that
Grotius has said in this chapter is remarkably indulgent and humane,
beyond the practice or even the philosophy of his age.[402]

     [402] C. 20.

120. War is commonly grounded upon the right of punishing injuries, so
that the general principles upon which this right depends upon
mankind, ought well to be understood before we can judge of so great a
matter of national law. States, Grotius thinks, have a right,
analogous to that of individuals out of society, to punish heinous
offences against the law of nature or of nations, though not affecting
themselves, or even any other independent community. But this is to be
done very cautiously, and does not extend to violations of the
positive divine law, or to any merely barbarous and irrational
customs. Wars undertaken only on this score are commonly suspicious.
But he goes on to determine that war may be justly waged against those
who deny the being and providence of God, though not against
idolaters, much less for the sake of compelling any nation to embrace
Christianity, unless they persecute its professors, in which case they
are justly liable to punishment. He pronounces strongly in this place
against the persecution of heretics.[403]

     [403] C. 20.

121. This is the longest chapter in the work of Grotius. Several of
his positions, as the reader may probably have observed, would not
bear a close scrutiny; the rights of individuals in a state of nature,
of magistrates in civil society, and of independent communities, are
not kept sufficiently distinct; the equivocal meaning of right, as it
exists correlatively between two parties, and as it comprehends the
general obligations of moral law, is not always guarded against. It
is, notwithstanding these defects, a valuable commentary, regard being
had to the time when it appeared, on the principles both of penal
jurisprudence, and of the rights of war.

|Their responsibility.|

122. It has been a great problem, whether the liability to punishment
can be transmitted from one person to another. This may be asked as to
those who have been concerned in the crime, and those who have not. In
the first case, they are liable as for their own offence, in having
commanded, connived at, permitted, assisted, the actors in the crime
before or after its perpetration. States are answerable for the
delinquencies of their subjects when unpunished. They are also bound
either to punish, or to deliver up, those who take refuge within their
dominions from the justice of their own country. He seems, however, to
admit afterwards, that they need only command such persons to quit the
country. But they have a right to inquire into and inform themselves
of the guilt alledged, the ancient privileges of suppliants being
established for the sake of those who have been unjustly persecuted at
home. The practice of modern Europe, he owns, has limited this right
of demanding the delivery or punishment of refugees within narrow
bounds. As to the punishment of those who have been wholly innocent of
the offence, Grotius holds it universally unjust, but distinguishes it
from indirect evil, which may often fall on the innocent. Thus, when
the estate of a father is confiscated, his children suffer, but are
not punished; since their succession was only a right contingent on
his possession at his death.[404] It is a consequence from this
principle, that a people, so far subject to its sovereign as
to have had no control upon his actions, cannot justly incur
punishment on account of them.

     [404] C. 21. § 10. Hence it would follow, by the principle of
     Grotius, that our law of forfeiture in high treason is just,
     being part of the direct punishment of the guilty; but that of
     attainder, or corruption of blood, is unjust, being an infliction
     on the innocent alone. I incline to concur in this distinction,
     and think it at least plausible, though it was seldom or never
     taken in the discussions concerning those two laws. Confiscation
     is no more unjust towards the posterity of an offender than fine,
     from which of course it only differs in degree: and, on the other
     hand, the law has as much right to exclude that posterity from
     enjoying property at all, as from enjoying that which descends
     from a third party through the blood, as we call it, of a
     criminal ancestor.

|Insufficient causes of war.|

|Duty of avoiding it.|

123. After distinguishing the causes of war into pretexts and motives,
and setting aside wars without any assignable justification as mere
robberies, he mentions several pretexts which he deems insufficient,
such as the aggrandisement of a neighbour; his construction of
fortresses; the right of discovery, where there is already a
possessor, however barbarous; the necessity of occupying more land.
And here he denies, both to single men and to a people, the right of
taking up arms in order to recover their liberty. He laughs at the
pretended right of the emperor or of the pope to govern the world; and
concludes with a singular warning against wars undertaken upon any
pretended explanation of scriptural prophecies.[405] It will be
anticipated from the scrupulousness of Grotius in all his casuistry,
that he enjoins sovereigns to abstain from war in a doubtful cause,
and to use all convenient methods of avoiding it by conference,
arbitration, or even by lot. Single combat itself, as a mode of lot,
he does not wholly reject. In answer to a question often put, Whether
a war can be just on both sides? he replies that, in relation to the
cause or subject, it cannot be so, since there cannot be two opposite
rights; but since men may easily be deceived as to the real right, a
war may be just on both sides with respect to the agents.[406] In
another part of his work, he observes that resistance, even where the
cause is not originally just, may become such by the excess of the
other party.

     [405] C. 22.

     [406] C. 23.

|And expediency.|

|War for the sake of other subjects.|

124. The duty of avoiding war, even in a just cause, as long as
possible, is rather part of moral virtue in a large sense, than of
mere justice. But, besides the obligations imposed on us by humanity
and by Christian love, it is often expedient for our own interests to
avoid war. Of this, however, he says little, it being plainly a matter
of civil prudence with which he has no concern.[407] Dismissing,
therefore, the subject of this chapter, he comes to the justice of
wars undertaken for the sake of others. Sovereigns, he conceives, are
not bound to take up arms in defence of any one of their subjects, who
may be unjustly treated. Hence, a state may abandon those whom it
cannot protect without great loss to the rest; but whether an innocent
subject may be delivered up to an enemy is a more debated question.
Soto and Vasquez, casuists of great name, had denied this; Grotius
however determines it affirmatively. This seems a remarkable exception
from the general inflexibility of his adherence to the rule of right.
For on what principle of strict justice can a people, any more than
private persons, sacrifice, or put in jeopardy, the life of an
innocent man? Grotius is influenced by the supposition that the
subject ought voluntarily to surrender himself into the hands of the
enemy for the public good: but no man forfeits his natural rights by
refusing to perform an action not of strict social obligation.[408]

     [407] C. 24.

     [408] C. 25.

|Allies.|

|Strangers.|

125. Next to subjects are allies, whom the state has bound itself to
succour; and friendly powers, though without alliance, may also be
protected from unjust attack. This extends even to all mankind; though
war in behalf of strangers is not obligatory. It is also lawful to
deliver the subjects of others from extreme manifest oppression of
their rulers; and though this has often been a mere pretext, we are
not on that account to deny the justice of an honest interference. He
even thinks the right of foreign powers, in such a case, more
unequivocal than that of the oppressed people themselves. At the close
of this chapter he protests strongly against those who serve in any
cause for the mere sake of pay, and holds them worse than the common
executioner, who puts none but criminals to death.[409]

     [409] C. 25.

|None to serve in an unjust war.|

126. In the twenty-sixth and concluding chapter of this second book,
Grotius investigates the lawfulness of bearing arms at the command of
superiors and determines that subjects are indispensably bound not
to serve in a war which they conceive to be clearly unjust. He
even inclines, though admitting the prevailing opinion to be
otherwise, to think, that in a doubtful cause, they should adhere to
the general moral rule in case of doubt, and refuse their personal
service. This would evidently be impracticable and ultimately
subversive of political society. It, however, denotes the extreme
scrupulosity of his mind. One might smile at another proof of this,
where he determines that the hangman, before the performance of his
duly, should satisfy himself as to the justice of the sentence.[410]

     [410] C. 26.

|Rights in war.|

127. The rights of war, that is, of commencing hostility, have thus
far been investigated with a comprehensiveness that has sometimes
almost hidden the subject. We come now, in the third book, to rights
in war. Whatever may be done in war, is permitted either by the law of
nature or that of nations. Grotius begins with the first. The means
morally, though not physically, necessary to attain a lawful end are
themselves lawful; a proposition which he seems to understand
relatively to the rights of others, not to the absolute moral quality
of actions; distinctions which are apt to embarrass him. We have
therefore a right to employ force against an enemy, though it may be
the cause of suffering to innocent persons. The principles of natural
law authorize us to prevent neutrals from furnishing an enemy with the
supplies of war, or with anything else essential for his resistance to
our just demands of redress, such as provisions in a state of siege.
And it is remarkable that he refers this latter question to natural
law, because he had not found any clear decision of it by the positive
law of nations.[411]

     [411] L. iii., c. 1.

|Use of deceit.|

128. In acting against an enemy force is the nature of war. But it may
be inquired, whether deceit is not also a lawful means of success? The
practice of nations and the authority of most writers seem to warrant
it. Grotius dilates on different sorts of artifice, and after
admitting the lawfulness of such as deceive by indications, comes to
the questions of words equivocal or wholly false. This he first
discusses on the general moral principle of veracity, more prolixly,
and with more deference to authority, than would suit a modern reader;
yet this basis is surely indispensable for the support of any decision
in public casuistry. The right, however, of employing falsehood
towards an enemy, which he generally admits, does not extend to
promises, which are always to be kept, whether express or implied,
especially when confirmed by oath. And more greatness of mind, as well
as more Christian simplicity would be shown by abstaining wholly from
falsehood in war. The law of nature does not permit us to tempt any
one to do that which in him would be criminal, as to assassinate his
sovereign, or to betray his trust. But we have a right to make use of
his voluntary offers.[412]

     [412] L. iii., c. 1.

|Rules and Customs of nations.|

|Reprisals.|

129. Grotius now proceeds from the consideration of natural law or
justice to that of the general customs of mankind, in which,
according, to him, the arbitrary law of nations consists. By this, in
the first place, though naturally no one is answerable for another, it
has been established that the property of every citizen is as it were
mortgaged for the liabilities of the state to which he belongs. Hence,
if justice is refused to us by the sovereign, we have a right to
indemnification out of the property of his subjects. This is commonly
called reprisals; and it is a right which every private person would
enjoy, were it not for the civil laws of most countries, which compel
him to obtain the authorisation of his own sovereign, or of some
tribunal. By an analogous right the subjects of a foreign state have
sometimes been seized in return for one of our own subjects unjustly
detained by their government.[413]

     [413] C. 2.

|Declarations of war.|

130. A regular war, by the law of nations, can only be waged between
political communities. Wherever there is a semblance of civil justice
and fixed law, such a community exists however violent may be its
actions. But a body of pirates or robbers are not one. Absolute
independence, however, is not required for the right of war. A formal
declaration of war, though not necessary by the law of nature, has
been rendered such by the usage of civilized nations. But it is
required, even by the former, that we should demand reparation for an
injury, before we seek redress by force. A declaration of war may be
conditional or absolute; and it has been established as a ratification
of regular hostilities, that they may not be confounded with the
unwarranted acts of private men. No interval of time is required for
their commencement after declaration.[414]

     [414] C. 3.

|Rights by law of nations over enemies.|

131. All is lawful during war, in one sense of the word, which by the
law and usage of nations is dispunishable. And this, in formal
hostilities, is as much the right of one side as of the other. The
subjects of our enemy, whether active on his side or not, become
liable to these extreme rights of slaughter and pillage; but it seems
that, according to the law of nations, strangers should be exempted
from them, unless by remaining in the country they serve his cause.
Women, children, and prisoners may be put to death; quarter or
capitulation for life refused. On the other hand, if the law of
nations is less strict in this respect than that of nature, it forbids
some things which naturally might be allowable means of defence, as
the poisoning an enemy, or the wells from which he is to drink. But
the assassination of an enemy is not contrary to the law of nations,
unless by means of traitors, and even this is held allowable against a
rebel or robber, who are not protected by the rules of formal war. But
the violation of women is contrary to the law of nations.[415] The
rights of war with respect to enemies’ property are unlimited, without
exception even of churches or sepulchral monuments, sparing always the
bodies of the dead.[416]

     [415] C. 4.

     [416] C. 5.

132. By the law of nature, Grotius thinks that we acquire a property
in as much of the spoil as is sufficient to indemnify us, and to
punish the aggressor. But the law of nations carries this much
farther, and gives an unlimited property in all that has been acquired
by conquest, which mankind are bound to respect. This right commences
as soon as the enemy has lost all chance of recovering his losses;
which is in moveables, as soon as they are in a place within our sole
power. The transfer of property in territories is not so speedy. The
goods of neutrals are not thus transferred, when found in the cities
or on board the vessels of an enemy. Whether the spoil belongs to the
captors, or to their sovereign, is so disputed a question, that it can
hardly be reckoned a part of that law of nations, or universal usage,
with which Grotius is here concerned. He thinks, however, that what is
taken in public enterprises appertains to the state; and that this has
been the general practice of mankind. The civil laws of each people
may modify this, and have frequently done so.[417]

     [417] C. 6.

|Prisoners become slaves.|

133. Prisoners, by the law of nations, become slaves of the captor,
and their posterity also. He may treat them as he pleases with
impunity. This has been established by the custom of mankind, in order
that the conqueror might be induced to spare the lives of the
vanquished. Some theologians deny the slave, even when taken in an
unjust war, the right of making his escape, from whom Grotius
dissents. But he has not a right, in conscience, to resist the
exercise of his master’s authority. This law of nations, as to the
slavery of prisoners, as he admits, has not been universally received,
and is now abolished in christian countries out of respect to
religion.[418] But, strictly, as an individual may be reduced into
slavery, so may a whole conquered people. It is of course at the
discretion of the conqueror to remit a portion of his right, and to
leave as much of their liberties and possessions untouched as he
pleases.[419]

     [418] C. 7.

     [419] C. 8.

|Right of postliminium.|

134. The next chapter relates to the right of postliminium, one
depending so much on the peculiar fictions of the Roman jurists, that
it seems strange to discuss it as part of an universal law of nations
at all. Nor does it properly belong to the rights of war, which are
between belligerent parties. It is certainly consonant to natural
justice, that a citizen returning from captivity should be fully
restored to every privilege and all property that he had enjoyed at
home. In modern Europe there is little to which the jus postliminii
can even by analogy be applied. It has been determined, in courts of
admiralty, that vessels recaptured after a short time do not revert to
their owner. This chapter must be reckoned rather episodical.[420]

     [420] C. 9.

|Moral limitation of rights in war.|

135. We have thus far looked only at the exterior right, accorded by
the law of nations to all who wage regular hostilities in a just or
unjust quarrel. This right is one of impunity alone, but before our
own conscience, or the tribunal of moral approbation in mankind, many
things hitherto spoken of as lawful must be condemned. In the first
place, an unjust war renders all acts of force committed in its
prosecution unjust, and binds the aggressor before God to reparation.
Every one, general or soldier, is responsible in such cases for the
wrong he has commanded or perpetrated. Nor can any one knowingly
retain the property of another obtained by such a war, though he
should come to the possession of it with good faith.[421] And as
nothing can be done, consistently with moral justice in an unjust war,
so, however legitimate our ground for hostilities may be, we
are not at liberty to transgress the boundaries of equity and
humanity. In this chapter, Grotius, after dilating with a charitable
abundance of examples and authorities in favour of clemency in war,
even towards those who have been most guilty in provoking it specially
indicates women, old men, and children, as always to be spared,
extending this also to all whose occupations are not military.
Prisoners are not to be put to death, nor are towns to be refused
terms of capitulation. He denies that the law of retaliation, or the
necessity of striking terror, or the obstinate resistance of an enemy,
dispense with the obligation of saving his life. Nothing but some
personal crime can warrant the refusal of quarter or the death of a
prisoner. Nor is it allowable to put hostages to death.[422]

     [421] C. 10.

     [422] C. 11.

|Moderation required as to spoil.|

136. All unnecessary devastation ought to be avoided, such as the
destruction of trees, of houses, especially ornamental and public
buildings, and of everything not serviceable in war, nor tending to
prolong it, as pictures and statues. Temples and sepulchres are to be
spared for the same or even stronger reasons. Though it is not the
object of Grotius to lay down any political maxims, he cannot refrain
in this place from pointing out several considerations of expediency,
which should induce us to restrain the licence of arms within the
limits of natural law.[423] There is no right by nature to more booty,
strictly speaking, than is sufficient for our indemnity, wherein are
included the expenses of the war. And the property of innocent
persons, being subjects of our enemies, is only liable in failure of
those who are primarily aggressors.[424]

     [423] C. 12.

     [424] C. 13.

|And as to prisoners.|

137. The persons of prisoners are only liable, in strict moral
justice, so far as is required for satisfaction of our injury. The
slavery into which they may be reduced ought not to extend farther
than an obligation of perpetual servitude in return for maintenance.
The power over slaves by the law of nature is far short of what the
arbitrary law of nations permits, and does not give a right of
exacting too severe labour, or of inflicting punishment beyond desert.
The peculium, or private acquisitions of a slave by economy or
donation, ought to be reckoned his property. Slaves, however, captured
in a just war, though one in which they have had no concern, are not
warranted in conscience to escape and recover their liberty. But the
children of such slaves are not in servitude by the law of nature,
except so far as they have been obliged to their master for
subsistence in infancy. With respect to prisoners, the better course
is to let them redeem themselves by a ransom, which ought to be
moderate.[425]

     [425] C. 14.

|Also in conquest.|

138. The acquisition of that sovereignty which was enjoyed by a
conquered people, or by their rulers, is not only legitimate, so far
as is warranted by the punishment they have deserved, or by the value
of our own loss, but also so far as the necessity of securing
ourselves extends. This last is what it is often unsafe to remit out
of clemency. It is a part of moderation in victory to incorporate the
conquered with our own citizens on equal terms, or to leave their
independence on reasonable precautions for our own security. If this
cannot be wholly conceded, their civil laws and municipal magistracies
may be preserved, and, above all, the free exercise of their religion.
The interests of conquerors are as much consulted, generally, as their
reputation, by such lenient use of their advantages.[426]

     [426] C. 15.

|And in restitution to right owners.|

139. It is consonant to natural justice that we should restore to the
original owners all of which they have been despoiled in an unjust
war, when it falls into our hands by a lawful conquest, without regard
to the usual limits of postliminium. Thus, if an ambitious state comes
to be stripped of its usurpations, this should be not for the benefit
of the conqueror but of the ancient possessors. Length of time,
however, will raise the presumption of abandonment.[427] Nothing
should be taken in war from neutral states, except through necessity
and with compensation. The most ordinary case is that of the passage
of troops. The neutral is bound to strict impartiality in a war of
doubtful justice.[428] But it seems to be the opinion of Grotius, that
by the law of nature, every one, even a private man, may act in favour
of the innocent party as far as the rights of war extend, except that
he cannot appropriate to himself the possessions of the enemy; that
right being one founded on indemnification. But civil and military
laws have generally restrained this to such as obey the express order
of their government.[429]

     [427] C. 16.

     [428] C. 17.

     [429] C. 19.

|Promises to enemies and pirates.|

140. The licence of war is restrained either by the laws of nature and
nations, which have been already discussed, or by particular
engagement. The obligation of promises extends to enemies, who
are still parts of the great society of mankind. Faith is to be kept
even with tyrants, robbers, and pirates. He here again adverts to the
case of a promise made under an unjust compulsion; and possibly his
reasoning on the general principle is not quite put in the most
satisfactory manner. It would now be argued that the violation of
engagements towards the worst of mankind, who must be supposed to have
some means of self-defence, on account of which we propose to treat
with them, would produce a desperation among men in similar
circumstances injurious to society. Or it might be urged, that men do
not lose by their crimes a right to the performance of all
engagements, especially when they have fulfilled their own share in
them, but only of such as involve a positive injustice towards the
other party. In this place he repeats his former doctrine, that the
most invalid promise may be rendered binding by the addition of an
oath. It follows from the general rule, that a prince is bound by his
engagements to rebel subjects; above all, if they have had the
precaution to exact his oath. And thus a change in the constitution of
a monarchy may legitimately take place, and it may become mixed
instead of absolute by the irrevocable concession of the sovereign.
The rule, that promises made under an unjust compulsion are not
obligatory, has no application in a public and regular war.[430]
Barbeyrac remarks on this, that if a conqueror, like Alexander,
subdues an unoffending people with no specious pretext at all, he does
not perceive why they should be more bound in conscience to keep the
promises of obedience they may have been compelled to enter into, than
if he had been an ordinary bandit. And this remark shows us, that the
celebrated problem in casuistry, as to the obligation of compulsory
promises, has far more important consequences than the payment of a
petty sum to a robber. In two cases, however, Grotius holds that we
are dispensed from keeping an engagement towards an enemy. One of
these is, when it has been conditional, and the other party has not
fulfilled his part of the convention. This is of course obvious, and
can only be open to questions as to the precedence of the condition.
The other case is where we retain what is due to us by way of
compensation, notwithstanding our promise. This is permissible in
certain instances.[431]

     [430] C. 19, § 11. There seems, as has been intimated
     above, to be some inconsistency in the doctrine of Grotius with
     respect to the general obligation of such promises, which he
     maintains in the second book; and now, as far as I collect his
     meaning, denies by implication.

     [431] C. 19.

|Treaties concluded by competent authority.|

141. The obligation of treaties of peace depends on their being
concluded by the authority which, according to the constitution of the
state, is sovereign for this purpose. Kings who do not possess a
patrimonial sovereignty cannot alienate any part of their dominions
without the consent of the nation or its representatives; they must
even have the consent of the city or province which is thus to be
transferred. In patrimonial kingdoms, the sovereign may alienate the
whole, but not always a part, at pleasure. He seems however to admit
an ultimate right of sovereignty, or _dominium eminens_, by which
all states may dispose of the property of their subjects, and
consequently alienate it for the sake of a great advantage, but
subject to the obligation of granting them an indemnity. He even holds
that the community is naturally bound to indemnify private subjects
for the losses they sustain in war, though this right or reparation
may be taken away by civil laws. The right of alienation by a treaty
of peace is only questionable between the sovereign and his subjects;
foreign states may presume its validity in their own favour.[432]

     [432] C. 20.

|Matters relating to them.|

142. Treaties of peace are generally founded on one of two principles:
that the parties shall return to the condition wherein they were
before the commencement of hostilities, or that they shall retain what
they possess at their conclusion. The last is to be presumed in a case
of doubtful interpretation. A treaty of peace extinguishes all public
grounds of quarrel, whether known to exist or not, but does not put an
end to the claims of private men subsisting before the war, the
extinguishment of which is never to be presumed. The other rules of
interpretation which he lays down are, as usual with him, derived
rather from natural equity than the practice of mankind, though with
no neglect or scorn of the latter. He maintains the right of giving an
asylum to the banished, but not of receiving large bodies of men who
abandon their country.[433]

     [433] Id.

143. The decision of lot may be adopted in some cases, in order to
avoid a war, wherein we have little chance of resisting an enemy. But
that of single combat, according to Grotius’s opinion, though
not repugnant to the law of nature, is incompatible with Christianity;
unless in the case where a party, unjustly assailed, has no other
means of defence. Arbitration by a neutral power is another method of
settling differences, and in this we are bound to acquiesce. Wars may
also be terminated by implicit submission or by capitulation. The
rights this gives him have been already discussed. He concludes this
chapter with a few observations upon hostages and pledges. With
respect to the latter he holds that they may be reclaimed after any
lapse of time, unless there is a presumption of tacit abandonment.[434]

     [434] C. 20.

|Truces and conventions.|

144. A truce is an interval of war, and does not require a fresh
declaration at its close. No act of hostility is lawful during its
continuance; the infringement of this rule by either party gives the
other a right to take up arms without delay. Safe conducts are to be
construed liberally, rejecting every meaning of the words which does
not reach their spirit. Thus a safe conduct to go to a place implies
the right of returning unmolested. The ransom of prisoners ought to be
favoured.[435] A state is bound by the conventions in war made by its
officers, provided they are such as may reasonably be presumed to lie
within their delegated authority, or such as they have a special
commission to warrant, known to the other contracting party. A state
is also bound by its tacit ratification in permitting the execution of
any part of such a treaty, though in itself not obligatory, and also
by availing itself of any advantage thereby. Grotius dwells afterwards
on many distinctions relating to this subject, which, however, as far
as they do not resolve themselves into the general principle, are to
be considered on the ground of positive regulation.[436]

     [435] C. 21.

     [436] C. 22.

|Those of private persons.|

145. Private persons, whether bearing arms or not, are as much bound
as their superiors by the engagements they contract with an enemy.
This applies particularly to the parole of a prisoner. The engagement
not to serve again, though it has been held null by some jurists, as
contrary to our obligation towards our country, is valid. It has been
a question, whether the state ought to compel its citizens to keep
their word towards the enemy? The better opinion is that it should do
so; and this has been the practice of the most civilized nations.[437]
Those who put themselves under the protection of a state engage to do
nothing hostile towards it. Hence, such actions as that of Zopyrus,
who betrayed Babylon under the guise of a refugee, are not excusable.
Several sorts of tacit engagements are established by the usage of
nations, as that of raising a white flag in token of a desire to
suspend arms. These are exceptions from the general rule which
authorises deceit in war.[438] In the concluding chapter of the whole
treatise Grotius briefly exhorts all states to preserve good faith and
to seek peace at all times, upon the mild principles of
Christianity.[439]

     [437] C. 23.

     [438] C. 24.

     [439] C. 25.

|Objections to Grotius made by Paley unreasonable.|

146. If the reader has had the patience to make his way through the
abstract of Grotius, De Jure Belli, that we have placed before him, he
will be fully prepared to judge of the criticisms made upon this
treatise by Paley and Dugald Stewart. “The writings of Grotius and
Puffendorf,” says the former, “are of too forensic a cast, too much
mixed up with civil law and with the jurisprudence of Germany, to
answer precisely the design of a system of ethics, the direction of
private consciences in the general conduct of human life.” But it was
not the intention of Grotius (we are not at present concerned with
Puffendorf) to furnish a system of ethics; nor did anyone ever hold
forth his treatise in this light. Upon some most important branches of
morality he has certainly dwelt so fully as to answer the purpose of
“directing the private conscience in the conduct of life.” The great
aim, however, of his inquiries was to ascertain the principles of
natural right applicable to independent communities.

147. Paley, it must be owned, has a more specious ground of accusation
in his next charge against Grotius for the profusion of classical
quotations. “To anything more than ornament they can make no claim. To
propose them as serious arguments, gravely to attempt to establish or
fortify a moral duty by the testimony of a Greek or Roman poet, is to
trifle with the reader, or rather take off his attention from all just
principles in morals.”

|Reply of Mackintosh.|

148. A late eminent writer has answered this from the text of Grotius,
but in more eloquent language than Grotius could have employed.
“Another answer,” says Mackintosh, “is due to some of those who have
criticised Grotius, and that answer might be given in the words of
Grotius himself. He was not of such a stupid and servile cast
of mind, as to quote the opinions of poets or orators, of historians
and philosophers, as those of judges from whose decision there was no
appeal. He quotes them, as he tells us himself, as witnesses, whose
conspiring testimony, mightily strengthened and confirmed by their
discordance on almost every other subject, is a conclusive proof of
the unanimity of the whole human race on the great rules of duty and
the fundamental principles of morals. On such matters, poets and
orators are the most unexceptionable of all witnesses; for they
address themselves to the general feelings and sympathies of mankind;
they are neither warped by system, nor prevented by sophistry; they
can attain none of their objects, they can neither please nor
persuade, if they dwell on moral sentiments not in unison with those
of their readers. No system of moral philosophy can surely disregard
the general feelings of human nature, and the according judgment of
all ages and nations. But where are these feelings and that judgment
recorded and preserved? In those very writings which Grotius is
gravely blamed for having quoted. The usages and laws of nations, the
events of history, the opinions of philosophers, the sentiments of
orators and poets, as well as the observation of common life are, in
truth, the materials out of which the science of morality is formed;
and those who neglect them are justly chargeable with a vain attempt
to philosophise without regard to fact and experience, the sole
foundation of all true philosophy.”[440]

     [440] Mackintosh, Discourse on the Study of the Law of
     Nature and Nations, p. 23 (edit. 1828).

149. The passage in Grotius which has suggested this noble defence
will be found above. It will be seen on reference to it, that he
proposes to quote the poets and orators cautiously, and rather as
ornamental than authoritative supports of his argument. In no one
instance, I believe, will he be found to “enforce a moral duty,” as
Paley imagines, by their sanction. It is, nevertheless, to be fairly
acknowledged, that he has sometimes gone a good deal farther than the
rules of a pure taste allow in accumulating quotations from the poets,
and that, in an age so impatient of prolixity as the last, this has
stood much in the way of the general reader.

|Censures of Stewart.|

150. But these criticisms of Paley contain very trifling censure in
comparison with the unbounded scorn poured on Grotius by Dugald
Stewart, in his first Dissertation on the Progress of Philosophy. I
have never read these pages of an author whom I had unfortunately not
the opportunity of personally knowing, but whose researches have
contributed so much to the delight and advantage of mankind, without
pain and surprise. It would be too much to say that, in several parts
of this Dissertation, by no means in the first class of Stewart’s
writings, other proofs of precipitate judgment do not occur; but that
he should have spoken of a work so distinguished by fame, and so
effective, as he himself admits, over the public mind of Europe, in
terms of unmingled depreciation, without having done more than glanced
at some of its pages, is an extraordinary symptom of that tendency
towards prejudices, hasty but inveterate, of which this eminent man
seems to have been not a little susceptible. The attack made by
Stewart on those who have taken the law of nature and nations as their
theme, and especially on Grotius who stands forward in that list, is
protracted for several pages, and it would be tedious to examine every
sentence in succession. Were I to do so, it is not, in my opinion, an
exaggeration to say that almost every successive sentence would lie
open to criticism. But let us take the chief heads of accusation.

|Answer to them.|

151. “Grotius,” we are told, under the title, De Jure Belli et Pacis,
“has aimed at a complete system of natural law. Condillac says, that
he chose the title in order to excite a more general curiosity.” The
total erroneousness of this passage must appear to every one who has
seen what Grotius declares to have been his primary object. He chose
the title because it came nearest to express that object--the
ascertainment of laws binding on independent communities in their
mutual relations, whether of war or peace. But as it was not possible
to lay down any solid principles of international right till the
notions of right, of sovereignty, of dominion over things and persons,
of war itself, were clearly established, it became indispensable to
build upon a more extensive basis than later writers on the law of
nations, who found the labour performed to their hands, have thought
necessary. All ethical philosophy, even in those parts which bear a
near relation to jurisprudence and to international law, was in the
age of Grotius a chaos of incoherent and arbitrary notions, brought in
from various sources, from the ancient schools, from the
scriptures, the fathers, the canons, the casuistical theologians, the
rabbins, the jurists, as well as from the practice and sentiments of
every civilised nation, past and present, the Jews, the Greeks, and
Romans, the trading republics, the chivalrous kingdoms of modern
Europe. If Grotius has not wholly disentangled himself from this
bewildering maze, through which he painfully traces his way by the
lights of reason and revelation, he has at least cleared up much, and
put others still oftener in the right path, where he has not been able
to follow it. Condillac, as here quoted by Stewart, has anticipated
Paley’s charge against Grotius, of labouring to support his
conclusions by the authority of others, and of producing a long string
of quotations to prove the most indubitable propositions. In what
degree this very exaggerated remark is true we have already seen. But
it should be kept in mind, that neither the disposition of the age in
which Grotius lived, nor the real necessity of illustrating every part
of his inquiries by the precedent usages of mankind, would permit him
to treat of moral philosophy as of the abstract theorems of geometry.
If his erudition has sometimes obstructed or misled him, which perhaps
has not so frequently happened as these critics assume, it is still
true that a contemptuous ignorance of what has been done or has been
taught, such as belonged to the school of Condillac and to that of
Paley, does not very well qualify the moral philosopher for inquiry
into the principles which are to regulate human nature.

152. “Among the different ideas,” Stewart observes, “which have been
formed of natural jurisprudence, one of the most common, especially in
the earlier systems, supposes its object to be--to lay down those
rules of justice which would be binding on men living in a social
state without any positive institutions; or, as it is frequently
called by writers on this subject, living together in a state of
nature. This idea of the province of jurisprudence seems to have been
uppermost in the mind of Grotius in various parts of his treatise.”
After some conjectures on the motives which led the early writers to
take this view of national law, and admitting that the rules of
justice are in every case precise and indispensable, and that their
authority is altogether independent of that of the civil magistrate,
he deems it “obviously absurd to spend much time in speculating about
the principles of this natural law, as applicable to men before the
institution of governments.” It may possibly be as absurd as he thinks
it. But where has Grotius shown that this condition of natural society
was uppermost in his thoughts? Of the state of nature, as it existed
among individuals before the foundation of civil institutions, he says
no more than was requisite in order to exhibit the origin of those
rights which spring from property and government. But that he has, in
some part especially of his second book, dwelt upon the rules of
justice binding on men subsequent to the institution of property, but
independently of positive laws, is most certain; nor is it possible
for any one to do otherwise, who does not follow Hobbes in confounding
moral with legal obligation; a theory to which Mr. Stewart was of all
men the most averse.

153. Natural jurisprudence is a term that is not always taken in the
same sense. It seems to be of English origin; nor am I certain, though
my memory may deceive me, that I have ever met with it in Latin or in
French. Strictly speaking, as jurisprudence means the science of law,
and is especially employed with respect to the Roman, natural
jurisprudence must be the science of morals, or the law of nature. It
is, therefore, in this sense, co-extensive with ethics, and
comprehends the rules of temperance, liberality, and benevolence, as
much as those of justice. Stewart, however, seems to consider this
idea of jurisprudence as an arbitrary extension of the science derived
from the technical phraseology of the Roman law. “Some vague notion of
this kind,” he says, “has manifestly given birth to many of the
digressions of Grotius.” It may have been seen by the analysis of the
entire treatise of Grotius above given, that none of his digressions,
if such they are to be called, have originated in any vague notion of
an identity, or proper analogy, between the strict rules of justice
and those of the other virtues. The Aristotelian division of justice
into commutative and distributive, which Grotius has adopted, might
seem in some respect to bear out this supposition; but it is evident,
from the contents of Stewart’s observations, that he was referring
only to the former species, or justice in its more usual sense, the
observance of perfect rights, whose limits may be accurately
determined, and whose violation may be redressed.

154. Natural jurisprudence has another sense imposed upon it by Adam
Smith. According to this sense, its object, in the words of
Stewart, is “to ascertain the general principles of justice which
ought to be recognised in every municipal code, and to which it ought
to be the aim of every legislator to accommodate his institutions.”
Grotius, in Smith’s opinion, was “the first who attempted to give the
world anything like a system of those principles which ought to run
through, and to be the foundation of, the laws of all nations; and his
treatise on the laws of peace and war, with all its imperfections, is
perhaps at this day the most complete book that has yet been given on
the subject.”

155. The first probably, in modern times, who conceived this idea of
an universal jurisprudence was Lord Bacon. He places among the
desiderata of political science, the province of universal justice, or
the sources of law. Id nunc agatur, ut fontes justitiæ et utilitatis
publicæ petantur, et in singulis juris partibus character quidam et
idea justi exhibeatur, ad quem particularium regnorum et
rerumpublicarum leges probare, atque inde emendationem moliri quisque,
cui hæc cordi erit et curæ possit.[441] The maxims which follow are an
admirable illustration of the principles which should regulate the
enactment and expression of laws, as well as much that should guide,
in a general manner, the decision of courts of justice. They touch
very slightly, if at all, any subject which Grotius has handled; but
certainly come far closer to natural jurisprudence, in the sense of
Smith, inasmuch as they contain principles which have no limitation to
the circumstances of particular societies. These maxims of Bacon, and
all others that seem properly to come within the province of
jurisprudence in this sense, which is now become not uncommon, the
science of universal _law_, are resolvable partly into those of
natural justice, partly into those of public expediency. Little,
however, could be objected against the admission of universal
jurisprudence, in this sense, among the sciences. But if it is meant
that any systematic science, whether by the name of jurisprudence or
legislation, can be laid down as to the principles which ought to
determine the institutions of all nations, or that, in other words,
the laws of each separate community ought to be regulated by any
universal standard, in matters not depending upon eternal justice, we
must demur to receiving so very disputable a proposition. It is
probable that Adam Smith had no thoughts of asserting it; yet his
language is not very clear, and he seems to have assigned some object
to Grotius, distinct from the establishment of natural and
international law. “Whether this was,” says Stewart, “or was not, the
leading object of Grotius, it is not material to decide; but if this
was his object, it will not be disputed that he has executed his
design in a very desultory manner, and that he often seems to have
lost sight of it altogether, in the midst of those miscellaneous
speculations on political, ethical, and historical subjects, which
form so large a portion of his treatise, and which so frequently
succeed each other without any apparent connexion or common aim.”

     [441] De Augmentis, lib. vii.

156. The unfairness of this passage, it is now hardly incumbent upon
me to point out. The reader has been enabled to answer that no
political speculation will be found in the volume, De Jure Belli ac
Pacis, unless the disquisition on the origin of human society is thus
to be denominated; that the instances continually adduced from history
are always in illustration of the main argument; and that what are
here called ethical speculations are, in fact, the real subject of the
book, since it avowedly treats of obligations on the conscience of
mankind, and especially of their rulers. Whether the various topics in
this treatise “succeed each other without apparent connection or
common aim,” may best be seen by the titles of the chapters, or by the
analysis of their contents. There are certainly a very few of these
that have little in common, even by deduction or analogy, with
international law, though scarce any, I think, which do not rise
naturally out of the previous discussion. Exuberances of this kind are
so common in writers of great reputation, that where they do not
transgress more than Grotius has done, the censure of irrelevancy has
been always reckoned hypercritical.

157. “The Roman system of jurisprudence,” Mr. Stewart proceeds, “seems
to have warped in no inconsiderable degree the notions of Grotius on
all questions connected with the theory of legislation, and to have
diverted his attention from that philosophical idea of law so well
expressed by Cicero, Non a prætoris edicto, neque a duodecim tabulis,
sed penitus ex intima philosophia hauriendam juris disciplinam. In
this idolatry, indeed, of the Roman law, he has not gone so far as
some of his commentators, who have affirmed that it is only a
different name for the law of nature: but that his partiality for his
professional pursuits has often led him to overlook the immense
difference between the state of society in ancient and modern Europe,
will not, I believe, now be disputed.” It is probable that it will be
disputed by all who are acquainted with Grotius. The questions
connected with the theory of legislation which he has discussed, are
chiefly those relating to the acquisition and alienation of property
in some of the earlier chapters of the second book. That he has not,
in these disquisitions, adopted all the determinations of the Roman
jurists is certain; whether he may in any particular instance have
adhered to them more than the best theory of legislation would admit,
is a matter of variable opinion. But Stewart, wholly unacquainted with
the civil laws, appears to have much underrated their value. In all
questions of private right, they form the great basis of every
legislation; and, as all civilised nations, including our own, have
derived a large portion of their jurisprudence from this source, so
even the modern theorists, who would disdain to be ranked as disciples
of Paullus and Papinian, are not ashamed to be their plagiaries.

|Grotius vindicated against Rousseau.|

158. It has been thrown out against Grotius by Rousseau,[442] and the
same insinuation may be found in other writers, that he confounds the
fact with the right, and the duties of nations with their practice.
How little foundation there is for this calumny is sufficiently
apparent to our readers. Scrupulous, as a casuist, to an excess hardly
reconcilable with the security and welfare of good men, he was the
first, beyond the precincts of the confessional or the church, to pour
the dictates of a saint-like innocence into the ears of princes. It is
true, that, in recognising the legitimacy of slavery, and in carrying
too far the principles of obedience to government, he may be thought
to have deprived mankind of some of their security against injustice,
but this is exceedingly different from a sanction to it. An implicit
deference to what he took for divine truth was the first axiom in the
philosophy of Grotius; if he was occasionally deceived in his
application of this principle, it was but according to the notions of
his age; but those who wholly reject the authority must of course want
a common standard by which his speculations in moral philosophy can be
reconciled with their own.

     [442] Contrat Social.

159. I must now quit a subject upon which, perhaps, I have dwelt too
long. The high fame of Dugald Stewart has rendered it a sort of duty
to vindicate from his hasty censures the memory of one still more
illustrious in reputation, till the lapse of time, and the fickleness
of literary fashion, conspired with the popularity of his assailants
to magnify his defects, and meet the very name of his famous treatise
with a kind of scornful ridicule. That Stewart had never read much of
Grotius, or even gone over the titles of his chapters, is very
manifest; and he displays a similar ignorance as to the other writers
on natural law, who, for more than a century afterwards, as he admits
himself, exercised a great influence over the studies of Europe. I
have commented upon very few, comparatively, of the slips which occur
in his pages on this subject.

|His arrangement.|

160. The arrangement of Grotius has been blamed as unscientific by a
more friendly judge, Sir James Mackintosh. Though I do not feel very
strongly the force of his objections, it is evident that the law of
nature might have been established on its basis, before the author
passed forward to any disquisition upon its reference to independent
communities. This would have changed a good deal the principal object
that Grotius had in view, and brought his treatise, in point of
method, very near to that of Puffendorf. But assuming, as he did, the
authority recognised by those for whom he wrote, that of the
Scriptures, he was less inclined to dwell on the proof which reason
affords for a natural law, though fully satisfied of its validity,
even without reference to the Supreme Being.

|His defects.|

161. The real faults of Grotius, leading to erroneous determinations,
seem to be rather an unnecessary scrupulousness, and somewhat of old
theological prejudice, from which scarce any man in his age, who was
not wholly indifferent to religion, had liberated himself. The notes
of Barbeyrac seldom fail to correct this leaning. Several later
writers on international law have treated his doctrine of an universal
law of nations founded on the agreement of mankind, as an empty
chimera of his invention. But if he only meant by this the tacit
consent, or, in other words, the general custom of civilized nations,
it does not appear that there is much difference between his theory
and that of Wolf or Vattel.




                           CHAPTER XXII.

               HISTORY OF POETRY FROM 1600 TO 1650.


                              SECT. I.

                        ON ITALIAN POETRY.

_Characters of the Poets of the Seventeenth Century--Sometimes too
much depreciated--Marini--Tassoni--Chiabrera._


|Low estimation of the Seicentisti.|

1. At the close of the sixteenth century, few remained in Italy to
whom posterity has assigned a considerable reputation for their
poetry. But the ensuing period has stood lower, for the most part, in
the opinion of later ages than any other since the revival of letters.
The _seicentisti_, the writers of the seventeenth century, were
stigmatised in modern criticism, till the word has been associated
with nothing but false taste and everything that should be shunned and
despised. Those who had most influence in leading the literary
judgment of Italy went back, some almost exclusively, to the
admiration of Petrarch and his contemporaries, some to the various
writers who cultivated their native poetry in the sixteenth century.
Salvini is of the former class, Muratori of the latter.[443]

     [443] Muratori, Della Perfetta Poesia, is one of the best books
     of criticism in the Italian language; in the second volume are
     contained some remarks by Salvini, a bigoted Florentine.

|Not quite so great as formerly.|

2. The last age, that is, the concluding twenty years of the
eighteenth century, brought with it, in many respects, a change of
public sentiment in Italy. A masculine turn of thought, an expanded
grasp of philosophy, a thirst, ardent to excess, for great exploits
and noble praise, has distinguished the Italian people of the last
fifty years from their progenitors of several preceding generations.
It is possible that the enhanced relative importance of the Lombards
in their national literature, may have not been without its influence
in rendering the public taste less fastidious as to purity of
language, less fine in that part of æsthetic discernment which relates
to the grace and felicity of expression, while it became also more apt
to demand originality, nervousness, and the power of exciting emotion.
The writers of the seventeenth century may, in some cases, have gained
by this revolution; but those of the preceding ages, especially the
Petrarchists whom Bembo had led, have certainly lost ground in
national admiration.

|Praise of them by Rubbi.|

3. Rubbi, editor of the voluminous collection, called Parnaso
Italiano, had the courage to extol the “seicentisti” for their genius
and fancy, and even to place them, in all but style, above their
predecessors. “Give them,” he says, “but grace and purity, take from
them their capricious exaggerations, their perpetual and forced
metaphors, you will think Marini the first poet of Italy, and his
followers, with their fulness of imagery and personification, will
make you forget their monotonous predecessors. I do not advise you to
make a study of the seicentisti; it would spoil your style, perhaps
your imagination; I only tell you that they were the true Italian
poets; they wanted a good style, it is admitted, but they were so far
from wanting genius and imagination, that these perhaps tended to
impair their style.”[444]

     [444] Parnaso Italiano, vol. xli. (Avvertimento). Rubbi, however,
     gives but two out of his long collection in fifty volumes, to the
     writers of the seventeenth century.

|Also by Salfi.|

4. It is probable that every native critic would think some parts of
this panegyric, and especially the strongly hyperbolical praise of
Marini, carried too far. But I am not sure that we should be wrong in
agreeing with Rubbi, that there is as much _Catholic_ poetry, by
which I mean that which is good in all ages and countries, in some of
the minor productions of the seventeenth as in those of the sixteenth
age. The sonnets, especially, have more individuality and more
meaning. In this, however, I should wish to include the latter portion
of the seventeenth century. Salfi, a writer of more taste and judgment
than Rubbi, has recently taken the same side, and remarked the
superior originality, the more determined individuality, the greater
variety of subjects, above all, what the Italians now most value, the
more earnest patriotism of the later poets.[445] Those immediately
before us, belonging to the first half of the century, are less
numerous than in the former age; the sonnetteers, especially,
have produced much less; and in the collections of poetry, even in
that of Rubbi, notwithstanding his eulogy, they take up very little
room. Some, however, have obtained a durable renown, and are better
known in Europe than any, except the Tassos, that flourished in the
last fifty years of the golden age.

     [445] Salfi, Hist. Litt. de l’Italie (continuation de Ginguéné),
     vol. xii., p. 424.

|Adone of Marini.|

5. It must be confessed that the praise of a masculine genius, either
in thought or language, cannot be bestowed on the poet of the
seventeenth century whom his contemporaries most admired, Giovanni
Battista Marini. He is, on the contrary, more deficient than all the
rest in such qualities, and is indebted to the very opposite
characteristics for the sinister influence he exerted on the public
taste. He was a Neapolitan by birth, and gave to the world his famous
Adone, in 1623. As he was then fifty-four years old, it may be
presumed, from the character of the poem, that it was in great part
written long before; and he had already acquired a considerable
reputation by his other works. The Adone was received with an
unbounded and ill-judging approbation; ill-judging in a critical
sense, because the faults of this poem are incapable of defence, but
not unnatural, as many parallel instances of the world’s enthusiasm
have shown. No one had before carried the corruption of taste so far;
extravagant metaphors, false thoughts and conceits on equivocal words
are very frequent in the Adone; and its author stands accountable in
some measure for his imitators, who during more than half a century
looked up to Marini with emulous folly, and frequently succeeded in
greater deviations from pure taste, without his imagination and
elegance.

|Its character.|

6. The Adone is one of the longest poems in the world, containing more
than 45,000 lines. He has shown some ingenuity in filling up the
canvas of so slight a story by additional incidents from his own
invention, and by long episodes allusive to the times in which he
lived. But the subject, expanded so interminably, is essentially
destitute of any superior interest, and fit only for an enervated
people, barren of high thoughts and high actions, the Italy,
notwithstanding some bright exceptions, of the seventeenth century. If
we could overcome this essential source of weariness, the Adone has
much to delight our fancy and our ear. Marini is, more than any other
poet, the counterpart of Ovid; his fertility of imagination, his ready
accumulation of circumstances and expressions, his easy flow of
language, his harmonious versification, are in no degree inferior; his
faults are also the same; for in Ovid we have all the overstrained
figures and the false conceits of Marini. But the Italian poet was
incapable of imitating the truth to nature and depth of feeling which
appear in many parts of his ancient prototype, nor has he as vigorous
an expression. Never does Marini rise to any high pitch; few stanzas,
perhaps, are remembered by natives for their beauty, but many are
graceful and pleasing, all are easy and musical.[446] “Perhaps,” says
Salfi, “with the exception of Ariosto, no one has been more a poet by
nature than he;”[447] a praise, however, which may justly seem
hyperbolical to those who recall their attention to the highest
attributes of poetry.

     [446] Five stanzas of the seventh canto, being a choral song of
     satyrs and bacchanti, are thrown into _versi sdruccioli_, and
     have been accounted by the Italians an extraordinary effort of
     skill, from the difficulty of sustaining a metre which is not
     strong in rhymes with so much spirit and ease. Each verse also is
     divided into three parts, themselves separately _sdruccioli_,
     though not rhyming. One stanza will make this clear:--

       Hor d’ellera s’adornino, e di pampino
       I giovani, e le vergini più tenere,
       E gemina nell’anima si stampino
       L’imagine di Libero, e di Venere.
       Tutti ardano, s’accendano, ed avampino,
       Qual Semele, ch’al folgore fù cenere;
       E cantino a Cupidine, ed a Bromio,
       Con numeri poetici un’encomio.
                    Cant. vii., st. 118.

     Though this metrical skill may not be of the highest merit in
     poetry, it is no more to be slighted than facility of touch in a
     painter.

     [447] Vol. xiv., p. 147. The character of Marini’s poetry, which
     this critic has given, is in general very just, and in good
     taste. Corniani (vii., 123) has also done justice, and no more
     than justice, to Marini. Tiraboschi has hardly said enough in his
     favour; and as to Muratori, it was his business to restore and
     maintain a purity of taste, which rendered him severe towards the
     excesses of such poets as Marini.

|And popularity.|

7. Marini belongs to that very numerous body of poets who, delighted
with the spontaneity of their ideas, never reject any that arise;
their parental love forbids all preference, and an impartial law of
gavelkind shares their page among all the offspring of their brain.
Such were Ovid and Lucan, and such have been some of our own poets of
great genius and equal fame. Their fertility astonishes the reader,
and he enjoys for a time the abundant banquet; but satiety is too sure
a consequence, and he returns with less pleasure to a second
perusal. The censure of criticism falls invariably, and sometimes too
harshly, on this sort of poetry; it is one of those cases where the
critic and the world are most at variance; but the world is apt, in
this instance, to reverse its own judgment, and yield to the tribunal
it had rejected. “To Marini,” says an eminent Italian writer, “we owe
the lawlessness of composition: the ebullition of his genius,
incapable of restraint, burst through every bulwark, enduring no rule
but that of his own humour, which was all for sonorous verse, bold and
ingenious thoughts, fantastical subjects, a phraseology rather Latin
than Italian, and in short aimed at pleasing by a false appearance of
beauty. It would almost pass belief how much this style was admired,
were it not so near our own time that we hear as it were the echo of
its praise; nor did Dante, or Petrarch, or Tasso, or perhaps any of
the ancient poets, obtain in their lives so much applause.”[448] But
Marini, who died in 1625, had not time to enjoy much of this glory.
The length of this poem, and the diffuseness which produces its
length, render it nearly impossible to read through the Adone; and it
wants that inequality which might secure preference to detached
portions. The story of Psyche in the fourth canto may perhaps be as
fair a specimen of Marini as could be taken: it is not easy to destroy
the beauty of that fable, nor was he unfitted to relate it with grace
and interest; but he has displayed all the blemishes of his own
style.[449]

     [448] Crescimbeni, ii. 470.

     [449] The Adone has been frequently charged with want of decency.
     It was put to the ban of the Roman Inquisition, and grave writers
     have deemed it necessary to protest against its licentiousness.
     Andrès even goes so far as to declare, that no one can read the
     Adone whose heart as well as taste is not corrupt; and that both
     for the sake of good morals and good poetry, it should be taken
     out of every one’s hands. After such invectives, it may seem
     extraordinary that, though the poem of Marini must by its nature
     be rather voluptuous, it is by far less open to such an objection
     than the Orlando Furioso, nor more, I believe, than the Faëry
     Queen. No charge is apt to be made so capriciously as this.

|Secchia Rapita of Tassoni.|

8. The Secchia Rapita of Alessandro Tassoni, published at Paris in
1622, is better known in Europe than might have been expected from its
local subject, idiomatic style, and unintelligible personalities. It
turns, as the title imports, on one of the petty wars frequent among
the Italian cities as late as the beginning of the fourteenth century,
wherein the Bolognese endeavoured to recover the bucket of a well,
which the citizens of Modena, in a prior incursion, had carried off.
Tassoni, by a poetical anachronism, mixed this with an earlier contest
of rather more dignity between the little republics, wherein Enzio,
king of Sardinia, a son of Frederic II., had been made prisoner. He
has been reckoned by many the inventor, or at least the reproducer in
modern times, of the mock heroic style.[450] Pulci, however, had led
the way; and when Tassoni claims originality, it must be in a very
limited view of the execution of his poem. He has certainly more of
parody than Pulci could have attempted; the great poems of Ariosto and
Tasso, especially the latter, supply him with abundant opportunities
for this ingenious and lively, but not spiteful, exercise of wit, and
he has adroitly seized the ridiculous side of his contemporary Marini.
The combat of the cities, it may be observed, is serious enough,
however trifling the cause, and has its due proportion of slaughter;
but Tassoni, very much in the manner of the Morgante Maggiore, throws
an air of ridicule over the whole. The episodes are generally in a
still more comic style. A graceful facility and a light humour, which
must have been incomparably better understood by his countrymen and
contemporaries, make this a very amusing poem. It is exempt from the
bad taste of the age; and the few portions where the burlesque tone
disappears are versified with much elegance. Perhaps it has not been
observed that the Count de Culange, one of his most ludicrous
characters, bears a certain resemblance to Hudibras, both by his
awkward and dastardly appearance as a knight, and by his ridiculous
addresses to the lady whom he woos.[451] None, however, will question
the originality of Butler.

     [450] Boileau seems to acknowledge himself indebted to Tassoni
     for the Lutrin; and Pope may have followed both in the first
     sketch of the Rape of the Lock, though what he has added is a
     purely original conception. But in fact the mock heroic or
     burlesque style, in a general sense, is so natural, and,
     moreover, so common, that it is idle to talk of its inventor.
     What else is Rabelais, Don Quixote, or, in Italian, the romance
     of Bertoldo, all older than Tassoni? What else are the popular
     tales of children, John the Giganticide, and many more? The poem
     of Tassoni had a very great reputation. Voltaire did it
     injustice, though it was much in his own line.

     [451] Cantos X. and XI. It was intended as a ridicule on Marini,
     but represents a real personage. Salfi, xiii., 147.

|Chiabrera.|

9. But the poet of whom Italy has, in later times, been far
more proud than of Marini or Tassoni was Chiabrera. Of his long life
the greater part fell within the sixteenth century; and some of his
poems were published before its close; but he has generally been
considered as belonging to the present period. Chiabrera is the
founder of a school in the lyric poetry of Italy, rendered afterwards
more famous by Guidi, which affected the name of Pindaric. It is the
Theban lyre which they boast to strike: it is from the fountain of
Dirce that they draw their inspiration; and these allusions are as
frequent in their verse, as those to Valclusa and the Sorga in the
followers of Petrarch. Chiabrera borrowed from Pindar that grandeur of
sound, that pomp of epithets, that rich swell of imagery, that
unvarying majesty of conception, which distinguish the odes of both
poets. He is less frequently harsh or turgid, though the latter
blemish has been sometimes observed in him, but wants also the
masculine condensation of his prototype; nor does he deviate so
frequently, or with so much power of imagination, into such
digressions as those which generally shade from our eyes, in a skilful
profusion of ornament, the victors of the Grecian games whom Pindar
professes to celebrate. The poet of the house of Medici and of other
princes of Italy, great at least in their own time, was not so much
compelled to desert his immediate subject, as he who was paid for an
ode by some wrestler or boxer, who could only become worthy of heroic
song by attaching his name to the ancient glories of his native city.
The profuse employment of mythological allusions, frigid as it appears
at present, was so customary, that we can hardly impute to it much
blame; and it seemed peculiarly appropriate to a style which was
studiously formed on the Pindaric model.[452] The odes of Chiabrera
are often panegyrical, and his manner was well fitted for that style,
though sometimes we have ceased to admire those whom he extols. But he
is not eminent for purity of taste, nor, I believe, of Tuscan
language: he endeavoured to force the idiom, more than it would bear,
by constructions and inventions borrowed from the ancient tongues; and
these odes, splendid and noble as they are, bear in the estimation of
critics some marks of the seventeenth century.[453] The satirical
epistles of Chiabrera are praised by Salfi as written in a moral
Horatian tone, abounding with his own experience and allusions to his
time.[454] But in no other kind of poetry has he been so highly
successful as in the lyric; and, though the Grecian robe is never cast
away, he imitated Anacreon with as much skill as Pindar. “His lighter
odes,” says Crescimbeni, “are most beautiful and elegant, full of
grace, vivacity, spirit, and delicacy, adorned with pleasing
inventions, and differing in nothing but language from those of
Anacreon. His dithyrambics I hold incapable of being excelled, all the
qualities required in such compositions being united with a certain
nobleness of expression which elevates all it touches upon.”[455]

     [452] Salfi justifies the continual introduction of mythology by
     the Italian poets, on the ground that it was a part of their
     national inheritance, associated with the monuments and
     recollections of their glory. This would be more to the purpose
     if this mythology had not been almost exclusively Greek. But
     perhaps all that was of classical antiquity might be blended in
     their sentiments with the memory of Rome.

     [453] Salfi, xii. 250.

     [454] Id. xiii. 2012.

     [455] Storia della volgar poesia, ii. 483.

10. The greatest lyric poet of Greece was not more the model of
Chiabrera than his Roman competitor was of Testi. “Had he been more
attentive to the choice of his expression,” says Crescimbeni, “he
might have earned the name of the Tuscan Horace.” The faults of his
age are said to be frequently discernible in Testi; but there is, to
an ordinary reader, an Horatian elegance, a certain charm of grace and
ease in his canzoni, which render them pleasing. One of these,
beginning, Ruscelletto orgoglioso, is highly admired by Muratori, the
best, perhaps, of the Italian critics, and one not slow to censure any
defects of taste. It apparently alludes to some enemy in the court of
Modena.[456] The character of Testi was ambitious and restless, his
life spent in seeking and partly in enjoying public offices, but
terminated in prison. He had taken, says a later writer, Horace for
his model; and perhaps like him he wished to appear sometimes a stoic,
sometimes an epicurean; but he knew not like him how to profit by the
lessons either of Zeno or Epicurus, so as to lead a tranquil and
independent life.[457]

     [456] This canzon is in Matthias, Componimenti Lirici, ii. 190.

     [457] Salfi, xii. 281.

|His followers.|

11. The imitators of Chiabrera were generally unsuccessful; they
became hyperbolical and exaggerated. The translation of Pindar by
Alessandro Adimari, though not very much resembling the original, has
been praised for its own beauty. But these poets are not to be
confounded with the Marinists, to whom they are much superior.
Ciampoli, whose Rime were published in 1628, may perhaps be the best
after Chiabrera.[458] Several obscure epic poems, some of which are
rather to be deemed romances, are commemorated by the last historian
of Italian literature. Among these is the Conquest of Granada by
Graziani, published in 1650. Salfi justly observes that the subject is
truly epic; but the poem itself seems to be nothing but a series of
episodical intrigues without unity. The style, according to the same
writer, is redundant, the similes too frequent and monotonous; yet he
prefers it to all the heroic poems which had intervened since that of
Tasso.[459]

     [458] Id. p. 303. Tiraboschi, xi. 364. Baillet, on the authority
     of others, speaks less honourably of Ciampoli. N. 1451.

     [459] Id. vol. xiii., p. 94-129.


                             SECT. II.

                         ON SPANISH POETRY.

   _Romances--The Argensolas--Villegas--Gongora, and his School._

|The styles of Spanish poetry.|

12. The Spanish poetry of the sixteenth century might be arranged in
three classes. In the first we might place that which was formed in
the ancient school, though not always preserving its characteristics;
the short trochaic metres, employed in the song or the ballad,
altogether national, or aspiring to be such, either in its subjects or
in its style. In the second would stand that to which the imitation of
the Italians had given rise, the school of Boscan and Garcilasso; and
with these we might place also the epic poems which do not seem to be
essentially different from similar productions of Italy. A third and
not inconsiderable division, though less extensive than the others, is
composed of the poetry of good sense; the didactic, semi-satirical,
Horatian style, of which Mendoza was the founder, and several
specimens of which occur in the Parnaso Español of Sedano.

|The romances.|

|The brothers Argensola.|

13. The romances of the Cid and many others are referred by the most
competent judges to the reign of Philip III.[460] These are by no
means among the best of Spanish romances, and we should naturally
expect that so artificial a style as the imitation of ancient manners
and sentiments by poets in wholly a different state of society, though
some men of talent might succeed in it, would soon degenerate into an
affected mannerism. The Italian style continued to be cultivated:
under Philip III., the decline of Spain in poetry, as in arms and
national power, was not so striking as afterwards. Several poets
belong to the age of that prince, and even that of Philip IV. was not
destitute of men of merited reputation.[461] Among the best were two
brothers, Lupercio and Bartholomew Argensola. These were chiefly
distinguished in what I have called the third or Horatian manner of
Spanish poetry, though they by no means confined themselves to any
peculiar style. “Lupercio,” says Bouterwek, “formed his style after
Horace with no less assiduity than Luis de Leon; but he did not
possess the soft enthusiasm of that pious poet, who in the religious
spirit of his poetry is so totally unlike Horace. An understanding at
once solid and ingenious, subject to no extravagant illusion, yet full
of true poetic feeling, and an imagination more plastic than creative,
impart a more perfect Horatian colouring to the odes, as well as to
the canciones and sonnets of Lupercio. He closely imitated Horace in
his didactic satires, a style of composition in which no Spanish poet
had preceded him. But he never succeeded in attaining the bold
combination of ideas which characterizes the ode style of Horace; and
his conceptions have therefore seldom anything like the Horatian
energy. On the other hand, all his poems express no less precision of
language than the models after which he formed his style. His odes, in
particular, are characterized by a picturesque tone of expression
which he seems to have imbibed from Virgil rather than from Horace.
The extravagant metaphors by which some of Herrera’s odes are deformed
were uniformly avoided by Lupercio.”[462] The genius of Bartholomew
Argensola was very like that of his brother, nor are their writings
easily distinguishable; but Bouterwek assigns on the whole a higher
place to Bartholomew. Dieze inclines to the same judgment, and thinks
the eulogy of Nicolas Antonio on these brothers, extravagant as it
seems, not beyond their merits.

     [460] Duran, Romançero de romances doctrinales, amatorios,
     festivos, &c., 1829. The Moorish romances, with a few exceptions,
     and those of the Cid, are ascribed by this author to the latter
     part of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth
     century. In the preface to a former publication, Romances
     Moriscos, this writer has said, Cosî todos los romances que
     publicamos en este libro pertenecen al siglo 16^{mo}, y algunos
     pocos a principio del 17^{mo}. Los autores son desconoscidos,
     pero sub obras han llegado, y merecido llegar à la posteridad. It
     seems manifest from internal evidence, without critical knowledge
     of the language, that those relating to the Cid are not of the
     middle ages, though some seem still inclined to give them a high
     antiquity. It is not sufficient to say that the language has been
     modernised; the whole structure of these ballads is redolent of a
     low age; and if the Spanish critics agree in this, I know not why
     foreigners should strive against them.

     [461] Antonio bestows unbounded praise on a poem of the epic class,
     the Bernardo of Balbuena, published at Madrid, in 1624, though he
     complains that in his own age it lay hid in the corners of
     booksellers’ shops. Balbuena, in his opinion, has left all
     Spanish poets far behind him. The subject of his poem is the very
     common fable of Roncesvalles. Dieze, a more judicious and
     reasonable critic than Antonio, while he denies this absolute
     pre-eminence of Balbuena, gives him a respectable place among the
     many epic writers of Spain. But I do not find him mentioned in
     Bouterwek; in fact most of these poems are very scarce, and are
     treasures for the bibliomaniacs.

     [462] Hist. of Spanish Literature, p. 396.

|Villegas.|

14. But another poet, Manuel Estevan de Villegas, whose poems, written
in very early youth, entitled Amatorias or Eroticas, were published in
1620, has attained a still higher reputation, especially in other
parts of Europe. Dieze calls him “one of the best lyric poets of
Spain, excellent in the various styles he has employed, but above all
in his odes and songs. His original poems are full of genius; his
translations of Horace and Anacreon might often pass for original. Few
surpass him in harmony of verse; he is the Spanish Anacreon, the poet
of the Graces.”[463] Bouterwek, a more discriminating judge than
Dieze, who is perhaps rather valuable for research than for taste, has
observed that “the graceful luxuriance of the poetry of Villegas has
no parallel in modern literature; and, generally speaking, no modern
writer has so well succeeded in blending the spirit of ancient poetry
with the modern. But constantly to observe that correctness of ideas,
which distinguished the classical compositions of antiquity, was by
Villegas, as by most Spanish poets, considered too rigid a
requisition, and an unnecessary restraint on genius. He accordingly
sometimes degenerates into conceits and images, the monstrous
absurdity of which are characteristic of the author’s nation and age.
For instance, in one of his odes in which he entreats Lyda to suffer
her tresses to flow, he says that ‘agitated by Zephyr, her locks would
occasion a thousand deaths, and subdue a thousand lives;’ and then he
adds, in a strain of extravagance, surpassing that of the Marinists,
‘that the sun himself would cease to give light, if he did not snatch
beams from her radiant countenance to illumine the east.’ But faults
of this glaring kind are by no means frequent in the poetry of
Villegas, and the fascinating grace with which he emulates his models,
operates with so powerful a charm, that the occasional occurrence of
some little affectations, from which he could scarcely be expected
entirely to abstain, is easily overlooked by the reader.”[464]

     [463] Geschichte der Spanischen Dichtkunst, p. 210.

     [464] Bouterwek, i. 479.

|Quevedo.|

15. Quevedo, who, having borne the surname of Villegas, has sometimes
been confounded with the poet we have just named, is better known in
Europe for his prose than his verse; but he is the author of numerous
poems both serious and comic or satirical. The latter are by much the
more esteemed of the two. He wrote burlesque poetry with success, but
it is frequently unintelligible except to natives. In satire he
adopted the Juvenalian style.[465] A few more might be added, perhaps,
especially Espinel, a poet of the classic school, Borja of Esquillace,
once viceroy of Peru, who is called by Bouterwek the last
representative of that style in Spain, but more worthy of praise for
withstanding the bad taste of his contemporaries than for any vigour
of genius, and Christopher de la Mena.[466] No Portuguese poetry about
this time seems to be worthy of notice in European literature, though
Manuel Faria y Sousa and a few more might attain a local reputation by
sonnets and other amatory verse.

     [465] Id. p. 468.

     [466] Bouterwek, p. 488.

|Defects of taste in Spanish verse.|

16. The original blemish of Spanish writing, both in prose and verse,
had been an excess of effort to say everything in an unusual manner, a
deviation from the beaten paths of sentiment and language in a wider
curve than good taste permits. Taste is the presiding faculty which
regulates, in all works within her jurisdiction, the struggling powers
of imagination, emotion, and reason. Each has its claim to mingle in
the composition; each may sometimes be allowed in a great measure to
predominate; and a phlegmatic application of what men call common
sense in æsthetic criticism is almost as repugnant to its principles
as a dereliction of all reason for the sake of fantastic
absurdity. Taste also must determine, by an intuitive sense of right
somewhat analogous to that which regulates the manners of polished
life, to what extent the most simple, the most obvious, the most
natural, and, therefore, in a popular meaning, the most true, is to be
modified by a studious introduction of the new, the striking, and the
beautiful, so that neither what is insipid and trivial, nor yet what
is forced and affected, may displease us. In Spain, as we have
observed, the latter was always the prevailing fault. The public taste
had been formed on bad models, on the Oriental poetry, metaphorical
beyond all perceptible analogy, and on that of the Provençals, false
in sentiment, false in conception, false in image and figure. The
national character, proud, swelling, and ceremonious, conspired to
give an inflated tone; it was also grave and sententious, rather than
lively or delicate, and therefore fond of a strained and ambitious
style. These vices of writing are carried to excess in romances of
chivalry, which became ridiculous in the eyes of sensible men, but
were certainly very popular: they affect also, though in a different
manner, much of the Spanish prose of the sixteenth century, and they
belong to a great deal of the poetry of that age, though it must be
owned that much appears wholly exempt from them, and written in a very
pure and classical spirit. Cervantes strove by example and by precept
to maintain good taste; and some of his contemporaries took the same
line.[467] But they had to fight against the predominant turn of their
nation, which soon gave the victory to one of the worst manners of
writing that ever disgraced public favour.

     [467] Cervantes, in his Viage del Parnaso, praises Gongora, and
     even imitates his style; but this, Dieze says, is all ironical.
     Gesch. der Dichtkunst, p. 250.

|Pedantry and far-fetched allusions.|

17. Nothing can be more opposite to what is strictly called a
classical style, or one formed upon the best models of Greece and
Rome, than pedantry. This was, nevertheless, the weed that overspread
the face of literature in those ages when Greece and Rome were the
chief objects of veneration. Without an intimate discernment of their
beauty, it was easy to copy allusions that were no longer
intelligible, to counterfeit trains of thought that belonged to past
times, to force reluctant idioms into modern form, as some are said to
dress after a lady for whom nature has done more than for themselves.
From the revival of letters downwards, this had been more or less
observable in the learned men of Europe, and after that class grew
more extensive, in the current literature of modern languages.
Pedantry, which consisted in unnecessary, and perhaps unintelligible,
references to ancient learning, was afterwards combined with other
artifices to obtain the same end, far-fetched metaphors and
extravagant conceits. The French versifiers of the latter end of the
sixteenth century were eminent in both, as the works of Ronsard and Du
Bartas attest. We might, indeed, take the Creation of Du Bartas more
properly than the Euphues of our English Lilly, which, though very
affected and unpleasing, does hardly such violence to common speech
and common sense, for the prototype of the style which, in the early
part of the seventeenth century, became popular in several countries,
but especially in Spain, through the misplaced labours of Gongora.

|Gongora.|

18. Luis de Gongora, a man of very considerable talents, and capable
of writing well, as he has shown, in different styles of poetry, was
unfortunately led by an ambitious desire of popularity to introduce
one which should render his name immortal, as it has done in a mode
which he did not design. This was his _estilo culto_, as it was
usually called, or highly polished phraseology, wherein every word
seems to have been out of its natural place. “In fulfilment of this
object,” says Bouterwek, “he formed for himself with the most
laborious assiduity, a style as uncommon as affected, and opposed to
all the ordinary rules of the Spanish language, either in prose or
verse. He particularly endeavoured to introduce into his native tongue
the intricate constructions of the Greek and Latin, though such an
arrangement of words had never been attempted in Spanish composition.
He consequently found it necessary to invent a particular system of
punctuation, in order to render the sense of his verses intelligible.
Not satisfied with this patch-work kind of phraseology, he affected to
attach an extraordinary depth of meaning to each word, and to diffuse
an air of superior dignity over his whole style. In Gongora’s poetry
the most common words received a totally new signification; and in
order to impart perfection to his _estilo culto_, he summoned all
his mythological learning to his aid.”[468] “Gongora,” says an English
writer, “was the founder of a sect in literature. The style
called in Castilian _cultismo_ owes its origin to him. This
affectation consists in using language so pedantic, metaphors so
strained, and constructions so involved, that few readers have the
knowledge requisite to understand the words, and still fewer ingenuity
to discover the allusion, or patience to unravel the sentences. These
authors do not avail themselves of the invention of letters for the
purpose of conveying, but of concealing their ideas.”[469]

     [468] Bouterwek, p. 434.

     [469] Lord Holland’s Lope de Vega, p. 64.

|The schools formed by him.|

19. The Gongorists formed a strong party in literature, and carried
with them the public voice. If we were to believe some writers of the
seventeenth century, he was the greatest poet of Spain.[470] The age
of Cervantes was over, nor was there vitality enough in the criticism
of the reign of Philip IV. to resist the contagion. Two sects soon
appeared among these _cultoristos_; one who retained that name,
and, like their master, affected a certain precision of style;
another, called _conceptistos_, which went still greater lengths
in extravagance, desirous only of expressing absurd ideas in unnatural
language.[471] The prevalence of such a disease, for no other analogy
can so fitly be used, would seem to have been a bad presage for Spain;
but in fact, like other diseases, it did but make the tour of Europe,
and rage worse in some countries than in others. It had spent itself
in France, when it was at its height in Italy and England. I do not
perceive the close connection of the _estilo culto_ of Gongora
with that of Marini, whom both Bouterwek and Lord Holland suppose to
have formed his own taste on the Spanish school. It seems rather too
severe an imputation on that most ingenious and fertile poet, who, as
has already been observed, has no fitter parallel than Ovid. The
strained metaphors of the Adone are easily collected by critics, and
seem extravagant in juxtaposition, but they recur only at intervals;
while those of Gongora are studiously forced into every line, and are
besides incomparably more refined and obscure. His style, indeed,
seems to be like that of Lycophron, without the excuse of that
prophetical mystery, which breathes a certain awfulness over the
symbolic language of the Cassandra. Nor am I convinced that our own
metaphysical poetry in the reigns of James and Charles, had much to do
with either Marini or Gongora, except as it bore marks of the same
vice, a restless ambition to excite wonder by overstepping the
boundaries of nature.

     [470] Dieze, p. 250. Nicolas Antonio, to the disgrace of his
     judgment, maintains this with the most extravagant eulogy on
     Gongora; and Baillet copies him; but the next age unhesitatingly
     reversed the sentence. The Portuguese have laid claim to the
     estilo culto as their property, and one of their writers who
     practises it, Manuel de Faria y Sousa, gives Don Sebastian the
     credit of having been the first who wrote it in prose.

     [471] Bouterwek, p. 438.


                            SECT. III.

             _Malherbe--Regnier--Other French Poets._

|Malherbe.|

20. Malherbe, a very few of whose poems belong to the last century,
but the greater part to the first twenty years of the present, gave a
polish and a grace to the lyric poetry of France which has rendered
his name celebrated in her criticism. The public taste of that country
is (or I should rather say, used to be) more intolerant of defects in
poetry than rigorous in its demands of excellence. Malherbe,
therefore, who substituted a regular and accurate versification, a
style pure and generally free from pedantic or colloquial phrases, and
a sustained tone of what were reckoned elevated thoughts, for the more
unequal strains of the sixteenth century, acquired a reputation which
may lead some of his readers to disappointment. And this is likely to
be increased by a very few lines of great beauty which are known by
heart. These stand too much alone in his poems. In general, we find in
them neither imagery nor sentiment that yield us delight. He is less
mythological, less affected, less given to frigid hyperboles than his
predecessors, but far too much so for anyone accustomed to real
poetry. In the panegyrical odes Malherbe displays some felicity and
skill; the poet of kings and courtiers, he wisely perhaps wrote, even
when he could have written better, what kings and courtiers would
understand and reward. Polished and elegant, his lines seldom pass the
conventional tone of poetry; and while he is never original, he is
rarely impressive. Malherbe may stand in relation to Horace as
Chiabrera does to Pindar: the analogy is not very close; but he is far
from deficient in that calm philosophy which forms the charm of the
Roman poet, and we are willing to believe that he sacrificed his time
reluctantly to the praises of the great. It may be suspected that he
wrote verses for others; a practice not unusual, I believe, among
these courtly rhymers; at least, his Alcandre seems to be Henry IV.,
Chrysanthe or Oranthe, the Princess of Condé. He seems himself, in
some passages, to have affected gallantry towards Mary of Medicis,
which at that time was not reckoned an impertinence. It is hardly
perhaps worth mentioning that Malherbe uses lines of an uneven number
of syllables; an innovation, as I believe it was, that has had no
success.

|Criticisms upon his poetry.|

21. Bouterwek has criticised Malherbe with some justice, but with
greater severity.[472] He deems him no poet, which in a certain sense
is surely true. But we narrow our definition of poetry too much, when
we exclude from it the versification of good sense and select diction.
This may probably be ascribed to Malherbe; though Bouhours, an acute
and somewhat rigid critic, has pointed out some passages which he
deems nonsensical. Another writer of the same age, Rapin, whose own
taste was not very glowing, observes that there is much prose in
Malherbe; and that, well as he merits to be called correct, he is a
little too desirous of appearing so, and often becomes frigid.[473]
Boileau has extolled him, perhaps, somewhat too highly, and La Harpe
is inclined to the same side; but in the modern state of French
criticism, the danger is that the Malherbes will be too much
depreciated.

     [472] Vol. v., p. 238.

     [473] Réflexions sur la Poétique, p. 147. Malherbe a esté le
     premier qui nous a remis dans le bon chemin, joignant la purité
     au grand style; mais comme il commença cette manière, il ne put
     la porter jusques dans sa perfection; il y a bien de la prose
     dans ses vers. In another place he says, Malherbe est exact et
     correct; mais il ne hazarde rien, et par l’envie qu’il a d’être
     trop sage, il est souvent froid, p. 209.

|Satires of Regnier.|

|Racan--Maynard.|

22. The satires of Regnier have been highly praised by Boileau, a
competent judge, no doubt, in such matters. Some have preferred
Regnier even to himself, and found in this old Juvenal of France a
certain stamp of satirical genius which the more polished critic
wanted.[474] These satires are unlike all other French poetry of the
age of Henry IV.; the tone is vehement, somewhat rugged and coarse,
and reminds us a little of his contemporaries Hall and Donne, whom,
however, he will generally and justly be thought much to excel. Some
of his satires are borrowed from Ovid or from the Italians.[475] They
have been called gross and licentious; but this only applies to one,
the rest are unexceptionable. Regnier, who had probably some quarrel
with Malherbe, speaks with contempt of his elaborate polish. But the
taste of France, and especially of that highly cultivated nobility who
formed the court of Louis XIII. and his son, no longer endured the
rude though sometimes animated versification of the older poets. Next
to Malherbe in reputation stood Racan and Maynard, both more or less
of his school. Of these it was said by their master that Racan wanted
the diligence of Maynard, as Maynard did the spirit of Racan, and that
a good poet might be made out of the two.[476] A foreigner will in
general prefer the former, who seems to have possessed more
imagination and sensibility, and a keener relish for rural beauty.
Maynard’s verses, according to Pelisson, have an ease and elegance
that few can imitate, which proceeds from his natural and simple
construction.[477] He had more success in epigram than in his sonnets,
which Boileau has treated with little respect. Nor does he speak
better of Malleville, who chose no other species of verse, but seldom
produced a finished piece, though not deficient in spirit and
delicacy. Viaud, more frequently known by the name of Theophile, a
writer of no great elevation of style, is not destitute of
imagination. Such at least is the opinion of Rapin and Bouterwek.[478]

     [474] Bouterwek, p. 246. La Harpe. Biogr. Univ.

     [475] Niceron, xi. 397.

     [476] Pelisson, Hist. de l’Acadèmie, i. 260. Baillet, Jugemens
     des Savans (Poetes), n. 1510. La Harpe Cours de Littérature.
     Bouterwek, v. 260.

     [477] Idem.

     [478] Bouterwek, 252. Rapin says, Théophile a l’imagination
     grande et le sens petit. Il a des hardiesses heureuses à force de
     se permettre tout. Réflexions sur la Poétique, p. 209.

|Voiture.|

|Sarrazin.|

23. The poems of Gombauld were, in general, published before the
middle of the century; his epigrams, which are most esteemed, in 1657.
These are often lively and neat. But a style of playfulness and gaiety
had been introduced by Voiture. French poetry under Ronsard and his
school, and even that of Malherbe, had lost the lively tone of Marot,
and became serious almost to severity. Voiture, with an apparent ease
and grace, though without the natural air of the old writers, made it
once more amusing. In reality, the style of Voiture is artificial and
elaborate, but, like his imitator Prior among us, he has the skill to
disguise this from the reader. He must be admitted to have had, in
verse as well as prose, a considerable influence over the taste of
France. He wrote to please women, and women are grateful when
they are pleased. Sarrazin, says his biographer, though less
celebrated than Voiture, deserves perhaps to be rated above him; with
equal ingenuity, he is far more natural.[479] The German historian of
French literature has spoken less respectfully of Sarrazin, whose
verses are the most insipid rhymed prose, such as he not unhappily
calls toilet-poetry.[480] This is a style which finds little mercy on
the right bank of the Rhine; but the French are better judges of the
merit of Sarrazin.

     [479] Biogr. Univ. Baillet, n. 1532.

     [480] Bouterwek, v. 256. Specimens of all these poets will be
     found in the collection of Auguis, vol. vi.: and I must own,
     that, with the exceptions of Malherbe, Regnier, and one or two
     more, my own acquaintance with them extends little farther.


                             SECT. IV.

_Rise of Poetry in Germany--Opitz and his followers--Dutch Poets._

|Low state of German literature.|

|Literary Societies.|

24. The German language had never been more despised by the learned
and the noble than at the beginning of the seventeenth century, which
seems to be the lowest point in its native literature. The capacity
was not wanting; many wrote Latin verse with success; the collection
made by Gruter is abundant in these cultivators of a foreign tongue,
several of whom belong to the close of the preceding age. But among
these it is said that whoever essayed to write their own language did
but fail, and the instances adduced are very few. The upper ranks
began about this time to speak French in common society; the burghers,
as usual, strove to imitate them, and what was far worse, it became
the mode to intermingle French words with German, not singly and
sparingly, as has happened in other times and countries, but in a
jargon affectedly pie-bald and macaronic. Some hope might have been
founded on the literary academies, which, in emulation of Italy,
sprung up in this period. The oldest is The Fruitful Society, (die
fruchtbringende Gesellschaft) known also as the order of Palms,
established at Weimar in 1617.[481] Five princes enrolled their names
at the beginning. It held forth the laudable purpose of purifying and
correcting the mother tongue and of promoting its literature, after
the manner of the Italian academies. But it is not unusual for
literary associations to promise much and fail of performance; one man
is more easily found to lay down a good plan, than many to co-operate
in its execution. Probably this was merely the scheme of some more
gifted individual, perhaps Werder, who translated Ariosto and
Tasso;[482] for little good was affected by the institution. Nor did
several others which at different times in the seventeenth century
arose over Germany, deserve more praise. They copied the academies of
Italy in their quaint names and titles, in their bye-laws, their petty
ceremonials and symbolic distinctions, to which, as we always find in
these self-elected societies, they attached vast importance, and
thought themselves superior to the world by doing nothing for it.
“They are gone,” exclaims Bouterwek, “and have left no clear vestige
of their existence.” Such had been the meister-singers before them,
and little else in effect were the Academies, in a more genial soil,
of their own age. Notwithstanding this, though I am compelled to
follow the historian of German literature, it must strike us that
these societies seem to manifest a public esteem for something
intellectual, which they knew not precisely how to attain; and it is
to be observed that several of the best poets in the seventeenth
century belonged to them.

     [481] Bouterwek, x. 35.

     [482] Id. p. 29.

|Opitz.|

25. A very small number of poets, such as Meckerlin and Spee, in the
early part of the seventeenth century, though with many faults in
point of taste, have been commemorated by the modern historians of
literature. But they were wholly eclipsed by one whom Germany regards
as the founder of her poetic literature, Martin Opitz, a native of
Silesia, honoured with a laurel crown by the emperor in 1628, and
raised to offices of distinction and trust in several courts. The
national admiration of Opitz seems to have been almost enthusiastic;
yet Opitz was far from being the poet of enthusiasm. Had he been such
his age might not have understood him. His taste was French and Dutch;
two countries of which the poetry was pure and correct but not
imaginative. No great elevation, no energy of genius will be found in
this German Heinsius and Malherbe. Opitz displayed, however, another
kind of excellence. He wrote the language with a purity of idiom, in
which Luther alone, whom he chose as his model, was superior; he gave
more strength to the versification, and paid a regard to the
collocation of syllables according to their quantity, or length of
time required for articulation, which the earlier poets had neglected.
He is therefore reckoned the inventor of a rich and harmonious rhythm;
and he also rendered the Alexandrine verse much more common than
before.[483] His verse is good; he writes as one conversant with the
ancients, and with mankind; if he is too didactic and learned for a
poet in the higher sense of the word, if his taste appears fettered by
the models he took for imitation, if he even retarded, of which we can
hardly be sure, the development of a more genuine nationality in
German literature, he must still be allowed, in a favourable sense, to
have made an epoch in its history.[484]

     [483] Bouterwek (p. 94) thinks this no advantage; a rhymed prose
     in Alexandrines overspread the German literature of the
     seventeenth and first part of the eighteenth century.

     [484] Bouterwek, x. 89-119, has given an elaborate critique of
     the poetry of Opitz. “He is the father, not of German poetry, but
     of the modern German language of poetry, der neueren deutschen
     dichtersprache, p. 93. The fame of Opitz spread beyond his
     country, little as his language was familiar. Non periit
     Germania, Grotius writes to him, in 1631, Opiti doctissime, quæ
     te habet locupletissimum testem, quid lingua Germanica, quid
     ingenia Germanica valeant. Epist. 272. And afterwards, in 1638,
     thanking him for the present of his translation of the Psalms;
     Dignus erat rex poeta interprete Germanorum poetarum rege; nihil
     enim tibi blandiens dico; ita sentio à te primum Germanicæ poesi
     formam datam et habitum quo cum aliis gentibus possit contendere.
     Ep. 999. Baillet observes, that Opitz passes for the best of
     German poets, and the first who give rules to that poetry, and
     raised it to the state it had since reached; so that he is rather
     to be accounted its father than its improver. Jugemens des Savans
     (Poëtes), n. 1436. But reputation is transitory; though ten
     editions of the poems of Opitz were published within the
     seventeenth century, which Bouterwek thinks much for Germany at
     that time, though it would not be so much in some countries,
     scarce anyone, except the lovers of old literature, now ask for
     these obsolete productions, p. 90.

|His followers.|

26. Opitz is reckoned the founder of what was called the first
Silesian school, rather so denominated from him than as determining
the birthplace of its poets. They were chiefly lyric, but more in the
line of songs and short effusions in trochaic metre than of the
regular ode, and sometimes display much spirit and feeling. The German
song always seems to bear a resemblance to the English; the identity
of metre and rhythm conspires with what is more essential, a certain
analogy of sentiment. Many, however, of Opitz’s followers, like
himself, took Holland for their Parnassus, and translated their songs
from Dutch. Fleming was distinguished by a genuine feeling for lyric
poetry; he made Opitz his model, but had he not died young, would
probably have gone beyond him, being endowed by nature with a more
poetical genius. Gryph, or Gryphius, who belonged to the Fruitful
Society, and bore in that the surname of the immortal, with faults
that strike the reader in every page, is also superior in fancy and
warmth to Opitz. But Gryph is better known in German literature by his
tragedies. The hymns of the Lutheran church are by no means the lowest
form of German poetry. They have been the work of every age since the
reformation; but Dach and Gerhard, who, especially the latter,
excelled in these devotional songs, lived about the middle of the
seventeenth century. The shade of Luther seemed to protect the church
from the profanation of bad taste; or, as we should rather say, it was
the intense theopathy of the German nation, and the simple majesty of
their ecclesiastical music.[485]

     [485] Bouterwek, x. 218. Eichhorn, iv. 888.

|Dutch poetry.|

27. It has been the misfortune of the Dutch, a great people, a people
fertile of men of various ability and erudition, a people of scholars,
of theologians and philosophers, of mathematicians, of historians, of
painters, and, we may add, of poets, that these last have been the
mere violets of the shade, and have peculiarly suffered by the narrow
limits within which their language has been spoken or known. The
Flemish dialect of the southern Netherlands might have contributed to
make up something like a national literature, extensive enough to be
respected in Europe, if those provinces, which now affect the somewhat
ridiculous name of Belgium, had been equally fertile of talents with
their neighbours.

|Spiegel.|

28. The golden age of Dutch literature is this first part of the
seventeenth century. Their chief poets are Spiegel, Hooft, Cats, and
Vondel. The first, who has been styled the Dutch Ennius, died in 1612:
his principal poem, of an ethical kind, is posthumous, but may
probably have been written towards the close of the preceding century.
“The style is vigorous and concise; it is rich in imagery and
powerfully expressed, but is deficient in elegance and perspicuity.”[486]
Spiegel had rendered much service to his native tongue, and was a
member of a literary academy which published a Dutch grammar in 1584.
Coornhert and Dousa, with others known to fame, were his colleagues;
and be it remembered, to the honour of Holland, that in Germany or
England, or even in France, there was as yet no institution of this
kind. But as Holland at the end of the sixteenth century, and for many
years afterwards, was pre-eminently the literary country of Europe, it
is not surprising that some endeavours were made, though unsuccessfully
as to European renown, to cultivate the native language. This language
is also more soft, though less sonorous than the German.

     [486] Biogr. Univ.

|Hooft. Cats. Vondel.|

29. Spiegel was followed by a more celebrated poet, Peter Hooft, who
gave sweetness and harmony to Dutch verse. “The great creative power
of poetry,” it has been said, “he did not possess; but his language is
correct, his style agreeable, and he did much to introduce a better
epoch.”[487] His amatory and Anacreontic lines have never been
excelled in the language; and Hooft is also distinguished both as a
dramatist and an historian. He has been called the Tacitus of Holland.
But here again his praises must by the generality be taken upon trust.
Cats is a poet of a different class; ease, abundance, simplicity,
clearness, and purity are the qualities of his style: his imagination
is gay, his morality popular and useful. No one was more read than
Father Cats, as the people call him; but he is often trifling and
monotonous. Cats, though he wrote for the multitude, whose descendants
still almost know his poems by heart, was a man whom the republic held
in high esteem; twice ambassador in England, he died great pensionary
of Holland, in 1651. Vondel, a native of Cologne, but the glory, as he
is deemed, of Dutch poetry, was best known as a tragedian. In his
tragedies, the lyric part, the choruses which he retained after the
ancient model, have been called the sublimest of odes. But some have
spoken less highly of Vondel.[488]

     [487] Biogr. Univ.

     [488] Foreign Quart. Rev., vol. iv., p. 49. For this short
     account of the Dutch poets I am indebted to Eichhorn, vol. iv.,
     part 1, and to the Biographie Universelle.

|Danish poetry.|

30. Denmark had no literature in the native language, except a
collection of old ballads, full of Scandinavian legends, till the
present period; and in this it does not appear that she had more than
one poet, a Norwegian bishop, named Arrebo. Nothing, I believe, was
written in Swedish. Sclavonian writers there were; but we know so
little of those languages, that they cannot enter, at least during so
distant a period, into the history of European literature.


                             SECT. V.

                       ON ENGLISH POETRY.

_Imitators of Spenser--The Fletchers--Philosophical Poets--Denham--
Donne--Cowley--Historical and Narrative Poets--Shakspeare’s
Sonnets--Lyric Poets--Milton’s Lycidas, and other Poems._

|English poets numerous in this age.|

31. The English poets of these fifty years are very numerous, and
though the greater part are not familiar to the general reader, they
form a favourite study of those who cultivate our poetry, and are
sought by all collectors of scarce and interesting literature. Many of
them have within half a century been reprinted separately, and many
more in the useful and copious collections of Anderson, Chalmers, and
other editors. Extracts have also been made by Headley, Ellis,
Campbell, and Southey. It will be convenient to arrange them rather
according to the schools to which they belonged, than in mere order of
chronology.

|Phineas Fletcher.|

32. Whatever were the misfortunes of Spenser’s life, whatever neglect
he might have experienced at the hands of a statesman grown old in
cares, which render a man insensible to song, his spirit might be
consoled by the prodigious reputation of the Faëry Queen. He was
placed at once by his country above all the great Italian names, and
next to Virgil among the ancients; it was a natural consequence that
some should imitate what they so deeply reverenced. An ardent
admiration for Spenser inspired the genius of two young brothers,
Phineas and Giles Fletcher. The first, very soon after the Queen’s
death, as some allusions to Lord Essex seem to denote, composed,
though he did not so soon publish, a poem, entitled The Purple Island.
By this strange name he expressed a subject more strange; it is a
minute and elaborate account of the body and mind of man. Through five
cantos the reader is regaled with nothing but allegorical anatomy, in
the details of which Phineas seems tolerably skilled, evincing a great
deal of ingenuity in diversifying his metaphors, and in presenting the
delineation of his imaginary island with as much justice as
possible to the allegory, without obtruding it on the reader’s view.
In the sixth canto he rises to the intellectual and moral faculties of
the soul, which occupy the rest of the poem. From its nature it is
insuperably wearisome; yet his language is often very poetical, his
versification harmonious, his invention fertile. But that perpetual
monotony of allegorical persons, which sometimes displeases us even in
Spenser, is seldom relieved in Fletcher; the understanding revolts at
the confused crowd of inconceivable beings in a philosophical poem;
and the justness of analogy, which had given us some pleasure in the
anatomical cantos, is lost in tedious descriptions of all possible
moral qualities, each of them personified, which can never coexist in
the Purple Island of one individual.

|Giles Fletcher.|

33. Giles Fletcher, brother of Phineas, in Christ’s Victory and
Triumph, though his subject has not all the unity that might be
desired, had a manifest superiority in its choice. Each uses a stanza
of his own; Phineas one of seven lines, Giles one of eight. This poem
was published in 1610. Each brother alludes to the work of the other,
which must be owing to the alterations made by Phineas in his Purple
Island, written probably the first, but not published, I believe, till
1633. Giles seems to have more vigour than his elder brother; but less
sweetness, less smoothness, and more affectation in his style. This,
indeed, is deformed by words neither English nor Latin, but simply
barbarous; such as _elamping_, _eblazon_, _deprostrate_, _purpured_,
_glitterand_, and many others. They both bear much resemblance to
Spenser: Giles sometimes ventures to cope with him, even in celebrated
passages, such as the description of the Cave of Despair.[489] And he
has had the honour, in turn, of being followed by Milton, especially
in the first meeting of our Saviour with Satan in the Paradise
Regained. Both of these brothers are deserving of much praise; they
were endowed with minds eminently poetical, and not inferior in
imagination to any of their contemporaries. But an injudicious taste,
and an excessive fondness for a style which the public was rapidly
abandoning, that of allegorical personification, prevented their
powers from being effectively displayed.

     [489] Christ’s Vict. and Triumph, ii. 23.

|Philosophical poetry.|

34. Notwithstanding the popularity of Spenser, and the general pride
in his name, that allegorical and imaginative school of poetry, of
which he was the greatest ornament, did not by any means exclude a
very different kind. The English, or such as by their education gave
the tone in literature, had become, in the latter years of the Queen,
and still more under her successor, a deeply thinking, a learned, a
philosophical people. A sententious reasoning, grave, subtle, and
condensed, or the novel and remote analogies of wit, gained praise
from many whom the creations of an excursive fancy could not attract.
Hence, much of the poetry of James’s reign is distinguished from that
of Elizabeth, except, perhaps, her last years, by partaking of the
general character of the age; deficient in simplicity, grace, and
feeling, often obscure and pedantic, but impressing us with a respect
for the man, where we do not recognise the poet. From this condition
of public taste arose two schools of poetry, different in character,
if not unequal in merit, but both appealing to the reasoning more than
to the imaginative faculty as their judge.

|Lord Brooke.|

35. The first of these may own as its founder, Sir John Davis, whose
poem on the Immortality of the Soul, published in 1600, has had its
due honour in our last volume. Davies is eminent for perspicuity; but
this cannot be said for another philosophical poet, Sir Fulk Greville,
afterwards Lord Brooke, the bosom friend of Sir Philip Sydney, and
once the patron of Jordano Bruno. The titles of Lord Brooke’s poems, A
Treatise of Human Learning, A Treatise of Monarchy, A Treatise of
Religion, An Inquisition upon Fame and Honour, lead us to anticipate
more of sense than fancy. In this we are not deceived; his mind was
pregnant with deep reflection upon multifarious learning, but he
struggles to give utterance to thoughts which he had not fully endowed
with words, and amidst the shackles of rhyme and metre which he had
not learned to manage. Hence, of all our poets he may be reckoned the
most obscure; in aiming at condensation, he becomes elliptical beyond
the bounds of the language, and his rhymes, being forced for the sake
of sound, leave all meaning behind. Lord Brooke’s poetry is chiefly
worth notice as an indication of that thinking spirit upon political
science, which was to produce the riper speculations of Hobbes, and
Harrington, and Locke.

|Denham’s Cooper’s Hill.|

36. This argumentative school of verse was so much in unison with the
character of that generation, that Daniel, a poet of a very
different temper, adopted it in his panegyric addressed to James soon
after his accession, and in some other poems. It had an influence upon
others who trod generally in a different track, as is especially
perceived in Giles Fletcher. The Cooper’s Hill of Sir John Denham,
published in 1643, belongs in a considerable degree to this reasoning
class of poems. It is also descriptive, but the description is made to
slide into philosophy. The plan is original, as far as our poetry is
concerned, and I do not recollect any exception in other languages.
Placing himself upon an eminence not distant from Windsor, he takes a
survey of the scene; he finds the tower of St. Paul’s on his farthest
horizon, the Castle much nearer, and the Thames at his feet. These,
with the ruins of an abbey, supply in turn materials for a reflecting
rather than imaginative mind, and, with a stag hunt which he has very
well described, fill up the canvas of a poem of no great length, but
once of no trifling reputation.

37. The epithet, _majestic_ Denham, conferred by Pope, conveys
rather too much; but Cooper’s Hill is no ordinary poem. It is nearly
the first instance of vigorous and rhythmical couplets, for Denham is
incomparably less feeble than Browne, and less prosaic than Beaumont.
Close in thought, and nervous in language like Davies, he is less hard
and less monotonous; his cadences are animated and various, perhaps a
little beyond the regularity that metre demands; they have been the
guide to the finer ear of Dryden. Those who cannot endure the
philosophic poetry, must ever be dissatisfied with Cooper’s Hill; no
personification, no ardent words, few metaphors beyond the common use
of speech, nothing that warms, or melts, or fascinates the heart. It
is rare to find lines of eminent beauty in Denham; and equally so to
be struck by anyone as feeble or low. His language is always well
chosen and perspicuous, free from those strange turns of expression,
frequent in our older poets, where the reader is apt to suspect some
error of the press, so irreconcilable do they seem with grammar or
meaning. The expletive _do_, which the best of his predecessors
use freely, seldom occurs in Denham; and he has in other respects
brushed away the rust of languid and ineffective redundancies which
have obstructed the popularity of men with more native genius than
himself.[490]

     [490] The comparison by Denham between the Thames and
     his own poetry was one celebrated:--

       O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
       My bright example, as it is my theme:
       Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull;
       Strong without rage, without o’erflowing full.

     Johnson, while he highly extols these lines, truly observes, that
     “most of the words thus artfully opposed, are to be understood
     simply on one side of the comparison, and metaphorically on the
     other; and if there be any language which does not express
     intellectual operations by material images, into that language
     they cannot be translated.” Perhaps these metaphors are so
     naturally applied to style, that no language of a cultivated
     people is without them. But the ground of objection is, in fact,
     that the lines contain nothing but wit, and that wit which turns
     on a play of words. They are rather ingenious in this respect,
     and remarkably harmonious, which is probably the secret of their
     popularity; but, as poetry, they deserve no great praise.

|Poets called metaphysical.|

38. Another class of poets in the reigns of James and his son were
those whom Johnson has called the metaphysical; a name rather more
applicable, in the ordinary use of the word, to Davies and Brooke.
These were such as laboured after conceits, or novel turns of thought,
usually false, and resting upon some equivocation of language, or
exceedingly remote analogy. This style Johnson supposes to have been
derived from Marini. But Donne, its founder, as Johnson imagines, in
England, wrote before Marini. It is in fact, as we have lately
observed, the style which, though Marini has earned the discreditable
reputation of perverting the taste of his country by it, had been
gaining ground through the latter half of the sixteenth century. It
was, in a more comprehensive view, one modification of that vitiated
taste which sacrificed all ease and naturalness of writing and
speaking for the sake of display. The mythological erudition and
Grecisms of Ronsard’s school, the Euphuism of that of Lilly, the
“estilo culto” of Gongora, even the pedantic quotations of Burton and
many similar writers, both in England and on the continent, sprang
like the concetti of the Italians, and of their English imitators,
from the same source, a dread of being overlooked if they paced on
like their neighbours. And when a few writers had set the example of
successful faults, a bad style, where no sound principles of criticism
had been established, readily gaining ground, it became necessary that
those who had not vigour enough to rise above the fashion, should seek
to fall in with it. Nothing is more injurious to the cultivation of
verse, than the trick of desiring, for praise or profit, to attract
those by poetry whom nature has left destitute of every quality which
genuine poetry can attract. The best, and perhaps the only secure
basis for _public_ taste, for an æsthetic appreciation of beauty, in a
court, a college, a city, is so general a diffusion of classical
knowledge, as by rendering the finest models familiar, and by giving
them a sort of authority, will discountenance and check at the outset
the vicious novelties which always exert some influence over
uneducated minds. But this was not yet the case in England. Milton was
perhaps the first writer who eminently possessed a genuine discernment
and feeling of antiquity; though it may be perceived in Spenser, and
also in a very few who wrote in prose.

|Donne.|

39. Donne is generally esteemed the earliest, as Cowley was afterwards
the most conspicuous model of this manner. Many instances of it,
however, occur in the lighter poetry of the Queen’s reign. Donne is
the most inharmonious of our versifiers, if he can be said to have
deserved such a name by lines too rugged to seem metre. Of his earlier
poems many are very licentious; the later are chiefly devout. Few are
good for much; the conceits have not even the merit of being
intelligible; it would perhaps be difficult to select three passages
that we should care to read again.

|Crashaw.|

40. The second of these poets was Crashaw, a man of some imagination
and great piety, but whose softness of heart, united with feeble
judgment, led him to admire and imitate whatever was most extravagant
in the mystic writings of Saint Teresa. He was more than Donne a
follower of Marini, one of whose poems, The Massacre of the Innocents,
he translated with success. It is difficult, in general, to find
anything in Crashaw that bad taste has not deformed. His poems were
first published in 1646.

|Cowley.|

41. In the next year, 1647, Cowley’s Mistress appeared; the most
celebrated performance of the miscalled metaphysical poets. It is a
series of short amatory poems, in the Italian style of the age, full
of analogies that have no semblance of truth, except from the double
sense of words, and thoughts that unite the coldness of subtlety with
the hyperbolical extravagance of counterfeited passion. The
Anacreontic lines, and some other light pieces of Cowley, have a
spirit and raciness very unlike these frigid conceits; and in the ode
on the death of his friend Mr. Harvey, he gave some proofs of real
sensibility and poetic grace. The Pindaric odes of Cowley were not
published within this period. But it is not worth while to defer
mention of them. They contain, like all his poetry, from time to time,
very beautiful lines, but the faults are still of the same kind; his
sensibility and good sense, nor has any poet more, are choked by false
taste; and it would be difficult to fix on any one poem in which the
beauties are more frequent than the blemishes. Johnson has selected
the elegy on Crashaw as the finest of Cowley’s works. It begins with a
very beautiful couplet, but I confess that little else seems, to my
taste, of much value. The Complaint, probably better known than any
other poem, appears to me the best in itself. His disappointed hopes
give a not unpleasing melancholy to several passages. But his Latin
ode in a similar strain is much more perfect. Cowley, perhaps, upon
the whole has had a reputation more above his deserts than any English
poet; yet it is very easy to perceive that some who wrote better than
he, did not possess so fine a genius. Johnson has written the life of
Cowley with peculiar care; and as his summary of the poet’s character
is more favourable than my own, it may be candid to insert it in this
place, as at least very discriminating, elaborate, and well expressed.

|Johnson’s character of him.|

42. “It may be affirmed, without any encomiastic fervour, that he
brought to his poetic labours a mind replete with learning, and that
his pages are embellished with all the ornaments which books could
supply; that he was the first who imparted to English numbers the
enthusiasm of the greater ode, and the gaiety of the less;[491] that
he was equally qualified for sprightly sallies and for lofty flights;
that he was among those who freed translation from servility, and
instead of following his author at a distance, walked by his side; and
that, if he left versification yet improvable, he left likewise from
time to time such specimens of excellence as enabled succeeding poets
to improve it.”

     [491] Was not Milton’s Ode on the Nativity written as early as
     any of Cowley’s? And would Johnson have thought Cowley superior
     in gaiety to Sir John Suckling?

|Narrative poets. Daniel.|

43. The poets of historical or fabulous narrative belong to another
class. Of these the earliest is Daniel, whose minor poems fall partly
within the sixteenth century. His History of the Civil Wars between
York and Lancaster, a poem in eight books, was published in 1604.
Faithfully adhering to truth, which he does not suffer so much as an
ornamental episode to interrupt, and equally studious to avoid the
bolder figures of poetry, it is not surprising that Daniel should be
little read. It is indeed certain that much Italian and Spanish
poetry, even by those whose name has once stood rather high, depends
chiefly upon merits which he abundantly possesses, a smoothness of
rhythm, and a lucid narration in simple language. But that which from
the natural delight in sweet sound is enough to content the ear in the
southern tongues, will always seem bald and tame in our less
harmonious verse. It is the chief praise of Daniel, and must have
contributed to what popularity he enjoyed in his own age, that his
English is eminently pure, free from affectation of archaism and from
pedantic innovation, with very little that is now obsolete. Both in
prose and in poetry, he is, as to language, among the best writers of
his time, and wanted but a greater confidence in his own power, or, to
speak less indulgently, a greater share of it, to sustain his correct
taste, calm sense, and moral feeling.

|Drayton’s Polyolbion.|

44. Next to Daniel in time, and much above him in reach of mind, we
place Michael Drayton, whose Baron’s Wars have been mentioned under
the preceding period, but whose more famous work was published partly
in 1613 and partly in 1622. Drayton’s Polyolbion is a poem of about
30,000 lines in length, written in Alexandrine couplets, a measure,
from its monotony, and perhaps from its frequency in doggerel ballads,
not at all pleasing to the ear. It contains a topographical
description of England, illustrated with a prodigality of historical
and legendary erudition. Such a poem is essentially designed to
instruct, and speaks to the understanding more than to the fancy. The
powers displayed in it are, however, of a high cast. It has generally
been a difficulty with poets to deal with a necessary enumeration of
proper names. The catalogue of ships is not the most delightful part
of the Iliad, and Ariosto never encounters such a roll of persons or
places without sinking into the tamest insipidity. Virgil is
splendidly beautiful upon similar occasions; but his decorative
elegance could not be preserved, nor would continue to please in a
poem that kept up through a great length the effort to furnish
instruction. The style of Drayton is sustained, with extraordinary
ability, on an equable line, from which he seldom much deviates,
neither brilliant nor prosaic; few or no passages could be marked as
impressive, but few are languid or mean. The language is clear,
strong, various, and sufficiently figurative; the stories and fictions
interspersed, as well as the general spirit and liveliness, relieve
the heaviness incident to topographical description. There is probably
no poem of this kind in any other language, comparable together in
extent and excellence to the Polyolbion; nor can any one read a
portion of it without admiration for its learned and highly gifted
author. Yet, perhaps, no English poem, known as well by name, is so
little known beyond its name; for while its immense length deters the
common reader, it affords, as has just been hinted, no great harvest
for selection, and would be judged very unfairly by partial extracts.
It must be owned also that geography and antiquities may, in modern
times, be taught better in prose than in verse; yet, whoever consults
the Polyolbion for such objects, will probably be repaid by petty
knowledge which he may not have found anywhere else.

|Browne’s Britannia’s Pastorals.|

45. Among these historical poets I should incline to class William
Browne, author of a poem with the quaint title of Britannia’s
Pastorals, though his story, one of little interest, seems to have
been invented by himself. Browne indeed is of no distinct school among
the writers of that age; he seems to recognise Spenser as his master,
but his own manner is more to be traced among later than earlier
poets. He was a native of Devonshire; and his principal poem,
above-mentioned, relating partly to the local scenery of that county,
was printed in 1613. Browne is truly a poet full of imagination,
grace, and sweetness, though not very nervous or rapid. I know not why
Headley, favourable enough for the most part to this generation of the
sons of song, has spoken of Browne with unfair contempt. Justice,
however, has been done to him by later critics.[492] But I
have not observed that they take notice of what is remarkable in the
history of our poetical literature, that Browne is an early model of
ease and variety in the regular couplet. Many passages in his unequal
poem are hardly excelled by the fables of Dryden. It is manifest that
Milton was well acquainted with the writings of Browne.

     [492] “Browne,” Mr. Southey says, “is a poet who produced no
     slight effect upon his contemporaries. George Wither in his
     happiest pieces has learned the manner of his friend, and Milton
     may be traced to him. And in our days his peculiarities have been
     caught, and his beauties imitated, by men who will themselves
     find admirers and imitators hereafter.” “His poetry,” Mr.
     Campbell, a far less indulgent judge of the older bards,
     observes, “is not without beauty; but it is the beauty of mere
     landscape and allegory, without the manners and passions that
     constitute human interest.” Specimens of English Poetry, iv. 323.

|Sir John Beaumont.|

46. The commendation of improving the rhythm of the couplet is due
also to Sir John Beaumont, author of a short poem on the battle of
Bosworth Field. It was not written, however, so early as the
Britannia’s Pastorals of Browne. In other respects it has no
pretensions to a high rank. But it may be added that a poem of
Drummond on the visit of James I. to Scotland, in 1617, is perfectly
harmonious; and what is very remarkable in that age, he concludes the
verse at every couplet with the regularity of Pope.

|Davenant’s Gondibert.|

47. Far unlike the poem of Browne was Gondibert, published by Sir
William Davenant in 1650. It may probably have been reckoned by
himself an epic: but in that age the practice of Spain and Italy had
effaced the distinction between the regular epic and the heroic
romance. Gondibert belongs rather to the latter class by the entire
want of truth in the story, though the scene is laid at the court of
the Lombard kings, by the deficiency of unity in the action, by the
intricacy of the events, and by the resources of the fable, which are
sometimes too much in the style of comic fiction. It is so imperfect,
only two books and part of the third being completed, that we can
hardly judge of the termination it was to receive. Each book, however,
after the manner of Spenser, is divided into several cantos. It
contains about 6,000 lines. The metre is the four-lined stanza of
alternate rhymes; one capable of great vigour, but not perhaps well
adapted to poetry of imagination or of passion. These, however,
Davenant exhibits but sparingly in Gondibert; they are replaced by a
philosophical spirit, in the tone of Sir John Davies, who had adopted
the same metre, and, as some have thought, nourished by the author’s
friendly intercourse with Hobbes. Gondibert is written in a clear,
nervous, English style; its condensation produces some obscurity, but
pedantry, at least that of language, will rarely be found in it, and
Davenant is less infected by the love of conceit and of extravagance
than his contemporaries, though I would not assert that he is wholly
exempt from the former blemish. But the chief praise of Gondibert is
for masculine verse in a good metrical cadence; for the sake of which
we may forgive the absence of interest in the story, and even of those
glowing words and breathing thoughts which are the soul of genuine
poetry. Gondibert is very little read; yet it is better worth reading
than the Purple Island, though it may have less of that which
distinguishes a poet from another man.

|Sonnets of Shakspeare.|

48. The sonnets of Shakspeare, for we now come to the minor, that is,
the shorter and more lyric, poetry of the age, were published in 1609,
in a manner as mysterious as their subject and contents. They are
dedicated by an editor (Thomas Thorpe, a bookseller) “to Mr. W. H.,
the only begetter of these sonnets.”[493] No one, as far as I
remember, has ever doubted their genuineness; no one can doubt that
they express not only real but intense emotions of the heart; but when
they were written, who was the W. H., quaintly called their begetter,
by which we can only understand the cause of their being written, and
to what persons or circumstances they allude, has of late years been
the subject of much curiosity. These sonnets were long overlooked;
Steevens spoke of them with the utmost scorn, as productions which no
one could read; but a very different suffrage is generally given by
the lovers of poetry, and perhaps there is now a tendency, especially
among young men of poetical tempers, to exaggerate the beauties of
these remarkable productions. They rise, indeed, in estimation as we
attentively read and reflect upon them; for I do not think that at
first they give us much pleasure. No one ever entered more fully than
Shakspeare into the character of this species of poetry, which
admits of no expletive imagery, no merely ornamental line. But though
each sonnet has generally its proper unity, the sense, I do not mean
the grammatical construction, will sometimes be found to spread from
one to another, independently of that repetition of the leading idea,
like variations of an air, which a series of them frequently exhibits,
and on account of which they have latterly been reckoned by some
rather an integral poem than a collection of sonnets. But this is not
uncommon among the Italians, and belongs in fact to those of Petrarch
himself. They may easily be resolved into several series according to
their subjects;[494] but when read attentively, we find them relate to
one definite, though obscure, period of the poet’s life; in which an
attachment to some female, which seems to have touched neither his
heart nor his fancy very sensibly, was overpowered, without entirely
ceasing, by one to a friend; and this last is of such an enthusiastic
character, and so extravagant in the phrases that the author uses, as
to have thrown an unaccountable mystery over the whole work. It is
true that in the poetry as well as in the fictions of early ages, we
find a more ardent tone of affection in the language of friendship
than has since been usual; and yet no instance has been adduced of
such rapturous devotedness, such an idolatry of admiring love, as the
greatest being whom nature ever produced in the human form, pours
forth to some unknown youth in the majority of these sonnets.

     [493] The precise words of the dedication are the following:

        To the only Begetter
      Of these ensuing sonnets
             Mr. W. H.
           All Happiness
     And that eternity promised
       By our ever living poet
             Wisheth the
     Well-wishing Adventurer
         In setting forth
             T. T.

     The title page runs: Shakspeare’s Sonnets, never before
     imprinted, 4to, 1609. G. Eld for T. T.

     [494] This has been done in a late publication, “Shakspeare’s
     Autobiographical poems, by George Armitage Brown” (1838). It
     might have occurred to any attentive reader, but I do not know
     that the analysis was ever so completely made before, though
     almost every one has been aware that different persons are
     addressed in the former and latter part of the sonnets. Mr.
     Brown’s work did not fall into my hands till nearly the time that
     these sheets passed through the press, which I mention on account
     of some coincidences of opinion, especially as to Shakspeare’s
     knowledge of Latin.

|The person whom they address.|

49. The notion that a woman was their general object is totally
untenable, and it is strange that Coleridge should have entertained
it.[495] Those that were evidently addressed to a woman, the person
above hinted, are by much the smaller part of the whole, but
twenty-eight out of one hundred and fifty-four. And this mysterious
Mr. W. H. must be presumed to be the idolised friend of Shakspeare.
But who could he be? No one recorded in literary history or anecdote
answers the description. But if we seize a clue which innumerable
passages give us, and suppose that they allude to a youth of high rank
as well as personal beauty and accomplishment, in whose favour and
intimacy, according to the base prejudices of the world, a player and
a poet, though he were the author of Macbeth, might be thought
honoured, something of the strangeness, as it appears to us, of
Shakspeare’s humiliation in addressing him as a being before whose
feet he crouched, whose frown he feared, whose injuries, and those of
the most insulting kind, the seduction of the mistress to whom we have
alluded, he felt and bewailed without resenting; something, I say, of
the strangeness of this humiliation, and at best it is but little, may
be lightened and in a certain sense rendered intelligible. And it has
been ingeniously conjectured within a few years by inquirers
independent of each other, that William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke,
born in 1580, and afterwards a man of noble and gallant character,
though always of a licentious life, was shadowed under the initials of
Mr. W. H. This hypothesis is not strictly proved, but sufficiently so,
in my opinion, to demand our assent.[496]

     [495] “It seems to me that the sonnets could only have come from
     a man deeply in love, and in love with a woman; and there is one
     sonnet which, from its incongruity, I take to be a purposed
     blind.” Table Talk, vol. ii., p. 180. This sonnet the editor
     supposes to be the twentieth, which certainly could not have been
     addressed to a woman; but the proof is equally strong as to most
     of the rest. Coleridge’s opinion is absolutely untenable; nor do
     I conceive that any one else is likely to maintain it after
     reading the sonnets of Shakspeare; but to those who have not done
     this the authority may justly seem imposing.

     [496] In the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1832, p. 217, et post, it
     will be seen that this occurred both to Mr. Boaden and Mr.
     Heywood Bright. And it does not appear that Mr. Brown, author of
     the work above-quoted, had any knowledge of their priority.

     Drake has fixed on Lord Southampton as the object of these
     sonnets, induced probably by the tradition of his friendship with
     Shakspeare, and by the latter’s having dedicated to him his Venus
     and Adonis, as well as by what is remarkable on the face of the
     series of sonnets, that Shakspeare looked up to his friend “with
     reverence and homage.” But, unfortunately, this was only the
     reverence and homage of an inferior to one of high rank, and not
     such as the virtues of Southampton might have challenged. Proofs
     of the low moral character of “Mr. W. H.” are continual. It was
     also impossible that Lord Southampton could be called “beauteous
     and lovely youth,” or “sweet boy.” Mrs. Jameson, in her “Loves of
     the Poets,” has adopted the same hypothesis, but is forced in
     consequence to suppose some of the earlier sonnets to be
     addressed to a woman.

     Pembroke succeeded to his father in 1601: I incline to think that
     the sonnets were written about that time, some probably earlier,
     some later. That they were the same as Meres, in 1598, has
     mentioned among the compositions of Shakspeare, his “sugred
     sonnets among his private friends,” I do not believe, both on
     account of the date, and from the peculiarly personal allusions
     they contain.

50. Notwithstanding the frequent beauties of these sonnets,
the pleasure of their perusal is greatly diminished by these
circumstances; and it is impossible not to wish that Shakspeare had
never written them. There is a weakness and folly in all excessive and
misplaced affection, which is not redeemed by the touches of nobler
sentiments that abound in this long series of sonnets. But there are
also faults of a merely critical nature. The obscurity is often such
as only conjecture can penetrate; the strain of tenderness and
adoration would be too monotonous, were it less unpleasing; and so
many frigid conceits are scattered around, that we might almost fancy
the poet to have written without genuine emotion, did not such a host
of other passages attest the contrary.

|Sonnets of Drummond and others.|

51. The sonnets of Drummond, of Hawthornden, the most celebrated in
that class of poets, have obtained, probably, as much praise as they
deserve.[497] But they are polished and elegant, free from conceit and
bad taste, in pure, unblemished English; some are pathetic or tender
in sentiment, and if they do not show much originality, at least would
have acquired a fair place among the Italians of the sixteenth
century. Those of Daniel, of Drayton, and of Sir William Alexander,
afterwards Earl of Stirling, are perhaps hardly inferior. Some may
doubt, however, whether the last poet should be placed on such a
level.[498] But the difficulty of finding the necessary rhymes in our
language has caused most who have attempted the sonnet to swerve from
laws which cannot be transgressed, at least to the degree they have
often dared, without losing the unity for which that complex mechanism
was contrived. Certainly, three quatrains of alternate rhymes,
succeeded by a couplet, which Drummond, like many other English poets,
has sometimes given us, is the very worst form of the sonnet, even if,
in deference to a scanty number of Italian precedents, we allow it to
pass as a sonnet at all.[499] We possess, indeed, noble poetry in the
form of sonnet; yet with us it seems more fitted for grave than
amatory composition; in the latter we miss the facility and grace of
our native English measures, the song, the madrigal, or the ballad.

     [497] I concur in this with Mr. Campbell, iv., 343. Mr. Southey
     thinks Drummond “has deserved the high reputation he has
     obtained;” which seems to say the same thing, but is, in fact,
     different. He observes that Drummond “frequently borrows and
     sometimes translates from the Italian and Spanish poets.”
     Southey’s British Poets, p. 798. The furious invective of Gifford
     against Drummond, for having written private memoranda of his
     conversations with Ben Jonson, which he did not publish, and
     which, for aught we know, were perfectly faithful, is absurd.
     Anyone else would have been thankful for so much literary
     anecdote.

     [498] Lord Stirling is rather monotonous, as sonnetteers usually
     are, and he addresses his mistress by the appellation, “Fair
     tygress.” Campbell observes that there is elegance of expression
     in a few of Stirling’s shorter pieces. Vol. iv., p. 206. The
     longest poem of Stirling is entitled Domesday, in twelve books,
     or, as he calls them, hours. It is written in the Italian octave
     stanza, and has somewhat of the condensed style of the
     philosophical school, which he seems to have imitated, but his
     numbers are harsh.

     [499] The legitimate sonnet consists of two quatrains and two
     tercets; as much skill, to say the least, is required for the
     management of the latter as of the former. The rhymes of the last
     six lines are capable of many arrangements; but by far the worst,
     and also the least common in Italy, is that we usually adopt, the
     fifth and sixth rhyming together, frequently after a full pause,
     so that the sonnet ends with the point of an epigram. The best
     form, as the Italians hold, is the rhyming together of the three
     uneven, and the three even lines; but as our language is less
     rich in consonant terminations, there can be no objection to what
     has abundant precedents even in theirs, the rhyming of the first
     and fourth, second and fifth, third and sixth lines. This, with a
     break in the sense at the third line, will make a real sonnet,
     which Shakspeare, Milton, Bowles, and Wordsworth have often
     failed to give us, even where they have given us something good
     instead.

|Carew.|

52. Carew is the most celebrated among the lighter poets, though no
collection has hitherto embraced his entire writings. Headley has
said, and Ellis echoes the praise, that “Carew has the ease without
the pedantry of Waller, and perhaps less conceit. Waller is too
exclusively considered as the first man who brought versification to
anything like its present standard. Carew’s pretensions to the same
merit are seldom sufficiently either considered or allowed.” Yet, in
point of versification, others of the same age seem to have surpassed
Carew, whose lines are often very harmonious, but not so artfully
constructed or so uniformly pleasing as those of Waller. He is
remarkably unequal; the best of his little poems (none of more than
thirty lines are good), excel all of his time; but, after a few lines
of great beauty, we often come to some ill-expressed or obscure, or
weak, or inharmonious passage. Few will hesitate to acknowledge that
he has more fancy and more tenderness than Waller, but less choice,
less judgment and knowledge where to stop, less of the equability
which never offends, less attention to the unity and thread of his
little pieces. I should hesitate to give him, on the whole, the
preference as a poet, taking collectively the attributes of that
character; for we must not, in such a comparison, overlook a good deal
of very inferior merit which may be found in the short volume of
Carew’s poems. The best has great beauty, but he has had, in late
criticism, his full share of applause. Two of his most pleasing little
poems appear also among those of Herrick; and as Carew’s were, I
believe, published posthumously, I am rather inclined to prefer the
claim of the other poet, independently of some internal evidence as to
one of them. In all ages, these very short compositions circulate, for
a time, in polished society, while mistakes as to the real author are
natural.[500]

     [500] One of these poems begins, “Amongst the myrtles as I
     walked, Love and my sighs thus intertalked.” Herrick wants four
     good lines which are in Carew; and as they are rather more likely
     to have been interpolated than left out, this leads to a sort of
     inference that he was the original; there are also some other
     petty improvements. The second poem is that beginning, “Ask me
     why I send you here, This firstling of the infant year.” Herrick
     gives the second line strangely, “This sweet infanta of the
     year,” which is little else than nonsense; and all the other
     variances are for the worse. I must leave it in doubt, whether he
     borrowed, and disfigured a little, or was himself improved upon.
     I must own that he has a trick of spoiling what he takes.
     Suckling has an incomparable image, on a lady dancing.

          Her feet beneath the petticoat,
          _Like little mice_, stole in and out,
            As if they feared the light--.

     Herrick has it thus:--

          Her pretty feet, _like snails_, did creep
          A little out.

     A most singular parallel for an elegant dancer.

|Ben Jonson.|

53. The minor poetry of Ben Jonson is extremely beautiful. This is
partly mixed with his masques and interludes, poetical and musical
rather than dramatic pieces, and intended to gratify the imagination
by the charms of song, as well as by the varied scenes that were
brought before the eye; partly in very short effusions of a single
sentiment, among which two epitaphs are known by heart. Jonson
possessed an admirable taste and feeling in poetry, which his dramas,
except the Sad Shepherd, do not entirely lead us to value highly
enough; and when we consider how many other intellectual excellencies
distinguished him, wit, observation, judgment, memory, learning, we
must acknowledge that the inscription on his tomb, O rare Ben Jonson!
is not more pithy than it is true.

|Wither.|

54. George Wither, by siding with the less poetical, though more
prosperous party in the civil war, and by a profusion of temporary
writings to serve the ends of faction and folly, has left a name which
we were accustomed to despise, till Ellis did justice to “that playful
fancy, pure taste, and artless delicacy of sentiment which distinguish
the poetry of his early youth.” His best poems were published in 1622
with the title “Mistress of Philarete.” Some of them are highly
beautiful, and bespeak a mind above the grovelling puritanism into
which he afterwards fell. I think there is hardly anything in our
lyric poetry of this period equal to Wither’s lines on his Muse,
published by Ellis.[501]

     [501] Ellis’s Specimens of Early English Poets, iii. 96.

|Habington.|

|Earl of Pembroke.|

55. The poetry of Habington is that of a pure and amiable mind, turned
to versification by the custom of the age, during a real passion for a
lady of birth and virtue, the Castara whom he afterwards married; but
it displays no great original power, nor is it by any means exempt
from the ordinary blemishes of hyperbolical compliment and far-fetched
imagery. The poems of William Earl of Pembroke, long known by the
character drawn for him by Clarendon, and now as the object of
Shakspeare’s doting friendship, were ushered into the world after his
death, with a letter of extravagant flattery addressed by Donne to
Christiana Countess of Devonshire.[502] But there is little reliance
to be placed on the freedom from interpolation of these posthumous
editions. Among these poems attributed to Lord Pembroke, we find one
of the best known of Carew’s,[503] and even the famous lines addressed
to the Soul, which some have given to Silvester. The poems, in
general, are of little merit; some are grossly indecent; nor would
they be mentioned here except for the interest recently attached to
the author’s name. But they throw no light whatever on the sonnets of
Shakspeare.

     [502] The only edition that I have seen, or that I find
     mentioned, of Lord Pembroke’s poems is in 1660. But as Donne died
     in 1631, I conceive that there must be one of earlier date. The
     Countess of Devonshire is not called dowager; her husband died in
     1643.

     [503]
       Ask me no more whither do stray
       The golden atoms of the day.

|Suckling.|

|Lovelace.|

56. Sir John Suckling is acknowledged to have left far behind him all
former writers of song in gaiety and ease; it is not equally clear
that he has ever since been surpassed. His poetry aims at no higher
praise; he shows no sentiment or imagination, either because he had
them not, or because he did not require either in the style he chose.
Perhaps the Italians may have poetry in that style equal to
Suckling’s; I do not know that they have, nor do I believe that there
is any in French; that there is none in Latin I know.[504] Lovelace is
chiefly known by a single song; his other poetry is much inferior; and
indeed it may be generally remarked that the flowers of our early
verse, both in the Elizabethan and the subsequent age, have been well
culled by good taste and a friendly spirit of selection. We must not
judge of them, or shall judge of them very favourably, by the extracts
of Headley or Ellis.

     [504] Suckling’s Epithalamium, though not written for those “Qui
     Musas colitis severiores,” has been read by almost all the world,
     and is a matchless piece of liveliness and facility.

|Herrick.|

57. The most amorous, and among the best of our amorous poets was
Robert Herrick, a clergyman ejected from his living in Devonshire by
the long parliament, whose “Hesperides, or Poems Human and Divine,”
were published in 1648. Herrick’s divine poems are of course such as
might be presumed by their title and by his calling; of his human,
which are poetically much superior, and probably written in early
life, the greater portion is light and voluptuous, while some border
on the licentious and indecent. A selection was published in 1815, by
which, as commonly happens, the poetical fame of Herrick does not
suffer; a number of dull epigrams are omitted, and the editor has a
manifest preference for what must be owned to be the most elegant and
attractive part of his author’s rhymes. He has much of the lively
grace that distinguishes Anacreon and Catullus, and approaches also,
with a less cloying monotony, to the Basia of Joannes Secundus.
Herrick has as much variety as the poetry of kisses can well have; but
his love is in a very slight degree that of sentiment, or even any
intense passion; his mistresses have little to recommend them, even in
his own eyes, save their beauties, and none of these are omitted in
his catalogues. Yet he is abundant in the resources of verse; without
the exuberant gaiety of Suckling, or perhaps the delicacy of Carew, he
is sportive, fanciful, and generally of polished language. The faults
of his age are sometimes apparent; though he is not often obscure, he
runs, more perhaps for the sake of variety than any other cause, into
occasional pedantry; he has his conceits and false thoughts, but these
are more than redeemed by the numerous very little poems (for those of
Herrick are frequently not longer than epigrams) which may be praised
without much more qualification than belongs to such poetry.

|Milton.|

58. John Milton was born in 1609. Few are ignorant of his life, in
recovering and recording every circumstance of which no diligence has
been spared, nor has it often been unsuccessful. Of his Latin poetry
some was written at the age of seventeen; in English we have nothing,
I believe, the date of which is known to be earlier than the sonnet on
entering his twenty-third year. In 1634, he wrote Comus, which was
published in 1637. Lycidas was written in the latter year, and most of
his shorter pieces soon afterwards, except the sonnets, some of which
do not come within the first half of the century.

|His Comus.|

59. Comus was sufficient to convince any one of taste and feeling that
a great poet had arisen in England, and one partly formed in a
different school from his contemporaries. Many of them had produced
highly beautiful and imaginative passages; but none had evinced so
classical a judgment, none had aspired to so regular a perfection
Jonson had learned much from the ancients; but there was a grace in
their best models which he did not quite attain. Neither his Sad
Shepherd nor the Faithful Shepherdess of Fletcher have the elegance or
dignity of Comus. A noble virgin and her young brothers, by whom this
masque was originally represented, required an elevation, a
purity, a sort of severity of sentiment which no one in that age could
have given but Milton. He avoided, and nothing loth, the more festive
notes which dramatic poetry was wont to mingle with its serious
strain. But for this he compensated by the brightest hues of fancy and
the sweetest melody of song. In Comus we find nothing prosaic or
feeble, no false taste in the incidents and not much in the language,
nothing over which we should desire to pass on a second perusal. The
want of what we may call personality, none of the characters having
names, except Comus himself, who is a very indefinite being, and the
absence of all positive attributes of time and place, enhance the
ideality of the fiction by a certain indistinctness not unpleasing to
the imagination.

|Lycidas.|

60. It has been said, I think very fairly, that Lycidas is a good test
of a real feeling for what is peculiarly called poetry. Many, or
perhaps we might say most readers do not taste its excellence; nor
does it follow that they may not greatly admire Pope and Dryden, or
even Virgil and Homer. It is, however, somewhat remarkable that
Johnson, who has committed his critical reputation by the most
contemptuous depreciation of this poem, had in an earlier part of his
life selected the tenth eclogue of Virgil for peculiar praise;[505]
the tenth eclogue, which, beautiful as it is, belongs to the same
class of pastoral and personal allegory, and requires the same
sacrifice of reasoning criticism as the Lycidas itself. In the age of
Milton, the poetical world had been accustomed by the Italian and
Spanish writers to a more abundant use of allegory than has been
pleasing to their posterity; but Lycidas is not so much in the nature
of an allegory as of a masque; the characters passed before our eyes
in imagination, as on the stage; they are chiefly mythological, but
not creations of the poet. Our sympathy with the fate of Lycidas may
not be much stronger than for the desertion of Gallus by his mistress;
but many poems will yield an exquisite pleasure to the imagination
that produce no emotion in the heart; nor none at least, except
through associations independent of the subject.

     [505] Adventurer, No. 92.

61. The introduction of St. Peter after the fabulous deities of the
sea has appeared an incongruity deserving of censure to some admirers
of this poem. It would be very reluctantly that we could abandon to
this criticism the most splendid passage it presents. But the censure
rests, as I think, on too narrow a principle. In narrative or dramatic
poetry, where something like illusion or momentary belief is to be
produced, the mind requires an objective possibility, a capacity of
real existence, not only in all the separate portions of the imagined
story, but in their coherency and relation to a common whole. Whatever
is obviously incongruous, whatever shocks our previous knowledge of
possibility, destroys to a certain extent that acquiescence in the
fiction, which it is the true business of the fiction to produce. But
the case is not the same in such poems as Lycidas. They pretend to no
credibility, they aim at no illusion; they are read with the willing
abandonment of the imagination to a waking dream, and require only
that general possibility, that combination of images which common
experience does not reject as incompatible, without which the fancy of
the poet would be only like that of the lunatic. And it had been so
usual to blend sacred with mythological personages in allegory, that
no one probably in Milton’s age would have been struck by the
objection.

|Allegro and Penseroso.|

62. The Allegro and Penseroso are perhaps more familiar to us than any
part of the writings of Milton. They satisfy the critics and they
delight mankind. The choice of images is so judicious, their
succession so rapid, the allusions are so various and pleasing, the
leading distinction of the poems is so felicitously maintained, the
versification is so animated, that we may place them at the head of
that long series of descriptive poems which our language has to boast.
It may be added, as in the greater part of Milton’s writings, that
they are sustained at an uniform pitch, with few blemishes of
expression and scarce any feebleness; a striking contrast, in this
respect, to all the contemporaneous poetry, except perhaps that of
Waller. Johnson has thought, that while there is no mirth in his
melancholy, he can detect some melancholy in his mirth. This seems to
be too strongly put; but it may be said that his Allegro is rather
cheerful than gay, and that even his cheerfulness is not always
without effort. In these poems he is indebted to Fletcher, to Burton,
to Browne, to Withers, and probably to more of our early versifiers;
for he was a great collector of sweets from those wild flowers.

|Ode on the Nativity.|

63. The Ode on the Nativity, far less popular than most of the poetry
of Milton, is perhaps the finest in the English language. A
grandeur, a simplicity, a breadth of manner, an imagination at once
elevated and restrained by the subject, reign throughout it. If Pindar
is a model of lyric poetry, it would be hard to name any other ode so
truly Pindaric; but more has naturally been derived from the
Scriptures. Of the other short poems, that on the death of the
Marchioness of Winchester deserves particular mention. It is pity that
the first lines are bad, and the last much worse; for rarely can we
find more feeling or beauty than in some other passages.

|His sonnets.|

64. The sonnets of Milton have obtained of late years the admiration
of all real lovers of poetry. Johnson has been as impotent to fix the
public taste in this instance as in his other criticisms on the
smaller poems of the author of Paradise Lost. These sonnets are indeed
unequal; the expression is sometimes harsh and sometimes obscure;
sometimes too much of pedantic allusion interferes with the sentiment,
nor am I reconciled to his frequent deviations from the best Italian
structure. But such blemishes are lost in the majestic simplicity, the
holy calm, that ennoble many of these short compositions.

|Anonymous poetry.|

65. Many anonymous songs, many popular lays, both of Scottish and
English minstrelsy, were poured forth in this period of the
seventeenth century. Those of Scotland became, after the union of the
crowns, and the consequent cessation of rude border frays, less
warlike than before; they are still, however, imaginative, pathetic,
and natural. It is probable that the best are a little older; but
their date is seldom determinable with much precision. The same may be
said of the English ballads; ballads, which, so far as of a merely
popular nature, appear, by their style and other circumstances, to
belong more frequently to the reign of James I. than any other period.


                             SECT. VI.

                         ON LATIN POETRY.

_Latin Poets of France--And other Countries--Of England--May--Milton._

|Latin poets of France.|

66. France, in the latter part of the sixteenth century, had been
remarkably fruitful of Latin poetry; it was the pride of her scholars,
and sometimes of her statesmen. In the age that we have now in review,
we do not find so many conspicuous names; but the custom of academical
institutions, and especially of the seminaries conducted by the
Jesuits, kept up a facility of Latin versification, which it was by no
means held pedantic or ridiculous to exhibit in riper years. The
French enumerate several with praise, Guijon, Bourbon (Borbonius),
whom some have compared with the best of the preceding century, and
among whose poems that on the death of Henry IV. is reckoned the best,
Cerisantes, equal, as some of his admirers think, to Sarbievius, and
superior, as others presume, to Horace, and Petavius, who, having
solaced his leisure hours with Greek and Hebrew, as well as Latin
versification, has obtained in the last the general suffrage of
critics.[506] I can speak of none of these from direct knowledge,
except of Borbonius, whose Diræ on the death of Henry have not
appeared, to my judgment, deserving of so much eulogy.

     [506] Baillet, Jugemens des Sçavans, has criticised all these and
     several more. Rapin’s opinion on Latin poetry is entitled to much
     regard from his own excellence in it. He praises three lyrists,
     Casimir, Magdelenet and Cerisantes; the two latter being French.
     Sarbieuski a de l’élévation mais sans pureté; Magdelenet est pur
     mais sans élévation. Cerisantes a joint dans ses odes l’un et
     l’autre; car il écrit noblement, et d’un style assez pur. Après
     tout, il n’a pas tant de feu, que Casimir, lequel avoit bien de
     l’esprit, et de cet esprit heureux qui fait les poètes. Bucanan a
     des odes dignes de l’antiquité, mais il a de grandes inégalités
     par le mélange de son caractère qui n’est pas assez uni.
     Réflexions sur la Poétique, p. 208.

|In Germany and Italy.|

67. The Germans wrote much in Latin, especially in the earlier decads
of this period. Melissus Schedius, not undistinguished in his native
tongue, might have been mentioned as a Latin poet in the last volume,
since most of his compositions were published in the sixteenth
century. In Italy we have not many conspicuous names. The bad taste
that infested the school of Marini, spread also, according to
Tiraboschi, over Latin poetry. Martial, Lucan, and Claudian, became in
their eyes better models than Catullus and Virgil. Baillet, or rather
those whom he copies, and among whom Rossi, author of the Pinacotheca
Virorum illustrium, under the name of Erythræus, a profuse and
indiscriminating panegyrist, for the most part, of his contemporaries,
furnishes the chief materials, bestows praise on Cesarini, and
Querenghi, whom even Tiraboschi selects from the crowd, and Maffei
Barberini, best known as pope Urban VIII.

|In Holland. Heinsius.|

68. Holland stood at the head of Europe in this line of poetry.
Grotius has had the reputation of writing with spirit, elegance, and
imagination. But he is excelled by Heinsius, whose elegies, still more
than his hexametres, may be ranked high in modern Latin. The habit,
however, of classical imitation, has so much weakened all individual
originality in these versifiers, that it is often difficult to
distinguish them, or to pronounce of any twenty lines that they might
not have been written by some other author. Compare, for example, the
elegies of Buchanan with those of Heinsius, wherever there are no
proper names to guide us; a more finished and continued elegance
belongs, on the whole (as at least I should say), to the latter, but
in a short passage this may not be perceptible, and, I believe, few
would guess with much confidence between the two. Heinsius, however,
like most of the Dutch, is remarkably fond of a polysyllabic close in
the pentameter; at least in his Juvenilia, which, notwithstanding
their title, are perhaps better than his later productions. As it is
not necessary to make a distinct head for the Latin drama, we may here
advert to a tragedy by Heinsius, Herodes Infanticida. This has been
the subject of a critique by Balzac, for the most part very
favourable; and it certainly contains some highly beautiful passages.
Perhaps the description of the Virgin’s feelings on the nativity,
though praised by Balzac, and exquisitely classical in diction, is not
quite in the best taste.[507]

     [507]
       Oculosque nunc huc pavida nunc illuc jacit,
       Interque matrem virginemque hærent adhuc,
       Suspensa matris gaudia, ac trepidus pudor.
       .     .     .     sæpe, cum blandus puer
       Aut a sopore languidas jactat manus,
       Tenerisque labris pectus intactum petit,
       Virginea subitus ora perfundit rubor,
       Laudemque matris virginis crimen putat.

     A critique on the poems of Heinsius will be found in the
     Retrospective Review, vol. i., p. 49; but notwithstanding the
     laudatory spirit, which is, for the most part, too
     indiscriminating in that publication, the reviewer has not done
     justice to Heinsius, and hardly seems, perhaps a very competent
     judge of Latin verse. The suffrages of those who were so, in
     favour of this Batavian poet, are collected by Baillet, n. 1482.

|Casimir Sarbievius.|

69. Sidonius Hoschius, a Flemish Jesuit, is extolled by Baillet and
his authorities. But another of the same order, Casimir Sarbievius, a
Pole, is far better known, and, in lyric poetry, which he almost
exclusively cultivated, obtained a much higher reputation. He had
lived some years at Rome, and is full of Roman allusion. He had read
Horace, as Sannazarius had Virgil, and Heinsius Ovid, till the style
and tone became spontaneous, but he has more of centonism than the
other two. Yet, while he constantly reminds us of Horace, it is with
as constant an inferiority; we feel that his Rome was not the same
Rome, that Urban VIII. was not Augustus, nor the Polish victories on
the Danube like those of the sons of Livia. Hence, his flattery of the
great, though not a step beyond that of his master, seems rather more
displeasing, because we have it only on his word that they were truly
great. Sarbievius seldom rises high or pours out an original feeling;
but he is free from conceits, never becomes prosaic, and knows how to
put in good language the common-places with which his subject happens
to furnish him. He is, to a certain degree, in Latin poetry, what
Chiabrera is in Italian, but does not deserve so high a place.
Sarbievius was perhaps the first who succeeded much in the Alcaic
stanza, which the earlier poets seem to avoid, or to use unskilfully.
But he has many unwarrantable licences in his metre, and even false
quantities, as is common to the great majority of these Latin
versifiers.

|Barlæus.|

70. Gaspar Barlæus had as high a name, perhaps, as any Latin poet of
this age. His rhythm is indeed excellent, but if he ever rises to
other excellence, I have not lighted on the passages. A greater
equality I have never found than in Barlæus; nothing is bad, nothing
is striking. It was the practice with Dutchmen on their marriage to
purchase epithalamiums in hexameter verse; and the muse of Barlæus was
in request. These nuptial songs are, of course, about Peleus and
Thetis, or similar personages, interspersed with fitting praises of
the bride and bridegroom. Such poetry is not likely to rise high. The
epicedia, or funeral lamentations, paid for by the heir, are little,
if at all, better than the epithalamia; and the panegyrical effusions
on public or private events rather worse. The elegies of Barlæus, as
we generally find, are superior to the hexameters; he has here the
same smoothness of versification, and a graceful gaiety which gives us
pleasure. In some of his elegies and epistles he counterfeits the
Ovidian style extremely well, so that they might pass for those of his
model. Still, there is an equability, a recurrence of trivial thoughts
and forms, which, in truth, is too much characteristic of modern Latin
to be a reproach to Barlæus. He uses the polysyllabic termination less
than earlier Dutch poets. One of the epithalamia of Barlæus, it may be
observed before we leave him, is entitled Paradisus, and recounts the
nuptials of Adam and Eve. It is possible that Milton may have seen
this; the fourth book of the Paradise Lost compresses the excessive
diffuseness of Barlæus, but the ideas are in great measure the same.
Yet, since this must naturally be the case, we cannot presume
imitation. That Milton availed himself of all the poetry he had read,
we cannot doubt; if Lauder had possessed as much learning as
malignity, he might have made out his case (such as it would have
been), without having recourse to his own stupid forgeries. Few of the
poems of Barlæus are so redundant as this; he has the gift of
stringing together mythological parallels and descriptive poetry
without stint, and his discretion does not inform him where to stop.

|Balde.--Greek poems of Heinsius.|

71. The eight books of Sylvæ by Balde, a German ecclesiastic, are
extolled by Baillet and Bouterwek far above their value; the odes are
tumid and unclassical; yet some have called him equal to Horace.
Heinsius tried his skill in Greek verse. His Peplus Græcorum
Epigrammatum was published in 1613. These are what our schoolboys
would call very indifferent in point of elegance, and, as I should
conceive, of accuracy: articles and expletives (as they used to be
happily called), are perpetually employed for the sake of the metre,
not of the sense.

|Latin poets of Scotland. Jonston’s Psalms.|

72. Scotland might perhaps compete with Holland in this as well as in
the preceding age. In the Delitiæ Poetarum Scotorum, published in 1637
by Arthur Jonston, we find about an equal produce of each century, the
whole number being thirty-seven. Those of Jonston himself, and some
elegies by Scot of Scotstarvet, are among the best. The Scots
certainly wrote Latin with a good ear and considerable elegance of
phrase. A sort of critical controversy was carried on in the last
century as to the versions of the psalms by Buchanan and Jonston.
Though the national honour may seem equally secure by the superiority
of either, it has, I believe, been usual in Scotland to maintain the
older poet against all the world. I am nevertheless inclined to think
that Jonston’s psalms, all of which are in elegiac metre, do not fall
short of those of Buchanan, either in elegance of style or in
correctness of Latinity. In the 137th, with which Buchanan has taken
much pains, he may be allowed the preference, but not at a great
interval, and he has attained this superiority by too much
diffuseness.

|Owen’s Epigrams.|

|Alabaster’s Roxana.|

73. Nothing good, and hardly tolerable, in a poetical sense, had
appeared in Latin verse among ourselves till this period. Owen’s
epigrams (Audoeni Epigrammata), a well-known collection, were
published in 1607; unequal enough, they are sometimes neat and more
often witty: but they scarcely aspire to the name of poetry.
Alabaster, a man of recondite Hebrew learning, published in 1632 his
tragedy of Roxana, which, as he tells us, was written about forty
years before for one night’s representation, probably at college, but
had been lately printed by some plagiary as his own. He forgets,
however, to inform the reader, and thus lays himself open to some
recrimination, that his tragedy is very largely borrowed from the
Dalida of Groto, an Italian dramatist of the sixteenth century.[508]
The story, the characters, the incidents, almost every successive
scene, many thoughts, descriptions and images, are taken from this
original; but it is a very free translation, or rather differs from
what can be called a translation. The tragedy of Groto is shortened,
and Alabaster has thrown much into another form, besides introducing
much of his own. The plot is full of all the accumulated horror and
slaughter in which the Italians delighted on their stage. I rather
prefer the original tragedy. Alabaster has spirit and fire with some
degree of skill; but his notion of tragic style is of the “King
Cambyses’ vein;” he is inflated and hyperbolical to excess, which is
not the case with Groto.

     [508] I am indebted for the knowledge of this to a manuscript
     note I found in the copy of Alabaster’s Roxana in the British
     Museum: Haud multum abest hæc tragedia a pura versione tragediæ
     Italicæ Ludovici Groti Cæci Hadriensis cui titulus Dalida. This
     induced me to read the tragedy of Groto, which I had not
     previously done.

     The title of Roxana runs thus: Roxana tragedia a plagiarii
     unguibus vindicata aucta et agnita ab autore Gul. Alabastro.,
     Lond., 1632.

|May’s Supplement to Lucan.|

74. But the first Latin poetry which England can vaunt is May’s
Supplement to Lucan, in seven books, which carry down the history of
the Pharsalia to the death of Cæsar. This is not only a very spirited
poem, but, in many places at least, an excellent imitation. The
versification, though it frequently reminds us of his model, is
somewhat more negligent. May seems rarely to fall into Lucan’s
tumid extravagances, or to emulate his philosophical grandeur; but the
narration is almost as impetuous and rapid, the images as thronged;
and sometimes we have rather a happy imitation of the ingenious
sophisms Lucan is apt to employ. The death of Cato and that of Cæsar,
are among the passages well worthy of praise. In some lines on
Cleopatra’s intrigue with Cæsar, being married to her brother, he has
seized, with felicitous effect, not only the broken cadences, but the
love of moral paradox we find in Lucan.[509]

     [509]
       ---- Nec crimen inesse
       Concubitu nimium tali, Cleopatra, putabunt
       Qui Ptolemæorum thalamos, consuetaque jura
       Incestæ novere domûs, fratremque sorori
       Conjugio junctam, sacræ sub nomine tædæ
       Majus adulterio delictum; turpius îsset,
       Quis credat? justi ad thalamos Cleopatra mariti,
       Utque minus lecto peccaret, adultera facta est.

|Milton’s Latin poems.|

75. Many of the Latin poems of Milton were written in early life, some
even at the age of seventeen. His name, and the just curiosity of
mankind to trace the development of a mighty genius, would naturally
attract our regard. They are in themselves full of classical elegance,
of thoughts natural and pleasing, of a diction culled with taste from
the gardens of ancient poetry, of a versification remarkably
well-cadenced and grateful to the ear. There is in them, without a
marked originality, which Latin verse can rarely admit but at the
price of some incorrectness or impropriety, a more individual display
of the poet’s mind than we usually find. “In the elegies,” it is said
by Warton, a very competent judge of Latin poetry, “Ovid was
professedly Milton’s model for language and versification. They are
not, however, a perpetual and uniform tissue of Ovidian phraseology.
With Ovid in view he has an original manner and character of his own,
which exhibit a remarkable perspicuity of contexture, a native
facility and fluency. Nor does his observation of Roman models oppress
or destroy our great poet’s inherent powers of invention and
sentiment. I value these pieces as much for their fancy and genius as
for their style and expression. That Ovid, among the Latin poets, was
Milton’s favourite, appears not only from his elegiac but his
hexametric poetry. The versification of our author’s hexameters has
yet a different structure from that of the metamorphoses: Milton’s is
more clear, intelligible, and flowing; less desultory, less familiar,
and less embarrassed, with a frequent recurrence of periods. Ovid is
at once rapid and abrupt.”[510] Why Warton should have at once
supposed Ovid to be Milton’s favourite model in hexameters, and yet so
totally different as he represents him to be, seems hard to say. The
structure of our poet’s hexameters is much more Virgilian, nor do I
see the least resemblance in them to the manner of Ovid. These Latin
poems of Milton bear some traces of juvenility, but, for the most
part, such as please us for that very reason; it is the spring time of
an ardent and brilliant fancy, before the stern and sour spirit of
polemical puritanism had gained entrance into his mind, the voice of
the Allegro and of Comus.

     [510] Warton’s essay on the Latin poetry of Milton, inserted at
     length in Todd’s edition.




                          CHAPTER XXIII.

         HISTORY OF DRAMATIC LITERATURE FROM 1600 TO 1650.


                             SECT. I.

                 ON THE ITALIAN AND SPANISH DRAMA.

_Character of the Italian Theatre in this Age--Bonarelli--The
Spanish Theatre--Calderon--Appreciation of his merits as a Dramatic
Poet._

|Decline of the Italian Theatre.|

1. The Italian theatre, if we should believe one of its historians,
fell into total decay during the whole course of the seventeenth
century, though the number of dramatic pieces of various kinds was by
no means small. He makes a sort of apology for inserting in a copious
list of dramatic performances any that appeared after 1600, and stops
entirely with 1650.[511] But in this he seems hardly to have done
justice to a few, which, if not of remarkable excellence, might be
selected from the rest. Andreini is perhaps best known by name in
England, and that for one only of his eighteen dramas, the Adamo,
which has been supposed, on too precarious grounds, to have furnished
the idea of Paradise Lost in the original form, as it was planned by
its great author. The Adamo was first published in 1613, and
afterwards with amplification in 1641. It is denominated “A Sacred
Representation;” and, as Andreini was a player by profession, must be
presumed to have been brought upon the stage. It is, however, asserted
by Riccoboni, that those who wrote regular tragedies did not cause
them to be represented; probably he might have scrupled to give that
epithet to the Adamo. Hayley and Walker have reckoned it a composition
of considerable beauty.

     [511] Riccoboni, Hist. du Théâtre Italien, vol. i.

2. The majority of Italian tragedies in the seventeenth century were
taken, like the Adamo, from sacred subjects, including such as
ecclesiastical legends abundantly supplied. Few of these gave
sufficient scope, either by action or character, for the diversity of
excitement which the stage demands. Tragedies more truly deserving
that name were the Solimano of Bonarelli, the Tancredi of Campeggio,
the Demetrius of Rocco, which Salfi prefers to the rest, and the
Aristodemo of Carlo de Dottori. A drama by Testi, L’Isola di Alcina,
had some reputation; but in this, which the title betrays not to be a
legitimate tragedy, he introduced musical airs, and thus trod on the
boundaries of a rival art.[512] It has been suggested, with no
inconsiderable probability, that in her passion for the melodrame
Italy lost all relish for the graver tone of tragedy. Music, at least
the music of the opera, conspired with many more important
circumstances to spread an effeminacy over the public character.

     [512] Salfi, Continuation de Ginguéné, vol. xii., chap. 9.
     Besides this larger work, Salfi published, in 1829, a short essay
     on the Italian stage, Saggio Storico-Critico della Commedia
     Italiana.

|Filli di Sciro.|

3. The pastoral drama had always been allied to musical sentiment,
even though it might be without accompaniment. The feeling it inspired
was nearly that of the opera. In this style we find one imitation of
Tasso and Guarini, inferior in most qualities, yet deserving some
regard, and once popular even with the critics of Italy. This was the
Filli di Sciro of Bonarelli, published at Ferrara, a city already
fallen into the hands of priests, but round whose deserted palaces the
traditions of poetical glory still lingered, in 1607, and represented
by an academy in the same place soon afterwards. It passed through
numerous editions, and was admired, even beyond the Alps, during the
whole century, and perhaps still longer. It displays much of the bad
taste and affectation of that period. Bonarelli is as strained in the
construction of his story and in his characters, as he is in his
style. Celia, the heroine of this pastoral, struggles with a double
love, the original idea, as he might truly think, of his drama, which
he wrote a long dissertation in order to justify. It is, however, far
less conformable to the truth of nature than to the sophisticated
society for which he wrote. A wanton capricious court lady might
perhaps waver, with some warmth of inclination towards both, between
two lovers, “Alme dell’alma mia,” as Celia calls them, and be very
willing to possess either. But what is morbid in moral affection
seldom creates sympathy, or is fit either for narrative poetry or the
stage. Bonarelli’s diction is studied and polished to the highest
degree; and though its false refinement and affected graces often
displease us, the real elegance of insulated passages makes us pause
to admire. In harmony and sweetness of sound he seems fully equal to
his predecessors, Tasso and Guarini; but he has neither the pathos of
the one, nor the fertility of the other. The language and turn of
thought seems, more than in the Pastor Fido to be that of the opera,
wanting indeed nothing but the intermixture of air to be perfectly
adapted to music. Its great reputation, which even Crescimbeni does
his utmost to keep up, proves the decline of good taste in Italy, and
the lateness of its revival.[513]

     [513] Istoria della volgar Poesia, iv. 147. He places the Filli
     di Sciro next to the Aminta.

|Translations of Spanish dramas.|

4. A new fashion which sprang up about 1620, both marks the extinction
of taste for genuine tragedy, and by furnishing a substitute, stood in
the way of its revival. Translations from Spanish tragedies and
tragi-comedies, those of Lope de Vega and his successors, replaced the
native muse of Italy. These were in prose and in three acts, irregular
of course, and with very different characteristics from those of the
Italian school. “The very name of tragedy,” says Riccoboni, “became
unknown in our country; the _monsters_ which usurped the place
did not pretend to that glorious title. Tragi-comedies rendered from
the Spanish, such as Life is a Dream (of Calderon), the Samson, the
Guest of Stone, and others of the same class, were the popular
ornaments of the Italian stage.”[514]

     [514] Hist. du Théâtre Italien, i. 47. The extemporaneous comedy
     was called commedia dell’arte. “It consisted,” says Salfi, “in a
     mere sketch or plan of a dramatic composition, the parts in which
     having been hardly shadowed out were assigned to different actors
     who were to develop them in extemporaneous dialogue. Such a
     sketch was called a scenario, containing the subject of each
     scene, and those of Flaminio Scala were celebrated. Saggio
     Storico-Critico, p. 38. The pantomime, as it exists among us, is
     the descendant of this extemporaneous comedy, but with little of
     the wit and spirit of its progenitor.

|Extemporaneous comedy.|

5. The extemporaneous comedy had always been the amusement of the
Italian populace, not to say of all who wished to unbend their minds.
An epoch in this art was made in 1611 by Flaminio Scala, who first
published the outline or canvas of a series of these pieces, the
dialogue being of course reserved for the ingenious performers.[515]
This outline was not quite so short as that sometimes given in Italian
play bills; it explained the drift of each actor’s part in the scene,
but without any distinct hint of what he was to say. The construction
of these fables is censured by Riccoboni as both weak and licentious;
but it would not be reasonable to expect that it should be otherwise.
The talent of the actors supplied the deficiency of writers. A certain
quickness of wit, and tact in catching the shades of manner,
comparatively rare among us, are widely diffused in Italy. It would
be, we may well suspect, impossible to establish an extemporaneous
theatre in England which should not be stupidly vulgar.[516] But
Bergamo sent out many Harlequins, and Venice many Pantaloons. They
were respected, as brilliant wit ought to be. The emperor Mathias
ennobled Cecchini, a famous Harlequin, who was, however, a man of
letters. These actors sometimes took the plot of old comedies as their
outline, and disfigured them, so as hardly to be known, by their
extemporaneous dialogue.[517]

     [515] Salfi, p. 40.

     [516] This is only meant as to dialogue and as to the public
     stage. The talent of a single actor, like the late Charles
     Mathews, is not an exception; but even the power of strictly
     extemporaneous comedy, with the agreeable poignancy that the
     minor theatre requires, is not wanting among some whose station
     and habits of life restrain its exercise to the most private
     circles.

     [517] Riccoboni, Hist. du Théâtre Italien. Salfi, xii., 518. An
     elaborate disquisition on the extemporaneous comedy by Mr.
     Panizzi, in the Foreign Review for 1829 (not the Foreign
     Quarterly, but one early extinguished), derives it from the mimes
     and Atellanian comedies of ancient Italy, tracing them through
     the middle ages. The point seems sufficiently proved. The last
     company of performers in this old, though plebeian, family
     existed within about thirty years in Lombardy; a friend of mine
     at that time witnessed the last of the Harlequins. I need hardly
     say that this character was not a mere skipper over the stage, as
     we have seen him, but a very honest and lively young Bergamasque.
     The plays of Gasparo Gozzi, if plays they are, are mere hints to
     guide the wit of extemporaneous actors.

|Spanish stage.|

|Calderon. Number of his pieces.|

6. Lope de Vega was at the height of his glory at the beginning of
this century. Perhaps the majority of his dramas fall within it; but
enough has been said on the subject in the last volume. His
contemporaries and immediate successors were exceedingly numerous; the
effulgence of dramatic literature in Spain corresponding exactly in
time to that of England. Several are named by Bouterwek and Velasquez;
but one only, Pedro Calderon de la Barca, must be permitted to arrest
us. This celebrated man was born in 1600 and died 1683. From an early
age till after the middle of the century when he entered the church,
he contributed, with a fertility only eclipsed by that of Lope, a long
list of tragic, historic, comic, and tragi-comic dramas to the Spanish
stage. In the latter period of his life, he confined himself to the
religious pieces, called Autos Sacramentales. Of these, 97 are
published in the collective edition of 1726, besides 127 of his
regular plays. In one year, 1635, it is said that twelve of his
comedies appeared. But the authenticity of so large a number has been
questioned; he is said to have given a list of his sacred plays, at
the age of eighty, consisting of only 68. No collection was published
by himself. Some of his comedies, in the Spanish sense, it may be
observed, turn more or less on religious subjects, as their titles
show: El Purgatorio de San Patricio--La Devocion de la Cruz--Judas
Maccabeus--La Cisma de Inghilterra. He did not dislike contemporary
subjects. In El Sitio de Breda, we have Spinola, Nassau, and others
then living on the scene. Calderon’s metre is generally trochaic, of
eight or seven syllables, not always rhyming; but verses de arte
mayor, as they are called, or anapæstic lines of eleven or twelve
syllables, and also hendecasyllables frequently occur.

|His comedies.|

7. The comedies, those properly so called, _de capa y espada_,
which represent manners, are full of incident, but not perhaps crowded
so as to produce any confusion; the characters have nothing very
salient, but express the sentiments of gentlemen with frankness and
spirit. We find in every one a picture of Spain: gallantry, jealousy,
quick resentment of insult, sometimes deep revenge. The language of
Calderon is not unfrequently poetical, even in these lighter dramas,
but hyperbolical figures and insipid conceits deform its beauty. The
gracioso, or witty servant, is an unfailing personage; but I do not
know (my reading, however, being extremely limited) that Calderon
displays much brilliancy or liveliness in his sallies.

8. The plays of Calderon required a good deal of theatrical apparatus,
unless the good nature of the audience dispensed with it. But this
kind of comedy must have led to scenical improvements. They seem to
contain no indecency, nor do the intrigues ever become criminal, at
least in effect; most of the ladies indeed are unmarried. Yet they
have been severely censured by later critics on the score of their
morality, which is, no doubt, that of the stage, but considerably
purified in comparison with the Italian and French of the sixteenth
century. Calderon seems to bear no resemblance to any English writer
of his age, except, in a certain degree, to Beaumont and Fletcher. And
as he wants their fertility of wit and humour, we cannot, I presume,
place the best of his comedies on a level with even the second class
of theirs. But I should speak, perhaps, with more reserve of an
author, very few of whose plays I have read, and with whose language I
am very imperfectly acquainted; nor should I have ventured so far, if
the opinion of many European critics had not seemed to warrant my
frigid character of one who has sometimes been so much applauded.

|La Vida es Sueno.|

9. La Vida es Sueno rises, in its subject as well as style, above the
ordinary comedies of Calderon. Basilius, king of Poland, a deep
philosopher, has, by consulting the stars, had the misfortune of
ascertaining that his unborn son, Sigismund, would be under some
extraordinary influences of evil passion. He resolves in consequence
to conceal his birth, and to bring him up in a horrible solitude,
where, it hardly appears why, he is laden with chains, and covered
with skins of beasts, receiving meantime an excellent education, and
becoming able to converse on every subject, though destitute of all
society but that of his keeper Clotaldo. The inheritance of the crown
of Poland is supposed to have devolved on Astolfo, duke of Moscovy, or
on his cousin Estrella, who, as daughter of an elder branch, contests
it with him. The play opens by a scene, in which Rosaura, a Moscovite
lady, who, having been betrayed by Astolfo, has fled to Poland in
man’s attire, descends the almost impassable precipices which overhang
the small castle wherein Sigismund is confined. This scene and that in
which he first appears, are impressive and full of beauty, even now
that we are are become accustomed in excess to these theatrical
wonders. Clotaldo discovers the prince in conversation with a
stranger, who, by the king’s general order must be detained, and
probably for death. A circumstance leads him to believe that this
stranger is his son; but the Castilian loyalty transferred to Poland
forbids him to hesitate in obeying his instructions. The king,
however, who has fortunately determined to release his son, and try an
experiment upon the force of the stars, coming in at this time, sets
Rosaura at liberty.

10. In the next act Sigismund, who, by the help of a sleeping potion,
has been conveyed to the palace, wakes in a bed of down, and in the
midst of royal splendour. He has little difficulty in understanding
his new condition, but preserves a not unnatural resentment of his
former treatment. The malign stars prevail; he treats Astolfo with the
utmost arrogance, reviles and threatens his father, throws one of his
servants out of the window, attempts the life of Clotaldo and the
honour of Rosaura. The king, more convinced than ever of the truth of
astrology, directs another soporific draught to be administered; and
in the next scene we find the prince again in his prison. Clotaldo,
once more at his side, persuades him that his late royalty has passed
in a dream, wisely observing, however, that asleep or awake, we should
always do what is right.

11. Sigismund, after some philosophical reflections, prepares to
submit to the sad reality which has displaced his vision. But in the
third act, an unforeseen event recalls him to the world. The army,
become acquainted with his rights, and indignant that the king should
transfer them to Astolfo, break into his prison, and place him at
their head. Clotaldo expects nothing but death. A new revolution,
however, has taken place. Sigismund, corrected by the dismal
consequences of giving way to passion in his former dream, and
apprehending a similar waking once more, has suddenly overthrown the
sway of the sinister constellations that had enslaved him; he becomes
generous, mild, and master of himself; and the only pretext
for his disinheritance being removed, it is easy that he should be
reconciled to his father, that Astolfo, abandoning a kingdom he can no
longer claim, should espouse the injured Rosaura, and that the
reformed prince should become the husband of Estrella. The incidents
which chiefly relate to these latter characters, have been omitted in
this slight analysis.

12. This tragi-comedy presents a moral not so contemptible in the age
of Calderon, as it may now appear; that the stars may influence our
will, but do not oblige it. If we could extract an allegorical meaning
from the chimeras of astrology, and deem the stars but names for the
circumstances of birth and fortune which affect the character as well
as condition of every man, but yield to the persevering energy of
self-correction, we might see in this fable the shadow of a permanent
and valuable truth. As a play, it deserves considerable praise; the
events are surprising without excessive improbability, and succeed
each other without confusion; the thoughts are natural and poetically
expressed; and it requires, on the whole, less allowance for the
different standard of national taste than is usual in the Spanish
drama.

|A Secreto agravio secreta vengança.|

13. A Secreto agravio secreta vengança is a domestic tragedy which
turns on a common story--a husband’s revenge on one whom he
erroneously believes to be still a favoured, and who had been once an
accepted lover. It is something like Tancred and Sigismunda, except
that the lover is killed instead of the husband. The latter puts him
to death secretly, which gives name to the play. He afterwards sets
fire to his own house, and in the confusion designedly kills his wife.
A friend communicates the facts to his sovereign, Sebastian, king of
Portugal, who applauds what has been done. It is an atrocious play,
and speaks terrible things as to the state of public sentiment in
Spain, but abounds with interesting and touching passages.

|Style of Calderon.|

14. It has been objected to Calderon, and the following defence of
Bouterwek seems very insufficient, that his servants converse in a
poetical style like their masters. “The spirit, on these particular
occasions,” says that judicious but lenient critic, “must not be
misunderstood. The servants in Calderon’s comedies always imitate the
language of their masters. In most cases they express themselves like
the latter, in the natural language of real life, and often divested
of that colouring of the ideas, without which a dramatic work ceases
to be a poem. But whenever romantic gallantry speaks in the language
of tenderness, admiration, or flattery, then, according to Spanish
custom, every idea becomes a metaphor; and Calderon, who was a
thorough Spaniard, seized these opportunities to give the reins to his
fancy, and to suffer it to take a bold lyric flight beyond the
boundaries of nature. On such occasions the most extravagant
metaphoric language, in the style of the Italian Marinists, did not
appear unnatural to a Spanish audience; and even Calderon himself had
for that style a particular fondness, to the gratification of which he
sacrificed a chaster taste. It was his ambition to become a more
refined Lope de Vega, or a Spanish Marini. Thus, in his play, Bien
vengas mal, si vengas solo, a waiting-maid, addressing her young
mistress who has risen in a gay humour, says--“Aurora would not have
done wrong had she slumbered that morning in her snowy crystal, for
that the sight of her mistress’s charms would suffice to draw aside
the curtains from the couch of Sol.” She adds that, using a Spanish
idea, “it might then indeed be said that the sun had risen in her
lady’s eyes.” Valets, on the like occasion, speak in the same style;
and when lovers address compliments to their mistresses, and these
reply in the same strain, the play of far-fetched metaphors is
aggravated by antitheses to a degree which is intolerable to any but a
Spanish-formed taste. But it must not be forgotten that this language
of gallantry was in Calderon’s time spoken by the fashionable world,
and that it was a vernacular property of the ancient national
poetry.”[518] What is this but to confess that Calderon had not genius
to raise himself above his age, and that he can be read only as a
“Triton of the minnows;” one who is great but in comparison with his
neighbours? It will not convert bad writing into good to tell us, as
is perpetually done, that we must place ourselves in the author’s
position, and make allowances for the taste of his age, or the temper
of his nation. All this is true, relatively to the author himself, and
may be pleaded against a condemnation of his talents; but the excuse
of the man is not that of the work.

     [518] P. 507. It has been ingeniously hinted in the Quarterly
     Review, vol. xxv., that the high-flown language of servants in
     Spanish dramas, is a parody on that of their masters, and
     designed to make it ridiculous. But this is probably too refined
     an excuse.

|His merits sometimes over-rated.|

15. The fame of Calderon has been latterly revived in Europe through
the praise of some German critics, but especially the unbounded
panegyric of one of their greatest men, William Schlegel. The passage
is well known for its brilliant eloquence. Every one must differ with
reluctance and respect from this accomplished writer; and an
Englishman, acknowledging with gratitude and admiration what Schlegel
has done for the glory of Shakspeare, ought not to grudge the laurels
he showers upon another head. It is, however, rather as a poet than a
dramatist that Calderon has received this homage; and in his poetry it
seems to be rather bestowed on the mysticism, which finds a responsive
chord in so many German hearts, than on what we should consider a more
universal excellence, a sympathy with, and a power over all that is
true and beautiful in nature and in man. Sismondi (but the distance
between Weimar and Geneva in matters of taste is incomparably greater
than by the public road), dissenting from this eulogy of Schlegel,
which he fairly lays before the reader, stigmatizes Calderon as
eminently the poet of the age wherein he lived, the age of Philip IV.
Salfi goes so far as to say we can hardly read Calderon without
indignation; since he seems to have had no view but to make his genius
subservient to the lowest prejudices and superstitions of his
country.[519] In the 25th volume of the Quarterly Review an elaborate
and able critique on the plays of Calderon seems to have estimated him
without prejudice on either side. “His boundless and inexhaustible
fertility of invention, his quick power of seizing and prosecuting
everything with dramatic effect, the unfailing animal spirits of his
dramas, if we may venture on the expression, the general loftiness and
purity of his sentiments, the rich facility of his verse, the
abundance of his language, and the clearness and precision with which
he embodies his thoughts in words and figures, entitle him to a high
rank as to the imagination and creative faculty of a poet, but we
cannot consent to enrol him among the mighty masters of the human
breast.”[520] His total want of truth to nature, even the ideal nature
which poetry embodies, justifies, at least, this sentence. “The
wildest flights of Biron and Romeo,” it is observed, “are tame to the
heroes of Calderon; the Asiatic pomp of expression, the exuberance of
metaphor, the perpetual recurrence of the same figures, which the
poetry of Spain derived from its intercourse with the Arabian
conquerors of the peninsula, are lavished by him in all their fulness.
Every address of a lover to a mistress is thickly studded with stars
and flowers; her looks are always nets of gold, her lips rubies, and
her heart a rock, which the rivers of his tears attempt in vain to
melt. In short, the language of the heart is entirely abandoned for
that of the fancy; the brilliant but false concetti which have
infected the poetical literature of every country, and which have been
universally exploded by pure taste, glitter in every page, and intrude
into every speech.”[521]

     [519] Hist. Litt. de Ginguéné, vol. xii., p. 499.

     [520] P. 24.

     [521] P. 14.


                             SECT. II.

                       ON THE FRENCH DRAMA.

_Early French Dramatists of this Period--Corneille--His principal
Tragedies--Rotrou._

|Plays of Hardy.|

16. Among the company who performed at the second theatre of Paris,
that established in the Marais, was Hardy, who, like Shakspeare,
uniting both arts, was himself the author of 600, or, as some say, 800
dramatic pieces. It is said that forty-one of these are extant in the
collection of his works which I have never seen. Several of them were
written, learned by heart, and represented within a week. His own
inventions are the worst of all; his tragedies and tragi-comedies are
borrowed with as close an adherence to the original text as possible,
from Homer or Plutarch or Cervantes. They have more incident than
those of his predecessors, and are somewhat less absurd; but Hardy is
a writer of little talent. The Marianne is the most tolerable of his
tragedies. In these he frequently abandoned the chorus, and even where
he introduces it, does not regularly close the act with an ode.”[522]

     [522] Fontenelle, Hist. du Théâtre Français (in Œuvres de
     Fontenelle, iii., 72). Suard, Mélanges de Littérature, vol. iv.

17. In the comedies of Hardy, and in the many burlesque farces
represented under Henry IV. and Louis XIII., no regard was paid to
decency, either in the language or the circumstances. Few persons of
rank, especially ladies, attended the theatres.[523] These
were first attracted by pastoral representations, of which Racan gave
a successful example in his Artenice. It is hardly, however, to be
called a drama.[524] But the stage, being no longer abandoned to the
populace, and a more critical judgment in French literature gaining
ground, encouraged by Richelieu, who built a large room in his palace
for the representation of Mirame, an indifferent tragedy, part of
which was suspected to be his own,[525] the ancient theatre began to
be studied, rules were laid down and partially observed, a perfect
decorum replaced the licentiousness and gross language of the old
writers. Mairet and Rotrou, though without rising, in their first
plays, much above Hardy, just served to prepare the way for the father
and founder of the national theatre.[526]

     [523] Suard, p. 134. Rotrou boasts that since he wrote for the
     theatre, it had become so well-regulated that respectable women
     might go to it with as little scruple as to the Luxembourg
     garden. Corneille, however, has, in general, the credit of having
     purified the stage; after his second piece, Clitandre, he
     admitted nothing licentious in his comedies. The only remain of
     grossness, Fontenelle observes, was that the lovers _se
     tutoyoient_; but, as he gravely goes on to remark, le tutoiement
     ne choque pas les bonnes mœurs; il ne choque que la politesse et
     la vraie galanterie, p. 91. But the last instance of this heinous
     offence is in Le Menteur.

     [524] Suard, ubi suprà.

     [525] Fontenelle, p. 84, 96.

     [526] Id. p. 78. It is difficult in France, as it is with us, to
     ascertain the date of plays, because they were often represented
     for years before they came from the press. It is conjectured by
     Fontenelle, that one or two pieces of Mairet and Rotrou may have
     preceded any by Corneille.

18. The Melite of Corneille, his first production, was represented in
1629, when he was twenty-three years of age. This is only
distinguished, as some say, from those of Hardy by a greater vigour of
style; but Fontenelle gives a very different opinion. It had, at
least, a success which caused a new troop of actors to be established
in the Marais. His next, Clitandre, it is agreed, is not so good. But
La Veuve is much better; irregular in action, but with spirit,
character, and well-invented situations, it is the first model of the
higher comedy.[527] These early comedies must, in fact, have been
relatively of considerable merit, since they raised Corneille to high
reputation, and connected him with the literary men of his time. The
Medea, though much borrowed from Seneca, gave a tone of grandeur and
dignity unknown before to French tragedy. This appeared in 1635, and
was followed by the Cid next year.

     [527] Suard, Fontenelle, La Harpe.

|The Cid.|

19. Notwithstanding the defence made by La Harpe, I cannot but agree
with the French Academy, in their criticism on this play, that the
subject is essentially ill-chosen. No circumstances can be imagined,
no skill can be employed, that will reconcile the mind to the marriage
of a daughter with one that has shed her father’s blood. And the law
of unity of time, which crowds every event of the drama within a few
hours, renders the promised consent of Chimène (for such it is) to
this union still more revolting and improbable.[528] The knowledge of
this termination re-acts on the reader during a second perusal, so as
to give an irresistible impression of her insincerity in her previous
solicitations for his death. She seems, indeed, in several passages,
little else than a tragic coquette, and one of the most odious
kind.[529] The English stage at that time was not exempt from great
violations of nature and decorum; yet, had the subject of the Cid
fallen into the hands of Beaumont and Fletcher, and it is one which
they would have willingly selected for the sake of the effective
situations and contrasts of passion it affords, the part of Chimène
would have been managed by them with great warmth and spirit, though
probably not less incongruity and extravagance; but I can scarcely
believe that the conclusion would have been so much in the style of
comedy. Her death, or retirement into a monastery, would have seemed
more consonant to her own dignity and to that of a tragic subject.
Corneille was, however, borne out by the tradition of Spain, and by
the authority of Guillen de Castro, whom he imitated.

     [528] La Harpe has said that Chimène does not promise at last to
     marry Rodrigue, though the spectator perceives that she will do
     so. He forgets that she has commissioned her lover’s sword in the
     duel with Don Sancho:--

       Sors vainqueur d’un combat dont Chimène est le prix.--Act v.,
       sc. 1.

     [529] In these lines, for example, of the third act,
     scene 4th:--

       Malgré les feux si beaux qui rompent ma colère,
       Je ferai mon possible à bien venger mon père;,
       Mais malgré la rigueur d’un si cruel devoir,
       Mon unique souhait est de ne rien pouvoir.

     It is true that he found this in his Spanish original, but that
     does not render the imitation judicious, or the sentiment either
     moral, or even theatrically specious.

|Style of Corneille.|

20. The language of Corneille is elevated, his sentiments, if
sometimes hyperbolical, generally noble, when he has not to deal with
the passion of love; conscious of the nature of his own powers, he has
avoided subjects wherein this must entirely predominate; it was to be,
as he thought, an accessory but never a principal source of dramatic
interest. In this, however, as a general law of tragedy, he was
mistaken; love is by no means unfit for the chief source of tragic
distress, but comes in generally with a cold and feeble effect as a
subordinate emotion. In those Roman stories he most affected, its
expression could hardly be otherwise than insipid and incongruous.
Corneille probably would have dispensed with it like Shakspeare in
Coriolanus and Julius Cæsar; but the taste of his contemporaries,
formed in the pedantic school of romance, has imposed fetters on his
genius in almost every drama. In the Cid, where the subject left him
no choice, he has perhaps succeeded better in the delineation of love
than on any other occasion; yet even here we often find the cold
exaggerations of complimentary verse, instead of the voice of nature.
But other scenes of this play, especially in the first act, which
bring forward the proud Castilian characters of the two fathers of
Rodrigo and Chimène, are full of the nervous eloquence of Corneille;
and the general style, though it may not have borne the fastidious
criticism either of the Academy or of Voltaire, is so far above
anything which had been heard on the French stage, that it was but a
very frigid eulogy in the former to say that it “had acquired a
considerable reputation among works of the kind.” It had at that time
astonished Paris; but the prejudices of Cardinal Richelieu and the
envy of inferior authors, joined perhaps to the proverbial
unwillingness of critical bodies to commit themselves by warmth of
praise, had some degree of influence on the judgment which the Academy
pronounced on the Cid, though I do not think it was altogether so
unjust and uncandid as has sometimes been supposed.

|Les Horaces.|

21. The next tragedy of Corneille, Les Horaces, is hardly open to less
objection than the Cid; not so much because there is, as the French
critics have discovered, a want of unity in the subject, which I do
not quite perceive, nor because the fifth act is tedious and
uninteresting, as from the repulsiveness of the story, and the jarring
of the sentiments with our natural sympathies. Corneille has
complicated the legend in Livy with the marriage of the younger
Horatius to the sister of the Curiatii, and thus placed his two female
personages in a nearly similar situation, which he has taken little
pains to diversify by any contrast in their characters. They speak on
the contrary, nearly in the same tone, and we see no reason why the
hero of the tragedy should not, as he seems half disposed, have
followed up the murder of his sister by that of his wife. More skill
is displayed in the opposition of character between the combatants
themselves; but the mild, though not less courageous or patriotic,
Curiatius attaches the spectator, who cares nothing for the triumph of
Rome, or the glory of the Horatian name. It must be confessed that the
elder Horatius is nobly conceived; the Roman energy, of which we find
but a caricature in his brutish son, shines out in him with an
admirable dramatic spirit. I shall be accused, nevertheless, of want
of taste, when I confess that his celebrated _Qu’il mourût_, has
always seemed to me less eminently sublime than the general suffrage
of France has declared it. There is nothing very novel or striking in
the proposition, that a soldier’s duty is to die in the field rather
than desert his post by flight; and in a tragedy full of the
hyperboles of Roman patriotism, it appears strange that we should be
astonished at that which is the principle of all military honour. The
words are emphatic in their position, and calculated to draw forth the
actor’s energy; but this is an artifice of no great skill; and one can
hardly help thinking, that a spectator in the pit would spontaneously
have anticipated the answer of a warlike father to the feminine
question,

     Que vouliez-vous qu’il fît contre trois?

The style of this tragedy is reckoned by the critics superior to that
of the Cid; the nervousness and warmth of Corneille is more displayed;
and it is more free from incorrect and trivial expression.

|Cinna.|

22. Cinna, the next in order of time, is probably that tragedy of
Corneille which would be placed at the head by a majority of
suffrages. His eloquence reached here its highest point; the speeches
are longer, more vivid in narration, more philosophical in argument,
more abundant in that strain of Roman energy, which he had derived
chiefly from Lucan, more emphatic and condensed in their language and
versification. But, as a drama, this is deserving of little praise;
the characters of Cinna and Maximus are contemptible, that of
Emilia is treacherous and ungrateful. She is indeed the type of a
numerous class who have followed her in works of fiction, and
sometimes, unhappily, in real life; the female patriot, theoretically,
at least, an assassin, but commonly compelled, by the iniquity of the
times, to console herself in practice with safer transgressions. We
have had some specimens; and other nations, to their shame and sorrow,
have had more. But even the magnanimity of Augustus, whom we have not
seen exposed to instant danger, is uninteresting, nor do we perceive
why he should bestow his friendship as well as his forgiveness on the
detected traitor that cowers before him. It is one of those subjects,
which might, by the invention of a more complex plot than history
furnishes, have better excited the spectator’s attention, but not his
sympathy.

|Polyeucte.|

23. A deeper interest belongs to Polyeucte; and this is the only
tragedy of Corneille wherein he affects the heart. There is indeed a
certain incongruity which we cannot overcome between the sanctity of
Christian martyrdom and the language of love, especially when the
latter is rather the more prominent of the two in the conduct of the
drama.[530] But the beautiful character of Pauline would redeem much
greater defects than can be ascribed to this tragedy. It is the
noblest, perhaps, on the French stage, and conceived with admirable
delicacy and dignity.[531] In the style, however, of Polyeucte, there
seems to be some return towards the languid tone of common-place which
had been wholly thrown off in Cinna.[532]

     [530] The coterie at the Hôtel Rambouillet thought that Polyeucte
     would not succeed, on account of its religious character.
     Corneille, it is said, was about to withdraw his tragedy, but was
     dissuaded by an actor of so little reputation that he did not
     even bear a part in the performance. Fontenelle, p. 101.

     [531] Fontenelle thinks that it shows “un grand attachement à son
     devoir, et un grand caractère” in Pauline to desire that Severus
     should save her husband’s life, instead of procuring the latter
     to be executed that she might marry her lover. Réflexions sur la
     Poétique, sect. 16. This is rather an odd notion of what is
     sufficient to constitute an heroic character. It is not the
     conduct of Pauline, which in every Christian or virtuous woman
     must naturally be the same, but the fine sentiments and language
     which accompany it, that render her part so noble.

     [532] In the second scene of the second act, between Severus and
     Pauline, two characters of the most elevated class, the former
     quits the stage with this line: Adieu trop vertueux objet, et
     trop charmant. The latter replies: Adieu, trop malheureux, et
     trop parfait amant.

|Rodogune.|

24. Rodogune is said to have been a favourite with the author. It can
hardly be so with the generality of his readers. The story has all the
atrocity of the older school, from which Corneille had emancipated the
stage. It borders even on ridicule. Two princes, kept by their mother,
one of those furies whom our own Webster or Marston would have
delighted to draw, in ignorance which is the elder, and consequently
entitled to the throne, are enamoured of Rodogune. Their mothers make
it a condition of declaring the succession, that they shall shed the
blood of this princess. Struck with horror at such a proposition, they
refer their passion to the choice of Rodogune, who, in her turn,
demands the death of their mother. The embarrassment of these amiable
youths may be conceived. La Harpe extols the fifth act of this
tragedy, and it may perhaps be effective in representation.

|Pompey.|

25. Pompey, sometimes inaccurately called the Death of Pompey, is more
defective in construction than even any other tragedy of Corneille.
The hero, if Pompey is such, never appears on the stage, and his death
being recounted at the beginning of the second act, the real subject
of the piece, so far as it can be said to have one, is the punishment
of his assassins; a retribution demanded by the moral sense of the
spectator, but hardly important enough for dramatic interest. The
character of Cæsar is somewhat weakened by his passion for Cleopatra,
which assumes more the tone of devoted gallantry than truth or
probability warrant; but Cornelia, though with some Lucanic
extravagance, is full of a Roman nobleness of spirit, which renders
her, after Pauline, but at a long interval, the finest among the
female characters of Corneille. The language is not beneath that of
his earlier tragedies.

|Heraclius.|

26. In Heraclius we begin to find an inferiority of style. Few
passages, especially after the first act, are written with much
vigour; and the plot, instead of the faults we may ascribe to some of
the former dramas, a too great simplicity and want of action, offends
by the perplexity of its situations, and still more by their nature;
since they are wholly among the proper resources of comedy. The true
and the false Heraclius, each uncertain of his paternity, each afraid
to espouse one who may or may not be his sister, the embarrassment of
Phocas, equally irritated by both, but aware that in putting either to
death, he may punish his own son, the art of Leontine who produces
this confusion, not by silence but by a series of inconsistent
falsehoods, all these are in themselves ludicrous, and such as in
comedy could produce no other effect than laughter.

|Nicomède.|

27. Nicomède is generally placed by the critics below Heraclius, an
opinion in which I should hardly concur. The plot is feeble and
improbable, but more tolerable than the strange entanglements of
Heraclius; and the spirit of Corneille shines out more in the
characters and sentiments. None of his later tragedies deserve much
notice, except that we find one of his celebrated scenes in Sertorius,
a drama of little general merit. Nicomède and Sertorius were both
first represented after the middle of the century.

|Faults and beauties of Corneille.|

28. Voltaire has well distinguished the fine scenes of Corneille, and
the fine tragedies of Racine. It can perhaps hardly be said that, with
the exception of Polyeucte, the former has produced a single play
which, taken as a whole, we can commend. The keys of the passions were
not given to his custody. But in that which he introduced upon the
French stage, and which long continued to be its boast, impressive
energetic declamation, thoughts masculine, bold, and sometimes
sublime, conveyed in a style for the most part clear, condensed, and
noble, and in a rhythm sonorous and satisfactory to the ear, he has
not since been equalled. Lucan, it has always been said, was the
favourite study of Corneille. No one indeed can admire one who has not
a strong relish for the other. That the tragedian has ever surpassed
the highest flights of his Roman prototype, it might be difficult to
prove; but if his fire is not more intense, it is accompanied by less
smoke; his hyperboles, for such he has, are less frequent and less
turgid; his taste is more judicious, he knows better, especially in
description, what to chuse and where to stop. Lucan, however, would
have disdained the politeness of the amorous heroes of Corneille, and
though often tedious, often offensive to good taste, is never languid
or ignoble.

|Le Menteur.|

29. The first French comedy written in polite language without low wit
or indecency, is due to Corneille, or rather, in some degree, to the
Spanish author whom he copied in Le Menteur. This has been improved a
little by Goldoni, and our own well-known farce, The Liar, is borrowed
from both. The incidents are diverting, but it belongs to the
subordinate class of comedy, and a better moral would have been shown
in the disgrace of the principal character. Another comedy about the
same time, Le Pedant Joué, by Cyrano de Bergerac, had much success. It
has been called the first comedy in prose, and the first wherein a
provincial dialect is introduced; the remark, as to the former
circumstances, shows a forgetfulness of Larivey. Molière has borrowed
freely from this play.

|Other French tragedies.|

30. The only tragedies, after those of Corneille, anterior to 1650,
which the French themselves hold worthy of remembrance, are the
Sophonisbe of Mairet; in which some characters, and some passages are
vigorously conceived, but the style is debased by low and ludicrous
thoughts, which later critics never fail to point out with
severity;[533] the Scevole of Duryer, the best of several good
tragedies, full of lines of great simplicity in expression, but which
seem to gain force by their simplicity, by one who, though never
sublime, adopted with success the severe reasoning style of
Corneille;[534] the Marianne of Tristan, which, at its appearance in
1637, passed for a rival of the Cid, and remained for a century on the
stage, but is now ridiculed for a style alternately turgid and
ludicrous; and the Wenceslas of Rotrou, which had not ceased thirty
years since to be represented, and perhaps is so still.

     [533] Suard, ubi supra.

     [534] Suard, p. 196.

|Wenceslas of Rotrou.|

31. This tragedy, the best work of a fertile dramatist, who did
himself honour by a ready acknowledgment of the superiority of
Corneille, instead of canvassing the suffrages of those who always
envy genius, is by no means so much below that great master, as, in
the unfortunate efforts of his later years, he was below himself.
Wenceslas was represented in 1647. It may be admitted that Rotrou had
conceived his plot, which is wholly original, in the spirit of
Corneille; the masculine energy of the sentiments, the delineation of
bold and fierce passions, of noble and heroic love, the attempt even
at political philosophy, are copies of that model. It seems indeed
that in several scenes Rotrou must, out of mere generosity to
Corneille, have determined to out-do one of his most exceptionable
passages, the consent of Chimène to espouse the Cid. His own
curtain drops on the vanishing reluctance of his heroine to accept the
hand of a monster whom she hated, and who had just murdered her lover
in his own brother. It is the Lady Anne of Shakspeare; but Lady Anne
is not a heroine. Wenceslas is not unworthy of comparison with the
second class of Corneille’s tragedies. But the ridiculous tone of
language and sentiment, which the heroic romance had rendered popular,
and from which Corneille did not wholly emancipate himself, often
appears in this piece of Rotrou; the intrigue is rather too complex,
in the Spanish style, for tragedy; the diction seems frequently
obnoxious to the most indulgent criticism; but above all, the story is
essentially ill contrived, ending in the grossest violation of
poetical justice ever witnessed on the stage, the impunity and even
the triumph of one of the worst characters that was ever drawn.


                            SECT. III.

                       ON THE ENGLISH DRAMA.

_London Theatres--Shakspeare--Jonson--Beaumont and Fletcher--Massinger--
Other English Dramatists._

|Popularity of the stage under Elizabeth.|

32. The English drama had been encouraged through the reign of
Elizabeth by increasing popularity, notwithstanding the strenuous
opposition of a party sufficiently powerful to enlist the magistracy,
and, in a certain measure, the government on its side. A progressive
improvement in dramatic writing, possibly also, though we know less of
this, in the skill of the actors, ennobled, while it kept alive, the
public taste; the crude and insipid compositions of an Edwards or a
Whetstone, among numbers more whose very names are lost, gave way to
the real genius of Greene and Marlowe, and after them, to Shakspeare.

|Number of theatres.|

33. At the beginning of this century, not less than eleven regular
play-houses had been erected in London and its suburbs; several of
which, it appears, were still in use, an order of the privy council in
1600, restraining the number to two being little regarded. Of these,
the most important was that of the Black Friars, with which another,
called the Globe, on the opposite side of the river, was connected;
the same company performing at the former in winter, at the latter in
summer. This was the company of which Burbage, the best actor of the
day, was chief, and to which Shakspeare, who was also a proprietor,
belonged. Their names appear in letters patent, and other legal
instruments.[535]

     [535] Shakspeare probably retired from the stage, as a performer,
     soon after 1603; his name appears among the actors of Sejanus in
     1603, but not among those of Volpone in 1605. There is a
     tradition that James I. wrote a letter thanking Shakspeare for
     the compliment paid to him in Macbeth. Malone, it seems, believed
     this: Mr. Collier does not, and probably most people will be
     equally sceptical. Collier, i. 370.

|Encouraged by James.|

34. James was fond of these amusements, and had encouraged them in
Scotland. The Puritan influence, which had been sometimes felt in the
council of Elizabeth, came speedily to an end; though the
representation of plays on Sundays, a constant theme of complaint, but
never wholly put down, was now abandoned, and is not even tolerated by
the declaration of sports. The several companies of players, who, in
her reign, had been under the nominal protection of some men of rank,
were now denominated the servants of the king, the queen, or other
royal personages.[536] They were relieved from some of the vexatious
control they had experienced, and subjected only to the gentle sway of
the Master of the Revels. It was his duty to revise all dramatic works
before they were represented, to exclude profane and unbecoming
language, and specially to take care that there should be no
interference with matters of state. The former of these functions must
have been rather laxly exercised; but there are instances in which a
licence was refused on account of very recent history being touched in
a play.

     [536] Id. p. 347. But the privilege of peers to grant licences to
     itinerant players, given by statute 14 Eliz., c. 5, and 39 Eliz.,
     c. 4, was taken away by 1 Jac. I., c. 7, so that they became
     liable to be treated as vagrants. Accordingly there were no
     established theatres in any provincial city, and strollers,
     though dear to the lovers of the buskin, were always obnoxious to
     grave magistrates. The licence, however, granted to Burbage,
     Shakspeare, Hemmings, and others in 1603 authorizes them to act
     plays not only at the usual house, but in any other part of the
     kingdom. Burbage was reckoned the best actor of his time, and
     excelled as Richard III.

|General taste for the stage.|

35. The reigns of James and Charles were the glory of our theatre.
Public applause, and the favour of princes, were well bestowed on
those bright stars of our literature who then appeared. In 1623, when
Sir Henry Herbert became Master of the Revels, there were five
companies of actors in London. This indeed is something less
than at the accession of James, and the latest historian of the drama
suggests the increase of puritanical sentiments as a likely cause of
this apparent decline. But we find little reason to believe that there
was any decline in the public taste for the theatre; and it may be as
probable an hypothesis, that the excess of competition, at the end of
Elizabeth’s reign, had rendered some undertakings unprofitable; the
greater fishes, as usual in such cases, swallowing up the less. We
learn from Howes, the continuator of Stow, that within sixty years
before 1631 seventeen play-houses had been built in the metropolis.
These were now larger and more convenient than before. They were
divided into public and private; not that the former epithet was
inapplicable to both; but those styled public were not completely
roofed, nor well provided with seats, nor were the performances by
candlelight; they resembled more the rude booths we still see at
fairs, or the constructions in which interludes are represented by day
in Italy; while private theatres, such as that of the Black Friars,
were built in nearly the present form. It seems to be the more
probable opinion that moveable scenery was unknown on these theatres.
“It is a fortunate circumstance,” Mr. Collier has observed, “for the
poetry of our old plays that it was so; the imagination of the auditor
only was appealed to: and we owe to the absence of painted canvas many
of the finest descriptive passages in Shakspeare, his contemporaries,
and immediate followers. The introduction of scenery gives the date to
the commencement of the decline of our dramatic poetry.” In this
remark, which seems as original as just, I entirely concur. Even in
this age the prodigality of our theatre in its peculiar boast,
scene-painting, can hardly keep pace with the creative powers of
Shakspeare; it is well that he did not live when a manager was to
estimate his descriptions by the cost of realizing them on canvas, or
we might never have stood with Lear on the cliffs of Dover, or amidst
the palaces of Venice with Shylock and Antonio. The scene is
perpetually changed in our old drama, precisely because it was not
changed at all. A powerful argument might otherwise have been
discovered in favour of the unity of place, that it is very cheap.

|Theatres closed by the parliament.|

36. Charles, as we might expect, was not less inclined to this liberal
pleasure than his predecessors. It was to his own cost that Prynne
assaulted the stage in his immense volume, the Histrio-mastix. Even
Milton, before the foul spirit had wholly entered into him, extolled
the learned sock of Jonson, and the wild wood-notes of Shakspeare. But
these days were soon to pass away; the ears of Prynne were avenged; by
an order of the two houses of parliament, Sept. 2, 1642, the theatres
were closed, as a becoming measure, during the season of public
calamity and impending civil war; but, after some unsuccessful
attempts to evade this prohibition, it was thought expedient, in the
complete success of the party who had always abhorred the drama, to
put a stop to it altogether; and another ordinance of Jan. 22, 1648,
reciting the usual objections to all such entertainments, directed the
theatres to be rendered unserviceable. We must refer the reader to the
valuable work which has supplied the sketch of these pages for further
knowledge;[537] it is more our province to follow the track of those
who most distinguished a period so fertile in dramatic genius; and
first, that of the greatest of them all.

     [537] I have made no particular references to Mr. Collier’s
     _double_ work, The History of English Dramatic Poetry, and Annals
     of the Stage; it will be necessary for the reader to make use of
     his index; but few books lately published contain so much
     valuable and original information, though not entirely arranged
     in the most convenient manner. He seems, nevertheless, to have
     obligations to Dodsley’s preface to his Collection of Old Plays,
     or rather, perhaps, to Reed’s edition of it.

|Shakspeare’s Twelfth Night.|

37. Those who originally undertook to marshal the plays of Shakspeare
according to chronological order, always attending less to internal
evidence than to the very fallible proofs of publication they could
obtain, placed Twelfth Night last of all, in 1612 or 1613. It
afterwards rose a little higher in the list; but Mr. Collier has
finally proved that it was on the stage early in 1602, and was at that
time chosen, probably as rather a new piece, for representation at one
of the Inns of Court.[538] The general style resembles, in my
judgment, that of Much Ado about Nothing, which is referred with
probability to the year 1600. Twelfth Night, notwithstanding some very
beautiful passages, and the humorous absurdity of Malvolio, has not
the coruscations of wit and spirit of character that distinguish the
excellent comedy it seems to have immediately followed; nor is the
plot nearly so well constructed. Viola would be more interesting, if
she had not indelicately, as well as unfairly towards Olivia,
determined to win the Duke’s heart before she had seen him. The part
of Sebastian has all that improbability which belongs to mistaken
identity, without the comic effect for the sake of which that is
forgiven in Plautus and in the Comedy of Errors.

     [538] Vol. i., p. 327.

|Merry Wives of Windsor.|

38. The Merry Wives of Windsor is that work of Shakspeare in which he
has best displayed English manners; for though there is something of
this in the historical plays, yet we rarely see in them such a picture
of actual life as comedy ought to represent. It may be difficult to
say for what cause he has abstained from a source of gaiety whence his
prolific invention and keen eye for the diversities of character might
have drawn so much. The Masters Knowell and Well-born, the young
gentlemen who spend their money freely, and make love to rich widows,
an insipid race of personages, it must be owned, recur for ever in the
old plays of James’s reign; but Shakspeare threw an ideality over this
class of characters, the Bassanios, the Valentines, the Gratianos, and
placed them in scenes which neither by dress nor manners recalled the
prose of ordinary life.[539] In this play, however, the English
gentleman, in age and youth, is brought upon the stage, slightly
caricatured in Shallow, and far more so in Slender. The latter,
indeed, is a perfect satire, and I think was so intended, on the
brilliant youth of the provinces, such as we may believe it to have
been before the introduction of newspapers and turnpike roads, awkward
and boobyish among civil people, but at home in rude sports, and proud
of exploits at which the town would laugh, yet perhaps with more
courage and good nature than the laughers. No doubt can be raised that
the family of Lucy is ridiculed in Shallow; but those who have had
recourse to the old fable of the deer stealing, forget that Shakspeare
never lost sight of his native county, and went, perhaps every summer,
to Stratford. It is not impossible that some arrogance of the
provincial squires towards a player, whom, though a gentleman by birth
and the recent grant of arms, they might not reckon such, excited his
malicious wit to those admirable delineations.

     [539] “No doubt,” says Coleridge, “they (Beaumont and Fletcher)
     imitated the ease of gentlemanly conversation better than
     Shakspeare, who was unable not to be too much _associated_ to
     succeed in this.” Table Talk, ii., 396. I am not quite sure that
     I understand this expression; but probably the meaning is not
     very different from what I have said.

39. The Merry Wives of Windsor was first printed in 1602, but very
materially altered in a subsequent edition. It is wholly comic; so
that Dodd, who published the Beauties of Shakspeare, confining himself
to poetry, says it is the only play which afforded him nothing to
extract. This play does not excite a great deal of interest; for Anne
Page is but a sample of a character not very uncommon, which, under a
garb of placid and decorous mediocrity, is still capable of pursuing
its own will. But in wit and humorous delineation no other goes beyond
it. If Falstaff seems, as Johnson has intimated, to have lost some of
his powers of merriment, it is because he is humiliated to a point
where even his invention and impudence cannot bear him off victorious.
In the first acts he is still the same Jack Falstaff of the Boar’s
Head. Jonson’s earliest comedy, Every Man in his Humour, had appeared
a few years before the Merry Wives of Windsor; they both turn on
English life in the middle classes, and on the same passion of
jealousy. If, then, we compare these two productions of our greatest
comic dramatists, the vast superiority of Shakspeare will appear
undeniable. Kitely, indeed, has more energy, more relief, more perhaps
of what might appear to his temper matter for jealousy, than the
wretched, narrow-minded Ford; he is more of a gentleman, and commands
a certain degree of respect; but dramatic justice is better dealt upon
Ford by rendering him ridiculous, and he suits better the festive
style of Shakspeare’s most amusing play. His light-hearted wife, on
the other hand, is drawn with more spirit than Dame Kitely; and the
most ardent admirer of Jonson would not oppose Master Stephen to
Slender, or Bobadil to Falstaff. The other characters are not parallel
enough to admit of comparison; but in their diversity (nor is
Shakspeare, perhaps, in any one play more fertile), and their amusing
peculiarity, as well as in the construction and arrangement of the
story, the brilliancy of the wit, the perpetual gaiety of the
dialogue, we perceive at once to whom the laurel must be given. Nor is
this comparison instituted to disparage Jonson, whom we have praised,
and shall have again to praise so highly, but to show how much easier
it was to vanquish the rest of Europe than to contend with Shakspeare.

|Measure for Measure.|

40. Measure for Measure, commonly referred to the end of 1603,
is perhaps, after Hamlet, Lear, and Macbeth, the play in which
Shakspeare struggles, as it were, most with the over-mastering power
of his own mind; the depths and intricacies of being which he has
searched and sounded with intense reflection, perplex and harass him;
his personages arrest their course of action to pour forth, in
language the most remote from common use, thoughts which few could
grasp in the clearest expression; and thus he loses something of
dramatic excellence in that of his contemplative philosophy. The Duke
is designed as the representative of this philosophical character. He
is stern and melancholy by temperament, averse to the exterior shows
of power, and secretly conscious of some unfitness for its practical
duties. The subject is not very happily chosen, but artfully improved
by Shakspeare. In most of the numerous stories of a similar nature,
which before or since his time have been related, the sacrifice of
chastity is really made, and made in vain. There is, however,
something too coarse and disgusting in such a story; and it would have
deprived him of a splendid exhibition of character. The virtue of
Isabella, inflexible and independent of circumstance, has something
very grand and elevated; yet one is disposed to ask, whether, if
Claudio had been really executed, the spectator would not have gone
away with no great affection for her; and at least we now feel that
her reproaches against her miserable brother when he clings to life
like a frail and guilty being, are too harsh. There is great skill in
the invention of Mariana, and without this the story could not have
had anything like a satisfactory termination; yet it is never
explained how the Duke had become acquainted with this secret, and
being acquainted with it, how he had preserved his esteem and
confidence in Angelo. His intention, as hinted towards the end, to
marry Isabella, is a little too common-place, it is one of
Shakspeare’s hasty half-thoughts. The language of this comedy is very
obscure, and the text seems to have been printed with great
inaccuracy. I do not value the comic parts highly; Lucio’s impudent
profligacy, the result rather of sensual debasement than of natural
ill disposition, is well represented; but Elbow is a very inferior
repetition of Dogberry. In dramatic effect, Measure for Measure ranks
high; the two scenes between Isabella and Angelo, that between her and
Claudio, those where the Duke appears in disguise, and the catastrophe
in the fifth act are admirably written and very interesting; except so
far as the spectator’s knowledge of the two stratagems which have
deceived Angelo may prevent him from participating in the indignation
at Isabella’s imaginary wrong which her lamentations would excite.
Several of the circumstances and characters are borrowed from the old
play of Whetstone, Promos and Cassandra; but very little of the
sentiments or language. What is good in Measure for Measure is
Shakspeare’s own.

|Lear.|

41. If originality of invention did not so much stamp almost every
play of Shakspeare that to name one as the most original seems a
disparagement to others, we might say that this great prerogative of
genius was exercised above all in Lear. It diverges more from the
model of regular tragedy than Macbeth or Othello, and even more than
Hamlet; but the fable is better constructed than in the last of these,
and it displays full as much of the almost superhuman inspiration of
the poet as the other two. Lear himself is perhaps the most wonderful
of dramatic conceptions, ideal to satisfy the most romantic
imagination, yet idealized from the reality of nature. In preparing us
for the most intense sympathy with this old man, he first abases him
to the ground; it is not Œdipus, against whose respected age the gods
themselves have conspired; it is not Orestes, noble minded and
affectionate, whose crime has been virtue; it is a headstrong feeble
and selfish being, whom, in the first act of the tragedy, nothing
seems capable of redeeming in our eyes; nothing but what follows,
intense woe, unnatural wrong. Then comes on that splendid madness, not
absurdly sudden, as in some tragedies, but in which the strings that
keep his reasoning power together give way one after the other in the
frenzy of rage and grief. Then it is that we find what in life may
sometimes be seen, the intellectual energies grow stronger in
calamity, and especially under wrong. An awful eloquence belongs to
unmerited suffering. Thoughts burst out, more profound than Lear in
his prosperous hour could ever have conceived; inconsequent, for such
is the condition of madness, but in themselves fragments of coherent
truth, the reason of an unreasonable mind.

|Timon of Athens.|

42. Timon of Athens is cast as it were in the same mould as Lear; it
is the same essential character, the same generosity more from wanton
ostentation than love of others, the same fierce rage under
the smart of ingratitude, the same rousing up, in that tempest, of
powers that had slumbered unsuspected in some deep recess of the soul;
for had Timon or Lear known that philosophy of human nature in their
calmer moments which fury brought forth, they would never have had
such terrible occasion to display it. The thoughtless confidence of
Lear in his children has something in it far more touching than the
self-beggary of Timon; though both one and the other have prototypes
enough in real life. And as we give the old king more of our pity, so
a more intense abhorrence accompanies his daughters and the worse
characters of that drama, than we spare for the miserable sycophants
of the Athenian. Their thanklessness is anticipated, and springs from
the very nature of their calling; it verges on the beaten road of
comedy. In this play there is neither a female personage, except two
courtezans, who hardly speak, nor any prominent character (the honest
steward is not such) redeemed by virtue enough to be estimable; for
the cynic Apemantus is but a cynic, and ill replaces the noble Kent of
the other drama. The fable, if fable it can be called, is so
extraordinarily deficient in action, a fault of which Shakspeare is
not guilty in any other instance, that we may wonder a little how he
should have seen in the single delineation of Timon a counterbalance
for the manifold objections to this subject. But there seems to have
been a period of Shakspeare’s life when his heart was ill at ease, and
ill content with the world or his own conscience; the memory of hours
misspent, the pang of affection misplaced or unrequited, the
experience of man’s worser nature, which intercourse with ill-chosen
associates, by choice or circumstance, peculiarly teaches;--these, as
they sank down into the depths of his great mind, seem not only to
have inspired into it the conception of Lear and Timon, but that of
one primary character, the censurer of mankind. This type is first
seen in the philosophic melancholy of Jaques, gazing with an
undiminished serenity, and with a gaiety of fancy, though not of
manners, on the follies of the world. It assumes a graver cast in the
exiled Duke of the same play, and next one rather more severe in the
Duke of Measure for Measure. In all these, however, it is merely
contemplative philosophy. In Hamlet, this is mingled with the impulses
of a perturbed heart under the pressure of extraordinary
circumstances; it shines no longer, as in the former characters, with
a steady light, but plays in fitful coruscations amidst feigned gaiety
and extravagance. In Lear it is the flash of sudden inspiration across
the incongruous imagery of madness; in Timon it is obscured by the
exaggerations of misanthropy. These plays all belong to nearly the
same period: As you Like It, being usually referred to 1600; Hamlet,
in its altered form, to about 1602; Timon to the same year; Measure
for Measure to 1603, and Lear to 1604. In the later plays of
Shakspeare, especially in Macbeth and the Tempest, much of moral
speculation will be found, but he has never returned to this type of
character in the personages. Timon is less read and less pleasing than
the great majority of Shakspeare’s plays; but it abounds with signs of
his genius. Schlegel observes that of all his works it is that which
has most satire; comic in representation of the parasites, indignant
and Juvenalian in the bursts of Timon himself.

|Pericles.|

43. Pericles is generally reckoned to be in part, and only in part,
the work of Shakspeare. From the poverty and bad management of the
fable, the want of any effective or distinguishable character, for
Marina is no more than the common form of female virtue, such as all
the dramatists of that age could draw, and a general feebleness of the
tragedy as a whole, I should not believe the structure to have been
Shakspeare’s. But many passages are far more in his manner than in
that of any contemporary writer with whom I am acquainted; and the
extrinsic testimony, though not conclusive, being of some value, I
should not dissent from the judgment of Steevens and Malone, that it
was, in no inconsiderable degree, repaired and improved by his touch.
Drake has placed it under the year 1590, as the earliest of
Shakspeare’s plays, for no better reason, apparently, than that he
thought it inferior to all the rest. But if, as most will agree, it
were not quite his own, this reason will have less weight; and the
language seems to me rather that of his second or third manner than of
his first. Pericles is not known to have existed before 1609.

44. The majority of readers, I believe, assign to Macbeth, which seems
to have been written about 1606, the pre-eminence among the works of
Shakspeare; many, however, would rather name Othello, one of his
latest, which is referred to 1611; and a few might prefer Lear to
either. The great epic drama, as the first may be called,
deserves, in my own judgment, the post it has attained, as being, in
the language of Drake, “the greatest effort of our author’s genius,
the most sublime and impressive drama which the world has ever
beheld.” It will be observed that Shakspeare had now turned his mind
towards the tragic drama. No tragedy but Romeo and Juliet belongs to
the sixteenth century; ten, without counting Pericles, appeared in the
first eleven years of the present. It is not my design to distinguish
each of his plays separately; and it will be evident that I pass over
some of the greatest. No writer, in fact, is so well known as
Shakspeare, or has been so abundantly, and, on the whole, so ably
criticised; I might have been warranted in saying even less than I
have done.

|His Roman tragedies. Julius Cæsar.|

45. Shakspeare was, as I believe, conversant with the better class of
English literature which the reign of Elizabeth afforded. Among other
books, the translation by North, of Amyot’s Plutarch, seems to have
fallen into his hands about 1607. It was the source of three tragedies
founded on the lives of Brutus, Antony, and Coriolanus, the first
bearing the name of Julius Cæsar. In this the plot wants even that
historical unity which the romantic drama requires; the third and
fourth acts are ill connected; it is deficient in female characters,
and in that combination which is generally apparent amidst all the
intricacies of his fable. But it abounds in fine scenes and fine
passages; the spirit of Plutarch’s Brutus is well seized, the
predominance of Cæsar himself is judiciously restrained, the
characters have that individuality which Shakspeare seldom misses; nor
is there, perhaps, in the whole range of ancient and modern eloquence
a speech more fully realising the perfection that orators have striven
to attain than that of Antony.

|Antony and Cleopatra.|

46. Antony and Cleopatra is of rather a different order; it does not
furnish, perhaps, so many striking beauties as the last, but is at
least equally redolent of the genius of Shakspeare. Antony, indeed,
was given him by history, and he has but embodied in his own vivid
colours the irregular mind of the Triumvir, ambitious and daring
against all enemies but himself. In Cleopatra he had less to guide
him; she is another incarnation of the same passions, more lawless and
insensible to reason and honour, as they are found in women. This
character being not one that can please, its strong and spirited
delineation has not been sufficiently observed. It has, indeed, only a
poetical originality; the type was in the courtezan of common life,
but the resemblance is that of Michael Angelo’s Sybils to a muscular
woman. In this tragedy, like Julius Cæsar, as has been justly observed
by Schlegel, the events that do not pass on the stage are scarcely
made clear enough to one who is not previously acquainted with
history, and some of the persons appear and vanish again without
sufficient reason. He has, in fact, copied Plutarch too exactly.

|Coriolanus.|

47. This fault is by no means discerned in the third Roman tragedy of
Shakspeare, Coriolanus. He luckily found an intrinsic historical unity
which he could not have destroyed, and which his magnificent
delineation of the chief personage has thoroughly maintained.
Coriolanus himself has the grandeur of sculpture; his proportions are
colossal, nor would less than this transcendent superiority by which
he towers over his fellow-citizens, warrant, or seem for the moment to
warrant, his haughtiness and their pusillanimity. The surprising
judgment of Shakspeare is visible in this. A dramatist of the second
class, a Corneille, a Schiller, or an Alfieri, would not have lost the
occasion of representing the plebeian form of courage and patriotism.
A tribune would have been made to utter noble speeches, and some
critics would have extolled the balance and contrast of the antagonist
principles. And this might have degenerated into the general saws of
ethics and politics, which philosophical tragedians love to pour
forth. But Shakspeare instinctively perceived that to render the
arrogance of Coriolanus endurable to the spectator, or dramatically
probable, he must abase the plebeians to a contemptible populace. The
sacrifice of historic truth is often necessary for the truth of
poetry. The citizens of early Rome, “_rusticorum mascula militum
proles_,” are indeed calumniated in his scenes, and might almost
pass for burgesses of Stratford; but the unity of emotion is not
dissipated by contradictory energies. Coriolanus is less rich in
poetical style than the other two, but the comic parts are full of
humour. In these three tragedies it is manifest that Roman character,
and still more Roman manners, are not exhibited with the precision of
a scholar; yet there is something that distinguishes them from the
rest, something of a _grandiosity_ in the sentiments and
language, which shows us that Shakspeare had not read that history
without entering into its spirit.

|His retirement and death.|

48. Othello, or perhaps the Tempest, is reckoned by many the latest of
Shakspeare’s works. In the zenith of his faculties, in possession of
fame disproportionate indeed to what has since accrued to his memory,
but beyond that of any contemporary, at the age of about forty-seven,
he ceased to write, and settled himself at a distance from all
dramatic associations in his own native town; a home, of which he had
never lost sight, nor even permanently quitted, the birthplace of his
children, and to which he brought what might then seem affluence in a
middle station, with the hope, doubtless, of a secure decline into the
yellow leaf of years. But he was cut off in 1616, not probably in the
midst of any schemes for his own glory, but to the loss of those
enjoyments which he had accustomed himself to value beyond it. His
descendants, it is well known, became extinct in little more than half
a century.

|Greatness of his genius.|

49. The name of Shakspeare is the greatest in our literature--it is
the greatest in all literature. No man ever came near to him in the
creative powers of the mind; no man had ever such strength at once,
and such variety of imagination. Coleridge has most felicitously
applied to him a Greek epithet, given before to I know not whom,
certainly none so deserving of it, μυριονους [myrionous], the
thousand-souled Shakspeare.[540] The number of characters in his plays
is astonishingly great, without reckoning those, who, although
transient, have often their individuality, all distinct, all types of
human life in well defined differences. Yet he never takes an abstract
quality to embody it, scarcely perhaps a definite condition of
manners, as Jonson does; nor did he draw much, as I conceive, from
living models; there is no manifest appearance of personal caricature
in his comedies, though in some slight traits of character this may
not improbably have been the case. Above all, neither he nor his
contemporaries wrote for the stage in the worst, though most literal,
and of late years the most usual sense; making the servants and
handmaids of dramatic invention to lord over it, and limiting the
capacities of the poet’s mind to those of the performers. If this
poverty of the representative department of the drama had hung like an
incumbent fiend on the creative power of Shakspeare, how would he have
poured forth with such inexhaustible prodigality the vast diversity of
characters that we find in some of his plays? This it is in which he
leaves far behind not the dramatists alone, but all writers of
fiction. Compare with him Homer, the tragedians of Greece, the poets
of Italy, Plautus, Cervantes, Molière, Addison, Le Sage, Fielding,
Richardson, Scott, the romancers of the elder or later schools--one
man has far more than surpassed them all. Others may have been as
sublime, others may have been more pathetic, others may have equalled
him in grace and purity of language, and have shunned some of its
faults; but the philosophy of Shakspeare, his intimate searching out
of the human heart, whether in the gnomic form of sentence, or in the
dramatic exhibition of character, is a gift peculiarly his own. It is,
if not entirely wanting, very little manifested in comparison with
him, by the English dramatists of his own and the subsequent period,
whom we are about to approach.

     [540] Table-talk, vol. ii., p. 301. Coleridge had previously
     spoken of Shakspeare’s _oceanic_ mind, which, if we take it in
     the sense of multitudinous unity, ποντιων κυματων ανηριθμον
     γελασμα [pontiôn kymatôn anêrithmon gelasma], will present the
     same idea as μυριονουσ [myrionous] in a beautiful image.

|His judgment.|

50. These dramatists, as we shall speedily perceive, are hardly less
inferior to Shakspeare in judgment. To this quality I particularly
advert, because foreign writers, and sometimes our own, have imputed
an extraordinary barbarism and rudeness to his works. They belong
indeed to an age sufficiently rude and barbarous in its
entertainments, and are of course to be classed with what is called
the romantic school, which has hardly yet shaken off that reproach.
But no one who has perused the plays anterior to those of Shakspeare,
or contemporary with them, or subsequent to them down to the closing
of the theatres in the civil war, will pretend to deny that there is
far less regularity, in regard to everything where regularity can be
desired, in a large proportion of these (perhaps in all the tragedies)
than in his own. We need only repeat the names of the Merchant of
Venice, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Othello, the Merry Wives of
Windsor, Measure for Measure. The plots in these are excellently
constructed, and in some with uncommon artifice. But even where an
analysis of the story might excite criticism, there is generally an
unity of interest which tones the whole. The Winter’s Tale is not a
model to follow, but we feel that the Winter’s Tale is a single story;
it is even managed as such with consummate skill. It is another proof
of Shakspeare’s judgment, that he has given action enough to his
comedies without the bustling intricacy of the Spanish stage. If his
plots have any little obscurity in some parts, it is from copying his
novel or history too minutely.

51. The idolatry of Shakspeare has been carried so far of late years,
that Drake and perhaps greater authorities have been unwilling to
acknowledge any faults in his plays. This, however, is an extravagance
rather derogatory to the critic than honourable to the poet. Besides
the blemishes of construction in some of his plots, which are
pardonable but still blemishes, there are too many in his style. His
conceits and quibbles often spoil the effect of his scenes and take
off from the passion he would excite. In the last act of Richard II.,
the Duke of York is introduced demanding the punishment of his son
Aumale for a conspiracy against the king, while the Duchess implores
mercy. The scene is ill conceived and worse executed throughout; but
one line is both atrocious and contemptible. The Duchess having dwelt
on the word _pardon_, and urged the king to let her hear it from
his lips, York takes her up with this stupid quibble:

     Speak it in French, King; say, Pardonnez moi.

It would not be difficult to find several other instances, though
none, perhaps, quite so bad, of verbal equivocations, misplaced and
inconsistent with the person’s, the author’s, the reader’s sentiment.

|His obscurity.|

52. Few will defend these notorious faults. But is there not one, less
frequently mentioned, yet of more continual recurrence; the extreme
obscurity of Shakspeare’s diction? His style is full of new words and
new senses. It is easy to pass this over as obsoleteness; but though
many expressions are obsolete and many provincial, though the labour
of his commentators has never been so profitably, as well as so
diligently, employed as in tracing this by the help of the meanest and
most forgotten books of the age, it is impossible to deny that
innumerable lines in Shakspeare were not more intelligible in his time
than they are at present. Much of this may be forgiven, or rather is
so incorporated with the strength of his reason and fancy that we love
it as the proper body of Shakspeare’s soul. Still can we justify the
very numerous passages which yield to no interpretation, knots which
are never unloosed, which conjecture does but cut, or even those,
which if they may at last be understood, keep the attention in
perplexity till the first emotion has passed away? And these occur not
merely in places where the struggles of the speaker’s mind may be well
denoted by some obscurities of language, as in the soliloquies of
Hamlet and Macbeth, but in dialogues between ordinary personages, and
in the business of the play. We learn Shakspeare, in fact, as we learn
a language, or as we read a difficult passage in Greek, with the eye
glancing on the commentary; and it is only after much study that we
come to forget a part, it can be but a part, of the perplexities he
has caused us. This was no doubt one reason that he was less read
formerly, his style passing for obsolete, though in many parts, as we
have just said, it was never much more intelligible than it is.[541]

     [541] “Shakspeare’s style is so pestered with figurative
     expressions that it is as affected as it is obscure. It is true
     that in his later plays he had worn off somewhat of this
     rust.”--Dryden’s Works (Malone), vol. ii., part ii., p. 252. This
     is by no means the truth, but rather the reverse of it: Dryden
     knew not at all which were earlier, or which later, of
     Shakspeare’s plays.

|His popularity.|

53. It does not appear probable that Shakspeare was ever placed below,
or merely on a level with the other dramatic writers of this
period.[542] That his plays were not so frequently represented as
those of Fletcher, is little to the purpose; they required a more
expensive decoration, a larger company of good performers, and
above all, they were less intelligible to a promiscuous audience. But
it is certain that throughout the seventeenth century, and even in the
writings of Addison and his contemporaries, we seldom or never meet
with that complete recognition of his supremacy, that unhesitating
preference of him to all the world, which has become the faith of the
last and the present century. And it is remarkable that this
apotheosis, so to speak, of Shakspeare was originally the work of what
has been styled a frigid and tasteless generation--the age of George
II. Much is certainly due to the stage itself, when those appeared,
who could guide and control the public taste, and discover that in the
poet himself which sluggish imaginations could not have reached. The
enthusiasm for Shakspeare is nearly coincident with that for Garrick;
it was kept up by his followers, and especially by that highly-gifted
family which has but recently been withdrawn from our stage.

     [542] A certain William Cartwright, in commendatory verses
     addressed to Fletcher, has the assurance to say:

       Shakspeare to thee was dull, whose best wit lies
       I’ th’ ladies’ questions, and the fools’ replies.

     But the suffrage of Jonson himself, of Milton, and of many more
     that might be quoted, tends to prove that his genius was esteemed
     beyond that of any other, though some might compare inferior
     writers to him in other qualifications of the dramatist. Even
     Dryden, who came in a worse period, and had no undue reverence
     for Shakspeare, admits that “he was the man who of all modern,
     and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive
     soul. All the images of nature were still present to him, and he
     drew them not laboriously, but luckily: when he describes
     anything, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse
     him to have wanted learning give him the greater commendation; he
     was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to
     read nature; he looked inwards, and found her there.”--Dryden’s
     Prose Works (Malone’s edition), vol. i., part ii., p. 99.

|Critics on Shakspeare.|

54. Among the commentators on Shakspeare, Warburton, always striving
to display his own acuteness and scorn of others, deviates more than
anyone else from the meaning. Theobald was the first who did a little.
Johnson explained much well, but there is something magisterial in the
manner wherein he dismisses each play like a boy’s exercise, that
irritates the reader. His criticism is frequently judicious, but
betrays no ardent admiration for Shakspeare. Malone and Steevens were
two laborious commentators on the meaning of words and phrases; one
dull, the other clever; but the dullness was accompanied by candour
and a love of truth, the cleverness by a total absence of both.
Neither seems to have had a full discernment of Shakspeare’s genius.
The numerous critics of the last age who were not editors have poured
out much that is trite and insipid, much that is hypercritical and
erroneous; yet, collectively, they not only bear witness to the public
taste for the poet, but taught men to judge and feel more accurately
than they would have done for themselves. Hurd and Lord Kaimes,
especially the former, may be reckoned among the best of this
class;[543] Mrs. Montagu, perhaps, in her celebrated Essay, not very
far from the bottom of the list. In the present century, Coleridge and
Schlegel, so nearly at the same time that the question of priority and
even plagiarism has been mooted, gave a more philosophical, and, at
the same time, a more intrinsically exact view of Shakspeare, than
their predecessors. What has since been written, has often been highly
acute and æsthetic, but occasionally with an excess of refinement
which substitutes the critic for the work. Mrs. Jameson’s Essays on
the Female Characters of Shakspeare are among the best. It was right
that this province of illustration should be reserved for a woman’s
hand.

     [543] Hurd, in his notes on Horace’s Art of Poetry, vol. .,
     p. 52, has some very good remarks on the diction of Shakspeare,
     suggested by the “callida junctura” of the Roman poet,
     illustrated by many instances. These remarks both serve to bring
     out the skill of Shakspeare, and to explain the disputed passage
     in Horace. Hurd justly maintains the obvious construction of that
     passage: “notum si callida verbum Reddiderit junctura novum.”
     That proposed by Lambinus and Beattie, which begins with _novum_,
     is inadmissible, and gives a worse sense.

|Ben Jonson.|

55. Ben Jonson, so generally known by that familiar description that
some might hardly recognise him without it, was placed next to
Shakspeare by his own age. They were much acquainted, and belonged to
the oldest, perhaps, and not the worst of clubs, formed by Sir Walter
Raleigh about the beginning of the century, which met at the Mermaid
in Friday-street. We may easily believe the testimony of one of its
members, that it was a feast of the most subtle and brilliant
wit.[544] Jonson had abundant powers of poignant and sarcastic humour,
besides extensive reading, and Shakspeare must have brought to the
Mermaid the brightness of his fancy. Selden and Camden, the former in
early youth, are reported to have given the ballast of their strong
sense and learning to this cluster of poets. There has been, however,
a prevalent tradition that Jonson was not without some malignant and
envious feelings towards Shakspeare. Gifford has repelled this
imputation with considerable success, though we may still suspect that
there was something caustic and saturnine in the temper of Jonson.

     [544] Gifford’s Life of Jonson, p. 65. Collier, iii., 275.

|The Alchemist.|

56. The Alchemist is a play which long remained on the stage, though I
am not sure that it has been represented since the days of Garrick,
who was famous in Abel Drugger. Notwithstanding the indiscriminate and
injudicious panegyric of Gifford, I believe there is no reader of
taste but will condemn the outrageous excess of pedantry with which
the first acts of this play abound; pedantry the more intolerable,
that it is not even what, however unfit for the English stage,
scholars might comprehend, but the gibberish of obscure treatises on
alchemy, which, whatever the commentators may chuse to say, was as
unintelligible to all but a few half-witted dupes of that imposture as
it is at present. Much of this, it seems impossible to doubt, was
omitted in representation. Nor is his pedantic display of learning
confined to the part of the Alchemist, who had certainly a right to
talk in the style of his science, if he had done it with some
moderation: Sir Epicure Mammon, a worldly sensualist, placed in the
author’s own age, pours out a torrent of gluttonous cookery from the
kitchens of Heliogabalus and Apicius; his dishes are to be camels’
heels, the beards of barbels and dissolved pearl, crowning all with
the paps of a sow. But while this habitual error of Jonson’s vanity is
not to be overlooked, we may truly say, that it is much more than
compensated by the excellencies of this comedy. The plot, with great
simplicity, is continually animated and interesting; the characters
are conceived and delineated with admirable boldness, truth, spirit,
and variety; the humour, especially in the two Puritans, a sect who
now began to do penance on the stage, is amusing; the language, when
it does not smell too much of book-learning, is forcible and clear.
The Alchemist is one of the three plays which usually contest the
superiority among those of Jonson.

|Volpone or The Fox.|

57. The second of these is The Fox, which, according to general
opinion, has been placed above the Alchemist. Notwithstanding the
dissent of Gifford, I should concur in this suffrage. The fable
belongs to a higher class of comedy. Without minutely inquiring
whether the Roman hunters after the inheritance of the rich, so well
described by Horace, and especially the costly presents by which they
endeavoured to secure a better return, are altogether according to the
manners of Venice, where Jonson has laid his scene, we must
acknowledge that he has displayed the base cupidity, of which there
will never be wanting examples among mankind, in such colours as all
other dramatic poetry can hardly rival. Cumberland has blamed the
manner, in which Volpone brings ruin on his head by insulting, in
disguise, those whom he had duped. In this, I agree with Gifford,
there is no violation of nature. Besides their ignorance of his
person, so that he could not necessarily foresee the effects of
Voltore’s rage, it has been well and finely said by Cumberland
himself, that there is a moral in a villain’s out-witting himself. And
this is one that many dramatists have displayed.

58. In the choice of subject, The Fox is much inferior to Tartuffe, to
which it bears some very general analogy. Though the Tartuffe is not a
remarkably agreeable play, The Fox is much less so; five of the
principal characters are wicked almost beyond any retribution that
comedy can dispense; the smiles it calls forth are not those of gaiety
but scorn; and the parts of an absurd English knight and his wife,
though very humorous, are hardly prominent enough to enliven the
scenes of guilt and fraud which pass before our eyes. But, though too
much pedantry obtrudes itself, it does not overspread the pages with
nonsense, as in the Alchemist; the characters of Celia and Bonario
excite some interest; the differences, one can hardly say the
gradations, of villainy are marked with the strong touches of Jonson’s
pen; the incidents succeed rapidly and naturally; the dramatic effect,
above all, is perceptible to every reader, and rises in a climax
through the last two acts to the conclusion.

|The Silent Woman.|

59. The Silent Woman, which has been named by some with the Alchemist
and the Fox, falls much below them in vigorous delineation and
dramatic effect. It has more diversity of manners than of character,
the amusing scenes border sometimes on farce, as where two cowardly
knights are made to receive blows in the dark, each supposing them to
come from his adversary, and the catastrophe is neither pleasing nor
probable. It is written with a great deal of spirit, and has a value
as the representation of London life in the higher ranks at that time.
But, upon the whole, I should be inclined to give to Every Man in his
Humour a much superior place. It is a proof of Jonson’s extensive
learning that the story of this play, and several particular passages,
have been detected in a writer so much out of the beaten track as
Libanius.[545]

     [545] Gifford discovered this. Dryden, who has given an
     examination of the Silent Woman, in his Essay on Dramatic Poetry,
     takes Morose for a real character, and says that he had so been
     informed. It is possible that there might be some foundation of
     truth in this; the skeleton is in Libanius, but Jonson may have
     filled it up from the life. Dryden gives it as his opinion that
     there is more wit and acuteness of fancy in this play than in any
     of Ben Jonson’s, and that he has described the conversation of
     gentlemen with more gaiety and freedom than in the rest of his
     comedies, p. 107.

|Sad Shepherd.|

60. The pastoral drama of the Sad Shepherd is the best testimony to
the poetical imagination of Jonson. Superior in originality,
liveliness, and beauty, to the Faithful Shepherdess of Fletcher, it
reminds us rather, in language and imagery, of the Midsummer Night’s
Dream, and, perhaps, no other poetry has come so near to that of
Shakspeare. Jonson, like him, had an extraordinary command of English,
in its popular and provincial idioms, as well as what might be gained
from books; and though his invincible pedantry now and then obtrudes
itself into the mouths of shepherds, it is compensated by numerous
passages of the most natural and graceful expression. This beautiful
drama is imperfect, hardly more than half remaining, or more probably
having ever been written. It was also Jonson’s last song; age and
poverty had stolen upon him; but, as one has said, who experienced the
same destiny, “the life was in the leaf,” and his laurel remained
verdant amidst the snow of his honoured head. The beauties of the Sad
Shepherd might be reckoned rather poetical than dramatic; yet the
action is both diversified and interesting to a degree we seldom find
in the pastoral drama; there is little that is low in the comic
speeches, nothing that is inflated in the serious.

|Beaumont and Fletcher.|

61. Two men, once united by friendship, and for ever by fame, the
Dioscuri of our zodiac, Beaumont and Fletcher, rose upon the horizon
as the star of Shakspeare, though still in its fullest brightness, was
declining in the sky. The first, in order of time, among more than
fifty plays published with their joint names, is the Woman-Hater,
represented, according to Langbaine, in 1607, and ascribed to Beaumont
alone by Seward, though, I believe, merely on conjecture.[546]
Beaumont died, at the age of thirty, in 1615; Fletcher in 1625. No
difference of manner is perceptible, or, at least, no critic has
perceived any, in the plays that appeared between these two epochs; in
fact, the greater part were not printed till 1647, and it is only
through the records of the play-house that we distinguish their dates.
The tradition, however, of their own times, as well as the earlier
death of Beaumont, give us reason to name Fletcher, when we mention
one singly, as the principal author of all these plays; and, of late
years, this has, perhaps, become more customary than it used to be. A
contemporary copy of verses, indeed, seems to attribute the greater
share in the Maid’s Tragedy, Philaster, and King and no King, to
Beaumont. But testimony of this kind is very precarious. It is
sufficient that he bore a part in these three.

     [546] Vol. i., p. 3. He also thinks The Nice Valour exclusively
     Beaumont’s. These two appear to me about the worst in the
     collection.

|Corrupt state of their text.|

62. Of all our early dramatic poets, none have suffered such mangling
by the printer as Beaumont and Fletcher. Their style is generally
elliptical, and not very perspicuous; they use words in peculiar
senses, and there seems often an attempt at pointed expression, in
which its meaning has deserted them. But, after every effort to
comprehend their language, it is continually so remote from all
possibility of bearing a rational sense, that we can only have
recourse to one hypothesis, that of an extensive and irreparable
corruption of the text. Seward and Simpson, who, in 1750, published
the first edition in which any endeavour was made at illustration or
amendment, though not men of much taste, and too fond of extolling
their authors, showed some acuteness, and have restored many passages
in a probable manner, though often driven out at sea to conjecture
something, where the received reading furnished not a vestige which
they could trace. No one since has made any great progress in this
criticism, though some have carped at these editors for not performing
more. The problem of actual restoration in most places, where the
printers or transcribers have made such strange havoc, must evidently
be insoluble.

|The Maid’s Tragedy.|

63. The first play in the collected works of Beaumont and Fletcher,
though not the earliest, is the Maid’s Tragedy, and it is among the
best. None of their female characters, though they are often very
successful in beautiful delineations of virtuous love, attaches our
sympathy like Aspasia. Her sorrows are so deep, so pure, so unmerited,
she sustains the breach of plighted faith in Amyntor, and the taunts
of vicious women with so much resignation, so little of that termagant
resentment these poets are apt to infuse into their heroines, the
poetry of her speeches is so exquisitely imaginative, that, of those
dramatic persons who are not prominent in the development of a story,
scarce any, even in Shakspeare, are more interesting. Nor is the
praise due to the Maid’s Tragedy confined to the part of Aspasia. In
Melantius we have Fletcher’s favourite character, the brave, honest
soldier, incapable of suspecting evil, till it becomes impossible to
be ignorant of it, but unshrinking in its punishment. That of Evadne
well displays the audacious security of guilt under the safeguard of
power; it is highly theatrical, and renders the success of this
tragedy not surprising in times when its language and situations could
be endured by the audience. We may remark in this tragedy, as in many
others of these dramatists, that, while pouring out the unlimited
loyalty fashionable at the court of James, they are full of implied
satire, which could hardly escape observation. The warm eulogies on
military glory, the scorn of slothful peace, the pictures of dissolute
baseness in courtiers, seem to spring from a dislike, very usual among
the English gentry, a rank to which they both belonged, for that
ignominious government; and though James was far enough removed from
such voluptuous tyrants as Fletcher has pourtrayed in this and some
other plays, they did not serve to exemplify the advantages of
monarchy in the most attractive manner.

64. The Maid’s Tragedy, unfortunately, beautiful and essentially moral
as it is, cannot be called a tragedy for maids; and, indeed, should
hardly be read by any respectable woman. It abounds with that
studiously protracted indecency which distinguished Fletcher beyond
all our early dramatists, and is so much incorporated with his plays,
that very few of them can be so altered as to become tolerable at
present on the stage. In this he is strikingly contrasted with
Shakspeare, whose levities of this kind are so transitory, and so much
confined to language, that he has borne the process of purification
with little detriment to his genius, or even to his wit.

|Philaster.|

65. Philaster has been in his day one of the best known and most
popular of Fletcher’s plays.[547] This was owing to the pleasing
characters of Philaster and Bellario, and to the frequent sweetness of
the poetry. It is nevertheless not a first-rate play. The plot is most
absurdly managed. It turns on the suspicion of Arethusa’s infidelity.
And the sole ground of this is that an abandoned woman, being detected
herself, accuses the princess of unchastity. Not a shadow of
presumptive evidence is brought to confirm this impudent assertion,
which, however, the lady’s father, her lover, and a grave sensible
courtier do not fail implicitly to believe. How unlike the chain of
circumstance, and the devilish cunning by which the Moor is wrought up
to think his Desdemona false! Bellario is suggested by Viola; there is
more picturesqueness, more dramatic importance, not, perhaps, more
beauty and sweetness of affection, but a more eloquent development of
it in Fletcher; on the other hand, there is still more of that
improbability which attends a successful concealment of sex by mere
disguise of clothes, though no artifice has been more common on the
stage. Many other circumstances in the conduct of Fletcher’s story are
ill-contrived. It has less wit than the greater part of his comedies;
for among such, according to the old distinction, it is to be ranked,
though the subject is elevated and serious.

     [547] Dryden says, but I know not how truly, that Philaster was
     “the first play that brought Beaumont and Fletcher in esteem; for
     before that they had written two or three very unsuccessfully,”
     p. 100. Philaster was not printed, according to Langbaine, till
     1620; I do not know that we have any evidence of the date of its
     representation.

|King and No King.|

66. King and No King is, in my judgment, inferior to Philaster. The
language has not so much of poetical beauty. The character of Arbaces
excites no sympathy; it is a compound of vain-glory and violence,
which rather demands disgrace from poetical justice than reward.
Panthea is innocent, but insipid; Mardonius a good specimen of what
Fletcher loves to exhibit, the plain honest courtier. As for Bessus,
he certainly gives occasion to several amusing scenes; but his
cowardice is a little too glaring; he is neither so laughable as
Bobadil, nor so sprightly as Parolles. The principal merit of this
play, which rendered it popular on the stage for many years, consists
in the effective scenes where Arbaces reveals his illicit desire. That
especially with Mardonius is artfully and elaborately written.
Shakspeare had less of this skill; and his tragedies suffer for it in
their dramatic effect. The scene between John and Hubert is an
exception, and there is a great deal of it in Othello; but in general
he may be said not to have exerted the power of detaining the
spectator in that anxious suspense, which creates almost an actual
illusion, and makes him tremble at every word, lest the secret which
he has learned should be imparted to the imaginary person on the
stage. Of this there are several fine instances in the Greek
tragedians, the famous scene in the Œdipus Tyrannus being the best;
and it is possible that the superior education of Fletcher may
have rendered him familiar with the resources of ancient tragedy.
These scenes in the present play would have been more highly powerful
if the interest could have been thrown on any character superior to
the selfish braggart Arbaces. It may be said perhaps that his
humiliation through his own lawless passions, after so much insolence
of success, affords a moral; he seems, however, but imperfectly cured
at the conclusion, which is also hurried on with unsatisfactory
rapidity.

|The Elder Brother.|

67. The Elder Brother has been generally reckoned among the best of
Fletcher’s comedies. It displays in a new form an idea not very new in
fiction, the power of love, on the first sight of a woman, to vivify a
soul utterly ignorant of the passion. Charles, the Elder Brother, much
unlike the Cymon of Dryden, is absorbed in study; a mere scholar,
without a thought beyond his books. His indifference, perhaps, and
ignorance about the world are rather exaggerated and border on
stupidity; but it was the custom of the dramatists in that age to
produce effect in representation by very sudden developments, if not
changes, of character. The other persons are not ill conceived; the
honest, testy Miramont, who admires learning without much more of it
than enables him to sign his name; the two selfish worldly fathers of
Charles and Angelina, believing themselves shrewd, yet the easy dupes
of coxcomb manners from the court; the spirited Angelina; the spoiled
but not worthless Eustace, show Fletcher’s great talent in dramatic
invention. In none of his mere comedies has he sustained so uniformly
elegant and pleasing a style of poetry; the language of Charles is
naturally that of a refined scholar, but now and then perhaps we find
old Miramont talk above himself. The underplot hits to the life the
licentious endeavours of an old man to seduce his inferior; but, as
usual, it reveals vice too broadly. This comedy is of very simple
construction, so that Cibber was obliged to blend it with another, The
Custom of the Country, in order to compose from the two his Love Makes
a Man, by no means the worst play of that age. The two plots, however,
do not harmonize very well.

|The Spanish Curate.|

68. The Spanish Curate is in all probability taken from one of those
comedies of intrigue, _capa y espada_, which the fame of Lope de
Vega had made popular in Europe. It is one of the best specimens of
that manner; the plot is full of incident and interest, without being
difficult of comprehension, nor, with fair allowance for the
conventions of the stage and manners of the country, improbable. The
characters are in full relief without caricature. Fletcher, with an
artifice of which he is very fond, has made the fierce resentment of
Violante break out unexpectedly from the calmness she had shown in the
first scenes; but it is so well accounted for, that we see nothing
unnatural in the development of passions for which there had been no
previous call. Ascanio is again one of Fletcher’s favourite
delineations; a kind of Bellario in his modest affectionate
disposition; one in whose prosperity the reader takes so much pleasure
that he forgets it is, in a worldly sense, inconsistent with that of
the honest-hearted Don Jamie. The doting husband, Don Henrique
contrasts well with the jealous Bartolus; and both afford by their
fate the sort of moral which is looked for in comedy. The underplot of
the lawyer and his wife, while it shows how licentious in principle as
well as indecent in language the stage had become, is conducted with
incomparable humour and amusement. Congreve borrowed part of this in
the Old Bachelor without by any means equalling it. Upon the whole, as
a comedy of this class, it deserves to be placed in the highest rank.

|The Custom of the Country.|

69. The Custom of the Country is much deformed by obscenity,
especially the first act. But it is full of nobleness in character and
sentiment, of interesting situations, of unceasing variety of action.
Fletcher has never shown what he so much delights in drawing, the
contrast of virtuous dignity with ungoverned passion in woman, with
more success than in Zenocia and Hippolyta. Of these three plays, we
may say, perhaps, that there is more poetry in the Elder Brother, more
interest in the Custom of the Country, more wit and spirit in the
Spanish Curate.

|The Loyal Subject.|

70. The Loyal Subject ought also to be placed in a high rank among the
works of Beaumont and Fletcher. There is a play by Heywood, The Royal
King and Loyal Subject, from which the general idea of several
circumstances of this have been taken. That Heywood’s was the
original, though the only edition of it is in 1637, while the Loyal
Subject was represented in 1615, cannot bear a doubt. The former is
expressly mentioned in the epilogue as an old play, belonging to a
style gone out of date, and not to be judged with rigour. Heywood has,
therefore, the praise of having conceived the character of Earl
Marshal, upon which Fletcher somewhat improved in Archas; a brave
soldier of that disinterested and devoted loyalty, which bears all
ingratitude and outrage at the hands of an unworthy and misguided
sovereign. In the days of James there could be no more courtly moral.
In each play, the prince, after depriving his most deserving subject
of honours and fortune, tries his fidelity by commanding him to send
two daughters, whom he had educated in seclusion, to the court, with
designs that the father may easily suspect. The loyalty, however, of
these honest soldiers, like the hospitality of Lot, submits to
encounter this danger; and the conduct of the young ladies soon proves
that they might be trusted in the fiery trial. In the Loyal Subject,
Fletcher has beautifully, and with his light touch of pencil, sketched
the two virtuous sisters; one high-spirited, intrepid, undisguised,
the other shrinking with maiden modesty, a tremulous dewdrop in the
cup of a violet. But unfortunately his original taint betrays itself,
and the elder sister cannot display her scorn of licentiousness
without borrowing some of its language. If Shakspeare had put these
loose images into the mouth of Isabella, how differently we should
have esteemed her character!

71. We find in the Loyal Subject what is neither pleasing nor
probable, the disguise of a youth as a girl. This was, of course, not
offensive to those who saw nothing else on the stage. Fletcher did not
take this from Heywood. In the whole management of the story he is
much superior; the nobleness of Archas and his injuries are still more
displayed than those of the Earl Marshal; and he has several new
characters, especially Theodore, the impetuous son of the Loyal
Subject, who does not brook the insults of a prince as submissively as
his father, which fill the play with variety and spirit. The language
is in some places obscure and probably corrupt, but abounding with
that kind of poetry which belongs to Fletcher.

|Beggar’s Bush.|

72. Beggar’s Bush is an excellent comedy; the serious parts
interesting, the comic diverting. Every character supports itself
well; if some parts of the plot have been suggested by As you Like it,
they are managed so as to be original in spirit. Few of Fletcher’s
plays furnish more proofs of his characteristic qualities. It might be
represented with no great curtailment.

|The Scornful Lady.|

73. The Scornful Lady is one of those comedies which exhibit English
domestic life, and have, therefore, a value independent of their
dramatic merit. It does not equal Beggar’s Bush, but is full of
effective scenes, which, when less regard was paid to decency, must
have rendered it a popular play. Fletcher, in fact, is as much
superior to Shakspeare in his knowledge of the stage, as he falls
below him in that of human nature. His fertile invention was turned to
the management of his plot (always with a view to representation), the
rapid succession of incidents, the surprises and embarrassments which
keep the spectator’s attention alive. His characters are but vehicles
to the story; they are distinguished, for the most part, by little
more than the slight peculiarities of manner, which are easily caught
by the audience; and we do not often meet, especially in his comedies,
with the elaborate delineations of Jonson, or the marked
idiosyncracies of Shakspeare. Of these, his great predecessors, one
formed a deliberate conception of a character, whether taken from
general nature or from manners, and drew his figure, as it were, in
his mind, before he transferred it to the canvas; with the other, the
idea sprang out of the depths of his soul, and though suggested by the
story he had chosen, became so much the favourite of his genius as he
wrote, that in its development he sometimes grew negligent of his
plot.

|Valentinian.|

74. No tragedy of Fletcher would deserve higher praise than
Valentinian, if he had not, by an inconceivable want of taste and
judgment, descended from beauty and dignity to the most preposterous
absurdities. The matron purity of the injured Lucina, the ravages of
unrestrained self-indulgence on a mind not wholly without glimpses of
virtue in Valentinian, the vileness of his courtiers, the spirited
contrast of unconquerable loyalty in Ætius, with the natural
indignation at wrong in Maximus, are brought before our eyes in some
of Fletcher’s best poetry, though in a text that seems even more
corrupt than usual. But after the admirable scene in the third act,
where Lucina (the Lucretia of this story) reveals her injury, perhaps
almost the only scene in this dramatist, if we except the Maid’s
Tragedy, that can move us to tears, her husband Maximus, who even here
begins to forfeit our sympathy by his ready consent, in the
Spanish style of perverted honour, to her suicide, becomes a
treacherous and ambitious villain; the loyalty of Ætius turns to
downright folly, and the rest of the play is but such a series of
murders as Marston or the author of Andronicus might have devised. If
Fletcher meant, which he very probably did, to inculcate as a moral,
that the worst of tyrants are to be obeyed with unflinching
submission, he may have gained applause at court, at the expense of
his reputation with posterity.

|The Two Noble Kinsmen.|

75. The Two Noble Kinsmen is a play that has been honoured by a
tradition of Shakspeare’s concern in it. The evidence as to this is
the title page of the first edition; which, though it may seem much at
first sight, is next to nothing in our old drama, full of misnomers of
this kind. The editors of Beaumont and Fletcher have insisted upon
what they take for marks of Shakspeare’s style; and Schlegel, after
“seeing no reason for doubting so probable an opinion,” detects the
spirit of Shakspeare in a certain ideal purity which distinguishes
this from other plays of Fletcher, and in the conscientious fidelity
with which it follows the Knight’s Tale in Chaucer. The Two Noble
Kinsmen has much of that elevated sense of honour, friendship,
fidelity, and love, which belongs, I think, more characteristically to
Fletcher, who had drunk at the fountain of Castilian romance, than to
one, in whose vast mind this conventional morality of particular
classes was subordinated to the universal nature of man. In this
sense, Fletcher is always, in his tragic compositions, a very ideal
poet. The subject itself is fitter for him than for Shakspeare. In the
language and conduct of this play, with great deference to better and
more attentive critics, I see imitations of Shakspeare rather than
such resemblances as denote his powerful stamp. The madness of the
jailor’s daughter, where some have imagined they saw the masterhand,
is doubtless suggested by that of Ophelia, but with an inferiority of
taste and feeling, which it seems impossible not to recognise. The
painful and degrading symptom of female insanity, which Shakspeare has
touched with his gentle hand, is dwelt upon by Fletcher with all his
innate impurity. Can anyone believe that the former would have written
the last scene in which the jailor’s daughter appears on the stage?
Schlegel has too fine taste to believe that this character came from
Shakspeare, and it is given up by the latest assertor of his claim to
a participation in the play.[548]

     [548] A “Letter on Shakspeare’s Authorship of the Drama, entitled
     the Two Noble Kinsmen,” Edinburgh, 1833, notwithstanding this
     title, does not deny a considerable participation to Fletcher. He
     lays no great stress on the external evidence. But in arguing
     from the similarity of style in many passages to that of
     Shakspeare, the author, with whose name I am unacquainted, shows
     so much taste and so competent a knowledge of the two dramatists,
     that I should perhaps scruple to set up my own doubts in
     opposition. His chief proofs are drawn from the force and
     condensation of language in particular passages, which,
     doubtless, is one of the great distinctions between the two. But
     we might wish to have seen this displayed in longer extracts than
     such as the author of this Letter has generally given us. It is
     difficult to say of a man like Fletcher that he could not have
     written single lines in the spirit of his predecessor. A few
     instances, however, of longer passages will be found; and I
     believe that it is a subject upon which there will long be a
     difference of opinion.

|The Faithful Shepherdess.|

76. The Faithful Shepherdess, deservedly among the most celebrated
productions of Fletcher, stands alone in its class, and admits of no
comparison with any other play. It is a pastoral drama, in imitation
of the Pastor Fido, at that time very popular in England. The Faithful
Shepherdess, however, to the great indignation of the poets, did not
succeed on its first representation. There is nothing in this
surprising; the tone of pastoral is too far removed from the
possibilities of life for a stage which appealed, like ours, to the
boisterous sympathies of a general audience. It is a play very
characteristic of Fletcher, being a mixture of tenderness, purity,
indecency, and absurdity. There is some justice in Schlegel’s remark,
that it is an immodest eulogy on modesty. But this critic, who does
not seem to appreciate the beauty of Fletcher’s poetry, should hardly
have mentioned Guarini as a model whom he might have followed. It was
by copying the Corisca of the Pastor Fido that Fletcher introduced the
character of the vicious shepherdess Cloe; though, according to his
times, and, we must own, to his disposition, he has greatly aggravated
the faults to which just exception has been taken in his original.

77. It is impossible to withhold our praise from the poetical beauties
of this pastoral drama. Every one knows that it contains the germ of
Comus; the benevolent Satyr, whose last proposition to “stray in the
middle air, and stay the sailing rack, or nimbly take hold of the
moon” is not much in the character of these sylvans, has been
judiciously metamorphosed by Milton to an attendant spirit; and a more
austere, as well as more uniform language has been given to the
speakers. But Milton has borrowed largely from the imagination of his
predecessor; and by quoting the lyric parts of the Faithful
Shepherdess, it would be easy to deceive any one not accurately
familiar with the songs of Comus. They abound with that rapid
succession of ideal scenery, that darting of the poet’s fancy from
earth to heaven, those picturesque and novel metaphors, which
distinguish much of the poetry of this age, and which are ultimately,
perhaps, in great measure referrible to Shakspeare.

|Rule a Wife and Have a Wife.|

78. Rule a Wife and Have a Wife is among the superior comedies of its
class. That it has a prototype on the Spanish theatre must appear
likely; but I should be surprised if the variety and spirit of
character, the vivacity of humour, be not chiefly due to our own
authors. Every personage in this comedy is drawn with a vigorous
pencil; so that it requires a good company to be well represented. It
is indeed a mere picture of roguery; for even Leon, the only character
for whom we can feel any sort of interest, has gained his ends by
stratagem; but his gallant spirit redeems this in our indulgent views
of dramatic morality, and we are justly pleased with the discomfiture
of fraud and effrontery in Estifania and Margarita.

|Some other plays.|

79. The Knight of the Burning Pestle is very diverting, and more
successful perhaps than any previous attempt to introduce a drama
within a drama. I should hardly except the Induction to the Taming of
a Shrew. The burlesque, though very ludicrous, does not transgress all
bounds of probability. The Wild-goose Chase, The Chances, The Humorous
Lieutenant, Women Pleased, Wit without Money, Monsieur Thomas, and
several other comedies, deserve to be praised for the usual
excellencies of Fletcher, his gaiety, his invention, his ever varying
rapidity of dialogue and incident. None are without his defects; and
we may add, what is not in fairness to be called a defect of his,
since it applies perhaps to every dramatic writer, except Shakspeare
and Molière, that, being cast as it were in a common mould, we find
both a monotony in reading several of these plays, and a difficulty of
distinguishing them in remembrance.

80. The later writers, those especially after the Restoration, did not
fail to appropriate many of the inventions of Fletcher. He and his
colleague are the proper founders of our comedy of intrigue, which
prevailed through the seventeenth century, the comedy of Wycherley,
Dryden, Behn, and Shadwell. Their manner, if not their actual plots,
may still be observed in many pieces that are produced on our stage.
But few of those imitators came up to the sprightliness of their
model. It is to be regretted that it is rarely practicable to adapt
any one of his comedies to representation without such changes as
destroy their original raciness, and dilute the geniality of their
wit.

|Origin of Fletcher’s plays.|

81. There has not been much curiosity to investigate the sources of
his humorous plays. A few are historical; but it seems highly probable
that the Spanish stage of Lope de Vega and his contemporaries often
furnished the subject, and perhaps many of the scenes, to his
comedies. These possess all the characteristics ascribed to the
comedies of intrigue so popular in that country. The scene too is more
commonly laid in Spain, and the costume of Spanish manners and
sentiments more closely observed, than we should expect from the
invention of Englishmen. It would be worth the leisure of some lover
of theatrical literature to search the collection of Lope de Vega’s
works, and, if possible, the other Spanish writers at the beginning of
the century, in order to trace the footsteps of our two dramatists.
Sometimes they may have had recourse to novels. The Little French
Lawyer seems to indicate such an origin. Nothing had as yet been
produced, I believe, on the French stage from which it could have been
derived, but the story and most of the characters are manifestly of
French derivation. The comic humour of La Writ in this play we may
ascribe to the invention of Fletcher himself.[549]

     [549] Dryden reckons this play with the Spanish Curate, the
     Chances, and Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, among those which he
     supposes to be drawn from Spanish novels. Essay on Dramatic
     Poetry, p. 204. By novels we should probably understand plays;
     for those which he mentions are little in the style of novels.
     But the Little French Lawyer has all the appearance of coming
     from a French novel; the scene lies in France, and I see nothing
     Spanish about it. Dryden was seldom well-informed about the early
     stage.

|Defects of their plots.|

82. It is, however, not improbable that the entire plot was sometimes
original. Fertile as their invention was, to an extraordinary
degree, in furnishing the incidents of their rapid and animated
comedies, we may believe the fable itself to have sometimes sprung
from no other source. It seems indeed now and then, as if the authors
had gone forward with no very clear determination of their
catastrophe; there is a want of unity in the conception, a want of
consistency in the characters, which appear sometimes rather intended
to surprise by incongruity, than framed upon a definite model. That of
Ruy Diaz in the Island Princess, of whom it is hard to say whether he
is a brave man or a coward, or alternately one and the other, is an
instance to which many more might easily be added. In the Bloody
Brother, Rollo sends to execution one of his counsellors, whose
daughter Edith vainly interferes in a scene of great pathos and
effect. In the progress of the drama she arms herself to take away the
tyrant’s life; the whole of her character has been consistent and
energetic; when Fletcher, to the reader’s astonishment, thinks fit to
imitate the scene between Richard and Lady Anne; and the ignominious
fickleness of that lady, whom Shakspeare with wonderful skill, but in
a manner not quite pleasing, sacrifices to the better display of the
cunning crook-back, is here transferred to the heroine of the play,
and the very character upon whom its interest ought to depend. Edith
is on the point of giving up her purpose, when some others in the
conspiracy coming in, she recovers herself enough to exhort them to
strike the blow.[550]

     [550] Rotrou, in his Wenceslas, as we have already observed, has
     done something of the same kind; it may have been meant as an
     ungenerous and calumnious attack on the constancy of the female
     sex. If lions were painters, the old fable says, they would
     exhibit a very different view of their contentions with men. But
     lionesses are become very good painters; and it is but through
     their clemency that we are not delineated in such a style as
     would retaliate the injuries of these tragedians.

|Their sentiments and style dramatic.|

83. The sentiments and style of Fletcher, where not concealed by
obscurity or corruption of the text, are very dramatic. We cannot deny
that the depths of Shakspeare’s mind were often unfathomable by an
audience; the bow was drawn by a matchless hand, but the shaft went
out of sight. All might listen to Fletcher’s pleasing, though not
profound or vigorous language; his thoughts are noble, and tinged with
the ideality of romance, his metaphors vivid, though sometimes too
forced; he possesses the idiom of English without much pedantry,
though in many passages he strains it beyond common use; his
versification, though studiously irregular, is often rhythmical and
sweet. Yet we are seldom arrested by striking beauties; good lines
occur in every page, fine ones but rarely; we lay down the volume with
a sense of admiration of what we have read, but little of it remains
distinctly in the memory. Fletcher is not much quoted, and has not
even afforded copious materials to those who cull the beauties of
ancient lore.

|Their characters.|

84. In variety of character there can be no comparison between
Fletcher and Shakspeare. A few types return upon us in the former; an
old general, proud of his wars, faithful and passionate, a voluptuous
and arbitrary king (for his principles of obedience do not seem to
have inspired him with much confidence in royal virtues), a supple
courtier, a high-spirited youth, or one more gentle in manners but not
less stout in action, a lady, fierce and not always very modest in her
chastity, repelling the solicitations of licentiousness, another
impudently vicious, form the usual pictures for his canvas. Add to
these, for the lighter comedy, an amorous old man, a gay spendthrift,
and a few more of the staple characters of the stage, and we have the
materials of Fletcher’s dramatic world. It must be remembered that we
compare him only with Shakspeare, and that as few dramatists have been
more copious than Fletcher, few have been so much called upon for
inventions, in which the custom of the theatre has not exacted much
originality. The great fertility of his mind in new combinations of
circumstance gives as much appearance of novelty to the personages
themselves as an unreflecting audience requires. In works of fiction,
even those which are read in the closet, this variation of the mere
dress of a character is generally found sufficient for the public.

|Their tragedies.|

85. The tragedies of Beaumont and Fletcher, by which our ancestors
seem to have meant only plays wherein any of the personages, or at
least any whom the spectator would wish to keep alive, dies on the
stage, are not very numerous, but in them we have as copious an
effusion of blood as any contemporary dramas supply. The conclusion
indeed of these, and of the tragi-comedies, which form a larger class,
is generally mismanaged. A propensity to take the audience by surprise
leads often to an unnatural and unsatisfactory catastrophe; it seems
their aim to disappoint common expectation, to baffle reasonable
conjecture, to mock natural sympathy. This is frequently the practice
of our modern novelists, who find no better resource in the poverty of
their invention to gratify the jaded palate of the world.

|Inferior to their comedies.|

86. The comic talents of these authors far exceeded their skill in
tragedy. In comedy they founded a new school, at least in England, the
vestiges of which are still to be traced in our theatre. Their plays
are at once distinguishable from those of their contemporaries by the
regard to dramatic effect which influenced the writers’ imagination.
Though not personally connected with the stage, they had its picture
ever before their eyes. Hence their incidents are numerous and
striking, their characters sometimes slightly sketched, not drawn like
those of Jonson, from a preconceived design, but preserving that
degree of individual distinctness which a common audience requires,
and often highly humorous without extravagance; their language
brilliant with wit, their measure, though they do not make great use
of prose, very lax and rapid, running frequently to lines of thirteen
and fourteen syllables. Few of their comedies are without a mixture of
grave sentiments or elevated characters; and though there is much to
condemn in their indecency and even licentiousness of principle, they
never descend to the coarse buffoonery not unfrequent in their age.
Never were dramatic poets more thoroughly gentlemen, according to the
standard of their times; and, when we consider the court of James I.,
we may say that they were above that standard.[551]

     [551] “Their plots were generally more regular than Shakspeare’s,
     especially those which were made before Beaumont’s death: and
     they understood and imitated the conversation of gentlemen much
     better; whose wild debaucheries and quickness of wit in
     repartees, no poet before them could paint as they have done.
     Humour, which Ben Jonson derived from particular persons, they
     made it not their business to describe; they represented all the
     passions very lively, but above all, love. I am apt to believe
     the English language in them arrived to its highest perfection;
     what words have since been taken in, are rather superfluous than
     ornamental. Their plays are now the most pleasant and frequent
     entertainments of the stage; two of theirs being acted through
     the year for one of Shakspeare’s or Jonson’s; the reason is
     because there is a certain gaiety in their comedies, and pathos
     in their more serious plays, which suits generally with all men’s
     humours. Shakspeare’s language is likewise a little obsolete, and
     Jonson’s wit falls short of theirs.”--Dryden, p. 101.

|Their female characters.|

87. The best of Fletcher’s characters are female; he wanted that large
sweep of reflection and experience which is required for the greater
diversity of the other sex. None of his women delight us like Imogen
and Desdemona; but he has many Imogens and Desdemonas of a fainter
type. Spacelia, Zenocia, Celia, Aspasia, Evanthe, Lucina, Ordella,
Oriana, present the picture that cannot be greatly varied without
departing from its essence, but which never can be repeated too often
to please us, of faithful, tender, self-denying female love, superior
to everything but virtue. Nor is he less successful, generally, in the
contrast of minds stained by guilty passion, though in this he
sometimes exaggerates the outline till it borders on caricature. But
it is in vain to seek in Fletcher the strong conceptions of
Shakspeare, the Shylocks, the Lears, the Othellos. Schlegel has well
said that “scarce anything has been wanting to give a place to
Beaumont and Fletcher among the great dramatists of Europe, but more
of seriousness and depth, and the regulating judgment which prescribes
the due limits in every part of composition.” It was for want of the
former qualities that they conceive nothing in tragedy very forcibly;
for want of the latter that they spoil their first conception by
extravagance and incongruity.[552]

     [552] “Shakspeare,” says Dryden, “writ better between man and
     man, Fletcher betwixt man and woman; consequently, the one
     described friendship better, the other love; yet, Shakspeare
     taught Fletcher to write love, and Juliet and Desdemona are
     originals. It is true the scholar had the softer soul, but the
     master had the kinder.... Shakspeare had an universal mind which
     comprehended all characters and passions; Fletcher a more
     confined and limited; for though he treated love in perfection,
     yet honour, ambition, revenge, and generally all the stronger
     passions, he either touched not, or not masterly. To conclude
     all, he was a limb of Shakspeare,” p. 301. This comparison is
     rather generally than strictly just, as is often the case with
     the criticisms of Dryden. That Fletcher wrote better than
     Shakspeare “between man and woman,” or in displaying love, will
     be granted when he shall be shown to have excelled Ferdinand and
     Miranda, or Posthumus and Imogen. And, on the other hand, it is
     unjust to deny him credit for having sometimes touched the
     stronger emotions, especially honour and ambition, with great
     skill, though much inferior to that of Shakspeare.

88. The reputation of Beaumont and Fletcher was at its height, and
most of their plays had been given to the stage, when a worthy
inheritor of their mantle appeared in Philip Massinger. Of his extant
dramas the Virgin Martyr, published in 1622, seems to be the
earliest; but we have reason to believe that several are lost; and
even this tragedy may have been represented some years before. The far
greater part of his remaining pieces followed within ten years; the
Bashful Lover, which is the latest now known, was written in 1636.
Massinger was a gentleman, but in the service, according to the
language of those times, of the Pembroke family; his education was at
the university, his acquaintance both with books and with the manners
of the court is familiar, his style and sentiments are altogether
those of a man polished by intercourse of good society.

89. Neither in his own age nor in modern times, does Massinger seem to
have been put on a level with Fletcher or Jonson. Several of his
plays, as has been just observed, are said to have perished in
manuscript; few were represented after the restoration; and it is only
in consequence of his having met with more than one editor, who has
published his collected works in a convenient form, that he is become
tolerably familiar to the general reader. He is, however, far more
intelligible than Fletcher; his text has not given so much
embarrassment from corruption, and his general style is as perspicuous
as we ever find it in the dramatic poets of that age. The obscure
passages in Massinger, after the care that Gifford has taken, are by
no means frequent.

|General nature of his dramas.|

90. Five of his sixteen plays are tragedies, that is, are concluded in
death; of the rest, no one belongs to the class of mere comedy, but by
the depth of the interest, the danger of the virtuous, or the atrocity
of the vicious characters, as well as the elevation of the general
style, must be ranked with the serious drama, or as it was commonly
termed, tragi-comedy. A shade of melancholy tinges the writings of
Massinger; but he sacrifices less than his contemporaries to the
public taste for superfluous bloodshed on the stage. In several of his
plays, such as the Picture, or the Renegado, where it would have been
easy to determine the catastrophe towards tragedy, he has preferred to
break the clouds with the radiance of a setting sun. He consulted in
this his own genius, not eminently pathetic, nor energetic enough to
display the utmost intensity of emotion, but abounding in sweetness
and dignity, apt to delineate the loveliness of virtue, and to delight
in its recompense after trial. It has been surmised that the religion
of Massinger was that of the church of Rome; a conjecture not
improbable, though, considering the ascetic and imaginative piety,
which then prevailed in that of England, we need not absolutely go so
far for his turn of thought in the Virgin Martyr or the Renegado.

|His delineations of character.|

91. The most striking excellence of this poet is his conception of
character; and in this I must incline to place him above Fletcher,
and, if I may venture to say it, even above Jonson. He is free from
the hard outline of the one, and the negligent looseness of the other.
He has indeed no great variety, and sometimes repeats, with such bare
modifications as the story demands, the type of his first design.
Thus, the extravagance of conjugal affection is pourtrayed, feeble in
Theodosius, frantic in Domitian, selfish in Sforza, suspicious in
Mathias; and the same impulses of doting love return upon us in the
guilty eulogies of Mallefort on his daughter. The vindictive hypocrisy
of Montreville in the Unnatural Combat, has nearly its counterpart in
that of Francesco in the Duke of Milan, and is again displayed with
more striking success in Luke. This last villain indeed, and that
original, masterly, inimitable conception, Sir Giles Overreach, are
sufficient to establish the rank of Massinger in this great province
of dramatic art. But his own disposition led him more willingly to
pictures of moral beauty. A peculiar refinement, a mixture of
gentleness and benignity with noble daring, belong to some of his
favourite characters, to Pisander in the Bondman, to Antonio in A Very
Woman, to Charolois in the Fatal Dowry. It may be readily supposed
that his female characters are not wanting in these graces. It seems
to me that he has more variety in his women than in the other sex, and
that they are less mannered than the heroines of Fletcher. A slight
degree of error or passion in Sophia, Eudocia, Marcelia, without
weakening our sympathy, serves both to prevent the monotony of
perpetual rectitude, so often insipid in fiction, and to bring forward
the development of the story.

|His subjects.|

92. The subjects chosen by Massinger are sometimes historical, but
others seem to have been taken from French or Italian novels, and
those so obscure, that his editor Gifford, a man of much reading and
industry, has seldom traced them. This indeed was an usual practice of
our ancient dramatists. Their works have consequently a
romantic character, presenting as little of the regular Plautine
comedy, as of the Greek forms of tragedy. They are merely novels in
action, following probably their models with no great variance, except
the lower and lighter episodes which it was always more or less
necessary to combine with the story. It is from this choice of
subjects, perhaps, as much as from the peculiar temper of the poets,
that love is the predominant affection of the mind which they display;
not cold and conventional, as we commonly find it on the French stage,
but sometimes, as the novelists of the South were prone to delineate
its emotions, fiery, irresistible, and almost resembling the fatalism
of ancient tragedy, sometimes a subdued captive at the chariot-wheels
of honour or religion. The range of human passion is consequently far
less extensive than in Shakspeare; but the variety of circumstance,
and the modifications of the paramount affection itself, compensated
for this deficiency.

|Beauty of his style.|

93. Next to the grace and dignity of sentiment in Massinger, we must
praise those qualities in his style. Every modern critic has been
struck by the peculiar beauty of his language. In his harmonious swell
of numbers, in his pure and genuine idiom, which a text, by good
fortune and the diligence of its last editor, far less corrupt than
that of Fletcher, enables us to enjoy, we find an unceasing charm. The
poetical talents of Massinger were very considerable; his taste
superior to that of his contemporaries; the colouring of his imagery
is rarely over-charged; a certain redundancy, as some may account it,
gives fullness, or what the painters call _impasto_, to his
style, and if it might not always conduce to effect on the stage, is,
on the whole, suitable to the character of his composition.

|Inferiority of his comic powers.|

94. The comic powers of this writer are not on a level with the
serious; with some degree of humorous conception he is too apt to aim
at exciting ridicule by caricature, and his dialogue wants altogether
the sparkling wit of Shakspeare and Fletcher. Whether from a
consciousness of this defect, or from an unhappy compliance with the
viciousness of the age, no writer is more contaminated by gross
indecency. It belongs indeed chiefly, not perhaps, exclusively, to the
characters he would render odious; but upon them he has bestowed this
flower of our early theatre with no sparing hand. Few, it must be
said, of his plays are incapable of representation merely on this
account, and the offence is therefore more incurable in Fletcher.

|Some of his tragedies particularised.|

95. Among the tragedies of Massinger, I should incline to prefer the
Duke of Milan. The plot borrows enough from history to give it
dignity, and to counterbalance in some measure the predominance of the
passion of love which the invented parts of the drama exhibit. The
characters of Sforza, Mercelia, and Francesco, are in Massinger’s best
manner; the story is skilfully and not improbably developed; the
pathos is deeper than we generally find in his writings; the eloquence
of language, especially in the celebrated speech of Sforza, before the
emperor, has never been surpassed by him. Many, however, place the
Fatal Dowry still higher. This tragedy furnished Rowe with the story
of his Fair Penitent. The superiority of the original, except in
suitableness for representation, has long been acknowledged. In the
Unnatural Combat, probably among the earliest of Massinger’s works, we
find a greater energy, a bolder strain of figurative poetry, more
command of terror and perhaps of pity, than in any other of his
dramas. But the dark shadows of crime and misery which overspread this
tragedy belong to rather an earlier period of the English stage than
that of Massinger, and were not congenial to his temper. In the Virgin
Martyr, he has followed the Spanish model of religious Autos, with
many graces of language and a beautiful display of Christian heroism
in Dorothea; but the tragedy is in many respects unpleasing.

|And of his other plays.|

96. The Picture, The Bondman, and A Very Woman may perhaps be reckoned
the best among the tragi-comedies of Massinger. But the general merits
as well as defects of this writer are perceptible in all; and the
difference between these and the rest is not such as to be apparent to
every reader. Two others are distinguishable as more English than the
rest; the scene lies at home, and in the age; and to these the common
voice has assigned a superiority. They are A New Way to Pay Old Debts,
and the City Madam. A character drawn, as it appears, from reality,
and though darkly wicked, not beyond the province of the higher
comedy, Sir Giles Overreach, gives the former drama a striking
originality and an impressive vigour. It retains, alone among the
productions of Massinger, a place on the stage. Gifford inclines to
prefer the City Madam; which, no doubt, by the masterly delineation of
Luke, a villain of a different order from Overreach, and a larger
portion of comic humour and satire than is usual with this writer, may
dispute the palm. It seems to me that there is more violent
improbability in the conduct of the plot, than in a A New Way to Pay
Old Debts.

|Ford.|

97. Massinger, as a tragic writer, appears to me second only to
Shakspeare; in the higher comedy, I can hardly think him inferior to
Jonson. In wit and sprightly dialogue, as well as in knowledge of
theatrical effect, he falls very much below Fletcher. These, however,
are the great names of the English stage. At a considerable distance
below Massinger, we may place his contemporary, John Ford. In the
choice of tragic subjects from obscure fictions which have to us the
charm of entire novelty, they resemble each other; but in the conduct
of their fable, in the delineation of their characters, each of these
poets has his distinguishing excellencies. “I know,” says Gifford,
“few things more difficult to account for, than the deep and lasting
impression made by the more tragic portions of Ford’s poetry.” He
succeeds, however, pretty well in accounting for it; the situations
are awfully interesting, the distress intense, the thoughts and
language becoming the expression of deep sorrow. Ford, with none of
the moral beauty and elevation of Massinger, has, in a much higher
degree, the power over tears; we sympathise even with his vicious
characters, with Giovanni and Annabella and Bianca. Love, and love in
guilt or sorrow, is almost exclusively the emotion he pourtrays; no
heroic passion, no sober dignity, will be found in his tragedies. But
he conducts his stories well and without confusion; his scenes are
often highly wrought and effective; his characters, with no striking
novelty, are well supported; he is seldom extravagant or regardless of
probability. The Broken Heart has generally been reckoned his finest
tragedy; and if the last act had been better prepared by bringing the
love of Calantha for Ithocles more fully before the reader in the
earlier part of the play, there would be very few passages of deeper
pathos in our dramatic literature. “The style of Ford,” it is said by
Gifford, “is altogether original and his own. Without the majestic
march which distinguishes the poetry of Massinger, and with little or
none of that light and playful humour which characterises the dialogue
of Fletcher, or even of Shirley, he is yet elegant and easy and
harmonious; and though rarely sublime, yet sufficiently elevated for
the most pathetic tones of that passion on whose romantic energies he
chiefly delighted to dwell.” Yet he censures afterwards Ford’s
affectation of uncouth phrases, and perplexity of language. Of comic
ability this writer does not display one particle. Nothing can be
meaner than those portions of his dramas which, in compliance with the
prescribed rules of that age, he devotes to the dialogue of servants
or buffoons.

|Shirley.|

98. Shirley is a dramatic writer much inferior to those who have been
mentioned, but has acquired some degree of reputation, or, at least,
notoriety of name, in consequence of the new edition of his plays.
These are between twenty and thirty in number; some of them, however,
written in conjunction with his fellow dramatists. A few of these are
tragedies, a few are comedies, drawn from English manners; but in the
greater part we find the favourite style of that age, the characters
foreign and of elevated rank, the interest serious, but not always of
buskined dignity, the catastrophe fortunate; all, in short, that has
gone under the vague appellation of tragi-comedy. Shirley has no
originality, no force in conceiving or delineating character, little
of pathos, and less, perhaps, of wit; his dramas produce no deep
impression in reading, and of course can leave none in the memory. But
his mind was poetical, his better characters, especially females,
express pure thoughts in pure language; he is never tumid or affected,
and seldom obscure; the incidents succeed rapidly, the personages are
numerous, and there is a general animation in the scenes, which causes
us to read him with some pleasure. No very good play, nor, possibly,
any very good scene could be found in Shirley; but he has many lines
of considerable beauty. Among his comedies, the Gamesters may be
reckoned the best. Charles I. is said to have declared that it was
“the best play he had seen these seven years;” and it has even been
added that the story was of his royal suggestion. It certainly
deserves praise both for language and construction of the plot, and it
has the advantage of exposing vice to ridicule; but the ladies of that
court, the fair forms whom Vandyke has immortalised, must have been
very different indeed from their posterity, as in truth I believe they
were, if they could sit it through. The Ball, and also some more among
the comedies of Shirley, are so far remarkable and worthy of being
read, that they bear witness to a more polished elegance of manners,
and a more free intercourse in the higher class, than we find in the
comedies of the preceding reign. A queen from France, and that queen
Henrietta Maria, was better fitted to give this tone than Anne of
Denmark. But it is not from Shirley’s pictures that we can draw the
most favourable notions of the morals of that age.

|Heywood.|

99. Heywood is a writer still more fertile than Shirley; between forty
and fifty plays are ascribed to him. We have mentioned one of the best
in the former volume, antedating, perhaps, its appearance by a few
years. In the English Traveller, he has returned to something like the
subject of A Woman Killed with Kindness, but with less success. This
play is written in verse, and with that ease and perspicuity, seldom
rising to passion or figurative poetry, which distinguishes this
dramatist. Young Geraldine is a beautiful specimen of the Platonic, or
rather inflexibly virtuous lover whom the writers of this age
delighted to pourtray. On the other hand, it is difficult to pronounce
whether the lady is a thorough paced hypocrite in the first acts, or
falls from virtue, like Mrs. Frankfort, on the first solicitation of a
stranger. In either case, the character is unpleasing, and, we may
hope, improbable. The under plot of this play is largely borrowed from
the Mostellaria of Plautus, and is diverting, though somewhat absurd.
Heywood seldom rises to much vigour of poetry; but his dramatic
invention is ready, his style is easy, his characters do not
transgress the boundaries of nature, and it is not surprising that he
was popular in his own age.

|Webster.|

100. Webster belongs to the first part of the reign of James. He
possessed very considerable powers, and ought to be ranked, I think,
the next below Ford. With less of poetic grace than Shirley, he had
incomparably more vigour; with less of nature and simplicity than
Heywood, he had a more elevated genius, and a bolder pencil. But the
deep sorrows and terrors of tragedy were peculiarly his province. “His
imagination,” says his last editor, “had a fond familiarity with
objects of awe and fear. The silence of the sepulchre, the sculptures
of marble monuments, the knolling of church bells, the cearments of
the corpse, the yew that roots itself in dead men’s graves, are the
illustrations that most readily present themselves to his
imagination.” I think this well-written sentence a little one-sided,
and hardly doing justice to the variety of Webster’s power; but, in
fact, he was as deeply tainted as any of his contemporaries with the
savage taste of the Italian school, and in the Duchess of Malfy,
scarcely leaves enough on the stage to bury the dead.

|His Duchess of Malfy.|

101. This is the most celebrated of Webster’s dramas. The story is
taken from Bandello, and has all that accumulation of wickedness and
horror, which the Italian novelists perversely described, and our
tragedians as perversely imitated. But the scenes are wrought up with
skill, and produce a strong impression. Webster has a superiority in
delineating character above many of the old dramatists; he is seldom
extravagant beyond the limits of conceivable nature; we find the
guilt, or even the atrocity, of human passions, but not that
incarnation of evil spirits which some more ordinary dramatists loved
to exhibit. In the character of the Duchess of Malfy herself there
wants neither originality nor skill of management, and I do not know
that any dramatist after Shakspeare would have succeeded better in the
difficult scene where she discloses her love to an inferior. There is,
perhaps, a little failure in dignity and delicacy, especially towards
the close; but the Duchess of Malfy is not drawn as an Isabella or a
Portia; she is a lovesick widow, virtuous and true-hearted, but more
intended for our sympathy than our reverence.

|Vittoria Corombona.|

102. The White Devil, or Vittoria Corombona, is not much inferior in
language and spirit to the Duchess of Malfy; but the plot is more
confused, less interesting, and worse conducted. Mr. Dyce, the late
editor of Webster, praises the dramatic vigour of the part of
Vittoria, but justly differs from Lamb, who speaks of “the innocence,
resembling boldness” she displays in the trial scene. It is rather a
delineation of desperate guilt, losing in a counterfeited audacity all
that could seduce or conciliate the tribunal. Webster’s other plays
are less striking; in Appius and Virginia he has done, perhaps, better
than any one who has attempted a subject not, on the whole, very
promising for tragedy; several of the scenes are dramatic and
effective; the language, as is usually the case with Webster, is
written so as to display an actor’s talents, and he has followed the
received history sufficiently to abstain from any excess of slaughter
at the close. Webster is not without comic wit, as well as a power of
imagination; his plays have lately met with an editor of taste enough
to admire his beauties, and not very over-partial in estimating them.

103. Below Webster we might enumerate a long list of dramatists under
the first Stuarts. Marston is a tumid and ranting tragedian, a
wholesale dealer in murders and ghosts. Chapman, who assisted Ben
Jonson and some others in comedy, deserves no great praise for his
Bussy d’Amboise. The style in this, and in all his tragedies, is
extravagantly hyperbolical; he is not very dramatic, nor has any power
of exciting emotion, except in those who sympathize with a tumid pride
and self-confidence. Yet he has more thinking than many of the old
dramatists; and the praise of one of his critics, though strongly
worded, is not without some foundation, that we “seldom find richer
contemplations on the nature of man and the world.” There is also a
poetic impetuosity in Chapman, such as has redeemed his translation of
Homer, by which we are hurried along. His tragi-comedies, All Fools
and The Gentleman-usher, are, perhaps, superior to his tragedies.[553]
Rowley and Le Tourneur, especially the former, have occasionally good
lines, but we cannot say that they were very superior dramatists.
Rowley, however, was often in comic partnership with Massinger. Dekker
merits a higher rank; he co-operated with Massinger in some of his
plays, and in his own displays some energy of passion and some comic
humour. Middleton belongs to this lower class of dramatic writers; his
tragedy entitled “Women beware Women,” is founded on the story of
Bianca Cappello; it is full of action, but the characters are all too
vicious to be interesting, and the language does not rise much above
mediocrity. In comedy, Middleton deserves more praise. “A Trick to
catch the Old One,” and several others that bear his name are amusing
and spirited. But Middleton wrote chiefly in conjunction with others,
and sometimes with Jonson and Massinger.

     [553] Chapman is well reviewed and at length, in an article of
     the Retrospective Review, vol. iv., p. 333, and again in vol. v.




                           CHAPTER XXIV.

      HISTORY OF POLITE LITERATURE IN PROSE PROM 1600 TO 1650.


                             SECT. I.

_Italian Writers--Boccalini--Grammatical and Critical Works--Gracian--
French Writers--Balzac--Voiture--French Academy--Vaugelas--Patru and
Le Maistre--Style of English Prose--Earl of Essex--Knolles--Several
other English Writers_.

|Decline of taste in Italy.|

1. It would be vain, probably, to inquire from what general causes we
should deduce the decline of taste in Italy. None, at least, have
occurred to my mind, relating to political or social circumstances,
upon which we could build more than one of those sophistical theories,
which assume a causal relation between any concomitant events. Bad
taste, in fact, whether in literature or the arts, is always ready to
seize upon the public, being, in many cases, no more than a pleasure
in faults which are really fitted to please us, and of which it can
only be said that they hinder or impair the greater pleasure we should
derive from beauties. Among these critical sins, none are so dangerous
as the display of ingenious and novel thoughts, or turns of phrase.
For as such enter into the definition of good writing, it seems very
difficult to persuade the world that they can ever be the
characteristics of bad writing. The metes and bounds of ornament, the
fine shades of distinction which regulate a judicious choice, are only
learned by an attentive as well as a naturally susceptible mind; and
it is rarely, perhaps, that an unprepared multitude does not prefer
the worse picture, the worse building, the worse poem, the worse
speech to the better. Education, an acquaintance with just criticism,
and still more the habitual observation of what is truly beautiful in
nature or art, or in the literature of taste, will sometimes generate
almost a national tact that rejects the temptations of a meretricious
and false style; but experience has shown that this happy state of
public feeling will not be very durable. Whatever might be the cause
of it, this age of the Italian seicentisti has been reckoned almost as
inauspicious to good writing in prose as in verse. “If we except,”
says Tiraboschi, “the Tuscans and a very few more, never was our
language so neglected as in this period. We can scarce bear to read
most of the books that were published, so rude and full of barbarisms
is their style. Few had any other aim than to exercise their wit in
conceits and metaphors; and, so long as they could scatter them
profusely over their pages, cared nothing for the choice of phrases or
the purity of grammar. Their eloquence on public occasions was
intended only for admiration and applause, not to persuade, or
move.”[554] And this, he says, is applicable alike to their Latin and
Italian, their sacred and profane harangues. The academical
discourses, of which Dati has collected many in his Prose Fiorentine,
are poor in comparison with those of the sixteenth.[555]

     [554] Vol. xi., p. 415.

     [555] Vol. xi., p. 415.

2. A later writer than Tiraboschi has thought this sentence against
the seicentisti a little too severe, and condemning equally with him
the bad taste characteristic of that age, endeavours to rescue a few
from the general censure.[556] It is, at least, certain that the
insipidity of the cinque cento writers, their long periods void of any
but the most trivial meaning, their affectation of the faults of
Cicero’s manner in their own language, ought not to be overlooked or
wholly pardoned, while we dwell on an opposite defect of their
successors, the perpetual desire to be novel, brilliant, or profound.
These may, doubtless, be the more offensive of the two; but they are,
perhaps, not less likely to be mingled with something really worth
reading.

     [556] Salfi, xiv., 11.

|Style of Galileo.|

3. It will not be expected that we can mention many Italian books,
after what has been said, which come very precisely within the class
of polite literature, or claim any praise on the ground of style.
Their greatest luminary, Galileo, wrote with clearness, elegance, and
spirit; no one among the moderns had so entirely rejected a dry and
technical manner of teaching, and thrown such attractions round the
form of truth. Himself a poet and a critic, he did not hesitate to
ascribe his own philosophical perspicuity to the constant perusal of
Ariosto. This I have mentioned in another place; but we cannot too
much remember that all objects of intellectual pursuit are as bodies
acting with reciprocal forces in one system, being all in relation to
the faculties of the mind, which is itself but one; and that the most
extensive acquaintance with the various provinces of literature will
not fail to strengthen our dominion over those we more peculiarly deem
our own. The school of Galileo, especially Torricelli and Redi, were
not less distinguished than himself for their union of elegance with
philosophy.[557]

     [557] Salfi, xiv., 12.

|Bentivoglio.|

4. The letters of Bentivoglio are commonly known. This epistolary art
was always cultivated by the Italians, first in the Latin tongue, and
afterwards in their own. Bentivoglio has written with equal dignity
and ease. Galileo’s letters are also esteemed on account of their
style as well as of what they contain. In what is more peculiarly
called eloquence, the Italians of this age are rather emulous of
success than successful; the common defects of taste in themselves,
and in those who heard or read them, as well as, in most instances,
the uninteresting nature of their subjects exclude them from our
notice.

|Boccalini’s News from Parnassus.|

5. Trajan Boccalini was by his disposition inclined to political
satire, and possibly to political intrigue; but we have here only to
mention the work by which he is best known, Advices from Parnassus
(Ragguagli di Parnaso). If the idea of this once popular and
celebrated book is not original, which I should rather doubt, though
without immediately recognising a similarity to anything earlier
(Lucian, the common prototype, excepted), it has at least been an
original source. In the general turn of Boccalini’s fictions, and
perhaps in a few particular inventions, we may sometimes perceive what
a much greater man has imitated; they bear a certain resemblance to
those of Addison, though the vast superiority of the latter in
felicity of execution and variety of invention may almost conceal it.
The Ragguagli are a series of despatches from the court of Apollo on
Parnassus, where he is surrounded by eminent men of all ages. This
fiction becomes in itself very cold and monotonous; yet there is much
variety in the subjects of the decisions made by the god, with the
advice of his counsellors, and some strokes of satire are well
hit, though more perhaps fail of effect. But we cannot now catch the
force of every passage. Boccalini is full of allusions to his own
time, even where the immediate subject seems ancient. This book was
published at Venice in 1612; at a time when the ambition of Spain was
regarded with jealousy by patriotic Italians, who thought that pacific
republic their bulwark and their glory. He inveighs, therefore,
against the military spirit and the profession of war, “necessary
sometimes, but so fierce and inhuman that no fine expressions can make
it honourable.”[558] Nor is he less severe on the vices of kings, nor
less ardent in his eulogies of liberty; the government of Venice,
being reckoned, and not altogether untruly, an asylum of free-thought
and action, in comparison with that of Spain. Aristotle, he reports in
one of his despatches, was besieged in his villa on Parnassus by a
number of armed men belonging to different princes, who insisted on
his retracting the definition he had given of a tyrant, that he was
one who governed for his own good and not that of the people, because
it would apply to every prince, all reigning for their own good. The
philosopher, alarmed by this demand, altered his definition; which was
to run thus, that tyrants were certain persons of old time, whose race
was now quite extinct.[559] Boccalini, however, takes care, in
general, to mix something of playfulness with his satire, so that it
could not be resented without apparent ill-nature. It seems, indeed,
to us free from invective, and rather meant to sting than to wound.
But this, if a common rumour be true, did not secure him against a
beating of which he died. The style of Boccalini is said by the
critics to be clear and fluent, rather than correct or elegant; and he
displays the taste of his times by extravagant metaphors. But to
foreigners, who regard this less, his News from Parnassus, unequal, of
course, and occasionally tedious, must appear to contain many
ingenious allusions, judicious criticisms, and acute remarks.

     [558] Ragg, 75.

     [559] Ragg, 76.

|His Pietra del Paragone.|

6. The Pietra del Paragone by the same author is an odd, and rather
awkward mixture of reality and fiction, all levelled at the court of
Spain, and designed to keep alive a jealousy of its ambition. It is a
kind of episode or supplement to the Ragguagli di Parnaso, the leading
invention being preserved. Boccalini is an interesting writer on
account of the light he throws on the history and sentiments of Italy.
He is in this work a still bolder writer than in the former; not only
censuring Spain without mercy, but even the Venetian aristocracy,
observing upon the insolence of the young nobles towards the citizens,
though he justifies the senate for not punishing the former more
frequently with death by public execution, which would lower the
nobility in the eyes of the people. They were, however, he says, as
severely punished, when their conduct was bad, by exclusion from
offices of trust. The Pietra del Paragone is a kind of political, as
the Ragguagli is a critical miscellany.

|Ferrante Pallavicino.|

7. About twenty years after Boccalini, a young man appeared, by name
Ferrante Pallavicino, who, with a fame more local and transitory, with
less respectability of character, and probably with inferior talents,
trod to a certain degree in his steps. As Spain had been the object of
satire to the one, so was Rome to the other. Urban VIII., an ambitious
pontiff, and vulnerable in several respects, was attacked by an
imprudent and self-confident enemy, safe, as he imagined, under the
shield of Venice. But Pallavicino, having been trepanned into the
power of the pope, lost his head at Avignon. None of his writings have
fallen in my way; that most celebrated at the time, and not wholly
dissimilar in the conception to the News from Parnassus, was entitled
The Courier robbed; a series of imaginary letters which such a fiction
gave him a pretext for bringing together. Perhaps we may consider
Pallavicino as rather a counterpart to Jordano Bruno, in the satirical
character of the latter, than to Boccalini.[560]

     [560] Corniani, viii., 205. Salfi, xiv., 46.

|Dictionary Della Crusca.|

8. The Italian language itself, grammatically considered, was still
assiduously cultivated. The Academicians of Florence published the
first edition of their celebrated Vocabolario della Crusca, in 1613.
It was avowedly founded on Tuscan principles, setting up the
fourteenth century as the Augustan period of the language, which they
disdained to call Italian; and though not absolutely excluding the
great writers of the sixteenth age whom Tuscany had not produced,
giving in general a manifest preference to their own. Italy has
rebelled against this tyranny of Florence, as she did, in the Social
War, against that of Rome. Her Lombard, and Romagnol, and Neapolitan
writers, have claimed the rights of equal citizenship, and fairly won
them in the field of literature. The Vocabulary itself was not
received as a legislative code. Beni assailed it by his Anti-Crusca
the same year; many invidiously published marginal notes to point out
the inaccuracies; and in the frequent revisions and enlargements of
this dictionary, the exclusive character it affected has, I believe,
been nearly lost.

|Grammatical works.--Buonmattei Bartoli.|

9. Buonmattei, himself a Florentine, was the first who completed an
extensive and methodical grammar, “developing,” says Tiraboschi, “the
whole economy and system of our language.” It was published entire,
after some previous impressions of parts, with the title, Della Lingua
Toscana, in 1643. This has been reckoned a standard work, both for its
authority, and for the clearness, precision, and elegance with which
it is written; but it betrays something of an academical and
Florentine spirit in the rigour of its grammatical criticism.[561]
Bartoli, a Ferrarese Jesuit, and a man of extensive learning, attacked
that dogmatic school, who were accustomed to proscribe common phrases
with a Non si può (It cannot be used), in a treatise entitled Il torto
ed il diritto del Non si può. His object was to justify many
expressions thus authoritatively condemned, by the examples of the
best writers. This book was a little later than the middle of the
century.[562]

     [561] Tiraboschi, xi., 409. Salfi, xiii., 398.

     [562] Corniani, vii., 259. Salfi, xiii., 417.

|Tassoni’s remarks on Petrarch.|

10. Petrarch had been the idol, in general, of the preceding age; and
above all, he was the peculiar divinity of the Florentines. But this
seventeenth century was in the productions of the mind a period of
revolutionary innovation; men dared to ask why, as well as what, they
ought to worship; and sometimes the same who rebelled against
Aristotle, as an infallible guide, were equally contumacious in
dealing with the great names of literature. Tassoni published in 1609
his Observations on the Poems of Petrarch. They are not written, as we
should now think, adversely to one whom he professes to honour above
all lyric poets in the world, and though his critical remarks are
somewhat minute, they seem hardly unfair. A writer like Petrarch,
whose fame has been raised so high by his style, is surely amenable to
this severity of examination. The finest sonnets Tassoni generally
extols, but gives a preference, on the whole, to the odes; which, even
if an erroneous judgment, cannot be called unfair upon the author of
both.[563] He produces many parallel passages from the Latin poems of
Petrarch himself, as well as from the ancients and from the earlier
Italians and Provençals. The manner of Tassoni is often humorous,
original, intrepid, satirical on his own times; he was a man of real
taste, and no servile worshipper of names.

     [563] Tutte le rime, tutti i versi in generale del Petrarca lo
     fecero poeta; ma le canzoni, per quanto a mi ne pare, furono
     quelle, che poeta grande e famoso lo fecero, p. 46.

|Galileo’s remarks on Tasso.|

|Sforza Pallavicino.|

|And other critical writers.|

11. Galileo was less just in his observations upon Tasso. They are
written with severity and sometimes an insulting tone towards the
great poet, passing over generally the most beautiful verses, though
he sometimes bestows praise. The object is to point out the imitations
of Tasso from Ariosto, and his general inferiority. The Observations
on the Art of Writing by Sforza Pallavicino, the historian of the
council of Trent, published at Rome, 1646, is a work of general
criticism containing many good remarks. What he says of imitation is
worthy of being compared with Hurd; though he will be found not to
have analysed the subject with anything like so much acuteness, nor
was this to be expected in his age. Pallavicino has an ingenious
remark, that elegance of style is produced by short metaphors, or
_metaforette_ as he calls them, which give us a more lively
apprehension of an object than its proper name. This seems to mean
only single words in a figurative sense, as opposed to phrases of the
same kind. He writes in a pleasing manner, and is an accomplished
critic without pedantry. Salfi has given rather a long analysis of
this treatise.[564] The same writer, treading in the steps of Corniani
has extolled some Italian critics of this period, whose writings I
have never seen; Beni, author of a prolix commentary in Latin on the
poetics of Aristotle; Peregrino, not inferior, perhaps, to
Pallavicino, though less known, whose theories are just and deep, but
not expressed with sufficient perspicuity; and Fioretti, who assumed
the fictitious name of Udeno Nisieli, and presided over an academy at
Florence denominated the Apatisti. The Progymnasmi Poetici of this
writer, if we may believe Salfi, ascend to that higher theory of
criticism which deduces its rules, not from precedents or arbitrary
laws, but from the nature of the human mind, and has, in modern times,
been distinguished by the name of æsthetic.[565]

     [564] Vol. xiii., p. 440.

     [565] Corniani, vii., 156; Salfi, xiii., 426.

|Prolusiones of Strada.|

12. In the same class of polite letters as these Italian writings, we
may place the Prolusiones Academicæ of Famianus Strada. They are
agreeably written, and bespeak a cultivated taste. The best is the
sixth of the second book, containing the imitations of six Latin
poets, which Addison has made well known (as I hope) to every reader
in the 115th and 119th numbers of the Guardian. It is here that all
may judge of this happy and graceful fiction; but those who have read
the Latin imitations themselves, will perceive that Strada has often
caught the tone of the ancients with considerable felicity. Lucan and
Ovid are, perhaps, best counterfeited, Virgil not quite so well, and
Lucretius worst of the six. The other two are Statius and
Claudian.[566] In almost every instance the subject chosen is
appropriated to the characteristic peculiarities of the poet.

     [566] A writer quoted in Blount’s Censura Autorum, p. 859,
     praises the imitation of Claudian above the rest, but thinks all
     excellent.

|Spanish prose. Gracian.|

13. The style of Gongora which deformed the poetry of Spain extended
its influence over prose. A writer named Gracian (it seems to be
doubtful which of two brothers, Lorenzo and Balthazar) excelled
Gongora himself in the affectation, the refinement, the obscurity of
his style. “The most voluminous of his works,” says Bouterwek, “bears
the affected title of El Criticón. It is an allegorical picture of the
whole course of human life divided into Crises, that is, sections
according to fixed points of view, and clothed in the formal garb of a
pompous romance. It is scarcely possible to open any page of this book
without recognising in the author a man who is in many respects far
from common, but who, from the ambition of being entirely uncommon in
thinking and writing, studiously and ingeniously, avoids nature and
good taste. A profusion of the most ambiguous subtleties expressed in
ostentatious language, are scattered throughout the work; and these
are the more offensive, in consequence of their union with the really
grand view of the relationship of man to nature and his Creator, which
forms the subject of the treatise. Gracian would have been an
excellent writer had not he so anxiously wished to be an extraordinary
one.”[567]

     [567] Hist. of Spanish Literature, p. 533.

14. The writings of Gracian seem in general to be the quintessence of
bad taste. The worst of all, probably, is El Eroe, which is admitted
to be almost unintelligible by the number of far-fetched expressions,
though there is more than one French translation of it. El político
Fernando, a panegyric on Ferdinand the catholic, seems as empty as it
is affected and artificial. The style of Gracian is always pointed,
emphatic, full of that which looks like profundity or novelty, though
neither deep nor new. He seems to have written on a maxim he
recommends to the man of the world: “if he desires that all should
look up to him, let him permit himself to be known, but not to be
understood.”[568] His treatise entitled Agudeza y arte di ingenio is a
system of concetti, digested under their different heads, and selected
from Latin, Italian, and Spanish writers of that and the preceding
age. It is said in the Biographie Universelle that this work, though
too metaphysical, is useful in the critical history of literature.
Gracian obtained a certain degree of popularity in France and England.

     [568] Si quiere que le veneren todos, permítase al conocimiento,
     no a la comprehensión.

|French prose. Du Vair.|

15. The general taste of French writers in the sixteenth century, as
we have seen, was simple and lively, full of sallies of natural wit
and a certain archness of observation, but deficient in those higher
qualities of language which the study of the ancients had taught men
to admire. In public harangues, in pleadings, and in sermons, these
characteristics of the French manner were either introduced out of
place, or gave way to a tiresome pedantry. Du Vair was the first who
endeavoured to bring in a more elaborate and elevated diction. Nor was
this confined to the example he gave. In 1607, he published a treatise
on French eloquence, and on the causes through which it had remained
at so low a point. This work relates chiefly to the eloquence of the
bar, or at least that of public speakers, and the causes which he
traces are chiefly such as would operate on that kind alone. But some
of his observations are applicable to style in the proper sense; and
his treatise has been reckoned the first which gave France the rules
of good writing, and the desire to practice them.[569] A modern critic
who censures the Latinisms of Du Vair’s style, admits that his
treatise on eloquence makes an epoch in the language.[570]

     [569] Gibert, Jugemens des Savans sur les auteurs qui ont traité
     de la rhétorique. This work is annexed to some editions of
     Baillet. Goujet has copied or abridged Gibert, without distinct
     acknowledgement, and not always carefully preserving the sense.

     [570] Neufchateau, préface aux Œuvres de Pascal, p. 181.

|Balzac.|

|Character of his writings.|

16. A more distinguished æra, however, is dated from 1625, when the
letters of Balzac were published.[571] There had indeed been a few
intermediate works, which contributed, though now little known, to the
improvement of the language. Among these, the translation of Florus by
Coeffeteau was reckoned a masterpiece of French style, and Vaugelas
refers more frequently to this than to any other book. The French were
very strong in translations from the classical writers; and to this
they are certainly much indebted for the purity and correctness they
reached in their own language. These translators, however, could only
occupy a secondary place. Balzac himself is hardly read. “The polite
world,” it was said a hundred years since, “knows nothing now of these
works, which were once its delight.”[572] But his writings are not
formed to delight those, who wish either to be merry or wise, to laugh
or to learn; yet he has real excellencies, besides those which may be
deemed relative to the age in which he came. His language is polished,
his sentiments are just but sometimes common, the cadence of his
periods is harmonious, but too artificial and uniform; on the whole,
he approaches to the tone of a languid sermon, and leaves a tendency
to yawn. But in his time superficial truths were not so much
proscribed as at present; the same want of depth belongs to almost all
the moralists in Italian and in modern Latin. Balzac is a moralist
with a pure heart and a love of truth and virtue, somewhat alloyed by
the spirit of flattery towards persons, however he may declaim about
courts and courtiers in general, a competent erudition and a good deal
of observation of the world. In his Aristippe, addressed to Christina,
and consequently a late work, he deals much in political precepts and
remarks, some of which might be read with advantage. But he was
accused of borrowing his thoughts from the ancients, which the author
of an Apology for Balzac seems not wholly to deny. This apology indeed
had been produced by a book on the Conformity of the eloquence of M.
Balzac with that of the ancients.

     [571] The same writer fixes on this as an epoch, and it was
     generally admitted in the seventeenth century. The editor of
     Balzac’s Works in 1665, says, after speaking of the unformed
     state of the French language, full of provincial idioms and
     incorrect phrases: M. de Balzac est venu en ce temps de confusion
     et de désordre, où toutes les lectures qu’il faisoit, et toutes
     les actions qu’il entendoit lui devoient être suspectes, où il
     avoit à se défier de tous les maîtres et de tous les exemples; et
     où il ne pouvoit arriver à son but qu’en s’éloignant de tous les
     chemins battus, ni marcher dans la bonne route qu’après se l’être
     ouverte à lui même. Il l’a ouverte en effet, et pour lui et pour
     les autres; il y a fait entrer un grand nombre d’heureux génies,
     dont il étoit le guide et le modèle: et si la France voit
     aujourd’hui que ses écrivains sont plus polis et plus réguliers,
     que ceux d’Espagne et d’Italie, il faut qu’elle en rende
     l’honneur à ce grand homme, dont la mémoire lui doit être en
     vénération.... La même obligation que nous avons a M. de Malherbe
     pour la poésie, nous l’avons a M. de Balzac pour la prose; il lui
     a prescrit des bornes et des régles; il lui a donné de la douceur
     et de la force, il a montré que l’éloquence doit avoir des
     accords, aussi bien que la musique, et il a sçu mêler si
     adroitement cette diversité de sons et de cadences, qu’il n’est
     point de plus délicieux concert que celui de ses paroles. C’est
     en plaçant tous les mots avec tant d’ordre et de justesse qu’il
     ne laisse rien de mol ni de foible dans son discours, &c. This
     regard to the cadence of his periods is characteristic of Balzac.
     It has not, in general, been much practised in France,
     notwithstanding some splendid exceptions, especially in Bossuet.
     Olivet observes, that it was the peculiar glory of Balzac to have
     shown the capacity of the language for this rhythm. Hist. de
     l’Acad. Française, p. 84. But has not Du Vair some claim also?
     Neufchateau gives a much more limited eulogy of Balzac. Il avoit
     pris à la lettre les reflections de Du Vair sur la trop grande
     bassesse de notre éloquence. Il s’en forma une haute idée; mais
     il se trompe d’abord dans l’application, car il porta dans le
     style épistolaire qui doit être familier et leger, l’enflure
     hyperbolique, la pompe, et le nombre, qui ne convient qu’aux
     grandes déclamations et aux harangues oratoires.... Ce défaut de
     Balzac contribua peut être à son succès; car le gout n’étoit pas
     formé; mais il se corrigea dans la suite, et en parcourant son
     recueil on s’aperçoit des progrès sensibles qu’il faisoit avec
     l’age. Ce recueil si précieux pour l’histoire de notre
     littérature a eu long temps une vogue extraordinaire. Nos plus
     grands auteurs l’avoient bien étudié. Molière lui a emprunté
     quelques idées.

     [572] Goujet, i., 426.

|His letters.|

17. The letters of Balzac are in twenty-seven books; they begin in
1620 and end about 1653; the first portion having appeared in 1625.
“He passed all his life,” says Vigneul-Marville, “in writing letters,
without ever catching the right characteristics of that style.”[573]
This demands a peculiar ease and naturalness of expression, for want
of which they seem no genuine exponents of friendship or gallantry,
and hardly of polite manners. His wit was not free from pedantry, and
did not come from him spontaneously. Hence, he was little fitted to
address ladies, even the Rambouillets; and indeed he had acquired so
laboured and artificial a way of writing letters, that even those to
his sister, though affectionate, smell too much of the lamp. His
advocates admit that they are to be judged rather by the rules of
oratorical than epistolary composition.

     [573] Mélanges de Littérature, vol. i., p. 126. He adds, however,
     that Balzac had “un talent particulier pour embellir notre
     langue.” The writer whom I quote under the name of
     Vigneul-Marville which he assumed was D’Argonne, a Benedictine of
     Rouen.

18. In the moral dissertations, such as that entitled the Prince, this
elaborate manner is of course not less discernible, but not so
unpleasant or out of place. Balzac has been called the father of the
French language, the master and model of the great men who have
followed him. But it is confessed by all that he wanted the fine taste
to regulate his style according to the subject. Hence, he is pompous
and inflated upon ordinary topics; and in a country so quick to seize
the ridiculous as his own, not all his nobleness, purity, and vigour
of style, not the passages of eloquence which we often find, have been
sufficient to redeem him from the sarcasms of those who have had more
power to amuse. The stateliness, however, of Balzac is less offensive
and extravagant than the affected intensity of language which
distinguishes the style of the present age on both sides of the
Channel, and which is in fact a much worse modification of the same
fault.

|Voiture.--Hotel Rambouillet.|

19. A contemporary and rival of Balzac, though very unlike in most
respects, was Voiture. Both one and the other were received with
friendship and admiration in a celebrated society of Paris, the first
which, on this side of the Alps, united the aristocracy of rank and of
genius in one circle, that of the Hotel Rambouillet. Catherine de
Vivonne, widow of the Marquis de Rambouillet, was the owner of this
mansion. It was frequented, during the long period of her life, by all
that was distinguished in France, by Richelieu and Condé, as much as
by Corneille, and a long host of inferior men of letters. The heiress
of this family, Julie d’Angennes, beautiful and highly accomplished,
became the central star of so bright a galaxy. The love of
intellectual attainments, both in mother and daughter, the sympathy
and friendship they felt for those who displayed them, as well as
their moral worth, must render their names respectable; but these were
in some measure sullied by false taste and what we may consider an
habitual affectation even in their conduct. We can scarcely give
another name to the caprice of Julia, who, in the fashion of romance,
compelled the Duke of Montausier to carry on a twelve years’
courtship, and only married him in the decline of her beauty. This
patient lover, himself one of the most remarkable men in the court of
Louis XIV., had many years before presented her with what has been
called The Garland of Julia, a collection to which the poets and wits
of Paris had contributed. Every flower, represented in a drawing, had
its appropriate little poem, and all conspired to the praise of Julia.

20. Voiture is chiefly known by his letters; his other writings, at
least, are inferior. These begin about 1627, and are addressed to
Madame de Rambouillet and to several other persons of both sexes.
Though much too laboured and affected, they are evidently the original
type of the French epistolary school, including those in England who
have formed themselves upon it. Pope very frequently imitated Voiture,
Walpole not so much in his general correspondence, but he knew how to
fall into it. The object was to say what meant little with the utmost
novelty in the mode, and with the most ingenious compliment to the
person addressed; so that he should admire himself, and admire the
writer. They are, of course, very tiresome after a short time; yet
their ingenuity is not without merit. Balzac is more solemn and
dignified, and it must be owned that he has more meaning. Voiture
seems to have fancied that good sense spoils a man of wit. But he has
not so much wit as _esprit_; and his letters serve to exemplify
the meaning of that word. Pope, in addressing ladies, was nearly the
ape of Voiture. It was unfortunately thought necessary, in such a
correspondence, either to affect despairing love, which was to express
itself with all possible gaiety, or where love was too presumptuous,
as with the Rambouillets, to pour out a torrent of nonsensical
flattery, which was to be rendered tolerable by far-fetched turns of
thought. Voiture has the honour of having rendered this style
fashionable. But if the bad taste of others had not perverted his own,
Voiture would have been a good writer. His letters, especially those
written from Spain, are sometimes truly witty, and always vivacious.
Voltaire, who speaks contemptuously of Voiture, might have been glad
to have the author of some of his jeux d’esprit; that, for example,
addressed to the Prince of Condé in the character of a pike, founded
on a game where the Prince had played that fish. We should remember
also, that Voiture held his place in good society upon the tacit
condition that he should always strive to be witty.[574]

     [574] Nothing, says Olivet, could be more opposite than Balzac
     and Voiture. L’un se portoit toujours au sublime, l’autre
     toujours au délicat. L’un avoit une imagination enjouée, qui
     faisoit prendre à toutes ses pensées un air de galanterie. L’un
     même lorsqu’il vouloit plaisanter, étoit toujours grave; l’autre,
     dans les occasions même sérieuses, trouvoit à rire. Hist. de
     l’Académie, p. 83.

|Establishment of French Academy.|

21. But the Hotel Rambouillet, with its false theories of taste
derived in a great measure from the romances of Scudery and
Calprenede, and encouraged by the agreeably artificial manner of
Voiture, would have produced, in all probability, but a transient
effect. A far more important event was the establishment of the French
Academy. France was ruled by a great minister who loved her glory and
his own. This, indeed, has been common to many statesmen, but it was a
more peculiar honour to Richelieu, that he felt the dignity which
letters confer on a nation. He was himself not deficient in literary
taste; his epistolary style is manly and not without elegance; he
wrote theology in his own name, and history in that of Mezeray; but,
what is most to the present purpose, his remarkable fondness for the
theatre led him not only to invent subjects for other poets, but, as
it has been believed, to compose one forgotten tragi-comedy, Mirame,
without assistance.[575] He availed himself fortunately of an
opportunity which almost every statesman would have disregarded, to
found the most illustrious institution in the annals of polite
literature.

     [575] Fontenelle, Hist. du Thèatre, p. 96.

22. The French Academy sprang from a private society of men of letters
at Paris, who, about the year 1629, agreed to meet once a week, as at
an ordinary visit, conversing on all subjects and especially on
literature. Such among them as were authors communicated their works,
and had the advantage of free and fair criticism. This continued for
three or four years with such harmony and mutual satisfaction, that
the old men, who remembered this period, says their historian,
Pelisson, looked back upon it as a golden age. They were but nine in
number, of whom Gombauld and Chapelain are the only names by any means
famous, and their meetings were at first very private. More by degrees
were added, among others Boisrobert, a favourite of Richelieu, who
liked to hear from him the news of the town. The Cardinal, pleased
with the account of this society, suggested their public
establishment. This, it is said, was unpleasing to every one of them,
and some proposed to refuse it; but the consideration that the offers
of such a man were not to be slighted overpowered their modesty; and
they consented to become a royal institution. They now enlarged their
numbers, created officers, and began to keep registers of their
proceedings. These records commence on March 13, 1634, and are the
basis of Pelisson’s history. The name of French Academy was chosen
after some deliberation. They were established by letters patent in
January, 1635; which the parliament of Paris enregistered with great
reluctance, requiring not only a letter from Richelieu, but an express
order from the king; and when this was completed in July, 1637, it was
with a singular proviso that the Academy should meddle with nothing
but the embellishment and improvement of the French language, and such
books as might be written by themselves, or by others who should
desire their interference. This learned body of lawyers had some
jealousy of the innovations of Richelieu; and one of them said it
reminded him of the satire of Juvenal, where the senate, after ceasing
to bear its part in public affairs, was consulted about the sauce for
a turbot.[576]

     [576] Pelisson, Hist. de l’Acadèmie Française.

|Its objects and constitution.|

23. The professed object of the Academy was to purify the language
from vulgar, technical, or ignorant usages, and to establish a fixed
standard. The Academicians undertook to guard scrupulously the
correctness of their own works, examining the arguments, the method,
the style, the structure of each particular word. It was proposed by
one that they should swear not to use any word which had been rejected
by a plurality of votes. They soon began to labour in their vocation,
always bringing words to the test of good usage, and deciding
accordingly. These decisions are recorded in their registers. Their
number was fixed by the letters patent at forty, having a director,
chancellor, and secretary; the two former changed every two,
afterwards every three months, the last chosen for life. They
read discourses weekly; which by the titles of some that Pelisson has
given us, seem rather trifling and in the style of the Italian
Academies; but this practise was soon disused. Their more important
and ambitious occupations were to compile a dictionary and a grammar:
Chapelain drew up the scheme of the former, in which it was
determined, for the sake of brevity, to give no quotations, but to
form it from about twenty-six good authors in prose, and twenty in
verse. Vaugelas was entrusted with the chief direction of this work.

|It publishes a critique on the Cid.|

24. The Academy was subjected in its very infancy, to a severe trial
of that literary integrity without which such an institution can only
escape from being pernicious to the republic of letters, by becoming
too despicable and odious to produce mischief. On the appearance of
the Cid, Richelieu, who had taken up a strong prejudice against it,
insisted that the Academy should publish their opinion on this play.
The more prudent part of that body were very loth to declare
themselves at so early a period of their own existence; but the
Cardinal was not apt to take excuses; and a committee of three was
appointed to examine the Cid itself and the observations upon it which
Scudery had already published. Five months elapsed before the
Sentimens de l’Académie Française sur la Tragédie du Cid were made
public in November, 1637.[577] These are expressed with much respect
for Corneille, and profess to be drawn up with his assent, as well as
at the instance of Scudery. It has been not uncommon to treat this
criticism as a servile homage to power. But a perusal of it will not
lead us to confirm so severe a reproach. The Sentimens de l’Académie
are drawn up with great good sense and dignity. The spirit indeed of
critical orthodoxy is apparent; yet this was surely pardonable in an
age when the violation of rules had as yet produced nothing but such
pieces as those of Hardy. It in easy to sneer at Aristotle when we
have a Shakspeare; but Aristotle formed his rules on the practice of
Sophocles. The Academy could not have done better than by inculcating
the soundest rules of criticism, but they were a little too narrow in
their application. The particular judgments which they pass on each
scene of the play, as well as those on the style, seem for the most
part very just, and such as later critics have generally adopted; so
that we can really see little ground for the allegation of undue
compliance with the Cardinal’s prejudices, except in the frigid tone
of their praise, and in their omission to proclaim that a great
dramatic genius had arisen in France.[578] But this is so much the
common vice or blindness of critics, that it may have sprung less from
baseness, than from a fear to compromise their own superiority by
vulgar admiration. The Academy had great pretensions, and Corneille
was not yet the Corneille of France and of the world.

     [577] Pelisson. The printed edition bears the date of 1638.

     [578] They conclude by saying that in spite of the faults of this
     play, la naïveté et la véhémence de les passions, la force et la
     délicatesse de plusieurs de ses pensées, et cet agrément
     inexplicable qui se mêle dans tous ses défauts lui ont acquis un
     rang considérable entre les poèmes Français de ce genre qui ont
     le plus donné de satisfaction. Si l’auteur ne doit pas toute sa
     réputation à son mérite il ne la doit pas toute à son bonheur, et
     la nature lui a été assez libérale pour excuser la fortune si
     elle lui a été prodigue.

     The Academy justly, in my opinion, blame Corneille for making
     Chimène consent to marry Rodrigue the same day that he had killed
     her father. Cela surpasse toute sorte de créance, et ne peut
     vraisemblablement tomber dans l’ame non seulement d’une sage
     fille, mais d’une qui seroit le plus dépouillée d’honneur et
     d’humanité, &c., p. 49.

|Vaugelas’s remarks on the French language.|

25. Gibert, Goujet, and other writers enumerate several works on the
grammar of the French language in this period. But they were
superseded, and we may almost say that an æra was made in the national
literature, by the publication of Vaugelas, Rémarques sur la Langue
Française, in 1649. Thomas Corneille, who, as well as Patru, published
notes on Vaugelas, observes that the language has only been written
with politeness since the appearance of these remarks. They were not
at first received with general approbation, and some even in later
times thought them too scrupulous; but they gradually became of
established authority. Vaugelas is always clear, modest, and ingenuous
in stating his opinion. His remarks are 547 in number, no gross fault
being noticed, nor any one which is not found in good authors. He
seldom mentions those whom he censures. His test of correct language
is the manner of speaking in use with the best part (la plus saine
partie) of the court, conformably with the manner of writing in the
best part of contemporary authors. But though we must have recourse to
good authors in order to establish an indisputably good usage, yet the
court contributes incomparably more than books; the consent of
the latter being as it were the seal and confirmation of what is
spoken at court, and deciding what is there doubtful. And those who
study the best authors get rid of many faults common at court, and
acquire a peculiar purity of style. None, however, can dispense with a
knowledge of what is reckoned good language at court, since much that
is spoken there will hardly be found in books. In writing, it is
otherwise, and he admits that the study of good authors will enable us
to write well, though we shall write still better by knowing how to
speak well. Vaugelas tells us that his knowledge was acquired by long
practice at court, and by the conversation of Cardinal Perron and of
Coeffeteau.

|La Mothe le Vayer.|

26. La Mothe le Vayer in his Considérations sur l’Eloquence Française,
1647, has endeavoured to steer a middle course between the old and the
new schools of French style, but with a marked desire to withstand the
latter. He blames Du Vair for the strange and barbarous words he
employs. He laughs also at the nicety of those who were beginning to
object to a number of common French words. One would not use the
conjunction Car; against which folly Le Vayer wrote a separate
treatise.[579] He defends the use of quotations in a different
language, which some purists in French style had in horror. But this
treatise seems not to contain much that is valuable, and it is very
diffuse.

     [579] This was Gomberville, in whose immense romance, Polexandre,
     it is said that this word only occurs three times; a discovery
     which does vast honour to the person who took the pains to make
     it.

|Legal speeches of Patru.|

27. Two French writers may be reckoned worthy of a place in this
chapter, who are, from the nature of their works, not generally known
out of their own country, and whom I cannot refer with absolute
propriety to this rather than to the ensuing period, except by a
certain character and manner of writing, which belongs more to the
antecedent than the later moiety of the seventeenth century. These
were two lawyers, Patru and Le Maistre. The pleadings of Patru appear
to me excellent in their particular line of forensic eloquence,
addressed to intelligent and experienced judges. They greatly resemble
what are called the private orations of Demosthenes, and those of
Lysias and Isæus, especially, perhaps, the last. No ambitious
ornament, no appeal to the emotions of the heart, no bold figures of
rhetoric are permitted in the Attic severity of this style; or, if
they ever occur, it is to surprise us as things rather uncommon in the
place where they appear than in themselves. Patru does not even employ
the exordium usual in speeches, but rushes instantaneously, though
always perspicuously, into his statement of the case. In the eyes of
many this is no eloquence at all, and it requires perhaps some taste
for legal reasoning to enter fully into its merit. But the Greek
orators are masters whom a modern lawyer need not blush to follow, and
to follow, as Patru did, in their respect for the tribunal they
addressed. They spoke to rather a numerous body of judges; but those
were Athenians, and, as we have reason to believe, the best and most
upright, the salt of that vicious city. Patru again spoke to the
parliament of Paris, men too well versed in the ways of law and
justice to be the dupes of tinkling sound. He is, therefore, plain,
lucid, well-arranged, but not emphatic or impetuous; the subjects of
his published speeches would not admit of such qualities; though Patru
is said to have employed on some occasions the burning words of the
highest oratory. His style has always been reckoned purely and rigidly
French; but I have been led rather to praise what has struck me in the
substance of his pleadings; which, whether read at this day in France
or not, are, I may venture to say, worthy to be studied by lawyers,
like those to which I have compared them, the strictly forensic
portion of Greek oratory. In some speeches of Patru which are more
generally praised, that on his own reception in the Academy, and one
complimentary to Christina, it has seemed to me that he falls very
short of his judicial style; the ornaments are common-place, and such
as belong to the panegyrical department of oratory, in all ages less
important and valuable than the other two. It should be added, that
Patru was not only one of the purest writers, but one of the best
critics whom France possessed.[580]

     [580] Perrault says of Patru in his Hommes Illustres de France,
     vol. ii., p. 66. Ses plaidoyers servent _encore aujourd’hui_ de
     modèle pour écrire correctement en notre langue. Yet they were
     not much above thirty years old--so much had the language
     changed, as to rules of writing, within that time.

|And of Le Maistre.|

28. The forensic speeches of Le Maistre are more eloquent, in a
popular sense of the word, more ardent, more imaginative, than those
of Patru; the one addresses the judges alone, the other has a view to
the audience; the one seeks the success of his cause alone, the other,
that and his own glory together. The one will be more prized by the
lovers of legal reasoning, the other by the majority of mankind. The
one more resembles the orations of Demosthenes for his private
clients, the others those of Cicero. Le Maistre is fervid and
brilliant, he hurries us with him; in all his pleadings, warmth is his
first characteristic, and a certain elegance is the second. In the
power of statement, I do not perceive that he is inferior to Patru;
both are excellent. Wherever great moral or social topics, or
extensive views of history and human nature can be employed, Le
Maistre has the advantage. Both are concise, relatively to the common
verbosity of the bar; but Le Maistre has much more that might be
retrenched; not that it is redundant in expression, but unnecessary in
substance. This is owing to his ambitious display of general
erudition; his quotations are too frequent and too ornamental, partly
drawn from the ancients, but more from the fathers. Ambrose, in fact,
Jerome and Augustin, Chrysostom, Basil, and Gregory, were the models
whom the writers of this age were accustomed to study; and hence, they
are often, and Le Maistre among the rest, too apt to declaim where
they should prove, and to use arguments from analogy, rather striking
to the common hearer, than likely to weigh much with a tribunal. He
has less simplicity, less purity of taste than Patru; his animated
language would, in our courts, be frequently effective with a jury,
but would seem too indefinite and common-place to the judges; we
should crowd to hear Le Maistre, we should be compelled to decide with
Patru. They are both, however, very superior advocates, and do great
honour to the French bar.

|Improvement in English style.|

29. A sensible improvement in the general style of English writers had
come on before the expiration of the sixteenth century; the rude and
rough phrases, sometimes requiring a glossary, which lie as spots of
rust on the pages of Latimer, Grafton, Aylmer, or even Ascham, had
been chiefly polished away; if we meet in Sydney, Hooker, or the prose
of Spenser, with obsolete expressions or forms, we find none that are
unintelligible, none that give us offence. But to this next period
belong most of those whom we commonly reckon our old English writers;
men often of such sterling worth for their sense, that we might read
them with little regard to their language, yet, in some instances at
least, possessing much that demands praise in this respect. They are
generally nervous and effective, copious to redundancy in their
command of words, apt to employ what seemed to them ornament with much
imagination rather than judicious taste, yet seldom degenerating into
common-place and indefinite phraseology. They have, however, many
defects; some of them, especially the most learned, are full of
pedantry, and deform their pages by an excessive and preposterous
mixture of Latinisms unknown before;[581] at other times we are
disgusted by colloquial and even vulgar idioms or proverbs; nor is it
uncommon to find these opposite blemishes not only in the same author,
but in the same passages. Their periods, except in a very few, are
ill-constructed and tediously prolonged; their ears (again with some
exceptions) seem to have been insensible to the beauty of rhythmical
prose; grace is commonly wanting, and their notion of the artifices of
style, when they thought at all about them, was not congenial to our
own language. This may be deemed a general description of the English
writers under James and Charles; we shall now proceed to mention some
of the most famous, and who may, in a certain degree, be deemed to
modify this censure.

     [581] In Pratt’s edition of Bishop Hall’s works, we have a
     glossary of obsolete or unusual words employed by him. They
     amount to more than 1,100, the greater part being of Latin or
     Greek origin; some are Gallicisms.

|Earl of Essex.|

30. I will begin with a passage of very considerable beauty, which is
here out of its place, since it was written in the year 1598. It is
found in the Apology for the Earl of Essex, published among the works
of Lord Bacon, and passing, I suppose, commonly for his. It seems,
nevertheless, in my judgment, far more probably genuine. We have
nowhere in our early writers a flow of words so easy and graceful, a
structure so harmonious, a series of antitheses so spirited without
affectation, an absence of quaintness, pedantry, and vulgarity, so
truly gentleman-like, a paragraph so worthy of the most brilliant man
of his age. This could not have come from Bacon, who never divested
himself of a certain didactic formality, even if he could have
counterfeited that chivalrous generosity which it was not in his
nature to feel. It is the language of a soldier’s heart, with the
unstudied grace of a noble courtier.[582]

     [582] “A word for my friendship with the chief men of action, and
     favour generally to the men of war; and then I come to their main
     objection, which is my crossing of the treaty in hand. For most
     of them that are accounted the chief men of action, I do confess,
     I do entirely love them. They have been my companions both abroad
     and at home; some of them began the wars with me, most have had
     place under me, and many have had me a witness of their rising
     from captains, lieutenants, and private men, to those charges,
     which since by their virtue they have obtained. Now that I have
     tried them, I would choose them for friends, if I had them not;
     before I had tried them, God, by his providence, chose them for
     me. I love them for mine own sake; for I find sweetness in their
     conversation, strong assistance in their employments with me, and
     happiness in their friendship. I love them for their virtues’
     sake, and for their greatness of mind (for little minds, though
     never so full of virtue, can be but a little virtuous); and for
     their great understanding; for to understand little things, or
     things not of use, is little better than to understand nothing at
     all. I love them for their affections; for self-loving men love
     ease, pleasure, and profit; but they that love pains, danger, and
     fame, show that they love public profit more than themselves. I
     love them for my country’s sake; for they are England’s best
     armour of defence and weapons of offence. If we may have peace,
     they have purchased it; if we must have war, they must manage it.
     Yet, while we are doubtful and in treaty, we must value ourselves
     by what may be done, and the enemy will value us by what hath
     been done by our chief men of action.

     “That generally I am affected to the men of war, it should not
     seem strange to any reasonable man. Every man doth love them of
     his own profession. The grave judges favour the students of the
     law; the reverend bishops the labourers in the ministry; and I
     (since her Majesty hath yearly used my service in her late
     actions) must reckon myself in the number of her men of war.
     Before, action providence makes me cherish them for what they can
     do; in action, necessity makes me value them for the service they
     do; and, after action, experience and thankfulness makes me love
     them for the service they have done.”

|Knolles’s History of the Turks.|

31. Knolles, already known by a spirited translation of Bodin’s
Commonwealth, published in 1610 a copious History of the Turks,
bringing down his narrative to the most recent times. Johnson in a
paper of the Rambler has given him the superiority over all English
historians. “He has displayed all the excellencies that narration can
admit. His style, though somewhat obscured by time, and vitiated by
false wit, is pure, nervous, elevated, and clear.... Nothing could
have sunk this author into obscurity but the remoteness and barbarity
of the people whose story he relates. It seldom happens that all
circumstances concur to happiness or fame. The nation which produced
this great historian has the grief of seeing his genius employed upon
a foreign and uninteresting subject; and that writer who might have
secured perpetuity to his name by a history of his own country, has
exposed himself to the danger of oblivion by recounting enterprises
and revolutions of which none desire to be informed.”[583] The
subject, however, appeared to Knolles, and I know not how we can say
erroneously, one of the most splendid he could have selected. It was
the rise and growth of a mighty nation, second only to Rome in the
constancy of success, and in the magnitude of empire; a nation fierce
and terrible, the present scourge of half Christendom, and though from
our remoteness not very formidable to ourselves, still one of which
not the bookish man in his closet or the statesman in council had
alone heard, but the smith at his anvil, and the husbandman at his
plough. A long decrepitude of the Turkish empire on one hand, and our
frequent alliance with it on the other, have obliterated the
apprehensions and interests of every kind which were awakened
throughout Europe by its youthful fury and its mature strength. The
subject was also new in England, yet rich in materials; various, in
comparison with ordinary history, though not perhaps so fertile of
philosophical observation as some others, and furnishing many
occasions for the peculiar talents of Knolles. These were displayed,
not in depth of thought, or copiousness of collateral erudition, but
in a style and in a power of narration which Johnson has not too
highly extolled. His descriptions are vivid and animated;
circumstantial, but not to feebleness; his characters are drawn with a
strong pencil. It is indeed difficult to estimate the merits of an
historian very accurately without having before our eyes his original
sources: he may probably have translated much that we admire, and he
had shown that he knew how to translate. In the style of Knolles there
is sometimes, as Johnson has hinted, a slight excess of desire to make
every phrase effective; but he is exempt from the usual blemishes of
his age; and his command of the language is so extensive, that we
should not err in placing him among the first of our elder writers.
Comparing as a specimen of Knolles’s manner, his description of the
execution of Mustapha, son of Solyman, with that given by Robertson,
where the latter historian has been as circumstantial as his
limits would permit, we shall perceive that the former paints better
his story, and deepens better its interest.[584]

     [583] Rambler, No. 122.

     [584] Knolles, p. 515. Robertson, book xi.

|Raleigh’s History of the World.|

32. Raleigh’s History of the World is a proof of the respect for
laborious learning that had long distinguished Europe. We should
expect from the prison-hours of a soldier, a courtier, a busy
intriguer in state affairs, a poet and man of genius, something well
worth our notice; but hardly a prolix history of the ancient world,
hardly disquisitions on the site of Paradise and the travels of Cain.
These are probably translated with little alteration from some of the
learned writings of the Continent; they are by much the least valuable
portion of Raleigh’s work. The Greek and Roman story is told more
fully and exactly than by any earlier English author, and with a plain
eloquence, which has given this book a classical reputation in our
language, though from its length and the want of that critical sifting
of facts which we now justly demand, it is not greatly read. Raleigh
has intermingled political reflections, and illustrated his history by
episodes from modern times, which perhaps are now the most interesting
passages. It descends only to the second Macedonian war; the
continuation might have been more generally valuable; but either the
death of Prince Henry, as Raleigh himself tells us, or the new schemes
of ambition which unfortunately opened upon his eyes, prevented the
execution of the large plan he had formed. There is little now
obsolete in the words of Raleigh, nor, to any great degree, in his
turn of phrase; the periods, when pains have been taken with them,
show that artificial structure which we find in Sydney and Hooker; he
is less pedantic than most of his contemporaries, seldom low, never
affected.[585]

     [585] Raleigh’s History was so little known, that Warburton, in
     the preface to his Julian, took from it a remarkable passage
     without acknowledgment; and Dr. Parr, though a man of very
     extensive reading, extolled it as Warburton’s not knowing, what
     he afterwards discovered, the original source. The passage is as
     follows in Raleigh, Warburton of course having altered some of
     the expressions. “We have left it (the Roman empire) flourishing
     in the middle of the field, having rooted up or cut down all that
     kept it from the eyes and admiration of the world. But after some
     continuance, it shall begin to lose the beauty it had; the storms
     of ambition shall beat her great boughs and branches one against
     another; her leaves shall fall off, her limbs wither, and a
     rabble of barbarous nations enter the field and cut her down.”
     Raleigh’s History, ad finem.

     Notwithstanding the praise that has been bestowed on this
     sentence, it is open to some censure; the simile and subject are
     too much confounded; a rabble of barbarous nations might be
     required to subvert the Roman empire, but make an odd figure in
     cutting down a tree. The rhythm and spirit indeed are admirable.

|Daniel’s History of England.|

33. Daniel’s History of England from the Conquest to the Reign of
Edward III., published in 1618, is deserving of some attention on
account of its language. It is written with a freedom from all
stiffness, and a purity of style which hardly any other work of so
early a date exhibits. These qualities are indeed so remarkable that
it would require a good deal of critical observation to distinguish it
even from writings of the reign of Anne; and where it differs from
them (I speak only of the secondary class of works, which have not
much individuality of manner), it is by a more select idiom, and by an
absence of the Gallicism or vulgarity which are often found in that
age. It is true that the merits of Daniel are chiefly negative; he is
never pedantic or antithetical or low, as his contemporaries were apt
to be; but his periods are ill constructed, he has little vigour or
elegance; and it is only by observing how much pains he must have
taken to reject phrases which were growing obsolete, that we give him
credit for having done more than follow the common stream of easy
writing. A slight tinge of archaism, and a certain majesty of
expression, relatively to colloquial usage, were thought by Bacon and
Raleigh congenial to an elevated style; but Daniel, a gentleman of the
king’s household, wrote as the court spoke, and his facility would be
pleasing if his sentences had a less negligent structure. As an
historian, he has recourse only to common authorities; but his
narration is fluent and perspicuous, with a regular vein of good
sense, more the characteristic of his mind, both in verse and prose,
than any commanding vigour.

|Bacon.|

34. The style of Bacon has an idiosyncracy which we might expect from
his genius. It can rarely indeed happen, and only in men of secondary
talents, that the language they use is not, by its very choice and
collocation, as well as its meaning, the representative of an
individuality that distinguishes their turn of thought. Bacon is
elaborate, sententious, often witty, often metaphorical; nothing could
be spared; his analogies are generally striking and novel; his
style is clear, precise, forcible; yet there is some degree of
stiffness about it, and in mere language he is inferior to Raleigh.
The History of Henry VII., admirable as many passages are, seems to be
written rather too ambitiously, and with too great an absence of
simplicity.

|Milton.|

35. The polemical writings of Milton, which chiefly fall within this
period, contain several bursts of his splendid imagination and
grandeur of soul. They are, however, much inferior to the
Areopagitica, or Plea for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing. Many
passages in this famous tract are admirably eloquent; an intense love
of liberty and truth glows through it, the majestic soul of Milton
breathes such high thoughts as had not been uttered before; yet even
here he frequently sinks in a single instant, as is usual with our old
writers, from his highest flights to the ground; his intermixture of
familiar with learned phraseology is unpleasing, his structure is
affectedly elaborate, and he seldom reaches any harmony. If he turns
to invective, as sometimes in this treatise, and more in his Apology
for Smectymnuus, it is mere ribaldrous vulgarity blended with
pedantry; his wit is always poor and without ease. An absence of
idiomatic grace, and an use of harsh inversions violating the rules of
the language, distinguish, in general, the writings of Milton, and
require, in order to compensate them, such high beauties as will
sometimes occur.

|Clarendon.|

36. The History of Clarendon may be considered as belonging rather to
this than to the second period of the century, both by the probable
date of composition and by the nature of its style. He is excellent in
everything that he has performed with care; his characters are
beautifully delineated, his sentiments have often a noble gravity
which the length of his periods, far too great in itself, seems to
befit; but in the general course of his narration he is negligent of
grammar and perspicuity, with little choice of words, and therefore
sometimes idiomatic without ease or elegance. The official papers on
the royal side, which are generally attributed to him, are written in
a masculine and majestic tone, far superior to those of the
parliament. The latter had, however, a writer who did them honour:
May’s History of the Parliament is a good model of genuine English; he
is plain, terse, and vigorous, never slovenly, though with few
remarkable passages, and is, in style as well as substance, a kind of
contrast to Clarendon.

|The Icon Basilice.|

37. The famous Icon Basilice, ascribed to Charles I., may deserve a
place in literary history. If we could trust its panegyrists, few
books in our language have done it more credit by dignity of sentiment
and beauty of style. It can hardly be necessary for me to express my
unhesitating conviction that it was solely written by Bishop Gauden,
who, after the Restoration, unequivocally claimed it as his own. The
folly and impudence of such a claim, if it could not be substantiated,
are not to be presumed as to any man of good understanding, fair
character, and high station, without stronger evidence than has been
alleged on the other side; especially when we find that those who had
the best means of inquiry, at a time when it seems impossible that the
falsehood of Gauden’s assertion should not have been demonstrated, if
it were false, acquiesced in his pretensions. We have very little to
place against this, except secondary testimony, vague, for the most
part, in itself, and collected by those whose veracity has not been
put to the test like that of Gauden.[586] The style, also, of the Icon
Basilice has been identified by Mr. Todd with that of Gauden, by the
use of several phrases, so peculiar that we can hardly conceive them
to have suggested themselves to more than one person. It is,
nevertheless, superior to his acknowledged writings. A strain of
majestic melancholy is well kept up; but the personated sovereign is
rather too theatrical for real nature, the language is too rhetorical
and amplified, the periods too artificially elaborated. None but
scholars and practised writers employ such a style as this.

     [586] There is only one claimant, in a proper sense, for the Icon
     Basilice, which is Gauden himself; the king neither appears by
     himself or representative. And, though we may find several
     instances of plagiarism in literary history (one of the grossest
     being the publication by a Spanish friar, under another title, of
     a book already in print with the name of Hyperius of Marpurg, its
     real author), yet I cannot call to mind any, where a man known to
     the world has asserted in terms his own authorship of a book not
     written by himself, but universally ascribed to another, and
     which had never been in his possession. A story is told, and, I
     believe, truly, that a young man assumed the credit of
     Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling, while it was still anonymous. But
     this is widely different from the case of the Icon Basilice. We
     have had an interminable discussion as to the Letters of Junius.
     But no one has ever claimed this derelict property to himself, or
     told the world, I am Junius.

|Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.|

38. Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy belongs, by its systematic
divisions and its accumulated quotations, to the class of mere
erudition; it seems, at first sight, like those tedious Latin folios,
into which scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries threw
the materials of their Adversaria, or common-place books, painfully
selected and arranged by the labour of many years. But writing,
fortunately, in English, and in a style not by any means devoid of
point and terseness, with much good sense and observation of men as
well as of books, and having also the skill of choosing his quotations
for their rareness, oddity, and amusing character, without losing
sight of their pertinence to the subject, he has produced a work of
which, as is well known, Johnson said, that it was the only one which
had ever caused him to leave his bed earlier than he had intended.
Johnson, who seems to have had some turn for the singularities of
learning, which fill the Anatomy of Melancholy, may perhaps have
raised the credit of Burton higher than his desert. He is clogged by
excess of reading, like others of his age, and we may peruse entire
chapters without finding more than a few lines that belong to himself.
This becomes a wearisome style, and, for myself, I have not found much
pleasure in glancing over the Anatomy of Melancholy. It may be added
that he has been a collector of stories far more strange than true,
from those records of figments, the old medical writers of the
sixteenth century, and other equally deceitful sources. Burton lived
at Oxford, and his volumes are apparently a great sweeping of
miscellaneous literature from the Bodleian library.

|Earle’s Characters.|

39. John Earle, after the Restoration bishop of Worcester, and then of
Salisbury, is author of “Microcosmographia, or a Piece of the Worlde
discovered in Essays and Characters,” published anonymously in 1628.
In some of these short characters, Earle is worthy of comparison with
La Bruyère; in others, perhaps the greater part, he has contented
himself with pictures of ordinary manners, such as the varieties of
occupation, rather than of intrinsic character, supply. In all,
however, we find an acute observation and a happy humour of
expression. The chapter entitled the Sceptic is best known; it is
witty, but an insult throughout on the honest searcher after truth,
which could have come only from one that was content to take up his
own opinions for ease or profit. Earle is always gay and quick to
catch the ridiculous, especially that of exterior appearances; his
style is short, describing well with a few words, but with much of the
affected quaintness of that age. It is one of those books which give
us a picturesque idea of the manners of our fathers at a period now
become remote, and for this reason it would deserve to be read.

|Overbury’s Characters.|

40. But the Microcosmography is not an original work in its plan or
mode of execution; it is a close imitation of the Characters of Sir
Thomas Overbury. They both belong to the favourite style of
apophthegm, in which every sentence is a point or a witticism. Yet the
entire character so delineated produces a certain effect; it is a
Dutch picture, a Gerard Dow, somewhat too elaborate. Earle has more
natural humour than Overbury, and hits his mark more neatly; the other
is more satirical, but often abusive and vulgar. The “Fair and Happy
Milk-maid,” often quoted, is the best of his characters. The wit is
often trivial and flat; the sentiments have nothing in them general,
or worthy of much resemblance; praise is only due to the graphic skill
in delineating character. Earle is as clearly the better, as Overbury
is the more original, writer.

|Jonson’s Discoveries.|

41. A book by Ben Jonson, entitled “Timber, or Discoveries made upon
Men and Matter,” is altogether miscellaneous, the greater part being
general moral remarks, while another portion deserves notice as the
only book of English criticism in the first part of the seventeenth
century. The observations are unconnected, judicious, sometimes witty,
frequently severe. The style is what was called pregnant, leaving much
to be filled up by the reader’s reflection. Good sense and a vigorous
manner of grappling with every subject will generally be found in
Jonson, but he does not reach any very profound criticism. His English
Grammar is said by Gifford to have been destroyed in the conflagration
of his study. What we have, therefore, under that name is, he thinks,
to be considered as properly the materials of a more complete work
that is lost. We have, as I apprehend, no earlier grammar upon so
elaborate a plan; every rule is illustrated by examples, almost to
redundance; but he is too copious on what is common to other
languages, and perhaps not full enough as to our peculiar idiom.
Nothing else deserving of the slightest notice can be added to this
book of Jonson.


                             SECT. II.

                            ON FICTION.

_Cervantes--French Romances--Calprenede--Scuderi--Latin and English
Works of Fiction._

|Publication of Don Quixote.|

42. The first part of Don Quixote was published in 1605. We have no
reason, I believe, to suppose that it was written long before. It
became immediately popular; and the admiration of the world raised up
envious competitors, one of whom, Avellenada, published a continuation
in a strain of invective against the author. Cervantes, who cannot be
imagined to have ever designed the leaving his romance in so
unfinished a state, took time about the second part, which did not
appear till 1615.

|Its reputation.|

43. Don Quixote is the only book in the Spanish language which can now
be said to possess much of an European reputation. It has, however,
enjoyed enough to compensate for the neglect of all the rest. It is to
Europe in general what Ariosto is to Italy, and Shakspeare to England;
the one book to which the slightest allusions may be made without
affectation, but not missed without discredit. Numerous translations
and countless editions of them, in every language, bespeak its
adaptation to mankind; no critic has been paradoxical enough to
withhold his admiration, no reader has ventured to confess a want of
relish for that in which the young and old, in every climate, have,
age after age, taken delight. They have doubtless believed that they
understood the author’s meaning; and, in giving the reins to the
gaiety that his fertile invention and comic humour inspired, never
thought of any deeper meaning than he announces, or delayed their
enjoyment for any metaphysical investigation of his plan.

|New views of its design.|

44. A new school of criticism, however, has of late years arisen in
Germany, acute, ingenious, and sometimes eminently successful in
philosophical, or, as they denominate it, æsthetic analysis of works
of taste, but gliding too much into refinement and conjectural
hypothesis, and with a tendency to mislead men of inferior capacities
for this kind of investigation into mere paradox and absurdity. An
instance is supplied, in my opinion, by some remarks of Bouterwek,
still more explicitly developed by Sismondi, on the design of
Cervantes in Don Quixote, and which have been repeated in other
publications. According to these writers, the primary idea is that of
a “man of elevated character, excited by heroic and enthusiastic
feelings to the extravagant pitch of wishing to restore the age of
chivalry; nor is it possible to form a more mistaken notion of this
work than by considering it merely as a satire, intended by the author
to ridicule the absurd passion for reading old romances.”[587] “The
fundamental idea of Don Quixote,” says Sismondi, “is the eternal
contrast between the spirit of poetry and that of prose. Men of an
elevated soul propose to themselves as the object of life to be the
defenders of the weak, the support of the oppressed, the champions of
justice and innocence. Like Don Quixote, they find on every side the
image of the virtues they worship; they believe that disinterestedness,
nobleness, courage, in short, knight errantry, are still prevalent;
and with no calculation of their own powers, they expose themselves
for an ungrateful world, they offer themselves as a sacrifice to the
laws and rules of an imaginary state of society.”[588]

     [587] Bouterwek, p. 334.

     [588] Littérature du Midi, vol. iii., p. 339.

45. If this were a true representation of the scheme of Don Quixote,
we cannot wonder that some persons should, as M. Sismondi tells us
they do, consider it as the most melancholy book that has ever been
written. They consider it also, no doubt, one of the most immoral, as
chilling and pernicious in its influence on the social converse of
mankind, as the Prince of Machiavel is on their political intercourse.
“Cervantes,” he proceeds, “has shown us in some measure the vanity of
greatness of soul and the delusion of heroism. He has drawn in Don
Quixote a perfect man (un homme accompli), who is, nevertheless, the
constant object of ridicule. Brave beyond the fabled knights he
imitates, disinterested, honourable, generous, the most faithful and
respectful of lovers, the best of masters, the most accomplished and
well educated of gentlemen, all his enterprises end in discomfiture to
himself, and in mischief to others.” M. Sismondi descants upon the
perfections of the knight of La Mancha with a gravity which is not
quite easy for his readers to preserve.

|Probably erroneous.|

46. It might be answered by a phlegmatic observer, that a mere
enthusiasm for doing good, if excited by vanity, and not accompanied
by common sense, will seldom be very serviceable to ourselves
or to others; that men who, in their heroism and care for the
oppressed, would throw open the cages of lions, and set galley-slaves
at liberty, not forgetting to break the limbs of harmless persons whom
they mistake for wrongdoers, are a class of whom Don Quixote is the
real type; and that the world being much the worse for such heroes, it
might not be immoral, notwithstanding their benevolent enthusiasm, to
put them out of countenance by a little ridicule. This, however, is
not, as I conceive, the primary aim of Cervantes; nor do I think that
the exhibition of one great truth, as the predominant, but concealed,
moral of a long work, is in the spirit of his age. He possessed a very
thoughtful mind and a profound knowledge of humanity; yet the
generalisation which the hypothesis of Bouterwek and Sismondi requires
for the leading conception of Don Quixote, besides its being a little
inconsistent with the valorous and romantic character of its author,
belongs to a more advanced period of philosophy than his own. It will,
at all events, I presume, be admitted that we cannot reason about Don
Quixote except from the book, and I think it may be shown in a few
words that these ingenious writers have been chiefly misled by some
want of consistency which circumstances produced in the author’s
delineation of his hero.

|Difference between the two parts.|

47. In the first chapter of this romance Cervantes, with a few strokes
of a great master, sets before us the pauper gentleman, an early riser
and keen sportsman, who, “when he was idle, which was most part of the
year,” gave himself up to reading books of chivalry till he lost his
wits. The events that follow are in every one’s recollection; his
lunacy consists, no doubt, only in one idea; but this is so absorbing
that it perverts the evidence of his senses, and predominates in all
his language. It is to be observed, therefore, in relation to the
nobleness of soul ascribed to Don Quixote, that every sentiment he
utters is borrowed with a punctilious rigour from the romances of his
library; he resorts to them on every occasion for precedents; if he is
intrepidly brave, it is because his madness and vanity have made him
believe himself unconquerable; if he bestows kingdoms, it is because
Amadis would have done the same; if he is honourable, courteous, a
redresser of wrongs, it is in pursuance of these prototypes, from
whom, except that he seems rather more scrupulous in chastity, it is
his only boast not to diverge. Those who talk of the exalted character
of Don Quixote, seem really to forget that, on these subjects, he has
no character at all; he is the echo of romance; and to praise him is
merely to say, that the tone of chivalry, which these productions
studied to keep up, and, in the hands of inferior artists, foolishly
exaggerated, was full of moral dignity, and has, in a subdued degree
of force, modelled the character of a man of honour in the present
day. But throughout the first two volumes of Don Quixote, though in a
few unimportant passages he talks rationally, I cannot find more than
two in which he displays any other knowledge or strength of mind than
the original delineation of the character would lead us to expect.

48. The case is much altered in the last two volumes. Cervantes had
acquired an immense popularity, and perceived the opportunity, of
which he had already availed himself, that this romance gave for
displaying his own mind. He had become attached to a hero who had made
him illustrious, and suffered himself to lose sight of the clear
outline he had once traced for Quixote’s personality. Hence, we find
in all this second part that, although the lunacy as to knights errant
remains unabated, he is, on all other subjects, not only rational in
the low sense of the word, but clear, acute, profound, sarcastic,
coolheaded. His philosophy is elevated but not enthusiastic, his
imagination is poetical, but it is restrained by strong sense. There
are, in fact, two Don Quixotes; one, whom Cervantes first designed to
draw, the foolish gentleman of La Mancha, whose foolishness had made
him frantic; the other, a highly gifted, accomplished model of the
best chivalry, trained in all the court, the camp, or the college
could impart, but scathed in one portion of his mind by an
inexplicable visitation of monomania. One is inclined to ask why this
Don Quixote, who is Cervantes, should have been more likely to lose
his intellects by reading romances than Cervantes himself. As a matter
of bodily disease, such an event is doubtless possible; but nothing
can be conceived more improper for fiction, nothing more incapable of
affording a moral lesson than the insanity which arises wholly from
disease. Insanity is, in no point of view, a theme for ridicule; and
this is an inherent fault of the romance (for those who have imagined
that Cervantes has not rendered Quixote ridiculous have a strange
notion of the word); but the thoughtlessness of mankind, rather than
their insensibility, for they do not connect madness with misery,
furnishes some apology for the first two volumes. In proportion as we
perceive below the veil of mental delusion a noble intellect, we feel
a painful sympathy with its humiliation; the character becomes more
complicated and interesting, but has less truth and naturalness; an
objection which might also be made, comparatively speaking, to the
incidents in the latter volumes, wherein I do not find the admirable
probability that reigns through the former. But this contrast of
wisdom and virtue with insanity in the same subject would have been
repulsive in the primary delineation; as I think any one may judge by
supposing that Cervantes had, in the first chapter, drawn such a
picture of Quixote as Bouterwek and Sismondi have drawn for him.

49. I must, therefore, venture to think as, I believe, the world has
generally thought for two centuries, that Cervantes had no more
profound aim than he proposes to the reader. If the fashion of reading
bad romances of chivalry perverted the taste of his contemporaries,
and rendered their language ridiculous, it was natural that a zealous
lover of good literature should expose this folly to the world by
exaggerating its effects on a fictitious personage. It has been said
by some modern writer, though I cannot remember by whom, that there
was a _prose side_ in the mind of Cervantes. There was indeed a
side of calm strong sense, which some take for unpoetical. He thought
the tone of those romances extravagant. It might naturally occur how
absurd any one must appear who should attempt to realize in actual
life the adventures of Amadis. Already a novelist, he perceived the
opportunities this idea suggested. It was a necessary consequence that
the hero must be represented as literally insane, since his conduct
would have been extravagant beyond the probability of fiction on any
other hypothesis; and from this happy conception germinated in a very
prolific mind the whole history of Don Quixote. Its simplicity is
perfect; no limit could be found save the author’s discretion, or
sense that he had drawn sufficiently on his imagination; but the death
of Quixote, which Cervantes has been said to have determined upon,
lest some one else should a second time presume to continue the story,
is, in fact, the only possible termination that could be given, after
he had elevated the character to that pitch of mental dignity which we
find in the last two volumes.

|Excellence of this romance.|

50. Few books of moral philosophy display as deep an insight into the
mechanism of the mind as Don Quixote. And when we look also at the
fertility of invention, the general probability of the events, and the
great simplicity of the story, wherein no artifices are practised to
create suspense, or complicate the action, we shall think Cervantes
fully deserving of the glory that attends this monument of his genius.
It is not merely that he is superior to all his predecessors and
contemporaries. This, though it might account for the European fame of
his romance, would be an inadequate testimony to its desert. Cervantes
stands on an eminence below which we must place the best of his
successors. We have only to compare him with Le Sage or Fielding, to
judge of his vast superiority. To Scott indeed he must yield in the
variety of his power; but in the line of comic romance, we should
hardly think Scott his equal.

|Minor novels of Cervantes.|

|Other novels--Spanish.|

|And Italian.|

51. The moral novels of Cervantes, as he calls them (Novellas
Exemplares), are written, I believe, in a good style, but too short,
and constructed with too little artifice to rivet our interest. Their
simplicity and truth, as in many of the old novels, have a certain
charm; but in the present age, our sense of satiety in works of
fiction cannot be overcome but by excellence. Of the Spanish comic
romances, in the _picaresque_ style, several remain: Justina was
the most famous. One that does not strictly belong to this lower class
is the Marcos de Obregon of Espinel. This is supposed to have
suggested much to Le Sage in Gil Bias; in fact, the first story we
meet with is that of Mergellina the physician’s wife. The style,
though not dull, wants the grace and neatness of Le Sage. This is
esteemed one of the best novels that Spain has produced. Italy was no
longer the seat of this literature. A romance of chivalry by Marini
(not the poet of that name), entitled Il Caloandro (1640), was
translated but indifferently into French by Scuderi, and has been
praised by Salfi as full of imagination, with characters skilfully
diversified, and an interesting well-conducted story.[589]

     [589] Salfi, vol. xiv., p. 88.

|French romances--Astrée.|

52. France, in the sixteenth century, content with Amadis de Gaul and
the numerous romances of the Spanish school, had contributed very
little to that literature. But now she had native writers of
both kinds, the pastoral and heroic, who completely superseded the
models they had before them. Their earliest essay was the Astrée of
D’Urfé. Of this pastoral romance the first volume was published in
1610; the second in 1620; three more came slowly forth, that the world
might have due leisure to admire. It contains about 3,500 pages. It
would be almost as discreditable to have read such a book through at
present, as it was to be ignorant of it in the age of Louis XIII.
Allusions, however, to real circumstances served in some measure to
lessen the insipidity of a love-story, which seems to equal any in
absurdity and want of interest. The style, and I can judge no farther,
having read but a few pages, seems easy and not unpleasing; but the
pastoral tone is insufferably puerile, and a monotonous solemnity
makes us almost suspect that one source of its popularity was its
gentle effect, when read in small portions before retiring to rest. It
was, nevertheless, admired by men of erudition, like Camus and Huet,
or even by men of the world like Rochefoucault.[590]

     [590] Dunlop’s History of Fiction, vol. iii., p. 184. Biographie
     Universelle. Bouterwek, vol. v., p. 295.

|Heroic romances--Gomberville.|

53. From the union of the old chivalrous romance with this newer
style, the courtly pastoral, sprang another kind of notion, the French
heroic romance. Three nearly contemporary writers, Gomberville,
Calprenède, Scuderi, supplied a number of voluminous stories,
frequently historical in some of their names, but utterly destitute of
truth in circumstances, characters, and manners. Gomberville led the
way in his Polexandre, first published in 1632, and reaching in later
editions to about 6,000 pages. “This,” says a modern writer, “seems to
have been the model of the works of Calprenède and Scuderi. This
ponderous work may be regarded as a sort of intermediate production
between the later compositions and the ancient fables of chivalry. It
has, indeed, a close affinity to the heroic romance; but many of the
exploits of the hero are as extravagant as those of a paladin or
knight of the round table.”[591] No romance in the language has so
complex an intrigue, insomuch that it is followed with difficulty; and
the author has in successive editions capriciously remodelled parts of
his story, which is wholly of his own invention.[592]

     [591] Dunlop, iii., 230.

     [592] Biog. Univ.

|Calprenède.|

54. Calprenède, a poet of no contemptible powers of imagination,
poured forth his stores of rapid invention in several romances more
celebrated than that of Gomberville. The first, which is contained in
ten octavo volumes, is the Cassandra. This appeared in 1642, and was
followed by the Cleopatra, published, according to the custom of
romancers, in successive parts, the earliest in 1646. La Harpe thinks
this unquestionably the best work of Calprenède; Bouterwek seems to
prefer the Cassandra. Pharamond is not wholly his own; five out of
twelve volumes belong to one De Vaumorière, a continuator.[593]
Calprenède, like many others, had but a life-estate in the temple of
fame, and more happy, perhaps, than greater men, lived out the whole
favour of the world, which, having been largely showered on his head,
strewed no memorials on his grave. It became, soon after his death,
through the satire of Boileau and the influence of a new style in
fiction, a matter of course to turn him into ridicule. It is
impossible that his romances should be read again; but those who, for
the purposes of general criticism, have gone back to these volumes,
find not a little to praise in his genius, and in some measure to
explain his popularity. “Calprenède,” says Bouterwek, “belonged to the
extravagant party, which endeavoured to give a triumph to genius at
the expense of taste, and by that very means played into the hands of
the opposite party, which saw nothing so laudable as the observation
of the rules which taste prescribed. We have only to become acquainted
with any one of the prolix romances of Calprenède, such, for instance,
as the Cassandra, to see clearly the spirit which animates the whole
invention. We find there again the heroism of chivalry, the
enthusiastic raptures of love, the struggle of duty with passion, the
victory of magnanimity, sincerity, and humanity over force, fraud, and
barbarism, in the genuine characters and circumstances of romance. The
events are skilfully interwoven, and a truly poetical keeping belongs
to the whole, however extended it may be. The diction of Calprenède is
a little monotonous, but not at all trivial, and seldom affected. It
is like that of old romance, grave, circumstantial, somewhat in the
chronicle style, but picturesque, agreeable, full of sensibility and
simplicity. Many passages might, if versified, find a place in the
most beautiful poem of this class.”[594]

     [593] Dunlop, iii., 259.

     [594] Bouterwek, vi., 230.

|Scuderi.|

55. The honours of this romantic literature have long been shared by
the female sex. In the age of Richelieu and Mazarin, this was
represented by Mademoiselle de Scuderi, a name very glorious for a
season, but which unfortunately did not, like that of Calprenède,
continue to be such during the whole lifetime of her who bore it. The
old age of Mademoiselle de Scuderi was ignominiously treated by the
pitiless Boileau; and reaching more than her ninetieth year, she
almost survived her only offspring, those of her pen. In her youth she
had been the associate of the Rambouillet circle, and caught, perhaps,
in some measure from them, what she gave back with interest, a tone of
perpetual affectation and a pedantic gallantry, which could not
withstand the first approach of ridicule. Her first romance was
Ibrahim, published in 1635; but the more celebrated were the Grand
Cyrus and the Clelie. Each of these two romances is in ten
volumes.[595] The persons chiefly connected with the Hotel Rambouillet
sat for their pictures, as Persians or Babylonians, in Cyrus. Julie
d’Angennes herself bore the name of Artenice, by which she was
afterwards distinguished among her friends; and it is a remarkable
instance not only of the popularity of these romances, but of the
respectful sentiment, which, from the elevation and purity no one can
deny them to exhibit, was always associated in the gravest persons
with their fictions, that a prelate of eminent taste and eloquence,
Fléchier, in his funeral sermon on this lady, calls her “the
incomparable Artenice.”[596] Such an allusion would appear to us
misplaced; but we may presume that it was not so thought. Scuderi’s
romances seem to have been remarkably the favourites of the clergy;
Huet, Mascaron, Godeau, as much as Fléchier, were her ardent admirers.
“I find,” says the second of these, one of the chief ornaments of the
French pulpit, in writing to Mademoiselle de Scuderi, “so much in your
works calculated to reform the world, that in the sermons I am now
preparing for the court, you will often be on my table by the side of
St. Augustin and St. Bernard.”[597] In the writings of this lady we
see the last footstep of the old chivalrous romance. She, like
Calprenède, had derived from this source the predominant
characteristics of her personages, an exalted generosity, a disdain of
all selfish considerations, a courage which attempts impossibilities
and is rewarded by achieving them, a love outrageously hyperbolical in
pretence, yet intrinsically without passion, all, in short, that
Cervantes has bestowed on Don Quixote. Love, however, or its
counterfeit, gallantry, plays a still more leading part in the French
romance than in its Castilian prototype; the feats of heroes, though
not less wonderful, are less prominent on the canvas, and a
metaphysical pedantry replaces the pompous metaphors in which the
knight of sorrowful countenance had taken so much delight. The
approbation of many persons, far better judges than Don Quixote, makes
it impossible to doubt that the romances of Calprenède and Scuderi
were better than his library. But as this is the least possible
praise, it will certainly not tempt any one away from the rich and
varied repast of fiction which the last and present century have
spread before him. Mademoiselle de Scuderi has perverted history still
more than Calprenède, and changed her Romans into languishing
Parisians. It is not to be forgotten that the taste of her party,
though it did not, properly speaking, infect Corneille, compelled him
to weaken some of his tragedies. And this must be the justification of
Boileau’s cutting ridicule upon this truly estimable woman. She had
certainly kept up a tone of severe and high morality, with which the
aristocracy of Paris could ill dispense; but it was one not difficult
to feign, and there might be Tartuffes of sentiment as well as of
religion. Whatever is false in taste is apt to be allied to what is
insincere in character.

     [595] Biogr. Univ. Dunlop. Bouterwek.

     [596] Sermons de Fléchier, ii., 825 (edit. 1690). But probably
     Bossuet would not have stooped to this allusion.

     [597] Biogr. Univ. Mademoiselle de Scuderi was not gifted by
     nature with beauty, or, as this biographer more bluntly says,
     étoit d’un extrême laideur. She would, probably, have wished this
     to have been otherwise, but carried off the matter very well, as
     appears by her epigram on her own picture by Nanteuil:
         Nanteuil, en faisant mon image,
         A de son art divin signalé le pouvoir;
         Je hais mes yeux dans mon miroir,
         Je les aime dans son ouvrage.

|Argenis of Barclay.|

|His Euphormio.|

56. The Argenis of Barclay, a son of the defender of royal authority
against republican theories, is a Latin romance, superior to those
which the Spanish or French language could boast. It has indeed always
been reckoned among political allegories. That the state of France, in
the last years of Henry III., is partially shadowed in it, can admit
of no doubt; several characters are faintly veiled, either by anagram
or Greek translation of their names; but whether to avoid the
insipidity of servile allegory, or to excite the reader by perplexity,
Barclay has mingled so much of mere fiction with his story, that no
attempts at a regular key to the whole work can be successful, nor in
fact does the fable of this romance run in any parallel stream with
real events. His object seems in great measure to have been the
discussion of political questions in feigned dialogue. But though in
these we find no want of acuteness or good sense, they have not at
present much novelty in our eyes; and though the style is really
pleasing, or, as some have judged, excellent,[598] and the incidents
not ill contrived, it might be hard to go entirely through a Latin
romance of 700 pages, unless, indeed, we had no alternative given but
the perusal of the similar works in Spanish or French. The Argenis was
published at Rome in 1622; some of the personages introduced by
Barclay are his own contemporaries; a proof that he did not intend a
strictly historical allegory of the events of the last age. The
Euphormio of the same author resembles in some degree the Argenis but,
with less of story and character, has a more direct reference to
European politics. It contains much political disquisition, and one
whole book is employed in a description of the manners and laws of
different countries with no disguise of names.

     [598] Coleridge has pronounced an ardent, and rather excessive,
     eulogy on the language of the Argenis, preferring it to that of
     Livy or Tacitus. Coleridge’s Remains, vol. i., p. 257. I cannot
     by any means go this length; it has struck me that the Latinity
     is more that of Petronius Arbiter, but I am not well enough
     acquainted with this writer to speak confidently. The same
     observation seems applicable to the Euphormio.

|Campanella’s City of the Sun.|

57. Campanella gave a loose to his fanciful humour in a fiction,
entitled the City of the Sun, published at Frankfort in 1623, in
imitation perhaps of the Utopia. The City of the Sun is supposed to
stand upon a mountain situated in Ceylon, under the equator. A
community of goods and women is established in this republic; the
principal magistrate of which is styled Sun, and is elected after a
strict examination in all kinds of science. Campanella has brought in
so much of his own philosophical system, that we may presume that to
have been the object of this romance. The Solars, he tells us,
abstained at first from flesh, because they thought it cruel to kill
animals. “But afterwards considering that it would be equally cruel to
kill plants, which are not less endowed with sensation, so that they
must perish by famine, they understood that ignoble things were
created for the use of nobler things, and now eat all things without
scruple.” Another Latin romance had some celebrity in its day, the
Monarchia Solipsorum, a satire on the Jesuits in the fictitious name
of Lucius Cornelius Europeus. It has been ascribed to more than one
person; the probable author is one Scotti, who had himself belonged to
the order.[599] This book did not seem to me in the least interesting;
if it is so in any degree, it must be not as mere fiction, but as a
revelation of secrets.

     [599] Biogr. Univ. arts. Scotti and Inchoffer. Niceron,
     vols. xxxv. and xxxix.

|Few books of fiction in England.|

58. It is not so much an extraordinary as an unfortunate deficiency in
our own literary annals, that England should have been destitute of
the comic romance, or that derived from real life, to a late period;
since in fact we may say the same, as has been seen, of France. The
picaresque novels of Spain were thought well worthy of translation;
but it occurred to no one, or no one had the gift of genius, to shift
the scene, and imitate their delineation of native manners. Of how
much value would have been a genuine English novel, the mirror of
actual life in the various ranks of society, written under Elizabeth
or under the Stuarts! We should have seen, if the execution had not
been very coarse, and the delineation absolutely confined to low
characters, the social habits of our forefathers better than by all
our other sources of that knowledge, the plays, the letters, the
traditions and anecdotes, the pictures or buildings of the time.
Notwithstanding the interest all profess to take in the history of
manners, our notions of them are generally meagre and imperfect; and
hence, modern works of fiction are but crude and inaccurate designs
when they endeavour to represent the living England of two centuries
since. Even Scott, who had a fine instinctive perception of truth and
nature, and who had read much, does not appear to have seized the
genuine tone of conversation, and to have been a little misled by the
style of Shakspeare. This is rather elaborate and removed from vulgar
use by a sort of archaism in phrase and a pointed turn in the
dialogue, adapted to theatrical utterance, but wanting the ease of
ordinary speech.

|Mundus Alter et Idem of Hall.|

59. I can only produce two books by English authors in this
first part of the seventeenth century which fall properly under the
class of novels or romances; and of these one is written in Latin.
This is the Mundus Alter et Idem of Bishop Hall, an imitation of the
later and weaker volumes of Rabelais. A country in Terra Australis is
divided into four regions, Crapulia, Viraginia, Moronea, and Lavernia.
Maps of the whole land and of particular regions are given; and the
nature of the satire, not much of which has any especial reference to
England, may easily be collected. It is not a very successful effort.

|Godwin’s Journey to the Moon.|

60. Another prelate, or one who became such, Francis Godwin, was the
author of a much more curious story. It is called the Man in the Moon,
and relates the journey of one Domingo Gonzalez to that planet. This
was written by Godwin, according to Antony Wood, while he was a
student at Oxford.[600] By some internal proofs, it must have been
later than 1599, and before the death of Elizabeth in 1603. But it was
not published till 1638. It was translated into French, and became the
model of Cyrano de Bergerac, as he was of Swift. Godwin himself had no
prototype, as far as I know, but Lucian. He resembles those writers in
the natural and veracious tone of his lays. The fiction is rather
ingenious and amusing throughout; but the most remarkable part is the
happy conjectures, if we must say no more, of his philosophy. Not only
does the writer declare positively for the Copernican system, which
was uncommon at that time, but he has surprisingly understood the
principle of gravitation, it being distinctly supposed that the
earth’s attraction diminishes with the distance. Nor is the following
passage less curious. “I must let you understand that the globe of the
moon is not altogether destitute of an attractive power; but it is far
weaker than that of the earth; as, if a man do but spring upwards with
all his force, as dancers do when they show their activity by
capering, he shall be able to mount fifty or sixty feet high, and then
he is quite beyond all attraction of the moon.” By this device
Gonzalez returns from his sojourn in the latter, though it required a
more complex device to bring him thither. “The moon,” he observes, “is
covered with a sea, except the parts which seem somewhat darker to us,
and are dry land.” A contrary hypothesis came afterwards to prevail;
but we must not expect everything from our ingenious young student.

     [600] Athenæ Oxonienses, vol. ii., col. 558. It is remarkable
     that Mr. Dunlop has been ignorant of Godwin’s claim to this work,
     and takes Dominic Gonzalez for the real author. Hist. of Fiction,
     iii. 394.

|Howell’s Dodona’s Grove.|

61. Though I can mention nothing else in English which comes exactly
within our notions of a romance, we may advert to the Dodona’s Grove
of James Howell. This is a strange allegory, without any ingenuity in
maintaining the analogy between the outer and inner story, which alone
can give a reader any pleasure in allegorical writing. The subject is
the state of Europe, especially of England, about 1640, under the
guise of animated trees in a forest. The style is like the
following:--“The next morning the royal olive sent some prime elms to
attend prince Rocolino in quality of officers of state; and a little
after he was brought to the royal palace in the same state Elaiana’s
kings used to be attended the day of their coronation.” The
contrivance is all along so clumsy and unintelligible, the invention
so poor and absurd, the story, if story there be, so dull an echo of
well-known events, that it is impossible to reckon Dodona’s Grove
anything but an entire failure. Howell has no wit, but he has
abundance of conceits, flat and common-place enough. With all this he
was a man of some sense and observation. His letters are entertaining,
but they scarcely deserve consideration in this volume.

|Adventures of Baron de Fæneste.|

62. It is very possible that some small works belonging to this
extensive class have been omitted, which my readers, or myself, on
second consideration, might think not unworthy of notice. It is also
one so miscellaneous that we might fairly doubt as to some which have
a certain claim to be admitted into it. Such are the Adventures of the
Baron de Fæneste, by the famous Agrippa d’Aubigné (whose
autobiography, by the way, has at least the liveliness of fiction); a
singular book written in dialogue, where an imaginary Gascon baron
recounts his tales of the camp and the court. He is made to speak a
patois not quite easy for us to understand, and not perhaps worth the
while; but it seems to contain much that illustrates the state of
France about the beginning of the seventeenth century. Much in this
book is satirical; and the satire falls on the Catholics, whom
Fæneste, a mere foolish gentleman of Gascony, is made to defend
against an acute Hugonot.




                          CHAPTER XXV.

   HISTORY OF MATHEMATICAL AND PHYSICAL SCIENCE FROM 1600 TO 1650.


                             SECT. I.

_Invention of logarithms by Napier--New geometry of Kepler and
Cavalieri--Algebra--Harriott--Descartes--Astronomy--Kepler--Galileo--
Copernican system begins to prevail--Cartesian theory of the
world--Mechanical discoveries of Galileo--Descartes--Hydrostatics--
Optics._

|State of science in 16th century.|

1. In the second volume of this work, we have followed the progress of
mathematical and physical science down to the close of the sixteenth
century. The ancient geometers had done so much in their own province
of lines and figures, that little more of importance could be
effected, except by new methods extending the limits of the science,
or derived from some other source of invention. Algebra had yielded a
more abundant harvest to the genius of the sixteenth century; yet
something here seemed to be wanting to give that science a character
of utility and reference to general truth; nor had the formulæ of
letters and radical signs that preceptible beauty which often wins us
to delight in geometrical theorems of as little apparent usefulness in
their results. Meanwhile, the primary laws, to which all mathematical
reasonings, in their relation to physical science, must be
accommodated, lay hidden, or were erroneously conceived; and none of
these sciences, with the exception of astronomy, were beyond their
mere infancy, either as to observation or theory.[601]

     [601] In this chapter my obligations to Montucla are so continual
     that I shall make no single reference to his Histoire des
     Mathématiques, which must be understood to be my principal
     authority.

|Tediousness of calculations.|

2. Astronomy, cultivated in the latter part of the sixteenth century
with much industry and success, was repressed, among other more
insuperable obstacles, by the laborious calculations it required. The
trigonometrical tables of sines, tangents, and secants, if they were
to produce any tolerable accuracy in astronomical observation, must be
computed to six or seven places of decimals, upon which the regular
processes of multiplication and division were perpetually to be
employed. The consumption of time, as well as risk of error which this
occasioned, was a serious evil to the practical astronomer.

|Napier’s invention of logarithms.|

3. John Napier, laird of Merchiston, after several attempts to
diminish this labour by devices of his invention, was happy enough to
discover his famous method of logarithms. This he first published at
Edinburgh, in 1614, with the title, Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio,
seu Arithmeticarum Supputationum Mirabilis Abbreviatio. He died in
1618, and in a posthumous edition, entitled Mirifici Logarithmorum
Canonis Descriptio, 1618, the method of construction, which had been
at first withheld, is given; and the system itself, in consequence
perhaps of the suggestion of his friend Briggs, underwent some change.

|Their nature.|

4. The invention of logarithms is one of the rarest instances of
sagacity in the history of mankind; and it has been justly noticed as
remarkable, that it issued complete from the mind of its author, and
has not received any improvement since his time. It is hardly
necessary to say, that logarithms are a series of numbers, arranged in
tables parallel to the series of natural numbers, and of such a
construction, that by adding the logarithms of two of the latter we
obtain the logarithm of their product; by subtracting the logarithm of
one number from that of another we obtain that of their quotient. The
longest processes therefore of multiplication and division are spared,
and reduced to one of mere addition or subtraction.

|Property of numbers discovered by Stifelius.|

5. It has been supposed that an arithmetical fact, said to be
mentioned by Archimedes, and which is certainly pointed out in the
work of an early German writer, Michael Stifelius, put Napier in the
right course for this invention. It will at least serve to illustrate
the principle of logarithms. Stifelius shows that if in a geometrical
progression, we add the indices of any terms in the series, we shall
obtain the index of the products of those terms. Thus, if we compare
the geometrical progression, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, with the
arithmetical one which numbers the powers of the common ratio, namely,
0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, we see that by adding two terms of the latter
progression, as 2 and 3, to which 4 and 8 correspond in the
geometrical series, we obtain 5, to which 32, the product of 4 by 8,
corresponds; and the quotient would be obtained in a similar manner.
But though this, which becomes self-evident, when algebraical
expressions are employed for the terms of a series, seemed at the time
rather a curious property of numbers in geometrical progression, it
was of little value in facilitating calculation.

|Extended to magnitudes.|

6. If Napier had simply considered numbers in themselves, as
repetitions of unity, which is their only intelligible definition, it
does not seem that he could ever have carried this observation upon
progressive series any farther. Numerically understood, the terms of a
geometrical progression proceed _per saltum_; and in the series
2, 4, 8, 16, it is as unmeaning to say that 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, in any
possible sense, have a place, or can be introduced to any purpose, as
that ½, ¼, ⅛, 1/16 or other fractions are true numbers at all.[602]
The case, however, is widely different when we use numbers as merely
the signs of something capable of continuous increase or decrease of
space, of duration, of velocity. These are, for our convenience,
divided by arbitrary intervals, to which the numerical unit is made to
correspond. But as these intervals are indefinitely divisible, the
unit is supposed capable of division into fractional parts, each of
them a representation of the ratio which a portion of the interval
bears to the whole. And thus also we must see, that as fractions of
the unit bear a relation to uniform quantity, so all the integral
numbers, which do not enter into the terms of a geometrical
progression, correspond to certain portions of variable quantity. If a
body falling down an inclined plane acquires a velocity at one point
which would carry it through two feet in a second, and at a lower
point one which would carry it through four feet in the same time,
there must, by the nature of a continually accelerated motion, be some
point between these where the velocity might be represented by the
number three. Hence, wherever the numbers of a common geometrical
series, like 2, 4, 8, 16, represent velocities at certain intervals,
the intermediate numbers will represent velocities at intermediate
intervals; and thus it may be said that all numbers are terms of a
geometrical progression, but one which should always be considered as
what it is--a progression of continuous, not discrete quantity,
capable of being indicated by number, but not number itself.

     [602] Few books of arithmetic, or even algebra, as far as I know,
     draw the reader’s attention at the outset to this essential
     distinction between discrete and continuous quantity, which is
     sure to be overlooked in all their subsequent reasonings. Wallis
     has done it very well; after stating very clearly that there are
     no proper numbers but integers he meets the objection, that
     fractions are called intermediate numbers. Concedo quidem sic
     responderi posse; concedo etiam numeros quos fractos vocant, sive
     fractiones, esse quidam uni et nulli quasi intermedios. Sed addo,
     quod jam transitur εις αλλο γενος [eis allo genos]. Respondetur
     enim non de _quot_, sed de quanto. Pertinet igitur hæc responsio
     propriè loquendo, non tam ad quantitatem discretam, seu numerum,
     quam ad continuam; prout hora supponitur esse quid continuum in
     partes divisibile, quamvis quidem harum partium ad totum ratio
     numeris exprimatur. Mathesis Universalis, c. 1.

|By Napier.|

7. It was a necessary consequence, that if all numbers could be
treated as terms of a progression, and if their indices could be found
like those of an ordinary series, the method of finding products of
terms by addition of indices would be universal. The means that Napier
adopted for this purpose were surprisingly ingenious; but it would be
difficult to make them clear to those who are likely to require it,
especially without the use of lines. It may suffice to say that his
process was laborious in the highest degree, consisting of the
interpolation of 6931472 mean proportionals between 1 and 2, and
repeating a similar and still more tedious operation for all prime
numbers. The logarithms of other numbers were easily obtained,
according to the fundamental principle of the invention, by adding
their factors. Logarithms appear to have been so called, because they
are the sum of these mean ratios, λογων αριθμος [logôn arithmos].

|Tables of Napier and Briggs.|

8. In the original tables of Napier the logarithm of 10 was 3.0225850.
In those published afterwards (1618), he changed this for 1.0000000,
making of course that of 100, 2.0000000, and so forth. This
construction has been followed since; but those of the first method
are not wholly neglected; they are called hyperbolical logarithms,
from expressing a property of that curve. Napier found a coadjutor
well worthy of him in Henry Briggs, professor of geometry at Gresham
college. It is uncertain from which of them the change in the form of
logarithms proceeded. Briggs, in 1618, published a table of logarithms
up to 1,000, calculated by himself. This was followed in 1624 by his
greater work, Arithmetica Logarithmica, containing the logarithms of
all natural numbers as high as 20,000, and again from 90,000 to
100,000. These are calculated to fourteen places of decimals, thus
reducing the error, which strictly speaking, must always exist from
the principle of logarithmical construction, to an almost
infinitesimal fraction. He had designed to publish a second table,
with the logarithms of sines and tangents to the 100th part of a
degree. This he left in a considerably advanced state; and it was
published by Gellibrand in 1633. Gunter had as early as 1620 given the
logarithms of sines and tangents on the sexagesimal scale, as far as
seven decimals. Vlacq, a Dutch bookseller, printed in 1628 a
translation of Brigg’s Arithmetica Logarithmica, filling up the
interval from 20,000 to 90,000 with logarithms calculated to eleven
decimals. He published also in 1633 his Trigonometrica Artificialis,
the most useful work, perhaps, that had appeared, as it incorporated
the labours of Briggs and Gellibrand, but with no great regard to the
latter’s fair advantage. Kepler came like a master to the subject; and
observing that some foreign mathematicians disliked the theory upon
which Napier had explained the nature of logarithms, as not rigidly
geometrical, gave one of his own to which they could not object. But
it may probably be said that the very novelty to which the disciples
of the ancient geometry were averse, the introduction of the notion of
velocity into mathematical reasoning, was that which linked the
abstract science of quantity with nature, and prepared the way for
that expansive theory of infinites which bears at once upon the
subtlest truths that can exercise the understanding, and the most
evident that can fall under the senses.

|Kepler’s new geometry.|

9. It was, indeed, at this time that the modern geometry, which, if it
deviates something from the clearness and precision of the ancient,
has incomparably the advantage over it in its reach of application,
took its rise. Kepler was the man that led the way. He published, in
1615, his Nova Stereometria Doliorum, a treatise on the capacity of
casks. In this he considers the various solids which may be formed by
the revolution of a segment of a conic section round a line which is
not its axis, a condition not unfrequent in the form of a cask. Many
of the problems which he starts he is unable to solve. But what is
most remarkable in this treatise is that he here suggests the bold
idea, that a circle may be deemed to be composed of an infinite number
of triangles, having their bases in the circumference, and their
common apex in the centre; a cone, in like manner, of infinite
pyramids, and a cylinder of infinite prisms.[603] The ancients had
shown, as is well known, that a polygon inscribed in a circle, and
another described about it, may, by continual bisection of their
sides, be made to approach nearer to each other than any assignable
differences. The circle itself lay, of course, between them. Euclid
contents himself with saying that the circle is greater than any
polygon that can be inscribed in it, and less than any polygon that
can be described about it. The method by which they approximated to
the curve space by continual increase or diminution of the rectilineal
figure was called exhaustion, and the space itself is properly called
by later geometers the limit. As curvilineal and rectilineal spaces
cannot possibly be compared by means of superposition, or by showing
that their several constituent portions could be made to coincide, it
had long been acknowledged impossible by the best geometers to
quadrate by a direct process any curve surface. But Archimedes had
found, as to the parabola, that there was a rectilineal space, of
which he could indirectly demonstrate that it was equal, that is,
could not be unequal, to the curve itself.

     [603] Fabroni, Vitæ Italorum, i., 272.

|Its difference from the ancient.|

10. In this state of the general problem, the ancient methods of
indefinite approximation having prepared the way, Kepler came to his
solution of questions which regarded the capacity of vessels.
According to Fabroni, he supposed solids to consist of an infinite
number of surfaces, surfaces of an infinity of lines, lines of
infinite points.[604] If this be strictly true, he must have left
little, in point of invention, for Cavalieri. So long as geometry is
employed as a method of logic, an exercise of the understanding on
those modifications of quantity which the imagination cannot
grasp, such as points, lines, infinites, it must appear almost an
offensive absurdity to speak of a circle as a polygon with an infinite
number of sides. But when it becomes the handmaid of practical art, or
even of physical science, there can be no other objection, than always
arises from incongruity and incorrectness of language. It has been
found possible to avoid the expressions attributed to Kepler; but they
seem to denote in fact nothing more than those of Euclid or
Archimedes; that the difference between a magnitude and its limit may
be regularly diminished, till, without strictly vanishing, it becomes
less than any assignable quantity, and may consequently be disregarded
in reasoning upon actual bodies.

     [604] Idem quoque solida cogitavit ex infinito numero
     superflcierum existere, superficies autem ex lineis infinitis, ac
     lineis ex infinitis punctis. Ostendit ipse quantum ea ratione
     brevior fieri via possit ad vera quædam captu difficiliora, cum
     antiquarum demonstrationum circuitus ac methodus inter se
     comparandi figuras circumscriptas et inscriptas iis planis aut
     solidis, quæ mensuranda essent, ita declinarentur. Ibid.

|Adopted by Galileo.|

11. Galileo, says Fabroni, trod in the steps of Kepler, and in his
first dialogue on mechanics, when treating on a cylinder cut out of a
hemisphere, became conversant with indivisibles (familiarem habere
cœpit cum indivisibilibus usum). But in that dialogue he confused the
metaphysical notions of divisible quantity, supposing it to be
composed of unextended indivisibles; and not venturing to affirm that
infinites could be equal or unequal to one another, he preferred to
say, that words denoting equality or excess could only be used as to
finite quantities. In his fourth dialogue on the centre of gravity, he
comes back to the exhaustive method of Archimedes.[605]

     [605] Fabroni, Vitæ Italorum, i., 272.

|Extended by Cavalieri.|

12. Cavalieri, professor of mathematics at Bologna, the generally
reputed father of the new geometry, though Kepler seems to have so
greatly anticipated him, had completed his method of indivisibles in
1626. The book was not published till 1635. His leading principle is
that solids are composed of an infinite number of surfaces placed one
above another as their indivisible elements. Surfaces are formed in
like manner by lines, and lines by points. This, however, he asserts
with some excuse and explanation; declaring that he does not use the
words so strictly, as to have it supposed that divisible quantities
truly and literally consist of indivisibles, but that the ratio of
solids is the same as that of an infinite number of surfaces, and that
of surfaces the same as of an infinite number of lines; and to put an
end to cavil, he demonstrated that the same consequences would follow
if a method should be adopted, borrowing nothing from the
consideration of indivisibles.[606] This explanation seems to have
been given after his method had been attacked by Guldin in 1640.

     [606] Non eo rigore a se voces adhiberi, ac si dividuæ
     quantitates verè ac propriè ex indivisibilibus existerent;
     verumtamen id sibi duntaxat velle, ut proportio solidorum eadem
     esset ac ratio superficierum omnium numero inflnitarum, et
     proportio superficierum eadem ac illa infinitarum linearum:
     denique ut omnia, quæ contra dici poterant, in radice præcideret,
     demonstravit, easdem omnino consecutiones erui, si methodi aut
     rationes adhiberentur omnino diversæ, quæ nihil ab indivisibilium
     consideratione penderent. Fabroni.

     Il n’est aucun cas dans la géometrie des indivisibles, qu’on ne
     puisse facilement reduire à la forme ancienne de démonstration.
     Ainsi, c’est s’arrêter à l’écorce que de chicaner sur le mot
     d’indivisibles. Il est impropre si l’on veut, mais il n’en
     résulte aucun danger pour la géometrie; et loin de conduire à
     l’erreur, cette méthode, au contraire, a été utile pour atteindre
     à des vérités qui avoient échappé jusqu’alors aux efforts des
     géométres. Montucla, vol. ii., p. 39.

|Applied to the ratios of solids.|

13. It was a main object of Cavalieri’s geometry to demonstrate the
proportions of different solids. This is partly done by Euclid, but
generally in an indirect manner. A cone, according to Cavalieri, is
composed of an infinite number of circles decreasing from the base to
the summit, a cylinder of an infinite number of equal circles. He
seeks, therefore, the ratio of the sum of all the former to that of
all the latter. The method of summing an infinite series of terms in
arithmetical progression was already known. The diameters of the
circles in the cone decreasing uniformly were in arithmetical
progression, and the circles would be as their squares. He found that
when the number of terms is infinitely great, the sum of all the
squares described on lines in arithmetical progression is exactly one
third of the greatest square multiplied by the number of terms. Hence,
the cone is one third of a cylinder of the same base and altitude, and
the same may be shown of other solids.

|Problem of the cycloid.|

14. This bolder geometry was now very generally applied in difficult
investigations. A proof was given in the celebrated problems relative
to the cycloid, which served as a test of skill to the mathematicians
of that age. The cycloid is the curve described by a point in a
circle, while it makes one revolution along a horizontal base, as in
the case of a carriage wheel. It was far more difficult to determine
its area. It was at first taken for the segment of a circle. Galileo
considered it, but with no success. Mersenne, who was also unequal to
the problem, suggested it to a very good geometer, Roberval, who,
after some years, in 1634, demonstrated that the area of the cycloid
is equal to thrice the area of the generating circle. Mersenne
communicated this discovery to Descartes, who, treating the matter as
easy, sent a short demonstration of his own. On Roberval’s intimating
that he had been aided by a knowledge of the solution, Descartes found
out the tangents of the curve, and challenged Roberval and Fermat to
do the same. Fermat succeeded in this, but Roberval could not achieve
the problem, in which Galileo also and Cavalieri failed; though it
seems to have been solved afterwards by Viviani. “Such,” says
Montucla, “was the superiority of Descartes over all the geometers of
his age, that questions which most perplexed them cost him but an
ordinary degree of attention.” In this problem of the tangents (and it
might not, perhaps, have been worth while to mention it otherwise in
so brief a sketch), Descartes made use of the principle introduced by
Kepler, considering the curve as a polygon of an infinite number of
sides, so that an infinitely small arc is equal to its chord. The
cycloid has been called by Montucla, the Helen of geometers. This
beauty was, at least, the cause of war, and produced a long
controversy. The Italians claim the original invention as their own;
but Montucla seems to have vindicated the right of France to every
solution important in geometry. Nor were the friends of Roberval and
Fermat disposed to acknowledge so much of the exclusive right of
Descartes as was challenged by his disciples. Pascal, in his history
of the cycloid, enters the lists on the side of Roberval. This was not
published till 1658.

|Progress of algebra.|

15. Without dwelling more minutely on geometrical treatises of less
importance, though in themselves valuable, such as that of Gregory St.
Vincent, in 1647, or the Cyclometricus of Willebrod Snell, in 1621, we
come to the progress of analysis during this period. The works of
Vieta, it may be observed, were chiefly published after the year 1600.
They left, as must be admitted, not much in principle for the more
splendid generalisations of Harriott and Descartes. It is not
unlikely, that the mere employment of a more perfect notation would
have led the acute mind of Vieta to truths which seem to us, who are
acquainted with them, but a little beyond what he discovered.

|Briggs. Girard.|

16. Briggs, in his Arithmetica Logarithmica, was the first who clearly
showed what is called the Binomial Theorem, or a compendious method of
involution, by means of the necessary order of co-efficients in the
successive powers of a binomial quantity. Cardan had partially, and
Vieta much more clearly, seen this, nor was it likely to escape one so
observant of algebraic relations as the latter. Albert Girard, a
Dutchman, in his Invention Nouvelle en Algebre, 1629, conceived a
better notion of negative roots than his predecessors. Even Vieta had
not paid attention to them in any solution. Girard, however, not only
assigns their form, and shows, that in a certain class of cubic
equations there must always be one or two of this description, but
uses this remarkable expression: “A negative solution means in
geometry that the _minus_ recedes as the _plus_ advances.”[607] It
seems manifest that till some such idea suggested itself to the minds
of analysts, the consideration of negative roots, though they could
not possibly avoid perceiving their existence, would merely have
confused their solutions. It cannot, therefore, be surprising that not
only Cardan and Vieta, but Harriott himself, should have disregarded
them.

     [607] La solution par moins s’explique en géometrie en
     retrogradant, et le moins recule ou le plus avance. Montucla,
     p. 112.

|Harriott.|

17. Harriott, the companion of Sir Walter Raleigh in Virginia, and the
friend of the Earl of Northumberland, in whose house he spent the
latter part of his life, was destined to make the last great discovery
in the pure science of algebra. Though he is mentioned here after
Girard, since the Artis Analyticæ Praxis was not published till 1631,
this was ten years after the author’s death. Harriott arrived at a
complete theory of the genesis of equations, which Cardan and Vieta
had but partially conceived. By bringing all the terms on one side, so
as to make them equal to zero, he found out that every unknown
quantity in an equation has as many values as the index of its powers
in the first term denotes; and that these values, in a necessary
sequence of combinations, from the co-efficients of the succeeding
terms into which the decreasing powers of the unknown quantity enter,
as they do also, by their united product, the last or known term of
the equation. This discovery facilitated the solution of equations, by
the necessary composition of their terms which it displayed.
It was evident, for example, that each root of an equation must be a
factor, and consequently a divisor, of the last term.[608]

     [608] Harriott’s book is a thin folio of 180 pages, with very
     little besides examples; for his principles are shortly and
     obscurely laid down. Whoever is the author of the preface to this
     work cannot be said to have suppressed or extenuated the merits
     of Vieta, or to have claimed anything for Harriott but what he is
     allowed to have deserved. Montucla justly observes, that Harriott
     _very rarely_ makes an equation equal to zero, by bringing all
     the quantities to one side of the equation.

18. Harriott introduced the use of small letters instead of capitals
in algebra; he employed vowels for unknown, consonants for known
quantities, and joined them to express their product.[609] There is
certainly not much in this; but its evident convenience renders it
wonderful that it should have been reserved for so late an era.
Wallis, in his History of Algebra, ascribes to Harriott a long list of
discoveries, which have been reclaimed for Cardan and Vieta, the great
founders of the higher algebra, by Cossali and Montucla.[610] The
latter of these writers has been charged, even by foreigners, with
similar injustice towards our countryman; and that he has been
provoked by what he thought the unfairness of Wallis to something like
a depreciation of Harriott, seems as clear as that he has himself
robbed Cardan of part of his due credit in swelling the account of
Vieta’s discoveries. From the general integrity, however, of
Montucla’s writings, I am much inclined to acquit him of any wilful
partiality.

     [609] Oughtred, in his Clavis Mathematica, published in 1631,
     abbreviated the rules of Vieta, though he still used capital
     letters. He also gives succinctly the praxis of algebra, or the
     elementary rules we find in our common books, which, though what
     are now first learned, were, from the singular course of
     algebraical history, discovered late. They are, however, given
     also by Harriott. Wallisii Algebra.

     [610] These may be found in the article Harriott of the
     Biographia Britannica. Wallis, however, does not suppress the
     honour due to Vieta quite as much as is intimated by Montucla.

|Descartes.|

19. Harriott had shown what were the hidden laws of algebra, as the
science of symbolical notation. But one man, the pride of France and
wonder of his contemporaries, was destined to flash light upon the
labours of the analyst, and to point out what those symbols, so darkly
and painfully traced, and resulting commonly in irrational or even
impossible forms, might represent and explain. The use of numbers, or
of letters denoting numbers, for lines and rectangles capable of
division into aliquot parts, had long been too obvious to be
overlooked, and is only a compendious abbreviation of geometrical
proof. The next step made was the perceiving that irrational numbers,
as they are called, represent incommensurable quantities; that is, if
unity be taken for the side of a square, the square-root of two will
represent its diagonal. Gradually the application of numerical and
algebraical calculation to the solution of problems respecting
magnitude became more frequent and refined.[611] It is certain,
however, that no one before Descartes had employed algebraic formulæ
in the construction of curves; that is, had taught the inverse
process, not only how to express diagrams by algebra, but how to turn
algebra into diagrams. The ancient geometers, he observes, were
scrupulous about using the language of arithmetic in geometry, which
could only proceed from their not perceiving the relation between the
two; and this has produced a great deal of obscurity and embarrassment
in some of their demonstrations.[612]

     [611] See note in Vol. II., p. 445.

     [612] Œuvres de Descartes, v. 323.

|His application of algebra to curves.|

20. The principle which Descartes establishes is that every curve, of
those which are called geometrical, has its fundamental equation
expressing the constant relation between the absciss and the ordinate.
Thus, the rectangle under the abscisses of a diameter of the circle is
equal to the square of the ordinate, and the other conic sections, as
well as higher curves, have each their leading property, which
determines their nature, and shows how they may be generated. A simple
equation can only express the relation of straight lines; the solution
of a quadratic must be found in one of the four conic sections; and
the higher powers of an unknown quantity lead to curves of a superior
order. The beautiful and extensive theory developed by Descartes in
this short treatise displays a most consummate felicity of genius.
That such a man, endowed with faculties so original, should have
encroached on the just rights of others, is what we can only believe
with reluctance.

|Suspected plagiarism from Harriott.|

21. It must, however, be owned that independently of the suspicions of
an unacknowledged appropriation of what others had thought before him,
which unfortunately hang over all the writings of Descartes, he has
taken to himself the whole theory of Harriott on the nature of
equations in a manner which, if it is not a remarkable case of
simultaneous invention, can only be reckoned a very unwarrantable
plagiarism. For not only he does not name Harriott, but he evidently
introduces the subject as an important discovery of his own, and in
one of his letters asserts his originality in the most positive
language.[613] Still it is quite possible that, prepared as the way
had been by Vieta, and gifted as Descartes was with a wonderfully
intuitive acuteness in all mathematical reasoning, he may in this, as
in other instances, have struck out the whole theory by himself.
Montucla extols the algebra of Descartes, that is, so much of it as
can be fairly claimed for him without any precursor, very highly; and
some of his inventions in the treatment of equations have long been
current in books on that science. He was the first who showed what
were called impossible or imaginary roots, though he never assigns
them, deeming them no quantities at all. He was also perhaps the first
who fully understood negative roots, though he still retains the
appellation, false roots, which is not so good as Harriott’s epithet,
privative. According to his panegyrist, he first pointed out that in
every equation (the terms being all on one side) which has no
imaginary roots, there are as many changes of signs as positive roots,
as many continuations of them as negative.

     [613] Tant s’en faut que les choses que j’ai écrites puissent
     être aisément tirées de Viéte, qu’au contraire ce qui est cause
     que mon traité est difficile à entendre, c’est que j’ai tâché à
     n’y rien mettre que ce que j’ai crû n’avoir point été su ni par
     lui ni par aucun autre; comme on peut voir si on confére ce que
     j’ai écrit du nombre des racines qui sont en chaque équation,
     dans la page 372, qui est l’endroit où je commence à donner les
     règles de mon algèbre, avec ce que Viéte en a écrit tout à la fin
     de son livre, De Emendatione Æquationum; car on verra que je le
     determine généralement en toutes équations, au lieu que lui n’en
     aiant donné que quelques exemples particuliers, dont il fait
     toutefois si grand état qu’il a voulu conclure son livre par là,
     il a montre qu’il ne le pouvoit déterminer en général. Et ainsi
     j’ai commencé où il avoit achevé, ce que j’ai fait toutefois sans
     y penser; car j’ai plus feuilleté Viéte depuis que j’ai reçu
     votre dernière que je n’avois jamais fait auparavant, l’ayant
     trouvé ici par hasard entre les mains d’un de mes amis; et entre
     nous, je ne trouve pas qu’il en ait tant su que je pensois, non
     obstant qu’il fût fort habile. This is in a letter to Mersenne in
     1637. Œuvres de Descartes, vol. vi., p. 300.

     The charge of plagiarism from Harriott was brought against
     Descartes in his lifetime: Roberval, when an English gentleman
     showed him the Artis Analyticæ Praxis, exclaimed eagerly, Il l’a
     vu! il l’a vu! It is also a very suspicious circumstance, if
     true, as it appears to be, that Descartes was in England the year
     (1631) that Harriott’s work appeared. Carcavi, a friend of
     Roberval, in a letter to Descartes in 1649, plainly intimates to
     him that he has only copied Harriott as to the nature of
     equations Œvres des Descartes, vol. x., p. 373. To this
     accusation Descartes made no reply. See Biographia Britannica,
     art. Harriott. The Biographie Universelle unfairly suppresses all
     mention of this, and labours to depreciate Harriott.

     See Leibnitz’s catalogue of the supposed thefts of Descartes in
     Vol. III., p. 267, of this work.

|Fermat.|

22. The geometer next in genius to Descartes, and perhaps nearer to
him than to any third, was Fermat, a man of various acquirements, of
high rank in the parliament of Toulouse, and of a mind incapable of
envy, forgiving of detraction, and delighting in truth, with almost
too much indifference to praise. The works of Fermat were not
published till long after his death in 1665; but his frequent
discussions with Descartes, by the intervention of their common
correspondent Mersenne, render this place more appropriate for the
introduction of his name. In these controversies Descartes never
behaved to Fermat with the respect due to his talents; in fact, no one
was ever more jealous of his own pre-eminence, or more unwilling to
acknowledge the claims of those who scrupled to follow him implicitly,
and who might in any manner be thought rivals of his fame. Yet it is
this unhappy temper of Descartes which ought to render us more
unwilling to credit the suspicions of his designed plagiarism from the
discoveries of others; since this, combined with his unwillingness to
acknowledge their merits, and affected ignorance of their writings,
would form a character we should not readily ascribe to a man of great
genius, and whose own writings give many apparent indications of
sincerity and virtue. But in fact there was in this age a great
probability of simultaneous invention in science, from developing
principles that had been partially brought to light. Thus Roberval
discovered the same method of indivisibles as Cavalieri, and Descartes
must equally have been led to this theory of tangents by that of
Kepler. Fermat also, who was in possession of his principal
discoveries before the geometry of Descartes saw the light, derived
from Kepler his own celebrated method, de maximis et minimis;
a method of discovering the greatest or least value of a variable
quantity, such as the ordinate of a curve. It depends on the same
principle as that of Kepler. From this he deduced a rule for drawing
tangents to curves different from that of Descartes. This led to a
controversy between the two geometers, carried on by Descartes, who
yet is deemed to have been in the wrong, with his usual quickness of
resentment. Several other discoveries, both in pure algebra and
geometry, illustrate the name of Fermat.[614]

     [614] A good article on Fermat, by M. Maurice, will be found in
     the Biographie Universelle.

|Algebraic geometry not successful at first.|

23. The new geometry of Descartes was not received with the universal
admiration it deserved. Besides its conciseness and the inroad it made
on old prejudices as to geometrical methods, the general boldness of
the author’s speculations in physical and metaphysical philosophy, as
well as his indiscreet temper, disinclined many who ought to have
appreciated it; and it was in his own country, where he had ceased to
reside, that Descartes had the fewest admirers. Roberval made some
objections to his rival’s algebra, but with little success. A
commentary on the treatise of Descartes by Schooten, professor of
Geometry at Leyden, first appeared in 1649.

|Astronomy.--Kepler.|

24. Among those who devoted themselves ardently and successfully to
astronomical observations at the end of the sixteenth century, was
John Kepler, a native of Wirtemburg, who had already shown that he was
likely to inherit the mantle of Tycho Brahe. He published some
astronomical treatises of comparatively small importance in the first
years of the present period. But in 1609 he made an epoch in that
science by his Astronomia Nova αιτιολογτος, [aitiologêtos], or
Commentaries on the Planet Mars. It had been always assumed that the
heavenly bodies revolve in circular orbits round their centre, whether
this were taken to be the sun or the earth. There was, however, an
apparent eccentricity or deviation from this circular motion, which it
had been very difficult to explain, and for this Ptolemy had devised
his complex system of epicycles. No planet showed more of this
eccentricity than Mars; and it was to Mars that Kepler turned his
attention. After many laborious researches he was brought by degrees
to the great discovery, that the motion of the planets, among which,
having adopted the Copernican system, he reckoned the earth, is not
performed in circular but in elliptical orbits, the sun not occupying
the centre but one of the foci of the curve; and, secondly, that it is
performed with such a varying velocity, that the areas described by
the radius vector, or line which joins this focus to the revolving
planet, are always proportional to the times. A planet, therefore,
moves less rapidly as it becomes more distant from the sun. These are
the first and second of the three great laws of Kepler. The third was
not discovered by him till some years afterwards. He tells us himself
that on the 8th May, 1618, after long toil in investigating the
proportion of the periodic times of the planetary movements to their
orbits, an idea struck his mind, which, chancing to make a mistake in
the calculation, he soon rejected. But a week after, returning to the
subject, he entirely established his grand discovery, that the squares
of the times of revolution are as the cubes of the mean distances of
the planets. This was first made known to the world in his Mysterium
Cosmo graphicum, published in 1619; a work mingled up with many
strange effusions of a mind far more eccentric than any of the planets
with which it was engaged. In the Epitome Astronomiæ Copernicanæ,
printed the same year, he endeavours to deduce this law from his
theory of centrifugal forces. He had a very good insight into the
principles of universal gravitation, as an attribute of matter; but
several of his assumptions as to the laws of motion are not consonant
to truth. There seems indeed to have been a considerable degree of
good fortune in the discoveries of Kepler; yet, this may be deemed the
reward of his indefatigable laboriousness, and of the ingenuousness
with which he renounced any hypothesis that he could not reconcile
with his advancing knowledge of the phenomena.

|Conjectures as to comets.|

25. The appearance of three comets in 1619 called once more the
astronomers of Europe to speculate on the nature of those anomalous
bodies. They still passed for harbingers of worldly catastrophies; and
those who feared them least could not interpret their apparent
irregularity. Galileo, though Tycho Brahe had formed a juster notion,
unfortunately took them for atmospheric meteors. Kepler, though he
brought them from the far regions of space, did not suspect the nature
of their orbits, and thought that, moving in straight lines,
they were finally dispersed and came to nothing. But a Jesuit, Grassi,
in a treatise, De Tribus Cometis, Rome, 1618, had the honour of
explaining what had baffled Galileo, and first held them to be planets
moving in vast ellipses round the sun.[615]

     [615] The Biographie Universelle, art. Grassi, ascribes this
     opinion to Tycho.

|Galileo’s discovery of Jupiter’s satellites.|

26. But long before this time the name of Galileo had become immortal
by discoveries which, though they would certainly have soon been made
by some other, perhaps far inferior, observer, were happily reserved
for the most philosophical genius of the age. Galileo assures us that,
having heard of the invention of an instrument in Holland which
enlarged the size of distant objects, but knowing nothing of its
construction, he began to study the theory of refractions till he
found by experiment, that by means of a convex and concave glass in a
tube, he could magnify an object threefold. He was thus encouraged to
make another which magnified thirty times; and this he exhibited in
the autumn of 1609 to the inhabitants of Venice. Having made a present
of his first telescope to the senate, who rewarded him with a pension,
he soon constructed another; and in one of the first nights of
January, 1610, directing it towards the moon, was astonished to see
her surface and edges covered with inequalities. These he considered
to be mountains, and judged by a sort of measurement that some of them
must exceed those of the earth. His next observation was of the milky
way; and this he found to derive its nebulous lustre from myriads of
stars not distinguishable through their remoteness, by the unassisted
sight of man. The nebulæ in the constellation Orion he perceived to be
of the same character. Before his delight at these discoveries could
have subsided, he turned his telescope to Jupiter, and was surprised
to remark three small stars, which, in a second night’s observation,
had changed there places. In the course of a few weeks, he was able to
determine by their revolutions, which are very rapid, that these are
secondary planets, the moons or satellites of Jupiter; and he had
added a fourth to their number. These marvellous revelations of nature
he hastened to announce in a work, aptly entitled Sidereus Nuncius,
published in March, 1610. In an age when the fascinating science of
astronomy had already so much excited the minds of philosophers, it
may be guessed with what eagerness this intelligence from the heavens
was circulated. A few, as usual, through envy or prejudice, affected
to contemn it. But wisdom was justified of her children. Kepler, in
his Narratio de observatis a se Quatuor Jovis Satellitibus, 1610,
confirmed the discoveries of Galileo. Peiresc, an inferior name, no
doubt, but deserving of every praise for his zeal in the cause of
knowledge, having with difficulty procured a good telescope, saw the
four satellites in November, 1610, and is said by Gassendi to have
conceived at that time the ingenious idea that their occultations
might be used to ascertain the longitude.[616]

     [616] Gassendi Vita Peirescii, p. 77.

|Other discoveries by him.|

27. This is the greatest and most important of the discoveries of
Galileo. But several others were of the deepest interest. He found
that the planet Venus had phases, that is, periodical differences of
apparent form like the moon; and that these are exactly such as would
be produced by the variable reflection of the sun’s light on the
Copernican hypothesis; ascribing also the faint light on that part of
the moon which does not receive the rays of the sun, to the reflection
from the earth, called by some late writers earth-shine; which, though
it had been suggested by Mæstlin, and before him by Leonardo da Vinci,
was not generally received among astronomers. Another striking
phenomenon, though he did not see the means of explaining it, was the
triple appearance of Saturn, as if smaller stars were conjoined as it
were like wings to the planet. This, of course, was the ring.

|Spots of the sun discovered.|

28. Meantime the new auxiliary of vision which had revealed so many
wonders could not lie unemployed in the hands of others. A
publication, by John Fabricius, at Wittenberg, in July, 1611, De
Maculis in Sole visis, announced a phenomenon in contradiction of
common prejudice. The sun had passed for a body of liquid flame, or,
if thought solid, still in a state of perfect ignition. Kepler had,
some years before, observed a spot, which he unluckily mistook for the
orb of Mercury in its passage over the solar orb. Fabricius was not
permitted to claim this discovery as his own. Scheiner, a Jesuit,
professor of mathematics at Ingolstadt, asserts in a letter, dated
12th of November, 1611, that he first saw the spots in the month of
March in that year, but he seems to have paid little attention to them
before that of October. Both Fabricius, however, and Scheiner
may be put out of the question. We have evidence, that Harriott
observed the spots on the sun as early as December 8th, 1610. The
motion of the spots suggested the revolution of the sun round its
axis, completed in twenty-four days, as it is now determined; and
their frequent alterations of form, as well as occasional
disappearance, could only be explained by the hypothesis of a luminous
atmosphere in commotion, a sea of flame, revealing at intervals the
dark central mass of the sun’s body which it envelopes.

|Copernican system held by Galileo.|

29. Though it cannot be said, perhaps, that the discoveries of Galileo
would fully prove the Copernican system of the world to those who were
already insensible to reasoning from its sufficiency to explain the
phenomena, and from the analogies of nature, they served to
familiarise the mind to it, and to break down the strong rampart of
prejudice which stood in its way. For eighty years, it has been said,
this theory of the earth’s motion had been maintained without censure;
and it could only be the greater boldness of Galileo in its assertion
which drew down upon him the notice of the church. But, in these
eighty years since the publication of the treatise of Copernicus, his
proselytes had been surprisingly few. They were now becoming more
numerous: several had written on that side; and Galileo had begun to
form a school of Copernicans who were spreading over Italy. The
Lincean society, one of the most useful and renowned of Italian
academies, founded at Rome by Frederic Cesi, a young man of noble
birth, in 1603, had, as a fundamental law, to apply themselves to
natural philosophy; and it was impossible that so attractive and
rational a system as that of Copernicus could fail of pleasing an
acute and ingenious nation strongly bent upon science. The church,
however, had taken alarm; the motion of the earth was conceived to be
as repugnant to Scripture as the existence of antipodes had once been
reckoned; and in 1616, Galileo, though respected and in favour with
the court of Rome, was compelled to promise that he would not maintain
that doctrine in any manner. Some letters that he had published on the
subject were put, with the treatise of Copernicus and other works,
into the Index Expurgatorius, where, I believe, they still
remain.[617]

     [617] Drinkwater’s Life of Galileo. Fabroni, Vitæ Italorum,
     vol. i. The former seems to be mistaken in supposing that Galileo
     did not endeavour to prove his system compatible with Scripture.
     In a letter to Christina, the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, the
     author (Brenna) of the Life in Fabroni’s work, tells us, he
     argued very elaborately for that purpose. In ea videlicet
     epistolâ philosophus noster ita disserit, ut nihil etiam ab
     hominibus, qui omnem in sacrarum literarum studio consumpsissent
     ætatem, aut subtilius aut verius aut etiam accuratius explicatum
     expectari potuerit, p. 118. It seems, in fact, to have been this
     over-desire to prove his theory orthodox, which incensed the
     church against it. See an extraordinary article on this subject
     in the eighth number of the Dublin Review (1838). Many will
     tolerate propositions inconsistent with orthodoxy, when they are
     not brought into immediate juxtaposition with it.

|His dialogues, and persecution.|

30. He seems, notwithstanding this, to have flattered himself that,
after several years had elapsed, he might elude the letter of this
prohibition by throwing the arguments in favour of the Ptolemaic and
Copernican systems into the form of a dialogue. This was published in
1632; and he might, from various circumstances, not unreasonably hope
for impunity. But his expectations were deceived. It is well known
that he was compelled by the Inquisition at Rome, into whose hands he
fell, to retract, in the most solemn and explicit manner, the
propositions he had so well proved, and which he must have still
believed. It is unnecessary to give a circumstantial account,
especially as it has been so well done in a recent work, the Life of
Galileo, by Mr. Drinkwater Bethune. The papal court meant to humiliate
Galileo, and through him to strike an increasing class of philosophers
with shame and terror; but not otherwise to punish one, of whom even
the inquisitors must, as Italians, have been proud; his confinement,
though Montucla says it lasted for a year, was very short. He
continued, nevertheless, under some restraint for the rest of his
life, and though he lived at his own villa near Florence, was not
permitted to enter the city.[618]

     [618] Fabroni. His Life is written in good Latin, with knowledge
     and spirit, more than Tiraboschi has ventured to display.

     It appears from some of Grotius’s Epistles, that Galileo had
     thought, about 1635, of seeking the protection of the United
     Provinces. But on account of his advanced age he gave this up:
     fessus senio constituit manere in quibus est locis, et potius quæ
     ibi sunt incommoda perpeti, quam malæ ætati migrandi onus, et
     novas parandi amicitias imponere. The very idea shows that he
     must have deeply felt the restraint imposed upon him in his
     country. Epist. Grot. 407, 446.

|Descartes alarmed by this.|

31. The church was not mistaken in supposing that she should
intimidate the Copernicans, but very much so in expecting to suppress
the theory. Descartes was so astonished at hearing of the sentence on
Galileo, that he was almost disposed to burn his papers, or at least
to let no one see them. “I cannot collect,” he says, “that he who is
an Italian, and a friend of the pope, as I understand, has been
criminated on any other account than for having attempted to establish
the motion of the earth. I know that this opinion was formerly
censured by some cardinals; but I thought I had since heard that no
objection was now made to its being publicly taught even at
Rome.”[619] It seems not at all unlikely that Descartes was induced,
on this account, to pretend a greater degree of difference from
Copernicus than he really felt, and even to deny, in a certain sense
of his own, the obnoxious tenet of the earth’s motion.[620] He was not
without danger of a sentence against truth nearer at hand; Cardinal
Richelieu having had the intention of procuring a decree of the
Sorbonne to the same effect, which, by the good sense of some of that
society, fell to the ground.[621]

     [619] Vol. vi., p. 239. He says here, of the motion of the earth,
     Je confesse que s’il est faux, tous les fondemens de ma
     philosophie le sont aussi.

     [620] Vol. vi., p. 50.

     [621] Montucla, ii., p. 297.

|Progress of Copernican system.|

32. The progress, however, of the Copernican theory in Europe, if it
may not actually be dated from its condemnation at Rome, was certainly
not at all slower after that time. Gassendi rather cautiously took
that side; the Cartesians brought a powerful reinforcement; Bouillaud
and several other astronomers of note avowed themselves favourable to
a doctrine which, though in Italy it lay under the ban of the papal
power, was readily saved on this side of the Alps by some of the
salutary distinctions long in use to evade that authority.[622] But in
the middle of the seventeenth century, and long afterwards, there were
mathematicians of no small reputation, who struggled staunchly for the
immobility of the earth; and except so far as Cartesian theories might
have come in vogue, we have no reason to believe that any persons
unacquainted with astronomy, either in this country or on the
continent, had embraced the system of Copernicus. Hume has censured
Bacon for rejecting it; but if Bacon had not done so, he would have
anticipated the rest of his countrymen by a full quarter of a century.

     [622] Id., p. 50.

|Descartes denies general gravitation.|

33. Descartes, in his new theory of the solar system, aspired to
explain the secret springs of nature, while Kepler and Galileo had
merely showed their effects. By what force the heavenly bodies were
impelled, by what law they were guided, was certainly a very different
question from that of the orbit they described or the period of their
revolution. Kepler had evidently some notion of that universally
mutual gravitation which Hooke saw more clearly, and Newton
established on the basis of his geometry.[623] But Descartes rejected
this with contempt. “For,” he says “to conceive this we must not only
suppose that every portion of matter in the universe is animated, and
animated by several different souls which do not obstruct one another,
but that those souls are intelligent and even divine; that they may
know what is going on in the most remote places, without any messenger
to give them notice, and that they may exert their powers there.”[624]
Kepler, who took the world for a single animal, a leviathan that
roared in caverns and breathed in the ocean tides, might have found it
difficult to answer this, which would have seemed no objection at all
to Campanella. If Descartes himself had been more patient towards
opinions which he had not formed in his own mind, that constant divine
agency, to which he was, on other occasions, apt to resort, could not
but have suggested a sufficient explanation of the gravity of matter,
without endowing it with self-agency. He had, however, fallen upon a
complicated and original scheme; the most celebrated, perhaps, though
not the most admirable, of the novelties which Descartes brought into
philosophy.

     [623] “If the earth and moon,” he says, “were not retained in
     their orbits, they would fall one on another, the moon moving
     about 33/34 of the way, the earth the rest, supposing them
     equally dense.” By this attraction of the moon he accounts for
     tides. He compares the attraction of the planets towards the sun
     to that of heavy bodies towards the earth.

     [624] Vol. x., p. 560.

|Cartesian theory of the world.|

34. In a letter to Mersenne, January 9th, 1639, he shortly states that
notion of the material universe, which he afterwards published in the
Principia Philosophiæ. “I will tell you,” he says, “that I conceive,
or rather I can demonstrate, that besides the matter which composes
terrestrial bodies, there are two other kinds; one very subtle, of
which the parts are round or nearly round like grains of sand, and
this not only occupies the pores of terrestrial bodies, but
constitutes the substance of all the heavens; the other incomparably
more subtle, the parts of which are so small and move with such
velocity, that they have no determinate figure, but readily take at
every instant that which is required to fill all the little intervals
which the other does not occupy.”[625] To this hypothesis of a double
æther he was driven by his aversion to admit any vacuum in nature; the
rotundity of the former corpuscles having been produced, as he
fancied, by their continual circular motions, which had rubbed off
their angles. This seems at present rather a clumsy hypothesis, but it
is literally that which Descartes presented to the world.

     [625] Vol. viii., p. 73.

35. After having thus filled the universe with different sorts of
matter, he supposes that the subtler particles, formed by the
perpetual rubbing off of the angles of the larger in their progress
towards sphericity, increased by degrees till there was a superfluity
that was not required to fill up the intervals; and this, flowing
towards the centre of the system, became the sun, a very subtle and
liquid body, while in like manner, the fixed stars were formed in
other systems. Round these centres the whole mass is whirled in a
number of distinct vortices, each of which carries along with it a
planet. The centrifugal motion impels every particle in these vortices
of each instant to fly off from the sun in a straight line; but it is
retained by the pressure of those which have already escaped and form
a denser sphere beyond it. Light is no more than the effect of
particles seeking to escape from the centre, and pressing one on
another, though perhaps without actual motion.[626] The planetary
vortices contain sometimes smaller vortices, in which the satellites
are whirled round their principal.

     [626] J’ai souvent averti que par la lumière je n’entendois pas
     tant le mouvement que cette inclination ou propension que ces
     petits corps ont à se mouvoir, et que ce que je dirois du
     mouvement, pour être plus aisément entendu, se devoit rapporter à
     cette propension; d’où il est manifeste qua selon moi l’on ne
     doit entendre autre chose par les couleurs que les différentes
     variétés qui arrivent en ces propensions. Vol. vii., p. 193.

36. Such, in a few words, is the famous Cartesian theory, which,
fallen in esteem as it now is, stood its ground on the continent of
Europe, for nearly a century, till the simplicity of the Newtonian
system, and, above all, its conformity to the reality of things,
gained an undisputed predominance. Besides the arbitrary suppositions
of Descartes, and the various objections that were raised against the
absolute plenum of space and other parts of his theory, it has been
urged that his vortices are not reconcilable, according to the laws of
motion in fluids, with the relation, ascertained by Kepler, between
the periods and distances of the planets; nor does it appear why the
sun should be in the focus, rather than in the centre of their orbits.
Yet, within a few years it has seemed not impossible, that a part of
his bold conjectures will enter once more with soberer steps into the
schools of philosophy. His doctrine as to the nature of light,
improved as it was by Huygens, is daily gaining ground over that of
Newton; that of a subtle æther pervading space, which in fact is
nearly the same thing, is becoming a favourite speculation, if we are
not yet to call it an established truth; and the affirmative of a
problem, which an eminent writer has started, whether this æther has a
vorticose motion round the sun, would not leave us very far from the
philosophy it has been so long our custom to turn into ridicule.

|Transits of Mercury and Venus.|

37. The passage of Mercury over the sun was witnessed by Gassendi in
1631. This phenomenon, though it excited great interest in that age,
from its having been previously announced, so as to furnish a test of
astronomical accuracy, recurs too frequently to be now considered as
of high importance. The transit of Venus is much more rare. It
occurred on December 4, 1639, and was then only seen by Horrox, a
young Englishman of extraordinary mathematical genius. There is reason
to ascribe an invention of great importance, though not perhaps of
extreme difficulty, that of the micrometer, to Horrox.

|Laws of Mechanics.|

|Statics of Galileo.|

38. The satellites of Jupiter and the phases of Venus are not so
glorious in the scutcheon of Galileo as his discovery of the true
principles of mechanics. These, as we have seen in the former volume,
were very imperfectly known till he appeared; nor had the additions to
that science since the time of Archimedes been important. The treatise
of Galileo, Della Scienza Mecanica, has been said, I know not on what
authority, to have been written in 1592. It was not published,
however, till 1634, and then only in a French translation by Mersenne,
the original not appearing till 1649. This is chiefly confined to
statics, or the doctrine of equilibrium; it was in his dialogues on
motion, Della Nuova Scienza, published in 1638, that he developed his
great principles of the science of dynamics, the moving forces of
bodies. Galileo was induced to write his treatise on mechanics, as he
tells us, in consequence of the fruitless attempts he witnessed in
engineers to raise weights by a small force, “as if with their
machines they could cheat nature, whose instinct as it were by
fundamental law is that no resistance can be overcome except by a
superior force.” But as one man may raise a weight to the height of a
foot by dividing it into equal portions, commensurate to his power,
which many men could not raise at once, so a weight, which raises
another greater than itself, may be considered as doing so by
successive instalments of force, during each of which it traverses as
much space as a corresponding portion of the larger weight. Hence the
velocity, of which space uniformly traversed in a given time is the
measure, is inversely as the masses of the weights; and thus the
equilibrium of the straight lever is maintained, when the weights are
inversely as their distance from the fulcrum. As this equilibrium of
unequal weights depends on the velocities they would have if set in
motion, its law has been called the principle of virtual velocities.
No theorem has been of more important utility to mankind. It is one of
those great truths of science, which combating and conquering enemies
from opposite quarters, prejudice and empiricism, justify the name of
philosophy against both classes. The waste of labour and expense in
machinery would have been incalculably greater in modern times, could
we imagine this law of nature not to have been discovered; and as
their misapplication prevents their employment in a proper direction,
we owe in fact to Galileo the immense effect which a right application
of it has produced. It is possible, that Galileo was ignorant of the
demonstration given by Stevinus of the law of equilibrium in the
inclined plane. His own is different; but he seems only to consider
the case when the direction of the force is parallel to that of the
plane.

|His Dynamics.|

39. Still less was known of the principles of dynamics than of those
of statics, till Galileo came to investigate them. The acceleration of
falling bodies, whether perpendicularly or on inclined planes, was
evident; but in what ratio this took place, no one had succeeded in
determining, though many had offered conjectures. He showed that the
velocity acquired was proportional to the time from the commencement
of falling. This might now be demonstrated from the laws of motion;
but Galileo, who did not perhaps distinctly know them, made use of
experiment. He then proved by reasoning that the spaces traversed in
falling were as the squares of the times or velocities; that their
increments in equal times were as the uneven numbers, 1, 3, 5, 7, and
so forth; and that the whole space was half what would have been
traversed uniformly from the beginning with the final velocity. These
are the great laws of accelerated and retarded motion, from which
Galileo deduced most important theorems. He showed that the time in
which bodies roll down the length of inclined planes is equal to that
in which they would fall down the height, and in different planes is
proportionate to the height; and that their acquired velocity is in
the same ratios. In some propositions he was deceived; but the science
of dynamics owes more to Galileo than to any one philosopher. The
motion of projectiles had never been understood; he showed it to be
parabolic; and in this he not only necessarily made use of a principle
of vast extent, that of compound motion, which, though it is clearly
mentioned in one passage by Aristotle[627] and may probably be implied
in the mechanical reasonings of others, does not seem to have been
explicitly laid down by modern writers, but must have seen the
principle of curvilinear deflection by forces acting in infinitely
small portions of time. The ratio between the times of vibration in
pendulums of unequal length, had early attracted Galileo’s attention.
But he did not reach the geometrical exactness of which this subject
is capable.[628] He developed a new principle as to the resistance of
solids to the fracture of their parts, which, though Descartes as
usual treated it with scorn, is now established in philosophy. “One
forms, however,” says Playfair, “a very imperfect idea of this
philosopher from considering the discoveries and inventions, numerous
and splendid as they are, of which he was the undisputed author. It is
by following his reasonings, and by pursuing the train of his
thoughts, in his own elegant, though somewhat diffuse exposition
of them, that we become acquainted with the fertility of his
genius, with the sagacity, penetration, and comprehensiveness of his
mind. The service which he rendered to real knowledge is to be
estimated not only from the truths which he discovered, but from the
errors which he detected; not merely from the sound principles which
he established, but from the pernicious idols which he overthrew. Of
all the writers who have lived in an age which was yet only emerging
from ignorance and barbarism, Galileo has most entirely the tone of
true philosophy, and is most free from any contamination of the times,
in taste, sentiment, and opinion.”[629]

     [627] Drinkwater’s Life of Galileo, p. 80.

     [628] Fabroni.

     [629] Preliminary Dissertation to Encyclop. Britain.

|Mechanics of Descartes.|

40. Descartes, who left nothing in philosophy untouched, turned his
acute mind to the science of mechanics, sometimes with signal credit,
sometimes very unsuccessfully. He reduced all statics to one
principle, that it requires as much force to raise a body to a given
height, as to raise a body of double weight to half the height. This
is the theorem of virtual velocities in another form. In many respects
he displays a jealousy of Galileo, and an unwillingness to acknowledge
his discoveries, which puts himself often in the wrong. “I believe,”
he says, “that the velocity of very heavy bodies which do not move
very quickly in descending increases nearly in a duplicate ratio; but
I deny that this is exact, and I believe that the contrary is the case
when the movement is very rapid.”[630] This recourse to the air’s
resistance, a circumstance of which Galileo was well aware, in order
to diminish the credit of a mathematical theorem, is unworthy of
Descartes; but it occurs more than once in his letters. He maintained
also, against the theory of Galileo, that bodies do not begin to move
with an infinitely small velocity, but have a certain degree of motion
at the first instance, which is afterwards accelerated.[631] In this
too, as he meant to extend his theory to falling bodies, the consent
of philosophers has decided the question against him. It was a
corollary from these notions that he denies the increments of spaces
to be according to the progression of uneven numbers.[632] Nor would
he allow that the velocity of a body augments its force, though it is
a concomitant.[633]

     [630] Œuvres de Descartes, vol. viii., p. 24.

     [631] Il faut savoir, quoique Galilée et quelques autres disent
     au contraire, que les corps qui commencent à descendre, ou à se
     mouvoir en quelque façon que ce soit, ne passent point par tous
     les degrés de tardiveté; mais que des le premier moment ils ont
     certaine vitesse qui s’augmente après de beaucoup, et c’est de
     cette augmentation que vient la force de la percussion. viii.,
     181.

     [632] Cette proportion d’augmentation selon les nombres impairs,
     1, 3, 5, 7, &c., qui est dans Galilée et que je crois vous avoir
     aussi écrite autrefois, ne peut être vraie, qu’en supposant deux
     ou trois choses qui sont très fausses, dont l’une est que le
     mouvement croisse par degrés depuis le plus lent, ainsi que le
     songe Galilée, et l’autre que la résistance de l’air n’empêche
     point. Vol. ix., p. 349.

     [633] Je pense que la vitesse n’est pas la cause de
     l’augmentation de la force, encore qu’elle l’accompagne toujours.
     Id. p. 356, See also vol. viii., p. 14. He was probably perplexed
     by the metaphysical notion of causation, which he knew not how to
     ascribe to mere velocity. The fact that increased velocity is a
     condition or antecedent of augmented force could not be doubted.

|Law of motion laid down by Descartes.|

41. Descartes, however, is the first who laid down the laws of motion;
especially that all bodies persist in their present state of rest or
uniform rectilineal motion till affected by some force. Many had
thought, as the vulgar always do, that a continuance of rest was
natural to bodies, but did not perceive that the same principle of
inertia or inactivity was applicable to them in rectilineal motion.
Whether this is deducible from theory, or depends wholly on
experience, by which we ought to mean experiment, is a question we
need not discuss. The fact, however, is equally certain; and hence
Descartes inferred that every curvilinear deflection is produced by
some controlling force, from which the body strives to escape in the
direction of a tangent to the curve. The most erroneous part of his
mechanical philosophy is contained in some propositions as to the
collision of bodies, so palpably incompatible with obvious experience
that it seems truly wonderful he could ever have adopted them. But he
was led into these paradoxes by one of the arbitrary hypotheses which
always governed him. He fancied it a necessary consequence from the
immutability of the divine nature that there should always be the same
quantity of motion in the universe; and rather than abandon this
singular assumption he did not hesitate to assert, that two hard
bodies striking each other in opposite directions would be reflected
with no loss of velocity; and, what is still more outrageously
paradoxical, that a smaller body is incapable of communicating motion
to a greater; for example, that the red billiard-ball cannot
put the white into motion. This manifest absurdity he endeavoured to
remove by the arbitrary supposition, that when we see, as we
constantly do, the reverse of his theorem take place, it is owing to
the air, which, according to him, renders bodies more susceptible of
motion, than they would naturally be.

|Also those of compound forces.|

42. Though Galileo, as well as others, must have been acquainted with
the laws of the composition of moving forces, it does not appear that
they had ever been so distinctly enumerated as by Descartes, in a
passage of his Dioptrics.[634] That the doctrine was in some measure
new may be inferred from the objections of Fermat; and Clerselier,
some years afterwards, speaks of persons “not much versed in
mathematics, who cannot understand an argument taken from the nature
of compound motion.”[635]

     [634] Vol. v., p. 18.

     [635] Vol. vi., p. 508.

|Other discoveries in mechanics.|

43. Roberval demonstrated what seems to have been assumed by Galileo,
that the forces on an oblique or crooked lever balance each other,
when they are inversely as the perpendiculars drawn from the centre of
motion to their direction. Fermat, more versed in geometry than
physics, disputed this theorem which is now quite elementary.
Descartes, in a letter to Mersenne, ungraciously testifies his
agreement with it.[636] Torricelli, the most illustrious disciple of
Galileo, established that when weights balance each other in all
positions, their common centre of gravity does not ascend or descend,
and conversely.

     [636] Je suis de l’opinion, says Descartes, de ceux qui disent
     que _pondera sunt in æquilibrio quando sunt in ratione reciproca
     linearum perpendicularium_, &c., vol. xi., p. 357. He would not
     name Roberval; one of those littlenesses which appear too
     frequently in his letters and in all his writings. Descartes in
     fact could not bear to think that another, even though not an
     enemy, had discovered anything. In the preceding page he says:
     C’est une chose ridicule que de vouloir employer la raison du
     levier dans la poulie, ce qui est, si j’ai bonne mémoire, une
     imagination de Guide Ubalde. Yet this imagination is demonstrated
     in all our elementary books on mechanics.

|In Hydrostatics and pneumatics.|

44. Galileo, in a treatise entitled, Delle Cose che stanno nell’Acqua,
lays down the principles of hydrostatics already established by
Stevin, and among others what is called the hydrostatical paradox.
Whether he was acquainted with Stevin’s writings, may be perhaps
doubted; it does not appear that he mentions them. The more difficult
science of hydraulics was entirely created by two disciples of
Galileo, Castellio and Torricelli. It is one everywhere of high
importance, and especially in Italy. The work of Castellio, Della
Misura dell’Acque Correnti, and a continuation, were published at
Rome, in 1628. His practical skill in hydraulics, displayed in
carrying off the stagnant waters of the Arno, and in many other public
works, seems to have exceeded his theoretical science. An error, into
which he fell, supposing the velocity of fluids to be as the height
down which they had descended, led to false results. Torricelli proved
that it was as the square root of the altitude. The latter of these
two was still more distinguished by his discovery of the barometer.
The principle of the syphon or sucking-pump, and the impossibility of
raising water in it more than about thirty-three feet, were both well
known; but even Galileo had recourse to the clumsy explanation that
nature limited her supposed horror of a vacuum to this altitude. It
occurred to the sagacity of Torricelli that the weight of the
atmospheric column pressing upon the fluid which supplied the pump was
the cause of this rise above its level; and that the degree of rise
was consequently the measure of that weight. That the air had weight
was known, indeed, to Galileo and Descartes; and the latter not only
had some notion of determining it by means of a tube filled with
mercury, but in a passage which seems to have been much overlooked,
distinctly suggests as one reason why water will not rise above
eighteen _brasses_ in a pump, “the weight of the water which
counterbalances that of the air.”[637] Torricelli happily thought of
using mercury, a fluid thirteen times heavier, instead of water, and
thus invented a portable instrument by which the variations of the
mercurial column might be readily observed. These he found to
fluctuate between certain well known limits, and in circumstances
which might justly be ascribed to the variations of atmospheric
gravity. This discovery he made in 1643; and in 1648, Pascal, by his
celebrated experiment on the Puy de Dome, established the theory of
atmospheric pressure beyond dispute. He found a considerable
difference in the height of the mercury at the bottom and the top of
that mountain; and a smaller yet perceptible variation was proved on
taking the barometer to the top of one of the loftiest churches in
Paris.

     [637] Vol. vii., p. 437.

|Optics.--Discoveries of Kepler.|

|Invention of the telescope.|

45. The science of optics was so far from falling behind other
branches of physics in this period, that, including the two great
practical discoveries which illustrate it, no former or later
generation has witnessed such an advance. Kepler began, in the year
1604, by one of his first works, Paralipomena ad Vitellionem, a title
somewhat more modest than he was apt to assume. In this supplement to
the great Polish philosopher of the middle ages, he first explained
the structure of the human eye, and its adaptation to the purposes of
vision. Porta and Maurolycus had made important discoveries, but left
the great problem untouched. Kepler had the sagacity to perceive the
use of the retina as the canvas on which images were painted. In his
treatise, says Montucla, we are not to expect the precision of our own
age; but it is full of ideas novel and worthy of a man of genius. He
traced the causes of imperfect vision in its two principal cases,
where the rays of light converge to a point before or behind the
retina. Several other optical phenomena are well explained by Kepler;
but he was unable to master the great enigma of the science, the law
of refraction. To this he turned his attention again in 1611, when he
published a treatise on Dioptrics. He here first laid the foundation
of that science. The angle of refraction, which Maurolycus had
supposed equal to that of incidence, he here assumed to be one third
of it; which, though very erroneous as a general theorem, was
sufficiently accurate for the sort of glasses he employed. It was his
object to explain the principle of the telescope; and in this he well
succeeded. That admirable invention was then quite recent. Whatever
endeavours have been made to carry up the art of assisting vision by
means of a tube to much more ancient times, it seems to be fully
proved that no one had made use of combined lenses for that purpose.
The slight benefit which a hollow tube affords by obstructing the
lateral ray, must have been early familiar, and will account for
passages which have been construed to imply what the writers never
dreamed of.[638] The real inventor of the telescope is not certainly
known. Metius of Alkmaer long enjoyed that honour; but the best claim
seems to be that of Zachary Jens, a dealer in spectacles at
Middleburg. The date of the invention, or at least of its publicity,
is referred, beyond dispute, to 1609. The news of so wonderful a
novelty spread rapidly through Europe; and in the same year, Galileo,
as has been mentioned, having heard of the discovery, constructed, by
his own sagacity, the instrument which he exhibited at Venice. It is,
however, unreasonable to regard himself as the inventor; and in this
respect his Italian panegyrists have gone too far. The original sort
of telescope, and the only one employed in Europe for above thirty
years, was formed of a convex object-glass with a concave eye-glass.
This, however, has the disadvantage of diminishing too much the space
which can be taken in at one point of view; “so that,” says Montucla,
“one can hardly believe that it could render astronomy such service as
it did in the hands of a Galileo or a Scheiner.” Kepler saw the
principle upon which another kind might be framed with both glasses
convex. This is now called the astronomical telescope, and was first
employed a little before the middle of the century. The former, called
the Dutch telescope, is chiefly used for short spying-glasses.

     [638] Even Dutens, whose sole aim is to depreciate those whom
     modern science has most revered, cannot pretend to show that the
     ancients made use of glasses to assist vision. Origine des
     Découvertes, i., 218.

|Of the microscope.|

46. The microscope has also been ascribed to Galileo; and so far with
better cause, that we have no proof of his having known the previous
invention. It appears, however, to have originated, like the
telescope, in Holland, and perhaps at an earlier time. Cornelius
Drebbel, who exhibited the microscope in London about 1620, has often
passed for the inventor. It is suspected by Montucla that the first
microscopes had concave eye-glasses; and that the present form with
two convex glasses is not older than the invention of the astronomical
telescope.

|Antonio de Dominis.|

47. Antonio de Dominis, the celebrated archbishop of Spalatro, in a
book published in 1611, though written several years before, De Radiis
Lucis in Vitris Perspectivis et Iride, explained more of the phenomena
of the rainbow than was then understood. The varieties of colour had
baffled all inquirers, though the bow itself was well known to be the
reflection of solar light from drops of rain. Antonio de Dominis, to
account for these, had recourse to refraction, the known means of
giving colour to the solar ray; and guiding himself by the experiment
of placing between the eye and the sun a glass bottle of water, from
the lower side of which light issued in the same order of colours as
in the rainbow, he inferred that after two refractions and one
intermediate reflection within the drop, the ray came to the eye
tinged with different colours, according to the angle at which it had
entered. Kepler, doubtless ignorant of De Dominis’s book, had
suggested nearly the same. “This, though not a complete theory of the
rainbow, and though it left a great deal to occupy the attention,
first of Descartes, and afterwards of Newton, was probably just, and
carried the explanation as far as the principles then understood
allowed it to go. The discovery itself may be considered as an anomaly
in science, as it is one of a very refined and subtle nature, made by
a man who has given no other indication of much scientific sagacity or
acuteness. In many things, his writings show great ignorance of
principles of optics well known in his time, so that Boscovich, an
excellent judge in such matters, has said of him, ‘Homo opticarum
rerum supra quod patiatur ea ætas imperitissimus.’”[639] Montucla is
hardly less severe on De Dominis, who, in fact, was a man of more
ingenious than solid understanding.

     [639] Playfair, Dissertation on Physical Philosophy, p. 119.

|Dioptrics of Descartes.--Law of refraction.|

48. Descartes announced to the world in his Dioptrics, 1637, that he
had at length solved the mystery which had concealed the law of
refraction. He showed that the sine of the angle of incidence at which
the ray enters, has, in the same medium, a constant ratio to that of
the angle at which it is refracted, or bent in passing through. But
this ratio varies according to the medium; some having a much more
refractive power than others. This was a law of beautiful simplicity
as well as extensive usefulness; but such was the fatality, as we
would desire to call it, which attended Descartes, that this discovery
had been indisputably made twenty years before by a Dutch geometer of
great reputation, Willibrod Snell. The treatise of Snell had never
been published; but we have the evidence both of Vossius and Huygens,
that Hortensius, a Dutch professor, had publicly taught the discovery
of his countryman. Descartes had long lived in Holland; privately, it
is true, and by his own account reading few books; so that in this, as
in other instances, we may be charitable in our suspicions; yet it is
unfortunate that he should perpetually stand in need of such
indulgence.

|Disputed by Fermat.|

49. Fermat did not inquire whether Descartes was the original
discoverer of the law of refraction but disputed its truth. Descartes,
indeed, had not contented himself with experimentally ascertaining it,
but, in his usual manner, endeavoured to show the path of the ray by
direct reasoning. The hypothesis he brought forward seemed not very
probable to Fermat, nor would it be permitted at present. His rival,
however, fell into the same error; and starting from an equally
dubious supposition of his own, endeavoured to establish the true law
of refraction. He was surprised to find that, after a calculation
founded upon his own principle, the real truth of a constant ratio
between the sines of the angles came out according to the theorem of
Descartes. Though he did not the more admit the validity of the
latter’s hypothetical reasoning, he finally retired from the
controversy with an elegant compliment to his adversary.

|Curves of Descartes.|

50. In the Dioptrics of Descartes, several other curious theorems are
contained. He demonstrated that there are peculiar curves, of which
lenses may be constructed, by the refraction from whose superficies
all the incident rays will converge to a focal point, instead of being
spread, as in ordinary lenses, over a certain extent of surface,
commonly called its spherical aberration. The effect of employing such
curves of glass would be an increase of illumination, and a more
perfect distinctness of image. These curves were called the ovals of
Descartes; but the elliptic or hyperbolic speculum would answer nearly
the same purpose. The latter kind has been frequently attempted; but,
on account of the difficulties in working them, if there were no other
objection, none but spherical lenses are in use. In Descartes’s
theory, he explained the equality of the angles of incidence and
reflection in the case of light, correctly as to the result, though
with the assumption of a false principle of his own, that no motion is
lost in the collision of hard bodies such as he conceived light to be.
Its perfect elasticity makes his demonstration true.

|Theory of the rainbow.|

51. Descartes carried the theory of the rainbow beyond the point where
Antonio de Dominis had left it. He gave the true explanation of the
outer bow, by a second intermediate reflection of the solar
ray within the drop: and he seems to have answered the question most
naturally asked, though far from being of obvious solution, why all
this refracted light should only strike the eye in two arches with
certain angles and diameters, instead of pouring its prismatic lustre
over all the rain-drops of the cloud. He found that no pencil of light
continued, after undergoing the processes of refraction and reflection
in the drop, to be composed of parallel rays, and consequently to
possess that degree of density which fits it to excite sensation in
our eyes, except the two which make those angles with the axis drawn
from the sun to an opposite point at which the two bows are perceived.




                           CHAPTER XXVI.

  HISTORY OF SOME OTHER PROVINCES OF LITERATURE FROM 1600 TO 1650.


                              SECT. I.

                        ON NATURAL HISTORY.

         _Zoology--Fabricius on Language of Brutes--Botany._

|Aldrovandus.|

1. The vast collections of Aldrovandus on zoology, though they may be
considered as representing to us the knowledge of the sixteenth
century, were, as has been seen before, only published in a small part
before its close. The fourth and concluding part of his Ornithology
appeared in 1603; the History of Insects in 1604. Aldrovandus himself
died in 1605. The posthumous volumes appeared in considerable
intervals: that on molluscous animals and zoophytes in 1606; on fishes
and cetacea in 1613; on whole-hoofed quadrupeds in 1616; on digitate
quadrupeds, both viviparous and oviparous, in 1637; on serpents in
1640; and on cloven-hoofed quadrupeds in 1642. There are also volumes
on plants and minerals. These were all printed at Bologna, and most of
them afterwards at Frankfort; but a complete collection is very rare.

|Clusius.|

2. In the Exotica of Clusius, 1605, a miscellaneous volume on natural
history, chiefly, but not wholly, consisting of translations or
extracts from older works, we find several new species of simiæ, the
manis, or scaly ant-eater of the old world, the three-toed sloth, and
one or two armadillos. We may add also the since extinguished race,
that phœnix of ornithologists, the much-lamented dodo. This portly
bird is delineated by Clusius, such as it then existed in the
Mauritius.

|Rio and Marcgraf.|

3. In 1648, Piso on the Materia Medica of Brazil, together with
Marcgraf’s Natural History of the same country, was published at
Leyden, with notes by De Laet. The descriptions of Marcgraf are good,
and enable us to identify the animals. They correct the imperfect
notions of Gesner, and add several species which do not appear in his
work, or perhaps in that of Aldrovandus: such as the tamandua, or
Brasilian ant-eater; several of the family of cavies; the coati-mondi,
which Gesner had perhaps meant in a defective description; the lama,
the pacos, the jaguar, and some smaller feline animals; the prehensile
porcupine, and several ruminants. But some, at least, of these had
been already described in the histories of the West Indies, by
Hernandez d’Oviedo, Acosta, and Herrera.

|Jonston.|

4. Jonston, a Pole of Scots origin, collected the information of his
predecessors in a Natural History of Animals, published in successive
parts from 1648 to 1652. The History of Quadrupeds appeared in the
latter year. “The text,” says Cuvier, “is extracted, with some taste,
from Gesner, Aldrovandus, Marcgraf, and Mouffet; and it answered its
purpose as an elementary work in natural history, till Linnæus taught
a more accurate method of classifying, naming, and describing animals.
Even Linnæus cites him continually.”[640] I find in Jonston a pretty
good account of the chimpanzee (Orang-otang Indorum, ab Angola
delatus), taken perhaps from the Observationes Medicæ of Tulpius.[641]
The delineations in Jonston being from copper-plates, are superior to
the coarse wood-cuts of Gesner, but fails sometimes very greatly in
exactness. In his notions of classification, being little else than a
compiler, it may be supposed that he did not advance a step beyond his
predecessors. The Theatrum Insectorum by Mouffet, an English physician
of the preceding century, was published in 1634; it seems to be
compiled in a considerable degree from the unpublished papers of
Gesner and foreign naturalists, whom the author has rather too
servilely copied. Haller, however, is said to have placed Mouffet
above all entomologists before the age of Swammerdam.[642]

     [640] Biogr. Univ.

     [641] Grotius; Epist. ad Gallos, p. 21., gives an account of a
     chimpanzee, monstrum hominis dicam an bestiæ? and refers to
     Tulpius. The doubt of Grotius as to the possible humanity of this
     quam similis turpissima bestia nobis, is not so strange as the
     much graver language of Linnæus.

     [642] Biogr. Univ. Chalmers. I am no judge of the merits of the
     book; but if the following sentence of the English translation
     does it no injustice, Mouffet must have taken little pains to do
     more than transcribe. “In Germany and England I do not hear that
     there are any _grasshoppers_ at all; but if there be, they are
     _in both countries_ called Bow-krickets, or Baulm-krickets,” p.
     989. This translation is subjoined to Topsell’s History of
     Four-footed Beasts, collected out of Gesner and others, in an
     edition of 1658. The first edition of Topsell’s very ordinary
     composition was in 1608.

|Fabricius on the language of brutes.|

5. We may place under the head of zoology a short essay by Fabricius
de Aquapendente on the language of brutes; a subject very curious in
itself, and which has by no means sufficiently attracted notice even
in this experimental age. It cannot be said that Fabricius enters
thoroughly into the problem, much less exhausts it. He divides the
subject into six questions:--1. Whether brutes have a language, and of
what kind: 2. How far it differs from that of man, and whether the
languages of different species differ from one another: 3. What is its
use: 4. In what modes animals express their affections: 5. What means
we have of understanding their language: 6. What is their organ of
speech. The affirmative of the first question he proves by authority
of several writers, confirmed by experience, especially of hunters,
shepherds, and cowherds, who know by the difference of sounds what
animals mean to express. It may be objected that brutes utter sounds,
but do not speak. But this is merely as we define speech; and he
attempts to show that brutes by varying their utterance do all that we
do by _literal_ sounds. This leads to the solution of the second
question. Men agree with brutes in having speech, and in forming
elementary sounds of determinate time; but ours is more complex; these
elementary sounds, which he calls _articulos_, or joints of the
voice, being quicker and more numerous. Man, again, forms his sounds
more by means of the lips and tongue, which are softer in him than
they are in brutes. Hence, his speech runs into great variety and
complication, which we call language, while that of animals within the
same species is much more uniform.

6. The question as to the use of speech to brutes is not difficult.
But he seems to confine this utility to the expression of particular
emotions, and does not meddle with the more curious inquiry, whether
they have a capacity of communicating specific facts to one another;
and if they have, whether this is done through the organs of the
voice. The fourth question is, in how many modes animals express their
feelings. These are by look, by gesture, by sound, by voice, by
language. Fabricius tells us that he had seen a dog, meaning to expel
another dog from the place he wished himself to occupy, begin by
looking fierce, then use meaning gestures, then growl, and finally
bark. Inferior animals, such as worms, have only the two former sorts
of communication. Fishes, at least some kinds, have a power of
emitting a sound, though not properly a voice; this may be by the fins
or gills. To insects also he seems to deny voice, much more language,
though they declare their feelings by sound. Even of oxen, stags, and
some other quadrupeds, he would rather say that they have no voice
than language. But cats, dogs, and birds, have a proper language. All,
however, are excelled by man, who is truly called μεροψ [meropsi],
from his more clear and distinct articulations.

7. In the fifth place, however difficult it may appear to understand
the language of brutes, we know that they understand what is said to
them; how much more, therefore, ought we, superior in reason, to
understand them. He proceeds from hence to an analysis of the
passions, which he reduces to four: joy, desire, grief, and fear.
Having thus drawn our map of the passions, we must ascertain by
observation what are the articulations of which any species of animals
is capable, which cannot be done by description. His own experiments
were made on the dog and the hen. Their articulations are sometimes
complex; as, when a dog wants to come into his master’s chamber, he
begins by a shrill small yelp, expressive of desire, which becomes
deeper, so as to denote a mingled desire and annoyance, and ends in a
lamentable howl of the latter feeling alone. Fabricius gives several
other rules deduced from observation of dogs, but ends by confessing
that he has not fully attained his object, which was to furnish
everyone with a compendious method of understanding the language of
animals: the inquirer must therefore proceed upon these rudiments, and
make out more by observation and good canine society. He shows
finally, from the different structure of the organs of speech, that no
brute can ever rival man; their chief instrument being the throat,
which we use only for vowel sounds. Two important questions are hardly
touched in this little treatise: first, as has been said, whether
brutes can communicate specific facts to each other; and secondly, to
what extent they can associate ideas with the language of man. These
ought to occupy our excellent naturalists.

|Botany--Columna.|

8. Columna, belonging to the Colonna family, and one of the greatest
botanists of the sixteenth century, maintained the honour of that
science during the present period, which his long life embraced. In
the academy of the Lincei, founded by Prince Fredric Cesi about 1606,
and to which the revival of natural philosophy is greatly due Columna
took a conspicuous share. His Ecphrasis, a history of rare plants, was
published in two parts at Rome, in 1606 and 1616. In this he laid down
the true basis of the science, by establishing the distinction of
genera, which Gesner, Cæsalpin, and Camerarius had already conceived,
but which it was left for Columna to confirm and employ. He alone, of
all the contemporary botanists, seems to have appreciated the luminous
ideas which Cæsalpin had bequeathed to posterity.[643] In his
posthumous observations on the natural history of Mexico by Hernandez,
he still farther developed the philosophy of botanical arrangements.
Columna is the first who used copper instead of wood to delineate
plants; an improvement which soon became general. This was in the
Φυτοβασανος, [Phytobasanos], sive Plantarum aliquot Historia, 1594.
There are errors in this work; but it is remarkable for the accuracy
of the descriptions, and for the correctness and beauty of the
figures.[644]

     [643] Biogr. Univ.

     [644] Id. Sprengel.

|John and Gaspar Bauhin.|

9. Two brothers, John and Gaspar Bauhin, inferior in philosophy to
Columna, made more copious additions to the nomenclature and
description of plants. The elder, who was born in 1541, and had
acquired some celebrity as a botanist in the last century, lived to
complete, but not to publish, an Historia Plantarum Universalis, which
did not appear till 1650. It contains the descriptions of 5,000
species, and the figures of 3,577, but small and ill executed. His
brother, though much younger, had preceded him, not only by the
Phytopinax in 1596, but by his chief work, the Pinax Theatri Botanici,
in 1623. “Gaspar Bauhin,” says a modern botanist, “is inferior to his
brother in his descriptions and in sagacity; but his delineations are
better, and his synonyms more complete. They are both below Clusius in
description, and below several older botanists in their figures. In
their arrangement they follow Lobel, and have neglected the lights
which Cæsalpin and Columna had held out. Their chief praise is to have
brought together a great deal of knowledge acquired by their
predecessors, but the merit of both has been exaggerated.”[645]

     [645] Biog. Univ. Pulteney speaks more highly of John Bauhin.
     “That which Gesner performed for zoology, John Bauhin effected in
     botany. It is, in reality, a repository of all that was valuable
     in the ancients, in his immediate predecessors, and in the
     discoveries of his own time, relating to the history of
     vegetables, and is executed with that accuracy and critical
     judgment which can only be exhibited by superior talents.” Hist.
     of Botany in England, i. 190.

|Parkinson.|

10. Johnson, in 1636, published an edition of Gerard’s Herbal. But the
Theatrum Botanicum of Parkinson, in 1640, is a work, says Pulteney, of
much more originality than Gerard’s and it contains abundantly more
matter. We find in it near 3,800 plants; but many descriptions recur
more than once. The arrangement is in seventeen classes, partly
according to the known or supposed qualities of the plant, and partly
according to their external character.[646] “This heterogeneous
classification, which seems to be founded on that of Dodoens, shows
the small advances that had been made towards any truly scientific
distribution; on the contrary, Gerard, Johnson, and Parkinson, had
rather gone back, by not sufficiently pursuing the example of Lobel.”

     [646] P. 146.


                             SECT. II.

                     ON ANATOMY AND MEDICINE.

_Claims of early Writers to the Discovery of the Circulation of the
Blood--Harvey--Lacteal Vessels discovered by Asellius--Medicine._

|Valves of the veins discovered.|

11. The first important discovery that was made public in this century
was that of the valves of the veins; which is justly ascribed to
Fabricius de Aquapendente, a professor at Padua; because, though some
of these valves are described even by Berenger, and further
observations were made on the subject by Sylvius, Vesalius, and other
anatomists, yet Fallopius himself had in this instance thrown back the
science by denying their existence, and no one before Fabricius had
generalised the discovery. This he did in his public lectures as early
as 1524; but his tract De Venarum Ostiolis appeared in 1603. This
discovery, as well as that of Harvey, has been attributed to Father
Paul Sarpi, whose immense reputation in the north of Italy accredited
every tale favourable to his glory. But there seems to be no sort of
ground for either supposition.

|Theory of the blood’s circulation.|

12. The discovery of a general circulation in the blood has done such
honour to Harvey’s name, and has been claimed for so many others, that
it deserves more consideration than we can usually give to anatomical
science. According to Galen, and the general theory of anatomists
formed by his writings, the arterial blood flows from the heart to the
extremities, and returns again by the same channels, the venous blood
being propelled, in like manner, to and from the liver. The discovery
attributed to Harvey was, that the arteries communicate with the
veins, and that all the blood returns to the heart by the latter
vessels. Besides this general or systemic circulation, there is one
called the pulmonary, in which the blood is carried by certain
arteries through the lungs, and returned again by corresponding veins,
preparatory to its being sent into the general sanguineous system; so
that its course is through a double series of ramified vessels, each
beginning and terminating at the heart, but not at the same side of
the heart; the left side, which from a cavity called its ventricle
throws out the arterial blood by the aorta, and by another called its
auricle receives that which has passed through the lungs by the
pulmonary vein, being separated by a solid septum from the right side,
which, by means of similar cavities, receives the blood of all the
veins, excepting those of the lungs, and throws it out into the
pulmonary artery. It is thus evident, that the word pulmonary
circulation is not strictly proper, there being only one for the whole
body.

|Sometimes ascribed to Servetus.|

13. The famous work of Servetus, Christianismi Restitutio, has excited
the attention of the literary part of the world, only by the unhappy
fate it brought upon the author, and its extreme scarcity, but by a
remarkable passage wherein he has been supposed to describe the
circulation of the blood. That Servetus had a just idea of the
pulmonary circulation and the aeration of the blood in the lungs, is
manifest by this passage, and is denied by no one; but it has been the
opinion of anatomists that he did not apprehend the return of the mass
of the blood through the veins to the right auricle of the heart.[647]

     [647] In the first volume of this work, p. 643, I have observed
     that Levasseur had come much nearer to the theory of a general
     circulation than Servetus. But the passage in Levasseur, which I
     knew only from the quotation in Portal, Hist. de l’Anatomie, i.,
     373, does not, on consulting the book itself, bear out the
     inference which Portal seems to deduce; and he has, not quite
     rightly, omitted all expressions which he thought erroneous. Thus
     Levasseur precedes the first sentence of Portal’s quotation by
     the following: Intus (in corde) sunt sinus seu ventriculi duo
     tantum, septo quodam medio discreti, _per cujus foramina_ sanguis
     et spiritus communicatur. In utroque duo vasa habentur. For this
     he quotes Galen; and the perforation of the septum of the heart
     is known to be one of Galen’s errors. Upon the whole, there seems
     no ground for believing that Levasseur was acquainted with the
     general circulation; and though his language may at first lead us
     to believe that he speaks of that through the lungs, even this is
     not distinctly made out. Sprengel, in his History of Medicine,
     does not mention the name of Levasseur (or Vassæus, as he was
     called in Latin) among those who anticipated, in any degree, the
     discovery of circulation. The book quoted by Portal is Vassæus in
     Anatomen Corporis Humani Tabulæ Quatuor, several times printed
     between 1540 and 1560.

     Andrès (Origine e Progressio d’Ogni Litteratura, vol. xiv., p.
     37) has put in a claim for a Spanish farrier, by name Reina, who,
     in a book printed in 1552, but of which there seems to have been
     an earlier edition (Libro di Maniscalcheria hecho y ordenado por
     Francisco de la Reyna), asserts, in few and plain words, as
     Andrès quotes them in Italian, that the blood goes in a circle
     through all the limbs. I do not know that the book has been seen
     by anyone else; and it would be desirable to examine the context,
     since other writers have seemed to know the truth without really
     apprehending it.

     That Servetus was only acquainted with the pulmonary circulation,
     has been the general opinion. Portal, though in one place he
     speaks with less precision, repeatedly limits the discovery to
     this; and Sprengel does not entertain the least suspicion that it
     went farther. Andrès (xiv. 38), not certainly a medical
     authority, but conversant with such, and very partial to Spanish
     claimants, asserts the same. If a more general language may be
     found in some writers, it may be ascribed to their want of
     distinguishing the two circulations. A medical friend who, at my
     request, perused and considered the passage in Servetus, as it is
     quoted in Allwoerden’s life, says in a letter, “All that this
     passage implies which has any reference to the greater
     circulation, may be comprised in the following points:--1. That
     the heart transmits a vivifying principle along the arteries and
     the blood which they contain to the anastomosing veins; 2. That
     this living principle vivifies the liver and the venous system
     generally; 3. That the liver produces the blood itself, and
     transmits it through the vena cava to the heart, in order to
     obtain the vital principle, by performing the lesser circulation,
     which Servetus seems perfectly to comprehend.

     “Now, according to this view of the passage, all the movement of
     the blood _implied_ is that which takes place from the
     liver, through the vena cava to the heart, and that of the lesser
     circulation. It would appear to me that Servetus is on the brink
     of the discovery of the circulation; but that his notions
     respecting the transmission of his ‘vitalis spiritus,’ diverted
     his attention from that great _movement_ of the blood
     itself, which Harvey discovered.... It is clear, that the
     quantity of blood sent to the heart for the elaboration of the
     vital spiritus, is, according to Servetus, only that furnished by
     the liver to the vena cava inferior. But the blood thus
     introduced is represented by him as performing the circulation
     through the lungs very regularly.”

     It appears singular that, while Servetus distinctly knew that the
     septum of the heart, paries ille medius, as he calls it, is
     closed, which Berenger had discovered, and Vesalius confirmed
     (though the bulk of anatomists long afterwards adhered to Galen’s
     notion of perforation), and consequently, that some other means
     must exist for restoring the blood from the left division of the
     heart to the right, he should not have seen the necessity of a
     system of vessels to carry forward this communication.

|To Columbus.|

14. Columbus is acknowledged to have been acquainted with the
pulmonary circulation. He says of his own discovery, that no one had
observed or consigned it to writing before. Arantius, according to
Portal, has described the pulmonary circulation still better than
Columbus, while Sprengel denies that he has described it all. It is
perfectly certain, and is admitted on all sides, that Columbus did not
know the systemic circulation: in what manner he disposed of the blood
does not very clearly appear; but, as he conceived a passage to exist
between the ventricles of the heart, it is probable, though his words
do not lead to this inference, that he supposed the aerated blood to
be transmitted back in this course.[648]

     [648] The leading passage in Columbus (De Re Anatomica,
     lib. vii., p. 177, edit. 1559), which I have not found quoted by
     Portal or Sprengel, is as follows: Inter hos ventriculos septum
     adest, per quod fere omnes existimant sanguini a dextro
     ventriculo ad sinistrum aditum patefieri; id ut fieret facilius,
     in transitu ob vitalium spirituum generationem demum reddi; sed
     longa errant via; nam sanguis per arteriosam venam ad pulmonem
     fertur; ibique attenuatur; deinde cum aere una per arteriam
     venalem ad sinistrum cordis ventriculum defertur; quod nemo
     hactenus aut animadvertit aut scriptum reliquit; licet maximè et
     ab omnibus animadvertendum. He afterwards makes a remark, in
     which Servetus had preceded him, that the size of the pulmonary
     artery (vena arteriosa) is greater than would be required for the
     nutrition of the lungs alone. Whether he knew of the passages in
     Servetus or no, notwithstanding his claim of originality is not
     perhaps manifest: the coincidence as to the function of the lungs
     in aerating the blood is remarkable; but, if Columbus had any
     direct knowledge of the Christianismi Restitutio, he did not
     choose to follow it in the remarkable discovery that there is no
     perforation in the septum between the ventricles.

|And to Cæsalpin.|

15. Cæsalpin, whose versatile genius entered upon every field of
research, has, in more than one of his treatises relating to very
different topics, and especially in that upon plants, some remarkable
passages on the same subject, which approach more nearly than any we
have seen to a just notion of the general circulation, and have led
several writers to insist on his claim as a prior discoverer to
Harvey. Portal admits that this might be regarded as a fair
pretension, if he were to judge from such passages; but there are
others which contradict this supposition, and show Cæsalpin to have
had a confused and imperfect idea of the office of the veins.
Sprengel, though at first he seems to incline more towards the
pretensions of Cæsalpin, comes ultimately almost to the same
conclusion; and giving the reader the words of most importance, leaves
him to form his own judgment. The Italians are more confident:
Tiraboschi and Corniani, neither of whom are medical authorities, put
in an unhesitating claim for Cæsalpin as the discoverer of the
circulation of the blood not without unfair reflections on
Harvey.[649]

     [649] Tiraboschi, x., 49. Corniani, vi., 8. He quotes, on the
     authority of another Italian writer, il giudizio di que illustri
     Inglesi, i fratelli Hunter, i quali, esaminato bene il processo
     di questa causa, _si maravigliano della sentenza data in favore
     del loro concittadino_. I must doubt, till more evidence is
     produced, whether this be true.

     The passage in Cæsalpin’s Quæstiones Peripateticæ is certainly
     the most resembling a statement of the entire truth that can be
     found in any writer before Harvey. I transcribe it from Dutens’s
     Origine des Découvertes, vol. ii., p. 23. Idcirco pulmo per venam
     arteriis similem ex dextro cordis ventriculo fervidum hauriens
     sanguinem, eumque per anastomosin arteriæ venali reddens, quæ in
     sinistrum cordis ventriculum tendit, transmisso interim aere
     frigido per asperæ arteriæ canales, qui juxta arteriam venalem
     protenduntur, non tamen osculis communicantes, ut putavit Galenus
     solo, tactu temperat. Huic sanguinis circulationi ex dextro
     cordis ventriculo per pulmones in sinistrum ejusdem ventriculum
     optimè respondent ea quæ ex dissectione apparent. Nam duo sunt
     vasa in dextrum ventriculum desinentia, duo etiam in sinistrum:
     duorum autem unum intromittit tantum, alterum educit, membranis
     eo ingenio constitutis. Vas igitur intromittens vena et magna
     quidem in dextro, quæ cava appellatur; parva autem in sinistro ex
     pulmone introducens, cujus unica est tunica, ut cæterarum
     venarum. Vas autem educens arteria est magna quidem in sinistro,
     quæ aorta appellatur; parva autem in dextro, ad pulmones
     derivans, cujus similiter duæ sunt tunicæ, ut in cæteris
     arteriis.

     In the treatise De Plantis we have a similar, but shorter
     passage. Nam in animalibus videmus alimentum per venas duci ad
     cor tanquam ad officinam caloris insiti, et adepta inibi ultima
     perfectione, per arterias in universum corpus distribui agente
     spiritu, qui ex eodem alimento in corde gignitur. I have taken
     this from the article of Cæsalpin in the Biographie Universelle.

|Generally unknown before Harvey.|

16. It is thus manifest that several anatomists of the sixteenth
century were on the verge of completely detecting the law by which the
motion of the blood is governed; and the language of one is so strong,
that we must have recourse, in order to exclude his claim, to the
irresistible fact that he did not confirm by proof his own theory, nor
announce it in such a manner as to attract the attention of the world.
Certainly, when the doctrine of a general circulation was advanced by
Harvey, he both announced it as a paradox, and was not deceived in
expecting that it would be so accounted. Those again who strove to
depreciate his originality, sought intimations in the writings of the
ancients, and even spread a rumour that he had stolen the papers of
Father Paul; but it does not appear that they talked, like some
moderns, of plagiarism from Levasseur or Cæsalpin.

|His discovery.|

17. William Harvey first taught the circulation of the blood in
London, in 1619; but his Exercitatio de Motu Cordis was not published
till 1628. He was induced, as is said, to conceive the probability of
this great truth, by reflecting on the final cause of those valves,
which his master, Fabricius de Aquapendente, had demonstrated in the
veins; valves whose structure was such as to prevent the reflux of the
blood towards the extremities. Fabricius himself seems to have been
ignorant of this structure, and certainly of the circulation; for he
presumes that they serve to prevent the blood from flowing like a
river towards the feet and hands, and from collecting in one part.
Harvey followed his own happy conjecture by a long inductive process
of experiments on the effects of ligatures, and on the observed motion
of the blood in living animals.

|Unjustly doubted to be original.|

18. Portal has imputed to Harvey an unfair silence as to Servetus,
Columbus, Levasseur, and Cæsalpin, who had all preceded him in the
same track. Tiraboschi copies Portal, and Corniani speaks of the
appropriation of Cæsalpin’s discovery by Harvey. It may be replied,
that no one can reasonably suppose Harvey to have been acquainted with
the passage in Servetus. But the imputation of suppressing the merits
of Columbus is grossly unjust, and founded upon ignorance or
forgetfulness of Harvey’s celebrated Exercitation. In the proœmium to
this treatise he observes, that almost all anatomists have hitherto
supposed with Galen, that the mechanism of the pulse is the same as
that of respiration. But he not less than three times makes an
exception for Columbus, to whom he most expressly refers the theory of
a pulmonary circulation.[650] Of Cæsalpin he certainly says
nothing; but there seems to be no presumption that he was acquainted
with that author’s writings. Were it even true that he had been guided
in his researches by the obscure passages we have quoted, could this
set aside the merit of that patient induction by which he established
his own theory? Cæsalpin asserts at best, what we may say he divined,
but did not know to be true; Harvey asserts what he had demonstrated.
The one is an empiric in a philosophical sense, the other a legitimate
minister of truth. It has been justly said, that he alone discovers
who proves; nor is there a more odious office, or a more sophistical
course of reasoning, than to impair the credit of great men, as Dutens
wasted his erudition in doing, by hunting out equivocal and insulated
passages from older writers, in order to depreciate the originality of
the real teachers of mankind.[651] It may indeed be thought wonderful
that Servetus, Columbus, or Cæsalpin should not have more distinctly
apprehended the consequences of what they maintained, since it seems
difficult to conceive the lesser circulation without the greater; but
the defectiveness of their views is not to be alledged as a
counterbalance to the more steady sagacity of Harvey. The solution of
their falling so short is that they were right, not indeed quite by
guess, but upon insufficient proof; and that the consciousness of this
embarrassing their minds, prevented them from deducing inferences
which now appear irresistible. In every department of philosophy, the
researches of the first inquirers have often been arrested by similar
causes.[652]

     [650] Pæne omnes huc usque anatomici medici et philosophi
     supponunt cum Galeno eundem usum esse pulsus, quam respirationis.
     But though he certainly claims the doctrine of a general
     circulation as wholly his own, and counts it a paradox which will
     startle everyone, he as expressly refers (p. 38 and 41 of the
     Exercitatio) that of a pulmonary transmission of the blood to
     Columbus, peritissimo, doctissimoque anatomico; and observes, in
     his proœmium, as an objection to the received theory, quomodo
     probabile est (_uti notavit Rualdus Columbus_) tanto sanguine
     opus esse ad nutritionem pulmonum, cum hoc vas, vena videlicet
     arteriosa (hoc est, uti tum loquebantur, arteria pulmonalis)
     exsuperet magnitudine utrumque ramum distributionis venæ cavæ
     descendentis cruralem, p. 16.

     [651] This is the general character of a really learned and
     interesting work by Dutens Origine des Découvertes attribuées aux
     Modernes. Justice is due to those who have first struck out, even
     without following up, original ideas in any science; but not at
     the expense of those who, generally without knowledge of what had
     been said before, have deduced the same principles from reasoning
     or from observation, and carried them out to important
     consequences. Pascal quotes Montaigne for the shrewd remark, that
     we should try a man who says a wise thing, for we may often find
     that he does not understand it. Those who entertain a morbid
     jealousy of modern philosophy, are glad to avail themselves of
     such hunters into obscure antiquity as Dutens, and they are
     seconded by all the envious, the uncandid, and by many of the
     unreflecting among mankind. With respect to the immediate
     question, the passages which Dutens has quoted from Hippocrates
     and Plato, have certainly an appearance of expressing a real
     circulation of the blood by the words περιοδος [periodos] and
     περιφερομενου αἱματος [peripheromenou ahimatos]; but others, and
     especially one from Nemesius, on which some reliance has been
     placed, mean nothing more than the flux and reflux of the blood,
     which the contraction and dilatation of the heart was supposed to
     produce. See Dutens, vol. ii., p. 8-13. Mr. Coleridge has been
     deceived in the same manner by some lines of Jordano Bruno, which
     he takes to describe the circulation of the blood: whereas, they
     merely express its movement to and fro, _meat et remeat_, which
     might be by the same system of vessels.

     [652] The biographer of Harvey in the Biographie Universelle
     strongly vindicates his claim. Tous les hommes instruits
     conviennent aujourd’hui que Harvey est la véritable auteur de
     cette belle découverte.... Césalpin pressentoit la circulation
     artérielle, en supposant que le sang rétourne des extrémités au
     cœur; mais ces assertions ne furent point prouvées; elles ne se
     trouvèrent étayées par aucune expérience, par aucun fait; et l’on
     peut dire de Césalpin qu’il divina presque la grande circulation
     dont les lois lui furent totalement inconnues; la découverte en
     était réservée a Guillaume Harvey.

|Harvey’s treatise on Generation.|

19. Harvey is the author of a treatise on generation, wherein he
maintains that all animals, including men, are derived from an egg. In
this book, we first find an argument maintained against spontaneous
generation, which, in the case of the lower animals, had been
generally received. Sprengel thinks this treatise prolix, and not
equal to the author’s reputation.[653] It was first published in 1651.

     [653] Hist. de la Médecine, iv., 299. Portal, ii., 477.

|Lacteals discovered by Assellius.|

20. Next in importance to the discovery of Harvey, is that of
Assellius as to the lacteal vessels. Eustachius had observed the
thoracic duct in a horse. But Asellius, more by chance, as he owns,
than by reflection, perceived the lacteals in a fat dog whom he opened
soon after it had eaten. This was in 1622, and his treatise, De
Lacteis Venis, was published in 1627.[654] Harvey did not assent to
this discovery, and endeavoured to dispute the use of the vessels; nor
is it to his honour that even to the end of his life he disregarded
the subsequent confirmation that Pecquet and Bartholin had
furnished.[655] The former detected the common origin of the lacteal
and lymphatic vessels in 1647, though his work on the subject
was not published till 1651. But Olaus Rudbeck was the first who
clearly distinguished these two kinds of vessels.

     [654] Portal, ii., 461. Sprengel, iv., 201. Peiresc soon
     after this got the body of a man fresh hanged after a good
     supper, and had the pleasure of confirming the discovery of
     Asellius by his own eyes. Gassendi, Vita Peirescii, p. 177.

     [655] Sprengel, iv., 203.

|Optical discoveries of Scheiner.|

21. Scheiner, the Jesuit, proved that the retina is the organ of
sight, and that the humours serve only to refract the rays which paint
the object on the optic nerve. This was in a treatise entitled,
Oculus, hoc est, Fundamentum Opticum, 1619.[656] The writings of
several anatomists of this period, such as Riolan, Vesling, Bartholin,
contain partial accessions to the science; but it seems to have been
less enriched by great discoveries, after those already named, than in
the preceding century.

     [656] Sprengel, iv., 270.

|Medicine--Van Helmont.|

22. The mystical medicine of Paracelsus continued to have many
advocates in Germany. A new class of enthusiasts sprung from the same
school, and calling themselves Rosicrucians, pretended to cure
diseases by faith and imagination. A true Rosicrucian, they held, had
only to look on a patient to cure him. The analogy of magnetism,
revived in the last and present age, was commonly employed.[657] Of
this school the most eminent was Van Helmont, who combined the
Paracelsian superstitions with some original ideas of his own. His
general idea of medicine was that its business was to regulate the
archæus, an immaterial principle of life and health; to which, like
Paracelsus, he attributed a mysterious being and efficacy. The seat of
the archæus is in the stomach; and it is to be effected either by a
scheme of diet or through the imagination. Sprengel praises Van
Helmont for overthrowing many current errors, and for announcing
principles since pursued.[658] The French physicians adhered to the
Hippocratic school, in opposition to what Sprengel calls the
Chemiatric, which, more or less, may be reckoned that of Paracelsus.
The Italians were still renowned in medicine. Sanctorius, De Medicina
Statica, 1614, seems the only work to which we need allude. It is
loaded with eulogy by Portal, Tiraboschi, and other writers.[659]

     [657] All in nature, says Croll of Hesse, one of the principal
     theosophists in medicine, is living; all that lives has its vital
     force, or astrum, which cannot act without a body, but passes
     from one to another. All things in the macrocosm are found also
     in the microcosm. The inward or astral man is Gabalis, from which
     the science is named. This Gabalis or imagination, is as a magnet
     to external objects, which it thus attracts. Medicines act by a
     magnetic force. Sprengel, iii., 362.

     [658] Vol. v., p. 22.

     [659] Portal, ii., 391. Tiraboschi, xi., 270. Biog. Univ.


                            SECT. III.

_On Oriental Literature--Hebrew Learning--Arabic and other Eastern
Languages._

|Diffusion of Hebrew.|

23. During no period of equal length, since the revival of letters,
has the knowledge of the Hebrew language been, apparently, so much
diffused among the literary world as in that before us. The frequent
sprinkling of its characters in works of the most miscellaneous
erudition, will strike the eye of every one who habitually consults
them. Nor was this learning by any means so much confined to the
clergy as it has been in later times, though their order naturally
furnished the greater portion of those who laboured in that field.
Some of the chief Hebraists of this age were laymen. The study of this
language prevailed most in the protestant countries of Europe, and it
was cultivated with much zeal in England. The period between the last
years of Elizabeth and the Restoration, may be reckoned that in which
a knowledge of Hebrew has been most usual among our divines.

|Language not studied in the best method.|

24. Upon this subject, I can only assert what I collect to be the
verdict of judicious critics.[660] It seems that the Hebrew language
was not yet sufficiently studied in the method most likely to give an
insight into its principles, by comparing it with all the cognate
tongues, latterly called Semitic, spoken in the neighbouring parts of
Asia, and manifestly springing from a common source. Postel, indeed,
had made some attempts at this in the last century, but his learning
was very slight; and Schindler published in 1612 a Lexicon
Pentaglottum, in which the Arabic, as well as Syriac and Chaldaic,
were placed in apposition with the Hebrew text. Louis De Dieu, whose
“Remarks on all the Books of the Old Testament,” were published at
Leyden in 1648, has frequently recourse to some of the kindred
languages, in order to explain the Hebrew.[661] But the first
instructors in the latter had been Jewish rabbis; and the Hebraists of
the sixteenth age had imbibed a prejudice, not unnatural though
unfounded, that their teachers were best conversant with the language
of their forefathers.[662] They had derived from the same source an
extravagant notion of the beauty, antiquity, and capacity of the
Hebrew; and, combining this with still more chimerical dreams of a
mystical philosophy, lost sight of all real principles of criticism.

     [660] The fifth volume of Eichhorn’s Geschichte der Cultur is
     devoted to the progress of Oriental literature in Europe, not
     very full in characterising the various productions it mentions,
     but analytically arranged, and highly useful for reference.
     Jenisch, in his preface to Meninski’s Thesaurus (Vienna, 1780),
     has traced a sketch of the same subject. We may have trusted in
     some respects to Simon, Histoire Critique du Vieux Testament. The
     biographical dictionaries, English and French, have, of course,
     been resorted to.

     [661] Simon, Hist. Critique du Vieux Testament, p. 494.

     [662] This was not the case with Luther, who rejected the
     authority of the rabbis, and thought none but Christians could
     understand the Old Testament. Simon, p. 375. But Munster, Fagius,
     and several others, who are found in the Critici Sacri, gave way
     to the prejudice in favour of rabbinical opinions, and their
     commentaries are consequently too Judaical, p. 496.

|The Buxtorfs.|

25. The most eminent Hebrew scholars of this age were the two Buxtorfs
of Basle, father and son, both devoted to the rabbinical school. The
elder, who had become distinguished before the end of the preceding
century, published a grammar in 1609, which long continued to be
reckoned the best, and a lexicon of Hebrew, Chaldee, and Syriac, in
1623, which was not superseded for more than a hundred years. Many
other works relating to these three dialects, as well as to that of
the later Jews, do honour to the erudition of the elder Buxtorf; but
he is considered as representing a class of Hebraists which, in the
more comprehensive Orientalism of the eighteenth century, has lost
much of its credit. The son trod closely in his father’s footsteps,
whom he succeeded as professor of Hebrew at Basle. They held this
chair between them more than seventy years. The younger Buxtorf was
engaged in controversies which had not begun in his father’s lifetime.
Morin, one of those learned protestants who had gone over to the
church of Rome, systematically laboured to establish the authority of
those versions which the church had approved, by weakening that of the
text which passed for original.[663] Hence, he endeavoured to show,
though this could not logically do much for his object, that the
Samaritan Pentateuch, lately brought to Europe, which is not in a
different language, but merely the Hebrew written in Samaritan
characters, is deserving of preference above what is called the
Masoretic text, from which the protestant versions are taken. The
variations between these are sufficiently numerous to affect a
favourite hypothesis, borrowed from the rabbis, but strenuously
maintained by the generality of protestants, that the Hebrew text of
the Masoretic recension is perfectly incorrupt.[664] Morin’s opinion
was opposed by Buxtorf and Hottinger, and by other writers even of the
Romish church. It has, however, been countenanced by Simon and
Kennicott. The integrity, at least, of the Hebrew copyist, was
gradually given up, and it has since been shown that they differ
greatly among themselves. The Samaritan Pentateuch was first published
in 1645, several years after this controversy began, by Sionita,
editor of the Parisian Polyglott. This edition, sometimes called by
the name of Le Jay, contains most that is in the Polyglott of Antwerp,
with the addition of the Syriac and Arabic versions of the Old
Testament.

     [663] Simon, p. 522.

     [664] Id. p. 522. Eichhorn, v., 464.

|Vowel points rejected by Cappel.|

26. An epoch was made in Hebrew criticism by a work of Louis Cappel,
professor of that language at Saumur, the Arcanum Punctuationis
Revelatum, in 1624. He maintained in this an opinion promulgated by
Elias Levita, and held by the first reformers and many other
protestants of the highest authority, though contrary to that vulgar
orthodoxy which is always omnivorous, that the vowel points of Hebrew
were invented by certain Jews of Tiberias in the sixth century. They
had been generally deemed coeval with the language, or at least
brought in by Esdras through divine inspiration. It is not surprising
that such an hypothesis clashed with the prejudices of mankind, and
Cappel was obliged to publish his work in Holland. The protestants
looked upon it as too great a concession in favour of the Vulgate;
which having been translated before the Masoretic punctuation, on
Cappel’s hypothesis, had been applied to the text, might now claim to
stand on higher ground, and was not to be judged by these innovations.
After twenty years, the younger Buxtorf endeavoured to vindicate the
antiquity of vowel-points; but it is now confessed that the victory
remained with Cappel, who has been styled the father of Hebrew
criticism. His principal work is the Critica Sacra, published at Paris
in 1650, wherein he still farther discredits the existing manuscripts
of the Hebrew scriptures, as well as the Masoretic punctuation.[665]

     [665] Simon, Eichhorn, &c. A detailed account of this controversy
     about vowel-points between Cappel and the Buxtorfs will be found
     in the 12th volume of the Bibliothèque Universelle; and a shorter
     précis in Eichhorn’s Einleitung in das alte Testament, vol. i.,
     p. 242.

|Hebrew scholars.|

27. The rabbinical literature, meaning as well the Talmud and other
ancient books, as those of the later ages since the revival of
intellectual pursuits among the Jews of Spain and the East, gave
occupation to a considerable class of scholars. Several of these
belong to England, such as Ainsworth, Godwin, Lightfoot, Selden, and
Pococke. The antiquities of Judaism were illustrated by Cunæus in Jus
Regium Hebræorum, 1623, and especially by Selden, both in the Uxor
Hebraica, and in the treatise De Jure Naturali et Gentium juxta
Hebræos. But no one has left a more durable reputation in this
literature than Bochart, a protestant minister at Caen. His Geographia
Sacra, published in 1646, is not the most famous of his works, but the
only one which falls within this period. It displays great learning
and sagacity; but it was impossible, as has been justly observed, that
he could thoroughly elucidate this subject at a time when we knew
comparatively little of modern Asia, and had few good books of
travels. A similar observation might of course be applied to his
Hierozoicon, on the animals mentioned in Scripture. Both these works,
however, were much extolled in the seventeenth century.

|Chaldee and Syriac.|

28. In the Chaldee and Syriac languages, which approach so closely to
Hebrew, that the best scholars in the latter are rarely unacquainted
with them, besides the Buxtorfs, we find Ferrari, author of a Syriac
lexicon, published at Rome in 1622; Louis de Dieu of Leyden, whose
Syriac grammar appeared in 1626; and the Syriac translation of the Old
Testament in the Parisian Polyglott, edited by Gabriel Sionita, in
1642. A Syriac college for the Maronites of Libanus, was founded at
Rome by Gregory XIII.; but it did not as yet produce anything of
importance.

|Arabic.|

|Erpenius.|

|Golius.|

29. But a language incomparably more rich in literary treasures, and
long neglected by Europe, began now to take a conspicuous place in the
annals of learning. Scaliger deserves the glory of being the first
real Arabic scholar; for Postel, Christman, and a very few more of the
sixteenth century, are hardly worth notice. His friend, Casaubon, who
extols his acquirements, as usual, very highly, devoted himself some
time to this study. But Scaliger made use of the language chiefly to
enlarge his own vast sphere of erudition. He published nothing on the
subject; but his collections became the base of Rapheling’s Arabic
lexicon; and it is said that they were far more extensive than what
appears in that work. He who properly added this language to the
domain of learning was Erpenius, a native of Gorcum, who, at an early
age, had gained so unrivalled an acquaintance with the Oriental
languages as to be appointed professor of them at Leyden in 1613. He
edited the same year the above-mentioned lexicon of Rapheling, and
published a grammar, which might not only be accounted the first
composed in Europe that deserved the name, but became the guide to
most later scholars. Erpenius gave several other works to the world,
chiefly connected with the Arabic version of the Scriptures.[666]
Golius, his successor in the Oriental chair at Leyden, besides
publishing a lexicon of the language, which is said to be still the
most copious, elaborate, and complete that has appeared,[667] and
several editions of Arabic writings, poetical and historical,
contributed still more extensively to bring the range of Arabian
literature before the world. He enriched with a hundred and fifty
manuscripts, collected in his travels, the library of Leyden, to which
Scaliger had bequeathed forty.[668] The manuscripts belonging to
Erpenius found their way to Cambridge; while, partly by the
munificence of Laud, partly by later accessions, the Bodleian Library
at Oxford became extremely rich in this line. The much larger
collection in the Escurial seems to have been chiefly formed under
Philip III. England was now as conspicuous in Arabian as in Hebrew
learning. Selden, Greaves, and Pococke, especially the last, who was
probably equal to any Oriental scholar whom Europe had hitherto
produced, by translations of the historical and philosophical writings
of the Saracenic period, gave a larger compass to general
erudition.[669]

     [666] Biogr. Univ.

     [667] Jenisch, præfatio in Meninski Thesaurus Linguarum
     Orientalium, p. 110.

     [668] Biogr. Univ.

     [669] Jenisch, Eichhorn, Biogr. Universelle, Biogr. Britannica.

|Other Eastern languages.|

30. The remaining languages of the East are of less importance. The
Turkish had attracted some degree of attention in the sixteenth
century; but the first grammar was published by Megiser, in 1612, a
very slight performance; and a better at Paris, by Du Ryer, in
1630.[670] The Persic grammar was given at Rome by Raymondi, in 1614;
by De Dieu, at Leyden, in 1639; by Greaves, at London, in 1641 and
1649.[671] An Armenian dictionary, by Rivoli, in 1621, seems the only
accession to our knowledge of that ancient language during this
period.[672] Athanasius Kircher, a man of immense erudition, restored
the Coptic, of which Europe had been wholly ignorant. Those farther
eastward had not yet begun to enter much into the studies of Europe.
Nothing was known of the Indian; but some Chinese manuscripts had been
brought to Rome and Madrid as early as 1580; and not long afterwards,
two Jesuits, Roger and Ricci, both missionaries in China, were the
first who acquired a sufficient knowledge of the language to translate
from it.[673] But scarcely any farther advance took place before the
middle of the century.

     [670] Eichhorn, v., 367.

     [671] Id. 320.

     [672] Eichhorn, 351.

     [673] Id. 64.


                              SECT. IV.

                    _On Geography and History._

|Purchas’s Pilgrim.|

31. Purchas, an English clergyman, imbued by nature, like Hakluyt,
with a strong bias towards geographical studies, after having formed
an extensive library in that department, and consulted, as he
professes, above 1,200 authors, published the first volume of his
Pilgrim, a collection of voyages in all parts of the world, in 1613;
four more followed in 1625. The accuracy of this useful compiler has
been denied by those who have had better means of knowledge, and
probably is inferior to that of Hakluyt; but his labour was far more
comprehensive. The Pilgrim was at all events a great source of
knowledge to the contemporaries of Purchas.[674]

     [674] Biogr. Univ. Pinkerton’s Collection of Voyages and Travels.
     The latter does not value Purchas highly for correctness.

|Olearius and Pietro della Valle.|

32. Olearius was ambassador from the Duke of Holstein to Moscovy and
Persia from 1633 to 1639. His travels, in German, were published in
1647, and have been several times reprinted and translated. He has
well described the barbarism of Russia and the despotism of Persia; he
is diffuse and episodical, but not wearisome; he observes well and
relates faithfully: all who have known the countries he has visited
are said to speak well of him.[675] Pietro della Valle is a far more
amusing writer. He has thrown his travels over Syria and Persia into
the form of letters written from time to time, and which he professes
to have recovered from his correspondents. This perhaps is not a very
probable story, both on account of the length of the letters, and the
want of that reference to the present time and to small passing events
which authentic letters commonly exhibit. His observations, however,
on all the countries he visited, especially Persia, are apparently
such as consist with the knowledge we have obtained from later
travellers. Gibbon says that none have better observed Persia, but his
vanity and prolixity are insufferable. Yet I think that Della Valle
can hardly be reckoned tedious; and if he is a little egotistical, the
usual and almost laudable characteristic of travellers, this gives a
liveliness and racy air to his narrative. What his wife, the Lady
Maani, an Assyrian Christian, whom he met with at Bagdad, and who
accompanied him through his long wanderings, may really have been, we
can only judge from his eulogies on her beauty, her fidelity, and her
courage; but she throws an air of romance over his adventures, not
unpleasing to the reader. The travels of Pietro della Valle took place
from 1614 to 1626; but the book was first published at Rome in 1650,
and has been translated into different languages.

     [675] Biogr. Univ.

|Lexicon of Ferrari.|

33. The Lexicon Geographicum of Ferrari, in 1627, was the chief
general work on geography; it is alphabetical, and contains 9,600
articles. The errors have been corrected in later editions, so that
the first would probably be required in order to estimate the
knowledge of its author’s age.[676]

     [676] Salfi, xi., 418. Biogr. Universelle.

|Maps of Blaew.|

34. The best measure, perhaps, of geographical science, are the maps
published from time to time, as perfectly for the most part, we may
presume, as their editors could render them. If we compare the map of
the world in the “Theatrum Orbis Terrarum sive Novus Atlas” of Blaew,
in 1648, with that of the edition of Ortelius, published at Antwerp in
1612, the improvements will not appear exceedingly great. America is
still separated from Asia by the straights of Anian about lat. 60; but
the coast to the south is made to trend away more than before;
on the N.E. coast we find Davis’s Sea, and Estotiland has vanished to
give way to Greenland. Canada is still most inaccurate, though there
is a general idea of lakes and rivers better than in Ortelius.
Scandinavia is far better, and tolerably correct. In the South, Terra
del Fuego terminates in Cape Horn, instead of being united to Terra
Australis; but in the East, Corea appears as an oblong island; the Sea
of Aral is now set down, and the wall of China is placed north of the
fiftieth parallel. India is very much too small, and the shape of the
Caspian Sea is wholly inaccurate. But a comparison with the map in
Hakluyt, mentioned in our second volume, will not exhibit so much
superiority of Blaew’s Atlas. The latter, however, shows more
knowledge of the interior country, especially in North America, and a
better outline in many parts, of the Asiatic coast. The maps of
particular regions in Europe are on a large scale, and numerous.
Speed’s maps 1646, appear by no means inferior to those of Blaew; but
several of the errors are the same. Considering the progress of
commerce, especially that of the Dutch, during this half century, we
may rather be surprised at the defective state of these maps.

|Davila and Bentivoglio.|

35. Two histories of general reputation were published in the Italian
language during these fifty years; one of the civil wars in France by
Davila, in 1630, and another of those in Flanders by Cardinal
Bentivoglio. Both of these had the advantage of interesting subjects;
they had been sufficiently conversant with the actors to know much and
to judge well, without that particular responsibility which tempts an
historian to prevarication. They were both men of cool and sedate
tempers, accustomed to think policy a game in which the strong play
with the weak, obtuse, especially the former, in moral sentiment, but
on this account not inclined to calumniate an opposite party, or to
withhold admiration from intellectual power. Both these histories may
be read over and over with pleasure; if Davila is too refined, if he
is not altogether faithful, if his style wants the elegance of some
older Italians, he more than redeems all this by the importance of his
subject, the variety and picturesqueness of his narration, and the
acuteness of his reflections. Bentivoglio is reckoned, as a writer,
among the very first of his age.

|Mendoza’s Wars of Granada.|

|Mezeray.|

|English historians.|

|English histories.|

36. The History of the War of Granada, that is, the rebellion of the
Moriscos in 1565, by the famous Diego de Mendoza, was published
posthumously in 1610. It is placed by the Spaniards themselves on a
level with the most renowned of the ancients. The French have now
their first general historian, Mezeray, a writer esteemed for his
lively style and bold sense, but little read, of course, in an age
like the last or our own, which have demanded an exactness in matter
of fact, and an extent of historical erudition, which was formerly
unknown. We now began, in England, to cultivate historical
composition, and with so much success, that the present period was far
more productive of such works as deserve remembrance than a whole
century that next followed. But the most considerable of these have
already been mentioned. Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s History of Henry VIII.
ought here to be added to the list, as a book of good authority,
relatively at least to any that preceded, and written in a manly and
judicious spirit. Camden’s Life of Elizabeth is also a solid and
valuable history. Bacon’s Life of Henry VII. is something more; it is
the first instance in our language of the application of philosophy to
reasoning on public events in the manner of the ancients and the
Italians. Praise upon Henry is too largely bestowed; but it was in the
nature of Bacon to admire too much a crafty and selfish policy; and he
thought also, no doubt, that so near an ancestor of his own sovereign
should not be treated with severe impartiality.


                             SECT. V.

                 _On general State of Literature._

|Universities.|

37. Of the Italian and other continental universities, we have little
to say beyond what may be collected from the general tenor of this
literary history, that they contributed little to those departments of
knowledge to which we have paid most attention, and adhering
pertinaciously to their ancient studies, were left behind in the
advance of the human mind. They were, indeed, not less crowded with
scholars than before, being the necessary and prescribed road to
lucrative professions. In theology, law, and medicine, sciences, the
two former of which, at least, did not claim to be progressive, they
might sustain a respectable posture; in philosophy, and even in polite
letters, they were less prominent.

|Bodleian library founded.|

38. The English universities are in one point of view very different
from those of the rest of Europe. Their great endowments created a
resident class, neither teachers nor students, who might devote an
unbroken leisure to learning with the advantage of that command of
books which no other course of life could have afforded: It is true
that in no age has the number of these been great; but the diligence
of a few is enough to cast a veil over the laziness of many. The
century began with an extraordinary piece of fortune to the university
of Oxford, which formed in the seventeenth century, whatever it may
since have been, one great cause of her literary distinction. Sir
Thomas Bodley, with a munificence which has rendered his name more
immortal than the foundation of a family could have done, bestowed on
the university a library collected by him at great cost, building a
magnificent room for its reception, and bequeathed large funds for its
increase. The building was completed in 1606; and Casaubon has, very
shortly afterwards, given such an account of the university itself, as
well as of the Bodleian library, as will perhaps be interesting to the
reader, though it contains some of those mistakes into which a
stranger is apt to fall.

|Casaubon’s account of Oxford.|

39. “I wrote you word,” he says, in July 1613, to one of his
correspondents, “a month since, that I was going to Oxford, in order
to visit that university and its library, of which I had heard much.
Everything proved beyond my expectation. The colleges are numerous;
most of them very rich. The revenues of these colleges maintain above
two thousand students, generally of respectable parentage, and some
even of the first nobility; for what we call the habits of pedagogues
(pædagogica vitæ ratio) is not found in these English colleges.
Learning is here cultivated in a liberal style; the heads of houses
live handsomely, even splendidly, like men of rank. Some of them can
spend ten thousand livres [about 1,000_l_. at that time, if I
mistake not] by the year. I much approved the mode in which pecuniary
concerns are kept distinct from the business of learning.[677] Many
still are found, who emulate the liberality of their predecessors.
Hence, new buddings rise every day; even some new colleges are raised
from the foundation; some are enlarged, such as that of Merton, over
which Savile presides, and several more. There is one begun by
Cardinal Wolsey, which if it should be completed, will be worthy of
the greatest admiration. But he left at his death many buildings which
he had begun in an unfinished state, and which no one expects to see
complete. None of the colleges, however, attracted me so much as the
Bodleian library, a work rather for a king than a private man. It is
certain that Bodley, living or dead, must have expended 200,000 livres
on that building. The ground plot is the figure of the letter T. The
part which represents the perpendicular stem was formerly built by
some prince, and is very handsome; the rest was added by Bodley with
no less magnificence. In the lower part is a divinity school, to which
perhaps nothing in Europe is comparable. It is vaulted with peculiar
skill. The upper story is the library itself, very well built, and
fitted with an immense quantity of books. Do not imagine that such
plenty of manuscripts can be found here, as in the royal library (of
Paris); there are not a few manuscripts in England, but nothing to
what the king possesses. But the number of printed books is wonderful,
and increasing every year; for Bodley has bequeathed a considerable
revenue for that purpose. As long as I remained at Oxford, I passed
whole days in the library; for books cannot be taken out, but the
library is open to all scholars for seven or eight hours every day.
You might always see therefore many of these greedily enjoying the
banquet prepared for them, which gave me no small pleasure.”[678]

     [677] Res studiosorum et rationes separatæ sunt, quod valde
     probavi. I have given the translation which seemed best; but I
     may be mistaken.

     [678] Casaub. Epist., 899.

40. The Earl of Pembroke, Selden, and above all, archbishop Laud,
greatly improved the Bodleian library. It became, especially through
the munificence of that prelate, extremely rich in Oriental
manuscripts. The Duke of Buckingham presented a collection made by
Erpenius to the public library at Cambridge, which, though far behind
that of the sister university, was enriched by many donations and
became very considerable. Usher formed the library of Trinity College,
Dublin; an university founded on the English model, with noble
revenues, and a corporate body of fellows and scholars to enjoy them.

|Catalogue of Bodleian library.|

41. A catalogue of the Bodleian library was published by James in
1620. It contains about 20,000 articles. Of these no great number
are in English, and such as there are chiefly since the year
1600; Bodley, perhaps, had been rather negligent of poetry and plays.
The editor observes that there were in the library three or four
thousand volumes in modern languages. This catalogue is not classed,
but alphabetical; which James mentions as something new, remarking at
the same time the difficulty of classification, and that in the German
catalogues we find grammars entered under the head of philosophy. One
published by Draud, Bibliotheca Classica, sive Catalogus Officinalis,
Frankfort, 1625, is hardly worth mention. It professes to be a general
list of printed books; but as the number seems to be not more than
30,000, all in Latin, it must be very defective. About two fifths of
the whole are theological. A catalogue of the library of Sion College,
founded in 1631, was printed in 1650; it contains eight or nine
thousand volumes.[679]

     [679] In Museo Britannico.

|Continental libraries.|

42. The library of Leyden had been founded by the first prince of
Orange. Scaliger bequeathed his own to it; and it obtained the
oriental manuscripts of Golius. A catalogue had been printed by Peter
Bertius as early as 1597.[680] Many public and private libraries
either now began to be formed in France, or received great accessions;
among the latter, those of the historian De Thou, and the president
Seguier.[681] No German library, after that of Vienna, had been so
considerable as one formed in the course of several ages by the
electors Palatine at Heidelberg. It contained many rare manuscripts.
On the capture of the city by Tilly, in 1622, he sent a number of
these to Rome, and they long continued to sleep in the recesses of the
Vatican. Napoleon, emulous of such a precedent, obtained thirty-eight
of the Heidelberg manuscripts by the treaty of Tolentino, which were
transmitted to Paris. On the restitution of these in 1815, it was
justly thought that prescription was not to be pleaded by Rome for the
rest of the plunder, especially when she was recovering what she had
lost by the same right of spoliation; and the whole collection has
been replaced in the library of Heidelberg.

     [680] Jugler, Hist. Litteraria, c. 3.

     [681] Id. ibid.

|Italian academies.|

43. The Italian academies have been often represented as partaking in
the alleged decline of literary spirit during the first part of the
seventeenth century. Nor is this reproach a new one. Boccalini, after
the commencement of this period, tells us that these institutions,
once so famous, had fallen into decay, their ardent zeal in literary
exercises and discussions having abated by time, so that while they
had once been frequented by private men, and esteemed by princes, they
were now abandoned and despised by all. They petition Apollo,
therefore, in a chapter of his Ragguagli di Parnasso, for a reform.
But the god replies that all things have their old age and decay, and
as nothing can prevent the neatest pair of slippers from wearing out
so nothing can rescue academies from a similar lot; hence, he can only
advise them to suppress the worst, and to supply their places by
others.[682] If only such a counsel were required, the institution of
academies in general would not perish. And, in fact, we really find
that while some societies of this class came to nothing, as is always
the case with self-constituted bodies, the seventeenth century had
births of its own to boast, not inferior to the older progeny of the
last age. The Academy of Humourists at Rome was one of these. It arose
casually at the marriage of a young nobleman of the Mancini family,
and took the same line as many had done, reciting verses and
discourses, or occasionally representing plays. The tragedy of
Demetrius, by Rocco, one of this academy, is reckoned among the best
of the age. The Apatisti of Florence took their name from Fioretti,
who had assumed the appellation of Udeno Nisielo, Academico Apatista.
The Rozzi of Siena, whom the government had suppressed in 1568,
revived again in 1605, and rivalled another society of the same city,
the Intronati. The former especially dedicated their time to pastoral,
in the rustic dialect (comedia rusticale), a species of dramatic
writing that might amuse at the moment, and was designed for no other
end, though several of these farces are extant. [683]

     [682] Ragg., xviii., c. 1.

     [683] Salfi, vol. xii.

|The Lincei.|

44. The Academy della Crusca, which had more solid objects for the
advantages of letters in view, has been mentioned in another place.
But that of the Lincei, founded by Frederic Cesi, stands upon a higher
ground than any of the rest. This young man was born at Rome in 1585,
son of the duke of Acqua Sparta, a father and a family known only for
their pride and ignorance. But nature had created in Cesi a
philosophic mind; in conjunction with a few of similar dispositions,
he gave his entire regard to science, and projected himself, at the
age of eighteen, an academy, that is, a private association of
friends for intellectual pursuits, which, with reference to their
desire of piercing with acute discernment into the depths of truth, he
denominated the Lynxes. Their device was that animal, with its eyes
turned towards heaven, and tearing a Cerberus with its claws; thus
intimating that they were prepared for war against error and
falsehood. The church, always suspicious, and inclined to make common
cause with all established tenets, gave them some trouble, though
neither theology nor politics entered into their scheme. This
embraced, as in their academies, poetry and elegant literature; but
physical science was their peculiar object. Porto, Galileo, Colonna,
and many other distinguished men, both of Italy and the Transalpine
countries, were enrolled among the Lynxes; and Cesi is said to have
framed rather a visionary plan of a general combination of
philosophers, in the manner of the Pythagoreans, which should extend
itself to every part of Europe. The constitutions of this imaginary
order were even published in 1624; they are such as could not have
been realised, but from the organization and secrecy that seem to have
been their elements, might not improbably have drawn down a
persecution upon themselves, or even rendered the name of philosophy
obnoxious. Cesi died in 1630, and his academy of Lynxes did not long
survive the loss of their chief.[684]

     [684] Salfi, xi., 102. Tiraboschi, xi., 42, 243.

|Prejudice for antiquity diminished.|

45. The tide of public opinion had hitherto set regularly in one
direction; ancient times, ancient learning, ancient wisdom and virtue,
were regarded with unqualified veneration; the very course of nature
was hardly believed to be the same, and a common degeneracy was
thought to have overspread the earth and its inhabitants. This had
been at its height in the first century after the revival of letters,
the prejudice in favour of the past, always current with the old, who
affect to dictate the maxims of experience, conspiring with the
genuine lustre of classical literature and ancient history, which
dazzled the youthful scholar. But this aristocracy of learning was now
assailed by a new power which had risen up in sufficient strength to
dispute the pre-eminence. We, said Bacon, are the true ancients; what
we call the antiquity of the world was but its infancy. This thought
equally just and brilliant, was caught up and echoed by many; it will
be repeatedly found in later works. It became a question whether the
moderns had not really left behind their progenitors; and though it
has been hinted, that a dwarf on a giant’s shoulders sees farther than
the giant, this is, in one sense, to concede the point in
dispute.[685]

     [685] Ac quemadmodum pygmæus humeris gigantis insidens longius
     quam gigas prospicere, neque tamen se gigante majorem habere aut
     sipi multum tribuere potest, ita nos veterum laboribus
     vigiliisque in nostros usus conversis adjicere aliquid, non
     supercilia tollere, aut parvi facere, qui ante nos fuerunt,
     debemus. Cyprianus, Vita Campanellæ, p. 15.

46. Tassoni was one of the first who combated the established
prejudice by maintaining that modern times are not inferior to
ancient; it well became his intrepid disposition.[686] But Lancilotti,
an Italian ecclesiastic, and member of several academies, pursued this
subject in an elaborate work, intended to prove--first, that the world
was neither morally worse nor more afflicted by calamities than it had
been; secondly, that the intellectual abilities of mankind had not
degenerated. It bears the general title, L’Hoggidi, To-Day; and is
throughout a ridicule of those whom he calls Hoggidiani, perpetual
declaimers against the present state of things. He is a very copious
and learned writer, and no friend to antiquity; each chapter being
entitled Disinganno, and intended to remove some false prejudice. The
first part of this work appeared in 1623, the second, after the
author’s death, not till 1658. Lancilotti wrote another book with
somewhat a similar object, entitled Farfalloni degl’Antichi Istorici,
and designed to turn the ancient historians into ridicule; with a good
deal of pleasantry, but chiefly on account of stories which no one in
his time would have believed. The same ground was taken soon
afterwards by an English divine, George Hakewill, in his “Apology, or
Declaration of the Power and Providence of God in the Government of
the World,” published in 1627. This is designed to prove that there is
not that perpetual and universal decay in nature which many suppose.
It is an elaborate refutation of many absurd notions which seem to
have prevailed; some believing that even physical nature, the sun and
stars, the earth and waters, were the worse for wear. A greater number
thought this true of man; his age, his size, his strength, his powers
of mind were all supposed to have been deteriorated. Hakewill
patiently and learnedly refuted all this. The moral character of
antiquity he shows to be much exaggerated, animadverting especially on
the Romans. The most remarkable, and certainly the most disputable
chapters, are those which relate to the literary merits of ancient and
modern times. He seems to be one of the first who ventured to put in a
claim for the latter. In this he anticipates Wotton, who had more to
say. Hakewill goes much too far in calling Sydney’s Arcadia “nothing
inferior to the choicest piece among the ancients”; and even thinks
“he should not much wrong Virgil by matching him with Du Bartas.” The
learning shown in this treatise is very extensive, but Hakewill has no
taste, and cannot perceive any real superiority in the ancients.
Compared with Lancilotti, he is much inferior in liveliness, perhaps
even in learning; but I have not observed that he has borrowed
anything from the Italian, whose publication was but four years
earlier.

     [686] Salfi, xi., 381.

|Browne’s Vulgar Errors.|

47. Browne’s Inquiry into Vulgar Errors displays a great deal of
erudition, but scarcely raises a high notion of Browne himself as a
philosopher, or of the state of physical knowledge in England. The
errors he indicates are such as none but illiterate persons, we should
think, were likely to hold; and I believe that few on the Continent,
so late as 1646, would have required to have them exploded with such
an ostentation of proof. Who did not know that the phœnix is a fable?
Browne was where the learned in Europe had been seventy years before,
and seems to have been one of those who saturate their minds with bad
books till they have little room for anything new that is better. A
man of so much credulity and such an irregular imagination as Browne
was almost sure to believe in witchcraft and all sorts of spiritual
agencies. In no respect did he go in advance of his age, unless we
make an exception for his declaration against persecution. He seems to
have been fond of those trifling questions which the bad taste of the
schoolmen and their contemporaries introduced; as whether a man has
fewer ribs than a woman, whether Adam and Eve had navels, whether
Methusaleh was the oldest man; the problems of children put to adults.
With a strong curiosity and a real love of truth, Browne is a striking
instance of a merely empirical mind; he is at sea with sails and a
rudder, but without a compass or log-book; and has so little notion of
any laws of nature, or of any inductive reasoning either as to
efficient or final causes, that he never seems to judge anything to be
true or false except by experiment.

|Life and character of Peiresc.|

48. In concluding our review of the sixteenth century, we selected
Pinelli, as a single model of the literary character, which loving and
encouraging knowledge, is yet too little distinguished by any writings
to fall naturally within the general subject of these volumes. The
period which we now bring to a close will furnish us with a much more
considerable instance. Nicholas Peiresc was born in 1580, of an
ancient family in Provence, which had for some generations held
judicial offices in the parliament of Aix. An extraordinary thirst for
every kind of knowledge characterized Peiresc from his earliest youth,
and being of a weak constitution, as well as ample fortune, though he
retained, like his family, an honourable post in the parliament, his
time was principally devoted to the multifarious pursuits of an
enlightened scholar. Like Pinelli, he delighted in the rarities of art
and antiquity; but his own superior genius, and the vocation of that
age towards science, led him on to a far more extensive field of
inquiry. We have the life of Peiresc written by his countryman and
intimate friend Gassendi; and no one who has any sympathy with science
or with a noble character will read it without pleasure. Few books
indeed of that period are more full of casual information.

49. Peiresc travelled much in the early part of his life; he was at
Rome in 1600, and came to England and Holland in 1606. The hard
drinking, even of our learned men,[687] disconcerted his southern
stomach; but he was repaid by the society of Camden, Savile, and
Cotton. The king received Peiresc courteously, and he was present at
the opening of parliament. On returning to his native province, he
began to form his extensive collections of marbles and medals, but
especially of natural history in every line. He was, perhaps, the
first who observed the structure of zoophytes, though he seems not to
have suspected their animal nature. Petrifactions occupied much of his
time; and he framed a theory of them which Gassendi explains at
length, but which, as might be expected, is not the truth.[688] Botany
was among his favourite studies, and Europe owes to him, according to
Gassendi, the Indian jessamine, the gourd of Mecca, the real Egyptian
papyrus, which is not that described by Prosper Alpinus. He first
planted ginger, as well as many other Oriental plants, in an European
garden, and also the cocoa-nut, from which, however, he could not
obtain fruit.

     [687] Gassendi, Vita Peiresc, p. 51.

     [688] P. 147.

50. Peiresc was not less devoted to astronomy; he had no sooner heard
of the discoveries of Galileo than he set himself to procure a
telescope, and had in the course of the same year, 1610, the pleasure
of observing the moons of Jupiter. It even occurred to him that these
might serve to ascertain the longitude, though he did not follow up
the idea. Galileo indeed, with a still more inventive mind, and with
more of mathematics, seems to have stood in the way of Peiresc. He
took, as far as appears, no great pains to publish his researches,
contenting himself with the intercourse of literary men, who passed
near him, or with whom he could maintain correspondence. Several
discoveries are ascribed to him by Gassendi; of their originality, I
cannot venture to decide. “From his retreat,” says another biographer,
“Peiresc gave more encouragement to letters than any prince, more even
than the Cardinal de Richelieu, who sometime afterwards founded the
French Academy. Worthy to have been called by Bayle the
_attorney-general_ of literature, he kept always on the level of
progressive science, published manuscripts at his own expense,
followed the labours of the learned throughout Europe, and gave them
an active impulse by his own aid.” Scaliger, Salmasius, Holstenius,
Kircher, Mersenne, Grotius, Valois, are but some of the great names of
Europe whom he assisted by various kinds of liberality.[689] He
published nothing himself, but some of his letters have been collected.

     [689] Biogr. Universelle.

51. The character of Peiresc was amiable and unreserved among his
friends; but he was too much absorbed in the love of knowledge for
insipid conversation. For the same reason, his biographer informs us,
he disliked the society of women, gaining nothing valuable from the
trifles and scandal upon which alone they could converse.[690]
Possibly the society of both sexes at Aix, in the age of Peiresc, was
such as, with no excessive fastidiousness, he might avoid. In his
eagerness for new truths, he became somewhat credulous; an error not
perhaps easy to be avoided, while the accumulation of facts proceeded
more rapidly than the ascertainment of natural laws. But for a genuine
liberality of mind and extensive attainments in knowledge, very few
can be compared to Peiresc; nor among those who have resembled him in
this employment of wealth and leisure, do I know that any names have
descended to posterity with equal lustre, except our two countrymen of
the next generation, who approached so nearly to his character and
course of life, Boyle and Evelyn.

     [690] Gassendi, p. 219.




                          CHAPTER XXVII.

     HISTORY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE IN EUROPE FROM 1650 TO 1700.


                             SECT. I.

_Dutch Scholars--Jesuit and Jansenist Philologers--Delphin Editions--
French Scholars--English Scholars--Bentley._

|James Frederic Gronovius.|

1. The death of Salmasius, about the beginning of this period, left a
chasm in critical literature which no one was equal to fill. But the
nearest to this giant of philology was James Frederic Gronovius, a
native of Hamburg, but drawn, like several more of his countrymen, to
the universities of Holland, the peculiarly learned state of Europe
through the seventeenth century. The principal labours of Gronovius
were those of correcting the text of Latin writers; in Greek we find
very little due to him.[691] His notes form an useful and considerable
part of those which are collected in what are generally styled the
Variorum editions, published, chiefly after 1660, by the Dutch
booksellers. These contain selections from the older critics, some of
them, especially those first edited, indifferently made and often
mutilated; others with more attention to preserve entire the original
notes. These, however, are, for the most part, only critical, as if
explanatory observations were below the notice of an editor; though,
as Le Clerc says, those of Manutius on Cicero’s epistles cost him much
more time than modern editors have given to their conjectures.[692] In
general, the Variorum editions were not greatly prized, with the
exception of those by the two Gronovii and Grævius.[693]

     [691] Baillet. Critiques Grammairiens, n. 548. Blount. Biogr.
     Univ.

     [692] Parrhasiana, i., 233.

     [693] A list of the Variorum editions will be found in Baillet,
     Critiques Grammairiens, n. 604.

|James Gronovius.|

|Grævius.|

2. The place of the elder Gronovius, in the latter part of this
present period, was filled by his son. James Gronovius, by
indefatigable labour, and by a greater number of editions which bear
his name, may be reckoned, if not a greater philologer, one not less
celebrated than his father. He was, at least, a better Greek critic,
and in this language, though far below those who were about to arise,
and who did, in fact, eclipse him long before his death, Bentley and
Burman, he kept a high place for several years.[694] Grævius, another
German whom the Dutch universities had attracted and retained,
contributed to the Variorum editions, chiefly those of Latin authors,
an erudition not less copious than that of any contemporary scholar.

     [694] Baillet, n. 548. Niceron, ii., 177.

|Isaac Vossius.|

3. The philological character of Gerard Vossius himself, if we might
believe some partial testimonies, fell short of that of his son Isaac;
whose Observations on Pomponius Mela, and an edition of Catullus, did
him extraordinary credit, and have placed him among the first
philologers of this age. He was of a more lively genius, and perhaps
hardly less erudition, than his father, but with a paradoxical
judgment, and has certainly rendered much less service to
letters.[695] Another son of a great father, Nicolas Heinsius, has by
none been placed on a level with him; but his editions of Prudentius
and Claudian are better than any that had preceded them.

     [695] Niceron, vol. xiii.

|Decline of German learning.|

|Spanheim.|

4. Germany fell lower and lower in classical literature. A writer, as
late as 1714, complains, that only modern books of Latin were taught
in the schools, and that the students in the universities despised all
grammatical learning. The study, “not of our own language, which we
entirely neglect, but of French,” he reckons among the causes of this
decay in ancient learning; the French translations of the classics led
many to imagine that the original could be dispensed with.[696]
Ezekiel Spanheim, envoy from the court of Brandenburg to that of Louis
XIV., was a distinguished exception; his edition of Julian, and his
notes on several other writers, attest an extensive learning, which
has still preserved his name in honour. As the century drew nigh to
its close, Germany began to revive; a few men of real philological
learning, especially Fabricius, appeared as heralds of those greater
names which adorn her literary annals in the next age.

     [696] Burckhardt, De Linguæ Latinæ hodie neglectæ Causis Oratio,
     p. 34.

|Jesuit colleges in France.|

5. The Jesuits had long been conspicuously the classical scholars of
France; in their colleges the purest and most elegant Latinity was
supposed to be found; they had early cultivated these graces of
literature, while all polite writing was confined to the Latin
language, and they still preserved them in its comparative disuse.
“The Jesuits,” Huet says, “write and speak Latin well, but their style
is almost always too rhetorical. This is owing to their keeping
regencies (an usual phrase for academical exercises) from their early
youth, which causes them to speak incessantly in public, and become
accustomed to a sustained and polished style above the tone of common
subjects.”[697] Jouvancy, whose Latin orations were published in 1700,
has had no equal, if we may trust a panegyric, since Maffei and
Muretus.[698]

     [697] Huetiana, p. 71.

     [698] Biogr. Univ.

|Port-Royal writers. Lancelot.|

6. The Jansenists appeared ready at one time to wrest this palm from
their inveterate foes. Lancelot threw some additional lustre round
Port-Royal by the Latin and Greek grammars, which are more frequently
called by the name of that famous cloister than by his own. Both were
received with great approbation in the French schools, except, I
suppose, where the Jesuits predominated, and their reputation lasted
for many years. They were never so popular though well known, in this
country. “The public,” says Baillet of the Greek grammar, which is
rather the more eminent of the two, “bears witness that nothing of its
kind has been more finished. The order is clear and concise. We find
in it many remarks, both judicious and important for the full
knowledge of the language. Though Lancelot has chiefly followed
Caninius, Sylburgius, Sanctius, and Vossius, his arrangement is new,
and he has selected what is most valuable in their works.”[699] In
fact, he professes to advance nothing of his own, being more indebted,
he says, to Caninius than to anyone else. The method of Clenardus he
disapproves, and thinks that of Ramus intricate. He adopts the
division into three declensions. But his notions of the proper
meaning of the tenses are strangely confused and erroneous: several
other mistakes of an obvious nature, as we should now say, will occur
in his syntax; and, upon the whole, the Port-Royal grammar does not
give us a high idea of the critical knowledge of the seventeenth
century, as to the more difficult language of antiquity.

     [699] Baillet, n. 714.

|Latin grammars. Perizonius.|

7. The Latin, on the other hand, had been so minutely and laboriously
studied, that little more than gleanings after a great harvest could
be obtained. The Aristarchus of Vossius, and his other grammatical
works, though partly not published till this period, have been
mentioned in the last volume. Perizonius, a professor at Franeker, and
in many respects one of the most learned of this age, published a good
edition of the Minerva of Sanctius in 1687. This celebrated grammar
had become very scarce, as well as that of Scioppius, which contained
nothing but remarks upon Sanctius. Perizonius combined the two with
notes more ample than those of Scioppius, and more bold in differing
from the Spanish grammarian.

|Delphin editions.|

8. If other editions of the classical authors have been preferred by
critics, none, at least of this period, have been more celebrated than
those which Louis XIV., at the suggestion of the Duke de Montausier,
caused to be prepared for the use of the Dauphin. The object in view
was to elucidate the Latin writers, both by a continual gloss in the
margin, and by such notes as should bring a copious mass of ancient
learning to bear on the explanation, not of the more difficult
passages alone, but of all those in which an ordinary reader might
require some aid. The former of these is less useful, and less
satisfactorily executed than the latter; for the notes, it must be
owned that, with much that is superfluous even to tolerable scholars,
they bring together a great deal of very serviceable illustration. The
choice of authors as well as of editors was referred to Huet, who
fixed the number of the former at forty. The idea of an index on a
more extensive plan than in any earlier editions, was also due to
Huet, who had designed to fuse those of each work into one more
general, as a standing historical analysis of the Latin language.[700]
These editions are of very unequal merit, as might be expected from
the number of persons employed, a list of whom will be found in
Baillet.[701]

     [700] Huetiana, p. 92.

     [701] Critiques Grammairiens, n. 605.

|Le Fevre and the Daciers.|

9. Tanaquil Faber, thus better known than by his real name, Tanneguy
le Fevre, a man learned, animated, not fearing the reproach of
paradox, acquired a considerable name among French critics by several
editions, as well as by other writings in philology. But none of his
literary productions were so celebrated as his daughter, Anne le
Fevre, afterwards Madame Dacier. The knowledge of Greek though once
not very uncommon in a woman, had become prodigious in the days of
Louis XIV.; and when this distinguished lady taught Homer and Sappho
to speak French prose, she appeared a phœnix in the eyes of her
countrymen. She was undoubtedly a person of very rare talents and
estimable character; her translations are numerous, and reputed to be
correct, though Niceron has observed that she did not raise Homer in
the eyes of those who were not prejudiced in his favour. Her husband
was a scholar of kindred mind and the same pursuits. Their union was
facetiously called the wedding of Latin and Greek. But each of this
learned couple was skilled in both languages. Dacier was a great
translator; his Horace is perhaps the best known of his versions; but
the Poetics of Aristotle have done him most honour. The Daciers had to
fight the battle of antiquity against a generation both ignorant and
vain-glorious, yet keen-sighted in the detection of blemishes, and
disposed to avenge the wrongs of their fathers who had been trampled
upon by pedants with the help of a new pedantry, that of the court and
the mode. With great learning they had a competent share of good
sense, but not perhaps a sufficiently discerning taste, or liveliness
enough of style, to maintain a cause that had so many prejudices of
the world now enlisted against it.[702]

     [702] Baillet. Niceron, vol. iii. Bibliothèque Universelle,
     x. 295, xxii. 176, xxiv. 241, 261, Biogr. Univers.

|Henry Valois. Complaints of decay of learning.|

10. Henry Valois might have been mentioned before for his edition of
Ammianus Marcellinus in 1636, which established his philological
reputation. Many other works in the same line of criticism followed;
he is among the great ornaments of learning in this period. Nor was
France destitute of others that did her honour. Cotelier, it is said,
deserved by his knowledge of Greek to be placed on a level with the
great scholars of former times. Yet there seems to have been some
decline, at least toward the close of the century, in that
prodigious erudition which had extinguished the preceding period. “For
we know no one,” says Le Clerc, about 1699, “who equals in learning,
in diligence and in the quantity of his works, the Scaligers, the
Lipsii, the Casaubons, the Salmasii, the Meursii, the Vossii, the
Seldens, the Gronovii, and many more of former times.”[703] Though
perhaps in this reflection there was something of the customary bias
against the present generation, we must own that the writings of
scholars were less massive, and consequently gave less apparent
evidence of industry than formerly. But in classical philology at
least, a better day was about to arise, and the first omen of it came
from a country not yet much known in that literature.

     [703] Parrhasiana, vol. i., p. 225. Je viens d’apprendre, says
     Charles Patin in one of his letters, que M. Gronovius est mort à
     Leyden. Il restoit presque tout seul du nombre des savans
     d’Hollande. Il n’est plus dans ce pais-là des gens faits comme
     Jos. Scaliger, Baudius, Heinsius, Salmasius, et Grotius. (P. 582.)

|English learning. Duport.|

11. It has been observed in the last volume, that while England was
very far from wanting men of extensive erudition, she had not been at
all eminent in ancient or classical literature. The proof which the
absence of critical writings, or even of any respectable editions,
furnishes, appears weighty; nor can it be repelled by sufficient
testimony. In the middle of the century James Duport, Greek professor
at Cambridge, deserves honour by standing almost alone. “He appears,”
says a late biographer, “to have been the main instrument by which
literature was upheld in this university during the civil disturbances
of the seventeenth century; and though little known at present, he
enjoyed an almost transcendant reputation for a great length of time
among his contemporaries as well as in the generation which
immediately succeeded.”[704] Duport however has little claim to this
reputation except by translations of the writings of Solomon, the book
of Job, and the Psalms, into Greek hexameters, concerning which his
biographer gently intimates that “his notions of versification were
not formed in a severe or critical school,” and by what has certainly
been more esteemed, his Homeri Gnomologia, which Le Clerc and bishop
Monk agree to praise, as very useful to the student of Homer. Duport
gave also some lectures on Theophrastus about 1656, which were
afterwards published in Needham’s edition of that author. “In these,”
says Le Clerc, “he explains words with much exactness, and so as to
show that he understood the analogy of the language.”[705] “They are
upon the whole calculated,” says the bishop of Gloucester, “to give no
unfavourable opinion of the state of Greek learning in the university
of that memorable crisis.”

     [704] Museum Criticum, vol. ii., p. 672 (by the Bishop of
     Gloucester and Bristol).

     [705] Bibliothèque Choisie, xxv., 18.

|Greek not much studied.|

12. It cannot be fairly said that our universities declined in general
learning under the usurpation of Cromwell. They contained, on the
contrary, more extraordinary men than in any earlier period, but not
generally well affected to the predominant power. Greek, however,
seems not much to have flourished, even immediately after the
restoration. Barrow, who was chosen Greek professor in 1660, complains
that no one attended his lectures. “I sit like an Attic owl,” he says,
“driven out from the society of all other birds.”[706] According
indeed to the scheme of study retained from a more barbarous age, no
knowledge of the Greek language appears to have been required from the
students, as necessary for their degrees. And if we may believe a
satirical writer of the time of Charles II., but one whose satire had
great circulation and was not taxed with falsehood the general state
of education both in the schools and universities was as narrow,
pedantic, and unprofitable, as can be conceived.[707]

     [706] See a biographical memoir of Barrow prefixed to Hughe’s
     edition of his works. This contains a sketch of studies pursued
     in the university of Cambridge from the twelfth to the
     seventeenth century, brief indeed, but such as I should have been
     glad to have seen before, p. 62. No alteration in the statutes,
     so far as they related to study, was made after the time of Henry
     VIII. or Edward VI.

     [707] Eachard’s Grounds and Occasions of the Contempt of the
     Clergy. This little tract was published in 1670, and went through
     ten editions by 1696.

|Gataker’s Cinnus and Antonius.|

13. We were not, nevertheless, destitute of men distinguished for
critical skill, even from the commencement of this period. The first
was a very learned divine, Thomas Gataker, one whom a foreign writer
has placed among the six protestants most conspicuous, in his
judgment, for depth of reading. His Cinnus, sive Adversaria
Miscellanea, published in 1651, to which a longer work, entitled
Adversaria Posthuma, is subjoined in later editions, may be introduced
here; since, among a far greater number of scriptural explanations,
both of these miscellanies contain many relating to profane antiquity.
He claims a higher place for his edition of Marcus Antoninus the next
year. This is the earliest edition, if I am not mistaken, of any
classical writer published in England with original annotations. Those
of Gataker evince a very copious learning, and the edition is still
perhaps reckoned the best that has been given of this author.

|Stanley’s Æschylus.|

14. Thomas Stanley, author of the History of Ancient Philosophy,
undertook a more difficult task, and gave in 1663 his celebrated
edition of Æschylus. It was, as every one has admitted, by far
superior to any that had preceded it; nor can Stanley’s real praise be
effaced though it may be diminished, by an unfortunate charge that has
been brought against him, of having appropriated to himself the
conjectures, most of them unpublished, of Casaubon, Dorat, and
Scaliger, to the number of at least three hundred emendations of the
text. It will hardly be reckoned a proof of our nationality, that a
living English scholar was the first to detect and announce this
plagiarism of a critic, in whom we had been accustomed to take pride,
from these foreigners.[708] After these plumes have been withdrawn,
Stanley’s Æschylus will remain a great monument of critical learning.

     [708] Edinburgh Review, xix., 494. Museum Criticum, ii., 498.
     (Both by the Bishop of London.)

|Other English philologers.|

15. Meric Casaubon by his notes on Persius, Antoninus, and Diogenes
Laertius, Pearson by those on the last author, Gale on Iamblichus,
Price on Apuleius, Hudson, by his editions of Thucydides and Josephus,
Potter by that of Lycophron, Baxter of Anacreon, attested the progress
of classical learning in a soil so well fitted to give it nourishment.
The same William Baxter published the first grammar, not quite
elementary, which had appeared in England, entitled, De Analogia, seu
Arte Latinæ Linguæ Commentarius. It relates principally to etymology,
and to the deduction of the different parts of the verb from a stem,
which he conceives to be the imperative mood. Baxter was a man of some
ability, but, in the style of critics, offensively contemptuous
towards his brethren of the craft.

|Bentley.|

|His epistle to Mill.|

16. We must hasten to the greatest of English critics in this, or
possibly any other age, Richard Bentley. His first book was the
Epistle to Mill, subjoined to the latter’s edition of the chronicle of
John Malala, a Greek writer of the lower empire. In a desultory and
almost garrulous strain, Bentley pours forth an immense store of novel
learning and of acute criticism, especially on his favourite subject,
which was destined to become his glory, the scattered relics of the
ancient dramatists. The style of Bentley, always terse and lively,
sometimes humorous and drily sarcastic, whether he wrote in Latin or
in English, could not but augment the admiration which his learning
challenged. Grævius and Spanheim pronounced him the rising star of
British literature, and a correspondence with the former began in
1692, which continued in unbroken friendship till his death.

|Dissertation on Phalaris.|

17. But the rare qualities of Bentley were more abundantly displayed,
and before the eyes of a more numerous tribunal, in his famous
dissertation on the epistles ascribed to Phalaris. This was provoked,
in the first instance, by a few lines of eulogy on these epistles by
Sir William Temple, who pretended to find in them indubitable marks of
authenticity. Bentley, in a dissertation subjoined to Wotton’s
Reflections on Modern and Ancient Learning, gave tolerably conclusive
proofs of the contrary. A young man of high family and respectable
learning, Charles Boyle, had published an edition of the Epistles of
Phalaris, with some reflection on Bentley for personal incivility; a
charge which he seems to have satisfactorily disproved. Bentley
animadverted on this in his dissertation. Boyle the next year, with
the assistance of some leading men at Oxford, Aldrich, King, and
Atterbury, published his Examination of Bentley’s Dissertation on
Phalaris; a book generally called, in familiar brevity, Boyle against
Bentley.[709] The Cambridge giant of criticism replied in an answer
which goes by the name of Bentley against Boyle. It was the first
great literary war that had been waged in England; and like that of
Troy, it has still the prerogative of being remembered after the
Epistles of Phalaris are almost as much buried as the walls of Troy
itself. Both combatants were skillful in wielding the sword: the arms
of Boyle, in Swift’s language, were given him by all the gods; but his
antagonist stood forward in no such figurative strength, master of a
learning to which nothing parallel had been known in England, and that
directed by an understanding prompt, discriminating, not idly
sceptical, but still farther removed from trust in authority,
sagacious in perceiving corruptions of language, and ingenious, at the
least, in removing them, with a style rapid, concise, amusing, and
superior to Boyle in that which he had most to boast, a sarcastic
wit.[710]

     [709] “The principal share in the undertaking fell to the lot of
     Atterbury; this was suspected at the time, and has since been
     placed beyond all doubt by the publication of a letter of his to
     Boyle.” Monk’s Life of Bentley, p. 69.

     [710] In point of classical learning the joint stock of the
     confederacy bore no proportion to that of Bentley; their
     acquaintance with several of the books upon which they comment
     appears only to have begun upon that occasion, and sometimes they
     are indebted for their knowledge of them to their adversary;
     compared with his boundless erudition, their learning was that of
     school boys, and not always sufficient to preserve them from
     distressing mistakes. But profound literature was at that period
     confined to few, while wit and raillery found numerous and eager
     readers. It may be doubtful whether Busby himself, by whom every
     one of the confederated band had been educated, possessed
     knowledge which would have qualified him to enter the lists in
     such a controversy.” Monk’s Bentley, p. 69. Warburton has justly
     said, that Bentley by his wit foiled the Oxford men at their own
     weapons.

18. It may now seem extraordinary to us, even without looking at the
anachronisms or similar errors which Bentley has exposed, that any one
should be deceived by the Epistles of Phalaris. The rhetorical
common-places, the cold declamation of the sophist, the care to please
the reader, the absence of that simplicity, with which a man who has
never known restraint in disguising his thoughts or choosing his
words, is sure to express himself, strike us in the pretended letters
of this buskined tyrant, the Icon Basilice of the ancient world. But
this was doubtless thought evidence of their authenticity by many, who
might say, as others have done in a happy vein of metaphor, that they
seemed not written with a pen but with a sceptre. The argument from
the use of the Attic dialect by a Sicilian tyrant, contemporary with
Pythagoras, is of itself conclusive, and would leave no doubt in the
present day.

|Disadvantages of scholars in that age.|

19. “It may be remarked,” says the Bishop of Gloucester, “that a
scholar at that time possessed neither the aids nor the encouragements
which are now presented to smooth the paths of literature. The
grammars of the Latin and Greek languages were imperfectly and
erroneously taught; and the critical scholar must have felt severely
the absence of sufficient indices, particularly of the voluminous
scholiasts, grammarians, and later writers of Greece, in the
examination of which no inconsiderable portion of a life might be
consumed. Bentley relying upon his own exertions and the resources of
his own mind, pursued an original path of criticism, in which the
intuitive quickness and subtlety of his genius qualified him to excel.
In the faculty of memory so important for such pursuits, he has
himself candidly declared that he was not particularly gifted.
Consequently, he practised throughout life the precaution of noting in
the margin of his books the suggestions and conjectures which rushed
into his mind during their perusal. To this habit of laying up
materials in store, we may partly attribute the surprising rapidity
with which some of his most important works were completed. He was
also at the trouble of constructing for his own use indices of authors
quoted by the principal scholiasts, by Eustathius and other ancient
commentators, of a nature similar to those afterwards published by
Fabricius in his Bibliotheca Græca; which latter were the produce of
the joint labour of various hands.”[711]

     [711] Monk’s Life of Bentley, p. 12.


                             SECT. II.

                          ON ANTIQUITIES.

  _Grævius and Gronovius--Fabretti--Numismatic Writers--Chronology_.

|Thesauri of Grævius and of Gronovius.|

20. The two most industrious scholars of their time, Grævius and
Gronovius, collected into one body such of the numerous treatises on
Roman and Greek antiquities, as they thought most worthy of
preservation in an uniform and accessible work. These form the
Thesaurus Antiquitatum Romanarum by Grævius, in twelve volumes, the
Thesaurus Antiquitatum Græcarum by Gronovius, in thirteen volumes; the
former published in 1694, the first volumes of the latter in 1697.
They comprehend many of the labours of the older antiquaries already
commemorated from the middle of the sixteenth to that of the
seventeenth century, and some also of a later date. Among these, in
the collection of Grævius, are a treatise of Albert Rubens, son of the
great painter, on the dress of the Romans, particularly the laticlave
(Antwerp, 1665), the enlarged edition of Octavius Ferrarius on the
same subject, several treatises by Spanheim and Ursatus, and
the Roma Antica of Nardini, published in 1666. Gronovius gave a place
in his twelfth volume (1702) to the very recent work of a young
Englishman, Potter’s Antiquities, which the author, at the request of
the veteran antiquary, had so much enlarged, that the Latin
translation in Gronovius is nearly double in length the first edition
of the English.[712] The warm eulogies of Gronovius attest the merit
of this celebrated work. Potter was but twenty-three years of age; he
had of course availed himself of the writings of Meursius, but he has
also contributed to supercede them. It has been said that he is less
exact in attending to the difference of times and places than our
finer criticism requires.[713]

     [712] The first edition of Potter’s Antiquities was published in
     1697 and 1698.

     [713] Biogr. Univ.

|Fabretti.|

21. Bellori, in a long list of antiquarian writings, Falconieri in
several more, especially his Inscriptiones Athleticæ, maintained the
honour of Italy in this province so justly claimed as her own.[714]
But no one has been accounted equal to Raphael Fabretti, by judges so
competent as Maffei, Gravina, Fabroni, and Visconti.[715] His
diligence in collecting inscriptions was only surpassed by his
sagacity in explaining them; and his authority has been preferred to
that of any other antiquary.[716] His time was spent in delving among
ruins and vaults to explore the subterranean treasures of Latium; no
heat nor cold nor rain nor badness of road could deter him from these
solitary peregrinations. Yet the glory of Fabretti must be partly
shared with his horse. This wise and faithful animal, named Marco
Polo, had acquired, it is said, the habit of standing still, and as it
were pointing, when he came near an antiquity; his master candidly
owning that several things which would have escaped him had been
detected by the antiquarian quadruped.[717] Fabretti’s principal works
are three dissertations on the Roman aqueducts, and on the Trajan
column. Little, says Fabroni, was known before about the Roman galleys
or their naval affairs in general.[718] Fabretti was the first who
reduced lapidary remains into classes, and arranged them so as to
illustrate each other; a method, says one of his most distinguished
successors, which has laid the foundations of the science.[719] A
profusion of collateral learning is mingled with the main stream of
all his investigations.

     [714] Salfi, vol. xi., 364.

     [715] Fabretti’s life has been written by two very favourable
     biographers, Fabroni, in Vitæ Italorum, vol. vi., and Visconti, in
     the Biography Universelle.

     [716] Fabroni, p. 187, Biogr. Univ.

     [717] Fabroni, p. 192.

     [718] P. 201.

     [719] Biogr. Univ.

|Numismatics. Spanheim--Vaillant.|

22. No one had ever come to the study of medals with such stores of
erudition as Ezekiel Spanheim. The earlier writers on the subject,
Vico, Erizzo, Angeloni, were not comparable to him, and had rather
dwelt on the genuineness or rarity of coins than on their usefulness
in illustrating history. Spanheim’s Dissertations on the Use of
Medals, the second improved edition of which appeared in 1671, first
connected them with the most profound and critical research into
antiquity.[720] Vaillant, travelling into the Levant, brought home
great treasures of Greek coinage, especially those of the Seleucidæ,
at once enriching the cabinets of the curious and establishing
historical truth. Medallic evidence, in fact, may be reckoned among
those checks upon the negligence of historians, which having been
retrieved by industrious antiquaries, have created that caution, and
discerning spirit which has been exercised in later times upon facts,
and which, beginning in scepticism, passes onward to a more rational,
and therefore more secure, conviction of what can fairly be proved.
Jobert, in 1692, consolidated the researches of Spanheim, Vaillant,
and other numismatic writers in his book, entitled La Science des
Medailles, a better system of the science than had been
published.[721]

     [720] Bibl. Choisie, vol. xxii.

     [721] Biogr. Univ.

|Chronology. Usher.|

23. It would, of course, not be difficult to fill these pages with
brief notices of other books that fall within the extensive range of
classical antiquity. But we have no space for more than a mere
enumeration, which would give little satisfaction. Chronology has
received some attention in former volumes. Our learned archbishop
Usher might there have been named, since the first part of his Annals
of the Old Testament, which goes down to the year of the world 3828,
was published in 1650. The second part followed in 1654. This has been
the chronology generally adopted by English historians, as well as by
Bossuet, Calmet, and Rollin, so that for many years it might be called
the orthodox scheme of Europe. No former annals of the world had been
so exact in marking dates and collating sacred history with profane.
It was, therefore, exceedingly convenient for those who, possessing no
sufficient leisure or learning for these inquiries, might very
reasonably confide in such authority.

|Pezron.|

24. Usher, like Scaliger and Petavius, had strictly conformed to the
Hebrew chronology in all scriptural dates. But it is well known that
the Septuagint version, and also the Samaritan Pentateuch, differ
greatly from the Hebrew and from each other, so that the age of the
world has nearly 2,000 years more antiquity in the Greek than in the
original text. Jerome had followed the latter in the Vulgate; and in
the seventeenth century it was usual to maintain the incorrupt purity
of the Hebrew manuscripts, so that when Pezron, in his Antiquité des
Temps Devoilée, 1687, attempted to establish the Septuagint
chronology, it excited a clamour in some of his church, as derogatory
to the Vulgate translation. Martianay defended the received
chronology, and the system of Pezron gained little favour in that
age.[722] It has since become more popular, chiefly, perhaps, on
account of the greater latitude it gives to speculations on the origin
of kingdoms and other events of the early world, which are certainly
somewhat cramped in the common reckoning. But the Septuagint
chronology is not free from its own difficulties, and the internal
evidence seems rather against its having been the original. Where two
must be wrong, it is possible that all three may be so; and the most
judicious inquirers into ancient history have of late been coming to
the opinion, that, with some few exceptions, there are no means of
establishing accurate dates before the Olympiads. While the more
ancient history itself, even in leading and important events, is so
precarious as must be acknowledged, there can be little confidence in
chronological schemes. They seem, however, to be very seducing, so
that those who enter upon the subject as sceptics become believers in
their own theory.

     [722] Biogr. Univ. arts. Pezron and Martianay. Bibliothèque
     Univ., xxiv., 103.

|Marsham.|

25. Among those who addressed their attention to particular portions
of chronology, Sir John Marsham ought to be mentioned. In his Canon
Chronicus Ægyptiacus, he attempted, as the learned were still more
prone than they are now, to reconcile conflicting authorities without
rejecting any. He is said to have first started the ingenious idea
that the Egyptian dynasties, stretching to such immense antiquity,
were not successive but collateral.[723] Marsham fell, like many
others after him, into the unfortunate mistake of confounding
Sesostris with Sesac. But in times when discoveries that Marsham could
not have anticipated, were yet at a distance, he is extolled by most
of those who had laboured, by help of the Greek and Hebrew writers
alone, to fix ancient history on a stable foundation, as the restorer
of the Egyptian annals.

     [723] Biograph. Britannica. I have some suspicion that this will
     be found in Lydiat.




                          CHAPTER XXVIII.

        HISTORY OF THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE FROM 1650 TO 1700.


                             SECT. I.

_Papal Power limited by the Gallican Church--Dupin--Fleury--Protestant
Controversy--Bossuet--His Assaults on Protestantism--Jansenism--
Progress of Arminianism in England--Trinitarian Controversy--Defences
of Christianity--Pascal’s Thoughts--Toleration--Boyle--Locke--French
Sermons--And English--Other Theological Works._

|Decline of papal influence.|

1. It has been observed in the last volume that while little or no
decline could be perceived in the general church of Rome at the
conclusion of that period which we then had before us, yet the papal
authority itself had lost a part of that formidable character, which,
through the Jesuits, and especially Bellarmin, it had some years
before assumed. This was now still more decidedly manifest; the
temporal power over kings was not, certainly, renounced, for Rome
never retracts anything; nor was it, perhaps, without Italian
Jesuits to write in its behalf; but the common consent of nations
rejected it so strenuously, that on no occasion has it been brought
forward by any accredited or eminent advocate. There was also a
growing disposition to control the court of Rome; the treaty of
Westphalia was concluded in utter disregard of her protest. But such
matters of history do not belong to us, when they do not bear a close
relation to the warfare of the pen. Some events there were which have
had a remarkable influence on the theological literature of France,
and indirectly of the rest of Europe.

|Dispute of Louis XIV. with Innocent XI.|

2. Louis XIV., more arrogant, in his earlier life, than bigoted,
became involved in a contest with Innocent XI., by a piece of his
usual despotism and contempt of his subjects’ rights. He extended in
1673 the ancient prerogative, called the regale, by which the king
enjoyed the revenues of vacant bishoprics, to all the kingdom, though
many Sees had been legally exempt from it. Two bishops appealed to the
pope, who interfered in their favour more peremptorily than the times
would permit. Innocent, it is but just to say, was maintaining the
fair rights of the church, rather than any claim of his own. But the
dispute took at length a different form. France was rich in prelates
of eminent worth, and among such, as is evident, the Cisalpine
theories had never lain dormant since the councils of Constance and
Basle. Louis convened the famous assembly of the Gallican clergy in
1682. Bossuet, who is said to have felt some apprehensions lest the
spirit of resistance should become one of rebellion, was appointed to
open this assembly; and his sermon on that occasion is among his most
splendid works. His posture was, indeed, magnificent: he stands
forward, not so much the minister of religion as her arbitrator; we
see him poise in his hands earth and heaven, and draw that boundary
line which neither was to transgress; he speaks the language of
reverential love towards the mother church, that of St. Peter, and the
fairest of her daughters to which he belongs, conciliating their
transient feud; yet, in this majestic tone which he assumes, no
arrogance betrays itself, no thought of himself as one endowed with
transcendant influence; he speaks for the church, and yet we feel that
he raises himself above those for whom he speaks.[724]

     [724] This sermon will be found in Œuvres de Bossuet, vol. ix.

|Four articles of 1682.|

3. Bossuet was finally entrusted with drawing up the four articles,
which the assembly, rather at the instigation, perhaps, of Colbert
than of its own accord, promulgated as the Gallican creed on the
limitations of papal authority. These declare: 1. That kings are
subject to no ecclesiastical power in temporals, nor can be deposed
directly or indirectly by the chiefs of the church; 2. That the
decrees of the council of Constance as to the papal authority are in
full force and ought to be observed; 3. That this authority can only
be exerted in conformity with the canons received in the Gallican
church; 4. That, though the pope has the principal share in
determining controversies of faith, and his decrees extend to all
churches, they are not absolutely final, unless the consent of the
catholic church be superadded. It appears that some bishops would have
willingly used stronger language, but Bossuet foresaw the risk of an
absolute schism. Even thus the Gallican church approached so nearly to
it that, the pope refusing the usual bulls to bishops nominated by the
king, according to the concordat, between thirty and forty Sees, at
last, were left vacant. No reconciliation was effected till 1693, in
the pontificate of Innocent XII. It is to be observed, whether the
French writers slur this over or not, that the pope gained the honours
of war; the bishops who had sat in the assembly of 1682, writing
separately letters which have the appearance of regretting, if not
retracting, what they had done. These were, however, worded with
intentional equivocation; and as the court of Rome yields to none in
suspecting the subterfuges of words, it is plain that it contented
itself with an exterior humiliation of its adversaries. The old
question of the regale was tacitly abandoned; Louis enjoyed all he had
desired, and Rome might justly think herself not bound to fight for
the privileges of those who had made her so bad a return.[725]

     [725] I have derived most of this account from Bausset’s life of
     Bossuet, vol. ii. Both the bishop and his biographer shuffle a
     good deal about the letter of the Gallican prelates in 1693. But
     when the Roman legions had passed under the yoke at the Caudine
     forks, they were ready to take up arms again.

|Dupin on the ancient discipline.|

5. The doctrine of the four articles gained ground perhaps in the
church of France through a work of great boldness, and deriving
authority from the learning and judgment of its author, Dupin.
In the height of the contest, while many were considering how far the
Gallican church might dispense with the institution of bishops at
Rome, that point in the established system which evidently secured the
victory to their antagonist, in the year 1686, he published a treatise
on the ancient discipline of the church. It is written in Latin, which
he probably chose as less obnoxious than his own language. It may be
true, which I cannot affirm or deny, that each position in this work
had been advanced before; but the general tone seems undoubtedly more
adverse to the papal supremacy than any book which could have come
from a man of reputed orthodoxy. It tends, notwithstanding a few
necessary admissions, to represent almost all that can be called power
or jurisdiction in the see of Rome as acquired, if not abusive, and
would leave, in a practical sense, no real pope at all; mere primacy
being a trifle, and even the right of interfering by admonition being
of no great value, when there was no definite obligation to obey. The
principle of Dupin is that the church having reached her perfection in
the fourth century, we should endeavour, as far as circumstances will
admit, to restore the discipline of that age. But, even in the
Gallican church, it has generally been held that he has urged his
argument farther than is consistent with a necessary subordination to
Rome.[726]

     [726] Bibliothèque Universelle, vi., 109. The book is very clear,
     concise, and learned, so that it is worth reading through by
     those who would understand such matters. I have not observed that
     it is much quoted by English writers.

|Dupin’s Ecclesiastical Library.|

6. In the same year, Dupin published the first volume of a more
celebrated work, his Nouvelle Bibliothèque des Auteurs
Ecclesiastiques, a complete history of theological literature, at
least within the limits of the church, which, in a long series of
volumes, he finally brought down to the close of the seventeenth
century. It is unquestionably the most standard work of that kind
extant, whatever deficiencies may have been found in its execution.
The immense erudition requisite for such an undertaking may have
rendered it inevitable to take some things at second hand, or to fall
into some errors; and we may add other causes less necessary, the
youth of the writer in the first volumes, and the rapidity with which
they appeared. Integrity, love of truth, and moderation, distinguish
this ecclesiastical history, perhaps beyond any other. Dupin is often
near the frontier of orthodoxy, but he is careful, even in the eyes of
jealous catholics, not quite to overstep it. This work was soon
translated into English, and furnished a large part of such knowledge
on the subject as our own divines possessed. His free way of speaking,
however, on the Roman supremacy and some other points, excited the
animadversion of more rigid persons, and among others of Bossuet, who
stood on his own vantage-ground, ready to strike on every side. The
most impartial critics have been of Dupin’s mind; but Bossuet, like
all dogmatic champions Of orthodoxy, never sought truth by an
analytical process of investigation, assuming his own possession of it
as an axiom in the controversy.[727]

     [727] Bibliothèque Universelle, iii. 39, vii. 335, xxii. 120.
     Biogr. Universelle. Œuvres de Bossuet, vol. xxx. Dupin seems not
     to have held the superiority of bishops to priests jure divino,
     which nettles our man of Meaux. Ces grands critiques sont peu
     favorables aux supériorités ecclésiastiques, et n’aiment guère
     plus celles des evêques que celle du pape, p. 491.

|Fleury’s Ecclesiastical History.|

7. Dupin was followed a few years afterwards by one not his superior
in learning and candour (though deficient in neither), but in skill of
narration and beauty of style, Claude Fleury. The first volume of his
Ecclesiastical History came forth in 1691; but a part only of the long
series falls within this century. The learning of Fleury has been said
to be frequently not original; and his prolixity to be too great for
an elementary historian. The former is only blameable when he has
concealed his immediate authorities; few works of great magnitude have
been written wholly from the prime sources; with regard to his
diffuseness, it is very convenient to those who want access to the
original writers, or leisure to collate them. Fleury has been called
by some credulous and uncritical; but he is esteemed faithful,
moderate, and more respectful or cautious than Dupin. Yet many of his
volumes are a continual protest against the vices and ambition of the
mediæval popes, and his Ecclesiastical History must be reckoned among
the causes of that estrangement, in spirit and affection, from the
court of Rome which leavens the literature of France in the eighteenth
century.

|His Dissertations.|

8. The dissertations of Fleury, interspersed with his history, were
more generally read and more conspicuously excellent. Concise, but
neither dry nor superficial; luminous, yet appearing simple;
philosophical without the affectation of profundity, seizing
all that is most essential in their subject without the tediousness of
detail or the pedantry of quotation; written, above all, with that
clearness, that ease, that unaffected purity of taste, which belong to
the French style of that best age, they present a contrast not only to
the inferior writings on philosophical history with which our age
abounds, but, in some respects, even to the best. It cannot be a crime
that these dissertations contain a good deal which, after more than a
century’s labour in historical inquiry, has become more familiar than
it was.

|Protestant Controversy in France.|

9. The French protestants, notwithstanding their disarmed condition,
were not, I apprehend, much oppressed under Richelieu and Mazarin. But
soon afterwards an eagerness to accelerate what was taking place
through natural causes, their return into the church, brought on a
series of harassing edicts, which ended in the revocation of that of
Nantes. During this time, they were assailed by less terrible weapons,
yet such as required no ordinary strength to resist, the polemical
writings of the three greatest men in the church of France, Nicole,
Arnauld, and Bossuet. The two former were desirous to efface the
reproaches of an approximation to Calvinism, and of a disobedience to
the Catholic church, under which their Jansenist party was labouring.
Nicole began with a small treatise, entitled La Perpétuité de la Foi
de l’Eglise Catholique, touchant l’Eucharistie, in 1664. This aimed to
prove that the tenet of transubstantiation had been constant in the
church. Claude, the most able controvertist among the French
protestants, replied in the next year. This led to a much more
considerable work by Nicole and Arnauld conjointly, with the same
title as the former; nor was Claude slow in combating his
double-headed adversary. Nicole is said to have written the greater
portion of this second treatise, though it commonly bears the name of
his more illustrious colleague.[728]

     [728] Biogr. Univ.

|Bossuet’s exposition of Catholic faith.|

10. Both Arnauld and Nicole were eclipsed by the most distinguished
and successful advocate of the Catholic church, Bossuet. His
Exposition de la Foi Catholique was written in 1668, for the use of
two brothers of the Dangeau family; but having been communicated to
Turenne, the most eminent protestant that remained in France, it
contributed much to his conversion. It was published in 1671; and
though enlarged from the first sketch, does not exceed eighty pages in
octavo. Nothing can be more precise, more clear, or more free from all
circuity and detail than this little book; everything is put in the
most specious light; the authority of the ancient church, recognised
by the majority of protestants, is alone kept in sight. Bossuet limits
himself to doctrines established by the Council of Trent, leaving out
of the discussion not only all questionable points, but, what is
perhaps less fair, all rites and usages, however general, or
sanctioned by the regular discipline of the church, except so far as
formally approved by that council. Hence, he glides with a transient
step over the invocation of saints and the worship of images, but
presses with his usual dexterity on the inconsistencies and weak
concessions of his antagonists. The Calvinists, or some of them, had
employed a jargon of words about real presence, which he exposes with
admirable brevity and vigour.[729] Nor does he gain less advantage in
favour of tradition and church authority from the assumption of
somewhat similar claims by the same party. It has often been alledged
that the Exposition of Bossuet was not well received by many on his
own side. And for this there seems to be some foundation, though the
Protestant controvertists have made too much of the facts. It was
published at Rome in 1678, and approved in the most formal manner by
Innocent XI. the next year. But it must have been perceived to
separate the faith of the church, as it rested on dry propositions,
from the same faith living and embodied in the every-day worship of
the people.[730]

     [729] Bossuet observes that most other controversies are found to
     depend more on words than substance, and the difference becomes
     less the more they are examined; but in that of the eucharist the
     contrary is the case, since the Calvinists endeavour to
     accommodate their phraseology to the Catholics, while essentially
     they differ. Vol. xviii., p. 135.

     [730] The writings of Bossuet against the Protestants occupy nine
     volumes, xviii.-xxvi., in the great edition of his works.
     Versailles, 1816. The Exposition de la Foi is in the eighteenth.
     Bausset, in his life of Bossuet, appears to have refuted the
     exaggerations of many Protestants as to the ill reception of this
     little book at Rome. Yet there was a certain foundation for it.
     See Bibliothèque Universelle, vol. xi., p. 455.

|His conference with Claude.|

11. Bossuet was now the acknowledged champion of the Roman church in
France; Claude was in equal pre-eminence on the other side. These
great adversaries had a regular conference in 1678. Mademoiselle
de Duras, a protestant lady, like most others of her rank at
that time, was wavering about religion, and in her presence the
dispute was carried on. It entirely turned on church authority. The
arguments of Bossuet differed only from those which have often been
adduced by the spirit and conciseness with which he presses them. We
have his own account which of course gives himself the victory. It was
almost as much of course that the lady was converted; for it is seldom
that a woman can withstand the popular argument on that side, when she
has once gone far enough to admit the possibility of its truth by
giving it a hearing. Yet Bossuet deals in sophisms which, though
always in the mouths of those who call themselves orthodox, are
contemptible to such as know facts as well as logic. “I urged,” he
says, “in a few words what presumption it was to believe that we can
better understand the word of God than all the rest of the church, and
that nothing would thus prevent there being as many religions as
persons.”[731] But there can be no presumption in supposing that we
may understand anything better than one who has never examined it at
all; and if this rest of the church, so magnificently brought forward,
have commonly acted on Bossuet’s principle, and thought it
presumptuous to judge for themselves; if out of many millions of
persons a few only have deliberately reasoned on religion, and the
rest have been, like true zeros, nothing in themselves, but much in
sequence; if also, as is most frequently the case, this
presumptuousness is not the assertion of a paradox or novelty, but the
preference of one denomination of Christians, or of one tenet
maintained by respectable authority to another, we can only scorn the
emptiness, as well as resent the effrontery of this common-place that
rings so often in our ears. Certainly, reason is so far from
condemning a deference to the judgment of the wise and good, that
nothing is more irrational than to neglect it; but when this is
claimed for those whom we need not believe to have been wiser and
better than ourselves, nay, sometimes whom without vain-glory we may
esteem less, and that so as to set aside the real authority of the
most philosophical, unbiassed, and judicious of mankind, it is not
pride or presumption, but a sober use of our faculties that rejects
the jurisdiction.

     [731] Œuvres de Bossuet, xxiii., 290.

|Correspondence with Molanus and Leibnitz.|

12. Bossuet once more engaged in a similar discussion about 1691.
Among the German Lutherans there seems to have been for a long time a
lurking notion that on some terms or other a reconciliation with the
church of Rome could be effected; and this was most countenanced in
the dominions of Brunswick, and above all in the university of
Helmstadt. Leibnitz himself and Molanus, a Lutheran divine, were the
negotiators on that side with Bossuet. Their treaty, for such it was
apparently understood to be, was conducted by writing; and when we
read their papers on both sides, nothing is more remarkable than the
tone of superiority which the catholic plenipotentiary, if such he
could be deemed without powers from anyone but himself, has thought
fit to assume. No concession is offered, no tenet explained away; the
sacramental cup to the laity, and a permission to the Lutheran clergy
already married to retain their wives after their re-ordination, is
all that he holds forth; and in this, doubtless, he could have had no
authority from Rome. Bossuet could not veil his haughty countenance,
and his language is that of asperity and contemptuousness instead of
moderation. He dictates terms of surrender as to a besieged city when
the breach is already practicable, and hardly deigns to show his
clemency by granting the smallest favour to the garrison. It is
curious to see the strained constructions, the artifices of silence,
to which Molanus has recourse in order to make out some pretence for
his ignominious surrender. Leibnitz, with whom the correspondence
broke off in 1693, and was renewed again in 1699, seems not quite so
yielding as the other; and the last biographer of Bossuet suspects
that the German philosopher was insincere or tortuous in the
negotiation. If this were so, he must have entered upon it less of his
own accord, than to satisfy the princess Sophia, who, like many of her
family, had been a little wavering, till our act of settlement became
a true settlement to their faith. This bias of the court of Hanover is
intimated in several passages. The success of this treaty of union, or
rather of subjection, was as little to be expected as it was
desirable; the old spirit of Lutheranism was much worn out, yet there
must surely have been a determination to resist so unequal a
compromise. Rome negotiated as a conqueror with these beaten
Carthaginians; yet no one had beaten them but themselves.[732]

     [732] Œuvres de Bossuet, vols. xxv. and xxvi.

|His Variations of Protestant Churches.|

13. The warfare of the Roman church may be carried on either in a
series of conflicts on the various doctrines wherein the reformers
separated from her, or by one pitched battle on the main question of a
conclusive authority somewhere in the church. Bossuet’s temper, as
well as his inferiority in original learning, led him in preference to
the latter scheme of theological strategy. It was also manifestly that
course of argument which was most likely to persuade the unlearned. He
followed up the blow which he had already struck against Claude in his
famous work on the Variations of Protestant Churches. Never did his
genius find a subject more fit to display its characteristic
impetuosity, its arrogance, or its cutting and merciless spirit of
sarcasm. The weaknesses, the inconsistent evasions, the extravagances
of Luther, Zuingle, Calvin, and Beza pass, one after another, before
us, till these great reformers seem like victim prisoners to be hewn
down by the indignant prophet. That Bossuet is candid in statement, or
even faithful in quotation, I should much doubt; he gives the words of
his adversaries in his own French, and the references are not made to
any specified edition of their voluminous writings. The main point, as
he contends it to be, that the protestant churches (for he does not
confine this to persons), fluctuated much in the sixteenth century, is
sufficiently proved; but it remained to show that this was a reproach.
Those who have taken a different view from Bossuet may perhaps think
that a little more of this censure would have been well incurred; that
they have varied too little rather than too much; and that it is far
more difficult, even in controversy with the church of Rome, to
withstand the inference which their long creeds and confessions, as
well as the language too common with their theologians, have furnished
to her more ancient and catholic claim of infallibility, than to
vindicate those successive variations which are analogous to the
necessary course of human reason on all other subjects. The essential
fallacy of Romanism, that truth must ever exist visibly on earth, is
implied in the whole strain of Bossuet’s attack on the variances of
protestantism: it is evident that variance of opinion proves error
somewhere; but unless it can be shown that we have any certain method
of excluding it, this should only lead us to be more indulgent towards
the judgment of others, and less confident of our own. The notion of
an intrinsic moral criminality in religious error is at the root of
the whole argument; and till protestants are well rid of this, there
seems no secure mode of withstanding the effect which the vast weight
of authority asserted by the Latin church, even where it has not the
aid of the Eastern, must produce on timid and scrupulous minds.

|Anglican writings against Popery.|

14. In no period has the Anglican church stood up so powerfully in
defence of the protestant cause as in that before us. From the era of
the restoration to the close of the century the war was unremitting
and vigorous. And it is particularly to be remarked, that the
principal champions of the church of England threw off that ambiguous
syncretism which had displayed itself under the first Stuarts, and,
comparatively at least with their immediate predecessors, avoided
every admission which might facilitate a deceitful compromise. We can
only mention a few of the writers who signalised themselves in this
controversy.

|Taylor’s Dissuasive.|

15. Taylor’s Dissuasive from Popery was published in 1664; and in
this, his latest work, we find the same general strain of protestant
reasoning, the same rejection of all but scriptural authority, the
same free exposure of the inconsistencies and fallacies of tradition,
the same tendency to excite a sceptical feeling as to all except the
primary doctrines of religion, which had characterised the Liberty of
Prophesying. These are mixed, indeed, in Taylor’s manner, with a few
passages (they are, I think, but few), which singly taken might seem
to breathe not quite this spirit; but the tide flows for the most part
the same way, and it is evident that his mind had undergone no change.
The learning, in all his writings is profuse; but Taylor never leaves
me with the impression that he is exact and scrupulous in its
application. In one part of this Dissuasive from Popery, having been
reproached with some inconsistency, he has no scruple to avow that in
a former work he had employed weak arguments for a laudable
purpose.[733]

     [733] Taylor’s Works, x., 304. This is not surprising, as in his
     Ductor Dubitantium, xi., 484, he maintains the right of using
     arguments and authorities in controversy, which we do not believe
     to be valid.

|Barrow.--Stillingfleet.|

16. Barrow, not so extensively learned as Taylor, who had read rather
too much, but inferior, perhaps, even in that respect to hardly any
one else, and above him in closeness and strength of reasoning,
combated against Rome in many of his sermons, and especially
in a long treatise on the papal supremacy. Stillingfleet followed, a
man deeply versed in ecclesiastical antiquity, of an argumentative
mind, excellently fitted for polemical dispute, but perhaps by those
habits of his life rendered too much of an advocate to satisfy an
impartial reader. In the critical reign of James II., he may be
considered as the leader on the protestant side; but Wake, Tillotson,
and several more would deserve mention in a fuller history of
ecclesiastical literature.

|Jansenius.|

17. The controversies always smouldering in the Church of Rome,
sometimes breaking into flame, to which the Anti-Pelagian writings of
Augustin had originally given birth, have been slightly touched in our
former volumes. It has been seen that the rigidly predestinarian
theories had been condemned by the court of Rome in Baius, that the
opposite doctrine of Molina had narrowly escaped censure, that it was
safest to abstain from any language not verbally that of the church,
or of Augustin whom the church held incontrovertible. But now a more
serious and celebrated controversy, that of the Jansenists, pierced,
as it were, to the heart of the church. It arose before the middle of
the century. Jansenius, bishop of Ypres, in his Augustinus, published,
after his death, in 1640, gave, as he professed, a faithful statement
of the tenets of that father. “We do not inquire,” he says, “what men
ought to believe on the powers of human nature, or on the grace and
predestination of God, but what Augustin once preached with the
approbation of the church, and has consigned to writing in many of his
works.” This book is in three parts: the first containing a history of
the Pelagian controversy, the second and third an exposition of the
tenets of Augustin. Jansenius does not, however, confine himself so
much to mere analysis, but that he attacks the Jesuits Lessius and
Molina, and even reflects on the bull of Pius V. condemning Baius,
which he cannot wholly approve.[734]

     [734] A very copious history of Jansenism, taking it up from the
     council of Trent, will be found in the fourteenth volume of the
     Bibliothèque Universelle, p. 139-398, from which Mosheim has
     derived most of what we read in his Ecclesiastical History. And
     the History of Port-Royal was written by Racine, in so
     perspicuous and neat a style, that, though we may hardly think
     with Olivet that it places him as high in prose writing as his
     tragedies do in verse, it entitles him to rank in the list, not a
     very long one, of those who have succeeded in both. Is it not
     probable, that in some scenes of Athalie he had Port-Royal before
     his eyes? The history and the tragedy were written about the same
     time. Racine, it is rather remarkable, had entered the field
     against Nicole in 1666, chiefly indeed to defend theatrical
     representations, but not without many sarcasms against Jansenism.

|Condemnation of his Augustinus in France.|

18. Richelieu, who is said to have retained some animosity against
Jansenius on account of a book called Mars Gallicus, which he had
written on the side of his sovereign the king of Spain, designed to
obtain the condemnation of the Augustinus by the French clergy. The
Jesuits, therefore, had gained ground so far that the doctrines of
Augustin were out of fashion, though few besides themselves ventured
to reject his nominal authority. It is certainly clear that Jansenius
offended the greater part of the church. But he had some powerful
advocates, and especially Antony Arnauld, the most renowned of a
family long conspicuous for eloquence, for piety, and for opposition
to the Jesuits. In 1649, after several years of obscure dispute,
Cornet, syndic of the faculty of Theology in the University of Paris,
brought forward for censure seven propositions, five of which became
afterwards so famous, without saying that they were found in the work
of Jansenius. The faculty condemned them, though it had never been
reckoned favourable to the Jesuits; a presumption that they were at
least expressed in a manner repugnant to the prevalent doctrine. Yet
Le Clerc, to whose excellent account of this controversy in the
fourteenth volume of the Bibliothèque Universelle we are chiefly
indebted, declares his own opinion that there may be some ambiguity in
the style of the first, but that the other four are decidedly
conformable to the theology of Augustin.

|And at Rome.|

19. The Jesuits now took the course of calling in the authority of
Rome. They pressed Innocent X. to condemn the five propositions, which
were maintained by some doctors in France. It is not the policy of
that court to compromise so delicate a possession as infallibility by
bringing it to the test of that personal judgment, which is of
necessity the arbiter of each man’s own obedience. The popes have in
fact rarely taken a part, independently of councils, in these school
debates. The bull of Pius V., a man too zealous by character to regard
prudence, in which he condemned many tenets of Baius, had not, nor
could it, give satisfaction to those who saw with their own eyes that
it swerved from the Augustinian theory. Innocent was, at first,
unwilling to meddle with a subject which, as he owned to a friend, he
did not understand. But after hearing some discussions, he grew more
confident of his knowledge, which he ascribed, as in duty bound, to
the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, and went so heartily along with the
Anti-Jansenists, that he refused to hear the deputies of the other
party. On the 31st of May, 1653, he condemned the five propositions,
four as erroneous, and the fifth in stronger language; declaring,
however, not in the bull, but orally, that he did not condemn the
tenet of efficacious grace (which all the Dominicans held), nor the
doctrine of Saint Augustin, which was, and ever would be that of the
church.

|The Jansenists take a distinction.|

20. The Jansenists were not bold enough to hint that they did not
acknowledge the infallibility of the pope in an express and positive
declaration. Even if they had done so, they had an evident recognition
of this censure of the five propositions by their own church, and
might dread its being so generally received as to give the sanction
which no catholic can withstand. They had recourse, unfortunately, to
a subterfuge which put them in the wrong. They admitted that the
propositions were false, but denied that they could be found in the
book of Jansenius. Thus, each party was at issue on a matter of fact,
and each erroneously, according at least to the judgment of the most
learned and impartial protestants. The five propositions express the
doctrine of Augustin himself; and if they do this, we can hardly doubt
that they express that of Jansenius. In a short time, this ground of
evasion was taken from their party. An Assembly of French prelates in
the first place, and afterwards Alexander VII., successor of Innocent X.,
condemned the propositions, as in Jansenius, and in the sense
intended by Jansenius.

|And are persecuted.|

21. The Jansenists were now driven to the wall: the Sorbonne in 1655,
in consequence of some propositions of Arnauld, expelled him from the
theological faculty; a formulary was drawn up to be signed by the
clergy, condemning the propositions of Jansenius, which was finally
established in 1661; and those who refused, even nuns, underwent a
harassing persecution. The most striking instance of this, which still
retains an historical character, was the dissolution of the famous
convent of Port-Royal, over which Angelica Arnauld, sister of the
great advocate of Jansenism, had long presided with signal reputation.
This nunnery was at Paris, having been removed in 1644 from an ancient
Cistertian convent of the same name, about six leagues distant, and
called for distinction Port-Royal des Champs. To this now unfrequented
building some of the most eminent men repaired for study, whose
writings being anonymously published, have been usually known by the
name of their residence. Arnauld, Pascal, Nicole, Lancelot, De Sacy,
are among the Messieurs de Port-Royal, an appellation so glorious in
the seventeenth century. The Jansenists now took a distinction, very
reasonable, as it seems, in its nature, between the authority which
asserts or denies a proposition, and that which does the like as to a
fact. They refused to the pope, that is, in this instance, to the
church, the latter infallibility. We cannot prosecute this part of
ecclesiastical history farther; if writings of any literary importance
had been produced by the controversy, they would demand our attention;
but this does not appear to have been the case. The controversy
between Arnauld and Malebranche may perhaps be an exception. The
latter, carried forward by his original genius, attempted to deal with
the doctrines of theology as with metaphysical problems, in his Traité
de la Nature et de la Grace. Arnauld animadverted on this in his
Réflexions Philosophiques et Théologiques. Malebranche replied in
Lettres du Père Malebranche à un de ses Amis. This was published in
1686, and the controversy between such eminent masters of abstruse
reasoning began to excite attention. Malebranche seems to have retired
first from the field. His antagonist had great advantages in the
dispute, according to received systems of theology, with which he was
much more conversant, and perhaps on the whole in the philosophical
part of the question. This however cannot be reckoned entirely a
Jansenistic controversy, though it involved those perilous
difficulties which had raised that flame.[735]

     [735] An account of this controversy will be found at length in
     the second volume of the Bibliothèque Universelle.

|Progress of Arminianism.|

|Courcelles.|

22. The credit of Augustin was now as much shaken in the protestant,
as in the catholic regions of Europe. Episcopius had given to the
Remonstrant party a reputation which no sect so inconsiderable in its
separate character has ever possessed. The Dutch Arminians were at no
time numerous; they took no hold of the people; they had few
churches, and though not persecuted by the lenient policy of Holland,
were still under the ban of an orthodox clergy, as exclusive and
bigoted as before. But their writings circulated over Europe, and made
a silent impression on the adverse party. It became less usual to
bring forward the Augustinian hypothesis in prominent or unequivocal
language. Courcelles, born at Geneva, and the successor of Episcopius
in the Remonstrant congregation at Amsterdam, with less genius than
his predecessor, had, perhaps, a more extensive knowledge of
ecclesiastical antiquity. His works were much in esteem with the
theologians of that way of thinking; but they have not fallen in my
way.

|Limborch.|

23. Limborch, great-nephew of Episcopius, seems more than any other
Arminian divine to have inherited his mantle. His most important work
is the Theologia Christiana, containing a system of divinity and
morals, in seven books and more than 900 pages, published in 1686. It
is the fullest delineation of the Arminian scheme; but as the
Arminians were by their principle free inquirers, and not, like other
churches, bondsmen of symbolical formularies, no one book can strictly
be taken as their representative. The tenets of Limborch, are, in the
majority of disputable points, such as impartial men have generally
found in the primitive or Ante-Nicene fathers; but in some he probably
deviates from them, steering far away from all that the protestants of
the Swiss reform had abandoned as superstitious or unintelligible.

|Le Clerc.|

24. John Le Clerc, in the same relationship to Courcelles that
Limborch was to Episcopius, and like him transplanted from Geneva to
the more liberal air, at that time, of the United Provinces, claims a
high place among the Dutch Arminians; for though he did not maintain
their cause either in systematic or polemical writings, his commentary
on the Old Testament, and still more his excellent and celebrated
reviews, the Bibliothèques Universelle, Choisie, and Ancienne et
Moderne, must be reckoned a perpetual combat on that side. These
journals enjoyed an extraordinary influence over Europe, and deserved
to enjoy it. Le Clerc is generally temperate, judicious, appeals to no
passion, displays a very extensive, though not perhaps a very deep
erudition, lies in wait for the weakness and temerity of those he
reviews, thus sometimes gaining the advantage over more learned men
than himself. He would have been a perfect master of that sort of
criticism, then newly current in literature, if he could have
repressed an irritability in matters personal to himself, and a degree
of prejudice against the Romish writers, or perhaps those styled
orthodox in general, which sometimes disturbs the phlegmatic
steadiness with which a good reviewer, like a practised sportsman,
brings down his game.[736]

     [736] Bishop Monk observes that Le Clerc “seems to have been the
     first person who understood the power which may be exercised over
     literature by a reviewer.” Life of Bentley, p. 209. This may be
     true, especially as he was nearly the first reviewer, and
     certainly better than his predecessors. But this remark is
     followed by a sarcastic animadversion upon Le Clerc’s ignorance
     of Greek metres, and by the severe assertion, that “by an
     absolute system of terror, he made himself a despot in the
     republic of letters.” The former is so far true, that he neither
     understood the Greek metres as well as Bentley and Porson, or
     those who have trod in their steps, nor supposed that all
     learning was concentred in that knowledge, as we seemed in danger
     of supposing within my memory. The latter is not warranted by the
     general character of Le Clerc’s criticisms, which, where he has
     no personal quarrel, is temperate and moderate, neither traducing
     men, nor imputing motives; and consequently unlike certain
     periodical criticism of a later date.

|Sancroft’s Fur Prædestinatus.|

25. The most remarkable progress made by the Arminian theology was in
England. This had begun under James and Charles; but it was then taken
up in conjunction with that patristic learning, which adopted the
fourth and fifth centuries as the standard of orthodox faith. Perhaps
the first very bold and unambiguous attack on the Calvinistic system
which we shall mention came from this quarter. This was an anonymous
Latin pamphlet, entitled Fur Prædestinatus, published in 1651, and
generally ascribed to Sancroft, at that time a young man. It is a
dialogue between a thief under sentence of death and his attendant
minister, wherein the former insists upon his assurance of being
predestinated to salvation. In this idea there is nothing but what is
sufficiently obvious; but the dialogue is conducted with some spirit
and vivacity. Every position in the thief’s mouth is taken from
eminent Calvinistic writers, and what is chiefly worth notice, is that
Sancroft, for the first time, has ventured to arraign the greatest
heroes of the Reformation; not only Calvin, Beza, and Zanchius, but
who had been hitherto spared, Luther and Zuingle. It was in the nature
of a manifesto from the Arminian party, that they would not defer in
future to any modern authority.[737]

     [737] The Fur Prædestinatus is reprinted in D’Oyly’s Life of
     Sancroft. It is much the best proof of ability that the worthy
     archbishop ever gave.

|Arminianism in England.|

26. The loyal Anglican clergy, suffering persecution at the hands of
Calvinistic sectaries, might be naturally expected to cherish the
opposite principles. These are manifest in the sermons of Barrow,
rather perhaps by his silence than his tone, and more explicitly in
those of South. But many exceptions might be found among leading men,
such as Sanderson; while in an opposite quarter, among the younger
generation who had conformed to the times, arose a more formidable
spirit of Arminianism, which changed the face of the English church.
This was displayed among those who, just about the epoch of the
Restoration, were denominated Latitude-men, or more commonly
Latitudinarians, trained in the principles of Episcopius and
Chillingworth, strongly averse to every compromise with popery, and
thus distinguished from the high church party, learned rather in
profane philosophy than in the fathers, more full of Plato and
Plotinus than Jerome or Chrysostom, great maintainers of natural
religion and of the eternal laws of morality, not very solicitous
about systems of orthodoxy, and limiting very considerably beyond the
notions of former ages, the fundamental tenets of Christianity. This
is given as a general character, but varying in the degree of its
application to particular persons. Burnet enumerates as the chief of
this body of men, More, Cudworth, Whichcot, Tillotson, Stillingfleet;
some, especially the last, more tenacious of the authority of the
fathers and of the church than others, but all concurring in the
adoption of an Arminian theology.[738] This became so predominant
before the revolution, that few English divines of eminence remained,
who so much as endeavoured to steer a middle course, or to dissemble
their renunciation of the doctrines which had been sanctioned at the
synod of Dort by the delegates of their church. “The Theological
Institutions of Episcopius,” says a contemporary writer, “were at that
time (1685) generally in the hands of our students of divinity in both
universities, as the best system of divinity that had appeared.”[739]
And he proceeds afterwards: “The Remonstrant writers, among whom there
were men of excellent learning and parts, had now acquired a
considerable reputation in our universities by the means of some great
men among us.” This testimony seems irresistible; and as one hundred
years before the Institutes of Calvin were read in the same academical
studies, we must own, unless Calvin and Episcopius shall be maintained
to have held the same tenets, that Bossuet might have added a chapter
to the Variations of Protestant Churches.

     [738] Burnet’s History of His Own Times, i., 187. Account of the
     new sect called Latitudinarians, in the collection of tracts,
     entitled Phœnix, vol. ii., p. 499.

     [739] Nelson’s Life of Bull, in Bull’s Works, vol. viii., p. 257.

|Bull’s Harmonia Apostolica.|

27. The methods adopted in order to subvert the Augustinian theology
were sometimes direct, by explicit controversy, or by an opposite
train of scriptural interpretation in regular commentaries; more
frequently perhaps indirect, by inculcating moral duties, and
especially by magnifying the law of nature. Among the first class, the
Harmonia Apostolica of Bull seems to be reckoned the principal work of
this period. It was published in 1669, and was fiercely encountered at
first, not merely by the presbyterian party, but by many of the
church, the Lutheran tenets as to justification by faith being still
deemed orthodox. Bull establishes as the groundwork of his harmony
between the apostles Paul and James, on a subject where their language
apparently clashes in terms, that we are to interpret St. Paul by St.
James, and not St. James by St. Paul, because the latest authority,
and that which may be presumed to have explained what was obscure in
the former, ought to prevail;[740] a rule doubtless applicable in many
cases, whatever it may be in this. It, at least, turned to his
advantage; but it was not so easy for him to reconcile his opinions
with those of the reformers, or with the Anglican articles.

     [740] Nelson’s Life of Bull.

|Hammond--Locke--Wilkins.|

28. The Paraphrase and Annotations of Hammond on the New Testament,
give a different colour to the Epistles of St. Paul, from that which
they display in the hands of Beza and the other theologians of the
sixteenth century. And the name of Hammond stood so high with the
Anglican clergy, that he naturally turned the tide of interpretation
his own way. The writings of Fowler, Wilkins, and Whichcot are chiefly
intended to exhibit the moral lustre of Christianity, and to
magnify the importance of virtuous life. The first of these ventured
on an express defence of Latitudinarianism; but in general those to
whom their adversaries gave that name declined the invidious
prejudices which they knew to be associated with it. Wilkins left an
unfinished work on the Principles and Duties of Natural Religion.
Twelve chapters only, about half the volume, were ready for the press
at his death; the rest was compiled by Tillotson as well as the
materials left by the author would allow; and the expressions employed
lead us to believe that much was due to the editor. The latter’s
preface strongly presses the separate obligation of natural religion,
upon which both the disciples of Hobbes, and many of the less learned
sectaries, were at issue with him.

|Socinians in England.|

29. We do not find much of importance written on the Trinitarian
controversy before the middle of the seventeenth century, except by
the Socinians themselves. But the case was now very different. Though
the Polish or rather German Unitarians did not produce more
distinguished men than before, they came more forward in the field of
dispute. Finally, expelled from Poland in 1660, they sought refuge in
more learned, as well as more tolerant, regions, and especially in the
genial soil of religious liberty, the United Provinces. Even here,
they enjoyed no avowed toleration; but the press, with a very slight
concealment of place, under the attractive words, Eleutheropolis,
Irenopolis, or Freystadt, was ready to serve them with its natural
impartiality. They began to make a slight progress in England; the
writings of Biddle were such as even Cromwell, though habitually
tolerant, did not overlook; the author underwent an imprisonment both
at that time and after the Restoration. In general, the Unitarian
writers preserved a disguise. Milton’s treatise, not long since
brought to light, goes on the Arian hypothesis, which had probably
been countenanced by some others. It became common, in the reign of
Charles II., for the English divines to attack the Anti-Trinitarians
of each denomination.

|Bull’s Defensio Fidei Nicenæ.|

30. An epoch is supposed to have been made in this controversy, by the
famous work of Bull, Defensio Fidei Nicenæ. This was not primarily
directed against the heterodox party. In the Dogmata Theologica of
Petavius, published in 1644, that learned Jesuit, laboriously
compiling passages from the fathers, had come to the conclusion that
most of those before the Nicene council had seemed, by their language,
to run into nearly the same heresy as that which the council had
condemned, and this inference appeared to rest on a long series of
quotations. The Arminian Courcelles, and even the English philosopher,
Cudworth, the latter of whom was as little suspected of a heterodox
leaning, as Petavius himself, had come to the same result; so that a
considerable triumph was given to the Arians, in which the Socinians,
perhaps at that time more numerous, seem to have thought themselves
entitled to partake. Bull had, therefore, to contend with authorities
not to be despised by the learned.

31. The Defensio Fidei Nicenæ was published in 1685. It did not want
answerers in England; but it obtained a great reputation, and an
assembly of the French clergy, through the influence of Bossuet,
returned thanks to the author. It was, indeed, evident that Petavius,
though he had certainly formed his opinion with perfect honesty, was
preparing the way for an inference, that if the primitive fathers
could be heterodox on a point of so great magnitude, we must look for
infallibility, not in them nor in the diffusive church, but in general
councils presided over by the pope, or ultimately in the pope himself.
This, though not unsuitable to the notions of some Jesuits, was
diametrically opposite to the principles of the Gallican church, which
professed to repose on a perpetual and catholic tradition.

|Not satisfactory to all.|

32. Notwithstanding the popularity of this defence of the Nicene
faith, and the learning it displays, the author was far from ending
the controversy, or from satisfying all his readers. It was alledged
that he does not meet the question with which he deals; that the word
ὁμοουσιος [homoousios], being almost new at the time of the council,
and being obscure and metaphysical in itself, required a precise
definition to make the reader see his way before him, or, at least,
one better than Bull has given, which the adversary might probably
adopt without much scruple; that the passages adduced from the fathers
are often insufficient for his purpose; that he confounds the eternal
essence with the eternal personality or distinctness of the Logos,
though well aware, of course, that many of the early writers employed
different names (ενδιαθετος [endiathetos] and προφορικος
[prophorikos]) for these; and that he does not repel some of the
passages which can hardly bear an orthodox interpretation. It was
urged, moreover, that his own hypothesis, taken altogether, is but a
palliated Arianism; that by insisting, for more than one hundred
pages, on the subordination of the Son to the Father, he came close to
what since has borne that name, though it might not be precisely what
had been condemned at Nice, and could not be reconciled with the
Athanasian creed, except by such an interpretation of the latter as is
neither probable, nor has been reputed orthodox.

|Mystics.|

|Fenelon.|

33. Among the theological writers of the Roman church, and in a less
degree among protestants, there has always been a class not
inconsiderable for numbers or for influence, generally denominated
mystics, or, when their language has been more unmeasured, enthusiasts
and fanatics. These may be distinguished into two kinds, though it
must readily be understood that they may often run much into one
another; the first believing that the soul, by immediate communion
with the Deity, receives a peculiar illumination and knowledge of
truths, not cognisable by the understanding; the second less
solicitous about intellectual than moral light, and aiming at such
pure contemplation of the attributes of God, and such an intimate
perception of spiritual life as may end in a sort of absorption into
the divine essence. But I should not probably have alluded to any
writings of this description, if the two most conspicuous luminaries
of the French church, Bossuet and Fenelon, had not clashed with each
other in that famous controversy of Quietism, to which the
enthusiastic writings of Madame Guyon gave birth. The “Maximes des
Saints” of Fenelon I have never seen: the editions of his entire works
as they affect to be, do not include what the church has condemned;
and the original book has probably become scarce. Fenelon appears to
have been treated by his friend, shall we call him? or rival, with
remarkable harshness. Bossuet might have felt some jealousy at the
rapid elevation of the archbishop of Cambray: but we need not have
recourse to this; the rigour of orthodoxy in a temper like his will
account for all. There could be little doubt but that many saints
honoured by the church had uttered things quite as strong as any that
Fenelon’s work contained. Bossuet however succeeded in obtaining its
condemnation at Rome. Fenelon was of the second class above-mentioned
among the mystics, and seems to have been absolutely free from such
pretences to illumination as we find in Behmen or Barclay. The pure
disinterested love of God was the main spring of his religious theory.
The Divine Œconomy of Poiret, 1686, and the writings of a German
quietist, Spener, do not require any particular mention.[741]

     [741] Bibl. Universelle, v., 412; xvi., 224.

|Change in the character of theological literature.|

34. This later period of the seventeenth century was marked by an
increasing boldness in religious inquiry; we find more disregard of
authority, more disposition to question received tenets, a more
suspicious criticism, both as to the genuineness and the credibility
of ancient writings, a more ardent love of truth, that is, of
perceiving and understanding what is true, instead of presuming that
we possess it without any understanding at all. Much of this was
associated, no doubt, with the other revolutions in literary opinion;
with the philosophy of Bacon, Descartes, Gassendi, Hobbes, Bayle, and
Locke, with the spirit which a slightly learned, yet acute generation
of men rather conversant with the world than with libraries, to whom
the appeal in modern languages must be made, was sure to breathe, with
that incessant reference to proof which the physical sciences taught
mankind to demand. Hence, quotations are comparatively rare in the
theological writings of this age; they are better reduced to their due
office of testimony as to fact, sometimes of illustration or better
statement of an argument, but not so much alledged as argument or
authority in themselves. Even those who combated on the side of
established doctrines were compelled to argue more from themselves,
lest the public, their umpire, should reject, with an opposite
prejudice, what had enslaved the prejudices of their fathers.

|Freedom of many writings.|

35. It is well known that a disbelief in Christianity became very
frequent about this time. Several books more or less appear to
indicate this spirit, but the charge has often been made with no
sufficient reason. Of Hobbes, enough has been already said, and
Spinosa’s place as a metaphysician will be in the next chapter. His
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, published anonymously at Amsterdam,
with the false date of Hamburg, in 1670, contains many observations on
the Old Testament, which, though they do not really affect its general
authenticity and truth, clashed with the commonly received opinion of
its absolute inspiration. Some of these remarks were, if not borrowed,
at least repeated in a book of more celebrity, Sentimens de quelques
Theologiens d’Hollande sur l’Histoire Critique du Père Simon. This
work is written by Le Clerc, but it has been doubted whether he is the
author of some acute, but hardy, remarks on the inspiration of
scripture which it contains. These, however, must be presumed to
coincide for the most part with his own opinion; but he has afterwards
declared his dissent from the hypothesis contained in these volumes,
that Moses was not the author of the Pentateuch. The Archæologia
Philosophica of Thomas Burnet is intended to question the literal
history of the creation and fall. But few will pretend that either Le
Clerc or Burnet were disbelievers in revelation.

|Thoughts of Pascal.|

36. Among those who sustained the truth of Christianity by argument
rather than authority, the first place both in order of time and of
excellence is due to Pascal, though his Thoughts were not published
till 1670, some years after his death, and, in the first edition, not
without suppressions. They have been supposed to be fragments of a
more systematic work that he had planned, or perhaps only reflections
committed to paper, with no design of publication in their actual
form. But, as is generally the case with works of genius we do not
easily persuade ourselves that they could have been improved by any
such alteration as would have destroyed their type. They are at
present bound together by a real coherence through the predominant
character of the reasonings and sentiments, and give us everything
that we could desire in a more regular treatise without the tedious
verbosity which regularity is apt to produce. The style is not so
polished as in the Provincial Letters, and the sentences are sometimes
ill constructed and elliptical. Passages almost transcribed from
Montaigne have been published by careless editors as Pascal’s.

37. But the Thoughts of Pascal are to be ranked, as a monument of his
genius, above the Provincial Letters, though some have asserted the
contrary. They burn with an intense light; condensed in expression,
sublime, energetic, rapid, they hurry away the reader till he is
scarcely able or willing to distinguish the sophisms from the truth
they contain. For that many of them are incapable of bearing a calm
scrutiny is very manifest to those who apply such a test. The notes of
Voltaire, though always intended to detract, are sometimes
unanswerable; but the splendour of Pascal’s eloquence absolutely
annihilates, in effect on the general reader, even this antagonist.

38. Pascal had probably not read very largely, which has given an
ampler sweep to his genius. Except the Bible and the writings of
Augustin, the book that seems most to have attracted him was the
Essays of Montaigne. Yet no men could be more unlike in personal
dispositions and in the cast of their intellect. But Pascal, though
abhorring the religious and moral carelessness of Montaigne, found
much that fell in with his own reflections in the contempt of human
opinions, the perpetual humbling of human reason, which runs through
the bold and original work of his predecessor. He quotes no book so
frequently; and, indeed, except Epictetus, and once or twice
Descartes, he hardly quotes any other at all. Pascal was too acute a
geometer, and too sincere a lover of truth to countenance the sophisms
of mere Pyrrhonism; but, like many theological writers, in exalting
faith he does not always give reason her value, and furnishes weapons
which the sceptic might employ against himself. It has been said that
he denies the validity of the proofs of natural religion. This seems
to be in some measure an error, founded on mistaking the objections he
puts in the mouths of unbelievers for his own. But it must, I think,
be admitted that his arguments for the being of a God are too often
_à tutiori_, that it is the safer side to take.

39. The Thoughts of Pascal on miracles abound in proofs of his
acuteness and originality; an originality much more striking when we
recollect that the subject had not been discussed as it has since, but
with an intermixture of some sophistical and questionable positions.
Several of them have a secret reference to the famous cure of his
niece, Mademoiselle Perier, by the holy thorn. But he is embarrassed
with the difficult question whether miraculous events are sure tests
of the doctrine they support, and is not wholly consistent in his
reasoning, or satisfactory in his distinctions. I am unable to
pronounce whether Pascal’s other observations on the rational proofs
of Christianity are as original as they are frequently ingenious and
powerful.

40. But the leading principle of Pascal’s theology, that from which he
deduces the necessary truth of revelation, is the fallen nature of
mankind; dwelling less upon scriptural proofs, which he takes
for granted, than on the evidence which he supposes man himself to
supply. Nothing, however, can be more dissimilar than his beautiful
visions to the vulgar Calvinism of the pulpit. It is not the sordid,
groveling, degraded, Caliban of that school, but the ruined archangel
that he delights to paint. Man is so great, that his greatness is
manifest, even in his knowledge of his own misery. A tree does not
know itself to be miserable. It is true that to know we are miserable
is misery; but still it is greatness to know it. All his misery proves
his greatness; it is the misery of a great lord, of a king,
dispossessed of their own. Man is the feeblest branch of nature, but
it is a branch that thinks. He requires not the universe to crush him.
He may be killed by a vapour, by a drop of water. But if the whole
universe should crush him, he would be nobler than that which causes
his death, because he knows that he is dying, and the universe would
not know its power over him. This is very evidently sophistical and
declamatory; but it is the sophistry of a fine imagination. It would
be easy, however, to find better passages. The dominant idea recurs in
almost every page of Pascal. His melancholy genius plays in wild and
rapid flashes, like lightning round the scathed oak, about the fallen
greatness of man. He perceives every characteristic quality of his
nature under these conditions. They are the solution of every problem,
the clearing up of every inconsistency that perplexes us. “Man,” he
says very finely, “has a secret instinct that leads him to seek
diversion and employment from without; which springs from the sense of
his continual misery. And he has another secret instinct, remaining
from the greatness of his original nature, which teaches him that
happiness can only exist in repose. And from these two contrary
instincts there arises in him an obscure propensity, concealed in his
soul, which prompts him to seek repose through agitation, and even to
fancy that the contentment he does not enjoy will be found, if by
struggling yet a little longer he can open a door to rest.”[742]

     [742] Œuvres de Pascal, vol. i., p. 121.

41. It can hardly be conceived that any one would think the worse of
human nature or of himself by reading these magnificent lamentations
of Pascal. He adorns and ennobles the degeneracy he exaggerates. The
ruined aqueduct, the broken column, the desolated city, suggest no
ideas but of dignity and reverence. No one is ashamed of a misery
which bears witness to his grandeur. If we should persuade a labourer
that the blood of princes flows in his veins, we might spoil his
contentment with the only lot he has drawn, but scarcely kill in him
the seeds of pride.

42. Pascal, like many others who have dwelt on this alledged
degeneracy of mankind, seems never to have disentangled his mind from
the notion that what we call human nature has not merely an arbitrary
and grammatical, but an intrinsic objective reality. The common and
convenient forms of language, the analogies of sensible things, which
the imagination readily supplies, conspire to delude us into this
fallacy. Each man is born with certain powers and dispositions which
constitute his own nature; and the resemblance of these in all his
fellows produces a general idea, or a collective appellation,
whichever we may prefer to say, called the nature of man; but few
would in this age contend for the existence of this as a substance
capable of qualities, and those qualities variable, or subject to
mutation. The corruption of human nature is therefore a phrase which
may convey an intelligible meaning, if it is acknowledged to be merely
analogical and inexact, but will mislead those who do not keep this in
mind. Man’s nature, as it now is, that which each man and all men
possess, is the immediate workmanship of God, as much as at his
creation; nor is any other hypothesis consistent with theism.

43. This notion of a real universal in human nature, presents to us in
an exaggerated light those anomalies from which writers of Pascal’s
school are apt to infer some vast change in our original constitution.
Exaggerated, I say, for it cannot be denied, that we frequently
perceive a sort of incoherence, as it appears at least to our
defective vision, in the same individual; and, like threads of various
hues shot through one web, the love of vice and of virtue, the
strength and weakness of the heart, are wonderfully blended in
self-contradictory and self-destroying conjunction. But even if we
should fail altogether in solving the very first steps of this
problem, there is no course for a reasonable being, except to
acknowledge the limitations of his own faculties; and it seems rather
unwarrantable, on the credit of this humble confession, that we do not
comprehend the depths of what has been withheld from us, to substitute
something far more incomprehensible and revolting to our moral and
rational capacities in its place. “What,” says Pascal, “can be
more contrary to the rules of our wretched justice, than to damn
eternally an infant incapable of volition, for an offence wherein he
seems to have had no share, and which was committed six thousand years
before he was born? Certainly, nothing shocks us more rudely than this
doctrine; and yet, without this mystery, the most incomprehensible of
all, we are incomprehensible to ourselves. Man is more inconceivable
without this mystery, than the mystery is inconceivable to man.”

44. It might be wandering from the proper subject of these volumes if
we were to pause, even shortly, to inquire whether, while the creation
of a world so full of evil must ever remain the most inscrutable of
mysteries, we might not be led some way in tracing the connection of
moral and physical evil in mankind with his place in that creation;
and especially, whether the law of continuity, which it has not
pleased his Maker to break with respect to his bodily structure, and
which binds that, in the unity of one great type, to the lower forms
of animal life by the common conditions of nourishment, reproduction,
and self-defence, has not rendered necessary both the physical
appetites and the propensities which terminate in self: whether,
again, the superior endowments of his intellectual nature, his
susceptibility of moral emotion, and of those disinterested affections
which, if not exclusively, he far more intensely possesses than any
inferior being; above all, the gifts of conscience, and a capacity to
know God, might not be expected, even beforehand, by their conflict
with the animal passions, to produce some partial inconsistencies,
some anomalies at least, which he could not himself explain, in so
compound a being. Every link in the long chain of creation does not
pass by easy transition into the next. There are necessary chasms,
and, as it were, leaps, from one creature to another, which, though
not exceptions to the law of continuity, are accommodations of it to a
new series of being. If man was made in the image of God, he was also
made in the image of an ape. The framework of the body of him who has
weighed the stars, and made the lightning his slave, approaches to
that of a speechless brute, who wanders in the forests of Sumatra.
Thus, standing on the frontier land between animal and angelic
natures, what wonder that he should partake of both! But these are
things which it is difficult to touch; nor would they have been here
introduced, but in order to weaken the force of positions so
confidently asserted by many, and so eloquently by Pascal.

|Vindications of Christianity.|

45. Among the works immediately designed to confirm the truth of
Christianity, a certain reputation was acquired, through the known
erudition of its author, by the Demonstratio Evangelica of Huet,
bishop of Avranches. This is paraded with definitions, axioms, and
propositions, in order to challenge the name it assumes. But the
axioms, upon which so much is to rest, are often questionable or
equivocal; as, for instance: Omnis prophetia est verax, quæ prædixit
res eventu deinde completas--equivocal in the word _verax_. Huet
also confirms his axioms by argument, which shows that they are not
truly such. The whole book is full of learning; but he frequently
loses sight of the points he would prove, and his quotations fall
beside the mark. Yet he has furnished much to others, and possibly no
earlier work on the same subject is so elaborate and comprehensive.
The next place, if not a higher one, might be given to the treatise of
Abbadie, a French refugee, published in 1684. His countrymen bestow on
it the highest eulogies; but it was never so well known in England,
and is now almost forgotten. The oral conferences of Limborch with
Orobio, a Jew of considerable learning and ability, on the prophecies
relating to the Messiah, were reduced into writing and published; they
are still in some request. No book of this period among many that were
written, reached so high a reputation in England as Leslie’s Short
Method with the Deists, published in 1694: in which he has started an
argument, pursued with more critical analysis by others, on the
peculiarly distinctive marks of credibility that pertain to the
scriptural miracles. The authenticity of this little treatise has been
idly questioned on the Continent, for no better reason than that a
translation of it has been published in a posthumous edition (1732) of
the works of Saint Real, who died in 1692. But posthumous editions are
never deemed of sufficient authority to establish a literary title
against possession; and Prosper Marchand informs us, that several
other tracts, in this edition of Saint Real, are erroneously ascribed
to him. The internal evidence that the Short Method was written by a
protestant should be conclusive.[743]

     [743] The Biographie Universelle, art. Leslie, says: Cet ouvrage,
     qui passe pour ce qu’il a fait de mieux, lui a été contesté. Le
     Docteur Gleigh [sic] a fait de grands efforts pour prouver qu’il
     appartenait à Leslie, quoiqu’il fût publié parmi les ouvrages de
     l’Abbe de Saint Real, mort en 1692. It is melancholy to see this
     petty spirit of cavil against an English writer in so respectable
     a work as the Biographic Universelle. No _grands efforts_ could
     be required from Dr. Gleig or anyone else, to prove that a book
     was written by Leslie, which bore his name, which was addressed
     to an English peer, and had gone through many editions; when
     there is literally no claimant on the other side; for a
     posthumous edition, forty years after an author’s death, without
     attestation, is no literary evidence at all, even where a book is
     published for the first time, much less where it has a known
     _status_ as the production of a certain author. This is so
     manifest to anyone who has the slightest tincture of critical
     judgment, that we need not urge the palpable improbability of
     ascribing to Saint Real, a Romish ecclesiastic, an argument which
     turns peculiarly on the distinction between the scriptural
     miracles and those alledged upon inferior evidence. I have lost,
     or never made, the reference to Prosper Marchand; but the passage
     will be found in his Dictionnaire Historique, which contains a
     full article on Saint Real.

|Progress of tolerant principles.|

46. Every change in public opinion which this period witnessed,
confirmed the principles of religious toleration, that had taken root
in the earlier part of the century; the progress of a larger and more
catholic theology, the weakening of bigotry in the minds of laymen,
and the consequent disregard of ecclesiastical clamour, not only in
England and Holland, but to a considerable extent in France; we might
even add, the violent proceedings of the last government, in the
revocation of the edict of Nantes, and the cruelties which attended
it. Louis XIV., at a time when mankind were beginning to renounce the
very theory of persecution, renewed the ancient enormities of its
practice, and thus unconsciously gave the aid of moral sympathy and
indignation to the adverse argument. The Protestant refugees of
France, scattered among their brethren, brought home to all minds the
great question of free conscience; not with the stupid and impudent
limitation which even protestants had sometimes employed, that truth
indeed might not be restrained, but that error might; a broader
foundation was laid by the great advocates of toleration in this
period, Bayle, Limborch, and Locke, as it had formerly been by Taylor
and Episcopius.[744]

     [744] The Dutch clergy, and a French minister in Holland, Jurieu,
     of great polemical fame in his day, though now chiefly known by
     means of his adversaries, Bayle and Le Clerc, strenuously
     resisted both the theory of general toleration, and the moderate
     or liberal principles in religion which were connected with it.
     Le Clerc passed his life in fighting this battle, and many
     articles in the Bibliothèque Universelle relate to it.

|Bayle’s Philosophical Commentary.|

47. Bayle, in 1686, while yet the smart of his banishment was keenly
felt, published his Philosophical Commentary on the text in Scripture,
“Compel them to come in;” a text which some of the advocates of
persecution were accustomed to produce. He gives in the first part
nine reasons against this literal meaning, among which none are
philological. In the second part he replies to various objections.
This work of Bayle does not seem to me as subtle and logical as he was
wont to be, notwithstanding the formal syllogisms with which he
commences each of his chapters. His argument against compulsory
conversions, which the absurd interpretation of the text by his
adversaries required, is indeed irresistible; but this is far from
sufficiently establishing the right of toleration itself. It appears
not very difficult for a skilful sophist, and none was more so than
Bayle himself, to have met some of his reasoning with a specious
reply. The sceptical argument of Taylor, that we can rarely be sure of
knowing the truth ourselves, and consequently of condemning in others
what is error, he touches but slightly; nor does he dwell on the
political advantages which experience has shown a full toleration to
possess. In the third part of the Philosophical Commentary, he refutes
the apology of Augustin for persecution; and a few years afterwards he
published a supplement answering a book of Jurieu, which had appeared
in the mean time.

|Locke’s Letter on Toleration.|

48. Locke published anonymously his Letter on Toleration in 1689. The
season was propitious; a legal tolerance of public worship had first
been granted to the dissenters after the revolution, limited indeed to
such as held most of the doctrines of the church, but preparing the
nation for a more extensive application of its spirit. In the Liberty
of Prophesying, Taylor had chiefly in view to deduce the justice of
tolerating a diversity in religion from the difficulty of knowing the
truth. He is not very consistent as to the political question, and
limits too narrowly the province of tolerable opinions. Locke goes
more expressly to the right of the civil magistrate, not omitting, but
dwelling less forcibly on the latitudinarian scepticism of his
predecessor. His own theory of government came to his aid. The clergy
in general, and perhaps Taylor himself, had derived the magistrate’s
jurisdiction from paternal power. And as they apparently assumed this
power to extend over adult children, it was natural to give those who
succeeded to it in political communities, a large sway over the moral
and religious behaviour of subjects. Locke, adopting the opposite
theory of compact, defines the commonwealth to be a society of men
constituted only for the procuring, preserving, and advancing their
own civil interests. He denies altogether that the care of souls
belongs to the civil magistrate, as it has never been committed to
him. “All the power of civil government relates only to men’s civil
interests, is confined to the things of this world, and hath nothing
to do with the world to come.”

49. The admission of this principle would apparently decide the
controversy, so far as it rests on religious grounds. But Locke has
recourse to several other arguments independent of it. He proves, with
no great difficulty, that the civil power cannot justly, or
consistently with any true principle of religion, compel men to
profess what they do not believe. This, however, is what very few
would, at present, be inclined to maintain. The real question was as
to the publicity of opinions deemed heterodox, and especially in
social worship; and this is what those who held the magistrate to
possess an authority patriarchal, universal, and arbitrary, and who
were also rigidly tenacious of the necessity of an orthodox faith, and
perfectly convinced that it was no other than their own, would hardly
be persuaded to admit by any arguments that Locke has alledged. But
the tendency of public opinion had begun to manifest itself against
both these tenets of the high-church party, so that, in the eighteenth
century, the principles of general tolerance became too popular to be
disputed with any chance of attention. Locke was engaged in a
controversy, through his first letter on toleration, which produced a
second and a third; but it does not appear that these, though longer
than the first, have considerably modified its leading positions.[745]
It is to be observed that he pleads for the universal toleration of
all modes of worship not immoral in their nature, or involving
doctrines inimical to good government; placing in the latter category
some tenets of the church of Rome.

     [745] Warburton has fancied that Locke’s real sentiments are only
     discoverable in his first Letter on Toleration, and that in the
     two latter he “combats his intolerant adversary quite through the
     controversy with his own principles, well foreseeing, that at
     such a time of prejudice arguments built on received opinions
     would have greatest weight, and make quickest impression on the
     body of the people whom it was his business to gain.” Biogr.
     Britannica, art. Locke.

|French Sermons.|

50. It is confessed by Goujet that, even in the middle of the
seventeenth century, France could boast very little of pulpit
eloquence. Frequent quotations from heathen writers and from the
schoolmen, with little solid morality and less good reasoning, make up
the sermons of that age.[746] But the revolution in this style, as in
all others, though perhaps gradual, was complete in the reign of
Louis XIV. A slight sprinkling of passages from the fathers, and still
more frequently from the Scriptures, but always short, and seeming to
rise out of the preacher’s heart, rather than to be sought for in his
memory, replaced that intolerable parade of a theological common place
book, which had been as customary in France as in England. The style
was to be the perfection of French eloquence, the reasoning persuasive
rather than dogmatic, the arrangement more methodical and distributive
than at present, but without the excess we find in our old preachers.
This is the general character of French sermons; but those who most
adorned the pulpit, had of course their individual distinctions.
Without delaying to mention those who are now not greatly remembered,
such as La Rue, Hubert, Mascaron, we must confine ourselves to three
of high reputation, Bourdaloue, Bossuet, and Fléchier.

     [746] Bibliothèque Française, vol. ii., p. 283.

|Bourdaloue.|

51. Bourdaloue, a Jesuit, but as little of a Jesuit in the worst
acceptation of the word, as the order has produced, is remarkably
simple, earnest, practical: he convinces rather than commands; and by
convincing he persuades; for his discourses tend always to some duty,
to something that is to be done or avoided. His sentences are short,
interrogative, full of plain and solid reasoning, unambitious in
expression, and wholly without that care in the choice of words and
cadences which we detect in Bossuet and Fléchier. No one would call
Bourdaloue a rhetorician, and though he continually introduces the
fathers, he has not caught their vices of language.[747]

     [747] The public did justice to Bourdaloue, as they generally do
     to a solid and impressive style of preaching. Je crois, says
     Goujet, p. 300, que tout le monde convient qu’aucun autre ne lui
     est supérieur. C’est le grand maître pour l’éloquence de la
     chaire; c’est le prince des prédicateurs. Le public n’a jamais
     été partagé sur son sujet; la ville et la cour l’ont également
     estimé et admiré. C’est qu’il avoit réuni en sa personne tous les
     grands caractères de la bonne éloquence; la simplicité du
     discours Chrétien avec la majesté et la grandeur, le sublime avec
     l’intelligible et le populaire, la force avec la douceur, la
     véhémence avec l’onction, la liberté avec la justesse, et le plus
     vive ardeur avec la plus pure lumière.

|Compared with Bossuet.|

52. Bourdaloue is almost in the same relation to Bossuet, as Patru to
Le Maistre, though the two orators of the pulpit are far above those
of the bar. As the one is short, condensed, plain, reasoning, and
though never feeble, not often what is generally called eloquent, so
the other is animated, figurative, rather diffuse and prodigal of
ornament, addressing the imagination more than the judgment, rich and
copious in cadence, elevating the hearer to the pitch of his own
sublimity. Bossuet is sometimes too declamatory; and Bourdaloue
perhaps sometimes borders on dryness. Much in the sermons of the
former is true poetry; but he has less of satisfactory and persuasive
reasoning than the latter. His tone is also, as in all his writings,
too domineering and dogmatical for those who demand something beyond
the speaker’s authority when they listen.

|Funeral discourses of Bossuet.|

53. The sermons, however, of Bossuet, taken generally, are not
reckoned in the highest class of his numerous writings; perhaps
scarcely justice has been done to them. His genius, on the other hand,
by universal confession, never shone higher than in the six which bear
the name of Oraisons Funèbres. They belong in substance so much more
naturally to the province of eloquence than of theology, that I should
have reserved them for another place, if the separation would not have
seemed rather unexpected to the reader. Few works of genius perhaps in
the French language are better known, or have been more prodigally
extolled. In that style of eloquence which the ancients called
demonstrative, or rather descriptive (επιδεικτικος [epideiktikos]),
the style of panegyric or commemoration, they are doubtless superior
to those justly celebrated productions of Thucydides and Plato that
have descended to us from Greece; nor has Bossuet been equalled by any
later writer. Those on the Queen of England, on her daughter the
Duchess of Orleans, and on the Prince of Condé, outshine the rest; and
if a difference is to be made among these, we might, perhaps, after
some hesitation, confer the palm on the first. The range of topics is
so various, the thoughts so just, the images so noble and poetical,
the whole is in such perfect keeping, the tone of awful contemplation,
is so uniform, that if it has not any passages of such extraordinary
beauty as occur in the other two, its general effect on the mind is
more irresistible.[748]

     [748] An English preacher of conspicuous renown for eloquence was
     called upon, within no great length of time, to emulate the
     funeral discourse of Bossuet on the sudden death of Henrietta of
     Orleans. He had before him a subject incomparably more deep in
     interest, more fertile in great and touching associations--he had
     to describe, not the false sorrow of courtiers, not the shriek of
     sudden surprise that echoed by night in the halls of Versailles,
     not the apocryphal penitence of one so tainted by the world’s
     intercourse, but the manly grief of an entire nation in the
     withering of those visions of hope which wait upon the untried
     youth of royalty, in its sympathy with grandeur annihilated, with
     beauty and innocence precipitated into the tomb. Nor did he sink
     beneath this subject, except as compared with Bossuet. The sermon
     to which my allusion will be understood, is esteemed by many the
     finest effort of this preacher; but if read together with that of
     its prototype, it will be laid aside as almost feeble and
     unimpressive.

54. In this style, much more of ornament, more of what speaks in the
spirit, and even the very phrase, of poetry, to the imagination and
the heart, is permitted by a rigorous criticism, than in forensic or
in deliberative eloquence. The beauties that rise before the author’s
vision are not renounced; the brilliant colours of his fancy are not
subdued; the periods assume a more rhythmical cadence, and emulate,
like metre itself, the voluptuous harmony of musical intervals; the
whole composition is more evidently formed to delight; but it will
delight to little purpose, or even cease, in any strong sense of the
word, to do so at all, unless it is ennobled by moral wisdom. In this
Bossuet was pre-eminent; his thoughts are never subtle or far-fetched;
they have a sort of breadth, a generality of application, which is
peculiarly required in those who address a mixed assembly, and which
many that aim at what is profound and original are apt to miss. It may
be confessed, that these funeral discourses are not exempt from some
defects, frequently inherent in panegyrical eloquence; they are
sometimes too rhetorical, and do not appear to show so little effort
as some have fancied; the amplifications are sometimes too unmeasured,
the language sometimes borders too nearly on that of the stage; above
all, there is a tone of adulation not quite pleasing to a calm
posterity.

|Fléchier.|

55. Fléchier (the third name of the seventeenth century, for Massillon
belongs only to the next), like Bossuet, has been more celebrated for
his funeral sermons than for any others; but, in this line, it is
unfortunate for him to enter into unavoidable competition with one
whom he cannot rival. The French critics extol Fléchier for the
arrangement and harmony of his periods; yet, even in this, according
to La Harpe, he is not essentially superior to Bossuet; and, to an
English ear, accustomed to the long swell of our own writers, and of
the Ciceronian school in Latin, he will probably not give so much
gratification. He does not want a moral dignity, or a certain
elevation of thought, without which the funeral panegyric must be
contemptible; but he has not the majestic tone of Bossuet; he does
not, like him, raise the heroes and princes of the earth in order to
abase them by paintings of mortality and weakness, or recall the
hearer in every passage to something more awful than human power, and
more magnificent than human grandeur. This religious solemnity, so
characteristic in Bossuet, is hardly felt in the less emphatic
sentences of Fléchier. Even where his exordium is almost worthy of
comparison, as in the funeral discourse on Turenne, we find him
degenerate into a trivial eulogy, and he flatters both more profusely
and with less skill. His style is graceful, but not without
affectation and false taste. La Harpe has not ill compared him to
Isocrates among the orators of Greece, the place of Demosthenes being,
of course, reserved for Bossuet.[749]

     [749] The native critics ascribe a reform in the style of
     preaching to Paolo Segneri, whom Corniani does not hesitate to
     call, with the sanction, he says, of posterity, the father of
     Italian eloquence. It is to be remembered, that in no country has
     the pulpit been so much degraded by empty declamation, and even
     by a stupid buffoonery. “The language of Segneri,” the same
     writer observes, “is always full of dignity and harmony. He
     inlaid it with splendid and elegant expressions, and has thus
     obtained a place among the authors to whom authority has been
     given by the Della Crusca dictionary. His periods are flowing,
     natural, and intelligible, without the affectation of obsolete
     Tuscanisms, which pass for graces of the language with many.”
     Tiraboschi, with much commendation of Segneri, admits that we
     find in him some vestiges of the false taste he endeavoured to
     reform. The very little that I have seen of the sermons of
     Segneri, gives no impression of any merit that can be reckoned
     more than relative to the miserable tone of his predecessors. The
     following specimen is from one of his most admired sermons:--E
     Cristo non potrà ottenere da voi che gli rimettiate un torto, un
     affronto, un aggravio, una parolina? Che vorreste da Christo?
     Vorreste ch’egli vi si gettasse supplichevole a’ piedi a
     chiedergli questa grazia? Io son quasi per dire ch’egli il
     farebbe; perchè se non dubiti di prostrarsi a’ piedi di un
     traditore, qual’era Guida, di lavarglieli, di asciugarglieli, di
     baciarglieli, non si vergognerebbe, cred’io, di farsi vedere
     ginocchioni a’ piè vostri. Ma vi fa bisogno di tanto per muovervi
     a compiacerlo? Ah Cavalieri, Cavalieri, io non vorrei questa
     volta farvi arrossire. Nel resto io so di certo, che se
     altrettanto fosse a voi domandato da quella donna che chiamate la
     vostra dama, da quella, di cui forsennati idolatrate il volto,
     indovinate le voglie, ambite le grazie, non vi farete pregar
     tanto a concederglielo. E poi vi fate pregar tanto da un Dio per
     voi crocefisso? O confusione! O vitupero! O vergogna! Raccolta di
     Prose Italiane (in Classici Italiani), vol. ii., p. 345.

     This is certainly not the manner of Bossuet, and more like that
     of a third-rate Methodist among us.

|English sermons--Barrow.|

56. The style of preaching in England was less ornamental, and spoke
less to the imagination and affections, than these celebrated writers
of the Gallican church; but in some of our chief divines it had its
own excellencies. The sermons of Barrow display a strength of mind, a
comprehensiveness and fertility, which have rarely been equalled. No
better proof can be given than his eight sermons on the government of
the tongue; copious and exhaustive without tautology or superfluous
declamation, they are, in moral preaching, what the best parts of
Aristotle are in ethical philosophy, with more of development and a
more extensive observation. It would be said of these sermons, and
indeed, with a few exceptions, of all those of Barrow, that they are
not what is called evangelical; they indicate the ascendancy of an
Arminian party, dwelling far more than is usual in the pulpit on moral
and rational, or even temporal, inducements, and sometimes hardly
abstaining from what would give a little offence in later times.[750]
His quotations also from ancient philosophers, though not so
numerous as in Taylor, are equally uncongenial to our ears. In his
style, notwithstanding its richness and occasional vivacity, we may
censure a redundancy and excess of apposition; it is not sufficient to
avoid strict tautology; no second phrase (to lay down a general rule
not without exception) should be so like the first, that the reader
would naturally have understood it to be comprised therein. Barrow’s
language is more antiquated and formal than that of his age; and he
abounds too much in uncommon words of Latin derivation, frequently
such as appear to have no authority but his own.

     [750] Thus, in his sermon against evil speaking (xvi.), Barrow
     treats it as fit “for rustic boors or men of coarsest education
     and employment, who, having their minds debased by being
     conversant in meanest affairs, do vent their sorry passions and
     bicker about their petty concernments in such strains, who also,
     not being capable of a fair reputation, or sensible of disgrace
     to themselves, do little value the credit of others, or care for
     aspersing it. But such language is unworthy of those persons, and
     cannot easily be drawn from them, who are wont to exercise their
     thoughts about nobler matters,” &c. No one would venture this now
     from the pulpit.

|South.|

57. South’s sermons begin, in order of date, before the Restoration,
and come down to nearly the end of the century. They were much
celebrated at the time, and retain a portion of their renown. This is
by no means surprising. South had great qualifications for that
popularity which attends the pulpit, and his manner was at that time
original. Not diffuse, not learned, not formal in argument like
Barrow, with a more natural structure of sentences, a more pointed,
though by no means a more fair and satisfactory turn of reasoning,
with a style clear and English, free from all pedantry, but abounding
with those colloquial novelties of idiom, which, though now become
vulgar and offensive, the age of Charles II. affected, sparing no
personal or temporary sarcasm, but, if he seems for a moment to tread
on the verge of buffoonery, recovering himself by some stroke of
vigorous sense and language; such was the witty Dr. South, whom the
courtiers delighted to hear. His sermons want all that is called
unction, and sometimes even earnestness, which is owing, in a great
measure, to a perpetual tone of gibing at rebels and fanatics; but
there is a masculine spirit about them, which, combined with their
peculiar characteristics, would naturally fill the churches where he
might be heard. South appears to bend towards the Arminian theology,
without adopting so much of it as some of his contemporaries.

|Tillotson.|

59. The sermons of Tillotson were, for half a century, more read than
any in our language. They are now bought almost as waste paper, and
hardly read at all. Such is the fickleness of religious taste, as
abundantly numerous instances would prove. Tillotson is reckoned
verbose and languid. He has not the former defect in nearly so great a
degree as some of his eminent predecessors; but there is certainly
little vigour or vivacity in his style. Full of the Romish
controversy, he is perpetually recurring to that “world’s debate;” and
he is not much less hostile to all the Calvinistic tenets. What is
most remarkable in the theology of Tillotson is his strong assertion,
in almost all his sermons, of the principles of natural religion and
morality, not only as the basis of all revelation, without a
dependence on which it cannot be believed, but as nearly coincident
with Christianity in its extent, a length to which few at present
would be ready to follow him. Tillotson is always of a tolerant and
catholic spirit, enforcing right actions rather than orthodox
opinions, and obnoxious, for that and other reasons, to all the bigots
of his own age.

|Expository Theology.|

60. It has become necessary to draw towards a conclusion of this
chapter; the materials are far from being exhausted. In expository,
or, as some call it, exegetical theology, the English divines had
already taken a conspicuous station. Andrès, no partial estimator of
Protestant writers, extols them with marked praise.[751] Those who
belonged to the earlier part of the century form a portion of a vast
collection, the Critici Sacri, published by one Bee, a bookseller, in
1660. This was in nine folio volumes; and in 1669, Matthew Pool, a
nonconforming minister, produced his Synopsis Criticorum, in five
volumes, being, in great measure, an abridgment and digest of the
former. Bee complained of the infraction of his copyright, or rather
his equitable interest; but such a dispute hardly pertains to our
history.[752] The work of Pool was evidently a more original labour
than the former. Hammond, Patrick, and other commentators, do honour
to the Anglican church in the latter part of the century.

     [751] I soli Inglesi, che ampio spazio non dovrebbono occupare in
     questo capo dell’esegetica sacra, se l’istituto della nostr’opera
     ci permettesse tener dietro a tutti i più degni della nostra
     stima? Vol. xix., p. 253.

     [752] Chalmers.

|Pearson on the Creed.|

61. Pearson’s Exposition of the Apostle’s Creed, published in 1659, is
a standard book in English divinity. It expands beyond the literal
purport of the creed itself to most articles of orthodox belief, and
is a valuable summary of arguments and authorities on that side. The
closeness of Pearson, and his judicious selection of proofs,
distinguish him from many, especially the earlier, theologians. Some
might surmise that his undeviating adherence to what he calls the
church is hardly consistent with independence of thinking; but,
considered as an advocate, he is one of much judgment and skill. Such
men as Pearson and Stillingfleet, would have been conspicuous at the
bar, which we could not quite affirm of Jeremy Taylor.

|Simon’s Critical Histories.|

62. Simon, a regular priest of the congregation called The Oratory,
which has been rich in eminent men, owes much of his fame to his
Critical History of the Old Testament. This work, bold in many of its
positions, as it then seemed to both the Catholic and Protestant
orthodox, after being nearly strangled by Bossuet in France, appeared
at Rotterdam in 1685. Bossuet attacked it with extreme vivacity, but
with a real inferiority to Simon, both in learning and candour.[753]
Le Clerc on his side carped more at the Critical History than it seems
to deserve. Many paradoxes, as they then were called, in his famous
work are now received as truth, or at least pass without reproof.
Simon may possibly be too prone to novelty, but a love of truth as
well as great acuteness are visible throughout. His Critical History
of the New Testament was published in 1689, and one or two more works
of a similar description before the close of the century.

     [753] Défense de la Tradition des Saints Pères. Œuvres de
     Bossuet, vol. v., and Instructions sur la Version du N. T.,
     imprimée à Trevoux, Id. vol. iv., 313. Bausset, Vie de Bossuet,
     iv., 276.

63. I have, on a former occasion, adverted, in a corresponding
chapter, to publications on witchcraft, and similar superstitions.
Several might be mentioned at this time; the belief in such tales was
assailed by a prevalent scepticism which called out their advocates.
Of these, the most unworthy to have exhibited their great talents in
such a cause were our own philosophers Henry More and Joseph Glanvil.
The Sadducismus Triumphatus, or Treatise on Apparitions, by the
latter, has passed through several editions, while his Scepsis
Scientifica has hardly been seen, perhaps, by six living persons. A
Dutch minister, by name Bekker, raised a great clamour against himself
by a downright denial of all power to the devil, and consequently to
his supposed instruments, the ancient beldams of Holland and other
countries. His Monde Enchanté, originally published in Dutch, is in
four volumes, written in a systematic manner and with tedious
prolixity. There was no ground for imputing infidelity to the author,
except the usual ground of calumniating everyone who quits the beaten
path in theology; but his explanations of scripture in the case of the
demoniacs and the like are, as usual with those who have taken the
same line, rather forced. The fourth volume which contains several
curious stories of imagined possession, and some which resemble what
is now called magnetism, is the only part of Bekker’s once celebrated
book that can be read with any pleasure. Bekker was a Cartesian, and
his theory was built too much on Cartesian assumptions of the
impossibility of spirit _acting_ on body, which are easily
parried by denying his inference from them.




                           CHAPTER XXIX.

        HISTORY OF SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY FROM 1650 TO 1700.

_Aristotelians--Logicians--Cudworth--Sketch of the Philosophy of
Gassendi--Cartesianism--Port-Royal Logic--Analysis of the Search for
Truth of Malebranche, and of the Ethics of Spinosa--Glanvil--Locke’s
Essay on the Human Understanding._


|Aristotelian metaphysics.|

1. The Aristotelian and scholastic metaphysics, though shaken on every
side, and especially by the rapid progress of the Cartesian theories,
had not lost their hold over the theologians of the Roman church, or
even the protestant universities, at the beginning of this period, and
hardly at its close. Brucker enumerates several writers of that
class in Germany;[754] and we find, as late as 1693, a formal
injunction by the Sorbonne, that none who taught philosophy in the
colleges under its jurisdiction should introduce any novelties, or
swerve from the Aristotelian doctrine.[755] The Jesuits, rather
unfortunately for their credit, distinguished themselves as strenuous
advocates of the old philosophy, and thus lost the advantage they had
obtained in philology as enemies of barbarous prejudice, and
encouragers of a progressive spirit in their disciples. Rapin, one of
their most accomplished men, after speaking with little respect of the
Novum Organum, extols the disputations of the schools as the best
method in the education of young men, who, as he fancies, have too
little experience to delight in physical science.[756]

     [754] Vol. iv. See his long and laborious chapter on the
     Aristotelian philosophers of the sixteenth and seventeenth
     centuries; no one else seems to have done more than copy Brucker.

     [755] Cum relatum esset ad Societatem (Sorbonicam) nonnullos
     philosophiæ, professores, ex iis etiam aliquando qui ad
     Societatem anhelant, novas quasdam doctrinas in philosophicis
     sectari, minusque Aristotelicæ doctrinæ studere, quam hactenus
     usurpatum fuerit in Academiâ Parisiensi, censuit Societas
     injungendum esse illis, imo et iis qui docent philosophiam in
     collegiis suo regimini creditis, ne deinceps novitatibus
     studeant, aut ab Aristotelica doctrina deffectant. 31 Dec. 1693.
     Argentré, Collectio Judiciorum, iii., 150.

     [756] Réflexions sur la Poétique, p. 368. He admits, however,
     that to introduce more experiment and observation would be an
     improvement. Du reste il y a apparence que les loix, qui ne
     souffrent point d’innovation dans l’usage des choses
     universellement établies, n’autoriseront point d’autre méthode
     que celle qui est aujourd’hui en usage dans les universités; afin
     de ne pas donner trop de licence à la passion qu’on a
     naturellement pour les nouvelles opinions, dont le cours est
     d’une dangereuse conséquence dans un état bien réglé; vu
     particulièrement que la philosophie est un des organes dont se
     sert la religion pour s’expliquer dans ses décisions.

|Their decline. Thomas White.|

2. It is a difficult and dangerous choice, in a new state of public
opinion (and we have to make it at present), between that which may
itself pass away, and that which must efface what has gone before.
Those who clung to the ancient philosophy believed that Bacon and
Descartes were the idols of a transitory fashion, and that the wisdom
of long ages would regain its ascendancy. They were deceived, and
their own reputation has been swept off with the systems to which they
adhered. Thomas White, an English catholic priest, whose Latin
appellation is Albius, endeavoured to maintain the Aristotelian
metaphysics and the scholastic terminology in several works, and
especially in an attack upon Glanvil’s Vanity of Dogmatizing. This
book, entitled Sciri, I know only through Glanvil’s reply in his
second edition, by which White appears to be a mere Aristotelian. He
was a friend of Sir Kenelm Digby, who was himself, though a man of
considerable talents, incapable of disentangling his mind from the
Peripatetic hypotheses. The power of words indeed is so great, the
illusions of what is called realism, or of believing that general
terms have an objective exterior being, are so natural, and especially
so bound up both with our notions of essential, especially
theological, truth, and with our popular language, that no man could
in that age be much censured for not casting off his fetters, even
when he had heard the call to liberty from some modern voices. We find
that even after two centuries of a better method, many are always
ready to fall back into a verbal process of theorising.

|Logic.|

3. Logic was taught in the Aristotelian method, or rather in one
which, with some change for the worse, had been gradually founded upon
it. Burgersdicius, in this and in other sciences, seems to have been
in repute; Smiglecius also is mentioned with praise.[757] These lived
both in the former part of the century. But they were superceded, at
least in England, by Wallis, whose Institutio Logicæ ad Communes Usus
Accommodata was published in 1687. He claims as an improvement upon
the received system, the classifying singular propositions among
universals.[758] Ramus had made a third class of them, and in this he
seems to have been generally followed. Aristotle, though it does not
appear that he is explicit on the subject, does not rank them as
particular. That Wallis is right cannot be doubted by anyone who
reflects at all; but his originality we must not assert. The same had
been perceived by the authors of the Port-Royal Logic; a work to which
he has made no allusion.[759] Wallis claims also as his own the method
of reducing hypothetical to categorical syllogisms, and proves it
elaborately in a separate dissertation. A smaller treatise, still much
used at Oxford, by Aldrich, Compendium Artis Logicæ, 1691, is clear
and concise, but seems to contain nothing very important; and he
alludes to the Art de Penser in a tone of insolence, which must rouse
indignation in those who are acquainted with that excellent work.
Aldrich’s censures are, in many instances, mere cavil and
misrepresentation; I do not know that they are right in any.[760] Of
the Art de Penser itself we shall have something to say in the course
of this chapter.

     [757] La Logique de Smiglecius, says Rapin, est un bel ouvrage.
     The same writer proceeds to observe that the Spaniards of the
     preceding century had corrupted logic by their subtleties. En se
     jettant dans des spéculations creuses qui n’avoient rien de réel,
     leur philosophes trouvèrent l’art d’avoir de la raison malgré le
     bon sens, et de donner de la couleur, et même je ne scai quoi de
     specieuse, à ce qui étoit de plus déraisonnable, p. 382. But this
     must have been rather the fault of their metaphysics than of what
     is strictly called logic.

     [758] Atque hoc signanter notatum velim, quia novus forte hic
     videar, et præter aliorum loquendi formulam hæc dicere. Nam
     plerique logici propositionem quam vocant singularem, hoc est, de
     subjecto individuo sive singulari, pro particulari habent, non
     universali. Sed perperam hoc faciunt, et præter mentem
     Aristotelis (qui, quantum memini, nunquam ejusmodi singularem,
     την κατα μερος [tên kata meros] appellat aut pro tali habet) et
     præter rei naturam: Non enim hic agitur de particularitate
     subjecti (quod ατομον [atomon] vocat Aristotelis, non κατα μερος
     [kata meros]) sed de partialitate prædicationis.... Neque ego
     interim novator censendus sum qui hæc dixerim, sed illi potius
     novatores qui ab Aristotelica doctrina recesserint; eoque multa
     introduxerint incommoda de quibus suo loco dicetur, p. 125. He
     has afterwards a separate dissertation or thesis to prove this
     more at length. It seems that the Ramists held a third class of
     propositions, neither universal nor particular, to which they
     gave the name of _propria_, equivalent to singular.

     [759] Art de Penser, part ii., chap. iii.

     [760] One of Aldrich’s charges against the author of the Art de
     Penser is, that he brings forward as a great discovery the
     equality of the angles of a chiliagon to 1996 right angles; and
     another is, that he gives as an example of a regular syllogism
     one that has obviously five terms; thus expecting the Oxford
     students, for whom he wrote, to believe, that Antony Arnauld
     neither knew the first book of Euclid, nor the mere rudiments of
     common logic.

|Stanley’s History of Philosophy.|

4. Before we proceed to those whose philosophy may be reckoned
original or at least modern, a very few deserve mention who have
endeavoured to maintain or restore that of antiquity. Stanley’s
History of Philosophy, in 1655, is in great measure confined to
biography, and comprehends no name later than Carneades. Most is
derived from Diogenes Laertius; but an analysis of the Platonic
philosophy is given from Alcinous, and the author has compiled one of
the Peripatetic system from Aristotle himself. The doctrine of the
Stoics is also elaborately deduced from various sources. Stanley on
the whole brought a good deal from an almost untrodden field; but he
is merely a historian, and never a critic of philosophy. He does not
mention Epicurus at all, probably because Gassendi had so well written
that philosopher’s life.

|Gale’s Court of Gentiles.|

5. Gale’s Court of the Gentiles, partly in 1669 and partly in later
years, is incomparably a more learned work, than that of Stanley. Its
aim is to prove that all heathen philosophy, whether barbaric or
Greek, was borrowed from the Scriptures, or at least from the Jews.
The first part is entitled Of Philology, which traces the same leading
principle by means of language; the second, Of Philosophy: the third
treats of the Vanity of Philosophy, and the fourth of Reformed
Philosophy, “wherein Plato’s moral and metaphysic or prime philosophy
is reduced to an useful form and method.” Gale has been reckoned among
Platonic philosophers, and indeed he professes to find a great
resemblance between the philosophy of Plato and his own. But he is a
determined Calvinist in all respects, and scruples not to say,
“Whatever God wills is just, because he wills it;” and again, “God
willeth nothing without himself because it is just, but it is
therefore just because he willeth it. The reasons of good and evil
extrinsic to the divine essence are all dependent on the divine will,
either decernent or legislative.”[761] It is not likely that Plato
would have acknowledged such a disciple.

     [761] Part iv., p. 339.

|Cudworth’s Intellectual System.|

6. A much more eminent and enlightened man than Gale, Ralph Cudworth,
by his Intellectual System of the Universe, published in 1678, but
written several years before, placed himself in a middle point between
the declining and rising schools of philosophy; more independent of
authority, and more close, perhaps, in argument than the former, but
more prodigal of learning, more technical in language, and less
conversant with analytical and inductive processes of reasoning than
the latter. Upon the whole, however, he belongs to the school of
antiquity, and probably his wish was to be classed with it. Cudworth
was one of those whom Hobbes had roused by the atheistic and immoral
theories of the Leviathan; nor did any antagonist perhaps of that
philosopher bring a more vigorous understanding to the combat. This
understanding was not so much obstructed in its own exercise by a vast
erudition, as it was sometimes concealed by it from the reader.
Cudworth has passed more for a recorder of ancient philosophy, than
for one who might stand in a respectable class among philosophers; and
his work, though long, being unfinished, as well as full of
digression, its object has not been fully apprehended.

|Its object.|

7. This object was to establish the liberty of human actions against
the fatalists. Of these he lays it down that there are three kinds,
the first atheistic; the second admitting a Deity, but one acting
necessarily and without moral perfections; the third granting the
moral attributes of God, but asserting all human actions to be
governed by necessary laws which he has ordained. The first book of
the Intellectual System, which alone is extant, relates wholly to the
proofs of the existence of a Deity against the atheistic fatalists,
his moral nature being rarely or never touched; so that the greater
and more interesting part of the work, for the sake of which the
author projected it, was never written, unless we take for fragments
of it some writings of the author preserved in the British Museum.

|Sketch of it.|

8. The first chapter contains an account of the ancient corpuscular
philosophy, which, till corrupted by Leucippus and Democritus,
Cudworth takes to have been not only theistic, but more consonant to
theistic principles than any other. These two, however, brought in a
fatalism grounded on their own atomic theory. In the second chapter he
states very fully and fairly all their arguments, or rather all that
have ever been adduced on the atheistic side. In the third he
expatiates on the hylozoic atheism, as he calls it, of Strato, which
accounts the world to be animated in all its parts but without a
single controlling intelligence, and adverts to another hypothesis,
which gives a vegetable but not sentient life to the world.

|His plastic nature.|

9. This leads Cudworth to his own famous theory of a plastic nature, a
device to account for the operations of physical laws without the
continued agency of the Deity. Of this plastic energy he speaks in
rather a confused and indefinite manner giving it in one place a sort
of sentient life, or what he calls “a drowsy unawakened cogitation,”
and always treating it as an entity or real being. This language of
Cudworth, and indeed the whole hypothesis of a plastic nature, was
unable to stand the searching eye of Bayle, who, in an article of his
dictionary, pointed out its unphilosophical and dangerous assumptions.
Le Clerc endeavoured to support Cudworth against Bayle, but with
little success.[762] It has had, however, some partizans, though
rather among physiologists than metaphysicians. Grew adopted it to
explain vegetation; and the plastic nature differs only, as I
conceive, from what Hunter and Abernethy have called life in organised
bodies by its more extensive agency; for if we are to believe that
there is a vital power, not a mere name for the sequence of phenomena,
which marshals the molecules of animal and vegetable substance, we can
see no reason why a similar energy should not determine other
molecules to assume geometrical figures in crystallization. The error
or paradox consists in assigning a real unity of existence, and a real
power of causation, to that which is unintelligent.

     [762] Biblothèque Choisie, vol. v.

|His account of old philosophy.|

10. The fourth chapter of the Intellectual System, of vast length, and
occupying half the entire work, launches into a sea of old philosophy,
in order to show the unity of a supreme God to have been a general
belief of antiquity. “In this fourth chapter,” he says “we were
necessitated by the matter itself to run out into philology and
antiquity, as also in the other parts of the book we do often give an
account of the doctrine of the ancients; which, however, some
over-severe philosophers may look upon fastidiously or undervalue and
depreciate, yet as we conceived it often necessary, so possibly may
the variety thereof not be ungrateful to others, and this mixture of
philology throughout the whole sweeten and allay the severity of
philosophy to them; the main thing which the book pretends to, in the
meantime, being the philosophy of religion. But for our part, we
neither call philology, nor yet philosophy, our mistress, but serve
ourselves of either as occasion requireth.”[763]

     [763] Preface, p. 37.

11. The whole fourth chapter may be reckoned one great episode, and as
it contains a store of useful knowledge on ancient philosophy, it has
not only been more read than the remaining part of the Intellectual
System, but has been the cause, in more than one respect, that the
work has been erroneously judged. Thus, Cudworth has been reckoned, by
very respectable authorities, in the Platonic school of philosophers,
and even in that of the later Platonists; for which I perceive little
other reason than that he has gone diffusely into a supposed
resemblance between the Platonic and Christian Trinity. Whether we
agree with him in this or no, the subject is insulated, and belongs
only to the history of theological opinion; in Cudworth’s own
philosophy he appears to be an eclectic, not the vassal of Plato,
Plotinus, or Aristotle, though deeply versed in them all.

|His arguments against atheism.|

12. In the fifth and last chapter of the first and only book of the
Intellectual System, Cudworth, reverting to the various atheistical
arguments which he had stated in the second chapter, answers them at
great length, and though not without much erudition, perhaps more than
was requisite, yet depending chiefly on his own stores of reasoning.
And inasmuch as even a second-rate philosopher ranks higher in
literary precedence than the most learned reporter of other men’s
doctrine, it may be unfortunate for Cudworth’s reputation that he
consumed so much time in the preceding chapter upon mere learning,
even though that should be reckoned more useful and valuable than his
own reasonings. These, however, are frequently valuable, and, as I
have intimated above, he is partially tinctured by the philosophy of
his own generation, while he endeavours to tread in the ancient paths.
Yet he seems not aware of the place which Bacon, Descartes, and
Gassendi were to hold; and not only names them sometimes with censure,
hardly with praise, but most inexcusably throws out several
intimations that they had designedly served the cause of atheism. The
disposition of the two former to slight the argument from final
causes, though it might justly be animadverted upon, could not warrant
this most uncandid and untrue aspersion. But justice was even-handed;
Cudworth himself did not escape the slander of bigots; it was idly
said by Dryden, that he had put the arguments against a Deity so well,
that some thought he had not answered them, and if Warburton may be
believed, the remaining part of the Intellectual System was never
published, on account of the world’s malignity in judging of the
first.[764] Probably it was never written.

     [764] Warburton’s preface to Divine Legation, vol. ii.

13. Cudworth is too credulous and uncritical about ancient writings,
defending all as genuine, even where his own age had been sceptical.
His terminology is stiff and pedantic, as is the case with all our
older metaphysicians, abounding in words, which the English language
has not recognised. He is full of the ancients, but rarely quotes the
schoolmen. Hobbes is the adversary with whom he most grapples; the
materialism, the resolving all ideas into sensation, the low morality
of that writer, were obnoxious to the animadversion of so strenuous an
advocate of a more elevated philosophy. In some respects, Cudworth
has, as I conceive, much the advantage; in others, he will generally
be thought by our metaphysicians to want precision and logical
reasoning; and, upon the whole, we must rank him, in philosophical
acumen, far below Hobbes, Malebranche, and Locke, but also far above
any mere Aristotelians, or retailers of Scotus and Aquinas.

|More.|

14. Henry More, though by no means less eminent than Cudworth in his
own age, ought not to be placed on the same level. More fell not only
into the mystical notions of the later Platonists, but even of the
Cabbalistic writers. His metaphysical philosophy was borrowed in great
measure from them; and though he was in correspondence with Descartes,
and enchanted with the new views that opened upon him, yet we find
that he was reckoned much less of a Cartesian afterwards, and even
wrote against parts of the theory.[765] The most peculiar tenet of
More was the extension of spirit; acknowledging and even striving for
the souls’ immateriality, he still could not conceive it to be
unextended. Yet it seems evident that if we give extension as well as
figure, which is implied in finite extension, to the single
self-conscious monad, qualities as heterogeneous to thinking as
material impenetrability itself, we shall find it in vain to deny the
possibility at least of the latter. Some, indeed, might question
whether what we call matter is any real being at all, except as
extension under peculiar conditions. But this conjecture need not here
be pressed.

     [765] Baillet, Vie de Descartes, liv. vii. It must be observed
     that More never wholly agreed with Descartes. Thus they differed
     about the omnipresence of the Deity; Descartes thought that he
     was partout à raison de sa puissance, et qu’à raison de son
     essence il n’a absolument aucune rélation au lieu. More, who may
     be called a lover of extension, maintained a strictly local
     presence. Œuvres de Descartes, vol. x., p. 239.

|Gassendi.|

|His Logic.|

15. Gassendi himself, by the extensiveness of his erudition,
may be said to have united the two schools of speculative philosophy,
the historical and the experimental, though the character of his mind
determined him far more towards the latter. He belongs in point of
time rather to the earlier period of the century; but his Syntagma
Philosophicum having been published in 1658, we have deferred the
review of it for this volume. This posthumous work, in two volumes
folio, and nearly 1600 pages closely printed in double columns, is
divided into three parts, the Logic, the Physics, and the Ethics; the
second occupying more than five-sixths of the whole. The Logic is
introduced by two proœmial books; one containing a history of the
science from Zeno of Elea, the parent of systematic logic, to Bacon
and Descartes;[766] the other, still more valuable, on the criteria of
truth; shortly criticising also, in a chapter of this book, the
several schemes of logic which he had merely described in the former.
After stating very prolixly, as is usual with him, the arguments of
the sceptics against the evidence of the senses, and those of the
dogmatics, as he calls them, who refer the sole criterion of truth to
the understanding, he propounds a sort of middle course. It is
necessary, he observes, before we can infer truth, that there should
be some sensible sign, αισθητον σημειον [aisthêton sêmeion]; for,
since all the knowledge we possess is derived from the sense, the mind
must first have some sensible image, by which it may be led to a
knowledge of what is latent and not perceived by sense. Hence, we may
distinguish in ourselves a double criterion; one by which we perceive
the sign--namely, the senses; another, by which we understand through
reasoning the latent thing--namely, the intellect or rational
faculty.[767] This he illustrates by the pores of the skin, which we
do not perceive, but infer their existence by observing the permeation
of moisture.

     [766] Prætereundum porro non est ob eam, quâ est, celebritatem
     Organum, sive logica Francisci Baconis Verulamii. He extols Bacon
     highly, but gives an analysis of the Novum Organum without much
     criticism. De Logicæ Origine, c. x.

     Logica Verulamii, Gassendi says in another place, tota ac per se
     ad physicam, atque adeo ad veritatem notitiamve rerum germanam
     habendam contendit. Præcipuè autem in eo est, ut bene imaginemur,
     quatenus vult esse imprimis exuenda omnia præjudicia ac novas
     deinde notiones ideasve ex novis debitèque factis experimentis
     inducendas. Logica Cartesii rectè quidem Verulamii imitatione ab
     eo exorditur, quod ad bene imaginandum prava prejudicia exuenda,
     recta vero induenda vult, &c., p. 90.

     [767] P. 81. If this passage be well attended to, it will show
     how the philosophy of Gassendi has been misunderstood by those
     who confound it with the merely sensual school of metaphysicians.
     No one has more clearly, or more at length, distinguished the
     αισθητον σημειον [aisthêton sêmeion], the sensible associated
     sign, from the unimaginable objects of pure intellect, as we
     shall soon see.

|His theory of ideas.|

16. In the first part of the treatise itself on Logic, to which these
two books are introductory, Gassendi lays down again his favourite
principle, that every idea in the mind is ultimately derived from the
senses. But while what the senses transmit are only singular ideas,
the mind has the faculty of making general ideas out of a number of
these singular ones when they resemble each other.[768] In this part
of his Logic he expresses himself clearly and unequivocally a
conceptualist.

     [768] P. 93.

17. The Physics were expanded with a prodigality of learning upon
every province of nature. Gassendi is full of quotation, and his
systematic method manifests the comprehensiveness of his researches.
In the third book of the second part of the third section of the
Physics, he treats of the immateriality, and, in the fourteenth, of
the immortality of the soul, and maintains the affirmative of both
propositions. This may not be what those who judge of Gassendi merely
from his objections to the Meditations of Descartes have supposed. But
a clearer insight into his metaphysical theory will be obtained from
the ninth book of the same part of the Physics, entitled, De
Intellectu, on the Human Understanding.

|And of the nature of the soul.|

18. In this book, after much display of erudition on the tenets of
philosophers, he determines the soul to be an incorporeal substance,
created by God, and infused into the body, so that it resides in it as
an informing and not merely a present nature, forma informans, et non
simpliciter assistens.[769] He next distinguishes intellection or
understanding from imagination or perception; which is worthy of
particular notice, because in his controversy with Descartes he had
thrown out doubts as to any distinction between them. We have in
ourselves a kind of faculty which enables us, by means of reasoning,
to understand that which by no endeavours we can imagine or represent
to the mind.[770] Of this the size of the sun, or innumerable
other examples might be given; the mind having no idea suggested by
the imagination of the sun’s magnitude, but knowing it by a peculiar
process of reasoning. And hence we infer that the intellectual soul is
immaterial, because it understands that which no material image
presents to it, as we infer also that the imaginative faculty is
material, because it employs the images supplied by sense. It is true
that the intellect makes use of these sensible images, as steps
towards its reasoning upon things which cannot be imagined; but the
proof of its immateriality is given by this, that it passes beyond all
material images, and attains a true knowledge of that whereof it has
no image.

     [769] P. 440.

     [770] Itaque est in nobis intellectûs species, qua ratiocinando
     eo provehimur, ut aliquid intelligamus, quod imaginari, vel cujus
     habere obversantem imaginem, quantumcunque animi vires
     contenderimus, non possimus.... After instancing the size of the
     sun, possunt consimilia sexcenta afferri.... Verum quidem istud
     sufficiat, ut constet quinpiam nos intelligere quod imaginari non
     liceat, et intellectum ita esse distinctum a phantasia, ut cum
     phantasia habeat materiales species, sub quibus res imaginatur,
     non habeat tamen intellectus, sub quibus res intelligat: neque
     enim ullam, v. g. habet illius magnitudinis quam in sole
     intelligit; sed tantum vi propria, seu ratiocinando, eam esse in
     sole magnitudinem comprehendit, ac pari modo cætera. Nempe ex hoc
     efficitur, ut rem sine specie materiali intelligens, esse
     immaterialis debeat; sicuti phantasia ex eo materialis arguitur,
     quod materiali specie utatur. Ac utitur quidem etiam intellectus
     speciebus phantasia perceptis, tanquam gradibus, ut ratiocinando
     assequatur ea, quæ deinceps sine speciebus phantasmatisve
     intelligit: sed hoc ipsum est quod illius immaterialitatem
     arguit, quod ultra omnem speciem materialem se provehat,
     quidpiamque cujus nullam habeat phantasma revera agnoscat.

19. Buhle observes that in what Gassendi has said on the power of the
mind to understand what it cannot conceive, there is a forgetfulness
of his principle, that nothing is in the understanding which has not
been in the sense. But, unless we impute repeated contradictions to
this philosopher, he must have meant that axiom in a less extended
sense than it has been taken by some who have since employed it. By
that which is “in the understanding,” he could only intend definite
images derived from sense, which must be present before the mind can
exercise any faculty, or proceed to reason up to unimaginable things.
The fallacy of the sensualist school, English and French, was to
conclude that we can have no knowledge of that which is not “in the
understanding;” an inference true in the popular sense of words, but
false in the metaphysical.

|Distinguishes ideas of reflection.|

20. There is, moreover, Gassendi proceeds, a class of reflex
operations, whereby the mind understands itself and its own faculties,
and is conscious that it is exercising such acts. And this faculty is
superior to any that a material substance possesses; for no body can
act reflexly on itself, but must move from one place to another.[771]
Our observation, therefore, of our own imaginings must be by a power
superior to imagination itself; for imagination is employed on the
image, not on the perception of the image, since there is no image of
the act of perception.

     [771] Alterum est genus reflexarum actionum, quibus intellectus
     seipsum, suasque functioneo intelligit, ac speciatim se
     intelligere animadvertit. Videlicet hoc munus est omni facultate
     corporea superius; quoniam quicquid corporeum est, ita certo
     loco, sive permanenter, sive succedenter alligatum est, ut non
     versus se, sed solum versus aliud diversum a se procedere possit.

21. The intellect also not only forms universal ideas, but perceives
the nature of universality. And this seems peculiar to mankind; for
brutes do not show anything more than a power of association by
resemblance. In our own conception of an universal, it may be urged,
there is always some admixture of singularity, as of a particular
form, magnitude, or colour; yet we are able, Gassendi thinks, to strip
the image successively of all these particular adjuncts.[772] He
seems, therefore, as has been remarked above, to have held the
conceptualist theory in the strictest manner, admitting the reality of
universal ideas even as images present to the mind.

     [772] Et ne instes in nobis quoque, dum universale concipimus,
     admisceri semper aliquid singularitatis, ut certæ magnitudinis,
     certæ figuræ, certi coloris, &c., experimur tamen, nisi [sic]
     simul, saltem successivè spoliari à nobis naturam qualibet
     speciali magnitudine, qualibet speciali figura, quolibet speciali
     colore; atque ita de cæteris.

|Also intellect from imagination.|

22. Intellection being the proper operation, of the soul, it is
needless to inquire whether it does this by its own nature, or by a
peculiar faculty called understanding, nor should we trouble ourselves
about the Aristotelian distinction of the active and passive
intellect.[773] We have only to distinguish this intellection from
mere conception derived from the phantasy, which is necessarily
associated with it. We cannot conceive God in this life, except under
some image thus supplied; and it is the same with all other
incorporeal things. Nor do we comprehend infinite quantities, but have
a sort of confused image of indefinite extension. This is surely a
right account of the matter; and if Stewart had paid any attention to
these and several other passages, he could not have so much
misconceived the philosophy of Gassendi.

     [773] P. 446.

23. The mind, as long as it dwells in the body, seems to have no
intelligible species, except phantasms derived from sense. These he
takes for impressions on the brain, driven to and fro by the animal
spirits till they reach the _phantasia_, or imaginative faculty,
and cause it to imagine sensible things. The soul, in Gassendi’s
theory, consists of an incorporeal part or intellect, and of a
corporeal part, the phantasy or sensitive soul, which he conceives to
be diffused throughout the body. The intellectual soul instantly
perceives, by its union with the phantasy, the images impressed upon
the latter, not by impulse of these sensible and material species, but
by intuition of their images in the phantasy.[774] Thus, if I rightly
apprehend his meaning, we are to distinguish, first, the species in
the brain, derived from immediate sense or reminiscence; secondly, the
image of these conceived by the phantasy; thirdly, the act of
perception in the mind itself, by which it knows the phantasy to have
imagined these species, and knows also the species themselves to have,
or to have had, their external archetypes. This distinction of the
_animus_, or reasonable, from the _anima_, or sensitive
soul, he took, as he did a great part of his philosophy, from
Epicurus.

     [774] Eodem momento intellectus ob intimam sui præsentiam
     cohærentiamque cum phantasia rem eandem contuetur, p. 450.

24. The phantasy and intellect proceed together, so that they might
appear at first to be the same faculty. Not only, however, are they
different in their operation even as to objects which fall under the
senses, and are represented to the mind, but the intellect has certain
operations peculiar to itself. Such is the apprehensions of things
which cannot be perceived by sense, as the Deity, whom, though we can
only imagine as corporeal, we apprehend or understand to be
otherwise.[775] He repeats a good deal of what he had before said on
the distinctive province of the understanding, by which we reason on
things incapable of being imagined; drawing several instances from the
geometry of infinites, as in asymptotes, wherein, he says, something
is always inferred by reasoning which we presume to be true, and yet
cannot reach by any effort of imagination.[776]

     [775] Hoc est autem præter phantasiæ cancellos, intellectûsque
     ipsius proprium, potestque adeo talis apprehensio non jam
     imaginatio, sed intelligentia vel intellectio dici. Non quod
     intellectus non accipiat ansam ab ipsa phantasia ratiocinandi
     esse aliquid ultra id, quod specie imagineve repræsentatur, neque
     non simul comitantem talem speciem vel imaginationem habeat; sed
     quod apprehendat, intelligatve aliquid, ad quod apprehendendum
     sive percipiendum assurgere phantasia non possit, ut quæ omnino
     terminetur ad corporum speciem, seu imaginem, ex qua illius
     operatio imaginatio appallatur. Ibid.

     [776] In quibus semper aliquid argumentando colligitur, quod et
     verum esse intelligimus et imaginando non assequimur tamen.

|His philosophy misunderstood by Stewart.|

25. I have given a few extracts from Gassendi, in order to confirm
what has been said, his writings being little read in England, and his
philosophy not having been always represented in the same manner. De
Gérando has claimed, on two occasions, the priority for Gassendi in
that theory of the generation of ideas which has usually been ascribed
to Locke.[777] But Stewart protests against this alledged similarity
in the tenets of the French and English philosophers. “The remark,” he
says, “is certainly just, if restrained to Locke’s doctrine as
interpreted by the greater part of philosophers on the continent; but
it is very wide of the truth, if applied to it as now explained and
modified by the most intelligent of his disciples in this country. The
main scope, indeed, of Gassendi’s argument against Descartes is to
materialise that class of our ideas which the Lockists, as well as the
Cartesians, consider as the exclusive objects of the power of
_reflection_, and to show that these ideas are all ultimately
resolvable into images or conceptions borrowed from things external.
It is not, therefore, what is sound and valuable in this part of
Locke’s system, but the errors grafted on it in the comments of some
of his followers, that can justly be said to have been borrowed from
Gassendi. Nor has Gassendi the merit of originality even in these
errors; for scarcely a remark on the subject occurs in his works, but
what is copied from the accounts transmitted to us of the Epicurean
metaphysics.”[778]

     [777] Histoire comparée des Systèmes (1804), vol. i., p. 301, and
     Biogr. Universelle, art. Gassendi. Yet in neither of these does
     M. de Gérando advert expressly to the peculiar resemblance
     between the system of Gassendi and Locke, in the account they
     give of ideas of reflection. He refers, however, to a more
     particular essay of his own, on the Gassendian philosophy, which
     I have not seen. As to Locke’s positive obligations to his
     predecessor, I should be, perhaps, inclined to doubt whether he,
     who was no great lover of large books, had read so unwieldy a
     work as the Syntagma Philosophicum; but the abridgment of Bernier
     would have sufficed.

     [778] Preliminary Dissertation to Encyclopædia.

26. It will probably appear to those who consider what I have quoted
from Gassendi, that in his latest writings he did not differ so much
from Locke, and lead the way so much to the school of the French
metaphysicians of the eighteenth century as Stewart has supposed. The
resemblance to the Essay on the Human Understanding, in several
points, especially in the important distinction of what Locke has
called ideas of reflection from those of sense, is too evident to be
denied. I am at the same time unable to account in a satisfactory
manner for the apparent discrepancy between the language of Gassendi
in the Syntagma Philosophicum, and that which we find in his
objections to the Meditations of Descartes. No great interval of time
had intervened between the two works; for the correspondence with
Descartes bears date in 1641, and it appears by that with Louis, Count
of Angoulême, in the succeeding year, that he was already employed on
the first part of the Syntagma Philosophicum.[779] Whether he urged
some of his objections against the Cartesian metaphysics with a regard
to victory rather than truth, or, as would be the more candid, and
perhaps more reasonable hypothesis, he was induced by the acuteness of
his great antagonist, to review and reform his own opinions, I must
leave to the philosophical reader.[780]

     [779] Gassendi Opera, vol. i., p. 130. These letters are
     interesting to those who would study the philosophy of Gassendi.

     [780] Baillet, in his Life of Descartes, would lead us to think
     that Gassendi was too much influenced by personal motives in
     writing against Descartes, who had mentioned the phenomena of
     parhelia, without alluding to a dissertation of Gassendi on the
     subject. The latter, it seems, owns in a letter to Rivet that he
     should not have examined so closely the metaphysics of Descartes,
     if he had been treated by him with as much politeness as he had
     expected. Vie de Descartes, liv. vi. The retort of Descartes, O
     caro! (see chap. xx. of this work, p. 497) offended Gassendi, and
     caused a coldness; which, according to Baillet, Sorbière
     aggravated acting a treacherous part in exasperating the mind of
     Gassendi.

|Bernier’s epitome of Gassendi.|

27. Stewart had evidently little or no knowledge of the Syntagma
Philosophicum. But he had seen an Abridgment of the Philosophy of
Gassendi by Bernier, published at Lyons in 1678, and finding in this
the doctrine of Locke on ideas of reflection, conceived that it did
not faithfully represent its own original. But this was hardly a very
plausible conjecture; Bernier being a man of considerable ability, an
intimate friend of Gassendi, and his epitome being so far from concise
that it extends to eight small volumes. Having not indeed collated the
two books, but read them within a short interval of time, I can say
that Bernier has given a faithful account of the philosophy of
Gassendi, as it is contained in the Syntagma Philosophicum, for he
takes notice of no other work; nor has he here added anything of his
own. But in 1682 he published another little book, entitled, Doutes de
M. Bernier sur quelques uns des principaux Chapitres de son Abrégé de
la Philosophie de Gassendi. One of these doubts relates to the
existence of space; and in another place he denies the reality of
eternity or abstract duration. Bernier observes, as Descartes had
done, that it is vain and even dangerous to attempt a definition of
evident things, such as motion, because we are apt to mistake a
definition of the word for one of the thing; and philosophers seem to
conceive that motion is a real being, when they talk of a
billiard-ball communicating or losing it.[781]

     [781] Even Gassendi has defined duration “an incorporeal flowing
     extension,” which is a good instance of the success that can
     attend such definitions of simple ideas.

|Process of Cartesian philosophy.|

28. The Cartesian philosophy, which its adversaries had expected to
expire with its founder, spread more and more after his death, nor had
it ever depended on any personal favour or popularity of Descartes,
since he did not possess such except with a few friends. The churches
and schools of Holland were full of Cartesians. The old scholastic
philosophy became ridiculous, its distinctions, its maxims were
laughed at, as its adherents complain; and probably a more fatal blow
was given to the Aristotelian system by Descartes than even by Bacon.
The Cartesian theories were obnoxious to the rigid class of
theologians; but two parties of considerable importance in Holland,
the Arminians and the Coccejans, generally espoused the new
philosophy. Many speculations in theology were immediately connected
with it, and it acted on the free and scrutinising spirit which began
to sap the bulwarks of established orthodoxy. The Cartesians were
denounced in ecclesiastical synods, and were hardly admitted to any
office in the church. They were condemned by several universities, and
especially by that of Leyden, in 1678, for the position that the truth
of scripture must be proved by reason.[782] Nor were they less exposed
to persecution in France.[783]

     [782] Leyden had condemned the whole Cartesian system as early as
     1651, on the ground that it was an innovation on the Aristotelian
     philosophy so long received; and ordained, ut in Academia intra
     Aristotelicæ philosophiæ limites, quæ hic hactenus recepta fuit,
     nos contineamus, utque in posterum nec philosophiæ, neque nominis
     Cartesiani in disputationibus lectionibus aut publicis aliis
     exercitiis, nec pro nec contra mentio fiat. Utrecht, in 1644, had
     gone farther, and her decree is couched in terms which might have
     been used by anyone who wished to ridicule university prejudice
     by a forgery. Rejicere novam istam philosophiam, primo quia
     veteri philosophiæ, quam Academiæ toto orbi terrarum hactenus
     optimo consilio docuere, adversatur, ejusque fundamenta
     subvertit; deinde quia juventutem a veteri et sana philosophia
     avertit, impeditque quo minus ad _culmen eruditionis provehatur_;
     eo quod istius præsumptæ philosophiæ adminiculo et _technologemata
     in auctorum libris professorumque lectionibus et disputationibus
     usitata, percipere, nequit_; postremo quod ex eadem variæ falsæ
     et absurdæ opiniones partim consignantur, partim ab improvida
     juventute deduci possint pugnantes cum cæteris disciplinis et
     facultatibus, atque imprimis cum orthodoxa theologia; censere
     igitur et statuere omnes philosophiam in hac academia docentes
     imposterum a tali instituto et incepto abstinere debere,
     contentos _modica libertate dissentiendi_ in singularibus
     nonnullis opinionibus ad aliarum celebrium Academiarum exemplum
     hic usitata, ita ut veteris et receptæ philosophiæ fundamenta non
     labefactent. Tepel. Hist. Philos. Cartesianæ, p. 75.

     [783] An account of the manner in which the Cartesians were
     harassed through the Jesuits is given by M. Cousin, in the
     Journal des Sçavans, March, 1838.

29. The Cartesian philosophy, in one sense, carried in itself the
seeds of its own decline; it was the Scylla of many dogs; it taught
men to think for themselves, and to think often better than Descartes
had done. A new eclectic philosophy, or rather the genuine spirit of
free inquiry, made Cartesianism cease as a sect, though it left much
that had been introduced by it. We owe thanks to these Cartesians of
the seventeenth century for their strenuous assertion of reason
against prescriptive authority: the latter part of this age was
signalised by the overthrow of a despotism which had fought every inch
in its retreat, and it was manifestly after a struggle, on the
continent, with this new philosophy, that it was ultimately
vanquished.[784]

     [784] For the fate of the Cartesian philosophy in the life of its
     founder, see the life of Descartes by Baillet, 2 vols., in
     quarto, which he afterwards abridged in 12mo. After the death of
     Descartes, it may be best traced by means of Brucker. Buhle, as
     usual, is a mere copyist of his predecessor. He has, however,
     given a fuller account of Regis. A contemporary History of
     Cartesian Philosophy by Tepel contains rather a neatly written
     summary of the controversies it excited both in the lifetime of
     Descartes and for a few years afterwards.

|La Forge. Regis.|

30. The Cartesian writers of France, the Low Countries, and Germany,
were numerous and respectable. La Forge of Saumur first developed the
theory of occasional causes to explain the union of soul and body,
wherein he was followed by Geulinx, Regis, Wittich, and
Malebranche.[785] But this and other innovations displeased the
stricter Cartesians who did not find them in their master. Clauberg in
Germany, Clerselier in France, Le Grand in the Low Countries, should
be mentioned among the leaders of the school. But no one has left so
comprehensive a statement and defence of Cartesianism, as Jean Silvain
Regis, whose système de la Philosophie, in three quarto volumes,
appeared at Paris in 1690. It is divided into four parts, on Logic,
Metaphysics, Physics, and Ethics. In the three latter, Regis claims
nothing as his own except some explanations, “All that I have said,
being due to M. Descartes, whose method and principles I have
followed, even in explanations that are different from his own.” And
in his Logic he professes to have gone little beyond the author of the
Art de Penser.[786] Notwithstanding this rare modesty, Regis is not a
writer unworthy of being consulted by the studious of philosophy, nor
deficient in clearer and fuller statements than will always be found
in Descartes. It might even be said that he has many things which
would be sought in vain through his master’s writings, though I am
unable to prove that they might not be traced in those of the
intermediate Cartesians. Though our limits will not permit any further
account of Regis, I will give a few passages in a note.[787]

     [785] Tennemann (Manuel de la Philosophie, ii., 99.) ascribes
     this theory to Geulinx. See also Brucker, v. 704.

     [786] It is remarkable that Regis says nothing about figures and
     modes of syllogism: Nous ne dirons rien des figures ne des
     syllogismes en général; car bien que tout cela puisse servir de
     quelque chose pour la spéculation de la logique, il n’est au
     moins d’aucun usage pour la pratique, laquelle est l’unique but
     que nous nous sommes proposés dans ce traité, p. 37.

     [787] Regis, in imitation of his master, and perhaps with more
     clearness, observes that our knowledge of our own existence is
     not derived from reasoning, mais par une connoissance simple et
     intérieure, qui précède toutes les connoissances acquisés, et qui
     j’appelle _conscience_. En effet, quand je dis que je connais ou
     que je crois connoître, ce _je_ presuppose lui-même mon
     existence, étant impossible que je connoisse, ou seulement que je
     croye connoître et que je ne sois pas quelque chose d’existant,
     p. 68. The Cartesian paradox, as it has been deemed, that
     thinking is the essence of the soul, Regis has explained away.
     After coming to the conclusion, Je suis donc une pensée, he
     immediately corrects himself: Cependant je crains encore de me
     définir mal, quand je dis que je suis une pensée, qui a la
     propriété de douter et d’avoir de la certitude; car quelle
     apparence y a t’il que ma nature, qui doit être une chose fixe et
     permanente, consiste dans la pensée, puisque je sais par
     expérience que mes pensées sont dans un flux continuel, et que je
     ne pense jamais à la même chose deux momens de suite? mais quand
     je considère la difficulté de plus près, je conçois aisément
     qu’elle vient de ce que le mot de _pensée_ est équivoque, et que
     je m’en sers indifféremment pour signifier la pensée qui
     constitue ma nature, et pour designer les différentes manières
     d’être de cette pensée; ce qui est une erreur extrême, car il y a
     cette différence entre la pensée qui constitue ma nature, et les
     pensées, qui n’en sont que les manières d’être, que la première
     est une pensée fixe et permanente, et que les autres sont des
     pensées changeantes et passagères. C’est pourquoi, afin de donner
     une idée exacte de ma nature, je dirai que je suis une pensée qui
     existe en elle-même, et qui est le sujet de toutes mes manières
     de penser. Je dis que je suis une pensée pour marquer ce que la
     pensée qui constitute ma nature à de commun avec la pensée en
     général qui comprend sous soi toutes les manières particulières
     de penser: et j’ajoute, qui existe en elle-même, et qui est le
     sujet de différentes manières de penser, pour designer ce que
     cette pensée a de particulier que la distingue de la pensée en
     général, vu qu’elle n’existe que dans l’entendement de celui qui
     la conçoit, ainsi que toutes les autres natures universelles,
     p. 70.

     Every mode supposes a substance wherein it exists. From this
     axiom Regis deduces the objective being of space, because we have
     the ideas of length, breadth, and depth, which cannot belong to
     ourselves, our souls having none of these properties; nor could
     the idea be suggested by a superior being, if space did not
     exist, because they would be the representations of non entity,
     which is impossible. But this transcendental proof is too subtle
     for the world.

     It is an axiom of Regis that we only know things without us by
     means of ideas, and that things of which we have no ideas, are in
     regard to us as if they did not exist at all. Another axiom is
     that all ideas, considered in respect to their representative
     property, depend on objects as their types, or _causes
     exemplaires_. And a third, that the “cause exemplaire” of ideas
     must contain all the properties which the ideas represent. These
     axioms, according to him, are the bases of all certainty in
     physical truth. From the second axiom he deduces the objectivity
     or “cause exemplaire” of his idea of a perfect being; and his
     proof seems at least more clearly put than by Descartes. Every
     idea implies an objective reality; for otherwise there would be
     an effect without a cause. In this we have the sophisms and
     begging of questions of which we may see many instances in
     Spinosa.

     In the second part of the first book of his metaphysics, Regis
     treats of the union of soul and body, and concludes that the
     motions of the body only act on the soul by a special will of
     God, who has determined to produce certain thoughts
     simultaneously with certain bodily motions, p. 124. God is the
     efficient first cause of all effects, his creatures are but
     secondarily efficient. But as they act immediately, we may
     ascribe all model beings to the efficiency of second causes. And
     he prefers this expression to that of occasional causes, usual
     among the Cartesians, because he fancies the latter rather
     derogatory to the fixed will of God.

|Huet’s Censure of Cartesianism.|

31. Huet, bishop of Avranches, a man of more general erudition than
philosophical acuteness, yet not quite without this, arraigned the
whole theory in his Censura Philosophiæ Cartesianæ. He had been for
many years, as he tells us, a favourer of Cartesianism, but his
retractation is very complete. It cannot be denied that Huet strikes
well at the vulnerable parts of the Cartesian metaphysics, and exposes
their alternate scepticism and dogmatism with some justice. In other
respects he displays an inferior knowledge of the human mind and of
the principles of reasoning to Descartes. He repeats Gassendi’s cavil
that, Cogito, ergo sum, involves the truth of Quod cogitat, est. The
Cartesians, Huet observes, assert the major, or universal, to be
deduced from the minor; which, though true in things known by
induction, is not so in propositions necessarily known, or as the
schools say, à priori, as that the whole is greater than its part. It
is not, however, probable that Descartes would have extended his reply
to Gassendi’s criticism so far as this; some have referred our
knowledge of geometrical axioms to experience, but this seems not
agreeable to the Cartesian theory.

|Port-Royal Logic.|

32. The influence of the Cartesian philosophy was displayed in a
treatise of deserved reputation, L’Art de Penser, often called
the Port-Royal Logic. It was the work of Antony Arnauld, with some
assistance, perhaps, by Nicole. Arnauld was not an entire Cartesian;
he had himself been engaged in controversy with Descartes; but his
understanding was clear and calm, his love of truth sincere, and he
could not avoid recognising the vast superiority of the new philosophy
to that received in the schools. This logic accordingly is perhaps the
first regular treatise on that science that contained a protestation,
though in very moderate language, against the Aristotelian method. The
author tells us that after some doubt he had resolved to insert a few
things rather troublesome and of little value, such as the rules of
conversion and the demonstration of the syllogistic figures, chiefly
as exercises of the understanding, for which difficulties are not
without utility. The method of syllogism itself he deems little
serviceable in the discovery of truth; while many things dwelt upon in
books of logic, such as the ten categories, rather injure than improve
the reasoning faculties, because they accustom men to satisfy
themselves with words, and to mistake a long catalogue of arbitrary
definitions for real knowledge. Of Aristotle he speaks in more
honourable terms than Bacon had done before, or than Malebranche did
afterwards; acknowledging the extraordinary merit of some of his
writings, but pointing out with an independent spirit his failings as
a master in the art of reasoning.

33. The first part of L’Art de Penser is almost entirely metaphysical,
in the usual sense of that word. It considers ideas in their nature
and origin, in the chief differences of the objects they represent, in
their simplicity of composition, in their extent, as universal,
particular, or singular, and lastly in their distinctness or
confusion. The word idea, it is observed, is among those which are so
clear that we cannot explain them by means of others, because none can
be more clear and simple than themselves.[788] But here it may be
doubtful whether the sense in which the word is to be taken, must
strike everyone in the same way. The clearness of a word does not
depend on its association with a distinct conception in our own minds,
but on the generality of this same association in the minds of others.

     [788] C. 1.

34. No follower of Descartes has more unambiguously than this author
distinguished between imagination and intellection, though he gives
the name of idea to both. Many suppose, he says, that they cannot
conceive a thing when they cannot imagine it. But we cannot imagine a
figure of 1,000 sides, though we can conceive it and reason upon it.
We may indeed get a confused image of a figure with many sides, but
these are no more 1,000 than they are 999. Thus, also, we have ideas
of thinking, affirming, denying, and the like, though we have no
imagination of these operations. By ideas therefore we mean not images
painted in the fancy, but all that is in our minds when we say that we
conceive anything, in whatever manner we may conceive it. Hence, it is
easy to judge of the falsehood of some opinions held in this age. One
philosopher has advanced that we have no idea of God; another that all
reasoning is but an assemblage of words connected by an affirmation.
He glances here at Gassendi and Hobbes.[789] Far from all our ideas
coming from the senses, as the Aristotelians have said, and as
Gassendi asserts in his Logic, we may say on the contrary that no idea
in our minds is derived from the senses except occasionally (par
occasion); that is, the movements of the brain, which is all the
organs of sense can effect, give occasion to the soul to form
different ideas which it would not otherwise form, though these ideas
have scarce ever any resemblance to what occurs in the organs of sense
and in the brain, and though there are also very many ideas, which,
deriving nothing from any bodily image, cannot without absurdity be
referred to the senses.[790] This is perhaps a clearer statement of an
important truth than will be found in Malebranche or in Descartes
himself.

     [789] The reflection on Gassendi is a mere cavil, as will appear
     by remarking what he has really said, and which we have quoted a
     few pages above. The Cartesians were resolute in using one sense
     of the word idea, while Gassendi used another. He had himself
     been to blame in his controversy with the father of the new
     philosophy, and the disciples (calling the author of L’Art de
     Penser such in a general sense) retaliated by equal captiousness.

     [790] C. 1.

35. In the second part, Arnauld treats of words and propositions. Much
of it may be reckoned more within the province of grammar than of
logic. But as it is inconvenient to refer the student to works of a
different class, especially if it should be the case that no good
grammars, written with a regard to logical principles, were then to be
found, this cannot justly be made an objection. In the latter chapters
of this second part, he comes to much that is strictly logical, and
taken from ordinary books on that science. The third part relates to
syllogisms, and notwithstanding the author’s low estimation of that
method, in comparison with the general regard for it in the schools,
he has not omitted the common explanations of mood and figure, ending
with a concise but good account of the chief sophisms.

36. The fourth and last part is entitled, On Method, and contains the
principles of connected reasoning, which he justly observes to be more
important than the rules of single syllogisms, wherein few make any
mistake. The laws of demonstration given by Pascal, are here laid down
with some enlargement. Many observations not wholly bearing on merely
logical proof, are found in this part of the treatise.

37. The Port-Royal Logic, though not, perhaps, very much read in
England, has always been reckoned among the best works in that
science, and certainly had a great influence in rendering it more
metaphysical, more ethical (for much is said by Arnauld on the moral
discipline of the mind in order to fit it for the investigation of
truth), more exempt from technical barbarisms and trifling definitions
and divisions. It became more and more acknowledged that the rules of
syllogism go a very little way in rendering the mind able to follow a
course of enquiry without error, much less in assisting it to discover
truth; and that even their vaunted prerogative of securing us from
fallacy is nearly ineffectual in exercise. The substitution of the
French language, in its highest polish, for the uncouth Latinity of
the Aristotelians, was another advantage of which the Cartesian school
legitimately availed themselves.

|Malebranche.|

38. Malebranche, whose Recherche de la Vérité was published in 1674,
was a warm and almost enthusiastic admirer of Descartes, but his mind
was independent, searching, and fond of its own inventions; he
acknowledged no master, and in some points dissents from the Cartesian
school. His natural temperament was sincere and rigid; he judges the
moral and intellectual failings of mankind with a severe scrutiny, and
a contemptuousness not generally unjust in itself, but displaying too
great confidence in his own superiority. This was enhanced by a
religious mysticism, which enters, as an essential element, into his
philosophy of the mind. The fame of Malebranche, and still more the
popularity in modern times of his Search for Truth, has been affected
by that peculiar hypothesis, so mystically expressed, the seeing all
things in God, which has been more remembered than any other part of
that treatise. “The union,” he says, “of the soul to God is the only
means by which we acquire a knowledge of truth. This union has indeed
been rendered so obscure by original sin, that few can understand what
it means; to those who follow blindly the dictates of sense and
passion it appears imaginary. The same cause has so fortified the
connection between the soul and body that we look on them as one
substance, of which the latter is the principal part. And hence, we
may all fear that we do not well discern the confused sounds with
which the senses fill the imagination from that pure voice of truth
which speaks to the soul. The body speaks louder than God himself; and
our pride makes us presumptuous enough to judge without waiting for
those words of truth, without which we cannot truly judge at all. And
the present work,” he adds, “may give evidence of this; for it is not
published as being infallible. But let my readers judge of my opinions
according to the clear and distinct answers they shall receive from
the only Lord of all men after they shall have interrogated him by
paying a serious attention to the subject.” This is a strong evidence
of the enthusiastic confidence in supernatural illumination which
belongs to Malebranche, and which we are almost surprised to find
united with so much cool and acute reasoning as his writings contain.

|His style.|

39. The Recherche de la Vérité is in six books; the first five on the
errors springing from the senses, from the imagination, from the
understanding, from the natural inclinations, and from the passions.
The sixth contains the method of avoiding these, which, however, has
been anticipated in great measure throughout the preceding.
Malebranche has many repetitions, but little, I think, that can be
called digressive, though he takes a large range of illustration, and
dwells rather diffusely on topics of subordinate importance. His style
is admirable; clear, precise, elegant, sparing in metaphors, yet not
wanting them in due place, warm, and sometimes eloquent, a little
redundant, but never passionate or declamatory.

|Sketch of his theory.|

40. Error, according to Malebranche, is the source of all human
misery; man is miserable because he is a sinner, and he would not sin
if he did not consent to err. For the will alone judges and reasons,
the understanding only perceives things and their relations; a
deviation from common language, to say the least, that seems quite
unnecessary.[791] The will is active and free; not that we can avoid
willing our own happiness; but it possesses a power of turning the
understanding towards such objects as please us, and commanding it to
examine everything thoroughly, else we should be perpetually deceived,
and without remedy, by the appearances of truth. And this liberty we
should use on every occasion: it is to become slaves, against the will
of God, when we acquiesce in false appearances; but it is in obedience
to the voice of eternal truth which speaks within us, that we submit
to those secret reproaches of reason, which accompany our refusal to
yield to evidence. There are, therefore, two fundamental rules, one
for science, the other for morals; never to give an entire consent to
any propositions, except those which are so evidently true, that we
cannot refuse to admit them without an internal uneasiness and
reproach of our reason; and, never fully to love anything, which we
can abstain from loving without remorse. We may feel a great
inclination to consent absolutely to a probable opinion; yet, on
reflection, we shall find that we are not compelled to do so by any
tacit self-reproach if we do not. And we ought to consent to such
probable opinions for the time until we have more fully examined the
question.

     [791] L. i., c. 2.

41. The sight is the noblest of our senses, and if they had been given
us to discover truth, it is through vision that we should have done
it. But it deceives us in all it represents, in the size of bodies,
their figures and motions, in light and colours. None of these are
such as they appear, as he proves by many obvious instances. Thus, we
measure the velocity of motion by duration of time and extent of
space; but of duration the mind can form no just estimate, and the eye
cannot determine equality of spaces. The diameter of the moon is
greater by measurement when she is high in the heavens; it appears
greater to our eyes in the horizon.[792] On all sides we are beset
with error through our senses. Not that the sensations themselves,
properly speaking, deceive us. We are not deceived in supposing that
we see an orb of light before the sun has risen above the horizon, but
in supposing that what we see is the sun itself. Were we even
delirious, we should see and feel what our senses present to us,
though our judgment as to its reality would be erroneous. And this
judgment we may withhold by assenting to nothing without perfect
certainty.

     [792] L. i., c. 9. Malebranche was engaged afterwards in
     a controversy with Regis on this particular question of the
     horizontal moon.

42. It would have been impossible for a man endowed with such
intrepidity and acuteness as Malebranche to overlook the question, so
naturally raised by this sceptical theory, as to the objective
existence of an external world. There is no necessary connection, he
observes, between the presence of an idea in the soul, and the
existence of the thing which it represents, as dreams and delirium
prove. Yet we may be confident that extension, figure, and movement,
do generally exist without us when we perceive them. These are not
imaginary; we are not deceived in believing their reality, though it
is very difficult to prove it. But it is far otherwise with colours,
smells, or sounds, for these do not exist at all beyond the mind. This
he proceeds to show at considerable length.[793] In one of the
illustrations subsequently written in order to obviate objections, and
subjoined to the Recherche de la Vérité, Malebranche comes again to
this problem of the reality of matter, and concludes by subverting
every argument in its favour, except what he takes to be the assertion
of Scripture. Berkeley, who did not see this in the same light, had
scarcely a step to take in his own famous theory, which we may
consider as having been anticipated by Malebranche, with the important
exception that what was only scepticism and denial of certainty in the
one, became a positive and dogmatic affirmation in the other.

     [793] L. i., c. 10.

43. In all our sensations there are four things distinct in
themselves, but which, examined as they arise simultaneously, we are
apt to confound; these are the action of the object, the effect upon
the organ of sense, the mere sensation, and the judgment we form as to
its cause. We fall into errors as to all these, confounding the
sensation with the action of bodies, as when we say there is heat in
the fire, or colour in the rose, or confounding the motion of the
nerves with sensation, as when we refer heat to the hand; but most of
all, in drawing mistaken inferences as to the nature of objects from
our sensations.[794] It may be here remarked that what Malebranche has
properly called the judgment of the mind as to the cause of its
sensations, is precisely what Reid denominates perception; a term less
clear, and which seems to have led some of his school into important
errors. The language of the Scottish philosopher appears to imply that
he considered perception as a distinct and original faculty of the
mind, rather than what it is, a complex operation of the judgment and
memory, applying knowledge already acquired by experience. Neither he,
nor his disciple Stewart, though aware of the mistakes that have
arisen in this province of metaphysics by selecting our instances from
the phenomena of vision instead of the other senses, have avoided the
same source of error. The sense of sight has the prerogative of
enabling us to pronounce instantly on the external cause of our
sensation; and this perception is so intimately blended with the
sensation itself, that it has not to our minds, whatever may be the
case with young children, the least appearance of a judgment. But we
need only make our experiment upon sound or smell, and we shall at
once acknowledge that there is no sort of necessary connection between
the sensation and our knowledge of its corresponding external object.
We hear sounds continually, which we are incapable of referring to any
particular body; nor does anyone, I suppose, deny that it is by
experience alone we learn to pronounce, with more or less of certainty
according to its degree, on the causes from which these sensations
proceed.

     [794] C. 12.

44. Sensation he defines to be “a modification of the soul in relation
to something which passes in the body to which she is united.” These
sensations we know by experience; it is idle to go about defining or
explaining them; this cannot be done by words. It is an error,
according to Malebranche, to believe that all men have like sensations
from the same objects. In this he goes farther than Pascal, who thinks
it probable that they have, while Malebranche holds it indubitable,
from the organs of men being constructed differently, that they do not
receive similar impressions; instancing music, some smells and
flavours, and many other things of the same kind. But it is obvious to
reply that he has argued from the exception to the rule; the great
majority of mankind agreeing as to musical sounds (which is the
strongest case that can be put against his paradox), and most other
sensations. That the sensations of different men, subject to such
exceptions, if not strictly alike, are, so to say, in a constant
ratio, seems as indisputable as any conclusion we can draw from their
testimony.

45. The second book of Malebranche’s treatise relates to the
imagination, and the errors connected with it. “The imagination
consists in the power of the mind to form images of objects by
producing a change in the fibres of that part of the brain, which may
be called principal because it corresponds with all parts of the body,
and is the place where the soul, if we may so speak, immediately
resides.” This he supposes to be where all the filaments of the brain
terminate; so difficult was it, especially in that age, for a
philosopher, who had the clearest perception of the soul’s
immateriality, to free himself from the analogies of extended presence
and material impulse. The imagination, he says, comprehends two
things; the action of the will and the obedience of the animal spirits
which trace images on the brain. The power of conception depends
partly upon the strength of those animal spirits, partly on the
qualities of the brain itself. For just as the size, the depth, and
the clearness of the lines in an engraving depend on the force with
which the graver acts, and on the obedience which the copper yields to
it, so the depth and clearness of the traces of the imagination depend
on the force of the animal spirits, and on the constitution of the
fibres of the brain; and it is the difference of these which occasions
almost the whole of that vast difference we find in the capacities of
men.

46. This arbitrary, though rather specious hypothesis, which, in the
present more advanced state of physiology, a philosopher might not in
all points reject, but would certainly not assume, is spread out by
Malebranche over a large part of his work, and especially the second
book. The delicacy of the fibres of the brain, he supposes, is one of
the chief causes of our not giving sufficient application to difficult
subjects. Women possess this delicacy, and hence have more
intelligence than men as to all sensible objects; but whatever is
abstract is to them incomprehensible. The fibres are soft in children,
and become stronger with age, the greatest perfection of the
understanding being between thirty and fifty; but with prejudiced men,
and especially when they are advanced in life, the hardness of the
cerebral fibre confirms them in error. For we can understand nothing
without attention, nor attend to it without having a strong image
in the brain, nor can that image be formed without a suppleness and
susceptibility of motion in the brain itself. It is, therefore, highly
useful to get the habit of thinking on all subjects, and thus to give
the brain a facility of motion analogous to that of the fingers in
playing on a musical instrument. And this habit is best acquired by
seeking truth in difficult things while we are young, because it is
then that the fibres are most easily bent in all directions.[795]

     [795] L. ii., c. 1.

47. This hypothesis, carried so far as it has been by Malebranche,
goes very great lengths in asserting not merely a connection between
the cerebral motions and the operations of the mind, but something
like a subordination of the latter to a plastic power in the animal
spirits of the brain. For if the differences in the intellectual
powers of mankind, and also, as he afterwards maintains, in their
moral emotions, are to be accounted for by mere bodily configuration
as their regulating cause, little more than a naked individuality of
consciousness seems to be left to the immaterial principle. No one,
however, whether he were staggered by this difficulty or not, had a
more decided conviction of the essential distinction between mind and
matter than this disciple of Descartes. The soul, he says, does not
become body, nor the body soul, by their union. Each substance remains
as it is, the soul incapable of extension and motion, the body
incapable of thought and desire. All the alliance between soul and
body, which is known to us, consists in a natural and mutual
correspondence of the thoughts of the former with the traces on the
brain, and of its emotions with the traces of the animal spirits. As
soon as the soul receives new ideas, new traces are imprinted on the
brain; and as soon as external objects imprint new traces, the soul
receives new ideas. Not that it contemplates these traces, for it has
no knowledge of them; nor that the traces contain the ideas, since
they have no relation to them; nor that the soul receives her ideas
from the traces, for it is inconceivable that the soul should receive
anything from the body, and become more enlightened, as some
philosophers (meaning Gassendi) express it, by turning itself towards
the phantasms in the brain. Thus, also, when the soul wills that the
arm should move, the arm moves, though she does not even know what
else is necessary for its motion; and thus, when the animal spirits
are put into movement, the soul is disturbed, though she does not even
know that there are animal spirits in the body.

48. These remarks of Malebranche it is important to familiarise to our
minds; and those who reflect upon them will neither fall into the
gross materialism to which many physiologists appear prone, nor, on
the other hand, out of fear of allowing too much to the bodily organs,
reject any sufficient proof that may be adduced for the relation
between the cerebral system and the intellectual processes. These
opposite errors are by no means uncommon in the present age. But,
without expressing an opinion on that peculiar hypothesis which is
generally called phrenology, we might ask whether it is not quite as
conceivable that a certain state of portions of the brain may be the
antecedent condition of memory or imagination, as that a certain state
of nervous filaments may be, what we know it is, an invariable
antecedent of sensation. In neither instance can there be any
resemblance or proper representation of the organic motion transferred
to the soul; nor ought we to employ, even in metaphor, the analogies
of impulse or communication. But we have two phenomena, between which,
by the constitution of our human nature, and probably by that of the
very lowest animals, there is a perpetual harmony and concomitance; an
ultimate fact, according to the present state of our faculties, which
may, in some senses, be called mysterious, inasmuch as we can neither
fully apprehend its final causes, nor all the conditions of its
operation, but one which seems not to involve any appearance of
contradiction, and should therefore not lead us into the useless
perplexity of seeking a solution that is almost evidently beyond our
reach.

49. The association of ideas is far more extensively developed by
Malebranche in this second book than by any of the old writers, not
even, I think, with the exception of Hobbes; though he is too fond of
mixing the psychological facts which experience furnishes with his
precarious, however plausible, theory of cerebral traces. Many of his
remarks are acute and valuable. Thus, he observes that writers who
make use of many new terms in science, under the notion of being more
intelligible, are often not understood at all, whatever care they may
take to define their words. We grant in theory their right to do this;
but nature resists. The new words, having no ideas previously
associated with them, fall out of the reader’s mind, except in
mathematics, where they can be rendered evident by diagrams. In all
this part, Malebranche expatiates on the excessive deference shown to
authority, which, because it is great in religion, we suppose equally
conclusive in philosophy, and on the waste of time which mere reading
of many books entails; experience, he says, having always shown that
those who have studied most are the very persons who have led the
world into the greatest errors. The whole of the chapters on this
subject is worth perusal.

50. In another part of this second book, Malebranche has opened a new
and fertile vein, which he is far from having exhausted, on what he
calls the contagiousness of a powerful imagination. Minds of this
character, he observes, rule those which are feebler in conception:
they give them by degrees their own habit, they impress their own
type; and as men of strong imagination are themselves for the most
part very unreasonable, their brains being cut up, as it were, by deep
traces, which leave no room for anything else, no source of human
error is more dangerous than this contagiousness of their disorder.
This he explains, in his favourite physiology, by a certain natural
sympathy between the cerebral fibres of different men, which being
wanting in anyone with whom we converse, it is vain to expect that he
will enter into our views, and we must look for a more sympathetic
tissue elsewhere.

51. The moral observations of Malebranche are worth more than these
hypotheses with which they are mingled. Men of powerful imagination
express themselves with force and vivacity, though not always in the
most natural manner, and often with great animation of gesture; they
deal with subjects that excite sensible images, and from all this they
acquire a great power of persuasion. This is exercised especially over
persons in subordinate relations; and thus children, servants, or
courtiers adopt the opinions of their superiors. Even in religion,
nations have been found to take up the doctrines of their rulers, as
has been seen in England. In certain authors, who influence our minds
without any weight of argument, this despotism of a strong imagination
is exercised, which he particularly illustrates by the examples of
Tertullian, Seneca, and Montaigne. The contagious power of imagination
is also manifest in the credulity of mankind as to apparitions and
witchcraft; and he observes that where witches are burned, there is
generally a great number of them, while, since some parliaments have
ceased to punish for sorcery, the offence has diminished within their
jurisdiction.

52. The application which these striking and original views will bear,
spreads far into the regions of moral philosophy, in the largest sense
of that word. It is needless to dwell upon, and idle to cavil at the
physiological theories to which Malebranche has had recourse. False
let them be, what is derived from the experience of human nature will
always be true. No one general phenomenon in the intercommunity of
mankind with each other is more worthy to be remembered, or more
evident to an observing eye, than this contagiousness, as Malebranche
phrases it, of a powerful imagination, especially when assisted by any
circumstances that secure and augment its influence. The history of
every popular delusion, and even the petty events of every day in
private life, are witnesses to its power.

53. The third book is entitled, Of the Understanding or Pure Spirit
(l’Esprit Pur). By the pure understanding he means the faculty of the
soul to know the reality of certain things without the aid of images
in the brain. And he warns the reader that the inquiry will be found
dry and obscure. The essence of the soul, he says, following his
Cartesian theory, consists in thinking, as that of matter does in
extension; will, imagination, memory, and the like, are modifications
of thought or forms of the soul, as water, wood, or fire are
modifications of matter. This sort of expression has been adopted by
our metaphysicians of the Scots school in preference to the ideas of
reflection, as these operations are called by Locke. But by the word
thought (pensée) he does not mean these modifications, but the soul or
thinking principle absolutely, capable of all these modifications, as
extension is neither round nor square, though capable of either form.
The power of volition, and, by parity of reasoning we may add, of
thinking, is inseparable from the soul, but not the acts of volition
or thinking themselves; as a body is always movable though it be not
always in motion.

54. In this book it does not seem that Malebranche has been very
successful in distinguishing the ideas of pure intellect from those
which the senses or imagination present to us; nor do we clearly see
what he means by the former, except those of existence and a few more.
But he now hastens to his peculiar hypothesis as to the mode of
perception. By ideas he understands the immediate object of the soul,
which all the world, he supposes, will agree not to be the same with
the external object of sense. Ideas are real existences; for they have
properties, and represent very different things; but nothing can have
no property. How then do they enter into the mind, or become present
to it? Is it, as the Aristotelians hold, by means of species
transmitted from the external objects? Or are they produced
instantaneously by some faculty of the soul? Or have they been created
and posited, as it were, in the soul, when it began to exist? Or does
God produce them in us whenever we think or perceive? Or does the soul
contain in herself in some transcendent manner whatever is in the
sensible world? These hypotheses of elder philosophers, some of which
are not quite intelligibly distinct from each other, Malebranche
having successively refuted, comes to what he considers the only
possible alternative--namely, that the soul is united to an
all-perfect Being, in whom all that belongs to his creatures is
contained. Besides the exclusion of every other supposition which, by
his sorites he conceives himself to have given, he subjoins several
direct arguments in favour of his own theory, but in general so
obscure and full of arbitrary assumption that they cannot be stated in
this brief sketch.[796]

     [796] L. iii., c. 6.

55. The mysticism of this eminent man displays itself throughout this
part of his treatise, but rarely leading him into that figurative and
unmeaning language from which the inferior class of enthusiasts are
never free. His philosophy which has hitherto appeared so sceptical,
assumes now the character of intense irresistible conviction. The
scepticism of Malebranche is merely ancillary to his mysticism. His
philosophy, if we may use so quaint a description of it, is
subjectivity leading objectivity in chains. He seems to triumph in his
restoration of the inner man to his pristine greatness, by subduing
those false traitors and rebels, the nerves and brain, to whom, since
the great lapse of Adam, his posterity had been in thrall. It has been
justly remarked by Brown, that in the writings of Malebranche, as in
all theological metaphysicians of the catholic church, we perceive the
commanding influence of Augustin.[797] From him, rather than, in the
first instance, from Plato or Plotinus, it may be suspected that
Malebranche, who was not very learned in ancient philosophy, derived
the manifest tinge of Platonism that, mingling with his warm
admiration of Descartes, has rendered him a link between two famous
systems, not very harmonious in their spirit and turn of reasoning.
But his genius more clear, or at least disciplined in a more accurate
logic than that of Augustin, taught him to dissent from that father by
denying objective reality to eternal truths, such as that two and two
are equal to four; descending thus one step from unintelligible
mysticism.

     [797] Philosophy of the Human Mind, Lecture xxx. Brown’s own
     position, that “the idea _is_ the mind,” seems to me as
     paradoxical, in expression at least, as anything in Malebranche.

56. “Let us repose,” he concludes, “in this tenet, that God is the
intelligible world, or the place of spirits, like as the material
world is the place of bodies; that it is from his power they receive
all their modifications; that it is in his wisdom they find all their
ideas; and that it is by his love they feel all their well-regulated
emotions. And since his power and his wisdom and his love are but
himself, let us believe with St. Paul, that he is not far from each of
us, and that in him we live and move, and have our being.” But
sometimes Malebranche does not content himself with these fine
effusions of piety. His theism, as has often been the case with
mystical writers, expands till it becomes as it were dark with
excessive light, and almost vanishes in his own effulgence. He has
passages that approach very closely to the pantheism of Jordano Bruno
and Spinosa; one especially, wherein he vindicates the Cartesian
argument for a being of necessary existence in a strain which perhaps
renders that argument less incomprehensible, but certainly cannot be
said, in any legitimate sense, to establish the existence of a
Deity.[798]

     [798] L. iii. c. 8.

57. It is from the effect which the invention of so original and
striking an hypothesis, and one that raises such magnificent
conceptions of the union between the Deity and the human soul, would
produce on a man of an elevated and contemplative genius, that we must
account for Malebranche’s forgetfulness of much that he has
judiciously said in part of his treatise, on the limitation of our
faculties and the imperfect knowledge we can attain as to our
intellectual nature. For, if we should admit that ideas are
substances, and not accidents of the thinking spirit, it would
still be doubtful whether he has wholly enumerated, or conclusively
refuted, the possible hypotheses as to their existence in the mind.
And his more direct reasonings labour under the same difficulty from
the manifest incapacity of our understandings to do more than form
conjectures and dim notions of what we can so imperfectly bring before
them.

58. The fourth and fifth books of the Recherche de la Vérité treat of
the natural inclinations and passions, and of the errors which spring
from those sources. These books are various and discursive, and very
characteristic of the author’s mind; abounding with a mystical
theology, which extends to an absolute negation of secondary causes,
as well as with poignant satire on the follies of mankind. In every
part of his treatise, but especially in these books, Malebranche
pursues with unsparing ridicule two classes, the men of learning, and
the men of the world. With Aristotle and the whole school of his
disciples he has an inveterate quarrel, and omits no occasion of
holding them forth to contempt. This seems to have been in a great
measure warranted by their dogmatism, their bigotry, their
pertinacious resistance to modern science, especially to the Cartesian
philosophy, which Malebranche in general followed. “Let them,” he
exclaims, “prove, if they can, that Aristotle, or any of themselves,
has deduced one truth in physical philosophy from any principle
peculiar to himself, and we will promise never to speak of him but in
eulogy.”[799] But, until this gauntlet should be taken up, he thought
himself at liberty to use very different language. “The works of the
Stagyrite,” he observes, “are so obscure and full of indefinite words,
that we have a colour for ascribing to him the most opposite opinions.
In fact, we make him say what we please, because he says very little,
though with much parade; just as children fancy bells to say anything,
because they make a great noise, and in reality say nothing at all.”

     [799] L. iv., c. 3.

59. But such philosophers are not the only class of the learned he
depreciates. Those who pass their time in gazing through telescopes,
and distribute provinces in the moon to their friends, those who pore
over worthless books, such as the Rabbinical and other Oriental
writers, or compose folio volumes on the animals mentioned in
Scripture, while they can hardly tell what are found in their own
province, those who accumulate quotations to inform us not of truth,
but of what other men have taken for truth, are exposed to his sharp,
but doubtless exaggerated and unreasonable ridicule. Malebranche, like
many men of genius, was much too intolerant of what might give
pleasure to other men, and too narrow in his measure of utility. He
seems to think little valuable in human learning but metaphysics and
algebra.[800] From the learned he passes to the great, and after
enumerating the circumstances which obstruct their perception of
truth, comes to the blunt conclusion that men “much raised above the
rest by rank, dignity, or wealth, or whose minds are occupied in
gaining these advantages, are remarkably subject to error, and hardly
capable of discerning any truths which lie a little out of the common
way.”[801]

     [800] It is rather amusing to find that, while lamenting the want
     of a review of books, he predicts that we shall never see one, on
     account of the prejudice of mankind in favour of authors. The
     prophecy was falsified almost at the time. On regarde
     ordinairement les auteurs comme des hommes rares et
     extraordinaires et beaucoup élevés au-dessus des autres; on les
     révère donc au lieu de les mépriser et de les punir. Ainsi il n’y
     a guères d’apparence que les hommes érigent jamais un tribunal
     pour examiner et pour condamner tous les livres, qui ne font que
     corrompre la raison, c. 8.

     La plupart des livres de certains savans ne sont fabriqués qu’à
     coups de dictionnaires, et ils n’ont guères lû que les tables des
     livres qu’ils citent, ou quelques lieux communs, ramassés de
     différens auteurs. On n’oseroit entrer d’avantage dans le détail
     de ces choses, ni en donner des exemples, de peur de choquer des
     personnes aussi fières et aussi bilieuses que sont ces faux
     savans; car on ne prend pas plaisir à se faire injurier en Grec
     et en Arabe.

     [801] C. 9.

60. The sixth and last book announces a method of directing our
pursuit of truth, by which we may avoid the many errors to which our
understandings are liable. It promises to give them all the perfection
of which our nature is capable, by prescribing the rules we should
invariably observe. But it must, I think, be confessed that there is
less originality in this method than we might expect. We find,
however, many acute and useful, if not always novel, observations on
the conduct of the understanding, and it may be reckoned among the
books which would supply materials for what is still wanting to
philosophical literature, an ample and useful logic. We are so
frequently inattentive, he observes, especially to the pure ideas of
the understanding, that all resources should be employed to fix our
thoughts. And for this purpose we may make use of the passions, the
senses, or the imagination, but the second with less danger than the
first, and the third than the second. Geometrical figures he ranges
under the aids supplied to the imagination rather than to the senses.
He dwells much at length on the utility of geometry in fixing our
attention, and of algebra in compressing and arranging our thoughts.
All sciences, he well remarks, and I do not know that it had been said
before, which treat of things distinguishable by more or less in
quantity, and which consequently may be represented by extension, are
capable of illustration by diagrams. But these, he conceives, are
inapplicable to moral truths, though sure consequences may be derived
from them. Algebra, however, is far more useful in improving the
understanding than geometry, and is in fact, with its sister
arithmetic, the best means that we possess.[802] But as men like
better to exercise the imagination than the pure intellect, geometry
is the more favourite study of the two.

     [802] L. vi., c. 4. All conceptions of abstract ideas, he justly
     remarks in another place, are accompanied with some imagination,
     though we are often not aware of it; because these ideas have no
     natural images or traces associated with them, but such only as
     the will of man or chance has given. Thus, in analysis, however
     general the ideas, we use letters and signs, always associated
     with the ideas of the things, though they are not really related,
     and for this reason do not give us false and confused notions.
     Hence, he thinks, the ideas of things which can only be perceived
     by the understanding, may become associated with the traces on
     the brain, l. v., c. 2. This is evidently as applicable to
     language as it is to algebra.

     Cudworth has a somewhat similar remark in his Immutable Morality,
     that the cogitations we have of corporeal things are usually, in
     his technical style, both noematical and phantasmatical together,
     the one being as it were the soul, and the other the body of
     them. “Whenever we think of a phantasmatical universal or
     universalised phantasm, or a thing which we have no clear
     intellection of (as for example of the nature of a rose in
     general), there is a complication of something noematical and
     something phantasmatical together; for phantasms themselves as
     well as sensations are always individual things.” P. 143.

|Character of Malebranche.|

61. Malebranche may perhaps be thought to have occupied too much of
our attention at the expense of more popular writers. But for this
very reason, that the Recherche de la Vérité is not at present much
read, I have dwelt long on a treatise of so great celebrity in its own
age, and which, even more perhaps than the metaphysical writings of
Descartes, has influenced that department of philosophy. Malebranche
never loses sight of the great principle of the soul’s immateriality,
even in his long and rather hypothetical disquisitions on the
instrumentality of the brain in acts of thought; and his language is
far less objectionable on this subject than that of succeeding
philosophers. He is always consistent and clear in distinguishing the
soul itself from its modifications and properties. He knew well and
had deeply considered the application of mathematical and physical
science to the philosophy of the human mind. He is very copious and
diligent in illustration, and very clear in definition. His principal
errors, and the sources of them in his peculiar temperament, have
appeared in the course of these pages. And to these we may add his
maintaining some Cartesian paradoxes, such as the system of vortices,
and the want of sensation in brutes. The latter he deduced from the
immateriality of a thinking principle, supposing it incredible, though
he owns it had been the tenet of Augustin, that there could be an
immaterial spirit in the lower animals, and also from the
incompatibility of any unmerited suffering with the justice of
God.[803] Nor was Malebranche exempt from some prejudices of
scholastic theology; and though he generally took care to avoid its
technical language, is content to repel the objection to his denial of
all secondary causation from its making God the sole author of sin, by
saying that sin being a privation of righteousness, is negative, and
consequently requires no cause.

     [803] This he had borrowed from a maxim of Augustin: sub justo
     Deo quisquam nisi mereatur, miser esse non potest; whence, it
     seems that father had inferred the imputation of original sin to
     infants; a happy mode of escaping the difficulty.

|Compared with Pascal.|

62. Malebranche bears a striking resemblance to his great contemporary
Pascal, though they were not, I believe, in any personal relation to
each other, nor could either have availed himself of the other’s
writings. Both of ardent minds, endowed with strong imagination and
lively wit, sarcastic, severe, fearless, disdainful of popular opinion
and accredited reputations; both imbued with the notion of a vast
difference between the original and actual state of man, and thus
solving many phenomena of his being; both, in different modes and
degrees, sceptical, and rigorous in the exaction of proof; both
undervaluing all human knowledge beyond the regions of mathematics;
both of rigid strictness in morals, and a fervid enthusiastic piety.
But in Malebranche there is a less overpowering sense of religion; his
eye roams unblenched in the light, before which that of Pascal had
been veiled in awe; he is sustained by a less timid desire of truth,
by greater confidence in the inspirations that are breathed into his
mind; he is more quick in adopting a novel opinion, but less apt to
embrace a sophism in defence of an old one; he has less energy, but
more copiousness and variety.

|Arnauld on true and false ideas.|

63. Arnauld, who, though at first in personal friendship with
Malebranche, held no friendship in a balance with his rigid love of
truth, combated the chief points of the other’s theory in a treatise
on true and false ideas. This work I have never had the good fortune
to see; it appears to assail a leading principle of Malebranche, the
separate existence of ideas, as objects in the mind independent and
distinguishable from the sensation itself. Arnauld maintained, as Reid
and others have since done, that we do not perceive or feel ideas, but
real objects, and thus led the way to a school which has been called
that of Scotland, and has had a great popularity among our later
metaphysicians. It would require a critical examination of his work,
which I have not been able to make, to determine precisely what were
the opinions of this philosopher.[804]

     [804] Brucker. Buhle. Reid’s Intellectual Powers.

64. The peculiar hypothesis of Malebranche, that we see all things in
God, was examined by Locke in a short piece, contained in the
collection of his works. It will readily be conceived that two
philosophers, one eminently mystical and endeavouring upon this highly
transcendental theme to grasp in his mind and express in his language
something beyond the faculties of man, the other as characteristically
averse to mystery, and slow to admit any thing without proof, would
have hardly any common ground even to fight upon. Locke, therefore,
does little else than complain that he cannot understand what
Malebranche has advanced; and most of his readers will probably find
themselves in the same position.

|Norris.|

65. He had, however, an English supporter of some celebrity in his own
age, Norris; a disciple, and one of the latest we have had, of the
Platonic school of Henry More. The principal metaphysical treatise of
Norris, his Essay on the Ideal World, was published in two parts, 1701
and 1702. It does not therefore come within our limits. Norris is more
thoroughly Platonic than Malebranche, to whom, however, he pays great
deference, and adopts his fundamental hypothesis on seeing all things
in God. He is a writer of fine genius, and a noble elevation of moral
sentiments, such as predisposes men for the Platonic schemes of
theosophy. He looked up to Augustin with as much veneration as to
Plato, and respected more, perhaps, than Malebranche, certainly more
than the generality of English writers, the theological metaphysicians
of the schools. With these he mingled some visions of a later
mysticism. But his reasonings will seldom bear a close scrutiny.

|Pascal.|

66. In the Thoughts of Pascal we find many striking remarks on the
logic of that science with which he was peculiarly conversant, and
upon the general foundations of certainty. He had reflected deeply
upon the sceptical objections to all human reasoning, and, though
sometimes out of a desire to elevate religious faith at its expense,
he seems to consider them unanswerable, he was too clear-headed to
believe them just. “Reason,” he says, “confounds the dogmatists, and
nature the sceptics.”[805] “We have an incapacity of demonstration,
which one cannot overcome; we have a conception of truth which the
others cannot disturb.”[806] He throws out a notion of a more complete
method of reasoning than that of geometry, wherein everything shall be
demonstrated, which, however, he holds to be unattainable;[807] and
perhaps on this account he might think the cavils of pyrrhonism
invincible by pure reason. But as he afterwards admits that we may
have a full certainty of propositions that cannot be demonstrated,
such as the infinity of number and space, and that such incapability
of direct proof is rather a perfection than a defect, this notion of a
greater completeness in evidence seems neither clear nor
consistent.[808]

     [805] Œuvres de Pascal, vol. i., p. 205. Il faut que chacun
     prenne parti, et se range nécessairement ou au dogmatisme, ou au
     pyrrhonisme; car qui penseroit demeurer neutre seroit pyrrhonien
     par excellence; cette neutralité est l’essence du pyrrhonisme,
     p. 204. I do not know that I understand this; is it not either a
     self-evident proposition or a sophism?

     [806] P. 208.

     [807] Pensées de Pascal, part i., art. 2.

     [808] Comme la cause qui les rend incapables de démonstration
     n’est pas leur obscurité, mais au contraire leur extrême
     évidence, ce manque de preuve n’est pas un défaut, mais plutôt
     une perfection.

67. Geometry, Pascal observes, is almost the only subject, as
to which we find truths wherein all men agree. And one cause of this
is that geometers alone regard the true laws of demonstration. These
as enumerated by him are eight in number. 1. To define nothing which
cannot be expressed in clearer terms than those in which it is already
expressed. 2. To leave no obscure or equivocal terms undefined. 3. To
employ in the definition no terms not already known. 4. To omit
nothing in the principles from which we argue unless we are sure it is
granted. 5. To lay down no axiom which is not perfectly evident. 6. To
demonstrate nothing which is as clear already as we can make it. 7. To
prove everything in the least doubtful, by means of self-evident
axioms, or of propositions already demonstrated. 8. To substitute
mentally the definition instead of the thing defined. Of these rules,
he says, the first, fourth, and sixth are not absolutely necessary in
order to avoid error, but the other five are indispensable. Yet,
though they may be found in books of logic, none but the geometers
have paid any regard to them. The authors of these books seem not to
have entered into the spirit of their own precepts. All other rules
than those he has given are useless or mischievous; they contain, he
says, the whole art of demonstration.[809]

     [809] Œuvres de Pascal, i., 66.

68. The reverence of Pascal, like that of Malebranche, for what is
established in religion does not extend to philosophy. We do not find
in them, as we may sometimes perceive in the present day, all sorts of
prejudices against the liberties of the human mind clustering
together, like a herd of bats, by an instinctive association. He has
the same idea as Bacon, that the ancients were properly the children
among mankind. Not only each man, he says, advances daily in science,
but all men collectively make a constant progress, so that all
generations of mankind during so many ages may be considered as one
man, always subsisting and always learning; and the old age of this
universal man is not to be sought in the period next to his birth, but
in that which is most removed from it. Those we call ancients were
truly novices in all things; and we who have added to all they knew
the experience of so many succeeding ages, have a better claim to that
antiquity which we revere in them. In this, with much ingenuity and
much truth, there is a certain mixture of fallacy, which I shall not
wait to point out.

69. The genius of Pascal was admirably fitted for acute observation on
the constitution of human nature, if he had not seen everything
through a refracting medium of religious prejudice. When this does not
interfere to bias his judgment, he abounds with fine remarks, though
always a little tending towards severity. One of the most useful and
original is the following: “When we would show anyone that he is
mistaken, our best course is to observe on what side he considers the
subject, for his view of it is generally right on this side, and admit
to him that he is right so far. He will be satisfied with this
acknowledgment that he was not wrong in his judgment, but only
inadvertent in not looking at the whole of the case. For we are less
ashamed of not having seen the whole, than of being deceived in what
we do see; and this may perhaps arise from an impossibility of the
understanding’s being deceived in what it does see, just as the
perceptions of the senses, as such, must be always true.”[810]

     [810] Id., p. 149. Though Pascal here says that the perceptions
     of the senses are always true, we find the contrary asserted in
     other passages; he is not uniformly consistent with himself.

|Spinosa’s ethics.|

70. The Cartesian philosophy has been supposed to have produced a
metaphysician very divergent in most of his theory from that school,
Benedict Spinosa. No treatise is written in a more rigidly geometrical
method than his Ethics. It rests on definitions and axioms, from which
the propositions are derived in close, brief, and usually perspicuous
demonstrations. The few explanations he has thought necessary are
contained in scholia. Thus a fabric is erected, astonishing and
bewildering in its entire effect, yet so regularly constructed, that
the reader must pause and return on his steps to discover an error in
the workmanship, while he cannot also but acknowledge the good faith
and intimate persuasion of having attained the truth, which the acute
and deep-reflecting author everywhere displays.

|Its general originality.|

71. Spinosa was born in 1632; we find by his correspondence with
Oldenburg, in 1661, that he had already developed his entire scheme,
and in that with De Vries in 1663, the propositions of the Ethics are
alluded to numerically, as we now read them.[811] It was therefore the
fruit of early meditation, at its fearlessness, its general disregard
of the slow process of observation, its unhesitating dogmatism, might
lead us to expect. In what degree he had availed himself of prior
writers is not evident; with Descartes and Lord Bacon he was familiar,
and from the former he had derived some leading tenets; but he
observes both in him and Bacon what he calls mistakes as to the first
cause and origin of things, their ignorance of the real nature of the
human mind, and of the true sources of error.[812] The pantheistic
theory of Jordano Bruno is not very remote from that of Spinosa; but
the rhapsodies of the Italian, who seldom aims at proof, can hardly
have supplied much to the subtle mind of the Jew of Amsterdam. Buhle
has given us an exposition of the Spinosistic theory.[813] But several
propositions in this I do not find in the author, and Buhle has at
least, without any necessity, entirely deviated from the arrangement
he found in the Ethics. This seems as unreasonable in a work so
rigorously systematic, as it would be in the elements of Euclid; and I
believe the following pages will prove more faithful to the text. But
it is no easy task to translate and abridge a writer of such
extraordinary conciseness as well as subtlety; nor is it probable that
my attempt will be intelligible to those who have not habituated
themselves to metaphysical inquiry.

     [811] Spinosæ Opera Posthuma, p. 398-460.

     [812] Cartes et Bacon tam longè a cognitione primæ causæ et
     originis omnium rerum aberrarunt.... Veram naturam humanæ mentis
     non cognoverunt ... veram causam erroris nunquam operati sunt.

     [813] Hist. de la Philosophie, vol. iii., p. 440.

|View of his metaphysical theory.|

72. The first book or part of the Ethics is entitled, Concerning God,
and contains the entire theory of Spinosa. It may even be said that
this is found in a few of the first propositions; which being granted,
the rest could not easily be denied; presenting, as it does, little
more than new aspects of the former, or evident deductions from them.
Upon eight definitions and seven axioms reposes this philosophical
superstructure. A substance, by the third definition, is that, the
conception of which does not require the conception of anything else
as antecedent to it.[814] The attribute of a substance is whatever the
mind perceives to constitute its essence.[815] The mode of a substance
is its accident or affection, by means of which it is conceived.[816]
In the sixth definition he says: I understand by the name of God a
being absolutely infinite; that is, a substance consisting of infinite
attributes, each of which expresses an eternal and infinite essence.
Whatever expresses an essence, and involves no contradiction, may be
predicated of an absolutely infinite being.[817] The most important of
the axioms are the following: From a given determinate cause the
effect necessarily follows; but if there be no determinate cause, no
effect can follow.--The knowledge of an effect depends upon the
knowledge of the cause, and includes it.--Things that have nothing in
common with each other cannot be understood by means of each other;
that is, the conception of one does not include that of the other.--A
true idea must agree with its object.[818]

     [814] Per substantiam intelligo id quod in se est, et per se
     concipitur; hoc est, id cujus conceptus non indiget conceptu
     alterius rei, a quo formari debeat. The last words are omitted by
     Spinosa in a letter to De Vries (p. 463), where he repeats this
     definition.

     [815] Per attributum intelligo id quod intellectus de substantia
     percipit, tanquam ejusdem essentiam constituens.

     [816] Per modum intelligo substantiæ affectiones, sive id, quod
     in alio est, per quod etiam concipitur.

     [817] Per Deum intelligo Ens absolutè infinitum, hoc est,
     substantiam constantem infinitis attributis, quorum unumquodque
     æternam et infinitam essentiam exprimit. Dico absolutè infinitum,
     non autem in suo genere; quicquid enim in suo genere tantum
     infinitum est, infinita de eo attributa negare possumus; quod
     autem absolutè infinitum est, ad ejus essentiam pertinet,
     quicquid essentiam exprimit et negationem nullam involvit.

     [818] Axiomata, iii., iv., v., and vi.

73. Spinosa proceeds to his demonstrations upon the basis of these
assumptions alone. Two substances, having different attributes, have
nothing in common with each other; and hence one cannot be the cause
of the other, since one may be conceived without involving the
conception of the other; but an effect cannot be conceived without
involving the knowledge of the cause.[819] It seems to be in this
fourth axiom, and in the proposition grounded upon it, that the
fundamental fallacy lurks. The relation between a cause and effect is
surely something different from our perfect comprehension of it, or
indeed from our having any knowledge of it at all; much less can the
contrary assertion be deemed axiomatic. But if we should concede this
postulate, it might perhaps be very difficult to resist the subsequent
proofs, so ingeniously and with such geometrical rigour are they
arranged.

     [819] Prop. ii. and iii.

74. Two or more things cannot be distinguished, except by the
diversity of their attributes, or by that of their modes. For there is
nothing out of ourselves except substances and their modes. But there
cannot be two substances of the same attribute, since there would be
no means of distinguishing them except their modes or affections; and
every substance, being prior in order of time to its modes, may be
considered independently of them; hence, two such substances could not
be distinguished at all. One substance therefore cannot be the cause
of another; for they cannot have the same attribute, that is, anything
in common with one another.[820] Every substance therefore is
self-caused; that is, its essence implies its existence.[821] It is
also necessarily infinite, for it would otherwise be terminated by
some other of the same nature and necessarily existing; but two
substances cannot have the same attribute, and therefore cannot both
possess necessary existence.[822] The more reality or existence any
being possesses, the more attributes are to be ascribed to it. This he
says appears by the definition of an attribute.[823] The proof
however, is surely not manifest, nor do we clearly apprehend what he
meant by degrees of reality or existence. But of this theorem he was
very proud. I look upon the demonstration, he says in a letter, as
capital (palmariam) that the more attributes we ascribe to any being,
the more we are compelled to acknowledge its existence; that is, the
more we conceive it as true and not a mere chimera.[824] And from this
he derived the real existence of God, though the former proof seems
collateral to it. God, or a substance consisting of infinite
attributes, each expressing an eternal and infinite power, necessarily
exists.[825] For such an essence involves existence. And, besides
this, if anything does not exist, a cause must be given for its
non-existence, since this requires one as much as existence
itself.[826] The cause may be either in the nature of the thing, as,
e. gr. a square circle cannot exist by the circle’s nature, or in
something extrinsic. But neither of these can prevent the existence of
God. The later propositions in Spinosa are chiefly obvious corollaries
from the definitions and a few of the first propositions which contain
the whole theory, which he proceeds to expand.

     [820] Prop. vi.

     [821] Prop. vii.

     [822] Prop. viii.

     [823] Prop. ix.

     [824] P. 463. This is in the letter to De Vries, above quoted.

     [825] Prop. xi.

     [826] If twenty men exist, neither more nor less, an extrinsic
     reason must be given for this precise number, since the
     definition of a man does not involve it. Prop. viii., Schol. ii.

75. There can be no substance but God. Whatever is, is in God, and
nothing can be conceived without God.[827] For he is the sole
substance, and modes cannot be conceived without a substance; but
besides substance and mode nothing exists. God is not corporeal, but
body is a mode of God, and therefore uncreated. God is the permanent,
but not the transient cause of all things.[828] He is the efficient
cause of their essence, as well as their existence, since otherwise
their essence might be conceived without God, which has been shown to
be absurd. Thus, particular things are but the affections of God’s
attributes, or modes in which they are determinately expressed.[829]

     [827] Prop. xiv.

     [828] Deus est omnium rerum causa immanens, sed non transiens.
     Prop. xviii.

     [829] Prop. xxv. and Coroll.

76. This pantheistic scheme is the fruitful mother of many paradoxes,
upon which Spinosa proceeds to dwell. There is no contingency, but
everything is determined by the necessity of the divine nature, both
as to its existence and operation; nor could anything be produced by
God otherwise than as it is.[830] His power is the same as his
essence; for he is the necessary cause both of himself and of all
things, and it is as impossible for us to conceive him not to act as
not to exist.[831] God, considered in the attributes of his infinite
substance, is the same as nature, that is, _natura naturans_; but
nature, in another sense, or _natura naturata_, expresses but the
modes under which the divine attributes appear.[832] And intelligence,
considered in act, even though infinite, should be referred to
_natura naturata_; for intelligence, in this sense, is but a mode
of thinking, which can only be conceived by means of our conception of
thinking in the abstract, that is, by an attribute of God.[833] The
faculty of thinking, as distinguished from the act, as also those of
desiring, loving, and the rest, Spinosa explicitly denies to exist at
all.

     [830] Prop. xxix.-xxxiii.

     [831] Prop. xxxix. and part ii. prop. iii. Schol.

     [832] Schol. in prop. xxix.

     [833] Prop. xxxi. The atheism of Spinosa is manifest from this
     single proposition.

77. In an appendix to the first chapter, De Deo, Spinosa controverts
what he calls the prejudice about final causes. Men are born
ignorant of causes, but merely conscious of their own appetites, by
which they desire their own good. Hence, they only care for the final
cause of their own actions or those of others, and inquire no farther
when they are satisfied about these. And finding many things in
themselves and in nature, serving as means to a certain good, which
things they know not to be provided by themselves, they have believed
that someone has provided them, arguing from the analogy of the means
they in other instances themselves employ. Hence, they have imagined
gods, and these gods they suppose to consult the good of men in order
to be worshipped by them, and have devised every mode of superstitious
devotion to ensure the favour of these divinities. And finding in the
midst of so many beneficial things in nature not a few of an opposite
effect, they have ascribed them to the anger of the gods, on account
of the neglect of men to worship them; nor has experience of
calamities, falling alike on the pious and impious, cured them of this
belief, choosing rather to acknowledge their ignorance of the reason
why good and evil are thus distributed, than to give up their theory.
Spinosa thinks the hypothesis of final causes refuted by his
proposition, that all things happen by eternal necessity. Moreover, if
God were to act for an end, he must desire something which he wants;
for it is acknowledged by theologians that he acts for his own sake,
and not for the sake of things created.

78. Men having satisfied themselves that all things were created for
them, have invented names to distinguish that as good which tends to
their benefit; and believing themselves free, have gotten the notions
of right and wrong, praise and dispraise. And when they can easily
apprehend and recollect the relations of things, they call them well
ordered, if not ill ordered; and then say that God created all things
in order, as if order were anything, except in regard to our
imagination of it; and thus they ascribe imagination to God himself,
unless they mean that he created things for the sake of imagining
them.

79. It has been sometimes doubted whether the Spinosistic philosophy
excludes altogether an infinite intelligence. That it rejected a moral
providence or creative mind is manifest in every proposition. His
Deity could at most be but a cold, passive intelligence, lost to our
understandings and feelings in its metaphysical infinity. It was not,
however, in fact, so much as this. It is true that in a few passages
we find what seems at first a dim recognition of the fundamental
principle of theism. In one of his letters to Oldenburg, he asserts an
infinite power of thinking, which, considered in its infinity,
embraces all nature as its object, and of which the thoughts proceed
according to the order of nature, being its correlative ideas.[834]
But afterwards he rejected the term, power of thinking, altogether.
The first proposition of the second part of the Ethics, or that
entitled, On the Mind, runs thus: Thought is an attribute of God, or,
God is a thinking being. Yet this, when we look at the demonstration,
vanishes in an abstraction destructive of personality.[835] And, in
fact, we cannot reflect at all on the propositions already laid down
by Spinosa, without perceiving that they annihilate every possible
hypothesis in which the being of a God can be intelligibly stated.

     [834] Statuo dari in natura potentiam infinitam cogitandi quæ
     quatenus infinita in se continet totam naturam objectivè, et
     cujus cogitationes procedunt eodem modo ac natura, ejus nimirum
     edictum, p. 441. In another place he says, perhaps at some
     expense of his usual candour. Agnosco interim, id quod summam
     mihi præbet satisfactionem et mentis tranquillitatem, cuncta
     potentia Entis summè perfecti et ejus immutabili ita fieri
     decreto, p. 498. What follows is in the same strain. But Spinosa
     had wrought himself up, like Bruno, to a mystical personification
     of his infinite unity.

     [835] Singulares cogitationes, sive hæc et illa cogitatio, modi
     sunt, qui Dei naturam certo et determinto modo exprimunt.
     Competit ergo Dei attributum, cujus conceptum singulares omnes
     cogitationes involvunt, per quod etiam concipiuntur. Est igitur
     cogitatio unum ex infinitis Dei attributis quod Dei æternam et
     infinitam essentiam exprimit, sive Deus est res cogitans.

80. The second book of the Ethics begins, like the first, with
definitions and axioms. Body he defines to be a certain and
determinate mode expressing the essence of God, considered as
extended. The essence of anything he defines to be that, according to
the affirmation or negation of which the thing exists or otherwise. An
idea is a conception which the mind forms as a thinking being. And he
prefers to say conception than perception, because the latter seems to
imply the presence of an object. In the third axiom he says: Modes of
thinking, such as love, desire, or whatever name we may give to the
affections of the mind, cannot exist without an idea of their object,
but an idea may exist with no other mode of thinking.[836] And
in the fifth: We perceive no singular things besides bodies and modes
of thinking; thus distinguishing, like Locke, between ideas of
sensation and of reflection.

     [836] Modi cogitandi, ut amor, cupiditas, vel quocunque
     nomine affectus animi insigniuntur, non dantur nisi in eodem
     individuo detur idea rei amatæ, desideratæ, &c. At idea dari
     potest, quamvis nullus alius detur cogitandi modus.

81. Extension, by the second proposition, is an attribute of God as
well as thought. As it follows from the infinite extension of God,
that all bodies are portions of his substance, inasmuch as they cannot
be conceived without it, so all particular acts of intelligence are
portions of God’s infinite intelligence, and thus all things are in
him. Man is not a substance, but something which is in God, and cannot
be conceived without him; that is, an affection or mode of the divine
substance expressing its nature in a determinate manner.[837] The
human mind is not a substance, but an idea constitutes its actual
being, and it must be the idea of an existing thing.[838] In this he
plainly loses sight of the percipient in the perception; but it was
the inevitable result of the fundamental sophisms of Spinosa to
annihilate personal consciousness. The human mind, he afterwards
asserts, is part of the infinite intellect of God; and when we say,
the mind perceives this or that, it is only that God, not as infinite,
but so far as he constitutes the essence of the human mind, has such
or such ideas.[839]

     [837] Prop. x.

     [838] Quod actuale mentis humanæ esse constituit, nihil aliud est
     quam idea rei alicujus singularis actu existentis. This is an
     anticipation of what we find in Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature,
     the negation of a substance, or Ego, to which paradox no one can
     come except a professed metaphysician.

     [839] Prop. xi., coroll.

82. The object of the human mind is body actually existing.[840] He
proceeds to explain the connection of the human body with the mind,
and the association of ideas. But in all this advancing always
synthetically and by demonstration, he becomes frequently obscure if
not sophistical. The idea of the human mind is in God, and is united
to the mind itself in the same manner as the latter is to the
body.[841] The obscurity and subtlety of this proposition are not
relieved by the demonstration; but in some of these passages we may
observe a singular approximation to the theory of Malebranche. Both,
though with very different tenets on the highest subjects, had been
trained in the same school; and if Spinosa had brought himself to
acknowledge the personal distinctness of the Supreme Being from his
intelligent creation, he might have passed for one of those mystical
theosophists, who were not averse to an objective pantheism.

     [840] Prop. xiii.

     [841] Mentis humanæ datur etiam in Deo idea, sive cognitio, quæ
     in Deo eodem modo sequitur, et ad Deum odem modo refertur, ac
     idea sive cognitio corporis humani. Prop. xx. Hæc mentis idea
     eodem modo unita est menti, ac ipsa mens unita est corpori.

83. The mind does not know itself, except so far as it receives ideas
of the affections of the body.[842] But these ideas of sensation do
not give an adequate knowledge of an external body, nor of the human
body itself.[843] The mind therefore has but an inadequate and
confused knowledge of anything, so long as it judges only by
fortuitous perceptions; but may attain one clear and distinct by
internal reflection and comparison.[844] No positive idea can be
called false; for there can be no such idea without God, and all ideas
in God are true, that is, correspond with their object.[845] Falsity
therefore consists in that privation of truth, which arises from
inadequate ideas. An adequate idea he has defined to be one which
contains no incompatibility, without regard to the reality of its
supposed correlative object.

     [842] Prop. xxiii.

     [843] Prop. xxv.

     [844] Schol., Prop. xxix.

     [845] Prop. xxxii., xxxiii., xxxv.

84. All bodies agree in some things, or have something in common: of
these all men have adequate ideas;[846] and this is the origin of what
are called common notions, which all men possess; as extension,
duration, number. But to explain the nature of universals, Spinosa
observes, that the human body can only form at the same time a certain
number of distinct images; if this number be exceeded, they become
confused; and as the mind perceives distinctly just so many images as
can be formed in the body, when these are confused, the mind will also
perceive them confusedly, and will comprehend them under one
attribute, as Man, Horse, Dog; the mind perceiving a number of such
images, but not their differences of stature, colours and the like.
And these notions will not be alike in all minds, varying according to
the frequency with which the parts of the complex image have occurred.
Thus those who have contemplated most frequently the erect figure of
man will think of him as a perpendicular animal, others as two-legged,
others as unfeathered, others as rational. Hence, so many disputes
among philosophers who have tried to explain natural things by mere
images.[847]

     [846] Prop. viii.

     [847] Schol., prop. xl.

85. Thus we form universal ideas; first, by singulars, represented by
the senses confusedly, imperfectly and disorderly; secondly, by signs,
that is, by associating the remembrance of things with words; both of
which he calls imagination, or primi generis cognitio; thirdly, by
what he calls reason, or secundi generis cognitio; and fourthly, by
intuitive knowledge, or tertii generis cognitio.[848] Knowledge of the
first kind is the only source of error; the second and third being
necessarily true.[849] These alone enable us to distinguish truth from
falsehood. Reason contemplates things not as contingent but necessary;
and whoever has a true idea, knows certainly that his idea is true.
Every idea of a singular existing thing involves the eternal and
infinite being of God. For nothing can be conceived without God, and
the ideas of all things, having God for their cause, considered under
the attribute of which they are modes, must involve the conception of
the attribute, that is, the being of God.[850]

     [848] Schol. ii., prop. xl.

     [849] Prop. xli., xlii, et sequent.

     [850] Prop. xlv.

86. It is highly necessary to distinguish images, ideas, and words,
which many confound. Those who think ideas consists in images which
they perceive, fancy that ideas of which we can form no image are but
arbitrary figments. They look at ideas, as pictures on a tablet, and
hence do not understand that an idea, as such, involves an affirmation
or negation. And those who confound words with ideas, fancy they can
will something contrary to what they perceive, because they can affirm
or deny it in words. But these prejudices will be laid aside by him
who reflects that thought does not involve the conception of
extension; and therefore that an idea, being a mode of thought,
neither consists in images nor in words, the essence of which consists
in corporeal motions, not involving the conception of thought.[851]

     [851] Schol., prop. xlix.

87. The human mind has an adequate knowledge of the eternal and
infinite being of God. But men cannot imagine God as they can bodies,
and hence have not that clear perception of his being which they have
of that of bodies, and have also perplexed themselves by associating
the word God with sensible images, which it is hard to avoid. This is
the chief source of all error, that men do not apply names to things
rightly. For they do not err in their own minds, but in this
application; as men who cast up wrong see different numbers in their
mind from those in the true result.[852]

     [852] Prop. xlvii. Atque hinc pleræque oriuntur controversiæ,
     nempe, quia homines mentem suam non recte explicant, vel quia
     alterius mentem male interpretantur.

88. The mind has no free will, but is determined by a cause, which
itself is determined by some other, and so for ever. For the mind is
but a mode of thinking and, therefore cannot be the free cause of its
own actions. Nor has it any absolute faculty of loving, desiring,
understanding; these being only metaphysical abstractions.[853] Will
and understanding are one and the same thing; and volitions are only
affirmations or negations, each of which belongs to the essence of the
idea affirmed or denied.[854] In this there seems to be not only an
extraordinary deviation from common language, but an absence of any
meaning which, to my apprehension at least, is capable of being given
to his words. Yet we have seen something of the same kind said by
Malebranche; and it will also be found in a recently published work of
Cudworth,[855] a writer certainly uninfluenced by either of these, so
that it may be suspected of having some older authority.

     [853] Prop. xlviii.

     [854] Prop. xlix.

     [855] See Cudworth’s Treatise on Free will (1838), p. 20, where
     the will and understanding are purposely, and, I think, very
     erroneously confounded.

|Spinosa’s theory of action and passion.|

89. In the third part of this treatise, Spinosa comes to the
consideration of the passions. Most who have written on moral
subjects, he says, have rather treated man as something out of nature,
or as a kind of imperium in imperio, than as part of the general
order. They have conceived him to enjoy a power of disturbing that
order by his own determination, and ascribed his weakness and
inconstancy not to the necessary laws of the system, but to some
strange defect in himself, which they cease not to lament, deride, or
execrate. But the acts of mankind, and the passions from which they
proceed, are in reality but links in the series, and proceed in
harmony with the common laws of universal nature.

90. We are said to act when anything takes place within us, or
without us, for which we are an adequate cause; that is, when it may
be explained by means of our own nature alone. We are said to be acted
upon, when anything takes place within us which cannot wholly be
explained by our own nature. The affections of the body which increase
or diminish its power of action, and the ideas of those affections, he
denominates passions (affectus). Neither the body can determine the
mind to thinking, nor can the mind determine the body to motion or
rest. For all that takes place in body must be caused by God,
considered under his attribute of extension, and all that takes place
in mind must be caused by God under his attribute of thinking. The
mind and body are but one thing, considered under different
attributes; the order of action and passion in the body being the same
in nature with that of action and passion in the mind. But men, though
ignorant how far the natural powers of the body reach, ascribe its
operations to the determination of the mind, veiling their ignorance
in specious words. For if they alledge that the body cannot act
without the mind, it may be answered that the mind cannot think till
it is impelled by the body, nor are the volitions of the mind anything
else than its appetites, which are modified by the body.

91. All things endeavoured to continue in their actual being; this
endeavour being nothing else than their essence, which causes them to
be, until some exterior cause destroys their being. The mind is
conscious of its own endeavour to continue as it is, which is, in
other words, the appetite that seeks self-preservation; what the mind
is thus conscious of seeking, it judges to be good, and not inversely.
Many things increase or diminish the power of action in the body, and
all such things have a corresponding effect on the power of thinking
in the mind. Thus, it undergoes many changes, and passes through
different stages of more or less perfect power of thinking. Joy is the
name of a passion, in which the mind passes to a greater perfection or
power of thinking; grief, one in which it passes to a less. Spinosa,
in the rest of this book, deduces all the passions from these two and
from desire; but as the development of his theory is rather long, and
we have already seen that its basis is not quite intelligible, it will
be unnecessary to dwell longer upon the subject. His analysis of the
passions may be compared with that of Hobbes.

|Character of Spinosism.|

92. Such is the metaphysical theory of Spinosa, in as concise a form
as I found myself able to derive it from his Ethics. It is a
remarkable proof, and his moral system will furnish another, how an
undeviating adherence to strict reasoning may lead a man of great
acuteness and sincerity from the paths of truth. Spinosa was truly,
what Voltaire has with rather less justice called Clarke, a reasoning
machine. A few leading theorems, too hastily taken up as axiomatic,
were sufficient to make him sacrifice, with no compromise or
hesitation, not only every principle of religion and moral right, but
the clear intuitive notions of common sense. If there are two axioms
more indisputable than any others, they are that ourselves exist, and
that our existence is exclusive of any other being. Yet both these are
lost in the pantheism of Spinosa, as they had always been in that
delusive reverie of the imagination. In asserting that the being of
the human mind consists in the idea of an existing thing presented to
it, this subtle metaphysician fell into the error of the school which
he most disdained, as deriving all knowledge from perception, that of
the Aristotelians. And, extending this confusion of consciousness with
perception to the infinite substance, or substratum of particular
ideas, he was led to deny it the self, or conscious personality,
without which the name of Deity can only be given in a sense deceptive
of the careless reader, and inconsistent with the use of language. It
was an equally legitimate consequence of his original sophism to deny
all moral agency, in the sense usually received, to the human mind,
and even, as we have seen, to confound action and passion themselves,
in all but name, as mere phenomena in the eternal sequence of things.

93. It was one great error of Spinosa to entertain too arrogant a
notion of the human faculties, in which, by dint of his own subtle
demonstrations, he pretended to show a capacity of adequately
comprehending the nature of what he denominated God. And this was
accompanied by a rigid dogmatism, no one proposition being stated with
hesitation, by a disregard of experience, at least as the basis of
reasoning, and by an uniform preference of the synthetic method. Most
of those, he says, who have turned their minds to those subjects have
fallen into error, because they have not begun with the contemplation
of the divine nature, which both in itself and in order of knowledge
is first, but with sensible things, which ought to have been
last. Hence, he seems to have reckoned Bacon, and even Descartes,
mistaken in their methods.

94. All pantheism must have originated in overstraining the infinity
of the divine attributes till the moral part of religion was
annihilated in its metaphysics. It was the corruption, or rather, if
we may venture the phrase, the suicide of theism; nor could this
strange theory have arisen, except where we know it did arise, among
those who had elevated their conceptions above the vulgar polytheism
that surrounded them to a sense of the unity of the Divine nature.

95. Spinosa does not essentially differ from the pantheists of old. He
conceived, as they had done, that the infinity of God required the
exclusion of all other substance; that he was infinite _ab omni
parte_, and not only in certain senses. And probably the loose and
hyperbolical tenets of the schoolmen, derived from ancient philosophy,
ascribing, as a matter of course, a metaphysical infinity to all the
divine attributes, might appear to sanction those primary positions,
from which Spinosa, unfettered by religion, even in outward
profession, went on “sounding his dim and perilous track” to the
paradoxes that have thrown discredit on his name. He had certainly
built much on the notion that the essence or definition of the Deity
involved his actuality or existence, to which Descartes had given
vogue.

96. Notwithstanding the leading errors of this philosopher, his clear
and acute understanding perceived many things which baffle ordinary
minds. Thus, he well saw and well stated the immateriality of thought.
Oldenburg, in one of his letters, had demurred to this, and reminded
Spinosa that it was still controverted whether thought might not be a
bodily motion. “Be it so,” replied the other, “though I am far from
admitting it; but at least you must allow that extension, so far as
extension, is not the same as thought.”[856] It is from inattention to
this simple truth that all materialism, as it has been called, has
sprung. Its advocates confound the union between thinking and
extension or matter (be it, if they will, an indissoluble one) with
the identity of the two, which is absurd and inconceivable. “Body,”
says Spinosa in one of his definitions, “is not terminated by
thinking, nor thinking by body.”[857] This also does not ill express
the fundamental difference of matter and mind; there is an
incommensurability about them, which prevents one from bounding the
other, because they can never be placed in juxtaposition.

     [856] At ais, forte cogitatio est actus corporeus. Sit, quamvis
     nullus concedam; sed hoc unum non negabis, extensionem, quoad
     extensionem, non esse cogitationem. Epist. iv.

     [857] Corpus dicitur finitum, quia aliud semper majus concipimus.
     Sic cogitatio alia cogitatione terminatur. At corpus non
     terminatur cogitatione, nec cogitatio corpore.

|Glanvil’s Scepsis Scientifica.|

97. England, about the æra of the Restoration, began to make a
struggle against the metaphysical creed of the Aristotelians, as well
as against their natural philosophy. A remarkable work, but one so
scarce as to be hardly known at all, except by name, was published by
Glanvil in 1661, with the title, the Vanity of Dogmatizing. A second
edition, in 1663, considerably altered, is entitled Scepsis
Scientifica.[858] This edition has a dedication to the Royal Society,
which comes in place of a fanciful preface, wherein he had expatiated
on the bodily and mental perfections of his protoplast, the father of
mankind.[859] But in proportion to the extravagant language he employs
to extol Adam before his lapse, is the depreciation of his unfortunate
posterity, not, as common among theologians, with respect to their
moral nature, but to their reasoning faculties. The scheme of
Glanvil’s book is to display the ignorance of man, and especially to
censure the Peripatetic philosophy of the schools. It is, he says,
captious and verbal, and yet does not adhere itself to any constant
sense of words, but huddles together insignificant terms, and
unintelligible definitions; it deals with controversies, and
seeks for no new discovery or physical truth. Nothing, he says, can be
demonstrated but when the contrary is impossible, and of this there
are not many instances. He launches into a strain of what may be
called scepticism, but answered his purpose in combating the dogmatic
spirit still unconquered in our academical schools. Glanvil had
studied the new philosophy, and speaks with ardent eulogy of “that
miracle of men, the illustrious Descartes.” Many, if not most, of his
own speculations are tinged with a Cartesian colouring. He was however
far more sceptical than Descartes, or even than Malebranche. Some
passages from so rare and so acute a work may deserve to be chosen,
both for their own sakes, and in order to display the revolution which
was at work in speculative philosophy.

     [858] This Book, I believe, especially in the second edition, is
     exceedingly scarce. The editors, however, of the Biographia
     Britannica art. Glanvil, had seen it, and also Dugald Stewart.
     The first edition, or Vanity of Dogmatizing, is in the Bodleian
     Catalogue, and both are in the British Museum.

     [859] Thus, among other extravagances worthy of the Talmud, he
     says, “Adam needed no spectacles. The acuteness of his natural
     optics (if conjecture may have credit), showed him much of the
     celestial magnificence and bravery without a Galileo’s tube; and
     it is most probable that his naked eyes could reach near as much
     of this upper world as we with all the advantages of art. It may
     be it was as absurd even in the judgment of his senses, that the
     sun and stars should be so very much less than this globe, as the
     contrary seems in ours; and it is not unlikely that he had as
     clear a perception of the earth’s motion as we have of its
     quiescence.” p. 5, edit. 1661. In the second edition, he still
     adheres to the hypothesis of intellectual degeneracy, but states
     it with less of rhapsody.

98. “In the unions which we understand the extremes are reconciled by
interceding participations of natures, which have somewhat of either.
But body and spirit stand at such a distance in their essential
compositions, that to suppose an uniter of a middle construction, that
should partake of some of the qualities of both, is unwarranted by any
of our faculties, yea, most absonous to our reasons; since there is
not any the least affinity betwixt length, breadth, and thickness, and
apprehension, judgment, and discourse; the former of which are the
most immediate results, if not essentials of matter, the latter of
spirit.”[860]

     [860] Scepsis Scientifica, p. 16. We have just seen something
     similar in Spinosa.

99. “How is it, and by what art does it (the soul), read that such an
image or stroke in matter (whether that of her vehicle or of the
brain, the case is the same), signifies such an object? Did we learn
an alphabet in our embryo state? And how comes it to pass that we are
not aware of any such congenite apprehensions? We know what we know;
but do we know any more? That by diversity of motions we should spell
out figures, distances, magnitudes, colours, things not resembled by
them, we must attribute to some secret deduction. But what this
deduction should be, or by what medium this knowledge is advanced, is
as dark as ignorance. One that hath not the knowledge of letters may
see the figures, but comprehends not the meaning included in them; an
infant may hear the sounds and see the motion of the lips, but hath no
conception conveyed by them, not knowing what they are intended to
signify. So our souls, though they might have perceived the motions
and images themselves by simple sense, yet, without some implicit
inference, it seems inconceivable how by that means they should
apprehend their anti-types. The striking of divers filaments of the
brain cannot well be supposed to represent distances, except some kind
of inference be allotted us in our faculties; the concession of which
will only stead us as a refuge for ignorance, when we shall meet what
we would seem to shun.”[861] Glanvil, in this forcible statement of
the heterogeneity of sensations, with the objects that suggest them,
has but trod in the steps of the whole Cartesian school, but he did
not mix this up with those crude notions that halt half way between
immaterialism and its opposite; and afterwards well exposes the
theories of accounting for the memory by means of images in the brain,
which, in various ways, Aristotle, Descartes, Digby, Gassendi, and
Hobbes had propounded, and which we have seen so favourite a
speculation of Malebranche.

     [861] P. 22, 23.

100. It would be easy to quote many paragraphs of uncommon vivacity
and acuteness from this forgotten treatise. The style is eminently
spirited and eloquent; a little too figurative, like that of Locke,
but less blameably, because Glanvil is rather destroying than building
up. Every bold and original thought of others finds a willing
reception in Glanvil’s mind, and his confident, impetuous style gives
them an air of novelty which makes them pass for his own. He stands
forward as a mutineer against authority, against educational
prejudice, against reverence for antiquity.[862] No one thinks more
intrepidly for himself; and it is probable that, even in what
seems mere superstition, he had been rather misled by some paradoxical
hypothesis of his own ardent genius, than by slavishly treading in the
steps of others.[863]

     [862] “Now, if we inquire the reason why the mathematics and
     mechanic arts have so much got the start in growth of other
     sciences, we shall find it probably resolved into this as one
     considerable cause, that their progress hath not been retarded by
     that reverential awe of former discoveries, which hath been so
     great a hindrance to theorical improvements. For, as the noble
     Lord Verulam hath noted, we have a mistaken apprehension of
     antiquity, calling that so which in truth is the world’s non-age.
     Antiquitas sæculi est juventus mundi. ‘Twas this vain idolising
     of authors which gave birth to that silly vanity of impertinent
     citations, and inducing authority in things neither requiring nor
     deserving it.--Methinks it is a pitiful piece of knowledge that
     can be learned from an index, and a poor ambition to be rich in
     the inventory of another’s treasure. To boast a memory, the most
     that these pedants can aim at, is but a humble ostentation.”
     P. 104.

     [863] “That the fancy of one man should bind the thoughts of
     another, and determine them to their particular objects, will be
     thought impossible; which yet, if we look deeply into the matter,
     wants not its probability.” P. 146. He dwells more on this, but
     the passage is too long to extract. It is remarkable that he
     supposes a subtle æther (like that of the modern Mesmerists), to
     be the medium of communication in such cases; and had also a
     notion of explaining these sympathies by help of the anima mundi,
     or mundane spirit.

101. Glanvil sometimes quotes Lord Bacon, but he seems to have had the
ambition of contending with the Novum Organum in some of its brilliant
passages, and has really developed the doctrine of _idols_ with
uncommon penetration, as well as force of language. “Our initial age
is like the melted wax to the prepared seal, capable of any impression
from the documents of our teachers. The half-moon or cross are
indifferent to its reception; and we may with equal facility write on
this _rasa tabula_ Turk or Christian. To determine this indifferency
our first task is to learn the creed of our country, and our next to
maintain it. We seldom examine our receptions, more than children do
their catechisms, but by a careless greediness swallow all at a
venture. For implicit faith is a virtue, where orthodoxy is the
object. Some will not be at the trouble of a trial, others are scared
from attempting it. If we do, ’tis not by a sun-beam or ray of light,
but by a flame that is kindled by our affections, and fed by the fuel
of our anticipations. And thus, like the hermit, we think the sun
shines nowhere but in our cell, and all the world to be darkness but
ourselves. We judge truth to be circumscribed by the confines of our
belief and the doctrines we were brought up in.”[864] Few books, I
think, are more deserving of being reprinted than the Scepsis
Scientifica of Glanvil.

     [864] P. 95.

|His Plus Ultra.|

102. Another bold and able attack was made on the ancient philosophy
by Glanvil in his “Plus Ultra, or the Progress and Advancement of
Knowledge since the days of Aristotle, 1668.” His tone is peremptory
and imposing, animated and intrepid, such as befits a warrior in
literature. Yet he was rather acute by nature, than deeply versed in
learning, and talks of Vieta and Descarte’s algebra so as to show he
had little knowledge of the science, or of what they had done for
it.[865] His animosity against Aristotle is unreasonable, and he was
plainly an incompetent judge of that philosopher’s general deserts. Of
Bacon and Boyle he speaks with just eulogy. Nothing can be more free
and bold than Glanvil’s assertion of the privilege of judging, for
himself in religion;[866] and he had doubtless a perfect right to
believe in witchcraft.

     [865] Plus Ultra, p. 24 and 33.

     [866] P. 142.

|Dalgarno.|

103. George Dalgarno, a native of Aberdeen, conceived, and, as it
seemed to him, carried into effect the idea of an universal language
and character. His Ara Signorum, vulgo Character Universalis et Lingua
Philosophica, Lond., 1661, is dedicated to Charles II. in this
philosophical character, which must have been as great a mystery to
the sovereign as to his subjects. This dedication is followed by a
royal proclamation in good English, inviting all to study this useful
art, which had been recommended by divers learned men, Wilkins,
Wallis, Ward, and others, “judging it to be of singular use for
facilitating the matter of communication and intercourse between
people of different languages.” The scheme of Dalgarno is
fundamentally bad, in that he assumes himself, or the authors he
follows, to have given a complete distribution of all things and
ideas; after which his language is only an artificial scheme of
symbols. It is evident that until objects are truly classified, a
representative method of signs can only rivet and perpetuate error. We
have but to look at his tabular synopsis to see that his ignorance of
physics, in the largest sense of the word, renders his scheme
deficient; and he has also committed the error of adopting the
combinations of the ordinary alphabet, with a little help from the
Greek, which, even with his slender knowledge of species, soon leave
him incapable of expressing them. But Dalgarno has several acute
remarks; and it deserves especially to be observed, that he
anticipated the famous discovery of the Dutch philologers, namely,
that all other parts of speech may be reduced to the noun,
dexterously, if not successfully, resolving the verb substantive into
an affirmative particle.[867]

     [867] Tandem mihi affulsit clarior lux; accuratius enim
     examinando omnium notionum analysin logicam, percepi nullam esse
     particulam quæ non derivetur a nomine aliquo prædicamentali, et
     omnes particulas esse vere casus seu modos notionum nominalium,
     p. 120. He does not seem to have arrived at this conclusion by
     etymological analysis, but by his own logical theories.

     The verb-substantive, he says, is equivalent to _ita_. Thus,
     Petrus est in domo, means, Petrus--ita--in domo. That is, it
     expresses an idea of apposition or conformity between a subject
     and predicate. This is a theory to which a man might be led by
     the habit of considering propositions logically, and thus
     reducing all verbs to the verb-substantive; and it is not
     deficient, at least, in plausibility.

|Wilkins.|

104. Wilkins, bishop of Chester, one of the most ingenious men of his
age, published in 1668 his Essay towards a Philosophical Language,
which has this advantage over that of Dalgarno, that it abandons the
alphabet, and consequently admits of a greater variety of characters.
It is not a new language, but a more analytical scheme of characters
for English. Dalgarno seems to have known something of it, though he
was the first to publish, and glances at “a more difficult way of
writing English.” Wilkins also intimates that Dalgarno’s compendious
method would not succeed. His own has the same fault of a premature
classification of things; and it is very fortunate that neither of
these ingenious but presumptuous attempts to fasten down the
progressive powers of the human mind by the cramps of association had
the least success.[868]

     [868] Dalgarno, many years afterwards, turned his attention to a
     subject of no slight interest, even in mere philosophy, the
     instruction of the deaf and dumb. His Didascalocophus is perhaps
     the first attempt to found this on the analysis of language. But
     it is not so philosophical as what has since been effected.

|Locke on human Understanding.|

|The merits.|

105. But from these partial and now very obscure endeavours of English
writers in metaphysical philosophy we come at length to the work that
has eclipsed every other, and given to such inquiries whatever
popularity they ever possessed, the Essay, of Locke on the human
Understanding. Neither the writings of Descartes, as I conceive, nor
perhaps those of Hobbes, so far as strictly metaphysical, had excited
much attention in England beyond the class of merely studious men. But
the Essay on Human Understanding was frequently reprinted within a few
years from its publication, and became the acknowledged code of
English philosophy.[869] The assaults it had to endure in the author’s
lifetime, being deemed to fail, were of service to its reputation; and
considerably more than half a century was afterwards to elapse before
any writer in our language (nor was the case very different in France,
after the patronage accorded to it by Voltaire) could with much chance
of success question any leading doctrine of its author. Several
circumstances no doubt conspired with its intrinsic excellence to
establish so paramount a rule in an age that boasted of peculiar
independence of thinking, and full of intelligent and inquisitive
spirits. The sympathy of an English public with Locke’s tenets as to
government and religion was among the chief of these; and the reaction
that took place in a large portion of the reading classes towards the
close of the eighteenth century turned in some measure the tide even
in metaphysical disquisition. It then became fashionable sometimes to
accuse Locke of preparing the way for scepticism; a charge which, if
it had been truly applicable to some of his opinions, ought rather to
have been made against the long line of earlier writers with whom he
held them in common; sometimes, with more pretence, to alledge that he
had conceded too much to materialism; sometimes to point out and
exaggerate other faults and errors of his Essay, till we have seemed
in danger of forgetting that it is perhaps the first, and still the
most complete chart of the human mind which has been laid down; the
most ample repertory of truths relating to our intellectual being; and
the one book which we are compelled to name as the first in
metaphysical science. Locke had not, it may be said, the luminous
perspicacity of language we find in Descartes, and, when he does not
soar too high, in Malebranche; but he had more judgment, more caution,
more patience, more freedom from paradox, and from the sources of
paradox, vanity and love of system, than either. We have no denial of
sensation to brutes, no reference of mathematical truths to the will
of God, no oscillation between the extremes of doubt and of
positiveness, no bewildering mysticism, no unintelligible
chaos of words. Certainly neither Gassendi nor even Hobbes could be
compared with him; and it might be asked of the admirers of later
philosophers, those of Berkeley, or Hume, or Hartley, or Reid, or
Stewart, or Brown, without naming any on the continent of Europe,
whether in the extent of their researches, or in the originality of
their discoveries, any of these names ought to stand on a level with
that of Locke. One of the greatest I have mentioned, and one, who
though candid towards Locke, had no prejudice whatever, in his favour,
has extolled the first two books of the Essay on Human Understanding,
which yet he deems in many respects inferior to the third and fourth,
as “a precious accession to the theory of the human mind; as the
richest contribution of well-observed and well-described facts which
was ever bequeathed by a single individual; and as the indisputable,
though not always acknowledged, source of some of the most refined
conclusions with respect to the intellectual phenomena, which have
been since brought to light by succeeding inquirers.”[870]

     [869] It was abridged at Oxford, and used by some tutors as early
     as 1695. But the heads of the university came afterwards to a
     resolution to discourage the reading of it. Stillingfleet, among
     many others, wrote against the Essay; and Locke, as is well
     known, answered the bishop. I do not know that the latter makes
     altogether so poor a figure as has been taken for granted; but
     the defence of Locke will seem in most instances satisfactory.
     Its success in public opinion contributed much to the renown of
     his work; for Stillingfleet, though not at all conspicuous as a
     philosopher, enjoyed a great deal of reputation, and the world
     can seldom understand why a man who excels in one province of
     literature should fail in another.

     [870] Stewart’s Preliminary Dissertation to Encyclopædia, part ii.

|Its defects.|

106. It would be an unnecessary prolixity to offer in this place an
analysis of so well-known a book as the Essay on the Human
Understanding. Few have turned their attention to metaphysical
inquiries without reading it. It has however no inconsiderable faults,
which, though much over-balanced, are not to be passed over in a
general eulogy. The style of Locke is wanting in philosophical
precision; it is a very fine model of English language; but too
idiomatic and colloquial, too indefinite and figurative, for the
abstruse subjects with which he has to deal. We miss in every page the
translucent simplicity of his great French predecessors. This seems to
have been owing, in a considerable degree, to an excessive desire of
popularising the subject, and shunning the technical pedantry which
had repelled the world from intellectual philosophy. Locke displays in
all his writings a respect which can hardly be too great, for men of
sound understanding unprejudiced by authority, mingled with a scorn,
perhaps a little exaggerated, of the gown-men or learned world; little
suspecting that the same appeal to the people, the same policy of
setting up equivocal words and loose notions, called the common sense
of mankind, to discomfit subtle reasoning, would afterwards be turned
against himself, as it was, very unfairly and unsparingly, by Reid and
Beattie. Hence he falls a little into a laxity of phrase, not unusual,
and not always important, in popular and practical discourse, but an
inevitable source of confusion in the very abstract speculations which
his Essay contains. And it may perhaps be suspected, without
disparagement to his great powers, that he did not always preserve the
utmost distinctness of conception, and was liable as almost every
other metaphysician has been, to be entangled in the ambiguities of
language.

|Origin of ideas, according to Locke.|

107. The leading doctrine of Locke, as is well known, is the
derivation of all our ideas from sensation and from reflection. The
former present no great difficulty; we know what is meant by the
expression; but he is not very clear or consistent about the latter.
He seems in general to limit the word to the various operations of our
own minds in thinking, believing, willing, and so forth. This, as has
been shown formerly, is taken from, or at least coincident with, the
theory of Gassendi in his Syntagma Philosophicum. It is highly
probable that Locke was acquainted with that work; if not immediately,
yet through the account of the Philosophy of Gassendi, published in
English by Dr. Charleton, in 1663, which I have not seen, or through
the excellent and copious abridgment of the Syntagma by Bernier. But
he does not strictly confine his ideas of reflection to this class.
Duration is certainly no mode of thinking; yet the idea of duration is
reckoned by Locke among those with which we are furnished by
reflection. The same may perhaps be said, though I do not know that he
expresses himself with equal clearness, as to his account of several
other ideas, which cannot be deduced from external sensation, nor yet
can be reckoned modifications or operations of the soul itself; such
as number, power, existence.

|Vague use of the word idea.|

108. Stewart has been so much struck by this indefiniteness, with
which the phrase “ideas of reflection” has been used in the Essay on
the Human Understanding, that he “does not think, notwithstanding some
casual expressions which may seem to favour the contrary supposition,
that Locke would have hesitated for a moment to admit, with Cudworth
and Price, that the understanding is the source of new ideas.”[871]
And though some might object that this is too much in opposition, not
to casual expressions, but to the whole tenor of Locke’s Essay, his
language concerning substance almost bears it out. Most of the
perplexity which has arisen on this subject, the combats of some
metaphysicians with Locke, the portentous errors into which others
have been led by want of attention to his language, may be referred to
the equivocal meaning of the word idea. The Cartesians understood by
this whatever is the object of thought, including an intellection as
well as an imagination. By an intellection they meant that which the
mind conceives to exist, and to be the subject of knowledge, though it
may be unimaginable and incomprehensible. Gassendi and Locke limit the
word idea to something which the mind sees and grasps as immediately
present to it. “That,” as Locke not very well expresses it “which the
mind is applied about while thinking being the ideas that are there.”
Hence, he speaks with some ridicule of “men who persuade themselves
that they have clear comprehensive ideas of infinity.” Such men can
hardly have existed; but it is by annexing the epithets clear and
comprehensive, that he shows the dispute to be merely verbal. For that
we know the existence of infinities as objectively real, and can
reason upon them, Locke would not have denied: and it is this
knowledge to which others gave the name of idea.

     [871] Prelim. Dissertation.

109. The different manner in which this all-important word was
understood by philosophers is strikingly shown when they make use of
the same illustration. Arnauld, if he is author of L’Art de Penser,
mentions the idea of a chiliagon, or figure of 1,000 sides, as an
instance of the distinction between that which we imagine, and that
which we conceive or understand. Locke has employed the same instance
to exemplify the difference between clear and obscure ideas. According
to the former, we do not imagine a figure with 1,000 sides at all;
according to the latter, we form a confused image of it. We have an
idea of such a figure, it is agreed by both; but in the sense of
Arnauld, it is an idea of the understanding alone; in the sense of
Locke, it is an idea of sensation, framed, like other complex ideas,
by putting together those we have formerly received, though we may
never have seen the precise figure. That the word suggests to the mind
an image of a polygon with many sides is indubitable; but it is urged
by the Cartesians, that as we are wholly incapable of distinguishing
the exact number, we cannot be said to have, in Locke’s sense of the
word, any idea, even an indistinct one of a figure with 1,000 sides;
since all we do imagine is a polygon. And it is evident that in
geometry we do not reason from the properties of the image, but from
those of a figure which the understanding apprehends. Locke, however,
who generally preferred a popular meaning to one more metaphysically
exact, thought it enough to call this a confused idea. He was not I
believe, conversant with any but elementary geometry. Had he reflected
upon that which in his age had made such a wonderful beginning, or
even upon the fundamental principles of it, which might be found in
Euclid, the theory of infinitesimal quantities, he must, one would
suppose, have been more puzzled to apply his narrow definition of an
idea. For what image can we form of a differential, which can pretend
to represent it in any other sense than as _d x_ represents it,
by suggestion, not by resemblance?

110. The case is, however, much worse when Locke deviates, as in the
third and fourth books he constantly does, from this sense that he has
put on the word idea, and takes it either in the Cartesian meaning or
in one still more general and popular. Thus, in the excellent chapter
on the abuse of words, he insists upon the advantage of using none
without clear and distinct ideas; he who does not this “only making a
noise without any sense or signification.” If we combine this position
with that in the second book, that we have no clear and distinct idea
of a figure with 1,000 sides, it follows, with all the force of
syllogism, that we should not argue about a figure of 1,000 sides at
all, nor, by parity of reason, about many other things of far higher
importance. It will be found, I incline to think, that the large use
of the word idea for that about which we have some knowledge, without
limiting it to what can be imagined, pervades the third and fourth
books. Stewart has ingeniously conjectured that they were written
before the second, and probably before the mind of Locke had been much
turned to the psychological analysis which that contains. It is
however certain that in the Treatise upon the Conduct of the
Understanding, which was not published till after the Essay, he uses
the word idea with full as much latitude as in the third and fourth
books of the latter. We cannot, upon the whole, help admitting that
the story of a lady who, after the perusal of the Essay on the Human
Understanding, laid it down with a remark, that the book would
be perfectly charming were it not for the frequent recurrence of one
very hard word, idea, though told, possibly, in ridicule of the fair
philosopher, pretty well represents the state of mind in which many at
first have found themselves.

|An error as to geometrical figure.|

111. Locke, as I have just intimated seems to have possessed but a
slight knowledge of geometry; a science which, both from the clearness
of the illustrations it affords, and from its admitted efficacy in
rendering the logical powers acute and cautious, may be reckoned,
without excepting physiology, the most valuable of all to the
metaphysician. But it did not require any geometrical knowledge,
strictly so called, to avoid one material error into which he has
fallen; and which I mention the rather, because even Descartes, in one
place, has said something of the same kind, and I have met with it not
only in Norris very distinctly and positively, but, more or less, in
many or most of those who have treated of the metaphysics or abstract
principles of geometry. “I doubt not,” says Locke,[872] “but it will
be easily granted that the knowledge we have of mathematical truths is
not only certain but real knowledge, and not the bare empty vision of
vain insignificant chimeras of the brain; and yet if we well consider,
we shall find, that it is only of our own ideas. The mathematician
considers the truth and properties belonging to a rectangle or circle
only as they are in idea in his own mind; for it is possible he never
found either of them existing mathematically, that is, precisely true,
in his life.... All the discourses of the mathematicians about the
squaring of a circle, conic sections, or any other part of
mathematics, concern not the existence of any of those figures; but
their demonstrations, which depend on their ideas, are the same,
whether there be any square or circle in the world or no.” And the
inference he draws from this is, that moral as well as mathematical
ideas being archetypes themselves, and so adequate and complete ideas,
all the agreement or disagreement which he shall find in them will
produce real knowledge, as well as in mathematical figures.

     [872] B. iv., c. 8.

112. It is not perhaps necessary to inquire how far, upon the
hypothesis of Berkeley, this notion of mathematical figures, as mere
creations of the mind, could be sustained. But on the supposition of
the objectivity of space, as truly existing without us, which Locke
undoubtedly believed, it is certain that the passage just quoted is
entirely erroneous, and that it involves a confusion between the
geometrical figure itself and its delineation to the eye. A
geometrical figure is a portion of space contained in boundaries
determined by given relations. It exists in the infinite round about
us, as the statue exists in the block.[873] No one can doubt, if he
turns his mind to the subject, that every point in space is
equidistant, in all directions, from certain other points. Draw a line
through all these, and you have the circumference of a circle; but the
circle itself and its circumference exist before the latter is
delineated. The orbit of a planet is not a regular geometrical figure,
because certain forces disturb it. But this disturbance means only a
deviation from a line which exists really in space, and which the
planet would actually describe, if there were nothing in the universe
but itself and the centre of attraction. The expression therefore of
Locke, “whether there be any square or circle existing in the world or
no,” is highly inaccurate, the latter alternative being an absurdity.
All possible figures, and that “in number numberless,” exist
everywhere; nor can we evade the perplexities into which the geometry
of infinities throws our imagination, by considering them as mere
beings of reason, the creatures of the geometer, which I believe some
are half disposed to do, nor by substituting the vague and
unphilosophical notion of indefinitude for a positive objective
infinity.

     [873] Michael Angelo has well conveyed this idea in four lines,
     which I quote from Corniani.

       Non ha l’ottimo artista alcun concetto,
       Che un marmo solo in se non circonscriva
       Col suo soverchio, e solo a quello arriva
       La mano che obbedisce all’intelletto.

     The geometer uses not the same obedient hand, but he equally
     feels and perceives the reality of that figure which the broad
     infinite around him comprehends _con suo soverchio_.

113. This distinction between ideas of mere sensation and those of
intellection, between what the mind comprehends, and what it conceives
without comprehending, is the point of divergence between the two
sects of psychology which still exist in the world. Nothing is in the
intellect which has not before been in the sense, said the
Aristotelian schoolmen. Every idea has its original in the senses,
repeated the disciple of Epicurus, Gassendi. Locke indeed, as Gassendi
had done before him, assigned another origin to one class of
ideas; but these were few in number, and in the next century two
writers of considerable influence, Hartley and Condillac, attempted to
resolve them all into sensation. The Cartesian school, a name rather
used for brevity, as a short denomination of all who, like Cudworth,
held the same tenets as to the nature of ideas, lost ground both in
France and England; nor had Leibnitz who was deemed an enemy to some
of our great English names, sufficient weight to restore it. In the
hands of some who followed in both countries, the worst phrases of
Locke were preferred to the best; whatever could be turned to the
account of pyrrhonism, materialism, or atheism, made a figure in the
Epicurean system of a popular philosophy. The names alluded to will
suggest themselves to the reader. The German metaphysicians from the
time of Kant deserve at least the credit of having successfully
withstood this coarse sensualism, though they may have borrowed much
that their disciples take for original, and added much that is hardly
better than what they have overthrown. The opposite philosophy to that
which never rises above sensible images is exposed to a danger of its
own; it is one which the infirmity of the human faculties renders
perpetually at hand; few there are who in reasoning on subjects where
we cannot attain what Locke has called “positive comprehensive ideas”
are secure from falling into mere nonsense and repugnancy. In that
part of physics which is simply conversant with quantity, this danger
is probably not great, but in all such inquiries as are sometimes
called transcendental, it has perpetually shipwrecked the adventurous
navigator.

|His notions as to the soul.|

114. In the language and probably the notions of Locke as to the
nature of the soul there is an indistinctness more worthy of the
Aristotelian schoolmen than of one conversant with the Cartesian
philosophy. “Bodies,” he says, “manifestly produce ideas in us by
impulse, the only way which we can conceive bodies to operate in. If
then external objects be not united to our minds, when they produce
ideas in it, and yet we perceive these original qualities in such of
them as singly fall under our senses, it is evident that some motion
must be thence continued by our nerves, or animal spirits, by some
parts of our bodies to the brain, or the seat of sensation, there to
produce in our minds the particular ideas we have of them. And since
the extention, figure, number, and motion of bodies of an observable
bigness may be perceived at a distance by the sight, it is evident
some singly imperceptible bodies must come from them to the eyes, and
thereby convey to the brain some motion which produces those ideas,
which we have of them, in us.” He so far retracts his first position
afterwards, as to admit, “in consequence of what Mr. Newton has shown
in the Principia on the gravitation of matter towards matter” that God
not only can put into bodies powers and ways of operation above what
can be explained from what we know of matter, but that he has actually
done so. And he promises to correct the former passage, which however
he has never performed. In fact, he seems, by the use of phrases which
recur too often to be thought merely figurative, to have supposed that
something in the brain comes into local contact with the mind. He was
here unable to divest himself, any more than the schoolmen had done,
of the notion that there is a proper action of the body on the soul in
perception. The Cartesians had brought in the theory of occasional
causes and other solutions of the phenomena, so as to avoid what seems
so irreconcilable with an immaterial principle. No one is so lavish of
a cerebral instrumentality in mental images as Malebranche; he seems
at every moment on the verge of materialism; he coquets, as it were,
with an Epicurean physiology; but if I may be allowed to continue the
metaphor, he perceives the moment where to stop, and retires, like a
dexterous fair one, with unsmirched honour to his immateriality.
It cannot be said that Locke is equally successful.

|And its immateriality.|

115. In another and a well-known passage, he has thrown out a doubt
whether God might not superadd the faculty of thinking to matter; and
though he thinks it probable that this has not been the case, leaves
it at last a debatable question, wherein nothing else than
presumptions are to be had. Yet he has strongly argued against the
possibility of a material Deity upon reasons derived from the nature
of matter. Locke almost appears to have taken the union of a thinking
being with matter for the thinking of matter itself. What is there,
Stillingfleet well asks, like self-consciousness in matter? “Nothing
at all,” Locke replies, “in matter as matter. But that God cannot
bestow on some parcels of matter a power of thinking, and with it
self-consciousness, will never be proved by asking how it is possible
to apprehend that mere body should perceive that it doth perceive.”
But if that we call mind, and of which we are self-conscious, were
thus superadded to matter, would it the less be something real? In
what sense can it be compared to an accident or quality? It has been
justly observed that we are much more certain of the independent
existence of mind than of that of matter. But that, by the
constitution of our nature, a definite organization, or what will be
generally thought the preferable hypothesis, an organic molecule,
should be a necessary concomitant of this immaterial principle, does
not involve any absurdity at all, whatever want of evidence may be
objected to it.

116. It is remarkable that in the controversy with Stillingfleet on
this passage, Locke seems to take for granted that there is no
immaterial principle in brutes; and as he had too much plain sense to
adopt the Cartesian theory of their insensibility, he draws the most
plausible argument for the possibility of thought in matter by the
admitted fact of sensation and voluntary motion in these animal
organizations. “It is not doubted but that the properties of a rose, a
peach, or an elephant superadded to matter change not the properties
of matter, but matter is in these things matter still.” Few perhaps at
present who believe in the immateriality of the human soul, would deny
the same to an elephant; but it must be owned that the discoveries of
zoology have pushed this to consequences which some might not readily
adopt. The spiritual being of a sponge revolts a little our
prejudices; yet there is no resting-place, and we must admit this, or
be content to sink ourselves into a mass of medullary fibre. Brutes
have been as slowly emancipated in philosophy as some classes of
mankind have been in civil polity; their souls we see, were almost
universally disputed to them at the end of the seventeenth century,
even by those who did not absolutely bring them down to machinery.
Even within the recollection of many, it was common to deny them any
kind of reasoning faculty, and to solve their most sagacious actions
by the vague word instinct. We have come of late years to think better
of our humble companions; and as usual in similar cases, the
predominant bias seems rather too much of a levelling character.

|His love of truth and originality.|

117. No quality more remarkably distinguishes Locke than his love of
truth. He is of no sect or party, has no oblique design, such as we so
frequently perceive, of sustaining some tenet which he suppresses, no
submissiveness to the opinions of others, nor what very few lay aside,
to his own. Without having adopted certain dominant ideas, like
Descartes and Malebranche, he follows with inflexible impartiality and
unwearied patience the long process of analysis to which he has
subjected the human mind. No great writer has been more exempt from
vanity, in which he is very advantageously contrasted with Bacon and
Descartes; but he is sometimes a little sharp and contemptuous of his
predecessors. The originality of Locke is real and unaffected; not
that he has derived nothing from others, which would be a great
reproach to himself or to them, but in whatever he has in common with
other philosophers, there is always a tinge of his own thoughts, a
modification of the particular tenet, or at least a peculiarity of
language which renders it not very easy of detection. “It was not to
be expected,” says Stewart, “that in a work so composed by snatches,
to borrow a phrase of the author, he should be able accurately to draw
the line between his own ideas and the hints for which he was indebted
to others. To those who are well acquainted with his speculations it
must appear evident that he had studied diligently the metaphysical
writings both of Hobbes and Gassendi, and that he was no stranger to
the Essays of Montaigne, to the philosophical works of Bacon, and to
Malebranche’s Inquiry after Truth. That he was familiarly conversant
with the Cartesian system may be presumed from what we are told by his
biographer, that it was this which first inspired him with a disgust
at the jargon of the schools, and led him into that train of thinking
which he afterwards prosecuted so successfully. I do not however
recollect that he has anywhere in his Essay mentioned the name of any
one of those authors. It is probable that when he sat down to write,
he found the result of his youthful reading so completely identified
with the fruits of his subsequent reflections, that it was impossible
for him to attempt a separation of the one from the other, and that he
was thus occasionally led to mistake the treasures of memory for those
of invention. That this was really the case may be further presumed
from the peculiar and original cast of his phraseology, which though
in general careless and unpolished, has always the merit of that
characteristical unity and raciness of style, which demonstrate that
while he was writing he conceived himself to be drawing only
from his own resources.”[874]

     [874] Preliminary Dissertation.

|Defended in two cases.|

118. The writer however whom we have just quoted has not quite done
justice to the originality of Locke in more than one instance. Thus,
on this very passage we find a note in these words: “Mr. Addison has
remarked that Malebranche had the start of Locke by several years in
his notions on the subject of duration. Some other coincidences not
less remarkable might be easily pointed out in the opinions of the
English and of the French philosopher.” I am not prepared to dispute,
nor do I doubt, the truth of the latter sentence. But with respect to
the notions of Malebranche and Locke on duration, it must be said,
that they are neither the same nor has Addison asserted them to be
so.[875] The one threw out an hypothesis with no attempt at proof; the
other offered an explanation of the phenomena. What Locke has advanced
as to our getting the idea of duration by reflecting on the succession
of our ideas seems to be truly his own. Whether it be entirely the
right explanation, is another question. It rather appears to me that
the internal sense, as we may not improperly call it, of duration
belongs separately to each idea, and is rather lost than suggested by
their succession. Duration is best perceived when we are able to
detain an idea for some time without change, as in watching the motion
of a pendulum. And though it is impossible for the mind to continue in
this state of immobility more perhaps than about a second or two, this
is sufficient to give us an idea of duration as the necessary
condition of existence. Whether this be an objective or merely a
subjective necessity, is an abstruse question, which our sensations do
not decide. But Locke appears to have looked rather at the measure of
duration, by which we divide it into portions, than at the mere
simplicity of the idea itself. Such a measure, it is certain, can only
be obtained through the medium of a succession in our ideas.

     [875] Spectator, No. 94.

119. It has been also remarked by Stewart, that Locke claims a
discovery rather due to Descartes--namely, the impossibility of
defining simple ideas. Descartes, however, as well as the authors of
the Port-Royal Logic, merely says that words already as clear as we
can make them do not require, or even admit, of definition. But I do
not perceive that he has made the distinction we find in the Essay on
the Human Understanding, that the names of simple ideas are not
capable of any definition, while the names of all complex ideas are
so. “It has not, that I know,” Locke says, “been observed by any body
what words are and what are not capable of being defined.” The passage
I have quoted in another place (chap. xx., p. 500), from Descartes’
posthumous dialogue, even if it went to this length, was unknown to
Locke; yet he might have acknowledged that he had been in some measure
anticipated in other observations by that philosopher.

|His view of innate ideas.|

120. The first book of the Essay on the Human Understanding is
directed, as is well known, against the doctrine of innate ideas, or
innate principles in the mind. This has been often censured, as
combating in some places a tenet which no one would support, and as,
in other passages, breaking in upon moral distinctions themselves, by
disputing the universality of their acknowledgment. With respect to
the former charge, it is not perhaps easy for us to determine what
might be the crude and confused notions, or at least language, of many
who held the theory of innate ideas. It is by no means evident that
Locke had Descartes chiefly, or even at all, in his view. Lord
Herbert, whom he distinctly answers, and many others, especially the
Platonists, had dwelt upon innate ideas in far stronger terms than the
great French metaphysician, if indeed he can be said to have
maintained them at all. The latter and more important accusation rests
upon no other pretext, than that Locke must be reckoned among those
who have not admitted a moral faculty of discovering right from wrong
to be a part of our constitution. But that there is a law of nature
imposed by the Supreme Being, and consequently universal, has been so
repeatedly asserted in his writings, that it would imply great
inattention to question it. Stewart has justly vindicated Locke in
this respect from some hasty and indefinite charges of Beattie; but I
must venture to think that he goes much too far when he attempts to
identify the doctrines of the Essay with those of Shaftesbury. These
two philosophers were in opposite schools as to the test of moral
sentiments. Locke seems always to adopt what is called the selfish
system in morals, resolving all morality into religion, and all
religion into a regard to our own interest. And he seems to have paid
less attention to the emotions than to the intellectual powers
of the soul.

|General praise.|

121. It would by no means be difficult to controvert other tenets of
this great man. But the obligations we owe to him for the Essay on the
Human Understanding are never to be forgotten. It is truly the first
real chart of the coasts; wherein some may be laid down incorrectly,
but the general relations of all are perceived. And we who find some
things to censure in Locke have perhaps learned how to censure them
from himself; we have thrown off so many false notions and films of
prejudice by his help that we are become capable of judging our
master. This is what has been the fate of all who have pushed onward
the landmarks of science; they have made that easy for inferior men
which was painfully laboured through by themselves. Among many
excellent things in the Essay on Human Understanding none are more
admirable than the whole third book on the nature of words, especially
the three chapters on their imperfection and abuse. In earlier
treatises of logic, at least in that of Port-Royal, some of this might
be found; but nowhere are verbal fallacies, and, above all, the
sources from which they spring so fully and conclusively exposed.

|Locke’s Conduct of Understanding.|

122. The same praiseworthy diligence in hunting error to its
lurking-places distinguishes the short treatise on the Conduct of the
Understanding; which, having been originally designed as an additional
chapter to the Essay,[876] is as it were the ethical application of
its theory, and ought always to be read with it, if, indeed, for the
sake of its practical utility, it should not come sooner into the
course of education. Aristotle himself, and the whole of his
dialectical school, had pointed out many of the sophisms against which
we should guard our reasoning faculties; but these are chiefly such as
others attempt to put upon us in dispute. There are more dangerous
fallacies by which we cheat ourselves; prejudice, partiality,
self-interest, vanity, inattention and indifference to truth. Locke,
who was as exempt from these as almost any man who has turned his mind
to so many subjects where their influence is to be suspected, has
dwelled on the moral discipline of the intellect in this treatise
better, as I conceive, than any of his predecessors, though we have
already seen, and it might appear far more at length to those who
should have recourse to the books, that Arnauld and Malebranche,
besides other French philosophers of the age, had not been remiss in
this indispensable part of logic.

     [876] See a letter to Molyneux, dated April, 1697. Locke’s Works
     (fol. 1759), vol. iii., p. 539.

123. Locke, throughout this treatise, labours to secure the honest
inquirer from that previous persuasion of his own opinion, which
generally renders all his pretended investigations of its truth little
more than illusive and nugatory. But the indifferency he recommends to
everything except truth itself, so that we should not even wish
anything to be true before we have examined whether it be so, seems to
involve the impossible hypothesis that man is but a purely reasoning
being. It is vain to press the recommendation of freedom from
prejudice so far; since we cannot but conceive some propositions to be
more connected with our welfare than others, and consequently to
desire their truth. These exaggerations lay a fundamental condition of
honest inquiry open to the sneers of its adversaries; and it is
sufficient, because nothing more is really attainable, first to
dispossess ourselves of the notion that our interests are concerned
where they are not, and next, even when we cannot but wish one result
of our inquiries rather than another, to be the more unremitting in
our endeavours to exclude this bias from our reasoning.

124. I cannot think any parent or instructor justified in neglecting
to put this little treatise in the hands of a boy about the time when
the reasoning faculties become developed. It will give him a sober and
serious, not flippant or self-conceited, independency of thinking; and
while it teaches how to distrust ourselves, and to watch those
prejudices which necessarily grow up from one cause or another, will
inspire a reasonable confidence in what he has well considered, by
taking off a little of that deference to authority, which is the more
to be regretted in its excess, that, like its cousin-german
party-spirit, it is frequently united to loyalty of heart, and the
generous enthusiasm of youth.




                           CHAPTER XXX.

   HISTORY OF MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND OF JURISPRUDENCE,
                        FROM 1650 TO 1700.


                             SECT. I.

                       ON MORAL PHILOSOPHY.

_Pascal’s Provincial Letters--Taylor--Cudworth--Spinosa--Cumberland’s
Law of Nature--Puffendorf’s Treatise on the same Subject--Rochefoucault
and La Bruyere--Locke on Education--Fenelon._

|Casuistry of the Jesuits.|

|Pascal’s Provincial Letters.|

1. The casuistical writers of the Roman church, and especially of the
Jesuit order, belong to earlier periods; for little room was left for
anything but popular compilations from large works of vast labour and
accredited authority. But the false principles imputed to the latter
school now raised a louder cry than before. Implacable and unsparing
enemies, as well as ambitious intriguers themselves, they were
encountered by a host of those who envied, feared, and hated them.
Among those none were such willing or able accusers as the Jansenists
whom they persecuted. Pascal, by his Provincial Letters, did more to
ruin the name of Jesuit than all the controversies of Protestantism,
or all the fulminations of the parliament of Paris. A letter of Antony
Arnauld, published in 1655, wherein he declared that he could not find
in Jansenius the propositions condemned by the pope, and laid himself
open to censure by some of his own, provoked the Sorbonne, of which he
was a member, to exclude him from the faculty of theology. Before this
resolution was taken, Pascal came forward in defence of his friend,
under a fictitious name, in the first of what have been always called
Lettres Provinciales, but more accurately Lettres écrites par Louis de
Montalte à un Provincial de ses Amis. In the first four of them he
discusses the thorny problems of Jansenism, aiming chiefly to show
that St. Thomas Aquinas had maintained the same doctrine on
efficacious grace which his disciples the Dominicans now rejected from
another quarter. But he passed from hence to a theme more generally
intelligible and interesting, the false morality of the Jesuit
casuists. He has accumulated so long a list of scandalous decisions,
and dwelled upon them with so much wit and spirit, and yet with so
serious a severity, that the order of Loyola became a bye-word with
mankind. I do not agree with those who think the Provincial Letters a
greater proof of the genius of Pascal than his Thoughts, in spite of
the many weaknesses in reasoning which the latter display. They are at
present, finely written as all confess them to be, too much filled
with obsolete controversy, they quote books too much forgotten, they
have too little bearing on any permanent sympathies, to be read with
much interest or pleasure.

|Their truth questioned by some.|

2. The Jesuits had, unfortunately for themselves, no writers at that
time of sufficient ability to defend them; and being disliked by many
who were not Jansenists, could make little stand against their
adversaries, till public opinion had already taken its line. They have
since not failed to charge Pascal with extreme misrepresentation of
their eminent casuists, Escobar, Busenbaum, and many others, so that
some have ventured to call the Provincial Letters the immortal liars
(les immortelles menteuses). It has been insinuated, since Pascal’s
veracity is hard to attack, that he was deceived by those from whom he
borrowed his quotations. But he has declared himself, in a remarkable
passage, not only that far from repenting of these letters he would
make them yet stronger if it were to be done again, but that although
he had not read all the books he has quoted, else he must have spent
great part of his life in reading bad books, yet that he had read
Escobar twice through, and with respect to the rest, he had not quoted
a single passage without having seen it in the book, and examined the
context before and after, that he might not confound an objection with
an answer, which would have been reprehensible and unjust[877]: it is
therefore impossible to save the honour of Pascal, if his quotations
are not fair. Nor did he stand alone in his imputations on the Jesuit
casuistry. A book called Morale des Jesuites, by Nicolas Perrault,
published at Mons in 1667, goes over the same ground with less
pleasantry but not less learning.

     [877] Œuvres de Pascal, vol. i., p. 400.

|Taylor’s Ductor Dubitantium.|

3. The most extensive and learned work on casuistry which has appeared
in the English language is the Ductor Dubitantium of Jeremy Taylor,
published in 1660. This, as its title shows, treats of subjective
morality, or the guidance of the conscience. But this cannot be much
discussed without establishing some principles of objective right and
wrong, some standard by which the conscience is to be ruled. “The
whole measure and rule of conscience,” according to Taylor, “is the
law of God, or God’s will signified to us by nature or revelation; and
by the several manners and times and parts of its communication it
hath obtained several names:--the law of nature--the consent of
nations--right reason--the Decalogue--the sermon of Christ--the canons
of the apostles--the laws ecclesiastical and civil of princes and
governors--fame or the public reputation of things, expressed by
proverbs and other instances and manners of public honesty.... These
being the full measures of right and wrong, of lawful and unlawful,
will be the rule of conscience and the subject of the present book.”

|Its character and defects.|

4. The heterogeneous combination of things so different in nature and
authority, as if they were all expressions of the law of God, does not
augur well for the distinctness of Taylor’s moral philosophy, and
would be disadvantageously compared with the Ecclesiastical Polity of
Hooker. Nor are we deceived in the anticipations we might draw. With
many of Taylor’s excellencies, his vast fertility and his frequent
acuteness, the Ductor Dubitantium exhibits his characteristic defects;
the waste of quotations is even greater than in his other writings,
and his own exuberance of mind degenerates into an intolerable
prolixity. His solution of moral difficulties is often unsatisfactory;
after an accumulation of arguments and authorities we have the
disappointment to perceive that the knot is neither untied nor cut;
there seems a want of close investigation of principles, a frequent
confusion and obscurity, which Taylor’s two chief faults, excessive
display of erudition and redundancy of language, conspire to produce.
Paley is no doubt often superficial, and sometimes mistaken; yet in
clearness, in conciseness, in freedom from impertinent reference to
authority, he is far superior to Taylor.

5. Taylor seems too much inclined to side with those who resolve all
right and wrong into the positive will of God. The law of nature he
defines to be “the universal law of the world, or of mankind, to which
we are inclined by nature, invited by consent, prompted by reason, but
which is bound upon us only by the command of God.” Though in the
strict meaning of the word, law, this may be truly said, it was surely
required, considering the large sense which that word has obtained as
coincident with moral right, that a fuller explanation should be given
than Taylor has even intimated, lest the goodness of the Deity should
seem something arbitrary and precarious. And, though in maintaining,
against most of the scholastic metaphysicians, that God can dispense
with the precepts of the Decalogue, he may be substantially right, yet
his reasons seem by no means the clearest and most satisfactory that
might be assigned. It may be added, that in his prolix rules
concerning what he calls a probable conscience, he comes very near to
the much decried theories of the Jesuits. There was indeed a vein of
subtlety in Taylor’s understanding which was not always without
influence on his candour.

|Cudworth’s immutable morality.|

6. A treatise concerning eternal and immutable morality, by Cudworth,
was first published in 1731. This may be almost reckoned a portion of
his Intellectual System, the object being what he has declared to be
one of those which he had there in view. This was to prove that moral
differences of right and wrong are antecedent to any divine law. He
wrote therefore not only against the Calvinistic school, but in some
measure against Taylor, though he abstains from mentioning any recent
author except Descartes, who had gone far in referring all moral
distinctions to the arbitrary will of God. Cudworth’s reasoning is by
no means satisfactory, and rests too much on the dogmatic metaphysics
which were going out of use. The nature or essence of nothing, he
maintains, can depend upon the will of God alone; which is the
efficient, but not the formal, cause of all things; a distinction not
very intelligible, but on which he seems to build his theory.[878] For
moral relations, though he admits that they have no objective
existence out of the mind, have a positive essence, and therefore are
not nothing; whence, it follows that they must be independent of will.
He pours out much ancient learning, though not so lavishly as in the
Intellectual System.

     [878] P. 15.

|Nicole--La Placette.|

7. The urgent necessity of contracting my sails in this last
period, far the most abundant as it is in the variety and extent of
its literature, restrains me from more than a bare mention of several
works not undeserving of regard. The Essais de Morale of Nicole are
less read than esteemed, says a late biographer.[879] Voltaire however
prophesied that they would not perish. “The chapter especially,” he
proceeds, “on the means of preserving peace among men is a masterpiece
to which nothing equal has been left to us by antiquity.”[880] These
Essays are properly contained in six volumes; but so many other pieces
are added in some editions that the collection under that title is
very long. La Placette, minister of a French church at Copenhagen, has
been called the Protestant Nicole. His Essais de Morale, in 1692 and
other years, are full of a solid morality, rather strict in casuistry,
and apparently not deficient in observation and analytical views of
human nature. They were much esteemed in their own age. Works of this
kind tread so very closely on the department of practical religion
that it is sometimes difficult to separate them on any fixed
principle. A less homiletical form, a comparative absence of
scriptural quotation, a more reasoning and observing mode of dealing
with the subject, are the chief distinctions. But in the sermons of
Barrow and some others we find a great deal of what may be justly
called moral philosophy.

     [879] Biog. Univ.

     [880] Siècle de Louis XIV.

|Other writers.|

8. A book by Sharrock, De Officiis secundum Rationis Humanæ Dictata,
1660, is occasionally quoted, and seems to be of a philosophical
nature.[881] Velthuysen, a Dutch minister, was of more reputation. His
name was rather obnoxious to the orthodox, since he was a strenuous
advocate of toleration, a Cartesian in philosophy, and inclined to
judge for himself. His chief works are De Principiis Justi et Decori,
and De Naturali Pudore.[882] But we must now pass on to those who have
exercised a greater influence in moral philosophy, Cumberland and
Puffendorf, after giving a short consideration to Spinosa.

     [881] Cumberland (in præfatione) De Legibus Naturæ.

     [882] Biog. Univ., Barbeyrac’s notes on Puffendorf, passim.

|Moral system of Spinosa.|

9. The moral system, if so it may be called, of Spinosa, has been
developed by him in the fourth and fifth parts of his Ethics. We are
not deceived in what might naturally be expected from the unhesitating
adherence of Spinosa to a rigorous line of reasoning, that his ethical
scheme would offer nothing inconsistent with the fundamental pantheism
of his philosophy. In nature itself, he maintains as before, there is
neither perfection nor imperfection, neither good nor evil; but these
are modes of speaking, adopted to express the relations of things as
they appear to our minds. Whatever contains more positive attributes
capable of being apprehended by us than another contains, is more
perfect than it. Whatever we know to be useful to ourselves, that is
good; and whatever impedes our attainment of good is evil. By this
utility Spinosa does not understand happiness, if by that is meant
pleasurable sensation, but the extension of our mental and bodily
capacities. The passions restrain and overpower these capacities; and
coming from without, that is, from the body, render the mind a less
powerful agent than it seems to be. It is only, we may remember in a
popular sense, and subject to his own definitions, that Spinosa
acknowledges the mind to be an agent at all; it is merely so, in so
far as its causes of action cannot be referred by us to anything
external. No passion can be restrained except by a stronger passion.
Hence, even a knowledge of what is really good or evil for us can of
itself restrain no passion; but only as it is associated with a
perception of joy and sorrow, which is a mode of passion. This
perception is necessarily accompanied by desire or aversion; but they
may often be so weak as to be controlled by other sentiments of the
same class, inspired by conflicting passions. This is the cause of the
weakness and inconstancy of many, and he alone is wise and virtuous
who steadily pursues what is useful to himself; that is, what reason
points out as the best means of preserving his well-being, and
extending his capacities. Nothing is absolutely good, nothing
therefore is principally sought by a virtuous man, but knowledge, not
of things external, which gives us only inadequate ideas, but of God.
Other things are good or evil to us, so far as they suit our nature or
contradict it; and so far as men act by reason, they must agree in
seeking what is conformable to their nature. And those who agree with
us in living by reason, are themselves of all things most suitable to
our nature; so that the society of such men is most to be desired; and
to enlarge that society by rendering men virtuous, and by promoting
their advantage when they are so, is most useful to ourselves. For the
good of such as pursue virtue may be enjoyed by all, and does not
obstruct our own. Whatever conduces to the common society of mankind
and promotes concord among them is useful to all; and whatever has an
opposite tendency is pernicious. The passions are sometimes incapable
of excess, but of this the only instances are joy and cheerfulness;
more frequently they become pernicious by being indulged, and in some
cases, such as hatred, can never be useful. We should therefore, for
our own sakes, meet the hatred and malevolence of others with love and
liberality. Spinosa dwells much on the preference due to a social
above a solitary life, to cheerfulness above austerity, and alludes
frequently to the current theological ethics with censure.

10. The fourth part of the Ethics is entitled, On Human Slavery,
meaning the subjugation of the reason to the passions; the fifth, On
Human Liberty, is designed to show, as had been partly done in the
former, how the mind or intellectual man is to preserve its supremacy.
This is to be effected, not by the extinction, which is impossible,
but the moderation of the passions; and the secret of doing this,
according to Spinosa, is to contemplate such things as are naturally
associated with affections of no great violence. We find that when we
look at things simply in themselves, and not in their necessary
relations, they affect us more powerfully; whence it may be inferred
that we shall weaken the passion by viewing them as parts of a
necessary series. We promote the same end by considering the object of
the passion in many different relations, and, in general, by enlarging
the sphere of our knowledge concerning it. Hence, the more adequate
ideas we attain of things that affect us, the less we shall be
overcome by the passion they excite. But most of all it should be our
endeavour to refer all things to the idea of God. The more we
understand ourselves and our passions, the more we shall love God; for
the more we understand anything, the more pleasure we have in
contemplating it; and we shall associate the idea of God with this
pleasurable contemplation, which is the essence of love. The love of
God should be the chief employment of the mind. But God has no
passions; therefore he who desires that God should love him, desires,
in fact, that he should cease to be God. And the more we believe
others to be united in the same love of God, the more we shall love
him ourselves.

11. The great aim of the mind, and the greatest degree of virtue, is
the knowledge of things in their essence. This knowledge is the
perfection of human nature; it is accompanied with the greatest joy
and contentment; it leads to a love of God, intellectual, not
imaginative, eternal, because not springing from passions that perish
with the body, being itself a portion of that infinite love with which
God intellectually loves himself. In this love towards God our chief
felicity consists, which is not the reward of virtue, but virtue
itself; nor is anyone happy because he has overcome the passions, but
it is by being happy, that is, by enjoying the fulness of divine love,
that he has become capable of overcoming them.

12. These extraordinary effusions confirm what has been hinted in
another place, that Spinosa, in the midst of his atheism, seemed often
to hover over the regions of mystical theology. This last book of the
Ethics speaks, as is evident, the very language of Quietism. In
Spinosa himself it is not easy to understand the meaning; his
sincerity ought not, I think, to be called in question; and this
enthusiasm may be set down to the rapture of the imagination
expatiating in the enchanting wilderness of its creation. But the
possibility of combining such a tone of contemplative devotion with
the systematic denial of a Supreme Being, in any personal sense, may
put us on our guard against the tendency of mysticism, which may
again, as it has frequently, degenerate into a similar chaos.

|Cumberland’s De Legibus Naturæ.|

13. The science of ethics, in the third quarter of the seventeenth
century, seemed to be cultivated by three very divergent schools; by
that of the theologians who went no farther than revelation, or at
least than the positive law of God, for moral distinctions; by that of
the Platonic philosophers, who sought them in eternal and intrinsic
relations; and that of Hobbes and Spinosa, who reduced them all to
selfish prudence. A fourth theory, which, in some of its
modifications, has greatly prevailed in the last two centuries, may be
referred to Richard Cumberland, afterwards bishop of Peterborough. His
famous work, De Legibus Naturæ Disquisitio Philisophica, was published
in 1672. It is contained in nine chapters, besides the preface or
prolegomena.

|Analysis of prolegomena.|

14. Cumberland begins by mentioning Grotius, Selden, and one or two
more who have investigated the laws of nature _à posteriori_,
that is, by the testimony of authors and the consent of nations. But
as some objections may be started against this mode of proof, which,
though he does not hold them to be valid, are likely to have some
effect, he prefers another line of demonstration, deducing the laws of
nature, as effects, from their real causes in the constitution of
nature itself. The Platonic theory of innate moral ideas, sufficient
to establish natural law, he does not admit. “For myself, at least, I
may say that I have not been so fortunate as to arrive at the
knowledge of this law by so compendious a road.” He deems it therefore
necessary to begin with what we learn by daily use and experience,
preserving nothing but the physical laws of motion shown by
mathematicians, and the derivation of all their operations from the
will of a First Cause.

15. By diligent observation of all propositions which can be justly
reckoned general moral laws of nature, he finds that they may be
reduced to one, the pursuit of the common good of all rational agents,
which tends to our own good as part of the whole; as its opposite
tends not only to the misery of the whole system, but to our own.[883]
This tendency, he takes care to tell us, though he uses the present
tense (conducit), has respect to the most remote consequences, and is
so understood by him. The means which serve to this end, the general
good, may be treated as theorems in a geometrical method.[884]
Cumberland, as we have seen in Spinosa, was captivated by the apparent
security of this road to truth.

     [883] Prolegomena, sect. 9.

     [884] Sect. 12.

16. This scheme, he observes, may at first sight want the two
requisites of a law, a legislator, and a sanction. But whatever is
naturally assented to by our minds, must spring from the author of
nature. God is proved to be the author of every proposition which is
proved to be true by the constitution of nature, which has him for its
author.[885] Nor is a sanction wanting in the rewards, that is the
happiness which attends the observance of the law of nature, and in
the opposite effects of its neglect; and in a lax sense, though not
that of the jurists, reward as well as punishment may be included in
the word sanction.[886] But benevolence, that is love and desire of
good towards all rational beings, includes piety towards God, the
greatest of them all, as well as humanity.[887] Cumberland altogether
abstains from arguments founded on revelation, and is perhaps the
first writer on natural law who has done so, for they may even be
found in Hobbes. And I think that he may be reckoned the founder of
what is awkwardly and invidiously called the utilitarian school; for
though similar expressions about the common good may sometimes be
found in the ancients, it does not seem to have been the basis of any
ethical system.

     [885] Sect. 13.

     [886] Sect. 14.

     [887] Sect. 15.

17. This common good, not any minute particle of it, as the benefit of
a single man, is the great end of the legislator and of him who obeys
his will. And such human actions as by their natural tendency promote
the common good may be called naturally good, more than those which
tend only to the good of any one man, by how much the whole is greater
than this small part. And whatever is directed in the shortest way to
this end may be called right, as a right line is the shortest of all.
And as the whole system of the universe, when all things are arranged
so as to produce happiness, is beautiful, being aptly disposed to its
end, which is the definition of beauty, so particular actions
contributing to this general harmony may be called beautiful and
becoming.[888]

     [888] Sect. 16.

18. Cumberland acutely remarks, in answer to the objection to the
practice of virtue from the evils which fall on good men, and the
success of the wicked, that no good or evil is to be considered, in
this point of view, which arises from mere necessity, or external
causes and not from our virtue or vice itself. He then shows that a
regard for piety and peace, for mutual intercourse, and civil and
domestic polity, tends to the happiness of every one; and in reckoning
the good consequences of virtuous behaviour we are not only to
estimate the pleasure intimately connected with it, which the love of
God and of good men produces, but the contingent benefits we obtain by
civil society which we promote by such conduct.[889] And we see that
in all nations there is some regard to good faith and the distribution
of property, some respect to the obligation of oaths, some attachments
to relations and friends. All men therefore acknowledge, and to a
certain extent perform, those things which really tend to the common
good. And though crime and violence sometimes prevail, yet these are
like diseases in the body which it shakes off; or if, like them, they
prove sometimes mortal to a single community, yet human society is
immortal; and the conservative principles of common good have in the
end far more efficacy than those which dissolve and destroy states.

     [889] Sect. 20.

19. We may reckon the happiness consequent on virtue as a true
sanction of natural law annexed to it by its author, and thus
fulfilling the necessary conditions of its definition. And though some
have laid less stress on these sanctions, and deemed virtue its own
reward, and gratitude to God and man its best motive, yet the consent
of nations and common experience show us that the observance of the
first end, which is the common good, will not be maintained without
remuneration or penal consequences.

20. By this single principle of common good, we simplify the method of
natural law, and arrange its secondary precepts in such subordination
as best conduces to the general end. Hence, moral rules give way in
particular cases, when they come in collision with others of more
extensive importance. For all ideas of right or virtue imply a
relation to the system and nature of all rational beings. And the
principles thus deduced as to moral conduct are generally applicable
to political societies, which in their two leading institutions, the
division of property and the coercive power of the magistrate, follow
the steps of natural law, and adopt these rules of polity, because
they perceive them to promote the common weal.

21. From all intermixture of scriptural authority Cumberland proposes
to abstain, building only on reason and experience; since we believe
the scriptures to proceed from God because they illustrate and promote
the law of nature. He seems to have been the first christian writer
who sought to establish systematically the principles of moral right
independently of revelation. They are indeed taken for granted by
many, especially those who adopted the Platonic language; or the
schoolmen may have demonstrated them by arguments derived from reason,
but seldom, if ever, without some collateral reference to theological
authority. In this respect, therefore, Cumberland may be deemed to
make an epoch in the history of ethical philosophy, though Puffendorf,
whose work was published the same year, may have nearly equal claims
to it. If we compare the Treatise on the Laws of Nature with the
Ductor Dubitantium of Taylor, written a very few years before, we
shall find ourselves in a new world of moral reasoning. The schoolmen
and fathers, the canonists and casuists, have vanished like ghosts at
the first daylight; the continual appeal is to experience, and never
to authority; or if authority can be said to appear at all in the
pages of Cumberland, it is that of the great apostles of experimental
philosophy, Descartes or Huygens, or Harvey or Willis. His mind,
liberal and comprehensive as well as acute, had been forcibly
impressed with the discoveries of his own age, both in mathematical
science and in what is now more strictly called physiology. From this
armoury he chose his weapons, and employed them, in some instances,
with great sagacity and depth of thought. From the brilliant success,
also, of the modern analysis, as well as from the natural prejudice in
favour of a geometrical method, which arises from the acknowledged
superiority of that science in the determination of its proper truths,
he was led to expect more from the use of similar processes in moral
reasoning than we have found justified by experience. And this analogy
had probably some effect on one of the chief errors of his ethical
system, the reduction, at least in theory, of the morality of actions
to definite calculation.

|His theory expanded afterwards.|

22. The prolegomena or preface to Cumberland’s treatise contains that
statement of his system with which we have been hitherto concerned,
and which the whole volume does but expand. His manner of reasoning is
diffuse, abounding in repetitions, and often excursive; we cannot
avoid perceiving that he labours long on propositions which no
adversary would dispute, or on which the dispute could be little else
than one of verbal definition. This however is almost the universal
failing of preceding philosophers, and was only put an end to, if it
can be said yet to have ceased, by the sharper logic of controversy,
which a more general regard to metaphysical inquiries, and a juster
sense of the value of words, brought into use.

23. The question between Cumberland and his adversaries, that is, the
school of Hobbes, is stated to be, whether certain propositions of
immutable truth, directing the voluntary actions of men in choosing
good and avoiding evil, and imposing an obligation upon them,
independently of civil laws, are necessarily suggested to the mind by
the nature of things and by that of mankind. And the affirmative of
this question he undertakes to prove from a consideration of the
nature of both; from which many particular rules might be deduced, but
above all that which comprehends all the rest, and is the basis of his
theory--namely, that the greatest possible benevolence (not a mere
languid desire but an energetic principle) of every rational agent
towards all the rest constitutes the happiest condition of each and of
all, so far as depends on their own power, and is necessarily required
for their greatest happiness; whence, the common good is the supreme
law. That God is the author of this law appears evident from his being
the author of all nature and of all the physical laws according to
which impressions are made on our minds.

24. It is easy to observe by daily experience that we have the power
of doing good to others, and that no men are so happy or so secure as
they who most exert this. And this may be proved synthetically and in
that more rigorous method which he affects, though it now and then
leads the reader away from the simplest argument, by considering our
own faculties of speech and language, the capacities of the hand and
countenance, the skill we possess in sciences and in useful arts; all
of which conduce to the social life of mankind and to their mutual
co-operation and benefit. Whatever preserves and perfects the nature
of anything, that is to be called good, and the opposite evil; so that
Hobbes has crudely asserted good to respect only the agent desiring
it, and consequently to be variable. In this it will be seen that the
dispute is chiefly verbal.

25. Two corollaries of great importance in the theory of ethics spring
from a consideration of our physical powers. The first is, that
inasmuch as they are limited by their nature, we should never seek to
transgress their bounds, but distinguish, as the Stoics did things
within our reach, τα εφ’ ἡμιν [ta eph' hêmin], from those beyond it, τα
ουκ εφ’ ἡμιν [ta ouk eph' hêmin], thus relieving our minds from anxious
passions, and turning them to the prudent use of the means assigned to
us. The other is one which applies more closely to his general
principles of morals; that as all we can do in respect of others, and
all the enjoyment we or they can have of particular things, is limited
to certain persons, as well as in space and time, we perceive the
necessity of distribution, both as to things, from which spring the
rights of property, and as to persons, by which our benevolence,
though a general rule in itself, is practically directed towards
individuals. For the conservation of an aggregate whole is the same as
that of its divided parts, that is, of single persons, which requires
a distributive exercise of the powers of each. Hence, property and
dominion, or meum and tuum, in the most general sense, are
consequences from the general law of nature. Without a support from
that law, according to Cumberland, without a positive tendency to the
good of all rational agents, we should have no right even to things
necessary for our preservation; nor have we that right, if a greater
evil would be incurred by our preservation than by our destruction. It
may be added as a more universal reflection, that as all we see in
nature is so framed as to persevere in its appointed state, and as the
human body is endowed with the power of throwing off whatever is
noxious and threatens the integrity of its condition, we may judge
from this that the conservation of mankind in its best state must be
the design of nature, and that their own voluntary actions conducing
to that end must be such as the author of nature commands and approves.

26. Cumberland next endeavours, by an enlarged analysis of the mental
and bodily structure of mankind, to evince their aptitude for the
social virtues, that is, for the general benevolence which is the
primary law of nature. We have the power of knowing these by our
rational faculty, which is the judge of right and wrong, that is, of
what is conformable to the great law; and by the other faculties of
the mind, as well as by the use of language, we generalise and reduce
to propositions the determinations of reason. We have also the power
of comparison, and of perceiving analogies, by means of which we
estimate degrees of good. And if we are careful to guard against
deciding without clear and adequate apprehensions of things, our
reason will not mislead us. The observance of something like this
general law of nature by inferior animals, which rarely, as Cumberland
supposes, attack those of the same species, and in certain instances
live together, as if by a compact for mutual aid; the peculiar
contrivances in the human body which seem designed for the maintenance
of society; the possession of speech, the pathognomic countenance, the
efficiency of the hand, a longevity beyond the lower animals, the
duration of the sexual appetite throughout the year, with several
other arguments derived from anatomy, are urged throughout this
chapter against the unsocial theory of Hobbes.

27. Natural good is defined by Cumberland, with more latitude
than has been used by Paley and by those of a later school, who
confine it to happiness or pleasurable perception. Whatever conduces
to the preservation of an intelligent being, or to the perfection of
his powers, he accounts to be good, without regard to enjoyment. And
for this he appeals to experience, since we desire existence, as well
as the extension of our powers of action, for their own sakes. It is
of great importance to acquire a clear notion of what is truly good,
that is, of what serves most to the happiness and perfection of
everyone; since all the secondary laws of nature, that is, the rules
of particular virtues, derive their authority from this effect. These
rules may be compared one with another as to the probability, as well
as the value of their effects upon the general good; and he
anticipates greater advantage from the employment of mathematical
reasoning and even analytical forms in moral philosophy than the
different nature of the subjects would justify, even if the
fundamental principle of converting the theory of ethics into
calculation could be allowed.[890]

     [890] Ea quippe tota (disciplina morum) versatur in æstimandis
     rationibus virium humanarum ad commune bonum entium rationalium
     quicquam facientium, quæ quidem variant in omni casuum
     possibilium varietate. Cap. ii., sect. 9. The same is laid down in
     several other passages. By _rationibus_ we must understand
     _ratios_; which brings out the calculating theory in the
     strongest light.

28. A law of nature, meaning one subordinate to the great principle of
benevolence, is defined by Cumberland to be a proposition manifested
by the nature of things to the mind according to the will of the First
Cause, and pointing out an action tending to the good of rational
beings, from the performance of which an adequate reward, or from the
neglect of which a punishment, will ensue by the nature of such
rational beings. Every part of this definition he proves with
exceeding prolixity in the longest chapter--namely the fifth, of his
treatise; but we have already seen the foundations of his theory upon
which it rests. It will be evident to the reader of this chapter that
both Butler and Paley have been largely indebted to Cumberland.[891]
Natural obligation he defines thus:--No other necessity determines the
will to act than that of avoiding evil and of seeking good, so far as
appears to be in our power.[892] Moral obligation is more limited, and
is differently defined.[893] But the main point, as he justly
observes, of the controversy, is the connection between the tendency
of each man’s actions, taking them collectively through his life, to
the good of the whole, and that to his own greatest happiness and
perfection. This he undertakes to show, premising that it is twofold;
consisting immediately in the pleasure attached to virtue, and
ultimately in the rewards it obtains from God and from man. God, as a
rational being, cannot be supposed to act without an end, or to have a
greater end than the general good; that is, the happiness and
perfection of his creatures.[894] And his will may not only be shown
_à priori_, by the consideration of his essence and attributes,
but by the effects of virtue and vice in the order of nature, which he
has established. The rewards and punishments which follow at the hands
of men are equally obvious; and whether we regard men as God’s
instruments, or as voluntary agents, demonstrate that virtue is the
highest prudence. These arguments are urged rather tediously, and in
such a manner as to encounter none of the difficulties which it is
desirable to overcome.

     [891] A great part of the second and third chapters of Butler’s
     Analogy will be found in Cumberland. See cap. v., sect. 22.

     [892] Non alia necessitas voluntatem ad agendum determinat, quam
     malum in quantum tale esse nobis constat fugiendi bonumque
     quatenus nobis apparet prosequendi. Cap. v., sect. 7.

     [893] Sect. 27.

     [894] Sect. 19.

29. Two objections might be alledged against this kind of proof; that
the rewards and punishments of moral actions are too uncertain to be
accounted clear proofs of the will of God, and consequently of their
natural obligation, and that by laying so much stress upon them we
make private happiness the measure of good. These he endeavours to
repel. The contingency of a future consequence has a determinate
value, which, if it more than compensates, for good or evil, the evil
or good of a present action, ought to be deemed a proof given by the
author of nature that reward or punishment are annexed to the action,
as much as if they were its necessary consequences.[895] This
argument, perhaps sophistical, is an instance of the calculating
method affected by Cumberland, and which we may presume, from the then
recent application of analysis to probability, he was the first to
adopt on such an occasion. Paley is sometimes fond of a similar
process. But after these mathematical reasonings, he dwells,
as before, on the beneficial effects of virtue, and concludes that
many of them are so uniform as to leave no doubt as to the intention
of the Creator. Against the charge of postponing the public good to
that of the agent, he protests that it is wholly contrary to his
principle, which permits no one to preserve his life, or what is
necessary for it, at the expense of a greater good to the whole.[896]
But his explication of the question ends in repeating that no single
man’s greatest felicity can, by the nature of things, be inconsistent
with that of all; and that every such hypothesis is to be rejected as
an impossible condition of the problem. It seems doubtful whether
Cumberland uses always the same language on the question whether
private happiness is the final motive of action, which in this part of
the chapter he wholly denies.

     [895] Sect. 37.

     [896] Sua cujusque felicitas est pars valde exigua finis illius,
     quem vir verè rationalis prosequitur, et ad totum finem, scilicet
     commune bonum cui a natura seu a Deo intertexitur, eam tantum
     habet rationem quam habet unus homo ad aggregatum ex omnibus
     rationalibus, quæ minor est quam habet unica arenula ad molem
     universi corporis. Sect. 23 and sect. 28.

30. From the establishment of this primary law of universal
benevolence, Cumberland next deduces the chief secondary principles,
which are commonly called the moral virtues. And among these he gives
the first place to justice, which he seems to consider, by too lax an
use of terms, or too imperfect an analogy, as comprehending the social
duties of liberality, courtesy, and domestic affection. The right of
property, which is the foundation of justice, he rests entirely on its
necessity for the common good; whatever is required for that prime end
of moral action being itself obligatory on moral agents, they are
bound to establish and to maintain separate rights. And all right so
wholly depends on this instrumentality to good, that the rightful
sovereignty of God over his creatures is not founded on that relation
he bears to them, much less on his mere power, but on his wisdom and
goodness, through which his omnipotence works only for their
happiness. But this happiness can only be attained by means of an
absolute right over them in their Maker, which is therefore to be
reckoned a natural law.

31. The good of all rational beings is a complex whole, being nothing
but the aggregate of good enjoyed by each. We can only act in our
proper spheres, labouring to do good. But this labour will be
fruitless, or rather mischievous, if we do not keep in mind the higher
gradations which terminate in universal benevolence. No man must seek
his own advantage otherwise than that of his family permits; or
provide for his family to the detriment of his country; or promote the
good of his country at the expense of mankind; or serve mankind, if it
were possible, without regard to the majesty of God.[897] It is,
indeed, sufficient that the mind should acknowledge and recollect this
principle of conduct, without having it present on every single
occasion. But where moral difficulties arise, Cumberland contends that
the general good is the only measure by which we are to determine the
lawfulness of actions, or the preference due to one above another.

32. In conclusion, he passes to political authority, deriving it from
the same principle, and comments with severity and success, though in
the verbose style usual to him, on the system of Hobbes. It is,
however, worthy of remark, that he not only peremptorily declares the
irresponsibility of the supreme magistrate in all cases, but seems to
give him a more arbitrary latitude in the choice of measures, so long
as he does not violate the chief negative precepts of the decalogue,
than is consistent with his own fundamental rule of always seeking the
greatest good. He endeavours to throw upon Hobbes, as was not uncommon
with the latter’s theological opponents, the imputation of encouraging
rebellion while he seemed to support absolute power; and observes with
full as much truth that if kings are bound by no natural law, the
reason for their institution--namely, the security of mankind,
assigned by the author of the Leviathan, falls to the ground.

     [897] Cap. viii., sect. 14, 15.

|Remarks on Cumberland’s theory.|

33. I have gone rather at length into a kind of analysis of this
treatise, because it is now very little read, and yet was of great
importance in the annals of ethical philosophy. It was, if not a
textbook in either of our universities, concerning which I am not
confident, the basis of the system therein taught, and of the books
which have had most influence in this country. Hutcheson, Law, Paley,
Priestley, Bentham, belong, no doubt some of them unconsciously, to
the school founded by Cumberland. Hutcheson adopted the principle of
general benevolence as the standard of virtue; but by limiting
the definition of good to happiness alone, he simplified the scheme of
Cumberland, who had included conservation and enlargement of capacity
in its definition. He rejected also what encumbers the whole system of
his predecessor, the including the Supreme Being among those rational
agents whose good we are bound to promote. The schoolmen, as well as
those whom they followed, deeming it necessary to predicate
metaphysical infinity of all the divine attributes, reckoned
unalterable beatitude in the number. Upon such a subject no wise man
would like to dogmatise. The difficulties on both sides are very
great, and perhaps among the most intricate to which the momentous
problem concerning the cause of evil has given rise. Cumberland, whose
mind does not seem to have been much framed to wrestle with mysteries,
evades, in his lax verbosity, what must perplex his readers.

34. In establishing the will of a supreme lawgiver as essential to the
law of nature, he is followed by the bishop of Carlisle and Paley, as
well as by the majority of English moralists in the eighteenth
century. But while Paley deems the recognition of a future state so
essential, that he even includes in the definition of virtue that it
is performed “for the sake of everlasting happiness,” Cumberland not
only omits this erroneous and almost paradoxical condition, but very
slightly alludes to another life, though he thinks it probable from
the stings of conscience and on other grounds; resting the whole
argument on the certain consequences of virtue and vice in the
present, but guarding justly against the supposition that any
difference of happiness in moral agents can affect the immediate
question except such as is the mere result of their own behaviour. If
anyone had urged, like Paley, that without taking a future state into
consideration, the result of calculating our own advantage will either
not always be in favour of virtue, or, in consequence of the violence
of passion, will not always seem so, Cumberland would probably have
denied the former alternative, and replied to the other, that we can
only prove the truth of our theorems in moral philosophy, and cannot
compel men to adopt them.

35. Sir James Mackintosh, whose notice of Cumberland is rather too
superficial, and hardly recognises his influence on philosophy,
observes that “the forms of scholastic argument serve more to encumber
his style than to insure his exactness.”[898] There is not, however,
much of scholastic form in the treatise on the Laws of Nature, and
this is expressly disclaimed in the Preface. But he has, as we have
intimated, a great deal too much of a mathematical line of argument
which never illustrates his meaning, and has sometimes misled his
judgment. We owe, probably to his fondness for this specious illusion,
I mean the application of reasonings upon quantity to moral subjects,
the dangerous sophism that a direct calculation of the highest good,
and that not relatively to particulars, but to all rational beings, is
the measure of virtuous actions, the test by which we are to try our
own conduct and that of others. And the intervention of general rules,
by which Paley endeavoured to dilute and render palatable this
calculating scheme of utility, seems no more to have occurred to
Cumberland than it was adopted by Bentham.

     [898] Dissertation on Ethical Philosophy, p. 48.

36. Thus as Taylor’s Ductor Dubitantium is nearly the last of a
declining school, Cumberland’s Law of Nature may be justly considered
as the herald, especially in England, of a new ethical philosophy, of
which the main characteristics were, first, that it stood complete in
itself without the aid of revelation; secondly, that it appealed to no
authority of earlier writers whatever, though it sometimes used them
in illustration; thirdly, that it availed itself of observation and
experience, alledging them generally, but abstaining from particular
instances of either, and making, above all, no display of erudition;
and fourthly; that it entered very little upon casuistry, leaving the
application of principles to the reader.

|Puffendorf’s Law of Nature and Nations.|

37. In the same year, 1672, a work still more generally distinguished
than that of Cumberland, was published at Lund, in Sweden, by Samuel
Puffendorf, a Saxon by birth, who filled the chair of moral philosophy
in that recently-founded university. This large treatise, On the Law
of Nature and Nations, in eight books, was abridged by the author, but
not without some variations, in one perhaps more useful, On the Duties
of a Man and a Citizen. Both have been translated into French and
English; both were long studied in the foreign universities, and even
in our own. Puffendorf has been, perhaps, in moral philosophy, of
greater authority than Grotius, with whom he is frequently named in
conjunction; but this is not the case in international jurisprudence.

|Analysis of this work.|

38. Puffendorf, after a very diffuse and technical chapter on moral
beings, or modes, proceeds to assert a demonstrative certainty in
moral science, but seems not to maintain an inherent right and wrong
in actions antecedent to all law, referring the rule of morality
altogether to the divine appointment. He ends, however, by admitting
that man’s constitution being what it is, God could not, without
inconsistency, have given him any other law than that under which he
lives.[899] We discern good from evil by the understanding, which
judgment when exercised on our own actions is called conscience; but
he strongly protests against any such jurisdiction of conscience,
independent of reason and knowledge, as some have asserted. This
notion “was first introduced by the schoolmen, and has been maintained
in these latter ages by the crafty casuists for the better securing,
of men’s minds and fortunes to their own fortune and advantage.”[900]
Puffendorf was a good deal imbued with the Lutheran bigotry which did
no justice to any religion but its own.

     [899] C. 2.

     [900] C. 3.

39. Law alone creates obligation; no one can be obliged except towards
a superior. But to compel and to oblige being different things, it is
required for this latter that we should have received some great good
at the hands of a superior, or have voluntarily submitted to his will.
This seems to involve an antecedent moral right, which Puffendorf’s
general theory denies.[901] Barbeyrac, his able and watchful
commentator, derives obligation from our natural dependence on the
supreme authority of God, who can punish the disobedient and reward
others. In order to make laws obligatory, it is necessary, according
to Puffendorf, that we should know both the law and the lawgiver’s
authority. Actions are good or evil, as they conform more or less to
law. And, coming to consider the peculiar qualities of moral actions,
he introduces the distinction of perfect and imperfect rights,
objecting to that of Grotius and the Roman lawyers, expletive and
distributive justice.[902] This first book of Puffendorf is very
diffuse; and some chapters are wholly omitted in the abridgment.

     [901] C. 6.

     [902] C. 7.

40. The natural state of man, such as in theory we may suppose, is one
in which he was never placed, “thrown into the world at a venture, and
then left entirely to himself, with no larger endowments of body or
mind than such as we now discover in men.” This, however, he seems to
think physically possible to have been, which I should incline to
question. Man, in a state of nature, is subject to no earthly
superior; but we must not infer thence that he is incapable of law,
and has a right to everything that is profitable to himself. But,
after discussing the position of Hobbes that a state of nature is a
state of war, he ends by admitting that the desire of peace is too
weak and uncertain a security for its preservation among mankind.[903]

     [903] L. ii. c. 2.

41. The law of nature he derives not from consent of nations, nor from
personal utility, but from the condition of man. It is discoverable by
reason; its obligation is from God. He denies that it is founded on
the intrinsic honesty or turpitude of actions. It was free to God
whether he would create an animal to whom the present law of nature
should be applicable. But supposing all things human to remain
constant, the law of nature, though owing its institution to the free
will of God, remains unalterable. He therefore neither agrees wholly
with those who deem this law as one arbitrary and mutable at God’s
pleasure, or those who look upon it as an image of his essential
holiness and justice. For he doubts whether the law of nature is
altogether conformed to the divine attributes as to a type; since we
cannot acquire a right with respect to God; so that his justice must
be of a different kind from ours. Common consent, again, is an
insufficient basis of natural law, few men having searched into the
foundations of their assent, even if we could find a more general
consent than is the case. And here he expatiates, in the style of
Montaigne’s school, on the variety of moral opinions.[904] Puffendorf
next attacks those who resolve right into self-interest. But,
unfortunately, he only proves that men often mistake their interest.
“It is a great mistake to fancy it will be profitable to you to take
away, either by fraud or violence, what another man has acquired by
his labour; since others have not only the power of resisting you, but
of taking the same freedom with your goods and possessions.” This is
evidently no answer to Hobbes or Spinosa.

     [904] C. 3.

42. The nature of man, his wants, his powers of doing mischief to
others, his means of mutual assistance, show that he cannot be
supported in things necessary and convenient to him without
society, so that others may promote his interests. Hence, sociableness
is a primary law of nature, and all actions tending towards it are
commanded, as the opposite are forbidden by that law. In this he
agrees with Grotius; and, after he had become acquainted with
Cumberland’s work, observes that the fundamental law of that writer,
to live for the common good, and show benevolence towards all men,
does not differ from his own. He partly explains, and partly answers,
the theory of Hobbes. From Grotius he dissents in denying that the law
of nature would be binding without religion, but does not think the
soul’s immortality essential to it.[905] The best division of natural
law is into duties towards ourselves and towards others. But in the
abridged work, the Duties of a Man and a Citizen, he adds those
towards God.

     [905] C. 8.

43. The former class of duties he illustrates with much prolixity and
needless quotation,[906] and passes to the right of self-defence,
which seems to be the debatable frontier between the two classes of
obligation. In this chapter Puffendorf is free from the extreme
scrupulousness of Grotius; yet he differs from him, as well as from
Barbeyrac and Locke, in denying the right of attacking the aggressor,
where a stranger has been injured, unless where we are bound to him by
promise.[907]

     [906] C. 4.

     [907] C. 5.

44. All persons, as is evident, are bound to repair wilful injury, and
even that arising from their neglect; but not where they have not been
in fault.[908] Yet the civil action _ob pauperiem_, for casual
damage by a beast or slave, which Grotius held to be merely of
positive law, and which our own (in the only applicable case) does not
recognise, Puffendorf thinks grounded on natural right. He considers
several questions of reparation, chiefly such as we find in Grotius.
From these, after some intermediate disquisitions on moral duties, he
comes to the more extensive province of casuistry, the obligation of
promises.[909] These, for the most part, give perfect rights which may
be enforced, though this is not universal; hence, promises may
themselves be called imperfect or perfect. The former, or _nuda
pacta_, seem to be obligatory rather by the rules of veracity, and
for the sake of maintaining confidence among men, than in strict
justice; yet he endeavours to refute the opinion of a jurist who held
_nuda pacta_ to involve no obligation beyond a compensation for
damage. Free consent and knowledge of the whole subject are required
for the validity of a promise; hence, drunkenness takes away its
obligation.[910] Whether a minor is bound in conscience, though not in
law, has been disputed; the Romish casuists all denying it unless he
has received an advantage. La Placette, it seems, after the time of
Puffendorf, though a very rigid moralist, confines the obligation to
cases where the other party sustains any real damage by the
non-performance. The world, in some instances, at least, would exact
more than the strictest casuists. Promises were invalidated, though
not always mutual contracts, by error; and fraud in the other party
annuls a contract. There can be no obligation, Puffendorf maintains,
without a corresponding right; hence, fear arising from the fault of
the other party invalidates a promise. But those made to pirates or
rebels, not being extorted by fear, are binding. Vows to God he deems
not binding, unless accepted by him; but he thinks that we may presume
their acceptance when they serve to define or specify an indeterminate
duty.[911] Unlawful promises must not be performed by the party
promising to commit an evil act, and as to performance of the other
party’s promise, he differs from Grotius in thinking it not binding.
Barbeyrac concurs with Puffendorf, but Paley holds the contrary; and
the common sentiments of mankind seem to be on that side.[912]

     [908] L. iii., c. 1.

     [909] C. 5.

     [910] C. 6.

     [911] C. 6.

     [912] C. 7.

45. The obligations of veracity Puffendorf, after much needless
prolixity on the nature of signs and words, deduces from a tacit
contract among mankind, that words, or signs of intention, shall be
used in a definite sense which others may understand.[913] He is
rather fond of these imaginary compacts. The laxer casuists are in
nothing more distinguishable from the more rigid than in the
exceptions they allow to the general rule of veracity. Many, like
Augustin and most of the fathers, have laid it down that all falsehood
is unlawful; even some of the jurists, when treating of morality, had
done the same. But Puffendorf gives considerable latitude to
deviations from truth, by mental reserve, by ambiguous words, by
direct falsehood. Barbeyrac, in a long note, goes a good deal farther,
and indeed beyond any safe limit.[914] An oath, according to those
writers, adds no peculiar obligation; another remarkable
discrepancy between their system and that of the theological casuists.
Oaths may be released by the party in favour of whom they are made;
but it is necessary to observe whether the dispensing authority is
really the obligee.

     [913] L. iv., c. 1.

     [914] Barbeyrac admits that several writers of authority
     since Puffendorf had maintained the strict obligation of veracity
     for its own sake; Thomasius, Buddæus, Noodt, and above all, La
     Placette. His own notions are too much the other way, both
     according to the received standard of honourable and decorous
     character among men, and according to any sound theory of ethics.
     Lying, he says, condemned in Scripture, always means fraud or
     injury to others. His doctrine is, that we are to speak the
     truth, or to be silent, or to feign and dissemble, accordingly as
     our own lawful interest, or that of our neighbour, may demand it.
     This is surely as untenable one way as any paradox in Augustin or
     La Placette can be the other.

46. We now advance to a different part of moral philosophy, the rights
of property. Puffendorf first inquires into the natural right of
killing animals for food; but does not defend it very well, resting
this right on the want of mutual obligation between man and brutes.
The arguments from physiology and the manifest propensity in mankind
to devour animals, are much stronger. He censures cruelty towards
animals, but hardly on clear grounds; the disregard of moral emotion,
which belongs to his philosophy, prevents his judging it rightly.[915]
Property itself in things he grounds on an express or tacit contract
of mankind, while all was yet in common, that each should possess a
separate portion. This covenant he supposes to have been gradually
extended, as men perceived the advantage of separate possession, lands
having been cultivated in common after severalty had been established
in houses and moveable goods; and he refutes those who maintain
property to be coeval with mankind, and immediately founded on the law
of nature.[916] Nothing can be the subject of property which is
incapable of exclusive occupation; not therefore the ocean, though
some narrow seas may be appropriated.[917] In the remainder of this
fourth book he treats on a variety of subjects connected with
property, which carry us over a wide field of natural and positive
jurisprudence.

     [915] C. 3.

     [916] C. 4. Barbeyrac more wisely denies this assumed compact,
     and rests the right of property on individual occupancy.

     [917] C. 5.

47. The fifth book of Puffendorf relates to price, and to all
contracts onerous or lucrative, according to the distinction of the
jurists, with the rules of their interpretation. It is a running
criticism on the Roman Law, comparing it with right reason and
justice. Price he divides into proper and eminent; the first being
what we call real value, or capacity of procuring things desirable by
means of exchange; the second the money value. What is said on this
subject would now seem common-place and prolix; but it is rather
interesting to observe the beginnings of political economy. Money, he
thinks, was introduced by an agreement of civilized nations, as a
measure of value. Puffendorf, of more enlarged views than Grotius,
vindicates usury which the other had given up; and mentions the
evasions usually practised such as the grant of an annuity for a
limited term.

48. In the sixth book we have disquisitions on matrimony and the
rights incident to it, on paternal and on herile power. Among
other questions he raises one whether the husband has any natural
dominion over the wife. This he thinks hard to prove, except as his
sex gives him an advantage; but fitness to govern does not create a
right. He has recourse therefore to his usual solution, her tacit or
express promise of obedience. Polygamy he deems contrary to the law of
nature, but not incest except in the direct line. This is consonant to
what had been the general determination of philosophers.[918] The
right of parents he derives from the general duty of sociableness,
which makes preservation of children necessary, and on the affection
implanted in them by nature; also on a presumed consent of the
children in return for their maintenance.[919] In a state of nature
this command belongs to the mother, unless she has waived it by a
matrimonial contract. In childhood, the fruits of the child’s labour
belong to the father, though the former seems to be capable of
receiving gifts. Fathers, as heads of families, have a kind of
sovereignty, distinct from the paternal, to which adult children
residing with them are submitted. But after their emancipation by
leaving their father’s house, which does not absolutely require his
consent, they are bound only to duty and reverence. The power of a
master over his servant is not by nature, nor by the law of war, but
originally by a contract founded on necessity. War increased the
number of those in servitude. A slave, whatever Hobbes may say, is
capable of being injured by his master; but the laws of some
nations give more power to the latter than is warranted by those of
nature. Servitude implies only an obligation to perpetual labour for a
recompence (namely, at least maintenance); the evil necessary to this
condition has been much exaggerated by opinion.[920]

     [918] L. vi., c. 1.

     [919] C. 2.

     [920] C. 3.

|Puffendorf and Paley compared.|

49. Puffendorf and Cumberland are the two great promoters, if not
founders of that school in ethics, which abandoning the higher ground
of both philosophers and theologians, that of an intrinsic fitness and
propriety in actions, resolved them all into their conduciveness
towards good. Their _utile_ indeed is very different from what
Cicero has so named, which is merely personal, but it is different
also from his _honestum_. The sociableness of Puffendorf is
perhaps much the same with the general good of Cumberland, but is
somewhat less comprehensive and less clear. Paley, who had not read a
great deal, had certainly read Puffendorf; he has borrowed from him
several minor illustrations, such as the equivocal promise of Timur
(called by Paley Temures) to the garrison of Sebastia, and the rules
for division of profits in partnership. Their minds were in some
respects alike; both phlegmatic, honest, and sincere, without warmth
or fancy; yet there seems a more thorough good-nature and kindliness
of heart in our countryman. Though an ennobled German, Puffendorf had
as little respect for the law of honour as Paley himself. They do not
indeed resemble each other in their modes of writing; one was very
laborious, the other very indolent; one sometimes misses his mark by
circuity, the other by precipitance. The quotations in Puffendorf are
often as thickly strewed as in Grotius, though he takes less from the
poets; but he seems not to build upon their authority, which gives
them still more the air of superfluity. His theory indeed, which
assigns no weight to anything but a close geometrical deduction from
axioms, is incompatible with much deference to authority; and he sets
aside the customs of mankind as unstable and arbitrary. He has not
taken much from Hobbes, whose principles are far from his; but a great
deal from Grotius. The leading difference between the treatises of
these celebrated men is that, while the former contemplated the law
that ought to be observed among independent communities as his primary
object, to render which more evident he lays down the fundamental
principles of private right or the law of nature, the latter, on the
other hand, not only begins with natural law, but makes it the great
theme of his inquiries.

|Rochefoucault.|

50. Few books have been more highly extolled or more severely blamed
than the Thoughts or Maxims of the Duke of Rochefoucault. They have,
indeed, the greatest advantages for popularity; the production of a
man less distinguished by his high rank than by his active
participation in the factions of his country at a time when they
reached the limits of civil war, and by his brilliancy among the
accomplished courtiers of Louis XIV.; concise and energetic in
expression; reduced to those short aphorisms, which leave much to the
reader’s acuteness, and yet save his labour; not often obscure and
never wearisome; an evident generalisation of long experience, without
pedantry, without method, without deductive reasonings, yet wearing an
appearance at least of profundity, they delight the intelligent though
indolent man of the world, and must be read with some admiration by
the philosopher. Among the books in ancient and modern times which
record the conclusions of observing men on the moral qualities of
their fellows, a high place should be reserved for the Maxims of
Rochefoucault.

51. The censure that has so heavily fallen upon this writer is founded
on his proneness to assign a low and selfish motive to human actions,
and even to those which are most usually denominated virtuous. It is
impossible to dispute the partial truth of this charge. Yet it may be
pleaded, that many of his maxims are not universal even in their
enunciation; and that, in others, where, for the sake of a more
effective expression, the position seems general, we ought to
understand it with such limitations as our experience may suggest. The
society with which the Duke of la Rochefoucault was conversant could
not elevate his notions of disinterested probity in man, or of
unblemished purity in woman. Those who call themselves the world, it
is easy to perceive, set aside, in their remarks on human nature, all
the species but themselves, and sometimes generalise their maxims, to
an amusing degree, from the manners and sentiments which have grown up
in the atmosphere of a court or an aristocratic society. Rochefoucault
was of far too reflecting a mind to be confounded with such mere
worldlings; yet he bears witness to the contracted observation and the
precipitate inferences which an intercourse with a single class of
society scarcely fails to generate. The malignity of Rochefoucault is
always directed against the false virtues of mankind, but never
touches the reality of moral truths, and leaves us less injured than
the cold, heartless indifference to right which distils from the pages
of Hobbes. Nor does he deal in those sweeping denials of goodness to
human nature which are so frequently hazarded under the mask of
religion. His maxims are not exempt from defects of a different kind;
they are sometimes refined to a degree of obscurity, and sometimes,
under an epigrammatic turn, convey little more than a trivial meaning.
Perhaps, however, it would be just to say that one third of the number
deserve to be remembered, as at least partially true and useful; and
this is a large proportion, if we exclude all that are not in some
measure original.

|La Bruyere.|

52. The Characters of La Bruyere, published in 1687, approach to the
Maxims of La Rochefoucault by their refinement, their brevity, their
general tendency to an unfavourable explanation of human conduct. This
nevertheless is not so strongly marked, and the picture of selfishness
wants the darkest touches of his contemporary’s colouring. La Bruyere
had a model in antiquity, Theophrastus, whose short book of Characters
he had himself translated, and prefixed to his own; a step not
impolitic for his own glory, since the Greek writer, with no
contemptible degree of merit, has been incomparably surpassed by his
imitator. Many changes in the condition of society, the greater
diversity of ranks and occupations in modern Europe, the influence of
women over the other sex, as well as their own varieties of character
and manners, the effects of religion, learning, chivalry, royalty,
have given a range to this very pleasing department of moral
literature which no ancient could have compassed. Nor has Theophrastus
taken much pains to search the springs of character; his delineations
are bold and clear, but merely in outline; we see more of manners than
of nature, and the former more in general classes than in portraiture.
La Bruyere has often painted single persons; whether accurately or no,
we cannot at this time determine, but with a felicity of description
which at once renders the likeness probable, and suggests its
application to those we ourselves have seen. His general reflections,
like those of Rochefoucault, are brilliant with antithesis and
epigrammatic conciseness; sometimes perhaps not quite just or quite
perspicuous. But he pleases more, on the whole, from his greater
variety, his greater liveliness, and his gentler spirit of raillery.
Nor does he forget to mingle the praise of some with his satire. But
he is rather a bold writer for his age and his position in the court,
and what looks like flattery may well have been ironical. Few have
been more imitated, as well as more admired, than La Bruyere, who
fills up the list of those whom France has boasted as most conspicuous
for their knowledge of human nature. The others are Montaigne,
Charron, Pascal, and Rochefoucault; but we might withdraw the second
name without injustice.

|Education. Milton’s Tractate.|

53. Moral philosophy comprehends in its literature whatever has been
written on the best theory and precepts of moral education,
disregarding what is confined to erudition, though this may frequently
be partially treated in works of the former class. Education,
notwithstanding its recognised importance, was miserably neglected in
England, and quite as much, perhaps, in every part of Europe. Schools,
kept by low-born illiberal pedants, teaching little, and that little
ill, without regard to any judicious discipline or moral culture, on
the one hand, or, on the other, a pretence of instruction at home
under some ignorant and servile tutor, seem to have been the
alternatives of our juvenile gentry. Milton raised his voice against
these faulty methods in his short Tractate on Education. This abounds
with bursts of his elevated spirit; and sketches out a model of public
colleges, wherein the teaching should be more comprehensive, more
liberal, more accommodated to what he deems the great aim of education
than what was in use. “That,” he says, “I call a complete and generous
education which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and
magnanimously all the offices, both private and public, of peace and
war.” But when Milton descends to specify the course of studies he
would recommend, it appears singularly ill-chosen and impracticable,
nearly confined to ancient writers, even in mathematics and other
subjects where they could not be sufficient, and likely to leave the
student very far from that aptitude for offices of war and peace which
he had held forth as the reward of his diligence.

|Locke on Education. Its merits.|

54. Locke, many years afterwards, turned his thoughts to education
with all the advantages that a strong understanding and entire
disinterestedness could give him; but, as we should imagine, with some
necessary deficiencies of experience, though we hardly perceive much
of them in his writings. He looked on the methods usual in his age
with severity, or, some would say, with prejudice; yet I know not by
what proof we can refute his testimony. In his Treatise on Education,
which may be reckoned an introduction to that on the Conduct of the
Understanding, since the latter is but a scheme of that education an
adult person should give himself, he has uttered, to say the least,
more good sense on the subject than will be found in any preceding
writer. Locke was not like the pedants of his own or other ages, who
think that to pour their wordy book-learning into the memory is the
true discipline of childhood. The culture of the intellectual and
moral faculties in their most extensive sense, the health of the body,
the accomplishments which common utility or social custom have
rendered valuable, enter into his idea of the best model of education,
conjointly at least with any knowledge that can be imparted by books.
The ancients had written in the same spirit: in Xenophon, in Plato, in
Aristotle, the noble conception which Milton has expressed, of forming
the perfect man, is always predominant over mere literary instruction,
if indeed the latter can be said to appear at all in their writings on
this subject; but we had become the dupes of schoolmasters in our
riper years, as we had been their slaves in our youth. Much has been
written, and often well, since the days of Locke; but he is the chief
source from which it has been ultimately derived; and though the Emile
is more attractive in manner, it may be doubtful whether it is as
rational and practicable as the Treatise on Education. If they have
both the same defect, that their authors wanted sufficient observation
of children, it is certain that the caution and sound judgment of
Locke have rescued him better from error.

|And defects.|

55. There are, indeed, from this or from other causes, several
passages in the Treatise on Education to which we cannot give an
unhesitating assent. Locke appears to have somewhat exaggerated the
efficacy of education. This is an error on the right side in a work
that aims at persuasion in a practical matter; but we are now looking
at theoretical truth alone. “I think I may say,” he begins, “that of
all the men we meet with nine parts of ten are what they are, good or
evil, useful or not, by their education. It is this which makes the
great difference in mankind. The little or almost insensible
impressions on our tender infancies have very important and lasting
consequences; and there it is as in the fountains of some rivers,
where a gentle application of the hand turns the flexible waters into
channels that make them take quite contrary courses; and by this
little direction given them at first in the source, they receive
different tendencies, and arrive at last at very remote and distant
places.” “I imagine,” he adds soon afterwards, “the minds of children
as easily turned this or that way as water itself.”[921]

     [921] Treatise on Education, § 152. “The difference,” he
     afterwards says, “to be found in the manners and abilities of men
     is owing more to their education than to anything else.” § 32.

56. This passage is an instance of Locke’s unfortunate fondness for
analogical parallels, which, as far as I have observed, much more
frequently obscure a philosophical theorem, than shed any light upon
it. Nothing would be easier than to confirm the contrary proposition
by such fanciful analogies from external nature. In itself, the
position is hyperbolical to extravagance. It is no more disparagement
to the uses of education that it will not produce the like effects
upon every individual, than it is to those of agriculture (I purposely
use this sort of idle analogy) that we do not reap the same quantity
of corn from every soil. Those who are conversant with children on a
large scale will, I believe, unanimously deny this levelling efficacy
of tuition. The variety of characters even in children of the same
family, where the domestic associations of infancy have run in the
same trains, and where many physical congenialities may produce, and
ordinarily do produce, a moral resemblance, is of sufficiently
frequent occurrence to prove that in human beings there are intrinsic
dissimilitudes, which no education can essentially overcome. Among
mere theorists, however, this hypothesis seems to be popular. And as
many of these extend their notion of the plasticity of human nature to
the effects of government and legislation, which is a sort of
continuance of the same controlling power, they are generally induced
to disregard past experience of human affairs, because they flatter
themselves that under a more scientific administration mankind will
become something very different from what they have been.

57. In the age of Locke, if we may confide in what he tells
us, the domestic education of children must have been of the worst
kind. “If we look,” he says, “into the common management of children
we shall have reason to wonder, in the great dissoluteness of manners
which the world complains of, that there are any footsteps at all left
of virtue. I desire to know what vice can be named which parents and
those about children do not season them with, and drop into them the
seeds of, as often as they are capable to receive them.” The mode of
treatment seems to have been passionate and often barbarous severity
alternating with foolish indulgence. Their spirits were often broken
down and their ingenuousness destroyed by the former; their habits of
self-will and sensuality confirmed by the latter. This was the course
used by parents; but the pedagogues of course confined themselves to
their favourite scheme of instruction and reformation by punishment.
Dugald Stewart has animadverted on the austerity of Locke’s rules of
education.[922] And this is certainly the case in some respects. He
recommends that children should be taught to expect nothing because it
will give them pleasure, but only what will be useful to them; a rule
fit, in its rigid meaning, to destroy the pleasure of the present
moment in the only period of life that the present moment can be
really enjoyed. No father himself, Locke neither knew how ill a parent
can spare the love of his child, nor how ill a child can want the
constant and practical sense of a parent’s love. But if he was led too
far by deprecating the mischievous indulgence he had sometimes
witnessed, he made some amends by his censures on the prevalent
discipline of stripes. Of this he speaks with the disapprobation
natural to a mind already schooled in the habits of reason and
virtue.[923] “I cannot think any correction useful to a child where
the shame of suffering for having done amiss does not work more upon
him than the pain.” Esteem and disgrace are the rewards and
punishments to which he principally looks, and surely this is a noble
foundation for moral discipline. He also recommends that children
should be much with their parents, and allowed all reasonable liberty.
I cannot think that Stewart’s phrase “hardness of character,” which he
accounts for by the early intercourse of Locke with the Puritans, is
justly applicable to anything that we know of him; and many more
passages in this very treatise might be adduced to prove his
kindliness of disposition, than will appear to any judicious person
over austere. He found in fact everything wrong; a false system of
reward and punishment, a false view of the objects of education, a
false selection of studies, false methods of pursuing them. Where so
much was to be corrected, it was perhaps natural to be too sanguine
about the effects of the remedy.

     [922] Preliminary Dissertation to Encyclop. Britann.

     [923] If severity carried to the highest pitch does prevail, and
     works a cure upon the present unruly distemper, it is often
     bringing in the room of it a worse and more dangerous disease by
     breaking the mind; and then in the place of a disorderly young
     fellow, you have a low-spirited moped creature, who however with
     his unnatural sobriety he may please silly people, who commend
     tame inactive children, because they make no noise, nor give them
     any trouble; yet at least will probably prove as uncomfortable a
     thing to his friends, as he will be all his life an useless thing
     to himself and others. § 51.

58. Of the old dispute as to public and private education he says,
that both sides have their inconveniencies, but incline to prefer the
latter, influenced, as is evident, rather by disgust at the state of
our schools than by any general principle.[924] For he insists much on
the necessity of giving a boy a sufficient knowledge of what he is to
expect in the world. “The longer he is kept hood-winked, the less he
will see when he comes abroad into open daylight, and be the more
exposed to be a prey to himself and others.” And this experience will,
as is daily seen, not be supplied by a tutor’s lectures, any more than
by books; nor can be given by any course save a public education.
Locke urges the necessity of having a tutor well-bred, and with
knowledge of the world, the ways, the humours, the follies, the
cheats, the faults of the age he is fallen into, and particularly of
the country he lives in, as of far more importance than his
scholarship. “The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge
of it.... He that thinks not this of more moment to his son, and for
which he more needs a governor, than the languages and learned
sciences, forgets of how much more use it is to judge right of men and
manage his affairs wisely with them, than to speak Greek and Latin,
and argue in mood and figure, or to have his head filled with the
abstruse speculations of natural philosophy and metaphysics; nay, than
to be well versed in Greek and Roman writers, though that be much
better for a gentleman, than to be a good Peripatetic or Cartesian;
because these ancient authors observed and painted mankind
well, and give the best light into that kind of knowledge. He that
goes into the eastern parts of Asia will find able and acceptable men
without any of these; but without virtue, knowledge of the world, and
civility, an accomplished and valuable man can be found nowhere.”[925]

     [924] § 70.

     [925] § 94.

59. It is to be remembered, that the person whose education Locke
undertakes to fashion is an English gentleman. Virtue, wisdom,
breeding, and learning, are desirable for such an one in their order,
but the last not so much as the rest.[926] It must be had, he says,
but only as subservient to greater qualities. No objections have been
more frequently raised against the scheme of Locke than on account of
his depreciation of classical literature, and of the study of the
learned languages. This is not wholly true: Latin he reckons
absolutely necessary for a gentleman, though it is absurd that those
should learn Latin who are designed for trade, and never look again at
a Latin book.[927] If he lays not so much stress on Greek as a
gentleman’s study, though he by no means would abandon it, it is
because, in fact, most gentlemen, especially in his age, have done
very well without it; and nothing can be deemed indispensable in the
education of a child, the want of which does not leave a manifest
deficiency in the man. “No man,” he observes, “can pass for a scholar
who is ignorant of the Greek language. But I am not here considering
of the education of a professed scholar, but of a gentleman.”[928]

     [926] § 138.

     [927] § 189.

     [928] § 195.

60. The peculiar methods recommended by Locke in learning languages,
especially the Latin, appear to be of very doubtful utility, though
some of them do not want strenuous supporters in the present day. Such
are the method of interlinear translation, the learning of mere words
without grammar, and, above all, the practice of talking Latin with a
tutor who speaks it well--a phœnix whom he has not shown us where to
find.[929] In general, he seems to underrate the difficulty of
acquiring what even he would call a competent learning, and what is of
more importance, and no rare mistake in those who write on this
subject, to confound the acquisition of a language with the knowledge
of its literature. The best ancient writers both in Greek and Latin
furnish so much of wise reflection, of noble sentiment, of all that is
beautiful and salutary, that no one who has had the happiness to know
and feel what they are, will desire to see their study excluded or
stinted in its just extent, wherever the education of those who are to
be the first and best of the country is carried forward. And though by
far the greater portion of mankind must, by the very force of terms,
remain in the ranks of intellectual mediocrity, it is an ominous sign
of any times when no thought is taken for those who may rise beyond
it.

     [929] § 165.

61. In every other part of instruction, Locke has still an eye to what
is useful for a gentleman. French he justly thinks should be taught
before Latin; no geometry is required by him beyond Euclid, but he
recommends geography, history and chronology, drawing, and what may be
thought now as little necessary for a gentleman as Homer, the
jurisprudence of Grotius and Puffendorf. He strongly urges the writing
English well, though a thing commonly neglected, and after speaking
with contempt of the artificial systems of logic and rhetoric, sends
the pupil to Chillingworth for the best example of reasoning, and to
Tully for the best idea of eloquence. “And let him read those things
that are well writ in English to perfect his style in the purity of
our language.”[930]

     [930] § 188.

62. It would be to transcribe half this treatise, were we to mention
all the judicious and minute observations on the management of
children it contains. Whatever may have been Locke’s opportunities, he
certainly availed himself of them to the utmost. It is as far as
possible from a theoretical book; and in many respects the best of
modern times, such as those of the Edgeworth name, might pass for
developments of his principles. The patient attention to every
circumstance, a peculiar characteristic of the genius of Locke, is in
none of his works better displayed. His rules for the health of
children, though sometimes trivial, since the subject has been more
regarded, his excellent advice as to checking effeminacy and
timorousness, his observations on their curiosity, presumption,
idleness, on their plays and recreations, bespeak an intense, though
calm, love of truth and goodness; a quality which few have possessed
more fully, or known so well how to exert, as this admirable
philosopher.

|Fenelon on female education.|

63. No one had condescended to spare any thoughts for female
education, till Fenelon, in 1688, published his earliest work, Sur
l’Education des Filles. This was the occasion of his appointment as
preceptor to the grandchildren of Louis XIV.; for much of this
treatise, and perhaps the most valuable part, is equally applicable to
both sexes. It may be compared with that of Locke, written nearly at
the same time, and bearing a great resemblance in its spirit. Both
have the education of a polished and high-bred youth, rather than of
scholars, before them; and Fenelon rarely loses sight of his peculiar
object, or gives any rule which is not capable of being practised in
female education. In many respects he coincides with our English
philosopher, and observes with him that a child learns much before he
speaks, so that the cultivation of his moral qualities can hardly
begin too soon. Both complain of the severity of parents, and
deprecate the mode of bringing up by punishment. Both advise the
exhibition of virtue and religion in pleasing lights, and censure the
austere dogmatism with which they were inculcated, before the mind was
sufficiently developed to apprehend them. But the characteristic
sweetness of Fenelon’s disposition is often shown in contrast with the
somewhat stern inflexibility of Locke. His theory is uniformly
indulgent; his method of education is a labour of love; a desire to
render children happy for the time, as well as afterwards, runs
through his book, and he may perhaps be considered the founder of that
school which has endeavoured to dissipate the terrors and dry the
tears of childhood. “I have seen,” he says, “many children who have
learned to read in play; we have only to read entertaining stories to
them out of a book, and insensibly teach them the letters, they will
soon desire to go for themselves to the source of their amusement.”
“Books should be given them well bound and gilt, with good engravings,
clear types; for all that captivates the imagination facilitates
study; the choice should be such as contain short and marvellous
stories.” These details are now trivial, but in the days of Fenelon
they may have been otherwise.

64. In several passages he displays not only a judicious spirit, but
an observation that must have been long exercised. “Of all the
qualities we perceive in children,” he remarks, “there is only one
that can be trusted as likely to be durable, which is sound judgment;
it always grows with their growth, if it is well cultivated; but the
grace of childhood is effaced; its vivacity is extinguished; even its
sensibility is often lost, because their own passions and the
intercourse of others insensibly harden the hearts of young persons
who enter into the world.” It is therefore a solid and just way of
thinking which we should most value and most improve, and this not by
any means less in girls than in the other sex, since their duties and
the occupations they are called upon to fill do not less require it.
Hence he not only deprecates an excessive taste for dress, but, with
more originality, points out the danger of that extreme delicacy and
refinement which incapacitate women for the ordinary affairs of life,
and give them a contempt for a country life and rural economy.

65. It will be justly thought at present, that he discourages too much
the acquisition of knowledge by women. “Keep their minds,” he says in
one place, “as much as you can within the usual limits, and let them
understand that the modesty of their sex ought to shrink from science
with almost as much delicacy as from vice.” This seems, however, to be
confined to science or philosophy in a strict sense; for he permits
afterwards a larger compass of reading. Women should write a good
hand, understand orthography and the four rules of arithmetic, which
they will want in domestic affairs. To these he requires a close
attention, and even recommends to women an acquaintance with some of
the common forms and maxims of law. Greek, Roman, and French history,
with the best travels, will be valuable, and keep them from seeking
pernicious fictions. Books also of eloquence and poetry may be read
with selection, taking care to avoid any that relate to love; music
and painting may be taught with the same precaution. The Italian and
Spanish languages are of no use but to enlarge their knowledge of
dangerous books; Latin is better as the language of the church; but
this he would recommend only for girls of good sense and discreet
conduct, who will make no display of the acquisition.


                             SECT. II.

                     ON POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.

_Puffendorf--Spinosa--Harrington’s Oceana--Locke on Government--
Political Economy._

|Puffendorf’s theory of politics.|

66. In the seventh book of Puffendorf’s great work, he comes to
political philosophy, towards which he had been gradually tending for
some time; primary societies, or those of families, leading the way to
the consideration of civil government. Grotius derives the origin of
this from the natural sociableness of mankind. But this, as Puffendorf
remarks, may be satisfied by the primary societies. The real cause was
experience of the injuries which one man can inflict on another.[931]
And, after a prolix disquisition, he concludes that civil society must
have been constituted, first, by a covenant of a number of men, each
with each, to form a commonwealth, and to be bound by the majority, in
which primary covenant they must be unanimous, that is, every
dissentient would retain his natural liberty; next, by a resolution or
decree of the majority, that certain rulers shall govern the rest;
and, lastly, by a second covenant between these rulers and the rest,
one promising to take care of the public weal, and the other to obey
lawful commands.[932] This covenant, as he attempts to show, exists
even in a democracy, though it is less evident than in other forms.
Hobbes had admitted the first of these covenants, but denied the
second; Barbeyrac, the able commentator on Puffendorf, has done
exactly the reverse. A state once formed may be conceived to exist as
one person, with a single will, represented by that of the sovereign,
wherever the sovereignty may be placed. This sovereignty is founded on
the covenants, and is not conferred, except indirectly like every
other human power, by God. Puffendorf here combats the opposite
opinion, which churchmen were as prone to hold, it seems, in Germany
as in England.[933]

     [931] L. vii., c. 1.

     [932] C. 2.

     [933] C. 3.

67. The legislative, punitive, and judiciary powers, those of making
war and peace, of appointing magistrates, and levying taxes, are so
closely connected that no one can be denied to the sovereign. As to
his right in ecclesiastical matters, Puffendorf leaves it for others
to determine.[934] He seems in this part of the work too favourable to
unlimited monarchy, declaring himself against a mixed government. The
sovereign power must be irresponsible, and cannot be bound by the law
itself has given. He even denies that all government is intended for
the good of the governed--a position strangely inconsistent with his
theory of a covenant--but if it were, this end, the public good, may
be more probably discerned by the prince than by the people.[935] Yet
he admits that the exorbitancies of a prince should be restrained by
certain fundamental laws, and holds, that having accepted such, and
ratified them by oath, he is not at liberty to break them; arguing,
with some apparent inconsistency, against those who maintain such
limitations to be inconsistent with monarchy, and even recommending
the institution of councils, without whose consent certain acts of the
sovereign shall not be valid. This can only be reconciled with his
former declaration against a mixed sovereignty, by the distinction
familiar to our own constitutional lawyers, between the joint acts of
A and B, and the acts of A with B’s consent. But this is a little too
technical and unreal for philosophical politics.[936] Governments not
reducible to one of the three simple forms he calls irregular; such as
the Roman republic or German empire. But there may be systems of
states, or aggregate communities, either subject to one king by
different titles, or united by federation. He inclines to deny that
the majority can bind the minority in the latter case, and seems to
take it for granted that some of the confederates can quit the league
at pleasure.[937]

     [934] C. 4.

     [935] C. 6.

     [936] C. 6.

     [937] C. 5.

68. Sovereignty over persons cannot be acquired, strictly speaking, by
seizure or occupation, as in the case of lands, and requires, even
after conquest, their consent to obey; which will be given, in order
to secure themselves from the other rights of war. It is a problem
whether, after an unjust conquest, the forced consent of the people
can give a lawful title to sovereignty. Puffendorf distinguishes
between a monarchy and a republic thus unjustly subdued. In the former
case, so long as the lawful heirs exist or preserve their claim, the
duty of restitution continues. But in the latter, as the people may
live as happily under a monarchy as under a republic, he thinks that
an usurper has only to treat them well, without scruple as to his
title. If he oppresses them, no course of years will make his title
lawful, or bind them in conscience to obey, length of possession being
only length of injury. If a sovereign has been justly divested of his
power, the community becomes immediately free; but if by unjust
rebellion, his right continues till by silence he has appeared to
abandon it.[938]

     [938] C. 7.

69. Every one will agree that a lawful ruler must not be opposed
within the limits of his authority. But let us put the case that he
should command what is unlawful, or maltreat his subjects. Whatever
Hobbes may say, a subject may be injured by his sovereign. But
we should bear minor injuries patiently, and in the worst cases avoid
personal resistance. Those are not to be listened to who assert that a
king, degenerating into a tyrant, may be resisted and punished by his
people. He admits only a right of self-defence, if he manifestly
becomes a public enemy: in all this he seems to go quite as far as
Grotius himself. The next question is as to the right of invaders and
usurpers to obedience. This, it will be observed, he had already in
some measure discussed; but Puffendorf is neither strict in method,
nor free from repetitions. He labours much about the rights of the
lawful prince insisting upon them, where the subjects have promised
allegiance to the usurper. This, he thinks, must be deemed temporary,
until the legitimate sovereign has recovered his dominions. But what
may be done towards this end by such as have sworn fidelity to the
actual ruler, he does not intimate. It is one of the nicest problems
in political casuistry.[939]

     [939] C. 8.

70. Civil laws are such as emanate from the supreme power, with
respect to things left indifferent by the laws of God and nature. What
chiefly belongs to them is the form and method of acquiring rights or
obtaining redress for wrongs. If we give the law of nature all that
belongs to it, and take away from the civilians what they have
hitherto engrossed and promiscuously treated of, we shall bring the
civil law to a much narrower compass; not to say that at present
whenever the civil law is deficient we must have recourse to the law
of nature, and that therefore in all commonwealths the natural laws
supply the defects of the civil.[940] He argues against Hobbes’s tenet
that the civil law cannot be contrary to the law of nature; and that
what shall be deemed theft, murder, or adultery, depends on the
former. The subject is bound generally not to obey the unjust commands
of his sovereign; but in the case of war he thinks it, on the whole,
safest, considering the usual difficulties of such questions, that the
subject should serve, and throw the responsibility before God or the
prince.[941] In this problem of casuistry, common usage is wholly
against theory.

     [940] L. viii., c. 1.

     [941] L. viii., c. 1.

71. Punishment may be defined an evil inflicted by authority upon view
of antecedent transgression.[942] Hence, exclusion, on political
grounds, from public office, or separation of the sick for the sake of
the healthy, is not punishment. It does not belong to distributive
justice, nor is the magistrate bound to apportion it to the malignity
of the offence, though this is usual. Superior authority is necessary
to punishment; and he differs from Grotius by denying that we have a
right to avenge the injuries of those who have no claim upon us.
Punishment ought never to be inflicted without the prospect of some
advantage from it; either the correction of the offender, or the
prevention of his repeating the offence. But example he seems not to
think a direct end of punishment, though it should be regarded in its
infliction. It is not necessary that all offences which the law
denounces should be actually punished, though some jurists have
questioned the right of pardon. Punishments ought to be measured
according to the object of the crime, the injury to the commonwealth,
and the malice of the delinquent. Hence, offences against God should
be deemed most criminal, and next, such as disturb the state; then
whatever affect life, the peace or honour of families, private
property or reputation, following the scale of the Decalogue. But
though all crimes do not require equal severity, an exact proportion
of penalties is not required. Most of this chapter exhibits the
vacillating, indistinct, and almost self-contradictory resolutions of
difficulties so frequent in Puffendorf. He concludes by establishing a
great truth, that no man can be justly punished for the offence of
another; nor even a community for the acts of their forefathers,
notwithstanding their fictitious immortality.[943]

     [942] C. 3.

     [943] C. 3.

72. After some chapters on the law of nations, Puffendorf concludes
with discussing the cessation of subjection. This may ordinarily be by
voluntarily removing to another state with permission of the
sovereign. And if no law or custom interferes, the subject has a right
to do this at his discretion. The state has not a right to expel
citizens without some offence. It loses all authority over a banished
man. He concludes by considering the rare case of so great a
diminution of the people, as to raise a doubt of their political
identity.[944]

     [944] C. 11. 12.

|Politics of Spinosa.|

73. The political portion of this large work, is not, as will appear,
very fertile in original or sagacious reflection. A greater degree of
both, though by no means accompanied with a sound theory,
distinguishes the Political Treatise of Spinosa, one which must not be
confounded with the Theologico-political Treatise, a very different
work. In this he undertakes to show how a state under a regal
or aristocratic government ought to be constituted so as to secure the
tranquility and freedom of the citizens. Whether Spinosa borrowed his
theory on the origin of government from Hobbes, is perhaps hard to
determine: he seems acquainted with the treatise, De Cive; but the
philosophical system of both was such as, in minds habituated like
theirs to close reasoning, could not lead to any other result.
Political theory, as Spinosa justly observes, is to be founded on our
experience of human kind as it is, and on no visionary notions of an
Utopia or golden age; and hence politicians of practical knowledge
have written better on these subjects than philosophers. We must treat
of men as liable to passions, prone more to revenge than to pity,
eager to rule and to compel others to act like themselves, more
pleased with having done harm to others than with procuring their own
good. Hence, no state wherein the public affairs are entrusted to
anyone’s good faith can be secure of their due administration; but
means should be devised that neither reason nor passion should induce
those who govern, to obstruct the public weal; it being indifferent by
what motive men act if they can be brought to act for the common good.

74. Natural law is the same as natural power; it is that which the
laws of nature, that is the order of the world, give to each
individual. Nothing is forbidden by this law, except what no one
desires, or what no one can perform. Thus, no one is bound to keep the
faith he has plighted any longer than he will, and than he judges it
useful to himself; for he has not lost the power of breaking it, and
power is right in natural law. But he may easily perceive that the
power of one man in a state of nature is limited by that of all the
rest, and in effect is reduced to nothing; all men being naturally
enemies to each other; while, on the other hand, by uniting their
force, and establishing bounds by common consent to the natural powers
of each, it becomes really more effective than while it was unlimited.
This is the principle of civil government; and now the distinctions of
just and unjust, right and wrong, begin to appear.

75. The right of the supreme magistrate is nothing but the collective
rights of the citizens; that is, their powers. Neither he nor they in
their natural state can do wrong; but after the institution of
government, each citizen may do wrong by disobeying the magistrate;
that, in fact, being the test of wrong. He has not to inquire whether
the commands of the supreme power are just or unjust, pious or
impious; that is, as to action, for the state has no jurisdiction over
his judgment.

76. Two independent states are naturally enemies, and may make war on
each other whenever they please. If they make peace or alliance, it is
no longer binding than the cause, that is, hope or fear in the
contracting parties, shall endure. All this is founded on the
universal law of nature, the desire of preserving ourselves; which,
whether men are conscious of it or no, animates all their actions.
Spinosa in this, as in his other writings, is more fearless than
Hobbes, and though he sometimes may throw a light veil over his
abjuration of moral and religious principle, it is frequently placed
in a more prominent view than his English precursor in the same system
had deemed it secure to advance. Yet so slight is often the connection
between theoretical tenets and human practice, that Spinosa bore the
character of a virtuous and benevolent man. We do not know, indeed,
how far he was placed in circumstances to put his fidelity to the
test. In this treatise of politics, especially in the broad assertion
that good faith is only to be preserved so long as it is advantageous,
he leaves Machiavel and Hobbes at some distance, and may be reckoned
the most phlegmatically impudent of the whole school.

77. The contract or fundamental laws, he proceeds, according to which
the multitude transfers its right to a king or a senate, may
unquestionably be broken, when it is advantageous to the whole to do
so. But Spinosa denies to private citizens the right of judging
concerning the public good in such a point, reserving, apparently, to
the supreme magistrate an ultimate power of breaking the conditions
upon which he was chosen. Notwithstanding this dangerous admission, he
strongly protests against intrusting absolute power to any one man;
and observes, in answer to the common argument of the stability of
despotism, as in the instance of the Turkish monarchy, that if
barbarism, slavery, and desolation are to be called peace, nothing can
be more wretched than peace itself. Nor is this sole power of one man
a thing so possible as we imagine; the kings who seem most despotic
trusting the public safety and their own to counsellors and
favourites, often the worst and weakest in the state.

|His theory of a monarchy.|

78. He next proceeds to his scheme of a well regulated monarchy, which
is in some measure original and ingenious. The people are to be
divided into families, by which he seems to mean something like the
φρατριαι [phratriai] of Attica. From each of these, counsellors, fifty
years of age, are to be chosen by the king, succeeding in a rotation
quinquennial, or less, so as to form a numerous senate. This assembly
is to be consulted upon all public affairs, and the king is to be
guided by its unanimous opinion. In case, however, of disagreement,
the different propositions being laid before the king, he may choose
that of the minority, provided at least one hundred counsellors have
recommended it. The less remarkable provisions of this ideal polity it
would be waste of time to mention; except that he advises that all the
citizens should be armed as a militia, and that the principal towns
should be fortified, and, consequently, as it seems, in their power. A
monarchy thus constituted would probably not degenerate into the
despotic form. Spinosa appeals to the ancient government of Aragon, as
a proof of the possibility of carrying his theory into execution.

79. From this imaginary monarchy he comes to an aristocratical
republic. In this he seems to have taken Venice, the idol of
theoretical politicians, as his primary model, but with such
deviations as affect the whole scheme of government. He objects to the
supremacy of an elective doge, justly observing that the precautions
adopted in the election of that magistrate show the danger of the
office itself, which was rather retained in the aristocratical polity
as an ancient institution than from any persuasion of its usefulness.
But the most remarkable discrepancy between the aristocracy of Spinosa
and that of Venice is that his great council, which ought, as he
strongly urges, not to consist of less than 5,000, the greatness of
its number being the only safeguard against the close oligarchy of a
few families, is not to be hereditary, but its vacancies to be filled
up by self-election. In this election, indeed, he considers the
essence of aristocracy to consist, being, as is implied in its
meaning, a government by the best, who can only be pronounced such by
the choice of many. It is singular that he never adverts to popular
representation, of which he must have known examples. Democracy, on
the contrary, he defines to be a government where political power
falls to men by chance of birth, or by some means which has rendered
them citizens, and who can claim it as their right without regard to
the choice of others. And a democracy, according to Spinosa, may
exist, if the law should limit this privilege of power to the seniors
in age, or to the elder branches of families, or to those who pay a
certain amount in taxation; although the numbers enjoying it should be
a smaller portion of the community than in an aristocracy of the form
he has recommended. His treatise breaks off near the beginning of the
chapters intended to delineate the best model of democracy, which he
declares to be one wherein all persons, in their own power, and not
infamous by crime, should have a share in the public government. I do
not know that it can be inferred from the writings of Spinosa, nor is
his authority, perhaps, sufficient to render the question of any
interest, to which of the three plans devised by him, as the best in
their respective forms, he would have ascribed the preference.

|Amelot de la Houssaye.|

80. The condition of France under Louis XIV. was not very tempting to
speculators on political theory. Whatever short remarks may be found
in those excellent writers on other subjects who distinguish this
period, we can select no one book that falls readily into this class.
For Telemaque we must find another place. It is scarcely worth while
to mention the political discourses on Tacitus, by Amelot de la
Houssaye. These are a tedious and pedantic running commentary on
Tacitus, affecting to deduce general principles, but much unlike the
short and poignant observations of Machiavel and Bacon. A whole volume
on the reign alone of Tiberius, and printed at Paris, is not likely to
repay a reader’s trouble; at least, I have found nothing in it above
the common level. I have no acquaintance with the other political
writings of Amelot de la Houssaye, one of those who thought they could
make great discoveries by analysing the constitution of Venice and
other states.

|Harrington’s Oceana.|

81. England, thrown at the commencement of this period upon the
resources of her own invention to replace an ancient monarchy by
something new, and rich at that time in reflecting as well as learned
men, with an unshackled press, and a growing disdain of authority as
opposed to argument, was the natural soil of political theory. The
earliest fruit was Sir James Harrington’s Oceana, published in 1656.
This once famous book is a political allegory, partly suggested,
perhaps, by the Dodona’s Grove of Howell, or by Barclay’s Argenis, and
a few other fictions of the preceding age. His Oceana represents
England, the history of which is shadowed out with fictitious
names. But this is preliminary to the great object, the scheme of a
new commonwealth, which, under the auspices of Olphaus Megaletor, the
lord Archon, meaning, of course, Cromwell, not as he was, but as he
ought to have been, the author feigns to have been established. The
various laws and constitutions of this polity occupy the whole work.

82. The leading principle of Harrington is that power depends on
property; denying the common saying, that knowledge or prudence is
power. But this property must be in land, “because, as to property
producing empire, it is required that it should have some certain root
or foot-hold, which, except in land, it cannot have, being otherwise,
as it were, upon the wing. Nevertheless, in such cities as subsist
mostly by trade, and have little or no land, as Holland and Genoa, the
balance of treasure may be equal to that of land.”[945] The law fixing
the balance of lands is called by him agrarian, and without an
agrarian law, he holds that no government, whether monarchical,
aristocratic, or popular, has any long duration; this is rather
paradoxical; but his distribution of lands varies according to the
form of the commonwealth. In one best constituted the possession of
lands is limited to £2,000 a year; which, of course, in his time, was
a much greater estate than at present.

     [945] P. 38, edit. 1771.

83. Harrington’s general scheme of a good government is one
“established upon an equal agrarian arising into the superstructure,
or three orders, the senate debating and proposing, the people
resolving, and the magistracy executing by an equal rotation through
the suffrage of the people given by the ballot.” His more particular
form of polity, devised for his Oceana, it would be tedious to give in
detail: the result is a moderate aristocracy; property, though under
the control of his agrarian, which prevents its excess, having so
great a share in the elections that it must predominate. But it is an
aristocracy of what we should call the middle ranks, and might not be
unfit for a small state. In general, it may be said of Harrington,
that he is prolix, dull, pedantic, yet seldom profound; but sometimes
redeems himself by just observations. Like most theoretical
politicians of that age he had an excessive admiration for the
republic of Venice.[946] His other political writings are in the same
spirit as the Oceana, but still less interesting.

     [946] “If I be worthy to give advice to a man that would study
     politics, let him understand Venice; he that understands Venice
     right, shall go nearest to judge, notwithstanding the difference
     that is in every policy, right of any government in the world.”
     Harrington’s Works, p. 292.

|Patriarcha of Filmer.|

84. The manly republicanism of Harrington, though sometimes visionary
and, perhaps, impracticable, shines by comparison with a very opposite
theory, which, having been countenanced in the early part of the
century by our clergy, revived with additional favour after the
Restoration. This was maintained in the Patriarcha of Sir Robert
Filmer, written, as it appears, in the reign of Charles I., but not
published till 1680, at a time when very high notions of royal
prerogative were as well received by one faction as they were
indignantly rejected by another. The object, as the author declares,
was to prove that the first kings were fathers of families; that it is
unnatural for the people to govern or to choose governors; that
positive laws do not infringe the natural and fatherly power of kings.
He refers the tenet of natural liberty and the popular origin of
government to the schoolmen, allowing that all papists and the
reformed divines have imbibed it, but denying that it is found in the
fathers. He seems, indeed, to claim the credit of an original
hypothesis; those who have vindicated the rights of kings in most
points not having thought of this, but with one consent admitted the
natural liberty and equality of mankind. It is certain, nevertheless,
that the patriarchal theory of government as the basis of actual right
was laid down as explicitly as by himself in what is called Bishop
Overall’s Convocation Book, at the beginning of the reign of James I.
But this book had not been published when Filmer wrote. His arguments
are singularly insufficient; he quotes nothing but a few irrelevant
texts from Genesis; he seems not to have known at all the strength,
whatever it may be, of his own case, and it is hardly possible to find
a more trifling and feeble work. It had, however, the advantage of
opportunity to be received by a party with approbation.

|Sydney’s Discourses on Government.|

85. Algernon Sydney was the first who devoted his time to a refutation
of this patriarchal theory, propounded as it was, not as a plausible
hypothesis to explain the origin of civil communities, but as a
paramount title, by virtue of which all actual sovereigns, who were
not manifest usurpers, were to reign with an unmitigated despotism.
Sydney’s Discourses on Government, not published till 1698, are a
diffuse reply to Filmer. They contain, indeed, many chapters full of
historical learning and judicious reflection; yet the constant anxiety
to refute that which needs no refutation renders them a little
tedious. Sydney does not condemn a limited monarchy like the English,
but his partiality is for a form of republic which would be deemed too
aristocratical for our popular theories.

|Locke on Government.|

86. Locke, immediately after the revolution, attacked the Patriarcha
with more brevity, and laid down his own celebrated theory of
government. The fundamental principle of Filmer is, that paternal
authority is naturally absolute. Adam received it from God, exercised
it over his own children, and transmitted it to the eldest born for
ever. This assumption Locke combats rather too diffusely, according to
our notions. Filmer had not only to show this absolute monarchy of a
lineal ancestor, but his power of transmitting it in course of
primogeniture. Locke denies that there is any natural right of this
kind, maintaining the equality of children. The incapacity of Filmer
renders his discomfiture not difficult. Locke, as will be seen,
acknowledges a certain _de facto_ authority in fathers of families,
and, possibly, he might have found, as, indeed, he seems to admit,
considerable traces of a regard to primogeniture in the early ages of
the world. It is the question of natural right with which he is here
concerned; and, as no proof of this had been offered, he had nothing
to answer.

87. In the second part of Locke’s Treatise on Civil Government, he
proceeds to lay down what he holds to be the true principles upon
which society is founded. A state of nature is a state of perfect
freedom and equality; but within the bounds of the law of nature,
which obliges every one, and renders a state of liberty no state of
licence. And the execution of this law, in such a state, is put into
everyone’s hands, so that he may punish transgressors against it, not
merely by way of reparation for his own wrongs, but for those of
others. “Every offence that can be committed in the state of nature
may, in the state of nature, be punished equally, and as far forth, as
it may in a commonwealth.” And not only independent communities, but
all men, as he thinks, till they voluntarily enter into some society,
are in a state of nature.[947]

     [947] L. ii., c. 2.

88. Whoever declares by word or action a settled design against
another’s life, puts himself in a state of war against him, and
exposes his own life to be taken away, either by the other party, or
by anyone who shall espouse his cause. And he who endeavours to obtain
absolute power over another, may be construed to have a design on his
life, or at least to take away his property. Where laws prevail, they
must determine the punishment of those who injure others; but if the
law is silenced, it is hard to think but that the appeal to Heaven
returns, and the aggressor may be treated as one in a state of
war.[948]

     [948] C. 3.

89. Natural liberty is freedom from any superior power except the law
of nature. Civil liberty is freedom from the dominion of any authority
except that which a legislature, established by consent of the
commonwealth, shall confirm. No man, according to Locke, can by his
own consent enslave himself, or give power to another to take away his
life. For slavery, in a strict sense, is but a continuance of the
state of war between a conqueror and his captive.[949]

     [949] C. 4.

90. The excellent chapter on property which follows would be
sufficient, if all Locke’s other writings had perished, to leave him a
high name in philosophy. Nothing can be more luminous than his
deduction of the natural right of property from labour, not merely in
gathering the fruits of the earth, or catching wild animals, but in
the cultivation of land, for which occupancy is but the preliminary,
and gives as it were an inchoate title. “As much land as a man tills,
plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is
his property. He by his labour does, as it were, inclose it from the
common.” Whatever is beyond the scanty limits of individual or family
labour, has been appropriated under the authority of civil society.
But labour is the primary basis of natural right. Nor can it be
thought unreasonable that labour should confer an exclusive right,
when it is remembered how much of everything’s value depends upon
labour alone. “Whatever bread is more worth than acorns, wine than
water, and cloth or silk than leaves, skins, or moss, that is wholly
owing to labour and industry.” The superiority in good sense and
satisfactory elucidation of his principle, which Locke has manifested
in this important chapter over Grotius and Puffendorf, will strike
those who consult those writers, or look at the brief sketch of their
theories in the foregoing pages. It is no less contrasted with the
puerile rant of Rousseau against all territorial property. That
property owes its origin to occupancy accompanied with labour, is now
generally admitted; the care of cattle being of course to be
considered as one species of labour, and requiring at least a
temporary ownership of the soil.[950]

     [950] C. 5.

91. Locke, after acutely remarking that the common arguments for the
power of a father over his children would extend equally to the
mother, so that it should be called parental power, reverts to the
train of reasoning in the first book of this treatise against the
regal authority of fathers. What they possess is not derived from
generation, but from the care they necessarily take of the infant
child, and during his minority; the power then terminates, though
reverence, support, and even compliance are still due. Children are
also held in subordination to their parents by the institutions of
property, which commonly make them dependent both as to maintenance
and succession. But Locke, which is worthy to be remarked, inclines to
derive the origin of civil government from the patriarchal authority;
one not strictly coercive, yet voluntarily conceded by habit and
family consent. “Thus the natural fathers of families, by an
insensible change, became the politic monarchs of them too; and as
they chanced to live long, and leave worthy and able heirs for several
successions or otherwise, so they laid the foundations of hereditary
or elective kingdoms.”[951]

     [951] C. 6.

92. The necessity that man should not live alone, produced the primary
society of husband and wife, parent and children, to which that of
master and servant was early added; whether of freemen engaging their
service for hire, or of slaves taken in just war, who are by the right
of nature subject to the absolute dominion of the captor. Such a
family may sometimes resemble a little commonwealth by its numbers,
but is essentially distinct from one, because its chief has no
imperial power of life and death except over his slaves, nature having
given him none over his children, though all men have a right to
punish breaches of the law of nature in others according to the
offence. But this natural power they quit and resign into the hands of
the community, when civil society is instituted; and it is in this
union of the several rights of its members that the legislative right
of the commonwealth consists, whether this be done by general consent
at the first formation of government, or by the adhesion which any
individual may give to one already established. By either of these
ways men pass from a state of nature to one of political society, the
magistrate having now that power to redress injuries, which had
previously been each man’s right. Hence, absolute monarchy, in Locke’s
opinion, is no form of civil government; for there being no common
authority to appeal to, the sovereign is still in a state of nature
with regard to his subjects.[952]

93. A community is formed by the unanimous consent of any body of men;
but when thus become one body, the determination of the majority must
bind the rest, else it would not be one. Unanimity, after a community
is once formed, can no longer be required; but this consent of men to
form a civil society is that which alone did or could give beginning
to any lawful government in the world. It is idle to object that we
have no records of such an event; for few commonwealths preserve the
tradition of their own infancy; and whatever we do know of the origin
of particular states gives indications of this mode of union. Yet he
again inclines to deduce the usual origin of civil societies from
imitation of patriarchal authority, which having been recognised by
each family in the arbitration of disputes and even punishment of
offences, was transferred with more readiness to some one person, as
the father and representative head of the infant community. He even
admits that this authority might tacitly devolve upon the eldest son.
Thus the first governments were monarchies, and those with no express
limitations of power, till exposure of its abuse gave occasion to
social laws, or to co-ordinate authority. In all this he follows
Hooker, from the first book of whose Ecclesiastical Polity he quotes
largely in his notes.[953]

     [952] C. 7.

     [953] C. 8.

94. A difficulty commonly raised against the theory of compact is,
that all men being born under some government, they cannot be at
liberty to erect a new one, or even to make choice whether they will
obey or no. This objection Locke does not meet, like Hooker and the
jurists, by supposing the agreement of a distant ancestor to oblige
all his posterity. But explicitly acknowledging that nothing can bind
freemen to obey any government save their own consent, he rests the
evidence of a tacit consent, on the enjoyment of land, or even on mere
residence within the dominions of the community; every man
being at liberty to relinquish his possessions, or change his
residence, and either incorporate himself with another commonwealth,
or, if he can find an opportunity, set up for himself in some
unoccupied part of the world. But nothing can make a man irrevocably a
member of one society, except his own voluntary declaration; such
perhaps as the oath of allegiance, which Locke does not mention, ought
to be reckoned.[954]

     [954] C. 8.

95. The majority having, in the first constitution of a state, the
whole power, may retain it themselves, or delegate it to one or more
persons.[955] And the supreme power is, in other words, the
legislature sacred and unalterable in the hands where the community
have once placed it, without which no law can exist, and in which all
obedience terminates. Yet this legislative authority itself is not
absolute or arbitrary over the lives and fortunes of its subjects. It
is the joint power of individuals surrendered to the state; but no man
has power over his own life or his neighbour’s property. The laws
enacted by the legislature must be conformable to the will of God, or
natural justice. Nor can it take any part of the subject’s property
without his own consent, or that of the majority. “For if any one
shall claim a power to lay and levy taxes on the people by his own
authority, and without such consent of the people, he thereby invades
the fundamental law of property, and subverts the end of government.
For what property have I in that which another may by right take, when
he pleases, to himself?” Lastly, the legislative power is inalienable;
being but delegated from the people, it cannot be transferred to
others.[956] This is the part of Locke’s treatise which has been open
to most objection, and which in some measure seems to charge with
usurpation all the established governments of Europe. It has been a
theory fertile of great revolutions, and perhaps pregnant with more.
In some part of this chapter also, though by no means in the most
practical corollaries, the language of Hooker has led onward his more
hardy disciple.

     [955] C. 10.

     [956] C. 11.

96. Though the legislative power is alone supreme in the constitution,
it is yet subject to the people themselves, who may alter it whenever
they find that it acts against the trust reposed in it; all power
given in trust for a particular end being evidently forfeited when
that end is manifestly disregarded or obstructed. But while the
government subsists the legislature is alone sovereign, though it may
be the usage to call a single executive magistrate sovereign, if he
has also a share in legislation. Where this is not the case, the
appellation is plainly improper. Locke has in this chapter a
remarkable passage, one perhaps of the first declarations in favour of
a change in the electoral system of England. “To what gross
absurdities the following of custom, when reason has left it, may
lead, we may be satisfied when we see the bare name of a town, of
which there remains not so much as the ruins, where scarce so much
housing as a sheep-cot, or more inhabitants than a shepherd is to be
found, send as many representatives to the grand assembly of
law-makers as a whole county, numerous in people and powerful in
riches. This strangers stand amazed at, and every one must confess
needs a remedy, though most think it hard to find one, because the
constitution of the legislative being the original and supreme act of
the society, antecedent to all positive laws in it, and depending
wholly on the people, no inferior power can alter it.” But Locke is
less timid about a remedy, and suggests that the executive magistrate
might regulate the number of representatives, not according to old
custom but reason, which is not setting up a new legislature, but
restoring an old one. “Whatsoever, shall be done manifestly for the
good of the people and the establishing the government on its true
foundation, is, and always will be, just prerogative;”[957] a maxim of
too dangerous latitude for a constitutional monarchy.

     [957] C. 13.

97. Prerogative he defines to be “a power of acting according to
discretion for the public good without the prescription of the law,
and sometimes even against it.” This however is not by any means a
good definition in the eyes of a lawyer; and the word, being merely
technical, ought not to have been employed in so partial if not so
incorrect a sense. Nor is it very precise to say, that in England the
prerogative was always largest in the hands of our wisest and best
princes, not only because the fact is otherwise, but because he
confounds the legal prerogative with its actual exercise. This chapter
is the most loosely reasoned of any in the treatise.[958]

     [958] C. 14.

98. Conquest, in an unjust war, can give no right at all, unless
robbers and pirates may acquire a right. Nor is anyone bound by
promises which unjust force extorts from him. If we are not strong
enough to resist, we have no remedy save patience; but our children
may appeal to Heaven, and repeat their appeals till they recover their
ancestral rights, which was to be governed by such a legislation as
themselves approve. He that appeals to Heaven must be sure that he has
right on his side, and right too that is worth the trouble and cost of
his appeal, as he will answer at a tribunal that cannot be deceived.
Even just conquest gives no further right than to reparation of
injury; and the posterity of the vanquished, he seems to hold, can
forfeit nothing by their parent’s offence, so that they have always a
right to throw off the yoke. The title of prescription, which has
commonly been admitted to silence the complaints, if not to heal the
wounds, of the injured, finds no favour with Locke.[959] And hence, it
seems that no state composed, as most have been, out of the spoils of
conquest, can exercise a legitimate authority over the latest
posterity of those it has incorporated. Wales, for instance, has an
eternal right to shake off the yoke of England; for what Locke says of
consent to laws by representatives, is of little weight when these
must be out-numbered in the general legislature of both countries; and
indeed the first question for the Cambro-Britons would be to determine
whether they would form part of such a common legislation.

     [959] C. 16.

99. Usurpation, which is a kind of domestic conquest, gives no more
right to obedience than unjust war; it is necessary that the people
should both be at liberty to consent, and have actually consented to
allow and confirm a power which the constitution of their commonwealth
does not recognise.[960] But tyranny may exist without usurpation,
whenever the power reposed in anyone’s hands for the people’s benefit
is abused to their impoverishment or slavery. Force may never be
opposed but to unjust and unlawful force; in any other case, it is
condemned before God and man. The king’s person is in some countries
sacred by law; but this, as Locke thinks, does not extend to the case
where, by putting himself in a state of war with his people, he
dissolves the government.[961] A prince dissolves the government by
ruling against law, by hindering the regular assembly of the
legislature, by changing the form of election, or by rendering the
people subject to a foreign power. He dissolves it also by neglecting
or abandoning it, so that the laws cannot be put into execution. The
government is also dissolved by breach of trust in either the
legislature or the prince; by the former when it usurps an arbitrary
power over the lives, liberties, and fortunes of the subject; by the
latter, when he endeavours to corrupt the representatives or to
influence the choice of the electors. If it be objected that no
government will be able long to subsist, if the people may set up a
new legislature whenever they take offence at the old one, he replies
that mankind are too slow and averse to quit their old institutions
for this danger to be apprehended. Much will be endured from rulers
without mutiny or murmur. Nor is anything more likely to restrain
governments than this doctrine of the right of resistance. It is as
reasonable to tell men they should not defend themselves against
robbers, because it may occasion disorder, as to use the same argument
for passive obedience to illegal dominion. And he observes, after
quoting some other writers, that Hooker alone might be enough to
satisfy those who rely on him for their ecclesiastical polity.[962]

     [960] C. 17.

     [961] C. 18.

     [962] C. 19.

|Observations on this Treatise.|

100. Such is, in substance, the celebrated treatise of Locke on civil
government, which, with the favour of political circumstances, and the
authority of his name, became the creed of a numerous party at home;
while silently spreading the fibres from its root over Europe and
America, it prepared the way for theories of political society, hardly
bolder in their announcement, but expressed with more passionate
ardour, from which the great revolutions of the last and present age
have sprung. But as we do not launch our bark upon a stormy sea, we
shall merely observe that neither the Revolution of 1688, nor the
administration of William III., could have borne the test by which
Locke has tried the legitimacy of government. There was certainly no
appeal to the people in the former, nor would it have been convenient
for the latter to have had the maxim established, that an attempt to
corrupt the legislature entails a forfeiture of the entrusted power.
Whether the opinion of Locke, that mankind are slow to political
change, be conformable to an enlarged experience, must be judged by
everyone according to his reading and observation; it is, at least,
very different from that which Hooker, to whom he defers so greatly in
most of his doctrine, has uttered in the very first sentence of his
Ecclesiastical Polity. For my own part, I must confess, that in these
latter chapters of Locke on Government I see, what sometimes
appears in his other writings, that the influence of temporary
circumstances on a mind a little too susceptible of passion and
resentment, had prevented that calm and patient examination of all the
bearings of this extensive subject which true philosophy requires.

101. But whatever may be our judgment of this work, it is equally true
that it opened a new era of political opinion in Europe. The earlier
writings on the side of popular sovereignty, whether those of Buchanan
and Languet, of the Jesuits, or of the English republicans, had been
either too closely dependent on temporary circumstances, or too much
bound up with odious and unsuccessful factions, to sink very deep into
the hearts of mankind. Their adversaries, with the countenance of
every government on their side, kept possession of the field; and
neither jurist, nor theologian, nor philosopher on the Continent,
while they generally followed their predecessors in deriving the
origin of civil society from compact, ventured to meet the delicate
problem of resistance to tyranny, or of the right to reform a
constitution, except in the most cautious and indefinite language. We
have seen this already in Grotius and Puffendorf. But the success of
the English Revolution; the necessity which the powers allied against
France found of maintaining the title of William; the peculiar
interest of Holland and Hanover, states at that time very strong in
the literary world, in our new scheme of government, gave a weight and
authority to principles which, without some such application, it might
still have been thought seditious to propound. Locke too, long an
exile in Holland, was intimate with Le Clerc, who exerted a
considerable influence over the protestant part of Europe. Barbeyrac,
some time afterwards, trod nearly in the same steps, and without going
all the lengths of Locke, did not fail to take a very different tone
from the two older writers, upon whom he has commented.

|Avis aux Refugiéz, perhaps by Bayle.

102. It was very natural that the French protestants, among whom
traditions of a turn of thinking not the most favourable to kings may
have been preserved, should, in the hour of severe persecution, mutiny
in words and writings against the despotism that oppressed them. Such,
it appears, had been the language of those exiles, as it is of all
exiles, when an anonymous tract, entitled Avis aux Refugiéz, was
published with the date of Amsterdam in 1690. This, under pretext of
giving advice, in the event of their being permitted to return home,
that they should get rid of their spirit of satire, and of their
republican theories, is a bitter and able attack on those who had
taken refuge in Holland. It asserts the principle of passive
obedience, extolling also the king of France and his government, and
censuring the English Revolution. Public rumour ascribed this to
Bayle; it has usually passed for his, and is even inserted in the
collection of his miscellaneous works. Some, however, have ascribed it
to Pelisson, and others to Larroque; one already, and the other soon
after, proselytes to the church of Rome. Basnage thought it written by
the latter, and published by Bayle, to whom he ascribed the preface.
This is, apparently, in a totally opposite strain, but not without
strong suspicion of irony or ill faith. The style and manner
throughout appear to suggest Bayle; and though the supposition is very
discreditable to his memory, the weight of presumption seems much to
incline that way.

|Political economists.|

103. The separation of political economy from the general science,
which regards the well-being of communities, was not so strictly made
by the earlier philosophers as in modern times. It does not follow
that national wealth engaged none of their attention. Few, on the
contrary, of those who have taken comprehensive views, could have
failed to regard it. In Bodin, Botero, Bacon, Hobbes, Puffendorf,
Locke, we have already seen proofs of this. These may be said to have
discussed the subject, not systematically, nor always with thorough
knowledge, but with acuteness and in a philosophical tone. Others
there were of a more limited range, whose habits of life and
experience led them to particular departments of economical inquiry,
especially as to commerce, the precious metals, and the laws affecting
them. The Italians led the way; Serra has been mentioned in our last
volume, and a few more might find a place in this. De Witt’s Interest
of Holland can hardly be reckoned among economical writings; and it is
said by Morhof, that the Dutch were not fond of promulgating their
commercial knowledge;[963] little, at least, was contributed from that
country, even at a later period, towards the theory of becoming rich.
But England now took a large share in this new literature. Free,
inquisitive, thriving rapidly in commerce, so that her progress even
in the nineteenth century has hardly been in a greater ratio than
before, and after the middle of the seventeenth, if we may trust the
statements of contemporaries, she produced some writers who, though
few of them merit the name of philosophers, may not yet here be
overlooked, on account of their influence, their reputation, or their
position as links in the chain of science.

     [963] Polyhistor, part iii., lib. iii., § 3.

|Mun on Foreign Trade.|

|Child on Trade.|

104. The first of these was Thomas Mun, an intelligent merchant in the
earlier part of the century, whose posthumous treatise, England’s
Treasure by Foreign Trade, was published in 1664, but seems to have
been written soon after the accession of Charles I.[964] Mun is
generally reckoned the founder of what has been called the mercantile
system. His main position is that “the ordinary means to increase our
wealth and treasure is by foreign trade, wherein we must ever observe
this rule to sell more to strangers yearly than we consume of theirs
in value.”[965] We must therefore sell as cheap as possible; it was by
underselling the Venetians of late years, that we had exported a great
deal of cloth to Turkey.[966] It is singular that Mun should not have
perceived the difficulty of selling very cheap the productions of a
country’s labour, whose gold and silver were in great abundance. He
was, however, too good a merchant not to acknowledge the inefficacy
and impolicy of restraining by law the exportation of coin, which is
often a means of increasing our treasure in the long run; advising
instead a due regard to the balance of trade, or general surplus of
exported goods, by which we shall infallibly obtain a stock of gold
and silver. These notions have long since been covered with ridicule;
and it is plain that, in a merely economical view, they must always be
delusive. Mun, however, looked to the accumulation of a portion of
this imported treasure by the state; a resource in critical
emergencies which we have now learned to despise, since others have
been at hand, but which, in reality, had made a great difference in
the events of war, and changed the balance of power between many
commonwealths. Mun was followed, about 1670, by Sir Josiah Child, in a
discourse on Trade, written on the same principles of the mercantile
system, but more copious and varied. The chief aim of Child is to
effect a reduction of the legal interest of money, from six to four
per cent., drawing an erroneous inference from the increase of wealth
which had followed similar enactments.

     [964] Mr. Maculloch says (Introductory Discourse to Smith’s
     Wealth of Nations), it had most probably been written about 1635
     or 1640. I remarked some things which serve to carry it up a
     little higher.

     [965] P. 11 (edit. 1664).

     [966] P. 18.

|Locke on the Coin.|

105. Among the many difficulties with which the government of
William III. had to contend, one of the most embarrassing was the
scarcity of the precious metals and depreciated condition of the coin.
This opened the whole field of controversy in that province of
political economy; and the bold spirit of inquiry, unshackled by
prejudice in favour of ancient custom, which, in all respects, was
characteristic of that age, began to work by reasonings on general
theorems, instead of collecting insulated and inconclusive details.
Locke stood forward on this, as on so many subjects, with his
masculine sense and habitual closeness of thinking. His
“Considerations of the Consequences of lowering Interest, and raising
the Value of Money” were published in 1691. Two further treatises are
in answer to the pamphlets of Lowndes. These economical writings of
Locke are not in all points conformable to the modern principles of
the science. He seems to incline rather too much towards the
mercantile theory, and to lay too much stress on the possession of the
precious metals. From his excellent sense, however, as well as from
some expressions, I should conceive that he only considers them, as
they doubtless are, a portion of the exchangeable wealth of the
nation, and by their inconsumable nature, as well as by the constancy
of the demand for them, one of the most important. “Riches do not
consist,” he says, “in having more gold and silver, but in having more
in proportion than the rest of the world or than our neighbours,
whereby we are enabled to procure to ourselves a greater plenty of the
conveniences of life.”

106. Locke had the sagacity to perceive the impossibility of
regulating the interest of money by law. It was an empirical
proposition at that time, as we have just seen in Sir Josiah Child, to
render loans more easy to the borrower by reducing the legal rate to
four per cent. The whole drift of his reasoning is against any
limitation, though, from fear of appearing too paradoxical, he does
not arrive at that inference. For the reasons he gives in favour of a
legal limit of interest, namely, that courts of law may have some rule
where nothing is stipulated in the contract, and that a few
money-lenders in the metropolis may not have the monopoly of all loans
in England, are, especially the first, so trifling, that he could not
have relied upon them; and, indeed, he admits that, in other
circumstances, there would be no danger from the second. But his
prudence having restrained him from speaking out, a famous writer,
almost a century afterwards, came forward to assert a paradox, which
he loved the better for seeming such, and, finally, to convince the
thinking part of mankind.

107. Laws fixing the value of silver Locke perceived to be nugatory,
and is averse to prohibit its exportation. The value of money, he
maintains, does not depend on the rate of interest, but on its plenty
relatively to commodities. Hence, the rate of interest, he thinks,
but, perhaps, erroneously, does not govern the price of land; arguing
from the higher rate of land relatively to money, that is, the worse
interest it gave, in the reigns of Elizabeth and James, than in his
own time. But one of Locke’s positions, if generally received, would
alone have sufficed to lower the value of land. “It is in vain,” he
says, “in a country whose great fund is land, to hope to lay the
public charges of the government on anything else; there, at last, it
will terminate.” The legislature soon proceeded to act on this
mistaken theory in the annual land tax; an impost of tremendous
severity at that time, the gross unfairness, however, of which has
been compensated in later times by the taxes on personal succession.

108. In such a monetary crisis as that of his time, Locke was
naturally obliged to consider the usual resource of raising the
denomination of the coin. This, he truly says, would be to rob all
creditors of such a proportion of their debts. It is probable that his
influence, which was very considerable, may have put a stop to the
scheme. He contends in his Further Considerations, in answer to a
tract by Lowndes, that clipped money should go only by weight. This
seems to have been agreed by both parties; but Lowndes thought the
loss should be defrayed by a tax; Locke that it should fall on the
holders. Honourably for the government, the former opinion prevailed.

|Statistical tracts.|

109. The Italians were the first who laid anything like a foundation
for statistics or political arithmetic; that which is to the political
economist what general history is to the philosopher. But their
numerical reckonings of population, houses, value of lands or stock,
and the like, though very curious, and sometimes taken from public
documents, were not always more than conjectural, nor are they so full
and minute as the spirit of calculation demands. England here again
took the lead, in Graunt’s Observations on the Bills of Mortality,
1661, in Petty’s Political Arithmetic (posthumous in 1691), and other
treatises of the same ingenious and philosophical person, and, we may
add, in the Observations of Gregory King on the Natural and Political
State of England; for, though these were not published till near the
end of the eighteenth century, the manuscripts had fallen into the
hands of Dr. Charles Davenant, who has made extracts from them in his
own valuable contributions to political arithmetic. King seems to have
possessed a sagacity which has sometimes brought his conjectures
nearer to the mark than, from the imperfection of his data, it was
reasonable to expect. Yet he supposes that the population of England,
which he estimated, perhaps rightly, at five millions and a half,
would not reach the double of that number before A.D. 2300. Sir
William Petty, with a mind capable of just and novel theories, was
struck by the necessary consequences of an uniformly progressive
population. Though the rate of movement seemed to him, as in truth it
was, much slower than we have latterly found it, he clearly saw that
its continuance would, in an ascertainable length of time, overload
the world. “And then, according to the prediction of the Scriptures,
there must be wars and great slaughter.” He conceived that, in the
ordinary course of things, the population of a country would be
doubled in two hundred years; but the whole conditions of the problem
were far less understood than at present. Davenant’s Essay on Ways and
Means, 1693, gained him a high reputation which he endeavoured to
augment by many subsequent works, some falling within the seventeenth
century. He was a man of more enlarged reading than his predecessors,
with the exception of Petty, and of close attention to the statistical
documents which were now more copiously published than before; but he
seldom launches into any extensive theory, confining himself rather to
the accumulation of facts and to the immediate inferences, generally
for temporary purposes, which they supplied.


                            SECT. III.

                         ON JURISPRUDENCE.

|Works of Leibnitz on Roman Law.|

110. In 1667, a short book was published at Frankfort, by a young man
of twenty-two years, entitled Methodi Novæ discendæ docendæque
Jurisprudentiæ. The science which of all had been deemed to require
the most protracted labour, the ripest judgment, the most experienced
discrimination, was, as it were, invaded by a boy, but by one who had
the genius of an Alexander, and for whom the glories of an Alexander
were reserved. This is the first production of Leibnitz; and it is
probably in many points of view the most remarkable work that has
prematurely united erudition and solidity. We admire in it the vast
range of learning (for though he could not have read all the books he
names, there is evidence of his acquaintance with a great number, and
at least with a well-filled chart of literature), the originality of
some ideas, the commanding and comprehensive views he embraces, the
philosophical spirit, the compressed style in which it is written, the
entire absence of juvenility, of ostentatious paradox,[967] of
imagination, ardour, and enthusiasm, which, though Leibnitz did not
always want them, would have been wholly misplaced on such a subject.
Faults have been censured in this early performance, and the author
declared himself afterwards dissatisfied with it.[968]

     [967] I use the epithet ostentatious, because some of his
     original theories are a little paradoxical; thus, he has a
     singular notion that the right of bequeathing property by
     testament is derived from the immortality of the soul; the living
     heirs being as it were the attorneys of those we suppose to be
     dead. Quia mortui revera adhuc vivunt, ideo manent domini rerum,
     quos vero hæredes reliquerunt, concipiendi sunt ut procuratores
     in rem suam. In our own discussions on the law of entail, I am
     not aware that this argument has ever been explicitly urged,
     though the advocates of perpetual control seem to have none
     better.

     [968] This tract, and all the other works of Leibnitz on
     jurisprudence, will be found in the fourth volume of his works by
     Dutens. An analysis by Bon, professor of law at Turin, is
     prefixed to the Methodi Novæ, and he has pointed out a few
     errors. Leibnitz says in a letter, about 1676, that his book was
     effusus potius quam scriptus, in itinere, sine libris, &c., and
     that it contained some things he no longer would have said,
     though there were others of which he did not repent. Lerminier,
     Hist. du Droit, p. 150.

111. Leibnitz was a passionate admirer of the Roman jurisprudence; he
held the great lawyers of antiquity second only to the best geometers
for strong and subtle and profound reasoning; not even acknowledging,
to any considerable degree, the contradictions (antinomiæ juris),
which had perplexed their disciples in later times, and on which many
volumes had been written. But the arrangement of Justinian he entirely
disapproved; and in another work, Corporis Juris reconcinnandi Ratio,
published in 1668, he pointed out the necessity and what he deemed the
best method of a new distribution. This appears to be not quite like
what he had previously sketched, and which was rather a philosophical
than a very convenient method;[969] in this new arrangement, he
proposes to retain the texts of the Corpus Juris Civilis, but in a
form rather like that of the Pandects than of the Institutes; to the
latter of which, followed as it has been among us by Hale and
Blackstone, he was very averse.

     [969] In this Methodi Novæ he divides law, in the didactic part,
     according to the several sources of rights--namely, 1. Nature,
     which gives us right over res nullius, things where there is no
     prior property. 2. Succession. 3. Possession. 4. Contract. 5.
     Injury, which gives right to reparation.

112. There was only one man in the world who could have left so noble
a science as philosophical jurisprudence for pursuits of a still more
exalted nature, and for which he was still more fitted; and that man
was Leibnitz himself. He passed onward to reap the golden harvests of
other fields. Yet the study of law has owed much to him; he did much
to unite it with moral philosophy on the one hand, and with history on
the other; a great master of both, he exacted perhaps a more
comprehensive course of legal studies than the capacity of ordinary
lawyers could grasp. In England also, its conduciveness to
professional excellence might be hard to prove. It is however certain
that, in Germany at least, philology, history, and philosophy have
more or less since the time of Leibnitz marched together under the
robe of law. “He did but pass over that kingdom,” says Lerminier, and
he has reformed and enlarged it.”[970]

     [970] Biogr. Univ. Lerminier, Hist. du Droit, p. 142.

|Civil Jurists--Godefroy--Domat.|

|Noodt on Usury.|

113. James Godefroy was thirty years engaged on an edition of the
Theodosian Code, published, several years after his death, in 1665. It
is by far the best edition of that body of laws, and retains a
standard value in the historical department of jurisprudence. Domat, a
French lawyer, and one of the Port-Royal connection, in his
Loix Civiles dans leur Ordre Naturel, the first of five volumes of
which appeared in 1689, carried into effect the project of Leibnitz,
by re-arranging the laws of Justinian, which, especially the Pandects,
are well known to be confusedly distributed, in a more regular method,
prefixing a book of his own on the nature and spirit of law in
general. This appears to be an useful digest or abridgment, something
like those made by Viner and earlier writers of our own texts, but
perhaps with more compression and choice; two editions of an English
translation were published. Domat’s Public Law, which might, perhaps,
in our language, have been called constitutional, since we generally
confine the epithet public to the law of nations, forms a second part
of the same work, and contains a more extensive system wherein
theological morality, ecclesiastical ordinances, and the fundamental
laws of the French monarchy are reduced into method. Domat is much
extolled by his countryman; but in philosophical jurisprudence, he
seems to display little force or originality. Gravina, who obtained a
high name in this literature at the beginning of the next century, was
known merely as a professor at the close of this; but a Dutch jurist,
Gerard Noodt, may deserve mention for his treatise on usury, in 1698,
wherein he both endeavours to prove its natural and religious
lawfulness, and traces its history through the Roman law. Several
other works of Noodt on subjects of historical jurisprudence seem to
fall within this century, though I do not find their exact dates of
publication.

|Law of Nations.--Puffendorf.|

114. Grotius was the acknowledged master of all who studied the theory
of international right. It was, perhaps, the design of Puffendorf, as
we may conjecture by the title of his great work on the Law of Nature
and Nations, to range over the latter field with as assiduous
diligence as the former. But from the length of his prolix labour on
natural law and the rights of sovereigns, he has not more than one
twentieth of the whole volume to spare for international questions;
and this is in great measure copied or abridged from Grotius. In some
instances he disagrees with his master. Puffendorf singularly denies
that compacts made during war are binding by the law of nature, but
for weak and unintelligible reasons.[971] Treaties of peace extorted
by unjust force, he denies with more reason to be binding; though
Grotius had held the contrary.[972] The inferior writers on the law of
nations, or those who, like Wicquefort in his Ambassador, confined
themselves to merely conventional usages, it is needless to mention.

     [971] B. viii., chap. 7.

     [972] Chap. 8.




                           CHAPTER XXXI.

               HISTORY OF POETRY FROM 1650 TO 1700.


                             SECT. I.

                        ON ITALIAN POETRY.

            _Filicaja--Guidi--Menzini--Arcadian Society._

|Improved tone of Italian poetry.|

1. The imitators of Marini, full of extravagant metaphors, and the
false thoughts usually called _concetti_, were in their vigour at
the commencement of this period. But their names are now obscure, and
have been overwhelmed by the change of public taste which has
condemned and proscribed what it once most applauded. This change came
on long before the close of the century, though not so decidedly but
that some traces of the former manner are discoverable in the majority
of popular writers. The general characteristics, however, of Italian
poetry became a more masculine tone, a wider reach of topics, and a
selection of the most noble, an abandonment, except in the lighter
lyrics, of amatory strains, and especially of such as were languishing
and querulous, an anticipation, in short, as far as the circumstances
of the age would permit, of that severe and elevated style which has
been most affected for the last fifty years. It would be futile to
seek an explanation of this manlier spirit in any social or political
causes; never had Italy, in these respects, been so lifeless; but the
world of poets is often not the world around them, and their stream of
living waters may flow, like that of Arethusa, without imbibing much
from the surrounding brine. Chiabrera had led the way by the Pindaric
majesty of his odes, and had disciples of at least equal name with
himself.

|Filicaja.|

2. Florence was the mother of one who did most to invigorate Italian
poetry, Vincenzo Filicaja; a man gifted with a serious, pure, and
noble spirit, from which congenial thoughts spontaneously arose, and
with an imagination rather vigorous than fertile. The siege of Vienna
in 1683, and its glorious deliverance by Sobieski, are the subjects of
six odes. The third of these, addressed to the king of Poland himself,
is generally most esteemed, though I do not perceive that the first or
second are inferior. His ode to Rome, on Christina’s taking up her
residence there, is in many parts highly poetical; but the flattery of
representing this event as sufficient to restore the eternal city from
decay is too gross. It is not on the whole so successful as those on
the siege of Vienna. A better is that addressed to Florence on leaving
her for a rural solitude, in consequence of his poverty and the
neglect he had experienced. It breathes an injured spirit, something
like the complaint of Cowley, with which posterity are sure to
sympathize. The sonnet of Filicaja, “Italia mia,” is known by every
one who cares for this poetry at all. This sonnet is conspicuous for
its depth of feeling, for the spirit of its commencement, and above
all, for the noble lines with which it ends; but there are surely
awkward and feeble expressions in the intermediate part. _Armenti_ for
regiments of dragoons could only be excused by frequent usage in
poetry, which, I presume, is not the case, though we find the same
word in one of Filicaja’s odes. A foreigner may venture upon this kind
of criticism.

3. Filicaja was formed in the school of Chiabrera; but, with his pomp
of sound and boldness of imagery, he is animated by a deeper sense
both of religion and patriotism. We perceive more the language of the
heart; the man speaks in his genuine character, not with assumed and
mercenary sensibility, like that of Pindar and Chiabrera. His genius
is greater than his skill; he abandons himself to an impetuosity which
he cannot sustain, forgetful of the economy of strength and breath, as
necessary for a poet as a race-horse. He has rarely or never any
conceits or frivolous thoughts; but the expression is sometimes rather
feeble. There is a general want of sunshine in Filicaja’s poetry;
unprosperous himself, he views nothing with a worldly eye; his notes
of triumph are without brilliancy, his predictions of success are
without joy. He seems also deficient in the charms of grace and
felicity. But his poetry is always the effusion of a fine soul; we
venerate and love Filicaja as a man, but we also acknowledge that he
was a real poet.

|Guidi.|

4. Guidi, a native of Pavia, raised himself to the highest point that
any lyric poet of Italy has attained. His odes are written at Rome,
from about the year 1685 to the end of the century. Compared with
Chiabrera or even Filicaja, he may be allowed the superiority; if he
never rises to a higher pitch than the latter, if he has never chosen
subjects so animating, if he has never displayed so much depth and
truth of feeling, his enthusiasm is more constant, his imagination
more creative, his power of language more extensive and more
felicitous. “He falls sometimes,” says Corniani, “into extravagance,
but never into affectation.... His peculiar excellence is poetical
expression, always brilliant with a light of his own. The magic of his
language used to excite a lively movement among the hearers when he
recited his verses in the Arcadian society.” Corniani adds, that he is
sometimes exuberant in words and hyperbolical in images.[973]

     [973] Vol. viii., p. 224.

5. The ode of Guidi on Fortune, appears to me, at least, equal to any
in the Italian language. If it has been suggested by that of Celio
Magno, entitled Iddio, the resemblance does not deserve the name of
imitation; a nobleness of thought, imagery, and language, prevails
throughout. But this is the character of all his odes. He chose better
subjects than Chiabrera; for the ruins of Rome are more glorious than
the living house of Medici. He resembles him, indeed, rather than any
other poet, so that it might not always be easy to discern one from
the other in a single stanza; but Guidi is a bolder, a more
imaginative, a more enthusiastic poet. Both adorn and amplify a little
to excess; and it may be imputed to Guidi that he has abused an
advantage which his native language afforded. The Italian is rich in
words, where the sound so well answers to the meaning, that it is
hardly possible to hear them without an associated sentiment; their
effect is closely analogous to musical expression. Such are the
adjectives denoting mental elevation, as _superbo_, _altiero_,
_audace_, _gagliardo_, _indomito_, _maestoso_. These recur in the
poems of Guidi with every noun that will admit of them; but sometimes
the artifice is a little too transparent, and though the meaning is
not sacrificed to sound, we feel that it is too much enveloped in it,
and are not quite pleased that a great poet should rely so much on a
resource which the most mechanical slave of music can employ.

|Menzini.|

6. The odes of Benedetto Menzini are elegant and in poetical language,
but such as does not seem very original, nor do they strike us by much
vigour or animation of thought. The allusions to mythology which we
never find in Filicaja, and rarely in Guidi, are too frequent. Some
are of considerable beauty, among which we may distinguish that
addressed to Magalotti, beginning, “Un verde ramuscello in piaggia
aprica.” Menzini was far from confining himself to this species of
poetry; he was better known in others. As an Anacreontic poet, he
stands, I believe, only below Chiabrera and Redi. His satires have
been preferred by some to those of Ariosto; but neither Corniani nor
Salfi acquiesce in this praise. Their style is a mixture of obsolete
phrases from Dante, with the idioms of the Florentine populace; and
though spirited in substance, they are rather full of common-place
invective. Menzini strikes boldly at priests and governments, and,
what was dangerous to Orpheus, at the whole sex of women. His Art of
Poetry, in five books, published in 1681, deserves some praise. As his
atrabilious humour prompted, he inveighs against the corruption of
contemporary literature, especially on the stage, ridiculing also the
Pindaric pomp that some affected, not, perhaps, without allusion to
his enemy Guidi. His own style is pointed, animated, sometimes
poetical, where didactic verse will admit of such ornament, but a
little too diffuse and minute in criticism.

|Salvator Rosa--Redi.|

7. These three are the great restorers of Italian poetry after the
usurpation of false taste. And it is to be observed, that they
introduced a new manner, very different from that of the sixteenth
century. Several others deserve to be mentioned, though we can only do
so briefly. The Satires of Salvator Rosa, full of force and vehemence,
more vigorous than elegant, are such as his ardent genius and rather
savage temper would lead us to expect. A far superior poet was a man
not less eminent than Salvator, the philosophical and every way
accomplished Redi. Few have done so much, in any part of science, who
have also shone so brightly in the walks of taste. The sonnets of Redi
are esteemed; but his famous dithyrambic, Bacco in Toscana, is
admitted to be the first poem of that kind in modern language, and is
as worthy of Monte Pulciano wine, as the wine is worthy of it.

|Other poets.|

8. Maggi and Lemene bore an honourable part in the restoration of
poetry, though neither of them is reckoned altogether to have purified
himself from the infection of the preceding age. The sonnet of
Pastorini on the imagined resistance of Genoa to the oppression of
Louis XIV., in 1684, though not borne out by historical truth, is one
of those breathings of Italian nationality which we always admire, and
which had now become more common than for a century before. It must be
confessed, in general, that when the protestations of a people against
tyranny become loud enough to be heard, we may suspect that the
tyranny has been relaxed.

|Christina’s patronage of letters.|

|Society of Arcadians.|

9. Rome was to poetry in this age what Florence had once been, though
Rome had hitherto done less for the Italian muses than any other great
city. Nor was this so much due to her bishops and cardinals, as to a
stranger and a woman. Christina finally took up her abode there in
1688. Her palace became the resort of all the learning and genius she
could assemble round her; a literary academy was established, and her
revenue was liberally dispensed in pensions. If Filicaja and Guidi,
both sharers of her bounty, have exaggerated her praises, much may be
pardoned to gratitude, and much also to the natural admiration which
those who look up to power must feel for those who have renounced it.
Christina died in 1690, and her own academy could last no longer; but
a phœnix sprang at once from its ashes. Crescimbeni, then young, has
the credit of having planned the Society of Arcadians, which began in
1690, and has eclipsed in celebrity most of the earlier academies of
Italy. Fourteen, says Corniani, were the original founders of this
society; among whom were Crescimbeni and Gravina and Zappi. In course
of time the Arcadians vastly increased, and established colonies in
the chief cities of Italy. They determined to assume every one a
pastoral name and a Greek birthplace, to hold their meetings in some
verdant meadow, and to mingle with all their compositions, as far as
possible, images from pastoral life; images always agreeable, because
they recall the times of primitive innocence. This poetical tribe
adopted as their device the pipe of seven reeds bound with laurel, and
their president or director was denominated general shepherd or keeper
(custode generale).[974] The fantastical part of the Arcadian society
was common to them with all similar institutions; and mankind has
generally required some ceremonial follies to keep alive the wholesome
spirit of association. Their solid aim was to purify the national
taste. Much had been already done, and in great measure by their own
members, Menzini and Guidi; but their influence, which was, of course,
more felt in the next century, has always been reckoned both important
and auspicious to Italian literature.

     [974] Corniani, viii., 301. Tiraboschi, xi., 43. Crescimbeni,
     Storia d’Arcadia (reprinted by Mathias.)


                             SECT. II.

                         ON FRENCH POETRY.

             _Fontaine--Boileau--Minor French Poets._

|La Fontaine.|

10. We must pass over Spain and Portugal as absolutely destitute of
any name which requires commemoration. In France it was very different
if some earlier periods had been not less rich in the number of
versifiers, none had produced poets who have descended with so much
renown to posterity. The most popular of these was La Fontaine. Few
writers have left such a number of verses which, in the phrase of his
country, have made their fortune, and been like ready money, always at
hand for prompt quotation. His lines have at once a proverbial truth
and a humour of expression which render them constantly applicable.
This is chiefly true of his Fables; for his Tales, though no one will
deny that they are lively enough, are not reckoned so well written,
nor do they supply so much for general use.

|Character of his Fables.|

11. The models of La Fontaine’s style were partly the ancient
fabulists whom he copied, for he pretends to no originality; partly
the old French poets, especially Marot. From the one he took the real
gold of his fables themselves, from the other he caught a peculiar
archness and vivacity, which some of them had possessed, perhaps, in
no less degree, but which becomes more captivating from his
intermixture of a solid and serious wisdom. For notwithstanding the
common anecdotes, sometimes, as we may suspect, rather exaggerated, of
La Fontaine’s simplicity, he was evidently a man who had thought and
observed much about human nature, and knew a little more of the world
than he cared to let the world perceive. Many of his Fables are
admirable; the grace of the poetry, the happy inspiration that seems
to have dictated the turns of expression, place him in the first rank
among fabulists. Yet the praise of La Fontaine should not be
indiscriminate. It is said that he gave the preference to Phædrus and
Æsop above himself, and some have thought that in this he could not
have been sincere. It was at least a proof of his modesty. But, though
we cannot think of putting Phædrus on a level with La Fontaine, were
it only for this reason, that in a work designed for the general
reader, and surely fables are of this description, the qualities that
please the many are to be valued above those that please the few, yet
it is true that the French poet might envy some talents of the Roman.
Phædrus, a writer scarcely prized enough, because he is an early
school-book, has a perfection of elegant beauty which very few have
rivalled. No word is out of its place, none is redundant, or could be
changed for a better; his perspicuity and ease make everything appear
unpremeditated, yet everything is wrought by consummate art. In many
fables of La Fontaine this is not the case; he beats round the
subject, and misses often before he hits. Much, whatever La Harpe may
assert to the contrary, could be retrenched; in much the exigencies of
rhyme and metre are too manifest.[975] He has, on the other
hand, far more humour than Phædrus; and, whether it be praise or not,
thinks less of his fable and more of its moral. One pleases by
enlivening, the other pleases, but does not enliven; one has more
felicity, the other more skill; but in such skill there is felicity.

     [975] Let us take, for example, the first lines of L’Homme et la
     Couleuvre.

         Un homme vit une couleuere.
       Ah méchante, dit-il, je m’en vais faire un œuvre
         Agréable à tout l’univers!
          A ces mots l’animal pervers
         (C’est le serpent que je veux dire,
       _Et non l’homme, on pourroit aisément s’y tromper_)
       A ces motes le serpent se laissant attrapper
       Est pris, mis en un sac; et, ce qui fut le pire,
       On resolut sa mort, _fût il coupable ou non_.

     None of these lines appear to me very happy; but there can be no
     doubt about that in Italics, which spoils the effect of the
     preceding, and is feebly redundant. The last words are almost
     equally bad; no question could arise about the serpent’s guilt,
     which had been assumed before. But these petty blemishes are
     abundantly redeemed by the rest of the fable, which is beautiful
     in choice of thoughts and language, and may be classed with the
     best in the collection.

|Boileau.--His epistles.|

12. The first seven satires of Boileau appeared in 1666; and these,
though much inferior to his later productions, are characterised by La
Harpe as the earliest poetry in the French language where the
mechanism of its verse was fully understood, where the style was
always pure and elegant, where the ear was uniformly gratified. The
Art of Poetry was published in 1673, the Lutrin in 1674; the Epistles
followed at various periods. Their elaborate though equable strain, in
a kind of poetry which, never requiring high flights of fancy, escapes
the censure of mediocrity and monotony which might sometimes fall upon
it, generally excites more admiration in those who have been
accustomed to the numerous defects of less finished poets, than it
retains in a later age, when others have learned to emulate and
preserve the same uniformity. The fame of Pope was transcendant for
this reason, and Boileau is the analogue of Pope in French literature.

|His Art of Poetry.|

13. The Art of Poetry has been the model of the Essay on Criticism;
few poems more resemble each other. I will not weigh in opposite
scales two compositions, of which one claims an advantage from its
originality, the other from the youth of its author. Both are uncommon
efforts of critical good sense, and both are distinguished by their
short and pointed language, which remains in the memory. Boileau has
very well incorporated the thoughts of Horace with his own, and given
them a skilful adaptation to his own times. He was a bolder critic of
his contemporaries than Pope. He took up arms against those who shared
the public favour, and were placed by half Paris among great
dramatists and poets, Pradon, Desmarests, Brebœuf. This was not true
of the heroes of the Dunciad. His scorn was always bitter and probably
sometimes unjust; yet posterity has ratified almost all his judgments.
False taste, it should be remembered, had long infected the poetry of
Europe; some steps had been lately taken to repress it, but
extravagance, affectation, and excess of refinement, are weeds that
can only be eradicated by a thorough cleansing of the soil, by a
process of burning and paring which leaves not a seed of them in the
public mind. And when we consider the gross blemishes of this
description that deform the earlier poetry of France, as of other
nations, we cannot blame the severity of Boileau, though he may
occasionally have condemned in the mass what contained some
intermixture of real excellence. We have become of late years in
England so enamoured of the beauties of our old writers, and certainly
they are of a superior kind, that we are sometimes more than a little
blind to their faults.

|Comparison with Horace.|

14. By writing satires, epistles, and an art of poetry, Boileau has
challenged an obvious comparison with Horace. Yet they are very
unlike; one easy, colloquial, abandoning himself to every change that
arises in his mind, the other uniform as a regiment under arms, always
equal, always laboured, incapable of a bold neglect. Poetry seems to
have been the delight of one, the task of the other. The pain that
Boileau must have felt in writing communicates itself in some measure
to the reader; we are fearful of losing some point, of passing over
some epithet without sufficiently perceiving its selection; it is as
with those pictures which are to be viewed long and attentively, till
our admiration of detached proofs of skill becomes wearisome by
repetition.

|The Lutrin.|

15. The Lutrin is the most popular of the poems of Boileau. Its
subject is ill chosen; neither interest nor variety could be given to
it. Tassoni and Pope have the advantage in this respect; if there
leading theme is trifling, we lose sight of it in the gay liveliness
of description and episode. In Boileau, after we have once been told
that the canons of a church spend their lives in sleep and eating, we
have no more to learn, and grow tired of keeping company with a race
so stupid and sensual. But the poignant wit and satire, the elegance
and correctness, of numberless couplets, as well as the ingenious
adaptation of classical passages, redeem this poem, and confirm its
high place in the mock-heroic line.

|General character of his poetry.|

16. The great deficiency of Boileau is insensibility. Far below Pope
or even Dryden in this essential quality, which the moral epistle or
satire not only admits but requires, he rarely quits two paths, those
of reason and of raillery. His tone on moral subjects is firm and
severe, but not very noble; a trait of pathos, a single touch of pity
or tenderness, will rarely be found. This of itself serves to gives a
dryness to his poetry, and it may be doubtful, though most have read
Boileau, whether many have read him twice.

|Lyric poetry lighter than before.|

17. The pompous tone of Ronsard and Du Bartas had become ridiculous in
the reign of Louis XIV. Even that of Malherbe was too elevated for the
public taste; none at least imitated that writer, though the critics
had set the example of admiring him. Boileau, who had done much to
turn away the world from imagination to plain sense, once attempted to
emulate the grandiloquent strains of Pindar in an ode on the taking of
Namur, but with no such success as could encourage himself or others
to repeat the experiment. Yet there was no want of gravity or
elevation in the prose writers of France, nor in the tragedies of
Racine. But the French language is not very well adapted for the
higher kind of lyric poetry, while it suits admirably the lighter
forms of song and epigram. And their poets, in this age, were almost
entirely men living at Paris, either in the court, or at least in a
refined society, the most adverse of all to the poetical character.
The influence of wit and politeness is generally directed towards
rendering enthusiasm or warmth of fancy ridiculous; and without these
no great energy of genius can be displayed. But, in their proper
department, several poets of considerable merit appeared.

|Benserade.|

|Chaulieu.|

18. Benserade was called peculiarly the poet of the court; for twenty
years it was his business to compose verses for the ballets
represented before the king. His skill and tact were shown in delicate
contrivances to make those who supported the characters of gods and
goddesses in these fictions, being the nobles and ladies of the court,
betray their real inclinations, and sometimes their gallantries. He
even presumed to shadow in this manner the passion of Louis for
Mademoiselle La Vallière, before it was publicly acknowledged.
Benserade must have had no small ingenuity and adroitness; but his
verses did not survive those who called them forth. In a different
school, not essentially, perhaps, much more vicious than the court,
but more careless of appearances, and rather proud of an immorality
which it had no interest to conceal, that of Ninon l’Enclos, several
of higher reputation grew up; Chapelle (whose real name was
L’Huillier), La Fare, Bachaumont, Lainez, and Chaulieu. The first,
perhaps, and certainly the last of these, are worthy to be remembered.
La Harpe has said, that Chaulieu alone retains a claim to be read in a
style where Voltaire has so much left all others behind, that no
comparison with him can ever be admitted. Chaulieu was an original
genius, his poetry has a marked character, being a happy mixture of a
gentle and peaceable philosophy with a lively imagination. His verses
flow from his soul, and though often negligent through indolence, are
never in bad taste or affected. Harmony of versification, grace and
gaiety, with a voluptuous and Epicurean, but mild and benevolent turn
of thought, belong to Chaulieu, and these are qualities which do not
fail to attract the majority of readers.[976]

     [976] La Harpe. Bouterwek, vi. 127. Biogr. Univ.

|Pastoral poetry.|

|Segrais.|

|Deshoulières.|

|Fontenelle.|

19. It is rather singular that a style so uncongenial to the spirit of
the age as pastoral poetry appears was quite as much cultivated as
before. But it is still true that the spirit of the age gained the
victory, and drove the shepherds from their shady bowers, though
without substituting anything more rational in the fairy tales which
superseded the pastoral romance. At the middle of the century, and
partially till near its close, the style of D’Urfé and Scudery
retained its popularity. Three poets of the age of Louis were known in
pastoral; Segrais, Madame Deshoulières, and Fontenelle. The first
belongs most to the genuine school of modern pastoral; he is elegant,
romantic, full of complaining love; the Spanish and French romances
had been his model in invention, as Virgil was in style. La Harpe
allows him nature, sweetness, and sentiment, but he cannot emulate the
vivid colouring of Virgil, and the language of his shepherds, though
simple, wants elegance and harmony. The tone of his pastorals seems
rather insipid, though La Harpe has quoted some pleasing lines. Madame
Deshoulières, with a purer style than Segrais, according to the same
critic, has less genius. Others have thought her Idylls the best in
the language.[977] But these seem to be merely trivial moralities
addressed to flowers, brooks, and sheep, sometimes expressed in a
manner both ingenious and natural, but on the whole, too feeble to
give much pleasure. Bouterwek observes that her poetry is to be
considered as that of a woman, and that its pastoral morality would be
somewhat childish in the mouth of man; whether this says more for the
lady, or against her sex, I must leave to the reader. She has
occasionally some very pleasing and even poetical passages.[978] The
third among these poets of the pipe is Fontenelle. But his pastorals,
as Bouterwek says, are too artificial for the ancient school, and too
cold for the romantic. La Harpe blames, besides this general fault,
the negligence and prosaic phrases of his style. The best is that
entitled Ismene. It is in fact a poem for the world; yet as love and
its artifices are found everywhere, we cannot censure anything as
absolutely unfit for pastoral, save a certain refinement which
belonged to the author in everything, and which interferes with our
sense of rural simplicity.

     [977] Biogr. Univ.

     [978] Bouterwek, vi. 152.

|Bad epic poems.|

20. In the superior walks of poetry France had nothing of which she
has been inclined to boast. Chapelain, a man of some credit as a
critic, produced his long-laboured epic, La Pucelle, in 1656, which is
only remembered by the insulting ridicule of Boileau. A similar fate
has fallen on the Clovis of Desmarests, published in 1684, though the
German historian of literature has extolled the richness of
imagination it shows, and observed that if those who saw nothing but a
fantastic writer in Desmarests had possessed as much fancy, the
national poetry would have been of a higher character.[979] Brebœuf’s
translation of the Pharsalia is spirited, but very extravagant.

     [979] Bouterwek, vi. 157.

|German Poetry.|

21. The literature of Germany was now more corrupted by bad taste than
ever. A second Silesian school, but much inferior to that of Opitz,
was founded by Hoffmanswaldau and Lohenstein. The first had great
facility, and imitated Ovid and Marini with some success. The second,
with worse taste, always tumid and striving at something elevated, so
that the Lohenstein swell became a by-word with later critics, is
superior to Hoffmanswaldau in richness of fancy, in poetical
invention, and in warmth of feeling for all that is noble and great.
About the end of the century arose a new style, known by the unhappy
name spiritless (geistlos), which, avoiding the tone of Lohenstein,
became wholly tame and flat.[980]

     [980] Id. vol. x., p. 288. Heinsius. iv. 287. Eichhorn,
     Geschichte der Cultur, iv. 776.


                            SECT. III.

                        ON ENGLISH POETRY.

         _Waller--Butler--Milton--Dryden--The Minor Poets._

|Waller.|

22. We might have placed Waller in the former division of the
seventeenth century, with no more impropriety than we might have
reserved Cowley for the latter; both belong by the date of their
writings to the two periods. And perhaps the poetry of Waller bears
rather the stamp of the first Charles’s age than of that which ensued.
His reputation was great, and somewhat more durable than that of
similar poets have generally been; he did not witness its decay in his
own protracted life, nor was it much diminished at the beginning of
the next century. Nor was this wholly undeserved. Waller has a more
uniform elegance, a more sure facility and happiness of expression,
and, above all, a greater exemption from glaring faults, such as
pedantry, extravagance, conceit, quaintness, obscurity, ungrammatical
and unmeaning constructions, than any of the Caroline era with whom he
would naturally be compared. We have only to open Carew or Lovelace to
perceive the difference; not that Waller is wholly without some of
these faults, but that they are much less frequent. If others may have
brighter passages of fancy or sentiment, which is not difficult, he
husbands better his resources, and though left behind in the beginning
of the race, comes sooner to the goal. His Panegyric on Cromwell was
celebrated. “Such a series of verses,” it is said by Johnson, “had
rarely appeared before in the English language. Of these lines some
are grand, some are graceful, and all are musical. There is now and
then a feeble verse, or a trifling thought; but its great fault is the
choice of its hero.” It may not be the opinion of all, that Cromwell’s
actions were of that obscure and pitiful character which the majesty
of song rejects, and Johnson has before observed, that Waller’s choice
of encomiastic topics in this poem is very judicious. Yet his
deficiency in poetical vigour will surely be traced in this
composition; if he rarely sinks, he never rises very high, and we find
much good sense and selection, much skill in the mechanism of language
and metre, without ardour and without imagination. In his amorous
poetry, he has little passion or sensibility; but he is never free and
petulant, never tedious, and never absurd. His praise consists much in
negations; but in a comparative estimate, perhaps negations ought to
count for a good deal.

|Butler’s Hudibras.|

23. Hudibras was incomparably more popular than Paradise Lost; no poem
in our language rose at once to greater reputation. Nor can this be
called ephemeral, like that of most political poetry. For at least
half a century after its publication it was generally read, and
perpetually quoted. The wit of Butler has still preserved many lines;
but Hudibras now attracts comparatively few readers. The eulogies of
Johnson seem rather adapted to what he remembered to have been the
fame of Butler, than to the feelings of the surrounding generation;
and since his time, new sources of amusement have sprung up, and
writers of a more intelligible pleasantry have superseded those of the
seventeenth century. In the fiction of Hudibras there was never much
to divert the reader, and there is still less left at present. But
what has been censured as a fault, the length of dialogue, which puts
the fiction out of sight, is, in fact, the source of all the pleasure
that the work affords. The sense of Butler is masculine, his wit
inexhaustible, and it is supplied from every source of reading and
observation. But these sources are often so unknown to the reader that
the wit loses its effect through the obscurity of its allusions, and
he yields to the bane of wit, a purblind mole-like pedantry. His
versification is sometimes spirited, and his rhymes humorous; yet he
wants that ease and flow which we require in light poetry.

|Paradise Lost--Choice of subject.|

24. The subject of Paradise Lost is the finest that has ever been
chosen for heroic poetry; it is also managed by Milton with remarkable
skill. The Iliad wants completeness; it has an unity of its own, but
it is the unity of a part where we miss the relation to a whole. The
Odyssey is perfect enough in this point of view; but the subject is
hardly extensive enough for a legitimate epic. The Æneid is spread
over too long a space, and perhaps the latter books have not that
intimate connection with the former that an epic poem requires. The
Pharsalia is open to the same criticism as the Iliad. The Thebaid is
not deficient in unity or greatness of action; but it is one that
possesses no sort of interest in our eyes. Tasso is far superior both
in choice and management of his subject to most of these. Yet the Fall
of Man has a more general interest than the Crusade.

|Open to some difficulties.|

25. It must be owned, nevertheless, that a religious epic labours
under some disadvantages; in proportion as it attracts those who hold
the same tenets with the author, it is regarded by those who dissent
from him with indifference or aversion. It is said that the discovery
of Milton’s Arianism, in this rigid generation, has already impaired
the sale of Paradise Lost. It is also difficult to enlarge or adorn
such a story by fiction. Milton has done much in this way; yet he was
partly restrained by the necessity of conforming to Scripture.

|Its arrangement.|

26. The ordonnance or composition of the Paradise Lost is admirable;
and here we perceive the advantage which Milton’s great familiarity
with the Greek theatre, and his own original scheme of the poem had
given him. Every part succeeds in an order, noble, clear, and natural.
It might have been wished, indeed, that the vision of the eleventh
book had not been changed into the colder narration of the twelfth.
But what can be more majestic than the first two books, which open
this great drama? It is true that they rather serve to confirm the
sneer of Dryden that Satan is Milton’s hero; since they develop a plan
of action in that potentate, which is ultimately successful; the
triumph that he and his host must experience in the fall of man being
hardly compensated by their temporary conversion into serpents; a
fiction rather too grotesque. But it is, perhaps, only pedantry to
talk about the hero, as if a high personage were absolutely required
in an epic poem to predominate over the rest. The conception of Satan
is doubtless the first effort of Milton’s genius. Dante could not have
ventured to spare so much lustre for a ruined archangel, in an age
when nothing less than horns and a tail were the orthodox creed.[981]

     [981] Coleridge has a fine passage which I cannot resist my
     desire to transcribe. “The character of Satan is pride and
     sensual indulgence, finding in itself the motive of action. It is
     the character so often seen in little on the political stage. It
     exhibits all the restlessness, temerity, and cunning which have
     marked the mighty hunters of mankind from Nimrod to Napoleon. The
     common fascination of man is that these great men, as they are
     called, must act from some great motive. Milton has carefully
     marked in his Satan the intense selfishness, the alcohol of
     egotism, which would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven.
     To place this lust of self in opposition to denial of self or
     duty, and to show what exertions it would make, and what pains
     endure, to accomplish its end, is Milton’s particular object in
     the character of Satan. But around this character he has thrown a
     singularity of daring, a grandeur of sufferance, and a ruined
     splendour, which constitute the very height of poetic sublimity.”
     Coleridge’s Remains, p. 176.

     In reading such a paragraph as this, we are struck by the vast
     improvement of the highest criticism, the philosophy of
     æsthetics, since the days of Addison. His papers in the Spectator
     on Paradise Lost were, perhaps, superior to any criticism that
     had been written in our language; and we must always acknowledge
     their good sense, their judiciousness, and the vast service they
     did to our literature, in settling the Paradise Lost on its
     proper level. But how little they satisfy us, even in treating of
     the _natura naturata_, the poem itself! and how little
     conception they show of the _natura naturans_, the
     individual genius of the author! Even in the periodical criticism
     of the present day, in the midst of much that is affected, much
     that is precipitate, much that is written for mere display, we
     find occasional reflections of a profundity and discrimination
     which we should seek in vain through Dryden or Addison, or the
     two Wartons, or even Johnson, though much superior to the rest.
     Hurd has perhaps the merit of being the first who in this country
     aimed at philosophical criticism; he had great ingenuity, a good
     deal of reading, and a facility in applying it; but he did not
     feel very deeply, was somewhat of a coxcomb, and having always
     before his eyes a model neither good in itself, nor made for him
     to emulate, he assumes a dogmatic arrogance, which, as it always
     offends the reader, so for the most part stands in the way of the
     author’s own search for truth.

|Characters of Adam and Eve.|

27. Milton has displayed great skill in the delineations of Adam and
Eve; he does not dress them up, after the fashion of orthodox
theology, which had no spell to bind his free spirit, in the fancied
robes of primitive righteousness. South, in one of his sermons, has
drawn a picture of unfallen man, which is even poetical; but it might
be asked by the reader, Why then did he fall? The first pair of Milton
are innocent of course, but not less frail than their posterity; nor
except one circumstance, which seems rather physical intoxication than
anything else, do we find any sign of depravity super-induced upon
their transgression. It might even be made a question for profound
theologians whether Eve, by taking amiss what Adam had said, and by
self-conceit, did not sin before she tasted the fatal apple. The
necessary paucity of actors in Paradise Lost is perhaps the apology of
Sin and Death; they will not bear exact criticism, yet we do not wish
them away.

|He owes less to Homer than the tragedians.|

28. The comparison of Milton with Homer has been founded on the
acknowledged pre-eminence of each in his own language, and on the lax
application of the word epic to their great poems. But there was not
much in common either between their genius or its products; and Milton
has taken less in direct imitation from Homer than from several other
poets. His favourites had rather been Sophocles and Euripides; to them
he owes the structure of his blank verse, his swell and dignity of
style, his grave enunciation of moral and abstract sentiment, his tone
of description, neither condensed like that of Dante, nor spread out
with the diffuseness of the other Italians and of Homer himself. Next
to these Greek tragedians, Virgil seems to have been his model; with
the minor Latin poets, except Ovid, he does not, I think, show any
great familiarity; and though abundantly conversant with Ariosto,
Tasso, and Marini, we cannot say that they influenced his manner,
which, unlike theirs, is severe and stately, never light, nor in the
sense we should apply the words to them, rapid and animated.[982]

     [982] The solemnity of Milton is striking in those passages where
     some other poets would indulge a little in voluptuousness, and
     the more so, because this is not wholly uncongenial to him. A few
     lines in Paradise Lost are rather too plain, and their gravity
     makes them worse.

|Compared with Dante.|

29. To Dante, however, he bears a much greater likeness. He has, in
common with that poet, an uniform seriousness, for the brighter
colouring of both is but the smile of a pensive mind, a fondness for
argumentative speech, and for the same strain of argument. This,
indeed, proceeds in part from the general similarity, the religious
and even theological cast of their subjects; I advert particularly to
the last part of Dante’s poem. We may almost say, when we look to the
resemblance of their prose writings, in the proud sense of being born
for some great achievement, which breathes through the Vita Nuova, as
it does through Milton’s earlier treatises, that they were twin
spirits, and that each might have animated the other’s body, that each
would, as it were, have been the other, if he had lived in the other’s
age. As it is, I incline to prefer Milton, that is, the Paradise Lost,
both because the subject is more extensive, and because the resources
of his genius are more multifarious. Dante sins more against good
taste, but only, perhaps, because there was no good taste in his time;
for Milton has also too much a disposition to make the grotesque
accessory to the terrible. Could Milton have written the lines on
Ugolino? Perhaps he could. Those on Francesca? Not, I think, every
line. Could Dante have planned such a poem as Paradise Lost? Not
certainly, being Dante in 1300; but, living when Milton did, perhaps
he could. It is, however, useless to go on with questions that no one
can fully answer. To compare the two poets, read two or three cantos
of the Purgatory or Paradise, and then two or three hundred lines of
Paradise Lost. Then take Homer, or even Virgil, the difference will be
striking. Yet, notwithstanding this analogy of their minds, I have not
perceived that Milton imitates Dante very often, probably from having
committed less to memory while young (and Dante was not the favourite
poet of Italy when Milton was there), than of Ariosto and Tasso.

30. Each of these great men chose the subject that suited his natural
temper and genius. What, it is curious to conjecture, would have been
Milton’s success in his original design, a British story? Far less
surely than in Paradise Lost; he wanted the rapidity of the common
heroic poem, and would always have been sententious, perhaps arid and
heavy. Yet, even as religious poets, there are several remarkable
distinctions between Milton and Dante. It has been justly observed
that, in the Paradise of Dante, he makes use of but three leading
ideas, light, music, and motion, and that Milton has drawn Heaven in
less pure and spiritual colours.[983] The philosophical imagination of
the former, in this third part of his poem, almost defecated from all
sublunary things by long and solitary musing, spiritualizes all it
touches. The genius of Milton, though itself subjective, was less so
than that of Dante; and he has to recount, to describe, to bring deeds
and passions before the eye. And two peculiar causes may be assigned
for this difference in the treatment of celestial things between the
Divine Comedy and the Paradise Lost; the dramatic form which Milton
had originally designed to adopt, and his own theological bias towards
anthropomorphitism, which his posthumous treatise on religion has
brought to light. This was, no doubt, in some measure inevitable in
such a subject as that of Paradise Lost; yet much that is ascribed to
God, sometimes with the sanction of Scripture, sometimes without it,
is not wholly pleasing; such as “the oath that shook Heaven’s vast
circumference,” and several other images of the same kind, which bring
down the Deity in a manner not consonant to philosophical religion,
however it may be borne out by the sensual analogies, or mythic
symbolism of Oriental writing.[984]

     [983] Quarterly Review, June, 1825. This article contains some
     good and some questionable remarks on Milton; among the latter I
     reckon the proposition, that his contempt for women is shown in
     the delineation of Eve; an opinion not that of Addison or of many
     others who have thought her exquisitely drawn. It is true that,
     if Milton had made her a wit or a _blue_, the fall would have
     been accounted for with as little difficulty as possible, and
     spared the serpent his trouble.

     [984] Johnson thinks that Milton should have secured the
     consistency of this poem by keeping immateriality out of sight,
     and enticing his reader to drop it from his thoughts. But here
     the subject forbade him to preserve consistency, if, indeed,
     there be inconsistency in supposing a rapid assumption of form by
     spiritual beings. For, though the instance that Johnson alleges
     of inconsistency in Satan’s animating a toad was not necessary,
     yet his animation of the serpent was absolutely indispensable.
     And the same has been done by other poets, who do not scruple to
     suppose their gods, their fairies or devils, or their allegorical
     personages, inspiring thoughts, and even uniting themselves with
     the soul, as well as assuming all kinds of form, though their
     natural appearance is almost always anthropomorphic. And, after
     all, Satan does not animate a real toad, but takes the shape of
     one. “Squat like a toad close by the ear of Eve.” But he does
     enter a real serpent, so that the instance of Johnson is ill
     chosen. If he had mentioned the serpent, everyone would have seen
     that the identity of the animal serpent with Satan is part of the
     original account.

|Elevation of his style.|

31. We rarely meet with feeble lines in Paradise Lost,[985] though
with many that are hard, and, in a common use of the word, might be
called prosaic. Yet few are truly prosaic; few wherein the tone is not
some way distinguished from prose. The very artificial style of
Milton, sparing in English idiom, and his study of a rhythm, not
always the most grateful to our ears, but preserving his blank verse
from a trivial flow, is the cause of this elevation. It is, at least,
more removed from a prosaic cadence than the slovenly rhymes of such
contemporary poets as Chamberlayne. His versification is entirely his
own, framed on a Latin and chiefly a Virgilian model, the pause less
frequently resting on the close of the line than in Homer, and much
less than in our own dramatic poets. But it is also possible that the
Italian and Spanish blank verse may have had some effect upon his ear.

     [985] One of the few exceptions is in the sublime description of
     Death, where a wretched hemistich, “Fierce as ten furies,” stands
     as an unsightly blemish.

|His blindness.|

32. In the numerous imitations, and still more numerous traces of
older poetry which we perceive in Paradise Lost, it is always to be
kept in mind that he had only his recollection to rely upon.[986] His
blindness seems to have been complete before 1654; and I scarcely
think that he had begun his poem, before the anxiety and trouble into
which the public strife of the commonwealth and the restoration had
thrown him, gave leisure for immortal occupations. Then the
remembrance of early reading came over his dark and lonely path like
the moon emerging from the clouds. Then it was that the muse was truly
his; not only as she poured her creative inspiration into his mind,
but as the daughter of Memory, coming with fragments of ancient
melodies, the voice of Euripides and Homer and Tasso; sounds that he
had loved in youth, and treasured up for the solace of his age. They
who, though not enduring the calamity of Milton, have known what it
is, when afar from books, in solitude, or in travelling, or in the
intervals of worldly care, to feed on poetical recollections, to
murmur over the beautiful lines whose cadence has long delighted their
ear, to recall the sentiments and images which retain by association
the charm that early years once gave them--they will feel the
inestimable value of committing to the memory, in the prime of its
power, what it will easily receive and indelibly retain. I know not,
indeed, whether an education that deals much with poetry, such as is
still usual in England, has any more solid argument among many in its
favour, than that it lays the foundation of intellectual pleasures at
the other extreme of life.

     [986] I take this opportunity of mentioning, on the authority of
     Mr. Todd’s Inquiry into the Origin of Paradise Lost (edit. of
     Milton, vol. ii., p. 229), that Lauder, whom I have taxed with
     ignorance, Vol. III., p. 522, really published the poem of Barlæus
     on the nuptials of Adam and Eve.

|His passion for music.|

|Faults in Paradise Lost.|

33. It is owing, in part, to his blindness, but more, perhaps, to his
general residence in a city, that Milton, in the words of Coleridge,
is “not a picturesque but a musical poet;” or, as I would prefer to
say, is the latter more of the two. He describes visible things, and
often with great powers of rendering them manifest, what the Greeks
called εναργεια [enargeia], though seldom with so much circumstantial
exactness of observation, as Spenser or Dante; but he feels music. The
sense of vision delighted his imagination, but that of sound wrapped
his whole soul in ecstacy. One of his trifling faults may be connected
with this, the excessive passion he displays for stringing together
sonorous names, sometimes so obscure that the reader associates
nothing with them, as the word Namancos in Lycidas, which long baffled
the commentators. Hence, his catalogues, unlike those of Homer and
Virgil, are sometimes merely ornamental and misplaced. Thus, the names
of unbuilt cities come strangely forward in Adam’s vision,[987] though
he has afterwards gone over the same ground with better effect in
Paradise Regained. In this there was also a mixture of his pedantry.
But, though he was rather too ostentatious of learning, the nature of
his subject demanded a good deal of episodical ornament. And this,
rather than the precedents he might have alledged from the Italians
and others, is, perhaps, the best apology for what some grave critics
have censured, his frequent allusions to fable and mythology. These
give much relief to the severity of the poem, and few readers would
dispense with them. Less excuse can be made for some affectation of
science which has produced hard and unpleasing lines; but he had been
born in an age when more credit was gained by reading much than by
writing well. The faults, however, of Paradise Lost are, in general,
less to be called faults than necessary adjuncts of the qualities we
most admire, and idiosyncrasies of a mighty genius. The verse of
Milton is sometimes wanting in grace, and almost always in ease; but
what better can be said of his prose? His foreign idioms are too
frequent in the one; but they predominate in the other.

     [987] Par. Lost, xi., 386.

|Its progress to fame.|

34. The slowness of Milton’s advance to glory is now generally owned
to have been much exaggerated; we might say that the reverse was
nearer the truth. “The sale of 1,300 copies in two years,” says
Johnson, “in opposition to so much recent enmity, and to a style of
versification new to all and disgusting to many, was an uncommon
example of the prevalence of genius. The demand did not immediately
increase; for many more readers than were supplied at first the nation
did not afford. Only 3,000 were sold in eleven years.” It would hardly
however be said, even in this age, of a poem 3,000 copies of which had
been sold in eleven years, that its success had been small; and I have
some few doubts, whether Paradise Lost, published eleven years since,
would have met with a greater demand. There is sometimes a want of
congeniality in public taste which no power of genius will overcome.
For Milton it must be said by every one conversant with the literature
of the age that preceded Addison’s famous criticism, from which some
have dated the reputation of Paradise Lost, that he took his place
among great poets from the beginning. The fancy of Johnston that few
dared to praise it, and that “the revolution put an end to the secrecy
of love,” is without foundation; the government of Charles II. was not
so absurdly tyrannical, nor did Dryden, the court’s own poet,
hesitate, in his preface to the State of Innocence, published soon
after Milton’s death, to speak of its original, Paradise Lost, as
“undoubtedly one of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime poems
which either this age or nation has produced.”

|Paradise Regained.|

35. The neglect which Paradise Lost never experienced, seems to have
been long the lot of Paradise Regained. It was not popular with the
world; it was long believed to manifest a decay of the poet’s genius,
and, in spite of all the critics have written, it is still but the
favourite of some whose predilections for the Miltonic style are very
strong. The subject is so much less capable of calling forth the vast
powers of his mind, that we should be unfair in comparing it
throughout with the greater poem; it has been called a model of the
shorter epic, an action comprehending few characters and a brief space
of time.[988] The love of Milton for dramatic dialogue, imbibed from
Greece, is still more apparent than in Paradise Lost; the whole poem,
in fact, may almost be accounted a drama of primal simplicity, the
narrative and descriptive part serving rather to diversify and relieve
the speeches of the actors, than their speeches, as in the legitimate
epic, to enliven the narration. Paradise Regained abounds with
passages equal to any of the same nature in Paradise Lost; but the
argumentative tone is kept up till it produces some tediousness, and
perhaps, on the whole, less pains have been exerted to adorn and
elevate even that which appeals to the imagination.

     [988] Todd’s Milton, vol. v., p. 308.

|Samson Agonistes.|

36. Samson Agonistes is the latest of Milton’s poems; we see in it,
perhaps, more distinctly than in Paradise Regained, the ebb of a
mighty tide. An air of uncommon grandeur prevails throughout; but the
language is less poetical than in Paradise Lost; the vigour of thought
remains, but it wants much of its ancient eloquence. Nor is the lyric
tone well kept up by the chorus; they are too sententious, too slow in
movement, and, except by the metre, are not easily distinguishable
from the other personages. But this metre is itself infelicitous; the
lines being frequently of a number of syllables, not recognised in the
usage of English poetry, and, destitute of rhythmical language, fall
into prose. Milton seems to have forgotten that the ancient chorus had
a musical accompaniment.

37. The style of Samson, being essentially that of Paradise Lost, may
show us how much more the latter poem is founded on the Greek
tragedians than on Homer. In Samson we have sometimes the pompous tone
of Æschylus, more frequently the sustained majesty of Sophocles; but
the religious solemnity of Milton’s own temperament, as well as the
nature of the subject, have given a sort of breadth, an unbroken
severity, to the whole drama. It is, perhaps, not very popular even
with the lovers of poetry; yet, upon close comparison, we should find
that it deserves a higher place than many of its prototypes. We might
search the Greek tragedies long for a character so powerfully
conceived and maintained as that of Samson himself; and it is only
conformable to the sculptural simplicity of that form of drama which
Milton adopted, that all the rest should be kept in subordination to
it. “It is only,” Johnson says, “by a blind confidence in the
reputation of Milton, that a drama can be praised in which the
intermediate parts have neither cause nor consequence, neither hasten
nor retard the catastrophe.” Such a drama is certainly not to be
ranked with Othello and Macbeth, or even with the Œdipus or the
Hippolytus; but a similar criticism is applicable to several famous
tragedies in the less artificial school of antiquity, to the
Prometheus and the Persæ of Æschylus, and if we look strictly, to not
a few of the two other masters.

|Dryden. His earlier poems.|

38. The poetical genius of Dryden came slowly to perfection. Born in
1631, his first short poems, or, as we might rather say, copies of
verses, were not written till he approached thirty; and though some of
his dramas, not indeed of the best, belong to the next period of his
life, he had reached the age of fifty, before his high rank as
a poet had been confirmed by indubitable proof. Yet he had manifested
a superiority to his immediate contemporaries; his Astræa Redux, on
the Restoration, is well versified; the lines are seldom weak, the
couplets have that pointed manner which Cowley and Denham had taught
the world to require; they are harmonious, but not so varied as the
style he afterwards adopted. The Annus Mirabilis, in 1667, is of a
higher cast; it is not so animated as the later poetry of Dryden,
because the alternate quatrain, in which he followed Davenant’s
Gondibert, is hostile to animation; but it is not less favourable to
another excellence, condensed and vigorous thought. Davenant, indeed,
and Denham may be reckoned the models of Dryden, so far as this can be
said of a man of original genius, and one far superior to theirs. The
distinguishing characteristic of Dryden, it has been said by Scott,
was the power of reasoning and expressing the result in appropriate
language. This, indeed, was the characteristic of the two we have
named, and so far as Dryden has displayed it, which he eminently has
done, he bears a resemblance to them. But it is insufficient praise
for this great poet. His rapidity of conception and readiness of
expression are higher qualities. He never loiters about a single
thought or image, never labours about the turn of a phrase. The
impression upon our minds that he wrote with exceeding ease, is
irresistible, and I do not know that we have any evidence to repel it.
The admiration of Dryden gains upon us, if I may speak from my own
experience, with advancing years, as we become more sensible of the
difficulty of his style, and of the comparative facility of that which
is merely imaginative.

|Absalom and Achitophel.|

39. Dryden may be considered as a satirical, a reasoning, a
descriptive and narrative, a lyric poet, and as a translator. As a
dramatist, we must return to him again. The greatest of his satires is
Absalom and Achitophel, that work in which his powers became fully
known to the world, and which, as many think, he never surpassed. The
admirable fitness of the English couplet for satire had never been
shown before; in less skilful hands it had been ineffective. He does
not frequently, in this poem, carry the sense beyond the second line,
which, for the most part, enfeebles the emphasis; his triplets are
less numerous than usual, but energetic. The spontaneous ease of
expression, the rapid transitions, the general elasticity and movement
have never been excelled. It is superfluous to praise the
discrimination and vivacity of the chief characters, especially
Shaftesbury and Buckingham. Satire, however, is so much easier than
panegyric, that with Ormond, Ossory, and Mulgrave, he has not been
quite so successful. In the second part of Absalom and Achitophel,
written by Tate, one long passage alone is inserted by Dryden. It is
excellent in its line of satire, but the line is less elevated; the
persons delineated are less important, and he has indulged more his
natural proneness to virulent ribaldry. This fault of Dryden’s
writings, it is just to observe, belonged less to the man than to the
age. No libellous invective, no coarseness of allusion, had ever been
spared towards a private or political enemy. We read with nothing but
disgust the satirical poetry of Cleveland, Butler, Oldham, and
Marvell, or even of men whose high rank did not soften their style,
Rochester, Dorset, Mulgrave. In Dryden there was, for the first time,
a poignancy of wit which atones for his severity, and a discretion
even in his taunts which made them more cutting.

|Mac Flecknoe.|

40. The Medal, which is in some measure a continuation of Absalom and
Achitophel, as it bears wholly on Shaftesbury, is of unequal merit,
and on the whole falls much below the former. In Mac Flecknoe, his
satire on his rival Shadwell, we must allow for the inferiority of the
subject, which could not bring out so much of Dryden’s higher powers
of mind; but scarcely one of his poems is more perfect. Johnson, who
admired Dryden almost as much as he could anyone, has yet, from his
proneness to critical censure, very much exaggerated the poet’s
defects. “His faults of negligence are beyond recital. Such is the
unevenness of his compositions, that ten lines are seldom found
together without something of which the reader is ashamed.” This might
be true, or more nearly true, of other poets of the seventeenth
century. Ten good consecutive lines will, perhaps, rarely be found,
except in Denham, Davenant and Waller. But it seems a great
exaggeration as to Dryden. I would particularly instance Mac Flecknoe
as a poem of about four hundred lines, in which no one will be
condemned as weak or negligent, though three or four are rather too
ribaldrous for our taste. There are also passages, much exceeding ten
lines, in Absalom and Achitophel, as well as in the later works, the
Fables, which excite in the reader none of the shame for the poet’s
carelessness, with which Johnson has furnished him.

|The Hind and Panther.|

41. The argumentative talents of Dryden appear, more or less, in the
greater part of his poetry; reason in rhyme was his peculiar delight,
to which he seems to escape from the mere excursions of fancy. And it
is remarkable that he reasons better and more closely in poetry than
in prose. His productions more exclusively reasoning are the Religio
Laici and the Hind and Panther. The latter is every way an
extraordinary poem. It was written in the hey-day of exultation, by a
recent proselyte to a winning side, as he dreamed it to be, by one who
never spared a weaker foe, nor repressed his triumph with a dignified
moderation. A year was hardly to elapse before he exchanged this
fulness of pride for an old age of disappointment and poverty. Yet
then too his genius was unquenched, and even his satire was not less
severe.

|Its singular fable.|

42. The first lines in the Hind and Panther are justly reputed among
the most musical in our language; and perhaps we observe their rhythm
the better because it does not gain much by the sense; for the
allegory and the fable are seen, even in this commencement, to be
awkwardly blended. Yet, notwithstanding their evident incoherence,
which sometimes leads to the verge of absurdity, and the facility they
give to ridicule, I am not sure that Dryden was wrong in choosing this
singular fiction. It was his aim to bring forward an old argument in
as novel a style as he could; a dialogue between a priest and a parson
would have made but a dull poem, even if it had contained some of the
excellent paragraphs we read in the Hind and Panther. It is the
grotesqueness and originality of the fable that give this poem its
peculiar zest, of which no reader, I conceive, is insensible; and it
is also by this means that Dryden has contrived to relieve his
reasoning by short but beautiful touches of description, such as the
sudden stream of light from heaven which announces the conception of
James’s unfortunate heir near the end of the second book.

|Its reasoning.|

43. The wit in the Hind and Panther is sharp, ready, and pleasant, the
reasoning is sometimes admirably close and strong; it is the energy of
Bossuet in verse. I do not know that the main argument of the Roman
church could be better stated; all that has been well said for
tradition and authority, all that serves to expose the inconsistencies
of a vacillating protestantism, is in the Hind’s mouth. It is such an
answer as a candid man should admit to any doubts of Dryden’s
sincerity. He who could argue as powerfully as the Hind may well be
allowed to have thought himself in the right. Yet he could not forget
a few bold thoughts of his more sceptical days, and such is his bias
to sarcasm that he cannot restrain himself from reflections on kings
and priests when he is most contending for them.[989]

     [989]
     By education most have been misled;
     So they believe because they so were bred.
     The priest continues what the nurse began,
     And thus the child imposes on the man.
                                     Part. iii.

     “Call you this backing of your friends?” his new allies might
     have said.

|The Fables.|

44. The Fables of Dryden, or stories modernised from Boccaccio and
Chaucer, are at this day probably the most read and the most popular
of Dryden’s poems. They contain passages of so much more impressive
beauty, and are altogether so far more adapted to general sympathy
than those we have mentioned, that I should not hesitate to concur in
this judgment. Yet Johnson’s accusation of negligence is better
supported by these than by the earlier poems. Whether it were that age
and misfortune, though they had not impaired the poet’s vigour, had
rendered its continual exertion more wearisome, or, as is perhaps the
better supposition, he reckoned an easy style, sustained above prose,
in some places, rather by metre than expression, more fitted to
narration, we find much which might appear slovenly to critics of
Johnson’s temper. He seems, in fact, to have conceived, like Milton, a
theory that good writing, at least in verse, is never either to follow
the change of fashion, or to sink into familiar phrase, and that any
deviation from this rigour should be branded as low and colloquial.
But Dryden wrote on a different plan. He thought, like Ariosto, and
like Chaucer, whom he had to improve, that a story, especially when
not heroic, should be told in easy and flowing language, without too
much difference from that of prose, relying on his harmony, his
occasional inversions, and his concealed skill in the choice of words,
for its effect on the reader. He found also a tone of popular idiom,
not perhaps old English idiom, but such as had crept into society,
current among his contemporaries; and though this has in many cases
now become insufferably vulgar, and in others looks like affectation,
we should make some allowance for the times in condemning it. This
last blemish, however, is not much imputable to the Fables. Their
beauties are innumerable; yet few are very well chosen; some, as
Guiscard and Sigismunda, he has injured through coarseness of mind,
which neither years nor religion had purified; and we want in all the
power over emotion, the charm of sympathy, the skilful arrangement and
selection of circumstance, which narrative poetry claims as its
highest graces.

|His Odes--Alexander’s Feast.|

45. Dryden’s fame as a lyric poet depends a very little on his Ode on
Mrs. Killigrew’s death, but almost entirely on that song for St.
Cecilia’s Day, commonly called Alexander’s Feast. The former, which is
much praised by Johnson, has a few fine lines, mingled with a far
greater number ill conceived and ill expressed; the whole composition
has that spirit which Dryden hardly ever wanted, but it is too faulty
for high praise. The latter used to pass for the best work of Dryden
and the best ode in the language. Many would now agree with me that it
is neither one nor the other and that it was rather over-rated during
a period when criticism was not at a high point. Its excellence indeed
is undeniable; it has the raciness, the rapidity, the mastery of
language which belong to Dryden; the transitions are animated, the
contrasts effective. But few lines are highly poetical, and some sink
to the level of a common drinking song. It has the defects, as well as
the merits of that poetry which is written for musical accompaniment.

|His translation of Virgil.|

46. Of Dryden as a translator it is needless to say much. In some
instances, as in an ode of Horace, he has done extremely well; but his
Virgil is, in my apprehension, the least successful of his chief
works. Lines of consummate excellence are frequently shot, like
threads of gold, through the web; but the general texture is of an
ordinary material. Dryden was little fitted for a translator of
Virgil; his mind was more rapid and vehement than that of his
original, but by far less elegant and judicious. This translation
seems to have been made in haste; it is more negligent than any of his
own poetry, and the style is often almost studiously, and as it were
spitefully, vulgar.

|Decline of poetry from the Restoration.|

|Some minor poets enumerated.|

47. The supremacy of Dryden from the death of Milton in 1674 to his
own in 1700 was not only unapproached by any English poet, but he held
almost a complete monopoly of English poetry. This latter period of
the seventeenth century, setting aside these two great names, is one
remarkably sterile in poetical genius. Under the first Stuarts, men of
warm imagination and sensibility, though with deficient taste and
little command of language, had done some honour to our literature;
though once neglected, they have come forward again in public esteem,
and if not very extensively read, have been valued by men of kindred
minds full as much as they deserve. The versifiers of Charles II. and
William’s days have experienced the opposite fate; popular for a time,
and long so far known at least by name as to have entered rather
largely into collections of poetry, they are now held in no regard,
nor do they claim much favour from just criticism. Their object in
general was to write like men of the world; with ease, wit, sense, and
spirit, but dreading any soaring of fancy, any ardour of moral
emotion, as the probable source of ridicule in their readers. Nothing
quenches the flame of poetry more than this fear of the prosaic
multitude, unless it is the community of habits with this very
multitude; a life such as these poets generally led, of taverns and
brothels, or, what came much to the same, of the court. We cannot say
of Dryden, that “he bears no traces of those sable streams;” they
sully too much the plumage of that stately swan, but his indomitable
genius carries him upwards to a purer empyrean. The rest are just
distinguishable from one another, not by any high gifts of the muse,
but by degrees of spirit, of ease, of poignancy, of skill and harmony
in versification, of good sense and acuteness. They may easily be
disposed of. Cleveland is sometimes humorous, but succeeds only in the
lightest kinds of poetry. Marvell wrote sometimes with more taste and
feeling than was usual, but his satires are gross and stupid. Oldham,
far superior in this respect, ranks perhaps next to Dryden; he is
spirited and pointed, but his versification is too negligent, and his
subjects temporary. Roscommon, one of the best for harmony and
correctness of language, has little vigour, but he never offends, and
Pope has justly praised his “unspotted bays.” Mulgrave affects ease
and spirit, but his Essay on Satire belies the supposition that Dryden
had any share in it. Rochester, with more considerable and varied
genius, might have raised himself to a higher place than he holds. Of
Otway, Duke, and several more, it is not worth while to give any
character, The Revolution did nothing for poetry; William’s reign,
always excepting Dryden, is our _nadir_ in works of imagination. Then
came Blackmore with his epic poems of Prince Arthur and King Arthur,
and Pomfret with his Choice, both popular in their own age, and both
intolerable by their frigid and tame monotony in the next. The lighter
poetry, meantime, of song and epigram did not sink along with the
serious; the state of society was much less adverse to it. Rochester,
Dorset, and some more whose names are unknown, or not easily traced,
do credit to the Caroline period.

48. In the year 1699, a poem was published, Garth’s Dispensary, which
deserves attention, not so much for its own merit, though it comes
nearest to Dryden, at whatever interval, as from its indicating a
transitional state in our versification. The general structure of the
couplet through the seventeenth century may be called abnormous; the
sense is not only often carried beyond the second line, which the
French avoid, but the second line of one couplet and the first of the
next are not seldom united in a single sentence or a portion of one,
so that the two, though not rhyming, must be read as a couplet. The
former, when as dexterously managed as it was by Dryden, adds much to
the beauty of the general versification; but the latter, a sort of
adultery of the lines already wedded to other companions at rhyme’s
altar, can scarcely ever be pleasing, unless it be in narrative
poetry, where it may bring the sound nearer to prose. A tendency,
however, to the French rule of constantly terminating the sense with
the couplet, will be perceived to have increased from the Restoration.
Roscommon seldom deviates from it, and in long passages of Dryden
himself there will hardly be found an exception. But, perhaps, it had
not been so uniform in any former production as in the Dispensary. The
versification of this once famous mock-heroic poem is smooth and
regular, but not forcible; the language clear and neat; the parodies
and allusions happy. Many lines are excellent in the way of pointed
application, and some are remembered and quoted, where few call to
mind the author. It has been remarked that Garth enlarged and altered
the Dispensary in almost every edition, and what is more uncommon,
that every alteration was for the better. This poem may be called an
imitation of the Lutrin, inasmuch as but for the Lutrin, it might
probably not have been written, and there are even particular
resemblances. The subject, which is a quarrel between the physicians
and apothecaries of London, may vie with that of Boileau in want of
general interest; yet it seems to afford more diversity to the
satirical poet. Garth, as has been intimated, is a link of transition
between the style and turn of poetry under Charles and William, and
that we find in Addison, Prior, Tickell, and Pope, in the reign of
Anne.


                             SECT. IV.

                         ON LATIN POETRY.

|Latin poets of Italy.|

|Ceva.|

|Sergardi.|

49. The Jesuits were not unmindful of the credit their Latin verses
had done them in periods more favourable to that exercise of taste
than the present. Even in Italy, which had ceased to be a very genial
soil, one of their number, Ceva, may deserve mention. His Jesus Puer
is a long poem, not inelegantly written, but rather singular in some
of its descriptions, where the poet has been more solicitous to adorn
his subject than attentive to its proper character; and the same
objection might be made to some of its episodes. Ceva wrote also a
philosophical poem, extolled by Corniani, but which has not fallen
into my hands.[990] Averani, a Florentine of various erudition,
Cappellari, Strozzi, author of a poem on chocolate, and several
others, both within the order of Loyola and without it, cultivated
Latin poetry with some success.[991] But, though some might be
superior as poets, none were more remarkable or famous than Sergardi,
best known by some biting satires under the name of Q. Sectanus, which
he levelled at his personal enemy Gravina. The reputation, indeed, of
Gravina with posterity has not been affected by such libels; but they
are not wanting either in poignancy and spirit, or in a command of
Latin phrase.[992]

     [990] Corniani, viii., 214. Salfi, xiv., 257.

     [991] Bibl. Choisie, vol. xxii. Salfi, xiv., 238, et post.

     [992] Salfi, xiv., 299. Corniani, viii., 280.

|Of France--Quillet.|

50. The superiority of France in Latin verse was no longer contested
by Holland or Germany. Several poets of real merit belong to this
period. The first in time was Claude Quillet, who, in his Callipædia,
bears the Latinised name of Leti. This is written with much elegance
of style and a very harmonious versification. No writer has a more
Virgilian cadence. Though inferior to Sammarthanus, he may be reckoned
high among the French poets. He has been reproached with too open an
exposition of some parts of his subject; which applies only to the
second book.

|Menage.|

51. The Latin poems of Menage are not unpleasing; he has, indeed, no
great fire or originality, but the harmonious couplets glide over the
ear, and the mind is pleased to recognise the tesselated fragments
of Ovid and Tibullus. His affected passion for Mademoiselle Lavergne,
and lamentations about her cruelty are ludicrous enough, when we
consider the character of the man, as Vadius in the Femmes Savantes of
Molière. They are perfect models of want of truth; but it is a want of
truth to nature, not to the conventional forms of modern Latin verse.

|Rapin on gardens.|

52. A far superior performance is the poem on gardens, by the Jesuit,
Réné Rapin. For skill in varying and adorning his subject, for a truly
Virgilian spirit in expression, for the exclusion of feeble, prosaic,
or awkward lines, he may, perhaps, be equal to any poet, to
Sammarthanus, or to Sannazarius himself. His cadences are generally
very gratifying to the ear, and in this respect he is much above
Vida.[993] But his subject, or his genius, has prevented him from
rising very high; he is the poet of gardens, and what gardens are to
nature, that is he to mightier poets. There is also too monotonous a
repetition of nearly the same images, as in his long enumeration of
flowers in the first book; the descriptions are separately good, and
great artifice is shown in varying them; but the variety could not be
sufficient to remove the general sameness that belongs to a
horticultural catalogue. Rapin was a great admirer of box and all
topiary works, or trees cut into artificial forms.

     [993] As the poem of Rapin is not in the hands of everyone who
     has taste for Latin poetry, I will give as a specimen the
     introduction to the second book:--

     Me nemora atque omnis nemorum pulcherrimus ordo,
     Et spatia umbrandum latè fundanda per hortum
     Invitant; hortis nam si florentibus umbra
     Abfuerit, reliquo deerit sua gratia ruri.
     Vos grandes luci et silvæ aspirate canenti;
     Is mihi contingat vestro de munere ramus,
     Unde sacri quando velant sua tempora vates,
     Ipse et amem meritam capiti imposuisse coronam.
     Jam se cantanti frondosa cacumina quercus
     Inclinant, plauduntque comis nemora alta coruscis.
     Ipsa mihi læto fremitu, assensuque secundo
     E totis plausum responsat Gallia silvis.
     Nec me deinde suo teneat clamore Cithæron,
     Mænalaque Arcadicis toties lustrata deabus.
     Non Dodonæi saltus, silvæque Molorchi,
     Aut nigris latè ilicibus nemorosa Calydne,
     Et quos carminibus celebravit fabula lucos:
     Una meos cantus tellus jam Franca moretur,
     Quæ tot nobilibus passim lætissima silvis,
     Conspicienda sui latè miracula ruris
     Ostendit, lucisque solum commendat amœnis.

     One or two words in these lines are not strictly correct; but
     they are highly Virgilian, both in manner and rhythm.

53. The first book of the Gardens of Rapin is on flowers, the second
on trees, the third on waters, and the fourth on fruits. The poem is
of about 3,000 lines, sustained with equable dignity. All kinds of
graceful associations are mingled with the description of his flowers,
in the fanciful style of Ovid and Darwin; the violet is Ianthis, who
lurked in valleys to shun the love of Apollo, and stained her face
with purple to preserve her chastity; the rose is Rhodanthe, proud of
her beauty, and worshipped by the people in the place of Diana, but
changed by the indignant Apollo to a tree, while the populace, who had
adored her, are converted into her thorns, and her chief lovers into
snails and butterflies. A tendency to conceit is perceived in Rapin,
as in the two poets to whom we have just compared him. Thus, in some
pretty lines, he supposes Nature to have “tried her ‘prentice hand” in
making a convolvulus before she ventured upon a lily.[994]

     [994]
     Et tu rumpis humum et multo te flore profundis,
     Qui riguas inter serpis, convolvule, valles;
     Dulce rudimentum meditantis lilia quondam
     Naturæ, cum sese opera ad majora pararet.

54. In Rapin there will generally be remarked a certain redundancy,
which fastidious critics might call tautology of expression. But this
is not uncommon in Virgil. The Georgics have rarely been more happily
imitated, especially in their didactic parts, than by Rapin in the
Gardens; but he has not the high flights of his prototype; his
digressions are short and belong closely to the subject; we have no
plague, no civil war, no Eurydice. If he praises Louis XIV., it is
more as the founder of the garden of Versailles, than as the conqueror
of Flanders, though his concluding lines emulate, with no unworthy
spirit, those of the last Georgic.[995] It may be added, that
some French critics have thought the famous poem of Delille on the
same subject inferior to that of Rapin.

     [995]
     Hæc magni insistens vestigia sacra Maronis,
     Re super hortensi, Claro de monte canebam,
     Lutetia in magna; quo tempore Francica tellus
     Rege beata suo, rebusque superba secundis,
     Et sua per populos latè dare jura volentes
     Cæperat, et toti jam morem imponere mundo.

|Santeul.|

55. Santeul (or Santolius) has been reckoned one of the best Latin
poets whom France ever produced. He began by celebrating the victories
of Louis and the virtues of contemporary heroes. A nobleness of
thought and a splendour of language distinguish the poetry of Santeul,
who furnished many inscriptions for public monuments. The hymns which
he afterwards wrote for the breviary of the church of Paris have been
still more admired, and at the request of others he enlarged his
collection of sacred verse. But I have not read the poetry of Santeul,
and give only the testimony of French critics.[996]

     [996] Baillet. Biogr. Universelle.

|Latin Poetry in England.|

56. England might justly boast, in the earlier part of the century,
her Milton; nay, I do not know that, with the exception of a
well-known and very pleasing poem, though perhaps hardly of classical
simplicity, by Cowley on himself, Epitaphium Vivi Auctoris, we can
produce anything equally good in this period. The Latin verse of
Barrow is forcible and full of mind, but not sufficiently redolent of
antiquity.[997] Yet versification became, about the time of the
Restoration, if not the distinctive study, at least the favourite
exercise, of the university of Oxford. The collection entitled Musæ
Anglicanæ, published near the end of the century, contains little from
any other quarter. Many of these relate to the political themes of the
day, and eulogise the reigning king, Charles, James, or William;
others are on philosophical subjects, which they endeavour to decorate
with classical phrase. The character of this collection does not, on
the whole, pass mediocrity; they are often incorrect and somewhat
turgid, but occasionally display a certain felicity in adapting
ancient lines to their subject, and some liveliness of invention. The
golden age of Latin verse in England was yet to come.

     [997] Walker’s Memoir on Italian Tragedy, p. 201. Salfi, xii. 57.




                          CHAPTER XXXII.

          HISTORY OF DRAMATIC LITERATURE FROM 1650 TO 1700.


                             SECT. I.

_Racine--Minor French Tragedians--Molière--Regnard, and other Comic
Writers._

|Italian and Spanish drama.|

1. Few tragedies or dramatic works of any kind are now recorded by
historians of Italian literature; those of Delfino, afterwards
patriarch of Aquileia, which are esteemed among the best, were
possibly written before the middle of the century, and were not
published till after its termination. The Corradino of Caraccio, in
1694, was also valued at the time.[998] Nor can Spain arrest us
longer; the school of Calderon in national comedy extended no doubt
beyond the death of Philip IV., in 1665, and many of his own religious
pieces are of as late a date; nor were names wholly wanting, which are
said to merit remembrance, in the feeble reign of Charles II., but
they must be left for such as make a particular study of Spanish
literature.[999] We are called to a nobler stage.

     [998] The following stanzas on an erring conscience will
     sufficiently prove this:--

       Tyranne vitæ, fax temeraria,
       Infide dux, ignobile vinculum,
       Sidus dolosum, ænigma præsens,
       Ingenui labyrinthe voti,
     Assensus errans, invalidæ potens
     Mentis propago, quam vetuit Deus
       Nasci, sed ortæ principatum
       Attribuit, regimenque sanctum, &c.

     [999] Bouterwek.

|Racine’s first tragedies.|

2. Corneille belongs in his glory to the earlier period of this
century, though his inferior tragedies, more numerous than the better,
would fall within the later. Fontenelle, indeed, as a devoted admirer,
attributes considerable merit to those which the general voice
both of critics and of the public had condemned.[1000] Meantime,
another luminary arose on the opposite side of the horizon. The first
tragedy of Jean Racine, Les Frères Ennemis, was represented in 1664,
when he was twenty-five years of age. It is so far below his great
works, as to be scarcely mentioned, yet does not want indications of
the genius they were to display. Alexandre, in 1665, raised the young
poet to more distinction. It is said that he showed this tragedy to
Corneille, who praised his versification, but advised him to avoid a
path which he was not fitted to tread. It is acknowledged by the
advocates of Racine that the characters are feebly drawn, and that the
conqueror of Asia sinks to the level of a hero in one of those
romances of gallantry which had vitiated the taste of France.

     [1000] Hist. du Théâtre François, in Œuvres de Fontenelle,
     iii., 111. St. Evremond also despised the French public for not
     admiring the Sophonisbe of Corneille, which he had made too Roman
     for their taste.

|Andromaque.|

3. The glory of Racine commenced with the representation of his
Andromaque in 1667, which was not printed till the end of the
following year. He was now at once compared with Corneille, and the
scales have been oscillating ever since. Criticism, satire, epigrams,
were unsparingly launched against the rising poet. But his rival
pursued the worst policy by obstinately writing bad tragedies. The
public naturally compare the present with the present, and forget the
past. When he gave them Pertharite, they were dispensed from looking
back to Cinna. It is acknowledged even by Fontenelle that, during the
height of Racine’s fame, the world placed him at least on an equality
with his predecessor; a decision from which that critic, the relation
and friend of Corneille, appeals to what he takes to be the verdict of
a later age.

4. The Andromaque was sufficient to show that Racine had more skill in
the management of a plot, in the display of emotion, in power over the
sympathy of the spectator, at least where the gentler feelings are
concerned, in beauty and grace of style, in all except nobleness of
character, strength of thought, and impetuosity of language. He took
his fable from Euripides, but changed it according to the requisitions
of the French theatre and of French manners. Some of these changes are
for the better, as the substitution of Astyanax for an unknown
Molossus of the Greek tragedian, the supposed son of Andromache by
Pyrrhus. “Most of those,” says Racine himself very justly, “who have
heard of Andromache, know her only as the widow of Hector and the
mother of Astyanax. They cannot reconcile themselves to her loving
another husband and another son.” And he has finely improved this
happy idea of preserving Astyanax, by making the Greeks, jealous of
his name, send an embassy by Orestes to demand his life; at once
deepening the interest and developing the plot.

5. The female characters, Andromache and Hermione are drawn with all
Racine’s delicate perception of ideal beauty; the one, indeed,
prepared for his hand by those great masters in whose school he had
disciplined his own gifts of nature, Homer, Euripides, Virgil; the
other more original and more full of dramatic effect. It was, as we
are told, the fine acting of Mademoiselle de Champmelé in this part,
generally reckoned one of the most difficult on the French stage,
which secured the success of the play. Racine, after the first
representation, threw himself at her feet in a transport of gratitude,
which was soon changed to love. It is more easy to censure some of the
other characters. Pyrrhus is bold, haughty, passionate, the true son
of Achilles, except where he appears as the lover of Andromache. It is
inconceivable and truly ridiculous that a Greek of the heroic age, and
such a Greek as Pyrrhus is represented by those whose imagination has
given him existence, should feel the respectful passion towards his
captive which we might reasonably expect in the romances of chivalry,
or should express it in the tone of conventional gallantry that suited
the court of Versailles. But Orestes is far worse; love-mad, and yet
talking in gallant conceits, cold and polite, he discredits the poet,
the tragedy, and the son of Agamemnon himself. It is better to kill
one’s mother than to utter such trash. In hinting that the previous
madness of Orestes was for the sake of Hermione, Racine has presumed
too much on the ignorance, and too much on the bad taste, of his
audience. But far more injudicious is his fantastic remorse and the
supposed vision of the Furies in the last scene. It is astonishing
that Racine should have challenged comparison with one of the most
celebrated scenes of Euripides in circumstances that deprived him of
the possibility of rendering his own effective. For the style of the
Andromaque, it abounds with grace and beauty; but there are, to my
apprehension, more insipid and feeble lines, and a more effeminate
tone, than in his later tragedies.

|Britannicus.|

6. Britannicus appeared in 1669; and in this admirable play Racine
first showed that he did not depend on the tone of gallantry usual
among his courtly hearers, nor on the languid sympathies that it
excites. Terror and pity, the twin spirits of tragedy, to whom
Aristotle has assigned the great moral office of purifying the
passions, are called forth in their shadowy forms to sustain the
consummate beauties of his diction. His subject was original and
happy; with that historic truth which usage required, and that
poetical probability which fills up the outline of historic truth
without disguising it. What can be more entirely dramatic, what more
terrible in the sense that Aristotle means (that is, the spectator’s
sympathy with the dangers of the innocent), than the absolute master
of the world, like the veiled prophet of Khorasan, throwing off the
appearances of virtue, and standing out at once in the maturity of
enormous guilt! A presaging gloom, like that which other poets have
sought by the hackneyed artifices of superstition, hangs over the
scenes of this tragedy, and deepens at its close. We sympathise by
turns with the guilty alarms of Agrippina, the virtuous consternation
of Burrhus, the virgin modesty of Junia, the unsuspecting
ingenuousness of Britannicus. Few tragedies on the French stage, or
indeed on any stage, save those of Shakspeare, display so great a
variety of contrasted characters. None, indeed, are ineffective,
except the confidante of Agrippina; for Narcissus is very far from
being the mere confidant of Nero; he is, as in history, his preceptor
in crime; and his cold villainy is well contrasted with the fierce
passion of the despot. The criticisms of Fontenelle and others on
small incidents in the plot, such as the concealment of Nero behind a
curtain, that he may hear the dialogue between Junia and Britannicus,
which is certainly more fit for comedy, ought not to weigh against
such excellence as we find in all the more essential requisites of a
tragic drama. Racine had much improved his language since Andromaque;
the conventional phraseology about flames and fine eyes, though not
wholly relinquished, is less frequent; and if he has not here reached,
as he never did, the peculiar impetuosity of Corneille, nor given to
his Romans the grandeur of his predecessor’s conception, he is full of
lines wherein, as every word is effective, there can hardly be any
deficiency of vigour. It is the vigour indeed of Virgil, not of Lucan.

7. In one passage, Racine has, I think, excelled Shakspeare. They have
both taken the same idea from Plutarch. The lines of Shakspeare are in
Antony and Cleopatra:

  Thy demon, that’s the spirit that keeps thee, is
  Noble, courageous, high, unmatchable,
  Where Cæsar’s is not; but near him, thy angel
  Becomes a fear, as being o’erpowered.

These are, to my apprehension, not very forcible, and obscure even to
those who know, what many do not, that by “a fear” he meant a common
goblin, a supernatural being of a more plebeian rank than a demon or
angel. The single verse of Racine is magnificent:

  Mon génie étonné tremble devant le sien.

|Berenice.|

8. Berenice, the next tragedy of Racine, is a surprising proof of what
can be done by a great master; but it must be admitted that it wants
many of the essential qualities that are required in the drama. It
might almost be compared with Timon of Athens, by the absence of fable
and movement. For nobleness and delicacy of sentiment, for grace of
style, it deserves every praise; but is rather tedious in the closet,
and must be far more so on the stage. This is the only tragedy of
Racine, unless, perhaps, we except Athalie, in which the story
presents an evident moral; but no poet is more uniformly moral in his
sentiments. Corneille, to whom the want of dramatic fable was never
any great objection, attempted the subject of Berenice about the same
time with far inferior success. It required what he could not give,
the picture of two hearts struggling against a noble and a blameless
love.

|Bajazet.|

9. It was unfortunate for Racine that he did not more frequently break
through the prejudices of the French theatre in favour of classical
subjects. A field was open of almost boundless extent, the mediæval
history of Europe, and especially of France herself. His predecessor
had been too successful in the Cid to leave it doubtful whether an
audience would approve such an innovation at the hands of a favoured
tragedian. Racine, however, did not venture on a step, which, in the
next century, Voltaire turned so much to account, and which made the
fortune of some inferior tragedies. But, considering the distance of
place equivalent, for the ends of the drama, to that of time, he
founded on an event in the Turkish history not more than thirty years
before his next tragedy, that of Bajazet. Most part, indeed, of the
fable is due to his own invention. Bajazet is reckoned to fall below
most of his other tragedies in beauty of style; but the fable is well
connected; there is a great deal of movement, and an unintermitting
interest is sustained by Bajazet and Atalide, two of the noblest
characters that Racine has drawn. Atalide has not the ingenuous
simplicity of Junie, but displays a more dramatic flow of sentiment,
and not less dignity or tenderness of soul. The character of Roxane is
conceived with truth and spirit; nor is the resemblance some have
found in it to that of Hermione greater than belongs to forms of the
same type. Acomat, the vizir, is more a favourite with the French
critics; but in such parts Racine does not rise to the level of
Corneille. No poet is less exposed to the imputation of bombastic
exaggeration; yet, in the two lines with which Acomat concludes the
fourth act, there seems almost an approach to burlesque; and one can
hardly say that they would have been out of place in Tom Thumb:

  Mourons, moi, cher Osmin, comme un vizir, et toi,
  Comme le favori d’un homme tel que moi.

|Mithridate.|

10. The next tragedy was Mithridate; and in this Racine has been
thought to have wrestled against Corneille on his own ground, the
display of the unconquerable mind of a hero. We find in the part of
Mithridate, a great depth of thought in compressed and energetic
language. But, unlike the masculine characters of Corneille, he is not
merely sententious. Racine introduces no one for the sake of the
speeches he has to utter. In Mithridates he took what history has
delivered to us, blending with it no improbable fiction according to
the manners of the East. His love for Monime has nothing in it
extraordinary, or unlike what we might expect from the king of Pontus;
it is a fierce, a jealous, a vindictive love; the necessities of the
French language alone, and the usages of the French theatre, could
make it appear feeble. His two sons are naturally less effective; but
the loveliness of Monime yields to no female character of Racine.
There is something not quite satisfactory in the stratagems which
Mithridates employs to draw from her a confession of her love for his
son. They are not uncongenial to the historic character, but,
according to our chivalrous standard of heroism, seem derogatory to
the poetical.

|Iphigénie.|

11. Iphigénie followed in 1674. In this Racine had again to contend
with Euripides in one of his most celebrated tragedies. He had even,
in the character of Achilles, to contend, not with Homer himself, yet
with the Homeric associations familiar to every classical scholar. The
love, in fact, of Achilles, and his politeness towards Clytemnestra,
are not exempt from a tone of gallantry a little repugnant to our
conception of his manners. Yet the Achilles of Homer is neither
incapable of love nor of courtesy, so that there is no essential
repugnance to his character. That of Iphigenia in Euripides has been
censured by Aristotle as inconsistent: her extreme distress at the
first prospect of death being followed by an unusual display of
courage. Hurd has taken upon him the defence of the Greek tragedian,
and observes, after Brumoy, that the Iphigénie of Racine being
modelled rather after the comment of Aristotle than the example of
Euripides, is so much the worse.[1001] But his apology is too subtle,
and requires too long reflection, for the ordinary spectator; and
though Shakspeare might have managed the transition of feeling with
some of his wonderful knowledge of human nature, it is certainly
presented too crudely by Euripides, and much in the style which I have
elsewhere observed to be too usual with our old dramatists. The
Iphigénie of Racine is not a character, like those of Shakspeare, and
of him perhaps alone, which nothing less than intense meditation can
develop to the reader, but one which a good actress might compass and
a common spectator understand. Racine, like most other tragedians,
wrote for the stage; Shakspeare aimed at a point beyond it, and
sometimes too much lost sight of what it required.

     [1001] Hurd’s Commentary on Horace, vol. i., p. 115.

12. Several critics have censured the part of Eriphile. Yet
Fontenelle, prejudiced as he was against Racine, admits that it is
necessary for the catastrophe, though he cavils, I think, against her
appearance in the earlier part of the play, laying down a rule, by
which our own tragedians would not have chosen to be tried, and which
seems far too rigid, that the necessity of the secondary characters
should be perceived from their first appearance.[1002] The question
for Racine was in what manner he should manage the catastrophe. The
_fabulous truth_, the actual sacrifice of Iphigénia, was so revolting
to the mind, that even Euripides thought himself obliged to depart
from it. But this he effected by a contrivance impossible on the
French stage, and which would have changed Racine’s tragedy to a
common melodrame. It appears to me that he very happily substituted
the character of Eriphile, who, as Fontenelle well says, is the hind
of the fable; and whose impetuous and somewhat disorderly passions
both furnish a contrast to the ideal nobleness of Iphigénia throughout
the tragedy, and reconcile us to her own fate at the close.

     [1002] Réflexions sur la Poétique. Œuvres de Fontenelle,
     vol. iii., p. 149.

|Phèdre.|

13. Once more, in Phèdre, did the great disciple of Euripides attempt
to surpass his master. In both tragedies the character of Phædra
herself throws into shade all the others, but with this important
difference, that in Euripides her death occurs about the middle of the
piece, while she continues in Racine till the conclusion. The French
poet has borrowed much from the Greek, more perhaps than in any former
drama, but has surely heightened the interest, and produced a more
splendid work of genius. I have never read the particular criticism in
which Schlegel has endeavoured to elevate the Hippolytus above the
Phèdre. Many, even among French critics, have objected to the love of
Hippolytus for Aricia, by which Racine has deviated from the
mythological tradition. But we are hardly tied to all the circumstance
of fable; and the cold young huntsman loses nothing in the eyes of a
modern reader by a virtuous attachment. This tragedy is said to be
more open to verbal criticism than the Iphigenie; but in poetical
beauty I do not know that Racine has ever surpassed it. The
description of the death of Hippolytus is perhaps his masterpiece. It
is true that, according to the practice of our own stage, long
descriptions, especially in elaborate language, are out of use; but it
is not, at least, for the advocates of Euripides to blame them.

|Esther.|

|Athalie.|

14. The Phèdre was represented in 1677; and after this its illustrious
author seemed to renounce the stage. His increasing attachment to the
Jansenists made it almost impossible, with any consistency, to promote
an amusement they anathematised. But he was induced, after many years,
in 1689, by Madame de Maintenon, to write Esther for the purpose of
representation by the young ladies whose education she protected at
St. Cyr. Esther, though very much praised for beauty of language, is
admitted to possess little merit as a drama. Much indeed could not be
expected in the circumstances. It was acted at St. Cyr; Louis
applauded, and it is said that the Prince de Condé wept. The greatest
praise of Esther is that it encouraged its author to write Athalie.
Once more restored to dramatic conceptions, his genius revived from
sleep with no loss of the vigour of yesterday. He was even more in
Athalie than in Iphigénie and Britannicus. This great work, published
in 1691, with a royal prohibition to represent it on any theatre,
stands by general consent at the head of all the tragedies of Racine,
for the grandeur, simplicity, and interest of the fable, for dramatic
terror, for theatrical effect, for clear and judicious management, for
bold and forcible, rather than subtle, delineation of character, for
sublime sentiment and imagery. It equals, if it does not, as I should
incline to think, surpass, all the rest in the perfection of style,
and is far more free from every defect, especially from feeble
politeness and gallantry, which of course the subject could not admit.
It has been said that he gave himself the preference to Phèdre; but it
is more extraordinary that not only his enemies, of whom there were
many, but the public itself was for some years incapable of
discovering the merit of Athalie. Boileau declared it to be a
masterpiece, and one can only be astonished that any could have
thought differently from Boileau. It doubtless gained much in general
esteem when it came to be represented by good actors; for no tragedy
in the French language is more peculiarly fitted for the stage.

15. The chorus which he had previously introduced in Esther was a very
bold innovation (for the revival of what is forgotten must always be
classed as innovation), and it required all the skill of Racine to
prevent its appearing in our eyes an impertinent excrescence. But
though we do not, perhaps, wholly reconcile ourselves to some, of the
songs, which too much suggest, by association, the Italian opera, the
chorus of Athalie enhances the interest as well as the splendour of
the tragedy. It was indeed more full of action and scenic pomp than
any he had written, and probably than any other which up to that time
had been represented in France. The part of Athalie predominates, but
not so as to eclipse the rest. The high-priest Joad is drawn with a
stern zeal admirably dramatic, and without which the idolatrous queen
would have trampled down all before her during the conduct of the
fable, whatever justice might have ensued at the last. We feel this
want of an adequate resistance to triumphant crime in the Rodogune of
Corneille. No character appears superfluous or feeble; while the plot
has all the simplicity of the Greek stage, it has all the movement and
continual excitation of the modern.

|Racine’s female characters.|

16. The female characters of Racine are of the greatest beauty; they
have the ideal grace and harmony of ancient sculpture, and bear
somewhat of the same analogy to those of Shakspeare which that art
does to painting. Andromache, Monimia, Iphigénie, we may add Junia,
have a dignity and faultlessness neither unnatural nor insipid,
because they are only the ennobling and purifying of human passions.
They are the forms of possible excellence, not from individual models,
nor likely perhaps to delight every reader, for the same reason that
more eyes are pleased by Titian than by Raphael. But it is a very
narrow criticism which excludes either school from our admiration,
which disparages Racine out of idolatry of Shakspeare. The latter, it
is unnecessary for me to say, stands out of reach of all competition.
But it is not on this account that we are to give up an author so
admirable as Racine.

|Racine compared with Corneille.|

17. The chief faults of Racine may partly be ascribed to the influence
of national taste, though we must confess that Corneille has avoided
them. Though love with him is always tragic and connected with the
heroic passions, never appearing singly, as in several of our own
dramatists, yet it is sometimes unsuitable to the character, and still
more frequently feeble and courtier-like in the expression. In this he
complied too much with the times; but we must believe that he did not
entirely feel that he was wrong. Corneille had, even while Racine was
in his glory, a strenuous band of supporters. Fontenelle, writing in
the next century, declares that time has established a decision in
which most seem to concur, that the first place is due to the elder
poet, the second to the younger; every one making the interval between
them a little greater or less according to his taste.[1003] But
Voltaire, La Harpe, and in general, I apprehend, the later French
critics, have given the preference to Racine. I presume to join my
suffrage to theirs. Racine appears to me the superior tragedian; and I
must add that I think him next to Shakspeare among all the moderns.
The comparison with Euripides is so natural that it can hardly be
avoided. Certainly no tragedy of the Greek poet is so skilful or so
perfect as Athalie or Britannicus. The tedious scenes during which the
action is stagnant, the impertinencies of useless, often perverse
morality, the extinction, by bad management, of the sympathy that had
been raised in the earlier part of a play, the foolish alternation of
repartees in a series of single lines, will never be found in Racine.
But, when we look only at the highest excellencies of Euripides, there
is, perhaps, a depth of pathos and an intensity of dramatic effect
which Racine himself has not attained. The difference between the
energy and sweetness of the two languages is so important in the
comparison, that I shall give even this preference with some
hesitation.

     [1003] P. 118.

|Beauty of his style.|

18. The style of Racine is exquisite. Perhaps he is second only to
Virgil among all poets. But I will give the praise of this in the
words of a native critic. “His expression is always so happy and so
natural, that it seems as if no other could have been found; and every
word is placed in such a manner that we cannot fancy any other place
to have suited it as well. The structure of his style is such that
nothing could be displaced, nothing added, nothing retrenched; it is
one unalterable whole. Even his incorrectnesses are often but
sacrifices required by good taste, nor would anything be more
difficult than to write over again a line of Racine. No one has
enriched the language with a greater number of turns of phrase; no one
is bold with more felicity and discretion, or figurative with more
grace and propriety; no one has handled with more command an idiom
often rebellious, or with more skill an instrument always difficult;
no one has better understood that delicacy of style which must not be
mistaken for feebleness, and is, in fact, but that air of ease which
conceals from the reader the labour of the work and the artifices of
the composition; or better managed the variety of cadences, the
resources of rhythm, the association and deduction of ideas. In short,
if we consider that his perfection in these respects may be opposed to
that of Virgil, and that he spoke a language less flexible, less
poetical, and less harmonious, we shall readily believe that
Racine is, of all mankind, the one to whom nature has given the
greatest talent for versification.”[1004]

     [1004] La Harpe, Eloge de Racine, as quoted by himself
     in Cours de Littérature, vol. vi.

|Thomas Corneille--his Ariane.|

19. Thomas, the younger and far inferior brother of Pierre Corneille,
was yet, by the fertility of his pen, by the success of some of his
tragedies, and by a certain reputation which two of them have
acquired, the next name, but at a vast interval, to Racine. Voltaire
says he would have enjoyed a great reputation but for that of his
brother--one of those pointed sayings which seem to mean something,
but are devoid of meaning. Thomas Corneille is never compared with his
brother; and probably his brother has been rather serviceable to his
name with posterity than otherwise. He wrote with more purity,
according to the French critics, than his brother, and it must be
owned that, in his Ariane, he has given to love a tone more passionate
and natural than the manly scenes of the older tragedian ever present.
This is esteemed his best work, but it depends wholly on the principal
character, whose tenderness and injuries excite our sympathy, and from
whose lips many lines of great beauty flow. It may be compared with
the Berenice of Racine, represented but a short time before; there is
enough of resemblance in the fables to provoke comparison. That of
Thomas Corneille is more tragic, less destitute of theatrical
movement, and consequently better chosen; but such relative praise is
of little value, where none can be given, in this respect, to the
object of comparison. We feel that the prose romance is the proper
sphere for the display of an affection, neither untrue to nature, nor
unworthy to move the heart, but wanting the majesty of the tragic
muse. An effeminacy uncongenial to tragedy belongs to this play; and
the termination, where the heroine faints away instead of dying, is
somewhat insipid. The only other tragedy of the younger Corneille that
can be mentioned is the Earl of Essex. In this he has taken greater
liberties with history than his critics approve; and though love does
not so much predominate as in Ariane, it seems to engross, in a style
rather too romantic, both the hero and his sovereign.

|Manlius of La Fosse.|

20. Neither of these tragedies, perhaps, deserves to be put on a level
with the Manlius of La Fosse, to which La Harpe accords the preference
above all of the seventeenth century after those of Corneille and
Racine. It is just to observe what is not denied, that the author has
borrowed the greater part of his story from the Venice Preserved of
Otway. The French critics maintain that he has far excelled his
original. It is possible that we might hesitate to own this
superiority; but several blemishes have been removed, and the conduct
is perhaps more noble, or at least more fitted to the French stage.
But when we take from La Fosse what belongs to another--characters
strongly marked, sympathies powerfully contrasted, a development of
the plot probable and interesting, what will remain that is purely his
own? There will remain a vigorous tone of language, a considerable
power of description, and a skill in adapting, we may add with
justice, in improving, what he found in a foreign language. We must
pass over some other tragedies which have obtained less honour in
their native land, those of Duché, Quinault, and Campistron.

|Molière.|

21. Molière is, perhaps, of all French writers, the one whom his
country has most uniformly admired, and in whom her critics are most
unwilling to acknowledge faults; though the observations of Schlegel
on the defects of Molière, and especially on his large debts to older
comedy, are not altogether without foundation. Molière began with
L’Etourdi in 1653, and his pieces followed rapidly till his death in
1673. About one half are in verse; I shall select a few without regard
to order of time, and first one written in prose, L’Avare.

|L’Avare.|

22. Plautus first exposed upon the stage the wretchedness of avarice,
the punishment of a selfish love of gold, not only in the life of pain
it has cost to acquire it, but in the terrors that it brings, in the
disordered state of mind, which is haunted, as by some mysterious
guilt, by the consciousness of secret wealth. The character of Euclio
in the Aulularia is dramatic, and, as far as we know, original; the
moral effect requires, perhaps, some touches beyond absolute
probability, but it must be confessed that a few passages are
over-charged. Molière borrowed L’Avare from this comedy; and I am not
at present aware that the subject, though so well adapted for the
stage, had been chosen by any intermediate dramatist. He is indebted
not merely for the scheme of his play, but for many strokes of humour,
to Plautus. But this takes off little from the merit of this
excellent comedy. The plot is expanded without incongruous or
improbable circumstances; new characters are well combined with that
of Harpagon, and his own is at once more diverting and less
extravagant than that of Euclio. The penuriousness of the latter,
though by no means without example, leaves no room for any other
object than the concealed treasure, in which his thoughts are
concentred. But Molière had conceived a more complicated action.
Harpagon does not absolutely starve the rats; he possesses horses,
though he feeds them ill; he has servants, though he grudges them
clothes; he even contemplates a marriage supper at his own expense,
though he intends to have a bad one. He has evidently been compelled
to make some sacrifices to the usages of mankind, and is at once a
more common and a more theatrical character than Euclio. In other
respects, they are much alike; their avarice has reached that point
where it is without pride; the dread of losing their wealth has
overpowered the desire of being thought to possess it; and though this
is a more natural incident in the manners of Greece than in those of
France, yet the concealment of treasure, even in the time of Molière,
was sufficiently frequent for dramatic probability. A general tone of
selfishness, the usual source and necessary consequence of avarice,
conspires with the latter quality to render Harpagon odious; and there
wants but a little more poetical justice in the conclusion, which
leaves the casket in his possession.

23. Hurd has censured Molière without much justice. “For the picture
of the avaricious man, Plautus and Molière have presented us with a
fantastic, unpleasing draught of the passion of avarice.” It may be
answered to this, that Harpagon’s character is, as has been said
above, not so mere a delineation of the passion as that of Euclio. But
as a more general vindication of Molière, it should be kept in mind,
that every exhibition of a predominant passion within the compass of
the five acts of a play must be coloured beyond the truth of nature,
or it will not have time to produce its effect. This is one great
advantage that romance possesses over the drama.

|L’Ecole des Femmes.|

24. L’Ecole des Femmes is among the most diverting comedies of
Molière. Yet it has, in a remarkable degree, what seems inartificial
to our own taste, and contravenes a good general precept of Horace;
the action passes almost wholly in recital. But this is so well
connected with the development of the plot and characters, and
produces such amusing scenes, that no spectator, at least on the
French theatre, would be sensible of any languor. Arnolphe is an
excellent modification of the type which Molière loved to reproduce;
the selfish and morose cynic, whose pretended hatred of the vices of
the world springs from an absorbing regard to his own gratification.
He has made him as malignant as censorious; he delights in tales of
scandal; he is pleased that Horace should be successful in gallantry,
because it degrades others. The half-witted and ill-bred child, of
whom he becomes the dupe, as well as the two idiot servants, are
delineated with equal vivacity. In this comedy we find the spirited
versification, full of grace and humour, in which no one has rivalled
Molière, and which has never been attempted on the English stage. It
was probably its merit which raised a host of petty detractors, on
whom the author revenged himself in his admirable piece of satire, La
Critique de l’Ecole des Femmes. The affected pedantry of the Hôtel
Rambouillet seems to be ridiculed in this retaliation; nothing, in
fact, could be more unlike than the style of Molière to their own.

|Le Misanthrope.|

25. He gave another proof of contempt for the false taste of some
Parisian circles in the Misanthrope; though the criticism of Alceste
on the wretched sonnet forms but a subordinate portion of that famous
comedy. It is generally placed next to Tartuffe among the works of
Molière. Alceste is again the cynic, but more honourable and less
openly selfish, and with more of a real disdain of vice in his
misanthropy. Rousseau, upon this account, and many others after him,
have treated the play as a vindication of insincerity against truth,
and as making virtue itself ridiculous on the stage. This charge,
however, seems uncandid; neither the rudeness of Alceste, nor the
misanthropy from which it springs, are to be called virtues; and we
may observe that he displays no positively good quality beyond
sincerity, unless his ungrounded and improbable love for a coquette is
to pass for such. It is true that the politeness of Philinthe, with
whom the Misanthrope is contrasted, borders a little too closely upon
flattery; but no oblique end is in his view; he flatters to give
pleasure; and, if we do not much esteem his character, we are not
solicitous for his punishment. The dialogue of the Misanthrope
is uniformly of the highest style; the female, and, indeed, all the
characters, are excellently conceived and sustained; and if this
comedy fails of anything at present, it is through the difference of
manners, and, perhaps, in representation, through the want of animated
action on the stage.

|Les Femmes Savantes.|

26. In Les Femmes Savantes, there is a more evident personality in the
characters, and a more malicious exposure of absurdity than in the
Misanthrope; but the ridicule falling on a less numerous class is not
so well calculated to be appreciated by posterity. It is, however,
both in reading and representation, a more amusing comedy: in no one
instance has Molière delineated such variety of manners, or displayed
so much of his inimitable gaiety and power of fascinating the audience
with very little plot, by the mere exhibition of human follies. The
satire falls deservedly on pretenders to taste and literature, for
whom Molière always testifies a bitterness of scorn in which we
perceive some resentment of their criticisms. The shorter piece,
entitled Les Précieuses Ridicules, is another shaft directed at the
literary ladies of Paris. They had provoked a dangerous enemy; but the
good taste of the next age might be ascribed in great measure to his
unmerciful exposure of affectation and pedantry.

|Tartuffe.|

27. It was not easy, so late as the age of Molière, for the dramatist
to find any untrodden field in the follies and vices of mankind. But
one had been reserved for him in Tartuffe--religious hypocrisy. We
should have expected the original draft of such a character on the
English stage; nor had our old writers been forgetful of their
inveterate enemies, the Puritans, who gave such full scope for their
satire. But, choosing rather the easy path of ridicule, they fell upon
the starch dresses and quaint language of the fanatical party; and
where they exhibited these in conjunction with hypocrisy, made the
latter more ludicrous than hateful. The Luke of Massinger is deeply
and villainously dissembling, but does not wear so conspicuous a garb
of religious sanctity as Tartuffe. The comedy of Molière is not only
original in this character, but is a new creation in dramatic poetry.
It has been doubted by some critics, whether the depth of guilt it
exhibits, the serious hatred it inspires, are not beyond the strict
province of comedy. But this seems rather a technical cavil. If
subjects such as the Tartuffe are not fit for comedy, they are, at
least, fit for dramatic representation, and some new phrase must be
invented to describe their class.

28. A different kind of objection is still sometimes made to this
play, that it brings religion itself into suspicion. And this would,
no doubt, have been the case, if the contemporaries of Molière in
England had dealt with the subject. But the boundaries between the
reality and its false appearances are so well guarded in this comedy,
that no reasonable ground of exception can be thought to remain. No
better advice can be given to those who take umbrage at the Tartuffe
than to read it again. For there may be good reason to suspect that
they are themselves among those for whose benefit it was intended; the
Tartuffes, happily, may be comparatively few; but, while the Orgons
and Pernelles are numerous, they will not want their harvest. Molière
did not invent the prototypes of his hypocrite; they were abundant at
Paris in his time.

29. The interest of this play continually increases, and the fifth act
is almost crowded by a rapidity of events, not so usual on the French
stage as our own. Tartuffe himself is a masterpiece of skill. Perhaps,
in the cavils of La Bruyère, there may be some justice; but the
essayist has forgotten that no character can be rendered entirely
effective to an audience without a little exaggeration of its
attributes. Nothing can be more happily conceived than the credulity
of the honest Orgon, and his more doting mother; it is that which we
sometimes witness, incurable except by the evidence of the senses, and
fighting every inch of ground against that. In such a subject there
was not much opportunity for the comic talent of Molière; yet, in some
well known passages, he has enlivened it as far as was possible. The
Tartuffe will generally be esteemed the greatest effort of this
author’s genius; the Misanthrope, the Femmes Savantes, and the Ecole
des Femmes will follow in various order, according to our tastes.
These are by far the best of his comedies in verse. Among those in
prose we may give the first place to L’Avare, and the next either to
Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, or to George Dandin.

|Bourgeois Gentilhomme.--George Dandin.|

30. These two plays have the same objects of moral satire; on the one
hand, the absurd vanity of plebeians in seeking the alliance or
acquaintance of the nobility, on the other, the pride and meanness of
the nobility themselves. They are both abundantly diverting; but the
sallies of humour are, I think, more frequent in the first three acts
of the former. The last two acts are improbable and less amusing. The
shorter pieces of Molière border very much upon farce; he permits
himself more vulgarity of character, more grossness in language and
incident, but his farces are seldom absurd, and never dull.

|Character of Molière.|

31. The French have claimed for Molière, and few, perhaps, have
disputed the pretension, a superiority over all earlier and later
writers of comedy. He certainly leaves Plautus, the original model of
the school to which he belonged, at a vast distance. The grace and
gentlemanly elegance of Terence he has not equalled; but in the more
appropriate merits of comedy, just and forcible delineation of
character, skilful contrivance of circumstances, and humorous
dialogue, we must award him the prize. The Italian and Spanish
dramatists are quite unworthy to be named in comparison; and if the
French theatre has, in later times, as is certainly the case, produced
some excellent comedies, we have, I believe, no reason to contradict
the suffrage of the nation itself, that they owe almost as much to
what they have caught from this great model, as to the natural genius
of their authors. But it is not for us to abandon the rights of
Shakspeare. In all things most essential to comedy, we cannot
acknowledge his inferiority to Molière. He had far more invention of
characters, and an equal vivacity and force in their delineation. His
humour was, at least, as abundant and natural, his wit incomparably
more brilliant; in fact, Molière hardly exhibits this quality at all.
The Merry Wives of Windsor, almost the only pure comedy of Shakspeare,
is surely not disadvantageously compared with George Dandin or Le
Bourgeois Gentilhomme, or even with L’Ecole des Femmes. For the
Tartuffe or the Misanthrope it is vain to seek a proper counterpart in
Shakspeare; they belong to a different state of manners. But the
powers of Molière are directed with greater skill to their object;
none of his energy is wasted; the spectator is not interrupted by the
serious scenes of tragi-comedy, nor his attention drawn aside by
poetical episodes. Of Shakspeare, we may justly say that he had the
greater genius, but, perhaps, of Molière, that he has written the best
comedies. We cannot, at least, put any later dramatist in competition
with him. Fletcher and Jonson, Wycherley and Congreve, Farquhar and
Sheridan, with great excellencies of their own, fall short of his
merit as well as his fame. Yet in humorous conception, our admirable
play, the Provoked Husband, the best parts of which are due to
Vanbrugh, seems to be equal to anything he has left. His spirited and
easy versification stands, of course, untouched by any English
rivalry; we may have been wise in rejecting verse from our stage, but
we have certainly given the French a right to claim all the honour
that belongs to it.

|Les Plaideurs of Racine.|

32. Racine once only attempted comedy. His wit was quick and
sarcastic, and in epigram he did not spare his enemies. In his
Plaideurs there is more of humour and stage-effect than of wit. The
ridicule falls, happily, on the pedantry of lawyers and the folly of
suitors; but the technical language is lost, in great measure, upon
the audience. This comedy, if it be not rather a farce, is taken from
The Wasps of Aristophanes; and that Rabelais of antiquity supplied an
extravagance, very improbably introduced into the third act of Les
Plaideurs, the trial of the dog. Far from improving the humour, which
had been amusingly kept up during the first two acts, this degenerates
into nonsense.

|Regnard--Le Joueur.|

33. Regnard is always placed next to Molière among the comic writers
of France in this, and perhaps in any age. The plays, indeed, which
entitle him to such a rank, are but few. Of these the best is
acknowledged to be Le Joueur. Regnard, taught by his own experience,
has here admirably delineated the character of an inveterate gamester;
without parade of morality, few comedies are more usefully moral. We
have not the struggling virtues of a Charles Surface, which the
dramatist may feign that he may reward at the fifth act; Regnard has
better painted the selfish ungrateful being, who, though not incapable
of love, pawns his mistress’s picture, the instant after she has given
it to him, that he may return to the dice-box. Her just abandonment,
and his own disgrace, terminate the comedy with a moral dignity which
the stage does not always maintain, and which, in the first acts, the
spectator does not expect. The other characters seem to me various,
spirited, and humorous; the valet of Valére the gamester is one of the
best of that numerous class, to whom comedy has owed so much; but the
pretended Marquis, though diverting, talks too much like a genuine
coxcomb of the world. Molière did this better in Les Précieuses
Ridicules. Regnard is in this play full of those gay sallies which
cannot be read without laughter; the incidents follow rapidly; there
is more movement than in some of the best of Molière’s comedies, and
the speeches are not so prolix.

|His other plays.|

34. Next to Le Joueur, among Regnard’s comedies, it has been usual to
place Le Légataire, not by any means inferior to the first in humour
and vivacity, but with less force of character, and more of the common
tricks of the stage. The moral, instead of being excellent, is of the
worst kind, being the success and dramatic reward of a gross fraud,
the forgery of a will by the hero of the piece and his servant. This
servant is, however, a very comical rogue, and we should not, perhaps,
wish to see him sent to the galleys. A similar censure might be passed
on the comedy of Regnard, which stands third in reputation: Les
Menechmes. The subject, as explained by the title, is old--twin-brothers,
whose undistinguishable features are the source of endless confusion;
but what neither Plautus nor Shakspeare have thought of, one avails
himself of the likeness to receive a large sum of money due to the
other, and is thought very generous at the close of the play when he
restores a moiety. Of the plays founded on this diverting
exaggeration, Regnard’s is perhaps the best; he has more variety of
incident than Plautus; and, by leaving out the second pair of twins,
the Dromio servants, which renders the Comedy of Errors almost too
inextricably confused for the spectator or reader, as well as by
making one of the brothers aware of the mistake, and a party in the
deception, he has given an unity of plot instead of a series of
incoherent blunders.

|Quinault. Boursault.|

35. The Mère Coquette of Quinault appears a comedy of great merit.
Without the fine traits of nature which we find in those of Molière,
without the sallies of humour which enliven those of Regnard, with a
versification, perhaps, not very forcible, it pleases us by a fable at
once novel, as far as I know, and natural, by the interesting
characters of the lovers, by the decency and tone of good company,
which are never lost in the manners, the incidents, or the language.
Boursault, whose tragedies are little esteemed, displayed some
originality in Le Mercure Galant. The idea is one which has not
unfrequently been imitated on the English as well as French stage, but
it is rather adapted to the shorter drama, than to a regular comedy of
five acts. The Mercure Galant was a famous magazine of light,
periodical amusements such as was then new in France, which had a
great sale, and is described in a few lines by one of the characters
in this piece.[1005] Boursault places his hero, by the editor’s
consent, as a temporary substitute, in the office of this publication,
and brings, in a series of detached scenes, a variety of applicants
for his notice. A comedy of this kind is like a compound animal; a few
chief characters must give unity to the whole, but the effect is
produced by the successive personages who pass over the stage, display
their humour in a single scene, and disappear. Boursault has been in
some instances successful; but such pieces generally owe too much to
temporary sources of amusement.

     [1005]
             Le Mercure est une bonne chose:
     On y trouve de tout, fable, histoire, vers, prose,
     Sieges, combats, procés, mort, mariage, amour,
     Nouvelles de province, et nouvelles de cour--
     Jamais livre à mon gré ne fut plus nécessaire.
                                    Act I., scene 2.

     The Mercure Galant was established in 1672 by one Visé; it was
     intended to fill the same place as a critical record of polite
     literature, which the Journal des Sçavans did in learning and
     science.

|Dancourt.|

36. Dancourt, as Voltaire has said, holds the same rank relatively to
Molière in farce, that Regnard does in the higher comedy. He came a
little after the former, and when the prejudice that had been created
against comedies in prose by the great success of the other kind had
begun to subside. The Chevalier à la Mode is the only play of Dancourt
that I know; it is much above farce, and, if length be a distinctive
criterion, it exceeds most comedies. This would be very slight praise,
if we could not add that the reader does not find it one page too
long, that the ridicule is poignant and happy, the incidents well
contrived, the comic situations amusing, the characters clearly
marked. La Harpe, who treats Dancourt with a sort of contempt, does
not so much as mention this play. It is a satire on the pretensions of
a class then rising, the rich financiers, which long supplied
materials, through dramatic caricature, to public malignity and the
envy of a less opulent aristocracy.

|Brueys.|

37. The life of Brueys is rather singular. Born of a noble Huguenot
family, he was early devoted to protestant theology, and even presumed
to enter the lists against Bossuet. But that champion of the faith was
like one of those knights in romance, who first unhorse their rash
antagonists, and then make them work as slaves. Brueys was soon
converted, and betook himself to write against his former errors. He
afterwards became an ecclesiastic. Thus far there is nothing much out
of the common course in his history. But, grown weary of living alone,
and having some natural turn to comedy, he began, rather late, to
write for the stage, with the assistance, or perhaps only under the
name, of a certain Palaprat. The plays of Brueys had some success; but
he was not in a position to delineate recent manners, and in the only
comedy with which I am acquainted, Le Muet, he has borrowed the
leading part of his story from Terence. The language seems deficient
in vivacity, which, when there is no great naturalness or originality
of character, cannot be dispensed with.

|Operas of Quinault.|

38. The French opera, after some ineffectual attempts by Mazarin to
naturalise an Italian company, was successfully established by Lulli
in 1672. It is the prerogative of music in the melo-drama, to render
poetry its dependent ally; but the airs of Lulli have been forgotten,
and the verses of his coadjutor Quinault remain. He is not only the
earliest, but, by general consent, the unrivalled poet of French
music. Boileau, indeed, treated him with undeserved scorn, but,
probably, through dislike of the tone he was obliged to preserve,
which in the eyes of so stern a judge, and one so insensible to love,
appeared languid and effeminate. Quinault, nevertheless, was not
incapable of vigorous and impressive poetry; a lyric grandeur
distinguishes some of his songs; he seems to possess great felicity of
adorning every subject with appropriate imagery and sentiment; his
versification has a smoothness and charm of melody, which has made
some say that the lines were already music before they came to the
composer’s hands; his fables, whether taken from mythology or modern
romance, display invention and skill. Voltaire, La Harpe, Schlegel,
and the author of the life of Quinault in the Biographie Universelle,
but, most of all, the testimony of the public, have compensated for
the severity of Boileau. The Armide is Quinault’s latest, and also his
finest opera.


                             SECT. II.

                       ON THE ENGLISH DRAMA.

_State of the Stage after the Restoration--Tragedies of Dryden,
Otway, Southern--Comedies of Congreve and others._

|Revival of the English theatre.|

38. The troubles of twenty years, and much more the fanatical
antipathy to stage-plays which the predominant party affected,
silenced the muse of the buskin, and broke the continuity of those
works of the elder dramatists, which had given a tone to public
sentiment as to the drama from the middle of Elizabeth’s reign.
Davenant had, by a sort of connivance, opened a small house for the
representation of plays, though not avowedly so called, near the
Charter House in 1656. He obtained a patent after the Restoration. By
this time another generation had arisen, and the scale of taste was to
be adjusted anew. The fondness for the theatre revived with increased
avidity; more splendid decoration, actors probably, especially
Betterton, of greater powers, and above all, the attraction of female
performers, who had never been admitted on the older stage, conspired
with the keen appetite that long restraint produced, and with the
general gaiety, or rather dissoluteness, of manners. Yet the multitude
of places for such amusement was not as great as under the first
Stuarts. Two houses only were opened by royal patents, granting them
an exclusive privilege, one by what was called the King’s Company, in
Drury Lane, another by the Duke of York’s Company, in Lincoln’s Inn
Fields. Betterton, who was called the English Roscius, till Garrick
claimed that title, was sent to Paris by Charles II., that, taking a
view of the French stage, he might better judge of what would
contribute to the improvement of our own. It has been said, and
probably with truth, that he introduced moveable scenes, instead of
the fixed tapestry that had been hung across the stage; but this
improvement he could not have borrowed from France. The king not only
countenanced the theatre by his patronage, but by so much personal
notice of the chief actors, and so much interest in all the affairs of
the theatre as elevated their condition.

|Change of public taste.|

39. An actor of great talents is the best friend of the great
dramatists; his own genius demands theirs for its support and display;
and a fine performer would as soon waste the powers of his hand on
feeble music, as a man like Betterton or Garrick represent what is
insipid or in bad taste. We know that the former, and some of his
contemporaries, were celebrated in the great parts of our early stage,
in those of Shakspeare and Fletcher. But the change of public taste is
sometimes irresistible by those who, as, in Johnson’s antithesis, they
“live to please, must please to live.” Neither tragedy nor comedy was
maintained at its proper level; and as the world is apt to demand
novelty on the stage, the general tone of dramatic representation in
this period, whatever credit it may have done to the performers,
reflects little, in comparison with our golden age, upon those who
wrote for them.

|Its causes.|

40. It is observed by Scott, that the French theatre, which was now
thought to be in perfection, guided the criticism of Charles’s court,
and afforded the pattern of those tragedies which continued in fashion
for twenty years after the Restoration, and which were called rhyming
or heroic plays. Though there is a general justice in this remark, I
am not aware that the inflated tone of these plays is imitated from
any French tragedy; certainly, there was a nobler model in the best
works of Corneille. But Scott is more right in deriving the unnatural
and pedantic dialogue which prevailed through these performances from
the romances of Scudery and Calprenède. These were, about the era
of the Restoration, almost as popular among the indolent gentry as in
France; and it was to be expected that a style would gain ground in
tragedy, which is not so widely removed from what tragedy requires,
but that an ordinary audience would fail to perceive the difference.
There is but a narrow line between the sublime and the tumid; the man
of business or of pleasure who frequents the theatre must have
accustomed himself to make such large allowances, to put himself into
a slate of mind so totally different from his every-day habits, that a
little extraordinary deviation from nature, far from shocking him,
will rather show like a further advance towards excellence. Hotspur
and Almanzor, Richard and Aurungzebe, seem cast in the same mould;
beings who can never occur in the common walks of life, but whom the
tragedian has, by a tacit convention with the audience, acquired a
right of feigning like his ghosts and witches.

|Heroic tragedies of Dryden.|

41. The first tragedies of Dryden were what was called heroic, and
written in rhyme; an innovation which, of course, must be ascribed to
the influence of the French theatre. They have occasionally much
vigour of sentiment and much beautiful poetry, with a versification
sweet even to lusciousness. The “Conquest of Grenada” is, on account
of its extravagance, the most celebrated of the plays; but it is
inferior to the “Indian Emperor,” from which it would be easy to
select passages of perfect elegance. It is singular that although the
rhythm of dramatic verse is commonly permitted to be the most lax of
any, Dryden has in this play availed himself of none of his wonted
privileges. He regularly closes the sense with the couplet, and falls
into a smoothness of cadence which, though exquisitely mellifluous, is
perhaps too uniform. In the Conquest of Grenada the versification is
rather more broken.

|His later tragedies.|

|Don Sebastian.|

42. Dryden may probably have been fond of this species of tragedy on
account of his own facility in rhyming, and his habit of condensing
his sense. Rhyme, indeed, can only be rejected in our language from
the tragic scene, because blank verse affords wider scope for the
emotions it ought to excite; but for the tumid rhapsodies which the
personages of his heroic plays utter there can be no excuse. He
adhered to this tone, however, till the change in public taste, and
especially the ridicule thrown on his own plays by the Rehearsal,
drove him to adopt a very different, though not altogether faultless
style of tragedy. His principal works of this latter class are All for
Love, in 1678, the Spanish Friar, commonly referred to 1682, and Don
Sebastian, in 1690. Upon these the dramatic fame of Dryden is built;
while the rants of Almanzor and Maximin are never mentioned but in
ridicule. The chief excellence of the first appears to consist in the
beauty of the language, that of the second in the interest of the
story, and that of the third in the highly finished character of
Dorax. Dorax is the best of Dryden’s tragic characters, and perhaps
the only one in which he has applied his great knowledge of the human
mind to actual delineation. It is highly dramatic, because formed of
those complex passions which may readily lead either to virtue or to
vice, and which the poet can manage so as to surprise the spectator
without transgressing consistency. The Zanga of Young, a part of some
theatrical effect, has been compounded of this character and of that
of Iago. But Don Sebastian is as imperfect as all plays must be in
which a single personage is thrown forward in too strong relief for
the rest. The language is full of that rant which characterised
Dryden’s earlier tragedies, and to which a natural predilection seems,
after some interval, to have brought him back. Sebastian himself may
seem to have been intended as a contrast to Muley Moloch; but if the
author had any rule to distinguish the blustering of the hero from
that of the tyrant, he has not left the use of it in his reader’s
hands. The plot of this tragedy is ill conducted, especially in the
fifth act. Perhaps the delicacy of the present age may have been too
fastidious in excluding altogether from the drama this class of
stories; because they may often excite great interest, give scope to
impassioned poetry, and are admirably calculated for the αναγνωρισις
[anagnôrisis], or discovery, which is so much dwelt upon by the
critics; nor can the story of Œdipus, which has furnished one of the
finest and most artful tragedies ever written, be well thought an
improper subject even for representation. But they require, of all
others, to be dexterously managed; they may make the main distress of
a tragedy, but not an episode in it. Our feelings revolt at seeing, as
in Don Sebastian, an incestuous passion brought forward as the
make-weight of a plot, to eke out a fifth act, and to dispose of those
characters whose fortune the main story has not quite wound up.

|Spanish Friar.|

43. The Spanish Friar has been praised for what Johnson calls the
“happy coincidence and coalition of the two plots.” It is difficult to
understand what can be meant by a compliment which seems either
ironical or ignorant. Nothing can be more remote from the truth. The
artifice of combining two distinct stories on the stage is, we may
suppose, either to interweave the incidents of one into those of the
other, or at least so to connect some characters with each intrigue,
as to make the spectator fancy them less distinct than they are. Thus,
in the Merchant of Venice, the courtship of Bassanio and Portia is
happily connected with the main plot of Antonio and Shylock by two
circumstances; it is to set Bassanio forward in his suit that the
fatal bond is first given; and it is by Portia’s address that its
forfeiture is explained away. The same play affords an instance of
another kind of underplot, that of Lorenzo and Jessica, which is more
episodical, and might perhaps be removed without any material loss to
the fable; though even this serves to account for, we do not say to
palliate, the vindictive exasperation of the Jew. But to which of
these do the comic scenes in the Spanish Friar bear most resemblance?
Certainly to the latter. They consist entirely of an intrigue which
Lorenzo, a young officer, carries on with a rich usurer’s wife; but
there is not, even by accident, any relation between his adventures
and the love and murder which go forward in the palace. The Spanish
Friar, so far as it is a comedy, is reckoned the best performance of
Dryden in that line. Father Dominic is very amusing, and has been
copied very freely by succeeding dramatists, especially in the Duenna.
But Dryden has no great abundance of wit in this or any of his
comedies. His jests are practical, and he seems to have written more
for the eye than the ear. It may be noted as a proof of this, that his
stage directions are unusually full. In point of diction, the Spanish
Friar in its tragic scenes, and All for Love, are certainly the best
plays of Dryden. They are the least infected with his great fault,
bombast, and should indeed be read over and over by those who would
learn the true tone of English tragedy. In dignity, in animation, in
striking images and figures, there are few or none that excel them;
the power indeed of impressing sympathy, or commanding tears, was
seldom placed by nature within the reach of Dryden.

|Otway.|

44. The Orphan of Otway, and his Venice Preserved, will generally be
reckoned the best tragedies of this period. They have both a deep
pathos, springing from the intense and unmerited distress of women;
both, especially the latter, have a dramatic eloquence, rapid and
flowing, with less of turgid extravagance than we find in Otway’s
contemporaries, and sometimes with very graceful poetry. The story of
the Orphan is domestic, and evidently borrowed from some French novel,
though I do not at present remember where I have read it; it was once
popular on the stage, and gave scope for good acting, but is
unpleasing to the delicacy of our own age. Venice Preserved is more
frequently represented than any tragedy after those of Shakspeare; the
plot is highly dramatic in conception and conduct; even what seems,
when we read it, a defect, the shifting of our wishes, or perhaps
rather of our ill-wishes, between two parties, the senate and the
conspirators, who are redeemed by no virtue, does not, as is shown by
experience, interfere with the spectator’s interest. Pierre indeed is
one of those villains for whom it is easy to excite the sympathy of
the half-principled and the inconsiderate. But the great attraction is
in the character of Belvidera; and when that part is represented by
such as we remember to have seen, no tragedy is honoured by such a
tribute, not of tears alone, but of more agony than many would seek to
endure. The versification of Otway, like that of most in this period,
runs almost to an excess into the line of eleven syllables, sometimes
also into the sdrucciolo form, or twelve syllables with a dactylic
close. These give a considerable animation to tragic verse.

|Southern.|

|Lee.|

|Congreve.|

45. Southern’s Fatal Discovery, latterly represented by the name of
Isabella, is almost as familiar to the lovers of our theatre as Venice
Preserved itself; and, for the same reason, that whenever an actress
of great tragic powers arises, the part of Isabella is as fitted to
exhibit them as that of Belvidera. The choice and conduct of the story
are, however, Southern’s chief merits; for there is little vigour in
the language, though it is natural and free from the usual faults of
his age. A similar character may be given to his other tragedy,
Oroonoko, in which Southern deserves the praise of having, first of
any English writer, denounced the traffic in slaves, and the cruelties
of their West Indian bondage. The moral feeling is high in this
tragedy; and it has sometimes been acted with a certain success; but
the execution is not that of a superior dramatist. Of Lee nothing need
be said, but that he is, in spite of his proverbial extravagance, a
man of poetical mind and some dramatic skill. But he has violated
historic truth in Theodosius without gaining much by invention. The
Mourning Bride of Congreve is written in prolix declamation, with no
power over the passions. Johnson is well known to have praised a few
lines in this tragedy as among the finest descriptions in the
language; while others, by a sort of contrariety, have spoken of them
as worth nothing. Truth is in its usual middle path; many better
passages may be found, but they are well written and impressive.[1006]

     [1006] Mourning Bride, act II., scene 3. Johnson’s Life
     of Congreve.

|Comedies of Chas. II.’s reign.|

46. In the early English comedy, we find a large intermixture of
obscenity in the lower characters, nor always confined to them, with
no infrequent scenes of licentious incident and language. But these
are invariably so brought forward as to manifest the dramatist’s scorn
of vice, and to excite no other sentiment in a spectator of even an
ordinary degree of moral purity. In the plays that appeared after the
Restoration, and that from the beginning, a different tone was
assumed. Vice was in her full career on the stage, unchecked by
reproof, unshamed by contrast, and, for the most part, unpunished by
mortification at the close. Nor are these less coarse in expression,
or less impudent in their delineation of low debauchery, than those of
the preceding period. It may be observed, on the contrary, that they
rarely exhibit the manners of truly polished life, according to any
notions we can frame of them, and are, in this respect, much below
those of Fletcher, Massinger, and Shirley. It might not be easy,
perhaps, to find a scene in any comedy of Charles II.’s reign where
one character has the behaviour of a gentleman, in the sense we attach
to the word. Yet the authors of these were themselves in the world,
and sometimes men of family and considerable station. The cause must
be found in the state of society itself, debased as well as corrupted,
partly by the example of the court, partly by the practice of living
in taverns, which became much more inveterate after the Restoration
than before. The contrast with the manners of Paris, as far as the
stage is their mirror, does not tell to our advantage. These plays, as
it may be expected, do not aim at the higher glories of comic writing;
they display no knowledge of nature, nor often rise to any other
conception of character than is gained by a caricature of some known
class, or, perhaps, of some remarkable individual. Nor do they in
general deserve much credit as comedies of intrigue; the plot is
seldom invented with much care for its development; and if scenes
follow one another in a series of diverting incidents, if the
entanglements are such as produce laughter, above all, if the
personages keep up a well-sustained battle of repartee, the purpose is
sufficiently answered. It is in this that they often excel; some of
them have considerable humour in the representation of character,
though this may not be very original, and a good deal of wit in their
dialogue.

|Wycherley.|

47. Wycherley is remembered for two comedies, the Plain Dealer, and
the Country Wife, the latter represented with some change, in modern
times, under the name of the Country Girl. The former has been
frequently said to be taken from the Misanthrope of Molière; but this,
like many current assertions, seems to have little, if any,
foundation. Manly, the Plain Dealer, is, like Alceste, a speaker of
truth; but the idea is, at least, one which it was easy to conceive
without plagiarism, and there is not the slightest resemblance in any
circumstance or scene of the two comedies. We cannot say the same of
the Country Wife; it was evidently suggested by L’Ecole des Femmes;
the character of Arnolphe has been copied; but even here, the whole
conduct of the piece of Wycherley is his own. It is more artificial
than that of Molière, wherein too much passes in description; the part
of Agnes is rendered still more poignant; and among the comedies of
Charles’s reign, I am not sure that it is surpassed by any.

|Improvement after the Revolution.|

48. Shadwell and Etherege, and the famous Afra Behn, have endeavoured
to make the stage as grossly immoral as their talents permitted; but
the two former are not destitute of humour. At the death of Charles it
had reached the lowest point; after the Revolution it became not much
more a school of virtue, but rather a better one of polished manners
than before; and certainly drew to its service some men of comic
genius, whose names are now not only very familiar to our ears, as the
boasts of our theatre, but whose works have not all ceased to enliven
its walls.

|Congreve.|

49. Congreve, by the Old Bachelor, written, as some have said, at
twenty-one years of age, but, in fact, not quite so soon, and
represented in 1693, placed himself at once in a rank which he has
always retained. Though not, I think, the first, he is undeniably
among the first names. The Old Bachelor was quickly followed by the
Double Dealer, and that by Love for Love, in which he reached the
summit of his reputation. The last of his four comedies, the Way of
the World, is said to have been coldly received; for which it is hard
to assign any substantial cause, unless it be some want of sequence in
the plot. The peculiar excellence of Congreve is his wit, incessantly
sparkling from the lips of almost every character, but, on this
account, it is accompanied by want of nature and simplicity. Nature,
indeed, and simplicity do not belong, as proper attributes, to that
comedy which, itself the creature of an artificial society, has for
its proper business to exaggerate the affectation and hollowness of
the world. A critical code, which should require the comedy of polite
life to be natural, would make it intolerable. But there are limits of
deviation from likeness which even caricature must not transgress; and
the type of truth should always regulate the playful aberrations of an
inventive pencil. The manners of Congreve’s comedies are not, to us,
at least, like those of reality; I am not sure that we have any cause
to suppose that they much better represent the times in which they
appeared. His characters, with an exception or two, are heartless and
vicious; which, on being attacked by Collier, he justified, probably
by an afterthought, on the authority of Aristotle’s definition of
comedy; that it is μιμησις φανλοτερων [mimêsis phauloterôn], an
imitation of what is the worst in human nature.[1007] But it must be
acknowledged that, more than any preceding writer among us, he kept up
the tone of a gentleman; his men of the world are profligate, but not
coarse; he rarely, like Shadwell, or even Dryden, caters for the
populace of the theatre by such indecencies as they must understand;
he gave, in fact, a tone of refinement to the public taste, which it
never lost, and which, in its progression, has banished his own
comedies from the stage.

     [1007] Congreve’s Amendments of Mr. Collier’s false citations.

|Love for Love.|

50. Love for Love is generally reputed the best of these. Congreve has
never any great success in the conception or management of his plot;
but in this comedy there is least to censure; several of the
characters are exceedingly humorous; the incidents are numerous and
not complex; the wit is often admirable. Angelica and Miss Prue, Ben
and Tattle, have been repeatedly imitated; but they have, I think, a
considerable degree of dramatic originality in themselves. Johnson has
observed that Ben the sailor is not reckoned over natural, but he is
very diverting. Possibly he may be quite as natural a portrait of a
mere sailor, as that to which we have become used in modern comedy.

|His other comedies.|

51. The Way of the World I should, perhaps, incline to place next to
this; the coquetry of Millamant, not without some touches of
delicacy, and affection, the impertinent coxcombry of Petulant and
Witwood, the mixture of wit and ridiculous vanity in Lady Wishfort,
are amusing to the reader. Congreve has here made more use than, as
far as I remember, had been common in England, of the all-important
soubrette, on whom so much depends in French comedy. The manners of
France happily enabled her dramatists to improve what they had
borrowed with signal success from the ancient stage, the witty and
artful servant, faithful to his master while he deceives every one
besides, by adding this female attendant, not less versed in every
artifice, nor less quick in repartee. Mincing and Foible, in this play
of Congreve, are good specimens of the class; but, speaking with some
hesitation, I do not think they will be found, at least, not so
naturally drawn, in the comedies of Charles’s time. Many would,
perhaps, not without cause, prefer the Old Bachelor; which abounds
with wit, but seems rather deficient in originality of character and
circumstance. The Double Dealer is entitled to the same praise of wit,
and some of the characters, though rather exaggerated, are amusing;
but the plot is so entangled towards the conclusion, that I have found
it difficult, even in reading, to comprehend it.

|Farquhar. Vanbrugh.|

52. Congreve is not superior to Farquhar and Vanbrugh, if we might
compare the whole of their works. Never has he equalled in vivacity,
in originality of contrivance, or in clear and rapid development of
intrigue, the Beau’s Stratagem of the one, and much less the admirable
delineation of the Wronghead family in the Provoked Husband of the
other. But these were of the eighteenth century. Farquhar’s Trip to
the Jubilee, though once a popular comedy, is not distinguished by
more than an easy flow of wit, and perhaps a little novelty in some of
the characters; it is indeed written in much superior language to the
plays anterior to the Revolution. But the Relapse, and the Provoked
Wife of Vanbrugh have attained a considerable reputation. In the
former, the character of Amanda is interesting; especially in the
momentary wavering, and quick recovery of her virtue. This is the
first homage that the theatre had paid, since the Restoration, to
female chastity; and notwithstanding the vicious tone of the other
characters, in which Vanbrugh has gone as great lengths as any of his
contemporaries, we perceive the beginnings of a reaction in public
spirit, which gradually reformed and elevated the moral standard of
the stage.[1008] The Provoked Wife, though it cannot be said to give
any proofs of this sort of improvement, has some merit as a comedy; it
is witty and animated, as Vanbrugh usually was; the character of Sir
John Brute may not have been too great a caricature of real manners,
such as survived from the debased reign of Charles; and the endeavour
to expose the grossness of the older generation was itself an evidence
that a better polish had been given to social life.

     [1008] This purification of English comedy has sometimes been
     attributed to the effects of a famous essay by Collier on the
     immorality of the English stage. But if public opinion had not
     been prepared to go along, in a considerable degree, with
     Collier, his animadversions could have produced little change. In
     point of fact, the subsequent improvement was but slow, and, for
     some years, rather shown in avoiding coarse indecencies than in
     much elevation of sentiment. Steele’s Conscious Lovers is the
     first comedy which can be called moral; Cibber, in those parts of
     the Provoked Husband that he wrote, carried this farther, and the
     stage afterwards grew more and more refined, till it became
     languid and sentimental.




                          CHAPTER XXXIII.

      HISTORY OF POLITE LITERATURE IN PROSE, FROM 1650 to 1700.


                             SECT. I.

_Italy--High Refinement of French Language--Fontenelle--St. Evremond--
Sevigné--Bouhours and Rapin--Miscellaneous Writers--English Style--and
Criticism--Dryden._

|Low state of literature in Italy.|

1. If Italy could furnish no long list of conspicuous names in this
department of literature to our last period, she is far more deficient
in the present. The Prose Florentine of Dati, a collection of what
seemed the best specimens of Italian eloquence in this century, served
chiefly to prove its mediocrity, nor has that editor, by his
own panegyric on Louis XIV. or any other of his writings, been able to
redeem its name.[1009] The sermons of Segneri have already been
mentioned; the eulogies bestowed on them seem to be founded, in some
measure, on the surrounding barrenness. The letters of Magalotti, and
still more of Redi, themselves philosophers, and generally writing on
philosophy, seem to do more credit than anything else to this
period.[1010]

     [1009] Salfi, xiv. 25. Tiraboschi, xi, 412.

     [1010] Salfi, xiv. 17. Corniani, viii. 71.

|Crescimbeni.|

2. Crescimbeni, the founder of the Arcadian Society, has made an
honourable name by his exertions to purify the national taste, as well
as by his diligence in preserving the memory of better ages than his
own. His History of National Poetry is a laborious and useful work, to
which I have sometimes been indebted. His treatise on the beauty of
that poetry is only known to me through Salfi. It is written in
dialogue, the speakers being Arcadians. Anxious to extirpate the
school of the Marinists, without falling back altogether into that of
Petrarch, he set up Costanzo as a model of poetry. Most of his
precepts, Salfi observes, are very trivial at present; but at the
epoch of its appearance, it was of great service towards the reform of
Italian literature.[1011]

     [1011] Salfi, xiii. 450.

|Age of Louis XIV. in France.|

3. This period, the second part of the seventeenth century,
comprehends the most considerable, and in every sense the most
important and distinguished portion of what was once called the great
age in France, the reign of Louis XIV. In this period the literature
of France was adorned by its most brilliant writers; since,
notwithstanding the genius and popularity of some who followed, we
generally find a still higher place awarded by men of fine taste to
Bossuet and Pascal than to Voltaire and Montesquieu. The language was
written with a care that might have fettered the powers of ordinary
men, but rendered those of such as we have mentioned more resplendent.
The laws of taste and grammar, like those of nature, were held
immutable; it was the province of human genius to deal with them, as
it does with nature, by a skilful employment, not by a preposterous
and ineffectual rebellion against their control. Purity and
perspicuity, simplicity and ease, were conditions of good writing; it
was never thought that an author, especially in prose, might
transgress the recognised idiom of his mother tongue, or invent words
unknown to it, for the sake of effect or novelty; or, if in some rare
occurrence so bold a course might be forgiven, these exceptions were
but as miracles in religion, which would cease to strike us, or be no
miracles at all, but for the regularity of the laws to which they bear
witness even while they violate them. We have not thought it necessary
to defer the praise which some great French writers have deserved on
the score of their language for this chapter. Bossuet, Malebranche,
Arnauld, and Pascal, have already been commemorated; and it is
sufficient to point out two causes in perpetual operation during this
period which ennobled and preserved in purity the literature of
France; one, the salutary influence of the Academy, the other, that
emulation between the Jesuits and Jansenists for public esteem, which
was better displayed in their politer writings, than in the abstruse
and endless controversy of the five propositions. A few remain to be
mentioned, and as the subject of this chapter, in order to avoid
frequent subdivisions, is miscellaneous, the reader must expect to
find that we do not, in every instance, confine ourselves to what he
may consider as polite letters.

|Fontenelle--his character.|

4. Fontenelle, by the variety of his talents, by their application to
the pursuits most congenial to the intellectual character of his
contemporaries, and by that extraordinary longevity which made those
contemporaries not less than three generations of mankind, may be
reckoned the best representative of French literature. Born in 1657,
and dying within a few days of a complete century, in 1757, he enjoyed
the most protracted life of any among the modern learned; and that a
life in the full sunshine of Parisian literature, without care and
without disease. In nothing was Fontenelle a great writer; his mental
and moral disposition resembled each other; equable, without the
capacity of performing, and hardly of conceiving, anything truly
elevated, but not less exempt from the fruits of passion, from
paradox, unreasonableness, and prejudice. His best productions are,
perhaps, the eulogies on the deceased members of the Academy of
Sciences, which he pronounced during almost forty years, but these
nearly all belong to the eighteenth century; they are just and candid,
with sufficient, though not very profound, knowledge of the exact
sciences, and a style pure and flowing, which his good sense had freed
from some early affectation, and his cold temper as well as
sound understanding restrained from extravagance. In his first works
we have symptoms of an infirmity belonging more frequently to age than
to youth; but Fontenelle was never young in passion. He affects the
tone of somewhat pedantic and frigid gallantry which seems to have
survived the society of the Hôtel Rambouillet who had countenanced it,
and which borders too nearly on the language which Molière and his
disciples had well exposed in their coxcombs on the stage.

|His Dialogues of the Dead.|

5. The Dialogues of the Dead, published, I think, in 1685, are
condemned by some critics for their false taste and perpetual strain
at something unexpected, and paradoxical. The leading idea is, of
course, borrowed from Lucian; but Fontenelle has aimed at greater
poignancy by contrast; the ghosts in his dialogues are exactly those
who had least in common with each other in life, and the general
object is to bring, by some happy analogy which had not occurred to
the reader, or by some ingenious defence of what he had been
accustomed to despise, the prominences and depressions of historic
characters to a level. This is what is always well received in the
kind of society for which Fontenelle wrote; but if much is mere
sophistry in his dialogues, if the general tone is little above that
of the world, there is also, what we often find in the world, some
acuteness and novelty, and some things put in a light which it may be
worth while not to neglect.

|Those of Fenelon.|

6. Fenelon, not many years afterwards, copied the scheme, though not
the style, of Fontenelle in his own Dialogues of the Dead, written for
the use of his pupil the Duke of Burgundy. Some of these dialogues are
not truly of the dead; the characters speak as if on earth, and with
earthly designs. They have certainly more solid sense and a more
elevated morality than those of Fontenelle, to which La Harpe has
preferred them. The noble zeal of Fenelon not to spare the vices of
kings, in writing for the heir of one so imperious and so open to the
censure of reflecting minds, shines throughout these dialogues; but
designed as they were for a boy, they naturally appear in some places
rather superficial.

|Fontenelle’s Plurality of Worlds.|

7. Fontenelle succeeded better in his famous dialogues on the
Plurality of Worlds, Les Mondes; in which, if the conception is not
wholly original, he has at least developed it with so much spirit and
vivacity, that it would show as bad taste to censure his work, as to
reckon it a model for imitation. It is one of those happy ideas which
have been privileged monopolies of the first inventor; and it will be
found accordingly that all attempts to copy this whimsical union of
gallantry with science have been insipid almost to a ridiculous
degree. Fontenelle throws so much gaiety and wit into his compliments
to the lady whom he initiates in his theory, that we do not confound
them with the nonsense of coxcombs; and she is herself so spirited,
unaffected, and clever, that no philosopher could be ashamed of
gallantry towards so deserving an object. The fascinating paradox, as
then it seemed, though our children are now taught to lisp it, that
the moon, the planets, the fixed stars, are full of inhabitants, is
presented with no more show of science than was indispensable, but
with a varying liveliness that, if we may judge by the consequences,
has served to convince as well as amuse. The plurality of worlds had
been suggested by Wilkins, and probably by some Cartesians in France;
but it was first rendered a popular tenet by this agreeable little
book of Fontenelle, which had a great circulation in Europe. The
ingenuity with which he obviates the difficulties he is compelled to
acknowledge, is worthy of praise; and a good deal of the popular
truths of physical astronomy is found in these dialogues.

|His History of Oracles.|

8. The History of Oracles, which Fontenelle published in 1687, is
worthy of observation as a sign of the change that was working in
literature. In the provinces of erudition and of polite letters, long
so independent, perhaps even so hostile, some tendency towards a
coalition began to appear. The men of the world, especially after they
had acquired a free temper of thinking in religion, and become
accustomed to talk about philosophy, desired to know something of the
questions which the learned disputed; but they demanded this knowledge
by a short and easy road, with no great sacrifice of their leisure or
attention. Fontenelle, in the History of Oracles, as in the dialogues
on the Plurality of Worlds, prepared a repast for their taste. A dull
work of a learned Dutch physician, Van Dale, had taken up the subject
of the ancient oracles, and explained them by human imposture instead
of that of the devil, which had been the more orthodox hypothesis. A
certain degree of paradox, or want of orthodoxy, already gave a zest
to a book in France; and Fontenelle’s lively manner, with more
learning than good society at Paris possessed, and about as much as it
could endure, united to a clear and acute line of argument, created a
popularity for his History of Oracles, which we cannot reckon
altogether unmerited.[1012]

     [1012] I have not compared, or indeed read, Van Dale’s work; but
     I rather suspect that some of the reasoning, not the learning, of
     Fontenelle is original.

|St. Evremond.|

9. The works of St. Evremond were collected after his death in 1705;
but many had been printed before, and he evidently belongs to the
latter half of the seventeenth century. The fame of St. Evremond as a
brilliant star, during a long life, in the polished aristocracy of
France and England, gave for a time a considerable lustre to his
writings, the greater part of which are such effusions as the daily
intercourse of good company called forth. In verse or in prose, he is
the gallant friend, rather than lover, of ladies who, secure probably
of love in some other quarter, were proud of the friendship of a wit.
He never, to do him justice, mistakes his character which as his age
was not a little advanced might have incurred ridicule. Hortense
Mancini, Duchess of Mazarin, is his heroine; but we take little
interest in compliments to a woman neither respected in her life, nor
remembered since. Nothing can be more trifling than the general
character of the writings of St. Evremond; but sometimes he rises to
literary criticism, or even civil history; and on such topics he is
clear, unaffected, cold, without imagination or sensibility; a type of
the frigid being, whom an aristocratic and highly polished society is
apt to produce. The chief merit of St. Evremond is in his style and
manner; he has less wit than Voiture who contributed to form him, or
than Voltaire whom he contributed to form; but he shows neither the
effort of the former, nor the restlessness of the latter. Voltaire,
however, when he is most quiet, as in the earliest and best of his
historical works, seems to bear a considerable resemblance to St.
Evremond, and there can be no doubt that he was familiar with the
latter’s writings.

|Madame de Sevigné.|

10. A woman has the glory of being full as conspicuous in the graces
of style as any writer of this famous age. It is evident that this was
Madame de Sevigné. Her letters, indeed, were not published till the
eighteenth century, but they were written in the mid-day of Louis’s
reign. Their ease and freedom from affectation are more striking, by
contrast with the two epistolary styles which had been most admired in
France, that of Balzac, which is laboriously tumid, and that of
Voiture, which becomes insipid by dint of affectation. Everyone
perceives that in the letters of a mother to her daughter, the public,
in a strict sense, is not thought of; and yet the habit of speaking
and writing what men of wit and taste would desire to hear and read,
gives a certain mannerism, I will not say air of effort, even to the
letters of Madame de Sevigné. The abandonment of the heart to its
casual impulses is not so genuine as in some that have since been
published. It is, at least, clear that it is possible to become
affected in copying her unaffected style; and some of Walpole’s
letters bear witness to this. Her wit and talent of painting by single
touches are very eminent; scarcely any collection of letters, which
contain so little that can interest a distant age, are read with such
pleasure; if they have any general fault, it is a little monotony and
excess of affection towards her daughter, which is reported to have
wearied its object, and, in contrast with this, a little want of
sensibility towards all beyond her immediate friends, and a readiness
to find something ludicrous in the dangers and sufferings of
others.[1013]

     [1013] The proofs of this are numerous enough in her letters. In
     one of them she mentions that a lady of her acquaintance, having
     been bitten by a mad dog, had gone to be dipped in the sea, and
     amuses herself by taking off the provincial accent with which she
     will express herself on the first plunge. She makes a jest of La
     Voisin’s execution; and though that person was as little entitled
     to sympathy as anyone, yet, when a woman is burned alive, it is
     not usual for another woman to turn it into drollery.

     Madame de Sevigné’s taste has been arraigned for slighting
     Racine; and she has been charged with the unfortunate prediction;
     Il passera comme le café. But it is denied that these words can
     be found, though few like to give up so diverting a
     miscalculation of futurity. In her time, Corneille’s party was so
     well supported, and he deserved so much gratitude and reverence,
     that we cannot much wonder at her being carried a little too far
     against his rival. Who has ever seen a woman just towards the
     rivals of her friends, though many are just towards their own?

|The French Academy.|

11. The French Academy had been so judicious, both in the choice of
its members, and in the general tenor of its proceedings, that it
stood very high in public esteem, and a voluntary deference was
commonly shown to its authority. The favour of Louis XIV., when he
grew to manhood, was accorded as amply as that of Richelieu.
The Academy was received by the king, when they approached him
publicly, with the same ceremonies as the superior courts of justice.
This body had, almost from its commencement, undertaken a national
dictionary, which should carry the language to its utmost perfection,
and trace a road to the highest eloquence that depended on purity and
choice of words; more than this could not be given by man. The work
proceeded very slowly; and dictionaries were published in the
meantime, one by Richelet in 1680, another by Furetiére. The former
seems to be little more than a glossary of technical, or otherwise
doubtful words;[1014] but the latter, though pretending to contain
only terms of art and science, was found, by its definitions and by
the authorities it quoted, to interfere so much with the project of
the academicians, who had armed themselves with an exclusive
privilege, that they not only expelled Furetiére from their body, on
the allegation that he had availed himself of materials intrusted to
him by the Academy for its own dictionary, but instituted a long
process at law to hinder his publication. This was in 1685, and the
dictionary of Furetiére only appeared after his death, at Amsterdam,
in 1690.[1015] Whatever may have been the delinquency, moral or legal,
of this compiler, his dictionary is praised by Goujet as a rich
treasure, in which almost everything is found that we can desire for a
sound knowledge of the language. It has been frequently reprinted, and
continued long in esteem. But the dictionary of the Academy, which was
published in 1694, claimed an authority to which that of a private man
could not pretend. Yet the first edition seems to have rather
disappointed the public expectation. Many objected to the want of
quotations, and to the observance of an orthography that had become
obsolete. The Academy undertook a revision of its work in 1700; and,
finally, profiting by the public opinion on which it endeavoured to
act, rendered this dictionary the most received standard of the French
language.[1016]

     [1014] Goujet, Baillet, n. 762.

     [1015] Pelisson, Hist. de l’Académie (continuation par Olivet),
     p. 47. Goujet, Bibliothèque Française, i., 232, et post. Biogr.
     Univers., art. Furetiére.

     [1016] Pelisson, p. 69. Goujet, p. 261.

|French Grammars.|

12. The Grammaire Générale et Raisonnée of Lancelot, in which Arnauld
took a considerable share, is rather a treatise on the philosophy of
all language than one peculiar to the French. “The best critics,” says
Baillet, “acknowledge that there is nothing written by either the
ancient or the modern grammarians, with so much justness and
solidity.”[1017] Vigneul-Marville bestows upon it an almost equal
eulogy.[1018] Lancelot was copied in a great degree by Lami, in his
Rhetoric or Art of Speaking, with little of value that is
original.[1019] Vaugelas retained his place as the founder of sound,
grammatical criticism, though his judgments have not been uniformly
confirmed by the next generation. His remarks were edited with notes
by Thomas Corneille, who had the reputation of an excellent
grammarian.[1020] The observations of Ménage on the French language,
in 1675 and 1676, are said to have the fault of reposing too much on
obsolete authorities, even those of the sixteenth century, which had
long been proscribed by a politer age.[1021] Notwithstanding the zeal
of the Academy, no critical laws could arrest the revolutions of
speech. Changes came in with the lapse of time, and were sanctioned by
the imperious rule of custom. In a book on grammar, published as early
as 1688, Balzac and Voiture, even Patru and the Port-Royal writers,
are called semi-moderns;[1022] so many new phrases had since made
their way into composition, so many of theirs had acquired a certain
air of antiquity.

     [1017] Jugemens des Sçavans, n. 606. Goujet copies Baillet’s
     words.

     [1018] Mélanges de Littérature, i., 124.

     [1019] Goujet, i., 56. Gibert, p. 351.

     [1020] Goujet, 146. Biogr. Univ.

     [1021] Id. 153.

     [1022] Bibliothèque Universelle, xv., 351. Perrault makes a
     similar remark on Patru.

|Bouhours’ Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène.|

13. The genius of the French language, as it was estimated in this
age, by those who aspired to the character of good critics, may be
learned from one of the dialogues in a work of Bouhours, Les
Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène. Bouhours was a Jesuit, who affected a
polite and lively tone, according to the fashion of his time, so as to
warrant some degree of ridicule; but a man of taste and judgment,
whom, though La Harpe speaks of him with some disdain, his
contemporaries quoted with respect. The first and the most
interesting, at present, of these conversations, which are feigned to
take place between two gentlemen of literary taste, turns on the
French language.[1023] This he presumes to be the best of all
modern; deriding the Spanish for its pomp, the Italian for its finical
effeminacy.[1024] The French has the secret of uniting brevity with
clearness, and with purity, and politeness. The Greek and Latin are
obscure where they are concise. The Spanish is always diffuse. The
Spanish is a turbid torrent, often over-spreading the country with
great noise; the Italian a gentle rivulet, occasionally given to
inundate its meadows; the French, a noble river, enriching the
adjacent lands, but with an equal, majestic course of waters that
never quits its level.[1025] Spanish, again, he compares to an
insolent beauty, that holds her head high, and takes pleasure in
splendid dress; Italian, to a painted coquette, always attired to
please; French, to a modest and agreeable lady, who, if you may call
her a prude, has nothing uncivil or repulsive in her prudery. Latin is
the common mother; but while Italian has the sort of likeness to Latin
which an ape bears to a man, in French we have the dignity,
politeness, purity, and good sense of the Augustan age. The French
have rejected almost all the diminutives once in use, and do not, like
the Italians, admit the right of framing others. This language does
not tolerate rhyming sounds in prose, nor even any kind of assonance,
as amertume and fortune, near together. It rejects very bold
metaphors, as the zenith of virtue, the apogée of glory; and it is
remarkable that its poetry is almost as hostile to metaphor as its
prose.[1026] “We have very few words merely poetical, and the language
of our poets is not very different from that of the world. Whatever be
the cause, it is certain that a figurative style is neither good among
us in verse nor in prose.” This is evidently much exaggerated, and, in
contradiction to the known examples, at least, of dramatic poetry. All
affectation and labour, he proceeds to say, are equally repugnant to a
good French style. “If we would speak the language well, we should not
try to speak it too well. It detests excess of ornament; it would
almost desire that words should be as it were naked; their dress must
be no more than necessity and decency require. Its simplicity is
averse to compound words; those adjectives which are formed by such a
juncture of two, have long been exiled both from prose and verse. Our
own pronunciation,” he affirms, “is the most natural and pleasing of
any. The Chinese and other Asiatics sing; the Germans rattle
(rallent); the Spaniards spout; the Italians sigh; the English
whistle; the French alone can properly be said to speak; which arises,
in fact, from our not accenting any syllable before the penultimate.
The French language is best adapted to express the tenderest
sentiments of the heart; for which reason our songs are so impassioned
and pathetic, while those of Italy and Spain are full of nonsense.
Other languages may address the imagination, but ours alone speaks to
the heart, which never understands what is said in them.”[1027] This
is literally amusing; and with equal patriotism, Bouhours in another
place has proposed the question, whether a German can, by the nature
of things, possess any wit.

     [1023] Bouhours points out several innovations which had lately
     come into use. He dislikes _avoir des ménagemens_, or _avoir de
     la considération_, and thinks these phrases would not last; in
     which he was mistaken. _Tour de visage_ and _tour d’esprit_ were
     new: the words _fonds_, _mésures_, _amitiés_, _compte_, and many
     more were used in new senses. Thus also _assez_ and _trop_; as
     the phrase, _je ne suis pas trop de votre avis_. It seems, on
     reflection, that some of the expressions he animadverts upon,
     must have been affected while they were new, being in opposition
     to the correct meaning of words; and it is always curious, in
     other languages as well as our own, to observe the comparatively
     recent _nobility_ of many things quite established by present
     usage. Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène p. 95.

     [1024] P. 52 (edit. 1671).

     [1025] P. 77.

     [1026] P. 60.

     [1027] P. 68.

|Attacked by Barbier d’Aucour.|

14. Bouhours, not deficient, as we may perceive, in self-confidence
and proneness to censure, presumed to turn into ridicule the writers
of Port-Royal, at that time of such distinguished reputation as
threatened to eclipse the credit which the Jesuits had always
preserved in polite letters. He alludes to their long periods and the
exaggerated phrases of invective which they poured forth in
controversy.[1028] But the Jansenist party was well able to defend
itself. Barbier d’Aucour retaliated on the vain Jesuit by his
Sentimens de Cleanthe sur les Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène.
It seems to be the general opinion of French critics that he has well
exposed the weak parts of his adversary, his affected air of the
world, the occasional frivolity and feebleness of his observations;
yet there seems something morose in the censures of the supposed
Cleanthe, which renders this book less agreeable than that on which it
animadverts.

     [1028] P. 150. Vigneul-Marville observes that the Port-Royal
     writers formed their style originally on that of Balzac (vol. i.,
     p. 107); and that M. d’Andilly, brother of Antony Arnauld,
     affected at one time a grand and copious manner like the
     Spaniards, as being more serious and imposing, especially in
     devotional writings; but afterwards finding the French were
     impatient of this style, that party abandoned it for one more
     concise, which it is by no means less difficult to write well, p.
     139. Baillet seems to refer their love of long periods to the
     famous advocate Le Maistre, who had employed them in his
     pleadings, not only as giving more dignity, but also because the
     public taste at that time favoured them. Jugemens des Sçavans,
     n. 953.

|La Manière de Bien Penser.|

15. Another work of criticism by Bouhours La Manière de Bien Penser,
which is also in dialogue, contains much that shows acuteness and
delicacy of discrimination; though his taste was deficient in warmth
and sensibility, which renders him somewhat too strict and fastidious
in his judgments. He is an unsparing enemy of obscurity, exaggeration
and nonsense, and laughs at the hyperbolical language of Balzac, while
he has rather over-praised Voiture.[1029] The affected inflated
thoughts, of which the Italian and Spanish writers afford him many
examples, Bouhours justly condemns, and by the correctness of his
judgment may deserve, on the whole, a respectable place in the second
order of critics.

     [1029] Voiture, he says, always takes a tone of raillery when he
     exaggerates. Le faux devient vrai à la faveur de l’ironie, p. 29.
     But we can hardly think that Balzac was not gravely ironical in
     some of the strange hyperboles which Bouhours quotes from him.

     In the fourth dialogue, Bouhours has many just observations on
     the necessity of clearness. An obscurity arising from allusion to
     things now unknown, such as we find in the ancients, is no fault
     but a misfortune; but this is no excuse for one which may be
     avoided, and arises from the writer’s indistinctness of
     conception or language. Cela n’est pas intelligible, dit
     Philinthe (after hearing a foolish rhapsody extracted from a
     funeral sermon on Louis XIII.). Non, répondit Eudoxe, ce n’est
     pas tout-à-fait de galimatias, ce n’est que du phébus. Vous
     mettez donc, dit Philinthe, de la différence entre le galimatias
     et le phébus? Oui, repartit Eudoxe, le galimatias renferme une
     obscurité profonde, et n’a de soi-même nul sens raisonnable. Le
     phébus n’est pas si obscur, et a un brillant qui signfie, ou
     semble signifier quelque chose; le soleil y entre d’ordinaire, et
     c’est peut-être ce qui a donné lieu en notre langue au nom de
     phébus. Ce n’est pas que quelquefois le phébus ne devienne
     obscur, jusqu’à n’être pas entendu; mais alors le galimatias s’en
     joint; ce ne sont que brillans et que ténèbres de tous côtes,
     p. 342.

|Rapin’s Reflections on Eloquence and Poetry.|

16. The Réflexions sur l’Eloquence et sur la Poësie of Rapin, another
Jesuit, whose Latin poem on Gardens has already been praised, are
judicious, though perhaps rather too diffuse; his criticism is what
would appear severe in our times; but it was that of a man formed by
the ancients, and who lived also in the best and most critical age of
France. The reflections on poetry are avowedly founded on Aristotle,
but with much that is new, and with examples from modern poets to
confirm and illustrate it. The practice at this time in France was to
depreciate the Italians; and Tasso is often the subject of Rapin’s
censure; for want, among other things, of that grave and majestic
character which epic poetry demands. Yet Rapin is not so rigorous, but
that he can blame the coldness of modern precepts in regard to French
poetry. After condemning the pompous tone of Brebœuf in his
translation of the Pharsalia, he remarks that “we have gone since to
an opposite extreme by too scrupulous a care for the purity of the
language; for we have begun to take from poetry its force and dignity
by too much reserve and a false modesty, which we have established as
characteristics of our language, so as to deprive it of that judicious
boldness which true poetry requires; we have cut off the metaphors and
all those figures of speech which give force and spirit to words and
reduced all the artifices of words to a pure regular style which
exposes itself to no risk by bold expression. The taste of the age,
the influence of women who are naturally timid, that of the court
which had hardly anything in common with the ancients, on account of
its usual antipathy for learning, accredited this manner of
writing.”[1030] In this Rapin seems to glance at the polite but cold
criticism of his brother Jesuit, Bouhours.

     [1030] P. 147.

|His Parallels of Great Men.|

17. Rapin, in another work of criticism, the Parallels of Great Men of
Antiquity, has weighed in the scales of his own judgment Demosthenes
and Cicero, Homer and Virgil, Thucydides and Livy, Plato and
Aristotle. Thus eloquence, poetry, history and philosophy pass under
review. The taste of Rapin is for the Latins; Cicero he prefers to
Demosthenes, Livy on the whole to Thucydides, though this he leaves
more to the reader; but is confident that none except mere grammarians
have ranked Homer above Virgil.[1031] The loquacity of the older poet,
the frequency of his moral reflections, which Rapin thinks misplaced
in an epic poem, his similes, the sameness of his traditions, are
treated very freely; yet he gives him the preference over Virgil for
grandeur and nobleness of narration, for his epithets, and the
splendour of his language. But he is of opinion that Æneas is a much
finer character than Achilles. These two epic poets he holds, however,
to be the greatest in the world; as for all the rest, ancient and
modern, he enumerates them one after another, and can find little but
faults in them all.[1032] Nor does he esteem dramatic and lyric poets,
at least modern, much better.

     [1031] P. 158.

     [1032] P. 175.

|Bossu on Epic Poetry.|

18. The Treatise on Epic Poetry by Bossu was once of some reputation.
An English poet has thought fit to say that we should have stared,
like Indians, at Homer, if Bossu had not taught us to understand
him.[1033] The book is, however, long since forgotten; and we fancy
that we understand Homer not the worse. It is in six books, which
treat of the fable, the action, the narration, the manners, the
machinery, the sentiments and expressions of an epic poem. Homer is
the favourite poet of Bossu, and Virgil next to him; this preference
of the superior model does him some honour in a generation which was
becoming insensible to its excellence. Bossu is judicious and correct
in taste, but without much depth, and he seems to want the acuteness
of Bouhours.

     [1033]
     Had Bossu never writ, the world had still,
     Like Indians, viewed this mighty piece of wit.
                      MULGRAVE’S _Essay on Poetry_.

|Fontenelle’s critical writings.|

19. Fontenelle is a critic of whom it may be said, that he did more
injury to fine taste and sensibility in works of imagination and
sentiment, than any man without his good sense and natural acuteness
could have done. He is systematically cold; if he seems to tolerate
any flight of the poet, it is rather by caprice than by a genuine
discernment of beauty; but he clings, with the unyielding claw of a
cold-blooded animal, to the faults of great writers, which he exposes
with reason and sarcasm. His Reflections on Poetry relate mostly to
dramatic composition, and to that of the French stage. Theocritus is
his victim in the Dissertation on Pastoral Poetry; but Fontenelle gave
the Sicilian his revenge; he wrote pastorals himself; and we have
altogether forgotten, or, when we again look at, can very partially
approve, the idylls of the Boulevards, while those Doric dactyls of
Theocritus linger still, like what Schiller has called soft music of
yesterday, from our school-boy reminiscences on our aged ears.

|Preference of French language to Latin.|

20. The reign of mere scholars was now at an end; no worse name than
that of pedant could be imposed on those who sought for glory; the
admiration of all that was national in arts, in arms, in manners, as
well as in speech, carried away like a torrent those prescriptive
titles to reverence which only lingered in colleges. The superiority
of the Latin language to French had long been contested; even Henry
Stephens has a dissertation in favour of the latter; and in this
period, though a few resolute scholars did not retire from the field,
it was generally held either that French was every way the better
means of expressing our thoughts, or, at least, so much more
convenient as to put nearly an end to the use of the other. Latin had
been the privileged language of stone; but Louis XIV., in consequence
of an essay by Charpentier, in 1676, replaced the inscriptions on his
triumphal arches by others in French.[1034] This, of course, does not
much affect the general question between the two languages.

     [1034] Goujet, i., 13.

|General superiority of ancients disputed.|

|Charles Perrault.|

21. But it was not in language alone that the ancients were to endure
the aggression of a disobedient posterity. It had long been a problem
in Europe whether they had not been surpassed; one, perhaps, which
began before the younger generations could make good their claim. But
time, the nominal ally of the old possessors, gave his more powerful
aid to their opponents; every age saw the proportions change, and new
men rise up to strengthen the ranks of the assailants. In philosophy,
in science, in natural knowledge, the ancients had none but a few mere
pedants, or half-read lovers of paradox, to maintain their
superiority; but in the beauties of language, in eloquence and poetry,
the suffrage of criticism had long been theirs. It seemed time to
dispute even this. Charles Perrault, a man of some learning, some
variety of acquirement, and a good deal of ingenuity and quickness,
published, in 1687, his famous “Parallel of the Ancients and Moderns
in all that regards Arts and Sciences.” This is a series of dialogues,
the parties being first, a president, deeply learned and prejudiced in
all respects for antiquity; secondly, an abbé, not ignorant, but
having reflected more than read, cool and impartial, always made to
appear in the right, or, in other words, the author’s representative;
thirdly, a man of the world, seizing the gay side of every subject,
and apparently brought in to prevent the book from becoming dull. They
begin with architecture and painting, and soon make it clear that
Athens was a mere heap of pig-sties in comparison with Versailles; the
ancient painters fare equally ill. They next advance to eloquence and
poetry, and here, where the strife of war is sharpest, the defeat of
antiquity is chanted with triumph. Homer, Virgil, Horace are
successively brought forward for severe and often unjust censure; but,
of course, it is not to be imagined that Perrault is always in the
wrong; he had to fight against a pedantic admiration which surrenders
sound taste; and having found the bow bent too much in one way, he
forced it himself too violently into another direction. It is the
fault of such books to be one-sided; they are not unfrequently right
in censuring blemishes, but very uncandid in suppressing beauties.
Homer has been worst used by Perrault, who had not the least power of
feeling his excellence; but the advocate of the newer age in his
dialogue admits that the Æneid is superior to any modern epic. In his
comparison of eloquence, Perrault has given some specimens of both
sides to contrast; comparing, by means, however, of his own versions,
the funeral orations of Pericles and Plato with those of Bourdaloue,
Bossuet, and Fléchier, the description by Pliny of his country seat
with one by Balzac, an epistle of Cicero with another of Balzac. These
comparisons were fitted to produce a great effect among those who
could neither read the original text, nor place themselves in the
midst of ancient feelings and habits. It is easy to perceive that a
vast majority of the French in that age would agree with Perrault; the
book was written for the times.

|Fontenelle.|

22. Fontenelle, in a very short digression on the ancients and
moderns, subjoined to his Discourse on Pastoral Poetry, followed the
steps of Perrault. “The whole question as to pre-eminence between the
ancients and moderns,” he begins, “reduces itself into another,
whether the trees that used to grow in our woods were larger than
those which grow now. If they were, Homer, Plato, Demosthenes cannot
be equalled in these ages; but if our trees are as large as trees were
of old, then there is no reason why we may not equal Homer, Plato, and
Demosthenes.” The sophistry of this is glaring enough; but it was
logic for Paris. In the rest of this short essay, there are the usual
characteristics of Fontenelle, cool, good sense, and an incapacity, by
natural privation, of feeling the highest excellence in works of
taste.

|Boileau’s defence of antiquity.|

23. Boileau, in observations annexed to his translation of Longinus,
as well as in a few sallies of his poetry, defended the great poets,
especially Homer and Pindar, with dignity and moderation; freely
abandoning the cause of antiquity where he felt it to be untenable.
Perrault replied with courage, a quality meriting some praise where
the adversary was so powerful in sarcasm and so little accustomed to
spare it; but the controversy ceased in tolerable friendship.

|First Reviews--Journal des Sçavans.|

24. The knowledge of new accessions to literature which its lovers
demanded, had hitherto been communicated only through the annual
catalogues published at Frankfort or other places. But these lists of
title-pages were unsatisfactory to the distant scholar, who sought to
become acquainted with the real progress of learning, and to know what
he might find it worth while to purchase. Denis de Sallo, a member of
the parliament of Paris, and not wholly undistinguished in literature,
though his other works are not much remembered, by carrying into
effect a happy project of his own, gave birth, as it were, to a mighty
spirit which has grown up in strength and enterprise, till it has
become the ruling power of the literary world. Monday, the 5th of
January, 1665, is the date of the first number of the first review,
the Journal des Sçavans, published by Sallo, under the name of the
Sieur de Hedouville, which some have said to be that of his
servant.[1035] It was printed weekly, in a duodecimo or sexto-decimo
form, each number containing from twelve to sixteen pages. The first
book ever reviewed (let us observe the difference of subject between
that and the last, whatever the last may be) was an edition of the
works of Victor Vitensis and Vigilius Tapsensis, African bishops of
the fifth century, by Father Chiflet, a Jesuit.[1036] The second is
Spelman’s Glossary. According to the prospectus prefixed to the
Journal des Sçavans, it was not designed for a mere review, but a
literary miscellany; composed, in the first place, of an exact
catalogue of the chief books which should be printed in Europe; not
content with the mere titles, as the majority of bibliographers had
hitherto been, but giving an account of their contents, and their
value to the public; it was also to contain a necrology of
distinguished authors, an account of experiments in physics and
chemistry, and of new discoveries in arts and sciences, with the
principal decisions of civil and ecclesiastical tribunals, the decrees
of the Sorbonne and other French or foreign universities; in short,
whatever might be interesting to men of letters. We find, therefore,
some piece of news, more or less of a literary or scientific nature,
subjoined to each number. Thus, in the first number, we have a
double-headed child born near Salisbury; in the second, a question of
legitimacy decided in the parliament of Paris; in the third, an
experiment on a new ship or boat constructed by Sir William Petty; in
the fourth, an account of a discussion in the College of Jesuits on
the nature of comets. The scientific articles, which bear a large
proportion to the rest, are illustrated by engravings. It was
complained that the Journal des Sçavans did not pay much regard to
polite or amusing literature; and this led to the publication of the
Mercure Galant, by Visé, which gave reviews of poetry and of the drama.

     [1035] Camusat, in his Histoire Critique des Journaux, in two
     volumes, 1734, which, notwithstanding its general title, is
     chiefly confined to the history of the Journal des Sçavans, and
     wholly to such as appeared in France, has not been able to clear
     up this interesting point; for there are not wanting those who
     assert, that Hedouville was the name of an estate belonging to
     Sallo; and he is called in some public description, without
     reference to the journal, Dominus de Sallo d’Hedouville in
     Parisiensi curia senator. Camusat, i., 13. Notwithstanding this,
     there is evidence that leads us to the valet; so that “ampliùs
     deliberandum censeo; Res magna est.”

     [1036] Victoria Vitensis et Vigilii Tapsensis, Provinciæ Bisacenæ
     Episcoporum Opera, edente R. P. Chifletio, Soc. Jesu. Presb., in
     4to. Divione. The critique, if such it be, occupies but two pages
     in small duodecimo. That on Spelman’s Glossary, which follows, is
     but in half a page.

25. Though the notices in the Journal des Sçavans are very short, and
when they give any character, for the most part of a laudatory tone,
Sallo did not fail to raise up enemies by the mere assumption of power
which a reviewer is prone to affect. Menage, on a work of whose he had
made some criticism, and by no means, as it appears, without justice,
replied in wrath; Patin and others rose up as injured authors against
the self-erected censor; but he made more formidable enemies by some
rather blunt declarations of a Gallican feeling, as became a
counsellor of the parliament of Paris, against the court of Rome; and
the privilege of publication was soon withdrawn from Sallo.[1037] It
is said that he had the spirit to refuse the offer of continuing the
journal under a previous censorship; and it passed into other hands,
those of Gallois, who continued it with great success.[1038] It is
remarkable that the first review, within a few months of its origin,
was silenced for assuming too imperious an authority over literature,
and for speaking evil of dignities. “In cunis jam Jove dignus erat.”
The Journal des Sçavans, incomparably the most ancient of living
reviews, is still conspicuous for its learning, its candour, and its
freedom from those stains of personal and party malice which deform
more popular works.

     [1037] Camusat, p. 28. Sallo had also attacked the Jesuits.

     [1038] Eloge de Gallois, par Fontenelle, in the latter’s works,
     vol. v., p. 168. Biographie Universelle, arts. Sallo and Gallois.
     Gallois is said to have been a coadjutor of Sallo from the
     beginning, and some others are named by Camusat as its
     contributors, among whom were Gomberville and Chapelain.

|Reviews established by Bayle.|

|And Le Clerc|

26. The path thus opened to all that could tempt a man who made
writing his profession--profit, celebrity, a perpetual appearance in
the public eye, the facility of pouring forth every scattered thought
of his own, the power of revenge upon every enemy, could not fail to
tempt more conspicuous men than Sallo or his successor Gallois. Two of
very high reputation, at least of reputation that hence became very
high, entered it, Bayle and Le Clerc. The former, in 1684, commenced a
new review, Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres. He saw and was
well able to improve the opportunities which periodical criticism
furnished to a mind eminently qualified for it; extensively, and in
some points, deeply learned; full of wit, acuteness, and a happy
talent of writing in a lively tone without the insipidity of affected
politeness. The scholar and philosopher of Rotterdam had a rival, in
some respects, and ultimately an adversary, in a neighbouring city. Le
Clerc, settled at Amsterdam as professor of belles lettres and of
Hebrew in the Arminister seminary, undertook in 1686, at the age of
twenty-nine, the first of those three celebrated series of reviews, to
which he owes so much of his fame. This was the Bibliothèque
Universelle, in all the early volumes of which La Croze, a much
inferior person, was his coadjutor, published monthly in a very small
form. Le Clerc had afterwards a disagreement with La Croze, and the
latter part of the Bibliothèque Universelle (that after the tenth
volume) is chiefly his own. It ceased to be published in 1693, and the
Bibliothèque Choisie, which is perhaps even a more known work of Le
Clerc, did not commence till 1708. But the fulness, the variety, the
judicious analysis and selection, as well as the value of the original
remarks, which we find in the Bibliothéque Universelle, renders it of
signal utility to those who would embrace the literature of that
short, but not unimportant period which it illustrates.

|Leipsic Acts.|

27. Meantime a less brilliant, but by no means less erudite, review,
the Leipsic Acts, had commenced in Germany. The first volume of this
series was published in 1682. But being written in Latin, with more
regard to the past than to the growing state of opinions, and
consequently almost excluding the most attractive, and indeed the most
important, subject, with a Lutheran spirit of unchangeable orthodoxy
in religion, and with an absence of anything like philosophy or even
connected system in erudition, it is one of the most unreadable books,
relatively to its utility in learning, which has ever fallen into my
hands. Italy had entered earlier on this critical career; the Giornale
de’ Litterati was begun at Rome in 1668; the Giornale Veneto de’
Litterati, at Venice in 1671. They continued for some time; but with
less conspicuous reputation than those above mentioned. The Mercure
Savant, published at Amsterdam in 1684, was an indifferent production,
which induced Bayle to set up his own Nouvelles de la Republique des
Lettres in opposition to it. Two reviews were commenced in the German
language within the seventeenth century, and three in English. The
first of these latter was the “Weekly Memorials for the Ingenious,”
London, 1682. This, I believe, lasted but a short time. It was
followed by one, entitled “The Works of the Learned,” in 1691; and by
another “History of the Works of the Learned,” in 1699. I have met
with none of these, nor will any satisfactory account of them, I
believe, be readily found.[1039]

     [1039] Jugler, Hist. Litteraria, cap. 9. Bibliothèque
     Universelle, xiii. 41.

|Bayle’s Thoughts on the Comet.|

28. Bayle had first become known in 1682, by the Pensées Diverses sur
la Comète de 1680; a work which I am not sure that he ever
decidedly surpassed. Its purpose is one hardly worthy, we should
imagine, to employ him; since those who could read and reason were not
likely to be afraid of comets, and those who could do neither would be
little the better for his book. But with this ostensible aim Bayle had
others in view; it gave scope to his keen observation of mankind, if
we may use the word observation for that which he chiefly derived from
modern books, and to the calm philosophy which he professed. There is
less of the love of paradox, less of a cavilling pyrrhonism, and
though much diffuseness, less of pedantry and irrelevant instances in
the Pensées Diverses than in his greater work. It exposed him,
however, to controversy; Jurieu, a French minister in Holland, the
champion of Calvinistic orthodoxy, waged a war that was only
terminated with their lives; and Bayle’s defence of the Thoughts on
the Comet is fully as long as the original performance, but far less
entertaining.

|His Dictionary.|

29. He now projected an immortal undertaking, the Historical and
Critical Dictionary. Moreri, a laborious scribe, had published in 1673
a kind of encyclopedic dictionary, biographical, historical, and
geographical; Bayle professed to fill up the numerous deficiencies,
and to rectify the errors of this compiler. It is hard to place his
dictionary, which appeared in 1694, under any distinct head in a
literary classification which does not make a separate chapter for
lexicography. It is almost equally difficult to give a general
character of this many-coloured web, that great erudition and still
greater acuteness and strength of mind wove for the last years of the
seventeenth century. The learning of Bayle was copious, especially in
what most required it, the controversies, the anecdotes, the
miscellaneous facts and sentences, scattered over the vast surface of
literature for two preceding centuries. In that of antiquity he was
less profoundly versed, yet so quick in application of his classical
stores, that he passes for even a better scholar than he was. His
original design may have been only to fill up the deficiencies of
Moreri; but a mind so fertile and excursive could not be restrained in
such limits. We may find however in this an apology for the numerous
omissions of Bayle, which would, in a writer absolutely original, seem
both capricious and unaccountable. We never can anticipate with
confidence that we shall find any name in his dictionary. The notes
are most frequently unconnected with the life to which they are
appended; so that, under a name uninteresting to us, or inapposite to
our purpose, we may be led into the richest vein of the author’s fine
reasoning or lively wit. Bayle is admirable in exposing the fallacies
of dogmatism, the perplexities of philosophy, the weaknesses of those
who affect to guide the opinions of mankind. But, wanting the
necessary condition of good reasoning, an earnest desire to reason
well, a moral rectitude from which the love of truth must spring, he
often avails himself of petty cavils, and becomes dogmatical in his
very doubts. A more sincere spirit of inquiry could not have suffered
a man of his penetrating genius to acquiesce, even contingently; in so
superficial a scheme as the Manichean. The sophistry of Bayle,
however, bears no proportion to his just and acute observations. Less
excuse can be admitted for his indecency, which almost assumes the
character of monomania, so invariably does it recur, even where there
is least pretext for it.

|Baillet.--Morhof.|

30. The Jugemens des Sçavans by Baillet, published in 1685 and 1686,
the Polyhistor of Morhof in 1689, are certainly works of criticism as
well as of bibliography. But neither of these writers, especially the
latter, are of much authority in matters of taste; their erudition was
very extensive, their abilities respectable, since they were able to
produce such useful and comprehensive works; but they do not greatly
serve to enlighten or correct our judgments; nor is the original
matter in any considerable proportion to that which they have derived
from others. I have taken notice of both these in my preface.

|The Ana.|

31. France was very fruitful of that miscellaneous literature which,
desultory and amusing, has the advantage of remaining better in the
memory than more systematic books, and in fact is generally found to
supply the man of extensive knowledge with the materials of his
conversation, as well as to fill the vacancies of his deeper studies.
The memoirs, the letters, the travels, the dialogues and essays, which
might be ranged in so large a class as that we now pass in review, are
too numerous to be mentioned, and it must be understood that most of
them are less in request even among the studious than they were in the
last century. One group has acquired the distinctive name of Ana; the
reported conversation, the table-talk of the learned. Several belong
to the last part of the sixteenth century, or the first of the next;
the Scaligerana, the Perroniana, the Pithæana, the Naudæana, the
Casauboniana; the last of which are not conversational, but fragments
collected from the common-place books and loose papers of Isaac
Casaubon. Two collections of the present period are very well known;
the Menagiana, and the Mélanges de Littérature par Vigneul-Marville;
which differs indeed from the rest in not being reported by others,
but published by the author himself; yet comes so near in spirit and
manner, that we may place it in the same class. The Menagiana has the
common fault of these Ana, that it rather disappoints expectation, and
does not give us as much new learning as the name of its author seems
to promise; but it is amusing, full of light anecdote of a literary
kind, and interesting to all who love the recollections of that
generation. Vigneul-Marville is an imaginary person; the author of the
Mélanges de Littérature is D’Argonne, a Benedictine of Rouen. This
book has been much esteemed; the mask gives courage to the author, who
writes, not unlike a Benedictine, but with a general tone of
independent thinking, united to good judgment and a tolerably
extensive knowledge of the state of literature. He had entered into
the religious profession rather late in life. The Chevræana and
Segraisiana, especially the latter, are of little value. The
Parrhasiana of Le Clerc are less amusing and less miscellaneous than
some of the Ana; but in all his writings there is a love of truth and
a zeal against those who obstruct inquiry, which to congenial spirits
is as pleasing as it is sure to render him obnoxious to opposite
tempers.

|English style in this Period.|

32. The characteristics of English writers in the first division of
the century were not maintained in the second, though the change, as
was natural, did not come on by very rapid steps. The pedantry of
unauthorized Latinisms, the affectation of singular and not generally
intelligible words from other sources, the love of quaint phrases,
strange analogies, and ambitious efforts at antithesis, gave way by
degrees; a greater ease of writing was what the public demanded, and
what the writers after the Restoration sought to attain; they were
more strictly idiomatic and English than their predecessors. But this
ease sometimes became negligence and feebleness, and often turned to
coarseness and vulgarity. The language of Sevigné and Hamilton is
eminently colloquial; scarce a turn occurs in their writings which
they would not have used in familiar society; but theirs was the
colloquy of the gods, ours of men; their idiom, though still simple
and French, had been refined in the saloons of Paris, by that
instinctive rejection of all that is low which the fine tact of
accomplished women dictates; while in our own contemporary writers,
with little exception, theirs is what defaces the dialogue of our
comedy, a tone not so much of provincialism, or even of what is called
the language of the common people, as of one much worse, the dregs of
vulgar ribaldry, which a gentleman must clear from his conversation
before he can assert that name. Nor was this confined to those who led
irregular lives; the general manners being unpolished, we find in the
writings of the clergy, wherever they are polemic or satirical, the
same tendency to what is called _slang_; a word which, as itself
belongs to the vocabulary it denotes, I use with some unwillingness.
The pattern of bad writing in this respect was Sir Roger L’Estrange;
his Æsop’s Fables will present everything that is hostile to good
taste; yet by a certain wit and readiness in raillery L’Estrange was a
popular writer and may even now be read, perhaps, with some amusement.
The translation of Don Quixote, published in 1682, may also be
specified as incredibly vulgar, and without the least perception of
the tone which the original author has preserved.

|Hobbes.|

33. We can produce nevertheless several names of those who laid the
foundations at least, and indeed furnished examples, of good style;
some of them among the greatest, for other merits, in our literature.
Hobbes is perhaps the first of whom we can say that he is a good
English writer; for the excellent passages of Hooker, Sydney, Raleigh,
Bacon, Taylor, Chillingworth, and others of the Elizabethan or the
first Stuart period are not sufficient to establish their claim; a
good writer being one whose composition is nearly uniform, and who
never sinks to such inferiority or negligence as we must confess in
most of these. To make such a writer, the absence of gross fault is
full as necessary as actual beauties; we are not judging as of poets,
by the highest flight of their genius, and forgiving all the rest, but
as of a sum of positive and negative quantities, where the latter
counterbalance and efface an equal portion of the former. Hobbes is
clear, precise, spirited, and, above all, free, in general, from the
faults of his predecessors; his language is sensibly less obsolete; he
is never vulgar, rarely, if ever, quaint or pedantic.

|Cowley.|

34. Cowley’s prose, very unlike his verse, as Johnson has observed, is
perspicuous and unaffected. His few essays may even be reckoned among
the earliest models of good writing. In that, especially, on the death
of Cromwell, till, losing his composure, he falls a little into the
vulgar style towards the close, we find an absence of pedantry, an
ease and graceful choice of idiom, an unstudied harmony of periods,
which had been perceived in very few writers of the two preceding
reigns. “His thoughts,” says Johnson, “are natural, and his style has
a smooth and placid equability which has never yet obtained its due
commendation. Nothing is far-sought or hard-laboured; but all is easy
without feebleness, and familiar without grossness.”

|Evelyn.|

35. Evelyn wrote in 1651 a little piece, purporting to be an account
of England by a Frenchman. It is very severe on our manners,
especially in London; his abhorrence of the late revolutions in church
and state conspiring with his natural politeness which he had lately
improved by foreign travel. It is worth reading as illustrative of
social history; but I chiefly mention it here on account of the polish
and gentlemanly elegance of the style, which very few had hitherto
regarded in such light compositions. An answer by some indignant
patriot has been reprinted together with this pamphlet of Evelyn, and
is a good specimen of the bestial ribaldry which our ancestors seem to
have taken for wit.[1040] The later writings of Evelyn are such as his
character and habits would lead us to expect, but I am not aware that
they often rise above that respectable level, nor are their subjects
such as to require an elevated style.

     [1040] Both these will be found in the late edition of Evelyn’s
     Miscellaneous Works.

|Dryden.|

36. Every poem and play of Dryden, as they successively appeared, was
ushered into the world by those prefaces and dedications which
have made him celebrated as a critic of poetry and a master of the
English language. The Essay on Dramatic Poesy, and its subsequent
Defence, the Origin and Progress of Satire, the Parallel of Poetry and
Painting, the Life of Plutarch, and other things of minor importance,
all prefixed to some more extensive work, complete the catalogue of
his prose. The style of Dryden was very superior to any that England
had seen. Not conversant with our old writers, so little, in fact, as
to find the common phrases of the Elizabethan age unintelligible,[1041]
he followed the taste of Charles’s reign, in emulating the politest
and most popular writers in the French language. He seems to have
formed himself on Montaigne, Balzac, and Voiture; but so ready was his
invention, so vigorous his judgment, so complete his mastery over his
native tongue, that, in point of style, he must be reckoned above all
the three. He had the ease of Montaigne without his negligence and
embarrassed structure of periods; he had the dignity of Balzac with
more varied cadences, and without his hyperbolical tumour, the
unexpected turns of Voiture without his affectation and air of effort.
In the dedications especially, we find paragraphs of extraordinary
gracefulness, such as possibly have never been surpassed in our
language. The prefaces are evidently written in a more negligent
style; he seems, like Montaigne, to converse with the reader from his
arm-chair, and passes onward with little connection from one subject
to another.[1042] In addressing a patron, a different line is
observable; he comes with the respectful air which the occasion seems
to demand; but, though I do not think that Dryden ever, in language,
forgets his own position, we must confess that the flattery is
sometimes palpably untrue, and always offensively indelicate. The
dedication of the Mock Astrologer to the Duke of Newcastle is a
masterpiece of fine writing; and the subject better deserved these
lavish commendations than most who received them. That of the State of
Innocence to the Duchess of York is also very well written; but the
adulation is excessive. It appears to me that, after the Revolution,
Dryden took less pains with his style; the colloquial vulgarisms, and
these are not wanting even in his earlier prefaces, become more
frequent; his periods are often of more slovenly construction; he
forgets even in his dedications that he is standing before a lord.
Thus, remarking on the account Andromache gives to Hector of her own
history, he observes, in a style rather unworthy of him, “The devil
was in Hector if he knew not all this matter as well as she who told
it him, for she had been his bed-fellow for many years together; and
if he knew it then, it must be confessed that Homer in this long
digression has rather given us his own character, than that of the
fair lady whom he paints.”[1043]

     [1041] Malone has given several proofs of this. Dryden’s Prose
     Works, vol. i., part 2, p. 136, et alibi. Dryden thought
     expressions wrong and incorrect in Shakspeare and Johnson which
     were the current language of their age.

     [1042] This is his own account. “The nature of a preface is
     rambling, never wholly out of the way, nor in it.... This I have
     learned from the practice of honest Montaigne.” Vol. iii.,
     p. 605.

     [1043] Vol. iii., p. 286. This is in the dedication of his third
     Miscellany to Lord Ratcliffe.

|His Essay on Dramatic Poesy.|

37. His Essay on Dramatic Poesy, published in 1668, was reprinted
sixteen years afterwards, and it is curious to observe the changes
which Dryden made in the expression. Malone has carefully noted all
these; they show both the care the author took with his own style, and
the change which was gradually working in the English language.[1044]
The Anglicism of terminating the sentence with a preposition is
rejected.[1045] Thus “I cannot think so contemptibly of the age I live
in,” is exchanged for “the age in which I live.” “A deeper expression
of belief than all the actor can persuade us to,” is altered, “can
insinuate into us.” And, though the old form continued in use long
after the time of Dryden, it has of late years been reckoned inelegant
and proscribed in all cases, perhaps with an unnecessary fastidiousness,
to which I have not uniformly deferred, since our language is of a
Teutonic structure, and the rules of Latin or French grammar are not
always to bind us.

     [1044] Vol. i., p. 136-142.

     [1045] “The preposition in the end of the sentence, a common
     fault with him (Ben Johnson), and which I have but lately
     observed in my own writings,” p. 237. The form is, in my opinion,
     sometimes emphatic and spirited, though its frequent use appears
     slovenly. I remember my late friend, Mr. Richard Sharp, whose
     good taste is well known, used to quote an interrogatory of
     Hooker: “Shall there be a God to swear by, and none to pray to?”
     as an instance of the force which this arrangement, so eminently
     idiomatic, sometimes gives. It is unnecessary to say that it is
     derived from the German; and nothing but Latin prejudice can make
     us think it essentially wrong. In the passive voice, I think it
     better than in the active; nor can it always be dispensed with,
     unless we choose rather the feeble encumbering pronoun _which_.

|Improvements in his style.|

38. This Essay on Dramatic Poesy is written in dialogue; Dryden
himself, under the name of Neander, being probably one of the
speakers. It turns on the use of rhyme in tragedy, on the observation
of the unities, and on some other theatrical questions. Dryden, at
this time, was favourable to rhymed tragedies, which his practice
supported. Sir Robert Howard having written some observations on that
essay and taken a different view as to rhyme, Dryden published a
defence of his essay in a masterly style of cutting scorn, but one
hardly justified by the tone of the criticism, which had been very
civil towards him; and, as he was apparently in the wrong, the air of
superiority seems the more misplaced.

|His critical character.|

39. Dryden, as a critic, is not to be numbered with those who have
sounded the depths of the human mind, hardly with those who analyse
the language and sentiments of poets, and teach others to judge by
showing why they have judged themselves. He scatters remarks,
sometimes too indefinite, sometimes too arbitrary; yet his
predominating good sense colours the whole; we find in them no
perplexing subtlety, no cloudy nonsense, no paradoxes and heresies in
taste to revolt us. Those he has made on translation in the preface to
that of Ovid’s Epistles are valuable. “No man,” he says, “is capable
of translating poetry, who besides a genius to that art, is not a
master both of his author’s language and of his own. Nor must we
understand the language only of the poet, but his particular turn of
thoughts and expression, which are the characters that distinguish,
and, as it were, individuate him from all other writers.”[1046] We
cannot pay Dryden the compliment of saying that he gave the example as
well as precept, especially in his Virgil. He did not scruple to copy
Segrais in his discourse on Epic Poetry. “Him I follow, and what I
borrow from him am ready to acknowledge to him; for, impartially
speaking, the French are as much better critics than the English as
they are worse poets.”[1047]

     [1046] Vol. iii., p. 19.

     [1047] P. 460. The quotations in this paragraph present two
     instances of the word _to_ in an unauthorised usage; the second is
     a Gallicism; but the first has not even that excuse.

40. The greater part of his critical writings relates to the drama; a
subject with which he was very conversant; but he had some
considerable prejudices; he seems never to have felt the transcendent
excellence of Shakspeare; and sometimes, perhaps, his own opinions, if
not feigned, are biased by that sort of self-defence to which he
thought himself driven in the prefaces to his several plays. He had
many enemies on the watch; the Duke of Buckingham’s Rehearsal, a
satire of great wit, had exposed to ridicule the heroic tragedies,[1048]
and many were afterwards ready to forget the merits of the poet in the
delinquencies of the politician. “What Virgil wrote,” he says, “in the
vigour of his age, in plenty and in ease, I have undertaken to
translate in my declining years; struggling with wants, oppressed by
sickness, curbed in my genius, liable to be misconstrued in all I
write; and my judges, if they are not very equitable, already
prejudiced against me by the lying character which has been given them
of my morals.”[1049]

     [1048] This comedy was published in 1672; the parodies are
     amusing; and though parody is the most unfair weapon that
     ridicule can use, they are in most instances warranted by the
     original. Bayes, whether he resembles Dryden or not, is a very
     comic personage: the character is said by Johnson to have been
     sketched for Davenant; but I much doubt this report; Davenant had
     been dead some years before the Rehearsal was published, and
     could have been in no way obnoxious to its satire.

     [1049] Vol. iii., p. 557.

|Rymer on Tragedy.|

41. Dryden will hardly be charged with abandoning too hastily our
national credit, when he said the French were better critics than the
English. We had scarcely anything worthy of notice to alledge beyond
his own writings. The Theatrum Poetarum by Philips, nephew of Milton,
is superficial in every respect. Thomas Rymer, best known to mankind
as the editor of the Fœdera, but a strenuous advocate for the
Aristotelian principles in the drama, published, in 1678, “The
Tragedies of the last Age considered and examined by the Practice of
the Ancients, and by the common Sense of all Ages.” This contains a
censure of some plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, Shakspeare and Jonson.
“I have chiefly considered the fable or plot which all conclude to be
the soul of a tragedy, which with the ancients is always found to be a
reasonable soul, but with us for the most part a brutish, and often
worse than brutish.”[1050] I have read only his criticisms on the
Maid’s Tragedy, King and no King, and Rollo; and as the conduct and
characters of all three are far enough from being invulnerable, it is
not surprising that Rymer has often well exposed them.

     [1050] P. 4.

|Sir William Temple’s Essays.|

42. Next to Dryden, the second place among the polite writers of the
period, from the Restoration to the end of the century, has commonly
been given to Sir William Temple. His Miscellanies, to which,
principally, this praise belongs, are not recommended by more
erudition than a retired statesman might acquire, with no great
expense of time, nor by much originality of reflection. But if Temple
has not profound knowledge, he turns all he possesses well to account;
if his thoughts are not very striking, they are commonly just. He has
less eloquence than Bolingbroke, but is also free from his
restlessness and ostentation. Much, also, which now appears
superficial in Temple’s historical surveys, was far less familiar in
his age; he has the merit of a comprehensive and a candid mind. His
style, to which we should particularly refer, will be found in
comparison with his contemporaries highly polished, and sustained with
more equability than they preserve, remote from anything either
pedantic or humble. The periods are studiously rhythmical; yet they
want the variety and peculiar charm that we admire in those of Dryden.

|Style of Locke.|

43. Locke is certainly a good writer, relatively to the greater part
of his contemporaries; his plain and manly sentences often give us
pleasure by the wording alone. But he has some defects; in his Essay
on the Human Understanding he is often too figurative for the subject.
In all his writings, and especially in the Treatise on Education, he
is occasionally negligent, and though not vulgar, at least according
to the idiom of his age, slovenly in the structure of his sentences as
well as the choice of his words; he is not, in mere style, very
forcible, and certainly not very elegant.

|Sir George Mackenzie’s Essays.|

|Andrew Fletcher.|

44. The Essays of Sir George Mackenzie are empty and diffuse; the
style is full of pedantic words to a degree of barbarism; and though
they were chiefly written after the Revolution, he seems to have
wholly formed himself on the older writers, such as Sir Thomas Browne,
or even Feltham. He affects the obsolete and unpleasing termination of
the third person of the verb in _eth_, which was going out of use
even in the pulpit, besides other rust of archaism. Nothing can be
more unlike the manner of Dryden, Locke, or Temple. In his matter he
seems a mere declaimer, as if the world would any longer endure the
trivial morality which the sixteenth century had borrowed from Seneca,
or the dull ethics of sermons. It is probable that, as Mackenzie was a
man who had seen and read much, he must have some better passages than
I have found in glancing shortly at his works. His countryman, Andrew
Fletcher, is a better master of English style; he writes with purity,
clearness, and spirit; but the substance is so much before his eyes,
that he is little solicitous about language. And a similar character
may be given to many of the political tracts in the reign of William.
They are well expressed for their purpose; their English is
perspicuous, unaffected, often forcible, and, upon the whole, much
superior to that of similar writings in the reign of Charles; but they
do not challenge a place of which their authors never dreamed; they
are not to be counted in the polite literature of England.

|Walton’s Complete Angler.|

45. I may have overlooked, or even never known, some books of
sufficient value to deserve mention; and I regret that the list of
miscellaneous literature should be so short. But it must be confessed
that our golden age did not begin before the eighteenth century, and
then with him who has never since been rivalled in grace, humour, and
invention. Walton’s Complete Angler, published in 1653, seems by the
title a strange choice out of all the books of half a century; yet its
simplicity, its sweetness, its natural grace, and happy intermixture
of graver strains with the precepts of angling, have rendered this
book deservedly popular, and a model which one of the most famous
among our late philosophers, and a successful disciple of Isaac Walton
in his favourite art, has condescended to imitate.

|Wilkin’s New World.|

46. A book, not indeed remarkable for its style, but one which I could
hardly mention in any less miscellaneous chapter than the present,
though, since it was published in 1638, it ought to have been
mentioned before, is Wilkin’s “Discovery of a New World, or a
Discourse tending to prove that it is probable there may be another
habitable World in the Moon, with a Discourse concerning the
Possibility of a Passage thither.” This is one of the births of that
inquiring spirit, that disdain of ancient prejudice, which the
seventeenth century produced. Bacon was undoubtedly the father of it
in England; but Kepler, and above all Galileo, by the new truths they
demonstrated, made men fearless in investigation and conjecture. The
geographical discoveries indeed of Columbus and Magellan had prepared
the way for conjectures, hardly more astonishing in the eyes of the
vulgar than those had been. Wilkins accordingly begins by bringing a
host of sage writers who had denied the existence of antipodes. He
expressly maintains the Copernican theory, but admits that it was
generally reputed a novel paradox. The arguments on the other side he
meets at some length, and knew how to answer, by the principles of
compound motion, the plausible objection that stones falling from a
tower were not left behind by the motion of the earth. The spots in
the moon he took for sea, and the brighter parts for land. A lunar
atmosphere he was forced to hold, and gives reasons for thinking it
probable. As to inhabitants, he does not dwell long on the subject.
Campanella, and long before him Cardinal Cusanus, had believed the sun
and moon to be inhabited,[1051] and Wilkins ends by saying: “Being
content for my own part to have spoken so much of it, as may conduce
to show the opinion of others concerning the inhabitants of the moon,
I dare not myself affirm anything of these Selenites, because I know
not any ground whereon to build any probable opinion. But I think that
future ages will discover more, and our posterity perhaps may invent
some means for our better acquaintance with those inhabitants.” To
this he comes as his final proposition, that it may be possible for
some of our posterity to find out a conveyance to this other world;
and if there be inhabitants there, to have communication with them.
But this chapter is the worst in the book, and shows that Wilkins,
notwithstanding his ingenuity, had but crude notions on the principles
of physics. He followed this up by what I have not seen, a “Discourse
concerning a new planet; tending to prove that it is possible our
earth is one of the planets.” This appears to be a regular vindication
of the Copernican theory, and was published in 1640.

     [1051] Suspicamur in regione solis magis esse solares, claros et
     illuminatos intellectuales habitatores, spiritualiores etiam quam
     in luna, ubi magis lunatici, et in terra magis materiales et
     crassi, ut illi intellectualis naturæ solares sint multum in actu
     et parum in potentiâ, terreni vero magis in potentia et parum in
     actu, lunares in medio fluctuantes, &c. Cusanus apud Wilkins,
     p. 103 (edit. 1802).

|Antiquity defended by Temple.|

|Wotton’s Reflections.|

47. The cause of antiquity, so rudely found support in Sir William
Temple, assailed abroad by Perrault and Fontenelle, who has defended
it in one of his essays with more zeal than prudence or knowledge of
the various subjects on which he contends for the rights of the past.
It was in fact such a credulous and superficial view as might have
been taken by a pedant of the sixteenth century. For it is in science,
taking the word largely, full as much as in works of genius, that he
denies the ancients to have been surpassed. Temple’s Essay, however,
was translated into French, and he was supposed by many to have made a
brilliant vindication of injured antiquity. But it was soon refuted in
the most solid book that was written in any country upon this famous
dispute. William Wotton published in 1694 his Reflections on ancient
and modern Learning.[1052] He draws very well in this the line between
Temple and Perrault, avoiding the tasteless judgment of the latter in
poetry and eloquence, but pointing out the superiority of the moderns
in the whole range of physical science.

     [1052] Wotton had been a boy of astonishing precocity; at six
     years old he could readily translate Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; at
     seven he added some knowledge of Arabic and Syriac. He entered
     Catherine Hall, Cambridge, in his tenth year; at thirteen, when
     he took the degree of bachelor of arts, he was acquainted with
     twelve languages. There being no precedent of granting a degree
     to one so young, a special record of his extraordinary
     proficiency was made in the registers of the university. Monk’s
     Life of Bentley, p. 7.


                             SECT. II.

                            ON FICTION.

_French Romances--La Fayette and others--Pilgrim’s Progress--Turkish
Spy._

|Quevedo’s Visions.|

48. Spain had about the middle of this century a writer of various
literature, who is only known in Europe by his fictions, Quevedo. His
visions and his life of the great Tacaño, were early translated, and
became very popular.[1053] They may be reckoned superior to anything
in comic romance, except Don Quixote, that the seventeenth century
produced; and yet this commendation is not a high one. In the
picaresque style, the life of Tacaño is tolerably amusing; but
Quevedo, like others, has long since been surpassed. The Sueños, or
Visions, are better; they show spirit and sharpness with some
originality of invention. But Las Zahurdas de Pluton, which, like the
other sueños, bears a general resemblance to the Pilgrim’s Progress,
being an allegorical dream, is less powerfully and graphically
written; the satire is also rather too obvious. “Lucian,” says
Bouterwek, “furnished him with the original idea of satirical visions;
but Quevedo’s were the first of their kind in modern literature. Owing
to frequent imitations, their faults are no longer disguised by the
charm of novelty, and even their merits have ceased to interest.”[1054]

     [1053] The translation of this, “made English by a person of
     honour” takes great liberties with the original, and endeavours
     to excel it in wit by means of frequent interpolation.

     [1054] Hist. of Spanish Literature, p. 471.

|French heroic romances.|

49. No species of composition seems less adapted to the genius of the
French nation in the reign of Louis XIV. than the heroic romances so
much admired in its first years. It must be confessed that this was
but the continuance, and in some respect possibly, an improvement of a
long established style of fiction. But it was not fitted to endure
reason or ridicule, and the societies of Paris knew the use of both
weapons. Molière sometimes tried his wit upon the romances; and
Boileau, rather later in the day, when the victory had been won,
attacked Mademoiselle Scudery with his sarcastic irony in a dialogue
on the heroes of her invention.

|Novels of Madame La Fayette.|

50. The first step in descending from the heroic romance was to ground
not altogether dissimilar. The feats of chivalry were replaced by less
wonderful adventures; the love became less hyperbolical in expression,
though not less intensely engrossing the personages; the general tone
of manners was lowered down better to that of nature, or at least of
an ideality which the imagination did not reject; a style already
tried in the minor fictions of Spain. The earliest novels that demand
attention in this line are those of the Countess de la Fayette,
celebrated while Mademoiselle de la Vergne under the name of Laverna
in the Latin poetry of Menage.[1055] Zayde, the first of these, is
entirely in the Spanish style; the adventures are improbable, but
various and rather interesting to those who carry no scepticism into
fiction; the language is polished and agreeable, though not very
animated; and it is easy to perceive that while that kind of novel was
popular, Zayde would obtain a high place. It has, however, the usual
faults; the story is broken by intervening narratives, which occupy
too large a space; the sorrows of the principal characters excite, at
least as I should judge, little sympathy; and their sentiments and
emotions are sometimes too much refined in the alembic of the Hôtel
Rambouillet. In a later novel, the Princess of Cleves, Madame La
Fayette threw off the affectation of that circle to which she had once
belonged, and though perhaps Zayde is, or was in its own age, the more
celebrated novel, it seems to me that in this she has excelled
herself. The story, being nothing else than the insuperable and
insidious, but not guilty, attachment of a married lady to a lover,
required a delicacy and correctness of taste which the authoress has
well displayed in it. The probability of the incidents, the natural
course they take, the absence of all complication and perplexity, give
such an inartificial air to this novel, that we can scarcely help
believing it to shadow forth some real event. A modern novelist would
probably have made more of the story; the style is always calm,
sometimes almost languid; a tone of decorous politeness, like that of
the French stage, is never relaxed; but it is precisely by this means
that the writer has kept up a moral dignity, of which it would have
been so easy to lose sight. The Princess of Cleves is perhaps the
first work of mere invention (for though the characters are
historical, there is no known foundation for the story) which brought
forward the manners of the aristocracy; it may be said, the
contemporary manners; for Madame La Fayette must have copied her own
times. As this has become a popular theme of fiction, it is just to
commemorate the novel which introduced it.

     [1055] The name Laverna, though well-sounding, was in one respect
     unlucky, being that given by antiquity to the goddess of thieves.
     An epigram on Menage, almost, perhaps, too trite to be quoted, is
     _piquant_ enough:

     Lesbia nulla tibi, nulla est tibi dicta Corinna;
       Carmine laudatur Cynthia nulla tuo.
     Sed cum doctorum compilas scrinia vatum,
       Nil mirum, si sit culta Laverna tibi.

|Scarron’s Roman Comique.|

51. The French have few novels of this class in the seventeenth
century which they praise; those of Madame Villedieu, or Des Jardins,
may deserve to be excepted; but I have not seen them. Scarron,
a man deformed and diseased, but endowed with vast gaiety, which
generally exuberated in buffoon jests, has the credit of having struck
out into a new path by his Roman Comique. The Spaniards, however, had
so much like this that we cannot perceive any great originality in
Scarron. The Roman Comique is still well known, and if we come to it
in vacant moments, will serve its end in amusing us; the story and
characters have no great interest, but they are natural; yet, without
the least disparagement to the vivacity of Scarron, it is still true
that he has been left at an immense distance in observation of
mankind, in humorous character, and in ludicrous effect by the
novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is said that
Scarron’s romance is written in a pure style; and some have even
pretended that he has not been without effect in refining the
language. The Roman Bourgeois of Furetière appears to be a novel of
middle life; it had some reputation, but I cannot speak of it with any
knowledge.

|Cyrano de Bergerac.|

|Segrais.|

52. Cyrano de Bergerac had some share in directing the public taste
towards those extravagances of fancy which were afterwards highly
popular. He has been imitated himself, as some have observed, by Swift
and Voltaire, and I should add, to a certain degree, by Hamilton; but
all the three have gone far beyond him. He is not himself a very
original writer. His Voyage to the Moon and History of the Empire of
the Sun are manifestly suggested by the True History of Lucian; and he
had modern fictions, especially the Voyage to the Moon by Godwin,
mentioned in our last volume, which he had evidently read, to imp the
wings of an invention not perhaps eminently fertile. Yet Bergerac has
the merit of being never wearisome; his fictions are well conceived,
and show little effort, which seems also the character of his language
in this short piece; though his letters had been written in the worst
style of affectation, so as to make us suspect that he was turning the
manner of some contemporaries into ridicule. The novels of Segrais
such at least as I have seen, are mere pieces of light satire,
designed to amuse by transient allusions the lady by whom he was
patronized, Mademoiselle de Montpensier. If they deserve any regard at
all, it is as links in the history of fiction between the mock-heroic
romance, of which Voiture had given an instance, and the style of
fantastic invention, which was perfected by Hamilton.

|Perrault.|

53. Charles Perrault may, so far as I know, be said to have invented a
kind of fiction which became extremely popular, and has had, even
after it ceased to find direct imitators, a perceptible influence over
the lighter literature of Europe. The idea was original, and happily
executed. Perhaps he sometimes took the tales of children, such as the
tradition of many generations had delivered them; but much of his
fairy machinery seems to have been his own, and I should give him
credit for several of the stories, though it is hard to form a guess.
He gave to them all a real interest, as far as could be, with a
naturalness of expression, an arch naïveté, a morality neither too
obvious nor too refined, and a slight poignancy of satire on the
world, which render the Tales of Mother Goose almost a counterpart in
prose to the Fables of La Fontaine.

|Hamilton.|

54. These amusing fictions caught the fancy of an indolent but not
stupid nobility. The court of Versailles and all Paris resounded with
fairy tales; it became the popular style for more than half a century.
But few of these fall within our limits. Perrault’s immediate
followers, Madame Murat and the Countess D’Aunoy, especially the
latter, have some merit; but they come very short of the happy
simplicity and brevity we find in Mother Goose’s Tales. It is possible
that Count Antony Hamilton may have written those tales which have
made him famous before the end of the century, though they were
published later. But these with many admirable strokes of wit and
invention, have too forced a tone in both these qualities; the labour
is too evident, and, thrown away on such trifling, excites something
like contempt; they are written for an exclusive coterie, not for the
world; and the world in all such cases will sooner or later take its
revenge. Yet Hamilton’s tales are incomparably superior to what
followed; inventions alternately dull and extravagant, a style
negligent or mannered, an immorality passing onward from the
licentiousness of the Regency to the debased philosophy of the ensuing
age, became the general characteristics of these fictions, which
finally expired in the neglect and scorn of the world.

|Télémaque of Fenelon.|

55. The Télémaque of Fenelon, after being suppressed in France,
appeared in Holland clandestinely without the author’s consent
in 1699. It is needless to say that it soon obtained the admiration of
Europe, and perhaps there is no book in the French language that has
been more read. Fenelon seems to have conceived that, metre not being
essential, as he assumed, to poetry, he had, by imitating the Odyssey
in Télémaque, produced an epic of as legitimate a character as his
model. But the boundaries between epic poetry, especially such epics
as the Odyssey, and romance were only perceptible by the employment of
verse in the former; no elevation of character, no ideality of
conception, no charm of imagery or emotion had been denied to romance.
The language of poetry had for two centuries been seized for its use.
Télémaque must therefore take its place among romances; but still it
is true that no romance had breathed so classical a spirit, none had
abounded so much with the richness of poetical language, much in fact
of Homer, Virgil, and Sophocles having been woven in with no other
change than verbal translation, nor had any preserved such dignity in
its circumstances, such beauty, harmony, and nobleness in its diction.
It would be as idle to say that Fenelon was indebted to D’Urfé and
Calprenede, as to deny that some degree of resemblance may be found in
their poetical prose. The one belonged to the morals of chivalry,
generous but exaggerated; the other to those of wisdom and religion.
The one has been forgotten because its tone is false; the other is
ever admired, and is only less regarded because it is true in excess;
because it contains too much of what we know. Télémaque, like some
other of Fenelon’s writings, is to be considered in reference to its
object; an object of all the noblest, being to form the character of
one to whom many must look up for their welfare, but still very
different from the inculcation of profound truth. The beauties of
Télémaque are very numerous; the descriptions, and indeed the whole
tone of the book, have a charm of grace, something like the pictures
of Guido; but there is also a certain languor which steals over us in
reading, and though there is no real want of variety in the narration,
it reminds us so continually of its source, the Homeric legends, as to
become rather monotonous. The abandonment of verse has produced too
much diffuseness; it will be observed, if we look attentively, that
where Homer is circumstantial, Fenelon is more so; in this he
sometimes approaches the minuteness of the romancers. But these
defects are more than compensated by the moral, and even æsthetic
excellence of this romance.

|Deficiency of English romances.|

56. If this most fertile province of all literature, as we have now
discovered it to be, had yielded so little even in France, a nation
that might appear eminently fitted to explore it, down to the close of
the seventeenth century, we may be less surprised at the greater
deficiency of our own country. Yet the scarcity of original fiction in
England was so great as to be inexplicable by any reasoning. The
public taste was not incapable of being pleased; for all the novels
and romances of the continent were readily translated. The manners of
all classes were as open to humorous description, the imagination was
as vigorous, the heart as susceptible as in other countries. But not
only we find nothing good; it can hardly be said that we find anything
at all that has ever attracted notice in English romance. The
Parthenissa of Lord Orrery, in the heroic style, and the short novels
of Afra Behn, are nearly as many, perhaps, as could be detected in old
libraries. We must leave the beaten track before we can place a single
work in this class.

|Pilgrim’s Progress.|

57. The Pilgrim’s Progress essentially belongs to it, and John Bunyan
may pass for the father of our novelists. His success in a line of
composition like the spiritual romance or allegory, which seems to
have been frigid and unreadable in the few instances where it had been
attempted, is doubtless enhanced by his want of all learning and his
low station in life. He was therefore rarely, if ever, an imitator; he
was never enchained by rules. Bunyan possessed in a remarkable degree
the power of representation; his inventive faculty was considerable,
but the other is his distinguishing excellence. He saw, and makes us
see, what he describes; he is circumstantial without prolixity, and in
the variety and frequent change of his incidents, never loses sight of
the unity of his allegorical fable. His invention was enriched, and
rather his choice determined, by one rule he had laid down to himself,
the adaptation of all the incidental language of scripture to his own
use. There is scarce a circumstance or metaphor in the Old Testament
which does not find a place, bodily and literally, in the story of the
Pilgrim’s Progress; and this peculiar artifice has made his own
imagination appear more creative than it really is. In the
conduct of the romance no rigorous attention to the propriety of the
allegory seems to have been uniformly preserved. Vanity Fair, or the
cave of the two giants, might, for anything we see, have been placed
elsewhere; but it is by this neglect of exact parallelism that he
better keeps up the reality of the pilgrimage, and takes off the
coldness of mere allegory. It is also to be remembered that we read
this book at an age when the spiritual meaning is either little
perceived or little regarded. In his language, nevertheless, Bunyan
sometimes mingles the signification too much with the fable; we might
be perplexed between the imaginary and the real Christian; but the
liveliness of narration soon brings us back, or did at least when we
were young, to the fields of fancy. Yet, the Pilgrim’s Progress, like
some other books, has of late been a little over-rated; its excellence
is great, but it is not of the highest rank, and we should be careful
not to break down the landmarks of fame by placing the John Bunyans
and the Daniel De Foes among the Dii Majores of our worship.

|Turkish spy.|

58. I am inclined to claim for England not the invention, but, for the
most part, the composition of another book which, being grounded on
fiction, may be classed here, The Turkish Spy. A secret emissary of
the Porte is supposed to remain at Paris in disguise for above forty
years, from 1635 to 1682. His correspondence with a number of persons,
various in situation, and with whom therefore his letters assume
various characters, is protracted through eight volumes. Much, indeed
most, relates to the history of those times and to the anecdotes
connected with it; but in these we do not find a large proportion of
novelty. The more remarkable letters are those which run into
metaphysical and theological speculation. These are written with an
earnest seriousness, yet with an extraordinary freedom, such as the
feigned garb of a Mohammedan could hardly have exempted from censure
in catholic countries. Mahmud, the mysterious writer, stands on a sort
of eminence above all human prejudice; he was privileged to judge as a
stranger of the religion and philosophy of Europe; but his bold spirit
ranges over the field of Oriental speculation. The Turkish Spy is no
ordinary production, but contains as many proofs of a thoughtful, if
not very profound mind, as any we can find. It suggested the Persian
Letters to Montesquieu and the Jewish to Argens; the former deviating
from his model with the originality of talent, the latter following it
with a more servile closeness. Probability, that is, a resemblance to
the personated character of an Oriental, was not to be attained, nor
was it desirable, in any of these fictions; but Mahmud has something
not European, something of a solitary insulated wanderer, gazing on a
world that knows him not, which throws, to my feelings, a striking
charm over the Turkish Spy; while the Usbek of Montesquieu has become
more than half Parisian; his ideas are neither those of his
birthplace, nor such as have sprung up unbidden from his soul, but
those of a polite, witty, and acute society; and the correspondence
with his harem in Persia, which Montesquieu has thought attractive to
the reader, is not much more interesting than it is probable, and ends
in the style of a common romance. As to the Jewish Letters of Argens,
it is far inferior to the Turkish Spy, and, in fact, rather an insipid
book.

|Chiefly of English origin.|

59. It may be asked why I dispute the claim made by all the foreign
biographers in favour of John Paul Marana, a native of Genoa, who is
asserted to have published the first volume of the Turkish Spy at
Paris in 1684, and the rest in subsequent years.[1056] But I am not
disputing that Marana is the author of the thirty letters, published
in 1684, and of twenty more in 1686, which have been literally
translated into English, and form about half the first volume in
English of our Turkish spy.[1057] Nor do I doubt in the least that the
remainder of that volume had a French original; though it happens that
I have not seen it. But the later volumes of the Espion Turc, in the
edition of 1696, with the date of Cologne, which, according to
Barbier, is put for Rouen,[1058] are avowedly translated from the
English. And to the second volume of our Turkish Spy, published in
1691, is prefixed an account, not very credible, of the manner in
which the volumes subsequent to the first had been procured by a
traveller in the original Italian; no French edition, it is declared,
being known to the booksellers. That no Italian edition ever existed,
is, I apprehend, now generally admitted; and it is to be shown by
those who contend for the claims of Marana, to seven out of the eight
volumes, that they were published in France before 1691 and the
subsequent years, when they appeared in English. The Cologne or Rouen
edition of 1696 follows the English so closely that it has not given
the original letters of the first volume, published with the name of
Marana, but rendered them back from the translation.

     [1056] This first portion was published at Paris and also at
     Amsterdam. Bayle gives the following account. Cet ouvrage a été
     contrefait à Amsterdam du consentement du libraire de Paris, qui
     l’a le premier imprimé. Il sera composé de plusieurs petits
     volumes qui contiendront les événemens les plus considérables de
     la chrétienté en général, et de la France en particulier, depuis
     l’année 1637 jusqu’en 1682. Un Italien natif de Gênes, Marana,
     donne ces rélations pour des lettres écrites aux ministres de la
     Porte par un espion Turc qui se tenoit caché à Paris. Il prétend
     les avoir traduites de l’Arabe en Italien: et il raconte fort en
     long comment il les a trouvées. On soupçonne avec beaucoup
     d’apparence, que c’est un tour d’esprit Italien, et une fiction
     ingénieuse semblable à celle dont Virgile s’est servi pour louer
     Auguste, &c. Nouvelles de la République des Lettres; Mars, 1684;
     in Œuvres diverses de Bayle, vol. i., p. 20. The Espion Turc is
     not to be traced in the index to the Journal des Sçavans; nor is
     it noticed in the Bibliothèque Universelle.

     [1057] Salfi, xiv., 61. Biograph. Univers.

     [1058] Dictionnaire des Anonymes, vol. i., p. 406. Barbier’s
     notice of L’Espion dans les cours des princes Chrétiens ascribes
     four volumes out of six, which appear to contain as much as our
     eight volumes, to Marana, and conjectures that the last two are
     by another hand; but does not intimate the least suspicion of an
     English original. And as his authority is considerable, I must
     fortify my own opinion by what evidence I can find.

     The preface to the second volume (English) of the Turkish Spy
     begins thus: “Three years are now elapsed since the first volume
     of letters written by a Spy at Paris was published in English.
     And it was expected that a second should have come out long
     before this. The favourable reception which that found amongst
     all sorts of readers would have encouraged a speedy translation
     of the rest, had there been extant any French edition of more
     than the first part. _But after the strictest inquiry none
     could be heard of_; and, as for the Italian, our booksellers
     have not that correspondence in those parts as they have in the
     more neighbouring countries of France and Holland. So that it was
     a work despaired of to recover any more of this Arabian’s
     memoirs. We little dreamed that the Florentines had been so busy
     in printing, and so successful in selling the continued
     translation of these Arabian epistles, till it was the fortune of
     an English gentleman to travel in those parts last summer, and
     discover the happy news. I will not forestall his letter which is
     annexed to this preface.” A pretended letter with the signature
     of Daniel Saltmarsh follows, in which the imaginary author tells
     a strange tale of the manner in which a certain learned physician
     of Ferrara, Julio de Medici, descended from the Medicean family,
     put these volumes, in the Italian language, into his hands. This
     letter is dated Amsterdam, Sept. 9, 1690, and as the preface
     refers it to the last summer, I hence conclude that the first
     edition of the second volume of the Turkish Spy was in 1691; for
     I have not seen that, nor any other edition earlier than the
     fifth, printed in 1702.

     Marana is said by Salfi and others to have left France in 1689,
     having fallen into a depression of spirits. Now the first thirty
     letters, about one thirty-second part of the entire work, were
     published in 1684, and about an equal length in 1686. I admit
     that he had time to double these portions, and thus to publish
     one-eighth of the whole; but is it likely that between 1686 and
     1689 he could have given the rest to the world? If we are not
     struck by this, is it likely that the English translator should
     have fabricated the story above mentioned, when the public might
     know that there was actually a French original which he had
     rendered? The invention seems without motive. Again, how came the
     French edition of 1696 to be an avowed translation from the
     English, when, according to the hypothesis of M. Barbier, the
     volumes of Marana had all been published in France? Surely, till
     these appear, we have reason to suspect their existence; and the
     _onus probandi_ lies _now_ on the advocates of Marana’s
     claim.

60. In these early letters, I am ready to admit, the scheme of the
Turkish Spy may be entirely traced. Marana appears not only to have
planned the historical part of the letters, but to have struck out the
more original and striking idea of a Mohammedan wavering with
religious scruples, which the English continuator has followed up with
more philosophy and erudition. The internal evidence for their English
origin, in all the latter volumes, is to my apprehension exceedingly
strong; but I know the difficulty of arguing from this to convince a
reader. The proof we demand is the production of these volumes in
French, that is, the specification of some public or private library
where they may be seen, in any edition anterior to 1691, and nothing
short of this can be satisfactory evidence.[1059]

     [1059] I shall now produce some direct evidence for the English
     authorship of seven out of eight parts of the Turkish Spy.

     “In the Life of Mrs. Manley, published under the title of ‘The
     Adventures of Rivella,’ printed in 1714, in pages 14 and 15, it
     is said, That her father, Sir Roger Manley, was the genuine
     author of the first volume of the Turkish Spy. Dr. Midgley, an
     ingenious physician, related to the family by marriage, had the
     charge of looking over his papers, among which he found that
     manuscript, which he easily reserved to his proper use: and both
     by his own pen and the assistance of some others, continued the
     work until the eighth volume, without ever having the justice to
     name the author of the first.” MS. note in the copy of the
     Turkish Spy (edit. 1732), in the British Museum.

     Another MS. note in the same volume gives the following extract
     from Dunton’s Life and Errors. “Mr. Bradshaw is the best
     accomplished hackney writer I have met with; his genius was quite
     above the common size, and his style was incomparably fine.... So
     soon as I saw the first volume of the Turkish Spy, the very style
     and manner of writing convinced me that Bradshaw was the
     author.... Bradshaw’s wife owned that Dr. Midgley had engaged him
     in a work which would take him some years to finish, for which
     the Doctor was to pay him 40s. per sheet.... So that ’tis very
     probable (for I cannot swear I saw him write it), that Mr.
     William Bradshaw was the author of the Turkish Spy; were it not
     for this discovery, Dr. Midgley had gone off with the honour of
     that performance.” It thus appears that in England it was looked
     upon as an original work; though the authority of Dunton is not
     very good for the facts he tells, and that of Mrs. Manley much
     worse. But I do not quote them as evidence of such facts, but of
     common report. Mrs. Manley, who claims for her father the first
     volume, certainly written by Marana, must be set aside; as to Dr.
     Midgley and Mr. Bradshaw, I know nothing to confirm or refute
     what is here said.

|Swift’s Tale of a Tub.|

61. It would not, perhaps, be unfair bring within the pale of the
seventeenth century an effusion of genius, sufficient to redeem our
name in its annals of fiction. The Tale of a Tub, though not published
till 1704, was chiefly written, as the author declares, eight years
before; and the Battle of the Books subjoined to it, has every
appearance of recent animosity against the opponents of Temple and
Boyle, is the question of Phalaris. The Tale of a Tub is, in my
apprehension, the masterpiece of Swift; certainly Rabelais has nothing
superior, even in invention, nor anything so condensed, so pointed, so
full of real meaning, of biting satire, of felicitous analogy. The
Battle of the Books is such an improvement of the similar combat in
the Lutrin, that we can hardly own it is an imitation.




                          CHAPTER XXXIV.

     HISTORY OF PHYSICAL AND OTHER LITERATURE FROM 1650 TO 1700.


                             SECT. I.

                    ON EXPERIMENTAL PHILOSOPHY.

_Institutions for Science at Florence--London--Paris--Chemistry--Boyle
and others._

|Reasons for omitting mathematics.|

1. We have now arrived, according to the method pursued in
corresponding periods, at the history of mathematical and physical
science in the latter part of the seventeenth century. But I must here
entreat my readers to excuse the omission of that which ought to
occupy a prominent situation in any work that pretends to trace the
general progress of human knowledge. The length to which I have found
myself already compelled to extend these volumes, might be an adequate
apology; but I have one more insuperable in the slightness of my own
acquaintance with subjects so momentous and difficult, and upon which
I could not write without presumptuousness and much peril of betraying
ignorance. The names, therefore, of Wallis and Huygens, Newton and
Leibnitz, must be passed with distant reverence.

|Academy del Cimento.|

2. This was the age, when the experimental philosophy, to which Bacon
had held the torch, and which had already made considerable progress,
especially in Italy, was finally established on the ruins of arbitrary
figments and partial inductions. This philosophy was signally indebted
to three associations, the eldest of which did not endure long; but
the others have remained to this day, the perennial fountains of
science; the Academy del Cimento at Florence, the Royal Society of
London, the Academy of Sciences at Paris. The first of these was
established in 1657, with the patronage of the Grand Duke Ferdinand
II., but under the peculiar care of his brother Leopold. Both were, in
a manner at that time remarkable, attached to natural philosophy; and
Leopold, less engaged in public affairs, had long carried on a
correspondence with the learned of Europe. It is said that the advice
of Viviani, one of the greatest geometers that Europe has produced,
led to this institution. The name this Academy assumed, gave promise
of their fundamental rule, the investigation of truth by experiment
alone. The number of Academicians was unlimited, and all that was
required as an article of faith was the abjuration of all faith, a
resolution to inquire into truth without regard to any previous sect
of philosophy. This Academy lasted, unfortunately, but ten years in
vigour; it is a great misfortune for any literary institution to
depend on one man, and especially on a prince, who, shedding a
factitious, as well as sometimes a genuine lustre round it, is not
easily replaced without a diminution of the world’s regard. Leopold,
in 1667, became a cardinal, and was thus withdrawn from Florence;
others of the Academy del Cimento died or went away, and it rapidly
sunk into insignificance. But a volume containing reports of the
yearly experiments it made, among others, the celebrated one showing
the incompressibility of water, is generally esteemed.[1060]

     [1060] Galluzzi, Storia del Gran Ducato, vol. vii., p. 240.
     Tiraboschi, xi., 204. Corniani, viii., 29.

|Royal Society.|

3. The germ of our Royal Society may be traced to the year 1645, when
Wallis, Wilkins, Glisson, and others less known, agreed to meet weekly
at a private house in London, in order to converse on subjects
connected with natural, and especially experimental philosophy. Part
of these soon afterwards settled in Oxford; and thus arose two little
societies in connection with each other, those at Oxford being
recruited by Ward, Petty, Willis, and Bathurst. They met at Petty’s
lodgings till he removed to Ireland in 1652; afterwards at those of
Wilkins, in Wadham College, till he became Master of Trinity College,
Cambridge, in 1659; about which time most of the Oxford philosophers
came to London, and held their meetings in Gresham College. They
became more numerous after the Restoration, which gave better hope of
a tranquillity indispensable for science; and, on the 28th of
November, 1660, agreed to form a regular society which should meet
weekly for the promotion of natural philosophy; their registers are
kept, from this time.[1061] The king, rather fond himself of their
subjects, from the beginning afforded them his patronage; their first
charter is dated 15th July, 1662, incorporating them by the style of
the Royal Society, and appointing Lord Brouncker the first president,
assisted by a council of twenty, the conspicuous names among which are
Boyle, Kenelm Digby, Wilkins, Wren, Evelyn, and Oldenburg.[1062] The
last of these was secretary, and editor of the Philosophical
Transactions, the first number of which appeared March 1, 1665,
containing sixteen pages in quarto. These were continued monthly, or
less frequently, according to the materials he possessed. Oldenburg
ceased to be the editor in 1677, and was succeeded by Grew, as he was
by Hooke. These early transactions are chiefly notes of conversations
and remarks made at the meetings, as well as of experiments either
then made or reported to the Society.[1063]

     [1061] Birch’s Hist. of Royal Society, vol. i., p. 1.

     [1062] Birch’s Hist. of Royal Society, vol. i., p. 88.

     [1063] Id. vol. ii., p. 18. Thomson’s Hist. of Royal Society,
     p. 7.

|Academy of Sciences at Paris.|

4. The Academy of Sciences at Paris was established in 1666, under the
auspices of Colbert. The king assigned to them a room in the royal
library for their meetings. Those first selected were all
mathematicians; but other departments of science, especially chemistry
and anatomy, afterwards furnished associates of considerable name. It
seems, nevertheless, that this Academy did not cultivate experimental
philosophy with such unremitting zeal as the Royal Society, and that
abstract mathematics have always borne a larger proportion to the rest
of their inquiries. They published in this century ten volumes, known
as Anciens Mémoires de l’Academie. But near its close, in 1697, they
received a regular institution from the king, organising them in a
manner analogous to the two other great literary foundations, the
French Academy, and that of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres.[1064]

     [1064] Fontenelle, vol. v., p. 23. Montucla, Hist. des
     Mathématiques, vol. ii., p. 557.

|State of Chemistry.|

5. In several branches of physics, the experimental philosopher is
both guided and corrected by the eternal laws of geometry. In others
he wants this aid, and, in the words of his master, knows and
understands no more concerning the order of nature, than, as her
servant and interpreter, he has been taught by observation and
tentative processes. All that concerns the peculiar actions of bodies
on each other was of this description; though, in our own times, even
this has been, in some degree, brought under the omnipotent control of
the modern analysis. Chemistry, or the science of the molecular
constituents of bodies, manifested in such peculiar and reciprocal
operations, had never been rescued from empirical hands till this
period. The transmutation of metals, the universal medicine, and other
inquiries utterly unphilosophical in themselves, because they assumed
the existence of that which they sought to discover, had occupied the
chemists so much that none of them had made any further progress than
occasionally by some happy combination or analysis, to contribute an
useful preparation to pharmacy, or to detect an unknown substance.
Glauber and Van Helmont were the most active and ingenious of these
elder chemists; but the former has only been remembered by having long
given his name to sulphate of soda, while the latter wasted his time
on experiments from which he knew not how to draw right inferences,
and his powers on hypotheses which a sounder spirit of the inductive
philosophy would have taught him to reject.[1065]

     [1065] Thomson’s Hist. of Chemistry, i., 183.

|Becker.|

6. Chemistry, as a science of principles, hypothetical, no doubt, and
in a great measure unfounded, but cohering in a plausible system, and
better than the reveries of the Paracelsists and Behmenists, was
founded by Becker, in Germany, by Boyle and his contemporaries of the
Royal Society in England. Becker, a native of Spire, who, after
wandering from one city of Germany to another, died in London in 1685,
by his Physica Subterranea, published in 1669, laid the foundation of
a theory, which having in the next century been perfected by Stahl,
became the creed of philosophy till nearly the end of the last
century. “Becker’s theory,” says an English writer, “stripped of
everything but the naked statement, may be expressed in the following
sentence: besides water and air there are three other substances,
called earths, which enter into the composition of bodies; namely the
fusible or vitrifiable earth, the inflammable or sulphureous, and the
mercurial. By the intimate combination of earths with water is formed
an universal acid, from which proceed all other acid bodies; stones
are produced by the combination of certain earths, metals by the
combination of all the three earths in proportions which vary
according to the metal.”[1066]

     [1066] Thomson’s Hist. of Royal Society, p. 468.

|Boyle.|

7. No one Englishman of the seventeenth century, after Lord Bacon,
raised to himself so high a reputation in experimental philosophy as
Robert Boyle; it has even been remarked, that he was born in the year
of Bacon’s death, as the person destined by nature to succeed him. An
eulogy which would be extravagant, if it implied any parallel between
the genius of the two; but hardly so, if we look on Boyle as the most
faithful, the most patient, the most successful disciple who carried
forward the experimental philosophy of Bacon. His works occupy six
large volumes in quarto. They may be divided into theological or
metaphysical, and physical or experimental. Of the former, we may
mention, as the most philosophical, his Disquisition into the Final
Causes of Natural Things, his Free Inquiry into the Received Notion of
Nature, his Discourse of Things above Reason, his Considerations about
the Reconcilableness of Reason and Religion, his Excellency of
Theology, and his Considerations on the Style of the Scriptures; but
the latter, his chemical and experimental writings, form more than two
thirds of his prolix works.

|His metaphysical works.|

8. The metaphysical treatises, to use that word in a large sense, of
Boyle, or rather those concerning Natural Theology, are very
perspicuous, very free from system, and such as bespeak an independent
lover of truth. His Disquisition on Final Causes, was a well-timed
vindication of that palmary argument against the paradox of the
Cartesians, who had denied the validity of an inference from the
manifest adaptation of means to ends in the universe to an intelligent
Providence. Boyle takes a more philosophical view of the principle of
final causes than had been found in many theologians, who weakened the
argument itself by the presumptuous hypothesis, that man was the sole
object of Providence in the Creation.[1067] His greater knowledge of
physiology led him to perceive that there are both animal, and what he
calls cosmical ends, in which man has no concern.

     [1067] Boyle’s Works, vol. v., p. 394.

|Extract from one of them.|

9. The following passage is so favourable a specimen of the
philosophical spirit of Boyle, and so good an illustration of the
theory of _idols_ in the Novum Organum, that, although it might
better, perhaps, have deserved a place in a former chapter, I will not
refrain from inserting it. “I know not,” he says, in his Free Inquiry
into the received Notion of Nature, “whether it be a prerogative in
the human mind, that, as it is itself a true and positive being, so is
it apt to conceive all other things as true and positive beings also;
but whether or no this propensity to frame such kind of ideas supposes
an excellency, I fear it occasions mistakes, and makes us think and
speak after the manner of true and positive beings, of such things as
are but chimerical, and some of them negations or privations
themselves; as death, ignorance, blindness, and the like. It concerns
us, therefore, to stand very carefully upon our guard, that we be not
insensibly misled by such an innate and unheeded temptation to error,
as we bring into the world with us.”[1068]

     [1068] Vol. v., p. 161.

|His merits in physics and chemistry.|

10. Boyle improved the air-pump and the thermometer, though the latter
was first made an accurate instrument of investigation by Newton. He
also discovered the law of the air’s elasticity, namely, that its bulk
is inversely as the pressure. For some of the principles of
hydrostatics we are indebted to him, though he did not possess much
mathematical knowledge. The Philosophical Transactions contain several
valuable papers by him on this science.[1069] By his “Sceptical
Chemist,” published in 1661, he did much to overturn the theories of
Van Helmont’s school, that commonly called of the iatro-chemists,
which was in its highest reputation; raising doubts as to the
existence, not only of the four elements of the peripatetics, but of
those which these chemists had substituted. Boyle holds the elements
of bodies to be atoms of different shapes and sizes, the union of
which gives origin to what are vulgarly called elements.[1070] It is
unnecessary to remark that this is the prevailing theory of the
present age.

     [1069] Thomson’s Hist. of Royal Society, p. 400, 411.

     [1070] Thomson’s Hist. of Chemistry, i. 205.

|General character of Boyle.|

11. I shall borrow the general character of Boyle and of his
contemporaries in English chemistry from a modern author of credit.
“Perhaps Mr. Boyle may be considered as the first person neither
connected with pharmacy nor mining, who devoted a considerable degree
of attention to chemical pursuits. Mr. Boyle, though in common with
the literary men of his age he may be accused of credulity, was both
very laborious and intelligent; and his chemical pursuits, which were
various and extensive, and intended solely to develop the truth
without any regard to previously conceived opinions, contributed
essentially to set chemistry free from the trammels of absurdity and
superstition, in which it had been hitherto enveloped, and to
recommend it to philosophers as a science deserving to be studied on
account of the important information which it was qualified to convey.
His refutation of the alchemistical opinions respecting the
constituents of bodies, his observations on cold, on the air, on
phosphorus, and on ether, deserve particularly to be mentioned as
doing him much honour. We have no regular account of any one substance
or of any class of bodies in Mr. Boyle, similar to those which at
present are considered as belonging exclusively to the science of
chemistry. Neither did he attempt to systematize the phenomena, or to
subject them to any hypothetical explanation.

|Of Hooke and others.|

12. But his contemporary, Dr. Hooke, who had a particular predilection
for hypothesis, sketched in his Micrographia a very beautiful
theoretical explanation of combustion, and promised to develop his
doctrine more fully in a subsequent book; a promise which he never
fulfilled; though in his Lampas, published about twenty years
afterwards, he has given a very beautiful explanation of the way in
which a candle burns. Mayow, in his Essays, published at Oxford about
ten years after the Micrographia, embraced the hypothesis of Dr. Hooke
without acknowledgment; but clogged it with so many absurd additions
of his own as greatly to obscure its lustre and diminish its beauty.
Mayow’s first and principal Essay contains some happy experiments on
respiration and air, and some fortunate conjectures respecting the
combustion of the metals; but the most valuable part of the whole is
the chapter on affinities; in which he appears to have gone much
farther than any other chemist of his day, and to have anticipated
some of the best established doctrines of his successors. Sir Isaac
Newton, to whom all the sciences lie under such great obligations,
made two most important contributions to chemistry, which constitute,
as it were, the foundation stones of its two great divisions. The
first was pointing out a method of graduating thermometers, so as to
be comparable with each other in whatever part of the world
observations with them are made. The second was by pointing out the
nature of chemical affinity, and showing that it consisted in an
attraction by which the constituents of bodies were drawn towards each
other and united; thus destroying the previous hypothesis of the
hooks, and points, and rings, and wedges, by means of which the
different constituents of bodies were conceived to be kept
together.”[1071]

     [1071] Thomson’s Hist. of Royal Society, p. 466.

|Lemery.|

13. Lemery, a druggist at Paris, by his Cours de Chymie in 1675, is
said to have changed the face of the science; the change,
nevertheless, seems to have gone no deeper. “Lemery,” says Fontenelle,
“was the first who dispersed the real or pretended obscurities of
chemistry, who brought it to clearer and more simple notions, who
abolished the gross barbarisms of its language, who promised nothing
but what he knew the art could perform; and to this he owed the
success of his book. It shows not only a sound understanding, but some
greatness of soul, to strip one’s own science of a false pomp.”[1072]
But we do not find that Lemery had any novel views in chemistry, or
that he claims with any irresistible pretension the title of a
philosopher. In fact, his chemistry seems to have been little more
than pharmacy.

     [1072] Eloge de Lemery, in Œuvres de Fontenelle, v. 361.
     Biog. Universelle.


                             SECT. II.

                        ON NATURAL HISTORY.

_Zoology--Ray--Botanical Classifications--Grew--Geological Theories._

|Slow Progress of Zoology.|

14. The accumulation of particular knowledge in Natural History must
always be progressive, where any regard is paid to the subject; every
traveller in remote countries, every mariner may contribute some
observation, correct some error, or bring home some new species. Thus
zoology had made a regular advance from the days of Conrad Gesner;
yet, with so tardy a step, that, reflecting on the extensive
intercourse of Europe with the Eastern and Western world, we may be
surprised to find how little Jonston in the middle of the seventeenth
century, had added, even in the most obvious class, that of
quadrupeds, to the knowledge collected one hundred years before. But
hitherto zoology, confined to mere description, and that often
careless or indefinite, unenlightened by anatomy, unregulated by
method, had not merited the name of a science. That name it owes to
John Ray.

|Before Ray.|

15. Ray first appeared in Natural History as the editor of the
Ornithology of his highly accomplished friend Francis Willoughby, with
whom he had travelled over the continent. This was published in 1676;
and the History of Fishes followed in 1686. The descriptions are
ascribed to Willoughby, the arrangement to Ray, who might have
considered the two works as in great part his own, though he has not
interfered with the glory of his deceased friend. Cuvier observes,
that the History of Fishes is the more perfect work of the two, that
many species are described which will not be found in earlier
ichthyologists, and that those of the Mediterranean especially are
given with great precision.[1073]

     [1073] Biographie Universelle, art. Ray.

|His Synopsis of Quadrupeds.|

16. Among the original works of Ray we may select the Synopsis
Methodica Animalium Quadrupedum et Serpentini Generis, published in
1693. This book makes an epoch in zoology, not for the additions of
new species it contains, since there are few wholly such, but as the
first classification of animals that can be reckoned both general and
grounded in nature. He divides them into those with blood and without
blood. The former are such as breathe through lungs, and such as
breathe through gills. Of the former of these again some have a heart
with two ventricles, some with one only. And among the former class of
these some are viviparous, some oviparous. We thus come to the proper
distinction of Mammalia. But in compliance with vulgar prejudice, Ray
did not include the cetacea in the same class with quadrupeds, though
well aware that they properly belonged to it, and left them as an
order of fishes.[1074] Quadrupeds he was the first to divide into
_ungulate_ and _unguiculate_, hoofed and clawed, having himself
invented the Latin words.[1075] The former are _solidipeda_,
_bisulca_, or _quadrisulca_; the latter are _bifida_ or _multifida_;
and these latter with undivided, or with partially divided toes; which
latter again may have broad claws, as monkeys, or narrow claws; and
these with narrow claws he arranges according to their teeth, as
either carnivora, or leporina, now generally called rodentia. Besides
all these quadrupeds which he calls analoga, he has a general division
called anomala, for those without teeth, or with such peculiar
arrangements of teeth as we find in the insectivorous genera, the
hedgehog and mole.[1076]

     [1074] Nos ne a communi hominum opinione nimis recedamus, et ut
     affectatæ novitatis notam evitemus, cetaceum aquatilium genus,
     quamvis cum quadrupedibus viviparis in omnibus fere præter, quam
     in pilis et pedibus et elemento in quo degunt convenire
     videantur, piscibus annumerabimus, p. 55.

     [1075] P. 50.

     [1076] P. 56.

|Merits of this work.|

17. Ray was the first zoologist who made use of comparative anatomy;
he inserts at length every account of dissections that he could find;
several had been made at Paris. He does not appear to be very anxious
about describing every species; thus in the simian family he omits
several well known.[1077] I cannot exactly determine what quadrupeds
he has inserted that do not appear in the earlier zoologists;
according to Linnæus, in the twelfth-edition of the Systema Naturæ, if
I have counted rightly, they amount to thirty-two; but I have found
him very careless in specifying the synonyms of his predecessors, and
many for which he only quotes Ray, are in Gesner or Jonston. Ray has
however much the advantage over these in the brevity and closeness of
his specific characters. The particular distinction of his labours,
says Cuvier, consists in an arrangement more clear, more determinate
than those of any of his predecessors, and applied with more
consistency and precision. His distribution of the classes of
quadrupeds and birds have been followed by the English naturalists
almost to our own days; and we find manifest traces of that he has
adopted as to the latter class in Linnæus, in Brisson, in Buffon, and
in all other ornithologists.[1078]

     [1077] Hoc genus animalium tum caudatorum tum cauda carentium
     species valde numerosæ sunt; non tamen multos apud autores fide
     dignos descriptæ occurrunt. He only describes those species he
     has found in Clusius or Marcgrave, and what he calls Parisienses,
     such, I presume, as he had found in the Memoirs of the Académie
     des Sciences. But he does not mention the Simia Inuus, or the S.
     Hamadryas, and several others of the most known species.

     [1078] Biogr. Univ.

|Redi.|

|Swammerdam.|

18. The bloodless animals, and even those of cold blood, with the
exception of fishes, had occupied but little attention of any good
zoologists till after the middle of the century. They were now studied
with considerable success. Redi, established as a physician at
Florence, had yet time for that various literature which has
immortalized his name. He opposed, and in a great degree disproved by
experiment, the prevailing doctrine of the equivocal generation of
insects, or that from corruption; though where he was unable to show
the means of reproduction, he had recourse to a paradoxical hypothesis
of his own. Redi also enlarged our knowledge of intestinal animals,
and made some good experiments on the poison of vipers.[1079]
Malpighi, who combated like Redi, the theory of the reproduction of
organised bodies from mere corruption, has given one of the most
complete treatises on the silkworm that we possess.[1080] Swammerdam,
a Dutch naturalist, abandoned his pursuits in human anatomy to follow
up that of insects, and by his skill and patience in dissection made
numerous discoveries in their structure. His General History of
Insects 1669, contains a distribution into four classes, founded on
their bodily forms and the metamorphoses they undergo. A posthumous
work, Biblia Naturæ, not published till 1738, contains, says the
Biographie Universelle, “a multitude of facts wholly unknown before
Swammerdam; it is impossible to carry farther the anatomy of these
little animals, or to be more exact in the description of the organs.”

     [1079] Biogr. Univ. Tiraboschi, ix. 252.

     [1080] Idem.

|Lister.|

19. Lister, an English physician, may be reckoned one of those who
have done most to found the science of conchology by his Historia sive
Synopsis Conchyliorum, in 1685; a work very copious and full of
accurate delineations: and also by his three treatises on English
animals, two of which relate to fluviatile and marine shells. The
third, which is on spiders, is not less esteemed in entomology. Lister
was also perhaps the first to distinguish the specific characters,
such at least as are now reckoned specific, though probably not in his
time, of the Asiatic and African elephant. “His works in natural
history and comparative anatomy are justly esteemed, because he has
shown himself an exact and sagacious observer, and has pointed out
with correctness the natural relations of the animals that he
describes.”[1081]

     [1081] Biogr. Univ. Chalmers.

|Comparative anatomy.|

20. The beautiful science which bears the nonsensical name of
comparative anatomy had but casually occupied the attention of the
medical profession.[1082] It was to them, rather than to mere
zoologists, that it owed, and indeed strictly must always owe, its
discoveries, which had hitherto been very few. It was now more
cultivated; and the relations of structure to the capacities of animal
life became more striking, as their varieties were more fully
understood; the grand theories of final causes found their most
convincing arguments. In this period, I believe, comparative anatomy
made an important progress, which in the earlier part of the
eighteenth century was by no means equally rapid. France took the lead
in these researches. “The number of papers on comparative anatomy,”
says Dr. Thomson, “is greater in the memoirs of the French Academy
than in our national publication. This was owing to the pains taken
during the reign of Louis XIV. to furnish the Academy with proper
animals, and the number of anatomists who received a salary, and of
course devoted themselves to anatomical subjects.” There are however
about twenty papers in the Philosophical Transactions before 1700 on
this subject.[1083]

     [1082] It is most probable that this term was originally designed
     to express a comparison between the human structure and that of
     brutes, though it might also mean one between different species
     of the latter. In the first sense it is never now used, and the
     second is but a small though important part of the science.
     _Zootomy_ has been suggested as a better name, but it is not
     quite analogical to anatomy; and on the whole it seems as if we
     must remain with the old word, protesting against its propriety.

     [1083] Thomson’s Hist. of Royal Society, p. 114.

|Botany.|

|Jungius.|

21. Botany, notwithstanding the gleams of philosophical light which
occasionally illustrate the writings of Cæsalpin and Columna, had
seldom gone farther than to name, to describe, and to delineate plants
with a greater or less accuracy and copiousness. Yet it long had the
advantage over zoology, and now when the latter made a considerable
step in advance, it still continued to keep a-head. This is a period
of great importance in botanical science. Jungius of Hamburgh, whose
posthumous Isagoge Phytoscopica was published in 1679, is said to have
been the first in the seventeenth century who led the way to a better
classification than that of Lobel; and Sprengel thinks that the
English botanists were not unacquainted with his writings; Ray indeed
owns his obligations to them.[1084]

     [1084] Sprengel, Hist. Rei Herbariæ, vol. ii., p. 32.

|Morison.|

22. But the founder of classification, in the eyes of the world, was
Robert Morison, of Aberdeen, professor of botany at Oxford; who, by
his Hortus Blesensis, in 1669; by his Plantarum Umbelliferarum
Distributio Nova, in 1672; and chiefly by his great work Historia
Plantarum Universalis, in 1678, laid the bases of a systematic
classification, which he partly founded, not on trivial distinctions
of appearance, as the older botanists, but, as Cæsalpin had first
done, on the fructifying organs. He has been frequently charged with
plagiarism from that great Italian, who seems to have suffered, as
others have done, by failing to carry forward his own luminous
conceptions into such details of proof as the world justly demands;
another instance of which has been seen in his very striking passages
on the circulation of the blood. Sprengel, however, who praises
Morison highly, does not impute to him this injustice towards
Cæsalpin, whose writings might possibly be unknown in Britain.[1085]
And it might be observed also, that Morison did not as has sometimes
been alledged, establish the fruit as the sole basis of his
arrangement. Out of fifteen classes, into which he distributes all
herbaceous plants, but seven are characterised by this distinction.[1086]
“The examination of Morison’s works,” says a late biographer, “will
enable us to judge of the service he rendered in the reformation of
botany. The great botanists, from Gesner to the Bauhins, had published
works, more or less useful by their discoveries, their observations,
their descriptions, or their figures. Gesner had made a great step in
considering the fruit as the principal distinction of genera. Fabius
Columna adopted this view; Cæsalpin applied it to a classification
which should be regarded as better than any that preceded the epoch of
which we speak. Morison had made a particular study of fruits, having
collected 1,500 different species of them, though he did not neglect
the importance of the natural affinities of other parts. He dwells on
this leading idea, insists on the necessity of establishing generic
characters, and has founded his chief works on this basis. He has
therefore done real service to the science; nor should the vanity
which has made him conceal his obligations to Cæsalpin induce us to
refuse him justice.”[1087] Morison speaks of his own theory with
excessive vanity, and deprecates all earlier botanists as full of
confusion. Several English writers have been unfavourable to Morison,
out of partiality to Ray, with whom he was on bad terms; but
Tournefort declares that if he had not enlightened botany it would
still have been in darkness.

     [1085] Sprengel, p. 34.

     [1086] Pulteney, Historical Progress of Botany in England,
     vol. i., p. 307.

     [1087] Biogr. Universelle.

|Ray.|

23. Ray, in his Methodus Plantarum Nova, 1682, and in his Historia
Plantarum Universalis, in three volumes, the first published in 1686,
the second in 1688, and the third, which is supplemental, in 1704,
trod in the steps of Morison, but with more acknowledgment of what was
due to others, and with some improvements of his own. He described
6,900 plants, many of which are now considered as varieties.[1088] In
the botanical works of Ray we find the natural families of plants
better defined, the difference of complete and incomplete flowers more
precise, and the grand division of monocotyledons and bicotyledons
fully established. He gave much precision to the characteristics of
many classes, and introduced several technical terms, very useful for
the perspicuity of botanical language; finally, he established many
general principles of arrangement which have since been adopted.[1089]
Ray’s method of classification was principally by the fruit, though he
admits its imperfections. “In fact, his method,” says Pulteney,
“though he assumes the fruit as the foundation, is an elaborate
attempt, for that time, to fix natural classes.”[1090]

     [1088] Pulteney. The account of Ray’s life and botanical
     writings in this work occupies nearly 100 pages.

     [1089] Biogr. Universelle.

     [1090] P. 259.

|Rivinus.|

24. Rivinus, in his Introductio in Rem Herbariam, Leipsic, 1690, a
very short performance, struck into a new path, which has modified to
a great degree the systems of later botanists. Cæsalpin and Morison
had looked mainly to the fruit as the basis of classification; Rivinus
added the flower, and laid down as a fundamental rule that all plants
which resemble each other both in the flower and in the fruit ought to
bear the same generic name.[1091] In some pages of this Introduction,
we certainly find the basis of the Critica Botanica of Linnæus.[1092]
Rivinus thinks the arrangement of Cæsalpin the best, and that Morison
has only spoiled what he took; of Ray he speaks in terms of eulogy,
but blames some part of his method. His own is primarily founded on
the flower, and thus he forms eighteen classes, which, by considering
the differences of the fruits, he subdivides into ninety-one genera.
The specific distinctions he founded on the general habit and
appearance of the plant. His method is more thoroughly artificial, as
opposed to natural; that is, more established on a single principle,
which often brings heterogeneous plants and families together, than
that of any of his predecessors; for even Ray had kept the distinction
of trees from shrubs and herbs, conceiving it to be founded in their
natural fructification. Rivinus set aside wholly this leading
division. Yet he had not been able to reduce all plants to his method,
and admitted several anomalous divisions.[1093]

     [1091] Biogr. Univ.

     [1092] Id.

     [1093] Biogr. Univ. Sprengel, p. 56.

|Tournefort.|

25. The merit of establishing an uniform and consistent system was
reserved for Tournefort. His Elémens de la Botanique appeared in
1694; the Latin translation, Institutiones Rei Herbariæ, in 1700.
Tournefort, like Rivinus, took the flower, or corolla, as the basis of
his system; and the varieties in the structure, rather than number, of
the petals furnish him with his classes. The genera--for, like other
botanists before Linnæus, he has no intermediate division--are
established by the flower and fruit conjointly, or now and then by
less essential differences, for he held it better to constitute new
genera than, as others had done, to have anomalous species. The
accessory parts of a plant are allowed to supply specific
distinctions. But Tournefort divides vegetables, according to old
prejudice--which it is surprising that, after the precedent of Rivinus
to the contrary, he should have regarded--into herbs and trees; and
thus he has twenty-two classes. Simple flowers, monopetalous or
polypetalous, form eleven of these; composite flowers, three; the
apetalous, one; the cryptogamous, or those without flower or fruit,
make another class; shrubs or _suffrutices_ are placed in the
seventeenth; and trees, in five more, are similarly distributed,
according to their floral characters.[1094] Sprengel extols much of
the system of Tournefort, though he disapproves of the selection of a
part so often wanting as the corolla for the sole basis; nor can its
various forms be comprised in Tournefort’s classes. His orders are
well marked, according to the same author; but he multiplied both his
genera and species too much, and paid too little attention to the
stamina. His method was less repugnant to natural affinities, and more
convenient in practice than any which had come since Lobel. Most of
Tournefort’s generic distinctions were preserved by Linnæus, and some
which had been abrogated without sufficient reason, have since been
restored.[1095] Ray opposed the system of Tournefort, but some have
thought that in his later works he came nearer to it, so as to be
called magis corollista quam fructista.[1096] This, however, is not
acknowledged by Pulteney, who has paid great attention to Ray’s
writings.

     [1094] Biogr. Univ. Thomson’s Hist. of Royal Society, p. 34.
     Sprengel, p. 64.

     [1095] Biogr. Universelle.

     [1096] Id.

|Vegetable physiology.|

|Grew.|

26. The classification and description of plants constitute what
generally is called botany. But these began now to be studied in
connection with the anatomy and physiology of the vegetable world; a
phrase, not merely analogical, because as strictly applicable as to
animals, but which had never been employed before the middle of the
seventeenth century. This interesting science is almost wholly due to
two men, Grew and Malpighi. Grew first directed his thoughts towards
the anatomy of plants in 1664, in consequence of reading several books
of animal anatomy, which suggested to him that plants, being the works
of the same Author, would probably show similar contrivances. Some had
introduced observations of this nature, as Highmore, Sharrock, and
Hooke, but only collaterally; so that the systematic treatment of the
subject, following the plant from the seed, was left quite open for
himself. In 1670, he presented the first book of his work to the Royal
Society, who next year ordered it to be printed. It was laid before
the society in print, December, 1671; and on the same day a manuscript
by Malpighi on the same subject was read. They went on from this time
with equal steps; Malpighi, however, having caused Grew’s book to be
translated for his own use. Grew speaks very honourably of Malpighi,
and without claiming more than the statement of facts permits
him.[1097]

     [1097] Pulteney. Chalmers. Biogr. Univ. Sprengel calls Grew’s
     book opus absolutum et immortale.

|His Anatomy of Plants.|

27. The first book of his Anatomy of Plants, which is the title given
to three separate works, when published collectively in 1682, contains
the whole of his physiological theory, which is developed at length in
those that follow. The nature of vegetation and its processes seem to
have been unknown when he began; save that common observation, and the
more accurate experience of gardeners and others, must have collected
the obvious truths of vegetable anatomy. He does not quote Cæsalpin,
and may have been unacquainted with his writings. No man, perhaps, who
created a science, has carried it farther than Grew; he is so close
and diligent in his observations, making use of the microscope, that
comparatively few discoveries of great importance have been made in
the mere anatomy of plants since his time;[1098] though some of his
opinions are latterly disputed by Mirbel and others of a new botanical
school.

     [1098] Biogr. Univ.

|He discovers the sexual system.|

28. The great discovery ascribed to Grew is of the sexual system in
plants. He speaks thus of what he calls the attire, though rather, I
think, in obscure terms:--“The primary and chief use of the attire is
such as hath respect to the plant itself, and so appears to be very
great and necessary. Because even those plants which have no flower or
foliature, are yet some way or other attired, either with the
seminiform or the floral attire. So that it seems to perform its
service to the seeds as the foliature to the fruit. In discourse,
hereof, with our learned Savilian professor, Sir Thomas Millington, he
told me he conceived that the attire doth serve, as the male, for the
generation of the seed. I immediately replied that I was of the same
opinion, and gave him some reasons for it, and answered some
objections which might oppose them. But withal, in regard every plant
is αρρενοθηλυς [arrenothêlus], or male and female, that I was also of
opinion that it serveth for the separation of some parts as well as
the affusion of others.”[1099] He proceeds to explain his notion of
vegetable impregnation. It is singular that he should suppose all
plants to be hermaphrodite, and this shows he could not have
recollected what had long been known, as to the palm, or the passages
in Cæsalpin relative to the subject.

     [1099] Book iv., ch. 1. He had hinted at some “primary and
     private use of the attire,” in book i., ch. 5.

|Camerarius confirms this.|

29. Ray admitted Grew’s opinion cautiously at first: Nos ut
verisimilem tantum admittimus. But in his Sylloge Stirpium, 1694, he
fully accedes to it. The real establishment of the sexual theory,
however, is due to Camerarius, professor of botany at Tubingen, whose
letter on that subject, published 1694, in the work of another, did
much to spread the theory over Europe. His experiments, indeed, were
necessary to confirm what Grew had rather hazarded as a conjecture
than brought to a test; and he showed that flowers deprived of their
stamina do not produce seeds capable of continuing the species.[1100]
Woodward, in the Philosophical Transactions, illustrated the nutrition
of plants, by putting sprigs of vegetables in phials filled with
water, and after some time determining the weight they had gained and
the quantity they had imbibed.[1101] These experiments had been made
by Van Helmont, who had inferred from them that water is convertible
into solid matter.[1102]

     [1100] Sprengel. Biogr. Univ. Pulteney, p. 338.

     [1101] Thomson’s Hist. of Royal Society, p. 58.

     [1102] Thomson’s Hist. of Chemistry.

|Predecessors of Grew.|

|Malpighi.|

30. It is just to observe that some had preceded Grew in vegetable
physiology. Aromatari, in a letter of only four pages, published at
Venice in 1625, on the generation of plants from seeds, which was
reprinted in the Philosophical Transactions, showed the analogy
between grains and eggs, each containing a minute organised embryo,
which employs the substances inclosing it for its own development.
Aromatari has also understood the use of the cotyledons.[1103] Brown,
in his Inquiry into Vulgar Errors, has remarks on the budding of
plants, and on the quinary number they affect in their flower. Kenelm
Digby, according to Sprengel, first explained the necessity in
vegetation for oxygen, or vital air, which had lately been discovered
by Bathurst. Hooke carried the discoveries hitherto made in vegetable
anatomy much farther in his Micrographia. Sharrock and Lister
contributed some knowledge, but they were rather later than Grew. None
of these deserve such a place as Malpighi, who, says Sprengel, was not
inferior to Grew in acuteness, though, probably, through some
illusions of prejudice, he has not so well understood and explained
many things. But the structure and growth of seeds he has explained
better, and Grew seems to have followed him. His book is also better
arranged and more concise.[1104] The Dutch did much to enlarge
botanical science. The Hortus Indicus Malabaricus of Rheede, who had
been a governor in India, was published at his own expense in twelve
volumes, the first appearing in 1686; it contains an immense number of
new plants.[1105] The Herbarium Amboinense of Rumphius was collected
in the seventeenth century, though not published till 1741.[1106]
Several botanical gardens were formed in different countries; among
others that of Chelsea was opened in 1686.[1107]

     [1103] Sprengel. Biogr. Univ.

     [1104] Sprengel, p. 15.

     [1105] Biogr. Univ. The date of the first volume is given
     erroneously in the B. U.

     [1106] Id.

     [1107] Sprengel. Pulteney.

|Early notions of geology.|

31. It was impossible that men of inquiring tempers should not have
been led to reflect on those remarkable phenomena of the earth’s
visible structure, which being in course of time accurately registered
and arranged, have become the basis of that noble science, the boast
of our age, geology. The first thing which must strike the eyes of the
merest clown, and set the philosopher thinking, is the irregularity of
the surface of our globe; the more this is observed, the more signs of
violent disruption, and of a prior state of comparative uniformity
appear. Some, indeed, of whom Ray seems to have been one,[1108] were
so much impressed by the theory of final causes that, perceiving the
fitness of the present earth for its inhabitants, they thought it
might have been created in such a state of physical ruin. But the
contrary inference is almost irresistible. A still more forcible
argument for great revolutions in the history of the earth is drawn
from a second phenomenon of very general occurrence, the marine and
other fossil relics of organised beings, which are dug up in strata
far remote from the places where these bodies could now exist. It was
common to account for them by the Mosaic deluge. But the depth at
which they are found was incompatible with this hypothesis. Others
fancied them to be not really organised, but sports of nature, as they
were called, the casual resemblances of shells and fishes in stone.
The Italians took the lead in speculating on these problems; but they
could only arrive now and then at a happier conjecture than usual, and
do not seem to have planned any scheme of explaining the general
structure of the earth.[1109] The Mundus Subterraneus of Athanasius
Kircher, famous for the variety and originality of his erudition,
contains probably the geology of his age, or at least his own. It was
published in 1662. Ten out of twelve books relate to the surface or
the interior of the earth, and to various terrene productions; the
remaining two to alchemy and other arts connected with mineralogy.
Kircher seems to have collected a great deal of geographical
and geological knowledge. In England, the spirit of observation was so
strong after the establishment of the Royal Society, that the
Philosophical Transactions, in this period, contain a considerable
number of geognostic papers, and the genius of theory was aroused,
though not at first in his happiest mood.[1110]

     [1108] See Ray’s Three Physico-Theological Discourses on
     the Creation, Deluge, and final Conflagration. 1692.

     [1109] Lyell’s Principles of Geology, vol. i., p. 25.

     [1110] Thomson’s Hist. of Royal Society.

|Burnet’s Theory of Earth.|

|Other geologists.|

32. Thomas Burnet, master of the Charterhouse, a man fearless and
somewhat rash, with more imagination than philosophy, but ingenious
and eloquent, published in 1694 his Theoria Telluris Sacra, which he
afterwards translated into English. The primary question for the early
geologists had always been how to reconcile the phenomena with which
they were acquainted to the Mosaic narratives of the creation and
deluge. Every one was satisfied that his own theory was the best; but
in every case it has hitherto proved, whatever may take place in
future, that the proposed scheme has neither kept to the letter of
Scripture, nor to the legitimate deductions of philosophy. Burnet
gives the reins to his imagination more than any other writer on that
which, if not argued upon by inductive reasoning, must be the dream of
one man, little better in reality, though it may be more amusing, than
the dream of another. He seems to be eminently ignorant of geological
facts, and has hardly ever recourse to them as evidence. And
accordingly, though his book drew some attention as an ingenious
romance, it does not appear that he made a single disciple. Whiston
opposed Burnet’s theory, but with one not less unfounded, nor with
less ignorance of all that required to be known. Hooke, Lister, Ray,
and Woodward came to the subject with more philosophical minds, and
with a better insight into the real phenomena. Hooke seems to have
displayed his usual sagacity in conjecture; he saw that the common
theory of explaining marine fossils by the Mosaic deluge would not
suffice, and perceived that, at some time or other, a part of the
earth’s crust must have been elevated and another part depressed by
some subterraneous power. Lister was aware of the continuity of
certain strata over large districts, and proposed the construction of
geological maps. Woodward had a still more extensive knowledge of
stratified rocks; he was in a manner the founder of scientific
mineralogy in England, but his geological theory was not less
chimerical than those of his contemporaries.[1111] It was first
published in the Philosophical Transactions for 1695.[1112]

     [1111] Lyell, p. 31.

     [1112] Thomson, p. 207.

|Protogæa of Leibnitz.|

33. The Protogæa of Leibnitz appears, in felicity of conjecture and
minute attention to facts, far above any of these. But this short
tract was only published in 1749, and on reading it, I have found an
intimation that it was not written within the seventeenth century. Yet
I cannot refrain from mentioning that his hypothesis supposes the
gradual cooling of the earth from igneous fusion; the formation of a
vast body of water to cover the surface, a part of his theory but ill
established, and apparently the weakest of the whole; the subsidence
of the lower parts of the earth, which he takes to have been once on
the level of the highest mountains, by the breaking in of vaulted
caverns within its bosom;[1113] the deposition of sedimentary strata
from inundations, their induration, and the subsequent covering of
these by other strata through fresh inundations; with many other
notions which have been gradually matured and rectified in the process
of the science.[1114] No one can read the Protogæa without perceiving
that of all the early geologists, or indeed of all down to a time not
very remote, Leibnitz came nearest to the theories which are most
received in the English school at this day. It is evident that if the
literal interpretation of Genesis, by a period of six natural days,
had not restrained him, he would have gone much farther in his views
of the progressive revolutions of the earth.[1115] Leibnitz had made
very minute inquiries, for his age, into fossil species, and was aware
of the main facts which form the basis of modern geology.[1116]

     [1113] Sect. 21. He admits also a partial elevation by
     intumescence, but says, ut vastissimæ Alpes ex solida jam terra
     eruptione surrexerint, minus consentaneum puto. Scimus tamen et
     in illis deprehendi reliquias maris. Cum ergo alterutrum factum
     oporteat, credibilius multo arbitror defluxisse aquas spontaneo
     nisu, quam ingentem terrarum partem incredibili violentia tam
     alte ascendisse. Sect. 22.

     [1114] Facies teneri adhuc orbis sæpius novata est; donec
     quiescentibus causis atque æquilibratis, consistentior emergeret
     status rerum. Unde jam duplex origo intelligitur firmorum
     corporum; una cum ignis fusione refrigescerent, altera cum
     reconcrescerent ex solutione aquarum. Neque igitur putandum est
     _lapides ex sola esse fusione_. Id enim potissimum de prima
     tantum massa ex terræ basi accipio; Nec dubito, postea materiam
     liquidam in superficie telluris procurrentem, quiete mox reddita,
     ex ramentis subactis ingentem materiæ vim deposuisse, quorum alia
     varias terræ species formarunt, alia in saxa induruere, e quibus
     strata diversa sibi super imposita diversas præcipitationum vices
     atque intervalla testantur. Sect. 4.

     This he calls the incunabula of the world, and the basis of a new
     science, which might be denominated “naturalis geographia.” But
     wisely adds, licet conspirent vestigia veteris mundi in præsenti
     facie rerum, tamen rectius omnia definient posteri, ubi
     curiositas eo processerit, ut per rejar regiones procurrentia
     soli genera et strata describant. Sect. 5.

     [1115] See sect. 21, et alibi.

     [1116] Sect. 24, et usque ad finem libri.


                            SECT. III.

                     ON ANATOMY AND MEDICINE.

34. Portal begins the history of this period, which occupies more than
800 pages of his voluminous work, by announcing it as the epoch most
favourable to anatomy: in less than fifty years the science put on a
new countenance; nature is interrogated, every part of the body is
examined with an observing spirit; the mutual intercourse of nations
diffuses the light on every side; a number of great men appear, whose
genius and industry excite our admiration.[1117] But for this very
reason I must, in these concluding pages, glide over a subject rather
foreign to my own studies and to those of the generality of my readers
with a very brief enumeration of names.

     [1117] Hist. de l’Anatomie, vol. iii, p. 1.

|Circulation of blood established.|

35. The Harveian theory gained ground, though obstinate prejudice
gave way but slowly. It was confirmed by the experiment of transfusing
blood, tried on dogs, at the instance of Sir Christopher Wren, in
1657, and repeated by Lower in 1661.[1118] Malpighi in 1661, and
Leeuwenhoek in 1690, by means of their microscopes, demonstrated the
circulation of the blood in the smaller vessels, and rendered visible
the anastomoses of the arteries and veins, upon which the theory
depended.[1119] From this time it seems to have been out of doubt.
Pecquet’s discovery of the thoracic duct, or rather of its uses, as a
reservoir of the chyle from which the blood is elaborated, for the
canal itself had been known to Eustachius, stands next to that of
Harvey, which would have thrown less light on physiology without it,
and like his, was perseveringly opposed.[1120]

     [1118] Sprengel, Hist. de la Médecine, vol. iv., p. 120.

     [1119] Id. p. 126, 142.

     [1120] Portal. Sprengel.

|Willis-Vieussens.|

36. Willis, a physician at Oxford, is called by Portal, who thinks all
mankind inferior to anatomists, one of the greatest geniuses that ever
lived; his bold systems have given him a distinguished place among
physiologers.[1121] His Anatomy of the Brain, in which, however, as in
his other works, he was much assisted by an intimate friend, and
anatomist of the first character, Lower, is, according to the same
writer, a masterpiece of imagination and labour. He made many
discoveries in the structure of the brain, and has traced the nerves
from it far better than his predecessors, who had in general very
obscure ideas of their course. Sprengel says that Willis is the first
who has assigned a peculiar mental function to each of the different
parts of the brain; forgetting, as it seems, that this hypothesis, the
basis of modern phrenology, had been generally received, as I
understand his own account, in the sixteenth century.[1122] Vieussens
of Montpelier carried on the discoveries in the anatomy of the nerves,
in his Neurographia Universalis, 1684; tracing those arising from the
spinal marrow which Willis had not done, and following the minute
ramifications of those that are spread over the skin.[1123]

     [1121] P. 88. Biogr. Univ.

     [1122] Sprengel, p. 250. See vol. iii., p. 204.

     [1123] Portal, vol. iv., p. 5. Sprengel, p. 256, Biogr. Univ.

|Malpighi.|

|Other anatomists.|

37. Malpighi was the first who employed good microscopes in anatomy,
and thus revealed the secrets, we may say, of an invisible world,
which Leeuwenhoek afterwards, probably using still better instruments,
explored with surprising success. To Malpighi anatomists owe their
knowledge of the structure of the lungs.[1124] Graaf has overthrown
many errors, and suggested many truths in the economy of
generation.[1125] Malpighi prosecuted this inquiry with his
microscope, and first traced the progress of the egg during
incubation. But the theory of evolution, as it is called, proposed by
Harvey, and supported by Malpighi, received a shock by Leeuwenhoek’s
or Hartsoeker’s discovery of spermatic animalcules, which apparently
opened a new view of reproduction. The hypothesis they suggested
became very prevalent for the rest of the seventeenth century, though
it is said to have been shaken early in the next.[1126] Borelli
applied mathematical principles to muscular movements in his treatise
De Motu Animalium. Though he is a better mathematician than anatomist,
he produces many interesting facts, the mechanical laws are rightly
applied, and his method is clear and consequent.[1127] Duverney, in
his Treatise on Hearing, in 1683, his only work, obtained a
considerable reputation; it threw light on many parts of a delicate
organ, which, by their minuteness, had long baffled the
anatomist.[1128] In Mayow’s Treatise on Respiration, published in
London, 1668, we find the necessity of oxygen to that function laid
down; but this portion of the atmosphere had been discovered by
Bathurst and Henshaw in 1654, and Hooke had shown by experiment that
animals die when the air is deprived of it.[1129] Ruysch, a Dutch
physician, perfected the art of injecting anatomical preparations,
hardly known before, and thus conferred an inestimable benefit on the
science. He possessed a celebrated cabinet of natural history.[1130]

     [1124] Portal, iii., 120. Sprengel, p. 578.

     [1125] Portal, iii., 219. Sprengel, p. 303.

     [1126] Sprengel, p. 309.

     [1127] Portal, iii., 246. Biogr. Univ.

     [1128] Portal, p. 464. Sprengel, p. 288.

     [1129] Portal, p. 176, 181.

     [1130] Id. p. 259. Biogr. Univ.

|Medical theories.|

38. The chemical theory of medicine which had descended from
Paracelsus through Van Helmont, was propagated chiefly by Sylvius, a
physician of Holland, who is reckoned the founder of what was called
the chemiatric school. His works were printed at Amsterdam, in 1679,
but he had promulgated his theory from the middle of the century. His
leading principle was that a perpetual fermentation goes on in the
human body, from the deranged action of which diseases proceed; most
of them from excess of acidity, though a few are of alkaline origin.
“He degraded the physician,” says Sprengel, “to the level of a
distiller or a brewer.”[1131] This writer is very severe on the
chemiatric school, one of their offences in his eyes being their
recommendation of tea; “the cupidity of Dutch merchants conspiring
with their medical theories.” It must be owned that when we find them
prescribing also a copious use of tobacco, it looks as if the trade of
the doctor went hand-in-hand with those of his patients. Willis, in
England, was a partisan of the chemiatrics,[1132] and they had a great
influence in Germany; though in France the attachment of most
physicians to the Hippocratic and Galenic methods, which brought upon
them so many imputations of pedantry, was little abated. A second
school of medicine, which superseded this, is called the
iatro-mathematical. This seems to have arisen in Italy. Borelli’s
application of mechanical principles to the muscles has been mentioned
above. These physicians sought to explain everything by statical and
hydraulic laws; they were, therefore, led to study anatomy, since it
was only by an accurate knowledge of all the parts that they could
apply their mathematics. John Bernouilli even taught them to employ
the differential calculus in explaining the bodily functions.[1133]
But this school seems to have had the same leading defect as the
chemiatric; it forgot the peculiarity of the laws of organisation and
life which often render those of inert matter inapplicable. Pitcairn
and Boerhaave were leaders of the iatro-mathematicians; and Mead was
reckoned the last of its distinguished patrons.[1134] Meantime, a
third school of medicine grew up, denominated the empirical; a name to
be used in a good sense, as denoting their regard to observation and
experience, or the Baconian principles of philosophy. Sydenham was the
first of these in England; but they gradually prevailed to the
exclusion of all systematic theory. The discovery of several
medicines, especially the Peruvian bark, which was first used in Spain
about 1640, and in England about 1654, contributed to the success of
the empirical physicians, since the efficacy of some of these could
not be explained on the hypotheses hitherto prevalent.[1135]

     [1131] Vol. v., p. 59. Biogr. Univ.

     [1132] Sprengel, p. 73.

     [1133] Sprengel, p. 159.

     [1134] Id. p. 182. See Biographie Universelle, art. Boerhaave,
     for a general criticism of the iatro-mathematicians.

     [1135] Sprengel, p. 413.


                             SECT. IV.

                      ON ORIENTAL LITERATURE.

|Polyglott of Walton.|

39. The famous Polyglott of Brian Walton was published in 1657; but
few copies appear to have been sold before the restoration of
Charles II., in 1660, since those are very scarce which contain in the
preface the praise of Cromwell for having facilitated and patronised
the undertaking; praise replaced in the change of times by a loyal
eulogy on the king. This Polyglott is in nine languages; though no one
book of the Bible is printed in so many. Walton’s Prolegomena are in
sixteen chapters or dissertations. His learning, perhaps, was greater
than his critical acuteness or good sense; such, at least, is the
opinion of Simon and Le Long. The former, in a long examination of
Walton’s Prolegomena, treats him with all the superiority of a man who
possessed both. Walton was assailed by some bigots at home for
acknowledging various readings in the Scriptures, and for denying the
authority of the vowel punctuation. His Polyglott is not reckoned so
magnificent as the Parisian edition of Le Long; but it is fuller and
more convenient.[1136] Edmund Castell, the coadjutor of Walton in this
work, published his Lexicon Heptaglotton in 1669, upon which he had
consumed eighteen years and the whole of his substance. This is
frequently sold together with the Polyglott.

     [1136] Simon, Hist. Critique du Vieux Testament, p. 541.
     Chalmers. Biogr. Britan. Biogr. Univ. Brunet. Man. du Libraire.

|Hottinger.|

|Spencer.|

|Bochart.|

40. Hottinger of Zurich, by a number of works on the Eastern
languages, and especially by the Bibliotheca Orientalis, in 1658,
established a reputation which these books no longer retain since the
whole field of Oriental literature has been more fully explored.
Spencer, in a treatise of great erudition, De Legibus Hebræorum, 1685,
gave some offence by the suggestion that several of the Mosaic
institutions were borrowed from the Egyptian, though the general scope
of the Jewish law was in opposition to the idolatrous practices of the
neighbouring nations. The vast learning of Bochart expanded itself
over Oriental antiquity, especially that of which the Hebrew nation
and language is the central point; but his etymological conjectures
have long since been set aside, and he has not, in other respects,
escaped the fate of the older Orientalists.

|Pococke.|

|D’Herbelot.|

41. The great services of Pococke to Arabic literature, which had
commenced in the earlier part of the century, were extended to the
present. His edition and translation of the Annals of Eutychius in
1658, that of the History of Abulfaragius in 1663, with many other
works of a similar nature, bear witness to his industry; no
Englishman, probably, has ever contributed so much to that province of
learning.[1137] A fine edition of the Koran, and still esteemed the
best, was due to Marracci, professor of Arabic in the Sapienza or
university of Rome, and published at the expense of Cardinal
Barbadigo, in 1698.[1138] But France had an Orientalist of the most
extensive learning, in D’Herbelot, whose Bibliothèque Orientale must
be considered as making an epoch in this literature. It was published
in 1697, after his death, by Galland, who had also some share in
arranging the materials. This work, it has been said, is for the
seventeenth century what the History of the Huns, by De Guignes, is
for the eighteenth; with this difference, that D’Herbelot opened the
road, and has often been copied by his successor.[1139]

     [1137] Chalmers. Biogr. Univ.

     [1138] Tiraboschi, xi., 398.

     [1139] Biographie Universelle.

|Hyde.|

42. Hyde, in his Religionis Persarum Historia, published in 1700, was
the first who illustrated in a systematic manner the religion of
Zoroaster, which he always represents in a favourable manner. The
variety and novelty of its contents gave this book a credit which, in
some degree, it preserves; but Hyde was ignorant of the ancient
language of Persia, and is said to have been often misled by
Mohammedan authorities.[1140] The vast increase of Oriental
information in modern times, as has been intimated above, renders it
difficult for any work of the seventeenth century to keep its ground.
In their own times, the writings of Kircher on China, and still more
those of Ludolph on Abyssinia, which were founded on his own knowledge
of the country, claimed a respectable place in Oriental learning. It
is remarkable that very little was yet known of the Indian languages,
though grammars existed of the Tamul, and perhaps some others, before
the close of the seventeenth century.[1141]

     [1140] Id.

     [1141] Eichhorn, Gesch. der Cultur, v., 269.


                             SECT. V.

                     ON GEOGRAPHY AND HISTORY.

|Maps of the Sansons.|

43. The progress of geographical science long continued to be slow. If
we compare the map of the world in 1651, by Nicholas Sanson, esteemed
on all sides the best geographer of his age, with one by his son in
1692, the variances will not appear, perhaps, so considerable as we
might have expected. Yet some improvement may be detected by
the eye. Thus, the Caspian sea has assumed its longer diameter from
north to south, contrary to the old map. But the sea of Aral is still
wanting. The coasts of New Holland, except to the east, are tolerably
laid down, and Corea is a peninsula, instead of an island. Cambalu,
the imaginary capital of Tartary, has disappeared;[1142] but a vast
lake is placed in the centre of that region; the Altai range is
carried far too much to the north, and the name of Siberia seems
unknown. Africa and America have nearly the same outline as before; in
the former, the empire of Monomotopa stretches to join that of
Abyssinia in about the 12th degree of south latitude; and the Nile
still issues, as in all the old maps, from a lake Zayre, in nearly the
same parallel. The coasts of Europe, and especially of Scandinavia,
are a little more accurate. The Sanson family, of whom several were
publishers of maps, did not take pains enough to improve what their
father had executed, though they might have had material helps from
the astronomical observations which were now continually made in
different parts of the world.

     [1142] The Cambalu of Marco Polo is probably Pekin; but the
     geographers frequently placed this capital of Cathay north of the
     wall of China.

|De Lisle’s map of the world.|

44. Such was the state of geography when, in 1699, De Lisle, the real
founder of the science, at the age of twenty-four, published his map
of the world. He had been guided by the observations, and worked under
the directions of Cassini, whose tables of the emersion of Jupiter’s
satellites, calculated for the meridian of Bologna in 1668, and, with
much improvement, for that of Paris in 1693, had prepared the way for
the perfection of geography. The latitudes of different regions had
been tolerably ascertained by observation; but no good method of
determining the longitude had been known before this application of
Galileo’s great discovery. It is evident that the appearance of one of
those satellites at Paris being determined by the tables to a precise
instant, the means were given to find the longitudinal distance of
other places by observing the difference of time; and thus a great
number of observations having gradually been made, a basis was laid
for an accurate delineation of the surface of the globe. The previous
state of geography and the imperfect knowledge which the mere
experience of navigators could furnish, may be judged by the fact that
the Mediterranean sea was set with an excess of 300 leagues in length,
being more than one third of the whole. De Lisle reduced it within its
bounds, and cut off at the same time 500 leagues from the longitude of
Eastern Asia. This was the commencement of the geographical labours of
De Lisle, which reformed, in the first part of the eighteenth century,
not only the general outline of the world, but the minuter relations
of various countries. His maps amount to more than one hundred
sheets.[1143]

     [1143] Eloge de De Lisle, in Œuvres de Fontenelle, vol. vi.,
     p. 253. Eloge de Cassini, in vol. v., p. 328. Biogr. Universelle.

|Voyages and travels.|

45. The books of travels, in the last fifty years of the seventeenth
century, were far more numerous and more valuable than in any earlier
period, but we have no space for more than a few names. Gemelli
Carreri, a Neapolitan, is the first who claims to have written an
account of his own travels round the world, describing Asia and
America with much detail. His Giro del Mondo was published in 1699.
Carreri has been strongly suspected of fabrication, and even of having
never seen the countries which he describes; but his character, I know
not with what justice, has been latterly vindicated.[1144] The French
justly boast the excellent travels of Chardin, Bernier, Thevenot, and
Tavernier in the East; the account of the Indian archipelago and of
China by Nieuhoff, employed in a Dutch embassy to the latter empire,
is said to have been interpolated by the editors, though he was an
accurate and faithful observer.[1145] Several other relations of
voyages were published in Holland, some of which can only be had in
the native language. In English there were not many of high
reputation: Dampier’s Voyage round the World, the first edition of
which was in 1697, is better known than any which I can call to mind.

     [1144] Tiraboschi, xi., 86. Selfi, ix., 442.

     [1145] Biogr. Univ.

|Historians.|

|De Solis.|

46. The general characteristics of historians in this period are
neither a luminous philosophy, nor a rigorous examination of evidence.
But, as before, we mention only a few names in this extensive province
of literature. The History of the Conquest of Mexico by Antonio De
Solis, is “the last good work,” says Sismondi, perhaps too severely,
“that Spain has produced; the last where purity of taste, simplicity,
and truth are preserved; the imagination, of which the author had
given so many proofs, does not appear.”[1146] Bouterwek is not less
favourable; but Robertson, who holds De Solis rather cheap as an
historian, does not fail to censure even his style.

     [1146] Littérature du Midi, iv., 101.

|Memoirs of De Retz.|

47. The French have some authors of history who, by their elegance and
perspicuity, might deserve notice; such as St. Real, Father D’Orleans,
and even Varillas, proverbially discredited as he is for want of
veracity. The Memoirs of Cardinal De Retz rise above these; their
animated style, their excellent portraitures of character, their acute
and brilliant remarks, distinguish their pages, as much as the similar
qualities did their author. “They are written,” says Voltaire, “with
an air of greatness, an impetuosity and an inequality which are the
image of his life; his expression, sometimes incorrect, often
negligent, but almost always original, recalls continually to his
readers what has been so frequently said of Cæsar’s Commentaries, that
he wrote with the same spirit that he carried on his wars.”[1147] The
Memoirs of Grammont, by Antony Hamilton, scarcely challenge a place as
historical, but we are now looking more at the style than the
intrinsic importance of books. Every one is aware of the peculiar
felicity and fascinating gaiety which they display.

     [1147] Biogr. Univ., whence I take the quotation.

|Bossuet on universal history.|

48. The Discourse of Bossuet on Universal History is perhaps the
greatest effort of his wonderful genius. Every preceding abridgment of
so immense a subject had been superficial and dry. He first irradiated
the entire annals of antiquity down to the age of Charlemagne with
flashes of light that reveal an unity and coherence which had been
lost in their magnitude and obscurity. It is not perhaps an unfair
objection that, in a history calling itself that of all mankind, the
Jewish people have obtained a disproportionate regard; and it might be
almost as reasonable, on religious grounds, to give Palestine a larger
space in the map of the world, as, on a like pretext, to make the
scale of the Jewish history so much larger than that of the rest of
the human race. The plan of Bossuet has at least divided his book into
two rather heterogeneous portions. But his conceptions of Greek, and
still more of Roman history, are generally magnificent; profound in
philosophy, with an outline firm and sufficiently exact, never
condescending to trivial remarks or petty details; above all, written
in that close and nervous style which no one certainly in the French
language has ever surpassed. It is evident that Montesquieu in all his
writings, but especially in the Grandeur and Decadence des Romains,
had the Discourse of Bossuet before his eyes; he is more acute,
sometimes, and ingenious, and has reflected longer on particular
topics of inquiry, but he wants the simple majesty, the comprehensive
eagle-like glance of the illustrious prelate.

|English historical works.|

|Burnet.|

49. Though we fell short in England of the historical reputation which
the first part of the century might entitle us to claim, this period
may be reckoned that in which a critical attention to truth, sometimes
rather too minute, but always praiseworthy, began to be characteristic
of our researches into fact. The only book that I shall mention is
Burnet’s History of the Reformation, written in a better style than
those who know Burnet by his later and more negligent work are apt to
conceive, and which has the signal merit of having been the first, as
far as I remember, which is fortified by a large appendix of
documents. This, though frequent in Latin, had not been usual in the
modern languages. It became gradually very frequent and almost
indispensable in historical writings, where the materials had any
peculiar originality.

                     *     *     *     *     *

|General character of 17th century.|

50. The change in the spirit of literature and of the public mind in
general, which had with gradual and never receding steps been coming
forward in the seventeenth century, but especially in the latter part
of it, has been so frequently pointed out to the readers of this and
the last volume, that I shall only quote an observation of Bayle. “I
believe,” he says, “that the sixteenth century produced a greater
number of learned men than the seventeenth; and yet the former of
these ages was far from being as enlightened as the latter. During the
reign of criticism and philology, we saw in all Europe many prodigies
of erudition. Since the study of the new philosophy and that of living
languages has introduced a different taste, we have ceased to behold
this vast and deep learning. But in return there is diffused through
the republic of letters a more subtle understanding and a more
exquisite discernment; men are now less learned but more able.”[1148]
The volumes which are now submitted to the public contain sufficient
evidence of this intellectual progress both in philosophy and in
polite literature.

     [1148] Dictionnaire de Bayle, art. Aconce, note D.

|Conclusion.|

51. I here terminate a work, which, it is hardly necessary to say, has
furnished the occupation of not very few years, and which, for several
reasons, it is not my intention to prosecute any farther. The length
of these volumes is already greater than I had anticipated; yet I do
not perceive much that could have been retrenched without loss to a
part, at least, of the literary world. For the approbation which the
first of them has received I am grateful; for the few corrections that
have been communicated to me I am not less so; the errors and
deficiencies of which I am not specially aware may be numerous; yet I
cannot affect to doubt that I have contributed something to the
general literature of my country, something to the honourable
estimation of my own name, and to the inheritance of those, if it is
for me still to cherish that hope, to whom I have to bequeath it.




                             THE END.


        _S. Cowan & Co., Strathmore Printing Works, Perth._




                    INDEX.



                                   Page

  Aberlard, Poetry of, 17
  Academies, Italian Literary, 229
  Academy del Cimento, The, 831
  ---- French, Established, 630
  ---- Neapolitan, 112
  Afra Behn, Plays of, 808
  Agricola, The first Mineralogist, 227
  ---- Works of, 103
  Agrippa, Cornelius, 192
  Augustine, Antonio, 201
  Alamanni, 202
  Alciati, Andrew, 201
  Aldine Editions, The, 109
  Aldus, Press of, 125
  Algebra, Descartes on, 650
  ---- Earliest Work on, 118
  Alchemy, Study of, 58
  Amadis de Gaul, The, 66, 152
  Aminto, Passo’s, 351
  Amyot, His Translations, 371
  Ana, The, 820
  Anatomy, Fallopius on, 397
  ---- Leaders in studying, 842
  Andreæ, John Valentine, 532, _and note_
  Anglo-Saxon, Change of, to English, 22
  Antiquaries, Society of, founded, 405
  Apianus, Cosmography of, 228
  Apology, Jewell’s, 272
  Arabic, Rise of Study of, 399
  Arcadia, Sir Philip Sydney’s, 383
  ---- Character of, 383
  ---- Walpole on, 383
  Aretin, Leonard, 44
  ---- Plays of, 211
  Argensola, The Brothers, 570
  Arianism in Italy, 181
  Ariosto, Satires of, 203
  Aristotle countenanced by Melancthon, 189
  ---- Veneration shown for, 189
  Arithmetic of Sacro Bosco, 56
  Arnauld on true and false ideas, 725
  Art of Rhetoric, Cox’s, 219
  Ascham, His Character of Cambridge, 168
  ---- Writings of, 372
  Astronomy in Middle Ages, 58
  Augsburg, Confession of, 173
  ---- Diet of, 259
  Averroes on the Soul, 93
  Avis aux Refugiéz, 772
  Ayala, Balthazar, on War, 315

  Bacon, Lord, 468
  ---- Conception of his Philosophy, 469
  ---- Essays of, 293, 529
  ---- his fame on the Continent, 489
  ---- his Instauratio Magna, 469
  ---- ---- ---- ---- Analysis of, 469
  ---- ignorant of Mathematics, 488
  ---- Nature of his Philosophy, 472
  ---- Novum Organum, 478
  ---- Plan of Philosophy, 469
  Bacon, Roger, 57
  Balbi, Catholicon of, 40
  Baldi, Sonnets of, 319
  Ballads, Early Spanish, 59
  Balzac, Letters of, 628
  Bandello, Novels of, 380
  Barbarism, A relapse into, 38
  Barbarus, Hermolaus, 111
  Barclay, his works, 642
  Barlæus, Gaspar, 589
  Barrow, Sermons of, 703
  Basson, Sebastian, 463
  Bath, Adelard of, 56
  Bayle on the Comet, 819
  ---- his Dictionary, 819
  ---- Philosophical Commentary of, 700
  Beaumont, Fletcher and, 611
  Bellarmin, Works of, 273
  Bellenden, de Statu, 534
  Bello Francesco, 113
  Belon, Zoology of, 394
  Belphegor, Machiavel’s, 215
  Bembo, Care of, 159
  ---- Life of, 217
  ---- Works of, 159, 201
  Berigard, Claude, 463
  Benserade, Poems of, 781
  Bentley, Richard, the Critic, 682
  Berchonius, 59
  Beza, Works of, 27
  Bible, Cranmer’s, 187
  ---- First printed, 76
  ---- Latin Versions of the, 137
  ---- Mazarin, 77
  ---- The Authorised Version, 457
  Bibles, Early English, 187
  Block-books, 75
  Blood, Circulation of the, discovered, 665
  Boccalini, Trajan, 624
  Bodin, compared with Aristotle and Machiavel, 310
  Bodleian, Foundation of the, 674
  Boehm, Jacob, 464
  Boethius, his Consolation of Philosophy, 1
  ---- Poem on, 13
  Boiardo, Works of, 112
  Boileau, Works of, 780
  Bookselling, Rise of, 121
  ---- The Universities and, 123
  Books, Early, price and form of, 122
  ---- Number of, printed at close of the Fourteenth Century, 120
  ---- Price of in Middle Ages, 52
  ---- Sold by printers, 121
  Bossu on Epic Poems, 816
  Bossuet, Exposition of Faith, 688
  ---- other Works, 689
  ---- Sermons of, 702
  Botany, Turner’s, 395
  Botero, Giovanni, 301
  Boucher, Treatise of, 299
  Bouhours, Works by, 813
  Bourdalone, Style of, 701
  Boyle, Works of, 833
  Brahé, Tycho, 387
  ---- System of, 387
  Brandt, Sebastian, 117
  Browne, Thomas, 531
  ---- his Religio Medici, 531
  ---- William, 581
  Bruno, characteristics of his system, 285
  Buchanan, de Jure Regni, 296
  ---- Poetry of, 349
  Buda, Royal Library at, 81
  Budæus, Budé on, 115
  ---- his Commentaries, 161
  ---- Style of, 162
  Bunyan, John, 828
  Burnet, his Theory of Earth, 841
  Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 637
  Bury, Richard of, 39
  Butler, Hudibras of, 783
  Byzantine Literature, 48

  Cabbala, The Jewishp, 100
  Calderon, his Comedies, 593
  ----- his Tragedies, 595
  Calendar, Gregorian, 390
  Calisto and Melibœa, Drama of, 128
  Calvin, John, 177
  ---- Institutes of, 177
  Camoenss, The Lusiad of, 330
  Cancionero General, The, 61
  Cardan, Jerome, 193
  ---- Discoveries of, 221
  Carew, Poetry of, 584
  Cartesian Theory, The, 655
  Casa, Poems of, 318
  Casaubon, Isaac, 248, 410
  ---- Wavering of, 428, 430, _note_
  Cassander, Consultation of, 265
  Castalio, Sebastian, 270
  Castelvetro, Ludovico, 377
  Castile, Rhymes in Language of, 60
  ---- The Language of, 21
  Castillejo, 329
  Casuistry, Schemes of, 523
  Casuists, English, 527
  ---- Literature of the, 521
  Cathani, Labours of, 276
  Catholicon, Balbi’s, 40
  Cats, Father, 577
  Caxton, First Works of, 79
  Celio Magno, Odes of, 319
  Celso Minop, 271
  Cena de li Ceneri, The, 282
  Century, Twelfth, Progress during, 6
  Cervantes, his Don Quixote, 638
  ---- Minor Novels, 640
  Cesalpin, System of, 280
  Ceva, Poems of, 791
  Chapman, his Translation of Homer, 341
  Charlemagne, Few schools before, 4
  ---- Greeks under, 45
  ---- Work effected by, 4
  Charron, Pierre, 529
  ---- on Wisdom, 529
  Chaucer, Gower and, 24
  Chaulieu, Poems of, 781
  Cheke, Teaching of, 168
  Chiabrera, Poems of, 569
  ---- Style of, 569
  Chillingworth, his Religion of Protestants, 436
  China, Jesuits in, 401
  Chivalry, Effects of, on Poetry, 64
  ---- Romances of, 215
  Christianismi Restitutio, The, 268, _note_
  Christianity, Vindicators of, 699
  Chronicle, The Saxon, 23
  Chronology, Lydiat’s, 420
  ---- Scaliger’s, 258
  Chrysoloras, Disciples of, 49
  Chrysostom, Saville’s, 412
  Church, Early Learning in the, 2
  ---- High, Rise of in England, 427, 435
  Cicero, Editions of, 160
  Ciceronianus, The, 159
  ---- Scaliger on the, 160
  Cid, The, 597
  Citizens, Privileges of, 303
  Clarendon, History of, 636
  Classics, First Editions of, 231
  Clergy, Discipline of the, 261
  ---- Prejudices of, against profane learning, 2
  ---- Use of their prejudices, 3
  Codex, Chartaceus, 30
  Colleges at Alcala and Louvain, 134
  ---- not derived from Saracens, 9
  Colonna, Vittoriap, 202
  Columbus, the Anatomist, 398
  Columns, Double, use of, 241
  Comedies of the Restoration, 807
  Comedy, First English, 214
  Comenius, Popularity of, 409
  Commès, Philip de, 118
  Commentators, English, about 1600, 453
  Commonwealths, Origin of, 303
  Concord, Form of, 267
  Congreve, Plays of, 807, 808
  Conti, Account of the East by, 72
  Controversy raised by Baius, 267
  Copernican Theory, The, 386
  Copernicus, Labours of, 222
  Corneille, Pierre, Plays of, 597
  ---- Style of, 598
  Corneille, Thomas, 799
  Cortesius, Paulus, 89
  Costanzo, Poems of, 319
  Cowley, Johnson’s Character of, 580
  Crashaw and Donne, 580
  Crellius, Ruanus and, 440
  Cremonini, 281
  Criticism in the Sixteenth Century, 375
  Critics about 1600, 414
  Cruquius of Ypres, 236
  Cudworth, Ralph, 707
  Cumberland, Richard, 747

  Daillé on the Fathers, 435
  Dalgarno, George, 735
  Daniel, his History of England, 635
  Dante, Petrarch and, 22
  De Bergerac, Novels of, 827
  De Gongora, Luis, 572
  ---- Style of, 572
  ---- Works of, 572
  De Leon, Luis, 328
  De Lisle, Map of the World by, 845
  De Retz, Memoirs of, 846
  De Sevigné, Madame, 812
  De Vega, Lope, 353
  ---- Fertility of, 353
  ---- Popularity of, 354
  ---- Style of, 354
  ---- Versification of, 354
  De Villegas, Manuel Estevan, 571
  Dead, Dialogues of the, 811
  Decline of German Poetry, 20
  Defensio Fidei Nicenæ, The, 695
  Deistical Writers, 277
  Delineation, Arts of, 93
  Della Causa, The, 282
  Delphin Editions, 680
  Denham, Sir John, 579
  Descartes, René, 491
  ---- Attacked by Gassendi, 497
  ---- Charged with Plagiarism, 505
  ---- Early Life, 491
  ---- his Meditations, 495
  ---- his Mental Labours, 492
  ---- his Paradoxes, 499
  ---- his Publications, 492
  ---- his Superiority, 497
  ---- Merits of his Writings, 503
  ---- on Free will, 503
  ---- on Intuitive Truth, 501
  Desportes, Poems of, 335
  Deventes, College at, 54
  Devotional Works in 1600, 454
  Dictionary, Della Crusca, 625
  Dodorus, Clusius and, 396
  D’Oliva, Perez, 195
  Don Quixote, 638
  Don Sancho Ortiz, Analysis of, 355
  Donne, Crashaw and Cowley, 580
  Dramatic Mysteries, Origin of, 105
  Drayton, Michael, 581
  ---- His Polyolbion, 591
  Dryden, Early Poems, 787
  ---- Fables, 789
  ---- Odes, 790
  ---- Style of, 821
  ---- Tragedies, 805
  ---- Translations, 790
  Ductor Dubitantium, Taylor’s, 745
  Dunbar, Poems of, 130
  Dupin on Ancient Discipline, 686
  Du Vair, Works of, 371

  Earle, John, Works of, 637
  Eastern Languages, Early Study of, 128
  Ecclesiastical Polity, The, 289
  Elizabeth, Learning under, 249
  Encomium Moræ, The, 143
  Encyclopædias of Middle Ages, 58
  England, Reformed Tenets in, 178
  England, Revival of Learning in, 3
  English, Use of, 22
  Equations, Cubic, Invention of, 220
  Episcopius, Works of, 440
  Erasmus, Adages of, 139
  ---- Character of, 139
  ---- Epistles of, 175
  ---- First Visit to England, 116
  ---- His Controversy with Luther, 174
  ---- Jealousy of, 139
  ---- Quotations from, 140
  ---- Testament of, 142
  ---- Zeal of, 114
  Erastianism, Disputes on, 444
  Ercilla, The Araucana of, 329
  Erpenius, Works of, 671
  Essays, Bacon’s, 293
  ---- Montaigne’s, 290
  ---- Sir W. Temple’s, 824
  Essex, Earl of, 633
  Etherege, Plays of, 808
  Euclid, Early Translations of, 56
  Europe, Language in, in 1400, 25
  Eustachius on Anatomy, 397
  Evelyn, Works of, 821

  Faber of Savoy, 313
  Fabricius on the Language of Brutes, 663
  Faery Queen, The, 343
  ---- Style of, 344
  ---- Superiority of First Volume, 343
  Fallopius on Anatomy, 397
  Fanaticism, Growth of, 172
  Farces, First Real, 107
  Farquhar, Plays of, 809
  Fenelon on Female Education, 761
  ---- Works of, 696
  Fermat, the Geometer, 651
  Fernel, Works of, 220
  Ferreira, 331
  Ficinus, Works of, 98
  Fiction, Popular Moral, 66
  Figures in MSS. of Boethius, 55
  Filacaja, Vincenzo, 777
  Filli di Sciro, The, 592
  Fléchier, Style of, 703
  Fletcher, Beaumont and, 611
  ---- Phineas and Giles, 577
  Fleury, Ecclesiastical History, 687
  Florence, Academy of, 229
  ---- History of, 199
  Fontenelle, Character of, 810, 817
  ---- Poems of, 782
  Ford, John, 621
  France, Troubadours of, 21
  Francesca of Rimini, 26
  Franco-Gallia, The, 295
  Free will, Molina on, 268
  France, Classical Study in, 53
  French, Diffusion of, 19
  ---- During Eleventh Century, 14
  ---- Early, 13
  ---- in England, Disuse of, 24
  ---- Whence it came, 13
  Friars, Mendicant, The, 9
  Fuchs, Leonard, 226
  Fur Prædestinatus, Sancroft’s, 693

  Galileo, compared with, Bacon, 486
  ---- Discoveries of, 653
  Gallantry, Effects of on Poetry, 64
  ---- Probable Origin of, 64
  Garnier, 357
  Gascoyne, George, 337
  Gasparin, Style of, 43
  ---- Works of, 42, 43
  Gassendi, Syntagma Philosophicum of, 710
  ---- Bernier on, 713
  ---- Works of, 467, 468
  Gemalis Dies, The, 160
  Genius, Want of, in Dark Ages, 5
  Gentilis, Albenius, 316
  ---- De Jure Belli, 377
  Geology, Rise of the Science, 840
  Gerard, Herbal of, 397
  German Poetry, Decline of, 20
  ---- ---- of Swabian Period, 19
  Germany, Schools in, 89
  Gesner, Conrad, 241, 392
  ---- His Zoology, 392
  ---- Quadrupeds discovered by, 393
  Gilbert, his Treatise on the Magnet, 392
  Glanvil, his Scepsis Scientifica, 733
  ---- the Plus Ultra, 735
  Glosa, Nature of the, 61
  Glosses, Meaning of, 31
  ---- Use of, 31
  Gloucester, Library of Duke of, 54
  Godefroy, James, 775
  Gomberville, 641
  Gorboduc, Sackville’s, 359
  Governor, Sir T. Elyot’s, 195
  Gower, Chaucer and, 24
  Grammars of the Sixteenth Century, 239 _note_.
  ---- Provençal, 14
  Greek, better known after 1580, 251
  ---- Corruption of Language, 47
  ---- Dawn of in England, 115
  ---- Early Grammars and Lexicons, 112
  ---- Latin Translations of, 50
  ---- Learned by Petrarch, 48
  ---- Learning in Middle Ages, 45
  ---- Printing, Early, 84
  ---- Revival of Study of, 44
  ---- Study of at Paris, 91
  ---- Taught by Chrysoloras, 49
  ---- Taught to Boys, 167
  Greeks, Emigration of, to Italy, 52
  Grew, Discoveries of, 839
  Grocyn, Linaire and, 135
  Groot, Gerard, College of, 54
  Grotius, De Imperio Circa Sacra, 444
  ---- De Jure Belli, 544 _et seq._
  ---- his Arrangement, 565
  ---- his Defects, 565
  ---- Objections to, 561
  ---- Religious Doubts of, 428
  ---- Vindicated against Rousseau, 565
  ---- Works of, 414
  Gruchius, Works of, 255
  Gruter, his Collection of Inscriptions, 419
  ---- his Suspicions, 413
  Grymæus, Geography of, 228
  Guevara, Treatise of, 194
  Guiciardini, History of, 402
  Guidi, Poems of, 777
  Gymnasium, Roman, 131

  Habington, 585
  Hales on Schism, 438
  Hardy, Plays of, 596
  Harmonia Apostolica, Bull’s, 694
  Harriott, Works of, 649
  Harvey, his Anatomical Discoveries, 665
  Havelok the Dane, 18
  Hawes, Stephen, 153
  Hebraists of the Fifteenth Century, 227
  Hebrew, First Printed, 95
  ---- in the Sixteenth Century, 670
  Heinsius, Daniel, 413
  Herbert, Lord, of Cherbury, 456, 465
  Herrera, Works of, 329
  Herrick, Robert, 586
  Heterodoxy, Italian, 179
  Heywood, Plays of, 622
  ---- Thomas, 363
  Hippocrates, Study of, 224
  History, Natural, from 1600-1650, 662
  Hobbes, Political Works of, 538
  ---- The Leviathan of, 506
  ---- Analysis of, 506 _et seq._
  Hooft, Peter, 577
  Hooke, Works of, 834
  Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity, 289
  ---- his Theory of Natural Law, 290
  Horace, Lambinus’s, 235
  Hottoman, Francis, 295
  Hudibras, Butler’s, 783
  Huet, The Censura of, 715
  Hymns, German, 206

  Icon Basilice, The, 636
  Immutable Morality, Cudworth’s, 745
  Index Expurgatorius, The, 407
  Ingulfus, History of, 15
  Instauratio Magna, The, 469
  Irnerius, Works of, 31
  Italian, Early, 22
  ---- Language, Origin of, 10
  Italy, Printing in, 83

  Jansenism, Rise of, 441
  Jansenius, Tenets of, 691
  Jesuits, Colleges of the, 262
  ---- Patronized by Popes, 263
  ---- Rise of the, 181
  ---- Rising Influence of the, 261
  ---- their Popularity, 181
  Jewell, Apology of, 272
  Joachim, Rhæticus, 388
  Jodelle, Father of the French Theatre, 357
  John II., Poetry under, 62
  ---- of Ravenna, 41
  ---- of Salisbury, 36
  Jonson, Ben, 585
  ---- his Every Man in his Humour, 369
  ---- Plays of, 609
  Journal des Sçavans, The, 817
  Julian Period, Invention of the, 258
  Jurisprudence, Golden Ages of, 311
  ---- in 1500, 200
  Jurists, Decline of, after Accursius, 32
  ---- Early, 32
  ---- Scholastic, 33

  Kempis, Thomas à, Works of, 68
  Kepler, Discoveries of, 652
  King’s Quair, The, 63
  Knolles, his History of the Turks, 634
  Knowledge, Limited by Sense, 481

  La Bruyere, Characters of, 758
  La Fayette, Madame, 826
  La Fontaine, Fables of, 779
  La Forge, Regis and, 714
  La Motte le Vayer, 632
  La Noue, Works of, 301
  Labbe, Philip, 411
  Lacteals, Discoveries of the, 668
  Land, Views of, 427
  Lanfrance and his Schools, 35
  Language, A New, formed from Latin, 12
  Language, Early Imperfections of, 6
  ---- Modern, Metres of, 15
  Languet, Vindicæ of, 295
  Latin becomes a New Language, 12
  ---- Colloquial Corruption of, 11
  ---- in the Lower Empire, 11
  ---- in the Seventh Century, 12
  ---- Origin of Rhyme in, 16
  ---- Poems, Mediæval, 210
  Latinists, Apology for the, 217
  ---- in 1600, 415
  Laws, Abridgments of, 31
  Layamon, Works of, 23
  Leaguers, Tenets of the, 298
  Learned, Persecution of the, 81
  Learning, Decline of in Sixth Century, 2
  ---- Encouraged by a Pope, 51
  ---- General, Rise of, 26
  ---- in England, Revival of, 3
  ---- in England under Edward VI., 249
  Lebrixa, Character of, 86
  Legal Study, Importance of, 30
  Leibnitz on Roman Law, 775
  ---- The Protogæa of, 841
  Leipsic Acts, The, 819
  Leo X., a Patron of Letters, 131
  Letters, The Paston, 82
  Lexicon, Constantin’s, 237
  ---- Feirari’s, 672
  ---- Scapula’s, 238, _note_.
  Libraries, New Public, 230
  ---- Public, Want of, 169
  Library, Bodleian, Founded, 674
  ---- of Charles V., 39
  ---- Vatican, Founded, 230
  Lilly, his Euphues, 373
  ---- Popularity of, 373
  Lipsius, and other antiquaries, 256
  Lister, Studies of, 836
  Literature, Checks upon, 407
  ---- Theological, of Sixteenth Century, 183
  Loci Communes, The, 275
  Locke on Education, 759
  ---- on Government, 768
  ---- on Human Understanding, 736
  ---- on the Coin, 773
  ---- on Toleration, 700
  Logarithms, Invention of, 645
  Logic, Aconcio’s, 286
  ---- Campanella on, 460
  ---- Inductive, 481 _et seq._
  ---- Ramus’s, Success of, 288
  Lombard, Peter, 7
  London, First Theatre in, 360
  Lotichius, 347
  Love songs, Abelard’s, 17
  ---- Spanish, 61
  Lucan, May’s supplement to, 591
  Lully, Raymond, 155
  ---- his method, 155
  Lusiad, The, 330
  ---- Defects of, 330
  ---- Excellencies of, 330
  Luther, Character of, 182
  ---- Dangerous tenets of, 148
  ---- Differences from Zwingle, 172
  ---- Theses of, 146
  Lutrin, The, 780
  Lydgate, Works of, 63
  Lyndsay, Poems of, 207
  Lyrics, Portuguese, early, 117

  Machiavel, Nicolas, 196, 211
  ---- Motives of, 197
  ---- some of his rules not immoral, 197
  ---- The Prince, of, 197
  ---- Works of, 198
  Malebranche, Theory of, 717
  Malherbe, Poems of, 573
  ---- Style of, 573
  Malpighi, Discoveries of, 840
  Manana, de Rege, 299
  Mantuan, Works of, 111
  Manuscripts, Copying of, 36
  Manutius, de Civitate, 253
  ---- Epistles of, 245
  Maps, Early, 94
  Maranta on gardening, 395
  Margarita, Antoniana, The, 287
  Marlowe, Plays of, 360
  Marot, Poems of, 206
  Marsham, Sir John, 685
  Massinger, Philip, 618
  Matthiola, System of, 226
  Medici, Lorenzo de, 80
  Medicine, Early Study of, 58
  ---- Revival of Greek methods of, 223
  Meigret, Orthography of, 219
  Melancthon, Early Studies of, 127
  ---- Tenets of, 266
  Melville, Andrew, 253
  Memoirs, Political, 301
  Mendicant Friars, The, 9
  Mendoza, Works of, 208, 673
  Mercator, Gerard, 402
  Metre, Romances in, 18
  Metres of Modern Languages, 15
  ---- Spanish, 60
  Microscope, first used in Anatomy, 842
  Milton, John, 586
  ---- Allegro, 587
  ---- Compared with Dante, 784
  ---- Comus, 586
  ---- Il Penseroso, 587
  ---- Lycidas, 587
  ---- Paradise Lost, 783
  ---- Paradise Regained, 787
  ---- Samson Agonistes, 787
  ---- Sonnets, 588
  Minot, Lawrence, 24
  Mirandola, Picus of, 101
  ---- Credulity of, 101
  ---- Literary Works of, 102
  Miscellanies of Politian, 95
  Moliére, Plays of, 799
  Montaigne, Essays of, 290
  ---- Characteristics of, 291
  Montesquieu, Bodin compared with, 310
  Moralities, Early, 107
  Morals, Italian writers on, 292
  More, Henry, 709
  More, Utopia of, 137
  Morgante Maggiore, The, 97
  Morison, Robert, 837
  Motion, Laws of, 658
  Mun, Thomas, on Foreign Trade, 773
  Muretus, Marc Antony, 233
  Mysteries, Desire to explore, 99
  ---- Early English, 105

  Naudé, Gabriel, 534
  Napier, Works of, 645
  Nizolius, Marius, 286
  Norris, Essay of, 725
  Northern Seas, Discoveries in, 401
  Nosce Teipsum, The, 340
  Novum Organum, The, 478
  Numencia, The, of Cervantes, 356
  Numerals, Arabic, 55
  Numismatics, Works on, 257

  Oceana, Harrington’s, 766
  Opinion, Religious, in Fifteenth Century, 67
  Opitz, Martin, 575
  ---- Followers of, 576
  Optics, Discoveries in, 660
  Opus Magnus, Bacon’s, 57
  Oracles, The History of, 811
  Orientalists, Celebrated, 844
  Orlando Furioso, The, 150
  ---- a continuation of Boiardo, 150
  ---- its popularity, 150
  ---- its want of seriousness, 150
  ---- Style of, 151
  Orlando Innamorata, The, 112
  Ortelius, Works of, 401
  Otway, Plays of, 806
  Oxford, University of, founded, 8

  Paley, Compared with Puffendorf, 707
  Pallavicino, Ferrante, 625
  Pantheism, Bruno and, 283
  Papal Power, Decline of, 425
  Papal Power, Discussion of, 274
  Paper, Cotton, First use of, 28
  ---- Invention of, 28
  ---- Linen, as old as 1100, 29
  ---- ---- First use of, 28
  ---- ---- Known to Peter of Clugni, 29
  ---- of mixed materials, 29
  Papias, Vocabulary of, 36
  Papyrus, Use of the, 28
  Paracelsus, Theophrastus, 191, 463
  ---- his extravagances, 192
  ---- his impostures, 192
  Paradise Lost, Milton’s, 783
  Parchment, Use of, 28
  Paris, University of, founded, 6
  ---- ---- increase of, 8
  Paruta, Paolo, 302
  Pascal, Malebranche and, 724
  ---- Provincial letters of, 744
  ---- Thoughts of, 697, 725
  Pastor Fido, Guarini’s, 351
  Pastourelles, Early, 18
  Patrizzi, 281
  Pearson on the Creed, 704
  Peele, Greene and, 362
  Pelletier, Algebra of, 385
  Pellican, 227
  Perkins, his Cases of Conscience, 527
  Perrault, Charles, 816
  Petavius, the Jesuit, 421
  Peter Martyr, Epistles of, 156
  Petrarch, Dante and, 22
  ---- Latin Poems of, 41
  ---- Restoration of Letters by, 40
  ---- Style of, 41
  Philology, Stephens’s Works on, 243
  Philosophy, Consolation of, 1
  ---- Scholastic, Defeat of, 188
  ---- Scholastic, Origin of, 7
  ---- Speculative, 188
  ---- Stanley’s History of, 707
  Pibrac, 335
  Pilgrim’s Progress, The, 828
  Pinelli, Occupations of, 404
  Platonists, Aristotelians and, 74
  Poem, Early, on Boethius, 13
  Poetry, Early English, 62
  ---- German, Decline of, 20
  ---- German, of Swabian Period, 19
  ---- Provençal, 16
  Poets, Early Spanish, 203
  ---- Elizabethan, 342
  ---- Minor, from 1650-1700, 790
  Poggio, Bracciolini, 42
  ---- on the Views of Rome, 72
  Politian, Works of, 95, 105
  Political Philosophy in the Sixteenth Century, 294
  Polyglott, Walton’s, 843
  Pontanus, Works of, 111
  Popery, Taylor’s Dissuasive from, 690
  Port-Royal Writers, 679
  Poynet on Politique Power, 296
  Prerogative Argument, 485, _note_.
  Press, The, of Aldus, 125
  Printing, Effects of, on Reformation, 124
  ---- Invention of, 75
  ---- Progress of, 79
  ---- Restraint of, 124
  Progress in the Tenth Century, 4
  Prophesying, Taylor’s Liberty of, 449
  Prose-writers under Elizabeth, 373
  Protestantism Extinguished in Italy, 260
  ---- ---- ---- ---- And Spain, 261
  Protestants, use of the Term, 173
  ---- The Religion of, 426
  Provençal Grammar, 14
  Psalter, Early Printed, 77
  Publications, Early European, 85
  Puffendorf, his Theory of Politics, 762
  ---- The Law of Nature, 753
  Pulci, Works of, 97
  Purbach, Discoveries of, 78

  Quevedo, Satires of, 571
  ---- Visions of, 825

  Rabelais, 216
  Racine, Plays of, 793, 802
  ---- Style of, 798
  Raleigh, his History of the World, 635
  Ramus, Peter, mentioned by Bacon, 191
  ---- Peter, New Logic of, 190
  Ramusio, Voyages of, 400
  Rapin, René, on Gardens, 792
  ---- Critical Works of, 815
  Ray, Works of, 835, 838
  Reading and Writing, Ignorance of, 25
  Réflexions sur l’Eloquence, Les, 815
  Reformation, Burnet’s History of the, 846
  ---- Origin of the, 146
  Regiomontanus, 93
  Regnard, Plays of, 802
  Regnier, Statues of, 574
  Religion, Differences of, Effects of, on Poetry, 66
  Republic, Analysis of the, 302
  Reuchlin,, 104
  ---- The Monks and, 145
  Reviews, Early, 817
  Rhetoric, Cox’s Art of, 219
  Rhetorique, Wilson’s Art of, 379
  Rhyme, Origin of in Latin, 16
  Ribeyro, Works of, 205
  Richard of Bury, 39
  Richelieu, his Care for Liberty, 426
  Rienzi, The Story of, 52
  Rivinus, System of, 838
  Rochefoucault, 757
  Roger Bacon, Works of, 57
  Roman Laws, never wholly unknown, 31
  Romances, Metrical, 18
  ---- of Chivalry, The, 65
  Rome, Loss of Learning on Fall of, 1
  ---- Conversions to, 263
  ---- Supremacy of, 422
  Ronsard, Poems of, 333
  Roscelin, Story of, 7
  Rose, Bishop of Senlis, 298
  Rosmunda, The, 132
  Rota, Bernardino, 320
  Rowley, Thomas, 83
  Royal Society, Origin of the, 832
  Ruanus, Crellius and, 440
  Rueda, Lope de, 212
  Ruel, Studies of, 226
  Rymer on Tragedy, 823

  Sachs, Hans, Dramas of, 213
  Sackville, Works of, 336
  St. Evremond, 812
  Salmasius, Works of, 412, 415
  Salvator, Rosa, Satires of, 778
  Sanchez, Minerva of, 244
  ---- Sceptical Theory of, 285
  Sansons, Maps of the, 844
  Santeul, Latin Poems, 793
  Sarpi, Fra Paolo, 423
  Saville on Roman Militia, 257
  Saxon Chronicle, The, 23
  Scaliger, Joseph, 247
  ---- as a Critic, 375
  Scaliger assists Gruter, 419
  Scarron, Roman Comique of, 826
  Schools, Early teaching in, 136
  ---- Greek Taught in, 251
  Science in Sixteenth Century, 645
  Sciences, Academy of, at Paris, 832
  ---- of Middle Ages, 55
  Scioppius, Work of, 416
  Scot, Reginald, 278
  Scotland, Learning in about 1550, 253
  Scotus, 91
  ---- Reasonings of, 92
  Scripture, Early Translation of, 85
  Sebonde, Raymond de, 69
  ---- Real Objects of, 70
  Secchia Rapita, The, 568
  Secular Variation, Law of, 176
  Segrais, Novels of, 827
  Seicentisti, Opinions on the, 566
  Selden, De Jure Naturali, 528
  Semi-Pelagian School, The, 439
  Sermons, Donne’s and Taylor’s, 454
  ---- Latimer’s, 184
  Serra, Antonio, 537
  Servetus, Labours of, 180
  ---- Life of, 269
  Servitude, Domestic, 303
  Shadwell, Plays of, 808
  Shakspeare, William, 364, 602
  ---- As You Like it, 369
  ---- Comedy of Errors, 365
  ---- First Writings, 364
  ---- Historical Plays, 368
  ---- Love’s Labours Lost, 365
  ---- Lear, 604
  ---- Lucrece, 340
  ---- Measure for Measure, 603
  ---- Merry Wives of Windsor, 603
  ---- Midsummer Night’s Dream, 365
  ---- Pericles, 605
  ---- Poems, 340
  ---- Roman Tragedies, 606
  ---- Romeo and Juliet, 366
  ---- Sonnets, 582
  ---- Twelfth Night, 602
  ---- Two Gentlemen of Verona, 365
  ---- Venus and Adonis, 340
  Shirley, Plays of, 621
  Skelton, Works of, 154
  Smith, Teaching of, 167
  Societies, German Literary, 575
  Socinianism, Rise of, 181
  Sonnets, Shakspeare’s, 583
  Soto, Dominic, 289
  South, Sermons of, 704
  Southern, Plays of, 807
  Spain, Pastoral Romances of, 117
  Spanish Language, Origin of, 10
  Spenser, his Sense of Beauty, 344
  ---- Resembles Ariosto, 344
  ---- Shepherd’s Kalendar of, 337
  ---- Style of, 345
  Spregel, the Dutch Ennius, 576
  Spinosa, Ethics of, 726, 746
  ---- Politics of, 764
  Stampa, Gaspara, 321
  ---- her Love for Collalto, 321
  ---- her Second Love, 322
  ---- her Style, 322
  Statics, Galileo’s, 657
  Stephens, Thesaurus of, 163, 237
  ---- Works of, 236
  Stevinus, Statics of, 391
  Strada, his Prolusiones, 627
  Sturm on German Schools, 165
  Suarez, of Granada, 524
  ---- on Laws, 544
  ---- Works of, 525
  Surrey, Wyatt and, 207
  Surville, Clotilde de, 83
  Swift, his Tale of a Tub, 831
  Sydney, Algernon, on Government, 767
  ---- Sir Philip, his Defence of Poesie, 338
  ---- his Poetry, 339
  Syriac, New Testament in, 399

  Table Talk, Selden’s, 532
  Tacitus of Lipsius, The, 235
  Tale of a Tub, The, 831
  Talent, Deficiency of Poetical, in Tenth Century, 5
  Tasso, Bernardo, The Amadigi of, 323
  ---- Torquato, 324
  ---- compared with others, 326
  ---- his Jerusalem, 324
  ---- ---- ---- Characters of, 325
  ---- ---- ---- Faults in, 325
  ---- his Styles, 324
  ---- Virgil and, 326
  Tassoni, Alessandro, 568
  Taste, Prevalence of Bad, 5
  Tauler, John, 25
  Taylor, Bishop Jeromy, 447
  Telemaque, Fenelon’s, 828
  Telesio, System of, 281
  Theatre, English, Revival of, 804
  ---- First French, 107
  Theosophists, Paracelsists, and, 463
  Thesauri of Grævius and Gronovius, 683
  Thesaurus Criticus, Gruter’s, 234
  Thomas À Kempis, School of, 55
  Tillotson, Sermons of, 704
  Toleration, Arguments for, 446
  Tournebœuf, or Turnebus, 233
  Tournefort, System of, 838
  Tractate, Milton’s, 758
  Tracts, Statistical, 775
  Treatise de Imitatione Christi, 68
  Trent, Council of, 182
  ---- ---- Efforts of, 264
  Trinitarian Controversy, The, 268
  Turkish Spy, The, 829
  Tyndale, Bible of, 187
  Tyrannicide, Poynet and, 297

  Universities, Rise of, 8
  Usher, Chronology of, 684
  Usury, Noodt on, 776
  Utopia, More’s, 137

  Valla, Laurentius, 72
  ---- Defects of his Work, 73
  ---- Heeren’s Praise of it, 73
  ---- Testament, Annotations on New, 73
  Valors, Henry, 681
  Van Helmont, 669
  Vanbrugh, Plays of, 809
  Vanini, Writings of, 455
  Vatican Library, The, 230
  Vesalius, Works of, 224
  Victa, Francis, 385
  Victoria, Learning of, 44
  Vincent of Beauvais, 59
  Vinci, Leonardo de, 108
  Vocabulary of Papias, 36
  Voiture, Poems of, 574
  Vondel, 577
  Vossius, Gerard, 417
  Vulgar Errors, Browne’s, 677
  Vulgate, The, 187
  ---- Authenticity of, 278

  Waller, Poetry of, 782
  Walton, the Complete Angler, 824
  Webster, Plays of, 622
  White, Thomas, 706
  Wilkins, Bishop, 736
  Wit, Whetstone of, The, 385
  Witchcraft, Scot on, 278
  Writers, Romish, 183
  Writing, Rise of Knowledge of, 27
  Wyatt, Surrey and, 207
  Wycherley, Plays of, 803

  Ximenes, Cardinal, 134

  Zerbi, Anatomy of, 130
  Zwingle, Work of, 147





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                       Transcriber’s Notes:

Volume 1 contains the Table of Contents for both Volumes 1 and 2; it
has been duplicated and added to this volume for the convenience of
users.

Sidenotes were moved to precede the paragraph to which they pertain
and are surrounded by pipes (|).

Transliterations of words and phrases in Greek were added in brackets.

Footnotes were renumbered sequentially and moved to the end of the
numbered paragraph in which the related anchors occur.

Superscript text is noted with a caret and brackets, thus: ^{mo}.

The author/editor usually omitted quotation marks around cited text;
this was not changed. All other punctuation and accents marks were
standardized.

Words with missing or partially printed letters were completed. This
edition contains many spelling/typographical errors; obvious errors
were corrected. Capitalization of words was corrected, where
appropriate. Obsolete, archaic, and consistently misspelled words were
retained. Other corrections:

  Ch. 18, §8, ‘waved’ to ‘waived’ ... which had imprudently waived.
  Footnote 67, ὁημεραι [hoêmerai] to ὁσημεραι [hosêmerai]
    and τελευτνᾶν [teleutnan] to τελευτᾶν [teleutan]
  Ch. 20, §35, ‘give’ to ‘gave’ ... since he gave to the world ...
  Footnote 194, ’words’ to ‘word’ The word ... is perhaps unhappy ...
  Footnote 212, added anchor missing in the original.
  Footnote 290, In the original, where ‘A - Y’ is part of a
    formula, it is annotated with a bar that extends above all three
    characters. In this e-book, brackets were used instead: [A - Y].
  Footnote 290, duplicate ‘in’ removed ... in the conclusion ...
  Ch. 21, §29, ‘their’ to ‘there’ ... there will frequently be ...
  Ch. 21, §111, ‘treatises’ to ‘treaties’ ... relates to treaties ...
  Ch. 21, §137, ‘notions’ to ‘nations’ ... law of nations permit ...
  Ch. 23, §52, ‘then’ to ‘than’ ... in his time than they are at ...
  Ch. 24, §33, duplicate ‘and’ removed ... and his facility ...
  Ch. 24, §60, ‘lyes’ to ‘lays’ ... veracious tone of his lays....
  Ch. 29, §25 and Footnote 777, ‘Degerando’ and ‘Degenerando‘
    to ‘de Gérando‘
  Ch. 29, §45 duplicate ‘the’ removed ... the depth, and
    the clearness ...
  Ch. 30, §1 duplicate ‘the’ removed ... the propositions condemned ...
  Ch. 33, §32, ‘their’ to ‘theirs’ ... theirs is what defaces the ...
  Ch. 33, §58, ‘1862’ to ‘1682 ... above forty years, from 1635 to 1682.
  Footnote 1079, reference is to ‘xi.’ in other editions.
  In the index, ‘Bengard’ was changed to ‘Berigard’; for the entry
    ‘Calendar, Gregorian,’ the page number was changed from 388 to 390;
    and for the entry under Rome, ‘Perversions’ was changed to
    ‘Conversions.’