to.1 Alexander is on his throne in the palace of Persepolis; the lovely Thais sate by his side; before him, in a vast hall, his glorious captains. And Timotheus sings: The praise of Bacchus, then, the sweet musician sung ; Of Bacchus ever fair, and ever young. He shews his honest face. Now, give the hautboys breath; he comes, he comes. Bacchus, ever fair and young, Drinking joys did first ordain; Bacchus' blessings are a treasure, Drinking is the soldier's pleasure; Rich the treasure, Sweet the pleasure; Sweet is pleasure after pain.' And at the stirring sounds the king is troubled; his cheeks are glowing; his battles return to his memory; he defies heaven and earth. Then a sad song depresses him. Timotheus mourns the death of the betrayed Darius. Then a tender song softens him; Timotheus lauds the dazzling beauty of Thais. Suddenly he strikes the lyre again: 'A louder yet, and yet a louder strain. Break his bands of sleep asunder, And rouse him, like a rattling peal of thunder. Has raised up his head; As awaked from the dead, See the snakes, that they rear, How they hiss in their hair! And the sparkles that flash from their eyes! Behold a ghastly band, Each a torch in his hand! Those are Grecian ghosts, that in battle were slain, Thus already music softened, exalted, mastered men; Dryden's verses acquire power in describing it. X. This was one of his last works; brilliant and poetical, it was born amidst the greatest sadness. The king for whom he had written was deposed and in exile; the religion which he had embraced was despised and oppressed; a Roman Catholic and a royalist, he was bound to a conquered party, which the nation resentfully and mistrustfully considered as the natural enemy of liberty and reason. He had lost the two places which were his support; he lived wretchedly, burdened with a family, obliged to support his son abroad; treated as a hireling by a coarse publisher, forced to ask him for money to pay for a watch which he could not get on credit, beseeching Lord Bolingbroke to protect him against Tonson's insults, rated by this shopkeeper when the promised page was not finished on the stated day. His enemies persecuted him with pamphlets; the Puritan Collier lashed his comedies unfeelingly; he was damned without pity, but conscientiously. He had long been in ill health, crippled, constrained to write much, reduced to exaggerate flattery in order to earn from the great the indispensable money which the publishers would not give him:1 2 'What Virgil wrote in the vigour of his age, in plenty and at ease, I have undertaken to translate in my declining years; struggling with wants, oppressed with 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 morals.' my Although well meant for his own part, he knew that his conduct had not always been worthy, and that all his writings would not endure. Born between two epochs, he had oscillated between two forms of life and two forms of thought, having reached the perfection of neither, having kept the faults of both; having found in surrounding manners no support worthy of his character, and in surrounding ideas no subject worthy of his talent. If he had founded criticism and good style, this criticism had only found scope in pedantic treatises or unconnected prefaces; this good style continued out of the track in inflated tragedies, dispersed over multiplied translations, scattered in occasional pieces, in odes written to order, in party poems, meeting only here and there an afflatus capable of employing it, and a subject capable of sustaining it. What efforts for such a moderate result! For a long time gravel and gout left him no peace; erysipelas seized one of his legs. In April 1700 he tried to go out; a slight inflammation in one of his toes became, from neglect, a gangrene;' the doctor would have tried amputation, but he decided that what remained him of health and happiness was not worth the pain. He died at the age of sixty-nine. 1 He was paid two hundred and fifty guineas for ten thousand lines. CHAPTER III. The Revolution. 1. The moral revolution of the seventeenth century-It advances side by side with the political revolution. II. Brutality of the people-Gin-Riots Corruption of the great-Political manners-Treasons under William III. and Anne-Morality under Walpole and Bute-Private manners-The roysterers-The atheists-Chesterfield's Letters-His polish and morality-Gay's Beggars' Opera-His elegance and satire. III. Principles of civilisation in France and England-Conversation in France; how it ends in a revolution-Moral sense in England; how it ends in a reformation. IV. Religion-Visible signs-Its profound sentiment-Religion popular-Life like-Arians-Methodists. V. The pulpit-Mediocrity and efficacy of preaching-Tillotson-His heaviness and solidity- Barrow-His abundance and minuteness - South - His harshness and energy-Comparison of French and English preachers. VI. Theology-Comparison of the French and English apology for religion— Sherlock, Stillingfleet, Clarke-Theology not speculative but moral—The greatest minds are on the side of Christianity-Impotence of speculative philosophy-Berkeley, Newton, Locke, Hume, Reid-Development of moral philosophy-Smith, Pine, Hutcheson. VII. The Constitution-Sentiment of right-Locke's Essay on GovernmentTheory of personal right accepted—Maintained by temperament, pride, and interest Theory of personal right applied-Put in practice by elections, the press, the tribunals. VIII. Parliamentary eloquence-Its energy and harshness - Lord ChathamJunius-Fox-Sheridan-Pitt-Burke. IX. Issue of the century's labours-Economic and moral transformation-Comparison of Reynolds' and Lely's portraits-Contrary doctrines and tendencies in France and England - Revolutionists and Conservatives Judgment of Burke and the English people on the French Revolution. I. ITH the constitution of 1688 a new spirit appears in England. W Slowly, gradually, the moral revolution accompanies the social: man changes with the state, in the same sense and for the same causes; character moulds itself to the situation; and little by little, in manners and in literature, we trace the empire of a serious, reflective, moral spirit, capable of discipline and independence, which can alone maintain and give effect to a constitution. II. This was not achieved without difficulty, and at first sight it seems as though England had gained nothing by this revolution of which she is so proud. The aspect of things under William, Anne, and the first two Georges, is repulsive. We are tempted to agree in Swift's judgment, to say that if he has depicted a Yahoo, it is because he has seen him; naked or drawn in his carriage, the Yahoo is not beautiful. We see but corruption in high places, brutality in low, a band of intriguers leading a mob of brutes. The human beast, inflamed by political passions, gives vent to cries and violence, burns Admiral Byng in effigy, demands his death, would destroy his house and park, sways from party to party, seems with its blind force ready to annihilate civil society. When Dr. Sacheverell was tried, the butcher boys, crossingsweepers, chimney-sweepers, costermongers, drabs, the entire scum, conceiving the Church to be in danger, follow him with yells of rage and enthusiasm, and in the evening set to work to burn and pillage the dissenters' chapels. When Lord Bute, in defiance of public opinion, was set up in Pitt's place, he was assailed with stones, and was obliged to surround his carriage with a strong guard. At every political crisis was heard a riotous growl, were seen disorder, blows, broken heads. It was worse when the people's own interests were at stake. Gin had been discovered in 1684, and about half a century later England consumed seven millions of gallons.1 The tavernkeepers on their signboards invited people to come and get drunk for a penny; for twopence they might get dead drunk; no charge for straw; the landlord dragged those who succumbed into a cellar, where they slept off their carouse. You could not walk London streets without meeting wretches, incapable of motion or thought, lying in the kennel, whom the care of the passers-by alone could prevent from being smothered in mud, or crushed by carriage-wheels. A tax was imposed to stop this madness: it was in vain; the judges dared not condemn, the informers were assassinated. The House gave way, and Walpole, finding himself threatened with a riot, withdrew his law. All these bewigged and ermined lawyers, these bishops in lace, these embroidered and gold-bedizened lords, this fine government so cleverly balanced, was carried on the back of a vast and formidable brute, which as a rule would tramp peacefully though growlingly on, but which on a sudden, for a mere whim, could shake and crush it. It was clearly seen in 1780, during the riots of Lord George Gordon. Without reason or command, at the cry of No Popery the excited mob demolished the prisons, let loose the criminals, abused the Peers, and was for three 1 1742, Report of Lord Lonsdale. 2 In the present inflamed temper of the people, the Act could not be carried into execution without an armed force.-Speech of Sir Robert Walpole. days master of the town, burning, pillaging, and glutting itself. Barrels of gin were staved in and made rivers in the streets. Children and women on their knees drank themselves to death. Some became mad, others fell down besotted, and the burning and falling houses ended by destroying or burying them. Eleven years later, at Birmingham, the people sacked and gutted the houses of the Liberals and Dissenters, and were found next day in heaps, dead drunk in the roads and ditches. The riot of instinct in this over-strong and well-fed race is perilous. The popular bull dashed headlong at the first red rag which it thought it saw. The higher ranks were even less estimable than the lower. If there has been no more beneficial revolution than that of 1688, there has been none that was launched or supported by dirtier means. Treason was everywhere, not simple, but double and triple. Under William and Anne, admirals, ministers, councillors, favourites of the antechamber, corresponded and conspired with the same Stuarts whom they had sold, only to sell them again, with a complication of bargains, each destroying the last, and a complication of perjuries, each surpassing the last, until in the end no one knew whose or who he was. The greatest general of the age, the Duke of Marlborough, is one of the basest rogues in history, supported by his mistresses, a niggard user of the pay which he received from the State, systematically plundering his soldiers, trafficking in political secrets, a traitor to James, to William, to England, ready to risk his life to avoid changing a pair of wet boots, and to let an expedition of English soldiers fall into a French ambush. After him, Bolingbroke, a sceptic and cynic, minister in turn to Queen and Pretender, disloyal alike to both, a trafficker in consciences, marriages, and promises, who had squandered his talent in debauch and intrigues, to end in disgrace, impotence, and scorn.1 Then Walpole was compelled to resign, after having been prime minister for twenty years, and who used to boast that 'every man had his price.' tesquieu wrote in 1729:3 Mon "There are Scotch members who have only two hundred pounds for their vote, and sell it at this price. Englishmen are no longer worthy of their liberty. They sell it to the king; and if the king would sell it back to them, they would sell it him again.' We must read in Bubb Doddington's Diary the candid fashion and pretty contrivances of this great traffic. So Dr. King states: ... He (Walpole) wanted to carry a question in the House of Commons, to which he knew there would be great opposition. . . As he was passing through the Court of Requests, he met a member of the contrary party, whose avarice he imagined would not reject a large bribe. He took him aside, and said, "Such 1 See Walpole's terrible speech against him, 1734. 2 See, for the truth of this statement, Memoirs of Horace Walpole, 2 vols., ed. E. Warburton, 1851, i. 381, note. 3 Notes during a journey in England made in 1729 with Lord Chesterfield. |