Free trade, one of the greatest blessings which a government can confer on a people, is in almost every country unpopular. On Mitford's History of Greece. 1824. The history of nations, in the sense in which I use the word, is often best studied in works not professedly historical. Ibid. Wherever literature consoles sorrow or assuages pain; wherever it brings gladness to eyes which fail with wake fulness and tears, and ache for the dark house and the long sleep, there is exhibited in its noblest form the immortal influence of Athens. Ibid. We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age. On Milton. 1825. Nobles by the right of an earlier creation, and priests by the imposition of a mightier hand. Ibid. Out of his surname they have coined an epithet for a knave, and out of his Christian name a synonym for the Devil.1 On Machiavelli. 1825. The English Bible, a book which if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power. On John Dryden. 1828. His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run, though not to soar. Ibid. A man possessed of splendid talents, which he often abused, and of a sound judgment, the admonitions of which he often neglected; a man who succeeded only in an inferior department of his art, but who in that depart ment succeeded pre-eminently. Ibid. He had a head which statuaries loved to copy, and a foot the deformity of which the beggars in the streets mimicked. On Moore's Life of Lord Byron. 1830 1 See Butler, page 215. We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality. On Moore's Life of Lord Byron. 1830. From the poetry of Lord Byron they drew a system of ethics compounded of misanthropy and voluptuousa system in which the two great commandments were to hate your neighbour and to love your neighbour's wife. ness, Ibid. That wonderful book, while it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, is loved by those who are too simple to admire it. On Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. 1831. The conformation of his mind was such that whatever was little seemed to him great, and whatever was great seemed to him little. On Horace Walpole. 1833. What a singular destiny has been that of this remarkable man!-To be regarded in his own age as a classic, and in ours as a companion! To receive from his contemporaries that full homage which men of genius have in general received only from posterity; to be more inti mately known to posterity than other men are known to their contemporaries! On Boswell's Life of Johnson (Croker's ed.). 1831. Temple was a man of the world amongst men of letters, a man of letters amongst men of the world.1 On Sir William Temple. 1838. She [the Roman Catholic Church] may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.2 On Ranke's History of the Popes. 1840. 1 See Pope, page 331-332. The same image was employed by Macaulay in 1824 in the concluding paragraph of a review of Mitford's Greece, and he repeated it in his review of Mill's "Essay on Government" in 1829. What cities, as great as this, have... promised themselves immortality! Posterity can hardly trace the situation of some. The sorrowful traveller wanders over the awful ruins of others. . . . Here stood their cit The chief-justice was rich, quiet, and infamous. In that temple of silence and reconciliation where the enmities of twenty generations lie buried, in the great Abbey which has during many ages afforded a quiet resting-place to those whose minds and bodies have been shattered by the contentions of the Great Hall. Ibid. In order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel and red men scalped each other by the great lakes of North America. On Frederic the Great. 1842. We hardly know an instance of the strength and weak ness of human nature so striking and so grotesque as the character of this haughty, vigilant, resolute, sagacious adel, but now grown over with weeds; there their senate-house, but now the haunt of every noxious reptile; temples and theatres stood here, now only an undistinguished heap of ruins. GOLDSMITH: The Bee, No. ic. (1759.) A City Night Piece. Who knows but that hereafter some traveller like myself will sit down upon the banks of the Seine, the Thames, or the Zuyder Zee, where now, in the tumult of enjoyment, the heart and the eyes are too slow to take in the multitude of sensations? Who knows but he will sit down solitary amid silent ruins, and weep a people inurned and their greatness changed into an empty name?-VOLNEY: Ruins, chap. ii. At last some curious traveller from Lima will visit England, and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul's, like the editions of Baalbec and Palmyra. HORACE WALPOLE: Letter to Mason, Nov. 24, 1774. Where now is Britain? In the firm expectation that when London shall be a habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul and Westminster Abbey shall stand shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh, when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, some Transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges and their historians. —SHELLEY: Dedication to Peter Bell. blue-stocking, half Mithridates and half Trissotin, bearing up against a world in arms, with an ounce of poison in one pocket and a quire of bad verses in the other. On Frederic the Great. 1842. I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history.1 History of England. Vol. i. Chap. i. There were gentlemen and there were seamen in the navy of Charles II. But the seamen were not gentlemen, and the gentlemen were not seamen. Chap. ii. The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.2 I have not the Chancellor's encyclopedic mind. indeed a kind of semi-Solomon. He half knows thing, from the cedar to the hyssop. Chap. iii. He is every Letter to Macvey Napier, Dec. 17, 1830. To every man upon this earth Death cometh soon or late; Than facing fearful odds And the temples of his gods? Lays of Ancient Rome. Horatius, xxvii. How well Horatius kept the bridge These be the great Twin Brethren The Battle of Lake Regillus. The sweeter sound of woman's praise. Lines written in August, 1847. Ye diners-out from whom we guard our spoons.3 1 See Bolingbroke, page 304. Political Georgics. 2 Even bear-baiting was esteemed heathenish and unchristian: the sport of it, not the inhumanity, gave offence. -- HUME: History of England, vol. i. chap. lxii. 3 Macaulay, in a letter, June 29, 1831, says "I sent these lines to the 'Times' about three years ago." An unreflected light did never yet He that lacks time to mourn, lacks time to mend. We figure to ourselves The thing we like; and then we build it up, Such souls, Whose sudden visitations daze the world, Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Sc. 7. |