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The writings of these men, and of their mo-' dern imitators, have produced effects which deserve some notice. The English have been so long accustomed to political speculation, and have enjoyed so large a measure of prac tical liberty, that such works have produced little effect on their minds. We have classical associations and great names of our own, which we can confidently oppose to the most splendid of ancient times. Senate has not to

berty a plea for cutting off the favourites of the | lament that, from the frailty of human nature, people. In almost all the little commonwealths a man who could perform so great an exploit of antiquity, liberty was used as a pretext for could repent of it. measures directed against every thing which makes liberty valuable, for measures which stifled discussion, corrupted the administration of justice, and discouraged the accumulation of property. The writers, whose works we are considering, confounded the sound with the substance, and the means with the end. Their imaginations were inflamed by mystery. They conceived of liberty as monks conceive of love, as Cockneys conceive of the happiness and innocence of rural life, as novel-reading semp-our ears a sound so venerable as Parliament. stresses conceive of Almack's and Grosvenor Square, accomplished Marquesses and handsome Colonels of the Guards. In the relation of events, and the delineation of characters, they have paid little attention to facts, to the costume of the times of which they pretend to treat, or to the general principles of human nature. They have been faithful only to their own puerile and extravagant doctrines. Generals and Statesmen are metamorphosed into magnanimous coxcombs, from whose fulsome virtues we turn away with disgust. The fine sayings and exploits of their heroes reminds us of the insufferable perfections of Sir Charles Grandison, and affect us with a nausea similar to that which we feel when an actor, in one of Morton's or Kotzebue's plays, lays his hand on-Even those parts of our history, over which, his heart, advances to the ground-lights, and mouths a moral sentence for the edification of the gods.

We respect the Great Charter more than the laws of Solon. The Capitol and the Forum impress us with less awe than our own Westminster Hall and Westminster Abbey, the place where the great men of twenty generations have contended, the place where they sleep together! The list of warriors and statesmen by whom our constitution was founded or preserved, from De Monfort down to Fox, may well stand a comparison with the Fasti of Rome. The dying thanksgiving of Sidney is as noble as the libation which Thrasea poured to Liberating Jove: and we think with far less pleasure of Cato tearing out his entrails, than of Russel saying, as he turned away from his wife, that the bitterness of death was past.

on some accounts, we would gladly throw a veil, may be proudly opposed to those on which the moralists of antiquity loved most to dwell These writers, men who knew not what it The enemy of English liberty was not murwas to have a country, men who had never en-dered by men whom he had pardoned and joyed political rights, brought into fashion an offensive cant about patriotism and zeal for freedom. What the English Puritans did for the language of Christianity, what Scuderi did for the language of love, they did for the language of public spirit. By habitual exaggeration they made it mean. By monotonous emphasis they made it feeble. They abused it till it became scarcely possible to use it with effect.

loaded with benefits. He was not stabbed in the back by those who smiled and cringed before his face. He was vanquished on fields of stricken battle; he was arraigned, sentenced, and executed in the face of heaven and earth. Our liberty is neither Greek nor Roman; but essentially English. It has a character of its own-a character which has taken a tinge from the sentiments of the chivalrous ages, and which accords with the peculiarities of our manners and of our insular situation. It has a language, too, of its own, and a language singularly idiomatic, full of meaning to ourselves, scarcely intelligible to strangers.

Their ordinary rules of morality are deduced from extreme cases. The common regimen which they prescribe for society is made up of those desperate remedies, which only its most desperate distempers require. They look with peculiar complacency on actions, which even Here, therefore, the effect of books, such as those who approve them consider as excep- those which we have been considering, has tions to laws of almost universal application- been harmless. They have, indeed, given cur which bear so close an affinity to the most atro-rency to many very erroneous opinions with cious crimes, that even where it may be unjust to censure them, it is unsafe to praise them. It is not strange, therefore, that some flagitious instances of perfidy and cruelty should have been passed unchallenged in such company, that grave moralists, with no personal interest at stake, should have extolled, in the highest terms, deeds of which the atrocity appalled even the infuriated factions in whose cause they were perpetrated. The part which Timoleon took in the assassination of his brother shocked many of his own partisans. The recollection of it preyed long on his own mind. But it was reserved for historians who lived me centuries later to discover that his conduct was a glorious display of virtue, and to VOL I.-8

respect to ancient history. They have heated the imagination of boys. They have misled the judgment, and corrupted the taste of some men of letters, such as Akenside and Sir Wil liam Jones. But on persons engaged in pub lic affairs they have had very little influence The foundations of our constitution were laid by men who knew nothing of the Greeks, but that they denied the orthodox procession, and cheated the Crusaders; and nothing of Rome, but that the Pope lived there. Those who followed, contented themselves with improving on the original plan. They found n. dels at home; and therefore they did not look for them abroad. But when enlightened men on the continent began to think about political re

formation, having no patterns before their "is laid in moral paradoxes. All those ineyes in their domestic history, they naturally stances to be found in history, whether real or had recourse to those remains of antiquity, fabulous, of a doubtful public spirit, at which the study of which is considered throughout morality is perplexed, reason is staggered, and Europe as an important part of education. from which affrighted nature recoils, are their The historians of whom we have been speak- chosen and almost sole examples for the ining had been members of large communities, struction of their youth." This evil, we beand subjects of absolute sovereigns. Hence lieve, is to be directly ascribed to the influence it is, as we have already said, that they com- of the historians whom we have mentioned, mit such gross errors in speaking of the little and their modern imitators. republics of antiquity. Their works were now read in the spirit in which they had been written. They were read by men placed in circumstances closely resembling their own, unacquainted with the real nature of liberty, but inclined to believe every thing good which could be told respecting it. How powerfully these books impressed these speculative reformers, is well known to all who have paid any attention to the French literature of the last century. But, perhaps, the writer on whom they produced the greatest effect, was Vittorio Alfieri. In some of his plays, particularly in Virginia, Timoleon, and Brutus the Younger, he has even caricatured the extravagance of his masters.

the

Livy had some faults in common with these writers. But on the whole he must be considered as forming a class by himself. No historian with whom we are acquainted has shown so complete an indifference to truth He seems to have cared only about the picturesque effect of his book and the honour of his country. On the other hand, we do not know, in the whole range of literature, an instance of a bad thing so well done. The painting of the narrative is beyond description vivid and graceful. The abundance of interesting sentiments and splendid imagery in the speeches is almost miraculous. His mind is a soil which is never overteemed, a fountain which never seems to trickle. It pours forth profusely; yet It was not strange that the blind, thus led it gives no sign of exhaustion. It was probaby the blind, should stumble. The transactions bly to this exhuberance of thought and lanof the French Revolution, in some measure, guage, always fresh, always sweet, always took their character from these works. With-pure, no sooner yielded than repaired, that the out the assistance of these works, indeed, a critics applied that expression which has been revolution would have taken place-a revolu- so much discussed, lactea ubertas. tion productive of much good and much evil, All the merits and all the defects of Livy tremendous, but short-lived evil, dearly pur-take a colouring from the character of his nachased, but durable good. But it would not tion. He was a writer peculiarly Roman; have been exactly such a revolution. The proud citizen of a commonwealth which had style, the accessories, would have been in ma- indeed lost the reality of liberty, but which ny respects different. There would have been still sacredly preserved its forms-in fact the less of bombast in language, less of affectation subject of an arbitrary prince, but in his own in manner, less of solemn trifling and ostenta- estimation one of the masters of the world, tious simplicity. The acts of legislative as- with a hundred kings below him, and only the semblies, and the correspondence of diploma- gods above him. He, therefore, looked back tists, would not have been disgraced by rants on former times with feelings far different from worthy only of a college of declamation. The those which were naturally entertained by his government of a great and polished nation Greek contemporaries, and which at a later would not have rendered itself ridiculous by period became general among men of letters attempting to revive the usages of a world throughout the Roman Empire. He contemwhich had long passed away, or rather of a plated the past with interest and delight, not world which had never existed except in the because it furnished a contrast to the present, description of a fantastic school of writers. but because it had led to the present. He reThese second-hand imitations resembled the curred to it, not to lose in proud recollections originals about as much as the classical feasts the sense of national degradation, but to trace with which the Doctor in Peregrine Pickle the progress of national glory. It is true that turned the stomachs of all his guests, resem- his veneration for antiquity produced on him bled one of the suppers of Lucullus in the some of the effects which it produced on those Hall of Apollo. who arrived at it by a very different road. He has something of their exaggeration, something of their cant, something of their fondness for anomalies and lusus nature in morality. Yet even here we perceive a difference. They talk rapturously of patriotism and liberty in the abstract. He does not seem to think any country but Rome deserving of love; nor is it for liberty, as liberty, but for liberty as a part of the Roman institutions, that he is zealous.

These were mere follies. But the spirit excited by these writers produced more serious effects. The greater part of the crimes which disgraced the revolution, sprung indeed from the relaxation of law, from popular ignorance, from the remembrance of past oppression, from the fear of foreign conquest, from rapacity, from ambition, from party spirit. But many atrocious proceedings must, doubtless, be ascribed to heated imagination, to perverted principle, to a distaste for what was vulgar in morals, and a passion for what was startling and dubicus. Mr. Burke has touched on this subject with great felicity of expression: "The gradation of their republic," says he,

Of the concise and elegant accounts of the campaigns of Cæsar little can be said. They are incomparable models for military despatches. But histories they are not, and do not pretend to be.

The ancient critics placed Sallust in the

speeches of Cicero sufficiently prove, that some
persons considered the shocking and atrocious
parts of the plot as mere inventions of the go-
vernment, designed to excuse its unconstitu
tional measures. We must confess ourselves
to be of that opinion. There was, undoubtedly,
a strong party desirous to change the adminis
While Pompey held the command of
an army, they could not effect their purpose
without preparing means for repelling force,
if necessary, by force. In all this there is no
thing different from the ordinary practice of
Roman factions. The other charges brought
against the conspirators are so inconsistent
and improbable, that we give no credit what-
ever to them. If our readers think this skep-
ticism unreasonable, let them turn to the con-
temporary account of the Popish plot.
them look over the votes of Parliament, and
the speeches of the king; the charges of
Scroggs, and the harangues of the managers

Let

should form his judgment from these pieces alone, would believe that London was set on fire by the Papists, and that Sir Edmondbury Godfrey was murdered for his religion. Yet these stories are now altogether exploded. They have been abandoned by statesmen to aldermen, by aldermen to clergymen, by clergymen to old women, and by old women to Sir Harcourt Lees.

same rank with Livy; and unquestionably the | small portion of his works which has come down to us, is calculated to give a high opinion of his talents. But his style is not very pleasant; and his most powerful work, the account of the Conspiracy of Catiline, has rather the air of a clever party pamphlet than that of a history. It abounds with strange in-tration. consistencies, which, unexplained as they are, necessarily excite doubts as to the fairness of the narrative. It is true, that many circumstances now forgotten may have been familiar to his contemporaries, and may have rendered passages clear to them which to us appear dubions and perplexing./ But a great historian should remember that he writes for distant generations, for men who will perceive the apparent contradictions, and will possess no means of reconciling them/We can only vindicate the fidelity of Sallust at the expense of his skill. But in fact all the information which we have from contemporaries respect-employed against Strafford. A person, who ing this famous plot is liable to the same objection, and is read by discerning men with the same incredulity. It is all on one side. No answer has reached our times. Yet, on the showing of the accusers, the accused seem entitled to acquittal. Catiline, we are told, intrigued with a Vestal virgin, and murdered his own son. His house was a den of gamblers and debauchees. No young man could cross his threshold without danger to his fortune and reputation. Yet this is the man with whom Cicero was willing to coalesce in a contest for the first magistracy of the republic; and whom he described, long after the fatal termination of the conspiracy, as an accomplished hypocrite, by whom he had himself been deceived, and who had acted with consummate skill the character of a good citizen and a good friend. We are told that the plot was the most wicked and desperate ever known, and almost in the same breath, that the great body of the people, and many of the nobles favoured it: that the richest citizens of Rome were eager for the spoliation of all property, and its high-setting gives additional lustre to the brilliants. est functionaries for the destruction of all order; that Crassus, Cæsar, the prætor Lentulus, one of the consuls of the year, one of the consuls elect, were proved or suspected to be engaged in a scheme for subverting institutions to which they owed the highest honours, and introducing universal anarchy. We are told, that a government which knew all this suffered the conspirator, whose rank, talents, and courage rendered him most dangerous, to quit Rome without molestation. We are told, that bondmen and gladiators were to be armed against the citizens. Yet we find that Catiline rejected the slaves who crowded to enlist in his army, est, as Sallust himself expresses it," he should seem to identify their cause with that of the citizens." Finally, we are told that the magistrate, who was universally allowed to have saved all classes of his countrymen from conflagration and massacre, rendered himself so unpopular by his conduct, that a marked insult was offered to him at the expiration of his office, and a severe punishment inflicted on him shortly after.

Sallust tells us, what, indeed, the letters and

Of the Latin historians, Tacitus was certainly the greatest. His style indeed is not only faulty in itself, but is, in some respects, peculiarly unfit for historical composition. He carries his love of effect far beyond the limits of moderation. He tells a fine story finely: but he cannot tell a plain story plainly. He stimulates till all stimulants lose their power. Thucydides, as we have already observed, relates ordinary transactions with the unpretending clearness and succinctness of the gazette. His great powers of painting he reserves for events, of which the slightest details are interesting. The simplicity of the

There are passages in the narrative of Tacitus superior to the best which can be quoted from Thucydides. But they are not enchased and relieved with the same skill. They are far more striking when extracted from the body of the work to which they belong, than when they occur in their place, and are read in connection with what precedes and follows.

In the delineation of character, Tacitus is unrivalled among historians, and has very few superiors among dramatists and novelists. By the delineation of character, we do not mean the practice of drawing up epigrammatic catalogues of good and bad qualities, and append ing them to the names of eminent men. No writer, indeed, has done this more skilfully than Tacitus; but this is not his peculiar glory. All the persons who occupy a large space in his works have an individuality of character which seems to pervade an their words and actions. We know them as if we had lived with them. Claudius, Nero, Otho, both the Agrippinas, are masterpieces. Tiberius is a still higher miracle of art. The historian undertook to make us intimately ac

But

inclined to pass sentence on them in masses. We shall, therefore, instead of pointing out the defects and merits of the different modern historians, state generally in what particulars they have surpassed their predecessors, and in what we conceive them to have failed.

quainted with a man singularly dark and library, to be tired with taking down books one inscrutable-with a man whose real disposi- after another for separate judgment, and feel tion long remained swathed up in intricate folds of factitious virtues; and over whose actions the hypocrisy of his youth and the seclusion of his old age threw a singular mystery. He was to exhibit the specious qualities of the tyrant in a light which might render them transparent, and enable us at once to perceive the covering and the vices which it concealed. He was to trace the gradations by which the first magistrate of a republic, a senator mingling freely in debate, a noble as sociating with his brother nobles, was transformed into an Asiatic sultan; he was to exhibit a character distinguished by courage, self-command, and profound policy, yet defiled by all

"th' extravagancy And crazy ribaldry of fancy."

He was to mark the gradual effect of advancing age and approaching death on this strange compound of strength and weakness; to exhibit the old sovereign of the world sinking into a dotage which, though it rendered his appetites eccentric and his temper savage, never impaired the powers of his stern and penetrating mind, conscious of failing strength, raging with capricious sensuality, yet to the last the keenest of observers, the most artful of dissemblers, and the most terrible of masters. The task was one of extreme difficulty. The execution is almost perfect.

They have certainly been, in one sense, far more strict in their adherence to truth than most of the Greek and Roman writers. They do not think themselves entitled to render their narrative interesting by introducing descriptions, conversations, and harangues, which have no existence but in their own imagination. This improvement was gradually introduced. History commenced among the modern nations of Europe, as it had commenced among the Greeks, in romance. Froissart was our Herodotus. Italy was to Europe what Athens was to Greece. In Italy, therefore, a more accurate and manly mode of narration was early introduced. Machiavelli and Guicciardini, in imitation of Livy and Thucydides, composed speeches for their historical personages. But as the classical enthusiasm which distinguished the age of Lorenzo and Leo gradually subsided, this absurd practice was abandoned. In France, we fear, it still, in some degree, keeps its ground. In our own country, a writer who should venture on it would be laughed to scorn. Whether the historians of the last twc centuries tell more truth than those of anti quity, may perhaps be doubted. But it is quite certain that they tell fewer falsehoods.

The talent which is required to write history thus, bears a considerable affinity to the talent In the philosophy of history, the moderns of a great dramatist. There is one obvious have very far surpassed the ancients. It is distinction. The dramatist creates, the histo- not, indeed, strange that the Greeks and Rorian only disposes. The difference is not in mans should not have carried the science of the mode of execution, but in the mode of con-government, or any other experimental science, ception. Shakspeare is guided by a model which exists in his imagination; Tacitus, by a model furnished from without. Hamlet is to Tiberius what the Laocoon is to the Newton of Roubilliac.

In this part of his art Tacitus certainly had neither equal nor second among the ancient historians. Herodotus, though he wrote in a dramatic form, had little of dramatic genius. The frequent dialogues which he introduces give vivacity and movement to the narrative; but are not strikingly characteristic. Xenophon is fond of telling his readers, at considerable length, what he thought of the persons whose adventures he relates. But he does not show them the men, and enable them to judge for themselves. The heroes of Livy are the most insipid of all beings, real or imaginary, the heroes of Plutarch always excepted. Indeed, the manner of Plutarch in this respect reminds us of the cookery of those continental inns, the horror of English travellers, in which a certain nondescript broth is kept constantly boiling, and copiously poured, without distinction, over every dish as it comes up to table. Thucydides, though at a wide interval, comes next to Tacitus. His Pericles, his Nicias, his Cleon, his Brasidas, are happily discriminated. The lines are few, the colouring faint; but the general air and expression is caught.

We begin, like the priest in Don Quixote's

so far as it has been carried in our time; for the experimental sciences are generally in a state of progression. They were better understood in the seventeenth century than in the sixteenth, and in the eighteenth century than in the seventeenth. But this constant improve, ment, this natural growth of knowledge, will not altogether account for the immense superiority of the modern writers. The difference is a difference, not in degree, but of kind. It is not merely that new principles have been discovered, but that new faculties seem to be exerted. It is not that at one time the human intellect should have made but small progress, and at another time have advanced far; but that at one time it should have been stationary, and at another time constantly proceeding. In taste and imagination, in the graces of style, in the arts of persuasion, in the magnificence of public works, the ancients were at least our equals. They reasoned as justly as ourselves on subjects which required pure demonstration. But in the moral sciences they made scarcely any advance. During the long period which elapsed between the fifth century before the Christian era and the fifth century after it, little perceptible progress was made. All the metaphysical discoveries of all the philoso phers, from the time of Socrates to the northern invasion, are not to be compared in importance with those which have been made in England

every fifty years since the time of Elizabeth. There is not the least reason to believe that the principles of government, legislation, and political economy, were better understood in the time of Augustus Caesar than in the time of Pericles. In our own country, the sound doctrines of trade and jurisprudence have been, within the lifetime of a single generation, dimly hinted, boldly propounded, defended, systematized, adopted by all reflecting men of all parties, quoted in legislative assemblies, incorporated into laws and treaties.

those which Boileau may have formed about
Shakspeare. Dionysius lived in the most
splendid age of Latin poetry and eloquence.
He was a critic, and, after the manner of his
age, an able critic. He studied the language
of Rome, associated with its learned men, and
compiled its history. Yet he seems to have
thought its literature valuable only for the pur-
pose of illustrating its antiquities. His read
ing appears to have been confined to its public
records, and to a few old annalists. Once, and
but once, if we remember rightly, he quotes
Ennius, to solve a question of etymology. He
has written much on the art of oratory; yet he
has not mentioned the name of Cicero.

To what is this change to be attributed? Partly, no doubt, to the discovery of printing, -a discovery which has not only diffused knowledge widely, but, as we have already observed, has also introduced into reasoning a precision unknown in those ancient communities, in which information was, for the most part, conveyed orally. There was, we suspect, another cause less obvious, but still more pow-Men of letters affected to understand the Greek erful.

The Romans submitted to the pretensions of a race which they despised. Their epic poet, while he claimed for them pre-eminence in the arts of government and war, acknowledged their inferiority in taste, eloquence, and science.

language better than their own. Pomponius The spirit of the two most famous nations preferred the honour of becoming an Athenian, of antiquity was remarkably exclusive. In the by intellectual naturalization, to all the distinc time of Homer, the Greeks had not begun to tions which were to be acquired in the politi consider themselves as a distinct race. They cal contests of Rome. His great friend comstill looked with something of childish wonder posed Greek poems and memoirs. It is well and awe on the riches and wisdom of Sidon known that Petrarch considered that beautiful and Egypt. From what causes, and by what language in which his sonnets are written, as gradations, their feelings underwent a change, a barbarous jargon, and intrusted his fame to it is not easy to determine. Their history, from those wretched Latin hexameters, which, durthe Trojan to the Persian war, is covered with ing the last four centuries, have scarcely found an obscurity broken only by dim and scattered four readers. Many eminent Romans appear gleams of truth. But it is certain that a great to have felt the same contempt for their native alteration took place. They regarded them-tongue as compared with the Greek. The preselves as a separate people. They had com- judice continued to a very late period. Julian mon religious rites, and common principles of was as partial to the Greek language as Frepublic law, in which foreigners had no part. derick the Great to the French; and it seems In all their political systems, monarchical, aris- that he could not express himself with ele tocratical, and democratical, there was a strong gance in the dialect of the state which he ruled. family likeness. After the retreat of Xerxes Even those Latin writers, who did not carry and the fall of Mardonius, national pride ren- this affectation so far, looked on Greece as the dered the separation between the Greeks and only fount of knowledge. From Greece they the Barbarians complete. The conquerors con- derive the measures of their poetry, and indeed, sidered themselves men of a superior breed, all of poetry that can be imported. From men who, in their intercourse with neighbour- Greece they borrowed the principles and the ing nations, were to teach, and not to learn. vocabulary of their philosophy. To the litera They looked for nothing out of themselves.ture of other nations they do not seem to have They borrowed nothing. They translated nothing. We cannot call to mind a single expression of any Greek writer earlier than the age of Augustus, indicating an opinion that any thing worth reading could be written in any language except his own. The feelings which sprung from national glory were not altogether extinguished by national degradation. They were fondly cherished through ages of slavery and shame. The literature of Rome herself was regarded with contempt by

paid the slightest attention. The sacred books
of the Hebrews, for example, books which, con-
sidered merely as human compositions, are in-
valuable to the critic, the antiquary, and the
philosopher, seem to have been utterly unno-
ticed by them. The peculiarities of Judaism,
and the rapid growth of Christianity, attracted
their notice. They made war against the Jews.
They made laws against the Christians. But
they never opened the books of Moses. Juve
nal quotes the Pentateuch with censure. The

those who had fled before her arms, and who author of the treatise on the Sublime quotes Loxy mus

bowed beneath her fasces. Voltaire says, in one of his six thousand pamphlets, that he was the first person who told the French that England had produced eminent men besides the Duke of Marlborough. Down to a very late period, the Greeks seem to have stood in need of similar information with respect to their masters. With Paulus Æmilius, Sylla, and Cæsar, they were well acquainted. But the notions which they entertained respecting Cicero and Virgil were, probably, not unlike

it with praise: but both of them quote it erro-
neously. When we consider what sublime
poetry, what curious history, what striking and
peculiar views of the divine nature, and of the
social duties of men, are to be found in the
Jewish Scriptures; when we consider the two
sects on which the attention of the government
was constantly fixed, appealed to those Scrip-
tures as the rule of their faith and practice.
this indifference is astonishing. The fact
seems to be, that the Greeks admired only them-
F

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