Rebecca at a stake for a sorceress, because she was a Jewess, beautiful and innocent, and the consequent victim of insane bigotry and unbridled profligacy. And it is at this moment (when the heart is kindled and bursting with indignation at the revolting abuses of self-constituted power), that Sir Walter "stops the press" to have a sneer at the people, and to put a spoke as he thinks in the wheel of upstart innovation! This is what he calls "backing his friends" — it is thus he administers charms and philtres to our love of Legitimacy, makes us conceive a horror of all reform, civil, political, or religious, and would fain put down the Spirit of the Age. The author of Waverley might just as well get up and make a speech at a dinner at Edinburgh, abusing Mr. MacAdam for his improvements in the roads, on the ground that they were nearly impassable in many places "sixty years since," or object to Mr. Peel's Police Bill by insisting that Hounslow Heath was formerly a scene of greater interest and terror to highwaymen and travellers, and cut a greater figure in the Newgate Calendar than it does at present. Oh! Wickliff, Luther, Hampden, Sidney, Somers, mistaken Whigs and thoughtless reformers in religion and politics, and all ye, whether poets or philosophers, heroes or sages, inventors of arts or sciences, patriots, benefactors of the human race, enlighteners and civilizers of the world, who have (so far) reduced opinion to reason, and power to law, who are the cause that we no longer burn witches and heretics at slow fires, that the thumbscrews are no longer applied by ghastly, smiling judges, to extort confession of imputed crimes from sufferers for conscience' sake, that men are no longer strung up like acorns on trees without judge or jury, or hunted like wild beasts through thickets and glens, who have abated the cruelty of priests, the pride of nobles, the divinity of kings in former times, to whom we owe it that we no longer wear round our necks the collar of Gurth the swineherd and of Wamba the jester; that the castles of great lords are no longer the dens of banditti, from whence they issue with fire and sword to lay waste the land; that we no longer expire in loathsome dungeons without knowing the cause, or have our right hands struck off for raising them in self-defence against wanton insult; that we can sleep without fear of being burnt in our beds, or travel without making our wills; that no Amy Robsarts are thrown down trap-doors by Richard Varneys with impunity; that no Red Reiver of Westburn Flat sets fire to peaceful cottages; that no Claverhouse signs cold-blooded death-warrants in sport; that we have no Tristan the Hermit, or Petit-André, crawling near us, like spiders, and making our flesh creep and our hearts sicken at every moment of our lives; - ye who have produced this change in the face of nature and society, return to earth once more, and beg pardon of Sir Walter and his patrons, who sigh at not being able to undo all that you have done! 1... OF PERSONS ONE WOULD WISH TO HAVE "A SEEN [Published in the New Monthly Magazine for January. The gathering described is one of Lamb's "Wednesdays," and he appears throughout the essay as "B-" is William Ayrton, a musician; "Captain C" and "M- C 'James and Marton Burney; "Miss D—," a Mrs. Reynolds; "J. F—," Barron Field; "H,” Leigh Hunt.] Bit was, I think, who suggested this subject, as well as the defence of Guy Faux, which I urged him to execute. As, however, he would undertake neither, I suppose I must do both a task for which he would have been much fitter, no less from the temerity than the felicity of his pen, — Never so sure our rapture to create As when it touch'd the brink of all we hate.2 Compared with him I shall, I fear, make but a commonplace piece of business of it, but I should be loth the idea was entirely lost. ... On the question being started, A— said, “I suppose the two first persons you would choose to see would be the two greatest names in English literature, Sir Isaac Newton and Mr. Locke?" In this A, as usual, reckoned without his host. 1 It will be understood that Hazlitt draws the incidents in this paragraph from Scott's own tales. 2 From Pope, Moral Essays, II. Every one burst out a laughing at the expression of B―'s face, in which impatience was restrained by courtesy. "Yes, the greatest names," he stammered out hastily, "but they were not persons not persons. ." "Not persons?" said Alooking wise and foolish at the same time, afraid his triumph might be premature. "That is," rejoined B, "not characters, you know. By Mr. Locke and Sir Isaac Newton, you mean the Essay on the Human Understanding and the Principia, which we have to this day. Beyond their contents there is nothing personally interesting in the men. But what we want to see any one bodily for, is when there is something peculiar, striking in the individuals, more than we can learn from their writings, and yet are curious to know. I dare say Locke and Newton were very like Kneller's portraits of them. But who could paint Shakespeare?" "Ay," retorted A-, "there it is; then I suppose you would prefer seeing him and Milton instead?" "No," said B-, "neither. I have seen so much of Shakespeare on the stage and on bookstalls, in frontispieces and on mantelpieces, that I am quite tired of the everlasting repetition; and as to Milton's face, the impressions that have come down to us of it I do not like; it is too starched and puritanical; and I should be afraid of losing some of the manna of his poetry in the leaven of his countenance and the precisian's band and gown." "I shall guess no more," said A. "Who is it, then, you would like to see 'in his habit as he lived,' if you had your choice of the whole range of English literature?" B- then named Sir Thomas Browne and Fulke Greville, the friend of Sir Philip Sidney, as the two worthies whom he should feel the greatest pleasure to encounter on the floor of his apartment in their nightgown and slippers, and to exchange friendly greeting with them. At this A- laughed outright, and conceived B- was jesting with him; but as no one followed his example, he thought there might be something in it, and waited for an explanation in a state of whimsical suspense. B then (as well as I can remember a conversation that passed twenty years ago how time slips!) went on as follows. "The reason why I pitch upon these two authors is that their writings are riddles, and they themselves are the most mysterious of personages. They resemble the soothsayers of old, who dealt in dark hints and doubtful oracles; and I should like to ask them the meaning of what no mortal but themselves, I should suppose, can fathom. There is Dr. Johnson: I have no curiosity, no strange uncertainty, about him; he and Boswell together have pretty well let me into the secret of what passed through his mind. He and other writers like him are sufficiently explicit; my friends, whose repose I should be tempted to disturb (were it in my power), are implicit, inextricable, inscrutable. And call up him who left half-told When I look at that obscure but gorgeous prose composition, the Urn Burial,2 I seem to myself to look into a deep abyss, at the bottom of which are hid pearls and rich treasure; or it is like a stately labyrinth of doubt and withering speculation, and I would invoke the spirit of the author to lead me through it." Captain C― muttered something about Columbus, and M—C— hinted at the Wandering Jew, but the last was set aside as spurious, and the first made over to the New World. "I should like," said Miss D-, "to have seen Pope talking with Patty Blount; and I have seen Goldsmith." Every one turned round to look at Miss D- as if by so doing they too could get a sight of Goldsmith. "I thought," said A- -, turning short round upon B"that you of the Lake School did not like Pope?" "Not like Pope! My dear sir, you must be under a mistake - I can read him over and over for ever!" "Why certainly, the 'Essay on Man' must be allowed to be a masterpiece." "It may be so, but I seldom look into it." "Oh! then it's his Satires you admire?" "No, not his Satires, but his friendly Epistles and his compliments." "Compliments! I did not know he ever made any." "The finest," said B, "that were ever paid by the wit of man. Each of them is worth an estate for life nay, is an immortality. There is that superb one to Lord Cornbury: 1 From Il Penseroso, referring to Chaucer's Squire's Tale. Despise low joys, low gains; Disdain whatever Cornbury disdains; Be virtuous, and be happy for your pains. Was there ever more artful insinuation of idolatrous praise?". There was but one statesman in the whole of English history that any one expressed the least desire to see - Oliver Cromwell, with his fine, frank, rough, pimply face, and wily policy; and one enthusiast, John Bunyan, the immortal author of The Pilgrim's Progress. It seemed that if he came into the room dreams would follow him, and that each person would nod under his golden cloud, "nigh-sphered in heaven," a canopy as strange and stately as any in Homer. Of all persons near our own time, Garrick's name was received with the greatest enthusiasm, who was proposed by J. F. He presently superseded both Hogarth and Handel, who had been talked of, but then it was on condition that he should act in tragedy and comedy, in the play and the farce, Lear and Wildair and Abel Drugger. What a "sight for sore eyes" that would be! Who would not part with a year's income at least, almost with a year of his natural life, to be present at it? Besides, as he could not act alone, and recitations are unsatisfactory things, what a troop he must bring with him —the silver-tongued Barry, and Quin, and Shuter and Weston, and Mrs. Clive, and Mrs. Pritchard, of whom I have heard my father speak as so great a favourite when he was young! This would indeed be a revival of the dead, the restoring of art; and so much the more desirable as, such is the lurking skepticism mingled with our overstrained admiration of past excellence, that though we have the speeches of Burke, the portraits of Reynolds, the writings of Goldsmith, and the conversation of Johnson, to show what people could do at that period, and to confirm the universal testimony to the merits of Garrick, yet, as it was before our time, we have our misgivings, as if he was probably after all little better than a Bartlemy-fair actor, dressed out to play Macbeth in a scarlet coat and laced cockedhat. For one, I should like to have seen and heard with my own eyes and ears. Certainly, by all accounts, if any one was ever moved by the true histrionic aestus,1 it was Garrick. When he 1 Vehemence. |