LlBRiiu uFCaXGRESS. 11*. PR4534- 1 3-55 rtUxN'lTED STATES OF AJtLiUCA ,»-> ;4; TJ-T"; .V^*?'??'?^'i'?^'»'-'^ ♦'J'?^ •'. '• pmjCT ife?ai^.^^«!'^^i m^i*A^m ?m ^U^^riWj^; ww>'w^''wg^5 aw,^> iW ii ^y'^"^S^ ■'s^m& ^■, V fe,K:''-^K Wyvg^^; Si'^SJ^ «y<^e^ mM- V,'l \^ \^^^ %^^ww; DE QUINCEY'S WRITINGS. THE NOTE BOOK OS AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER, BY THOMAS DE QUINCEY. ATTTHOR OF COJVFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER,' ETC. ETC. BOSTON: TICK NOR AND FIELDS M DCCC LV. L-ff- |\,v. SL- ^55 Ng Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1855, by TICKNOR AND FIELDS, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. CAMBRIDGE : STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY THUBSTON AND TOBRY. CONTENTS. Page Three Memorable Murders ....,<... 1 True Relations of the Bible to merely Human Science 72 Literary History of the Eighteenth Century ... 81 The Antigone of Sophocles 137 The Marquess Wellesley 177 Milton vs. Southey and Landor 193 Falsification of English History 217 A Peripatetic Philosopher 241 On Suicide 260 Superficial Knowledge 267 English Dictionaries 274 Dryden's Hexastich 281 Pope's Retort upon Addison 286 THUEE MEMORABLE. MURDERS. A SEQUEL TO * MURDER CONSIDERED AS ONE OF THE FINE ARTS.'* [1854.] It is impossible to conciliate readers of so saturnine and gloomy a class, that they cannot enter with genial sympathy into any gaiety whatever, but, least of all, when the gaiety trespasses a little into the province of the extravagant. In such a case, not to sympathize is not to understand ; and the playfulness, which is not relished, becomes flat and insipid, or absolutely with- out meaning. Fortunately, after all such churls have withdrawn from my audience in high displeasure, there remains a large majority who are loud in acknowledg- ing the amusement which they have derived from a former paper of mine, ' On Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts ; ' at the same time proving the sin- cerity of their praise by one hesitating expression of censure. Repeatedly they have suggested to me, that perhaps the extravagance, though clearly intentional, and forming one element in the general gaiety of the * See ' Miscellaneous Essays,' p. 17. 2 THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. conception, went too far. I am not myself of that opinion ; and I beg to remind these friendly censors, that it is amongst the direct purposes and efforts of this bagatelle to graze the brink of horror, and of all that would in actual realization be most repulsive. The very excess of the extravagance, in fact, by suggesting to the reader continually the mere aeriality of the entire speculation, furnishes the surest means of dis- enchanting him from the horror which might else gather upon his feelings. Let me remind such ob- jectors, once for all, of Dean Swift's proposal for turning to account the supernumerary infants of the three kingdoms, which, in those days, both at Dublin and at London, were provided for in foundling hospitals, by cooking and eating them. This was an extrava- ganza, though really bolder and more coarsely practical than mine, which did not provoke any reproaches even to a dignitary of the supreme Irish church ; its own monstrosity was its excuse ; mere extravagance was felt to license and accredit the little jeu d"* esprit, precisely as the blank impossibilities of Lilliput, of Laputa, of the Yahoos, &c., had licensed those. If, therefore, any man thinks it worth his while to tilt against so mere a foam-bubble of gaiety as this lecture on the sesthetics of murder, I shelter myself for the moment under the Telamonian shield of the Dean. But, in reality, my own little paper may plead a privileged excuse for its extravagance, such as is alto- gether wanting to the Dean's. Nobody can pretend, for a moment, on behalf of the Dean, that there is any ordinary and natural tendency in human thoughts, which could ever turn to infants as articles of diet; under any conceivable circumstances, this would be THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. 3 felt as the most aggravated form of cannibalism — cannibalism applying itself to the most defenceless part of the species. But, on the other hand, the ten- dency to a critical or aesthetic valuation of fires and murders is universal. If you are summoned to the spectacle of a great fire, undoubtedly the first impulse is — to assist in putting it out. But that field of ex- ertion is very limited, and is soon filled by regular professional people, trained and equipped for the ser- vice. In the case of a fire which is operating upon private property, pity for a neighbor's calamity checks us at first in treating the affair as a scenic spectacle. But perhaps the fire may be confined to public build- ings. And in any case, after we have paid our tribute of regret to the affair, considered as a calamity, in- evitably, and without restraint, we go on to consider it as a stage spectacle. Exclamations of — How grand ! how magnificent ! arise in a sort of rapture from the crowd. For instance, when Drury Lane was burned down in the first decennium of this centuiy, the falling in of the roof was signalized by a mimic suicide of the protecting Apollo that surmounted and crested the centre of this roof. The god was stationary with his lyre, and seemed looking down upon the fiery ruins that were so rapidly approaching him. Suddenly the supporting timbers below him gave way ; a convulsive heave of the billowing flames seemed for a moment to raise the statue ; and then, as if on some impulse of despair, the presiding deity appeared not to fall, but to throw himself into the fiery deluge, for he went down head foremost; and in all respects, the descent had the air of a voluntary act. What followed.? From every one of the bridges over the river, and from other 4 THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. open areas which commanded the spectacle, there arose a sustained uproar of admiration and sympathy. Some few years before this event, a prodigious fire occurred at Liverpool ; the Goree^ a vast pile of ware- houses close to one of the docks, was burned to the ground. The huge edifice, eight or nine stories high, and laden with most combustible goods, many thousand bales of cotton, wheat and oats in thousands of quar- ters, tar, turpentine, rum, gunpowder, &c., continued through many hours of darkness to feed this tremendous fire. To aggravate the calamity, it blew a regular gale of wind ; luckily for the shipping, it blew inland, that is, to the east ; and all the way down to Warrington, eighteen miles distant to the eastward, the whole air was illuminated by flakes of cotton, often saturated with rum, and by what seemed absolute worlds of blazing sparks, that lighted up all the upper chambers of the air. All the cattle lying abroad in the fields through a breadth of eighteen miles, were thrown into terror and agitation. Men, of course, read in this hurrying overhead of scintillating and blazing vortices, the annunciation of some gigantic calamity going on in Liverpool ; and the lamentation on that account was universal. But that mood of public sympathy did not at all interfere to suppress or even to check the momentary bursts of rapturous admiration, as this arrowy sleet of many-colored fire rode on the wings of hurricane, alternately through open depths of air, or through dark clouds overhead. Precisely the same treatment is applied to murders. After the first tribute of sorrow to those who have perished, but, at all events, after the personal interests. have been tranquillized by time, inevitably the scenical THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. 5 features (what aesthetically may be called the com- parative adva?itages) of the several murders are re- viewed and valued. One murder is compared with another ; and the circumstances of superiority, as, for example, in the incidence and effects of surprise, of mystery, &c., are collated and appraised. I, there- fore, for my extravagance, claim an inevitable and perpetual ground in "the spontaneous tendencies of the human mind when left to itself. But no one will pretend that any corresponding plea can be advanced on behalf of Sv/ift. In this important distinction between myself and the Dean, lies one reason which prompted the present writ- ing. A second purpose of this paper is, to make the reader acquainted circumstantially with three memo- rable cases of murder, which long ago the voice of amateurs has crowned with laurel, but especially with the two earliest of the three, viz., the immortal Williams' murders of 1812. The act and the actor are each separately in the highest degree interesting ; and, as forty-two years have elapsed since 1812, it can- not be supposed that either is known circumstantially to the men of the current generation. Never, throughout the annals of universal Christen- dom, has there indeed been any act of one solitary insulated individual, armed with power so appalling over the hearts of men, as that exterminating murder, by which, during the winter of 1812, John Williams in one hour, smote two houses with emptiness, extermin- ated all but two entire households, and asserted his own supremacy above all the children of Cain. It would be absolutely impossible adequately to describe the frenzy of feelings which, throughout the next fortnight, mas- 6 THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. tered the popular heart ; the mere delirium of indignant horror in some, the mere delirium of panic in others. For twelve succeeding da3/s, under some groundless notion that the unknown murderer had quitted London, the panic which had convulsed the mighty metropolis diffused itself all over the island. I was myself at that time nearly three hundred miles from London ; but there, and everywhere, the panic was indescribable. One lady, my next neighbor, whom personally I knew, living at the moment, during the absence of her hus- band, with a few servants in a very solitary house, never rested until she had placed eighteen doors (so she told me, and, indeed, satisfied me by ocular proof), each secured by ponderous bolts, and bars, and chains, be- tween her own bedroom and any intruder of human build. To reach her, even in her drawing-room, was like going, as a flag of truce, into a beleaguered for- tress ; at every sixth step one was stopped by a sort of portcullis. The panic was not confined to the rich; women in the humblest ranks more than once died upon the spot, from the shock attending some suspicious at- tempts at intrusion upon the part of vagrants, meditating probably nothing worse than a robbery, but whom the poor women, misled by the London newspapers, had fancied to be the dreadful London murderer. Mean- time, this solitary artist, that rested in the centre of London, self-supported by his own conscious grandeur, as a domestic Attila, or ' scourge of God ;' this man, that walked in darkness, and relied upon murder (as afterwards transpired) for bread, for clothes, for pro- motion in life, was silently preparing an effectual answer to the public journals ; and on the twelfth day after his inaugural murder, he advertised his presence in Lon- THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. 7 don, and published to all men the absurdity of ascribing to him any ruralizing propensities, by striking a second blow, and accomplishing a second family extermination. Somewhat lightened was the provincial panic by this proof that the murderer had not condescended to sneak into the country, or to abandon for a moment, under any motive of caution or fear, the great metropolitan castra stativa of gigantic crime, seated for ever on the Thames. In fact, the great artist disdained a provincial reputation ; and he must have felt, as a case of ludicrous disproportion, the contrast between a country town or village, on the one hand, and, on the other, a work more lasting than brass — a xnjua ig aei — a murder such in quality as any murder that he would condescend to own for a work turned out from his own studio. Coleridge, whom I saw some months after these terrific murders, told me, that, for his part, though at the time resident in London, he had not shared in the prevailing panic ; him they effected only as a philoso- pher, and threw him into a profound reverie upon the tremendous power which is laid open in a moment to any man who can reconcile himself to the abjuration of all conscientious restraints, if, at the same time, thoroughly without fear. Not sharing in the public- panic, however, Coleridge did not consider that panic at all unreasonable ; for, as he said most truly in that vast metropolis there are many thousands of households, composed exclusively of women and children ; many other thousands there are who necessarily confide their safety, in the long evenings, to the discretion of a young servant girl ; and if she suffers herself to be beguiled by the pretence of a message from her mother, sister, or sweetheart, into opening the door, there, in one 8 THREE BIEMORABLE MURDERS. second of time, goes to wreck the security of the house. However, at that time, and for many months afterwards, the practice of steadily putting the chain upon the door before it was opened prevailed generally, and for a long time served as a record of that deep impression left upon London by Mr. Williams. Southey, I may add, entered deeply into the public feeling on this occasion, and said to me, within a week or two of the first mur- der, that it was a private event of that order which rose to the dignity of a national event.* But now, having prepared the reader to appreciate on its true scale this dreadful tissue of murder (which as a record belonging to an era that is now left forty-two years behind us, not one person in four of this generation can be expected to know correctly), let me pass to the circumstantial details of the affair. Yet, first of all, one word as to the local scene of the murders. Ratcliffe Highway is a public thoroughfare in a most chaotic quarter of eastern or nautical London ; and at this time (viz., in 1812), when no adequate police existed except the detective police of Bow Street, admirable for its own peculiar purposes, but utterly in- commensurate to the general service of the capital, it was a most dangerous quarter. Every third man at the least might be set down as a foreigner. Lascars, Chinese, Moors, Negroes, were met at every step. And apart from the manifold ruffianism, shrouded im- penetrably under the mixed hats and turbans of men whose past was untraceable to any European eye, it is * I am not sure whether Southey held at this time his appoiut- ment to the editorship of the ' Edinburgh Annual Register.' If he did, no doubt in the domestic section of that clu'onicle mil be found an excellent account of the whole. THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. 9 well known that the navy (especially, in time of war, the commercial navy) of Christendom is the sure receptacle of all the murderers and ruffians whose crimes have given them a motive for withdrawing themselves for a season from the public eye. It is true, that few of this class are qualified to act as ' able ' seamen : but at all times, and especially during war, only a small proportion (or nucleus) of each ship's company consists of such men: the large majority being mere untutored landsmen. John Williams, how- ever, who had been occasionally rated as a seaman on board of various Indiamen, &c., was probably a very accomplished seaman. Pretty generally, in fact, he was a ready and adroit man, fertile in resources under all sudden difficulties, and most flexibly adapting him- self to all varieties of social life. Williams was a man of middle stature (five feet seven and a-half, to five feet eight inches high), slenderly built, rather thin, but wiry, tolerably muscular, and clear of all superfluous flesh. A lady, who saw him under examination (I think at the Thames Police Office), assured me that his hair was of the most extraordinary and vivid color, viz., bright yellow, something between an orange and lemon color. Williams had been in India ; chiefly in Bengal and Madras : but he had also been upon the Indus. Now, it is notorious that, in the Punjaub, horses of a high caste are often painted — crimson, blue, green, purple ; and it struck me that Williams might, for some casual purpose of disguise, have taken a hint from this prac- tice of Scinde and Lahore, so that the color might not have been natural. In other respects, his appearance was natural enough ; and, judging by a plaster cast of him, which I purchased in London, I should say mean, 10 THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. as regaroed his facial structure. One fact, however, was striking, and fell in with the impression of his natural tiger character, that his face wore at all times a bloodless ghastly pallor. 'You might imagine,' said my informant, 'that in his veins circulated not red life-blood, such as could kindle into the blush of shame, of wrath, of pity — but a green sap that welled from no human heart.' His eyes seemed frozen and glazed, as if their light were all converged upon some victim lurking in the far background. So far his ap- pearance might have repelled ; but, on the other hand, the concurrent testimony of many witnesses, and also the silent testimony of facts, showed that the oiliness and snaky insinuation of his demeanor counteracted the repulsiveness of his ghastly face, and amongst inex- perienced young women won for him a very favorable reception. In particular, one gentle-mannered girl, whom Williams had undoubtedly designed to murder, gave in evidence — that once, when sitting alone with her, he had said, ' Now, Miss R., supposing that I should appear about midnight at your bedside, armed with a carving knife, what would you say ?' To which the confiding girl had replied, ' Oh, Mr. Williams, if it was anybody else, I should be frightened. But, as soon as I heard your voice, I should be tranquil.' Poor girl ! had this outline sketch of Mr. Williams been filled in and realized, she would have seen something in the corpse-like face, and heard something in the sinister voice, that would have unsettled her tranquillity for ever. But nothing short of such dreadful experiences could avail to unmask Mr. John Williams. Into this perilous region it was that, on a Saturday night in December, Mr. Williams, whom we suppose to THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. 11 . have long since made his coup d^essai, forced his way- through the crowded streets, bound on business. To say, was to do. And this night he had said to himself secretly, that he would execute a design which he had already sketched, and which, when finished, was des- tined on the following day to strike consternation into ' all that mighty heart ' of London, from centre to cir- cumference. It was afterwards remembered that he had quitted his lodgings on this dark errand about eleven o'clock p. m. ; not that he meant to begin so soon : but he needed to reconnoitre. He carried his tools closely buttoned up under his loose roomy coat. It was in harmony with the general subtlety of his character, and his polished hatred of brutality, that by- universal agreement his manners were distinguished for exquisite suavity : the tiger's heart was masked by the most insinuating and snaky refinement. All his acquaintances afterwards described his dissimulation as so ready and so perfect, that if, in making his way through the streets, always so crowded on a Saturday night in neighborhoods so poor, he had accidentally jostled any person, he would (as they were all satisfied) have stopped to ofTer the most gentlemanly apologies : with his devilish heart brooding over the most hellish of purposes, he would yet have paused to express a benign hope that the huge mallet, buttoned up under his elegant surtout, with a view to the little business that awaited him about ninety minutes further on, had not inflicted any pain on the stranger with whom he had come into collision. Titian, I believe, but certainly Rubens, and perhaps Vandyke, made it a rule never to practise his art but in full dress — point ruffles, bag wig, and diamond-hilted sword; and Mr. Williams, ]2 THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. there is reason to believe, when he went out for. a grand compoimd massacre (in another sense, one might have applied to it the Oxford phrase of going out as Grand Compounder) , Blways assumed black silk stock- ings and pumps ; nor would he on any account have degraded his position as an artist by wearing a morn- ing gown. In his second great performance, it was particularly noticed and recorded by the one sole trem- bling man, who under killing agonies of fear was com- pelled (as the reader will find) from a secret stand to become the soljtary spectator of his atrocities, that Mr. Williams wore a long blue frock, of the very finest cloth, and richly lined with silk. Amongst the anec- dotes which circulated about him, it was also said at the time, that Mr. Williams employed the first of den- tists, and also the first of chiropodists. On no account would he patronize any second-rate skill. And be- yond a doubt, in that perilous little branch of business which was practised by himself, he might be regarded as the most aristocratic and fastidious of artists. But who meantime was the victim, to whose abode he was hurrying ? For surely he never could be so indiscreet as to be sailing about on a roving cruise in search of some chance person to murder ? Oh, no : he had suited himself with a victim some time before, viz., an old and very intimate friend. For he seems to have laid it down as a maxim — that the best person to murder was a friend ; and, in default of a friend, which is an article one cannot always command, an acquaintance : because, in either case, on first ap- proaching his subject, suspicion would be disarmed : whereas a stranger might take alarm, and find in the very countenance of his murderer elect a warning THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. 13 summons to place himself on guard. However, in the present case, his destined victim was supposed to unite both characters : originally he had been a friend ; but subsequently, on good cause arising, he had be- come an enemy. Or more probably, as others said, the feelings had long smce languished which gave life to either relation of friendship or of enmity. Marr was the name of that unhappy man, who (whether in the character of friend or enemy) had been selected for the subject of this present Saturday night's per- formance. And the story current at that time about the connection between Williams and Marr, having (whether true or not true) never been contradicted upon authority, was, that they sailed in the same India- man to Calcutta ; that they had quarrelled when at sea ; but another version of the story said — no : they had quarrelled after returning from sea ; and the sub- ject of their quarrel was Mrs. Marr, a very pretty young woman, for whose favor they had been rival candidates, and at one time with most bitter enmity towards each other. Some circumstances give a color of probability to this story. Otherwise it has some- times happened, on occasion of a murder not suffi- ciently accounted for, that, from pure goodness of heart intolerant of a mere sordid motive for a striking murder, some person has forged, and the public has accredited, a story representing the murderer as having moved under some loftier excitement : and in this case the public, too much shocked at the idea of Will- iams having on the single motive of gain consummated so complex a tragedy, welcomed the tale which repre- sented him as governed by deadly malice, growing out of the more impassioned and noble rivalry for the 14 THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. favor of a woman. The case remains in some degree doubtful ; but, certainly, the probability is, that Mrs. Marr had been the true cause, the causa teterrima, of the feud between the men. Meantime, the minutes are numbered, the sands of the hour-glass are running out, that measure the duration of this feud upon earth. This night it shall cease. To-morrow is the day which in England they call Sunday, which in Scotland they call by the Judaic name of ' Sabbath.' To both na- tions, under different names, the day has the same functions ; to both it is a day of rest. For thee also, Marr, it shall be a day of rest ; so is it written ; thou, too, young Marr, shalt find rest — thou, and thy house- hold, and the stranger that is within thy gates. But that rest must be in the world which lies beyond the grave. On this side the grave ye have all slept your final sleep. The night was one of exceeding darkness ; and in this humble quarter of London, whatever the night happened to be, light or dark, quiet or stormy, all shops were kept open on Saturday nights until twelve o'clock, at the least, and many for half an hour longer. There was no rigorous and pedantic Jewish superstition about the exact limits of Sunday. At the very worst, the Sunday stretched over from one o'clock, a. m. of one day, up to eight o'clock A. M. of the next, making a clear circuit of thirty-one hours. This, surely, was long enough. Marr, on this particular Saturday night, would be content if it were even shorter, provided it would come more quickly, for he has been toiling through sixteen hours behind his counter. Marr's position in life was this : he kept a little hosier's shop, and had invested in his stock and the fittings of his THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. 15 shop about .^180. Like all men engaged in trade, he suffered some anxieties. He was a new beginner ; but, already, bad debts had alarmed him ; and bills were coming to maturity that were not likely to be met by commensurate sales. Yet, constitutionally, he was a sanguine hoper. At this time he was a stout, fresh- colored young man of twenty-seven ; in some slight degree uneasy from his commercial prospects, but still cheerful, and anticipating — (how vainly !) — that for this night, and the next night, at least, he will rest his wearied head and his cares upon the faithful bosom of his sweet lovely young wife. The household of Marr, consisting of five persons, is as follows : „ First, there is himself, who, if he should happen to be ruined, in a limited commercial sense, has energy enough to jump up again, like a pyramid of fire, and soar high above ruin many times repeated. Yes, poor Marr, so it might be, if thou wert left to thy native energies unmolested ; but even now there stands on the other side of the street one born of hell, who puts his peremptory nega- tive on all these flattering prospects. Second in the list of his household, stands his pretty and amiable wife, who is happy after the fashion of youthful wives, for she is only twenty-two, and anxious (if at all) only on account of her darling infant. For, thirdly, there is in a cradle, not quite nine feet below the street, viz., in a warm, cosy kitchen, and rocked at inter- vals by the young mother, a baby eight months old. Nineteen months have Marr and herself been married ; and this is their first-born child. Grieve not for this child, that it must keep the deep rest of Sunday in some other world ; for wherefore should an orphan, steeped to the lips in poverty, when once bereaved 16 THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. of father and mother, linger upon an alien and mur- derous earth ? Fourthl}^, there is a stoutish boy, an apprentice, say thirteen years old ; a Devonshire boy, with handsome features, such as most Devonshire youths have ; * satisfied with his place ; not over- worked ; treated kindly, and aware that he was treated kindly, by his master and mistress. Fifthly, and lastly, bringing up the rear of this quiet household, is a ser- vant girl, a grown-up young woman ; and she, being particularly kind-hearted, occupied (as often happens in families of humble pretensions as to rank) a sort of sisterly place in her relation to her mistress. A great democratic change is at this very time (1854), and has been for twenty years, passing over British society. Multitudes of persons are becoming ashamed of say- ing, ' my master,' or ' my mistress : ' the term now in the slow process of superseding it is, ' my employer.' Now, in the United States, such an expression of democratic hauteur, though disagreeable as. a needless proclamation of independence which nobody is dis- puting, leaves, however, no lasting bad effect. For the domestic ' helps ' are pretty generally in a state of transition so sure and so rapid to the headship of domestic establishments belonging to themselves, that in effect they are but ignoring, for the present moment, a relation which would at any rate dissolve itself in a year or two. But in England, where no * An artist told me in this year, 1812, that having accidentally seen a native Deyonsliire regiment (either volunteers or militia), nine hundred strong, marching past a station at which he had posted himself, he did not observe a dozen men that would not have been described in common parlance as ' good looking.' THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. 17 such resources exist of everlasting surplus lands, the tendency of the change is painful. It carries with it a sullen and a coarse expresion of immunity from a yoke which was in any case a light one, and often a benign one. In some other place I will illustrate my meaning. Here, apparently, in Mrs. Marr's service, the principle concerned illustrated itself practically. Mary, the female servant, felt a sincere and unaffected respect for a mistress whom she saw so steadily occu- pied with her domestic duties, and who, though so young, and invested with some slight authority, never exerted it capriciously, or even showed it at all con- spiciously. According to the testimony of all the neighbors, she treated her mistress with a shade of unobtrusive respect on the one hand, and yet was eager to relieve her, whenever that was possible, from the weight of her maternal duties, with the cheerful voluntary service of a sister. To this young woman it was, that, suddenly, within three or four minutes of midnight, Marr called aloud from the head of the stairs — directing her to go out and purchase some oysters for the family supper. Upon what slender accidents hang oftentimes solemn lifelong results ! Marr occupied in the concerns of his shop, Mrs. Marr occupied with some little ailment and restlessness of her baby, had both forgotten the affair of supper; the time was now narrowing every mo- ment, as regarded any variety of choice ; and oysters were perhaps ordered as the likeliest article to be had at all, after twelve o'clock should have struck. And yet, upon this trivial circumstance depended Mary's life. Flad she been sent abroad for supper at the ordinary time of ten or eleven o'clock, it is almost 2 18 THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. certain that she, the solitary member of the household who escaped from the exterminating tragedy, would not have escaped ; too surely she would have shared the general fate. It had now become necessary to be quick. Hastily, therefore, receiving money from Marr with a basket in her hand, but unbonneted, Mary trip- ped out of the shop. It became afterwards, on recol- lection, a heart-chilling remembrance to herself — that, precisely as she emerged from the shop-door, she noticed, on the opposite side of the street, by the light of the lamps, a man's figure ; stationary at the instant, but in the next instant slowly moving. This was Williams ; as a little incident, either just before or just after (at present it is impossible to say which), suffi- ciently proved. Now, when one considers the inevita- ble hurry and trepidation of Mary under the circum- stances stated, time barely sufficing for any chance of executing her errand, it becomes evident that she must have connected some deep feeling of mysterious un- easiness with the movements of this unknown man ; else, assuredly, she would not have found her attention disposable for such a case. Thus far, she herself threw some little light upon what it might be that, semi- consciously, was then passing through her mind ; she said, that, notwithstanding the darkness, which would not permit her to trace the man's features, or to ascertain the exact direction of his eyes, it yet struck her, that from his carriage when in motion, and from the ap- parent inclination of his person, he must be looking at No. 29. The little incident which I have alluded to as con- firming Mary's belief was, that, at some period not veiy far from midnight, the watchman had specially THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. 19 noticed this stranger ; he had observed him continu- ally peeping into the window of Marr's shop ; and had thought this act, connected with the man's appear- ance, so suspicious, that he stepped into Marr's shop, and communicated what he had seen. This fact he afterwards stated before the magistrates ; and he added, that subsequently, viz., a few minutes after twelve (eight or ten minutes, probably, after the de- parture of Mary), he (the watchman), when re-entering upon his ordinary half-hourly beat, was requested by Marr to assist him in closing the shutters. Here they had a final communicatio^ with each other ; and the watchman mentioned to Marr that the mysterious stranger had now apparently taken himself off; for that he had not been visible since the first communica- tion made to Marr by the watchman. There is little doubt that Williams had observed the watchman's visit to Marr, and had thus had his attention seasonably drawn to the indiscretion of his own demeanor ; so that the warning, given unavailingly to Marr, had been turned to account by Williams. There can be still less doubt, that the bloodhound had commenced his work within one minute of the watchman's assisting Marr to put up his shutters. And on the following consideration: — that which prevented Williams from commencing even earlier, was the exposure of the shop's whole interior to the gaze of street passengers. It was indispensable that the shutters should be accu- rately closed before Williams could safely get to work. But, as soon as ever this preliminary precaution had been completed, once having secured that concealment from the public eye it then became of still greater importance not to lose a moment by delay, than pre- 20 THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. viously it had been not to hazard any thing by precipi- tance. For all depended upon going in before Marr should have locked the door. On any other mode of effecting an entrance (as, for instance, by waiting for the return of Mary, and making his entrance simul- taneously with her), it will be seen that Williams must have forfeited that particular advantage which mute facts, when read into their true construction, will soon show the reader that he must have employed. Williams waited, of necessity, for the sound of the watchman's retreating steps ; waited, perhaps, for thirty seconds ; but when that danger was past, the next danger was, lest Marr should lock the door ; one turn of the key, and the murderer would have been locked out. In, therefore, he bolted, and by a dexterous movement of. his left hand, no doubt, turned the key, without letting Marr perceive this fatal stratagem. It is really won- derful and most interesting to pursue the successive steps of this monster, and to notice the absolute cer- tainty with which the silent hieroglyphics of the case betray to us the whole process and movements of the bloody drama, not less surely and fully than if we had been ourselves hidden in Marr's shop, or had looked down from the heavens of mercy upon this hell-kite, that knew not what mercy meant. That he had concealed from Marr his trick, secret and rapid, upon the lock, is evident ; because else, Marr would instantly have taken the alarm, especially after what the watchman had communicated. But it will soon be seen that Marr had not been alarmed. In reality, towards the full success of Williams, it was important, in the last degree, to intercept and forestall any yell or shout of agony from Marr. Such an outcry, and THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. 21 in a situation so slenderly fenced off from the street, viz., by walls the very thinnest, makes itself heard outside pretty nearly as well as if it were uttered in the street. Such an outcry it was indispensable to stifle. It was stifled ; and the reader will soon under- stand how. Meantime, at this point, let us leave the murderer alone with his victims. For fifty minutes let him work his pleasure. The front-door, as we know, is now fastened against all help. Help there is none. Let us, therefore, in vision, attach ourselves to Mary ; and, when all is over, let us come back with her, again raise the curtain, and read the dread- ful record of all that has passed in her absence. The poor girl, uneasy in her mind to an extent that she could but half understand, roamed up and down in search of an oyster shop ; and finding none that was still open, within any circuit that her ordinary experi- ence had made her acquainted with, she fancied it best to try the chances of some remoter district. Lights she saw gleaming or twinkling at a distance, that still tempted her onwards; and thus, amongst unknown streets poorly lighted,* and on a night of peculiar dark- ness, and in a region of London where ferocious tumults were continually turning her out of what seemed to be the direct course, naturally she got bewildered. The purpose with which she started, had by this time become hopeless. Nothing remained for her now but to retrace * I do not remember, chronologically, the history of gas-lights. But in London, long after Mr. Winsor had shown the value of gas-lighting, and its applicability to street purposes, various dis- tricts were prevented, for many years, from resorting to the new system, in consequence of old contracts with oil-dealers, subsisting through long terms of years. 22 THREE MEMORABLE BIURDERS. her steps. But this was difficult ; for she was afraid to ask directions from chance passengers, whose appear- ance the darkness prevented her from reconnoitring. At length by his lantern she recognized a watchman ; through him she was guided into the right road ; and in ten minutes more, she found herself back at the door of No. 29, in RatclifTe Highway. But by this time she felt satisfied that she must have been absent for fifty or sixty minutes ; indeed, she had heard, at a distance, the cry of past one o'^dock, which, commencing a few seconds after one, lasted intermittingly for ten or thirteen minutes. In the tumult of agonizing thoughts that very soon surprised her, naturally it became hard for her to recall distinctly the whole succession of doubts, and jealousies, and shadowy misgivings that soon opened upon her. But, so far as could be collected, she had not in the first moment of reaching home noticed anything deci- sively alarming. In very many chies bells are the main instruments for communicating between the street and the interior of houses : but in London knockers prevail. At Marr's there was both a knocker and a bell. Mary rang, and at the same time very gently knocked. She had no fear of disturbing her master or mistress ; them she made sure of finding still up. Her anxiety was for the baby, who being disturbed, might again rob her mistress of a night's rest. And she well knew that, with three people all anxiously awaiting her return, and by this time, perhaps, seriously uneasy at her delay, the least audible whisper from herself would in a moment bring one of them to the door. Yet how is this ? To her astonishment, but with the astonish- ment came creeping over her an icy horror, no stir nor THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. 23 murmur was heard ascending from the kitchen. At this moment came , back upon her, with shuddering anguish, the indistinct image of the stranger in the loose dark coat, whom she had seen steaUng along under the shadowy lamp-light, and too certainly watching her master's motions : keenly she now reproached herself that, under whatever stress of hurry, she had not ac- quainted Mr. Marr with the suspicious appearances. Poor girl ! she did not then know that, if this commu- nication could have availed to put Marr upon his guard, it had reached him from another quarter ; so that her own omission, which had in reality arisen under her hurry to execute her master's commission, could not be charged with any bad consequences. But all such reflections this way or that were swallowed up at this point in over-mastering panic. That her double sum- mons could have been unnoticed — this solitary fact in one moment made a revelation of horror. One person might have fallen asleep, but two — but three — that was a mere impossibility. And even supposing all three together with the baby locked in sleep, still how unaccountable was this utter — utter silence! Most naturally at this moment something like hysterical horror overshadowed the poor girl, and now at last she rang the bell with the violence that belongs to sickening terror. This done, she paused : self-command enough she still retained, though fast and fast it was slipping away from her, to bethink herself — that, if any over- whelming accident had compelled both Marr and his apprentice-boy to leave the house in order to summon surgical aid from opposite quarters — a thing barely supposable — still, even in that case Mrs. Marr and her infant would be left ; and some murmuring reply, under 24 THREE ME.^IORABLE MURDERS. any extremity, would be elicited from the poor mother. To pause, therefore, to impose stern silence upon her- self, so as to leave room for the possible answer to this final appeal, became a duty of spasmodic effort. Listen, therefore, poor trembling heart ; listen, and for twenty seconds be still as death. Still as death she was : and during that dreadful stillness, when she hushed her breath that she might listen, occurred an incident of killing fear, that to her dying day would never cease to renew its echoes in her ear. She, Mary, the poor trembling girl, checking and overruling herself by a final effort, that she might leave full opening for her dear young mistress's answer to her own last frantic appeal, heard at last and most distinctly a sound within the house. Yes, now bey-ond a doubt there is coming an answer to her summons. What was it ? On the stairs, not the stairs that led downwards to the kitchen, but the stairs that led upwards to the single story of bed-chambers above, was heard a creaking sound. Next was heard most distinctly a footfall : one, two, three, four, five stairs were slowly and distinctly descended. Then the dreadful footsteps were heard advancing along the little narrow passage to the door. The steps — oh heavens ! whose steps ? — have paused at the door. The very breathing can be heard of that dreadful being, who has silenced all breathing except his own in the house. There is but a door between him and Mary. What is he doing on the other side of the door ? A cautious step, a stealthy step it was that came down the stairs, then paced along the little narrow passage — narrow as a coffin — till at last the step pauses at the door. How hard the fellow breathes ! He, the soli- tary murderer, is on one side the door j Mary is on the THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. 25 Other side. Now, suppose that he should suddenly- open the door, and that incautiously in the dark Mary- should rush in, and find herself in the arms of the mur- derer. Thus far the case is a possible one — that to a certainty, had this little trick been tried immediately upon Mary's return, it would have succeeded ; had the door been opened suddenly upon her first tingle-tingle, headlong she would have tumbled in, and perished. But now Mary is upon her guard. The unknown mur- derer and she have both their lips upon the door, listening, breathing hard ; but luckily they are on different sides of the door ; and upon the least indication of unlocking or unlatching, she would have recoiled into the asylum of general darkness. What was the murderer's meaning in coming along the passage to the front door ? The meaning was this : separately, as an individual, Mary was worth nothing at all to him. But, considered as a member of a house- hold, she had this value, viz., that she, if caught and murdered, perfected and rounded the desolation of the house. The case being reported, as reported it would be all over Christendom, led the imagination captive. The whole covey of victims was thus netted ; the house- hold ruin was thus full and orbicular ; and m that pro- portion the tendency of men and women, flutter as they might, would be helplessly and hopelessly to sink into the all-conquering hands of the mighty murderer. He had but to say — my testimonials are dated from No. 29 Ratcliffe Highway, and the poor vanquished imagi- nation sank powerless before the fascinating rattlesnake eye of the murderer. There is not a doubt that the motive of the murderer for standing on the inner side 3 26 THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. of Marr's front-door, whilst Mary stood on the outside, was — a hope that, if he quietly opened the door, whisperingly counterfeiting Marr's voice, and saying, What made you stay so long ? possibly she might have been inveigled. He was wrong; the time was past for that ; Mary was now maniacally awake ; she began now to ring the bell and to ply the knocker with unin- termitting violence. And the natural consequence was, that the next door neighbor, who had recently gone to bed and instantly fallen asleep, was roused ; and by the incessant violence of the ringing and the knocking, which now obeyed a delirious and uncontrollable im- pulse in Mary, he became sensible that some very dreadful event must be at the root of so clamorous an uproar. To rise, to throw up the sash, to demand angrily the cause of this unseasonable tumult, was the work of a moment. The poor girl remained sufficiently mistress of herself rapidly to explain the circumstance of her own absence for an hour ; her belief that Mr. and Mrs. Marr's family had all been murdered in the interval ; and that at this very moment the murderer was in the house. The person to whom she addressed this statement was a pawnbroker; and a thoroughly brave man he must have been ; for it was a perilous undertaking, merely as a trial of physical strength, singly to face a mysterious assassin, who had apparently signalized his prowess by a triumph so comprehensive. But, again, for the imagination it required an effort of self-conquest to rush headlong into the presence of one invested with a cloud of mystery, whose nation, age, motives, were all alike unknown. Rarely on any field of battle has THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. 27 a soldier been called upon to face so complex a danger. For if the entire family of his neighbor Marr had been exterminated,- were this indeed true, such a scale of bloodshed would seem to argue that there must have been two persons as the perpetrators ; or if one singly had accomplished such a ruin, in that case how colossal must have been his audacity ! proba- bly, also, his skill and animal power ! Moreover, the unknown , enemy (whether single or double) would, doubtless, be elaborately armed. Yet, under all these disadvantages, did this fearless man rush at once to the field of butchery in his neighbor's house. Waiting only to draw on his trousers, and to arm himself with the kitchen poker, he went down into his own little back-yard. On this mode of approach, he would have a chance of intercepting the murderer ; whereas from the front there would be no such chance ; and there would also be considerable delay in the process of breaking open the door. A brick wall, nine or ten feet high, divided his own back premises from- those of Marr. Over this he vaulted ; and at the moment when he was recalling himself to the necessity of going back for a candle, he suddenly perceived a feeble ray of light already glimmering on some part of Marr's premises. Marr's back-door stood wide open. Proba- bly the murderer had passed through it one half minute before. Rapidly the brave man passed onwards to the shop, and there beheld the carnage of the night stretched out on the floor, and the narrow premises so floated with gore, that it was hardly possible to escape the pollution of blood in picking out a path to the front-door. In the lock of the door still remained the 28 THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. key which had given to the unknown murderer so fatal an advantage over his victims. By this time, the heart-shaking news involved in the outcries of Mary (to whom it occurred that by possibility some one out of so many victims might still be within the reach of medical aid, but that all would depend upon speed) had availed, even at that late hour, to gather a small mob about the house. The pawnbroker threw open the door. One or two watchmen headed the crowd ; but the soul-harrowing spectacle checked them, and impressed sudden silence upon their voices, previously so loud. The tragic drama read aloud its own history, and the succession of its several steps — few and summary. The murderer was as yet altogether un- known ; not even suspected. But there were reasons for thinking that he must have been a person familiarly known to Marr. He had entered the shop by opening the door after it had been closed by Marr. But it was justly argued — that, after the caution conveyed to Marr by the watchman, the appearance of any stranger in the shop at that hour, and in so dangerous a neigh- borhood, and entering by so irregular and suspicious a course, (i. e., walking in after the door had been closed, and after the closing of the shutters had cut off all open communication with the street), would naturally have roused Marr to an attitude of vigilance and self-defence. Any indication, therefore, that Marr had not been so roused, would argue to a certainty that something had occurred to neutralize this alarm, and fatally to disarm the prudent jealousies of Marr. But this ' something ' could only have lain in one simple fact, viz., that the person of the murderer was familiarly known to Marr as that of an ordinary and THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. 29 unsuspected acquaintance. This being presupposed as the key to all the rest, the whole course and evolution of the subsequent drama becomes clear as daylight. The murderer, it is evident, had opened gently, and again closed behind him with equal gentleness, the street-door. He had then advanced to the little coun- ter, all the while exchanging the ordinary salutation of an old acquaintance with the unsuspecting Marr. Having reached the counter, he would then ask Marr for a pair of unbleached cotton socks. In a shop so small as Marr's, there could be no great latitude of choice for disposing of the different commodities. The arrangement of these had no doubt become familiar to the murderer ; and he had already ascertained that, in order to reach down the particular parcel wanted at present, Marr would find it requisite to face round to the rear, and, at the same moment, to raise his eyes and his hands to a level eighteen inches above his own head. This movement placed him in the most dis- advantageous possible position with regard to the mur- derer, who now, at the instant when Marr's hands and eyes were embarrassed, and the back of his head fully exposed, suddenly from below his large surtout, had unslung a heavy ship-carpenter's mallet, and, with one solitary blow, had so thoroughly stunned his victim, as to leave him incapable of resistance. The whole position of Marr told its own tale. He had collapsed naturally behind the counter, with his hands so occupied as to confirm the whole outline of the affair as I have here suggested it. Probable enough it is that the veiy first blow, the first indication of treachery that reached Marr, would also be the last blow as regarded the abolition of consciousness. The 30 THREE MEBIORABLE MURDERS. murderer's plan and rationale of murder started syste- matically from this infliction of apoplexy, or at least of a stunning sufficient to insure a long loss of con- sciousness. This opening step placed the murderer at his ease. But still, as returning sense might constantly have led to the fullest exposures, it was his settled practice, by way of consummation, to cut the throat. To one invariable type all the murders on this occasion conformed : the skull was first shattered ; this step secured the murderer from instant retaliation ; and then, by way of locking up all into eternal silence, uniformly the throat was cut. The rest of the circum- stances, as self-revealed, were these. The fall of Marr might, probably enough, cause a dull, confused sound of a scuffle, and the more so, as it could not now be confounded with any street uproar — the shop- door being shut. It is more probable, however, that the signal for the alarm passing down to the kitchen, would arise when the murderer proceeded to cut Marr's throat. The very confined situation behind the counter would render it impossible, under the critical hurry of the case, to expose the throat broadly; the horrid scene would proceed by partial and interrupted cuts ; deep groans would arise ; and then would come the rush up-stairs. Against this, as the only dangerous stage in the transaction, the murderer would have specially prepared. Mrs. Marr and the apprentice- boy, both young and active, would make, of course, for the street door ; had Mary been at home, and three persons at once had combined to distract the purposes of the murderer, it is barely possible that one of them would have succeeded in reaching the street. But -the dreadful swing of the heavy mallet intercepted both THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. 31 the boy and his mistress before they could reach the door. Each of them lay stretched out on the centre of the shop floor ; and the very moment that this dis- abling was accomplished, the accursed hound was down upon their throats with his razor. The fact is, that, in the mere blindness of pity for poor Marr, on hearing his groans, Mrs. Marr had lost sight of her obvious policy ; she and the boy ought to have made for the back door ; the alarm would thus have been given in the open air; which, of itself, was a great point ; and several means of distracting the murderer's attention offered upon that course, which the ex- treme limitation of the shop denied to them upon the other. Vain would be all attempts to convey the horror which thrilled the gathering spectators of this piteous tragedy. It was known to the crowd that one person had, by some accident, escaped the general massacre : but she was now speechless, and probably delirious ; so that, in compassion for her pitiable situation, one female neighbor had carried her away, and put her to bed. Hence it had happened, for a longer space of time than could else have been possible, that no person pres- ent was sufficiently acquainted with the Marrs to be aware of the little infant ; for the bold pawnbroker had gone off to make a communication to the coroner ; and another neighbor to lodge some evidence which he thought urgent at a neighboring police-office. Sudden- ly some person appeared amongst the crowd who was aware that the murdered parents had a young infant ; this would be found either below-stairs, or in one of the bedrooms above. Immediately a stream of people poured down into the kitchen, where at once they saw 32 THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. the cradle — but with the bedclothes in a state of inde- scribable confusion. On disentangling these, pools of blood became visible ; and the next ominous sign was, that the hood of the cradle had been smashed to pieces. It became evident that the wretch had found himself doubly embarrassed — first, by the arched hood at the head of the cradle, which, accordingly, he had beat into a ruin with his mallet, and secondly, by the gathering of the blankets and pillows about the baby's head. The free play of his blows had thus been baffled. And he had therefore finished the scene by applying his razor to the throat of the little innocent; after which, with no apparent purpose, as though he had become confused by the spectacle of his own atroci- ties, he had busied himself in piling the clothes elabo- rately over the child's corpse. This incident undeniably gave the character of a vindictive proceeding to the whole affair, and so far confirmed the current rumor that the quarrel between Williams and Marr had originated in rivalship. One writer, indeed, alleged that the murderer might have found it necessary for his own safety to extinguish the crying of the child ; but it was justly replied, that a child only eight months old could not have cried under any sense of the trag- edy proceeding, but simply in its ordinary way for the absence of its mother ; and such a cry, even if audible at all out of the house, must have been precisely what the neighbors were hearing constantly, so that it could have drawn no special attention, nor suggested any reasonable alarm to the murderer. No one incident, indeed, throughout the whole tissue of atrocities, so much envenomed the popular fury against the un- known ruffian, as this useless butchery of the infant. THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. 33 Naturally, on the Sunday morning that dawned four or five hours later, the case was too full of horror not to diffuse itself in all directions; but I have no reason to think that it crept into any one of the numerous Sunday papers. In the regular course, any ordinary occurrence, not occurring, or not transpiring until fifteen minutes after 1 a. m. on a Sunday morning, would first reach the public ear through the Monday editions of the Sunday papers, and the regular morning papers of the Monday. But, if such were the course pursued on this occasion, never can there have been a more signal oversight. For it is certain, that to have met the public demand for details on the Sunday, which might so easily have been done by cancelling a couple of dull columns, and substituting a circumstantial nar- rative, for which the pawnbroker and the watchman could have furnished the materials, would have made a small fortune. By proper handbills dispersed through all quarters of the infinite metropolis, two hundred and fifty thousand extra copies might have been sold ; that is, by any journal that should have collected exclusive materials, meeting the public excitement, everywhere stirred to the centre by flying rumors, and everywhere burning for ampler information. On the Sunday se'ennight (Sunday the octave from the event), took place the funeral of the Marrs ; in the first cofRn was placed Marr ; in the second Mrs. Marr, and the baby in her arms ; in the third the apprentice boy. They were buried side by side ; and thirty thousand laboring people followed the funeral procession, with horror and grief written in their countenances. As yet no whisper was astir that indicated, even conjecturally, the hideous author of these ruins — this 34 THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. patron of grave-diggers. Had as much been known on this Sunday of the funeral concerning that person as became known universally six days later, the people would have gone right. from the churchyard to the mur- derer's lodgings, and (brooking no delay) would have torn him limb from limb. As yet, however, in mere default of any object on whom reasonable suspicion could settle, the public wrath was compelled to suspend itself. Else, far indeed from showing any tendency to subside, the public emotion strengthened every day conspicuously, as the reverberation of the shock began to travel back from the provinces to the capital. On every great road in the kingdom, continual arrests were made of vagrants and ' trampers,' who could give no satisfactory account of themselves, or whose appear- ance in any respect answered to the imperfect descrip- tion of Williams furnished by the watchman. With this mighty tide of pity and indignation point- ing backwards to the dreadful past, there mingled also in the thoughts of reflecting persons an under-current of fearful expectation for the immediate future. ' The earthquake,' to quote a fragment from a striking pas- sage in Wordsworth — * The earthquake is not satisfied at once.' All perils, specially malignant, are recurrent. A murderer, who is such by passion and by a wolfish craving for bloodshed as a mode of unnatural luxury, cannot relapse into inertia. Such a man, even more than the Alpine chamois hunter, comes to crave the dangers and the hairbreadth escapes of his trade, as a condiment for seasoning the insipid monotonies of daily life. But, apart from the hellish instincts that might THREE MEMORABLE BIURDERS. 35 too surely be relied on for renewed atrocities, it was clear that tlie murderer of the Marrs, wheresoever lurking, must be a needy man ; and a needy man of that class least likely to seek or to find resources in honorable modes of industry; for which, equally by haughty disgust and by disuse of the appropriate habits, men of violence are specially disqualified. Were it, therefore, merely for a livelihood, the murderer whom all hearts were yearning to decipher, might be expected to make his resurrection on some stage of horror, after a reasonable interval. Even in the Marr murder, grant- ing that it had been governed chiefly by cruel and vindictive impulses, it was still clear that the desire of booty had co-operated with such feelings. Equally clear it was that this desire must have been disap- pointed : excepting the trivial sum reserved by Marr for the week's expenditure, the murderer found, doubt- less, little or nothing that he could turn to account. Two guineas, perhaps, would be the outside of what he had obtained in the way of booty. A week or so would see the end of that. The conviction, therefore, of all people was, that in a month or two, when the fever of excitement might a little have cooled down, or have been superseded by other topics of fresher interest, so that the newborn vigilance of household life would have had time to relax, some new murder, equally appalling, might be counted upon. Such was the public expectation. Let the reader then figure to himself the pure frenzy of horror when in this hush of expectation, looking, indeed, and waiting for the unknown arm to strike once more, but not be- lieving that any audacity could be equal to such an attempt as yet, whilst all eyes were watching, suddenly, 36 THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. on the twelfth night from the Marr murder, a second case of the same mysterious nature, a murder on the same exterminating plan was perpetrated in the very same neighborhood. It was on the Thursday next but one succeeding to the Marr murder that this second atrocity took place ; and many people thought at the time, that in its dramatic features of thrilling interest, this second case even went beyond the first. The family which suffered in this instance was that of a Mr. Williamson ; and the house was situated, if not abso- lutely i?i Ratcliffe Highway, at any rate immediately round the corner of some secondary street, running at right angles to this public thoroughfare. Mr. William- son was a well-known and respectable man, long settled in that district ; he was supposed to be rich ; and more with a view to the employment furnished by such a calling, than with much anxiety for further accumula- tions, he kept a sort of tavern ; which, in this respect, might be considered on an old patriarchal footing — that, although people of considerable property resorted to the house in the evenings, no kind of anxious sepa- ration was maintained between them and the other visiters from the class of artisans or common laborers. Anybody who conducted himself with propriety was free to take a seat, and call for any liquor that he might prefer. And thus the society was pretty miscellaneous ; in part stationary, but in some proportion fluctuating. The household consisted of the following five per- sons : — 1. Mr. Williamson, its head, who was an old man above seventy, and was well fitted for his situation, being civil, and not at all morose, but, at the same time, firm in maintaining order ; 2. Mrs. Williamson, his wife, about ten years younger than himself; 3. a THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. 37 little grand-daughter, about nine years old ; 4. a house- maid, who was nearly forty years old ; 5. a young journeyman, aged about twenty-six, belonging to some manufacturing establishment (of what class I have for- gotten) ; neither do I remember of what nation he was. It was the established rule at Mr. Williamson's, that, exactly as the clock struck eleven, all the com- pany, without favor or exception, moved off. That was one of the customs by which, in so stormy a dis- trict, Mr. Williamson had found it possible to keep his house free from brawls. On the present Thursday night everything had gone on as usual, except for one slight shadow of suspicion, which had caught the at- tention of more persons than one. Perliaps at a less agitating time it would hardly have been noticed ; but now, when the first question and the last in all social meetings turned upon the Marrs, and their unknown murderer, it was a circumstance naturally fitted to cause some uneasiness, that a stranger, of sinister ap- pearance, in a wide surtout, had flitted in and out of the room at intervals during the evening ; had some- times retired from the light into obscure corners ; and, by more than one person, had been observed stealing into the private passages of the house. It was pre- sumed in general, that the man must be known to Wil- liamson. And, in some slight degree, as an occasional customer of the house, it is not impossible that he was. But afterwards, this repulsive stranger, with his ca- daverous ghastliness, extraordinary hair, and glazed eyes, showing himself intermittingly through the hours from 8 to 11 p. m., revolved upon the memory of all who had steadily observed him with something of the same freezing effect as belongs to the two assassins in 38 THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. ' Macbeth,' who present themselves reeking from the murder of Banquo, and glcammg dimly, with dreadful faces, from the misty background, athwart the pomps of the regal banquet. Meantime the clock struck eleven; the company broke up ; the door of entrance was nearly closed ; and at this moment of general dispersion the situation of the five inmates left upon the premises was precisely this : the three elders, viz., Williamson, his wife, and his female servant, were all occupied on the ground floor — Williamson himself was drawing ale, porter, «fec., for those neighbors, in whose favor the house- door had been left ajar, until the hour of twelve should strike ; Mrs. Williamson and her servant were moving to and fro between the back-kitchen and a little parlor ; the little grand-daughter, whose sleeping-room was on the Jirst floor (which term in London means always the floor raised by one flight of stairs above the level of the street), had been fast asleep since nine o'clock ; lastly, the journeyman artisan had retired to rest for some time. He was a regular lodger in the house ; and his bedroom was on the second floor. For some time he had been undressed, and had lain down in bed. Being, as a working man, bound to habits of early rising, he was naturally anxious to fall asleep as soon as possible. But, on this particular night, his uneasi- ness, arising from the recent murders at No. 29, rose to a paroxysm of nervous excitement which kept him awake. It is possible, that from somebody he had heard of the suspicious-looking stranger, or might even personally observed him slinking about. But, were it otherwise, he was aware of several circumstances dangerously affecting this house ; for instance, the THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. 39 ruffianism of this whole neighborhood, and the dis- ao-reeable fact that the Marrs had Uved within a few doors of this very house, which again argued that the murderer also lived at no great distance. These were matters of general alarm. But there were others peculiar to this house ; in particular, the notoriety of Williamson's opulence ; the belief, whether well or ill founded, that he accumulated, in desks and drawers, the money continually flowing into his hands ; and lastly, the danger so ostentatiously courted by that habit of leaving the house-door ajar through one entire hour — and that hour loaded with extra danger, by the well-advertised assurance that no collision need be feared with chance convivial visiters, since all such people were banished at eleven. A regulation, which had hitherto operated beneficially for the character and comfort of the house, now, on the contrary, under altered circumstances, became a positive proclamation of exposure and defencelessness, through one entire period of an hour. Williamson himself, it was said generally, being a large unwieldy man, past seventy, and signally inactive, ought, in prudence, to make the locking of his door coincident with the dismissal of his evening party. Upon these and other grounds of alarm (particularly this, that Mrs. Williamson was reported to possess a considerable quantity of plate), the journeyman was musing painfully, and the time might be within twenty- eight or twenty-five minutes of twelve, when all at once, with a crash, proclaiming some hand of hideous violence, the house-door was suddenly Shut and locked. Here, then, beyond all doubt, was the diabolic man, clothed in mystery, from No. 29 Ratcliffe Highway. 40 THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. Yes, that dreadful being, who for twelve days had employed all thoughts and all tongues, was now, too certainly, in this defenceless house, and would, in a few minutes, be face to face with every one of its inmates. A question still lingered in the public mind — whether at Marr's there might not have been two men at work. If so, there would be two at present ; and one of the two would be immediately disposable for the up-stairs work ; since no danger could obviously be more imme- diately fatal to such an attack than any alarm given from an upper window to the passengers in the street. Through one half-minute the poor panic-stricken man sat up motionless in bed. But then he rose, his first movement being towards the door of his room. Not for any purpose of securing it against intrusion — too well he knew that there was no fastening of any sort — neither lock, nor bolt ; nor was there any such move- able furniture in the room as might have availed to barricade the door, even if time could be counted on for such an attempt. It was no effect of prudence, merely the fascination of killing fear it was, that drove him to open the door. One step brought him to the head of the stairs : he lowered his head over the balus- trade in order to listen ; and at that moment ascended, from the little parlor, this agonizing cry from the woman-servant, ' Lord Jesus Christ ! we shall all be murdered ! ' What a Medusa's head must have lurked in those dreadful bloodless features, and those glazed rigid eyes, that seemed rightfully belonging to a corpse, when one glance at them sufficed to proclaim a death-warrant. Three separate death-struggles were by this time over ; and the poor petrified journeyman, quite uncon- THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. 41 scious of what he was doing, in blind, passive, self- surrender to panic, absolutely descended both flights of stairs. Infinite terror inspired him with the same im- pulse as might have been inspired by headlong courage. In his shirt, and upon old decaying stairs, that at times creaked under his feet, he continued to descend, until he had reached the lowest step but four. The situation was tremendous beyond any that is on record. A sneeze, a cough, almost a breathing, and the young man would be a corpse, without a chance or a struggle for his life. The murderer was at that time in the little parlor — the door of which parlor faced you in descending the stairs; and this door stood ajar; indeed, much more considerably open than what is understood by the term ' ajar.' Of that quadrant, or .90 degrees, which the door would describe in swinging so far open as to stand at right angles to the lobby, or to itself, in a closed position, 55 degrees at the least were exposed. Consequently, two out of three corpses were exposed to the young man's gaze. Where was the third t And the murderer — where was he? As to the murderer, he was walking rapidly backwards and forwards in the parlor, audible but not visible at first, being engaged with something or other in that part of the room which the door still concealed. What the something might be, the sound soon explained ; he was applying keys tentatively to a cupboard, a closet, and a scrutoire, in the hidden part of the room. Very soon, however, he came into view ; but, fortunately for the young man, at this critical moment, the murderer's purpose too entirely absorbed him to allow of his throwing a glance to the staircase, on which else the white figure of the jour- neyman, standing in motionless horror, would have 4 42 THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. been detected in one instant, and seasoned for the grave in the second. As to the third corpse, the missing corpse, viz., Mr. Williamson's, that is in the cellar; and how its local position can be accounted for, re- mains a separate question much discussed at the time, but never satisfactorily cleared up. Meantime, that Williamson was dead, became evident to the young man ; since else he would have been heard stirring or groaning. Three friends, therefore, out of four, whom the young man had parted with forty minutes ago, were now extinguished ; remained, therefore, 40 per cent, (a large per centage for Williams to leave) ; remained, in fact, himself and his pretty young friend, the little > grand-daughter, whose childish innocence was still slumbering without fear for herself, or grief for her aged grand-parents. If they are gone for ever, happily one friend (for such he will prove himself, indeed, if from such a danger he can save this child) is pretty near to her. But alas ! he is still nearer to a murderer. At this moment he is unnerved for any exertion what- ever ; he has changed into a pillar of ice ; for the objects before him, separated by just thirteen feet, are these : — The housemaid had been caught by the mur- derer on her knees ; she was kneeling before the fire- grate, which she had been polishing with black lead. That part of her task was finished ; and she had passed on to another task, viz., the filling of the grate with wood and coals, not for kindling at this moment, but so as to have it ready for kindling on the next day. The appearances all showed that she must have been en- gaged in this labor at the very moment when the murderer entered ; and perhaps the succession of the incidents arranged itself as follows: — From the awful THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. 43 ejaculation and loud outcry to Christ, as overheard by the journeyman, it was clear that then first she had been alarmed ; yet this was at least one and a-half or even two minutes after the door-slamming. Conse- quently the alarm which had so fearfully and season- ably alarmed the young man, must, in some unaccount- able way, have been misinterpreted by the two women. It was said, at the time, that Mrs. Williamson labored under some dulness of hearing ; and it was conjec- tured that the servant, having her ears filled with the noise of her own scrubbing, and her head half under the grate, might have confounded it with the street noises, or else might have imputed this violent closure to some mischievous boys. But, howsoever explained, the fact was evident, that, until the words of appeal to Christ, the servant had noticed nothing suspicious, nothing which interrupted her labors. If so, it followed that neither had Mrs. Williamson noticed anything ; for, in that case, she would have communicated her own alarm to the servant, since both were in the same small room. Apparently the course of things after the mur- derer had entered the room was this : — Mrs. Williamson had probably not seen him, from the accident of stand- ing with her back to the door. Her, therefore, before he was himself observed at all, he had stunned and prostrated by a shattering blow on the back of her head ; this blow, inflicted by a crow-bar, had smashed in the hinder part of the skull. She fell ; and by the noise of her fall (for all was the work of a moment) had first roused the attention of the servant ; who then uttered the cry which had reached the young man ; but before she could repeat it, the murderer had descended with his uplifted instrument upon her head, crushing 44 THREE MEMORABLE BIURDERS. the skull inwards upon the brain. Both the women were irrecoverably destroyed, so that further outrages were needless ; and, moreover, the murderer was con- scious of the imminent danger from delay ; and yet, in spite of his hurry, so fully did he appreciate the fatal consequences to himself, if any of his victims should so far revive into consciousness as to make circumstantial depositions, that, by way of making this impossible, he had proceeded instantly to cut the throats of each. All this tallied with the appearances as now presenting themselves. Mrs. Williamson had fallen backwards with her head to the door ; the servant, from her kneel- ing posture, had been incapable of rising, and had presented her head passively to blows ; after which, the miscreant had but to bend her head backwards so as to expose her throat, and the murder was finished. It is remarkable that the young artisan, paralyzed as he had been by fear, and evidently fascinated for a time so as to walk right towards the lion's mouth, yet found himself able to notice everything important. The reader must suppose him at this point watching the murderer whilst hanging over the body of Mrs. Williamson, and whilst renewing his search for certain important keys. Doubtless it was an anxious situation for the murderer; for, unless he speedily found the keys wanted, all this hideous tragedy would end in nothing but a prodigious increase of the public horror, in tenfold precautions therefore, and redoubled obsta- cles interposed between himself and his future game. Nay, there was even a nearer interest at stake ; his own immediate safety might, by a probable accident, be compromised. Most of those who came to the house for liquor were giddy girls or children, who, on THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. 45 finding this house closed, would go off carelessly to some other; but, let any thoughtful woman or man come to the door now, a full quarter of an hour before the established time of closing, in that case suspicion would arise too powerful to be checked. There would be a sudden alarm given ; after which, mere luck would decide the event. For it is a remarkable fact, and one that illustrates the singular inconsistency of this villain, who, being often so superfluously subtle, was in other directions so reckless and improvident, that at this very moment, standing amongst corpses that had deluged the little parlor with blood, Williams must have been in considerable doubt whether he had any sure means of egress. There were windows, he knew, to the back ; but upon what ground they opened, he seems to have had no certain information ; and in a neighborhood so dangerous, the windows of the lower story would not improbably be nailed down ; those in the upper might be free, but then came the necessity of a leap too formidable. From all this, however, the sole practical inference was to hurry forward with the trial of further keys, and to detect the hidden treasure. This it was, this intense absorption in one overmaster- ing pursuit, that dulled the murderer's perceptions as to all around him ; otherwise, he must have heard the breathing of the young man, which to himself at times became fearfully audible. As the murderer stood once more over the body of Mrs. Williamson, and searched her pockets more narrowly, he pulled out various clusters of keys, one of which dropping, gave a harsh gingling sound upon the floor. At this time it was that the secret witness, from his secret stand, noticed the fact of Williams's surtout being lined with silk of the 46 THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. finest quality. One other fact he noticed, which even- tually became more immediately important than many stronger circumstances of incrimination ; this was, that the shoes of the murderer, apparently new, and bought, probably, with poor Marr's money, creaked as he walked, harshly and frequently. With the new clusters of keys, the murderer walked off to the hidden section of the parlor. And here, at last, was suggested to the journeyman the sudden opening for an escape. Some minutes would be lost to a certainty trying all these keys ; and subsequently in searching the drawers, sup- posing that the keys answered — or in violently forcing them, supposing that they did not. He might thus count upon a brief interval of leisure, whilst the rat- tling of the keys might obscure to the murderer the creaking of the stairs under the re-ascending journey- man. His plan was now formed : on regaining his bedroom, he placed the bed against the door by way of a transient retardation to the enemy, that might give him a short warning, and in the worst extremity, might give him a chance for life by means of a desperate leap. This change made as quietly as possible, he tore the sheets, pillow-cases, and blankets into broad ribbons ; and after plaiting them into ropes, spliced the different lengths together. But at the very first he descries this ugly addition to his labors. Where shall he look for any staple, hook, bar, or other fixture, from which his rope, when twisted, may safely depend } Measured from the window-siZ/ — i. e., the lowest part of the window architrave — there count but twenty-two or twenty-three feet to the ground. Of this length ten or twelve feet may be looked upon as cancelled, because to that extent he might drop without danger. THREE BIEMORABLE MURDERS. 47 So much being deducted, there would remain, say, a dozen feet of rope to prepare. But, unhappily, there is no stout iron fixture anywhere about his window. The nearest, indeed the sole fixture of that sort, is not near to the window at all ; it is a spike fixed (for no reason at all that is apparent) in the bed-tester ; now, the bed being shifted, the spike is shifted ; and its distance from the window, having been always four feet, is now seven. Seven entire feet, therefore, must be added to that which would have sufficed if measured from the window. But courage ! God, by the proverb of all nations in Christendom, helps those that help themselves. This our young man thankfully acknowl- edges ; he reads already, in the very fact of any spike at all being found where hitherto it has been useless, an earnest of providential aid. Were it only for himself that he worked, he could not feel himself meritoriously employed ; but this is not so ; in deep sincerity, he is now agitated for the poor child, whom he knows and loves ; every minute, he feels, brings ruin nearer to her; and, as he passed her door, his first thought had been to take her out of bed in his arms, and to carry her where she might share his chances. But, on consideration, he felt that this sud- den awaking of her, and the impossibility of even whispering any explanation, would cause her to cry audibly ; and the inevitable indiscretion of one would be fatal to the two. As the Alpine avalanches, when suspended above the traveller's head, oftentimes (we are told) come down through the stirring of the air by a simple whisper, precisely on such a tenure of a whisper was now suspended the murderous malice of the man below. No ; there is but one way to save 48 THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. the child; towards her deliverance, the first step is through his own. And he has made an excellent beginning ; for the spike, which too fearfully he had expected to see torn away by any strain upon the half-carious wood, stands firmly when tried against the pressure of his own weight. He has rapidly fastened on to it three lengths of his new rope, measuring eleven ^qqI. He plaits it roughly ; so that only three feet have been lost in the intertwisting ; he has spliced on a second length equal to the first ; so that, already, sixteen feet are ready to throw out of the window ; and thus, let the worst come to the worst, it will not be absolute ruin to swarm down the rope so far as it will reach, and then to drop boldly. All this has been accomplished in about six minutes ; and the hot con- test between above and below is steadily but fervently proceeding. Murderer is working hard in the parlor ; journeyman is working hard in the bedroom. Mis- creant is getting on famously down-stairs ; one batch of bank-notes he has already bagged ; and is hard upon the scent of a second. Fie has also sprung a covey of golden coins. Sovereigns as yet were not ; but guineas at this period fetched thirty shillings a-piece ; and he has worked his way into a little quarry of these. Murderer is almost joyous ; and if any creature is still living in this house, as shrewdly he suspects, and very soon means to know, with that creature he would be happy, before cutting the crea- ture's throat, to drink a glass of something. Instead of the glass, might he not make a present to the poor creature of its throat ? Oh no ! impossible ! Throats are a sort of thing that he never makes presents of; business — business must be attended to. Really the THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. 49 two men, considered simply as men of business, are both meritorious. Like chorus and semi-chorus, strophe and antistrophe, they work each against the other. Pull journeyman, pull murderer ! Pull baker, pull devil ! As regards the journeyman, he is now safe. To his sixteen feet, of which seven are neutralized by the distance of the bed, he has at last added six feet more, which will be short of reaching the ground by perhaps ten feet — a trifle which man or boy may drop without injury. All is safe, therefore, for him : which is more than one can be sure of for miscreant in the parlor. Miscreant, however, takes it coolly enough : the reason being, that, with all his cleverness, for once in his life miscreant has been over-reached. The reader and 1 know, but miscreant does not in the least suspect, a little fact of some importance, viz., that just now through a space of full three minutes he has been overlooked and studied by one, who (though reading in a dreadful book, and suffering under mortal panic) took accurate notes of so much as his limited opportunities allowed him to see, and will assuredly report the creaking shoes and the silk-mounted surtout in quarters where such little facts will tell very little to his advantage. But, although it is true that Mr. Wil- liams, unaware of the journeyman's having ' assisted ' at the examination of Mrs. Williamson's pockets, could not connect any anxiety with that person's subsequent proceedings, nor specially, therefore, with his havmg embarked in the rope-weaving line, assuredly he knew of reasons enough for not loitering. And yet he did loiter. Reading his acts by the light of such mute traces as he left behind him, the police became aware that latterly he must have loitered. And the reason 6 50 THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. which governed him is striking ; because at once it records — that murder was not pursued by him simply as a means to an end, but also as an end for itself. Mr. Williams had now been upon the premises for perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes ; and in that space of time he had dispatched, in a style satisfactory to himself, a considerable amount of business. He had done, in commercial language, ' a good stroke of busi- ness.' Upon two floors, viz., the cellar- floor and the ground-floor, he has ' accounted for ' all the population. But there remained at least two floors more ; and it now occurred to Mr. Williams that, although the land- lord's somewhat chilling manner had shut him out from any familiar knowledge of the household arrange- ments, too probably on one or other of those floors there must be some throats. As to plunder, he has already bagged the whole. And it was next to impos- sible that any arrear the most trivial should still remain for a gleaner. But the throats — the throats — there it was that arrears and gleanings might perhaps be counted on. And thus it appeared that, in his wolfish thirst for blood, Mr. Williams put to hazard the whole fruits of his night's work, and his life into the bargain. At this moment, if the murderer knew all, could he see the open window above stairs ready for the descent of the journeyman, could he witness the life-and-death rapidity with which that journeyman is working, could he guess at the almighty uproar which within ninety seconds will be maddening the population of this pop- ulous district — no picture of a maniac in flight of panic or in pursuit of vengeance would adequately represent the agony of haste with which he would himself be hurrying to the street-door for final evasion. THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. 51 That mode of escape was still free. Even at this moment, there yet remained time sufficient for a suc- cessful flight, and, therefore, for the follov/ing revolu- tion in the romance of his own abominable life. He had in his pockets above a hundred pounds of booty ; means, therefore, for a full disguise. This very night, if he will shave off his yellow hair, and blacken his eyebrows, buying, when morning light returns, a dark- colored wig, and clothes such as may co-operate in personating the character of a grave professional man, he may elude all suspicions of impertinent policemen ; may sail by any one of a hundred vessels bound for any port along the huge line of sea-board (stretching through twenty-four hundred miles) of the American United States ; may enjoy fifty years for leisurely repentance ; and may even die in the odor of sanctity. On the other hand, if he prefer active life, it is not impossible that, with his subtlety, hardihood, and unscrupulousness, in a land where the simple process of naturalization converts the alien at once into a child of the family, he might rise to the president's chair ; might have a statue at his death ; and afterwards a life in three volumes quarto, with no hint glancing towards No. 29 Ratcliffe Highway. But all depends on the next ninety seconds. Within that time there is a sharp turn to be taken ; there is a wrong turn, and a right turn. Should his better angel guide him to the right one, all may yet go well as regards this world's pros- perity. But behold ! in two minutes from this point we shall see him take the wrong one : and then Neme- sis will be at his heels with ruin perfect and sudden. Meantime, if the murderer allows himself to loiter, the ropemaker overhead does not. Well he knows 52 THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. that tne poor chilcPs fate is on the edge of a razor : for all turns upon the alarm being raised before the mur- derer reaches her bedside. And at this very moment, whilst desperate agitation is nearly paralyzing his fingers, he hears the sullen stealthy step of the mur- derer creeping up through the darkness. It had been the expectation of the journeyman (founded on the clamorous uproar with which the street-door was slam- med) that Williams, when disposable for his up-stairs work, would come racing at a long jubilant gallop, and with a tiger roar ; and perhaps, on his natural instincts, he would have done so. But this mode of approach, which was of dreadful effect when applied to a case of surprise, became dangerous in the case of people who might by this time have been placed fully upon their guard. The step which he had heard was on the staircase — but upon which stair? He fancied upon the lowest : and in a movement so slow and cautious, even this might make all the difference ; yet might it not have been the tenth, twelfth, or fourteenth stair .? Never, perhaps, in this world did any man feel his own responsibility so cruelly loaded and strained, as at this moment did the poor journeyman on behalf of the slumbering child. Lose but two seconds, through awkwardness or through the self-counteractions of panic, and for her the total difference arose between life and death. Still there is a hope : and nothing can so frightfully expound the hellish nature of him whose baleful shadow, to speak astrologically, at this moment darkens the house of life, than the simple expression of the ground on which this hope rested. The journey- man felt sure that the murderer would not be satisfied to kill the poor child whilst unconscious. This would THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. 53 be to defeat his whole purpose in murdering ner at all. To an epicure in murder such as Williams, it would be taking away the very sting of the enjoyment, if the poor child should be suffered to drink off the bitter cup of death without fully apprehending the misery of the situation. But this luckily would require time : the double confusion of mind, first, from being roused up at so unusual an hour, and, secondly, from the horror of the occasion when explained to her, would at first produce fainting, or some mode of insensibility or dis- traction, such as must occupy a considerable time. The logic of the case, in short, all rested upon the ultra fiendishness of Williams. Were he likely to be con- tent with the mere fact of the child's death, apart from the process and leisurely expansion of its mental agony — in that case there would be no hope. But, because our present murderer is fastidiously finical in his exactions — a sort of martinet in the scenical group- ing and draping of the circumstances in his murders — therefore it is that hope becomes reasonable, since all such refinements of preparation demand time. Mur- ders of mere necessity Williams was obliged to hurry ; but, in a murder of pure voluptuousness, entirely dis- interested, where no hostile witness was to be removed, no extra booty to be gained, and no revenge to be grat- ified, it is clear that to hurry would be altogether to ruin. If this child, therefore, is to be saved, it will be on pure cDsthetical considerations.* * Let the reader, who is disposed to regard as exaggerated or romantic the pure fiendishness imputed to "Williams, recollect that, except for the luxurious purpose of basking and revelling in the anguish of dying despair, he had no motive at all, small or great, for attempting the murder of this young girl. She had seen 54 THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. But all considerations whatever are at this moment suddenly cut short. A second step is heard on the stairs, but still stealthy and cautious ; a third — and then the child's doom seems fixed. But just at that moment all is ready. The window is wide open ; the rope is swinging free ; the journeyman has launched himself; and already he is in the first stage of his de- scent. Simply by the weight of his person he descended, and by the resistance of his hands he retarded the de- scent. The danger was, that the rope should run too smoothly through his hands, and that by too rapid an acceleration of pace he should come violently to the ground. Happily he was able to resist the descending impetus : the knots of the splicings furnished a succes- sion of retardations. But the rope proved shorter by four or five feet than he had calculated : ten or eleven feet from the ground he hung suspended in the air; speechless for the present, through long-continued agitation ; and not daring to drop boldly on the rough carriage pavement, lest he should fracture his legs. But the night was not dark, as it had been on occasion of the Marr murders. And yet, for purposes of criminal police, it was by accident worse than the darkest night that ever hid a murder or baffled a pursuit. London, from east to west, was covered with a deep pall (rising from the river) of universal fog. Hence it happened, that for twenty or thirty seconds the young man hang- ing in the air was not observed. His white shirt at nothing, heard nothing — was .fast asleep, and her door was closed ; so that, as a witness against him, he knew that she was as useless as any one of the three corpses. And yet he was making preparations for her murder, when the alarm in the street interi-upted him. THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. 55 length attracted notice. Three or four people ran up, and received him in their arms, all anticipating some dreadful annunciation. To what house did he belong .'' Even that was not instantly apparent ; but he pointed with his finger to Williamson's door, and said in a half-choking whisper — ' ilf arr's murderer^ now at loork I ' All explained itself in a moment : the silent language of the fact made its own eloquent revelation. The mysterious exterminator of No. 29 Ratcliffe Highway had visited another house ; and, behold ! one man only had escaped through the air, and in his night-dress, to tell the tale. Superstitiously, there was something to check the pursuit of this unintelligible criminal. Mor- ally, and in the interests of vindictive justice, there was everything to rouse, quicken, and sustain it. Yes, Marr's murderer — the man of mystery — was again at work ; at this moment perhaps extinguishing some lamp of life, and not at any remote place, but here — in the very house which the listeners to this dreadful announcement were actually touching. The chaos and blind uproar of the scene which followed, measured by the crowded reports in the journals of many subsequent days, and in one feature of that case, has never to my knowledge had its parallel ; or, if a parallel, only in one case — what followed, I mean, on the acquittal of the seven bishops at Westminster in 1688. At present there was more than passionate enthusiasm. The frenzied movement of mixed horror and exultation — the ululation of vengeance which ascended instantaneously from the individual street, and then by a sublime sort of magnetic contagion from all 56 THREE MEMORABLE BIURDERS. the adjacent streets, can be adequately expressed only by a rapturous passage in Shelley : — ' The transport of a fierce and monstrous gladness Spread through the multitudinous streets, fast flying Upon the wings of fear : — From his dull madness The starveling waked, and died in joy : the dying. Among the corpses in stark agony lying, Just heard the happy tidings, and in hope Closed their faint eyes : from house to house replying With loud acclaim the living shook heaven's cope, And fill'd the startled earth with echoes.'* There was something, indeed, half inexplicable in the instantaneous interpretation of the gathering shout ac- cording to its true meaning. In fact, the deadly roar of vengeance, and its sublime unity, could point in this district only to the one demon whose idea had brooded and tyrannized, for twelve days, over the general heart : every door, every window in the neighborhood, flew open as if at a word of command ; multitudes, without waiting for the regular means of egress, leaped down at once from the windows on the lower story ; sick men rose from their beds ; in one instance, as if expressly to verify the image of Shelley (in v. 4, 5, 6, 7), a man whose death had been looked for through some days, and who actually did die on the following day, rose, armed himself with a sword, and descended in his shirt into the street. The chance was a good one, and the mob were made aware of it, for catching the wolfish dog in the high noon and carnival of his bloody revels — in the very centre of his own shambles. For * * ReYolt of Islam,' canto xii. THREE MEMORABLE BIUEDERS. 57 a moment the mob was self-baffled by its own numbers and its own fury. But even that fury felt the call for self-control. It was evident that the massy street-door must be driven in, since there was no longer any living person to co-operate with their efforts from within, ex- cepting only a female child. Crowbars dexterously applied in one minute threw the door out of hangings, and the people entered like a torrent. It may be guessed with what fret and irritation to their consuming fury, a signal of pause and absolute silence was made by a person of local importance. In the hope of re- ceiving some useful communication, the mob became silent. ' Now listen,' said the man of authority, ' and we shall learn whether he is above-stairs or below.' Immediately a noise was heard as if of some one forcing windows, and clearly the sound came from a bedroom above. Yes, the fact was apparent that the murderer was even yet in the house : he had been caught in a trap. Not having made himself familiar with the details of Williamson's house, to all appear- ance he had suddenly become a prisoner in one of the upper rooms. Towards this the crowd now rushed impetuously. The door, however, was found to be slightly fastened ; and, at the moment when this was forced, a loud crash of the window, both glass and frame, announced that the wretch had made his escape. He had leaped down ; and several persons in the crowd, who burned with the general fury, leaped after hun. These persons had not troubled themselves about the nature of the ground ; but now, on making an ex- amination of it with torches, they reported it to be an inclined plane, or embankment of clay, very wet and adhesive. The prints of the man's footsteps were 58 THREE MEMORABLE BIURDERS. deeply impressed upon the clay, and therefore easily traced up to the summit of the embankment ; but it was perceived at once that pursuit would be useless, from the density of the mist. Two feet ahead of you, a man was entirely withdrawn from your power of identifica- tion ; and, on overtaking him, you could not venture to challenge him as the same whom you had lost sight of. Never, through the course of a whole century, could there be a night expected more propitious to an escaping criminal : means of disguise Williams now had in excess ; and the dens were innumerable in the neighborhood of the river that could have sheltered him for years from troublesome inquiries. But favors are thrown away upon the reckless and the thankless. That night, when the turning-point offered itself for his whole future career, Williams took the wrong turn ; for, out of mere indolence, he took the turn to his old lodgings — that place which, in all England, he had just now the most reason to shun. Meantime the crowd had thoroughly searched the premises of Williamson. The first inquiry was for the young grand-daughter. Williams, it was evident, had gone into her room : but in this room apparently it was that the sudden uproar in the streets had surprised him ; after which his undivided attention had been directed to the windows, since through these only any retreat had been left open to him. Even this retreat he owed only to the fog and to the hurry of the moment, and to the difficulty of approaching the premises by the rear. The little girl was naturall}^ agitated by the influx of strangers at that hour ; but otherwise, through the hu- mane precautions of the neighbors, she was preserved from all knowledge of the dreadful events that had oc- THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. 59 curred whilst she herself was sleeping. Her poor old grandfather was still missing, until the crowd descended into the cellar ; he was then found lying prostrate on the cellar floor : apparently he had been thrown down from the top of the cellar stairs, and with so much vio- lence, that one leg was broken. After he had been thus disabled, Williams had gone down to him, and cut his throat. There was much discussion at the time, in some of the public journals, upon the possibility of re- conciling these incidents with other circumstantialities of the case, supposing that only one man had been con- cerned in the affair. That there teas only one man concerned, seems to be certain. One only was seen or heard at Marr's : one only, and beyond all doubt the same man, was seen by the young journeyman in Mrs. Williamson's parlor ; and one only was traced by his footmarks on the clay embankment. Apparently the course which he had pursued was this : he had intro- duced himself to Williamson by ordering some beer. This order would oblige the old man to go down into the cellar ; Williams would wait until he had reached it, and would then ' slam ' and lock the street-door in the violent way described. Williamson would come up in agitation upon hearing this violence. The murderer, aware that he would do so, met him, no doubt, at the head of the cellar stairs, and threw him down ; after which he would go down to consummate the murder in his ordinary way. All this would occupy a minute, or a minute and a half; and in that way the interval would be accounted for that elapsed between the alarming sound of the street-door as heard by the journeyman, and the lamentable outcry of the female servant. It is evident also, that the reason why no cry whatsoever 60 THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. had been heard from the lips of Mrs. Williamson, is due to the positions of the parties as I have sketched them. Coming behind Mrs. Williamson, unseen there- fore, and from her deafness unheard, the murderer would inflict entire abolition of consciousness while she was yet unaware of his presence. But with the servant, who had unavoidably witnessed the attack upon her mistress, the murderer could not obtain the same ful- ness of advantage ; and she therefore had time for making an agonizing ejaculation. It has been mentioned, that the murderer of the Marrs was not for nearly a fortnight so much as suspected ; meaning that, previously to the Williamson murder, no vestige of any ground for suspicion in any direction whatever had occurred either to the general public or to the police. But there were two very limited exceptions to this state of absolute ignorance. Some of the magis- trates had in their possession something which, when closely examined, offered a very probable means for tracing the criminal. But as yet they had not traced him. Until the Friday morning next after the destruc- tion of the Williamsons, they had not published the im- portant fact, that upon the ship-carpenter's mallet (with which, as regarded the stunning or disabling process, the murders had been achieved) were inscribed the let- ters ' J. P.' This mallet had, by a strange oversight on the part of the murderer, been left behind in Marr's shop ; and it is an interesting fact, therefore, that, had the villain been intercepted by the brave pawnbroker, he would have been met virtually disarmed. This pub- lic notification was made officially on the Friday, viz., on the thirteenth day after the first murder. And it was instantly followed (as will be seen) by a most im- THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. 61 portant result. Meantime, within the secrecy of one single bedroom in all London, it is a fact that Williams had been whisperingly the object of very deep suspicion from the very first — that is, within that same hour which witnessed the Marr tragedy. And singular it is, that the suspicion was due entirely to his own folly. Williams lodged, in company with other men of various nations, at a public-house. In a large dormitory there were arranged five or six beds ; these were occupied by artisans, generally of respectable character. One or two Englishmen there were, one or two Scotchmen, three or four Germans, and Williams, whose birth-place was not certainly known. On the fatal Saturday night, about half-past one o'clock, when Williams returned from his dreadful labors, he found the English and Scotch party asleep, but the Germans awake : one of them was sitting up with a lighted candle in his hands, and reading aloud to the other two. Upon this, Wil- liams said, in an angry and very peremptory tone, ' Oh, put that candle out ; put it out directly ; we shall all be burned in our beds.' Had the British party in the room been awake, Mr. Williams would have roused a muti- nous protest against this arrogant mandate. But Ger- mans are generally mild and facile in their tempers ; so the light was complaisantly extinguished. Yet, as there were no curtains, it struck the Germans that the danger was really none at all ; for bed-clothes, massed upon each other, will no more burn than the leaves of a closed book. Privately, therefore, the Germans drew an inference, that Mr. Williams must have had some urgent motive for withdrawing his own person and dress from observation. What this motive might be, the next day's news diffused all over London, and of course at 62 THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. this house, not two furlongs from Marr's shop, made awfully evident ; and, as may w^ell be supposed, the suspicion was communicated to the other members of the dormitory. All of them, however, were aware of the legal danger attaching, under English law, to insin- uations against a man, even if true, which might not admit of proof. In reality, had Williams used the most obvious precautions, had he simply walked down to the Thames (not a stone's-throw distant), and flung two of his implements into the river, no conclusive proof could have been adduced against him. And he might have realized the scheme of Courvoisier (the murderer of Lord William Russell) — viz., have sought each sepa- rate month's support in a separate well-concei;ted mur- der. The party in the dormitory, meantime, were satisfied themselves, but waited for evidences that might satisfy others. No sooner, therefore, had the official notice been published as to the initials J. P. on the mallet, than every man in the house recognized at once the well-known initials of an honest Norwegian ship-carpenter, John Petersen, who had worked in the English dockyards until the present year ; but, having occasion to revisit his native land, had left his box of tools in the garrets of this inn. These garrets were now searched. Petersen's tool-chest was found, but wanting the mallet ; and, on further examination, another overwhelming discovery was made. The sur- geon, who examined the corpses at Williamson's, had given it as his opinion that the throats were not cut by means of a razor, but of some implement differently shaped. It was now remembered that Williams had recently borrowed a large French knife of peculiar construction ; and accordingly, from a heap of old lum- THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS, 63 ber and rags, there was soon extricated a waistcoat, which the whole house could swear to as recently worn by Williams. In this waistcoat, and glued by gore to the lining of its pockets, was found the French knife. Next, it was matter of notoriety to everybody in the inn, that Williams ordinarily wore at present a pair of creaking shoes, and a brown surtout lined with silk. Many other presumptions seemed scarcely called for. Williams was immediately apprehended, and briefly examined. This was on the Friday. On the Saturday morning (viz., fourteen days from the Marr murders) he was again brought up. The circumstantial evidence was overwhelming ; Williams watched its course, but said very little. At the close, he was fully committed for trial at the next sessions ; and it is needless to say, that, on his road to prison, he was pursued by mobs so fierce, that, under ordinary circumstances, there would have been small hope of escaping summary vengeance. But upon this occasion a powerful escort had been pro- vided ; so that he was safely lodged in jail. In this particular jail at this time, the regulation was, that at five o'clock, p. M. all the prisoners on the criminal side should be finally locked up for the night, and with- out candles. For fourteen hours (that is, until seven o'clock on the next morning) they were left unvisited, and in total darkness. Time, therefore, Williams had for committing suicide. The means in other respects were small. One iron bar there was, meant (if I re- member) for the suspension of a lamp ; upon this he had hanged himself by his braces. At what hour was uncertain : some people fancied at midnight. And in that case, precisely at the hour when, fourteen days before, he had been spreading horror and desolation 64 THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. through the quiet family of poor Marr, now was he forced into drinking of the same cup, presented to his lips by the same accursed hands. The case of the M'Keans, which has been specially alluded to, merits also a slight rehearsal for the dread- ful picturesqueness of some two or three amongst its circumstances. The scene of this murder was at a rustic inn, some few miles (I think) from Manchester ; and the advantageous situation of this inn it was, out of which arose the two fold temptations of the case. Generally speaking, an inn argues, of course, a close cincture of neighbors — as the original motive for opening such an establishment. But, in this case, the house individually was solitary, so that no interruption was to be looked for from any persons living within reach of screams ; and yet, on the other hand, the cir- cumjacent vicinity was eminently populous ; as one consequence of which, a benefit club had established its weekly rendezvous in this inn, and left the peculiar accumulations in their club-room, under the custody of the landlord. This fund arose often to a considerable amount, fifty or seventy pounds, before it was trans- ferred to the hands of a banker. Here, therefore, was a treasure worth some little risk, and a situation that promised next to none. These attractive circumstances had, by accident, become accurately known to one or both of the two M'Keans ; and, unfortunately, at a moment of overwhelming misfortune to themselves. They were hawkers ; and, until lately, had borne most respectable characters : but some mercantile crash had overtaken them with utter ruin, in which their joint capital had been swallowed up to the last shilling. THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. 65 This sudden prostration had made them desperate : their own little property had been swallowed up in a large social catastrophe, and society at large they looked upon as accountable to them for a robbery. In preying, therefore, upon society, they considered themselves as pursuing a wild natural justice of retali- ation. The money aimed at did certainly assume the character of public money, being the product of many separate subscriptions. They forgot, however, that in the murderous acts, which too certainly they meditated as preliminaries to the robbery, they could plead no such imaginary social precedent. In dealing with a family that seemed almost helpless, if all went smoothly, they relied entirely upon their own bodily strength. They were stout young men, twenty-eight to thirty-two years old ; somewhat undersized as to height ; but squarely built, deep-chested, broad-shouldered, and so beau- tifully formed, as regarded the symmetry of their limbs and their articulations, that, after their execution, the bodies were privately exhibited by the surgeons of the Manchester Infirmary, as objects of statuesque interest. On the other hand, the household which they proposed to attack consisted of the following four persons : — 1. the landlord, a stoutish farmer — but him they intended to disable by a trick then newly introduced amongst robbers, and termed hocussing, i. e., clandestinely drug- ging the liquor of the victim with laudanum ; 2. the landlord's wife ; 3. a young servant woman ; 4. a boy, twelve or fourteen years old. The danger was, that out of four persons, scattered by possibility over a house which had two separate exits, one at least might escape, and by better acquaintance with the adjacent paths, might succeed in giving an alarm to some of the 6 66 THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. houses a furlong distant. Their final resolution was, to he guided by circumstances as to the mode of conducting the affair ; and yet, as it seemed essential to success that they should assume the air of strangers to each other, it was necessary that they should preconcert some general outline of their plan ; since it would on this scheme be impossible, without awaking violent sus- picions, to make any communications under the eyes of the family. This outline included, at the least, one murder : so much was settled ; but, otherwise, their subsequent proceedings make it evident that they wished to have as little bloodshed as was consistent with their final object. On the appointed day, they presented themselves separately at the rustic inn, and at difierent hours. One came as early as four o'clock in the after- noon ; the other not until half-past seven. They saluted each other distantly and shyly ; and, though occasion- ally exchanging a few words in the character of strangers, did not seem disposed to any familiar inter- course. With the landlord, however, on his return about eight o'clock from Manchester, one of the brothers entered into a lively conversation ; invited him to take a tumbler of punch ; and, at a moment when the land- lord's absence from the room allowed it, poured into the punch a spoonful of laudanum. Some time after this, the clock struck ten ; upon which the elder M'Kean, professing to be weary, asked to be shown up to his bedroom ; for each brother, immediately on arriving, had engaged a bed. On this, the poor servant girl had presented herself with a bed-candle to light him up- stairs. At this critical moment the family were dis- tributed thus : — the landlord, stupefied with the horrid narcotic which he had drunk, had retired to a private THREE MEBIORABLE MURDERS. 67 room adjoining the public room, for the purpose of re- clining upon a sofa : and he, luckily for his own safety, was looked upon as entirely incapacitated for action. The landlady was occupied with her husband. And thus the younger M'Kean was left alone in the public room. He rose, therefore, softly, and placed himself at the foot of the stairs which his brother had just ascended, so as to be sure of intercepting any fugitive from the bed-room above. Into that room the elder M'Kean was ushered by the servant, who pointed to two ^eds — one of which was already half occupied by the boy, and the other empty : in these, she intimated that the two strangers must dispose of themselves for the night, according to any arrangement that they might agree upon. Saying this, she presented him with the candle, which he in a moment placed upon the table ; and, intercepting her retreat from the room threw his arm round her neck with a gesture as though he meant to kiss her. This was evidently what she herself an- ticipated, and endeavored to prevent. Her horror may be imagined, when she felt the perfidious hand that clasped her neck armed with a razor, and violently cut- ting her throat. She was hardly able to utter one scream, before she sank powerless upon the floor. This dreadful spectacle was witnessed by the boy, who was not asleep, but had presence of mind enough instantly to close his eyes. The murderer advanced hastily to the bed, and anxiously examined the expression of the boy's features : satisfied he was not, and he then placed his hand upon the boy's heart, in order to judge by its beatings whether he were agitated or not. This was a dreadful trial : and no doubt the counterfeit sleep would immediately have been detected, when suddenly a 68 THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. dreadful spectacle drew off the attention of the murderer. Solemnly, and in ghostly silence, uprose in her dying delirium the murdered girl ; she stood upright, she walked steadily for a moment or two, she bent her steps towards the door. The murderer turned away to pur- sue her ; and at that moment the boy, feeling that his one solitary chance was to fly while this scene was in progress, bounded out of bed. On the landing at the head of the stairs was one murderer, at the foot of the stairs was the other : who could believe that the boy had the shadow of a chance for escaping ? And yet, in the most natural way, he surmounted all hindrances. In the boy's horror, he laid his left hand on the balustrade, and took a flying leap over it, which landed him at the bottom of the stairs, without having touched a single stair. He had thus effectually passed one of the mur- derers : the other, it is true, was still to be passed ; and this would have been impossible but for a sudden accident. The landlady had been alarmed by the faint scream of the young woman ; had hurried from her pri- vate room to the girl's assistance ; but at the foot of the stairs had been intercepted by the younger brother, and was at this moment struggling with him. The confusion of this life-and-death conflict had allowed the boy to whirl past them. Luckily he took a turn into a kitchen, out of which was a back-door, fastened by a single bolt, that ran freely at a touch ; and through this door he rushed into the open fields. But at this moment the elder brother was set free for pursuit by the death of the poor girl. There is no doubt, that in her deli- rium the image moving through her thoughts was that of the club, which met once a- week. She fancied it no doubt sitting ; and to this room, for help and for THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. 69 safety she staggered along ; she entered it, and within the doorway once more she dropped down, and instantly expired. Her murderer, who had followed her closely, now saw himself set at liberty for the pursuit of the boy. At this critical moment, all was at stake ; unless the boy were caught, the enterprise was ruined. He passed his brother, therefore, and the landlady without pausing, and rushed through the open door into the fields. By a single second, perhaps, he was too late. The boy was keenly aware, that if he continued in sight, he would have no chance of escaping from a powerful young man. He made, therefore, at once for a ditch, into which he tumbled headlong. Had the murderer ventured to make a leisurely examination of the nearest ditch, he would easily have found the boy — made so conspicuous by his white shirt. But he lost all heart, upon failing at once to arrest the boy's flight. And every succeeding second made his despair the greater. If the boy had really effected his escape to the neigh- boring farm-house, a party of men might be gathered within five minutes ; and already it might have become difficult for himself and his brother, unacquainted with the field paths, to evade being intercepted. Nothing remained, therefore, but to summon his brother away. Thus it happened that the landlady, though mangled, escaped with life, and eventually recovered. The land- lord owed his safety to the stupefying potion. And the baffled murderers had the misery of knowing that their dreadful crime had been altogether profitless. The road, indeed, was now open to the club-room ; and, probably, forty seconds would have sufficed to carry off the box of treasure, which afterwards might have been burst open and pillaged at leisure. But the fear of 70 THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. intercepting enemies was too strongly upon them ; and they fled rapidly by a road which carried them actually within six feet of the lurking boy. That night they passed through Manchester. When daylight returned, they slept in a thicket twenty miles distant from the scene of their guilty attempt. On the second and third nights, they pursued their march on foot, resting again during the day. About sunrise on the fourth morning, they were entering some village near Kirby Lonsdale, in Westmoreland. They must have designedly quitted the direct line of route ; for their object was Ayrshire, of which county they were natives ; and the regular road would have led them through Shap, Penrith, Carlisle. Probably they were seeking to elude the persecution of the stage-coaches, which, for the last thirty hours, had been scattering at all the inns and road-side cabarets hand-bills describing their persons and dress. It happened (perhaps through design) that on this fourth morning they had separated, so as to enter the village ten minutes apart from each other. They were exhausted and footsore. In this condition it was easy to stop them. A blacksmith had silently reconnoitred them, and compared their appearance with the description of the hand-bills. They were then easily overtaken, and separately arrested. Their trial and condemnation speedily followed at Lancaster; and in those days it followed, of course, that they were executed. Otherwise their case fell so far within the sheltering limits of what would now be regarded as extenuating circumstances — that, whilst a murder more or less was not to repel them from their object, very evidently they were anxious to economize the bloodshed as much as possible. Immeasurable, there- THREE MEMORABLE MURDERS. 71 fore, was the interval which divided them from the monster Williams. They perished on the scaffold : Williams, as I have said, by his own hand ; and, in obedience to the law as it then stood, he was buried in the centre of a quadrivium, or conflux of four roads (in this case four streets), with a stake driven through his heart. And over him drives for ever the uproar of un- resting London ! THE TRUE RELATIONS OF THE BIELE TO MERELY HUMAN SCIENCE. It is sometimes said, that a religious messenger from God does not come amongst men for the sake of teach- ing truths in science, or of correcting errors in science. Most justly is this said : but often in terms far too feeble. For generally these terms are such as to imply, that, although no direct and imperative function of his mission, it was yet open to him, as a permissible function — that, although not pressing with the force of an obligation upon the missionary, it was yet at his discretion — if not to correct other men's errors, yet at least in his own person to speak with scientific pre- cision. I contend that it was not. I contend, that to have uttered the truths of astronomy, of geology, &c., at the era of new-born Christianity, was not only helow and beside the purposes of a religion, but would have been against them. Even upon errors of a far more important class than errors in science can ever be — superstitions, for instance, that degraded the very idea of God; prejudices and false usages, that laid waste human happiness (such as slavery, and many hundreds of other abuses that might be mentioned), the rule evidently acted upon by the Founder of Chris- tianity was this — Given the purification of the well- head, once assumed that the fountains of truth are [72] THE TRUE RELATIONS OF THE BIBLE, ETC. 73 cleansed, all these derivative currents of evil will cleanse themselves. As a general rule, the branches of error were disregarded, and the roots only attacked. If, then, so lofty a station was taken with regard even to such errors as really had moral and spiritual rela- tions, how much more with regard to the comparative trifles (as in the ultim.ate relations of human nature they are) of merely human science ! But, for my part, I go further, and assert, that upon three reasons it was impossible for any messenger from God (or offering himself in that character) to have descended into the communication of truth merely scientific, or economic, or worldly. And the three reasons are these : — First, Because such a descent would have degraded his mission, by lowering it to the base level of a collusion with human curiosity, or (in the most favorable case) of a collusion with petty and transitory interests. Secondly, Because it would have ruined his mission, by disturbing its free agency, and misdirecting its energies, in tv/o separate modes : first, by destroy- ing the spiritual auctoritas (the prestige and consider- ation) of the missionary; secondly, by vitiating the spiritual atmosphere of his audience — that is, cor- rupting and misdirecting the character of their thoughts and expectations. He that in the early days of Chris- tianity should have proclaimed the true theory of the solar system, or that by any chance word or allusion should then, in a condition of man so little prepared to receive such truths, have asserted or assumed the daily motion of the earth on its own axis, or its annual motion round the sun, would have found himself en- tangled at once and irretrievably in the following unmanageable consequences: — First of all, and in- 7 74 THE TRUE RELATIONS OF THE BIBLE stantaneously, he would have been roused to the alarm- in.o- fact, that, by this dreadful indiscretion he himself, the professed deliverer of a new and spiritual religion, had in a moment untuned the spirituality of his audi- ence. He would find that he had awakened within them the passion of curiosity — the most unspiritual of passions, and of curiosity in a fierce polemic shape. The very safest step in so deplorable a situation would be, instantly to recant. Already by this one may estimate the evil, when such would be its readiest palliation. For in what condition would the reputation of the teacher be left for discretion and wisdom as an intellectual guide, when his first act must be to recant — and to recant what to the whole body of his hearers would wear the character of a lunatic proposition. Such considerations might possibly induce him not to recant. But in that case the consequences are far worse. Having once allowed himself to sanction what nis hearers regard as the most monstrous of paradoxes, he has no liberty of retreat open to him. He must stand to the promises of his own acts. Uttering the first truth of a science, he is pledged to the second ; taking the main step, he is committed to all which follow. He is thrown at once upon the endless con- troversies which science in every stage provokes, and in none more than in the earliest. Starting, besides, from the authority of a divine mission, he could not (as others might) have the privilege of selecting arbi- trarily or partially. If upon one science, then upon all ; if upon science, then upon art ; if upon art and science, then upon every branch of social economy his reformations and advances are equally due — due as to all, if due as to any. To move in one direction, TO MERELY HUMAN SCIENCE. 75 is constructively to undertake for all. Without power to retreat, he has thus thrown the intellectual interests of his followers into a channel utterly alien to the purposes of a spiritual mission. The spiritual mission, therefore, the purpose for which only the religious teacher was sent, has now perished altogether — overlaid and confounded by the merely scientific wranglings to which his own incon- siderate precipitance has opened the door. But sup- pose at this point that the teacher, aware at length of the mischief which he has caused, and seeing that the fatal error of uttering one solitary novel truth upon a matter of mere science is by inevitable consequence to throw him upon a road leading altogether away from the proper field of his mission, takes the laudable course of confessing his error, and of attempting a return into his proper spiritual province. This may be his best course ; yet, after all, it will not retrieve his lost ground. He returns with a character confessedly damaged. His very excuse rests upon the blindness and shortsightedness which forbade his anticipating the true and natural consequences. Neither will his own account of the case be generally accepted. He will not be supposed to retreat from further controversy, as inconsistent with spiritual purposes, but because he finds himself unequal to the dispute. And, in the very best case, he is, by his own acknowledgment, tainted with human infirmity. He has been ruined for a servant of inspiration ; and how ? By a process, let it be remembered, of which all the steps are inevitable under the same agency : that is, in the case of any primitive Christian teacher having attempted to speak the language of scientific truth in dealing with the 7-6 THE TRUE RELATIONS OF THE BIBLE phenomena of astronomy, geology, or of any merely human knowledge. Now, thirdly and lastly, m order to try the question in an extreme form, let it be supposed that, aided by powers of working miracles, some early apostle of Christianity should actually have succeeded in carrying through the Copernican system of astronomy, as an article of blind belief, sixteen centuries before the pro- gress of man's intellect had qualified him for naturally developing that system. What, in such a case, would be the true estimate and valuation of the achievement ? Simply this, that he had thus succeeded in cancelling and counteracting a determinate scheme of divine dis- cipline and training for man. Wherefore did God give to man the powers for contending with scientific difficulties ? Wherefore did he lay a secret train of continual occasions, that should rise, by relays, through scores of generations, for provoking and developing those activities in man's intellect, if, after all, he is to send a messenger of his own, more than human, to intercept and strangle all these great purposes ? This is to mistake the very meaning and purposes of a reve- lation. A revelation is not made for the purpose of showing to indolent men that which, by faculties al- ready given to them, they may show to themselves ; no : but for the purpose of showing that which the moral darkness of man will not, without supernatural light, allow him to perceive. With disdain, therefore, must every thoughtful person regard the notion, that God could wilfully interfere with his own plans, by accrediting ambassadors to reveal astronomy, or any other science, which he has commanded men, by qualifying men, to reveal for themselves. TO MERELY HUMAN SCIENCE. 77 Even as regards astronomy — a science so nearly allying itself to religion by the loftiness and by the purity of its contemplations — Scripture is nowhere the parent of any doctrine, nor so much as the silent sanctioner of any doctrine. It is made impossible for Scripture to teach falsely, by the simple fact that Scripture, on such subjects, will not condescend to teach at all. The Bible adopts the erroneous language of men (which at any rate it must do, in order to make itself understood), not by way of sanctioning a theory, but by way of using a fact. The Bible, for instance, uses (postulates) the phenomena of day and night, of summer and winter ; and, in relation to their causes, speaks by the same popular and inaccurate language which is current for ordinary purposes, even amongst the most scientific of astronomers. For the man of science, equally with the populace, talks of the sun as rising and setting, as having finished half his day's journey, &c., and, without pedantry, could not in many cases talk otherwise. But the results, which are all that concern Scripture, are equally true, whether accounted for by one hypothesis which is philosophi- cally just, or by another which is popular and erring. Now, on the other hand, in geology and cosmology, the case is stronger. Here there is no opening for a compliance even with a language that is erroneous ; for no language at all is current upon subjects that have never engaged the popular attention. Here, where there is no such stream of apparent phenomena running counter (as in astronomy there is) to the real phenomena, neither is there any popular language op- posed to the scientific. The whole are abtruse specu- lations, even as regards their objects, nor dreamed of 78 THE TRUE RELATIONS OF THE BIBLE as possibilities, either in their true aspects or their false aspects, till modern times. The Scriptures, therefore, nowhere allude to such sciences, either as taking the shape of histories, applied to processes current and in movement, or as taking the shape of theories applied to processes past and accomplished. The Mosaic cos- mogony, indeed, gives the succession of natural births ; and probably the general outline of such a succession will be more and more confirmed as geology ad- vances. But as to the time, the duration, of this suc- cessive evolution, it is' the idlest of notions that the Scriptures either have, or could have, condescended to human curiosity upon so awful a prologue to the drama of this world. Genesis would no more have indulged so mean a passion with respect to the myste- rious inauguration of the world, than the Apocalypse with respect to its mysterious close. ' Yet the six days of Moses ! ' Days ! But is it possible that human folly should go the length of understanding by the Mosaical day^ the mysterious day of that awful agency which moulded the heavens and the heavenly host, no more than the ordinary nychthemeron or cycle of twenty-four hours? The period implied in a day^ when used in relation to the inaugural manifestation of creative power in that vast drama which introduces God to man in the character of a demiurgus or creator of the world, indicated one stage amongst six ; in- volving probably many millions of years. The silliest of nurses, in her nursery babble, could hardly suppose that the mighty process began on a Monday morning, and ended on Saturday night. If we are seriously to study the value and scriptural acceptation of scriptural words and phrases, I presume that our first business TO MERELY HUMAN SCIENCE. 79 will be to collate the use of these words in one part of Scripture, with their use in other parts, holding the same spiritual relations. The creation, for instance, does not belong to the earthly or merely historical records, but to the spiritual records of the Bible ; to the same category, therefore, as the prophetic sections of the Bible. Now, in those, and in the Psalms, how do we understand the word day 7 Is any man so little versed in biblical language as not to know, that (except in the merely historical parts of the Jewish records) every section of time has a secret and sepa- rate acceptation in the Scriptures ? Does an cEon^ though a Grecian word, bear scripturally (either in Daniel or in St. John) any sense known to Grecian ears ? Do the seventy lueeks of the prophet mean weeks in the sense of human calendars ? Already the Psalms (xc), already St. Peter (2d Epist.), warn us of a peculiar sense attached to the word day in divine ears. And who of the innumerable interpreters un- derstands the twelve hundred and sixty days in Dan- iel, or his two thousand and odd days, to mean, by possibility, periods of twenty-four hours ? Surely the theme of Moses was as mystical, and as much entitled to the benefit of mystical language, as that of the prophets. The sum of this matter is this : — God, by a He- brew prophet, is sublimely described as the Revealer ; and, in variation of his own expression, the same pro- phet describes him as the Being 'that knoweth the darkness.' Under no idea can the relations of God to man be more grandly expressed. But of what is he the revealer ? Not surely of those things which he has enabled man to reveal for himself, but of those things 80 THE TFwUE RELATIONS OF THE BIBLE, ETC. which, were it not through special light from heaven, must eternally remain sealed up in inaccessible darkness. On this principle we should all laugh at a revealed cookery. But essentially the same ridicule, not more, and not less, applies to a revealed astron- omy, or a revealed geology. As a fact, there is no such astronomy or geology : as a possibility, by the a priori argument which I have used (viz., that a revelation on such fields would counteract other ma- chineries of providence), there can be no such astro- nomy or geology in the Bible. Consequently there is -none. Consequently there can be no schism or feud upon these subjects between the Bible and the philoso- phies outside. SCHLOSSER'S LITERARY HISTORY OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. In the person of this Mr. Schlosser is exemplified a common abuse, not confined to literature. An artist from the Italian opera of London and Paris, making a professional excursion to our provinces, is received according to the tariff of the metropolis ; no one being bold enough to dispute decisions coming down from the courts above. In that particular case there is seldom any reason to complain — since really out of Germany and Italy there is no city, if you except Paris and London, possessing materials^ in that field of art, for the composition of an audience large enough to act as a court of revision. It would be presumption in the provincial audience, so slightly trained to good music and dancing, if it should afTect to reverse a judgment ratified in the supreme capital. The result, therefore, is practically just, if the original verdict was just ; what was right from the first cannot be made wrong- by iteration. Yet, even in such a case, there is some- thing not satisfactory to a delicate sense of equity ; for the artist returns from the tour as if from some new and independent triumph, whereas, all is but the reverberation of an old one ; it seems a new access of sunlight, whereas it is but a reflex illumination from satellites. [81] 82 sciilosser's literary history In literature the corresponding case is worse. An author, passing by means of translation before a foreign people, ought de jure to find himself before a new tribunal ; but de facto ^ he does not. Like the opera artist, but not with the same p.ropriety, he comes before a court that never interferes to disturb a judgment, but only to re-affirm it. And he returns to his native country, quartering in his armorial bearings these new trophies, as though won by new trials, when, in fact, they are due to servile ratifications of old ones. When Sue, or Balzac, Hugo, or George Sand, comes before an English audience — the opportunity is invariably lost for estimating them at a new angle of sight. All who dislike them lay them aside — whilst those only apply themselves seriously to their study, who are predisposed to the particular key of feeling, through which originally these authors had prospered. And thus a new set of judges, that might usefully have modified the narrow views of the old ones, fall by mere inertia into the humble character of echoes and sounding-boards to swell the uproar of the original mob. In this way is thrown away the opportunity, not only of applying corrections to false national tastes, but oftentimes even to the unfair accidents of luck that befall books. For it is well known to all who watch literature with vigilance, that books and authors have their fortunes, which travel upon a far different scale of proportions from those that measure their merits. Not even the caprice or the folly of the reading public is required to account for this. Very often, indeed, the whole difference between an extensive circulation for one book, and none at all for another of about OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 83 equal merit, belongs to no particular blindness in men, but to the simple fact, that the one lias^ whilst the other has not^ been brought efFectually under the eyes of the public. By far the greater part of books are lost, not because they are rejected, but because they are never introduced. In any proper sense of the word, very few books are published. Technically they are published ; which means, that for six or ten times they are advertised^ but they are not made known to attentive ears, or to ears prepared for attention. And amongst the causes which account for this difference in the fortune of books, although there are many, we may reckon, as foremost, personal accidents of position in the authors. For instance, with us in England it will do a bad book no ultimate service, that it is written by a lord, or a bishop, or a privy counsellor, or a member of Parliament — though, undoubtedly, il will do an instant service — it will sell an edition or so. This being the case, it being certain that no rank will reprieve a bad writer from final condemnation, the sycophantic glorifier of the public fancies his idol justified ; but not so. A bad book, it is true, will not be saved by advantages of position in the author ; but a book moderately good will be extravagantly aided by such advantages. Lectures on Christianity^ that hap- pened to be respectably written and delivered, had prodigious success in my young days, because, also, they happened to be lectures of a prelate ; three times the ability would not have procured them any attention had they been the lectures of an obscure curate. Yet^ on the other hand, it is but justice to say, that, if written with three times less ability, lawn-sleeves would not have given them buoyancy, but, on the contrary, 84 schlosser's literary history they would have sunk the bishop irrecoverably ; whilst the curate, favored by obscurity, would have survived for another chance. So again, and indeed, more than so, as to poetry. Lord Carlisle, of the last generation, wrote tolerable verses. They were better than Lord Roscommon's, which, for one hundred and fifty years, the judicious public has allowed the booksellers to incorporate, along with other refuse of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, into the costly collections of the ' British Poets.' And really, if you will insist on odious comparisons, they were not so very much below the verses of an amiable prime minister known to us all. Yet, because they wanted vital stamina,, not only they fell, but, in falling, they caused the earl to reel much more than any commoner would have done. Now, on the other hand, a kinsman of Lord Carlisle, viz.. Lord Byron, because he brought real genius and power to the effort, found a vast auxiliary advantage in a peerage and a very ancient descent. On these double wings he soared into a region of public interest, far higher than ever he would have reached by poetic power alone. Not only all his rubbish — which in quantity is great — passed for jewels, but also what are incontestably jewels have been, and will be, valued at a far higher rate than if they had been raised from less aristocratic mines. So fatal for mediocrity, so gracious for real power, is any adventitious distinction from birth, station, or circumstances of brilliant noto- riety. In reality, the public, our never-sufficiently-to- be-respected mother, is the most unutterable sycophant that ever the clouds dropped their rheum upon. She is always ready for Jacobinical scoffs at a man - for being a lord, if he happens to fail ; she is always OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTXTRY. 85 ready for toadying a lord, if he happens to make a hit. Ah, dear sycophantic old lady, I kiss your syco- phantic hands, and wish heartily that I were a duke for your sake ! It would be a mistake to fancy that this tendency to confound real merit and its accidents of position is at all peculiar to us or to our age. Dr. Sacheverel], by embarking his small capital of talent on the spring- tide of a furious political collision, brought back an ampler return for his little investment than ever did Wickliffe or Luther. Such was his popularity in the heart of love and the heart of hatred, that he would have been assassinated by the Whigs, on his triumphal progresses through England, had he not been canon- ized by the Tories. He was a dead man if he had not been suddenly gilt and lacquered as an idol. Neither is the case peculiar at all to England. Ronge, the ci-devant Romish priest (whose name pronounce as you would the English word wrongs supposing that it had for a second syllable the final a of ' sopha,' i. e., Wronguh), has been found a wrong-headed man by all parties, and in a venial degree is, perhaps, a stupid man ; but he moves about with more eclat by far than the ablest man in Germany. And, in days of old, the man that burned down a miracle of beauty, viz., the temple of Ephesus, protesting, with tears in his eyes, that he had no other way of getting himself a name, has got it in spite of us all. He's booked for a ride down all history, whether you and I like it or not. Every pocket dictionary knows that Erostratus was that scamp. So of Martin, the man that parboiled, or par-roasted York Minster some ten or twelve years back ; that fellow will float down to posterity with the annals of the glorious cathedral : he will 86 schlosser's literary history « Pursue tlie triumpli and partake the gale,' whilst the founders and benefactors of the Minster are practically forgotten. These incendiaries, in short, are as well known as Ephesus or York ; but not one of us can tell, without humming and hawing, who it was that rebuilt the Ephesian wonder of the world, or that repaired the time-honored Minster. Equally in literature, not the weight of service done, or the power exerted, is some- times considered chiefly — either of these must be very conspicuous before it will be considered at all — but the splendor, or the notoriety, or the absurdity, or even the scandalousness of the circumstances^ sur- rounding the author. Schlosser must have benefitted in some such adven- titious way before he ever could have risen to his Ger- man celebrity. What was it that raised him to his momentary distinction.? Was it something very wick- ed that he did, or something very brilliant that he said } I should rather conjecture that it must have been something inconceivably absurd which he pro- posed. Any one of the three achievements stands good in Germany for a reputation. But, however it were that Mr. Schlosser first gained his reputation, mark what now follows. On the wings of this equivo- cal reputation he flies abroad to Paris and London. There he thrives, not by any approving experience or knowledge of his works, but through blind faith in his original German public. And back he flies afterwards to Germany, as if carrying with him new and inde- pendent testimonies to his merit, and from two nations that are directly concerned in his violent judgments ; whereas (which is the simple truth) he carries back a OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 87 (iareless reverberation of his first German character, from those who have far too much to read for declining- aid from vicarious criticism when it will spare that eifort to themselves. Thus it is that German critics become audacious and libellous. Kohl, Von Raumer, Dr. Carus, physician to the King of Saxony, by means of introductory letters floating them into circles far above any they had seen in homely Germany, are qualified by our own negligence and indulgence for mounting a European tribunal, from which they pro- nounce malicious edicts against ourselves. Sentinels present arms to Von Raumer at Windsor, because he rides in a carriage of Queen Adelaide's ; and Von Raumer immediately conceives himself the Chancellor of all Christendom, keeper of the conscience to uni- versal Europe, upon all questions of art, manners, politics, or any conceivable intellectual relations of England, Schlosser meditates the same career. But have I any right to quote Schlosser's words from an English translation ? I do so only because this happens to be at hand, and the German not. Ger- man books are still rare in this country, though more (by one thousand to one) than they were thirty years ago. But I have a full right to rely 'on the English of Mr. Davison. 'I hold in my hand,' as gentlemen so often say at public meetings, ' a certificate from Herr Schlosser, that to quote Mr. Davison is to quote 7im.' The English translation is one which Mr. Schlosser '• durchgelesen hat^undfur deren genauigkeit und rich' tigkeit er liirgt [has read through, and for the ac- curacy and propriety of which he pledges himself]. Mr. Schossler was so anxious for the spiritual wel- fare of us poor islanders, that he not only read it 88 scHLOSSEa's literary history through, but he has even avfmerksam durchgelesen it [read it through wide awake] unci gepruft [and care- fully examined it] ; nay, he has done all this in com- pany with the translator. ' Oh ye Athenians ! how hard do I labor to earn your applause ! ' And, as the result of such herculean labors, a second time he makes himself surety for its precision ; ' er hurgt also dofur wie fur seine eigne arheit ' [he guarantees it accordingly as he would his own workmanship]. Were it not for this unlimited certificate, I should have sent for the book to Germany. As it is, I need not wait ; and all complaints on this score I defy, above all from Herr Schlosser.^ In dealing with an author so desultory as Mr. Schlosser, the critic has a right to an extra allowance of desultoriness for his own share ; so excuse me, reader, for rushing at once in medias res. Of Swift, Mr. Schlosser selects for notice three works — the ' Drapier's Letters,' ' Gulliver's Travels,' and the ' Tale of a Tub.' With respect to the first, as it is a necessity of Mr. S. to be forever wrong in his substratum of facts, he adopts the old erroneous account of Wood's contract as to the copper coinage, and of the imaginary wrong which it inflicted on Ire- land. Of all Swift's villainies for the sake of popu- larity, and still more for the sake of wielding this popularity vindictively, none is so scandalous as this. In any new life of Swift the case must be stated de novo. Even Sir Walter Scott is not impartial ; and for the same reason as now forces me to blink it, viz., the difficulty of presenting the details in a readable shape. 'Gulliver's Travels' Schlosser strangely con- siders ' spun out to an intolerable extent.' Many evil OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUKi". 89 things might be said of Gulliver ; but not this. The captain is anything but tedious. And, indeed, it be- comes a question of mere mensuration, that can be settled in a moment. A year or two since I had in my hands a pocket edition, comprehending all the four parts of the worthy skipper's adventures within a sin- gle volume of 420 pages. Some part of the space was also wasted on notes, often very idle. Now the 1st part contains two separate voyages (Lilliput and Ble- fuscu), the 2d, one, the 3d, jive, and the 4th, one ; so that, in all, this active navigator, who has enriched geography, I hope, with something of a higher quality than your old muffs that thought much of doubling Cape Horn, here gives us nine great discoveries, far more surprising than the pretended discoveries of Sin- bad (which are known to be fabulous), averaging quam proxime, forty-seven small 16mo pages each. Oh you unconscionable German, built round in your own country with circumvallations of impregnable 4tos, oftentimes dark and dull as Avernus — that you will have the face to describe dear excellent Captain Lemuel Gulliver of RedrifF, and subsequently of New- ark, that ' darling of children and men,' as tedious. It is exactly because he is not tedious, because he does not shoot into German foliosity, that Schlosser finds him ' intolerahle.'' I have justly transferred to Gul- liver's use the words originally applied by the poet to the robin-redbreast, for it is remarkable that Gulliver and the Arabian Nights are amongst the few books where children and men find themselves meeting and jostling each other. This was the case from its first publication, just one hundred and tv/enty years since. ' It was received,' says Dr. Johnson, ' with such 90 SCHLOSSEPt's LITERARY HISTORY avidity, that the price of the first edition was raised before the second could be made — it was read by the high and the low, the learned and the illiterate. Crit- icism was lost in wonder. Now, on the contrary, Schlosser wonders not at all, but simply criticises; which we could bear, if the criticism were even in- genious. Whereas, he utterly misunderstands Swift, and is a malicious calumniator of the captain who, luckily, roaming in Sherwood, and thinking, often with a sigh, of his little nurse,^ Glumdalclitch, would trouble himself slightly about what Heidelberg might say in the next century. There is but one example on our earth of a novel received with such indiscriminate applause as ' Gulliver ; ' and tliot was ' Don Quixote.' Many have been welcomed joyfully by a class — these two by a people. Now, could that have happened had it been characterized by dulne.ss ? Of all faults, it could least have had that. As to the ' Tale of a Tub,' Schlosser is in such Cimmerian vapors that no system of bellows could blow open a shaft or tube through which he might gain a glimpse of the English truth and daylight. It is useless talking to such a man on such a subject. I consign him to the attentions of some patriotic Irishman. Schlosser, however, is right in a graver reflection which he makes upon the prevailing philosophy of Swift, viz., that ' all his views were directed towards what was immediately beneficial, which is the charac- teristic of savages.' This is undeniable. The mean- ness of Swift's nature, and his rigid incapacity for dealing with the grandeurs of the human spirit, with religion, with poetry, or even with science, when it rose above the mercenary practical, is absolutely ap- OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 91 palling. His own yaJioo is not a more abominable one-sided degradation of humanity, than is he himself under this aspect. And, perhaps, it places this inca- pacity of his in its strongest light, when we recur to the fact of his astonishment at a religious princess re- fusing to confer a bishoprick upon one that had treated the Trinity, and all the profoundest mysteries of Chris- tianity, not with mere scepticism, or casual sneer, but with set pompous merriment and farcical buffoonery. This dignitary of the church. Dean of the most con- spicuous cathedral in Ireland, had, in full canonicals, made himself into a regular mountebank, for the sake of giving fuller effect, by the force of contrast, to the silliest of jests directed against all that was most inalienable from Christianity. Ridiculing such things, could he, in any just sense, be thought a Christian ? But, as Schlosser justly remarks, even ridiculing the peculiarities of Luther and Calvin as he did ridicule them. Swift could not be thought other than constitu- tionally incapable of religion. Even a Pagan philoso- pher, if made to understand the case, would be inca- pable of scofhng at any/orm, natural or casual, simple or distorted, which might be assumed by the most solemn of problems — problems that rest with the weight of worlds upon the human spirit — ' Fix'd fate, free-will, fore-knowledge absolute.' the destiny of man, or the relations of man to God. Anger, therefore, Swift might feel, and he felt it * to the end of his most wretched life ; but what reasonable ground had a man of sense for astonishment — that a princess, who (according to her knowledge) was sin- * See Ms bitter letters to Lady Suffolk. 92 schlosser's literary history cerely pious, should decline to place such a man upon an Episcopal throne ? This argues, beyond a doubt, that Swift was in that state of constitutional irreligion, irreligion from a vulgar temperament, which imputes to everybody else its own plebeian feelings. People differed, he fancied, not by more and less religion, but by more and less dissimulations. And, therefore, it seemed to him scandalous that a princess, who must, of course, in her heart regard (in common with him- self ) all mysteries as solemn masques and mummeries, should pretend in a case of downright serious business, to pump up, out of dry conventional hoaxes, any solid objection to a man of his shining merit. ' The Trinity^'' for instance, that he viewed as the password, which the knowing ones gave in answer to the challenge of the sentinel ; but, as soon as it had obtained admission for the party within the gates of the camp, it was rightly dismissed to oblivion or to laughter. No case so much illustrates Swift's essential irreligion ; since, if he had shared in ordinary human feelings on such subjects, not only he could not have been surprised at his own exclusion from the bench of bishops, after such ribaldries, but originally he would have abstained from them as inevitable bars to clerical promotion, even upon principles of public decorum. As to the style of Swift, Mr. Schlosser shows him- self without sensibility in his objections, as the often hackneyed English reader shows himself without phi- losophic knowledge of style in his applause. Schlosser thinks the style of Gulliver ' somewhat dull.' This shows Schlosser's presumption in speaking upon a point where he wanted, 1st, original delicacy of tact ; and, 2dly, familiar knowledge of English. Gulliver's OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 93 Style is purposely touched slightly with that dulness of circumstantiality which besets the excellent, but ' some- what dull' race of men — old sea captains. Yet it wears only an aerial tint of dulness; the felicity of this coloring in Swift's management is, that it never goes the length of wearying, but only of giving a comic air of downright Wapping and Rotherhithe verisimilitude. All men grow dull, and ought to be dull, that live under a solemn sense of eternal danger, one inch only of plank (often worm-eaten) between themselves and the grave ; and, also, that see for ever one wilderness of waters — sublime, but (like the wil- derness on shore) monotonous. All sublime people, being monotonous, have a tendency to be dull, and sublime things also. Milton and yEschylus, the sublimest of men, are crossed at times by a shade of dulness. It is their weak side. But as to a sea cap- tain, a regular nor'-nor'-wester, and sou'-sou'-easter, he ought to be kicked out of the room if he is not dull. It is not ' ship-shape,' or barely tolerable, that he should be otherwise. Yet, after all, considering what I have stated about Captain Gulliver's nine voyages crowding into one pocket volume, he cannot really have much abused his professional license for being dull. Indeed, one has to look out an excuse for his being so little dull ; which excuse is found in the fact that he had studied three years at a learned university. Captain Gulliver, though a sailor, I would have you to know, was a gownsman of Cambridge : so says Swift, who knew more about the Captain than anybody now- a-days. Cantabs are all horsemen, ergo^ Gulliver was fit for any thing, from the wooden shoon of Cambridge up to the Horse Marines. 94 schlosser's literary history Now, on the other hand, you, common-place reader, that (as an old tradition) believe Swift's style to be a model of excellence, hereafter I shall say a word to you, drawn from deeper principles. At present I con- tent myself with these three propositions, which over- throw if you can ; — 1. That the merit, which justly you ascribe to Swift, is vernacular ity ; he never forgets his mother-tongue in exotic forms, unless we may call Irish exotic ; for Hibernicisms he certainly has. This merit, however, is exhibited — not, as you fancy, in a graceful artless- ness, but in a coarse inartificial ity. To be artless, and to be inartificial, are very different things ; as different as being natural and being gross ; as different as being simple and being homely. 2. That whatever, meantime, be the particular sort of excellence, or the value of the excellence, in the style of Swift, he had it in common with multitudes beside of that age. De Foe wrote a style for all the world the same as to kind and degree of excellence, only pure from Hibernicisms. So did every honest skipper [Dampier was something more] who had occa- sion to record his voyages in this world of storms. So did many a hundred of religious writers. And what wonder should there be in this, when the main qualifi- cation for such a style was plain good sense, natural feeling, unpretendingness, some little scholarly practice in putting together the clockwork of sentences, so as to avoid mechanical awkwardness of construction, but above all the advantage of a subject^ such in its nature as instinctively to reject ornament, lest it should draw off attention from itself ? Such subjects are common ; but grand impassioned subjects insist upon a different OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 95 treatment ; and there it is that the true difficulties of style commence. 3. [Which partly is suggested by the last remark.] That nearly all the blockheads with whom I have at any time had the pleasure of conversing upon the subject of style (and pardon me for saying that men of the most sense are apt, upon two subjects, viz., poetry and style, to talk most like blockheads), have invariably regarded Swift's style not as if relatively good \i. e. given a proper subject], but as if absolutely good — good un- conditionally, no matter what the subject. Now, my friend, suppose the case, that the Dean had been re- quired to write a pendant for Sh' Walter Raleigh's im- mortal apostrophe to Death, or to many passages that I will select in Sir Thomas Brown's ' Religio Medici,' and his ' Urn-burial,' or to Jeremy Taylor's inaugural sections of his ' Holy Living and Dying,' do you know what would have happened ? Are you aware what sort of ridiculous figure your poor bald Jonathan would have cut ? About the same that would be cut by a forlorn scullion or waiter from a greasy eating-house at Rotter- dam, if suddenly called away in vision to act as senes- chal to the festival of Belshazzar the king, before a thousand of his lords. Schlosser, after saying any thing right and true (and he really did say the true thing about Swift's essential irreligion), usually becomes exhausted, like a boa-con- strictor after eating his half-yearly dinner. The boa gathers himself up, it is to be hoped for a long fit of dvspepsy, in which the horns and hoofs that he has swallowed may chance to avenge the poor goat that owned them. Schlosser, on the other hand, retires into a corner, for the purpose of obstinately talking 96 schlosser's literary history nonsense, until the gong sounds again for a slight re- fection of sense. Accordingly he likens Swift, before he has done with him, to whom ? I might safely allow the reader three years for guessing, if the greatest of wagers were depending between us. He likens him to Kotzebue, in the first place. How faithful the resem- blance ! How exactly Swift reminds you of Count Benyowski in Siberia, and of Mrs. Haller moping her eyes in the ' Stranger ! ' One really is puzzled to say, according to the negro's logic, whether Mrs. H^aller is more like the Dean of St. Patrick's, or the Dean more like Mrs. Haller. Anyhow, the likeness is prodigious, if it is not quite reciprocal. The other terminus of the comparison is Wieland. Now there is some shadow of a resemblance there. For Wieland had a touch of the comico-cynical in his nature ; and it is notorious that he was often called the German Voltaire, which argues some tiger-monkey grin that traversed his fea- tures at intervals. Wieland's malice, however, was far more playful and genial than Swift's ; something of this is shown in his romance of ' Idris,' and oftentimes in his prose. But what the world knows Wieland by is his ' Oberon.' Now in this gay, musical romance of Sir Huon and his enchanted horn, with its gleams of voluptuousness, is there a possibility that any sugges- tion of a scowling face like Swift's should cross the festal scenes ? From Swift the scene changes to Addison and Steele. Steele is of less importance ; for, though a man of greater intellectual activity ^ than Addison, he had far less of genius. So I turn him out, as one would turn out upon a heath a ram that had missed his way OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 97 into one's tulip preserve ; requesting him to fight for himself against Schlosser, or others that may molest him. But, so far as concerns Addison, I am happy to support the character of Schlosser for consistency, by assuring the reader that, of all the monstrosities uttered by any man upon Addison, and of all the monstrosities uttered by Schlosser upon any man, a thing which he says about Addison is the worst. But this I reserve for a climax at the end. Schlosser really puts his best leg foremost at starting, and one thinks he's going to mend ; for he catches a truth, viz., the following — that all the brilliances of the Queen Anne period (which so many inconsiderate people have called the Augustan age of our literature) ' point to this — that the reading public wished to be entertained, not roused to think ; to be gently moved, not deeply excited.' Undoubtedly what strikes a man in Addison, or icill strike him when indi- cated, is the coyness and timidity, almost the girlish shame, which he betrays in the presence of all the ele- mentary majesties belonging to impassioned or idealized nature. Like one bred in crowded cities, when first left alone in forests or amongst mountains, he is fright- ened at their silence, their solitude, their magnitude of form, or their frowning glooms. It has been remarked by others that Addison and his companions never rise to the idea of addressing the ' nation ' or the ' people ; ' it is always the ' town.' Even their audience was con- ceived of by them under a limited form. Yet for this they had some excuse in the state of facts. A man would like at this moment to assume that Europe and Asia were listening to him ; and as some few copies of his book do really go to Paris and Naples, some to Calcutta, there is a sort of legal fiction that such an 9 98 schlosser's literary history assumption is steadily taking root. Yet, unhappily, that ugly barrier of languages interferes. Schamyl, the Circassian chief, though much of a savage, is not so wanting in taste and discernment as to be backward in reading any book of yours or mine. Doubtless he yearns to read it. But then, you see, that infernal Tchirkass language steps between our book, the dar- ling, and him, the discerning reader. Now, just such a barrier existed for the Spectator in the travelling ar- rangements of England. The very few old heavies that had begun to creep along three or four main roads, depended so much on wind and weather, their chances of foundering were so uncalculated, their periods of revolution were so cometary and uncertain, that no body of scientific observations had yet been collected to warrant a prudent man in risking a heavy bale of goods ; and, on the whole, even for York, Norwich, or Winchester, a consignment of ' Specs ' was not quite a safe spec. Still, I could have told the Spectator who was anxious to make money, where he might have been sure of a distant sale, though returns would have been slow, viz., at Oxford and Cambridge. We know from Milion that old Hobson delivered his parcels pretty regularly eighty years before 1710. And, one generation before that, it is plain, by the interesting (though somewhat Jacobinical) letters ^ of Joseph Mode, the commenter on the Apocalypse, that news and poli- tics of one kind or other (and scandal of every kind) found out for themselves a sort of contraband lungs to breathe through between London and Cambridge ; not quite so regular in their systole and diastole as the tides of ebb and flood, but better than nothing. If you con- signed a packet into the proper hands on the 1st of OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 99 May, 'as sure as death' to speak Scottice) it would be delivered within Sixty miles of the capital before mid- summer. Still there were delays ; and these forced a man into carving his world out of London. That excuses the word toivii. Inexcusable, however, were many other forms of ex- pression in those days, which argued cowardly feel- ings. One would like to see a searching investigation into the state of society in Anne's days — its extreme artificiality, its sheepish reserve upon all the impas- sioned grandeurs, its shameless outrages upon all the decencies of human nature. Certain it is, that Addi- son (because everybody) was in that meanest of condi- tions which blushes at any expression of sympathy with the lovely, the noble, or the impassioned. The wretches were ashamed of their own nature, and perhaps with reason ; for in their own denaturalized hearts they read only a degraded nature. Addison, in particular, shrank from every bold and every profound expression as from an offence against good taste. He durst not for his life have used the word ' passion ' except in the vulgar sense of an angry paroxysm. He durst as soon have danced a hornpipe on the top of the ' monument ' as have talked of a ' rapturous emotion.' What would he have said ? Why, ' sentiments that were of a nature to prove agreeable after an unusual rate.' In their odious verses, the creatures of that age talk of love as some- thing that ' burns ' them. You suppose at first that they are discoursing of tallow candles, though you can- not imagine by what impertinence they address you^ that are no tallow-chandler, upon such painful subjects. And, when they apostrophize the woman of their heart (for you are to understand that they pretend to such an 100 SCHLOSSEU'S LITERARY HISTORY organ), they beseech her to 'ease their pain.' Can human meanness descend lower ? As if the man, being ill from pleurisy, therefore had a right to take a lady for one of the dressers in an hospital, whose duty it would be to fix a burgundy-pitch plaster between his shoulders. Ah, the monsters ! Then to read of their Phillises and Strephons, and Cliloes, and Corydons — names that, by their very non-reality amongst names of flesh and blood, proclaim the fantasticalness of the life with which they are poetically connected — it throws me into such con- vulsions of rage, that I move to the window, and (with- out thinking what I am about) throwing it up, calling, ' Police ! police ! ' What's iJiat for ? What can the police do in the business ? Why, certainly nothing. What I meant in my dream was, perhaps [but one for- gets loliat one meant upon recovering one's temper], that the police should take Strephon and Corydon into custody, whom I fancied at the other end of the room. And really the justifiable fury, that arises upon recalling such abominable attempts at bucolic sentiments in such abominable language, sometimes transports me into a luxurious vision sinking back through one hundred and thirty years, in which I see Addison, Phillips, both John and Ambrose, Tickell, Fickell, Budgell, and Cudgell, with many others beside, all cudgelled in a round robin, none claiming precedency of another, none able to shrink from his own dividend, until a voice seems to recall me to milder thoughts by saying, ' But surely, my friend, you never could wish to see Addison cudg- elled ? Let Strephon and Corydon be cudgelled with- out end, if the police can show any warrant for doing it But Addison was a man of great genius.' True, he was so. I recollect it suddenly, and will back out OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 101 of any angry things that I have been misled into saying by Schlosser, who, by-the-bye, was right, after all, for a wonder. But now I will turn my whole fury in vengeance upon Schlosser. And, looking round for a stone to throw at him, I observe this. Addison could not be so entirely careless of exciting the public to think and feel, as Schlosser pretends, when he took so much pains to inoculate that public with a sense of the Mil- tonic grandeur. The ' Paradise Lost ' had then been published barely forty years, which was nothing in an age without reviews ; the editions were still scanty ; and though no Addison could eventually promote, for the instant he quickened, the circulation. If I recol- lect, Tonson's accurate revision of the text followed immediately upon Addison's papers. And it is certain that Addison 6 must have diffused the knowledge of Milton upon the continent, from signs that soon fol- lowed. But does not this prove that I myself have been in the wrong as well as Schlosser ? No : that 's impossible. Schlosser 's always in the wrong; but it's the next thing to an impossibility that I should be de- tected in an error : philosophically speaking, it is sup- posed to involve a contradiction. ' But surely I said the very same thing as Schlosser by assenting to what he said.' Maybe I did : but then I have time to make a distinction, because my article is not yet finished ; we are only at page six or seven ; whereas Schlosser can't make any distinction now, because his book's printed ; and his list of errata (which is shocking though he does not confess to the thousandth part), is actually published. My distinction is — that, though Addison generally hated the impassioned, and shrank 102 schlosser's literary history from it as from a fearful thing, yet this was when it combined with forms of hfe and fleshy reahties (as in dramatic works), but not when it combined with elder forms of eternal abstractions. Hence, he did not read, and did not like Shakspeare ; the music was here too rapid and life-like : but he sympathized pro- foundly with the solemn cathedral chanting of Milton. An appeal to his sympathies which exacted quick changes in those sympathies he could not meet, but a more stationary key of solemnity he could. Indeed, this difference is illustrated daily. A long list can be cited of passages in Shakspeare, which have been solemnly denounced by many eminent men (all block- heads) as ridiculous : and if a man does find a passage in a tragedy that displeases him, it is sure to seem ludicrous : witness the indecent exposures of them- selves made by Voltaire, La Harpe, and many billions beside of bilious people. Whereas, of all the shameful people (equally billions and not less bilious) that have presumed to quarrel with Milton, not one has thought him ludicrous, but only dull and somnolent. In 'Lear' and in ' Hamlet,' as in a human face agitated by passion, are many things that tremble on the brink of the ludicrous to an observer endowed with small range of sympathy or intellect. But no man ever found the starry heavens ludicrous, though many find them dull, and prefer a near view of a brandy flask. So in the solemn wheelings of the Miltonic movement, Addison could find a sincere delight. But the sub- limities of earthly misery and of human frenzy were for him a book sealed. Beside all which, Milton re- newed the types of Grecian beauty as to form^ whilst Shakspeare, without designing at all to contradict these OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 103 types, did so, in effect, by his fidelity to a new nature, radiating from a Gothic centre. Jn the midst, however, of much just feeling, which one could only wish a little deeper, in the Addisonian papers on ' Paradise Lost,' there are some gross blun- ders of criticism, as there are in Dr. Johnson, and from the self-same cause — an understanding suddenly palsied from defective passion. A feeble capacity of passion must, upon a question of passion, constitute a feeble range of intellect. But, after all, the worst thing uttered by Addison in these papers is, not against Milton, but meant to be complimentary. To- wards enhancing the splendor of the great poem, he tells us that it is a Grecian palace as to amplitude, symmetry, and architectural skill : but being in the English language, it is to be regarded as if built in brick ; whereas, had it been so happy as to be written in Greek, then it would have been a palace built in Parian marble. Indeed! that's smart — 'that's hand- some, I calculate.' Yet, before a man undertakes to sell his mother-tongue, as old pewter trucked against gold, he should be quite sure of his own metallurgic skill ; because else, the gold may happen to be copper, and the pewter to be silver. Are you quite sure, my Addison, that you have understood the powers of this language which you toss away so lightly, as an old tea-kettle ? Is it a ruled case that you have exhausted its resources ? Nobody doubts your grace in a certain line of composition, but it is only one line among many, and it is far from being amongst the highest. It is dangerous, without examination, to sell even old kettles ; misers conceal old stockings filled with guineas in old tea-kettles ; and we all know that 104 schlosser's literary history Aladdin's servant, by exchanging an old lamp for a new one, caused an Iliad of calamities : his master's palace jumped from Bagdad to some place on the road to Ashantee ; Mrs. Aladdin and the piccaninies were carried off as inside passengers ; and Aladdin himself only escaped being lagged, for a rogue and a conjuror, by a flying jump after his palace. Now, mark the folly of man. Most of the people I am going to men- tion subscribed, generally, to the supreme excellence of Milton ; but each wished for a little change to be made — which, and which only was wanted to per- fection. Dr. Johnson, though he pretended to be satisfied with the ' Paradise Lost,' even in what he re- garded as the undress of blank verse, still secretly wished it in rhyme. That's No. 1. Addison, though quite content with it in English, still could have wished it in Greek. That's No. 2. Bentley, though admiring the blind old poet in the highest degree, still observed, smilingly, that after all he was blind ; he, therefore, slashing Dick, could have wished that the great man had always been surrounded by honest people ; but, as that was not to be, he could have wished that his amanuensis has been hanged ; but, as that also had become impossible, he could wish to do execution upon him in effigy, by sinking, burning, and destroying his handywork — upon which basis of posthumous justice, he proceeded to amputate all the finest passages in the poem. Slashing Dick was No. 3. Payne Knight was a severer man even than slashing Dick ; he professed to look upon the first book of ' Paradise Lost' as the finest thing that earth had to show ; but, for that very reason, he could have wished, by your leave, to see the other eleven books sawed off, and sent overboard ; OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 105 because, though tolerable perhaps in another situation, they really were a national disgrace, when standing be- hind that unrivalled portico of book 1. There goes No. 4. Then came a fellow, whose name was either not on his title page, or I have forgotten it, that pro- nounced the poem to be laudable, a-nd full of good materials ; but still he could have wished that the ma- terials had been put together in a more workmanlike manner ; which kind office he set about himself. He made a general clearance of all lumber : the ex- pression of every thought he entirely re-cast : and he fitted up the metre with beautiful patent rhymes ; not, I believe, out of any consideration for Dr. Johnson's comfort, but on principles of mere abstract decency : as it was, the poem seemed naked, and yet was not ashamed. There went No. 5. Him succeeded a droller fellow than any of the rest. A French book- seller had caused a prose French translation to be made of the ' Paradise Lost,' without particularly no- ticing its English origin, or at least not in the title page. Our friend. No. 6, getting hold of this as an original French romance, translated it back into En- glish prose, as a satisfactory novel for the season. His little mistake was at length discovered, and communi- cated to him with shouts of laughter ; on which, after considerable kicking and plunging (for a man cannot but turn restive when he finds that he has not only got the wrong sow by the ear, but actually sold the sow to a bookseller), the poor translator was tamed into sulki- ness ; in which state he observed that he could have wished his own work, being evidently so much supe- rior to the earliest form of the romance, might be admitted by the courtesy of England to take the pre- 106 schlosser's literary history cedency as the original ' Paradise Lost,' and to super- sede the very rude performance of ' Mihon, Mr. John.' 7 Schlosser makes the astounding assertion, that a com- pliment of Boileau to Addison,. and a pure compliment of ceremony upon Addison's early Latin verses, was (credit e poster i !) the making of Addison in England. Understand, Schlosser, that Addison's Latin verses were never heard of by England, until long after his English prose had fixed the public attention upon him ; his Latin reputation was a slight reaction from his English reputation : and, secondly, understand that Boileau had at no time any such authority in England as to make anybody's reputation ; he had first of all to make his own. A sure proof of this is, that Boileau's name was first published to London, by Prior's bur- lesque of what the Frenchman had called an ode. This gasconading ode celebrated the passage of the Rhine in 1672, and the capture of that famous fortress called Skink (' le fameux fort de '), by Louis XIV., known to London at the time of Prior's parody by the name of 'Louis Baboon.' ^ That was not likely to recommend Master Boileau to any of the allies against the said Baboon, had it ever been heard of out of France. Nor was it likely to make him popular in England, that his name was first mentioned amongst shouts of laughter and mockery. It is another argument of the slight notoriety possessed by Boileau in England — that no attempt was ever made to translate even his satires, epistles, or ' Lutrin,' except by booksellers' hacks ; and that no such version ever took the slightest root amongst ourselves, from Addison's day to this very summer of 1847. Boileau was essentially, and OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 107 in two senses, viz., both as to mind and as to influence, un homme borne. Addison's 'Blenheim' is poor enough; one might think it a translation from some German original of those times. Gottsched's aunt, or Bodmer's wet-nurse, might have written it; but still no fibs even as to ' Blenheim.' His ' enemies ' did not say this thing against ' Blenheim ' ' aloud,' nor his friends that thing against it ' softly.' And why ? Because at that time (1704-5) he had made no particular enemies, nor any particular friends ; unless by friends you mean his Whig patrons, arid by enemies his tailor and co. As to ' Cato,' Schlosser, as usual, wanders in the shadow of ancient night. The English ' people,' it seems, so ' extravagantly applauded ' this wretched drama, that you might suppose them to have ' alto- gether changed their nature,' and to have forgotten Shakspeare. That man must have forgotten Shak- speare, indeed, and from ramollissement of the brain, who could admire ' Cato.' ' But,' says Schlosser, ' it was only a ' fashion ; ' and the English soon re- pented.' The English could not repent of a crime which they had never committed. Cato was not popu- lar for a moment, nor tolerated for a moment, upon any literary ground, or as a work of art. It was an apple of temptation and strife thrown by the goddess of faction between two infuriated parties. ' Cato,' coming from a man without Parliamentary connections, would have dropped lifeless to the ground. The Whigs have always affected a special love and favor for popular counsels : they have never ceased to give themselves the best of characters as regards public freedom. The Tories, as contradistinguished to the 108 schlosser's literary history Jacobites, knowing that without their aid, the Revo- lution could not have been carried, most justly con- tended that the national liberties had been at least as much indebted to themselves. When, therefore, the Whigs put forth their man Cato to mouth speeches about liberty, as exclusively their pet, and about patriotism and all that sort of thing, saying insultingly to the Tories, ' How do you like that 7 Does that sting ? ' ' Sting, indeed ! ' replied the Tories ; ' not at all; it's quite refreshing to us, that the Whigs have not utterly disowned such sentiments, which, by their public acts, we really thought they had,'' And, ac- cordingly, as the popular anecdote tells us, a Tory leader. Lord Bolingbroke, sent for Booth who per- formed Cato, and presented him (populo spectante) with fifty guineas ' for defending so well the cause of the people against a perpetual dictator.' In which words, observe. Lord Bolingbroke at once asserted the cause of his own party, and launched a sarcasm against a great individual opponent, viz., Marlborough. Now, Mr. Schlosser, I have mended your harness : all right ahead ; so drive on once more. But, oh Castor and Pollux, whither — in what di- rection is it, that the man is driving us ? Positively, Schlosser, you must stop and let me get out. I '11 go no further with such a drunken coachman. Many another absurd thing I was going to have noticed, such as his utter perversion of what Mandeville said about Addison (viz., by suppressing one word, and misap- prehending all the rest). Such, again, as his point- blank misstatement of Addison's infirmity in his official character, which was not that ' he could not prepare despatches in a good style,' but diametrically OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 109 the opposite case — that he insisted too much on style, to the serious retardation of public business. But ail these things are as nothing to what Schlosser says elsewhere. He actually describes Addison, on the whole, as a ' dull prosaist,' and the patron of pedantry ! Addison, the man of all that ever lived most hostile even to what was good in pedantry, to its tendencies towards the profound in erudition and the non-popular ; Addison, the champion of all that is easy, natural, superficial, a pedant and a master of pedantry ! Get down, Schlosser, this moment ; or let me get out. Pope, by far the most important writer, English or Continental, of his own age, is treated with more ex- tensive ignorance by Mr. Schlosser than any other, and (excepting Addison) with more ambitious injustice. A false abstract is given, or a false impression, .of any one amongst his brilliant works, that is noticed at all ; and a false sneer, a sneer irrelevant to the case, at any work dismissed by name as unworthy of notice. The three works, selected as the gems of Pope's collection, are the ' Essay on Criticism,' the ' Rape of the Lock,' and the ' Essay on Man.' On the first, which (with Dr. Johnson's leave) is the feeblest and least interesting of Pope's writings, being substantially a mere versifi- cation, like a metrical multiplication-table, of common- places the most mouldy with which criticism has baited its rat-traps ; since nothing is said worth answering, it is sufficient to answer nothing. The ' E,ape of the Lock' is treated with the same delicate sensibility that we might have looked for in Brennus, if consulted on the picturesque, or in Attila the Hun, if adjured to de- cide sesthetically, between two rival cameos. Attila is 110 schlosser's liteeary history said (though no doubt falsely) to have described him- self as not properly a man so much as the Divine wrath incarnate. This would be fine in a melodrama, with Bengal lights burning on the stage. But, if ever he said such a naughty thing, he forgot to tell us what it was that had made him angry ; by what title did he come into alliance with the Divine wrath, which was not likely to consult a savage ? And why did his wrath hurry, by forced marches, to the Adriatic ? Now so much do people differ in opinion, that, to us, who look at him through a telescope from an eminence, fourteen centuries distant, he takes the shape rather of a Mahratta trooper, painfully gathering chout, or a cateran levying black-mail, or a decent tax-gatherer with an inkhorn at his bulton-hole, and supported by a select party of constabulary friends. The very natural instinct which Attila always showed for following the trail of the wealthiest footsteps, seems to argue a most commercial coolness in the dispensation of his wrath. Mr. Schlosser burns with the wrath of Attila against all aristocracies, and especially that of England. He governs his fury, also, with an Atilla discretion in many cases ; but not here. Imagine this Hun coming down, sword in hand, upon Pope and his Rosicrucian light^ troops, levying chout upon Sir Plume, and fluttering the dove-cot of the Sylphs. Pope's ' duty it was,' says this demoniac, to ' scourge the follies of good society,' and also ' to break with the aristocracy.' No, surely ? something short of a total rupture would have satisfied the claims of duty ? Possibly ; but it would not have satisfied Schlosser. And Pope's guilt consists in having made his poem an idol or succession of pictures repre- senting the gayer aspects of society as it really was, OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. Ill and supported by a comic interest of the mock-lieroic derived from a playful machinery, instead of convert- ing it into a bloody satire. Pope", however, did not shrink from such assaults on the aristocracy, if these made any part of his duties. Such assaults he made twice at least too often for his own peace, and perhaps for his credit at this day. It is useless, however, to talk of the poem as a work of art, with one who sees none of its exquisite graces, and can imagine his countryman Zacharia equal to a competition with Pope. But this it may be right to add, that the ' Rape of the Lock ' was not borrowed from the ' Lutrin' of Boileau. That was impossible. Neither was it suggested by the ' Lutrin.' The story in Herodotus of the wars between cranes and pigmies, or the Batracliomyomacliia (so absurdly ascribed to Homer) might have suggested the idea more naturally. Both these, there is proof that Pope had read : there is none that he had read the ' Lutrin,' nor did lie read French with ease to himself. The ' Lutrin,' meantime, is as much below the ' Rape of the Lock' in brilliancy of treatment, as it is dissimilar in plan or the quality of its pictures. The ' Essay on Man ' is a more thorny subject. When a man finds himself attacked and defended from all quarters, and on all varieties of principle, he is be- wildered. Friends are as dangerous as enemies. He must not defy a bristling enemy, if he cares for repose ; he must not disown a zealous defender, though making concessions on his own behalf not agreeable to him- self; he must not explain away ugly phrases in one direction, or perhaps he is recanting the very words of his ' guide, philosopher, and friend,' who cannot safely be taxed with having first led him into tempta- 112 schlosser's literary history tion ; he must not explain them away in another direc- tion, or he runs full lilt into the wrath of mother Church — who will soon bring him to his senses by penance. Long lents, and no lampreys allowed, would soon cauterize the proud flesh of heretical ethics. Pope did wisely, situated as he was, in a decorous nation, and closely connected, upon principles of fidelity under political suffering, with the Roman Catholics, to say little in his own defence. That defence, and any re- versionary cudgelling which it might entail upon the Quixote undertaker, he left — meekly but also slyly, humbly but cunningly — to those whom he professed to regard as greater philosophers than himself. All parties found their account in the affair. Pope slept in peace ; several pugnacious gentlemen up and down Europe expectorated much fiery wrath in dusting each other's jackets ; and Warburton, the attorney, finally earned his bishoprick in the service of whitewashing a writer, who was aghast at finding himself first trampled on as a deist, and then exalted as a defender of the faith. Meantime, Mr. Schlosser mistakes Pope's cour- tesy, when he supposes his acknowledgments to Lord Bolingbroke sincere in their whole extent. Of Pope's ' Homer ' Schlosser think fit to say, amongst other evil things, which it really does deserve (though hardly in comparison with the German ' Homer' of the ear-splitting Voss), ' that Pope pocketed the subscription of the " Odyssey," and left the work to be done by his understrappers.' Don't tell fibs, Schlosser. Never do thai any more. True it is, and disgraceful enough, that Pope (like modern contractors for a railway or a loan) let off* to sub-contractors several portions of the undertaking. He was perhaps not illiberal in the OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 113 terms of his contracts. At least I know of people now-a-days (much better artists) that would execute such contracts, and enter into any penalties for keeping time at thirty per cent. less. But navies and bill- brokers, that are in excess now, then were scarce. Still the affair, though not mercenary, was illiberal in a higher sense of art; and no anecdote shows more pointedly Pope's sense of the mechanic fashion, in which his own previous share of the Homeric labor had been executed. It was disgraceful enough, and needs no exaggeration. Let it, therefore, be reported truly : Pope personally translated one-half of the ' Odyssey ' — a dozen books he turned out of his own oven : and, if you add the Batrachomyomachia, his dozen was a baker's dozen. The journeyman did the other twelve; were regularly paid; regularly turned off when the job was out of hand ; and never once had to ' strike for wages.' Flow much beer was allowed, I cannot say. This is the truth of the matter. So no more fibbing, Schlosser, if you please. But there remains behind all these labors of Pope, the ' Dunciad,' which is by far his greatest. T shall not, within the narrow bounds assigned to me, enter upon a theme so exacting; for, in this instance, I should have to fight not against Schlosser only, but against Dr. Johnson, who has thoroughly misrepresented the nature of the ' Dunciad,' and, ,consequently, could not measure its merits. Neither he, nor Schlosser, in fact, ever read more than a few passages of this admirable poem. But the villany is too great for a brief exposure. One thing only 1 will notice of Schlosser's misrepresentations. He asserts (not when directly speaking of Pope, but after- wards, under the head of Voltaire) that the French 10 114 schlosser's literary history author's trivial and random Temple de Gout ' shows the superiority in this species of poetry to have been greatly on the side of the Frenchman.' Let's hear a reason, though but a Schlosser reason, for this opinion : know, then, all men whom it concerns, that ' the Englishman's satire only hit such people as would never have been known without his mention of them, whilst Voltaire selected those who were still called great, and their re- spective schools.' Pope's men, it seems, never had been famous — Voltaire's might cease to be so, but as yet they had not ceased ; as yet they commanded in- terest. Now mark how I will put three bullets into that plank, riddle it so that the leak shall not be stopped by all the old hats in Heidelberg, and Schlosser will have to swim for his life. First, he is forgetting that, by his own previous confession, Voltaire, not less than Pope, had ' immortalized a great many insignificant persons ;' consequently, had it been any fault to do so, each alike was caught in that fault ; and insignificant as the people might be, if they could be ' immortalized,' then we have Schlosser himself confessing to the pos- sibility that poetic splendor should create a secondary interest where originally there had been none. Sec- ondly, the question of merit does not arise from the object of the archer, but from the style of his archery. Not the choice of victims, but the execution done is what counts. Even for continued failures it would plead advantageously, much more for continued and brilliant successes, that Pope fired at an object offering no sufficient breadth of mark. Thirdly, it is the ■grossest of blunders to say that Pope's objects of satire were obscure by comparison with Voltaire's. True, the Frenchman's example of a scholar, viz., the French OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 115 Salmaslus, was most accomplished. But so was the Englishman's scholar, viz., the English Bentley. Each was absolutely without a rival in his own day. But the day of Bentley was the very day of Pope. Pope's man had not even faded ; whereas the day of Salmasius, as respected Voltaire had gone by for more than half a century. As to Dacier, '-which Dacier, Bezonian?' The husband was a passable scholar — but madame was a poor sneaking fellow, fit only for the usher of a boarding-school. All this, however, argues Schlosser's two-fold ignorance — first, of English authors ; second, of the ' Dunciad ;' — else he would have known that even Dennis, mad John Dennis, was a much cleverer man than most of those alluded to by Voltaire. Gibber, though slightly a coxcomb, was born a brilliant man. Aaron Hill was so lustrous, that even Pope's venom fell off spontaneously, like rain from the plumage of a pheasant, leaving him to ' mount far upwards with the swans of Thanes' — and, finally, let it not be forgot- ten, that Samuel Clarke Burnet, of the Charterhouse, and Sir Isaac Newton, did not wholly escape tasting the knout ; if that rather impeaches the equity, and sometimes the judgment of Pope, at least it contributes to show the groundlessness of Schlosser's objection — that the population of the Dunciad, the characters that filled its stage, were inconsiderable. FOX AND BURKE. It is, or it would be, if Mr. Schlosser were himself more interesting, luxurious to pursue his ignorance as to facts, and the craziness of his judgment as to the valuation of minds, throughout his comparison of Burke with Fox. The force of antithesis brincrs out into a 116 schlosser's literary history feeble life of meaning, what, in its own insulation, had been, languishing mortally into nonsense. The dark- ness of his ' Burke ' becomes visible darkness under the glimmering that steals upon it from the desperate com- monplaces of this ' Fox.' Fox is painted exactly as he loould have been painted fifty years ago by any pet subaltern of the Whig club, enjoying free pasture in Devonshire House. The practised reader knows well what is coming. Fox is ' formed after the model of the ancients ' — Fox is ' simple ' -^ — Fox is ' natural ' — Fox is 'chaste' — Fox is 'forcible;' why yes, in a sense, Fox is even ' forcible : ' but then, to feel that he was so, you must have heard him ; whereas, for forty years he has been silent. We of 1847, that can only read him, hearing Fox described u.s forcible, are disposed to recollect Shakspeare's Mr. Feeble amongst Falstaff's recruits, who also is described as forcible, viz., as the ' most forcible Feeble.' And, perhaps, a better de- scription could not be devised for Fox himself — so feeble was he in matter, so forcible in manner ; so power- ful for instant effect, so impotent for posterity. In the Pythian fury of his gestures — in his screaming voice — in his directness of purpose. Fox would now remind you of some demon steam-engine on a railroad, some Fire-king or Salmoneus, that had counterfeited, because he could not steal, Jove's thunderbolts ; hissing, bub- bling, snorting, fuming ; demoniac gas, you think — gas from Acheron must feed that dreadful system of convulsions. But pump ^ out the imaginary gas, and, behold ! it is ditch-water. Fox, as Mr. Schlosser rightly thinks, was all of a piece — simple in his manners, simple in his style, simple in his thoughts. No waters in him turbid with new ciystalizations ; everywhere the OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 117 eye can see to the bottom. No music in him dark with Cassandra meanings. Fox, indeed, disturb decent gen- tlemen by ' allusions to all the sciences, from the in- tegral calculus and metaphysics to navigation ! ' Fox would have seen you hanged first. Burke, on the other hand, did all that, and other wickedness besides, which fills an 8vo page in Schlosser ; and Schlosser crowns his enormities by charging him, the said Burke (p. 99), with ' wearisome tedioiisness.'' Among my own ac- quaintances are several old women, who think on this point precisely as Schlosser thinks ; and they go further, for they even charge Burke with ' tedious wearisome- ncss.' Oh, sorrowful woe, and also woeful sorrow, when an Edmund Burke arises, like a cheeta or hunting leopard coupled in a tiger-chase with a German poodle. To think, in a merciful spirit, of the jungle — barely to contemplate, in a temper of humanity, the incompre- hensible cane-thickets, dark and bristly, into which that bloody cheeta will drag that unoffending poodle ! But surely the least philosophic of readers, who hates philosophy 'as toad or asp,' must yet be aware, that, where new growths are not germinating, it is no sort of praise to be free from the throes of growth- Where expansion is hopeless, it is little glory to have escaped distortion. Nor is it any blame that the rich fermenta- tion of grapes should disturb the transparency of their golden fluids. Fox had nothing new to tell us, nor did he hold a position amongst men that required or would even have allowed him to tell anything new. He was helmsman to a party ; what he had to do, though seeming to give orders, was simply to repeat their orders — ' Port your helm,' said the party ; ' Port it is,' replied the helmsman. But Burke was no steersman; 118 sciilosser's literary history he was the Orpheus that sailed with the Argonauts ; he was their seer, seeing more in his visions than he always understood himself; he was their watcher through the hours of night ; he was their astrological interpreter. Who complains of a prophet for being a little darker of speech than a post-office directory ? or of him that reads the stars for being sometimes per- plexed ? But, even as to facts, Schlosser is always blunder- ing. Post-office directories would be of no use to him ; nor link-boys ; nor blazing tar-barrels. He wanders in a fog such as sits upon the banks of Cocytus. He fancies that Burk6, in his lifetime, was popular. Of course, it is so natural to be popular by means of ' wea- risome tediousness,^ that Schlosser, above all people, should credit such a tale. Burke has been dead just fifty years, come next autumn. I remember the time from this accident — that my own nearest relative stepped on a day of October, 1797, into that same suite of rooms at Bath (North Parade) from which, six hours before, the great man had been carried out to die at Beaconsfield. It is, therefore, you see, fifty years. Now, ever since then, his collective works have been growing in bulk by the incorporation of juvenile essays (such as his ' European Settlements,' his ' Essay on the Sublime,' on ' Lord Bolingbroke,' &c.), or (as more recently) by the posthumous publica- tion of his MSS. ; ^ and yet, ever since then, in spite of growing age and growing bulk, are more in demand. At this time, half a century after his last sigh, Burke is popular ; a thing, let me tell you, Schlosser, which never happened before to a writer steeped to his lips in personal politics. 'What a tilth of intellectual lava OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 119 must that man have interfused amongst the refuse and scoria of such mouldering party rubbish, to force up a new verdure and laughing harvests, annually increas- ing for new generations ! Popular he is now, but popular he was not in his own generation. And how could Schlosser have the face to say that he was ? Did he never hear the notorious anecdote, that at one period Burke obtained the sobriquet of ' dinner-bell ? ' And why ? Not as one who invited men to a banquet by his gorgeous eloquence, but as one that gave a sig- nal to shoals in the House of Commons, for seeking refuge in a literal dinner from the oppression of his philosophy. This was, perhaps, in part a scoif of his opponents. Yet there must have been some founda- tion for the scoff, since, at an earlier stage of Burke's career, Goldsmith had independently said, that this great orator ' went on refining, And thought of convincing, whilst they thought of dining.' I blame neither party. It ought not to be expected of any popular body that it should be patient of abstrac- tions amongst the intensities of party-strife, and the immediate necessities of voting. No deliberative body would less have tolerated such philosophic exorbita- tions from public business than the agora of Athens, or the Roman senate. So far the error was in Burke, not in the House of Commons. Yet, also, on the other side, it must be remembered, that an intellect of Burke's combining power and enormous compass, could not, from necessity of nature, ^abstain from such speculations. For a man to reach a remote posterity, it is sometimes necessary that he should throw his 120 schlosser's literary history voice over to them in a vast arch — it must sweep a parabola — which, therefore, rises high above the heads of those next to him, and is heard by the by- standers but indistinctly, like bees swarming in the upper air before they settle on the spot fit for hiving. See, therefore, the immeasurableness of miscon- ception. Of all public men, that stand confessedly in the first rank as to splendor of intellect, Burke was the least popular at the time when our blind friend Schlosser assumes him to have run off with the lion's share of popularity. Fox, on the other hand, as the leader of opposition, was at that time a household term of love or reproach, from one end of the island to the other. To the very children playing in the streets, Pitt and Fox, throughout Burke's generation, were pretty nearly as broad distinctions, and as much a war-cry, as English and French, Roman and Punic. Now, however, all this is altered. As regards the relations between the two Whigs whom Schlosser so steadfastly delighteth to misrepresent, ' Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer ' for that intellectual potentate, Edmund Burke, the man whose true mode of power has never yet been truly investigated ; whilst Charles Fox is known only as an echo is known, and for any real effect of intellect upon this generation, for anything but the 'whistling of a name,' the Fox of 1780-1807 sleeps where the carols of the larks are sleeping, that gladdened the spring-tides of those years — sleeps with the roses that glorified the beauty of their summers. ^^ OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 121 JUNIUS. Schlosser talks of Junius, who is to him, as to many people, more than entirely the enigma of an enigma, Hermes Trismegistus, or the mediaeval Prester John. Not only are most people unable, to solve the enigma, but they have no idea of what it is that they are to solve. I have to inform Schlosser that there are three separate questions about Junius, of which he has evi dently no distinct knowledge, and cannot, therefore, have many chances to spare for settling them. The three questions are these : — A. Who was Junius ? B. What was it that armed Junius with a power so unac- countable at this day over the public mind ? C. Why, having actually exercised this power, and gained under his masque far more than he ever hoped to. gain, did this Junius not come forward in Ms own person, when all the legal danger had long passed away, to claim a distinction that for him (among the vainest of men) must have been more precious than his heart's blood ? The two questions, B and C, 1 have examined in past times, and I will not here repeat my explanations fur- ther than to say, with respect to the last, that the reason for the author not claiming his own property was this, because he dared not ; because it would have been infamy for him to avow himself as Junius ; because it would have revealed a crime and published a crime in his own earlier life, for which many a man is trans- ported in our days, and for less than which many a man has been in past days hanged, broken on the wheel, burned, gibbeted, or impaled. To say that he watched and listened at his master's key-holes, is nothing. It was not key-holes only that he made free 11 122 schlosser's literary history with, but keys ; he tampered with his master's seals ; he committed larcenies ; not, like a brave man, risk- ing his life on the highway, but petty larcenies — lar- cenies in a dwelling-house — larcenies under the op- portunities of a confidential situation — crimes which formerly, in the days of Junius, our bloody code never pardoned in villains of low degree. Junius was in the situation of Lord Byron's Lara, or, because Lara is a plagiarism, of Harriet Lee's Kraitzrer. But this man, because he had money, friends, and talents, instead of going to prison, took himself off for a jaunt to the continent. From the continent, in full security and in possession of the otiu77i cum dignitate, he negotiated with the government, whom he had alarmed by pub- lishing the secrets which he had stolen. He suc- ceeded. He sold himself to great advantage. Bought and sold he was ; and of course it is understood that, if you buy a knave, and expressly in consideration of his knaveries, you secretly undertake not to hang him. ' Honor bright ! ' Lord Barrington might certainly have indicted Junius at the Old Bailey, and had a rea- son for wishing to do so ; but George IIL, who was a party to the negotiation, and all his ministers, would have said, with fits of laughter — ' Oh, come now, my lord, you must not do that. For, since we have bar- gained for a price to send him out as a member of council to Bengal, you see clearly that we could not possibly hang him iefore we had fulfilled our bargain. Then it is true we might hang him after he comes back. But, since the man (being a clever man) has a fair chance in the interim of rising to be Governor- General, we put it to your candor, Lorcf Barrington, whether it would be for the public service to hang his OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 123 excellency ? ' In fact, lie might probably have been Governor-General, had his bad temper not over- mastered him. Had he not quarrelled so viciously with Mr. Hastings, it is ten to one that he might, by playing his cards well, have succeeded him. As it was, after enjoying an enormous salary, he returned to England — not Governor-General, certainly, but still in no fear of being hanged. Instead of hanging him, on second thoughts. Government gave him a red rib- bon. He represented a borough in Parliament. He was an authority upon Indian affairs. He was caressed by the Whig party. He sat at good men's tables. He gave for toasts — Joseph Surface sentiments at dinner parties — ' The man that betrays ' [something or other] — 'the man that sneaks into' [other men's portfolios, perhaps] — ' is ' — ay, what is he ? Why he is, perhaps, a Knight of the Bath, has a sumptuous mansion in St. James's Square, dies full of years and honor, has a pompous funeral, and fears only some such epitaph as this — 'Here lies, in a red ribbon, the man who built a great prosperity on the basis of a great knavery.' I complain heavily of Mr. Taylor, the very able unmasker of Junius, for blinking the whole questions B and C. He it is that has settled the ques- tion A, so that it will never be re-opened by a man of sense. A man who doubts, after really reading Mr. Taylor's work, is not only a blockhead, but an irre- claimable blockhead. It is true that several men, among them Lord Brougham, whom Schlosser (though hating him, and kicking him) cites, still profess scepti- cism. But the reason is evident : they have not read the book, they have only heard of it. They are unac- quainted with the strongest arguments, and even with 124 schlosser's literary history the nature of the evidence. i^ Lord Brougham, mdeed, is generally reputed to have reviewed Mr. Taylor's book. That may be : it is probable enough : what I am denying is not at all that Lord Brougham reviewed Mr. Taylor, but that Lord Brougham read Mr. Taylor. And there is not much wonder in that^ when we see professed writers on the subject — bulky writers — writers of Answers and Refutations, dispensing with the whole of Mr. Taylor's book, single paragraphs of which would have forced them to cancel their own. The possibility of scepticism, after really reading Mr. Taylor's book, would be the strongest exemplification upon record of Sancho's proverbial reproach, that a man ' wanted better bread than was made of wheat — ' would be the old case renewed from the scholastic grumblers ' that some men do not know when they are answered.' They have got their quietus^ and they still continue to 'maunder' on with objections long since disposed of. In fact, it is not too strong a thing to say — and Chief Justice Dallas did say something like it — that if Mr. Taylor is not right, if Sir Philip Fran- cis is not Junius, then was no man ever yet hanged on sufficient evidence. Even confession is no absolute proof. Even confessing to a crime, the man may be mad. Well, but at least seeing is believing: if the court sees a man commit an assault, M'ill not that suffice .? Not at all : ocular delusions on the largest scale are common. What's a court ? Lawyers have no better eyes than other people. Their physics are often out of repair, and whole cities have been known to see things that could have no existence. Now, all other evidence is held to be short of this blank seeing or blank confessing. But I am not at all sure of that. OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 125 Circumstantial evidence, that multiplies indefinitely its points of interncxus with known admitted facts, is more impressive than direct testimony. If you detect a fellow with a large sheet of lead that by many (to wit seventy) salient angles, that by tedious (to wit thirty) reentrant angles, fits into and owns its sisterly relationship to all that is left of the lead upon your roof — this tight fit will weigh more with a jury than even if my lord chief justice should jump into the wit- ness-box, swearing that, with judicial eyes, he saw the vagabond cutting the lead whilst he himself sat at breakfast ; or even than if the vagabond should protest before this honorable court that he did cut the lead, in order that he (the said vagabond) might have hot rolls and coffee as well as my lord, the witness. If Mr. Taylor's body of evidence does not hold water, then is there no evidence extant upon any question, judicial or not judicial, that will. But I blame Mr. Taylor heavily for throwing away the whole argument applicable to B and C ; not as any debt that rested particularly upon him to public justice ; but as a debt to the integrity of his own book. That book is now a fragment ; admirable as regards A ; but (by omitting B and C) not sweeping the whole area of the problem. There yet remains, therefore, the dissatisfaction which is always likely to arise — not from the smallest allegatio falsi, but from the large suppressio veri. B, which, on any other solution than the one I have proposed, is perfectly un- intelligible, now becomes plain enough. To imagine a heavy, coarse, hard-working government, seriously affected by such a bauble as they would consider per- formances on the tight rope of style, is mere midsum- 126 schlosser's literary history mer madness. ' Hold your absurd tongue,' would any of the ministers have said to a friend descanting on Junius as a powerful artist of style — ' do you dream, dotard, that this baby's rattle is the thing that keeps us from sleeping ? Our eyes are fixed on something else : that fellow, whoever he is, knows what he ought not to know ; he has had his hand in some of our pockets: he's a good locksmith, is that Junius; and before he reaches Tyburn, who knows what amount of mischief he may do to self and partners ? ' The rumor that ministers were themselves alarmed (which was the naked truth) travelled downwards; but the why did not travel ; and the innumerable blockheads of lower circles, not understanding the real cause of fear, sought a false one in the supposed thunderbolts of the rhetoric. Opera-house thunderbolts they were : and strange it is, that grave men should fancy news- papers, teeming (as they have always done) with Publicolas^ with Catos, with Algernon Sidneys^ able by such trivial small shot to gain a moment's attention from the potentates of Downing Street. Those who have despatches to write, councils to attend, and votes of the Commons to manage, think little of Junius Brutus. A Junius Brutus, that dares not sign by his own honest name, is presumably skulking from his creditors. A Timoleon, who hints at assassination in a newspaper, one may take it for granted, is a manu- facturer of begging letters. And it is a conceivable case that a twenty pound note, enclosed to Timoleon's address, through the newspaper office, might go far to soothe that great patriot's feelings, and even to turn aside his avenging dagger. These sort of people were not the sort to frighten a British Ministry. One laughs OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 127 at the probable conversation between an old hunting squire coming up to comfort the First Lord of the Treasury, on the rumor that he was panic-struck. ' What, surely, my dear old friend, you 're not afraid of Timoleon?' First Lord. — 'Yes, I am.' C. Gent. — ' What, afraid of an anonymous fellow in the papers ? ' F. L. — ' Yes, dreadfully.' C. Gent. — ' Why, I always understood that these people were a son of shams — living in Grub Street — or where was it that Pope used to tell us they lived ? Surely you 're not afraid of Timoleon, because some people think he 's a patriot ? ' F. L. — ' No, not at all ; but I am afraid because some people think he 's a housebreaker ! ' In that character only could Timoleon become for- midable to a Cabinet Minister ; and in some such charac- ter must our friend, Junius Brutus, have made himself alarming to Government. From the moment that B is properly explained, it throws light upon C. The Government was alarmed — not at such moonshine as patriotism, or at a soap-bubble of rhetoric — but be- cause treachery was lurking amongst their own house- holds : and, if the thing went on, the consequences might be appalling. But this domestic treachery, which accounts for B, accounts at the same time for C. The very same treachery that frightened its objects at the time by the consequences it might breed, would frighten its author afterwards from claiming its literary honors by the remembrances it might awaken. The mysterious disclosures of official secrets, which had once roused so much consternation within a limited circle, and (like the French affair of the diamond necklace) had sunk into neglect only when all clue seemed lost for perfectly unravelling it, 128 schlosser's literary history would revive in all its interest when a discovery came before the public, viz., a claim on the part of Francis to have written the famous letters, which must at the same time point a strong light upon the true origin of the treacherous disclosures. Some astonishment had always existed as to Francis — how he rose so sud- denly into rank and station : some astonishment always existed as to Junius, how he should so suddenly have fallen asleep as a writer in the journals. The coinci- dence of this sudden and unaccountable silence with the sudden and unaccountable Indian appointment of Francis ; the extraordinary familiarity of Junius, which had not altogether escaped notice^ with the secrets of one particular office, viz., the War Office ; the sud- den recollection, sure to flash upon all who remem- bered Francis, if again he should become revived into suspicion, that he had held a situation of trust in that particular War Office ; all these little recollections would begin to take up their places in a connected story : this and that^ laid together, would become clear as day-light ; and to the keen eyes of still surviving enemies — Home Tooke, 'little Chamier,' Ellis, the Fitzroy, Russell, and Murray houses — the whole pro- gress and catastrophe of the scoundrelism, the perfidy and the profits of the perfidy, would soon become as intelligible as any tale of midnight burglary from without, in concert with a wicked butler within, that was ever sifted by judge and jury at the Old Bailey, or critically reviewed by Mr. John Ketch at Tyburn. Francis was the man. Francis was the wicked butler within, whom Pharaoh ought to have hanged, but whom he clothed in royal apparel, and mounted OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 129 upon a horse that carried him to a curule chair of honor. So far his burglary prospered. But, as gene- rally happens in such cases, this prosperous crime subsequently avenged itself. By a just retribution, the success of Junius, in two senses so monstrously exag- gerated — exaggerated by a romantic over-estimate of its intellectual power through an error of the public, not admitted to the secret — and equally exaggerated as to its political power by the government in the hush-money for its future suppression, became the heaviest curse of the successful criminal. This crim- inal thirsted for literary distinction above all other dis- tinction, with a childish eagerness, as for the amreeta cup of immortality. And, behold ! there the brilliant bauble lay, glittering in the sands of a solitude, un- claimed by any man; disputed with him (if he chose to claim it) by nobody ; and yet for his life he durst not touch it. He stood — he knew that he stood — in the situation of a murderer who has dropt an inestima- ble jewel upon the murdered body in the death-strug- gle with his victim. The jewel is his ! Nobody will deny it. He may have it for asking. But to ask is his death-warrant. ' Oh yes ! ' would be the answer, ' here 's your jewel, wrapt up safely in tissue paper. But here's another lot that goes along with it — no bidder can take them apart — viz. a halter, also wrapt up in tissue paper.' Francis, in relation to Junius, was in that exact predicament. ' You are Junius ? You are that famous man who has been missing since 1772 ? And you can prove it ? God bless me ! sir ; what a long time you 've been sleeping : every body's gone to bed. Well, then, you are an exceedingly clever fellow, that have had the luck to be thought ten 130 schlosser's literary history, etc. times more clever than really you were. And also, you are the greatest scoundrel that at this hour rests in Europe unhanged!' — Francis died, and made no sign. Peace of mind he had parted with for a pea- cock's feather, which feather, living or dying, he durst not mount in the plumage of his cap. NOTES Note 1. Page 86. Even Pope, with all liis natural and reasonable interest in aristocratic society, could not shut his eyes to the fact that a jest in his mouth became twice a jest in a lord's. But still he foiled to perceive what I am here contending for, that if the jest hap- pened to miss fire, through the misfortune of bursting its barrel, the consequences would be far worse for the lord than the com- moner. There is, you see, a blind sort of compensation. Note 2. Page 88. Mr. Schlosser, who speaks English, who has read rather too much English for any good that he has turned it to, and who ought to have a keen eye for the English yersion of his own book, after so much reading and study of it, has, however, overlooked several manifest errors. I do not mean to tax Mr. Davison with general inaccuracy. On the contrary, he seems wary, and in most cases successful as a dealer with the peculiarities of the German. But several cases of error I detect without needing the original : they tell their own story. And one of these I here notice, not only for its own importance, but out of love to Schlosser, and by way of nailing his guarantee to the counter — not altogether as a bad shilling, but as a light one. At p. 5 of vol. 2, in a foot-note, which is speaking of Kant, we read of his attempt to introduce the notion of negative greatness into Phi- losophy. JVegative greatness ! AVhat strange bird may that be ? Is it the ornithorynchus paradoxus 7 Mr. Schlosser was not wide awake there. The reference is evidently to Kant's essay upon the advantages of introducing into philosophy the algebraic [131] 132 NOTES. idea of negative quantities. It is one of Kant's grandest gleams into hidden truth. Were it only for the merits of this most masterly essay in reconstituting the algebraic meaning of a negative quantitij [so generally misunderstood as a negation of quantity, and which even Sir Isaac Newton misconstrued as regarded its metaphysics], great would have been the service rendered to logic by Kant. But there is a greater. From this little brochure I am satisfied was derived originally the German regeneration of the Dynamic philosophy, its expansion through the idea of polarity, indifference, &c. Oh, Mr. Sclilosser, you had not gepriift p. 5 of vol. 2. You skipped the notes. Note 3. Page 90. * Little nurse : ' — the word Glumdalclitch, in Brobding- nagian, absolutely means little nurse, and nothing else. It may seem odd that the captain should call any nurse of Brobdingnag, however kind to him, by such an epithet as little; and the reader may fancy that Sherwood forest had put it into his head, where Robin Hood always called his right hand man 'Little John,' not although, but expressly because John stood seven feet high in his stockings. But the truth is — that Glumdalclitch was little; and literally so; she was only nine years old, and (says the captain) ' little of her age,' being barely forty feet high. She had time to grow certainly, but as she had so much to do before she could overtake other women, it is probable that she would turn out what, in Westmoreland, they call a little stiffeiiger — very little, if at all, higher than a common English church steeple. Note 4. Page 96. * Activity.'' — It is some sign of this, as well as of the more thoroughly English taste in literature which distinguished Steele, that hardly twice throughout the ' Spectator ' is Shakspeare quoted or alluded to by Addison. Even these quotations he had from the theatre, or the breath of popular talk. Generally, if you see a line from Shakspeare, it is safe to bet largely that the paper is Steele's; sometimes, indeed, of casual contributors ; but, almost to a certainty, not a paper of Addison's. Another mark of Steele's superiority in vigor of uitellect is, that much oftener NOTES. 133 in him than in otlier contributors strong thoughts came forward; harsh and disproportioned, perhaps, to the case, and never har- moniously developed with the genial grace of Addison, but origi- nal, and pregnant with promise and suggestion. Note 5. Page 98. • Letters of Joseph Mede,' published more than twenty years ago by Sir Henry Ellis. Note 6. Page 101. It is an idea of many people, and erroneously sanctioned by Wordsworth, that Lord Somers gave a powerful lift to the * Par- adise Lost.' He was a subscriber to the sixth edition, the first that had plates ; but this was some years before the Revolution of 1688, and when he was simply Mr. Somers, a barrister, with no effectual power of patronage. Note 7. Page 106. * Milton, Mr. John : ' — Dr. Johnson expressed his wrath, in an amusing way, at some bookseller's hack who, when employed to make an index, introduced Milton's name among the M's, un- der the civil title of— ' Milton, Mr. John.' Note 8. Page 106. ' Louis Baboon : ^ — As people read nothing in these days that is more than forty-eight hours old, I am daily admonished that allusions the most obvious to anything in the rear of our own time, needs explanation, Louis Baboon is Swift's jesting name for Louis Bourbon, i. e., Louis XIV. Note 9. Page 118. ' Of his MSS. : ' — And, if all that I have heard be true, much has somebody to answer for, that so little has been yet published. The two executors of Burke were Dr. Lawrence, of Doctors' Com- mons, a well-known M. P. in forgotten days, and Windham, a man too like Burke in elasticity of mind ever to be spoken of in connection with forgotten things. Which of them was to blame, I know not. But Mr. R. Sharpe, M. P., twenty-five years ago, 134 NOTES. well known as River Sharpe, from the a/ttQccvToXoyia cf his con- versation, used to say, that one or both of the executors had offered him (the river) a huge travelling trunk, perhaps an Im- perial or a Salisbury boot (equal to the wardrobe of a family), filled with Burke's MSS., on the simple condition of editing them with proper annotations. An Oxford man, and also the celebrated Mr. Christian Curwen, then member for Cumberland, made, in my heai-ing, the same report. The Oxford man, in particular, being questioned as to the probable amount of MS., deposed, that he could not speak upon oath to the cubical contents ; but this he could say, that, having stripped up his coat sleeve, he had endeavored, by such poor machinery as nature had allowed him, to take the soundings of the trunk, but apparently there were none ; with his middle finger he could find no bottom ; for it was stopped by a dense stratum of MS. ; below which, you know, other strata might lie ad infinitum. For anything proved to the contrary, the trunk might be bottomless. Note 10. Page 120. A man in Fox's situation is sure, whilst living, to draw after him trains of sycophants ; and it is the evil necessity of news- papers the most independent, that they must swell the mob of sycophants. The public compels them to exaggerate the true proportions of such people as we see every hour in our own day. Those who, for the moment, modify, or may modify the national condition, become preposterous idols in the eyes of the gaping public ; but with the sad necessity of being too utterly trodden under foot after they are shelved, unless they live in men's memory by something better than speeches in Parliament. Hav ing the usual fate, Fox was complimented, whilst living, on his knowledge of Homeric Greek, which was a jest : he knew neither more nor less of Homer, than, fortunately, most English gentle- men of his rank ; quite enough that is to read the ' Iliad ' with unaffected pleasure, far too little to revise the text of any three lines, without making himself ridiculous. The excessive slender- ness of his general literature, English and French, may be seen in the letters published by his Secretary, Trotter. But his frag- ment of a History, published by Lord Holland, at two guineas, and currently sold for tAvo shillings (not two pence, or else I NOTES. 135 have been defrauded of Is. lOd.), most of all proclaims the tenuity of his knowledge. He looks upon Malcolm Laing as a huge oracle ; and, having read eyen less than Hume, a thing not very easy, with great naivete, cannot guess where Hume picked up his facts. Note 11. Page 124. Even in Dr. Francis's Translation of Select Speeches from Demosthenes, which Lord Brougham naturally used a little in his own labors on that theme, there may be traced several pecu- liarities of diction that startle us in Junius. Sir P. had them from his father. And Lord Brougham ought not to have overlooked them. The same thing may be seen in the notes to Dr. Francis's translation of Horace. These points, though not independently of much importance, become far more so in combination with others. The reply made to me once by a publisher of some emi- nence upon this question, was the best fitted to lower Mr. Taylor's investigation with a stranger to the long history of the dispute. ' I feel,' he said, ' the impregnability of the case made out by Mr. Taylor. But the misfortune is, that I have seen so many pre- vious impregnable cases made out for other claimants.' Ay, that would be unfortunate. But the misfortune for this repartee was, that I, for whose use it was intended, not being in the predica- ment of a stranger to the dispute, having seen every page of the pleadings, knew all (except Mr. Taylor's) to be false ia their statements ; after which their arguments signified nothing. THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES, AS REPRESENTED ON THE EDINBURGH STAGE. Every thing in our days is new. Roads, for in- stance, which, being formerly ' of the earth earthy,' and therefore perishable, are now iron, and next door to being in^.mortal ; tragedies, which are so entirely new, that neither we nor our fathers, through eighteen hundred and ninety odd years, gone by, since Ccesar did our little island the honor to sit upon its skirts, have ever seen the like to this ' Antigone ; ' and, finally, even more new are readers, who, being once an obe- dient race of men, most humble and deferential in the presence of a Greek scholar, are now become intrac- tably mutinous ; keep their hats on whilst he is ad- dressing them ; and listen to him or not, as he seems to talk sense or nonsense. Some there are, however, who look upon all these new things cis being intensely old. Yet, surely the railroads are new ? No ; not at all. Talus, the iron man in Spenser, who continually ran round the island of Crete, administering gentle warning and correction to offenders, by flooring them with an iron flail, was a very ancient personage in Greek fable ; and the received opinion is, that he must have been a Cretan railroad, called The Great Circular Coast-Line, that carried my lords the judges on their circuits of jail-delivery. The ' Antigone,' again, that 12 " [137] 138 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. wears the freshness of morning dew, and is so fresh and dewy in the beautiful person of Miss Faucit, had really begun to look faded on the Athenian stage, and even ' of a certain age,' about the death of Pericles, whose meridian year was the year 444 before Christ. Lastly, these modern readers^ that are so obstinately rebellious to the once Papal authority of Greek, they — No ; on consideration, they are new. Antiquity pro- duced many monsters, but none like them. The truth is, that this vast multiplication of readers, within the last twenty-five years, has changed the prevailing character of readers. The minority has become the overwhelming majority : the quantity has disturbed the quality. Formerly, out of every five readers, at least four were, in some degree, classical scholars : or, if that would be saying too much, if two of the four had ' small Latin and less Greek,' they were generally connected with those who had more, or at the worst, who had much reverence for Latin, and more reverence for Greek. If they did not all share in the services of the temple, all, at least, shared in the superstition. But, now-a-days, the readers come chiefly from a class of busy people who care very little for ancestral crazes. Latin they have heard of, and some of them know it as a good sort of industrious language, that even, in modern times, has turned out many useful books, astronomical, medical, philosophi- cal, and (as Mrs. Malaprop observes) diabolical ; but, as to Greek, they think of it as of an ancient mummy : you spend an infinity of time in unswathing it from its old dusty wrappers, and, when you have come to the end, what do you find for your pains } A woman's face, or a baby's, that certainly is not the better for THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 139 being three thousand years old ; and perhaps a few ears of wheat, stolen from Pharaoh's granary ; which wheat, when sown ' in Norfolk or Mid-Lothian, reaped, thrashed, ground, baked, and hunted through all sorts of tortures, yields a breakfast roll that (as a Scottish baker observed to me) is ' not just that bad.' Cer- tainly not : not exactly ' that bad ; ' not worse than the worst of our own ; but still, much fitter for Pharaoh's breakfast-table than for ours. I, for my own part, stand upon an isthmus, con- necting me, at one terminus, with the rebels against Greek, and, at the other, with those against whom they are in rebellion. On the one hand, it seems shocking to me, who am steeped to the lips in antique prejudices, that Greek, in unlimited quantities, should not secure a limited privilege of talking nonsense. Is all reverence extinct for old, and ivy-mantled, and worm-eaten things ? Surely, if your own grandmother lectures on morals, which perhaps now and then she does, she will command that reverence from you, by means of her grandmotherhood, which by means of her ethics she might not. To be a good Grecian, is now to be a faded potentate ; a sort of phantom Mogul, sitting at Delhi, with an English sepoy bestriding his shoulders. Matched against the master of ologies, in our days, the most accomplished of Grecians is becoming what the ' master of sentences ' had become long since, in competition with the political economist. Yet, be assured, reader, that all the ' ologies ' hitherto chris- tened oology, ichthyology, ornithology, conchology, palseodontology, &c., do not furnish such mines of labor as does the Greek language when thoroughly searched. The ' Mithridates ' of Adelung, improved 140 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. by the commentaries of Vater and of subsequent au- thors, numbers up about four thousand languages and jargons on our polyglot earth ; not including the chuckling of poultry, nor caterwauling, nor barking, howlmg, braying, lowing, nor other respectable and ancient dialects, that perhaps have their elegant and their vulgar varieties, as well as prouder forms of com- munication. But my impression is, that the Greek, taken by itself, this one exquisite language, considered as a quarry of intellectual labor, has more work in it, is more truly a piece de resistance^ than all the re- maining three thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine, with caterwauling thrown into the bargain. So far I side with the Grecian, and think that he ought to "be honored with a little genuflexion. Yet, on the other hand, the finest sound on this earth, and which rises like an orchestra above all the uproars of earth, and the Babels of earthly languages, is truth — absolute truth ; and the hatefulest is conscious falsehood. Now, there is falsehood, nay (which seems strange), even sycophancy, in the old undistinguishing homage to all that is called classical. Yet why should men be syco- phants in cases where they must be disinterested > Sycophancy grows out of fear, or out of mercenary self-interest. Bat what can there exist of either point- ing to an old Greek poet? Cannot a man give his free opinion upon Homer, without fearing to be way- laid by his ghost ? But it is not that which startles him from .publishing the secret demur which his heart prompts, upon hearing false praises of a Greek poet, or praises which, if not false, are extravagant. What he fears, is the scorn of his contemporaries. Let once a party have formed itself considerable enough to THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 141 protect a man from the charge of presumption in throwing off the yoke of servile allegiance to all that is called classical, — let it be a party ever so small numerically, and the rebels will soon be many. What a man fears is, to affront the whole storm of indigna- tion, real and affected, in his own solitary person. ' Goth ! ' * Vandal ! ' he hears from every side. Break that storm by dividing it, and he will face its anger. ' Let me be a Goth,' he mutters to himself, ' but let me not dishonor myself by affecting an enthusiasm which my heart rejects ! ' Ever since the restoration of letters there has been a cabal, an academic interest, a factious league amongst universities, and learned bodies, and individual scholars, for exalting as something superterrestrial, and quite unapproachable by moderns, the monuments of Greek literature. France, in the time of Louis XIV., Eng- land, in the latter part of that time ; in fact, each country as it grew polished at some cost of strength, carried this craze to a dangerous excess — dangerous as all things false are dangerous, and depressing to the aspirations of genius. Boileau, for instance, and Addison, though neither ^ of them accomplished in scholarship, nor either of them extensively read in any department of the classic literature, speak every where of the classics as having notoriously, and by the general confession of polished nations, carried the functions of poetry and eloquence to that sort of fault- less beauty which probably does really exist in the Greek sculpture. There are few things perfect in this world of frailty. Even lightning is sometimes a failure : Niagara has horrible faults ; and Mont Blanc might be improved by a century of chiselling from 142 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. judicious artists. Such are the works of blind ele- ments, which (poor things !) cannot improve by expe- rience. As to man who does^ the sculpture of the Greeks in their marbles and sometimes in their gems, seems the only act of his workmanship which has hit the bull's eye in the target at which we are all aiming. Not so, with permission from Messrs. Boileau and Ad- dison, the Greek literature. The faults in this are often conspicuous; nor are they likely to be hidden for the coming century, as they have been for the three last. The idolatry will be shaken : as idols, some of the classic models are destined to totter : and I foresee, without gifts of prophecy, that many laborers will soon be in this field — many idoloclasts, who will expose the signs of disease, which zealots had inter- preted as power ; and of weakness, which is not the less real because scholars had fancied it health, nor the less injurious to the total effect because it was inevita- ble under the accidents of the Grecian position. Meantime, I repeat, that to disparage any thing whatever, or to turn the eye upon blemishes, is no part of my present purpose. Nor could it be : since the one sole section of the Greek literature, as to which I profess myself an enthusiast, happens to be the tragic drama ; and here, only, 1 myself am liable to be chal- lenged as an idolater. As regards the Antigone in particular, so profoundly do I feel the impassioned beauty of her situation in connection with her charac- ter, that long ago, in a work of my own (yet unpub- lished), having occasion (by way of overture intro- ducing one of the sections) to cite before the reader's eye the chief pomps of the Grecian theatre, after invoking ' the magnificent witch ' Medea, I call up THE ANTIGONE OF SOrHOCLES. 143 Antigone to this shadowy stage by the apostrophe, ' Holy heathen, daughter of God, before God was known, 3 flower from Paradise after Paradise was closed ; that quitting all things for which flesh lan- guishes, safety and honor, a palace and a home, didst make thyself a houseless pariah, lest the poor pariah king, thy outcast father, should want a hand to lead him in his darkness, or a voice to whisper comfort in his misery; angel, that badst depart for ever the glories of thy own bridal day, lest he that had shared thy nursery in childhood, should want the honors of a funeral ; idolatrous, yet Christian Lady, that in the spirit of martyrdom trodst alone the yawning billows of the grave, flying from earthly hopes, lest everlast- ing despair should settle upon the grave of thy brother,' &c. In fact, though all the groupings, and what I would call permanent atthudes of the Grecian stage, are majestic, there is none that, to my mind, towers into such affecting grandeur, as this final revelation, through Antigone herself, and through her own dread- ful death, of the tremendous wo that destiny had sus- pended over her house. If therefore my business had been chiefly with the individual drama, I should have found little room for any sentiment but that of pro- found admiration. But my present business is differ- ent : it concerns the Greek drama generally, and the attempt to revive it ; and its object is to elucidate, rather than to praise or to blame. To explain this better, I will describe two things: — 1st, The sort of audience that I suppose myself to be addressing; and, 2dly, As growing out of that^ the particular quality of the explanations which I wish to make. 1st, As to the audience : in order to excuse the tone 144 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPnOCLES. (which occasionally I may be obliged to assume) of one speaking as from a station of knowledge, to others having no knowledge, I beg it to be understood, that I take that station deliberately, on no conceit of supe- riority to my readers, but as a companion adapting my services to the wants of those who need them. I am not addressing those already familiar with the Greek drama, but those who frankly confess, and (according to their conjectural appreciation of it) who regret their non-familiarity with that drama. It is a thing well known to publishers, through remarkable results, and is now showing itself on a scale continually widening, that a new literary public has arisen, very different from any which existed at the beginning of this cen- tury. The aristocracy of the land have always been, in a moderate degree, literary ; less, however, in con- nection with the current literature, than with literature generally — past as well as present. And this is a tendency naturally favored and strengthened in them^ by the fine collections of books, carried forward through successive generations, which are so often found as a sort of hereditary foundation in the country mansions of our nobility. But a class of readers, prodigiously more ' extensive, has formed itself within the com- mercial orders of our great cities and manufacturing districts. These orders range through a large scale. The highest classes amongst them were always literary. But the interest of literature has now swept downwards through a vast compass of descents: and this large body, though the busiest in the nation, yet, by having under their undisturbed command such leisure time as they have at all under their command, are eventually able to read more than those even who seem to have THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 145 nothing else but leisure. In justice, however, to the nobility of our land, it should be remembered, that their stations in society, and their wealth, their terri- torial duties, and their various public duties in London, as at court, at public meetings, in parliament, &c., bring crowded claims upon their time ; whilst even sacrifices of time to the graceful courtesies of life, are in reference to their stations, a sort of secondary duties. These allowances made, it still remains true that the busier classes are the main reading classes; whilst from their immense numbers, they are becoming ef- fectually the body that will more and more impress upon the moving literature its main impulse and di- rection. One other feature of difference there is amongst this commercial class of readers : amongst the aristocracy all are thoroughly educated, excepting those who go at an early age into the army ; of the commercial body, none receive an elaborate, and what is meant by a liberal education, except those standing by their connections in the richest classes. Thus it happens that, amongst those who have not inherited but achieved their stations, many men of fine and powerful understandings, accomplished in manners, and admirably informed, not having had the bene- fits when young of a regular classical education, find (upon any accident bringing up such subjects) a de- ficiency which they do not find on other subjects. They are too honorable to undervalue advantages, which they feel to be considerable, simply because they were denied to themselves. They regret their loss. And yet it seems hardly worth while, on a simple prospect of contingencies that may never be realized, to undertake an entirely new course of study 13 146 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. for redressing this loss. But they would be glad to avail themselves of any useful information not exact- ing study. These are the persons, this is the class, to which I address my remarks on the ' Antigone ; ' and out of their particular situation, suggesting upon all elevated subjects a corresponding tone of liberal curi- osity, will arise the particular nature and direction of these remarks. Accordingly, I presume, secondly, that this curiosity will take the following course : — these persons will naturally wish to know, at starting, what there is differentially interesting in a Grecian tragedy, as con- trasted with one of Shakspeare's or of Schiller's : in what respect, and by what agencies, a Greek tragedy affects us, or is meant to aifect us, otherwise than as they do ; and how far the Antigone of Sophocles was judiciously chosen as the particular medium for con- veying to British minds a first impression, and a repre- sentative impression, of Greek tragedy. So far, in relation to the ends proposed, and the means selected. Finally, these persons will be curious to know the issue of such an experiment. Let the purposes and the means have been bad or good, what was the actual success ? And not merely success, in the sense of the momentary acceptance by half a dozen audiences, whom the mere decencies of justice must have com- pe-lled to acknowledge the manager's trouble and expense on their behalf; but what was the degree of satisfaction felt by students of the Athenian 4 tragedy, in relation to their long-cherished ideal } Did the re- presentation succeed in realizing, for a moment, the awful pageant of the Athenian stage ? Did Tragedy, in Milton's immortal expression, THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 147 come sweeping by In sceptred pall ? Or was the whole, though successful in relation to the thing attempted, a failure in relation to what ought to have been attempted ? Such are the questions to be answered. The first elementary idea of a Greek tragedy, is to be sought in a serious Italian opera. The Greek dialogue is represented by the recitative, and the tumultuous lyrical parts assigned chiefly, though not exclusively, to the chorus on the Greek stage, are represented by the impassioned airs, duos, trios, cho- ruses, &c. on the Italian. And here, at the very outset, occurs a question which lies at the threshold of a Fine Art, — that is, of any Fine Art: for had the views of Addison upon the Italian opera had the least foundation in truth, there could have been no room or opening for any mode of imitation except such as belongs to a mechanic art. The reason for at all connecting Addison with this case is, that he chiefly was the person occupied in assailing the Italian opera ; and this hostility arose, probably, in his want of sensibility to good (that is, to Italian) music. But whatever might be his motive for the hostility, the single argument by which he sup- ported it was this, — that a hero ought not to sing upon the stage, because no hero known to history ever summoned a garrison in a song, or charged a battery in a semichorus. In this argument lies an ignorance of the very first principle concerned in every Fine Art. In all alike, more or less directly, the object is to reproduce in the mind some great eflect, through 148 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. the agency of idem in alio. The idem^ the same im- pression, is to be restored ; but in alio., in a different material, — by means of some different instrument. For instance, on the Roman stage there was an art, now entirely lost, of narrating, and, in part of dramati- cally representing an impassioned tale, by means of dancing, of musical accompaniment in the orchestra, and of elaborate pantomime in the performer. Saltavit Hypermnestram, he danced (that is, he represented by dancing and pantomime the story of) Hypermnestra. Now, suppose a man to object, that young ladies, when saving their youthful husbands at midnight from assassination, could not be capable of waltzing or quadrilling, how wide is this of the whole problem ! This is still seeking for the mechanic imitation, some imitation founded in the very fact ; whereas the object is to seek the imitation in the sameness of the im- pression drawn from a different, or even from an impossible fact. If a man, taking a hint from the Roman ' Saltatio' {saltavit Andromachen), should say that he would ' whistle Waterloo,' that is, by whistling connected with pantomime, would express the passion and the changes of Waterloo, it would be monstrous to refuse him his postulate on the pretence that ' people did not whistle at Waterloo.' Precisely so : neither are most people made of marble, but of a material as different as can well be imagined, viz. of elastic flesh, with warm blood coursing along its tubes ; and yet, for all that, a sculptor will draw tears from you, by exhibiting, in pure statuary marble, on a sepulchral monument, two young children with their little heads on a pillow, sleeping in each other's arms ; whereas, if he had presented them in wax-work, which yet is THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 149 far more like to flesh, you would have felt little more pathos in the scene than if they had been shown baked in gilt gingerbread. He has expressed the idem^ the identical thing expressed in the real children; the sleep that masks death, the rest, the peace, the purity, the innocence ; but in alio^ in a substance the most different ; rigid, non-elastic, and as unlike to flesh, if tried by touch, or eye, or by experience of life, as can well be imagined. So of the whistling. It is the very worst objection in the world to say, that the strife of Waterloo did not reveal itself through whistling : undoubtedly it did not ; but that is the very ground of the man's art. He will reproduce the fury and the movement as to the only point which concerns you, viz. the effect, upon your own sympathies, through a language that seems without any relation to it : he will set before you what was at Waterloo through that which was not at Waterloo. Whereas any direct factual imitation, resting upon painted figures drest up in regimentals, and worked by watchwork through the whole movements of the battle, would have been no art whatsoever in the sense of a Fine Art, but a base mechanic mimicry. This principle of the idem in alio, so widely diffused through all the higher revelations of art, it is peculiarly requisite to bear in mind when looking at Grecian tragedy, because no form of human composition em- ploys it in so much complexity. How confounding it would have been to Addison, if somebody had told him, that, substantially, he had himself committed the offence (as he fancied it) which he charged so bitterly upon the Italian opera ; and that, if the opera had gone farther upon that road than himself, the Greek tragedy, 150 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. which he presumed to be so prodigiously exalted be- yond modern approaches, had gone farther even than the opera. Addison himself, when writing a tragedy, made this violation (as he would have said) of nature, made this concession (as I should say) to a higher nature, that he compelled his characters to talk in metre. It is true this metre was the common iambic, which (as Aristotle remarks) is the most natural and spontaneous of all metres ; and, for a sufficient reason, in all languages. Certainly ; but Aristotle never meant to say that it was natural for a gentleman in a passion to talk threescore and ten iambics consecu- tively : a chance line might escape him once and away; as we know that Tacitus opened one of his works by a regular dactylic hexameter in full curl, without ever discovering it to his dying day (a fact which is clear from his never having corrected it) ; and this being a very artificial metre, a fortiori Tacitus might have slipped into a simple iambic. But that was an accident, whilst Addison had deliberately and uniformly made his characters talk in verse. Accord- ing to the common and false meaning [which was his own meaning] of the word nature, he had as undeniably violated the principle of the natural, by this metrical dialogue, as the Italian opera by musical dialogue. If it is hard and trying for men to sing their emotions, not less so it must be to deliver them in verse. But, if this were shocking, how much more shocking would it have seemed to Addison, had he been intro- duced to parts which really exist in the Grecian drama ? Even Sophocles, who, of the three tragic poets sur- viving from the wrecks of the Athenian stage, is reputed the supreme artist,^ if not the most impas- THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 151 sioned poet, with what horror he would have over- whch-ned Addison, when read by the light of those principles which he had himself so scornfully applied to the opera! In the very monsoon of his raving misery, from calamities as sudden as they were irre- deemable, a king is introduced, not only conversing, but conversing in metre ; not only in metre, but in the most elaborate of choral metres ; not only under the torture of these lyric difficulties, but also chanting; not only chanting, but also in all probability dancing. What do you think of tliat^ Mr. Addison ? There is, in fact, a scale of graduated ascents in these artifices for unrealizing the effects of dramatic situations : 1. We may see, even in novels and prose comedies, a keen attention paid to the inspiriting and dressing of the dialogue : it is meant to be life-like, but still it is a little raised, pointed, colored, and idealized. 2. In comedy of a higher and more poetic cast, we find the dialogue metrical. 3. In comedy or in tragedy alike, which is meant to be still further removed from ordinary life, we find the dialogue fettered not only by metre, but by rhyme. We need not go to Dryden, and others, of our own middle stage, or to the French stage for this : even in Shakspeare, as for example, in parts of Romeo and Juliet (and for no capricious purpose), we may see effects sought from the use of rhyme. There is another illustration of the idealizing effect to be obtained from a particular treatment of the dialogue, seen in the Hamlet of Shakspeare. In that drama there arises a necessity for exhibiting a play within a play. This interior drama is to be further removed from the 152 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. spectator than the principal drama ; it is a deep below a deep ; and, to produce that effect, the poet relies chiefly upon the stiffening the dialogue, and removing it still farther, than the general dialogue of the in- cluding or outside drama, from the standard of ordi- nary life. 4. We find, superadded to these artifices for ideal- izing the situations, even music of an intermitting character, sometimes less, sometimes more impas- sioned — recitatives, airs, choruses. Here we have reached the Italian opera. 5, And, finally, besides all these resources of art, we find dancing introduced ; but dancing of a solemn, mystical, and symbolic character. Here, at last, we have reached the Greek tragedy. Probably the best exemplification of a Grecian tragedy that ever will be given to a modern reader is found in the Samson Agonistes of Milton. Now, in the choral or lyric parts of this fine drama, Samson not only talks, 1st, metri- cally (as he does every where, and in the most level parts of the scenic business), but, 2d, in very intricate metres, and, Sd, occasionally in rhymed metres (though the rhymes are too sparingly and too capriciously scat- tered by Milton), and, 4th, singing or chanting these metres (for, as the chorus sang, it was impossible that he could be allowed to talk in his ordinary voice, else he would have put them out, and ruined the music). Finally, 5th, I am satisfied that Milton meant him to dance. The office of the chorus was imperfectly de- fined upon the Greek stage. They are generally understood to be the woralizers of the scene. But this is liable to exceptions. Some of them have been known to do very bad things on the stage, and to come THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 153 within a trifle of felony : as to misprision of felony, if there is such a crime, a Greek chorus thinks nothing of it. But that is no business of mine. What I was going to say is, that, as the chorus sometimes inter- mingles too much in the action, so the actors some- times intermingle in the business of the chorus. Now, when you are at Rome, you must do as they do at Rome. And that the actor, who mixed with the chorus, was compelled to sing, is a clear case ; for Ids part in the choral ode is always in the nature of an echo, or answer, or like an aiitiphony in cathedral ser- vices. But nothing could be more absurd than that one of these antiphonies should be sung, and another said. That he was also compelled to dance, I am satisfied. The chorus only sometimes moralized, but it always danced : and any actor, mingling with the chorus, must dance also. A little incident occurs to my remembrance, from the Moscow expedition of 1812, which may here be used as an illustration : One day King Murat, flourishing his plumage as usual, made a gesture of invitation to some squadrons of cavalry that they should charge the enemy : upon which the cavalry advanced, but maliciously contrived to envelope the king of dandies, before he had time to execute his ordinary manoeuvre of riding off to the left and be- coming a spectator of their prowess. The cavalry resolved that his majesty should for once ride down at their head to the melee, and taste what fighting was like ; and he, finding that the thing must be, though horribly vexed, made a merit of his necessity, and afterwards pretended that he liked it very much. Sometimes, in the darkness, in default of other mis- anthropic visions, the wickedness of this cavalry, their 154 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. mechancete, causes me to laugh immoderately. Now I conceive that anj^ interloper into the Greek chorus must have danced when they danced, or he would have been swept away by their impetus : nolens volens^ he must have rode along with the orchestral charge, he must have rode on the crest of the choral billows, or he would have been rode down by their impassioned sweep. Samson, and (Edipus, and others, must have danced, if they sang ; and they certainly did sing, by notoriously intermingling in the choral business.^ ' But now,' says the plain English reader, ' what was the object of all these elaborate devices ? And how came it that the English tragedy, which surely is as good as the Greek,' (and at this point a devil of de- fiance whispers to him, like the quarrelsome servant of the Capulets or the Montagus, 'say better,'') 'that the English tragedy contented itself with fewer of these artful resources than the Athenian ? ' I reply, that the object of all these things was — to unrealize the scene. The English drama, by its metrical dress, and by other arts more disguised, unrealized itself, liberated itself from the oppression of life in its ordinary stand- ards, up to a certain height. Why it did not rise still higher, and why the Grecian did, T will endeavor to explain. It was not that the English tragedy was less impassioned ; on the contrary, it was far more so ; the Greek being awful rather than impassioned ; but the passion of each is in a different key. It is not again that the Greek drama sought a lower object than the English : it sought a different object. It is not im- parity, but disparity, that divides the two magnificent theatres. Suffer me, reader, at this point, to borrow from my- THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 155 self, and do not betray me to the authorities that rule in this journal, if you happen to know [which is not likely] that I am taking an idea from a paper which years ago I wrote for an eminent literary journal. As I have no copy of that paper before me, it is impos- sible that I should save myself any labor of writing. The words at any rate I must invent afresh : and, as to the idea, you never can be such a churlish man as, by insisting on a new one, in effect to insist upon my writing a false one. In the following paragraph, there- fore, I give the substance of a thought suggested by myself some years ago. That kind of feeling, which broods over the Grecian tragedy, and to court which feeling the tragic poets of Greece naturally spread all their canvas, was more nearly allied to the atmosphere of death than that of life. This expresses rudely the character of awe and religious horror investing the Greek theatre. But to my own feeling the different principle of passion which governs the Grecian conception of tragedy, as com- pared with the English, is best conveyed by saying that the Grecian is a breathing from the world of sculpture, the English a breathing from the world of painting. What we read in sculpture is not abso- lutely death, but still less is it the fulness of life. We read there the abstraction of a life that reposes, the sublimity of a life that aspires, the solemnity of a life that is thrown to an infinite distance. This last is the feature of sculpture which seems most characteristic : the form which presides in the most commanding groups, ' is not dead but sleepeth : ' true, but it is the sleep of a life sequestrated, solemn, liberated from the bonds of space and time, and (as to both alike) thrown 156 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. (I repeat the words) to a distance which is infinite. It affects us profoundly, but not by agitation. Now, on the other hand, the breathing life — life kindling, trembling, palpitating — that life which speaks to us in painting, this is also the life that speaks to us in English tragedy. Into an English tragedy even fes- tivals of joy may enter ; marriages, and baptisms, or commemorations of national trophies : which, or any thing like which, is incompatible with the very being of the Greek. In that tragedy what uniformity of gloom ; in the English what light alternating with depths of darkness ! The Greek, how mournful ; the English, how tumultuous ! Even the catastrophes how different ! In the Greek we see a breathless waiting for a doom that cannot be evaded ; a waiting, as it were, for the last shock of an earthquake, or the inex- orable rising of a deluge : in the English it is like a midnight of shipwreck, from which up to the Ictst and till the final ruin comes, there still survives the sort of hope that clings to human energies. Connected with this original awfulness of the Greek tragedy, and possibly in part its cause, or at least lending strength to its cause, we may next remark the grand dimensions of the ancient theatres. Every citizen had a right to accommodation. There at once was a pledge of grandeur. Out of this original stand- ard grew the magnificence of many a future amphi- theatre, circus, hippodrome. Had the original theatre been merely a speculation of private interest, then, exactly as demand arose, a corresponding supply would have provided for it through its ordinary vulgar chan- nels ; and this supply would have taken place through rival theatres. But the crushing exaction of ' room for THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 157 every citizen,' put an end to that process of subdivision. Druiy Lane, as 1 read (or think that I read) thirty years ago, allowed sitting room for three thousand eight hundred people. Multiply that by ten ; imagine thirty-eight thousand instead of thirty-eight hundred, and then you have an idea of the Athenian theatre.''' Next, out of that grandeur in the architectural pro- portions arose, as by necessity, other grandeurs. You are aware of the cothurnus^ or buskin, which raised the actor's heel by two and a half inches ; and you think that this must have caused a deformity in the general figure as incommensurate to this height. Not at all. The flowing dress of Greece healed all that. But, besides the cothurnus^ you have heard of the mask. So far as it was fitted to swell the intona- tions of the voice, you are of opinion that this mask would be a happy contrivance ; for what, you say, could a common human voice avail against the vast radiation from the actor's centre of more than three myriads? If, indeed (like the Homeric Stentor), an actor spoke in point of loudness, 6oov hXXoi nsvTyjxovra, as much as other fifty, then he might become audible to the assembled Athenians without aid. But this being impossible, art must be invoked ; and well if the mask, together with contrivances of another class, could correct it. Yet if it could, still you think that this mask would bring along with it an overbalancing evil. For the expression, the fluctuating expression, of the features, the play of the muscles, the music of the eye and of the lips, — aids to acting that, in our times, have given immortality to scores, whither would those have vanished? Reader, it mortifies me that all which I said to you upon the peculiar and separate 158 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. grandeur investing the Greek theatre is forgotten. For, you must consider, that where a theatre is built for receiving upwards of thirty thousand spectators, the curve described by what in modern times you would call the tiers of boxes, must be so vast as to make the ordinary scale of human features almost ridiculous by disproportion. Seat yourself at this day in the amphi- theatre at Verona, and judge for yourself. In an amphitheatre, the stage, or properly the arena, occupy- ing, in fact, the place of our modern pit, was much nearer than in a scenic theatre to the surrounding spectators. Allow for this, and placing some adult in a station expressing the distance of the Athenian stage, then judge by his appearance if the delicate pencilling of Grecian features could have told at the Grecian dis- tance. But even if it could, then I say that this cir- cumstantiality would have been hostile to the general tendencies (as already indicated) of the Grecian drama. The sweeping movement of the Attic tragedy ought not to admit of interruption from distinct human features ; the expression of an eye, the loveliness of a smile, ought to be lost amongst effects so colossal. The mask aggrandized the features : even so far it acted favorably. Then figure to yourself this mask presenting an idealized face of the noblest Grecian outline, moulded by some skilful artist Fhidiacd manu^ so as to have the effect of a marble bust ; this accorded with the aspiring cothurnus ; and the motionless char- acter impressed upon the features, the marble tran- quillity, would (I contend) suit the solemn processional character of Athenian tragedy, far better than the most expressive and flexible countenance on its natural scale. ' Yes,' you say, on considering the character THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 159 of the Greek drama, 'generally it might; in forty- nine cases suppose out of fifty : but what shall be done in the fiftieth, where some dreadful discovery or a7iag- norisis [i. e. recognition of identity) takes place within the compass of a single line or two ; as, for instance, in the (Edipus Tyrannus, at the moment when CEdipus by a final question of his own, extorts his first fatal discovery, viz. that he had been himself unconsciously the murderer of Laius ? ' True, he has no reason as yet to suspect that Laius was his own father ; which discovery, when made further on, will di'aw with it another still more dreadful, viz. that by this parricide he had opened his road to a throne, and to a marriage with his father's widow, who was also his own natural mother. He does not yet know the worst : and to have killed an arrogant prince, would not in those days have seemed a very deep offence : but then he believes that the pestilence had been sent as a secret vengeance for this assassination, which is thus invested with a mysterious character of horror. Just at this point, Jocasta, his mother and his wife, says,^ on witnessing the sudden revulsion of feeling in his face, ' I shudder, oh king, when looking on thy countenance.' Now, in what way could this passing spasm of horror be recon- ciled with the unchanging expression in the marble - looking mask ? This, and similar cases to this, must surely be felt to argue a defect in the scenic apparatus. But I say, no : first. Because the general indistinctiveness from distance is a benefit that applies equally to the fugitive changes of the features and to their permanent expression. You need not regret the loss through absence, of an appearance that would equally, though present, have been lost through dis- 160 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. tance. Secondly, The Greek actor had always the resource, under such difficulties, of averting his face ; a resource sanctioned in similar cases by the greatest of the Greek painters. Thirdly, The voluminous draperies of the scenic dresses, and generally of the Greek costume, made it an easy thing to muffle the features altogether by a gesture most natural to sudden horror. Fourthly, We must consider that there were no stage lights : but, on the contrary that the general light of day was specially mitigated for that particular part of the theatre ; just as various architectural devices were employed to swell the volume of sound. Finally, I repeat my sincere opinion, that the general indis- tinctness of the expression was, on principles of taste, an advantage, as harmonizing with the stately and sullen monotony of the Greek tragedy. Grandeur in the attitudes, in the gestures, in the groups, in the pro- cessions — all this was indispensable : but, on so vast a scale as the mighty cartoons of the Greek stage, an Attic artist as little regarded the details of physiognomy, as a great architect would regard, on the frontispiece of a temple, the miniature enrichments that might be suitable in a drawing-room. With these views upon the Grecian theatre, and other views that it might oppress the reader to dwell upon in this place, suddenly in December last an op- portunity dawned — a golden opportunity, gleaming for a moment amongst thick clouds of impossibility that had gathered through three-and-twenty centuries — for seeing a Grecian tragedy presented on a British stage, and with the nearest approach possible to the beauty of those Athenian pomps which Sophocles, which Phidias, which Pericles created, beautified, pro- THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 161 moted. I protest, when seeing the Edinburgh theatre's programme, that a note dated from the Vatican would not have startled me more, though sealed with the seal of the fisherman, and requesting the favor of my com- pany to take coffee with the Pope. Nay, less: for channels there were through which I might have com- passed a presentation to his Holiness ; but the daughter of (Edipus, the holy Antigone, could I have hoped to see her ' in the flesh ? ' This tragedy in an English version, 9 and v/ith German music, had first been placed before the eyes and ears of our countrymen at Convent Garden during the winter of 1844-5. It was said to have succeeded. And soon after a report sprang up, from nobody knew where, that Mr. Murray meant to reproduce it in Edinburgh. What more natural ? Connected so nearly with the noblest house of scenic artists that ever shook the hearts of nations, nobler than ever raised undying echoes amidst the mighty walls of Athens, of Rome, of Paris, of London, — himself a man of talents almost unparalleled for versatility, — why should not Mr. Murray, always so liberal in an age so ungrateful to his profession, have sacrificed something to this occa- sion ? He, that sacrifices so much, why not sacrifice to the grandeur of the Antique ? I was then in Edin- burgh, or in its neighborhood ; and one morning, at a casual assembly of some literary friends, present Pro- fessor Wilson, Messrs. J. F., C. N., L. C, and others, advocates, scholars, lovers of classical literature, we proposed two resolutions, of which the first was, that the news was too good to be true. That passed nem. con.; and the second resolution was iiearly passing, viz. that a judgment would certainly fall upon Mr. 14 162 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. Murray, had a second report proved true, viz. that not the Antigone, but a burlesque on the Antigone, was what he meditated to introduce. This turned out false ; ^^ the original report was suddenly revived eight or ten months after. Immediately on the heels of the promise the execution followed ; and on the last (which I believe was the seventh) representation of the An- tigone, I prepared myself to attend. It had been generally reported as characteristic of myself, that in respect to all coaches, steamboats, rail- roads, wedding-parties, baptisms, and so forth, there was a fatal necessity of my being a trifle too late. Some malicious fairy, not invited to my own baptism, was supposed to have endowed me with this infirmity. It occurred to me that for once in my life I would show the scandalousness of such a belief by being a trifle too soon, say, three minutes. And no name more lovely for inaugurating such a change, no memory with which I could more willingly connect any re- formation, than thine, dear, noble Antigone ! Accord- ingly, because a certain man (whose name is down in my pocket-book for no good) had told me that the doors of the theatre opened at half-past six, whereas, in fact, they opened at seven, there was I, if you please, freezing in the little colonnade of the theatre precisely as it wanted six-and-a-half minutes to seven, — six-and-a-half minutes observe too soon. Upon which this son of absurdity coolly remarked, that, if he had not set me half-an-hour forward, by my own showing, I should have been twenty-three-and-a-half minutes too late. What sophistry ! But thus it happened (namely, through the wickedness of this man), that, upon enter- ing the theatre, I found myself like Alexander Selkirk, THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 163 in a frightful solitude, or like a single family of Arabs gathering at sunset about a solitary cofFee-pot in the boundless desert. Was there an echo raised ? it was from my own steps. Did any body cough? it was too evidently myself. 1 was the audience ; I was the public. And, if any accident happened to the theatre, such as being burned down, Mr. Murray would cer- tainly lay the blame upon me. My business meantime, as a critic, was — to find out the most malicious seat, i. e. the seat from which all things would take the most unfavorable aspect. I could not suit myself in this respect; however bad a situation might seem, I still fancied some other as promising to be worse. And I was not sorry when an audience, by mustering in strength through all parts of the house, began to divide my responsibility as to burning down the building, and, at the same time, to limit the caprices of my distracted choice. At last, and precisely at half-past seven, the curtain drew up ; a thing not strictly correct on a Grecian stage. But in theatres, as in other places, one must forget and forgive. Then the music began, of which in a moment. The overture slipped out at one ear, as it entered the other, which, with submission to Mr. Mendelssohn, is a proof that it must be horribly bad ; for, if ever there lived a man that in music can neither forget nor forgive, that man is myself. What- ever is very good never perishes from my remem- brance, — that is, sounds in my ears by intervals for ever, — and for whatever is bad, I consign the author, in my wrath, to his own consience, and to the tortures of his own discords. The most villanous things, how- ever, have one merit ; they are transitory as the best things; and that was true of the overture : it perished. 164 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. Then, suddenly, — oh, heavens ! what a revelation of beauty! — forth stepped, walking in brightness, the most faultless of Grecian marbles, Miss Helen Faucit as Antigone. What perfection of Athenian sculpture ! the noble figure, the lovely arms, the fluent drapery ! What an unveiling of the ideal statuesque ! Is it Hebe ? is it Aurora ? is it a goddess that moves before us ? Perfect she is in form ; perfect in attitude ; * Beautiful exceedingly, Like a ladie from a far countrie.' Here was the redeeming jewel of the performance. It flattered one's patriotic feelings, to see this noble young countrywoman realizing so exquisitely, and restoring to our imaginations, the noblest of Grecian girls. We critics, dispersed through the house, in the very teeth of duty and conscience, all at one moment unanimously fell in love with Miss Faucit. We felt in our remorse, and did not pretend to deny, that our duty was — to be savage. But when was the voice of duty listened to in the first uproars of passion ? One thing I regretted, viz. that from the indistinctness of my sight for distant faces, I could not accurately discriminate Miss Faucit's features ; but I was told by my next neighbor that they were as true to. the antique as her figure. Miss Faucit's voice is fine and impassioned, being deep for a female voice ; but in this organ lay also the only blemish of her personation. In her last scene, which is injudi- ciously managed by the Greek poet, — too long by much, and perhaps misconceived in the modern way of understanding it, — her voice grew too husky to execute the cadences of the intonations : yet, even in this scene, her fall to the ground, under the burden of THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 165 her farewell anguish, was in a high degree sculptur- esque through the whole succession of its stages. Antigone in the written drama, and still more in the personated drama, draws all thoughts so entirely to herself, as to leave little leisure for examining the other parts ; and, under such circumstances, the first impulse of a critic's mind is, that he ought to massacre all the rest indiscriminately ; it being clearly his duty to presume every thing bad which he is not unwillingly forced to confess good, or concerning which he retains no distinct recollection. But I, after the first glory of Antigone's avatar had subsided, applied myself to con- sider the general ' setting ' of this Theban jewel. Creon, whom the Greek tragic poets take delight in describing as a villain, has very little more to do (until his own turn comes for grieving), than to tell Antigone, by minute-guns, that die she must. ' Well, uncle, don't say that so often,' is the answer which, secretly, the audience whispers to Antigone. Our uncle grows tedious ; and one wishes at last that he himself could be ' put up the spout.' Mr. Glover, from the sepulchral depth of his voice, gave effect to the odious Creontic menaces ; and, in the final lamentations over the dead body of Hsemon, being a man of considerable intel- lectual power, Mr. Glover drew the part into a promi nence which it is the fault of Sophocles to have authorized in that situation ; for the closing sympathies of the spectator ought not to be diverted, for a moment, from Antigone. But the chorus, how did tliey play their part ? Mainly tlieir part must have always depended on the character of the music : even at Athens, that must have been very much the case, and at Edinburgh altogether, be- 166 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. cause dancing on the Edinburgh stage there was none. How came that about ? For the very word, ' orchestral,' suggests to a Greek ear dancings as the leading ele- ment in the choral functions. Was it because dancing with us is never used mystically and symbolically, never used in our religious services? Still it would have been possible to invent solemn and intricate dances, that might have appeared abundantly signifi- cant, if expounded by impassioned music. But that music of Mendelssohn! — like it I cannot. Say not that Mendelssohn is a great composer. He is so. But here he was voluntarily abandoning the resources of his own genius, and the support of his divine art, in quest of a chimera : that is, in quest of a thing called Greek music, which for us seems far more irrecover- able than the ' Greek fire.' I myself, from an early date, was a student of this subject. I read book after book upon it ; and each successive book sank me lower into darkness, until I had so vastly improved in ignorance, that I could myself have written a quarto upon it, which all the world should not have found it possible to understand. It should have taken three men to construe one sentence. I confess, however, to not having yet seen the writings upon this impractica- ble theme of Colonel Perronet Thompson. To write experimental music for choruses that are to support the else meagre outline of a Greek tragedy, will not do. Let experiments be tried upon worthless subjects ; and if this of Mendelssohn's be Greek music, the sooner it takes itself off the better. Sophocles will be delivered from an incubus, and we from an affliction of the audi- tory nerves. It strikes me that i see the source of this music. THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 167 We, that were learning German some thirty years ago, must remember the noise made at that time about Mendelssohn, the Platonic philosopher. And why ? Was there any thing particular in ' Der Phsedon,' on the immortality of the soul ? Not at all ; it left us quite as mortal as it found us ; and it has long since been found mortal itself. Its venerable remains are still to be met with in many worm-eaten trunks, pasted on the lids of which 1 have myself perused a matter of thirty pages, except for a part that had been too closely perused by worms. But the key to all the popularity of the Platonic Mendelssohn, is to be sought in the whimsical nature of German liberality, which, in those days, forced Jews into paying toll at the gates of cities, under the title of ' swine,' but caressed their infidel philosophers. Now, in this category of Jew and infidel, stood the author of ' Phsedon.' He was certainly liable to toll as a hog ; but, on the other hand, he was much admired as one who despised the Pentateuch. Now that Mendelssohn, whose learned labors lined our trunks, was the father of this Men- delssohn, whose Greek music afflicts our ears. Nat- urally, then, it strikes me, that as ' papa ' Mendelssohn attended the synagogue to save appearances, the filial Mendelssohn would also attend it. I likewise attended the synagogue now and then at Liverpool, and else- where. We all three have been cruising in the same latitudes ; and, trusting to my own remembrances, I should pronounce that Mendelssohn has stolen his Greek music from the synagogue. There was, in the first chorus of the ' Antigone,' one sublime ascent (and once repeated) that rang to heaven: it might have entered into the music of Jubal's lyre, or have glorified 168 THE ANTIGOJNE OF SOPHOCLES. the timbrel of Miriam. All the rest, tried by the deep standard of my own feeling, that clamors for the im- passioned in music, even as the daughter of the horse- leech says, ' Give, give,' is as much without meaning as most of the Hebrew chanting that I heard at the Liver- pool synagogue. I advise Mr. Murray, in the event of his ever reviving the ' Antigone,' to make the chorus sing the Hundredth Psalm, rather than Mendelssohn's music ; or, which would be better still, to import from Lancashire the Handel chorus-singers. But then, again, whatever change in the music were made, so as to ' better the condition ' of the poor audi- ence, something should really be done to ' better the condition ' of the poor chorus. Think of these worthy men, in their white and skyblue liveries, kept standing the whole evening ; no seats allowed, no dancing ; no tobacco ; nothing to console them but Antigone's beauty ; and all this in our climate, latitude fifty-five degrees, 30th of December, and Fahrenheit groping about, I don't pretend to know where, but clearly on his road down to the wine cellar. Mr. Murray, I am perfectly sure, is too liberal to have grudged the expense, if he could have found any classic precedent for treating the chorus to a barrel of ale. Ale, he may object, is an unclassical tipple ; but perhaps not. Xenophon, the most Attic of prose writers, mentions pointedly in his Anabasis, that the Ten Thousand, when retreating through snowy mountains, and in circumstances very like our General Elphinstone's retreat from Cabul, came upon a considerable stock of bottled ale. To be sure, the poor ignorant man calls it barley wine, [uirog xQiQivog :] but the flavor was found so perfectly classical that not one man of the ten thousand, not THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 169 even the Attic bee himself, is reported to have left any protest against it, or indeed to have left much of the ale. But stop : perhaps I am intruding upon other men's space. Speaking, therefore, now finally to the prin- cipal question, How far did this memorable experiment succeed ? I reply, that, in the sense of realizing all that the joint revivers proposed to realize, it succeeded ; and failed only where these revivers had themselves failed to comprehend the magnificent tendencies of Greek tragedy, or where the limitations of our theatres, arising out of our habits and social differences, had made it impossible to succeed. In London, I believe that there are nearly thirty theatres, and many more, if every place of amusement (not bearing the technical name of theatre) were included. All these must be united to compose a building such as that which re- ceived the vast audiences, and consequently the vast spectacles, of some ancient cities. And yet, from a great mistake in our London and Edinburgh attempts to imitate the stage of the Greek theatres, little use was made of such advantages as really were at our disposal. The possible depth of the Edinburgh stage was not laid open. Instead of a regal hall in Thebes, I protest I took it for the boudoir of Antigone. It was painted in light colors, an error which was abominable, though possibly meant by the artist (but quite unnecessarily) as a proper ground for relieving the sumptuous dresses of the leading performers. The doors of entrance and exit were most unhappily managed. As to the dresses, those of Creon, of his queen, and of the two loyal sisters, were good : chaste, and yet princely. The dress of the chorus was as bad as bad as could be : a few 170 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. surplices borrowed from Episcopal chapels, or rather the ornamented albes^ &c. from any rich Roman Catholic establishment, would have been more effec- tive. The Coi'yphceus himself seemed, to my eyes, no better than a railway laborer, fresh from tunnelling or boring, and wearing a House to hide his working dress. These ill-used men ought to ' strike ' for better clothes, in case Antigone should again revisit the glimpses of an Edinburgh moon ; and at the same time they might mutter a hint about the ale. But the great hin- drances to a perfect restoration of a Greek tragedy, lie in peculiarities of our theatres that cannot be re- moved, because bound up with their purposes. 1 suppose that Salisbury Plain would seem too vast a theatre : but at least a cathedral would be required in dimensions, York Minster or Cologne. Lamp-light gives to us some advantages which the ancients had not. But much art would be required to train and organize the lights and the masses of superincumbent gloom, that should be such as to allow no calculation of the dimensions overhead. Aboriginal night should brood over the scene, and the sweeping movements of the scenic groups : bodily expression should be given to the obscure feeling of that dark power which moved in ancient tragedy : and we should be made to know why it is that, with the one exception of the PerscB, founded on the second Persian invasion,ii in which ^schylus, the author, was personally a combatant, and therefore a contemporary^ not one of the thirty-four Greek tragedies surviving, but recedes into the dusky shades of the heroic, or even fabulous times. A failure, therefore, I think the ' Antigone,' in rela- tion to an object that for us is unattainable ; but a THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 171 failure worth more than many ordinary successes. We are all deeply indebted to Mr. Murray's liberality, in two senses ; to his liberal interest in the noblest section of ancient literature, and to his liberal disregard of ex- pense. To have seen a Grecian play is a great remembrance. To have seen Miss Helen Faucit's Antigone, were that all, with her bust, wg ayaXi.iarog,'^^ and her uplifted arm 'pleading against unjust tribu- nals,' is worth what is it worth ? Worth the money ? How mean a thought ! To see Helen, to see Helen of Greece, was the chief prayer of Marlow's Dr. Faustus ; the chief gift which he exacted from the fiend. To see Helen of Greece ? Dr. Faustus, we have seen her : Mr. Murray is the Mephistopheles that showed her to us. It was cheap at the price of a journey to Siberia, and is the next best thing to having seen Waterloo at sunset on the 18th of June, 1815.^^ NOTES. Note 1. Page 139. * When sown ; ' as it lias been repeatedly ; a fact wliich some readers may not be aware of. Note 2. Page 141. Boileau, it is true, translated Longinus. But there goes little Greek to that. It is in dealing with Attic Greek, and Attic poetSf that a man can manifest his Grecian skill. Note 3. Page 143. * Before God was known ; ' — i. e. known in Greece. Note 4. Page 146. At times, I say pointedly, the Athenian rather than the Grecian tragedy, in order to keep the reader's attention awake to a re- mark made by Paterculus, — viz. That although Greece coquet- tishly welcomed homage to herself, as generally concerned in the Greek literature, in reality Athens only had any original share in the drama, or in the oratory of Greece. Note 5. Page 150. 'The supreme artist:' — It is chiefly by comparison with Eui-ipides, that Sophocles is usually crowned with the laurels of art. But there is some danger of doing wrong to the truth in too blindly adhering to these old rulings of critical courts. The judgments would sometimes be reversed, if the pleadings were before us. There were blockheads in those days. Undoubtedly [173] 174 NOTES. it is past denying that Euripides at times betrays marks of care- lessness in the structure of his plots, as if writing too much in a hurry : the original cast of the fable is sometimes not happy, and the evolution or disentangling is too precipitate. It is easy to see that he would have remoulded them in a revised edition, or diaskeue [diaoysvy].] On the other hand, I remember nothing in the Greek drama more worthy of a great artist than parts in his PhcEnissae. Neither is he the effeminately tender, or merely pathetic poet that some people imagine. He was able to sweep all the chords of the impassioned spirit. But the whole of this subject is in arrear : it is in fact res integray almost unbroken ground. Note 6. Page 154. I see a possible screw loose at this point : if you see it, reader, have the goodness to hold your tongue. Note 7. Page 157. 'Athenian Theatre : ' — Many corrections remain to be made. Athens, in her bloom, was about as big as Calcutta, which con- tained, forty years ago, more than half a million of people ; or as Naples, which (being long rated at three hundred thousand), is now known to contain at least two hundred thousand more. The well known census of Demetrius Phalereus gave twenty-one thousand citizens. Multiply this by 5, or 4|, and you have their families. Add ten thousand, multiplied by 4^, for the Inquilini. Then add four hundred thousand for the slaves : total, about five hundred and fifty thousand. But upon the fluctuations of the Athenian population there is much room for speculation. And, quaere, was not the population of Athens greater two centuries before Demetrius, in the days of Pericles ? Note 8. Page 159. Having no Sophocles at hand, I quote from memory, not pre- tending therefore to exactness : but the sense is what I state. NOTES. 175 Note 9. Page 161. Whose version, I do not know. But one unaccountable error was forced on one's notice. Thebes, which, by Milton and by every scholar is made a monosyllable, is here made a dissyllable. But Thebez, the dissyllable, is a Syrian city. It is true that Causabon deduces from a Syriac word meaning a case or enclosure (a theca), the name of Thebes, whether Boeotian or Egyptian. It is probable, therefore, that Thebes the hundred-gated of Upper Egypt, Thebes the seven-gated of Greece, and Thebes of Syria, had all one origin as regards the name. But this matters not ; it is the English name that we are concerned with. Note 10. Page 162. * False : ' or rather inaccurate. The burlesque was not on the Antigone, but on the Medea of Euripides ; and very amusing. Note 11. Page 170. But in this instance, perhaps, distance of space, combined with the unrivalled grandeur of the war, was felt to equiponderate the distance of time, Susa, the Persian capital, being fourteen hun- dred miles from Athens. Note 12. Page 171. ^TiQva &'v)g ayaXuarog, her bosom as the bosom of a statue; an expression of Euripides, and applied, I think, to Polyxena at the moment of her sacrifice on the tomb of Achilles, as the bride that was being married to him at the moment of his death. Note 13. Page 171. Amongst the questions which occurred to me as requiring an answer, in connection with this revival, was one with regard to the comparative fitness of the Antigone for giving a representa- tive idea of the Greek stage. I am of opinion that it was the worst choice which could have been made ; and for the very reason which no doubt governed that choice, viz. — because the austerity of the tragic passion is disfigured by a love episode. 176 NOTES. Rousseau in his letter to D'Alembert upon his article Geneve, in the French Encyclopedic, asks, — ' Qui est-ce qui doute que, sur nos theatres, la ineilleure piece de Sophocle ne tombdt tout-d-platl' And his reason (as collected from other passages) is — because an interest derived from the passion of sexual loye can rarely be found on the Greek stage, and yet cannot be dispensed with on that of Paris. But 'why was it so rare on the Greek stage ? Not from accident, but because it did not harmonize with the prin- ciple of that stage, and its vast overhanging gloom. It is the great infirmity of the French, and connected constitutionally with the gayety of their temperament, that they cannot sympathize with this terrific mode of grandeur. We can. And for us the choice should have been more purely and severely Grecian ; whilst the slenderness of the plot in any Greek tragedy, would require a far more efiective support from tumultuous movement in the chorus. Even the French are not uniformly insensible to this Grecian grandeur. I remember that Voltaire, amongst many just remarks on the Electra of Sophocles, mixed with others that are not just, bitterly condemns this demand for a love fable on the French stage, and illustrates its extravagance by the French tragedy on the same subject, of Crebillon. He (in default of any more suitable resource) has actually made Electra, whose char- acter on the Greek stage is painfully vindictive, in love with an imaginary son of -^gisthus, her father's murderer. Something should also have been said of Mrs. Leigh Murray's Ismene, which was very effective in supporting and in relieving the magnificent impression of Antigone. I ought also to have added a note on the scenic mask, and the common notion (not authorized, I am satisfied, by the practice in the supreme era of Pericles), that it exhibited a Janus face, the windward side expressing grief or horror, the leeward expressing tranquillity. Believe it not, reader. But on this and other points, it will be better to speak circumstantially, in a separate paper on the Greek drama, as a majestic but very exclusive and almost, if one may say so, bigoted form of the scenic art. THE MARQUESS WELLESIEY.* It sounds like the tolling of funeral bells, as the annunciation is made of one death after another amongst those who supported our canopy of empire through the last most memorable generation. The eldest of the Wellesleys is gone : he is gathered to his fathers ; and here we have his life circumstantially written. Who, and of what origin are the Wellesleys .'' There is an impression current amongst the public, or there was an impression, that the true name of the Wellesley family is Wesley. This is a case very much resem- bling some of those imagined by the old scholastic logicians, where it was impossible either to deny or to affirm : saying yes^ or saying wo, equally you told a falsehood. The facts are these : the family was origi- nally English ; and in England, at the earliest era, there is no doubt at all that its name was De Welles leigh, which was pronounced in the eldest times just ais it is now, viz. as a dissyllable,! the first syllable sounding exactly like the cathedral city Wells, in * Memoirs and Correspondence. i 'As a dissyllable : ' — just as the Annesley family, of which Lord Valentia is the present head, do not pronoiince their name trisyllabically (as strangers often suppose) ■, but as the two sylla- bles Anns lea, accent on the first. [177] 178 THE MARQUESS WELLESLEY. Somersetshire, and the second like lea^ (a field lying fallow.) It is plain enough, from various records, that the true historical genesis of the name, was precisely- through that composition of words, which here, for the moment, I had imagined merely to illustrate its pro- nunciation. Lands in the diocese of Bath and Wells, lying by the pleasant river Perret, and almost up to the gates of Bristol, constituted the earliest possessions of the De Weilesleighs. They, seven centuries before Assay, and Waterloo, were ' seised ' of certain rich leas belonging to Wells. And from these Saxon elements of the name, some have supposed the Wellesleys a Saxon race. They could not possibly have better blood: but still the thing does not follow from the premises. Neither does it follow from the de that they were Norman. The first De Wellesley known to history, the very tip-top man of the pedigree, is Ave- nant de Wellesleigh. About a hundred years nearer to our own times, viz. in 1239, came Michael de Welles- leigh; of whom the important fact is recorded, that he was the father of Wellerand de Wellesley. And what did young Mr. Wellerand perform in this wicked world, that the proud muse of history should con- descend to notice his rather singular name ? Reader, he was — 'killed:' that is all; and in company with Sir Robert de Percival ; which again argues his Somer- setshire descent : for the family of Lord Egmont, the head of all Percivals, ever was, and ever will be, in Somersetshire. But how was he killed? The time when, viz. 1303, the place where, are known : but the manner hoiv, is not exactly stated ; it was in skirmish with rascally Irish 'kernes,' fellows that (when pre- sented at the font of Christ for baptism) had their right THE BIARQUESS WELLESLEY. 179 arms covered up from the baptismal waters, in order that, still remaining consecrated to the devil, those arms might inflict a devilish blow. Such a blow, with such an unbaptized arm, the Irish villain struck ; and there was an end of Wellerand de Wellesleigh. Strange that history should make an end of a man, before it had made a beginning of him. These, however, are the facts ; which, in writing a romance about Sir Wel- lerand and Sir Percival, I shall have great pleasure in falsifying. But how, says the too curious reader, did the De Wellesleighs find themselves amongst Irish kernes ? Had these scamps the presumption to invade Somersetshire ? Did they dare to intrude into Wells ? Not at all : but the pugnacious De Wellesleys had dared to intrude into Ireland. Some say in the train of Henry II. Some say — but no matter : there they were : and there they stuck like limpets. They soon engrafted themselves into the county of Kildare ; from which, by means of a fortunate marriage, they leaped into the county of Meath ; and in that county, as if to refute the pretended mutability of human things, they have roosted ever since. There was once a famous copy of verses floating about Europe, which asserted that, whilst other princes were destined to fight for thrones, Austria — the handsome house of Hapsburgh — should obtain them by marriage : « Pugnabunt alii : tu, felix Austria, nube.' So of the Wellesleys : Sir Wellerand took quite the wrong way : not cudgelling, but courting, was the cor- rect way for succeeding in Kildare. Two great estates, by two separate marriages, the De Wellesleighs ob- tained in Kildare ; and, by a third marriage in a third 180 THE MARQUESS WELLESLEY. generation, they obtained in the county of Meath, Castle Dengan (otherwise Dangan) with lordships as plentiful as blackberries. Castle Dangan came to them in the year of our Lord, 1411, i, e. before Agin- court : and, in Castle Dangan did Field-marshal, the man of Waterloo, draw his first breath, shed his first tears, and perpetrate his earliest trespasses. That is what one might call a pretty long spell for one family : four hundred and thirty-five years has Castle Dangan furnished a nursery for the Wellesley piccaninnies. Amongst the lordships attached to Castle Dangan was Mornington, which more than three centuries after- wards supplied an earldom for the grandfather of Waterloo. Any further memorabilia of the Castle Dangan family are not recorded, except that in 1485 (which sure was the year of Bosworth field?) they began to omit the de and to write themselves Welles- ley tout court. From indolence, I presume : for a certain lady Di. le Fl., whom once I knew, a Howard by birth, of the house of Suffolk, told me as her reason for omitting the Le, that it caused her too much addi- tional trouble. So far the evidence seems in favor of Wellesley and against Wesley. But, on the other hand, during the last three centuries the Wellesleys wrote the name Wesley. They, however, were only the maternal an- cestors of the present Wellesleys. Garret Wellesley, the last male heir of the direct line, in the year 1745, left his whole estate to one of the Cowleys, a Stafford- shire family who had emigrated to Ireland in Queen Elizabeth's time, but who were, however, descended from the Wellesleys. This Cov/ley or Colley, taking, in 1745, the name of Wesley, received from George THE MARQUESS WELLESLEY. 181 11, the title of Earl Mornington : and CoUey's grand- son, the Marquess Wellesley of our age, was recorded in the Irish peerage as Wesley, Earl of Mornington ; was uniformly so described up to the end of the eigh- teenth century ; and even Arthur of Waterloo, whom most of us Europeans know pretty well, on going to India a little before his brother, was thus introduced by Lord Cornwallis to Sir John Shore (Lord Teignmouth, the Governor- general), 'Dear sir, I beg leave to intro- duce to you Colonel Wesley, who is a lieutenant-colonel of my regiment. He is a sensible man, and a good officer.' Posterity, for ive are posterity in respect of Lord Cornwallis, have been very much of Ids opinion. Colonel Wesley really is a sensible man; and the sensible man, soon after his arrival in Bengal, under the instigation of his brother, resumed the old name of Wellesley. In reality, the name of Wesley was merely the abbreviation of indolence, as Chumley for Cholmondeley, Pomfret for Pontefract, Cicester for Cirencester ; or, in Scotland, Marchbanks for Majori- banks, Chatorow for the Duke of Hamilton's French title of Chatelherault. I remember myself, in child- hood, to have met a niece of John Wesley the Proto- Methodist, who always spoke of the second Lord Mornington (author of the well-known glees) as a cousin, and as intimately connected with her brother the gmdlfoudroyant performer on the organ. Southey, in his Life of John Wesley, tells us that Charles Wesley, the brother of John, and father of the great organist, had the offer from Garret Wellesley of those same estates which eventually were left to Richard Cowley. This argues a recognition of near consan- guinity. Why the offer was declined, is not distinctly 182 THE MARQUESS WELLESLEY. explained. But if it had been accepted, Southey thinks that then we should have had no storming of Seringapatam, no Waterloo, and no Arminian Metho- dists. All that is not quite clear. Tippoo was booked for a desperate British vengeance by his own desperate enmity to our name, though no Lord Wellesley had been Governor-General. Napoleon, by the same fury of hatred to us, was booked for the same fate, though the scene of it might not have been Waterloo. And, as to John Wesley, why should he not have made the same schism with the English Church, because his brother Charles had become unexpectedly rich ? The Marquess Wellesley was of the same standing, as to age, or nearly so, as Mr. Pitt ; though he outlived Pitt by almost forty years. Born in 1760, three or four months before the accession of George III., he was sent to Eton, at the age of eleven ; and from Eton, in his eighteenth year, he was sent to Christ Church, Oxford, where he matriculated as a nobleman. He then bore the courtesy title of Viscount Wellesley ; but in 1781, when he had reached his twenty-first year, he- was summoned away from Oxford by the death of his father, the second Earl of Mornington. It is interest- ing, at this moment, to look back on the family group of children collected at Dangan Castle. The young earl was within a month of his majority : his younger brothers and sisters were, William Wellesley Pole (since dead, under the title of Lord Maryborough), then aged eighteen ; Anne, since married to Henry, son of Lord Southampton, aged thirteen ; Arthur, aged twelve ; Gerald Valerian, now in the church, aged ten ; Mary Elizabeth (since Lady Culling Smith), aged nine ; Henry, since Lord Cowley, and British ambas- THE MARQUESS WELLESLEY. 183 sador to Spain, France, &c. aged eight. The new Lord Mornington showed his conscientious nature, by assuming his father's debts, and by superintending the education of his brothers. He had distinguished him- self at Oxford as a scholar ; but he returned thither no more, and took no degree. As Earl of Mornington, he sat in the Irish House of Lords ; but not being a British peer, he was able to sit also in the English House of Commons ; and of this opening for a more national career, he availed himself at the age of twenty-four. Except that he favored the claims of the Irish Catholics, his policy was pretty uniformly that of Mr. Pitt. He supported that minister throughout the contests on the French Revolution ; and a little earlier, on the Regency question. This came forward in 1788, on occasion of the first insanity which attacked George III. The reader, who is likely to have been born since that era, will perhaps not be acquainted with the constitutional question then at issue. It was this : Mr. Fox held that, upon any incapacity arising in the sovereign, the regency would then settle {ipso facto of that incapacity) upon the Prince of Wales ; overlooking altogether the case in which there should he no Prince of Wales, and the case in which such a Prince might be as incapable, from youth, of exer- cising the powers attached to the office, as his father from disease. Mr. Pitt denied that a Prince of Wales simply as such, and apart from any moral fitness which he might possess, had more title to the office of regent than any lamp -lighter or scavenger. It \vas the prov- ince of Parliament exclusively to legislate for the par- ticular case. The practical decision of the question was not called for, from the accident of the king's 184 THE MARQUESS WELLESLEY. sudden recovery : but in Ireland, from the indepen- dence asserted by the two houses of the British councils, the question grew still more complex. The Lord Lieutenant refused to transmit their address,* and Lord Mornington supported him powerfully in his refusal. Ten years after this hot collision of parties, Lord Mornington was appointed Governor-General of India ; and now first he entered upon a stage worthy of his powers. I cannot myself agree with Mr. Pearce, that 'the wisdom of his policy is now universally recog- nized ; ' because the same false views of our Indian position, which at that time caused his splendid ser- vices to be slighted in many quarters, still prepon- derates. All administrations alike have been intensely ignorant of Indian politics ; and for the natural reason, that the business of home politics leaves them no dis- posable energies for affairs so distant, and with which each man's chance of any durable connection is so exceedingly small. What Lord Mornington did was this : he looked our prospects in the face. Two great enemies were then looming upon the horizon, both ignorant of our real resources, and both deluded by our imperfect use of such resources, as, even in a pre- vious war, we had possessed. One of these enemies was Tippoo, the Sultan of Mysore : him, by the crush- ing energy of his arrangements. Lord Mornington was able utterly to destroy, and to distribute his dominions with equity and moderation, yet so as to prevent any * Which adopted neither view ; for by offering the regency of Ireland to the Prince of Wales, they negatived Mr. Fox's view, who held it to be the Prince's by inherent right ; and, on the other hand, they still more openly opposed Mr. Pitt. THE MARQUESS WELLESLEY. 185 new coalition arising in that quarter against the British power. There is a portrait of Tippoo, of this very- tiger, in the second volume of Mr. Pearce's work, which expresses sufficiently the mnparalleled ferocity of his nature ; and it is guaranteed, by its origin, as authentic. Tippoo, from the personal interest investing him, has more fixed the attention of Europe than a much more formidable enemy : that enemy was the Mahratta confederacy, chiefly existing in the persons of the Peishwah, of Scindia, of Holkar, and the Rajah of Berar. Had these four princes been less profoundly ignorant, had they been less inveterately treacherous, they would have cost us the only dreadful struggle which in India we have stood. As it was. Lord Morn- ington's government reduced and crippled the Mah- rattas to such an extent, that in 1817, Lord Hastings found it possible to crush them for ever. Three ser- vices of a profounder nature. Lord Wellesley was enabled to do for India ; first, to pave the way for the propagation of Christianity, — mighty service, stretch- ing to the clouds, and which, in the hour of death, must have given him consolation ; secondly, to enter upon the abolition of such Hindoo superstitions as are most shocking to humanity, particularly the practice of Suttee, and the barbarous exposure of dying per- sons, or of first-born infants at Sanger on the Ganges ; finally, to promote an enlarged system of education, which (if his splendid scheme had been adopted) would have diffused its benefits all over India. It ought also to be mentioned that the expedition by way of the Red Sea against the French in Egypt, was so entirely of his suggestion and his preparation, that, to the great dishonor of Messrs. Pitt and Dundas, whose adminis- 16 186 THE MARQUESS WELLESLEY. tration was the worst, as a war administration, that ever misapplied, or non-applied, the resources of a mighty empire, it languished for eighteen months purely through their neglect. In 1805, having staid about seven years in India, Lord Mornington was recalled, was created Marquess of Wellesley, was sent, in 1821, as Viceroy to Ireland, where there was little to do ; having previously, in 1809, been sent Ambassador to the Spanish Cortes, where there was an affinity to do, but no means of doing it. The last great political act of Lord Welles- ley, was the smashing of the Peel ministry in 1834 ; viz. by the famous resolution (which he personally drew up) for appropriating to general education in Ireland any surplus arising from the revenues of the Irish Church. Full of honors, he retired from public life at the age of seventy-five, and, for seven years more of life, dedicated his time to such literary pur- suits as he had found most interesting in early youth. Mr. Pearce, who is so capable of writing vigorously and sagaciously, has too much allowed himself to rely upon public journals. For example, he reprints the whole of the attorney-general's official information against eleven obscure persons, who, from the gallery of the Dublin theatre, did 'wickedly, riotously, and routously' hiss, groan, insult, and assault (to say nothing of their having caused and procured to be hissed, groaned, &c.) the Marquess Wellesley, Lord- Lieutenant General, and General Governor of Ireland. This document covers more than nine pages ; and, after all, omits the only fact of the least consequence, viz., that several missiles were thrown by the rioters into the vice-regal box, and amongst them a quart- THE MARQUESS WELLESLEY. 187 bottle, which barely missed his excellency s temples. Considering the impetus acquired by the descent from the gallery, there is little doubt that such a weapon would have killed Lord Wellesley on the spot. In de- fault however, of this weighty fact, the attorney-general favors us with memorializing the very best piece of doggerel that I remember to have read ; viz., that upon divers, to wit, three thousand papers, the rioters had wickedly and maliciously written and printed, besides, observe, causing to be written and printed, 'No Popery,' as also the following traitorous couplet — * The Protestants want Talbot, As the Papists have got all but ; ' Meaning 'all but' that which they got some years later by means of the Clare election. Yet if, in some instances like this, Mr. Pearce has too largely drawn upon olficial papers, which he should rather have ab- stracted and condensed, on the other hand, his work has a specific value in bringing forward private docu- ments, to which his opportunities have gained him a confidential access. Two portraits of Lord Welles- ley, one in middle life, and one in old age, from a sketch by the Comte d'Orsay, are felicitously exe- cuted. Something remains to be said of Lord Wellesley as a literary man ; and towards such a judgment Mr. Pearce has contributed some very pleasing materials. As a public speaker. Lord Wellesley had that degree of brilliancy and effectual vigor, which might have been expected in a man of great talents, possessing much native sensibility to the charms of style, but not led by any personal accidents of life into a separate cultiva- 188 THE MARQUESS WELLESLEY. vation of oratory, or into any profound investigation of its duties and its powers on the arena of a British senate. There is less call for speaking of Lord Welles- ley in this character, where he did not seek for any eminent distinction, than in the more general character of an elegant litterateur^ which furnished to him much of his recreation in all stages of his life, and much of his consolation in the last. It is interesting to see this accomplished nobleman, in advanced age, when other resources were one by one decaying, and the lights of life were successively fading into darkness, still cheer- ing his languid hours by the culture of classical litera- ture, and in his eighty-second year drawing solace from those same pursuits which had given grace and distinction to his twentieth. One or two remarks I will make upon Lord Welles- ley's verses — Greek as well as Latin. The Latin lines upon Chantrey's success at Holkham in killing two woodcocks at the first shot, which subsequently he sculptured in marble and presented to Lord Leicester, are perhaps the most felicitous amongst the whole. Masquerading, in Lord Wellesley's verses, as Praxi- teles, who could not well be represented with a Manon having a percussion lock, Chantrey is armed with a bow and arrows : ' En ! trajecit aves una sagitta duas.' In the Greek translation of PartheiiopcEus, there are as few faults as could reasonably be expected. But, first, one word as to the original Latin poem : to whom does it belong ? It is traced first to Lord Grenville, who received it from his tutor (afterwards Bishop of Lon- don), who had taken it as an anonymous poem from THE MARQUESS WELLESLEY. 189 the ' Censor's book ; ' and with very little probability, it is doubtfully assigned to ' Lewis of the War Office,' meaning, no doubt, the father of Monk Lewis. By this anxiety in tracing its pedigree, the reader is led to ex- aggerate the pretensions of the little poem; these are inconsiderable : and there is a conspicuous fault, which it is worth while noticing, because it is one peculiarly besetting those who write modern verses with the help of a gradus, viz. that the Pentameter is often a mere reverberation of the preceding Hexameter. Thus, for instance — ' Parthenios inter saltus non amplius erro, Non repeto Dryadum pascua Iseta choris ; ' and so of others, where the second line is but a varia- tion of the first. Even Ovid, with all his fertility, and partly in consequence of his fertility, too often commits this fault. Where indeed the thought is effectually varied, so that the second line acts as a musical minor ^ succeeding to the major ^ in the first, there may happen to arise a peculiar beauty. But I speak of the ordinary case, where the second is merely the rebound of the first, presenting the sam.e thought in a diluted form. This is the commonest resource of feeble thinking, and is also a standing temptation or snare for feeble think- ing. Lord Wellesley, however, is not answerable for these faults in the original, which indeed he notices slightly as ' repetitions ; ' and his own Greek version is spirited and good. There, are, however, some mistakes. The second line is altogether faulty ; XaiQia MaivaXim navr* iQareiva fi£