PAMPHLETS AND SKETCHES. 
 
Pamphlets 
 
 AND 
 
 Sketches 
 
 / 
 
 : 
 
 BY 
 
 THE RIGHT HON. LORD LYTTON 
 
 LONDON 
 
 GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS 
 
 THE BROADWAY, LIT) GATE 
 
 NEW YOEK : 416 BROOME STREET 
 1S75 
 

 LONDON 
 
 BRADBURY, AGXFW, & CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS. 
 
/ 
 
 PBEFATOKY NOTE TO THE KNEBWOETH 
 EDITION. 
 
 The half-dozen pieces comprised in this volume are 
 given for the most part in the chronological order in which 
 they originally appeared. 
 
 The Letter upon the Political Crisis of 1834 had an 
 extraordinary success at the time of its first publication, 
 enjoying, besides this, the repute of having considerably 
 influenced the General Election, which immediately after- 
 wards led to a change of government. 
 
 How it was that the " Confessions of a Water-Patient " 
 came to be written at all may be here explained. 
 Mr. Harrison Ainsworth having, in 1845, purchased the 
 New Monthly Magazine, applied to Sir Edward Lytton, 
 with whom he had long been on terms of intimacy, and 
 who had himself been a former editor of that periodical, 
 to aid his new enterprise with a contribution. In com- 
 pliance with this request, these Experiences of the Water 
 Cure were jotted down in the form of a letter addressed 
 to Mr. Ainsworth, as editor of the New Monthly. Grateful 
 for so welcome a contribution, the romancist of " Rook- 
 wood" begged his brother author's acceptance of two 
 antique suits of armour, which still adorn the banqueting- 
 hall at Knebworth. 
 
 As for the "Letters to John Bull," which appeared from 
 the press in 1851, they were the vindication of the writer's 
 views as an agriculturist and a politician, or, as he ex- 
 pressed it by his signature, as a landlord and a labourer 
 — views consistently maintained by him during seventeen 
 years consecutively. The publication of these Letters was 
 chiefly important to himself, as preparing the way for 
 
VI PREFACE. 
 
 his return to the House of Commons (after an absence 
 from it of eleven years) in his capacity as the Conserva- 
 tive member for Hertfordshire. 
 
 The " Life of Schiller " originally appeared as a prefix to 
 the translations of the poems and ballads of the great 
 German lyrist, when, in 1845, they were first collected 
 together, after their piecemeal issue in the pages of 
 BlackivoooV s Magazine. Similarly the essay illustrative of 
 the " Causes of Horace's Popularity,' ' having first appeared 
 as a contribution to Maga, was, in 1849, placed, by way of 
 Introduction, before Lord Lytton's unrhymed but rythmi- 
 cal version of the Odes and Epodes published by the 
 Messrs. Blackwood. 
 
 The concluding pages in this volume, now first identified 
 as from the hand of " Bulwer," appeared anonymously 
 nearly forty years ago, that is, in 1838, in the first volume 
 of the Monthly Chronicle. As an elaborate disquisition 
 upon the Art of Fiction, penned in mid-career by one of 
 the great masters of that art, it will, doubtless, be turned 
 to with something of the same interest with which the 
 reader might turn to a treatise of Paganini on the 
 structure of a Straduarius, or to one by Sebastian Bach 
 ■upon the subtleties of counterpoint. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Present Ceisis 9 
 
 Confessions of a Water-Patient 49 
 
 Letters to John Bull, Esq .76 
 
 Life and Writings of Paul Lotjis Courier . . . 175 
 
 The Life of Schiller 195 
 
 The Causes of Hoeace's Pofularity 291 
 
 On Art in Fiction ........ 318 
 
PAMPHLETS AND SKETCHES. 
 
 THE PEESENT CRISIS. 
 
 A LETTER TO A LATE CABINET MINISTER.* 
 
 "But, my Lords, how is the King's Government to be carried on? " — The 
 Duke of Wellington on the Reform Bill. 
 
 " The general appearance of submission .... encouraged the King 
 to remove from office the Marquis of Halifax, with whose liberal opinions 
 he had recently, as well as early, been dissatisfied. As the King found that 
 Halifax would not comply with his projects, he determined to dismiss him 
 before the meeting of Parliament." — Mackintosh' s History of the Revolu- 
 tion, chap, ii. 
 
 My LoPvD, — The Duke of Wellington has obtained many 
 victories, but he never yet has obtained a victory over the 
 English People ! — That battle has now to be adventured ; 
 it has been tried before, but in vain. On far worse ground 
 the great Captain hazards it again ; for his first battle was 
 to prevent giving power to the people ; the power obtained, 
 his second is to resist it. It is the usual fate of fortunate 
 warriors, that their old age is the sepulchre of their renown. 
 No man has read the history of England without compas- 
 sion for the hero of Anne's time. Marlborough in his glory, 
 and Marlborough in his dotage ; what a satire in the con- 
 trast ! With a genius for war, it may be, equal ; with a 
 genius in peace, incontestably inferior ; with talents far less 
 various ; with a knowledge of his times far less profound ; 
 with his cunning and his boldness, without his eloquence 
 and his skill, the Duke of Wellington has equalled the 
 glory of Marlborough, — is he about to surpass his dotage ? 
 
 * [Origina'ly published in 1834 as an 8vo pamphlet.] 
 
10 THE PRESENT CRISIS. 
 
 Marlborough was a trickster, but he sought only to trick a 
 court ; has the Duke of Wellington a grander ambition, 
 and would he trick a people ? " Like chimneys," said the 
 wise man, " which are useful in winter and useless in sum- 
 mer, soldiers are great in war, and valueless in peace." 
 The chimney smokes again! — there is a shout from the 
 philosophers who disagree with the wise man, " See how 
 useful it is! " — but it smokes because it has kept the soot 
 of the last century, and has just set the house in a blaze ! — 
 the smoke of the chimney, in this instance, is only the first 
 sign of the conflagration of the edifice. 
 
 Let us, my Lord, examine the present state of affairs. 
 Your Lordship is one of that portion of the late Ministry 
 which has been considered most liberal. Acute, far-seeing, 
 and accomplished, with abilities, which, exercised in a 
 difficult position, have been singularly successful in the 
 results they achieved, your Lordship is among those whose 
 elevation to the Cabinet was hailed with a wider satisfac- 
 tion than that of a party — and so short a time has elapsed 
 between your accession and retirement, (expulsion would 
 be the proper term,) that you are but little implicated in 
 the faults or virtues of the administration, over whose 
 grave I shall endeavour, in the course of this letter, to 
 inscribe a just and impartial epitaph. I address to you, 
 my Lord, these observations, as one interested alike in the 
 preservation of order, and the establishment of a popular 
 government — there may be a few who wish to purchase the 
 one at the expense of the other ; you wish to unite them, 
 and so do I. And we are both confident that such is yet 
 the wish, — nay more — the assured hope, of the majority of 
 the English people. 
 
 The King has dissolved Lord Melbourne's Administra- 
 tion, and the Duke of Wellington is at the head of affairs. 
 Who will be his colleagues is a question that admits of no 
 speculation. We are as certain of the list as if it were 
 already in the Gazette. It is amusing to see the now 
 ministerial journals giving out, that we are not on any 
 account to suppose, that it must necessarily be a high Con- 
 servative cabinet. God forbid so rash a conjecture ! " Who 
 knows," say they, "but what many Whigs — many Liberals, 
 will be a part of it ! We are only waiting for Sir Robert 
 Peel, in order to show you, perhaps, that the Government 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS. 11 
 
 will not be Tory ! " * So then, after all the Tory abuse 
 
 of the Whigs — after all the assertions of their unpopularity, 
 it is nevertheless convenient to insinuate that some of these 
 most abominable men may yet chequer and relieve the too 
 expectant and idolatrous adoration with which the people 
 would be imbued for a Cabinet purely Conservative ! The 
 several ambrosias of Wellington and Londonderry, of 
 Herries and Peel, would be too strong for mortal tastes, if 
 blended into one divine combination — so they might as well 
 pop a Whig or two into the composition, just to make it fit 
 for mankind ! The hypothesis may be convenient — but, 
 unhappily, no one accepts it. Every man in the political 
 world who sees an inch before his nose, is aware, that 
 though his Grace may have an option with respect to 
 measures, he has none with respect to men. He may filch 
 away the Whig policy, but he cannot steal the Whigs them- 
 selves without their consent. And the fact is notorious, 
 that there is not a single man of liberal politics — a single 
 man, who either belonged to the late government, or has 
 supported popular measures, who will take office under the 
 Duke of Wellington, charm he never so wisely. It is said, 
 my Lord, by those who ought best to know, that even Lord 
 Stanley, of whom, by the unthinking, a momentary doubt 
 was entertained, scorns the very notion of a coalition with 
 the Conservatives — a report I credit at once, because it is 
 congenial to the unblemished integrity and haughty honour 
 of the man. The Duke of Wellington, then, has no option 
 as to the party he must co-invest with office — unless, in- 
 deed, he strip himself of all power — abdicate the post of 
 chef, and send up to his Majesty the very same bill of fare 
 which has just been found so unpalatable to the royal 
 tastes. This is not exactly probable. And we know, there- 
 fore, even before Sir Robert Peel arrives, and whether Sir 
 Robert Peel take office or whether he do not, — we know 
 that his Grace's colleagues, or his Grace's nominees, can 
 only be the dittos of himself — it is the Farce of Anti-Re- 
 form once more, by Mr. Sarum and his family — it is the 
 old company again, and with the old motto " Vivant Rex 
 et Regina ! " Now-a-days, even in farces, the loyalty of 
 
 * " It is possible his Grace may think that some of the "Whig leaders who 
 are abroad, or absent from London, are likely to form useful components of 
 a new administration." — Standard. 
 
12 THE PRESENT CRISIS. 
 
 the play-bill does not suffice to carry the public. Thank 
 God ! for the honour of political virtue, it is, and can be, 
 no compromise of opinions ! — no intermixture of Whigs 
 and Tories ! — not a single name to which the heart of the 
 people ever for a moment responded will be found to re- 
 lieve the well-known list of downright, thorough, uncom- 
 promising enemies to all which concedes abuse to the 
 demands of opinion. Your Lordship remembers in Virgil 
 how iEneas meets suddenly with the souls of those who 
 were to return to the earth they had before visited, after 
 drinking deep enough of oblivion : so now how eager — how 
 noisy — how anxious wait the Conservative shadows, for the 
 happy hour that is to unite them to the substance of place. 
 
 — Strepit omnis murmure campus ! * 
 
 how they must fret and chafe for the appointed time ! — 
 but in the meanwhile have they drauk of the Lethe ? If 
 they have, unhappily the world to which they return has 
 not had a similar advantage ; they are escaped from their 
 purgatory before the appointed time — for the date which 
 Virgil, and we, gave them, in order completely to cleanse 
 their past misdeeds, was — a thousand years ! In the mean- 
 while there they stand ! mistaken, unequivocal ! — Happy 
 rogues — behold them, in the elysium of their hopes, perched 
 upon little red boxes, tied together by little red strings — 
 
 " Iterumque in tarda reverti 
 
 Corpora ; qua? hicis miseris tarn dira cupido ! " f 
 
 Well may the Times and the Tories say they will be " an 
 united Cabinet:" — united they always were in their own 
 good days of the Liverpool ascendancy — united to take 
 office at every risk — to seize all they can get — to give 
 nothing that they can refuse ! — My God ! what delight 
 among the subordinate scramblers to see before them once 
 more the prospect of a quarter's salary ! — They have been 
 out of service a long time — their pride is down — they are 
 willing to be hired by the job ; — a job too of the nature of 
 their old services ; for, without being a prophet, one may 
 venture to predict that they will have little enough to do 
 
 * [And all the plain buzzes with their humming noise.] 
 f [And enter again into inactive bodies ; what direful loye of the light 
 possesses the miserable beings !] 
 
THE PEESENT CRISIS. 13 
 
 for their money ! When working- day commences with the 
 next session of Parliament they will receive their wages 
 and their discharge. They have gone into sinecures again ! 
 honest fellows ! they are making quick use of the Poor 
 Law bill — in which it is ordained that able-bodied paupers 
 out of employ should be taken in doors for relief ! And 
 yet I confess, there is something melancholy as well as 
 ludicrous, in the avidity of these desperadoes. — The great 
 Florentine historian informs us, with solemn indignation, 
 (as something till then unheard of in the corruption of 
 human nature,) that in the time of the plague there were 
 certain men who rejoiced, for it was an excellent time for 
 pillage ! — the people perished, but the brigands throve ! — 
 And nothing, we might imagine at first, could exceed the 
 baseness of those who sought to enrich themselves amidst 
 the general affliction. But on consideration, we must deem 
 those men still baser who do not find — but who create — 
 the disorder ; — and who not only profit by the danger of 
 the public — but in order to obtain the profit, produce the 
 danger ! — For, my Lord, there are two propositions which 
 I hold to be incontestable : — first, that the late resolution 
 of the King, if sudden in effect, was the result of a pre- 
 vious and secret understanding that the Tories would 
 accept office ; and that his Majesty never came to the de- 
 termination of dismissing my Lord Melbourne, until he 
 had ascertained, mediately or immediately — (it matters not 
 which, nor how long ago) — that the Duke of Wellington 
 was not only prepared to advise the King as to his suc- 
 cessor, but could actually pledge himself to form a Ministry. 
 
 I grant that this is denied, though feebly, by the Conser- 
 vative journals, but to what an alternative would belief in 
 that denial reduce us ! Can we deem so meanly of the 
 royal prudence, as to imagine that the King could dismiss 
 one Government, without being assured that he could form 
 another ? In what an awful situation would this empire 
 be placed, could we attribute to his Majesty, with the 
 Tory tellers of the tale, so utter a want of the commonest 
 resources of discretion, — so reckless and improvident a 
 lunacy ! 
 
 But it may be granted, perhaps, that the King was aware 
 that the Duke of Wellington ivould either undertake to 
 form a Cabinet, or to advise his Majesty as to its forma- 
 
14 THE PRESENT CRISIS. 
 
 tion, whenever it should please the King to exercise his 
 undoubted prerogative in the dismissal of Lord Melbourne, 
 and yet be asserted that neither that understanding nor 
 that dismissal was the result of intrigue. Doubtless! 
 Who knows so little of a Court as to suppose that an in- 
 trigue is ever carried on within its precincts ? Is not that 
 the place, above all others, where the secret whisper, the 
 tranquil hint, the words that never commit the speaker, 
 the invisible writing and automaton talking of diplomacy, 
 are never known ! It is never in a Court that an intrigue 
 is formed ; and the reason is obvious — because they have 
 always another name for it ! There was no intrigue then. 
 Why should there be one ? The King might never have 
 spoken to the Duke of Wellington on the subject — the 
 Duke of Wellington might be perfectly unaware of what 
 time or on what pretext Lord Melbourne would be dis- 
 missed ; and yet the King might, and must, (for who can 
 say a King has not common sense ?) have known that the 
 Duke would accept office whenever Lord Melbourne was 
 dismissed ; and the Duke have known, on his part, that the 
 King was aware of that loyal determination. This is so 
 plain a view of the case, that it requires no state explana- 
 tions to convince us of it, or persuade us out of it. 
 
 The Duke, then, and his colleagues were willing to 
 accept office : on the knowledge of that willingness the 
 King exercised his prerogative, and since we now see no 
 other adviser of the Crown, it is his Grace alone whom we 
 must consider responsible for the coming experiment, 
 which is to back the House of Lords against the Repre- 
 sentatives of the People. 
 
 I hold it as a second and incontestable proposition, that 
 in this experiment there is danger, were it only for Ireland 
 — the struggle has begun — the people have not been the 
 first to commence — they will be the last to leave it. It is 
 a struggle between the Court and the People. My Lord, 
 recollect that fearful passage, half tragedy, half burlesque, 
 in the history of France 9 which we now see renewed in 
 England — when Mirabeau rose up in the midst of an 
 assembly suddenly dissolved, and the nation beheld the 
 tiers etat on one side, and the Master of the Ceremo- 
 nies on the other ! 
 
 The Duke of Wellington is guiltless of the lore of history, 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS, 15 
 
 not so his colleagues. I will concede the whole question of 
 danger in the struggle about to be — I will subscribe to the 
 wisdom of the experiment — I will renounce liberty itself — 
 if Sir Robert Peel, so accomplished in letters — if Sir 
 George Murray, so erudite in history, will but tell us of a 
 single instance in which the people, having firmly obtained 
 the ascendant power, — having held that power for two 
 years, have, at the end of that period, spontaneously re- 
 signed it. The English people have the power now, in 
 their elections — an election is at hand — there is no army to 
 awe, no despot to subdue, no enemy to embarrass them — 
 will they, of their own accord, give back that power to the 
 very men from whom they have wrenched it ? The notion 
 is so preposterous that we can scarcely imagine the design 
 of the new Cabinet to rest with the experiment of a new 
 Parliament : it would seem as if they meditated the alter- 
 native of governing without a Parliament at all — as if they 
 would hazard again the attempt of the Stuarts ; as if the 
 victor of Waterloo were already looking less to the conduct 
 of the electors than to the loyalty of the army. In fact, this 
 is not so wholly extravagant an expectation as it may seem. 
 The Tories fear the people — why should the people not fear 
 the Tories ? They call us desirous of a revolution — why 
 may we not think they would crush that revolution in the 
 bud, by a despotism ? Nor, for politicians without prin- 
 ciple, would the attempt be so ridiculous as our pride might 
 suppose. It seems to me, if they are resolved to govern us, 
 that the sword would be the best sceptre. A resolute army, 
 well disciplined, and well officered, with the Duke of Wel- 
 lington at the head, would be a far more formidable enemy 
 to the people than half a score hack officials in the council, 
 and a legion of smooth-faced Conservatives, haranguing, 
 bribing, promising, — abusing known reformers, and pro- 
 mising unknown reforms, to the " ten-pound philosophers'' 
 from the hustings : the latter experiment is ridiculous, the 
 former is more grave and statesmanlike. If a Londonderry 
 would have advised his Majesty to call in the Duke of 
 Wellington, a Machiavelli would have told him in doing so 
 to calculate on the army. Folly in these days, as in all 
 others, can only be supported and rendered venerable by 
 force. 
 
 As vet we are lost in astonishment at the late changes : 
 
16 THE PRESENT CRISIS. 
 
 we are not angry, we are too much, amused, and too con- 
 fident of our own strength to be angiy. So groundless 
 seems the change, that people imagine it only to be 
 fathomed by the most recondite conjectures. They are 
 lost in a wilderness of surmise, and yet, I fancy, that the 
 mystery is not difficult to solve. 
 
 Let us for a moment leave Lord Althorp out of the ques- 
 tion ; we will come to him by-and-by. Let us consider the 
 question of reforming the Irish Church. England has two 
 prominent causes of trouble : the one is the state of Ire- 
 land, the other is her House of Lords. Now it is notorious 
 that we cannot govern Ireland without a very efficient and 
 thorough reform in the mighty grievance of her church ; it 
 is equally notorious that that reform the House of Lords 
 would reject. We foresaw this — we all knew that in six 
 months the collision between the two Houses would come 
 — we all knew that the Lords would reject that reform, 
 and we all felt assured that Lord Melbourne would tell the 
 King that he was not fit to be a minister if he could not 
 carry it. There is the collision ! in that collision which 
 would have yielded? Not the House of Commons. All 
 politicians, even the least prophetic, must have foreseen this 
 probability, this certainty. His Majesty (let us use our 
 common sense) must have foreseen it too. Doubtless, his 
 Majesty foresaw also that this was not the sole question of 
 dispute, which his present administration, and his present 
 House of Commons would have been compelled by public 
 opinion to raise with the Hereditary Chamber, and his 
 Majesty therefore resolved to take the earliest decorous 
 opportunity of preventing the collision, not by gaining the 
 Lords, but by dismissing the Commons, and he now hopes, 
 by the assistance of the leader of the House of Lords, to make 
 the attempt to govern his faithful subjects, not by the 
 voice of that chamber they have chosen for themselves, but 
 by that very assembly who were formerly in the habit of 
 choosing for them. It is an attempt to solve our most 
 difficult problem, an attempt to bring the two Houses into 
 harmony with each other ; but it is on an unexpected prin- 
 ciple. — There is an anecdote of Sheridan, that walking 
 home one night, not altogether so sober as he should be, bo 
 was suddenly accosted by a gentleman in the gutter, con- 
 siderably more drunk than himself. " For the love of Grod, 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS. 17 
 
 help me up ! M cried the stranger. " My dear Sir," hic- 
 cuped Sheridan, " that is out of the question. I cannot 
 help you up ; but (let us compromise the matter) I will lie 
 down by you ! " The House of Lords is in the gutter — the 
 House of Commons on its legs — the matter is to be compro- 
 mised — the House of Commons is not to help up the 
 House of Lords, but to lie down by its side ! Fate takes 
 from us the leader of the Liberals in one House; — to 
 supply the place, his Majesty gives us the leader of the 
 Tories in the other. Prophetic exchange ! We are not to 
 make our Lords reformers, but our representatives cease to 
 be so ! Such is the royal experiment to prevent a collision. 
 It is a very ingenious one ; but his Majesty has forgotten 
 that Gatton and Lost wit hiel are no more. In the next 
 election this question is to be tried, "Are the people of 
 England to be governed according to the opinion of the 
 House of Lords, or according to the principles of their 
 own reform ! " That is the point at issue. Twist, pervert, 
 construe it as you will — raise whatever cries in favour of 
 the Church on one hand, or in abuse of the Whigs on the 
 other, the question for the electors is ; — will they, or will 
 they not, choose a House of Commons that shall pass the 
 same votes as the Lords, and that shall not pass votes 
 which the Lords would reject ? After having abolished 
 the Gattons, will they make their whole House a Gatton ? 
 
 Supposing then the King, from such evident reasons, to 
 have resolved to get rid of his Ministers, at the first oppor- 
 tunity,* — suddenly Lord Spencer dies, and the opportunity 
 is afforded. There might have been a better one. Through- 
 
 * And the Standard (Nov. 20th), the now official organ (and certainly an 
 abler or a more eloquent the ministers could not have), frankly allows that 
 the King has long been dissatisfied with the government — and even suggests 
 the causes of that displeasure. 
 
 " Lord Grey's administration," it says, "was at first perfect — (indeed! 
 that is the first time we have heard the concession from such a quarter) — or 
 if altered, altered only for the better by its purification from the to-all- 
 intolerable ! Earl of Durham." But this halcyon state soon ceases, because 
 liberal measures creep in, and chief among the causes of the King's dislike 
 to his ministers, and therefore to the Commons, is, first, the Irish Church 
 Bill, which the reader will remember was rejected by the House of Lords — 
 the bill, not the rejection of it, is mightily displeasing to the King; and 
 secondly, that change in the Irish Coercion Bill which allowed his Majesty's 
 Irish subjects a Jury instead of a Court-Martial. This is termed by the 
 Standard — u the Coercion Bill mangled into a mere mockery." — We* may 
 see what sort of mangling we are likely to have, 
 
 C 
 
18 THE PRESENT CRISIS. 
 
 out the whole history of England, since the principles of a 
 constitutional government, and of a responsible adminis- 
 tration, were established, in 1688, there is no parallel to 
 the combination of circumstances attendant upon the pre- 
 sent change. A parallel to a part of the case there may 
 be, to the whole case there is none. The Cabinet assure 
 the King of their power and willingness to carry on the 
 government : the House of Commons, but recently elected, 
 supports that Cabinet by the most decided majorities ; the 
 Premier, not forced on the King by a party, but solicited 
 by himself to accept office ; a time of profound repose ; no 
 resignation tendered, no defeat incurred — the revenue in- 
 creasing — quiet at home — peace abroad ; the political at- 
 mosphere perfectly serene : — when lo, there dies a very old 
 man, whose death every one has been long foreseeing — not 
 a minister, but the father of a minister, which removes, not 
 the Premier, but the Chancellor of the Exchequer, from the 
 House of Commons to the House of Lords ! An event so 
 long anticipated, does not confound the Cabinet. The 
 premier is not aghast, he cannot be taken by surprise by 
 an event so natural, and so anticipated, (for very old men 
 will die !) he is provided with names to fill up the vacant 
 posts of Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Leader of the 
 House of Commons. He both feels and declares himself 
 equally strong as ever ; he submits his new appointments 
 to his Majesty. Let me imagine the reply. The King, we 
 are informed, by the now ministerial organs, expresses the 
 utmost satisfaction at Lord Melbourne and his Govern- 
 ment ; he considers him the most honourable of men, and 
 among the wisest of statesmen. Addressing him, then, 
 after this fashion — 
 
 " He does not affect to dissemble his love, 
 And therefore lie kicks him down stairs." 
 
 " My Lord : — you are an excellent man, very — but old 
 Lord Spencer — he was a man seventy-six years old ; no 
 one could suppose that at that age, an Earl would die ! 
 You are an admirable minister, I am pleased with your 
 measures; but old Lord Spencer is no more. It is a 
 sudden, an unforeseen event. Who could imagine he 
 would only live to seventy- six ? The revenue is prospering, 
 the Cabinet is strong — our allies are faithful, you have the 
 
THE PRESENT CMSIS. 19 
 
 House of Commons at your back , but alas ! Lord Spencer 
 is dead ! You cannot doubt my attachment to Eeform, but 
 of course it depended on the life of Lord Spencer ? You 
 have lost a Chancellor of the Exchequer ; you say, you can 
 supply his place ; — but who can supply the place of the 
 late Lord Spencer ? You have lost a leader of the House 
 of Commons ; you have found another on whom you can 
 depend ; but, my Lord, where shall we find another Earl 
 Spencer, so aged, and so important as the Earl who is 
 gone ! The life of the government, you are perfectly 
 aware, was an annuity on the life of this unfortunate 
 nobleman — he was only seventy-six! my love of liberal 
 men, and liberal measures, is exceeding, and it was bound 
 by the strongest tie, — the life of the late Lord Spencer. 
 How can my people want Reform, now Lord Spencer is 
 dead ? How can I support reforming ministers, when 
 Lord Spencer has ceased to be ? The Duke of Wellington, 
 you must be perfectly aware, is the only man to govern the 
 country, which has just lost the owner of so fine a library, 
 and so large an estate. It is true, that his Grace could not 
 govern it before, but then Lord Spencer was in the way ! 
 The untimely decease of that nobleman has altered the 
 whole face of affairs. The people were not quite contented 
 with the Whigs, because they did not go far enough ; but 
 then — Lord Spencer was alive ! The people now will be 
 satisfied with the Tories, because they do not go so far, for 
 — Lord Spencer is dead ! A Tory ministry is necessary, it 
 cannot get on without a Tory parliament ; and a Tory par- 
 liament cannot be chosen without a Tory people. But, 
 ministry, parliament, and people, what can they be but Tory, 
 after so awful a dispensation of Providence as the death of 
 the Earl of Spencer? My Lord, excuse my tears, and do me 
 the favour to take this letter to the Duke of Wellington." 
 
 Well, but it may be said, that it was not the death of 
 this good old man, that so affected the King's arrange- 
 ments ; it was the removal of Lord Althorp from the Com- 
 mons. ;; What, is not that cause enough ? r ' cry the Tories. 
 About as much cause as the one just assigned. "What, 
 did not Lord Melbourne himself say, at the retirement of 
 Lord Grey, that the return of Lord Althorp was indispen- 
 sably necessary to his taking office?" Yery possibly. 
 But there is this Little difference between the two cases ; in 
 
 c 2 
 
20 THE PRESENT CRISIS. 
 
 the one, Lord Melbourne said, he could not carry on the 
 government without Lord Althorp as leader of the Commons ; 
 and in the other, he assured the King, that he could. The 
 circumstances at the time which broke up Lord Grey's 
 government, were such as raised the usual importance of 
 Lord Althorp to a degree which every one saw must sub- 
 side with the circumstances themselves. In the first place, 
 it was understood, that Lord Althorp left the government, 
 rather than pass an unpopular clause in the Coercion Bill, 
 the passing of which certain circumstances rendered doubly 
 distasteful to his mind ; that this led to the resignation of 
 Earl Grey, and that Lord Althorp felt a natural and gene- 
 rous scruple in resuming office after that resignation. The 
 Members of the House of Commons came to their memo- 
 rable requisition, because they looked upon Lord Althorp's 
 resignation, as the consequence of his popular sentiments. 
 They feared the vacancy he created could be filled only by 
 a man of less liberal opinions, and they felt his return, in 
 such circumstances, would be for the popular triumph, as 
 his secession might be but a signal for a change of policy. 
 Such were the circumstances under which Lord Melbourne, 
 at that time, considered Lord Althorp's return to the leader- 
 ship of the Commons as necessary to the stability of the 
 government. But what circumstances in the late changes 
 are analogous to these ? Is Lord Althorp now removed 
 from office by popular sentiments, which rendered his 
 return necessary for the triumph of his sentiments — not the 
 use of his talents ? Is the Cabinet broken up ? Is the 
 House of Commons declaring, that not even death shall 
 tear it from its beloved leader ? What absurdity, to follow 
 out the parallel ! Lord Althorp was called by the death of 
 his venerable father to the House of Lords. His loss 
 created no alarm for an alteration in our policy, broke up 
 no cabinet, and disturbed no measures ; the prime minister 
 was perfectly resigned to the event, and perfectly prepared 
 with his succesor — a successor of the same principles, and 
 if of less conciliatory manners, of equal experience, more 
 comprehensive knowledge, and greater eloquence. * The 
 King has a right to exercise his prerogative — no one dis- 
 
 * In the best informed political circles it is understood that Lord John 
 Kussell would have led the House of Commons and had the conduct of the 
 Irish Church Bill. Mr. Abercromby would have taken charge of the Muni- 
 
 o 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS. 21 
 
 putes it. It is only a misfortune that other ministers have 
 not also fathers of seventy-six ! Old Sir Robert, good Lord 
 Mornington — would that they were alive ! 
 
 And having now to all plain men shown how utterly 
 burlesque is the whole pretext of the dismissal, and the 
 whole parallel between Lord Althorp's former retirement 
 and present elevation, let us turn again from the reason of 
 the change to the change itself. 
 
 There are some persons simple enough to imagine that 
 though the Tory government may imply Tory men it does 
 not imply Tory measures ; that the Duke of Wellington, 
 having changed his sentiments (no, not his sentiments, — 
 his actions) — on the Catholic question, will change them 
 again upon matters like — the reform of the Protestant 
 Church, the abuses of corporations, perhaps even triennial 
 parliaments, and the purgation of the pension list ! There 
 are men, calling themselves reformers, and blaming the 
 Whigs as too moderate in reforms, not only vain enough 
 to hope this, but candid enough to say that a government 
 thus changing — no matter with what open and shameless 
 profligacy — no matter with what insatiate lust of power, 
 purchased by what unparalleled apostacy — that a govern- 
 ment, thus changing, and therefore thus unprincipled, 
 ought to receive the support of the people ! They would 
 give their suffrage to the Duke of Wellington upon the 
 very plea, that he will desert his opinions ; and declare 
 that they will support him as a minister, if they can but be 
 permitted to loathe him as an apostate. 
 
 My Lord, I think differently on this point. Even were I 
 able to persuade myself that the new Tory government 
 would rival or outbid the Whigs in popular measures, I . 
 would not support it. I might vote for their measures, 
 but I would still attempt to remove the men. What ! is 
 there nothing at which an honest and a generous people 
 should revolt, in the spectacle of ministers suddenly turned 
 traitors by the bribe of office — in the juggling by which 
 men, opposing all measures of reform when out of place, 
 will, the very next month, carry those measures if place 
 depends upon it ? Would there be no evil in this to the 
 morality of the people ? Would there be no poison in this 
 
 cipal Reform. Names that on these questions in particular would have 
 shown that the government were in earnest in their measures. 
 
22 THE PRESENT CRISIS. 
 
 to the stream of public opinion ? Would it be no national 
 misfortune — no shock to order itself, (so much of which 
 depends on confidence in its administrators,) to witness 
 what sickening tergiversation, what indelible infamy, the 
 vilest motives of place and power could inflict on the cha- 
 racters of public men ? And to see the still more lament- 
 able spectacle of a Parliament and a Press vindicating the 
 infamy, and applauding the tergiversator ! Vain, for these 
 new-light converts, would be the cant excuses of ' practical 
 statesmen attending to the spirit of the age • — ' conforming 
 to the wants of the time ' — ' yielding their theories to the 
 power of the people ;' for these are the very excuses of which 
 they have denied the validity ! If this argument be good 
 for them in office, why did they deny, and scorn, and 
 trample upon it out of office ? far more strong and cogent 
 was it when they had only to withdraw opposition to mea- 
 sures their theories disapproved, than when they themselves 
 are spontaneously to frame those measures, administer them, 
 and carry thern through. There could be but one interpre- 
 tation to their change — one argument in their defence, and 
 that is, — that they would not yield to reforms when nothing 
 was to be got by it ; but that they would enforce reforms 
 when they were paid for it — that they would not part with the 
 birthright without the pottage, nor play the Judas without 
 the fee ! I do not think so meanly of the high heart of 
 England as to suppose that it would approve, even of good 
 measures, from motives so shamelessly corrupt. And, for 
 my own part, solemnly as I consider a thorough redress of 
 her " monster grievance " necessary for the peace of Ireland, 
 a reform of our own Church, and our own Corporations, 
 and a thorough carrying out and consummation of the 
 principles of our reform, desirable for the security and 
 prosperity of England, I should consider these blessings 
 purchased at too extravagant a rate, if the price were the 
 degradation of public men — and the undying contempt for 
 consistency, faith, and honour — for all that makes power 
 sacred, and dignity of moral weight — which such an 
 apostacy would evince. Never was liberty permanently 
 served by the sacrifice of honesty. 
 
 But this supposition, though industriously put forward 
 by some politicians, unacquainted with what is best in our 
 English nature, is, I think, utterly groundless. I do not 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS. 23 
 
 attribute to the Duke of Wellington himself too rigid a 
 political honesty. He, who after having stigmatized one 
 day the Reform Bill, could undertake to carry it the next, 
 may be supposed to have a mind, which, however locked 
 and barred, the keys of state can open to conviction. But, 
 let it be remembered, that his Grace stood then almost 
 alone. All that was high and virtuous of his party refused 
 to assist in his astonishing enterprise. From Sir Robert 
 Peel to Sir Robert Inglis — from the moderate to the ultra- 
 Tory — every man who had tasted the sweets of character, 
 recoiled from so gross a contamination. His three days' 
 government fell at once. Now he is wiser — doubtless he 
 has formed a government — doubtless, he has contrived to 
 embrace in it the men who refused before. I believe, for 
 the honour of my countrymen, that they have not receded 
 from their principles now, any more than they receded 
 then. And those principles are anti-reforming. 
 
 This is, then, their dilemma : either they will prosecute 
 reform, or they will withhold it — either they will adhere 
 to their former votes, or they will reverse them : in the 
 one case, then, people of England, you will have uncom- 
 promising anti-reformers at your head, — in the other, you 
 will have ambitious and grasping traitors. Let them ex- 
 tricate themselves from this dilemma if they can ! 
 
 But, in fact, they have not this option. They are com- 
 mitted in every way to their old principles ; they are com- 
 mitted, first, to their own party, and secondly, to the King. 
 Were they as liberal as the Whigs, their friends would 
 desert them, perhaps his Majesty would dismiss them. 
 Their friends are the High Church party. High Church 
 is the war cry they raise — High Church the motto of their 
 banner. What is the High Church party ? It is the 
 party that is sworn to the abuses of the Church. Its 
 members are pledged body and soul to the Bishops, and 
 the Deans, and the Prebends, and the Universities, and 
 the Orangemen of Ireland. They may give out that they 
 think a great Church Reform is necessary ; vague ex- 
 pression ! what is great to their eyes would be invisible to 
 ours. Will they — let us come to the point, and I will 
 single out one instance — will they curtail the Protestant 
 Establishment of Catholic Ireland ? They have called the 
 attempt " spoliation ; " will they turn "spoliators?" — If 
 
24 THE PRESENT CRISIS. 
 
 so, they lose their friends, for no man supposes that the 
 Tory churchmen have a chemical affinity to the Duke of 
 Wellington — they have no affinity but that of interest : if 
 he offend their interests, he offends the party. Let him 
 but say, " that church has no congregation, but it gives 
 1500?. a year to the parson ; I respect property — the 
 property of the people — and they shall cease to pay, after 
 the death of the incumbent, for receiving no benefit ; " and 
 all the parsons of the country are in arms again st him ! What 
 a moment to suppose that he could do justice in such a case, 
 — with the cheers of the Orangemen, and the ravings of Lon- 
 donderry, and Roden, and Wicklow ringing in his ears ! * 
 
 As for the claims of the Dissenters, who can imagine 
 they will be attended to by the man who has called them 
 atheists ? He may swallow his words, but can he swallow 
 his friends of the colleges ? He cannot lose his great per- 
 manent support, the Church, for a temporary and hollow 
 support which would forsake him the moment he had 
 served its purpose. 
 
 The Corporations — what hope of reform there ? Every 
 politician knows the Corporations are the strongholds of 
 Toryism, and many of the truest liberals supported the 
 government till the Corporation reform should be passed, 
 in order to see, safely carried a measure against Toryism, 
 only less important than the Reform Bill. To reform the 
 Corporations will be to betray his own fortresses. Is the 
 Duke of Wellington the man to do this ? 
 
 But it is not to isolated measures that we are to look — the 
 contest is not for this reform or the other — the two parties 
 stand forth clear and distinct — they are no parties of names, 
 but parties of opposite and irreconcilable interests. With 
 the Duke of Wellington are incorporated those who have 
 an interest in what belongs to an aristocratic, in opposition 
 to a popular goverment, and he can concede nothing, or as 
 little as possible, calculated to weaken the interests of his 
 partizans. He is the incarnation of the House of Lords 
 in opposition to the voice of the House of Commons. 
 
 * See too the extracts from the Duke's speeches appended to this letter. 
 And while I am correcting th^se sheets (Friday, Nov. 21), in the Report of 
 the Conservative Dinner in Kent, it is pleasing to find that the supporters 
 of the Duke of Wellington are of opinion that the cause of the great 
 sinecure of Ireland, is the cause of all England ! Very true — but one 
 is the plaintiff in the cause, the other the defendant ! 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS. 25 
 
 Were lie then a Reformer, the people would despise him, 
 his friends would desert,* and we may add, the possibility 
 that the King would dismiss him. 
 
 His Majesty, we are assured, has no personal dislike to 
 the late premier : he lauds him as the most honourable of 
 men — he blows up his government, and scatters chaplets 
 over the ruin. It was not a dislike to his person, but to 
 his principles that ensured his dismissal. Perhaps, had 
 that accomplished and able minister condescended ' to 
 palter in a double sense ' — to equivocate and dissemble, to 
 explain his means, but to disguise his objects, he might 
 still be in office. But it is known in the political world 
 that he was an honest statesman — that whatever was his 
 last conference with the King, he did not disguise informer 
 interviews that reform must be an act as well as name — 
 that a government to be strong must be strong in public 
 gratitude and confidence — and perhaps, with respect to the 
 particular reform of the Irish church, he may have deli- 
 cately remarked, that the late Commission sanctioned by 
 the King was not to amuse but to satisfy the people — that 
 if its Report furnished a list of sinecure livings, there 
 would be no satisfaction in wondering at the number — that 
 to ascertain the manner and amount of abuses is only the 
 prelude to their redress. This is reported of Lord Mel- 
 bourne. I believe it, though not a syllable about any 
 reform might have been introduced at the exact period of his 
 removal. These, then, were the sentiments that displeased 
 his Majesty, and to these sentiments he preferred the Duke 
 of Wellington. He chose these new ministers because they 
 would do less than his late ones. He can only give them 
 his countenance so long as they fulfil his expectations. 
 
 I pass over as altogether frivolous and absurd the tittle- 
 tattle of the day. The King might or not be displeased 
 at the speeches of Lord Brougham, — true, they might 
 have offended the royal taste, but scarcely the royal poli- 
 tics — Heaven knows they were sufficiently conservative and 
 sufficiently loyal ; — they were much of the same character 
 as those his Majesty might hear whispered, not declaimed, 
 from his next chancellor at his own table. Such as they 
 
 * But he might suppose that the measure which lost a Tory would gain 
 a liberal. Yes, for that measure only. The friend would be lost for ever, 
 the enemy gained but for a night. 
 
26 THE PRESENT CRISIS. 
 
 were, they had nothing to do with his Majesty's resolve 
 — if they had, he would have sent, not for the Duke of 
 Wellington, but the Earl of Durham ! I pass over with 
 equal indifference the gossip that attacks the family of his 
 Majesty. I know enough of courts to be sensible that we, 
 who do not belong to them, are rarely well informed as 
 to the influences which prevail in that charmed orbit ; and 
 I am sufficiently embued with the chivalry of an honest 
 man not to charge women with errors of which they are 
 probably innocent, and of the consequences of which they 
 are almost invariably unaware. I can even conceive that 
 were it true that his Majesty's royal consort, or the female 
 part of his family, were able to exercise an influence over 
 state affairs, they would be actuated by the most affec- 
 tionate regard for his interests and his dignity. The 
 views of women are necessarily confined to a narrow circle : 
 their public opinion is not that of a wide and remote 
 multitude. They are attracted, even in humble stations, 
 by the " solemn plausibilities " of life — they feel an anxious 
 interest for those connected with them, which often renders 
 their judgment too morbidly jealous of the smallest ap- 
 parent diminution of their splendour or their power. To 
 imagine that the more firmly a monarch adheres to his 
 prerogatives the more he secures his throne, is a mistake 
 natural to their sex. If such of them as may be supposed 
 to advise his Majesty did form and did act on such a belief, 
 to my mind it would be a natural and even an excusable 
 error. Neither while I lament the resolution of the King, 
 am I blind to the circumstances of his situation. Called 
 to the throne in times of singular difficulty — the advisers 
 of his predecessor, whose reign had been peaceful and 
 brilliant, on one side — a people dissatisfied with half 
 reforms on the other — educated to consider the House of 
 Lords at least as worthy of deference as the popular will 
 — disappointed at finding that one concession, however 
 great, could not content a people who demanded it, but as 
 the means to an end — turning to the most powerful organ 
 of the Press, and reading that his liberal Ministers were 
 unpopular, and that the country cared not who composed 
 its government — seeing before him but two parties, besides 
 the government party — the one headed by the idol of that 
 people he began to fear, and the other by the most illus- 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS. 27 
 
 trious supporter of an order of things which in past times 
 was the most favourable to monarchy; — I cannot deem it 
 altogether as mnch a miracle as a misfortune that he 
 should be induced to make the experiment he has risked. 
 But I do feel indignation at those — not women, but men — 
 grey-haired and practical politicians, who must have been 
 aware, if nob of its utter futility, of its pregnant danger ; 
 by whose assistance the King now adventures no holiday 
 experiment. — For a poor vengeance or a worse ambition 
 they are hazarding the monarchy itself; by playing the 
 Knave they expose the King. " There are some men," 
 says Bacon, " who are such great self-lovers, that they will 
 burn down their neighbour's house to roast their own 
 eggs in the embers." In the present instance their neigh- 
 bour's house may be a palace ! For this is the danger — 
 not (if the people be true to themselves) that the Duke of 
 Wellington will crush liberty, but that the distrust of the 
 Royal wisdom in the late events — the feeling of insecurity 
 it produces — the abrupt exercise of one man's prerogative 
 to change the whole face of our policy, domestic, foreign, 
 and colonial, without any assigned reason greater than the 
 demise of old Lord Spencer — the indignation for the 
 aristocracy, if the Duke should head it against Reform — 
 the contempt for the aristocracy if the Duke should 
 countermarch it to Reform — the release of all extremes of 
 more free opinions, on the return which must take place, 
 sooner or later, of a liberal administration ; — the danger is, 
 lest these and similar causes should in times, when all 
 institutions have lost the venerable moss of custom, and 
 are regarded solely for their utility — induce a desire for 
 stronger innovations than these merely of reform. 
 
 " Xo thing," said a man who may be called the prophet 
 of revolutions, "destroys a monarchy while the people 
 trust the King. Bat persons and things are too easily 
 confounded, and to lose faith in the representative of an 
 institution, forbodes the decease of the institution itself." 
 Attached as I am by conviction to a monarchy for this 
 country — an institution that I take the liberty humbly to 
 say I have elsewhere vindicated, with more effect, perhaps, 
 as coming from one known to embrace the cause of the 
 people, than the more vehement declamations of slaves and 
 courtiers —I view such a prospect with alarm, And not 
 
28 THE PRESENT CRISIS. 
 
 the less so, because Order is of more value than the 
 Institutions which are but formed to guard it ; and in the 
 artificial and complicated affairs of this country, a struggle 
 against monarchy would cost the tranquillity of a generation. 
 
 We are standing on a present, surrounded by fearful 
 warnings from the past. The dismissal of a ministry too 
 liberal for a King — too little liberal for the people, is to be 
 found a common event in the stormiest pages of human 
 history. It is like the parting with a common mediator, 
 and leaves the two extremes to their own battle. 
 
 And now, my Lord, before I speak of what ought to be, 
 and I am convinced will be the conduct of the people, who 
 are about to be made the judge of the question at issue, 
 let me say a few words upon the Cabinet that is no more. 
 I am not writing a panegyric on the Whigs — I leave that 
 to men who wore their uniform and owned their leaders. 
 I have never done so. In the palmiest days of their power, 
 I stooped not the knee to them. By vote, pen, and speech, 
 I have humbly but honestly asserted my own independence ; 
 and I had my reward in the sarcasms and the depreciation 
 of that party which seemed likely for the next quarter of a 
 century to be the sole dispensers of the ordinary prizes of 
 ambition. ISTo matter. I wanted not their favours, and 
 could console myself for the thousand little obstacles, by 
 which a powerful party can obstruct the parliamentary 
 progress of one who will not adopt their errors. I do not 
 write the panegyric of the Whig, and though I am not 
 one of those who can be louder in vituperation when the 
 power is over, than in warning before the offence is done, 
 I have not, I own, the misplaced generosity to laud now 
 the errors which I have always lamented. It cannot be 
 denied, my Lord, or at least I cannot deny it, that the 
 Whig government disappointed the people. And by the 
 Whig government I refer to that of my Lord Grey. Not 
 so much because it did not go far enough, as with some ill 
 judged partizans is contended, but rather because it went 
 too far. It went too far, my Lord, when its first act was 
 to place Sir Charles Sutton in the Speaker's chair, — it 
 went too far when it passed the Coercion Bill — it went 
 too far when it defended Sinecures — it went too far 
 when it marched its army to protect the Pension list. 
 — It might have denied many popular changes — if it had 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS. 29 
 
 not defended and enforced unpopular measures. — It could 
 not do all that the people expected, but where was the 
 necessity of doing what the people never dreamt of ? 
 Some might have regretted when it was solely Whig — 
 but how many were disgusted when it seemed three parts 
 Tory ! Nor was this all — much that it did was badly 
 done : there was a want of practical knowledge in the 
 principle and the details of many of its measures — it often 
 blundered and it often bungled. But these were the faults 
 of a past Cabinet. The Cabinet of Lord Melbourne had 
 not been tried. There was a vast difference between the 
 two administrations, and that difference was this — in the 
 one the more liberal party was the minority, in the other it 
 was the majority. In the Cabinet of the late Premier, the 
 weight of Sir John Hobhouse, Lord Duncannon, and the 
 Earl of Mulgrave was added to the scale of the people. 
 There was in the Cabinet just dissolved a majority of men 
 whose very reputation was the popular voice, whose names 
 were as wormwood to the Tories, and to whom it is amusing 
 to contrast the language applied by the Tory Journals 
 with that which greeted "in liquid lines mellinuously 
 bland," the luke-warm reformers they supplanted. Lord 
 Melbourne's Cabinet had not been tried — It is tried now 
 — The King has dismissed it in favour of the Duke of 
 Wellington ! His Majesty took the earliest opportunity 
 and the faintest pretext in the royal power to prove that 
 he thought it more liberal than the Cabinet which preceded 
 it. If some cry out with the Tories — " Nay, what said 
 Lord Brougham at the Edinburgh dinner ? " the answer is 
 obvious. Without lending any gloss to the expressions of 
 that singular and unfortunate speech, it is enough to 
 remind the people that Lord Brougham, though a great 
 orator and a great man, able to play many parts, cannot 
 fill up the whole rdles of the Cabinet. Three other Cabinet 
 ministers were present, Sir John Hobhouse, Mr. Ellice, 
 Mr. Abercromby. Did they echo the sentiments of Lord 
 Brougham ? No ; they declared only their sympathy with 
 the sentiments of Lord Durham. They too lamented every 
 hour that passed over "recognized and unreformed abuses ;" 
 they adopted Lord Durham's principle as their own. The 
 Chancellor, since he quoted so reverently the royal name, 
 may have uttered the royal sentiments, but three of his 
 
30 THE PKESENT CRISIS. 
 
 colleagues before his very face uttered only the sentiments 
 which were those of the people when they elected a re- 
 formed parliament for the snpport of reforming ministers. 
 By these three speakers, and not by the one speaker, are we 
 to judge, then, in common fairness of what the government 
 would have done. The majority of the Cabinet were of the 
 principles of these speakers. Had even Lord Brougham 
 been an obstacle to those principles when they came to be 
 discussed in the Cabinet, Lord Brougham would have 
 succumbed and not the principles. Of the condnct of that 
 remarkable man it is not now necessary to speak ; nor is it 
 by these hasty lines, nor perhaps by so nnable a hand, that 
 so intricate a character can be accurately and profoundly 
 analysed. When the time comes that may restore him to 
 office, it will be the fitting season for shrewder judges of 
 character than I am, to speak firmly and boldly of his 
 merits or his faults. At present it is no slight blame to 
 one so long in public life — so eminent and so active — to 
 say that his friends consider him a riddle : if he be mis- 
 construed, whose fault is it but his own? When the 
 Delphic oracle could be interpreted two ways, what 
 wonder that the world grew at last to consider it a cheat ! 
 With Lor dMelbourne himself, it was my lot in early 
 youth to be brought in contact, and, though our acquaint- 
 ance has now altogether ceased, (for I am not one who 
 seeks to refresh the memories of men in proportion as they 
 become great,) I still retain a lively impression of his pro- 
 fundity as a scholar — of his enthusiasm at generous senti- 
 ments — and of that happy frame of mind he so peculiarly 
 possesses, and of which the stuff of Statesmen is best made, 
 at once practical and philosophical, large enough to con- 
 ceive principles, — close enough to bring them to effect.* 
 Could we disentangle and remove ourselves from the pre- 
 sent, could we fancy ourselves in a future age, it might 
 possibly be thus that an historian would describe him : — 
 " Few persons could have been selected by a king, as prime 
 minister, in those days of violent party, and of constant 
 
 * I imagined Mm susceptible onl) T to the charge of indolence, and I once 
 imputed to him that fault. On learning from those who can best judge, 
 that in office at least the imputation was unjust, I took, long since, the 
 opportunity of a new edition to efface it from the work in which the impu- 
 tation was made. 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS. 31 
 
 change, who were more fitted by nature and circumstances 
 to act with the people, but for the King. A Politician pro- 
 bably less ardent than sagacious, he was exactly the man to 
 conform to the genius of a particular time ; — to know how 
 far to go with prudence — where to stop with success ; not 
 vehement iu temper, not inordinate in ambition, he was not 
 likely to be hurried away by private objects, affections, or 
 resentments. To the moment of his elevation as premier, 
 it can scarcely be said of his political life that it affords one 
 example of imprudence. 'Not to commit himself,' was at 
 one time supposed to be his particular distinction. His 
 philosophy was less that which deals with abstract doctrines 
 than that which teaches how to command shifting and 
 various circumstances. He seldom preceded his time, and 
 never stopped short of it. Add to this, that with a search- 
 ing knowledge of mankind, he may have sought to lead, 
 but never to deceive, them. His was the high English 
 statesmanship which had not recourse to wiles or artifice. 
 He was one whom a king might have trusted, for he was 
 not prone to deceive himself, and he would not deceive 
 another. His judgment wary — his honour impregnable. 
 Such was the minister who, if not altogether that which 
 the people would have selected, seems precisely that which 
 a king should have studied to preserve. He would not have 
 led, as by a more bold and vigorous genius, Lord Durham, 
 equally able, equally honest, with perhaps a yet deeper 
 philosophy, the result of a more masculine and homely 
 knowledge of mankind, and a more prophetic vision of 
 the spirit of the age, might have done ; he would not have 
 led the People to good government, but he would have 
 marched with them side by side." 
 
 Such, I believe, will be the outline of the character Lord 
 Melbourne will bequeath to a calmer and more remote time. 
 And this is not my belief alone. I observe that most of 
 those independent members who had been gradually de- 
 tached from the Cabinet of Lord Grey, looked with hope 
 and friendly dispositions to that of his successor. In most 
 of the recent public meetings and public dinners where the 
 former Cabinet was freely blamed, there was a willingness 
 to trust the later one. And even those who would have 
 wreaked on the government their suspicions of the Chan- 
 cellor were deterred by Lord Durham's honest eulogium on 
 
32 THE PRESENT CRISIS. 
 
 the Premier. This much then we must concede to the 
 Melbourne administration. First, it went a step beyond 
 Lord Grey's, it embraced the preponderating, instead of 
 the lesser, number of men of the more vigorous and liberal 
 policy. The faults of Lord Grey's government are not 
 fairly chargeable upon it. Men of the independent party 
 hoped more from it. 
 
 Secondly, by what we know, it seems to have been in 
 earnest as to its measures, for we know this, that the 
 Corporation Reform was in preparation — that the Com- 
 mission into the Irish Church had produced reports which 
 were to be fairly acted upon — that a great measure of 
 justice to Ireland was to be based upon the undeniable 
 evidence which that Commission afforded of her wrongs. 
 We know this, — and knowing no more, we see the Cabinet 
 dissolved, — presumption in its favour, since we have seen 
 its successor ! 
 
 But, my Lord, if we may speak thus in favour of that 
 Cabinet which your abilities adorned, and in hope of the 
 services which it would have rendered us, we must not for- 
 get that we are about in the approaching election, to have 
 not the expectation of good government, but the power of 
 securing it. We must demand from the candidates who 
 are disposed to befriend and restore you, not vague assur- 
 ances of support to one set of men or the other, to the 
 principles of Lord Grey or those of Lord Melbourne, but to 
 the principles of the people. Your friends must speak out, 
 and boldly — they must place a wide distinction, by candid 
 and explicit declarations, between themselves and their 
 Tory antagonists. Sir Edward Sugden said at Cambridge 
 that he was disposed to reform temperately all abuses. 
 The Emperor of Russia would say the same. Your partizans 
 must specify what abuses they will reform, and to what 
 extent they will go. The people must see, on the one hand, 
 defined reform, in order to despise indefinite reformers on 
 the other. Let your friends come forward manfully and 
 boldly as befits honest men in stirring times, and the same 
 people who gave the last majority to Lord Grey, will give 
 an equal support to a cabinet yet more liberal, and dismissed 
 only because it was felt to be in earnest. I know what the 
 conduct of all who are temperate and honest among re- 
 formers ought to be. It is the cry of those who have com- 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS. 33 
 
 promised themselves with, their constituents in their too 
 implicit adherence to the measures of Lord Grey, that " All 
 differences must cease — Whig and Radical must forget 
 their small dissensions — all must unite against a common 
 enemy." A convenient cry for them ; they are willing now 
 to confound themselves with us, to take shelter under our 
 popularity ! — For we, my Lord — and let this be a lesson to 
 the next Parliament — we are safe. Of us who have not 
 subscribed implicitly to Lord Grey's government — of us 
 who have been more liberal than that government — of us 
 who have not defended its errors, nor, what was worse, de- 
 fended the errors of its Tory predecessors, — I do not believe 
 that a single member will lose his seat ! The day of election 
 will be to us a day of triumph. We have not enjoyed the 
 emoluments and honours of a victorious party — we have 
 not basked in the ministerial smiles — we have been depre- 
 ciated by lame humour, as foolish and unthinking men, and 
 stigmatized by a lamer calumny as revolutionary Destruc- 
 tives. But we had our consolation — we have found it in 
 our consistency and our conscience — in our own self- 
 acquittal, and in the increased esteem of our constituents. 
 And now they need our help ! Shall they have it ? I trust 
 yes ! We can forgive jests at our expense, for nobody 
 applauded them, and they were not echoed, my Lord, by the 
 majority of the Cabinet. One man might disavow us — one 
 man might not enter our house nor travel by our coach, (it 
 is not we who have now pulled down the house, or upset 
 the conveyance!) but three of his colleagues asserted our 
 principles, and we felt that there spoke the preponderating 
 voice of the ministry. I trust, and I feel assured, that we 
 shall forget minor differences, when we have great and in- 
 effaceable distinctions to encounter. I trust that we shall 
 show we are sensible we have it now in our power to prove 
 that we fought for no selfish cause — that we were not 
 thinking of honours and office for ourselves — that we shall 
 show we wished to make our principles, not our interests, 
 triumphant ; — willing that others should be the agents for 
 carrying them into effect. This should be our sentiment, 
 and this our revenge. All men who care for liberty should 
 unite — all private animosities, all partial jealousies should 
 be merged. We should remember only that some of us 
 have advocated good measures more than others; but that, 
 
 L) 
 
34 THE PRESENT CRISIS. 
 
 the friends of the New Ministry have opposed all. Haroun 
 Alraschid, the caliph of immortal memory, went out one 
 night disguised, as was his wont, and attended by his 
 favourite Giaffer ; — they pretended to be merchants in dis- 
 tress, and asked charity. The next morning two candidates 
 for a place in the customs appeared before the divan. The 
 sultan gave the preference to one of them. " Sire," whis- 
 pered Giaffer, " don't you recollect that that man only gave 
 us a piece of silver when we asked for a piece of gold ? " 
 " And don't you recollect," answered Haroun, "that the 
 other man, when we asked for a piece of silver, called for a 
 cudgel ? " 
 
 Looking temperately back at the proceedings of the 
 Whigs, we must confess that they have greater excuses, 
 than at the time we were aware of. " Who shall read," 
 says the proverb, "the inscrutable heart of kings ?" We 
 could not tell now far the Monarch was with us : rumours 
 and suspicions were afloat — but we were unwilling to 
 believe them of William the Reformer. We imagined his 
 Majesty, induced by secret and invisible advisers, might 
 indeed be timid, and reluctant ; but we imagined, also, 
 that the government, by firmness, might bias the royal 
 judgment to a consistent and uniformly paternal policy. 
 Many of us, (though, for my own part, I foresaw and fore- 
 told'"" that the Tory party, so far from being crushed, were 
 but biding their time, scotched not killed) — many of us 
 supposed the Tories more humbled and more out of the 
 reach of office, than the Cabinet, with a more prophetic 
 vision, must have felt they were. With a House of Lords, 
 which the Ministers had neither the power to command nor 
 to reform — with a King, whose secret, and it may be 
 stubborn inclinations, are now apparent, — surrounded by 
 intrigues and cabals, and sensible that the alternative of a 
 Tory government was not so impossible as the public 
 believed, we must, in common candour, make many excuses 
 for men, who, however inclined to the people, had also 
 every natural desire to preserve the balance of the consti- 
 tution — to maintain the second chamber, and to pay to the 
 wishes of the King that deference,' which, as the third 
 voice of the legislature, his Majesty is entitled to receive. 
 
 * England and the English, 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS. 35 
 
 Add to this, if they resigned office, the King would have 
 had the excuse he has not now : he would have had no 
 alternative but a Tory Cabinet ! It is true, however, that 
 so beset with difficulties, their wisest course would have 
 been to remember the end and origin of all government — 
 have thrown themselves on the people and abided the con- 
 sequences — and that, my Lord, is exactly what I believe 
 your colleagues and yourself intended to do, and it is for 
 that reason you are dismissed. A few months will show, a 
 few months will allow you to explain yourselves ; but I 
 should not address to your Lordship this letter — I should 
 not commit myself to a vain prophecy — I should not volun- 
 tarily incur your own contempt for my simplicity, if I had 
 not the fullest reason to believe, that the occasion is only 
 wanting to acquit yourself to the public. 
 
 Considering these circumstances with candour — the 
 situation of the last ministry — the dissolution of the pre- 
 sent, and the reasons for that dissolution ; considering also 
 the first enthusiasm of the Reform Bill, which induced so 
 many members, with the purest motives, to place confi- 
 dence in the men who had obtained it ; — we shall find now 
 excuses for much of whatever temporising we may yet 
 desire for the future to prevent : and to prevent it must be 
 our object at the next election. 
 
 On all such members of the Whig majority as will declare 
 for the future for a more energetic and decided conduct, so 
 as to lead the government through counteracting obstacles, 
 and both encourage, if willing, and force it, if hesitating, 
 to a straightforward and uncompromising policy, the elec- 
 tors cannot but look with indulgence. Such candidates 
 have only to own on their part, that any dallying with 
 " recognized abuse " has been the result not of inclination, 
 but of circumstance, and the difficulties of circumstance 
 will be at once remembered. For those who will not make 
 this avowal, whatever their name, they are but Tories at 
 heart, and as such they must be considered. This is what 
 the late Cabinet itself, if I have construed it rightly, must 
 desire ; and if we act thus, with union and with firmness, 
 with charity to others, but with justice to our principles, 
 we shall return to the next Parliament a vast majority of 
 men who will secure the establishment of a government 
 that no intrigue can undermine, no oligarchy supplant; 
 
 I) 2 
 
36 THE PRESENT CRISIS. 
 
 based upon a broad union of all reformers, and entitled to 
 the gratitnde of the people, not by perpetually reminding 
 it of one obligation, but by constantly feeding it with new 
 ones. Of such a Cabinet I know that you, my Lord, will 
 be one ; and I believe that you will find yourself not per- 
 haps among all, but among many of your old companions, 
 and no longer without the services of one man in particular 
 whose name is the synonym of the people's confidence. 
 Taught by experience,*"* there must then be no compromise 
 with foes — no Whig organ holding out baits of office to Sir 
 Robert Peel — no speeches of " little" having a successor in 
 "less" — no crowding popular offices with Tory malcon- 
 tents — no ceding to an anti-national interest, however 
 venerable its name — no clipping to please the Lords — no 
 refusing to nnfurl the sail when the wind is fair, unless 
 Mrs. Partington will promise not to mop up the ocean ! 
 
 At present we are without a government ; we have only 
 a dictator. His Grace the Duke of Wellington outbids my 
 Lord Brougham in versatility. He stands alone, the repre- 
 sentative of all the offices of this great empire. India is in 
 one pocket, our colonies in the other t — see him now at the 
 Home Office, and now at the Horse Guards ; Law, State, 
 and Army, each at his command — Jack of all trades, and 
 master of none — but that of war ; — we ask for a cabinet, 
 and see bnt a soldier. 
 
 Meanwhile, eager and panting, flies the Courier to Sir 
 Robert Peel ! — grave Sir Robert ! How well we can pic- 
 ture his prudent face ! — with what solemn swiftness will he 
 obey the call ! how demurely various must be his medita- 
 tions ! — how ruffled his stately motions at the night-and- 
 day celerity of his homeward progress ! Can this be the 
 slow Sir Robert ? No ! I beg pardon ; he is not to discom- 
 
 * And we have the assurance from one of the organs of the late ministers, 
 in an article admirable for its temper and its tenets, that this lesson is 
 already taught. " The leaders of the liberal party must have at last learned 
 the utter futility of every attempt to conciliate the supporters of existing 
 abuses — they must now know that secret enmity is ever watching the occa- 
 sion of wounding them unawares, and that the public men who would con- 
 tend against it can only maintain themselves by exhibiting a frank and full 
 reliance on the popular support, and meriting it by an unflinching assertion 
 of popular principles." — Globe, Nov. 17. 
 
 f "' His grace will superintend generally the affairs of the government, 
 till the return of Sir Robert Peel." So says the Morning Post. But the 
 JPost isyery angry if any one else says the same. 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS. 37 
 
 pose himself. I sec, by the papers, that it is only the 
 
 Courier that is to go at " minute speed " — the Neophyte of 
 
 Reform is to travel " by easy stages" — we must wait 
 
 patiently his movements — God knows we shall want 
 
 patience by and by ; his stages will be easy enough in 
 
 the road the Times wishes him to travel ! 
 
 The new political Hamlet ! — how applicable the situation 
 
 of his parallel! — how well can his Horatio, (Twiss,) were 
 
 he himself the courier, break forth with the exposition of 
 
 the case — 
 
 . . . . "For.inbras* 
 Of un improved mettle hot and full, 
 Sharks up a list of brainless resolutes 
 For food and diet to some enterprise, 
 That hath a stomach in't, which is no other, 
 As it doth well appear unto the state, 
 Hut to recover for us by strong hand, 
 And terms compulsatory, our — ' offices.' 
 
 '1 his, I take it, 
 
 Is the main motive of our preparations, 
 
 The source of this our watch, and the chief head 
 
 Of this post-haste and romage in the land ! 
 
 [Enter the Ghost of the old Tory Rule.] 
 
 " 'Tis here — 'tis here — 'tis gone ! " 
 
 [Xow appears Hamlet himself, arms folded, brow thoughtful. — Sir Robert 
 iv as always a solemn man .'] 
 
 [Enter the same Ghost of Tory Ascendancy, in the likeness of old Sir 
 
 Robert.'] 
 
 11 My father's spirit in arms ! 
 
 Thou eom'st in such a questionable shape, 
 That I will speak to thee. 
 
 Tell, 
 
 Why thy canonized bones, hearsed in death, 
 Have burst their cerements." 
 
 Whereat good Horatio wooingly observes — 
 " It beckons you to go away with it." 
 
 Our Hamlet is in doubt. The Tory sway was an excellent 
 thing when alive, but to follow the ghost now, may lead to 
 the devil; nevertheless, Horatio says, shrewdly, 
 
 " The very place puts toys of desperation, 
 "Without more motive, into every brain!" 
 
 * Fortinbras, Anglice " Strong Arm "—literally "the Duke." 
 
38 THE PRESENT CRISIS. 
 
 The temptation is too great, poor Hamlet is decoyed, and 
 the wise Marcellus, (the Herries of the play,) disinterestedly 
 observes, 
 
 "Let's follow!" 
 
 Alas ! we may well exclaim, then, with the soft Horatio, 
 " To what issue will this come ? " 
 
 And reply with the sensible Marcellus, who sums up the 
 whole affair, 
 
 " Something is rotten in the state of Denmark ! " 
 
 We need not further pursue the parallel, though inviting, 
 especially in that passage, where to be taken for a rat, is 
 the prelude to destruction. Leave we Hamlet undisturbed 
 to his soliloquy, 
 
 " To be, or not to be — that is the question," 
 
 And that question is unresolved. Will Sir Robert Peel 
 commit himself at last—will he join the administration — 
 will he, prudent and wary, set the hopes of his party, the 
 reputation of his life, on the hazard of a die, thrown not 
 for Whigs and Tories — but for Toryism, it is true, on the 
 one hand, and a government far more energetic than Whig- 
 gism on the other, with all the chances attendant on the 
 upset of the tables in the meanwhile ? The game is not 
 for the restoring, it is for the annihilation of the juste 
 milieu ! If he joins the gamesters, let him ; we can yet 
 give startling odds on the throw. But may he see dis- 
 tinctly his position ! If he withdraw from this rash and 
 ill-omened government, if he remain neutral, he holds the 
 highest station in the eyes of the country, which one of his 
 politics can ever hope to attain. It is true, that office may 
 be out of his reach, but to men of a large and a generous 
 ambition, there are higher dignities than those which office 
 can bestow. He will stand a power in himself — a man 
 true to principle, impervious to temptation ; he will vindi- 
 cate nobly, not to this time only, but to posterity, his single 
 change upon the Catholic Emancipation ; he will prove 
 that no sordid considerations influenced that decision. He 
 will stand alone and aloft, with more than the practical 
 sense, with all the moral weight of Chateaubriand — one 
 whom all parties must honour, whose counsels must be 
 respected by the most liberal, as by the most Tory, cabinet. 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS. 39 
 
 Great in his talents — greater in his position — greatest in 
 his honour. But if he mix himself irrevocably with the 
 insane and unprincipled politicians, who now seek either to 
 deceive or subdue the people, he is lost for ever. That 
 ministry have but this option, to refuse all reform and to 
 brave the public, or to carry, in contempt of all honesty, 
 measures at least as liberal as those which he, as well as 
 they, opposed when proceeding from the Whigs. Will he 
 be mad enough to do the one — will he be base enough to 
 do the other ? Can he be a tyrant, or will he be a turn- 
 coat ? His may be the ambition which moderate men have 
 assigned to him — an ambition prudent and sincere : — His 
 may be a name on which the posterity that reads of these 
 eventful times, will look with approval and respect; — on 
 the other hand, the alternative is not tempting — it is to be 
 deemed the creature of office, and the dupe of the Duke 
 of Wellington ! Imagine his situation, rising to support 
 either the measures which must be carried by the soldiers, 
 or those which would have been proposed by the Whigs — 
 bully or hypocrite ; — what an alternative for one who can 
 yet be (how few in this age may become the same !) a 
 great man ! And this too, mainly from one quality that he 
 has hitherto carried to that degree in which it becomes 
 genius. That quality is Prudence ! all his reputation de- 
 pends on his never being indiscreet! He is in the situation 
 of a prude of a certain age, who precisely because she may 
 be a saint, the world has a double delight in damning as a 
 sinner. Sweet, tempted Innocence, beware the one false 
 step ! turn from the old Duke ! list not the old Lord Eldon! 
 allow not his Grace of Cumberland (irresistible seducer!) 
 to come too near ! Susanna, Susanna, what lechers these 
 Elders are ! 
 
 But enough of speculation for the present on an uncer- 
 tain event. We have only now to look to what is sure 
 and that is a New Parliament.^ They hint at the policy 
 
 * Since writing the above, it seems to be a growing opinion among men 
 of all parries, that if' Sir Robert Peel join the Ministers, they will meet 
 Parliament — for the sake of mntnal explanations ! — But the Duke is a 
 prompt man, and lores to take us by surprise — we must be prepared ! 
 
 Addendum to Third Edition. — And now we have additional reason to be 
 prepared, and to acknowledge how little to-morrow can depend on the reports 
 of to-day. 
 
 ''We owe it to our readers to acknowledge that we have much less hope 
 of a dissolution of parliament being dispensed with than we had on Saturday. 
 
40 THE PRESENT CRISIS. 
 
 of trying this : let them ! I think they would dissolve us 
 the second day of our meeting ! 
 
 And now, my Lord, deviating from the usual forms of 
 correspondence, permit me, instead of addressing your Lord- 
 ship, to turn for a few moments to our mutual friends — 
 the Electors of England. 
 
 I wish them clearly and distinctly to understand, the 
 grounds and the results of the contest we are about to try. 
 I do not write these lines for the purpose of converting the 
 Conservatives — far from me so futile an attempt. With one 
 illustrious example before our eyes, what man of sense can 
 dream of the expediency of attempting to convert our foes? 
 I write only to that great multitude of men of all grades of 
 property and rank, who returned to the Reformed Parlia- 
 ment its vast reforming majority. Thank God, that 
 electoral body is as yet unaltered. Who knows, if it now 
 neglect its duty, how long it may remain the same ! I 
 have before spoken, Electors of England, of what seems to 
 me likely to be your conduct. But let us enter into that 
 speculation somewhat more minutely. There are some who 
 tell us that you are indifferent to the late changes, and 
 careless of the result, — who laugh at the word " Crisis " 
 and disown its application. Are you yourselves, then, 
 thoroughly awakened to your position, to the mighty 
 destinies at your command ? I will not dwell at length 
 upon the fearful anxiety with which your decision will be 
 looked for in Foreign Nations ; for we must confess, that 
 engrossed as we have lately been in domestic affairs, 
 Foreign Nations have for us but a feeble and lukewarm 
 interest. But we are still the great English people, the 
 slightest change in whose constitutional policy vibrates 
 from corner to corner of the civilized world. We are still 
 that people, who have grown great, not by the extent of 
 our possessions, not by the fertility of our soil, not by the 
 wild ambition of our conquests ; but, by the success of our 
 
 The caballing of the metropolitan members, and a repetition of the kind of 
 display made on Friday at Stroud, may render it impossible for any govern- 
 ment, not prepared to sacrifice the Xing, to go on -with the present House of 
 Commons.*' — (Standard, Nov. 24.) Let other than the metropolitan 
 members cabal ! Let there be other displays than those at Stroud. We see 
 the force attached to the, e e demonstrations ; we have no cause to fear a 
 dissolution : the threat does not awe us ; — we would not sacrifice the King, 
 and therefore we would rescue him from his advisers. 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS. 41 
 
 commerce, and the preservation of our liberties. The in- 
 fluence of England has been that of a moral power, not 
 derived from regal or oligarchic, or aristocratic ascendancy; 
 but from the enterprise and character of her people. We 
 are the Great Middle Class of Europe. When jSTapoleon 
 called us a bourgeois nation, in one sense of the word he 
 was right. What the middle class is to us, that we are to 
 the world ! — a part of the body politic of civilization, re- 
 mote alike from Ochlocracy^ and Despotism, and drawing 
 its dignity — its power — its very breath — from its freedom. 
 The Duke of Wellington and his band are to be in office : 
 for when we are met with the cry, " Perhaps the Duke 
 himself will not take office at all," what matters it to us 
 whether he be before the stage or behind the scenes — 
 whether he represent the borough himself, or appoint his 
 nominees — the votes will be the same ! — The Duke and his 
 band are to be in office ! what to the last hour have been 
 their foreign politics ? — wherever tyranny the grossest was 
 to be defended — wherever liberty the most moderate was 
 to be assailed — there have they lent their aid ! The King 
 of Holland trampling on his subjects was " our most 
 ancient ally," whom ''nothing but the worst revolutionary 
 doctrines could induce us to desert." Charles X. vainly 
 urging his Ordinances against the Parliament and the Press 
 at the point of the bayonet, was an "injured monarch," 
 and the people " a rebellious mob." The despotism of 
 Austria is an " admirable government" — with Russia it is 
 "insolence" to interfere in behalf of Poland. Miguel 
 himself, blackened by such crimes as the worst period of 
 the Eoman empire cannot equal, is eulogized as " the illus- 
 trious victim of foreign swords." Not the worst excesses 
 that belong to despotism, from the bonds of the negro to 
 the blood of a people, have been beneath the praises of your 
 present government — not the most moderate resistance that 
 belongs to liberty has escaped their stigma. This is no 
 exaggeration ; chapter and verse, their very speeches are 
 
 * Ochlocracy, Mob-rule ; the proper antithesis to democracy, which 
 (though perverted from its true signification) is People-rule. Tories are 
 often great ochlocrats, as their favourite mode of election, in which mobs 
 are bought with beer, can testify. Lord Chandos's celebrated clause in the 
 Eeform Bill was ochlocratic. Ochlocracy is the plebeian partner of oligarch v, 
 carrying on the business under another name. The extremes meet, or, as the 
 Eastern proverb informs us, when the serpent wants to seem innocent, it 
 puts its tail in its mouth ! 
 
42 THE PRESENT CRISIS. 
 
 before us, and out of their own mouths do we condemn 
 them. Can we then be insensible, little as we may regard 
 our more subtle relations with foreign states — can we be 
 insensible to the links which bind us with our fellow-crea- 
 tures ; no matter in what region of the globe ? Can we 
 feel slightly the universal magnitude of the interests now 
 resting on our resolves ? Believe me, wherever the inso- 
 lence of power is brooding on new restraints, wherever — 
 some men, " in the chamber of dark thought," are forging 
 fetters for other countries or their own — there is indeed a 
 thrill of delight at the accession of the Duke of Wellington! 
 But wherever Liberty struggles successfully, or suffers in 
 vain — wherever Opinion has raised its voice — wherever 
 Enlightenment is at war with Darkness, and Patience 
 rising against Abuse — there will be but one feeling of 
 terror at these changes, and one feeling of anxious hope 
 for the resolution which you, through whose votes speaks 
 the voice of England, may form at this awful crisis. Shall 
 that decision be unworthy of you ? 
 
 If we pass from foreign nations to Ireland, (which un- 
 happily we have often considered as foreign to us,) what 
 can we expect from the Duke of Wellington's tender 
 mercies ? Recollect that there will be no peace for England 
 while Ireland remains as it is. Cabinet after Cabinet has 
 been displaced, change after change has convulsed us, mea- 
 sures the most vital to England have been unavoidably 
 postponed to discussion on Bills for Ireland ; night upon 
 night, session upon session of precious time have been 
 thrown away, because we have not done for Ireland what 
 common sense would dictate to common justice. I have 
 just returned from that country. I have seen matters with 
 my own eyes. Having assuredly no sympathy with the 
 question of Repeal, I have not sought the judgment of 
 Repealers — of the two, I have rather solicited that of the 
 Orangemen : for knowing by what arguments misgovern- 
 ment can be assailed, I was anxious to learn, in its strong- 
 hold, by what arguments misgovernment can be defended. 
 And J declare solemnly, that it seems to me the universal 
 sentiment of all parties, that Grod does not look down upon 
 any corner of the earth in which the people are more 
 supremely wretched, or in which a kind, fostering, and 
 paternal government is more indispensably needed. That 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS. 43 
 
 people arc Catholic. Hear what the Duke of Wellington 
 deems necessary for them. 
 
 " The object of the government, (for Ireland,) after the 
 passing of the Roman Catholic Relief Bill, shonld have 
 been to do all in their power to conciliate — whom ? The 
 Protestants ! Every thing had been granted to the Roman 
 Catholics that they conld require ! " — The Duke of Welling- 
 ton's Speech. Hansard, p. 950, vol. xix. 3rd Series. Every- 
 thing a people groaning under each species of exaction that 
 ever took the name of religion can require ! This state- 
 ment may delight the Orangemen, but will it content 
 Ireland ? that is the question. As for the Orangemen 
 themselves, with their Christian zeal, and their Mahometan 
 method of enforcing it ; — with their — " here is our Koran," 
 and "there is our sword," — they remind us only of that 
 ingenious negro, to whom his master, detecting him in some 
 offence, put the customary query — " What, sir, do you 
 never make use of your bible ? " — " Yes, massa, me trap my 
 razor on it sometime ! " So, with these gentlemen, they 
 seem to think that the only use of the bible is to sharpen 
 their steels upon it ! 
 
 The story of the Negro recalls us to the Colonies : what 
 effect will this change have upon the fate of the late Slave 
 Population ? By our last accounts, the managers, instead 
 of co-operating with the local authorities, were rather 
 striving to exasperate the Negroes into conduct, which must 
 produce a failure of that grand experiment of humanity. — 
 The news arrives, — (just before Christmas too,' — what a 
 season !) the managers see in office, the very men, who not 
 only opposed the experiment, but who prophesied the 
 failure : — they know well, that if the failure occur, it is not 
 to them, that the new government will impute the blame — 
 they know well that a prophet is rarely displeased with the 
 misfortunes he foretells. Is there no danger in all this ? 
 And shall we be told that this is no crisis ? that there is 
 nothing critical in these changes — nothing to reverse or 
 even to affect our relations with Ireland, the Colonies, and 
 the Continent — nothing that we should lament, and nothing 
 that we should fear ? 
 
 And now, looking only to ourselves, is there nothing 
 critical in the state of England ? 
 
 You must remember that whatever parliament you elect 
 
44 THE PRESENT CEISIS. 
 
 will have the right of remodelling that parliament ! The 
 same legislative power that reformed can un- reform. If 
 you give to the Duke of Wellington a majority in the House 
 of Commons, you give him the whole power of this Empire 
 for six years. If a liberal House of Commons should ever 
 go too far, you have a King and a House of Lords to stop 
 the progress. If a conservative House of Commons should 
 go too far in the opposite extreme, who will check its pro- 
 ceedings ? You may talk of public opinion — you may talk 
 of resistance — but when y oar three branches of the legisla- 
 ture are against you, with what effect could you resist ? 
 You might talk vehemently — could you act successfully ; — 
 when you were no longer supported by your representatives, 
 — when to act would be to rebel ! The law and the army 
 would be both against you. How can you tell to what 
 extent the one might be stretched or the other increased ? 
 Vainly then would you say, "In our next parliament we 
 will be wiser ; " in your next parliament the people might be 
 no longer the electors ! There cannot be a doubt but that, 
 if the parliament summoned by the Duke be inclined to 
 support the Duke, the provisions of the Reform Bill will 
 be changed. Slight alterations in the franchise — raising it 
 where men are free, lowering it where men can be intimi- 
 dated, making it different for towns and for agricultural 
 districts, working out in detail the principles of Lord 
 Chandos, may suffice to give you a constituency of slaves. 
 This is no idle fear — the Reform Transformed will be the 
 first play the new company will act, if you give them a 
 stage — it is a piece they have got by heart ! Over and 
 over again have they said at their clubs, in public and in 
 private, that the Reform Bill ought to be altered.* They 
 
 * And Lord Strangford seems to speak out pretty boldly at the Ashford 
 dinner. " It was true that among the institutions of the country, there was 
 something that might be amended and improved, but there was much more 
 that required to be placed in its pristine state of purity. That that would 
 come to pass he felt sure, when he saw so many around him thinking as he 
 did," &c. Pristine state of purity! But what so pure as the rotten 
 boroughs ? What so pure as the old parliamentary system ? And if the 
 restoration of these immaculate blessings depends upon seeing "many 
 around him who thought as he did," where will his Lordship find those of 
 that philosophy, except in the party now in power ? It matters not what 
 Lord Strangford meant should be restored to its pristine purity. He may 
 say it was not the old parliamentary system. What was it then? Is there 
 a single thing which the Reformed Parliament has altered that the people 
 wish to see restored to u its pristine purity? " But then we are told that 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS. 45 
 
 may now disavow any such, intention. Calling themselves 
 reformers, they may swear to protect reform. Bat how can 
 you believe them ? " Abu Rafe is witness to the fact, but 
 who will be witness for Abu B/efe ? " * By their own con- 
 fessions, if they call themselves reformers, they would be 
 liars ; if they are false in one thing, will they not be false 
 in another ? Are they to be trusted because they own 
 they have been insincere ? If we desire to know in what 
 light even the most honourable Tories consider public 
 promises, shall we forget Sir George Murray and the dis- 
 senters ? Do not fancy they will not hazard an attempt on 
 your liberties — they will hazard it, if you place the House 
 of Commons in their hands. "Whatever their fault, it is not 
 that of a want of courage. You talk of Public Opinion — 
 history tells us that public opinion can be kept down. It 
 is the nature of slavery, that as it creeps on, it accustoms 
 men to its yoke. They may feel, but they are not willing 
 always to struggle. Where was the iron-hearted Public 
 Opinion, that confronted the first Charles, threw its shield 
 round the person of Hampden, abolished the star-chamber, 
 and vindicated the rights of England, when, but a few years 
 afterwards, a less accomplished and a more unprincipled 
 monarch, sent Sydney to the block — judges decided against 
 law — Parliament itself was suspended — and the tyrant of 
 England was the pensioner of France ? The power of 
 jDublic opinion woke afterwards in the reign of James II. 
 but from how shameful a slumber — and to what even 
 greater perils than that of domestic tyranny, had we not 
 been exposed in the interval ! Nothing but the forbearance 
 of the Continent itself saved us from falling a prey to 
 whatever vigorous despot might have conceived the design. 
 With the same angry, but impotent dejection with which 
 Public Opinion beheld the country spoiled of its Parliament 
 — its martyrs consigned to the block — its governors harlots, 
 and its King a hireling — it saw, unavenged, the Dutch fleet 
 riding up the Thames, — the war- ships of England burnt 
 before the very eyes of her Capital, — and "the nation," to 
 
 we are cot to judge the Duke by tlie language of his supporters. By what 
 are we to judge of him then r Either by their language or his own: it is 
 quite indifferent which. But perhaps Tory speeches are like witches' 
 prayers, and are to be read backwards ! 
 * Gibbon. 
 
46 THE PJRESENT CRISIS. 
 
 quote even Hume's courtly words, " though the King ever 
 appeared but in sport (!) exrjosed to the ruin and ignominy 
 of a foreign conquest. " Happily, Austria then was not as 
 it is now — profound in policy, stern in purpose, indomitable 
 in its hate to England ; Russia was not looking abroad for 
 conquests, aspiring to the Indian Empire, and loathing the 
 freemen who dare to interfere for Poland. We were saved, 
 but not by your Public Opinion ! You may boast of the 
 nineteenth century, and say, such things cannot happen to- 
 day ; but the men of Cromwell's time boasted equally of 
 the spirit of the seventeenth, and were equally confident, 
 that liberty was eternal ? And even at this day have we 
 not seen in France, how impotent is mere opinion ? Have 
 not the French lost all the fruits of their Revolution ? Are 
 not the Ordinances virtually carried ? and why ? Because 
 the French parted with the power out of their own hands, 
 under the idea that public opinion was a power sufficient in 
 itself ? "When the man first persuaded the horse to try (by 
 way of experiment) the saddle and bridle, what was his 
 argument ? — "My good friend, you are much stronger than 
 I am ; you can kick me off again if you don't like me — 
 your will is quite enough to dislodge me; — come — the 
 saddle — it is but a ride, recollect! — come, open your 
 mouth — Lord have mercy, what fine teeth ! — how you could 
 bite if I displeased you. So so, old boy !" — What's the 
 moral ? The man is riding the horse to this day ! — Public 
 opinion is but the expression of the prevalent power. The 
 people have now the power, and public opinion is its voice; 
 let them give away the power, and what is opinion ? — vox, 
 (indeed,) et prceterea nihil — the voice and — nothing more ! 
 It is madness itself in you, who have now the option of 
 confirming or rejecting the Duke of Wellington's govern- 
 ment, to hesitate in your choice. They tell you to try the 
 men ; have you not tried them before ? Has not the work 
 of reform been solely to undo what they have done ? If 
 your late governments could not proceed more vigorously, 
 who opposed them ? 
 
 " Hark ! in the lobby hear a lion roar ; 
 Say, Mr. Speaker, shall we shut the door? 
 Or, Mr. Speaker, shall we let him in, 
 To — try if we can turn him out again ! " 
 
 You may say, that amongst the multiplicity of candidates 
 
THE PRESENT CRISIS. 47 
 
 who present themselves, and amongst the multiplicity of 
 their promises, you may be unable to decide who will be 
 your friends, who not. You have one test that cannot fail 
 you. Ask them if they will support the Duke of Welling- 
 ton. If they say " Yes, if he reform," you will know that 
 they will support him if he apostatizes. He who sees no 
 dishonour in apostacy, waits but his price to apostatize 
 himself. " Away," said Mr. Canning, long since — " Away 
 with the cant of measures, not men. The idle supposition, 
 that it is the harness, not the horses that draw the chariot 
 along." "In times of difficulty and danger, it is to the 
 energy and character of individuals, that a nation must be 
 indebted for its salvation ! " — the energy and character ! 
 Doubtless, the Duke has at present energy and character ! 
 I grant it ; but if he exert in your behalf the energy, will 
 he keep the character ? or if he preserve his character, how 
 will you like his energy ? 
 
 Recollect that it is not for measures which you can 
 foresee that caution is necessary, it is for measures that you 
 cannot foresee ; it is not for what the Duke may profess to 
 do, but for what he may dare to do, that you must not put 
 yourselves under his command. Be not led away by some 
 vague promises of taking off this tax, and lowering that. 
 The empire is not for sale ! We, who gave twenty millions 
 to purchase freedom for the negro, are not to accept a 
 bribe for the barter of our own. One tax too may be taken 
 off, but others may be put on ! They may talk to you of 
 the first, but they will say nothing of the last ! Malt is a 
 good thing, but even malt may be bought too dear. Did 
 not the Tories blame Lord Al thorp for reducing taxation too 
 much ? Are they the men likely to empty the Exchequer ? 
 To drop a shilling in the street was the old trick of those 
 who wanted to pick your pockets! Remember that you 
 are not fighting the battle between Whigs and Tories ; if 
 the Whigs return to office, they must be more than Whigs ; 
 you are now fighting for things not men — for the real con- 
 sequences of your reform. In your last election your grati- 
 tude made you fight too much for names ; it was enough 
 for your candidates to have served Lord Grey ; you must 
 now return those who will serve the people. If you are 
 lukewarm, if you are indifferent, if you succumb, you will 
 deserve the worst. But if you exert yourselves once more, 
 
48 THE PRESENT CRISIS. 
 
 with the same honesty, the same zeal, the same firm and 
 enlightened virtue as two years ago ensured your triumph, 
 — wherever, both now and henceforth, men honour faith, 
 or sympathise with liberty, there will be those who will 
 record your struggle, and rejoice in its success. These are 
 no exaggerated phrases : you may or may not be insensible 
 to the character of the time ; — you may or may not be in- 
 different to the changes that have taken place — but the 
 next election, if Parliament be dissolved by a Tory minister, 
 will make itself a Date in History, — recording one of those 
 ominous conjunctions in "the Old Almanack*' by which 
 we calculate the chronology of the human progress. 
 
 And, my Lord, that the conduct and the victory of our 
 countrymen will be, as they have been, the one firm and 
 temperate, the other honourable and assured, I do, from 
 my soul, believe. Two years may abundantly suffice to 
 wreck a Government, or convert a King — but scarcely to 
 change a People ! *» 
 
 I have the honour to be, 
 My Lord, 
 With respect and consideration, 
 Your Lordship's obedient servant, 
 
 E. LYTTON BULWER. 
 
 London, Nov. 21, 1834. 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A WATER-PATIENT,* 
 
 IN A LETTER TO W. HARRISON AINSWOETH, ESQ., EDITOR 
 OF THE "NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE.'' 
 
 Dear Mb. Editoe, — I am truly glad to see so worthily 
 filled the presidency of one of the many chairs which our 
 republic permits to criticism and letters — a dignity in 
 which I had the honour to precede you, sub consule Planco, 
 in the good days of William IV. I feel as if there were 
 something ghost-like in my momentary return to my an- 
 cient haunts, no longer in the editorial robe and purple, 
 but addressing a new chief, and in great part, a new as- 
 sembly : For the reading public is a creature of rapid 
 growth — every five years a fresh generation pours forth 
 from our institutes, our colleges, our schools, demanding, 
 and filled with, fresh ideas, fresh principles and hopes : 
 And the seas wash the place where Canute parleyed with 
 the waves. 
 
 All that interested the world, when to me (then Mr. 
 Editor, now Mr. Editor's humble servant) contributors ad- 
 dressed their articles — hot and seasoned for the month, and 
 like all good articles to a periodical, " warranted not to 
 keep," have passed away into the lumber-room, where those 
 old maids, History and Criticism, hoard their scraps and 
 relics, and where, amidst dust and silence, things old- 
 fashioned ripen into antique. 
 
 The roar of the Reform Bill is still, Fanny Kemble is 
 Mrs. Butler, the "Hunchback " awaits upon our shelves the 
 resuscitation of a new Julia ; poets of promise have become 
 mute, Bubini sings no more, Macready is in the provinces ; 
 " Punch " frisks it on the jocund throne of Sydney Smith, 
 and over a domain once parcelled amongst many, reigns 
 " Boz." Scattered and voiceless the old contributors — a 
 new hum betrays the changing Babel of a new multitude. 
 
 Gliding thus, I say, ghost-like, amidst the present race, 
 busy and sanguine as the past, I feel that it best suits with 
 a ghost's dignity, to appear but for an admonitory purpose ; 
 not with the light and careless step of an ordinary visitor, 
 
 * [Originally published in 1845 in the " New Monthly Magazine," from 
 which it was shortly afterwards reprinted as a duodecimo of 98 pages.] 
 
 E 
 
50 CONFESSIONS OF A WATER-PATIENT. 
 
 but with meaning stride, and finger upon lip. Ghosts, we 
 know, have appeared to predict death — more gentle I, my 
 apparition would only promise healing, and beckon not to 
 graves and charnels, but to the Hygeian spring. 
 
 And now that I am fairly on the ground, let us call to 
 mind, Mr. Editor, the illustrious names which still over- 
 shadow it at once with melancholy and fame. Your post 
 has been filled by men, whose fate precludes the envy which 
 their genius might excite. By Campbell, the high-souled 
 and silver-tongued, and by Hook, from whom jest, and 
 whim, and humour, flowed in so free and riotous a wave, 
 that books confined and narrowed away the stream ; to 
 read Hook is to wrong him. 
 
 Nor can we think of your predecessors without remem- 
 bering your rival, Hood, who, as the tree puts forth the 
 most exuberant blossoms the year before its decay, showed 
 the bloom and promise of his genius most when the worm 
 was at the trunk. To us behind the scenes, to us who 
 knew the men, how melancholy the contrast between the 
 fresh and youthful intellect, the worn-out and broken 
 frame ; for, despite what I have seen written, Campbell 
 when taken at the right moment, was Campbell ever. ISTot 
 capable, indeed, towards the last, of the same exertion, 
 if manifested by those poor evidences of what is in us, that 
 books parade, but still as powerful in his great and noble 
 thoughts, in the oral poetry revealed by flashes and winged 
 words, though unrounded into form. 
 
 And Hook jested on the bed of death, as none but he 
 could jest. And Hood ! who remembers not the tender 
 pathos, the exquisite humanity, which spoke forth from his 
 darkened room ? Alas ! what prolonged pangs, what heavy 
 lassitude, what death in life did these men endure ! 
 
 Here we are, Mr. Editor, in these days of cant and 
 jargon, preaching up the education of the mind, forcing 
 our children under melon-frames, and babbling to the 
 labourer and mechanic, " Read, and read, and read," as if 
 God had not given us muscles, and nerves, and bodies, 
 subjected to exquisite pains as pleasures — as if the body 
 were not to be cared for and cultivated as well as the 
 mind ; as if health were no blessing instead of that capital 
 good, without which all other blessings — save the hope of 
 health eternal — grow flat and joyless ; as if the enjoyment 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A WATER-PATIENT. 51 
 
 of tlie world in which we are, was not far more closely 
 linked with our physical than our mental selves ; as if we 
 were better than maimed and imperfect men ; so long as 
 our nerves are jaded and prostrate, our senses dim and 
 heavy, our relationship with Nature abridged and thwarted 
 by the jaundiced eye, and failing limb, and trembling hand 
 ■ — the apothecary's shop between us and the sun ! 
 
 For the mind, we admit, that to render it strong ated 
 clear, habit and discipline are required ; — how deal we 
 (especially we, Mr. Editor, of the London world — we of 
 the literary craft — we of the restless, striving brotherhood) 
 — how deal we with the body ? We carry it on with us, 
 as a post-horse, from stage to stage — does it flag ? no rest ! 
 give it ale or the spur. We begin to feel the frame break 
 under us ; — we administer a drug, gain a temporary relief, 
 shift the disorder from one part to another — forget our 
 ailments in our excitemeuts, and when we pause at last, 
 thoroughly shattered, with complaints grown chronic, 
 diseases fastening to the organs, send for the doctors in 
 good earnest, and die as your predecessors and your rival 
 died, under combinations of long-neglected maladies, which 
 could never have been known had we done for the body 
 what we do for the mind — made it strong by discipline, 
 and maintained it firm by habit. 
 
 Not alone calling to recollection our departed friends, 
 but looking over the vast field of suffering which those 
 acquainted with the lives of men who think and labour 
 cannot fail to behold around them, I confess, though I have 
 something of Canning's disdain of professed philanthropists, 
 and do not love every knife-grinder as much as if he were my 
 brother — I confess, nevertheless, that I am filled with an ear- 
 nest pity ; and an anxious desire seizes me to communicate 
 to others that simple process of healing and well being which 
 has passed under my own experience, and to which I grate- 
 fully owe days no longer weary of the sun, and nights 
 which no longer yearn for and yet dread the morrow. 
 
 And now, Mr. Editor, I may be pardoned, I trust, if I 
 illustrate by my own case the system I commend to others. 
 
 I have been a workman in my day. I began to write 
 and to toil, and to win some kind of a name, which I had 
 the ambition to improve, while yet little more than a boy. 
 With a strong love for study of books — with yet greater 
 
 e 2 
 
52 CONFESSIONS OF A WATER-PATIENT. 
 
 desire to accomplish myself in the knowledge of men, for 
 sixteen years I can conceive no life to have been more filled 
 by occupation than mine. What time was not given to 
 action was given to study ; what time not given to study, 
 to action — labour in both ! To a constitution naturally far 
 from strong, I allowed no pause nor respite. The wear and 
 tear went on without intermission — the whirl of the wheel 
 never ceased. 
 
 Sometimes, indeed, thoroughly overpowered and ex- 
 hausted, I sought for escape. The physicians said, 
 " Travel," and I travelled. " Go into the country," and I 
 went. But at such attempts at repose all my ailments 
 gathered round me — made themselves far more palpable 
 and felt. I had no resource but to fly from myself — to fly 
 into the other world of books, or thought, or reverie — to 
 live in some state of being less painful than my own. As 
 long as I was always at work it seemed that I had no leisure 
 to be ill. Quiet was my hell. 
 
 At length the frame thus long neglected — patched up for 
 awhile by drugs and doctors — put off and trifled with as 
 an intrusive dun — like a dun who is in his rights — brought 
 in its arrears — crushing and terrible — accumulated through 
 long years. Worn out and wasted, the constitution seemed 
 wholly inadequate to meet the demand. 
 
 The exhaustion of toil and study had been completed by 
 great anxiety and grief. I had watched with alternate 
 hope and fear the lingering and mournful death-bed of my 
 nearest relation and dearest friend — of the person around 
 whom was entwined the strongest affection my life had 
 known — and when all was over, I seemed scarcely to live 
 myself. 
 
 At this time, about the January of 1844, 1 was thoroughly 
 shattered. The least attempt at exercise exhausted me. 
 The nerves gave way at the most ordinary excitement — a 
 chronic irritation of that vast surface we call the mucous 
 membrane, which had defied for years all medical skill, 
 rendered me continually liable to acute attacks, which from 
 their repetition, and the increased feebleness of my frame, 
 might at any time be fatal. Though free from any organic 
 disease of the heart, its action was morbidly restless and 
 painful. My sleep was without refreshment. At morning 
 I rose more weary than I laid down to rest. 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A WATER -PATIENT. 53 
 
 Without fatiguing you and your readers further with 
 the long a coliors of my complaints, I pass on to record my 
 struggle to resist them. I have always had a great belief 
 in the power of will. What a man determines to do — that 
 in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred I hold that he 
 succeeds in doing. I determined to have some insight into 
 a knowledge I had never attained since manhood — the 
 knowledge of health. 
 
 I resolutely put away books and study, sought the airs 
 which the physicians esteemed most healthful, and adopted 
 the strict regimen on which all the children of Esculapius 
 so wisely insist. In short, I maintained the same general 
 habits as to hours, diet (with the exception of wine, which 
 in moderate quantities seemed to me indispensable), and, 
 so far as my strength would allow, of exercise, as I found 
 afterwards instituted at hydropathic establishments. 
 
 I dwell on this to forestall in some degree the common 
 remark of persons not well acquainted with the medical 
 agencies of water — that it is to the regular life which 
 water-patients lead, and not to the element itself that they 
 owe their recovery. Nevertheless I found that these 
 changes, however salutary in theory, produced little, if any, 
 practical amelioration in my health. 
 
 All invalids know, perhaps, how difficult, under ordinary 
 circumstances, is the alteration of habits from bad to good. 
 The early rising, the walk before breakfast, so delicious in 
 the feelings of freshness and vigour which they bestow 
 upon the strong, often become punishments to the valetu- 
 dinarian. Headache, langour, a sense of weariness over 
 the eyes, a sinking of the whole system towards noon, 
 which seemed imperiously to demand the dangerous aid of 
 stimulants, were all that I obtained by the morning breeze 
 and the languid stroll by the sea-shore. 
 
 The suspension from study only afflicted me with intole- 
 rable ennui, and added to the profound dejection of the 
 spirits. The brain, so long accustomed to morbid activity, 
 was but withdrawn from its usual occupations to invent 
 horrors and chimeras. Over the pillow, vainly sought two 
 hours before midnight, hovered no golden sleep. The 
 absence of excitement, however unhealthy, only aggravated 
 the symptoms of ill-health. 
 
 It was at this time that I met by chance, in the library 
 
54 CONFESSIONS OF A WATEK-PATIENT. 
 
 at St. Leonard's, with Captain Claridge's work on the 
 " Water Cure," as practised bj Priessnitz, at Graafenberg. 
 Making allowance for certain exaggerations therein, which 
 appeared evident to my common sense, enough still re- 
 mained not only to captivate the imagination and flatter 
 the hopes of an invalid, but to appeal with favour to his 
 sober judgment. 
 
 Till then, perfectly ignorant of the subject and the 
 system, except by some such vague stories and good jests 
 as had reached my ears in Germany, I resolved at least to 
 read what more could be said in favour of the ariston 
 udor, and examine dispassionately into its merits as a medi- 
 cament. 
 
 I was then under the advice of one of the first physicians 
 of our age. I had consulted half the faculty. I had every 
 reason to be grateful for the attention, and to be confident 
 in the skill of those whose prescriptions had, from time to 
 time, flattered my hopes and enriched the chemist. But 
 the truth must be spoken — far from being better, I was 
 sinking fast. Little remained to me to try in the great 
 volume of the herbal. Seek what I would next, even if a 
 quackery, it certainly might expedite my grave, but it 
 could scarcely render life — at least the external life — more 
 un joyous. 
 
 Accordingly I examined, with such grave thought as a 
 sick man brings to bear upon his case, all the grounds upon 
 which to justify to myself an excursion to the snows of 
 Silesia. But I own that in proportion as I found my faith 
 in the system strengthen, I shrunk from the terrors of this 
 long journey to the rugged region in which the probable 
 lodging would be a labourer's cottage,^ and in which the 
 Babel of a hundred languages (so agreeable to the health- 
 ful delight in novelty — so appalling to the sickly despond- 
 ency of a hypochondriac), would murmur and growl over 
 a public table spread with no tempting condiments. 
 
 Could I hope to find healing in my own land, and not too 
 far from my own doctors in case of failure, I might indeed 
 
 * Let me not disparage the fountain head of the water-cure, the parent 
 institution of the great Preissnitz. I believe many of the earlier hardships 
 complained of at Graafenberg have been removed or amended ; and such as 
 remain, are no doubt well compensated by the vast experience and extra- 
 ordinary tact of a man who will rank hereafter amongst the most illustrious 
 discoverers who have ever benefited the human race. 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A WATER-PATIENT. 55 
 
 solicit the watery gods — but the journey. I who scarcely 
 lived through a day without leech or potion ! — the long — 
 gelid journey to Graafenberg — I should be sure to fall ill 
 by the way — to be clutched and mismanaged by some Ger- 
 man doctor —to deposit my bones in some dismal church- 
 yard on the banks of Father "Rhine. 
 
 While thus perplexed, I fell in with one of the pamphlets 
 written by Doctor Wilson, of Malvern, and my doubts 
 were solved. Here was an English doctor, who had him- 
 self known more than my own sufferings, who, like myself, 
 had found the pharmacopoeia in vain — who had spent ten 
 months at Grraafenberg, and left all his complaints behind 
 him — who, fraught with the experience he had acquired, 
 not only in his own person, but from scientific examination 
 of the cases under his eye, had transported the system to 
 our native shores, and who proffered the proverbial salu- 
 brity of Malvern air and its holy springs, to those who, 
 like me, had ranged in vain from simple to mineral, and 
 who had become bold by despair — bold enough to try if 
 health, like truth, lay at the bottom of a well. 
 
 I was not then aware that other institutions had been 
 established in England of more or less fame. I saw in 
 Doctor Wilson the first transporter — at least as a physician 
 — of the Silesian system, and did not care to look out for 
 other and later pupils of this innovating German school. 
 
 I resolved then to betake myself to Malvern. On my 
 way through town I paused, in the innocence of my heart, 
 to inquire of some of the faculty if they thought the 
 water-cure would suit my case. With one exception, they 
 were unanimous in the vehemence of their denunciations. 
 
 Granting even that in some cases, especially of rheuma- 
 tism, hydropathy had produced a cure, to my complaints 
 it was worse than inapplicable — it was highly dangerous — 
 it would probably be fatal. I had not stamina for the 
 treatment — it would fix chronic ailments into organic 
 disease — surely it would be much better to try what I had 
 not yet tried. 
 
 What had I not yet tried ? A course of prussic acid ! 
 Nothing was better for gastrite irritation, which was no 
 doubt the main cause of my suffering ! If, however, I 
 were obstinately bent upon so mad an experiment, Doctor 
 Wilson was the last person I should go to. I was not 
 
56 CONFESSIONS OF A WATER-PATIENT. 
 
 deterred by all these intimidations, nor seduced by the 
 salubrious allurements of the prussic acid under its scien- 
 tific appellation of hydrocyanic. 
 
 A little reflection taught me that the members of a 
 learned profession are naturally the very persons least dis- 
 posed to favour innovation upon the practices which cus- 
 tom and prescription have rendered sacred in their eyes. 
 A lawyer is not the person to consult upon bold reforms in 
 jurisprudence. A physician can scarcely be expected to 
 own that a Silesian peasant will cure with water the dis- 
 eases which resist an armament of phials. And with re- 
 gard to the peculiar objections to Doctor Wilson, T had read 
 in his own pamphlet attacks upon the orthodox practice 
 sufficient to account for — perhaps to justify — the disposition 
 to depreciate him in return. 
 
 Still my friends were anxious and fearful ; to please them 
 I continued to inquire, though not of physicians, but of 
 patients. I sought out some of those who had gone 
 through the process. I sifted some of the cases of cure 
 cited by Doctor Wilson. I found the account of the patients 
 so encouraging, the cases quoted so authentic, that I grew 
 impatient of the delay. I threw physic to the dogs, and 
 went to Malvern. 
 
 It is not my intention, Mr. Editor, to detail the course I 
 underwent. The different resources of water as a medica- 
 ment are to be found in many works easily to be obtained,* 
 and well worth the study. In this letter I suppose myself 
 to be addressing those as thoroughly unacquainted with the 
 system as I was myself at the first, and I deal, therefore, 
 only in generals. 
 
 The first point which impressed and struck me was the 
 extreme and utter innocence of the water-cure in skilful 
 hands — in any hands, indeed, not thoroughly new to the 
 system. Certainly when I went, I believed it to be a kill 
 or cure system. I fancied it must be a very violent remedy 
 — that it doubtless might effect great and magical cures — 
 but that if it failed, it might be fatal. 
 
 Now, I speak not alone of my own case, but of the im- 
 mense number of cases I have seen — patients of all ages — 
 all species and genera of disease — all kinds and conditions 
 
 * The works of Drs. Johnson, (of Stansted-Beriy,) Weiss, Wilson, Gully, 
 &c., as well as that of Capt. Claridge. 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A WATER-PATIENT. 57 
 
 of constitution, when I declare, upon my honour, that I 
 never witnessed one dangerous symptom produced by the 
 water-cure, whether at Doctor Wilson's or the other hy- 
 dropathic institutions which I afterwards visited. 
 
 And though unquestionably fatal consequences might 
 occur from gross mismanagement, and as unquestionably 
 have so occurred at various establishments, I am yet con- 
 vinced that water in itself is so friendly to the human body, 
 that it requires a very extraordinary degree of bungling, 
 of ignorance, and presumption, to produce results really 
 dangerous ; that a regular practitioner does more frequent 
 mischief from the misapplication of even the simplest 
 drugs, than a water doctor of very moderate experience 
 does or can do, by the misapplication of his baths and 
 friction. 
 
 And here I must observe, that those portions of the 
 treatment which appear to the uninitiated as the most 
 perilous are really the safest,* and can be applied with the 
 most impunity to the weakest constitutions ; whereas those 
 which appear, from our greater familiarity with them, the 
 least startling and most innocuous,t are those which require 
 the greatest knowledge of general pathology and the indi- 
 vidual constitution. I shall revert to this part of my 
 subject before T conclude. 
 
 The next thing that struck me was the extraordinary ease 
 with which, under this system, good habits are acquired, 
 and bad habits relinquished. The difficulty with which, 
 under orthodox medical treatment, stimulants are aban- 
 doned, is here not witnessed. 
 
 Patients accustomed for half a century to live hard and 
 high, wine- drinkers, spirit-bibbers, whom the regular phy- 
 sician has sought in vain to reduce to a daily pint of sherry, 
 here voluntarily resign all strong potations, after a day or 
 two cease to feel the want of them, and reconcile them- 
 selves to water as if they had drunk nothing else all their 
 lives. Others, who have had recourse for years and years 
 to medicine, — their potion in the morning, their cordial at 
 noon, their pill before dinner, their narcotic at bedtime, 
 cease to require these aids to life, as if by a charm. 
 
 Nor this alone. Men to whom mental labour has been 
 
 * Such as the wet-sheet packing, 
 f The plunge-bath — the Douche. 
 
58 CONFESSIONS OF A WATER-PATIENT. 
 
 a necessary — who have existed on the excitement of the 
 passions and the stir of the intellect— who have felt, these 
 withdrawn, the prostration of the whole system — the lock 
 to the wheel of the entire machine — return at once to the 
 careless spirits of the boy in his first holiday. 
 
 Here lies a great secret ; water thus skilfully adminis- 
 tered is in itself a wonderful excitement, it supplies the 
 place of all others — it operates powerfully and rapidly 
 upon the nerves, sometimes to calm them, sometimes to 
 irritate, but always to occupy. 
 
 Hence follows a consequence which all patients have re- 
 marked — the complete repose of the passions during the 
 early stages of the cure ; they seem laid asleep as if by 
 enchantment. The intellect shares the same rest ; after a 
 short time, mental exertion becomes impossible ; even the 
 memory grows far less tenacious of its painful impressions, 
 cares and griefs are forgotten ; the sense of the present 
 absorbs the past and future ; there is a certain freshness of 
 youth which pervades the spirits, and lives upon the enjoy- 
 ment of the actual hour. 
 
 Thus the great agents of our mortal wear and tear — the 
 passions and the mind — calmed into strange rest, — Nature 
 seems to leave the body to its instinctive tendency, which 
 is always towards recovery. All that interests and amuses 
 is of a healthful character ; exercise, instead of being an 
 unwilling drudgery, becomes the inevitable impulse of the 
 frame braced and invigorated by the element. A series of 
 reactions is continually going on — the willing exercise pro- 
 duces refreshing rest, the refreshing rest willing exercise. 
 
 The extraordinary effect which water taken early in the 
 morning produces on the appetite is well known amongst 
 those who have tried it, even before the water-cure was 
 thought of ; an appetite it should be the care of the skilful 
 doctor to check into moderate gratification ; the powers of 
 nutrition become singularly strengthened, the blood grows 
 rich and pure— the constitution is not only amended — it 
 undergoes a change.* 
 
 * Doctor Wilson observed to me once, very truly I think, that many regular 
 physicians are beginning to own the effect of water as a stimulant who yet 
 do not perceive its far more complicated and beneficial effects as an altera- 
 tive. I may here remark, that eminent physicians are already borrowing 
 largely from the details of the water-cure— recommending water "to be drunk 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A WATER-PATIENT. 59 
 
 The safety of the system, then, struck me first; — its 
 power of replacing by healthful stimulants the morbid 
 ones it withdrew, whether physical or moral, surprised me 
 next ; that which thirdly impressed me was no less con- 
 trary to all my preconceived notions. I had fancied that 
 whether good or bad, the treatment must be one of great 
 hardship, extremely repugnant and disagreeable. I won- 
 dered at myself to find how soon it became so associated 
 with pleasurable and grateful feelings as to dwell upon the 
 mind amongst the happiest passages of existence. 
 
 For my own part, despite all my ailments, or whatever 
 may have been my cares, I have ever found exquisite pleasure 
 in that sense of being which is, as it were, the conscience, 
 the mirror, of the soul. I have known hours of as much 
 and as vivid happiness as perhaps can fall to the lot of 
 man ; but amongst all my most brilliant recollections I can 
 recall no periods of enjoyment at once more hilarious and 
 serene than the hours spent on the lonely hills of Malvern 
 — none in which nature was so thoroughly possessed and 
 appreciated. 
 
 The rise from a sleep sound as childhood's — the im- 
 patient rush into the open air, while the sun was fresh, and 
 the birds first sang — the sense of an unwonted strength in 
 every limb and nerve, which made so light of the steep 
 ascent to the holy spring — the delicious sparkle of that 
 morning draught — the green terrace on the brow of the 
 mountain, with the rich landscape wide and far below — the 
 breeze that once would have been so keen and biting, now 
 but exhilarating the blood, and lifting the spirits into 
 religious joy ; and this keen sentiment of present pleasure 
 rounded by a hope sanctioned by all I felt in myself, and 
 nearly all that I witnessed in others — that that very present 
 was but the step — the threshold — into an unknown and 
 delightful region of health and vigour ; — a disease and a 
 care dropping from the frame and the heart at every stride. 
 
 But here I must pause to own that if on the one hand 
 the danger and discomforts of the cure are greatly ex- 
 fasting— the use of the sitz, or hip-bath, &c. But these, however useful as 
 aids in the treatment of maladies, cannot comprehend that extraordinary 
 alterative which is produced by the various and complicated agencies of 
 water, brought systematically, unintermittingly, and for a considerable 
 period, to bear, not only upon the complaint, but the constitution. 
 
CO CONFESSIONS OF A WATER-PATIENT. 
 
 aggerated (exaggerated is too weak a word) — so, on the 
 other hand, as far as my own experience, which is perhaps 
 not inconsiderable, extends, the enthusiastic advocates of 
 the system have greatly misrepresented the duration of the 
 curative process. I have read and heard of chronic diseases 
 of long standing cured permanently in a very few weeks. 
 I candidly confess that I have seen none such. I have, it 
 is true, witnessed many chronic diseases perfectly cured — 
 diseases which had been pronounced incurable by the first 
 physicians, but the cure has been long and fluctuating. 
 
 Persons so afflicted who try this system must arm them- 
 selves with patience. The first effects of the process are 
 indeed usually bracing, and inspire such feelings of general 
 well-being, that some think they have only to returrfhome, 
 and carry out the cure partially, to recover. A great 
 mistake! — the alterative effects begin long after the 
 bracing — a disturbance in the constitution takes place, 
 prolonged more or less, and not till that ceases does the 
 cure really begin. 
 
 Not that the peculiar " crisis," sought for so vehemently 
 by the German water- doctors, and usually under their 
 hands manifested by boils and eruptions, is at all a neces- 
 sary part of the cure — it is, indeed, as far as I have seen, 
 of rare occurrence — but a critical action, not single, not 
 confined to one period, or one series of phenomena, is at 
 work, often undetected by the patient himself, during a 
 considerable (and that the later) portion of the cure in 
 most patients where the malady has been grave, and where 
 the recovery becomes permanent. During this time the 
 patient should be under the eye of his water-doctor. 
 
 To conclude my own case: I stayed some nine or ten 
 weeks at Malvern, and business, from which I could not 
 escape, obliging me then to be in the neighbourhood of 
 town, I continued the system seven weeks longer under 
 Doctor Weiss, at Petersham ; during this latter period the 
 agreeable phenomena which had characterised the former, 
 the cheerfulness, the Hen etre, the consciousness of return- 
 ing health vanished ; and were succeeded by great irrita- 
 tion of the nerves, extreme fretfulness, and the usual 
 characteristics of the constitutional disturbance to which I 
 have referred. I had every reason, however, to be satisfied 
 with the care and skill of Doctor Weiss, who fullv deserves 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A WATER-PATIENT. 61 
 
 the reputation he has acquired, and the attachment enter- 
 tained towards him by his patients ; nor did my judgment 
 ever despond or doubt of the ultimate benefits of the 
 process. 
 
 I emerged at last from these operations in no very portly 
 condition. I was blanched and emaciated — washed out 
 like a thrifty housewife's gown — but neither the bleaching 
 nor the loss of weight had in the least impaired my strength ; 
 on the contrary, all the muscles had grown as hard as iron, 
 and I was become capable of great exercise without fatigue ; 
 my cure was not effected, but I was compelled to go into 
 Germany. 
 
 On my return homewards I was seized with a severe 
 cold, which rapidly passed into high fever. Fortunately I 
 was within reach of Doctor Schmidt's magnificent hydro- 
 pathic establishment at Boppart ; thither I caused myself 
 to be conveyed ; and now I had occasion to experience the 
 wonderful effect of the water-cure in acute cases ; slow in 
 chronic disease, its beneficial operation in acute is imme- 
 diate. In twenty-four hours all fever had subsided, and on 
 the third day I resumed my journey, relieved from every 
 symptom that had before prognosticated a tedious and 
 perhaps alarming illness. 
 
 And now came gradually, yet perceptibly, the good 
 effects of the system I had undergone ; flesh and weight 
 returned ; the sense of health became conscious and steady; 
 I had every reason to bless the hour when I first sought 
 the springs of Malvern. And, here I must observe, that it 
 often happens that the patient makes but slight apparent 
 improvement, when under the cure, compared with that 
 which occurs subsequently. A water-doctor of repute at 
 Brussels, indeed, said frankly to a grumbling patient, " I 
 do not expect you to be well while here — it is only on 
 leaving me that you will know if I have cured you.'' 
 
 It is as the frame recovers from the agitation it under- 
 goes, that it gathers round it powers utterly unknown to it 
 before— as the plant watered by the rains of one season, 
 betrays in the next the effect of the grateful dews. 
 
 I had always suffered so severely in winter, that the 
 severity of our last one gave me apprehensions, and I re- 
 solved to seek shelter from my fears at my beloved Malvern. 
 I here passed the most inclement period of the winter, not 
 
62 CONFESSIONS OF A WATEK-PATIENT. 
 
 only perfectly free from the colds, rheums, and catarrhs, 
 which had hitherto visited me with the snows, but in the 
 enjoyment of excellent health ; and I am persuaded that for 
 those who are delicate, and who suffer much during the 
 winter, there is no place where the cold is so little felt as 
 at a water-cure establishment. 
 
 I am persuaded, also, and in this I am borne out by the 
 experience of most water-doctors, that the cure is most 
 rapid and effectual during the cold season — from autumn 
 through the winter. I am thoroughly convinced that con- 
 sumption in its earlier stages can be more easily cured, and 
 the predisposition more permanently eradicated by a winter 
 spent at Malvern, under the care of Doctor Wilson, than 
 by the timorous flight to Pisa or Madeira. It is by harden- 
 ing rather than defending the tissues that we best secure 
 them from disease. 
 
 And now, to sum up, and to dismiss my egotistical re- 
 velations ; — I desire in no way to overcolour my own case ; 
 I do not say that when I first went to the water-cure I was 
 afflicted with any disease immediately menacing to life — I 
 say only that I was in that prolonged and chronic state of 
 ill-health, which made life at the best extremely precarious 
 — I do not say that I had any malady which the faculty 
 could pronounce incurable — I say only that the most 
 eminent men of the faculty had failed to cure me. I do 
 not even now affect to boast of a perfect and complete 
 deliverance from all my ailments — I cannot declare that a 
 constitution naturally delicate has been rendered Herculean, 
 or that the wear and tear of a whole manhood have been 
 thoroughly repaired. 
 
 What might have been the case had I not taken the cure 
 at intervals, had I remained at it steadily for six or eight 
 months without interruption, I cannot do more than con- 
 jecture, but so strong is my belief that the result would 
 have been completely successful, that I promise myself, 
 whenever I can spare the leisure, a long renewal of the 
 system. 
 
 These admissions made, what have I gained meanwhile 
 to justify my eulogies and my gratitude ? — an immense 
 accumulation of the capital of health. Formerly, it was my 
 favourite and querulous question to those who saw much of 
 me, " Did you ever know me twelve hours without pain or 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A WATER-PATIENT. Go 
 
 illness r" Now, instead of these being my constant com- 
 panions, they are but my occasional visitors. I compare 
 my old state and my present to the poverty of a man who 
 has a shilling in his pocket, and whose poverty is therefore 
 a struggle for life, with the occasional distresses of a man 
 of £5000 a year, who sees but an appendage endangered, 
 or a luxury abridged. 
 
 All the good that I have gained, is wholly unlike what I 
 have ever derived either from medicine or the German 
 mineral baths : in the first place, it does not relieve a single 
 malady alone, it pervades the whole frame ; in the second 
 place, unless the habits are intemperate, it does not wear 
 off as we return to our ordinary pursuits, so that those who 
 make fair experiment of the system towards, or even after, 
 the season of middle age, may, without exaggeration, find 
 in the latter period of life (so far as freedom from suffering, 
 and the calm enjoyment of physical being are concerned) a 
 second — a younger youth ! And it is this profound con- 
 viction which has induced me to volunteer these details, in 
 the hope (I trust a pure and kindly one) to induce those, 
 who more or less have suffered as I have done, to fly to 
 the same rich and bountiful resources. 
 
 We ransack the ends of the earth for drugs and minerals 
 — we extract our potions from the deadliest poisons — but 
 around us and about us, Nature, the great mother proffers 
 the Hygeian fount, unsealed and accessible to all. Wher- 
 ever the stream glides pure, wherever the spring sparkles 
 fresh, there, for the vast proportion of the maladies which 
 Art produces, Nature yields the benignant healing. 
 
 It remains for me to say, merely as an observer, and 
 solely with such authority as an observer altogether disin- 
 terested, but, of course, without the least pretence to profes- 
 sional science, may fairly claim, what class of diseases I have 
 seen least, and what most, tractable to the operations of the 
 water-cure, and how far enthusiasts appear to me to have 
 over-estimated, how far sceptics have under- valued the 
 effects of water as a medicament. 
 
 There are those (most of the water doctors especially) 
 who contend that all medicine by drugs is unnecessary — 
 that water internally and outwardly applied suffices, under 
 skilful management, for all complaints— that the time will 
 come when the drug doctor will cease to receive a fee, when 
 
64 CONFESSIONS OF A WATER-PATIENT. 
 
 the apothecary will close his shop, and the water-cure be 
 adopted in every hospital and by every family. 
 
 Dreams and absurdities ! Even granting that the water- 
 cure were capable of all the wonders ascribed to it, its 
 process is so slow in most chronic cases — it usually requires 
 such complete abstraction from care and business — it takes 
 the active man so thoroughly out of his course of life, 
 that a vast proportion of those engaged in worldly pursuits 
 cannot hope to find the requisite leisure, There are also a 
 large number of complaints (perhaps the majority) which 
 yield so easily to a sparing use of drugs under a mode- 
 rately competent practitioner, that the convenient plan of 
 sending to the next chemist for your pill or potion can 
 never be superseded, nor can I think it desirable that it 
 should be. Moreover, as far as I have seen, there are 
 complaints curable by medicine which the water-cure 
 utterly fails to reach. 
 
 The disorders wherein hydropathy appears to me to be 
 the least effectual are, first, neuralgic pains, especially the 
 monster pain of the Tic Doloreux. Not one instance of a 
 cure in the latter by hydropathy has come under my own ob- 
 servation, and I have only heard of one authentic case of 
 recovery from it by that process. Secondly, paralysis of a 
 grave character in persons of an advanced age. Thirdly, 
 in tubercular consumption. As may be expected, in this 
 stage of that melancholy disease, the water-cure utterly 
 fails to restore, but I have known it even here prolong life, 
 beyond all reasonable calculation, and astonishingly relieve 
 the more oppressive symptoms. 
 
 In all cases where the nervous exhaustion is great, and 
 of long standing, and is accompanied with obstinate hy- 
 pochondria ; hydropathy, if successful at all, is very slow 
 in its benefits, and the patience of the sufferer is too often 
 worn out before the favourable turn takes place. I have also 
 noticed that obstinate and deep-rooted maladies in persons 
 otherwise of very athletic frames seem to yield much more 
 tardily to the water-cure than similar complaints in more 
 delicate constitutions ; so that you will often see, of two 
 persons afflicted with the same genera of complaints, the 
 feeble and fragile one recover before the stout man with 
 Atlantic shoulders evinces one symptom of amelioration. 
 I must add, too, generally, that where the complaint is not 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A WATER-PATIENT. 65 
 
 functional, but clearly organic, I should deceive the patient 
 if I could bid him hope from water more than what drugs 
 may effect — viz., palliatives and relief. But medical 
 science is not always unerring in its decisions on organic 
 complaints, and many that have been pronounced to be 
 such, yield to the searching and all penetrating influences 
 of water. 
 
 Those cases, on the other hand, in which the water-cure 
 seems an absolute panacea, and in which the patient may 
 commence with the most sanguine hopes, are, First, rheu- 
 matism, however prolonged, however complicated. In this 
 the cure is usually rapid — nearly always permament. 
 Secondly, gout. 
 
 Here its efficacy is little less startling to appearance than 
 in the former case ; it seems to take up the disease by the 
 roots ; it extracts the peculiar acid, which often appears in 
 discolorations upon the sheets used in the application, or 
 is ejected ill other modes. Bat here, judging always from 
 cases subjected to my personal knowledge, I have not seen 
 instances to justify the assertion of some water doctors 
 that returns of the disease do not occur. The predisposi- 
 tion — the tendency, has appeared to me to remain. The 
 patient is liable to relapses — but T have invariably found 
 them far less frequent, less lengthened, and readily sus- 
 ceptible of simple and speedy cure, especially if the habits 
 remain temperate. 
 
 Thirdly, that wide and grisly family of affliction classed 
 under the common name of dyspepsia. All derangements 
 of the digestive organs, imperfect powers of nutrition — 
 the malaise of an injured stomach, appear precisely the 
 complaints on which the system takes firmest hold, and in 
 which it effects those cures that convert existence from a 
 burden into a blessing. 
 
 Hence it follows that many nameless and countless com- 
 plaints proceeding from derangement of the stomach, cease 
 as that great machine is restored to order. I have seen 
 disorders of the heart which have been pronounced organic 
 by no inferior authorities of the profession, disappear in 
 an incredibly short time — cases of incipient consumption, 
 in which the seat is in the nutritious powers ; hemorrhages, 
 and various congestions, shortness of breath, habitual 
 fainting-fits, many of what are call act improperly nervous 
 
66 CONFESSIONS OF A WATER- PATIENT. 
 
 complaints, but which, in reality, are radiations from the 
 main ganglionic spring ; the disorders produced by the 
 abuse of powerful medicines, especially mercury and iodine, 
 the loss of appetite, the dulled sense, and the shaking hand 
 of intemperance, skin complaints, and the dire scourge of 
 scrofula — all these seem to obtain from hydropathy relief 
 — nay, absolute and unqualified cure, beyond not only the 
 means of the most skilful drug doctor, but the hopes of 
 the most sanguine patient.^ 
 
 The cure may be divided into two branches — the process 
 for acute complaints — that for chronic ; I have just referred 
 to the last. - And great as are there its benefits, they seem 
 commonplace beside the effect the system produces in 
 acute complaints. Fever, including the scarlet and the 
 typhus, influenza, measles, small-pox, the sudden and rapid 
 disorders of children, are cured with a simplicity and pre- 
 cision which must, I am persuaded, sooner or later, render 
 the resources of the hydropathist the ordinary treatment 
 for such acute complaints in the hospitals. 
 
 The principal remedy here employed by the water-doctor 
 is the wet- sheet packing, which excites such terror amongst 
 the uninitiated, and which, of all the curatives adopted by 
 hydropathy, is unquestionably the safest — the one that can 
 be applied without danger to the greatest variety of cases, 
 and which I do not hesitate to aver can rarely, if ever, 
 be misapplied in any cases where the pulse is hard and 
 high, and the skin dry and burning. 
 
 I have found in conversation so much misapprehension 
 of this very easy and very luxurious remedy, that I may 
 be pardoned for re- explaining what has been explained so 
 often. It is not, as people persist in supposing, that 
 patients are put into wet sheets and there left to shiver. 
 The sheets, after being saturated, are well wrung out — 
 the patient quickly wrapped in them — several blankets 
 tightly bandaged round, and a feather-bed placed at top ; 
 
 * Amongst other complaints, I may add dropsy, which, in its simple state, 
 and not as the crowning symptom of a worn-out constitution, I have known 
 most successfully treated ; cases of slight paralysis ; and I have witnessed two 
 instances of partial blindness, in which the sight was restored. I have never 
 seen deafness cured by hydropathy, though I believe that one of the best 
 German treatises on the water Cure, at Graafenberg, was written by a Prus- 
 sian officer, whom Preissnitz relieved from that not least cheerless of human 
 infirmities. 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A WATER-PATIENT. 67 
 
 thus, especially where there is the least fever, the first 
 momentary chill is ]3romptly succeeded by a gradual and 
 vivifying warmth, perfectly free from the irritation of 
 dry heat — a delicious sense of ease is usually followed by 
 sleep more agreeable than anodynes ever produced. It 
 seems a positive cruelty to be relieved from this magic 
 girdle in which pain is lulled and fever cooled, and watch- 
 fulness lapped in slumber. 
 
 The bath which succeeds, refreshes and braces the skin, 
 which the operation relaxed and softened. They only who 
 have tried this, after fatigue or in fever, can form the least 
 notion of its pleasurable sensations, or of its extraordinary 
 efficacy; nor is there anything startling or novel in its 
 theory. 
 
 In hospitals, now, water- dressings are found the best 
 poultice to an inflamed member ; this expansion of the wet 
 dressing is a poultice to the whole inflamed surface of the 
 body. It does not differ greatly, except in its cleanliness 
 and simplicity, from the old remedy of the ancients — the 
 wrapping the body in the skins of animals newly slain, or 
 placing it on dunghills, or immersing it, as now in Ger- 
 many, in the soft slough of mud-baths. # Its theory is 
 that of warmth and moisture, those friendliest agents to 
 inflammatory disorders. 
 
 In fact, I think it the duty of every man, on whom the 
 lives of others depend, to make himself acquainted with 
 at least this part of the water-cure : — the wet sheet is the 
 true life-preserver. In the large majority of sudden in- 
 flammatory complaints, the doctor at a distance, prompt 
 measures indispensable, it will at the least arrest the disease, 
 check the fever, till, if you prefer the drugs, the drugs can 
 come — the remedy is at hand wherever you can find a bed 
 and a jug of water ; and whatever else you may apprehend 
 after a short visit to a hydropathic establishment, your fear 
 of that bugbear — the wet sheet — is the first you banish. 
 
 The only cases, I believe, where it can be positively mis- 
 chievous is where the pulse scarcely beats — where the vital 
 
 * A very eminent London physician, opposed generally to the water-cure, 
 told me that he had effected a perfect cure in a case of inveterate leprosy, 
 hy swathing the patient in wet lint covered with oil skin. This is the wet 
 sheet packing, hut there are patients who would take kindly to wet lint, and 
 shudder at the idea of a wet sheet ! 
 
68 CONFESSIONS OF A WATER-PATIENT. 
 
 sense is extremely low — where the inanition of the frame 
 forbids the necessary reaction; — in cholera, and certain 
 disorders of the chest and bronchia ; otherwise at all ages, 
 from the infant to the octogenarian, it is equally applicable, 
 and in most acute cases, equally innocent. 
 
 Hydropathy being thus rapidly beneficial in acute dis- 
 orders, it follows naturally that it will be quick as a cure in 
 chronic complaints in proportion as acute symptoms are 
 mixed with them, and slowest where such complaints are 
 dull and lethargic — it will be slowest also where the nervous 
 exhaustion is the greatest. With children, its effects can 
 scarcely be exaggerated ; in them, the nervous system, not 
 weakened by toil, grief, anxiety, and intemperance, lends 
 itself to the gracious element as a young plant to the 
 rains. 
 
 When I now see some tender mother coddling, and physick- 
 ing, and preserving from every breath of air, and swaddling 
 in flannels, her pallid little ones, I long to pounce upon the 
 callow brood, and bear them to the hills of Malvern, and 
 the diamond fountain of St. Anne's — with what rosy faces 
 and robust limbs I promise they shall return — alas ! I 
 promise and preach in vain — the family apothecary is 
 against me, and the progeny are doomed to rhubarb and 
 the rickets. 
 
 The water-cure as yet has had this evident injustice, — the 
 patients resorting to it have mostly been desperate cases. 
 So strong a notion prevails that it is a desperate remedy, 
 that they only who have found all else fail have dragged 
 themselves to the Bethesda Pools. That all thus not only 
 abandoned by hope and the College, but weakened and 
 poisoned by the violent medicines absorbed into their system 
 for a score or so of years, — that all should not recover is 
 not surprising ! 
 
 The wonder is that the number of recoveries should be 
 so great ; — that every now and then we should be surprised 
 by the man whose untimely grave we predicted when we 
 last saw him meeting us in the streets ruddy and stalwart, 
 fresh from the springs of Graaf enberg, Boppart, Petersham, 
 or Malvern. 
 
 The remedy is not desperate ; it is simpler, I do not say 
 than any dose, but than any course of medicine — it is infi- 
 nitely more agreeable — it admits no remedies for the com- 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A WATER-PATIENT. 69 
 
 plaints which are inimical to the constitution. It bequeaths 
 none of the maladies consequent on blue pill and mercury 
 — on purgatives and drastics — on iodine and aconite — on 
 leeches and the lancet. If it cures your complaint, it will 
 assuredly strengthen your whole frame ; if it fails to cure 
 your complaint, it can scarcely fail to improve your general 
 system. 
 
 As it acts, or ought, scientifically treated, to act, first on 
 the system, lastly on the complaint, placing nature herself 
 in the way to throw off the disease, so it constantly hap- 
 pens that the patients at a hydropathic establishment will 
 tell you that the disorder for which they came is not re- 
 moved, but that in all other respects their health is better 
 than they ever remember it to have been. 
 
 Thus, I would not only recommend it to those who are 
 sufferers from some grave disease, but to those who require 
 merely the fillip, the alterative, or the bracing which they 
 now often seek in vain in country air or a watering place. 
 For such, three weeks at Malvern will do more than three 
 months at Brighton or Boulogne ; for at the water-cure the 
 whole life is one remedy ; the hours, the habits, the dis- 
 cipline — not incompatible with gaiety and cheerfulness 
 (the spirits of hydropathists are astounding, and in high 
 spirits all things are amusement) tend perforce to train the 
 body to the highest state of health of which it is capable. 
 
 Compare this life, merchant, trader, man of busi- 
 ness, escaping to the sea- shore, with that which you there 
 lead — with your shrimps and your shell -fish, and your 
 wine and your brown stout — with all which counteracts in 
 the evening, the good of your morning dip and your noon- 
 day stroll. 
 
 What, I own, I should envy most, are the feelings of the 
 robust, healthy man, only a little knocked down by his city 
 cares or his town pleasures, after his second week at Dr. 
 Wilson's establishment — yea, how I should envy the exqui- 
 site pleasure which he would derive from that robustness 
 made clear and sensible to him ; — the pure taste, the iron 
 muscles, the exuberant spirits, the overflowing sense of life. 
 
 If even to the weak and languid the water-cure gives 
 hours of physical happiness which the pleasures of the 
 grosser senses can never bestow, what would it give to the 
 strong man, from whose eye it has but to lift the light film 
 
70 CONFESSIONS OF A WATER-PATIENT. 
 
 — in whose mechanism, attuned to joy, it but brushes away 
 the grain of dust, or oils the solid wheel ! 
 
 I must bring my letter to a close. I meant to address it 
 through you, Mr. Editor, chiefly to our brethern — the over- 
 jaded sons of toil and letters — behind whom I see the 
 warning shades of departed martyrs. But it is applicable 
 to all who ail — to all who would not only cure a complaint, 
 but strengthen a system and prolong a life. 
 
 To such, who will so far attach value to my authority, 
 that they will acknowledge, at least, I am no interested 
 witness — for I have no institution to establish — no pro- 
 fession to build up — I have no eye to fees, my calling is 
 but that of an observer — as an observer only do I speak, it 
 may be with enthusiasm — but enthusiasm built on expe- 
 rience and prompted by sympathy ; — to such, then, as may 
 listen to me, I give this recommendation : pause if you 
 please — inquire if you will — but do not consult your doctor. 
 I have no doubt he is a most honest, excellent man — but 
 you cannot expect a doctor of drugs to say other than that 
 doctors of water are but quacks. 
 
 Do not consult your doctor whether you shall try hydro- 
 pathy, but find out some intelligent persons in whose 
 shrewdness you can confide — who have been patients 
 themselves at a hydropathic establishment. Better still, go 
 for a few days — the cost is not much — into some such in- 
 stitution yourself, look round, talk to the patients, examine 
 with your own eyes, hear with your own ears, before you 
 adventure the experiment. Become a witness before you 
 are a patient ; if the evidence does not satisfy you, turn 
 and flee. 
 
 But if you venture, venture with a good heart and a 
 stout faith. Hope, but not with presumption. Do not 
 fancy that the disorder which has afflicted you for ten 
 years ought to be cured in ten clays. Beware, above all, 
 lest, alarmed by some phenomena which the searching ele- 
 ment produces, you have recourse immediately to drugs to 
 disperse them. The water-boils, for instance, which are 
 sometimes, as I have before said, but by no means fre- 
 quently, a critical symptom of the cure, are, in all cases that 
 I have seen, cured easily by water, but may become 
 extremely dangerous in the hands of your apothecary.* 
 * I have no prejudice, as I have before implied, against the use of drugs, 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A WATER-PATIENT. 71 
 
 Most of the few solitary instances that have terminated 
 fatally, to the prejudice of the water-cure, have been those 
 in which the patient has gone from water to drugs. It is 
 the axiom of the system, that water only cures what water 
 produces. Do not leave a hydropathic establishment in 
 the time of any " crisis," however much you may be panic- 
 stricken. Hold the doctor responsible for getting you out 
 of what he gets you into ; and if your doctor be discreetly 
 chosen, take my word he will do it. 
 
 Do not begin to carry on the system at home, and under 
 any eye but that of an experienced hydropathist. After 
 you know the system, and the doctor knows you, the 
 curative process may probably be continued at your own 
 house with ease — but the commencement must be watched, 
 and if a critical action ensues when you are at home, 
 return to the only care that can conduct it safely to a happy 
 issue. 
 
 When at the institution, do not let the example of other 
 patients tempt you to overdo — to drink more water, or take 
 more baths than are prescribed to you. Above all, never 
 let the eulogies which many will pass upon the douche (the 
 popular bath), tempt you to take it on the sly, unknown to 
 your adviser. The douche is dangerous when the body is 
 
 though, despite their more merciful and sparing administration during the 
 last twenty years, I venture, with such diffidence as becomes oue practised 
 upon, not practising, to hint an opinion, that they are still applied more 
 frequently than is warranted by their success on the complaint, or their effect 
 on the constitution. But I am quite sure that a patient can rarely, with im- 
 punity, be at once under a water doctor and a drug doctor ; and that the 
 passage from the first to the last, requires the greatest nicety and caution. 
 A physician, however skilful, who not only has not witnessed, but is inclined 
 to deride that commotion which is produced in the system, especially on the 
 nerves, by vigorous hydropathic treatment, can scarcely be aware of its nature 
 and extent, nor how frequently medicines, quite innocuous with an ordinary 
 patient, may become dangerous, misapplied to one fresh from a long course 
 of hydropathy. Dr. "Weeding, of Eyde, it is true, sometimes unites drugs 
 with the water-cure. As I never witnessed his treatment, so I can say 
 nothing as to its effects. But granting them to be such as to warrant his de- 
 parture from hydropathic theory and practice, it is one question whether a 
 water-doctor, thoroughly acquainted with his own system, and minutely 
 studying its effects on a particular patient, may or not, with advantage, occa- 
 sionally administer drugs, and another question, whether a physician, wholly 
 unacquainted with the water-cure, can be reasonably expected to deal, from 
 his ordinary pathological experience, however great, with the peculiar symp- 
 toms produced by a system of which he knows nothing, or with a constitu- 
 tion rendered by the same system acutely sensitive to drugs, and in which a 
 critical excitement, wholly out of his range of practice is probably at work. 
 
1% CONFESSIONS OF A WATER-PATIENT. 
 
 unprepared — when the heart is affected — when apoplexy- 
 may be feared. After you leave the establishment, be slow 
 and gradual in your return to all habits that require much 
 intellectual labour, or subject you to much nervous harass- 
 ment ; be slow, also, in your return to habits that neces- 
 sitate late hours. If you drink wine or fermented liquors 
 at all, be sparing in your first recurrence to them. Well 
 for you if you adhere throughout life to water as your 
 ordinary beverage, and make wine but your occasional 
 luxury. At all events, let the constitution slowly settle 
 back — do not hurry it back — to artifice from Nature. 
 
 For your choice of an establishment you have a wide 
 range. Institutions in England are now plentiful, and 
 planted in some of the loveliest spots of our island. But 
 as I only speak from personal knowledge, I can but here 
 depose to such as I have visited. I hear, indeed, a high 
 character of Doctor Johnson, of Stansted-Berry, and his 
 books show great ability. Much is said in praise of Doctor 
 Freeman, of Cheltenham, though his system, in some mea- 
 surers at variance with the received notions of hydropathists. 
 But of these and many others, perhaps no less worthy of 
 confidence — such as the magnificent establishment at Ben 
 Rhydding, in Yorkshire ; that at Grasmere, under Doctor 
 Stumm ; and that at Ryde, in which Doctor Weeding seeks 
 to unite hydropathy with drugs, &c, &c. — I have no expe- 
 rience of my own. I have sojourned with advantage at 
 Doctor Weiss's, at Petersham ; and for those whose busi- 
 ness and avocations oblige them to be near London, his 
 very agreeable house proffers many advantages, besides his 
 own long practice and great skill. 
 
 To those who wish to try the system abroad, and shrink 
 from the long journey to Graafenberg, Dr. Schmidt, at 
 Boppart, proffers a princely house, comprising every 
 English comfort, amidst the noble scenery of the Rhine, 
 and I can bear ready witness to his skill ; but it is natural 
 that the place which has for me the most grateful recol- 
 lections, should be that where I received the earliest and 
 the greatest benefit, viz., Doctor Wilson's, at Malvern ; 
 there even the distance from the capital has its advan- 
 tages. 
 
 The cure imperatively demands, at least in a large pro- 
 portion of cases, abstraction from all the habitual cares of 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A WATER-PATIENT. 73 
 
 li-fe, and in some the very neighbourhood of London suffices 
 to produce restlessness and anxiety. For certain com- 
 plaints, especially those of children, and such as are at- 
 tended with debility, the air of Malvern is in itself Hygeian. 
 The water is immemorially celebrated for its purity — the 
 landscape is a perpetual pleasure to the eye — the moun- 
 tains furnish the exercise most suited to the cure — "Man 
 muss Gebirge haben" "one must have mountains," is the 
 saying of Preissnitz. 
 
 All these are powerful auxiliaries, and yet all these are 
 subordinate to the diligent, patient care — the minute, un- 
 wearied attention — the anxious, unaffected interest, which 
 Doctor Wilson manifests to every patient, from the hum- 
 blest to the highest, who may be submitted to his care. 
 The vast majority of difficult cures which I have witnessed, 
 have emanated from his skill. A pupil of the celebrated 
 Broussais, his anatomical knowledge is considerable, and 
 his tact * in diseases seems intuitive ; he has that pure 
 pleasure in his profession that the profits of it seem to be 
 almost lost sight of, and having an independence of his 
 own, his enthusiasm for the system he pursues is at least 
 not based upon any mercenary speculation. I have seen him 
 devote the same time and care to those whom his liberal 
 heart has led him to treat gratuitously as to the wealthiest 
 of his patients, and I mention this less to praise him for 
 generosity than to show that he has that earnest faith in 
 his own system, which begets an earnest faith in those to 
 whom he administers ; in all new experiments, it is a great 
 thing to have confidence, not only in the skill, but the 
 sincerity, of your adviser. — His treatment is less violent 
 and energetic than that in fashion on the continent. If he 
 errs, it is on the side of caution, and his theory leads him 
 so much towards the restoration of the whole system, that 
 the relief of the particular malady will sometimes seem 
 
 * I use the word "tact" advisedly; for I think the medical profession 
 will bear me out in the observation, that a certain quality, which I can de- 
 scribe by no other word, is as valuable, as it is rare in practice, and often 
 makes the precise and scarce describable difference between one physician 
 and another. To this Dr. Wilson joins a remarkable acuteness in his pre- 
 dictions as to the nature and termination of complaints, which (as no man 
 is less a charlatan) he, no doubt, owes in much to his knowledge of the 
 human frame, and his careful education as a practitioner, — but towards 
 which, I suppose, as in all other gifts, a natural faculty guides the acquired 
 experience. 
 
74 CONCESSIONS OP A WATER-PATIENT. 
 
 tedious in order to prove complete. Hence he inspires in 
 those who have had a prolonged experience of his treat- 
 ment a great sense of safety and security. For your im- 
 patient self, you might sometimes prefer the venture of a 
 brisker process — for those in whom you are interested, and 
 for whom you are fearful — you would not rjsk a step more 
 hurried. 
 
 And since there is no small responsibility in recommend- 
 ing any practitioner of a novel school, so it is a comfort Jto 
 know that whoever resorts to Doctor Wilson will at least be 
 in hands not only practised and skilful, but wary and safe. 
 He may fail in doing good, but I never met with a single 
 patient who accused him of doing harm. And I cannot 
 help adding, that though Mrs. Wilson does not interfere 
 with the patients, it must be gratifying to such ladies as 
 resort to Malvern to find in her the birth and manners of a 
 perfect gentlewoman, and the noiseless solicitude of a heart 
 genuinely kind and good ! 
 
 Here then, brothers, afflicted ones, I bid you fare- 
 well. I wish you one of the most blessed friendships man 
 ever made — the familiar intimacy with Water. Not 
 Undine in her virgin existence more sportive and bewitch- 
 ing, not Undine in her wedded state more tender and faith- 
 ful than the Element of which she is the type. In health 
 may you find it the joyous playmate, in sickness the genial 
 restorer and soft assuager. Round the healing spring still 
 literally dwell the jocund nymphs in whom the Greek 
 poetry personified Mirth and Ease. No drink, whether 
 compounded of the gums and rosin of the old Falernian, or 
 the alcohol and acid of modern wine, gives the animal 
 spirits which rejoice the water- drinker. 
 
 Let him who has to go through severe bodily fatigue try 
 first whatever — wine, spirits, porter, beer — he may conceive 
 most generous and supporting ; let him then go through 
 the same toil with no draughts but from the crystal lymph, 
 and if he does not acknowledge [that there is no beverage 
 which man concocts so strengthening and animating as 
 that which Grod pours forth to all the children of nature, I 
 throw up my brief. 
 
 Finally, as health depends upon healthful habits, let 
 those who desire easily and luxuriously to glide into the 
 courses most agreeable to the human frame, to enjoy the 
 
CONFESSIONS OF A WATER-PATIENT. 75 
 
 morning breeze, to grow epicures in the simple regimen, to 
 become cased in armour against the vicissitudes of our 
 changeful skies — to feel, and to shake off, light sleep as a 
 blessed dew, let them, while the organs are jet sound, and 
 the nerves yet unshattered, devote an autumn to the water- 
 cure. 
 
 And you, parents ! who, too indolent, too much slaves 
 to custom, to endure change for yourselves, to renounce for 
 awhile your artificial natures, but who still covet for your 
 children hardy constitutions, pure tastes, and abstemious 
 habits — who wish to see them grow up with a manly dis- 
 dain of luxury — with a vigorous indifference to climate — 
 with a full sense of the value of health, not alone for itself, 
 but for the powers it elicits, and the virtues with which it 
 is intimately connected — the serene, unfretful temper — the 
 pleasure in innocent delights — the well-being that, content 
 with self, expands in benevolence to others — you I adjure 
 not to scorn the facile process of which I solicit the experi- 
 ment. Dip your young heroes in the spring, and hold 
 them not back by the heel. May my exhortations find 
 believing listeners, and may some, now unknown to me, 
 write me word from the green hills of Malvern, or the 
 groves of Petersham, "We have hearkened to you — not in 
 vain." 
 
 Adieu, Mr. Editor, the ghost returns to silence. 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, Esq.* 
 
 " Et itECKEAVERUNT vitam, legesque rogarunt." f 
 
 Lucuet. 1. yi. 3. 
 
 LETTER I. 
 
 Dear and Respected John, — Although I deeply sympa- 
 thise with your natural vexation at the troubled state of 
 your Town Household in Downing Street, and although at 
 other times, I might have much to say upon the disorders 
 of that establishment, yet at this moment your rural affairs 
 appear to me in a condition so bad and unpromising, as to 
 claim all the attention which you can spare from your just 
 quarrel with the Pope, and your hospitalities to the strangers 
 you have invited to your Barmecide's feast on the banks of 
 the Serpentine. 
 
 I bear no ill-will, my dear John, to your present servants, 
 they are horrible plagues to you, it is true, — but servants 
 always are. I believe many of them to be extremely in- 
 telligent, — I am sure that they are as honest as day. All 
 they want is a comfortable situation — wages no object. 
 And that, somehow or other, the situation is not comfortable, 
 seems perfectly clear ; for though they've expressed them- 
 selves ready to go, yet, when it comes to the point, nobody 
 else appears anxious to step into their shoes. It used not 
 to be so, my dear John : I remember the time when you 
 could not discharge a servant from Downing Street but 
 what his face was as long as my arm, and you had plenty 
 to choose from, amongst applicants who were thoroughly 
 up to their business. 
 
 For this domestic dilemma of yours, so wounding to your 
 pride and destructive to your peace, no doubt there are 
 many causes ; but I suspect that the one most serious is 
 this — you have allowed your town servants to regulate all 
 
 * [Originally published in 1851 as an 8vo pamphlet.] 
 
 t [And they renewed or remodelled life and secured or established laws.] 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 77 
 
 your country affairs, and they know just as much about 
 them as — common sense might have told you ! They have 
 thus got the poor land, on which, sooner or later, you are 
 doomed to fall back for the expenses of housekeeping, into 
 such a deuce of a mess, that I don't wonder they are willing 
 to shift to others the task of hearing the complaint, and 
 contriving the remedy ; while those who might otherwise 
 be disposed to succeed, have the wit to perceive that it will 
 be no easy matter to undo what is done, or restore what is 
 — undone. For, unhappily, in the dispute so inevitably 
 created between your town and country establishments, the 
 neighbours of each have been called in to take part in the 
 quarrel; and the question is, how to give content to the 
 one side, without making the servants' hall too hot to con- 
 tain the other. 
 
 This I believe to be the true state of things. And this, 
 my dear John, it behoves you to consider with that freedom 
 from prejudice and passion which should characterise the 
 head of a family when its peace is disturbed by dissensions. 
 
 There drop we the metaphor, and enlarge the scope of 
 our views. 
 
 That the existing government cannot last as it is now 
 composed, all men seem to admit. We may galvanise the 
 lifeless muscles, — we may give to the worn-out frame the 
 grimace and convulsion of simulated vitality; but the 
 animal spark has fled. We feel that the body is only kept 
 above ground for the purpose of philosophical experiment, 
 and are quite indifferent to the shocks it receives or the 
 gashes inflicted on it, because we say to ourselves, "It is 
 a dead thing practised upon for a short time for the sake of 
 the living.' ' 
 
 Whether this Government, by some gentle metempsy- 
 chosis, shall pass into another much resembling itself, — or 
 whether the party it embraces shall rise into vigour and 
 power as an antagonistical principle to some Government 
 by which my Lord Derby may boldly replace it, — is a 
 speculation that I leave to the hopes and the fears of others. 
 I shun in these Letters all mere party questions. I stand 
 alone from all party. I will not attack the Minister. I 
 will not panegyrise the rival. I leave to those whose 
 support, as the representatives of manufacturing and urban 
 
78 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 populations, Lord John Russell unhesitatingly preferred to 
 all terms with the agricultural constituencies, — the grateful 
 task to extenuate his merits, and enforce his offences. To 
 me his name is identified with the memory of imperishable 
 services ; and I feel too much regret to differ from him, 
 not to be reluctant to blame. If in him could yet be sup- 
 plied what appears to me the main want of the time, there 
 is no man I should be so proud — what ? — to follow as a 
 Leader? No. To support as a Conciliator. What the 
 time now demands is, not the Leader ; it is the Conciliator. 
 Wherever I turn, I dread the chance of a chief who is to 
 represent all the passions of class or the selfishness of 
 interests, — wherever I turn, I see cause to desire that the 
 Coming Man may covet, not the bays of the conqueror, but 
 the oak wreath of the citizen. 
 
 Is it not so, my dear John ? — pause and reflect ! Carry 
 your eye from these figures in the front ; examine the vast 
 background that lies beyond. Is it simple strife between 
 two parties, in which each requires the strong hand and 
 fierce heart of the captain, that meets your survey, and 
 solicits your preference ? — No : everywhere you behold 
 divisions between classes; jealousies, and feuds between 
 national interests; and victory, pushed too far by the 
 one against the other, will be a victory achieved over the 
 country itself by its own sons, far worse than the fears of 
 Lord Ellesmere could ever anticipate from the fleets and 
 hosts of the foreigner. Penetrate the smoky atmosphere 
 through which rise the tall chimneys of countless factories ; 
 examine the heart of those mighty towns, in which all 
 theories that affect the interests of labour are discussed 
 with the passions which numbers speed and inflame ; where 
 the spirit of an eternal election agitates the mass of the 
 everlasting crowd — say, if there be not yet reserved for the 
 Coming Man the consideration of social questions which no 
 Factory Bill has yet settled ; which no Repeal of the Corn 
 Laws, after its first novelty is worn away, can lull into rest ; 
 and tell me whether it be better for the solution of these 
 that the Man shall come as the leader or the conciliator ? 
 What are become of our sanitary regulations ? Where are 
 the reforms in the law ? Doomed to " lie in cold obstruc- 
 tion, and to rot," till statesmen have time to conciliate, and 
 till we can look to the forum and not find it a battle-field. 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 79 
 
 What have we done to regain the affections and arrest the 
 min of our West Indian colonies ? What is the nature of 
 the emigration now ponring into Australia and America ? 
 Friendly to the mother country, or carrying thence all the 
 bitterness engendered by that scorn of complaints which has 
 compelled expatriation ? If our colonies are to be our foes 
 or our friends, our weakness or strength, all depends on 
 whether the Coming Man shall be the leader of a party or 
 the conciliator of discontents that may dissolve an empire. 
 
 Look to the state ' of the Church, with a schism that 
 threatens far more peril to its future integrity and well- 
 being than the petty questions of surplice and gown, which 
 inflame congregations, and trouble the peace of bishops, 
 So much of learning, of earnestness, of zeal, rising with 
 each generation of Churchmen, that leaves the college for 
 the pulpit, against the popular feeling, clashing with it, 
 warring on it, and remaining within the camp, under its 
 separate banner of mutiny, or deserting to the Roman 
 Gonfalon, with all the arms of controversy it had found in 
 the very arsenal which Oxford had established against the 
 foe. " Atque, atque accedet muros Siomana juventus." — 
 " And more and more Home's youth invades our walls." 
 Woe to the Church, and woe to the peace of our religious 
 community, if we are to have our statesmen of the laity 
 appear as leaders for or against these spiritual factions of 
 the Bianchi and jSTeri, in a war of which texts and citations 
 are the ostensible weapons ! A Minister who has the con- 
 fidence, not only of the Church, but of the main body of 
 Protestant belief, might possibly be able to conciliate — if 
 not, time and common sense will ultimately settle — these 
 disputes, as they have hitherto settled all disputes among 
 the clergy, where they are not whirled away and mixed up 
 with the party passions of politicians. Behold the vast 
 question of Popular Education, checked in the Legislature 
 by the rival jealousies of Church and Dissenter, but daily 
 and hourly, without-side the walls of Parliament, occupying 
 the thoughts of intelligent men, who see not only, in the 
 want of education, an element of crime and misery, but 
 who see in education itself, unless it be taken up in a noble 
 and fitting spirit, evils as great as can befall society, if in- 
 tellectual cultivation (limited to the extent that it must be 
 when you deal with large masses whose destined employ- 
 
80 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 ment is manual labour) is to be held a thing wholly diffe- 
 rent and apart from moral instruction and religious disci- 
 pline. Who, regarding popular education in its compre- 
 hensive application to states, — who, knowing the statistical 
 fact, that whereas with us the larger proportion of criminals 
 can neither read nor write, in France the larger proportion 
 of the worse sort of criminals possesses even more than that 
 elementary instruction;* — who does not hope that some 
 statesman may arise, with the happy art to conciliate 
 Church and Dissent, and to insure to the rising generation 
 those early lessons which not only quicken the thought, 
 but guide the conduct ? 
 
 Carry your gaze across the Channel — look at Ireland. 
 Long distracted from the true objects of civilisation by the 
 genius of one leader — Heaven preserve her from another ! 
 Consider there the differences affecting the very core of 
 society, which hitherto you have so vainly struggled to 
 adjust. Recall the late famine there — contemplate the 
 vast diminution in the produce of the soil, which your laws, 
 intended to prevent the recurrence of such famine, have 
 already effected ; while Ireland at least has no foreign 
 commerce that can be supposed to recruit the capital that 
 is lost to the land. Recall, too, the toil it has cost to the 
 wisest to harmonise religious distinctions with due regard 
 
 * By the elaborate tables of M. Guerry, it would seem not only that this 
 applies to individual cases, but that in those departemens of France in which 
 the average of education is highest, it is found, almost invariably, that crimes, 
 against both life and property, are the most relatively numerous ; and crimes 
 against life especially, rarest in some districts, such as Limousin and Brittany, 
 where the people are most ignorant. Beaumont and Tocqueville, in their 
 works on Crime in America, have also rather startled us with the remark, 
 that "they cannot attribute the diminution of crime in the northern states 
 to instruction, because in Connecticut, where there is more instruction than 
 in New York, crime increases with terrible rapidity." It is obviously need- 
 less to say that such facts prove nothing against popular instruction ; but 
 they do prove that popular instruction alone does not suffice for the ends re- 
 quired from it ; that it cannot be safely dissociated from direct moral and 
 religious cultivation. A critic in the Edinburgh Revieiv, in noticing these 
 Letters, asserts that M. Guerry' s tables, which were published some years 
 ago, have been explained away ; and that, though crime may have been found 
 most in educated districts, it was not among the educated part of their popu- 
 lation. But M. Guerry, who is one of the most illustrious statists in Europe, 
 visited England this very year, and in an address at the great meeting of our 
 men of science, repeated and enforced the inferences drawn from his tables, 
 refuted the explanations on which the reviewer relies, and brought forward 
 new facts in support of his proposition, "that mere mental education has not 
 been found to diminish crime." 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 81 
 
 to the conscience of both, between Protestant Britain and 
 Roman Catholic Ireland — then see this new brand which 
 the Pope and his Cardinal have flung amongst the smoulder- 
 ing fires of recent rebellion — and who does not sigh, " May 
 the Coming Man be the Peace-maker! " 
 
 Conciliation! — this is in all times, and all lands, the 
 master-art of the administrator. As the vehement advo- 
 cate once raised to the bench becomes the impartial judge, 
 so he who in opposition is the leader, in office should be- 
 come the arbiter. And that authority has ever been the 
 firmest which reconciles the differences of each with the 
 order and progi^ess of all. Difficult task, and rarely under- 
 taken ! — but wisdom is difficult, and firm administrations 
 are rare. 
 
 So far, my dear John, methinks I have your approval ; — 
 nay, had I the voice of the orator, here perhaps I might be 
 flattered by your cheers. There remains yet a class and 
 an interest, towards the propitiation of which there is more 
 doubt of a fair hearing. Nevertheless, I deliberately ap- 
 proach that subject ; for I honestly think that here the 
 conciliator is the most immediately needed. I speak of the 
 class which cultivate the land we live in ; I speak of the 
 interest which comprises a vast mass of the real property 
 of the country — an interest which supports the bulk of our 
 poor ; which maintains the clergy and defrays the costs 
 that uphold civilisation in rural districts ; which, whether 
 it be or be not disproportionately taxed, does at all events 
 contribute towards the State to so large an amount, that it 
 cannot be materially injured nor depressed by any change 
 in the law, without affecting the very capital upon which 
 depend the income of the fund-holder and the solvency of 
 the nation. 
 
 Now, dear and respected John, when we survey this 
 important tribe of your family — pretty well united in the 
 complaints of distress, and in the assertion of its cause — do 
 you think we may say that this is precisely the class in the 
 kingdom to which we can safely refuse attention, and which 
 we will thrust out of the pale of all paternal and beneficent 
 legislation ? 
 
 But, hark ! — it seems to me that I hear a loud and deri- 
 sive outcry. " Pooh ! — Stop your ears, John ! This gentle- 
 man, who is in reality a vampire, wants to open the ques- 
 
 G 
 
82 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 tion of the Corn Law. Don't listen to him ; that question 
 is settled. The law is passed — once passed, it cannot be 
 repealed. As well talk of repealing the Reform Bill ! " 
 
 You scratch your head, John ; you look puzzled ; but 
 still you listen to me : for a moment's reflection tells you 
 that there is all the difference in the world between a ques- 
 tion of constitutional change, and a question of political 
 economy or fiscal arrangement. It is rare, indeed, that a 
 law which serves to popularise a Constitution, or advance 
 democracy, is repealed. But even that has been done in 
 times the most agitated, where the public expediency 
 seemed to require it. You yourself, John, once advanced 
 into a republic, and drew back into monarchy as fast as 
 you could. Again, you once transacted your affairs through 
 a triennial parliament, yet you very soon made a retrograde 
 movement, and are still compelled to grant a seven years' 
 lease to the occupiers of St. Stephen's, notwithstanding all 
 the arguments of the National Reform League to prove 
 that lease a great deal too long for your interests as land- 
 lord. You have only to look to the Foreign News in the 
 Times to see that it was but as the day before yesterday, 
 compared with your long life, when universal suffrage was 
 proclaimed in France ; and but as yesterday that a law has 
 been passed which shakes off a weighty per-centage from 
 the suffrage so recently created. And the whole history of 
 Europe for the last few years does little more than chronicle 
 the sudden enactment and as sudden repeal of charters and 
 constitutions which wise-heads declare to be the irrevocable 
 advance of entire populations. You know, therefore, that 
 even a political step backward has been taken, sometimes 
 because of the brute force of a despot — but sometimes, also, 
 as the voluntary choice of a nation. The Seel revocare 
 graclum* applies to progress, not towards the region where 
 we all wish to go, but to its dismal antipodes. It is only 
 the first step to the infernal regions which Virgil so em- 
 phatically implies that mortal man can never recall. But, 
 bless your heart, my dear John, as to changes and re- 
 changes in commercial regulations, in duties and non-duties 
 upon produce, raw and manufactured, — what man in his 
 senses, or with no more knowledge of history than he could 
 pick up at a grammar-school, ever dreamed that laws affect- 
 * [But to retrace the step.] 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. S3 
 
 ing them were not, by their very nature, experiments, and 
 the most liable of all laws to revision or repeal? "Ay — 
 but corn — the staple of food — the big loaf ? " The very 
 thing, my dear John, of all others, that your experience 
 tells you has been most subject to the mutability inherent 
 to affairs mundane and mortal. 
 
 What, did we never try this experiment before ? Why, 
 throughout all the dark ages, the importation of foreign 
 corn was substantially free. For about five hundred years 
 that experiment was tried ; and much good it did to com- 
 merce and manufactures — much good it did to the condition 
 of the people ; and well it prevented fluctuations, scarcity, 
 and famine ! Free importation of corn ! The duration of 
 that experiment extends through the history of our bar- 
 barism. From the dawn of civilisation dates the record of 
 Protection : it commenced under the dynasty of the House 
 of York, in which commerce was first especially honoured 
 and upheld — in which, under a king who himself was a 
 merchant,* began the sagacious favour to the trading 
 middle class, as a counterpoise to armed aristocracy, that, 
 under the more tranquil intellect of Henry the Seventh, 
 created the civil powers ruling modern dominions ; and 
 that Protection, thus first admitted in theory, but long de- 
 feated in practice, can hardly be said to have been vitally 
 and resolutely incorporated in our national system till the 
 very era that confirmed our constitutional freedom, and 
 saw the rise of Great Britain to the rank it now holds 
 amongst nations — the reign of William the Third. 
 
 Well, this Protection, first vigorously enforced at the 
 Revolution of 1688, f lasted for the best part of a century ; 
 
 * Edward IY. — " King Edward went beyond all the contemporary sove- 
 reigns in commercial transactions. He owned several vessels, and, like men 
 whose living depended on their merchandise, exported the finest wool, cloth, 
 tin, and the other commodities of the kingdom, to Italy and Greece, and im- 
 ported their produce in return by the agency of factors or supercargoes." — 
 Macpher son's Annals of Commerce. In one sense of the word, it was very 
 injurious to merchants to have a royal competitor, who paid no duties ; but 
 his example served very much to increase the power and dignity of the mer- 
 cantile order ; and during his reign that order gained the authority which 
 enabled Henry the Seventh to found a middle class on the ruins of the 
 Eeudal system. 
 
 f In 1463, reign of Edward the Fourth, importation was legally prohibited 
 until the home price reached that at which exportation ceased, viz., 6s. 8cl. 
 a quarter (money of that period) ; but, as Mr. M'Culloch observes, " the 
 fluctuating policy of the times prevented these regulations being carried 
 
 G 2 
 
81 LETTERS TO JOHiN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 "and under it," says the commercial historian, " the com- 
 merce and manufactures of the country were extended to 
 an unprecedented degree." The country wished then, as 
 now, to have some return to the system of those blessed 
 five centuries of Free Trade in corn; and in 1773 a law 
 was passed which a few years ago would have satisfied, 
 I suspect, Manchester itself ; for foreign wheat was per- 
 mitted to be imported on paying a nominal duty of 6d. 
 whenever the home price was at or above 48s. per quarter. 
 The Nation tried that plan for about eighteen years, and 
 then what did it do ? — this England that the newspapers 
 tell us " never goes back ! " — why, it went back, of course ! 
 And the price at which foreign importation could take 
 place at 6d. was raised in 1791 from 48s. to 54s. ; while 
 under 50s. the home producer was protected by a duty of 
 24s. 3d. And observe this date, 1791 ! Was that a period 
 when the temper of the times was peculiarly submissive, 
 and inclined towards political retrogression? It was a 
 time more democratic than this — a time when the spirit of 
 the first French Revolution was at work through all the 
 great towns of the empire. " But the people cried out ? 
 There were riots, rebellions, for the sake of the big loaf ? " 
 Not a bit of it, my dear John ! The people were a sensible 
 people, as the English are in the long run : they had tried 
 their experiment — did not like it ; " And," says Mr. 
 M'Culloch, with a candid sigh, " there was a pretty general 
 acquiescence in the act of 1791." 
 
 " Pretty general acquiescence ! " — the admission is satis- 
 factory in extent, but lukewarm in expression : the truth 
 is, that no more popular act passed throughout the whole 
 reign of George the Third. 
 
 And yet " laws against protection are never repealed ! 
 as well repeal the Reform Act ! — England never goes back ! 
 — A law about corn is as fixed as the nod of Jove ! " And 
 all the while you are going back to the reigns of the Nor- 
 
 into full effect, and, indeed, rendered them in a great measure inopera- 
 tive." 
 
 The subsequent law that imposed prohibitory duties on the importation of 
 wheat, till the price rose to 53s. 4<tf., and a fixed duty of 85. between that price 
 and 8O5., was enacted eighteen years before the great Revolution that placed 
 William the Third on the Throne ; but " the want of any proper method for 
 the determination of prices went far to nullify the prohibition of importa- 
 tion." — M'Culloch. Protection against importation cannot be said to have 
 been vigorously and systematically earned out before the reign of William. 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 85 
 
 man and Plantagenet ! and insisting on the stability of 
 experimental legislature npon the very article and in the 
 very mode upon which the History of Civilisation abounds 
 the most with precedents of change ! 
 
 I read, indeed, in very popular and influential journals — 
 I hear, indeed, from grave authorities ''speaking in their 
 place in Parliament " — that " all sensible men " are of one 
 opinion upon this point; that to doubt for a moment a 
 dogma of the Corn Law Catechism is to forfeit one's claim 
 to understanding. Were it an actual fact that the opinion 
 of " sensible men " was thus forcibly expressed, I confess 
 to you frankly, my dear John, that it would not, as a 
 matter of logic and reasoning — as a proof upon which side 
 lies the truth — have the slightest weight upon my convic- 
 tions. And it never ought to have the slightest weight on 
 the convictions of the man who calls himself a reformer in 
 politics, or a student in philosophy ; for is there a simple 
 question of reform in the laws, or a single principle now 
 maintained in philosophy, which has not had at one time 
 nearly all who, in their own day, were called " sensible men," 
 dead against it ? The " sensible men " of their age were, 
 at one time, for burning the Lollards and drowning old 
 women with bleared eyes and hook noses — nay, theorems 
 in sciences far more positive than Political Economy pro- 
 fesses to be — in Astronomy, in Chemistry — which, not 
 twenty years ago, all "sensible men" were agreed on, are 
 now maintained to be errors. The history of Truth, is the 
 history of her opposition to "sensible men." And Truth, 
 would never have advanced one step from the wilds of the 
 savage, if those who sought for her traces had paused a 
 moment to ask of her " whereabout " from the public 
 opinion of their day. But not to go further than the very 
 subject before us, pray were not the great majority of 
 " sensible men," even though. favouring Free Trade, against 
 a total repeal of the Corn Law some dozen years ago ? 
 And when you — the Free- Traders — so exultingly taunt my 
 Lord Derby that, on the recent resignation of the present 
 ministers, he could not form a cabinet of statesmen in 
 favour of a fixed duty of five shillings — pray is it ten years 
 ago that you could not maintain a cabinet in favour of a 
 fixed duty of eight ? All your argument as to the fashion 
 of opinion being wholly on your side, would prove nothing 
 
86 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 more than the changeability of such fashion, so far as the 
 positive truth of the question at issue is concerned. If 
 wholly correct, however, I allow that, whether the doctrine 
 itself be true or false, it would present on your side the 
 argument of tyrants — Might, if not Right. And public 
 opinion is, I allow, to the legislator, though not to the mere 
 seeker of truth, an adversary against whom it were idle to 
 hoist the banner and flourish the sword. 
 
 But I have lived long enough to find out that there are 
 two Publics — a Public invisible, with " airy tongues that 
 syllable men's names," much quoted in newspapers, much 
 referred to by members of Parliament; — and another 
 Public that is visible and tangible, that we meet in street and 
 club, in market and shop ; and I cannot say I find this 
 latter Public of the same mind as that first mentioned and 
 mythical Public, with which neither you nor I, nor any 
 creature of flesh and blood, ever comes into positive con- 
 tact. I have as wide a range of acquaintance as most 
 people, amongst all ranks and all classes ; and whether I 
 talk with the statesman, the man of the world, the abstruse 
 thinker, whose task it is to master these topics, or with the 
 merchant, the man of business, and the intelligent trades- 
 men, I find a very large proportion who are in favour, cer- 
 tainly not of prohibitory duties, not of a reversal of the 
 general policy involved in our tariffs, but of a moderate 
 fixed duty upon foreign grain. And, moreover, amongst 
 those not in favour of attempting such a modification of 
 the law, I find at least half who are far from disliking the 
 notion of that said fixed duty in itself — far from doubting 
 its beneficial effects, if it could be carried ; but who merely 
 doubt whether that incorporeal essence, the other Public, 
 will be disposed to accept it. And, though it may seem 
 strange to persons less acquainted with the inconsistencies 
 of mankind than it has been my professional lot, as a writer, 
 to make myself, I positively aver, that among those who, 
 thus seen in the streets, and talked with in tranquil nooks, 
 either favour a fixed duty altogether, or wish the other 
 metaphysical Public might so favour it, I find no small 
 number of the very men who enjoy, by votes in Parlia- 
 ment or paragraphs in print, the reputation of being 
 " sensible and enlightened," and go the whole loaf with 
 Mr. Cobden ! 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 87 
 
 The Corn Law settled ! No ! Free-traders and Protec- 
 tionists alike feel in their heart of hearts that it is not 
 settled ; that it is not in the power of this Parliament to 
 settle it. Many large portions of the constituent body, 
 many agriculturists themselves, were induced, by the cal- 
 culations of great authorities, to consent to what was called 
 an experiment. Those calculations have been tested ; and 
 it is now not on the speculative probabilities, but on the 
 experiment itself, that the agriculturists at least desire to 
 pass their opinion. There has been a Parliament with 
 faith in the prophecy; there must be a Parliament to 
 decide on the nature of its fulfilment. " It is one thing," 
 said the shrewd Arab, ; ' to believe the assurance of 
 Mahomet that he can move a mountain, and another thing 
 to say before the kadi that the mountain has been 
 removed." 
 
 Let there be fair play. Let this be the question at the 
 hustings. Do not try, by a new Reform Bill, cut and 
 carved so as to adjust the franchise to a particular party 
 question ; so as to create a constitution for the purpose of 
 enforcing an experiment in political economy — do not try, 
 by a proceeding so obviously disingenuous, either to silence 
 the expression of the complaint you have occasioned, by 
 the uproar of recruits to the aggressors, or represent the 
 man who contends that one class of his countrymen is 
 wronged, as an enemy to the claim of another class not 
 yet enfranchised. This great and solemn question of an 
 extended suffrage should be approached in a spirit free 
 from what, at this moment, must warp justice on either 
 side; viz., the heated jealousy of town and country — agri- 
 culture and manufactures. The Corn Law, the cry of the 
 day, should be really settled, ere a question that may affect 
 the duration of the empire can be fairly considered. 
 
 And now, my dear John, before I proceed further, let me 
 humbly and respectfully seek to remove from your mind 
 an impression which, if entertained by you, as it is by 
 many of your family, would go far towards deadening 
 any attention that you may condescend to pay to the 
 remarks that I proffer. It is industriously represented 
 that to question Free Trade, is to abandon Freedom 
 itself ; that such sceptics are to be classed with the 
 
88 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 dust and shadow of defunct Toryism ; that a man who 
 doubts whether a fiscal law does not injure a large class of 
 his countrymen, more than it will, in the long run, benefit 
 any other, is to be considered a recreant to all those noble 
 principles which, comprehended in the word Liberty, exalt 
 the character of a people, and widen the basis of states. By 
 the air that we breathe, John, at least do not do the author 
 of these pages that signal injustice ! Perhaps, in bis day, be 
 has rendered some service to Freedom — some service to 
 the party from which he has at present the misfortune to 
 differ. Dear as were to him, in the ardour of youth, the 
 principles of political freedom, they are no less dear to him 
 in the maturity of manhood. And time has only strength- 
 ened his belief that you can select from no class in the 
 community a man who has so fervent and absolute a sym- 
 pathy with the People as The Writer, who is compelled, 
 in every thought and in every study, to look to that 
 People as the tribunal of the worth of his labours, and to 
 hope in its ultimate judgment for the enduring reward of all. 
 But I own to you, my honoured and somewhat anti- 
 quated John ! I own to you, that the school in which I learned 
 to love liberty seems now as old-fashioned as yourself. For 
 I learned that love in the school of the great patriots of 
 the Past ; I learned to connect it inseparably with love of 
 country ; and it would really seem as if a new school had 
 arisen, which identifies the passion for freedom with 
 scornful indifference for England. And when, in a popular 
 meeting, which was crowded by the friends of the late 
 Corn-Law League, and at which one of the great chiefs of 
 that combination presided, an orator declared, in reference 
 to the defences of the country, that " he thought it might be 
 a very good thing for the people if the country were con- 
 quered by the foreigner ; v and when that sentiment was re- 
 ceived with cheers by the audience, and met with no rebuke 
 from the Paladin of Free Trade seated in the chair, I felt 
 that, however such sentiments might be compatible with 
 Free Trade, — in the school in which I learned to glow at 
 the grand word of Liberty, they would have been stigmatised 
 as the sentiments of slaves. Yet more recently and more 
 notoriously, when Sir James Grraham, who, it now seems, 
 is the "Coming Man" of the Free-Traders, introduced 
 into an address to the Commons of England a significant 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 89 
 
 menace of the will and the power of the soldiers ; * and 
 when that menace w T as not drowned by the indignant out- 
 burst, but hailed by the exulting cheers, of a party pro- 
 fessing affection for civil freedom, I own again, that, in the 
 school in which I learned that liberty rested upon law, the 
 barest allusion to the armed force of a standing army as a 
 parliamentary argument would have been deemed an out- 
 rage on the senate, and applause given to such allusion the 
 last degradation that could debase the representatives of 
 citizens. Another high authority in Free Trade — nay, the 
 very author of the Com Law Catechism — uttered, not long 
 since, a sentiment equally worthy the loyalty of an officer 
 and the patriotism of an Englishman : — "I would rather," 
 said Colonel Thompson, " see a foreign army in possession 
 of London six weeks, than see the Protectionists for six 
 weeks in possession of those benches." t What ! prefer 
 the sword of the foreign conqueror to the vote of legislators 
 elected by the free choice of the native ! — No, such is not 
 the school in which I learned to love liberty, and these are 
 not the authorities I will consent to acknowledge as guides 
 to the free men of England. 
 
 But, in truth, my dear John, you have only to open your 
 eyes in order to recognise the plain fact, that there is no 
 reason why a man should not be a very democrat in politics, 
 if he so please, and un ultra-protectionist in trade. The 
 Americans are as free and as progressive a people as one 
 can well suppose to exist, but they have evinced no peculiar 
 affection for Free Trade. The French seem pretty well 
 disposed to go all lengths in democracy, but they still 
 maintain rather strict notions as to the value of Protection. 
 The principle, therefore, of Free Trade may be wise or not ; 
 but it is indisputably clear, when we look to other nations, 
 that it is perfectly consistent with the freest opinions on 
 politics, to have very exclusive notions as to national 
 trade. 
 
 It is not, then, incompatible with freedom to believe that 
 
 * " The time has arrived when the truth fully must be spoken. There is 
 not a soldier who returns to England from abroad that does not practically 
 feel that his daily pay is augmented, — that he has a cheaper, larger, and 
 a better mess, — and that he enjoys greater comforts ; and he also knows 
 the reason. Xow, Sir, I entreat my honourable friends who sit below 
 me to be on their guard." — Speech of Sir James Graham, Privy Councillor 
 and ex-Cabinet Minister, in the Parliament of Great Britain, 1851. 
 
 f Speech of Col. Thompson, M.P., April 2, apropos of a County Franchise ! 
 
90 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 there may be circumstances in which it is expedient to 
 protect articles of home produce from the competition of 
 the foreigner. But is it so wholly incompatible with wis- 
 dom ? Must I be totally without intelligence and instruc- 
 tion, if I doubt every article in the Corn Law Catechism ? 
 Do the arguments against me rest upon propositions as 
 clear as those in Euclid, or are they confirmed by the pre- 
 ponderating authorities of history ? 
 
 Looking first to the logic employed by these Free-trading 
 denouncers of fallacies, is there any coincidence between 
 the premises and conclusions ? Has there been a general 
 concurrence amongst modern Free- Traders as to even the 
 effect of the recent law upon the price of bread — the 
 amount of importation? The League Circular asserted 
 that the Corn Law " compelled us to pay three times the 
 value for a loaf of bread." Mr. Cobden, on the contrary, 
 exclaimed in his speech at Winchester, " The idea of low- 
 priced corn is all a delusion ; provisions will be no cheaper." 
 Colonel Torrens, Mr. Villiers, the Manchester Chamber of 
 Commerce, concurred in the assertion that the first object 
 of the Corn Law was to raise the price of corn above its 
 natural level. And yet Mr. James Wilson, considered the 
 most learned authority of all the repealers, thus denounces 
 — what? the fallacies of the Protectionists? No — the 
 especial and most popular fallacies of his own Free-trading 
 friends ! Thus saith Mr. Wilson in his work on The In- 
 fluence of the Com Laws : — " Our belief is, that, if we had 
 had a free trade in corn since 1815, the average price of 
 the whole period, actually received by the British growers, 
 would have been higher than it has been ; that little or no 
 foreign grain would have been imported ; and that if, for 
 the next twenty years, the whole protective system shall be 
 abandoned, the average price of wheat will be higher than 
 it has been for the last seven years, or than it would be 
 with a continuance of the present system." 
 
 Here, then, in the first great principle, viz., the cheapness 
 of food, and the lowness of prices — here, then, we have the 
 most contradictory deductions from the same premises. 
 Fallacies there must be somewhere, but they are not here 
 those of the Protectionists. Here, it is one Corn Law re- 
 pealer who answers another. It is the old story of Mun- 
 ch ansen : the tiger jumps down the jaws of the crocodile ; 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 91 
 
 the crocodile is strangled by the tiger. What and who 
 alone remains safe, challenging onr convictions, insisting 
 on onr belief ? Mnnchansen ! 
 
 I come next to the qnestion — so important to labonr — 
 the ultimate effect which the repeal of the Corn Laws is to 
 have npon wages. Do we arrive at any better agreement 
 in opinion amongst those gentlemen who so despise the 
 understanding of all who differ from them? I turn to the 
 speeches of Mr. Villiers. I know there that I shall find 
 the evidence of an acute, subtle, and honest intellect — and 
 I find that just as the Protectionists venture still to say, 
 the cheapening of bread must sooner or later produce the 
 cheapening of labour. On the necessity of lowering wages 
 — ay, and not in agricultural districts, but in manufacturing 
 towns — on the necessity of lowering them in order to com- 
 pete with the foreigner, Mr. Villiers rests half his case. 
 And yet, what says his fellow political economist, Colonel 
 Torrens? Exactly the contrary: " The true cause of low 
 wages is high food \ for then mechanical power is brought 
 more and more in competition with human labour, and the 
 operative will be employed at wages reduced to the slavery 
 point." 
 
 " The repeal of the Corn Laws must lower the wages," 
 says Mr. Villiers. " It must raise them," says Colonel 
 Torrens. Every fact, real or supposed, adduced by the 
 Manchester Chamber of Commerce, tended to show the 
 necessity of conforming to the low wages of the Continent. 
 And again, Mr. James Wilson, who has a kind word and 
 coaxing lure for every class, fells the Manchester Chamber 
 of Commerce with this knock-down prediction, " We are 
 therefore of opinion that, in the event of a free trade in 
 corn, the price of labour in this country would rather be 
 increased than diminished." 
 
 The farther we advance in the polemics of Free Trade, 
 the more the perplexity gathers : not a result but has its 
 separate Free-trading prophet, and not a prophet that does 
 not belie his brother. "Will rents fall?" murmurs the 
 timid landowner. " Fall ? of course, you vampire ! n cries 
 the Manchester Chamber of Commerce ; " you have been 
 living on the capital of the farmer ever since the peace." 
 " Certainly they will fall," says Mr. Villiers, with polite 
 indifference to so small a calamity. 
 
92 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 " Fall ? — they will rise ! " exclaims Colonel Torrens. 
 " They will rise," says Mr. W. W. Whitmore, who was a 
 very popular prophet in his day. " Pooh ! don't believe 
 them, my dear vampire," argues that dear, good Mr. Wil- 
 son ; " my object in removing these Corn Laws is to increase 
 the value of your land ! " 
 
 The farmer puts his question, "Will these horrible prices 
 last for ever ; and how many quarters of grain are likely 
 to be imported ? " 
 
 And straight, therewith, arises such a discord of contra- 
 dictory answers, all equally positive, and equally contradic- 
 tory, that poor Chawbacon, if he have any animal desire 
 still to have bacon to chaw, thinks it best to escape from 
 the hubbub, and stick to his old motto, " Live and let live 
 in the land we live by." 
 
 Now, my dear Free-Traders, own that the honestest 
 vampire who ever set out on his travels in search of an 
 understanding, has had very little chance to find it amongst 
 you ! Shall he be enlightened with Mr. Villiers ? then he 
 can't be enlightened with Mr. Wilson. How can he get rid 
 of his fallacies, when every opinion he picks up in exchange 
 from one Free-Trader is remorselessly condemned as a fallacy 
 by the rhetoric of another. 
 
 The question settled ! Why, it was settled on the faith 
 of logic like that I have quoted. And those who believed 
 with one set of Free-Traders, are perhaps undeceived by 
 the results foretold by another. But, if you say, fairly, 
 " Oh, we own this was an experiment on which no one 
 could calculate" — can you add, "We have history and ex- 
 perience on the side of the general good effects of Free 
 Trade ?" When one hears you so confident in your asser- 
 tions, one would be tempted to believe that, under all cir- 
 cumstances, and in all nations, the prosperity of trade has 
 been found to depend upon its freedom ; that all depart- 
 ments of commerce wither under protection, and expand 
 in the open air of competition. But when we turn to 
 history, we find nowhere sufficient facts to prove the pros- 
 perity of commercial nations under a system of perfectly 
 free trade, while we have abundant facts to prove the 
 prosperity of the greatest commercial states in the history 
 of the world under systems of protection. The longest 
 pre-eminence in commerce ever enjoyed by a state, since 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 93 
 
 Cartilage, is that of Venice — the earliest commercial city in 
 our modern era. For five centuries this little community 
 maintained a trading ascendency, which is one of the 
 marvels of human annals. With little natural advantages, 
 and under a wretched form of government, Venice was the 
 most illustrious navigator, the most renowned manufacturer, 
 of the globe. All the other contemporaneous maritime 
 powers of earth combined, scarcely equalled the Venetian 
 commerce from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. 
 Under what system arose her greatness ? Free Trade ? — 
 No; under a system that grasped at monopoly, and in- 
 trenched itself under every imaginable rigidity of protec- 
 tion.* Our accounts of the ancient trade of Genoa are less 
 ample than those of Venice ; but they leave no doubt, at 
 least, that in its palmiest time it was guarded with the 
 laws most opposed to the enlightenment of Free-Traders. 
 So jealous were the Genoese of competition that they 
 stipulated with kings to banish their mercantile rivals. 
 Thus they requested the King of Sicily, a.d. 1156, to expel 
 from his territories the merchants of Provence and France. 
 And the fierce commercial strife which lasted for nearly 
 two hundred years between Venice and Genoa was decided 
 in favour of Venice — how ? — by her wisdom in opening her 
 markets ? Oh no — by her good luck in securing the mono- 
 poly of the trade of the Black Sea, and becoming, by the 
 revolution of the Eastern Homan Empire, the master of 
 markets that she most rigidly protected. And how did 
 Genoa, for a short time, regain the ground she had lost in 
 her struggle with Venice ? — by reversing her commercial 
 policy, and abjuring her villanous systems of Protection ? 
 Oh no — by upsetting the Latin Empire, and obtaining from 
 the Greek she restored, the keys of the Black Sea, and the 
 principal part of the monopoly which had enriched the 
 Venetians. If we go back to the commerce of the Ancient 
 World, and strive to pierce the obscurity which wraps its 
 economical regulations, we find nothing to sanction the 
 assertion that Protection is injurious, or unshackled com- 
 petition essential, to the prosperity of Commerce. Athens 
 was the most considerable commercial state of Greece. 
 Much, at the first glance, appears to favour the Free- 
 
 * Dart;, Histoire de la Repablique de V6nise; unrivalled as an authority 
 on this State. 
 
94i LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 Traders, in our information respecting the old delight and 
 teacher of the world. The necessities of the soil, and the 
 magnitude of the population, obliged Athens to favour to 
 the utmost extent the importation of corn. Unquestionably, 
 the early stimulus to maritime enterprise, which could not 
 but goad a people living on the shore, and driven betimes 
 to search elsewhere for their food, tended to sharpen the 
 activity and intellect of the Athenians, and, as I have else- 
 where observed,* made one secret of their after greatness. 
 But I apprehend that it made also a main cause of their 
 after downfall. They paid dear for their Egyptian corn. 
 All the regulations of their ablest statesmen, all the seve- 
 rities of their most stringent laws, all the power of their 
 vigilant fleets, could not save them from the greatest 
 fluctuations in the price of corn. In vain were the Attic 
 promontories garrisoned for the protection of ships bring- 
 ing corn to the Pirasus ; in vain the City of the Violet 
 Crown sought to make herself the granary of the world. 
 All her arts and all her genius could not save her from the 
 distresses which attend the country that depends on the 
 foreigner for the food of the population. Scarcity at Athens 
 was only to be met, and that partially, by provisions incom- 
 patible with modern empires ; viz., ample storehouses and 
 gratuitous distribution of corn. Fluctuations greater than 
 have ever been known under a system of protection, no policy 
 could prevent. And it is possible that this necessity to 
 seek elsewhere, not only empire, but one market to counter- 
 balance the vicissitudes of another, contributed to the fatal 
 ambition by which Athens eventually lost both political 
 freedom and maritime supremacy. Her population that 
 gathered round the fleets of Nicias saw, in the anticipated 
 conquest of Sicily, not only an addition to the empire, but 
 fresh corn-supplies for the Pirasus. 
 
 But Athens was a free trader for corn, because her neces- 
 sities made her so. Athens was not a free trader where 
 national interests and national policy suggested prohibi- 
 tion. She would not export the timber, which might 
 supply her rivals with shipping, to be used against herself ; 
 she would not export the weapons for which her manu- 
 factories were renowned, to arm an enemy ; she would not 
 import the commodities of hostile states, nor give her 
 * Athens, its Else and Fall, yol. i. 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 93 
 
 markets to Boeotia and Megara. "In brief," as Boeckh 
 justly observes, "the Athenians did not avoid any restriction 
 of commerce, so long as it appeared profitable to them." * 
 Holland has been a free trader in corn. She required 
 the provision her own soil could not adequately supply ; but 
 though in this respect Holland has been held out to us by 
 Free-Traders as an example. Holland was not, in her 
 greatest day, what is meant by a Free- Trader. In that 
 branch of commerce on which she mainly herself depended, 
 — her fisheries, — Holland was jealously restrictive. Her 
 commerce with India was carried on through the monopoly of 
 a company, and, no doubt, to her disadvantage. But what 
 was the main cause of the commercial eminence of Hol- 
 land ? She herself was one monopoly. Her greatness was 
 in the feebleness of her rivals. Her judicious tolerance to 
 religion, her hospitable reception of all aliens and strangers, 
 might certainly assist towards the accumulation of her 
 wealth ; or, to use the words of her own merchants, " make 
 the cause that many people not only fled thither for refuge 
 with their whole stock in ready cash, and their real valu- 
 able effects, but also settled and established many trades, 
 fabrics, manufactures, arts, and sciences in the country." 
 But the great and paramount cause of Dutch prosperity in 
 the seventeenth century was the absence of competition. 
 The absence of the very principle which you allege is vital 
 in all cases to the healthful action of trade and barter ! 
 Let Mr. M'Culloch here speak for himself: "During the 
 period when the Republic rose to great eminence as a com- 
 mercial state, England, France, and Spain, distracted by 
 civil and religious dissensions, or engrossed wholly by 
 schemes of foreign conquest, were unable to apply their 
 energies to the cultivation of commerce, or to withstand 
 the competition of so industrious a people as the Dutch. 
 They, therefore, were under the necessity of allowing the 
 greater part of their foreign, and even of their coasting 
 trade, to be carried on in Dutch bottoms, and under the 
 superintendence of Dutch factors. But after the accession 
 of Louis Fourteenth, and the ascendency of Cromwell had 
 put an end to internal commotions in France and Eng- 
 land, the energies of these two great nations began to be 
 directed to pursuits of which the Dutch had hitherto 
 * Boeckh* s Public Economy of Athens, Book i. 
 
96 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 enjoyed almost a monopoly. . . . The Dutch ceased to be 
 the carriers of Europe without any fault of their own." * 
 
 Hitherto, then, the Dutch had enjoyed a virtual monopoly. 
 Their greatness was the absence of competition — it declined 
 as competition arose. It is so distinctly stated in the luminous 
 Dissertation drawn up from the communications of their 
 own merchants. Here, then, was Holland, with all the 
 advantages attributed to a thorough free trade in corn, 
 which could nevertheless not keep its pre-eminence when 
 other nations began to compete ; and its commerce declined 
 mainly from two causes — competition and great taxation. 
 Will free trade in corn suffice to remedy those causes in 
 other countries ? No ! Home taxation and foreign com- 
 petition !— these are the enemies to England now as to 
 Holland before. Free trade in corn could not preserve to 
 Amsterdam its ascendency, — free trade in corn cannot give 
 monopoly to Manchester. 
 
 I argue not in exclusive favour of Protection. I say, 
 simply, that those who attribute all advantages to the op- 
 posite system have not facts sufficient to render their theory 
 indisputable ; that in all the commercial States in the 
 history of the world, the policy of Protection has been ad- 
 mitted — more or less stringent, according to the expediency 
 of the State ; that the duration of commercial eminence in 
 the most restrictive of all modern States, Venice, was more 
 than double that of the most liberal of all modern States, 
 Holland ; that England has grown up into the greatest 
 commercial commonwealth now existing, under systems of 
 Protection ; that under systems of Protection the rivals 
 she has to encounter, in America, in Germany, in France, 
 nourish and increase ; that even our cotton manufacture, 
 " that hardy child of Free Trade," was shown, before a 
 Committee of the House of Commons, to have increased in 
 the years between 1812 and 1826 in the ratio of only 270 
 per cent., while the cotton manufacture of France, " that 
 sickly offspring of Protection," had increased in the ratio 
 of 310 per cent. ; and this in spite of French duties, the 
 most really injudicious, on raw cotton and iron. " The in- 
 crease," says Mr. Porter, f "has since gone forward with 
 at least equal speed, the quantity of cotton used by the 
 
 * Commercial Dictionary — Art. " Amsterdam." 
 
 f Progress of the Nation, Sect. ii. c. 3, "Manufactures." 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 97 
 
 manufacturers of France in 1843 having been equal to 
 132,000,000 of pounds, being about 70 per cent, addition 
 in ten years, and about 22| per cent, of the quantity used 
 in the same year in the United Kingdom." And if we ask 
 the cause of this progress in France, I suspect we shall 
 soon find the u reason why." It is that she excludes the 
 competition to which you so vainly invite her. In fine, no 
 man can anywhere discover in history that Protection has 
 been the cause of decline in any commercial State ; the 
 cause invariably has been found to be in the awakened 
 energies of other countries ; the pre-eminent state has lost 
 its monopoly, through the competition of fresh rivals, in 
 lands less taxed. It is quite true, that the judicious and 
 tempered opening of some particular branch of trade, over 
 protected, may often give it fresh stimulus and vigour ; 
 this was signally the case with the English Silk Trade ; 
 but it is equally true, that Protection to a certain, some- 
 times to a high, degree is necessary to other branches of 
 trade at particular epochs. Nay, let us take the Silk 
 Trade itself. There was a time when it was expedient to 
 repeal the prohibitions, which gave to our silk manufacturer 
 the monopoly of the home market ; but there was a time 
 when, without those prohibitions, the Silk Trade would 
 have been without any market at all. The law of prohibi- 
 tion was enacted in 1765. Let any man look back, andses 
 the comparative perfection of foreign looms at that period, 
 and say, whether it would have been possible for the Eng- 
 lish manufacturer to have competed with his continental 
 rival. What does Mr. Porter* himself remark on this 
 head : — " By this prohibitory law, the English silk manu- 
 facturers were legally secured in the exclusive possession of 
 the home market ; from which, in the then imperfect condi- 
 tion of the manufacture, they would have been driven by the 
 superior fabrics of foreign looms." The true reason why the 
 prohibition finally failed was, that silk is an article against 
 the importation of which prohibition is in vain. The 
 smuggler stepped in, and redressed the market. But as 
 long as the prohibition was effective, the manufactory 
 thrived, and the operative had from 30s. to 40s. a week. 
 When, in the beginning of the present century, the smug- 
 gler became formidable, the manufactory drooped and 
 
 * Progress of the Nation, Sect. ii. c. 2. 
 
 n 
 
98 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 wages fell : it was then expedient to remove a useless prohibi- 
 tion. The smuggler was a more terrible rival than the 
 Lyonnese. But the manufacture really rose while the pro- 
 tection was de facto strict, and fell exactly in proportion as 
 the prohibition, though legally the same, became practically 
 inoperative. The silk trade, when Mr. Huskisson legislated 
 for it, was precisely in that state when an opened market 
 gave stimulus and refreshed vitality; in 1765, an opened 
 market, as Mr. Porter himself owns, would have destroyed 
 it. Again, take the German States included in the Prussian 
 League : they begin to compete with the English manu- 
 facturer j but with all their advantages of cheap food and 
 cheap labour, could they do so, if not protected ? What 
 does our friend Mr. Porter say, too, on this head? — "At 
 present it is only through the imposition of considerable im- 
 port duty on the German States that their cotton goods are 
 able in any way to compete with English fabrics." And what 
 does he add ? — " But it is altogether impossible to say how 
 long this state of things may continue ; and it may reason- 
 ably be expected that the German artisans will in time 
 acquire a degree of skill and experience which, aided by 
 the lower cost of subsistence in Germany as compared with 
 England, will render their rivalry formidable to Manchester 
 and Paisley — at least in neighbouring countries, if nob in 
 more distant parts of the world ! " What ! this formidable 
 rivalry against our cotton manufacture — " that hardy 
 child ! " Is the rivalry, too, a " hardy child," growing up 
 under Free Trade ? ISTo ! — under a system of Protection, 
 without which, Mr. Porter himself tells us, the Germans 
 " are not able in any way to compete with our fabrics ! " 
 
 It is clear, therefore, that what is one man's meat may 
 be another man's poison. It is natural that the Manchester 
 •manufacturer should be desirous of competing with the 
 German ; it is natural that the German should, at present, 
 beg to be excused ; it is natural that the Cracovian corn- 
 grower should be desirous of competing with the English ; 
 it is natural that the English corn-grower should be un- 
 willing to have that honour thrust upon him. A State can 
 adopt no dogma for universal application, whether of Pro- 
 tection or Free Trade. In those branches in which it 
 produces more or better supplies at less cost, it must 
 naturally court Free Trade ; in those branches where its 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 99 
 
 produce is less or its cost greater than that of its neigh- 
 bours, it must either consent to the certain injury, the 
 possible ruin, of that department of industry, or it must 
 place it under Protection. Free Trade, could it be uni- 
 versally reciprocal, would therefore benefit Manchester 
 s Germany, and injure Lincolnshire versus Poland. 
 The English cotton manufacturer thoroughly understands 
 this when he says, with Mr. Cobden, "Let us have Free 
 Trade, and we will beat the world ! " But the world does 
 not want to be beaten ! Prussia, France, and even America, 
 prefer "stupid selfishness " and protected manufactures to 
 enlightened principles and English competition. When the 
 English manufacturer says, " he wants only Free Trade to 
 beat the world," he allows the benefit of Protection to his 
 rivals, and excuses them for shutting their markets in his 
 face. 
 
 But whether Free Trade be, in all cases, right or wrong, 
 every one has allowed that we can't have it. To Free 
 Trade, fairly and thoroughly carried out, there are more 
 than fifty million obstacles to be found — in the Budget.* 
 
 That we must lay certain duties on certain foreign 
 articles of general consumption, and cramp the home 
 producer by the iron hand of the exciseman, are facts 
 enforced upon our attention every time the miserable man 
 doomed to hold the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer 
 goes through the yearly agonies of his financial statement. 
 Free Trade, too, in the proper acceptation of the term, by 
 all the laws of grammar and common sense, requires two 
 parties to the compact — the native and the foreigner. Be- 
 tween you and me, John, I see no hope of the foreigner. 
 I wish, however, to raise no argument upon this, against 
 the policy of our tariffs. Reciprocity may be good ; but I 
 allow that it is not essential. Wherever it is for our in- 
 terest to open our markets, it would be idle to wait till 
 the foreigner, against his idea of his interests, opened his 
 own. All that I would observe is, that such one-sided 
 liberality may be judicious and politic, but it has no right 
 to the appellation of Free Trade. 
 
 But the name matters little ; and the real question that 
 
 * u To expect that the freedom of trade should ever be entirely restored to 
 Great Britain is as absurd as to expect that an Oceana or Utopia should ever 
 be established in it." — Adam South' s Wealth of Nations^ Book iv. c. 11. 
 
 H 2 
 
100 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 now opens before us is the special application of a special 
 principle to the commodity of grain. 
 
 Free Trade at present means the free importation of 
 foreign corn ; and that is the question I proceed to consider. 
 In doing so, I shall make no declaration of war on political 
 economy. I will not refuse to it the name which its pro- 
 fessors arrogate for it — a science — though I cannot hold 
 with M. Say that it has been investigated on the Baconian 
 principle of philosophy — viz., the inductive. I do not 
 think that it has proceeded from the collection, examina- 
 tion, and weighing of the largest number of experiences, 
 and then, and not till then, deducing thence its general 
 maxims. For obviously, were it so, we should not find 
 such notable differences as I have shown in anticipations 
 amongst its disciples,* nor so startling a disparity between 
 
 * If two men of the acuteness of Mr. Villiers and Mr. Wilson were study- 
 ing any natural science according to the inductive philosophy, they would not 
 differ as to facts produced by certain agencies, though they might differ 
 widely as to the nature and inherent principle of the agencies themselves. 
 They would both, agree, for instance, that heat expands bodies ; but the one 
 might contend that the nature of heat was an accident, and the other a sub- 
 stance, as philosophers have disputed from the time of Bacon to this day : 
 they would, doubtless, come to a like result as to a proposition on the specific 
 gravity of a fluid, though as to the cause of fluidity in bodies they might be 
 wholly at variance. Mr. Villiers might assert that it depended on the globu- 
 lar form of the particles, Mr. Wilson on the caloric contained between them, 
 or on both combined. For, notwithstanding the centuries that have passed 
 since the experiment of Archimedes on fluid, those questions as to cause are, 
 I believe, still open to discussion. Had they studied political economy in 
 the same way, through induction and experiment, they could never differ as 
 to whether a" law like that put in motion by the opening of the home corn- 
 market, through free importation, would raise or lower wages and prices ; 
 though they might fairly differ as to the abstract nature of the principle 
 which produced the effect. Eut this is precisely the reverse with them, as 
 with all the exclusive students of political economy — they concur wonder- 
 fully as to the abstract principles, and differ only as to the results ; — whether 
 political economy yet fails in what is the great and ultimate source of know- 
 ledge, viz., "the experience not of one man only, nor of one generation, but 
 the accumulated experience of mankind in all ages ; " * or whether, from the 
 many disturbing elements which society interposes between cause and effect, 
 it cannot be thus inductively followed — certain it is, that they do not, as ex- 
 perimental philosophy demands, " suspend the preconceived notions of what 
 might or ought to be the order of nature in any presupposed case, and con- 
 tent themselves with observing as a plain matter of fact what is ; f but 
 rather pursue the opposite and more popular principle condemned by Bacon, 
 viz., " of explaining phenomena according to their own preconceived 
 notions." Now that mode of philosophising which makes sure of the re- 
 sults of a given agency under certain conditions, and reserves to the last the 
 
 * Herschel's Discourses on Natural Philosophy. + Ibid. 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ, 101 
 
 the fund of its experiences and the rigidity of its dogmas. 
 It has rather, I think, proceeded in "that opposite way" 
 which Bacon * has condemned, and in which, according to 
 him, no subtlety of definition, and no logical acuteness, 
 can suffice to avail for the establishment of truth. It has 
 rather commenced with the abstract principles, and then 
 selected the experiences on which to support them — resem- 
 bling somewhat that ingenious philosopher of whom Con- 
 dillac informs us, who blessed himself with the persuasion 
 that he had discovered a system that was to explain all the 
 phenomena of Chemistry, and hastened to a practical 
 chemist to communicate his discovery. "Unhappily," 
 said the chemist, "the chemical facts are exactly the re- 
 verse of what, in this most luminous and ingenious dis- 
 covery, you suppose them to be." " Tell me," then cries 
 the philosopher, nothing daunted, " what the facts are, that 
 I may explain them by my system ! " But whether or not 
 political economy be a science rather than a system, and 
 a science based upon induction rather than logic, it is a 
 study affording the most valuable suggestions, throwing 
 light upon much that had been hitherto obscure; it is 
 allied to researches with which I have for years been 
 familiar ; I have pondered it with attention, I would speak 
 of it with respect ; and it is the more my interest to do 
 so now, for I shall rest much of my case on reference to 
 
 general maxims to be deduced, (nay, if it never even pretends to ascertain 
 the abstract cause thereof,) can rarely be unsafe. But that other mode of 
 philosophising in which men so able as Messrs. Wilson and Villiers can 
 concur in asserting their absolute knowledge of the abstract principle, aud of 
 its infallibility, and yet contend that its application under the circumstances 
 they are agreed on will produce totally opposite phenomena, is obviously 
 always liable to mislead us into very great errors. 
 
 * Bacon, Nov. Org., Lib. i. c. 19. [Bacon, in the passage here particu- 
 larly referred to, says : Duce vice sunt atque esse possunt ad inquirendum ct 
 inveniendum veritatem : that is, There are and can be but two ways of in- 
 vestigating and discovering truth. Altera a sensu et ad partieularibus 
 advolat ad axiomata maxim* generalia, atque ex lis principiis eorumque 
 immota veritate judicat et invenit axiomata media: atque hoee via in 
 usu est : that is, The one flies from sense and particulars to the most general 
 axioms, and from these as first principles, and their undisputed truth deter- 
 mines and discovers middle axioms ; and this is the way which is in use. 
 Altera a sensu et partieularibus excited axiomata, ascendendo continent e 
 et gradation, id ultimo loco perveniatur ad maxime generalia : qua vice 
 vera est sed intentata : meaning, The other draws out the axioms from sense 
 and particulars by ascending uniformly, and step by step, so that at last 
 it reaches the most general or comprehensive; and this is the true way, but 
 untried.} 
 
102 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 its maxims and the admissions of its authorities. But I 
 must be permitted to observe, that it is a common mistake 
 with the ordinary run of students in political economy, to 
 mistake altogether the nature of that science, and the 
 reservations imposed upon the practical adoption of its 
 principles. Political economy deals with but one element 
 in a state — viz., its wealth ; and the soundest political 
 economists will be found cautiously stopping short of what 
 would seem the goal of an argument with some such ex- 
 pression as — "But this belongs to national policy." Political 
 economy goes strictly and sternly, as it were, towards the 
 investigation of the rigid principle it is pursuing ; it has 
 only incidentally to do with the modifications which it 
 would be wise to adopt when you apply the principle to 
 living men. Of living men, their passions, and habits, 
 and prejudices, it often* thinks no more than Euclid does 
 when he is demonstrating the properties of a triangle. 
 All this is out of the province of the political economist, 
 and within that of the statesman. 
 
 Far from blaming political economy for this, it could 
 not be what it professes to be if it were otherwise. The 
 persons to blame are those who insist on applying all its 
 principles, as if they were describing lifeless things, and 
 not dealing with human beings ; and hence innumerable 
 mistakes, made by hasty readers, not only in the applica- 
 tion, but we may say also in the comprehension, of the 
 principle itself. 
 
 Political economy, for instance, says drily, " It is for 
 the interest of a nation to do so and so." Well, grant that 
 it is so ; but every man who has dipped into metaphysics 
 should know that there are different degrees of interest, and 
 sometimes one degree of interest will practically be found 
 to counterbalance the other ; just the same as in phreno- 
 logy, Grail or Spurzheim would say, " Here is a strong 
 
 * Mr. Senior, indeed, says distinctly that the political economist " is not 
 to give a single syllable of advice, and that his business is neither to recom- 
 mend nor dissuade, but to state general principles." Mr. M'Culloch, dis- 
 senting from this restricted view of the science, yet very properly distin- 
 guishes between political economy and politics : while he owns with a can-, 
 dour that proves the largeness of his intellect — " However humiliating the 
 confession, it is certainly true that, owing to the want of information, not a 
 few of the most interesting problems in economical legislation are at present 
 all but insoluble." 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 103 
 
 impulse to conibativeness, but is the man then combative ? 
 No ; for here are two larger organs of caution and bene- 
 volence — that counterbalance the combative faculty." 
 
 Bearing in mind this variety of interests or impelling 
 motives, let us take a favourite proposition in political 
 economy, and we will do so in the words of Mr. Mill. 
 
 "It is the interest of two nations to exchange with 
 one another two sorts of commodities, as often as the rela- 
 tive cost is different in the two countries." Now I will 
 grant the general proposition ; but it will often happen 
 that there is a still stronger interest not thus to interchange 
 particular articles. For instance, Athens manufactures 
 admirable weapons at a cheaper cost than Bceotia ; Boeotia 
 produces corn, which Athens very much needs, at a much 
 cheaper cost than Athens. Is it to the interest of Athens 
 to exchange her weapons for the corn ? Not if she has 
 cause to dread the hostility of Boeotia, and believes that 
 the weapons she thus sends out will be used with advantage 
 against her freedom and existence. There is an interest 
 to effect exchange with two sorts of commodities, the rela- 
 tive cost of producing them being very different in the two 
 countries, upon the abstract general principle, but, in the 
 special case, a much stronger interest not to furnish Bceotia 
 with weapons. 
 
 Take another case. Suppose Germany has lately in- 
 stituted a cotton manufacture, but produces cotton goods 
 with greater labour (that is, more cost) than England, and 
 England, on the other hand, produces corn at more cost 
 than Germany — Is it for the interest of Germany to ex- 
 change her corn for the English cotton goods ? No ; for, 
 as it has been seen, we have Mr. Porter's assurance that 
 nothing but protective duties can preserve the German 
 cotton manufacture from ruin, as against the English com- 
 petition. Therefore here, again, though, on the abstract 
 general principle, it is the interest of Germany to exchange 
 with England two sorts of commodities, of which the rela- 
 tive cost is different, yet she has a stronger interest, in the 
 special case, to guard the cotton manufactures, which may 
 ultimately enrich her much more than the price she receives 
 for the corn that she sends into England. So, finally, 
 without in the least disputing the abstract proposition of 
 Mr. Mill, a statesman may well consider, that, seeing the 
 
104 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 importance to England of a thriving and prosperous agri- 
 culture, and all the danger to the State that may be in- 
 curred by the impoverishment and disaffection of many 
 millions of his countrymen, there is a greater interest, in 
 the special case, to limit an exchange which may be as 
 injurious, for a time at least, to the British husbandman, 
 as Germany holds it injurious to the German cotton manu- 
 facturer. For the political economist deals with the dead 
 principle — the statesman, with the living men. 
 
 These distinctions would be perfectly clear to all per- 
 sons, if they would only regard political economy as they 
 do any other investigation of art or science. First, with 
 regard to the abstract truth of its principles, and next, to 
 the prudence of applying them in each special instance. 
 
 Suppose that I write a treatise on Architecture, wherein 
 I geometrically establish the fact that the Parthenon is a 
 most beautiful building. If my neighbour, Squire Haw- 
 thorn, who lives in an old-fashioned irregular country- 
 house, as unlike the Parthenon as a house can be, runs to 
 me out of breath, transported to enthusiasm by my admir- 
 able treatise, — " My dear sir, I have read your work ; you 
 have proved to my satisfaction that no building on earth is 
 so perfect as the Parthenon. Pray, would you advise me 
 to pull down Hawthorn Hall, and build a country-house 
 exactly on the model of which you have so lucidly given 
 the geometrical designs ? Shall I turn Hawthorn Hall 
 into a Parthenon ? What's your advice ? " 
 
 " Sir," I should answer, unless I had a sinister interest 
 to answer otherwise, " I am not the proper person of whom 
 to ask that advice ; whether it is for your interest to pull 
 down your very irregular old house, — whether, if you did, 
 you would be as comfortable in a Parthenon ; and, however 
 beautiful that edifice, find that it could be adapted to the 
 wants of your family and the difference of your climate — 
 whether you could even live in it, without catching your 
 death of cold — are all considerations with which I had 
 nothing to do when I wrote my treatise. My object was 
 but to explain the true principles of Architecture, and 
 establish the excellence of the Parthenon upon geometrical 
 principles ! " 
 
 Squire Hawthorn would have no right to blame me for 
 having written my treatise and disturbed his mind ; but he 
 
LETTERS TO JOHX BULL, ESQ. 105 
 
 would be a monstrous great fool if he turned his old hall 
 into a Parthenon ! 
 
 In this Letter, I trust, my dear John, that I have cleared 
 my way to a fair and candid examination of a subject 
 uppermost in men's minds ; that I have shown that there 
 is nothing in that great storehouse of truth called History 
 which should induce us to believe that a fiscal enactment 
 once passed, must be regarded as a law not to be repealed ; 
 and that, according to history, such belief can be least 
 entertained on the matter of the very enactment which we 
 are forbidden to question ; that there is nothing in the 
 doubt whether absolute Free Trade in corn be desirable, 
 that implies indifference or distaste to freedom in political 
 opinions ; that, whether examining the contradictory asser- 
 tions of the Corn Law repealers, or the records of nations, a 
 man may presume to form a judgment in favour of Protec- 
 tion applied to certain articles of home cultivation and 
 industry without being necessarily excluded from the 
 average understanding of the human biped; that it is 
 obvious, by the admission of the great authorities of Free 
 Trade themselves, that there are circumstances under which 
 a check upon competition, by means of protective duties, is 
 necessary to the article produced ; and finally, that, what- 
 ever our respect for political economy, it is one thing to 
 accept the general principle, another to enforce its applica- 
 tion to each special instance. 
 
 Think of all this, my dear John ; and having commenced 
 with stating that the policy of the Coming Man should be 
 that of conciliation, now let us see whether it will be just 
 and wise to leave out of that policy the class whose claims 
 I am about to advocate. 
 
 Your affectionate well-wisher, 
 
 And A labourer, though 
 
 A LANDLORD. 
 
 LETTER II. 
 
 My Dear Johx, — I closed my last Letter by subscribing 
 myself "A Labourer, though a Landlord.'' Why did I 
 arrogate that title ? not merely as a boast, though it be 
 
106 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 one of which I am justly proud. "Why ? Because, when 
 my main income was derived from my labour, ten 
 years before I was a landlord, I recorded, by my vote 
 in Parliament, the same opinion that I profess now — 
 viz., that a total repeal of the Corn Laws would ulti- 
 mately prove injurious to the true social interests of this 
 community. 
 
 If I have, as a landlord, a landlord's interest in the 
 question, it cannot, therefore, be taken in account against 
 my honesty in the formation of my convictions — let it bo 
 taken in account against the motives that still uphold my 
 consistency in the same faith, to whatever extent it may bo 
 supposed that self-interest perverts the judgment or mis- 
 conceives the argument. Yet, even so, it is the law of our 
 land, and the privilege of freemen, for each class to state 
 its own grievance. And were men to be dismissed unheard, 
 because they felt the injury of which they complain, pray 
 tell me what grievance, since the world began, would ever 
 have been redressed ? 
 
 On the other hand, my dear John, while I believe that 
 my land, which is free from all mortgage, is not of that 
 kind on which the severest loss is likely to be incurred ; 
 so, health permitting, I have as a labourer a resource that 
 all landlords do not enjoy — and if my rents should fall, no 
 corn law will affect my pen and my brain, — I can work ; I 
 am used to it. Moreover, dear John, you are too fine- 
 hearted a fellow not to own that avarice is rarely the most 
 cogent motive in the ambition of public men. It is some- 
 thing to see myself separated, not by my own change of 
 opinions, but by theirs, from the party with which, in 
 public, I have acted, and the men whom, in private, I have 
 honoured or loved — and on this, as on all matters where 
 conviction is strong and earnest, whatever divides the 
 opinion, estranges the friendship ; — it is something for 
 many years, and those spreading over the prime of man- 
 hood, to have stood alone and excluded from the noble 
 field of action — Parliamentary life. Had I consented not 
 to compromise, nay, but to conceal, the doubts I entertain, 
 as to the success of the experiment made on the original 
 and primary source of capital, — land, — I should have been 
 at no loss for a seat in Parliament. But I could not accept 
 the experiment as a fait accompli until its results were 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 107 
 
 tested, and tlius my principles, right or wrong, at least 
 have not furthered my ambition. Nor, if the Free-Traders 
 are right, and the authority of intelligence and the power 
 of numbers are opposed to the views I entertain, is it 
 much to my interests, as a writer, to hazard at once my 
 reputation with the few and my popularity with the many, 
 by plying, with feeble oar, against the strong current of 
 the day ? 
 
 Wherefore, all these circumstances, pro and con, balanced 
 fairly one against the other, I trust that I may be exonerated 
 from the suspicion of interests purely sinister and selfish, 
 and that, if my views be erroneous, they will be held those 
 of a man who is accustomed to carry his gaze beyond the 
 map of his estate, and is capable of fears more generous 
 than such as darken the perspective that is closed by an 
 audit-day. And though I have advanced the doctrine that 
 there is nothing which in historical precedent or political 
 science should make us condemn the principle of Pro- 
 tection, as applied whether to land or to manufactures, in 
 certain periods, or under certain conditions, I am inclined 
 to go very far — nay, as far as the most eminent political 
 economists, whom Time acknowledges to be the standard 
 authorities of their school, in the policy of exposing native 
 agriculture to the risk of foreign competition, and of pro- 
 curing a steady and regular importation of corn, as the 
 best means of extending the market of our manufacturers. 
 I cannot consent, it is true, to say with Mr. Cobden, that 
 the fear of depending solely for the staple of food upon 
 the soil of the foreigner is an exploded fallacy. If it be 
 so, it is a fallacy that was never exploded from the mind of 
 the man who most combined the practical statesman with 
 the political economist — I mean Mr. Huskisson. However 
 else he might have modified the strong opinions that he 
 once expressed upon protection to agriculture, it is noto- 
 rious to those who best knew him, that Mr. Huskisson 
 never modified, never changed this doctrine, " that in peace 
 the habitual dependence on foreign supply is dangerous. 
 We place the subsistence of our own population not only 
 at the mercy of foreign powers, but also on their being 
 able to spare us as much corn as we may want to buy." 
 Thus said Mr. Huskisson in 1815 ; and in 1827 he said, 
 "I hold that doctrine now, and think nothing so dangerous 
 
108 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 to this country as to rely too largely and too frequently on 
 foreign countries for supplies of corn."* 
 
 I cannot consent, then, to dismiss the authority of a man 
 like Mr. Huskisson, upon the risk of depending on the 
 foreigner, with the contempt which it inspires in Mr. 
 Cobden ; nor do I think that those answers to Mr. Hus- 
 kisson which he borrows from Mr. Mill, and considers so 
 victorious (viz., " that countries most dependent on their 
 neighbours for grain, have enjoyed the steadiest and least 
 variable market ; that if one neighbour withholds his corn 
 others will send it, and that the abundant harvests of one 
 land may atone for the deficiencies of another/') would 
 have been considered by Mr. Huskisson incontestably 
 established by a sufficient number of experiments and 
 facts. But it is not now my object to dispute those pre- 
 mises, since I am willing to concede the conclusions to 
 which they bring Messieurs Cobden and Mill. And looking 
 to the rapid increase of our population, doubting the re- 
 sults that some anticipate, from bringing our own waste 
 lands into cultivation, seeing the growth aud grandeur of 
 our manufacturing interests — knowing that whatever corn 
 we take from the foreigner must increase the sale of what- 
 ever cotton or other manufacture the foreigner takes from 
 us — seeing, moreover, that no system of protection, short 
 of prohibition, could prevent our receiving some supplies 
 of corn from abroad, I willingly allow, with Mr. Mill, that 
 the apprehension of future evil should not operate against 
 present good ; and cannot prevail against what nature and 
 commerce have made stronger than all arguments, viz., 
 necessity. 
 
 I do not, therefore, dispute the policy of opening to 
 foreign corn a constant and regular market in our ports — 
 and of exposing the home producer to a severe competition ; 
 but I do maintain that, while you arrogate Mr. Huskisson' s 
 authority, you should so far respect his judgment as to 
 take some precaution that, while the supplies of corn from 
 abroad are increased, the supplies grown at home do not 
 
 * Mr. Cutler Ferguson, than whom a more honourable and truthful man 
 never existed, said in the debate on Mr. Hume's motion on the Corn Law, 
 1834: — " I was intimately acquainted with Mr. Huskisson' s sentiments on 
 these subjects, and know that to the last it was his opinion that a great 
 country like this should not be subject to foreign powers in the article 
 of food." 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 109 
 
 incur the risk of being materially diminished — that the 
 competition you invite, while it will tend to lower the 
 price, may serve to stimulate the energies that will aug- 
 ment the quantity ; and so, while fitting the farmer for the 
 struggle, save the country from that absolute reliance on 
 the harvests and the will of other States, which I firmly 
 believe could never exist without endangering our political 
 independence as a nation, and subjecting us to more than 
 fluctuations — to scarcities, approaching to famine. Are 
 these sentiments to be despised ? " Yes," cries Mr. Cobden, 
 " the men in fustian would laugh them to scorn ! " Be it 
 so — it is at Mr. Huskisson they laugh ! — the sentiments are 
 his ; and I will quote his words in order afterwards, my 
 dear John, to call your attention to a signal proof that his 
 sagacity is already shown to be deeper than that of any of 
 the gentlemen, whether they be clothed in fustian or broad- 
 cloth, who laugh at him. Thus says Mr. Huskisson ■: — 
 " Suppose, as it frequently happens, the harvest in this 
 year to be a short one, not only in this^ country, but the 
 foreign countries, from which we are fed. What follows ? 
 The habitually exporting country, France, for instance, 
 stops the export of its corn, and feeds its people without 
 any great pressure. The habitually importing country, 
 England, which, even in a good season, has hitherto de- 
 pended on the aid of foreign corn, deprived of that aid in 
 a year of scarcity, is driven to distress, bordering upon 
 famine." 
 
 Now observe, my Lord John Russell (in arguing lately 
 that the present low prices were to be held no criteria for 
 the future) stated, as a peculiar phenomenon in the case, 
 "that corn had come exactly from the quarter which no one 
 had anticipated — viz. France." 
 
 Mr. Huskisson, at least, was more far-sighted — it is ex- 
 pressly France that he names as the quarter from which 
 the exports will habitually come. Of this I myself never 
 had a doubt — I said so at the time of the Repeal of the 
 Corn Laws, not induced to that belief by any examination 
 of tariffs and reports, but simply from my personal know- 
 ledge of the social habits of the French. It is difficult for 
 an Englishman to imagine how the small French proprietor, 
 usually a peasant, will pinch and save in his household, in 
 order to put monies into his pouch. There is that in the 
 
110 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 actual property of land, strongly contrasting mere tenure, 
 still more service by hire, which, induces the labourer who 
 owns it to push economy into what you, my dear John, 
 would call the self-mortification of the miser. The more 
 corn your farming labouring children can grow, the more 
 they will eat ; the more corn Jacques Bonhomme can grow, 
 with the better heart he will starve ; — it is something not 
 to live upon, but to send away and to sell. And the money 
 goes ; — upon mutton and shoes, tobacco and coffee ? No, 
 my dear John ; upon buying some other half acre of land — 
 which after his death will be equitably subdivided, perhaps 
 among a family of five — from whom the self-pinching 
 system will start anew.* Prom France habitually you will 
 have corn, but there is no country in the world upon which 
 it is more dangerous to rely for the quantity and steadiness 
 of the supply. Take this year : — suppose that your recent 
 change had been some years in operation — that a great 
 deal of British land, now devoted to corn, had relinquished 
 that grain, as the Free- Traders tell us it ought — that there 
 was a scarcity at home — and in the same year a scarcity in 
 France — or a quarrel with that somewhat irascible country, 
 (which, to do it justice, is always willing to sacrifice self- 
 interest to some touchy crochet of honour,) pray do you 
 think, then, that the men in fustian would laugh Mr. Hus- 
 kisson to scorn ? Or dare you say that they might not be 
 inclined to exclaim with him — " Let the bread we eat be 
 the produce of corn grown amongst ourselves, and I for 
 one care not how cheap it is — the cheaper the better : 
 cheapness produced by foreign importation is the sure fore- 
 runner of scarcity, and a steady home supply the only safe 
 foundation of steady and moderate prices." 
 
 What is it, then, that I ask ? I go much farther than 
 Mr. Huskisson did in 1815 ; go as far as I believe he ever 
 
 * It is thus stated in recent statistical accounts of France, that less butcher's 
 meat is consumed now by its population than there was under the ancient 
 regime, when the state of the agricultural peasantry is represented to have 
 been so miserable. And the fact is accounted for (no doubt justly) by the 
 asserters of the social improvement effected by the Great Revolution— in the 
 doctrine that the small subdivisions of land, which have raised the peasant 
 from the serf into the proprietor, have induced habits of extraordinary thrift, 
 and that to maintain his land, and to meet its mortgages, he stints himself 
 much more in the consumption of food than he did, when living totally from 
 day to day without heed of the morrow, upon the wages secured from a 
 master. 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. Ill 
 
 went. I subscribe to the expediency of opening our ports 
 — of greatly increasing our regular importation of corn ; — 
 and all that I ask of the manufacturer is this — Fit the 
 farmer for the competition you force on him ; and, gaining 
 a great deal, concede a little in return ! You say that you 
 find in Christianity itself a sanction for the maxim to buy 
 in the cheapest, and sell in the dearest market. There is 
 another maxim to which the sanction of Christianity is 
 more generally conceded — " As ye would that men should 
 do to you, do ye also to them likewise." Your friend, Mr. 
 M'Cullock, in speaking of the Cotton Trade, and in seeking 
 to calm any excess of imprudent compassion which might 
 be excited by the sufferings of the children employed in 
 the factories, uses these very sensible and conciliatory ex- 
 pressions : — 
 
 " The subsistence of 1,400,000 people is not to be en- 
 dangered on slight grounds. The abuses, even, of such a 
 business, must be cautiously dealt with ; lest, in eradicating 
 them, we shake or disorder the whole fabric." 
 
 I concede this proposition in favour of the British 
 manufacturers of cotton; and I claim that concession in 
 favour of the British producers of corn. 
 
 But in this latter case, it is more than 1,400,000 persons 
 whose subsistence is involved. I will take the lowest cal- 
 culations of the proportional agricultural population that I 
 can find in any Free- Trade authorities ; and it is at least a 
 fourth of the entire population in Great Britain, and con- 
 siderably more than half the population in Ireland. * And 
 from these computations I omit altogether one important 
 item, in wealth at least, if not in numbers — I mean the 
 landowners, classed under the general head of " Persons of 
 independent means." Take, then, the agricultural popu- 
 lation of Great Britain at certainly not less than three mil- 
 lions and a half ; add to it the millions similarly engaged 
 in Ireland. Join to these the landlords "of independent 
 means ;" and if you refuse to annex to such numbers the 
 most moderate proportion that can be assigned of that part 
 of the trading population, such as the ploughwright, the 
 
 * Mr. Porter calculates from the census of 1841, that the farmers, graziers, 
 bailiff's, agricultural labourers, 6cc, are to be assessed at 25-17 per cent of the 
 population in Great Britain; and 66*15 per cent, in Ireland. '1 he land- 
 owners (if of independent means) are not reckoned in either computation. 
 
112 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 wheel wright, the blacksmith, the farrier — essentially de- 
 pendent npon the agriculturist — still you will have in 
 Great Britain and Ireland at least eight million persons 
 vitally interested in your laws affecting their produce and 
 its price. Surely, then, I may well exclaim that the sub- 
 sistence of numbers so far exceeding all the population 
 engaged in the cotton trade, to whom I make a similar 
 concession, should not be hazarded — I will not say on 
 slight grounds, but on grounds that have already called 
 forth one cry of acknowledged distress ; and that even if 
 abuse does exist, in such a business you should be as careful 
 of eradicating it, " lest you shake or disorder the whole 
 fabric," as you would of interference with the economy of 
 the cotton trade. Yet how have we dealt with this mighty 
 interest ? We have for more than half a century, by re- 
 peated acts of our legislation, approved, confirmed, rooted 
 as a very habit of thought into the minds of the cultivators 
 of our soil, the idea that Protection from the foreigner is 
 necessary to their existence. And having ourselves autho- 
 rised that faith, we have suddenly removed all that we 
 ourselves have told them their very existence required, and 
 brought them into unmitigated competition with lands the 
 most fertile which the world can boast, tilled by populations 
 exempted from the burdens we bear ! Just see how dif- 
 ferently the Free- Traders dealt with the silk manufacture, 
 which has been so often cited against us in advocating the 
 advantage of foreign competition over protective duties. 
 When, by the advice of Mr. Huskisson, you removed the 
 prohibition of foreign silk goods, beginning in 1824, you 
 left in 1826 an ad valorem duty of 30 per cent, on the im- 
 portation of foreign silk goods. You altered the duty to 
 specific rates per pound, but so calculated upon different 
 kinds of goods as to be equal in most cases to 30 per cent, 
 upon the presumed value, this rate being assumed as the 
 maximum of protection ; yet was the duty bounded in 
 effect to 30 per cent. ? Par from it : twenty years after- 
 wards, the duties on crape were from 43 to 50 per cent. ; 
 on velvet, from 34 to 50 per cent. ; on silk net, from 36 to 
 to 58 per cent. ; on manufactured bonnets, 145 per cent. I 
 quote from the statement of Sir Robert Peel, on January 
 27, 1846 — eventful day to the agriculturist! 
 
 Such was the protection you left to manufactures in silk 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 113 
 
 when you began to open the trade — snch was the protection 
 yon left to them for twenty years. And yon still left pro- 
 tection to silk (it exists still) on the very day that yon 
 passed sentence on the corn-grower, and doomed him to 
 compete, not as the manufacturer of silk does with the 
 rival inhabitants of a few towns, and meeting that rivalry 
 with advantages no other land possesses — but wherever in 
 the universe corn can be sowed in a richer soil, ripened 
 under a brighter sun, reaped by a cheaper labour. You 
 were as clearly persuaded of the truth of your abstract 
 principle of the benefit of free trade in silk as you are in 
 that of corn ; but you applied it in the one case with due con- 
 sideration of the fact that you were dealing not only with 
 the interests, but the convictions (and, if you will, with 
 the prejudices) of human beings ; and you have dealt, in 
 the other case, with as much sternness as if the machinery of 
 your law operated only upon brute matter. Why, when you 
 opened the trade in silk, did you leave still to the silk manu- 
 facturer duties so protective ? Mr. Huskisson stated the 
 reason, and all succumbed to it — "Because, as our manu- 
 factures were burthened by taxation, a protection as against 
 France was necessary." The reason by which you aided 
 the competition that was successful in silk, you throw to 
 the winds when you call forth a far severer competition in 
 corn. And while you have been thus abrupt and imperious 
 in enforcing so wholesale and entire a change upon the 
 business in which many millions are engaged, in what 
 mode have you shaped your policy so as to soften, at least, 
 the austerity of your fiat ? By all that can soothe irrita- 
 tion, by all that can encourage effort, by all that can 
 lighten burdens ? No. You have done it so that it is 
 made to bear a character the most galling ; made to seem 
 the triumphant victory of the men who had gone about 
 from platform to platform to preach a crusade against 
 those whom your change has afflicted ; who had used 
 language the most derisive to their understanding, the 
 most inflammatory against their motives : whose favourite 
 expressions for the owners of the land had been "Vampire" 
 and " Blood-sucker," and for the occupiers, " Thick-scull" 
 and " Bull-calf." Very good words, it may be, for a cheer 
 or a laugh, but not words that make eloquence as per- 
 suasive as it is " unadorned." And when the chief to whom 
 
 i 
 
114 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 this class had committed its interests, and the leader who 
 had so shortly before proposed on its behalf a duty of 85., 
 concurred to ascribe the principal merit of the wholesale 
 change enforced to the head of the Anti-Corn Law League 
 — thereby approving an agitation that had created an im- 
 perium in imperio, and virtually commending the oratory 
 of abuse which yet rung in the ears and rankled at the 
 hearts of the victims — can you say that you did not make 
 your experiment as intolerable to the spirit of Englishmen 
 as it has been abrupt and trying to the resources upon 
 which so many millions depend ? The Italian proverb 
 saith, " That it must be a very fine tree to make one 
 pleased to be hung from it." And a tree more rugged and 
 thorny than that on which you have hung the British 
 corn-grower, certainly never yet was planted by the hand 
 of the legislator. 
 
 Reflect, too, from whom come these assaults on the very 
 character of those who advocated the protection our ha- 
 bitual legislation had taught to consider essential to their 
 existence ? Who denounced them as plunderers and rob- 
 bers, bloodsuckers and vampires ? The very men who 
 had first introduced protection into the legislature. Thus 
 says the Father of Free Trade, Adam Smith : — " The 
 merchants and manufacturers seem to have been the ori- 
 ginal inventors of these restraints upon the importation of 
 foreign goods which secure to them the monopoly of the 
 home market. ... It was probably in imitation of them, 
 and to put themselves on a level with those who they found 
 were opposed to oppress them, that the country gentlemen 
 and farmers of Great Britain so -far forgot the generosity 
 which is natural to their stations as to demand the exclusive 
 privilege of supplying their countrymen with corn and 
 butcher's meat." 
 
 And Sir Robert Peel himself, at the very time that he 
 extolled the "unadorned eloquence" which had sought to 
 arouse the country against the class that was struggling 
 for what Sir Robert Peel himself had asserted, during the 
 whole previous period of his career, to be the condition of 
 life to them and of welfare to the commonwealth, still 
 echoed Adam Smith, and said, with the Repeal of the Corn 
 Law in his hand — " It id as the mercantile and manufac- 
 turing interest which set the example of requiring protection" 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 115 
 
 Of this there can be no doubt. Our statutes tell us that 
 the policy of protection was introduced on behalf of the 
 manufacturers and merchants, and at their own demand, 
 for centuries before it was accorded to the land. 
 
 And if such has been your mode to soothe the pain and 
 to cheer the spirit, where has since been your attempt to 
 lighten the burden ? 
 
 Nothing can be more true, and nothing more tacitly ac- 
 ceded to by the conscience of the community, than the 
 proposition Mr. Disraeli has luminously stated — viz., that 
 under the system of Protection, offered and insisted on as 
 a counter- equivalent, you have built up your present system 
 of taxation ; you remove the equivalent, you will not touch 
 the taxation. Just consider the vast amount of taxes that 
 has been taken off since the war — the manner in which, 
 especially of late years, since 1830, the reductions have 
 been shaped so as to give the greatest relief or the greatest 
 impetus to manufactures ; and out of all those millions so 
 dealt with, what, from the passing of the Corn Law in 
 1815 to the year 1846, has been the amount of taxes, 
 bearing chiefly on agriculture, reduced or repealed ? I 
 quote the authority of Mr. Pressley himself before the 
 House of Lords — £985,824! — a relief that appears as 
 nothing, compared with the vast sums which have been 
 cast forth from the revenue to meet the demands of rival 
 interests in commerce and manufactures. And justly so. 
 Why? because during those years the agriculturists had their 
 equivalent — protection ! But the protection is vanished from 
 the agriculturist, and the agriculturist stands alone in the 
 community without a due share of relief. 
 
 And now, my dear John, as I know you are a lover of 
 fair play, even in fighting your enemies, (if, indeed, we 
 poor owners and tillers of land are to be so considered,) let 
 us see whether we have had something of good faith to set 
 off against so much severity — let us see whether you would 
 not have been ashamed to have dealt with a Frenchman, 
 when you were at war with him, as your agents have dealt 
 with your own children. 
 
 In 1846, Sir Robert Peel, in arguing for Free Trade, 
 observes, " I have always felt and maintained that the land 
 is subject to peculiar burdens." He goes on to argue that 
 the question of Free Trade is one of policy — that of relief 
 
 i 2 
 
116 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 to peculiar burdens on those it may affect, one of justice ; 
 and he implies as strongly as man can do, that, having 
 decided on the question of policy we should then have to 
 consider the question of justice. 
 
 The antithesis was ominous. What Englishman, on 
 reading it, will not say with Burke, " It was with the 
 greatest difficulty that I was able to separate policy from 
 justice. Justice itself is the great standing policy of civil 
 society; and any eminent departure from it, under any 
 circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy 
 at all." But to proceed — 
 
 Lord John Russell, in his letter to the Queen, 1846, 
 (read to the House of Commons,) states that the measures 
 which Sir Robert Peel had in contemplation appear to 
 have been " a present suspension of the duties of corn — a 
 repeal of the Corn Laws at no remote period, preceded by 
 diminution of duties — relief to the occupiers of land from 
 burdens by which they are peculiarly affected, so far as it may 
 be practicable." And Lord John adds, in the same letter, 
 an opinion yet more strongly expressed as to the said 
 burdens — "Lord John Russell is prepared to assent to the 
 opening of the ports, and to the fiscal relief which it was 
 calculated to convey. He would have accompanied this 
 proposal with measures of relief to a considerable extent of 
 the occupiers of land from the burdens to which they were 
 subjected." 
 
 ISTow, I ask you, John, as an honest man, whether a dis- 
 tinct and positive pledge of the relief of burdens on land 
 be not hereby and herein held forth as an accompaniment 
 to the repeal of the Corn Laws ? — whether many, who in 
 Parliament agreed to such a repeal, must not have been so 
 induced to agree ? — whether the country generally would 
 not have been led on to accept the policy, by the persuasion 
 that the justice that was to soften it would be fairly meted 
 out ? Well, what has been the fact ? Sir Robert Peel re- 
 moved the protection, and left untouched the burdens he 
 had engaged to release. It is true that he did at the time 
 dwell on some peddling and pitiful mitigations of local 
 burdens — some mitigations of a county rate, on the pro- 
 portions the land should pay to the gaoler of the prison 
 and the doctor of the pauper, on some trifling extension of 
 the law of settlement. But there was not a man in the 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 117 
 
 country who did not feel that it was not to such miserable 
 doles that Sir Robert Peel could have meant to stint the 
 performance of his solemn engagements to the land, if he 
 had remained in office, and when, having carried his system 
 of policy, his mind would be free to consider freely the 
 question of justice. Well, Lord John becomes Prime 
 Minister ; he accepts the task of maintaining and per- 
 petuating the repeal of the Corn Laws ; but surely with it 
 he inherits the pledge to relieve the burdens of the land. 
 Is not this the absolute condition imposed by good faith ? 
 And could any man suppose we were afterwards to be met 
 by a doubt if there were any burdens at all ? And if before 
 the enactment of the law, when the sages and prophets of 
 the Corn League predicted that the land would be no 
 sufferer — that rents would rather rise than fall — prices 
 would average 7s. on wheat, where they now average 5s. — 
 farmers rather flourish than decay — agricultural wages 
 rather increase than diminish — if then Lord John thought 
 such concessions of relief to a considerable extent fair and 
 reasonable, how much more have they become so now, 
 when the distress of the cultivator is acknowledged by 
 Lord John himself, and lamented in the speech which is 
 delivered from the throne ? Concessions ! First, redac- 
 tion on bricks, which benefits certainly urban speculators 
 more than it can at present the unhappy landlord, who has 
 small heart for building new farm premises ; and now a 
 further reduction on timber, which, where the landowner 
 has any timber on his property, is another diminution of 
 the income from which he is to contribute new barns and 
 granaries for the corn, which the farmer trembles while he 
 stores ! And this is the way faith has been kept to us, and 
 the pledges of two Prime Ministers fulfilled ! 
 
 The true question before us is plain. Will you, or will 
 you not, conciliate this great interest, comprising so much 
 of your capital — this great class, containing so large a 
 share of your population ? Are you to continue to treat 
 the producers of bread, in your own country, as an enemy 
 whom it is necessary or wise thoroughly and resolutely to 
 conquer and put down ; or as a vast element in the com- 
 monwealth, with whose claims and opinions it is prudent 
 and patriotic to effect some gentle compromise ? And here 
 let me observe that, in all important questions which you 
 
118 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 have safely and durably settled, you have always (and in 
 all times and countries judicious statesmen always have) 
 shunned to extend too far the victory of one opinion over 
 another. It is the principle of compromise, more or less 
 extended, upon which you have always gone ; and hence 
 the stability of your institutions, and the contrast they pre- 
 sent to our impetuous neighbours, the French, who, because 
 they push the dogma of the day into the unqualified 
 triumph of a party, obtain nothing that far-sighted men 
 can consider settled, and leave liberty equally endangered 
 by the pressure of the mob and the cannon of the soldier. 
 Tour great constitutional changes, where durable, have been 
 compromises — your religious Reformation — your Revolu- 
 tion of 1688 — your Reform Bill of 1831 — were all compro- 
 mises between the extremes of opinion. The sole time 
 when you deserted this principle was amidst the passions 
 of the Civil War, when you destroyed a [Monarchy, tried 
 for a Republic, gained a Dictatorship, passed at once into 
 reaction, and welcomed back in Charles the Second a des- 
 potism more degrading than that which you had success- 
 fully resisted in Charles the First. Beware then, how, in 
 dealing with your own countrymen, and in those civil wars 
 which are now fought by the pen or in the senate — beware 
 how you push, too far, even what you consider just on the 
 abstract principle. This total repeal of all Protection, as 
 affecting men whom your previous legislation has tutored, 
 right or wrong, into believing that without Protection 
 there is ruin, is no compromise — it is the extreme opinion 
 urged to its extremist point, and, as I have shown, in its 
 harshest character ; it has been attended with insult, with 
 betrayal, with forfeited promises and broken faith. 
 
 Z±j Lord John Russell, you are fond of quoting Burke : 
 your scholarship can appreciate the vast range of his know- 
 ledge; your experience of men, the common sense that lies 
 under the subtlety of his thought or the glow of his elo- 
 quence ; and the natural loftiness of your mind, when it 
 rises free from the trammels of party, finds something con- 
 genial in that genius which was equally hostile to cruelty 
 and meanness, whether they took the plausibilities of power 
 or usurped the high attributes of freedom. Dees your 
 lordship remember these passages, or can you dispute their 
 application ? — 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 119 
 
 " What is the use of discussing men's abstract right to 
 food or medicine ? The question is upon the method of 
 procuring and administering them. In that deliberation I 
 shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the 
 physician, rather than the professor of metaphysics. " . . . 
 
 " The science of government being, therefore, so prac- 
 tical in itself, and intended for such practical purposes, a 
 matter which requires experience, and even more experi- 
 ence than any man can gain in his whole life, however 
 sagacious and observing he may be, it is with infinite 
 caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling down 
 an edifice which has answered in any tolerable degree for 
 ages the common purposes of society, or on building it up 
 again without having models and patterns of approved 
 utility before his eyes." 
 
 On these two passages I make but two brief comments — 
 
 In the first, Burke would, in deliberating on the method 
 of procuring and administering food, call in the aid of the 
 farmer rather than the professor of metaphysics. It is the 
 farmer whom, in your change, you altogether exclude from 
 your council ; and I will show, later, that you have not 
 even on your side the aid of the professor of metaphysics, 
 though you may have the sanction of some of his obscurer 
 disciples. 
 
 Look to the second passage. Can you deny that you 
 pull down the whole edifice of protection, which has for 
 ages sheltered the farmer, and which has so far answered 
 the common purposes of society that, to use the words of 
 Sir Robert Peel, "if you convinced us that your most 
 sanguine hopes would be realised, that this country would 
 become the workshop of the world, would blight, through 
 the cheapness of food and the demand for foreign corn, the 
 manufacturing industry of every other country, we should 
 not forget, amid all these presages of complete happiness, 
 that it is under the influence of protection to agriculture, 
 continued for two hundred years, that the fen has been 
 drained, the wild heath reclaimed, the health of a whole 
 people improved, their life prolonged — and all this not at 
 the expense of manufacturing prosperity, but concurrently 
 with its w r onderful advancement." * 
 
 You pull down this edifice. Where is the " model and 
 * Speech of Sir Robert Peel, 1839. 
 
120 LETTEES TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 pattern of approved utility before your eyes ? " Historian 
 that you are, I defy you to find in all history one such 
 model and pattern. I turn to you, my dear Mr. Bull, to 
 your agents and your family, and I say renovate, alter, 
 repair, curtail the edifice — do not wholly pull down. I 
 say you are dealing with men, not machines ■*— fellow- 
 citizens, not foes ; conciliate, do not crush ; compromise, 
 do not conquer. Have you a compromise? You have, 
 theoretically, two ; practically, but one. Theoretically, 
 you have the option of revising your whole taxation, 
 national and local, and readjusting those burdens which, 
 under Protection, you laid or continued to enforce on the 
 agricultural interest : but so arduous is the task of dealing 
 with the most prominent and least disputed of all — the 
 Poor-Rate; so injurious to the condition of the working 
 class, so favourable to the extension of pauperism, does all 
 sound evidence prove it would be to take the rates from 
 local control, and add them to national taxation ; and so 
 difficult does it appear to be to restore and enforce the 
 original law — which, declaring that every man should con- 
 tribute to the support of the poor according to his means, 
 imposed the relief of pauperism upon personal as well as 
 real property — that I believe any systematic and wholesale 
 legislation, which should aim at dividing fairly amongst 
 the community the burdens which now rest unduly on the 
 land, could not be carried into effect. And therefore this 
 compromise with the agricultural interest is not practically 
 in your power. Your difficulty is not diminished by the 
 loud cry of the opposite party, that, in point of fact, no 
 such undue burdens exist ; that the land does not bear 
 more than its due proportion — some say, even less ; for, if 
 your object is to conciliate, the very discussion of such 
 questions only frustrates that at which you would aim. 
 And — wrangle, cavil, subtleise and special-plead as you 
 may — you cannot convince either owner or occupier that 
 he does not pay taxes which he does not see paid by his 
 neighbour ; that the poor-rate collector does not take out of 
 his pocket pounds which the poor-rate collector does not 
 take out of the pockets of a man better oh than himself. 
 Nay, the very arguments by which you urge the necessity 
 of repealing the Corn Law bring before him more strik- 
 ingly the injustice of the burden that cripples the competi* 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 121 
 
 tion to which you condemn him. For you say that the old 
 proportions of property are altered, that the manufacturing 
 wealth increases in a ratio far beyond that of the agricul- 
 tural ; and yet this increasing wealth escapes comparatively 
 free from the support of the very population that it forces 
 to produce it ! It takes the sinews of the human being, 
 from childhood to decay, and then throws the human 
 machine, when it breaks under its use, upon the alms of that 
 very property to which that human machine has yielded no 
 return, and towards the war against which it has been used 
 as an instrument. Glance at this instance from the evi- 
 dence given before the Committee of the House of Lords, 
 (on the Burdens on Land). A farmer was examined, and 
 speaks thus : — " The poor-rates on Mr. Heathcoat's factory, 
 in this parish, have averaged £41 Qs. 9cl. a-year, for the 
 last seven years ; on the farm occupied by myself, £58 2s. 
 So that I have paid £17 Is. 3d. a-year more than Mr. 
 Heathcoat. My rental is <£300 a-year, and the profits 
 you can imagine ; Mr. Heathcoat's profits are reputed to 
 be £40,000 a-year ! 
 
 jN"ow, observe, if in any time of distress Mr. Heathcoat 
 reduces the number of hands he employs in the produce of 
 his wealth, the men thus thrown out of work fall, not on 
 the factory which their labour has benefited, but on the 
 lands of the parish. The farmer maintains not only the 
 paupers for whom the land has no labour, but those whom 
 the factory flings back upon the land.* Nor, while thus 
 oppressed by the Free Trade, and unrelieved by the burden, 
 can you convince the agriculturists that this Free Trade, 
 which so endangers the returns to his industry in its 
 habitual directions, fairly opens to him fresh fields for his 
 enterprise and invention. You may tell him there are 
 reasons why he should not unrestrictedly sell any sugar he 
 may extract from beet-root ; but it is quite clear that those 
 reasons are opposed to Free Trade. You may tell him 
 there are reasons why he should not grow tobacco ; but he 
 sees in France that tobacco is a main element in the profits 
 
 * I cannot here resist quoting the witty " definition of the building called 
 a factory," by Henry Brougham, before that illustrious man was a Corn- 
 Law repealer — " A large building, erected on a comparatively small piece of 
 ground, carrying on the manufacture of two very important articles — cotton 
 and paupers'" 
 
122 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 of the cultivator, and that portions of his land could grow 
 quite as good tobacco as that which the labouring popula- 
 tion poison the air with in France. And if there are 
 reasons why he should not have Free Trade for such ex- 
 periment, which his climate does not suit, he replies to you 
 that he finds reasons quite as good why Free Trade should 
 not be forced on him in the article to which he is con 
 demned as the staple of his produce, and for which his 
 climate is suited. 
 
 Suppose that the merchant has hitherto had a monopoly 
 of the markets in India, and by some change in your com- 
 mercial system he is driven from those markets by foreign 
 competition. He complains, and you say, " Unjust Man, 
 we have done with monopoly ; " he then turns his prows 
 towards the North, and you say, "No, there you must not 
 deal." "Why ? " " We have permitted to our Colonists 
 a monopoly against you." " Towards the West ?" " JSTo, 
 my friend, the products of the West do not suit your way 
 of business, and for very good reasons ; we have given to 
 others a monopoly there, too, for which they pay us a very 
 high price ! " Suppose this, and then allow me to ask, 
 whether you could continue to read to your merchant a 
 lecture on the blessings of Free Trade ? Reverse the case, 
 and what the difference, when the farmer sees Free Trade 
 give to the foreigner his market in corn, and monopoly ex- 
 clude his fields from beet-root and tobacco ? 
 
 In dealing with mankind, I say, as said one who under- 
 stood nations well, "that even if burdens are laid on fairly, 
 you must convince those who suffer that such burdens 
 are fair." I say this without prejudice to the question 
 whether the land is or is not disproportionably burdened. 
 I am ready, if necessary, to go wholly into that considera- 
 tion. And if I do not do so now, it is, first, because I never 
 yet met a fair and dispassionate thinker who doubted the 
 fact, though he might cavil as to the degree. Secondly, 
 because, at the very time the Corn Law was repealed, the 
 fact of the burdens was admitted by the Minister who 
 repealed it, and the Minister to whom the maintenance of 
 the repeal was intrusted. Thirdly, because the promise of 
 relief to those burdens accompanied the intimation of their 
 repeal ; and, without such promise, I know that many of 
 the votes Sir Robert Peel obtained to his change of policy 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 123 
 
 would have been withheld. And we have a right, if yon 
 tell ns that we must submit to the hardship, to hold as un- 
 challengeable, in poiut of honesty, the pledge that was given 
 to us of relief from the burdens acknowledged by those 
 who inflicted the hardship. Fourthly, because I here 
 argue for the expediency of a compromise ; and compro- 
 mise in the way of relief from taxation, be my assertions 
 ever so true, and any calculations I might found on them 
 ever so accurate, I am convinced that every financier would 
 concur with me in considering wholly impracticable. 
 
 The second compromise, and the only one you can actually 
 effect, is to deal in some mode with your customs, that, in- 
 terfering the least with the good you anticipate from your 
 recent experiment — leaving undisturbed your general tariff 
 — militating not against its main principle, and recom- 
 mended by the great authorities you have assumed as your 
 guides, may yet be of some benefit to the agricultural pro- 
 ducer, and put him in good heart and good humour to 
 befriend the system you have commenced. Such a com- 
 promise Lord Derby has proposed, viz., a low fixed duty 
 upon wheat and other grain — a tax upon the foreigner for 
 the benefit of the native cultivator ; and the profits of that 
 tax to go in relief of the most odious burden upon all, 
 whether engaged in trade, commerce, agriculture, or manu- 
 factures. 
 
 In favour of this low fixed duty as a compromise, I sub- 
 mit these considerations to the Free-Trader : — First, That 
 it still leaves you the victory for which you so eagerly 
 contend — the victory over the abstract principle of Protec- 
 tion. I can well conceive a derisive cheer at this sentence. 
 " So the principle of Protection you give up ! " My dear 
 fellow-citizens, I am not writing for Protection or Free 
 Trade as abstract principles ; I am writing for what I 
 believe, in my conscience, to be the very existence of a 
 generation of human beings, and in deprecation of the 
 consequences which the ruin of one race may entail on 
 generations yet to come. I believe that my principle is 
 right ; but this is no question of School Metaphysics, and 
 I will surrender the principle with all my heart, if you will 
 aid me to save the men. The principle, then, of such a tax 
 is a principle of revenue, drawn from duty on a commodity 
 in general use, and introduced into the country from the 
 
124 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 foreign merchant. It is the same principle you apply to 
 tea, to tobacco, to any other article you might desire to 
 have free, but to which, for the sake of the revenue, you 
 attach fiscal duties. If indirectly it operates as a protection 
 to the cultivator, because it happens that we cultivate grain, 
 and not tobacco or tea, and thereby effects the compromise 
 that it is best for all classes to establish, it is an incidental 
 good which you admit in dealing with other articles of 
 home production. You derive revenue from duties on 
 foreign shoes, boots, gloves, embroidery ; you have a duty 
 of 25 per cent, upon artificial flowers, 15 per cent, upon 
 foreign silk ; and you defend these duties, not only as 
 sources of revenue, but as some aid against foreign compe- 
 tition to certain classes of your countrymen. Why deprive 
 yourselves of a source of revenue larger than is derived 
 from all these duties put together, because it would aid, 
 during a fearful strain upon its energies, a Class that com- 
 prises at least a fourth of your population ? 
 
 Secondly, the fixed duty carries with it the recommenda- 
 tion of high authority among Free-Traders themselves; 
 and that, if you gainsay this, you may contradict not me, 
 poor Squire and selfish Vampire, but your own authorities, 
 I give you the words of the most eminent enemies of the 
 old Corn Laws, the most illustrious masters of Political 
 Economy. 
 
 Hear, first, Mr. Bicardo — no friend to the Landowner. 
 You will see that he admits the policy of the fixed duty, 
 contends for its justice, and even intimates his concession 
 to a duty of 10s. — double that which Lord Stanley in these 
 times has suggested. 
 
 " The growers of corn are subject to some of these pecu- 
 liar taxes, such as tithes, a portion of the poor-rate, and 
 perhaps one or two other taxes, all of which tend to raise 
 the price of corn and other raw produce equal to these 
 peculiar burdens. In the degree, then, in which these 
 taxes raise the price of corn, a duty should be imposed on 
 its importation. If from this cause it be raised 10s. per 
 quarter, a duty of 10s. should be imposed on the importa- 
 tion of foreign corn, and a drawback of the same amount 
 should be allowed on the exportation of corn. By means 
 of this duty and this drawback, the trade would be placed 
 en the same footing as if it had never been taxed ; and we 
 
LETTEKS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 125 
 
 should be quite sure that capital would neither be injuri- 
 ously, for the interests of society, attracted towards nor 
 
 repelled from it If importation was 
 
 allowed, an undue encouragement would be given to the 
 importation of foreign corn, unless the foreign commodity 
 were subject to the same duty equal to tithes, or any other 
 exclusive tax as that imposed on the home grower." 
 
 Thus says Mr. Bicardo. Hear, next, Mr. Poulett Thom- 
 son, afterwards Lord Sydenham, speaking against the Corn 
 Laws in 1834: — 
 
 " He concluded that a fixed duty of from 8s. to 10s. the 
 quarter, under which foreign corn could at all times come 
 into the market of this country at a moderate price, would 
 have prevented this occurrence (fluctuation) and the con- 
 sequent loss 
 
 " He would not dispute that the Landowners had a claim to 
 a certain degree of protection. His right honourable friend 
 had quoted Mr. Ricardo as if he was with him, and against 
 the imposition of a fixed duty ; but he would find that the 
 authority of Mr. Ricardo, was against him on that point. 
 Mr. Ricardo proposed the adoption of a certain fixed duty 
 as being a full and sufficient compensation to the land- 
 owners. Let them adopt that plan. By the adoption of 
 such a plan as that of a fixed duty, there was no doubt that 
 the revenue would be a gainer, and he would not object to 
 appropriate the amount of duty thus received towards 
 affording that relief to the landowners to which they should 
 prove themselves entitled. " 
 
 But you say, whatever these eminent men may have 
 thought then of a fixed duty, in 1846 they would have been 
 for the total repeal now enforced on us. Yet surely, if 
 there be one person who may guide us as to their probable 
 opinion, had they been spared to us in 1846, it is the great 
 living disciple and elucidator of Adam Smith and Ricardo, 
 the most learned and profound of all our surviving masters 
 in the Free-Trade school of this science of Political Eco- 
 nomy. Thus says Mr. M'Culloch, writing in 1849, three 
 years after the enactment, but before the serious distress 
 that has befallen the agriculturist : — 
 
 <k At the same time, we are ready to admit that we 
 should have preferred seeing this question settled by impos- 
 ing a low fixed duty of 5s., 6s. , or 7s. a quarter on wheat, 
 
126 LETTE11S TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 and other grain in proportion, accompanied by a propor- 
 tionate drawback. We make this statement on general 
 grounds, and without any reference to the peculiar bur- 
 dens that affect the agriculturists, though these should 
 neither be forgotten nor overlooked. In scarce years, a 
 duty of this description would fall wholly on the foreigner, 
 without affecting prices or narrowing importation ; for in 
 such years the prices of corn are wholly determined by 
 demand or supply, without reference to the cost of the 
 corn, including therein any reasonable duty with which it 
 may be charged. The latter is then, in truth, deducted 
 from the profits of the foreign grower or merchant ; and 
 its repeal would not sensibly affect prices. But while, in 
 scarce years, when importation is necessary, the influence 
 of a low duty is thus innocuous, it would lessen or prevent 
 importation in unusually abundant years, when the home 
 supply is sufficient. The drawback by which it is supposed 
 to be accompanied would then also come into play, and 
 facilitate exportation ; so that their conjoined effect would 
 be to hinder the overloading of the market, and conse- 
 quently to prevent prices falling so low as to be injurious to 
 the agriculturists and those dependent on them. And it must 
 be borne in mind that the distress of the agriculturists never 
 fails to react on the other classes. When the former are in- 
 volved in difficulties, the demand for the products of the loom 
 and of our colonial possessions, are proportionally diminished ; 
 so that the market is glutted with manufactured goods, 
 sugar, &c, as well as with corn. It is, indeed, uniformly 
 found that the injury that is thus inflicted on the manufac- 
 turing and trading part of the community very much exceeds 
 all that they gain by the temporary fall in the price of raw 
 produce. It is plainly, therefore, a capital mistake to suppose 
 that the duty and drawback now referred to would be advan- 
 tageous only to the agriculturists : they would redound quite 
 as much to the advantage of the other classes. And though 
 this were less certain than it appears to be, still, in a matter 
 of such importance as the welfare of agriculture, and of 
 those dependent thereon, a wise Government should be ex- 
 tremely cautious about taking any step, of the consequences 
 of which it is not fully assured." * This, then, is the 
 opinion of Mr. M'Culloch on the abstract merits of the 
 * M'Culloch's Pol. Econ., pp. 548, 549, 4th edit., p. 49. 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 127 
 
 question ; and though I grant that this eminent person 
 doubts whether, as " Government had, in 1846, to deal 
 with an irritated and unreasoning populace, it might not 
 have been better to make an end of the matter than to pro- 
 long by any system, however well devised, the pernicious 
 trade of agitation ; " yet, as the chief reason he states for 
 so preferring concession to wisdom is, that the agricul- 
 turists had "little to apprehend" in the change, I think 
 we have a fair right, now that, in 1851, the cause for appre- 
 hension is proved to be so grave, to appeal to the country 
 to decide between " an unreasoning" clamour and the 
 principle which this master of the science declares would 
 11 not only be for the advantage of the agriculturists, but 
 redound quite as much to the advantage of the other classes." 
 You tell me, inflexible Repealers, in defiance of Mr. 
 M'Culloch, that this moderate fixed duty is a miserable 
 boon to the agriculturist, not worth his contending for. 
 So much the better for you, if you can effect such a com- 
 promise, and secure yourselves, upon terms so easy, against 
 the reaction that is always liable to follow extremes. You 
 may tell me that this does not carry out your abstract prin- 
 ciple to the utmost ; but I have proved to you, at least, 
 that the most illustrious asserters of your abstract principle 
 have advocated the very compromise thus proposed. And 
 if, after all, it does not go to the full length to which you 
 would urge your theory, consider, all you who are intelli- 
 gent among my manufacturing opponents — consider, I pray 
 you, whether in this, as in all other affairs of life, where 
 you deal between man and man, you do not gain more, in 
 security to what you have obtained, in exemption from 
 hostility upon other points affecting your interests, than 
 you lose by your trifling concessions ! Reflect, that but a 
 very few years ago you would have delightedly hailed the 
 compromise now submitted to you. Lord J. Russell tells 
 us in the House of Commons, that, had his proposal of an 
 85. fixed duty been accepted, the Free-Traders would have 
 been satisfied, and the Corn Law League dissolved ! And 
 think, too, how you obtained your triumph — by what com- 
 bination of circumstances, rare and unprecedented : — by a 
 famine in Ireland — the prospect of a famine in England — 
 the influence of: a great man now no more — the changed 
 opinions of Representatives, excusing change by calcula- 
 
128 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 tions on prices that have proved erroneous, or the pledges 
 of Ministers that have not been redeemed ; regard and 
 immber the votes upon the opposite benches, — calculate 
 somewhat on the prospect of a majority, in the ensuing 
 Parliament, composed of men whom your obstinate refusal 
 to listen to a question they deem so vital to their interests 
 must make as obstinate as yourselves in regard to your 
 own, — recollect that even in this Parliament, upon the 
 question that "something should be done for the land," 
 you have barely escaped by a Majority of Fourteen,* — 
 own that, in the present balance of parties, legislation, 
 according to your own principles, is impeded by the rally- 
 ing point you leave to all who own that " Something must- 
 be done,"— and say whether, as wise and far-sighted men, 
 you had not better seize this time to settle a dispute, which, 
 believe me, is not settled now, by the consent of your oppo- 
 nents to terms more advantageous than those that, but for 
 extraordinary circumstances, would, a short time ago, have 
 so contented yourselves. 
 
 What say you, John ! am I not right in my counsel ? 
 Did ever one great class in your family refuse all terms 
 with another, and not live to repent it ? 
 
 I close this letter, to give you time to turn to your His- 
 tory : — Do so, and I can doubt not your answer. 
 
 Yours, &c. 
 
 LETTER III. 
 
 But it is said to the agriculturist, " Ton have suffered 
 distress before; therefore you must learn to suffer it now: 
 you complained when enjoying a high protection duty ; we 
 cannot attend to your complaints, if you suffer when that 
 dtity is repealed. In 1835, for instance, your average prices 
 were as low as now, in 1851. Why tease us to death with 
 your lamentations ? " 
 
 O disingenuous, if plausible adversaries, who denies that, 
 ever since Triptolemus invented the plough, the agricul- 
 turist has been subjected to great casualties and hard 
 
 * A majority which, on Mr. Disraeli's motion, April 11th, (debated since 
 the first edition of these Letters,) has been decreased to thirteen. 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 129 
 
 trials ? He is engaged in a constant war with the soil and 
 the elements, and they will sometimes prove more than a 
 match for him. Is that any reason why yon should unfit 
 him still more for the struggle ? In 1835, prices were low 
 from the abundance of the harvest ; they are low now, be- 
 cause you have suddenly brought against the agriculturist 
 the granaries of the world. Your argument only goes to 
 this — that, because he is liable to temporary distress, there- 
 fore you will create for him a distress that ghall be perma- 
 nent; and that since he complains of other elements which, 
 in certain seasons, conspire against continuous prosperity 
 to his labour, he has no right to complain when you add a 
 new one which threatens, in all seasons, to render labour 
 without hope of its reward. Because a man has groaned 
 aloud in a fit of the gout, is it a reason that he should not 
 complain if he is dosed to death by ratsbane and arsenic ? 
 
 But competition is to do wonders ! Competition does 
 much when the competitors are fairly pitted, and I grant 
 that there is some truth in the old boast that, if one 
 Englishman is not a match for three Frenchmen, at least 
 he will try his best to be so ; but you do not raise the spirit 
 — you crush it — if the odds are thoroughly unequal. You 
 may stimulate the combative nature of the Englishman if 
 you set three Frenchmen against him ; but if, in addition 
 to the Frenchmen, you add the Dane, the German, the 
 American, the Russian, the Pole, the stoutest Anglo-Saxon 
 who ever existed is likely to give up the battle. To tell 
 the British agriculturist, whose most triumphant marvels 
 of skill have been shown in extracting rich crops from the 
 fens of Lincolnshire or the sands of ^Norfolk, that he must 
 compete with the most fertile corn soils of the globe — that, 
 met at all sides by excisemen and tax-collectors, he must 
 compete with men free from those drawbacks on his profits 
 — that, having literally thrown upon him the burden of 
 two-thirds of all the poor of his country, he must compete 
 with men to whom a poor-rate is unknown, and who have 
 no check either from the charity of the Legislature or the 
 habits of the labourer upon the minimum of wages — is to 
 tell him that from which his common sense revolts, and 
 which only insults, with the insinuation of cowardice, the 
 courage which you deprive of all hope. 
 
 The cotton manufacturer, you say, does not require PrO- 
 
130 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 tection. Why should the manufacturer of corn? Just 
 an egregious query ! If, where ten pieces of cotton were 
 demanded before, I ask the cotton manufacturer to pro- 
 duce me a hundred, or I must cease to pay him any price 
 for the ten pieces that remunerate his labour, he most 
 thankfully accepts the order, and the hundred pieces are 
 produced. There is no limit to the supply that, by the 
 help of the steam-engine and the coal which the mines be- 
 neath his own soil afford to the mechanism he employs — 
 no limit to the supply that he can yield to your demand ; 
 but if I say to the corn manufacturer, the agriculturist, 
 " Where you grew five quarters of wheat to your acre, you 
 must now grow twenty ; or you cannot be paid the price 
 that remunerates the production of the five" — can the 
 agriculturist make the same answer ? Can the clod-crusher 
 and harrow wring from the land more than the land can 
 bear ? Gan the manure that the farmer lays on the soil 
 give to the plough the horse-power that coal gives to the 
 steam-engine ? The difference between the two is plain 
 and obvious. The supply of the cotton pieces is inex- 
 haustible, of the acres is limited. The extra demand upon 
 the one is wealth, upon the other is ruin. 
 
 " Farm high," you say — " Farm high ! " and there ends 
 all your philosophy of relief. To farm high means keep 
 plenty of stock, and buy plenty of artificial manure ; in 
 other words, increase your gross exjDenditure in order to 
 increase your net income — adventure your capital in the 
 hope o£ a return. Excellent advice ! As a landowner, it 
 is not my interest to gainsay it. But allow, at least, that 
 two things are necessary to induce even men so abtuse as, 
 in your superior wit, you deem the poor farmer, to follow 
 your recommendation. First, you must not diminish the 
 capital; and, secondly, you must allow the speculator a 
 reasonable hope that a return is likely to follow the expendi- 
 ture. But, even if I were to grant assent to a favourite 
 saying of yours, that this is but the period of transition, it 
 is during that period of transition that you are wasting 
 rapidly away the very capital on which you are to depend, 
 in order to bring you through it. And I appeal to any 
 farmer if it be not true that, in cultivating his land, he is 
 now sacrificing his capital. It is not only that the tenant 
 has been paying, in some cases all, in nearly every case a 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 131 
 
 large portion, of his rent out of his capital, and not from 
 the returns of the farm ; but even yeomen and proprietors 
 (I don't mean the mere amateur farming squires, who, with 
 the laudable desire of encouraging the breed of stock, and 
 trying various experiments on Model Farms, rarely make 
 or look to a profit — but proprietors farming as practical 
 farmers, and with no rent to pay) find that the first drain 
 that is needed is the — drain on their bankers. 
 
 It is frightful to think of the degree of agricultural 
 capital lost for ever to the country, at the very time in 
 which you tell us that capital is our only chance of ultimate 
 salvation. 
 
 And if this high farming be indeed the sure remedy, 
 how happens it that those very districts where high farm- 
 ing has been carried to its acme, has extorted the admira- 
 tion of foreigners, and ranks amongst the triumphs of 
 national enterprise and skill— how comes it that those are 
 precisely the districts from which the complaints are the 
 loudest, and their justice most conceded by the Govern- 
 ment itself ? The Lothians, Norfolk, Lincolnshire — surely 
 you cannot say to the cultivators of these districts, when 
 they tell you that they are cultivating at a loss, and that 
 they anticipate their ruin: — " Gentlemen, go home and 
 farm high! " 
 
 I remember that in 1846 I predicted to the Lincolnshire 
 agriculturist that he, above most cultivators, would suffer, 
 and that his suffering would tell quickly upon the labour- 
 ing population, where, in other counties, the distress of 
 the farmer would be slow in reaching the labourer. " It 
 is," I then said, "in proportion to the cost upon the soil, 
 and not to the quality of the produce grown upon it, that 
 the farmer will suffer by a fall in price below profits. You, 
 who produce such crops by artificial manures, who consume 
 so much upon guano and bones, you will be the first to 
 find how small and minute would be the benefit of any 
 reduction in rent compared to your great cost in culti- 
 vating. And as free competition must affect the gross 
 profits of your land, so the larger the expenses in propor- 
 tion to the profits, why, the greater you must be the 
 sufferers in any great fall of prices. Suppose A. B. has a 
 certain farm, for which he pays £300 a-year, and has for 
 his own profit as tenant £300 a-year also, but his land, 
 
 k 2 
 
13-2 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 being not originally fertile, is brought into high cultivation 
 by artificial means, and it therefore requires an expendi- 
 ture of three times the net profit, viz. £900, in order to 
 yield the said rent to the landlord, and the said return to 
 the farmer: in all, the sum risked in the cultivation is 
 £1500 a-year. But suppose C. D. has another farm, on 
 which he too pays £300 a-year ; has also £300 a-year for 
 his personal profit ; but, the soil being light and fertile, 
 requires an expenditure of only £400 to realise the said 
 rent, and return the said farmer's profit : in all, the sum 
 risked on this farm is but £1000 a-year. 
 
 It is perfectly clear, therefore, that the loss occasioned 
 by low prices on these two farms — though at the . same 
 rent, and yielding at fair prices the same average profit — ■ 
 is not the same : the loss upon one affects an annnal 
 expenditure of £1500, upon the other of only £1000. 
 
 And it is clear, also, that in this case the greater loss 
 may fall upon the tenant who farms the highest. Now, if 
 the " strain on his capital compels him to withdraw a cer- 
 tain amount of the labour he had hitherto employed, or if 
 he devotes more attention so some produce demanding less 
 labour than wheat, it is clear, also, that the labourer will 
 be affected by the loss on the higher farming in proportion 
 to the greater loss of the farmer." It has proved thus : — 
 And while the farmer of Lincolnshire is so great a sufferer, 
 you find also that in Lincolnshire the President of the 
 Board of Trade himself confessed that pauperism had 
 largely increased. 
 
 We have been told that such lands, not paying the cost 
 of culture, should go out of cultivation. But much of 
 these lands, in the triumph of art over soil, is the very 
 perfection of husbandry. Condemn the fens of Lincoln- 
 shire, the sands of Norfolk, to go out of cultivation ! It 
 would be to condemn at once enterprise and skill — con- 
 demn the noble conquest of man over matter. " Return to 
 pasture ! " cry some. Return to comparative barbarism ! 
 Return to pasture, and throw hundreds and thousands of 
 labourers out of employ ! — diminish the product that is the 
 wealth of your country ! — and relinquish large tracts from 
 which the industry and art of successive generations have 
 extracted the food of men — to such desolate sheep walks 
 and rabbit-haunts as a Ceorl of old might have tended for 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 133 
 
 Athelstar.es and Cerdics ! Is it you, the friends of labour 
 and civilisation, of the progress of nations — is it for you 
 to say this ? Let me not think it. 
 
 Farm high ! Farm high ! I agree "with. you. Only 
 help, only encourage us to do so ! Away with the fear of 
 throwing land out of cultivation, and back into pasture. 
 Away with it, I say ! But, Manufacturers ! if we must 
 throw aside the staff, and yet keep the fardel, do not ask 
 us to perform in a day the pilgrimage which it has taken 
 your class years to accomplish. The last protection was 
 not taken from cotton itself until, by the avowal of the 
 Cotton Manufacturers, it was no longer required ! Farm 
 high ! Farm high ! Yes, but do not forget, that before you 
 affected farming operations by your Corn Law, you affected 
 them by the tariff introducing foreign cattle and meat. 
 And I am sure that I speak the sentiments of a very large 
 proportion of the most spirited agriculturists when I say, 
 that you could not have more interfered with the success of 
 the experiment which was to depend npon high farming to 
 bring us through the "transition " consequent on the re- 
 peal of the Corn Law, than by the previous discouragement 
 to high farming in the loss upon cattle. Many a high 
 farmer, dependent on his turnip and bean crops, looked less 
 to the yield of corn than the price of his mutton and beef. 
 1 do not say that the sudden fall in the price of meat is not 
 a great boon to the consumer ; but it obviously entailed a 
 heavy loss on the farmer, on the very article which con- 
 stitutes the pith and root of high farming, and at the very 
 time when he had need of all his resources to face the prices 
 to which grain has been since subjected. The object of 
 the high farmer is to sell off every year large quantities of 
 fat meat ; without this, it is not high farming. And if he 
 does this at a loss, why, of course, his loss must be great 
 in proportion to his obedience to your command, " Farm 
 high, and don't trouble us." * 
 
 Nevertheless, I neither hope nor ask that you should 
 
 * Thus Adam Smith, in one of his most valuable chapters, (Book I. Chap. 
 XL,) proves briefly and clearly the effect of the price of cattle upon the cul- 
 tivation of land, and says, "*0f all the commercial advantages, however, 
 which Scotland has derived from the union with England, this rise in the 
 price of cattle is perhaps the greatest. It has not only raised the value 
 <5f all highland estates, but it has been perhaps the principal eause of tb« 
 improvement of the low eo^ntryt" 
 
134 LETTEES TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 alter the tariff ; and by degrees I believe that the farmer 
 will, more than he now expects, readjust his speculations 
 on cattle. If he must sell the fat cattle cheaper, he can 
 also buy the lean cheaper ; and to the farmer now entering 
 on business, there will be far less demand on his capital in 
 the first purchase of stock. But as yet the difference be- 
 tween the purchase of the lean cattle (especially bullocks), 
 and the price at which the farmer sells them when fattened, 
 does not, spite of all reductions on oilcake and forage, cover 
 the costs of feed — as yet, therefore, he still is a loser in 
 proportion to the capital so employed. And for the genera- 
 tion with whom you are dealing, it is impossible to deny 
 that the fall in the price of meat * was a terrible blow to 
 the resources with which high farming was to meet the 
 repeal of the Corn Law. Excellently well has the terse old 
 Satirist described the present condition of the farmer who 
 cultivates with spirit, and sells at a loss : — 
 
 -"Jam crescit ager, jam. crescit ovile, 
 
 Jam dabitur — jam jam ! donee deceptus et exspes 
 Nequicquam fundo suspiret nummus in imo ! 
 
 " Now teems the field, and now augments the fold ; 
 What gains await ! what harvests shall be told ! 
 Now — the return — now — now ! ' Alas ! ' he sighs, 
 * So low the prices — hang it, they must rise ! ' 
 ' Try Lawes' manure — ' .... He tries it. ' Well the grain ? ' 
 ' Good.' — ' Then why sad ? ' 'It don't manure Mark Lane ! ' 
 Thus the crops flourish, thus the funds decay, 
 Till the last pound — improves itself away ! " 
 
 No ! Just before the change in your policy there was, 
 indeed, every prospect that could gratify those who advocate 
 agricultural improvement. Under this system of protection, 
 now so condemned, British agriculture had made the most 
 rapid and striking advances. Mr. Porter, in adducing his 
 calculations of our produce in grain, and in showing in 
 how small a degree this country had hitherto been de- 
 pendent on foreigners, in ordinary seasons, for a due supply 
 of our staple article of food, says : — " It is not, however, 
 with this view that these calculations are brought forward, 
 but rather to prove how exceedingly great the increase of 
 agricultural production must have been to have thus effect- 
 
 * The large importation of cured meat has had a greater effect upon prices 
 here than the importation of cattle. 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 135 
 
 tially kept in a state of independence a population which 
 has increased with so great a degree of rapidity." 
 
 Just before the change, nothing conld equal the zeal and 
 cordiality with which farmers and squires were entering 
 into all that could increase our produce, and improve our 
 agricultural art. And now how inert and lifeless are all 
 the discussions which then provoked so keen and animated 
 an interest ! I appeal to any man conversant with agricul- 
 tural meetings, or what is contemptuously called " the 
 Agricultural Mind," whether all that relates to scientific 
 experiment has not receded before the dread of this com- 
 petition which you tell ns should stimulate science. Nay, 
 even those vexed questions between squire and tenant, out 
 of which our common enemies would make subjects of 
 quarrel, such as the removal of superfluous field and hedge- 
 row timber, the fair opening of land to sun and air, the 
 destruction of rabbits and hares, and, where guarantee is 
 given of the capital and spirit of the farmer, the system of 
 securer tenure by lease — all questions that were about then 
 amicably to be settled, are now comparatively lost sight of 
 in the general feeling, " Pooh, these are trifles \ can we 
 continue to live by the land we till ? " 
 
 I say, fearlessly, that whereas a moderate competition, 
 such as a fixed duty might produce, would have been a 
 stimulant to improvement : improvement has been arrested 
 by a competition carried to an extent which does not 
 stimulate energy, but engender despondence. 
 
 "But we never contended, never expected," say my Lord 
 John Russell and our sympathising enemy, the Chancellor 
 of the Exchequer, " that either landowner or occupier would 
 not go through a sharp period of distress ; ultimately both 
 will profit by the general prosperity of all classes, and the 
 increase of population. The weal of the country requires 
 the change from the old system. This is a Period of 
 Transition; you must go through it. Hold your tongues, 
 and Heaven be with you ! " 
 
 A Period of Transition. Well, but what to ? To the 
 ultimate growth of our population ? A prospect pleasing, 
 nc doubt, but exceediugly distant. The generation that 
 complains passes to the grave, while the generation that is 
 to redress the complaint emerges from the nursery. We 
 have not only to look to the growth of population here, 
 
136 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 but the growth of corn throughout that small occupant of 
 space commonly called The Earth. And while we are 
 waiting for the little Johns and Thomases at present sup- 
 plied at the pap-boat, and with whom, as they rise inch by 
 inch, profits are to rise also, we are to continue to sell at a 
 loss, pay for the paupers our ranks will recruit, and the 
 gaols to which the transition is hurrying our footsteps — 
 transition to penury, to destitution, to despair, disaffection, 
 hatred of the Legislature which dooms us, and indifference 
 to the safety of the State, whose prosperity is invoked as 
 the cause of our own destitution. For this general pros- 
 perity is unwisely and invidiously held up to our eyes in 
 contrast to our sufferings. And when you tell Hodge, the 
 farmer, that he ought to be extremely well satisfied because 
 Smith, the calico-printer, is growing a rich man at his 
 expense, my own private and honest opinion is, that you 
 are making Hodge a very dangerous enemy to Smith. I 
 confess, that if I had to reconcile a man to the contempla- 
 tion of bankruptcy, I should not say to him, " My dear 
 sir, be comforted with your present state of transition by 
 the gratifying survey of your neighbour's prosperity. You 
 grow thin, it is true ; but how plump is the gentleman next 
 door ? You, to save yourself from the Gazette, are selling 
 off at dead loss your stock in trade ; but then, how agree- 
 able it is for others to buy your articles a bargain ! Think 
 of that, and be consoled. Instead of selfishly regarding 
 your own poverty, fix your delighted eyes on the wealth 
 of all the rivals who are buying for sixpence what it cost 
 you a shilling to produce." Human nature is human 
 nature ; and that is not the way to soothe its sorrows or 
 soften its passions. But, you say, this general prosperity 
 will ultimately benefit us as a part of the public. We deny 
 that this prosperity can long be general, if you continue to 
 destroy what all true political economists acknowledge to 
 be the primary source of the national wealth. A transition 
 state ! — a transition in which so vast an interest is con- 
 cerned ! You allow it must be one of distress ; will you do 
 nothing to render it less violent and abrupt ? I have 
 granted your premises, that a change in the old law was 
 rendered necessary. I have no desire to return to large 
 protective duties, or the principle of a sliding-scale. But 
 m there no medium ? Would not a moderate fixed duty 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 137 
 
 secure the true objects at which, your policy would aim, and 
 gradually bring about the transition to which it is neces- 
 sary to subject so, large a class of your population, so im- 
 mense an amount of your national wealth ? The transition, 
 even then, will be sharp enough. But you will at least 
 give to it the consoling effect of your obvious desire to 
 sympathise and conciliate. You will appear to be dealing 
 amicably with your own countrymen. You will appear to 
 remember that when you say, " Sacrifice your interests to 
 those of the community," the men you address can be 
 counted as millions in that community itself ! By a fixed 
 duty you obtain — I rejDeat it — the great principle you con- 
 tend for. The sliding-scale checks or forbids importation 
 at certain prices. The fixed duty leaves the market always 
 open, with but a slight toll on the foreigner — a toll to 
 which he will soon, when it is regular and unalterable, con- 
 form his dealings, and will as little operate against his 
 bringing his corn habitually to your ports, as the toll which 
 the farmer pays on the turnpike to the neighbouring town 
 operates against his conveying his droves there for sale. 
 A low fixed tax upon the seller, to whom you extend a new 
 range of customers, will never be found to interfere with 
 his business ; it diminishes a little his profits, and the com- 
 petition to which you admit a world will compel him to 
 take that diminution to himself, rather than add to the cost 
 of the article — except in times when prices are nnusually 
 low. I say, indeed, that a small fixed duty, accompanied 
 by a proportional drawback, must be better for all classes 
 of labour ; for it must render prices much less fluctuating 
 than that total repeal of all duty which you have enacted. 
 And great, yet brief, fluctuation in prices is the worst de- 
 moraliser you can create in the habits of your people. In 
 whatever country corn has been imported free, I will under- 
 take to show that fluctuations have been more extreme than 
 ever they have been in England, even under the worst 
 operations of the old excessive duties ; * whereas — I here 
 
 * Whatever the faults of the old Com Law, fluctuations in price, taken by 
 a series of years, were less extreme in England than in any other country. 
 From 1815 to 1838, the highest variation in England was 140 per cent. ^V'e 
 all cried out pretty loudly at this variation ; but what was it elsewhere dur- 
 ing the same period r 
 
 In Bordeaux 260 per cent, 
 
 In liottenkm , < < . 5 295 ,, 
 
188 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 once more quote Mr. M'Culloch — " it may, we think, be 
 concluded, on unassailable grounds, that were the ports 
 constantly open under a moderate fixed duty and an 
 equivalent drawback, extreme fluctuation of prices would 
 be very rare." 
 
 "But," say our adversaries, "why should we think that 
 these prices don't pay the cost of culture ? Did not you 
 grumble years ago at prices which now seem a dream ? 
 At the end of the war, did you not contend for eighty 
 shillings a quarter, where you would now be rejoiced to 
 contemplate fifty ? " 
 
 And that cry comes from gentlemen who call themselves 
 political economists ! Why, what, according to your theory, 
 is the origin of rent ? — (I mean in the scientific sense of 
 the word.) Does it not always presuppose " some anterior 
 soil for which no rent is paid, as a test of comparison? " 
 "Is it not the excess of produce upon any given quality of 
 soil, by comparison with another quality worse than itself? " 
 Thus, "as inferior land is brought into cultivation, rent 
 rises, and with rent prices," — "the higher price of corn 
 being caused by the necessity under which every increasing 
 population is placed of cultivating inferior land, or of being 
 starved." 
 
 Well, then, during the war, every inducement was given 
 to bring under cultivation lands previously waste. It was 
 the avowed object of the Legislature to encourage to the ut- 
 most the home production of food. Vast tracts of land were 
 thus reclaimed and tilled — an immense capital thus buried 
 in the soil. Necessarily, prices rose at that time, assisted 
 by a long depreciation of the currency ; capital was invested 
 on the calculation of such prices ; and while the expense of 
 bringing into tillage fens and heaths was at its height, no 
 
 In Prussia Proper . . . . 212 per cent. 
 In Brandenburg .... 248 ,, 
 
 In Saxony _ 269 „ 
 
 In "Westphalia . . . . 334 „ 
 
 Any comparison between protected England and unprotected Holland, as 
 to fluctuations, was so in favour of the former that the Free-Traders were 
 forced to push to the extreme an explanation, that it was because England 
 was protected that the prices in Holland so fluctuated ; — an argument that, 
 so exaggerated, is obviouly untenable. In Athens, under free importation, 
 fluctuations to 300 per cent, were common. And during those centuries, 
 when in England grain was unprotected, variations were so great that there 
 were seasons when even the middle class could not purchase bread. 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 139 
 
 doubt the farmer really required much, higher remunerative 
 prices to sustain his engagements, and save him from 
 bankruptcy, than at a period when this inferior land had 
 been rendered artificially fertile, and produced, perhaps, 
 thirty bushels per acre where it bad before produced ten. 
 I believe it to be perfectly true that 80-5. then would have 
 been required to remunerate the farmer, where now 50s. 
 might suffice. But the Corn Law of 1815, in forbidding 
 free importation till home-grown wheat reached that price, 
 was no doubt most absurd and impolitic ; it held out a 
 hope that could not be realised. Two years of extraordi- 
 nary bigb prices — 1817 and 1818 — induced rasb and sudden 
 returns to the inferior tillages, before gradually aban- 
 doned. Bold risks of fresh capital in agricultural im- 
 provements, " for improvements almost always follow a rise 
 in prices," and the increased supply thus obtained, combined 
 with plentiful seasons, sunk the price of wheat six years 
 afterwards (in 1824) to an average of 43s. 3d. I do not 
 argue for duties like these, nor duties that are based on a 
 similar system ; but it is not the less true that the Legis- 
 lature, during the war, had encouraged such applications 
 of capital to husbandry as high prices for a certain period 
 (till the return to the capital began to show itself) alone 
 could repay — and that large numbers of farmers were left 
 broken and bankrupt by the energy and enterprise which 
 (honour to their spirit, and, alas, for their calamities!) 
 added millions upon millions to the wealth of their 
 country.* Very different are the circumstances under 
 which the farmer now assesses the average of bis remune- 
 rative prices. The present race of agriculturists are 
 profiting by the improvements effected and the sacrifices 
 undergone by their predecessors. You have no longer to 
 
 * " The progress of agricultural improvement, which, during the late war, 
 had been extremely rapid, was retarded for a few years by the sudden and 
 heavy fall of prices that took place after the peace ; but since 1825, it has 
 been rapid beyond all former precedent. Estimating the increase of popula- 
 tion in Great Britain since 1770 at eight millions, and taking the average 
 animal expenditure of each individual on agricultural produce at £8, it will 
 be seen that the immense siun of sixty-four millions a-year has been added 
 to the value of the agricultural produce of Great Britain since 1770." — 
 M'CulIoch's Appendix to Smith's Wealth of Nations— Art. Com Laws 
 and Corn Trade. And it is the class that, in less than a century, en- 
 riched the nation by sixty-four millions a-year, which is to be represented 
 as possessing an interest adverse to the community ! 
 
140 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 calculate the first cost of bringing waste lands under tillage, 
 but the after cost of maintaining them ; and if you take soils 
 brought into the finest cultivation, from which now all is ob- 
 tained that can be wrung from them, and find that, despite 
 all that the economists effected by the tariff, the present 
 prices cannot pay for the cost, what prospect remains but 
 the retrogression of husbandry, or the ruin of at least the 
 generation that have buried their substance in the furrows 
 traced by the ploughshare, and to whom "persisting is as 
 fatal as give o'er ? " 
 
 Here, my dear John, arise a new crowd of opponents ; 
 for while the more popular and numerous sect of our ad- 
 versaries rejoice in their convictions that prices must, on 
 the long run, continue at least thus low, another, more 
 serene and lofty — disdaining what Mr. Sidney Herbert desig- 
 nates " the clap-trap cry of cheap bread" — reply, "But why 
 deem that the repeal of the Corn Law will have this effect 
 upon prices ? Why believe that there is any connection 
 between the prices you suffer from, and the importation we 
 invite ? This year there are exceptional causes at work, 
 et cetera ! et cetera !« Plough away, and sow on ! Depend on 
 it, that, take an average of years, all things will come right, 
 and prices be no lower than they were before the change."* 
 
 Thus asserts my Lord Grey — an authority that I always 
 hear with respect, and question with diffidence ; for Lord 
 Grey is an original thinker, no parrot repeater of phrases, 
 and certainly no trite dealer in clap-traps. But while he 
 maps out the air, I place before me the chart of the world; 
 and, without pausing to inquire if the causes of agricultural 
 distress are this year exceptional or not, I see on that chart 
 all reason to think that every year fresh causes must rise 
 as the foreigner brings fresh lands into tillage, opens new 
 roads to the sea, and widens the range of the taxless and 
 
 * In an average of years I don't doubt that there will be found, under 
 wholly unlimited importation, sudden, brief, and excessive rises in price ; 
 but these will be found more hurtful than profitable to the generality of 
 farmers. They will profit only monied speculators, with other resources than 
 their land wherefrom to meet periodical payments, whether of rents, rates, or 
 tithes, and weekly payments of labour. They may come at a time when the 
 general farmer has nothing to sell, and operate only against him in what he 
 has to buy and to pay away. They may help the landlord in keeping up his 
 rents, and the clergyman in his corn commutation, by a reference to averages j 
 but to the farmer they will be worse than uselessi 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 141 
 
 greedy competitors, with whom your poor farmers, dear 
 John, are to sharpen scythe and wit to contend. I have 
 said before, that the prospect of such competition, wholly 
 unmitigated, does not stimnlate the British producer — it 
 only disheartens him. Bat it is clear whom it does stimu- 
 late, and that is the — Foreigner * And when I have been 
 told that among these special causes is the importation 
 from France, which your wise men did not choose to foresee 
 — why, I know as a fact that, the moment you opened your 
 ports, you suddenly and marvellously increased in France 
 that impetus in agricultural improvement which you as 
 suddenly checked at home; that a large increase of corn as 
 pure surplus over habitual consumption has been obtained, 
 and is in active progression on the lands of that country ; 
 that whatever France wants not for its own population it 
 will sell, no matter the price, for all beyond consumption 
 is gain ; and sell here, for this is its only market for the 
 surplus your bribe has created. 
 
 "No matter," says my Lord John; " be the prices of 
 corn high or low, all I contend for is, that it should be the 
 natural price !" — And therewith he is cheered. 
 
 Oh, my Lord John, that sophism might do very well for 
 the mere tyros in political economy, who exchange all 
 knowledge of the complex relations of men for the pedantry 
 of set terms and phrases ; but is it worthy a statesman of 
 your rank ? 
 
 Natural price ! — why, what is the natural price ? (id est, 
 the central price to which other prices are continually 
 gravitating). Adam Smith states it thus: — "When the 
 price of any commodity is neither more nor less than what 
 is sufficient to pay the rent of the land, the wages of the 
 labour, and the profits of the stock employed in raising, 
 preparing, and bringing it to market according to their 
 natural rates, the commodity is then sold for what may be 
 called its natural price." If that is what your lordship 
 means by a natural price, give us that, and we are satisfied 
 — it is exactly what we contend for. But if by natural 
 price you mean, that, by the introduction of a foreign 
 element, prices are to be reduced below their cost, such ceases 
 at once to be the natural price, scientifically treated ; for 
 the natural price means, as Adam Smith proceeds to define 
 it — what it costs the person who brings it to market, in- 
 
142 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 eluding his profit at the ordinary rate of profits — where ? 
 Five thousand miles off ? In Poland or Russia ? — ISTo ! — 
 " In his neighbourhood." * If you reply, " I mean by a 
 natural price that to which the competition, not of the 
 neighbour, but of the foreigner, five thousand miles off, 
 drives you down," I reply again, that if that is what you 
 mean, by the natural price — if you forget or disdain the 
 fact that the natural price varies in different communities 
 according to the varying degree of labour (i.e. capital) 
 employed to produce it — then, I say, with the natural 
 price, as you esteem it, give us at least a natural — taxa- 
 tion ! 
 
 A Latin author has pithily said :— 
 
 " Life is like swimming— lie fares the best who carries least weight about 
 hiin." 
 
 When Leander swam across the Hellespont, no doubt he 
 was in puris naturalibus ; but let us suppose that some ex- 
 perimental philosopher, a lover of Nature, coaxed a rival 
 to swim against Leander, burthened with tunic and cloak, 
 two great stones in his pocket, and a couple of paupers 
 tied to his back, I don't think it would have been quite 
 fair for the sage to say to the rival, " Swim away, my good 
 friend ; I have no doubt that you'll outswim Leander; but 
 whether you do, or whether you don't, all I can say is, that 
 I'll not lend you a cock-boat, nor throw you a tub, for 
 there's nothing so natural as swimming." 
 
 "Natural ! yes," the poor rival might gasp, ere he "gra- 
 vitated to the centre" — in other words, went to the bottom 
 — "natural to that fellow Leander, for he has nothing but 
 nature to carry. But I've got a tunic and cloak, two great 
 stones in my pockets, and two paupers as heavy as lead on 
 my back. Is that the natural way to swim over the Helle- 
 spont ? " 
 
 Leander gains the shore ; that is natural ! The com- 
 petitor is drowned ; that also is natural ! The philosopher 
 contemplates the result with philanthropical pleasure, and 
 walks off to his dinner, saying, " What stimulates exertion 
 like rivalry ? But, Jupiter ! how could you suffer that 
 man to be drowned in gravitating to the centre ? There is 
 nothing so natural as swimming ! " 
 
 * Adam Smith, Wealth of 'Nations ', Booki., c. 7. 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 143 
 
 "Well, well! Talk as you will," cry those gentlemen, 
 who only think of a farmer as an abstract proposition, and 
 who ha^e the same vague idea of a landlord that the poets 
 had of a harpy — " Talk as you will ; if the landed interest 
 does suffer, and very likely it does, it is all one to the 
 farmer. Mr. Ricardo, a great thinker, and a very eminent 
 stockbroker, and therefore, of course, practically acquainted 
 with all details upon farming, assures us that the farmer 
 himself, honest fellow, can't be any ways injured. It is 
 only a loss to the landlords. They must lower their rents; 
 and there will be an end of all grievance." 
 
 Happy, indeed, could the question be so easily settled ! 
 Yet, even then, not so light an affliction to the community 
 itself as these gentlemen too rashly imagine. Reduction 
 of rents cannot happen without the depreciation of the 
 property from which the rents are derived — a depreciation 
 of so vast a proportion of the real property of the country 
 — a depreciation of the land throughout Great Britain and 
 Ireland ! Would that be so paltry an evil ? Would the 
 evil affect the landlord alone ? Does he not spend these 
 ' rents of his amongst the community ? Can you impoverish 
 the man who spends money without impoverishing those 
 upon whom he spends it ? When you talk of this reduc- 
 tion so lightly, do you sufficiently consider that a reduction 
 of rents is a very different thing in amount from a dimi- 
 nution, nominally the same, on an income derived from the 
 Funds ? and how largely what may seem but a moderate 
 reduction must operate on the surplus the landlord has to 
 spend upon trade ? Suppose the landlord gives back to 
 his tenants 10 per cent, on his gross rental : when you 
 consider all his ordinary drawbacks as a landowner — the 
 tithes that he pays for the grounds, &c. in his own occupa- 
 tion — his own poor-rates, and other local burdens — the in- 
 cumbrances (I will not say mortgages, but such as probably 
 some jointure or annuity, provision for younger children, 
 &c.) with which most estates are more or less charged, that 
 10 per cent, on his gross rental will probably amount to at 
 least 20 per cent, on his net income.* And he must be an 
 imprudent and reckless vampire indeed if he do not in- 
 
 * I do not believe there are ten properties in a hundred where a reduction 
 of 10 per cent, on the gross rental could be set down at so low a figure aa 
 20 per cent, on the net income. 
 
144 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 stantly reduce his dealings with his neighbour, and spend 
 so much the less upon some other classes of the community. 
 But if it should come to a time when the landlord must 
 reduce on his gross rental 25 per cent., and must face 
 the enormous effect which that would have on his net in- 
 come, what trade in the kingdom would not sensibly feel 
 the loss of so large and necessary a retrenchment of expen- 
 diture upon the part of the landed proprietors of the 
 country ? That a considerable proportion of proprie- 
 tors would go abroad is a natural supposition ; and, in 
 addition to the pecuniary loss thus entailed on the general 
 community, there would also be that social loss in our 
 rural districts occasioned by numerous absentees amongst 
 a class whose members, whatever their faults, have never 
 been accused by any reasonable and fair antagonist of in- 
 difference to the welfare of those who live immediately 
 around them. 
 
 And what is this class of men, whose affliction it is so 
 pleasant to contemplate ? What injury have they inflicted 
 on our social system, or what inroads have they made on 
 our freedom, that we should cry with complacency, u No 
 evil ; they alone are the victims ? " They are the men of 
 whom all true political economists have spoken with grateful 
 reverence ; whose prosperity the fathers of the science have 
 regarded as the paramount interest in the State ; they are 
 men to whom the history of this land assigns the chief 
 merit when a tyrant was to be humbled, or a f oeman defied. 
 " While," says thus, with noble truth, a Free-Trader him- 
 self, " while other aristocracies have been the sycophants of 
 courts, they have borne the chief burdens of the State ; 
 they have given to the State their service, their blood, and 
 their treasure." # Take we the loftiest in birth and pos- 
 sessions, are they banded together, like oligarchs in Venice, 
 as the opponents to progress ; or, like those Greek nobles 
 justly branded by Aristotle, have they entered into vows 
 against the Demos — the people ? No : wherever you turn 
 to our records, in the front of each march towards social 
 improvement and political freedom, your chiefs have been 
 ever the landed proprietors of England, or the children 
 whom they have reared. Through the cycle of progress 
 they stand out in each era — Magna Charta, Protestant Re- 
 
 * Speech cf the Et. Hon. Sidney Herbert, Feb. 9, 1851. 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 145 
 
 formation, the first resistance to Charles the First, the mar- 
 tyrdom under Charles the Second, the Revolution of 
 1688, Catholic Emancipation, the Reform Bill — in each the 
 pioneers and achievers have been the sons of the soil. And 
 even where, as in this very repeal of the Corn Law, their 
 virtual representatives in the Upper Chamber have yielded 
 from what you assert to be fear, the fear at least was gene- 
 rous and noble — the fear of patriots and citizens — lest they 
 might seem to oppose what the statesman they trusted had 
 told them the people demanded, and hazard the peace of 
 their country by even a suspicion that their policy could 
 be debased to their pecuniary interests. And who, in this 
 victory, on which you now plume yourselves, who were the 
 chiefs before a Peel was converted, or a Cobden arose ? 
 Who ? A Villiers, a Fitzwilliam, a Spenser, a Russell, a 
 Seymour, a Howard. And a glorious thing it is for Eng- 
 land that the aristocracy thus never stands distinct and 
 apart in one phalanx for interest and privilege ; that it is 
 so indissolubly fused and commingled with all shades of 
 the people, that men as powerful and noble are found on 
 the popular side as can grace the patrician : and when you 
 would seize, as some tangible substance to confront and 
 oppose, the aristocratic element in our civilisation, it escapes 
 and eludes you, lost in the free air that you breathe, or but 
 seen in the light that encircles you ! 
 
 Yet it is not the titled aristocracy of our order from whom 
 you derive the more ordinary social advantages ; it is rather 
 the men by whom the loss that you so placidly contemplate 
 will be chiefly felt — the smaller proprietors, amongst whom 
 is subdivided a far greater share of the land ; who reside, 
 for the most part, on the domains that they improve, 
 amongst the population that their surplus immediately 
 supports or enriches ; the class that we call the Gentry, 
 who in other countries are ISTobles — in this, more proud of 
 their place with the Commons. It is they who communi- 
 cate to the middle class in which they hold station that 
 hard^ patriotism which is inseparably connected with 
 attachment to the soil, the notions of honour, of stout in- 
 dependence, of just pride of character, of contempt for all 
 meanness, that constitute what we mean by the word, for 
 which the tongue of no other land has a synonym, Gen- 
 tleman. For myself, I hold it my proudest distinction to 
 
 L 
 
146 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 belong by habit and profession to a class even nobler than 
 they- — and to which they have largely contributed — the 
 Labourers of Literature ; but, next to that honour, I am 
 not ashamed to confess the pride which I cherish that by 
 birth and rearing I belong to the owners of Land. And if 
 in my childhood I was ever reminded of the centuries in 
 which my forefathers had dwelt on the soil, it was only to 
 impress on me the lesson of deeper love to my country, and 
 warm me to that ambition to render her service, and link 
 my name with her language, which has coloured my life 
 and dictated my labours. 
 
 To the class of gentry the words of the sternest of all 
 political economists emphatically apply : — " It is also in a 
 peculiar manner the business of those whose object it is to 
 ascertain the means of raising human happiness to its 
 greatest height, to consider which is that class of men by 
 whom the greatest happiness is enjoyed. It will not pro- 
 bably be disputed that they who are raised above solicitude 
 for the means of subsistence and respectability, without 
 being exposed to the vices and follies of great riches ; the 
 men of middling fortunes ; in short, the men to whom 
 society is indebted for its greatest improvements, are the 
 men who, having their time at their own disposal, freed 
 from the necessity of manual labour, subject to no man's 
 authority, and engaged in the most delightful occupations, 
 obtain, as a class, the greatest sum of human enjoyment. 
 For the happiness, therefore, as well as the ornament of 
 our nature, it is peculiarly desirable that a class of this de- 
 scription should form as large a proportion of the com- 
 munity as possible. For this purpose it is absolutely neces- 
 sary that population should not, by a forced accumulation 
 of capital, be made to go on till the return to capital from 
 the land is very small. To enable a considerable portion of 
 the community to enjoy the advantages of leisure, the return 
 to capital should be large." * 
 
 Mr. Mill is here arguing on the proportions of population 
 and capital ; but the argument holds equally good to the 
 object in view — viz., a return of capital from the land : and 
 whether that return be diminished by a law of nature or a 
 law of Parliament, the same evil is created, so far as affects 
 the happiness of society. 
 
 * Mill, Elements of Political Economy. 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 147 
 
 But would, indeed, that the loss were, or could be con- 
 fined to the landowner ! Can any man go into one country 
 market, or one farmer's club, and still adopt so prepos 
 terous a fallacy ? 
 
 Believe me, that farmers, whatever contempt may be 
 entertained for their understanding, have the same know- 
 ledge where the shoe pinches, which characterises all 
 human beings who stand upon shoe-leather. To use an 
 Italian proverb — 
 
 f ' The tongue touches where the tooth aches." 
 
 And were it but a question for the landlord, the rural 
 districts would resound, not with cries of Protection, but 
 entreaty or clamour for the reduction of rent. Yet who 
 does not know that the most ardent of Protectionist land- 
 lords scarcely represents the passionate fervour of the 
 occupier ; that, obstinate as you may think the county 
 members in Parliament, they rather repress than excite 
 the impatient groan of their constituents ! and that, 
 wherever the corn-law agitator has now the satisfaction to 
 point to some rancour professed by the farmers against 
 the landlords, it is where the farmers contend that the 
 landlords do not sufficiently enter into their grievance, and 
 can never sufficiently participate their loss ? 
 
 Any one in the least acquainted with the principle upon 
 which farm rents are assessed, must know how little any 
 possible reduction of rent can meet the depression com- 
 plained of in the price of agricultural produce. I will 
 endeavour to put this clear before the reason of the un- 
 initiated. 
 
 We have nothing here to do with the scientific theory of 
 rent ; and I suspect that many popular errors, which Bicardo 
 would have been the first to condemn, have arisen from 
 confounding the distinction between rent, scientifically 
 defined, and rents, as practically existing.* 
 
 * No writer, perhaps, is more subjected to dangerous misinterpretation by 
 inconsiderate readers than Mr. Eicardo. He is constantly applying scienti- 
 fically, or according to his peculiar use of terms, words that convey to the 
 general reader totally different meanings. Thus, in his whole Chapter on 
 Profits, upon a matter of the most yital importance, he has misled many into 
 opinions wholly at variance with positive facts. "Why ? Because, as Mr, 
 M'Culloch remarks, "he did not in his investigations in that chapter, 
 understand the term in the sense in which it is understood in the ordinary 
 business of life. In his own point of view, his doctrine with respect to 
 
 L 2 
 
148 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 Rent is a thing unknown in a newly- settled country — 
 nay, in a country where only the best soils are cultivated. 
 It begins when cultivation is extended to inferior lands ; 
 it increases according to the extent in which such lands are 
 brought into tillage, and diminishes according as their 
 culture is relinquished. Such is the theory generally 
 adopted by political economists. 
 
 Rent, scientifically considered, is the sum paid for the 
 inherent and natural properties of the soil, and is entirely 
 distinct in its origin from the sums paid for all buildings, 
 improvements, and local advantages produced by civilisa- 
 tion, (such as the neighbourhood of towns and markets, 
 roads, facilities of carriage, &c.) 
 
 But as it is utterly impossible to distinguish in practice 
 between this original rent paid solely for the soil, when 
 first brought under the plough, and the sum added thereon 
 for all subsequent improvements — so, in every instance, at 
 present, the two are confounded under the general word 
 rent. And the sum paid to that landlord, under that title, 
 is assessed on all the profits of the farm, natural or acquired. 
 Now let us see how, in practice, any surveyor or land agent 
 apportions the rent, (using the word in the popular sense, 
 as all practical men understand it.*) 
 
 When a farm is to be let, and the rent to be assessed, 
 the first calculation ie the gross profits, and the next 
 the outgoings and the probable expenses of cultivation. 
 There, then, remains the net produce, from which the 
 farmer takes one share as the remuneration for his labour 
 and capital ; the landlord another share, including or de- 
 ducting the tithes. 
 
 Formerly the gross produce used to be divided into three 
 parts ; one-third allowed for the general expenses of farm- 
 ing, one for the farmer's maintenance and profit on capital, 
 and the third remaining was devoted to taxes, tithes, 
 assessments, and — rent. It would appear by the evidence 
 of Mr. Bradley, the eminent land-surveyor, before the Corn- 
 profit is unexceptionable ; but practically it is of little or no value, and may 
 lead, unless the sense in which he understood it be always kept in view, 
 to the wost erroneous conclusions." — 3PCalloch on Rent, appended to his 
 edition of Adam Smith. 
 
 * See Donaldson's corrected edition of Bayldon's Art of Valuing Rents 
 and Tillages, &c— (a deservedly popular and standard authority.) 
 
LETTERS TO J0HX BULL, ESQ. 149 
 
 mittee of the House of Lords on the Burdens of Land, 
 that this mode of apportionment still commonly exists in 
 Yorkshire. But the difference of localities, the nature of 
 soil, the proportions of grass-land, the distinction between 
 light soils and clay (so considerable when the relative ex- 
 penses of cultivation are estimated), all serve to render 
 more complicated what was formerly this simple mode of 
 computation ; and the improved cultivation of land, while 
 increasing the gross produce, increases also the expenses 
 of cultivating, As far as my own experience goes, I 
 should say that the gross produce was generally now 
 divided into five portions rather than three (unless where 
 land is very fertile), that three-fifths went to the expenses, 
 rates, and taxes ; one-fifth to the maintenance and remu- 
 neration of the farmer, and the remaining fifth to the 
 tithes and rent.* 
 
 More or less competition among tenants, and peculiar 
 circumstances independent of produce, may, in special 
 cases, somewhat enhance or somewhat diminish the sum 
 thus received for rent ; but, as a general rule, the relative 
 proportion, whether under three, five, or more divisions of 
 gross produce, will be found to prevail ; and there is not 
 
 * In poor clay lands, the landlord has not so large a share, and the farmer 
 somewhat a larger one ; for in these, the expenses being nearly as great as 
 upon light soils yielding much more, a larger proportion must be set upon 
 the cost of tillage ; a somewhat larger proportion to the return of the farmer, 
 who requires little less capital to work the less productive than the more 
 productive — and of course the landlord's proportion is smaller. In the 
 county in which I reside, there are many farms in which the landlord's rent 
 is not more than a seventh of the gross produce. 
 
 Mr. De Quincy {Logic of Political Economy), who, to a mind habituated 
 to metaphysical and abstract investigations, adds what is rare in political 
 economists — a knowledge of the practical concerns and interests of husbandry 
 ■ — justly observes : " It has been accidentally Eicardo's ordinary oversight to 
 talk of rent as if this were the one great burden on the farmer of land, whereas 
 so much greater is the burden in this country from the capital required, that 
 Mr. Jacob (well known in past times to the British Government as an excel- 
 lent authority) reports the proportion of capital to rent needed in ordinary 
 circumstances as very little less than four to one. From fifty-two reports 
 made to a Committee of the Lords in the year before Waterloo, the result 
 was, that upon one hundred acres, paying indent no more than £161 12s. 7d., 
 the total of other expenses was £601 15*. Id. per annum. And in some 
 other cases — as, for instance, in bringing into tillage the waste lands techni- 
 cally known as poor clays — the proportion required for some years appeared 
 to be much greater — on an average, three times greater — so that the capital 
 would be ten or eleven times as much as the rent." This may explain to 
 the Free -Trader why the farmer required such high remunerative prices in 
 1815. 
 
150 LETTEES TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 an experienced valuer or land-surveyor who will not allow 
 that in all cases it is from the net or the surplus profit 
 that the farmer gets his maintenance and the landlord 
 his rent. 
 
 On the other hand, it is perfectly clear that any gain or 
 any loss on the gross produce is the gain or loss of the 
 tenant, whether he hold on a lease or from year to year : 
 the landlord does not raise his rent when prices are high, 
 and he does not, except in special cases, reduce it when 
 prices are low. Prices, therefore, belong to the specula- 
 tion of the farmer when he enters on the farm ; it is him 
 that their fluctuations must immediately affect : and any 
 general alteration of rent can only be made, not on the 
 average of one or two years, but on the average of a certain 
 series of years. Therefore, if there is a reduction on the 
 gross profit, it must, at all events for a time, fall on the 
 profits of the farmer ; though, doubtless, if long continued, 
 the reduction will extend to the rent of the landlord.* To 
 what extent that reduction of profits to the farmer has 
 gone, since the free importation of foreign corn, I am con- 
 vinced that our countrymen in towns cannot be aware, or 
 they would be rather startled at the patience than callous 
 to the complaints of those upon whom this vast experiment 
 has been so ruthlessly tried. 
 
 My table is covered with accounts of tenant-farmers; in 
 many of them the whole amount of their share of profit on 
 time and capital is absorbed — in some, considerably more 
 — in few, less than half. But as I do not wish, my dear 
 John, to fatigue your attention by minute arithmetical 
 details — and as, to make such statements perfectly fair and 
 clear, they ought to be numerous, selected from various 
 districts under different modes and degrees of cultivation, 
 and would thus swell these epistles beyond all readable 
 length, I reluctantly postpone the enforcement of my posi- 
 
 * " The occasional and temporary fluctuations in the market price of any 
 • commodity Ml chiefly upon those parts of its price which resolve themselves 
 into wages and profit. That part which resolves itself into rent is less 
 affected by them. A rent certain in money is not in the least affected by 
 them, either in its rate or its value. In settling the terms of the lease, the 
 landlord and farmer endeavour, according to their best judgment, to adjust that 
 rate, not to the temporary and occasional, but to the average and ordinary 
 price of the produce." — Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book i M c. /— 
 Frice of Commodities, 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 151 
 
 tions by the vouchers before me. I will promise, however, 
 that, if the question of relief may be allowed to rest on 
 the proof of the generality and amount of the distress 
 among farmers, I will produce evidence thereof in the 
 minutest detail, with all balance of each possible saving 
 effected by the recent tariffs and diminution of wages, that 
 shall bear the severest test of the most lynx-eyed Free- 
 Trad er. 
 
 Meanwhile, one short appeal to common sense will suffice. 
 Suppose that I have a farm on which not only rent has 
 been computed, but my capital has been invested, on the 
 calculation of the averages whereon the Tithe Commutation 
 was based, those being what the statesmen who procured 
 the Repeal of the Corn Law stated would be the averages 
 on the continuance of which they reckoned.* According 
 to averages, this farm, on the Four- Course System, pro- 
 duces me — 
 
 £ s. d. 
 
 348 quarters, at 56s. per quarter . . . . 974 8 
 
 And 435 quarters of barley, at £1 lis. 8d. per quarter. 683 15 
 
 £1663 3 
 
 See what the same produce me at the present prices — 
 
 £ s. d. 
 
 Wheat, 348 quarters, at the average of Christmas 1850, 
 
 viz., 4:0s. "3d. per quarter 700 7 
 
 Barley, 435 quarters, at £1 3s. 6d., ditto . . . 511 2 6 
 
 £1211 9 6 
 
 My gross loss on wheat and barley, by the fall in price, 
 amounts to £451 13s. 6d. 
 
 I am speaking here of a farm which I well know,f the 
 
 * Sir Robert Peel said in 1842, " With reference to the probable re- 
 munerating price, I should say, that for the protection of the agricultural 
 interest, if the price of wheat, allowing for its natural oscillations, could be 
 limited to some such amount as between 54s. and 58s., I do not believe that 
 it is for the interest of the agriculturist that it should be higher. Take the 
 average of the last ten years, excluding from some portion of the average the 
 extreme prices of the last three years, and 56s. would be found to be the 
 average. I cannot say, on the other hand, that I am able to see any great 
 or permanent advantage to be derived from the diminution of the price of 
 corn beyond the lowest amount I have named." 
 
 f It is obviously unnecessary for the present purpose of illustration to 
 enter into more detail. The quick Free-Trader will probably say, " But 
 from how many acres do you get these quarters of grain ? Could you not 
 produce a greater number of bushels per acre by higher cultivation ? " A 
 
152 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 rent of which is but £435, exclusive of tithes, and on which 
 the farmer's net profit was calculated at the same sum, 
 the remainder being sunk on the cost of cultivation. There- 
 fore the gross loss exceeds the rent on the one hand, and 
 the farmer's net profit on the other ? But there are savings 
 in the reduced cost of seed, wages, &c. ? Certainly, to a 
 considerable amount; but this farm (a turnip farm) was 
 an excellent stock-farm. I have already shown how the re- 
 duced price of meat affected those profits on which the 
 farmer was to meet the loss upon corn ; and I do ask you, 
 my dear John, (if you have not entirely forgotten all rural 
 affairs,) to consider how it is possible that any economy and 
 saving in seeds, and in wages, keep of horses, housekeeping 
 of farmer, (computed to the uttermost farthing,) can render 
 this gross loss on corn and on barley — added to all preced- 
 ing and continued loss upon cattle — otherwise than appalling 
 to the mind, and ruinous to the purse, of the farmer ? What 
 can any probable or possible reduction of rent do here ? 
 What would be 10 per cent, on the rental (viz., between 
 <£40 and £50) in counterbalance to a deficit of hundreds ? 
 
 In the first stage of the depression at which we are 
 arrived, the loss, as I before stated, falls mainly upon the 
 occupier. As yet the landowner has been enabled fairly to 
 say — " I never called upon you in prosperous seasons for an 
 increase of rent ; and one or two failing seasons you must 
 bear as a just set-off to your advantage in the good. We 
 are told by some that there are exceptional causes to the 
 present prices ; we are not without hopes held forth by 
 others that the Legislature will interpose on our behalf. 
 We were assured that this repeal of the Corn Law was an 
 experiment ; and certainly the consent of many was obtained 
 to it by the calculations held out by the great authorities in 
 favour of it — that we should still retain remunerating 
 prices. We don't mean to say that there was an absolute 
 
 very fair question, but not at present to the point. Either the land is already 
 in the highest state of cultivation, or it is not. If it is, it can yield no more 
 bushels without impoverishing the soil : if it is not, the farmer would reply 
 frankly, " Sir, you are right : my land could produce a greater number of 
 bushels by the help of a much greater cost in stock and artificial manures ; 
 and under the stimulus of a fair competition I might so have risked my 
 capital. But I dare not do so now, at these prices ; and indeed all my 
 neighbours who have been thus applying to their land tbe utmost extent of 
 their capital, in artificial manures or large purchases of stock, find that these 
 prices don't pay the cost of increasing the produce." 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 153 
 
 promise or contract on a subject on which there was no 
 experience to base a guarantee ; but as these great authori- 
 ties have been, as yet, egregiously mistaken in their calcu- 
 lations, we have a fair hope that, in another Parliament, a 
 great portion of such as those authorities influenced will do 
 us the justice to reconsider the question. Such reduction 
 of rent, meanwhile, as I could make, while in the aggregate 
 most serious to me, would, subdivided amongst yourselves, 
 scarcely be felt." — So think or say some. Others return 
 the 10 per cent., and scarcely felt it is by the occupier — 
 severely, often, no doubt by the owner. 
 
 Well, grant that this depreciation continues — that land- 
 lords' rent and farmers' profit are to be re-assessed on an 
 average of years, (according to such prices) — grant that, 
 in consequence of the savings from cost effected by the 
 tariff and in wages, the farm upon which £451 were lost in 
 barley and wheat is only lowered in annual value £200 
 a-year of net profit, and that landlord and farmer divide 
 that loss between them — still it is not only a question of 
 rent ; the landlord will lose about a fourth of his gross 
 farm-revenue therefrom, or at least 35 per cent, of his net 
 income ; but the farmer must also lose a fourth of his 
 profits in return to his capital. And the error into w T hich 
 uninformed theorists have fallen on this point will be found, 
 I think, clearly explained in the note I append.* 
 
 * Political economists are quite right in practice, as well as theory, in 
 supposing that rent comes from the surplus profit ; but those of Mr. Ricardo's 
 school err in treating the farmer's share as if that did not, also, by uniform 
 practice, come from the surplus profit also. They hare argued, for instance, 
 as if on a farm paying £435 a-year rent, and returning for the tenant's profit, 
 say £435 a-year also — there was. in consequence of low prices, a loss in gross 
 profit of £200 — the landlord would take that loss all on himself by lowering 
 the rent to that amount — whereas by the invariable practice of surveyors and 
 land agents, and by the usages of custom, a re-assessment would divide that 
 loss between the farmer's profit and the landlord's rent. W r e shall see in the 
 next page that there are many disturbing circumstances which would long 
 prevent the landlord's share of loss being so large as the farmer's; but in 
 no case of re-assessment, as a general principle, would his rent fall, but what 
 the farmer's profit on the capital he has expended must fall also. The work- 
 ing out of this principle becomes yet more clear, if Ave look to the practice in 
 other countries, where the landlord's share is not positively based upon what 
 Ave call rent. Thus, for instance, it is very common abroad, in France and 
 in Itaiv, for the landlord and farmer to share the net annual profits between 
 them, the farmer finding the requisite capital and paying all the expenses. 
 These shares are sometimes in equal moieties ; sometimes where the ground 
 is fertile and the expense light, the landlord's share of profit is much more 
 than the moiety. Generally (in spite of what is said to the contrary) it is 
 
154 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ, 
 
 Grant that you mulct the landlord and the tenant 
 equally to a fourth of their income — the fourth of the 
 yearly proceeds from the principal part of the real property 
 of the nation is gone from those not only who spend it, but 
 those upon whom it was spent. 
 
 Whichever way we look to the question, £200 loss upon 
 a farm that yielded £435 rent is lost to the community — 
 whether subtracted for the most part from the profits of 
 the farmer, or equably divided between him and the land- 
 lord — all those upon whom that sum were expended, must 
 to that amount feel the loss. Extend that loss throughout 
 the country, and say if it is to be despised — or if it be only 
 a question of rent. 
 
 Meanwhile many circumstances concur to delay for a 
 considerable period any fall of rents proportionate to the 
 loss of the occupier. The landlord, be he ever so benevo- 
 lent and desirous to meet the times, has against his con- 
 cessions the check of his absolute ruin ; to the majority of 
 the larger landed proprietors, with hereditary burdens, a 
 reduction of 20 per cent, on the gross rental would wholly 
 absorb the net income. A large proportion of proprietors 
 on a smaller scale, habitually resident in the country, and 
 acquainted with rural management, would prefer cultivating 
 a considerable portion of their land themselves to reduc- 
 tions which they could not bear without resigning, not 
 luxuries, but comforts, and crippling the means of educa- 
 tion to their children. For though the land, if let, might 
 not yield enough for adequate rent to the landlord, and 
 adequate return to the tenant, yet, taken in hand by the 
 owner, it might well yield enough when there was only one 
 share, instead of two, to be taken from the produce. On 
 the other hand, while the landlord has the check of his 
 ruin against material reduction, the farmer is urged by the 
 
 larger tlian in England, inasmuch, as there are not the same exclusive deduc- 
 tions from the landlord's profit. Now here it is at once obvious, that all loss 
 of net profit falls on the tenant as well as the landlord ; and so it does in 
 England, because, though here the rent simplifies the contract, the same 
 common-sense principle prevails in practice — viz., that both landlord and 
 tenant are paid out of net profit. And the reason why, in England, the first 
 loss falls exclusively on the farmer is also obvious. He, by the payment of 
 a fixed rent, becomes not only the sharer of profit, but the speculator in its 
 variations. He has all the extra gain in the good year, and therefore sus- 
 tains all the loss on the bad, until, as I before said, by a long continuation 
 of the bad years, a re-assessment is made to the joint loss of both parties. 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 155 
 
 fear of bis ruin into struggling on to the last, rather than 
 throw up the farm on which he has sunk all his capital. 
 The existing race of farmers cannot, as a class, have the 
 resource of other occupation ; and there will be always 
 found competitors for a vacant farm as there are for a 
 theatre, though both {arm and theatre may be a losing 
 concern. 
 
 "'Tis credulous hope that nurtures life, and whispers 
 Some kiud ' to-morrow ' — if we droop to-day. 
 'Tis hope that nerves the tiller of the soil, 
 And bids him trust the corn-seed to the furrow, 
 Sure of a usurer's wealth from niggard fields." 
 
 A new race, too, continually springs up — the children, 
 perhaps, of traders — liking the hardy life and healthful 
 pursuits of the farmer, willing to trust to the future; 
 having some little extra means, beyond the capital invested 
 on the land ; disposed to risk, and for the present resign, 
 their fair share of pecuniary return from the land. They 
 may serve to keep up the rents of the landlord ; but do 
 they keep up the present generation of farmers ? Nay, do 
 we not hear it constantly said, with all the complacent 
 sangfroid of pseudo-political economists, "No doubt the 
 present race of farmers must be swept away, and a new 
 race of more energy and capital must succeed." How then 
 can it be said that this is not a vital question for the 
 existing generation of farmers ? how can you be astonished 
 that they object to being swept away ? Great changes in 
 a commercial system must necessarily occasion great dis- 
 tress and hardship to those the changes affect ; but when 
 your changes affect a class so numerous as the living men 
 engaged in agriculture, at least make your changes as mild 
 and as gradual as you can. 
 
 But what effect is this loss to both classes of employer, 
 landlord or tenant, to have on the wages of the labourer ; 
 or his social condition ? I grant to you frankly that, as 
 yet, the distress is but gradually passing from the first 
 phase in the cycle — viz., the class of the occupier; but 
 must it not soon operate on the labourer to a degree far 
 beyond what it has yet reached in those partial districts, 
 where wages already have been brought below the level of 
 the cheaper prices of food ? 
 
 You say wages do not depend on the price of bread, and 
 
156 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 you point to instances in manufacturing towns, in which, 
 while the price of bread has fallen, the money rate of 
 wages has not decreased. 
 
 It is this very fact that ought to make us beware how 
 we adopt the error into which a cursory reading of the 
 political economists is apt to betray us. They are generally 
 inclined, in the course of argument, to personify the country 
 or community as if it were an individual, and to say such 
 and such things affect the country or interest the com- 
 munity. But this country or community is parcelled out 
 in different classes and interests, and what may affect the 
 one is often very slow in reaching the other. 
 
 "The cost of food is," no doubt, (as Mr. M'Culloch 
 observes,) "the main regulator of wages " in the long run. 
 But for a considerable time it may regulate wages in the 
 agricultural districts, and not affect them in the manufac- 
 turing, and vice versa. And for this very obvious reason, 
 which comprises one of the fundamental doctrines of poli- 
 tical economy — Wages vise and fall not only in money value, 
 but in actual value, in proportion to the ratio between the 
 population and the Capital which employs it.* Wages will 
 rise not only in countries, but in particular districts, 
 according as the capital in those districts increases faster 
 than the population ; and fall in proportion as the capital is 
 decreased in ratio to the population. 
 
 Whenever therefore capital, which, as Mr. Mill truly 
 says, is nothing more than " the result of savings," is dimin- 
 ished in the agricultural districts, wages must fall. But 
 certainly you have left the farmer no savings ! His capital 
 is diminished, and diminishing ; and, by the inevitable law 
 of political economy, the wages given to the population he 
 employs must proportionally decrease, so long as that 
 population increases or remains stationary. Now, as Mr. 
 M'Culloch has shown, (Pol. Uco?i., p. 413,) when wages 
 decline in consequence of a diminution of the capital ap- 
 portioned to their payment, the supply of labourers does 
 not immediately decline ; and therefore, for a certain time, 
 wages may fall in the agricultural districts, and not in the 
 manufacturing, if the capital in the one, as proportioned to 
 the population is diminished, and is not diminished in the 
 
 * Mill, Political Economy, Sect, ii., chap. 2, on wages. M'Culloch, 
 ibid., Part III. — On the Distribution of Wealth. 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 157 
 
 other. By degrees that portion of the surplus agricultural 
 population which is not removed by mortality or emigration 
 is draughted off to the manufacturing towns, and dimin- 
 ishes wages there by increasing the supply of labour. The 
 comparatively better wages in the manufacturing towns 
 could not be permanent, because it is an axiom in Political 
 Economy that ultimately both " profits and wages on land 
 regulate those in manufacturing communities.' ' Mean- 
 while, if the capital devoted to the land be not repaired, 
 the consequences upon wages become more and more 
 serious and threatening. For, again, Political Economy 
 tells us that agricultural wages rise in proportion as capital 
 is employed in bringing inferior soils into cultivation, and 
 the concomitant necessity of additional cost on the good. 
 And therefore, as either inferior soils are abandoned, or less . 
 cost devoted to the good, wages continue to fall; and 
 hence it is that " the cost of food is the main regulator of 
 wages." 
 
 Now, to what depth a fall of wages, caused by permanent 
 diminution of capital, in ratio to the population, may de- 
 scend, Mr. Mill shall inform us : — "How slow soever the 
 increase of population, provided that of capital is still 
 slower, wages will be reduced so low that a portion of 
 the population will regularly die from the consequences of 
 want." * 
 
 Certainly the farmer does not trouble his head about 
 these theories. The distress falls first upon him ; he looks 
 round to see what he can save : he comes slowly and 
 reluctantly (for he is a warm-hearted fellow, the British 
 farmer) to a reduction in wages equivalent to the price at 
 which he must sell the main article of food ; but come to it 
 he must at last. And it is only the fortunate check of the 
 farmer's own burden, the poor-rate, that interposes between 
 the labourer and that absolute want which Mr. Mill predicts 
 to him under the operations of a capital that decreases in 
 ratio to the population. 
 
 The distress extends necessarily from occupier and 
 labourer to proprietor, and soon spreads to all the trades 
 with which they have dealt ; and if the foreigner preserve 
 awhile the cotton manufacturer, I know not if that be an 
 adequate counter-balancing advantage, and am tempted to 
 * Mill, Polit. Econ., p. 58. 
 
158 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 exclaim with Lord Chatham, " That state alone is sovereign 
 which stands on its own strength, and hangs not on the 
 will of the foreigner." 
 
 But, meanwhile, there is another class most materially 
 affected by the change — a class most essential to the civili- 
 sation of the country — I mean the Parochial Clergy. When 
 they were induced, for the benefit of the community, to 
 commute their tithes into a corn rent- charge upon the 
 average of seven years, they were not led to anticipate the 
 time when your law was to deprive them of from twenty to 
 twenty-five per cent, of their income. To that reduction, 
 if free importation continues, and, with it, the present 
 prices, that class of our clergy most worked, and which few 
 will consider as over-paid, must soon submit. And when 
 we remember how the income of these men is, for the most 
 part, devoted — the unostentatious charity they practise, the 
 popular education they so liberally help to elevate and 
 diffuse (compelled, by their residence in the country, to 
 spend what they require for their wants chiefly among the 
 neighbouring traders) — I can conceive nothing more calcu- 
 lated to retard the prosperity and well-being of the rural 
 districts than the impoverishment of that class of gentle- 
 men which applies means the most moderate to services the 
 most useful. 
 
 It is true that the clergy profit by the cheaper price in 
 the necessaries of life. But that does not meet the ques- 
 tion of justice. For you do not say to the other classes of 
 the community, "In return for such cheapness, we will 
 take away a fourth of your income." The clergyman only 
 profits by that cheapness because you cannot exclude him 
 from the general effects of legislation. But if it be true 
 that he could profit to the amount of from 20 to 25 per 
 cent, by your changes, then the other members of society 
 whom you have not mulcted to that amount profit to the 
 same degree, and relatively to them he is therefore still 
 from 20 to 25 per cent, the poorer. 
 
 But it is a very small proportion of the clergy, and 
 indeed of all the middle class, whom a cheaper rate of 
 housekeeping profits to between a third and a fourth of 
 their income. 
 
 It profits those whose income is at the lowest, whose 
 families are unusually large, and whoso whole income, or 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 159 
 
 \ nearly so, is spent upon the absolute bread and meat of the 
 ! household : but this applies less to the clergy and the 
 middle class of gentry than to most men : their chief 
 yearly expenses are not in housekeeping, but in various 
 wants and duties, which your tariffs as yet little reach. 
 There is an insurance on life, or a saving for wife and 
 kindred ; charities ; doctors ; the various accidents which 
 are never anticipated ; and, above all, the school bills for 
 children. And if, on the average, you say that the paro- 
 chial clergyman gains 10 per cent, on his house bills, and 
 will lose 25 per cent in hard money, he has still to thank 
 you for a loss, on a modest income, of 15 per cent., which 
 may materially interfere with the usefulness of his life as 
 well as its comforts. 
 
 R~or do I think it a matter of subordinate importance, 
 though it lies latent, acts indirectly, and has been wholly 
 unnoticed, to consider what effect the impoverishment of 
 squire, clergyman, and farmer, will practically have on the 
 quality of instruction to be received by the rising genera- 
 tion ; — how far the stinted income of the parents may stint 
 also the education of the sons. At the very time that you 
 say that farmers most need intellectual culture, and call 
 upon them to grapple with new theories and rely upon dis- 
 coveries in science, you will take away the very power to 
 bestow on their children the culture you enforce. The 
 clergyman will be compelled to lower the standard of edu- 
 cation for his sons, the squire that for his ; for the first 
 item on which men, pushed hard to make both ends meet, 
 retrench, is the school bills of their children. The im- 
 poverishment of these classes diminishes the source of 
 intelligence which has been hitherto the richest in its sup- 
 plies to the nation. For if we look through biography, we 
 shall find that by far the largest proportion of the most 
 eminent men of whom we boast in literature, in science, in 
 the elevated and intellectual departments of action, in all 
 that has enriched our nation with the ideas that constitute 
 its most imperishable wealth, have sprung, not from manu- 
 facturing towns, but from rural districts, and claim descent 
 from farmers and yeomen, country squires, and clergymen. 
 I say this in no disrespect to manufacturing communities, 
 certainly in no disparagement of the keen and lively intelli- 
 gence which such communities arouse and foster, but which 
 
160 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 it is in the nature of things that such communities should 
 divert either to the pursuit of gain or the contests of 
 politics. The trading and manufacturing Cathaginians 
 were quite as clever as the agricultural Romans, but the 
 Carthaginians were the first nation that had for its prover- 
 bial maxim — "Bay at the dearest and sell at the cheapest 
 market ; " * and the Romans have left to all time grand 
 thoughts, the memory of great deeds, and the heirlooms of 
 imperishable books ; while the Carthaginians, wholly occu- 
 pied in commerce, and presenting to us an aspect so superb 
 in the sole relation with which political economy professes 
 to deal — viz., the economy of material wealth — the nego- 
 tiators and factors of the world — contributed as little as 
 might be to the wealth of the mind — to science and art ; 
 and a Voyage round Africa, by one of their generals, is the 
 sole contribution still extant of the rivals to Roman power 
 during a dominion that exceeded seven centuries. t 
 
 * The following anecdote, recorded by one of the fathers of the Christian 
 Church, (St. Aug. lib. xiii. de Trin., c. 3,) in reference to the maxim we are 
 told to receive as a virtual precept of Christianity, is rather amusing : — "A 
 mountebank promised to the Carthaginians to discover to them their most 
 secret thoughts, if they came on a certain day to hear him. When they had 
 assembled, 'The secret thought of all of you,' said this shrewd fellow, 'is, 
 when you buy, to buy cheap ; when you sell, to sell dear.' They all con- 
 fessed laughing, and with great applause, that he had denned aright — and 
 thus," adds St. Augustine, "confessed themselves — rogues!" The saint 
 there would seem a little too severe if his meaning be not carefully denned. 
 It is a very honest wish to buy cheap and sell dear, provided it is one of the 
 thoughts of men ; but if it is the paramount engrossing thought, then I am 
 afraid that Augustine spoke very much— as a saint would do. 
 
 f Intellectual education was much restricted in Carthage — Greek, at one 
 time, interdicted. Terence was an African, though it is not clear if he 
 was, properly speaking, a Carthaginian by birth ; but he left his country at 
 the age of thirteen, received his education at Home, and cannot be judged as 
 a Carthaginian writer, though he may, perhaps, be fairly regarded as an 
 example of what Carthaginians might have produced, had their extraordinary 
 intelligence been less confined to buying cheap and selling dear. If Terence be 
 excepted, I am not aware that they are recorded to have produced any other 
 literary works than Han no's Voyage, cited in the text (which is the sole 
 one extant, through the medium of a Greek translation),* except a long trea- 
 
 * [This remarkable fragment barely extends to the length of half a dozen 
 pages octavo. Slight though the sketch is, it is pronounced by Montesquieu 
 one of the most valuable remains of antiquity. Its title, kvvoovos Kapxydovicov 
 fSuai\evs, k.t.A., maybe rendered thus : The Account of the Voyage of Hanno, 
 Commander of the Carthaginians round the parts of Libya beyond the Pillars 
 of Hercules, which he deposited in the Temple of Saturn. It has been 
 translated into Italian by Ramusio, into Spanish by Campomanes, into 
 French by Bougainville, and into English by Thomas Falconer.] 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 161 
 
 It has been so haughtily asked by Mr. Cobden, what the 
 "landed aristocracy" has contributed to the mental wealth 
 of this country, that we may be forgiven the answer — 
 "More than two-thirds of the greatest men whom your 
 history can boast of ! " 
 
 But, as here I am contending for the value of sustained 
 education, alike to the proprietor, the farmer, and clergy- 
 man of the parish — and as all three, in fact, appertain to 
 the " Agricultural Mind " — may I respectfully ask, whether, 
 from the first date of manufacturers amongst us, with all 
 the wealth they have amassed, with all the laws that have 
 favoured them, their several communities leagued together 
 — and added, if you will, to all the manufacturing popula- 
 tions of Europe — have produced either writers or thinkers, 
 authorities in the law and the state, patriots or heroes, to 
 compare for an instant to those whose fathers were 
 dwellers on our soil, or pastors in our Church ? 
 
 What writers to compare to Newton, to Bacon, to Boyle ; 
 to Addison, to Dryden, to Byron ; to Burns ; to Gibbon ; 
 to Robertson ; to Fielding, and to Swift ? 
 
 What statesmen who will throw into shade, Burleigh, 
 and Cecil ; Cromwell, and Clarendon ; Walpole, and Chat- 
 ham ; Fox, Wyndham, and Grey ? 
 
 Where are the patriots or heroes — the doers of deeds — 
 who are to obscure the great images of Hampden and 
 Sidney — of Eliot, of Yane, of Falkland and Derby, of Wel- 
 lesley and Nelson ? Where the Luminaries of Law, that 
 
 tise on Agriculture hj one of their generals ; and after their f&li they got up 
 one philosopher, Clitoniachus, who attempted to comfort them by essays — a 
 diligent and learned person, whom Cicero says was acute enough for a 
 Carthaginian — (acutus, ut Teen us), We have a fine picture left to us of the 
 great Hannibal, in contrast to his countrymen. "When, after the severe con- 
 ditions imposed by Eome, which ruined their freedom and grandeur, they 
 were lamenting over the necessity of paying the fine from their private for- 
 tunes, Hannibal burst out laughing. Chid for his indecorum, he answered, 
 " My laughter is near upon tears. You are lamenting your money, and I 
 thought of the ruin of Carthage." 
 
 I must be pardoned this long reference to the great Commercial State of 
 the ancient world, because it stands in contrast to the Greek republics, 
 where, and in Athens especially, though all encouragement was given to 
 foreign commerce, it was carried on by settlers — not the citizens. The 
 Greek republicans were so jealous of political freedom that they did not like 
 to extend the franchise to men who, as dependent on the foreigner, were 
 deemed, right or wrong, by all the Greek sages and legislators, to have an 
 interest apart from, and sometimes paramount to, the domestic and internal 
 welfare of the State. 
 
162 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 are to outshine Coke, "the great oracle of our municipal 
 jurisprudence " — Somers, " the chief founder of our con- 
 stitutional monarchy " — Mansfield, Nottingham, and Ers- 
 kine ; — Cowper, equally famous as lawyer and statesman ; 
 or the stainless Camden, " whose name Englismen will 
 honour to the latest generations, for having secured per- 
 sonal freedom, by putting an end to arbitrary arrests under 
 general warrants : for having established the constitutional 
 rights of juries ; and for having placed on an imperishable 
 basis the liberty of the press ? " * 
 
 All these — sons of the soil or the Church ! t We may 
 be proud of such claims on the respect that is due to one 
 use of our orders (and that use offthe loftiest), and we may 
 justly desire that there should be no diminution in that 
 degree of instruction which the children of those orders 
 may receive for the ornament or strength of generations to 
 come. Nor for them only, but for the whole population, I 
 say, that to lower the standard of education among the 
 classes set apart for that portion of the intelligence of the 
 country not devoted to buying in the cheapest market to 
 sell in the dearest, is to lower the standard of idea, and 
 to debase the quality, while it diminishes the degree, of 
 intelligence throughout the whole community ; — and that 
 in this question of prices which you would reduce to one 
 of rent — this question affecting so fearfully the means of 
 squire and clergyman — yeoman and farmer — is inevitably 
 involved a fall in the standard of education for the rising 
 generation — since the impoverishment of the parent must 
 affect the resources on which the education of the sons will 
 depend. 
 
 You may tell us that Adam Smith, however, asserts that 
 merchants and master manufacturers are more intelligent 
 as a body than we plain country squires. — (And their in- 
 telligence, indeed, I never dispute ; it is only the applica- 
 tion of it which can give us, through biography, any claim 
 to superiority.) But while Adam Smith praises their 
 a,cuteness, observe, my dear John, how he cautions society 
 
 * Campbell's Lives of the Lord Chancellors. 
 
 t Even Mr. Cartwright, to whose mechanical ingenuity manufacturers 
 owe so much, was the son of a country gentleman ; and Mr. Cobden himself, 
 of whose talents no man can doubt, is fond of stating, with some semblance 
 of pride, that he, too, is a child of the land. 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 163 
 
 against their judgment. And in citing the words of the 
 great writer upon whom that class which is supposed to 
 have an interest more peculiarly counter to the agricultural 
 iu the question before us, chiefly relies, I say with sincerity, 
 that the language of caution employed by Adam Smith is 
 far stronger than I would have presumed to use : — 
 
 " Merchants and master manufacturers, ... as during 
 their whole lives they are engaged in plans and projects, 
 they have frequently more acuteness of understanding 
 than the greater part of country gentlemen. As their 
 thoughts, however, are commonly exercised rather about the 
 interest of their own particular branch of business that that 
 of the society, their judgment, even when given with the 
 greatest candour (which it has not been upon every occa- 
 sion), is much more to be depended upon with regard to the 
 former of those two objects than the latter. . . . The 
 interest of the dealers in any particular branch of trade and 
 manufactures is always in some degree different from, and 
 even opposite to, that of the public. The proposal of any 
 new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this 
 order ought always to be listened to with great precaution, 
 and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and 
 carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but 
 with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order 
 of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of 
 the public ; who have generally an interest to deceive, and 
 even to oppress the public ; and who, accordingly, have 
 upon many occasions both oppressed and deceived it."— 
 (Adam Smith, Book I., c. xi., Wealth of Nations.) 
 
 To sum up the authorities from Free-trading political 
 economists that I have arrayed on the side of justice to 
 the land, I must here bid you observe, my dear John, how 
 wholly it has been overlooked, that when Adam Smith 
 expresses himself in favour of the free importation of cattle 
 and corn, he does so expressly upon the assumption that that 
 importation will be so slight as not to inj ure the farmer. This 
 is his main and almost sole argument for advising such im- 
 portation. "If," he says, "importation of foreign cattle 
 were made ever so free, so few could be imported that the 
 grazing trade of Great Britain could be little affected by 
 it." — (Book IV., c. xi.) And he supposes that the importa- 
 tion of lean cattle — which, he says, only could be imported, 
 
 m 2 
 
164 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 would not interfere with the interest of feeding or fattening 
 countries, only with the breeding. Experience having proved 
 that these assumptions are wholly contradicted by the facts 
 — 1st, That the importations of foreign cattle have been 
 very large ; 2nd, That not only lean cattle, bnt meat for mar- 
 ket (cured meat alone to at least four times the weight of 
 the lean cattle), has been imported ; 3rd, That the reduced 
 price in meat effected by these importations does interfere 
 with the interest of the feeding and fattening countries, 
 since the price at which cattle are again sold by the farmer 
 does not pay the cost of feeding and fattening ; — the whole 
 of Adam Smith's argument falls to the ground, and he 
 himself, in consistency, would have been compelled to re- 
 linquish it, since (in Book I., c. xi.) he had shown it to be 
 absolutely necessary for the improvement of tillage that the 
 " price of butcher's meat, and consequently of cattle, must 
 rise till it gets so high as to become as profitable to employ 
 the most fertile and best cultivated lands in raising food 
 for them, as in raising corn." 
 
 In the same chapter (Book IV., c, xi.) he argues for the 
 importation of free corn expressly on the same ground — 
 viz., that " it would very little affect the interest of the 
 farmer in England, since corn is a much more bulky com- 
 modity than butcher's meat ; since the small quantity of 
 corn imported in times of scarcity ought to satisfy the 
 farmers they had nothing to fear from the freest importa- 
 tion : and since (according to his calculation) the average 
 importation one year with another does not exceed the five 
 hundredth and seventy- one part of the annual consumption." 
 Here again, too, the recent facts being diametrically op- 
 posed by experience to the assertion in theory, Adam 
 Smith's argument is lost; and here again he would be 
 compelled in consistency to withdraw it, since, if the free 
 importation does largely affect the capital of the farmer, 
 Adam Smith has expressly stated his opinion, " that the 
 capital employed in Agriculture, not only puts into motion 
 a greater quantity of productive labour than any equal 
 capital employed in manufactures, but in proportion, too, 
 to the quantity of productive labour which it employs, it 
 adds a much greater value to the annual produce of the 
 land and labour of the country, to the real wealth and 
 revenue of its inhabitants. Of all the ways in which a 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 165 
 
 capital can be employed, it is by far the most advantageous 
 to the community." # 
 
 This early father of the doctrine of free competition 
 proceeds to admit and to state that " there are two cases 
 in which it will generally be advantageous to lay some 
 burden ujDon foreign, for the encouragement of domestic, 
 industry. 
 
 " The first is when some particular sort of industry is 
 necessary for the defence of the country." He alludes here 
 to the Shipping Interest under the Navigation Act; but it 
 matters not whether the defence be from without or within. 
 A country may be in as much danger from internal disaffec- 
 tion as from a foreign enemy ; and there are few, perhaps, 
 who would not think it a less danger for Britain to face a 
 fleet from Russia, than to contend with deep and rankling 
 discontent amongst the owners and occupiers of the British 
 soil. 
 
 ' ; The second case" (says Adam Smith) "in which it 
 will be generally advantageous to lay some burden upon 
 foreign, for the encouragement of domestic, industry, is 
 where some tax is imposed at home upon the produce of 
 the latter. In this case it seems reasonable that an equal 
 tax should be imposed -upon the produce of the former. 
 This would not give the monopoly of the home market to 
 domestic industry, nor turn towards a particular employ- 
 ment a greater share of the stock and labour of the country 
 than what would naturally go to it. It would only hinder any 
 part of what would naturally go to it from being turned away 
 by the tax into a less natural direction, and would leave the 
 competition between foreign and domestic industry after the 
 tax, as nearly as possible upon the same footing as before 
 it." Therefore, in just equivalent to the taxes on the land 
 (for every tax on the producer, by diminishing his capital, 
 is effectively a tax on the produce), a correspondent tax on 
 the foreign-corn competitor is required. 
 
 Thirdly. — Mark this ! Even where neither of these cases 
 
 * Certain modem political economists contend that this is a very exagge- 
 rated estimate of the national value of agricultural capital ; but they will 
 observe that that is not here the point in question : the more important 
 Adam Smith considered that capital, the more he would have shrunk from 
 invading it by any of his own theories as to the safety of free importation of 
 agricultural produce, if experience showed that the 'facts contradicted those 
 theories to the injury of the capital. 
 
166 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 may apply, Adam Smith states, " that where, by previous 
 high duties or prohibitions, employment has been extended 
 to a great multitnde of hands, humanity may in this case 
 require that the freedom of trade should be restored only 
 by slow gradations, and with a good deal of reserve and 
 circumspection." — (Book IV., c. xi.) 
 
 I now hasten to the close. Without entering into mere 
 party and personal questions involving the rise or the fall 
 of Governments ; without impugning the motives of the 
 dead, or violating the respect due to the living ; with as 
 little of acrimony, I trust, as may be compatible with 
 manly and earnest contest against powerful opponents — I 
 have stated the case of my Clients— I have summoned as 
 my witnesses on their behalf (for a fixed duty at least) the 
 great masters of economical science. The distress they 
 allege is acknowledged from the throne ; it is allowed by 
 the Minister. At present, as I have stated, the full weight 
 of distress rests on the occupier. Soon it must extend, not 
 only to clergman and landowner — but to labourer and 
 tradesman. Already in many districts the labourer begins 
 to feel that the cheap loaf entails low wages, and brings 
 him nearer and nearer to the workhouse. In other dis- 
 tricts, where wages are not yet lowered to the ratio of 
 prices, the farmer feels the humanity that is akin to his 
 genial nature oozing away, as the wellbeing of the men he 
 employs is adduced as an argument for beggaring the em- 
 ployer. Grand social evil! Hostile interest between 
 masters and men — beware how it spreads too far. Already 
 in rural towns tradesmen begin to feel the change — already 
 say, " Trade is bad ; something must be done for the 
 farmer." Ay, that " something." Yfhat but the miti- 
 gation of your policy can do it ? Already the tradesmen 
 in the metropolis, spite of the temporary aid the Grand 
 Exhibition may afford them, begin to complain that gentle- 
 men don't lay out what they did; and many a sturdy 
 Free- Trader behind the counter is already converted by 
 the inspection of his ledger. Common sense is at work 
 amongst all who sell, and is putting this question, which 
 admits but one answer — " Do I save , by the baker what I 
 lose by abridging the means of my customers ? " And so 
 gradually will that same common sense work, till it reach 
 the manufacturer himself through all its indirect channels, 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 167 
 
 and prove to him the true value of the Home market, that 
 he at pre scut despises. 
 
 Sooner or later, the movement of distress must pass 
 through all these phases, if there be a single shred of truth 
 in the fundamental laws that govern the relations of seller 
 and buyer, of capital and wages. And if the question of 
 some relief to the agricultural interest could be delayed till 
 then, there would be no doubt as to how the constituencies 
 of the countiy would decide it. But then, alas ! much 
 greater the difficulty to repair the evil — a vast portion of 
 the agricultural capital would be irretrievably sunk and 
 destroyed — the process of restoration would be far more 
 arduous and prolonged. Feelings of bitterness and desire 
 of retaliation would have been engendered by distress and 
 rooted by despair ; and I fear that you would have con- 
 verted the very class most naturally inclined to peace and 
 order, into the very one most dangerous and disaffected. 
 
 Pause, then, before you so resolutely say that you will 
 not retrace a step of your path — before you close the door 
 to all conciliation, on so many millious of your suffering 
 countrymen. I own myself that it is the social considera- 
 tions inseparably mixed up with this question that weigh 
 upon me far more than any that can be suggested by the 
 principles to which mere political economy confines its 
 survey. And I will own further, that, while pleading for 
 the cultivator of the land, I carry my sight far beyond his 
 immediate interest ; and I feel, as an Englishman, grave 
 apprehensions for all the other sections into which the 
 community is divided. 
 
 Grant that you are correct in your general principle, as 
 political economists ; pause as statesmen, pause as patriots, 
 before you so rigidly apply it. 
 
 "All that in the end become evil in example, spring from principles that 
 were good in the commencement." 
 
 Such are the words assigned to Cassar by an historian, 
 reared amid those feuds of party and of class which closed 
 in the corruption of the noblest people and the downfall of 
 the grandest commonwealth that illustrate the mournful 
 record of departed nations. 
 
 Our foreign trade, the exports of our cotton manufac- 
 ture, are worthy objects of attention ; but they are not the 
 
i6S LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 sole ones. The wealth, of a State itself cannot so absorb 
 the attention of a thoughtful Legislator, but what he will 
 also regard the moral and social circumstances by which 
 alone that wealth can be permanently secured. Let me 
 care ever so much for money, it is not only to make money 
 that I must care ; I must also look to the safeguards that 
 are to prevent me from losing it. 
 
 " Defence," says Adam Smith, " is of much more im- 
 portance than opulence." 
 
 Our debt — the fundholder — the safety of the empire in 
 its actual and necessary defences — all these I must look to 
 as a citizen, as well as to the quantity of cotton I can sell 
 to the foreigner. 
 
 The debt — the fundholder ! Are any of us so blind to 
 the fact that, ever since Peel's Currency Bill, there has 
 rankled deep in the minds of the agricultural class, which 
 that Bill so gravely affected, a sentiment of injury which 
 it were wise not to irritate too sorely ? And though I, 
 myself, reprove that sentiment, and would resist any re- 
 taliation which it might engender, there is a man of far 
 more authority than I, who, not very long since, has openly 
 maintained that sentiment to be just ; a man at the time 
 clothed with the dignity of a Minister of the Cabinet, and 
 who is now the momentary idol of the party that arrogates 
 the title of " Liberal" — I mean, of course, Sir James 
 Graham.* This powerful orator and distinguished legis- 
 lator has lately invited us to frankness ; pardon me, then, 
 John, if I am frank ; for I speak of an evil which, to my 
 mind, is as great as (perhaps it is greater than) all that 
 could fall on the land. Frankly I say, then, this : — 
 
 Plunge the whole agricultural class into permanent diffi- 
 culty and distress, and depend upon it the fundholder will 
 
 * " Subsequent events had confirmed the wisdom of the predictions of the 
 Hon. Member for Essex (Mr. Earing). The landlords were obliged to re- 
 duce their rents equivalant to the altered value of money ; they were obliged 
 to reduce their means of meeting their engagements, while the weight of 
 their fixed engagements, instead of being diminished, was actually increased 
 by the alteration effected in the standard of value. He concurred in what 
 was stated on that point in the Eeport of the Agricultural Commission of 
 last session. In fact he drew up the report that was agreed to by that com- 
 mittee ; he had stated in that report that a matter which, according to the 
 time prescribed for its consideration, might be but a trifling injustice in 1826 
 and 1827, would be an overwhelming and most indefensible injustice in 
 1833.' ' — Speech of Sir JoAr.es Graham on the Com Laws, March 6, 1834. 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL; ESQ. 169 
 
 have cause to tremble — either by loud demands for paper 
 currency, or by a determined resolution to resist the taxes 
 which defray the debt. 
 
 First, indeed, under the cry of economy will go those 
 expenses which maintain our navy and protect our shores. 
 And, however welcome to the followers of Mr. Cobden may 
 be the recruits to his financial standard amongst the agri- 
 cultural members to whom he has before appealed, I do 
 not think that prudent men — nor men who have not lost 
 the love and pride of country, without which no com- 
 munity can endure long — can contemplate without alarm 
 the probability of such a combination of votes in the House 
 of Commons as may reduce the empire of Great Britain 
 to a fourth- rate state, leaving none of the defences which 
 other fourth-rate states concur in maintaining. It was 
 the boast of Themistocles that he knew how to render a 
 small state great. From a modern school politicians have 
 arisen, who seem to make it their boast that they know 
 how to make great states small.* 
 
 Look where we will at the consequence of leaving a deep 
 and lasting remembrance of wrong and of insult upon the 
 minds and hearts of a vast number of men — whom no re- 
 distribution of the franchise, however artfully arranged, 
 can deprive of numerous representatives connected by the 
 union of a common suffering — and there is cause for the 
 most anxious alarm in all who do not confine their 
 thoughts to the Carthaginian's maxim of " Buy cheap, and 
 sell dear." 
 
 You dilate on the blessings of Peace — you cannot prize 
 those blessings too highly ; but is there no danger in im- 
 pressing upon the most high-spirited and martial part of 
 your population the conviction that in war lies their sole 
 chance of return from property and remuneration for 
 labour? You must be conscious that the evil which 
 
 ^ * Themistocles fulfilled his boast by a policy which appears to have con- 
 sisted in creating and maintaining a shipping interest and a maritime power 
 —obtaining the sovereignty of the sea ; founding and securing an empire of 
 dependent confederacies ; introducing into his own country the manufactures 
 and arts of the foreigner ; securing to them the markets of Home : protect- 
 ing their industry where such protection seemed needed ; but not giving to 
 the counsels of those who, by foreign trade, could make themselves inde- 
 pendent of the native interests, the preponderant influence in the state. 
 Such, too, was the policy by which England rose ; and such is the policy the 
 new school would reverse from its base to its capital. 
 
170 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 modern civilisation has most to apprehend lies, not as of 
 old, in the incursions of the barbarians, but in the struggle 
 and ferment of civilisation itself ; that in the heart of your 
 great manufacturing towns works alike all that expedite 
 progress, and all that can threaten dissolution ; that thence 
 emerge the dread " coJiors febrium ; " the heated desires for 
 a change never circumscribed in the mild limits of reform; 
 the tendencies to whatever can revolutionise institutions, 
 and substitute for the fair false dreams of Atlantis and 
 Utopia those conditions of labour on which practical society 
 is based. Checked by the inert resistance of the classes 
 that live on the land, this, which, is the immemorial and 
 universal spirit of manufacturing communities under all 
 forms of government, is but conducive to improvement. 
 The collision of opinion, when the innovating spirit is op- 
 posed and tempered by that which adheres to the ancient 
 forms of constitutional freedom, strikes out those compro- 
 mises which admit of change, but temper change into 
 harmony with order. It is good for democracy itself that 
 the state should contain a fair proportion of the elements 
 of conservatism. Political liberty could not last a year, if 
 there were not in the community some retentive and tena- 
 cious principle which preserves liberty itself from the 
 eternal experiments of fanatics ; who, finding no movement 
 of the machine can convey them beyond the reach of toil 
 and of hunger, vent their disappointment at last on the 
 mainspring of the mechanism itself. It is the recognition 
 and establishment of this principle which has rendered 
 hitherto so stable the mighty Republic of America ; and 
 has balanced the impatience of men " in crowded cities 
 pent," with the counterpoise of that prudence which is 
 inseparably connected with property in land — that is, where 
 return from the property is safe under systems of order, 
 and only endangered by periods of convulsion. It is this 
 principle alone, though exhibited in its weakest and most 
 inoperative form, which has saved France from Paris and 
 Lyons, and stayed the Communism engendered in urban 
 populations, by the votes of proprietors in land. While, 
 on the contrary, one main cause of the brief duration of 
 all the ancient republics was the preponderance of the 
 urban over the rural classes; — with them there was but 
 one word for the State and the City. 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 171 
 
 Is there, then, no danger in converting the sole conserv- 
 ing and retentive classes of the State into those most in- 
 different to your institutions, and least interested in that 
 order of things which has condemned them alone to sacri- 
 fice and calamity, and denied to them alone all mitigation 
 of injury ? Consider the incessant fluctuations, from well- 
 being to adversity, to which that part of your population 
 dependent chiefly or largely on foreign trade and foreign 
 competition is exposed. Consider that at any time, despite 
 the repeal of the Corn Law, the manufacturing operatives 
 must be subject to sudden distress; that sudden distress 
 with them springs at once into loud disaffection ; that 
 they never want the agitator and the leader : And w r hen 
 you would turn for aid, not to the bayonet of the soldier 
 (I at least will not speak of that), but to the opinion of 
 the class on which, of old, without repeal, you could peace- 
 fully rely, is there no chance that you may find it sullen or 
 neutral in the senate ? — supine or hostile through the land ? 
 It is not that the members of that class would sympathise 
 with the cause which threatened disorder ; it is simply that 
 they may have ceased to feel interest in the order endan- 
 gered. No proprietor, no gentlemen, felt interest in the 
 cause of the mob that surrounded the Tuileries; they 
 had only ceased to feel interest in the principles of 
 government which Louis Philippe represented. Their 
 interest did not awake till afterwards, when life was 
 threatened by the blood-red banner of the terrorist, and 
 property was proclaimed a theft by the schoolmen of Com- 
 munism. 
 
 Believe me, these are no idle fears ; they come from close 
 observation of the temper of the cultivators and inhabitants 
 of the land. Scorn, O Free-Trader, if you will, my views 
 of your theory ; despise me, if you will, as reasoner, logi- 
 cian, scholar, investigator of historical precedent, or ex- 
 aminer into the theories and abstract principles of science. 
 But few will deny, however exaggerated in all else be my 
 reputation as a writer, that, where the reputation has been 
 the most acknowledged, it rests upon some truth in ob- 
 serving the springs of human action. It is as the habitual 
 and long-experienced observer of men that I utter this 
 warning. It is my hope and belief that the warning will 
 not be in vain. 
 
172 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 If you say, " Grant that your apprehensions are just as 
 to the danger from irritation in one class, is there not a 
 danger as great in provoking the resentment of others 
 more numerous ? Remember this is a question of exports 
 to the manufacturer ; it is more, a question of the price of 
 bread to the people." If you say this, I reply, that I know 
 and feel most deeply the importance of those considerations 
 in popular opinion ; and, though exports are not in them- 
 selves a guarantee of the prosperity of the manufacturer, 
 nor the cheapness of food an unequivocal test of the phy- 
 sical well-being and social advance of the labouring popula- 
 tion, yet I think that Lord Derby has acted wisely, and 
 shown that, in this respect, he comprehends the duty of 
 the conciliator when he has taken Free- Traders themselves 
 for authorities, and proposed a moderate fixed duty, on 
 which any rise in price to the farmer cannot, in the judg- 
 ment of profound economists, raise in practice the price of 
 the loaf beyond what at least would be immediately coun- 
 terbalanced by custom to the tradesman — improved home 
 market to the manufacturer, and rise of wages to the 
 labourer; a rise, under such a duty, sufficiently slight 
 to conciliate him who sells his work, sufficiently just 
 not to ruin him who hires it ; a duty, in short, (to 
 repeat the deliberate opinion of Mr. M'Culloch,) that 
 would " be innocuous in scarce years, when importa- 
 tion is necessary, and not only be advantageous to the 
 agriculturist, but redound to the advantage of the other 
 classes." * 
 
 Much misconception prevails when our opponents seem 
 to confound the consideration of this single claim with a 
 repeal of the general tariff. Neither Lord Derby, nor any 
 chief in his party, has proposed to reverse the commercial 
 policy commenced, or to interfere with those articles the 
 greater cheapness of which now diminishes the yearly 
 expense of the consumer. It is but on a single article that 
 it is proposed to raise a revenue on the foreigner, to be 
 devoted towards a reduction of the most grievous tax on 
 the national community ; and with the indirect conse- 
 quence, though with the acknowledged view, of relieving a 
 
 " * Eefer to the quotation from Mr. M'Culloch, (pp. 125, 126) on the advan- 
 tages of a fixed Dutj r to all classes. 
 
LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 173 
 
 vast class of our countrymen whom our Legislature con- 
 demns to severe trial, and has no other practical means to 
 assist. 
 
 Let the agriculturists contrast by their own moderation 
 the vehement intolerance which would deny all relief to 
 their distress, and it will be impossible to revive against 
 them, at least to any degree that would justify alarm, the 
 agitation which is held forth as the main argument to pre- 
 vent concession to what suffering demands as justice, and 
 political economy commends as wisdom. Far more cause 
 for alarm in the despair of hearts hitherto so attached to 
 your institutions, and the progressive decay of an interest 
 so essential to the welfare of all. It is difficult to agitate 
 the humanity of England against distress : And though, 
 as yet, the distress of the agriculturist may have but par- 
 tially reacted on the rest of the community, enough has 
 been felt to make " sensible men" of every rank rejoice at 
 any reasonable proposition by which it may be mitigated, 
 and separate themselves from the unworthy clamour by 
 which it may be sought to drown the groans of their suffer- 
 ing countrymen. 
 
 A moderate fixed duty will still leave to the agriculturist 
 a sufficiently sharp competition with the foreigner ; as it 
 will still leave to the manufacturer the regular market 
 assured by the opening of our ports ; leave to the general 
 consumer the cheapness effected by the various modifica- 
 tions of our tariffs ; and to the labourer it will sustain 
 wages, by sustaining the capital from which wages are 
 derived. To a competition thus mitigated, the farmer will 
 brace all the energies which competition — when it over- 
 tasks the strength and sickens the hope — can only enfeeble 
 and relax. Whatever relief to his pecuniary resources this 
 concession—made in time — will afford, greater still will be 
 the stimulus to spirit and courage which comes from all 
 sympathy in human struggles ; great the benefit to the 
 agriculturist, greater far to our social fabric, if you diminish 
 the fear with which the son of the soil, the originator of all 
 national capital, now anticipates the future — soften the 
 spirit with which he confronts the present — reconcile class 
 to class — smooth obstacles to progressive legislation — lessen 
 dangers in those crises in which progress is exchanged fo* 
 convulsion. And, therefore, from the depth of my heart, 
 
174 LETTERS TO JOHN BULL, ESQ. 
 
 and moved by interests that sway me far more as patriot 
 than proprietor — as citizen than landowner — I say to the 
 Constituencies of the empire, " Lose not the first occasion 
 to conciliate the cultivators of the land you live in ! " 
 
 Forgive, my dear John, this long infliction on your 
 patience; and believe in the truth of 
 
 Your loyal and anxious Servant, 
 
 A Labourer and a Landlord, 
 
 Edward Bulwer Lytton. 
 
PAUL LOUIS COUKIER— HIS LIFE AND 
 WRITINGS. 
 
 A BIOGRAPHICAL CRITICISM. 
 
 It has long been my intention to devote some pages of 
 this Journal f to the manes of Paul Lonis Courier, in the 
 hope of bringing my English readers to a better acquaint- 
 ance with some of the most remarkable writings, and one 
 of the most extraordinary men that France, in her later 
 day, has produced. Every time has its peculiar represen- 
 tative, and the genius of a single man is often the incarna- 
 tion of the intellectual character of his co temporaries. 
 There was only one period in the history of France that 
 could have produced Courier, — he is the man of that period. 
 He gathered once more into a focus those rays of light that 
 had been scattered into a thousand vague refractions by 
 the violent effects of the Revolution. He is the sequel to 
 Voltaire. What Btranger is to verse, Courier is to prose. 
 His life is of no less singular character than his works. 
 
 Born at Paris, in 1773, the parentage of Paul Louis 
 Courier was exactly that which was calculated to form in 
 after times the derider of the vices of a noblesse. His father 
 was a man of some literary pretensions and of competent 
 wealth ; — he was a Bourgeois — an able, witty, intellectual 
 Bourgeois. As such he seems to have mixed in the society 
 of the nobles, and to have very narrowly escaped death for 
 his presumption. A certain nobleman of great rank owed 
 our citizen a large sum of money ; it was inconvenient to 
 pay it, so he ordered his creditor to be assassinated. True 
 
 * [Truth is all to all.] 
 
 f [This paper was originally published in the Xew Monthly Magazine 
 for March, 1833.] 
 
176 PAUL LOUIS COURIER. 
 
 that he did not allege the debt as a reason for the proposed 
 murder. He gave a more gallant air to the proceeding, 
 and accused the Bourgeois of having seduced his wife. A 
 jealous husband in those days was not common ; — but then 
 every husband did not owe the object of his jealousy a con- 
 siderable sum of money. 
 
 If M. Courier escaped death, he did nofc escape banish- 
 ment ; and he felt himself obliged to become an inhabitant 
 of one of the cantons of Toulouse. He gave himself up to 
 the education of the young Paul Louis. Our hero early 
 developed his peculiar genius, — quick, facile, and impatient. 
 He evinced no turn for the mathematics, but a vehement 
 passion for ancient letters. In these his taste was formed 
 on no very judicious model. He was fond of the Rheto- 
 ricians, and considered Isocrates a model. In after life his 
 latent genius was no doubt influenced by these youthful 
 studies. You may trace in his writings all the art of rhe- 
 toric, but he studiously avoids its language. He is the only 
 rhetorician in whom simplicity is the most remarkable 
 feature. Those were not, however, the times for Isocrates 
 and rhetoric. The war against France required soldiers 
 for the frontiers, and confined the demand for sophists to 
 the metropolis. Paul Louis entered a school of artillery, 
 and at the age of twenty behold the young officer hastening 
 to join the armies of the Rhine. Never was there a more 
 singular recruit : with considerable valour of constitution, 
 Paul Louis had already formed a most philosophical in- 
 difference to glory. Compelled to be a soldier, he walked 
 the stage as an actor who laughs in his sleeve at the wilful 
 delusion of the audience. He saw the paint on the scene, 
 and heard the voice of the prompter; and when the galleries 
 were shouting applause at the effects, our actor was scru- 
 tinizing the tricks which produced them. He mixed among 
 that fiery and passionate army, with its boy soldiers and 
 its stripling leader,* like Jaques amidst the gallant foresters 
 of Ardens, for purposes not theirs, and feeding thoughts 
 they could not comprehend. But he was a Jaques without 
 melancholy. 
 
 While his young compatriots, all ardent for the new 
 Republic, strove with each other who should advance the 
 
 * Hoche, the commandant on the Rhine, was twenty-three. 
 
PAUL LOUIS COURIER. 177 
 
 soonest to death for her cause, — while honours showered 
 daily upon their adventurous emulation, — Courier, never 
 shunning danger, but never seeking fame, pursued his 
 separate and strange career, — his genius unknown and his 
 courses nncheered by the triumphs of success. He studied 
 much, but the library of a camp is confined, and it was only 
 among the books which he had read before. His literary 
 patience was of a peculiar sort : he preferred refreshing his 
 knowledge in one point to extending it in others. His 
 diligence was inexhaustible when applied to favourite 
 models; his apathy extraordinary towards subjects which 
 did not naturally allure him. He was conscious of this his 
 intellectual bias, and he speaks of it without affectation. 
 The philosophical nature of his mind made him in politics 
 consult the future rather than the past ; he had little love, 
 therefore, for history, and he never mastered its study. 
 The main defect of his mind was what is the rarest in 
 men of genius — it was a lack of curiosity ! He had a 
 great tendency to that dispiriting temper which is for ever 
 damping your ardour with the question of cui bono ? Yet 
 in this want of curiosity he was not consistent ; and in one 
 point all the other traits of his character seem strongly 
 contradicted. He was passionately fond of antiquities ; he 
 would travel miles and court the most imminent dangers 
 for a sight of some old ruin. And he wandered from the 
 enthusiastic and ambitious soldiery that now held the ter- 
 ritories of the Rhine and the soft Moselle, to pass long 
 hours among the mouldering convents and shattered towers 
 in which the dark memory of the middle ages is preserved. 
 It is assuredly an anomaly in character that a man so in- 
 different to the history of the Past, should be so attached 
 to its relics, — that one so derisive of the feudal pomps 
 should be so wedded to their trophies, — that so little 
 reverence for the essence of antiquity should be united with 
 such homage to its externals. I attribute the inconsistency 
 to early circumstances. As a boy he had been accustomed 
 to antiquarian researches, — his mind outgrew the passion 
 for antiquity, but retained the taste for its remains. TTe 
 may add to this, somewhat of the gratification of vanity ; 
 for he was not only a diligent but a learned antiquarian ; 
 he was an adept at inscriptions and the erudite mazes o£ 
 hieroglyphical conjecture; so that his habits of research 
 
178 PAUL LOUIS COURIER. 
 
 were probably endeared to him by the self-complacence of 
 a triumphant ingenuity. 
 
 In this life — brave without glory, and wise without 
 success — Courier passed two years, feeling himself, in that 
 rapid race of honour where he who died not to-day might 
 be a general to-morrow, distanced by his contemporaries, 
 and growing naturally discontented with his station. In 
 1795 occurred the blockade of Mayence, and at that very 
 time the elder Courier died. His mother was ill and 
 wretched — Paul Louis left the army — left the blockade — 
 and without leave, and with perfect nonchalance, returned 
 to France. His filial affection was not, however, perhaps 
 his sole inducement in hazarding the philosophy of deser- 
 tion. The hardships endured by the French army before 
 Mayence were exceedingly rigorous; they were by no means 
 to the taste of a man who thought renown was no recom- 
 pense. " It was wonderfully cold there," said the witty 
 soldier ; " I thought myself frozen. Never was there a 
 slighter distinction between a man and a crystallization. " 
 
 The army proclaimed Paul Louis a deserter. Meanwhile 
 Paul Louis shut himself up, and amused his leisure with 
 translating the oration jpro Ligario. His friends managed 
 to hush up the matter : the young soldier was grateful, — 
 for it enabled him to give a better polish to his translation. 
 The revolutionary war proceeded to its triumph. The star 
 of Napoleon rose above the horizon : the grave melancholy 
 that belonged to the Conventional moralities was broken 
 up. People rushed into feasts and balls. Paul Louis 
 caught the contagion with an avidity natural to his bold 
 and lively temper ; and behold him now the gallant and 
 the man of pleasure ! Passionately devoted to women, he 
 gave himself wholly up to their society. Young, gay, and 
 with a power of social wit rarely equalled, he became the 
 rage at Toulouse. But his ill fortune pursued him from 
 the camp to the chamber ; and an unlucky intrigue made 
 Toulouse no longer a place of security. At the age of 
 twenty-three a man without much difficulty forgives him- 
 self these offences : I suspect that he manages to console 
 himself with the same ease ! Banished Toulouse, Courier 
 resumed his former career, and he set out to Italy to take 
 the command of a company of artillery. 
 
 Italy did not present to the gallant spirit of Courier, in- 
 
PAUL LOUIS COURIER. 179 
 
 toxicated as it was by the adoration of beauty, and the 
 reverence for departed art, those nnrningled sources of 
 delight which earlier and later pilgrims have found amidst 
 its ruins. The severe licentiousness of the young Napoleon 
 was lavishly imitated by his coarser followers : the polished 
 inhabitants of Italy met with no dainty respect from the 
 new successors of the triumphant Gaul. Pillage and 
 Rapine devastated the marble cities and the vine- clad 
 plains. And what to Courier was more bitter than all, the 
 noble relics of antique art, " the breathing canvas and the 
 storied bust," were mangled, defaced, despoiled as the 
 avarice or the ignorance of the hardy conquerors ordained. 
 Too refined and too classical for his colleagues, Paul 
 Courier deplored these excesses in terms scarcely less 
 eloquent than we find in his later and more elaborate 
 writings. His letters (on this subject) to a Pole of con- 
 siderable attainments, whose friendship he bad acquired at 
 Toulouse, are full of his characteristic graces. Byron's 
 indignation at the rape of the Elgin marbles is tame beside 
 that of Courier at the insulting spoliation of the Italian 
 treasures, — Italy's last triumph, — her consolation in art for 
 her degradation in history. The same cavalier and careless 
 bravery that Courier had evinced on the banks of the 
 Rhine, equally distinguished him among the ruins of 
 Rome. Hated as a Frenchman, exposed day and night to 
 the poignard of the assassin, he yet wandered alone and 
 unguarded in the most solitary and perilous places. His 
 love for antiquities (mingled with the growing passion for 
 adventure, and it may be with a certain romance which his 
 perception of the ridiculous would not allow him to own) 
 was his sole guide. He followed it without fear. With, 
 his sabre by bts side, he traversed the mountains of Italy, 
 — explored the ruins, — braved the banditti; — Salvator 
 Rosa himself was not more reckless of the poignards of 
 the brigands, whom he afterwards immortalised ; — if 
 Courier was often surprised by them he invariably escaped. 
 He knew well the Italian language ; he was never without 
 a certain bribe to the robber ; and, above all, at that happy 
 age, and with that versatile temper, he possessed the art, 
 better than much, gold, which, leads us to accommodate 
 ourselves to all men, and supplies the absence of force by 
 the exertion of ingenuity. In the day he sought the nioun- 
 
 N 2 
 
]80 PAUL LOUIS COURIER. 
 
 tain passes, — at night lie was assailed ; — the next morning 
 he pursued his labours. He never feared the robber, — he 
 never avenged the robbery. A certain generous tone of 
 philosophy made him lenient to these wild banditti. He 
 was a soldier, and he murdered by art ; was he to be vin- 
 dictive to those who robbed by necessity ? 
 
 In this eccentric manner, perfecting his mind, enjoying 
 his life, and advancing not in his career, our extraordinary 
 hero passed his Italian campaign : it nearly came to a pre- 
 mature termination. 
 
 Paul Louis was one of the division left by General Mac- 
 donald at Home. The division capitulated : it was to quit 
 Rome at a certain hour. " A la bonne heure" thought 
 Courier; "a last look at the Vatican Library before I 
 depart." What a type of. the careless courage of the 
 soldier- student ! He repairs to the Vatican — plunges into 
 study — forgets the hour of departure — and quits the 
 Vatican when he himself is the sole Frenchman left at 
 Rome. 
 
 It was a calm, clear, and still evening. Nursing his 
 reveries, Courier walked slowly along the streets of Rome. 
 He was recognised as he passed beneath a lamp. A moment 
 more ; a bullet whizzed by him — missed him — and lodged 
 in the body of a Roman woman. In an instant the city 
 was alarmed — -the crowd gathered — Courier dashed through 
 the midst of the mob, and reached the palace of a Roman 
 of his acquaintance : through his aid he escaped. He em- 
 barked at Marseilles, and arrived at Paris ; but not without 
 new disasters. On his road he was despoiled of his 
 baggage and his money ; and, what was worse, a pulmonary 
 complaint attacked him, from which he never entirely 
 recovered. 
 
 At Paris, however, he renewed his former career of 
 pleasure, but pleasure of a more refined and literary cast. 
 Time had already begun to mellow the Passionate into the 
 Intellectual. He mixed with the learned of his day ; he 
 was welcomed by some of the more eminent amongst them. 
 That ambition of a circle, from which no Frenchman is 
 free, animated his powers ; and he wrote some works which 
 then were but little known to the public, but are not, for 
 that reason, unworthy of his fame. It often happens 
 among literary men that their best works are neglected, 
 
PAUL LOUIS COURIER. 181 
 
 till some lucky book gains the author a name ; they arc then 
 sought for, studied, and admired. Genius revives its own 
 deceased ; and the world, once taught to admire an author 
 for one work, lifts the stone from those its neglect has 
 already buried. 
 
 From these pursuits and these circles, Courier was 
 aroused by a summons to command a body of artillery 
 stationed in Italy, which now lay supine, and seemingly 
 reconciled, beneath the yoke of Napoleon. Among the 
 softer and more poetical characteristics of Courier's mind, 
 his passion for Italy was not the least remarkable. Not 
 Jacopo Foscari himself loved with a more yearning and 
 filial tenderness the bright air and the genial skies of that 
 divine land. Courier cared nothing for the rank they gave 
 him, and everything for the place assigned to it. He 
 arrived, then, in Italy, — arrived in time to witness one of 
 the most singular farces in the history of the world, and 
 which the pen of more than one memorialist has already 
 rendered so amusing. Buonaparte, tired with being Consul, 
 wanted to be Emperor ; — he was Emperor. He wanted 
 now to know what the army thought about the change : 
 an order arrived for the taking the opinion of the dif- 
 ferent regiments. These strokes of policy, where it is 
 advantageous to say " Yes," dangerous to say "No," and 
 wise to say nothing at all, usually succeed. Shakspeare 
 has described their effect admirably in " Richard the 
 Third": — 
 
 " Tliey spake not a word ; 
 But, like dumb statues or breathing stones 
 Stared at each, other. * * * 
 
 ****** 
 
 "When he had done, some followers of mine own, 
 
 At lower end o' the hall, hurled up their caps, 
 
 And some ten voices cried, ' God save King Richard ! ' 
 
 And thus I took the vantage of those few : 
 
 ' Thanks, gentle citizens and friends,' quoth I." 
 
 These lines explain tolerably well the nature and the result 
 of the questions put to the French army. 
 
 The great trait of Courier's character was — (I can 
 scarcely translate the word) — insouciance. We trace it 
 everywhere — in every action. It curbed his military ardour 
 — tant mieux; it chilled his patriotism — taut pis. He 
 resisted not the proposal ; he continued to serve under 
 
182 PAUL LOUIS COURIER. 
 
 Napoleon; and he contented himself, en philosophe et a fa 
 Frangaise, with a fine saying and a witticism — " Ftre Buona- 
 parte et se faire Sire ! il aspire d descendre" * In fact, 
 the essence of Courier's darker and sterner nature was 
 contempt: where he was not indifferent he despised. 
 " Buonaparte loves his rattle ; let him have it ! The 
 people will obey the puppet. Poor people ! — be it so." 
 This was the spirit with which he viewed the nascent 
 despotism. He had the disdain of Cassius, but not his 
 energy. If he had been a contemporary and countryman 
 of Brutus, he would have said the best thing against 
 Caesar, but have struck no blow. He subscribed to the 
 new dynasty ; and amused himself with painting it in 
 some letters of inimitable satire. His course of conduct 
 in this has been vindicated, — I think, without success. 
 The Directory, say his advocates, was a wretched govern- 
 ment, — feeble and venal. The Consulship had lasted too 
 short a time for trial. What did you lose by gaining; an 
 Emperor? The answer is obvious; — you lost Hojpe. A 
 republic purifies itself naturally, — a monarchy only by great 
 efforts. A republic wants but time, — a despotism wants 
 new revolutions. What was to be hoped from a sway like 
 Napoleon's, which crushed the Press, and resolved all the 
 elements of knowledge into — Military Schools? Paul 
 Courier was a philosopher, — he knew these truths ; — but 
 he was a philosopher for himself as well as for others. A 
 better excuse for him is in his position. What could he 
 do ? — an undistinguished officer in the artillery, what was 
 his consent to, or his rejection of, the empire of Napoleon ? 
 We judge too much in estimating the actions of men, and 
 the good they might have effected, by the rankz^e attribute 
 to their intellectual powers, without remembering that it is 
 only when those powers have become acknowledged that 
 their possessors can aspire to play their legitimate part. 
 But patriotism, to be a strong passion, must be a common 
 passion. You cannot inspire the individual, unless you 
 first form the nation ; and public integrity in Prance was 
 at that time at the lowest possible ebb. Despite its false 
 liberty, its laughable citizenship, its terrible republic, 
 France scarcely knew one sound principle of legislation ; 
 
 * [" To be Buonaparte and to make himself Sire ! he aspires to descend !"] 
 
PAUL LOUIS COURIER. 183 
 
 or, after the extinction of the eloquent Girondists, produced 
 one honourable coiys of men. Courier himself boasted 
 that he was able to show letters from the most eminent 
 men of the empire, who followed, like dogs, the track of 
 the times, — Republicans — Buonapartists — Bourbonists — 
 according as a shilling was to be gained : — " Men who 
 commence their destiny en sansculottes, and finish it en 
 habits de cour" The success of vice is the discouragement 
 of virtue. 
 
 In 1808, Courier, having long and vainly demanded leave 
 of absence to revisit his home, gave in his resignation. He 
 returned to Paris, and proclaimed an eternal renunciation 
 of his military trade. 
 
 At this time the wild but solemn fate of Napoleon was 
 rapidly hurrying towards its great, but unrecognised close. 
 His destiny was at its height : and the height of some men 
 is the main step to their fall. Scarce returned from Spain, 
 which his presence alone had almost conquered, he now 
 swept onto the armies gathered by the Danube, which he 
 was to lead to the city of the House of Hapsburg. All 
 Paris was in a paroxysm of excitement, and Courier caught 
 something of the contagion. To understand well the cha- 
 racter of this singular man, we must consider him as one 
 fond of studying the peculiar phases and aspects of his 
 kind, and scrutinizing rather than sharing their passions. 
 He looked upon the events which engross and absorb the 
 more vulgar, but warmer spirits, with an artist's inquiring 
 eye. The pomp of empire, the laurels of war, the rewards 
 of ambition, were to him but testimonials of human delu- 
 sion, and food for a just, and not malevolent, satire ; yet, 
 at this period of his life, his wonted philosophy seems to 
 have forsaken him, and he became one of the worshippers 
 of the Echo. He had never yet served under Napoleon ; 
 he now resolved to do so. He communicated his intention 
 to none of his friends ; he repaired secretly to the army. 
 Having once resigned, his re-admission, according to the 
 military rules of Napoleon, was not easy. He gained 
 access to the tent of a general of the artillery ; and, with- 
 out any peculiar station, became once more a French 
 soldier. 
 
 Something — (I apprehend, in examining his character, 
 his letters, and the common elements of human nature) — ■ 
 
184 PAUL LOUIS COURIER. 
 
 something of sore and mortified feeling, of the conscious- 
 ness of great powers and a foiled career, had led him to this 
 determination. On his late return to Paris he had found 
 how entirely military reputation engrossed the public 
 voice ; his philosophy might, in the main, support him in 
 his obscurity, but not perhaps at all times. He had had his 
 opportunities, and he had failed ! This was the sole inter- 
 pretation the public could attach to his career ; a bitter 
 verdict to a man of pride and genius, who had not yet 
 found, amidst the depths of an undeveloped intellect, the 
 triumphant answer of self-acquittal. He had arrived too at 
 an age in which a man is often more sensible to mortifica- 
 tion than at an earlier period ; the season of promise, at the 
 age of seven-and-thirty, is well nigh over, and the world 
 begins to ask for performance. The love, too, of pleasure 
 — of women and of strange adventure — is cooled ; and be- 
 fore we resign ourselves to a calm and obscure life, we are 
 often willing to make one sterner attempt than heretofore 
 at glory. Courier, perhaps too, had some sympathy with 
 the genius, if not with the temper and fortunes of Napoleon 
 — the higher minds are attracted toward each other. He 
 thought (this is evident from his letters) that Napoleon 
 might appreciate him. Mocked or slighted by inferior 
 men, he felt his powers, and hoped the penetration of a 
 great man might avenge the neglect. Whatever were his 
 motives, Courier joined the camp ; — joined — for forty- 
 eight hours ! What scenes were crowded into that 
 time. 
 
 Hitherto Courier had beheld war by samples, he now 
 beheld it wholesale. Never yet had he seen whole regi- 
 ments swept away beneath the deadly fires — never yet for 
 his ear had the music of four hundred pieces of cannon risen 
 above a soil of trampled and quivering flesh. Never yet 
 had he fully comprehended the wide vastness of the desola- 
 tion of War ! He himself speaks of the horror, the pity, 
 the disgust which seized him ; — a sort of sickness closed 
 around his senses, which were usually so keen — everything 
 passed before him like grotesque phantasmagoria ; — he 
 sank, at last, overcome by exhaustion, at the foot of a tree 
 — he recovered not until he was within the walls of 
 Vienna. Prom that time he required no further conviction 
 of the scourge of war. The theories of life were faint to 
 
PAUL LOUIS COURIER. 185 
 
 the practical experience of those terrible hours ; nay, he 
 thenceforward even denied genius to generalship ; he con- 
 tended, that all was disorder, and the resnlt chance. He 
 laughed at the phrase — the art of war ; a great battle con- 
 veyed to him the notion of a chaos incompatible with the 
 providence of an intellectual design. 
 
 As he sought the campaign, so he left it — abruptly, 
 silently, and with his usual arrogance, as a free agent. He 
 thought to lose the bloody memory of two days in a land 
 that Nature consecrated to love, — and he sought, once more, 
 his favourite Italy. 
 
 He took up his abode at Florence, and renewed his 
 studies in Greek literature. But poor Paul Louis was not 
 born under a lucky star, and he could not even study Greek 
 with impunity. His ill fortune led him to read the pastoral 
 romance of 4; Longus "' in manuscript — no trifling affliction 
 in itself — but unhappily, this MS. which was in the 
 Laurentine library, contained a passage to be found iu no 
 other printed edition of the tale — nay it supplied a terrible 
 chasm well known to the learned, which has hitherto 
 yawned in a certain part of the romance. Imagine the 
 rapture of the student. With trembling hands he hastened 
 to copy out the passage, and in his ecstacy he contrived to 
 upset the inkstand over the precious passage. The 
 librarians were furious — they swore that he had spoiled 
 the Greek copy on purpose, so that he might pillage its 
 spoils, and be the only one to arrogate the possession. The 
 Frenchman had not perhaps that hardihood of nerve which 
 our periodical critics ultimately bestow upon an English 
 victim. He could not resist unburthening himself in a 
 reply. He addressed this effusion to M. Renouard, 
 Librarian of Paris, and he transferred all the blame from 
 himself to his Italian accusers. His sole crime, he said, 
 was being a Frenchman ; and it was not the spilling of 
 ink, but the spilling of blood, that rose in judgment against 
 him. The letter made a noise — attention was riveted to 
 the writer and his inkstand — when lo ! — it came out that 
 the copier of " Longus " was the deserter at TVagram. 
 From two such crimes there was no easy escape — but, 
 however, the constitutional dexterity of Courier carried 
 him safe from the result of his constitutional imprudence. 
 Ink, liable to such accidents, was nevertheless considered 
 
186 PAUL LOUIS COUEIEB. 
 
 too dangerous for use, and he was enjoined upon no account 
 to dip his pen into it again. He obeyed the command 
 during his sojourn in Italy. In travel and in study the 
 years rolled on — peace was proclaimed — Buonaparte was 
 at St. Helena — and Paul Louis Courier was married! 
 Two of these events were important enough to the world, 
 the third was not wholly unimportant to Paul Louis 
 Courier ! 
 
 From this time the wilder portion of life closed for him. 
 The soldier — the adventurer — 'the wanderer — were no 
 more. He sat himself down in his paternal vineyards, 
 and commenced, in the beautiful seclusion of Touraine, 
 the date of a more bright career. Inspired by the strong 
 disdain which he felt for the rule, weak and violent, of the 
 Bourbons after the Restoration — Paul Courier, in 1816, 
 addressed the two Chambers on behalf of the inhabitants 
 of Luynes, in a short petition of sonis seven or eight pages, 
 which sufficed, however, to produce a very considerable 
 sensation. This petition is a narrative of the oppression 
 and injustice committed against a village. The narrative 
 of a village was a narrative applicable to all Prance. When 
 he stated the frivolous grounds of accusation — when he 
 stated the rigour of suspicion — the bigotry of fear — which 
 had converted a village of honest peasants into a herd of 
 discontented and wronged men, he was appealing to the 
 common sense of Prance, and he was answered at once by 
 the common heart. The style of this petition is simple yet 
 elaborate ; biting irony — generous complaint — severe truth 
 — are condensed in periods that remind you of Voltaire, 
 but without Voltaire's affectation. M. Decazes, Minister 
 of Police, courted this new and formidable writer. Courier, 
 in his visits to Paris, visited his salons, and obtained by 
 that complaisance some good for his fellow villagers and 
 himself. That done, he was no more a courtier. 
 
 M. Clavier, an Academician, died. Courier demanded 
 admission into the Academy of Inscriptions. He was re- 
 jected — he revenged himself by a letter " A Messieurs cle 
 l'Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres." This letter 
 contains yet stronger evidence of his powers of irony, than 
 his petition to the two Chambers ; but the subject was less 
 popular, and it mad*) lass noise. In 1819 he commenced 
 his famous letters to the editor of the " Censor." The 
 
PAUL LOUIS COURIER. 187 
 
 publication of these brief and stinging writings brought the 
 name of Courier into every one's mouth — and inquiry 
 turning, as it is wont to do, when a man begins to attract 
 celebrity, — from the work to the author, found sufficient to 
 interest the public in his person ; and thus doubly to in- 
 crease the charm and fascination of his genius. 
 
 This accomplished traveller, this profound student, lived 
 in an obscure village, affecting and proud to affect the 
 simple life and habits of the peasant. His vineyards and 
 his woods were his chief occupation, and yielded him his 
 revenue. He called himself Paul Louis Vigneron — he pre- 
 tended to no superiority over his fellow villagers — he was 
 one of them in all but knowledge. His style happily 
 united the two opposite characteristics he assumed — the 
 scholar and the peasant — at once most classical and most 
 familiar ; style irresistible alike to the academy and the 
 marketplace. "No man ever made elegance so popular, or 
 homeliness so elegant. He polished with great labour, but 
 the polish only rendered the diction and the sense trans- 
 parent to the dullest comprehension. In 1821 appeared 
 fche Simple JJiscours. The occasion was this, it was pro- 
 posed to purchase the Park of Chambord for the young 
 Duke of Bordeaux. This proposition Courier opposed. 
 Hence the Simple JDlscours. 
 
 ' ; If, (he begins this incomparable pamphlet) if we had 
 so much money that we did not know what to do with it 
 — if all our debts were paid — our highways repaired — our 
 poor relieved — and our church (for God before all things) 
 restored, and its windows glazed — I think, my friends, 
 that the best thing we could do with the surplus would be 
 to contribute with our neighbours to rebuild the Bridge of 
 St. Aventin ; which, shortening by one good league the 
 distance between us and Tours, would augment the price 
 and the produce of land throughout the neighbourhood. 
 That in my opinion would be the best employment for our 
 superfluous capital, — that is to say, whenever we possess it. 
 But to buy Chambord for the Duke of Bordeaux — I cannot 
 agree to it : no, not even if we had the means. It would 
 be but a bad scheme, in my opinion, for the Duke himself, 
 for us, and for Chambord. If you will listen to me, I will 
 tell you why. It is a holiday, my friends, and we have 
 time to chat over the matter." 
 
188 PAUL LOUIS COUEIEE. 
 
 In this familiar manner, Paul Louis, Vigneron de la Cha- 
 voniiiere, throws off his biting truths. He confesses that 
 the courtiers are inclined to the purchase ; " but our senti- 
 ments," saith he, wittily, "are very different from those 
 of the courtiers — they love the Prince in proportion to 
 what he gives them — we in proportion to what he 
 leaves us." 
 
 " The notion is entertained (says the government) of 
 purchasing Chambord by the Commons of France, for the 
 Duke of Bordeaux. The notion is entertained — by whom 
 pray ? By the Ministry ? No ; they would not conceal so 
 beautiful a thought, or content themselves with the mere 
 honour of approval upon such an occasion. By the Prince, 
 then ? God forbid that his first idea — his first gleam of 
 reason should be of so singular a character — that the desire 
 of our money should enter his young head, even before the 
 passion for sugar plums and rattles ! Do the Commons 
 then entertain the agreeable notion ? Not ours certainly 
 on this side of the Loire, &c." 
 
 How happily afterwards Courier proceeds to comment 
 on the cant anecdote of Titus ! — 
 
 "A preceptor — an abbe of the Court, now teaches our 
 young princes the science of history. Be sure he does not 
 forget to make them admire that excellent Emperor Titus, 
 who was so great an adept in the art of donation, that he 
 thought every day was lost in which he did not give some- 
 thing away. So that one never saw him without being made 
 happy — happy, you understand, my friends, with a pension, 
 a sinecure — a handful of the popular money. Such a 
 prince is sure to be adored by all those who are admitted 
 to court, and drive about the streets in their state car- 
 riages " — "La cour l'idolatrait — mais le peuple ? Le 
 peuple ? il n'y en avait pas, l'histoire n'en dit rien 
 . . . Voila les elemens d'histoire qu'on enseignait alors 
 aux princes."^ 
 
 To my taste this is the most perfect in point of union 
 between satire and logic of all Courier's works. I know 
 nothing like it in political literature — it is a political 
 library in itself. For this production he was of course 
 
 * [" The court idolized him — but the people ? The people ? There were 
 no people : history said nothing about them. . . Behold the elements of 
 history then taught to princes."] 
 
PAUL LOUIS COURIER. 189 
 
 imprisoned. They punished him for writing truth so well 
 by a fine of three hundred francs, and a confinement of 
 two months. Poor Paul Louis ! " Pray God for him ! " 
 cries he himself in his address aux times devotes, — " may 
 his example teach us never to say what we think of those 
 gentlemen who live at o«ar expense." Courier published a 
 pamphlet relative to his trial, which proved how indomit- 
 able wit is against persecution ; and the day of his release 
 from prison they brought him up for a new trial for a 
 pamphlet of the most exquisite composition, called " Peti- 
 tion pour les Villageois qu'on empeche de danser." The 
 peasants had been accustomed to dance every Sunday on 
 the usual spot allotted in the French villages to that 
 amusement. The Prefet forbade the dance. Courier 
 demands the restoration of the old and harmless pleasure. 
 Nothing can be more touching than his description of the 
 manners, the good order, the improving morality of his 
 poor neighbours ; nothing more convincing than his argu- 
 ments on their behalf. They did not think it quite right 
 to imprison a man for wishing the peasants to dance, so 
 this time they let him off with a reprimand. From that 
 date persecution begat its usual result, secrecy; and 
 Courier contrived to publish, but under a mask — a mask 
 which concealed his name but not his genius. I pass over 
 his " Replies to anonymous correspondents," one of which, 
 the second, contains more eloquent and pathetic passages 
 than any other of his tracts. I pass over the " Livret de Paul 
 Louis," a brilliant sketch, in which, however, the author 
 displays the usual ignorance of a Frenchman on English 
 history, when he observes that literary men have but little 
 knowledge of business, and that Bolingbroke repented of 
 having employed Addison and Steele ! — Bolingbroke's bit- 
 terest opponents ! I pass too over the " Gazette du Vil- 
 lage," a polished and most subtle piece of irony. I pass 
 over the few pages contained in the " Piece Diplo- 
 matique," which is supposed to be a letter from Louis of 
 France to the King of Spain, and which at least no Bour- 
 bon could have written. I come to the most admired — the 
 most laboured — the last of all Courier's writings, the 
 " Pamphlet des Pamphlets." This, I say, is esteemed in 
 France the most perfect and matured specimen of his 
 style. Imagine how wonderful, how expressive that style 
 
190 PAUL LOUiS COURIER. 
 
 must be, when we apply the epithets elaborate — finished 
 — even great — to writings scarcely exceeding in length 
 a newspaper article ! For my own part, I still hold to 
 my opinion that the " Simple Discours " is the best and 
 fullest of Courier's works — it has more thought and more 
 wisdom than the " Pamphlet des Pamphlets;" — its wit, 
 too, is more racy, and its diction more striking, if less 
 pure. Anything seemingly English in sentiment was at 
 that day sure to be popular in France ; and in this pamphlet 
 Courier supposes an English patriot, to whom he attributes 
 a letter to himself, — excellent, indeed, but scarcely charac- 
 teristic of the tone of English patriots. The merit of the 
 work scarcely strikes upon an English ear ; it consists in 
 the eloquence with which Courier vindicates himself from 
 being a pamphleteer — a term of disgrace in the vocabu-' 
 lary of French ion ton — a title not discreditable with us, 
 always excepting the refined judgment of my Lord of 
 Durham, who could find nothing worse to say of Bishop 
 Philpotts of Exeter ! To an English reader the vindication 
 loses its charm because we feel no venom in the charge. 
 The conclusion, however, of this tract is deeply impressive ; 
 it speaks of the shortness of human life — of the eternity of 
 human improvement — of the feebleness of individuals — of 
 the power of the mass. It hath in it a certain solemn and 
 warning voice, preceding as it did the untimely and bloody 
 end of the bold preacher. It reminds us of the deep 
 pathos of those lines, some of the latest that Byron ever 
 wrote, and to which we link the associations of his own 
 death : — 
 
 " Between two worlds life hovers like a star, — 
 'Twixt night and mom npon the horizon's verge ; 
 How little do we know that which we are ! 
 How less what we may be ! The eternal surge 
 Of time and tide rolls on, and bears afar 
 Our bubbles." 
 
 While Courier was thus occupying the mind of the 
 public, and while he employed his more learned hours in 
 the study of his favourite Greeks, he seems to have shared 
 the ordinary fate of genius ; — lie was no prophet in his own 
 country ! 
 
 A certain fretf ulness and acerbity of temper had come 
 upon him with years; always eccentric in his habits, be 
 
PAUL LOUIS COURIER. 191 
 
 became gradually rnorose in his humours ; he quarrelled 
 with his neighbours, and was at war with his own house- 
 hold. Much is to be said on his behalf, beyond the 
 common and valid excuse for the peevishness of literary 
 men in overwrought nerves and a feverish imagination. 
 The mind wears the body, and the body reacts upon the 
 temper. This is clear — it is inevitable — we require no 
 waste of sentiment upon so plain a matter. Poor Courier 
 had other excuses ; he had done much for his village, 
 and his villagers were ungrateful ; this wounded him, and 
 justly. He was not too, I suspect, happy in his marriage ; 
 he believed he had cause for jealousy ; and to a man so 
 proud the suspicion was no light curse. From the gloom 
 of his obscurity went forth a burning light among the 
 nations, but it came from the midst of discomfort, and 
 the hearth of strife ; — petty bickerings, and village annoy- 
 ances disturbed the serenity once natural to his consti- 
 tution. His very fame produced Lim but enemies. He 
 had offended the Valetaille of France, and France, in his 
 own words, was le plus valet de tons les peiuples. But the 
 mortification and the harassment were now drawing to a 
 close — the triumph of genius and the exhaustion of the 
 nerves were alike to cease. He beheld before him the apex 
 of his fame ; and he stood, while he gazed, upon the verge 
 of the grave. 
 
 On the 10th of April, 1825, Courier left his house — 
 he had spoken but little that day — an evident gloom had 
 hung over him. He was borne back to his door a corpse ; 
 — within a few paces from his home he had been found, 
 pierced by some secret bullet, and quite dead. His 
 assassin is unknown to this day. The rash enthusiasts 
 of liberty, often the most illiberal of men, laid the crime 
 on the Jesuits, but without a shadow of proof. One 
 nearest and dearest to himself was, not long since, accused 
 of abetting in the murder, and acquitted. A man of low 
 birth, of whom he had been jealous, was, some time after 
 his death, murdered himself; but eight years have passed, 
 and the sentence of life for life has had no formal record. 
 Peace to his ashes ! — they will not rest the less tranquilly, 
 nor will the turf above them be less green, because ven- 
 geance is still left in the hands of God ! 
 
 The countenance of Courier was grave and thoughtful ; 
 
192 PAUL LOUIS COURIER. 
 
 the brow high, broad, massive, and deeply marked ; liis 
 eye somewhat sunk and melancholy — his month sarcastic 
 and flexile. His manners varied at various periods of his 
 life. I have met with some who knew him well, and 
 considered him the most delightful of companions. I have 
 known others who considered him the most repellant. In 
 his later days he had transferred the graces from his habits 
 to his style. Perhaps few men, with advantage to the 
 temper, can begin the career of letters late in life. It 
 requires several years to harden us to the abuse, the ingra- 
 titude, the wilful misinterpretation, and the gnawing 
 slander we endure from our contemporaries and our 
 rivals. In youth we have years to spare to the apprentice- 
 ship ; in mature age the pride is more stubborn, and the 
 hope less sanguine. 
 
 As a writer Courier must rank amongst the most classical 
 of his language ; in vigour, in wit, in logic, he defies all 
 comparison among his contemporaries. They who would 
 learn to what degree the polish and power of style have 
 advanced in Prance since the peace, should read, not the 
 inflated paradoxes of Chateaubriand, or the extravagant 
 exaggerations of Victor Hugo ; but those pages in which 
 Courier has indeed made words things, and in which the 
 plainest truths are conveyed with the most marvellous art. 
 To the strength of Junius he adds the simplicity and the 
 playfulness of Pascal. He fails, however, in imagination, 
 and his thoughts are usually more bold than profound. 
 This is remarkable rather in his literary than his political 
 remains, for popular political writing does not of necessity 
 demand the profound ; its merit is often to familiarise, not 
 to invent, truth. In his preface to a new translation of 
 Herodotus, we may especially detect the comparative want 
 of depth in Courier's faculties — comparative, I say, to their 
 power and versatility. He tells us, for instance, that the 
 historical epic must cease for ever when the prose of a 
 language has come to some perfection. He declares that 
 the Greek literature is the only one not born of some other 
 literature, but produced by instinct, and the sentiment of 
 the beautiful, — mistakes which could not arise from a want 
 of learning, but from a want of that reflection which 
 stamps even the paradox of a profound intellect ; yet the 
 same piece of writing is rich in sentences of beautiful and 
 
PAUL LOUIS COURIER. 193 
 
 just criticism. Nothing can be better in its way than his 
 description of conrtly translators playing the petit maitre 
 with the simple language of the Greek; — nothing more 
 true than his warning to his countrymen that the language 
 of poetry is the last to be learnt in academies and courts. 
 "Limitation" he says finely, — U V imitation cle la cour est 
 lapeste du goat aussi bien que des mosurs" * 
 
 Courier's style has been compared to that of the Editor 
 of the " Examiner; " but Courier is more free and flowing 
 — more adapted to the popular taste — more familiar and 
 simple. On the other hand, he has not the iron grasp — 
 the novel metaphor — the rich illustration, and the careless 
 depth of remark which characterise the most standard and 
 philosophic of our living periodical writers. He reminds 
 us, I think, rather of Sydney Smith, but is less broad and 
 more daring. In fact, his manner is so peculiarly and 
 idiomatically French, that the English writer, who closely 
 resembled him, would write ill. 
 
 Paul Louis Courier is then no more !— his bright and 
 short race is run ; — the various threads of his desultory 
 and romantic life are prematurely and violently cut short. 
 He has left to mankind not only the evidence of what he 
 has achieved, but the belief of what greater results he had 
 the capacity to accomplish. Living in a time of transition, 
 when the people, passing from a brilliant despotism to a 
 gloomy and imperfect freedom, scarcely knew whether to 
 lament the one or to advance the other, his writings tended 
 to destroy the illusion of the despotism, and to instil right 
 notions as to the nature of freedom. No solemn plausi- 
 bilities of men or of names deceived him. His mockery 
 respected nothing — save the truth. He incorporated, in 
 the form of his constitutional disdain, the popular con- 
 tempt for the hollo wness and profligacy — the venality and 
 the servility — which marked so strongly the character of the 
 French court ; a court of slaves and traitors — of sharpers 
 and of cowards — a court of nobles proud without honour, 
 and subservient without loyalty. By expressing the con- 
 tempt of the people he made their sentiments known to 
 each other ; his genius was as a watchword of union, for it 
 
 * [The imitation of the Court is the blight of taste as well as of 
 manners.] 
 
 C 
 
194 PAUL LOUIS COUEIEK. 
 
 brought tliem together. The benefit effected by a bold 
 public writer is this- — he acquaints the people, by his own 
 popularity, "with the exact strength of the popular senti- 
 ment ; he thus prepares the common mind r though he may 
 not lead it ; — lie makes the impulse, and Chance the 
 conduct ! 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER.* 
 
 A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 FIEST PERIOD. 
 
 Schiller s boyhood — His parentage — Early studies and inclinations — His 
 entranced the Military Academy — His youthful poems, and predilec- 
 tions for the drama. 
 
 Close by the village of Lorch. on the borders of Wur- 
 teniberg, rise the ruins of a castle, the hereditary seat of 
 the Counts of Hohenstaufen. The graves of that illus- 
 trious family surround a couvent, placed upon a neighbour- 
 ing eminence, and half hid by venerable limes. Upon 
 another hill, stands an old chapel ; below, flows the river 
 Hems, through luxuriant vineyards, and fertile corn-fields. 
 Amidst the ruins of Hohenstaufen, or amidst the graves of 
 its ancient lords, between the years 1766-68, might often 
 be seen two children — a boy and girl, — so strongly resem- 
 bling each other, as to denote their relationship as brother 
 and sister.t Usually they were seen alone ; sometimes 
 with young companions, — sometimes with a man in a 
 military uniform, and in the vigour of life — to whom the 
 boy, especially, listened with avidity, whether he explained 
 the plan upon which the old Castle had been built, or 
 pleased the infant spirit of adventure, by anecdotes of 
 camp and field. ± More often, perhaps, their companion 
 was a female, of mild exterior, and manners peculiarly 
 gentle, though somewhat grave and serious. And she, 
 too, found in the children, still more especially in the 
 
 * [Written in 1347 and prefixed to a reprint of Lord Lytton's translation 
 of the " Poems and Ballads of Schiller, " which were first collected into a 
 volume in 1845", having appeared piecemeal from month to month hi the 
 pages of "Blackwood's Magazine."] 
 
 f Hoffmeister, Schwab. J Hofimeister. 
 
 o 2 
 
196 THE LIFE OF SCHILLEE. 
 
 boy, eager listeners to the talk by which she sought to 
 instruct the understanding, or arouse the fancy. She 
 had tales of witch and fairy to relate; — bat, as the 
 children grew older, she preferred rather to please their 
 imagination with verses from Klopstock, Gerhard, and 
 the pious Gellert. More than all — she at once charmed 
 and instructed her young pupils by stories and passages 
 from the Gospel, adapted to their understanding ; and 
 their tears flowed betimes at the sufferings of the Re- 
 deemer.* Already, perhaps, the scenes which he loved 
 to haunt, and certainly the subjects he was accustomed 
 to hear, had produced strong and deep impressions 
 upon the mind and character of the boy. Already he 
 had conceived a passion for Nature — formed habits of 
 reverie and reflection — and looked forward to the eccle- 
 siastic profession, for which his parents designed him, with 
 a religious and earnest enthusiasm. At eight years old, 
 alone in the woodlands, with a boy about his own age, he 
 exclaimed, " Karl, how beautiful is it here ! All — all 
 could I give, so that I might not miss this joy ! " f His 
 very sports partook of his serious character : nothing 
 pleased him more than, by the help of a cap and a black 
 apron, to assume the attire of the priest, mount a stool, and 
 deliver extemporaneous and fervent homilies to an audience 
 consisting of his mother and sisters. From his earliest 
 childhood he was ever delighted to leave his infant games, 
 to join the prayers or Bible lectures of the pious family to 
 which he belonged; and his favourite sister has left a 
 pleasing description of the child at; such moments — with 
 his folded hands, his blue eyes raised to Heaven, and the 
 fair hair clustering over the broad forehead which he 
 inherited from his mother. But though from infancy 
 unusually serious, and from infancy, also, impatient of 
 restraint, his temper was sweet, and his disposition full 
 of tenderness and compassion. If he met a poor child 
 in his way to school, he would bestow on him all he 
 had; even his books — his clothes were not sacred from 
 the impulse of his compassion. "With all this softness 
 of heart — this love of solitude, and this pious tem- 
 perament, there was no less manifest a resolute and 
 
 * Hofimeister, Schwab-. t Hoffmeister, Schwab. 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 197 
 
 determined spirit. He was peculiarly fond of reading 
 Voyages and books of Travels ; and the Histories of 
 popular heroes, such as Alexander the Great. He would 
 often exclaim, " I must go into the world ! " His reveries 
 were, in short, those that denote not an indolent temper, 
 but an active mind. His musings were not merely day- 
 dreams — they were animated by that zeal for inquiry 
 which usually foretells, in childhood, the career of men 
 destined to think boldly, and love truth. In his seventh 
 year, one evening, during a storm of thunder and light- 
 ning, the boy was missed at supper ; he was found at last 
 at the top of a tall lime-tree, near the house, enjoying the 
 tempest ; and, to quote his own apology, " wishing to see 
 where so much, fire in the heavens came from ! " * — Such 
 in childhood was the character of Johann Christoph 
 Friedrich Schiller. 
 
 His birth placed him in that condition, between wealth 
 and penury — (a condition bordering two classes — the 
 Popular and the Refined), which is perhaps the most 
 favourable to intellectual eminence. 
 
 His father, Johann Caspar Schiller, was of humble 
 extraction, the son of a baker, who held the office of 
 Bailiff in the village of Bittenfeld.f He was a man 
 of an adventurous and restless character ; stern and 
 severe indeed in manners, but warmly attached to his 
 family, of good abilities, of exemplary probity, and a 
 strong and fervent sense of religion. He had held the 
 rank of Surgeon in a Bavarian regiment. In 1749, a 
 year after the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, he married Eliza- 
 beth Dorothea Kodweiss, a young woman, born at Mar- 
 bach (about eight miles from Stuttgart), of parentage 
 suitable to his own ; though, it is said that her more 
 distant descent could be traced to the noble house of 
 Kottwitz.J 
 
 After his marriage, Caspar Schiller resigned the medical 
 profession ; but at the breaking out of the Seven Tears' 
 War in 1757, entered the Wiirtemberg army as ensign and 
 adjutant. It was not till after some years that their union 
 
 * To this anecdote Schwab gives the weight of his anthorit}'. 
 
 f Schwab. 
 
 J Kattwitz, according to Hoffmeister — corrected by Schwab to Kottwitz. 
 
198 THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 
 
 was blessed by children : Elizabeth, the eldest daughter, 
 born 1757 ; Johann Christoph Friedrich, the poet, born at 
 Marbach, Nov. 10, 1759 ;* Dorothea Louise, born two years 
 afterwards ; and JNTannette, the youngest.t 
 
 When Friedrich Schiller was six years old, his father, 
 then risen to the rank of captain, was sent to Lorch as 
 recruiting officer. Here the boy received the first regular 
 rudiments of education, including Latin, and something 
 even of Greek, from the clergyman of the parish, Philip 
 Moser; whose name and virtues he afterwards immor- 
 talised in " The Robbers." His favourite companions 
 were, his eldest sister, and the son of his tutor, Karl Moser. 
 But no observation is at once more true and more hackneyed 
 than that it is to the easy lessons of a mother, men of 
 genius have usually owed their earliest inspiration. 
 Schiller's mother had tastes and acquirements rare in 
 women of her rank : she was a good musician— fond of 
 poetry, and even wrote it; and the gentleness of her temper 
 gave a certain refinement to her manners. 
 
 Friedrich Schiller was nine years old when his father 
 1 7fiR was remove( l by ^ ne Grand Duke to Ludwigs- 
 burg, and the boy was entered at the public 
 school instituted at that place. The academical discipline 
 revolted one who had already formed his own desultory 
 modes of self- instruction, and his industry was reluctant 
 and constrained. Still he passed his examinations with 
 credit ; was ever one of the first in the Latin class to which 
 he belonged, and received marks of approbation in the four 
 several examinations he underwent before the School Com- 
 missioners, at Stuttgart. His character betrayed itself 
 rather with his playfellows than his preceptors. He ob- 
 tained an ascendancy over them ; and his high spirit would 
 brave those older and stronger than himself, if he sus- 
 pected any intention to affront him. With his superiors 
 he was reserved and awkward. But what, at this time, 
 chiefly influenced his future fate, was the sight of 
 the theatre at Ludwigsburg — the remembrance of that 
 spectacle, which, according to the fashion of the day, 
 seems to have been a gorgeous spectacle, half opera$- 
 
 * "A few monllis later than our own Robert Burns." — Carlyle. 
 f Two other children died soon after birth. 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 199 
 
 half melodrame, began to colour all his thoughts, and 
 dictate the character of his sports in the hours of play. 
 At the age of eleven, a change was noticeable -1 ^n 
 in his habits; he shrank from the games in 
 which he had been hitherto amongst the most active. In 
 the playhours he wonld wander with some friend amongst 
 the neighbouring plantations, and, in those moods of pre- 
 mature gloom and speculation, which so often cloud the 
 dawn of illustrious manhood, complain of present thral- 
 dom, and form wild conjectures of future fate. Already 
 he began to throw thought into verse — already he began 
 to meditate the scheme of some elaborate tragedy. But 
 his religious bias was still his strongest, and at -.^-o 
 the age of fourteen he still shared the predilec- 
 tions of his parents in favour of the ecclesiastical pro- 
 fession. But now came the first great revolution and crisis 
 of his life. 
 
 Karl, Grand Duke of Wtirtemberg, a luxurious and 
 ostentatious Prince, but one possessed of many excellent 
 qualities, formed the notion of a great National Academy, 
 first instituted at " Solitude," one of his country places, — 
 afterwards transferred to Stuttgart. This establish- 
 ment was called a Military Seminary, but not con- 
 fined exclusively to those intended for the military 
 profession. 
 
 The majority of the pupils were, indeed, the sons of 
 officers — or even privates — in the TTiirteniberg Army ; but 
 the sons of civilians were admitted also ; and suitable in- 
 struction was given to students intended for the peaceful 
 profession of the Law. But the school rightly deserved 
 the distinguishing epithet of Military, from the discipline by 
 which it was characterised. 
 
 The father of young Schiller had recently been pro- 
 moted by the Grand Duke to the ofilce of Inspector 
 and Layer-out of the grounds at " Solitude," and was 
 subsequently raised to the rank of Major. But these 
 benefits were not cheaply purchased. The Grand Duke in 
 return desired to send Friedrich Schiller to his Military 
 Seminary. This was tantamount to the rejection of the 
 long-cherished scheme of the clerical profession. After 
 much painful embarrassment, the elder Schiller frankly 
 represented to his Prince the inclinations of himself and his 
 
200 THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 
 
 son. The Grand Duke, however, repeated his request, 
 proposed to leave to Friedrich the choice of his studies at 
 the Academy, and promised him, when completed, an ap- 
 pointment in the Royal Service. There was no resisting a 
 petitioner, whose request was in reality a law, and from 
 whose favour was derived the very bread of the family. 
 Friedrich Schiller did not and could not hesitate to sacri- 
 fice his own wishes to the interests of his parents. But 
 this renunciation of his young hopes and the independence 
 of his freewill, wounded alike his heart and his pride, 
 •jhhq With grief and resentment equally keen, at the 
 age of fourteen he entered the Academy as a 
 student in Jurisprudence. The studies thus selected were, 
 in themselves, sufficiently uncongenial ; but to the dulness 
 of the Law Lecture was added the austerity of a corporal's 
 drill. The youths were defiled in parade to lessons, in 
 parade to meals, in parade to bed. At the word " March," 
 they paced to breakfast — at the word " Halt," they arrested 
 their steps — and at the word " Front," they dressed their 
 ranks before the table.* In this miniature Sparta, the 
 grand virtue to be instilled was subordination. Whoever 
 has studied the character of Schiller, will allow that its 
 leading passion was for Intellectual Liberty. Here mind 
 and body were to be alike machines. Schiller's letters at 
 this time to his friend Karl Moser, sufficiently show the 
 fiery tumult and agitation of his mind ; — sometimes 
 mournful — sometimes indignant — now sarcastic, now im- 
 passioned — weary disgust and bitter indignation are seen 
 through all. The German works, not included in the 
 school routine, were as contraband articles- — the obstacles 
 to obtain them only increased the desire : no barrier can 
 ever interpose between genius and its affections. The love 
 of Man to Woman is less irresistible than the love that 
 binds Intellect to Knowledge. Schiller stole, the more 
 ardently because secretly, to the embraces of his mistress 
 — Poetry. Klopstock still charmed him, but newer and 
 truer perceptions of the elements of Poetry came to him in 
 the " Goetz von Berlichingen " of Goethe, with which, 
 indeed, commenced the great Literary Revolution of 
 Europe — by teaching to each nation that the true classical 
 
 * Hoffmeister, Schwab, &c. 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 201 
 
 spirit for each, must be found in the genius of its own 
 Romance. He who would really imitate Homer, must, 
 in the chronicles of his native land, find out the Heroic 
 Age. 
 
 Schiller obeyed the impulse of his own frank and 
 courageous mind in an attempt to regain his freedom. A 
 strange custom at the Academy enjoined each pupil, once a 
 year, to draw up and read aloud an analysis of his own 
 character. Schiller seized the first opportunity -1774 
 thus presented to him, to state that his character 
 was not formed to excel in jurisprudence, but to serve God 
 as a preacher. The confession failed to amend the voca- 
 tion ; but finally he obtained permission to exchange Law 
 for Medicine, — a class for which was superadded to the 
 other academical instructions. The studies for this latter 
 profession were no doubt more congenial to him than 
 those of law, and served, indirectly and collaterally, to 
 enrich the stores of a mind so inquisitive into the opera- 
 tions of Nature. But the discipline in all studies was the 
 same. Had they sought to cure him of Poetry, they would 
 have had but to drill him into being a poet ! Meanwhile, 
 he was fast fitting himself for the great destiny to which 
 he was reserved. He devoured the writings of those who 
 were his precursors in German Literature. Wieland's 
 translation of Shakspeare fell into his hands. Nothing 
 more strongly marks the peculiar earnestness of his cha- 
 racter — the emphatic distinction between Shakspeare and 
 himself — than the effect which he tells us, in one of his 
 own compositions, the great Englishman produced on 
 him : — "When at a very early age I first grew acquainted 
 with this poet, I was indignant with his coldness — indig- 
 nant with the insensibility which allowed him to jest and 
 sport amidst the highest pathos. Led, by my knowledge 
 with more modern poets, to seek the poet in his works ; to 
 meet and sympathise with his heart ; to reflect with him 
 over his object ; it was insufferable to me that this poet 
 gave me nothing of himself. Many years had he my entire 
 reverence — certainly my earnest study — before I could 
 comprehend, as it were, his individuality. I was not yet 
 fit to comprehend Nature at first hand ! " Nor indeed 
 was Schiller ever able, as Shakspeare, thoroughly to 
 separate himself from his creations. The peculiarities 
 
20£ THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 
 
 of Ms mind inclined him, if they did not limit, to the 
 delineation of grave and elevated characters, and his heart, 
 always in nnison with his mind, led him to incorporate 
 himself with the beings he invoked ; bidding them be 
 serious with his own intellect or ardent with his own 
 emotions. 
 
 His friends were few, but they were well selected, and 
 they shared his inclinations, if they had not his genius, 
 for literature. They formed a sort of intellectual fra- 
 ternity. Each was to compose something, for which all 
 dreamed of publication and fame — one a romance after 
 "Werther;" one a pathetic drama; one a chivalrous 
 imitation of " Goetz von Berlichingen ; " Schiller himself 
 (fired by Grerstenberg's " Ugolino ") a tragedy, called 
 " The Student of Nassau." This he abandoned afterwards 
 for one of which he composed several scenes, and of which 
 a part yet lives transferred to "The Robbers," viz., 
 " Cosmo de Medicis." 
 
 Meanwhile his poetical talent found its first (and the 
 
 ihh/. h usual) vent in the corners of a periodical 
 Magazine. At the age of sixteen and seven- 
 teen appeared in the Suabian Magazine some small poems 
 (very judiciously omitted from the collected editions of 
 Schiller's works), in which the imitation of Klopstock is 
 sufficiently visible. "0, then was I still," he exclaimed 
 later, " but the slave of Klopstock ! " Nevertheless, the 
 editor of the Magazine, Balthasar Haug, found promise in 
 the midst of extravagance and bombast, and prophesied 
 that the young poet " would one day do honour to his 
 father-land." * 
 
 The more his inclinations grew confirmed, the more sen- 
 sibly he became alive to the formal tyranny by which they 
 were opposed. No youth was less likely to be corrupted 
 by Voltaire ; but bitter was his resentment at the disgrace 
 he incurred, when discovered reading one of Voltaire's 
 works. " Karl," he exclaims in his correspondence 
 with young Moser, " so long as my spirit can raise itself to 
 be free, it shall bow to no yoke ! " In fact, the Man's 
 mind was ripened long before the Poet's geniuSr Crude, 
 hard, laboured, and extravagant were Schiller's earliest 
 
 * Schwab, Hoffmeister. 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 203 
 
 efforts ; but the soul from which Poetry springs as a well, 
 clearing itself the more the farther it advances from its 
 source ; a soul ever observant of beauty ; ever on the 
 search for truth ; ever brave in difficulties ; ever fierce 
 against restraint; thai was the same in its large elements, 
 when the Boy, in vehement bombast, declaimed against the 
 blood-stained laurels of a conqueror, as when the Main 
 planted the robust step of Tell on the soil of Switzerland, 
 and drew forth from the obloquy of ages the virgin glory 
 of the Maid of Orleans. 
 
 At last this long and terrible conflict between Genius 
 and Circumstance became decisive. The cry of the 
 strong man went forth. The Titan moved beneath the 
 mountain ! 
 
CHAPTEE II. 
 
 Brief review ot some portion of German literature immediately previous to 
 the appearance of Schiller's " Robbers." 
 
 It was precisely that time in Germany when an Author, 
 whatever his defects, might hope for a favourable hearing, 
 provided his genins carried onward the revolution that had 
 already taken place in literature, and sympathised with 
 that more dangerous movement which had begun to dis- 
 turb society and agitate opinion. 
 
 In literature, the old Gallomania, which for half a cen- 
 tury had been vigorously opposed by sincere Poets and 
 sturdy Critics,* had become almost extinct, except in the 
 small royal circles where " Seigneur Oreste " and 
 " Madame Hermione " still maintained their ground. The 
 German genius had already arrogated a dynasty, and found 
 in Klopstock an altar and a throne. What Klopstock t 
 wrote is comparatively unimportant ; what Klopstock did 
 is sublime. No matter that his "Messiah" was overrated, 
 — that even his Odes are more tumid with cloud than in- 
 stinct with fire. Rather a verbal musician than a poet,J 
 his poetical imagination is doubtless frigid, and the weak- 
 ness of his thoughts in vain disguises itself in redundant 
 epithets and syllabic pomp. But he had two other imagi- 
 nations besides the poetical, — the imagination of the heart, 
 — the imagination of the conscience. He was an enthu- 
 siast for his country and his religion. He felt like an 
 honest man, and he wrote like a man in earnest. It has 
 been truly observed, that, after Klopstock, " Germans 
 were no longer ashamed to be German." If he was not 
 absolutely the first to awaken the national spirit, he made 
 it popular with the people, fashionable with the great, 
 ardent in the young, solemn in the pious. There is not a. 
 
 * Among critics, Bodmer and Breitinger ; among poets, von Haller and 
 especially Gellert. 
 
 f Born 1724. 
 
 J One of the greatest of the German critics has observed that Klopstock' s 
 odes, to be appreciated, should be accompanied with music — that he wrote, as 
 il were, to tunes and airs. 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 205 
 
 German poet coining after Klopstock, who is not indebted 
 to him ; indebted to him for a German audience — for that 
 prevalent sentiment of patriotism and devotion in the 
 Public without which the Poet sings to lay-figures, not to 
 men. What was begun by Klopstock, was continued, 
 with profounder views and on a grander scale by the illus- 
 trious Lessing.* Well does Heine f exclaim, that 
 " Lessing was the literary Arminius, who freed the 
 German Theatre from every foreign domination. " Nor 
 the Theatre alone — all German Art was embraced by the 
 vast range of his criticism and the stalwart vigour of his 
 genius. It is impossible to overrate the excellence of 
 Lessing's intellectual nature, and the noble tendencies of 
 his ambition. Though he modestly denied to himself the 
 qualities of the Poet, and though some shallow depredators 
 have echoed his own assertion, he enters even into prose with 
 the majesty none but Poets can assume. In his "Emilia 
 Galotti " domestic relations are elevated into the sublimest 
 tragic passion. This drama is the German Virginius. No 
 man has ever so happily effected the difficult union of 
 heroic sentiment with modern manners. Greater even as 
 a critic than a creator (and in the former character far 
 more popularly renowned), he served both to place Art in 
 its true sphere, and to enlarge its domain. Manliness was 
 his characteristic in life and in tastes. Like Schiller, he 
 loved to delineate Human Nature in its nobler qualities, 
 and to sympathise with its graver ends, rather than, like 
 Goethe, to dissect its infirmities, or,' like Wieland, to 
 trifle with its interests; — the " Werther " of the first 
 disgusted him — the "Agathon" of the last enraged. 
 Lessing had the nationality of Klopstock without his pre- 
 judice. If Klopstock were the first National Poet for the 
 Public, Lessing was the great National Writer for the 
 Writers. That a taste for German Poetry should exist, 
 Klopstock was necessary. That Herder, Schiller, and 
 even Goethe, should have been what they were, Lessing 
 must have lived. 
 
 But though the influence of Lessing was so pro- 
 found, it was not of a nature to be widely popular, 
 
 * Born 1729. 
 
 f " Zur Geschichte der neuern schoenen Literatur in Deutsckland," 
 
206 THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 
 
 nor to be clearly comprehended, save by its after- 
 results : and his great career was now approaching to 
 its close. He died in February, 1781, leaving a Public 
 prepared for manly sentiments, for energetic purpose, 
 for genial humanity, in those writers whom his mind had 
 formed. 
 
 At the period we enter (about 1780-1), Wieland* 
 stood next to Klopstock in popular opinion. Amiable 
 both in manners and in tastes, of mature years and esta- 
 blished fame, if he was less decidedly national than 
 Klopstock and Lessing, he was yet highly influential in the 
 formation of the National Literature. He was also a First, 
 an Originator — the first who taught the delicacies of Taste 
 to German strength' — the first who taught the various 
 imitators of the Gallic or Grecian Muse how, without 
 imitating, to appropriate — the first in whom learning 
 seemed airy as intuitive observation ; and in whom the 
 fancy of a genuine poet, and the fluency of a charming 
 novelist, were blended with the erudition of a scholar, and 
 the elegance of a man who has known the world. Partly 
 French, partly Greek — he is German through all ; a Ger- 
 man who commenced his education at Paris, and finished 
 it at Athens. We enter not into a discussion of the precise 
 rank Wieland should assume, — a rank too readily conceded 
 at one time, too harshly questioned now. But his influence 
 limited itself to the fancy and the taste — it did not extend 
 to opinions — it did not root itself in passions. His great 
 defect was his want of earnestness and purpose. He may 
 charm and he may refine ; but he does not brace the in- 
 tellect to masculine exertion, nor elevate the imagination 
 to lofty objects. At this time he sat on his careless throne 
 at Weimar, rather to receive homage than to govern. But 
 there were now already labouring into fame three young 
 men ; two of whom, at least, were destined not only to 
 wear the robes of sovereignty, but to wield the sceptre — 
 Herder, Goethe, and Johann Heinrich Voss. 
 
 The minds of these three men had been formed under 
 the most powerful influence which a Frenchman had ever 
 yet exercised in Germany. Always prone to imitate (as a 
 learned people necessarily must be), the Germans had 
 
 * Born 1733. 
 
THE LIFE OP SCHILLEK. 207 
 
 escaped from the old Gallomania to fall into Grecomania 
 and Anglomania — while one was imitating Theocritus, 
 another was imitating Pope. The English Richardson, 
 who, though less popular in Germany than Fielding, pro- 
 duced a far more profound impression, as, indeed, that 
 greater genius must do wherever the two can penetrate,* 
 may be seen overshadowing the large mind of Lessing 
 himself. The sublime Clarissa, whom Dishonour so noise- 
 lessly slays, is the original of the no less sublime Emilia 
 Galotti, who flies to Death from even a sentiment that dis- 
 honours. But in vain Klopstock and Lessing had thrown 
 from their pedestals Racine and Corneille — in vain Wieland 
 had given to the Germans a more kindly, if a feebler 
 Voltaire of their own — a new Gallomania had seized the 
 heart, and fevered the brain of the People : " Greek and 
 Briton, all gave way to the influence of Rousseau. Nothing 
 is more interesting to one who seeks with Helvetius to 
 trace the connection and sympathy between social in- 
 fluences and literary tastes, than to contrast the nugatory 
 effect produced in England, with the prodigious effect pro- 
 duced in Germany by this unhealthy Genius. Though, at 
 two great periods in the history of our Literature — that of 
 Elizabeth and that of Anne — the Italian and the French 
 writers have influenced our own, our more illustrious 
 authors have rather reproduced than imitated ; and with 
 the single exception of the Sterae-fever, the Literature of 
 Sentiment has never been widely successful with our 
 practical and busy population. But in Germany, always, 
 as we have said, prone to imitate, no imitation was likely 
 to be so contagious as that which combined sentiment with 
 thought. The peculiar habits of life amongst the Germans 
 — the absence for the most part of that active constitu- 
 tional liberty which, when accompanied with commercial 
 
 * The influence of Bichardson upon the fiction and poetry of Europe was 
 not only vast at the time, but, enduring still, it must endure for ever. In 
 vain his language grows obsolete, in vain his minuteness has become weari- 
 some, in vain the young race of novel-readers leave him on the shelf— to 
 those somewhat tedious pages turns every genius who aspires to rise in 
 fiction ; from them, though with toil and study, can best be learned the art 
 of extracting from the homeliest details the noblest pathos. In " Clarissa" 
 is beheld that true spirit of tragedy which first dispensed with kings and 
 heroes and the paraphernalia of the outward stage— teaching how the com- 
 pass of all grandeur in fiction can be attained by him who can describe the 
 affection, and comprehend the virtue, of one human being. 
 
208 THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 
 
 pursuits, always tends, overmuch perhaps, to harden and 
 materialise the national mind — do not present to domestic 
 life the counterpoise which the life of the Mart and the 
 Agora effects in England. Books which dispose the mind 
 to abstract reverie or speculation, exercise a greater in- 
 fluence over the Germans than they do over us ; a theory 
 appears to them the more seductive in proportion as it is 
 detached from the experience of practical life. Either 
 wholly contented with the existing state of things, or 
 wholly amidst the clouds of Utopia — they want that inter- 
 mediate standard to which the mass of Englishmen un- 
 consciously refer every suggestion of change or project of 
 reform. The love of liberty, instinctive to all, and especially 
 to nations at once so brave and so lettered as the German, 
 finds that vent in the ideal from which it is precluded by 
 the actual. Hence, while practical liberty amongst the 
 Germans is so confined when compared with ours,'" their 
 theoretical liberty — liberty of thought, opinion, and specu- 
 lation — is infinitely greater. The most religious German 
 will start inquiries which an irreligious Englishman would 
 be afraid to suggest : And the Politician who would shrink 
 from arguing for a Representative Constitution, will 
 luxuriate in the dreams of Republican Fraternity. Pre- 
 cisely the reasons that deadened the influence of Rousseau 
 in England, gave it vitality in Germany, viz., impracti- 
 cability in politics, and morbidity in romance. Our own 
 active life, that rude, common sense which is acquired 
 with our mother's milk, amidst our world-awake population, 
 would teach even an ordinary Englishman the untruth that 
 forms the ground-work of " The Social Contract," and 
 shock our sense of nature in the eloquence of St. Preux. 
 We know, without reasoning about it, that no Social Con- 
 tract ever existed, and that no lover, worthy the name, 
 could sit down to make an inventory of furniture five 
 minutes before his first assignation with the woman he 
 professes to adore. But with the Germans the novelty of 
 the political theory concealed its falsehood ; the sentiment 
 of the fiction concealed its want of nature. There was 
 much in Rousseau that could not fail to charm and to 
 dazzle the German mind, which, from its own deficient 
 
 * The reader will remember that this was written in 1847. 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 209 
 
 experience of agitated and various life, perceived not Lis 
 ignorance or perversion of nature in character and passion. 
 The Germans could fully comprehend his love and his 
 knowledge of inanimate nature; his enjoyment of scenery; 
 his passion for solitude ; his power of associating the land- 
 scape around with emotions within. Their own fondness 
 for domestic and rural life made them charmed with the 
 primitive simplicity which he held up to admiration. The 
 vast mass of disappointed ambition, which amongst an in- 
 tellectual population, without he multiform vents of a free 
 constitution, must necessarily be engendered, found a voice 
 and a sickly comfort in Rousseau's disgust of the active 
 world. The ardour for liberty — the revolutionary spirit, 
 awakened in Germany as in France — obtained in the 
 Dreamer of Geneva a representative nearly akin to the 
 amiable and tender character of the Germans. The biting 
 mockery of Voltaire might delight a court and charm a 
 scholar ; but the earnest and pious heart of the multitude 
 recoiled from a spirit that desecrated what it attacked, to 
 open itself with dangerous emotion to a spirit that sought 
 to sanctify what it embraced. The laughing philosopher 
 never makes disciples so devoted as the weeping one. 
 With Rousseau rose the great sect of humanity; the 
 school which seeks to lift human nature above convention ; 
 which would extract from social life all that is harsh and 
 tyrannous ; and (to use the phrase of Seneca) recognise a 
 claim to kindness wherever it looks upon the face of man. 
 Upon Herder, Goethe, and Voss, the influence of Rous- 
 seau produced effects, perhaps equally strong, but widely 
 differing in their nature. Herder * rejected all that in the 
 Genevese was effeminate and egotistical, to seize upon all 
 that was genial and philanthropic. In him arose the true 
 Preacher of Humanity : with Rousseau Humanity was a 
 sentiment ; with Herder it became a science. Of a mind 
 thoroughly sound and healthy — of a cultivation vast and 
 various — of a broad common sense which gave life and 
 substance to the boldest speculations, Herder snatched from 
 the weak hands of the French Socialists the great cause 
 which they profaned — viz. the Principle of Human Pro- 
 gress, recognised it through History, illustrated it through 
 Poetry, and reconciled it to Religion as the law of God. 
 * Born 1744. 
 
210 THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 
 
 For Herder the noblest destinies were reserved. By pro- 
 fession a preacher — by energy a citizen — by genins a poet 
 — by piety and wisdom a philosopher and cosmopolite — all 
 that is intellectual in man may be said to have flowered in 
 him. With a great inclination towards what is practical 
 in life, which he sometimes regretted he had not more 
 diligently studied in its minutiae, he combined an innocence 
 of heart in which lay half his strength. " My whole life," 
 he said once, " is the interpretation of the oracles of my 
 childhood." He loved to glean thoughts from the con- 
 jectures of childhood — from the wonder of ignorance. 
 Hence he saw in the infancy and youth of nations the 
 beauty and the promise which historians have overlooked. 
 Thus he was the first who gave to Poetry its proper place 
 in the grave and solemn dispensations of the world : — re- 
 garding it as the absolute voice that spoke the time and 
 character of a race, he brought into one vast compendium, 
 entitled " The Voices of the Nations," the popular songs of 
 all countries. Amongst the many influences he lived to 
 effect upon his age, is the impetus he gave to that tendency 
 in the German genius, which is called " Universalism." 
 For, as Humanity to Politics, Charity to Virtue, Chris- 
 tianity to Man, so is Universalism to Letters. * That 
 separation between the faculties — that division of mental 
 labour so general elsewliere — in Germany was broken 
 down. The Poet studied Philosophy — the Philosopher 
 Poetry. But most of what Herder lived to effect, was as 
 yet unfulfilled. He was already known as a scholar, an 
 essayist, a victorious prizeman, an eloquent preacher — and 
 in high station and repute at the Court of Weimar. But 
 still he stood somewhat apart from the popular literature 
 of the time ; and had rather served to indicate the great 
 
 * Herder is a very voluminous writer, but the epitome of his mind and his 
 views is to he found in his work on the " Philosophy of the History of Man- 
 kind." The work is not without grave faults. It is often incorrect in 
 detail; it too much follows Helvetius in founding authority on the imper- 
 fect accounts of travellers and voyagers ; it is often displeasingly declama- 
 tory in its tone. But its power of generalisation is astonishing. It seizes, 
 as with the grasp of a giant, the immensity of the subject it embraces. Few 
 works deserve so justly the epithets of luminous and comprehensive. 
 Headers well acquainted with this work will find many of its ideas, even 
 some of its images, borrowed by Schiller in his later poems, though it 
 would seem unconsciously. Schiller never appears to have been aware of 
 his great obligations to Herder. 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 211 
 
 change destined to take place in public taste and feeling, 
 than to dispirit, by his own renown, the ambition of 
 another. 
 
 While Rousseau had thus influenced Herder only to 
 grand results ; the primitive simplicity, the pastoral family 
 life which Rousseau had held up to admiration amongst 
 the homely Germans, had sunk deep into the mind of a 
 rude young Saxon — Johann Heinrich Voss,* not worthy, 
 indeed, from his mere genius, to be named in the same 
 breath with Herder and Goethe, but still, for many reasons, 
 not meriting the depreciation of Schlegel, and the disdain of 
 Menzel. Low-born, self-educated, a rigid Protestant sec- 
 tarian, driven for bread to the drudgery of a schoolmaster, 
 Voss is often vulgar in his taste, pedantic in his composi- 
 tions, prejudiced and intolerant in his polemics. But 
 withal, he is a true German, and a strong man. His ser- 
 vices to his language were immense. He enriched it with 
 the wealth of the foreigner; he strengthened it with the 
 cultivation of its own natural resources ; he revived the 
 old words of Luther on the lips of Homer. It is well said 
 of Voss that his strength is in his war with obstacles. He 
 hewed his way through poverty into learning ; and he cut 
 through rough crags f of diction, till he found out a 
 fount of poetry all his own. But, as yet, Voss was young, 
 — if not obscure, at least but partially known, — and had 
 neither obtained, by harsh and ungrateful controversy, the 
 title of the second Luther, nor given in his " Louise" and 
 his "Idyls" (poems most popular in their time, and 
 thoroughly repugnant to English taste) the pastoral of a 
 Curate's Parlour, and the model to Goethe's " Herman and 
 Dorothea." First, then, already in popular eminence, of 
 the three we have named — first, indeed, of all the younger 
 and rising generation, stood "Wolfgang Goethe, j Xor had 
 lie then escaped, perhaps he never altogether escaped, from 
 the influence of Rousseau. In fact, it is the merit of this 
 wonderful man, that *his whole nature was especially 
 plastic and impressionable. Every influence of his time 
 stamped itself on his intellect, to be reproduced in new 
 forms by his genius. Does the age incline to sentiment ? 
 
 * Bom 17-51, two years after Goethe. 
 f " Versified marble blocks." — Seine. 
 % Born 1749, five years after Herder. 
 
 r 2 
 
212 THE LIFE OF SCHILLEK. 
 
 he sounds its abysses : — To irony ? the sneer of Voltaire 
 seems venomless "beside the icy smile of the fiend he calls 
 from hell, to mock at human knowledge, and desecrate 
 human love ! Does the age yearn for Pastorals and family 
 life ? he turns from courts and the seventh heaven of 
 Poetry to borrow from homely Voss ; and ruins him by 
 the riches he extracts from the loan. In his " Werther " he 
 concentrates the history of an epoch in his country, — the 
 epoch of the Rousseau Mania. But though the " Nouvelle 
 Heloise " is incontestably the origin of " Werther," those 5 * 
 who regard it as a mere copy do it miserable injustice. 
 There is more rhetorical eloquence in one page of the 
 " Nouvelle Heloise" than in the whole of " Werther" — but 
 there is more nature in one page of " Werther" than in the 
 whole of the " Nouvelle Heloise" In this, the warmest and 
 most actual of all Goethe's novels — if once overrated, now 
 so unjustly depreciated, which he did right to regret for 
 its moral, which he did wrong to disparage as a proof of 
 his genius — lies the germ of much that, in fiction, its 
 author's riper intellect matured. Here we see that associa- 
 tion of homeliness and grandeur which his enemies have 
 called " the Adornment of Commonplace.' ' What English- 
 man, with his fastidious classical taste, has not ridiculed 
 the contrast of the Hero in the clouds, and the Heroine 
 cutting bread and butter — of the solemnity of deliberate 
 suicide, and the exact description of the top-boots and blue 
 coat in which the unhappy man rushed to the dread Un- 
 known ? But considered by a higher art than we learn at 
 college, it is this very homeliness of detail that gives truth 
 to the romance. And this peculiarity Goethe continued, 
 as he advanced in his luminous career, to invest with an 
 unspeakable beauty. It is, in truth, to a very early study 
 of what, while subtlest in the essence, is simplest in the 
 form, that Goethe owes the lucid ease of his after style, 
 and the popularity he secured to flights of imagination 
 which, in a less artful writer, would have left the multitude 
 far behind. Here, too, we see a yet more distinguishing 
 attribute of Goethe, to which we have before alluded — viz. 
 the inclination to describe, not so much the healthful 
 nobleness, as the diseased infirmity, of an intellectual 
 
 * Such as Menzel. 
 
THE LIFE OP SCHILLER. 213 
 
 character. What he here does in " Werther," he did after- 
 wards in " Clavigo," in the " Elective Affinities,' , in "Faust," 
 and in " Tasso." Menzel, who, whatever may be thought of 
 his injustice to Goethe, demands the greatest respect for 
 his honest passion for what is sincere and noble — for his 
 vigorous sense — for his daring courage — falls into a cant 
 unworthy of so great a critic, when he accuses Goethe of 
 confounding vice and virtue, by depicting weak or dis- 
 honourable characters as interesting and amiable. It is 
 among the most legitimate, and among the highest pro- 
 vinces of the Poet, to depict those contrasts which subject 
 him to this charge — to show a vice in the virtuous, and a 
 virtue in the wicked ; and this unquestionable truth in art 
 once granted, it follows as the very condition of fiction, 
 that to a hero thus selected, human interest must be given. 
 You cannot blame a Poet for making a faulty hero interest- 
 ing, unless you contend that heroes of fiction must be 
 perfect * — by which dogma you would at once cut off from 
 the Poet the whole realm of the human heart, and separate 
 his ethics from the representation of Truth and Nature. 
 This love, indeed, of probing the sores of character — of 
 representing the infirmities of intellectual man — was not 
 more remarkable in Goethe than in Shakspeare ; who, in 
 the whole range of his Dramas, has never presented to us 
 a single male image of perfect virtue ; who, in Macbeth, in 
 Othello, in Angelo, in Shylook, in Hamlet (the last is so 
 Goethe-like, that if Shakspeare had never created it one 
 might predict that Goethe would have done so), lays bare, 
 with fearful precision, the weakness of the wise — the 
 crime of the virtuous. It is in vain to deny that our 
 paramount interest in all these plays is with the erring, or 
 the infirm. But who shall say that Shakspeare, while 
 interesting us in the hero, sought to pervert our conscience 
 into admiring the defect : that it was his object to deco- 
 rate ambitious murder, or jealous ferocity ; licentious 
 hypocrisy, or implacable revenge ; or to womanize the 
 intellect, and emasculate the will, by all the doubts and 
 scruples which make up the philosophy of Hamlet? — 
 Hamlet, that great fountain-head of modern sentiment — 
 
 * Or unless you contend, that if a hero is faulty, the author must not make 
 him interesting ; but whatever an author does, he must give it interest. 
 IS o author is obliged to be dull. 
 
214 THE LIFE OF SCH1LLEE. 
 
 from -which have gushed a thousand rivulets of melancholy 
 and scepticism ; Hamlet, that perpetual mirror to minds 
 fluctuating between the Visible and the Unseen, the Actual 
 and the Ideal, the stern demands of uncomprehended 
 duty, and the desire to escape from practical action into 
 visionary self- commune ; Hamlet, in whom is shown the 
 mysterious prototype of what man would be with virtue, 
 and with wisdom, but without Will ! 
 
 But though Goethe does not seem to us to be blamed for 
 following the tendency of his genius, into directions in 
 which the peculiar delicacy and subtlety of his intellect 
 ensured him such success ; and though, a hundred years 
 hence, we believe that what Menzel and other depredators 
 consider immoral, will not mislead a single imitator, or 
 corrupt a single youth ; yet it must be conceded that the 
 direct object of his works was not to make Man more 
 manly, and his desires more elevated. We say the direct 
 object ; for indirectly, and sooner or later, whatever makes 
 man wiser, — nerves his mind, and purifies his emotions ; 
 and there may be truth in the theory, that Art is to be 
 cultivated as Art; that the Beautiful must reflect in- 
 differently on its tranquil mirror whatever Convention 
 deems moral or immoral : For, to whatever is really and 
 essentially vicious, the Beautiful itself is opposed; — Con- 
 vention revolts at the exhibition of the naked form, but 
 foul must be the imagination that finds immorality in the 
 Venus of the sculptor. 
 
 At this date, however, Goethe was still scarcely out of 
 his apprenticeship. His greatest works had not been pro- 
 duced. On his " Goetz von Berlicllingen,' , his " Werther," 
 and his " Clavigo," rested the principal columns of the 
 renown he had acquired. These, indeed, had unsettled the 
 public taste, and prepared it for bold innovations ; but 
 Goethe had not, like our Byron in a later day, engrossed 
 the general interest in himself, and become the sole repre- 
 sentative of a common sentiment. In that crisis of 
 opinion and of passion preceding the outbreak of the 
 French Revolution, and contemporaneous with the rise of 
 daring speculators and profound inquirers, men required 
 something more than the childlike pietism of Klopstock, 
 the airy elegance of Wieland, or that philosophy of senti- 
 ment — that analysis of man's weakness, so apart from 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 215 
 
 sympathy with men's interests, which Goethe had exhibited 
 in "Werther " and " Clavigo." Something indeed was want- 
 ing still ; something, it is true, which in order to be 
 popular mnst necessarily partake of the morbid craving, 
 the unsettled spirit, the revolutionary tendency of the 
 time, but which, in order to outlast the hour, must also 
 develop into fuller force, and diffuse through a wider 
 public whatever in Lessing had been earnest, whatever in 
 Herder promised to be humane. There was a great multi- 
 tude which as yet in Germany had f onnd no voice ; which 
 desired to hear its own discontented heart beat in the pulse 
 of some passionate Anthor, indignant with what was false, 
 and sympathising with what was free. Never, in Ger- 
 many, had there been a time more favourable to a writer 
 (no matter what his other defects) who, shouldering aside 
 courts and schoolmen, should address himself manfully 
 to men. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 The publication of " The Robbers " — Schiller's life at Stuttgart — His love 
 for Laura — and poems in the Anthology — " The Robbers " — Brought out 
 on the stage — Schiller's arrest — Fears, and determination to escape from 
 Wiirtemberg. 
 
 At this time there was published at Mannheim a strange, 
 rugged, fiery melodrame, in which, amidst uncouth masses 
 of extravagant diction, — flashed a spirit true to all the 
 turbulent and unsettled philosophy of the hour — and 
 which seemed destined to announce and to animate the 
 revolution of a world : — " The Robbers " appeared, and the 
 sensation it excited spread through the mind of Germany 
 like fire through flax ; — nor through Germany alone — it 
 produced in France the liveliest enthusiasm ; it even stirred 
 to its depths the calm intellect of England. It was, in 
 fact, the most earnest Revolutionary fiction that had yet 
 revealed what lay hid in the History of the Age. — What 
 the irruption of the old Germans was in the midst of the 
 smooth and decrepit civilisation of Rome, — was the burst 
 of this new German amidst the hollow conventions which 
 under the ancien regime less guarded the life of Virtue 
 than entombed her corpse. 
 
 "The Robbers " is one sweeping uncompromising defiance 
 of the sober proprieties in which the mature see decorum 
 and the young dissimulation. It is the baseness of the 
 World that makes Karl Moor a criminal. It is in propor- 
 tion to his exaggerated nobleness that he is unfitted for 
 Society. It is because he is a giant that he cannot live 
 amongst the dwarfs. He commences life with many 
 virtues, and it is the mediocrity of life that turns every 
 virtue into sin. It is his sympathy with poverty and 
 suffering, with the virtuous and oppressed that has 
 banished the Demigod to the rock — and afflicted hiui with 
 the ever-gnawing vulture. 
 
 That a work like this, so conceived, and executed with 
 all the power which can whirl along the passions of the 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 217 
 
 crowd, must have produced a great deal of mischief at 
 the time, may be readily allowed. No man can disturb 
 the settled course of opinion, right or w r rong, without 
 doing evil as well as good. — Whether Genius innovates in 
 a poem, or Science in a manufacture, some minds in the 
 one case must be thrown into disorder, some hands in the 
 other thrown out of employ. But Genius and Science 
 must still obey the great instincts of their being — the one 
 still innovate, the other still invent. In th.e moral consti- 
 tution of nature, they are the great alterative, the " Sturm- 
 Bad," which first fevers and convulses, then purifies and 
 strengthens. But nothing could be farther from the mind 
 of the Boy from whose unpractised hand came this rough 
 Titan sketch, than to unsettle virtue, in his delineations of 
 crime. Virtue was then, as it continued to the last, his 
 Ideal — and if at the first he shook the statue on its 
 pedestal, it was but from the rudeness of the caress that 
 sought to warm it into life.* 
 
 The original sketch of this drama Schiller had com- 
 pleted two years before the publication. But he kept it by 
 him till he had completed his medical studies, towards the 
 end of 1780, and been appointed by the Duke to the office 
 of Surgeon to a regiment. He then considered himself 
 a free agent, and after searching in vain for -. -q-. 
 
 a bookseller to hazard the necessary ex- -^, , A. 7 
 penses, he published " The Robbers " at his 
 own cost. 
 
 If the popularity of the work was dazzling, the aversion 
 it excited in some was as intense as the admiration it 
 called forth in others. But the most formidable critic was 
 the Grand Duke himself. This uncouth drama displeased 
 his taste no less than it revolted his opinions. He sent for 
 the author, and bade him in future eschew poetry, and 
 stick to medicine ; or, if he needs must write, submit 
 his productions to the revision of his Prince. It 
 is easy to sneer at the conduct of the man of power 
 
 * Goctlie himself has somewhere said that the most universal effect of the 
 highest Genius is to unsettle; and certainly it has ever been so where its 
 effect upon its age could be traced — witness Cervantes, Bacon, Luther, 
 Milton (especially in his prose works). Shakspeare, not studied in his own 
 time, has influenced, by unsettling, the literary mind of three Nations at the 
 least : in our own day, Bp'on and Wordsworth are, in their several ways, 
 equal Innovators. 
 
218 THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 
 
 to tlie man of genius ; bat the Grand Duke was 
 scareely to blame, for there are few individuals now-a-days 
 whose taste " The Robbers " will not offend, and we may 
 judge of the abhorrence it excited at that time in others, 
 besides the Grand Duke, by the words addressed by an 
 illustrious personage to Goethe, "If I were a Grod, and 
 deliberating whether I should create the world, and fore- 
 saw that in that world Schiller's " Robbers " would appear, 
 I would not create it." Meanwhile, however, the young 
 Poet had commenced a correspondence with the Freiherr 
 von Dalberg, a nobleman intrusted with the superintend- 
 ence of the Theatre at Mannheim, and the play was to be 
 j • . remodelled for the stage. Simultaneously 
 
 1 hoq appeared many lyrics and minor poems of the 
 
 author, contributions to a miscellany entitled 
 " The Anthology," and set up in concert with some of his 
 friends. A large portion of these performances, charac- 
 terised, it is true, by power, though distorted, and origi- 
 nality, though uncouth, still belonged to a very inferior and 
 coarse school of poetry, known in Germany by the signifi- 
 cant title of the " Storm and Stress " * — a school of which 
 some notion may be gleaned by those who turn to that 
 later era in our own literature, when the servile herd of 
 imitators mixed up, on their staring canvas, the sepia of 
 Matthew Lewis with the gamboge and vermilion of Lord 
 Byron. Most of these Schiller rejected from the collected 
 edition of his works ; some of those retained have been 
 wisely corrected and compressed. Such as they were, 
 however, they added to the sudden celebrity of the writer. 
 And now, while Germany began to ring with the name of 
 the young Poet, what was his life ? He lodged in a small 
 apartment, which he shared with a young officer named 
 Kapff, who had quitted the academy at the same time. 
 Kapff is said to have been of dissolute habits, f and to 
 have occasionally misled his wild and impetuous companion 
 into some irregularities ; favoured the more by the general 
 licence of a town to which the earlier example of the 
 
 * The German phrase is thus happily translated by Mr. Carlyle, in one of 
 his "Miscellaneous Writings." 
 
 f Schwab — who rests this assertion against Kapff upon imprinted, and, 
 therefore, very suspicious testimony. Probably poor Kapff lived like most 
 young soldiers, neither worse nor better. 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 219 
 
 reigning Duke had given a tone of manners the reverse of 
 austere.* Still such irregularities never degenerated into 
 habit, and were counteracted in their effects upon the mind 
 by Schiller's frequent visits to his excellent family, the 
 tender warnings of his mother, the fortunate narrowness 
 of his finances^ the professional demands upon his time, 
 and that passion for literature, with which systematic in- 
 dulgence in dissipation and disorder is, it is true, not 
 always incompatible, but to which it is certainly opposed. 
 Above all. perhaps, we must be permitted to believe that 
 the young Poet was saved from more vagrant and un- 
 worthy excesses, by that great purifier of youth — First 
 Love. In the same house lodged the widow of a captain, 
 who appears, by all probable accounts, to have been the 
 original of the " Laura," to whom the most impassioned 
 of all his love-verses are addressed. A humorous, but 
 somewhat flippant, friend of Schiller's — Scharffenstein — 
 lias described this lady in the same spirit of caricature 
 with which he has treated of the noble image of Schiller 
 himself. He says, " she was not pretty, nor clever ; but 
 had something about her, good-natured, piqtwmt, and 
 attractive.' ' One of Schiller's biographers hints at un- 
 published accounts, less flattering ; but what is unpublished 
 is necessarily unsifted and unsupported ; and we have no 
 evidence whatsoever to invalidate that on which the Poet 
 himself commands our interest for one who could make so 
 vivid an impression on his heart. Schiller was, no doubt, 
 a,t least as good a judge of beauty and of cleverness as his 
 friend Scharffenstein. 
 
 It would be impossible for a critic of common sense to 
 suppose, with certain metaphysical commentators, that this 
 love was merely Platonic. Platonic love in Schiller ! As 
 well talk of Platonic love in Burns ! The poerus them- 
 selves, in their very faults, bear internal evidence of the 
 healthful and natural passion of the man, which takes 
 poetry for its vent — not the vanity of the poetaster who 
 would simulate the great passion of man, in order to obtain 
 a vent for his verses. 
 
 But whatever this affection, it seems to have burned 
 out from its very fierceness, and (though, years after- 
 wards, the Poet speaks of the resignation of Laura as 
 * HofFineister. f Madame von "Wolzogen. 
 
220 THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 
 
 the great sacrifice of youth), it was obviously very 
 different from that steady, pure, and permanent at- 
 tachment which ultimately made the happiness of his 
 manhood. 
 
 At last, on the 13th of January, 1782, " The Robbers " 
 appeared on the stage at Mannheim, The sensation the 
 printed play had produced served to crowd the theatre. 
 Near and far, from Heidelberg and Darmstadt, from Prank- 
 fort, Mayence, and Worms, gathered the audience. The 
 play lasted five hours. The success in print was trivial to 
 that upon the stage. The fiery rebellion of thought which 
 it embodied became more startling when animated by the 
 art of the greatest actors of the time,* and hailed by the 
 enthusiasm of spectators, in whom, as everywhere in 1782, 
 the spirit of Revolution was astir. 
 
 We can easily imagine the impatient desire of Schiller 
 to witness his own triumph. He went by stealth to Mann- 
 heim. In an obscure corner of the crowded house, the 
 author beheld the living embodiment of his own thoughts 
 and passions. He saw himself raised at once into that 
 mighty power — the mover of the hearts of men. He re- 
 turned to Stuttgart confirmed for life in the vocation his 
 1 hn j genius had adopted. " If Germany/' he wrote 
 
 -, hno ' to Dalberg on his return, " shall one day recog- 
 nise in me a Dramatic Poet, I must date the 
 epoch from the last week. ,, 
 
 But in proportion to the ardour of his inclinations, was 
 the restraint of Schiller's actual life. At Mannheim, he 
 was the freeman, the poet ; he returned to Stuttgart to 
 sink again into the subaltern and the subject. Some ex- 
 pressions in the third act of the " The Robbers," reflecting 
 upon the national character of the Grisons, gave such 
 offence to the objects of the rude and boyish satire, that 
 their complaint was published in " The Hamburgh Corre- 
 
 * B6k acted Karl Moor with prodigious effect : but that is a part which 
 almost plays itself. Iffland, a man of real genius, elevated the disagreeable 
 character of Franz Moor into the dignity of an Iago. His representation of 
 this part seems to have been one of th6 most perfect as well as one of the 
 most popular triumphs of the stage. His thin figure and meagre countenance, 
 suiting well with the ideal of a formal hypocrite, served to increase the 
 actuality of the personation. Inland, like Schiller, was commencing his 
 career ; he was then about six-and-twenty, according to Schiller's bio- 
 graphers ; three-and-twenty according to other authorities, who state his 
 birth to have been in April, 1759. 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 221 
 
 spondent," and, by the mediation of a man named Walter, 
 who bore some personal grndge to Schiller, laid before the 
 Grand Duke. The result seems to have been a very 
 severe reprimand on the part of the Duke, and a peremp- 
 tory injunction to Schiller to confine his studies to Medi- 
 cine — his publications to such as befitted his profession — 
 to abandon all connexion with States under other jurisdic- 
 tion (meaning Mannheim), limiting his ambition to his 
 calling, and his connexions to his country.* Such a 
 command could not be obeyed by a man urged to resist by 
 the stronger despotism of his own genius. Already new 
 and vast designs were opening to Schiller's intellectual 
 ambition ; already he had commenced and proceeded far 
 in the tragedy of " Fiesco ; " already meditated a drama on 
 the fate of Don Carlos of Spain. To ask him to renounce 
 these projects was to ask him to renounce the very mind 
 by wmich they were formed. His first visit to the Mann- 
 heim theatre had been undetected or overlooked ; he went 
 again in the following May, and was put for fourteen days 
 under arrest. Dangers now beset him ; dark and sinister 
 menaces were repeated to him by officious friends, and 
 exaggerated perhaps in their import by the gloom of his 
 imagination. But the dangers in themselves were real 
 and imminent. Before his eyes was the fate of the Poet 
 Schubart,f eight years imprisoned for displeasing the 
 jealousies of Power. What fate could seem more terrible 
 to one drunk with the desire of liberty, and eager to spread 
 the wings of his genius ? Stuttgart, nay, all Suabian 
 scenes, as he himself complains, in a letter to Dalberg, 
 " became intolerable and loathed." He could have had 
 but small comfort from his family. His father as yet 
 regarded his notoriety with dislike and fear. He was not 
 a prophet in his own country, nor an honour to his own 
 hearth ; — with disgust he saw all around him ; — with san- 
 guine self-confidence he cast his eyes beyond. He formed 
 the only resolution natural to his circumstances and worthy 
 of his independence : he resolved to emancipate body and 
 soul both ; to fly from Stuttgart, and throw himself on the 
 world. 
 
 * Schwab, &c. 
 
 f An Appendix to Mr. Carlyle's " Life of Schiller " contains an interesting 
 account of this unfortunate poet. 
 
CHAPTEE IV. 
 
 Flight from Stuttgart — " Fiesco " read to the actors — Adventures and 
 wanderings — Schiller finds refuge at Bauerbach — Commencement of 
 " Cabal and Love." 
 
 Amongst Schiller's companions was a warmhearted 
 
 -t nno enthusiastic musician, two years younger than 
 himself, named Andrew Streicher. This youth 
 became his confidant. Together they brooded over the 
 future — together they conceived and nursed the project of 
 escape. It had been intended that Streicher should pro- 
 ceed to Hamburgh in the spring of the next year, to take 
 lessons in his art from the celebrated Bach.* He per- 
 suaded his mother to consent that the date of this journey 
 should be advanced, and the friends settled that Schiller 
 should bear him company. But Schiller, with all his inex- 
 perience, and all his fiery ardour, had that strong sense 
 with which true genius prepares for the fulfilment, even of 
 its wildest schemes. He felt the necessity of providing, 
 from his own talents, the materials for their support. He 
 would not leave Stuttgart till his tragedy of " Fiesco " was 
 nearly completed. In that tragedy lay his fortune and his 
 future. He worked at it night and day — illness seized 
 him, but the work went on. At length it was suffi- 
 ciently advanced for presentation to the Mannheim 
 Theatre, and the opportunity now offered itself for 
 escape. 
 
 The city and its neighbourhood were astir with the visit 
 of the Grand Duke Paul of Russia, and his young Princess, 
 niece to the Duke of Wtirtemberg. In the midst of these 
 festivities the flight was planned. 
 
 It was obviously necessary to conceal from the elder 
 Schiller the designs of the son ; the military notions and 
 military duty of the former might not only lead him to 
 forbid, but to disclose them. And the young Poet was 
 
 * Not the great Sebastian Bach, who died in 1750. 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLEE. 223 
 
 moreover anxious, that whatever the displeasure of his 
 sovereign, it might fall on himself alone — not involve his 
 father. But his eldest and favourite sister was admitted 
 to his confidence; — the little girl who had wandered with 
 the dreaming hoy through the ruins of Hohenstaufen, and 
 amidst the pines of Larch, was become a woman, capable 
 of sympathising with the lofty hopes of the adventurous 
 man : and at last, a day or two before the meditated de- 
 parture, the truth was broken to Schiller's mother. With 
 his friend Streicher, and the wife of the Stage Manager at 
 Mannheim, Madame Meier (whom, as well as the Director 
 Dalberg, the royal festivities had drawn to Stuttgart, but 
 from whom the secret was carefully kept), Schiller for the 
 last time visited his family at " Solitude." He took the 
 opportunity, which his father's absorption in his own 
 account of the royal preparations afforded, to steal with his 
 mother unobserved from the room. After an hour's absence, 
 he returned — alone. The affectionate gaze of Streicher saw 
 what he had suffered in that parting interview, by the 
 redness of his eyes. The important day was now fixed — 
 the 17th of September. 
 
 Streicher removed from Schiller's lodging a bundle, 
 containing the dress which was to be substituted for 
 the uniform of the Regimental Surgeon — some linen, 
 and a few books — among which were the works of 
 Haller and Shakspeare. But when Streicher came to 
 fetch Schiller himself — after the return of the latter from 
 his final visit to the Hospital — he found the young enthu- 
 siast with Klopstock's Odes in his hands. A favourite 
 ode had given unseasonable inspiration to his own muse, 
 and the impatient musician was forced to wait and hear, 
 not only the seductive ode, but the ode it had called forth. 
 At last all was ready — day passed — night came — Schiller 
 had assumed his disguise ; three-and-twenty florins consti- 
 tuted the Poet's wealth, eight-and-twenty the Musician's; 
 two trunks, containing books and apparel — a brace of 
 pistols — and a small clavichord, summed up the effects 
 of the fugitives. At ten o'clock the vehicle which con- 
 tained the adventurers rolled from Streicher's lodging 
 to the Esslingen Gate (the darkest of all the City 
 Gates), at which the Lieutenant of the Watch was a 
 firm friend of the Poet's. "Halt ! who goes there?" 
 
224 THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 
 
 " Dr. Ritter and Dr. Wolf, both bound to Esslingen." 
 " Pass." 
 
 The escape is made. Towards midnight they beheld, at 
 the left, the illuminated Ludwigsburg, like a mount of 
 fire ; further on, and at the distance of a mile from their 
 road, they saw the castle of " Solitude,' ' and the neigh- 
 bouring buildings, lighted up in honour of the Royal 
 visitor. In the clear air, all was so distinctly visible, that 
 the poet could point out to his companion his parents' 
 home; and a suppressed sigh — a soft " O meine Mutter " — 
 escaped him ! So fled from the capital of Wtirtemberg, 
 Friedrich Schiller, " empty " — as, with little exaggeration, 
 he himself has said, " of purse and hope ; " esteemed as a 
 rebel by his Sovereign ; condemned as a scapegrace by his 
 father ; regarded but as an imprudent reckless scribbler, 
 marring his own fair prospects for a vain ambition, by his 
 associates ! — He who now visits that capital finds little to 
 arrest his interest — except one colossal statue, in a broad 
 space near the Royal palace ; before which his guide will 
 bid him halt to contemplate Friedrich Schiller — the pride 
 of his Fatherland ! 
 
 The travellers reached Mannheim in safety. They 
 unpacked their boxes, and put on their best clothes ; 
 it was a holiday — they were out of the Grand Duke's 
 dominions — they were free ! Schiller's hope was in his 
 "Fiesco." In a few sheets of paper lay all that was to 
 give bread to existence, independence to labour, and glory 
 to ambition. Dalberg was at Stuttgart ; but Meier, the 
 manager, received them with kindness. When he heard, 
 with astonishment, the bold step Schiller had taken, he 
 urged the expediency of an immediate letter to the Grand 
 Duke. This, indeed, Schiller had already resolved upon. 
 In the small German States, the relation between prince 
 and subject is more parental and patriarchal than in the 
 larger Monarchies of Europe : if the prince be more de- 
 spotic, the subject can be more familiar. After dinner, to 
 which the young friends were invited by Meier, Schiller 
 withdrew into another apartment, and wrote frankly to his 
 Sovereign ; it was a letter at once manly and respectful. 
 He represented how impossible he found it to live upon his 
 professional gains as a surgeon ; — his income could only be 
 made sufficient by his literary labours. He prayed for 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 225 
 
 permission to try Lis fortune for a short time out of 
 the Duke's dominions, and declared his willingness ulti- 
 mately to return on receiving his Sovereign's pardon. 
 The letter was enclosed to the chief of Schiller's regi- 
 ment, General Auge, with a petition to present, and 
 to support it. The next day Madame Meier returned 
 from Stuttgart, with the news that Schiller's flight was 
 already notorious; and that it was expected that the 
 Grand Duke would demand the delivery of his person. 
 As Schiller, however, was not a soldier, he could not 
 be treated and reclaimed as a deserter ; still it was 
 deemed advisable that he should not show himself till 
 the Grand Duke's answer was received. A letter from 
 General Auge came at last ; it preserved perfect silence 
 as to the request Schiller had preferred, and only an- 
 nounced to him the permission, or implied the order, 
 immediately to return. Schiller hastened to reply to 
 the General, that he could not regard the Grand Duke's 
 message as a compliance with his request, which he again 
 respectfully urged. A second letter from the General 
 laconically repeated the purport of the former one. 
 Schiller's pride, his spirit of independence, and his honour 
 became engaged. He could not recall the step which had 
 delivered him from an intolerable bondage : the die was 
 cast, and he resolved, as he himself has expressed it, " to 
 exchange the citizenship of his country for that of the 
 world." 
 
 Meanwhile Streicher had fired the manager with his 
 accounts of " Fiesco ; " a day and hour were fixed for 
 Schiller to read his new performance to the more distin- 
 guished actors, among whom was Iffland. The young poet 
 commenced his reading, — all listened in silence, — not a 
 word of approbation. At the end of the first act some 
 slipped away ; at the end of the second, the disappoint- 
 ment grew more unequivocal ; and a quarter of an hour 
 afterwards, the poet had lost all his listeners except Iffland. 
 Meier now took aside Streicher, and asked him seriously, 
 " if Schiller really were the author of ' The Robbers ' ? " — 
 li Certainly," said the astonished friend. " Then," answered 
 Meier, "he has exhausted his strength in his first per- 
 formance." But the manuscript was left with the expe- 
 rienced manager, and the next morning, when fcJtreicher 
 
 Q 
 
226 THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 
 
 repaired, full of painfnl anxiety, to Meier, he was accosted 
 with " You are right, ' Fiesco ? is a masterpiece ! — better 
 fitted for the stage than ' The Robbers.' " It was 
 Schiller's Suabian dialect, and his high-pitched mono- 
 tonous mode of declamation, that had done such in- 
 justice to his genius — a perusal of the play excited Meier's 
 warmest admiration, and Streicher went back to his friend 
 with the welcome news, that arrangements would be made 
 to produce " Fiesco " on the stage. Alterations requiring 
 some time were nevertheless indispensable, and it became 
 necessary to remove farther from the power of his offended 
 prince. Warned by letters from Stuttgart, Schiller and 
 his friend resolved to pass to Darmstadt, near Frankfort. 
 Their money was nearly gone. Sorely pressed as he was, 
 Schiller had so tender a consideration for his parents, that 
 he would not apply to them, lest he might bring upon his 
 father the suspicion of conniving at his flight. With 
 enough barely to defray the expenses of their pilgrimage 
 on foot, the two friends set off one day at noon ; rested at 
 night in a village ; resumed their way the next morning 
 over one of the most striking roads in Europe (the Berg- 
 strasse) ; continued their journey for twelve hours ; rested 
 from six in the evening till midnight, when they were 
 wakened and alarmed by the drums of a reveille. Not- 
 withstanding Schiller felt himself unwell, with the early 
 morning the journey was resumed ; the day was serene and 
 clear, but Schiller's strength failed his spirit ; his step 
 grew every moment more weary, his cheek more pale : at 
 last, on entering a wood, he was unable to proceed further ; 
 he laid himself down for an hour's rest upon the grass ; 
 and Streicher, seated on the trunk of a tree, anxious 
 and sorrowful, watched beside him. The young man, 
 struggling with his destiny, may take heart for the future 
 when he contemplates the picture of that wearied sleeper, 
 homeless and penniless, but already on his path to the 
 conquest of Destiny itself, and the only throne which no 
 revolution shakes, and no time decays— in the hearts of 
 men. 
 
 They reached Frankfort at last, and Schiller addressed 
 a letter to Dalberg : — "When I tell you," he says, " that 
 I am flying my country, I describe to you my whole fate. 
 My safety obliged me to withdraw in haste from Stutt- 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 227 
 
 gart. My sole hopes rested on a removal to Mannheim ; 
 there, I trusted, by your Excellency's assistance, that my 
 new drama might enable me to clear myself from debt, and 
 permanently better my condition. This was frustrated 
 through the hasty departure to which I was compelled. I 
 might blush to make such disclosures to you. but I know 
 they do not debase me. If my former conduct — if all that 
 your Excellency knows of my character — can induce con- 
 fidence in my honour, let me frankly ask your assistance. 
 Greatly as I need the anticipated profit from " Fiesco.'' the 
 play cannot be ready for the theatre in less than five weeks. 
 My heart was oppressed — my poetic dreams fled before the 
 sense of my condition. But if at the time specified the 
 play could be ready, and, I trust, worthy, — from that belief 
 
 I take the courage to ask the advance of what would then 
 be due. I need it, perhaps, more now than I may ever do 
 hereafter. I owed nearly 200 florins when I left Stuttgart. 
 This gives me, I own, more uneasiness than all the care for 
 my future fate. I shall have no rest till in that quarter I 
 am free." 
 
 After this letter he was more relieved ; and yet, on re- 
 turning from the post-office to which he took it, he paused 
 on the bridge, beneath which flows the Maine : he gazed 
 long in silence on the river, and said at last. ' ; TVhich is 
 the deeper, that water or my sufferings ? " But no brave 
 man, and no true poet, can remain long despondent in the 
 midst of a world enriched by the activity of his kind, and 
 upheld by the goodness of his Maker. The very sight of 
 that bustling scene ; the vessels sailing to and fro ; the 
 river gilded by the setting sun ; the clear evening air ; the 
 fresh and cheerful wave ; amidst the smiles of Nature, the 
 evidences of that Nature's subjugation to the will and the 
 power of man — these gradually drew him from his sadness, 
 and re-animated his soul. His verv misfortunes, throwing 
 him so wholly on his own resources, quickened his inven- 
 tion, and the next evening he announced to his friend, 
 that he had conceived the plan of a domestic play, entitled* 
 
 II Louise Miller," which was afterwards completed, and 
 finally became famous under the title of "Cabal and Love." 
 
 * According to Madame von Wblzogen (Schiller's sister-in-law), lie had, 
 however, first thought of the subject of this play during his military arrest 
 at Stuttgart. 
 
 Q 2 
 
228 THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 
 
 A letter from Meier arrived at last, to say, that while 
 "Fiesco" remained unfit for the stage, Dalberg could not 
 make the proposed advance ; that the work must be com- 
 pleted before he could say more. No disappointment could 
 be more cruel. But Schiller bore it undauntedly. He 
 uttered no complaint ; not one harsh, one indignant word 
 passed his lips. He prepared only to comply with the 
 condition that was imposed. The friends were reduced to 
 a few small coins, when Streicher received thirty florins, 
 for which he had written to his mother ; and with this aid 
 they left Frankfort. A line was, however, first dispatched 
 to Meier, requesting him to meet and agree upon some place 
 in which "Fiesco" might be completed with safety and in 
 repose. 
 
 Finally, it was settled that Schiller should take up his 
 residence in an inn at Oggersheim, once more changing 
 his name from Hitter to Schmidt ; and here, still accom- 
 panied by the devoted Streicher, he shut himself up to 
 compose his glorious taskwork. But so much, while most 
 occupied, did his mind shrink from what was ordained to 
 it, that, instead of completing " Fiesco," his domestic 
 drama of " Cabal and Love " engrossed all his thoughts 
 and labours. Perhaps in a play which sought to prove the 
 tyranny and the prejudice of conventional rank, he found 
 something more congenial to his peculiar condition than 
 the loftier conception of the conspirator of Genoa. The 
 two friends shared one chamber, one bed ; the Poet had 
 his play — the Musician his instrument. And Streicher, 
 whom we esteem no less for his self-devotion than Schiller 
 for his indomitable courage, soothed the labours of his 
 friend with the notes of his clavichord. Again their re- 
 sources were exhausted ; again poor Streicher applied to his 
 mother for the money intended for his professional journey 
 to Hamburgh. Necessity then tore Schiller from the new 
 work, and restored him to the old. Early in November 
 "Fiesco" was completed. 
 
 But fresh disappointments awaited Schiller. After the 
 suspense of a week, Dalberg reported of " Fiesco " that a 
 part of it was not yet fitted for the stage, and that it must 
 either be rejected or improved. Nothing could be more 
 chilling, more laconic, more heartless, to all appearance, 
 than the reply of this literary courtier. Schiller had been 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 229 
 
 greatly instigated in his flight from Stuttgart by his re- 
 liance on Dalberg's professions of esteem and friendship. 
 And now not a word to comfort, mnch less a florin to 
 support ! Before the laborious student rose the sense of a 
 condition thoroughly desolate and alarming — the recol- 
 lection of his debts at Stuttgart ; more than all, the 
 remorse of having implicated his faithful friend in his own 
 ruin. It was evident that Dalberg, with that sympathy 
 which all courtiers have for the grievances of all courts, 
 regarded Schiller as a political offender, and feared to 
 befriend one with whom a Prince was displeased. 
 
 Two resources were left : firstly, to find for the two 
 plays a publisher who would advance some money upon 
 their probable profits ; and secondly, to take advantage of 
 a generous oifer — an invitation which might well put to 
 the blush the niggard heartlessness of Dalberg. 
 
 At the Stuttgart Academy, three young men of good 
 birth, named Wolzogen, had been educated contempo- 
 raneously with Schiller. The eldest of these, Wilhelm, 
 was afterwards amongst his most intimate friends ; their 
 mother, a widow in straitened circumstances, had known 
 and admired the Poet at Stuttgart ; she offered him an 
 asylum in a small house she possessed at Bauerbach, about 
 two miles from Meiningen. The advancement of her own 
 sons was in the hands of the Duke of Wurtemberg. She 
 hazarded much by receiving into her house the persecuted 
 fugitive ; but the magnanimity of her friendship would not 
 take the peril of a good action into account. Thither, 
 then, Schiller resolved to fly. A Mannheim bookseller, 
 named Schwan, advanced upon " Piesco " sufficient to dis- 
 charge the debt incurred at Oggersheim, and defray the 
 expenses of the journey to Bauerbach. In a winter's 
 night — the snow deep upon the ground — the generous 
 Streicher bade him farewell ; or rather, no word was 
 spoken, no embrace exchanged — a long and silent clasp of 
 the hand was the only token of an affection which had 
 endured so much hardship, and consoled through so much 
 sorrow. "But yet," says Schiller's German biographer, 
 with simple eloquence, "the Musician, after fifty years, 
 was filled with grief when he recalled the moment in 
 which he had left a truly kingly heart — the noblest of the 
 German poets — alone and in misfortune. 
 
CHAPTEE V. 
 
 Eesidence at Bauerbaeh. 
 
 As on a December evening, 1782, the wanderer beheld, 
 beneath the old ruins of the Castle of Henneberg, the 
 lights of the scattered houses of the village of Bauerbaeh 
 gleaming through the deep snow, he felt, as he himself 
 says, " like a shipwrecked man, who struggles at last from 
 the waves." Here, though the family themselves were 
 absent, everything that could comfort and welcome him, 
 awaited. He remained unknown and secure ; a bookseller 
 of eminence at Meiningen (Heinwald), who afterwards 
 married his sister, was admitted to his secret, and cheered 
 his solitude with books and his own society. Sometimes 
 he made a companion of the steward of the property, 
 jolayed with him at chess, or wandered, with him, through 
 the woods which surround that country. 5 * The calm, the 
 security and the solitude were, at first, beneficial to his 
 mind and to his labours. The two plays were completed, 
 and despatched to the bookseller, Schwan. But now, his 
 ardent imagination, having thrown off its tasks, began to 
 prey upon itself. He passed, though for a short time, and 
 with reluctance, into that state common to all good men, 
 in proportion to their original affection for their species — 
 misanthropy. No man ever was, in reality, a misanthrope, 
 but from too high an opinion of mankind, and too keen a 
 perception of ideal virtue. " I had embraced," complains 
 Schiller, " half the world, with feelings the most glowing, 
 to find a lump of ice within my arms." f The wild and 
 
 * A singular anecdote is related by Madame yon Wolzogen. One day, in 
 his walk with the steward, Schiller paused in a lonely spot between wild 
 rocks, and was seized with a notion that a dead body lay below. In fact, a 
 poor carrier had been murdered there, and his corpse had been buried in the 
 very place. 
 
 f Shortly after this period, on his settlement at Mannheim, he announced 
 his intention of translating Shakspeare's " Timon," and says, "In all 
 Shakspeare there is no piece in which he more loudly and eloquently speaks 
 to my heart — or in which I have learned more of the Science of Life,"— 
 Mem. Thai. Heft. 1, s. 13. 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 231 
 
 desolate scenery around him — the dreariness of winter — 
 served to increase the gloom that seized him. His prospects 
 were, in reality, snch as might render the hardest sensitive, 
 and the boldest anxious. The present might be safe, but 
 at any moment he might be cast again upon the world. 
 His gratitude to his friends made him feel that his asylum 
 must be resigned the moment the Grand Duke discovered 
 it. And, even as it was, could his spirit long bear the 
 thought of dependence, obscurity, and disguise ? Still he 
 was without a country, still without a career. He 
 seriously thought of abandoning poetry, and returning to 
 the medical profession ; sometimes the wilder notion of 
 exile to England — to America — possessed him. This state 
 of mind was, perhaps, fortunately invaded by a romantic 
 and hopeless fancy, rather than the love for which he mis- 
 took it. 
 
 Madame von TVolzogen visited Bauerbach. 
 
 In Charlotte, the youngest daughter of his benefactress, 
 Schiller found an image to replace his Laura. He could 
 not expect encouragement from the mother, nor does it 
 appear that his attachment was returned by Charlotte ; 
 but he was at that age when feeling is easily awakened, 
 and as easily misunderstood by the heart which feels it. 
 The love of youth, before it settles for life, hovers over all 
 to whom the fancy allures it. The Cupid, with the ex- 
 panded wings, and the arrow on the string, is but the 
 false Anteros : — In the true Eros, the wings are folded, and 
 the bow is broken. Certainly this was the most critical 
 period in the life of Schiller, moral and intellectual. If 
 new persecutions, whether of power or of opinion, had now 
 befallen him, it is at least doubtful whether he would 
 have ever attained to a name at once so revered and so 
 beloved — whether indignation and disgust might not, in a 
 spirit so proud and so impetuous, have ripened into per- 
 manent defiance of the world, and its existing orders and 
 forms. * Who shall say whether it would have been in the 
 power of Schiller, in the nature of man, to have preserved 
 the genial purity and kindliness which had been the early 
 concomitants and softeners of his restless and fiery genius, 
 if, at this moment, he had undergone from the public of 
 
 * "Oil!" he exclaims, in a letter to iladanie Ton TTolzogen, "you 
 cannot believe how necessary it is to me to find noble human natures ! " 
 
232 THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 
 
 his fatherland the same fearful calumny and injustice 
 which, in the anguish and the trial of existence, hooted 
 Byron into exile ? None of the earlier writings of Byron 
 can be compared for a moment, in their offences against 
 settled opinions, to those which the youth of Schiller sent 
 forth to agitate society and inflame the mind. "The 
 Robbers," " Fiesco," " Cabal and Love," are, one and all, 
 defiances of Prescription. The revolutionary stamp is upon 
 each. To ordinary observers they might well appear the 
 more dangerous from the systematic purpose which seemed 
 to pervade them all. In England, such works would have 
 given impunity to the slander of literary envy, and the 
 bigotry of political hate. But there was a nobler temper 
 in the German public ; — there was granted to Schiller what, 
 despite the greater temptations of birth, and beauty, and 
 prevalent example, was never conceded to our immortal 
 countryman — the allowance for unsettled youth and im- 
 perfect education ; — and the result should be a lesson to 
 the public in all lands. His manhood was the splendid 
 redeemer of his youth. 
 
 Suddenly, in the midst of Schiller's anxious gloom and 
 conflicting emotions — at the very moment when hypo- 
 chondria was fast darkening over his heart and unnerving 
 his intellect — the sun broke out upon him. The Duke of 
 Wiirtemberg, whose resentment never seems to have been 
 ungenerous or vindictive, tacitly relinquished all thoughts 
 of persecuting a man in whom the whole of Germany 
 began to feel a romantic interest. The courtier Dalberg 
 perceived that the time was come when, without impru- 
 dence, he might bring to the aid of his theatre the author 
 of the most popular drama of the time. He invited Schiller 
 to Mannheim. The young Poet's plays were to be pro- 
 duced upon the stage — the object of an ambition, modest 
 as to temporal means, vast as to intellectual empire, was 
 attained. He was appointed, with a fixed, though very 
 limited salary, Poet to the Theatre at Mannheim, then 
 the first in Germany. On the evening of the 22nd July, 
 1783, he arrived at the town in w r hich the foundations of 
 his dramatic glory had been laid ; and, at the house of 
 Meier he was once more beheld — but, this time, with 
 a cheerful and radiant countenance — by his faithful 
 Streicher. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Residence at Mannheim. 
 
 But it is one thing to print a drama — another to repre- 
 sent it. " Fiesco " still required great alterations to adapt 
 it to the stage. One essential canse of the theatrical 
 success of Schiller, was the earnest readiness with which 
 he lent himself to the suggestions of practical criticism. 
 He was not like many of our young authors who write for 
 the stage, and will not sacrifice a passage to what they call 
 the arrogant ignorance of managers and actors. Unless 
 the Poet obtains and follows the advice of manager and 
 actor, he may depend upon it that he will never command 
 an audience. While employed upon the task of revising 
 " Fiesco," and its companion Drama, Schiller was seized 
 with fever, which exhausted his strength and protracted 
 his labours. But, in nothing is Schiller more an example 
 to us than in his iron perseverance and diligent industry. 
 These were the very elements of his genius. Perhaps they 
 are so of all genius that accomplishes what is great 
 and lasting. Through weakness and through sickness he 
 toiled on. 
 
 "Fiesco" was not so successful at Mannheim as had 
 been anticipated. Schiller complained that the public 
 of the Palatine could not understand it ; that with them 
 Republican Liberty was an empty sound. But, in 
 Berlin and Frankfort, it produced a considerable sen- 
 sation, which reacted on the Mannheim audiences, and 
 soon secured its fame. It was followed, in March or April,* 
 by " Cabal and Love," which obtained the most brilliant 
 reception. 
 
 On the first representation of this drama, Streicher found 
 his reward for all his friendship. He sate by the side of 
 Schiller ; he heard the rapturous applauses it excited ; he 
 
 * On the 9th of March, according to Schwab ; somewhere in April, 
 according to Hoffmeister. 
 
234 THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 
 
 saw all eyes turned to the Poet ; he had shared the adver- 
 sity — he participated in the triumph. 
 
 Schiller's existence was now assured. He had found a 
 country, as well as confirmed his fame. He was acknow- 
 ledged a subject of the Elector Palatine. He had no 
 longer any cause of apprehension from the Duke of Wiir- 
 temberg. He was elected a member of the German 
 Literary Society established at Mannheim. The circle of 
 his intimates was thus enlarged amongst men of the same 
 pursuits, and his ambition corrected and guided, by com- 
 parison between himself and others. New resources were 
 opened to him ; and his ambition could not readily settle 
 upon any one of the numerous objects by which it was 
 allured. He proposed at first to translate " Timon of 
 Athens," and " Macbeth," but ultimately returned to " Don 
 Charles." This was the first drama, commenced in the 
 retirement of Bauerbach, which he had attempted in verse ; 
 and herein he first ascended, though with an uncertain 
 step, towards the higher and purer realm of ideal fiction, 
 in which his genius finally fixed its home. A marked 
 change, indeed, was now visible in his modes of thought. 
 He took loftier conceptions of the aims and duties of the 
 Poet. He became aware of the moral deficiencies of " The 
 Robbers ; " he meditated a sequel to that play, which 
 should be an ample apology for its predecessor, and in 
 which " all immorality should be resolved into the highest 
 moral." t He reassumed his early instincts of the preacher; 
 not indeed as from the pulpit, but from the boards. He 
 laid down to others and to himself the principle, that the 
 Stage should take its rank with the Church and the School 
 amongst the primary institutions of a state. In propor- 
 tion as representation must be more vivid than dead book- 
 lore and cold narration, so assuredly might he think that 
 the stage should work lessons deeper and more lasting 
 than mere moralising systems. J Whether he did not over- 
 estimate the possible influence of the theatre in modern 
 times, may be reasonably doubted. But that very ex- 
 
 * At the end of the second act the audience shouted applause so much 
 more emphatically than usual, that Schiller, taken by surprise, rose and 
 bowed. 
 
 f Schiller's "Brief an Dalberg," s. 85, &c. 
 
 t Hoffmeister. 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 235 
 
 aggeration could only serve to purify his ambition and 
 elevate his aims. 
 
 Meanwhile, his pecuniary circumstances, though im- 
 proved, and though, perhaps, sufficient for a strict econo- 
 mist, were not adequate to the wauts of a man so liberal, so 
 charitable, and so careless of detail and method. Wrapt 
 in his ideal realm, he forgot the exigencies of practical 
 life. "Hogarth," says his biographer, "might have been 
 inspired by the disorder of the young Poet's chamber." 
 His debt at Stuttgart still weighed upon him, till at length 
 his landlord lent him the money to defray it. He resolved 
 upon new efforts to emancipate himself from all difficulties. 
 He undertook a periodical called the " Rhenish Thalia," 
 from w^hich he anticipated to reap an independence. In the 
 announcement of this work he speaks thus of his own 
 views and hopes : "I write as a Citizen of the -^ 
 World who serves no prince. Early I left my -, t-^\ 
 father-land, exchanging it for the great world, 
 w T hich I only beheld at a distance, and through a glass." 
 He proceeds to speak of his education ; his poetic enthu- 
 siasm ; his " Robbers ; " his night from Wurtemberg ; and 
 thus continues : — " All my former connexions are dis- 
 solved. The Public has become my all, my study, my 
 sovereign, and my confidant. To the Public alone hence- 
 forth I belong. Before this tribunal, and this tribunal 
 only, I take my stand. Something of greatness hovers 
 over me as I resolve to know no restraint but the sen- 
 tence of the world — appeal to no throne but the soul of 
 Man ! " 
 
 This frank and stately egotism was thoroughly charac- 
 teristic of Schiller. And the reader will readily understand 
 how much, as in the case of Byron, the admiration for the 
 Poet became associated with interest in the Man. Grave 
 men, whom he did not know, wrote to offer him their 
 homage ; fair maidens, whom he had not seen, transmitted 
 to him their miniatures. But in the midst of his labours 
 and his increasing fame, his heart was lonely. He jDined 
 for love and for female society. In the bustle of the town 
 he recalled with a sigh the retirement of Bauerbach. For- 
 getful of the gloom which had, there, so often overshadowed 
 his solitude, he looked self-deludingly back to the winter 
 months he had spent amidst its pine-trees as amongst 
 
236 THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 
 
 the happiest of his life. The image of Charlotte von 
 Wolzogen haunted him ; but it was rather as the ideal 
 Egeria of the nympholept than as the one living woman 
 who renders all others charmless and indifferent. " To be 
 iinked to one," he says, " who shares with us joy and 
 sorrow ; who meets us in our emotions, and accommodates 
 her mood to our humours ; at her breast to release our 
 souls from the thousand distractions, the thousand wild 
 wishes and unruly passions ; and drown all the bitterness 
 of Fortune in the enjoyment of domestic calm ; — ah ! such 
 were the true delight of life." He proposed openly to 
 Madame von Wolzogen for her daughter Charlotte ; but, 
 thoroughly convinced at last of the hopelessness of that 
 pursuit, his desire for love in the abstract soon found its 
 object elsewhere. Margaret, the daughter of Schwan the 
 bookseller, was one in whom he might woo an equal, and 
 reasonably hope to find a return for his affection. She pos- 
 sessed great personal beauty, and a lively turn of mind ; 
 " rather devoted,'' say, with some malice, the good German 
 biographers, " to the world, to literature, and to art, than 
 to the tranquil domestic duties." She was then nineteen 
 years old, and the death of her mother had placed her at 
 the head of the household. Schiller's literary intercourse 
 with her father necessarily drew him much into her 
 society; and about the autumn of 1784, the fair Margaret 
 gained possession of a heart still somewhat too inflammable 
 for constancy. * 
 
 With the new love he resumed the new drama ; and 
 the passion for Margaret burns in many a line which 
 
 ■jhnK proclaims the affection of the ill-fated Carlos. 
 But new circumstances began to conspire against 
 the repose of Schiller, and his continuance at Mannheim. 
 The periodical he had commenced, without greatly in- 
 creasing his resources, embroiled him with the actors. 
 Those worthy personages were mightily concerned at the 
 freedom of his criticisms ; he in turn was no less aggrieved 
 
 * It appears, indeed, that in the interval Schiller had admitted the in- 
 fluence of some wilder and less refined passion than either Margaret Schwan 
 or Charlotte von Wolzogen had inspired, and to which he alludes with frank 
 regret, in a letter some years afterwards to the lady whom he married. The 
 object of this passing 'fancy has apparently baffled the research of his 
 biographers. 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLEE. 237 
 
 by their slovenly repetition of his verses, and their irre- 
 verent treatment of himself. His ambition had been 
 diverted into new paths, by the dignity of Councillor * of 
 the Duchy of Weimar, conferred upon him by the Duke, 
 who in a visit to Mannheim had granted him an audience. 
 The honour in which literary men were held in the court 
 of Weimar inflamed his imagination. He had not yet 
 entirely resigned the practical world for the ideal ; and in 
 Schiller, despite his want of economy and method, there 
 were talents and capacities which were not restricted solely 
 to the pen. Oue of those who knew him best says of 
 him, no doubt with truth, " that if he had been with- 
 held from the destiny of a great poet, he could not have 
 failed, perforce, to have become a remarkable man of 
 action. t For action Schiller certainly possessed those 
 peculiar qualities which usually ensure success in a career 
 once fairly opened ; — indomitable will — the power of 
 earnest application — inflexible honour — and a strong sense 
 of justice. 
 
 The rank of Councillor to the Duchy of Weimar 
 thus opened to him a path more alluring than that in 
 which he passed, not over the flowers his youth had 
 fancied, as Poet to a Theatre. After much consultation 
 with some friends at Leipsic, and with Schwan, and in the 
 midst of all kinds of disgusts and difficulties in his resi- 
 dence at Mannheim, it was determined that he should 
 remove to Leipsic. He resolved there to devote himself 
 to Jurisprudence, and to use Poetry, if we may borrow the 
 admirable saying of Sir Walter Scott, "as his staff, not 
 his crutch." He communicated these intentions to 
 Streicher, who shared his new enthusiasm. What might 
 not so much industry, in a mind already exercised in 
 severe thought and arduous studies, accomplish in a few 
 years ? Some honourable appointment at the least in one 
 of the small Saxon Courts. The friends grew warm over 
 their hopes, and agreed at last to suspend all correspond- 
 ence till the Poet was Minister, and the Musician Chapel 
 Master ! Thus ends — amidst new projects, and on the 
 
 * A merely nominal dignity — but it is difficult for an Englishman to 
 comprehend the eagerness with, which these petty distinctions are sought 
 for in Germany. 
 
 f Scharnenstein. At a later period Goethe expressed the same opinion. 
 
238 THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 
 
 eve of a new flight — the First Period in the life and career 
 of Friedrich Schiller. 
 
 He was only in his twenty- sixth year — and how much 
 -ijqx had he effected ! His name was already a house- 
 hold word in Europe. His genius had not been 
 stationary ; the most marked improvement in taste, in 
 thought, in self-cultivation distinguished his more recent 
 from his earlier compositions. Even at this time, the 
 genial and gentle Wieland had prophesied that Eriedrich 
 Schiller would be the first man of his age. The very mis- 
 fortunes, the very errors of his life, had served to augment 
 the true knowledge of genius — viz., experience of the heart 
 — its sufferings — its passions — its infirmities. In" Fiesco," 
 as in " The Robbers," there is much that is distorted and 
 exaggerated, but the characters- move in a far higher 
 atmosphere — the language is chaster and more severe — 
 the descriptive passages want nothing but rhythm to have 
 the beauty and the charm of poetry. All the men are 
 drawn on the large scale of heroes. The magnificence of 
 Piesco, and the austerity of Verrina, are no doubt con- 
 trasted with too distinct a force for the delicacy of art, but 
 the fault is that of a giant, who has not yet learned to 
 subdue and regulate his strength. Still more promise of 
 real and permanent excellence is to be found in " Cabal 
 and Love ; " for, to idealise common life is impossible, save 
 to those who have already perceived the great truths in 
 which high Poetry moves and breathes. In these plays, 
 the influences which we have noticed in our brief sketch 
 of the state of German Literature, are visible. Through 
 the lurid and stormy phantasies of French republicanism 
 — through the hazy mists of Rousseau's passionate senti- 
 ment — may yet be discovered glimpses of the robust 
 humanity of Herder — the noble earnestness of Lessing — 
 the last especially. " Emilia Galotti " speaks in the Do- 
 mestic Tragedy of "Cabal and Love," and its Odoardo 
 transfuses something of his high spirit into the Verrina 
 of "Piesco." Yet finer influences than even these were 
 now at work npon a mind ever shooting onward, or mount- 
 ing upward. The study of Shakspeare — necessarily 
 intense to one meditating the translation of " Timon " and 
 " Macbeth "—led Schiller, not indeed to imitate a genius 
 wholly dissimilar to his own, but to ponder upon the 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 239 
 
 attributes of that genius which were within his reach. 
 He began the transition from what may be called the 
 passionate and declamatory drama to the intellectual and 
 analytical. He says of the hero of the tragedy on which 
 he was now employed, " Carlos has the soul from Shaks- 
 peare's Hamlet — the pulse from me," There is little 
 in common, it is true, between Carlos and Hamlet; but 
 Schiller had made a great progress in his conceptions 
 of art, when he studied a Hamlet, in order to create a 
 Carlos. 
 
 But in this, as in the several periods of his life, the 
 mirror of his heart and his genius is to be found in h ; s 
 minor poems. In their fervour and exaggeration — their 
 beauties and defects — lives immortally the youth of 
 Schiller. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 SECOND PEEIOD. 
 
 Schiller's arrival at Leipsic — Proposes for Margaret Schwan — Removes to 
 Dresden — His habits, studies, &c. — His infatuation, and departure for 
 Weimar. 
 
 Schiller arrived at Leipsic in the midst of its famous 
 Fair. His name was soon bruited abroad, and the throng 
 pressed to see him. But though Schiller was not without 
 that noble vanity which pants for applause, and take3 
 enjoyment in renown, the curiosity of idlers could only 
 offend his taste, and wound his pride. "It is a peculiar 
 thing," he says, writing to Schwan, "to have an Author's 
 name. The few men of worth and mark who on this 
 account offer their acquaintance, and whose esteem confers 
 pleasure, are too greatly outweighed by the swarm who, 
 like flesh-flies, buzz around the Author as a monster, and 
 claim him as a colleague on the strength of a few sheets of 
 blotted paper. Many cannot get it into their heads that 
 the author of "The Robbers" should be like any other 
 mother's son. They expected at least a crop, the boots of 
 a postilion, and a hunting-whip! " 
 
 Meanwhile Schiller continued his contributions to " The 
 Thalia," in which a considerable portion of " Carlos " 
 appeared ; laboured with assiduity at the completion of 
 that drama; and composed, in a happy moment, "The 
 Hymn to Joy," by far the noblest lyrical poem he had yet 
 achieved. Insensibly the more worldly ambition with 
 which he had quitted Mannhein, died away. The pro- 
 fession of Jurisprudence was not adopted ; but, still 
 anxious to found a livelihood upon some basis more stable 
 than Literature, he meditated a return to Medicine ; and, 
 encouraged, perhaps, by the attention and respect he 
 received at Leipsic, he ventured now to demand the hand 
 of Margaret Schwan. After a preface at once modest and 
 manly, he thus opened himself to her father : " My free 
 and unconstrained access to your house afforded me the 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 241 
 
 opportunity of intimate acquaintance with yonr amiable 
 daughter; and the frank kind treatment with which both yon 
 and she honoured me, tempted my heart to entertain the 
 bold wish of becoming your son. My prospects have hitherto 
 been dim and vague ; they begin now to alter in my favour. 
 I will strive with more continuous vigour when the goal is 
 clear. Do you decide whether I can reach it, when the 
 dearest wish of my heart supports my zeal. Yet two 
 short years, and my whole fortune will be determined. . . . 
 The Duke of Weimar was the first person to whom I dis- 
 closed myself ; his anticipating goodness, and the declara- 
 tion that he took an interest in my happiness, induced me 
 to confess that that happiness depended on a union with 
 your noble daughter. He expressed satisfaction at my 
 choice. I have reason to hope he will do more, should it 
 come to the point of completing my happiness by this 
 union. I shall add nothing further. I know well that 
 hundreds of others might offer your daughter a more 
 splendid fate than I at this moment can promise her ; but 
 that any other heart can be more worthy of her, I venture 
 to deny." * 
 
 A bookseller is generally the last person to choose, as 
 his son-in-law, an Author. He has seen too much of the 
 vicissitudes of an Author's life, and of the airy basis of 
 an Author's hopes in the future, to be flattered by the pro- 
 posals of a suitor who finds it easier to charm the world 
 than to pay the butcher. He wrote to Schiller a refusal, 
 implying that his daughter's character was not in unison 
 with her wooer's. Till then, a correspondence had been 
 carried on between the young persons ; this, Schiller 
 properly and honourably now broke off, to Margaret's sur- 
 prise, and apparently to her grief, for her father had not 
 communicated to her Schiller's proposal, — a discreet re- 
 serve which seems to prove that he did not reckon on her 
 free acquiescence in his reply. The friendship between 
 Schiller and Schwan, however, still continued, and the re- 
 membrance of Margaret never wholly faded from Schiller's 
 heart. " Like all noble and manly natures," says Madame 
 von Wolzogen, " Schiller ever retained an affectionate 
 remembrance of the woman who had inspired him with 
 
 * We have borrowed the translation of this extract fiTin Carlyle's "Life 
 of Schiller" — the Boston edition, 1833. 
 
 n 
 
242 THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 
 
 tender emotion. These recollections moved him always, 
 but he rarely spoke of them ; for love with him was 
 always earnest and solemn ; not the sensual and fickle 
 boy, but the young Divinity, — who unites himself with 
 Psyche." 
 
 Perhaps, to dissipate his disappointment by new change, 
 Schiller yielded to the invitation of friends he had se- 
 cured at Dresden, and at the end of the summer he re- 
 paired to that city, and made a home in the house of 
 Korner, lately appointed Councillor of Appeals * (Appella- 
 tions-Rath), and newly married to Minna Stock, an enthu- 
 siastic admirer of S chiller, f 
 
 Korner's house was placed on the banks of the Elbe, 
 near Loschwitz. A summer-house in the garden, sur- 
 rounded by vineyards and pine-woods, was soon surren- 
 dered to the Poet, and became his favourite retreat. Here 
 "Don Carlos" made effective, though not rapid progress. 
 This Tragedy, the first (as we have before observed) in 
 which Schiller superadded the purer form and the more 
 refined delineations of Poetry to the vigour and effect of 
 the Drama, put the seal upon his fame. Hitherto, with all 
 the admiration of the many, he had not won to himself 
 that more durable, that more enviable reputation, which is 
 maintained and confirmed by the graver few. But judges, 
 the most critical and refined, shared for "Don Carlos," in 
 the closet, the enthusiasm it excited on the stage. 
 
 But, while engaged in the completion of this Drama, 
 Schiller's prodigious activity had already extended the 
 realm his genius was destined to subdue and overspread. 
 Besides the sketch of a Play — " The Misanthrope " — never 
 finished, he conceived the idea of his Romance, called 
 " The Ghost Seer," and collected materials for the his- 
 torical works he began to meditate. For History, indeed, 
 his mind was already prepared by the earnest and thought- 
 ful study of character, and of the philosophy of events, 
 which had been brought to bear on " Don Carlos." And 
 now this restless and ever-inquiring mind arrived at that 
 stage in which, between the enthusiasm of youth, and the 
 wisdom of manhood, is so often placed the transition- 
 
 * Father to the poet Theodor Komer. 
 
 f Minna Stock was one of the young ladies who had honoured Schiller 
 with their miniatures. 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 243 
 
 interval of Doubt. That intensity of religious faith and 
 conviction which had characterised his boyhood, had, 
 perhaps, been somewhat roughly shaken by the hard 
 bigotry of his teachers at the Stuttgart Academy; but 
 there is evidence to show that it existed during the com- 
 position of the "Robbers." Amongst his earlier Poems is 
 one called " Letter from Julius to Baphael, from an un- 
 published Romance. " This Romance afterwards took the 
 shape and title of " Philosophical Letters between Julius 
 and Raphael," of which only a fragment was printed, but 
 in which the scepticism of the Author is first apparent. 
 There is no doubt that this work was remodelled and re- 
 written during Schiller's sojourn at Dresden, and no reason 
 to suppose that, in its earlier form, it contained the matter 
 for just offence, subsequently admitted. 
 
 In these letters appears a crude and wavering conflict 
 between Spinozism and Kantism. With Kant's great 
 work on " Pure Reason," Schiller seems to have been first 
 acquainted, but only by hearsay, at Leipsic or Dresden, 
 between 1785-87. It was not till some years afterwards, 
 in 1791, that he studied Kant at the fountain-head, and 
 learned from him, if not a precisely orthodox Christianity, 
 at least that aesthetical form of religion to which the great 
 German has led so many, who won Id otherwise have been 
 lost in the pathless wilds of infidelity. But now, much 
 that Schiller composed, shows the doubt and conflict of 
 his mind — a state, to one so- constitutionally devout, of 
 great anguish and desjDondency, and to which, in his later 
 writings, he has many solemn and pathetic allusions. In 
 the " Philosophical Letters " is to be found the illogical 
 yet brilliant fallacy of Pantheism, which bewildered hope- 
 lessly the more erratic intellect of Shelley, but which did 
 not long delude the robust understanding of Schiller. In 
 the Poems which he composed at this time, denominated 
 by critics the Second Period of Schiller, the conflict is 
 visible, though subdued. It was in conformity with this 
 state of mind that Schiller — in whom the intellect was no 
 less strong than the imagination — should turn to that 
 positive and actual Something which is found in the 
 external history of man. Plans too large for one writer to 
 accomplish, hovered before his ambition — some history 
 that might be to practical narrative what the vast con- 
 
 e 2 
 
244 THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 
 
 ception of Herder suggested to the theory in which his- 
 tory should be told. 
 
 He meditated, and, in part, undertook, what, indeed, if 
 ever accomplished suitably, would be one of the greatest 
 records in the world — "A History of all the more re- 
 markable Conspiracies and Revolutions of Modern Times." 
 Meanwhile his private life had at once its charms and its 
 sorrows. The love of solitude still clung to him. He 
 was seen in the morning, wandering along the banks of 
 the Elbe, thoughtful and alone ; or, like Byron at Venice, 
 w r hen the lightning flashed and the storm burst, tossed in 
 his gondola upon the waves. He disliked, and sought to 
 shun, miscellaneous, and especially what is called fashion- 
 able society ; he carried his earnest mind, and his love of 
 freedom, into all circles, — impatient of the talk that was 
 frivolous, and the etiquette that was restrained. But he 
 generally devoted some portion of the day to the inter- 
 change of mind with the congenial ; — artists, men of 
 letters, or even those who, simple and unaffected, interested 
 his heart, if they could not appeal to his intellect. 
 
 Shy and silent in the crowd, he was eloquent with those 
 familiar to him, and his conversation was yet more charm- 
 ing from his simple kindliness, than from the stores which 
 it displayed : this was the bright side of his private life, 
 — the reverse of the medal is only darkly shadowed out. 
 Before his visit to Dresden, Schiller had formed an ac- 
 quaintance with a young woman named Sophy Albrecht, 
 intended for the stage ; he had taken a strong interest in 
 her professional career, and he met her again at Dresden, 
 as one of the most celebrated actresses of the day. He 
 visited at her house on familiar terms, and there, one 
 evening, after the play was over, he saw a young, blue-eyed 
 stranger, who made upon him an impression equally deep 
 and sudden. This girl was the eldest daughter of a Saxon 
 widow, who lived upon a small pension, and whose husband 
 had been an officer in the army. He afterwards en- 
 countered the fair Julia (such was the young lady's name) 
 at the " Redoute," and ventured to accost her. The 
 mother was, by all accounts, an artful and abandoned per- 
 son, who did not scruple to put to profit the beauty of her 
 daughter. She saw, in the admiration of so distinguished 
 a poet, the means of widening Julia's already lucrative 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 245 
 
 notoriety. Schiller was accordingly lured into an intimacy 
 which occasioned the most serions anxiety to his friends.* 
 It seems uncertain whether Julia, who appears to have 
 followed her mother's depraved counsels with something of 
 reluctant shame, returned the passion she had inspired. 
 There was that in Schiller to have won a worthier affection, 
 despite the unflattering portrait which Sophy Albrecht, in 
 her coarse taste of actress, has drawn of the young Poet. 
 
 Schiller, no doubt, at that time, and indeed from his 
 entrance into youth, had lost the mere physical beauty 
 which he seems to have possessed as a child, when his 
 sister compared his countenance, shaded with locks of gold, 
 " to an Angel's head." He w r as tall, extremely thin, though 
 muscular, and large of bone ; his neck was long (a noble 
 defect, which is never without dignity), and his dress was 
 rude and neglected. His face was not handsome, perhaps, 
 in the eyes of actresses, — whose profession leads them to 
 admire show and colour in all things, — but so noble a 
 countenance has rarely been given to the sons of Genius ; 
 true, the complexion was pale, the cheeks somewhat hollow, 
 and the dark auburn hair, though rich and profuse, had a 
 deep tinge of red, but the forehead was lofty and massive, 
 somewhat receding towards the temples when regarded in 
 profile (a peculiarity found in most men of characters 
 brave and determined). His eyes, described variously as 
 blue, brown, and dark gray, and probably shifting in colour 
 with the light, f were, though deep-sunken, singularly 
 brilliant and expressive ; and his nose, if too large for 
 perfect symmetry of feature, was finely formed. His per- 
 sonal appearance, in short, harmonised with his intellectual 
 character : and as, in Goethe, tbe pre-eminent attribute 
 both of outward form and mental accomplishment was 
 beauty ; J so, in Schiller, the pre-eminent attribute in both 
 
 * Doring, Madame yon "Wolzogen, Hoffmeister, Schwab. 
 
 f Madame you Wolzogen says their colour was undecided, between blue 
 and light brown. His sister calls them blue : one of his College friends, 
 dark gray. 
 
 J Goethe was, perhaps, the handsomest poet of whom we have any record. 
 With a beauty of face not inferior to that of Milton or Byron, he had ad- 
 vantages of stature denied to either,— and that air of majestic dignity which 
 is beauty in itself. We remember being very much struck with a com- 
 parison between two portraits of Byron and Goethe, taken when each was 
 about the same age, viz., twenty-one. There was a strong likeness between 
 the two, though Goethe's features, not less symmetrical, were larger and 
 more manly : but the contrast in the expression was startling. The Ger- 
 
24 G THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 
 
 was nobleness. If, as one who remembered him well 
 declares, the colossal bust of Dannecker alone shows him 
 as he really was in life, no one who has ever seen that like- 
 ness will deny, that it is a eonntenance which strikingly 
 arrests the admiration, and deeply engrosses the interest — 
 a certain grandeur, both of outline and expression, dwarfs 
 into effeminacy whatever portraits of more justly pro- 
 portioned beauty may be placed beside it. But the actress, 
 describing Schiller at this time, could see only, as was 
 natural to such an observer, the gray, threadbare frock — 
 the general disdain of the toilette — the awkwardness given 
 by pride and reserve to the movements of the tall figure — 
 the indulgence of Spanish snuff — and the stoop of the 
 " ever- thoughtful head." . . Whether or not the fair Julia 
 regarded Schiller with the same eyes as the actress is a 
 matter, however, of very little importance : — not so the 
 love felt by Schiller, since it not only gave rise to some of 
 his poems, but coloured many immortal pages in the 
 " Ghost-seer." His friends did their best to dispel his in- 
 fatuation, and tear him from a connexion which they con- 
 sidered disgraceful to his name, ruinous to his means, and 
 injurious to his prospects ; finally, they succeeded in their 
 appeals. He appears, indeed, to have become aware of the 
 treachery * practised on him ; and, after many a struggle 
 between reason and passion, at last he tore himself away. 
 
 He had long meditated a journey to Weimar — then to 
 Germany what Athens, in the time of Pericles, was to 
 Greece ; he now accepted a cordial invitation from a friend 
 of his, Madame f von Kalb ; and, in the month of July, 
 1787, he arrived at the little Court, brightened by a con- 
 stellation of Art and Genius, before which the wealth and 
 splendour of every capital in Europe was, at that day, but 
 as foil and tinsel. 
 
 man lady who showed us the portraits, observed with truth, — " "What 
 dejection and discontent with the world is already stamped on Lord Byron's 
 face ! — What calm, yet sanguine energy — what hopeful self-confidence in 
 Goethe's!" The several expression in either countenance seemed almost 
 like a prophecy of either fate. 
 
 * Julia had directed Schiller not to enter the house when a light was to 
 be seen in a certain chamber, upon pretence of being then engaged in the 
 domestic circle, while in truth she was receiving some more favoured 
 admirer. 
 
 f We have preferred (in this, and other instances), as more familiar to 
 the English ear, the title of Madame to that of Fmu, which is of course 
 more rigidly correct. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 Society at "Weimar — Character of the Duchess Amelia — The von Lengefelds 
 — Schiller in the retirement of Rudolstadt — First meeting with Goethe 
 — Study of Greek — Death of ^ladaine von "Wolzogen — Schiller accepts 
 the Professorship of History at Jena — Life at that University — Court- 
 ship of Charlotte von Lengefeld — Schiller's marriage. 
 
 Goethe was absent from Weimar, — in " those fair 
 i h nh Ansonian climates," the influence of which so 
 powerfully affected his plastic genius, and served 
 to give to his after- creations that severe and statue-like 
 repose which has, with all the beauty, something of the 
 coldness and the terror, of Medusa : — Goethe was absent ; 
 but at Weimar were Herder, Wieland, Bottiger, and other 
 eminent men. Schiller was not disappointed in the charm 
 of the place. " I think here," he writes, " at least in the 
 territory of Weimar, to end my days — and at last, once 
 more, to find a country." And yet Schiller was not at 
 first fully appreciated at the court to which he was ad- 
 mitted. The Augustan character which Weimar had 
 obtained, originated in the tastes and the talents of 
 Amelia, mother to the reigning Duke. Her especial 
 favourite was the polished and graceful Wieland, whom 
 she had appointed tutor to her son, Karl August. She had 
 been left a widow at* the age of nineteen; and fulfilled 
 the duties of Regent during the minority of the young 
 Prince. 
 
 To considerable talents for public business, and in- 
 tuitive knowledge of the world, this remarkable woman 
 added a strong affection for art ; and blended a thorough 
 enjoyment of society with a keen thirst for knowledge. 
 She acquired some acquaintance with the learned lan- 
 guages from Wieland, and translated Propertius. The 
 circle of eminent men that she drew aronnd her was 
 attracted no less by her manners than her information 
 and her abilities. But Schiller's genius, as yet made 
 manifest, was not very congenial to a taste half French 
 
248 THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 
 
 and half classical ; and the Duchess-Mother does not 
 seem to have been aware that, in the rude strength of 
 the young Suabian, Germany had secured a classic 
 author of her own * Of all the literary men then at 
 Weimar, the amiable Wieland was the most cordial to 
 Schiller. Herder welcomed him, " but without warmth." 
 Not till a much later period does the Duke himself appear 
 to have taken any very vivid interest in his great visitor. 
 The style of conversation, though intellectual and re- 
 fined, was not that which Schiller was likely to enjoy 
 — it was too critical, and perhaps too courtly — " more 
 was babbled than was thought. " But nothing is more 
 beneficial to a man of genius, yet young, than to frequent 
 society in which he is not over-estimated ; — nothing 
 more injurious than to be the sole oracle of his circle. 
 From that period we date a purer and more dignified 
 taste in Schiller — the tone of good society henceforth 
 entered into his writings, and improved his manners : 
 without weakening the one, it brought ease; without 
 marring the simplicity of the other, it served to soften and 
 make social. 
 
 At the end of October, Schiller made an excursion to 
 Meiningen, on a visit to his eldest sister, who had lately 
 married Reinwald. Madame von Wolzogen was also at 
 Meiningen ; at her house he found his old college friend, 
 Wilhelm ; and, with this companion he returned towards 
 Weimar. They took the journey on horseback, and pro- 
 posed by the way to visit some relations of M. von Wolzogen 
 — a memorable visit ; for now Schiller approached that 
 bright period of his life when his wanderings and appren- 
 ticeship of mind and heart were alike to cease — when his 
 genius settled into art — when his affections were con- 
 centered in a home. 
 
 At Rudolstadt, on the banks of " the soft winding 
 Saale," in a valley bounded by blue mountains and 
 sloping woodlands, lived a Madame von Lengefeld, with 
 two daughters ; the elder, Caroline, married to M. von 
 Beulwitz, Hofrath of Rudolstadt, to whom (more distin- 
 guished by the name she acquired in a second marriage, 
 
 * Schiller attributes to the good offices of Goethe (despite his absence) the 
 access to the Duchess Amelia. 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 249 
 
 von "W olzogen) we are indebted for a delightful, though 
 somewhat high-flown Biography of Schiller ; and the 
 younger, Charlotte, unmarried, and then in her twenty- 
 first year. The father had died when the children had 
 severally arrived at the ages of thirteen and ten. Till that 
 time they had been brought up in close retirement. But 
 a situation at the Court of Weimar being destined for 
 Charlotte when she should arrive at a fitting age, Madame 
 von Lengefeld deemed it advisable to remove for a short 
 time into Switzerland, as affording better facilities for 
 the kind of education necessary for a girl intended to mix 
 in the society of a brilliant and polished court. Three 
 years before the date on which we now enter, the two 
 sisters, who were related to the Wolzogens, had seen 
 Schiller for the first time at Mannheim, and been favour- 
 ably struck by his appearance. Madame von Lengefeld 
 was then on her return from Switzerland ; and the mar- 
 riage of her elder daughter to M. von Beulwitz. served to 
 settle her residence at Kudolstadt. The younger daughter, 
 Charlotte, was highly prepossessing both in form and face. 
 To borrow the description of her sister, " the expression of 
 the purest goodness of heart animated her features ; and 
 her eye beamed only truth and innocence." She had a 
 talent for landscape- drawing, and wrote poetry with grace 
 and feeling. But above all, she had sympathy with what- 
 ever, in others, was noble in character, or elevated in 
 genius ; — her temper was sweet, and her disposition 
 affectionate, faithful, and sincere. 
 
 At that time, however, Charlotte von Lengefeld was 
 suffering under the melancholy which succeeds to the first 
 fair illusions of life. Her early affections had been given 
 to one from whom Fate had divided her. Her lover was 
 in the army, and his duties called him to a distant 
 part of the globe. Whether there were other obstacles, 
 besides those of the young man's precarious profession, 
 does not appear clear ; but the family were opposed to 
 the connection, and Charlotte von Lengefeld obeyed 
 their wishes in struggling against the inclination she had 
 formed. 
 
 Nothing could be more solitary and remote than the 
 little valley in which the Lengefelds dwelt. jSTo high-road 
 intersected it : a stranger was a phenomenon. The appear- 
 
250 THE LIFE OF SCHILLEH. 
 
 ance of two horsemen along the straggling street, one dark 
 November evening, sufficed to create curiosity and interest. 
 One of the riders, as he presented himself to the Lenge- 
 felds, playfully concealed his face in his mantle, but the 
 ladies recognised their cousin, Wilhelm von Wolzogen. 
 
 nhnn The other was unknown or unremembered, till 
 his companion announced the already famous 
 name of Schiller. The simple and shy Suabian, usually 
 distant with strangers, found himself at home at once in 
 the family circle he had entered. The conversation fell on 
 his recent publication, " The Philosophical Letters," and 
 on his earlier poems. The earnest Schiller wished the 
 Lengefelds to become acquainted with his " Carlos/' A 
 single evening sufficed to form an intimacy. On his 
 departure, Schiller had already conceived the project of 
 spending the next summer at Rudolstadt. 
 
 It so chanced that Wilhelm von Wolzogen had, from 
 the early period of his student life at Stuttgart, cherished 
 a romantic attachment to his fair cousin, Caroline von 
 Lengefeld — now Madame von Beulwitz. Her marriage 
 was not happy, and her health was delicate and infirm. 
 Perhaps these circumstances served to confirm in Wolzogen 
 an affection that then seemed hopeless, and was only nursed 
 in secret. But as the two friends rode to Weimar, there 
 was no doubt much in Wolzogen's conversation that found 
 an echo in Schiller's breast. An impression more deep, 
 and yet more calm, than woman had hitherto made upon 
 him, recalled to the poet, amidst the distractions of 
 Weimar and the labour of his occupations, the image of 
 the soft and pensive Charlotte. Fortune smiled upon the 
 dawn of this affection. Charlotte came to Weimar 
 that very winter, on a visit to Madame von Stein, a 
 friend of her family, and Schiller met her in the 
 society of the place, but not frequently. Still he con- 
 trived to approach her, as nearly as his delicacy and the 
 consciousness of his precarious worldly circumstances 
 would allow to his pride. He supplied her occasionally 
 with his favourite authors ; she undertook the commission 
 to iind him a lodging at Rudolstadt for the summer. 
 Occasion was thus found for the interchange of notes. On 
 his part the correspondence was frank, but respectful ; it 
 proclaimed friendship and esteem — it did not betray more. 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 251 
 
 " There breathes," in these letters, says an eloquent bio- 
 grapher, u a noble, mild, discreet inclination, without a 
 trace of passion ; " — and here the writer we qnote adds 
 finely, " Our love is generally the effigy of the one we love. 
 Schiller's present love was the gold, purified from the 
 sensual passion which had mastered him at Dresden." 
 It seems probable, however, that in neither was the 
 memory of the previous love yet effaced : and this, while 
 it served to invest their feeling for each other with a cer- 
 tain tranquillity, allowed them both more sensibly to 
 perceive the remarkable congeniality between their minds, 
 tastes, and tempers. Thus, as it were, the soul began to 
 love, before the heart was thoroughly moved. Schiller's 
 fame, and his somewhat graver years, permitted him to 
 assume with his young friend a certain tone of warning 
 and advice. That court life, to which she seemed then 
 destined, was opposed to all his ideas of true dignity and 
 pure happiness. And, in the lines closing the second 
 division of his poems, he expresses, in verse, the ideas often 
 repeated in his correspondence.* 
 
 In the midst of May, the following year, we find 
 -j h-oo Schiller settled in the valley of Rudolstadt. 
 He lodged in a house, haif-an-hour's walk from 
 the town.j and his chamber overlooked the banks of the 
 Saale, flowing through meadows, and under the shade of 
 venerable trees. There, on the opposite side of the river 
 rose a hill, clothed with woods, at the foot of which lay 
 tranquil villages ; — there, high above the landscape, 
 towered the castle of Rudolstadt. A small monument, 
 crowned with a bronze copy of Dannecker's bust of 
 Schiller, yet commemorates his sojourn in this happy 
 valley, recalling Goethe's lovely words — 
 
 " The place that a good man has trod, remains hallowed to all time." J 
 
 It is thus that the elder sister speaks of those days — 
 the fairest, perhaps, in the life of Schiller : — " How 
 welcome was it, after some tedious visit, § to see our genial 
 iriend approaching, beneath the fair trees that skirt the 
 
 * Lines to a Female Friend, written in her Album. 
 
 t In the village of Yolkstadt. j HofFineister. 
 
 § " Kafee- Visite "— Coffee- visit : we should say Tea-party. 
 
252 THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 
 
 banks of the Saale ! A forest brook, that ponrs itself into 
 that river, and was crossed by a little bridge, was the 
 meeting-place at which we awaited. When we beheld him 
 in the twilight, coming towards us, a serener, an ideal life 
 entered within us ; a lofty earnestness, and the graceful 
 ease of a mind pure and candid, ever animated Schiller's 
 conversation. One seemed, as one heard him talk, to 
 wander as it were between the immutable stars of heaven, 
 and yet amidst the flowers of earth." 
 
 But Schiller, during this holiday of existence, was 
 not idle in that solemn vocation of Author — of In- 
 structor — of High Priest in Literature — to which he 
 was sworn* His evenings were devoted to Charlotte and 
 her family, his mornings to study. Here he laboured at 
 his " History of the Revolt of the Netherlands " — at the 
 correction of the tale so well known in England, " The 
 Ghost Seer," — here were concluded his " Letters upon 
 Don Carlos " — and here was composed the first portion of 
 the finest Poem written at this period of his life, " The 
 Artists." In the house of the Lengefelds, Schiller too, for 
 the first time, met Goethe, on his return from Italy. With 
 the works of Schiller hitherto published, Goethe had no 
 sympathy ; they contradicted his own theories of art, and 
 they revolted his serene taste. His manner to the Suabian 
 was reserved and cold ; the pride of Schiller forbade 
 him to make the first advances ; and though, as he 
 wrote word to his friend Korner, the great idea he 
 had formed of Goethe was not lessened by this first 
 personal contact, he doubted if they could ever come 
 into close communication. " Much which is yet in- 
 teresting to me — that which I yet wish and hope 
 for — has had its epoch for him. His whole being 
 is, from its origin, constructed differently from mine ; 
 his world is not my world ; our modes of conceiving 
 things are essentially different : from such a combina- 
 tion, no secure substantial intimacy can result. Time 
 will try." * 
 
 About this time, at the instigation of the friendly 
 and learned Wieland, Schiller turned his attention to 
 the literature of Greece, with which he had hitherto 
 
 * Correspondence with Korner : Carlyle's " Life of Schiller." 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 253 
 
 but a very slight and superficial acquaintance. Nothing 
 ever produces a more durable influence upon an author's 
 genius, than the deliberate and systematic recurrence 
 to Hellenic Poetry and Letters. Studied too early, they 
 may often correct the taste at the expense of the fancy ; 
 but, studied with the mature thought of manhood, they 
 only strengthen by purifying the inventive faculties. 
 From that time Schiller began to comprehend true art, 
 the vivifier of nature. From that time he became an 
 Artist. Homer first engrossed his reverent delight; he 
 passed to the Greek Tragedians ; and the character of 
 his mind, which inclined to philosophy, and the ten- 
 dency of his genius, which was essentially pathetic and 
 humane, rendered ample justice to the still wronged 
 Euripides. * 
 
 From these new sources of inspiration came his noble 
 Poem on the " Gods of Greece," and the classical perfec- 
 tion to which he brought " The Artists," before begun. 
 The fonner of these Poems, which appeared in the 
 "Mercury," superintended by Wieland, occasioned much 
 offence to those who sought orthodoxy, even in the wildest 
 dreams of the Poet. Although Schiller's mind at that 
 time was certainly still unsettled, he yet grieved at an 
 interpretation which he appears not to have foreseen ; and 
 at a subsequent period, he sacrificed many of his most 
 brilliant stanzas, in order to purify the whole from what- 
 soever sincere and liberal piety could reasonably revolt at 
 or regret. The remarkable frankness of his genius often, 
 it is true, led him to depict or to imply his own struggles, 
 and his own errors ; but, in his stormiest interval of 
 doubt, Schiller never contemplated the dangerous and 
 dark ambition of unsettling the religious convictions of 
 others. 
 
 Charlotte's admiration of " The Artists " greatly and 
 seasonably served to cement the affection now ripening 
 daily between them.f In fact, that fine poem no vulgar 
 mind could really relish and admire. In one whom so 
 elevated an appeal to the intellectual faculties could move 
 
 * W r e must not, however, 'suppose that Schiller ever attained to the 
 facility of a scholar in Greek. . . In translating Euripides, he had constant 
 need of the Latin version, and even the French of Bruinoy. 
 
 t Madame von AVolzogen. 
 
254 THE LIFE OF SCHILLEE. 
 
 and animate, a lover might well behold the true com- 
 panion of a poet's life, the true sympathiser in a poet's 
 labours. 
 
 This summer, otherwise so happy, was however dark- 
 ened by the death of Madame von Wolzogen — Schiller's 
 earliest protectress and second mother. He felt this afflic- 
 tion most deeply — his letter to her son, stillextant, is 
 full of tender grief and delicate consolation. 
 
 In November, Schiller returned to Weimar, and 
 occupied himself with the conclusion of his " Ghost 
 Seer," and translations from Euripides. His chief re- 
 laxation and luxury were in his letters to Charlotte — 
 letters unequalled in their combination of manly tender- 
 ness, confiding frankness, and refined yet unexaggerated 
 romance ; still, though they now betrayed his own love, 
 they did not formally hazard a declaration, or press for a 
 return. 
 
 But early in the following year he was called to a new 
 1 ,_Q Q and more active career. Considerable portions 
 i/by ' of his history of the " Revolt of the Nether- 
 lands " had already appeared in Wieland's " Mercury," and 
 excited considerable sensation. His friends wished to see 
 him in one of those honourable situations, which, to the 
 credit of Germany, afford shelter and independence to so 
 numerous and brilliant a host of literary men. Goethe 
 (though still not intimate with Schiller) displayed the 
 calm magnanimity towards a rival natural to one in whom 
 meanness was impossible, and employed the interest of his 
 rank and his fame on behalf of the young historian. 
 Mv -f- 30 Schiller was finally summoned to take the chair 
 'of Historical Professor at the University of 
 Jena. It was not without modest reluctance, and a sense 
 of his own deficiences in the details of history, that he 
 undertook this office. His reception was such as might be 
 anticipated — Four hundred students crowded to the Lecture- 
 room — their presence and applause animated him — and his 
 voice, naturally not strong, filled the Hall. 
 
 Amongst the German youth of this day, Schiller is the 
 favourite; he was then, says Hoffmeister, u the idol." 
 His very defects as a Lecturer were not those on which 
 young men would be severe or discriminating critics. 
 Through the fire and the vigour which animated his Ian- 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 255 
 
 guage and his delivery, liis ardent listeners were not likely 
 to detect that redundant rhetoric, in which genius is too 
 apt to conceal deficient information. He came too fresh 
 to his task. He was acquiring one day, the knowledge he 
 imparted the next. His facts had not "been sufficiently 
 meditated, nor his views sufficiently sobered down. 
 
 The society of Jena was more congenial to Schiller than 
 that of Weimar — here nothing was courtly and restrained ; 
 here manners were diversified and opinions uncontrolled. 
 To this illustrious University flocked the Professors and 
 the Students from so many quarters, that each part of 
 Germany found its representatives. The streets swarmed 
 with all varieties of costume ; the halls resounded with all 
 differences of dialect. From the coarsest manners to the 
 most super-refined ; from the most limited information 
 and the narrowest prejudice, to the profoundest wisdom — 
 to the most liberal knowledge of the world ; all forms of 
 intellect were here mixed and confounded. What a school 
 for a man, who had yet to complete his education by the 
 study of his kind — not in books, but in actual life ! The 
 true poet must divide his existence between solitude and 
 the crowd. 
 
 Schiller's correspondence with Charlotte continued ; and 
 his chivalrous devotion, the habitual intercourse with his 
 noble and beautiful nature, had produced, at last, its full 
 effect upon his young admirer. The old affection was 
 effaced — the new affection confirmed. Charlotte owned to 
 her sister, "that she had so lived in Schiller — he had so 
 contributed to the formation of her mind, and to her 
 happiness — that it seemed to her impossible to separate her 
 lot from his." 
 
 The sisters were now staying at Lauchstadt: thither 
 Schiller (escaping from Jena) visited them ; a full explana- 
 tion of what indeed must have been long since clear to 
 both hearts, took place. Charlotte confessed that the love 
 she had inspired was not unreturned, and promised, one 
 day or other, to become his wife. True, as yet, it was 
 hope deferred, — the fortunes of Schiller were still to be 
 confirmed — the consent of Madame von Lengefeld still to 
 be obtained. But it was enough for the present to feel 
 that love was won. " How different," thus writes Schiller 
 himself to Charlotte, on his return to Jena — " how different 
 
256 THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 
 
 is all around mo now, since in each step of my life thine 
 image meets me : like a halo thy love hovers over me ; like 
 a fair mist does it clothe the face of Nature. I return 
 from a walk : in the vast space of Nature, as in my lonely 
 chamber, it is ever the selfsame atmosphere in which I 
 move ; and the fairest landscape serves but for the fairer 
 mirror of one ever-enduring image. The remembrance of 
 thee leads me back to the All; the All reminds me, in 
 turn, of thee. Never so freely and so boldly could I 
 traverse, in my enthusiasm, through the world of Thought 
 as now that my soul has found a possession — a home ; and 
 no longer incurs the danger to lose itself in its wanderings : 
 I know where again to find myself — in thee ! " 
 
 At last came the long-yearned-for holidays. Schiller 
 was released from his task ; he fled back to the neighbour- 
 hood of Rudolstadt; he occupied his old chamber; he 
 lived back his old life, — but in the brighter air of hope 
 assured and of love returned. As yet, however, the lovers 
 could only hold unwitnessed interviews by stealth ; and to 
 this date we must refer the exquisite love poems of the 
 " Mystery " and the " Assignation." At last, but not till 
 after long and severe probation, Schiller's hopes were 
 crowned. After the failure of various schemes and pro- 
 jects, he obtained from the Duke of Saxe Weimar an ap- 
 pointment as Professor Extraordinary, with a salary of 
 200 rix dollars ; and he now boldly applied to Madame 
 von Lengefeld for the hand of her daughter. His suit was 
 supported with zeal and earnestness by Madame von Stein, 
 who had great influence with Madame von Lengefeld, and 
 by M. von Dalberg,* elder brother to the Superintendent 
 of the Mannheim stage, a nobleman of the highest rank, 
 and the most admirable character. Madame von Lengefeld 
 was moved by these instances ; her prejudices gave way 
 before the happiness of her daughter and the distinction of 
 the suitor. 
 
 The title of Hofrath, conferred on Schiller by the Court 
 of Meiningen, in the beginning of 1790, perhaps served 
 
 1 "7Q0 ^ more ^° con tent the good lady with her 
 
 daughter's choice ; and on the 20th February, 
 
 * Often confounded with Wolfgang; von Dalberg, the Mannheim Baron ; 
 but an infinitely better person. It was to the elder brother that Schiller 
 addressed the verses which accompanied the copy of " William Tell ; " not> 
 as Mr. Carlyle supposes, to Wolfgang, who deserved no such honour. 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 257 
 
 1790, after an intimate acquaintance of three years, the 
 lovers were united. 
 
 Never was marriage, if we except only the narrowness 
 of pecuniary circumstances, formed under more favourable 
 auspices. The very age of the parties was that, in each, 
 in which affection promises to be most durable, and the 
 choice best considered. Schiller was about one-and-thirty, 
 Charlotte about four-and -twenty : the length of the court- 
 ship had but served to found attachment upon esteem, 
 while it augmented it by delay. The characters of bride 
 and bridegroom were in the, most perfect harmony ; where 
 they differed, it was but for each to improve the other ; the 
 refinement of the woman softened the impetuous man ; 
 the noble fire of the man warmed and elevated the gentle 
 woman. Schiller was now really formed for the home he 
 had so long sighed for. With all that depth of feeling 
 and singleness of heart which are common to those fond of 
 solitude, he now combined much which intercourse with 
 mankind alone can give. As all misanthropy had fled 
 from his heart, so all cynicism was now banished from his 
 manners and his dress. He could no longer have been 
 open to the caricature of the Dresden actress ; and, inde- 
 pendently of his fame, his genius, and his noble heart, a 
 vainer woman than Charlotte von Lengefeld might have 
 been proud of her choice. 
 
CHAPTEE IX. 
 
 Schiller's illness — The sensation produced in Denmark by the report of his 
 death. — The letter addressed to him by the Prince von Holstein Augus- 
 tenburg, and Count von Schimmelmann — Schiller's reply — His study of 
 Kant — Schiller revisits his native land. 
 
 Schiller was not disappointed in the hopes he had 
 formed of domestic happiness. A few months after his 
 marriage he exclaims in his correspondence : " Life is quite 
 a different thing by* the side of a beloved wife, than so 
 forsaken and alone — even in summer. . . . The world 
 again clothes itself around me in poetic forms ; old feel- 
 ings are again awakening in my breast. . . . Pate has 
 conquered the difficulties for me. Prom the future I ex- 
 pect everything. ... I think my very youth will be re- 
 newed, an inward poetic life will give it me again." * But, 
 alas ! even as these lines were written, that bodily enemy 
 
 ., -Q-. for which the mind so rarely prepares itself was 
 
 at hand. Disease struck root into a constitu- 
 tion always delicate ; he was attacked with a disorder in 
 the chest ; and though he recovered from its immediate 
 severity, the head of the shaft was left behind. He never 
 entirely recovered his health — from that time consumption 
 rankled within. 
 
 He had been labouring more intensely than ever : to 
 such a man, the consciousness that on his toils rested the 
 worldly comforts of a wife who had resigned a Court for 
 a scholar's roof stimulated industry into fever. He was 
 immersed in severe studies connected with the historical 
 pursuits to which he was now devoted, but the first and 
 most peremptory injunction of his physician was repose to 
 
 his intellect Repose — and his very subsistence rested 
 
 on activity ! At this crisis, however, one of those rare 
 acts of munificence which are the god-like prerogatives of 
 wealth, came to brighten poverty and comfort genius. A 
 report of Schiller's death had been spread abroad : it had 
 
 * Extracted from the translation in Carlyle's " Life," 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 259 
 
 readied Denmark, at the moment when a princely circle of 
 the Poet's admirers had resolved to repair to Hellebeck, 
 near Copenhagen, and, amidst it sublime and enchanting 
 scenery, to hold a court in his honour, and chant his 
 " Hymn to Joy." Amongst these were the Danish Poet, 
 Baggesen ; the Count Ernest von Schimmelmann ; the 
 Prince Christian von Holstein Augustenburg and his Prin- 
 cess. Their grief, as enthusiastic as their admiration, 
 changed the meditated festivities into a funeral solemnity. 
 They met at Hellebeck, on the shore of the sea, opposite 
 the high rocks of Sweden, and Baggesen began to read 
 the hymn. Clarinets, horns, and flutes chimed in to the 
 song of the chorus ; two additional stanzas, in honour of 
 the supposed dead, were chanted, and may be thus 
 translated : — 
 
 " Hail to a Mend, choir of friends ! 
 
 The dead we love shall live once more ; 
 Bright to the bowers of heaven ascends 
 His soul : our lives it hovers o'er. 
 
 Chorus. — Lift your attesting hands on high ; 
 
 Swear by this wine from lands made free,* 
 Till found once more in yonder sky, 
 Faith t® our brother's memory." 
 
 As the song ceased, all eyes wept. 
 
 Homage to the dead is a vulgar and idle tribute, if it 
 come after neglect or injury to the living. The heart 
 sickens at that mockery of admiration, which allowed 
 Spenser to die of a broken heart, and threw copies of 
 verses into his grave, — which suffered political vengeance 
 to reduce Dryden to a bookseller's drudge, and insisted on 
 burying his dust in the sepulchre of kings. To Schiller's 
 biographers belongs the pleasing task of commemorating 
 the only true homage ever rendered to a dead poet, — 
 simply because the poet was not dead ! No sooner was the 
 report confuted, than the noble mourners exulted to ex- 
 change ceremonial honours to the lifeless, for practical 
 benefits to the living. A letter, from which we extract the 
 purport, was sent to Schiller by the Prince von Augusten- 
 burg and Count Schimmelmann. 
 
 "27#AJVatvl791. 
 
 "Two friends, united through the citizenship of the 
 
 * i.e. French wine. 
 
 s 2 
 
260 THE LIFE OF SCHILLER, 
 
 world, send this letter to you — noble man! Both are un- 
 known to you — both love you and revere. They find in 
 your recent works the mind and the enthusiasm which knit 
 the bond of their own friendship ; by the perusal of these 
 works they accustom themselves to regard the author as a 
 member of their own union. Great was their grief at the 
 report of his death ; their tears were not the scantiest of 
 those which flowed from all good men by whom he was 
 known and loved. The lively interest with which you 
 have inspired us must excuse us from the appearance of 
 officious importunity. They tell us that your health 
 suffers from too severe an application, and needs for some 
 time an entire repose. This repose your pecuniary circum- 
 stances alone forbid you to enjoy. Will you grudge us the 
 delight of contributing to your relief ? We entreat you 
 to receive, for three years, an annual gift of a thousand 
 dollars.' ' * The writers proceed with dignity to touch 
 upon their rank, and to imply a delicate hope that it may 
 not prove an obstacle to their request ; they desire not to 
 wound his spirit of independence, or parade the ostenta- 
 tion of patronage. " We know no pride but this, — to be 
 men! — citizens in that great Republic whose boundaries 
 extend beyond single generations — beyond the limits of 
 earth itself." They proceed to invite him into Denmark: 
 " For we are not the only ones here who know and love 
 you; and if, after the restoration of your health, you 
 desire to enter into the service of our state, it would be 
 easy for us to gratify such an inclination. Yet think us 
 not so selfish as to make such a change in your residence a 
 condition : we leave our suggestion to your free choice ; 
 we desire to preserve to Humanity its instructor, and to 
 this desire every other consideration is subordinate." 
 
 There may be in this letter — which the gratitude of 
 Literature should render no less imperishable than the 
 works of him to whom it is addressed — something of the 
 romantic exaggeration, in tone and phrase, which betrays 
 the influence of the French cosmopolites ; but that in- 
 fluence here affected men of noble hearts, who desired to 
 have an excuse in philanthropy for individual beneficence ; 
 not, as with the maudlin confraternities of France, an 
 
 * A sum which, at "Weimar, would go perhaps three times as far as it 
 
 would in England i 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 261 
 
 excuse, in the citizenship of the world, from doing good to 
 a single creature ! 
 
 The effect such a letter produced on Schiller no one can 
 describe — every one can imagine. Nothing but the decla- 
 ration of his physicians that a visit to so northern a 
 climate would be fatal, prevented him from hurrying to 
 benefactors so delicate and so munificent. In a letter to 
 Baggesen, the depth and manliness of his gratitude are 
 apparent ; and this letter is the more interesting, inasmuch 
 as it expresses those views of the dignity of letters, and 
 that repugnance to regard art as a livelihood, which may 
 serve the ambition of youthful genius at once with warning 
 and emulation. 
 
 "Frorn the cradle of my intellect till now," writes 
 Schiller, " have I struggled with Fate ; and since I knew 
 how to prize intellectual liberty, I have been condemned to 
 want it. A rash step, ten years since, divided me from 
 every other practical livelihood, but that of a writer. I 
 had given myself to this calling before I had made proof 
 of its demands, or surveyed its difficulties. The necessity 
 of pursuing it befel me before I was fitted for it by know- 
 ledge and intellectual maturity. That I felt this — that I 
 did not bound my ideal of an author's duty to those narrow 
 limits within which I was confined — I recognise as a favour 
 of Heaven. As unripe, and far below that ideal which 
 lived within me, I beheld all which I gave to the world." 
 With feeling and with modesty Schiller proceeded to 
 enlarge upon the conflict between his circumstances and 
 his aspirations, to touch upon the melancholy with which 
 he was saddened by the contemplation of the great master- 
 pieces of art, ripened only to their perfection by that 
 happy leisure denied to him. "What had I not given," 
 he exclaims, "for two or three tranquil years; that, free 
 from all the toils of an author, I could render myself only 
 to the study, the cultivation of my conception, — the ripen- 
 ing of my ideal ! " He proceeds to observe that in the 
 German literary world, a man could not unite the labour 
 for subsistence with fitting obedience to the demands of 
 lofty art; that for ten years he had struggled to unite 
 both ; and that the attempt to make the union only in 
 some measure possible, had cost him his health . ..." In 
 a moment when life began to display its whole value — 
 
262 THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 
 
 when I was about to knit a gentle and eternal bond 
 between the reason and the phantasy — when I girded 
 myself to a new enterprise in the service of art, death 
 drew near. This danger indeed passed away ; but I waked 
 only to an altered life, to renew, with slackened strength 
 and diminished hopes, my war with Fate. So the letter 
 received from Denmark found me ! I attain at last the 
 intellectual liberty so long and so eagerly desired. I win 
 leisure, and through leisure I may perhaps recover my 
 lost health ; if not, at least for the future, the trouble of 
 my mind will not give nourishment to disease. If my lot 
 does not permit me to confer beneficence in the same man- 
 ner as my benefactors, at least I will seek it where alone it 
 is in my power, — and make that seed which they scatter, 
 unfold itself in me, to a fairer blossom for humanity." 
 And he did so ! 
 
 Thus enabled to enrich while he relaxed his mind, 
 Schiller devoted himself with ardour to the study of 
 Kant.* With the closer knowledge of this philosopher — 
 who, whatever his defects, certainly did more than any 
 other reasoner to counteract the hard and narrow scepti- 
 cism of the French Encyclopedists, — to bring imagination 
 to the aid of Faith, and at once to enlarge the tolerance 
 of the sectarian and to calm the doubts of the seeker — 
 really commences the Third Period of Schiller's intellectual 
 career, though his biographers postpone its date to the 
 time when its fruits became practically apparent. 
 
 In June, 1792, Schiller and his wife visited Korner at 
 1 jqp Dresden : On their return, they received Schil- 
 
 ler's mother and youngest sister, Nannette, 
 whom he had not seen for eight years. The tender associ- 
 ations thus revived led the mind of the exile back to his 
 Suabian home. In August, 1793, the Schillers, therefore, 
 commenced an excursion to the Poet's father-land. f At 
 
 * Conz, Professor of Poetry and Eloquence at Tubingen, who visited 
 Schiller in 1792, says that he was then thoroughly absorbed in Kant. Conz 
 gives a charming picture of Schiller's simple and frugal life. "He was," 
 says the Professor, " Humanity itself, and his excellent wife a pattern of 
 complaisance and modesty." 
 
 f About this time Schiller's sister-in-law, according to the German law, 
 annulled her marriage with M. von Beulwitz. She afterwards married 
 "Wilhelm von AYolzogen, attached to her, as we have before said, from his 
 earliest youth. She also joined the Schillers at Heilbronn. 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 263 
 
 Heidelberg, Schiller met once more the object of his early 
 love, Margaret Sclrwan, now like himself married to 
 another ; he saw her with a deep emotion, which his wife 
 comprehended too well to resent ; he who sees, unmoved, 
 the one in whom he formerly garnered up his hopes of 
 home, can never constitute the happiness of the home he 
 has found with another. 
 
 At Heilbronn, unsurpassed, even in Germany, for the 
 peculiar beauties of its landscape, the family of -. *qo 
 Schiller met the long-lost wanderer. He stood 
 amongst them no longer a rude stripling, a penniless exile ; 
 — but the favourite of princes, the idol of a people — his 
 hopes fulfilled — his destiny assured ; crowned already with 
 renown, and calm in the certainty of triumphs more 
 splendid yet to come. He had reached the time when, 
 without humiliation, he could humble himself to his native 
 sovereign. With Schiller's wild love for liberty, he never 
 was without that loyalty, which is almost inborn with the 
 children of the North. He wrote to the Duke of "Wurt em- 
 berg such a letter as that loyalty might dictate ; he re- 
 ceived no direct reply, but was informed, privately, " that 
 the Duke would be ignorant of his movements if he re- 
 entered Wiirtemberg." Schiller then repaired to Ludwigs- 
 burg, where he was in the immediate neighbourhood of his 
 father's house, and under the medical care of one of his 
 early friends, von Hoven, now Court physician. ^ f 1 a 
 Here he first enjoyed the happiness he had -t-qo ' 
 long coveted ; he became a father. His earnest, 
 manly, and affectionate nature was precisely that which 
 finds children at once a charge and a blessing. Now he 
 would play for the hour together with his " Gold-son, his 
 heart's Karl," * as he named his firstborn ; now shut him- 
 self up to study Quintilian, on the plan of education to be 
 pursued. 
 
 Those who remembered the youth of Schiller were 
 startled by the charge which years and circumstance had 
 effected ; all that was sharp and hard in his character was 
 gone. His early fire was softened — it warmed more and 
 alarmed less ; there was far greater grace in his demeanour. 
 His ancient neglect of appearance and dress was replaced 
 
 * Conz. Schwab. Hoffineister. 
 
264 THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 
 
 by a decent elegance ; his even humour scarcely allowed 
 them to recognise the impetuous and stormy stripling they 
 had known ten years before.* But, alas ! with the mental 
 change had come the physical ; the features were drawn 
 and hollow, the complexion wan and haggard. Illness 
 frequently confined him to his bed — Kant and Homer his 
 companions ; and at this time the grand outline of " Wallen- 
 stein," before chalked out, began to receive colour and 
 fullness ; he devoted himself to its composition principally 
 at night, diversifying the poetical task with the first 
 sketch of his " Philosophical Essay npon iEsthetical 
 Cultivation. " 
 
 During his residence at Ludwigsburg the Grand Duke 
 Karl died.f Schiller was asked by his father to congratu- 
 O f 24 ^ e ^ e -D^e's successor in a poem — we need 
 ih'no ' scarcely say that he refused. He could not 
 seem to rejoice at the death of a man who 
 had been both his benefactor and his persecutor. Schiller 
 was never more himself than when, standing by his 
 sovereign's grave, with von Hoven, he spoke thus touch- 
 ingly : — " Here rests this once active restless man ! He 
 had great faults as a Prince, greater yet as an individual. 
 But the first were overwhelmed by his high qualities, and 
 the remembrance of the last must be buried with the dead. 
 I say to thee, therefore, if thou hearest one speak of him 
 disparagingly, as he lies there — trust that man not ! — he is 
 no good, at least, he is no noble man," At Ludwigsburg 
 he formed an acquaintance with Cotta the bookseller, 
 which had considerable influence on his later labours. 
 In connection with this publisher, a new literary periodical, 
 the " Horen," was chalked out, and a new political 
 journal, intended to take the lead over all its German 
 contemporaries. Of this last Schiller proposed to assume 
 the editorship ; but his growing disinclination for objects 
 less noble than the art of which Philosophy had brought 
 
 * Yon Hoven, ap. Mad. von Wolzogen. 
 
 f Biographers have raised a doubt if Schiller had removed from Heil- 
 bronn to Ludwigsburg before the Duke's death. But it seems quite clear 
 that he was at Ludwigsburg early in September, since von Hoven, who 
 resided at Ludwigsburg, attended his wife in her confinement, — Sept. 
 14th. 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 265 
 
 liini clearer, and sublimer views, induced him happily 
 to resign this notion. The political journal was, how- 
 ever, set up by the publisher, and exists to-day in high 
 repute, under the well-known name of the " Allgemeine 
 Zeitung." 
 
CHAPTEE X. 
 
 THIRD PERIOD. 
 
 The Horen and Musenalmanach — Two deaths in Schiller's family — Return 
 from philosophy to poetry — The summer-house — Influence of Goethe on 
 Schiller's genius— Appearance of Wallenstein. 
 
 In May, 1794, Schiller returned to Jena, his body 
 •worn to a shadow ; # his mind more than ever vigorous 
 and resolved. Here he found the charm of a friendship 
 more complete, and more sympathetic alike in intellect and 
 in taste, than he had yet known. Wilhelm von Humboldt 
 had settled at Jena, with a charming wife, whom he had 
 lately married ; — the two families contracted the closest 
 intimacy. The undertaking of the " Horen " was now 
 seriously commenced, as a monthly Periodical, with the 
 assistance of the greatest names in Germany, — Goethe, 
 Herder, Jacobi, Matthisson, &c. In this journal Schiller 
 desired to consummate an idea which had long haunted 
 him, and which had been but imperfectly developed in the 
 "Thalia." It may be said that this idea had grown out 
 of the vast and luminous humanity of Herder, and ripened 
 under the influence to which Herder was most opposed — 
 that of Kant. The journal was intended to merge all that 
 belonged to sect, to party, and the day, and devote itself 
 to all that could interest the common family of man ; so 
 far, this was akin to Herder ; but Schiller sought the 
 interest, not in broad and popular topics, but in that 
 SBsthetical cultivation — that development of ideal beauty, 
 which, since his study of Kant, he regarded as the flower 
 and apex of human accomplishment. But the enterprise 
 of this periodical, memorable in much, is so principally on 
 account of the union it established between Goethe f and 
 Schiller — an union inestimable to both, and therefore to 
 
 * Goethe thought, on seeing Schiller, that he had scarcely a fortnight's 
 life in him. — Hoffmeister. Eckermann. 
 
 f "We need scarcely say that Goethe's fame and position had prodigiously 
 increased since the publication of Schiller's "Bobbers." 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 267 
 
 the world. Hitherto, these eminent men had moved in 
 separate orbits ; and Goethe's calm kindness to his great 
 rival had not advanced to intimacy ; but now the friend- 
 ship Goethe felt for Schiller's wife, whom he had known 
 from her childhood ; the ties formed by acqnaintances in 
 common ; and that power of attracting others to his de- 
 signs, which Goethe himself has remarked in Schiller ; 
 drew them closely together, and served to form a bond 
 which death only could dissolve. Goethe says, with noble 
 candour, in his correspondence, " I really know not 
 what might have become of me, without the impulse 
 received from Schiller ; " — and he proceeds to enumerate 
 the writings which had never been produced but for the 
 co-operation of the only man from whom — had Goethe 
 been one fraction less than Goethe — he would have been 
 kept aloof by jealousy and alarm. Into this journal 
 Schiller, appointed chief editor, poured some of the finest 
 thoughts to be found in his prose writings ; embodied in 
 the form of philosophical criticism. Here too, and in the 
 "Musenalnianach," an annual publication, also undertaken 
 in conjunction with Goethe, somewhat later, appeared the 
 immortal lyrics, which perhaps established the most 
 popular and indisputable of Schiller's claims to admira- 
 tion, purely and singly as the Poet. In this last 
 periodical finally flashed forth those Epigrams, under the 
 name of Xenien ; sometimes personal and caustic, some- 
 times thoughtful and ideal, which set the literary world of 
 Germany in a blaze. The connection between Goethe and 
 Schiller had excited much jealous hostility amongst many 
 lesser writers ; an hostility wreaked upon the " Horen," 
 and avenged in the " ATusenalmanach "' by these laconic 
 sarcasms. The sensation they excited was prodigious ; 
 though they can inspire but a lukewarm interest in 
 the public of a foreign country. # Many of the more 
 personal epigrams Schiller had the grace to withdraw 
 from the subsequent collection of his poems; and in 
 
 * Nevertheless, their effect upon German literature yet endures. Mr. 
 Carlyle observes — ("Miscellanies," vol. i. p. 67) — that "the war of all the 
 few good heads in the nation with all the many bad ones, began in Schiller's 
 Musenalmanach for 1767; " and adds that, " since the age of Luther, there 
 has scarcely been seen such strife and stir in the intellect of Europe." Wo 
 do not quite subscribe to Mr. Carlyle' s admiration for "the new critical 
 doctrine,' ' which dates from the Xenien. 
 
268 THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 
 
 tliis withdrawal lie could afford to sacrifice what critics 
 have termed his best. In the midst of these labours 
 
 -|hq~ he had the misfortune to lose his youngest 
 sister, Nannette, a girl of promise and beauty; 
 and in the same year, after a lingering disease, his father. 
 He felt both losses acutely ; the last perhaps the most : 
 but in his letters it pleases us to see the philosopher 
 return to the old childlike faith in God, the reliance on 
 Divine goodness for support in grief, the trust in Divine 
 mercy for the life to come. For it has been remarked 
 with justice that, while Schiller's reason is often troubled 
 in regard to the fundamental truths of religion, his 
 heart is always clear. The moment death strikes upon 
 his affections, tho phraseology of the schools vanishes 
 from his lips — its cavils and scruples from his mind : 
 and he comforts himself and his fellow-mourners with 
 the simple lessons of Gospel resignation and Gospel 
 hope. 
 
 About this period Schiller began to turn wearily from 
 the studies which had for years occupied his intellect and 
 influenced his genius. He felt that he had given himself 
 too much to abstract speculation, too little to the free 
 poetic impulse. " It is high time, ,, he says, in a letter to 
 Goethe, " that for a while I should close the Philosophy 
 Shop." He returned with ardour to the grand outline of 
 his " WallensteiH," commenced years ago ; long suspended, 
 never forgotten. He yearned for some escape from the 
 learned and arid atmosphere around him, some quiet 
 retreat in which he could be alone with his genius — a 
 summer-house with a garden ! At length, this modest 
 desire which literally seemed to haunt him was realised. 
 Not far from Jena, to the south-west of the town, he pur- 
 chased a garden, and built himself a kind of pavilion, with 
 a single chamber. The site commanded a wide and noble 
 prospect. Placed on the brow of a hill, up which the 
 garden climbed, the summer-house overlooked the valley 
 of the Saale, and the hanging pines of a neighbouring 
 forest.* "There," says Goethe, in his Prologue to the 
 " Lay of the Bell "— 
 
 * The house exists no more ; upon its site is placed an urn dedicated to 
 the memory of the poet. — Doring. 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 269 
 
 " There, deck'd lie the fair garden watch-tower ; whence 
 listening he loved the voice of stars to hear, 
 Which to the no less ever-living sense 
 
 Made music, mystic, yet through mystery clear ! " 
 
 Here then, in the summer months, did he devote him- 
 self, with a passion more fervent than in youth, to the 
 divine faculty of creation. Often was the light seen at 
 night streaming from the window, and the curious might 
 even catch a glimpse of his tall shadowy figure walking 
 to and fro the chamber ; now halting to write down the 
 verses which he first declaimed aloud, or to support the 
 overstrained physical power with the fatal excitements, for 
 which our own Byron had more excuse, and has found less 
 mercy. It was his custom to have placed on the table not 
 only strong coffee and chocolate, but champagne, and the 
 far more irritating and pernicious wines of the Rhine. 
 Thus would he labour the night through, till sleep, or 
 rather exhaustion, came on at morning ; and he never rose 
 till late. Dearly purchased, indeed, was the luxury of 
 these midnight watches ; but who shall conceive their 
 intense delight ? Thus he speaks himself in his letter to 
 Goethe, May, 1797, on his first occupation of his new 
 abode : — " I greet you from my garden, on which I entered 
 this day : a fair landscape surrounds me ; the sun goes 
 gently down ; and the nightingales begin their warbles. 
 All around serves to render me serene ; and my first 
 evening in my own ground and soil is of the fairest 
 
 omen 
 
 ! » 
 
 It happened, perhaps fortunately, that, in the summer 
 of 1797, Wilhelm von Humboldt left Jena for Italy. The 
 influence that this eminent but over-refining intellect had 
 exercised on Schiller, had not been on the whole favourable 
 to his poetical genius ; * it had withdrawn him too much 
 from the broad and popular field in which poetry, of the 
 highest order and most extended empire, should seek its 
 themes, into the " Realm of Shadow," — an obscure and 
 metaphysical ideal. With the departure of Humboldt, a 
 new and far happier direction was given to Schiller's eager 
 
 * W. v. Humboldt, who was a devoted Kantian, seems to have supposed 
 that poetry should be a riddle. It is always in the Abstract that he searches 
 for the Beautiful. 
 
270 THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 
 
 energies. More delivered to the luminous influence of 
 Goethe, he became more imbued with his art. A 
 friendly emulation with Goethe led to the production 
 of Schiller's greatest, though simplest poetical produc- 
 tions — his Ballads. Goethe had already shown what 
 epic interest and what subtle wisdom might be given 
 to this form of verse : Schiller caught the inspiration, 
 and composed his " Diver," the sublimest ballad in the 
 German language. This was followed by "The Glove," 
 " The Cranes of Ibycus," &c, &c. The years 1797-98 
 were signalised by these performances, in which the 
 ripest art of Goethe seems united with the earliest force of 
 Schiller. 
 
 Meanwhile, " Wallenstein " still, though slowly ad- 
 vanced to its elaborate completion. Schiller grudged no 
 pains, and neglected no study, which might serve to fulfil 
 in this great work, that ideal of excellence, for the 
 achievement of which the necessary leisure had been so 
 desired. He plunged into the recesses of astrology and 
 consulted the dreams of the Cabalists, in order to treat 
 with conscientious accuracy, and invest with solemn 
 dignity, the favourite superstition of his hero.* Finally, 
 in January, 1799, after great preparation, the first portion 
 i ^qq °^ " Wallenstein/' the " Piccolomini," was pro- 
 
 Tj-,, , \ A duced at Weimar. This was followed by the 
 ^tat. 4U. « Death of Wallenste i n) >> ^ April. If on the 
 
 boards the interest of these several parts of the great 
 whole was not so intense as Schiller's earlier dramas, he 
 was fortunate in the cordial support of the few who ulti- 
 mately decide the judgment of the many : the perusal of 
 the work, subsequently published entire, served to deepen 
 and to widen general admiration : the more " Wallenstein" 
 was examined and discussed, the more its profound beauty 
 grew upon the world. Long after its publication, Goethe 
 compared it to a wine, which wins upon the taste in pro- 
 portion to its age. "This work," says Tieck, " at once 
 rich and profound, is a monument for all times, of which 
 
 * Schiller was fond, for their own sake, of such ultra-philosophical 
 inquiries. When at Heilbronn, 1793, he took much interest in animal 
 magnetism. 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 271 
 
 Germany may be proud ; and a national feeling — a native 
 sentiment — is reflected from tins pure mirror, teaching us 
 a greater sense of what we are, and what we were." In 
 fact, from that time Schiller became the National Poet of 
 all Germany. 
 
CHAPTEE XL 
 
 Residence at "Weimar— Mary Stuart — Maid of Orleans -Bride of Messina- 
 Reception at the Leipsic Theatre — Death of Schiller's mother — His life 
 and habits — He is ennobled — Acquaintance with Madame de Stael. 
 
 In the same year, 1799, by tlie advice of his physi- 
 cians, Schiller removed to Weimar ; the Grand Duke 
 awarded him a pension, of 1000 dollars, with a declara- 
 tion that it should be doubled if illness should interfere 
 with his other resources. His pecuniary circumstances 
 were now competent to his moderate wants. "Wallen- 
 stein " had brought him ample remuneration ; the pe- 
 riodicals with which he was connected yielded a regular 
 and liberal income. Nevertheless, his activity increased 
 as the ruder necessities for exertion were diminished. 
 Vast schemes were constantly before him. His genius 
 itself became to him that spur which Poverty is to the 
 genius of less earnest men. His play of "Maria Stuart," 
 and " The Lay of the Bell," long premeditated, were his 
 next productions; the last the greatest of his lyrics ; the 
 first the poorest of the dramas conceived in his riper years. 
 To an Englishman nothing can be less satisfactory than 
 Schiller's character of our great Elizabeth ; and history is 
 violated for insufficient causes, and from an indistinct and 
 imperfect ideal. Madame de Stael thought more highly 
 of the tragedy than it deserved, precisely because of its 
 defects. The Mary and the Elizabeth of Schiller have 
 much of the shallowness and the tinsel of French heroines.* 
 The public for once judged accurately in admiring the 
 scattered beauties of the piece, and condemning it as a 
 whole. But sickness of body may perhaps have conduced 
 to the faults of this play. After Schiller's death, this 
 note, in his handwriting, was found : " The year 1800 I 
 was very ill. Amidst pain was ' Mary Stuart ' completed." 
 
 * A. W. Sehlegel, nevertheless, preferred, or affected to prefer, in many- 
 important respects, the " Maria Stuart " to the " Wallenstein." 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 273 
 
 But from this single fall Schiller's genius recovered itself 
 with tbe bound of a Titan. The lovely image of the 
 " Maid of Orleans " haunted him. Already, with the com- 
 mencement of the new year, 1801, three acts of this 
 masterpiece of elevated romance were composed. In the 
 autumn of the same year, during a visit to his friend 
 Korner at Dresden, he laboured at the no less magnificent 
 " Bride of Messina," unequalled as a lyrical tragedy. 
 From Dresden he went to Leipsic, and was present at the 
 performance of the " Maid of Orleans." Here one of those 
 signal triumphs, which so rarely await living genius, 
 awaited him. Scarce had the drop-scene fallen on the 
 first act, than the house resounded with the cry, " JEs 
 lebe Friedrich Schiller ! " The cry was swelled by all 
 the force of the orchestra. After the performance the 
 whole crowd collected in the broad place before the 
 theatre to behold the Poet. Every head was bared as 
 he passed along ; while men lifted their children in their 
 arms, to show the pride of Germany to the new generation 
 — crying out, " Dieser 1st es " — " That is he ! " 
 
 From Leipsic Schiller returned to Weimar, where 
 "The Maid of Orleans " soon found its way to the boards ■; 
 but its most gorgeous representation was at Berlin, 
 where the New Theatre commenced with its performance 
 on a scale of grandeur unprecedented on the German 
 stage. 
 
 Schiller and Goethe were now almost inseparable. 
 Together they directed the management of the Weimar 
 Theatre, in which Schiller still entertained ideas of dra- 
 matic dignity too lofty for the social life of the moderns. 
 Still did his manhood desire that for which his boyhood 
 had been destined — the vocation of the Preacher ; — and 
 the stage still but suggested to him the office of the pulpit. 
 "The pulpit and the stage are the only places for us," 
 said he. He loved the Theatre ; it was the sole public 
 entertainment he habitually frequented. He was fond of 
 the society of actors. He used to invite them to supper 
 at the Stadthause, after the first, or even a more than 
 usually successful, performance of one of his pieces. But 
 generally, on returning from the Theatre, his mind was 
 excited, and his emulation fired. And the midnight 
 lamp at Weimar, as at Jena, attested that prodigious 
 
 T 
 
274 THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 
 
 energy, which no infirmity slackened, and no glory could 
 appease. 
 
 At this time he purchased a small house on the Espla- 
 nade — associated indeed with melancholy auspices : the 
 same day he entered it his mother died. He felt in this 
 affliction the rupture of the last tie of youth. He wrote to 
 his sister — " Ah, dear Sister, so both the beloved Parents 
 are gone from us, and the oldest bond that fastened us to 
 life is rent ! let us, we three (including his other sister), 
 alone surviving of our father's house, let us cling yet closer 
 to each other ; forget not that thou hast a loving brother. 
 I remember vividly the days of our youth when we were 
 all in all to each other. From that early existence our 
 fate has divided us ; but attachment — confidence, remain 
 unchanged — unchangeable." 
 
 In his own circle lay his purest and best comfort. He 
 loved to associate himself with the infant sports of his 
 children. Many a time was he found with his boy playing * 
 on the floor. Around him were assembled such friends as 
 Genius rarely finds — men dear alike to his heart, and 
 worthy of his intellect. At the Court he was grown familiar, 
 and, though he frequented it less than his royal friends 
 desired, it was no longer made displeasing to his tastes by 
 the reserve of his earlier pride. 
 
 To his intellectual life Groethe had grown necessary, — 
 w T hile his more household friends were his old College ac- 
 quaintance, Wilhelm von Wolzogen, and "Wolzogen's wife, 
 —the eloquent and enthusiastic sister of his own. But, 
 withal, his passion for solitary w r anderings was unabated. 
 Often was he seen in the lonely walks of the Park, stopping 
 abruptly to note down his thoughts in his tablets ; often 
 seated amidst the gloomy beeches and cypresses that clothe 
 the crags, leading towards the Royal Pleasure House 
 (the Romische Haus), and listening to the murmur of the 
 neighbouring brook. 
 
 In 1802 he received from the Emperor of Austria a 
 patent of nobility ; it was obtained through the unsolicited 
 influence of the Duke of Weimar. He esteemed the 
 honour at its just price — not with the vulgar scorn of the 
 would-be cynic, still less with the elation of a vain convert 
 from Republicanism. It pleased " Lolo and the children," 
 
 * At the game called " Lion and Dog," on all fours. 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 275 
 
 In the following year Madame de Stael visited 
 Weimar, where her nneqnalled powers of conversation 
 were more appreciated than in London. She herself 
 has, in her " Alleroagne," given ns an interesting sketch 
 of Schiller. He seems at first to have been more 
 startled with the readiness of her powers, than charmed 
 with their brilliancy, or penetrated with their depth. 
 He says of her, not withont justice, that her " Naturel 
 and her feeling were better than her metaphysics." He 
 is not qnite pleased with that French clearness of under- 
 standing that made her averse to the Ideal Philosophy, 
 which she believed led only to mysticism and supersti- 
 tion. He asserts somewhat too positively, " for what 
 we call Poetry, she has no sense." He complains that 
 " she can appreciate only in snch works, the passionate, 
 the rhetorical, the nniversal or popular. She does not 
 prize the false, but she does not always recognise the true." 
 
 In a subsequent letter to his sister, Schiller appears to 
 have found the illustrious Frenchwoman improved upon 
 acquaintance, for he there expresses his admiration with 
 more cordiality and less reserve. He now finds her a 
 Phenomenon in her sex — for esprit and eloquence equalled 
 but by few men — uniting with all the delicacy or finesse, 
 obtained by intercourse with the great world, that rare 
 earnestness and depth of mind obtained by most only 
 through solitude.* In truth, whatever were the errors 
 of Madame de Stael, there was in her character and 
 her genius, a genuine nobleness akin to Schiller's ; and 
 though much of her fame, founded on her conversational 
 eloquence, passed away with herself, her works still 
 attest that union of imagination with intellect — enthu- 
 siasm with sense, which is never found but in minds of 
 a great order, and in hearts which may indeed be misled 
 by passion, but in which honesty and goodness are as 
 instincts. 
 
 * In the sixth volume of the " Correspondence "between Goethe and 
 Schiller/ * and in Goethe's own " Tag-und Jahres-Heft," we may neverthe- 
 less perceive that Madame de Stael was to both these illustrious Germans 
 somewhat too oppressively brilliant and loquacious — somewhat approaching 
 occasionally to that social infliction for which we have no phrase so expres- 
 sive as that which one of our most eminent Englishmen somewhat bluntly 
 applied to her : — " The cleverest woman in the world for such a bore, and 
 the greatest bore in the world for so clever a woman." 
 
 T 2 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 
 " Wilhelm Tell "— Ill-health— Last sickness— Death— Burial. 
 
 And now, in that mysterious circle in which the life of 
 genius so frequently appears to move, Schiller, nearing the 
 close of his career, returned to the inspirations with which 
 it had commenced. His first rude Drama had burned with 
 the wild and half-delirious fever of Liberty ; — Liberty, 
 purified and made rational, gave theme and substance to 
 his last. The euthanasia of the genius which had com- 
 posed " The Robbers," was the " Wilhelm Tell." Goethe 
 has observed, indeed, that, although the idea of freedom 
 runs through all the works of Schiller, the earlier em- 
 bodied the physical freedom, the later the ideal. But this 
 cannot fairly be regarded as the distinction between " The 
 Robbers " and "Wilhelm Tell." It is no ideal liberty for 
 which the simple mountaineers, whom Schiller has drawn 
 in outlines so large and muscular, aspire and struggle ; it 
 is physical, practical, homely liberty — liberty of life and 
 soil. It is this very practicability which really divides the 
 " Tell " from " The Robbers : " in the last heaves the per- 
 turbed sigh for a social revolution, — for some liberty 
 contrary to all the forms and the very substance of the 
 organised world ; it is an unreasoning passion that would 
 risk a chaos for the chance that again may go forth 
 the words— " Let there be light!" But in "Tell" the 
 idea of liberty, intense and visible in itself, is yet cir- 
 cumscribed to the narrowest possible boundaries; it is 
 but the struggle of an honest and universal people for 
 independence, without one whisper of ambition, without 
 one desire of revenge : it is a revolution portrayed in an 
 anti-revolutionary spirit; throughout the whole breathes 
 the condemnation of the French anarchy ; it is an 
 evoking of the true Florimel, that, beside her living 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 277 
 
 and human Beauty, the false Florimel may dissolve into 
 snow.* 
 
 In the spring of 1804 Schiller visited Berlin, at which 
 city he was received with signal honours ; in July we find 
 him at Jena, where, while his wife was happily confined of 
 her youngest daughter, his constitution was severely 
 shaken by a feverish cold. He suffered much and fre- 
 quently during the rest of the year, but his mental activity 
 was undiminished : besides some of his minor poems, such 
 as 4i The Alp Hunter," and " The Lay of the Hill," he 
 was employed on a translation of Racine's "Phedre," 
 and the outline of the tragedy of " Demetrius," never 
 completed. 
 
 He also, about this time or very little later, conceived 
 the scheme of a Drama which, if suitably executed, would 
 have been, perhaps, the most extraordinary of all his 
 various compositions. The subject was to be the French 
 Police — and the plot to have embraced all the evils and 
 abuses of modern civilization. Such a work would indeed 
 be of wide compass and noble uses, but it seems to require 
 the space of a prose fiction, and it is difficult to compre- 
 hend how it could have been contracted into the limits, 
 and expressed in the form, of a Poetical Drama. It is 
 noticeable, that the singular sympathy witli mankind 
 which Schiller possessed, often makes him the father of 
 ideas in others with whom no direct communication can be 
 traced, — the seeds that spring up so lavishly in his humane 
 intellect are dispersed by invisible winds to grow on every 
 soil. This idea of depicting, by literary portraiture, the 
 social ills of Civilization and France, is the main stock of 
 more than half the French writers of our own day. — In 
 Balzac, in Sand, in Sue, in Souvestre, living in the 
 midst of the great whirlpool — are heard the echoes of 
 the Thought which was only breathed inaudibly within 
 the heart of the Poet-student of the tranquil Weimar. 
 And with these recurrences to the peculiar inspirations of 
 his youth, the desire of travel returned prophetically to 
 one about to depart for ever from all earthly homes. He 
 traced routes upon the chart, and spoke of plans and 
 pilgrimages never to be realised. 
 
 * See Schiller's own poem, entitled u William Tell," in which Ms object 
 is briefly and simply explained. 
 
278 THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 
 
 The reperusal of Herder's "Ideas on the History of 
 Man" — to which (though he was often largely indebted 
 to it) he did not before do justice 8 — seems also to have 
 deepened his meditations npon Life, Nature, and Eternal 
 Providence. "Christianity," he said to his gifted sister- 
 in-law, " has stamped a new impression on Humanity, 
 while it revealed a sublimer prospect to the soul." Accord- 
 ing to this witness, Madame von Wolzogen — the best, for 
 the most household, evidence — his faith increased as his 
 life drew nearer to its goal. 
 
 At length, after many preparatory warnings — visitings, 
 a .-■ under the name of catarrhal fever, of his con- 
 180^' stitutional pulmonary disease — Schiller was 
 stricken with his last illness on the 28th of 
 April, 1805 ; Goethe, who was just recovering from a dan- 
 gerous illness, called on Schiller, whom he found leaving 
 his house for the theatre. He was too unwell to accom- 
 pany, too polished to detain him, — they parted for the last 
 time at the threshold of Schiller's door. At the close of 
 the performance Schiller felt himself seized with a feverish 
 attack. A young friend, Henry Voss (son of the cele- 
 brated author of " Luise," &c.,), led him home. On 
 calling the next morning, Voss found him stretched on the 
 sofa between sleep and waking. "Here I lie again ! "he 
 said in a hollow voice. As yet, however, he had no con- 
 ception of his danger ; he thought to have discovered a 
 treatment to ensure his recovery. His mind for some days 
 continued clear, and the chief regret he expressed was for 
 the interruption to " Demetrius." But on the 6th of May 
 he began to wander : on that day Voss, visiting him again, 
 observed that his eyes were deep sunken ; every nerve 
 twitched convulsively : they brought him some lemons, at 
 which he caught eagerly, but laid them down again with a 
 feeble hand. Delirium came on : he raved of soldiers and 
 war ; the word Lichtenberg, or Leuchtenburg (the former 
 the name of an author whom he had been lately reading, 
 the latter of a castle which he had long desired to visit), 
 
 * He said to Madame von "Wolzogen, "I know not how it is, but this 
 Book speaks to me after quite a new fashion." Herder and Schiller were 
 not very familiarly intimate — they were too like each other for cordial con- 
 currence. Both were essentially earnest, and therefore the differences 
 between them resisted compromise. 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 279 
 
 came often to his lips. On the evening of the 7th, his 
 mind recovered ; he wished to renew his customary con- 
 versations with his sister-in-law upon the proper theme 
 and aims of tragedy ; she prayed him to keep quiet ; he 
 answered, touchingly — " True ; now, when no one under- 
 stands me, and I no more understand myself, it is better 
 that I should be silent." Shortly before, he had concluded 
 some talk on death with these striking words : " Death 
 can be no evil, for it is universal." And now the thought 
 of eternity seems to have occupied his mind in its dreams ,• 
 for in sleep he exclaimed, " Is that your hell £ — is that 
 your heaven ? " He then raised his looks, and a soft 
 smile came over his face. It was, perhaps, on awaking 
 from this sleep that he used those memorable words — 
 " Now is life so clear! — so much is made clear and 
 plain ! " 
 
 In the evening he took some broth, . and said to his 
 friends that " he thought that night to sleep well, with 
 God's will." His faithful servant, who watched him, said 
 that, during the night, he recited many lines from "Deme- 
 trius," and once he called on God to preserve him from a 
 long and tedious death-bed. 
 
 On the morning of the 8th of May he woke up com- 
 posed, and asked for his youngest child. She was brought 
 to him. He took the infant's hand in his own. and gazed 
 at her long with a look of unspeakable sorrow. He then 
 began to weep bitterly, kissed the young face with emotion, 
 and beckoned to them to remove the child. 
 
 Towards the evening his sister-in-law approached his 
 bed, and asked how he felt. ' ; Better and better, calmer 
 and calmer," was his answer. He then longed once more 
 to see the sun ; they drew aside the curtains ; he looked 
 serenely on the setting light. Nature received his 
 farewell. 
 
 His sleep that night was disturbed ; his mind again 
 wandered ; with the morning he had lost consciousness. 
 He spoke incoherently, and chiefly in Latin. His last 
 drink was champagne. Towards three in the afternoon 
 came on the last exhaustion; the breath began to fail. 
 Towards four, he would have called for naphtha, but the 
 last syllable died on his lips ; — finding himself speechless, 
 he motioned that he wished to write something ; but his 
 
280 THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 
 
 hand could trace only three letters, in which was yet recog- 
 nisable the distinct character of his writing. His wife 
 knelt by his side ; he pressed her hand. His sister-in-law 
 stood with the physician at the foot of the bed, applying 
 warm cushions to the cold feet. Suddenly a sort of electric 
 shock came over his countenance ; the head fell back ; the 
 deepest calm settled on his face. His features were as 
 those of one in a soft sleep. 
 
 The news of Schiller's death soon spread through 
 Weimar. The theatre was closed ; men gathered together 
 in groups. Each felt as if he had lost his dearest friend. 
 To Goethe, enfeebled himself by long illness, and again 
 stricken by some relapse, no one had the courage to men- 
 tion the death of his beloved rival. When the tidings 
 came to Henry Meyer, who was with him, Meyer left the 
 house abruptly, lest his grief might escape him. No one 
 else had the courage to break the intelligence. Goethe 
 perceived that the members of his household seemed em- 
 barrassed, and anxious to avoid him. He divined some- 
 thing of the fact, and said, at last, " I see, — Schiller must 
 be very ill." That night they overheard him — the serene 
 man, who seemed almost above human affection, who dis- 
 dained to reveal to others whatever grief he felt when his 
 son died — they overheard Goethe weep ! In the morning 
 he said to a friend, "Is it not true that Schiller was very 
 ill yesterday ? " The friend (it was a woman) sobbed. 
 "He is dead," said Goethe faintly. "You have said it," 
 was the answer. " He is dead ! " repeated Goethe, and 
 covered his eyes with his hands. 
 
 The body was dissected ; and it was some consolation 
 to the mourners to know that much prolongation of life 
 would have been beyond the art of medicine ; the left lung 
 was destroyed, the ventricles of the heart wasted, the 
 liver indurated, the gall-bladder extremely swelled. A son 
 of the great Herder, one of the physicians who examined 
 the body, thought it impossible that, under any circum- 
 stances, he could have lived half a year, nor that without 
 great suffering. 
 
 Schiller was buried in the night of the 11th of May ; 
 twelve young men of good family bore the coffin ; the 
 heavens were clouded, but the nightingales sang loud and 
 full. As the train proceeded, the sound of a horse's hoofs 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLEE. 281 
 
 was heard ; a rider dismounted and followed the proces- 
 sion—it was Willi elm von TV r olzogen, who had heard the 
 fatal news at Naumburg, and hastened to pay the last 
 respect to the remains of his college friend. As the 
 bier was lowered, the wind suddenly scattered the mists, 
 the moon broke forth, and its light streamed upon the 
 coffin. When all was over ? the skies were suddenly 
 obscured a»;ain. 
 
CONCLUDING CHAPTER. 
 
 CRITICAL SUMMARY. 
 
 So, at the early age of forty-five, closed the earthly 
 career of Friedrich Schiller. In this brief epitome of his 
 life the reader will not fail to perceive the peculiar dis- 
 tinctions of his character and mind : his singular ardour 
 for Truth; his solemn conviction of the duties of a Poet; 
 his prevailing idea, that the Minstrel should be the Preacher, 
 — that Song is the sister of Religion in its largest sense, — 
 that the Stage is the Pulpit to all sects, all nations, all 
 time. ISTo author ever had more earnestness than Schiller, 
 — his earnestness was the real secret of his greatness ; this 
 combination of philosophy and poetry, this harmony be- 
 tween genius and conscience, sprang out of the almost 
 perfect, almost unrivalled equality of proportions which 
 gave symmetry to his various faculties.^ With him the 
 imagination and the intellect were so nicely balanced, that 
 one knows not which was the greater ; owing, happily, to 
 the extensive range of his studies, it may be said that, as the 
 intellect was enriched, the imagination was strengthened. 
 Unlike Goethe's poet in "Wilhelm Meister," he did not 
 sing " as the bird sings," from the mere impulse of song, 
 but he rather selected Poetry as the most perfect form for 
 the expression of noble fancies and high thoughts. "His 
 conscience was his Muse."t It was thus said of him with 
 truth, "that his poetical excellence was of later growth 
 than his intellectual;" and as the style of Lord Bacon 
 ascended to its sonorous beauty in proportion as his mind 
 became more stored, and his meaning more profound, so 
 
 * Hence Mr. Carlyle well observes, ll Sometimes we suspect that it is the 
 very grandeur of his general powers which prevents us from exclusively 
 admiring his poetic genius. "We are not lulled by the siren song of poetry, 
 because her melodies are blended with the clearer, manlier tone of serious 
 reason, and of honest though exalted feeling." — Carlyle' s Life of Schiller, 
 
 f " Sa conscience etoit sa Muse." — De fStael, 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 283 
 
 the faculty of expression ripened -with. Schiller in exact 
 ratio to the cultivation of his intellect. His earliest com- 
 positions were written with difficulty and labour, and he 
 was slow in acquiring thorough mastery over the gigantic 
 elements of his language. Perhaps this very difficulty (for 
 nothing is so fatal to the mental constitution as that verbal 
 dysentery which we call facility) served both to increase 
 his passion for his art, and to direct it to objects worthy 
 the time and the care which, in his younger manhood, he 
 was compelled to bestow upon his compositions. From 
 this finely poised adjustment between the reasoning and 
 the imaginative faculties, came the large range of his 
 ambition, not confined to Poetry alone, but extending over 
 the whole fields of Letters. We can little appreciate 
 Schiller, if we regard him only as the author of " Wallen- 
 stein," and the " Lay of the Bell ; " wherever the genius of 
 his age was astir, we see the flight of his wing and the 
 print of his fcotstep. While, in verse, he has made experi- 
 ments in almost every combination, except the epic (and in 
 that he at one time conceived aud sketched a noble out- 
 line), embracing the drama, the ode, the elegy, the narrative, 
 the didactic, the epigrammatic, and in each achieved a 
 triumph, — in Prose, he has left monuments only less im- 
 perishable in the various and rarely reconcilable lands of 
 romance, of criticism, of high- wrought philosophical specu- 
 lation, and impartial historical research. His romance of 
 the " Ghost-Seer" is popular in every nation, and, if not 
 perfect of its kind, the faults are those of a super-exuberant 
 intellect, which often impedes, by too discursive a dialogue, 
 the progress of the narrative, and the thread of the events. 
 In this he resembled Godwin rather than Scott. If with 
 "St. Leon" and "Caleb Williams" the "Ghost-Seer" 
 rests in the second class of popularity, it is because, as 
 with them, it requires a reflective mind to seize all its 
 beauties, and yield to all its charms. 
 
 In History, if Schiller did not attain to the highest rank, 
 it was not because he wanted the greatest qualities of the 
 historian, but because the subjects he selected did not 
 admit of their full development. But while his works in 
 that direction are amongst the most charming, impartial, 
 and justly popular, of which his nation boasts, he has 
 shown, in the introductory Lecture, delivered by himself 
 
284 THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 
 
 at Jena, how grand his estimate of history was. His 
 notions on history are worth whole libraries of history 
 itself.* As a Philosophical Essayist, he is not perhaps 
 very original (though in borrowing from Kant he adds 
 much that may fairly be called his own), and rigid meta- 
 physicians have complained of his vagueness and obscurity, f 
 But his object was not that of severe and logical reasoning ; 
 it was to exalt the art to which most of his essays were 
 devoted ; to make the great and the pure popular ; to 
 educate the populace up to purity and greatness. The 
 ideal philosophy, as professed by Schiller, was, in fact, a 
 kind of mental as well as moral Christianity, which was to 
 penetrate the mind as well as the soul — extend to the arts 
 of man as well as his creeds ; to make all nature a temple 
 — all artists priests : Christianity in spirit and effect it was 
 — for its main purpose was that of the Gospel faith, viz., 
 to draw men out of this life into a purer and higher air of 
 being — to wean from virtue the hopes of reward below — 
 to make enjoyment consist in something beyond the senses. 
 What holy meditation was to the saints of old, the ideal of 
 ^Esthetic art was to the creed of Schiller. Therefore, his 
 philosophy, in strict accordance with his poetry, w^as de- 
 signed not so much to convince as to ennoble ; — and, 
 therefore, though in the wide compass of Schiller's works 
 there are passages which would wound the sincere and un- 
 questioning believer; though in his life there were times 
 when he was overshadowed by the doubts that beset 
 inquiry ; though, in the orthodox and narrower sense of 
 the word Christian, it would be presumptuous to define his 
 sect, or decide on his belief ; the whole scope and tendency 
 of his works, taken one with the other, are, like his mind, 
 eminently Christian. No German writer — no writer, not 
 simply theological — has done more to increase, to widen, 
 and to sanctify the reverent disposition that inclines to 
 Faith. 
 
 * Of this lecture— " What is universal History, and with what views 
 should it be studied?" — Mr. Carlyle observes justly, "There perhaps has 
 never been in Europe another course of history sketched out on principles 
 so magnificent and philosophical." — Carlyle' s Life of Schiller. 
 
 f Mr. Carlyle, however, estimates the logical precision of Schiller more 
 highly than many of Schiller's own countrymen ; and speaks of the iEsthetic 
 Letters as " one of the deepest, most compact pieces of reasoning he is 
 anywhere acquainted with." — Miscell. p. 62. 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLEB. 285 
 
 As Schiller's poetry was the flower of liis mind, so in his 
 poetry are to be found, in their most blooming produce, all 
 the faculties that led him to philosophy, criticism, and 
 history. In his poetry are reflected all his manifold studies. 
 Philosophy, criticism, and history pour their treasures into 
 his verse. One of a mind so candid, and a life so studious, 
 could not fail to be impressed by many and progressive 
 influences. Schiller's career was one education, and its 
 grades are strongly marked. Always essentially humane, 
 with a heart that beat warmly for mankind, his first works 
 betray the intemperate zeal and fervour of the Revolution 
 which then in its fair outbreak misled not more the in- 
 experience of youth than the sagacity of wisdom ; a zeal 
 and fervour increased in Schiller by the formal oppression 
 of academical tyranny ; * a nature unusually fiery and im- 
 patient ; and a taste terribly perverted by the sentiment of 
 Rousseau and the bombast of Klopstock. Friendship, love, 
 indignation, poverty, and solitude, all served afterwards to 
 enrich his mind with the recollection of strong passions 
 and keen sufferings : and, thrown much upon himself, it is 
 his own life and his own thoughts that he constantly re- 
 produces on the stage. The perusal of Shakspeare has less 
 visible and direct influence on his genius than he himself 
 seems to suppose ; — the study of History has far more. From 
 the period in which he steadily investigated the past, his 
 characters become more actual ; his Humanity more rational 
 and serene. He outgrows Rousseau ; the revolutionary 
 spirit fades gradually from his mind ; he views the vast 
 chronicle of man not with the fervour of a boy, but the 
 calm of a statesman. At this time he begins to deserve the 
 epithet Goethe has emphatically bestowed on him — he be- 
 comes "practical " But with the study of history comes the 
 crisis of doubt, the period of his scepticism and his anguish. 
 From this influence he emerged into the purer air, which 
 he never afterwards abandoned, of the ideal Philosophy. 
 Here he found a solution of his doubts — a religion for his 
 mind. Almost at the same time that his intellect is calmed 
 and deepened by philosophy, his taste acquires harmonious 
 symmetry and repose from the study of the ancient master- 
 pieces. From that period, his style attains its final beauty 
 
 * Thus Schiller himself calls his " Bobbers " a " monster produced by the 
 unnatural union of Genius with Thraldom." 
 
286 THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 
 
 of simplicity combined with stateliness, and vigour best 
 shown by ease. A happy marriage, a fame assured, an 
 income competent to his wants, serve permanently to settle 
 into earnest and serious dignity a life hitherto restless — an 
 ambition hitherto vague and undefined. Thenceforth he 
 surrenders himself wholly to the highest and purest objects 
 human art can attain. His frame is attacked, his health 
 gone for ever ; but the body has here no influence on the 
 mind. Schiller lives in his art ; he attains to the ideal 
 existence he has depicted ; he becomes the Pure Form, the 
 Archetype, the Gestcdt, that he has described in his poem 
 of the " Ideal and the Actual ; " living divorced from the 
 body — in the heavenly fields a spirit amongst the gods. It 
 is now that we trace in his works the influences of two 
 master-minds with which he lived familiarly — William von 
 Humboldt and Goethe. 1 * The first we see in his mystical, 
 typical, and Kantian compositions ; the last in the more 
 lucid and genial spirit of his lyrics and his narratives. By 
 degrees, the latter happily prevailed. As Humboldt re- 
 ceded from the scene, and his intercourse with Goethe 
 mellowed, Schiller comes out of the cloud into the light. 
 He recognises the true ideal of art ; the clear expression 
 of serene thought ; the Grecian Athene prevailing over 
 the typical Egyptian Naith. The last influence produced 
 on him by profane literature was in the works of Calderon, 
 then just translated ; and which, according to the testi- 
 mony of Goethe, deeply and sensibly impressed him. But 
 he did not survive long enough for that impression to 
 become apparent in his own compositions. 
 
 We omit all detailed criticism of Schiller's Dramas ; for 
 they have been made more or less familiar to the reader, 
 by various translations, by repeated notices in our popular 
 journals, and by the attention they have received in the 
 biographical work of Mr. Carlyle. Our limits would not 
 permit us to do justice to works requiring lengthened and 
 elaborate considerations, or to enter into a controversy with 
 other critics, from whom we may differ as fco their merits 
 or defects. Briefly, it appears to us, that, like the dramas 
 
 * The intimacy between Goethe and Schiller was the more remarkable, 
 because it was almost purely intellectual. Goethe says, in a conversation 
 with Eckermann, "that there was no necessity for especial fneudsHp 
 between them — their common efforts made their noblest bond." 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 287 
 
 of many great poets, from Byron np even to Shakspeare, 
 their highest merit is not that purely dramatic. Perhaps 
 of this quality there is more in the earlier than the later 
 Tragedies. " The Robbers " is still upon the whole the 
 most frequently acted of all Schiller's Plays. * Glancing 
 over his riper performances, his grandest, in point of in- 
 tellect, is " TVallenstein : " in point of verbal poetry, of 
 music and expression, " The Bride of Messina" is the 
 loveliest : in point of feeling and conception " The Maid 
 of Orleans " most engrosses the heart and enlists the 
 fancy. But the one in which Schiller, with the fullest suc- 
 cess, emancipates his art from himself — in which, his own 
 individuality the least moulds and influences his creations — 
 seems to us the " Wilhelm Tell." As his chief merit, 
 whether as Man or Artist, lay in bis earnestness, so in that 
 earnestness lay his main defect as a writer for the Stage. 
 He could not, as the stage-writer really ought, reflect in- 
 differently — velutiin speculum — vice and virtue f — the mean 
 and the sublime. He could not escape the temptation of 
 placing in the mouths of his characters tbe sentiments he 
 desired to enforce upon the world — even thougb the oc- 
 casion was inappropriate. All his favourite characters 
 talk too much — and too much as Schiller thought and 
 Schiller felt. Morally one of the least selfish of men, — 
 intellectually he is one of the most egotistical. Who that 
 held the doctrine that the Dramatist, the Poet, should be 
 the Preacher, could fail to be so ? He loved Truth too 
 much to suffer her to be silent, whenever he had occasion 
 to make her oracles be heard. The complex varieties — the 
 sinuous windings of human character, are, for the most 
 part, without the pale of Ms conscientious and stately 
 
 * The true test of the Dramatic faculty, apart from the Poetical, is its 
 practical adaptability to the stage. A play of very inferior literary merit 
 may keep its hold on the boards, to the exclusion of works infinitely more 
 poetical, by its dramatic qualities ; — viz., by the correspondence between 
 the action of its plot and emotions the most generally popular. . . . 
 Hence the vitality on the stage of plays that are almost despised in the 
 library — such as the "Stranger," " Pizarro," &c. Kotzebue's dramatic 
 talent, as separate from intellectual excellence or poetic inspiration, is 
 positively wonderful, and deserves the minutest study of all practical 
 writers for the stage. Of this, Schiller was fully aware. 
 
 t Thus Madame de Stael well observes, " that he lived, spoke, and acted 
 as if the wicked did not exist ; and when in his works he described them, it 
 was with more exaggeration and less depth than if he had really known 
 them." 
 
288 THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 
 
 genius. He thus avoids (at least in his later works) the 
 vulgar reproach attached to Goethe, and which might with 
 equal truth be urged against Shakspeare, viz., that he 
 makes error amiable, and clothes crime with charm. His 
 characters are, for the most part, embodiments of great prin- 
 ciples and great truths, rather than the flexible and multi- 
 form representations of human nature, which, while ideal- 
 ised into poetry, still render the creations of Shakspeare 
 so living and distinct. 
 
 Schiller is thus, on the whole, greater as a Poet than a 
 Dramatist — so, indeed, is Shakspeare, but from entirely 
 different and opposite causes: Shakspeare, from the ex- 
 quisite subtlety of his imagination, which, in a Caliban, an 
 Ariel, a Titania, escapes the grossness of representation ; 
 Schiller, from too statuelike a rigidity and hardness : we 
 do not see the veins at play beneath his marble. 
 
 It is in the Collection of his Minor Poems that Schiller's 
 true variety is best seen — a variety not of character, but of 
 thought, of sentiment, of fancy, of diction, and of metre. 
 In those poems are the confessions of his soul, as well as 
 the exercises of his genius. For, with a little modification, 
 what Jean Paul said of Herder, may be said of Schiller, 
 " that he was less a Poet than a Poem/' — and therefore, 
 all his poetry should be studied as illustrations of the 
 Human Poem — Schiller himself ! 
 
 Any comparison between Goethe and Schiller would be, 
 and has been, but a futile attempt at comparing dissimi- 
 larities.^ We shall waste no time in attempting to show 
 where one' is greater or the other less. Brothers they were 
 in life — let them shine together in equal lustre — the im- 
 mortal Dioscuri — twin stars ! Nor shall we touch upon 
 those theories of art which the mention of Schiller and 
 Goethe calls into discussion amongst the metaphysical 
 critics of their country. We cannot invent a set of school 
 terms to prove, without farther discussion, that one poem 
 is great because objective — another not so great because 
 subjective. Beauty escapes all technical definitions; the 
 art of estimating beauty — viz., criticism — must follow the 
 genius it would examine through all its capricious wind- 
 
 * Goethe himself is reported to have said, " The Germans are great fools 
 to quarrel which should take the prior rank, Schiller or myself— they ought 
 only to be too happy that they have us both." 
 
THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 289 
 
 ings, and admire equally, Milton where subjective, — and 
 where objective, Shakspeare. 
 
 There is a class of poets in which self -consciousness is 
 scarcely perceptible ; another in which it is pervading and 
 intense. In the former class, Shakspeare and Homer 
 tower pre-eminent ; in the latter, we recognise Dante and 
 Milton — Schiller, Byron, and Burns. 
 
 To the last two, Schiller, in some attributes of his 
 genius, bears a greater resemblance * than perhaps to any 
 of his own countrymen ; resembling them in the haunting 
 sense of individuality — in the power of blending interest 
 for the poet with delight in the poem — in the subordina- 
 tion of sentiment to feeling — in the embodiment of what 
 is peculiar in forms the most widely popular ; — resembling 
 them in these points, differing from them no less widely 
 in others, according as the different modifications of life, 
 habits, education, heart, and conscience, differ in the 
 English noble, the German student, the Scotch peasant. 
 But in all three there is this characteristic of a common 
 tribe — their poetry expresses themselves. To borrow the 
 idea of Schiller himself, they seek truth in the heart 
 within — others in the world without, — by each order of 
 inquirer can truth equally be found : Or, to avail ourselves 
 again of Schiller's accurate and noble distinction, whether 
 light breaks into the variety of colours in which its in- 
 dividuality is lost, or unites the colours into a single 
 shimmer, it is still the light which vivifies and illumes 
 the world. 
 
 Mr. Carlyle quotes, with some approval, a dogmatic 
 assertion,," that readers till their twenty-fifth year usually 
 prefer Schiller; after their twenty-fifth year, Goethe." f 
 If Herder and Novalis are right in their belief that the 
 true elements of wisdom and poetry are found freshest and 
 purest in the young, this is no disparagement to Schiller. 
 It is, certainly, only in proportion as the glow for all that 
 is noble in thought and heroic in character fades from the 
 weaker order of mind, amidst the cavils, disgusts, and 
 scepticism of later life, that the halo around the genius of 
 Schiller, which is but a reflection of all that is noble and 
 
 * Goethe himself has remarked the similarity in some points between 
 Byron and Schiller. 
 •f Carlyle' s Miscellanies, vol. iii. p. 65. 
 
 17 
 
290 THE LIFE OF SCHILLER. 
 
 heroic, wanes also into feebler lustre. For the stronger 
 nature, which still " feels as the enthusiast, while it learns 
 to see as the world-wise, " * . . . there is no conceivable 
 reason why Schiller should charm less in maturity than 
 youth. 
 
 Finally, as, in the life of Schiller, the student may 
 gather noble and useful lessons of the virtue of manly 
 perseverance — of the necessity of continued self-cultiva- 
 tion — of the alliance between labour and success — between 
 honesty and genius ; — so in his Poems will be found, living 
 and distinct, a great and forcible intellect ever appealing 
 to the best feelings — ever exalting those whom it addresses 
 — ever intent upon strengthening man in his struggles 
 with his destiny, and uniting with a golden chain the outer 
 world and the inner to the celestial throne. 
 
 * Schiller, " Light and Warmth." 
 
ON THE CAUSES OF HORACE'S 
 POPULARITY.* 
 
 No one denies that there are greater poets than Horace ; 
 and mnch has been said in disparagement even of some of 
 the merits most popularly assigned to him, by scholars who 
 have, nevertheless, devoted years of laborious study to the 
 correction of his text or the elucidation of his meaning. 
 But whatever his faults or deficiencies, he has remained 
 unexcelled in that special gift of genius which critics define 
 by the name of charm. Xo collection of small poems, 
 ancient or modern, has so universally pleased the taste of 
 all nations as Horace's Odes, or been so steadfastly secure 
 from all the capricious fluctuations of time and fashion. In 
 vain have critics insisted on the superior genius evinced in 
 the scanty relics left to us of the Greek lyrists, and even on 
 the more spontaneous inspiration which they detect in the 
 exquisite delicacy of form that distinguishes the muse of 
 Catullus. Horace still reigns supreme as the lyrical singer 
 most enthroned in the affections, most congenial to the 
 taste, of the complex multitude of students in every land 
 and in every age. 
 
 It is an era in the life of the schoolboy when he first com- 
 mences his acquaintance with Horace. He gets favourite 
 passages by heart with a pleasure which (Homer alone 
 excepted) no other ancient poet inspires. Throughout 
 life the lines so learnt remain on his memory, rising up 
 alike in gay and in grave moments, and applying them- 
 selves to varieties of incident and circumstance with the 
 felicitous suppleness of proverbs. Perhaps in the interval 
 between boyhood and matured knowledge of the world, the 
 
 * [Prefixed to Lord Lytton's translations of the Odes and Epodes of 
 Horace, published in 1869, after having appeared in the pages of " Black- 
 wood's ^Magazine."] 
 
 U 2 
 
292 causes of Horace's popularity. 
 
 attractive influence of Horace is suspended in favour of 
 some bolder poet adventuring far beyond the range of his 
 temperate though sunny genius, into the extremes of heated 
 passion or frigid metaphysics — 
 
 " Visere gostiens 
 Qua parte debacchentur ignes, 
 Qua nebulae pluviiquerores."* 
 
 But as men advance in years they again return to Horace 
 — again feel the young delight in his healthful wisdom, his 
 manly sense, his exquisite combination of playful irony and 
 cordial earnestness. They then discover in him innumer- 
 able beauties before unnoticed, and now enjoyed the more 
 for their general freedom from those very efforts at intense 
 emotion and recondite meaning for which, in the revolu- 
 tionary period of youth, they admired the writers who appear 
 to them, when reason and fancy adjust their equilibrium in 
 the sober judgment of maturer years, feverishly exagge- 
 rated or tediously speculative. That the charm of Horace 
 is thus general and thus imperishable, is a proposition 
 which needs no proof. It is more interesting and less trite 
 to attempt to analyse the secrets of that charm, and see 
 how far the attempt may suggest hints of art to the num- 
 berless writers of those poems which aim at the title of 
 lyrical composition, and are either the trinkets of a tran- 
 sitory fashion, or the ornaments of enduring vogue, ac- 
 cording as they fail or succeed in concentrating the rays of 
 poetry into the compactness and solidity of imperishable 
 gems. ^ 
 
 The first peculiar excellence of Horace is in his personal 
 character and temperament rather than his intellectual 
 capacities ; it is in his genial humanity. He touches us 
 on so many sides of our common nature ; he has sympa- 
 thies with such infinite varieties of men ; he is so equally 
 at home with us in town and country, in our hours of 
 mirth, in our moments of dejection. Are w T e poor ? he 
 disarms our envy of the rich by greeting as a sj3ecial boon 
 of the Deity the suffisance which He bestows with a thrifty 
 hand ; and, distinguishing poverty from squalor, shows 
 
 * [" . . .bounding blithely to visit 
 
 Either pole, where the mist or the sun 
 
 Holds the orgies of water or fire. "] 
 
causes of Horace's popularity. 293 
 
 what attainable elegance can embellish a home laro'e 
 enough to lodge content. Are we rich ? he inculcates 
 moderation, and restrains ns from purse-pride with the 
 kindliness of a spirit free from asceticism, and sensi- 
 tive to the true enjoyments of life. His very defects 
 and weaknesses of character serve to increase his at- 
 traction; he is not too much elevated above our own 
 erring selves. 
 
 Next to the charm of his humanity is that of his incli- 
 nation towards the agreeable aspects of our mortal state. 
 He invests the virtues of patience amidst the trials of 
 adversity with the dignity of a serene sweetness, and exalts 
 even the frivolities of worldly pleasure with associations of 
 heartfelt friendship and the refinements of music and song. 
 Garlands entwined with myrtle, and wine- cups perfumed 
 with nard, seem fit emblems of the banqueter who, when 
 he indulges his Genius, invokes the Muse and invites the 
 Grace. With this tender humanity and with this plea- 
 surable temperament is blended a singular manliness of 
 sentiment. In no poet can be found lines that more rouse, 
 or more respond to, the generous impulse of youth 
 towards fortitude and courage, sincerity and honour, 
 devoted patriotism, the superiority of mind over the 
 vicissitudes of fortune, and a healthful reliance on the 
 wisdom and goodness of the one divine providential 
 Power, who has no likeness and no second, even in the 
 family of Olympus. 
 
 Though at times he speaks as the Epicurean, at other 
 times as the Stoic, and sometimes as both in the same 
 poem, he belongs -exclusively to neither school. Out of 
 both he has poetised a practical philosophy which, even in 
 its inconsistencies, establishes a harmony with our own 
 inconsistent natures ; for most men are to this day in 
 part Epicurean, in part Stoic. Horace is the poet of 
 Eclecticism. 
 
 Erom the width of his observation, and the generalising 
 character of his reasoning powers, Horace is more em- 
 phatically the representative of civilisation than any other 
 extant lyrical poet. Though describing the manners of his 
 own time, he deals in types and pictures, sentiments and 
 opinions, in which every civilised time finds likeness and 
 expression. Hence men of the world claim him as one of 
 
294 causes of Horace's popularity. 
 
 their order, and they cheerfully accord to him an admira- 
 tion which they scarcely concede to any other poet. It is 
 not only the easy good-natnre of his philosophy, and his 
 lively wit, that secure to him this distinction, but he owes 
 much also to that undefinable air of good-breeding which is 
 independent of all conventional fashions, and is recognised 
 in every society where the qualities that constitute good- 
 breeding are esteemed. Catullus has quite as much wit, 
 and is at least as lax, where he appears in the character of 
 a man of pleasure — Catullus is equally intimate with the 
 great men of his time, and in grace of diction is by many 
 preferred to Horace ; yet Catullus has never attained to 
 the same oracnlar eminence as Horace among men of the 
 world, and does not, in their eyes, command the same rank 
 in that high class of gentlemen — thorough-bred authors. 
 For if we rightly interpret genius by ingeniurn — viz., the 
 inborn spirit which accommodates all conventional circum- 
 stances around it to its own native property of form and 
 growth — there is a genius of gentleman as there is a genius 
 of poet. That which his countrymen called urbanitas, in 
 contradistinction to provincial narrowness of mind or vul- 
 garity of taste, to false finery and affected pretence, is the 
 essential attribute of the son of the Venusian freedman. 
 And with this quality, which needs for brilliant develop- 
 ment familiar converse with the types of mind formed by 
 a polished metropolis, Horace preserves, in a degree un- 
 known to those who, like Pope and Boileau, resemble him 
 more or less on the town-bred side of his character, the 
 simple delight in rnral nature, which makes him the 
 favourite companion of those whom cool woodlands, 
 peopled with the beings of fable, " set apart from the 
 crowd." He might be as familiar with Sir Philip Sidney 
 in the shades of Penshurst, as witlj. Lord Chesterfield in 
 the saloons of Mayfair. And out of this rare combination 
 of practical wisdom and poetical sentiment there grows 
 that noblest part of his moral teaching which is distinct 
 from schools and sects, and touches at times upon chords 
 more spiritual than those who do not look below the sur- 
 face would readily detect. Hence, in spite of his occasional 
 sins, he has always found indulgent favour with the clergy 
 of every Church. Among the dozen books which form the 
 library of the village cure of France, Horace is sure to be 
 
CAUSES OF HORACES POPULARITY. 295 
 
 one ; and the greatest dignitaries of our own Church are 
 among his most sedulous critics and his warmest pane- 
 gyrists. With all his melancholy conceptions of the 
 shadow-land beyond the Grave, and the half -sportive, half- 
 pathetic injunction, therefore, to make the most of the 
 passing hour, there lies deep within his heart a conscious- 
 ness of nobler truths, which ever and anon find impressive 
 utterance, suggesting precepts and hinting consolations 
 that elude the rod of Mercury, and do not accompany the 
 dark flock to the shores of Styx : 
 
 " Virtus recludens immeritis mori 
 Coelum negata tentat iter via." * 
 
 Thus we find his thoughts interwoven with Milton's later 
 meditations ; f and Condorcet, baffled in aspiration of 
 human perfectibility on earth, dies in his dungeon with 
 Horace by his side, open at the verse which says, by what 
 arts of constancy and fortitude in mortal travail Pollux 
 and Hercules attained to the citadels of light. 
 
 It is, then, mainly to this large and many-sided nature in 
 the man himself that Horace owes his unrivalled popularity 
 — a popularity which has indeed both widened in its circle 
 and deepened in its degree in proportion to the increase of 
 modern civilisation. And as the popularity is thus so much 
 derived from the qualities in which the man establishes 
 friendly intimacy with all ranks of his species, so it is ac- 
 companied with that degree of personal affection which few 
 writers have the happiness to inspire. We give willing ear 
 to the praise of his merits, and feel a certain displeasure at 
 the criticisms which appear harshly to qualify and restrict 
 them ; we are indulgent to his faults, and rejoice when 
 the diligent research and kindly enthusiasm of German 
 scholars redeem his good name from any aspersions that 
 had been too lightly credited. It pleases us to think that 
 most, perhaps all, among his erotic poems which had left 
 upon our minds a painful impression, and which a decorous 
 translator shuns, are no genuine expressions of the poet's 
 own sentiment or taste, but merely a Roman artist's trans- 
 lation or paraphrase from the Greek originals.]: We 
 
 * [" Virtue essays her flight through ways to all but her denied ; 
 
 To those who do not merit death she opes the gates of heaven."] 
 f See Milton's Sonnet, rxi., To Cyriac Skinner. 
 J The opinion at which most Horatian scholars have now arrived is well 
 
296 causes of Horace's popularity. 
 
 readily grant the absurdity of any imputation upon the 
 personal courage of Brutus's young officer, founded upon 
 the modest confession, that on the fatal field of Philippi, 
 when those who most vaunted their valour fled in panic or 
 bit the dust, he too had left his shield not too valiantly 
 behind him ; he who, in the same poem, addressed to a 
 brother soldier, tells us that he had gone through the 
 worst extremities in that bloody war. For those pane- 
 gyrics on Augustus which, in our young days, we re- 
 garded as renegade flattery bestowed upon a man who 
 had destroyed the political liberties for which the poet had 
 fought, we accept the rational excuses which are sug- 
 gested by our own maturer knowledge of life and of the 
 grateful human heart, and our profounder acquaintance 
 with the events and circumstances of the age. We see 
 in the poems themselves, when fairly examined, with 
 what evident sincerity Horace vindicates his enthusiastic 
 admiration of a prince whom he identifies with the 
 establishment of safety to property and life, with the 
 restoration of arts and letters, with the reform of manners 
 and the amelioration of laws. We can understand with 
 what genuine horror a patriot so humane must have re- 
 garded the fratricide of intestine wars, . and with what 
 honest gratitude so ardent a lover of repose and peace 
 would have exclaimed, — 
 
 " Custode rcrum Caesare, non furor 
 Civilis aut vis exiget otium." * 
 
 If to the rule of one man this blessed change was to be 
 ascribed, and if public opinion so cordially endorsed that 
 assumption, that the people themselves placed their ruler in 
 
 expressed by Estre in his judicious and invaluable work, " Horatiana 
 Prosopograpneia : " " Credo Horatium prorsus abstinuisse a puerorum amor- 
 ibus, etiamsi ipse, joeans, aliter de se profitcatur. Distabant, si quid judico, 
 Horatii tempore, puerorum amores tantum a persona sancti castique vii 
 quantum libera venus nostris temporibus abest. jSTovi autem hodie quoque, 
 quis ignorat, juvencs virosque vel castissimos ct sanctissimos, inter amieos, 
 animi causa, ita jocantes, quasi liberam venerem ardentissime sectarentur. 
 Nee Libriiv. carm. i. euro, seriptum, uti egregie observavit Lessingius, post 
 legem Juliam latam de pudieitia quinn nemo amplius amorem in puerum 
 palam celebrare ausus fuisset." — P. 524:. 
 
 * [" Caesar our guardian, neither eivil rage 
 
 Nor felon violence scares us from repose. "] 
 
causes of Horace's popularity. 297 
 
 the order of Divinities — it scarcely needs even an excuse for 
 the poet that he joined in the general apotheosis of the 
 great prince, who to him was the benignant protector and 
 the sympathising friend. When the population have once 
 tested the security of established order, and, with terrified 
 remembrance of the bloodshed and havoc of a previous 
 anarchy, felt the old liberty rather voluntarily slip than be 
 violently wrenched from their hands, a benevolent auto- 
 cracy that consults the public opinion which installs it 
 seems a blessing to the many, and is accepted as a neces- 
 sity by the few. And if the professed statesmen and 
 political thinkers of the time — the Pollios and the 
 Messalas, the most eminent partisans of M. Antony, the 
 noblest companions of Brutus — acquiesced, with the more 
 courtly and consistent Maecenas, in the established govern- 
 ment of Augustus, it would indeed be no reproach to a 
 man whose mind habitually shunned gloomy anticipations 
 of the distant future, that he could not foresee the terrible 
 degeneration of manners and the military despotism which 
 were destined to grow out of the clement autocracy of 
 that accomplished prince who had won the title of " father 
 of his country," and who might be seen on summer 
 evenings angling in the Tiber, or stretched upon its banks 
 amidst a ring of laughing children, with whom the 
 Emperor whose word gave law to the Indian and the Mecle 
 was playing with nuts and pebbles. 
 
 What Horace was as man, can, however, furnish but 
 little aid to those who desire to rival him as poet — little 
 aid, indeed, except as it may serve to show how far a genial 
 and cordial temperament, an independent and manly spirit, 
 and a fellowship with mankind in their ordinary pursuits 
 and tastes, contribute to the culture and amenities of the 
 poet who would make his monument more lasting than 
 bronze and more lofty than the pyramids. But in Horace, 
 as artist, we may perhaps, on close examination, discover 
 some peculiarities of conception and form sufficiently 
 marked and pervasive to evince that with him they were 
 rules of art ; so successful as to make them worthy of 
 study, and hitherto so little noticed, even by his most 
 elaborate critics, as to justify an attempt to render them 
 more generally intelligible and instructive. 
 
 In what 1 am about to eay on this head, I confine my 
 
298 causes of Horace's popularity. 
 
 remarks to the short lyrical pieces to which, commentators 
 after his time gave the name of Odes, and on which his 
 eminence as a poet must mainly rely. Whatever merit 
 be ascribed to his Satires, it is scarcely in the power 
 of genius to raise satire to an elevated rank in poetry. 
 Satire, indeed, is the antipodes of poetry in its essence and 
 its mission. Satire always tends to dwarf, and it cannot 
 fail to caricature ; but poetry does nothing if it does not 
 tend to enlarge and exalt, and if it does not seek rather to 
 beautify than reform. And though such didactic and 
 moralising vein as belongs to the Epistles of Horace be in 
 itself much higher than satire, and in him has graces of 
 style that, with his usual consummate taste, he rejects for 
 satire, which he regards but as a rhythmical prose, still, 
 the higher atmosphere in which the genius of lyrical song 
 buoys and disports itself is not within the scope of that 
 didactic form of poetry which " walks highest but not 
 flies. " Hegel, in his luminous classification of the various 
 kinds of poetry, has perhaps somewhat too sharply drawn 
 the line between its several degrees of rank ; yet every one 
 acquainted with the rudimentary principles of criticism 
 must acknowledge, that just as it requires a larger com- 
 bination of very rare gifts to write an epic or a drama 
 which the judgment of ages allows to be really great, than 
 to write a lyrical poem, so it demands a much finer 
 combination of some of the rarest of those rare gifts to 
 write a lyrical poem which becomes the song of all times 
 and nations, than to write a brilliant sarcasm upon human 
 infirmities, or an elegant lecture in the style of an Epistle. 
 These last require but talents, however great, which are 
 more or less within the province of prose-writers. The 
 novel of " Gil Bias " or the Essays of Montaigne evince 
 qualities of genius equal at least to those displayed in 
 Horace's Satires and Epistles. But if you were to multiply 
 Lesages and Montaignes ad infinitum, they could not ac- 
 complish a single one of Horace's nobler odes. 
 f Now, the first thing that strikes us in examining the 
 secrets of Horace's art in lyrical poetry — and which I ven- 
 ture humbly to think it would be well for modern lyrists to 
 study — is his terseness. Terseness is one of the surest 
 proofs of painstaking. Nothing was ever more truthful in 
 art than the well-known reply of the writer to the friendly 
 
CAUSES OF HOE ACE'S POPULARITY. 299 
 
 critic, who said, " You are too prolix : " "I had not time to 
 be shorter." 
 
 We know from Horace himself that he bestowed upon 
 his artist-work an artist's labour — " Operosa carmina 
 jingo." He seems to have so meditated upon the subject 
 he chooses as to be able to grasp it readily. There is no 
 wandering after ideas — no seeking to prolong and over- 
 adorn the main purpose for which he writes. If it be but 
 a votive inscription to Diana, in which he dedicates a tree 
 to her, he does not let his command of language carry 
 him beyond the simple idea he desires to express. He 
 seems always to consider that he is addressing a very civi- 
 lised and a very impatient audience, which has other occu- 
 pations in life besides that of reading verses ; and nothing 
 in him is more remarkable than his study not to be 
 tedious. Perhaps, indeed, it is to this desire that some of 
 his shortcomings up to the mark which very poetical critics 
 would assign to lyrical rapture are to be ascribed ; but it is 
 a fault on the right side. 
 
 The next and much more important characteristic of 
 Horace as a lyrical artist is commonly exhibited in his 
 grander odes, and often in his lighter ones ; and to this I 
 do not know if I can give a more expressive word than 
 picturesqueness. His imagination, in his Odes, predomi- 
 nates over all his other qualities, great as those other 
 qualities are ; and that which he images being clear to 
 himself, he contrives in very few words to render it dis- 
 tinct and vivid to the reader. When Lydia is entreated 
 not to spoil Sybaris ; by enumerating the very sports for 
 which her lover has lost taste, he brings before us the 
 whole picture of an athletic young Roman noble — his 
 achievements in horsemanship, swimming, gymnastics ; 
 when, in the next ode, he calls on the Feastmaster to heap 
 up the fagots, and bring out the wine, and enjoy his youth 
 while he may, he slides into a totally different picture. 
 Here it is the young Roman idler, by whom only the 
 mornings are devoted to the Campus Martins, the after- 
 noons to the public lounge, the twilights to amorous 
 assignations ; and the whole closes still with a picture, the 
 girl hiding herself within the threshold, and betrayed by 
 her laugh, while the lover rushes in and snatches away the 
 love token from the not too reluctant finger. When he 
 
300 CAUSES OF HOEACE'S POPULARITY. 
 
 invites Tyndaris to his villa, the spot is brought before the 
 eye : the she-goats browsing amid the arbute and wild 
 thyme ; the pebbly slopes of Ustica ; the green nook 
 sheltered from the dog-star ; the noon- day entertainment ; 
 the light wines and the lute. The place and the figures 
 are before us as clearly as if on the canvas of a painter. 
 He would tell you that he is marked from childhood for 
 the destiny of poet ; and he charms the eye with the pic- 
 ture of the truant infant asleep on the wild mountain- side, 
 safe from the bear and the adder, while the doves cover 
 him with leaves. 
 
 With a rarer and higher attribute of art Horace intro- 
 duces the dramatic element very largely and prominently 
 into his lyrics. His picture becomes a scene. His ideas 
 take life and form as personations. Does he wish to dis- 
 suade his countrymen from the notion of transferring the 
 seat of government from Rome to Asia, or perhaps, rather, 
 from some large emigration and military settlement in the 
 East ? He calls up the image of the Founder of Rome 
 borne to heaven in the chariot of Mars ; ranges the gods 
 in council on Olympus ; and puts into the lips of Juno tho 
 warning which he desires to convey. Does he seek to dis- 
 courage popular impatience for the return of the Parthian 
 prisoners — viz., the soldiers of Crassus who had settled and 
 married in the land of the conqueror ? He evokes the 
 great form of Regulus urging the Senate to refuse to 
 ransom the Roman captives taken by Carthage — places 
 him as on a visible stage — utters his language, describes 
 his looks, and shows him departing to face the tormentors, 
 satisfied and serene. Would he console a girl for the ab- 
 sence of her lover, and hint to herself a friendly caution 
 against an insidious gallant ? In eight short stanzas he 
 condenses a whole drama in personages and plot. Does he 
 paint the reconciliation of two jealous lovers ? He makes 
 them speak for themselves ; and their brief dialogue is 
 among the most delightful of comedies. Would he tell us 
 that he is going to sup with convivial friends ? He sud- 
 denly transports us into the midst of the scene, regulates 
 the toasts, calls for the flowers and music, babbles out his 
 loves. The scene lives. 
 
 Not to weary the reader with innumerable instances of 
 this art of picture and of drama, so sedulously cultivated 
 
causes of Horace's popularity. 301 
 
 by Horace, I Trill only observe that the various imitators 
 of Horace have failed to emulate this the most salient cha- 
 racteristic of his charm in construction ; and that even his 
 numerous commentators have but slightly noticed it — nay, 
 some have even censured as a desultory episode that which, 
 according to Horace's system of treating his subject, is the 
 substance of the poem itself. For the commencing stanzas 
 sometimes only serve as a frame to the picture which he 
 intends to paint, or a prologue to the scene which he 
 proposes to dramatise. 
 
 Thus he begins a poem by an invocation to Mercury and 
 the lyre to teach him a strain that may soften the coy heart 
 of a young girl ; passes rapidly to the effect of music even 
 upon the phantoms in the shades below ; the Danaides rest 
 their urn, and then, as if the image of the Danaides spon- 
 taneously and suddenly suggested the idea, he places on the 
 scene the sister murderesses at night slaughtering their 
 bridegrooms — and the image of Hypermnestra, the sole 
 gentle and tender one, waking her lord and urging him 
 to fly. 
 
 So, again, when his lady friend, Galatea, is about to 
 undertake a voyage, he begins by a playful irony about 
 omens, hastens to the reality of stormy seas — and suddenly 
 we have the picture of Europa borne from the field-flowers 
 to the midst of the ocean. We behold her forlorn and alone 
 on the shores of Crete — hearken to the burst of her despair 
 and repentance — and see the drama conclude with the con- 
 solatory appearance of Venus, and Cupid with his loosened 
 bow. To some commentators these vivid presentations of 
 dramatic imagery have appeared exotic to the poem — 
 episodes and interludes. But the more they are examined 
 as illustrative of Horace's peculiar culture of lyric art, the 
 more (in this respect not unimitative of Pindar) they stand 
 out as the body of his piece, and the developed completion 
 of his purpose. Take them away, and the poems them- 
 selves would shrink into elegant vers d 'occasion. Horace, in 
 a word, generally studies to secure to each of his finer and 
 more careful poems, however brief it be, that which play- 
 writers call a "backbone." And even where he does not 
 obtain this through direct and elaborate picture or dra- 
 matic effect and interest, he achieves it perhaps in a sino-le 
 stanza, embodying some striking truth or maxim of popular 
 
302 causes op Horace's popularity. 
 
 application, expressed with a terseness so happy, that all 
 times and all nations adopt it as a proverb. 
 
 We see, then, how much of his art in construction de- 
 pends on his lavish employ of picture and drama — how 
 much on compression and brevity. We must next notice, 
 as constituent elements of Horace's peculiar charm, his 
 employment of playful irony, and the rapidity of his tran- 
 sitions from sportive to earnest, earnest to sportive ; so that, 
 perhaps, no poet more avails himself of the effect of " sur- 
 prise " — yet the surprise is not coarse and glaring, but for 
 the most part singularly subdued and delicate — arising 
 sometimes from a single phrase, a single word. He has 
 thus, in his lyrics, more of that combination of tragic and 
 comic elements to which the critics of a former age ob- 
 jected in Shakspeare, than perhaps any poet extant except 
 Shakspeare himself. The consideration of this admirably 
 artistic fidelity to the mingled yarn of life, leads us on to 
 the notice of Horatian style and diction. 
 
 The character of the audience he more immediately ad- 
 dresses will naturally have a certain effect on the style of 
 an author, and an effect great in proportion to his practical 
 good sense and good taste. ISTo man possessed of what the 
 French call s avoir vivre, employs exactly the same style 
 even in extempore discourse, whether he addresses a select 
 audience of scholars or a miscellaneous popular assembly. 
 The readers for whom Horace more immediately wrote 
 were the polite and intellectual circles of Rome, wherein a 
 large proportion were too busy, and a large proportion too 
 idle, to allow themselves to be diverted very far, or for 
 long at a stretch, into poetic regions, whether of thought 
 or diction, remote from their ordinary topics and habitual 
 lauguage. Horace does not, therefore, in the larger num- 
 ber of songs composed — some to be popularly sung and all 
 to be popularly read — build up a poetic language distinct 
 from that of conversation. On the contrary, with some 
 striking exceptions, where the occasion is unusually solemn, 
 he starts from the conversational tone, seeks to familiarise 
 himself winningly with his readers, and leads them on to 
 loftier sentiment, uttered in more noble eloquence — just as 
 an orator, beginning very simply, leads on the assembly he 
 addresses. And possibly Horace's manner in this respect 
 - — which, though in a less marked degree, is also that of 
 
causes of Horace's popularity. 803 
 
 Catullus in most of the few purely lyrical compositions the 
 latter has left to us — may be traced to the influence which 
 oratory exercised over the generation born in the last days 
 of the Republic. For in the age of Cicero and Hortensius 
 it may be said that the genius of the Roman language 
 developed itself rather in the beauties which belong to 
 oratory than those which lie more hidden from popular 
 appreciation in the dells and bosks of song. 
 
 And as the study of rhetoric and oratory formed an 
 essential part of education among the Roman youths con- 
 temporary with Horace, so that study would unconsciously 
 mould the taste of the poet in his selection and arrange- 
 ment of verbal decorations. Be the cause what it may, 
 nothing is more noticeable in Horace's style than its usual 
 conformity with oratorical art, its easy familiarisation with 
 the minds addressed, its avoidance of over-floridity and 
 recondite mysticism, and its reliance for effects that are 
 to fascinate the imagination, touch the heart, rouse the 
 soul, upon something more than the delicacies of poetic 
 form. His reliance, in short, is upon the sentiment, the 
 idea, which the glow of expression animates and illumes. 
 Thus that curiosa felicitas v&rborwm justly ascribed to 
 Horace has so much of the masculine, oratorical character 
 — so unites a hardy and compact simplicity of phrase with 
 a sentiment which itself has the nobleness or grace of poetry 
 (as oratorical expression of the highest degree ever has) — 
 that of all ancient poets Horace is the one who most fur- 
 nishes the public speaker with quotations sure of striking 
 effect in any public assembly to which the Latin language 
 is familiar. Take one example among many. Mr. Pitt is 
 said never to have more carried away the applause of the 
 House of Commons than when, likening England — then 
 engaged in a war tasking all her resources — to that image 
 of Rome which Horace has placed in the mouth of Hannibal 
 — he exclaimed : — 
 
 " Duris ut ilex tonsa biperrnibus 
 Nigrte feraci frondis in Algido, 
 Per darruia, per caedes, ab ipso 
 D licit opes anhnunigue ferro. " * 
 
 * 
 
 [" Even as the ilex, lopped by axes rude, 
 "Where rich with dusky boughs, soars Algidus, 
 Through loss, through wounds, receives 
 New gain, new life — yea, from the very steel."] 
 
304 causes of Horace's popularity. 
 
 Now, this passage, when critically examined, does not 
 owe its unmistakable poetry to any form of words, any 
 startling epithet, inadmissible in prose, but to an illustra- 
 tion at once very noble and yet very simple ; and, in 
 rapidity of force, in the development and completion of the 
 idea, so akin to oratory, that an impassioned speaker who 
 had his audience in his hands might have uttered the 
 substance of it in prose. 
 
 I may perhaps enable the general reader to comprehend 
 more clearly what I mean by Horace's art in diction as 
 starting from the conversational tone, and, save on rare 
 occasions, avoiding a style antagonistic to prose, by a re- 
 ference to the two loveliest, most elaborate, and most perfect 
 lyrics in our own language — " L' Allegro " and " II Pense- 
 roso." In these odes Milton takes for representation the 
 two types of temperament under which mankind are more 
 or less divisibly ranged — viz., the cheerful and the pensive. 
 But he treats these two common varieties of all our race as 
 a poet, of a singularly unique temperament himself, ad- 
 dressing that comparatively small number of persons who 
 are poetically cheerful or 'poetically pensive. And in so 
 addressing them his language is throughout essentially 
 distinct from prose : it is, like most of his youthful poems, 
 the very quintessence of poetic fancy, both in imagery and 
 expression. Perfectly truthful in itself, the poetry in these 
 masterpieces is still not of that kind of truthfulness which 
 comes home to all men's business and bosoms. Like the 
 poet's own soul, it is "a star, and dwells apart." It may 
 be doubted whether Horace, in his very finest odes, ever, 
 in his maturest age, wrote anything so exquisitely poeti- 
 cal, regarded as pure poetry addressed to poets, as these 
 two lyrics written by Milton in his youth. But then the 
 difference between them and Horace's Odes is, that out of 
 England the former are little known — certainly not appre- 
 ciated. # Their beauty of form is so delicate, that it is 
 only the eye of a native that can detect it — their truthful- 
 
 * It may be said in answer to this, that on the Continent Latin is more 
 read than English. True ; but that does not prevent those English poets 
 who address themselves to a cosmopolitan audience, as Shakspeaie, and I 
 may add Byron, being as well appreciated on the Continent as any Latin 
 author is ; and I doubt whether even in England there be as many readers 
 of poetry familiar with " L' Allegro " and "II Penseroso" as there are with 
 the Odes of Horace. 
 
causes of Horace's popularity. 305 
 
 ness to nature so limited to a circumscribed range of mind, 
 that, even in England, neither the mirthful nor the melan- 
 choly man, unless he be a poet or a student, recognises in 
 either poem his own favourite tastes and pleasures. But 
 where Horace describes men's pleasures, every man finds 
 something of himself; the familiar kindliness of his lan- 
 guage impresses its poetry upon those who have no preten- 
 sion to be poets. Had Horace written with equal length 
 and with equal care an "Allegro " and a " Penseroso," not 
 only the poet and the student, not only the man of sentiment 
 and reflection, but all varieties in our common family — the 
 young lover, the ambitious schemer, the man of pleasure, 
 the country yeoman, the city clerk, even the rural labourer 
 — would have found lines in which he saw himself as in a 
 mirror. 
 
 Thus, then, Horace's exquisite felicity of wording is for 
 the most part free from any sustained attempt at a lan- 
 guage essentially distinct from that of conversation ; and 
 for that very reason its beauties of poetical expression both 
 please and strike the more, because they have more the air 
 of those spontaneous flashes of genius which delight us in 
 a great orator or a brilliant talker. 
 
 I cannot pass by without comment a characteristic of 
 " form " which, though found more or less in other ancient 
 Poets, and not least in Virgil, is too strikingly conspicuous 
 in Horace to escape the notice of any ordinary critic ; yet 
 no critic has attempted satisfactorily to define the principles 
 of art to which its peculiar fascination may be traced. It 
 is in the choice of epithets derived from proper names, or 
 rather the names of places, by which "generals" are 
 individualised into " particulars." The sea is not the sea 
 in general — it is the Hadrian, or the Myrtoan, or the 
 Caspian sea ; the ship is not a ship in general — it is the 
 Cyprian or the Bithynian ship ; the oaks, which are not 
 always shaken by the blast, are not the oaks in general — 
 they are the oaks upon Garganus ; the ilex, which thrives 
 by being pruned, is not an ilex in general — it is the ilex 
 upon Algidus ; and so forth, through innumerable in- 
 stances. That in this peculiarity there is a charm to the 
 ear and the mind of the reader, no one acquainted with 
 Horace will deny. But whence that charm ? Partly be- 
 cause it gives that kind of individuality which belongs to 
 
 x 
 
306 CAUSES OF HORACES POPULARITY. 
 
 personation — it takes the object out of a boundless 
 common-place, and rivets the attention on a more fixed 
 and definite image ; but principally because, while it 
 thus limits the idea on the prosaic side of the object, it 
 enlarges its scope, by many vague and subtle associations, 
 on the poetic side. When a proper name is thus used — a 
 proper name suggesting of itself almost insensibly to the 
 mind the poetic associations which belong to the name 
 — the idea is enlarged from a simple to a complex idea, 
 adorned with delicate enrichments, and opening into 
 many dim recesses of imagination. The keel of a ship 
 suggests only a keel ; but the Cyprian keel connects itself 
 with dreamy recollections of all the lovely myths about 
 Cyprus. The ilex unpartieularised may be but an ilex by 
 a dusty roadside, or in the grounds of a citizen's villa ; but 
 the ilex of Algidus evokes, as an accompanying image, the 
 haunted mountain- top sacred to Diana. The verse of 
 Milton is largely indebted to such recourse to poetic proper 
 names for the delight it occasions, not more by melodious 
 sounds than by complex associations. Walter Scott owes 
 much of the animation of his lyrical narratives to his fre- 
 quent use of proper names in scenery connected with 
 historic association or romantic legend ; and Macaulay's 
 Roman Lays push the use of them almost to too evidently 
 artificial an extreme, savouring a little overmuch of elabo- 
 rate learning and perceptible imitation. But on the whole 
 this exquisite beauty — in lyrical composition especially — 
 is rare among later poets and may be safely commended to 
 their study. It is noticeable that Horace has little or 
 nothing of it in the Epodes (his earliest published poems, 
 except the First Book of the Satires). Perhaps he thought 
 it more especially appropriate to purely lyrical composi- 
 tion, such as the Odes, than to the Epodes, which are not 
 lyrical in form, and, with one exception, Epode xiii., are 
 but partially lyrical in spirit. For it might be wrong to 
 infer that it only occurred to him in the riper practice of 
 his general art as poet, since some of the Odes in which it 
 is found, though not published till after the Epodes, must 
 have been composed within the period to which the latter 
 are assigned. 
 
 The defects or shortcomings of Horace as a poet are, like 
 those of all original writers, intimately connected with his 
 
causes of Horace's popularity. 307 
 
 peculiar merits. His strong good sense, and that which 
 may be called the practical tendency of his mind in his 
 views both of life and art, while they serve to secure to him 
 so unrivalled a popularity among men of the world, not 
 only deter him from the metaphysical speculation which 
 would have been not less wearisome to the larger portion 
 of his readers than distasteful to himself, as appertaining 
 to those regions beyond the province of the human mind, 
 " at which Jove laughs to see us outstretch our human 
 cares/' — but rarely permit him to plumb very far into the 
 deejDS of feeling and passion. Marvellously as he repre- 
 sents the human nature we have all of us in common, each 
 thoughtful man has yet in him a something of human 
 nature peculiar to himself, which, like the goal of the 
 Olympian charioteer, is sometimes almost grazed, but ever 
 shunned, by the rapid wheels of the Yenusian. 
 
 It may also be said that his turn for irony, or his de- 
 ference to the impatient taste of a worldly audience, while 
 serving to keep the attention always pleased, and con- 
 tributing so largely to his special secrets in art, some- 
 times shows itself unseasonably, and detracts from the 
 effect of some noble passage, or interrupts the rush of some 
 animated description. 
 
 Take but one instance among many. In an ode which 
 is among his grandest — Book IV., Ode iv., " Qualem 
 ministrum f ulminis alitem " — when he comes, after imagery 
 of epic splendour, to the victory of Drusus over the Vinde- 
 lici, he checks himself to say, with a sort of mockery which 
 would have been well in its place at a supper-table, that 
 where the Vindelici learned the use of the Amazonian 
 battle-axe he refrains from inquiring, for it is not possible 
 to know everything. No doubt there was some " hit " or 
 point in this parenthetical diversion which is now lost to 
 us ; possibly it was a satirical allusion to some pedantic 
 work or antiquarian speculation which was among the 
 literary topics of the day ; but every reader of critical 
 taste feels the jar of an episodical levity, inharmonious to 
 all that goes before and after it.* It is like a sarcasm of 
 Voltaire's thrust into the midst of an ode of Pindar's. 
 
 * Some critics have indeed proposed to omit these digressive verses alto- 
 gether, and consider them an impertinent interpolation by an inferior hand. 
 But this is an audacity of assumption forbidden by the authority of manu- 
 
 X 2 
 
308 CAUSES OF HOE ACES POPULARITY. 
 
 From causes the same or similar, Horace's love-poetry 
 has been accused of want of deep feeling, and compared in 
 this' respect, disadvantageously, to the few extant frag- 
 ments of Sappho. But here it may be observed, that in 
 the whole character of Horace there is one marked 
 idiosyncrasy which influences the general expression of his 
 art. Like many men of our day, who unite to familiar 
 intercourse with fashionable and worldly society an in- 
 herent sincerity and a dread of all charlatanic pretences, 
 Horace is even over-studious not to claim any false credit 
 for himself — not to pretend to anything which may not be 
 considered justly his due ; he will not pretend to be better 
 born or richer, wiser or more consistent, or of a severer 
 temper than he is. In his Satires and Epistles he even 
 goes out of his way to tell us of his faults. In his Odes 
 themselves — with all his intense and candidly uttered 
 convictions of their immortality — he seizes frequent occa- 
 sion for modest reference to the light and trivial themes 
 to which his lyre and his genius are best suited. A man 
 of this character, and with a very keen susceptibility to 
 ridicule, would perhaps shun the expression of any feeling 
 in love much deeper in its sentiment, or much more de- 
 voted in its passion, than would find sympathy with the 
 men of the world for whom he principally wrote. If he 
 ever did compose love-poems so earnest and glowing, I 
 think it doubtful whether he would have prevailed on him- 
 self to publish them. To a poet who so earnestly seeks to 
 inculcate moderation in every passion and desire, there 
 would have seemed something not only inconsistent with 
 his general repute as writer, but perhaps something offen- 
 sive to his own sense of shame and the manliness of his 
 nature, in that passionate devotion to the charms of a 
 Cynthia to which Propertius refers the source of his 
 inspiration and his loftiest pretension to the immortality of 
 renown. And Horace is so far right, both as man and as 
 artist, in the mode in which he celebrates the smiling 
 goddess round whom hovers Mirth as well as Cupid, that, 
 as man, one really would respect him less if any of those 
 young ladies, who seem to have been too large-hearted to 
 
 scripts, and justly denounced by the editors and critics whose opinions on 
 such a subject Horatian students regard as decisive. 
 
causes of Horace's popularity. 309 
 
 confine their affection to a single adorer, had inspired him 
 with one of those rare passions which influence an entire 
 existence. We should feel as mnch shame as compassion 
 for any wise friend of ours whom Yenus linked lastingly in 
 her brazen yoke to a Lydia or a Pyrrha. And as an artist, 
 Horace appears so far right in his mode of dealing with 
 erotic subjects, that, despite all this alleged want of deep 
 feeling and passionate devotion, Horace's love-poetry is 
 still the most popular in the world — the most imitated, the 
 most quoted, the most remembered. The reason, perhaps, 
 is, that most men have loved np to the extent that Horace 
 admits the passion, and very few men have loved much 
 beyond that limit. 
 
 jSTot withstanding the amazing pains taken by grave pro- 
 fessors and erudite divines to ascertain the history of 
 Horace's love-affairs — to tell us wlio and what those young 
 beauties were — whom he loved first and whom he loved 
 last — how many of them are to be reduced to a select few, 
 one being sung nnder different names lending their 
 syllables to the same metrical convenience, so that Cinara, 
 Lalage, Lydia, are one and the same person, &c. — the ques- 
 tion remains insoluble. Some scholars have had even the 
 cold-blooded audacity to assert that, with the single ex- 
 ception of Cinara, and some strange sort of entanglement 
 with the terrible sorceress to whom he gives the name of 
 Canidia, all these Horatian beauties are myths and fig- 
 ments — as purely dreams as those out of the ivory gate — 
 many of them, no doubt, translations, more or less free, 
 from the Greek. 
 
 The safest conjecture here, as in most cases of disputed 
 judgment, lies between extremes. 
 
 It is probable enough, that a man like Horace — a man of 
 wit and pleasure — thrown early into gay society, and of a 
 very affectionate nature, as is evinced by the warmth of his 
 friendships — should have been pretty often in what is com- 
 monly called "love " during, say, thirty-nine years out of 
 the fifty-seven in which he led a bachelor's life. And as 
 few poets ever have been more subjective than Horace— 
 ever received the aspect of life more decidedly through the 
 medium of their own personal impressions — or more re- 
 garded poetry as the vehicle of utterance for their opinions 
 and doctrines, their likings and dislikings, their joys and 
 
310 CAUSES OF HOB ACE ? S POPULARITY. 
 
 their sorrows — so it may be reasonably presumed that in 
 many of his love-verses he expresses or symbolises his own 
 genuine state of feeling. Nor if in some of these there be 
 detected imitations from the .-Greek, does such imitation 
 suffice to prove that the person addressed was imaginary, 
 and the feeling uttered insincere. Nothing is more common 
 among poets than the adaptation of ideas found elsewhere 
 to their own individual circumstances and self- confessions. 
 When Pope paraphrases Horace where Horace most exclu- 
 sively personates himself, Pope still so paraphrases that the 
 lines personate Pope and not Horace ; and one would know 
 very little of the subjective character of Pope's mind and 
 genius who could assert that he did not utter his own 
 genuine feelings in describing, for instance, his early life 
 and his early friendships, because the description was 
 imitated from a Latin author. 
 
 On the other hand, it is impossible to distinguish with 
 any certainty what really does thus illustrate the actual 
 existence of Horace, and does utter the sounds of his own 
 heart, from those purely objective essays of his genius 
 (for, like all poets who have the dramatic faculty strongly 
 developed, he is objective as well as subjective) which 
 were the sportive exercises of art, and the airy embodi- 
 ments of fancy. It is safest here to leave an acute reader 
 to his own judgment ; and it is one of those matters in 
 which acute readers will perhaps differ the most. 
 
 Among the faults of Horace may also be mentioned his 
 marked tendency to self- repetition, and especially to the 
 repetition of what one of his most admirable but least 
 enthusiastic editors bluntly calls his " commonplaces : " 
 viz., the shortness of life ; the wisdom of seizing the present 
 hour ; the folly of anxious research into an unknown 
 future ; the vanity of riches and of restless ambition ; the 
 happiness of a golden mediocrity in fortune, and an 
 equable mind in the vicissitudes of life. But these itera- 
 tions of ideas, constituting the body of his ethics, if faulty 
 — inasmuch as the ultima linea of his range may therein 
 be too sharply defined — are the inseparable consequence of 
 the most beautiful qualities of his genius. They mark the 
 consistent unity and the sincere convictions of the man — 
 they show how much his favourite precepts are part and 
 parcel of his whole moral and intellectual organisation. 
 
causes of Horace's popularity. 311 
 
 Whether conversing in his Satires, philosophising in his 
 Epistles, giving free play to invention in his Odes — still 
 he cannot help nttering and re-nttering ideas the combina- 
 tion of which constitutes himself. And as the general 
 effect of these ideas is soothing, so their prevalence in his 
 verse has a charm of repose similar to the prevalence of 
 green in the tints of nature : we greet the constant recur- 
 rence of the soft familiar colour with a sensation of pleasure 
 even in its quiet monotony. 
 
 Perhaps in most writers who have in a pre-eminent 
 degree the gift of charm, there is, indeed, a certain 
 fondness for some peculiar train of thought, the repetition 
 of which gains the attraction of association. We should be 
 disappointed, in reading such writers, if we did not find 
 the ideas which characterise them, and for which we have 
 learned to seek and to love them, coming up again and 
 again like a refrain in music. It is so with some of our 
 own poets — Goldsmith, Cowper, and Byron — who, alike in 
 nothing else, are alike in the frequent recurrence of the 
 ideas which constitute the characteristic colourings of their 
 genius, and who, in that recurrence, deepen their spell over 
 their readers. 
 
 I believe, then, that the attributes thus imperfectly 
 stated are among the principal constituent elements of 
 Horace's indisputable charm, and of a popularity among 
 men of various minds which extends over a wider circle 
 than perhaps any other ancient poet commands, Homer 
 alone excepted. It is a popularity not diminished by the 
 limits imposed on the admiration that accompanies it. Even 
 those critics who deny him certain of the higher qualities 
 of a lyrical poet, do not love him less cordially on account 
 of the other qualities which they are pleased to accord to 
 him. It is commonly enough said that, either from his 
 own deficiencies or those of the Latin language, he falls 
 far short of the Greek lyrical poets in fire, in passion, in 
 elevation of style, in varied melodies of versification. 
 Granted : but judging by the scanty remains of those 
 poets which time has spared, we find evidence of no one — 
 unless it be Alcaeus, and conjecturing what his genius 
 might have been as a whole less by the fragments it has 
 left than by Horace's occasional imitations — no one who 
 combines so many excellences, be they great or small, as 
 
312 causes of Horace's popularity. 
 
 even a very qualified admirer must concede to Horace ; no 
 one who blends so large a knowledge of the practical 
 work-day world with so delicate a fancy, and so graceful a 
 perception of the poetic aspects of human life ; no one who 
 has the same alert quickness of movement U/ from gay to 
 grave, from lively to severe ; " no one who unites the same 
 manly and high-spirited enforcement of hardy virtues, 
 temperance and fortitude, devotion to friends and to the 
 native land, with so pleasurable and genial a tempera- 
 ment ; no one who adorns so extensive an acquaintance 
 with metropolitan civilisation by so many lovely pic- 
 tures of rural enjoyment ; or so animates the description 
 of scenery by the introduction of human groups and 
 images, instilling, as it were, into the body of outward 
 nature the heart and the thought of man. So that where 
 his genius may fail in height as compared with Pindar, 
 or in the intensity of sensuous passion as compared with 
 Sappho, it compensates by the breadth to which it 
 extends its survey, and over which it diffuses its light 
 and its w 7 armth. 
 
 Of all classical authors Horace is the one who has most 
 attracted the emulation of editors and commentators* 
 Students, indeed, have some reason to complain of the 
 very attempts made by learning and ingenuity to deter- 
 mine his text and interpret his meaning. No sooner have 
 they accustomed themselves to one edition than a new one 
 appears to challenge the authority they had deferred to, 
 and disturb the reading they had accepted. Paraphrases 
 and translations are still more numerous than editions and 
 commentaries. There is scarcely a man of letters who has 
 not at one time or other versified or imitated some of the 
 Odes ; and scarcely a year passes without a new translation 
 of them all. No doubt there is a charm in the proverbial 
 difficulty of dealing with Horace's modes of expression ; 
 but perhaps the true cause which invites translators to 
 encounter that difficulty has been sufficiently intimated in 
 the preceding remarks — viz., the comprehensive range of 
 his sympathy with human beings. He touches so many 
 sides of character, that on one side or the other he is sure 
 to attract us all, and we seek to clothe in his words some 
 
causes of Horace's popularity. 313 
 
 isbed feeling or sentiment of our own. Be that as it 
 , an unusual degree of indulgence has by tacit consent 
 . accorded to new translations from Horace. Readers 
 unacquainted with the original are disposed to welcome 
 every fresh attempt to make the Venusian Muse express 
 herself in familiar English ; and Horatian scholars feel 
 an interest in examining how each succeeding translator 
 grapples with the difficulties of interpretation which have 
 been, as many of them still are, matters of conjecture and 
 dispute to commentators the most erudite, and critics the 
 most acute. 
 
 May a reasonable share of such general indulgence be 
 vouchsafed to that variety in the mode of translation of 
 which I now propose to hazard the experiment, 
 
 I have long been of opinion that the adoption of other 
 rhymeless measures than that to which we at present con- 
 fine the designation of blank verse would be attended with 
 especial advantage in translations from the classical poets, 
 and, indeed, in poems founded upon Hellenic and Roman 
 myths, and treated in the classical character and spirit. 
 In that belief I began many years ago these translations 
 from Horace, and more recently submitted to the public 
 the experiment of the metres employed in the " Lost Tales 
 of Miletus.''* I will not lengthen this preface by any de- 
 finition of the general rhythmical principles upon which, 
 in my judgment, lyrical measures that, taking the form of 
 strophe or stanza, dispense with rhyme, should be invented 
 and framed. Should any writer be tempted hereafter to 
 repeat and improve on my experiments, he will easily de- 
 tect the laws I have laid down for myself, and adopt, 
 modify, or reject them, according to his own idiosyncrasies 
 of ear and taste. 
 
 So far as these translations are concerned, it will be 
 seen that I have shunned any attempt to transfer to our 
 own language the exact form of the original metres. 
 I have rather sought to construct measures in accord- 
 ance with the character of English prosody, akin to the 
 prevalent spirit of the original, and of compass sufficient 
 to allow a general adherence to the rule of translating 
 line by line, or at least strophe by strophe, without need- 
 less amplification on the one hand, or harsh contraction 
 on the other. 
 
314 CAUSES OF HOE ACE'S POPULARITY. 
 
 The same licence of diversifying the metres employee 
 translation, according as the prevalent spirit of the 
 demands lively and sportive, or serious and digni: 
 expression, in which most of the rhyming translators un- 
 scrupulously indulge, must be conceded to him who re- 
 jects, rhyme from his version. We have no English 
 metres, rhymed or unrhymed, so supple for the expressing 
 of opposing sentiment or emotion as are the Alcaic, and 
 even the Sapphic, in the hands of Horace ; and if we 
 desire to be true to the spirit of Horace, we have no 
 option but to vary his form, and not always preserve for 
 loose and sprightly movement the same mechanical ar- 
 rangement of syllables which accords with the march of 
 the serried and the grave. 
 
 For the Alcaic stanza I have chiefly employed two 
 different forms of rhythm ; the one, which is of more 
 frequent recurrence, as in Ode ix. — the other, as in Odes 
 xxxiv.-xxxv., Book I. But in both these forms of rhythm 
 I have made occasional variations. 
 
 For the Sapphic metre, in which Horace has composed 
 more odes than in any other except the Alcaic, I have 
 avoided, save in one or two of the shorter poems, any 
 imitation of the chime rendered sufficiently familiar by 
 Canning's " Knife-grinder, " not only because, in the mind 
 of an English reader, it is associated with a popular bur- 
 lesque, but chiefly because an English imitation of the 
 Latin rhythm, with a due observance of the trochee in the 
 first three lines of the stanza, has in itself an unpleasant 
 and monotonous sing-song. In my version of the Sapphic 
 I have chiefly employed two varieties of rhythm : for the 
 statelier odes, our own recognised blank verse in the first 
 three lines, usually, though not always, with a dissyllabic 
 termination; and, in the fourth line, a metre analogous in 
 length and cadence to the fourth line of the original, 
 though, of course, without any attempt at preserving the 
 Latin quantity of dactyl and spondee. In fact, as 
 Dr. Kennedy has truly observed, the spondee is not attain- 
 able in our language, except by a very forced effort of pro- 
 nunciation. That which passes current as an English 
 spondee is really a trochee. For the lighter odes of the 
 Sapphic metre, a more sportive or tripping measure is 
 adopted. 
 
CAUSES OF HOE ACE ? S POPULARITY. 315 
 
 I must leave my versions of the other metres which 
 Horace has less frequently employed to speak for them- 
 selves. 
 
 In the Latin version, placed side by side with the 
 English, I have generally adopted the text of Orelli. The 
 rare instances in which I have differed from it for that of 
 another editor are stated in the notes. For the current 
 punctuation — which in Orelli, and indeed in Macleane, is 
 so sparse as not unfrequently to render the sense obscure to 
 those not familiarly intimate with it — I am largely in- 
 debted to the admirable edition of Mr. Yonge. The modes 
 of spelling preferred by Bitter and Mr. Munro as more 
 faithful transcripts of the ancient MSS., involve questions 
 of great interest to professional scholars, but are as yet 
 too unfamiliar to the general reader for adoption in a 
 text especially designed for his use, and annexed to the 
 English translation for the convenient facilities of reference 
 and comparison. 
 
 My objects in the task I have undertaken have com- 
 pelled me to add in some degree the labour of a critic to 
 that of a translator. The introductions prefixed and the 
 notes appended to the several odes are designed not only 
 to serve for readers unacquainted with the original, but to 
 bring, in a terse and convenient form, before such students 
 of Horace as may not have toiled through the many and 
 often conflicting commentaries of the best editors, the 
 opinions of eminent authorities upon difficult or disputed 
 questions of interpretation. In my notes will be seen the 
 extent to which I am indebted not only to Dillenburger, 
 Orelli, Bitter, but to our own recent English editors, 
 Macleane and Yonge — and, on certain points of con- 
 troverted interpretation, to Mr. Munro' s erudite and 
 valuable introduction to the beautiful edition illustrated 
 from antique gems, by Mr. King. 
 
 The majority of critics concur in the doctrine that all 
 the Odes in Horace, differing in this respect from the 
 Epodes, consist of stanzas in four lines, as the Alcaic and 
 Sapphic do. This opinion has been ably controverted by 
 Bitter. Munro declines either to affirm or deny it. But 
 conformably to the general opinion, I have treated, and s@ 
 translated, the Odes as quatrains, with four exceptions, 
 for which I subjoin my reasons. 
 
316 causes of hobace's popularity. 
 
 Odes i. Book L, xxx. Book III., and viii. Book IV., are 
 in the same metre, and the only ones that are ; but Ode viii. 
 Book IV. consists of thirty-four lines, and cannot there- 
 fore be reduced to quatrain stanzas ; and the supposition 
 that two verses required for such subdivision have been 
 lost — no evidence of such loss appearing in the oldest 
 MSS. or being intimated by the early commentators — is a 
 hazardous basis on which to rest the theory that the poem 
 must have been originally composed in quatrain. It is also 
 to be observed that Ode i. Book I. so little adapts itself to 
 the division of four-line stanzas with a suitable pause, that 
 Mr. Tonge follows Stallbaum in printing the first two 
 lines as prefatory to the rest, and the last two lines as the 
 complement of the stanza. But it is a somewhat bold 
 proceeding, for the sake of establishing an arbitrary sys- 
 tem, thus to cut a stanza in half, placing one half at the 
 beginning and the other half at the end of a poem ; nor 
 does the arrangement entirely effect the object aimed at, 
 if, as Macleane and Munro contend, a full stop should be 
 placed at the end N of the fifth line — " nobilis." Even the 
 remaining ode in this metre — Ode xxx. Book III. — does 
 not readily flow into quatrain, the pause not occurring at 
 the fourth and eighth lines, but at the fifth and ninth. I 
 have not, therefore, in my translation, divided these three 
 odes into stanzas. Lastly, I have followed Dillenburger, 
 Orelli, Macleane, Munro, in the arrangement of Ode xii. 
 Book III. as a stanza of three lines, instead of adopting 
 the quatrain arrangement of Kirchner, to be found in the 
 excursus of Orelli, and favoured by Mr. Yonge. 
 
 The Secular Hymn I have printed in its proper chrono- 
 logical place, between Books III. and IV. 
 
 I concur in the reasons which have led recent editors to 
 reject the headings to the Latin version, which are found 
 in the MSS. ; but I have given headings to the translation, 
 for the convenience of reference which they afford to 
 English readers. 
 
 It remains for me only gratefully to acknowledge my 
 obligations to the distinguished scholars who have per- 
 mitted me to consult them in the course of this trans- 
 lation. Many years ago I submitted the earliest specimens 
 of my attempts to my valued friend Dr. Kennedy. His 
 encouragement induced me to proceed with my under- 
 
CAUSES OF HOE ACES POPULARITY. 317 
 
 taking, while bis advice and suggestions enabled me 
 materially to improve it. With no less liberal a kindness 
 another friend, the Rev. F. W. Farrar, has permitted me 
 to encroach on his time, and profit by his taste and his 
 learning. Much more could I say in gratitude, as to the 
 services so generously rendered me by these eminent 
 scholars, were it not for the fear that I might seem in so 
 doing to shelter my defects and shortcomings under the 
 authority of their names. It is enough for me to acknow- 
 ledge that to them must be largely ascribed any merit 
 which may be accorded to my labours, and that without 
 their aid my faults would have been much more numerous 
 and grave. 
 
ON ART IN FICTION. 
 
 Art is that process by which we give to natural 
 materials the highest excellence they are capable of re- 
 ceiving. 
 
 We estimate the artist, not only in proportion to the 
 success of his labours, but in proportion to the intellectual 
 faculties which are necessary to that success. Thus a 
 watch by Breguet is a beautiful work of art, and so is a 
 tragedy by Sophocles : — The first is even more perfect of 
 its kind than the last, but the tragedy reqnires higher in- 
 tellectual faculties than the watch, and we esteem the 
 tragedian above the watchmaker. 
 
 The excellence of art consists in the fitness of the object 
 proposed with the means adopted. Art carried to its per- 
 fection would be the nnion of the most admirable object 
 with the most admirable means : in other words it would 
 require a greatness in the conception correspondent to the 
 genius in the execution. But as mechanical art is sub- 
 jected to more definite and rigorous laws than intellectual 
 art, so, in the latter, a comprehensive critic regards the 
 symmetry of the whole with large indulgence towards 
 blemishes in detail. We contemplate mechanical art with 
 reference to its utility — intellectual art with reference to 
 its beauty. A single defect in a watch may suffice to 
 destroy all the value of its construction ; — a single blemish 
 in a tragedy may scarcely detract from its effect. 
 
 In regarding any work of art, we must first thoroughly 
 acquaint ourselves with the object that the artist had in 
 view. Were an antiquarian to set before us a drawing, 
 illustrative of the costume of the Jews in the time of 
 Tiberius, we should do right to blame him if he presented 
 to our eye goblets in the fashion of the fifteenth century ; 
 but when Leonardo da Vinci undertook the sublime and 
 moving representation of the Last Supper, we feel that 
 
 * [Original appeared in 1838, in two instalments, headed " The Critic," 
 No. I. and No. II. in the first of the seven volumes of The Monthly Chronicle, 
 published by the Messrs. Longman,] 
 
ON ART IN FICTION. 319 
 
 his object is not that of an antiquary ; and we do not re- 
 gard it as a blemish that the Apostles are seated upright 
 instead of being recumbent, and that the loaves of bread 
 are those of an Italian baker. Perhaps, indeed, the picture 
 affected the spectators the more sensibly from their 
 familiarity "with the details ; and the effect of art on the 
 whole was only heightened by a departure from correctness 
 in minutiae. So, in an anatomical drawing that professed 
 to give the exact proportions of man ; we might censure 
 the designer if the length of the limbs were dispropor- 
 tioned to the size of the trunk : but when the sculptor of 
 the Apollo Belvedere desired to convey to the human eye 
 the ideal of the God of Youth, the length of the limbs 
 contributed to give an additional and superhuman lightness 
 and elasticity to the form ; and the excellence of the art 
 was evinced and promoted by the sacrifice of mechanical 
 accuracy in detail. It follows, therefore, that Intellectual 
 Art and Technical Correctness are far from identical ; that 
 one is sometimes proved by the disdain of the other. And, 
 as this makes the distinction between mechanical and in- 
 tellectual art, so is the distinction remarkable in proportion 
 as that intellectual art is exercised in the highest degree- ; 
 in proportion as it realises the Ideal. For the Ideal con- 
 sists not in the imitation, but the exaltation, of Nature ; 
 and we must accordingly inquire, not how far it resembles 
 what we have seen so much as how far it embodies what 
 we can imagine. 
 
 It is not till we have had great pictures, that we can lay 
 down the rules of painting ; — it is not till we have had 
 great writers in a particular department of intellect, that 
 we can sketch forth a code of laws for those who succeed 
 them : For the theory of art resembles that of science ; 
 we must have data to proceed upon, and our inductions 
 must be drawn from a vast store of experiments. 
 
 Prose fictions have been cultivated by modern writers of 
 such eminence, and now form so wide and essential a part 
 of the popular literature of Europe, that it may not be an 
 uninteresting or an useless task to examine the laws by 
 which the past may be tested, and the labours of future 
 students simplified and abridged. 
 
320 ON ART IN FICTION. 
 
 PROSE FICTIONS. 
 
 The novelist has three departments for his art — Manners, 
 Passions, Character. 
 
 Manners. 
 
 The delineation of manners embraces both past and 
 present ; the Modern and Historical Romance. 
 
 The Historical. 
 
 We have a right to demand from the writer who pro- 
 fesses to illustrate a former age a perfect acquaintance 
 with its characteristics and spirit. At the same time, as 
 he intends rather to interest than instruct ns, his art will 
 be evinced in the illustrations he selects, and the skill with 
 which they are managed. He will avoid all antiquarian 
 dissertations not essentially necessary to the conduct of his 
 tale. If, for instance, his story should have no connection 
 with the mysteries of the middle ages, he will take care 
 how he weary us with an episodical description that 
 
 anges his character from that of a narrator into that of 
 a lecturer. In the tale of " Notre Dame de Paris," by 
 Victor Hugo, the description of the Cathedral of Notre 
 Dame is not only apposite, bnt of the deepest interest ; 
 for the cathedral is, by a high effort of art, made an abso- 
 lute portion of the machinery of the tale. But the long 
 superfluous description of the spectacle with which the 
 story opens is merely a parade of antiquarian learning, 
 because the Scholars and the Mysteries have no propor- 
 tionate bearing whatever in the future development of 
 the tale. 
 
 The usual fault of the historical novelist is over minute- 
 ness in descriptions of dress and feasts, of pageants and 
 processions. Minuteness is not accuracy. On the con- 
 trary, the more the novelist is minute, the more likely he 
 is to mar the accurate effect of the whole, either by 
 wearisome tameness or some individual error. 
 
 An over antiquated phraseology is a common and a most 
 inartistical defect : whatever diction the delineator of a 
 distant age employs can never be faithful to the language 
 of the time, for, if so, it would be unintelligible. So, in 
 
OX ART IN FICTION. 321 
 
 the German novels that attempt a classical subject, there 
 is the prevalent vice of a cold imitation of a classic epis- 
 tolary style. It is the very attempt at resemblance that 
 destroys the illusion, as it is by the servility of a copy that 
 we are most powerfully reminded of the difference between 
 the copy and the original. The language of a former 
 time should be presented to us in the freest and most 
 familiar paraphrase we can invent. Thus the mind is 
 relieved at once from the task of forming perpetual com- 
 parisons, and surrenders itself to the delusion the more 
 easily, from the very candour with which the author 
 makes demand on its credulity. In selecting a particular 
 epoch, for illustration, an artistical author will consider 
 well what is the principal obstacle in the mind of his 
 audience to the reception of his story. For instance, if he 
 selects a story of ancient Greece, the public will be predis- 
 posed to anticipate a frigid pedantry of style, and delinea- 
 tions of manners utterly different from those which are 
 familiar to us now. The author will, therefore, agreeably 
 surprise the reader, if he adopt a style as familiar and 
 easy which a Greek would have used in common conversa- 
 tion ; and show the classical spirit that pervades his 
 diction, by the grace of the poetry, or the lightness of the 
 wit, with which he can adorn his allusions and his 
 dialogue. Thus, the very learning he must evince will 
 only be but incidental and easy ornament. On the other 
 hand, instead of selecting such, specimens and modifications 
 of human nature as are most different from, and unfamiliar 
 to the sympathies of modern times, he will rather prefer to 
 appeal to the eternal sentiments of the heart, by showing 
 how closely the men of one age resemble those of another. 
 His hero, his lover, his epicure, his buffoon, his miser, his 
 boaster, will be as close to the life as if they were drawn 
 from the streets of London. The reader will be interested 
 to see society different, yet men the same ; and the Man- 
 ners will be relieved from the disadvantage of unfamiliarity 
 by an entire sympathy with the humours they mark, or the 
 passions on which they play. 
 
 Again, if the author propose to carry his readers to the 
 time of Richard I., or of Elizabeth, he will have to en- 
 counter a universal repugnance from the thought of an imi- 
 tation of " Ivanhoe " or " Kenil worth*" An author who was, 
 
 Y 
 
322 ON ART IN FICTION. 
 
 nevertheless, resolved to select such a period for his narra- 
 tive would, accordingly, if an artist of sufficient excellence, 
 avoid, with care, touching upon any of the points which 
 may suggest the recollection of Scott. He would deeply 
 consider all the features of the time, and select those ne- 
 glected by his predecessor ; — would carefully note all tha 
 deficiencies of the author of " Kenilworth," and seize at 
 once upon the ground which that versatile genius omitted 
 to consecrate to himself. 
 
 To take the same epoch ; the same characters, even the 
 same narrative, as a distinguished predecessor, is perfectly 
 allowable ; and if successful, a proof at once of originality 
 and skill. But if you find the shadow of the previous 
 work flinging itself over your own, — if you have not 
 thoroughly escaped the influence of the first occupant of 
 the soil — you will only invest your genius to unnecessary 
 disadvantage, and build edifices, however graceful and 
 laboured, upon the freehold of another. 
 
 In novels devoted to the delineation of existing manners, 
 the young author will be surprised to find, that exact and 
 unexaggerated fidelity has never been the characteristic of 
 the greatest novelists of their own time. There would be, 
 indeed, something inane and trifling, or mean and vulgar, 
 in Dutch copies of the modern still life. We do not 
 observe any frivolity in Walter Scott, when he describes 
 with elaborate care the set of the ruffle, the fashion of the 
 cloak of Sir Walter Raleigh, nor when he catalogues all 
 the minutiae of the chamber of Rowena. But to intro- 
 duce your hero of " May Fair," with an exact portraiture 
 of the colour of his coat or the length of his pantaloons, 
 to item all the commodes and fauteuils of a Lady Caro- 
 line or Frances, revolts our taste as an effeminate attention 
 to trifles. 
 
 In humbler life the same rule applies with equal 
 strength. We are willing to know how Gurth was 
 dressed or Esmeralda lodged, but we do not require the 
 same minuteness in describing the smock frock of a la- 
 bourer, or the garret of the girl who is now walking upon 
 stilts for a penny. The greatest masters of the novel of 
 modern life have usually availed themselves of Humour as 
 the illustration of manners ; and have, with a deep and 
 true, but perhaps unconscious, knowledge of art, pushed 
 
ON ART IN FICTION. 323 
 
 the humour almost to the verge of caricature. For as the 
 Serious Ideal requires a certain exaggeration in the pro- 
 portions of the Natural, so also does the Ludicrous. Thus 
 Aristophanes, in painting the h amours of his time, resorts 
 to the most poetical extravagance of machinery, and calls 
 the clouds in aid of his ridicule of philosophy, or summons 
 frogs and gods to unite in his satire on Euripides. The 
 Don Quixote of Cervantes never lived, nor, despite the 
 vulgar belief, ever could have lived, in Spain ; but the 
 art of the portrait is in the admirable exaltation of the 
 Humorous by means of the Exaggerated. With more 
 qualification the same may be said of Parson Adams, of 
 Sir Roger de Coverley, and even of the Vicar of Wake- 
 field. 
 
 Where the author has not adopted the Humorous as the 
 best vehicle for the delineation of manners, he has some- 
 times artfully removed the scene from the country that he 
 seeks to delineate, so that he might place his portraitures 
 at a certain, and the most advantageous, distance from the 
 eye. Thus, Le Sage obtains his object, of a consummate 
 and masterly picture of the manners of his own land, 
 though he has taken Spain for the theatre of the adven- 
 tures of Gil Bias ; and Swift has transferred all that his 
 experience or his malice could narrate of the intrigues of 
 courts, the chimeras of philosophy, the follies and vices of 
 his nation and his time, to the regions of Lilliput and 
 Laputa. 
 
 It may be observed, that the delineation of manners is 
 usually the secondary object of a novelist of high power. 
 To a penetrating mind manners are subservient to the 
 illustration of views of life or the consummation of original 
 character. In a few years the mere portraiture of manners 
 is obsolete. It is the knowledge of what is durable in 
 human nature that alone preserves the work from decay. 
 Lilly and Shakspeare alike painted the prevailing and 
 courtly mannerism of their age. The Euphues rests upon 
 ourselves — Don Arinado will delight us as long as pedantry 
 exists. 
 
 y2 
 
324 ON ART IN FICTION. 
 
 Character. 
 
 An author once said, " Give me a character, and I will 
 find the play ; " and, if we look to the most jDopular novels 
 we shall usually find, that where one reader speaks of the 
 conduct of the story, a hundred readers will speak of the 
 excellence of some particular character. 
 
 An author, before resolving on the characters he designs 
 to portray, will do well to consider maturely, first, what 
 part they are designed to play in his performance ; and, 
 secondly, what is the precise degree of interest which he 
 desires them to create. Having thus considered and duly 
 determined, he will take care that no other character in 
 the work shall interfere with the effect each is intended to 
 produce. Thus, if his heroine is to be drawn gentle and 
 mild, no second heroine, with the same attributes, should 
 distract the attention of the reader, a rule which may seem 
 obvious but which is usually overlooked. When the 
 author feels that he has thoroughly succeeded in a prin- 
 cipal and predominant character, he will even sacrifice 
 others, nominally more important, to increase the interest 
 of the figure in the foreground. Thus, in the tale of 
 " Ivanhoe," Rowena, professedly the heroine, is very pro- 
 perly sacrificed to Rebecca. The more interesting the 
 character of Rowena, the more pathetic the position she 
 had assumed, the more we should have lost our compassion 
 and admiration of the Jewess, and the highest merit of the 
 tale, its pathos, would have been diminished. The same 
 remark will apply to the Clementina and Harriet Byron of 
 Richardson. 
 
 The author. will take care not to crowd his canvas. He 
 will select as few characters as are compatible with the 
 full agency of his design. Too many plants in a narrow 
 compass destroy each other. He will be careful to indivi- 
 dualise each ; but if aspiring to the highest order of art, 
 he will yet tone down their colours by an infinite variety 
 of shades. The most original colours are those most 
 delicately drawn, where the individual peculiarity does not 
 obtrude itself naked and unrelieved. It was a very cheap 
 purchase of laughter in Sir Walter Scott, and a mere 
 trick of farce, which Shakspeare and Cervantes would 
 have disdained, to invest a favourite humorist with some 
 
OX ART IN FICTION. 323 
 
 cant phrase, which he cannot open his mouth without dis- 
 gorging. The "Prodigious" of Dominie Sampson, the 
 11 My Father the Baillie," of Nichol Jarvie, the " Provant " 
 
 of Major Dalgettie, the "Dejeuner at Tillietudlem," of Lady 
 Margaret Bellenden, &c, all belong to one source of 
 humour, and that the shallowest and most hackneyed. If 
 your tale spread over a considerable space of time, you 
 will take care that your readers may note the change of 
 character which time has necessarily produced. You will 
 quietly show the difference between the boy of eighteen 
 and the man of forty; you will connect the change in 
 the character with the influence of the events you have 
 narrated. In the novel of " Anastasius," this article of 
 composition is skilfully and delicately mastered, more so 
 than in " Gil Bias." 
 
 If you bend all your faculties to the development of 
 some single character, and you make us sensible that such 
 is your object, the conduct of your story becomes but a 
 minor consideration. Shakspeare probably cared but little 
 whether the fencing scene in " Hamlet " was the best catas- 
 trophe he could invent ; he took the incidents of the story 
 as he found them, and lavished his genius on the workings 
 of the mind, to which all external incidents on this side 
 the grave had become trivial and uninfluential — weary, 
 unprofitable, stale. 
 
 It must rest entirely on the nature of the interest you 
 desire it to effect, whether you seek clearly to place before 
 us, or dimly to shadow out, each particular character. If 
 you connect your hero with supernatural agency, if you 
 introduce agents not accounted for by purely human 
 means, if you resort to the Legendary and Mysterious, for 
 the interest you identify with any individual character, it 
 may be most artistical to leave such a character vague, 
 shadow}-, and half-incompleted. Thus, very skilfully is 
 the Master of Ravenswood, over whose head hang 
 ominous and weird predictions, left a less distinct and 
 palpable creation, than the broad-shouldered and much- 
 eating heroes whom Scott usually conducts through a 
 labyrinth of adventures to marriage with a wealthy 
 Ariadne. 
 
 The formation of characters, improbable and grotesque, 
 is not very compatible with a high conception of art, unless 
 
826 ON ART m FICTION. 
 
 tlie work be one that so avowedly deals with beings dif- 
 ferent from those we mix with, that onr imagination is 
 prepared as to the extent of the demand upon its faith. 
 Thus, when Shakspeare introduces us at once to the En- 
 chanted Island, and we see the wand of the magician, and 
 hear the song of Ariel, we are fully prepared to consider 
 Caliban a proper inhabitant of such a soil ; or when the 
 " Faust " opens with the chorus of angels, and the black dog 
 appears in the chamber of the solitary student, the imagi- 
 nation finds little difficulty in yielding assent to the 
 vagaries of the witches, and the grotesque diablerie of the 
 Hartz Mountains ; but we are wholly unprepared to find a 
 human Caliban in the bell-ringer of a Parisian cathedral ; 
 and we see no reason why Quasimodo should not have 
 been as well shaped as other people. The use of the gro- 
 tesque in " The Abbot," where Sir Percy Shafto is killed 
 and revived, is an absurdity which is as gross as can well 
 be conceived. 
 
 In the portraiture of evil and criminal characters lies 
 the widest scope for an author profoundly versed in the 
 philosophy of the human heart. In all countries, in all 
 times, the delineation of crime has been consecrated to the 
 highest order of poetry. For as the emotions of terror 
 and pity are those which it falls to the province of the 
 sublimest genius to arouse, so it is chiefly, though not 
 solely, in the. machinations of guilt that may be found, the 
 source of the one, and in the misfortunes, sometimes of the 
 victim of the guilt, nay, sometimes of the guilty agent 
 himself, that we arrive at the fountain of the softer 
 passion. Thus, the murder of Duncan rouses our compas- 
 sion, through our admission to all the guilty doubts and 
 aspirations of Macbeth ; and our terror is of a far higher 
 and more enthralling order, because it is reflected back 
 upon us from the bared and struggling heart of the mur- 
 derer, than it would have been if we had seen the physical 
 death of the victim. It may be observed, indeed, that, in 
 a fine tragedy, it is the preparation to the death that is to 
 constitute the catastrophe, that usually most sensibly 
 excites the interest of terror, and that the blow of the 
 murderer and the fall of the victim is but a release to the 
 suspense of fear, and changes the whole current of our 
 emotions. But the grandest combination is when the 
 
OX ART IN FICTION. 327 
 
 artist unite one person the opposite passions of terror 
 
 and pitj r — 1 we feel at once the horror of the crime, 
 
 jet compassi for the criminal. Tims, in the most 
 stirring of ai' 1 fche ancient dramas, the moment that we 
 discover that : lipus has committed the crimes from 
 which we mo avolt, homicide and incest, is the very 
 moment in which, to the deepest terror of the crimes is 
 united the most intense compassion for the criminal. So 
 again before the final catastrophe of the mystic fate of 
 Macbeth, when evil predictions are working to their close, 
 and we feel that his hour is come, Shakspeare has paused, 
 to draw from the dark bosom of the fated murderer those 
 moving reflections, "My way of life," &c, which steal 
 from us insensibly our hatred of his guilt, and awaken a 
 new and softer interest in the approaching consummation 
 of the usurper's doom. Again, in the modern play of 
 " Virginius," when the scene opens and discovers the 
 avenging father upon the body of the murdered Appius, it 
 is in Virginius, at once criminal and childless, that are 
 concentrated our pity and our terror. 
 
 In the portraiture of crime, however dark, the artist 
 will take care to throw some redeeming light. The 
 veriest criminal has some touch, and remnant of human 
 goodness, and it is according as this sympathy between 
 the outcast and ourselves is indicated or insinuated, that 
 the author profanes or masters the noblest mysteries of his 
 art. Where the criminal be one so resolute and hardened, 
 so inexorable and preterhuman, in his guilt, that he passes 
 the bounds of flesh and blood inconsistencies and sympa- 
 thies, a great artist will bring forth intellectual quali- 
 ties to balance our disgust at the moral. Thus, in 
 "Richard III.," it is with a masterly skill that Shakspeare 
 relieves us from the revolting contemplation of unmingied 
 crime, by enlisting our involuntary and unconscious admi- 
 ration on the side of the address, the subtle penetration 
 into character, the affluent wit, the daring energy, the 
 royal will, with which the ruthless usurper moves through 
 the bloody scenes of his treachery. And at the last, it is, 
 if not by a relic of human virtue, at least by a relic of 
 huma?i weakness, by the working conscience, and the 
 haunted pillow, that we are taught to remember that it is 
 a man who sins and suffers, not a beast that ravages and 
 
328 ON ART IN FICTION. 
 
 is slain. Still, despite all the subtle shadings in the 
 character of Richard, we feel that the guilt is overdrawn — ■ 
 that the dark spirit wants a moral as well as intellectual 
 relief. To penetrating critics, it has always, therefore, 
 been the most coarse of all the creations of Shak- 
 speare, and will never bear a comparison, as a dissection of 
 human nature, with the goaded and writhing wickedness 
 of Macbeth. 
 
 In the delineation of a criminal, the author will take 
 car.e to show us the motives of the crimes — the influences 
 beneath which the character has been formed. He will 
 suit the nature of the criminal to the state of society in 
 which he is cast. Thus he will have occasions for the 
 noblest morality. By concentrating in one focus the 
 vicious influences of any peculiar error in the social 
 system, he will hold up a mirror to nations them- 
 selves. 
 
 As the bad man will not be painted as thoroughly and 
 unredeemably bad, so he whom you represent as good, 
 will have his foibles or infirmities. You will show 
 where even the mainspring of his virtues sometimes calls 
 into play a counter vice. Your just man will be some- 
 times severe ; your generous man will be sometimes care- 
 less of the consequences of generosity. It is true that, in 
 both these applications of art, you will be censured by 
 shallow critics and pernicious moralists. It will be said 
 of you in the one case, " He seeks to interest us in a 
 murderer, or a robber, an adulterer, or a parricide ; " it 
 will be said of you in the other, " And this man whom he 
 holds up to us as an example, whom he calls wise and 
 good, is a rascal who indulges such an error, or commits 
 such an excess." But no man can be an artist who does 
 not prefer experience and human nature to all criticism, 
 and for the rest he must be contented to stand on the 
 same ground, or to have filled his urn from the same foun- 
 tains, as Shakspeare and Boccaccio, as Goethe and 
 Schiller, Fielding and Le Sage. If it be, however, neces- 
 sary to your design to paint some character as almost 
 faultless, as exempt from our common infirmities and 
 errors, you w T ill act skilfully if you invest it with the 
 attributes of old age. When all the experience of error 
 has been dearly bought, when the passions are laid at 
 
02s ART IN FICTIOK 
 
 rest, and the mind burns clear as tlic night deepens, virtue 
 docs in fact become less and less wavering and imperfect. 
 Bur youth without a fault would be youth without a 
 passion : and such a portrait would make n ir of 
 
 emulation, and arm against reverence and esteem all the 
 jealousies of self-love. 
 
 The Passioss. 
 
 Delineation of passions is inseparable from the delinea- 
 tion of character. A novel admirable in character, may, 
 indeed, be drawn, in which the passions are but coldly and 
 feebly shadowed forth. " Gil Bias " is an example. Bat 
 either such novels are intended as representations of 
 external life, not of the metaphysical operations of the 
 inner man, or they deal with the humours and follies, not 
 the grave and deep emotions, of our kind, and belong to 
 the Comedy of Romance. 
 
 But if a novel of character can be excellent without 
 passion, it would be impossible to create a novel of pas- 
 sion without character. The elementary passions them- 
 selves, like the elements, are few : it is the modifications 
 they take in passing through different bodies that give us 
 so inexhaustible a variety of lights and shadows of loveli- 
 ness and glory. 
 
 The passion of Love is not represented by a series of 
 eloquent rhapsodies, or even of graceful sentiments. It is 
 represented in fiction by its effects on some particular 
 character; the same with Jealousy, Avarice, Revenge, &c. 
 Therefore, in a certain sense of the word, all representa- 
 tions of passion in fiction may be considered typical. In 
 Juliet it is not the picture of love solely and ab- 
 stractedly, it is the picture of love in its fullest effect on 
 youth. In Antony it is love as wild, and as frantic, and 
 as self-sacrificing ; but it is love, not emanating froni the 
 enthusiasm of youth, but already touched with something 
 of the blindness and infirmity of dotage. 
 
 In Macbeth it is not the mere passion of ambition that 
 is portrayed, it is ambition operating on a man physically 
 daring, and morally irresolute ; a man whom the darkest 
 agencies alone can compel, and whom the fullest triumphs 
 of success cannot reconcile to crime. So, if we review all 
 
330 OX ART IN FICTION. 
 
 the passionate characters of Shakspeare, we shall find that 
 the passion is individualised and made original by the 
 mould in which the fiery liquid is cast. Nor is the lan- 
 guage of that passion declamation upon the passion itself, 
 but the revelation of the effect it produces on a single 
 subject. It is accordingly in the perfect harmony that 
 exists between the character and the passion, that the 
 abstract and bodiless idea finds human force and cor- 
 poreal interest. If you would place the passion before us 
 in a new light, the character that represents it must be 
 original. An artistical author, taking advantage of the 
 multiform inconsistencies of human nature, will often give 
 to the most hackneyed passion a thoroughly new form, by 
 placing it in a character where it could least be looked for. 
 For instance, should you desire to portray avarice, you 
 will go but on worn-out ground, if you resort to Plautus 
 and Moliere for your model. But if you find in history 
 the record of a brilliant courtier, a successful general, 
 marked and signalised by the vice of Harpagon, the vice 
 itself takes a new hue, and your portraiture will be a new 
 addition to our knowledge of the mysteries of our kind. 
 Such a representation, startling, untouched, and truthful, 
 might be taken from the character of the Duke of Marl- 
 borough, the hero of Blenheim. In portraying the effect 
 of a passion, the rarest art of the novelist is to give it its 
 due weight, and no more. Thus, in love novels we usually 
 find nothing but love ; as if in the busy and complicated 
 life of man, there were no other spring to desire and 
 action but 
 
 " Love, love eternal love." 
 
 Again, if an author portrays a miser, he never draws 
 him otherwise than as a miser. He makes him, not the 
 avaricious miser, but abstract avarice itself. Not so 
 Shakspeare when he created Shylock. Other things, 
 other motives occupy the spirit of the Jew besides his gold 
 and his argosies ; he is a grasping and relentless miser, yet 
 he can give up avarice to revenge. He has sublime pas- 
 sions that elevate his mean ones. 
 
 If your novel be devoted to love and its effects, you will 
 act more consistently with the truths of life, if you throw 
 the main interest of the passion in the heroine. In the 
 
ON ART IN FICTION. 3 SI 
 
 hero you will increase our sense of the power of the pas- 
 sion, if you show us all the conflicting passions with which 
 in men it usually contends — ambition, or honour, or duty : 
 the more the effect of love is shown by the obstacles it 
 silently subdues, the more triumphant will be your success. 
 You will recollect that in the novel, as in the drama, it is 
 in the struggle of emotions that the science of the heart is 
 best displayed ; and in the delineation of such struggles, 
 there is ground little occupied hitherto by the great 
 masters of English fiction. It was not in the province of 
 Fielding or Smollett, and Scott but rarely indulges, and 
 still more rarely succeeds, in the metaphysical operations 
 of stormy and conflicting feelings. He rather seems to 
 have made it a point of art to imitate the ancient painter, 
 and throw a veil over passions he felt inadequate to ex- 
 press. Thus, after the death and burial of Lucy, it is only 
 by the heavy and unequal tread of Eavenswood, in his 
 solitary chamber, that his agonies are to be conjectured. 
 But this avoidance of the internal man, if constant and 
 systematic, is but a clever trick to hide the want of power. 
 
 The Sentiment. 
 
 The Sentiment that pervades a book is often its most 
 effective moral, and its most nniversal charm. It is a per- 
 vading and indescribable harmony in which the heart of 
 the author seems silently to address our own. Through 
 creations of crime and vice, there may be one pervading 
 sentiment of virtue ; through the humblest scenes, a senti- 
 ment of power and glory. It is the sentiment of Words- 
 worth of which his disciples speak, when they enlarge upon 
 attributes of holiness and beauty, which detached pas- 
 sages, however exquisite, do not suffice to justify. Of all 
 the qnalities of fiction, the sentiment is that which we can 
 least subject to the inquiries or codes of criticism. It 
 emanates from the moral and predominant quality of the 
 author — the perfume from his genius : and by it he un- 
 consciously reveals himself. The sentiment of Shakspeare 
 is in the strong sympathies with all that is human. In the 
 sentiment of Swift, we see the reflection of a spirit dis- 
 contented and malignant. Mackenzie, Goldsmith, Voltaire, 
 Rousseau, betray their several characters as much in the 
 
33 2 ON ART IN FICTION. 
 
 prevalent sentiments of their writings as if tli<; had made 
 themselves the heroes. Of all writers of great genius, 
 Shakspeare has the most sentiment, and, perhaps, Smollett 
 and Defoe the least. The student will distinguish between 
 a work of sentiment and a sentimental work. As the 
 charm of sentiment in a fiction is that it is latent and in- 
 definite, so the charm vanishes directly it becomes ob- 
 truding and importunate. The mistake of Kotzebue, and 
 many of the Germans, of Metastasio and a feeble and 
 ephemeral school of the Italians, was in the confounding 
 sentiment with, passion. 
 
 Sentiment is capable of many classifications and sub- 
 divisions. The first and finest is that touched upon — the 
 sentiment of the whole work : a sentiment of beauty or of 
 grandeur— of patriotism or of benevolence — of veneration 
 of justice, or of piety. This may be perfectly distinct 
 from the character or scenes portrayed : it evinces itself 
 insensibly and invisibly : and we do not find its effect till 
 we sum up all the effects that the work has bequeathed. 
 The sentiment is, therefore, often incorporated and iden- 
 tified with the moral tendency of the fiction. 
 
 There is also a sentiment that belongs to style, and gives 
 depth and colouring to peculiar passages. For instance, in 
 painting a pastoral life in the heart of lonely forests, or by 
 the side of unpolluted streams, the language and thoughts 
 of the author glide into harmony with the images he 
 creates ; and we feel that he has, we scarcely know by 
 what art, penetrated himself and us with the Sentiment of 
 Repose. 
 
 A sentiment of this nature will be felt at once by the 
 lovers of Spenser, and of Ariosto and Tasso. In the en- 
 trance to the domains of Death, Milton breathes over the 
 whole description the Sentiment of Awe. 
 
 The Sentiments are distinct from the Passions : some- 
 times they are most eloquent in the utter absence of pas- 
 sion itself ; as the sentiment that pervades the poem of 
 " The Castle of Indolence ; " — at other times they are the 
 neighbours, the intervening shades, between one passion 
 and another; as the Sentiment of a Pleasing Melancholy. 
 Regret and Awe are sentiments ; Grief and Sorrow, 
 passions. 
 
 As there is a sentiment that belongs to description, so 
 
ON AllT IN FICTION. 333 
 
 there are characters in which sentiment supplies the place 
 of passion. The character of Jacques, in " As You Like 
 It," is purely one of sentiment. Usually sentiment is, in 
 character, most effective when united with humour, as in 
 Uncle Toby and Don Quixote, and, to quote a living 
 writer, some of the masterly creations of Paul de Kock. 
 For the very delicacy of the sentiment will be most appa- 
 rent by the contrast of what seems to us at first the oppo- 
 site quality, as the violet we neglect in the flower-bed, 
 enchants us in the hollow of a rock. 
 
 In the subsequent part of this paper it is proposed to 
 enter upon the construction of the fiction itself — the dis- 
 tinctions between the Drama and the Novel — and the 
 mechanism, conduct, and catastrophe of the different 
 species of Invented Narrative. 
 
 The Conception. 
 
 A story may be well constructed, yet devoid of interest ; 
 on the other hand, the construction may be faulty and the 
 interest vivid. This is the case even with the drama. 
 "Hamlet " is not so well constructed a story as the "Don 
 Carlos " of Alfieri ; but there is no comparison in the 
 degree of interest excited in either tragedy. Still, though 
 we ought not to consider that excellence in the technical 
 arrangement of incidents as a certain proof of the highest 
 order of art, it is a merit capable of the most brilliant 
 effects when possessed by a master. 
 
 An exquisite mechanism in the construction of the mere 
 story, not only gives pleasure in itself, but it displays 
 other and loftier beauties to the best advantage. It is the 
 setting of the jewels. 
 
 It is common to many novelists to commence a work 
 without any distinct chart of the country which they 
 intend to traverse — to suffer one chapter to grow out of 
 another, and invention to warm as the creation grows. 
 Scott * has confessed to this mode of novel writing ; but 
 Scott, with all his genius, was rather a great mechanist 
 
 * See Mr. Lockhart's Life of Scott, vol. v. p. 232 : " In writing I never 
 could lay down a plan/' &c. Scott, however, has the candour to add, "I 
 would not have young writers imitate my carelessness." 
 
334 OJST art m FICTION. 
 
 than a great artist. His execution was infinitely superior 
 to his conception. It may be observed, indeed, that his 
 conceptions are often singularly poor and barren, compared 
 with the vigour with which they are marked out. He 
 conceives a story with the design of telling it as well as he 
 can, but is wholly insensible to the high and true aim of 
 art, which is rather to consider for what objects the story 
 should be told. Scott never appears to say to himself, 
 " Such a tale will throw a new light upon human passions, 
 or add fresh stores to human wisdom : for that reason I 
 select it. He seems rather to consider what picturesque 
 effects it will produce, what striking scenes, what illustra- 
 tions of mere manners. He regards the story with the eye 
 of the property man, though he tells it with the fervour of 
 the poet. It is not thus that the greatest authorities in 
 fiction have composed. It is clear to us that Shakspeare, 
 when he selected the tale which he proposed to render 
 Xpwa « del — the everlasting possession of mankind, made it 
 his first and paramount object to work out certain passions 
 or affections of the mind, in the most complete and pro- 
 found form. He did not so much consider how the in- 
 cidents might be made most striking, as how the truths of 
 the human heart might be made most clear. And it is a 
 remarkable proof of his consummate art, that though in 
 his best plays we may find instances in which the mere 
 incidents might be made more probable, and the theatrical 
 effects more vivid. We can never see one instance in such 
 plays where the passion he desired to represent could have 
 been placed in a broader light, or the character he designed 
 to investigate could have been submitted to a minuter 
 analysis. Weare quite sure that " Othello " and "Macbeth" 
 were not written without the clear and deep and pre- 
 meditative conception of the story to be told us. For with 
 Shakspeare the conception itself is visible and gigantic 
 from the first line to the last. So in the greatest works of 
 Fielding a very obtuse critic may perceive that the author 
 sat down to write in order to embody a design previously 
 formed. The perception of moral truths urged him to the 
 composition of his fictions. In Jonathan Wild, the finest 
 prose satire in the English language, Fielding, before he 
 set pen to paper, had resolved to tear the mask from False 
 Greatness. In his conception of the characters and his- 
 
OX ART IN FICTION. 335 
 
 tories of Blifil and Jones, he was bent on dethroning that 
 popular idol — False Virtue. The scorn of hypocrisy in all 
 grades, all places, was the intellectual passion of Fielding; 
 and his masterpieces are the results of intense convictions. 
 That many incidents never contemplated would suggest 
 themselves as he proceeded — that the technical plan of 
 events might deviate and vary according as he saw new 
 modes of enforcing his aims, is unquestionable. But still 
 Fielding always commenced with a plan, with a conception 
 — with a moral end, to be achieved by definite agencies, 
 and through the medium of certain characters preformed 
 in his mind. If Scott had no preconcerted story when he 
 commenced chapter the first of one of his delightful tales, 
 it was because he was 'deficient in the highest attributes of 
 art, viz., its philosophy and its ethics. He never seems to 
 have imagined that the loftiest merit of a tale rests upon 
 the effect it produces, not on the fancy, but on the intellect 
 and the passions. He had no grandeur of conception, for 
 he had no strong desire to render palpable and immortal 
 some definite and abstract truth. 
 
 It is a sign of the low state of criticism in this country, 
 that Scott has been compared to Shakspeare. ISTo two 
 writers can be more entirely opposed to each other in 
 the qualities of their genius, or the sources to which they 
 were applied. Shakspeare, ever aiming at the develop- 
 ment of the secret man, and half disdaining the mechanism 
 of external incidents. Scott, painting the ruffles and the 
 dress and the features and the gestures — avoiding the 
 movements of the heart — elaborate in the progress of the 
 incident. Scott never caught the mantle of Shakspeare, 
 but he improved on the dresses of his wardrobe, and 
 threw artificial effects into the scenes of his theatres. 
 
 Let us take an example : we will select one of the finest 
 passages in Sir Walter Scott, a passage unsurpassed for 
 its mastery over the Picturesque. It is that chapter in 
 " Kenilworth 5 ' where Elizabeth has discovered Amy, and 
 formed her first suspicions of Leicester. 
 
 " Leicester was at this moment the centre of a splendid 
 group of lords and ladies assembled together under a 
 portico which closed the alley. The company had drawn 
 together in that place to attend the commands ©f her 
 Majesty when the hunting party should go forward, and 
 
336 ON ART IN FICTION. 
 
 their astonishment niay be imagined, when^ instead of 
 seeing Elizabeth, advance towards them with her usual 
 measured dignity of motion, they beheld her walking so 
 rapidly, that she was in the midst of them ere they were 
 aware, and then observed, with fear and surprise, that her 
 features were flushed betwixt anger and agitation, that 
 her hair was loosened by her haste of motion, and that 
 her eyes sparkled as they were wont when the spirit 
 of Henry VIII. mounted highest in his daughter. Nor 
 were they less astonished at the appearance of the pale, 
 attenuated, half- dead, yet still lovely female, whom the 
 queen upheld by main strength with one hand, while with 
 the other she waived aside the ladies and nobles who 
 pressed towards her, under the idea that she was taken 
 suddenly ill. ' Where is my Lord of Leicester ? ' she said, 
 in a tone that thrilled with astonishment all the courtiers 
 who stood around. i Stand forth, my Lord of Leicester ! ' 
 "If in the midst of the most serene day of summer, 
 when all is light and laughing around, a thunder-bolt were 
 to fall from the clear blue vault of heaven, and rend the 
 earth at the very feet of some careless traveller, he could 
 not gaze upon the smouldering chasm which so unex- 
 pectedly yawned before him, with half the astonishment 
 and fear which Leicester felt at the sight which so unex- 
 pectedly presented itself. He had that instant been 
 receiving, with a political affectation of disavowing and 
 misunderstanding their meaning, the half-uttered, half- 
 intimated congratulations of the courtiers upon the favour 
 of the queen, carried apparently to its highest pitch during 
 the interview of that morning ; from which most of them 
 seemed to augur, that he might soon arise from their equal 
 in rank to become their master. And now, while the 
 subdued yet proud smile with which he disclaimed those 
 inferences was yet curling his cheek, the queen shot into 
 the circle, her passions excited to the uttermost, and sup- 
 porting with one hand, and apparently without an effort, 
 the pale and sinking form of his almost expiring wife, and 
 pointing with the other to her half- dead features, demanded, 
 in a voice that sounded to the ears of the astounded 
 statesman, like the last dread trumpet-call that is to sum- 
 mon body and spirit to the Judgment-seat, ' Knowest thou 
 this woman ? ' " 
 
ON ART IN FICTION. 337 
 
 The reader will observe tbat the whole of this splendid 
 passage is devoted to external effects : the loosened hair 
 and sparkling eyes of Elizabeth — the grouping of * the 
 courtiers — the proud smile yet on the cheek of Leicester — 
 the pale and sinking form of the wife. Only by external 
 effects do we guess at the emotions of the agents. Scott 
 is thinking of the costume and postures of the actors, not 
 the passions they represent. Let us take a parallel pas- 
 sage in Shakspeare, parallel, for in each a mind disturbed 
 with jealousy is the real object placed before the reader. 
 It is thus that Iago describes Othello after the latter has 
 conceived his first suspicions. 
 
 "Look where lie comes ! Not poppy nor mandragora, 
 Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, 
 Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep 
 "Which thou oV dst yesterday. 
 
 Othello. Ha ! ha ! false to me ?" 
 
 Here the reader will observe that there is no attempt at 
 the Picturesque — no sketch of the outward man. It is only 
 by a reference to the woe that kills sleep that we can form 
 any notion of the haggard aspect of the Moor. So, if we 
 compare the ensuing dialogue in the romance with that in 
 the tragedy, we shall remark that Elizabeth utters only 
 bursts of shallow passion, which convey none of the deep 
 effects of the philosophy of jealousy, none of the senti- 
 ments that " inform us what we are." But every sentence 
 uttered by Othello penetrates to the very root of the pas- 
 sion described : the farewell to fame and pomp, which 
 comes from a heart that, finding falsehood in the prop it 
 leaned on, sees the world itself a*nd all its quality and 
 circumstance, crumbled away ; the burst of vehement in- 
 credulity ; the sudden return to doubt ; the intense revenge 
 proportioned to the intense love ; the human weakness that 
 must seek faith somewhere, and, with the loss of Desdemona, 
 casts itself upon her denouncer ; the mighty knowledge 
 of the heart exhibited in those simple words to Iago, " I 
 greet thy love ! " — compare all this with the mere words 
 of Elizabeth, which have no force in themselves, but are 
 made effective by the picturesque grouping of the scene, 
 you will detect at once the astonishing difference between 
 Shakspeare and Scott. Shakspeare could have composed 
 
338 ON ART IN FICTION. 
 
 the most wonderful plays from the stories in Scott ; Scott 
 could have written the most excellent stage directions to 
 Mie plays of Shakspeare. 
 
 If the novelist be contented with the secondary order of 
 Art in Fiction, and satisfied if his incidents be varied, 
 animating, and striking, he may write from chapter to 
 chapter and grope his way to a catastrophe in the dark ; 
 but if he aim at loftier and more permanent effects, he will 
 remember that to execute grandly we must conceive nobly. 
 He will suffer the subject he selects to lie long in his 
 mind, to be revolved, meditated, brooded over until from 
 the chaos breaks the light, and he sees distinctly the 
 highest end for which his materials can be used, and the 
 best process by which they can be reduced to harmony and 
 order. 
 
 If, for instance, he found his tale upon some legend, the 
 author, inspired with a great ambition, will consider what 
 will be, not the most vivid interest, but the loftiest and 
 most durable order of interest, he can extract from the 
 incidents. Sometimes it will be in a great truth elicited 
 by the catastrophe, sometimes by the delineation of one or 
 more characters, sometimes by the mastery over, and de- 
 velopment of, some complicated passion. Having decided 
 what it is he designs to work out, he will mould his story 
 accordingly ; but before he begins to execute he will have 
 clearly informed his mind of the conception that induces 
 the work itself. 
 
 Interest. 
 
 No fiction can be first-rate if it fail to create Interest. 
 But the merit of the fiction is not by any means pro- 
 portioned to the degree of excitement it produces, but to 
 the quality of the excitement. It is certainly some merit 
 to make us weep ; but the great artist will consider from 
 what sources our tears are to be drawn. We may weep as 
 much at the sufferings of a beggar as at the agonies of 
 Lear ; but from what sublime sympathies arise our tears 
 for the last ! What commonplace pity will produce the 
 first ! We may have our interest much more acutely excited 
 by the " Castle of Udolpho " than by " Anastasius," but in 
 the one, it is a melodramatic arrangement of hair-breadth 
 escapes and a technical skill in the arrangement of other 
 
ON ART IN FICTION. 339 
 
 mysteries — in the other it is the consummate knowledge 
 of actual life that fascinates the eye to the page. It is 
 necessary, then, that every novel should excite interest ; 
 but one novel may produce a much more gradual, gentle, 
 and subdued interest than another, and yet have infinitely 
 more merit in the quality of the interest it excites. 
 
 Terror and Horror. 
 
 True art never disgusts. If in descriptions intended to 
 harrow us, we feel sickened and revolted by the very 
 power with which the description is drawn, the author has 
 passed the boundary of his province, he does not appal — 
 he shocks. Thus nothing is more easy than to produce a 
 feeling of intense pain by a portrait of great bodily suffer- 
 ing. The vulgarest mind can do this, and the mistaken 
 populace of readers will cry, " See the power of this 
 author." But all sympathy with bodily torture is drawn 
 from our basest infirmities, all sympathy with mental 
 torture from our deepest passions and our most spiritual 
 nature. Horror is generally produced by the one, Terror 
 by the other. If you describe a man hanging by a break- 
 ing bough over a precipice — if you paint his starting eye- 
 balls, his erect hair, the death-sweat on his brow, the 
 cracking of the bough, the depth of the abyss, the sharp- 
 ness of the rock, the roar of the cataract below, you may 
 make us dizzy and sick with sympathy ; but you operate 
 on the physical nerves, and our sensation is that of coarse 
 and revolting pain. But take a moral abyss, CEdipus, for 
 instance, on the brink of learning the awful secret which 
 proclaims him an incestuous parricide. Show the splen- 
 dour of his power, the depth of his wisdom, the loftiness 
 of his pride, and then gradually, step by step, reveal the 
 precipice on which he stands — and you work not on the 
 body but the mind, you produce the true tragic emotion — 
 terror. Even in this you must stop short of all that could 
 make terror revolt while it thrills us. This Sophocles has 
 done by one of those fine perceptions of nature which 
 open the sublimest mysteries of art ; we are not allowed 
 time to suffer our thoughts to dwell upon the incest and 
 self-assault of CEdipus or upon the suicide of Jocasta, 
 before, by the introduction of the children, terror melts into 
 
 z 2 
 
310 ON AHT IN FICTION. 
 
 pity, and the parricide son, assumes the new aspect of the 
 broken-hearted father. A modern French writer, if he 
 had taken the subject, would have disgusted us by details 
 of the incest itself, or forced us from the riven heart to 
 gaze upon the bloody and eyeless sockets of the blind 
 king ; and the more he disgusted us, the more he would 
 have thought he excelled the tragedian of Colonos. Such 
 of the Germans, on the contrary, who follow the school of 
 Schiller, will often stop as far short of the true boundaries 
 of Terror as the French romanticists would go beyond it. 
 Schiller held it a principle of art never to leave the com- 
 plete and entire effects of a work of art, one of pain. 
 According to him the pleasure of the art should exceed the 
 sympathy with the suffering. He sought to vindicate this 
 principle by a reference to the Greek drama, but in this he 
 confounded the sentiments with which we moderns read 
 the works of ^Eschylus and Sophocles, with the sentiments 
 with which a Greek would have read them. No doubt, to 
 a Greek religiously impressed with the truth and reality of 
 the woes or the terror depicted, the " Agamemnon," of 
 iEschylus, the CEdipus Tyrnanns of Sophocles, and the 
 Medea of Euripides, would have left a far more unqualified 
 and overpowering sentiment of awe and painful sympathy, 
 than we now can entertain for victims, whom we believe 
 to be shadows, to duties and destinies that we know to be 
 chimeras. Were Schiller's rule universally adopted, we 
 should condemn Othello and Lear. 
 
 Terror may then be carried up to its full extent, pro- 
 vided that it work upon us through the mind, not the 
 body, and stop short of the reaction of recoil and disgust. 
 
 Description. 
 
 One of the greatest and most peculiar arts of the 
 novelist is description. It is in this that he has a 
 manifest advantage over the dramatic poet. The latter 
 will rarely describe scenery, costumes, personals, for they 
 ought to be placed before the eyes of the audience by 
 the theatre and the actors. "When he does do so, it is 
 generally understood by an intelligent critic to be an 
 episode introduced for the sake of some poetical beauty 
 which, without absolutely caiTying on the plot, increases 
 
ON ART IN FICTION. oil 
 
 the agreeable and artistieal effect of the whole perform- 
 ance. This is the case with the description of Dover 
 Cliff in " Lear," or with that of the chasm which adorns 
 by so splendid a passage the monstrous tragedy of " The 
 Cenci." In the classical French theatre, as in the Greek, 
 description, it is true, becomes an essential part of the 
 play itself , since the catastrophe is thrown into description. 
 Hence the celebrated picture of the death of Hippolvte 
 in the " Phedre " of Racine — of the suicide of Hgemon 
 in the " Antigone" of Sophocles. But it maybe doubted 
 whether both Sophocles and his French imitator did not, 
 in this transfer of action to words, strike at the very 
 core of dramatic art, whether ancient or modern, for it 
 may be remarked — and we are surprised that it has not 
 been remarked before — that ^Eschylus preferred placing 
 the tragedy before the eyes of the reader, and he who 
 remembers the sublime close of the Prometheus, the 
 storm, the lightning, the bolt, the shivered rock, and 
 the mingled groans and threats of the Titan himself, 
 must acknowledge that the effect is infinitely more 
 purely tragical than it would have been if we had been 
 told how it all happened by the Aggelos or Messenger. 
 So in the " Agamemnon " of the same sublime poet, 
 though we do not see the blow given, the scene itself, 
 opening, places before us the murderess and the corpse. 
 ISTo messenger intervenes, — no description is required for 
 the action. " I stand where I struck him," says Clytem- 
 nestra. " The deed is done ! " * 
 
 But without recurring farther to the Drama of other 
 nations, we may admit at once that, in our own, it is 
 the received and approved rule that Action, as much as 
 possible, should dispense with Description. With Nar- 
 rative Fiction it is otherwise ; the novel writer is his 
 own scene painter; description is as essential to him as 
 canvas is to the actor, — description of the most various 
 character. 
 
 In this art none ever equalled Scott. In the com- 
 parison we made between him and Shakspeare, we 
 meant not to censure the former for indulging in what 
 
 * Even Sophocles in one of his finest tragedies lias not scrupled to suffer 
 the audience to witness the last moments of Ajax. 
 
342 ON ART IN FICTION. 
 
 the latter stunned; each did that which his art required. 
 We only lament that Scott did not combine with external 
 description an equal, or, at least, not very inferior, skill in 
 metaphysical analysis. Had he done so, he would have 
 achieved all of which the novelist is capable. 
 
 In the description of natural scenery the author will 
 devote the greatest care to such landscapes as are meant 
 for the localities of his principal events. 
 
 There is nothing, for instance, very attractive in the 
 general features of a common ; but if the author lead 
 us through a common, on which, in a later portion of 
 his work, a deed of a murder is to be done, he will strive 
 to fix deeply in our remembrance the character of the 
 landscape, the stunted tree, or the mantling pool, which he 
 means to associate in our minds with an act of terror. 
 
 If the duration of time in a fiction be limited to a 
 year, the author may be enabled artfully to show us 
 the progress of time by minute descriptions of the 
 gradual change in the seasons. This is attempted to 
 be done in the tale of " Eugene Aram ; " instead of tell- 
 ing us when it is July and when it is October, the author 
 of that fiction describes the signs and characteristics of 
 the month, and seeks to identify our interest in the 
 natural phenomena with the approaching fate of the 
 hero, himself an observer and an artist of the " clouds 
 that pass to and fro," and the " herbs that wither and 
 are renewed." Again, in description, if there be any 
 natural objects that will bear upon the catastrophe — if, 
 for instance, the earthquake or the inundation be in- 
 tended as an agent in the fate of those whose history 
 the narrative relates, incidental descriptions of the state 
 of the soil, frequent references to the river or the sea, 
 will serve to make the elements themselves minister to 
 the interest of the plot, and the final catastrophe will 
 be made at once more familiar, yet more sublime, if we 
 have been prepared and led to believe that you have 
 from the first designed to invoke to your aid the awful 
 agencies of Nature herself. Thus in the CEdipus at 
 Colonos, the Poet at the very opening of the tragedy 
 indulges in the celebrated description of the seats of 
 the Dread Goddesses, because the place, and the deities 
 themselves though invisible, belong yet more insensibly 
 
ON ART IN FICTION. 843 
 
 to the crowning doom of the wanderer than any of the 
 characters introduced. 
 
 The description of feelings is also the property of the 
 novelist. The dramatist throws the feelings into dialogue 
 — the novelist goes at once to the human heart, and 
 calmly scrutinises, assorts, and dissects them. Few indeed 
 are the writers who have hitherto attempted this — the 
 master mystery of the hierophant. Godwin has done so 
 the most elaborately, Goethe the most skilfully. The first 
 writer is indeed so minute, that he is often frivolous, — 
 so lengthened, that he is generally tedious ; but the culti- 
 vator of the art, and not the art itself, is to be blamed for 
 such defects. 
 
 A few words will often paint the precise state of emo- 
 tion as faithfully as the most voluminous essay ; and in 
 this department condensation and brevity are to be care- 
 fully studied. Conduct us to the cavern, light the torch, 
 and startle and awe us by what you reveal ; but if you 
 keep us all day in the cavern, the effect is lost, and our 
 only feeling is that of impatience and desire to get away. 
 
 Arrangement of Incidents. 
 Distinctions between the Novel and the Drama. 
 
 In the arrangement of incidents the reader will carefully 
 study the distinctions between the novel and the drama, 
 — distinctions the more important because they are not at 
 the first glance very perceptible. 
 
 In the first place the incidents of a play must grow pro- 
 gressively out of each other. Each scene should appear 
 the necessary consequence of the one that precedes it. 
 This is far from being the case with the novel : in the 
 last it is often desirable to go back instead of forward, — to 
 wind, to vary, to shift the interest from person to person 
 — to keep even your principal hero, your principal actor, 
 in the background. In the novel you see more of Frank 
 Osbaldistone than you do of Rob Roy; but bring Rob 
 Roy on the stage, and Frank Osbaldistone must recede at 
 once into a fifth-rate personage. 
 
 In our closets we should be fatigued with the incessant 
 rush of events that we desire when we make one of a multi- 
 
84i ON ART IN FICTION. 
 
 tude. Oratory and the drama in this resemble each other 
 — that the things best to hear are not always the best to 
 read. In the novel we address ourselves to the one person, 
 — on the stage we address ourselves to a crowd; more 
 rapid effects, broader and more popular sentiments, more 
 condensed grasp of the universal passions, are required for 
 the last. The calm advice which persuades our friend 
 would only tire out the patience of the crowd. The man 
 who writes a play for Covent Garden ought to remember 
 that the Theatre is but a few paces distant from the 
 Hustings : success at either place, the Hustings or the 
 Theatre, wili depend upon a mastery over feelings not per- 
 haps the most common-place, but the most commonly felt. 
 If with his strong effects on the stage, the dramatic poet 
 can, like Shakspeare, unite the most delicate and subtle 
 refinement, like Shakspeare, he will be a consummate 
 artist. But the refinement will not do without the effects. 
 In the novel it is different : the most enchanting and per- 
 manent kind of interest, in the latter, is often gentle, tran- 
 quillising, and subdued. The novelist can appeal to those 
 delicate and subtle emotions, whicii are easily awakened 
 when we are alone, but which are torpid and unfelt in the 
 electric contagion of popular sympathies. The most refin- 
 ing among us will cease to refine when placed in the midst 
 of a multitude. 
 
 There is a great distinction between the plot of a novel 
 and that of a play — a distinction which has been indicated 
 by Goethe in the " Wilhelm Meister." The novel allows 
 accident, the drama never. In the former your principal 
 character may be throwm from his horse, and break his 
 neck ; in the latter this would be a gross burlesque on the 
 laws of the drama ; for in the drama the incidents must 
 bring about the catastrophe ; in the novel there is no such 
 necessity. Don Quixote at the last falls ill and dies in 
 his bed ; but in order that he should fall ill and die in his 
 bed, there was no necessity that he should fight windmills, 
 or mistake an inn for a castle. If a novelist had taken 
 for his theme the conspiracy of Fiesco, he might have ad- 
 hered to history with the most perfect consistency to his 
 art. In the history, as Fiesco, after realising his ambitious 
 projects, is about to step into the ship, he slips from the 
 plank ? and the weight of his armour drowns him. Tin's 
 
ON ART IN FICTION. 345 
 
 is accident, and tins catastrophe would not only have been 
 admissible in the novel, but would have conveyed, perhaps, 
 a sublimer moral than any that fiction could invent. But 
 when Schiller adapted Fiesco for the stage, he felt that 
 accident was not admissible,* and his Fiesco falls by the 
 hand of the patriot Verrina. The whole dialogue preced- 
 ing the fatal blow is one of the most masterly adaptations 
 of moral truth to the necessity of historical infidelity in 
 European literature. 
 
 In the " Bride of Lammermoor " Ravenswood is swal- 
 lowed up by a quicksand. This catastrophe is singularly 
 grand in romance ; it could not be allowable on the stage ; 
 for this again is accident and not result. 
 
 The distinctions, then, between the novel and the drama, 
 so far as the management of incidents is concerned, are 
 principally these : that in the one the interest must always 
 progress — that in the other it must often go back and often 
 halt ; that dealing with human nature in a much larger 
 scale in the novel, you will often introduce events and 
 incidents, not necessarily growing one out of the other, 
 though all conducing to the completeness of the whole ; 
 that in the drama you have more impatience to guard 
 against — you are addressing men in numbers, not the 
 individual man ; your effects must be more rapid and more 
 startling : that in the novel you may artistically have 
 recourse to accident for the "working out of your design, 
 in the drama never. 
 
 The ordinary faults of a play by the novelist, f and of a 
 
 * " The nature of the Drama," observes Schiller in his preface to Fiesco, 
 and in excuse for his corruption of history, " does not admit the hand of 
 Chance." 
 
 f " Why is it that a successful novelist has never been a successful play 
 writer ? " This is a question that has been so often put that we have been 
 frightened out of considering whether the premises involved in the question 
 are true or not. It is something like the schoolboy question, "Why is a 
 pound of feathers heavier than a pound of had ?" It is long before Tom or 
 Jack ask — is it heavier ? Is it true that a successful novelist never has been 
 a successful play writer? We will not insist on Goldsmith, whose comedy 
 of "She Stoops to Conquer" and whose novel of the "Vicar of Wake- 
 field " are alike among the greatest ornaments of our language. But was 
 not Goethe a great play- writer and a great novelist ? Who will decide 
 whether the palm in genius should be given to the " Tasso " or the " Wil- 
 helm Meister" of that all-sided genius ? Is not the " Ghost Seer" a success- 
 ful novel? Does it not afford the highest and most certain testimony of 
 what Schiller could have done as a writer of narrative Ecti n, and are not 
 
346 ON ART IN FICTION. 
 
 novel by the play writer, will serve as an illustration of the 
 principles which have insensibly regulated each. The nove- 
 list will be too diffuse, too narrative, and too refined in his 
 effects for the stage ; the play writer will be too condensed, 
 abrupt, and above all, too exaggerated, for our notions of 
 the Natural when we are in the closet. Stage effect is a vice 
 in the novel; but how can we expect a man trained to 
 write for the stage to avoid what on the stage is a merit ? 
 A certain exaggeration of sentiment is natural, and neces- 
 sary for sublime and truthful effect, when we address 
 numbers ; it would be ludicrous uttered to our friend in 
 his easy-chair. If Demosthenes, urging a young Athenian 
 to conduct himself properly, had thundered out * that sub- 
 lime appeal to the shades of Marathon, Platea and Salamis, 
 which thrilled the popular assembly, the young Athenian 
 would have laughed in his face. If the dialogue of 
 "Macbeth" were the dialogue of a romance on the same 
 subject it would be equally good in itself, but it would seem 
 detestable bombast. If the dialogue in Ivanhoe, which 
 is matchless of its kind for fire and spirit, were shaped 
 into blank verse, and cut up into a five act play, it would be 
 bald and pointless. As the difference between the effective 
 oration and the eloquent essay — between Pitt so great to 
 hear, and Burke so great to read, so is the difference be- 
 
 "Wallenstein" and "Fiesco" and "Don Carlos" great plays by the same 
 author ? Are not " Canclide " and " Zadig " imperishable masterpieces in the 
 art of the novelist ? Are not " Zaire " and " Mahomet " equally immortal ? 
 The three greatest geniuses, that in modem times the continent has pro- 
 duced, were both novelists and dramatists — equally great in each depart- 
 ment. In France at this day Victor Hugo, who, with all his faults, is im- 
 measurably the first writer in the school he has sought to found, is both the 
 best novelist and the most powerful dramatist. That it has not happened 
 oftener that the same man has achieved equal honour in the novel and the 
 play is another question. But we might just as well ask why it has not 
 happened oftener that the same man has been equally successful in tragedy 
 and epic — in the ode and the didactic — why he who is sublime as a poet is 
 often tame as a prose writer, and vice versa — why the same artist who 
 painted the "Transfiguration" did not paint the " Last Day." Nature, 
 circumstance, and education have not fitted many men to be great except in 
 one line. And least of all are they commonly great in two lines, which, 
 though seemingly close to each other, run in parallel directions. The more 
 subtle the distinction between the novel and the play, the more likely are 
 they to be overlooked by him who attempts both. It is the same with all 
 departments of art : the closer the approximation of the boundaries, the 
 more difficult the blending. 
 * Dem. de Cour. 
 
ON ART IX FICTION. 347 
 
 twcon the writing for the eye of one man, and the writing 
 for the ears of three thousand. 
 
 Mechanism and Conduct. 
 
 The Mechanism and Conduct of the story ought to de- 
 pond upon the nature of the preconceived design. Do you 
 desire to work out some definite end, through the passions 
 or through the characters you employ ? Do you desire to 
 carry on the interest less through, character and passion 
 than through incident ? Or, do you rather desire to enter- 
 tain and instruct by a general and wide knowledge of 
 living manners or human nature ? Or, lastly, would you 
 seek to incorporate all these objects ? Are you faithful to 
 your conception, will you be attentive to, and precise in 
 the machinery you use ? In other words, your progress 
 must depend upon the order of interest you mean to be 
 predominant. It is by not considering this rule that critics 
 have often called that episodical or extraneous, which is, 
 in fact, a part of the design. Thus, in " Gil Bias," the 
 object is to convey to the reader a complete picture of the 
 surface of society : the manners, foibles, and peculiarities 
 of the time ; elevated by a general, though not very pro- 
 found, knowledge of the more durable and universal 
 elements of human nature in the abstract. Hence the 
 numerous tales and nouvelletes scattered throughout the 
 work, though episodical to the adventures of Gil Bias, are 
 not episodical to the design of Le Sage. They all serve to 
 complete and furnish out the conception, and the whole 
 would be less rich, and consummate in its effect without 
 them. They are not passages which lead to nothing, but 
 conduce to many purposes we can never comprehend, 
 unless we consider well for what end the building was 
 planned. So, if you wish to bring out all the peculiarities 
 of a certain character, you will often seem to digress into 
 adventures which have no palpable bearing on the external 
 plot of incident and catastrophe. This is constantly the 
 case with Cervantes and Fielding; and the critic who 
 blames you for it, is committing the gross blunder of 
 judging the novel by the laws of the drama. 
 
 But as an ordinary rule, it may be observed that, since 
 both in the novel and the play human life is represented by 
 
318 ON ART IN FICTION. 
 
 an epitome, so in both it is desirable that all your charac- 
 ters should more or less be brought to bear on the con- 
 clusions you have in view. It is not necessary in the 
 novel that they should bear on the physical events ; they 
 may sometimes bear on the mental and interior changes in 
 the minds and characters of the persons you introduce. 
 For instance, if you design in the life of your hero to 
 illustrate the Passion of jealousy upon a peculiar confor- 
 mation of mind, you may introduce several characters and 
 several incidents, which will serve to ripen his tendencies, 
 but have not the least bearing on the actual cata- 
 strophe in which those tendencies are confirmed into deeds. 
 This is but fidelity to real life, in which it seldom happens 
 that they who foster the passion are the witnesses or suf- 
 ferers of the effects. This distinction between interior 
 and external agencies will be made apparent by a close 
 study of the admirable novel of "Zeluco." 
 
 In the mechanism of external incidents, Scott is the 
 greatest model that fiction possesses ; and if we select 
 from his works that in which this mechanism is most 
 artistical, we instance not one of his most brilliant and 
 popular, but one in which he combined all the advantages 
 of his multiform and matured experience in the craft : we 
 mean the " Fair Maid of Perth." By noting well the 
 manner in which, in this tale, the scene is ever varied at 
 the right moment, and the exact medium preserved be- 
 tween abruptness and longueur — how all the incidents are 
 complicated, so as to appear inextricable, yet the solution 
 obtained by the simplest and shortest process, the reader 
 will learn more of the art of mechanical construction, than 
 by all the rules that Aristotle himself, were he living, 
 could lay down. 
 
 Divisions of the Work. 
 
 In the drama the Divisions of the plot in Acts are of in- 
 finite service in condensing and simplifying the design of 
 the author. The novelist will find it convenient to himself 
 to establish analogous divisions in the conduct of his story. 
 The division into volumes is but the affair of the printer, 
 and affords little help to the intellectual purposes of the 
 author, Hence most of our greatest novelists have had 
 
ON ART IN FICTION. 319 
 
 recourse to the more definite sab-partition of the work into 
 Boohs; audit the student use this mode of division, not 
 from capricious or arbitrary pleasure, but with the same 
 purposes of art for which, in the drama, recourse is had to 
 the division into Acts, he will find it of the greatest ser- 
 vice. Properly speaking, each Book should be complete in 
 itself, working out the exact and whole purpose that the 
 author meditates in that portion of his work. It is clear, 
 therefore, that the number of his Books will vary accord- 
 ing to the nature of his design. Where you have shaped 
 your story after a dramatic fashion you will often be sur- 
 prised to find how greatly you serve to keep your con- 
 struction faithful to your design, by the mere arrangement 
 of the work into the same number of sub- divisions as 
 are adopted in the drama, viz., five books instead of five 
 acts. Where, on the other hand, you avoid the dramatic 
 construction, and lead the reader through great varieties 
 of life and action, meaning in each portion of the history 
 of your hero to illustrate separate views of society or 
 human nature, you will probably find a much greater 
 number of sub-divisions requisite. This must depend 
 upon your design. Another advantage in these divisions 
 consists in the rules that your own common sense will 
 suggest to you with respect to the introduction of charac- 
 ters. It is seldom advisable to admit any new Characters 
 of importance after the interest has arrived at a certain 
 point of maturity. As you would not introduce a new 
 character of consequence to the catastrophe, in the fifth 
 act of a play, so with more qualification and reserve it will 
 be inartistical to make a similar introduction in the cor- 
 responding portion of a novel. The most illustrious ex- 
 ception to this general rule is in " Clarissa," in which the 
 Avenger, the brother of the heroine, and the executioner 
 of Lovelace, only appears at the close of the story, and for 
 the single purpose of revenge ; and here the effect is 
 heightened by the lateness and suddenness of the intro- 
 duction of the very person to whom the catastrophe is 
 confided. 
 
350 OK AET IN FICTION. 
 
 The Catastrophe. 
 
 The distinction between the novel and the drama is 
 usually very visible in the Catastrophe. The stage effect 
 of bringing up all the characters together in the closing 
 chapter, to be married or stabbed, as the thing may require, 
 is to a fine taste eminently displeasing in a novel. It in- 
 troduces into the very place where we most desire verisimi- 
 litude, a clap-trap and theatrical effect. For it must be 
 always remembered, that in prose fiction we require more 
 of the Real than we do in the drama (which belongs of 
 right to the regions of pure poetry), and if the very last 
 effect bequeathed to us be that of palpable delusion and 
 trick, the charm of the whole work is greatly impaired. 
 Some of Scott's romances may be justly charged with this 
 defect. 
 
 Usually the author is so far aware of the inartist-like 
 effect of a final grouping of all the characters before the 
 fall of the curtain, that he brings but few of the agents he 
 has employed to be present at the catastrophe, and follows 
 what may be called the wind-up of the main interest by 
 one or more epilogical chapters, in which we are told how 
 Sir Thomas married and settled in his country seat, how 
 Miss Lucy died an old maid, and how the miser Grub was 
 found dead on his money- chest ; disposing, in a few sen- 
 tences, of the lives and deaths of all to whom we have 
 been presented — a custom that we think might now give 
 place to less hacknied inventions. 
 
 The drama will bear but one catastrophe ; the novel will 
 admit of more. Thus, in "Ivanhoe," the more vehement 
 and apparent catastrophe is the death of Bois Gruilbert ; 
 but the marriage of Ivanhoe, the visit of Rebecca to 
 Rowena, and the solemn and touching farewell of the 
 Jewess, constitute, properly speaking, a catastrophe, no 
 less capital in itself, and no less essential to the completion 
 of the incidents. So also there is often a moral cata- 
 strophe, as well as a physical one, sometimes identified each 
 with the other, sometimes distinct. If you have been 
 desirous to work out some conception of a principle or a 
 truth, the design may not be completed till after the more 
 violent effects which form the physical catastrophe. In 
 
ON ART IN FICTION. 351 
 
 the recent novel of " Alice, or the Mysteries," the external 
 catastrophe is in the vengeance of Csesarini and the death 
 of Vargravc, but the complete denouement aud com- 
 pletion of the more typical meanings, and ethical results 
 of the fiction, are reserved to the* moment when Maltravers 
 recognises the Natural to be the true Ideal, and is brought, 
 by faith and beauty of simple goodness, to affection and 
 respect for mankind itself. In the drama it would be 
 necessary to incorporate in one scene all the crowning 
 results of the preceding events. We could not bear a new 
 interest after the death of Bois Guilbert ; and a new act of 
 mere dialogue between Alice and Maltravers, after the 
 death of Yargrave would be insufferably tame and frigid. 
 The perfection of a catastrope is not so much in the power 
 with which it is told, as in the feeling of completeness 
 which it should leave on the mind. On closing the work 
 we ought to feel that we have read a whole — that there is 
 a harmonious unity in all its parts — that its close, whether 
 it be pleasiug or painful, is that which is essentially appro- 
 priate to all that has gone before : and not only the mere 
 isolated thoughts in the work, but the unity of the work 
 itself, ought to leave its single and deep impression on the 
 mind. The book itself should be a thought. There is 
 another distinction between the catastrophe of a novel and 
 that of a play. In the last it ought to be the most per- 
 manent and striking events that lead to the catastrophe, 
 in the former it will often be highly artistical to revive for 
 the consummating effect many slight details — incidents the 
 author had but dimly shadowed out — mysteries that you 
 had judged till then, he had forgotten to clear up, and to 
 bring a thousand rivulets, that had seemed merely intro- 
 duced to relieve or adorn the way into the rapid gulf 
 which closes over all. The effect of this has a charm not 
 derived from mere trick, but from its fidelity to the 
 natural and life-like order of events. What more common 
 in the actual world than that the great crises of our fate 
 are influenced and coloured, not so much by the incidents 
 and persons we have deemed most important, but by many 
 things of remote date, or of seeming insignificance. The 
 feather the eagle carelessly sheds by the wayside plumes 
 the shaft that transfixes him. In this management and 
 combination of incidents towards the grand end, knowledge 
 
352 ON ART IN FICTION. 
 
 of Human Nature can alone lead the student to the know- 
 ledge of Ideal Art. 
 
 These remarks form the summary of the hints and sug- 
 gestion that, after a careful study of books, we submit to 
 the consideration of the student in a class of literature 
 now so widely cultivated and hitherto almost wholly un- 
 examined by the critic. We presume not to say that they 
 form an entire code of laws for the art. Even Aristotle's 
 immortal treatise on Poetry, were it bequeathed to us com- 
 plete, would still be but a skeleton ; and though no poet 
 could read that treatise without advantage, the most 
 glorious poetry might be, and has been written in defiance 
 of nearly all its laws. Genius will arrive at fame by the 
 light of its own star ; but Criticism, will often serve as a 
 sign-post to save many an unnecessary winding, and in- 
 dicate many a short way. He who aspires to excel in that 
 fiction which is the glass of truth may learn much from 
 books and rules, from the lecturer and the critic ; but he 
 must be also the Imaginer, the Observer. He will be ever 
 examining human life in its most catholic and comprehen- 
 sive aspects. Nor is it enough to observe, — it is necessary 
 to feel. We must let the heart be a student as well as the 
 head. No man w r ho is a passionless and cold spectator, 
 will ever be an accurate analyst, of all the motives and 
 springs of action. Perhaps if we were to search for the 
 true secret of Creative Genius, we should find that secret 
 in the intenscness of its Sympathies. 
 
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