UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 AT LOS ANGELES
 
 UNIVERSITY of CALIFOKNU 
 
 AT 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 THE WORKS 
 
 THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 
 
 RIVERSIDE EDITION. 
 
 VOLIBIE IV. 
 
 ^ r\ 9 "^ ^
 
 LITERARY CRITICISM. 
 
 ^ 
 
 THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 
 
 BOSTON: 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY. 
 
 ertie EiiJWBiJie Press, Camfiritfff,
 
 Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1853, by 
 
 TiCKNOR AND FIELDS, 
 
 In tlie Clerli's Office of tlie District Court of tlie District of Massacliusetts, 
 
 Copyright, 1876, 
 B¥ HDRD AND IIOUGUTON. 
 
 The Riverside Press, Cambridge: 
 Printed by H. O. Houghton and Co>ni>any.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 — * — 
 
 PA0E 
 
 Theory of Greek Tragedy 1 
 
 The Antigone of Sophocles, as eepresented on the 
 
 Edinburgh Stage 25 
 
 Homer and the HoMERiOiB 60 
 
 - — Style < 172 
 
 -^ — ^Rhetoric 314 
 
 'iTTiANGUAGE . . . . < 373 
 
 ■■'^- English Dictionaries 394 
 
 Dryden's Hexastich ... 401 
 
 Notes on Walter Savage Landor 406 
 
 Milton ve,r$us Southey and Landor ... . 455 ^ 
 
 Orthographic Mutineers, with a Special Reference to 
 THE "Works of "Walter Savage Landor .... 479 
 - CQjJ "Wordsworth's Poetry . . . . . 495 
 On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth . . . 533 
 N'oTES 541
 
 LITERARY CRITICISM. 
 
 THEORY or GREEK TRAGEDY. 
 
 The Greek tragedy is a dark problem. We can- 
 not say that the Greek drama is such in any more 
 comprehensive sense ; for the comedy of Greece 
 depends essentially upon the same principles as our 
 own. Comedy, as the reflex of the current of social 
 life, will shift in correspondence to the shifting move- 
 ments of civilization. Inevitably as human inter- 
 course in cities grows more refined, comedy will 
 grow more subtle ; it will build itself on distinctions 
 of character less grossly defined, and on features of 
 manners more delicate and impalpable. But the 
 i fundus, the ultimate resource, the well-head of the 
 comic, must forever be sought in the same field, 
 jf namely, the ludicrous of incident, or the ludicrous 
 I cf situation, or the ludicrous which arises in a mixed 
 I way between the character and the situation. The 
 age of Aristophanes, for example, answered, in some 
 respects, to our own earliest dramatic era, namely, 
 from 1588 to 1635,— an age not (as Dr. Johnson 
 assumes it to have been, in his elaborate preface to 
 Shakspeare) rude or gross; on the contrary, fai 
 more intense with intellectual instincts and agencies 
 1
 
 2 THEORY OF GREEK TRAGEDY, 
 
 than his own, which was an age of collapse. But 
 in the England of Shakspeare, as in the Athens of 
 Aristophanes, the surface of society in cities still 
 rocked, or at least undulated, with the ground- 
 swell surviving from periods of intestine tumult 
 and insecurity. The times were still martial and 
 restless ; men still wore swords in pacific assemblies ; 
 the intellect of the age was a fermenting intellect ; 
 it was a revolutionary intellect. And comedy itself, 
 colored by the moving pageantries of life, was more 
 sinewy, more audacious in its movements ; spoke 
 with something more of an impassioned tone ; and 
 was hung with draperies more rich, more voluminous, 
 more picturesque. On the other hand, the age of 
 the Athenian Menander, or the English Congreve, 
 though still an unsettled age, was far less insecure 
 in its condition of police, and far less showy in its 
 exterior aspect. In England it is true that a pictur- 
 esque costume still prevailed ; the whole people were 
 still draped^ professionally ; each man's dress pro- 
 claimed his calling ; and so far it might be said, 
 " natio comcedia est." But the characteristic and 
 dividing spirit had fled, whilst the forms survived ; 
 and those middle men had universally arisen whose 
 equivocal relations to different employments broke 
 down the strength of contrast between them. Com 
 edy, therefore, was thrown more exclusively upon 
 the interior man ; upon the nuances of his nature, or 
 upon the finer spirit of his manners. It was now the 
 acknowledged duty of comedy to fathom the coy 
 nesses of human nature, and to arrest the fleeting 
 phenomena of human demeanor. 
 But tragedy stood upon another footing. Whilst
 
 THEORY OF GREEK TRAGEDY. 3 
 
 khe comic muse in every age acknowledges a rela- 
 tionship which is more than sisterly, — in fact, little 
 short of absolute identity, — the tragic muse of Greece 
 and England stand so far aloof as hardly to recognize 
 each other under any common designation. Few 
 people have ever studied the Grecian drama ; and 
 hence may be explained the possibility that so little 
 should have been said by critics upon its character- 
 istic differences, and nothing at all upon the philo- 
 sophic ground of these differences. Hence may be 
 explained the fact that, whilst Greek tragefly has 
 always been a problem in criticism, it is still a prob- 
 lem of which no man has attempted the solution. 
 This problem it is our intention briefly to investigate. 
 I. There are cases occasionally occurring in the 
 English drama and the Spanish, where a play is ex 
 hibited within a play. To go no further, every pei 
 son remembers the remarkable instance of this in 
 Hamlet. Sometimes the same thing takes place in 
 painting. We see a chamber, suppose, exhibited by 
 the artist, on the walls of which (as a customary 
 piece of furniture) hangs a picture.- And as this 
 picture again might represent a room furnished with 
 pictures, in the mere logical possibility of the case 
 we might imagine this descent into a life below a life 
 going on ad infinitum. Practically, however, the 
 process is soon stopped. A retrocession of this 
 nature is diflBcult to manage. The original picture 
 is a mimic, — an unreal life. But this unreal life is 
 itself a real life with respect to the secondary pic- 
 ture ; which again must be supposed realized with 
 relation to the tertiary picture, if such a thing were 
 attempted. Consequently, at every step of the in
 
 4: THEORY OF GKEEK TRAGEDY. 
 
 trovolution (to neologize a little in a case justifying a 
 neologism), something must be done to diflferentiate 
 the gradations, and to express the subordinations of 
 life ; because each term in the descending series, 
 being first of all a mode of non-reality to the spec- 
 tator, is next to assume the functions of a real life 
 in its relations to the next lower or interior term of 
 the series. 
 
 What the painter does in order to produce thia 
 peculiar modification of appearances, so that an 
 object shall afi'ect us first of all as an idealized oi 
 unreal thing, and next as itself a sort of relation to 
 Bome secondary object still more intensely unreal, 
 we shall not attempt to describe ; for in some techni- 
 cal points we should, perhaps, fail to satisfy the 
 reader ; and without technical explanations we could 
 not satisfy the question. But, as to the poet, all the 
 depths of philosophy (at least, of any known and 
 recognized philosophy) would less avail to explain, 
 speculatively, the principles which, in such a case, 
 should guide him, than Shakspeare has explained by 
 his practice. The problem before him was one of his 
 own suggesting ; the difficulty was of his own mak- 
 ing. It was, so to differentiate a drama that it might 
 stand within a drama, precisely as a painter places a 
 picture within a picture ; and therefore that the 
 secondary or inner drama should be non-realized 
 upon a scale that would throw, by comparison, a 
 reflex coloring of reality upon the principal drama 
 This was the problem, — this was the thing to be 
 accomplished ; and the secret, the law, of the pro- 
 cess by which he accomplishes this is, to swell, 
 tumefy, stiffen, not the diction only, but the tenor o/
 
 THEORY OF GREEK TRAGEDY. 5 
 
 the thought, — in fact, to stilt it, and to give it a 
 prominence and an ambition beyond the scale which 
 he adopted for his ordinary life. It is, of course, 
 therefore in rhyme, — an artifice which Shakspeare 
 employs with great efiect on other similar occasions 
 (that is, occasions when he wished to solemnize or 
 in any way difi'erentiate the life) ; it is condensed 
 and massed as respects the flowing of the thoughts ; 
 it is rough and horrent with figures in strong relief, 
 like the embossed gold of an ancient vase ; and the 
 movement of the scene is contracted into short gyra- 
 tions, so unlike the free sweep and expansion of his 
 general developments. 
 
 Now, the Grecian tragedy stands in the very same 
 circumstances, and rises from the same original basis. 
 If, therefore, the reader can obtain a glimpse of the 
 life within a life, which the painter sometimes ex- 
 hibits to the eye, and which the Hamlet of Shaks- 
 peare exhibits to the mind, then he may apprehend 
 the original phasis under which we contemplate the 
 Greek tragedy. 
 
 II. But to press further into the centre of things, 
 perhaps the very first element in the situation of the 
 Grecian tragedy, which operated by degrees to evoke 
 all the rest, was the original elevation of the scale 
 by which all was to be measured, in consequence of 
 two accidents : 1st, the sanctity of the ceremonies in 
 which tragedy arose ; 2d, the vast size of the ancient 
 theatres. 
 
 The first point we need not dwell on ; everybody 
 is aware that tragedy in Greece grew by gradual ex- 
 pansions out of an idolatrous rite, — out of sacrificial 
 pomp ; though we do not find anybody who has
 
 6 THEORY OF GREEK TRAGEDY. 
 
 noticed the consequent overruling effect which this 
 had upon the quality of that tragedy ; how, in fact, 
 from this early cradle of tragedy, arose a sanctity 
 which compelled all things to modulate into the same 
 religious key. But next, the theatres — why were 
 they so vast in ancient cities, in Athens, in Syracuse, 
 in Capua, in Eome ? Purely from democratic influ- 
 ences. I^Every citizen was entitled to a place at the 
 public scenical representations. In Athens, for ex- 
 ample, the state paid for him. He was present, by 
 possibility and by legal fiction, at every performance ; 
 therefore, room must be prepared for him. And, 
 allowing for the privileged foreigners (the domiciled 
 aliens called /ustohcoi), we are not surprised to hear 
 that the Athenian theatre was adapted to an audience 
 of thirty thousand persons. It is not enough to say 
 naturally — inevitably out of this prodigious compass, 
 exactly ten times over the compass of the lai^ge 
 Drury-Lane, burned down a generation ago, arose 
 certain immediate resiilts that moulded the Greek 
 tragedy in all its functions, purposes, and phenom- 
 ena. The person must be aggrandized, the coun- 
 tenance must be idealized. For upon any stage 
 corresponding in its scale to the colossal dimensions 
 of such a house, the unassisted human figure would 
 have been lost ; the unexaggerated human features 
 would have been seen as in a remote perspective, 
 and, besides, have had their expression lost ; the un- 
 reverberated human voice would have been undis- 
 tinguishable from the surrounding murmurs of the 
 audience. Hence the cothurnus to raise the actor ; 
 hence the voluminous robes to hide the disproportion 
 thus resulting to the figure ; hence the mask largei
 
 THEORY OF GREEK TRAGEDY. 1 
 
 than life, painted to represent the noble Grecian con- 
 tour of countenance ; hence the mechanism by which 
 it was made to swell the intonations of the voice likp 
 the brazen tubes of an organ. 
 
 Here, then, you have a tragedy, by its very origin, 
 in mere virtue of the accidents out of which it arose, 
 standing upon the inspiration of religious feeling, 
 pointing, like the spires of our English parish 
 churches, up to heaven by mere necessity of its 
 earliest purpose, from which it could not alter or 
 Bwerve per saltum ; so that an influence once there 
 was always there. Even from that cause, therefore, 
 you have a tragedy ultra-human and Titanic. But 
 next, fi'om political causes falling in with that early 
 religious cause, you have a tragedy forced into a 
 more absolute and unalterable departure fi'om a 
 human standard. That figure so noble, that voice so 
 profound, and, by the very construction of the the- 
 atres as well as of the masks, receiving such solemn 
 reverberations, proclaim a being elevated above the 
 ordinary human scale. And then comes the coun- 
 tenance always adjusted to the same unvarying tone 
 of sentiment, namely, the presiding sentiment of the 
 situation, which of itself would go far to recover the 
 key-note of Greek tragedy. These things being 
 given, we begin to perceive a life removed by a great 
 gulf from the ordinary human life even of kings and 
 heroes ; we descry a life within a life. 
 
 III. Here, therefore, is the first great landing- 
 place, the first station, firom which we can contem- 
 plate the Greek tragedy with advantage. It is, by 
 comparison with the life of Shakspeare, what the 
 amer life of the mimetic play in Hamlet is to the outer
 
 8 THEORY OF GREEK TRAGEDY. 
 
 life of the Hamlet itself. It is a life below a life. 
 That is, it is a life treated upon a scale so sensibly 
 different from the proper life of the spectator, as to 
 impress him profoundly with the feeling of its ideal 
 ization. Shakspeare's tragic life is our own life ex- 
 alted and selected ; the Greek tragic life presupposed 
 another life, — the spectator's, — thrown into relief 
 before it. The tragedy was projected upon the eye 
 from a vast profundity in the rear ; and between this 
 life and the spectator, however near its phantasma- 
 goria might advance to him, was still an immeasur- 
 able gulf of shadows. 
 
 Hence, coming nearer still to the determinate 
 nature and circumscription of the Greek tragedy, it 
 was not in any sense a development — 1st, of human 
 character ; or, 2d, of human passion. Either of 
 these objects attributed to tragedy at once inoculates 
 it with a life essentially on the common human stand- 
 ard. But that neither was so much as dreamed of in 
 the Grecian tragedy is evident from the mere mechan- 
 ism and ordinary conduct of those dramas which 
 survive ; those especially which seem entitled to be 
 viewed as fair models of the common standard. 
 About a thousand lines, of which one fifth must be 
 deducted for the business of the chorus, may be 
 taken as the average extent of a Greek tragic drama. 
 Five acts, of one hundred and sixty lines each, allow 
 no sweep at all for the systole and diastole, the con- 
 traction and expansion, the knot and the denouement, 
 of a tragic interest, according to our modern mean- 
 ing. The ebb and flow, the inspiration and expira- 
 tion, cannot find room to play in such a narrow 
 scene. Were the interest made to turn at all upon
 
 THEOBT OF GREEK TBA6EDT. 9 
 
 the evolution of character, or of passion modified by 
 character, and both growing upon the reader through 
 various aspects of dialogue, of soliloquy, and of mul- 
 tiplied action, it would seem a storm in a wash- 
 hand basin. A passion which advanced and precipi- 
 tated itself through such rapid harlequin changes 
 would at best impress us with the feehng proper to 
 a hasty melodrame, or perhaps serious pantomime. 
 It would read like the imperfect outline of a play ; 
 or, still worse, would seem framed to move through 
 Buch changes as might raise an excuse for the danc- 
 ing and the lyiic music. But the very external 
 phenomena, the apparatus and scenic decorations, of 
 the Greek tragedy, all point to other functions. 
 Shakspeare — that is, English tragedy — postulates 
 the intense life of flesh and blood, of animal sensi- 
 bility, of man and woman, breathing, wakmg, stir- 
 ring, palpitating with the pulses of hope and fear. 
 In Greek tragedy, the very masks show the utter 
 impossibility of these tempests or conflicts. Struggle 
 there is none, internal or external ; not like Hamlet's 
 with his own constitutional inertia, and his gloomy 
 irresolution of conscience ; not like Macbeth' s with 
 his better feeling as a man, with his generosity as a 
 host. Medea, the most tragic figure in the Greet 
 scene, passes through no flux and reflux of passion, 
 through no convulsions of jealousy on the one hand, 
 or maternal love on the other. She is tossed to and 
 fro by no hurricanes of wi-ath, wrenched by no pangs 
 of anticipation. AU that is supposed to have passed 
 out of the spectator's presence. The dire conflict no 
 more exhibits itself scenically, and " coram populo/' 
 than the murder of Ler two innocent children. Wen?
 
 10 THEORY OF GBEEK TRAGEDY. 
 
 it possiWe that it should, how could the mask be 
 justified ? The apparatus of the stage would lose al! 
 decorum ; and Grecian taste, or sense of the appro- 
 priate, which much outran the strength of Grecian 
 creative power, would have been exposed to perpet- 
 ual shocks. 
 
 IV. The truth is now becoming palpable : certain 
 great situations — not passion in states of growth, of 
 movement, of self-conflict — but fixed, unmoving situ- 
 ations were selected ; these held on through the entire 
 course of one or more acts. A lyric movement of the 
 chorus, which closed the act, and gave notice that it 
 was closed, sometimes changed this situation ; but 
 throughout the act it continued unchanged, like a 
 statuesque attitude. The story of the tragedy was 
 pretty nearly involved and told by implication in the 
 tableaux vivans which presided through the several 
 acts. The very slight dialogue which goes on seems 
 meant rather as an additional exposition of the inter- 
 est — a commentary on the attitude originally as- 
 sumed — than as any exhibition of passions growing 
 and kindling under the eye of the spectator. The 
 mask, with its monotonous expression, is not out of 
 harmony with the scene ; for the passion is essen- 
 tially fixed throughout, not mantling and undulating 
 with the breath of change, but frozen into marble 
 life. 
 
 And all this is both explicable in itself, and per- 
 emptorily determined, by the sort of idealized life — 
 life in a state of remotion, unrealized, and translated 
 into a neutral world of high cloudy antiquity — which 
 the tragedy of Athens demanded for its atmosphere. 
 
 Had the Greeks, in fact, framed to themselves tha
 
 THEORY OF GREEK TRAGEDY. 11 
 
 idea of a tumultuous passion, passion expressing 
 itself by the agitations of fluctuating will, as any fit 
 or even possible subject for scenic treatment, in that 
 case they must have resorted to real life ; the more 
 real the better. Or, again, had real life offered to 
 their conceptions a just field for scenic exhibition, in 
 that case they must have been thrown upon conflicts 
 of tempestuous passion ; the more tempestuous the 
 better. But being, by the early religious character 
 of tragedy, and by the colossal proportions of their 
 theatres, imperiously driven to a life more awful and 
 still, — upon life as it existed in elder days, amongst 
 men so far removed that they had become invested 
 with a patriarchal, or even antediluvian mistiness 
 of antiquity, and often into the rank of demi-gods, — ■ 
 they felt it possible to present this mode of being in 
 states of suffering, for suffering is enduring and in- 
 definite ; but never in states of conflict, for conflict 
 is by its nature fugitive and evanescent. The 
 tragedy of Greece is always held up as a thing long 
 past ; the tragedy of England is a thing now pass- 
 ing. We are invited by Sophocles or Euripides, as 
 by some great necromancer, to see long-buried forms 
 standing in solid groups upon the stage — phantoms 
 from Thebes or from Cyclopian cities. But Shaks- 
 peare is a Cornelius Agrippa, who shows us, in his 
 mag-ic glass, creatures yet breathing, and actually 
 mixing in the great game of life upon some distant 
 field, inaccessible to us without a magician's aid. 
 
 The Greek drama, therefore, by its very necessities 
 Droposing to itself only a few grand attitudes or 
 lituations, and brief dialogues as the means of illum- 
 Uiating those situations, with scarcely anything o(
 
 12 THEORY OF GREEK TRAGEDY. 
 
 action " actually occurring on the stage," from these 
 purposes derives its other peculiarities : in the ele 
 mentarj necessities lay the fundus of the rest. 
 
 V. The notion, for example, that murder, or vio- 
 lent death, was banished from the Greek stage, on 
 the Parisian conceit of the shock which such bloody 
 incidents would give to the taste, is perfectly erro- 
 neous. Not because it was sanguinary, but because 
 it was action, had the Greeks an objection to such 
 violences. No action of any kind proceeds legiti- 
 mately on that stage. The persons of the drama are 
 always in a reposing state " so long as they are 
 before the audience." And the very meaning of an 
 act is, that in the intervals, the suspension of the 
 acts, any possible time may elapse, and any possible 
 action may go on. 
 
 VI. Hence, also, a most erroneous theory has 
 arisen about Fate as brooding over the Greek tragic 
 scene. This was a favorite notion of the two Schle- 
 gels. But it is evident that many Greek tragedies, 
 both amongst those w^hich survive and amongst those 
 the title and subjects of which are recorded, did not 
 and could not present any opening at all for this 
 dark agency. Consequently it was not essential. 
 And, even where it did intervene, the Schlegels seem 
 to have misunderstood its purpose. A prophetic 
 coloring, a coloring of ancient destiny, connected 
 with a character or an event, has the effect of exalt- 
 ing and ennobling. But whatever tends towards 
 this result inevitably translates the persons and 
 their situation from that condition of ordinary breath- 
 ing life which it was the constant effort of the Greek 
 tragedy to escape ; and therefore it was that the
 
 THEORY OF GUEEK TRAGEDY 13 
 
 Greek poet prefei-red the gloomy idea of Fate : not 
 because it was essential, but because it was elevat- 
 ing. It is for this reason, and apparently for thia 
 reason only, that Cassandra is connected by iEs- 
 chylus with Agamemnon. The Sphinx, indeed, was 
 connected with the horrid tale of (Edipus in evtrry 
 version of the tale ; but Cassandra was brought upon 
 the stage out of no certain historic tradition, or prop- 
 er relation to Agamemnon, but to confer the solemn 
 and mysterious hoar of a dark prophetic woe upon 
 the dreadful catastrophe. Fate was therefore used, 
 not for its own direct moral value as a force upon the 
 will, but for its derivative power of ennobling and 
 darkening. 
 
 VII, Hence, too, that habit amongst the tragic 
 poets of travelling back to regions of forgotten fable, 
 and dark legendary mythus. Antiquity availed 
 powerfully for their purposes, because of necessity it 
 abstracted all petty details of individuality and local 
 notoriety — all that would have composed a character. 
 It acted as twilight acts (which removes day's 
 "mutable distinctions"), and reduced the historic 
 person to that sublime state of monotonous gloom 
 which suited the views of a poet who wanted only 
 the situation, but would have repelled a poet who 
 sought also for the complex features of a character. 
 It is true that such remote and fabulous periods are 
 visited at times, though not haunted, by the modem 
 dramatist. Events are sought, even upon the French 
 stage, from Gothic or from Moorish times. But in 
 that case the poet endeavors to improve and 
 strengthen any traits of character that tradition may 
 have preserved, or by a direct effort of power to
 
 |4 THEORY OF GREEK TRAGEDY. 
 
 create thorn altogether where history presents 
 blank neutrality ; whereas the Greek poet used 
 simply that faint outline of character, in its gross 
 distinctions of good and bad, which the situation 
 itself implied. For example, the Creon of Thebes is 
 pretty uniformly exhibited as tyrannical and cruel. 
 But that was the mere result of his position as a 
 rival originally for the throne, and still more as the 
 executive minister of the popular vengeance against 
 Polynices for having brought a tide of war against 
 his mother land ; in that representative character, 
 Creon is compelled to acts of cruelty against Anti- 
 gone in her sublime exercise of natural piety — both 
 sisterly and filial ; and this cruelty to her, and to the 
 miserable wreck, her father, making the very wrath 
 of Heaven an argument for further persecution, 
 terminates in leaving him an object of hatred to the 
 spectator. But, after all, his conduct seems to have 
 been purely oflScial and ministerial. Nor, if the 
 reader think otherwise, will he find any further ema- 
 nation fi'om Croon's individual will or heart than the 
 mere blank expression of tyranny in a public cause ; 
 nothing, in short, of that complexity and interweaving 
 of qualities, that interaction of moral and intellectual 
 powers, which we moderns understand by a charac- 
 ter. In short, all the rude outlines of character on 
 the Greek stage were, in the first place, mere inher- 
 itances from tradition, and generally mere determina- 
 tions from the situation ; and in no instance did the 
 qualities of a man's will, heart, or constitutional 
 temperament, manifest themselves by and through a 
 collision or strife amongst each other ; which is our 
 test of a dramatic character. And therefore it was
 
 THEORY OF GREEK TRAGEDY. IS 
 
 tnat elder or even fabulous ages were used as the 
 true natural field of the tragic poet ; partly because 
 antiquity ennobled ; partly also because, by abstract- 
 ing the individualities of a character, it left the his- 
 toric figure in that neutral state which was most 
 entirely passive to the moulding and determining 
 power of the situation. 
 
 Two objections we foresee — 1 . That even jEschy 
 lus, the sublimest of the Greek tragedians, did not 
 always go back to a high antiquity. He himself had 
 fought in the Persian war ; and yet he brings both 
 Xerxes and his father Darius (by means of his appa- 
 rition) upon the stage ; though the very Marathon 
 of the father was but ten years earlier than the Ther- 
 mopylae and Salamis of the son. But in this instance 
 the scene is not properly Grecian ; it is referred by 
 the mind to Susa, the capital of Persia, far eastward 
 even of Babylon, and four months' march from Hellas. 
 Remoteness of space in that case countervailed the 
 proximity in point of time ; though it may be doubted 
 whether, without the benefit of the supernatural, it 
 would, even in that case, have satisfied the Grecian 
 taste. And it certainly would not, had the whole 
 reference of the piece not been so intensely Athenian. 
 For, when we talk of Grecian tragedy, we must re- 
 member that, after all, the Pagan tragedy was in an}' 
 proper sense exclusively Athenian ; and the tend- 
 ency of the Grecian taste, in its general Grecian 
 character, was in various instances modified or ab- 
 solutely controlled by that special feature of its ex- 
 istence. 
 
 2. It will be urged as indicating this craving after 
 <niliquity to be no peculiar or distinguishing feature
 
 16 THEORY OP GREEK TRAGEDY. 
 
 of the Greek stage, that we moderns also turn away 
 sometimes with dislike from a modern subject. Thus, 
 if it had no other fault, the Charles I. of Banks is 
 coldly received by English readers, doubtless ; but 
 not because it is too modern. The objection to it is, 
 that a parliamentary war is too intensely political ; 
 and political, moreover, in a way which doubly de- 
 feated its otherwise tragic power ; first, because 
 questions too notorious and too domineering of law 
 and civil polity were then at issue ; the very same 
 which came to a final hearing and settlement at 
 1688-9. Our very form of government, at this day, 
 is the result of the struggle then going on, — a fact 
 which eclipses and dwarfs any sepatrate or private 
 interest of an individual prince, though otherwise, 
 and by his personal character, in the highest degree, 
 an object of tragic pity and reverence. Secondly, 
 because the political interest afloat at that era (1649) 
 was too complex and intricate ; it wanted the sim- 
 plicity of a poetic interest. That is the objection to 
 Charles I. as a tragedy ; not because modern, but 
 because too domineeringly political ; and because 
 the political features of the case were too many and 
 too intricate. 
 
 VIII. Thus far, therefore, we now comprehend the 
 purposes and true locus to the human imagination of 
 the Grecian tragedy — that it was a most imposing 
 scenic exhibition of a few grand situations ; grand 
 from their very simplicity, and from the consequences 
 which awaited their denouement ; and seeking sup- 
 port to this grandeur from constantly fixing its eye 
 upon elder ages lost in shades of antiquity ; or, if de» 
 Darting with that ideal now and then, doing so with
 
 THEORY OF GREEK TRAGEDY. 17 
 
 n view to patriotic objects, and seeking an occasional 
 dispensation from the rigor of art in the popular in- 
 dulgence to whatever touched the glory of Athens. 
 Let the reader take, along with them, two other cir- 
 cumstances, and he will then complete the idea of 
 this stately drama , — first, the character of the Dia' 
 logue ; secondly, the functions of the Choi'us. 
 
 IX. From one hundred and fifty to one hundred 
 and eighty lines of hexameter iambic verse compose 
 the dialogue of each act.^ This space is sufficient 
 for the pui-pose of unfolding the situation to the spec- 
 tator ; but, as a means of unfolding a character, would 
 have been by much too limited. For such a purpose, 
 again, as this last, numerous scenes, dialogues, or 
 soliloquies, must have been requisite ; whereas, gen- 
 erally, upon the Greek stage, a single scene, one 
 dialogue between two interlocutors, occupies the 
 entire act. The object of this dialogue was, of course, 
 to bring forward the prominent points of the situa- 
 tion, and to improve the interest arising out of, — 1, 
 its grandeur ; 2, its statuesque arrangement to the 
 eye ; or, 3, the burden of tragic consequences which 
 it announced. With such puiposes, so distinct from 
 any which are pursued upon the modern stage, arose 
 a corresponding distinction of the dialogue. Had 
 the dialogue ministered to any purpose so progressixe 
 and so active as that of developing a character, with 
 new incidents and changes of the speakers coming 
 forward at every moment, as occasions for evoking 
 the peculiarities of that character, — in such a case 
 the more it had resembled the movement, the fluctu- 
 ations, the hurry of actual life and of real colloquial 
 intercourse, the more it would have aided the views 
 2
 
 18 THEORY OF GREEK TRAGEDT. 
 
 of the poet. But the purpose of the Greek dialogue 
 was not progressive ; essentially it was reti'ospective^ 
 For example, the Heracleidce opens with as fine and 
 impressive a group as ever sculptor chiselled, — a 
 group of young children, princely daughters of a 
 great hero, whose acts resound through all mythol- 
 ogy, namely, of Hercules, of a Grecian cleanser and 
 deliverer from monsters, once irresistible to quell the 
 oppressor, but now dead, and himself the subject of 
 outrage in the persons of his children. These youth- 
 ful ladies, helpless from their sex, with their grand- 
 mother Alcmene, now aged and infirm, have arranged 
 themselves as a marble group on the steps ascending 
 to the altars of a local deity. They have but one 
 guide, one champion, — a brother in arms of the de- 
 ceased Hercules, and his reverential friend ; but this 
 brave man also suffering, through years and martial 
 toils, under the penalties of decaying strength. Such 
 is the situation, such the inauguration, of this solemn 
 tragedy. The dialogue which follows between lolaus, 
 the faithful guardian of the ladies, and the local ruler 
 of the land, takes up this inaugural picture, — so 
 pompous from blazing altars and cloudy incense,-^ 
 so ceremonial from the known religious meaning of 
 the attitudes, — so beautiful from the loveliness of 
 the youthful suppliants rising tier above tier accord- 
 ing to their ages, and the graduation of the altar 
 steps, — so moving in its picture of human calamity 
 by the contrasting figure of the two gray-haired sup- 
 porters, — so complete and orbicular in its delineation 
 of human frailty by the surmounting circumstances 
 of its crest, the altar, the priestess, the temple, the 
 serene Grecian sky ; this impressive picture, having
 
 THEORY OF GREEK TRAGEDY. 19 
 
 of itself appealed to every one of thirty thousand 
 hearts, having already challenged universal attention, 
 IS now explained and unfolded through the entire 
 first act. lolaus, the noble old warrior, who had 
 clung the closer to the fluttering dovecot of his 
 buried friend from the unmerited persecution which 
 had assaulted them, comments to the stranger prince 
 upon the spectacle before him, — a spectacle signifi- 
 cant to Grecian eyes, intelligible at once to every- 
 body, but still rare, and witnessed in practice by 
 nobody. The prince, Demophoon, is a ruler of 
 Athens ; the scene is placed in the Attic territoiy, 
 but not in Athens ; about fifteen miles, in fact, from 
 that city, and not far from the dread field of Marathon. 
 To the prince lolaus explains the lost condition of 
 his young flock. The ruler of Argos had driven them 
 out of every asylum in the Peloponnesus. From city 
 to city he had followed them at the heels, with his 
 cruel heralds of persecution. They were a party of 
 unhappy fugitives (most of them proclaiming their 
 innocence by their very age and helplessness), that 
 had run the circle of Greek hospitality ; everywhere 
 had been hunted out like wild beasts, or those com- 
 mon nuisances from which their illustrious father had 
 liberated the earth ; that the long circuit of their un- 
 happy wanderings had brought them at the last to 
 Athens, in which they had a final confidence, as know- 
 ing well, not only the ju<^tice of that state, but that 
 she only would not be moved from her purposes by 
 fear of the aggressor. No finer opening can be 
 imagined. The statuesque beauty of the grcup, and 
 the unparalleled persecution which the first act ex- 
 poses (a sort of misery and an absolute hostility of
 
 20 THEORT OP GREEK TRAGEDY. 
 
 the human race to which our experience suggests uo 
 Dorresponding case, except that of a leper in the 
 middle ages, or the case of a man under a papal in- 
 terdict), fix the attention of the spectators beyond 
 any other situation in Grecian tragedy. And the 
 compliment to Athens, not verbal, but involved in 
 the very situation, gave a depth of interest to this 
 drama, for the very tutelary region of the drama, 
 which ought to stamp it with a sort of prerogative 
 as in some respects the ideal tragedy or model of the 
 Greek theatre. 
 
 Now, this one dialogue, as filling one act of a par- 
 ticular drama, is quite sufficient to explain the view 
 we take of the Greek tragic dialogue. It is altoyether 
 retrospective. It takes for its theme the visible group 
 arranged on the stage before the spectators from the 
 first. Looking back to this, the two interlocutors 
 (supposed to come forward upon the stage) contrive 
 between them, one by pertinent questions, the other 
 by judicious management of his replies, to bring out 
 those circumstances in the past fortunes and imme- 
 diate circumstances of this interesting family, which 
 may put the audience in possession of all which it is 
 important for them to know. The reader sees the 
 dark legendary character which invests the whole 
 tale ; and in the following acts this darkness is made 
 more emphatic from the fact that incidents are used 
 of which contradictory versions existed, some poets 
 adopting one version, some another, so cloudy and 
 uncertain were the facts. All this apocrypJial gloom 
 aids that sanctity and awe which belong to another 
 and a higher mode of life ; to that slumbering life of 
 sculpture, as opposed to painting, which we have
 
 THEORY OF GREEK TRAGEDY. 21 
 
 called a life within a life. Grecian taste would inevi- 
 tably require that the dialogue should be adjusted to 
 this starting-point and standard. Accordingly, in 
 the first place, the dialogue is always (and in a de- 
 gree quite unperceived by the translators up to this 
 time) severe, massy, simple, yet solemnized inten- 
 tionally by the use of a select vocabulary, corres- 
 ponding (in point of archaism and remoteness from 
 ordinary use) to our scriptural vocabulary. Secondly, 
 the metre is of a kind never yet examined with suit- 
 able care. There were two objects aimed at in the 
 Greek iambic of the tragic drama ; and in some 
 measure these objects were in collision with each 
 other, unless most artfully managed. One was, to 
 exhibit a purified imitation of real human conversa- 
 tion. The other was, to impress upon this colloquial 
 form, thus far by its veiy nature recalling ordinary 
 human life, a character of solemnity and religious 
 conversation. Partly this was effected by acts of 
 omission and commission ; by banishing certain 
 words or forms of words ; by recalling others of high 
 antiquity : particular tenses, for instance, were never 
 used by the tragic poets ; not even by Euripides 
 (the most Wordsworthian^ of the Athenian poets in 
 the circumstance of having a peculiar theory of poetic 
 diction,' which lowered its tone of separation, and 
 took it down fi'om the cothurnus) ; other verbal forms, 
 again, were used nowhere but upon the stage. Partly, 
 therefore, this consecration of the tragic style was 
 effected by the antique cast, and the exclusive cast 
 of its phraseology. But, partly also, it was effected 
 by the metre. From whatever cause it may arise, — 
 jhiefly, perhaps, from differences in the genius of tho
 
 12 THEORY OP GREEK TRAGEDY 
 
 two languages, — certain it is, that the Latin iambics 
 of Seneca, &c. (in the tragedies ascribed to him), 
 cannot be so read by an English mouth as to produce 
 anything like the sonorous rhythmus and the grand 
 intonation of the Greek iambics. This is a curious 
 fact, and as yet, we believe, unnoticed. But over and 
 above this original adaptation of the Greek language 
 to the iambic metre, we have no doubt whatever that 
 the recitation of verse on the stage was of an artificial 
 and semi-musical character. It was undoubtedly 
 much more sustained and intonated with a slow and 
 measured stateliness,* which, whilst harmonizing it 
 with the other circumstances of solemnity in Greek 
 tragedy, would bring it nearer to music. Beyond a 
 doubt, it had the effect (and might have the effect 
 even now, managed by a good reader) of the recita- 
 tive in the Italian opera ; as, indeed, in other points, 
 the Italian opera is a much nearer representative of 
 the Greek tragedy, than the direct modern tragedy, 
 professing that title. 
 
 X. As to the Chorus, nothing needs to be said 
 upon this element of the Athenian tragedy. Every- 
 body knows how solemn, and therefore how solem- 
 nizing, must have been the richest and most lyrical 
 music, the most passionate of the ancient poetry, the 
 most dithyrambic of tragic and religious raptures, 
 supported to the eye by the most hieroglyphic and 
 therefore mysterious of dances. For the dances of 
 the chorus, the strophe and the antistrophe, were 
 symbolic, and therefore full of mysterious meanings ; 
 and not the less impressive, because these meanings 
 'ind these symbols had lost their significancy to the 
 mob ; since the very cause of that loss lay in the
 
 THEORY OF GREEK TRAGEDY. 23 
 
 antiquity of their origin. One great error which 
 remains to be remov^ed is the notion that the chorus 
 either did support, or was meant to support, the office 
 of a moral teacher. The chorus simply stood on the 
 level of a sympathizing spectator, detached from the 
 business and interests of the action ; and its office 
 was to guide or to interpret the sympathies of the 
 audience. Here was a great error of Milton's, which 
 will be found in two' separate places. At present 
 it is sufficient to say, that the mysterious solemnity 
 conferred by the chorus presupposes and is in per- 
 fect harmony with om- theory of a life within a life, — 
 a life sequestrated into some far-ofi" slumbering state, 
 having the severe tranquillity of Hades, — a life sym- 
 bohzed by the marble life of sculpture ; but utterly 
 out of all symmetry and proportion to the realities 
 of that human life which we modems take up as the 
 basis of our tragic drama.
 
 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES, 
 
 AS REPRESENTED ON THE EDINBURGH STAGE. 
 
 Every thing in our days is new. Roads, for in- 
 stance, which, being formerly ' of the earth earthy,' 
 and therefore perishable, are now iron, and next door 
 to being immortal ; tragedies, which are so entirely 
 new, that neither we nor our fathers, through eighteen 
 hundred and ninety odd years, gone by, since CtEsar 
 did our little island the honor to sit upon its skirts, 
 have ever seen the like to this ' Antigone ; ' and, finally, 
 even more new are readers, who, being once an obe- 
 dient race of men, most humble and deferential in the 
 presence of a Greek scholar, are now become intrac- 
 tably mutinous; keep their hats on whilst he is ad- 
 dressing them ; and listen to him or not, as he seema 
 to talk sense or nonsense. Some there are, however, 
 who look upon all these new things as being intensely 
 old. Yet, surely the railroads are new ? No ; not at 
 all. Talus, the iron man in Spenser, who continually 
 ran round the island of Crete, administering gentle 
 warning and correction to otfenders, by flooring them 
 with an iron flail, was a very ancient personage in 
 Greek fable ; and the received opinion is, that he must 
 have been a Cretan railroad, called The Great Circular 
 Coast-Line, that carried my lords the judges on theii 
 eircuits of jail-delivery. The ' Antigone,' again, thai
 
 26 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 
 
 wears the freshness of morning dew, and is so fresh 
 and dewy in the beautiful person of Miss Faucit, had 
 really begun to look faded on the Athenian stage, and 
 even ' of a certain age,' about the death of Pericles, 
 whose meridian year was the year 444 before Christ. 
 Lastly, these modern readers^ that are so obstinately 
 rebellious to the once Papal authority of Greek, they — 
 No ; on consideration, they are new. Antiquity pro- 
 duced many monsters, but none like them. 
 
 The ti'uth is, that this vast multiplication of readers, 
 within the last twenty-five years, has changed the 
 prevailing character of readers. The minority has 
 become the overwhelming majority : the quantity has 
 disturbed the quality. Formerly, out of eveiy five 
 readers, at least four were, in some degree, classical 
 scholars : or, if that would be saying too much, if two 
 of the four had ' small Latin and less Greek,' they 
 were generally connected with those who had more, or 
 at the worst, who had much reverence for Latin, and 
 more reverence for Greek. If they did not all share 
 in the services of the temple, all, at least, shared in 
 <he superstition. But, now-a-days, the readers come 
 chiefly from a class of busy people who care very 
 little for ancestral crazes. Latin they have heard of, 
 and some of them know it as a good sort of industrious 
 language, that even, in modern times, has turned out 
 many useful books, astronomical, medical, philosophi- 
 cal, and (as Mrs. Malaprop observes) diabolical ; but, 
 as to Greek, they think of it as of an ancient mummy : 
 you spend an infinity of time in unswathing it from its 
 old dusty wrappers, and, when you have come to the 
 Dnd, what do you find for your pains } A woman's 
 face, or a baby's, that certainly is not the better for
 
 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 27 
 
 being three thousand years old ; and perhaps a few 
 ears of wheat, stolen from Pharaoh's granary ; which 
 wheat, when sown'^ in Norfolk or Mid-Lothian, reaped, 
 thrashed, ground, baked, and hunted through all sorts 
 of tortures, yields a breakfast roll that (as a Scottish 
 baker observed to me) is ' not just that bad.' Cer- 
 tainly not : not exactly ' that bad ; ' not worse than the 
 worst of our own ; but still, much fitter for Pharaoh'^s 
 breakfast-table than for ours. 
 
 I, for my own part, stand upon an isthmus, con- 
 necting me, at one terminus, with the rebels against 
 Greek, and, at the other, with those against whom they 
 are in rebellion. On the one hand, it seems shocking 
 to me, who am steeped to the lips in antique prejudices, 
 that Greek, in unlimited quantities, should not secure a 
 limited privilege of talking nonsense. Is all reverence 
 extinct for old, and ivy-mantled, and worm-eaten 
 things ? Surely, if your own grandmother lectures on 
 morals, which perhaps now and then she does, she will 
 command that reverence from you, by means of her 
 grandmotherhood, which by means of her ethics she 
 might not. To be a good Grecian, is now to be a 
 faded potentate ; a sort of phantom Mogul, sitting at 
 Delhi, with an English sepoy bestriding his shoulders. 
 Matched against the master of ologies, in our days, 
 \he most accomplished of Grecians is becoming what 
 the ' master of sentences ' had become long since, in 
 competition with the political economist. Yet, be 
 assured, reader, that all the ' ologies ' hitherto chris- 
 tened oology, ichthyology, ornithology, conchology, 
 palaeodontology, &c., do not furnish such mines of 
 labor as does the Greek language when thoroughly 
 searched. The ' Mithridates ' of Adelung improved
 
 28 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 
 
 by the commentaries of Vater and of subsequent au- 
 thors, numbers up about four thousand languages and 
 jargons on our polyglot earth ; not including the 
 chuckling of poultry, nor caterwauling, nor barking, 
 howlfug, braying, lowing, nor other respectable and 
 ancient dialects, that perhaps have their elegant and 
 their vulgar varieties, as well as prouder forms of com- 
 munication. But my impression is, that the Greek, 
 taken by itself, this one exquisite language, considered 
 as a quarry of intellectual labor, has more work in it, 
 is more truly a piece de resistance^ than all the re- 
 maining three thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine, 
 with caterwauling thrown into the bargain. So far I 
 side with the Grecian, and think that he ought to be 
 honored with a little genuflexion. Yet, on the other 
 hand, the finest sound on this earth, and which rises 
 like an orchestra above all the uproars of earth, and 
 the Babels of earthly languages, is truth absolute 
 truth ; and the hatefulest is conscious falsehood. Now, 
 there is falsehood, nay (which seems strange), even 
 sycophancy, in the old undistinguishing homage to all 
 that is called classical. Yet why should men be syco- 
 phants in cases where they must be disinterested } 
 Sycophancy grows out of fear, or out of mercenary 
 self-interest. But what can there exist of either point- 
 ing to an old Greek poet ? Cannot a man give his 
 free opinion upon Homer, without fearing to be way- 
 laid by his ghost } But it is not that which startles 
 him from publishing the secret demur which his heart 
 prompts, upon hearing false praises of a Greek poet, 
 or praisefs which, if not false, are extravagant. What 
 he fears, is the scorn of his contemporaries. Let 
 ©nee a party have formed itself considerable enough to
 
 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 29 
 
 protect a man from the charge of presumption in 
 throwing off the yoke of servile allegiance to all that 
 is called classical, — let it be a party ever so small 
 numerically, and the rebels will soon be many. What 
 a man feai-s is, to affront the whole storm of indigna- 
 tion, real and atfected, in his own solitary person. 
 ' Goth ! ' ' Vandal ! ' he heai*s from every side. Break 
 that storm by dividing it, and he will face its anger. 
 ' Let me be a Goth,' he mutters to himself, ' but let me 
 not dishonor myself by atiecting an enthusiasm which 
 my heart rejects ! ' 
 
 Ever since the restoration of letters there has been a 
 cabal, an academic interest, a factious league amongst 
 universities, and learned bodies, and individual scholare, 
 for exalting as something superierrestrial, and quite 
 unapproachable by moderns, the monuments of Greek 
 literature. France, in the time of Louis XIV., Eng- 
 land, in the latter part of that time ; in fact, each 
 country as it grew polished at some cost of strength, 
 carried this craze to a dangerous excess — dangerous 
 as all things false are dangerous, and depressing to 
 the aspirations of genius. Boileau, for instance, and 
 Addison, though neither^ of ihcm accomplished in 
 scholarship, nor either of them extensively read in any 
 department of the classic literature, speak every whei"e 
 j»f the classics as having notoriously, and by the 
 general confession of polished nations, carried the 
 functions of poetry and eloquence to that sort of fault- 
 less beauty which probably does realh/ exist in the 
 Greek sculpture. There are few things perfect in 
 this world of frailty. Even lightning is sometimes a 
 ♦iiilure : Niagara has horrible faults ; and IMont Blanc 
 might b3 improved by a century of chiselling from
 
 30 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 
 
 judicious artists. Such are the works of blind ele- 
 ments, which (poor things !) cannot improve by expe- 
 rience. As to man who does, the sculpture of the 
 Greeks in their marbles and sometimes in their gems, 
 seems the only act of his workmanship which has hit 
 the bull's eye in the target at which we are all aiming. 
 Not so, with permission from Messrs. Boileau and Ad- 
 dison, the Greek literature. The faults in this are 
 often conspicuous; nor are they likely to be hidden 
 for the coming century, as they have been for the 
 three last. The idolatry will be shaken : as idols, 
 some of the classic models are destined to totter : and 
 I foresee, without gifts of prophecy, that many laborers 
 will soon be in this field — many idoloclasts, who will 
 expose the signs of disease, which zealots had inter- 
 preted as power ; and of weakness, which is not the 
 less real because scholars had fancied it health, nor the 
 less injurious to the total effect because it was inevita- 
 ble under the accidents of the Grecian position. 
 
 Meantime, I repeat, that to disparage any thing 
 whatever, or to turn the eye upon blemishes, is no part 
 of my present purpose. Nor could it be : since the 
 one sole section of the Greek literature, as to which I 
 profess myself an enthusiast, happens to be the tragic 
 drama ; and here, only, 1 myself am liable to be chal- 
 lenged as an idolater. As regards the Antigone in 
 particular, so profoundly do I feel the impassioned 
 beauty of her situation in connection with her charac- 
 ter, that long ago, in a work of my own (yet unpub- 
 lished), having occasion (by way of overture intro- 
 ducing one of the sections) to cite before the reader 5 
 eye the chief pomps of the Grecian theatre, a*'*er 
 invoking ' the magnificent witch ' Medea, I call -p
 
 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 31 
 
 Antigone to this shadowy stage by the apostrophe, 
 ' Holy heathen, daughter of God, before God was 
 known, s flower from Paradise after Paradise was 
 closed ; that quitting all things for which flesh lan- 
 guishes, safety and honor, a palace and a home, didst 
 make thyself a houseless pariah, lest the poor pariah 
 king, thy outcast father, should want a hand to lead 
 him in his darkness, or a voice to whisper comfort in 
 his misery ; angel, that badst depart for ever the 
 glories of thy own bridal day, lest he that had shared 
 thy nursery in childhood, should want the honors of a 
 funeral ; idolatrous, yet Christian Lady, that in the 
 spirit of martyrdom trodst alone the yawning billows 
 of the grave, flying from earthly hopes, lest everlast- 
 ing despair should settle upon the grave of thy brother,' 
 &c. In fact, though all the groupings, and what I 
 would call permanent attitudes of the Grecian stage, 
 are majestic, there is none that, to my mind, towers 
 into such aflfecting grandeur, as this final revelation, 
 through Antigone herself, and through her own dread- 
 ful death, of the tremendous wo that destiny had sus- 
 pended over her house. If therefore my business had 
 been chiefly with the individual drama, I should have 
 found little room for any sentiment but that of pro- 
 found admiration. But my present business is difler- 
 ent : it concerns the Greek drama generally, and the 
 attempt to revive it ; and its object is to elucidate, 
 rather than to praise or to blame. To explain this 
 better, I will describe two things : — 1st, The sort 
 of audience that I suppose myself to be addressing ; 
 and, 2dly, As growing out of ihat^ the particular 
 Huality of the explanations which I wish to make. 
 1st, As to the audience : in order to excuse the tone
 
 82 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 
 
 (which occasionally I may be obliged to assume) of 
 one speaking as from a station of knowledge, to others 
 having no knowledge, I beg it to be understood, that I 
 take ihat station deliberately, on no conceit of supe- 
 riority to my readers, but as a companion adapting my 
 services to the wants of those who need them. I am 
 not addressing those already familiar with the Greek 
 drama, but those who frankly confess, and (according 
 to their conjectural appreciation of it) who regret their 
 non-familiarity with that drama. It is a thing well 
 known to publishers, through remarkable results, and 
 is now showing itself on a scale continually widening, 
 that a new literary public has arisen, very different 
 from any which existed at the beginning of this cen- 
 tury. The aristocracy of the land have always been, 
 in a moderate degree, literary ; less, however, in con- 
 nection with the current literature, than with literature 
 generally — past as well as present. And this is a 
 tendency naturally favored and strengthened in them, 
 by the fine collections of books, carried forward through 
 successive generations, which are so often found as a 
 sort of hereditary foundation in the country mansions 
 of our nobility. But a class of readers, prodigiously 
 more extensive, has formed itself within the com- 
 mercial orders of our great cities and manufacturing 
 districts. These orders range through a large scale 
 The highest classes amongst them were always literary. 
 But the interest of literature has now swept downwards 
 through a vast compass of descents : and this large 
 body, though the busiest in the nation, yet, by having 
 under their undisturbed command such leisure time as 
 they have at all under their command, are eventually 
 *ble to read more than those even who seem to ha'" e
 
 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOOLES. 33 
 
 nothing else but leisure. In justice, however, to the 
 nobilit)'^ of our land, it should be remembered, that 
 their stations in society, and their wealth, their terri- 
 torial duties, and their various public duties in London, 
 as at court, at public meetings, in parliament, &c., 
 bring crowded claims upon their time ; whilst even 
 sacrifices of time to the graceful courtesies of life, are in 
 reference to their stations, a sort of secondary duties. 
 These allowances made, it still remains true that the 
 busier classes are the main reading classes; whilst 
 from their immense numbers, they are becoming ef- 
 fectually the body that will more and more impress 
 upon the moving literature its main impulse and di- 
 rection. One other feature of difference there is 
 amongst this commercial class of readers : amongst 
 the aristocracy all are thoroughly educated, excepting 
 those who go at an early age into the army ; of the 
 commercial body, none receive an elaborate, and what 
 is meant by a liberal education, except those standing 
 by their connections in the richest classes. Thus it 
 happens that, amongst those who have not inherited 
 but achieved their stations, many men of fine and 
 powerful understandings, accomplished in* manners, 
 and admirably informed, not having had the bene- 
 fits when young of a regular classical education, find 
 (upon any accident bringing up such subjects) a de- 
 ficiency which they do not find on other subjects. 
 They are too honorable to undervalue advantages, 
 which they feel to be considerable, simply because 
 they were denied to themselves. They regret their 
 loss. And yet it seems hardly worth while, on a 
 simple prospect of contingencies that may never be 
 realized, to undertake an entirely new course of study 
 3
 
 54 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 
 
 for redressing this loss. But they would be glad to 
 avail themselves of any useful information not exa<5t- 
 ing study. These are the persons, this is the class, to 
 which I address my remarks on the ' Antigone ; ' and 
 out of their particular situation, suggesting upon all 
 elevated subjects a corresponding tone of liberal curi- 
 osity, will arise the particular nature and direction of 
 these remarks. 
 
 Accordingly, I presume, secondly, that this curiosity 
 will take the following course: — these persons will 
 naturally wish to know, at starting, what there is 
 differentially interesting in a Grecian tragedy, as con- 
 trasted with one of Shakspeare's or of Schiller's : in 
 what respect, and by what agencies, a Greek tragedy 
 affects us, or is meant to affect us, otherwise than as 
 they do ; and how far the Antigone of Sophocles was 
 judiciously chosen as the particular medium for con- 
 veying to British minds a first impression, and a repre- 
 sentative impression, of Greek tragedy. So far, in 
 relation to the ends proposed, and the means selected. 
 Finally, these persons will be curious to know the issue 
 of such an experiment. Let the purposes and the 
 means have been bad or good, what was the actual 
 success ? And not merely success, in the sense of 
 >,he momentary acceptance by half a dozen audiences 
 whom the mere decencies of justice must have com 
 pe-Ued to acknowledge the manager's trouble and 
 expense on their behalf; but what was the degree of 
 satisfaction felt by students of the Athenian ^ tragedy 
 in relation to their long-cherished ideal .? Did the re- 
 Dresentation succeed in realizing, for a moment, the 
 awful pageant of the Athenian stage ? Did Tragedy 
 m Milton's immortal expression,
 
 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 36 
 
 come sweeping by 
 
 In soeptred pall ? 
 
 Or was the whole, though successful in relation to the 
 thing attempted, a failure in relation to what ought 
 to have been attempted ? Such are the questions to 
 be answered. 
 
 The first elementaiy iaea of a Greek tragedy, is 
 to be sought in a serious Italian opera. The Greek 
 dialogue is represented by the recitative, and the 
 tumultuous lyrical parts assigned chiefly, though not 
 exclusively, to the chorus on the Greek stage, are 
 represented by the impassioned airs, duos, trios, cho- 
 ruses, (fee. on the Italian. And here, at the very outset, 
 occurs a question which lies at the threshold of a Fine 
 Art, — that is, of any Fine Art: for had the views of 
 Addison upon the Italian opera had the least foundation 
 in truth, there could have been no room or opening 
 for any mode of imitation except such as belongs to a 
 mechanic art. 
 
 The reason for at all connecting Addison with this 
 case is, that lie chiefly was the person occupied in 
 assailing the Italian opera; and this hostility arose, 
 probably, in his want of sensibility to good (that is, to 
 Italian) music. But whatever might be his motive for 
 the hostility, the single argument by which he sup- 
 ported it was this, — that a hero ought not to sing 
 upon the stage, because no hero known to historj' ever 
 summoned a garrison in a song, or charged a battery 
 in a semichorus. In this argument lies an ignorance 
 of the very first prmciple concerned in every Fine 
 Art. In all alike, more or less directly, the object is \ 
 to reproduce in the mind some great eflfect, through
 
 86 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 
 
 the agency of idem in alio. The idem, the same im- 
 pression, is to be restored ; but in alio, in a different 
 material, — by means of some different instrument. 
 For instance, on the Roman stage there was an art, 
 now entirely lost, of narrating, and, in part of dramati- 
 cally representing an impassioned tale, by means of 
 dancing, of musical accompaniment in the orchestra, 
 and of elaborate pantomime in the performer. Saltavit 
 Hypermnestram, he danced (that is, he represented by 
 dancing and pantomime the story of) Hypermnestra, 
 Now, suppose a man to object, that young ladies, 
 when saving their youthful husbands at midnight from 
 assassination, could not be capable of waltzing or 
 quadrilling, how wide is this of the whole problem ! 
 This is still seeking for the mechanic imitation, some 
 imitation founded in the very fact ; whereas the object 
 is to seek the imitation in the sameness of the im- 
 pression drawn from a different, or even from an 
 impossible fact. If a man, taking a hint from the 
 Roman ' Saltatio' {saltavit Andromachen), should say 
 that he would ' whistle Waterloo,' that is, by whistling 
 tonnected with pantomime, would express the passion 
 and the changes of Waterloo, it would be monstrous to 
 refuse him his postulate on the pretence that ' people 
 did not whistle at Waterloo.' Precisely so : neither 
 are most people made of marble, but of a material as 
 different as can well be imagined, viz. of elastic flesh, 
 with warm blood coursing along its tubef ; and yet, 
 for all that, a sculptor will draw tears from you, by 
 exhibiting, in pure statuary marble, on a sepulchral 
 monument, two young children with their little heads 
 on a pillow, sleeping in each other's arms ; whereas, 
 I he had presented them in wax-work, which yet is
 
 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 37 
 
 far more like to flesh, you would have felt little more 
 pathos in the scene than if they had been sho\vn baked 
 in gilt gingerbread. He has expressed the idem, the 
 identical thing expressed in the real children; the 
 sleep that masks death, the rest, the peace, the 
 purit}--, the innocence ; but in alio, in a substance 
 the most different; rigid, non-elastic, and as unlike to 
 flesh, if tried by touch, or eye, or by experience of 
 hfe, as can well be imagined. So of the whistling. It 
 is the very worst objection in the world to say, that 
 the strife of Waterloo did not reveal itself through 
 whistling : undoubtedly it did not ; but that is the very 
 ground of the man's art. He will reproduce the fuiy 
 and the movement as to the only point which concerns 
 you, viz. the effect, upon your own sympathies, through 
 a language that seems without any relation to it : he 
 will set before you what was at Waterloo through that 
 which was not at Waterloo. Whereas any direct 
 factual imitation, resting upon painted figures drest up 
 in regimentals, and worked by watchwork through the 
 whole movements of the battle, would have been no 
 art whatsoever in the sense of a Fine Art, but a base 
 mechanic mimicry. 
 
 This principle of the idem in alio, so widely diffused 
 through all the higher revelations of art, it is peculiarly 
 requisite to bear in mind when looking at Grecian 
 tragedy, because no form of human composition em- 
 ploys it in so much complexity. How confounding it 
 would have been to Addison, if somebody had told 
 him, that, substantially, he had himself committed the 
 offence (as he fancied it) which he charged so bitterly 
 upon the Italian opera ; and that, if the opera had gone 
 farther upon that road than himself, the Greek tragedy,
 
 88 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 
 
 which he presumed to be so prodigiously exalted be- 
 yond modern approaches, had gone farther even than 
 the opera. Addison himself, when writing a tragedy, 
 made this violation (as he would have said) of nature, 
 made this concession (as I should say) to a higher 
 nature, that he compelled his characters to talk in 
 metre. It is true this metre was the common iambic, 
 which (as Aristotle remarks) is the most natural and 
 spontaneous of all metres ; and, for a sufficient reason, 
 in all languages. Certainly ; but Aristotle never 
 meant to say that it was natural for a gentleman in a 
 passion to talk threescore and ten iambics consecu- 
 tively : a chance line might escape him once and 
 away ; as we know that Tacitus opened one of his 
 works by a regular dactylic hexameter in full curl, 
 without ever discovering it to his dying day (a fact 
 which is clear from his never having corrected it) ; 
 and this being a very artificial metre, a fortiori Tacitus 
 might have slipped into a simple iambics But that 
 was an accident, whilst Addison had deliberately and 
 uniformly made his characters talk in verse. Accord- 
 ing to the common and false meaning [which was hia 
 own meaning] of the word nature, he had as undeniably 
 violated the principle of the natural, by this metrical 
 dialogue, as the Italian opera by musical dialogue. If 
 it is hard and trying for men to sing their emotions, 
 not less so it must be to deliver them in verse. 
 
 But, if this were shocking, how much more shocking 
 ivould it have seemed to Addison, had he been intro- 
 duced to parts which really exist in the Grecian drama? 
 Even Sophocles, who, of the three tragic poets sur- 
 fiving from the wrecks of the Athenian stage, ia 
 leputod the supreme artist, ^'^ if not the most impa*
 
 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 39 
 
 sio^ied poet with wtiat horror he would have over- 
 whahned Addison, when read by the light of those 
 principles which he had himself so scornfully applied 
 to the opera ! In the very monsoon of his raving 
 misery, from calamities as sudden as they were irre- 
 deemable, a king is introduced, not only conversing, 
 but conversing in metre ; not only in metre, but in the 
 most elaborate of choral metres ; not only under the 
 torture of these lyric difficulties, but also chanting ; 
 not only chanting, but also in all probability dancing. 
 What do you think of that^ Mr. Addison ? 
 
 There is, in fact, a scale of graduated ascents in 
 ttvese artifices for unrealizing the effects of dramatic 
 situations : 
 
 1. We may see, even in novels and prose comedies, 
 a keen attention paid to the inspiriting and dressing of 
 the dialogue : it is meant to be life-like, but still it is a 
 little raised, pointed, colored, and idealized. 
 
 2. In comedy of a higher and more poetic cast, we 
 find the dialogue metrical. 
 
 3. In comedy or in tragedy alike, which is meant to 
 be still further removed from ordinary life, we find the 
 dialogue fettered not only by metre, but by rhyme. 
 We need not go to Dryden, and others, of our own 
 middle stage, or to the French stage for th,is : even in 
 Shakspeare, as for example, in parts of Romeo and 
 Juliet (and for no capricious purpose), we may see 
 effects sought from the vse of rhyme. There is another 
 illustration of the idealizing effect to be obtained from 
 a particular treatment of the dialogue, seen in the 
 Hamle: of Shakspeare. In that drama there arises a 
 necessity for exhibiting a play within a play. This 
 interior drama is tc> be further removed from the
 
 40 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 
 
 spectator than the principal drama ; it is a deep below 
 a deep ; and, to produce that effect, the poet relies 
 chiefly upon the stiffening the dialogue, and removing 
 it still farther, than the genei'al dialogue of the in- 
 cluding or outside drama, from the standard of ordi- 
 nary life. 
 
 4. We find, superadded to these artifices for ideal- 
 izing the situations, even music of an intermitting 
 character, sometimes less, sometimes more impas- 
 sioned — recitatives, airs, choruses. Here we have 
 reached the Italian opera. 
 
 5. And, finally, besides all these resources of art, 
 we find dancing introduced ; but dancing of a solemn, 
 mystical, and symbolic character. Here, at last, we 
 have reached the Greek tragedy. Probably the best 
 exemplification of a Grecian tragedy that ever will be 
 given to a modern reader is found in the Samson 
 Agonistes of Milton. Now, in the choral or lyric parts 
 of this fine drama, Samson not only talks, 1st, metri- 
 cally (as he does every where, and in the most level 
 parts of the scenic business), but, 2d, in very intricate 
 metres, and, Sd, occasionally in rhymed metres (though 
 the rhymes are too sparingly and too capriciously scat- 
 tered by Milton), and, 4th, singing or chanting these 
 metres (for, as the chorus sang, it was impossible that 
 he could be allowed to talk in his ordinary voice, else 
 he would have put them out, and ruined the music). 
 Finally, 5th, I am satisfied that Milton meant him to 
 dance. The office of the chorus was imperfectly de- 
 fined upon the Greek stage. They are generally 
 understood to be the moralizers of the scene. But this 
 js liable to exceptions. Some of them have been 
 known to do very bad things on the stage, and to come
 
 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES 41 
 
 within a trifle of felony : as to misprision of felony, 
 if there is such a crime, a Greek chorus thinks nothing 
 of it. But that is no business of mine. What 1 was 
 going to say is, that, as the chorus sometimes inter- 
 mingles too much in the action, so the actors some- 
 times intermingle in the business of the chorus. Now, 
 when you are at Rome, you must do as they do at 
 Rome. And that the actor, who mixed with the 
 chorus, was compelled to sing, is a clear case ; for his 
 part in the choral ode is always in the nature of an 
 echo, or answer, or like an antiphony in cathedral ser- 
 vices. But nothing could be more absurd than that 
 one of these antiphonies sliould be sung, and another 
 said. That he was also compelled to dance, I am 
 satisfied. The chorus only sometimes moralized, but it 
 always danced : and any actor, mingling whh the 
 chorus, must dance also. A little incident occurs to 
 my remembrance, from the Moscow expedition of 1812, 
 which may here be used as an illustration : One day 
 King Murat, flourishing his plumage as usual, made a 
 gesture of invitation to some squadrons of cavalry that 
 they should charge the enemy : upon which the cavalry 
 advanced, but maliciously contrived to envelope th< 
 king of dandies, before he had time to execute hir 
 ordinary manoeuvre of riding off to the left and be- 
 coming a spectator of their prowess. The cavalry 
 resolved that his majesty should for once ride down at 
 their head to the melee, and taste what fighting waa 
 like ; and he, finding that the thing must be, though 
 horribly vexed, made a merit of his necessity, and 
 afterwards pretended that he liked it very much. 
 Sometimes, in the darkness, in default of other mis- 
 Withrojiic visions, the wickedness of this cavalry, theil
 
 42 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLLS. 
 
 mechancete, causes me to laugh immoderately. Now 
 I conceive that any interloper into the Greek chorug 
 must have danced when they danced, or he would have 
 been swept away by their impetus : nolens volens, he 
 must have rode along with the orchestral charge, he 
 must have rode on the crest of the choral billows, or 
 he would have been rode down by their impassioned 
 sweep. Samson, and CEdipus, and others, must have 
 danced, if they sang ; and they certainly did sing, by 
 notoriously intermingling in the choral business." 
 
 ' But now,' says the plain English reader, ' what was 
 the object of all these elaborate devices ? And how 
 came it that the English tragedy, which surely is as 
 good as the Greek,' (and at this point a devil of de- 
 fiance whispers to him, like the quarrelsome servant 
 of the Capulets or the Montagus, 'say better,'^) 'that 
 the English tragedy contented itself with fewer of these 
 artful resources than the Athenian ? ' I reply, that 
 the object of all these things was — to unrealize the 
 scene. The English drama, by its metrical dress, and 
 by other arts more disguised, unrealized itself, liberated 
 itself from the oppression of life in its ordinary stand- 
 ards, up to a certain height. Why it did not rise still 
 higher, and why the Grecian did, T will endeavor to 
 explain. It was not that the English tragedy was less 
 impassioned ; on the contrary, it was far more so ; the 
 Greek being awful rather than impassioned ; but the 
 passion of each is in a different key. It is not again 
 that the Greek drama sought a lower object than the 
 English : it sought a different object. It is not im- 
 Tjarity, but disparity, that divides the two magnificeni 
 theatres. 
 
 Suffer me, reader at this pomt, to borrow frona my
 
 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 4ft 
 
 self, and do not betray me to the authorities that rule in 
 this journal, if you happen to know [which is not 
 likely] that I am taking an idea from a paper which 
 years ago I wrote for an eminent literary journal. As 
 I have no copy of that paper before me, it is impos- 
 sible that I should save myself any labor of writing. 
 The words at any rate I must invent afresh : and as 
 to the idea, you never can be such a churlish man as, 
 by insisting on a new one, in effect to insist upon my 
 writing a false one. In the following paragraph, there* 
 fore, I give the substance of a thought suggested by 
 myself some years ago. 
 
 That kind of feeling, which broods over the Grecian 
 tragedy, and to court which feeling the tragic poets 
 of Greece naturally spread all their canvas, was more 
 nearly allied to the atmosphere of death than that of 
 life. This expresses rudely the character of awe and 
 religious horror investing the Greek theatre. But to 
 my own feeling the different principle of passion which 
 governs the Grecian conception of tragedy, as com- 
 pared with the English, is best conveyed by saying 
 that the Grecian is a breathing from the world of 
 sculpture, the English a breathing from the world 
 of painting. What we read in sculpture is not abso- 
 lutely death, but still less is it the fulness of life. We 
 read there the abstraction of a life that reposes, the 
 sublimity of a life that aspires, the solemnity of a life 
 that is thrown to an infinite distance. This last is the 
 feature of sculpture which seems most characteristic : 
 the form which presides in the most commanding 
 groups, ' is not dead but sleepeth : ' true, but it is the 
 «!leep of a life sequestrated, solemn, liberated from the 
 Jjonds of space and time, and (as to both alike) thrown
 
 44 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 
 
 (I repeat the words) to a distance which is infinite. It 
 affects us profoundly, but not by agitation. Now, on 
 the other hand, the breathing life — life kindling, 
 trembling, palpitating — that life which speaks to us 
 in painting, this is also the life that speaks to us in 
 English tragedy. Into an English tragedy ev^en fes- 
 tivals of joy may enter ; marriages, and baptisms, OJ 
 commemorations of national trophies : which, or any 
 thing like which, is incompatible with the very being 
 of the Greek. In that tragedy what uniformity of 
 gloom ; in the English what light alternating with 
 depths of darkness ! The Greek, how mournful ; the 
 English, how tumultuous ! Even the catastrophes how 
 different ! In the Greek we see a breathless waiting 
 for a doom that cannot be evaded ; a waiting, as il 
 were, for the last shock of an earthquake, or the inex- 
 orable rising of a deluge : in the English it is like a 
 midnight of shipwreck, from which up to the last and 
 till the final ruin comes, there still survives the sort of 
 hope that clings to human energies. 
 
 Connected with this original awfulness of the Greek 
 tragedy, and possibly in part its cause, or at least 
 lending strength to its cause, we may next remark the 
 grand dimensions of the ancient theatres. Every 
 citizen had a right to accommodation. There at once 
 was a pledge of grandeur. Out of this original stand- 
 ard grew the magnificence of many a future amphi- 
 theatre, circus, hippodrome. Had the original theatre 
 been merely a speculation of private interest, then, 
 exactly as demand arose, a corresponding supply would 
 have provided for it through its ordinary vulgar chan- 
 nels ; and this supply would have taken place through 
 rival theatres. But the crushing exaction of ' room for
 
 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 45 
 
 tvery citizen,' put an end to that process of subdivision. 
 Drui-y Lane, as 1 read (or think that I read) thirty 
 years ago, allowed sitting room for three thousand 
 eight hundred people. Multiply that by ten ; imagine 
 thirty-eight thousand instead of thirty-eight hundred, 
 and then you have an idea of the Athenian theatre.^ 
 
 Next, out of that grandeur in the architectural pro- 
 portions arose, as by necessity, other grandeurs. You 
 are aware of the cothurnus, or buskin, which raised 
 the actoi''s heel by two and a half inches ; and you 
 think that this must have caused a deformity in the 
 general figure as incommensurate to this height. Not 
 at all. The flowing dress of Greece healed all that. 
 
 But, besides the cothurnus, you have heard of the 
 mask. So far as it was fitted to swell the intona- 
 tions of the voice, you are of opinion that this mask 
 would be a happy contrivance ; for what, you say, 
 could a common human voice avail against the vast 
 radiation from the actor's centre of more than three 
 myriads ? If, indeed (like the Homeric Stentor), an 
 actor spoke in point of loudness, 6aov uTlXol ntvTr^xoiTa, £i3 
 much as other fifty, then he might become audible to 
 the assembled Athenians without aid. But this bfing 
 impossible, art must be invoked ; and well if the 
 mask, together with contrivances of another class, 
 could correct it. Yet if it could, still you think that 
 this mask would bring along with it an overbalancing 
 evil. For the expression, the fluctuating expression, 
 tf the features, the play of the muscles, the music of 
 the eye and of the lips, — aids to acting that, in our 
 times, have given immortality to scores, whither would 
 those have vanished ? Reader, it mortifies me that 
 all which I said to you upon the peculiar and separate
 
 i6 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES 
 
 grandeur investing the Greek theatre is forgonen. 
 For, you must consider, that where a theatre is built 
 for receiving upwards of thirty thousand spectators, the 
 curve described by what in modern times you would 
 3all the tiers of boxes, must be so vast as to make the 
 ordinaiy scale of human features almost ridiculous by 
 disproportion. Seat yourself at this day in the amphi- 
 theatre at VerDna, and judge for yourself. In an 
 amphitheatre, the stage, or properly the arena, occupy- 
 ing, in fact, the place of our modern pit, was much 
 nearer than in a scenic theatre to the surrounding 
 spectators. Allow for this, and placing some adult in 
 a station expressing the distance of the Athenian stage, 
 then judge by his appearance if the delicate pencilling 
 of Grecian features could have told at the Grecian dis- 
 tance. But even if it could, then I say that this cir- 
 cumstantiality would have been hostile to the general 
 tendencies (as already indicated) of the Grecian 
 drama. The sweeping movement of the Attic tragedy 
 ought not to admit of interruption from distinct human 
 features ; the expression of an eye, the loveliness of a 
 smile, ought to be lost amongst effects so colossal. 
 The mask aggrandized the features : even so far it 
 acted favorably. Then figure to yourself this mask 
 presenting an idealized face of the noblest Grecian 
 outline, moulded by some skilful artist Phidiaca manu, 
 so as to have the effect of a marble bust ; this accorded 
 with the aspiring cothurnus ; and the motionless char- 
 acter impressed upon the features, the marble tran- 
 quillity, would (I contend) suit the solemn processional 
 character of Athenian tragedy, far better than the most 
 expressive and flexible countenance on its natural 
 icale. ' Yes,' you say, on considering the character
 
 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 47 
 
 of ihe Greek drama, 'generally it might; in forty- 
 nine cases suppose out of fifty : but what shall be done 
 in the fiftieth, where some dreadful discoveiy or anag- 
 norisis {i. e. recognition of identity) takes place within 
 the oompass of a single line or two ; as, for instance, 
 in ths CEdipus Tyrannus, at the moment when CEdipus 
 by a final question of his own, extorts his first fatal 
 discoveiy, viz. that he had been himself unconsciously 
 the murderer of Laius } ' True, he has no reason as 
 yet to suspect that Laius was his own father ; which 
 discovery, when made further on, will draw with it 
 another still more dreadful, viz. that by this parricide 
 he had opened his road to a throne, and to a marriage 
 with his father's widow, who was also his own natural 
 mother. He does not yet know the worst : and to 
 have killed an arrogant prince, would not in those days 
 have seemed a very deep offence : but then he believes 
 that the pestilence had been sent as a secret vengeance 
 for this assassination, which is thus invested with a 
 mysterious character of horror. Just at this point, 
 Jocasta, his mother and his wife, says,^^ on witnessing 
 the sudden revulsion of feeling in his face, ' I shudder, 
 oh king, Avhen looking on thy countenance.' Now, in 
 what way could this passing spasm of horror be recon- 
 ciled with the unchanging expression in the marble- 
 looking mask ? This, and similar cases to this, 
 must surely be felt to argue a defect in the scenic 
 apparatus. But I say, no : first, Because the general 
 indistinctiveness from distance is a benefit that applies 
 equally to the fugitive changes of the features and to 
 their permanent expression. You need not regret the 
 foss through absence, of an appearance that would 
 equally, though present, have been lost through dis'
 
 18 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 
 
 tance. Secondly, The Greek actor had always the 
 resource, under such difficulties, of averting his face; 
 a resource sanctioned in similar cases by the greatest 
 of the Greek painters. Thirdly, The voluminous 
 draperies of the scenic dresses, and generally of the 
 Greek costume, made it an easy thing to muffle the 
 features altogether by a gesture most natural to sudden 
 horror. Fourthly, We must consider that there were 
 no stage lights : but, on the contrary that the general 
 light of day was specially mitigated for that particular 
 part of the theatre ; just as various architectural devices 
 were employed to swell the volume of sound. Finally, 
 [ repeat my sincere opinion, that the general indis- 
 tinctness of the expression was, on principles of taste, 
 an advantage, as harmonizing with the stately and 
 sullen monotony of the Greek tragedy. Grandeur in 
 the attitudes, in the gestures, in the groups, in the pro- 
 cessions — all this was indispensable: but, on so vast 
 a scale as the mighty cartoons of the Greek stage, an 
 Attic artist as little regarded the details of physiognomy, 
 as a great architect would regard, on the frontispiece 
 of a temple, the miniature enrichments that might be 
 suitable in a drawing-room. 
 
 With these views upon the Grecian theatre, and 
 other views that it might oppress the reader to dwell 
 upon in this place, suddenly in December last an op- 
 portunity dawned — a golden opportunity, gleaming 
 for a moment amongst thick clouds of impossibility 
 that had gathered through three-and-twenty centuries — 
 for seeing a Grecian tragedy presented on a British 
 Btage, and with the nearest approach possible to the 
 beauty of those Athenian pomps which Sophocles 
 which Phidias, which Pericles created, beautified, pro
 
 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 49 
 
 moted. I protest, when seeing the Edinburgh theatre's 
 wogramnie^ that a note dated from the Vatican would 
 not have startled me more, though sealed with the seal 
 of the fisherman, and requesting the favor of my com- 
 pany to take coffee with the Pope. Nay, less : for 
 channels there were through which I might have com- 
 passed a presentation to his Holiness ; but the daughter 
 of CEdipus, the holy Antigone, could I have hoped to 
 see her ' in the flesh ? ' This tragedy in an English 
 version,^* and with German music, had first been 
 placed before the eyes and ears of our countrymen at 
 Convent Garden during the winter of 1844-5. It was 
 said to have succeeded. And soon after a report 
 sprang up, from nobody knew where, that Mr. Murray 
 meant to reproduce it in Edinburgh. 
 
 What more natural ? Connected so nearly with the 
 noblest house of scenic artists that ever shook the 
 hearts of nations, nobler than ever raised undying 
 echoes amidst the mighty walls of Athens, of Rome, 
 of Paris, of London, — himself a man of talents almost 
 uriparalleled for versatility, — why should not Mr. 
 Murray, always so liberal in an age so ungrateful to 
 his profession, have sacrificed something to this occa- 
 sion } He, that sacrifices so much, why not sacrifice 
 to the grandeur of the Antique } I was then in Edin- 
 Lurgh, or in its neighborhood ; and one morning, at a 
 casual assembly of some literary friends, present Pro- 
 fessor Wilson, Messrs. J. F., C. N., L. C, and others, 
 advocates, scholars, lovers of classical literature, we 
 proposed two resolutions, of which the first was, that 
 the news was too good to be true. That passed nem, 
 ion. ; and the second resoiution was nearly passing 
 viz. that a judgment would certainly fall upon Mr 
 4
 
 50 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 
 
 Murray, had a second report proved true, viz. that not 
 the Antigone, but a burlesque on the Antigone, was 
 what he meditated to introduce. This turned out 
 false ; ^^ the original report was suddenly revived eight 
 or ten months after. Immediately on the heels of the 
 promise the execution followed ; and on the last (which 
 I believe was the seventh) representation of the An- 
 tigone, I prepared myself to attend. 
 
 It had been generally reported as characteristic of 
 myself, that in respect to all coaches, steamboats, rail- 
 roads, wedding-parties, baptisms, and so forth, there 
 was a fatal necessity of my being a trifle too late. 
 Some malicious fairy, not invited to my own baptism, 
 was supposed to have endowed me with this infirmity. 
 It occurred to me that for once in my life I would show 
 the scandalousness of such a belief by being a trifle 
 too soon, say, three minutes. And no name more 
 lovely for inaugurating such a change, no memory 
 with which I could more willingly connect any re- 
 formation, than thine, dear, noble Antigone ! Accoi'd- 
 ingly, because a certain man (whose name is down in 
 my pocket-book for no good) had told me that the 
 doors of the theatre opened at half-past six, whereas, 
 in fact, they opened at seven, there was I, if you 
 please, freezing in the little colonnade of the theatre 
 precisely as it wanted six-and-a-half minutes to seven, — 
 six-and-a-half minutes observe too soon. Upon which 
 ihis son of absurdity coolly remarked, that, if he had 
 not set me half-an-hour forward, by my own showing, 
 I should have been twenty-three-and-a-half minutes too 
 late. What sophistry ! But thus it happened (namely 
 through the wickedness of this man), that, upon enter 
 ing the theatre, I found myself like Alexander Selkirk
 
 THE ANTI30NE OF SOPHOCLES. 51 
 
 in a frightful solitude, or like a single family of Arabs 
 gathering at sunset about a solitary coffee-pot in the 
 boundless desert. Was there an echo raised ? it was 
 from my own steps. Did any body cough ? it was 
 too evidently myself. 1 was the audience ; I was the 
 public. And, if any accident happened to the theatre, 
 such as being burned down, Mr. Murray would cer- 
 tainly lay the blame upon me. My business meantime, 
 as a critic, was — to find out the most malicious seat, 
 i. e. the seat from which all things would take the most 
 unfavorable aspect. I could not suit myself in this 
 respect ; however bad a situation might seem, I still 
 fancied some other as promising to be worse. And I 
 was not sorry when an audience, by mustering in 
 strength through all parts of the house, began to divide 
 my responsibility as to burning down the building, and, 
 at the same time, to limit the caprices of my distracted 
 choice. At last, and precisely at half-past seven, the 
 curtain drew up ; a thing not strictly correct on a 
 Grecian stage. But in theatres, as in other places, 
 one must forget and forgive. Then the music began, 
 of which in a moment. The overture slipped out at 
 one ear, as it entered the other, which, with submission 
 to Mr. Mendelssohn, is a proof that it must be horribly 
 bad ; for, if ever there lived a man that in music can 
 neither forget nor forgive, that man is myself. What- 
 ever is very good never perishes from my remem- 
 brance, — that is, sounds in my ears by intervals for 
 ever, — and for whatever is bad, I consign the author, 
 in my wrath, to his own consience, and to the tortures 
 of his own discords. The most villanous things, how- 
 ever, have one merit ; they are transitory as the best 
 tilings; and that was true of the overture : it perished.
 
 52 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLEb. 
 
 Then, suddenly, — oh, heavens ! what a revelation of 
 beauty! — forth stepped, walking in brightness, the 
 most faultless of Grecian marbles. Miss Helen Faucit 
 as Antigone. What perfection of Athenian sculpture ! 
 the noble figure, the lovely arms, the fluent drapery I 
 What an unveiling of the ideal statuesque ! Is it Hebe ? 
 is it Aurora ? is it a goddess that moves before us ? 
 Perfect she is in form ; perfect in attitude ; 
 
 * Beautiful exceedingly. 
 Like a ladie from a far countrie.' 
 
 Here was the redeeming jewel of the performance. It 
 flattered one's patriotic feelings, to see this noble young 
 countrywoman realizing so exquisitely, and restoring 
 to our imaginations, the noblest of Grecian girls. We 
 critics, dispersed through the house, in the very teeth 
 of duty and conscience, all at one moment unanimously 
 fell in love with Miss Faucit. We felt in our remorse, 
 and did not pretend to deny, that our duty was — to be 
 savage. But when was the voice of duty listened to 
 in the first uproars of passion ? One thing I regretted, 
 viz. that from the indistinctness of my sight for distant 
 faces, I could not accurately discriminate Miss Faucit's 
 features ; but I was told by my next neighbor that they 
 were as true to the antique as her figure. Miss Faucit'a 
 voice is fine and impassioned, being deep for a female 
 voice ; but in this organ lay also the only blemish of 
 her personation. In her last scene, which is injudi- 
 ciously managed by the Greek poet, — too long by 
 much, and perhaps misconceived in the modern way 
 of understanding it, — her voice grew too husky to 
 execute the cadences of the intonations : yet, even in 
 ihis scene, her fall to the ground, under the burden of
 
 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 63 
 
 her farewell anguish, was in a high degree sculptui- 
 esque through the whole succession of its stages. 
 
 Antigone in the written drama, and still more in the 
 personated drama, draws all thoughts so entirely to 
 herself, as to leave little leisure for examining the 
 other parts ; and, under such circumstances, the first 
 impulse of a critic's mind is, that he ought to massacre 
 all the rest indiscriminately ; it being clearly his duty 
 to presume every thing bad which he is not unwillingly 
 forced to confess good, or concerning which he retains 
 no distinct recollection. But I, after the first glory of 
 Antigone's avatar had subsided, applied myself to con- 
 sider the general 'setting' of this Theban jewel. 
 Creon, whom the Greek tragic poets take delight in 
 describing as a villain, has very little more to do (until 
 his own turn comes for grieving), than to tell Antigone, 
 by minute-guns, that die she must. ' Well, uncle, 
 don't say that so often,' is the answer which, secretly, 
 the audience whispers to Antigone. Our uncle grows 
 tedious ; and one wishes at last that he himself could 
 be ' put up the spout.' Mr. Glover, from the sepulchral 
 depth of his voice, gave efiect to the odious Creontic 
 menaces ; and, in the final lamentations over the dead 
 body of Hsemon, being a man of considerable intel- 
 lectual power, Mr. Glover drew the part into a promi- 
 nence which it is the fault of Sophocles to have 
 authorized in that situation ; for the closing sympathies 
 of the spectator ought not to be diverted, for a moment, 
 from Antigone. 
 
 But the chorus, how did they play their part } Mainly 
 their part must have always depended on the character 
 of the music : even at Athens, that must have been 
 Xery much the case, and at Edinburgh altogether, be-
 
 54 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 
 
 cause dancing on the Edinburgh stage there was none. 
 How came that about ? For the very word. ' orchestral,' 
 suggests to a Greek ear dancings as the leading ele- 
 ment in the choral functions. Was it because dancing 
 with us is never used mystically and symbolically, 
 never used in our religious services? Still it would 
 have been possible to invent solemn and intricate 
 dances, that might have appeared abundantly signifi- 
 cant, if expounded by impassioned music. But that 
 music of Mendelssohn ! — like it I cannot. Say not 
 that Mendelssohn is a great composer. He is so. But 
 here he was voluntarily abandoning the resources of 
 his own genius, and the support of his divine art, in 
 quest of a chimera: that is, in quest of a thing called 
 Greek music, which for us seems far more irrecover- 
 able than the ' Greek fire.' I myself, from an early 
 date, was a student of this subject. I read book after 
 book upon it ; and each successive book sank me 
 lower into darkness, until I had so vastly improved in 
 ignorance, that I could myself have written a quarto 
 upon it, which all the world should not have found it 
 possible to understand. It should have taken three 
 men to construe one sentence. I confess, however, to 
 not having yet seen the writings upon this impractica- 
 ble theme of Colonel Perronet Thompson. To write 
 experimental music for choruses that are to support the 
 else meagre outline of a Greek tragedy, will not do. 
 Let experiments be tried upon worthless subjects ; and 
 if this of Mendelssohn's be Greek music, the sooner it 
 takes itself off the better. Sophocles will be delivered 
 from an incubus, and we from an affliction of the audi- 
 tory nerves. 
 It strikes me that 1 see the source of this musia
 
 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 55 
 
 We, that were learning German some thirty yeai*s ago, 
 must remember the noise made at that time about 
 Mendelssohn, the Platonic philosopher. And why ? 
 Was there any thing particular in ' Der Phsedon,' on 
 Ihe immortality of the soul ? Not at all ; it left U3 
 quite as mortal as it found us ; and it has long since 
 been found mortal itself. Its venerable remains are 
 still to be met with in many worm-eaten trunks, pasted 
 on the lids of which 1 have myself perused a matter 
 of thirty pages, except for a part that had been too 
 closely perused by worms. But the key to all the 
 popularity of the Platonic Mendelssohn, is to be sought 
 in the whimsical nature of German liberality, whi-ch, 
 in those days, forced Jews into paying toll at the gates 
 of cities, under the title of ' swine,' but caressed their 
 infidel philosophers. Now, in this category of Jew 
 and infidel, stood the author of ' Phsedon.' Fie was 
 certainly liable to toll as a hog ; but, on the othei 
 hand, he was much admired as one who despised the 
 Pentateuch. Now that Mendelssohn, whose learned 
 'abors lined our trunks, was the father of this Men- 
 delssohn, whose Greek music afflicts our ears. Nat- 
 urally, then, it strikes me, that as ' papa' Mendelssohn 
 attended the synagogue to save appearances, the filial 
 Mendelssohn would also attend it. I likewise attended 
 the synagogue now and then at Liverpool, and else- 
 where. We all three have been cruising in the same 
 latitudes ; and, trusting to my own remembrances, 1 
 should pronounce that Mendelssohn has stolen his 
 Greek music from the synagogue. There was, in the 
 first chorus of the ' Antigone,' one sublime ascent (and 
 once repeated) that rang to heaven : it might have 
 (intered into the music of Jubal's lyre, or have glorified
 
 56 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 
 
 the timbrel of Miriam. All the rest, tried by the deep 
 standard of my own feeling, that clamors for the im- 
 passioned in music, even as the daughter of the horse- 
 leech says, ' Give, give,' is as much without meaning as 
 most of the Hebrew chanting that I heard at the Liver- 
 pool synagogue. I advise Mr. Murray, in the event 
 of his ever reviving the ' Antigone,' to make the chorus 
 sing the Hundredth Psalm, rather than Mendelssohn's 
 music ; or, which would be better still, to import from 
 Lancashire the Handel chorus-singers. 
 
 But then, again, whatever change in the music were 
 made, so as to ' better the condition ' of the poor audi- 
 ence, something should really be done to ' better the 
 condition ' of the poor chorus. Think of these worthy 
 men, in their white and skyblue liveries, kept standing 
 the whole evening ; no seats allowed, no dancing ; no 
 tobacco ; nothing to console them but Antigone's beauty ; 
 and all this in our climate, latitude fifty-five degrees, 
 30th of December, and Fahrenheit groping about, 1 
 don't pretend to know where, but clearly on his road 
 down to the wine cellar. Mr. Murray, I am perfectly 
 sure, is too liberal to have grudged the expense, if he 
 could have found any classic precedent for treating the 
 chorus to a barrel of ale. Ale, he may object, is an 
 unclassical tipple ; but perhaps not. Xenophon, the 
 most Attic of prose writers, mentions pointedly in hia 
 inahasis, that the Ten Thousand, when retreating 
 tnrough snowy mountains, and in circumstances very 
 like our General Elphinstone's retreat from Cabul, 
 came upon a considerable stock of bottled ale. To be 
 sure, the poor ignorant man calls it barley wine 
 [oiioj y.()iSnoi :] but the flavor was found so perfectly 
 tlassical that not one man of the ten thousand, no
 
 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 57 
 
 even the Attic bee himself, is reported to have left 
 any protest against it, or indeed to have left much of 
 the ale. 
 
 But stop : perhaps I am intruding upon other men's 
 space. Speaking, therefore, now finally to the prin- 
 cipal question, How far did this memorable experiment 
 succeed ? I reply, that, in the sense of realizing all 
 that the joint revivers proposed to realize, it succeeded ; 
 and failed only where these revivers had themselves 
 failed to comprehend the magnificent tendencies of 
 Greek tragedy, or where the limitations of our theatres, 
 arising out of our habits and social differences, had 
 made it impossible to succeed. In London, I believe 
 that there are nearly thirty theatres, and many more, 
 if every place of amusement (not bearing the technical 
 name of theatre) were included. All these must be 
 united to compose a building such as that which re- 
 ceived the vast audiences, and consequently the vast 
 spectacles, of some ancient cities. And yet, from a 
 great mistake in our London and Edinburgh attempts to 
 imitate the stage of the Greek theatres, little use was 
 made of such advantages as really zvere at our disposal. 
 The possible depth of the Edinburgh stage was not 
 laid open. Instead of a regal hall in Thebes, I protest 
 I took it for the boudoir of Antigone. It was painted 
 in light colors, an error which was abominable, though 
 possibly meant by the artist (but quite unnecessarily) 
 fts a proper ground for relieving the sumptuous dresses 
 of the leading performers. The doors of entrance and 
 exit were most unhappily managed. As to the dresses. 
 '^lose of Creon, of his queen, and of the two loyal 
 sisters, were good : chaste, and yet princely. Tlie dress 
 %f the chorus was as bad as bad as could be : a few
 
 58 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 
 
 Burplices borrowed from Episcopal chapels, or ratliei 
 the ornamented albes, &c. from any rich Roman 
 Catholic establishment, would have been more effec 
 tive. The Coryphceus himself seemed, to my eyes, no 
 better than a railway laborer, fresh from tunnelling or 
 boring, and wearing a blouse to hide his working dress. 
 These ill-used men ought to ' strike ' for better clothes, 
 in case Antigone should again revisit the glimpses 
 of an Edinburgh moon ; and at the same time they 
 might mutter a hint about the ale. But the great hin- 
 drances to a perfect restoration of a Greek tragedy, 
 lie in peculiarities of our theatres that cannot be re- 
 moved, because bound up with their purposes. 1 
 suppose that Salisbury Plain would seem too vast a 
 theatre : but at least a cathedral would be required in 
 dimensions, York Minster or Cologne. Lamp-light 
 gives to us some advantages which the ancients had 
 not. But much art would be required to train and 
 organize the lights and the masses of superincumbent 
 gloom, that should be such as to allow no calculation 
 of the dimensions overhead. Aboriginal night should 
 brood over the scene, and the sweeping movements of 
 the scenic groups : bodily expression should be given 
 to the obscure feeling of that dark power which moved 
 in ancient tragedy : and we should be made to know 
 why it is that, with the one exception of the Persce^ 
 founded on the second Persian invasion,^^ in which 
 iEschylus, the author, was personally a combatant, ana 
 therefore a contemporary^ not one of the thirty-foui 
 Greek tragedies surviving, but recedes into the dusky 
 shades of the heroic, or even fabulous times. 
 
 A failure, therefore, I think the ' Antigone,' in rela- 
 tion to an object that for us is unattainable ; but a
 
 THE ANTIGONE OF SOPHOCLES. 59 
 
 failure worth more than many ordinary successes. We 
 aro all deeply indebted to Mr. Murray's liberality, in two 
 senses • to his liberal interest in the noblest section of 
 ancient literature, and to his liberal disregard of ex- 
 pense To have seen a Grecian play is a great 
 remembrance. To have seen Miss Helen Faucit's 
 Anticrone, were that all, with her bust, ig ^yuXuuro^ 
 andlier uplifted arm 'pleading against unjust tribu- 
 nals,' is worth wnat is it worth.? VA/orth the 
 
 money? How mean a thought! To see Helen, to 
 see Helen of Greece, was the chief prayer of Marlow's 
 Dr Faustus , the chief gift which he exacted from the 
 fiend. To see Helen of Greece ? Dr. Faustus, we 
 have seen her: Mr. Murray is the Mephistopheles that 
 Bhowed her to us. It was cheap at the price of a 
 journey to Siberia, and is the next best thing to havmg 
 Been Waterloo at sunset on the 18th of June, 1815-»«
 
 HOMER AND THE HOMERIDii:. 
 
 IloMEK, the general patriarch of Occidental litera- 
 ture, reminds us oftentimes and powerfully, of the 
 river Nile. If you, reader, should (as easily you may) 
 be seated on the banks of that river in the months of 
 February or March, 1842, you may count on two lux- 
 uries for a poetic eye — first, on a lovely cloudless 
 morning ; secondly, on a gorgeous flora. For it has 
 been remarked, that nowhere, out of tropical regions, 
 is the vernal equipage of nature so rich, so pompously 
 variegated, in buds, and bells, and blossoms, as pre- 
 cisely in this unhappy Egypt — a ' house of bondage ' 
 undeniably, in all ages, to its own working population ; 
 and yet, as if to mock the misery it witnesses, the 
 gayest of all lands in its spontaneous flora. Now, sup- 
 posing your&elf to be seated, together with a child or 
 two, on some flowery carpet of the Delta ; and sup- 
 posing the Nile — ' that ancient river ' — within sight ; 
 happy infancy on the one side, the everlasting pomp 
 of waters on the other ; and the thought still intruding, 
 that on some quarter of your position, perhaps fifty 
 miles out of sight, stand pointing to the heavens the 
 mysterious pyramids. These circumstances presup- 
 posed, it is inevitable that your thoughts should wandei
 
 HOMEE AXD TSE HOMERID^. 61 
 
 upwards to the dark fountains of origination. The 
 pyramids, why and when did they arise ? This in- 
 fancy, so lovely and innocent, whence does it come, 
 whither does it go ? This creative river, what are its 
 ultimate well-heads ? That last question was Adcwed 
 by antiquity as charmed against solution. It was not 
 permitted, they fancied, to dishonor the river Nile by 
 stealing upon his solitude in a state of weakness and 
 childhood — 
 
 • Nee licmt populis parvum te, Nile, videre.' 
 
 So said Lucan. And in those days no image that the 
 earth suggested could so powerfully express a myste- 
 rious secrecy, as the coy fountains of the Nile. At 
 length came Abyssinian Bruce ; and that superstition 
 seemed to vanish. Yet now again the mystery has 
 revolved upon us. You have drunk, you say, from 
 the fountains of the Nile. Good; but, my friend, 
 from which fountains? 'Which king, Bezonian ? ' 
 Understand that there is another branch of the Nile — 
 another mighty arm, whose fountains lie in far other 
 regions. The great letter Y, that Pythagorean marvel, 
 is still covered with shades in one-half of its bifurca- 
 tion. And the darkness which, from the eldest of 
 days, has invested Father Nile with fabulous awe, still 
 broods over his most ancient fountains, defies our cu- 
 rious impertinence, and will not suffer us to behold the 
 Eurvivor of Memphis, and of Thebes — the hundred- 
 gated — other than in his grandeur as a benefactor of 
 nations. 
 
 Such thoughts, a world of meditations pointing in 
 the same direction, settle also upon Homer. Eight- 
 v^d-twenty hundred years, according to the improved
 
 62 HOMEK AND THE HOMEKTD^. 
 
 views of chronology, have men drunk from the waters 
 of this earliest among poets. Himself, under one of 
 his denominations, the son of a river [Melesigenes], 
 or the grandson of a river [Maeonides], he has been 
 the parent of fertilizing streams carried off derivatively 
 into every land. Not the fountains of the Nile have 
 been so diffusive, or so creative, as those of Homer — 
 
 —— ' a quo ceu fonte perenni, 
 Vatum Pieriis ora rigantur aquis.' 
 
 There is the same gayety of atmosphere, the same 
 ' blue rejoicing sky,' the same absence of the austere 
 and the gloomy sublime, investing the Grecian Homer 
 as invests the Nile of the Delta. And again, if you 
 would go upwards to the fountains of this ancient Nile, 
 or of this ancient Homer, you would find the same 
 mysterious repulsion. In both cases you find their 
 fountains shyly retreating before you ; and like the 
 sacred peaks of Ararat, where the framework of Noah'a 
 ark reposes, never less surmounted than when a man 
 fancies himself within arm's reach of their central 
 recesses.* 
 
 A great poet appearing in early ages, and a great 
 river, bear something of the same relation to human 
 civility and culture. In this view, with a peculiar sub- 
 limity, the Hindoos consider a mighty fertilizing river, 
 
 * Seven or eight Europeans — some Russian, some English — 
 have not only taken possession of the topmost crag on Ararat by 
 means of the broadest disc which their own persons cflered, but 
 have left flags flying, to mark out for those beloWj the exact 
 Btation which they had reached. All to no purpose ! Thi 
 bigoted Armenian still replied — these are mere illusions 
 worked by demons.
 
 HOMER AND THE H0M;ERID^. 63 
 
 when bursting away Avith torrent rapture from its 
 mountain cradle, and billowing onwards through two 
 thousand miles of realms made rich by itself, as in 
 some special meaning ' the Son of God.' The word 
 Burrampooter is said to bear that sublime sense. 
 Hence arose the profound interest about the Nile : 
 what cause could produce its annual swelling ? Even 
 as a phenomenon that was awful, but much more so as 
 a creative agency ; for it was felt that Egypt, which is 
 but the valley of the Nile, had been the mere creation 
 of the river annually depositing its rich layers of slime. 
 Hence arose the corresponding interest about Homer ; 
 for Greece and the Grecian Isles were in many moral 
 respects as much the creation of Homer as Egypt of 
 the Nile. And if, on the one hand, it is unavoidable 
 to assume some degree of civilization before a Homer 
 could exist, on the other, it is certain that Homer, by 
 the picture of unity which he held aloft to the Greeks, 
 in making them co-operate to a common enterprise 
 against Asia, and by the intellectual pleasure which he 
 first engrafted upon the innumerable festivals of Hellas, 
 did more than lawgivers to propagate this eai'ly civili- 
 zation, and to protect it against those barbarizing feuds 
 or migrations which through some centuries menaced 
 its existence. 
 
 HaA-ing, therefore, the same motive of curiosity — 
 having the same awe, connected first, with secrecy ; 
 secondly, with remoteness ; and thirdly, with benefi- 
 cent power, which turn our inquiries to the infant 
 Nile ; let us pursue a parallel investigation with regard 
 to the infant Homer. How was Homer possible ? how 
 could such a poet as Homer — how could such a poem 
 «s the Iliad — anse in days so illiterate -^ Or rather,
 
 64 HOMER AND THE HOMEEIDJS. 
 
 and first of all, was Homer possible? If the Iliad 
 could and did arise, not as a long series of separate 
 phenomena, but as one solitary birth of revolutionary 
 power, how was it preserved ? how passed onwards 
 from generation to generation ? how propagated over 
 Greece during centuries, when our modern facilities 
 for copying on paper, and the general art of reading, 
 were too probably unknown ? 
 
 We presume every man of letters to be aware, that, 
 since the time of the great German philologer, Fred. 
 Augustus Wolf, (for whose life and services to litera- 
 ture, see Wilhelm Koerte's ' Lehen und Studien Friedr. 
 Aug. Wolfs,' 1833,) a great shock has been given to 
 the slumbering credulity of men on these Homeric 
 subjects ; a galvanic resuscitation to the ancient scep- 
 ticism on the mere possibility of an Iliad, such as we 
 now have it, issuing sound and complete, in the tenth 
 or eleventh century before Christ, from the brain of a 
 blind man, who had not {they say) so much as chalk 
 towards the scoring down of his thoughts. The doubts 
 moved by Wolf in 1795, propagated a controversy in 
 Germany which has subsisted down to the present 
 time. This controversy concerns Homer himself, and 
 bis first-born child, the Iliad ; for as to the Odyssey, 
 sometimes reputed the child of his old age, and as to 
 the minor poems, which never could have been as- 
 cribed to him by philosophic critics, these are univer- 
 sally given up — as having no more connection with 
 Homer personally than any other of the many epic 
 and cyclical poems which arose during Post-Homeric 
 ages, in a spirit of imitation, more or less diverging 
 from the primitive Homeric model. 
 
 Fred. Wolf raised the question soon after the time
 
 HOMER AND THE HOMERID^. 65 
 
 of the French Revolution. Afterwards he pursued it 
 [1797] in his letters to Heyne. But it is remarkable 
 that a man so powerful in scholarship, witnessiiTg the 
 universal fermentation he had caused, should not have 
 responded to the general call upon himself to come 
 forward and close the dispute with a comprehensivt 
 valuation of all that had been said, and all that yet 
 remained to be said, upon this difficult problem. Voss, 
 the celebrated ti-auslator of Homer into German dac- 
 tylic hexameters, was naturally interested by a kind of 
 personal stake in the controversy. He wrote to Wolf 
 — warmly, perhaps, and in a tone almost of moral re- 
 monstrance ; but without losing his temper, or forget- 
 ting the urbanity of a scholar. ' I believe,' said he in 
 his later correspondence of the year 1796, ' I believe 
 in one Iliad, in one Odyssey, and in one Homer as the 
 sole father of both. Grant that Homer could not write 
 his own name — and so much I will concede that your 
 acute arguments have almost demonstrated — still to 
 my thinking that only enhances the glory of the poet. 
 The unity of this poet, and the unity of his works, are 
 as yet to m.e unshaken ideas. But what then ? I am 
 no bigot in my creed, so as to close my ears against 
 all hostile arguments. And these arguments, let me 
 Bay plainly, you now owe to us all ; arguments dra-\vp 
 from the internal structure of the Homeric poems. 
 You have wounded us, Mr. Wolf, in our affections ; 
 you have affronted us, Mr. Wolf, in our tenderest sen- 
 Bibilities. But still we are just men ; ready to listen, 
 willing to hear and to forbear. Meantime the matter 
 cannot rest here. You owe it, Mr. Wolf, to the dignity 
 of the subject, not to keep back those proofs which 
 doubtless you possess ; prof)fs, observe, conclusivo 
 5
 
 66 HOMER AND THE HOMERID-S;. 
 
 proofs. For hitherto, permit me to say, you have 
 merely played with the surface of the question. True, 
 even that play has led to some important results ; and 
 for these no man is more grateful than myself. Bui 
 the main battle is still in arrear.' 
 
 Wolf, however, hearkened not to such appeals. He 
 had called up spirits, by his evocation, more formi- 
 dable than he looked for or could lay. Perhaps, like 
 the goddess Eris at the wedding feast, he had merely 
 sought to amuse himself by throwing a ball of conten- 
 tion amongst the literati : a little mischief was all he 
 contemplated, and a little learned Billingsgate. Things 
 had taken a wider circuit. Wolf's acuteness in raising 
 objections to all the received opinions had fallen upon 
 a kindly soil : the public mind had reacted powerfully ; 
 for the German mind is but too naturally disposed to 
 scepticism ; and Wolf found himself at length in this 
 dilemma — viz, that either by writing a very inade- 
 quate sequel, he must forfeit the reputation he had 
 acquired ; or that he must prepare himself for a com- 
 pass of research to which his spirits were not equal, 
 and to which his studies had not latterly been directed. 
 A man of high celebrity may be willing to come for- 
 ward in undress, and to throw out such casual thoiiglits 
 as the occasion may prompt, provided he can preserve 
 his incognito ; but if he sees a vast public waiting to 
 receive him with theatric honors, and a flourish of 
 trumpets announcing his approach, reasonably he may 
 shrink from facing expectations so highly raised, and 
 may perhaps truly plead an absolute impossibility of 
 pursuing further any question under such origina' 
 sterility of materials, and after so elaborate a cultiva 
 tion by other laborers.
 
 HOMEB AND THE HOMEEID-S. 67 
 
 Wolf, therefore, is not to be blamed foi ha\mg 
 leclined, in its mature stages, to patronize his own 
 question. His own we call it, because he first pressed 
 its strongest points ; because he first kindled it into a 
 public feud ; and because, by his matchless revisal of 
 the Homeric text, he gave to the world, simultaneously 
 with his doubts, the very strongest credentials of his 
 own right to utter doubts. And the public, during the 
 forty-six years' interval which has succeeded to his first 
 opening of the case, have viewed the question as so 
 exclusively his, that it is generally known under the 
 name of the "VVolfian hypothesis. All this is fair and 
 natural ; that rebel who heads the mob of insurgents is 
 rightly viewed as the father of the insurrection. Yet 
 still, in the rigor of justice, we must not overlook the 
 earlier conspirators. Not to speak here of more ancient 
 sceptics, it is certain that in modern times Bentley, 
 something more than one hundred and fifty years back, 
 with his usual divinity of eye, saw the opening for 
 doubts. Already in the year 1689, when he was a 
 young man fresh from college, Bentley gave utterance 
 to several of the Wolfian scruples. And, indeed, had 
 he done nothing more than call attention to the di- 
 gamma, as applied to the text of Homer, he could not 
 have escaped feeling and communicating these scruples. 
 To a man who was one day speaking of some supposed 
 hiatus in the Iliad, Bentley, from whom courtesy flowed 
 as naturally as ' milk from a male tiger,' called out — 
 ' Hiatus, man ! Hiatus in your throat ! There is no 
 such thing in Homer.' And, when the other had 
 timidly submitted to him such cases as ^ityu tmvjv or 
 xala tpya, or fieXitjSfu oiior, Bentley showed him that, 
 unless where the final syllable of the prior word hap-
 
 t8 HOMEB AND THE HOMEBID-ffi!. 
 
 pened to be in arsi, (as suppose in nijhjtaSiw ^x'^i°?') 
 universally the hiatus had not existed to the ears of 
 Homer. And why ? Because it was cured by the 
 interposition of the digamma : ' Apud Homerum saepe 
 videtur hiatus esse, ubi prisca littera digamma ex- 
 plebat inter medium spatium.' Thus fisXnjdea oivov 
 in Homer's age was fuXnjdiu Fonov (from which ^olic 
 form is derived our modern word for wine in all the 
 western and central languages of Christendom ; F is 
 V, and V is W all the world over — whence vin, wine, 
 vino, wein, wiin, and so on ; all originally depending 
 upon that ^oliac letter F, which is so necessary to the 
 metrical integrity of Homer.) Now, when once a 
 man of Bentley's sagacity had made that step — forc- 
 ing him to perceive that here had been people of old 
 time tampering with Homer's text, (else how had the 
 digamma dropped out of the place which once it must 
 have occupied,) he could not but go a little further. 
 If you see one or two of the indorsements on a bill 
 misspelt, you begin to suspect general forgery. When 
 the text of Homer had once become frozen and settled, 
 no man could take liberties Avith it at the risk of being 
 tripped up himself on its glassy surface, and landed 
 in a lugubrious sedentary posture, to the derision of all 
 critics, compositors, pressmen, devils, and devillets. 
 But whilst the text was yet piping hot, or lukewarn-i, 
 or in the transitional state of cooling, every man who 
 had a private purpose to serve might impress upon its 
 plastic wax whatever alterations he pleased, whether 
 by direct addition or by substitution, provided only he 
 had skill to evade any ugly seam or cicatrice. It is 
 true he could run this adulterated Homer only on that 
 particular road to which he happened to have access
 
 HOMEB AND THE HOMEKID^. ^^^ 
 
 But then, in after generations, when all the Homers 
 were called in by authority for general collation, his 
 would go up with the rest ; his forgery would be ac- 
 cepted for a various reading, and would thus have a 
 fair chance of coming down to posterity — which word 
 means, at this moment, you, reader, and ourselves. 
 We are posterity. Yes, even we have been humbugged 
 by this Pagan rascal ; and have doubtless drunk off 
 much of his swipes, under the firm faith that we were 
 drinking the pure fragrant wine (the nt?.n;5ea Fonor) of 
 Homer. 
 
 Bentley having thus warned the public, by one gene- 
 ral caveat, that tricks upon travellers might be looked 
 for on this road, was succeeded by Wood, who, in his 
 Essay on the Genius of Homer, occasionally threw up 
 rockets in the same direction. This essay first crept 
 out in the j'ear 1769, but only to the extent of seven 
 copies ; and it was not until the year 1775,* that a 
 second edition diffused the new views freely amongst 
 the world. The next memorable era for this question 
 occurred in 1788, during which year it was that Vil- 
 loison published his Iliad ; and, as part of its appara- 
 tus, he printed the famous Venetian Scholia, hitherto 
 known only to inspectors of MSS. These Scholia 
 gave strength to the modern doubts, by showing that 
 many of them were but ancient doubts in a new form. 
 Still, as the worshipful Scholiasts do not offer the pleas- 
 
 * It is a proof, however, of the interest, even at that time, 
 taken by Germany in English literature, as ■well as of the in- 
 terest taken in this Homeric question, that one of the seven copies 
 oublished in 1769 must have found its way to some German 
 fccholar; for ah-eady, in 1773, a German translation of Wood 
 had been published at Frankfort.
 
 70 HOMEE AND THE HOMEKID^. 
 
 antest reading in tlie world, most of them being rather 
 drowsy or so — truly respectable men, but somewhat 
 apoplectic — it could not be expected that any explosion 
 of sympathy should follow : the clouds thickened ; but 
 the man who Avas to draw forth the lightnings from 
 their surcharged volumes, had not yet come forward. 
 In the meantime, Herder, not so much by learning as 
 by the sagacity of his genius, threw out some pregnant 
 hints of the disputable points. And finally, in 1795, 
 Wolf marched forth in complete mail, a sheaf of 
 sceptical arrows rattling on his harness, all of which he 
 pointed and feathered, giving by his learning, or by 
 masculine sense, buoyancy to their flight, so as to carry 
 them into every corner of literary Europe. Then 
 began the ' row ' — then the steam was mounted which 
 has never since subsided — and then opened upon 
 Germany a career of scepticism, which from the very 
 first promised to be contagious. It was a mode of 
 revolutionary disease, which could not by its very 
 nature confine itself to Homer. The religious reader 
 has since had occasion to see, with pain, the same 
 principles of audacious scepticism applied to books and 
 questions far more important ; but, as might be shown 
 upon a fitting occasion, with no reason whatever for 
 serious anxiety as to any popular eff"ect. Meantime, 
 for those numerous persons who do not read Latin or 
 German with fluency, but are familiar with French, the 
 best comprehensive view of Wolf's arguments, (as 
 given in his Homeric Prolegomena, or subsequently in 
 kia Brief e an Heyne,) is to be found in Franeeson's 
 Essai sur la question — Si Homere a connu Vusage de 
 V^criture. Berlin, 1818. 
 
 This French work we mention, as meeting the wanta
 
 HOMEE AND THE HOMERID^. 71 
 
 of those who simply wish to know how the feud began. 
 But, as that represents only the early stages of the en- 
 tire speculation, it will be more satisfactory for all who 
 are seriously interested in Homer, and ^vithout parti- 
 sanship seek to know the plain unvarnished truths 
 ' Is Homer a hum, and the Iliad a hoax ? ' — to consult 
 the various papers on this subject which have been con- 
 tributed by Nitzsch to the great Allgemeine Encyclo- 
 pcBdie of modern Germany. Nitzsch's name is against 
 him ; it is intolerable to see such a thicket of conso- 
 nants Avith but one little bit of a vowel amongst them • 
 it is like the proportions between Falstaff 's bread and 
 his sack. However, after all, the man did not make 
 his own name, and the name looks worse than it sounds, 
 for it is but our own word niche, barbarously written. 
 This man's essays are certainly the most full and rep- 
 resentative pleadings which this extensive question has 
 produced. On the other hand, they labor in excess 
 with the prevailing vices of German speculation ; \iz. 
 1st, vague indeterminate conception ; 2dly, total want 
 of power to methodize or combine the parts, and in- 
 deed generally a barbarian inaptitude for composition. 
 But, waiving our quarrel with Nitzsch and with 
 Nitzsch's name, no work of his can be considered as 
 generally accessible ; his body is not in court, and, if 
 it were, it talks German. So, in his chair we shall 
 seat ourselves ; and now, with one advantage over 
 him — viz. that we shall never leave the reader to 
 muse for an hour over our meaning — we propose to 
 state the outline of the controversy ; to report the de- 
 cisions upon the several issues sent down for trial upon 
 Jhis complex suit; and the apparent tendencies, so far 
 as they are yet discoverable, towards that kind of gen-
 
 72 HOMER AND THE HOMEBID^. 
 
 eral judgment which must be delivered by the Chan* 
 eery of European criticism, before this dispute will 
 subside into repose. 
 
 The great sectional or subordinate points into which 
 the Homeric controversy breaks up, are these : — 
 
 I. Homer — that is, the poet as distinct from his 
 works. 
 
 II. The Hiad and the Odyssey — that is, the poems 
 as distinct from their author. 
 
 III. The Rhapsodoi, or poetic chanters of Greece ; 
 these, and their predecessors or their contemporaries 
 — the Aoidoi, the Citharcedi, the HomeridcB. 
 
 TV. Lyciirgus. 
 
 V. Solon — and the Pisistratidse. 
 
 VI. The DiascenastcB. 
 
 We hardly know at what point to take up this 
 ravelled tissue ; but, by way of tracing the whole theme 
 ab ovo, suppose we begin by stating the chronological 
 bearings of the principal objects (things as well as 
 persons) connected with the Iliad. 
 
 Ilium was that city of Asia Minor, whose memorable 
 fortunes and catastrophe furnished the subject of the 
 Iliad. At what period of human history may we rea- 
 sonably suppose this catastrophe to have occurred ? 
 Never did a great man err so profoundly as Sir Isaac 
 Newton on this very question, in deducing the early 
 chronology of Greece. The semi-fabulous section of 
 Grecian annals he crowded into so narrow a space, 
 and he depressed the whole into such close proximity 
 to the regular opening of history, (that is, to the Olym- 
 piads,) that we are perfectly at a loss to imagine with 
 what sort of men, events, and epochs. Sir Isaac would 
 Have peopled that particular interval of a thousand
 
 HOMEE AND THE HOMEEID^. 73 
 
 rears in Grecian chronology, which, corresponds to the 
 Bcriptural interval between the patriarch Abraham and 
 Solomon, the Jewish king. This interval commences 
 with the year 2000 before Christ, and terminates with 
 the year 1000 before Christ. But such is the fury 
 of Sir Isaac for depressing all events not absolutely 
 fabulous below this latter terminus, that he has really 
 left himself without counters to mark the progress 
 of man, or to fill the cells of history, through a millen- 
 nium of Grecian life. The whole thousand years, 
 as respects Hellas, is a mere desert upon Sir Isaac's 
 map of time. As one instance of Sir Isaac's modern- 
 izing propensities, we never could sufficiently marvel 
 at his supposing the map of the heavens, including 
 those constellations which are derived from the Argo- 
 nautic enterprise, to have been completed about the 
 very time of that enterprise : as if it were possible that 
 a coarse, clumsy hulk like the ship Argo, at which no 
 possible Newcastle collier but would have sneezed, or 
 that any of the men who navigated her, could take a 
 consecrated place in men's imagination, or could obtain 
 an everlasting memorial in the starry heavens, until 
 time, by removing gross features, and by blending all 
 the circumstances with the solemnities of vast distance, 
 had reconciled the feelings to a sanctity which must 
 have been shocking, as applied to things local and 
 familiar. 
 
 Far different from Sir Isaac's is the present chrono- 
 logical theory. Almost universally it is now agreed, 
 that the siege of Troy occurred about 1300, or, at the 
 lowest calculation, more than 1200 years before Christ. 
 WTiat, then, is the chronological relation of Homer to 
 Troy ? It is generally agreed, that the period of his
 
 74 HOMER AND THE HOMEEID^. 
 
 flourisliing was from two to three centuries after Troy. 
 By some it was imagined that Homer himself had been 
 a Trojan ; and therefore contemporary mth the very 
 heroes whom he exhibits. Others, like our Jacob Bry- 
 ant, have fancied that he was not merely coeval with 
 those heroes, but actually was one of those heroes — 
 viz. Ulysses ; and that the Odyssey rehearses the per- 
 sonal adventures, the voyages, the calamities of Ho- 
 mer. It is our old friend the poet, but with a new 
 face ; he is now a soldier, a sailor, a king, and, in case 
 of necessity, a very fair boxer, or ' fistic artist,' for the 
 abatement of masterful beggars, ' sorners,' or other 
 nuisances. But these wild fancies have found no suc- 
 cess. All scholars have agreed in placing a deep gulf 
 of years between Homer and the Ilium which he sang. 
 Aristarchus fixes the era of Homer at 140 years after 
 the Trojan war; Philochorus at 180 years ; Apollodo- 
 rus at 240 ; the Arundel Marbles at 302 ; and Herodo- 
 tus, who places Homer about 400 years before his own 
 time, {i. e. about 850 before Christ,) ought, therefore, 
 to be interpreted as assuming 350 years at least be- 
 tween Homer and Troy. So that the earliest series of 
 events connected from before and from behind with 
 the Grecian bard, may be thus arranged : — 
 
 Years bef. Christ. 
 
 1220 — Trojan expedition. 
 
 1000 — Homer a young man, and contemporary with 
 the building of the first temple at Jeru- 
 salem. 
 
 820 — Lycurgus brings into the Peloponnesus from 
 Crete, (or else from Ionia,) the Homeric 
 poems, hitherto unknown upon the Grecian 
 continent.
 
 HOMEB AND THE HOMERID^. 76 
 
 Up to this epoch, (the epoch of transplanting the 
 Iliad from Greece insular and Greece colonial to 
 Greece continental,) the Homeric poems had been left 
 to the custody of two schools, or professional orders, 
 interested in the text of these poems : how interested, 
 or in what way their duties connected them with Ho- 
 mer, we will not at this point inquire. Suffice it, that 
 these two separate orders of men did confessedly ex- 
 ist ; one being elder, perhaps, than Homer himself, or 
 even than Troy — viz. the Aoidoi and Citharoedi. 
 These, no doubt, had originally no more relation to 
 Homer than to any other narrative poet ; their duty of 
 musical recitation had brought them connected with 
 Homer, as it woiJd have done with any other popular 
 poet ; and it was only the increasing current of Ho- 
 mer's predominance over all rival poets, which grad- 
 ually gave such a bias and inflection to these men's 
 professional art, as at length to suck them within the 
 great Homeric tide ; they became, but were not origin- 
 ally, a sort of Homeric choir and orchestra — a chapel 
 of priests having a ministerial duty in the vast Ho- 
 meric cathedral. Through them exclusively, perhaps, 
 certainly through them chiefly, the two great objects 
 were secured — fii'st, that to each separate generation 
 of men Homer was published with all the advantages 
 of a musical accompaniment ; secondly, that for dis- 
 tant generations Homer was preserved. We do not 
 thus beg the question as to the existence of alphabetic 
 writing in the days of Homer ; on the contrary, we go 
 along with Nitzsch and others in opposing Wolf upon 
 that point. We believe that a laborious art of wri ting 
 iid exist ; but with such disadvantages as to writing 
 materials, that Homer (we are satisfied) would have
 
 76 HOMEa AND THE HOMEKID^. 
 
 fared il as regards his chance of reaching the polished 
 ages of Pericles, had he relied on written memorials, 
 or upon any mode of publication less impassioned than 
 the orchestral chanting of the Rhapsodoi. The other 
 order of men dedicated to some Homeric interest, 
 whatever that might be, were those technically known 
 as the HomeridcB. The functions of these men have 
 never been satisfactorily ascertained, or so as to dis- 
 criminate them broadly and firmly from the Citharcedi 
 and Rhapsodoi. But in two features it is evident that 
 they differ essentially — first, that the Homeridui 
 constituted a more local and domestic college of Ho- 
 meric ministers, confined originally to a single island, 
 not diffused (as were the Rhapsodoi) over all Greece ; 
 secondly, that by their very name, which refers them 
 back to Homer as a mere product from his influence, 
 this class of followers is barred from pretending in the 
 Homeric equipage, (like the CitharoBdi) to any inde- 
 pendent existence, still less to any anterior existence. 
 The musical reciters had been a general class of public 
 ministers, gradually sequestered into the particular 
 service of Homer ; but the HomeridcB were, in some 
 way or other, either by blood, or by fiction of love and 
 veneration. Homer's direct personal representatives. 
 
 Thus far, however, though there is evidence of two 
 separate colleges or incorporations who charged them- 
 selves with the general custody, transmission, and 
 publication of the Homeric poems, we hear of no 
 care applied to the periodical review of the Homeric 
 text ; we hear of no man taking pains to qualify 
 himself for that office by collecting copies from all 
 quarters, or by applying the supreme political author- 
 ■ ty to the conservation and the authentication of the
 
 HOMER ANB THE HOMEKID-S;. 77 
 
 Homeric poems. The text of no book can become 
 an object of anxiety, until by numerous corruptions it 
 has become an object of doubt. Lycurgus, it is true, 
 the Spartan lawgiver, did ajDply his own authority, in 
 a very early age, to the general purpose of importing 
 the Iliad and Odyssey. But there his office termi- 
 nated. Critical skill, applied to the investigation of an 
 author's text, was a function, of the human mind as 
 unknown in the Greece of Lycurgus as in the Ger- 
 many of Tacitus, or the Tongataboo of Captain Cook. 
 And of all places in Greece, such delicate reactions of 
 the intellect upon its own creations were least likely 
 to arise amongst the illiterate Dorial tribes of the 
 Southern Peloponnesus — wretches that hugged their 
 own barbarizing institutions as the very jewels of their 
 birthright, aud would most certainly have degenerated 
 rapidly into African brutality, had they not been held 
 steady, and forcibly shouldered into social progress, 
 by the press of surrounding tribes more intellectual 
 than themselves. 
 
 Thus continued matters through about four centuries 
 from Homer. And by that time we begin to feel 
 anxious about the probable state of the Homeric text. 
 Not that we suppose any interregnum in Homer's 
 influence — not that we believe in any possible defect 
 of links in that vast series of traditional transmitters ; 
 the integrity of that succession was guarantied by 
 its interwreathing itself with human pleasures, with 
 religious ceremonies, with household and national 
 festivals. It is not that Homer would have become 
 ipocryphal or obscure for want of public repetition ; 
 on the contrary, too constant and too fervent a repe- 
 tition would have been the main source of corruptions
 
 78 HOMER AND THE HOMEUIDJE. 
 
 ia the text. Sympathy in the audience must alway» 
 have been a primary demand with the Rhapsodoi 
 and, to perfect sympathy, it is a previous condition to 
 be perfectly understood. Hence, when allusions were 
 no longer intelligible or effectual, it might sometimes 
 happen that they would be dropped from the text ; and 
 when any Homeric family or city had become extinct, 
 the temptation might be powerful for substituting the 
 r^mes of others who could delight the chanter by 
 fervid gratitude for a distinction which had been 
 merited, or could reward him with gifts for one 
 which had not. But it is not necessary to go over 
 the many causes in preparation, after a course of 
 four centuries, for gradually sapping the integrity of 
 Homer's text. Everybody will agree, that it was at 
 length high time to have some edition ' by authority ; ' 
 and that, had the Iliad and Odyssey received no 
 freezing arrest in their licentious tendency towards 
 a general interfusion of their substance with modern 
 ideas, most certainly by the time of Alexander, i. e. 
 about seven centuries from Homer, either poem would 
 have existed only in fragments. The connecting parts 
 between the several books would have dropped out ; 
 and all the a^iaruat, or episodes dedicated to the honor 
 of a particular hero, might, with regard to names less 
 hallowed in the imagination of Greece, or where no 
 representatives of the house remained, have perished 
 utterly. It was a real providential care for the civili- 
 gation of Greece, which caused the era of state 
 editions to supersede the ad libitum text of the care- 
 less or the interested, just at that precise period when 
 the rapidly rising tide of Athenian refinement would 
 soon have swept away all the landmarks of primitive
 
 HOMEB AND THE HOMERID^. 79 
 
 Greece, aud when the altered character of the public 
 reciters would have co-operated with the other diffi- 
 culties of the case to make a true Homeric text 
 irrecoverable. For the Rhapsodoi were in a regulai 
 course of degradation to the rank of mere mercenary 
 artists, from that of sacred minstrels, who connected 
 the past with the present, and who sang — precisely 
 because their burthen of truth was too solemn for 
 unimpassioned speech. This was the station they had 
 occupied ; but it remains in evidence against them, 
 that they were rapidly sinking under the changes of 
 the times — were open to tribes, and, as one con- 
 sequence (whilst partly it was one cause) of this 
 degradation, that they had ceased to command the 
 public respect. The very same changes, and through 
 the very same steps, and under the very same agen- 
 cies, have been since exhibited to Europe in the 
 parallel history of the minstrels. The pig-headed 
 Ritson, in mad pursuit of that single idea which 
 might vex Bishop Percy, made it his business, in one 
 essay, to prove, out of the statutes at large, and out of 
 local court records, that the minstrel, so far from 
 being that honored guest in the courts of princes 
 whom the bishop had described, w^as, in fact, a rogue 
 and a vagabond by act of Parliament, standing in awe 
 of that great man, the parish beadle, and liable to be 
 kicked out of any hundred or tithing where he should 
 be found trespassing. But what nonsense ! the min- 
 strel was, and he was not, all that the bishop and 
 others had affirmed. The contradiction lay in the 
 time ; Percy and Ritson spoke of different periods ; 
 )he bishop of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth 
 \enturies — the attorney ^^ of the sixteenth and seven-
 
 80 HOMEB AND THE HOMEKID^. 
 
 teenth. Now the Grecian Rhapsodoi passed through 
 corresponding stages of declension. Having minis- 
 tered through many centuries to advancing civilization, 
 finally they themselves fell before a higher civiliza- 
 tion ; and the particular aspect of the new civilization, 
 which proved fatal to them, was the general diffusion 
 of reading as an art of liberal education. In the 
 age of Pericles, every well-educated man could read ; 
 and one result from his skill, as no doubt it had also 
 been one amongst its exciting causes, was — that he 
 had a fine copy at home, beautifully adorned, of the 
 Iliad and Odyssey. Paper and vellum, for the last 
 six centuries B. C. (that is, from the era of the 
 Egyptian king, Psammetichus,) were much less scarce 
 in Greece than during the ages immediately consecu- 
 tive to Homer, This fact has been elaborately proved 
 in recent German essays. 
 
 How providential, therefore — and with the recol- 
 lection of that great part played by Greece in propa- 
 gating Christianity through the previous propagation of 
 her own literature and language, what is there in 
 such an interference unworthy of Providence ? — how 
 providential, that precisely in that interval of one 
 hundred and eleven years, between the year 555 
 B. C., the locus of Pisistratus, and 444 B. C, the 
 locus of Pericles, whilst as yet the traditional text 
 of Homer was retrievable, though rapidly nearing 
 to the time when it would be strangled with weeds, 
 and whilst as yet the arts of reading and writing had 
 not weakened the populai' devotion to Homer by 
 dividing it amongst multiplied books ; just then in 
 that critical isthmus of time, did two or three 
 A.thenians of rank, first Solon, next Pisistratus, and
 
 HOMER AND THE HOilERID^. 81 
 
 iMtly, (if Plato is right,) Hipparch.us, step forward to 
 make a public, solemn, and legally operative review of 
 the Homeric poems. They drew the old vessel into 
 dock ; laid bare its timbers ; and stopped the fiu-ther 
 progress of decay. What they did more than this, and 
 by what characteristic services each connected his 
 name with a separate province in this memorable res- 
 toration of the Iliad and Odyssey — we shall inquu-e 
 further on. 
 
 One century after Pisistratus we come to Pericles ; 
 or, counting from the locu^ of each, (555 B. C, and 
 444 B. C.,) exactly one hundred and eleven years divide 
 them. One century after Pericles w^e come to Alex- 
 ander the Great ; or, counting from the locits of each, 
 (444 B. C, and 333 B. C.,) exactly one hundi-ed and 
 eleven years divide them. During the period of two 
 hundred and twenty-two years Homer had rest. No- 
 body was allowed to torment his text any more. And 
 it is singular enough that this period of two hundred 
 and twenty-two years, during which Homer reigned in 
 the luxury of repose, having nothing to do but to let 
 himself be read and admired, was precisely that ring- 
 fence of years within which lies true Grecian history ; 
 for, if any man wishes to master the Grecian history, 
 he needs not to ascend above Pisistratus, nor to come 
 down below Alexander. Before Pisistratus all is mist 
 and fable ; after Alexander, all is dependency and ser- 
 vitude. And remarkable it is — that, soon after Alex- 
 ander, and indirectly through changes caused by nim. 
 Homer was again held out for the pleasure of the tor- 
 mentors. Among the dynasties founded by Alexan- 
 der's lieutenants, was one memorably devoted to 
 literature. The Macedonian house of the Ptolemies, 
 6
 
 62 HOMES AND THE HOMEKID^. 
 
 when seated on the throne of Egypt, had founded the 
 very first public library and the first learned public. 
 Alexander died in the year 320 B. C. ; and already in 
 the year 280 B. C, (that is, not more than forty years 
 after,) the learned Jews of Alexandria and Palestine 
 had commenced, under the royal patronage, that trans 
 lation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, which, 
 from the supposed number of the translators, has ob- 
 tained the name of the Septuagint. This was a ser- 
 vice to posterity. But the earliest Grecian service to 
 which this Alexandrian library ministers, was Homeric ; 
 and strikes us as singular, when we contrast it with the 
 known idolatry towards Homer of that royal soldier, 
 from whom the city itself, with all its novelties, drew 
 its name and foundation. Had Alexander siirvived 
 forty years longer, as very easily he might if he had 
 insisted upon leaving his heel-taps at Babylon, how 
 angry it would have made him that the very first trial 
 of this new and powerful galvanic battery should be 
 upon the body of the Iliad ! 
 
 From 280 B. C. to 160 B. C, there was a constant 
 succession of Homeric critics. The immense material 
 found in the public library towards a direct history of 
 Homer and his fortunes, would alone have sufiiced to 
 evoke a school of critics. But there was, besides, 
 another invitation to Homeric criticism, more oblique, 
 and eventually more effective. The Alexandrian libra- 
 ry contained vast collections towards the study of the 
 Greek language through all its dialects, and through 
 all its chronological stages. This study led back by 
 many avenues to Homer. A verse or a passage which 
 hitherto had passed for genuine, and which otherwise, 
 tjprhaps, yielded no internal argument for suspicion.
 
 HOMER AND THE HOMERID^. 83 
 
 was now found to be veined by some phrase, dialect, 
 terminal form, or mode of using words, that might be 
 too modern for Homer's age, or too far removed in 
 space from Homer's Ionian country. We moderns, 
 from our vast superiority to the Greeks themselves in 
 Greek metrical science, have had an extra resource 
 laid open to us for detecting the spurious in Greek 
 poetry ; and many are the condemned passages in our 
 modern editions of Greek books, against which no 
 jealousy would ever have arisen amongst unmetrical 
 scholars. Here, however, the Alexandrian critics, 
 with all their slashing insolence, showed themselves 
 sons of the feeble ; they groped about in twilight. But, 
 even without that resource, they contrived to riddle 
 Homer through and through with desperate gashes. 
 In fact, after being ' treated ' and ' handled ' by three 
 generations of critics. Homer came forth, (just as we 
 may suppose one of Lucan's legionary soldiers, from 
 the rencontre with the amphisbsena, the dipsas, and 
 the water-snake of the African wilderness,) one vast 
 wound, one huge system of confluent ulcers. Often 
 in reviewing the labors of three particularly amongst 
 these Alexandrine scorpions, we think of the ^sopian 
 fable, in which an old man with two wives, one aged 
 as befitted him, and the other young, submits his head 
 alternately to the Alexandrine revision of each. The 
 old lady goes to work at first ; and upon ' moral prin- 
 ciple ' she indignantly extirpates all the black hairs 
 which could ever have inspired him with the absurd 
 fancy of being young. Next comes the young critic : 
 she is disgusted with age ; and upon system eliminates, 
 (or, to speak with Aristarchus, ' obelizes,') all the gray 
 Aairs. And thus between the two ladies and their sep«
 
 64 HOMER AND THE HOMEKID^. 
 
 arate editions of the old gentleman, he, poor Homeric 
 creature, comes forth as bald as the back of one's 
 hand. Aristarchus might well boast that he had cured 
 Homer of the dry-rot : he has ; and by leaving hardly 
 one whole spar of his ancient framework. Nor can 
 we, with our share of persimmon, comprehend what 
 sort of abortion it is which Aristarchus would have us 
 to accept and entertain in the room of our old original 
 Iliad and Odyssey. To cure a man radically of the 
 toothache, by knocking all his teeth down his throat, 
 seems a suspicious recommendation for ' dental sur- 
 gery.' And, with respect to the Homer of Aristarchus, 
 it is to be considered, that besides the lines, sentences, 
 and long passages, to which that Herod of critics 
 affixed his obelus (f)or stiletto,^" there were entire books 
 which he found no use in assassinating piecemeal ; 
 because it was not this line or that line into which he 
 wished to thrust his dagger, but the whole rabble of 
 lines — ' tag, rag, and bobtail.' "Which reminds us of 
 Paul Richter, who suggests to some author anxiously 
 revising the table of his own errata — that perhaps he 
 might think it advisable, on second thoughts, to put his 
 whole book into the list of errata ; requesting of the 
 reader kindly to erase the total work as an oversight, 
 or general blunder, from page one down to the word 
 finis. In such cases, as Martial observes, no plurality 
 of cancellings or erasures will answer the critic's pur- 
 pose : but, ' una litura potest.' One mighty bucket 
 of ink thrown over the whole will do the business ; but, 
 us to obelizing, it is no better than snapping pocket- 
 pistols in a sea-fight, or throwing crackers amongst 
 ^e petticoats of a female mob. 
 
 With the Alexandrine tormentors, we may say that
 
 HOMER AND THE HOMERIDiE. 86 
 
 Homer's pre-Christian martyrdom came to an end. 
 His post-Christian sufferings have been due chiefly to 
 the Germans, ^Yho have renewed the warfare not only 
 of Alexandrine critics, but of the ancient Chorizontes. 
 These people we have not mentioned separately, be- 
 cause, in fact, nothing remains of their labors, and the 
 general spirit of their warfare may be best understood 
 from that of modern Germany. They acquired their 
 Qame of Chorizontes, (or separators,) from their prin- 
 ciple of breaking up the Iliad into multiform groups 
 of little tadpole Iliads ; as also of splitting the one 
 old hazy but golden Homer, that looms upon us so 
 venerably through a mist of centuries, into a vast 
 reverberation of little silver Homers, that twinkled up 
 and down the world, and lived when they found it 
 convenient. 
 
 Now, let us combine the separate points of this 
 chronological deduction into one focus, after which we 
 will examine apart, each for itself, the main questions 
 which we have already numbered as making up the 
 elements of the controversy. 
 
 fears bef. Christian Era. 
 
 1220 — Troy. 
 
 1000 — Solomon the king of Je-\vry, and Homer the 
 
 Grecian poet. 
 800 — Lycurgus the lawgiver, imports the Iliad into 
 
 Sparta, and thus first introduces Homer to 
 
 Continental Greece. 
 655 — Solon, the Athenian lawgiver, Pisistratus, the 
 
 ruler of Athens, and Hipparchus, his son, 
 
 do something as yet undetermined for the 
 
 better ascertaining ajad maintaining of the 
 
 original Homeric text.
 
 86 HOMEB A.ND THE HOMERIDJE. 
 
 years bef. Christian Era. 
 
 444 — From the text thus settled, are cited the 
 numerous Homeric passages which we find 
 in Plato, and all the other wits belonging to 
 this period, the noontide of Greek literature, 
 viz. the period of Pericles ; and these pas- 
 sages generally coincide with our present 
 text, so that we have no reason to doubt 
 about our present Iliad being essentially the 
 same as that which was used and read in 
 the family of Pisistratus. 
 
 833 — This is the main year of Alexander's Persian 
 expedition, and probably the year in which 
 his tutor Aristotle published those notions 
 about the tragic and epic ' unities,^ which 
 have since had so remarkable an efi'ect upon 
 the arrangement of the Uiad. In particular 
 the notion of ' episodes,' or digressional nar- 
 ratives, interwoven with the principal narra- 
 tive, was entirely Aristotelian ; and under 
 that notion, people submitted easily to inter- 
 polations which would else have betrayed 
 themselves for what they are. 
 
 320 — Alexander the Great dies. 
 
 280 -\ — The Alexandrian library is applied to for 
 Jown I the searching revision of Homer ; and a 
 
 to I school in Alexandrine critics (in which 
 
 160 ) school, through three consecutive genera- 
 tions, flourished as its leaders — Zenodotus, 
 Aristophanes, and Aristarchus) dedicated 
 themselves to Homer. They are usually 
 called the Alexandrine ' grainmatici ' or 
 litterateurs.
 
 HOMER AND THE HOMERID^. 87 
 
 After the era of 160 B. C, by wkicli time the second 
 Punic war had liberated Rome from her great African 
 rival, the Grecian or easturn states of the Mediterra- 
 nean began rapidly to fall under Roman conquest. 
 Henceforwards the text of Homer suffered no further 
 disturbance or inquisition, until it reached the little 
 wicked generation (ourselves and our immediate 
 fathers) which we have the honor to address. Now, 
 let us turn from the Iliad, viewed in its chronological 
 series of fortunes, to the Iliad viewed in itself and in 
 its personal relations ; i. e. in reference to its author, 
 to its Grecian propagators or philosophers, and to its 
 reformers or restorers, its re-casters or interpolators, 
 and its critical explorers. 
 
 r 
 
 A. HOMEB. 
 
 About the year 1797, Messrs. Pitt and Dundas 
 labored under the scandal of sometimes appearing 
 drunk in the House of Commons ; and on one par- 
 ticular evening, this impression was so strong against 
 them, that the morning papers of the following three 
 days fired off exactly one hundred and one epigrams 
 on the occasion. One was this : 
 
 Pitt. — I cannot see the Speaker, Hal, — can youl 
 Ddnd. — Not see the Speaker ! D — m'e, I see two. 
 
 Thus it has happened to Homer. Some say, ' There 
 never was such a person as Homer.' ' No such person 
 as Homer. On the contrary,' say others, ' there were 
 scores.' ; This latter hypothesis has much more to plead 
 for itself than the other. Numerous Homers were pos- 
 rulated with some apparent reason, by way of account-
 
 8» HOMEE AND THE HOMEEID^. 
 
 ing for the numerous Homeric poems, and numerous 
 Homeric birthplaces. One man, it was felt, never 
 could be equal to so many claims. Ten camel-loads 
 of poems you may see ascribed to Homer in Fabri- 
 cius ; and more states than seven claimed the man. 
 These claims, it is true, would generally have van- 
 ished, if there had been the means of critically 
 probing them ; but still there was a prima facie case 
 made out for believing in a plurality of Homers ; 
 whilst on the other hand, for denying Homer, there 
 aever was any but a verbal reason. The polytheism 
 of the case was natural ; the atheism was monstrous. 
 Ilgen, in the preface to his edition of the Homeric 
 Hymns, says, ' Homeri nomen, si recte video, deri- 
 vandum est ex ofiuv et aqoi.' And so, because the 
 name (like many names) can be made to yield a 
 fanciful emblematic meaning. Homer must be a myth. 
 But in fact, Mr. Ilgen has made little advance with 
 his d^« aQ(j}. For next comes the question. What do 
 those two little Greek words mean ? ^Iqu) is to join, 
 to fit, to adapt — 6fis is together or in harmony. But 
 such a mere outline or schematism of an idea may be 
 exhibited under many different constructions. One 
 critic, for instance, understands it in the sense of 
 dove-tailing, or metaphorical cabinet-making, as if it 
 applied chiefly to the art of uniting words into metri- 
 cal combinations. Another, Mr. Ilgen himself, takes 
 it quite differently ; it describes, not the poetical com- 
 position, or any labor whatever of the poet as a 
 poet, but the skill of the musical accompaniment and 
 adaptations. By accident the poet may chance to be 
 also the musical reciter of the poem ; and in tha 
 iharacter he may have an interest in this name of
 
 HOMEE AND THE HOMERIDJE. Si) 
 
 Ourjoog, but not as a poet. 'Outjottv and 6ut;otvtiv, says 
 Hesychius, mean avu(po,ieir, (to harmonize in point of 
 Bound ;) the latter of the two is used in this sense by 
 Hesiod ; and more nicely, says Mr. Ilgen, it means 
 accinere, to sing an accompaniment to another voice 
 or to an instrument ; and it means also sKccinere, to 
 sing such an accompaniment in an under-key, or 
 to sing what we. moderns call a second — i. e. an 
 arrangement of notes corresponding, but subordinated 
 to the other or leading part. So says Ilgen in mixed 
 Latin, German, and Greek. Now, we also have our 
 pocket theory. We maintain that ona aoto is Greek for 
 packing up ; and very pretty Greek, considering the 
 hot weather. And our view of the case is this — 
 ' Homer ' was a sort of Delphic or prophetic name 
 given to the poet, under a knowledge of that fate 
 which awaited him in Crete, where, if he did not 
 pack up any trunk that has yet been discovered, he 
 was, however, himself packed up in the portmanteau 
 of Lycurgus. Such, at least, is the coloring which 
 the credulous Plutarch, nine hundred years after Ly- 
 ciu-gus, gives to the story. { ' Man aiive ! ' says a Ger- 
 man, apostrophizing this thoughtless Plutarch, ' Man 
 alive ! how could Lycurgus make a shipment of 
 Homer's poems in the shape of a parcel for importa- 
 tion, unless there were written copies in Crete at a 
 time when nobody could write ? Or, how, why, for 
 what intelligible purpose, could he have consigned 
 this bale to a house in the Peloponnesus, where 
 nobody could rea d ? ' ) Homer, he thinks, •">uld be 
 imported at that period only in the shape of an 
 orchestra, as a band of Homeric chanter?. But, 
 returning seriously to the name 'Ouryoos, we oay that,
 
 90 HOMER AND THE HOMERID^. 
 
 were the name absolutely bursting with hieroglyphic 
 life this would be no proof that the man Homer, 
 instead of writing a considerable number of octavo 
 volumes, was (to use Mr. Ilgen's uncivil language) 
 ' an abstract idea.' Honest people's children are not 
 to be treated as ' abstract ideas,' because their names 
 may chance to look symbolical. Bunyan's ' Mr. 
 Ready-to-sink ' might seem suspicious ; but Mr. 
 Strong -i'-th' -arm, Avho would have been a desirable 
 companion for such an exhausted gentleman, is no 
 abstract idea at all, but a dense broad-shouldered 
 reality in a known street of London, liable to bills, 
 duns, and other affections of our common humanity. 
 Suppose, therefore, that Homer, in some one of his 
 names, really had borne a designation glancing at 
 symbolical meaning, what of that ? this should rather 
 be looked upon as a reflex name, artificially construct- 
 ed for reverberating his glory after it had gathered, 
 than as any predestinating (and so far marvellous) 
 name. 
 
 Chrysostom, that eloquent father of early Chris- 
 tianity, had he been baptized by such a name as 
 golden-mouthed (Chrysostomos), you would have sus- 
 pected for one of Mr. Ilgen's ' abstract ideas ; ' but, 
 as it happens, we all know that he existed in the 
 body, and that the appellation by which he is usually 
 recognized was a name of honor conferred upon him 
 by the public in commemoration of his eloquence. 
 However, we will bring this point to a short issue, 
 by drawing the reader's attention to the following 
 ease : Any man, who has looked into the body of 
 Greek rhetoricians, must know that in that hehdoma* 
 idearum, or septenary system of rhetorical forms
 
 HOMER AND THE HOMERID^. 91 
 
 wtich Hermogenes and many otliers illustrated, two 
 of the seven (and the foremost two) were the qualities 
 called gor gates and demotes. Now, turn to the list 
 of early Greek rhetoricians or popular orators ; and 
 who stands first ? Chronologically the first, and the 
 very first, is a certain Tisias, perhaps ; but he is a 
 mere nominis umbra. The first who made himself 
 known to the literature of Greece, is Gorgias ; that 
 Gorgias who visited Athens in the days of Socrates, 
 (see Athenaeus, for a rigorous examination of the 
 date assigned to that visit by Plato,) the same Gorgias 
 from whose name Plato had derived a title for one 
 of his dialogues. Again, amongst the early Greek 
 orators you will see Deinarchus. Gorgias and Dein- 
 archus ? Who but would say, were it not that these 
 men had flourished in the meridian light of Athenian 
 literature — ' Here we behold two ideal or symbolic, 
 orators typifying the qualities of gorgotes and dei- 
 notes ! ' But a stronger case still is that of Demos- 
 thenes. Were this great orator not (by comparison 
 with Homer) a modern person, under the full blaze 
 of history, and coeval with Alexander the Great 333 
 years B. C, who is there that would not pronounce 
 him a mere allegoric man, when he understood that the 
 name was composed of these two elements — Deraos, 
 the ' people ' in its most democratic expression, and 
 %lhenos, ' strength ? ' this last word having been noto- 
 riously used by Homer {mega sthenos Okeanoio) to 
 express that sort of power which makes itself known 
 by thundering sound, ' the thundering strength of the 
 people!' or, ^ the people's fulminating mi(jht !''^^ — 
 who would believe that the most potent of Greek 
 orators had actually brought with him thii? ominous
 
 92 HOMER ATfD THE HOMEKIDiE. 
 
 and magnificent name, fhis natural patent of presi- 
 dency to tlie Athenian hustings ? It startles us to 
 find, lurking in any man's name, a prophecy of his 
 after career ; as, for instance, to find a Latin legend 
 ' — • And his glory shall be from the Nile,'' {Est honor 
 a Nilo,) concealing itself in the name Horatio Nelson.^^ 
 But there the prophecy lies hidden, and cannot he 
 extracted without a painful cork-screw process of ana- 
 gram. Whereas, in Demosthenes, the handwriting is 
 plain to every child : it seems witchcraft — and a 
 man is himself alarmed at his own predestinating 
 name. Yet for all that, with Mr. Ilgen's permission, 
 Demosthenes was not an ' abstract idea.' Conse- 
 quently, had Homer brought his name in his waistcoat 
 pocket to the composition of the Iliad, he would still 
 not have been half as mythical in appearance aa 
 several well-authenticated men, decent people's sons, 
 who have kicked up an undeniable dust on the Athe- 
 nian hustings. Besides, Homer has other significant 
 or symbolizing senses. It means a hostage ; it means 
 a blind man, as much as a cabinet-maker, or even 
 as a packer of trunks. Many of these ' significant 
 names ' either express accidents of birth commonly 
 recurring, such as Benoni, ' The child of sorrow.' 
 a name frequently given by young women in West- 
 moreland to any child born under circumstances of 
 desertion, sudden death, &c. on the part of the 
 father ; or express those qualities which are always 
 presumable. Honor, Prudence, Patience, &c., as 
 common female names : or, if they imply anything 
 special, any peculiar determination of general qualities 
 that never could have been foreseen, in that case they 
 must be referred to an admiring posterity — that
 
 HOMEE AXD THE HOMERID^. 93 
 
 tenior posterity which was such for Homer, but foi 
 as has long ago become a worshipful ancestr3\ 
 
 From the name it is a natural step to the country. 
 AH the world knows, by means of a satirical couplet, 
 that 
 
 ' Seven cities claimed the mighty Homer dead, 
 Through which the living Homer begged his bread.' 
 
 What were the names of these seven cities, (and 
 islands,) we can inform the reader by means of an old 
 Latin couplet amongst our schoolboy recollections — 
 
 ' Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Salamds, Rhodos, Argos, Athenoe, 
 Orbis de patria certat, Homei'e, tua.' 
 
 Among these the two first, Smyrna and Chios, have 
 very superior pretensions Had Homer been passed 
 to his parish as a vagrant, or had Colophon (finding a 
 settlement likely to be obtained by his widow) resolved 
 upon trying the question, she would certainly have 
 quashed any attempt to make the family chargeable 
 upon herself. Smyrna lies under strong suspicion ; 
 the two rivers from which Homer's immediate progeni- 
 tors were named — the Meson and the Meles — bound 
 the plains near to Smyrna. And Wood insists much 
 upon the perfect correspondence of the climate in that 
 region of the Levant with each and all of Homer's 
 atmospherical indications. We suspect Smyrna our- 
 selves, and quite as much as Mr. Wood ; but still we 
 hesitate to charge any local peculiarities upon the 
 ilmyrniote climate that could nail it in an action of 
 damages. Gay and sunny, pellucid in air and water, 
 we are sure that Smyrna is ; in short, everything that 
 .■ould be wished by the public in general, or by 
 jurrant dealers in particular. But really that any city
 
 {14 HOiMEE AND THE HOMEBID^. 
 
 whatever, in that genial quarter of the Mediterranean, 
 should pretend to a sort of patent for sunshine, we 
 must beg to have stated in a private letter ' to the 
 Marines : ' us it will not suit. 
 
 Meantime these seven places are far from being all 
 the competitors that have entered their names with the 
 clerk of the course. Homer has been pronounced a 
 Syrian, which name in early Greece of course included 
 the Jew ; and so, after all, the Iliad may have issued 
 from the synagogue. Babylon, also, dusky Babylon, 
 has put in her claim to Homer ; so has Egypt. 
 And thus, if the poet were really derived from an Ori- 
 ental race, his name (sinking the aspiration) may have 
 been Omar. But those Oriental pretensions are mere 
 bubbles, exhaling from national vanity. The place 
 which, to our thinking, lies under the heaviest weight 
 of suspicion as the seat of Homer's connections, and 
 very often of his own residence, is the island of Crete. 
 Smyrna, we doubt not, was his bii'thplace. But in 
 those summer seas, quiet as lakes, and basking in 
 everlasting sunshine, it would be inevitable for a 
 stirring animated mind to float up and down the 
 ^^gean. ' Home-keeping youths had ever homely 
 wits,' says a great poet of our own ; and we doubt 
 not that Homer had a yacht, in which he visited all the 
 festivals of the ^53gean Islands. Thus he acquired that 
 earned eye which he manifests for female beauty 
 ' Rosy-fingered,' ' silver-footed,' ' full-bosomed,' ' ox- 
 eyed,' with a large vocabulary of similar notices, show 
 how widely Homer had surveyed the different chambers 
 of Grecian beauty ; for it has hai')pened through acci- 
 dents of migration and consequent modifications of ori- 
 gin, combined with varieties of diet and customs, that
 
 HOMER AND THE HOilEEID.E. 91) 
 
 the (Jreek Islands still differ greatly in the style of their 
 female beauty. ^^ Now, the time for seeing the young 
 women of a Grecian city, all congregated under the 
 happiest circumstances of display, was in their local 
 festivals. Many Avere the fair Phidiacan^ forms which 
 Homer had beheld moving like goddesses through the 
 mazes of religious choral dances. But at the islands 
 of los, of Chios, and of Crete, in particular, we are sat- 
 isfied that he had a standing invitation. To this hour, 
 the Cretan life delights us with the very echo of the 
 Homeric delineations. Take four several cases : — 
 
 I. — The old Homeric superstition, for instance, which 
 connects horses by the closest sympathy, and even 
 by prescience, with theu- masters — that superstitioR 
 which Virgil has borrowed from Homer in his beau- 
 tiful episode of Mezentius — still lingers unbroken in 
 Crete. Horses foresee the fates of riders who are 
 doomed, and express their prescience by weeping in a 
 \iuman fashion. With this view of the horse's capa- 
 c'.ty it is singular, that in Crete this animal by prefer- 
 ence should be called to a7.o/ov, the brute or irrational 
 creature. But the word Innng has, by some accident, 
 been lost in the modern Greek. As an instance both 
 of the disparaging name, and of the ennobling super- 
 stition, take the following stanza from a Cretan ballad 
 of 1825: — 
 
 ' S2rTiv sxajiaXXixivc, 
 
 Ey.XuLii t' alo-/o toV 
 Kai ToxfOa TO iyvu^Qiaa 
 
 Uujg itrai 6 daiarog rov.' 
 
 ' Upon which he mounted, and his horse wept : and 
 •Jien he saw clearly how this should bode his death.'
 
 96 HOMER AND THE HOMEBIDJE. 
 
 Under the same old Cretan faitli, Homer, in 11. xvii. 
 437, says — 
 
 ' /faxQva St a<fi 
 Gtijua xara (iXufniquiv j(ufia5tg ^ei fivQOfitvoiir 
 'Hi 10/010 no&ij.* 
 
 ' Tears, scalding tears, trickled to the ground down 
 the eyelids of them, (the horses,) fretting through grief 
 for the loss of their chavioteer.' 
 
 II, — Another almost decisive record of Homer'a 
 familiarity with Cretan life, lies in his notice of the 
 agrimi, a peculiar wild goat, or ibex, found in no part 
 of the Mediterranean world, whether island or main- 
 land, except in Crete. And it is a case almost without 
 a parallel in literature, that Homer should have sent 
 down to all posterity, in sounding Greek, the most 
 minute measurement of this animal's horns, which 
 measurement corresponds with all those recently ex- 
 amined by English travellers, and in particular with 
 \hvee separate pairs of these horns brought to England 
 about the year 1836, by Mr. Pashley, the learned 
 Mediterranean traveller of Trinity College, Cambridge. 
 Mr. Pashley has since published his travels, and from 
 him we extract the following description of these shy 
 but powerful animals, furnished by a Cretan moun- 
 taineer : — ' The agrimia are so active, that they will 
 leap up a perpendicular rock of ten to fourteen feet 
 high. They spring from precipice to precipice; and 
 bound along with such speed, that no dog would be 
 »ble to keep up with them — even on better ground 
 khan that where they are found. The sportsman must 
 ncTer be to windward of them, or they will perceive 
 lis approach long before he comes within musket-shot
 
 HOMEE AXD THE HOMEEID^. 97 
 
 Tliey often caiTy off a ball ; and, unless they fall 
 immediately on being struck, are mostly lost to the 
 sportsman, although they may have received a mortal 
 wound. They are commonly found two, three, or four 
 together ; sometimes a herd of eight and even nine is 
 seen. They are always larger than the common goat. 
 In the winter time, they may be tracked by the sports- 
 man in the snow. It is common for men to perish in 
 the chase of them. They are of a reddish color, and 
 never black or parti-colored like the common goat. 
 The number of prominences on each horn, indicates 
 the years of the ammal's age.' 
 
 Now Homer in Iliad iv. 105, on occasion of Panda- 
 rus drawing out his bow, notices it as an interesting 
 fact, that this bow, so beautifully polished, was derived 
 from [the horns ofl a wild goat, aiyo: ayniov ; and the 
 epithet by which he describes this wild creature is ituXt 
 — preternatiu-ally agile. In his Homeric manner he 
 adds a short digressional history of the fortunate shot 
 from a secret ambush, by which Pandarus had himself 
 killed the creature. From this it appears that, before 
 the invention of gunpowder, men did not think of 
 chasing the Cretan ibex ; and from the cu'cumstantiali- 
 ty of the account, it is evident that some honor attached 
 to the sportsman who had succeeded in such a capture. 
 He closes with the measurement of the horns in this 
 memorable line, (memorable as preserving such a fact 
 for three thousand years) — 
 
 ^ Tov nfQa ex xsipah/? iy.y.aiSixa SuyQa ntfpvxti.' 
 
 ' The horns from chis creature s head measured 
 
 sixteen dora in length. Now what is a doron 7 In 
 
 the Venetian Scholia, some annutator had hit the truth, 
 
 put had inadvertently used a wrong word. This word, 
 
 7
 
 98 HOMEE AND THE HOMERID-E 
 
 an oversight, was viewed as such by Heyne, who cor- 
 rected it accordingly, before any scholar had seen the 
 animal. The doron is now ascertained to be a Ho- 
 meric expression for a palm, or sixth part of a Grecian 
 foot ; and thus the extent of the horns, in that speci- 
 men which Pandarus had shot, would be two feet eight 
 inches. Now the casual specimens sent to Cambridge 
 by Mr. Pashley, (not likely to be quite so select as that 
 which formed a personal weapon for a man of rank,) 
 Tt^ere all two feet seven and a half inches on the outer 
 margin, and two feet one and a half inches on the 
 inner. And thus the accuracy of Homer's account, 
 (which as Heyne observes, had been greatly doubted 
 in past ages,) was not only remarkably confirmed, but 
 confirmed in a way which at once identifies, beyond 
 all question, the Homeric wild-goat (ai? ay^iog) with 
 the present agrimi of Crete ; viz. by the unrivalled 
 size of the animal's horns, and by the unrivalled power 
 of the animal's movements, which rendered it neces- 
 sary to shoot it from an ambush, in days before the 
 discovery of powder. 
 
 But this result becomes still more conclusive for our 
 present purpose : viz. for identifying Homer himself 
 as a Cretan by his habits of life, when we mention the 
 scientific report from Mr. Rothman of Trinity College, 
 Cambridge, on the classification and habitat of the 
 animal : — ' It is not the bouquetin,' (of the Alps,) ' to 
 which, however, it bears considerable resemblance, but 
 the real wild-goat, the capra cBgagrus (Pallas), the 
 supposed origin of all our domestic varieties. The 
 horns present the anterior trenchant edge characteris- 
 tic of this species. The discovery of the cegagrus iv 
 '3rete, is perhaps a fact of some zoological interest
 
 HOMER AND THE HOilEEID^. 90 
 
 li it is the Jirst well-authenticated European locality 
 of this animalJ' 
 
 Here is about as rigorous a demonstration that the 
 sporting adventure of Pandarus must have been a 
 Cretan adventure as would be required by the Queen's 
 Bench, Whilst the spirited delineation of the capture, 
 in which every word is emphatic, and picturesquely 
 true to the very life of 1841,* indicates pretty strongly 
 that Homer had participated in such modes of sporting 
 himself. 
 
 ni. — Another argument for the Cretan habitudes of 
 Homer, is derived from his allusion to the Cretan tum- 
 blers — the zu.'SigijTJ.^tg — the most whimsical, perhaps, 
 in the world ; and to this hour the practice continues 
 unaltered as in the eldest days. The description is 
 easily understood. Two men place themselves side 
 by side ; one stands upright in his natural posture ; the 
 other stands on his head. Of course this latter would 
 be unable to keep his feet aloft, and in the place be- 
 longing to his head, were it not that his comrade throws 
 his arms round his ankles, so as to sustain his legs 
 inverted in the air. Thus placed, they begin to roll 
 forward, head over heels, and heels over head : every 
 tumble inverts their positions : but always there is one 
 man, after each roll, standing upright on his pins, and 
 another whose lower extremities are presented to the 
 clouds. And thus they go on for hours. The per- 
 formance obviously requires two associates ; or, if the 
 number were increased, it must still be by pairs ; and 
 iccordingly Homer describes his tumbles as in the 
 iual number. 
 
 * 1841 — viz., the date of the first publication of this essay
 
 100 HOMEK AND THE HOMEEID^. 
 
 IV. — A fourtli, and most remarkable, among the 
 Homeric mementos of Cretan life, is the rijkoXaXia — oi 
 conversation from a distance. This it is, and must 
 have been, which suggested to Homer his preternatural 
 male voices — Stentor's, for instance, who spoke as 
 loud ' as other fifty men ; ' and that of Achilles, whom 
 Patroclus roused up with a long pole, like a lion from 
 his lair, to come out and roar at the Trojans ; simply 
 by which roar he scares the whole Trojan army. Now, 
 in Crete, and from Colonel Leake, it appears, in Alba- 
 nia, (wliere we believe that Cretan emigrants have set- 
 tled,) shepherds and others are found with voices so 
 resonant, aided perhaps by the quality of a Grecian 
 atmosphere, that they are able to challenge a person 
 ' out of sight ; ' and will actually conduct a ceremoni- 
 ous conversation (for all Cretan mountaineers are as 
 ceremonious as the Homeric heroes) at distances 
 which to us seem incredible. What distance ? de- 
 mands a litigious reader. Why, our own countrymen, 
 modest and veracious, decline to state what they have 
 not measured, or even had the means of computing. 
 They content themselves with saying, that sometimes 
 their guide, from the midst of a solitary valley, would 
 shout aloud to the public in general — taking his chance 
 of any strollers from that great body, though quite out 
 of sight, chancing to be within mouth-shot. But the 
 French are not so scrupulous. M. Zallony, in his 
 Voyage a VArcliipel, &c., says, that some of the 
 Greek islanders ' ont la voix forte et animee ; et deux 
 habitans, a une distance d'une demi-lieue, meme plus, 
 peuvent tres facilement s'entendre, et quelquefois 
 B'entretenir.' Now a royal league is hard upon three 
 English miles, and a sea league, we believe, is two ana
 
 HOMER AND THE HOMERIC^. 101 
 
 R half; so that half a league, et meme plus, would 
 bring us near to two miles, which seems a long interval 
 at which to conduct a courtship. But this reminds us 
 of an English farmer in the north, who certainly did 
 T(^gularly call in his son to dinner from a place two 
 measured miles distant ; and the son certainly came. 
 How far this punctuality, however, might depend on 
 the father's request, or on the son's watch, was best 
 known to the interested party. In Crete, meantime, 
 and again, no doubt, from atmospheric advantages, the 
 rijioaxoTTta, or power of descrying remote objects by the 
 eye, is carried to an extent that seems incredible. This 
 faculty also may be called Homeric; for Homer re- 
 peatedly alludes to it. 
 
 V, — But the legends and mythology of Crete are Avhat 
 most detect the intercourse of Homer with that island. 
 A volume would be requisite for the full illustration of 
 this truth. It will be sufficient here to remind the 
 reader of the early civilization, long anterior to that of 
 Greece continental, which Crete had received. That 
 premature refinement furnished an d priori argument 
 for supposing that Homer would resort to Crete ; and 
 inversely, the elaborate Homeric use of Cretan tradi- 
 tional fables, furnishes an a posteriori argument that 
 Homer did seek this Island. 
 
 It is of great use towards any full Homeric investi- 
 gation, that we should fix Homer's locality and trace 
 his haunts ; for locality, connected with the internal 
 indications of the Iliad, is the best means of approxi- 
 mating to Homer's true era ; as on the other hand, 
 Homer's era, if otherwise deduced, would assist the 
 indications of the Iliad to determine his locality. And
 
 102 HOMER AND THE HOMBEID^. 
 
 if any reader demands in a spirit of mistrust, How it 
 is that Crete, so harassed by intestine wars from Turk- 
 ish, Venetian, and recently from Egyptian tyranny, 
 the bloodiest and most exterminating, has been able, 
 through three thousand years, to keep up unbroken 
 her inheritance of traditions ? we reply. That the same 
 cause has protected the Cretan usages, which (since 
 the days of our friend Pandarus) has protected the 
 Cretan ibex ; viz. the physical conformation of the 
 island — mountains ; secret passes where one resolute 
 band of two hundred men is equal to an army ; ledges 
 of rock which a mule cannot tread with safety ; crags 
 where even infantry must break and lose their cohe- 
 sion ; and the blessedness of rustic poverty, which 
 offers no temptation to the marauder. These have 
 been the Cretan safeguards ; and a brave Sfakian popu- 
 lation, by many degrees the finest of all Grecian races 
 in their persons and their hearts. 
 
 The main point about Homer, the man, which now 
 remains to be settled, amongst the many that might be 
 useful, and the few that are recoverable, is this — 
 Coxdd he lorite ? and if he could, did he use that 
 method for fixing his thoughts and images as they 
 arose ? or did he trust to his own memory for the 
 rough sketch, and to the chanters for publishing the 
 revised copies ? 
 
 This question, however, as it will again meet us 
 under the head Solon and the Pisistratidce, we shall 
 defer to that section ; and we shall close this personal 
 •ection on Homer by one remark borrowed from Plato. 
 The reader will have noticed that, amongst the cities 
 pretending to Homer as a native child, stands the city 
 ȣ Argus. Now Plato, by way of putting a summary
 
 HOIIETI AXD THE HOMEEID^. 103 
 
 end to all sucli wiucly pretensions from Dorian cities, 
 introduces in one of Ids dialogues a stranger who re- 
 marks, as a leading characteristic of Homer — thai 
 everywhere he keeps the reader mo^dng amongst scenes, 
 images and usages, which reflect the forms and color- 
 ing of Ionian life. This remark is important, and we 
 shall use it in om- summing up. 
 
 PART II. 
 
 THE ILIAD. 
 
 What is the Iliad about ? What is the true and 
 proper subject of the Iliad 7 If that could be settled, 
 it would facilitate our inquiry. Now everybody knows, 
 that according to the ordinary notion, founded upon 
 the opening lines of this poem, the subject is the 
 WratJi of Achilles. Others, however, have thought, 
 wdth some reason, that the idea was not sufiiciently 
 self-diff"usive — was not all-pervasive : it seemed a lig- 
 ament that passed through some parts of the poem, 
 and connected them intimately, but missed others alto- 
 gether. It has, therefore, become a serious question 
 — How much of the Iliad is really interveined, or at 
 all modified, by the son of Peleus, and his feud with 
 Agamemnon ? To settle which, a German Jew took 
 a singular method. 
 
 We have all heard of that barbarous prince, (the 
 Btory is told of several,) who, in order to decide terri- 
 torial pretensions between himself and a brother po- 
 tentate, sent for a large map of the world ; and from 
 Jiis, with a pair of scissors, cutting out the rival states, 
 lajefully weighed them against each other, in gold
 
 104 irOMEB, AND THE HOMEKID^. 
 
 scales. We see no reason for laughing at tte pnnce r 
 for, the paper being presumed of equal thir.kness, the 
 map accurate, and on a large scale, the result would 
 exhibit the truth in a palpable shape. Probably on 
 this hint it was, that the Jew cut out of a Greek Uiad 
 every liae that could be referred to Achilles and his . 
 wrath — not omitting even the debates of Olympus, 
 where they grew out of that. And what was his re- 
 port? Why, that the wrath of Achilles formed only 
 ' 26 per shent ' upon the whole Iliad ; that is, in effect, 
 one quarter of the poem. 
 
 Thus far, therefore, we must concede to the Chori- 
 zontes, or breakers-up of the Iliad, that the original 
 stem on which the Iliad grew was probably an Achil- 
 leis ; for it is inconceivable that Homer himself could 
 have expected such a rope of sand as the Iliad now 
 presents, to preserve its order and succession under 
 the rough handling of posterity. Watch the fate of 
 any intricate machine in any private family. All the 
 loose or detached parts of such a machine are sure to 
 be lost. Ask for it at the end of a year, and the more 
 elaborate was the machine, so much the more certain 
 is the destruction which will have overtaken it. It is 
 only when any compound whole, whether engine, 
 poem, or tale, carries its several parts absolutely inter- 
 locked with its own substance, that it has a chance of 
 maintaining its integrity. 
 
 Now, certainly it cannot be argued by the most idol- 
 atrous lover of the Iliad, that the main central books 
 exhibit that sort of natural intercohesion which deter- 
 mines their place and order. But, says the reader 
 here they are ; they have held together : no use ir 
 asking whether it was natural for them to hold together
 
 HOMER AND THE HOMERID^. 105 
 
 Tliey have reached us : it is now past asking — Could 
 Homer expect them to reach us ? Yes, they have 
 reached us ; but since when ? Not, probably, in their 
 present arrangement, from an earlier period than that 
 of Pisistratus. When manuscripts had once become 
 general, it might be easy to preserve even the loosest 
 succession of parts — erpecially where great venera- 
 tion for the author, and the general notoriety of the 
 poems, would secure the fidelity of copies. But what 
 the sceptics require to be enlightened upon, is the 
 principle of cohesion which could carry these loose 
 parts of the Iliad over that gulf of years between 
 Homer and Pisistratus — the one a whole millennium 
 before our Christian era, the other little more than half 
 a millennium ; and whilst traditionary transmission 
 through singers and harpers constituted, perhaps, the 
 sole means of preservation, and therefore of arrange- 
 ment. 
 
 Let not the reader suppose German scepticism to be 
 the sole reason for jealousy with regard to the present 
 canon of the Iliad. On the contrary, sovie interpola- 
 tions are confessed by all parties. For instance, it ia 
 certain ^- and even Eustathius records it as a regulai' 
 tradition in Greece — that the night-adventure of 
 Diomed and Ulysses against the Trojan camp, their 
 capture of the beautiful horses brought by Ehesas, and 
 of Dolon the Trojan spy, did not originally form a 
 part of the Iliad. At present this adventure forms the 
 tenth book, but previously it had been an independent 
 tpos, or epic narrative, perhaps locally circulated 
 amongst the descendants of Diomed,* and known by 
 
 * Descendants, or perhaps, amongst the worshippers ; for, 
 though evei7body is not aware of that fact, many of the Grecian
 
 106 HOMEK AND THE HOMEEIDJfi. 
 
 the title of the Doloneia. Now, if one such intercala- 
 tion could pass, why not more ? With respect to this 
 particular night episode, it has been remarked, that its 
 place in the series is not asserted by any internal 
 indication. There is an allusion, indeed, to the wrath 
 of Achilles ; but probably introduced to harmonize it 
 as a part of the Iliad, by the same authoiity which 
 introduced the poem itself : else, the whole book may 
 be dropped out without any hiatus. The battle, sug- 
 gested by Diomed at the end of the ninth Book, takes 
 place in the eleventh ; and, as the critics remark, no 
 allusion is made in that eleventh book, by any of the 
 Grecian chiefs, to the remarkable plot of the interven- 
 ing night. 
 
 But of all the incoherences which, have been de- 
 tected in the Iliad, as arising out of arbitrary juxta- 
 positions between parts not originally related, the most 
 amusing is that brought to light by the late Wilhelm 
 Mueller. ' It is a fact,' says he, ' that (as the arrange- 
 ment now stands) Ulysses is not ashamed to attend 
 three dinner parties on one evening.' First, he had 
 a dinner engagement with Agamemnon, which, of 
 course, he keeps, [B. IX. 90 ;] so prudent a man could 
 
 heroes at Troy were deified. Ulysses and his wife, Idomeneua, 
 &c., assume even a mystical place in the subsequent superstitions 
 of Greece. But Diomed also became a god : and the occasion 
 was remarkable. A peerage (f. e. a godship) had been promised 
 ty the gods to his father Tydeus ; but when the patent came tc 
 le enrolled, a flaw was detected — it was found that Tydeus had 
 once eaten part of a man ! What was to be done ? Tlie objection 
 was fatal ; no cannibal could be a god, though a god might be a 
 cannibal. Tydeus therefore requested Jove to settle the rever- 
 lion on -his son Diomed. • And that,' said Jove, ♦ I shall have 
 great pleasure in doing.'
 
 H.OIVIEK AND THE HOMERID^. 107 
 
 not possibly neglect an invitation from the commander 
 of the forcts. Even in free and independent England, 
 the sovereign does not ask you to dinner, but commandi 
 your attendance. Next he dines with Achilles, [B. IX. 
 221 ;] and finally with Diomed, [B. XL 578:] Now, 
 Diomed was a swell of the first magnitude, and a man 
 of fashion, as may be seen in the 'Troilus and Cressida' 
 of Shakspeare, (who took his character from tradition, 
 and makes him the Greek rival of Troilus.) He there- 
 fore pushes his dinner as far towards ' to-morrow ' as 
 was well possible ; so that it is near morning before 
 that dinner is over. And the sum of the Ithacan's enor- 
 mities is thus truly stated by Mueller : — ' Deny it who 
 will, the son of Laertes accepts three distinct feeds, 
 between the sunset suppose of Monday and the dawn 
 of Tuesday ! ' 
 
 This is intolerable. Yet, perhaps, apologists will 
 say, (for some people will varnish anything,) ' If the 
 man had three dinners in one day, often, perhaps, in 
 three days he had but one dinner ! ' For ourselves, 
 we frankly confess, that if there is one man in the 
 Grecian camp whom we should have believed capable 
 of such a thing, it is precisely this cunning Ulysses. 
 Mueller insists on calling him the ' noble ' Ulysses ; 
 but that is only to blacken his conduct about the 
 .dinners. To our thinking, his nearest representative 
 in modern times is ' Sixteen-string Jack,' whose life 
 may be read in the ' Newgate Calendar.' What 
 most amuses ourselves in the business is Mueller's so 
 gtealthily pursuing Ulysses tnrough two books of the 
 Iliad,' in order to watch how many dinner parties he 
 attended ! And there is a good moral in the whole 
 discovery ; for it shows all knaves, that, though hidden
 
 108 HOMER AND THB HOMEEID^. 
 
 for tliree thousand years, their tricks are sure to be 
 found out at the last. 
 
 In general, it is undeniable that some of the German 
 objections to the present arrangement, as a possible 
 Homaric arrangement, are valid. For instance, the 
 following, against the present position of the duel 
 between Paris and Menelaus : — 'This duel, together 
 wi*;h the perfidious shot of Pandarus, and the general 
 engagement which follows, all belonging to the same 
 epos, wear the appearance of being perfectly insulated 
 where they now stand, and betray no sort of connection 
 with any of the succeeding cantos. In the 'Aqtama 
 Jionr,Sovg, which forms the fifth canto, the whole inci- 
 dent is forgotten, and is never revived. The Grecians 
 make no complaint of the treachery practised ; nor do 
 the gods {ex officio the avengers of perjury) take any 
 steps to punish it. Not many hours after the duel. 
 Hector comes to his brother's residence ; but neither 
 of them utters one word about the recent duel ; and as 
 little about what had happened since the duel, though 
 necessarily unknown to Paris. Hector's reproaches, 
 again, to Paris, for his Idchete, are in manifest contra- 
 diction to the single combat which he had so recently 
 faced. Yet Paris takes no notice whatevei of the 
 energy manifested by himself. And as to his final 
 evasion, that was no matter of reproach to him, since 
 it was the work of a goddess. Besides, when he 
 announces his intention to Hector of going again to 
 the field of battle, who would not anticipate from him 
 a proposal for re-establishing the interrupted duel ? 
 Yet not a syllable of all that. Now, with these broad 
 indications to direct our eyes upon the truth, can we 
 doubt that the duel, in connection with the breach o'
 
 HOMER AND THE HOMEEID^. 109 
 
 truce, and all that now fills the third and fourth books' 
 — [in a foot note Mueller adds — ' and also the former 
 half of the second book '] — ' originally composed an 
 independent ejjos, which belonged, very probably, to 
 an earlier stage of the Trojan war, and was first thrust 
 by the authorized arrangers of the " Iliad," into the 
 unhappy place it now occupies ; namely, in the course 
 of a day already far overcrowded with events ? ' 
 
 In the notes, where Mueller replies to some ob- 
 jections, he again insists upon the impossibility, under 
 the supposition that Homer had authorized the present 
 arrangement, of his never afterwards making the 
 Greeks allude to the infraction of the treaty ; especi- 
 ally when Hector proposes a second duel between 
 himself and some one of the Grecian chiefs. Yet, 
 perhaps, as regards this particular feature (namely, 
 the treachery) of the duel, we would suggest, that, as 
 the interposition of Venus is not to be interpreted in 
 any foolish allegorical way, (for the battle interferences 
 of the gods are visible and undisguised,) doubtless the 
 Greeks, not less than the Trojans, understood the in- 
 terruption as in effect divine ; after which, the act of 
 Pandarus is covered by the general apology, no matter 
 in what light Pandarus might have meant it. Even in 
 the first ' Iliad,' it is most childish to understand the 
 whispering of Minerva to Achilles as an allegorical 
 way of expressing, that his good sense, or his pru- 
 dence arrested his hand. Nonsense ! that is not 
 Homer's style of thinking, nor the style of Homeric 
 Bges. Where Mars, upon being wounded, howls, 
 and, instead of licking the man who offered him 
 \h.i3 irsult, shows the white feather and limps off 
 in confusion, do these critics imagine an allegory ?
 
 110 HOMEK AND THE HOMERID^. 
 
 What is an allegoric howl ? or what does a cut 
 sneaking from a fight indicate symbollically ? The 
 Homeric simplicity speaks plainly enough. Venus 
 finds that her man is likely to be beaten ; which, by 
 the way, surprises us ; for a stout young shepherd, 
 like Paris, ought to have found no trouble in taking 
 the conceit out of an elderly diner-out, such as Mene- 
 'aus. And, perhaps, with his mauleys, he would. 
 Finding, however, how the affair was likely to go, 
 Venus withdraws her man. Paris does not come to 
 time ; the umpires quarrel ; the mob breaks the ring ; 
 and a battle royal ensues. But the interference of 
 Venus must have been palpable : and this is one of 
 the circumstances in the ' Iliad ' which satisfies us, that 
 the age of Troy was removed by several generations 
 from Homer. To elder days, and men fancied more 
 heroic than those of his own day — (a fancy which 
 Homer expressly acknowledges) — he might find him- 
 self inclined to ascribe a personal intercourse with the 
 gods ; and he would find everywhere an audience 
 favoring this belief. A generation of men that often 
 rose themselves to divine honors, might readily be 
 conceived to mix personally with the gods. But no 
 man could think thus of his own contemporaries, of 
 whom he must know that the very best were liable 
 to indigestion, and suspected often to have schirroua 
 livers. Really no : a dyspeptic demigod it makes one 
 dyspeptic to think of ! 
 
 Meantime the duel of Paris is simply overlookerl 
 and neglected in the subsequent books of the Iliad : it 
 is nov'here absolutely contradicted by implication : but 
 sther cases have been noticed in the Iliad, which in- 
 volve direct contradictions, and therefore argue either
 
 HOMER AND THE HOMERID^ 111 
 
 that Homer in those ' naps ' which Horace imputes to 
 him slumbered too profoundly, or that counterfeits got 
 mixed up with the true bullion of the Iliad. Amongst 
 other examples pointed out by Heyne or by Tranceson, 
 the following deserve notice : 
 
 1. Pylsemenes the Paphlagonian, is killed by Mene- 
 laus, {11. V. 579-590;) but further on {11. xiii. 643- 
 658) we find the poor man pretty well in his health, 
 and chief mourner at the funeral of his son Harpalion. 
 
 2. Sarpedon is wounded in the leg by Tlepolemus, 
 {II. V. 028, &;c.) and an ugly wound it is, for the bone 
 is touched, so that an operation might be looked for. 
 Operation, indeed ! Two days after he is stumping 
 about upon his pins, and ' operating ' upon other 
 people {11. XII. 290, &c.). The contradiction, if it 
 really is one, was not found out until the approved 
 chronology of the Iliad was settled. Our reason for 
 doubting about the contradiction is simply this : Sar- 
 pedon, if we remember, was a son of Jupiter ; and 
 Jupiter might have a particular salve for wounded 
 legs. 
 
 3. Teucer, however, was an undeniable mortal. Yet 
 he {11. VIII. 324) is wounded desperately in the arm 
 by Hector. His neure is smashed, which generally is 
 taken to mean his bow-string ; but some surgical critics 
 understand it as the sinew of his arm. At all events 
 it was no trifle ; his brother, Telanionian Ajax, and 
 two other men, carry off the patient groaning heartily, 
 probably upon a shutter, to *.h.e hospital. He at last is 
 booked for the doctor, you think. Not at all. Next 
 Tjiorning he is abroad on the field of battle, and at hia 
 «ld trade of thumping respectable men {11. xii. 387.) 
 
 4. The history of Vulcan, and his long day's tumble
 
 112 HOMER AND THE HOMERID^. 
 
 from the sky, in iZ. i. 586, does not harmonize with 
 the account of the same accident in 11. xix. 394. 
 
 5. As an inconsistency not in the Iliad internally, 
 but between the Iliad and the Odyssey, it has often 
 been noticed, that in the former this same Vulcan is 
 married to Venus, whilst in the Odyssey his wife la 
 one of the Graces, 
 
 ' As upon earth,' says Mueller, ' so in Olympus, the 
 fable of the Iliad is but loosely put together ; and we 
 are not to look for any very severe succession of 
 motives and results, of promises and performances, 
 even amongst the gods. In the first Iliad, Thetis 
 receives a Jovian guarantee (viz. Jove's authentic nod) 
 on behalf of her offended son Achilles, that he 
 will glorify him in a particular way, and the way was 
 by making the Trojans victorious, until the Grecians 
 should see their error, and propitiate the irritated hero. 
 Mindful of his promise, Jove disposes Agamemnon, 
 by a delusive dream, to lead out the Grecian host to 
 battle. At this point, however, Thetis, Achilles, and 
 the ratifying nod, appear at once to be blown thereby 
 out of the Jovian remembrance. The duel between 
 Paris and Menelaus takes place, and the abrupt close 
 of that duel by Venus, apparently with equal indiffer- 
 ence on Jove's part to either incident. Even at the 
 general meeting of the gods in the fourth book, there 
 is no renewal of the proposal for the glorifying of 
 Achilles. It is true that Jove, from old attachments, 
 would willingly deliver the strong-hold of Priam from 
 nin, and lead the whole feud to some peaceful issue. 
 But the passionate female divinities, Juno and Minerva, 
 iriumph over his moderation, and the destruction of 
 froy is finally determined. Now, grant that Jove
 
 HOMER AXD THE HOMEKID^. 113 
 
 wanted firmness for meeting the furious demands of 
 the goddesses, by a candid confession of his previous 
 promise to Thetis, still we might have looked for some 
 intimation that this degradation of himself in the eyes 
 of a confiding suppliant had cost Inm a struggle. But 
 no ; nothing of the kind. In the next great battle the 
 Trojans are severely pressed, and the Greeks are fai 
 enough from feeling any regret for the absence of 
 Achilles. Nay, as if expressly to show that Achillea 
 was nol .wanted, Diomed turns out a trump of the first 
 magnitude ; and a son of Priam describes him pointedly 
 as more terrific than Pelides, the goddess-born ! And, 
 indeed, it was time to retreat before the man who had 
 wounded Mars, making him yell with pain, and howl 
 like " ten thousand mortals." This Mars, however — 
 he at least must have given some check to the advanc- 
 ing Greeks ? True, he had so ; but not as fulfilling 
 any Jovian counsels, which, on the contrary, tend 
 rather to the issue of this god's being driven out of the 
 Trojan ranks. First of all, in the eighth book, Jove 
 steps forward to guide the course of war, and with 
 remembrance of his promise to Thetis, he forbids 
 peremptorily both gods and goddesses to interfere on 
 either side ; and he seats himself on Mount Ida to over- 
 look the field of battle, threatening to the Greeks, by 
 his impartial scales, a preponderance of calamity. 
 From this review, it appears tolerably certain, that the 
 thii'd to the seventh book belong to no epos that could 
 have been dedicated to the glory of Achilles. The 
 wrath of that hero, his reconciliation, and his return to 
 battle, having been announced in the opening as the 
 theme of the poem, are used as a connecting link for 
 beading together all the cantos about other heroes 
 8
 
 114 HOMER AND THE HOMERID^. 
 
 whicli had been intercalated between itself and tlu, 
 close ; but this tie is far too slack ; and one rude shake 
 makes all the alien parts tumble out.' 
 
 Time of the Iliad. — Next let us ask, as a point 
 very important towards investigating the succession 
 and possible nexus of the events, what is the duration 
 — the compass of time — through which the action of 
 the poem revolves ? This has been of old a disputed 
 point ; and many are the different ' diaries ' which 
 have been abstracted by able men during the last two 
 centuries. Bossu made the period of the whole to be 
 jbrty-seven days ; Wood (in the earliest edition) forty ; 
 and a calculation in the Memoirs de Trevoux (May, 
 1708) carries it up to forty-nine. But the computus 
 now finally adopted, amended, and ruled irreversibly, 
 is that of Heyne, (as given in a separate Excursus,) 
 countersigned by Wolf ; this makes the number to be 
 fifty-two ; but, with a subsequent correction for an 
 obvious oversight of Heyne's, fifty-one. 
 
 'Book I. — Nine days the plague rages, (v. 53.) 
 On the tenth Achilles calls a meeting of the staff 
 officers. What occurs in that meeting subsequently 
 occasions his mother's visit. She tells him, (v. 422,) 
 that Jove had set off the day before to a festival of the 
 Ethiopians, and is not expected back in less than twelve 
 days. From this we gather, that the visit of Thetis to 
 Jove (v. 493) must be transplanted to the twenty-first 
 day. With this day terminates the first book, wiuch 
 cortains, therefore, twenty-one days. 
 
 ' Book II. up to V. 293 of Book VII., comprehends 
 a single day — viz. the twenty-second. 
 
 ' Book VII. (v. 381, 421, and 432,) the twenty-third 
 day.
 
 HOMER AND THE HOMERID^. 115 
 
 • Book VII. (v. 433-465,) the twenly-fourtli day. 
 
 ' Book YIII. up to the close of Book X., the twenty- 
 fifth day and the succeeding night. 
 
 ' Book XI. up to the close of Book XVIII., the 
 twenty-sixth day. 
 
 ' Book XIX. to V. 201 of Book XXIII., the twenty- 
 seventh day, with the succeeding night. 
 
 ' Bcok XXIII. (v. 109-225,) the twenty-eighth day. 
 
 ' Book XXIII. (v. 226 to the end,) the twenty-ninth 
 day. 
 
 ' Book XXIV. — Eleven days long Achilles trails 
 the corpse of Hector round the sepulchre of Patroclus. 
 On the twelfth day a meeting is called of the gods ; 
 consequently on the thirty-ninth day of the general 
 action ; for this indignity to the dead body of Hector, 
 must be dated from the day of his death, which is the 
 twenty seventh of the entire poem. On the same thirty- 
 ninth day, towards evening, the body is ransomed by 
 Priam, and during the night is conveyed to Troy. With 
 the morning of the following day, viz. the fortieth, the 
 venerable king returns to Troy ; and the armistice of 
 eleven days, which had been concluded with Achilles, 
 is employed in mourning for Hector during nine days, 
 and in preparing his funeral. On the tenth of these days 
 takes place the burning of the body, and the funeral 
 banquet. On the eleventh is celebrated the solemn 
 interment of the remains, and the raising of the sepul- 
 chral mound. With the twelfth recommences the war. 
 
 ' Upon this deduction, the entire Iliad is found to 
 revolve within the space of fifty-one days. Heyne's 
 raisreckoning is obvious : he had summed up the eleven 
 days of the corpse-trailing, as a clear addition, by ju5t 
 BO much, to the twenty-seven previous days ; whereas
 
 116 HOMER AND THE HOMEKID^, 
 
 the twenty-seventli of those days coincidea with the 
 first of the trailing, and is thus counted twice over in 
 effect.' 
 
 This computus, in the circumstantial detail here pre- 
 sented, is due to Wilhelm Mueller. But suhstantially, 
 it is guaranteed by numerous scholars. And, as to 
 Heyne's little blunder, corrected by Wolf, it is nothing, 
 for we have ourselves known a Quaker, and a celebrated 
 bank, to make an error of the same amount, in com- 
 puting the number of days to run upon a bill at six 
 weeks. But we soon ' wolfed ' them into better arith- 
 metic, upon finding that the error was against ourselves. 
 
 Name of the Iliad. — What follows is our own 
 suggestion. We off"er it as useful towards our final 
 judgment, in which Ave shall pronounce firmly upon 
 the site of Homer, as not essentially altered ; as being 
 true and very Homer to this day — that same Homer 
 who was raised into a state property by Pisistratus in 
 555 B. C. ; who was passionately revered by Pericles 
 in 444 B. C. ; who was idolized and consecrated by 
 Alexander in 333 B. C. When first arose the Iliad 7 
 This we cannot now determine : but so much we 
 know, that the eldest author now surviving, in Avhom 
 that designation occurs as a regular familiar word, ia 
 Herodotus ; and he was contemporary with Pericles. 
 Herodotus must be considered as the senior author in 
 that great period of Athenian splendor, as Plato and 
 Xenophon were the junior. Herodotus, therefore, 
 might have seen Hipparchus, the son of Pisistratus, if 
 that prince had not been cut off" prematurely by Jaco- 
 binical daggers. It is, therefore, probable in a high 
 degree, that the name Iliad was already familiar to
 
 HOMEfi AND THE HO.AlEfllD^. 117 
 
 Pisistratus ; first, because it is so used by Herodotus 
 Bs to imply that it was no novelty at that time ; seC' 
 ondly, because he who first gathered the entire series 
 of Trojan legends into artificial unity, would be the 
 first to require an expression for that unity. The col- 
 lector would be the first to want a collective title. 
 Solon, therefore, or Pisistratus, no matter which, did 
 (as we finally believe) first gather the whole cycle of 
 Iliac romances into one body. And to this aggregate 
 whole, he gave the name of llias. But why ? in what 
 sense ? Not for any purpose of deception, small or 
 great. Were that notion once admitted, then we open 
 a door to all sorts of licentious conjectures. Con- 
 sciously authorizing one falsehood, there is no saying 
 where he would have stopped. But there Avas no 
 falsehood. Pisistratus, whose original motive for 
 stirring in such an affair, could have been only love 
 and admiration, was not the author, but the sworn foe 
 of adulteration. It was to prevent changes, not to 
 sanction them, that he could ever have interposed with 
 the state authority. And what then did he mean by 
 calling these collected poems the Iliad ? He meant 
 precisely what a man would now mean, who should 
 Dublish a body of ancient romances relating to the 
 I'ound table or to Charlemagne, or to the Crusades ; 
 not implying, by any unity in the title, that these ro- 
 aiances were all one man's work, or several parts of 
 one individual whole, but that they related to one ter- 
 minal object. The unity implied, would lie not in the 
 mind conceiving, nor in the nexus of the several divis- 
 ions, but in the community of subject. As when we 
 call the five books of Moses by the name of Penta- 
 teuch, we do not assert any unity running through
 
 118 HOMEK AND THE HOMEEIDiE. 
 
 these books, as fhough one took up the subject where 
 anothei left off; for, in reality, some parts are purely 
 historical, some purely legislative. But we mean that 
 all, whether record of fact, or record of institution and 
 precept, bear upon one object — the founding a sep- 
 arate nation as the depository of truth, and elaborately, 
 therefore, kept from blending with Pagans. On the 
 one hand, therefore, we concede to the sceptics, that 
 several independent poems (though still by possibility 
 from the same author) were united by Pisistratus. But 
 on the other hand, we deny any fraud in this — we 
 deny that the name Iliad was framed to disguise this 
 independence. Some had a closer nexus than others. 
 But what Pisistratus says, is this : — Behold a series 
 of poems, all ancient ; all from Homeric days ; and 
 (whether Homer's or not) all relating to the great cru- 
 sade against Ilium. 
 
 SOLON AND PISISTKATDS. 
 
 Wliat was it, service or injury, that these men did 
 to Homer ? No one question, in the whole series of 
 Homeric questions, is more perplexing. Homer did a 
 great service to them ; if tradition is right, to both of 
 them ; — viz. by settling a legal dispute for each ; so 
 .'hat it was a knavish return for such national benefits, 
 if they — if these two Athenian statesmen — went 
 about to undermine that text from which they had 
 reaped such singular fruits in their own administra- 
 tion. But we are sure they did no such thing : they 
 were both gentlemen — both scholars. Yet something, 
 certainly, they must have done to Homer : in that 
 point all are agreed : but what it was remains a mys- 
 tery to this hour. Every man is entitled to his opin*
 
 nOMER AND THE HOMEEIDJ^,. 119 
 
 ion ; we to oui's ; which in some corner or other we 
 shall whisper into the private ear of the public, and 
 into the public ear of our private friends 
 
 The first thing which puzzles every man of reflec- 
 tion, when he hears of this anecdote, is — the extra- 
 ordinary coincidence that two great lawgivers, at 
 different eras, should both interest themselves in a 
 poet ; and not only so, but the particular two who 
 faced and confronted each other in the same way that 
 any leader of English civilization (Alfred suppose) 
 might be imagined as facing and confronting any 
 leader (Charlemagne suppose) of French ciAT-lization. 
 For Chi-istian Europe, the names France and England 
 are by analogy what for Greece were the names Sparta 
 and Athens ; we mean, as respects the two great fea- 
 tures of permanent rivalship and permanent leadership. 
 From the moment when they were regulaidy organized 
 by law and institutions, Athens and Sparta became the 
 two counterforces of Greece. About 800 B. C, Ly- 
 curgus draws up a system of laws for Sparta ; more 
 than two centuries later, Solon draws up a system of 
 laws for Athens. And most unaccountably, each of 
 these political leaders takes upon him, not passively 
 as a private literary citizen, to admire the Homeric 
 poems — that might be natural in men of high birth 
 enjoying the selectest advantages of education — but 
 actually to privilege Homer, to place him on the matri- 
 cula of denizens, to consecrate his name, and to set in 
 motion the whole machinery of government on behalf 
 of his poems. Wherefor, and for what purpose ? 
 Oi the part of Lycurgus, for a purpose well-known 
 Bud appreciated, viz. to use the IJiad as the basis of 
 public instruction, and thus mediately as the basis of a
 
 120 HOMER AND THE HOMEBIDJE. 
 
 warlike morality — but on the part of Solon, for no 
 purpose ever yet ascertained. Strangely enough, from 
 the literary land, and from the later period, we do not 
 learn the ' how ' and the ' why ; ' from the gross illite- 
 rate land and the short period, we do. 
 
 What Lycurgus did was rather for an interest of 
 Greece than for any interest of Homer. The order of 
 his thoughts was not, as has been supposed — ' I love 
 Homer ; and I will show my love by making Sparta 
 co-operate in extending his influence ; ' no, but this — 
 ' I love Sparta ; and I will show my love by making 
 Homer co-operate with the martial foundations of the 
 land ; I will introduce a martial poem like the Iliad, 
 to operate through public education and through public 
 festivals.' For Solon, on the other hand. Homer must 
 have been a final object ; no means towards something 
 else, but an end per se. Doubtless, Solon, as little as 
 Lycurgus, could be indifferent to the value of this 
 popular poem for his own professional objects. But, 
 practically, it is not likely that Solon could find any 
 opening for Homeric services in that direction. Pre- 
 cisely those two causes which would ensure to Solon a 
 vast superiority to Lycurgus in all modes of intellec- 
 tual liberality, viz. his chronologic period and his 
 country, must have also caused that the whole ground 
 would be pre-occupied. For education, for popular 
 influence, Athens would have already settled upon 
 Homer all the dowry of distinction which Solon might 
 risk to settle. Athens surely in the sixth century 
 B. C, if Sparta in the ninth. 
 
 At thii point our suspicions revolve upon us. That 
 the two vanward potentates of Greece — Athens and 
 Spai'ta — should each severally ascribe to her <;wc
 
 HOMEB A.>"D THE HOilEKID^. 121 
 
 greatest lawgiver separate Homeric labor, looks too 
 muoli like the Papal heraldiies of European sovereigns : 
 all the great ones are presumed to have rendered a 
 characteristic service to the chm-ch. 'Are you the 
 most Christian ? Be it so ; but I am the most Catholic ; 
 and my brother here is the most faithful, or Defender 
 of the Faith.' ' Was Homer, do you say, an Ionian ? 
 And did Athens first settle his text ? With all my 
 heart : and we Dorians might seem to have no pai-t in 
 that inheritance ; being rather asinine in our literary 
 character ; but for all that, Dorian as he was, you can- 
 not deny that my countryman, Lycurgus, first intro- 
 duced Homer upon the continent of Greece.' Indeed 
 the Spartans had a craze about the Iliad, as though it 
 bore some special relation to themselves : for Plutarch 
 mentions it as a current saying in Sparta — that Hesiod 
 was the poet for Helots, (and in a lower key perhaps 
 they added — for some other people beside;) since, 
 according to his poetry, the end of man's existence is 
 
 — to plough and to haiTOW ; but Homer, said they, 
 is the Spartan poet ; since the moral of the Iliad 
 proclaims — that the whole duty of man lies in 
 fighting. 
 
 Meantime, though it cannot be denied that these 
 repeated attempts in Greek statesmen to connect them- 
 selves with Homer by some capital ser\'ice, certaicly 
 do look too much like the consequent attempts cf 
 western nations to connect their ancestries with Troy 
 
 — still there seems to be good historic authority for 
 each of the cases separately. Or, if any case were 
 Buspicious, it would be that of Lycurgus. Solon, the 
 legislatorial founder of Athens — the Pisistratidae or 
 final princes of Athens — these great men, it is imde-
 
 122 HOMEE AND IHE HOMEKID^. 
 
 niable; did link their names with Homer : eacli and 
 all by specific services. What services ? what could 
 be the service of Solon ? Or, after Solon, what ser- 
 vice could remain for Pisistratus r 
 
 A conceited Frenchman pretended to think that 
 history, to be read beneficially, ought to be read back- 
 wards, i. e. in an order inverse to the chronological 
 succession of events. This absurd rule might, in the 
 present case, be applied with benefit. Pisistratus and 
 his son Hipparchus stand last in the order of Homeric 
 modifiers. Now if we ascertain what it was that they 
 did, this may show us what it was that their prede- 
 cessors did not do ; and to that extent it will narrow 
 the range from which we have to select the probable 
 functions of those predecessors. 
 
 What then was the particular service to Homer by 
 which Pisistratus and his son made themselves so fa- 
 mous ? The best account of this is contained in an 
 obscure grammaticus or litterateur, one Diomedes, no 
 small fool, who thus tells his tale : — ' The poems of 
 Homer, in process of time, were it by fire, by flood, 
 by earthquake, had come near to extinction ; they had 
 not absolutely perished, but they were continually 
 coming near to that catastrophe by wide dispersion. 
 From this dispersion it arose naturally that one place 
 possessed a hundred Homeric books ; some second 
 place a thousand ; some tliird place a couple of hun- 
 dreds ; and the Homeric poetry was fast tending to 
 oblivion. In that conjuncture there occurred to Pisis- 
 tratus, who ruled at Athens about 555 years B. C, the 
 following scheme : — With the double purpose of gain- 
 ing glory for himself and preservation for Homer, he 
 dispersed a notification through Greece, that every man
 
 HOMEK AND THE HOMEEID^. 123 
 
 who possessed any Homeric fragments, was to delivei 
 them into Athenian hands at a fixed rate of compen- 
 Bation. The possessors naturally hastened to remit 
 their quotas, and were honestly paid. Indeed, Pisis- 
 tratus did not reject even those contributors who pre- 
 sented verses already sent in by another ; to these also 
 he paid the stipulated price, without any discount at all. 
 And by this means it happened that oftentimes he 
 recovered, amongst a heap of repetitions, one, two, or 
 more verses that w-ere new. At length this stage of 
 the labor was completed ; all the returns from every 
 quarter had come in. Then it was that Pisistratus 
 summoned seventy men of letters, at salaries suitable 
 to their pretensions, as critical assessors upon these 
 poems ; giving to each man separately a copy of the 
 lines collected by himself, with the commission of 
 arranging them according to his individual judgment. 
 When the commissioners had closed their labors, Pisis- 
 tratus reassembled them, and called upon each man 
 separately to exhibit his own result. This having been 
 done, the general voice, in mere homage to merit and 
 the truth, unanimously pronounced the revisions of 
 Aiistarchus and Zenodotus to be the best ; and after a 
 second collation between these two, the edition of 
 Aristarchus was found entitled to the palm.' 
 
 Now the reader must not allow himself to be re- 
 pelled by the absurd anachronisms of this account, 
 which brings Pisistratus of the sixth century B.C., face 
 to face with Aristarchus of the third ; nor must he 
 allow too much weight to the obvious plagiarism from 
 the old marvellous legend of the seventy-two Jewish 
 ranslators. That very legend shows him how possi- 
 ble it is for a heap of falsehood, and evon miracles,
 
 124 HOMEE AND THE HOMEEIDJS. 
 
 to be embroidered upon a story whicb, after all, is true 
 in its main texture. We all know it to be true, in spite 
 of the fables engrafted upon the truth, that under the 
 patronage of a Macedonian prince, seventy- two learned 
 Jews really were assembled at Alexandria, and did 
 make that Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, 
 which, from the number of the translators, we still call 
 the Septuagint. And so we must suppose this ignorant 
 Diomedes, though embellishing the story acco-rding to 
 his slender means, still to have built upon old traditions. 
 Even the rate of payment has been elsewhere recorded , 
 by which it appears that ' penny-a-liners ' (of whom 
 we hear so much in our day) existed also for early 
 Athens. 
 
 If this legend were accurate even in its commence- 
 ment, it would put down Plato's story, that the Homeric 
 poems were first brought to Athens by Hipparchus, the 
 Bon of Pisistratus ; and it would put down the mere 
 possibility that Solon, thirty or forty years earlier than 
 either, had ever intermeddled with those poems. But, 
 if we adopt the tradition about Lycurgus, or even if 
 we reject it, we must believe that copies of the Iliad 
 and Odyssey (that is, quoad the substance, not quoad 
 the pregPint arrangement) existed in Athens long be- 
 fore the Pisistratidse, or even Solon. Were it only 
 ;hrough the Rhapsodoi, or musical reciters of the 
 Homeric poems, both Iliad and Odyssey must have 
 been known many a long year before Pisistratus ; or 
 else we undertake to say they would never have been 
 known at all. For, in a maritime city like Athens, 
 jommimicating so freely with Ionia and with all insular 
 Greece, so constitutionally gay besides, how is it pos- 
 libie to suppose that the fine old poetic romancee
 
 HOMIE. AXD THE HOMERID^. 1^5 
 
 ehanted to tlie accompaniment of harps, about thf 
 paladins of Greece, could be unknown or unwelcomed, 
 unless by supposing them non-existent ? If thej 
 lurked anywhere, they would assuredly float across 
 these sunny seas of the ^gean to Athens ; that city 
 which, in every age, (according to Milton, Par. Reg.) 
 was equally ' native to famous ^\its' and '■hospitable ' 
 — that is, equally fertile in giving birth to men of 
 genius itself, and forward to welcome those of foreign 
 states. 
 
 Throughout this story of Diomedes, disfigured as it 
 is, we may read that the labors of Pisistratus were 
 applied to written copies. That is a great point in 
 advance. And instantly it reacts upon Solon, as a 
 means of approximating to the nature of his labors. 
 If (as one German writer holds) Solon was the very 
 first person to take down the Iliad in writing, from the 
 recitations of the Rhapsodoi, then it would seem that 
 this step had suggested to Pisistratus the further im- 
 provement of collating Solon's written copy with such 
 partial copies, or memorials, or recollections of re- 
 citers, as would be likely to exist in many diS'erent 
 parts of Greece, amongst families or cities tracing 
 their descent from particular heroes of the Iliad. If, 
 on the other hand, Pisistratus was the first man who 
 matured a written copy, what will then remain open to 
 Solon for his share in the play ? This ; viz. that he 
 applied some useful check to the exorbitancies of the 
 musical rehearsers. The famous Greek words, still 
 surviving in Plato and Diogenes Laertius, support this 
 notion. The words must be true, though they may be 
 obscure. They must involve the fact, though they 
 may conceal it. What are they ? Let us review
 
 126 HOMER AND IHE HOMERID-aS. 
 
 them. To chant i^ vTfoXtjxf/tms — and to chant il ino^okin 
 —-these were the new regulations introduced ly Solon 
 and his successor. Now, what is the meaning of 
 vTToXtjiptg ? The commonest sense of the word is — 
 opinion. Thus, on the title-page of Lord Shaftes- 
 bury's Characteristics, stands, as a general motto, 
 llavxa vnoXrjrpig, ' All things are matters of opinion. 
 This, however, is a sense which will not answer 
 Another and rarer sense is — succession. And the way 
 in which the prepositions vno and sub are used by the 
 encients to construct the idea of succession, (a problem 
 which Dr. Parr failed to solve,) is by supposing such a 
 case as the slated roof of a house. Were the slates 
 simply contiguous by their edges, the rain would soon 
 show that their succession was not perfect. But, by 
 making each to underlap the other, the series is made 
 virtually perfect. In this way, the word came to be 
 used for succession. And, applied to the chanters, it 
 must have meant that, upon some great occasion peri- 
 odically recurring, they were obliged by the new law 
 to pursue the entire series of the several rhapsodies 
 composing the Iliad, and not to pick and choose, as 
 heretofore, with a view to their own convenience, or 
 to local purposes. But what was the use of this ? 
 We presume that it had the same object in view as the 
 rubric of the English church, {we believe also of the 
 Jewish synagogue,) in arranging the succession of 
 lessons appointed for each day's service ; viz. to secure 
 the certainty that, within a known period of time, the 
 whole of the canonical books should be read once 
 through from beginning to end. The particular pur- 
 pose is of our own suggestion ; but the fact itself is 
 olaced beyond all doubt. Plato says, that the chanters
 
 HOMEB AND THE H0MEEID2E. 127 
 
 were obliged, at the great Pauatlienaic festival, to re- 
 cite the Iliad i% r/roAiji/'Eui? i^tltig ; where the first ex- 
 pression (f? vna}.r^\piwc') applies to the persons, the second 
 (iV/tSi^s) to the poem. 
 
 The popular translation would be — that they were 
 obliged, by relieving each other, or by regular relays 
 of chanters, to recite the whole poem in its order, by 
 succession of party, from beginning to end. This very 
 story is repeated by an orator still extant not long after 
 Plato. And in his case there is no opening to doubt, 
 for he does not affirm the story, he assumes it, and re- 
 calls it to the people's attention as a thing notorious to 
 them all. The other expression it r,TO;*u/t,c or vjioShiSiiv 
 has occasioned some disputing ; but why, we cannot 
 conjecture. If ever there was a word whose meaning 
 L» certain in a position like this, that word is ruo^aUw, 
 with its derivatives. And we are confounded at hear- 
 ing that less than a Boeckh would not suffice to prove 
 that the i\ rno^oh;? means, ' by way of suggestion,' 
 * under the condition of being prompted.' The mean- 
 ing of which is e'sident : a state copy of the Iliad, 
 however it was obtained by Solon, a canon of the Ho- 
 meric text, was confided to a prompter, whose duty 
 was to check the slightest de\"iation from this author- 
 ized standard, to allow of no shortenings, omissions, or 
 Bycophautic -^ alterations. In this sense the two regula- 
 tions support and check each other. One provides for 
 quantity, the other for quality. One secures the whole 
 Bhall be recited ; the other secures the fidelity of this 
 whole. And here again comes in the story of Salamia 
 to give us the ' why ' and the ' wherefore ' of these 
 uew regulations. If a legal or international question 
 %bout Salamis had just been decided by the mere au«
 
 128 HOMER AND THE HOMEKIDiE. 
 
 thority of a passage in the Iliad, it was high time foi 
 statesmen to look about them, and to see that a poem, 
 which was thus solemnly adjudged to be good evidence 
 in the supreme courts of law, should have its text 
 authenticated. And in fact, several new cases (see 
 Eustathius on the second Iliad,) were decided not long 
 after on the very same-Homeric evidence. 
 
 But does not this prompter's copy presuppose a com- 
 plete manuscript of the Iliad ? Most certainly it does ; 
 ond the question is left to the reader, whether this in 
 fact was the service by which Pisistratus followed up 
 and completed the service of Solon, (as to going 
 through the whole Iliad ;) or whether both services 
 were due to Solon ; in which case it will become neces- 
 sary to look out for some new idea of the service that 
 could remain open to Pisistratus. 
 
 Towards that idea, let us ask universally what ser- 
 vices could be rendered by a statesman in that age to 
 a poem situated as the Iliad ? Such a man might 
 restore ; might authenticate ; might assemble ; might 
 arrange. 
 
 1 . He might restore — as from incipient decay and 
 corruption. 
 
 2. He might authenticate — as between readings 
 that were doubtful. 
 
 3. He might assemble — as from local dispersion of 
 parts. 
 
 4. He might arrange — as from an uncertain and 
 arbitrary succession. 
 
 All these services, we have little doubt, were, in 
 fact, rendered by Pisistratus. The three first are 
 fclready involved in the story of our foolish friend Dio- 
 tuedes. Pisistratus would do justice to the wise enact-
 
 HOMER AND THE HOMEKID-E. 129 
 
 ment of Solon, by which the Iliad was raised into a 
 liturgy, periodically rehearsed by law at the greatest 
 of the Athenian festivals : he would admire the regu- 
 lation as to the prompter's (or state) copy. But this 
 latter ordinance was rather the outline of a useful idea, 
 than one which the first proposer could execute satis- 
 factorily. Solon probably engrossed upon brazen 
 tablets such a lext as any one man could obtain. But 
 it would be a work of time, of labor, of collation, and 
 fine taste, to complete a sound edition. Even the work 
 of Pisistratus was liable, as we know, to severe mal- 
 treatment by the Alexandrine critics. And by the Avay, 
 those very Alexandrine revisals presuppose a received 
 and orthodox text : for how could Zenodotus or Aris- 
 tarchus breathe their mildewing breath upon the re- 
 ceived readings, how could they pronounce X or r, for 
 instance, spurious, unless by reference to some stand- 
 ard text in which X or r was adopted for legitimate ? 
 However, there is one single argument upon which the 
 reader may safely allow himself to suspect the suspicions 
 of Aristarchus, and to amend his emendations. It is 
 this : Valkenaer points out to merited reprobation a cor- 
 rection applied by Aristarchus to the autobiographical 
 sketch of himself, -which Phcenix gives to Achilles in 
 II. X. Phcenix, in his old age, goes back to his youthful 
 errors in a spirit of amiable candor. Out of affection to 
 his mother, whose unmerited ill-treatment he witnessed 
 with filial sympathy, he had offered a-t her request, 
 an injury to his father for which he could obtain no 
 forgiveness. T;, ni6ouip; says Phoenix : her I obeyed. 
 Which passage one villain alters into Tii s ni<3o,u»;r, her 
 f di 1 not obey : and thus the whole story is ruined, 
 •iut Aristarchus goes further : he cancels and stilettoes^® 
 9
 
 130 HOMEK AND THE HOMEEID^. 
 
 the -w-hole passage. Why then ? Upon what conceiv- 
 able objection? Simply, in both cases, upon the ridic- 
 ulous allegation — that this confession, so frank, and 
 even pathetic, was immoral ; and might put bad thoughts 
 into the minds of ' our young men.' Oh, you two old 
 vagabonds ! And thus, it seems, we have had a Bowd- 
 ler's Iliad, long before our own Bowdler's Shakspeare. 
 It is fit, however, that this anecdote should be known, 
 as it shows the sort of principles that governed the re- 
 visal of Ai'istarchus. An editor, who could castrate a 
 text upon any plea of disliking the sentiment, is not 
 trustworthy. And for our parts, v/e should far prefer 
 the authorized edition of Pisistratus to all the remodelled 
 copies that were issued from the Alexandrine library. 
 
 So far, with reference to the three superior functions 
 of Pisistratus. As to the fourth, his labor of arrange- 
 ment, there is an important explanation to be made. 
 Had the question been simply this — given four-and- 
 twenty cantos of the Iliad, to place them in the most 
 natural order ; the trouble would have been trivial for 
 the arranger, and the range of objections narrower for 
 us. Some books determine their own place in the 
 series ; and those which leave it doubtful are precisely 
 the least important. But the case is supposed to have 
 been very different. The existing distribution of the 
 poem into twenty-four tolerably equal sections, desig- 
 nated by the twenty-four capitals of the Greek alphabet, 
 is ascribed to Arrstarchus. Though one incomparable 
 donkey, a Greek scholiast, actually denies this upon 
 the following ground : Do you know reader, (says he,) 
 why Homer began the Iliad with the word menin, 
 [iiipnY'? Look this way and I will tell you: it is a 
 great mystery. What does the little fi of the Greek
 
 HOMER AXD THE HOMEKID^. 131 
 
 alphabet signify numerically ? "Why, forty. Good : 
 And what does the i; mean ? Why, eight. Now, put 
 both together, you have a prophecy or a promise on the 
 part of Homer, that he meant to write forty-eight 
 books, which proves that the Iliad must have had origi- 
 nally twenty-fom-. Take twenty-foxu" from forty- eight, 
 and there remain just twenty-four books for the Odys- 
 sey. Quod erat demonstrandum. 
 
 But what Aristarchus did was a trifle — interesting 
 rather to the eye or the bookbinder than the under- 
 standing. There was an earlier and a former impor- 
 tant arrangement, due probably to Pisistratus.-® 
 
 THE AOIDOI, KHAPSODOI, HOMERID^. 
 
 The Germans are exceedingly offended, that any 
 man in ancient days, should presume to call himself a 
 rhapsodes, without sending down a sealed letter to pos- 
 terity, stating all the reasons which had induced him to 
 take so unaccountable a step. And the uproar is incon- 
 ceivable which they have raised about the office or 
 function indicated by the word, as well as about the 
 word itself considered etymologically. We, for our 
 part, honestly confess, that, instead of finding that 
 perplexity in the rhapscdos which our German broth erj 
 find for us, we are chiefly perplexed in accounting for 
 their perplexity. However, we had been seduced into 
 writing a very long essay on the several classes named 
 in our title, until we came to this discovery ; that, how- 
 ever curious in itself, the whole inquiry could not be, 
 »nd was not, by the Germans themselves, connected 
 rith any one point at issue about Homer or the Iliad. 
 \£tev all the fighting on the question, it remains past 
 denial, that the one sole proposition by which the rhap'
 
 132 HOMUR AND THE HOMEEID^. 
 
 sodoi have been brought even into any semblance of 
 connection with Homer, is the following : — Every 
 narrative poem of any length, was called a rhapsodia , 
 and hence it is, that the several subordinate narratives 
 of the Iliad, such as that called the yiQt^cta Ayaui^ivovog, 
 the prowess of Agammemnon — the ^Qigtta Aiuvrog, the 
 prowess of Ajax — iiiQinoTa^iog ^laxij, the battle by the 
 river side — 'Oni-onona, the fabric of the arms — Ntwv 
 tcarciXoyog, the mustcr of the ships — JwXorsta, the ad- 
 venture of Dolon — and many others, which are now 
 united into a composite structure called the Iliad 
 were always introduced by the chanter with a proemial 
 address to some divinity. And the Hymns, which we 
 have now under the name of Homer, are supposed to 
 have been occasional preludes of that sort. But say 
 the Germans, these prelusive hymns were often the 
 composition confessedly of the chanters. Well, and 
 what then ? Why nothing, reader ; simply nothing. 
 Only we, out of our benignity and mere grace, not 
 wishing to see brother literati exposing themselves in 
 this way, without a rag of logic about them, are re- 
 solved to suppose them tending to this inference — that 
 if these fellows forged a beginning, they might also 
 have forged a middle and an end. Some such hypo- 
 thetic application of the long feuds about the rhap- 
 sodoi, is the one sole discoverable bearing that even 
 the microscope of criticism will ever detect upon the 
 Homeric questions. But really for any useful pur- 
 pose, as well might a man suggest, that by possibility 
 B, great poet arose in Greece 900 years B. C, that his 
 name was Nothos Kibdelos ; that he lived in a hole ; 
 and that he forged the Iliad. Well then, if he did, 
 NotJios is Homer And that is simply saying that
 
 HOMER AND IflE HOMEEID^. 133 
 
 [Tomer ought to be spelled by a different arrangement 
 of letters. We see no possible value in such un- 
 megining conjectures. Dean Swift's objection to the 
 Iliad, to the Greek language, and to all ancient history, 
 being obviously a modern hoax, inasmuch as Andro- 
 mache was evidently a corruption of Audi-ew ^lackay, 
 and Alexander the Great, only the war-cry of a school- 
 boy, (' All eggs under the grate ! ') to hide their egga 
 on the approach of the schoolmaster, is worth a thou- 
 gaud such dull objections. The single fact which we 
 know about these preludes is, that they were pure 
 detached generalities, applicable to all cases indiffer- 
 ently ; aitaSoiTa, irrelevant as an old Greek author calls 
 them ; and, to prevent any misconstruction of his mean- 
 ing, as if that musical metaphor were applied by him 
 to the mere music of the chanter, he adds — y.ai ovScv 
 7100? TO nqayfta dijXoi ; and they foreshow nothing at all 
 that relates to the subject. Now, from this little notice 
 of their character, it is clear, that, like doxologies, or 
 choral burdens or refrains to songs, they were not 
 improvised ; not impromptus ; they were stereotyped 
 forms, ready for all occasions. A Jove principium, 
 says Horace : mth this opening a man could never go 
 wrong, let the coming narative point which way it 
 would. And Pindar observes, that in fact all the Ho- 
 meric rhapsodoi did draw their openings from Jove. 
 Or by way of variety, the Muses would be a good inau- 
 guration, or Apollo ; and, as some man rightly sug- 
 gests, in a great city like Athens, or Ephesus, the local 
 divinity. Ha\'ing, therefore, this dispensation once and 
 forever from caring for the subject of their chants, 
 the chanters ai'e very little likely to have forged any- 
 fcing, e:;cept a bank note. Far more probable it is, that
 
 134 HOMER AND THE HOMEEID^. 
 
 their preludes were sold, like queen's heads, at so much 
 a dozen, leaving time to the chanters for clarifying 
 their voices with summat cool, and to the harpers for 
 splicing their broken harp-strings. 
 
 But the Germans, who will not leave this bone after 
 all its fruitless mumbling, want to pick a quarrel about 
 the time when these rhapsodoi began to exist. What 
 loes that signify ? We will quarrel with no man 
 ' about the age of Sir Archy's great-grandmother ; ' 
 and yet, on consideration, we will. If they will 
 persist in making a row, we shall try to rap their 
 knuckles. They say that their rhapsodoi were, com- 
 paratively with Homer, young people. We say that 
 they were not. And now that our blood is up, we 
 insist upon it — that they were as old as the hills ; 
 twice as old as Homer ; three times as old, if it Avill 
 vex them more. We cannot say that we know this 
 ' of our own knowledge ; ' but we have better evi- 
 dence for it than any which they can have against it. 
 In a certain old scholiast on Aristophanes, there is a 
 couplet quoted from Hesiod in the following terms : — 
 
 'Ev /frjAio Tore nocnov lyio y.ai 'OuyjQog aoidoi, 
 ]\lsk7T0fiev, sv %'saQoie I'uvoig oaxpavreg ieoi6i]v. 
 
 ' Then first in Delos did I and Homer, two bards, 
 perform as musical reciters, laying the nexus of our 
 poetry in original hymns.' He means to tell you 
 that they were none of your beggarly itinerant rhap' 
 iodoi, who hired the bellman to write a poetic address 
 for them. They had higher pretensions ; they killed 
 their own mutton. And not only were the preluding 
 hymns their own copyrights, (pirates and teggs be 
 off !) but also they had a meaning. They were spe-
 
 HOilER AXD THE HOMERID^. 135 
 
 cially connected with, the epos, or narrative, that fol- 
 lowed, and not (as usually) iiTelevant ; so that they 
 formed the transitional passages which connected one 
 epos with another. Plato again, who stood nearer to 
 Homer than any one of us, by the little difference of 
 two thousand, two hundred and sixty years, swears 
 that he knows Homer to have been a rhapsodos. 
 
 But what does the \vord mean ? We intend to 
 write a German quarto upon this question. It will be 
 adapted to the use of posterity. Meantime, for the 
 present flighty generation, whose ear must be power- 
 fully tweaked to make it listen through a single page, 
 we shall say thus much. Strabo, in a passage which 
 deserves closer attention than it has received, explains 
 why it is that poetry in general was called aotdtj or 
 song. This name having been established, then after- 
 wards each special kind of poetry bore this appella- 
 tion, viz., aoide, or ode, or odia, as a common or 
 generic element in its designation, whilst its differen- 
 tial element w^as prefixed. Thus goat-song, or trago- 
 dia, revel-song, or komodia, were designations (derived 
 from their occasional origins) of tragedy and comedy, 
 both being chanted. On the same principle, rhap- 
 sodia shows by its ending that it is poetry, some kind 
 or other : but what kind ? AVhy, that secret is con- 
 fided to the keeping of rhaps. And what may rhaps 
 mean ? Oh, Sir, you are not to know all for nothing. 
 Please to subscribe for a copy of our quarto. For 
 the present, however, understand that rhapto means 
 to sew with a needle, consequently to connect. But, 
 say you, all poetry must have some connection inter- 
 nally at least. True, but this circumslance is more 
 ioticeable and emphatic with regard to long narrative
 
 136 HOMER AND THE HOMERID-S:. 
 
 poems. TTie more were the parts to be connected, 
 the more was the connection : more also depended 
 upon it ; and it caught the attention more forcibly. 
 An ode, a song, a hymn, might contain a single 
 ebullition of feeling. The connection might lie in 
 the very rapture and passion, Avithout asking for any 
 effort on the poet's part. But, in any epos or epic 
 romance, the several adventures, and parts of adven- 
 tures, had a connecting link running through them, 
 such as bespoke design and effort in the composer, 
 viz., the agency of a single hero, or of a predominant 
 hero. And thus rhapsodia, or linked song, indicated 
 by an inevitable accident of all narrations, that it was 
 narrative poetry. And a rhapsodos was the personal 
 correlate of such poetry ; he was the man that chanted 
 it. 
 
 Well, and what is there in all this to craze a man's 
 brain, to make him smite his forehead in desperation., 
 or to ball up his huge fist in defiance ? Yet scarcely 
 is one row over before another commences. Pindar, 
 it seems, has noticed the rhapsodoi ; and, as if it 
 were not enough to fight furiously about the explana- 
 tion of that word, a second course of fights is under- 
 taken about Pindar's explanation of the explanation. 
 The Pindaric passages are two ; one in the 3d Isth- 
 mian, which we confess makes even ourselves (in 
 Kentuck phrase) ' wolfy about the shoulders, i. e. 
 prurient for fighting. Speaking of Homer, Pindar, 
 gays, that he established (i. e. raised into life and 
 celebrity) all modes of excellence, xara ^a^Sov. It is 
 a poet's way of saying that Homer did this as a 
 rhapsodos. Rhaidos, therefore, is used as the sym- 
 bol of a rhapsodos ; it is, or it may be conceived to
 
 HOMER AND THE HOMERIC^. 137 
 
 De, his instrument for connecting tlie narrative poem 
 which gives him his designation. But what instru- 
 ment ? Is it a large darning-needle for sewing the 
 parts together ? If so, Homer will want a thimble. 
 No, says one big solemn critic, not a needle : none 
 but an ass would think of such a thing. Well, old 
 fellow, what is it then ? It is, says he, a cane — a 
 wand — a rattan. And what is Homer to do with a 
 cane ? Why, understand, that when his singing robes 
 were on, (for it is an undoubted fact, that the ancient 
 rhapsodos not only chanted in full pontificals, but had 
 two sets of robes, crimso7i when he chanted the Iliad, 
 violet-colored when he chanted the Odyssey,) in that 
 case the rhapsodos held his stick in his right hand. 
 But what sort of a stick ? Slick is a large genus, 
 running up from switch to cudgel, from rod to blud- 
 geon. And our own persuasion is — that this stick 
 or pencil of wood had something to do with the roll 
 of remembrances, (not perhaps written copies, but 
 mechanical suggestions for recovering the main suc- 
 cession of paragraphs,) which the rhapsodos used as 
 short-hand notes for aiding his performance. But this 
 is a subject which we must not pursue. 
 
 The other passage of Pindar is in the second Ne- 
 
 mean '06ev mo nui 'OfnjniSixi ijiiTiTcDf f'/rtoi)' t« noXk' aoiSot 
 
 ap/oiTai.^^ Of a certain conquerer at the games, Pindaj 
 says — that he took his beginning, his coup d'essai, 
 from that point, viz. Jove, whence the Homeridae take 
 theirs ; alluding to the prelusive h)'mns. Now, what 
 ieen\s most remarkable to us in this passage is, the 
 art with which Pindar identifies the three classes 
 of — 1. HomeridcB — 2. Ajidoi — 3. Rhapsodoi. The 
 "vords ya.iTwv t;i»tov aoi3oi are an ingenious way of ex-
 
 138 HOMElt AND THE HOMEKIDJE. 
 
 pressing that the aoidoi were the same as the rhapso' 
 dot. Now, where Pindar saw no essential difference 
 except as a species differs from a genus, it is nol 
 likely that we of this day shall detect one. At all 
 events, it is certain that no discussion connected with 
 any one of these three classes has thrown any lighi 
 upon the main question as to the integrity of tha 
 Iliad. The aoidoi, and perhaps the rltapsodoi, cer- 
 tainly existed in the days of Homer. The Homerida 
 must have arisen after him : but when, or under whal 
 circumstances, no record remains to say. Only the 
 place of the Homeridcs is known : it was Crete : and 
 this seems to connect them personally with Homer. 
 But all is too obscm-e to penetrate ; and in fact has 
 not been penetrated. 
 
 PART III. 
 
 VERDICT ON THE HOMERIC QUESTION. 
 
 We will now, reader, endeavor to give you the 
 heads of a judgment, or verdict, on this great ques- 
 tion, drawn up with extreme care by ourselves. 
 
 I. — Rightly was it said by Voss, that all arguments 
 worth a straw in this matter must be derived from the 
 internal structure of the Iliad. Let us, therefore, hold 
 an inquest upon the very body of this mxcmorable 
 poem ; and, first of all, let us consider its outside 
 characteristics, its style, language, metrical structure. 
 
 One of the arguments on which the sceptics rely is 
 this — a thousand years, say they, make a severe tria 
 of a man's stj-le. What is very good Greek at one enfi 
 of that period will probably be unintelligible Greek at 
 tiie other. And throughout this period it will have
 
 HOMEE AND THE HOMEEID^. l"d 
 
 been the duty of the rhapsodoi, or public reciters, to 
 court the public interest, to sustain it, to humor it, by 
 adapting their own forms of delivery to the existing 
 state of language. Well, what of that ? Why this — 
 that under so many repeated alterations, the Iliad, as 
 we now have it, must resemble Sir Francis Drake's 
 ship — repaii'ed so often, that not a spar of the originsd 
 vessel remained. 
 
 In answer to this, we demand — why a thousand 
 years ? Doubtless there was that space between 
 Homer and the Christian era.^o But why particularly 
 connect the Greek language with the Christian era ? 
 In this artifice, reader, though it sounds natural to 
 bring forward our Christian era in a question that is 
 partly chronological, already there is bad faith. The 
 Greek language had nothing to do with the Chris- 
 tian era. Mark this, and note well — that already, in 
 the era of Pericles, whose chronological locus is 444 
 years B. C, the Greek language had reached its con- 
 summation. And by that word we mean its state of 
 rigid fixation. Will any man -deny that the Greek of 
 Thucydides, Sophocles, Euripides, who were in the 
 fullest sense, contemporaries with Pericles, that the 
 Greek of Plato or Xenophon, who were at least chil- 
 den of some growth before Pericles died, continued 
 througli all after ages (in the etymological sense of the 
 word) standard Greek ? That is, it was standing 
 Greek ; Greek which stood still, and never after 
 varied ; so that eighteen hundred and ninety years 
 after, at tho final capture of Constantinople by the 
 Ottomans, it remained the true familiar Greek of edu- 
 cated people ; as all educated people talked ; and 
 removed even from the vulgar Greek of the mob only
 
 140 HOMER AND THE HOMERIDJE. 
 
 as the written language of books always differs from 
 the spoken dialect of the uneducated. The time, 
 therefore, for which we have to account, is not a thou- 
 sand years, but a little more than one-half of that space. 
 The range, therefore, the compass of time within which 
 Homer had to struggle with the agencies of change, 
 was about five centuries and a half. 
 
 Now the tendency to change is different in different 
 languages ; both from internal causes, (mechanism, 
 &c.) and from causes external to the language, laid 
 in the varying velocities of social progress. Secondly^ 
 besides this varying liability to change, in one lan- 
 guage as compared with another, there is also a vary- 
 ing rate of change in the same language compared 
 with itself. Change in language is not, as in many 
 natural products, continuous : it is not equable, but 
 eminently by fits and starts. Probably one hundred 
 and fifty years at stagnant periods of history do less 
 to modify a language than forty years amidst great 
 struggles of intellect. And one thing we must insist 
 on, which is, that between Homer and Pisistratus, the 
 changes in Grecian society, likely to affect the lan- 
 guage, were not to be compared, for power, with those 
 acting upon English society ever since the Reforma- 
 tion. 
 
 This being premised, we request attention to tho 
 following case. Precisely on this very summer day 
 so bright and brilliant, of 1841, are the five hundred 
 years completed (less by forty-five years than the in- 
 terspace between Homer and Pisistratus) since Chau- 
 cer was a stout boy, ' alive,' and, probably, ' kicking : ' 
 for he was fined, about 1341, for kicking a Franciscan 
 friai in Fleet-street ; though Ritson er roneously assert«
 
 JIOMEK AND IHE HOilEBID^. 141 
 
 that the story was a 'hum,' invented by Chatter ton. 
 Now, what is the character of Chaucer's diction ? A 
 great delusion exists on that point. Some ninety or 
 one hundi'ed words that are now obsolete, certainly not 
 many more, vein the whole surface of Chaucer ; and 
 thus a J9?'i»iayacie impression is conveyed that Chau- 
 cer is difficult to understand : whereas a very slight 
 practice, familiarizes his language. The Canterbury 
 Tales were not made public until 1380 ; but the com- 
 position was certainly proceeding between 1350 and 
 1380; and before 1360 some considerable parts were 
 published. Here we have a space greater by thii-ty- 
 five years, than that between Homer and Pisistratus. 
 And observe — had Chaucer's Tales the benefit of an 
 oral recitation, were they assisted to the understanding 
 by the pauses in one place, the hm-rying and crowding 
 of important words at another, and by the proper dis- 
 tribution of emphasis everywhere, — (all which, though 
 impracticable in regular singing, is well enough ac- 
 complished in a chant, or Xoyog fifut'Atausiog,) there is no 
 man, however unfamiliar with old English, but might 
 be made to go along with, the movement of his admir- 
 able tales, though he might still remain at a loss for 
 the meaning of insulated words. 
 
 Not Chaucer himself, however, but that model of 
 language which. Chaucer ridicules and parodies, as be- 
 coming obsolete in his days, the rhyme of Sir Thopas, 
 — a model which may be safely held to represent the 
 language of the two centuries previous, — is the point 
 of appeal. Sir Thopas is clearly a parody of the Met- 
 rical Romances. Some of those hitherto published by 
 Ritson, &c., are not older than Chaucer ; but some 
 iscend much higher, and may be referred to 1200, or
 
 1^2 HOMER AND THE HOMEEIDJE. 
 
 periiaps earlier. Date tliem from 1240, and that 
 places a period of six centuries complete between our- 
 selves and them. Notwithstanding which, the greater 
 part of the Metrical Romances, when aided by the 
 connection of events narrated, or when impassioned, 
 remain perfectly intelligible to this hour 
 
 * What for labour, and what for faint. 
 Sir Bevis was well nigh attaint.' 
 
 This is a couplet from Bevis, of Southampton ; and 
 another we will quote from the romance of Sir Ga- 
 waine and Sir Ywaiue. In a vast forest. Sir G., by 
 striking a shield suspended to a tree, had caused a 
 dreadful storm to succeed ; which, subsiding, is fol- 
 lowed by a gloomy apparition of a mailed knight, who 
 claims the forest for his own, taxes Sir Gawaine with 
 having intruded on his domain, and concludes a tissue 
 of complaints with saying that he had 
 
 ♦ With weathers waken'd him of rest. 
 And done him wrong in his forest. ' 
 
 Now these two casual recollections well and fairly 
 lepresent the general current of the language ; not 
 certainly what would now be written, but what is per- 
 fectly luminous from the context. At present, for 
 instance, famt is an adjective ; but the context and the 
 corresponding word labour, easily teach the reader that 
 it here means faintness. So, again, ' weather ' is liot 
 aow used for storms; but it is so used by a writer as 
 late as Lord Bacon, and yet survives in such words as 
 weather-beaten,' ' weather-stained.' 
 
 Now, we say that the interval of time betAvecn these 
 romances and ourselves, is greater than between Ho« 
 mer and the age of Pericles. We say, also, that the
 
 HOMER AXD THE HOJIERID^. 143 
 
 constant succession of metrical writers connecting the 
 time of Homer with that of Pericles, such as the au- 
 thors of the ' Nostoi,' (or Memorahle Returns home- 
 ward from Troy,) of the ' Cypria,' of the many Cycli- 
 cal poems, nest of the Lyric poets, a list closing with 
 Pindar, in immediate succession to whom, and through 
 most of his life strictly a contemporary with Pindar, 
 comes -^schylus, close upon whose heels follow the 
 whole cluster of dramatic poets, who glorified the 
 life of Pericles — this apparently continuous series of 
 verse writers, without the interposition of a single 
 prose writer, would inevitably have the effect of keep- 
 ing alive the poetic forms and choice of words, in a 
 degree not so reasonably to be expected, under any 
 interrupted succession. Our Chaucer died an old man, 
 above seventy, in the year 1400 ; that is, in the con- 
 cluding year of the fourteenth century. The next 
 century, that is, the fifteenth, was occupied in much 
 of its latter half by the civil wars of the two Roses, 
 which threw back the development of the English 
 literature, and tended to disturb the fluent transmission 
 of Chaucer's and Gower's diction. The tumultuous 
 •century which came next, viz. the sixteenth, the former 
 naif of which was filled with the Reformation, caused 
 a prodigious fermentation and expansion of the English 
 intellect. But such convulsions are very nnfavorable to 
 the steady conservation of language, and of everything 
 ?lse depending upon usage. Now, in Grecian history, 
 *here are no corresponding agitations of society ; the 
 currents of tradition seem to flow downwards, without 
 meeting anything to ripple ■:h3ir surface. It is true 
 Uiat the great Persian war did agitate Greece pro- 
 foundly, and, by combining the Greeks from every
 
 144 HOMEE AND THE HOMEEIDJB. 
 
 quarter in large masses, this memorable war must 
 have given a powerful shock to the stagnant ideaa 
 inherited from antiquity. But, as this respects Homer, 
 observe how thoroughly its operation is defeated : for 
 the outrageous conflagration of Sardis occurred about 
 500 B. C. ; and the final events of the war, Salamis, 
 Platoea, &c. occurred in 480 B. C. But already, by Pi- 
 eistratus, whose locus is fifty jears before the affair of 
 Sardis, Homer had been revised and settled, and (as 
 one might express it) stereotyped. Consequently, the 
 chief political revolution afi"ecting Greece collectively, 
 if you except the Dorian migrations, &c., between 
 Homer and Pericles, was intercepted from all possi- 
 bility of affecting the Homeric diction, &c., by the 
 seasonable authentication of the entire Homeric text 
 under the seal and imprimatur of Pisistratus. Here 
 is the old physical guarantee urged by uEsop's lamb 
 versus wolf, that Homer's text could not have been 
 reached by any influence, direct or oblique, from the 
 greatest of the post-Homeric convulsions. It would be 
 the old miracle of the Greek proverb ('^tfiuj Trorauwr, &c.) 
 which adopted the reflux of rivers towai'ds their foun- 
 tains as the liveliest type of the impossible. 
 
 There is also a philosophic reason, why the range 
 of diction in Chaucer should be much wider, and 
 liable to greater changes, than that of Homer. Revise 
 those parts of Chaucer which at this day are most 
 obscure, and it will uniformly be found that they are 
 the subjective sections of his poetry ; those, for instance, 
 in which he is elaborately decomposing a character. 
 A character is a subtle fugacious essence which does, 
 or does not, exist, according to the capacity of the 
 eye which is applied to it. In Homer's age, no such
 
 HOMEE AXD THE HOMERID^. 145 
 
 meditative difierences were perceived. All is ohjectivc 
 in the descriptions, and external. And in those casea 
 where the mind or its affections must be noticed, 
 ah\dys it is by the broad distinctions of anger, fear, 
 love, hatred, without any vestige of a sense for the 
 more delicate interblendings or nuances of such quali- 
 ties. But a language built upon these elementary 
 distinctions is necessarily more durable than another, 
 which, applying itself to the subtler phenomena of 
 auman nature, exactly in that proportion applies itself 
 to what is capable of being variously viewed, oi 
 viewed in various combinations, as society shifts its 
 aspects. 
 
 The result from all this is, that, throughout the 
 four hundred and forty-five years from Homer to 
 Pisistratus, the diction even of real life would not 
 have suffered so much alteration, as in modern times 
 it would be likely to do witlain some single centuries. 
 But with respect to poetry, the result is stronger. 
 
 The diction of poetry is everywhere a privileged 
 diction. The antique or scriptural language is ever; 
 where affected in serious or impassioned poetry. So 
 that no call would arise from modern adaptations, until 
 the language had grown unintelligible. Nor would 
 that avail to raise such a call. The separate non- 
 intelligibility of a word would cause no difficulty, 
 «vhUst it would give the gi'ace of antique coloring. 
 For a word which is separately obscure is not so 
 in nexu. Suppose, reader, we were to ask you the 
 meaning of the English word diode, you might be a 
 little puzzled. Yet it is an honest and once an indus- 
 trious word, though now retired from business ; and 
 it stands in om- authorized translation of the Bible : 
 10
 
 1 46 HOMEE A.XD THE HOMEKIDiE. 
 
 where, if you had chanced to meet it 171 toco, you 
 
 would easily have collected from the context that it 
 was the past tense of chide. Again, what Southern 
 reader of Sir Walter Scott ever failed to gather the 
 full sense of the Scottish dialect -* or what Scotchman 
 to gather the sense of the Irish dialect so plentifully 
 strewed in modern tales ? or what landsman to gather 
 the sense of the marine dialect in our nautical novels ? 
 In all such cases, the passion, the animation and 
 movement of the feeling, very often the logic, as they 
 arise from the context, carry you fluently along with 
 the meaning. 
 
 Equating, therefore, the sleeping state of early 
 Greece mth the stirring progress of modern Christian 
 lands, we come to this conclusion, that Homer, the 
 genuine unaltered Homer, would not, hy all likelihood, 
 be more archaic in his coloring of style than the 
 Froissart of Lord Berners is to ourselves. That is, we 
 equate four hundred and forty-five early Greek years 
 with the last three hundred and twenty English years. 
 But we will concede something more. The common 
 English translation of the long prose romance, called 
 Mort d' Arthur, was composed, we believe, about the 
 year 1480. This will therefore be three hundred and 
 sixty years old. Now, both Lord Berners and the Mort 
 d' Arthur, are as intelligible as this morning's newspaper 
 in June, 1841. And one proof that they are so is, that 
 both works have been reprinted verbatim et literatim 
 in this generation for popular use. Something vene- 
 rable and solemn there is in both these works, as again 
 m the Paston Letters, which are hard upon four hun* 
 died years old, but no shadow of difficulty. 
 
 B. Homer's Lei>is. — Now, reader, having stated
 
 HOMER AND THE HOMEKID^. 147 
 
 by practical examples, wliat effect was to have been 
 anticipated from age, let us next inquire what effect 
 has laken place. Observe the monstrous dishonesty of 
 these German critics. What if a man should argue 
 thus : ' This helmet never can have descended from 
 Mambrino ; for, if it had, there would have been 
 weather-stains, cracks, dints of swords,' &c. To 
 which it is replied : — ' Doubtless ; but have you 
 looked to see if there are not such marks of antiq- 
 uity ? ' Would you not think the disparager of the 
 helmet worthy of the treadmill, if it should turn out 
 that he had never troubled himself to examine it ? 
 These Germans argue a priori, that, upon certain 
 natural causes, there would arise a temptation to the 
 Homeric chanters for adapting the diction to their 
 audience. Conditionally we grant this — that is, if a 
 deep night of darkness fell suddenly upon the lan- 
 guage. But our answer is, that this condition never 
 would be realized ; and that a solemnizing twilight is 
 the very utmost which could ever steal over Homer's 
 diction. Meantime, where is the sense of calculating 
 a priori what would be likeli/ to happen, when by 
 simply opening a book, we can see what has hap- 
 pened ? These Germans talk as if the Homer we 
 have now, spoke exactly such Greek as Euripides and 
 Sophocles. Or, if some slight differences are admit- 
 ted, as though these were really too inconsiderable 
 to meet the known operation of chance and change 
 vhrough four and a half centuries. To hear them, you 
 tnust suppose that Homer differed little more from the 
 golden writers of Greece than as Pope's diction differs 
 from that of 1841. W^ho now says, writ for wrote 
 and for written 7 Who says 'tis and 'twas since
 
 148 HOMER AND THE HOMEBID^. 
 
 ^ueen Anne's reign ? There are not twelve consecu- 
 tive lines in Pope, Swift, Addison, which will not 
 be found marked by such slight peculiarities of their 
 age. Ye*, their general agreement with ourselves is 
 BO striking, that the difficulty is to detect the differ- 
 ences. Now, if Homer were in that condition relating 
 to the age of Pericles — were it even that he exhibited 
 QO more sombre hues than those which ^schylus 
 exhibits, as compared with his younger brothers of the 
 drama, we should grant at once that a case is made 
 out, calling for some explanation. There has been a 
 change. There is something to account for. Some- 
 body has been ' doctoring ' this man, would be the 
 inference. But how stands the truth ? Why, reader, 
 the Homeric lexis is so thoroughly peculiar and indi- 
 vidual, that it requires a separate lexicon ; and if all 
 men do not use a separate lexicon, it is only because that 
 particular vocabulary has been digested into the series 
 of general vocabularies. Pierce Plowman is not half 
 so unlike in diction to Sir Walter Scott as is Homer to 
 Euripides. And, instead of simply accounting for the 
 time elapsed, and fairly answering to the reasonable 
 attrition of that time, the Homeric diction is sufficient 
 to account for three such spaces. What would the 
 infidels have ? Homer, they say, is an old — old — 
 very old man, whose trembling limbs have borne him to 
 your door ; and, therefore — what ? Why, he ought 
 10 look very old indeed. Well, good men, he does look 
 very old indeed. He ought, they say, to be covered 
 with lichens and ivy. Well, he is covered with lichens 
 fcnd ivy. And sure we are, that few people will un- 
 dertake to know how *i man looks, when he is five 
 Qundrod years old, by comparison with himself at foui
 
 HOMEK AXD THE HOMERID^. 149 
 
 aundred. Suffice it here to say, for tlie benefit of the 
 unlearned, that not one of our own earliest writers, 
 hardly Thomas of Ercildoune, has more of peculiar 
 antique words in his vocabulary than Homer. 
 
 C. Homer's Metre. — In this case, the Germans 
 themselves admit the extraordinary character of the 
 Homeric rhythmus. ' How free, how spirited in its 
 motion ! ' they all exclaim ; ' how characteristically his 
 own ! ' Well, now, did the father of sophisms ever 
 hear of such stuff as this, when you connect it with 
 what these Germans say elsewhere ? ' As well might 
 a woman say, that you had broken her china cups, but 
 that you had artfully contrived to preserve the original 
 Chinese designs. How could you preserve the form or 
 surface if you destroy the substance ? And, if these 
 imaginary adapters of Homer modernized his whole 
 diction, how could they preserve his metrical effects ? 
 With the peculiar word or idiom would vanish the 
 peculiar prosody. Even a single word is not easily 
 replaced by another having the same sense, the same 
 number of syllables, and in each syllable the same 
 metrical quantity ; but how immeasui-ably more diffi- 
 cult is this, when the requisition is for a whole sen- 
 tence or clause having the same sense in the same 
 number of syllables and the same prosody ? Why, a 
 man would not doctor three lines in a century under 
 such intolerable conditions. And, at the end of his 
 labor, like Addison's small poet, who worked for years 
 upon the name of ' Mary Bohun,' in order to bind its 
 stubborn letters within the hoop-ring of an anagram, 
 he would probably fail, and go mad into the bargain, 
 [f the metre is characteristically Homeric, as say these 
 nfidels, then is the present text, (so inextricably co-
 
 150 HOMEK AXD THE HOMEBID^. 
 
 adimated with the metre,) upon their own showing, the 
 good old Homeric text — and no mistake. 
 
 But, reader, the Homeric metre is not truly de- 
 scribed by these men. It is certainly kenapeck, to use a 
 good old English word — that is to say, recognizable ; 
 you challenge it for Homer's whenever you meet it. 
 Characteristic it is, but not exactly for the reason they 
 assign. The fact is, though flowing and lively, it 
 betrays the immaturity of the metrical art. Those 
 constraints, fi*om which the Germans praise its free- 
 dom, are the constraints of exquisite art. This is a 
 difficult subject; for, in our own literature, the true 
 science of metrical efiects has not belonged to our later 
 poets, but to the elder. Spenser, Shakspeare, Milton, 
 are the great masters of exquisite versification. And 
 Waller, who was idly reputed to have refined our 
 metre, was a mere trickster, having a single tune 
 moving in his imagination, without compass and with- 
 out variety. Chaucer, also, whom Dryden in this point 
 so thoroughly misunderstood, was undoubtedly a most 
 elaborate master of metre, as will appear when we 
 aave a really good edition of him. But in the Pagan 
 literature this was otherwise. We see in the Roman 
 poets that, precisely as they were antique, they were 
 careless, or at least very inartificial in the management 
 of their metre. Thus Lucilius, Ennius, even Lucre- 
 tius, leave a class of faults in their verse, from which 
 Virgil would have revolted. And the very same class 
 of faults is found in Homer. But though faults as 
 regards severe art, they are in the very spirit of naivete 
 or picturesque naturalness, and wear the stamp of a 
 primiti^'e age — artless and inexperienced. 
 
 This article would require a volume. But we wiL
 
 ho:mer and the homeridjE. 151 
 
 content ourselves with one illustration. Every scholar 
 is aware of the miserable effect produced where there 
 is no cceswa, in that sense of the word ccesura which 
 means the interlocking of the several feet into the 
 several words. Thus, imagine a line like this : — 
 ' Urbem Komam prirao condit Romulus auno.' 
 
 Here, the six feet of the hexameter are separately 
 made out by six several words. Each word is a foot ; 
 and no foot interlocks into another. So that there is 
 no ccesura. Yet even that is not the worst fault of the 
 line. The other and more destructive is — the coinci- 
 dence of the ictus, or emphasis, with the first syllable 
 of every foot. 
 
 Now in Homer we see both faults repeatedly. Thus, 
 to express the thundering pace with which a heavy stone 
 comes trundling back from an eminence, he says : — 
 
 ' Autis epeita pedonde kulindeto laiis anaides.' 
 
 Here there is the shocking fault, to any metrical ear, 
 of making the emphasis fiill regularly on the first syl- 
 lable, which in effect obliterates all the benefit of the 
 cassura. 
 
 Now, Virgil has not one such line in all his works, 
 nor could have endured such a line. In that verse 
 expressing the gallop or the caracoling of a horse, he 
 also has five dactyles — 
 
 ' Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum.' 
 
 But he takes care to distribute the accents properly, on 
 which so much even of the ancient versification de- 
 pended : except in the two last feet, the emphasis of 
 Virgil's line never coincides with the first syllable of 
 the foot. Homer, it will be said, wished to express
 
 152 HOMER AND THE HOMERID^. 
 
 naimetically the rolling, thundering, leaping motion of 
 the stone. True, but so did Virgil wish to express the 
 thundering gallop of the horse, in wliich the beats of 
 the hoofs return with regular intervals. Each sought 
 for a picturesque effect — each adopted a dactylic 
 structure : but to any man who has studied this sub- 
 ject, we need not say, that picturesqueness, like any 
 other effect, must be subordinated to a higher law of 
 beauty. Whence, indeed, it is that the very limits of 
 imitation arise for every art, sculpture, painting, &c., 
 indicating what it ought to imitate, and what it ought 
 not to imitate. And unless regard is had to such higher 
 restraints, metrical effects become as silly and childish 
 as the musical effects in Kotzwarra's Battle of Prague, 
 with its ridiculous attempts to mimic the firing of can- 
 non, groans of the wounded, &;c., instead of involving 
 the passion of a battle in the agitation of the music. 
 
 These rudenesses of art, however, are generally 
 found in its early stages. And we are satisfied that, as 
 art advanced, these defects must have been felt for such ; 
 so that, had any license of improvement existed, they 
 would have been removed. That they were left un- 
 vOuched in the ages of the great lyrical masters, when 
 metre was so scientifically understood, is a strong 
 argument that Homer was sacred from all tampering. 
 Over the whole field of the Homeric versification, both 
 for its quality of faults and its quality of merits, lies 
 diffused this capital truth — that no opening existed 
 for the correction, in any age after the perception of 
 a fault (that is, when the temptation to correct) could 
 tirst have arisen. 
 
 D. The Homeric Formulce. — Here is another conn-' 
 .ersign for the validity of our present Homeric text.
 
 nOMEK AND THE HOMEKIDJE. 153 
 
 In our own metrical romances, or -wlierever a poem 19 
 meant not for readers but for chanters and oral recit- 
 ers, these formulce, to meet the same recurring cases, 
 exist by scores. Thus every woman who happens to 
 be young, is described as ' so bright of ble,' or com- 
 plexion : always a man goes ' the moimtenance of a 
 mile,' before he overtakes or is overtaken. And so on 
 through a vast bead-roll of cases. In the same spirit 
 Homer has his eternal tov d' o(J vnoSQa idwr, or tnca mioo' 
 
 sfTa 7inoa)fjSa, ov Toy d' anauei^oiiivog n(ioae(pr,, &C. 
 
 Now these again, under any refining spirit of criti- 
 cism, at liberty to act freely, are characteristics that 
 would have disappeared. Not that they are faults : 
 on the contrary, to a reader of sensibility, such recur- 
 rences wear an aspect of childlike simplicity, beauti- 
 fully recalling the features of Homer's primitive age. 
 But they would have appeared faults to all common- 
 place critics in literary ages. 
 
 We say, therefore, that first, the Diction of the Iliad, 
 (B ;) secondly, the Metre of the Iliad, (C ;) thirdly, the 
 Formulae and recurring Clauses of the Iliad, (D;) — 
 all present us with so many separate attestations to the 
 purity of the Homeric text from any considerable 
 interference. For every one of these would have 
 given way to the ' Adapters,' had any such people 
 operated upon Homer. 
 
 n. — The first class of arguments, therefore, for the 
 sanity of the existing Homer, is derived from language. 
 Oui* second argument we derive from the ideality 
 OF Achilles. This we owe to a suggestion of Mr. 
 Wordsworth's. Once, when we observed to him, that 
 of in'.agination, in his own sense, we saw no instance
 
 154 HOMi:E AN1> THE HOMEKID^. 
 
 in the Iliad, lie replied — ' Yes : there is the charactei 
 of Achilles ; this is imaginative, in the same sense as 
 Ariosto's Angelica.' Character is not properly the 
 word : nor was it what Mr. Wordsworth meant. It is 
 an idealized conception. The excessive beauty of 
 Angelica, for instance, robs the Paladins of their wits ; 
 draws anchorites into guilt ; tempts the baptized into 
 mortal feud ; summons the unbaptized to war ; brings 
 nations together from the ends of the earth. And so, 
 with different but analogous effects, the very perfection 
 of courage, beauty, strength, speed, skill of eye, of 
 voice, and all personal accomplishments, are embodied 
 in the son of Peleus. He has the same supremacy in 
 modes of courtesy, and doubtless, according to the 
 poet's conception, in virtue. In fact, the astonishing 
 blunder which Horace made in deciphering his Ho- 
 meric portrait, gives the best memorandum for re- 
 calling the real points of his most self-commanding 
 character : — 
 
 • Impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer, 
 Jura negat sibi nata, nihil non arrogat arniis.' 
 
 Was that man iracundus, who, in the very opening 
 of the Iliad, makes his anger bend under the most brutal 
 Insult to the public welfare ? When two people quar- 
 rel, it is too commonly the unfair award of careless 
 bystanders, that ' one is as bad as the other ; ' whilst 
 generally it happens that one of the parties is but 
 the respondent in a quarrel originated by the other. 
 Homer says of the two chiefs, SiaaTijtijv tQiaarrt, they 
 stood aloof in feud ; but what was the nature of the 
 feud ? Agamemnon had inflicted upon Achilles, him- 
 self a king: and the most brilliant chieftain of the
 
 HOMEE AST) THE HOHEEID^. lOO 
 
 confederate aiiny, the very foulest outrage (matter 
 and manner) that can be imagined. Because his own 
 brutality to a priest of Apollo had caused a pestilence, 
 and he finds that he must resign this priest's daughter, 
 he declares that he will indemnify himself by seizing 
 a female captive from the tents of Achilles. Why of 
 Achilles more than of any other man? Color of 
 right, or any relation betv/een his loss and his redress, 
 this brutal Agamemnon does not offer by pretence 
 But he actually executes his threat. Nor does he 
 ever atone for it. Since his returning Briseis, without 
 disavowing his right to have seized her, is wide of the 
 whole point at issue. Now, under what show of com- 
 m.on sense can that man be called iracundus, who 
 calmly submits to such an indignity as this ? Or, is 
 that man inexorahilis, who sacrifices to the tears and 
 gray hairs of Priam, his own meditated revenge, 
 giving back the body of the enemy who had robbed 
 him of his dearest friend ? Or is there any gleam of 
 truth in saying that jura negat sibi nata, when of all 
 the heroes in the Iliad, he is the most punctiliously 
 coiu'teous, the most ceremonious in his religious ob- 
 servances, and the one who most cultivated the arts 
 of peace ? Or is that man the violent defier of all 
 law and religion, who submits with so pathetic a resig- 
 nation to the doom of early death ? 
 
 * Enougli, I know my fate — to die ; to see no more 
 My much-loved parents, or my native ehore.' 
 
 Charles XII. of Sweden threatened to tickle that 
 man who had libelled his hero Alexander. But Alex- 
 ander himself would have tickled master Horace for 
 this gross libel on Achilles, if they had happened to 
 •e contemporaries.
 
 i56 HOMER AND THE B.0M.ER1DJB. 
 
 The character, in short, of the matchless Pelides, 
 Qas ai. ideal finish and a divinity about it, which 
 argue, that it never could have been a fiction or a 
 gradual accumulation from successive touches. It 
 was raised by a single flash of creative imagination , 
 it was a reality seen through the harmonizing abstrac- 
 tions of two centuries ^-^ ; and it is in itself a great 
 unity, which penetrates every section where it comes 
 forward, with an identification of these several parts as 
 the work of one man. 
 
 III. — Another powerful guarantee of the absolute 
 integrity which belongs to the Iliad, lies in the Ionic 
 forms of language, combined everywhere (as Plato 
 remarks) with Ionic forms of life. Homer had seen 
 the modes of Dorian life, as in many cities of Crete, 
 But his heart turned habitually to the Ionian life of 
 his infancy. Here the man who builds on pretences 
 of recasting, &c., will find himself in this dilemma. 
 If, in order to account for the poem still retaining its 
 Ionic dress, which must have been afi'ected by any 
 serious attempts at modernizing it, he should argue 
 that the Ionic dialect, though not used on the conti- 
 nent, continued to be perfectly intelligible ; then, our 
 good Sir, what call for recasting it ? Nobody sup- 
 poses that an antique form of language would be 
 objectionable per se, or that it would be other than 
 solemn and religious in its effect, so long as it con- 
 tinued to be intelligible. On the other hand, if he 
 argues that it must gradually have grown unintelligible 
 or less intelligible, (for tliat the Ionic of Herodotus, 
 .n the age of Pericles, was very difi'erent from the 
 Homeric,) in that case, to whom would it be unintel-
 
 HOMER AND THE HOMEUID^. 157 
 
 ligible ? Why, to the Athenians, for example, or to 
 some people of continental Greece. But on that sup- 
 position, it would have been exchanged for some form 
 of Attic or other continental Greek — to be Ionian by 
 descent, did not imply the use of a dialect formed 
 in Asia Minor. And not only would heterogeneous 
 forms of language have thus crept into the Iliad, but 
 inevitably in making these changes, other heterogenei- 
 ties in the substance would have crept in concurrently. 
 That purity and sincerity of Ionic life, which arrested 
 the eye of Plato, would have melted away under such 
 modern adulterations. 
 
 IV. — But another argument, against the possibility 
 of such recasts, is founded upon a known remarkable 
 fact. It is a fact of history, coming down to us from 
 several quarters, that the people of Athens were 
 exceedingly discontented with the slight notice taken 
 of themselves in the Iliad. Now observe, already 
 this slight notice is in itself one argument of Homer's 
 antiquity ; and the Athenians did wrong to murmur 
 at so many petty towns of the Peloponnesus being 
 glorified, while in their case Homer only gives one 
 line or so to Menestheus their chief. Let them be 
 thankful for getting anything. Homer knew what 
 Athens was in those days much better than any of 
 us ; and surely Glasgow or Liverpool could not com- 
 plain of being left out of the play, in a poem on the 
 Crusades. But there was another case that annoyed 
 the Athenians equally. Theseus, it is well known, 
 was a great scamp ; in fact, a very bad fellow indeed. 
 You need go no further than Ariadne, (who, by most 
 tradition, hanged herself in her garters, at Naxos,) to
 
 158 HOMER AND THE HOMERIDJJ. 
 
 prove that. Now, Homer, who was determined to 
 tell no lies in the matter, roundly blurts out the motive 
 for his base desertion of Ariadne, which had the 
 double guUt of crueltj' and of ingratitude, as in 
 Jason's conduct towards Medea It was, says the 
 honest bard, because he was desperately in love mth 
 ^gle. Tliis line in Homer, was like a coroner's 
 verdict on Ariadne — died hy the villany of Theseus. 
 It was impossible to hide this conduct in their national 
 hero, if it were suffered to stand. An attempt was, 
 therefore, made to eject it. Pisistratus is cliarged, iii 
 this one instance, with having smuggled in a single 
 forged line. But, even in his own lifetime, it was 
 dismally suspected ; and, when Pisistratus saw men 
 looking askance at it, he would say — ' Well, Sir, 
 what's in the wind now ? What are you squinting 
 at ? ' Upon which the man would answer — ' Oh, 
 nothing. Sir, I was only looking at things in general.' 
 But Pisistratus knew better — it was no go — that he 
 saw — and the line is obelized to this day. Now, 
 where Athens failed, is it conceivable that anybody 
 else would succeed? 
 
 V. — A fifth argument, upon which we rely much, 
 is the Circumstantiality of the Iliad. Let the 
 reader pause to consider what that means in this 
 particular case. The invention of little personal cir- 
 cumstances and details, is now a well-known artifice 
 of novelists. We see even in our oldest metrical 
 romances, a tendency to this mode of giving a lively 
 expression to the characters, as well as of giving a 
 colorable reality to the tale. Yet, even with uu, it is 
 an art that has never but once been succet.s'x" r
 
 HOMER A.KD THE HOMEHID^. l59 
 
 ipplied to regular Mstory. De Foe is the only ailhor 
 known, who has so plausibly circumstantiated his false 
 historical records, as to make them pass for genuine, 
 even with literary men and critics. In his Memoirs of 
 a Cavalier, he assumes the character of a soldier who 
 had fought under Gustavus Adolphus, (1628-31,) and 
 afterwards (1642 — 45) in our own parliamentary war ; 
 in fact, he corresponds chronologically to Captain 
 Dalgetty. In other works he personates a sea cap- 
 tain, a hosier, a runaway apprentice, an officer under 
 Lord Peterborough in his Catalonian expedition. In 
 this last character, he imposed upon Dr. Johnson, and 
 by men better read in history he has actually been 
 quoted as a regular historical authority. How did he 
 accomplish so difficult an end? Simply by inventing 
 such little cii'cumstantiations of any character or inci- 
 dent, as seem by their apparent inertness of effect, 
 to verify themselves ; for, where the reader is told 
 that such a person was the posthumous son of a 
 tanner ; that his mother married afterwards a Presby- 
 terian schoolmaster, who gave him a smattering of 
 Latin ; but, the schoolmaster dying of the plague, 
 that he was compelled at sixteen to enlist for bread ; 
 in all this, as there is nothing at all amusing, we 
 conclude, that the author could have no reason to 
 detain us with such particulars, but simply because 
 they were true. To invent, when nothing at all ia 
 gained by inventing, there seems no imaginable temp- 
 tation. It never occurs to us, that this very construc- 
 tion of the case, this very inference from such neutral 
 details, was precisely the object which De Foe had in 
 view, and by which he meant to profit. He thus 
 gains the opportiinity of impressing upon his tales a
 
 160 HOMEB AND THE HOMEEIDJE. 
 
 double character ; he makes them so amusing, that 
 gii'ls read them for novels ; and he gives them such 
 an air of verisimilitude, that men read them for his- 
 tories. 
 
 Now this is one amongst the many acts by which, m 
 comparison of the ancients, we have so prodigiously 
 extended the compass of literature. In Grecian, oi 
 even in Roman literature, no dream ever arose of 
 interweaving a fictitious interest .with a true one. Noi 
 was the possibility then recognized of any interest 
 founded in fiction, even though kept apart from his- 
 toric records. Look at Statins ; look at Virgil ; look 
 at Valerius Flaccus ; or look at the entire Greek 
 drama ; not one incident beyond the mere descriptive 
 circumstances of a battle, or a storm, or. a funeral 
 solemnity, with the ordinary turns of skill or chance 
 in the games which succeed, can be looked upon as 
 matter of invention. All rested upon actual tradition : 
 — in the Mneid, for instance, upon ancient Italian 
 traditions still lingering amongst the people ; in the 
 Thebaid, where the antiquity of the story is too great 
 to allow of this explanation, doubtless they were found 
 in Grecian poems. Four centuries after the Christian 
 era, if the Satyricon of Petrouius Arbiter is excepted, 
 and a few sketches of Lucian, we find the first feeble 
 tentative development of the romance interest. The 
 CyropcEdia was simply one-sided in its information. 
 But, in the Iliad, we meet with many of these little 
 individual circumstances, which can be explained (con- 
 sistently with the remark here made) upon no princi- 
 ple whatever except that of downright, notorious truth. 
 Hom.er could not have wandered so far astray from the 
 universal sympathies of his country, as ever to think
 
 HOMER AND THE HOMEEID^. 161 
 
 of fictions so useless ; and if he had, he would soon 
 nave been recalled to the truth by disagreeable expe- 
 riences ; for the construction would have been — that 
 he was a person very ill-informed, and not trustworthy 
 through ignorance. 
 
 Thus, in speaking of Polydamas, Homer says {Iliad 
 XTiii. 250) that he and Hector were old cronies ; which 
 might strike the reader as odd, since Polydamas was 
 no fighting man at all, but cultivated the arts of peace. 
 Partly, therefore, by way of explaining their connec- 
 tion — partly for the simple reason that doubtless, it 
 was a fact. Homer adds that they were born in the 
 same night ; a circumstance which is known to have 
 had considerable weight upon early friendships in the 
 houses of Oriental princes. 
 
 'ExroQt d' j;tv iTuiQog, it; d' ev rvxri ycrovTO. 
 ' To Hector he was a bosom friend, 
 For in one night they were born.' 
 
 Now, we argue, that had Homer not lived within a 
 reasonable number of generations after Troy, he never 
 would have learned a little fact of this kind. He must 
 have heard it from his nurse, good old creature, who 
 had heard her grandfather talk with emotion of Troy 
 and its glorious palaces, and of the noble line of 
 princes that perished in her final catastrophe. A ray 
 of that great sunset had still lingered in the old man's 
 youth ; and the deep impression of so memorable a 
 tragedj had carried into popular remembrance vast 
 numbers of specialities and circumstantialities, such as 
 might be picked out of the Iliad, that could have no 
 attraction for the mind, out simply under the one con- 
 dition that they were true. An interval as great as 
 11
 
 162 HOMER AND THE HOMEKID^. 
 
 four centuries, Avhen all relation between the hcuse oi 
 Priam and the surrounding population would have been 
 obliterated, must have caused such petty anecdotes to 
 lose their entire interest, and, in that case, they would 
 never have reached Homer. Here, therefore, is a 
 collateral indication that Homer lived probably within 
 two centuries of Troy. On the other hand, if the Iliad 
 had ever become so obsolete in its diction that popular 
 feeling called for a diaskeue, or thorough recast, in 
 that case, we argue that all such trivial circumstances 
 (interesting only to those who knew them for facts) 
 would have dropped out of the composition. 
 
 VI. — That argument is of a nature to yield us an 
 extensive field, if we had space to pursue it. The 
 following, which we offer as our argument, is negative : 
 it lies in the absence of all anachronisms, which would 
 most certainly have arisen in any modern remodelling, 
 and which do in fact disfigure all the Greek forgeries 
 of letters, &c. in Alexandrian ages. How inevitable, 
 amongst a people so thoroughly uncritical as the 
 Greeks, would have been the introduction of anachro- 
 nisms by wholesale, had a more modern hand been 
 allowed to tamper Avith the texture of the poem ! But, 
 on the contrary, all inventions, rights, usages, known 
 to have been of later origin than the Homeric ages, 
 are absent from the Iliad. For instance, in any recast 
 subsequent to the era of 700 B. C, how natural it 
 would have been to introduce the trumpet ! And 
 javalry again, how excellent a resource for varying 
 and inspiriting the battles : whereas Homer introduces 
 horses only as attached to the chariots ; and the 
 chariots as used only by a few leading heroes, whose
 
 HOMER AND THE HOMEBID-j;. 163 
 
 heavy mail made it impossible for them to go on foot, 
 as the mass of the army did. Why, then, did Homer 
 himself forbear to introduce cavalry ? Was he blind to 
 the variety he would have gained for his descriptive 
 scenes ? No ; but simply upon the principle, so 
 absolute for him of adhering to the facts. But what 
 caused the fact ? Why was there no cavalry ? Evi- 
 dently from the enormous difficulty of carrying any 
 number of horses by sea, under the universal non- 
 adaptation to such a purpose of the Greek shipping. 
 The ' horse-marines ' had not begun to show out ; and 
 a proper ' troop-ship ' must have been as little known 
 to Agamemnon, as the right kind of Havana cigars or 
 as duelling pistols to Menelaus. 
 
 VII. — A seventh argument for the integrity of our 
 present Iliad in its main section, lies in the nexus of 
 its subordinate parts. Every canto in this main sec- 
 tion implies every other. Thus the funeral of Hector 
 implies that his body had been ransomed. That fact 
 implies the Avhole journey of Priam to the tents of 
 Achilles. This implies the death and last combat of 
 Hector. But how should Hector and Achilles have 
 met in battle, after the wrathful vow of Achilles ? 
 That argues the death of Patroclus as furnishing the 
 suificieiit motive. But the death of Patroclus argues 
 the death of Sarpedon, the Trojan ally, which it was 
 that roused the vindictive fury of Hector. These 
 events in their turn argue the previous success of the 
 Trojans, which had moved Patroclus to interfere. And 
 this success of the Trojans argues the absence of 
 Achilles, which again argues the feud with Agamem- 
 "^on. The whole of this story unfolds like a process of
 
 164 HOMEB AND THE HOMEEID^. 
 
 vegetation. And the close intertexture of the several 
 parts is as strong a proof of unity in the design and 
 execution, as the intense life and consistency in the 
 conception of Achilles. 
 
 VIII. — By an eighth argument, we reply to the ob- 
 jection sometimes made to the transmission of the 
 Iliad, through the rhapsodoi, from the burden which 
 so long a poem would have imposed upon the memory. 
 Some years ago was published, in this journal,* a paper 
 on the Flight of the Kalmuck Tartars from Russia. 
 Bergmann, the German from whom that account was 
 chiefly drawn, resided for a long time amongst the 
 Kalmucks, and had frequent opportunities of bearing 
 musical recitations from the DschaiigcEriade. This is 
 the great Tartar epic ; and it extends to three hundred 
 and sixty cantos, each averaging the length of an 
 Homeric book. Now, it was an ordinary effort for a 
 minstrel to master a score of these cantos, which 
 amounts pretty nearly to the length of the Iliad. But 
 a case more entirely in point is found in a minor work 
 of Xenophon's. A young man is there introduced as 
 boasting that he could repeat by heart the whole of the 
 Iliad and the Odyssey — a feat, by the way, which has 
 been more than once accomplished by English school- 
 boys."'^ But the answer made to this young man is, that 
 there is nothing at all extraordinary in that ; for thai 
 every common rhapsodos could do as much. To us, 
 indeed, the whole objection seems idle. The human 
 memory is capable of far greater efforts ; and the music 
 would prodigiously lighten the effort. But, as it is on 
 
 * Blackwood's Magazine
 
 HOMES AND THE HOMERID^. 165 
 
 objection often started, we may consider it fortunate 
 that we have such a passage as this in Xenophon, 
 which not only illustrates the kind of qualification 
 looked for in a rhapsodos, but shows also that such a 
 class of people continue to practise in the generation 
 subsequent to that of Pericles. 
 
 Upon these eight arguments we buUd. This is our 
 case. They are amply sufficient for the purpose. 
 Homei is not a person known to us separately and pre- 
 viously, concerning whom we are inquiring whether, 
 in addition to what else we know of him, he did not 
 also write the Iliad. ' Homer ' means nothing else 
 but the man who wrote the Iliad. Somebody, you 
 will say, mus^ have written it. True ; but, if that 
 somebody should appear by any probable argument, 
 to have been a multitude of persons, there goes to 
 wreck the tmity which is essential to the idea of a 
 Homer. Now, this unity is sufficiently secured, if it 
 should appear that a considerable section of the Iliad 
 — and that section by far the most full of motion, of 
 human interest, of tragical catastrophe, and through 
 which runs as the connecting principle, a character 
 the most brilliant, magnanimous, and noble, that Pagan 
 morality could conceive — was, and must have been, 
 the work and conception of a single mind. Achilles 
 revolves through that section of the Iliad in a series of 
 phases, each of which looks forward and backward to 
 all the rest. He travels like the sun through his diurnal 
 course. We see him first of all rising upon us as a 
 princely councillor for the welfare of the Grecian host. 
 We see him atrociously insulted in this office : yet 
 stUl, though a king and unused to opposition, and boil-
 
 166 HOMEE A.ND THE HOMEEID^. 
 
 rag with youthful blood, nevertheless commanding his 
 passion, and retiring in clouded majesty. Even thus, 
 though having now so excellent a plea for leaving the 
 army, and though aware of the early death that awaited 
 him if he stayed, he disdains to profit by the evasion. 
 We see him still living in the tented field, and generous- 
 ly unable to desert those who had so insultingly deserted 
 him. We see him in a dignified retirement, fulfilling 
 all the duties of religion, friendship, hospitality ; and, 
 like an accomplished man of taste, cultivating the arts 
 of peace. We see him so far surrendering his wrath 
 to the earnest persuasion of friendship, that he comes 
 forth at a critical moment for the Greeks to save them 
 from ruin. What are his arms ? He has none at all. 
 Simply by his voice he changes the face of the battle. 
 He shouts, and nations fly from the sound. Never but 
 once again is such a shout recorded by a poet — 
 
 • He called so loud, that all the hollow deep 
 Of hell resounded. 
 
 Who called ? That shout was the shout of an archangel. 
 Next we see him reluctantly allowing his dearest friend 
 to assume his own arms ; the kindness and the modesty 
 of his nature forbidding him to suggest, that not the 
 divine weapons but the immortal arm of the wielder 
 \;iad made them invincible. His friend perishes. Then 
 we see him rise in his noontide wrath, before which no 
 life could stand. The frenzy of his grief makes him 
 for a time cruel and implacable. He sweeps the field of 
 battle like a monsoon. His revenge descends perfect, 
 Budden, like a curse from heaven. We now recognize 
 the goddess-born. This is his avatar. Had he moved 
 ♦-o battle under the ordinary motives of Ajax, Diomed,
 
 HOMER AND THE H0MEEID2E. 167 
 
 tnd the other heroes, we never could have sympathized 
 or gone along with so withering a course. We should 
 have viewed him as a ' scourge of God,' or fiend, born 
 for the tears of women and the maledictions of mothers. 
 But the poet, before he would let him loose upon men, 
 creates for him a sufficient, or at least palliating motive. 
 In the sternest of his acts, we read only the anguish of 
 his grief. This is, surely the perfection of art. At 
 length the work of destruction is finished ; but, if the 
 poet leaves him at this point, there would be a want ot 
 repose, and we should be left with a painful impression 
 of his hero as forgetting the earlier humanities of his 
 nature, and brought forward only for final exhibition 
 in his terrific phases. Now, therefore, by machinery 
 the most natural, we see this great hero travelling back 
 within our gentler sympathies, and revolving to his rest 
 like the sun disrobed of his blazing terrors. We see 
 him settling down to that humane and princely charac- 
 ter in which he had been first exhibited — we see him 
 relenting at the sight of Priam's gray hairs, touched 
 with the sense of human calamity, and once again 
 mastering his passion — grief now, as formerly he had 
 mastered his wrath. He consents that his feud shall 
 sleep : he surrenders the corpse of his capital enemy ; 
 and the last solemn chords of the poem rise with a 
 solemn intonation from the grave of ' Hector, the tamer 
 of horses ' — that noble soldier who had so long been 
 the column of his country, and to whom, in his dying 
 moments, the stern Achilles had declared — but then 
 in the middle career of his grief — that no honorable 
 burial should ever be granted. 
 
 Such is the outline of an Achilleis, as it might be 
 gathered from the Iliad : and for the use of schools
 
 168 HOMER ANP THE HOMERID^. 
 
 we are surprised tliat such a beautiful whole has not 
 long since been extracted. A tale, more affecting by 
 its story and vicissitudes does not exist ; and, after 
 this, who cares in what order the non-essential parts 
 of the poem may be arranged, or whether Homer was 
 their author ? It is sufficient that one mind must have 
 executed this Achilleis, in consequence of its intense 
 unity. Every part implies every other part. With 
 such a model before him as this poem on the wrath of 
 Achilles, Aristotle could not carry his notions of unity 
 too high. And the unifying mind which could conceive 
 and execute th?s Achilleis — that is what we mean by 
 Homer. As well might it be said, that the parabola 
 described by a cannon-ball was in one-half due to a 
 first discharge, and in the other half to a second, as 
 that one poet could lay the preparations for the passion 
 and sweep of such a poem, whUst another conducted 
 it to a close. Creation does not proceed by instal- 
 ments : the steps of its revolution are not successive, 
 but simultaneous ; and the last book of the Achilleis 
 was undoubtedly conceived in the same moment as the 
 tvrst. 
 
 "What efiect such an Achilleis, abstracted from the 
 iliad, would probably leave upon the mind, it happens 
 that we can measure by our own childish experience. 
 In Rusdell's Ancient Europe, a book much used in the 
 ast century, there is an abstract of the Iliad, which 
 presents very nearly the outline of an Achilleis, such 
 as we have supposed. The heroes are made to speak 
 in a sort of stilted, or at least buskined language, not 
 unsuited to youthful taste : and from the close con- 
 rergement of the separate parts, the interest is con- 
 densed. This book, in our eighth year, we read. I*
 
 HOMER AN-D THE HOMEBID-E. 169 
 
 Iras our first introduction to the ' Tale of Troy divine ; ' 
 and we do not deceive ourselves in saying, that tiiis 
 memorable experience drew from us the first unselfish 
 tears that ever we shed ; and by the stings of grief which 
 tt left behind, demonstrated its own natural pathos. 
 
 "Whether the same mind conceived also the Odyssey^ 
 is a separate question. We are certainly inclined to 
 believe, that the Odyssey belongs to a post-Homeric 
 generation — to the generation of the Nostoi, or home- 
 ward voyages of the several Grecian chiefs. And 
 with respect to all the burlesque or satiric poems 
 ascribed to Homer, such as the Batrachomyomachia, 
 the Margites, &c., the whole fiction seems to have 
 arisen out of an uncritical blunder ; they had been 
 classed as Homeric poems — meaning by the word 
 ' Homeric,' simply that they had a relation or reference 
 to Homer, which they certainly have. At least we 
 may say this of the Batrachoinyoniachia, which still 
 survives, that it undoubtedly points to the Iliad as a 
 mock-heroic parody upon its majestic forms and diction. 
 In that sense it is Homeric — i. e. it relates to Homer's 
 poetry ; it presupposes it as the basis of its own fun. 
 But subsequent generations, careless and uncritical, 
 understood the word Homeric to mean — actually com- 
 posed by Homer. How impossible this was, the reader 
 may easily imagine to himself by the parallel case of 
 OUT own parodies on Scripture. What opening for a 
 parody could have arisen in the same age as that 
 Scriptural translation? ' Howbeit,' ' peradventure,' 
 • lifted up his voice and wept,' ' found favor in thy 
 right,' — phrases such as these have, to our modern 
 feelings, a deep coloring of antiquity ; placed, there- 
 'bre, in juxtaposition with modern words or modern
 
 170 HOMER AND THE HOMEKID^. 
 
 ideas, they produce a sense of contrast whick la 
 strongly connected with the ludicrous. But nothing 
 of this result could possibly exist for those who first 
 used, these phrases in translation. The words were 
 such as, in their own age, ranked as classical and 
 proper. These were no more liable to associations 
 of the ludicrous, than the serious style of our own age 
 is at this moment. And on the same principle, in 
 order to suppose the language of the Iliad, as, for 
 example, the solemn formulce. which introduce all the 
 replies and rejoinders, open to the ludicrous, they must, 
 first of all, have had time to assume the sombre hues 
 of antiquity. But even that is not enough : the Iliad 
 must previously have become so popular, that a man 
 might count with certainty upon his own ludicrous 
 travesties, as applying themselves at once to a serious 
 model, radicated in the universal feeling. Otherwise, 
 to express the case mechanically, there is no resistance, 
 and consequently no possibility of a rebound. Hence 
 it is certain that the burlesques of the Iliad could not 
 be Homeric, in the sense which an unlearned public 
 imagined ; and as to the satiric poem of the Margites, 
 it is contrary to all the tendencies of human nature, 
 that a public sensibility to satire should exist, until 
 the simple age of Homer had been supplanted by an 
 age of large cities, and a complex state of social refine- 
 ment. Thus far we abjure, as monstrous moral an- 
 achronisms, the parodies and lampoons attributed to 
 Homer. Secondly, upon the Odyssey, as liable to 
 heavy suspicion, we suspend our judgment, with a 
 weight of jealousy against it. But finally, as regards 
 the Iliad, we hold that its noblest section has a perfect 
 "ind separate unity ; that it was therefore written by
 
 HOMEE AXD THE HOM.EE D^. 171 
 
 one man ; that it was also written a thousand years 
 before our Christian era ; and that it has not been 
 essentially altered. These are the elements which 
 make up our compound meaning, when we assert the 
 existence of Homer, in any sense interesting to modern 
 ages. And for the affirmation of that question in that 
 interesting sense, we believe ourselves to have offered 
 more and weightier arguments than all which the 
 German army of infidels have been able to muster 
 against it.
 
 STYLE. 
 
 Amongst the never-ending arguments for thankful- 
 ness in the privilege of a British birth — arguments 
 more solemn even than numerous, and telling more 
 when weighed than when counted, pondere qudm nu- 
 mero — three aspects there are of our national charac- 
 ter which trouble the uniformity of our feelings. A 
 good son, even in such a case, is not at liberty to 
 describe himself as ' ashamed.' Some gentler word 
 must be found to express the character of his distress. 
 And, whatever grounds of blame may appear against 
 his venerated mother, it is one of his filial duties to 
 suppose — either that the blame applies but partially, 
 or, if it should seem painfully universal, that it is one 
 of those excesses to which energetic natures are liable, 
 through the very strength of their constitutional char- 
 acteristics. Such things do happen. It is certain, for 
 instance, that to the deep sincerity of British nature, 
 and to that shyness or principle of reserve which is 
 inseparable from self-resj)ect, must be traced philo- 
 sophically the churlishness and unsocial bearing, for 
 which, at one time, we were so angrily arraigned bv 
 the smooth south of Europe. That facile obsequious- 
 Dess, which attracts the inconsiderate in Belgians
 
 STYLE. 173 
 
 Frencliinen, and Italians, is too generally a mixed 
 product from impudence and insincerity. Want of 
 principle and want of moral sensibility compose the 
 original fundiis of southern manners : and the natural 
 product, in a specious hollowness of demeanor, has 
 been afterwards propagated by iirdtation through innu- 
 merable people, who may have partaken less deeply, 
 or not at all, in the original moral qualities that have 
 moulded such a manner. 
 
 Great faults, therefore, may grow out of great \irtue8 
 in excess. And this consideration should make us 
 cautious even towards an enemy ; much more when 
 approaching so holy a question as the merits of our 
 maternal land. Else, and supposing that a strange 
 nation had been concerned in our judgment, we should 
 declare ourselves mortified and humiliated by three 
 expressions of the British character, too public to have 
 escaped the notice of Europe. First, we writhe with 
 shame when we hear of semi-delirious lords and la- 
 dies, sometimes theatrically costumed in caftans and 
 turbans, proclaiming to the whole world — as the law 
 ■)f their households — that all nations and languages 
 *re free to enter their gates, with one sole exception 
 directed against their British compatriots ; that is to 
 say, abjuring by sound of trumpet that land through 
 which only they themselves have risen into considera- 
 tion ; spurning those for countrymen — ' without 
 whom,' (as M. Gourville had the boldness to tell 
 Charles II.) ' without whom, by G — Sir, you yourself 
 are nothing.' We all know who they are that have done 
 this thing : we may know, if we inquire, how many con- 
 '.jeited coxcombs are at this moment acting upon that 
 precedent; in which we scruple not to avow, is con-
 
 174 STYLE. 
 
 tiiined a fund of satire, more crying than any wnich 
 Juvenal found in the worst days of Rome. And we 
 may ask calmly — Would not death, judicial death, 
 have visited such an act amongst the ancient repub- 
 lics ? Next, but with that indulgence which belongs 
 to an infirmity rather than an error of the will, we feel 
 ashamed for the obstinate obtuseness of our country, 
 in regard to one and the most effective of the Fine 
 Alts. It will be understood that we speak of music. 
 In painting and in sculpture it is now past disputing 
 that if we are destined to inferiority at all, it is an infe- 
 riority only to the Italians and the ancient Greeks ; an 
 inferiority which, if it were even sure to be permanent, 
 we share with all the other malicious nations around 
 us. On that head we are safe. And in the most ma- 
 jestic of the Fine Arts, in poetry, we have a clear and 
 vast pre-eminence as regards all nations ; no nation 
 but ourselves have equally succeeded in both forms of 
 the higher poetry, epic and tragic. Whilst of medita- 
 tive or philosophic poetry, (Young's, Cowper's, Words' 
 worth's,) — to say nothing of lyric — we may affirm 
 what Quinctilian says justly of Roman satire — ' tola 
 quidem nostra est.'' If, therefore, in every mode of 
 composition through which the impassioned mind 
 speaks, a nation has excelled its rivals, we cannot 
 be allowed to suppose any general defect of sensi- 
 bility as a cause of obtuseness with regard to music 
 So little, however, is the grandeur of this divine art 
 suspected amongst us generally, that a man will write 
 an essay deliberately for the purpose of putting on 
 record his own preference of a song, to the most 
 elaborate music of Mozart : he will glory in his shame, 
 ind though speaking in the character of one confess-
 
 STYLE. 175 
 
 lag to a weakness, will evidently view Mmself in the 
 light of a candid man, laying bare a state of feeling 
 which is natural and sound, opposed to a class of false 
 pretenders who, whilst servile to rules of artists, in 
 reality contradict their own musical instincts, and feel 
 little or nothing of what they profess. Strange that 
 even the analogy of other arts should not open his 
 eyes to the delusion he is encouraging ! A song, an 
 air, a tune — that is, a short succession of notes revolv- 
 ing rapidly upon itself, how could that, by possibility, 
 offer a field of compass sufficient for the development 
 of great musical effects ? The preparation pregnant 
 with the future, the remote correspondence, the ques- 
 tions, as it were, which to a deep musical sense, are 
 asked in one passage, and answered in another ; the 
 iteration and ingemination of a given effect, moving 
 through subtle variations that sometimes disguise the 
 theme, sometimes fitfully reveal it, sometimes throw it 
 out tumultuously to the daylight, — these and ten thou- 
 sand forms of self-conflicting musical passion — what 
 room could they find, what opening, for utterance in 
 60 limited a field as an air or song ? A hunting-box, 
 a park-lodge, may have a forest grace and the beauty 
 of appropriateness ; but what if a man should match 
 such a bauble against the Pantheon, or against the 
 minsters of York and Strasburg ? A repartee may by 
 accident be practically efiective ; it has been known to 
 crush a party scheme, and an oration of Cicero's, or 
 cf Burke's, could have done no more ; but what judg- 
 ment would match the two against each other as de- 
 velopments of power ? Let him who finds the moon- 
 mum of nis musical gratification in a song, be assured, 
 by that one fact, that his sensibility is rude and undo
 
 176 STYLE. 
 
 veloped. Yet exactly upon this level is the ordinary 
 state of musical feeling throughout Great Britain ; and 
 the howling wilderness of the psalmody in most parish 
 churches of the land, countersigns the statement. There 
 is, however, accumulated in London more musical sci- 
 ence than in any capital of the world. This, gradually 
 diffused, will improve the feeling of the country. And, 
 if it should fail to do so, in the worst case we have the 
 satisfaction of knowing, through Jean Jacques Rous- 
 seau, and by later evidences, that, sink as we may 
 below Italy and Germany in the sensibility to this 
 divine art, we cannot go lower than France. Here, 
 however, and in this cherished obtuseness as to a 
 pleasure so important for human life, and at the head 
 of the physico-intellectual pleasures, we find a second 
 reason for quarrelling with the civilization of our coun- 
 try. At the summit of civilization in other points, she 
 is here yet uncultivated and savage. 
 
 A third point is larger. Here (properly speaking) 
 oui quarrel is co-extensive with that general principle 
 in England, which tends in all things to set the matter 
 above the manner, the substance above the external 
 show ; a principle noble in itself, but inevitably Avrong 
 wherever the manner blends inseparably with the sub- 
 stance. 
 
 This general tendency operates in many ways : but 
 our own immediate purpose is concerned with it only 
 so far as it operates upon style. In no country upon 
 earth, where it is possible to carry such a maxim into 
 practical effect, is it a more determinate tendency of 
 the national mind to value the matter of a book, not 
 snly as paramount to the mmmer^ but even as distinct 
 from it, and as capable of a separate insulation. What
 
 STYLE. 177 
 
 first gave a shock to such a tendency, must have been 
 the unwilling and mysterious sense — that, in some 
 cases, the matter and the manner were so inextricably 
 interwoven, as not to admit of this coarse bisection. The 
 one was embedded, entangled, and interfused through 
 the other, in a way which bade defiance to such gross 
 mechanical separations. But the tendency to view the 
 two elements as in a separate relation still predomi- 
 nates ; and, as a consequence, the tendency to under- 
 value the accomplishment of style. Do we mean that 
 the English, as a literary nation, are practically less 
 sensible of the effects of a beautiful style ? Not at 
 all. Nobody can be insensible to these effects. And, 
 upon a known fact of history, viz. the exclusive culti- 
 vation of popular oratory in England, throughout the 
 17th and 18th centuries, we might presume a peciJiar 
 and exalted sense of style amongst ourselves. Until 
 the French Revolution, no nation of Christendom ex- 
 cept England had any practical experience of popular 
 rhetoric ; any deliberative eloquence, for instance ; 
 any forensic eloquence that was made public ; any 
 democratic eloquence of the hustings ; or any form 
 whatever of public rhetoric beyond that of the pulpit. 
 Through two centuries at least, no nation could have 
 been so constantly reminded of the powers for good 
 and evil which belong to style. Often it must have 
 happened, to the mortification or joy of multitudes, 
 that one man out of nindy nothings has contructed 
 an overwhelming appeal to the passions of his hearers, 
 whilst another has thrown away the weightiest cause 
 by his manner of treating it. Neither let it be said, 
 »hat this might not arise from differences of style, but 
 fecaiise the triumphant demagogue made use of fic- 
 12
 
 178 STYLE. 
 
 tions, and, therefore, that his triumph was still obtained 
 by means of his matter, however hollow that matter 
 might have proved upon investigation. That case, 
 also, is a possible case ; but often enough two oratora 
 have relied upon the same identical matter — the facts, 
 for instance, of the slave-trade — and one has turned 
 this to such good account by his arrangements, by his 
 modes of vivifying dry statements, by his arts of illus- 
 tration, by his science of connecting things with human 
 feeling, that he has left his hearers in convulsions of 
 passion ; whilst the other shall have used every tittle 
 of the same matter without eliciting one scintillation of 
 sympathy, without leaving behind one distinct impres- 
 sion in the memory, or planting one murmur in the 
 heart. 
 
 In proportion, therefore, as the English people have 
 been placed for two centuries and a quarter, (i. e. 
 since the latter decennium of James the First's reign,) 
 under a constant experience of popular eloquence 
 thrown into all channels of social life, they must have 
 had peculiar occasion to feel the effects of style. But 
 to feel is not to feel consciously. Many a man is 
 charmed by one cause who ascribes the effect to an- 
 other. Many a man is fascinated by the artifices of 
 composition, who fancies that it is the subject which 
 has operated so potently. And even for the subtlest 
 of philosophers who keeps in mind the interpenetration 
 of the style and the matter, it would be as difficult to 
 distribute the true proportion of their joint action, as, 
 with regard to the earliest rays of the dawn, it would 
 be to say how much of the beauty lay in the heavenly 
 light which chased away the darkness — how much ?b 
 iie rosy color which that light entangled.
 
 STYLE. 179 
 
 Easily, therefore, it may have happened, that, under 
 the constant action and practical effects of style, a 
 nation may have failed to notice the cause as the 
 cause. And, besides the distiu'biug forces which mis- 
 lead the judgment of the auditor in such a case, there 
 are other disturbing forces which modify the practice 
 of the speaker. That is good rhetoric for the hustings 
 which is bad for a book. Even for the highest forms 
 of popular eloquence, the laws of style vary much 
 from the general standard.] In the senate, and for the 
 same reason in a newspaper, it is a vii-tue to reiterate 
 your meaning : tautology becomes a merit : variation 
 of the words, with a substantial identity of the sense 
 and dilution of the truth, is oftentimes a necessity. A 
 man who should content himself with a single con- 
 densed enunciation of a perplexed doctrine, would be 
 a madman and a felo-de-se, as respected his reliance 
 upon that doctrine. Like boys who are throwing the 
 sun's rays into the eyes of a mob by means of a 
 mirror, you must shift yoiur lights and vibrate your re- 
 flexions at every possible angle, if you would agitate 
 the popular mind extensively. Every mode of intel- 
 lectual communication has its sepai-ate strength and 
 separate weakness ; its peculiar embarrassments, com- 
 pensated by peculiar resources. It is the advantage of 
 a book, that you can return to the past page if anything 
 in the present depends upon it. But, return being im- 
 possible in the case of a spoken harangue, where each 
 sentence perishes as it is born, both the speaker and 
 the hearer become aware of a mutual interest in a 
 much -looser style, and a perpetual dispensation from 
 the severities of abstract discussion. It is for the ben- 
 efit of both, that the weightier propositions should be
 
 180 STYLE. 
 
 detained before the eye a good deal longer than the 
 chastity of taste or the austerity of logic would toler- 
 ate in a book. JTime must be given for the intellect to 
 eddy about a truth, and to appropriate its bearings. 
 There is a sort of previous lubrication, such as the 
 boa-constrictor applies to any subject of digestion, 
 which is requisite to familiarize the mind with a start- 
 ling or a complex novelty. And this is obtained for 
 the intellect by varying the modes of presenting it, — 
 now putting it directly before the eye, now obliquely, 
 now in an abstract shape, now in the concrete ; all 
 which being the proper technical discipline for dealing 
 with such cases, ought no longer to be viewed as a 
 licentious mode of style, but as the just style in respect 
 of those licentious circumstancesJ And the true art 
 for such popular display is — To contrive the best 
 forms for appearing to say something new, when in 
 reality you are but echoing yourself; to break up 
 massy chords into running variations ; and to mask, 
 by slight differences in the manner, a virtual identity 
 in the substance. 
 
 We have been illustrating a twofold neutralizing 
 effect applied to the advantages, otherwise enjoyed by 
 the English people, for appreciating the forms of style. 
 What was it that made the populace of Athens and of 
 Rome so sensible to the force of rhetoric and to the 
 magic of language ? It was the habit of hearing these 
 two great engines daily worked for purposes interest- 
 ing to themselves as citizens, and sufficiently intelligi- 
 ble to command their willing attention. The English 
 amongst modern nations have had the same advan- 
 tages, allowance being made for the much less intense 
 concentration of the audience. In the ancient repub-
 
 STTLE. 181 
 
 lies it was always the same city ; and, tl eiefore, the 
 Bame audience, except in so far as it was spread 
 through many generations. This has been otherwise 
 in England ; and yet, by newspaper reports, any great 
 effect in one assize town, or electoral town, has been 
 propagated to the rest of the empire, through the 
 eighteenth and the present century. But all this, and 
 the continual exemplification of style as a great agency 
 for democratic effect, have not availed to win a suffi- 
 cient practical respect, in England, for the arts of 
 composition as essential to authorship. And the reason 
 is, because, in the first place, from the intertexture of 
 style and matter, from the impossibility that the one 
 should affect them otherwise than in connection with 
 the other, it has been natui-al for an audience to charge 
 on the superior agent what often belonged to the lower. 
 This, in the first place ; and, secondly, because the 
 modes of style appropriate to popular eloquence being 
 essentially different from those of written composition, 
 any possible experience on the hustings, or in the 
 senate, would pro tanto tend rather to disqualify the 
 mind for appreciating the more chaste and more 
 elaborate qualities of style fitted for books ; and thus 
 a real advantage of the English in one direction has 
 been neutralized by two causes in another. 
 
 Generally and ultimately, it is certain, that our 
 British disregard or inadequate appreciation of style, 
 though a very lamentable fault, has had its origin in 
 the manliness of the Bridsh character ; in the sincerity 
 and directness of the British taste ; in the principle of 
 ' esse quam videri,' which might be taken as the key 
 to much in our manner, much in the philosophy of 
 our lives ; and finally in that same love for the practi-
 
 182 STYLE. 
 
 cal and the tangible whicli has so memorably governed 
 the course of our higher speculations from Bacon to 
 Newton. But, whatever may have been the origin of 
 this most faulty habit, whatever mixed causes no\l 
 support it, beyond all question it is, that such a habit 
 of disregard or of slight regard applied to all the arts 
 of composition does exist in the most painful extent, 
 and is detected by a practised eye in every page of 
 almost every book that is published. 
 
 If you could look anywhere with a right to expect 
 continual illustrations of what is good in the manifold 
 qualities of style, it should reasonably be amongst our 
 professional authors ; but, as a body, they are dis- 
 tingmshed by the most absolute carelessness in thia 
 respect. Whether in the choice of words and idioms, 
 or in the construction of their sentences, it is not 
 possible to conceive the principle of lazy indifFerence 
 cai-ried to a more revolting extremity. Proof lies 
 before you, spread out upon every page, that no 
 excess of awkwardness, or of inelegance, or of un- 
 rythmical cadence, is so rated in the tariff of faults as 
 to balance, in the writer's estimate, the trouble of 
 remoulding a clause, of interpolating a phrase, or even 
 of striking the pen through a superfluous word. In 
 our own experience it has happened, that we have 
 known an author so laudably fastidious in this subtle 
 art, as to have recast one chapter of a series no less 
 than seventeen times ; so difficult was the ideal or 
 model of excellence which he kept before his mind ; 
 Bo indefatigable was his labor for mounting to the 
 level of that ideal. Whereas, on the other hand, with 
 regard to a large majority of the writers now carrying 
 forward the literature of the country from the last
 
 STYLE. 183 
 
 generation to the next, the evidence is perpetual — not 
 BO much that they rest satisfied with their own random 
 preconceptions of each clause or sentence, as that they 
 never trouble themselves to form any such precon- 
 ceptions. Whatever words tumble out under the 
 blindest accidents of the moment, those are the words 
 retained ; whatever sweep is impressed by chance 
 upon the motion of a period, that is the arrangement 
 ratified. To fancy that men thus determinately care- 
 less as to the grosser elements of style would pause 
 to survey distant proportions, or to adjust any more 
 delicate symmetries of good composition, would be 
 visionary. As to the links of connection, the transi- 
 tions, and the, many other functions of logic in good 
 writing, things are come to such a pass, that what was 
 held true of Rome in two separate ages, by two great 
 rhetoricians, and of Constantinople in an age long 
 posterior, may now be affirmed of England : the idiom 
 of our language, the mother tongue, survives only 
 amongst our women and children ; not, Heaven knows, 
 amongst our women who write books — they are often 
 painfully conspicuous for all that disfigures authorship ; 
 but amongst well-educated women not professionally 
 given to literature. Cicero and Quinctilian, each for 
 his own generation, ascribed something of the same 
 pre-eminence to the noble matrons of Rome ; and 
 more than one writer of the lower empire has recorded 
 of Byzantium, that in the nurseries of that city was 
 found the last home for the purity of the ancient 
 Greek. Xo doubt it might have been found also 
 amongst the innumerable mob of that haughty metro- 
 polis, but stained with corruptions and vulgar abbre- 
 viations. Or wherever it might lurk, assuredly it was
 
 184 STYLE. 
 
 not amongst the noble, the officials, or the courtiers ; 
 else it was impossible that such a master of affectation 
 as Nicetas Choniates, for instance, should have found 
 toleration. But the rationale of this matter lies in a 
 small compass : why are the local names, whenever 
 they have resulted from the general good sense of a 
 country, faithful to the local truth, grave, and un- 
 affected ? Simply because they are not inventions of 
 any active faculty, but mere passive depositions from 
 a real impression upon the mind. On the other hand, 
 wherever there is an ambitious principle set in motion 
 for name-inventing, there it is sure to terminate in 
 something monstrous and fanciful. Women offend in 
 such cases even more than men ; because more of 
 sentiment or romance will mingle •with the names they 
 impose. Sailors again err in an opposite spirit ; there 
 is no affectation in their names, but there is too painful 
 an effort after ludicrous allusions to the gravities of 
 their native land — ' Big Wig Island,' or ' the Bishop 
 and his Clerks : ' or the name becomes a memento of 
 eal incidents, but too casual and personal to merit this 
 lasting record of a name, such as Point Farewell, or 
 Cajie Turn-again. This fault applies to many of the 
 Yankee^ names, and to many more in the southern 
 and western states of North America, where the earliest 
 population has usually been of a less religious charac- 
 ter : and, most of all, it applies to the names of thft 
 back settlements. These people live under influences 
 the most opposite to those of false refinement ; coarse 
 necessities, elementary features of peril or embarrass- 
 ment, primary aspects of savage nature, compose the 
 scenery of their thoughts ; and these are reflected by 
 their names. Dismal Swamp expresses a condition
 
 STYLE. 185 
 
 of unreclaimed nature, which must disappear with 
 growing civilization. Big Bone Lick tells a tale of 
 cruelty that cannot often he repeated. Buffaloes, like 
 all cattle, derive medicinal benefit from salt ; they 
 come in droves for a thousand miles to lick the masses 
 of rock salt. The new settlers observing this, lie in 
 ambush to surprise them : twenty-five thousand noble 
 animals, in one instance, were massacred for their 
 hides. In the following year the usual crowds ad- 
 vanced ; but the first who snufied the tainted air 
 wheeled round, bellowed, and ' recoiled ' far into his 
 native woods. Meantime the large bones remain to 
 attest the extent of the merciless massacre. Here, as 
 in all cases, there is a truth expressed ; but again too 
 casual and special. Besides that, from contempt of 
 elegance, or from defect of art, the names resemble 
 the seafaring nomenclature in being too rudely com- 
 pounded. 
 
 As mth the imposition of names, so vnih. the use of 
 the existing language, most classes stand between the 
 pressure of two extremes — of coarseness, of careless- 
 ness, of imperfect art, on the one hand, of spurious 
 refinement and fantastic ambition upon the other. 
 Authors have always been a dangerous class for any 
 language. Amongst the myriads who are prompted 
 to authorship by the coarse love of reputation, or by 
 the nobler craving for sympathy, there will always 
 be thousands seeking distinctions through novelties 
 of diction. Hopeless of any audience through mere 
 weight of matter, they will turn for their last resource 
 to such tricks of innovation as they can bring to bear 
 upon language. What care they for purity or sim- 
 ^liicity of diction, if at any cost of either they can win
 
 Igg STYLE. 
 
 h special attention to tliemselves ? Now, the great 
 body of women are under no such unhappy bias. If 
 they happen to move in polished circles, or have 
 received a tolerable education, they will speak their 
 native language of necessity with truth and simplicity. 
 And supposing them not to be professional writers, 
 (as so small a proportion can be, even in France or 
 England,) there is always something in the situation 
 of women which secures a fidelity to the idiom. From 
 the greater excitability of females, and the superior 
 vivacity of their feelings, they will be liable to far 
 more irritations from wounded sensibilities. It is for 
 such occasions chiefly that they seek to be effective in 
 their language. Now, there is not in the world so 
 certain a guarantee for pure idiomatic diction, without 
 tricks or affectation, as a case of genuine excitement. 
 Real situations are always pledges of a real natural 
 language. It is in counterfeit passion, in the mimical 
 situations of novels, or in poems that are efforts of 
 ingenuity, and no ebullitions of absolute unsimulated 
 feeling, that female writers endeavor to sustain their 
 own jaded sensibility, or to reinforce the languishing 
 interest of their readers by extravagances of language. 
 No woman in this world, under a movement of resent- 
 ment from a false accusation, or from jealousy, or from 
 confidence betrayed, ever was at leisure to practise 
 vagaries of caprice in the management of her mother 
 tongue ; strength of real feeling shuts out all tempta- 
 tion to the affectation of false feeling. 
 
 Hence the purity of the female Byzantine Greek. 
 Such caprices as they had took some other course 
 and found some other vent than through their mother 
 tongue. Hence, also, the purity of female English
 
 STTLE. 187 
 
 Would you desire at this day to read our noble lan- 
 guage in its native beauty, picturesque from idiomatic 
 propriety, racy in its phraseology, delicate yet sinewy 
 in its composition — steal the mail-bags, and break 
 open all the letters in female handwriting. Three out 
 of four will have been written by that class of women 
 who have the most leisure and the most interest in a 
 correspondence by the post — that class who combine 
 more of intelligence, cultivation, and of thoughtfulness, 
 than any other in Europe — the class of unmarried 
 women above twenty-five — an increasing class ; ^ 
 women who, from mere dignity of character, have 
 renounced all prospects of conjugal and parental life, 
 rather than descend into habits unsuitable to their 
 birth. Women capable of such sacrifices, and marked 
 by such strength of mind, may be expected to think 
 with deep feeling, and to express themselves (unless 
 where they have been too much biased by bookish 
 connections) with natural grace. Not impossibly 
 these same women, if required to come forwai'd in 
 some public character, might write ill and affectedly. 
 They would then have their free natural movement of 
 thought distorted into some accommodation to artificial 
 standards, amongst which they might happen to select 
 a bad one for imitation. But in their letters they write 
 under the benefit of their natural advantages ; not 
 warped, on the one hand, into that constraint or 
 awkwardness which is the inevitable effect of con- 
 scious exposure to public gaze ; yet, on the other, not 
 left to vacancy or the chills of apathy, but sustained 
 by some deep sympathy between themselves and their 
 correspondents. 
 
 So far as concerns idiomatic English, we are satis-
 
 188 STYLE. 
 
 fied from the many beautiful female letters wliich we 
 have heard upon chance occasions from every quarter 
 of the empire, that they, the educated women of 
 Great Britain — above all, the interesting class of 
 women unmarried upon scruples of sexual honor — 
 and also (as in Constantinople of old) the nurseries 
 of Great Britain, are the true and best depositaries of 
 the old mother idiom. But we must not forget, that 
 though this is another term for what is good in Eng- 
 lish, when we are talking of a human and a popular 
 interest, there is a separate use of the language, as in 
 the higher forms of history or philosophy, which ought 
 not to be idiomatic. As respects that which is, it is 
 remarkable that the same orders cling to the ancient 
 purity of diction amongst ourselves who did so in 
 pagan Rome — viz. women, for the reasons just no- 
 ticed, and people of rank. So much has this been 
 the tendency in England, that we know a person of 
 great powers, but who has in all things a one-sided 
 taste, and is so much a lover of idiomatic English as 
 to endure none else, who professes to read no writer 
 since Lord Chesterfield. It is certain that this accom- 
 plished nobleman, who has been most unjustly treated 
 from his unfortunate collision with a national favorite, 
 and in part also from the laxity of his moral princi- 
 ples, where, however, he spoke worse than he thought, 
 wrote with the ease and careless grace of a high-bred 
 gentleman. But his style is not peculiar : it has 
 always been the style of his order. After making the 
 Droper allowance for the continual new infusions into 
 our peerage from the bookish class of lawyers, and 
 for some modifications derived from the learned class 
 of spiritual peers, the tone of Lord Chestorfield has
 
 STYLE. 
 
 189 
 
 llways been the tone of our old aristocracy ; a tone 
 of elegance and propriety, above all things free from 
 the stiffness of pedantry or academic rigor, and obey- 
 ing Csesar's rule of shunning tanqumn scopulum any 
 insolens verbum. It is, indeed, through this channel 
 that the solicitudes of our British nobility have always 
 flowed : other qualities might come and go according 
 to the temperament of the individual ; but what in all 
 gen ^rations constituted an object of horror for that 
 class, was bookish precision and professional pecu- 
 liarity. From the free popular form of our great pub- 
 lic schools, to which nine out of ten amongst our old 
 nobility resorted, it happened unavoidably that they 
 were not equally clear of popular vulgarities ; indeed, 
 from another cause, that could not have been avoided 
 — for it is remarkable that a connection, as close as 
 through an umbilical cord, has always been main- 
 tained between the very highest orders of oux aris- 
 tocracy and the lowest of our democracy, by means 
 of nurses. The nurses and immediate personal at- 
 tendants of all classes come from the same sources, 
 most commonly from the peasantry of the land ; they 
 import into all families alike, into the highest and the 
 lowest, the coarsest expressions from the vernacular 
 language of anger and contempt. Whence, for exam- 
 ple, it was, that about five or six years ago, when a 
 new novel circulated in London, with a private under- 
 standing that it was a juvenile efi"ort from two very 
 youEg ladies of the very highest rank, nobody who 
 reflected at all could feel much surprise that one of 
 rhe characters should express her self-esteem by the 
 popular phrase that she did not ' think small beer of 
 herself.' Equally in its faults and its merits, the
 
 190 STYLE. 
 
 language of high life has always tended to simplicity 
 and the vernacular ideal, recoiling from every mode 
 of bookishness. And in this, as in so many other 
 instances, it is singular to note the close resemblance 
 between polished England and polished Rome. Au- 
 gustus Caesar was so little able to enter into any 
 artificial forms of tortuous obscurities of ambitious 
 rhetoric, that he could not so much as understand 
 them. Even the old antique forms of language, 
 where it happened that they had become obsolete, 
 were to him disgusting. And probably the main bond 
 of connection between himself and Horace was their 
 common and excessive hatred of obscurity ; from 
 which quality, indeed, the very intellectual defects of 
 both, equally with their good taste, alienated them to 
 intensity. 
 
 The pure racy idiom of colloquial or household 
 English, we have insisted, must be looked for in the 
 circles of well-educated women not too closely con- 
 nected with books. It is certain that books, in any 
 language, will tend to encourage a diction too remote 
 from the style of spoken idiom ; whilst the greater 
 solemnity, and the more ceremonial costume of regu- 
 lar literature must often demand such a non-idiomatic 
 diction, upon mere principles of good taste. But why 
 :s it that in our day literature has taken so determinate 
 a swing towards this professional language of books, 
 as to justify some fears that the other extreme of the 
 free colloquial idiom will perish as a living dialect ? 
 The apparent cause lies in a phenomenon of modern 
 life, which, on other accounts also, is entitled to 
 anxious consideration. It is in newspapers that we 
 must look for the main reading of this generation
 
 STYLE. 191 
 
 and in newspapers, therefore, we must seek for the 
 causes operating upon the style of the age. Seventy 
 years ago this tendency in political journals to usurp 
 upon the practice of books, and to mould the style of 
 writers, was noticed by a most ar iite observer, himself 
 one of the most brilliant writers in the class of satiric 
 sketches and personal historians that any nation has 
 produced. Already, before 1770, the late Lord 
 Oxford was in the habit of saying to any man who 
 consulted him on the cultivation of style — ' Style is 
 it that you want ? Oh, go and look into the news- 
 papers for a style.' This was said half contemptu- 
 ously and half seriously. But the e\-il has now 
 become overwhelming. One single number of a 
 London morning paper, which in half a century has 
 expanded from the size of a dinner napkin to that of 
 a breakfast tablecloth, from that to a carpet, and will 
 soon be forced, by the expansions of public business, 
 into something resembling the mainsail of a frigate, 
 already is equal in printed matter to a very large 
 octavo volume. Every old woman in the nation now 
 reads daily a vast miscellany in one volume royal 
 octavo. The evil of this, as regards the quality of 
 knowledge communicated, admits of no remedy. 
 Public business, in its whole unwieldy compass, must 
 always form the subject of these daily chronicles. 
 Nor is there much room to expect any change in the 
 style. The e-vdl effect of this upon the style of the 
 age may be reduced to two forms. Formerly the 
 natural impulse of every i»an was, spontaneously to 
 use the language of life ; the language of books was 
 $, secondary attainment not made without effort. Now, 
 on Ihe contrary, the daily composers of newspapers
 
 192 STYLE. 
 
 have so long dealt in tlie professional idiom of books, 
 as to have brought it home to every reader in the 
 nation who does not violently resist it by some domes- 
 tic advantages. Time was, within our own remem- 
 brance, that if you sbould have heard, in passing 
 along the street, from any old apple-woman such a 
 phrase as ' I will avail myself of your kindness,' 
 forthwith you would have shied like a, skittish horse 
 — you would have run away in as much terror as 
 any old Roman upon those occasions when Bos loque- 
 hatur. At present you swallow such marvels as 
 matters of course. The whole artificial dialect of 
 books has come into play as the dialect of ordinary 
 life. This is one form of the evil impressed iipon 
 our style by journalism ; a dire monotony of bookish 
 idiom has encrusted and stifiened all native freedom 
 of expression, like some scaly leprosy or elephantiasis, 
 barking and hide-binding the fine natural pulses of 
 the elastic flesh. Another and almost a worse evil 
 has established itself in the prevailing structure of 
 sentences. fEvery man who has had any experience 
 in writing, knows how natural it is for hurry and 
 fulness of matter to discharge itself by vast sentences. 
 Involving clause within clause ad infinitum — hoAv 
 difficult it is, and how much a work of time, to break 
 up this huge fasciculus of cycle and epicycle into a 
 graceful succession of sentences, long intermingled 
 with short, each modifying the other, and arising 
 musically by links of spontaneous connection. Now 
 the plethoric form of period, this monster model of 
 sentence, bloated with decomplex intercalations, and 
 exactly repeating the foi-m of syntax which distin- 
 guishes an act of Parliament, is the prevailino; mode.
 
 5. 193 
 
 n newspaper eloquence.! Crude undigested masses 
 of suggestion, furnislun| rather raw materials for 
 composition and jotting* for the memory, than any 
 formal developments of the ideas, describe the quality 
 of writing which must prevail in journalism : not from 
 defect of talents, which are at this day of that supe- 
 rior class which may be presumed from the superior 
 importance of the function itself ; but from the neces- 
 sities of hurry and of instant compliance with an 
 instant emergency, granting no possibility for revision, 
 or opening for amended thought, which are evils 
 attached to the flying velocities of public business. 
 
 As to structure of sentence, and the periodic 
 involution, that scarcely admits of being exemplified 
 in the conversation of those who do not write. But 
 the choice of phraseology is naturally and easily 
 echoed in the colloquial forms of those who surrender 
 themselves to such an influence. To mark in what 
 degree this contagion of bookishness has spread, and 
 how deeply it has moulded the habits of expression in 
 classes naturally the least likely to have been reached 
 by a revolution so artificial in its character, we will 
 report a single record from the memorials of our own 
 experience. Some eight years ago, we had occasion 
 to look for lodgings in a newly-built suburb of London. 
 The mistress of the house, (with respect to whom we 
 have nothing to report more than that she was in the 
 worst sense a \Tilgar woman, that is, not merely a low- 
 bred person — so much might have been expected 
 from her occupation — but morally vulgar by the evi- 
 ience of her own complex precautions against fraud, 
 reasonable enough in so dangerous a capital, but not 
 calling for the very ostentatious display of them which 
 13
 
 194 STTIiE. 
 
 she obtruded upon us,) was in regular training, it ap- 
 peared, as a student of newspapers. She had no chil- 
 dren : the newspapers were her children. There lay 
 her studies ; that branch of learning constituted her 
 occupation, from morning to night : and the following 
 were amongst the words which she — this semibarba- 
 rian — poured from her cornucopia during the very few 
 minutes of our interview ; which interview was brought 
 to an abrupt issue by mere nervous agitation upon our 
 part. The words, as noted down within an hour of 
 the occasion, and after allowing a fair time for our 
 recovery, were these : — first, ' Category ; ' secondly, 
 ' predicament ; ' (where, by the way, from the twofold 
 iteration of the idea — Greek and Roman — it appears 
 that the old lady was ' twice armed ; ') — thirdly, ' indi- 
 viduality ; ' fourthly, ' procrastination ; ' fifthly, ' speak- 
 ing diplomatically, would not wish to commit herself; ' 
 sixthly, ' would spontaneously adapt the several modes 
 of domestication to the reciprocal interests,' &c. ; and 
 finally, (which word it was that settled us ; we heard 
 it as we reached the topmost stair on the second floor ; 
 and, without further struggle against our instincts, 
 round we wheeled, rushed down forty-five stairs, and 
 exploded from the house with a fury causing us to 
 impinge against an obese or protuberant gentleman 
 and calling for mutual explanations ; a result which 
 nothing could account for, but a steel bow, or musta- 
 chios on the lip of an elderly woman ; meantime the 
 fatal word was,) seventhly, ' anteriorly.' Concerning 
 which word we solemnly depose and make affidavit, 
 that neither from man, woman, nor book, had we evei 
 heard it before this unique rencontre with this abomi- 
 ijable woman on the staircase. The occasion whici
 
 STTLE. 195 
 
 'urnislied the excuse for such a word was this : From 
 the staircase window we saw a large shed in the rear 
 of the house : apprehending some nuisance of ' manu- 
 facturing industry' in our neighborhood, — 'What's 
 that ? ' we demanded. Mark the answer : ' A shed ; 
 
 and anteriorly to the existing shed there was ; ' 
 
 xohat there was, posterity must consent to have wrapt 
 up in darkness, for there came on our nervous seizure, 
 which intercepted further communication. But ob- 
 Berve, as a point which took away any gleam of con- 
 solation from the case, the total absence of all malaprop 
 picturesqueness, that might have defeated its deadly 
 action upon the nervous system. No : it is due to the 
 integrity of her disease, and to the completeness of our 
 suffering, that we should attest the unimpeachable cor 
 rectness of her words and of the syntax by which she 
 connected them. 
 
 Now, if we could suppose the case that the old 
 household idiom of the land were generally so extin- 
 guished amongst us as it was in this particular instance 
 
 — if we could imagine, as a universal result of journal- 
 ism, that a coarse unlettered woman, having occasion 
 to say, ' this or that stood in such a place before thf- 
 present shed,' should take as a natural or current for- 
 mula, ' anteriorly to the existing shed there stood,' &c. 
 
 — what would be the final effect upon our literature ? 
 Pedantry, though it were unconscious pedantry, once 
 steadily diffused through a nation as to the very mould? 
 of its thinking, and the general tendencies of its ex- 
 pression, could not but stiffen the natural graces of 
 composition, and weave fetters about the free move- 
 ment of human thought. This would interfere as 
 effectually with our power of enjoying much that is
 
 196 
 
 STYLE. 
 
 excellent in our past literature, as it would with our 
 future powers of producing. And such an agency has 
 been too long at work amongst us, not to have already 
 accomplished some part of these separate evils. 
 Amongst women of education, as we have argued 
 above, standing aloof from literature, and less uni- 
 formly drawing their intellectual sustenance from news- 
 papers, the deadening effects have been partially 
 counteracted. Here and there, amongst individuals, 
 alive to the particular evils of the age, and watching 
 the very set of the current, there may have been even 
 a more systematic counteraction applied to the mis- 
 chief. But the great evil in such cases is this — that 
 we cannot see the extent of the changes wrought or 
 being wrought, from having ourselves partaken in them. 
 Tempora mutantur ; and naturally, if we could review 
 them with the neutral eye of a stranger, it would be 
 impossible for us not to see the extent of those changes. 
 But our eye is not neutral : we also have partaken in 
 the changes ; et nos mutamur in illis. And this fact 
 disturbs the power of appreciating those changes. 
 Every one of us would have felt, sixty years ago, that 
 the general tone and coloring of a style was stiff, book- 
 ish, pedantic, which, from the habituation of our or- 
 gans, we now feel to be natural and within the privilege 
 of learned art. Direct objective qualities it is always 
 by comparison easy to measure ; but the difficulty 
 commences when we have to combine with this outei 
 measurement of the object another corresponding 
 measurement of the subjective or inner qualities by 
 which we apply the measure ; that is, when besides 
 the objects projected to a distance from the spectator 
 we have to allow for variations or distuibances in the
 
 SIYIiE. 
 
 197 
 
 ^ery eye which surveys them. The eye cannot see 
 Itself; we cannot project from ourselves, and contem- 
 plate as an object our own contemplating faculty, or 
 appreciate our own appreciating power. Biases, there- 
 fore, or gradual warpings, that have occurred m our 
 critical faculty as applied to style, we cannot allow 
 for ; and these biases will unconsciously mask, to our 
 perceptions, an amount of change in the quality of 
 popular style such as we could not easily credit. 
 
 Separately from this change for the worse in the 
 droopmg idiomatic freshness of our diction, which is a 
 change that has been going on for a century, the othei 
 characteristic defect of tbis age Hes in the tumid and 
 tumultuary structure of our sentences. The one 
 change has partly grown out of the other. Ever since 
 a more bookish air was impressed upon composition 
 without much effort by the Latinized and artificial 
 phraseology, by forms of expression consecrated to 
 books, and by ' long-tailed words in osity and ation, 
 either because writers felt that already, in this one act 
 of preference sho^^-n to the artificial vocabulary, they 
 had done enough to establish a deferential character of 
 regular composition, and on that consideration thought 
 themselves entitled to neglect the combination of then 
 words into sentences and periods ; or because there i3 
 a real natural sympathy between the Latin phraseology 
 and a Latin structure of sentence ; certain it is and 
 remarkable, that our popular style, in the common 
 limited sense of arrangement applied to words, or the 
 ^yntaxes of sentences, has labored with two faults that 
 might have been thought incompatible : it has been 
 artificial, by artifices peculiarly adapted to the powers 
 of the Latin language, and yet at the very same time
 
 198 STYLE. 
 
 careless and disordinate. There is a strong idea ex- 
 pressed by the Latin word inconditus, disorganized, 
 or rather unorganized. Now, in spite of its artificial 
 bias, that is the very epithet which will best character- 
 ize our newspaper style. To be viewed as susceptible 
 of organization, such periods must already be elaborate 
 and artificial ; to be viewed as not having received it, 
 Buch periods must be careless. 
 
 But perhaps the very best illustration of all this will 
 be found in putting the case of English style into 
 close juxtaposition with the style of the French and 
 Germans — our only very important neighbors. As 
 leaders of civilization, as powers in an intellectual 
 sense, there are but three nations in Europe — Eng- 
 land, Germany, France. As to Spain, and Italy, 
 outlying extremities, they are not moving bodies ; 
 they rest upon the past. Russia and North America 
 are the two bulwarks of Christendom — east and west. 
 But the three powers at the centre are in all senses the 
 motive forces of civilization. In all things they have 
 the initiation ; and they preside. 
 
 By this comparison we shall have the advantage of 
 doing what the French express by sorienter — the 
 Germans by sich orientiren. Learning one of our 
 bearings on the compass, we shall be able to deduce 
 the rest ; and we shall be able to conjecture our 
 valuation as respects the art, by finding our place 
 amongst the artists. 
 
 With respect to French style, we can imagine the 
 astonishment of an English author, practised in com- 
 position, and with no previous knowledge of French 
 literature, who should first find himself ranging freely 
 dmongst a French library. That particular fault of
 
 STYLE. 199 
 
 style which in English books is all but universal, 
 absolutely has not an existence in the French. Speak- 
 ing rigorously and to the very letter of the case, we, 
 upon a large experience in French literature, affirm, 
 that it would be nearly impossible (perhaps strictly 
 so) to cite an instance of that cumbrous and imwieldy 
 style which disfigures English composition so exten- 
 sively. Enough could not be adduced to satisfy the 
 purpose of illustration. And to make a Frenchman 
 sensible of the fault as a possibility, you must appeal 
 to some translated model. 
 
 But why ? The cause of this national immunity 
 from a fault so common everywhere else, and so 
 natural, when we look into the producing occasions, 
 is as much entitled to our notice as the immunity 
 itself. The fault is inevitable, as one might fancy, 
 to two conditions of mind — hurry in the first place, 
 want of art in the second. The French must be 
 liable to these disadvantages as much as their neigh 
 bors : by what magic is it that they evade them or 
 neutralize them in the result ? The secret lies here ; 
 beyond all nations, by constitutional vivacity, the 
 French are a nation of talkers ; and the model of 
 their sentences is moulded by that fact. Conver- 
 sation, which is a luxury for other nations, is for them 
 a necessity ; by the very law of their peculiar intellect 
 and of its social training, they are colloquial. Hence 
 it happens, that there are no such people endured or 
 evei heard of in France as aZloquial wits ; people 
 who talk to but not with a circle ; the very finest of 
 dieir ieaux esprits must submit to the equities of 
 conversation, and would be crushed summarily as 
 Honsters, if they were to seek a selfish mode of
 
 200 STYLE. 
 
 display, or a privilege of lecturing any audience of 
 a salon who had met for purposes of social pleasure. 
 ' De monologue,' as Madame de Stael, in her broken 
 English, described this mode of display when speak- 
 ing of Coleridge, is so far from being tolerated in 
 France as an accomplishment, that it is not even 
 understood as a disease. This kind of what may be 
 called irresponsible talk, when a man runs on perpetuo 
 tenore, not accountable for any opinion to his auditors, 
 open to no contradiction, has sometimes procured for 
 a man in England the affix of River to his name : 
 Labitur et labetur in omne voluhilis cBvum. But that 
 has been in cases where the talking impulse was 
 sustained by mere vivacity of animal spirits, Mdthout 
 knowledge to support it, and liable to the full weight 
 of Archbishop Huet's sarcasm — that it was a diar- 
 rhoea of garrulity, afluxe de houche. But in cases like 
 that of Coleridge, where the solitary display, if selfish, 
 is still dignified by a pomp of knowledge, and a 
 knowledge which you feel to have been fused and 
 combined by the genial circumstances of the speaker's 
 position in the centre of an admiring circle, — wc- 
 English do still recognize the metier of a professional 
 talker as a privileged mode of social display. People 
 are asked to come and hear such a performer, as you 
 form a select party to hear Thalberg or Paganini. 
 The thing is understood at least with us ; right or 
 wrong, there is an understanding amongst the com- 
 pany that you are not to interrupt the great man of 
 the night. You may prompt him by a question ; you 
 may set him in motion ; but to begin arguing against 
 nim would be felt as not less unseasonable, than to 
 insist on whistling Jim Crow during the hravuras anC 
 \ours de force of the great musical artists.
 
 STTUE. 201 
 
 In France, tiierefore, from the intense adaptation of 
 the national mind to real colloquial intercourse, foi 
 which reciprocation is indispensable, the form of sen- 
 tence in use is adjusted to that primary condition; 
 brief, terse, simple ; shaped to avoid misunderstand- 
 ing, and to meet the impatience of those who are 
 waiting for their tui'n. People who wnrite rapidly 
 everywhere write as they talk : it is impossible to do 
 otherwise. Taking a pen into his hand, a man frames 
 his periods exactly as he would do if addressing an 
 audience. So far the Englishman and the Frenchman 
 are upon the same level. Suppose them, therefore, 
 both preparing to speak : an Englishman in such a 
 situation has no urgent motive for turning his thoughts 
 to any other object than the prevailing one of the 
 moment — viz. how best to convey his meaning. 
 That object weighs also with the Frenchman ; but he 
 has a previous, a paramount, object to watch — the 
 necessity of avoiding des longueurs. The rights, the 
 equities of conversation are but dimly present to the 
 mind of the Englishman. From the mind of a 
 Frenchman they are never absent. To an English- 
 man, the right of occupying the attention of the 
 company seems to inhere in things rather than in 
 person : if the particular subject under discussion 
 should happen to be a grave one, then, in right of 
 that, and not by any right of his own, a speaker will 
 seem to an Englishman invested with the privilege of 
 drawing largely upon the attention of a company. 
 But to a Frenchman this right of participation in the 
 talk is a personal right, which cannot be set aside by 
 any possible claims in the subject: it passes by neces- 
 sity to and fro, backwards and forwards, between the
 
 g02 STYLE. 
 
 several persons who are present ; and, as in the 
 games of battledore and shuttlecock, or of ' hunt the 
 slipper,' the momentary subject of interest never car 
 settle or linger for any length of time in any one 
 individual, without violating the rules of the sport, or 
 suspending its movement. Inevitably, therefore, the 
 structure of sentence must forever be adapted to this 
 primary function of the French national intellect — 
 the function of communicativeness, and to the neces- 
 sities (for to the French they are necessities) of social 
 intercourse. 
 
 Hence it is that in French authors, whatever may 
 otherwise be the differences of their minds, or the 
 differences of their themes, uniformly we find the 
 periods short, rapid, unelaborate — Pascal or Helve- 
 tius, Condillac or Rousseau, Montesquieu or Voltaire, 
 Buffon or Duclos, — all alike are terse, perspicuous, 
 brief. Even Mirabeau or Chateaubriand, so much 
 modified by foreign intercourse, in this point adhere 
 to their national models. Even Bossuet or Bourda- 
 loue, where the diffusiveness and amplitude of oratory 
 might have been pleaded as a dispensation, are not 
 more licentious in this respect than their compatriots. 
 One rise in every sentence, one gentle descent, — that 
 is the law for French composition ; even too monoto- 
 nously so — and thus it happens that such a thing as a 
 long or an. involved sentence could not be produced 
 from French literature, though a sultan were to offer 
 his daughter in marriage to the man who should find 
 it. Whereas now, amongst us English, not only is 
 the too general tendency of our sentences towards 
 liyperbolical length, but it will be found continually 
 -hat instead of one rise and one corresponding fall -
 
 STTIiE. 
 
 203 
 
 one arsis and one thesis — there are many. Flux and 
 reflux, swell and cadence, tliat is the movement for a 
 sentence ; but our modern sentences agitate us by 
 roUin- fires, after the fashion of those internal 
 earthquakes that, not content with one throe, run 
 along spasmodically like boys playing at what is 
 called ' drake-stone.' 
 
 It is not often that a single fault can produce any 
 vast amount of evil . But there are cases where it 
 does ; and this is one ; the effect of weariness and of 
 repulsion, which may arise from this single vice of 
 unwieldy comprehensiveness in the structure of sen- 
 tences, cannot better be illustrated than by a frank 
 exposure of what often happens to ourselves, and (as 
 we differ as to this case only by consciously noticmg 
 what all feel) must often happen to others. In the 
 evening, Avhen it is natural that we should feel _ a 
 cravin- for rest, some book lies near us which is writ- 
 ten in°a style, clear, tranquil, easy to follow. Just at 
 that moment comes in the wet newspaper, dripping 
 vith the dewy freshness of its news ; and even m its 
 parliamentary memorials promising so much mterest, 
 that let them be treated in what manner they may 
 merely for the subjects, they are often commandmgly 
 attractive. The attraction indeed is but too potent, 
 the interest but too exciting. Yet, after all, many 
 times we lay aside the journal, and we acquiesce m 
 Jx, rentier stimulation of the book. Simply the news 
 ve may read ; but the discussions, whether direct from 
 the editor, or reported from the Parliament, we refuse 
 or we delay. And why ? It is the subject, perhaps 
 you think, it is the great political question - too agi- 
 lating by the consequences it may happen to involve.
 
 204 STYLE. 
 
 No. All this, if treated in a winning style, we could 
 bear. It is the effort, the toil, the exertion of mind 
 requisite to follow the discussion through endless and 
 labyrinthine sentences — this it is which compels us 
 to forego the journal, or to lay it aside until the next 
 morning. 
 
 Those who are not accustomed to watch the effects 
 of composition upon the feelings, or have had little 
 experience in voluminous reading pursued for weeks, 
 would scarcely imagine how much of downright physi- 
 cal exhaustion is produced by what is technically called 
 the periodic style of writing : it is not the length, the 
 antqarToloyiay the paralytic flux of words : it is not 
 even the cumbrous involution of parts within parts, 
 separately considered, that bears so heavily upon the 
 attention. It is the suspense, the holding-on, of the 
 mind until what is called the anoSoatg or coming round 
 of the sentence commences ; this it is which wears out 
 "the faculty of attention. A sentence, for example, 
 begins with a series of ifs; perhaps a dozen lines 
 are occupied with expanding the conditions under 
 which something is affirmed or denied : here you 
 cannot dismiss and have done with the ideas as you 
 go along ; all is hypothetic ; all is suspended in air. 
 The conditions are not fully to be understood until you 
 are acquainted with the dependency ; you must give a 
 separate attention to each clause of this complex hy- 
 pothesis, and yet having done that by a painful effort, 
 you have done nothing at all ; for you must exercise 
 a reacting attention through the corresponding lattei 
 section, in order to follow out its relations to all parts 
 of the hypothesis which sustained it. In fact, under 
 »he rude yet also artificial character of newspape»
 
 STYLE. 205 
 
 style, each separate monstor period is a vast arch, 
 which, not receiving its keystone, not being locked 
 into self-supporting cohesion, until you nearly reach 
 its close, imposes of necessity upon the unhappy reader 
 all the onus of its ponderous weight through the main 
 process of its construction. The continued repetition 
 of so Atlantean an effort soon overwhelms the patience 
 of any reader, and establishes at length that habitual 
 feeling which causes him to shrink from the specula- 
 tions of journalists, or (which is more likely) to adopt 
 a worse habit than absolute neglect, which we shaU 
 notice immediately. 
 
 Meantime, as we have compared ourselves on this 
 important point with the French, let us now complete 
 our promise, by noticing our relation in the same point 
 to the Germans. Even on its own account, and with- 
 out any \iew to our present purpose, the character of 
 German prose is an object of legitimate astonishment. 
 Whatever is bad in our own ideal of prose style, what- 
 ever is repulsive in our own practice, we see there 
 carried to the most outrageous excess. Herod is out- 
 heroded, Sternhold is out-sternholded, with a zealotry 
 of extravagance that really seems like wilful burlesque. 
 Lessing, Herder, Paul Richter, and Lichtenberg, with 
 some few beside, either prompted by nature or trained 
 upon foreign models, have avoided the besetting sin 
 of German prose. Any man of distinguished talent, 
 whose attention has been once called steadily to this 
 subject, cannot fail to avoid it. The misfortune of 
 most writers has been, that once occupied with the 
 mterest of things, and overwhelmed by the embarrass- 
 ments of disputed doctrines, they never advert to any 
 question affecting what they view, by comparison, as
 
 206 STYLE. 
 
 a trifle. The ^'o docendum, the thing to be taught, has 
 availed to obscure or even to annihilate for their eyes 
 every anxiety as to the mode of teaching. And, as 
 one conspicuous example of careless style acts by its 
 authority to create many more, we need not wonder 
 at the results, even when they reach a point of what 
 may be called monstrous. Among ten thousand of- 
 fenders, who carry their neglect of style even to that 
 point, we would single out Imraanuel Kant. Such is 
 the value of his philosophy in some sections, and 
 partially it is so very capable of a lucid treatment, 
 intelligible to the plainest man of reflective habits, 
 that within no long interval we shall certainly see him 
 naturalized amongst ourselves ; there are particular 
 applications of his philosophy not contemplated by 
 himself, for which we venture to predict that the 
 Christian student will ultimately be thankful, when the 
 elementary principles have been brought under a clear 
 light of interpretation. Attention will then be forced 
 upon his style, and facts will come forward not credi- 
 ble without experimental proof. For instance, we 
 have lying before us at this moment his Critik der 
 Practischen Vernunft in the unpirated edition of Hart- 
 noch — the respectable publisher of all Kant's great 
 works. The text is therefore authentic : and being a 
 4th edition, (Riga, 1797,) must be presumed to have 
 benefited by the author's careful revision : we have no 
 time for search, but on barely throwing open the book, 
 we see a sentence at pp. 70, 71, exactly covering one 
 whole octavo page of thirty-one lines, each line averag- 
 ,Ug forty-five to forty-eight letters. Sentences of the 
 same calibre, some even of far larger hore, we have 
 observed in this and other works of the same author
 
 STYLE. ^^' 
 
 Ajid it is not the fact taken as an occasional possibility, 
 it is the prevailing character of his style, that we insist 
 on as the most formidable barrier to the study of his 
 writings, and to the progress of what will soon be 
 acknowledged as important in his principles. A sen- 
 cence is viewed by him, and by most of his country- 
 men, as a rude mould or elastic form admitting of 
 expansion to any possible extent : it is laid down as a 
 rude outline, and then by superstruction and epi- 
 snperstruction it is gradually reared to a giddy altitude 
 which no eye can follow. Yielding to his natural 
 impulse of subjoining all additions, or exceptions, or 
 modifications - not in the shape of separate consecu- 
 tive sentences, but as intercalations and stuffings of 
 one original sentence, Kant might naturally enough 
 have written a book from beginning to end m one vast 
 hyperbolical sentence. We sometimes see an English 
 Act of Parliament which does literally accomphsh that 
 end by an artifice which in law has a purpose and a 
 use. Instead of laying down a general proposition, 
 which is partially false until it has received its proper 
 restraints, the framer of the act endeavors to evade 
 even this momentary falsehood by coupling the re- 
 straints with the very primary enunciation of the truth: 
 c g A shall be entitled, provided always that he is 
 under the circumstances of e, or i, or o, to the right of 
 X Thus, even a momentary compliance with the 
 false notion of an absolute unconditional claim to X 
 is evaded ; a truth which is only a conditional truth, 
 Is stated as such fi-om the first. There is, thei-efore a 
 theoretic use. But what is the practical result ? Why, 
 mat when you attempt to read an Act of Parliament 
 WAere the exceptions, the secondary exceptions to the
 
 208 STYLE. 
 
 exceptions, the limitations and the sublimitations, de- 
 scend seriatim, by a vast scale of dependencies, the 
 mind finds itself overtasked : the energy of the most 
 energetic begins to droop ; and so inevitable is that 
 result, that Mr. Pitt, a minister unusually accomplished 
 for such process by constitution of mind and by prac- 
 tice, publicly avowed his inability to follow so trying 
 8 conflict with technical embarrassments. He declared 
 himself to be lost in the labyrinth of clauses : the 
 Ariadne's clue was wanting for his final extrication : 
 and he described his situation at the end with the 
 simplicity natural to one who was no charlatan, and 
 Bought for no reputation by the tricks of a funambulist : 
 ' In the crowd of things excepted and counter-excepted, 
 he really ceased to understand the main point — what 
 it was that the law allowed, and what it was that it 
 disallowed.' 
 
 We might have made our readers merry with the 
 picture of German prose ; but we must not linger. It 
 is enough to say, that it offers the counterpole to the 
 French style. Our own popular style, and (what is 
 worse) the tendency of our own, is to the German 
 extreme. For those who read German there is this 
 advantage — that German prose, as Avritten by the 
 mob of authors, presents, as in a Brobdignagian mirror, 
 the most offensive faults of our own. 
 
 But these faults — are they in practice so wearisome 
 and exhausting as we have described them ? Possibly 
 not ; and, where that happens to be the case, let the 
 reader ask himself if it is not by means of an evasion 
 worse in its effects than any fault of style could evei 
 prove in its most exaggerated form. Shrinking, through 
 long experience, from the plethoric form of cumulation
 
 8TTI,E. 209 
 
 and ' periodic ' writing in wKich the journalist supports 
 or explains his views, every man who puts a business 
 value upon his time, slips naturally into a trick of 
 short-hand reading. It is more even by the effort and 
 tension of mind required, than by the mere loss of time, 
 that most readers are repelled from the habit of careful 
 reading. An evil of modern growth is met by a 
 modern remedy. Every man gradually learns an art 
 of catching at the leading words, and the cardinal or 
 hinge-joints of transition, which proclaim the general 
 course of a writer's speculation. Now it is very true, 
 and is sure to be objected — that, where so much is 
 certain to prove mere iteration and teasing tautology, 
 little can be lost by this or any other process of abridg- 
 ment. Certainly, as regards the particular subject 
 concerned, there may be no room to apprehend a 
 serious injury. Not there, not in any direct interest, 
 but in a far larger interest — indirect for the moment, 
 but the most direct and absolute of all interests for an 
 intellectual being, the reader suffers a permanent de- 
 bilitation. He acquires a factitious propensity, he 
 forms an incorrigible habit of desultory reading. Now, 
 to say of a man's knowledge, that it will be shallow 
 or (which is worse than shallow) will be erroneous ana 
 insecure in its foundations, is to say little of such a 
 habit : it is by reaction upon a man's faculties, it is by 
 the effects reflected upon his judging and reasoning 
 powers, that loose habits of reading tell eventually. 
 And these are durable effects. Even as respects the 
 minor purpose of information, better it is, by a thou- 
 sand-fold, to have read threescore of books (chosen 
 judiciously) with severe attention, than to have raced 
 through the library of the "V atican et a newspaper pace, 
 14
 
 210 STYLE. 
 
 But, as respects the final habits acquired, habits of 
 thinking coherently, and of judging soundly - better 
 that a man should have not read one line throughout 
 his life, than have travelled through the journals of 
 Eui-ope by this random process of ' reading short.' 
 
 Yet, by this Parthian habit of aiming at full gallop 
 — of taking flying shots at conspicuous marks, and, 
 like Parthians also, directing their chance arrows whilst 
 retreating, and revolting with horror from si direct ap- 
 proach to the object, — thus it is, that the young and 
 the flexible are trained amongst us under the increasing 
 tyranny of journalism. A large part of the evil, there- 
 fore, belongs to style ; for 't is this which repels read- 
 ers, and enforces the short-hand process of desultory 
 reading. A large part of the evil, therefore, is of a 
 nature to receive a remedy. 
 
 It is with a view to that practical part of the exten- 
 sive evil, that we have shaped our present notice of 
 popular style, as made operative amongst ourselves. 
 One single vice of periodic syntax, a vice unknown to 
 the literature of Greece, and, until Paterculus, even of 
 Rome, (although the language of Rome was so naturally 
 adapted to that vice,) has with us counterbalanced all 
 possible vices of any other order. Simply by the vast 
 sphere of its agency for evil, in the habits of mind 
 which it produces and siipports, such a vice merits a 
 consideration which would else be disproportionate. 
 Yet, at the same time, it must not be forge tten, that if 
 the most operative of all vices, after all it is but one. 
 What are the others ? 
 
 It is a fault, amongst many faults, of such works as 
 we have on this subject of style — that they collect the 
 list of qualities, good or bad, to which composition ia
 
 STYLE. 211 
 
 liable, not under any principle from which they might 
 be deduced a priori, so as to be assured that all had 
 Deen enumerated, but. by a tentative groping, a mere 
 conjectural estimate. The word style has with us a 
 twofold meaning ; one sense, the narrow one, express- 
 ing the mere synthesis onomaton, the syntaxis or com- 
 bination of words into sentences ; the other of far 
 wider extent, and expressing all possible relations that 
 can arise between thoughts and words — the total 
 eflfect of a w'riter, as derived from manner. Style 
 may be viewed as an organic thing and as a mechanic 
 thing. By organic, we mean that which, being acted 
 upon, reacts — and which propagates the communi- 
 cated power without loss. By mechanic, that which, 
 being impressed with motion, cannot throw it back 
 without loss, and therefore soon comes to an end. 
 The human body is an elaborate system of organs ; It 
 is sustained by organs. But the human body is exer- 
 cised as a machine, and, as such, may be viewed in 
 the arts of riding, dancing, leaping, &c., subject to 
 the laws of motion and equilibrium. Now, the use of 
 words is an organic thing, in so far as language is con- 
 nected with thoughts, and modified by thoughts. It is 
 a mechanic thing, in so far as words in combination 
 determine or modify each other. The science of style, 
 as an organ of thought, of style in relation to the ideas 
 and feelings, might be called the organology of style. 
 The science of style, considered as a machine, in which 
 words act upon words, and through a particular gram- 
 mar, might be called the mechanology of style. It is 
 of little importance by what name these two functions 
 of composition are expressed. But it is of great im- 
 portance not to ajnfound the fuLctions ; that function
 
 212 STYLE. 
 
 Dy wliich style maintains a commerce with thought, 
 and that by which it chiefly communicates with gram- 
 mar and with words. A pedant only will insist upon 
 the names — but the distinction in the ideas, under 
 some name, can be neglected only by the man who is 
 careless of logic. 
 
 "We know not how far we may be ever called upon 
 to proceed Avith this discussion : if it should happen 
 that we were, an interesting field of questions would 
 lie before us for the first part, (the organology.) It 
 would lead us over the ground trodden by the Greek 
 and Roman rhetoricians ; and over those particular 
 questions which have arisen by the contrast between 
 the circumstances of the ancients and our own since 
 the origin of printing. Punctuation,"'^ trivial as such 
 an innovation may seem, was the product of typogra- 
 phy ; and it is interesting to trace the effects upon 
 style even of that one slight addition to the resources 
 of logic. Previously, a man was driven to depend for 
 his security against misunderstanding upon the pure 
 virtue of his syntax. Miscollocation or dislocation of 
 related words disturbed the whole sense : its least 
 effect was to give no sense ; often it gave a danger- 
 ous sense. Now, punctuation was an artificial ma- 
 chinery for maintaining the integrity of the sense 
 against all mistakes of the writer ; and, as one con- 
 sequence, it withdrew the energy of men's anxieties 
 from the natural machinery, which lay in just and 
 careful arrangement. Another and still greater ma- 
 chinery of art for the purpose of maintaining the 
 sense, and with the effect of relaxing the care of the 
 wrriter, lay in the exquisitely artificial structure of tlie 
 Latin language, which, by means of its terminal
 
 STYLE. 213 
 
 forms, indicated the arrangement, and referred the 
 proper predicate to the proper subject, spite of all 
 that affectation or negligence could do to disturb the 
 series of the logic or the succession of the syntax. 
 Greek, of course, had the same advantage in kind, 
 b«t not in degree ; and thence rose some differences 
 which have escaped all notice of rhetoricians. Here 
 also would properly arise the question started by 
 Charles Fox, (but probably due originally to the con- 
 versation of some far subtler frieod, such as Edmund 
 Burke,) how far the practice of foot-notes — a prac- 
 tice purely modern in its form — is reconcilable with 
 the laws of just composition ; and whether in virtue, 
 though not in form, such foot-notes did not exist for 
 the ancients, by an evasion we could point out. The 
 question is clearly one which grows out of style in its 
 relations to thought — how far, viz., such an excres- 
 cence as a note ai-gues that the sentence to which it is 
 attached has not received the benefit of a full devel- 
 opment for the conception involved ; whether if 
 thrown into the furnace again and re-melted, it might 
 not be so recast as to absorb the redundancy which 
 had previously flowed over into a note. Under this 
 head would fall not only all the differential questions 
 of style and composition between us and the ancients, 
 but also the questions of merit as fairly distributed 
 amongst the moderns compared with each other. The 
 French, as we recently insisted, undoubtedly nossess 
 one vast advantage over all other nations in the good 
 taste which governs the arrangement of their sen- 
 tences ; in the simplicity (a strange pretension to 
 Hake for anything French) o^ the modulation under 
 Thich their thoughts flow ; in the absence of all
 
 214 STYLE. 
 
 cumbrous involution, and in the quick succession 1 
 their periods. In reality this invaluable merit tends 
 to an excess ; and the style coupe as opposed to the 
 style soutenu, flippancy opposed to gravity, the sub- 
 sultory to the continuous, these are the two frequent 
 extremities to which the French manner betrays men. 
 Better, however, to be flippant, than, by a revolting 
 form of tumor and perplexity, to lead men into habits 
 cf intellect such as result from the modern vice of 
 English style. Still, with all its practical value, it is 
 evident that the intellectual merits of the French style 
 are but small. They are chiefly negative, in the first 
 place ; and, secondly, founded in the accident of their 
 colloquial necessities. The law of conversation has 
 prescribed the model of their sentences ; and in that 
 law there is quite as much of self-interest at work as 
 of respect for equity. Hanc veniam petimusque da- 
 tnusque vicissim. Give and take is the rule, and he 
 who expects to be heard must condescend to listen ; 
 which necessity, for both parties, binds over both to 
 be brief. Brevity so won could at any rate have 
 little merit ; and it is certain that, for profound think- 
 ing, it must sometimes be a hinderance. In order to 
 be brief, a man must take a short sweep of view : his 
 range of thought cannot be extensive ; and such a 
 rub), applied to a general method of thinking, is fitted 
 rather to aphorism? and maxims as upon a known 
 subject, than to any process of investigation as upon 
 '\ subject yet to be fathomed. Advancing stUl further 
 into the examination of style as the organ of thinking, 
 we should find occasion to see the prodigious defects 
 9f the French in all the higher qualities of prose 
 lomposition. One advantage, for a practical puroose
 
 RTYIiE. 
 
 21f 
 
 of life, is sadly counterbalanced by numerous faults, 
 many of which are faults of stamina, lying not in anj 
 corrigible defects, but in such as imply penury of 
 thinking, from radical inaptitude in the thinking 
 faculty °to connect itself with the feeling, and with 
 the creative faculty of the imagination. There are 
 many other researches belonging to this subtlest of 
 Bubj'ects, affecting both the logic and the ornaments 
 of style, which would fall under the head of organ- 
 ology. 'But for instant practical use, though far less 
 difficult for investigation, yet, for that reason, far more 
 tangible and appreciable, would be all the suggestions 
 proper to the other head of mechanology. Half a 
 dozen rules for evading the most frequently recurring 
 forms of awkwardness, of obscurity, of misproportion, 
 and of double meaning, would do more to assist a 
 writer in practice, laid under some necessity of hurry, 
 than volumes of general disquisition. It makes us 
 blush to add, that even grammar is so little of a 
 perfect attainment amongst us, that with two or three 
 exceptions, (one being Shakspeare, whom some affect 
 to consider as belonging to a semi-barbarous age,) we 
 have never seen the writer, through a circuit of pro- 
 digious reading, who has not sometimes violated the 
 accidence or the syntax of English grammar. 
 
 Whatever becomes of our own possible specula- 
 ^ons we shaU conclude with insisting on the gromng 
 necessity of style as a practical interest of daily life. 
 Upon subjects of public concern, and in proportion to 
 that concern, there will always be a suitable (and as 
 letters extend, a growing) competition. Other thmgs 
 .eing equal, or appearing to be equal, the determining 
 principle for the public choice will lie in the style.
 
 216 STYLE. 
 
 Of a German book, other-wise entitled to respect, it 
 was said — er Idsst sich nicht lesen, it does not permit 
 itself to be read: such, and so repulsive was the style. 
 Among ourselves, this has long been true of news- 
 papers : they do not suffer themselves to be read in 
 extenso, and they are read short — with what iuj ury to 
 the mind may be guessed. The same style of read- 
 ing, once largely practised, is applied universally. 
 To this special evil an improvement of style would 
 apply a special redress. The same improvement is 
 otherwise clamorously called for by each man's inter- 
 est of competition. Public luxury, which is gradually 
 consulted by everything else, must at length be con- 
 sulted in style. 
 
 PART II. 
 
 It is a natural resource, that whatsoever we find it 
 difficult to investigate as a result, we endeavor to 
 follow as a growth ; failing analytically to probe its 
 nature, historically we seek relief to our perplexities 
 by tracing its origin. Not able to assign the elements 
 of its theory, we endeavor to detect them in the stages 
 of its development. Thus, for instance, when any 
 feudal institution (be it Gothic, Norman, or Anglo- 
 Saxon) eludes our deciphering faculty, from the im- 
 perfect records of its use and operation, then we 
 endeavor conjecturally to amend our knowledge, by 
 watching the circumstances in which that institution 
 arose ; and from the necessities of the age, as indi- 
 cated by facts which have survived, we are sometimes 
 %ble to trace, through all their corresponding stages o/
 
 BTTLB. 217 
 
 ^owth, the natural succession of arrangements which 
 Buch necessities would be likely tc prescribe. 
 
 This mode of oblique research, where a more direct 
 one is denied, we find to be the only one in our power. 
 A.nd, -with respect to the liberal arts, it is even more 
 true than with respect to laws or institutions ; because 
 remote ages, widely separated, differ much more in 
 their pleasiires than they can ever do in their social 
 necessities. To make property safe and life sacred 
 — that is everywhere a primary purpose of law. But 
 the intellectual amusements of men are so different, 
 that the very purposes and elementary functions of 
 these amusements are different. They point to dif- 
 ferent ends as well as different means. The drama, 
 for instance, in Greece, connects itself with religion ; 
 in other ages, religion is the power most in resistance 
 to the drama. Hence, and because the elder and ruder 
 ages are most favorable to a ceremonial and mytholog- 
 ical religion, we find the tragedy of Greece defunct 
 before the literary age arose. Aristotle's era may be 
 taken as the earliest era of refinement and literary de- 
 velopment. But Aristotle wrote his Essay on the 
 Greek Tragedy just a century after the chefs d'ceuvre 
 jf that tragedy had been published. 
 
 If, therefore, it is sometimes requisite for the proper 
 explanation even of a law or legal usage, that we 
 should go to its history, not looking for a sufiicienl 
 key to its meaning in the mere analogies of our own 
 social necessities, much more will that be requisite in 
 explaining an art or a mode of intellectual pleasure. 
 Why it was that the ancients had no landscape paint- 
 ng, is a question deep almost as tne mystery of life, and 
 aarder of solution than all the problems of jurispru-
 
 218 STYLE. 
 
 dence comMned. What causes moulded the tragedy 
 of the ancients could hardly ^e guessed, if we did not 
 happen to know its history and mythologlc origin 
 And with respect to what is called Style, not so much 
 as a sketch — as an outline — as a hint could bo 
 furnished towards the earliest speculations upon this 
 subject, if we should overlook the historical facts con- 
 nected with its earliest development. 
 
 What was it that first produced into this world that 
 celebrated thing called Prose ? It was the bar, it was 
 the hustings, it was the Bema (to ^ij^io). What Gibbon 
 and most historians of the Mussulmans have rather 
 absurdly called the pulpit of the Caliphs, should rather 
 be called the rostrum, the Roman military suggestus, 
 or Athenian hema. The fierce and generally illiterate 
 Mahometan harangued his troops ; preach he could 
 not; he had no subject for preaching.^*' Now this 
 function of man, in almost all states of society, the 
 function of public haranguing was for the Pagan man, 
 who had no printing-press, more of a mere necessity, 
 through every mode of public life, than it is for the 
 modern man of Christian light : for as to the modern 
 man of Mahometan twilight, his perfect bigotry denies 
 him this characteristic resource of Christian energies. 
 Tust four centuries have we of the Cross propagated 
 our light by this memorable invention ; just four cen- 
 turies have the slaves of the Crescent clung to their 
 darkness by rejecting it. Christianity signs her name ; 
 [slamism makes her mark. And the great doctors of 
 the Mussulmans, take their stand precisely where Jack 
 Cade took his a few years after printing had been 
 discovered. Jack and they both make it felony to be 
 Viund with a spelling-book, and sorcery to deal with 
 syntax.
 
 STTLE. 
 
 219 
 
 Yet with these differences, all of us alike, Pagan, 
 Mussulman, Christian, have practised the ai-ts of public 
 speaking as the most indispensable resource of public 
 administration and of private intrigue. Whether the 
 purpose were to pursue the interests of legislation, or 
 to conduct the business of jurisprudence, or to bring 
 the merits of great citizens pathethically before their 
 countrymen ; or (if the state were democratic enough) 
 oftentimes to explain the conduct of the executive 
 government— oftentimes, also, to prosecute a scheme 
 of personal ambition ; whether the audience were a 
 mob, a senate, a judicial tribunal, or an army ; equaUy 
 (though not in equal degrees; for the Pagan of twenty- 
 five hundred years back, and for us moderns, the 
 arts of public speaking, and consequently of prose a? 
 opposed to metrical composition, have been the capital 
 engine — the one great intellectual machine — of civil 
 
 life. 
 
 This, to some people, may seem a matter of course ; 
 
 ' would you have men speak in rhyme ? ' We answer, 
 
 that when society comes into a state of refinement, the 
 
 total uses of language are developed in common with 
 
 other arts ; but originally, and whilst man was in his 
 
 primitive condition of simplicity, it must have seemed 
 
 an unnatural, nay, an absurd, thing to speak in prose. 
 
 For in those elder days, the sole justifying or exciting 
 
 cases for a public harangue, would be cases connected 
 
 with impassioned motives. Rare they would be, as 
 
 they had need to be, where both the ' hon. gentleman' 
 
 who moves, and Hs 'hon. friend' who seconds, are 
 
 -equired to speak in Trimeter Iambic. Hence the 
 
 Viece«sity that the oracles should be delivered in verse. 
 
 Who ever heard of a prose oracle ? And hence, as
 
 820 STYLE. 
 
 Grecian taste expanded, the disagreeable criticisms 
 whispered about in Athens as to the coai-se quality of 
 the verses that proceeded from Delphi. It was like 
 bad Latin from Oxford. Apollo himself, to turn out 
 of his own temple, in the very age of Sophocles, 
 such Birmingham hexameters as sometimes astonished 
 Greece, was like our English court keeping a Stephen 
 Duck, the thresher, for the national poet-laureate, at a 
 time when Pope was fixing an era in the literature. 
 Metre fell to a discount in such learned times. But, 
 in itself, metre must always have been the earliest 
 vehicle for public enunciations of truth among men, 
 for these obvious reasons: — 1. That, if metre rises 
 above the standard of ordinary household life, so must 
 any truth of importance and singularity enough to 
 challenge a public utterance. 2. That, because re- 
 ligious communications will always have taken a 
 metrical form, by a natural association of feeling, 
 whatsoever is invested with a privileged character will 
 seek something of religious sanction, by assuming 
 the same external shape ; and 3. That expressions, or 
 emphatic verbal forms, which are naturally courted for 
 the sake of pointed effect, receive a justification from 
 metre, as being already a departure from common 
 usage to begin with, whereas, in plain prose, they 
 would appear so many afi'ectations. Metre is natu- 
 rally and necessarily adopted in cases of impassioned 
 themes, for the very obvious reason, that rhythmus is 
 both a cause of impassioned feeling, an ally of such 
 feeling, and a natural efl'ect of it ; but upon other 
 subjects not impassioned, metre is also a subtle ally, 
 because it serves to introduce, and to reconcile with 
 our sense of propriety, various arts of condensat'on.
 
 STYLE. 221 
 
 antithesis, and other rhetorical effects, which, without 
 the metre (as a key for harmonizing them) would strike 
 the feelings as unnatural, or as full of affectation. 
 Interrogations, for example, passionate ejaculations, 
 &c., seem no more than natural, when metre (acting 
 as a key) has attuned and prepared the mind for such 
 effects. The metre raises the tone of coloring, so as 
 to introduce richer tints, without shocking or harshly 
 jarring upon the presiding key, when without this 
 semi-conscious pitching of the expectations, the sensi- 
 bility would have been revolted. Hence, for the very 
 earliest stages of society, it will be mere nature that 
 prompts men to metre : it is a mode of inspiration — it 
 is a promise of something preternatural ; and less than 
 preternatural cannot be any possible emergency that 
 should call for a public address. Only great truths 
 could require a man to come forward as a spokesman : 
 he is then a sort of interpreter between God and man, 
 his creature. 
 
 At first, therefore, it is mere nature which prompts 
 metre. Afterwards, as truth begins to enlarge itself — 
 as truth loses something of its sanctity by descending 
 amongst human details — that mode of exalting it, and 
 of courting attention, is dictated by artifice, which 
 originally was a mere necessity of nature raised above 
 herself. For these reasons, it is certain that men, 
 challenging high authentic character, will continue to 
 epeak by metre for many generations after it has 
 ceased to be a mere voice of habitual impulse. What- 
 Boever claims an oracular authority, will take the or- 
 iinary external form of an oracle. And after it has 
 ceased to be a badge of inspiration, metre will be re- 
 gained as a badge of professional distinction ; — Py-
 
 222 STYLE. 
 
 thagoras, for instance, within five centuries of Christ, 
 Thales or Theognis, will adopt metre out of a second- 
 ary prudence ; Orpheus and the elder Sibyl, out of an 
 original necessity. 
 
 Those people are, therefore, mistaken who imagine 
 that prose is either a natural or a possible form of 
 composition in early states of society. It is such truth 
 only as ascends from the earth, not such as descends 
 from heaven, which can ever assume an unmetrical 
 form. Now, in the earliest states of society, all truth 
 that has any interest or importance for man will con- 
 nect itself with heaven. If it does not originally 
 come forward in that sacred character, if it does not 
 borrow its importance from its sanctity ; then, by an 
 inverse order, it will borrow a sanctity from its impor- 
 tance. Even agricultural truth, even the homeliest 
 truths of rural industry, brought into connection with 
 religious inspiration, will be exalted (like the common 
 culinary utensils in the great vision of the Jewish 
 prophet) and transfigured into vessels of glorious con- 
 secration. All things in this early stage of social man 
 are meant mysteriously, have allegoric values ; and 
 week-day man moves amongst glorified objects. So 
 that if any doctrine, principle, or system of truth, 
 should call for communication at all, infallibly the coiw- 
 munication will take the tone of a revelation ; and the 
 holiness of a revelation will express itself in the most 
 impassioned form — perhaps with accompaniments of 
 inusic, but certainly with metre. 
 
 Prose, therefore, strange as it may seem to say so, 
 was something of a discovery. If not great invention, 
 at least great courage would be required for the man 
 who should first swim without the bladders of metre
 
 STYLE. 223 
 
 It is all very easy talking, when you and your ances- 
 tors, for fifty generations back, have talked prose. But 
 that man naust have had triplex ces about his prcecor- 
 dia, who first dared to come forward with pure prose 
 to a people who had never heard anything but metre. 
 It was like the case of the first physician who dared to 
 lay aside the ample wig and gold-headed cane. All the 
 Jovian terrors of his professional being laid aside, he 
 was thrown upon his mere natural resources of skill 
 and o-ood sense. "Who was the first lion-hearted man 
 that ventured to make sail in this frail boat of prose ? 
 We believe the man's name is reputed to have been 
 Pherecydes. But as nothing is less worth remember- 
 ing than the mere hollow shell of a name, where all 
 the pulp and the kernel is gone, we shall presume 
 Herodotus to have been the first respectable artist in 
 prose. And, what was this worthy man's view of 
 prose ? From the way in which he connected his 
 several books or ' fyttes ' with the names of the muses, 
 and from the romantic style of his narratives, as well as 
 from his using a dialect which had certainly become a 
 poetic dialect, in literary Greece, it is pretty clear that 
 llerodotus stood, and meant to stand, on that isthmus 
 oetween the regions of poetry and blank unimpassioned 
 prose, which in modern literature is occupied by such 
 works as Mort d' Arthur. In Thucydides, we scf the 
 fcrst exhibition of stern philosophic prose. And, con- 
 eidering the very brief interval between the two writers, 
 who stand related to each other, in point of time, pretty 
 much as Dryden and Pope, it is quite impossible to 
 look for the solution of their characteristic diff"erence8 
 in the mere graduations of social development. Peri- 
 cles, as a young man, would most certainly ask Hero-
 
 224 STYLB. 
 
 dotus to dinner, if business or curiosity ever dre^w 
 that amiable writer to Athens. As an elderly man, 
 Pericles must often have seen Thucydides at his le- 
 vees ; although by that time the sacrifice of his ' social 
 pleasure ill exchanged for power,' may have abridged 
 his opportunity of giving ' feeds ' to literary men. 
 But will anybody believe that the mere advance of 
 social refinement, within the narrow period of one 
 man's public life, could bring about so marvellous a 
 change, as that the friend of his youth should natu- 
 radly write very much in the spirit of Sir John Man- 
 deville, and the friend of his old age, like Machiavel 
 or Gibbon ? No, no ; the diff'erence between these 
 two writers does not refiect the different aspects of 
 literary Greece at two eras so slightly removed, too 
 great to be measured by that scale ; as though those 
 of the picturesque Herodotus were a splendid semi- 
 barbarous generation, those of the meditative Thucy- 
 dides, speculative, political, experimental, — but we 
 must look to subjective diff'erences of taste and tem- 
 perament in the men. The men, by nature, and by 
 powerful determination of original sensibility, belong 
 to diff'erent orders of intellect. Herodotus was the 
 Froissart of antiquity. He was the man that should 
 have lived to record the Crusades. Thucydides, 
 on the other hand, was obviously the Tacitus of 
 Greece, who (had he been privileged to benefit by 
 some metempsychosis dropping him into congenial 
 scenes of modern history) would have made his elec- 
 tion for the Avars of the French League, or for our Par- 
 liamentary war, or for the colossal conflicts which grew 
 i)ut of the French Revolution. The one was the son 
 of nature, fascinated by the mighty powers of chance
 
 STYLE. 225 
 
 or of tragic destiny, as they are sten in elder times 
 moulding the form of empires, or training the currents 
 of revolutions. The other was the son of political spec- 
 ulation, delighting to trace the darker agencies which 
 brood in the mind of man — the subtle motives, the 
 combinations, the plots which gather in the brain of 
 ' dark viziers,' when entrusted with the fate of millions, 
 and the nation-wielding tempests which move at the 
 bidding of the orator. 
 
 But these subjective differences were not all ; they 
 led to objective differences, by determining each wri- 
 ter's mind to a separate object. Does any man fancy 
 that these two writers imagined, each for himself, the 
 same audience ? Or again, that each represented his 
 own audience as addressed from the same station ? 
 The earlier of the two, fidl of those qualities which 
 fit a man for producing an effect as an artist, mani- 
 festly comes forward in a theatrical character, and 
 addresses his audience from a theatrical station. Is it 
 readers whom he courts ? No, but auditors. Is it the 
 literary body whom he addresses — a small body every- 
 where ? No, but the public without limitation. Pub- 
 lic ! but what public? Not the public of Lacedsemon, 
 drunk with the gloomy insolence of self-conceit — not 
 the public of Athens, amiably vain, courteous, affable, 
 refined : No, it is the public of universal Hellas, an 
 august congress representing the total civilization of 
 the earth : so that of any man not known at Olympia, 
 orince, emperor, whatever he might call himself, if he 
 were not present in person or by proxy, you might 
 warrantably affirm that he was homo ignordbilis — a 
 f>er8on of whose existence nobody was bound to take 
 tiotice ; a man to be ignored by a grand jury. This 
 15
 
 226 STTXB. 
 
 representative champ de Mai, Herodotus addressed. 
 And in what character did he address it ? What char- 
 acter did he ascribe to the audience ? What character 
 did he assume to himself ? Them he addressed some- 
 times in their general character of human beings ; but 
 still having a common interest in a central net- work of 
 civilization, investing a certain ring-fence, beginning 
 in Sicily and Carthage, whence it ran round through 
 Lybia, Egypt, Syria, Persia, the Ionian belt or zone, 
 and terminating in the majestic region of Men — the 
 home of liberty — the Pharos of truth and intellectual 
 power — the very region in which they were all at that 
 moment assembled. There was such a collective body 
 dimly recognized at times by the ancients, as corres- 
 ponds to our modern Christendom, and having some 
 unity of possible interest by comparison with the un- 
 known regions of Scythias, Indias, and Ethiopias, 
 lying in a far wider circle beyond ; regions that, from 
 their very obscurity, and from the utter darkness of 
 their exterior relations, must at times have been looked 
 to with eyes of anxiety — as permanently harboring 
 that possible deluge of savage eruption which, about 
 one hundred and fifty years after, did actually swallow 
 up the Grecian colony of Bactria, (or Bokhara,) as 
 founded by Alexander ; swallowed it so suddenly and 
 80 effectually, that merely the blank fact of its tragical 
 catastrophe has reached posterity. It was surprised 
 probably in one night, like Pompeii by Vesuvius ; or, 
 like the planet itself by Noah's flood. Or more nearly 
 its fate resembled those starry bodies which have been 
 Been, traced, recorded, fixed in longitude and latitude 
 "or generations ; and then suddenly are observed to 
 je missing by some of our wandering telescopes tha/
 
 STYLE. 227 
 
 keep watch and ward over the starry heavens. The 
 agonies of a perishing world have been going on ; but 
 all is bright and silent in the heavenly host. Infinite 
 space has swallowed up the infinite agonies. Perhaps 
 the only record of Bactria was the sullen report of 
 some courier from Susa, who would come back with 
 his letters undelivered ; simply reporting that on reach- 
 ing such a ferry on some nameless river, or such an 
 outpost upon a heath, he found it in possession of a 
 fierce unknown race — the ancestors of future Affghans 
 or Tartars. 
 
 Such a catastrophe, as menacing by possibility the 
 whole of civilization, and under that hypothetical peril 
 as giving even to Greece herself an interest in the sta- 
 bility even of Persia her great enemy, a great resist- 
 ing mass interjacent between Greece and the unknown 
 enemies to the far north-east, or east, could not but 
 have mixed occasionally with Greek anticipations for 
 the future ; and in a degree quite inappreciable by ue 
 who know the geographical limits of Asia. To the 
 ancients, these were by possibility, in a strict sense, 
 infinite. The terror from the unknown Scythians of 
 the world was certainly vague and indistinct ; but, if 
 that disarmed the terror or broke its sting, assuredly 
 the very same cause would keep it alive : for the peril 
 ATOuld often swell upon the eye, merely from its un- 
 certain limits. Far oftener, however, those glorious 
 certainties revolved upon the Grecian imagination 
 which presented Persia in the character of her enemy, 
 than those remote possibilities which might connect 
 her as a common friend against some horrid enemy 
 from the infinite deserts of Asia. In this character it 
 vaa that Herodotus at times addressed the assembled
 
 228 
 
 STYLE. 
 
 Greece, at whose bar lie stood. That the intensity of 
 this patriotic idea intermitted at times ; that it was suf- 
 fered to slumber through entire books ; this was but an 
 artist's management which caused it to swell upon 
 the ear all the more sonorously, more clamorously, 
 more terrifically, when the lungs of the organ filled 
 once more with breath, when the trumpet stop was 
 opened, and the ' foudroyant ' style of the organist 
 commenced the hailstone chorus from Marathon. Here 
 came out the character in which Herodotus appeared. 
 The Iliad had taken Greece as she was during the 
 building of the first temple at Jerusalem — in the 
 era of David and Solomon — a thousand years before 
 Christ. The eagle's plume in her cap at that era 
 was derived from Asia. It was the Troad, it was 
 Asia that in those days constituted the great enemy of 
 Greece. Greece universal had been confederated 
 against the Asia of that day, and, after an Iliad of 
 woes, had triumphed. But now another era of fiv0 
 hundred years has passed since Troy. Again there 
 has been an universal war raging between Greece and 
 a great foreign potentate. Again this enemy of Greece 
 is called Asia. But what Asia ? The Asia of the Iliad 
 was a petty maritime Asia. But Asia now means Per- 
 sia; and Persia, taken in combination with its depend- 
 ences of Syria and Egypt, means the world, v oixov^tvri. 
 The frontier line of the Persian empire ' marched ' or 
 confined with the Grecian ; but now so vast was the 
 revolution effected by Cyrus, that, had not the Persians 
 been withheld by their dismal bigotry from cultivating 
 maritime facilities, the Greeks must have sunk under 
 the enormous power now brought to bear upon them, 
 A-t one blow the whole territory of what is now Turkey
 
 STYLE. 229 
 
 in Asia, viz. the whole of Anatolia and of Armenia, 
 had been extinguished as a neutral and interjacent 
 force for Greece. At one blow, by the battle of 
 Thymbra, the Persian armies had been brought nearer 
 by much more than a thousand miles to the gates of 
 Greece. 
 
 That danger it is necessary to conceive, in order to 
 to conceive that subsequent triumph. Herodotus — 
 whose family and nearest generation of predecessors 
 must have trembled after the thoughtless insult offered 
 to Sardis, under the expectation of the vast revenge 
 prepared by the great king — must have had his young 
 imagination filled and dilated with the enormous dis- 
 play of Oriental power, and been thus prepared to 
 understand the terrific collisions of the Persian forces 
 with those of Greece. He had heard in his travels 
 how the glorious result was appreciated in foreign 
 lands. He came back to Greece with a twofold freight 
 of treasures. He had two messages for his country. 
 One was — a report of all that was wonderful in 
 foreign lands ; all that was interesting from its novelty 
 or its vast antiquity ; all that was regarded by the 
 natives for its sanctity, or by foreigners with amaze- 
 ment, as a measure of colossal power in mechanics. 
 And these foreign lands, we must remember, consti- 
 tuted the total world to a Greek. Rome was yet in 
 her infant days, unheard of beyond Italy. Egypt and 
 the other dependencies of Persia composed the total 
 map south of Greece. Greece, with the Mediterra- 
 nean islands, and the eastern side of the Adriatic, to- 
 gether with Macedon and Thrace, made up the world 
 of Europe. Asia, which had not yet received the nar- 
 xow limitation imposed upon that word by Rome, was
 
 280 STYLE. 
 
 co-extensive with Persia ; and it might be divided into 
 Asia crs-Tigritana, and Asia frans-Tigritana ; the 
 Euxine and the Caspian were the boundaries to the 
 north ; and to one advancing further, the Oxus was the 
 northern boundary, and the Indus the eastern. The 
 Punjab, as far as the river Sutlege, that is, up to our 
 present British cantonments at Ludiana, was indis- 
 tinctly supposed to be within the jurisdiction of the 
 Great King. Probably he held the whole intervening 
 territory of the late Runjeet Singh, as now possessed 
 by the Sikhs. And beyond these limits all was a mere 
 path of ideal splendor, or a dull repetition of monoto- 
 nous barbarism. 
 
 The report which personal travels enabled Herodotus 
 to make of this extensive region, composing neither 
 more nor less than the total map of the terraqueous 
 globe as it was then supposed to exist, (all the rest 
 being a mere Nova Zembla in their eyes,) was one of 
 two revelations which the great traveller had to lay at 
 the feet of Greece. The other was a connected nar- 
 rative of their great struggle with the King of Persia. 
 The earth bisected itself into two parts — Persia and 
 Greece. All that was not Persia was Greece : all that 
 was not Greece was Persia. The Greek traveller was 
 prepared to describe the one section to the other sec- 
 tion ; and having done this, to relate in a connected 
 shape the recent tremendous struggle of the one sec- 
 tion with the other.rHere was Captain Cook fresh 
 from his triple circuftmavigation of the world : here 
 was Mungo Park fresh from the Niger and Timbuctoo : 
 tere was Bruce, fresh from the coy fountains of the 
 Nile : here was Phipps, Franklin, Parry, from the 
 Ajctic circle : here was Leo Africanus from Moorish
 
 STYLE. 231 
 
 palaces : here was ManJeville from Prester John, from 
 the Cham of Tartary, and from the golden cities of 
 Ilindostan ; from Agra and Lahore of the Great Mo- 
 gul. ' This was one side of the medal ; and on the 
 other was the patriotic historian who recorded what all 
 had heai'd by fractions, but none in the whole series. 
 Now, if we consider how rare was either character in 
 ancient times, how diflBcult it was to travel where no 
 license made it safe, where no preparations in roads, 
 inns, carriages, made it convenient ; that even five 
 centuries in advance of this era, little knowledge was 
 generally circulated of any region, unless so far as it 
 had been traversed by the Roman legions ; considering 
 the vast credulity of the audience assembled — a gulf 
 capable of-4}vallowing mountains ; and, on the other 
 hand, that: here was a man fresh from the Pyramids 
 and the Nile^^ from Tyre, from Babylon, and the tem- 
 ple of Belusj— a traveller who had gone in with his 
 sickle to a harvest yet untouched — that this same 
 man, considered as an historian, spoke of a struggle 
 with which the earth was still agitated ; that the people 
 who had triumphed so memorably in this war, hap- 
 pened to be the same people who were then listening ; 
 that the leaders in this glorious war, whose names had 
 already passed into spiritual powers, were the fathers 
 of the present audience ; combining into one picture 
 all these circumstances — one must admit that no such 
 meeting between giddy expectation, and the very ex- 
 cess of power to meet its most clamorous calls, is 
 ikely to have occurred before or since upon this earth. 
 Hither had assembled people from the most inland and 
 most illiterate parts of Greece ; people that would have 
 settled a pension for life upon any man who would
 
 232 STYLE. 
 
 have described to them so much as a crocodile or ich- 
 neumon. To these people, the year of his public reci- 
 tation would be the meridian year of theu- lives. He 
 saw that the whole scene would become almost a dra- 
 matic work of art ; in the mere gratification of their 
 curiosity, the audience might be passive and neutral ; 
 in the history of the war, they became almost actors, 
 as in a dramatic scene. This scenical position could 
 not escape the traveller-historian. His work was re- 
 cited with the exaggeration that belongs to scenic art. 
 It was read probably with gesticulations by one of 
 those thundering voices, which Aristophanes calls a 
 ' damnable ' voice, from its ear-piercing violence. 
 
 Prose is a thing so well known to all of us, most of 
 our ' little accounts ' from shoemakers, dress-makers, 
 &c. being made out in prose — most of our sorrows and 
 of our joys having been communicated to us through 
 prose, and very few indeed through metre, (unless on 
 St. Valentine's day,) that its further history, after leav- 
 ing its original Olympic cradle, must be interesting to 
 everybody. Who were they that next took up the lit- 
 erary use of Prose ? Confining our notice to people of 
 celebrity, we may say that the House of Socrates {Do- 
 mus Socralica is the expression of Horace) were thosp 
 who next attempted to popularize Greek prose ; viz. 
 the old gentleman himself, the founder of the concern, 
 and his two apprentices, Plato and Xenophon. "We 
 acknowledge a sneaking hatred towards the whole 
 household, founded chiefly on the intense feeling we 
 entertain that all three were humbugs. We own the 
 Btony impeachment. Aristotle, who may be looked 
 upon as literary grandson to Socrates, is quite a difier- 
 ent person. But for the rest we cherish a .sentimenta.
 
 STYLE. 
 
 233 
 
 I may we call it a Platonic?) disgust. As relates to 
 the style, however, in which they have communicated 
 their philosophy, one feature of peculiarity is too re- 
 markable to pass without comment. Some years ago, 
 in one of our four or five Quarterly Reviews, (Theolo- 
 gical it was, Foreign, or else Westminster,) a critical 
 opinion was delivered with respect to a work of Coler- 
 id<xe's which opens a glimpse into the true philosophy 
 ofVose composition. It was not a very good-natured 
 opinion in that situation, since it was no more true of 
 Coleridge than it is of every other man who adopts the 
 same aphoristic form of expression for his thoughts ; 
 but it was eminently just. Speaking of Coleridge's 
 ' Aphorisms,' the reviewer observed — that this de- 
 tached and insulated form of delivering thoughts was, 
 in efi-ect, an evasion of all the difficulties connected 
 with composition. Every man as he walks through 
 the streets, may contrive to jot down an independent 
 thought ; a short-hand memorandum of a great truth. 
 So far as that purpose is concerned, even in tumultu 
 ous London. 
 
 ' Pur» sunt platen, nihil ut meditantibus obstet.' 
 
 Standing on one leg you may accomplish this. The 
 labor of composition begins when you have to put your 
 separate threads of thought into a loom ; to weave them 
 into a continuous whole ; to connect, to introduce them ; 
 to blow them out or expand them ; to carry them to a 
 close All this evil is evaded by the aphoristic form. 
 This one remark, we repeat, lifts up a corner of that 
 curtain which hangs over the difficult subjects of style 
 and composition. Indicating what is not in one form, 
 It points to what is in others. It was an original re-
 
 234 si^chiL. 
 
 mark, we doubt not, to the reviewer. But it is too 
 weighty and just to have escaped meditative men in 
 former times ; and accordingly the very same remark 
 will br found ane hundred and fifty years ago expanded 
 in the Huetiana. 
 
 But what relation has this remark to the House of 
 Socrates ? Did they Avrite by aphorisms ? No, cer- 
 tainly ; but they did what labors with the same radical 
 defect, considered in relation to the true difficulties of 
 composition. Let us dedicate a paragraph to these 
 great dons of literature. If we have any merely Eng- 
 lish scholars amongst our readers, it may be requisite 
 first to inform them that Socrates himself wrote noth- 
 ing. He was too much occupied with his talking — 
 ' ambitiosa loquela.' In this respect, Socrates differed, 
 as in some others that we could mention, from the late 
 Mr, Coleridge — who found time both for talking and 
 for writing at the least ten volumes octavo. From the 
 pupils of Socrates it is that we collect his pretended 
 philosophy ; and as there were only two of these pupils 
 who published, and as one of them intensely contradicts 
 the other, it would be found a hard matter at Nisi 
 Prius to extract any verdict as to what it was that 
 constituted the true staple of the Socratic philosophy. 
 We fear that any jury, who undertook that question, 
 would finally be carted to the bounds of the county, 
 and shot into the adjacent county like a ton of coals. 
 For Xenophon uniformly introduces the worthy hen- 
 pecked philosopher as prattling innocent nothings, 
 more limpid than small beer ; whilst Plato never lets 
 him condescend to any theme below those of Hermes 
 Trismegistus, or Thomas Aquinas. One or other must 
 be a liar. And the manner of the philosopher, under
 
 sxYiiE. 235 
 
 these two Boswellian reporters, is not less different 
 than his matter: with Xenophon, he reminds us much 
 of an elderly hen, superannuated a little, performing 
 ' the hen's march,' and clucking vociferously ; with 
 Plato, he seems much like a deep-mouthed houad in a 
 chase after some unknown but perilous game ; much as 
 such a hound is described by Wordsworth ranging ovei 
 the aerial heights of Mount Righi, his voice at times 
 muffled by mighty forests, and then again swelling as 
 he emerges upon the Alpine breezes ; whilst the vast 
 intervals between the local points from which the 
 intermitting voice ascends, proclaim the storm-like 
 pace at which he travels. In Plato, there is a gloomy 
 grandeur at times from the elementary mysteries of 
 man's situation and origin, snatches of music from 
 some older and Orphic philosophy, which impress a 
 vague feeling of solemnity towards the patriarch of the 
 school, though you can seldom trace his movement 
 through all this high and vapory region ; you would be 
 happy, therefore, to believe that there had been one 
 word of truth in ascribing such colloquies to Socrates ; 
 but how can that be, when you recollect the philosophic 
 vappa of Xenophon, seems to pass the deciphering 
 power of QEdipus. 
 
 Now, this body of inexplicable discord between the 
 two evangelists of Socrates, as to the whole sources 
 from which he drew his philosophy, as to the very 
 wells from which he raised it, and the mode of medi- 
 cating the draught, makes it the more worthy of remark 
 that both should have obstinately adopted the same 
 disagreeable form of composition. Both exhibit the 
 whole of their separate speculations under the form of 
 dialogue. It is always Socrates and Crito, or Socrates
 
 83G sxYiE. 
 
 and Phaedrus, or Socrates and Ischomaclius ; in fact, 
 Socrates and some man of straw or good-humored nine- 
 pin set up to be bowled down as a matter of course. 
 How inevitably the reader feels his fingers itching, to 
 take up the cudgels instead of Crito for one ten min- 
 utes ! Had we been favored with an interview, we can 
 answer for it that the philosopher should not have had 
 it all his own way : there should have been a ' scratch' 
 at least between us ; and instead of waiting to see Crito 
 punished without delivering one blow that would ' have 
 made a dent in a pound of butter,' posterity should 
 have formed a ring about us, crying out — ' Pull baker, 
 pull devil ' — according as the accidents of the struggle 
 went this way or that. If dialogue must be the form, 
 at least it should not have been collusive dialogue. 
 Whereas, with Crito and the rest of the men who were 
 in training for the part of disputants, it was a matter of 
 notoriety — that, if they presumed to put in a sly thrust 
 under the ribs of the philosopher, those about Socrates, 
 of amfi Tov 2(uy.QaTi]v, would kick them into the kennel. 
 It was a permanent ' cross ' that was fought throughout 
 life between Socrates and his obsequious antagonists. 
 
 As Plato and Xenophon must have hated each other 
 with a theological hatred, it is a clear case that they 
 tvould not have harmonized in anything if they had 
 supposed it open to evasion. They would have got 
 another atmosphere had it been possible. Diverging 
 from each other in all points beside, beyond doubt 
 they would have diverged as to this form of dialogue, 
 had they not conceived that it was essential to the 
 business of philosophy. It is plain from this one fact, 
 how narrow was the range of conception which the 
 Socratic school applied to the possible m.odes of deal-
 
 STYLE. 237 
 
 ing %vitli polemic truth. Tliey i epresented the case 
 thus : — Truth, they fancied, offered itself by separate 
 units, by moments, (to borrow a word from dynamics,) 
 by what Cicero calls ' apices rerum ' and ' punctiun- 
 culae.' Each of these must be sepai-ately examined. 
 It was like the items in a disputed account. There 
 must be an auditor to check and revise each severally 
 for itself. This process of auditing could only be 
 carried on through a brisk dialogue. The philosopher 
 in monologue was like a champion at a tournament 
 with nobody to face him. He was a chess-player with 
 no opponent. The game could not proceed. But how 
 mean and limited a conception this was, which lay as a 
 basis for the whole Socratic philosophy, becomes appa- 
 rent to any man who considers any ample body of truth, 
 whether polemic truth or not, in all its proportions. 
 Take Warbirrton's Divine Legation of Moses, and 
 imagine a Socratic man dealing with that. How does 
 "Warburton establish that Moses held such a legation ? 
 He lays dowTi a syllogism, the major of w'hich asserts a 
 general law wdth regard to false or unsound religions, 
 — viz. that no such religion could sustain itself, or 
 rear itself, to any height or duration without the aid 
 of a particular doctrine, viz. — the doctrine of a 
 resurrection. This is the major ; then for his minor, 
 Warburton maintains, that the Mosaic religion did 
 sustain itself wdthout that doctrine. Whence the con- 
 clusion follows formally — that, having accomplished 
 what was hopeless for a merely human invention, 
 the Mosaic dispensation could not have been such a 
 human invention ; that it enjoyed a secret support 
 rom God ; and that Moses was truly what he repre- 
 sented himself — God's ambasspdor. Consider how
 
 238 STYLE. 
 
 little the Platonic and Xenophontic mode of philoso* 
 phizing would apply to this case. You may see fit to 
 deny the entire major proposition of the bishop, and 
 yet you may find it impossible to quarrel with the 
 separate arguments, with each of them or with all 
 of them, on which the major is buUt. All may be 
 unexceptionable ; and yet, when the record is closed, 
 you may see cause to say, — ' Bishop, your materials 
 are g3od ; but they are not strong enough to support 
 the weighty column which you have built upon them.' 
 But this is an objection which cannot be made until 
 you have heard him to the end. You must suspend ; 
 whereas the Socratic man never does suspend. A 
 man who brings an alphabet of reasons, which are 
 professedly to avail cumulatively in proof of his thesis, 
 will not consider himself answered because you object 
 to P or Q amongst his arguments. ' My proofs are 
 separate and independent,' he replies ; ' it is my glory 
 that I can afibrd to give you a pawn or so, and yet 
 win the game.' Another mode of proceeding against 
 the bishop would be this : — You might concede his 
 major, and utterly deny, as many men have denied, 
 his minor. But whether joxi see cause to go against 
 the upper or lower proposition ; against the rule, or 
 against the subsumption under the rule ; equally you 
 find that the Socratic mode of process is quite unavail- 
 ing, or availing only by accident. And even this is 
 not by any means the worst case supposable. Here, 
 by the supposition, you have a long ti-ain of arguments, 
 which may be valid as a cumulus, notwithstanding that, 
 Socratically, you might find this or that in particular 
 to be a hollow nut. And again, such a train may be 
 supposed, to which, Socratically, you force an assen*
 
 STYLE. 239 
 
 tenatim and articulatim ; all the items, what the Ro- 
 mans called the nomina in a creditor's account, are 
 unimpeachable ; and yet, as a whole, as the ' tottle of 
 a whole,' you protest against them as insufficient for 
 the prohandum. They are good ; but not good for so 
 much. They are available, and for the length of a 
 mile, suppose ; but they do not reach the three miles 
 of the object in question. In the first case, Socrates 
 negatives some of the parts, and yet he cannot nega- 
 tive the result. He is partially Wctorious, and yet is 
 beaten as to the whole. In the second case, Socrates 
 affirms all the parts, and yet cannot affirm the result. 
 He is universally victorious in the detail, and yet is 
 beaten upon the whole question. Yet, in all this, we 
 repeat — the Socratic weakness is not adequately 
 exposed. There is a far larger and subtler class of 
 cases where the arguments for and against are not 
 susceptible of this separate valuation. One is valid 
 only through and by a second, which second again is 
 involved in a third ; and so on. Thus, by way of a 
 brief instance, take all the systems of political economy 
 which have grown up since Turgot and Quesnel. 
 They are all polemic — that is, all have moulded 
 themselves in hostility to some other ideas — all had 
 their birth in opposition. But it would be impossible 
 to proceed Socratically ^\^th any one of them. If you 
 should attempt to examine Ricardo sentence by sen- 
 tence, or even chapter by chapter, his apologist would 
 .oudly resist such a process as inapplicable. You must 
 hold on — you must keep fast hold of certain principles 
 nntil you have time to catch hold of certain others — 
 seven or eight, suppose ; and then from the whole 
 taken in continuation, but not from any one as an
 
 240 STYLE. 
 
 insulated principle, you come into a power of adjudi- 
 cating upon the pretensions of the whole theory. The 
 doctrine of value, for example — could you understand 
 that taken apart ? could you value it apart ? As a 
 Socratic logician, could you say of it either affirmatur 
 or negatur, until you see it coming round and revolving 
 in the doctrines of rent, profits, machinery, &c., which 
 are so many functions of value ; and which doctrines 
 first react with a weight of verification upon the other ? 
 
 These, unless parried, are knock-down blows to the 
 Socratic, and therefore to the Platonic philosophy, if 
 treated as a modus philosophandi ; and if that philoso- 
 phy is treated as a body of doctrines apart from any 
 modus or ratio docendi, we should be glad to hear 
 what they are. For we never could find any either in 
 Plato or Xenophon, which are insisted on as essential. 
 Accidental hints and casual suggestions cannot be 
 viewed as doctrines in that sense which is necessary 
 to establish a separate school. And all the German 
 Tiedemanns and Tennemanns, the tedious men and the 
 tenpenny-men, that have written their twelve or their 
 eighteen volumes viritim upon Plato, will find it hard 
 to satisfy their readers unless they make head against 
 these little objections ; because these objections seem 
 to impeach the very method of the ' Socraticae Chartse,' 
 and except as the authors or illustrators of a method 
 the Socratici are no school at all. 
 
 But are not we travelling a little out of our proper 
 field, in attacking this method ? Our business was 
 with this method considered as a form of style, not 
 considered as a form of logic. True, O rigorous 
 reader. Yet digressions and moderate excursions have 
 a license. Besides which, on strict consideration.
 
 STYLE 241 
 
 doubts arise whether we have been digressing. Foi 
 whatsoever acted as a power on Greek prose, through 
 many ages, whatsoever gave it a bias towards any one 
 characteristic excess, becomes important in virtue of 
 its relations to our subject. Now, the form of dialogue 
 so obstinately maintained by the earliest philosophers, 
 who used prose as the vehicle of their teaching, had 
 the unhappy effect of impressing from the earliest era 
 tjf Attic literature a colloquial taint upon the prose 
 literature of that country. The great authority of 
 Socrates, maintained for ages by all sorts of fables, 
 naturally did much to strengthen this original twist in 
 the prose style. About fifty years after the death of 
 Socrates, the writings of Aristotle were beginning to 
 occupy the attention of Greece ; and in them we see 
 as resolute a departure from the dialogue form as in 
 his elders of the same house the adherence to that 
 form had been servile and bigoted. His style, though 
 arid from causes that will hereafter be noticed, was 
 much more dignified, or at least more grave and suit- 
 able to philosophic speculation than that of any man 
 before him. Contemporary with the early life of 
 Socrates was a truly great man, Anaxagoras, the 
 friend and reputed preceptor of Pericles. It is prob- 
 able he may have written in the style of Aristotle. 
 Having great systematic truths to teach, such as solved 
 existing phenomena, and not such as raised fresh phe- 
 nomena for future solution, he would naturally adopt 
 the form of continuous exposition. Nor do we at this 
 moment remember a case Df any very great man who 
 had any real and novel truth to communicate, having 
 lidopted the form of dialogue, excepting only the case of 
 Galileo. Plato, indeed, like Galileo, demanded geoni- 
 16
 
 242 STYLE. 
 
 e try as a qualification in his students — that is, in those 
 who paid him a didaxTQov or fee for the privilege of per- 
 sonally attending his conversations : but he demanded 
 no such qualification in his readers ; or else we can 
 assure him that very few copies of his Opera Omnia 
 would have heen sold in Athens. This low qualifica- 
 tion it was for the readers of Plato, and still more for 
 those of Xenophon, which operated to difi'use the rep- 
 utation of Socrates. Besides, it was a rare thing in 
 Greece to see two men sounding the trumpet on behalf 
 of a third. And we hope it is not ungenerous to sus- 
 pect, that each dallied with the same purpose as our 
 Chatterton and Macpherson, viz. to turn round on the 
 public when once committed and compromised by 
 some unequivocal applause, saying, ' Gentlemen of 
 Athens, this idol Socrates is a phantom of my brain : 
 as respects the philosophy ascribed to him, I am Soc- 
 rates.' 
 
 But in what mode does the conversational taint, which 
 we trace to the writings of the Socratici, enforced by the 
 imaginary martyrdom of Socrates, express itself? In 
 what forms of language ? By what peculiarities ? By 
 what defects of style ? We Avill endeavor to explain. 
 One of the Scaligers (if we remember it was the elder,) 
 speaking of the Greek article 6, »,, to, called it loqua- 
 cissimcB gentis Jlaiellum. Now, pace superhissimi viri, 
 this seems nonsense ; because the use of the article 
 is not capricious, but grounded in the very structure 
 and necessities of the Greek language. Garrulous or 
 not, the poor men were obliged by the philosophy of 
 their tongue to use the article in certain situations. 
 And, to say the truth, these situations were very muck 
 »he same as in English. Allowing for a few cases of
 
 STYLE. 
 
 243 
 
 proper names, participles, or adjectives postponed to 
 their substantives, &c., the two general functions of 
 the article were, — 1, to individualize, as, e. g. ' It is 
 not any sword that will do, I will have the sword of my 
 father ; ' and 2, the very opposite function, viz., to 
 generalize in the highest degree — a use which our 
 best English grammars wholly overlook — as e. g. 
 « Let the sword give way to the gown ; ' not that par- 
 ticular sword, but every sword, where each is used as 
 a representative symbol of the corresponding profes- 
 sions. ' The peasant presses on the kibes of the 
 courtier,' where the class is indicated by the individual. 
 In speaking again of diseases, and the organs affected, 
 we usually accomplish this generalization by means of 
 the definite article. We say, ' He suffered from a 
 headache ; ' but also we say, ' from the headache ; ' 
 and invariably we say, ' He died of the stone,' &c. 
 And though we fancy it a peculiarity of the French 
 language to say, ' Le ccEur lui etoit navre de douleur,' 
 yet we ourselves say, ' The heart was affected in his 
 case.' In all these uses of the definite article, there is 
 little real difference between the Greek language and 
 our own. The main diflerence is in the negative use 
 — in the meaning implied by the absence of the article, 
 which, with the Greeks, expresses our article a, but 
 with us is a form of generalization. In all this there 
 was nothing left free to the choice. And Scaliger had 
 no right to find any illustration of Greek levity in what 
 was unavoidable. 
 
 But what we tax as undignified in the Greek prose 
 jtyle, as a badge of garrulity, as a taint from which 
 the Greek prose never cleansed itself, are all those 
 forms of lively colloquialism, with the fretfulness, and
 
 244 STYLE. 
 
 hurry, and demonstrative eneigy cf people undulv 
 excited by bodily presence and by ocular appeals to 
 their sensibility. Such a style is picturesque no doubt ; 
 so is the Scottish dialect of low life as first employed 
 in novels by Sir Walter Scott : that dialect greatly 
 assisted the characteristic expression : it furnished the 
 benefit of a Doric dialect ; but what man in his senses 
 would employ it in a grave work, and speaking in his 
 own person ? Now, the colloquial expletives, so pro- 
 fusely employed by Plato, his uqu, his ye, &c., the forms 
 of his sentences, the forms of his transitions, and other 
 intense peculiarities of the chattering man, as opposed 
 to the meditating man, have crept over the face of 
 Greek literature ; and though some people think every 
 thing holy which is printed in Greek characters, we 
 must be allowed to rank these forms of expression as 
 mere vulgarities. Sometimes, in Westmoreland, if 
 you chance to meet an ancient father of his valley, 
 one who is thoroughly vernacular in his talk, being 
 unsinged by the modern furnace of revolution, you 
 may have a fancy for asking him how far it is to the 
 next town. In which case, you will receive for answer 
 pretty nearly the following words : — ' WTiy like, it's 
 gaily nigh like, to four mile like.' Now, if the pruri- 
 ency of your curiosity should carry you to torment and 
 vex this aged man, by pressing a special investigation 
 into this word like, the only result is likely to be that 
 you will kill him, and do yourself no good. Call it an 
 expletive, indeed ! a filling up ! Why, to him it is the 
 only indispensable part of the sentence ; the sole 
 fixture. It is the balustrade which enables him to 
 descend the stairs of conversation, without falling over- 
 board ; and if the word were proscribed by Parliament,
 
 STTiE. 245 
 
 he would have no resource but in everlasting silence. 
 Now, the expletives of Plato are as gross, and must 
 have been, to the Athenian, as unintelligible as those 
 of the Westmoreland peasant. It is true the value, the 
 effect to the feelings, was secured by daily use, and 
 by the position in the sentence. But so it is to the 
 English peasant. Like in his use is a modifying, a 
 restraining particle, which forbids you to understand 
 anything in a dangerous, unconditional sense. But 
 then, again, the Greek particle of transition, that 
 eternal Jt, and the introductory formula of ^tv and 
 it, however earnestly people may fight for them, be- 
 cause in fact Greek, is now past mending. The St 
 is strictly equivalent to the whereby of a sailor : 
 ' whereby I went to London ; whereby I was robbed ; 
 whereby I found the man that robbed me.' All rela- 
 tions, all modes of succession or transition are indicated 
 by one and the same particle. This could arise, even 
 as a license, only in the laxity of conversation. But the 
 most offensive indication of the conversational spirit, as 
 presiding in Greek prose, is to be found in the morbid 
 energy of oaths scattered over the face of every prose 
 composition which aims at rhetorical effect. The 
 literature is deformed with a constant roulade of ' by 
 Jove,' 'by Minerva,' &c., as much as the conversation 
 of high-bred Englishmen in the reign of Charles IT. 
 In both cases, this habit belonged to a state of tran- 
 sition ; and if the prose literature of Greece had been 
 cultivated by a succession of authors as extended as 
 that of England, it would certainly have outworn this 
 badge of spurious energy. That it did not, is a proof 
 that the Greek literature did not reach the consumma- 
 tion of art.
 
 246 STYLE. 
 
 PAKT III. 
 
 Reader, you are beginning to suspect us. ' How 
 long do we purpose to detain people ? ' For anything 
 that appears, we may be designing to write on to the 
 twentieth century ; for twice thirty years. ' And 
 whither are we going?' Towards what object? 
 which is as urgent a quaere as how far. Perhaps 
 we may be leading you into treason ; or (which indeed 
 is pretty much the same thing) we may be paving the 
 way to ' Repeal.' You feel symptoms of doubt and 
 restiveness ; and, like Hamlet with his father's ghost, 
 you will follow us no further unless we explain what it 
 is that we are in quest of. 
 
 Our course, then, for the rest of our progress, the 
 outline of our method, will pursue the following ob- 
 jects. We shall detain you a little longer on the 
 Grecian prose literature ; and we shall pursue that 
 literature within the gates of Latium. What was the 
 Grecian idea of style, what the Roman, will appear 
 as a deduction from this review. With respect to the 
 Greeks, we shall endeavor to show that they had not 
 arrived at a full expanded consciousness of the sepa- 
 rate idea expressed by style ; and, in order to ac- 
 count for this failure, we shall point out the deflexion 
 — the bias — which was impressed upon the Greek 
 speculations in this particular, by the tendency of their 
 civil life. That was made important in the eyes of 
 the speculative critic, which was indispensable for the 
 actual practitioner ; that was indispensable for the ac- 
 tual practitioner, which was exacted by the course of 
 public ambition. The political aspirant, who needed 
 a command of fluent eloquence, sought for so mucli
 
 STYLE. 249 
 
 wluch lie will be resisted. Were this done, we should 
 no longer see those incoherent sketches which are 
 now circulating in the world upon questions of taste, 
 of science, of practical address, as applied to the 
 management of style and rhetoric : the public ear 
 would no longer be occupied by feeble Frenchmen — 
 RoUin, Rapin, Batteux, Bonhours, Du Bos, and id 
 genus omne ; nor by the elegant but desultory Blair ; 
 nor by scores of others who bring an occasional acute- 
 ness or casual information to this or that subsection of 
 their duty, whilst (taken as general guides) they are 
 universally insufficient : — No ; but the business of 
 rhetoric, the management of our mother-tongue in 
 all offices to which it can be applied, would become as 
 much a matter of systematic art, as regular a subject 
 for training and mechanic discipline, as the science of 
 discrete quantity in Arithmetic, or of continuous quan- 
 tity in Geometry. But will not that be likely to im- 
 press a character of mechanic monotony upon style^ 
 like the miserable attempts at reforming handwriting ? 
 Look at them ; touch them ; or, if you are afraid of 
 soiling your fingers, hold them up with the tongs ; they 
 reduce all characteristic varieties of writing to one 
 form of blank identity, and that the very vilest form 
 of scribbling which exists in Europe, viz. to the 
 wooden scratch (as if traced -ndth a skewer) univer- 
 sally prevailing amongst French people. Vainly would 
 Aldorisius apply his famous art, (viz. the art of 
 deciphering a man's character from handwriting,) to 
 the villanous scrawls wnich issue from this modern 
 .aboratory of pseudo-calligraphy. All pupils under 
 Jiese systems Avrite alike : the predestined thief is 
 confounded with the patriot or martyr; the innocent
 
 250 STYLE. 
 
 young girl with tlie old hag that watches country 
 wagons for victims. In the same indistinguishable 
 character, so far as this reforming process is con- 
 cerned, would Joseph Hume sign a motion for re- 
 trenching three half-crowns jjer annum from the 
 orphan daughter of a man who had died in battle ; 
 and Queen Adelaide write a subscription towards a 
 fresh church for carrying on war, from generation to 
 generation, upon sin and misery. 
 
 Now, if a mechanic system of training for Style 
 would have the same levelling effects as these false 
 calligraphies, better by far that we should retain our 
 old ignorance. If art is to terminate in a killing 
 monotony, welcome the old condition of inartificial 
 simplicity ! — So say you, reader : aye, but so say we 
 This does not touch us : — The mechanism we speak 
 of will apply to no meritorious qualities of style, but to 
 its faults, and, above all, to its awkwardnesses ; in fact, 
 to all that now constitutes the friction of style ; the 
 needless joltings and retardations of our fluent motion. 
 As to the motion itself, in all that is positive, in its 
 derivation, in its exciting impulses, in its speed, and its 
 characteristic varieties, it will remain unaffected. The 
 modes of human feeling are inexhaustible ; the forms 
 by which feeling connects itself with thought are inde- 
 teasibly natural ; the channels through which both 
 impress themselves upon language are infinite. All 
 these are imperturbable by human art : they are past 
 the reach of mechanism : you might as well be afraid 
 that some steam-engine — Atlas, suppose, or Samson, 
 (whom the Germans call Simpson,) — should perfid- 
 iously hook himself to the earth's axis, and run away 
 wdth us to Jupiter. Let Simpson do his worst, we defy
 
 STYLE. 25) 
 
 him. And so of style : in that sense, under which we 
 all have an interest in its free movements, it will foi 
 ever remain free. It wUl defy art to control it. In 
 that sense, under which it ever can be mechanized, we 
 have all an interest in wishing that it should he so. 
 Our final object therefore is a meritorious one, with no 
 intermixture of evil. This being explained, and our 
 course onwards having been mapped out, let us now 
 proceed with our work, first recapitulating in direct 
 juxtaposition with each other the points of our future 
 movement : — 
 
 1 . Greek and Latin literature we shall examine only 
 for the sake of appraising or deducing the sort of ideas 
 which they had upon the subject of style. It will ap- 
 pear that these ideas were insufficient. At the best 
 they were tentative. 2. From them, however, may be 
 derived a hint, a dim suggestion, of the true question 
 in arrear ; and, universally, that goes a great way 
 towards the true answer. ' Dimidium facti^ says the 
 Roman proverb, ' qui lene ccepit, habit.'' To have 
 made a good beginning is one-half of the work. Pru- 
 dens interrogatio, says a wise modern ; to have shaped 
 your question skilfully, is, in that sense, and with a 
 view to the answer, a good beginning. 3. Having 
 laid this foundation towards an answer, we shall then 
 attempt the answer itself. 4. After which, that is, 
 after removing to the best of our power such difficul- 
 ties to the higher understanding as beset the subject 
 C'f style, rhetoric, composition, having (if we do not 
 greatly delude ourselves) removed the one great bar 
 to a right theory of style, or a practical discipline of 
 Btyle, we shall leave to some future work of more suit- 
 ible dimensions the filling up of our outline. Our-
 
 252 STYLE. 
 
 selves we shall confine to such instant suggestions — 
 practical, popular, broadly intelligible, as require no 
 extensive preparation to introduce them on the author's 
 part ; no serious effort to understand them on the 
 reader's. "Whatever is more than this, will better suit 
 with the variable and elastic proportions of a separate 
 book, than with the more rigid proportions of a mis- 
 cellaneous journal. 
 
 Coming back, then, for hasty purposes, to Greek 
 literature, we wish to direct the reader's eye upon a 
 remarkable phenomenon in the history of that litera- 
 ture, and subsequently of all human genius ; not so 
 remarkable, but that multitudes must have noticed it, 
 and yet remarkable enough to task a man's ingenuity 
 in accounting for it. The earliest known occasion, on 
 which this phenomenon drew a direct and strong gaze 
 upon itself, was in a little historical sketch composed 
 by a Roman officer during the very opening era of 
 Christianity. We speak of the Historia Romano, 
 written and published about the very year of the Cru- 
 cifixion by Velleius Paterculus in the court of Tiberius 
 Caesar, the introduction to which presents us with a 
 very interesting outline of general history. The style 
 is sometimes clumsy and un-\vieldy, but nervous, mas- 
 culine, and such as became a soldier. In higher qual- 
 ities, in thoughtfulness, and the spirit of finer observa- 
 tion, it is far beyond the standard of a mere soldier ; 
 and it shows, in common with many other indications 
 lying on the face of Roman society at that era, how 
 profoundly the great struggles that had recently con- 
 vulsed the world must have terminated in that effect 
 ivhich followed in the wake of the French Revolution ; 
 riz. in a vast stimulation to the meditative facultiei
 
 STYLE. 253 
 
 of man. The agitation, the frenzy, the sorrow of the 
 times, reacted upon the human intellect, and forced 
 men into meditation. Their own nature was held up 
 before them in a sterner form. They were compelled 
 to contemplate an ideal of man, far more colossal than 
 's brought forward in the tranquil aspects of society ; 
 and they were often engaged, whether they would or 
 not, with the elementary problems of social philosophy. 
 Mere danger forced a man into thoughts which else 
 were foreign to his habits. Mere necessity of action 
 forced him to decide. Such changes went along with 
 the Reformation ; such changes went along with the 
 French Revolution ; such changes went along with the 
 great recasting of Roman society under the two earliest 
 Caesars. In every page of Paterculus we read the 
 swell and agitation of waters subsiding from a deluge. 
 Though a small book, it is tumid with revolutionary 
 life. And something also is due, no doubt, to the ex- 
 ample of the mighty leader in the Roman Revolution, 
 to the intellectual and literary tastes diffused by him — 
 
 * The foremost man of all this world,' 
 
 who had first shown the possibility of uniting the mili- 
 tary leader's truncheon with the most brilliant stylus of 
 the rhetorician. How wonderful and pleasing to find 
 such accomplishments of accurate knowledge, compre- 
 hensive reading, and study, combined mth so search- 
 ing an intellect, in a man situated as Paterculus, reared 
 amongst camps, amidst the hurry of forced marches, 
 and under the privations of solitary outposts. The old 
 race of hirsute centurions — how changed I — how per- 
 fectly regenerated by the influence of three Caesars in 
 succession applying a paternal encouragement to lite- 
 rature.
 
 254 STYLE. 
 
 Admiring this man so much, we have paused to 
 review the position in which he stood. Now, recur- 
 ring to that remark, (amongst so many original re- 
 marks,) by which, in particular, he connects himself 
 with our subject, we may venture to say — that, if it 
 was a very just remark for his experience, it is far 
 more so for ours. What he remarked, what he founded 
 upon a review of two nations and two literatures — we 
 may now countersign by an experience of eight or 
 nine. His remark was — upon the tendency of intel- 
 lectual power to gather in clusters ; its unaccountable 
 propensity (he thought it such) to form into separate 
 insulated groups. This tendency he illustrates first in 
 *wo cases of Grecian literature. Perhaps that might 
 have been an insufficient basis for a general theory. 
 But it occurred to Paterculus in confirmation of his 
 doctrine, that the very same tendency had reappeared 
 in his native literature. The same phenomenon had 
 manifested itself, and, more than once, in the history 
 of Roman intellect ; the same strong nisus of great 
 wits to gather and crystallize about a common nu- 
 cleus. That marked gregariousness in human genius 
 had taken place amongst the poets and orators of 
 Rome, which had previously taken place amongst the 
 poets, orators, and artists of Greece. What impor- 
 tance was attached by Paterculus to this interesting 
 remark, what stress he laid upon its appreciation by 
 the reader, is evident from the emphatic manner in 
 which he introduces it, as well as from the consc'ous 
 disturbance of the symmetry which he incurs rather 
 than suppress it. These are his words : — ' Notwith- 
 Itanding that this section of my work has considerably 
 jutrun the proportions of that model which I had laii
 
 STYLE. 256 
 
 down for my guidance, and although perfectly aware 
 that, in circumstances of hurry so unrelenfiug, which 
 like a revolving wheel or the eddy of rapid waters, 
 allows me no respite or paiise, I am summoned rather 
 to omit what is necessary than to court what is re- 
 dundant ; still, I cannot prevail on myself to forbear 
 from uttering and giving a pointed expression to a 
 thought which I have often revolved in my mind, but 
 to this hour have not been able satisfactorily to account 
 for in theory : {nequeo tamen temperare mihi quin rem 
 scepe agitatam animo meo, neque ad liquidiun ratione 
 perductam, signem stylo.') Having thus bespoke the 
 reader's special attention, the writer goes on to ask if 
 any man can sufficiently wonder on observing that 
 eminent genius, in almost every mode of its develop- 
 ment, {eminentissima cujusque professionis ingenia,) 
 had gathered itself into the same narrow ring-fence of 
 a single generation. Intellects that in each several 
 department of genius were capable of distinguished 
 execution, {cujusque clari operis capacia ingenia,) 
 had sequestrated themselves from the great stream 
 and succession of their fellow-men into a close insu- 
 lated community of time, and into a corresponding 
 stage of proficiency measured on their several scales 
 of merit,^" {in similitudinem et temporum et profectuum 
 semetipsa ah aliis separaverunt.) "Without giving all 
 the exemplifications by which Paterculus has supported 
 this thesis, we shall cite two : Una {neque multorum 
 annorum spatio divisa) cetas per divini spiritus viros, 
 ^schylum, Sophoclem, Euripidem, illustravit TragcB- 
 diam. Not that this trinity of poets was so contempo- 
 rary as brothers are ; but they were contemporary 
 as youthful uncles in relation to elderly nephews :
 
 256 STYLE. 
 
 ^Escliylus was viewed as a senior by Sophocles, Sopho- 
 cles by Euripides ; but all might by possibility have 
 met together (what a constellation !) at the same table. 
 Again, says Paterculus, Quid ante Isocrattm, quid post 
 ejus auditores, clarum in oratoribusfuit 7 Nothing of 
 any distinction in oratory before Isocrates, nothing 
 after his personal audience. So confined was that 
 orbit within which the perfection of Greek tragedy 
 within which the perfection of Greek eloquence re- 
 volved. The same law, the same strong tendency, he 
 insists, is illustrated in the different schools of Greek 
 comedy ; and again of Greek philosophy. Nay, it is 
 more extensively illustrated amongst Greek artists in 
 general : ' Hoc idem evenisse grammaticis, plastis, pic- 
 toribus, scalptoribus, quisquis temporum institerit notis 
 — reperiet.' 
 
 From Greece Paterculus translates the question to 
 his own country in the following pointed manner : 
 summing up the whole doctrine, and re-affirming it in 
 a form almost startling and questionable by its rigor — 
 ' Adeo artatum angustiis temporum,^ so punctually 
 concentrated was all merit within the closest limits of 
 time, ' ut nemo memorid dignus, alter ab altera videri 
 nequiverint : ' no man of any consideration but he might 
 have had ocular cognizance of all others in his own 
 field who attained to distinction. He adds — ' Neque 
 hoc in GrcBcis quam in Romanis evenit magis.^ 
 
 His illustrations from the Roman literature we do 
 not mean to follow : one only, as requisite for our 
 purpose, we cite : — ' Oratio, ac vis forensis, perfec' 
 'umqticB proscB eloquentice decus {pace P. Crassi et 
 Gracchorum dixerim) ita universa sub principe operis 
 sui eiupit Tullio, ut mirari neminem possis nisi aut
 
 STYLE. 257 
 
 Mb illo visum, aut qui ilium viderit.'' This is said \vith 
 epigrammatic point ; the perfection of prose, and the 
 brilliancy of style as an artificial accomplishment, was 
 80 identified with Cicero's generation, that no distin- 
 guished artist, none whom you could greatly admire, 
 but might be called his contemporary ; none so much 
 his senior, but Cicero might have seen him — none so 
 much his junior, but he might have seen Cicero. It is 
 true that Crassus, in Cicero's infancy, and the two 
 Gracchi, in the infancy of Crassus, (neither of whom, 
 therefore, could have been seen by Cicero,) were 
 memorably potent as orators ; in fact, for tragical re- 
 sults to themselves, (which, by the way, was the uni- 
 versal destiny of great Roman orators;) and nobody 
 was more sensible of their majestic pretensions, merely 
 as orators, than Cicero himself, who has, accordingly, 
 made Crassus and Antony predominant speakers in his 
 splendid dialogues De Oratore. But they were merely 
 demoniac powers, not artists. And with respect to 
 these early orators, (as also with respect to some 
 others, whose names we have omitted,) Paterculus 
 has made a special reservation. So that he had not 
 at all overlooked the claims of these great men ; but 
 he did not feel that any real exception to his general 
 law was created by orators, who were indeed wild 
 organs of party rage or popular frenzy, but who wil- 
 fully disdained to connect themselves with the re- 
 finements of literature. Such orators did not regard 
 themselves as intellectual, but as political, powers, 
 "^onfiniug himself to oratory, and to the perfection of 
 prose composition, written or spoken, in the sense of 
 great literary accomplishments, beginning in natural 
 power hut perfected by art, Paterculus stands to hi« 
 17
 
 258 STTLB. 
 
 assertion — that tliis mode of humau genius had so 
 crowded its development within the brief circuit of 
 Cicero's life, (threescore years and three,) as that the 
 total series of Roman orators formed a sort of circle, 
 centring in that supreme orator's person, such as, in 
 modern times, we might call an electrical circle ; each 
 link of the chain having been either electrified by 
 Cicero, or having electrified him. Seneca, with great 
 modesty, repeats the very same assertion in other 
 words : ' Quicquid Romana facundia habuit, quod iri' 
 solenti GrcecicB aut opponat aut prceferat, circa Cice- 
 ronem ejfloruit.^ A most ingenuous and self-forgetting 
 homage in him ; for a nobler master of thinking than 
 himself, Paganism has not to show, nor — when the 
 cant of criticism has done its worst — a more brilliant 
 master of composition. And were his rule construed 
 literally, it would exclude the two Plinys, the two 
 Senecas, Tacitus, Quinctilian, and others, from the 
 matricula of Roman eloquence. Not one of these 
 men could have seen Cicero ; all were divided by 
 more than one generation; and yet, most unquestiona- 
 bly, though all were too reasonable to have fancied 
 themselves any match for the almighty orator in public 
 speaking, yet not one but was an equally accomplished 
 artist in written composition, and under a law of arti- 
 ficial style far more difficult to manage. 
 
 However, with the proper allowances for too un- 
 nodified a form of expression, we must allow that the 
 singular phenomenon first noticed by Paterculus, as 
 connecting itself with the manifestations of human 
 genius, is sufficiently established by so much of human 
 history as even he had witnessed. For, if it should 
 be alleged that political changes accounted for the
 
 STYLE. 259 
 
 extinction of oral eloquence, concurrently with the 
 death of Cicero, still there are cases more than 
 enough, even in the poetry of both Greece and Rome, 
 to say nothing of the arts, which bear out the general 
 fact of human genius coming forward by insulated 
 groups and clusters ; or, if Pagan ages had left that 
 point doubtful, we haAe since witnessed Christian 
 repetitions of the truth on the very widest scale. The 
 Italian age of Leo X. in the fifteenth century, the 
 French age of Louis XIV, in the seventeenth century, 
 the German age, commencing with Kant, Wieland, 
 Goethe, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — 
 all illustrate the tendency to these intermitting parox- 
 ysms of intellectual energy. The lightning and the 
 storm seem to have made the circuit of the whole 
 European heavens, to have formed vortices succes- 
 sively in every civUized land, and to have discharged 
 themselves, by turns, from every quarter of the atmos- 
 phere. In our own country there have been three 
 such gatherings of intellectual power: — 1st, the age 
 of Shakspeare, Spenser, and the great school of dram- 
 atists that were already dying out in the latter days of 
 Ben Jonson, (1636,) and were finally extinguished by 
 the great civil commotions beginning in 1642 ; 2dly, 
 the age of Queen Anne and George I. ; 3dly, the age 
 commencing with Cowper, partially roused, perhaps, 
 by the American war, and afterwards so powerfully 
 stimulated (as was the corresponding era of Kant and 
 Wieland) by the French Revolution. This last vol- 
 canic eruption of the British genius has displayed 
 enormous power and splendor. Let malice and the 
 base detraction of contemporary jealousy say what it 
 will, greater originality of genius, more expansive
 
 260 STYLE. 
 
 variety of talent, never was exhibited than in our own 
 country since the year 1793. Every mode of excel- 
 lence, except only dramatic excellence, (in which we 
 have nothing modern to place by the side of Schiller's 
 Wallenstein,) has been revealed in dazzling lustre. 
 And he that denies it — may he be suffocated by his 
 own bilious envy ! 
 
 But the point upon which we wish to fix the reader's 
 attention, in citing this interesting observation of the 
 Roman officer, and the reason for which we have cited 
 it at all, is not so much for the mere fact of these 
 spring- tides occurring in the manifestations of human 
 genius, intermitting pulses (so to speak) in human 
 energies, as the psychological peculiarity which seems 
 to affect the cycle of their recurrences. Paterculus 
 occupies himself chiefly with the causes of such phe- 
 nomena ; and one main cause he suggests as lying in 
 the emulation which possesses men when once a 
 specific direction has been impressed upon the public 
 competitions. This, no doubt, is one of the causes. 
 But a more powerful cause, perhaps, lies in a prin- 
 ciple of union than in any principle of division amongst 
 men — viz. in the principle of sympathy. The great 
 Italian painters, for instance, were doubtless evoked in 
 such crowds by the action of this principle. To hear 
 the buzz of idolizing admiration settling for years 
 upon particular works of art and artists, kindles some- 
 thing better than merely the ambition and rivalship of 
 men ; it kindles feelings happier and more favorable 
 to excellence — viz. genial love and comprehension of 
 the qualities fitted to stir so profound and lasting an 
 emotion. This contagion of sympathy runs electrically 
 through society, searches high and low for congeniaii
 
 STYLE. 261 
 
 powers, and suflVrs none to lurk unkno\vn to the pos- 
 sessor. A vortex is created which draws into its suction 
 whatever is liable to a similar action. But, not to linger 
 upon this question of causes, what we wish to place 
 under the reader's eye is rather the peculiar type 
 which belongs to these revolutions of national intellect, 
 according to the place which each occupies in the 
 order of succession. Possibly it would seem an over- 
 refinement if we were to suggest that the odd terms 
 in the series indicate creative energies, and the even 
 terms reflective energies ; and we are far enough from 
 affecting the honors of any puerile hypothesis. But, 
 in a general way, it seems plausible and reasonable, 
 that there will be alternating successions of power in 
 the first place, and next of reaction upon that power 
 from the reflective faculties. It does seem natural, 
 that first of all should blossom the energies of cre- 
 ative power ; and, in the next era of the literature, 
 when the consciousness has been brightened to its 
 own agencies, will be likely to come forward the re- 
 agencies of the national mind on what it has created. 
 The period of meditation will succeed to the period of 
 production. Or, if the energies of creation are again 
 partially awake, finding themselves forestalled, as 
 regards the grander passions, they will be likely to 
 settle upon the feebler elements of manners. Social 
 differences wHl now fix the attention by way of sub- 
 stitute for the bolder differences of nature. Should a 
 third period, after the swing of the pendulum through 
 *n arch of centuries, succeed for the manifestation of 
 the national genius, it is possible that the long interval, 
 Btnce the inaugiu-al era of creative art, will have so 
 jhanged all the elements of society, and the aspects
 
 B62 STYLE. 
 
 of life, as to restore the mind to much of its infant 
 freedom ; it may no longer feel the capti^dty of an 
 Imitative spirit in dealing with the very same class of 
 creations as exercised its earliest powers. The original 
 national genius may now come forward in perfectly 
 new fonns, without the sense of oppression from inim- 
 itable models. The hoar of ages may have withdrawn 
 some of these models from active competition. And 
 thus it may not be impossible that oscillations between 
 the creative and reflective energies of the mind might 
 go on through a cycle of many ages. 
 
 In our own literature we sec this scheme of oscilla- 
 tions illustrated. In the Shakspeare period we see the 
 fulness of life and the enormity of power throwing up 
 a tropical exuberance of vegetation. A century after- 
 wards we see a generation of men, lavishly endowed 
 with genius, but partly degraded by the injurious 
 training of a most profligate era growing out of gieat 
 revolutionary convulsions, and partly lowered in the 
 tone of their aspirations by a despair of rivalling the 
 great creations of their predecessors. We see them 
 universally acquiescing in humbler modes of ambition ; 
 showing sometimes a corresponding merit to that of 
 their greatest forefathers, but merit (if sometimes 
 equal) yet equal upon a lower scale. Thirdly. In the 
 eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we see a new birth 
 of original genius, of which it is not lawful to aflSrm 
 any absolute inferiority, even by comparison with the 
 Shakspearian age of Titans. For whatsoever is strictly 
 und thoroughly original, being sui generis, cannot be 
 better or worse than any other model of excellence 
 which is also original. One animal structure, com- 
 pared with another of a diff'erent class, is equally gcod
 
 8TTLB. 
 
 263 
 
 md perfect. One valley, whicli is no copy of another, 
 but has a separate and peculiar beauty, cannot ba 
 compared for any purpose of disadvantage with an- 
 other. One poem, which is composed upon a law of 
 its own, and has a characteristic or sepai-ate beauty of 
 its own, cannot be inferior to any other poem what- 
 soever. The class, tbe order, may be inferior ; the 
 Bcale may be a lower one ; but the individual work, 
 the degree of merit marked upon the scale, must be 
 equal — if only the poem is equally original. In all 
 such cases, understand, ye miserable snarlers, at con- 
 temporary merit, that the puerile gout de comparaison 
 (as La Bruyere calls it) is out of place ; universally 
 you cannot affirm any imparity, where the ground is 
 preoccupied by disparity. Where there is no parity 
 of principle, there is no basis for comparison. 
 
 Now, passing with the benefit of these explanations, 
 to Grecian literature, we may observe that there were 
 in that field of human intellect no more than two 
 developments of power from first to last. And, per- 
 haps, the unlearned reader (for it is to the praise and 
 honor of a powerful journal, that it has the unlearned 
 equally with the learned amongst its readers) will thank 
 us for here giving him, in a very few words, such an 
 account of the Grecian literature in its periods of mani- 
 festation, and in the relations existing between these 
 periods — that he shall not easily forget them. 
 
 There were, in illustration of the Roman aide-de- 
 camp's^ doctrine, two groups or clusters of Grecian 
 wits ; two depositions or stratifications of the national 
 genius ; and these were about a century apart. What 
 Viakes them specially rememberable is — the fact that 
 each of these brilliant clusters had gathered separately
 
 264 STYLE. 
 
 about that man as central pivot, who, even apart from 
 this relation to the literature, was otherwise the lead- 
 ing spirit of his age. It is important for our purpose 
 — it will be interesting, even without that purpose, for 
 the reader — to notice the distinguishing character, or 
 marks, by which the two clusters arc separately recog- 
 nized ; the marks, both personal and chronological. 
 As to the personal distinctions, we have said — that 
 in each case severally the two men, who offered the 
 nucleus to the gathering, happened to be otherwise the 
 most eminent and splendid men of the period. Who 
 were they ? The one was Pericles, the other was 
 Alexander of Macedon. Except Themistoclcs, who 
 may be ranked as senior to Pericles by just one gene- 
 ration, (or thirty-three years,^^) in the whole deduction 
 of Grecian annals no other public man, statesman, 
 captain-general, administrator of the national resources, 
 can be mentioned as approaching to these two men in 
 splendor of reputation, or even in real merit. Pisis- 
 tratus was too far back : Alcibiades, who might (chro- 
 nologically speaking) have been the son of Pericles, 
 was too unsteady, and (according to Mr. Coleridge's 
 coinage) ' unreliable ; ' or, perhaps, in more correct 
 English, too ' unrelyuponable.' 
 
 Thus far our purpose prospers. No man can pre- 
 tend to forget two such centres as Pericles for the elder 
 group, or Alexander of Macedon, (the ' strong he-goat' 
 of Jewish prophecy,) for the junior. Round these two 
 foci, in two different but adjacent centuries gathered 
 the total starry heavens — the galaxy, the Pantheon of 
 Grecian intellect. All that Greece produced — of 
 iwful solemnity in her tragic stage, of riotous mirth 
 and fancy in her comir stage, of power in her elo-
 
 STYLE. 
 
 265 
 
 quence, of wisdom in her philosophy ; all that has 
 Bince tingled in the ears of twenty-four centuries, of 
 her prosperity in the arts, her sculpture, her architec- 
 ture, her painting, her music — everything, in short, 
 excepting only her higher mathematics, which waited 
 for a further development — which required the incu- 
 bation of the musing intellect for yet another century 
 
 revolved like two neighboring planetary systems 
 
 about these two solar orbs. Two mighty vortices, 
 Pericles and Alexander the Great, drew into strong 
 eddies about themselves all the glory and the pomp of 
 Greek literature, Greek eloquence, Greek wisdom, 
 Greek art. Next, that we may still more severely 
 search the relations in all points between the two sys- 
 tems, let us assign the chronological locus of each: 
 because that will furnish another element towards the 
 exact distribution of the chart representing the motion 
 and the oscillations of human genius. Pericles had a 
 very long administration. He was Prime Minister of 
 Athens for upwards of one entire generation. He died 
 in the year 429 before Christ, and in a very early stage 
 of that great Peloponnesian war, which was the one 
 sole intestine war for Greece affecting every nook and 
 angle in the land. Now, in this long public life of 
 Pericles, we are at liberty to fix on any year as his 
 chronological locus. On good reasons, not called for 
 in this place, we fix on the year 444. This is too re- 
 •narkable to be forgotten. Four, four, four, what at 
 some games of cards is called a ' prial,' (we presume, 
 by an elision of the first vowel a, for parial,) forms an 
 era which no man can forget. It was the fifteenth 
 ;ear before the death of Pericles, and not far from the 
 bisecting year of his political life. Now, passing to
 
 266 STYLE. 
 
 the other system, the locus of Alexander is quite as 
 remarkable, as little liable to be forgotten when once 
 indicated, and more easily determined, because select- 
 ed from a narrower range of choice. The exact chro- 
 nological locus of Alexander the Great is 333 years 
 before Christ. Everybody knows how brief was the 
 career of this great man : it terminated in the year 320 
 before Christ. But the annus mirabilis of his public 
 life, the most effective and productive year throughout 
 his oriental anabasis, was the year 333 before Christ. 
 Here we have another 'j^ri'aZ,' a prial of threes, for 
 the locu^ of Alexander. 
 
 Thus far the elements are settled, the chronological 
 longitude and latitude of the two great planetary sys- 
 tems into which the Greek literature breaks up and dis- 
 tributes itself: 444 and 333 are the two central years 
 for the two systems : allowing, therefore, an interspace 
 of 1 1 1 years between the foci of each. It is thought 
 by some people, that all those stars which you see 
 glittering so restlessly on a keen frosty night in a high 
 latitude, and which seem to have been sown broadcast 
 with as much carelessness as grain lies on a threshing- 
 floor — here showing vast zaarahs of desert blue sky ; 
 there again lying close and to some eyes presenting 
 
 ♦ The beauteous semblance of a flock at rest,' 
 
 are in fact all gathered into zones or strata ; that our 
 own wicked little earth, (with the whole of our pecu- 
 liar solar system,) is a part of such a zone ; and that 
 all this perfect geometry of the heavens, these radii in 
 the mighty wheel, would become apparent, if we, the 
 spectators, could but survey it from the true centre 
 ■vMch centre may be far too distani for any vision of
 
 ^ 8TT1E. 267 
 
 man, naked or armed, to reach. However that may 
 be, it is most instructive to see how many apparent 
 scenes of confusion break up into orderly arrangement, 
 when you are able to supply an a priori principle of 
 organization to their seeming chaos. The two vortices 
 of the Greek literature are now separated ; the chrono- 
 logical loci of their centres are settled. And next, we 
 request the reader thoughtfully to consider who they 
 are of whom the elder system is composed. 
 
 In the centre, as we have already explained, is Peri- 
 cles — the great practical statesman ; and that oratoi 
 of whom (amongst so many that vibrated thunderbolts) 
 it was said peculiarly that he thundered and lightened 
 as if he held this Jovian attribute by some indi^•idual 
 title. We spare you Milton's magnificent description 
 from the Paradise Regained of such an orator ' wield- 
 ing at will that fierce democracy,' partly because the 
 closing line in its reference ' to Macedon and Artaxer- 
 xes' thi'one,' too much points the homage to Demos- 
 thenes ; but still more, because by too trivial a repeti- 
 tion of splendid passages, a serious injury is done to 
 great poets. Passages of great musical eflfect, metrical 
 bravuras are absolutely vulgarized by too perpetual a 
 parroting — and the care of Augustus Caesar ne noinen 
 suum obsoleJieret,^ih.Sit the majesty of his name should 
 not be vulgarized by bad poets, is more seriously 
 needed in our days on behalf of great poets, to protect 
 them from trivial or too parrot-like a citation. 
 
 Passing onwards from Pericles, you find that all the 
 rest in his system were men in the highest sense cre- 
 tive ; absolutely setting the very first examples, each 
 in his peculiar walk of composition ; themselves with- 
 out pre\ious models, and yet destined every man of
 
 ^8 STYLE. 
 
 them to become models for aL after-generations ^ 
 themselves without fathers or mothers, and yet having 
 all posterity for their children. Jrirst come the three 
 men divini spiritus, under a heavenly afflatus, ^schy- 
 lus — Sophocles — Euripides, the creators of Tragedy 
 out of a village mummery. Next comes Aristophanes, 
 who breathed the breath of life into Comedy. Then 
 comes the great philosopher Anaxagoras, who first 
 theorized successfully upon man and the world. Next 
 come, whether great or not, the still more famous phi- 
 losophers — Socrates, Plato, Xenophon. Then comes, 
 leaning upon Pericles, as sometimes Pericles leaned 
 upon him, the divine artist, Phidias ; ^^ and behind this 
 immortal man walk Herodotus and Thucydides. What 
 a procession to Eleusis would these men have formed ; 
 what a frieze, if some great artist could arrange it as 
 dramatically as Chaucer has arranged the Pilgrimage 
 to Canterbury. 1 
 
 It will be gTfmted that this is unmasking a pretty 
 strong battery of great guns for the Athens of Pericles. 
 Now, let us step on a hundred years forward. We are 
 now within hail of Alexander ; and a brilliant consis- 
 tory of Grecian men, that is, by which he is surround- 
 ed. There are now exquisite masters of the more 
 refined Comedy ; there are, again, great philosophers, 
 for all the great schools are represented by able suc- 
 cessors ; and above all others, there is the one philoso- 
 pher who played with men's minds (according to Lord 
 Bacon's comparison) as freely as ever his princely 
 pupil with their persons — there is Aristotle. There 
 vre great orators, and, above all others, there is that 
 orator whom succeeding generations (wisely or not'*- 
 oave adopted as the representative name for what if
 
 STYLE 269 
 
 conceivable in oratorial perfection — there is Demos- 
 thenes. Aristotle and Demosthenes are in themselves 
 bulwarks of power ; many hosts lie in those two names. 
 For artists, again, to range against Phidias, there is 
 Lysippus the sculptor, and there is Apelles the painter. 
 For great captains and masters of strategic art, there is 
 Alexander himself, with a glittering cortege of general 
 officers, well qualified to wear the crowns which they 
 will win, and to head the dynasties which they will 
 found. Historians there are now, as in that former 
 age. And, upon the whole, it cannot be denied that 
 the ' turn-out ' is showy and imposing. 
 
 Before coming to that point, that is, before compar- 
 ing the second ' deposit ' (geologically speaking) of 
 Grecian genius with the first, let us consider what it 
 was (if anything) that connected them. Here, reader, 
 we would wish to put a question. Saving your pres- 
 ence. Did you ever see what is called a dumb-bell ? 
 "We have ; and know it by more painful evidence than 
 that of sight. 
 
 You, therefore, oh reader ! if personally cognisant 
 of dumb-bells, we shall remind — if not, we shall in- 
 form — that it is a cylindrical bar of iron, issuing at 
 each end in a globe of the same metal, and usually it 
 is sheathed in green baize ; but, perfidiously so, if that 
 covering is meant to deny or to conceal the fact of 
 those heart-rending thumps which it inflicts upon one's 
 too confiding fingers every third ictus. By the way, 
 we have a vague remembrance that the late Mr. Thur- 
 tell — the same who was generally censured for mur- 
 dering the late Mr. Weare — once in a dark lobby 
 attempted to murder a friend by means of a dumb-bell ; 
 m which he showed his judgment — we mean in his
 
 270 STYLE. 
 
 choice of tools ; for other\vise, in attempting to murdei 
 his friend, he was to blame. Now, reader, it is under 
 this image of the dumb-bell we couch an allegory. 
 Those globes at each end, are the two systems or 
 separate clusters of Greek literature ; and that cylinder 
 which connects them, is the long man that ran into 
 each system — binding the two together. Who was 
 that ? It was Isocrates. Great we cannot call him in 
 conscience ; and, therefore, by way of compromise, 
 we call him long, which, in one sense, he certainly 
 was ; for he lived through four-and-twenty Olympiads, 
 each containing four solar years. He narrowly escaped 
 being a hundred years old ; and though that did not 
 carry him from centre to centre, yet, as each system 
 might be supposed to portend a radius each way of 
 twenty years, he had, in fact, a full personal cogni- 
 sance (and pretty equally) of the two systems, remote 
 as they were, which composed the total world of Gre- 
 cian genius. Two circumstances have made this man 
 interesting to all posterity ; so that people, the most 
 'j'^mote and different in character, (Cicero, for instance, 
 ana^Milton,) have taken a delight in his memory. One 
 is, tlWt the school of rhetoric in Athens, which did not 
 finally go down till the reign of Justinian, and, there- 
 fore, lasted above nine hundred and forty years withou'; 
 interruption, began with him. He was, says Cicero 
 De Oral., ' Pater eloquentiae ; ' and elsewhere he calls 
 him ' Communis magister oratorum.' True, he never 
 practised himself, for which he had two reasons — 'my 
 lungs,' he tells us himself, ' are weak ; ' and secondly, 
 I am naturally, as well as upon principle, a coward,' 
 There he was right. A man would never have seen 
 twenty-four Olympiads who had gone about brawling
 
 STYLE. 2fl 
 
 and giving 'jaw,' as Demostlienes and Cicero did. 
 You see what they made of it. The other feature of 
 interest in this long man is precisely that fact, viz. that 
 he was long. Everybody looks with kindness upon 
 the snowy-headed man who saw the young prince 
 Alexander of Macedon -svithin four years of his starting 
 for Persia ; and personally knew most of those that 
 gave lustre to the levees of Pericles. Accordingly, it 
 is for this quality of length that Milton honors him with 
 a touching memorial ; for Isocrates was ' that old man 
 eloquent ' of Milton's sonnet, whom the battle of Chae- 
 ronea, ' fatal to liberty, killed with report.' This battle, 
 by which Philip overthrew the last struggles of dying 
 independence in Greece, occurred in the year 338 be- 
 fore Christ. Philip was himself assassinated two years 
 later. Consequently, had Isocrates pulled out, like 
 Caoutchouc, a little longer, he might have seen the 
 silver shields, or Macedonian life-guards, embarking 
 for Persia. In less than five years from that same 
 battle, ' fatal to liberty,' Alexander was taking fatal 
 liberties with Persia, and tickling the catastrophe of 
 Darius. There were just seventy good years between 
 the two expeditions — the Persian anabasis of Cyrus 
 the younger, and the Persian anabasis of Alexander ; 
 but Isocrates knew personally many officers and savans^ 
 in both. 
 
 Others, beside Cicero and Milton, have taken a deep 
 interest in Isocrates ; and, for the very circumstance 
 we have been noticing, his length, combined with the 
 accident of position which made that Icrngth efi"ective 
 m connecting the twofold literature of Greece. Had 
 he been ' long ' in any other situation than just in that 
 dreary desert between the oasis of Pericles and the
 
 272 STYLE. 
 
 oasis of Alexander, what good would that have done 
 us ? 'A wounded snake ' or an Alexandrine verse 
 would have been as useful. But he, feeling himself 
 wanted, laid his length down like a railroad, exactly 
 where he could be useful — with his positive pole 
 towards Pericles, and his negative pole towards Alex- 
 ander. Even Gibbon — even the frosty Gibbon — 
 condescends to be pleased with this seasonable appli- 
 cation of his two termini : — ' Our sense,' says he, in 
 his 40th chapter, ' of the dignity of human nature is 
 exalted'"' by the simple recollection, that Isocrates was 
 the companion of Plato and Xenophon ; that he assisted, 
 perhaps with the historian Thucydides, at the first 
 representations of the Oedipus of Sophocles and the 
 Iphigenia of Euripides.' So far in relation to the upper 
 terminus of the long man ; next, with reference to the 
 lower terminus. Gibbon goes on : — and that hia 
 pupils, ^schines and Demosthenes, contended for the 
 crown of patriotism in the presence of Aristotle, the 
 master of Theophrastus, who taught at Athens with the 
 founders of the Stoic and Epicurean sects.' 
 
 Now then, reader, you are arrived at that station 
 from which you overlook the whole of Greek literature, 
 as a few explanations will soon convince you. Where 
 is Homer, where is Hesiod ? You ask — where is 
 Pindar ? Homer and Hesiod lived a thousand years 
 B. C., or, by the lowest computations, near nine hun- 
 dred. For anything that we know, they may have 
 lived with Tubal Cain. At all events, they belong to 
 ao power or agency that set in motion the age of Peri- 
 cles, or that operated on that age. Pindar, again, was 
 a solitary emanation of some unknown influences, at 
 Thebes, more than five hundred years B. C. He may
 
 STYLE. 273 
 
 be referred to the same era as Pythagoras. These aro 
 all that caa bo cited before Pericles. 
 
 Next, for the ages after Alexander, it is certain that 
 Greece Proper was so much broken in spirit by the 
 loss of her autonomy dating from that era — as never 
 again to have rallied sufficiently to produce a single 
 man of genius ; not one solitary writer, who acted as a 
 power upon the national mind. Callimachus was no- 
 body, and not decidedly Grecian. Theocritus, a man 
 of real genius in a limited way, is a Grecian in that 
 sense only according to which an Anglo-American is 
 an Englishman. Besides that, one swallow does not 
 make °a summer. Of any other writers, we possess 
 only a few fragments: and of Anacreon, who must 
 have been a poet of original power, from the very 
 extended influence of his writings, we do not certainly 
 know that we have any remains at all. Of those which 
 pass under his name, not merely the anthorship, but 
 the era is very questionable indeed. Plutarch and 
 Lucian, the unlearned reader must understand that 
 both belong to post Christian ages. And for all the 
 Greek emigrants who may have written histories, such 
 as we now value for their matter more than for their 
 execution, one and all they belong too much to Roman 
 nvilization, that we should ever think of connecting 
 hhem with native Greek literature.^ Polybius in the 
 days of the second Scipio, Dion Cassius, and Appian, 
 in the acme of Roman civility, are no more Grecian 
 tuthors, because they wrote in Greek, than the Em- 
 peror Marcus Antoninus, or Julian, were other than 
 Uomans, because, from monstrous coxcombry, they 
 n.hoose to write in Greek their barren memoranda. As 
 well might Gibbon be thought not an Englishman, or 
 18
 
 274 STTIiB. 
 
 Leibnitz not a German ; because the former, in com* 
 posing the first draft of his essay on literature, and the 
 latter in composing his Theodicet, used the French 
 language. The motive in all these cases was analo- 
 gous : amongst the Greek writers it was the affectation 
 of reaching a particular body of educated men, a 
 learned class, to the exclusion of the uninstructed mul- 
 titude. With the affectors of French, the wish was, to 
 reach a particular body of thinkers, with whose feelings 
 they had a special sympathy from personal habituation 
 to their society, and to whose prejudices, literary or 
 philosophic, they had adapted their train of argument. 
 No : the Greek literature ends at the point we have 
 fixed, viz., with the era of Alexander. No power, no 
 heart-subduing agency, was ever again incarnated in 
 any book, system of philosophy, or other model of 
 creative energy, growing upon Grecian soil or from 
 Grecian roots. Creation was extinct — the volcano 
 was burned out. What books appeared at scattered 
 intervals, during the three centuries still remaining 
 before the Christian era, lie under a reproach, one and 
 all, which perhaps has not been perceived. From the 
 titles and passing notices of their objects, or mode of 
 dealing with their objects, such as we derive from 
 Cicero and many others, it is evident that they were 
 merely professional books ; text-books for lectures 
 addressed to students, or polemic works addressed to 
 competitors. Chairs of rhetoric and philosophy had 
 now been founded in Athens. A great university, the 
 resort of students from all nations, was established, and, 
 in a sense sufficient to insure the perpetual successior 
 \>f these corporate bodies, was endowed. Books, there* 
 ^re, and laboring with the same two opposite defects
 
 STYLE. 475 
 
 »s are unjustly charged upon the schoolmen of the 
 middle ages, viz., dulness from absolute monotony, and 
 visionariness from the aerial texture of the speculations, 
 continued to be written in discharge of professional 
 obligations, or in pursuit of professional interest. The 
 siimmum honum was discussed until it had become the 
 capital affliction of human patience ; the summum malum 
 of human life. Beyond these there was no literature ; 
 and these products of dreaming indolence, which ter- 
 minated in making the very name of Greek philosopher, 
 and Greek rhetorician, a jest and a byword amongst 
 the manlier Romans, no more constituted a literature 
 than a succession of academic studies from the pupils of 
 a royal institution can constitute a school of fine arts. 
 
 Here, therefore, at this era of Alexander, 333 B. C, 
 when every Greek patriot had reason to say of his 
 native literature, ' Venimus ad summum fortuncB ' — we 
 have seen the best of our days — we must look for the 
 Greek ideas of style, and the Greek theories of com- 
 position, in the uttermost development that either could 
 have received. In the earlier system of Greek intel- 
 lectual strength — in the era of Pericles, the powers of 
 style would be most comprehensively exercised. In 
 the second system, in the era of Alexander, the light 
 of conscious recognition and direct examination would 
 be most effectually applied. The first age furnished 
 the power — the second furnished the science. The 
 first brought the concrete model — the second brought 
 the abstracting skill ; and between them the whole 
 compass of Greek speculation upon this point would 
 be brought to a focus. Such being the state of pre- 
 paration, what was the result ?
 
 276 STYLE. 
 
 PART IV. 
 
 ' Such being the state of preparation, what was the 
 result 7 ' These were the words which concluded our 
 last essay. There had been two manifestations of the 
 Grecian intellect, revelations in two separate forms, 
 the first having gathered about Pericles in the year 444 
 B. C, the second about Alexander the Great in 333 
 B. C. ; the first being a pure literature of creative 
 power, the second, in a great measure, of reflective 
 power ; the first fitted to call out the differences of 
 style, the second to observe, classify, and discuss them : 
 under these circumstances of favorable preparation, 
 what had been the result ? Where style exists in 
 strong coloring as a practice or art, we reasonably 
 expect that style should soon follow as a theory — as 
 a science explaining that art, tracing its varieties, and 
 teaching its rules. To use ancient distinctions, where 
 the ' rhetorica utens ' has been cultivated with eminent 
 success, (as in early Greece it had,) it is but natural 
 to expect many consequent attempts at a ' rhetorica 
 docens.' And especially, it is natural to do so in a 
 case where the theorizing intellect had been powder- 
 fully awakened. What, therefore, we ask again, had 
 been in fact the result ? 
 
 We must acknowledge that it had fallen far below 
 the reasonable standard of our expectations. Greece, 
 it is true, produced a long series of works on rhetoric ; 
 many of which, though not easily met with,*^ survive 
 to this day : and one which stands first in order of 
 time — viz. the great work of Aristotle — is of sucL 
 distinguished merit, that some eminent moderns have 
 not scrupled to rank it as the very foremost legacy, in
 
 STYLE. 277 
 
 point of psychological knowledge, which Pagan litera- 
 ture has bequeathed to us. Without entering upon so 
 large a comparison as that, we readily admit the com- 
 manding talent which this work displays. But it is 
 under an equivocal use of the word ' rhetoric' that the 
 Rhetoric of Aristotle could ever have been classed 
 with books treating of style. There is in fact a com- 
 plex distinction to which the word rhetoric is liable : 
 Ist, it means the rhetor ica utens, as when we praise 
 the rhetoric of Seneca or Sir Thomas Browne ; not 
 meaning anything which they taught, but something 
 which they practised ; not a doctrine which they deliv- 
 ered, but a machinery of composition which they em- 
 ployed. 2dly, it means the rhetorica docens, as when 
 we praise the rhetoric of Aristotle or Hermogenes ; 
 writers far enough from being rhetorical by their own 
 Btyle of writing, but writers who professedly taught 
 others to be rhetorical. 3dly, the rhetorica utens itself 
 is subdix-idcd into two meanings, so wide apart that 
 they have very little bearing on each other : one being 
 applied to the art of persuasion, the dexterous use of 
 plausible topics for recommending any opinion what- 
 ever to the favor of an audience : this is the Grecian 
 sense universally ; the other being applied to the art 
 of composition — the art of treating any subject orna- 
 mentally, gracefully, affectingly. There is another 
 use of the word rhetoric distinct from all these, and 
 hitherto, we believe, not consciously noticed : of which 
 \t some other time. 
 
 Now, this last subdivision of the word rhetoric, viz. 
 • Rhetoric considered as a practising art — rhetorica 
 %tens,^ which is the sense exclusively indicated by our 
 modern use of the term, is not at all concerned in the
 
 278 STYLE. 
 
 rhetoric of Aristotle. It is rhetoric as a mode of moral 
 Buasion, as a technical system for obtaining a readi- 
 ness in giving to the false a coloring of plausibility, to 
 the doubtful a coloring of probability, or in giving to 
 the true, when it happens to be obsciure, the benefit of 
 a convincing exposition — this it is which Aristotle 
 undertakes to teach : and not at all the art of ornamen- 
 tal composition. In fact, it is the whole body of public 
 extempore speakers whom he addresses, not the body 
 of deliberate writers in any section whatever. And 
 therefore, whilst conceding readily all the honor which 
 is claimed for that great man's rhetoric, by this one 
 distinction as to what it was that he meant by rhetoric, 
 we evade at once all necessity for modifying our gen- 
 eral proposition ; viz. that style in our modern sense, 
 as a theory of composition, as an art of constructing 
 sentences and weaving them into coherent wholes, was 
 not effectually cultivated amongst the Greeks. It was 
 not so well understood, nor so distinctly contemplated 
 in the light of a separate accomplishment, as after- 
 wards among the Romans. And we repeat, that this 
 result from circumstances prima facie so favorable to 
 the very opposite result, is highly remarkable. It is so 
 remarkable, that we shall beg permission to linger a 
 little upon those features in the Greek literature, which 
 most of all might seem to have warranted our expect- 
 ing from Greece the very consummation of this deli- 
 cate art. For these same features, which would sepa- 
 rately have justified that expectation, may happen, 
 when taken in combination with others, to account for 
 its disappointment. 
 
 There is, then, amongst the earliest phenomena of the 
 Greek literature, and during its very inaugural period.
 
 STYLE. 279 
 
 one wkich of itself and singly furnishes a presumption 
 lor expecting an exquisite investigation of style. It 
 lies in the fact, that two out of the three great tragic 
 poets carried his own characteristic quality of style 
 to a morbid excess ; to such an excess as should force 
 itself, and in fact did force itself, into popular notice. 
 Had these poets all alike exhibited that sustained and 
 equable tenor of tragic style which we find in Sopho- 
 cles, it is not probable that the vulgar attention would 
 have been fixed by its character. Where a standard 
 of splendor is much raised, provided all parts are 
 Bimultaneously raised on the same uniform scale, we 
 know by repeated experience in many modes of dis- 
 play, whether in dress, in architecture, in the embel- 
 lishment of rooms, &c., that this raising of the standard 
 is not perceived with much vivacity ; and that the 
 feelings of the spectator are soon reconciled to altera- 
 tions that are harmonized. It is always by some want 
 of uniformity, some defect in following out the scale, 
 that we become roused to conscious observation of 
 the difference between tliis and our former standards. 
 We exaggerate these differences in such a case, as 
 much as we undervalue them in a case where all is 
 symmetrical. We might expect, therefore, before- 
 hand, that the opposite characteristics as to style of 
 JEschylus and Euripides, would force themselves upon 
 the notice of the Athenian populace ; and, in fact, 
 we learn from the Greek scholiasts on these poets, 
 that this efi'ect did really follow. These scholiasts, 
 indeed, belong to a later age. But we know by tra- 
 ditions which they have preserved, and we know from 
 A-ristotle himself, the immediate successor of the great 
 ^agic poets, (indirectlif we know also from the stormy
 
 280 STYLE. 
 
 ridicule of Aristophanes, who may be viewed as con- 
 temporary with those poets,) that -^'Eschylus was noto- 
 rious to a proverb amongst the very mob, for the 
 stateliness, pomp, and towering chai-acter of his dic- 
 tion ; whilst Euripides was equally notorious, not 
 merely for a diction in a lower key, more household, 
 more natural, less elaborate, but also for cultivating 
 such a diction by study and deliberate preference. 
 Having such great models of contrasting style to 
 begin with, having the attention converged upon these 
 differences by the furious merriment of Aristophanes, 
 less than a Grecian wit would have felt a challenge 
 in all this to the investigation of style, as a great 
 organ of difference between man and man, between 
 poet and poet. 
 
 But there was a more enduring reason, in the cir- 
 cumstances of Greece foi entitling us to expect from 
 her the perfect theory of style. It lay in those acci- 
 dents of time and place which obliged Greece to spin 
 most of her speculations, like a spider, out of her 
 own bowels. Now, for such a kind of literature style 
 is, generally speaking, paramount ; for a literature 
 less self-evolved, style is more liable to neglect. 
 Modern nations have labored under the very opposite 
 disadvantage. The excess of external materials has 
 sometimes oppressed their creative power, and some- 
 times their meditative power. The exuberance of 
 objectwe knowledge — that knowledge which carries 
 the mind to materials existing out of itself, such as 
 natural philosophy, chemistry, physiology, astronomy, 
 geology, where the mind of the student goes for 
 little, and the external object for much — has had the 
 effect of weaning men from subjective speculation,
 
 STYLE. 281 
 
 where the mind is all in all, and the alien object next 
 to nothing ; and in that degree has weaned them from 
 the culture of style. Now, on the other hand, if you 
 suppose a man in the situation of Baron Trenck at 
 Spandau, or Spinosa in the situation of Robinson 
 Crusoe at Juan Fernandez, or a contemplative monk 
 of the thirteenth century in his cell — you will per- 
 ceive that — unless he were a poor feeble-minded 
 creature like Cowper's Bastile prisoner, thrown by 
 utter want of energy upon counting the very nails 
 of his dungeon in all permutations and combinations 
 — rather than quit the external world, he must in his 
 own defence, were it only as a relief from gnawing 
 thoughts, cultivate some subjective science ; that is, 
 some branch of knowledge which, drawing everything 
 from the mind itself, is independent of external re- 
 sources. Such a science is found in the relations of 
 man to God, that is in theology ; in the determinations 
 of space, that is in geometry ; in the relations of exist- 
 ence or being universally to the human mind, other- 
 wise called metaphysics or ontology ; in the relations 
 of the mind to itself, otherwise called logic. Hence it 
 was that the scholastic philosophy evolved itself, like a 
 vast spider's loom, between the years 1100 and 1400 
 Men shut up in solitude — with the education often- 
 times of scholars — with a life of leisure — but with 
 hardly any books, and no means of observation — were 
 absolutely forced, if they would avoid lunacy, from 
 energies unoccupied with any object, to create an object 
 Dut of those very energies : they were driven by mere 
 pr jssure of solitude, and sometimes of external si- 
 lence, into raising vast aerial Jacob's ladders of vapory 
 metaphysics, just as endless as those raeteorologic
 
 282 STYLi 
 
 phenomena which technically bear that name — just as 
 Bublime and aspiring in their tendency upwards — and 
 sometimes (but not always, wicked critic!) just as 
 unsubstantial. In this land of the practical and the 
 ponderable, we so little understand or value such ab- 
 stractions, though once our British schoolmen took the 
 lead in these subtleties, that we confound their very 
 natures and names. Most people with us mean by 
 metaphysics, what is properly called psychology. No^v, 
 these two are so far from being the same thing, that the 
 former could be pursued (and, to say the truth, was, 
 in fact, under Aristotle created) by the monk in his 
 unfurnished cell, where nothing ever entered but moon- 
 beams. Whereas psychology is but in part a subjective 
 science ; in some proportion it is also objective, depend- 
 ing on multiplied experience, or on multiplied records 
 of experience. Psychology, therefore, could not have 
 been cultivated extensively by the schoolmen ; and in 
 fact would not have been cultivated at all, but for the 
 precedent of Aristotle. He, who laid the foundation 
 of their metaphysics, which have nothing to do with 
 man, had also written a work on man ; viz. on the 
 human soul, besides otber smaller works on particular 
 psychological phenomena (such as dreaming). Hence, 
 through mere imitation, arose the short sketches of 
 psychology amongst the schoolmen. Else their vocation 
 say to metaphysics, and that vocation arose entirely out 
 of their circumstances — solitude, scholarship, and no 
 jooks. Total extinction there was for them of all 
 objective materials, and therefore, as a consequence 
 mevitable, reliance on the solitary energies of their 
 own minds. Like Christabel's chamber lamp, and the 
 »ngels from which it was suspended, all was the inven* 
 tion of the unprompted artist.
 
 STYLE. 
 
 283 
 
 • All made out of the carver's brain.' 
 Models he had none before him, for printed books were 
 yet sleeping in futurity, and the gates of a grand 
 asceticism were closed upon the world of life. We 
 moderns, indeed, fancy that the necessities of the Ro- 
 mish church — the mere instincts of self-protection in 
 Popery — were what offered the bounty on this air- woven 
 philosophy ; and partly that is true ; but it iss most cer- 
 tain that all the bounties in this world would have failed 
 to operate effectually, had they not met with those 
 circumstances in the silent life of monasteries, which 
 favored the growth of such a self-spun metaphysical 
 divinity. Monastic life predisposed the restlessness of 
 human intellect to move in that direction. It was one 
 of the few directions compatible with solitude and 
 penury of books. It was the only one that opened an 
 avenue at once to novelty and to freedom of thought. 
 Now, then, precisely what the monastic life of the 
 schoolmen was, in relation to philosophy, the Greece 
 of Pericles had been in relation to literature. Wha. 
 circumstances, what training, or predisposing influ- 
 ences existed for the monk in his cell ; the same (or 
 such as were tantamount) existed for the Grecian wit 
 in the atmosphere of Athens. Three great agencies 
 were at work, and unconsciously moulding the efforts 
 of the earliest schoolmen about th3 opening of the Cru- 
 sades, and of the latest, some time after their close ; — 
 three analogous agencies, the same in virtue, though 
 varied in circumstances, gave impulse and guidance to 
 the men of Greece, from Pericles, at the opening of 
 Greek literature, to Alexander of Macedon, who wit- 
 uessed its second harvest. And these agencies were : 
 — 1st. Leisure in excess, with a teeming intellect ••
 
 2^4 STYLE. 
 
 the burden, under a new-born excitement, of Having 
 nothing to do. 2d. Scarcity, without an absolute fam- 
 ine, of books ; enough to awake the dormant cravings, 
 but not enough to gratify them without personal parti- 
 cipation in the labors of intellectual creation. 3d. A 
 revolutionary restlessness, produced by the recent es- 
 tablishment of a new and growing public interest. 
 
 The two first of these agencies, for stimulating 
 mtellects already roused by agitating changes, are 
 Bufficiently obvious ; though few, perhaps, are aware 
 to what extent idleness prevailed in Pagan Greece, 
 and even in Rome, under the system of household 
 slavery, and under the bigoted contempt of commerce. 
 But, waiving that point, and, for the moment, waiving 
 also the degree of scarcity which affected books at the 
 era of Pericles, we must say one word as to the two 
 great analogous public interests which had formed 
 themselves separately, and with a sense of revolution- 
 ary power, for the Greeks on the one hand, and for 
 the schoolmen on the other. As respected the Gre- 
 cians, and especially the Athenians, this excitement 
 lay in the sentiment of nationality which had been first 
 powerfully organized by the Persian war. Previously 
 to that war the sentiment no doubt smouldered ob- 
 scurely ; but the oriental invasion it was which kindled 
 it into a torrent of flame. And it is interesting to 
 remark, that the very same cause which fused and 
 combined these scattered tribes into the unity of Hellas 
 viz. their common interest in making head against an 
 awful invader, was also the cause which most of all 
 separated them into local parties by individual rival- 
 ship, and by characteristic services. The orroq^ant 
 Spartan, and with a Frerrh-like self-glnrific».tiQi\,
 
 STYLE. 285 
 
 boasted forever of his little Therraopyloc Ten years 
 earlier the far sublimer display of Athenian Marathon, 
 to say nothing of after services at Salamis, or else- 
 where, had placed Attica at the summit of the Greek 
 family. No matter whether selfish jealousy would 
 allow that pre-eminence to be recognized, doubtless it 
 was felt. With this civic pre-eminence arose concur- 
 rently for Athens the development of an intellectual 
 pre-eminence. On this we need say nothing. But 
 even here, although the pre-eminence was too dazzling 
 to have been at any time overlooked, yet Nvith some 
 injustice in every age to Athens, her light has been 
 recognized, but not what gave it value — the contrast- 
 ing darkness of all around her. This did not escape 
 Paterculus, whose understanding is always vigilant. 
 ' "We talk,' says he, ' of Grecian eloquence, or Grecian 
 poetry, when we should say Attic : for who has ever 
 heard of Theban orators, of Lacedaemonian artists, or 
 Corinthian poets ? ' ^ ^schylus, the first great au- 
 thor of Athens, (for Herodotus was not Athenian,) 
 personally fought in the Persian war. Consequently 
 the two modes of glory for Athens were almost of 
 simultaneous emergence. And what we are now 
 wishing to insist on, is, that precisely by and through 
 this great unifying event, viz. the double inroad of 
 Asia militant upon Greece, Greece first became gene- 
 rally and reciprocally known to Greece herself : that 
 Greece was then first arranged and cast, as it were, 
 dramatically, according to her capacities, services, 
 duties ; that a general consciousness was then difi"used 
 of the prevailing relations in which each political 
 family stood to the rest ; and that, in the leading states, 
 •>.very intellectual citizen drew a most agitating excite-
 
 286 STYLE. 
 
 tneut from the particular character of glory which had 
 settled upon his own tribe, and the particular station 
 which had devolved upon it amongst the champions of 
 civilization. 
 
 That was the positive force acting upon Athens. 
 Now, reverting to the monkish schoolmen, in order to 
 complete the parallel, what was the corresponding 
 force acting upon them ? Leisure, and want ol 
 books, were accidents common to both parties — to 
 the scholastic age and to the age of Pericles, These 
 were the negative forces ; concurring with others to 
 sustain a movement once begun, but incapable of 
 giving the original impulse. What was the active, 
 the affirmative force, which effected for the scholastic 
 monks that unity and sense of common pvirposes, which 
 had been effected for the Greeks by the sudden de- 
 velopment of a Grecian interest opposed to a Persian 
 — of a civilized interest, under sudden peril, opposed 
 to the barbarism of the universal planet ? 
 
 What was there for the race of monkish schoolmen, 
 laboring through three centuries, in the nature of a 
 known palpable interest, which could balance so grand 
 w principle of union and of effort, as this acknowledged 
 guardianship of civilization had suddenly unfolded, 
 Jike a banner, for the Greeks during the infancy of 
 Pericles ? *'^ What could there be of corresponding 
 grandeur ? 
 
 Beforehand, this should have seemed impossible. 
 i^ut, in reality, a far grander mode of interest had 
 arisen for the schoolmen ; grander, because more in- 
 definite ; more indefinite, because spiritual. It wa« 
 this : — The Western or Latin Church had slowlj 
 developed her earthly power. As an edifice of civi
 
 STYLE. 287 
 
 greatness, througliout the western world, she stood 
 erect and towering. In the eleventh century, beyond 
 all others, she had settled her deep foundations. The 
 work thus far was complete. But blank civil power, 
 though indispensable, was the feeblest of her arms ; 
 and, taken separately, was too frail to last, besides that 
 it was liable to revolutions. The authority by which 
 chiefly she ruled, had ruled, and hoped to rule, was 
 spiritual ; and with the growing institutions of the age, 
 embodying so much of future resistance, it was essen- 
 tial that this spiritual influence should be founded on 
 a subtle philosophy — difficult to learn, difficult to 
 refute ; as also that many dogmas already established, 
 such as tradition, by way of prop to infallibility, should 
 receive a far ampler development. The Latin church, 
 we must remember, was not yet that church of Papal 
 Rome, in the maturity of its doctrines and its preten- 
 sions, which it afterwards became. And when we 
 consider how vast a benefactrix this church had been 
 to early Christendom, when moulding and settling ita 
 foundations, as also in what light she must have ap- 
 peared to her own pious children, in centuries where 
 as yet only the first local breezes of opposition had 
 begun to whisper amongst the Albigenses, &c., we are 
 bound, in all candor, to see that a sublimer interest 
 could not have existed for any series of philosophers, 
 than the profound persuasion, that by marrying meta- 
 physics to divinity, two sciences even separately so 
 grand : and by the pursuit of labyrinthine truth, they 
 were building up an edifice reaching to the heavens — 
 
 he great spiritual fortress of the Catholic church. 
 Here let us retrace the course of our speculations, 
 
 est the reader should suppose us to be wandering.
 
 ?88 
 
 STYLE. 
 
 Firsi, for the sake of illustrating more vividly the 
 influences which acted on the Greece of Pericles, we 
 bring forward another case analogously circumstanced, 
 as moulded by the same causes ; — 1 . The same con- 
 dition of intellect under revolutionary excitement : 2. 
 The same penury of books : 3. The same chilling 
 gloom from the absence of female charities ; the con- 
 sequent reaction of that oppressive enmii, which Hel- 
 vetius fancied, amongst all human agencies, to be the 
 most potent stimulant for the intellect : 4. The same 
 (though far different) enthusiasm and elevation of 
 thought, from disinterested participation in forwarding 
 a great movement of the age : for the one side, involv- 
 ing the glory of their own brilliant country, and con- 
 current with civilization ; for the other, co-extensive 
 with all spiritual truth and all spiritual power. 
 
 Next, we remark, that men living permanently 
 under such influences, must, of mere necessity, resort 
 to that order of intellectual pursuits which requires 
 little aid ah extra ; that order, in fact, which philosoph- 
 ically is called ' subjective,' as drawing much from 
 our own proper selves, or little (if anything) from 
 extraneous objects. 
 
 And then, thirdly, we remark, that such pursuits 
 are peculiarly favorable to the culture of style. In 
 fact, ihey force that culture. A man who has abso- 
 lute facts to communicate from some branch of study, 
 external to himself, as physiology, suppose, or anat- 
 omy, or astronomy, is careless of stvle ; or, at least, 
 \ie may be so, because he is independent of style ; for 
 what he has to communicate, neither readily admits, 
 nor much needs, any graces in the mode of communi- 
 lation ; the matter transcends and oppresses the man*
 
 STYLE. 289 
 
 ner. Tlie matter tells mtliout any manner at all. But 
 he who has to treat a vague question, such as Cicero 
 calls a qucBstio injijiita, where everything is to he 
 finished out of his own peculiar feelings, or his own 
 way of viewing things, (in contradistinction to a qucestio 
 injiniti, where determinate data from without, already 
 furnish the main materials,) soon finds that the manner 
 of treating it not only transcends the matter, but very 
 often, and in a very great proportion, is the matter. 
 In very many subjective exercises of the mind, as, for 
 Instance, in that class of poetry which has been for- 
 mally designated by this epithet, (meditative poetry, 
 we mean, in opposition to the Homeric, which is in- 
 tensely objective,} the problem before the writer is 
 — to project his o'w^n inner mind ; to bring out con- 
 sciously what yet lurks by involution in many unan- 
 alyzed feelings ; in short, to pass through a prism, and 
 radiate into distinct elements, what previously had 
 been even to himself but dim and confused ideas, 
 intermixed with each other. Now, in such cases, the 
 skill with which detention or conscious arrest is given 
 to the evanescent, external projection to what is inter- 
 nal, outline to what is fluxionary, and body to what is 
 vague — all this depends entirely on the command 
 over language, as the one sole means of embodying 
 ideas. I And, in such cases, the style, or, in the largest 
 sensed manner, is confluent with the matter. But, 
 at all events, ^ven by those who are most impatient 
 of any subtleties, or what they consider ' metaphysi- 
 cal ' distinctions, thus much must be conceded — viz. 
 that those who rest upon external facts, tangible real- 
 ities, and circumstantial details, in short, generally 
 upon the objective, whether in a case of narration oi 
 19
 
 290 STYLE. 
 
 of argument, must forever be less dependent upon 
 Btyle, than those who have to draw upon their ovra 
 understandings and their own peculiar feelinga. for 
 the furniture and matter of their composition, i A 
 Bingle illustration will make this plain. It is an old 
 remark, and, in fact, a subject of continual experience 
 that lawyers fail as public speakers in the House of 
 Commons. Even Erskine, the greatest of modern ad 
 vocates, was nobody as a senator ; and the ' fluent 
 Murray,' two generations before him, had found his 
 fluency give way under that mode of trial. But why ? 
 How was it possible that a man's fluency in one cham- 
 ber of public business, should thus suddenly be de- 
 feated and confounded in another ? The reason is 
 briefly expressed in Cicero's distinction between a 
 qucBstio jinita and a qucBstio injlnita. In the courts of 
 law, the orator was furnished with a brief ; an abstract 
 of facts ; downright statements upon oath ; circum- 
 stances of presumption ; and, in short, a whole volume 
 of topics external to his own mind. Sometimes, it is 
 true, the advocate would venture a little out to sea, 
 propria marti : in a case of crim. con., for instance, 
 he would attempt a little picture of domestic happiness 
 drawn from his own funds. But he was emboldened 
 to do this from his certain knowledge, that in the facts 
 of his brief he had alway? a hasty retreat in case of 
 iny danger that he should founder. If the little pic- 
 ture prospered, it was well : if not, if symptoms of 
 weariness began to arise in the audience, or of hesita- 
 tion in himself, it was but to cut the matter short, and 
 ceturn to the terra firma of his brief, when all again 
 was fluent motion. Besides that each separate transi- 
 tion, and" the distribution of the general subject oflered
 
 STYLE. 
 
 291 
 
 themselves spontaneously in a law case ; the logic was 
 given as well as the method. Generally speaking, the 
 mere order cf chronology dictated the succession and 
 arrangement of the topics. Now on the other hand, 
 in a House of Commons' oration, although sometimes 
 there may occur statements of facts and operose calcu- 
 lations, still these are never more than a text, at the 
 very best, for the political discussion, but often no 
 more than a subsequent illustration or proof attached 
 to some one of its heads. The main staple of any 
 long speech must always be some general view of na- 
 tional policy ; and, in Cicero's language, such a view 
 must always be injinita — that is, not determined ah 
 extra, but shaped and drawn from the funds of one's 
 own understanding. The facts are here subordinate 
 and ministerial ; in the case before a jury, the facts 
 are all in all. The forensic orator satisfies his duty, if 
 he does but take the facts exactly as they stand in his 
 brief, and place them before his audience in that order, 
 and even (if he should choose it) in those words. The 
 parliamentary orator has no opening for facts at all, 
 but as he himself may be able to create such an open- 
 ing by some previous expositions of doctrine or opin- 
 ion, of the probable or the expedient. The one is 
 always creeping along shore — the other is always out 
 at sea. Accordingly, the degrees of anxiety which 
 severally affect the two cases, is best brought to the 
 test in this one question — ' What shall 1 say next 7 ' — 
 an anxidty besetting orators like that which besets poor 
 men in respect to their children's daily bread. — ' This 
 moment it is secured ; but, alas ! for the next ! ' Now, 
 che judicial orator finds an instant relief: the very 
 'joints of the case are numbered ; and, if he cannot
 
 292 
 
 STYLE. 
 
 find more to say upon No. 7, he has only to pas^s on, 
 and call up No. 8. Whereas, the deliberative orator, 
 in a senate or a literary meeting, finds himself always 
 in this situation — that having reached with difficulty 
 that topic which we have supposed to be No. 7, one of 
 three cases uniformly occurs : either he does not per- 
 ceive any No. 8 at all ; or, secondly, he sees a dis- 
 tracting choice of No. 8's — the ideas to which he 
 irdght next pass are many, but he does not see whither 
 chey will lead him ; or, thirdly, he sees a very fair and 
 promising No. 8, but cannot in any way discover, off- 
 hand, how he is to effect a transition to this new topic. 
 He cannot, with the rapidity requisite, modulate out of 
 the one key into the other. His anxiety increases, 
 utter confusion masters him, and he breaks down. 
 
 We have made this digression by way of seeking, 
 in a well known case of public life, an illustration of 
 the difference between a subjective and an objective 
 exercise of the mind. It is the sudden translation 
 from the one exercise to the other, which, and which 
 only, accounts for the failure of advocates when at- 
 tempting senatorial efforts. Once used to depend on 
 memorials or briefs of facts, or of evidence not self- 
 derived, the advocate, like a child in leading-strings, 
 loses that command over his own internal resources, 
 which otherwise he might have drawn from practice. 
 In fact, the advocate, with his brief lying before him, 
 is precisely in the condition of a parliamentary speak- 
 er, who places a written speech or notes for a speech 
 in his hat. This trick has sometimes been practised : 
 and the consternation which would befall the orator in 
 the case of such a hat-speech being sviddenly blown 
 %way, precisely realizes the situation of a nisi prim
 
 STYLE. 293 
 
 orator when first getting on his legs in the Hoiise of 
 Commons. He has swum mth bladders all his life : 
 suddenly he must swim without them. 
 
 This case explains why it is, that all subjectivB 
 branches of study favor the cultivation of style. — 
 Whatsoever is entirely independent of the mind, and 
 external to it, is generally equal to its own enuncia- 
 tion. I Ponderable facts and external realities are intel- 
 ligible in almost any language : they are self-explained 
 and self-sustained. But the more closely any exercise 
 of mind is connected with what is internal and individ- 
 ual in the sensibilities, that is, with what is philosoph- 
 ically termed subjective, precisely in that degree, and 
 the more subtly, does the style or the embodying of 
 the thoughts cease to be a mere separable ornament, 
 and in fact the more does the manner, as ^\i^ expressed 
 it before, become confluent with the matter. In saying 
 this, we do but vary the form of what we once heard 
 delivered on this subject by Mr. Wordsworth : his re- 
 mark was by far the weightiest thing we ever heard on 
 the subject of style ; and it was this — That it is in the 
 highest degree unphilosophic to call language or dic- 
 tion ' the dress of thoughts ; ' and what was it then that 
 he would substitute? Why this : he would call it ' the 
 incarnation of thoughts.' Never, in one word, was 
 80 profound a truth conveyed. Mr. Wordsworth was 
 thinking, doubtless, of poetry like his own ; viz. that 
 which is eminently meditative. And the truth is ap- 
 parent on consideration : for, if language were merely 
 ft dress, then you could separate the two : you could 
 la.y the thoughts on the left hand, the language on 
 the right. But, generally speaking, you can no more 
 ieal thus with poetic thoughts, than you can with soul
 
 £94 STYLE. 
 
 and body. The union is too subtle; tbe intertexture 
 too ineffable, each co-existing not merely with the 
 other, but each i7i and through the other. An image, 
 for instance, a single word, often enters into a thought 
 as a constituent part. In short, the two elements are 
 not united as a body with a separable dress, but as a 
 mysterious incarnation. And thus, in what proportion 
 the thoughts are subjective, in that same proportion 
 does their very essence become identical with the 
 expression, and the style become confluent with the 
 matter. 
 
 The Greeks, by want of books, philosophical in- 
 struments, and innumerable other aids to all objective 
 researches, being thrown more exclusively than we 
 upon their own unaided minds, cultivated logic, ethics, 
 metaphysics, psychology — all thoroughly subjective 
 studies. The schoolmen, in the very same situation, 
 cultivated precisely the same field of knowledge. The 
 Greeks, indeed, added to their studies that of geometry ; 
 for the inscription over the gate of the Academy (Let 
 no one enter who is not instructed in geometry) suffi- 
 ciently argues that this science must have made some 
 progress in the days of Pericles, when it could thus be 
 made a general qualification for admission to a learned - 
 establishment within thirty years after his death. But 
 geometry is partly an objective, partly a subjective 
 study. With this exception, the Greeks and the mo- 
 nastic schoolmen trode the very same path. 
 
 Consequently, in agreement with our principle, both 
 ought to have found themselves in circumstances 
 favorable to the cultivation of style. And it is certain 
 that they did. As an art, as a practice, it was felici- 
 lously pursued in both cases. It is true that the harsk
 
 STYLE. 295 
 
 iscetic mode of treating philosophy by the schoohnen, 
 generated a corresponding barrenness, aridity and re- 
 pulsiveness, in the rigid forms of their technical lan- 
 guage. But however offensive to genial sensibilities, 
 this diction was a perfect thing in its kind ; and, to do 
 It justice, we ought rather to compare it with the exqui- 
 site language of algebra, equally irreconcilable to all 
 standards of aesthetic beauty ; but yet for the three 
 qualities of elliptical rapidity, (that rapidity which con- 
 stitutes what is meant by elegance in mathematics,) — 
 of absolute precision — and of simplicity, this algebraic 
 language is unrivalled amongst human inventions. On 
 the other hand, the Greeks, whose objects did not 
 confine them to these austere studies, carried out their 
 corresponding excellence in style upon a far wider and 
 indeed a comprehensive scale. Almost all modes of 
 style were exemplified amongst them. Thus, we 
 endeavor to show that the subjective pursuits of the 
 Greeks and the schoolmen ought to have favored a 
 command of appropriate diction ; and afterwards that 
 it did. 
 
 But, fourthly, we are entitled to expect — that wher- 
 ever style exists in great development as a practice, it 
 will soon be investigated with corresponding success 
 as a theory. If fine music is produced spontaneously 
 in short snatches by the musical sensibility of a peo- 
 ple, it is a matter of certainty that a science of com- 
 position, that counterpoint, that thorough-bass. Will 
 Boon be cultivated ^vith a commensurate zeal. This is 
 matter of such obvious inference, that in any case 
 tvhere it fails, we look for some extraordinary cause 
 to account for it. Now, in Greece, with respect to 
 \tyle, the inforence did fail. Style, as an art, was in
 
 296 STYLE. 
 
 a high state of culture : style, as a science, was nearly 
 neglected. How is this to be accounted for ? It arose 
 naturally enough out of one great phenomenon in the 
 condition of ancient times, and the relation whish that 
 bore to literature, and to all human exertion of the 
 intellect. 
 
 Did the reader ever happen to reflect on the great 
 idea of Publication 7 An idea we call it ; because, 
 even in our own times, with all the mechanic aids of 
 steam-presses, &c., this object is most imperfectly ap- 
 proached, and is destined, perhaps, forever to remain 
 an unattainable ideal ; useful (like all ideals) in the 
 way of regulating our aims, but also as a practicable 
 object not reconcilable with the limitation of human 
 power. For it is clear that, if books were multiplied 
 by a thousand-fold, and truth of all kinds were carried 
 to the very fireside of every family, nay, placed below 
 the eyes of every individual, still the purpose of any 
 universal publication would be defeated and utterly 
 confounded, were it only by the limited opportunities 
 of readers. One condition of publication defeats 
 another. Even so much as a general publication is a 
 hopeless idea. Yet, on the other hand, publication, 
 in some degree, and by some mode, is a siyie qua non 
 condition for the generation of literature. Without a 
 larger sympathy than that of his own personal circle, 
 it is evident that no writer could have a motive for 
 those exertions and previous preparations, without 
 which excellence is not attainable in any art whatso- 
 ever. 
 
 Now, in our own times, it is singular, and really phi- 
 losophically curious, to remark the utter blindness of 
 Writers, readers, publishers, and all parties whatevei
 
 STYLE. 297 
 
 interested in literature, as to the trivial fraction of pub- 
 licity which settles upon each sepai-ate work. The 
 very multiplication of books has continually defeated 
 the object in a growing progression. Readers have 
 increased, the engines of publication have increased ; 
 but books, increasing in a still greater proportion, have 
 left as the practical result — an average quotient 
 of publicity for each book, taken apart, continually 
 decreasing. And if the whole world were readers, 
 probably the average publicity for each separate work 
 would reach a minimum — such would be the concur- 
 rent increase of books. But even this view of the case 
 keeps out of sight the most monstrous forms of this 
 phenomenon. The inequality of the publication has 
 the effect of keeping very many books absolutely with- 
 out a reader. The majority of books are never opened ; 
 five hundred copies may be printed, or half as many 
 more ; of these, it may happen, that five are carelessly 
 turned over. Popular journals, again, which carry a 
 promiscuous miscellany of papers into the same num- 
 ber of hands, as a stage-coach must convey all its pas- 
 sengers at the rame rate of speed, dupe the public with 
 a notion that here at least all are read. Not at all. 
 One or two are read from the interest attached to their 
 subjects. Occasionally one is read a little from the 
 ability with which it treats a subject not otherwise at- 
 tractive. The rest have a better chance certainly than 
 books, because they are at any rate placed under the 
 eye and in the hand of readers. But this is no more 
 than a variety of the same case. A hasty glance may 
 be taken by one in a hundred at the less attractive 
 papers ; but reading is out of the question. Then, 
 \gain, another delusion, by which all parties disguise
 
 298 STYLE. 
 
 the truth, is, the absurd belief that, not "being read at 
 present, a book may, however, be revived hereafter. 
 Believe it not ! This is possible only with regard to 
 books that demand to be studied, where the merit is 
 slowly discovered. Every month, every day indeed, 
 produces its own novelties, with the additional zest that 
 they are novelties. Every future year, which will 
 assuredly fail in finding time for its own books, how 
 should it find time for defunct books ? No, no — 
 every year buries its own literature. Since Waterloo, 
 there have been added upwards of fifty thousand books 
 and pamphlets to the shelves of our native literature, 
 taking no account of foreign importations. Of these 
 fifty thousand, possibly two hundred still survive ; pos- 
 sibly twenty will survive for a couple of centuries ; 
 possibly five or six thousand may have been indiffer- 
 ently read : the rest not so much as opened. In this 
 hasty sketch of a calculation, we assume a single copy 
 to represent a whole edition. But in order to have the 
 total sum of copies numerically neglected since Water- 
 loo, it will be requisite to multiply forty-four thousand 
 by five hundred at the least, but probably by a higher 
 multiplier. At the very moment of writing this — by 
 way of putting into a brighter light the inconceivable 
 blunder as to publicity habitually committed by sensi- 
 ble men of the world — let us mention what we now 
 see before us in a public journal. Speaking with 
 disapprobation of a just but disparaging expression 
 applied to the French war-mania by a London morn- 
 'jig paper, the writer has described it as likely to 
 irritate the people of France. O, genius of arithmetic. 
 The offending London journal has a circulation of four 
 ftiousand copies daily — and it is assumed that thirty-
 
 STYLE. 299 
 
 three millions, of whom assuredly not tweuty-fi'^'' 
 mdi%-iduals will ever see the English paper as a visible 
 object, nor five ever read the passage in question, are 
 to be maddened by one word in a colossal paper laid 
 this ■ morning on a table amongst fifty others, and 
 to-morrow morning pushed off that table by fifty others 
 of more recent date. How are such delusions possi- 
 ble ? Simply from the pre^ious delusion, of ancient 
 standing, connected with printed characters : Avhat is 
 printed seems to every man invested with some fatal 
 character of publicity such as cannot belong to mere 
 MS. ; whilst in the meantime, out of every thousand 
 printed pages, one at the most, but at all events a very 
 small proportion indeed, is in any true sense more 
 public when printed than previously as a manuscript ; 
 and that one, even that thousandth part, perishes as 
 effectually in a few days to each separate reader, as 
 the words perish in our daily conversation. Out of all 
 that we talk, or hear others talk, through the course of 
 a year, how much remains on the memory at the 
 closing day of December ? Quite as little, we may be 
 sure, survives from most people's reading. A book 
 answers its purpose by sustaining the intellectual 
 faculties in motion through the current act of reading ; 
 and a general deposition or settling takes effect from 
 the sum of what we read ; even that, however, chiefly 
 according to the pre\-ious condition in which the book 
 finds lis for understanding it, and referring them to 
 heads under some existing arrangement of our know- 
 edge. Publication is an idle term applied to what is 
 not published : and nothing is published wkich is not 
 made known puhlicly to the understanding as well as 
 » the eye : whereas, for the enormous majority of
 
 800 STYLE. 
 
 what is printed, we cannot say so much as that it iB 
 made known to the eyes. 
 
 For what reason have we insisted on this unpleasant 
 view of a phenomenon incident to the limitation of 
 our faculties, and apparently without remedy ? Upon 
 another occasion it might have been useful to do so, 
 were it only to impress upon every writer the vast 
 importance of compression. Simply to retrench one 
 word from each sentence, one superfluous epithet, for 
 example, would probably increase the disposable time 
 of the public by one twelfth part ; in other words, 
 would add another month to the year, or raise any 
 Bum of volumes read from eleven to twelve hundred. 
 A mechanic operation would effect that change : but, 
 by cultivating a closer logic and more severe habits of 
 thinking, perhaps two sentences out of each three 
 might be pruned away ; and the amount of possible 
 publication might thus be increased in a threefold 
 degree. A most serious duty, therefore, and a duty 
 which is annually growing in solemnity, appears to be 
 connected with the culture of an unwordy diction ; 
 much more, however, with the culture of clear think- 
 ing ; that being the main key to good writing, and 
 consequently to fluent reading. 
 
 But all this, though not unconnected with our general 
 theme, is wide of our immediate purpose. The course 
 of our logic at this point runs in the following order. 
 The Athenians, from causes assigned, ought to have 
 consummated the whole science and theory of style. 
 But they did not. Why ? Simply from a remarkable 
 deflection or bias given to their studies by a difficulty 
 connected with publication. For some modes of 
 tterature the Greeks had a means of publication, for
 
 STYLE. 301 
 
 many they had not. That one difference, as we shall 
 show, disturbed the just valuation of style. 
 
 Some mode of publication must have existed for 
 Athens, that is evident. Th. -yxerc fact of a literature 
 proves it. For without public sympathy how can a 
 literatiure arise ? or public sympathy without a regular 
 organ of publication ? What poet would submit to the 
 labors of his most difficult art, if he .tad no reasonable 
 prospect of a large audience, and son,^ewhat of a per- 
 manent audience to welcome and adopt his produc- 
 tions ? 
 
 Now then, in the Athens of Pericles, what was the 
 audience, how composed, and how ensured, on which 
 the literary composer might rely ? By what channel, 
 in short, did the Athenian writer calculate on a publi- 
 cation 7 
 
 This is a very interesting question ; and, as regards 
 much in the civilization of Greece, both for what it 
 caused and what it prevented, is an important question. 
 In the elder days, in fact we may suppose through the 
 five hundred years from the Trojan expedition to 
 Pisistratus and Solon, all publication was effected 
 through two classes of men — the public reciters and 
 the public singers. Thus no doubt it was, that the 
 Iliad and Odyssey were sent down to the hands of 
 Pisistratus, who has the traditional reputation of having 
 fi.rst arranged and revised these poems. These reciters 
 or singers to the harp, woidd probably rehearse one 
 entire book of the Iliad at every splendid banquet. 
 Every book would be kept in remembrance and cur- 
 rency by the peculiar local relations of particular states 
 V particular families to ancestors connected with Troy. 
 This mode of publication, however, had the disadvan-
 
 302 STYLE. 
 
 tage, that it was among tTie arts ministerial to sensual 
 enjoyment. And it is some argument for the exten- 
 sive diffusion of such a practice in the earlj- times of 
 Greece, that both in '' - Greece of later times, and, 
 by adoption from '9^^^ in the Rome of cultivated 
 ages, we find the axqoafiara as commonly established 
 by way of a dinner appurtenance — that is, exercises 
 of display addressed to the ear, recitations of any 
 kind with and without music — not at all less fre- 
 quently than oQcifiaTa, or the corresponding display to 
 the eye, (dances or combats of gladiators.) These 
 were doubtless inheritances from the ancient usages of 
 Greece, modes of publication resorted to long before 
 the Olympic games, by the mere necessitous cravings 
 for sympathy ; and kept up long after that institution, 
 as in itself too brief and rare in its recurrence to satisfy 
 the necessity. 
 
 Such was the earliest effort of publication, and in its 
 feeble infancy ; for this, besides its limitation in point 
 of audience, was confined to narrative poetry. But 
 when the ideal of Greece was more and more exalted 
 by nearer comparison with barbarous standards, after 
 the sentiment of patriotism had coalesced with vin- 
 dictive sentiments, and when towering cities began to 
 reflect the grandeur of this land as in a visual mirror, 
 these cravings for publicity became more restless and 
 irrepressible. And at length in the time of Pericles, 
 concurrently with the external magnificence of the 
 city, arose for Athens two modes of publication, each 
 upon a scale of gigantic magnitude. 
 
 What were these ? The Theatre and the Agora or 
 Forum ; publication by the Stage, and publication by 
 the Hustings. These were the extraordinary modes
 
 8TTLB . 303 
 
 of publication winch arose for Athens ; one by a 
 sudden birth, like that of Minerva, in the very genera- 
 tion of Pericles ; the other slowly matuiing itself from 
 the generation of Pisistratus, which preceded that of 
 Pericles by a hundred years. This double publication, 
 scenic and forensic, was virtually, and for all the loftier 
 purposes of publication, the press of Athens. And 
 however imperfect a representative this may seem of 
 a typographical publication, certain it is that in some 
 important features the Athenian publication had sepa- 
 rate advantages of its own. It was a far more effec- 
 tive and correct publication, in the first place ; enjoying 
 every aid of enforcing accompaniment, from voice, 
 gesture, scenery, music ; and suffering in no instance 
 from false reading or careless reading. Then secondly, 
 it was a far wider publication ; each drama being read 
 (or heard, which is a far better thing) by twenty-five 
 or thirty thousand persons, counterbalancing at leas . 
 forty editions, such as we on an average publish, eacli 
 oration being delivered with just emphasis, to perhaps 
 seven thousand. But why, in this mention of a stage 
 or hustings publication, as opposed to a publication by 
 the printing-press, why was it, we are naturally ad- 
 monished to ask, that the Greeks had no press ? The 
 ready answer will be, because the art of printing had 
 no; been discovered. But that is an error, the detec- 
 tion of which we owe to the present Archbishop of 
 Dublin. The art of printing was discovered. It had 
 been discovered repeatedly. The art which multiplied 
 the legends upon a coin or medal, (a work which the 
 ftncients performed by many degrees better than we 
 moderns, for we make it a mechanic art, they & fine 
 art,) naa in effect anticipated the art of printing. It was
 
 304 STTIiE. 
 
 an art, this typographic mystery, which awoke and went 
 back to sleep many times over, from mere defect of 
 materials. Not the defect of typography us an art, hut 
 the defect oi paper as a material for keeping this art in 
 motion — there lay the reason, as Dr. Whately most 
 truly observes, why printed books had no existence 
 amongst the Greeks of Pericles, or afterwards amongst 
 the llomans of Cicero. And why was there no paper ? 
 The common reason applying to both countries was 
 the want of linen rags ; and that want arose from the 
 universal habit of wearing woollen garments. In this 
 respect, Athens and Rome were on the same level. 
 But for Athens, the want was driven to a further ex- 
 tremity by the slenderness of her commerce with 
 Egypt, whence only any substitute could have been 
 drawn. 
 
 Even for Rome itself, the scarcity of paper ran 
 through many degrees. Horace, the poet, was amused 
 with the town of Equotuticum for two reasons ; as 
 incapable of entering into hexameter verse, from its 
 prosodial quantity, {yersu quod dicere non est,) and 
 because it purchased water, (vcenit vilissima rerum 
 aqua :) a circumstance in which it agrees with the well 
 known Clifton, above the hot Avells of Bristol, where 
 water is bought by the shilling's worth. But neither 
 Horatian Equotuticum, nor Bristolian Clifton, can ever 
 have been as ' hard up ' for water as the Mecca cara- 
 van. And the differences were as great, in respect to 
 the want of paper, between the Athens of Pericles or 
 Alexander, and the Rome of Augustus Caesar. Athens 
 had bad poets, whose names have come down to 
 modern times : but Athens could no more have afforded 
 to punish bad authors by sending their works to gro- 
 wers —
 
 STYLE. 305 
 
 ' in Yicum vendentem pus et odores, 
 
 Et piper, et quicquid chartis anicilur ineptis,* 
 
 than London, because gorged with the v/ealth of two 
 Indies, can afford to pave her streets with silver. This 
 practice of applying unsaleable authors to the ignoull 
 uses of retail dealers in petty articles, must have 
 existed in Rome for some time before it could have 
 attracted the notice of Horace, and upon some consid- 
 erable scale as a known public usage, before it could 
 have roused any echoes of public mirth as a satiric 
 allusion, or have had any meaning and sting. 
 
 In that one revelation of Horace, we see a proof 
 how much paper had become more plentiful. It is 
 true, that so long as men dressed in woollen materials, 
 it was impossible to look for a cheap paper. Maga 
 might have been printed at Rome very well for ten 
 guineas a copy. Paper was dear, undoubtedly ; but 
 it could be had. On the other hand, how desperate 
 must have been the bankruptcy at Athens in all mate- 
 rials for receiving the record of thoughts, when we 
 find a polished people having no better tickets or cards 
 for conveying their sentiments to the public than shells ? 
 Thence came the very name for civil banishment, viz. 
 ostracism, because the votes were marked on an ostra- 
 con, or marine shell. Again, in another great and 
 most splendid city, you see men reduced to petaUsm, 
 01 marking their votes by the petals of shrubs. Else- 
 where, as indeed many centuries nearer to our own 
 times, in Constantinople, bull's hide was used for the 
 same purpose. 
 
 Well might the poor Greeks adopt the desperate ex- 
 pedient of white plastered walls as the best memoran- 
 dum-book for a man who had thoughts occurring to 
 20
 
 STYLE. 
 
 him in the night-time. Brass only, oi marole, could 
 offer any lasting memorial for thoughts ; and upon 
 what material the parts wore written out for the actors 
 on the Athenian stage, or how the elaborate revisala 
 of the text could be carried on, is beyond our power 
 of conjecture. 
 
 In this appalling state of embarrassment for the 
 great poet or prose writer, what consequences would 
 naturally arise ? A king's favorite and friend like 
 Aristotle might command the most costly materials. 
 For instance, if you look back from this day to 1800, 
 into the advertising records or catalogues of great Pa- 
 risian publishers, you will find more works of exces- 
 si'-'e luxury, costing from a thousand francs for each 
 copy, all the way up to as many guineas, in each sep- 
 arate period of fifteen years, than in the whole forty 
 among the wealthier and more enterprising publishers 
 of Great Britain. What is the explanation ? Can the 
 very moderate incomes of the French gentry afford to 
 patronize works which are beyond the purses of our 
 British aristocracy, who, besides, are so much more of 
 a reading class ? Not so : the patronage for these 
 Parisian works of luxury is not domestic, it is exotic : 
 chiefly from emperors and kings ; from great national 
 libraries ; from rich universities ; from the grandees 
 of Russia, Hungary, or Great Britain ; and generally 
 from those who, living in splendid castles or hotels, 
 require corresponding furniture, and therefore corres- 
 ponding books ; because to such people books are 
 necessarily furniture ; since upon the principles of 
 good taste, they must correspond with the splendor of 
 all around them. And in the age of Alexander, there 
 were already purchasers enough among royal houses.
 
 STYLE. 807 
 
 or the imitators of such houses, to encourage costly 
 copies of attractive works, Aristotle was a privileged 
 man. But in other less favored cases, the strong 
 yearnings for public sympathy were met by blank 
 impossibilities. Much martyrdom, we feel assured, 
 was then suffered by poets. Thousands, it is true, 
 perish in our days, who have never had a solitary 
 reader. But still, the existence in print gives a delu- 
 sive feeling that they have been read. They are 
 standing in the market all day, and somebody, unper- 
 ceived by themselves, may have thrown an eye upon 
 their wares. The thing is possible. But for the an- 
 cient writer there was a sheer physical impossibility 
 that any man should sympathize with what he never 
 could have seen, except under the two conditions we 
 have mentioned. 
 
 These two cases there were of exemption from this 
 dire physical resistance ; two conditions which made 
 publication possible : and under the horrible circum- 
 stances of sequestration for authors in general, need it 
 be said, that to benefit by either advantage was sought 
 \\dth such a zeal as, in effect, extinguished all other 
 literature ? If a man could be a poet for the stage, a 
 scriptor scenicus, in that case he obtained a hearing. 
 If a man could be admitted as an orator, as a regular 
 demagogus, from the popular bona, or hustings, in that 
 case he obtained a hearing. If his own thoughts were 
 a torment to him, until they were reverberated from 
 the hearts and flashing eyes and clamorous sympathy 
 of a midtitude ; thus only an outlet was provided, a 
 mouth was opened, for the volcano surging within his 
 brain. The vast theati^e was ar organ of publication ; 
 the political forum was an organ of publication
 
 808 STYLE. 
 
 And on this twofold arena a torch was applied to that 
 inflammable gas, which exhaled spontaneously from so 
 excitable a mind as the mind of the Athenian. 
 
 Need we wonder, then, at the torrent-like deter- 
 mination with which Athenian literature, from the era 
 444 B. C, to the era 333 B. C, ran headlong into one 
 or other channel — the scenical poetry or the eloquence 
 of the hustings ? For an Athenian in search of pop- 
 ular applause, or of sympathy, there was no other 
 avenue to either ; unless, indeed, in the character of 
 an artist, or of a leading soldier: but too often, in this 
 latter class, it happened that mercenary foreigners had 
 a preference. And thus it was, that during that period 
 when the popular cast of government throughout Greece 
 awakened patriotic emulation, scarcely anything is 
 heard of in literature (allowing for the succession tc 
 philosophic chairs, which made it their pride to be 
 private and exclusive) except dramatic poetry on the 
 one hand, comic or tragic, and political oratory on the 
 other. 
 
 As to this last avenue to the public ear, how it was 
 abused, in what excess it became the nuisance and 
 capital scourge of Athens, there needs only the testi- 
 mony of all contemporary men who happened to stand 
 aloof from that profession, or all subsequent men even 
 of that very profession, who were not blinded by some 
 corresponding interest in some similar system of delu- 
 sion. Euripides and Aristophanes, contemporary with 
 the earliest practitioners of name and power on that 
 stage of jugglers, are overrun with expressions of 
 horror for these public pests. ' You have every quali- 
 fication,' says Aristophanes to an aspirant, ' that 
 could be wished for a public orator; (fvvtj ^laQa — a
 
 STYLE. ^^^ 
 
 roice like seven devils — y.a>fo? y«yna?— yon are by 
 uature a scamp — "yoS"'"? " — you are up to snuff in _ 
 the business of the forum.' From Euripides might 
 be gathered a small volume, relying merely upon so 
 much of his works as yet survives, in illustration of 
 the horror which possessed him for this gang of public 
 tnisleaders : — 
 
 Tovt" to6' SyrjToiv tv tto^eis oixot'^«i«S 
 Juftovg t' a/ro/AuT' — of xaXoi Xtar Xoyoi. 
 
 ' This is what overthrows cities, admirably organ- 
 ized, and the households of men — your superfine 
 harangues.' Cicero, full four centuries later, looking 
 back to this very period from Pericles to Alexander, 
 friendly as he was by the esprit de corps to the order 
 of orators, and professionally biased to uphold the 
 civil uses of eloquence ; yet, as an honest man, cannot 
 deny that it was this gift of oratory, hideously abused, 
 which led to the overthrow of Athens, and the ruin of 
 Gredan liberty : — ' Ilia vetus Graecia, qua quondam 
 opibus, imperio gloria floruit, hoc uno malo concidit — 
 libertate immoderatd ac Ucentid concionum.' Quin- 
 Ulian, standing on the very same ground of profes- 
 t'onal prejudice, all in favor of public orators, yet is 
 forced into the same sorrowful confession. In one of 
 the Declamations ascribed to him, he says — ' Civitar 
 tum status scimus ab oratoribus esse converses ; ' ana 
 in illustration he adds the example of Athens : ' sive 
 ill am Athen'.ensium civitatem, (quondam late princi- 
 pem,) intuen placeat, accisas ejus vires animadverte- 
 mus vitio condonantium: Root ard branch, Athena 
 »yas laid prostrate by her wicked radical orators ; for 
 radical, in the elliptic phrase of modern politics, they
 
 510 STTXE. 
 
 were almost to a man ; and in this featui-e above all 
 others, (a feature often scornfully exposed by Euripi- 
 des,) those technically known as ol Xiyoircc — the 
 speaking men, and as ut ih^uaymyui '^ — the misleaders 
 of the mob, offer a most suitable ancestry for the 
 modern leaders of radicalism — that with their base, 
 fawning flatteries of the people, they mixed up the 
 venom of vipers against their opponents and against 
 the aristocracy of the land. 
 
 ' y/iu Xvxantty or^uutoig fiayeiQixotg — 
 
 ' Subtly to wheedle the people with honeyed words 
 dressed to its palate ' — this had been the ironical 
 advice of the scoffing Aristophanes. That practice 
 made the mob orator contemptible to manly tastes 
 rather than hateful. But the sacrifice of independence 
 — the ' pride which licks the dust ' — is the readiest 
 training for all uncharitableness and falsehood towards 
 those who seem either rivals for the same base pur- 
 poses, or open antagonists for nobler. And accord- 
 ingly it is remarked by Euripides, that these pestilent 
 abusers of the popular confidence would bring a 
 mischief upon Athens before they had finished, equally 
 by their sycophancies to the mob, and by their libels 
 v '' foreign princes. Hundreds of years afterwards, a 
 Greek writer, upon reviewing this most interesting 
 period of one hundred and eleven years, from Pericles 
 to Alexander, sums up and repeats the opinion of Eu- 
 ripides in this general representative portrait of Attic 
 oratory, with respect to which we wish to ask, can any 
 better delineation be given of a Chartist, or generically 
 of a modern Jacobin ? — o St]iiaywyog xuxoSiSuaxaXn rovt 
 noXiovg, ktyfiv Ttt y-f^uQiouita — 'The mob-leader dupes 
 ';he multitude with false doctrines, whilst delivering
 
 STYLE. 311 
 
 things soothing to their credulous vanity.' This is one 
 half of his office — sychophancy to the immediate purse- 
 holders, and poison to the sources of truth — the other 
 half is expressed with the same spirit of prophecy as 
 regards the British future — ^a< 9,a^oXixig avrov? t^aXXo- 
 r^ro. 7ZQ0? -xovi antarovi, ' and hy Ij^ng calumnies he 
 utterly alienates their affections from their own native 
 
 aristocracy.' 
 
 Now this was a base pursuit, though somewhat re- 
 lieved by the closing example of Demosthenes, who, 
 amidst much frailty, had a generous nature ; and he 
 showed it chiefly by his death, and in his lifetime, to 
 use Milton's words, by uttering many times ' odious 
 truth,' which, with noble courage, he compelled the 
 mob to hear. But one man could not redeem a na- 
 tional dishonor. It was such, and such it was felt to 
 be. Men, therefore, of elevated natures, and men of 
 gentle pacific natures, equally revolted from a trade of 
 lies, as regarded the audience, and of strife, as regard- 
 ed the competitors. There remained the one other 
 pursuit of scenical poetry ; and it hardly needs to be 
 .;aid, what crowding there was amongst all the ener- 
 getic minds of Athens into one or other of these pursuits 
 _ the one for the unworldly and idealizing, the other 
 for the coarsely ambitious. These, therefore, became 
 the two quasi professions of Athens ; and at the same 
 time, in a sense more exclusive than can now be true 
 of our professions, became the sole means of publica- 
 tion for truth of any class, and a publication by many 
 degrees more certain, more extensive, and more imme- 
 diate, than ours by the press. 
 
 The Athenian theatre published an edition of thirty 
 thousand copies in one day, enabling, in effect every
 
 312 STYLE. 
 
 male citizen capable of attending, from the age of 
 twenty to sixty, together with many thousands of 
 domiciled aliens, to read the drama, with the fullest 
 understanding of its sense and poetic force that could 
 be affected by natural powers of voice and action, 
 combined with all possible auxiliaries of art, of music, 
 of pantomimic dancing ; and the whole carried home 
 to the heart by visible and audible sympathy in excess. 
 This, but in a very inferior form, as regarded the 
 adjuncts of art, and the scale of the theatre, and the 
 mise en scene, was precisely the advantage of Charles I. 
 for appreciating Shakspeare. 
 
 It was a standing reproach of the Puritans adopted 
 even by Milton, a leaden shaft feathered and made 
 buoyant by his wit, that the king had adopted that 
 stage poet as the companion of his closet retirements. 
 So it would have been a pity, if these malignant perse- 
 cutors of the royal solitude should have been liars as 
 well as fanatics. Doubtless, as king, and in his afflic- 
 tions, this storm-vexed man did read Shakspeare. But 
 that was not the original way in which he acquired his 
 acquaintance with the poet. A Prince of Wales, what 
 between public claims and social claims, finds little 
 time for reading, after the period of childhood ; that is, 
 at any period when he can comprehend a great poet. 
 And it was as Prince of Wales that Charles prosecuted 
 his studies of Shakspeare. He saw continually at 
 Whitehall, personated by the best actors of the time, 
 illustrated by the stage management, and assisted by 
 .,he mechanic displays of Inigo Jones, all the principal 
 iramas of Shakspeare actually performed. That was 
 publication with an Athenian advantage. A thousand 
 topics of a book may be brought into public libraries,
 
 STYLE. 
 
 313 
 
 ind not one of them opened. But the three thousand 
 copies of a play, which Drury Lane used to publish in 
 one night, were in the most literal sense as well as in 
 spirit read, properly punctuated by the speakers, made 
 intelligible by voice and action, endowed with Hfe and 
 cmphiis : in short, on each successive performance, a 
 very large edition of a fine tragedy was published in 
 the most impressive shape ; not merely with accuracy, 
 but with a mimic reality that forbade all forgetting, 
 and was liable to no inattention. 
 
 Now, if Drury Lane published a drama for Shak- 
 Bpeare by three thousand copies in one night, the 
 Athenian theatre published ten times that amount for 
 Sophocles. And this mode of publication in Athens 
 not co-operating (as in modern times) with other 
 modes, but standing out in solitary conspicuous relief, 
 gave an unnatural bounty upon that one mode of poetic 
 composition : as the hustings did upon one mode of 
 prose composition. And those two modes, being thus 
 cultivated to the utter exclusion of all others not bene- 
 fiting by that bounty of publication, gave an unnatural . 
 bias°to the national style ; determined, in effect, upon 
 too narrow a scale the operative ideal of composition 
 — and finally made the dramatic artist and the mob 
 orator the two sole intellectual professions for Athens. 
 Hence came a great limitation of style in practice : 
 and hence, for reasons connected with these two modes 
 of composition, a general neglect of style as a didactic 
 theory.
 
 RHETORIC/ 
 
 No art, cultivated by man, has suffered mere in the 
 revolutions of taste and opinion than the art of rheto- 
 ric. There was a time when, by an undue extension 
 of this term, it designated the whole cycle of accom- 
 plishments which prepared a man for public affairs. 
 From that height it has descended to a level with the 
 arts of alchemy and astrology, as holding out promises 
 which consist in a mixed degree of impostures and 
 of trifles. If we look into the prevailing theory of 
 rhetoric, under which it meets with so degrading an 
 estimate, we shall find that it fluctuates between two 
 different conceptions, according to one of which it is 
 an art of ostentatious ornament, and according to the 
 other an art of sophistry. A man is held to play the 
 rhetorician, when he treats a subject with more than 
 usual gayety of ornament ; and perhaps we may add, 
 fts an essential element in the idea, with conscious 
 ornament. This is one view of rhetoric ; and, under 
 ihis, what it accomplishes is not so much to p(!rsuade 
 as to delight; not so much to win the assent, as to 
 stimulate the attention, and captivate the taste. And 
 
 • Whately 's Elements of Rhetoric.
 
 BHETOKIC. 
 
 315 
 
 even this purpose is attached to something separable 
 and accidental in the manner. 
 
 But the other idea of rhetoric lays its foundation in 
 something essential to the matter. This is that rheto- 
 ric of which Milton spoke, as able ' to dash maturest 
 counsels, and to make the worse appear the better 
 reasjn.' Now it is clear, that argument of some 
 quality or other must be taken as the principle of this 
 rhetoric ; for those must be immature counsels indeed 
 that could be dashed by mere embellishments of man- 
 ner, or by artifices of diction and arrangement. 
 
 Here then we have in popular use two separate 
 ideas of rhetoric, one of which is occupied with the 
 general end of the fine ai'ts ; that is to say, intellec- 
 tual pleasure. The other applies itself more specifi- 
 cally to a definite purpose of utility. 
 
 Such is the popular idea of rhetoric, which wants 
 both unity and precision. If we seek these from the 
 formal teachers of rhetoric, our embarrassment is not 
 much relieved. All of them agree that rhetoric may 
 be defined the art of persuasion. But if we inquire 
 what is persuasion, we find them vague and indefinite, 
 or even contradictory. To waive a thousand of others. 
 Dr. Whately, in the work before us, insists upon the 
 conviction of the understanding as ' an essential part 
 of persuasion ; ' and, on the other hand, the author of 
 the Philosophy of Rhetoric is equally satisfied that 
 there is no persuasion without an appeal to the pas- 
 tions. Here are two views. We, for our parts, have 
 a third, which excludes both : where con\dction begins, 
 the field of rhetoric ends — that is our opinion : and, 
 \s to the passions, we contend that they are not within 
 the province of rhetoric, but of eloquence.
 
 516 KHETOEIC. 
 
 In this view cf rhetoric and its functions we coincide 
 with Aristotle ; as indeed originally we took it up on 
 a suggestion derived from him. But as all parties 
 may possibly fancy a confirmation of their views in 
 Aristotle, we shall say a word or two in support of 
 our own interpretation of that author, Avhich will sur- 
 prise our Oxford friends. Our explanation involves a 
 very remarkable detection, which will tax many thou- 
 sands of books with error in a particular point sup- 
 posed to be as well established as the hills. We 
 question, indeed, whether a Congreve rocket, or a 
 bomb, descending upon the schools of Oxford, would 
 cause more consternation than the explosion of that 
 novelty which we are going to discharge. 
 
 Many years ago, when studying the Aristotelian 
 rhetoric at Oxford, it struck us that, by whatever 
 name Aristotle might describe the main purpose of 
 rhetoric, practically, at least, in his own treatment of 
 it, he threw the whole stress upon finding such argu- 
 ments for any given thesis as, without positively prov- 
 ing or disproving it, gave it a colorable support. We 
 could not persuade ourselves that it was by accident 
 that the topics, or general heads of argument, were 
 never in an absolute and unconditional sense true — 
 but contained so much of plausible or colorable truth 
 jts is expressed in the original meaning of the word 
 vrobable. A ratio probabilis, in the Latin use of the 
 word probabilis, is that ground of assent — not which 
 the understanding can solemnly approve and abide 
 by — but the very opposite to this ; one which it can 
 Bubmit to for a moment, and countenance as within 
 the limits of the plausible.''^ That this was the real 
 governing law of Aristotle's procedure, it was not
 
 EHETOBIC. 317 
 
 possible to doubt : but was it consciously known to 
 himself ? If so, bow was it to be reconciled with his 
 own formal account of the office of rhetoric, so often 
 repeated, that it consisted in finding enthymemes? 
 What then was an enthymeme ? 
 
 Oxford ! thou wilt think us mad to ask. Certainly 
 we knew, what all the world knows, tbat an enthy- 
 meme was understood to be a syllogism of which one 
 proposition is suppressed — major, minor, or conclu- 
 sion. But what possible relation had that to rhetoric ? 
 Nature sufficiently prompts all men to that sort of 
 ellipsis ; and what impertinence in a teacher to build 
 his whole system upon a solemn precept to do this or 
 that, when the rack would not have forced any man 
 to do otherwise ! Besides, Aristotle had represented 
 it as the fault of former systems, that they applied 
 themselves exclusively to the treatment of the pas- 
 sions — an object foreign to the purpose of the 
 rhetorician, who, in some situations, is absolutely 
 forbidden by law to use any such arts : whereas, says 
 he, his true and universal weapon is the enthymeme, 
 which is open to him everywhere. Now what opposi- 
 tion, or what relation of any kind, can be imagined 
 between the system which he rejects and the one he 
 adopts, if the enthymeme is to be understood as it 
 isually has been r The rhetorician is not to adlress 
 the passions, but — what ? to mind that, in all his 
 drguments, he suppresses one of his propositions ! 
 And these follies are put into the mouth of Aristotle. 
 
 In this perplexity a learned Scottish friend commu- 
 nicated to us an Essay Df Facciolati's, read publicly 
 nbout a century ago, (Nov. 1724,) and entitled De 
 ^nthymemate,^ in which be maintains, that the re-
 
 318 KHETOEIC. 
 
 ceived idea of the enthymeme is a total blunder, and 
 triumphantly restores the lost idea. ' Nego,' says he, 
 ' nego enthymema esse syllogismum mutilum, ut vulgo 
 dialectici docent. Nego, inquam, et pernego enthy- 
 mema enunciatione una et conclusione constare, 
 quamvis ita in scholis omnibus finiatur, et a nobis 
 
 ipsis finitum sit aliquando nolentibus extra locum 
 
 lites suscipere.' I deny peremptorily that an enthy- 
 meme consists of one premiss and the conclusion : 
 although that doctrine has been laid dovm universally 
 in the schools, and upon one occasion even by myself, 
 as unwilling to move the question unseasonably. 
 
 Facciolati is not the least accurate of logicians, 
 because he happens to be the most eleg_ant. Yet, we 
 apprehend, that at such innovations/ Smiglecius will 
 Btir in his grave ; Keckermannus wilr^roan ; ' Dutch 
 Bargersdyk ' Avill snort : and English Crackenthorpius, 
 (who has the honor to be an ancestor of Mr. Words- 
 worth's,) though buried for two centuries, will revisit 
 the glimpses of the moon. {And really, if the ques- 
 tion were for a name, HeSfen forbid that we should 
 disturb the peace of logicians : they might have leave 
 to say, as of the Strid in Wharfdale, 
 
 • It has borne that name a thousand years. 
 And shall a thousand more.' 
 
 But, whilst the name is abused, the idea perishes. 
 Facciolati undoubtedly is right : nor is he the first 
 who has observed the error. Julius Pacius, who 
 understood Aristotle better than any man that ever 
 lived, had long before remarked it. The arguments 
 of Facciolati we shall give below ; "'^ it will be suffi- 
 cient here to state the result. An enthymeme difFep
 
 BHETOBIC r7l9 
 
 from a syllogism, not in the accident of sujipressing 
 one of its propositions ; either may do this, or neither ; 
 the difference is essential, and in the nature of the 
 matter ; that of the syllogism being certain and apo- 
 deictic ; that of the enthymeme probable, and drawn 
 from the province of opinion. 
 
 This theory tallies exactly -with our own previous 
 construction of Aristotle's rhetoric, and explains the 
 stress which he had laid at the outset upon enthy- 
 memes. Whatsoever is certain, or matter of fixed 
 science, can be no subject for the rhetorician : where 
 it is possible for the understanding to be convinced, 
 no field is open for rhetorical persuasion. Absolute 
 certainty, and fixed science, transcend and exclude 
 opinion and probability. The province of rhetoric, 
 whether meant for an influence upon the actions, or 
 simply upon the belief, lies amongst that vast field of 
 cases where there is a pro and a con, with the chance 
 of right and wrong, true and false, distributed in 
 varying proportions between them. There is also an 
 immense range of truths, where there are no chances 
 at all concerned, but the affirmative and the negative 
 are both true ; as, for example, the goodness of human 
 nature and its wickedness ; the happiness of human 
 life and its misery ; the charms of knowledge, and its 
 hollowness ; the fragility of human prosperity, in the 
 eye of religious meditation, and its security, as esti- 
 mated by worldly confidence and youthful hope. In 
 all these cases the rhetorician exhibits his art by giving 
 an impulse to one side, and by withdrawing the mind 
 BO steadily from all thoughts or images which support 
 the other, as to leave it practically under the posses- 
 ion of this partial estimate.
 
 B20 BHETORIC. 
 
 Upcn this theory, what relation to rhetoric shall we 
 assign to style and the ornamental arts of ccmposi- 
 tion ? In some respect they seem liahle to the same 
 objection as that which Aristotle has urged against 
 appeals to the passions ; both are extra-essential, or 
 iLcu Ts /loo/jUOToe ; they are subjective arts, not objec- 
 tive ; tnat is, they do not affect the thing which is to 
 be surveyed, but the eye of him who is to survey. 
 Yet, in a feast, the epicure holds himself not more 
 obliged to the cook for the venison, than to the physi- 
 cian who braces his stomach to enjoy. And any arts, 
 vvhich conciliate regard to the speaker, indirectly pro- 
 mote tbe effect of his arguments. On this account, 
 and because (under the severest limitation of rhetoric) 
 they are in many cases indispensable to the perfect 
 interpretation of the thoughts ; we may admit arts of 
 style and ornamental composition as the ministerial 
 part of rhetoric. But, with regard to the passions, as 
 contended for by Dr. Campbell, — it is a sufficient 
 answer, that they are already preoccupied by what is 
 called Eloquence. 
 
 Mr. Coleridge, as we have often heard, is in the 
 habit of drawing the line with much philosophical 
 beauty between rhetoric and eloquence. On this 
 topic we were never so fortunate as to hear him : but 
 if we are here called upon for a distinction, we shall 
 satisfy our immediate purpose by a very plain and 
 brief one. By Eloquence, we understand the over- 
 flow of powerful feelings upon occasions fitted to 
 excite them. But Rhetoric is the art of aggrandizing 
 and bringing out into strong relief, by means of vari- 
 ous and striking thoughts, some aspect of truth which 
 ►f itself is supported by no spontaneous feelings, and 
 therefore rests upon artificial aids.
 
 KHETOEIC. 321 
 
 Greece, as may well be imagined, was the birth- 
 place of Rhetoric ; to which of the Fine Arts was it 
 not ? and here, in one sense of the word Rhetoric, the 
 art had its consummation : for the theory, or ars 
 docejts, was taught vnth a fulness and an accuracy by 
 the Grecian masters, not afterwards approached. In 
 particular, it was so. taught by Aristotle, whose system, 
 we are disposed to agree with Dr. Whately, in pro- 
 nouncing the best, as regards the primary purpose of 
 a teacher ; though otherAvise, for elegance, and as a 
 practical model in the art he was expounding, neither 
 Aristotle, nor any less austere among the Greek rheto- 
 ricians, has any pretensions to measure himself with 
 Quintilian. In reality, for a triumph over the difficul- 
 ties of the subject, and as a lesson on the possibility 
 of imparting grace to the treatment of scholastic 
 topics, naturally as intractable as that of Grammar 
 or Prosody, there is no such chef-d' csuvre to this hour 
 in any literature, as the Institutions of Quintilian. 
 Laying this one case out of the comparison, however, 
 the Greek superiority was indisputable. 
 
 Yet how is it to be explained, that with these ad- 
 vantages on the side of the Greek rhetoric as an 
 ars docens, rhetoric as a practical art (the ars utens) 
 never made any advances amongst the Greeks to the 
 brilliancy which it attained in Rome ? Up to a 
 certain period, and throughout the palmy state of the 
 Greek republics, we may account for it thus : Rheto- 
 ric, in its finest and most absolute burnish, may be 
 called an eloquentia umbralica ; that is, it aims at an 
 elaborate form of beauty, which shrinks from the 
 trife of business, and cou.d neither arise nor make 
 'ttself felt in a tumultuous assembly. Certain features, 
 21
 
 S22 BHETOBIO. 
 
 it is well known, and peculiar styles of countenance, 
 which are impressive in a drawing-ruom, become 
 ineffective on a public stage. The fine tooling, and 
 delicate, tracery, of the cabinet artist is lost upon a 
 building of colossal proportions. Extemporaneous- 
 ness, again, a favorable circumstance to impassioned 
 eloquence, is death to Rhetoric. Two characteristics 
 indeed there were, of a Greek popular assembly, 
 which must have operated fatally on the rhetorician — 
 its fervor, in the first place, and, secondly, the coarse- 
 ness of a real interest. All great rhetoricians, in 
 selecting their subject, have shunned the determinate 
 cases of real life : and even in the single instance of a 
 deviation from the rule — that of the author (whoever 
 he be) of the Declamations attributed to Quintilian, 
 the cases are shaped with so romantic a generality, and 
 so slightly circumstantiated, as to allow him all the 
 benefit of pure abstractions. 
 
 We can readily understand, therefore, why the 
 fervid oratory of the Athenian Assemblies, and the 
 intense reality of its interest, should stifle the growth 
 of Rhetoric : the smoke, tarnish, and demoniac glare 
 of Vesuvius easily eclipse the pallid coruscations of 
 the Aurora Borealis. And in fact, amongst the greater 
 orators of Greece, there is not a solitary gleam of 
 rhetoric : Isocrates may have a little, being (to say 
 the truth) neither orator nor rhetorician in any emi- 
 nent sense ; Demosthenes has none. But when those 
 great thunders had subsided, which reached ' to Mace- 
 don, and Artaxerxes' throne,' when the ' fierce de- 
 mocracy ' itself had perished, and Greece had fallen 
 mder the common circumstances of the Roman Em- 
 pire, how came it that Greek rhetoric did not blossom
 
 EHETOHIC. 
 
 823 
 
 conrorrently vnth Roman? Vegetate it did: and a 
 rank crop of weeds grew np under the name of 
 Rhetoric, down to the times of the Emperor Julian 
 and his friend Lihanius, (both of whom, by the way, 
 .vere as worthless %vriters as have ever abused the 
 Greek language.) But this part of Greek literature 
 is a desert with no oasis. The fact is, if it were 
 required to assign the two bodies of ^^Titers who have 
 exhibited the human understanding in the most abject 
 poverty, and whose works by no possibility emit a 
 casual scintmation of wit, fancy, just thinking, or good 
 ^vritin-, we should certainly fix upon Greek rhetori- 
 cian", "and Italian critics. Amongst the whole mass 
 there' is not a page, that any judicious friend to litera- 
 ture would wish to reprieve from destruction. And in 
 both cases we apprehend that the possibility of so 
 much inanity is due in part to the quality of the two 
 lanc^ua<^es. The diffuseness and loose structure of 
 Gre^ek "style unfit it for the closeness, condensation, 
 and TO ayx'?r>o<for of rhctoric ; the melodious beauty of 
 the mere sounds, which both in the Italian and m the 
 Greek are combined with much majesty, dwells upon 
 the ear so delightfully, that in no other language is it 
 so easy as in these two to write with little or no 
 meaning, and to flow along through a whole wilderness 
 of inanity, without particularly rousing the reader s 
 
 disgust. 
 
 In the literature of Rome it is that we find the true 
 
 El Dorado of rhetoric, as we might expect from the 
 sinewy compactness of the language. Livy, and, 
 above all preceding writers, Ovid, display the greatest 
 powers of rhetoric in forms of composition, which 
 vere not particulariy adapted to favor that talent.
 
 324 SHETORIC. 
 
 ITie contest of Ajax and Ulysses, for the arms of 
 Achilles, in one of the latter Books of the Metamor- 
 phoses, is a chef-cT cEuvre of rhetoric, considering its 
 metrical form ; for metre, and especially the flowing 
 heroic hexameter, is no advantage to the rhetorician.*^ 
 The two Plinys, Liican, (though again under the dis- 
 advantage of verse,) Petronius Arbiter, and Quintilian, 
 but above all, the Senecas, (for a Spanish cross ap- 
 pears to improve the quality of the rhetorician,) have 
 left a body of rhetorical composition such as no 
 modern nation has rivalled. Even the most brilliant 
 of these writers, however, were occasionally sur- 
 passed, in particular hravuras of rhetoric, by several 
 of the Latin Fathers, particularly Tertullian, Arnobius, 
 St. Austin, and a writer whose name we cannot at 
 this moment recall. In fact, a little African blood 
 operated as genially in this respect as Spanish, whilst 
 an Asiatic cross w^as inevitably fatal. Partly from 
 this cause, and partly because they wrote in an unfa- 
 vorable language, the Greek Fathers are, one and all, 
 mere Birmingham rhetoricians. Even Gregory Nazi- 
 anzen is so, with submission to Messieurs of the Port 
 Royal, and other bigoted critics, who have pronounced 
 him at the very top of the tree among the fine writers 
 of antiquity. Undoubtedly, he has a turgid style of 
 mouthy grandiloquence, (though often the merest 
 bombast) : but for keen and polished rhetoric he is 
 singularly unfitted, by inflated habits of thinking, by 
 loitering difi'useness, and u dreadful trick of calling 
 names. The spirit of personal invective is peculiarly 
 adverse to the coolness of rhetoric. As to Chrysos- 
 ••.om, and Basil, wdth less of pomp and swagger than 
 Rregory, they have not at all more of rhetorica.
 
 BHETOEIC. 325 
 
 burnish and compression. Upon the whole, looking 
 back through the dazzling files of the ancient rhetori- 
 cians, we are disposed to rank the Senecas and Ter- 
 tullian as the leaders of the band : for St. Austin, in 
 his Confessions, and wherever he becomes peculiarly 
 interesting, is apt to be impassioned and fervent in a 
 degree which makes him break out of the proper 
 pace of rhetoric. He is matched to trot, and is con- 
 tinually breaking into a gallop. Indeed, his Confes- 
 sions have in parts, particularly in those which relate 
 to the death of his young fiiend, and his own frenzy 
 of grief, all that real passion which is only imagined 
 in the Confessions of llousseau, under a preconception 
 derived from his known character and unhappy life. 
 By the time of the Emperor Justinian, or in the 
 century between that time and the era of Mahomet, 
 (A. D. 620,) which century we regard as the common 
 crepusculum, between ancient and modern history, all 
 rhetoric, of every degree and quality, seems to have 
 finally expired. 
 
 In the literature of modern Europe, rhetoric has 
 been cultivated with success. But this remark applies 
 only with any force to a period which is now long 
 past ; and it is probable, upon various considerations, 
 that such another period will never revolve. The 
 rhetorician's art, in its glory and power, has silentlj 
 faded away before the stern tendencies of the age ; 
 and if, by any peculiarity of taste, or strong determi- 
 nation of the intellect, a rhetorician, en grand costume, 
 were again to appear amongst us, it is certain that he 
 \\'Ould have no better welcome than a stare of surprise 
 Rs a posture-maker or balancer, not more elevated in 
 the general estimate, but far less amusing, than tho
 
 326 BHETOKIO. 
 
 opera-dancer or equestrian gymnast. No — the age 
 of Rhetoric, like that of Chivalry, is gone, and passed 
 amongst forgotten things ; and the rhetorician can 
 have no more chance for returning, than the rhap- 
 Bodist of early Greece, or the Troubadour of romance. 
 So multiplied are the modes of intellectual enjoyment 
 in modern times, that the choice is absolutely dis- 
 tracted ; and in a boundless theatre of pleasures, to 
 be had at little or no cost of intellectual activity, it 
 would be marvellous, indeed, if any considerable audi- 
 ence could be found for an exhibition which presup- 
 poses a state of tense exertion on the part both of 
 auditor and performer. To hang upon one's own 
 thoughts as an object of conscious interest, to play 
 with them, to watch and pursue them through a maze 
 of inversions, evolutions, and harlequin changes, 
 implies a condition of society either like that in the 
 monastic ages, forced to introvert its energies from 
 mere defect of books ; (whence arose the scholastic 
 metaphysics, admirable for its subtlety, but famishing 
 the mind, whilst it sharpened its edge in one exclusive 
 direction ;) or, if it implies no absolute starvation of 
 intellect, as in the case of the Roman rhetoric, which 
 arose upon a considerable (though not very various) 
 literature, it proclaims at least a quiescent state of the 
 public mind, unoccupied with daily novelties, and at 
 leisure from the agitations of eternal change. 
 
 Growing out of the same condition of society, there 
 is another cause at work which will forever prevent 
 Jhe resurrection of rhetoric, viz. — the necessities of 
 public business, its vast extent, complexity, fulness 
 of detail, and consequent vulgarity, as compared with 
 that of the ancients. The very same cause, by tha
 
 BHETOKIC. 
 
 327 
 
 way, furnislies an answer to tlie question moved by 
 Hume, in one of his Essays, with regard to the 
 declension of eloquence in our deliberative assem- 
 blies. Eloquence, senatorial and forensic, at least, 
 has languished under the same changes of society 
 which have proved fatal to rhetoric. The political 
 economy of the ancient republics, and their com- 
 merce, were simple and unelaborate — the system of 
 their public services, both martial and civil, was 
 arranged on the most naked and manageable princi- 
 ples Tfor we must not confound the perplexity in our 
 modern explanations of these things, with a perplexity 
 in the things themselves. The foundation of these 
 differences was in the differences of domestic life. 
 Personal wants being few, both from climate and from 
 habit, and, in the great majority of the citizens, limited 
 almost to the pure necessities of nature ; hence arose, 
 for the mass of the population, the possibility of sur- 
 rendering themselves, much more than with us, either 
 to the one paramount business of the state — war, or 
 to a state of Indian idleness. Rome, in particular, 
 dui-ing the ages of her growing luxury, must be 
 regarded as a nation supported by other nations, by 
 largesses, in effect, that is to say, by the plunder of 
 conquest. Living, therefore, upon foreign alms, or 
 upon corn purchased by the product of tribute or of 
 spoils, a nation could readily dispense with that ex- 
 pansive development of her internal resources, upon 
 which modern Europe has been forced by the more 
 jqual distribution of power amongst the civilized 
 
 world. 
 
 The changes which have followed in the functions 
 •„f our popular assemblies, coiTCspond to the great
 
 S28 EHETOKIC. 
 
 revolution here described. Suppose yourself an an- 
 cient Athenian, at some customary display of Athe- 
 nian oratory, what will be the topics ? Peace or war, 
 vengeance for public wrongs, or mercy 1o prostrate 
 submission, national honor and national gratitude, 
 glory and shame, and every aspect of open appeal 
 to the primal sensibilities of man. On the other 
 hand, enter an English Parliament, having the most 
 of a popular character in its constitution and practice, 
 that is anywhere to be found in the Europe of this 
 day ; and the subject of debate will probably be a 
 road-bill, a bill for enabling a coal-gas company to 
 assume certain privileges against a competitor in oil- 
 gas ; a bill for defranchising a corrupt borough, or 
 perhaps some technical point of form in the Exche- 
 quer bills' bill. So much is the face of public business 
 vulgarized by details. The same spirit of differences 
 extends to forensic eloquence. Grecian and Roman 
 pleadings are occupied with questions of elementary 
 justice, large and diffusive, apprehensible even to the 
 uninstructed, and connecting themselves at every step 
 with powerful and tempestuous feelings. In British 
 trials, on the contrary, the field is foreclosed against 
 any interest of so elevating a nature, because the rights 
 and wrongs of the case are almost inevitably absorbed 
 to an unlearned eye by the technicalities of the law, 
 or by the intricacy of the facts. 
 
 But this is not always the case — doubtless not ; 
 -ubjects for eloquence, and, therefore, eloquence, will 
 sometimes arise in our senate, and our courts of jus- 
 tice. And in one respect our British displays are 
 more advantageously circumstanced than the ancient, 
 being more conspicuously brought forward into effect 
 3y their contrast to the ordinary course of business.
 
 ■RHETOKIC. 329 
 
 * Therefore are feasts so solemn and so rare, 
 Since seldom coming, in the long years set. 
 Like stones of worth they thinly placed are 
 Or captain jewels in the carcanet.' * 
 
 But still the objection of Hume remains unim- 
 peached as to the fact, that eloquence is a rarer 
 growth of modern than of ancient civil polity, even 
 in those countries which have the advantage of free 
 institutions. The letter of this objection is sustained, 
 but substantially it is disarmed, so far as its purpose 
 was to argue any declension on the part of Christian 
 nations, by this explanation of ours, which traces the 
 impoverished condition of civil eloquence to the com- 
 plexity of public business. 
 
 But eloquence in one form or other is immortal, 
 and will never perish so long as there are human 
 hearts moving under the agitations of hope and fear, 
 love and passionate hatred. And, in particular to us 
 of the modern world, as an endless source of indem- 
 nification for what we have lost in the simplicity of 
 our social systems, we have received a new dowry of 
 eloquence, and that of the highest order, in the sanc- 
 tities of our religion — a field unknown to antiquity 
 — for the Pagan religions did not produce much 
 poetry, and of oratory none at all. 
 
 On the other hand, that cause, which, operating 
 upon eloquence, has but extinguished it under a single 
 direction, to rhetoric has been unconditionally fatal. 
 Eloquence is not banished from the public business of 
 this country as useless, but as difficult, and as not 
 spontaneously arising from topics such as generally 
 
 * Shakspcare, Sonnet 52
 
 330 RHETORIC. 
 
 furnish the staple of debate. But rhetoiic, <f at- 
 tempted on a formal scale, would be sum.narily 
 exploded as pure foppery, and trifling with time. 
 Falstaff, on the field of battle, presenting his bottle 
 of sack for a pistol, or Polonius with his quibbles, 
 could not appear a more unseasonable plaisanteur 
 than a rhetorician alighting from the clouds upon a 
 public assembly in Great Britain, met for the dispatch 
 of business. 
 
 Under these malign aspects of the modern structure 
 of society, a structure to which the whole world will 
 be moulded as it becomes civilized, there can be no 
 room for any revival of rhetoric in public speaking ; 
 and from the same and other causes, acting upon the 
 standard of public taste, quite as little room in written 
 composition. In spite, however, of the tendencies to 
 this consummation, which have been long maturing, 
 it is a fact, that, next after Rome, England is the 
 country in which rhetoric prospered most — at a time 
 when science was unborn as a popular interest, and 
 the commercial activities of after-times were yet 
 sleeping in their rudiments. This was in the period 
 from the latter end of the sixteenth to the middle of 
 the seventeenth century ; and, though the English 
 rhetoric was less true to its own ideal than the 
 Roman, and often modulated into a higher key of 
 impassioned eloquence, yet, unquestionably, in some 
 of its qualities, it remains a monument of the very 
 finest rhetorical powers. 
 
 Omitting Sir Philip Sidney, and omitting his friend, 
 Lord Brooke, (in whose prose there are some bursts 
 of pathetic eloquence, as there is of rhetoric in his 
 verse, though too often harsh and affectedly obscure,)
 
 EHETOEIC. 331 
 
 the first very eminent rhetorician in the English litera- 
 ture is Donne. Dr. Johnson inconsiderately classes 
 him in company with Cowley, &c., under the title of 
 Metaphysical Poets ; but Rhetorical would have been 
 a more accurate designation. In saying that, how- 
 ever, we must remind our readers, that we revert to 
 the original use of the word Rhetoric, as laying tlie 
 principal stress upon the management of the thoughts, 
 and only a secondary one upon the ornaments of 
 style. Few writers have shown a more extraordinary 
 compass of power than Donne ; for he combined 
 what no other man has ever done — the last sublima- 
 tion of dialectical subtlety and address with the most 
 impassioned majesty. Massy diamonds compose the 
 very substance of his poem on the Metempsychosis, 
 thoughts and descriptions which have the fervent and 
 gloomy sublimity of Ezekiel or ^schylus, whilst a 
 diamond dust of rhetorical brilliances is strewed over 
 the whole of his occasional verses and prose. No 
 criticism was ever more unhappy than that of Dr. 
 Johnson's, which denounces all this artificial display 
 as so much perversion of taste. There cannot be a 
 falser thought than this ; for, upon that principle, a 
 whole class of compositions might be vicious, by con- 
 forming to its own ideal. The artifice and machinery 
 of rhetoric furnishes in its degree as legitimate a basis 
 for intellectual pleasure as any other ; that the pleas- 
 sure is of an inferior order, can no more attaint the 
 idea or model of the composition, than it can impeach 
 the excellence of an epigram that it is not a tragedy. 
 Every species of composition is to be tried by its own 
 laws ; and if Dr. Johnson had urged explicitly, (what 
 was evidently moving in his thoughts,) that a metrical
 
 532 HHETORIC. 
 
 Structure, by liolding forth the promise of poetry, 
 defrauds the mind of its just expectations, — he would 
 have said what is notoriously false. Metre is open to 
 any form of composition, provided it will aid the 
 expression of the thoughts ; and the only sound objec- 
 tion to it is, that it has not done so. Weak criticism, 
 indeed, is that which condemns a copy of verses 
 under the ideal of poetry, when the mere substitution 
 of another name and classification suffices to evade 
 the sentence, and to reinstate the composition in its 
 rights as rhetoric. It may be very true that the age 
 of Donne gave too much encouragement to his par 
 ticular vein of composition ; that, however, argues no 
 depravity of taste, but a taste erring only in being 
 too limited and exclusive. 
 
 The next writers of distinction, who came forward 
 as rhetoricians, were Burton in his Anatomy of Mel- 
 ancholy, and Milton in many of his prose works. 
 They labor under opposite defects : Burton is too 
 quaint, fantastic, and disjointed. Milton too slow, 
 solemn, and continuous. In the one we see the flutter 
 of a parachute ; in the other the stately and volu- 
 minous gyrations of an ascending balloon. Agile 
 movement, and a certain degree of fancifulness, are 
 indispensable to rhetoric. But Burton is not so much 
 fanciful as capricious ; his motion is not the motion 
 of freedom, but of lawlessness : he does not dance, 
 but caper. Milton, on the other hand, polonaises with 
 a grand Castilian air, in paces too sequacious and pro- 
 cessional ; even in his passages of merriment, and when 
 stung into a quicker motion by personal disdain for an 
 unworthy antagonist, his thoughts and his imagery stiD 
 appear to move to the music of the organ.
 
 KHETORIC. 333 
 
 In some measure it is a consequence of these pecu- 
 Karities, and so far it is the more a duty to allow for 
 them, that the rhetoric of ISIilton, though wanting in 
 animation, is unusually superb in its coloring ; its 
 very monotony is derived from the sublime unity of 
 the presiding impulse ; and hence, it sometimes 
 ascends into eloquence of the highest kind, and 
 sometimes even into the raptures of lyric poetry. 
 The main thing, indeed, wanting to Milton, was to 
 have fallen upon happier subj ects : for, with the 
 exception of the ' Areopagitica,' there is not one of 
 his prose works upon a theme of universal interest, 
 or perhaps fitted to be the groundwork of a rhetorical 
 display. 
 
 But, as it has happened to Milton sometimes to give 
 us poetry for rhetoric, in one instance he has unfortu- 
 nately given us rhetoric for poetry : this occurs in the 
 Paradise Lost, where the debates of the fallen angels 
 are carried on by a degrading process of gladiatorial 
 rhetoric. Nay, even the councils of God, though not 
 debated to and fro, are, however, expounded rhetori- 
 cally. This is astonishing; for no one was better 
 aware than Milton* of the distinction between the 
 discursive and intuitive acts of the mind, as appre- 
 hended by the old metaphysicians, and the incom- 
 oatibility of the former with any but a limitary 
 .ntellect. This indeed was familiar to all the writers 
 of his day : but, as old GifFord has shown, by a most 
 idle note upon a passage in Massinger, that it is a 
 distinction which has now perished (except indeed in 
 Germany), — we shall recall it to the reader's atten- 
 
 * See the fifth book of the Paradise Lost, and passages in hia 
 |>rose vrritings.
 
 334 EHETOBIC. 
 
 don. An intuition is any knowledge whatsoever, 
 Bensuous or intellectual, which is apprehended imme^ 
 diatehj : a notion on the other hand, or product of the 
 discursive faculty, is any knowledge whatsoever which 
 is apprehended mediately. All reasoning is carried 
 on discursively ; that is, discurrendo, — by running 
 about to the right and the left, laying the separate 
 notices together, and thence mediately deriving some 
 third apprehension. Now this process, howcA'er glori- 
 ous a characteristic of the human mind as distinguish- 
 ing it from the brute, is degrading to any supra-human 
 intelligence, divine or angelic, by arguing limitation. 
 God must not proceed by steps, and the fi-agmentary 
 knowledge of accretion ; in which case, at starting 
 he has all the intermediate notices as so many bai's 
 between himself and the conclusion ; and even at the 
 penultimate or antepenultimate act, he is still short of 
 the truth. God must see, he must iviuit, so to speak ; 
 and all truth must reach him simultaneously, first and 
 last, without succession of time, or partition of acts ; 
 just as light, before that theory had been refuted by 
 the Satellites of Jupiter, was held not to be propa- 
 g;ated in time, but to be here and there at one and 
 the same indivisible instant. Paley, from mere rude- 
 ness of metaphysical skill, has talked of the judgment 
 and the judiciousness of God : but this is profaneness, 
 and a language unworthily appli-ed even to an angelic 
 being. To judge, that is, to subsume one proposition 
 under another, — to be judicious, that is, to collate 
 )he means with the end, are acts impossible in the 
 divine nature, and not to be ascribed, even under the 
 license of a figure, to any being which transcends the 
 limitations of humanity. Many other instances there
 
 EHETOKIC. 335 
 
 lire in wbicli Milton is taxed with having too grossly 
 sensualized his supernatural agents ; some of which, 
 however, the necessities of the action may excuse ; 
 and at the worst they are readily submitted to as 
 having an intelligible purpose — that cf bringing so 
 mysterious a thing as a spiritual nature or agency 
 within the limits of the representable. But the intel- 
 lectual degradation fixed on his spiritual beings by the 
 rhetorical debates, is purely gratuitous, neither result- 
 ing from the course of the action, nor at all promoting 
 it. Making allowances, however, for the original 
 error in the conception, it must be granted that the 
 executioi is in the best style : the mere logic of the 
 debate, indeed, is not better managed than it would 
 have bren by the House of Commons. But the 
 colors cf style are grave and suitable to afflicted 
 ingels. In the Paradise Regained, this is still more 
 conspicuously true : the oratory there, on the part of 
 Satan in the Wilderness, is no longer of a rhetorical 
 cast, but in the grandest style of impassioned elo- 
 quence that can be imagined as the fit expression for 
 the mo\ ements of an angelic despair ; and in particular 
 the speech, on being first challenged by our Saviour, 
 beginning, 
 
 ♦ 'Tis true, I am that spirit unfortunate,' 
 
 16 not excelled in sublimity by any passage in the 
 poem. 
 
 MiiTon, hcweVer, was not d^stlrerl *-o gather the 
 vpolia opima of English rhetoric : two contemporaries 
 »f his own, and whose literary course pretty nearly 
 coincided with his own in point of time, surmounted 
 all competition, and in that amphitheatre became the
 
 336 EHETOKIC. 
 
 Protagonistae. These were Jeremy Taylor and Sir 
 Thomas Browne ; who, if not absolutely the foremost 
 in the accomplishments of art, were, undoubtedly, the 
 richest, the most dazzling, and, with reference to their 
 matter, the most captivating of all rhetoricians. In 
 them first, and, perhaps, (if we except occasional 
 passages in the German John Paul Richter,) in them 
 only, are the two opposite forces of eloquent passion 
 and rhetorical fancy brought into an exquisite equi- 
 librium, approaching, receding — attracting, repelling 
 — blending, separating — chasing and chased, as in 
 a fugue, and again lost in a delightful interfusion, so 
 as to create a middle species of composition, more 
 various and stimulating to the understanding than 
 pui-e eloquence, more gratifying to the affections than 
 naked rhetoric. Under this one circumstance of co- 
 incidence, in other respects their minds were of tho 
 most opposite temperament : Sir Thomas Browne, deep, 
 tranquil, and majestic as Milton, silently premeditat- 
 ing, and ' disclosing his golden couplets,' as under 
 some genial instinct of incubation : Jeremy Taylor, 
 restless, fervid, aspiring, scattering abroad a prodi- 
 gality of life, not unfolding but creating, with the 
 energy, and the ' myriad-mindedness,' of Shakspeare. 
 Where, but in Sir T. B., shall one hope to find music 
 so Miltonic, an intonation of such solemn chords as 
 are struck in the following opening bar of a passage 
 in the Urn-burial — ' Now. since these bones have 
 
 rested quietlv in '' ^" ^ ' . /' ' , " ° drums and 
 ^ _^. another, — to be judicious, that is, to cw^xm-u., 
 
 )he means with the end, are acts impossible in the 
 
 divine nature, and not to be ascribed, even under the 
 
 license of a figure, to any being which transcends the 
 
 limitations of humanity. Many other instances there
 
 EHETORIO. 337 
 
 nus of rhetoric ! Time expounded, not by generations 
 or centuries, but by the vast periods of conquests and 
 dynasties ; by cycles of Pharaohs and Ptolemies, 
 Antiochi, and Arsacides ! And these vast successions 
 of time distinguished and figured by the uproars 
 which revolve at their inaugurations — by the drums 
 and tramplings rolling overhead upon the chambers 
 of forgotten dead — the trepidations of time and 
 mortality vexing, at secular intervals, the everlasting 
 Sabbaths of the grave ! Show us, oh pedant, such 
 another strain from the oratory of Greece or Rome ! 
 For it is not an 'Ov na tss iv MaQa6(uii Tfdnixorug, or any 
 such bravura, that will make a fit antiphony to this 
 sublime rapture. We will not, however, attempt a 
 descant upon the merits of Sir T. Browne, after the 
 admirable one by Mr. Coleridge : and as to Jeremy 
 Taylor, we would as readily undertake to put a belt 
 about the ocean as to characterize him adequately 
 within the space at our command. It will please the 
 reader better that he shoi;ld characterize himself, 
 however imperfectly, by a few specimens selected 
 from some of his rarest works ; a method which will, 
 %t the same time, have the collateral advantage of 
 illustrating an important truth in reference to this 
 florid or Corinthian order of rhetoric, which we shall 
 have occasion to notice a little further on : — 
 
 ' It was observed by a Spanish confessor, — that in 
 persons nqf^ ^-7— "^;^ag ^^^ (] .gtnfessions which they 
 
 tpolia opima of English rhetoric : two contemporariel/^ 
 if his own, and whose literary course pretty nearly 
 coincided with his own in point of time, surmounted 
 all competition, and in that amphitheatre became the
 
 538 EHETOBIC. 
 
 from their bed of mud, and slime of Nilus, start up 
 into an equal and continual length, and uninterrupted 
 but with few knots, and are strong and beauteous, 
 with great distances and intervals ; but, when they are 
 grown to their full length, they lessen into the point 
 of a pyramid, and multiply their knots and joints, 
 interrupting the fineness and smoothness of its body. 
 So are the steps and declensions of him that does not 
 grow in grace. At first, when he springs up from his 
 impurity by the waters of baptism and repentance, he 
 grows straight and strong, and suffers but few inter- 
 ruptions of piety ; and his constant courses of religion 
 are but rarely intermitted, till they ascend up to a full 
 age, or towards the ends of their life : then they are 
 weak, and their devotions often intermitted, and their 
 breaks are frequent, and they seek excuses, and labor 
 for dispensations, and love God and religion less and 
 less, till their old age, instead of a crown of their 
 virtue and perseverance, ends in levity and unprofita- 
 ble courses, light and useless as the tufted feathers 
 upon the cane, every wind can play with it and abuse 
 it, but no man can make it useful.' 
 
 ' If we consider the price that the Son of God paid 
 for the redemption of a soul, we shall better estimate 
 of it, than from the weak discourses of our imperfect 
 and unlearned philosophy. Not the spoil of rich 
 provinces — not the estimate of kingdoms — not the 
 price of Cleopatra's draught, — not anything that was 
 corruptible or perishing ; for that, which could not one 
 minute retard the term of its own natural dissolution, 
 could not be a price for the redemption of one perish- 
 ing soul. When God made a soul, it was only faciof
 
 KHETOKIC. S39 
 
 tmus homincm ad imaginem nostram ; he spake the 
 word, and it was done. But, when man had lost his 
 Boul, which the spirit of God had breathed into him, 
 it was not so soon recovered. It is like the resurrec- 
 tion, which hath troubled the faith of many, who are 
 more apt to believe that God made a man from noth- 
 ing, than that he can return a man from dust and 
 corruption. But for this resurrection of the soul, for 
 th3 re-implacing of the Divine image, for the re- 
 entitling it to the kingdoms of grace and glory, God 
 did a greater work than the creation ; He was fain to 
 contract Divinity to a span ; to send a person to die 
 for us, who of himself could not die, and was con- 
 strained to use rare and mysterious arts to make him 
 capable of dying : He prepared a person instrumental 
 to his purpose, by sending his Son from his own 
 
 bosom, a person both God and man, an enigma to 
 
 all nations and to all sciences ; one that ruled over all 
 the angels, that walked on the pavements of heaven, 
 whose feet were clothed with stars; whose under- 
 standing is larger than that infinite space which we 
 imagine in the uncircumscribed distance beyond the 
 arst°orb of heaven ; a person to whom felicity was as 
 essential as life to God. This was the only person 
 that was designed in the eternal -decrees, to pay the 
 price of a soul — less than this person could not do it. 
 Nothing less than an infinite excellence could satisfy 
 for a soul lost to infinite ages ; who was to bear the 
 load of an infinite anger from the provocation of an 
 eternal God. And yet, if it be possible that Infinite 
 can receive degrees, this is but one-half of the abyss, 
 ind I think the lesser
 
 S40 BHEIO&IC. 
 
 ' It was a strange variety of natural efficacies, ^hat 
 manna should corrupt in twenty-four hours, if gath- 
 ered upon Wednesday or Thui-sday, and that it should 
 last till forty-eight hours, if gathered upon the even of 
 the Sabbath ; and that it should last many hundreds of 
 years, when placed in the sanctuary by the ministry of 
 the high-priest. But so it was in the Jews' religion ; 
 and manna pleased every palate, and it filled all appe- 
 tites ; and the same measure was a different proportion, 
 it was much, and it was little ; as if nature, that it 
 might serve religion, had been taught some measures 
 of infinity, which is everywhere and nowhere, filling 
 all things, and circumscribed with nothing, measured 
 by one omer, and doing the work of two ; like the 
 crowns of kings, fitting the brows of Nimrod and the 
 most mighty warrior, and yet not too large for the 
 temples of an infant prince.' 
 
 ' His mercies are more than we can tell, and they 
 are more than we can feel : for all the world, in the 
 abyss of the Divine mercies, is like a man diving into 
 the bottom of the sea, over whose head the waters run 
 insensibly and unperceived, and yet the w^eight is vast, 
 and the sum of them is immeasurable : and the man 
 is not pressed with the burden, nor confounded with 
 numbers : and no observation is able to recount, no 
 sense sufficient to perceive, no memory large enough 
 to retain, no understanding great enough to apprehend 
 this infinity.' 
 
 These passages are not cited with so vain a purpose 
 as that of furnishing a sea-line for measuring the 
 ' Boundless deeps ' of Jeremy Taylor, but to illustrate
 
 EHETOBIC. 341 
 
 that one remarkable characteristic of his style — 
 which we have already noticed — viz. the everlasting 
 strife and fluctuation between his rhetoric and his 
 eloquence, which maintain their alternations with a 
 force and inevitable recurrence, like the systole and 
 diastole — the contraction and expansion — of some 
 living organ. For this characteristic he was indebted 
 in mixed proportions to his own peculiar style of 
 understanding, and the nature of his subject. Where 
 the understanding is not active and teeming, but pos- 
 sessed by a few vast and powerful ideas, (which was 
 the case of MUton,) there the funds of a varied 
 rhetoric are wanting. On the other hand, where the 
 understanding is all alive with the subtilty of distinc- 
 tions, and nourished (as Jeremy Taylor's was) by 
 casuistical divinity, the variety and opulence of the 
 rhetoric is apt to be oppressive. But this tendency, in 
 the case of Taylor, was happily checked and balanced 
 by the commanding passion, intensity, and solemnity 
 of his exalted theme, which gave a final unity to the 
 tumultuous motions of his mtellect. The only very 
 obvious defects of Taylor were in the mechanical part 
 of his art, in the mere technique ; he writes like one 
 who never revises, nor tries the effect upon his ear of 
 his periods as musical wholes ; and in the syntax and 
 connection of the parts seems to have been habitually 
 careless of slight blemishes. 
 
 Jeremy Taylor^ died in a few years after the Restora- 
 tion. Sir Thomas Browne, though at that time nearly 
 thirty years removed from the first surreptitious edition 
 of his Religio Medici, lingered a little longer. But, 
 when both were gone, it may be truly afiirmed that 
 >liP ^reat oracles of rhetoric were finally silenced.
 
 542 EHETOBIC. 
 
 South and Barrow, indeed, were brilliant dialecticiana 
 in different styles ; but, after Tillotson, with his 
 meagre intellect, his low key of feeling, and the smug 
 and scanty draperies of his style, had announced a new 
 era, — English divinity ceased to be the racy vineyard 
 that it had been in ages of ferment and struggle. 
 Like the soil of Sicily, {vide Sir H. Davy's Agricultural 
 Chemistry,) it was exhausted forever by the tilth and 
 rank fertility of its golden youth. 
 
 Since then, great passions and high thinking have 
 either disappeared from literature altogether, or thrown 
 themselves into poetic forms which, with the privilege 
 of a masquerade, are allowed to assume the spirit of 
 past ages, and to speak in a key unknown to the 
 general literature. At all events, no pulpit oratory of 
 a rhetorical cast, for upwards of a century, has been 
 able to support itself, when stripped of the aids of 
 voice and action. Robert Hall and Edward Irving, 
 when printed, exhibit only the spasms of weakness. 
 Nor do we remember one memorable burst of rhetoric 
 in the pulpit eloquence of the last one hundred and 
 fifty years, with the exception of a fine oath ejacu- 
 lated by a dissenting minister of Cambridge, who, 
 when appealing for the confirmation of his words to 
 the grandeur of man's nature, swore — By this and 
 by the other, and at length, ' By the Iliad, by the 
 Od j'ssey ' — as the climax, in a long bead-roll of 
 speciosa miracula, which he had apostrophized as 
 monuments of human power. As to Foster, he has 
 been prevented from preaching by a complaint affect- 
 ing the throat; but, judging from the quality of his 
 celebrated Essays, he could never have figured as a 
 truly splendid rhetorician ; for the imagery and oroak-
 
 EHETOBIC. o43 
 
 mental parts of liis Essays have evidently not grown 
 ap in the loom, and concurrently with the texture of 
 the thoughts, but have been separately added after- 
 wards, as so much embroidery or fiinge. 
 
 Politics, meantime, however, inferior in any shape 
 to religion, as an ally of real eloquence, might yet 
 either when barbed by an interest of intense person- 
 ality, or on the very opposite footing of an interest 
 comprehensively national, have irritated the growth of 
 rhetoric such as the spirit of the times allowed. In 
 one conspicuous instance it did so ; but generally it 
 had little effect, as a cursory glance over the two last 
 centuries will show. 
 
 In the reign of James I. the House of Commons first 
 became the theatre of struggles truly national. The 
 relations of the people and the crown were then 
 brought to issue ; and under shifting names, continued 
 sub judice from that time to 1688 ; and from that 
 time, in fact, a corresponding interest was directed to 
 the proceedings of Parliament. But it was not until 
 1642 that any free communication was made of what 
 passed in debate. During the whole of the Civil "War, 
 the speeches of the leading members upon all greal 
 questions were freely published in occasional pam- 
 phlets. Naturally they were very much compressed ; 
 but enough survives to show that, from the agitations 
 of th« times, and the religious gravity of the House, 
 no rhetoric was sought, or would have been tolerated. 
 In the reign of Charles II , judging from such records 
 as we have of the most critical debates, (that pre- 
 gerved by Locke, for instance, through the assistance 
 of his patron Lord Shaftesbury,) the general tone and 
 standai'd of Parliamentary eloquence had taken pretty
 
 344 EHETORIC. 
 
 nearly its present form and level. The religious 
 gravity had then given way ; and the pedantic tone, 
 stiffness, and formality of punctual divisions, had been 
 abandoned foi the freedom of polite conversation. It 
 was not, however, until the reign of Queen Anne that 
 the qualities and style of parliamentary eloquence 
 were submitted to public judgment ; this was on occa- 
 sion of the trial of Dr. Sacheverel, which was man- 
 aged by members of the House of Commons. The 
 Whigs, however, of that era had no distinguished 
 speakers. On the Tory side, St. John (Lord Boling- 
 broke) was the most accomplished person in the 
 Louse. His style may be easily collected from his 
 writings, which have all the air of having been dic- 
 tated without premeditation ; and the effect of so 
 much showy and fluent declamation, combined wdth 
 the graces of his manner and person, may be inferred 
 from the deep impression which they seem to have 
 left upon Lord Chesterfield, himself so accomplished 
 a judge, and so familiar with the highest efforts of the 
 age of Mr. Pulteney and Lord Chatham. With two 
 exceptions indeed, to be noticed presently, Lord 
 Bolingbroke came the nearest of all Parliamentary 
 orators who have been particularly recorded, to the 
 ideal of a fine rhetorician. It was no disadvantage 
 to him that he was shallow, being so luminous and 
 transparent ; and the splendor of his periodic diction, 
 with his fine delivery, compensated his defect in 
 imagery. Sir Robert Walpole was another Lord 
 Londonderry ; like him, an excellent statesman, and 
 a first-rate leader of the House of Commons, but in 
 pther respects a plain, unpretending man ; and, like 
 Lord Londonderry, he had the reputation of a block
 
 fiHETOSIC. 345 
 
 head with, all eminent blockheads, and of a man of 
 talents with those who were themselves truly such. 
 ' When I was very young,' says, Burke, ' a general 
 fashion told me I was to admire some of the writings 
 against that minister ; a little more maturity taught 
 me as much to despise them.' Lord Mansfield, ' the 
 fluent Murray,' was or would have been, but for the 
 condensation of law, another Bolingbroke. ' How 
 sweet an Ovid was in Murray lost ! ' says Pope ; and, 
 if the comparison were suggested with any studied 
 propriety, it ascribes to Lord Mansfield the talents of 
 a first-rate rhetorician. Lord Chatham had no rheto- 
 ric at all, any more than Charles Fox of the next 
 generation : both were too fervent, too Demosthenic, 
 and threw themselves too ardently upon the graces 
 of nature. Mr. Pitt came nearer to the idea of a 
 rhetorician, in so far as he seemed to have more 
 artifice ; but this was only in the sonorous rotundity 
 of his periods, which were cast in a monotonous 
 mould ; for in other respects he would have been 
 keenly alive to the ridicule of rhetoric in a Fii-st Lord 
 of the Treasury. 
 
 All these persons, whatever might be their other 
 differences, agreed in this — that they were no jug- 
 glers, but really were that which they appeared to be, 
 and never struggled for distinctions which did not 
 naturally belong to them. But next upon the roll 
 comes forward an absolute charlatan — a charlatan 
 the most acomplished that can ever have figured 
 upon so intellectual a stage This was Sheridan — 
 a mocking-bird through the entire scale, from tho 
 Highest to the lowest note of the gamut ; in fact, to 
 borrow a coarse word, the mere impersonation of
 
 846 BHEXOBIO. 
 
 humbug. Even as a wit, lie has been long known to 
 be a wholesale plagiarist ; and the exposures of his 
 kind biographer, Mr. Moore, exhibit him in that line 
 as the most hide-bound and sterile of performers, 
 lying perdue through a whole evening for a casual 
 opportunity, or by miserable stratagem creating an 
 artificial one, for exploding some poor starveling jest ; 
 and, in fact, sacrificing to this petty ambition, in a 
 degree never before heard of, the ease and dignity of 
 his life. But it is in the character of a rhetorical 
 orator, that he, and his friends in his behalf, have put 
 forward the hollo west pretensions. In the course of 
 the Hastings' trial, upon the concerns of paralytic 
 Begums, and ancient Rannies, hags that, if ever 
 actually existing, were no more to us and our British 
 sympathies, than we to Hecuba, did Mr. Sheridan 
 make his capital exhibition. The real value of his 
 speech was never at any time misappreciated by the 
 judicious ; for his attempts at the grand, the pathetic, 
 and the sentimental, had been continually in the same 
 tone of falsetto and horrible fustian. Burke, however, 
 who was the most double-minded person in the world, 
 cloaked his contempt in hyperbolical flattery ; and all 
 the unhappy people who have since written lives of 
 Burke, adopt the whole for mere gospel truth. Ex- 
 actly in the same vein of tumid inanity, is the speech 
 which Mr. Sheridan puts into the mouth of Rolla the 
 Peruvian. This the reader may chance to have heard 
 upon the stage ; or, in default of that good Iz-ck, we 
 present him with the following fragrant twaddle from 
 one of the Begummiads, which has been enshrined in 
 the praises (si quid sua carmina possunt) of many 
 worthy critics ; the subject is Filial Piety. ' Filial
 
 BHETOEIC. 347 
 
 piety,' (Mr. Sheridan said,) ' it was impossible by 
 words to describe, but description by words was 
 unnecessary. It was that duty which they all felt 
 and imderstood, and which required not the poAvers 
 of language to explain. It was in truth more properly 
 to be called a 'principle than a duty. It required not 
 the aid of memory ; it needed not the exercise of the 
 understanding ; it awaited not the slow deliberations 
 of reason ; it flowed spontaneously from the fountain 
 cf our feelings ; it was involuntary in our natures ; 
 it was a quality of our being, innate and coeval with 
 life, which, though afterwards cherished as a passion, 
 was independent of our mental powers ; it was earlier 
 than all intelligence in our souls ; it displayed itself in 
 the earliest impulses of the heart, and was an emotion 
 of fondness that returned in smiles of gratitude the 
 affectionate solicitudes, the tender anxieties, the en- 
 dearing attentions experienced before memory began, 
 but which were not less dear for not being remem- 
 bered. It was the sacrament of nature in our hearts, 
 by which the union of the parent and child was seated 
 and rendered perfect in the community of love ; and 
 which, strengthening and ripening with life, acquired 
 vigor from the understanding, and was most lively and 
 active when most wanted.' Now we put it to any 
 candid reader, whether the above Birmingham ware 
 might not be vastly improved by one slight alteration, 
 viz. omitting the two first words, and reading it as a 
 'onundrum. Considered as rhetoric, it is evidently 
 fitted ' to make a horse sick ; ' but as a conundrum in 
 the Lady's Magazine, we contend that it would have 
 great success. 
 
 How it aggravates the disgust with which these
 
 848 EHETOKIC. 
 
 paste-diamunds are now viewed, to remember that 
 they were paraded in the presence of Edmund Burke 
 — nay, {credite posteri /) in jealous rivalry of his 
 genuine and priceless jewels. Irresistibly one is 
 reminded of the dancing efforts of Lady Blarney and 
 Miss Carolina Wilhelmiua Skeggs, against the native 
 grace of the Vicar of Wakefield's family : — ' The 
 ladies of the town strove hard to be equally easy, 
 but without success. They swam, spraioled, lan- 
 guished, and frisked ; but all would not do. The 
 gazers, indeed, owned that it was fine ; but neighbor 
 Flamborough observed, that Miss Livy's feet seemed 
 as pat to the music as its echo.' Of Goldsmith it was 
 said, in his epitaph, — Nil tetigit quod non ornavit ; 
 of the Drury-Lanc rhetorician it might be said, with 
 equal truth, — Nil tetigit quod non fiico aduUeravit. 
 But avaunt, Birmingham ! let us speak of a great 
 man. 
 
 All hail to Edmund Burke, the supreme writer of 
 his century, the man of the largest and finest under- 
 standing ! Upon that word, understanding, we lay 
 a stress : for oh ! ye immortal donkeys, who have 
 written ' about him and about him,' with what an 
 obstinate stupidity have ye brayed away for one-third 
 of a century about that which ye are pleased to call 
 his ' fancy.' Fancy in your throats, ye miserable 
 twaddlers ! as if Edmund Burke were the man to 
 play with his fancy, for the purpose of separable 
 ornament. He was a man of fancy in no other sense 
 than as Lord Bacon was so, and Jeremy Taylor, and 
 AS all large and discursive thinkers are and must be : 
 that is to say, the fancy which he had in coromon 
 with all mankind, and very probably in no eminen*
 
 ■BHETOBTC. 
 
 U9 
 
 degree, in liim was urged into unusual activity under 
 the necessities of his capacious understanding. His 
 great and peculiar distinction was that he \iewed all 
 objects of the understanding under more relations 
 than other men, and under more complex relations. 
 According to the multiplicity of these relations, a man 
 is said to have a large understanding ; according to 
 their subtilty, a Jine one ; and in an angelic under- 
 standing, all things would appear to be related to all. 
 Now, to apprehend and detect moral relations, or to 
 pursue them steadily, is a process absolutely impos- 
 sible without the intervention of physical analogies. 
 To say, therefore, that a man is a great thinker, or a 
 fine thinker, is but another expression for sapng that 
 he has a schematizing (or, to use a plainer but less 
 accurate expression, a figurative) understanding. In 
 that sense, and for that purpose, Burke is figurative : 
 but understood, as he has been understood by the 
 long-eared race of his critics, not as thinking in and 
 by his figures, but as deliberately laying them on by 
 way of enamel or after-ornament, — not as incar- 
 nating, but simply as dressing his thoughts in im- 
 agery, — so understood, he is not the Burke of reality, 
 but a poor fictitious Burke, modelled after the poverty 
 of conception which belongs to his critics. 
 
 It is true, however, that, in some rare cases, Burke 
 did indulge himself in a pure rhetorician's use of 
 fancy ; consciously and profusely lavishing his orna- 
 ments for mere purposes of effect. Such a case 
 »ccurs, for instance, in that admirable picture of the 
 degradation of Europe, where he represents the dif- 
 ferent crowned heads as bidding against each other 
 at Basle for the favor and countenance of Regicide.
 
 S50 
 
 RHETOBIC. 
 
 Others of the same kind there are in his hrilliant 
 letter on the Duke of Bedford's attack upon him in 
 the House of Lords : and one of these we shall here 
 cite, disregarding its greater chance for being already 
 familiar to the reader, upon two considerations ; first, 
 that it has all the appearance of being finished with 
 the most studied regard to effect ; and, secondly, for 
 an interesting anecdote connected with it, which we 
 have never seen in print, but for which we have 
 better authority than coidd be produced perhaps for 
 most of those which are. The anecdote is, that 
 Burke, conversing with Dr. Lawrence and another 
 gentleman on the literary value of his own writings, 
 declared that the particular passage in the entire 
 range of his works which had cost him the most 
 labor, and upon which, as tried by a certain canon of 
 his own, his labor seemed to himself to have been 
 the most successful, was the following : 
 
 After an introductory paragraph which may be thus 
 abridged — ' The crown has considered me after long 
 service. The crown has paid the Duke of Bedford by 
 advance. He has had a long credit for any service 
 which he may perform hereafter. He is secure, and 
 long may he be secure, in his advance, whether he 
 performs any services or not. His grants are en- 
 grafted on the public law of Europe, covered with 
 the awful hoar of innumerable ages. They ar* 
 guarded by the sacred rule of prescription. Thk 
 learned professors of the Rights of Man, however, 
 regard prescription not as a title to bar all other clain* 
 — but as a bar against the possessor and proprietoi. 
 They hold an immemorial possession to be no mor% 
 than an aggravated injustice.' Then follows the pas- 
 sage in question :
 
 RHETOKIC. 
 
 351 
 
 * Such are their ideas ; such thei?' religion ; and 
 such their law. But as to our country and our race, 
 as long as the well-compacted structure of our church 
 and state, the sanctuary, the holy of holies of that 
 ancient law, defended by reverence, defended by 
 power, a fortress at once and a temple ( Templum in 
 modum arcis*), shall stand inviolate on the brow of 
 the British Sion ; — as long as the British monarchy, 
 not more limited than fenced by the orders of the 
 state, shall, like the proud Keep of Windsor, rising in 
 the majesty of proportion, and girt with the double 
 belt of his kindred and coeval towers, as long as this 
 awful structure shall oversee and guard the subjected 
 land — so long the mounds and dykes of the low, fat, 
 Bedford level f will have nothing to fear from all the 
 pickaxes of all the levellers of France. As long as 
 our sovereign lord the king, and his faithful subjects 
 the lords and commons of this realm, the triple cord 
 which no man can break : the solemn sworn constitu- 
 tional frank-pledge of this nation ; the firm guarantees 
 of each other's being, and each other's rights ; the 
 joint and several securities, each in its place and order 
 for every kind and every quality of property and of 
 dignity, — as long as these endure, so long the Duke 
 of Bedford is safe ; and we are all safe together ; — 
 the high from the blights of envy, and the spoliation 
 of rapacity ; the low from the iron hand of oppres- 
 sion, and the insolent spurn of contempt. Amen J 
 and so be it : and so it -Rail be, 
 
 " Diim domus ^neae Capitoli immobile saxum 
 Accolet ; imperiumque pater Romanus habebit." ' 
 
 • Tacitus of the Temple of Jerusalem. 
 
 f Bedfo. d level, a rich tract of land 80 called in Bedford- 
 thire.
 
 852 RHETORIC. 
 
 This was the sounding passage which Burke alleged 
 as the chef-d'oeuvre of his rhetoric ; and the argu- 
 ment, upon which he justified his choice, is specious 
 — if not convincing. He laid it down as a maxim of 
 composition, that every passage in a rhetorical per- 
 formance, which was brought forward prominently 
 and relied upon as a key (to use the language of war) 
 in sustaining the main position of the writer, ought to 
 involve a thought, an image, and a sentiment : and 
 Buch a synthesis he found in the passage which we 
 have quoted. This criticism, over and above the 
 pleasure which it always gives to hear a great man's 
 opinion of himself, is valuable, as showing that Burke, 
 because negligent of trivial inaccuracies, was not at 
 all the less anxious about the larger proprieties and 
 decorums : [for this passage, confessedly so labored, 
 has several instances of slovenliness in tiifles ;] and 
 that, in the midst of his apparent hurry, he carried 
 out a jealous vigilance upon what he wrote, and the 
 eye of a person practised in artificial eff"ects. 
 
 An ally of Burke's upon East Indian politics, ought 
 to have a few words of notice, not so much for any 
 power that he actually had as a rhetorician, but 
 because he is sometimes reputed such. This was 
 Sir Philip Francis, who, under his early disguise of 
 Junius, had such a success as no writer of libels ever 
 will have again. It is our private opinion, that this 
 success rested upon a great delusion which has never 
 been exposed. The general belief is — that Junius 
 was read for his elegance ; we believe no such thing. 
 The pen of an angel would not, upon such a theme 
 as personal politics, have upheld the interest attached 
 to Junius, had there been no other cause in co-opera
 
 KHETORIC. 
 
 353 
 
 tion. Language, after all, is a limited instrument : 
 and it must be remembered that Junius, by the ex- 
 treme narrowness of his range, which went entirely 
 upon matters of fact, and personal interests, still 
 further limited the compass of that limited instrument. 
 Fur it is only in the expression and management of 
 general ideas, that any room arises for conspicuous 
 elegance. The real truth is this : the interest in 
 Junius travelled downwards ; he was read in the 
 lower ranks, because in London it speedily became 
 known that he was read with peculiar interest in the 
 highest. This was already a marvel ; for newspaper 
 patriots under the signatures of Publicola, Brutus, 
 and so forth, had become a jest and a by-word to the 
 real, practical statesman ; and any man at leisure to 
 ^vrite for so disinterested a purpose as ' his country's 
 good,' was presumed, of course, to write in a garret. 
 But here for the first time a pretended patriot, a 
 Junius Brutus, was anticipated with anxiety, and read 
 with agitation. Is any man simple enough to believe 
 that such a contagion could extend to cabinet minis- 
 ters, and official persons overladen with public busi- 
 ness, on so feeble an excitement as a little reputation 
 in the art of constructing sentences with elegance ; 
 an elegance which, after all, excluded eloquence and 
 every other positive quality of excellence ? That 
 this can have been believed, shows the readiness with 
 which men swallow marvels. The real secret wa? 
 this : — Junius was read with the profoundest interest 
 by members of the cabinet, who would not have 
 paid half-a-cro^vn for all the wit and elegance of this 
 world, simply because it was most evident that some 
 traitor was amongst them ; and that either directly by 
 23
 
 354 KHETOKTC. 
 
 Dne of themselves, or through some abuse of hie 
 confidence by a servant, the secrets of office were 
 betrayed. The circumstances of this breach of trust 
 are now fully known ; and it is readily understood 
 why letters, which were the channel for those per- 
 fidies, should interest the ministry of that day in the 
 deepest degree. The existence of such an interest, 
 but not its cause, had immediately become known : it 
 descended, as might be expected, amongst all classes : 
 once excited, it seemed to be justified by the real 
 merits of the letters ; which merit again, illustrated 
 by its efiects, appeared a thousand times greater than 
 it was ; and, finally, this interest was heightened and 
 sustained by the mystery which invested the author. 
 How much that mystery availed in keeping alive the 
 reputation of Junius, is clear from this fact, that, 
 since the detection of Junius, the Letters have much 
 declined in popularity ; and ornamented editions of 
 them are no longer the saleable article which they were 
 some years ago. 
 
 In fact, upon any other principle, the continued 
 triumph of Junius, and his establishment as a classical 
 author, is a standing enigma. One talent, undoubt- 
 edly, he had in a rare perfection — the talent of 
 sarcasm. He stung like a scorpion. But, besides 
 that such a talent has a narrow application, an interest 
 of personality cannot be other than fugitive, take what 
 direction it may : and malignity cannot embalm itself 
 in materials that are themselves perishable. Such 
 were the materials of Junius. His vaunted elegance 
 was, in a great measure, the gift of his subject : 
 general terseness, short sentences, and a careful 
 »voiding of all awkwardness of construction — theaa
 
 EHETOBIC. 355 
 
 were liis advantages. And from these he would have 
 been dislodged by a higher subject, or one that would 
 have forced him out into a wider compass of thought. 
 Rhetorician he was none, though he has often been 
 treated as such ; for, without sentiment, without im- 
 agery, without generalization, how should it be possi- 
 ble for rhetoric to subsist ? It is an absolute fact, that 
 Junius has not one principle, aphorism, or remark of 
 a general natiu'e in his whole armory — not in a 
 solitary instance did his bai'ren understanding ascend 
 to an abstraction, or general idea, but lingered for- 
 ever in the dust and rubbish of indi\dduality, amongst 
 the tangible reality of things and persons. Hence, 
 the peculiar absurdity of that hypothesis which dis- 
 covered Junius in the person of Burke. The opposi- 
 tion was here too pointedly ludicrous between Burke, 
 who exalted the merest personal themes into the 
 dignity of philosophic speculations, and Junius, in 
 whose hands the very loftiest dwindled into questions 
 of person and party. 
 
 Last of the family of rhetoricians, and in a form of 
 rhetoric as florid as the age could bear, came Mr, 
 Canning. ' Sufficit,' says a Roman author, ' in una 
 civitate esse unum rhetorem.' But, if more were in 
 his age unnecessary, in ours they would have been 
 intolerable^, lliree or four Mr. Cannings would have 
 been found a nuisance : indeed, the very admiration 
 which crowned his great displays, manifested of itself 
 the unsuitableness of his style to the atmosphere of 
 public affairs ; for it was of that kind which is offered 
 to a young lady rising from a brilliant performance on 
 the piano-forte. Something, undoubtedly, there was 
 df too juvenile an air, too gaudy a flutter of plumage,
 
 856 KHETOKIC. 
 
 m Mr. Canning's more solemn exhibitions ; but much 
 mdulgence was reasonably extended to a man, who, 
 in his class, was so complete. He was formed for 
 winning a favorable attention by every species of 
 popular fascination : to the eye he recommended 
 himself almost as much as the Bolingbroke of a 
 century before : his voice, and his management of 
 it, were no less pleasing: and upon him, as upon 
 St. John, the air of a gentleman sate with a native 
 grace. Scholarship and literature, as far as they 
 belong to the accomplishments of a gentleman, he 
 too brought forward in the most graceful manner : 
 and above all, there was an impression of honor, 
 generosity, and candor, stamped upon his manner, 
 agreeable rather to his original character, than to the 
 wrench which it had received from an ambition rest- 
 ing too much on mere personal merits. What a pity 
 that this ' gay creature of the elements ' had not taken 
 his place contentedly, where nature had assigned it, 
 as one of the ornamental performers of the time ! 
 His station was with the lilies of the field, which toi) 
 not, neither do they spin. He should have thrown 
 himself upon the admiring sympathies of the world 
 as the most dazzling of rhetorical artists, rather than 
 have challenged their angry passions in a vulgar 
 scuffle for power. In that case he would have been 
 alive at this hour — he would have had a perpetuity 
 of that admiration which to him was as the breath 
 of his nostrils ; and would not, by forcing the char- 
 acter of rhetorician into an incongruous alliance with 
 that of trading politician, have run the risk of making 
 ooth ridiculous. 
 
 In thus running over the modern history of rhetoric
 
 EHETOBIC. 357 
 
 we Kave confined ourselves to the literature of Eng- 
 land : the rhetoric of the continent would demand a 
 separate notice, and chiefly on account of the French 
 pulpit orators. For, laying them aside, we are not 
 aware of any distinct body of rhetoric — properly so 
 called — in modern literature. Four continental lan- 
 guages ma} be said to have a literature regularly 
 mounted in all departments, viz. the French, Italian, 
 Spanish, and German ; but each of these have stood 
 under separate disadvantages for the cultivation of an 
 ornamented rhetoric. In France, whatever rhetoric 
 they have, (for Montaigne, though lively, is too gos- 
 siping for a rhetorician,) arose in the age of Louis 
 XIV. ; since which time, the very same development 
 of science and public business, operated there and in 
 England, to stifle the rhetorical impulses, and all those 
 analogous tendencies in arts and in manners which 
 support it. Generally it may be assumed that rhetoric 
 will not survive the age of the ceremonious in man- 
 ners, and the gorgeous in costume. An unconscious 
 sympathy binds together the various forms of the 
 elaborate and the fanciful, under every manifestation 
 Hence it is that the national convulsions by which 
 modern France has been shaken, produced oratorj, 
 Mirabeau, Isnard, the Abbe Maury, but no rhetori- 
 cians. Florian, Chateaubriand, and others, who have 
 %mtten the most florid prose that the modern taste can 
 bear, aie elegant sentimentalists, sometimes maudlin 
 and semi-poetic, sometimes even eloquent, but never 
 rhetorical. There is no eddying about their o^vn 
 thoughts , no motion of fancy self-sustained from its 
 own activities ; no flux and reflux of thought, half 
 laeditative, half capricious ; but strains of feeling
 
 558 EHETOBIC. 
 
 genuine or not, supported at every step from the 
 ^ixcitement of independent external objects. 
 
 With respect to the German literature, the case is 
 very peculiar. A chapter upon German rhetoric 
 would be in the same ludicrous predicament as Van 
 Troll's chapter on the snakes of Iceland, which 
 delivers its business in one summary sentence, an- 
 nouncing, that snakes in Iceland — there are none. 
 Rhetoric, in fact, or any form of ornamented prose, 
 could not possibly arise in a literature, in which prose 
 itself had no proper existence till within these seventy 
 years. Lessing was the first German who wrote 
 prose with elegance ; and even at this day, a decent 
 prose style is the rarest of accomplishments in Ger- 
 many. We doubt, indeed, whether any German has 
 written prose with grace, unless he had lived abroad, 
 (like Jacobi, who composed indifferently in French 
 and German,) or had at least cultivated a very long 
 acquaintance with English and French models. Fred- 
 erick Schlegel has been led, by his comprehensive 
 knowledge of other literatures, to observe this singular 
 defect in that of his own country. Even he, however, 
 must have fixed his standard very low, when he could 
 praise, as elsewhere he does, the style of Kant. Cer- 
 tainly in any literature, where good models of prose 
 existed, Kant would be deemed a monster of vicious 
 diction, so far as regards the construction of his sen- 
 tences. He does not, it is true, write in the hybrid 
 iialect which prevailed up to the time of our George 
 the First, when every other word Avas Latin, with a 
 German inflexion ; but he has in perfection tha* 
 obtuseness which renders a German taste insensible 
 *o all beauty in the ba.ancing and structure of peri-
 
 EHETORIC. 359 
 
 ids, and to the art by which a succession of periods 
 modify each other. Every German regards a sen- 
 tence in the light of a package, and a package not 
 for the mail-coach, but for the wagon, into which 
 his privilege is to crowd as much as he possibly can. 
 Having framed a sentence, therefore, he next pro- 
 ceeds to pack it, which is effected partly by unwieldy 
 tails and codicils, but chiefly by enormous parenthetic 
 involutions. All qualifications, limitations, exceptions, 
 illustrations, are stuffed and violently rammed into the 
 bowels of the principal proposition. That all this 
 equipage of accessaries is not so arranged as to assist 
 its own orderly development, no more occurs to a 
 German as any fault, than that in a package of 
 shawls or of carpets, the colors and patterns are not 
 fully displayed. To him it is sufficient that they are 
 there. And Mr. Kant, when he has succeeded in 
 packing up a sentence which covers three close- 
 printed octavo pages, stops to draw his breath with 
 the air of one who looks back upon some brilliant 
 and meritorious performance. Under these disad- 
 vantages, it may be presumed that German rhetoric 
 is a nonentity ; but these disadvantages would not 
 have arisen, had there been a German bar or a 
 German senate, with any public existence. In the 
 absence of all forensic and senatorial eloquence, no 
 standard of good prose style — nay, which is more 
 important, no example of ambition directed to such 
 an object — has been at any time held up to the 
 public mind in Germany ; and the pulpit style has 
 been always either rustically negligent, or bristling 
 (fvith pedantry. 
 These disad-^antages with regard to public models
 
 360 BHEXOBIC. 
 
 Df civil eloquence, have in part affected the Italians ; 
 the few good prose writers of Italy have been his- 
 torians ; and it is observable that no writers exist in 
 the department of what are called Moral Essayists; 
 a class which, with us and the French, were the last 
 depositaries of the rhetorical faculty, when depressed 
 to its lowest key. Two other circumstances may be 
 noticed as unfavorable to an Italian rhetoric ; one, to 
 which we have adverted before, in the lanffua^e itself 
 — which is too loitering for the agile motion, and the 
 10 aYX'?Qotpoy of rhetoric ; and the other in the constitu- 
 tion of the national mind, which is not reflective, nor 
 remarkably fanciful — the two qualities most indis- 
 pensable to rhetoric. As a proof of the little turn 
 for reflection which there is in the Italian mind, we 
 may remind the reader that they have no meditative 
 or philosophic poetry, such as that of our Young, 
 Cowper, &c. ; a class of poetry which existed very 
 early indeed in the English literature, (e. g. Sir T. 
 Davies, Lord Brooke, Henry More, &c. ;) and which, 
 in some shape, has arisen at some stage of almost 
 ivery European literatui-e. 
 
 Of the Spanish rhetoric, a priori, we should have 
 b jgured well : but the rhetoric of their pulpit in past 
 times, which is all that we know of it, is vicious and 
 unnatural ; whilst, on the other hand, for eloquence 
 profound and heartfelt, measuring it by those many 
 admirable proclamations issued in all quarters of 
 Spain during 1808-9, the national capacity must be 
 presumed to be of the very highest order. 
 
 "We are thus thrown back upon the French pulpi* 
 orators as the only considerable body of modern 
 rhetoricians out of our own language. No writeri
 
 KHETOBIC. 
 
 361 
 
 u-e more uniformly praised; none are more eutii-ely 
 neglected. This is one of those numerous hypocri- 
 Bies so common in matters of taste, where the critic 
 is always ready with his good word, as the readiest 
 way of getting rid of the subject. To blame might 
 be hazardous ; for blame demands reasons ; but praise 
 enjoys a ready dispensation from all reasons and from 
 all discrimination. Superstition, however, as it is, 
 under which the French rhetoricians hold their repu- 
 tation, we have no thought of attempting any dis- 
 turbance to it in so slight and incidental a notice as 
 this. Let critics by all means continue to invest them 
 with every kind of imaginary splendor. Meantime 
 let us suggest, as a judicious caution, that French 
 rhetoric should be praised with a reference only to its 
 own narrow standard : for it would be a most unfor- 
 tunate trial of its pretensions, to bring so meagre a 
 style of composition into a close comparison A\-ith the 
 gorgeous opulence of the English rhetoric of the 
 same century. Under such a comparison, two capital 
 points of weakness would force themselves upon the 
 least observant of critics — first, the defect of strik- 
 ing 'magery ; and, secondly, the slenderness of the 
 thoughts. The rhetorical manner is supported in the 
 French writers chiefly by an abundance of ohs and 
 dJis — by interrogatories— apostrophes — and startling 
 exclamations : all which are mere mechanical devices 
 for raising the style ; but in the substance of the 
 composition, apart from its dress, there is nothing 
 properly rhetorical. The leading thoughts in all 
 pulpit eloquence being derived from religion, and, m 
 iict, the common inheritance of human nature, — if 
 toy PAnnot be novel, foj that very reason cannot be
 
 562 EHEIOBIO. 
 
 undignified ; but, for tlie same reason, they are apt 
 to become unafFecting and trite, unless varied and 
 individualized by new infusions of tbougbt and feel- 
 ing. The smooth monotony of the leading religioun 
 topics, as managed by the French orators, unde. the 
 treatment of Jeremy Taylor, receives at each turn 
 of the sentence a new flexure — or what may be 
 called a separate articulation : ^* old thoughts are sur- 
 veyed from novel stations and under various angles : 
 and a field absolutely exhausted throws up eternally 
 fresh verdure under the fructifying lava of burning 
 imagery. Human life, for example, is short — human 
 happiness is frail : how trite, how obvious a thesis! 
 Yet, in the beginning of the Holy Dying, upon that 
 simplest of themes how magnificent a descant ! Va- 
 riations the most original upon a ground the most 
 universal, and a sense of novelty diSiised over truths 
 coeval with human life ! Finally, it may be remarked 
 of the imagery in the French rhetoric, that it is thinly 
 sown, common-place, deficient in splendor, and, above 
 all, merely ornamental ; that is to say, it does no 
 more than echo and repeat what is already said in the 
 ought which it is brought to illustrate ; whereas, in 
 ^^Z^>- ^ Taylor, and in Burke, it will be found usually 
 times, wu. ,^^ amplify the thought, or to fortify it by 
 unnatural; wh. .^^^^^^^^^^ ^^ i^g ^^^^^ r^^^^^ f^^. ^^, 
 profound and hear.^,,^^ ^^^^.^ q^^^ed, from Taylor, 
 admii-able proclamation., ^^^ <.„ ^^^ continual mercies 
 Spain during 1808-9, th^^^^ j^ staggered by the ap- 
 presumed to be of the very^ .^^^^:^^^ ^ ^.^^li^y, and of so 
 We are thus thro^vn b^^^^^^ ^^^^p^ ^^^ ^^^^^ . ^^^ 
 orators as the only consi^.^ f^^^^ ^^^ ^^^^ of a mac 
 rhetoricians out of our 0W3 ^cean, and yet insensible
 
 BHETOKIC. 363 
 
 to tliat world of waters above him, from the uniformity 
 and eqiiality of its pressure, flashes upon us with a 
 sense of something equally marvellous, in a case which 
 we know to be a physical fact. We are thus recon- 
 ciled to the proposition, by the same image which 
 illustrates it. 
 
 In a single mechanical quality of good writing, that 
 is, in the structure of their sentences, the French 
 rhetoricians, in common with French writers generally 
 of that age, are superior to ours. This is what in 
 common parlance is expressed (though inaccurately) 
 by the word style, and is the subject of the third part 
 of the work before us. Dr. Whately, however, some- 
 what disappoints us by his mode of treating it. He 
 alleges, indeed, with some plausibility, that his subject 
 bound him to consider style no further than as it was 
 related to the purpose of persuasion. But besides 
 that it is impossible to treat it with eflfect in that muti- 
 lated section — even within the limits assumed, we are 
 not able to trace any outline of the law or system by 
 which Dr. Whately has been governed in the choice 
 of his topics : we find many very acute remarks de- 
 livered, but all in a desultory way, which leave the 
 reader no means of judging how much of the ground 
 has been surveyed, and how much omitted. We 
 'egret also that he has not addressed himself more 
 specifically to the question of English style, a subject 
 which has not yet received the comprehensive discus- 
 sion which it merits. In the age of our great rhetori- 
 lians, it is remarkable that the English language had 
 never been made an object of conscious attention. 
 No man seems to have reflected that there was a 
 wrong and a right in the choice of words — in the
 
 S64 RHETOBIC. 
 
 choice of phrases — in the mechanism of sentences 
 — or even in the grammar. Men wrote eloquently, 
 because they wrote feelingly : they wrote idiomati- 
 cally because they wrote naturally, and without affec- 
 tation: but if a false or acephalous structure of 
 sentence, — if a barbarous idiom, or an exotic word 
 happened to present itself, — no writer of the 17th 
 century seems to have had any such scrupulous sense 
 of the dignity belongmg to his own language, as 
 should make it a duty to reject, or worth his while 
 to re-model a line. The fact is, that verbal criticism 
 had not as yet been very extensively applied even 
 to the classical languages : the Scaligers, Casaubon, 
 and Salmasius, were much more critics on things than 
 critics philologically. However, even in that age, the 
 French writers were more attentive to the cultivation 
 of their mother tongue, than any other people. It is 
 justly remarked by Schlegel, that the most worthless 
 writers amongst the French, as to matter, generally 
 take pains with their diction ; or perhaps it is more 
 true to say, that with equal pains, in their language it 
 is more easy to write well than in one of greater 
 compass. It is also true, that the French are indebted 
 for their greater purity from foreign idioms, to their 
 much more limited acquaintance with foreign litera- 
 ture. Still, with every deduction from the merit, the 
 fact is as we have said ; and it is apparent, not only 
 by innumerable evidences in the concrete, but by the 
 superiority of all their abstract auxiliaries in the ar* 
 of writing. We English, even at this day, have n& 
 •yarned grammar of our language ; nay, we have 
 allow d the blundering attempt, in that department, 
 of an imbecile stranger, to supersede the learned
 
 EHETOSIC. 365 
 
 (however imperfect) works of our T^^allis, Lowtli, 
 &c. ; we have also no sufficient dictionary ; and we 
 aave no work at all, sufficient or insufficient, on the 
 phrases and idiomatic niceties of our language, corres- 
 ponding to the works of Yaugelas and others, for the 
 French. 
 
 Hence an anomaly, not found perhaps in any litera- 
 ture but ours, that the most eminent English writers 
 do not write their mother tongue without continual 
 violations of propriety. "With the single exception of 
 Mr. Wordsworth, who has paid an honorable attention 
 to the purity and accuracy of his English, we believe 
 tha^ there is not one celebrated author of this day 
 who has written two pages consecutively, without 
 some flagrant impropriety in the grammar, (such as 
 the eternal confusion of the preterite with the past 
 participle, confusion of verbs transitive with intransi- 
 tive, &c. &c.) or some violation more or less of the 
 vernacular idiom, li If this last sort of blemish does 
 not occur so frequently in modern books, the reason 
 is, — that since Dr. Johnson's time, the freohness of 
 the idiomatic style has been too frequently abandoned 
 for the lifelec? luechanism of a style purely bookish 
 and artificial. 
 
 The practical judgments of Dr. WTiately are such 
 as will seldom be disputed. Dr. Johnson for his triads 
 and his antithetic balances,' he taxes more than once 
 with a plethoric and tautologic tympany of sentence ; 
 and in the following passage, with a very happy 
 illustration : — ' Sentences, which might have been 
 expressed as simple ones, are expanded into complex 
 ^nes by the addition of clauses which add little oi 
 aothing to the s ":n5e ; and which have been compared
 
 866 BHETOKIC. 
 
 to the false handles and key-holes with which fund 
 ture is decorated, that serve no other purpose than to 
 correspond to the real ones. Much of Dr. Johnson's 
 writings is chargeable with this fault.' 
 
 We recollect a little biographic sketch of Dr. John- 
 son, published immediately after his death, in which, 
 amongst other instances of desperate tautology, the 
 author quotes the well known lines from the imitation 
 of Juvenal — 
 
 * Let observation, with extensive view. 
 Survey mankind from China to Peru; ' 
 
 and contends, with some reason, that this is saying in 
 effect, — ' Let observation with extensive observation 
 observe mankind extensively.^ Certainly Dr. Johnson 
 was the most faulty Avriter in this kind of inanity that 
 ever has played tricks with language.^ On the other 
 hand, Burke was the least so ; and we are petrified to 
 find him described by Dr. Whately as a writer ' qui 
 variare cupit rem prodigialiter unam,' and as on that 
 account offensive to good taste. The understanding 
 of Burke was even morbidly impatient of tautology : 
 progress and motion — everlasting motion — was a 
 mere necessity of his intellect. We will venture to 
 offer a king's ransom for one unequivocal case of 
 tautology from the whole circle of Burke's writings. 
 The principium indiscernibilium, upon which Leibnitz 
 affirmed the impossibility of finding any two leaves of 
 a tree that should be mere duplicates of each other, 
 may be applied to Burke as safely as to nature ; no 
 iwo propositions, we are satisfied, can be found in 
 him, which do not contain a larger variety than is 
 l^quisite to their justification.
 
 RHETOBIC. 367 
 
 Speaking of the advantages for energy and effect 
 in the license of arrangement open to the ancient 
 languages, especially to the Latin, Dr. Whately cites 
 the following senterrce from the opening of the 4th 
 Book of Q. Curtius : — Darius tanti modo exercittis 
 rex, qui, triuinphantis magis quam dimicantis more, 
 curru sublimis inierat p}'(xlium, — per Joca, qucB prope 
 immensis agminibus compleverat, jam inania, et in- 
 genti solitudine vasta fugiehat. ' The effect,' says 
 he, ' of the concluding verb, placed where it is, is 
 most striking.'^ The sentence is far enough from a 
 good one : but, confining ourselves to the sort of merit 
 for which it is here cited, as a merit peculiar to the 
 Latin, we must say that the very same position of the 
 verb, with a finer effect, is attainable, and, in fact, 
 often attained in English sentences : see, for instance, 
 the passage in the Duke of Gloucester's soliloquy — 
 Now is the winter of our discontent — and ending. 
 In the deep hosom of the ocean buried. See also an- 
 other at the beginning of Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity 
 on the thanklessness of the labor employed upon the 
 foundations of truth, which, says he, like those of 
 buildings, ' are in the bosom of the earth concealed.' 
 The fact is, that the common cases of inversion, such 
 as the suspension of the verb to the end, and the 
 anticipation of the objective case at the beginning, 
 are not sufiicient illustrations of the Latin structure. 
 All this can be done as well by the English. It is 
 not mere power of inversion, but of self-intrication, 
 and of self-dislocation, which mark the extremity of 
 the artificial structure ; that power by which a se- 
 \[uence of words, that naturally is directly consecutive, 
 iommences, intermits, and reappears at a remote part
 
 368 RHETORIC. 
 
 of the sentence, like what is called drake-stone on the 
 surface of a river. In this power the Greek is almost 
 as much helow the Latin as all modern languages ; 
 and in this, added to its elliptic brevity of connection 
 and transition, and to its wealth and abstractions ' the 
 long-tailed words in osity and ation,^ lie the peculiar 
 capacities of the Latin for rhetoric. 
 
 Dr. W. lays it down as a maxim in rhetoric, that 
 ' elaborate stateliness is always to be regarded as a 
 worse fault than the slovenliness and languor which 
 accompany a very loose style.' But surely this is a 
 rash position : — stateliness the most elaborate, in an 
 absolute sense, is no fault at all ; though it may 
 happen to be so in relation to a given subject, or to 
 any subject under given circumstances. ' Belshazzar 
 the king made a great feast for a thousand of his 
 lords.' Reading these words, who would not be justly 
 offended in point of taste, had his feast been charac- 
 terized by elegant simplicity ? Again, at a corona- 
 tion, what can be more displeasing to a philosophic 
 taste than a pretended chastity of ornament, at war 
 with the very purposes of a solemnity essentially 
 magnificent? An imbecile friend of ours, in 1825, 
 brought us a sovereign of a new coinage, ' which ' 
 (said he) ' I admire, because it is so elegantly simple.' 
 This, he flattered himself, was thinking like a man of 
 caste. But mark how we sent him to the right about ; 
 ' and that, weak-minded friend, is exactly the thing 
 which a coin ought not to be : the duty of a golden 
 coin is to be as florid as it can, rich with Corinthian 
 >rnaments, and as gorgeous as a peacock's tail.' So 
 of rhetoric, imagine that you read these words of 
 'ntroduction, ' And on a set day, Tullius Cicero re-
 
 BHETOEIC. 36.** 
 
 turned thanks to Cccsar on lehalf of Marcus Mar- 
 cellus,* what sort of a speech is reasonably to be 
 expected? The whole purpose being a festal and 
 ceremonial one, thanksgiving its sole burden first and 
 last, what else than the most ' elaborate stateliness ? ' 
 If it were not stately, and to the very verge of the 
 pompous, Mr. "Wolf would have had one argument 
 more than he had, and a better than any he has pro- 
 duced, for suspecting the authenticity of that thrice/ 
 famous oration. 
 
 In the course of his dissertation on style. Dr. W., 
 very needlessly, enters upon the thorny question of 
 the quiddity, or characteristic difference, of poetry as 
 distinguished from prose. ^' "We coidd much have 
 wished that he had forborne to meddle with a qucestio 
 vexata of this nature, both because, in so incidenteil 
 and cursory a discussion, it could not receive a proper 
 investigation ; and because Dr. "Whately is apparently 
 not familiar with much of what has been written on 
 that subject. On a matter so slightly discussed, we 
 shall not trouble ourselves to enter farther, than to 
 express our astonishment that a logician like Dr. 
 Whately should have allowed himself to deliver so 
 nugatory an argument as this which follows : — ' Any 
 composition in verse, (and none that is not,) is always 
 called, whether good or bad, a poem, by all who have 
 no favorite hypothesis to maintain.' And the infer- 
 ence manifestly is, that it is rightly so called. Now, 
 if a man has taken up any fixed opinion on the 
 subject, no matter whether A\Trong or right, and has 
 »easons to give for his opinion, this man comes under 
 the description of those who have a favorite hypothesis 
 to maintain. It follows, therefore, tha* *;he only clas» 
 24
 
 370 KHETOmC. 
 
 of people wliom Dr. Whately will allow as unbiassed 
 judges on this question — a question not of fiict, but 
 of opinion — are those who have, and who profess to 
 have, no opinion at all upon the subject; or, having 
 one, have no reasons for it. But, apart from this con- 
 tradiction, how is it possible that Dr. Whately should, 
 in any case, plead a popular usage of speech, as of 
 any weight in a philosophic argument ? Still more, 
 how is it possible in this case, where the accuracy of 
 the popular usage is the very thing in debate, so that 
 — if pleaded at all — it must be pleaded as its own 
 justification? Alms-giving — and nothing but alms- 
 giving — is universally called charity, and mistaken 
 for the charity of the Scriptures, by all who have no 
 favorite hypothesis to maintain — i. e. by all the in- 
 considerate. But Dr. Whately will hardly draw any 
 argument from this usage in defence of that popular 
 notion. 
 
 'u speaking thus freely of particular passages in 
 Dr. Whately' s book, we are so far from meaning any 
 disrespect to him, that, on the contrary, if we had not 
 been impressed with the very highest respect for his 
 talents, by the acuteness and originality which illumi- 
 nate every part of his book, we could not have 
 allowed ourselves to spend as much time upon the 
 whole, as we have, in fact, spent upon single para- 
 graphs. In reality, there is not a section of his work 
 which has not furnished us with occasion for some 
 profitable speculations ; and we are, in consequence, 
 most anxious to see his Logic, which treats a subject 
 BO much more important than rhetoric, and so obsti- 
 ttately misrepresented, that it would delight us much 
 •0 anticipate a radical exposure of the errors on thi»
 
 EHETOBIC. ^' *■ 
 
 gubject, taken up from the days of Lord Bacon. It 
 has not fallen in our way to quote much from Dr. . 
 Whately totidem verbis; our apology for which wil 
 be found in the broken and discontinuous method of 
 treatment by short sections and paragraphs, which a 
 subject of this nature has necessarily imposed upon 
 him Had it coincided with our purpose to go more 
 into detail, we could have delighted our readers with 
 some brilliant examples of philosophical penetration, 
 applied to questions interesting from their importance 
 or difficulty, with the happiest effect. As it is, we 
 shall content ourselves with saying, that, m any ele- 
 mentary work, it has not been our fortune to witness 
 a rarer combination of analytical acuteness, with 
 severity of judgment; and when we add that these 
 qualities are recommended by a scholar-like elegance 
 of manner, we suppose it hardly necessary to add 
 that Dr Whately's is incomparably the best book of 
 its class, since the days of Campbell's PhUouophy of 
 Rhetoric. 
 
 [Note. -In what is said at the beginning of this paper 
 of the true meaning of the enthymeme, as determmed b, 
 Facciolati, we must be understood with an exclusive refer- 
 ence to rhetoric. In logic the old acceptation cannot be dw- 
 turbed.]
 
 LANGUAGE. 
 
 No language is stationary, except in rude and early 
 periods of society. The languages of nations like 
 the English and French, walking in the van of civil- 
 ization, having popular institutions, and taking part 
 in the business of the earth with morbid energy, are 
 placed under the action of causes that will not allow 
 them any respite from change. Neologism, in revo- 
 lutionary times, is not an infirmity of caprice, seeking 
 (to use the proverb of Cervantes) " for better bread 
 than is made of wheat," but is a mere necessity of 
 the unresting intellect. New ideas, new aspects of 
 old ideas, new relations of objects to each other, or 
 to man — the subject who contemplates those objects 
 — absolutely insists on new words. And it would 
 not be a more idle misconception to find a disease in 
 the pains of growth, than to fancy a decay of ver- 
 nacular purity in the multitude of verbal coinages 
 which modern necessities of thought and action are 
 annually calling forth on the banks of the Thames 
 and the Seine. 
 
 Such coinages, however, do not all stand upon the 
 same basis of justification. Some are regularly 
 'brraed firom known roots upon known analogies;
 
 874 LANGUAOB, 
 
 others are formed licentiously. Some again meet a 
 real and clamorous necessity of the intellect ; others 
 are fitted to gratify the mere appetite for ianovation. 
 They take their rise in various sources, and are 
 moulded with various degrees of skill. Let us throw 
 a hasty glance on the leading classes of these coin- 
 ages, and of the laws which appear to govern them, 
 or of the anomalies with which they are sometimes 
 associated. There are also large cases of innovation, 
 in which no process of coinage whatever is mani 
 fested, but perhaps a simple restoration of old words, 
 long since obsolete in literature and good society, 
 yet surviving to this hour in provincial usage ; or, 
 again, an extension and emancipation of terms here- 
 tofore narrowly restricted to a technical or a pi'ofes- 
 sional use ; as we see exemplified in the word ignore, 
 which, until very lately, was so sacred to the sole 
 use of grand juries, that a man would have been ob- 
 scurely suspected by a policeman, and would indeed 
 have suspected himself, of something like petty lar- 
 ceny, in forcing it into any general and philosophic 
 meaning ; which, however, it has now assumed, with 
 little offence to good taste, and with yeomayi service 
 to the intellect. Other cases again there are, and at 
 present far too abundant, in which the necessities of 
 social intercourse, and not unfrequently the necessi- 
 ties of philosophic speculation, are provisionally sup- 
 plied by slang, and the phraseology that is born and 
 bred in the streets. The market-place and the highway, 
 ihe forum and tlie trivium, are rich seed-plots for the 
 sowing and the reaping of many indispensable ideas 
 That a phrase belongs to the slang dictionary is cer 
 tainly no absolute recommendation ; gn-^Baetimes such
 
 LANGUAGE. 375 
 
 a phrase may be simply disgusting from its vulgarity, 
 without adding anything to the meaning or to the 
 rhetorical force. How shocking to hear an oflQcial 
 dignitary saying (as but yesterday was heard), 
 " What on eaiHli could the clause mean ? " Yet 
 neither is it any safe ground of absolute excommuni- 
 cation even from the sanctities of literature that a 
 phrase is entirely a growth of the street. The word 
 humbug, for instance (as perhaps I may have occasion 
 to show further on), rests upon a rich and compre- 
 hensive basis ; it cannot be rendered adequately 
 either by German or by Greek, the two richest of 
 human languages ; and without this expressive word 
 we should all be disarmed for one great case, contin- 
 ually recurrent, of social enormity. A vast mass of 
 villany, that cannot otherwise be reached by legal 
 penalties or brought within the rhetoric of scorn, 
 would go at large with absolute impunity, were it not 
 through the stern Rhadamanthian aid of this virtuous 
 and inexorable word. 
 
 Meantime, as it would not suit the purposes of a 
 sketch to be too systematic in the treatment of a sub- 
 ject so inexhaustible as language and style, neither 
 would it be within the limits of just proportion that 1 
 should be too elaborate in rehearsing beforehand the 
 several avenues and classes of cases through which 
 an opening is made for new words amongst ourselves 
 or the French. I will select such cases for separate 
 notice as seem most interesting or most seasonable. 
 But previously, as a proper mode of awakening the 
 reader into giving relief and just prominence to the 
 Bubject, I will point attention to the varying scale 
 of appreciation applied to the diction and the nationai
 
 376 LANGUAGE. 
 
 language, as a ground of national distinction and 
 honor, by the five great intellectual nations of ancient 
 and modern history, namely, the Greeks, the Romans, 
 the French, the English, and the Germans. In no 
 country, except one, is such a preface more requisite 
 than in England, where it is strange enough that, 
 whilst the finest models of style exist, and sub-con- 
 sciously operate efiectively as sources of delight, the 
 conscious valuation of style is least perfectly devel- 
 oped. 
 
 Every nation has reason to feel interested in the 
 pretensions of its own native language ; in the orig- 
 inal quality of that language or characteristic kind 
 of its powers, and in the particular degree of its ex- 
 pansions at the period in question. Even semi-bar- 
 barous tribes sometimes talk grandiloquently on this 
 head, and ascribe to uncultivated jargons a fertility 
 or a range of expressiveness quite incompatible with 
 the particular stage of social development which the 
 national capacities have reached. Not only in spite 
 of its barbarism, but oftentimes in mere virtue of its 
 barbarism, we find a language claiming by its eulo- 
 gists to possess more than ordinary powers of pictur- 
 esque expression. Such a claim is continually put 
 forward on behalf of the Celtic languages, as, for 
 instance, the Armoric, the Welsh, the Irish, the 
 Manx, the Gaelic. Such a claim is put forward also 
 for many oriental languages. Yet, in most of these 
 cases, there is a profound mistake committed ; and 
 generally the same mistake. Without being strictly 
 barbarous, all these languages are uncultured and 
 rude in a degree corresponding to the narrow social 
 development of the races who speak them. These
 
 LANGUAGE. 377 
 
 races are precisely in that state of imperfect expan- 
 Bion, both civilly and intellectually, under which the 
 separation has not fully taken place between poetry 
 and prose. Their social condition is too simple and 
 elementary to require much cultivation of intellectual 
 topics. Little motive exists for writing, unless on 
 occasions of poetic excitement. The subdued color- 
 ing, therefore, of prose has not yet been (to speak 
 physiologically) secreted. And the national diction 
 has the appearance of being more energetic and 
 sparkling, simply because it is more inflated ; the 
 chastities of good taste not having yet been called 
 forth by social necessities to disentangle the separate 
 forms of impassioned and non-impassioned composi- 
 tion. The Kalmuck Tartars, according to a German 
 traveller, namely, Bergmann, long resident amongst 
 them, speak in rapturous terms of their own lan- 
 guage ; but it is probable that the particular modes 
 of phraseology which fascinate their admiration are 
 precisely those which a more advanced civilization, 
 and a corresponding development of taste, would 
 reject as spurious. Certainly, in the case of a lan- 
 guage and a literature likely to be much in advance 
 of the Kalmuck, namely, the Arabic, at the era of 
 Mahomet, we find this conjecture realized. The 
 Koran is held by the devout Mahometan to be the 
 most admirable model of composition ; but exactly 
 those ornaments of diction or of imagery, which he 
 regards as the jewels of the whole, are most entirely 
 in the childish taste of imperfect civilization. That 
 which attracts the Arab critic or the Persian is most 
 of all repulsive to the masculine judgment of the 
 Eiiropean
 
 378 LANGUAGE, 
 
 Barbansm, in short, through all degrees, generatee 
 its own barbaresque standards of taste ; and nowhere 
 so much as in the great field of diction and orna- 
 mental composition. A high civilization is an indis- 
 pensable condition for developing the full powers of 
 a language ; and it is equally a condition for develop- 
 ing the taste which must preside over the apprecia- 
 tion of diction and style. The elder civilizations of 
 Egypt and of Asiatic empires are too imperfectly 
 known at this day to furnish any suggestions upon 
 the subject. The earliest civilization that ofiers a 
 practical field of study to our own age is the superb 
 one of Greece. 
 
 It cannot be necessary to say that from that mem- 
 orable centre of intellectual activity have emanated 
 the great models in art and literature, which, to 
 Christendom, when recasting her mediaeval forms, 
 became chiefly operative in controlling her luxuri- 
 ance, and in other negative services, though not so 
 powerful for positive impulse and inspiration. Greece 
 was in fact too ebullient with intellectual activity,— ^ 
 an activity too palestric, and purely human, — so that 
 the opposite pole of the mind, which points to the 
 mysterious and the spiritual, was, in the agile Greek, 
 too intensely a child of the earth, starved and pal- 
 sied ; whilst in the Hebrew, dull and inert intellect- 
 ually, but in his spiritual organs awake and sublime, 
 the case was precisely reversed. Yet, after all, the 
 result was immeasurably in favor of the Hebrew. 
 Speaking in the deep sincerities of the solitary and 
 musing heart, which refuses to be duped by the 
 whistling of names, we must say of the Greek that 
 — laudatur et alget — he has won the admii'ation of
 
 LANGUAQR. 379 
 
 the human race, he is numbered amongst the chief 
 brilliances of earth, but on the deeper and more abid- 
 ing nature of man he has no hold. He will perish 
 when any deluge of calamity overtakes the libraries 
 of our planet, or if any great revolution of thought 
 remoulds them, and will be remembered only as a 
 generation of flowers is remembered ; with the same 
 tenderness of feeling, and with the same pathetic 
 sense of a natural predestination to evanescence. 
 Whereas the Hebrew, by introducing himself to the 
 secret places of the human heart, and sitting there as 
 incubator over the awful germs of the spiritualities 
 that connect man with the unseen worlds, has per- 
 petuated himself as a power in the human system ; 
 he is coenduring with man's race, and careless of 
 all revolutions in literature or in the composition of 
 society. The very languages of these two races 
 repeat the same expression of their intellectual differ- 
 ences, and of the differences in their missions. The 
 Hebrew, meagre and sterile as regards the numerical 
 wealth of its ideas, is infinite as regards their power ; 
 the Greek, on the other hand, rich as tropic forests 
 in the polymorphous life, the life of the dividing and 
 distinguishing intellect, is weak only in the supreme 
 region of thought. The Hebrew has scarcely any 
 individuated words. Ask a Hebrew scholar if he has 
 a word for a hall (as a tennis-ball, pila luso7ia) ; he 
 says, "0, yes." What is it, then ? Why, he gives 
 you the word for globe. Ask for 07-b, for sphei^e, &c., 
 still you have the same answer ; the individual cir- 
 cumstantiations are swallowed up in the generic out- 
 line. But the Greek has a felicitous parity of wealth 
 in the abstract and the concrete. Even as vocal lan^
 
 380 LANGUAGE. 
 
 gTiages, the Hebrew and the GreeK obey the same 
 prevailing law of difference. The Hebrew is a sub- 
 lime monochord, uttering vague vowel sounds as 
 indistinct and shy as the breathings of an ^olian 
 harp when exposed to a fitful breeze. The Greek is 
 more firmly articulated by consonants, and the suc- 
 cession of its syllables runs through a more extensive 
 compass of sonorous variety than can be matched in 
 any other known language. The Spanish and the 
 Italian, with all the stateliness of their modulation, 
 make no approach to the canorous variety of the 
 sounds of the Greek.^^ Read a passage from almost 
 any Greek poet, and each syllable seems to have 
 been placed in its present position as a relief, and 
 by way of contrast to the syllable which follows and 
 precedes. 
 
 Of a language thus and otherwise so divinely en- 
 dowed, the Greeks had a natural right to be proud. 
 Yet were they so ? There is no appearance of it ; and 
 the reason no doubt lay in their insulated position. 
 Having no intellectual intercourse with foreign na- 
 tions, they had virtually no intercourse at all — none 
 which could afiect the feelings of the literary class, 
 or generally of those who would be likely to contem- 
 plate language as a subject of aesthetic admiration. 
 Each Hellenic author might be compared with others 
 of his compatriot authors, in respect to his manage- 
 ment of their common language ; but not the lan- 
 guage itself compared as to structure or capacities 
 with other languages ; since these other languages 
 (one and all) were in any practical sense hardly as- 
 sumed to exist. In this there was no arrogance 
 A-liens, as to country and civil polity, being objects
 
 LANGUAGE. 881 
 
 ©f jealousy in the circumstances of Greece, there 
 could be no reason for abstaining from any designa- 
 tion, however hostile, which might seem appropriate 
 to the relation between the parties. But, in reality, 
 the term barbarians^^ seems, for many ages, to have 
 implied nothing either hostile or disrespectful. By 
 a natural onamatopceia, the Greeks used the iterated 
 syllables barbar to denote that a man was unintel- 
 ligible in his talk ; and by the word barbarian origin- 
 ally it is probable that no sort of reproach was 
 intended, but simply the fact that the people so called 
 spoke a language not intelligible to Greeks. Latterly 
 the term seems to have been often used as one of 
 mere convenience for classification, indicating the 
 non-Hellenes in opposition to the Hellenes ; and it was 
 not meant to express any qualities whatever of the 
 aliens — simply they were described as being aliens. 
 But in the earliest times it was meant, by the word 
 barbarians, to describe them under the idea of men 
 who were eTeepyUnioi, men who, speaking in a tongue 
 different from the Grecian, spoke unintelligibly ; and 
 at this day it is very probable that the Chinese mean 
 nothing more by the seemingly offensive term outside 
 barbarians. The mis-translations must be many be- 
 tween ourselves and the Chinese ; and the probability 
 is, that this reputedly arrogant expression means 
 only " the aliens, or external people, who speak in 
 kOngues foreign to China." Arrogant or not arro- 
 gant, however, in the mouth of the Greeks, the word 
 barbarians included the whole human race not living 
 in Hellas, or in colonies thrown off from Hellas?' 
 Having no temptation or facilities for holding any 
 jitellectual irtercourse with those who could not
 
 332 LANGUAGE. 
 
 communicate through the channel of the Greek 
 language, it followed that the Greeks had no means 
 or opportunity for comparing their own language 
 with the languages of other nations ; and, together 
 with this power of mutual comparison, fell away 
 the call and excitement to vanity upon that par- 
 ticular subject. Greece was in the absolute in- 
 sulation of the phoenix, the unique of birds, that dies 
 without having felt a throb of exultation or a pang 
 of jealousy, because it has exposed its gorgeous 
 plumage and the mysterious solemnities of its beauty 
 only to the dusky recesses of Thebaic deserts. 
 
 Not thus were the Romans situated. The Greeks, 
 so profound and immovable was their selfconceit, 
 never in any generation came to regard the Romans 
 with the slightest tremor of jealousy, as though they 
 were or ever could be rivals in literature. The Ro- 
 man nobles, as all Greece knew, resorted in youth to 
 Athens as to the eternal well-head of learning and 
 eloquence ; and the literary or the forensic efforts of 
 such persons were never viewed as by possibility 
 efforts of competition with their masters, but simply 
 as graceful expressions of homage to the inimitable 
 by men whose rank gave a value to this homage. 
 Cicero and other Romans of his day were egregiously 
 duped by their own vanity, when they received as 
 sincere the sycophantic praises of mercenary Greek 
 »hetoricians. No Greek ever in good faith admired 
 a Roman upon intellectual grounds, except indeed 
 as Polybius did, whose admiration was fixed upon 
 the Roman institutions, not upon their literature ; 
 though even in his day the Roman literature had 
 already put forth a masculine promise, and in Plau*
 
 LAKGUIOE. 383 
 
 tus, at least, a promise of unhorroioed excellence. 
 The Greeks were wrong ; the Eomans had some 
 things in their literature which a Greek could neither 
 have rivalled nor even understood. They had a pe- 
 culiar rhetoric, for example, such as Ovid's in the con- 
 test for the arms of Achilles, — such as Seneca's, 
 which, to this hour, has never been properly exam- 
 ined, and which not only has no parallel in Grecian 
 literature, but which, strangely enough, loses its 
 whole eflFect and sense when translated into Greek ; 
 so entirely is it Roman by incommunicable privilege 
 of genius. 
 
 But, if the Greeks did no justice to their Roman 
 pupils, on the other hand, the Roman pupils never 
 ceased to regard the Greeks with veneration, or to 
 acknowledge them for their masters in literature : 
 they had a foreign literature before their eyes chal- 
 lenging continual comparison ; and this foreign liter- 
 ature was in a language which also challenged com- 
 parison with their own. Every Roman of distinction 
 understood Greek : often talked it fluently, declaimed 
 in it, and wrote books in it. But there is no language 
 without its own peculiar genius, and therefore none 
 without its separate powers and advantages. The 
 Latin language has in excess such an original charac- 
 ter, and consequently such separate powers. These 
 Romans were not slow to discover. Studying the 
 Greek so closely, they found by continual collation in 
 what quarter lay the peculiar strength of the Latin. 
 And, amongst others, Cicero did himself the greatest 
 honor, and almost redeems the baseness of his politi- 
 cal conduct, by the patriotic fervor which he now and 
 then exhibits in defending the claims of his native
 
 384 LANGUAGE. 
 
 anguage and native literature. He maintains also, 
 more than once, and perhaps with good reason, the 
 native superiority of the Roman mind to the Grecian 
 in certain qualities of racy humor, &c.*^^ 
 
 Here, namely, in the case of Cicero, we have the 
 first eminent example (though he himself records 
 some elder examples amongst his own countrymen) 
 of a man standing up manfully to support the pre- 
 tensions of his mother tongue. And this might be 
 done in a mere spirit of pugnacious defiance to the 
 arrogance of another nation — a spirit which finds 
 matter of quarrel in a straw. But here also we find 
 the first example of a statesman's seriously regarding 
 a language in the light of a foremost jewel amongst 
 the trophies of nationality. 
 
 Coming forward to our own times, we find sove- 
 reign rulers, on behalf of great nations, occasionally 
 raising disputes which presume some sense of the 
 value and dignity attached to a language. Cromwell, 
 for instance, insisted upon Cardinal Mazarine's sur- 
 rendering his pretension to have the French lan- 
 guage used in a particular negotiation ; and accord- 
 ingly Latin was substituted. But this did not argue 
 in Cromwell any real estimation of the English lan- 
 guage. He had been weak enough to wish that his 
 own life and annals should be written in Latin rathei 
 than in English. The motive, it is true, might be to 
 facilitate the circulation of the work amongst the 
 literati of the continent. But vernacular translations 
 would more certainly have been executed all over 
 the continent in the absence of a Latin original ; for 
 this, by meeting the demand of foreigners in part 
 (namely, oi learned foreigners), wovldipro tanto have
 
 LANGUAGE. 385 
 
 lessened the motives to such translations. And apart 
 from this preference of a Latin to a domestic portrait- 
 ure addressing itself originally to his own country- 
 men, or, if Latin were otherwise the preferable lan- 
 guage, apart from Cromwell's preference of a Latin 
 Casaubon to a Latin Milton, in no instance did Crom- 
 well testify any sense of the commanding rank due 
 to English literature amongst the contemporary^^ 
 literatures of Christendom, nor any concern for its 
 extension. 
 
 In the case of resisting the French arrogance, 
 Cromwell had seemed to express homage to the 
 language of his country, but in reality he had only 
 regarded the political dignity of his country. A 
 pretension may be lighter than a feather ; and yet in 
 behalf of our country we do right to suffer no inso- 
 lent aggression upon it by an enemy. But this 
 argues no sincere regard for that pretension on its 
 own account. We have known a sailor to knock an 
 Italian down for speaking disrespectfully of English 
 tenor voices. The true and appropriate expression 
 of reverence to a language is not by fighting for it, as 
 a subject of national rivalry, but by taking earnest 
 pains to write it with accuracy, practically to display 
 its beauty, and to make its powers available for com- 
 jiensurate ends. Tried by this test, which of the 
 three peoples that walk at the head of civilization — 
 French, Germans, or English — have best fulfilled the 
 duties of their position ? 
 
 To answer that the French only have been fully 
 
 awake to these duties !s painfiil, but too manifestly 
 
 't is true. The French language possesses the very 
 
 highest degree of merit, though not in the very high- 
 
 25
 
 B86 LANGUAGE. 
 
 est mode of merit ; it is the unique language of the 
 planet as an instrument for giving effect to the 
 powers, and for meeting the necessities of social 
 gayety and colloquial intercourse. This is partly 
 the effect, and partly the cause, of the social tempera- 
 ment which distinguishes the French ; partly follows 
 the national disposition, and partly leads to it. The 
 adaptation of the language to the people, not per- 
 haps more really prominent in this case than in 
 others, is more conspicuously so ; and it may be in a 
 spirit of gratitude for this genial cooperation in their 
 language that the French are in a memorable degree 
 anxious to write it with elegance and correctness. 
 They take a pride in doing so ; and it is remarkable 
 that grammatical inaccuracies, so common amongst 
 ourselves, and common even amongst our literary 
 people, are almost unknown amongst the educated 
 French.*'^ 
 
 But mere fidelity to grammar would leave but a 
 negative impression ; the respect which the French 
 show to their language expresses itself chiefly in 
 their way of managing it, that is, in their attention 
 to style and diction. It is the rarest thing possible 
 to find a French writer erring by sentences too 
 'ong, too intricate and loaded with clauses, or too 
 (. lumsy in their structure. The very highest qualities 
 of style are not much within the ideal of French 
 composition ; but in the executive results French 
 prose composition usually reveals an air of finish, of 
 iself-restraint under any possible temptation to des 
 longueurs, and of graceful adroitness in the trans- 
 itions. 
 
 Preciselj the reverse of all this is found in the
 
 LANGUAGE. 387 
 
 compositions of the German, who is the ^eatest 
 nuisance, in what concerns the treatment of language, 
 that the mind of man is capable of conceiving. Of 
 his language the German is proud, and with reason, 
 for it is redundantly rich. Even in its Teutonic 
 section it is so rich as to be self-suflBcing, and capa- 
 ble; though awkwardly, of dispensing with the Greek 
 and Latin counter-section. This independence of 
 alien resources has sometimes been even practically 
 adopted as the basis of a dictionary, and officially 
 patronized. Some thirty years ago, the Prussian 
 government was said to have introduced into the 
 public service a dictionary^ which rejected all words 
 not purely vernacular. Such a word, for instance, 
 as philosophie was not admissible ; the indigenous 
 word weltweisheit was held to be not only sufficient, 
 which it really is, but exclusively legitimate. Yet, 
 with all this scrupulosity and purism of veneration 
 for his native language, to which he ascribes eveiy 
 quality of power and beauty, and amongst others — 
 credite posteri ! — sometimes even vocal beauty^ and 
 euphony, the true German has no sense of grace or 
 deformity in the management of his language. Style, 
 diction, the construction of sentences, are ideas per- 
 fectly without meaning to the German writer. If a 
 whole book were made up of a single sentence, all 
 collateral or subordinate ideas being packed into it 
 as parenthetical intercalations, — if this single sen- 
 ience should even cover an acre of ground, the true 
 German would see in all that no want of art, would 
 recognize no opportunities thrown away for the dis- 
 play of beauty. The temple would in Ms eyes exist, 
 because the materials of the temple — the stone, the
 
 888 LANGUAGE. 
 
 lime, the iron, the timber — had been carted to the 
 ground. A sentence, even when insulated aud 
 viewed apart for itself, is a subject for complex art : 
 even so far it is capable of multiform beauty, and 
 liable to a whole nosology of malconformations. But 
 it is in the relation of sentences, in what Horace 
 terms their "junctura," that the true life of compo- 
 sition resides. The mode of their nexus, — the way in 
 which one sentence is made to arise out of another, 
 and to prepare the opening for a third, — this is the 
 great loom in which the textile process of the moving 
 intellect reveals itself and prospers. Here the sepa- 
 rate clauses of a period become architectural parts, 
 aiding, relieving, supporting each other. But how 
 can any approach to that effect, or any suggestion 
 of it, exist for him who hides and buries all openings 
 for parts and graceful correspondences in one monot- 
 onous continuity of period, stretching over three 
 octavo pages ? Kant was a great man, but he was 
 obtuse and deaf as an antediluvian boulder with 
 regard to language and its capacities. He has sen- 
 tences which have been measured by a carpenter, and 
 some of them run two feet eight by six inches. Now, 
 a sentence with that enormous span is fit only for the 
 use of a megatherium or a pre-Adamite. Parts so 
 remote as the beginning and the end of such a sen- 
 tence can have no sensible relation to each other ; 
 not much as regards their logic, but none at all as 
 regards their more sensuous qiialities, — rhythmus, 
 for instance, or the continuity of metaphor. And it 
 is clear that, if the internal relations of a sentence 
 fade under the extravagant misproportion of its scale 
 % fortiori must the outer relations. If two figureB,
 
 LANGUAGE. 389 
 
 or other objects, are meant to modify each other vis- 
 ually by means of color, of outline, or of expression, 
 they must be brought into juxtaposition, or at least 
 into neighborhood. A chasm between them, so vast 
 as to prevent the synthesis of the two objects in one 
 coexisting field of vision, interrupts the play of all 
 genial comparison. Periods, and clauses of pei'iods, 
 modify each other, and build up a whole, then, only 
 when the parts are shown as parts, cohering and con- 
 Bpiring to a common result. But, if each part is 
 separately so vast as to eclipse the disc of the adja- 
 cent parts, then substantially they are separate 
 wholes, and do not coalesce to any joint or complex 
 impression. 
 
 We English in this matter occupy a middle position 
 between the French and the Germans. Agi-eeably 
 to the general cast of the national character, our 
 tendency is to degrade the value of the ornamental, 
 whenever it is brought before us under any sugges- 
 tion of comparison or rivalry with the substantial or 
 grossly useful. Viewing the thoughts as the substan- 
 tial objects in a book, we are apt to regard the man- 
 ner of presenting these thoughts as a secondary or 
 even trivial concern. The one we typify as the 
 metallic substance, the silver or gold, which consti- 
 lutes the true value, that cannot perish in a service 
 of plate ; whereas the style too generally, in our 
 estimate, represents the mere casual fashion given to 
 khe plate by the artist — an adjunct that any change 
 of public taste may degrade into a positive disadvan- 
 tage. But in this we English err greatly ; and by 
 these three capital oversights : 
 
 1. It is certain that style, or (to speak by the most
 
 390 LANGUAOB. 
 
 general expression) the management of language, 
 ranks amongst the fine arts, and is able therefore to 
 yield a separate intellectual pleasure quite apart from 
 the interest of the subject treated. So far it is al- 
 ready one error to rate the value of style as if it were 
 necessarily a dependent or subordinate thing. On 
 the contrary, style has an absolute value, like the 
 product of any other exquisite art, quite distinct from 
 the value of the subject about which it is employed, 
 and irrelatively to. the subject; precisely as the fine 
 workmanship of Scopas the Greek, or of Cellini the 
 Florentine, is equally valued by the connoisseur, 
 whether embodied in bronze or marble, in an ivory 
 or golden vase. But 
 
 2. If we do submit to this narrow valuation of 
 style, founded on the interest of the subject to which 
 it is ministerial, still, even on that basis, we English 
 commit a capital blunder, which the Fi'ench earnestly 
 and sincerely escape ; for, assuming that the thoughts 
 involve the primary interest, still it must make all 
 the difference in the world to the success of those 
 thoughts, whether they are treated in the way best 
 fitted to expel the doubts or darkness that may have 
 settled upon them ; and, secondly, in cases where 
 the business is, not to establish new convictions, but 
 to carry old convictions into operative life and power, 
 whether they are treated in the way best fitted to 
 rekindle in the mind a practical sense of their value. 
 Style has two separate functions — first, to brighten 
 the intelligibility of a subject which is obscure to the 
 understanding ; secondly, to regenerate the normal 
 vower and impressiveness of a subject which has 
 Decome dormant to the sensibilities. Darkness gath
 
 LANGUAGB. 391 
 
 era upon many a theme, sometimes from previous 
 mistreatment, but oftener from original perplexities 
 investing its very nature. Upon the style it is, if we 
 take that word in its largest sense — upon the skill 
 and art of the developer, that these perplexities 
 greatly depend for their illumination. Look, again, 
 at the other class of cases, when the diflSculties are 
 not for the understanding, but for the practical sensi- 
 bilities as applicable to the services of life. The 
 subject, suppose, is already understood sufficiently ; 
 but it is lifeless as a motive. It is not new light 
 that is to be communicated, but old torpor that is to 
 be dispersed. The writer is not summoned to con- 
 vince, but to persuade. Decaying lineaments are to 
 be retraced, and faded coloring to be refreshed. 
 Now, these offices of style are really not essentially 
 below the level of those other offices attached to the 
 original discovery of truth. He that to an old con- 
 viction, long since inoperative and dead, gives the 
 regeneration that carries it back into the heart as a 
 vital power of action, — he, again, that by new light, 
 or by light trained to flow through a new channel, 
 reconciles to the understanding a truth which hitherto 
 had seemed dark or doubtful, — both these men are 
 really, quoad us that benefit by their services, the 
 discoverers of the truth. Yet these results are 
 amongst the possible gifts of style. Light to see the 
 road, power to advance along it — such being amongst 
 the promises and proper functions of style, it is a 
 capital error, under the idea of its ministeriality, to 
 'pidervalue this great organ of the advancing intel- 
 lect — an organ which is equally important con- 
 sidered as a tool for the culture and popularization
 
 392 LANGUAGE. 
 
 of truth, and also (if it had no use at all in that way) 
 
 as a mode per se of the beautiful, and a fountain of 
 intellectual pleasure. The vice of that appreciation, 
 which we English apply to style, lies in representing 
 it as a mere ornamental accident of written composi- 
 tion — a trivial embellishment, like the mouldings of 
 furniture, the cornices of ceilings, or the arabesques 
 of tea-urns. On the contrary, it is a product of art 
 the rarest, subtlest, and most intellectual ; and, like 
 other products of the fine arts, it is then finest when 
 it is most eminently disinterested, that is, most con- 
 spicuously detached from gross palpable uses. Yet, 
 in very many cases, it really has the obvious uses of 
 that gross palpable order ; as in the cases just no- 
 ticed, when it gives light to the understanding, oi 
 power to the will, removing obscurities from one set 
 of truths, and into another circulating the life-blood 
 of sensibility. In these cases, meantime, the style is 
 contemplated as a thing separable from the thoughts ; 
 in fact, as the dress of the thoughts — a robe that 
 may be laid aside at pleasure. But 
 
 3. There arises a case entirely different, where 
 style cannot be regarded as a dress or alien covering, 
 but where style becomes the incarnation of the 
 thoughts. The human body is not the dress or ap- 
 parel of the human spirit ; far more mj'^sterious is the 
 mode of their union. Call the two elements A and B : 
 then it is impossible to point out A as existing aloof 
 from B, or vice versa. A exists in and through B, 
 B exists in and through A. No profound observer 
 can have failed to observe this illustrated in the 
 capacities of style. Imagery is sometimes not the 
 mere alien apparelling of a thought, and of a nature
 
 LANGUAGE. 393 
 
 to be detached from the thought, but is the coeffi- 
 cient that, being superadded to something else, abso- 
 lutely makes the thought. 
 
 In this third case, our English tendency to under- 
 value style goes more deeply into error than in the 
 other two. In those two we simply underrate the 
 enormous services that are or might be rendered by 
 style to the interests of truth and human thinking ; 
 but, in the third case, we go near to abolish a mode 
 of existence. This is not so impossible an offence as 
 might be supposed. There are many ideas in Leib- 
 nitz, in Kant, in the schoolmen, in Plato at times, 
 and certainly in Aristotle (as the ideas of antiperis- 
 tasis, entelecheia, &c.), which are only to be arrested 
 and realized by a signal effort — by a struggle and a 
 nisus both of reflection and of large combination. 
 Now, where so much depends upon an effort — on a 
 spasmodic strain — to fail by a hair's breadth is to 
 collapse. For instance, the idea involved in the 
 word transcendental,^ as used in the critical philos- 
 ophy of Kant, illustrates the metaphysical relations 
 of style.
 
 ENGLISH DICTIONARIES. 
 
 It has already, I believe, been said more than once 
 in print that one condition of a good dictionary would 
 be to exhibit the history of each word ; that is, to 
 record the exact succession of its meanings. But the 
 ph'losophic reason for this has not been given; which 
 reason, by the way, settles a question often agitated, 
 viz. whether the true meaning of a word be best ascer- 
 tained from its etymology, or from its present use and 
 acceptation. Mr. Coleridge says, ' the best explana- 
 tion of a woi'd is often that which is suggested by hs 
 derivation ' (I give the substance of his words from 
 memory). Others allege that we have nothing to do 
 with the primitive meaning of the word ; that the 
 question is — what does it mean now ^ and they ap- 
 peal, as the sole authority they acknowledge, to the 
 received — 
 
 Usus, penes quern est jus et norma loquendi. 
 
 In what degree each party is right, may be judged 
 from this consideration — that no word can ever de- 
 viate from its first meaning per sallum : each successive 
 stage of meaning must always have been determined 
 by that which preceded. And on this one law depends 
 ^he whole philosophy of the case : for it thus appears
 
 ENGLISH DICTIONARIES. 395 
 
 that the original and primitive sense of the word will 
 contain virtually all which can ever afterwards arise : 
 as in the evolution-theory of generation, the whole 
 series of births is represented as involved in the firet 
 parent. Now, if the evolution of successive meanings 
 has gone on rightly, i. e. by simply lapsing through a 
 series of close affinities, there can be no reason for 
 recurring to the primitive meaning of the word : but, 
 if it can be shown that the evolution has been faulty, 
 t. e. that the chain of true affinities has ever been 
 broken through ignorance, then we have a right to 
 reform the word, and to appeal from the usage ill- 
 instructed to a usage better-instructed. Whether wo 
 ought to exercise this right, will depend on a considera- 
 tion which I will afterwards notice. Meantime I will 
 first give a few instances of faulty evolution. 
 
 1. Implicit. This word is now used in a most 
 ignorant way ; and from its misuse it has come to be a 
 word wholly useless : for it is now never coupled, I 
 think, with any other substantive than these two — 
 faith and confidence : a poor domain indeed to have 
 sunk to from its original wide range of territory. 
 Moreover, when we say, implicit faith, or implicit 
 confidence, we do not thereby mdicate any specific 
 kind of faith and confidence differing from other faith 
 or other confidence : but it is a vague rhetorical word 
 which expresses a great degree of faith and confidence ; 
 a faith that is unquestioning, a confidence that is un- 
 limited ; i. e. in fact, a faith that is a faith, a confi- 
 dence that is a confidence. Such a use of the word 
 ought to be abandoned to women : doubtless, when 
 sitting in a bower in the month of May, it is pleasant 
 ♦o hear from a lovely mouth — ' I put implicit confi-
 
 396 ENGLISH DICTIONARIES. 
 
 dence in your honor : ' but, though pretty and becommg 
 lo such a mouth, it is very unfitting to the mouth of a 
 scholar : and I will be bold to affirm that no man, wlio 
 had ever acquired a scholar's knowle ige of the English 
 language, has used the word in that lax and unmeaning 
 way. The history of" the word is this. — Implicit 
 (from the Latin implicitus, involved in, folded up) was 
 always used originally, and still is so by scholars, as 
 the direct antithete of explicit (from the Latin expUcitus, 
 evolved, unfolded ) : and the use of both may be thus 
 illustrated, 
 
 Q. ' Did Mr. A. ever say that he would marry Misa 
 B. ? ' — A. ' No ; not explicitly (i. e. in so many 
 words) ; but he did implicitly — by showing great dis- 
 pleasure if she received attentions from any other 
 man ; by asking her repeatedly to select furniture for 
 his house ; by consulting her on his own plans of life.' 
 
 Q. ' Did Epicurus maintain any doctrines such as 
 are here ascribed to him ? ' — A. ' Perhaps not ex 
 plicitly, either in words or by any other mode of direct 
 sanction : on the contrary, 1 believe he denied them — 
 and disclaimed them with vehemence : but he main- 
 tained them implicitly : for they are involved in other 
 acknowledged doctrines of his, and may be deduced 
 from them by the fairest and most irresistible logic' 
 
 Q. ' Why did you complain of the man ? Had he 
 expressed any contempt for your opinion?' — A. 
 ' Yes, he had: not explicit contempt, I admit; for he 
 never opened his stupid mouth ; but implicitly he ex- 
 Dressed the utmost that he could : for, when I had 
 spoKen two hours against the old newspaper, and in 
 favor of the new one, he went instantly and put his 
 aame down as a subscriber to the old one.'
 
 ENGLISH DICTIONARIES. 397 
 
 Q. ' Did Mr. approve of that gentleman's con- 
 
 uact and way of life?' — A. 'I don't know that I 
 ever heard him speak about it : but he seemed to give 
 It his implicit approbation by allowing both his sons to 
 associate with him when the complaints ran highest 
 against him.' 
 
 These instances may serve to illustrate the original 
 use of the word ; which use has been retained from 
 the sixteenth century down to our own days by an 
 uninterrupted chain of writers. In the eighteenth cen- 
 tury this use was indeed nearly effaced ; but still in 
 the first half of that century it was retained by Saun- 
 derson the Cambridge professor of mathematics (see 
 his Algebra, &c.), with three or four others, and in 
 the latter half by a man to whom Saunderson had 
 some resemblance in spring and elasticity of under- 
 standing, viz. by Edmund Burke. Since his day I 
 know of no writers who have avoided the slang and 
 unmeaning use of the word, excepting Messrs. Coleridge 
 and Wordsworth ; both of whom (but especially the 
 last) have been remarkably attentive to the scholar- 
 like * use of words, and to the history of their own 
 languacre. 
 
 Thus much for the primitive use of the word implicit. 
 
 * Among the most shocking of the unscholarlike barbarisms, 
 now prevalent, I must notice the use of the word ' nice ' La an 
 objective instead of a subjective sense : ' 7iice ' does not and can- 
 not express a quality of the object, but merely a quality of the 
 subject : yet we hear daily of ' a very nice letter ' — 'a nice 
 young lady,' &c., meaning a letter or a young lady that it is 
 pleasant to contemplate : but ' a nice young lady ' — means a 
 Castidious young lady ; and ' a nice letter ' ought to mean a letter 
 that is very delicate in its rating and in the choice of its 
 company.
 
 398 ENGLISH DICTIONARIES. 
 
 Now, with regard to the history of its transition into 
 its present use, it is briefly this ; and it will appear at 
 once, that it has arisen through ignorance. When it 
 was objected to a papist that his church exacted an 
 assent to a great body of traditions and doctrines to 
 which it was impossible that the great majority could 
 be qualified, either as respected time — or knowledge 
 — or culture of the understanding, to give any reason- 
 able assent, — the answer was : ' Yes ; but that sort 
 of assent is not required of a poor uneducated man ; 
 all that he has to do — is to believe in the church : 
 he is to have faith in her faith : by that act he adopts 
 for his own whatsoever the church believes, though he 
 may never have heard of it even : his faith is implicit, 
 i. e. mvolved and wrapped up in the faith of the 
 church, which faith he firmly believes to be the true 
 faith upon the conviction he has that the church is 
 preserved from all possibility of erring by the spirit 
 of God.' * Now, as this sort of believing by proxy or 
 implicit belief (in which the belief was not immediate 
 in the thing proposed to the belief, but in the authority 
 of another person who believed in that thing and thus 
 mediately in the thing itself) was constantly attacked 
 by the learned assailants of popery, — it naturally 
 happened that many unlearned readers of these pro- 
 
 * Thus Milton, who (in common with his contemporaries) 
 always uses the word accurately, speaks of Ezekiel ' swallowing 
 his implicit roll of knowledge ' — i. e. coming to the knowledge 
 of many truths not separately and in detail, but by the act of 
 arriving at some one master truth which involved all the rest. — 
 So again, if any man or government were to suppress a book, 
 that man or government might justly be reproached as the im- 
 plicit destroyer of all the wisdom atid virtue that might iiavj 
 been the remote products of that book.
 
 ENGLISH DICTIONARIES. 390 
 
 teslant polemics caught at a phrase which was so much 
 bandied between the two parties : the spirit of the 
 context sufficiently explained to them that it was used 
 by protestants as a term of reproach, and indicated a 
 faith that was an erroneous faith by being too easy — 
 too submissive — and too passive : but the particular 
 mode of this erroneousness they seldom came to 
 understand, as learned writers naturally employed the 
 term without explanation, presuming it to be known to 
 those whom they addressed. Hence these ignorant 
 readers caught at the last result of the phrase ' im- 
 plicit faith ' rightly, truly supposing it to imply a 
 resigned and unquestioning faith ; but they missed the 
 whole immediate cause of meaning by which only the 
 word ' implicit ' could ever have been entitled to ex- 
 press that result. 
 
 I have allowed myself to say so much on this word 
 ' implicit,' because the history of the mode by which 
 its true meaning was lost applies almost to all other 
 corrupted words — mutatis mutandis : and the amount 
 of it may be collected into this formula, — that the 
 result of the word is apprehended and retained, but the 
 schematismus by which that result was ever reached is 
 lost. This is the brief theory of all corruption of 
 words. The word schematismus I have unwillingly 
 used because no other expresses my meaning. So 
 gr3at and extensive a doctrine however lurks in this 
 word, that I defer the explanation of it to a separate 
 article. Meantime a passable sense of the word will 
 occur to every body who reads Greek. I now go on 
 to a few more instances of words that have forfeited 
 their original meaning through the ignorance of those 
 who used them.
 
 400 ENGLISH DICTIONARIES. 
 
 ' Punctual.'' This word is now confined to the 
 meagre denoting of accuracy in respect to time — 
 fidelity to the precise moment of an appointment. 
 But originally it was just as often, and just as reason- 
 ably, applied to space as to time ; ' I cannot punctually 
 determine the origin of the Danube ; but I know in 
 general the district in which it rises, and that its 
 fountam is near that of the Rhine.' Not only, however, 
 was it applied to time and space, but it had a laige 
 and very elegant figurative use. Thus in the History 
 of the Royal Society by Sprat (an author who was 
 finical and nice in his use of words) — I remember a 
 sentence to this effect : ' the Society gave punctual 
 directions for the conducting of experiments ; ' i. e. 
 directions which descended to the minutise and lowest 
 details. Again in the once popular romance of Paris- 
 mus Prince of Bohemia — ' She ' (I forget who) ' made 
 a punctual relation of the whole matter ; ' i. e. a rela- 
 tion which was perfectly circumstantial and true to 
 the minutest features of the case.
 
 DRYDEN'S HEXASTICH. 
 
 It is a remarkable fact, that the very finest epigram 
 in the English language happens also to be the worst. 
 Epigram I call it in the austere Greek sense ; which 
 thus far resembled our modern idea of an epigram, that 
 something pointed and allied to wit was demanded in 
 the management of the leading thought at its close, 
 but otherwise nothing tending towards the comic or 
 the ludicrous. The epigram I speak of is the well- 
 known one of Dryden dedicated to the glorification 
 of Milton. It is irreproachable as regards its severe 
 brevity. Not one word is there that could be spared ; 
 nor could the wit of man have cast the movement of 
 the thought into a better mould. There are three 
 couplets. In the first couplet we are reminded of the 
 fact that this earth had, in three different stages of its 
 development, given birth to a trinity of transcendent 
 poets; meaning narrative poets, or, even more nar- 
 rowly, epic poets. The duty thrown upon the second 
 couplet is to characterize these three poets, and to 
 value them against each other, but in such terms as 
 that, whilst nothing less than the very highest praise 
 should be assigned to the two elder poets in this 
 26
 
 402 drydkn's hexastich. 
 
 i,riniiy — the Greek and the Roman — nevertheless, 
 by some dexterous artifice, a higher praise than the 
 highest should suddenly unmask itself, and drop, as 
 It were, like a diadem from the clouds upon the brows 
 of their English competitor. In the kind of expectation 
 raised, and in the extreme difficulty of adequately 
 meeting this expectation, there was pretty much the 
 same challenge offered to Dry den as was offered, 
 somewhere about the same time, to a British ambassa- 
 dor when dining with his political antagonists. One 
 of these — the ambassador of France — had proposed 
 to drink his master, Louis XIV,, under the character 
 of the sun, who dispensed life and light to the whole 
 political system. To this there was no objection ; 
 and immediately, by way of intercepting any further 
 draughts upon the rest of the solar system, the Dutch 
 ambassador rose, and proposed the health of their high 
 mightinesses the Seven United States, as the moon ana 
 six * planets, who gave light in the absence of the sun. 
 The two foreign ambassadors, Monsieur and Mynheer, 
 secretly enjoyed the mortification of their English 
 brother, who seemed to be thus left in a state of 
 bankruptcy, ' no funds ' being available for retaliation, 
 or so they fancied. But suddenly our British repre- 
 .sentative toasted his master as Joshua, the son of Nun 
 that made the sun and moon stand still. All had 
 seemed lost for England, when in an instant of time 
 both her antagonists were checkmated. Dryden as- 
 sumed something of the same position. He gave 
 away the supreme jewels in his exchequer ; apparently 
 nothing remained behind ; all was exhausted. T« 
 
 • '' Six planets : ' — No more had then been discovered.
 
 drtden's hexastich. 403 
 
 Homer he gave A ; to Virgil he gave B ; and, behold ! 
 after these vk^ere given away, there remained nothing 
 at all that would not have been a secondary praise. 
 But, in a moment of time, by giving A and B to 
 Milton, at one sling of his victorious arm he raised 
 him above Homer by the whole extent of B, and above 
 Virgil by the whole extent of A. This felicitou? eva- 
 sion of the embarrassment is accomplished in the 
 second couplet ; and, finally, the third couplet winds 
 up with graceful effect, by making a resume^ or recapi- 
 tulation of the logic concerned in the distribution of 
 prizes just announced. Nature, he says, had it not in 
 her power to provide a third prize separate from the 
 first and second ; her resource was, to join the first 
 and second in combination : ' To make a third, she 
 joined the former two.' 
 
 Such is the abstract of this famous epigram ; and, 
 judged simply by the outline and tendency of the 
 thought, it merits all the vast popularity which it has 
 earned. But in the meantime, it is radically vicious 
 as regards the filling in of this outline ; for the par- 
 ticular quality in which Homer is accredited with the 
 pre-eminence, viz., loftiness of thought., happens to be 
 a mere variety of expression for that qualitj', viz. 
 majesty., in which the pre-eminence is awarded to 
 Virgil. Homer excels Virgil in the very point in 
 which lies Virgil's superiority to Homer ; and that 
 synthesis, by means of which a great triumph is 
 resei-ved to Milton, becomes obviously impossible, 
 when it is perceived that the supposed analytic 
 elements of this synthesis are blank reiterations of 
 each other 
 
 Exceedingly s'rikmg it is, that a thought shouid
 
 404 drtden's hexastich. 
 
 have prospered for one hundred and seventy years, 
 which, on the slightest steadiness of examination, turns 
 out to be no thought at all, but mere blank vacuity. 
 There is, however, this justification of the case, that 
 the mould, the set of channels, into which the metal of 
 the thought is meant to run, really has the felicity 
 which it appears to have : the form is perfect ; and it 
 is merely in the matter, in the accidental filling up of 
 the mould, that a fault has been committed. Had the 
 Virgilian point of excellence been loveliness instead of 
 majesty, or any word whatever suggesting the common 
 antithesis of sublimity and beauty ; or had it been 
 power on the one side, matched against grace on 
 the other, the true lurking tendency of the thought 
 would have been developed, and the sub-conscious 
 purpose of the epigram would have fulfilled itself to 
 the letter. 
 
 N. B. — It is not meant that loftiness of thought 
 and majesty are expressions so entirely interchange- 
 Able, as that no shades of diflference could be sug- 
 gested ; it is enough that these ' shades ' are not 
 substantial enough, or broad enough, to support the 
 weight of opposition which the epigram assigns tc 
 them. Grace and elegance., for instance, are far from 
 being in all relations synonymous ; but they are so tc 
 the full extent of any purposes concerned in this 
 epigram. Nevertheless, it is probable enough thai 
 Drj'den had moving in his thoughts a relation of the 
 word majesty, which, if developed, would have done 
 justice to his meaning. It was, perhaps, the decorum 
 and sustained dignity of the composition — the work- 
 manship apart from the native grandeur of the ma- 
 terials — the majestic style of the artistic treatment af
 
 dryden's hexastich. 405 
 
 distinguished from the original creative power — which 
 Dryden, the translator of the Roman poet, familiar 
 therefore with his weakness and with his strength, 
 meant in this place to predicate as characteristically 
 ■observable in Virgil.
 
 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR* 
 
 JNoBODY in this generation reads The Spectator, 
 There are, however, several people still surviving 
 who have read No. 1 ; in which No. 1 a strange mis- 
 take is made. It is there asserted, as a general 
 affection of human nature, that it is impossible to 
 read a book with satisfaction until one has ascertained 
 whether the author of it be tall or short, corpulent or 
 thin, and, as to complexion, whether he be a "black'' 
 man (which, in the Spectator'' s time, was the absurd 
 expression for a swarthy man), or a fair man, or a 
 sallow man, or perhaps a green man, which Southey 
 affirmed*^' to be the proper description of many stout 
 artificers in Birmingham, too much given to work in 
 metallic fumes ; on which account the name of Southey 
 IS an abomination to this day in certain furnaces of 
 Warwickshire. But can anything be more untrue than 
 this Spectatorial doctrine ? Did ever the youngest of 
 female novel readers, on a sultry day, decline to eat a 
 bunch of grapes until she knew whether the fruiterer 
 were a good-looking man ? Which of us ever heard 
 R stranger inquiring for a " Guide to the Trosachs," 
 
 * The Works of Walter Savage Landor. 2 vols.
 
 NOTES OS WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 407 
 
 Dut saying, " I scruple, however, to pay for this book, 
 until I irnow whether the author is heather-lecrged." 
 On this principle, if any such principle prevailed, we 
 authors should be liable to as strict a revision of our 
 physics before having any right to be read, as we all 
 are before having our lives insured from the medical 
 advisers of insurance offices ; fellows that examine one 
 with stethescopes ; that pinch one, that actually punch 
 one in the ribs, until a man becomes savage, and — m 
 case the insurance should miss fire in consequence of 
 the medical report — speculates on the propriety of 
 prosecuting the medical ruffian for an assault, for a 
 most unprovoked assault and battery, and, if possible, 
 including in the indictment the now odious insurance 
 office a°s an accomplice before the fact. Meantime 
 the odd thing is, not that Addison should have made 
 a mistake, but that he and his readers should, in this 
 mistake, have recognized a hidden truth,— the sudden 
 illumination of a propensity latent in all people, but 
 now first exposed ; for it happens that there really « a 
 propensitv in all of us, ver>^ like what Addison de- 
 scribes very different, and yet, after one correction 
 the very same. No reader cares about an author's 
 persor. before reading his book ; it is after reading it, 
 md supposing the book to reveal something of the 
 writer's moral nature, as modifying his intellect ; it is 
 •or his fun, his fancy, his sadness, possibly his crazi- 
 ness, that any reader cares about seeing the author^ in 
 person. A^fflicted with the very satyriasis of curiosity 
 no man ever wished to see the author of a Ready 
 Reckmier, or of a treatise on the Agistment Tithe 
 ^1 on +lie Present deplorable Dry-rot in Potatoes.
 
 i08 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 " Bundle off, sir, as fast as you can," the most diligent 
 leader would say to such an author, in case he insisted 
 on submitting his charms to inspection. " I have had 
 quite enough distress of mind from reading your 
 works, without needing the additional dry-rot of your 
 bodily presence." Neither does any man, on descend- 
 ing from a railway train, turn to look whether the 
 carriage in which he has ridden happens to be a good- 
 looking carriage, or wish for an introduction to the 
 coach-maker. Satisfied that the one has not broken 
 his bones, and that the other has no writ against his 
 person, he dismisses with the same frigid scowl both the 
 carriage and the author of its existence. 
 
 But, with respect to Mr. Landor, as at all connected 
 with this reformed doctrine of the Spectator, a diffi- 
 culty arises. He is a man of great genius, and, as 
 such, he ought to interest the public. More than enough 
 appears of his strong, eccentric nature, through every 
 page of his now extensive writings, to win, amongst 
 those who have read him, a corresponding interest in 
 all that concerns him personally ; in his social rela 
 tions, in his biography, in his manners, in his appear- 
 ance. Out of two conditions for attracting a personal 
 interest, he has powerfully realized one. His moral 
 nature, shining with colored light through the crystal 
 s'hrine of his thoughts, will not allow of your forgetting 
 .i. A sunset of Claude, or a dying dolphin can be 
 forgotten, and generally is forgotten ; but not the fiery 
 radiations of a human spirit built by nature to animate 
 a leader in storms, a martyr, a national reformer, an 
 irch-rebel, as circumstances might dictate, but whom 
 too much wealth,'^ and the accidents of education, have
 
 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 409 
 
 »*urned aside into a contemplative recluse. Had Mr. 
 Landor, therefore, been read in any extent answering 
 to his merits, he must have become, for the English 
 public, an object of prodigious personal interest. We 
 should have had novels upon him, lampoons upon him, 
 libels upon him; he would have been shown up dra- 
 matically on the stage ; he would, according to the old 
 joke, have been " traduced " in French, and also " over- 
 set " in Dutch. Meantime he has not been read. It 
 would be an affectation to think it. Many a writer is, 
 by the sycophancy of literature, reputed to be read, 
 whom in all Europe not six eyes settle upon through 
 the revolving year. Literature, with its cowardly false- 
 hoods, exhibits the largest field of conscious Phrygian 
 adulation that human life has ever exposed to the de- 
 rision of the heavens. Demosthenes, for instance, or 
 Plato, is not read to the extent of twenty pages annu- 
 ally by ten people in Europe. The sale of their works 
 would not account for three readers ; the other six or 
 seven are generally conceded as possibilities furnished 
 by the great public libraries. But, then, Walter Savage 
 Landor, though writing a little in Latin, and a very 
 little in Italian, does not write at all in Greek. So far 
 \e has some advantage over Plato ; and, if he writes 
 chiefly in dialogue, which few people love to read any 
 more than novels in the shape of letters, that is a crime 
 
 'ommon to both. So that he has the d I's luck 
 
 und his own, all Plato's chances, and one of his own 
 beside — namely, his English. Still, it is no use count- 
 mg chances ; facts are the thing. And printing-presses, 
 whether of Europe or of England, bear witness that 
 neither Plato nor Landor is a marketable commodity
 
 410 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 In fact, these two men resemble each other in more 
 particulars than it is at present necessary to say, 
 Especially they were both inclined to be luxurious ■ 
 both had a hankering after purple and fine linen 
 both hated " filthy dowlas " with the hatred of Falstaff 
 whether in apparelling themselves or their diction ; and 
 both bestowed pains as elaborate upon the secret art 
 of a dialogue, as a lapidary would upon ^e cutting of a 
 sultan's rubies. 
 
 But might not a man build a reputation on the basis 
 of not being read ? To be read is undoubtedly some- 
 thing : to be read by an odd million or so, is a sort of 
 feather in a man's cap ; but it is also a distinction that 
 he has been read absolutely by nobody at all. There 
 have been cases, and one or two in modern times, 
 where an author could point to a vast array of his own 
 works, concerning which no evidence existed that so 
 much as one had been opened by human hand, oi 
 glanced at by human eye. That was awful ; such a 
 sleep of pages by thousands in one eternal darkness, 
 never to be visited by light ; such a rare immunity 
 from the villanies of misconstruction ; such a Sabbath 
 from the impertinencies of critics ! You shuddered 
 to reflect that, for anything known to the contrary, 
 iliere might lurk jewels of truth explored in vain, or 
 treasure forever intercepted to the interests of man. 
 But such a sublimity supposes total defect of readers ; 
 whereas it can be proved against Mr. Landor, that he 
 has been read by at least a score of people, all wide 
 awake ; and if any treason is buried in a page of his 
 *hank Heaven, by this time it must have been found 
 out and reported to the authorities. So that neither
 
 NOTES ON ■WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 411 
 
 :an Landor plead the unlimited popularity of a novel- 
 ist, aided by the interest of a tale, and by an artist, 
 nor the total obscuration of a Gennan metaphysician. 
 Neither do mobs read him, as they do M. Sue ; nor do 
 all men turn away their eyes from him, as they do from 
 Hegel.«3 
 
 This, however, is true only of Mr. Landor's prose 
 works. His first work was a poem, namely, Gebir and 
 it had the sublime distinction, for some time, of having 
 enjoyed only two readers; which two were Southey 
 and myself. It was on first entering at Oxford that I 
 found "Gebir" printed and (nominally) published; 
 whereas, in fact, all its advertisements of birth and 
 continued existence were but so many notifications of 
 its intense privacy. Not knowing Southey at that 
 time, I vainly conceited myself to be the one sole pur- 
 chaser and reader of this poem. I even fancied 
 myself to have been pointed out in the streets of 
 Oxford, where the Landors had been well known in 
 times preceding my own, as the one inexplicable man 
 authentically known to possess "Gebir," or even (it 
 might be whispered mysteriously) to have read " Ge- 
 bir." It was not clear but this reputation might stand 
 in lieu of any independent fame, and might raise 
 me to literary distinction. The preceding generation 
 had greatly esteemed the man called " Single-Speech 
 Hamilton ; " not at all for the speech (which, though 
 good, very few people had read), but entirely for the 
 supposed fact that he had exhausted himself in that 
 ,ne speech, and had become physically incapable of 
 making a second ; so that afterwards, when he really 
 iid make a second, everybody was incredulous; urtil
 
 412 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 the thing being past denial, naturally the world was 
 disgusted, and most people dropped his acquaintance. 
 To be a Mono-Gebirist was quite as good a title to 
 notoriety ; and five years after, when I found that I 
 had " a brother near the throne," namely, Southey, 
 mortification would have led me willingly to resign alto- 
 gether in his favor. Shall I make the reader acquainted 
 with the story of Gebir ? 
 
 Gebir is the king of Gibraltar; which, however, it 
 would be an anachronibm to call Gibraltar, since it 
 drew that name from this very Gebir; and doubtless, 
 by way of honor to his memory. Mussulmans tell a 
 different story ; but who cares for what is said by 
 infidel dogs ? King, then, let us call him of Calpe ; 
 and a very good king he is ; young, brave, of upright 
 intentions ; but being also warlike, and inflamed by 
 popular remembrances of ancient wrongs, he resolves 
 to seek reparation from the children's children of the 
 wrong-doers ; and he weighs anchor in search of Mr. 
 Pitt's " indemnity for the past," though not much re- 
 garding that right honorable gentleman's " security for 
 the future." Egypt was the land that sheltered the 
 wretches that represented the ancestors that had done 
 the wrong. To Egypt, therefore, does king Gebir steer 
 his expedition, which counted ten thousand picked 
 "nen • 
 
 " Incenst 
 
 By meditating on primeval wrongs, 
 
 He blew his battle-horn ; at which uprose 
 
 Whole nations : here ten thousand of most might 
 
 He called aloud ; and soon Charoba saw 
 
 His dark helm hover o'er the land of Nile."
 
 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOE. 413 
 
 W"Lo is Charoba? As respects the reader, she is the 
 neroine of the poem ; as respects Egypt, she is queen 
 Dy the grace of God, defender of the faith, and so 
 fortli. Young and accustomed to unlimited obedience, 
 how could she be otherwise than alarmed by the 
 descent of a host far more martial than her own effem- 
 inate people, and assuming a religious character — 
 avengers of wrong in some forgotten age ? In hex 
 trepidation, she turns for aid and counsel to her nurse 
 ^alica. Dalica, by the way, considered as a word, is 
 I dactyle , that is, you must not lay the accent on the 
 i, but on the first syllable. Dalica, considered as a 
 woman, is about as bad a one as even Egypt could 
 furnish. She is a thorough gypsy ; a fortune-teller, 
 and something worse, in fact. She is a sorceress, 
 " stiff in opinion ; " and it needs not Pope's authority to 
 
 infer that of course she " is always in the wrong." 
 
 By her advice, but for a purpose known best to herself, 
 an interview is arranged between Charoba and the 
 invading monarch. At this interview, the two youth- 
 ful sovereigns, Charoba the queen of hearts and Gebir 
 the king of clubs, fall irrevocably in love with each 
 other. There 's an end of club law ; and Gebir is ever 
 afterwards disarmed. But Dalica, that wicked Dalica, 
 that sad old dactyle, who sees everything clearly that 
 happens to be twenty years distant, cannot see a pike- 
 staff if it is close before her nose ; and of course she 
 mistakes Charoba's agitations of love for paroxysms of 
 anger. Charoba is herself partly to blame for this ; 
 tut you must excuse her. The poor child readily 
 confided her terrors to Dalica ; but how can she be 
 fxpected to make a love confidante of a tawny old
 
 414 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 Witch like her ? Upon this mistake, however, proceeds 
 the whole remaining plot. Dr. Dalica (which means 
 doctor D., and by no means dear D.), having totally 
 mistaken the symptoms, the diagnosis, the prognosis, 
 and everything that ends in osis. necessarily mistakes 
 also the treatment of the case, and, like some other 
 doctors, failing to make a cure, covers up her blunders 
 by a general slaughter. She visits her sister, a sorceress 
 more potent than herself, living 
 
 " Deep in the wilderness of woe, Masar." 
 
 Between them they concert hellish incantations. From 
 these issues a venomous robe, like that of the centaui 
 Nessus. This, at a festal meeting between the two 
 nations and their princes, is given by Charoba to hei 
 lover — her lover, but as yet not recognized as such by 
 her, nor, until the moment of his death, avowed as 
 such by himself. Gebir dies — the accursed robe, dipped 
 in the " viscous poison * exuding from the gums of the 
 gray cerastes, and tempered by other venomous juices 
 of plant and animal, proves too much for his rocky 
 constitution — Gibraltar is found not impregnable — 
 the blunders of Dalica, the wicked nurse, and the arts 
 of her sister Myrthyr, the wicked witch, are found too 
 potent; and in one moment the union of two nations, 
 with the happiness of two sovereigns, is wrecked for- 
 ever. The closing situation of the parties — monarch 
 and monarch, nation and nation, youthful king and 
 youthful queen, dying or despairing — nation and 
 nation that had been reconciled, starting asunder once 
 again amidst festival and flowers — these objects are 
 scenically efi'ective. The conception of the grouping
 
 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 415 
 
 IS good- the mise en scene is good; but, from want of 
 pains-taking, not sufficiently brought out into strong 
 relief; and the dying words of Gebir, which wind up 
 the whole, are too bookish ; they seem to be part of 
 some article which he had been writing for the Gibraltar 
 
 Quarterly. 
 
 There are two episodes, composing jointly about two- 
 sevenths of the poem, and by no means its weakest 
 parts. One describes the descent of Gebir to Hades 
 His guide is a man — who is this man ? 
 
 «« Living — they called Wm Aroar.'- 
 
 Ishe woHiving, then? No. Is he dead, then ? No, 
 nor dead either. Poor Aroar cannot live, and cannot 
 die — so that he is in an almighty fix. In this dis- 
 agreeable dilemma, he contrives to amuse himself 
 with politics— and, rather of a Jacobinical cast: like 
 the Vir^ilian jEneas, Gebir is introduced not to the 
 shades of the past only, but of the future. He sees 
 the preexisting ghosts of gentlemen who are yet to 
 come, silent as ghosts ought to be, but destined at some 
 far distant time to make a considerable noise m our 
 upper world. Amongst these is our worthy old George 
 III., who (strange to say !) is not foreseen as galloping 
 from Windsor to Kew, surrounded by an escort of 
 dragoons, nor in a scarlet coat riding after a fox, nor 
 taking his morning rounds amongst his sheep and his 
 turnips ; but in the likeness of some savage creature, 
 whom really, were it not for his eyebrows and his 
 '^slanting'' forehead, the reader would never recog- 
 
 nize
 
 416 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOK. 
 
 •* Aroar ! what wretch that nearest us ? what wretch 
 Is that, with eyebrows white and slanting brow ' 
 
 king I 
 
 Iberia bore him ; but the breed acciirst 
 Inclement winds blew blighting from north-east." 
 
 Iberia is spiritual England ; and north-east is mystical 
 Hanover. But what, then, were the "wretch's" crimes? 
 The white eyebrows I confess to ; those were certainly 
 crimes of considerable magnitude : but what else ? 
 Gebir has the same curiosity as myself, and propounds 
 something like the same fishing question : 
 
 " He was a warrior then, nor feared the gods ? " 
 
 To which Aroar answers — 
 
 •' Gebir ! he feared the demons, not the gods ; 
 Though them, indeed, his daily face adored, 
 And was no warrior ; yet the thousand lives 
 Squandered as if to exercise a sling, &c. &c." 
 
 Keally Aroar is too Tom-Painish, and seems up to a 
 little treason. He makes the poor king answerable 
 for more than his own share of national offences, if 
 such they were. (All of us in the last generation were 
 rather fond of fighting and assisting at fights in the 
 character of mere spectators. I am sure I was. But 
 if that is any fault, so was Plato, who (though probably 
 inferior as a philosopher to you and me, reader) was 
 much superior to either of us as a cock-fighter. So 
 was Socrates in the preceding age ; for, as he notori- 
 ously haunted the company of Alcibiades at all hours, 
 tie must often have found his pupil diverting himself 
 with these fighting quails which he kept in such 
 numbers. Be assured that the oracle's " wisest ot
 
 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 417 
 
 men '' lent a hand very cheerfully to putting on the 
 spurs when a main was to be fought; and; as to bet- 
 ting, probably that was the reason that Xantippe was 
 so often down upon him when he went home at night. 
 To come home reeling from a fight, without a drachma 
 left in his pocket, would naturally provoke any woman. 
 Posterity has been very much misinformed about these 
 things ; and, no doubt, about Xantippe, poor woman, 
 in particular. If she had had a disciple to write books, 
 as her cock-fighting husband had, perhaps we should 
 have read a very different story, f By the way, the 
 propensity to scandaliim magnatum in Aroar was one 
 of the things that fixed my youthful attention, and 
 perhaps my admiration, upon Gebir. For myself, as 
 perhaps the reader may have heard, 1 was and am a 
 Tory ; and in some remote geological era, my bones 
 may be dug up by some future Buckland as a specimen 
 of the fossil Tory. Yet, for all that, I loved audacity ; 
 and I gazed with some indefinite shade of approbation 
 upon a poet whom the attorney-general might have 
 occasion to speak with. 
 
 This, however, was a mere condiment to the mam 
 attraction of the poem. That lay in the picturesque- 
 ness of the images, attitudes, groups, dispersed every- 
 where. The eye seemed to rest everywhere upon 
 festal processions, upon the panels of Theban gates, 
 or upon sculptured vases. The very first lines that by 
 accident met my eye were thore which follow. I cite 
 them in mere obedience to the fact as it really was ; 
 else there are more striking illustrations of this sculp- 
 turesque faculty in Mr, Landor ; and for this faculty 
 •t was that both Southey and myself separately and 
 27
 
 418 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 independently had named him the English Valerius 
 Flaccus. 
 
 GEBIR ON REPAIRING TO HIS FIRST INTERVIEW WITH 
 CHAROBA. 
 
 •• But Gebir, when he heard of her approach. 
 Laid by his orbed shield : his vizor helm. 
 His buckler and his corslet he laid by, 
 And bade that none attend him : at his side 
 Two faithful dogs that urge the silent course, 
 Shaggy, deep-chested, croucht ; the crocodile. 
 Crying, oft made them raise their flaccid ears. 
 And push their heads within their master's hand. 
 There was a lightning paleness in his face. 
 Such as Diana rising over the rocks 
 Showered on the lonely Latmian ; on his brow 
 Sorrow there was, but there was naught severe." 
 
 " And the long moonbeam on the hard wet sand 
 Lay like a jasper column half up-reared." 
 
 " The king, who sate before his tent, descried 
 The dust rise reddened from the setting sun." 
 
 Now let us pass to the imaginarj'' dialogues : — 
 Marshal Bugeaud and Arab Chieftain. — This dia- 
 'ogue, which is amongst the shortest, would not chal- 
 lenge a separate notice, were it not for the freshness 
 m the public mind/" and the yet uncicatrized raw- 
 ness of that atrocity which it commemorates. Here 
 is an official account from the commander-in-chief: — 
 " Of seven hundred refractory and rebellious, who 
 took refuge in the caverns, thirty" [says the 
 glory-hunting Marshal], "and thirty only, are alive; 
 and of these thirty there are four only who are 
 capable of labor, or indeed of motion." How precious 
 K) the Marshal's heart must be that harvest of misery
 
 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 419 
 
 from which he so reluctantly allows the discount of 
 about one-half per cent ! Four only out of seven hun- 
 dred, he is happy to assure Christendom, remain capa- 
 ble of hopping about ; as to working, or getting honest 
 bread, or doing any service in this world to themselves 
 or others, it is truly delightful to announce, for public 
 information, that all such practices are put a stop to for- 
 ever. 
 
 Amongst the fortunate four, who retain the power 
 of hopping, we must reckon the Arab Chieftain, who 
 is introduced into the colloquy in the character of 
 respondent. He can hop, of course, ex hypothesi, 
 being one of the ever-lucky quaternion ; he can hop a 
 little also as a rhetorician ; indeed, as to that, he is too 
 much for the Marshal ; but on the other hand he can- 
 not see ; the cave has cured him of any such imperti- 
 nence as staring into other people's faces ; he is also 
 lame, the cave has shown him the absurdity of ram- 
 bling about ; — and, finally, he is a beggar ; or, if he 
 will not allow himself to be called by that name, upon 
 the argument [which seems plausible] that he cannot 
 be a beggar if he never begs, it is not the less certain 
 ihat, in case of betting a sixpence, the chieftain would 
 find it inconvenient to stake the cash. 
 
 The Marshal, who apparently does not pique him- 
 self upon politeness, adresses the Arab by the follow- 
 ing assortment of names — " Thief, assassm, traitor ; 
 blind graybeard ! lame beggar ! " The three first 
 titles being probably mistaken for compliments, the 
 Arab pockets in silence ; bat to the double-barrelled 
 discharges of the two last he replies thus : — " Cease 
 here. Thou canst never make me beg for bread, for
 
 420 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 water, or for life ; my gray beard is frora God ; my 
 blindness and lameness are from thee." This is a 
 pleasant way of doing business ; rarely does one find 
 little accounts so expeditiously settled and receipted. 
 Beggar ? But how if I do not beg ? Graybeard ? 
 Put that down to the account of God. Cripple ? Put 
 that down to your own. Getting sulky under this 
 mode of fencing from the desert-born, the Marshal 
 invites him to enter one of his new-made law courts, 
 where he will hear of something probably not to his 
 advantage. Our Arab friend, however, is no con- 
 noisseur m courts of law: small wale'^ of courts in 
 the desert ; he does not so much " do himself the honor 
 to decline" as he turns a deaf ear to this proposal, and 
 on his part presents a little counter invitation to the 
 Marshal for a pic-nic party to the caves of Dahra. 
 " Enter " (says the unsparing Sheik), " and sing and 
 whistle in the cavern where the bones of brave men 
 are never to bleach, are never to decay. Go, where 
 the mother and infant are inseparable forever — one 
 mass of charcoal; the breasts that gave life, the lips 
 that received it — all, all, save only where two arms 
 in color and hardness like corroded iron, cling round 
 a brittle stem, shrunken, warped, and where two heads 
 are calcined. Even this massacre, no doubt, will find 
 defenders in ymir country, for it is the custom of ycnir 
 country to cover blood with lies, and lies with blood." 
 " And (says the facetious French Marshal) here and 
 there a sprinkling of ashes over both." A^ab. " End- 
 ing in merriment, as befits ye. But is it ended ? " But 
 is it ended? Ay; the wilderness beyond Algiers 
 returns an echo to those ominous words of the blintf
 
 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 421 
 
 and mutilated chieftain. No, brave Arab, although 
 the Marshal scoffingly rejoins that at least it is ended 
 for you, ended it is not ; for the great quarrel by which 
 human nature pleads with such a fiendish spirit of 
 warfare, carried on under the countenance of him who 
 stands first in authority under the nation that stands 
 second in authority amongst the leaders of civiliza- 
 tion; — quarrel of that sort, once arising, does not 
 go to sleep again until it is righted forever. As the 
 English martyr at Oxford said to his fellow-martyr — 
 " Brother, be of good cheer, for we shall this day light 
 up a fire in England that, by the blessing of God, can- 
 not be extinguished forever," — even so the atrocities 
 of these hybrid campaigns between baffled civiliza- 
 tion and barbarism, provoked into frenzy, will, like 
 the horrors of the middle passage rising up from the 
 Atlantic deep, suddenly, at the bar of the British 
 senate, sooner or later reproduce themselves, in strong 
 reactions of the social mind throughout Christendom, 
 upon all the horrors of war that are wilful and super- 
 fluous. In that case there will be a consolation m 
 reserve for the compatriots of those, the bra\e men, 
 the women, and the innocent children, who died in that 
 fiery furnace at Dahra. 
 
 " Their moans 
 The vales redoubled to the hills, and the^ 
 To heaven. "''2 
 
 The caves of Dahra repeated the woe to the hills, 
 and the hills to God. But such a furnace, though 
 fierce, may be viewed as brief indeed if it shall ter- 
 Miinate in permanently pointing the wrath of nation.',
 
 422 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 (as in this dialog^ue it has pointed the wrath of genius) 
 to the particular outrage and class of outrages which 
 it concerns. The wrath of nations is a consuming 
 wrath, and the scorn of intellect is a withering scorn, 
 for all abuses upon which either one or the other is 
 led, by strength of circumstances, to settle itself syS' 
 tematically. The danger is for the most part that the 
 very violence of public feeling should rock it asleep 
 — the tempest exhausts itself by its own excesses — 
 and the thunder of one or two immediate explosions, 
 by satisfying the first clamors of human justice and 
 indignation, is too apt to intercept that sustained roll of 
 artillery which is requisite for the effectual assault of 
 long-established abuses. Luckily in the present case 
 of the Dahra massacre there is the less danger of such 
 a result, as the bloody scene has happened to fall 
 in with a very awakened state of the public sensibility 
 as to the evils of war generally, and with a state of 
 expectation almost romantically excited as to the possi- 
 bility of readily or soon exterminating these evils, 
 
 Hope, meantime, even if unreasonable, becomes wise 
 and holy when it points along a path of purposes 
 that are more than usually beneficent. According to 
 a fine illustration of Sir Phillip Sidney's, drawn from 
 the practice of archery, by attempting more than we 
 can possibly accomplish, we shall yet reach further 
 than ever we should have reached with a less ambitious 
 aim; we shall -do much for the purification of war, if 
 nothing at all for its abolition ; and atrocities of this 
 4Jgerino order are amongst the earliest that will give 
 way. They will sink before the growing illumination 
 and (what is equally important) before the growing
 
 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE UlNDOK. 423 
 
 combination of minds acting simultaneously from vari- 
 ous centres, in nations otherwise the most at variance. 
 By a rate of motion continually accelerated, the gath- 
 ering power of the press, falling in with the growing 
 facilities of personal intercourse, is, day by day, bring- 
 ing Europe more and more into a state of fusion, in 
 which the sublime name of Christendom will contin- 
 ually become more and more significant, and will 
 express a unity of the most awful order, namely, in 
 the midst of strife, long surviving as to inferior interests 
 and subordinate opinions, will express an agreement 
 continually more close, and an agreement continually 
 more operative, upon all capital questions affecting 
 human rights, duties, and the interests of human /tto- 
 gress. Before that tribunal, which every throb of 
 every steam-engine, in printing houses and on railroads, 
 is hurrying to establish, all flagrant abuses of bellige- 
 rent powers will fall prostrate ; and, in particular, no 
 form of pure undisguised murder will be any longer 
 allowed to confound itself with the necessities of honor- 
 able warfare. 
 
 Much already has been accomplished on this path ; 
 more than people are aware of; so gradual and silent 
 has been the advance. How noiseless is the growth 
 of corn ! Watch it night and day for a week, and you 
 will never see it growing ; but return after two months, 
 and you will find it all whitening for the harvest, Such, 
 and so imperceptible, in the stages of their motion, are 
 the victories of the press. Here is one instance. Just 
 forty-seven years ago, on the shores of Syria, was 
 selebrated, by Napoleon Bonaparte, the most damnable 
 sarnival of murder that romance has fabled, or that
 
 424 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOK. 
 
 history has recorded. Rather more than four thousand 
 men — not (like Tyrolese or Spanish guerillas), even 
 m pretence, " insurgent rustics," but regular troops, 
 serving the Pacha and the Ottoman Sultan, not old men 
 that might by odd fractions have been thankful for 
 dismissal from a life of care or sorrow, but all young 
 Albanians, in the early morning of manhood, the oldest 
 not twenty-four — were exterminated by successive 
 rolls of musketry, when helpless as infants, having 
 their arms pinioned behind their backs like felons or. 
 the scaffold, and having surrendered their muskets 
 (which else would have made so desperate a. resist- 
 ance), on the faith that they were dealing with soldiers 
 and men of honor. I have elsewhere examined, as a 
 question in casuistry, the frivolous pretences for this 
 infamous carnage, but that examination I have here no 
 wish to repeat ; for it would draw off the attention 
 from one feature of the case, which I desire to bring 
 before the reader, as giving to this Jaffa tragedy a 
 depth of atrocity wanting in that of Dahra. The four 
 thousand and odd young Albanians had been seduced, 
 trepanned, fraudulently decoyed, from a post of con- 
 siderable strength, in which they could and would have 
 so d their lives at a bloody rate, by a solemn promise 
 of safety from authorized French officers. " But," 
 said Napoleon, in part of excuse, " these men, my 
 aides-de-camp, were poltroons ; to save their own lives, 
 they made promises which they ought not to have 
 made." Suppose it so ; and suppose the case one in 
 whi-ih the supreme authority has a right to disavow 
 his agents ; what then ? This entitles that authority tc 
 -efuse his ratification to the terms agreed on ; but this
 
 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 4'i<3 
 
 at the same time, obliges him to replace the hostile 
 parties in the advantages from which his agents had 
 wiled them by these terms. A robber, who even owns 
 himself such, will not pretend that he may refuse the 
 price of the jewel as exorbitant, and yet keep pos- 
 session of the jewel. And next comes a fraudulent 
 advantage, not obtained by a knavery in the aid-de- 
 camp, but in the leader himself The surrender of the 
 weapons, and the submission to the fettering of the 
 arms, were not concessions from the Albanians, filched 
 by the representatives of Napoleon, acting (as he 
 says) without orders, but by express falsehoods, ema- 
 nating from himself. The offiaer commanding at 
 Dahra could not have reached his enemy without the 
 shocking resource which he employed ; Napoleon 
 could. The officer at Dahra violated no covenant ; 
 Napoleon did. The officer at Dahra had not by lies 
 seduced his victims from their natural advantages ; 
 Napoleon had. Such was the atrocity of Jaffa in the 
 year 1799. Now, the relation of that great carnage 
 to the press, the secret argument through which that 
 vast massacre connects itself with the progress of the 
 press, is this — that in 1799, and the two following 
 years, when most it had become important to search 
 the character and acts of Napoleon, excepting Sir 
 Robert Wilson, no writer in Europe, no section of the 
 press, cared much to insist upon this, by so many 
 degrees, the worst deed of modern'''' military life. 
 From that deed all the waters of the Atlantic would 
 not have cleansed him ; and yet, since 1804, we have 
 heard much oftener of the sick men whom he poisoned 
 m his Syrian hospital (an act of merely erroneous
 
 426 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 aumanity), and more of the Due d'Enghien's execu- 
 tion, than of either ; though this, savage as it was. 
 admits of such palliations as belong to doubtful prov- 
 ocations in the sufferer, and to extreme personal terror 
 in the inflicter. Here, then, we have a case of whole- 
 sale military murder, emanating from Christendom, 
 and not less treacherous than the worst which have 
 been ascribed to the Mahometan Timur, or even to any 
 Hindoo Rajah, which hardly moved a vibration of 
 anger, or a solitary outcry of protestation from the 
 European press (then, perhaps, having the excuse of 
 deadly fear for herself), or even from the press of 
 moral England, having no such excuse. Fifty years 
 have passed ; a less enormity is perpetrated, but again 
 by a French leader ; and, behold, Europe is nofw con- 
 vulsed from side to side by unaffected indignation ! So 
 travels the press to victory ; such is the light, and so 
 broad, which it diffuses ; such is the strength for action 
 by which it combines the hearts of nations. 
 
 MELANCTHON AND CALVIN. 
 
 Of Mr. Landor's notions in religion it would be use- 
 ess, and without polemic arguments it would be arro- 
 gant, to say that they are false. It is sufficient to say 
 that they are degrading. In the dialogue between 
 Melancthon and Calvin, it is clear that the former rep- 
 resents Mr. L. himself, and is not at all the Melancthon 
 whom we may gather from his writings. Mr. Landor 
 has heard that he was gentle and timid in action ; and 
 ne exhibits him as a mere development of that key 
 note ; as a compromiser of all that is severe in doc 
 trine ; and as on effeminate picker and chooser in
 
 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANUOR. 427 
 
 morals. God, in his conception of him, is not a iather 
 so much as a benign, but somewhat weak, old grand- 
 father; and we, his grandchildren, being now and then 
 rather naughty, are to be ticlded with a rod made of 
 feathers, but, upon the whole, may rely upon an eter- 
 nity of sugar-plums. For instance, take the puny idea 
 ascribed to Melancthon upon Idolatry; and consider, 
 for one moment, how little it corresponds to the vast 
 machinery reared up by God himself against this 
 secret poison and dreadful temptation of human na- 
 ture. Melancthon cannot mean to question the truth 
 or the importance of the Old Testament ; and yet, if 
 his view of idolatry (as reported by L.) be sound, the 
 Bible must have been at the root of the worst mischief 
 ever yet produced by idolatry. He begins by de- 
 scribing idolatry as " Jennsh ; " insinuating that it was 
 an irregularity -chiefly besetting the Jews. But how 
 perverse a fancy ! In the Jews, idolatry was a dis- 
 ease ; in Pagan nations, it was the normal state. In a 
 nation (if any such nation could exist) of cretins or of 
 lepers, nobody would talk of cretinism or leprosy as 
 of any morbid affection ; that would be the regular 
 and natural condition of man. But where either was 
 spoken of with horror as a ruinous taint in human flesh, 
 it would argue that naturally (and, perhaps, by a large 
 majority) the people were uninfected. Amongst Pa- 
 gans, nobody talked of idolatry — no such idea existed 
 — because that was the regular form of religious wor- 
 ship. To be named at all, idolatry must be viewed as 
 standmg in opposition to some higher worship that is 
 not idolatry. But, next, as we are all agreed that in 
 idolatry there is something evil, and differ only as to
 
 i28 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LA>DOR. 
 
 ihe propriety of considering it a Jewish evil, m what 
 does this evil lie ? It lies, according to the profound 
 Landorian Melancthon, in this, that different idolaters 
 figure the Deity under different forms ; if they could 
 all agree upon one and the same mode of figuring the 
 invisible Being, there need be no quarrelling; and in 
 this case, consequently, there would be no harm in 
 iJolatry, none whatever. But, unhappily, it seems 
 each nation, or sometimes section of a nation, has a 
 different fancy ; they get to disputing ; and from that 
 they get to boxing, in which, it is argued, lies the true 
 evil of idolatry. It is an extra cause of broken heads. 
 One tribe of men represent the Deity as a beautiful 
 young man, with a lyre and a golden bow ; another as 
 a snake ; and a third — Egyptians, for instance, of 
 old — as a beetle or an onion; these last, according to 
 Juvenal's remark, having the happy privilege of grow- 
 ing their own gods in their own kitchen-gardens. In 
 all this there would be no harm, were it not for subse- 
 quent polemics and polemical assaults. Such, if we 
 listen to Mr. L., is Melancthon's profound theory''* of 
 a talse idolatrous religion. Were the police every- 
 where on an English footing, and the magistrates as 
 unlike as possible to Turkish Cadis, nothing could be 
 less objectionable ; but, as things are, the beetle- 
 worshipper despises the onion-worshipper ; which 
 breeds ill blood ; whence grows a cudgel ; and from 
 (he cudgel a constable ; and from the constable an 
 unjust magistrate. Not so, Mr. Landor ; thus did not 
 Melancthon speak ; and if he did, and would defend 
 It for a thousand times, then for a thousand times he 
 would deserve to be trampled by posterity into tha
 
 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 429 
 
 Grerman mire which he sought to evade by his Grecian 
 disguise.''^ The true evil of idolatry is this : There is 
 one sole idea of God, which corresponds adequately 
 to his total nature. Of this idea, two things may be 
 affirmed : the first being, that it is at the root of all 
 absolute grandeur, of all truth, and of all moral per- 
 fection ; the second being, that, natural and easy as 
 it seems when once unfolded, it could only have been 
 unfolded by revelation; and, to all eternity, he that 
 started with a false conception of God, could not, 
 through any effort of his own, have exchanged it for a 
 true one. All idolaters alike, though not all in equal 
 degrees, by intercepting the idea of God through the 
 prism of some representative creature that partially 
 resembles God, refract, splinter, and distort that idea. 
 Even the idea of light, of the pure, solar light — the old 
 Persian symbol of God — has that depraving neces- 
 sity. Light itself, besides being an imperfect symbol, 
 is an incarnation for us. However pure itsejf, or in 
 its original divine manifestation, for us it is incarnated 
 in forms and in matter that are not pure : it gravitates 
 towards physical alliances, and therefore towards un- 
 spiritual pollutions. And all experience shows that 
 the tendency for man, left to his own imagination, is 
 downwards. The purest symbol, derived from created 
 things, can and will condescend to the grossness of 
 inferior human natures, by submitting to mirror itself 
 m more and more carnal representative symbols, until 
 finally the mixed element of resemblance to God la 
 altogether buried and lost. God, by this succession of 
 imperfect interceptions, falls more and more under the 
 taint and limitation of the alien elements associated
 
 i30 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 vvith all created things ; and, for the ruin of ill mora, 
 grandeur in man, every idolatrous nation left to itself 
 will gradually bring' round the idea of God into the 
 idea of a powerful demon. Many things check and 
 disturb this tendency for a time ; but finally, and under 
 that intense civilization to which- man intellectually is 
 always hurrying under the eternal evolution of physi- 
 cal knowledge, such a degradation of God's idea, 
 ruinous to the moral capacities of man, would un- 
 doubtedly perfect itself, were it not for the kindling of 
 a purer standard by revelation. Idolatry, therefore, is 
 not merely an evil, and one utterly beyond the power 
 of social institutions to redress, but, in fact, it is the 
 fountain of all other evil that seriously menaces the 
 destiny of the human race 
 
 PORSON AND SOUTHEY. 
 
 The two dialogues between Southey and Porson 
 relate to Wordsworth ; and they connect Mr. Landor 
 with a body of groundless criticism, for which vainly 
 he will seek to evade his responsibility by pleading the 
 caution posted up at the head of his Conversations, 
 namely, — " Avoid a mistake in attributing to the writer 
 any opinions in this book but what are spoken under 
 his own name." If Porson, therefore, should happen 
 to utter villanies that are indictable, that (you are to 
 understand) is Person's affair. Render unto Landoi 
 the eloquence of the dialogue, but render unto Porson 
 any kicks which Porson may have merited by his 
 atrocities against a man whom assuredly he never 
 heard of, and probably never saw. Now, unless 
 Wordsworth ran into Porson in the streets of Cam-
 
 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE L.LNDOR. 431 
 
 bridge on some dark night about the era of the French 
 Revolution, and capsized him into the kennel — a 
 thing which is exceedingly improbable, considering 
 that Wordsworth was never tipsy except once in his 
 life, yet, on the other hand, is exceeding probable, 
 considering that Porson was very seldom otherwise — 
 barring this one opening for a collision, there is no 
 human possibility or contingency known to insurance 
 offices, through which Porson ever could have been 
 brought to trouble his head about Wordsworth. It 
 would have taken three witches, and three broom- 
 sticks, clattering about his head, to have extorted from 
 Porson any attention to a contemporary poet that did 
 not give first-rate feeds. And a man that, besides his 
 criminal conduct in respect of dinners, actually made 
 it a principle to drink nothing but water, would have 
 seemed so depraved a character in Person's eyes that, 
 out of regard to public decency, he would never have 
 mentioned his name, had he even happened to know 
 it. " O no ! he never mentioned him." Be assured 
 of that. As to Poetry, be it known that Porson read 
 none whatever, unless it were either political or ob- 
 scene. With no seasoning of either sort, " wherefore," 
 he would ask indignantly, " should I waste iny time 
 upon a poem ? " Porson had read the Rolliad, because 
 *it concerned his political party ; he had read the epistle 
 of Obereea, Queen of Otaheite, to Sir Joseph Banks, 
 because, if Joseph was rather too demure, the poem was 
 not. Else, and with such exceptions, he condescended 
 not to any metrical writer subsequent to the era of Pope, 
 .vhose Eloisa to Abelard he could saj'- by heart, and 
 ^.onld even sing from beginning to end ; which, indeed.
 
 i32 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 he wmdd do, whether you chose it or not, after a sufR 
 cient charge of brandy, and sometimes even though 
 threatened with a cudgel, in case he persisted in his 
 molestations. Waller he had also read and occasion- 
 ally quoted with effect. But as to a critique on Words- 
 worth, whose name had not begun to mount from the 
 ground when Porson died,'^'' as reasonably and charac- 
 teristically might it have been put into the mouth of 
 the Hetman Platoff. Instead of Person's criticisms on 
 writings which he never saw, let us hear Person's 
 account of a fashionable rout in an aristocratic London 
 mansion : it was the only party of distinction that this 
 hirsute but most learned Theban ever visited; and his 
 history of what passed (comic alike and tragic) is 
 better worth preserving than " Brantome," or even than 
 Swift's " Memoirs of a Parish Clerk." It was by the 
 hoax of a young Cantab that the professor was ever 
 decoyed into such a party : the thing was a swindle ; 
 but his report of its natural philosophy is not on that 
 account the less picturesque : — 
 
 SouTHET. — Why do you repeat the word rout so often .' 
 
 PoBSON. — I was once at one by mistake ; and really I saw 
 there what you describe ; and this made me repeat the word and 
 smile. You seem curious. 
 
 SouTHEY. — Rather, indeed. 
 
 PoRSON. — I had been dining out ; there were some who 
 smoked after dinner : within a few hours, the fumes of their 
 pipes produced such an eifect on my head that I was willing 
 to go into the air a little. Still I continued hot and thirsty • 
 and an undergraduate, whose tutor was my old acquaintance 
 proposed tliat we should turn into an oyster-cellar, and refresh 
 ourselves with oysters and porter. The rogue, instead of this, 
 »onducted me to a fashionable house in the neighborhood of St
 
 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 433 
 
 Tames' ; and, although I expostulated with him, and insisted 
 that we were going up stairs and not down, he appeared to me 
 BO ingenuous in his protestations to the contrary that I could 
 well disbelieve him no longer. Nevertheless, receiving on the 
 stairs many shoves and elbowings, I could not help telling him 
 plainly, that, if indeed it was the oyster-cellar in Fleet street, 
 the company was much altered for the worse ; and that, in 
 future, I should frequent another. When the fumes of the 
 pipes had left me, I discovered the deceit by the brilliancy and 
 indecency of the dresses ; and was resolved not to fall into 
 temptation. Although, to my great satisfaction, no immodest 
 proposal was directly made to me, I looked about anxious that 
 no other man should know me beside him whose wantonness 
 had conducted me thither ; and I would have escaped, if I could 
 have found the door, from which every effort I made appeared 
 to remove me farther and farther. * * * A pretty woman 
 said loudly, " He has no gloves on ! " " What nails the crea- 
 ture has ! " replied an older one — "Piano-forte keys wanting 
 the white." 
 
 I pause to say that this, by all accounts which have 
 reached posterity, was really no slander. The profes- 
 sor's forks had become rather of the dingiest, probably 
 through inveterate habits of scratching up Greek roots 
 from diluvian mould, some of it older than Deucalion's 
 flood, and very good, perhaps, for turnips, but less so 
 for the digits which turn up turnips. What followed, 
 however, if it were of a nature to be circumstantially 
 
 epeated, must have been more trying to the sensibili 
 lies of the Greek oracle, and to the blushes of the 
 policemen dispersed throughout the rooms, than even 
 the harsh critique upon his nails ; which, let the wits 
 <iay what they would in their malice, were no doubt 
 washed regularly enough once every three years. 
 
 A.nd, even if they were 7iot, I should say that this is not 
 28
 
 434 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 80 Strong a fact as some that are reported about many 
 a continental professor. Mrs. CI nt, with the two- 
 fold neatness of an Englishwoman and a Quaker, told 
 me that, on visiting Pestalozzi, the celebrated education 
 professor, at Yverdun, about 1820, her first impression, 
 ^rom a distant view of his dilapidated premises, was 
 profound horror at the grimness of his complexion, 
 which struck her as no complexion formed by nature, 
 but as a deposition from half a century of atmospheric 
 rust — a most ancient (zrugo. She insisted on a radical 
 purification, as a 5Wie qiui non towards any interview 
 with herself. The mock professor consented. Mrs. CI, 
 hired a stout Swiss charwoman, used to the scouring of 
 staircases, kitchen floors, &c. ; the professor, whom, on 
 this occasion, one may call " the prisoner," was accom- 
 modated with a seat (as prisoners at the bar sometimes 
 are with us) in the centre of a mighty washing-tub, and 
 then scoured through a long summer forenoon, by the 
 strength of a brawny Helvetian arm. " And now, my 
 dear friends," said Mrs. CI. to myself, " is it thy opinion 
 that this was cruel ? Some people say it was ; and i 
 wish to disguise nothing ; — it was not mere soap 
 that I had him scoured with, but soap and sand ; so 
 say honestly, dost thee call that cruel ? " Laughing no 
 more than the frailty of my human nature compelled 
 ne, I replied, "Far from it; on the contrary, every- 
 bod}'' must be charmed with her consideration for the 
 professor, in not having him cleaned on the same 
 prmciple as her carriage, namely, taken to the stable- 
 yard, mopped severely" \^^ Mobbed, dost thee say?" she 
 exclaimed. " No, no," I said, " not mobbed, but mopped 
 antil the gravel should be all gone "], " then pelted with
 
 NOTES ON WALTEE SAVAGE LANDOU. i35 
 
 liuckets of water by firemen, and, finally, currycombed 
 and rubbed down by two grooms, keeping a sharp 
 sitsurrus'^ between them, so as to soothe his wounded 
 feelings ; after all which, a feed of oats might not have 
 been amiss." The result, however, of this scouring 
 extraordinary was probably as fatal as to Mambrino's 
 helmet in Don Quixote. Pestalozzi issued, indeed, 
 from the washing-tub like Aeson from Medea's kettle ; 
 he took his station amongst a younger and fairer gen- 
 eration ; and the dispute was now settled whether he 
 belonged to the Caucasian or Mongolian race. But 
 his intellect was thought to have sufTered seriously. 
 The tarnish of fifty or sixty years seemed to have 
 acquired powers of reacting as a stimulant upon the 
 professor's fancy, through the rete mucosum, or through. 
 — Heaven knows what. He was too old to be convert- 
 ed to cleanliness ; the Paganism of a neglected person 
 at seventy becomes a sort of religion interwoven with 
 the nervous system — just as the well-known Plica Po- 
 lo?iica from which the French armies suffered so much 
 in Poland, during 1807-8, though produced by neglect 
 of the hair, will not be cured by extirpation of the hair. 
 The hair becomes matted into Medusa locks, or what 
 look like snakes ; and to cut these off" is oftentimes to 
 ;ause nervous frenzy, or other great constitutional 
 iisturbance. I never heard, indeed, that Pestalozzi 
 suffered apoplexy from his scouring ; but certainly his 
 iieas on education grew bewildered, and will be found 
 essentially damaged, after that great epoch — his bap* 
 tism by water and sand. 
 
 Now, in comparison of an Orson like this man of 
 Vverdun — this great Swiss reformer, who might, per-
 
 436 NOTES ON .VALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 haps, have bred a pet variety of typhus-fevei for hjs own 
 separate use — what signify nails, though worse than 
 Caliban's or Nebuchadnezzar's ? 
 
 This Greek professor Porson — whose knowleage of 
 English was so limited that his total cargo might have 
 been embarked on board a walnut-shell, on the bosom 
 of a slop-basin, and insured for three halfpence — 
 astonishes me, that have been studying English for 
 thirty years and upwards, by the strange discoveries 
 that he announces in this field. One and all, I fear, 
 are mares' nests. He discovered, for instance, on his 
 first and last reception amongst aristocratic people, that 
 in this region of society a female bosom is called her 
 neck. But, if it really had been so called, I see no 
 objection to the principle concerned in such disguises ; 
 and I see the greatest to that savage frankness which 
 virtually is indicated with applause in the Porsonian 
 remark. Let us consider. It is not that we cannot 
 speak freely of the female bosom, and we do so daily 
 In discussing a statue, we do so without reserve ; and 
 In the act of suckling an infant, the bosom of every 
 woman is an idea so sheltered by the tenderness and 
 sanctity with which all but ruffians invest the organ 
 of maternity, that no man scruples to name it, if the 
 occasion warrants it. He suppresses it only as he 
 suppresses the name of God; not as an idea that can 
 tself contain any indecorum, but, on the contrary, as 
 making other and more trivial ideas to become inde- 
 corous when associated with a conception rising so 
 much above their own standard. Equally, the words 
 affliction, guilt, penitence, remorse, &c., are proscribed 
 from the ordinary current of conversation amongsf
 
 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE I<ANDOR. 437 
 
 mere acquaintances; and for the same reason, namely, 
 that they touch chords too impassioned and profound 
 for harmonizing with the key in which the mere social 
 civilities of life are exchanged. Meantime, it is not 
 true that any custom ever prevailed in any class of 
 calling a woman's bosom her neck. Porson goes on 
 to say, that, for his part, he was born in an age when 
 people had thighs. Well, a great many people have 
 thighs still. But in all ages there must have been 
 many of whom it is lawful to suspect such a fact zo- 
 ologically ; and yet, as men honoring our own race, 
 and all its veils of mystery, not too openly to insist 
 upon it, which, luckily, there is seldom any occasion 
 to do. 
 
 Mr. Landor conceives that we are growing worse in 
 the pedantries of false delicacy. I think not. His 
 own residence in Italy has injured his sense of discrim- 
 mation. It is not his countrymen that have grown 
 conspicuously more demure and prudish, but he himself 
 that has grown in Italy more tolerant of what is really 
 a blamable coarseness. Various instances occur in 
 these volumes of that faulty compliance with Southern 
 ^rossness. The tendencies of the age, among our- 
 selves, lie certainly in one channel towards excessive 
 refinement. So far, however, they do but balance the 
 opposite tendencies in some other channels. The 
 craving for instant effect in style — as it brings forward 
 many disgusting Germanisms and other barbarisms — 
 as it transplants into literature much slang from the 
 street — as it reacts painfully upon the grandeurs of the 
 antique scriptural diction, by recalling into colloquial 
 use many consecrated words which thus lose theii
 
 438 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 
 
 Grothic beauty — also operates daily amongst jcurna. 
 ists, by the temptations of apparent strength that lurk 
 in plain speaking or even in brutality. What other 
 temptation, for instance, can be supposed to govern 
 those who, in speaking of hunger as it affects our 
 paupers, so needlessly affect us by the very coarsest 
 English word for the Latin word venter ? Surely the 
 word stomach would be intelligible to everybody, and 
 yet disgust nobody. It would do for him that affectc 
 plain speaking ; it would do for you and me that revolt 
 from gross speaking. Signs from abroad speak the 
 very same language, as to the liberal tendencies (in 
 this point) of the nineteenth century. Formerly, it 
 was treason for a Spaniard, even in a laudatory copy 
 of verses, to suppose his own Queen lowered to the 
 level of other females by the possession of legs ! Con- 
 stitutionally, the Queen was incapable of legs. How 
 else her Majesty contrived to walk, or to dance, the 
 Inquisition soon taught the poet was no concern of his. 
 Royal legs for females were an inconceivable thing — 
 except amongst Protestant nations ; some of whom the 
 Spanish Church affirmed to be even disfigured by tails ' 
 Having tails, of course they might have legs. But not 
 Catholic Queens. Now-a-days, so changed is all this 
 that if you should even express your homage to her 
 Most Catholic Majesty, by sending her a pair of em 
 broidered garters — which certainly presuppose legs 
 — there is no doubt that the Spanish Minister of 
 Finance would gratefully carry them to account — or. 
 the principle that " every little helps." Mr. Porson is 
 equally wrong, as I conceive, in another illustratior 
 of this matter, drawn from the human toes, and spe-
 
 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 439 
 
 nfically from the great toe. It is true, that, in refined 
 society, upon any rare necessity arising for alluding to 
 so inconsiderable a member of the human statue, gen- 
 erally this is done at present by the French term doigt 
 de-pied — though noi always — as may be seen in 
 various honorary certificates granted to chiropodists 
 within the last twenty months. And whereas Mr. Per- 
 son asks pathetically — What harm has the great toe 
 done, that it is never to be named? I answer — The 
 greatest harm ; as may be seen in the first act of 
 " Coriolanus," where Menenius justly complains that 
 this arrogant subaltern of the crural system, 
 
 " Being basest, meanest, vilest, 
 
 Still goeth foremost." 
 
 Even in the villany of running away from battle, this 
 unworthy servant still asserts precedency. I repeat, 
 however, that the general tendencies of the age, as to 
 the just limits of parrhesia (using the Greek word in a 
 sense wider than of old), are moving at present upon 
 two opposite tracks ; which fact it is, as in some other 
 lases, that makes the final judgment difficult. 
 
 ROMAN IMPERATOR. 
 
 Mr. Landor, though really learned, often puts his 
 learning into his pocket. 
 
 Thus, with respect to the German Empire, Mr. L 
 asserts that it was a chimaera ; that the Imperium Ger- 
 nanicum was a mere usage of speech, founded (if I 
 understand him) not even in a legal fiction, but in 
 a blunder ; that a German Imperator never had a true 
 historical existence ; and, finally, that even the Roman
 
 440 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 title of Iraperator — which, unquestionably, surmounted 
 in grandeur all titles of honor that ever were or will be 
 — ranged in dignity below the title of Rex. 
 
 I believe him wrong in every one of these doctrines ; 
 let us confine ourselves to the last. The title of Impe- 
 rator was not originally either above or below the title 
 of Rex, or even upon the same level ; it was what 
 logicians call disparate — it radiated from a different 
 centre, precisely as the modern title of Decanus, or 
 Dean, which is originally astrological [see the elder 
 Scaliger on Manilius], has no relation, whether of 
 superiority or equality or inferiority, to the title of 
 Colonel, nor the title of Cardinal any such relation to 
 that of Field-Marshal; and quite as little had Rex to 
 Imperator. Masters of Ceremonies, or Lord Chamber- 
 lains, may certainly create a precedency in favor of 
 any title whatever in regard to any other title ; but 
 such a precedency for any of the cases before us would 
 oe arbitrary, and not growing out of any internal prin- 
 ciple, though useful for purposes of convenience. As 
 regards the Roman Imperator, originally like the Ro- 
 man PrcBtor — this title and the official rank pointed 
 exclusively to military distinctions. In process of time, 
 the Praetor came to be a legal officer, and the Impera- 
 tor to bt the supreme political officer. But the motive 
 for assuming the title of Imperator, as the badge or 
 cogrwzance of the sovereign authority, when the great 
 transfiguration of the Republic took place, seems to 
 have been this. An essentially new distribution of 
 political powers had become necessary, and this change 
 masked itself to Romans, published itself in menaces 
 ind muttering thunder to foreign states, through the
 
 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LAXDOR. 441 
 
 martial title of Imperator. A new equilibrium was 
 demanded by the changes which time and luxury and 
 pauperism had silently worked on the composition of 
 Roman society. If Rome was to be saved from herself 
 — if she was to be saved from the eternal flux and 
 reflux — action and reaction — amongst her oligarchy 
 of immense estates (which condition of things it was 
 that forced on the great sine qua Tioii reforms of Caesar, 
 against all the babble of the selfish Cicero, of the 
 wicked Cato, and of the debt-ridden Senate) — then it 
 was indispensable that a new order of powers should 
 be combined for bridling her internal convulsions. To 
 carry her off from her own self-generated vortex, 
 which would, in a very few years, have engulfed her 
 and drawn her down into fragments, some machinery 
 as new as steam-power was required ; her own native 
 sails filled in the wrong direction. There were already 
 powers in the constitution equal to the work, but dis- 
 tracted and falsely lodged. These must be gathered 
 into one hand. And, yet, as names are all-powerful 
 upon our frail race, this recast must be verbally dis- 
 guised. The title must be such as, whilst flattering 
 the Roman pride, might yet announce to Oriental 
 powers a plenipotentiary of Rome who argued all dis- 
 puted points, not so much strongly as (an Irish phrase) 
 with " a strong back " — not so much piquing himself 
 on Aristotelian syllogisms that came within Barbary 
 and Celarent, as upon thirty legions that stood within 
 »all. The Consulship was good for little ; that, with 
 iome reservations, could be safely resigned into subo- 
 iinate hands. The Consular name, and the name of 
 Senate, which was siill suflTered to retain an obscure
 
 442 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 vitality and power of resurrection, continued to throw 
 a popular lustre over the government. Millions were 
 duped. But the essential offices, the offices in which 
 settled the organs of all the life in the administration 
 were these: — 1, of Military Commander-in-Chief (in- 
 cluding such a partition of the provinces as might seal 
 the authority in this officer's hands, and yet flatter the 
 people through the Senate) ; 2, of Censor, so as to 
 watch tlie action of morals and social usages upon 
 politics ; 3, of Pontifex Maximus ; 4, and finally, 
 of Tribune. The tribunitial power, next after the 
 military power, occupied the earliest anxieties of the 
 Caesars. All these powers, and some others belonging 
 to less dignified functions, were made to run through 
 the same central rings (or what in mail-coach harness 
 is called the turrets) : the " ribbons " were tossed up to 
 one and the same imperial coachman, looking as ami- 
 able as he could, but, in fact, a very truculent person- 
 age, having powers more unlimited than was always 
 safe for himself. And now, after all this change of 
 things, what was to be the name ? By what title should 
 men know him ? Much depended upon that. The 
 tremendous symbols of S. P. Q. R. still remained ; nor 
 had they lost their power. On the contrary, the great 
 idea of the Roman destiny, as of some vast phantom 
 moving under God to some unknown end, was greater 
 han ever ; the idea was now so great, that it had 
 outgrown all its representative realities. Consul and 
 Proco7isul would no longer answer, because they rep- 
 resented too exclusively the interior or domestic foun- 
 tains of power, and not the external relations to the 
 terraqueous globe which were beginning to expand with
 
 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 413 
 
 sudden accelerations of velocity. The central power 
 could not be forgotten by any who were near enough 
 to have tasted its wrath ; but now there was arising a 
 necessity for expressing, by some great unity of de- 
 nomination, so as no longer to lose the totality in the 
 separate partitions — the enormity of the circumference. 
 A necessity for this had repeatedly been found in nego- 
 tiations, and in contests ot ceremonial rank with oriental 
 powers, as between ourselves and China. With Persia, 
 the greatest of these powers, an instinct of inevitable 
 collision ^^ had, for some time, been ripening. It be- 
 came requisite that there should be a representative 
 officer for the whole Roman grandeur, and one capable 
 of standing on the same level as the Persian king of 
 kings ; and this necessity arose at the very same 
 moment that a new organization was required of Ro- 
 man power for domestic purposes. There is no doubt 
 that both purposes were consulted in the choice of tho 
 title of Imperator. The chief alternative title was that 
 of Dictator. But to this, as regarded Romans, there 
 were two objections — first, that it was a mere provis' 
 ional title, always commemorating a transitional emer 
 gency, and pointing to some happier condition, vvh'ch 
 the extraordinary powers of the officer ought soon to 
 establish. It was in the nature of a problem, and con- 
 tinually asked for its own solution. The Dictator dic- 
 ated. He was the greatest ipse dixit that ever was 
 neard of. It reminded the people verbally of despotic 
 sowers and autocracy. Then again, as regarded foreign 
 nations, unacquainted witn the Roman constitution, and 
 throughout the servile East incapabie of understanding 
 it, the title of Dictator had no meaning at all. The
 
 444 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 Speaker is a magnificent title in England, and makes 
 brave men sometimes shake in their shoes. But, yet, 
 if from rustic ignorance it is not understood, even that 
 title means nothing. 
 
 Of the proudest Speaker that England ever saw, 
 namely. Sir Edward Seymour, it is recorded that his 
 grandeur failed him, sank under him, like the New- 
 gate drop, at the very moment when his boiling anger 
 most relied upon and required it. He was riding 
 near Barnet, when a rustic wagoner ahead of him, 
 by keeping obstinately the middle of the road, pre- 
 vented him from passing. Sir Edward motioned to 
 him magnificently, that he must turn his horses to 
 the left. The carter, on some fit of the sulks (perhaps 
 from the Jacobinism innate in man), despised this 
 pantomime, and sturdily persisted in his mutinous 
 disrespect. On which Sir Edward shouted — " Fellow, 
 do you know who I am ? " " Noo-ak," replied our 
 rebellious friend, meaning, when faithfully translated, 
 no. " Are you aware, sirrah." said Sir Edward, now 
 thoroughly incensed, " that I am the right honorable 
 the Speaker ? At your peril, sir, in the name of 
 the Commons of England, in Parliament assembled, 
 quarter instantly to the left." This was said in that 
 dreadful voice which sometimes reprimanded penitent 
 offenders, kneeling at the bar of the House. The 
 carter, more struck by the terrific tones than the 
 words, spoke an aside to " Dobbin " (his " thill " horse), 
 which procured an opening to the blazing Speaker, 
 and then replied thus — " Speaker ! Why, if so be as 
 thou canst speak, whoy-y-y-y-y " (in the tremulous un- 
 dulation with which he was used to utter his sovereign
 
 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 445 
 
 lA^hoah-h-h-h to his horses), " whoy-^-y-y didn't-a speak 
 afore ? " The wagoner, it seemed, had presumed Sir 
 Edward, from his mute pantomime, to be a dumb man ; 
 and all which the proud Speaker gained, by the 
 proclamation of his style and title, was, to be exoner- 
 ated from that suspicion, but to the heavy discredit of 
 his sanity. A Roman Dictator stood quite as poor a 
 chance with foreigners, as our Speaker with a rustic. 
 " Dictator ! let him dictate to his wife ; but he sha'n't 
 dictate to us." Any title, to prosper with distant 
 nations, must rest upon the basis of arms. And this 
 fell in admirably with the political exigency for Rome 
 herself. The title of Imperator was liable to no 
 jealousy. Being entirely a military title, it clashed 
 with no civil pretensions whatever. Being a military 
 title, that recorded a triumph over external enemies in 
 the field, it was dear to the patriotic heart; whilst it 
 directed the eye to a quarter where all increase of 
 power was concurrent with increase of benefit to the 
 State. And again, as the honor had been hitherto 
 purely titular, accompanied by some auctoritas, in the 
 Roman sense (not always honor, for Cicero was an 
 Imperator for Cilician exploits, which he reports with 
 laughter), but no separate authority in our modern 
 sense. Even in military circles it was open to little 
 jealousy ; nor apparently could ripen into a shape that 
 ever would be so, since, according to all precedent, it 
 would be continually balanced by the extension of the 
 same title, under popular military suffrage, to other 
 fortunate leaders. Who could foresee, at the inaugu- 
 ration of this reform, that this precedent would be 
 abolished? who could guess that henceforwards no
 
 446 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 more triumphs (but only a sparing distribution of 
 triumphal decorations), henceforvvards no more im- 
 peratorial titles for anybody out of the one consecrated 
 family ? All this was hidden in the bosom of the 
 earliest Imperator ; he seemed, to the great mass of 
 the people, perfectly innocent of civic ambition ; he 
 rested upon his truncheon, that is, upon S. P. Q. R. ; like 
 Napoleon, he said, "I am but the first soldier of the 
 republic," that is, the most dutiful of her servants ; and, 
 like Napoleon, under cover of this martial paludamen- 
 tum, he had soon filched every ensign of authority by 
 which the organs of public power could speak. But, 
 at the beginning, this title of Imperator was the one 
 by far the best fitted to mask all this, to disarm sus- 
 picion, and to win the confidence of the people. 
 
 The title, therefore, began in something like impos- 
 ture ; and it was not certainly at first the gorgeous 
 title into which it afterwards blossomed. The earth 
 did not yet ring with it. The rays of its diadem were 
 not then the first that said All hail! to the rising — 
 the last that said Fareioell! to the setting sun. But 
 still it was already a splendid distinction ; and, in a 
 Roman ear, it must have sounded far above all com- 
 petition from the trivial title (in that day) of " Rex," 
 unless it were the Persian Rex, namely, " Rex Regum." 
 Romans gave the title ; they stooped not to accept it. ^^ 
 Even Mark Antony, in the all-magnificent description 
 of him by Shakspeare's Cleopatra, could give it in 
 showers — kings waited in his ante-room, " and from his 
 pocket fell crowns and sceptres." The title of Imperator 
 was indeed repeated in glory that transcended the glory 
 vf earth, but it was not, therefore, sown in dishonor.
 
 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 447 
 
 We are all astonished at Mr. Landor — myself and 
 Jiree hundred select readers. What can he mean by 
 tilting against the Imperator — Semper Augustus? 
 Before him the sacred fire (that burned from century 
 to century) went pompously in advance — before him 
 the children of Europe and Asia — of Africa and the 
 islands, rode as dorypheroi ; his somatophulakes were 
 princes ; and his empire, when burning out in Byzan- 
 tium, furnished from its very ruins the models for our 
 western honors and ceremonial. Had it even begun 
 m circumstances of ignominy, that would have been 
 cured easily by its subsequent triumph. Many are the 
 titles of earth that have found a glory in looking back 
 to the humility of their origin as its most memorable 
 feature. The fisherman who sits upon Mount Pala- 
 tine, in some respects the grandest of all potentates, 
 as one wielding both earthly and heavenly thunders, is 
 the highest example of this. Some, like the Mame- 
 lukes of Egypt and the early Janizaries of the Porte, 
 have glorified themselves in being slaves. Others, 
 like the Caliphs, have founded their claims to men's 
 homage in the fact of being successors to those who 
 (between ourselves) were knaves. And once it hap- 
 pened to Professor Wilson and myself, that we trav- 
 elled in the same post-chaise with a most agreeable 
 madman, who, amongst a variety of other select facts 
 which he communicated, was kind enough to give us 
 the following etymological account of our much- 
 respected ancestors the Saxons; which furnishes a 
 further illustration (quite unknown tj the learned) of 
 the fact — that honor may glory in deducing itself 
 from circumstances of humility. He assured us that
 
 448 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 these worthy Pagans were a league, comprehending 
 every single brave man of German blood ; so much 
 so, that on sailing away they left that unhappy land 
 in a state of universal cowardice, which accounts for the 
 licking it subsequently received from Napoleon. The 
 Saxons were very poor, as brave men too often are. 
 In fact they had no breeches, and, of course, no silk 
 stockings. They had, however, sacJcs, which they 
 mounted on their backs, whence naturally their name 
 Sax-on. Sacks-on! was the one word of command, 
 and that spoken, the army was ready. In reality it 
 was treason to take them off. But this indorsement 
 of their persons was not assumed on any Jewish prin- 
 ciple of humiliation ; on the contrary, in the most 
 flagrant spirit of defiance to the whole race of man. 
 For they proclaimed that, having no breeches nor silk 
 stockings of their own, they intended, wind and weather 
 permitting, to fill these same sacks with those of other 
 men. The Welshmen then occupying England were 
 reputed to have a good stock of both, and in quest of 
 this Welsh wardrobe the Sacks-on army sailed. With 
 what success it is not requisite to say, since here in 
 one post-chaise, four hundred and thirty years after, 
 were three of their posterity, the professor, the mad- 
 man, and myself, indorsees (as you may say) of the 
 original indorsers, who were all well equipped with 
 the object of this great Sacks-on exodus. 
 
 It is true that the word emperor is not in every 
 situation so impressive as the word king. But that 
 arises in part from the latter word having less of 
 specialty about it ; it is more catholic, and to tha. 
 extent more poetic ; and in part from accidents of
 
 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 449 
 
 posiuoa which disturb the relations of many other 
 titles besides. The Proconsul had a grander sound, as 
 recrarded military expeditions, than the principal from 
 whom he emanated. The Suram left a more awful 
 remembrance of his title upon the comrades of Julian 
 in his Persian expedition than the Surena's master. 
 And there are many cases extant m which the word 
 angel strikes a deeper key- cases where power is con- 
 templated. as well as beauty or mysterious existence - 
 than the word archangel, though confessedly higher in 
 the hierarchies of heaven. 
 
 Let me now draw the reader's attention to Count 
 Mian, a great conception of Mr. Landor's. 
 
 The fable of Count Julian (that is, when compre- 
 bending all the parties to that web, of which he is the 
 centre) may be pronounced the grandest which mod- 
 ern history unfolds. It is, and it is not, scenical. In 
 some portions (as the fate so mysterious of Roderick, 
 and in a hio-h^r sense of Julian) it rises as much above 
 what the stage could illustrate, as does Thermopylae 
 above the petty details of narration. The man was 
 mad that, instead of breathing from a hurricane of 
 harps some mighty ode over Thermopylfe, fancied the 
 httle conceit of weaving it into a metrical novel or suc- 
 cession of incidents. Yet, on the other hand, though 
 rising hicrher, Count Julian sinks lower : though the 
 passions rise far above Troy, above Mamthon, above 
 ThermopvliE, and are such passions as coald not have 
 existed under Paganism, in some respects they conde- 
 scend and preconform to the stage. The characters 
 are all different, all marked, all in position ; by which, 
 never assuming fixed attitudes as to purpose and mter 
 29
 
 450 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 est, the passions are deliriously complex, and the situa 
 tions are of corresponding grandeur. Metius Fuffetius 
 Alban traitor ! that wert torn limb from limb by antag 
 onist .yet confederate chariots, thy tortures, seen by 
 shuddering armies, were not comparable to the unseen 
 tortures in Count Julian's mind; who — whether his 
 treason prospered or not, whether his dear outraged 
 daughter lived or died, whetlier his king were tram- 
 pled in the dust by the horses of infidels, or escaped 
 as a wreck from the fiery struggle, whether his dear 
 native Spain fell for ages under misbelieving hounds, 
 or, combining her strength, tossed off them, but then 
 also himself, with one loathing from her shores — saw, 
 as he looked out into the mighty darkness, and stretched 
 out his penitential hands vainly for pity or for pardon, 
 nothing but the blackness of ruin, and ruin that was 
 too probably to career through centuries. " To this 
 pass," as Caesar said to his soldiers at Pharsalia, " had 
 his enemies reduced him;" and Count Julian might 
 truly say, as he stretched himself a rueful suppliant 
 before the Cross, listening to the havoc that was driving 
 onwards before the dogs of the Crescent, "M?/ enemies, 
 because they would not remember that I was a man, 
 forced me to forget that I was a Spaniard :' — to forget 
 thee, O native Spain, — and, alas! thee, faith of 
 Christ ! " 
 
 The story is wrapped in gigantic mists, and looms 
 upon one like the Grecian fable of CEdipus ; and there 
 will be great reason for disgust, if the deep Arabic re- 
 searches now going on in the Escurial, or at Vienna, 
 should succeed in stripping it of its grandeurs. For 
 as it stands at present, it is the most fearful lessor
 
 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 451 
 
 extant of the great moral, that crime propagates crime, 
 and violence inherits violence ; nay, a lesson on the 
 awful necessity which exists at times, that one tremen- 
 dous wrong should blindly reproduce itself in endless 
 retaliato-y wrongs. To have resisted the dread temp- 
 tation, would have needed an angel's nature; to have 
 yielded, is but human ; should it, then, plead in vain 
 for pardon ? and yet, by some mystery of evil, to have 
 perfected this human vengeance, is, finally, to land all 
 parties alike, oppressor and oppressed, in the passions 
 of hell. 
 
 Mr. Landor, who always rises with his subject, and 
 dilates like Satan into TenerifTe or Atlas, when he sees 
 before him an antagonist worthy of his powers, is prob- 
 ably the one man in Europe that has adequately con- 
 ceived the situation, the stern self-dependency and the 
 monumental misery of Count Julian. That sublimity 
 of penitential grief, which cannot accept consolation 
 from man, cannot hear external reproach, cannot con- 
 descend to notice insult, cannot so much as see the 
 curiosity of by-standers ; that awful carelessness of 
 all but the troubled deeps within his own heart, and of 
 God's spirit brooding upon their surface, and searching 
 their abysses, never was so majestically described as in 
 the following lines; it is the noble Spaniard, Hernando, 
 comprehending and loving Count Julian in the midst of 
 his treasons, who speaks: — Tarik, the gallant Moor, 
 having said that at last the Count must be happy; foi 
 that 
 
 *' Delicious calm 
 Follows the fierce enjoyment of revenge." 
 
 Hernando replies thus : —
 
 452 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 " That calm was never his ; no other tvill be. 
 Not victory, that o'ershadows him, sees he . 
 No airy and light pas'iion stirs abroad 
 To ruffle or to soothe him ; all are quelled 
 Beneath a mightier, sterner, stress of mind. 
 Wakeful he sits, and lonely, and unmoved, 
 Beyond the arrows, shouts, and views of men. 
 As oftentimes an eagle, ere the sun 
 Throws o'er the varying earth his early ray, 
 Stands solitary — stands immovable 
 Upon some highest cliff, and rolls his eye, 
 Clear, constant, unobservant, unabased. 
 In the cold light above the dews of morn." 
 
 One change suggests itself to me as possibly for the 
 better, namely, if the magnificent line — 
 
 " Beyond the arrows, shouts, and views of men " — 
 
 were transferred to the secondary object, the eagle, 
 placed after what is ?iow the last line, it would give a 
 fuller rythmus to the close of the entire passage ; it 
 would be more literally applicable to the majestic and 
 solitary bird, than to the majestic and solitary man ; 
 whilst the figurative expression even more impassioned 
 might be found for the utter self-absorption of Count 
 Julian's spirit — too grandly sorrowful to be capable of 
 disdain. 
 
 It completes the picture of this ruined prince, that 
 Hernando, the sole friend (except his daughter) still 
 cleaving to him, dwells with yearning desire upon hi3 
 death, knowing the necessity of this consummation to 
 his own secret desires, knowing the forgiveness which 
 would settle upon his memory after that last penalty 
 should have been paid for his errors, comprehending 
 the peace that would then swallow up the storm : —
 
 NOTES ON WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 453 
 
 " For hi3 own sake I could endure his loss. 
 Pray for it, and thank God : yet mourn I mnst 
 Him aboTe all, so great, so bountiful, 
 So blessed once ! " 
 
 It is no satisfaction to Hernando that Julian should 
 ' yearn for death with speechless love," but Julian does 
 so ; and it is in vain now amongst these irreparable 
 ruins, to wish it otherwise. 
 
 " 'T is not my solace that 't is ^ his desire : 
 Of all who pass us in life's drear descent 
 We grieve the most for those who wished to die." 
 
 How much, then, is in this brief drama of Couni 
 Julian, chiselled, as one might think, by the' hands of 
 that sculptor who fancied the great idea of chiselling 
 Mount Athos into a demigod, which almost insists on 
 being quoted ; which seems to rebuke and frown on 
 one for not quoting it : passages to which, for their 
 solemn grandeur, one raises one's hat as at night in 
 walking under the Coliseum ; passages which, for their 
 luxury of loveliness, should be inscribed on the phy- 
 lacteries of brides, or upon the frescoes of Ionia, illus- 
 trated by the gorgeous allegories of Rubens. 
 
 " Sed fugit interea, fugit irreparibile tempus, 
 Singula dum capti circumvectamur amore." 
 
 Yet, reader, in spite of time, one word more on the 
 subject we are quitting. Father Time is certainly be- 
 come very importunate and clamorously shrill since he 
 has been fitted up with that horrid railway whistle ; 
 •ind even old Mother Space is growing rather imperti- 
 aent, when she speaks out of monthly journals licensed 
 ^o carry but small quantities of bulky goods ; yet om 
 xhing I must say in spite of them both.
 
 454 NOTES ON WALTER SAV/.GE LANDOR. 
 
 It is, that although we have had from men of memo- 
 rable genius, Shelley in parf/cular, both direct and 
 mdirect attempts (some of them powerful attempts) 
 to realize the great idea of Prometheus, which idea 
 is so great, that (like the primeval majesties of Hu- 
 man Innocence, of Avenging Deluges that are past, 
 of Fiery Visitations yet to come) it has had strength 
 to pass through many climates, and through many 
 religions, without essential loss, but surviving, without 
 tarnish, every furnace of chance and change ; so it is 
 that, after all has been done -which intellectual power 
 could do since ^scliylus (and since Milton in his 
 Satan), no embodiment of the Promethean situation, 
 none of the Promethean character, fixes the attentive 
 eye upon itself with the same secret feeling of fidelity 
 to the vast archetype, as Mr. Landor's " Count Julian." 
 There is in this modern aerolith the same jewelly 
 ustre, which cannot be mistaken ; the same " non 
 imitabile fulgur," and the same character of " fracture," 
 or cleavage, as mineralogists speak, for its beaming 
 iridescent grandeur, redoubling under the crush of 
 misery. The color and the coruscation are the same 
 when splintered by violence ; the tones of the rocky *^ 
 harp are the same when swept by sorrow. There is 
 the same spirit of heavenly persecution against his 
 enemy, persecution that would have hung upon his 
 rear, and " burned after him to the bottomless pit," 
 though it had yawned for both ; there is the same gulf 
 fixed between the possibilities of their reconciliation, 
 the same immortality of resistance, the same abysma. 
 inguish. Did Mr. Landor consciously cherish thia 
 ^schylean ideal in composing " Count Julian " ^ 1 
 know not ; there it is.
 
 MILTON VERSUS SOUTHEY AND LANDOR. 
 
 This conversation is doubly interesting : interesting 
 by its subject, interesting by its interlocutors ; for the 
 subject is Milton, whilst the interlocutors are Southey 
 and Landor. If a British gentleman, when taking his 
 pleasure in his well-armed yacht, descries, in some 
 foreign waters, a noble vessel, from the Thames or the 
 Clyde, riding peaceably at anchor — and soon after, 
 two smart-looking clippers, with rakish masts, bearing 
 down upon her in company — he slackens sail: his 
 suspicions are slightly raised ; they have not shown 
 their teeth as yet, and perhaps all is right ; but there 
 can be no harm in looking a little closer ; and, as- 
 suredly, if he finds any mischief in the wind against 
 his countryman, he will show his teeth also ; and, 
 please the wind, will take up such a position as to rake 
 both of these pirates by turns. The two dialogists are 
 introduced walking out after breakfast, ' each his Mil- 
 ton in his pocket ; ' and says Southey, ' Let us collect 
 all the graver faults we can lay our hands upon, with- 
 out a too minute and troublesome research;' — just 
 80 ; there would be danger in that — help might put 
 off* from shore ; — ' not,' says he, ' in the spirit of John- 
 son, but in our own.' Johnson we may suppose, is 
 some old ruffian well known upon that coast ; and 
 faults ' may be a flash term for what the Americana
 
 456 MILTON VS. SOUTHEY AND LANDOK. 
 
 call ' notions.' A part of the cargo it clearly is ; and 
 one is not surprised to hear Landor, whilst assenting 
 to the general plan of attack, suggesting in a whisper, 
 ' that they should abase their eyes in reverence to so 
 great a man, without absolutely closing them ; ' which 
 I take to mean — that, without trusting entirely to theii 
 boarders, or absolutely closing their ports, they should 
 depress their guns and fire down into the hold, in re- 
 spect of the vessel attacked standing so high out of the 
 water. After such plain speaking, nobody can wonder 
 much at the junior pirate (Landor) muttering, 'It will 
 be difficult for us always to refrain.' Of course it will • 
 refraining was no part of the business, I should fancy, 
 taught by that same buccaneer, Johnson. There is 
 mischief, you see, reader, singing in the air — ' miching 
 malhecho ' — and it is our business to watch it. 
 
 But, before coming to the main attack, I must suffer 
 myself to be detained for a few moments by what Mr. 
 L. premises upon the ' moral ' of any great fable, 
 and the relation which it bears, or should bear, to the 
 solution of such a fable. Philosophic criticism is so 
 far improved, that, at this day, few people, who have 
 reflected at all upon such subjects, but are agreed as 
 to one point: viz., that in metaphysical language the 
 moral of an epos or a drama should be immanent, not 
 transient ; or, otherwise, that it should be vitally dis- 
 tributed through the whole organization of the tree, not 
 gathered or secreted into a sort of red berry or race- 
 mus, pendent at the end of its boughs. This view Mr. 
 Landor himself takes, as a general view ; but, strange 
 to say, by some Landorian perverseness, where there 
 occurs a memorable exception to this rule (as in the 
 Paradise Lost'), in that case he insists upon the rule
 
 Mil TON VS. S.OTJTHET AND LANDOR. 457 
 
 in its rigor — the rule, and nothing hut the rule. 
 Where, on the contrary, the rule does really and ob- 
 viously take effect (as in the ' Iliad ' and ' Odyssey '), 
 there he insists upon an exceptional case. There is 
 a moral, in his opinion, hanging like a tassel of gold 
 bullion from the ' Iliad ; ' — and what is it ? Some- 
 thing so fantastic, that I decline to repeat it. As well 
 might he have said, that the moral of ' Othello' was — 
 ' Try Warren's Blacking ! ' There is no moral, 
 little or big, foul or fair, to the ' Iliad.' Up to the 17th 
 book, the moral might seem dimly to be this — ' Gen- 
 tlemen, keep the peace : you see what comes of quar- 
 relling.' But there this moral ceases ; — there is now 
 a break of guage : the narrow guage takes place after 
 this; whilst up to this point, the broad guage — viz., 
 the wrath of Achilles, growing out of his turn-up with 
 Agamemnon — had carried us smoothly along without 
 need to shift our luggage. There is no more quarrel- 
 ling after Book 17, how then can there be any more 
 moral from quarrelling } If you insist on my telling 
 you what is the moral of the ' Iliad,' I insist upon your 
 telling me what is the moral of a rattlesnake or the 
 moral of a Niagara. I suppose the moral is — that 
 you must get out of their way, if you mean to moralize 
 much longer. The going-up (or anabasis) of the 
 Greeks against Troy, was a fact ; and a pretty dense 
 fact; and, by accident, the very first in which all 
 Greece had a common interest. It was a joint-stock 
 concern — a representative expedition — whereas, pre- 
 viously there had been none ; for even the Argonautic 
 expedition, which is rather of the darkest, implied no 
 confederation except amongst individuals. How could 
 it ? For the Argr is supposed to have measured only
 
 458 MILTGN VS. SOIJTHET AND LANDOR. 
 
 twenty-seven tons : how she would have been classed 
 at Lloyd's is hard to say, but certainly not as A 1. 
 There was no state-cabin ; everybody, demi-gods and 
 all, pigged in the steerage amongst beans and bacon. 
 Greece was naturally proud of having crossed the her- 
 ring-pond, small as it was, in search of an entrenched 
 enemy ; proud also of having licked him ' into Al- 
 mighty smash;' this was sufficient; or if an imperti- 
 nent moralist sought for something more, doubtless the 
 moral must have lain in the booty. A peach is the 
 moral of a peach, and moral enough ; but if a man 
 tcill have something better — a moral within a moral — 
 why, there is the peach-stone, and its kernel, out of 
 which he may make ratafia, which seems to be the 
 ultimate morality that can be extracted from a peach. 
 Mr. Archdeacon Williams, indeed, of the Edinburgh 
 Academy, has published an octavo opinion upon the 
 case, which asserts that the moral of the Trojan war 
 was (to borrow a phrase from children) tit for tat. It 
 was a case of retaliation for crimes against Hellas, 
 committed by Troy in an earlier generation. It may 
 be so ; Nemesis knows best. But this moral, if it ccn- 
 cerns the total expedition to the Troad, cannot concern 
 the ' Iliad,' which does not take up matters from so 
 early a period, nor go on to the final catastrophe of 
 Ilium. 
 
 Now, as to the ' Paradise Lost,' it happens that there 
 is — whether there ought to be or not — a pure golden 
 moral, distinctly announced, separately contemplated, 
 and the very weightiest ever uttered by man or realized 
 by fable. It is a moral rather for the drama of a 
 world than for a human poem. And this moral is 
 made the more prominent and memorable by the
 
 MILTON VS. SOUTHEY AND LANDOR. 459 
 
 grandeur of its annunciation. The jewel is not more 
 splendid in itself than in its setting. Excepting the 
 well-known passage on Athenian oratory in the ' Para- 
 dise Regained,' there is none even in Milton where tht 
 metrical pomp is made so effectually to aid the pomp 
 of the sentiment. Hearken to the way in which a roll 
 or dactyles is made to settle, like the swell of the ad- 
 vancing tide, into the long thunder of billows breaking 
 foi leagues against the shore : 
 
 ' That to the height of this great argirment 
 I may assert eternal Providence.' 
 
 Hear what a motion, what a tumult, is given by the 
 dactylic close to each of the introductory lines ! And 
 how massily is the whole locked up into the peace of 
 heaven, as the aerial arch of a viaduct is locked up 
 into tranquil stability by its key-stone, through the deeo 
 spondaic close, 
 
 ' And justify the ways of God to man.' 
 
 That is the moral of the Miltonic epos ; and as much 
 grander than any other moral formally illustrated by 
 poets, as heaven is higher than earth. 
 
 But the most singular moral, which Mr. Landor any- 
 where discovers, is in his own poem of ' Gebir.' 
 Whether he still adheres to it, does not appear from 
 \he present edition. But I remember distinctly, in the 
 original edition, a Preface (now ^v^thdrawn) in which 
 he made his acknowledgments to some book read at a 
 Welsh Inn for the outhne of the story ; and as to the 
 moral, he declared it to be an exposition of that most 
 mysterious offence. Over- Colonization. Much I mused, 
 ai my youthful simplicity, upon this criminal novelty. 
 What might it be ? Could I, by mistake, have com
 
 460 MILTON VS. SOUTHEY AND LANDOR. 
 
 mitted it myself? Was it a felony, or a misde- 
 meanor? — liable to transportation, or only to fine ana 
 imprisonment ? Neither in the Decemviral Tables 
 nor in the Code of Justinian, nor the maritime Code 
 of Oleron, nor in the Canon Law, nor the Code Napo- 
 leon, nor our own Statutes at large, nor in Jeremy 
 Bentham, had I read of such a crime as a possibility. 
 Undoubtedly the vermin, locally called Squatters,* 
 both in the wilds of America and Australia, who pre- 
 occupy other men's estates, have latterly illustrated the 
 logical possibility of such an offence ; but they were 
 quite unknown at the era of Gebir. Even Dalica, who 
 knew as much wickedness as most people, would have 
 stared at this unheard of villany, and have asked, as 
 eagerly as I did — ' What is it now? Let's have a 
 shy at it in Egypt.' I, indeed, knew a case, but 
 Dalica did not, of shocking over-colonization. It was 
 the case, which even yet occurs on out-of-the-way 
 roads, where a man, unjustly big, mounts into the in- 
 side of a stage-coach already sufficiently crowded. In 
 streets and squares, where men could give him a wide 
 berth, they had tolerated the injustice of his person ; 
 but now, in a chamber so confined, the length and 
 breadth of his wickedness shines revealed to every 
 eye. And if the coach should upset, which it would 
 
 • Squatters : — They are a sort of self-elected warming-pans. 
 What we in England mean by the political term ' warming-pans,' 
 are men who occupy, by consent, some official place, or Par- 
 liamentary seat, until the proper claimant is old enough in law 
 to assume his rights. When the true man comes to bed, the 
 warming-pan respectfully turns out. But these ultra-marina 
 jfarming-pans wouldn't turn out. They showed fight, and 
 irouldu't bear of the true man, even aa a bed-fellow.
 
 MILTOM VS. SOUTHEY AND LANDOR. 461 
 
 not be the less likely to do for having Mm on board, 
 Bomebody or other (perhaps myself) must lie beneath 
 this monster, like Enceladus under Mount Etna, call- 
 ing upon Jove to come quickly with a few thunderbolts 
 and destroy both man and mountain, both succuhus and 
 incubus., if no other relief offered. Meantime, the only 
 case of over-colonization notorious to all Europe, is 
 that which some German traveller (Riedesel, I think) 
 has reported so eagerly, in ridicule of our supposed 
 English credulity; viz. — the case of the foreign 
 swindler, who advertised that he would get into a quart 
 bottle, filled Drury Lane, pocketed the admission 
 money, and decamped, protesting (in his adieus to the 
 spectators) that ' it lacerated his heart to disappoint so 
 many noble islanders ; but that on his next visit he 
 would make full reparation by getting into a vinegar 
 cruet.' Now, here certainly was a case of over- 
 colonization, not perpetrated, but meditated. Yet, 
 when one examines this case, the crime consisted by 
 no means in doing it, but in not doing it ; by no means 
 in getting into the bottle, but in not getting into it. 
 The foreign contractor would have been probably a 
 very unhappy man, had he fulfilled his contract by 
 over-colonizing the bottle, but he would have been 
 decidedly a more virtuous man. He would have 
 redeemed his pledge ; and, if he had even died in 
 the bottle, we should have honored him as a ' vir 
 bonus, cum maid fortund compositus ; ' as a man of 
 honor matched in single duel with calamity, and also 
 ^s the best of conjurers. Over-colonization, therefore, 
 except in the one case of the stage-coach, is ajjparently 
 no crime ; and the offence of King Gebir, in my eyes 
 remains a mystery to this day.
 
 462 MILTON VS. SOUTHEY AND LANDOR. 
 
 What next solicits notice is in the nature of a 
 digression: it is a kind of parenthesis on Words- 
 worth. 
 
 '■Landor. — When it was a matter of wonder how 
 Keats, who was ignorant of Greek, could have written 
 his " Hyperion," Shelley, whom envy never touched 
 gave as a reason — " because he was a Greek." Words- 
 worth, being asked his opinion of the same poem 
 called it, scoffingly, " a pretty piece of paganism ; " yet 
 he himself, in the best verses he ever wrote — and 
 beautiful ones they are — reverts to the powerful in- 
 fluence of the " pagan creed." ' 
 
 Here are nine lines exactly in the original type. 
 Now, nine tailors are ranked, by great masters of 
 algebra, as z= one man ; such is the received equa- 
 tion ; or, as it is expressed, with more liveliness, in an 
 old English drama, by a man who meets and quarrels 
 with eighteen tailors — ' Come, hang it ! Til fight you 
 hoth."* But, whatever be the algebraic ratio of tailors 
 to men, it is clear that nine Landorian lines are not 
 always equal to the delivery of one accurate truth, or 
 to a successful conflict with three or four signal errors. 
 Firstly — Shelley's reason, if it ever was assigned, is 
 irrelevant as regards any question that must have been 
 intended. It could not have been meant to ask — 
 Why was the ' Hyperion ' so Grecian in its spirit .'' for 
 jt is anything but Grecian. We should praise it falsely 
 to call it so ; for the feeble, though elegant, mythology 
 of Greece was incapable of breeding anything so deep 
 as the mysterious portents that, in the ' Hyperion,'' run 
 before and accompany the passing away of divine im- 
 memorial dynasties. Nothing can be mere impressive 
 han the picture of Saturn in his palsy of affliction, and
 
 MILTON VS. SOUTHEY AND LANDOR. 463 
 
 of the mighty goddess his grand-daughter, or than the 
 secret signs of coming woe in the palace of Hyperion. 
 These things grew from darker creeds than Greece 
 had ever known since the elder traditions of Pro- 
 metheus — creeds that sent down their sounding plum- 
 mets into far deeper wells within the human spirit. 
 What had been meant, by the question proposed to 
 Shelley, was no doubt — How so young a man as Keats, 
 not having had the advantage of a regular classical 
 education, could have been so much at home in the 
 details of the elder mythology ? Tooke's ' Pantheon ' 
 might have been obtained by favor of any English 
 schoolboy, and Dumoustier's ' Letlres a Emile sur la 
 Mythologie ' by favor of very many young ladies ; but 
 these, according to my recollection of them, would 
 hardly have sufficed. Spence's ' Polymetis,'^ however, 
 might have been had by favor of any good library ; 
 and the ' Bibliotheca ' of Apollodorus, who is the cock 
 of the walk on this subject, might have been read by 
 favor of a Latin translation, supposing Keats really 
 unequal to the easy Greek text. There is no wonder 
 in the case ; nor, if there had been, would Shelley's 
 kind remark have solved it. The treaiynent of the 
 facts must, in any case, have been due to Keats's 
 genius, so as to be the same whether he had studied 
 Greek or not : the facts., apart from the treatment, 
 must in any case have been had from a book. Sec- 
 ondly — Let Mr. Landor rely upon it — that Words- 
 worth never said the thing ascribed to him here as any 
 formal judgment, or what Scottish law would call 
 deliverance, upon the 'Hyperion.' .\s to what he 
 might have said incidentally and collaterally ; the 
 meaning of word's is so entirely affected by their posi
 
 464: MILTON VS. SOUTHEY AND LANDOR. 
 
 tion in a conversation — what followed, what went be- 
 fore — that five words dislocated from their context 
 never would be received as evidence in the Queen's 
 Bench. The court which, of all others, least strictly 
 weighs its rules of evidence, is the female tea-table ; 
 yet even that tribunal would require the deponent to 
 strengthen his evidence, if he had only five detached 
 words to produce. Wordsworth is a very proud man, 
 as he has good reason to be ; and perhaps it was 1, 
 myself, who once said in print of him — that it is not 
 the correct way of speaking, to say that Wordsworth 
 is as proud as Lucifer ; but, inversely, to say of Lucifer 
 that some people have conceived him to be as proud 
 as Wordsworth. But, if proud, Wordsworth is not 
 haughty, is not ostentatious, is not anxious for display, 
 is not arrogant, and, least of all, is he capable of de- 
 scending to envy. Who or what is it that he should be 
 envious of? Does anybody suppose that Wordsworth 
 would be jealous of Archimedes if he now walked 
 upon earth, or Michael Angelo, or Milton ? Nature 
 does not repeat herself. Be assured she will never 
 make a second Wordsworth. Any of us would be 
 jealous of his own duplicate ; and, if I had a doppel- 
 ganger, who went about personating me, copying me, 
 and pirating me, philosopher as I am, I might (if the 
 Court of Chancery would not grant an injunction 
 against him) be so far carried away by jealousy as to 
 attempt the crime of murder upon his carcass ; and no 
 great matter as regards him. But it would be a sad 
 thing for me to find myself hanged ; and for what, 1 
 beseech you ? for murdering a sham, that was eithei 
 nobody at all, or oneself repeated once too often. But 
 if you show to Wordsworth a man as great as himself
 
 MILTON VS. SOTTTHEY AND LANDOR. 465 
 
 Still that great man will not be much like Words- 
 worth — the great man will not be Wordsworth's 
 doppelganger. If not impar (as you say) he will be 
 dispar ; and why, then, should Wordsworth be jealous 
 of him, unless he is jealous of the sun, and of Abd el 
 Kader, and of Mr. Waghorn — all of whom carry off a 
 great deal of any spare admiration which Europe has 
 to dispose of. But suddenly it strikes me that we are 
 all proud, every man of us ; and I daresay with some 
 reason for it, ' be the same more or less.' For I never 
 came to know any man in my whole life intimately, 
 who could not do something or other better than any- 
 body else. The only man amongst us that is thoroughly 
 free from pride, that you may at all seasons rely on as 
 a pattern of humility, is the pickpocket. That man is 
 so admirable in his temper, and so used to pocketing 
 anything whatever which Providence sends in his way, 
 that he will even pocket a kicking, or anything in that 
 line of favors which you are pleased to bestow. The 
 smallest donations are by him thankfully received, 
 provided only that you, whilst half-blind with anger in 
 kicking him round a figure of eight, like a dexterous 
 skater, will but allow him (which is no more than fair) 
 to have a second ' shy ' at your pretty Indian pocket- 
 handkerchief, so as to convince you, on cooler reflec- 
 tion, that he does not always miss. Thirdly — Mr. 
 Landor leaves it doubtful what verses those are of 
 Wordsworth's which celebrate the power ' of the Pagan 
 creed ; ' whether that sonnet in which Wordsworth 
 wishes to exchange for glimpses of human life, then 
 %nd in those circumstances^ ' foAorn,' the sight 
 
 ' Of Proteus coming from the sea, 
 
 And hear old Triton wind his wreathed bom ; ' 
 30
 
 466 MILTON VS. SOUTHEY AND LANDOR. 
 
 whether this, or the passage on the Greek mythology 
 in ' The Excursion.' Whichever he means, I am the 
 last man to deny that it is beautiful, and especially if 
 he means the latter. But it is no presumption to deny 
 firmly Mr, Landor's assertion, that these are ' the best 
 verses Wordsworth ever wrote.' Bless the man ! 
 
 * There are a thousand such elsewhere. 
 As worthy of your wonder : ' — 
 
 Elsewhere, I mean, in Wordsworth's poems. In reality 
 it is impossible that these should be the best ; for eveh 
 if, in the executive part, they were so, which is not the 
 case, the veiy nature of the thought, of the feeling, 
 and of the relation, which binds it to the general 
 theme, and the nature of that theme itself, forbid the 
 possibility of merits so high. The whole movement 
 of the feeling is fanciful : it neither appeals to what is 
 deepest in human sensibilities, nor is meant to do so. 
 The result, indeed, serves only to show Mr. Landor's 
 Blender acquaintance with Wordsworth. And what is 
 worse than being slenderly acquainted, he is errone- 
 ously acquainted even with these two short breathings 
 from the Wordsworthian shell. He mistakes the logic. 
 Wordsworth does not celebrate any power at all in 
 Paganism. Old Triton indeed ! he's little better, in 
 respect of the terrific, than a mail-coach guard, nor 
 half as good, if you allow the guard his official seat, a 
 coal-black night, lamps blazing back upon his royal 
 scarlet, and his blunderbuss correctly slung. Triton 
 would not stay, I engage, for a second look at the old 
 Portsmouth mail, as once I knew it. But, alas ! hotter 
 things than ever stood on Triton's pins are now as little 
 able to stand up for themselves, or to startle the silen,*
 
 MILTON VS. SOUTHEY AND LANDOR. 467 
 
 helds in darkness, with the sudden flash of their 
 glory — gone before it had full come — as Triton is to 
 play the Freyschiitz chorus on his humbug of a horn. 
 But the logic of Wordsworth is this — not that the 
 Greek mythology is potent ; on the contrary, that it 
 is weaker than cowslip tea, and would not agitate 
 the nerves of a hen sparrow ; but that, weak as it is — 
 nay, by means of that very weakness — it does but the 
 better serve to measure the weakness of something 
 which he thinks yet weaker — viz. the death-like torpor 
 of London society in 1808, benumbed by conventional 
 apathy and worldliness — 
 
 * Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life.' 
 
 This seems a digression from Milton, who is prop- 
 erly the subject of this colloquy. But, luckily, it is 
 not one of my sins. Mr. Landor is lord within the 
 house of his own book ; he pays all accounts what- 
 ever ; and readers that have either a bill, or bill of ex- 
 ceptions, to tender against the concern, must draw 
 upon him. To Milton he returns upon a very dangerous 
 topic indeed — viz. the structure of his blank verse. 
 I know of none that is so trying to a wary man's 
 nerves. You might as well tax Mozart Avith harshness 
 in the divinest passages of ' Don Giovanni,' as Milton 
 with any such offence against metrical science. Be 
 assured, it is yourself that do not read with understand- 
 ing, not Milton that by possibility can be found deaf to 
 the demands of perfect harmony. You are tempted, 
 after walking round a line threescore times, to exclaim 
 at last — 'Well, if the Fiend himself should rise up 
 before me at this very moment, in this very study of 
 tftine, and say that no screw was loose in that line,
 
 468 MILTON VS. SOUTHEY AND LANDOR. 
 
 then would I reply — ' Sir, with submission, yoa 
 
 are .' 'What!' suppose the Fiend suddenly to 
 
 ■ demand in thunder , ' what am I ? ' * Horribly wrong, 
 you wish exceedingly to say ; but, recollecting that 
 some people are choleric in argument, you confine 
 yourself to the polite answer — 'That, with deference 
 to his better education, you conceive him to lie ; ' — 
 that's a bad word to drop your voice upon in talking 
 with a fiend, and you hasten to add — under a slight, a 
 very slight mistake.' Ay, you might venture on that 
 opinion with a fiend. But how if an angel should 
 undertake the case .'' And angelic was the ear of Mil- 
 ton. Many are the primd facie anomalous lines in 
 Milton ; many are the suspicious lines, which in many 
 a book I have seen many a critic peering into, with 
 eyes made up for mischief, yet with a misgiving that 
 all was not quite safe, very much like an old raven 
 looking down a marrow-bone. In fact, such is the 
 metrical skill of the man, and such the perfection of 
 his metrical sensibility, that, on any attempt to take 
 liberties with a passage of his, you feel as when 
 coming, m a forest, upon what seems a dead lion ; 
 perhaps he may not be dead, but only sleeping ; nay, 
 perhaps he may not be sleeping, but only shamming. 
 And you have a jealousy, as to Milton, even in the 
 most flagrant case of almost palpable error, that, after 
 ail, there may be a plot in it. You may be put down 
 with shame by some man reading the line otherwise, 
 reading it with a difierent emphasis, a different caesura, 
 or perhaps a different suspension of the voice, so as to 
 bring out a new and self-justifying effect. It must be 
 added, that, in reviewing Milton's metre, it is quite 
 necessary to have such books as ' Nare's English
 
 MLTON VS. SOUTHEY AND LANDOR. 469 
 
 Orthoepy' {in a late edition), and others of that class, 
 lying on the table; because the accentuaticn of Mil- 
 ton's age was, in many words, entirely different from 
 ours. And Mr. Landor is not free from some sus- 
 picion of inattention as to this point. Over and above 
 this accentual difference, the practice of our elder 
 dramat'.sts in the resolution of the final tion (which 
 now is uniformly pronounced shon), will be found ex- 
 ceedingly important to the appreciation of a writer's 
 verse. Cojitribution, which now is necessarily pro- 
 nounced as a word of four syllables, would tben,*^ in 
 verse, have five, being read into con-tri-hu-ce-on. 
 Many readers will recollect another word, which for 
 years brought John Kemble into hot water with the pit 
 of Drury Lane. It was the plural of the word ache. 
 This is generally made a dissyllable by the Elizabethan 
 dramatists ; it occurs in the ' Tempest.' Prospero 
 says — 
 
 ♦ I '11 fill thy bones •with aches.' 
 
 What follows, which I do not remember literatim, is 
 such metrically as to require two syllables for aches. 
 But how, then, was this to be pronounced ? Kemble 
 thought akies would sound ludicrous ; aitches therefore 
 he called it : and always the pit howled like a famished 
 menagerie, as they did also when he chose (and he 
 constantly chose) to pronounce beard like bird. Many 
 of these niceties must be known, before a critic can 
 ever allow himself to believe that he is right in obelizing, 
 or in marking with so much as a ? any verse whatever 
 of Milton's. And there are some of these niceties, I 
 am satisfied, not even yet fully investigated. 
 
 It is, however, to be borne in mind, after all allow
 
 470 MILTON VS. SOUTHEY AND LANDOR. 
 
 ances and provisional reservations have been made 
 that Bentley's hypothesis (injudiciously as it was 
 managed by that great scholar) has really a truth of 
 fact to stand upon. Not only must Milton have com- 
 posed his three greatest poems, the two 'Pai'adises 
 and the ' Samson,' in a state of blindness — but sub« 
 sequently, in the correction of the proofs, he must have 
 suffered still more from this conflict with darkness, 
 and, consequently, from this dependence upon care- 
 less readers. This is Bentley's case : as lawyers say 
 ' My lord, that is my case.' It is possible enough to 
 write correctly in the dark, as I myself often do, when 
 losing or missing my lucifers — which, like some elder 
 lucifers, are always rebelliously straying into places 
 where they can have no business. But it is quite im- 
 possible to correct a proof in the dark. At least, if 
 there is such an art, it must be a section of the black 
 art. Bentley gained from Pope that admirable epithet 
 of slashing, [^the rihbalds — from slashing Bentley 
 down to piddling Theobalds,^ i. e. Tihbalds as it was 
 pronounced], altogether from his edition of the 'Para- 
 dise Lost.' This the doctor founded on his own 
 hypothesis as to the advantage taken of Milton's blind- 
 ness ; and corresponding was the havoc which he 
 made of the text. In fact, on the really just allegation 
 that Milton must have used the services of an amanu- 
 ensis ; and the plausible one that this amanuensis, 
 being often weary of his task, would be likely to neg- 
 lect punctilious accuracy ; and the most improbable 
 allegation that this weary person would also be very 
 conceited, and add much rubbish of his own; Bentley 
 resigned himself luxuriously, without the whisper of a 
 scruple, to his own sense of what was or was not
 
 MILTON VS. SOUTHEY AND LANDOR. 471 
 
 poetic, which sense happened to be that of the adder 
 for music. The deaf adder heareth not though the 
 musician charm ever so wisely. No scholarship, 
 which so far beyond other men Bentley had, could 
 gain him the imaginative sensibility which, in a degree 
 so far beyond average men, he wanted. Consequently 
 the world never before beheld such a scene of mas- 
 aacre as his ' Paradise Lost' exhibited. He laid him- 
 self down to his work of extermination like the 
 brawniest of reapers going in steadily with his sickle, 
 coal stripped off, and shirt sleeves tucked up, to deal 
 with an acre of barley. One duty, and no other, 
 rested upon his conscience; one voice he heard — 
 Slash away, and hew down the rotten growths of this 
 abominable amanuensis. The carnage was like that 
 after a pitched battle. The very finest passages in 
 every book of the poem were marked by italics, as 
 dedicated to fire and slaughter. ' Slashing Dick ' went 
 through the whole forest, like a woodman marking 
 with white paint the giant trees that must all come down 
 in a month or so. And one naturally reverts to a 
 passage in the poem itself, where God the Father is 
 supposed to say to his Filial assessor on the heavenly 
 throne, when marking the desolating progress of Sin 
 and Death, — 
 
 * See with what hayoc these fell dogs advance 
 To ravage this fair world.' 
 
 But still this inhuman extravagance of Bentley, in 
 'bllowmg out his hypothesis, does not exonerate tut 
 from bearmg in mind so much truth as that hypothesis 
 really must have had, from the pitiable difficulties of 
 Vhe great poet's situation.
 
 472 MILTON VS. SOUTHEY AND LANDOtt. 
 
 My own opinion, therefore, upon the line, for in 
 stance, from ' Paradise Regained,' wliich Mr. Landor 
 appears to have indicated for tlie readei''s amaze- 
 ment, viz. : — 
 
 • As well might recommend 
 Such solitude before choicest society,' ^ 
 
 is — that it escaped revision from some accident call- 
 ing off the ear of Milton whilst in the act of having the 
 proof read to him. Mr. Landor silently prints it in 
 italics, without assigning his objection ; but, of course, 
 that objection must be — that the line has one foot too 
 much. It is an Alexandrine, such as Dryden scat- 
 tered so profusely, without asking himself why ; but 
 which Milton never tolerates except in the choruses 
 of the Samson. 
 
 ♦ JVbt difficult, if thou hearken to me ' — 
 
 is one of the lines which Mr. Landor thinks that ' no 
 authority will reconcile' to our ears. I think other- 
 wise. The caesura is meant to fall not with the comma 
 after difficult, but after thou ; and there is a most 
 effective and grand suspension intended. It is Satan 
 who speaks — Satan in the wilderness ; and he marks, 
 as he wishes to mark, the tremendous opposition of 
 attitude between the two parties to the temptation. 
 
 • Not difficult if thou ' 
 
 there let the reader pause, as if pulling up suddenly 
 four horses in harness, and throwing them on their 
 haunches — not difficult if thou (in some mysterious 
 Bense the son of God) ; and then, as with a burst of 
 thunder, again giving the reins to your quadriga., 
 
 * hearken to me : *
 
 MILTON VS. SOtrXHEY AND LANDOR. 473 
 
 that is, to me, that am the Prince of the Air, and able 
 to perform all my promises for those that hearken to 
 my temptations. 
 
 Two lines are cited under the same ban of irrecon- 
 cilability to our ears, but on a very different plea. 
 The first of these lines is — 
 
 ' Launcelot, or Pellias, or Pellinore ; ' 
 ITie other 
 
 ' Quintius, Fabricius, Curius, Regulus.' 
 
 The reader will readily suppose that both are objected 
 to as ' roll-calls of proper names.' Now, it is very 
 true that nothing is more offensive to the mind than 
 the practice of mechanically packing into metrical 
 successions, as if packing a portmanteau, names with- 
 out meaning or significance to the feelings. No man 
 ever carried that atrocity so far as Boileau, a fact of 
 which Mr. Landor is well aware ; and slight is the 
 sanction or excuse that can be drawn from him. But 
 it must not be forgotten that Virgil, so scrupulous in 
 finish of composition, committed this fault. I remem 
 ber a passage ending 
 
 ' Noemonaque Prytaninque ; ' 
 
 but, having no Virgil within reach, I cannot at this 
 moment quote it accurately. Homer, with more ex- 
 cuse, however, from the rudeness of his age, is a 
 deadly offender in this way. But the cases from Mil- 
 ton are very different. Milton was incapable of the 
 Homeric or Virgilian blemish. The objection to such 
 rolling musketry of names is, that unless interspersed 
 with epithets, or broken into irregular groups by brief 
 circumstances of parentage, country, or romantic ina
 
 474 MILTON VS. SOTJTHEY AND LANDOR. 
 
 dent, they stand audaciously perking up their heads 
 like lots in a catalogue, arrow-headed palisades, oi 
 young larches in a nursery ground, all occupying the 
 same space, all drawn up in line, all mere iterations 
 of each other. But in 
 
 * Quintius, Fabricius, Curius, Regulus,* 
 
 though certainly not a good line when insulated, 
 (better, however, in its connection with the entire suc- 
 cession of which it forms part), the apology is, that the 
 massy weight of the separate characters enables them 
 to stand like granite pillars or pyramids, proud of their 
 self-supporting independency. 
 
 Mr. Landor makes one correction by a simple im- 
 provement in the punctuation, which has a very fine 
 effect. Rarely has so large a result been distributed 
 through a sentence by so slight a change. It is in the 
 ' Samson.' Samson says, speaking of himself (as 
 elsewhere) with that profound pathos, which to all 
 hearts invests Milton's own situation in the days of his 
 old age, when he was composing that drama — 
 
 ' Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him 
 Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves.^ 
 
 Thas it is usually printed ; that is, without a comma in 
 the latter line ; but, says Landor, ' there ought to be 
 lommas after eyeless, after Gaza, after mill.'' And 
 why ? because thus ' the grief of Samson is aggravated 
 at every member of the sentence.' He (like Milton) 
 was — 1. bimd ; 2. in a city of triumphant enemies; 
 3. working for daily bread ; 4. herding with slaves 
 Samson literally, and Milton with those whom politi- 
 cally he regarded as such. 
 
 Mr. Landor 's perfectly wrong, I must take the
 
 MILTON VS. SOXJTHE'X AND* LANDOB. 475 
 
 liberty of saying, when he demurs to the line in 
 Paradise Regained : ' 
 
 ' From that placid aspect and meek regard,' 
 on the ground that ' meek regard conveys no new idea 
 to placid aspect.'' But aspect is the countenance of 
 Christ when passive to the gaze of others : regard is 
 the same countenance in active contemplation of those 
 others whom he loves or pities. The placid aspect 
 expresses, therefore, the divine rest ; the meek regard 
 expresses the divine benignity : the one is the self- 
 absorption of the total Godhead, the other the eternal 
 emanation of the Filial Godhead. 
 
 'By what ingenuity,' says Landor, 'can we erect 
 into a verse — 
 
 " In the bosom of bliss, and light of light ? " ' 
 Now really it is by my watch exactly three minutes 
 too late for him to make that objection. The court 
 cannot receive it now ; for the line just this moment 
 cited, the ink being hardly yet dry, is of the same 
 identical structure. The usual iambic flow is disturbed 
 in both Imes by the very same ripple, viz., a trochee 
 in the second foot, placid in the one line, bosom in the 
 other. They are a sort of snags, such as lie in the 
 current of the Mississippi. There they do nothing but 
 mischief. Here, when the lines are read in their 
 entire nexus, the disturbance stretches forwards and 
 backwards with good effect on the music. Besides, if 
 it did not, one is willing to take a snag from Milton. 
 bn» one does not altogether like being snagged by the 
 Mississippi. One sees no particular reason for bearing 
 It, if one only knew how to be revenged on a river. 
 But, of these metrical skirmishes, though full of
 
 J76 MILTON. t)S. SOUTHEY AND LANDOR. 
 
 mpoi*tance to the impassioned text of a great poei 
 (for mysterious is the life that connects all modes 
 of passion with rhythmus), let us suppose the casual 
 reader to have had enough. And now at closing for 
 the sake of change, let us treat him to a harlequin 
 trick upon another theme. Did the reader ever happen 
 to see a sheriff's officer arresting an honest gentle- 
 man, who was doing no manner of harm to gentle or 
 simple, and immediately afterwards a second sheriff's 
 officer arresting the first — by which means that 
 second officer merits for himself a place in history ; 
 for at the same moment he liberates a deserving 
 creature (since an arrested officer cannot possibly bag 
 his prisoner), and he also avenges the insult put upon 
 that worthy man? Perhaps the reader did not ever 
 see such a sight ; and, growing personal, he asks me, 
 in return, if I ever saw it. To say the truth, I never 
 did ; except once, in a too-flattering dream ; and 
 though I applauded so loudly as even to waken myself, 
 and shouted ' encore.^' yet all went for nothing ; and I 
 am still waiting for that splendid exemplification of 
 retributive justice. But why ? Why should it be a 
 spectacle so uncommon ? For surely those official 
 arresters of men must want arresting at times as well 
 as better people. At least, however, en attendant one 
 may luxuriate in the vision of such a thing ; and the 
 reader shall now see such a vision rehearsed. He 
 shall see Mr. Landor arresting Milton — Milton, of all 
 men ! — for a flaw in his Roman erudition ; and then 
 he shall see me instantly stepping up, tapping Mr. 
 Landor on the shoulder, and saying, ' Officer, you're 
 wanted ; ' whilst to Milton I say, touching my hat, 
 
 Now, sir, be off run for your life, whilst I holfl
 
 MILTON VS. SOUTHEY AND LANDOR. 477 
 
 Jiis man in custody, lest he should fasten on you 
 Rgain.' 
 
 What Milton had said, speaking of the ^watchful 
 cherubim,' was — 
 
 ' Four faces each 
 Had, like a double Janus ; ' 
 
 Upon which Southey — but, of course, Landor, ven- 
 triloquizing through Southey — says, ' Better left this 
 to the imagination : double Januses are queer figures.' 
 ^'ot at all. On the contrary, they became so common, 
 that finally there were no other. Rome, in her days 
 of childhood, contented herself with a two-faced 
 Janus; but, about the time of the first or second 
 CjBsar, a very ancient statue of Janus was exhumed, 
 which had four faces. Ever afterwards, this sacred 
 resurgent statue became the model for any possible 
 Janus that could show himself in good company. The 
 quadrifrons Janus was now the orthodox Janus ; and 
 it would have been as much a sacrilege to rob him of 
 any single face as to rob a king's statue * of its horse. 
 One thing may recall this to Mr. Lander's memory. I 
 think it was Nero, but certainly it was one of the first 
 six Csesars, that built, or that finished, a magnificent 
 temple to Janus ; and each face was so managed as 
 to point down an avenue leading to a separate market- 
 olace. Now, that there were four market-places, I 
 
 * A king's statue : — Till very lately the etiquette of Europe 
 was, that none but royal persons could have equestrian statues. 
 Lord Hopetoun, the reader will object, is allowed to have a horse, 
 m St. Andrew's Square, Edinburgh. True, but observe that he 
 is not allowed to mount him. The first person, so far as I re- 
 member, that, not being royal, has, in our island, seated himself 
 lomfortably in the saddle, is the Duke of Wellington.
 
 478 MILTON VS. SOITTHEY AND LANDOP.. 
 
 tvill make oath before any Justice of the Peace. One 
 was called the Forum Juliiim, one the Forum Augus- 
 tum, a third the Forum Transitorium : what the 
 fourth was called is best known to itself, for really I 
 forget. But if anybody says that perhaps it was 
 called the Forum Landorium, I am not the man to 
 object ; for few names have deserved such an honor 
 more, whether from those that then looked forward into 
 futurity with one face, or from our posterity that will 
 look back into the vanishing past with aj» ^ther.
 
 ORTHOGRAPHIC MUTINEERS. 
 
 WITH A SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE WORKS OF WALTEE 
 SAVAGE LANDOR. 
 
 As we are all of us crazy when tte wind sets m 
 »ome pai-ticular quarter, let not Mr. Landor be angry 
 with me for suggesting that he is outrageously crazy 
 upon one solitary subject of spelling. It occurs to 
 me, as a plausible solution of his fury upon this point, 
 that perhaps in his earliest school-days, when it is 
 understood that he was exceedingly pugnacious, he 
 may have detested spelling, and (like Roberto the 
 DevUleS*) have found it more satisfactory for all par- 
 ties, that when the presumptuous schoolmaster differed 
 from him on the spelling of a word, the question 
 between them should be settled by a stand-up fight. 
 Both parties would have the victory at times ; and 
 if, according to Pope's expression, 'justice rul'd the 
 ball,' the schoolmaster (who is always a vHlain) would 
 be floored three times out of four ; no great matter 
 whether wrong or not upon the immediate point of 
 spelling discussed. It is in this way, viz., from the 
 urregular adjudications upon litigated spelling, which 
 mus°t have arisen under such a mode of investigating 
 the matter, that we account for Mr. Lander's being 
 sometimes in the right, but too often (with regard to
 
 480 OKTHOGBA.PHIC MUTINEERS. 
 
 long words) egregiously in tlie wrong. As lie grew 
 stronger and taller, he would be coming more and 
 more amongst polj-syllables, and more and more 
 would be getting the upper hand of the schoolmaster ; 
 80 that at length he would have it all his own way , 
 one round would decide the turn-up ; and thencefor- 
 wards his spelling would become frightful. Now, I 
 myself detested spelling as much as all people ought 
 to do, except Continental compositors, who have extra 
 fees for doctoring the lame spelling of ladies and gen- 
 tlemen. But, unhappily, I had no power to thump the 
 schoolmaster into a conviction of his own absurdities ; 
 which, however, I greatly desired to do. Still, my 
 nature, powerless at that time for any active recusancy, 
 was strong for passive resistance ; and that is the 
 hardest to conquer. I took one lesson of this infernal 
 art, and then declined ever to take a second ; and in 
 fact, I never did. Well I remember that unique morn- 
 ing's experience. It was the first page of Entick's 
 Dictionary that I had to get by heart ; a sweet sen- 
 timental task ; and not, as may be fancied, the spelling 
 only, but the horrid attempts of this depraved Entick 
 to explain the supposed meaning of words that proba- 
 bly had none ; many of these, it is my belief, Entick 
 himself forged. Among the strange, grim-looking 
 words, to whose acquaintance I was introduced on that 
 unhappy morning, were abalienate and ahlaqueation — 
 most respectable words, I am fully persuaded, but so 
 exceedingly retired in their habits, that I never once 
 had the honor of meeting either of them in any book, 
 pamphlet, journal, whether in prose or numerous 
 ver«e, though haunting such society myself all my 
 Ufe. I also formed the acquaintance, at that time, o'
 
 OETHOGRAPHIC MXTTINEEES. 481 
 
 the word abacus, which, as a Latin word, I haAO often 
 used, but, as an English, one,, I really never had occa- 
 sion to spell, until this very moment. Yet, after all, 
 what harm comes of such obstinate recusancy against 
 ortliography ? I was an ' occasional conformist ; ' I 
 conformed for one morning, and never more. But, for 
 all that, I spell as well as my neighbors; and I can 
 spell ailaqueation besides, which I suspect that some 
 of them can not. 
 
 My own spelling, therefore, went right, because I 
 was left to nature, with strict neutrality on the part of 
 the authorities. Mr. Lander's too often went wrong, 
 because he was thrown into a perverse channel by his 
 continued triumphs over the prostrate schoolmaster. 
 To toss up, as it were, for the spelling of a word, by 
 the best of nine rounds, inevitably left the impression 
 that chance governed all ; and this accounts for the 
 extreme capriciousness of Landor. 
 
 It is a work for a separate dictionary in quarto to 
 record all the proposed revolutions in spelling through 
 which our English blood, either at home or in Ameri- 
 ca, has thrown off, at times, fhe surplus energy that 
 consumed it. I conceive this to be a sort of cutaneous 
 aifection, like nettle-rash, or ringworm, through which 
 the patient gains relief for his own nervous distraction, 
 whilst, in fact, he does no harm to anybody : for usu- 
 ally he forgets his own reforms, and if he should not, 
 everybody else does. Net to travel back into the 
 «;eventeenth century, and the noble arnry of short-hand 
 writers who have all made Avar upon orthography, for 
 secret purposes of their own, even in the last century, 
 and in the present, what a list of eminent rebels against 
 the spelling-book might be called up to answer for 
 31
 
 482 OKTHOGRAPHIC MTTTINEERS. 
 
 their -wickedness at the bar of the Old Bailev, if any- 
 body would be kind enough to make it a felony 
 Cowper, for instance, too modest and too pensive to 
 raise upon any subject an open standard of rebellion, 
 yet, in quiet Olney, made a small emeute as to the 
 word ' Grecian.' Everybody else was content with 
 one ' e ; ' but he recollecting the cornucopia of es, 
 which Providence had thought fit to empty upon the 
 mother word Greece, deemed it shocking to disinherit 
 the poor child of its hereditary wealth, and wrote it, 
 therefore, Greecian throughout his Homer. Such a 
 modest reform the sternest old Tory could not find in 
 his heart to denounce. But some contagion must have 
 collected about this word Greece ; for the next man, 
 who had much occasion to use it — viz., Mitford^ — 
 who wrote that ' History of Greece ' so eccentric, and 
 so eccentrically praised by Lord Byron, absolutely 
 took to spelling like a heathen, slashed right and left 
 against decent old English words, until, in fact, the 
 whole of Entick's Dictionary [ablaqueation and all) 
 was ready to swear the peace against him. Mitford, 
 in course of time, slept with his fathers ; his grave, I 
 trust, not haunted by the injured words whom he had 
 tomahawked ; and, at this present moment, the Bishop 
 of St. David's reigneth in his stead. His Lordship, 
 uound over to episcopal decorum, has hitherto been 
 sparing in his assaults upon pure old English words : 
 but one may trace the insurrectionary taint, passing 
 down from Cowper through the Avord Grecian, in 
 jtiany of his Anglo-Hellenic forms. For instance, he 
 insists on our saying — not Heracleidcs and PelopidcB, 
 as we all used to do — but Heracleids and Pehpids 
 A. list of my Lord's barbarities, in many other casea^
 
 OfiTHOaEAPHIC MTjTINEEES. 483 
 
 upon unprotected words, poor shivering aliens that fall 
 into his power, when thrown upon the coast of his dio- 
 cese, I had — had, I say, for, alas ! fuit Ilium. 
 
 Yet, really, one is ashamed to linger on cases so 
 mild as those, coming, as one does, in the order of 
 atrocity, to Elphinstone, to Noah Webster, a Yankee 
 — which word means, not an American, but that 
 separate order of Americans, growing in Massachu- 
 setts, Rhode Island, or Connecticut, in fact, a New 
 Englander^ — and to the rabid Ritson. Noah would 
 naturally have reduced us all to an antediluvian sim- 
 plicity. Shem, Ham, and Japheth, probably separated 
 in consequence of perverse varieties in spelling ; so 
 that orthographical unity might seem to him one con- 
 dition for preventing national schisms. But as to the 
 rabid Ritson, who can describe his vagaries ? What 
 great arithmetician can furnish an index to his absur- 
 dities, or what great decipherer furnish a key to the 
 principles of these absurdities ? In his very title- 
 pages, nay, in the most obstinate of ancient techni- 
 calities, he showed his cloven foot to the astonished 
 reader. Some of his many works were printed in 
 Pall-Mail ; now, as the world is pleased to pronounce 
 that word Pel-Mel, thus and no otherwise (said Rit- 
 son) it shall be spelled for ever. Whereas, on the 
 contrary, some men would have said : The spelling is 
 well enough, it is the public pronunciation which is 
 wrong. This ought to be Paul- Maul ; or, perhaps — 
 agreeably to the sound which we give to the a in such 
 rords as what, quantity, want — still better, and with 
 more gallantry, Poll-Moll. The word Mr., again, in 
 Ritson's reformation, must have astonished the Post- 
 office. He. insisted that this cabalistical-looking form,
 
 484 OBTHOGEAPHIC MTJTINEEKS. 
 
 wliicli might as reasonably be translated into monstst 
 was a direct fraud on the national language, quite as 
 bad as clipping the Queen's coinage. How, then, 
 should it be written ? Reader ! reader ! that you will 
 ask such a question ! mister, of course ; and mind that 
 you put no capital m ; unless, indeed, you are speak- 
 ing of some great gun, some mister of misters, such as 
 Mr. Pitt of old, or perhaps a reformer of spelling. 
 The plural, again, of such words as romance, age, 
 horse, he wrote romancees, agees, horsees ; and upon 
 the following equitable consideration, that, inasmuch 
 as the e final in the singular is mute, that is, by a 
 general vote of the nation has been allowed to retire 
 upon a superannuation allowance, it is abominable to 
 call it back upon active service — like the modern 
 Chelsea pensioners — ^as must be done, if it is to bear 
 the whole weight of a separate syllable like ces. Con- 
 sequently, if the nation and Parliament mean to keep 
 faith, they are bound to hire a stout young e to run in 
 the traces with the old original e, taking the whole 
 work off his aged shoulders. Volumes would not suf- 
 fice to exhaust the madness of Eitson upon this sub- 
 ject. And there was this peculiarity in his madness 
 over and above its clamorous ferocity, that being no 
 classical scholar (a meagre self-taught Latinist, and 
 no Grecian at all), though profound as a black-letter 
 scholar, he cared not one straw for ethnographic rela- 
 tions of the words, nor unity of analogy, which are the 
 principles that generally have governed reformers of 
 spelling. He was an attorney, and moved constantly 
 under the monomaniac idea that an action lay on be- 
 balf of the misused letters, mutes, liquids, vowels, and 
 diphthongs, against somebody or other (John Doe, was
 
 OBTHOGKAPflIC MUTINEERS. 485 
 
 it, or Richard Roe ?) for trespass on any rights of theirs 
 which an attorney might trace, and of course for any 
 direct outrage upon their persons. Yet no man was 
 more systematically an oflfender in both ways than 
 himself ; tying up one leg of a quadruped word, and 
 forcing it to run upon three ; cutting off noses and 
 ears, if he fancied that equity required it : and living 
 in eternal hot water with a language which he pre- 
 tended eternally to protect. 
 
 And yet all these fellows were nothing in compari- 
 son of Mr.^' Pinkerton. The most of these men did 
 but ruin the national spelling ; but Pinkerton — the 
 monster Pinkerton — proposed a revolution which 
 would have left us nothing to spell. It is almost in- 
 credible — if a book regularly printed and published, 
 bought and sold, did not remain to attest the fact — 
 that this horrid barbarian seriously proposed, as a 
 glorious discovery for refining our language, the fol- 
 lowing plan. All people were content wdth the com- 
 pass of the English language : its range of expression 
 was equal to anything ; but, unfortunately, as com- 
 pared with the sweet, orchestral languages of the 
 Bouth — Spanish the stately, and Italian the lovely — 
 it wanted rhythmus and melody. Clearly, then, the 
 one supplementary grace, which it remained for mod- 
 ern art to give, is that every one should add at discre- 
 tion and a, ino and ano, to the end of the English 
 words. The language, in its old days, should be 
 taught struttare strultissimainente. As a specimen, 
 Mr. Pinkerton favored us mth his own version of a 
 famous passage in Addison, viz., ' The Vision of 
 Mirza ' The passage, which begins thus, ' As I sat 
 nn the top of a rock,' being translated into, ' As I sattc
 
 486 ORTHOGKAPHIC MTTTIIfEEBS. 
 
 on tlie toppino of a rocko,' &c. But luckilissime thiA 
 proposalio of the ahsurdissimo Pinkertonio^ was not 
 adoptado by anyhody-ini whatever -ano. 
 
 Mr. Landor is more learned, and probably more 
 consistent in his assaults upon the established spelling 
 than most of these elder reformers. But that does not 
 make him either learned enough or consistent enough. 
 He never ascends into Anglo-Saxon, or the many cog- 
 nate languages of the Teutonic family, which is indis- 
 pensable to a searching inquest upon our language ; 
 he does not put forward in this direction even the 
 slender qualifications of Home Tooke. • But Greek 
 and Latin are quite unequal, when disjoined from the 
 elder wheels in our etymological system, to the work- 
 ing of the total machinery of the English language. 
 Mr. Landor proceeds upon no fixed principles in his 
 changes. Sometimes it is on the principle of internal 
 analogy within itself, that he would distort or retrotort 
 the language ; sometimes on the principle of externeJ 
 analogy with its roots ; sometimes on the principle of 
 euphony, or of metrical convenience. Even within 
 such principles he is not uniform. All well-built 
 English scholars, for instance, know that the word 
 fealty cannot be made into a dissyllable : trisyllabic 
 it ever was ^ with the elder poets — Spenser, Milton, 
 &c. ; and so it is amongst all the modern poets who 
 have taken any pains with their English studies : e. g, 
 
 ' The eagle, lord of land and sea, 
 Stoop'd — down to pay him fe-al-ty.' 
 
 It is dreadful to hear a man say feal-ty in any case ; 
 but here it is luckily impossible. Now, Mr. Lando* 
 generally is correct, and trisects the word ; but once
 
 OBTHOGBAPHIC MTJTINEEB8. 
 
 487 
 
 u least, lie bisects it. I complain, besides, that Mr, 
 Landor, in urging the authority of Milton for ortbo- 
 grapbic innovations, does not always distinguisb as to 
 Milton's motives. It is true, as be contends, tbat, in 
 some instances, Milton reformed the spelling in obedi- 
 ence to the Italian precedent : and certainly without 
 blame ; as in sovran, sdeign, which ought not to be 
 printed (as it is) with an elision before the s, as if 
 short for disdain; but in other instances Milton's mo- 
 tive had no reference to etymology. Sometimes it was 
 this. In Milton's day the modern use of italics was 
 nearly unknown. Everybody is aware that, in our 
 authorized version of the Bible, published in Milton's 
 infancy, italics are never once used for the purpose of 
 emphasis — but exclusively to indicate such words or 
 auxiHary forms as, though implied and virtualhj pres- 
 ent in the original, are not textually expressed, but 
 must be so in English, from the different genius of 
 the language.** Now, this want of a proper technical 
 resource amongst the compositors of the age, for indi- 
 cating a peculiar stress upon the word, evidently drove 
 Milto'n into some perplexity for a compensatory contri- 
 vance. It was unusually requisite for him, with his 
 elaborate metrical system and his divine ear, to have 
 an art for throwing attention upon his accents, and 
 apon his muffling of accents. When, for instance, he 
 wishes to direct a bright jet of emphasis upon the pos- 
 sessive pronoun their, he writes it as we now write it. 
 But, when he wishes to take off the accent, he writes 
 t thir.^^ Like Ritson[he writes therefor and wherefor 
 mthout the final e ; not regarding the analogy, but 
 lirgly the metrical quantity : for it was shocking to 
 tuB°cla8sical feeling that a sound so shor^ to the eai
 
 488 OETHOGKAPHIC MITTINEEHS. 
 
 should be represented to the eye by so long a combi- 
 nation as fore ; and tbe more so, because uneducated 
 people did then, and do now, often equilibrate the 
 accent between the two syllables, or rather make the 
 quantity long in both syllables, whilst giving an over- 
 balance of the accent to the last. The ' Paradise Lost,* 
 being printed during Milton's blindness, did not receive 
 the full and consistent benefit of his spelling reforms, 
 which (as I have contended) certainly arose partly in 
 the imperfections of typography at that eera ; \but such 
 changes as had happened most to impress his ear with 
 a sense of their importance, he took a special trouble, 
 even under all the disadvantages of his darkness, to 
 have rigorously adopted. He must have astonished 
 the compositors, though not quite so much as the 
 tiger-cat Ritson or the Mr. (viz. monster) Pinkerton — 
 each after his kind — astonished their compositors. 
 
 But the caprice of Mr. Landor is shown most of all 
 upon Greek names. Nous autres say ' Aristotle,' and 
 are quite content with it until we migrate into some 
 extra-superfine world ; but this title will not do for 
 him : ' Aristotles ' it must be. And why so ? Be- 
 cause, answers the Landor, if once I consent to say 
 Aristotle, then I am pledged to go the whole hog ; 
 and perhaps the next man I meet is Empedocles, 
 whom, in that case, I must call Empedocle. Well, do 
 so. Call him Empedocle ; it will not break his back, 
 which seems broad enough. But, now, mark the con- 
 tradictions in which Mr. Landor is soon landed. He 
 says, as everybody says, Terence, and not Terentius, 
 Horace, and not Horatius ; but he must leave ofi" such 
 horrid practices, because he dares not call Lucretius by 
 vhe analogous name of Lucrece, since that would be
 
 ORTHOGRAPHIC MXTTINEEBS. 489 
 
 putting a she instead of a he ; nor Propertius by the 
 name of Properce, because that would be speaking 
 French instead of English. Next he says, and con- 
 tinually he says, Virgil for Virgilius. But, on that 
 principle, he ought to say Valer for Valerius ; and yet 
 again he ought not : because as he says Tully and not 
 Tull for Tullius, so also is he bound, in Christian 
 equity, to say Valery for Valer ; but he cannot say 
 either Valer or Valery. So here we are in a mess. 
 Thirdly, I charge him with saying Ovid for Ovidius: 
 which I do, which everybody does, but which he must 
 not do : for if he means to persist in that, then, upon 
 his own argument from analogy, he must call Didius 
 Julianus by the shocking name of Did, which is the 
 same thing as Tit — since T is D soft. Did was a 
 very great man indeed, and for a very short time 
 indeed. Probably Did was the only man that ever 
 bade for an empire, and no mistake, at a public auc- 
 tion. Think of Did's bidding for the Roman empire ; 
 nay, think also of Did's having the lot actually 
 knocked down to him; and of Did's going home to 
 dinner with the lot in his pocket. It makes one per- 
 spire to think that, if the reader or myself had been 
 living at that time, and had been prompted by some 
 whim within us to bid against him — that is, he or I 
 — should actually have come down to posterity by the 
 abominable name of Anti-Did. All of us in England 
 say Livy when speaking of the great historian, not 
 Livius. Yet Livius Andronicus it would be impos- 
 sible to indulge with that brotherly name of Livy. 
 Marcus Antonius is called — not by Shakspeare only, 
 but by all the world — Mark Antony ; but who is it 
 that ever called Marcus Brutus by the affectionate
 
 490 ORTHOGEAPHIC MT7TINEEE8. 
 
 name o^ Mark Brute ? ' Keep your distance,' we say 
 to that very doubtful brute, ' and expect no pet names 
 from us.' Finally, apply the principle of abbreviation, 
 involved in the names of Pliny, Livy, Tully, all sub- 
 stituting y for ius, to Marius — that grimmest of grim 
 visions that rises up to us from the phantasmagoria of 
 Roman history. Figure to yourself, reader, that trucu- 
 lent face, trenched and scarred with hostile swords, 
 carrying thunder in its ominous eye-brows, and fright- 
 ening armies a mile off with its scowl, being saluted 
 by the tenderest of feminine names, as ' My Mary.' 
 
 Not only, therefore, is Mr. Landor inconsistent in 
 these innovations, but the innovations themselves, sup- 
 posing them all harmonized and established, would 
 but plough up the landmarks of old hereditary feel- 
 ings. We learn oftentimes, by a man's bearing a 
 good-natured sobriquet amongst his comrades, that he 
 is a kind-hearted, social creature, popular with them 
 all ! And it is an illustration of the same tendency, 
 that the scale of popularity for the classical authors 
 amongst our fathers, is registered tolerably well, in a 
 gross general way, by the difference between having 
 and not having a familiar name. If we except the first 
 Caesar, the mighty Caius Julius, who was too majestic 
 to invite familiarity, though too gracious to have 
 repelled it, there is no author whom our forefathers 
 loved, but has won a sort of Christian name in the 
 land. Homer, and Hesiod, and Pindar, we all say ; 
 we cancel the alien us ; but we never say Theocrit for 
 Theocritus. Anacreon remains rigidly Grecian marble ; 
 but that is only because his name is not of a plastic 
 •brm — else everybody loves the sad old fellow. The 
 •ame bar to familiarity existed in the names of the
 
 OETHOGKAPHIC MITTINEEB8. 491 
 
 tragic poets, except perhaps for ^schylus ; -who, 
 however, like Caesar, is too awful for a caressing 
 name. But Roman names were, generally, more 
 flexible. Livy and Sallust have ever been favorites 
 with men ; Livy with everybody ; Sallust, in a degree 
 that may be called extravagant, with many celebrated 
 Frenchmen, as the President des Brosses, and in our 
 own days with M. Lerminier, a most eloquent and 
 original writer {'Etudes Historiques') ; and two 
 centuries ago, with the greatest of men, John Milton, 
 in a degree that seems to me absolutely mysterious. 
 These writers are baptized into our society — have 
 gained a settlement in our parish: when you call a 
 man Jack, and not Mr. John, it's plain you like him. 
 But, as to the gloomy Tacitus, our fathers liked him 
 not. He was too vinegar a fellow for them ; nothing 
 hearty or genial about him ; he thought ill of every- 
 body ; and we all suspect that, for those times, he was 
 perhaps the worst of the bunch himself. Accordingly, 
 this Tacitus, because he remained so perfectly tacit for 
 our jolly old forefathers' ears, never slipped into the 
 name Tacit for their mouths ; nor ever will, I predict, 
 for the mouths of posterity. Coming to the Roman 
 poets, I must grant that three great ones, viz., Lucre- 
 tius, Statius, and Valerius Flaccus, have not been 
 complimented with the freedom of our city, as they 
 should have been, in a gold box. I regret, also, the 
 ill fortune, in this respect, of Catullus, if he was 
 really the author of that grand headlong dithyrambic, 
 the Atys : he certainly ought to have been ennobled 
 by the title of Catull. Looking to very much of his 
 writings, much more I regret the case of Plautus ; and 
 ' am sure that if her Majesty would waiTant his bear-
 
 492 OKTHOGEAPHIC MTTTINEEES. 
 
 ing tlie name and anns of Plant in all time coming, it 
 would gratify many of us. As to the rest, or those 
 that anybody cares about, Horace, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, 
 Martial, Claudian, all have been raised to the peerage. 
 Ovid was the great poetic favorite of Milton ; and not 
 without a philosophic ground : his festal gayety, and 
 the brilliant velocity of his aurora horealis intellect, 
 forming a deep natural equipoise to the mighty gloom 
 and solemn planetary movement in the mind of the 
 other ; like the wedding of male and female counter- 
 parts. Ovid was, therefore, rightly Milton's favorite. 
 But the favorite of all the world is Horace. Were 
 there ten peerages, were there three blue ribbons, 
 vacant, he ought to have them all. 
 
 Besides, if Mr. Landor could issue decrees, and even 
 harmonize his decrees for reforming our Anglo-Grecian 
 spelling — decrees which no Council of Trent could 
 execute, without first rebuilding the Holy Office of the 
 Inquisition — still there would be little accomplished. 
 The names of all continental Europe are often in con- 
 fusion, from diff'erent causes, when Anglicized : Ger- 
 man names are rarely spelled rightly by the laity of 
 our isle : Polish and Hungarian never. Many foreign 
 towns have in England what botanists would call trivial 
 names ; Leghorn, for instance, Florence, Madrid, Lis- 
 bon, Vienna, Munich, Antwerp, Brussels, the Hague, 
 — all unintelligible names to the savage Continental 
 native. Then, if Mr. Landor reads as much of Anglo- 
 Indian books as I do, he must be aware that, for many 
 years back, they have all been at sixes and sevens ; so 
 that now most Hindoo words are in masquerade, and 
 we shall soon require English pundits in Leadenhall 
 Street.^ How does he like, for instance, Sipahee, the
 
 OB.XHOQEAPHIC MUTINEEBS. 493 
 
 modem form for Sepoy 1 or Tepheen for Tiffin 7 At 
 this rate of metamorphosis, absorbing even the conse- 
 crated names of social meals, we shall soon cease to 
 understand what that disjune was which his sacred 
 Majesty graciously accepted at Tillietudlem. But even 
 elder forms of oriental speech are as little harmonized 
 in Christendom. A few leagues of travelling make 
 the Hebrew unintelligible to us ; and the Bible be- 
 comes a Delphic mystery to Englishmen amongst the 
 countrymen of Luther. Solomon is there called Sala- 
 mo ; Samson is called Simson, though probably he 
 never published an edition of Euclid. Nay, even in 
 this native isle of ours, you may be at cross purposes 
 on the Bible with your own brother. I am, myself, 
 next door neighbor to Westmoreland, being a Lan- 
 cashire man ; and, one day, I was talking with a 
 Westmoreland farmer, whom, of course, I ought to 
 have understood very well ; but I had no chance with 
 him : for I could not make out who that No wias, con- 
 cerning whom or concerning which, he persisted in 
 talking. It seemed to me, from the context, that No 
 must be a man, and by no means a chair ; but so very 
 negative a name, you perceive, furnished no positive 
 hints for solving the problem. I said as much to the 
 farmer, who stared in stupefaction. ' ' What,' cried 
 he, ' did a far-larn'd man, like you, fresh from Oxford, 
 never hear of No, an old gentleman that should have 
 been drowned, but was not, when all his folk were 
 drowned r ' ' Never, so help me Jupiter,' was my 
 reply : ' never heard of him to this hour, any more 
 than of Yes, an old gentleman that should have been 
 aanged, but was not, when all his folk were hanged. 
 Populous No — I had read of in the Prophets ; but
 
 494 OBTHOGEAPHIC MTJTINEEE8. 
 
 that was not an old gentleman.' It turned out that 
 the farmer and all his compatriots in bonny Martindale 
 had been taught at the parish school to rob the Patri- 
 arch Noah of one clear moiety appertaining in fee 
 simple to that ancient name. But afterwards I found 
 that the farmer was not so entirely absurd as he had 
 seemed. The Septuagint, indeed, is clearly against 
 him ; for there, as plain as a pikestaff, the farmer 
 might have read No^'i. But, on the other hand. Pope, 
 not quite so great a scholar as he Avas a poet, yet still 
 a fau* one, always made Noah into a monosyllable ; 
 and that seems to argue an old English usage ; though 
 I really believe Pope's reason for adhering to such an 
 absurdity was with a prospective view to the rhymes 
 How, or row, or stow (an important idea to the Ark), 
 which struck him as likely words, in case of any call 
 for writing about Noah. 
 
 The long and the short of it is — that the whole 
 world lies in heresy or schism on the subject of orthog- 
 raphy. All climates alike groan under heterography. 
 It is absolutely of no use to begin with one's own 
 grandmother in such labors of reformation. It is toil 
 thrown away : and as nearly hopeless a task as the 
 proverb insinuates that it is to attempt a reformation in 
 that old lady's mode of eating eggs. She laughs at 
 one. She has a vain conceit that she is able, out of 
 her own proper resources, to do both, viz., the spelling 
 and the eating of the eggs. And all that remains for 
 , philosophers, like Mr. Landor and myself, is — to turn 
 away in sorrow rather than in anger, dropping a silent 
 tear for the poor old lady's infatuation.
 
 ON WORDSWORTH'S POETRY. 
 
 Heretofore, upon one impulse or another, I have 
 retraced fugitive memorials of several persons cele- 
 brated in our own times ; but I have never undertaken 
 an examination of any man's writings. The one labor 
 is, comparatively, without an effort ; the other is both 
 difficult, and, with regard to contemporaries, is invidi- 
 ous. In genial moments the characteristic remem- 
 brances of men expand as fluently as buds travel into 
 blossoms; but criticism, if it is to be conscientious and 
 profound, and if it is applied to an object so unlimited 
 as poetry, must be almost as unattainable by any hasty 
 effort as fine poetry itself. " Thou hast convinced 
 me," says Rasselas to Imlac, " that it is impossible to be 
 a poet ; " so vast had appeared to be the array of qualifi- 
 cations. But, with the same ease, Imlac might have 
 convinced the prince that it was impossible to be a critic. 
 And hence it is, that, in the sense of absolute and 
 philosophic criticism, we have little or none ; for, before 
 ^hat can exist, we must have a good psychology ; whereas, 
 It present, we have none at all. 
 
 If, however, it is more difficult to write critical 
 BKetches than sketches of persoi.ty" recollections, often
 
 496 ON Wordsworth's POETRr. 
 
 It IS much less connected with painful scruples. Of 
 books, resting only on grounds which, in sincerity, you 
 believe to be true, and speaking without anger or scorn 
 you can hardly say the thing which ought to be taken 
 amiss. But of men and women you dare not, and must 
 nf^t, tell all that chance may have revealed to you. 
 Sometimes you are summoned to silence by pity for that 
 general human infirmity, which you also, the writer, 
 share. Sometimes you are checked by the consideration 
 that perhaps your knowledge of the case was originally 
 gamed under opportunities allowed by confidence or by 
 unsuspecting carelessness. Sometimes the disclosure 
 would cause quarrels between parties now at peace. 
 Sometimes it would carry pain, such as you could not 
 feel justified in carrying, into the mind of him who was 
 its object. Sometimes, again, if right to be told, it might 
 be difficult to prove. Thus, for one cause or another, 
 some things are sacred, and some things are perilous, 
 amongst any personal revelations that else you might 
 have it in your power to make. And seldom, indeed, is 
 your own silent retrospect of such connections altogether 
 happy. " Put not your trust in princes, nor in the sons 
 of princes," — this has been the warning, — this has 
 been the farewell moral, winding up and pointing the 
 •experience of dying statesmen. Not less tru^y it might 
 be said, " Put not your trust in the intellectual princes 
 of your age : " form no connections too close with any 
 who live only in the atmosphere of admiration and praise 
 The love or the friendship of such people rarely con 
 tracts itself into the narrow circle of individuals. You 
 If you are brilliant like themselves, they will hate ; you 
 if you are dull, *^ ' '11 despise. Gaze, therefore, om
 
 ON wordswokth's poetry. 497 
 
 the splendor of such idols as a passing stranger. Look 
 for a moment as one sharing in the idolatry ; but pass 
 on before the splendor has been sullied by human frailty, 
 or before your own generous homage has been con- 
 founded with offerings of weeds. 
 
 Safer, then, it is to scrutinize the works of eminent 
 poets, than long to connect yourself with themselves, or 
 :o revive your remembrances of them in any personal 
 record. Now, amongst all works that have illustrated 
 our own age, none can more deserve an earnest notice 
 than those of the Laureate^; and on some grounds, pecu- 
 liar to themselves, none so much. Their merit in fact 
 is not only supreme but unique ; not only supreme in 
 their general class, but unique as in a class of their own. 
 And there is a challenge of a separate nature to the 
 curiosity of the readers, in the remarkable contrast 
 between the first stage of Wordsworth 's acceptation with 
 the public and that which he enjoys at present. One 
 original obstacle to the favorable impression of the 
 / Wordsworthian poetry, and an obstacle purely self- 
 ) created, was his theory of poetic diction. The diction 
 itself, without the theory, was of less consequence ; for 
 the mass of readers would have been too blind or too 
 careless to notice it. But the preface to the second 
 edition of his Poems (2 vols. 1799-1800), compelled 
 'hem to notice it. Nothing more injudicious was ever 
 ■Jone by man. An unpopular truth would, at any rate, 
 lave been a bad inauguration, for what, on oMer accounts 
 [he author had announced as " an experiment." His 
 poetry was already an experiment as regarded the quality 
 of the subjects selected, and as regarded the mode of 
 treating them. That was surely trial enough for the 
 32
 
 498 ON WORDSWORTH'S POETRY. 
 
 reader's untrained sensibilities, without the unpopular 
 truth besides, as to the diction. But, in the mean time, 
 this truth, besides being unpopular, was also, in part, 
 false : it was true, and it was not true. And it was not 
 true in a double way. Stating broadly, and allowing it 
 to be taken for his meaning, that the diction of ordinary 
 life, in his own words, " the very language of man," was 
 the proper diction for poetry, the writer meant no such 
 thing ; for only a part of this diction, according to his 
 own subsequent restriction, was available for such a use. 
 And, secondly, as his own subsequent practice showed, 
 even this part was available only for peculiar classes of 
 poetry. In his own exquisite " Laodamia," in his " Son- 
 nets," in his "Excursion," few are his obligations to the 
 idiomatic language of life, as distinguished from that of 
 books, or of prescriptive usage. Coleridge remarked, 
 justly, that " The Excursion " bristles beyond most poems 
 with what are called " dictionary " words ; that is, poly- 
 syllabic words of Latin or Greek origin. And so it 
 must ever be, in meditative poetry upon solemn philo- 
 sophic themes. The gamut of ideas needs a correspond- 
 ing gamut of expressions ; the scale of the thinking, 
 which ranges through every key, exacts, for the artist, 
 an unlimited command over the entire scale of the 
 mstrument which he employs. Never, in fact, was there 
 a more erroneous direction than that given by a modern 
 rector^'* of the Glasgow University to the students, — viz., 
 that they should cultivate the Saxon part of our language, 
 \t the cost of the Latin part. Nonsense ! Both are 
 mdispensable ; and, speaking generally without stopping 
 to distinguish as to subjects, both are equally indispens 
 able. Pathos, in situations which are homely, or at al.
 
 ON Wordsworth's poetry. 499 
 
 connected with domestic affections, naturally moves by 
 Saxon words. Lyrical emotion of every kind, which 
 (to merit the name of lyrical), must be in the state of 
 flux and reflux, or, generally, of agitation, also requires 
 the Saxon element of our language. And why ? Be- 
 cause the Saxon is the aboriginal element ; the basis, 
 and not the superstructure : consequently it comprehends 
 all the ideas which are natural to the heart of man and 
 to the elementary situations of life. And, although the 
 Latin often furnishes us with duplicates of these ideas, 
 yet the Saxon or monosyllabic part has the advantage 
 of precedency in our use and knowledge ; for it is the 
 language of the nursery, whether for rich or poor, in 
 which great philological academy no toleration is given 
 ,to words in ^^osity" or ^^ ation." There is, therefore, a 
 ^great advantage, as regards the consecration to our feel- 
 ings, settled, by usage and custom, upon the Saxon 
 strands, in the mixed yam of our native tongue. And, 
 universally, this may be remarked — that, wherever the 
 passion of a poem is of that sort which iises, presumes, 
 or postulates the ideas, without seeking to extend them, 
 Saxon will be the " cocoon" (to speak by the language 
 applied to silk-worms) which the poem spins for itself 
 But, on the other hand, where the motion of the feeling 
 is by and through the ideas, where (as in rehgious or 
 meditative poetry — Young's for instance, or Cowper's) the 
 pathos creeps and kmdles underneath the very tissues of 
 the thinking, there the Latin will predominate ; and so 
 much so that, whilst the flesh, the blood and the muscle, 
 will be often almost exclusively Latin, the articulations 
 only, or hinges of connection, will be anglo-Saxon. 
 But a blunder, more perhaps from thoughtlessness and
 
 600 ON WORDSWORTH'S POETRr. 
 
 careless reading, than from malice on the part of the 
 professional critics, ought to have roused Wordsworth 
 into a firmer feeling of the entire question. These 
 critics have fancied that, in Wordsworth's estimate, 
 whatsoever was plebeian was also poetically just in dic- 
 tion ; not as though the impassioned phrase were some- 
 times the vernacular phrase, but as though the vernacular 
 phrase were universally the impassioned. They naturally 
 went on to suggest, as a corollary, which Wordsworth 
 could not refuse, that Dryden and Pope must be trans- 
 lated into the flash diction of prisons and the slang of 
 streets, before they could be regarded as poetically cos- 
 tumed. Now, so far as these critics were concerned, 
 the answer would have been — simply to say, that much 
 in the poets mentioned, but especially of the racy. Dry- 
 den, actually is in that vernacular .diction fo;r which 
 Wordsworth contended; and, for the other part, which 
 is not, frequently it does require the very purgation, (if 
 that were possible), which the critics were presuming to 
 be so absurd. In Pope, and sometimes in Dryden, there 
 is much of the unfeeling and the prescriptive slang which 
 Wordsworth denounced. During the eighty years be- 
 tv/een 1660 and 1740, grew up that scrofulous taint in 
 our diction which w^as denounced by Wordsworth as 
 technically " poetic language ; " and, if Dryden and Pope 
 were less infected than others, this was merely because 
 their understandings were finer. Much there is in both 
 poets, as regards diction, which does require correction. 
 And if, so far, the critics should resist Wordsworth's 
 principle of reform, not he, but they, would have been 
 found the patrons of deformity. This course would 
 soon have turned the tables upon the critics. Fo the
 
 ON tvokdsworth's poetry. 501 
 
 poets, or the class of poets, whom they unwisely selected 
 as models, susceptible of no correction, happen to be 
 those who chiefly require it. But their foolish selection 
 ought not to have intercepted or clouded the question 
 when put in another shape, since in this shape it opens 
 into a very troublesome dilemma. Spenser, Shakspeare, 
 the Bible of 1610, and Milton, — how say you, William 
 Wordsworth, — are these right and true as to diction, or 
 are they not ? If you say they are, then what is it that 
 you are proposing to change ? What room for a revolu- 
 tion ? Would you, as Sancho says, have " better bread 
 than is made of wheat ? " But if you say, no, they are 
 not ; then, indeed, you open a fearful range to your own 
 artillery, but in a war greater than you could, appa- 
 rently, have contemplated. In the first case, that is, if 
 the leading classics of the English literature are, in 
 quality of diction and style, loyal to the canons of sound 
 taste, then you cut away the lociis standi for yourself as 
 a reformer : the reformation applies only to secondary 
 and recent abuses. In the second, if they also are 
 faulty, you undertake an onus of hostility so vast that 
 you will be found fighting against the stars. 
 
 It is clear, therefore, that Wordsworth erred, and 
 
 caused unnecessary embarrassment, equally to the attack 
 
 and to the defence, by not assigning the names of the 
 
 parties ofTended, whom he had specially contemplated. 
 
 /The bodies of the criminals should have been had into 
 
 ■; court. But much more he erred in another point, where , 
 
 "^his neglect cannot be thought of without astonishment. 
 
 The whole appeal turned upon a comparison between 
 
 »wo modes of phraseology; each of the^ie, the bad and 
 
 the good, should have been extensively illustrated ; and-.—^-
 
 502 ON wordswokth's poetry. 
 
 until that IS done, tlie whole dispute is an aerial subtilty 
 equally beyond the grasp of the best critic and the worst. 
 How could, a man so much in earnest, and so deeply 
 interested in the question, commit so capital an over- 
 sight ? Tantamne rem tarn negligenter ? The truth is, 
 that, at this day, after a lapse of forty-seven years, and 
 some discussion, the whole question moved by Words- 
 worth is still a res Integra. And for this reason, that 
 no sufficient specimen has ever been given of the par- 
 ticular phraseology which each party contemplates as 
 good or as bad : no man, in this dispute, steadily under- 
 stands even himself; and, if he did, no other person 
 understands him for want of distinct illustrations. Not 
 only the answer, therefore, is still entirely in arrear, but 
 oven the question has not yet practically explained 
 itself so as that an answer to it could be possible. 
 
 Passing from the diction of Wordsworth's poetry to its 
 matter, the least plausible objection ever brought against 
 it was that of Mr. Hazlitt : " One would suppose," he 
 said, " from the tenor of his subjects, that on this earth 
 there was neither marrying nor giving in marriage." 
 But as well might it be said of Aristophanes : " One 
 would suppose, that in Athens no such thing had been 
 known as sorrow and weeping." Or Wordsworth him- 
 self might say reproachfully to some of Mr. Hazlitt's 
 more favored poets ; " Judging by ycnir themes, a man 
 must believe that there is no such thing on our planet 
 as fighting and kicking." Wordsworth has written many 
 memorable poems (for mstance, " On the Tyrolean and 
 the Spanish Insurrections ; " " On the Retreat from Mo3 
 ;*.ow;" "On the Feast, of Brougham Castle"), all sym 
 D^thizing powerfully with the martial spirit. Othet
 
 ON Wordsworth's poetry. 
 
 poets, favorites of Mr. Hazlitt, have never struck a 
 solitary note from this Tyrtaean lyre ; and who blames 
 them? Surely, if every man finds his powers hmited, 
 every man would do well to respect this silent admom- 
 tion of nature, by not travelling out of his appomted 
 walk, through any coxcombry of sporting a spurious 
 versatility. And in this view, what Mr. Hazlitt made the 
 reproach of the poet, is amongst the first of his praises. 
 But there is another reason why Wordsworth could not 
 meddle with festal raptures like the glory of a wedding- 
 day These raptures are not only too brief, but (which \ 
 is worse) they tend downwards : even for as long as 
 they last, they do not move upon an ascending scale. 
 And even that is not their worst fault: they do not dif- 
 fu.e or communicate themselves : the wretches chiefly 
 interested in a marriage are so selfish, that they keep all 
 the rapture to themselves. Mere joy, that does not 
 lincrer and reproduce itself in reverbemtions or mirrors 
 is not fitted for poetry. What would the sun be itself, 
 if it were a mere blank orb of fire that did not multiply 
 its splendors through millions of rays refracted and 
 reflected; or if its glory were not endlessly caught, 
 splintered, and thrown back by atmospheric repercus- 
 
 sions? , 
 
 There is, besides, a still subtler reason (and one that 
 , ught not to have escaped the acuteness of Mr. Hazlitt), 
 why the muse of Wordsworth could not glorify a wed- 
 ling festival. Poems no longer than a sonnet he might 
 derive from such an impulse : and one such poem of his 
 there really is. But whosoever looks searchingly into 
 the characteristic genius of Wordsworth, will see that he 
 does not willingly deal with a passion in its direct aspect.
 
 504 ON Wordsworth's poetry. 
 
 or presenting an unmodified contour, but in forms more 
 complex and oblique, and when passing under the shadow 
 of some secondary passion. Joy, for instance, that wells 
 up from constitutional sources, joy that is ebullient from 
 youth to age, and cannot cease to sparkle, he yet exhib- 
 its in the person of Matthew,^ the village schoolmaster, 
 as touched and overgloomed by memories of sorrow. In 
 the poem of " V/e are Seven," which brings into day for 
 the first time a profound fact in the abysses of human 
 nature, namely, that the mind of an infant cannot admit 
 the idea of death, anymore than the fountain of light can 
 comprehend the aboriginal darkness (a truth on which 
 Mr. Ferrier has since commented beautifully in his 
 " Philosophy of Consciousness ") ; the little mountaineer, 
 who furnishes the text for this lovely strain, she whose 
 fulness of life could not brook the gloomy faith in a 
 grave, is yet (for the effect upon the reader) brought into 
 connection with the reflex shadows of the grave : and 
 if she herself has not, the reader has, the gloom of that 
 contemplation obliquely irradiated, as raised in relief 
 upon his imagination, even by her. Death and its 
 sunny antipole are forced into connection. I remember 
 igain to have heard a man complain, that in a little 
 poem having for its very subject the universal diffusion 
 tind the gratuitous diffusion of joy — 
 
 "Pleasure is spread through the earth, 
 In stray gifts to be claimed by whoever shall find," 
 
 1 picture occurs which overpowered him with melan- 
 t.'holy : it was this — 
 
 1 See the exquisite poems, so little understood by the common- 
 place reader, of The Two April Mornings, and The Fountain,
 
 ON Wordsworth's poetry. 505 
 
 " In sight of the spires 
 All alive with the fires 
 Of the sun going down to his rest. 
 In the broad open eye of the solitary sky. 
 They dance, — there are three, as jocund as free, — 
 While they dance on the calm river's breast."! 
 
 Undeniably there is (and without ground for complaint 
 there is) even here, where the spirit of gayety is pro- 
 fessedly invoked, an oblique though evanescent image 
 flashed upon us of a sadness that lies deep behind the 
 laughing figures, and of a solitude that is the real pos- 
 sessor in fee of all things, but is waiting an hour or so 
 for the dispossession of the false dancing tenants. 
 
 An inverse case, as regards the three just cited, is 
 found in the poem of ' Hart-leap-well,' over which the 
 mysterious spirit of the noon-day, Pan, seems to brood. 
 Out of suffering is there evoked the image of peace. 
 Out of the cruel leap, and the agonizing race through 
 thirteen hours ; out of the anguish in the perishing 
 brute, and the headlong courage of his final despair, 
 
 " Not unobserved by sympathy divine," — 
 
 out of the ruined lodge and the forgotten mansion, 
 
 1 Coleridge had a grievous infirmity of mind as regarded pain. 
 He could not contemplate the shadows of fear, of sorrow, of suffer- 
 ing, with any steadiness of gaze. He was, in relation to that sub- 
 ject, what in Lancashire they call nesh, i. e., soft, or effeminate 
 This frailty claimed indulgence, had he not erected it at times into 
 a ground of superiority. Accoi-dingly, I remember that he also 
 iomplained of this passage in Wordswoi'th, and on the same 
 ground, as being too overpoweringly depressing in the fourth line, 
 when modified by +he other five.
 
 506 ON Wordsworth's poetry. 
 
 bowers that are trodden under foot, and pleasure-houscb 
 that are dust, the poet calls up a vision of palingenesis ; 
 he interposes his solemn images of suffering, of decay, 
 and ruin, only as a visionary haze through which gleams 
 transpire of a trembling dawn far off, but surely on the 
 road. 
 
 " The pleasure-house is dust : behind, before, 
 
 This is no common waste, no common gloom ; 
 But Nature in due course of time once more 
 Shall here put on her beauty and her bloom. 
 
 She leaves these objects to a slow decay, 
 
 That what we are, and have been, may be known 
 . But, at the coming of the milder day. 
 
 These monuments shall all be overgrown." 
 
 This influx of the joyous into the sad, and the sad into 
 the joyous, this reciprocal entanglement of darkness in 
 light, and of light in darkness, offers a subject too occult 
 for popular criticism ; but merely to have suggested it, 
 may be sufficient to account for Wordsworth not having 
 chosen a theme of pure garish sunshine, such as the 
 hurry of a wedding-day, so long as others, more pictu- 
 resque or more plastic, were to be had. A wedding-day 
 is, in many a life, the sunniest of its days. But unless 
 it is overcast with some event more tragic than could be 
 wished, its uniformity of blaze, without shade or relief, 
 I lakes it insipid to the mere bystander. Accordingly, 
 \A epithalamia seem to have been written under the 
 inspiration of a bank-note. 
 
 Far beyond these causes of repulsiveness to ordinnry 
 readers was the class of subjects selected, and the mode 
 of treating them. The earliest line of readers, the var
 
 ON Wordsworth's poetry. 507 
 
 :n point of time, always includes a majority of the 
 young-, the commonplace, and the unimpassioned. Sub- 
 sequently, these are sifted and winnowed, as the rear 
 ranks come forward in succession. But at first it was 
 sure to ruin any poems, that the situations treated are 
 not those which reproduce to the fancy of readers tteir 
 own hopes and prospects. The meditative are interested 
 by all that has an interest for human nature. But what 
 cares a young lady, dreaming of lovers kneelmg at her 
 feet, for the agitations of a mother forced into resigning 
 her child ? or of a shepherd at eighty parting forever 
 amongst mountain solitudes with an only son of seven- 
 teen, innocent and hopeful, whom soon afterwards the 
 guilty town seduces into ruin irreparable ? Romances 
 and novels in verse constitute the poetry which is 
 immediately successful ; and that is a poetry, it may be 
 added, which, after one generation, is unsuccessful for- 
 ever. 
 
 But this theme is too extensive. Let us pass to the 
 separate works of Wordsworth ; and, in deference to 
 the opinion of the world, let us begin with " The Excur- 
 sion." This poem, as regards its opening, seems to 
 require a recast. The inaugurating story of Margaret 
 is in a wrong key, and rests upon a false basis. It is a 
 case of sorrow from desertion. So at least it is repre- 
 sented. Margaret loses, in losing her husband, the one 
 sole friend of her heart. And the wanderer, who is the 
 oresiding philosopher of the poem, in retracing her story, 
 bees nothing in the case but a wasting away through 
 sorrow, at once natural in its kind, and preternatural in 
 its degree. 
 
 There is a story somewhere told of a man who com-
 
 ^03 ON WORDSWORTH'S POETRY. 
 
 plained, and his friends complained, that his face jooked 
 almost always dirty. The man explained this strange 
 affection out of a mysterious idiosyncrasy in the face 
 Itself, upon which the atmosphere so acted as to force 
 out stains or masses of gloomy suffusion, just as it does 
 upon some qualities of stone in vapory weather. But, 
 said liis friend, had you no advice for this strange affec- 
 tion ? O yes : surgeons had prescribed ; chemistry had 
 exhausted its secrets upon the case ; magnetism had 
 done its best ; electricity had done its worst. His friend 
 mused for some time, and then asked : " Pray, amongst 
 these painful experiments, did it ever happen to you to 
 try one that I have read of, namely, a basin of soap and 
 water ? " And perhaps, on the same principle, it might 
 be allowable to ask the philosophic wanderer, who 
 washes the case of Margaret with so many coats of 
 metaphysical varnish, but ends with finding all unavail- 
 ing, " Pray, amongst your other experiments, did you 
 ever try the effect of a guinea ? " Supposing this, 
 however, to be a remedy beyond his fortitude, at least 
 he might have offered a little rational advice, which costs 
 no more than civility. Let us look steadily at the case. 
 The particular calamity under which Margaret groaned 
 was the lossof her husband, who had enlisted. There 
 is something, even on the husband's part, in this enlist 
 ment, to which the reader can hardly extend his com 
 passion. The man had not gone off, it is true, as a 
 heartless deserter of his family, or in profligate quest of 
 pleasure : cheerfully he would have stayed and worked, 
 had trade been good ; but, as it was not, he found it 
 impossible to support the spectacle of domestic suffering 
 he takes the bounty of a recruiting sergeant, and off he
 
 ON WORDbWORTH's POETRY. 509 
 
 marches with his regiment. Nobody reaches the sum- 
 mit of heartlessness at once ; and, accordingly, ui this 
 early stage of his desertion, we are not surprised to hnd 
 that part (but what part ?) of the bounty had been 
 silently conveyed to his wife. So far we are barely not 
 mdignant ; but as time wears on we become highly so; 
 for no letter does he ever send to his poor, forsaken part- 
 ner, either of tender excuse, or of encouraging prospects. 
 Yet, if he had done this, still we must condemn him. 
 Millions have supported (and supported without praise 
 or knowledge of man) that trial from which he so 
 weakly fled. Even in this, and going no further, he 
 was a voluptuary. Millions have heard and acknowl- 
 edged, as a secret call from Heaven, the summons, not 
 only to take their own share of household suffering, as a 
 mere sacrifice to the spirit of manliness, but also to 
 stand the far sterner trial of witnessing the same priva- 
 tions in a wife and little children. To evade this, to 
 slip his neck out of the yoke, when God summons a poor 
 man to such a trial, is the worst form of cowardice. 
 And Margaret's husband, by adding to this cowardice 
 subsequently an entire neglect of his family, not so much 
 as intimating the destination of the regiment, forfeits his 
 last hold upon our lingering sympathy. But with him, 
 t will be said, the poet has not connected the leading 
 thread of the interest. Certainly not ; though in some 
 degree by a reaction from his character depends the re- 
 spectability of Margaret's grief. And it is impossible to 
 turn away from his case entirely, because from the act 
 of the enlistment is derived the whole movement of 
 the story. Here it is that we must lax the wandering 
 ©hilosopher with treason. He found ro luxurious a
 
 510 ON WORDSWORTH S POETRY. 
 
 pleasure in contemplating a pathetic phthisis of heart in 
 the abandoned wife, that the one obvious counsel in her 
 particular distress which dotage could not have over- 
 looked he suppresses. And yet this in the revolution 
 of a week would have brought her effectual relief. 
 Sur;dy the regiment, into which her husband had enlisted, 
 bore some number : it was the king's " dirty half-hun- 
 dred"^^ — or the rifle brigade — or some corps known to 
 men and the Horse Guards. Instead, therefore, of 
 suffering poor Margaret to loiter at a gate, looking for 
 answers to her questions from vagrant horsemen, — a 
 process which reminds one of a sight, sometimes extort- 
 ing at once smiles and deep pity, in the crowded 
 thoroughfares of London, namely, a little child inno- 
 cently asking with tearful eyes from strangers for the 
 mother whom it has lost in that vast wilderness, — the 
 wanderer should at once have inquired for the station 
 of that detachment which had enlisted him. This must 
 have been in the neighborhood. Here he would have 
 obtained all the particulars. That same night he would 
 have written to the War-Office ; and in a very few days 
 an official answer, bearing the indorsement, On H. M.' 
 Service, would have placed Margaret in communication 
 with the truant. To have overlooked a point of policy 
 so broadly apparent as this, vitiates and nullities the 
 very basis of the story. Even for a romance it will noi 
 do ; far less for a philosophic poem dealing with intense 
 realities. No such case of distress could have lived for 
 one fortnight, nor have survived a single interview with 
 the rector, the curate, the parish-clerk, with the school- 
 master, the doctor, the attorney, the innkeeper, or th« 
 exciseman.
 
 ON Wordsworth's poetry. 511 
 
 But, apart from the vicious mechanism of the inci- 
 dents, the story is even more objectionable by the doubt- 
 ful quality of the leading character from which it derives 
 its pathos. Had any one of us readers held the office 
 of coroner in her neighborhood, he would have found it 
 his duty to hold an inquest upon the body of her infant. 
 This child, as every reader could depose [now when the 
 details have been published by the poet), died of neglect; 
 not through direct cruelty, but through criminal self- 
 indulgence. Self-indulgence in what ? Not in liquor, 
 yet not altogether in fretting. Sloth, and the habit of 
 gadding abroad, were most in fault. The Wanderer^ 
 himself might have been called as a witness for the 
 crown, to prove that the infant was left to sleep in soli- 
 tude for hours : the key even was taken away, as if to 
 intercept the possibility (except through burglary) of 
 those tender attentions from some casual stranger, which 
 the unfeeling mother had withdrawn. The child abso- 
 lutely awoke whilst the philosopher was listening at the 
 door. It cried ; but finally hushed itself to sleep, That 
 looks like a case of Dalby's carminative.^^ But this crisis 
 could not have been relied on : tragical catastrophes 
 arise from neglected crying ; ruptures in the first place, 
 a very common result in infants ; rolling out of bed fol- 
 lowed by dislocation of the neck ; fits, and other short 
 cuts to death. It is hardly any praise to Margaret that 
 she carried the child to that consummation by a more 
 ingering road. 
 
 This first tale, therefore, must and will, if Mr. 
 Wordsworth retains ene'-gy for such recasts of a labo- 
 rious work, b: cut away from its connection with " The 
 Excursion." This is the more to be expected from a
 
 512 ON WORDS worth's poetry. 
 
 poet aware of his own importance and anxious for the 
 perfection of his works, because nothing in the following 
 books depends upon this narrative. No timbers or main 
 beams need to be sawed away ; it is but a bolt that is to be 
 slipped, a rivet to be unscrewed. And yet, on the other 
 hand, if the connection is slight, the injury is great ; for 
 ve all complain heavily of entering a temple dedicsted 
 to new combinations of truth through a vestibule of 
 falsehood. And the falsehood is double ; falsehood in 
 the adjustment of the details (however separately possi- 
 ble), falsehood in the character which, wearing the mask 
 of profound sentiment, does apparently repose upon dys- 
 pepsy and sloth. 
 
 Far different in value and in principle of composition 
 is the next tale in " The Excursion." This occupies the 
 fourth book, and is the impassioned record from the 
 infidel solitary of those heart-shaking chapters in his 
 own life which had made him what the reader finds him. 
 Once he had not been a solitary ; once he had not been 
 an infidel ; now he is both. He lives in a little, urn-like 
 valley (a closet-recess from Little Langdale by the de- 
 scription), amongst the homely household of a yeoman : 
 he is become a bitter cynic ; and not against man alone, 
 or society alone, but against the laws of hope or fear, 
 upon which both repose. If he endures the society 
 with which he is now connected, it is because, being 
 dull, that society is of few words ; it is because, being 
 tied to hard labor, that society goes early to bed, and 
 packs up its dulness at eight, p. M., in blankets ; it is 
 ^ecjiuse, under the acute inflictions of Sunday, or the 
 thronic inflictions of the Christmas holidays, that dull 
 iociety is easily laid into a magnetic sleep by three
 
 ON Wordsworth's poKTRi. 513 
 
 passes of metaphysical philosophy. The narrative of 
 this misanthrope is grand and impassioned ; not creeping 
 by details and minute touches, but rolling through capital 
 events, and uttering its pathos through great representa- 
 tive abstractions. Nothing can be finer than when, upon 
 the desolation of his household, upon the utter emptying 
 of his domestic chambers by the successive deaths of 
 children and youthful wife, just at that moment the 
 mighty phantom of the French Revolution rises solemnly 
 above the horizon ; even then new earth and new 
 heavens are promised to human nature ; and suddenly 
 the solitary man, translated by the frenzy of human 
 grief into the frenzy of supernatural hopes, adopts these 
 radiant visions for the darlings whom he has lost — 
 
 " Society becomes his glittering bride. 
 And airy hopes his children." 
 
 Yet it is a misfortune in the fate of this fine tragic 
 movement, rather than its structure, that it tends to col- 
 lapse : the latter strains, colored deeply by disappoint- 
 ment, do not correspond with the grandeur of the first. 
 And the hero of the record becomes even more painfully 
 a contrast to himself than the tenor of the incidents to 
 their earlier tenor. Sneering and querulous comments 
 upon so broad a field as human folly, make poor com- 
 pensation for the magnificence of youthful enthusiasm. 
 But may not this defect be redressed in a future section 
 of the poem ? It is probable, from a hint dropped by 
 the author, that one collateral object of the philosophical 
 discussions is — the reconversion of the splenetic infidel 
 to his ancient creed in some higher form, and to his 
 ancient temper of benignant hope : in which case, what 
 33
 
 614 ON WORDS WOETH's rOETEY. 
 
 now we feel to be a cheerless depression, will sweep 
 round into a noble reascent — quite on a level with the 
 aspirations of youth, and differing, not in degree, but 
 only in quality of enthusiasm. Yet, if this is the poet's 
 plan, it seems to rest upon a misconception. For how 
 should the sneering sceptic, who has actually found 
 solace in Voltaire's " Candide," be restored to the benig- 
 nities of faith and hope by argument ? It was not in 
 this way that he lost his station amongst Christian 
 believers. No false philosophy it had been which 
 wrecked his Christian spirit of hope ; but, on the con- 
 trary, his bankruptcy in hope which wrecked his Chris- 
 tian philosophy. Here, therefore, the poet will certainly 
 find himself in an " almighty fix; " because any possible 
 treatment, which could restore the solitary's former self, 
 such as a course of sea-bathing, could not interest the 
 reader ; and reversely, any successful treatment through 
 argument that could interest the philosophic reader 
 would not, under the circumstances, seem a plausible 
 restoration for the case. 
 
 What is it that has made the recluse a sceptic ? Is it 
 the reading of bad books ^ In that case he may be re- 
 claimed by the arguments of those who have read better. 
 But not at all. He has become the unbelieving cynie 
 that he is, 1st, through his own domestic calamities 
 predisposing him to gloomy views of human nature ; 
 and, 2dly, through the overclouding of his high-toned 
 expectations from the French Revolution, which has dis- 
 posed him, in a spirit of revenge for his own disappoint- 
 ment, to contemptuous views of human nature. Now, 
 surely the dejection which supports his gloom, and the 
 despondency which supports his contempt, are not of a
 
 ON WORDS Y. orth's poetrt. 515 
 
 nature to give way before philosophic reasonings. Make 
 him happy by restoring what he has lost, and his genial 
 philosophy will return of itself. Make him triumphant 
 by realizing what had seemed to him the golden promises 
 of ths French Revolution, and his political creed will 
 moult her sickly feathers. Do this, and he is still young 
 enoucrh for hope ; but less than this restoration of his 
 morning visions will not call back again his morning 
 happiness ; and breaking spears with him in logical 
 tournaments will mend neither his hopes nor his temper. 
 Indirectly, besides, it ought not to be overlooked, that, 
 as respects the French Revolution, the whole college of 
 philosophy in "The Excursion," who are gathered 
 together upon the case of the recluse, make the same 
 mistake that he makes. Why is the recluse disgusted with 
 the French Revolution ? Because it had not fulfilled 
 many of his expectations; and, of those which it had 
 fulfilled, some had soon been darkened by reverses. 
 But really this was childish impatience. If a man 
 depends for the exuberance of his harvest upon the 
 splendor of the coming summer, you do not excuse him 
 for taking prussic acid because it rains cats and dogs 
 throucrh the first ten days of April. All in good time 
 we say ; take it easy ; make acquaintance with May and 
 June before you do anything rash. The French Revo- 
 lution has not, even yet [1845], come into full actiom 
 It was the explosion of a prodigious volcano, which 
 scattered its lava over every kingdom of every contment, 
 every%vhere silently manuring them for social struggles; 
 this lava is gradually fertilizing all; the revolutionary 
 movement is moving onwards at this hour as inexorably 
 w ever. Listen, if you have ears for such spiritual
 
 516 ON Wordsworth's poetry. 
 
 sounds, to the mighty tide even now slowly coming up 
 from the sea to Milan, to Rome, to Naples, to Vienna. 
 Hearken to the gentle undulations already breaking 
 against the steps of that golden throne which stretches 
 from St. Petersburgh to Astrachaii; — tremble at the 
 hurricanes which have long been mustering about the 
 pavilions of the Ottoman Padishah. All these are long 
 swells setting in from the French Revolution. Even as 
 legards France herself, that which gave the mortal 
 ofTence to the sympathies of the solitary was the Reign 
 of Terror. But how thoughtless to measure the cyclea 
 of vast national revolutions by metres that would not 
 stretch round an ordinary human passion ! Even to a 
 frail sweetheart you would grant more indulgence than 
 to be off in a pet because some transitory cloud arose 
 between you. The Reign of Terror was a mere fleeting 
 phasis. The Napoleon dynasty was nothing more. Even 
 that scourge, which was supposed by many to have mas- 
 tered the Revolution, has itself passed away upon the wind, 
 
 — leaving no wreck, relic, or record behind, except pre- 
 cisely those changes which it worked, not as an enemy to 
 the Revolution (which also it was), hit as its servant and 
 its tool. See, even whilst we speak, the folly of that 
 cynical sceptic who would not allow time for great 
 natural processes of purification to travel onwards to 
 their birth, or wait for the evolution of natural results 
 
 — the storm that shocked him has wheeled away ; — ■ 
 the frost and the hail that offended him have done their 
 office ; — the rain is over and gone ; — happier days 
 have descended upon France ; — the voice of the turtle 
 3 heard in all her forests ; — man walks with his head 
 ?rect : — bastiles are no more ; — every cottage is
 
 OS Wordsworth's poEXRy. 517 
 
 searched by the golden light of law ; and the privilegee 
 of conscience are consecrated forever. 
 
 Here, then, the poet himself, the philosophic wanderei, 
 the learned vicar, are all equally in fault with the solitary- 
 sceptic ; for they all agree in treating his disappointment 
 as sound and reasonable in itself; but blamable only in 
 relation to those exalted hopes which he never ought to 
 have encouraged. Right (they say), to consider the 
 French Revolution, now, as a failure ; but not right 
 originally, to have expected that it should succeed. 
 Whereas, in fact, it has succeeded ; it is propagating its 
 life ; it is travelling on to new births — conquering, and 
 yet to conquer. 
 
 It is not easy to see, therefore, how the Laureate can 
 avoid making some change in the constitution of his 
 poem, were it only to rescue his philosophers, and, 
 therefore, his own philosophy, from the imputation of 
 precipitancy in judgment. They charge the sceptic with 
 rash judgment a parte ante ; and, meantime, they them- 
 selves are more liable to that charge d parte post. If he, 
 at the first, hoped too much (which is not clear, but only 
 that he hoped too impatiently), they afterwards recant 
 too blindly. And this error they will not, themselves, 
 fail to acknowledge, as soon as they awaken to the truth, 
 that the Revolution did not close on the 18th Brumaire, 
 1799, at which time it was only arrested or suspended, 
 in one direction, by military shackles, but is siill mining 
 \inder ground, like the ghost in Hamiet, through every 
 quarter of the globe. ^ 
 
 1 The reader must not understand the writer as unconditionally 
 »pproTing of the French Revolution. It is his belief that the
 
 518 ON Wordsworth's poetry. 
 
 In paying so much attention to " The "Excursion ' 
 (of which, in a more extended notice, the two books 
 entitled, " The Churchyard amongst the Mountains,' 
 would have claimed the profoundest attention), we yield 
 less to our own opinion than to that of the public. Or, 
 perhaps, it is not so much the public as the vulgar 
 opinion, governed entirely by the consideration that 
 " The Excursion " is very much the longest poem of its 
 author ; and, secondly, that it bears currently the title 
 of a philosophic poem ; on which account it is presumed 
 to have a higher dignity. The big name and the big 
 size are allowed to settle its rank. But in this there is 
 much delusion. In the very scheme and movement of 
 " The Excursion " there are two defects which interfere 
 greatly with its power to act upon, the mind as a whole, 
 or with any effect of unity ; so that, infallibly it will be 
 read, by future generations, in parts and fragments ; 
 and, being thus virtually dismembered into many small 
 poems, it will scarcely justify men in allowing it the 
 rank of a long one. One of these defects is the undula- 
 tory character of the course pursued by the poem, which 
 
 resistance to the revolution was, in many high quarters, a sacred 
 duty ; and that this resistance it was which forced out, from the 
 Revolution itself, the benefits which it has since diffused. To speak 
 by the language of mechanics, the case was one which illustrated 
 the composition of forces. Neither the Revolution singly, nor the 
 resistance to the Revolution singly, was calculated to regenerate 
 social man. But the two forces in union — where the one modified 
 mitigated, or even neutralized the other, at times, and where, at 
 times, each entered into a happy combination with the other^ 
 — yielded for the world those benefits which, by its separate ten^ 
 'lency, either of the two was fitted to stifle.
 
 ON WOEDSWORTH'b POETElf. 
 
 519 
 
 does not ascend uniformly, or even keep one steady 
 level, but trespasses, as if by forgetfulness, or chance, 
 into topics furnishing little inspiration, and not always 
 closely connected with the presiding theme. In part this 
 arises from the accident that a slight tissue of narrative 
 connects the different sections ; and to this the movement 
 of the narrative, the fluctuations of the speculative 
 themes, are in part obedient : the succession of the inc i- 
 dents becomes a law for the succession of the thoughts, 
 as oftentimes it happens that these incidents are the 
 proximate occasions of the thoughts. Yet, as the narra- 
 tive is not of a nature to be moulded by any determinate 
 principle of coercing passion, but bends easily to the ca- 
 prices of chance and the moment, unavoidably it stamps, 
 by reaction, a desultory or even incoherent character 
 upon the train of the philosophic discussions. You 
 know not what is coming next; and, when it does como, 
 you do not always know why it comes. This has the 
 effect of crumbling the poem into separate segments, 
 and causes the whole (when looked at a5 a whole) to 
 appear a rope of sand. A second defect lies in the col- 
 loquial form which the poem sometimes assumes. It is 
 QAngerous to conduct a philosophic discussion by talking. 
 If the nature of the argument could be supposed to roll 
 through logical quillets, or metaphysical conundrums, so 
 that, ^on putting forward a problem, the interlocutor 
 could bring matters to a crisis, by saying, " Do you give 
 it up ? "— in that case there might be a smart reciproca- 
 tion of dialogue, of swearing and denying, giving and 
 taking, butting, rebutting, and " surrebutting ;" ^ and 
 
 1 « Surrebutting :" this is not, directly, a term from Aristotle's
 
 520 ON WORDSWORTH'S POETRY. 
 
 this would confer an interlocutory or amcBbcean cliaracter 
 upon the process of altercation. But the topics, and the 
 quality of the arguments being moral, in which always 
 the reconciliation of the feelings is to be secured by 
 gradual persuasion, rather than the understanding to be 
 floored by a solitary blow, inevitably it becomes impos- 
 sible that anything of this brilliant conversational sword- 
 play, cut-and-thrust, " carte " and " tierce," can make for 
 itself an opening. Mere decorum requires that the 
 speakers should be prosy. And you yourself, though 
 sometimes disposed to say, " Do now, dear old soul, cut 
 it short," are sensible that he cannot cut it short. Dis- 
 quisitions, in a certain key, can no more turn round 
 upon a sixpence than a coach-and-six. They must have 
 sea-room to " wear " ship, and to tack. This in itself is 
 often tedious ; but it leads to a worse tediousness : a 
 practised eye sees from afar the whole evolution of the 
 coming argument ; and then, besides the pain of hearing 
 the parties preach, you hear them preach from a text 
 which already in germ had warned you of all the buds 
 and blossoms which it was laboriously to produce. And 
 this second blemish, unavoidable if the method of dia- 
 logue IS adopted, becomes more painfully apparent 
 through a third, almost inalienable from the natural 
 constitution of the subjects concerned. It is, that in 
 cases where a large interest of human nature is treated, 
 such as the position of man in this world, his duties, hia 
 difficulties, many parts become necessary as transitiona . 
 
 mint, but indirectly it is ; for it belongs to the old science of 
 " special pleading," which, in part, is an offset from the Aristote- 
 lian logio.
 
 ON wordswouth's poetry. 521 
 
 jr connecting links, which, per se, are not attractive, nor 
 can by any art be made so. Treating the whole theme 
 in extenso, the poet is driven, by natural corollary, or by 
 objections too obvious to be evaded, into discussions not 
 chcsen by his own taste, but dictated by the logic or 
 the tendencies of the question, and by the impossibility 
 of dismissing with partiality any one branch of a subject 
 which is essential to the integrity of the saeculation, 
 simply because it is at war with the brilliancy of its 
 development. 
 
 Not, therefore, in " The Excursion " must we look 
 for that reversionary influence which awaits Words- 
 worth with posterity. It is the vulgar superstition in 
 behalf of big books and sounding titles ; it is the weak 
 ness of supposino^ no book entitled to be considered a 
 power in the literature of the land, unless physicallv it 
 is weighty, that must have prevailed upon Coleridge 
 and others to undervalue, by comparison with the direc^' 
 philosophic poetry of Wordsworth, those earlier poems 
 which are all short, but generally scintillating with 
 gems of far profounder truth. Let the reader under- 
 stand, however, that, by "truth," I understand, not 
 merely that truth which takes the shape of a formal 
 proposition, reducible to " mood " and " figure," but 
 truth which suddenly strengthens into solemnity an nn- 
 pression very feebly acknowledged previously, or truth 
 which suddenly unveils a connection between objects 
 always before regarded as irrelate and independent. In 
 astronomy, to gain the rank of discoverer, ii is not 
 required that you should reveal a star absolutely new ; 
 find out with respect to an old star some new affection — 
 as, for instance, that it has an ascertainable parallax —
 
 522 ON w JE dsworth's poetry. 
 
 and immediately you bring it within the verge of a 
 (^ human interest ; or of some old familiar planet, that its 
 satellites suffer periodical eclipses, and immediately you 
 bring it within the verge of terrestrial uses. Gleams of 
 steadier vision, that brighten into certainty appearances else 
 doubtful, or that unfold relations else unsuspectedi are 
 not less discoveries of truth than the revelations of the 
 telescope, or the conquests of the diving-bell. It is 
 astonishing how large a harvest of new truths would be 
 reaped, simply through the accident of a man's feeling, 
 or being made to feel, more deeply than other men. He 
 sees the same objects, neither more nor fewer, but he 
 sees them engraved in lines far stronger and more deter- 
 minate ; and the difference in the strength makes the 
 whole difference between consciousness and sub-con- 
 sciousness. And in questions of the mere understanding, 
 we see the same fact illustrated : the author who rivets 
 notice the most, is not he that perplexes men by truths 
 drawn from fountains of absolute novelty, — truths un- 
 sunned as yet, and obscure from that cause ; but he that 
 awakens into illuminated consciousness old lineaments of 
 truth long slumbering m the mind, although too faint to 
 nave extorted attention. Wordsworth has brought many 
 a truth into life, both for the eye and for the understand- 
 ing, which previously had slumbered indistinctly for all 
 men. 
 
 For instance, as respects the eye, who does not ac- 
 knowledge instantaneously the strength of reality in 
 that saying upon a cataract seen from a station two 
 miles off, that it was " frozen by distance " ? In all 
 nature there is not an object so essentially at war with 
 the stiffening of .frost, as the headlong and desperate life
 
 ON WORDSWORTH'S POETRY. 523 
 
 ot a cataract ; and yet notoriously the effect of distance 
 is to lock up this frenzy of motion into the most petrific 
 column of stillness. This effect is perceived at once 
 when pointed out ; but how few are the eyes that ever 
 would have perceived it for themselves ! Twilight, 
 again, — who before Wordsworth ever distinctly noticed 
 its abstracting power ? — that power of removing, soften- 
 ing, harmonizing, by which a mode of obscurity executes 
 for the eye the same mysterious ofRce which the mind so 
 often within its own shadowy realms executes for itself. 
 In the dim interspace between day and night, all disap- 
 pears from our earthly scenery, as if touched by an 
 enchanter's rod, which is either mean or inharmonious, 
 or unquiet, or expressive of temporary things. Leaning 
 ag-ainst a column of rock, looking down upon a lake or 
 river, and at intervals carrying your eyes forward 
 through a vista of mountains, you become aware that 
 your sight rests upon the very same spectacle, unaltered 
 in a single feature, which once at the same hour was 
 beheld by the legionary Koman from his embattled 
 camp, or by the roving Briton in his " wolf-skin vest,' 
 lying down to sleep, and looking 
 
 •' through some leafy bower, 
 
 Before his eyes were closed." 
 
 How magnificent is the summary or abstraction of 
 the elementary features in such a scene, as executed 
 by the poet himself, in illustration of this abstraction 
 daily executed by nature, through her handmaid Twi- 
 light ! Listen, reader, to the closing stram, solemn as
 
 524 ON Wordsworth's poetry. 
 
 twilight is solemn, and grand as the spectacle which it 
 describes : — 
 
 " By him [t. e., the roving Briton] was seen, 
 The self-same visrion which we now behold, 
 At thy meek bidding, shadowy Power, brought forth. 
 These mighty barriers, and the gulf between ; 
 The floods, the stars, — a spectacle as old 
 As the beginning of the heavens and earth." 
 
 Another great field there is amongst the pomps of 
 nature, which, if Wordsworth did not first notice, he 
 certainly has noticed most circumstantially. I speak of 
 \ cloud-scenery, or those pageants of sky -built architecture, 
 which sometimes in summer, at noon-day, and in all sea- 
 sons about sunset, arrest or appal the meditative ; " per- 
 plexing monarchs " with the spectacle of armies ma- 
 no^.uvring, or deepening the solemnity of evening by 
 towering edifices that mimic — but which also in mimick- 
 ing mock — the transitory grandeurs of man. It is 
 singular that these gorgeous phenomena, not less than 
 those of the Aurora Borealis, have been so little noticed 
 by poets. The Aurora was naturally neglected by the 
 southern poets of Greece and Rome, as not much seen in 
 their latitudes.* But the cloud-architecture of the day- 
 
 * But then, says the reader, why is it not proportionably the 
 more noticed by poets of the north ? Certainly, that question is 
 t&ir. And the answer, it is scarcely possible to doubt, is this : — 
 That until the rise of Natural Philosophy, in Charles the Second's 
 reign, there was no 7)a.me for the appearance ; on which account, 
 some writers have been absurd enough to believe that the Aurora 
 did not exist, noticeably, until about 1690. Shakspeare, in his 
 journey down to Stratford (always performed on horseback) , must 
 erten have been belated : he must sometimes have seen, he could 
 aot but have admired, the fiery skirmishes of the Aurora. And
 
 ON WORDSWORTH'S POETRY. 625 
 
 ight belongs alike to north and south. Accordingly, 1 
 remember one notice of it in Hesiod, a case were the 
 clouds exhibited 
 
 " The beauteous semblance of a flock at rest." 
 
 Another there is, a thousand years later, m Lucan : 
 amongst the portents which prefigured the dreadful con- 
 vulsions destined to shake the earth at Pharsalia, is 
 noticed by him some fiery coruscation of arms in the 
 heavens ; but, so far as I recollect, the appearances might 
 have belonged equally to the workmanship of the clouds 
 or the Aurora. Up and down the next eight hundred 
 years are scattered evanescent allusions to these vapory 
 appearances ; in Hamlet and elsewhere occur gleams of 
 such allusions ; but I remember no distinct picture of 
 one before that in the " Antony and Cleopatra " of 
 Shakspeare, beginning, 
 
 " Sometimes we see a cloud that 's dragonish." 
 
 Subsequently to Shakspeare, these notices, as of all 
 nhenomena whatsoever that demanded a familiarity with 
 nature in the spirit of love, became rarer and rarer. At 
 length, as the eighteenth century was winding up its 
 accounts, forth stepped William Wordsworth, of whom, 
 as a reader of all pages in nature, it may be said that, 
 if we except Dampier, the admirable buccaneer, and 
 some few professional naturalists, he first and he last 
 looked at natural objects with the eye that neither will 
 be dazzled from without nor cheated by preconceptions 
 from within. Most men look at nature in the hurry of 
 
 fet, for want of a word to fix and identify the object, how could 
 ke introduce it as an image or allusion in his writings '
 
 526 ON wordswokth's poetri 
 
 R confusion that distinguishes nothing; tkeir error ia 
 from without. Pope, again, and many who live in 
 towns,* make such blunders as that of supposing the 
 moon to tip with silver the hills behhid which she is ris- 
 ing, not by erroneous use of their eyes (for they use 
 them not at all), but by inveterate preconceptions. 
 Scarcely has there been a poet with what could be called 
 a learned eye, or an eye extensively learned, before 
 Wordsworth. Much affectation there has been of that 
 sort since his rise, and at all times much counterfeit 
 enthusiasm ; but the sum of the matter is this, that 
 Wordsworth had his passion for nature fixed in his blood ; 
 — it was a necessity, like that of the mulberry-leaf to 
 the silk-worm ; and through his commerce with nature 
 did he live and breathe. Hence it was, namely, from the 
 truth of his love, that his knowledge grew ; whilst most 
 others, being merely hypocrites in their love, have 
 turned out merely charlatuTis in their knowledge. This 
 chapter, therefore, of sky scenery, may be said to have 
 been revivified amongst the resources of poetry by 
 Wordsworth — rekindled, if not absolutely kindled. 
 The sublime scene endorsed upon the draperies of the 
 storm in " The Excursion," — that witnessed upon the 
 passage of the Hamilton Hills in Yorkshire, — the 
 
 * It was not, however, that all poets then lived in towns ; neither 
 had Pope himself generally lived in towns. But it is perfectly 
 useless to be familiar with nature unless there is a public trained 
 to love and value nature. It is not what the individual sees that 
 will fix itself as beautiful in his recollections, but what he sees 
 under a consciousness that others will sympathize with his feelings 
 Under any other circumstances familiarity does but realize the 
 %dage, and " breeds contempt." The great despisers of rurau 
 scenery are rustics.
 
 ON WORDSWORTH S POKTRY. 
 
 527 
 
 ioletnn " sky prospect " from the fields of France, are 
 unrivalled in that order of composition ; and in one of 
 these records Wordsworth has given first of all the true 
 key-note of the sentiment belonging to these grand 
 pageants. They are, says the poet, speaking in a case 
 where the appearance had occurred towards night, 
 
 " Meek nature's evening comment on the shows 
 And all the fuming vanities of earth ' ' 
 
 ^es, that IS the secret moral whispered to the mind. 
 These mimicries express the laughter which is in heaven 
 at earthly pomps. Frail and vapory are the glories of 
 man, even as the parodies of those glories are frail 
 which nature weaves in clouds. 
 
 As another of those natural appearances which must 
 have haunted men's eyes since the Flood, but yet had 
 never forced itself into conscious notice until arrested by 
 Wordsworth, I may notice an effect of iteration daily 
 exhibited in the habits of cattle : — 
 
 " The cattle are grazing. 
 Their heads never raising , 
 There are forty feeding like one." 
 
 Now, merely as a fact, and if it were nothing more, this 
 characteristic appearance in the habits of cows, when all 
 repeat the action of each, ought not to have been over- 
 'ooked by those who profess themselves engaged in 
 Lolding up a mirror to nature. But the fact has also a 
 profound meaning as a hieroglyphic. In all animals 
 which live under the protection of man a life of peace 
 and quietness, but do not share in his labors or in his 
 pleasures, what we regard is the species, and .<iot the
 
 528 ON WORDSWORTH S POETRY. 
 
 individual. Nobody but a grazier ever looks at one cow 
 amongst a field of cows, or at one sheep in a flock. But 
 as to those animals which are more closely connected 
 with man, not passively connected, but actively, bemg 
 partners in his toils and perils and recreations, such as 
 horses, dogs, falcons, they are regarded as individuals, and 
 are allowed the benefit of an individual interest. It is not 
 that cows have not a differential character, each for her- 
 self; and sheep, it is well known, have all a separate 
 physiognomy for the shepherd who has cultivated their 
 acquaintance. But men generally have no opportunity 
 or motive for studying the individualities of creatures, 
 however otherwise respectable, that are too much re- 
 garded by all of us in the reversionary light of milk, and 
 beef, and mutton. Far otherwise it is with horses, who 
 share in man's martial risks, who sympathize with man's 
 frenzy in hunting, who divide with man the burdens of 
 noonday. Far otherwise it is with dogs, that share the 
 hearths of man, and adore the footsteps of his children. 
 These man loves ; of these he makes dear, though hum- 
 ble friends. These often fight for him ; and for them he 
 he will sometimes fight. Of necessity, therefore, every 
 horse and every dog is an individual — has a sort of 
 V)ersonality that makes him separately interesting — has 
 a beauty and a character of his own. Go to Melton, 
 therefore, and what will you see ? Every man, every 
 horse, every dog, glorying in the plentitude of life, is in 
 a diflferent attitude, motion, gesture, action. It is not 
 there the sublime unity which you must seek, where 
 forty are like one ; but the sublime infinity, like that of 
 wean, like that of Flora, like that of nature, where no
 
 ON WORDSWORTH S POETRY. 029 
 
 "epetitions are endured, no leaf the copy of another leaf 
 no absolute identity, and no painful tautologies. This 
 Bubject might be pursued into profounder recesses ; but 
 in a popular discussion it is necessary to forbear. 
 
 A volume might be filled with such glimpses of 
 novelty as Wordsworth has first laid bare, even to the 
 apprehension of the se?ises. For the UTiderstandhig, 
 when moving in the same track of human sensibilities, 
 he has done only not so much. How often (to give 
 an instance or two) must the human heart have felt 
 that there are sorrows which descend far below the 
 region in which tears gather; and yet who has ever 
 given utterance to this feeling until Wordsworth came 
 with his immortal line — 
 
 \ " Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears " ' 
 
 This sentiment, and others that might be adduced 
 (such as '• The child is father of the man"), have even 
 passed into the popular mind, and are often quoted by 
 those who know not whom they are quoting. Magnif- 
 icent, again, is the sentiment, and yet an echo to one 
 which lurks amongst all hearts, in relation to the 
 frailty of merely human schemes for working good, 
 which so often droop and collapse through the unsteadi- 
 ness of human energies, — 
 
 " foundations must be laid 
 
 In Heaven." 
 
 How^ Foundations laid in realms that are above' 
 But t/iat is at war with physics ; — foundations must 
 be laid below. Yes ; and even so the poet throws the 
 mind yet more forcibly on the hyperphysical character 
 34
 
 530 ON -Wordsworth's poetry. 
 
 — on the grandeur transcending all physics — of those 
 shadowy fountains which alone are enduring. 
 
 But the great distinction of Wordsworth, and the 
 pledge of his increasing popularity, is the extent of his 
 sympathy with what is really permanent in human feel- 
 ings, and also the depth of this sympathy. Young and 
 Cowper, the two earlier leaders in the province of medi- 
 tative poetry, are too circumscribed in the range of their 
 sym])athies, too exclusive, and oftentimes not sufficiently 
 profound. Both these poets manifested the quality of 
 their strength by the quality of their public reception. 
 Popular in some degree from the first, they entered upon 
 the inheritance of their fame almost at once. Far dif- 
 ferent was the fate of Wordsworth ; for, in poetry of this 
 class, which appeals to what lies deepest in man, in 
 proportion to the native power of the poet, and his fitness 
 for permanent life, is the strength of resistance in the 
 public taste. Whatever is too original will be hated at 
 the first. It must slowly mould a public for itself; and 
 the resistance of the early thoughtless judgments must 
 be overcome by a counter resistance to itself, in a better 
 audience slowly mustering against the first. Forty and 
 seven years * it is since William Wordsworth first ap- 
 peared as an author. Twenty of those years he was the 
 Bcoff" of the world, and his poetry a by-word of scorn. 
 Since then, and more than once, senates have rung with 
 acclamations to the echo of his name. Now at this 
 moment, while we are talking about him, he has entered 
 upon his seventy-sixth year. For himself, according to 
 the course of nature, he cannot be far from his setting; 
 but his poetry is but now clearing the clouds that gath- 
 ered about its rising. Meditative poetry is perhaps tha 
 * Written in 1845.
 
 ON WORDSWORTH S POETRY. 531 
 
 ivhich will finally maintain most power .upon generations 
 more thoughtful ; and in this department, at least, there 
 is little competition to be appprehended by Wordsworth 
 from anything that has appeared since the death of 
 Shakspeare.^
 
 OS 
 
 THE KNOCKING AT THE GATE 
 
 IN MACBETH. 
 
 " Whence is that knocking ? 
 
 How is 't with me, when every noise appals meT 
 
 What hands are here? ha ! they pluck out mine eyes. 
 
 WiU all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood 
 
 Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather 
 
 The multitudinous seas incarnadine, 
 
 Making the green one red." 
 
 Macbeth, Act II., Scene 2. 
 
 Fkom my boyish days I had always felt a great 
 perplexity on one point in Macbeth. It was this : the 
 knocking at the gate, which succeeds to the murder of 
 Duncanrproduced to my feelings an effect for which 1 
 never could account. The effect was, that it reflected 
 back upon the murder a peculiar awfulness and a depth 
 of solemnity ; yet, however obstinately I endeavored 
 with my understanding to comprehend this, for many 
 yeai-8 I never could see why it should produce such an 
 effect. 
 
 Here I pause for one moment to exhort the reader 
 Qever to pay any attention to his understanding, when 
 ;t stands in opposition to any other faculty of his mmd. 
 The mere understanding, however useful and mdispen- 
 Bable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind, and 
 Jie most to be distrusted ; and yet tlie great majority
 
 534 MACBETH. 
 
 oi people trust to nothing else ; which, may do for 
 ordinary life, but not for philosophical purposes. Of 
 this out of ten thousand instances that I might produce, 
 I will cite one. Ask of any person whatsoever, who is 
 not previously prepared for the demand by a knowledge 
 of perspective, to draw in the rudest way the com- 
 monest appearance which depends upon the laws of 
 that science ; as, for instance, to represent the effect of 
 two walls standing at right angles to each other, or 
 the appearance of the houses on each side of a street, 
 as seen by a person looking down the street from one 
 extremity. Now, in all cases, unless the person has 
 happened to observe in pictures how it is that artists 
 produce these effects, he will be utterly unable to make 
 the smallest approximation to it. Yet why ? For he 
 has actually seen the effect every day of his life. The 
 reason is — that he allows his understanding to over- 
 rule his eyes. His understanding, which includes no 
 intuitive knowledge of the laws of vision, can furnish 
 him with no reason why a line which is known and can 
 be proved to be a horizontal line, should not appear a 
 horizontal line ; a line that made any angle with the 
 perpendicular, less than a right angle, would seem to 
 him to indicate that his houses were all tumbling down 
 together. Accordingly, he makes the line of his houses 
 a horizontal line, and fails, of course, to produce the 
 effect demanded. Here, then, is one instance out of 
 many, in which not only the understanding is allowed 
 to overrule the eyes, but where the understanding is 
 positively allowed to obliterate the eyes, as it were, for 
 not only does the man believe the evidence of his 
 understanding, in opposition to that of his eyes, but, 
 (what is monstrous !) the idiot is not aware that his
 
 MACBETH. 535 
 
 eyes ever gave such evidence. He does not know that 
 he has seen (and therefore quoad his consciousness has 
 not seen) that which he has seen every day of his 
 Ufe. 
 
 But to return from this digression, my understanding 
 could furnish no reason why the knocking at the gate 
 in Macbeth should produce any effect direct or re- 
 flected. In fact, my understanding said positively that 
 it could not produce any effect. But I knew better ; I 
 felt that it did ; and I waited and clung to the problem 
 until further knowledge should enable me to solve it. 
 At length, in 1812, Mr. Williams made his debut ou 
 the stage of Ratcliffe Highway, and executed those 
 unparalleled murders which have procured for him 
 such a brilliant and undying reputation. On which 
 murders, by the way, I must observe, that in one 
 respect they have had an ill effect, by making the 
 connoisseur in murder very fastidious in his taste, and 
 dissatisfied by anything that has since been done in 
 that line. All other murders look pale by the deep 
 crimson of his ; and, as an amateur once said to me 
 in a querulous tone, ' There has been absolutely 
 nothing doing since his time, or nothing that's worth 
 speaking of.' But this is wrong ; for it is unreasonable 
 to expect all men to be great artists, and born with the 
 genius of Mr. Williams. Now it will be remembered, 
 that in the first of these murders, (that of the Marrs,) 
 the same incident (of a knocking at the door, soon after 
 the work of extermination was coinplete) did actually 
 occur, which the genius of Shakspeare has invented ; 
 and all good judges, and the most eminent dilettanti, 
 acknowledged the felicity of Shakspeare's suggestion, 
 as soon as it was actually realized. Here, then, was a
 
 536 MACBETH. 
 
 fresh proof that I was right in relying on my own feel- 
 ing, in opposition to my understanding ; and I again set 
 myseli to study the problem ; at length I solved it to 
 my own satisfaction ; and my solution is this. Murder, 
 in ordinary cases, where the sympathy is wholly di- 
 rected to the case of the murdered person, is an incident 
 of coarse and vulgar horror ; and for this reason, that 
 it flings the interest exclusively upon the natural but 
 ignoble instinct by which we cleave to life ; an in- 
 stinct, which, as being indispensable to the primal 
 law of self-preservation, is the same in kind, (though 
 different in degree,) amongst all living creatures ; this 
 instinct, therefore, because it annihilates all distinc- 
 tions, and degrades the greatest of men to the level of 
 ' the poor beetle that we tread on,' exhibits human na- 
 ture in its most abject and humiliating attitude. Such 
 an attitude would little suit the purposes of the poetv 
 What then must he do ? He must throw the interest 
 on the murderer. Our sympathy must be with him ; 
 (of course I mean a sympathy of comprehension, a 
 sympathy by which we enter into his feelings, and are 
 made to understand them, — not a sympathy i of pii^y 
 or approbation.) In the murdered person, all strife 
 of thought, all flux and reflux of passion and of pur- 
 
 * It seems almost ludicrous to guard and explain my use of a 
 word, in a situation where it would naturally explain itself 
 But it has become necessary to do so, in consequence of the 
 unscholarlike use of the word sympathy, at present so general, 
 by which, instead of taking it in its proper sense, as the act of 
 reproducing in our minds the feelings of another, whether for 
 hatred, indignation, love, pity, or approbation, it is made a 
 mere synonyme of the word pity ; and hence, instead of saying 
 sympathy with another,' many writers adopt the monsti'ous 
 ^rbarism of ' sympathy /or another.'
 
 IIACBETH. 537 
 
 pose, are crushed by one overwhelming panic ; the 
 fear of instant death smites him ' with its petrific mace.' 
 But in the murderer, such a murderer as a poet • 
 will condescend to, there must be raging some great 
 storm of passion, — jealousy, ambition, vengeance, 
 hatred, — which will create a hell within him ; and 
 into this hell we are to look. 
 
 In Macbeth, for the sake of gratifying his own enor- 
 mous and teeming faculty of creation, Shakspeare has 
 introduced two murderers ; and, as usual in his hands, 
 they are remarkably discriminated : but, though in 
 Macbeth the strife of mind is greater than in his Avife, 
 the tiger spirit not so awake, and his feelings caught 
 chiefly by contagion from her, — yet, as both were 
 finally involved in the guilt of murder, the murderous 
 mind of necessity is finally to be presumed in both. 
 This was to be expressed ; and on its own account, as 
 well as to make it a more proportionable antagonist to 
 the unoffending nature of their victim, ' the gracious 
 Duncan,' and adequately to expound ' the deep damna- 
 tion of his taking off,' this was to be expressed with 
 peculiar energy. We were to be made to feel that the,__ 
 human nature, i. e., the divine nature of love and 
 mercy, spread through the hearts of all creatures, and 
 seldom utterly withdrawn from man, — was gone, van- 
 ished, extinct ; and that the fiendish nature had taken 
 its place. And, as this effect is marvellously accom- 
 plished in the dialogues and soliloquies themselves, so 
 it is finally consummated by the expedient under con- 
 sideration ; and it is to this that I now solicit the , 
 reader's attention. If the reader has ever witnessed a 
 wife, daughter, or sister, in a fainting fit, he may chance 
 to have observed that the most affecting moment in
 
 533 MACBETH. 
 
 such, a spectacle, is that in wliicli a sigh and a stirring 
 announce the recommencement of suspended life. Or, 
 if the reader has ever been present in a vast metropolis, 
 on the day when some great national idol was carried 
 in funeral pomp to his grave, and chancing to walk 
 near the course through which it passed, has felt pow- 
 erfully, in the silence and desertion of the streets, and 
 in the stagnation of ordinary business, the deep interest 
 which at that moment was possessing the heart of man, 
 — if all at once he should hear the death-like stillness 
 broken up by the sound of wheels rattling away from 
 the scene, and making known that the transitory vision 
 was dissolved, he will be aware that at no moment was 
 his sense of the complete suspension and pause in 
 ordinary human concerns so full and aflecting, as at 
 that moment when the suspension ceases, and the goings- 
 on of human life are suddenly resumed. All action 
 in any direction is best expounded, measured, and made 
 apprehensible, by reaction. Now apply this to the case 
 in Macbeth. Here, as I have said, the retiring of the 
 human heart, and the entrance of the fiendish heart, 
 was to be expressed and made sensible. Another 
 world has stept in ; and the murderers are taken out 
 of the region of human things, human purposes, human 
 desu-es. They are transfigured : Lady Macbeth is 
 ' unsexed ; ' Macbeth has forgot that he was born of 
 woman ; both are conformed to the image of devils ; 
 and the world of devils is suddenly revealed. But how 
 shall this be conveyed and made palpable ? In order 
 that a new world may step in, this world must for a 
 time disappear. The murderers, and the murder, must 
 >e insulated — cut ofi" by an immeasurable gulph from 
 -Sie ordinary tide and succession of human afiairs —
 
 MACBETH. 539 
 
 locked up and sequestered in some deep recess ; we 
 must be made sensible that tbe world of ordinary life 
 is suddenly arrested — laid asleep — ti-anced — racked 
 into a dread armistice ; time must be annihilated ; rela- 
 tion to things without abolished ; and all must pass 
 Belf-"^vithdra^vn into a deep syncope and suspension of 
 earthly^passion. Hence it is, that when the deed is 
 done, when the work of dai'kness is perfect, then the 
 world of darkness passes away like a pageantry in the 
 clouds ; the knocking at the gate is heard ; and it makes 
 known audibly that the reaction has commenced : the 
 human has made its reflux upon the fiendish ; the 
 pulses of life are beginning to beat again ; and the re- 
 establishment of the goings-on of the world in which 
 we live, first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful ' 
 parenthesis that had suspended them. 
 
 0, mighty poet ! Thy works are not as those of 
 other men, simply and merely great works of art ; but 
 are also like the phenomena of nature, like the sun 
 and the sea, the stars and the flowers, — like frost and 
 snow, rain and dew, hail-storm and thunder, which are 
 to be studied with entire submission of our own fac- 
 ulties, and in the perfect faith that in them there can 
 be no too much or too little, nothing useless or inert, — 
 but that, the further we press in oiu* discoveries, the 
 more we shall see proofs of ekesign and self-supporting 
 arrangement where the careless eye had seen nothing 
 but accident ! J /
 
 NOTES 
 
 Note 1. Page 2. 
 **Tke whole people were still draped professionally."— For 
 example, physicians never appeared without the insignia of their 
 Balling ; clergymen would have incurred the worst suspicions had 
 they gone into the streets without, a gown and bands. Ladies» 
 again, universally wore masks, as the sole substitute known to 
 our ancestors for the modern parasol; a fact, perhaps, not generaUy 
 known. 
 
 Note 2. Page 17. 
 
 The five acts which old tradition prescribed as binding upon the 
 Greek tragic drama cannot always be marked off by the interrup- 
 tions of the chorus. In the HeracleidcB of Euripides they can. 
 But it is evident that these acts existed for the sake of the chorus, 
 by way of allowing sufficient openings (both as to number and 
 length) for the choral dances ; and the necessity must have grown 
 out of the time allowed for a dramatic representation, and origin- 
 ally, therefore, out of the mere accidental convenience prescribed 
 by the social usages of Athens. The rule, therefore, was at any 
 i-ate an arbitrary rule. Purely conventional it would have been, 
 &nd local, had it even grown out of any Attic superstition (as we 
 have sometimes thought it might) as to the number of the choral 
 dances. But most probably it rested upon a sort of convention, 
 Which Of all is the least entitled to respect or translation to foreign
 
 542 
 
 KOTES. 
 
 Boils, namely, the mere local arrangement of meals and sleeping 
 hours in Athens ; which, having prescribed a limited space to 
 the whole performance, afterwards left this space to be distributed 
 between the recitation and the more popular parts, addressed to 
 eye and ear as the mob of Athens should insist. Horace, in say- 
 ing roundly, as a sort of brutumfulmen, " JVon quinto brevior, 
 non sit productior, actufabulce," delivers this capricious rule in 
 the capricious manner which becomes it. The stet pro ratione 
 voluntas comes forward equally in the substance of the precept and 
 the style of its delivery. 
 
 Note 3. Page 21. 
 
 Valckenaer, in his immortal series of comments on the Phanissa 
 of Euripides, notices the peculiar spirit and tendency of the innova- 
 tions introduced into the tragic diction bj' this youngest of the great 
 Athenian dramatists. These innovations ran in the very same direc- 
 tion as those of Wordsworth in our own times ; to say this, however, 
 without further explanation, considering how profoundly the views 
 of Wordsworth in this matter have been misunderstood, would simply 
 be — to mislead the English reader equally as to Euripides. Yet, as 
 we should be sorry to discuss so great a theme indirectly and in a 
 comer, it maj' be enough for the present to remark — that Euripides 
 did not mean to tax his great predecessors ^schylus and Sophocles 
 with any error of taste in the cast of their diction. Having their pur- 
 poses, they chose wisely. But he felt that the Athenian tragedy had 
 two functions — 1, to impress awe, and religious terror; 2, to impress 
 pity. This last be adopted as his own peculiar function ; and with 
 it a corresponding diction — less grand (it is true) and stately, but 
 counterbalancing this loss by a far greater power of pure (sometimes 
 we may say, of holy) household pathos. Such also was the change 
 wrought by Wordsworth. 
 
 Note 4. Page 22. 
 
 Any man, who has at all studied the Greek iambics, must well 
 remember those forms of the metre which are used in a cadence at 
 the close of a resounding passage, meant to express a full pause, 
 and the prodigious difference from such as were meant for weaker 
 lines, or less impressive metrical effects. These cadences, with their 
 fiill body of rhythmus, are never reproduced in the Latin imitationa 
 of the iambic hexameter : nor does it seem within the compass of
 
 NOTES. 
 
 543 
 
 Latin metre to reach such effects : though otherwise, and especially 
 by the dactylic hexameter, the Latin language is more powerful 
 than the Greek. 
 
 Note 5. Page 23. 
 
 Viz., in the brief Introduction to the Samson Agonistes, and in a 
 remarkable passage (taxed not unreasonably with bigotry by Words- 
 worth) of the Paradise Regained. 
 
 Note 6. Page 27. 
 
 * When sown ; ' as it has been repeatedly ; a fact which some 
 readers may not be aware of. 
 
 Note 7. Page 29. 
 
 Boileau, it is true, translated Longinus. But there goes little 
 Greek to that. It is in dealing with Attic Greek, and Attic potU, 
 that a man can manifest his Grecian skill. 
 
 Note 8. Page 31. 
 
 • Before God was kno^vn ; ' — i. e. known in Greece. 
 
 Note 9. Page .34. 
 
 At times, I say pointedly, the Athenian rather than the Grecian 
 tragedy, in order to keep the reader's attention awake to a re- 
 mark made by Paterculus, — viz. That although Greece coquet- 
 tishly welcomed homage to herself, as generally concerned in the 
 Greek literature, in reality Athens only had any original share in 
 the drama, or in the oratory of Greece. 
 
 Note 10. Page 38. 
 
 ' The supreme artist ; ' — It is chiefly by comparison with 
 Euripides, that Sophocles is usually crowned with the laurels 
 of art. But there is some danger of doing wi-ong to the truth in 
 Vk) blindly adhering to these old rulings of critical courts. The 
 judgments would sometimes be reversed, if the pleadings were 
 ^fore us. There were blockheads in those days. Undoubtedly
 
 544 NOTES. 
 
 it is past denyiug that Euripides at times betra,ys marks of care- 
 lessness in the structure of his plots, as if writing too mucli in a 
 hurry : the original cast of the fable is sometimes not happy, and 
 the evolution or disentangling is too precipitate. It is easy to see 
 that he would have remoulded them in a revised edition, or 
 diaskeue [(^/uazei;)/.] On the other hand, I remember nothing in 
 the Greek drama more worthy of a great artist than parts in his 
 Phoenissae. Neither is he the eifeminately tender, or merely 
 pathetic poet that some people imagine. He was able to sweep 
 all the chords of the impassioned spirit. But the whole of thia 
 subject is in arrear : it is in fact res Integra, almost unbroken 
 ground. 
 
 Note 11. Page 42. 
 
 I see a possible screw loose at this point : if you see it, reader, 
 have the goodness to hold your tongue. 
 
 Note 12. Page 45. 
 
 * Athenian Tlieatre : ' — Many corrections remain to be made. 
 Athens, in her bloom, was about as big as Calcutta, which con- 
 tained, forty years ago, more than half a million of people ; or as 
 Naples, which (being long rated at three hundred thousand), is 
 now known to contain at least two hundred thousand more. The 
 well known census of Demetrius Phalereus gave twenty-one 
 thousand citizens. Multiply this by 5, or 4.^ , and you have their 
 families. Add ten thousand, multiplied by 4^, for the Metoikoi. 
 Then add four hundred thousand for the slaves : total, about five 
 hundred and fifty thousand. But upon the fluctuations of the 
 Athenian population there is much room for speculation. And, 
 quaere, was not the population of Alliens greater two centuriea 
 before Demetrius, in the days of Pericles ? 
 
 Note 13. Page 47. 
 
 Having no Sophocles at hand, I quote from memory, not pra 
 tending therefore to exactness : but the sense is what I state.
 
 NOTES. 545 
 
 Note 14. Page 49. 
 
 fi^hose version, I do not know. But one unaccountable error 
 was forced on one's notice. Thebes, wliicli by Milton and by 
 every scholar is made a monosyllable, is here made a dissyllable. 
 But Thebez, the dissyllable, is a Syrian city. It is true that 
 Casaubon deduces from a Syriac word meaning a case or enclosure 
 (a theca), the name of Thebes, whether Boeotian or Egyptian. It 
 is probable, therefore, that Thebes the hundred-gated of Upper 
 Egypt, Thebes the seven-gated of Greece, and Thebes of Syria, 
 had all one origin as \'egards the name. But this matters not ; 
 it is the English name that we are concerned with. 
 
 Note 15. Page 50. 
 
 ' False : ' or rather inaccurate. The burlesque was not on the 
 Antigone, but on the Medea of Euripides ; and very amusing. 
 
 Note 16. Page 58. 
 
 But in this instance, perhaps, distance of space, combined with 
 the unrivalled grandeur of the war, was felt to equiponderate the 
 distance of time, Susa, the Persian capital, being fourteen hun- 
 dred miles from Athens. 
 
 Note 17. Page 59. 
 
 STffira &'vK ayaXuuTo:, her bosom as the bosum of a statue; an 
 expression of Euripides, and applied, I think, to Polyxena at the 
 moment of her sacrifice on the tomb of Achilles, as the bride that 
 was being married to him at the moment of his death. 
 
 Note 18. Page 59. 
 
 Amongst the questions which occurred to me as requiring an 
 »nswer, in connection with this revival, was one with regard to 
 ihe comparative fitness of the Antigone for giving a representa^- 
 tive idea of the Greek stage. I am of opinion that it was the 
 worst choice which could have been made ; and ihr the very 
 reason which no doubt governed that choice, viz. — because the 
 austerity of the tragic passion la disfigured by a love epiaodfe 
 Rousseau in his letter t. U'Alembert upon his article Genet i, iq 
 35
 
 546 KOTES. 
 
 the French Encyclopcdie, aska, — • Qui est-ce qui doute que, sur 
 nos theatres, la meilleure piece de Sophocle ne tombdt tout-a-platl^ 
 A.nd his reason (as collected from other passages) is — because 
 an interest derived from the passion of sexual love can rarely be 
 found on the Greek stage, and yet cannot be dispensed witli on 
 that of Paris. But why was it so rare on the Greek stage ? Net 
 from accident, but because it did not harmonize with the prin- 
 ciple of that stage, and its vast overhanging gloom. It is the 
 greixt infirmity of the French, and connected constitutionally with 
 the gayety of their temperament, that they cannot sympathize 
 with this terrific mode of grandeur. We can. And for us the 
 choice should have been more purely and severely Grecian ; whilst 
 the slenderness of the plot in any Greek tragedy, would require 
 a far more effective support from tumultuous movement in the 
 chorus. Even the French are not uniformly insensible to this 
 Grecian grandeur. I remember that Voltaire, amongst many 
 just remarks on the Electra of Sophocles, mixed with others that 
 are not just, bitterly condemns this demand for a love fable on 
 the French stage, and illustrates its extravagance by the Fi-ench 
 tragedy on the same subject, of Crebillon. He (in default of any 
 more suitable resource) has actually made Electra, whose char- 
 acter on the Greek stage is painfully vindictive, in love with an 
 imaginary son of ^gisthus, her father's murderer. Something 
 should also have been said of Mrs. Leigh Murray's Ismene, which 
 was very effective in supporting and in relieving the magnificent 
 impression of Antigone. I ought also to have added a note on 
 the scenic mask, and the common notion (not authorized, I am 
 satisfied, by the practice in the supreme era of Pericles), that it 
 exhibited a Janus face, the windward side expressing grief or 
 horror, the leeward expressing tranquillity. Believe it not, 
 reader. But on this and other points, it will be better to speak 
 circumstantially, in a separate paper on the Greek drama, as 8 
 majestic but very exclusive and almost, if one may say so, bigoted 
 form of the scenic art 
 
 Note 19. Page 79. 
 
 Bitson was the most litigious of attorneys ; the leader of all black- 
 .etter Uterature ; dreaded equally by Bishop Percy and Sir Walter 
 Scott ; but constantly falling into error through pure mulish perverse- 
 ness. Of Greek he knew nothing. In Latin he was self-taught, and 
 consequently laid himself open to the scoffs of scholara better taught
 
 V0TB8. 
 
 547 
 
 NOTB 20. Page 84. 
 
 This obelus, or little spit, or in fact dagger, prefixed to a word, or 
 verse, or paragraph, indicated that it might consider itself stabbed, 
 and assassinated forever. 
 
 Note 21. Page 91. 
 
 Which (to borrow Milton' s grand words f rom " Paradise Regained '* ) 
 " Thvmder'd over Greece 
 To Macedon and Artaxerxes' throne." 
 
 Note 32. Page 92 
 
 A still more startling (because more complex) anagram is found in 
 the words Revolution Frangaise ; for if (as was said in 1800, after 
 Marengo), from those two words, involving nineteen letters, you sub- 
 tract the king's veto (viz., exactly those four letters), in that case 
 there will remain — Un Corse lajinira. 
 
 Note 23. Page 95. 
 
 For instance, the Athenian females, even when mature women, 
 seemed still girls in their graceful slenderness; they were, in modern 
 French phrase, sveltes. But the Boeotian, even whilst yet young girls, 
 seemed already mature women, fully developed. 
 
 Note 24. Page 95. 
 
 From the expression of Phidiaca manu — used by Horace — we learn 
 that the adjective, derived from Phidias, the immortal architect and 
 sculptor, was Phidiacus. 
 
 Note 25. Page 127. 
 
 " Sycophantic:"" — The reader must remember that the danger was 
 immiuent: there was always a body ready to be bribed into forgery — 
 viz., the mercenary rhapsodoi; there was always a body having a 
 deep interest of family ostentation in bribing them into flattering 
 interpolations. And standing by was a public the most uncritical 
 and the most servile to literary forgeries (such is the Letters of Pha- 
 laris, of Themistocles, &c.), that ever can have existed. 
 
 Note 26. Page 129. 
 
 " Stilettoes:" — u e., obelises, or places his autocratic obelus heton 
 the passage.
 
 54S 
 
 NOTES. 
 
 Note 27. Page 130. 
 
 The first words of the "Iliad" are, MjixtK aeiSe ©ea — i. e., Wrath 
 ling Goddess of Pelides. 
 
 Note 28. Page 131, 
 
 I have repeatedU' spoken of "publication''' as an incident to which 
 literary works were, or might be, liable in the times of Solon and 
 Pisistratus; that is, in times that range between 500 and 600 j'ears 
 B. c. But, as very many readers — especially female readers — make 
 no distinction between the act of printing and the act of publication, 
 there are few who will not be perplexed by this form of expression, 
 as supposing that neither one nor the other was an advantage physi- 
 cally open in those daj's to any author whatever. Printing, it is true, 
 was not; but for a very different reason from that ordinarily assigned 
 — viz., that it had not been discovered. It had been discovered many 
 times over; and many times forgotten. Paper it was, cheap paper 
 (as man}' writers have noticed), that had not been discovered ; which 
 failing, the other discoverj' fell back constantly into oblivion. This 
 want forced the art of printing to slumber for pretty nearly the exact 
 period of 2000 years from the era of Pisistratus. But that want did 
 not affect the power of publication, ^schylus, Sophocles, Euripides, 
 Aristophanes, Menander, were all published, to the extent of many 
 modern editions, on the majestic stage of Athens; published to myriads 
 in one day ; published with advantages of life-like action, noble enun- 
 ciation, and impassioned music. No modern author, except Thomas 
 a Kempis, has ever been half so well published. The Greek orators 
 on the Bema were published to more than all the citizens of Athens. 
 And some 2000 and odd years later, in regal London, at Whitehall, 
 the dramas of Shakspere were published effectually to two consec- 
 utive Princes of Wales, Henry and Charles, with royal apparatus of 
 scenery and music. 
 
 Note 29. Page 137. 
 
 Literally — Whence also the Homeridoe, who are m effect the singert 
 (aoiSoi) oj" continuous metrical narratives (i. e., pairTtav, iiittov), do for 
 the most part (to ttoXa*) derive their openings (apxovrax). 
 
 Note 30. Page 139. 
 
 It will be observed that I have uniformly assumed the chronologic 
 date of Homer as 1000 years b. c. Among the reasons for this, some 
 %re so transcendent that it would not have been worth while to detain
 
 NOTES. 549 
 
 Jie reader upon minute grounds of approximation to that date. One 
 ground is sufficient : Lycurgus, the Spartan lawgiver, seems accu- 
 ratelj placed about 800 years b. c. Now, if at that era Lycurgus 
 naturalizes the "Iliad" as a great educational power in Sparta (led 
 to this, no doubt, by gratitude for Homer's glorification of so many 
 cities in the Peloponnesus), then — because one main reason for this 
 must have been the venerable antiquity of Homer — it is impossible 
 to assign him less at that time than 200 years of duration. An 
 antiquity that was already venerable in the year 800 b. c. would 
 Itrgue, at the very least, a natal origin for the poet (if not for the 
 poem) of 1000 b. c. 
 
 Note 31. Page 156. 
 
 "Two centuries:" — i. e., the supposed interval between Troy and 
 Homer. 
 
 Note 32. Page 164. 
 
 In particular, by an Eton boy about the beginning of this century, 
 known extensively as Homeric Wright. 
 
 Note 33. Page 184, 
 
 • Yankee names. ' — Foreigners in America subject themselves 
 to a perpetual misinterpretation by misapplying this term. 
 ♦ Yankee,^ in the American use, does not mean a citizen of the 
 United States as opposed to a foreigner, but a citizen of the 
 Northern New England States (Massachusetts, Connecticut, 
 &c.) opposed to a Virginian, a Kentuckian, &c. 
 
 Note 34. Page 187. 
 
 • An increasing class ; ' but not in France. — It is a most 
 remarkable moral phenomenon in the social condition of that 
 nation, and one which speaks a volume as to the lower tone of 
 female dignity, that unmarried women, at the age which amongst 
 us obtains the insulting name of old maids, are almost unknown. 
 What shocking sacrifices of sexual honor does this one fact 
 argue ? 
 
 Note 35. Page 212. 
 
 This is a most instructive fact, and it is another fact not less 
 instructive, that law3'ers in most parts of Christendom, I believe, 
 »ertainlj' wherever they are wide awake professionally, tolerate no
 
 ;)50 iroTES. 
 
 puncfuation. But why? Are }awyers not sensible to the luminous 
 effect from a point happily placed? Yes, they are sensible; but also 
 I hey are sensible of the false prejudicating effect from a punctuation 
 managed (as too generally it is) carelessly and illogically. Here is 
 the brief abstract of the case. All punctuation narrows the path, 
 which is else unlimited; and (% narrowing it) may chance to guide 
 the reader into the right groove amongst several that are not right. 
 But also punctuation has the effect very often (and almost always 
 has the power) of biassing and predetermining the reader to an erro- 
 neous choice of meaning. Better, therefore, no guide at all than one 
 which is likely enough to lead astray, and which must always be 
 suspected and mistrusted, inasmuch as very nearly always it has the 
 power to lead astray. 
 
 Note 36. Page 218, 
 
 • JVo subject. ' — If he had a subject, what was it ? As to the 
 great and sole doctrines of Islam — the unity of God, and the 
 mission of Mahomet as his chief prophet, (i. e. not vaticinator, 
 but interpreter,) — that must be presumed known to every 
 man in a Mussulman army, since otherwise he could not have 
 been admitted into the army. But these doctrines might 
 require expansion, or at least evidence ? Not at all ; the 
 Mussulman believes them incapable of either. But at least 
 the Cahph might mount the pulpit, in order to urge the pri- 
 mary duty of propagating the true faith ? No ; it was not the 
 primary duty ; it was a secondary duty ; else there would have 
 been no option allowed — tribute, death, or conversion. Well, 
 then, the Caliph might ascend the pulpit, for the purpose of en- 
 forcing a secondary duty ? No, he could not ; because that was 
 no duty of time or place ; it was a postulate of the conscience at 
 all times alike ; and needed no argument or illustration. Why 
 then, what ivas it that the Caliph talked about ? It was this : — 
 He praised the man who had cut most throats ; he pronounced 
 the funeral panegyric of him who had his own throat cut under 
 the banners of the Prophet ; he explained the prudential merits 
 of the next movement or of the next campaign. In fact, he 
 did precisely what Pericles did — what Scipio did — what 
 Otesar did ; what it was a regular part of the Roman Impera- 
 tor's commission to do, both before a battle and after a battle, 
 and, generally, under any circumstances which make an ex- 
 planation necessary. What is now done in ' general orders,'
 
 KOTEfl. 
 
 551 
 
 tras then committed to a viva voce communication. Trifling 
 communications probably devolved on the six centurions of 
 each cohort (or regiment) ; graver communications were reserved 
 to the Imperator, surrounded by his stall". Why we should mis- 
 lead the student by calling this solemnity of addressing an army 
 from a tribunal, or suggestus, by the irrelevant name of preach- 
 ing from a pulpit, can only be understood by those who perceive 
 the false view taken of the Mahometan faith and its relation to 
 the human mind. It was certainly a poor plagiarism from the 
 Judaic and the Christian creeds; but it did not rise so high as 
 to conceive of any truth that needed or that admitted intellectual 
 development, or that was susceptible of exposition and argu- 
 ment. However, if we will have it that the Caliph preached, 
 then did his lieutenant say Amen. If Omar was a parson, then 
 certainly Caled was his clerk. 
 
 Note 37. Page 255. 
 
 Paterculus, it must be remembered, was composing a pecu- 
 liar form of history, and, therefore, under a peculiar law of 
 composition. It was designed for a rapid survey of many 
 ages, within a very narrow compass, and unavoidably pitched 
 its scale of abstraction very high. This justified a rhetorical, 
 almost a poetic, form of expression ; for in such a mode of 
 writing, whether a writer seeks that effect or not, the abrupt 
 and almost lyrical transitions, the startling leaps over vast 
 gulfs of time and action, already have the effect of impassioned 
 composition. Hence, by an instinct, he becomes rhetorical : 
 and the natural character of his rhetoric, its pointed condensa- 
 tion, often makes him obscure at first sight. We therefore, for 
 the merely English reader have a little expanded or at least 
 brought out his meaning. But foi the Latin reader, who will 
 unjoy his elliptical energy, we hav(, sometimes added the origi- 
 nal words. 
 
 Note 38. Page 263. 
 
 * The Roma?i aid-de-camp^s.' — Excuse, reader, this modern 
 (>hrase : by what other is it possible to express the relation to 
 Tiberius, and the military ofiice about his person, which Pater- 
 culus held on the German frontier ? In the lU-Ith chapter 
 \£ his second book he says — ^Hoctempus me, functum ante
 
 552 KOTKS. 
 
 'ribwialu castrorum, Tib. Ccesaris militem fecit ; ^ which in 
 our version is — ' This epoch placed me, who had previously 
 discharged the duties of camp-marshal, upon the staff of 
 Caesar.' And he goes on to say, that, having been made a 
 brigadier-general of cavalry (ala prcefectus) under a commission 
 which dated from the very day of Caesar's adoption into the 
 Imperial house and the prospect of succession, so that the two 
 acts of grace ran concurrently — thenceforwards ' per annos 
 continuous IX. prsefectus aut legatus, spectator, et pro captu 
 mediocritatis mea, adjutor fui ' — or, as we beg to translate 
 ' through a period of nine consecutive years from this date, I 
 a'.ted either as military lieutenant to Caesar, or as ministerial 
 secretary,' [such we hold to be the true virtual equivalent of 
 prafectus — i. e. speaking fully of prcefectus prcEtorio,] 'acting 
 simultaneously as inspector of the public works,' [bridges and 
 vast fortifications on the north-east German frontier,] ' and 
 (to the best capacity of my slender faculties) as his personal 
 aid-de-camp.' Possibly the reader may choose to give a less 
 confined or professional meaning to the word adjutor. But, in 
 apology, we muat suggest two cautions to him : 1st, That else- 
 where, Paterculus does certainly apply the term as a military 
 designation, bearing a known techical meaning ; and, 2d, That 
 this word adjutor, in other non-military uses, as for instance on 
 the stage, had none but a technical meaning. 
 
 Note 29. Page 264. 
 This is too much to allow for a generation in those days, 
 when the average duration of life was much less than at 
 present ; but, as an exceedingly convenient allowance (since 
 itirice o3i is just equal to a century), it may be allowedly used 
 In all cases not directly bearing on technical questions of civil 
 economy. Meantime, as we love to suppose ourselves in all 
 cases as speaking virginibus puerisque, who, though reading no 
 man's paper throughout, may yet often read a page or a para- 
 graph of every man's — we, for the chance of catching their 
 eye in a case where they may really gain in two minutes an 
 ineradicable conspectus of the Greek literature, (and for tho 
 sake of ignorant people universally, whose interests we hold 
 sacred.) add a brief explanation of what is meant by a gen- 
 'lation. Is it meant or imagined — that, in so narrow a com-
 
 VOTKS. 
 
 5d3 
 
 pass as 33 years + 4 montts the whole population of a city, or 
 A people, could have died off? By no means: not under the 
 lowest value of human life. What ia meant is — that a number 
 equal to the whole population will have died : not X, the actual 
 population, but a number equal to X. Suppose the population 
 of Paris 900,000. Then, in the time allowed for one generation, 
 900,000 will have died : but then, to make up that number, 
 there will be 300,000 furnished, not by the people now existing, 
 but by the people who will be born in the course of the thirty- 
 three years. And thus the balloting for death falls only upon 
 two out of three, whom at first sight it appears to hit. It falls 
 not exclusively upon X, but upon X+Y : this latter quality 
 Y being a quantity flowing concurrently with the lapse of the 
 generation. Obvious as this explanation is, and almost child- 
 ish, to every man who has even a tincture of political arithme- 
 tic, it is so far from being generally obvious — that, out of every 
 thousand who will be interested in learning the earliest revolu- 
 tions of literature, there will not be as many as seven who 
 will know, even conjecturally, what is meant by a generation. 
 Besides infinite other blunders and equivocations, many use an 
 age and a generation as synonymous, whilst by siecle the 
 French uniformly mean a ceiitury. 
 
 Note 40. Page 267. 
 The oddest feature in so odd a business was — that Augustus 
 committed this castigation of bad poets to the police. Bat 
 whence the police were to draw the skill for distinguishing 
 between good poets and bad is not explained. The poets 
 must have found their weak minds somewhat astonished by the 
 sentences of these reviewers — sitting like our Justices in Quar- 
 ter Sessions — and deciding, perhaps, very much in the same 
 terms ; treating an Ode, if it were too martial, as a breach of 
 the peace ; directing an epic poet to find security for his good 
 behavior during the next two years ; and for the writers of Epi- 
 thaliimia on imperial marriages, ordering them ' to be privately 
 Whipped and discharged.' The whole aflair is the more singular 
 |,s coming from one who carried his cifUliias, or show of popular 
 panners, even to affectation. Power without the invidious exte- 
 rior of power was the object of his life. Ovid seems to have
 
 &54 NOTES. 
 
 aoticed his inconsistency in this instance by reminding him, 
 that even Jupiter did not disdain to furnish a te me laudibui 
 ipso jure* 
 
 Note 41. Page 268. 
 
 ' Phidias : ' that he was as much of a creative power as the 
 rest of his great contemporaries, that he did not merely take 
 up or pursue a career already opened by others, is pretty clear 
 from the state of Athens, and of the forty marble quarries which 
 he began to lay under contribution. The quarries were previously 
 unopened ; the city was without architectural splendor. 
 
 Note 42. Page 271. 
 
 'Officers and savans.'' — Ctesias held the latter character, 
 Xenophon united both, in the earlier expedition. These were 
 friends of Isocrates. In the latter expedition, the difficulty 
 would have been to find the man, whether officer or savant, 
 who was not the friend of Isocrates. Old age, such as his, was a 
 very rare thing in Greece — a fact which is evident from the 
 Greek work surviving on the subject of Macrobiotics : few cases 
 occur beyond seventy. This accident, therefore, of length in 
 Isocrates, must have made him already one of the standing lions 
 in Athens for the last twenty-six years of his life ; while, for 
 the last seventy, his professorship of rhetoric must have 
 brought him into connection with every great family in Greece. 
 One thing puzzles us, what he did with his money, for he must 
 have made a great deal. He had two prices ; but he charged 
 high to those who could aflford it ; and why not ? people are not 
 to learn Greek for nothing. Yet, being a teetotaller and a cow- 
 ard, how could he spend his money ? That question is vexatious. 
 However, this one possibility in the long man's life will forever 
 jaake him interesting ; he might, and it is even probable that he 
 might, have seen Xenophon (itsmount from some horse which he 
 had stolen at Trebisond on his return from the Persian expedi- 
 tion ; and he might have seen Alexander mount for Chaeronea. 
 Alexander was present at that battle, and personally joined in a 
 charge of cavah-y. It is not impossible that he may have ridden 
 Bucephalus.
 
 KoiES. 555 
 
 Note 43. Page 272. 
 
 • Is exalted.' — The logic of Gibbon may seem defective. Why 
 ihould it exalt our sense of human dignity — that Isocrates waa 
 the youthful companion of Plato or Euripides, and the aged com- 
 panion of Demosthenes ? It ought, therefore, to be mentioned, 
 that, in the sentence preceding, he had spoken of Athens as a 
 city that ' condensed, within the period of a single life, the 
 genius of ages and millions.' The condensation is the measure 
 of the dignity ; and Isocrates, as the ' single life ' alluded to, is 
 the measure of the condensation. That is the logic. By the vray, 
 Gibbon ought always to be cited by the chapter — the page and 
 Tolume of course evanesce with many forms of publication, whilst 
 the chapter is always available ; and. in the commonest form of 
 twelve volumes, becomes useful in a second function, as a guide 
 to the particular volume ; for six chapters, with hardly any ex- 
 ception, {if any,) are thi-own into each volume. Consequently, 
 the 40th chapter, standing in the seventh series of sixes, indi- 
 cates the seventh volume. 
 
 Note 44. Page 273. 
 
 Excepting fragmentary writers, and the contributors from 
 various ages to the Greek Anthologies, (which, however, next 
 after the scenic literature, offer the most interesting expressions 
 of Greek household feeling,) we ai-e not aware of having omitted 
 in this rapid review any one name that could be fancied to 
 be a weighty name, excepting that of Lycophron. Of hira we will 
 say a word or two : — The work, by which he is known, is a 
 monologue or dramatic scene from the mouth of one single 
 speaker ; this speaker is Cassandra, the prophetic daughter of 
 Priam. In about one thousand five hundred Iambic lines (the 
 ordinary length of a. Greek tragedy), she pom-s forth a dark 
 prophecy with respect to all the heroes engaged in the Trojan 
 war, typifying their various unhappy catastrophes by symbolical 
 images, which would naturally be intelligible enough to us who 
 tnow their several histories, but which (from the p:irticular 
 eeleciion of accidents or circumstances used for the designation 
 |f the persons) read like riddles without the aid of a commenta- 
 tor. This prophetic gloom, and the impassioned character of th«
 
 556 NOTES. 
 
 many woes arising notoriously to the conquerors as well as the 
 conquered in the sequel of the memorable war, give a coloring of 
 dark power to the Cassandra of Lycophron. Else we confess to the 
 fact of not having examined the poem attentively. We read it in 
 the year 1809, having been told that it was the most difficult 
 book in the Greek language. This is the popular impression, but 
 a very false one. It is not difficult at all as respects the lan- 
 guage (allowing for a few peculiar Lycophrontic words) : the 
 difficulty lies in the allusions, which are intentionally obscure. 
 
 Note 45. Page 276. 
 
 • JVot easily met with.' — From Germany we have seen reprints 
 of some eight or nine ; but once only, so far as our bibliography 
 extends, were the whole body published collectively. This waa 
 at the Aldine press in Venice, more than three centuries ago. 
 Such an interval, and so solitary a publication, sufficiently ex- 
 plain the non-familiarity of modern scholars with this section of 
 Greek literature. 
 
 Note 46. Page 285. 
 
 People will here remind us that Aristotle was half a foreigner, 
 being born at Stagyra in Macedon. Ay, but amongst Athenian 
 emigrants, and of an Athenian father. His mother, we think, 
 was Thracian. The crossing of races almost uniformly terminates 
 in producing splendor, at any rate energy, of intellect. If the 
 roll of great men, or at least of energetic men, in Christendom, 
 were carefully examined, it would astonish us to observe how 
 many have been the children of mixed marriages ; i. e. of alli- 
 ances between two bloods as to nation, although the races might 
 originally have been the same. 
 
 Note 46. Page 286. 
 
 It is well to give unity to our grandest remembrances, by con- 
 necting them, as many as can be, with the same centre Pericles 
 died in the year 42'J B. C. Supposing his age to be fifty- 
 six, he would then be born about 485 B. C, that is, ti-ve yeors 
 after the first Persian invasion under Darius, five years before 
 the second under Xerxes.
 
 NOTES. 567 
 
 Note 48. Pagt 310. 
 
 With respect to the word ' demagogues,' as a technical desig- 
 nation for the political orators and partisans at Athens, (other- 
 wise called ui nnooTuiui, those who headed any movement,) it 
 is singular that so accurate a Greek scholar as Henry Stephens 
 should have supposed linguas promptas ad plebem. co acitandum 
 (an expression of Livy's) potius loir th^uayvtYt-'^r fuisse qua/n twv 
 ^ijTO}Qu!v ; as if the demagogues were a separate class from the 
 popular orators. But, says Valckenaer, the relation is soon 
 stated : Not all the Athenian orators were demagogues ; but all 
 the demagogues were in fact, and technically were called, thp 
 Orators. 
 
 Note 49. Page 316. 
 
 It is ludicrous to see the perplexity of some translators and 
 commentators of the Rhetoric, who, having read it under a false 
 point of view, and understood it in the sense of Aristotle's own 
 deliberate judgment on the truth, labor to defend it on that foot- 
 ing. On its real footing it needs no defence. 
 
 Note 50. Page 317. 
 
 It stands at p. 227 of Jacobi Facciolati Orationis XII., 
 Acroases, Sfc. Patavii, 1729. This is the second Italian edition, 
 and was printed at the University Press. 
 
 Note 51. Page 318. 
 
 Upon an innovation of such magnitude, and which will be so 
 Btartling to scholars, it is but feir that Facciolati should have the 
 benefit of all his own arguments : and we have therefore resolved 
 to condense them. 1. He begins with that very passage (or one 
 of them) on which the received idea of the enthymeme most 
 relies ; and from this he derives an argument for the new idea. 
 The passage is to this effect, that the enthymeme is composed 
 ix 7io/iJ(.a>cig iXaTJovwv i/ i: wy 6 nvi-Xoyioinug — i. e. frequently 
 ipnsists of fewer parts than the syllogism. Frequently ! What 
 ^gic is there in that 1 Can it be imagined, that so rigorous a
 
 5J8 NOTES. 
 
 logician as Aristotle would notice, as a circumstance of freqnent 
 occurrence in an enthymeme, what, by the received doctrine, 
 should be its mere essence and diiferential principle ? To say 
 that this happens fi-equently, is to say, by implication, that 
 sometimes it does iiot happen — i. e. that it is an accident, and 
 no part of the definition, since it may thus confessedly be absent, 
 salva ratione conceptus 2. Waiving this argument, and sup- 
 posing tlie suppression of one proposition to be even universal ia 
 the enthymeme, still it would be an impertinent circumstance, 
 and (philosophically speaking) an accident. Could it be tolera- 
 ted, that a great systematic distinction (for such it is in Ai-is- 
 totle) should rest upon a mere abbreviation of convenience ? 
 ' Quasi vero argumentandi ratio et natura varietur, cum brevius 
 eflfertur ; ' whereas Aristotle himself tells us, that ' ov noug rov 
 i'i.u) Xuyor ); i.Tot^f /;(C, alXa nQoc Tov iv T>i if'r/'i.' 3. From a 
 particular passage in the 2d book of the Prior Analytics, (chap. 
 27,) generally interpreted in a way to favor the existing account 
 of the enthymeme, after first of all showing, that under a more 
 accurate construction it is incompatible with that account, whilst 
 it is in perfect harmony with the new one, Facciolati deduces an 
 explanation of that accidental peculiarity in the enthymeme, 
 which has attracted such undue attention as to eclipse its true 
 characteristic : the peculiarity, we mean, of being entitled (though 
 not,_as the common idea is, required) to suppress one proposi 
 tion. So much we shall here anticipate, as to say, that this 
 privilege arises out of the peculiar matter of the enthymeme, 
 which fitted it for the purposes of the rhetorician ; and these 
 purposes being loose and popular, brought with them proportion- 
 able indulgences ; whereas the syllogism, technically so called, 
 employing a severer matter, belonged peculiarly to the dialecti- 
 cian, or philosophic disputant, whose purposes being rigorous 
 and scientific, imposed much closer restrictions ; and one of these 
 was, that he should in no case suppress any proposition, however 
 obvious, but should formally enunciate all : just as in the deba- 
 ting schools of later ages it has always been the rule, that before 
 urging his objection, the opponent should repeat the respondent's 
 syllogism. Hence, although the rhetorician naturally used his 
 privilege, and enthymemes were in fact generally shorn of ono 
 Vroposition, (and vice versa with respect to syllogisms in th«
 
 KOTBS. 559 
 
 strict philosophic sense,) yet was all this a mere effect of usage 
 an J accident ; and it was very possible for an enthymeme to have 
 its full complement of parts, whUst a syllogism might be defec- 
 tive in the very way which is falsely supposed to be of the 
 essence of an enthymeme. 4. He derives an argument from au 
 inconsistency with which Aristotle has been thought chargeable 
 under the old idea of the enthymeme. and with which Gassendi 
 has in f^ict charged him.* 5. He meets and rebuts the force of a 
 principal argument in favor of the enthymeme as commonly un- 
 derstood, viz. that, in a particular part of the Prior Analytics, 
 the enthymeme is called nv/Jioymuog uTf/i;s — an imperfect syl- 
 logism, which word the commentators generally expound by 
 * mutilus atque imminutus.^ Here he uses the assistance of the 
 excellent J. Pace, whom he justly describes as ' virum Graecarum 
 litterarum jeritissimum, philosophum in primis bonum, et Aris- 
 totelis interpretum quot sunt, quotque fuerunt, quotque futuri 
 sunt, longe prsestantissimum.' This admirable commentator, so 
 indispensable to all who would study the Organon and the TZs^i 
 Wv/y^i;, had himself originally started that hypothesis which we 
 are now reporting, as long afterwards adopted and improved by 
 Facciolati. Considering the unrivalled qualifications of Pace, 
 this of itself is a great argument on our side. The objection 
 before us, from the word <iTfA(,;, Pace disposes of briefly and 
 conclusively : firsty he says, that the word is wanting in four 
 MSS. ; and he has nc doubt himself ' quin ex glossemate irrep- 
 serit in contextum : ' secondly, the Latin translators and school- 
 men, as Agricola and many others, take no notice of this word in 
 their versions and commentaries : thirdly, the Greek commenta- 
 tors, such as Joannes Grammaticus and Alexander Aphrodisiensis, 
 clearly had no knowledge of any such use of the word enthymeme, 
 as that which has prevailed in later times ; which is plain from 
 this, that wherever they have occasion to speak of a syllogism 
 wanting one of its members, they do not in any instance call it 
 an enthymeme, but a ovXXuYintioe utnoXi^uiiaTov. 
 
 * However, as in reality the whole case was one of mere misapprehension 
 ^i the p;irt of Gassemli, ami has, in fact, nolliing at all to do with the nature 
 •f the enthymeme, well or ill understood, Facciolati takes nothing by thit 
 iviticular argument, which, however, we have retained, to make our analy 
 tis complete.
 
 5 GO NOTES. 
 
 Note 52. Page 324. 
 
 This, added to the style and quality of his poems, makes it the 
 more remarkable that Virgil should have been deemed a rhetori- 
 cian. Yet so it was. Walsh notices, in the Life of Virgil, which 
 he furnished for his friend Dryden's Translation, that ' his (Vir 
 gil's) rhetoric, was in such general esteem, that lectures were 
 read upon it in the reign of Tiberius, and the subject of declama- 
 tions taken out of him.' 
 
 Note 53. Page 341. 
 
 In retracing the history of English rhetoric, it may strike the 
 reader that we have made some capital omissions. But in these 
 he will find we have been governed by sufficient reasons. Shaks- 
 peare is no doubt a rhetorician, majorum gentium ; but he is so 
 much more, that scarcely an instance is to be found of his rheto- 
 ric which does not pass by fits inio a higher element of eloquence 
 or poetry. The first and the last acts, for instance, of The Two 
 JVoble Kinsmen, which, in point of composition, is perhaps the 
 most superb work in the language, and beyond all doubt from 
 the loom of Shakspeare, would have been the most gorgeous rhet- 
 oric, had they not happened to be something far better. The 
 supplications of the widowed Queens to Theseus, the invocations 
 of their tutelar divinities by Palamon and Ai'cite, the death of 
 Arcite, &c., are finished in a more elaborate style of excellence 
 than any other almost of Shakspeare's most felicitous scenes. In 
 their first intention, they were perhaps merely rhetorical ; but 
 the furnace of composition has transmuted their substance. In- 
 deed, specimens of mere rhetoric would be better sought in some 
 of the other great dramatists, who are under a less fatal neces- 
 sity of turning everything they touch into the pure gold of poetry. 
 Two other writers, with great original capacities for rhetoric, we 
 have omitted in our list from separate considerations : we mean 
 Bir Walter Pi,aleigh and Lord Bacon. The first will hardly have 
 been missed by the general reader ; for his finest passages are 
 iispersed through the body of his bulky history, and are touched 
 tith a sadness too pathetic, and of too personal a growth, to fulfil
 
 NOTES. 561 
 
 the conditions of a gay rhetoric as an art rejoicing in its own 
 energies. With regard to Lord Bacon, the case is different. He 
 had great advantages for rhetoric, being figurative and sensuous, 
 (as great thinkers must always be,) and laving no feelings too 
 profound, or of a nature to disturb the balance of a pleasurable 
 activity , but yet, if we except a few letters, and parts of a few 
 speeches, he never comes forward as a rhetorician. The reason 
 IS, that being always in quest of absolute truth, he contemplates 
 all subjects — not through the rhetorical fancy, which is most 
 excited by mere seeming resemblances, and such as can only sus- 
 tain themselves under a single phasis, but through the philo- 
 sophic fancy, or that which rests upon real analogies- Another 
 unfavorable circumstance, arising in fact out of the pletlmric 
 fulness of Lord B.'s mind, is the short-hand style of his composi- 
 tion, in which the connections are seldom fully developed. It 
 was the lively mot of a great modern poet, speaking of Lord B.'s 
 Essays, ' that they are not plants but seeds. ' 
 
 Note 54. Page 362. 
 
 We may take the opportunity of noticing what it is that con- 
 stitutes the peculiar and characterizing circumstance in Burke's 
 manner of composition. It is this, — that under his treatment 
 every truth, be it what it may, every thesis of a sentence, grows 
 in the very act of unfolding it. Take any sentence you please 
 from Dr. Johnson, suppose, and it will be found to contain a 
 thought — good or bad — fully preconceived. AVhereas, in Burke, 
 whatever may have been the preconception, it receives a new de- 
 termination or inflection at every clause of the sentence. Some 
 3ollateral adjunct of the main proposition, some temperament or 
 restraint, some oblique glance at its remote affinities, will inva- 
 riably be found to attend the progress of his sentences — like the 
 spray from a waterfall, or the scintillations from the iron under 
 the blacksmith's hammer. Hence, wnilst a writer of Dr. John- 
 son's class seems only to look back upon his thoughts, Burke 
 ooks forward — and does in fact advance and change his own 
 station concurrently with the advance of the sentences. This 
 \^culiarity is no doubt in some degree due to the habit of extern 
 pore speaking, but not to that only. 
 
 36
 
 562 NOTES. 
 
 Note 55. Page 366. 
 
 The following illustration, however, from Dr. J.'s critique on 
 Prior's Solomon, is far from a happy one : ' He had infused into 
 it much knowledge and much thought ; had often polished it to 
 elegance, dignified it with splendor, and sometimes heightened 
 it to sublimity ; he perceived in it many excellences, and did not 
 perceive that it wanted that, without which all others are of small 
 avail, — the power of engaging attention, Skni alluring turi 
 osity.^ The parts marked in italics are those to which Dr. W 
 would object as tautologic. Yet this objection can hardly be sus 
 tained ; the ideas are all sufficiently discriminated : the fault 
 is, that they are applied to no real corresponding differences in 
 Prior. 
 
 Note 56. Page 367. 
 
 We wish that in so critical a notice of an effect derived from 
 the fortunate position of a single word, Dr. W. had not shocked 
 our ears by this hideous collision of a double ' is. ' 
 
 Note 57. Page 369. 
 
 • As distinguished from prose.^ Here is one of the many in- 
 stances in which a false answer is prepared beforehand, by 
 falsely shaping the question. The accessary circumstance, as 
 ' distinguished from prose,' already prepares a false answer by 
 the very terms of the problem. Poetry cannot be distinguished 
 from prose without presupposing the whole question at issue. 
 Those who deny that metre is the characteristic distinction of 
 poetry, deny, by implication, that prose can be truly opposed 
 to prose. Some have imagined, that the proper opposition was 
 between poetry and science ; but suppose that this is an imper- 
 fect opposition, and suppose even that there is no adequate oppo- 
 sition, or counterpole, this is no more than happens in many 
 ■ither cases. One of two poles is often without a name, even 
 where the idea is fully assignable in analysis. But at all events 
 {he expression, as ' distinguished from prose,' is a subtle instance 
 »f a petitio principii.
 
 NOTES. 563 
 
 NOTK 58. Page 380. 
 
 The Romans discover something apparently of the same tendency 
 to a vague economy of abstraction. But in thein it is merely casual, 
 and dependent on accidental ignorance. Thus, for instance, it is 
 ridiculous to render the Catullian Passer niece puella by sparrow. 
 As well suppose Lesbia to have fondled a pet hedgehog. Passer, 
 or passerculus, means any little bird whatever. The sternness of 
 the Roman mind disdained to linger upon petty distinctions ; or at 
 least until the ages of luxurious refinement had paved the way for 
 intellectual refinements. So again, malum, or even pomum, does 
 not mean an apple, but any whatever of the larger spherical or 
 spheroidical fruits. A peach, indeed, was described differentially 
 as malum Persicum; an apricot, had the Romans known it, would 
 have been rendered by malum apricum, or malum apricatum ; 
 but an apple also, had it been mentioned with any stress of oppo- 
 sition or pointed distinction attached to it, would have been 
 described difierentially as malum vuli/are or malum domesticum~. 
 
 Note 59. Page 381. 
 
 There is a short note by Gibbon upon this word ; but it adds 
 nothing to the suggestions which every thoughtful person will 
 furnish to himself. 
 
 Note 60. Page 381. 
 
 In the later periods of Greek literature, namely, at and after the 
 era of Pericles, when the attention had been long pointed to lan- 
 guage, and a more fastidious apprehension had been directed to ita 
 slighter shades of difference, the term ^'barbarous " was applied 
 apparently to uncouth dialects of the Greek language itself. Thus 
 in the Ajax of Sophocles, Teucer (though certainly talking Greek) 
 is described as speaking barbarously. Perhaps, however, the ex 
 pression might bear a difierent construction. But in elder periods 
 it seems hardly possible that the term barbarous could ever have 
 been bo used. Sir Edward B. Lytton, in his "Athens," supposes 
 4omer, when describing the Carians by this term, to have meant 
 no more than that they spoke some provincial variety of the Ionic 
 Greek : but, applied to an age of so little refinement as the Ho- 
 tfierio, I should scarcely think this interpretation admissible.
 
 664 NOTES. 
 
 Note 61. Page 384. 
 
 Where, by the way, the vocabulary of aesthetic terms, after all 
 the labors of Ernesti and other German editors, is still far from 
 being understood. In particular, the word facetus is so far from 
 answering to its usual interpretation, that nostra periculo let the 
 reader understand it as precisely what the French mean by naive. 
 
 Note 62. Page 385. 
 
 At this era, when Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, and the con- 
 temporary dramatists, when Lord Bacon, Seldon, Milton, and 
 many of the leading English theologians (Jewel, Hooker, Chilling- 
 worth, and Jeremy Taylor), had appeared — in fact, all the opti- 
 mates of the English literature — it must be remembered that the 
 French literature was barely beginning. Montaigne was the only 
 deceased author of eminence ; Corneille was the only living author 
 in general credit. The reader may urge that already, in the times 
 of Catherine de Medici, there were eminent poets. In the reign 
 of her son Charles IX. were several ; and in the reign of her hus- 
 band there was even a celebrated Pleiad of poets. But these 
 were merely court poets — they had no national name ; and were 
 already forgotten in the days of Louis XIII. As to German litera- 
 ture, that was a blank. Germany had then but one tolerable poet, 
 namely, Opitz, whom some people (chiefly his countrymen) honor 
 with the title of the German Dryden ! 
 
 Note 63. Page 386. 
 
 This the reader might be apt to doubt, if he were to judge of 
 French grammar by French orthography. Until recently — that 
 is, through the last thirty years — very few people in France, even 
 of the educated classes, could spell. They spelt by procuration. 
 The compositors of the press held a general power-of-attorney to 
 spell for universal France. A fac simile of the spelling which 
 prevailed amongst the royal family of France at the time of the 
 elder Revolution is given in Clery's journal : it is terrific. Such 
 forms occur, for instance, as J'avoient (J'avois) for I had: J'ete 
 (etois) for / was. But, in publishing such facts, the reader is not 
 to imagine that Clery meant to expose anything needing conceal- 
 ment. All people of distinction spelled in that lawless way ; and
 
 NOTES. 665 
 
 the loyal valet doubtless no more thought it decorous for a man of 
 rank to spell his own spelling, than to clean his own shoes or to 
 wash his own linen. " Base is the man who pays," says Ancient 
 Pistol ; "base is the man who spells," said the French of that 
 aentury. It would have been vulgar to spell decently ; and it was not 
 illiterate to spell abominably ; for literary men spelled not at all 
 better : they also spelled by proxy, and by grace of compositors. 
 
 Note 64. Page 387. 
 By Heinze, if I recollect ; and founded partly on that of WolflF 
 
 Note 65. Page 387. 
 
 Foreigners do not often go so far as this ; and yet an American, 
 in his ♦' Sketches of Turkey " (New York, 1833), characterizes the 
 German (p. 478) not only as a soft and melodious language, but 
 absolutely as "the softest of all European languages." Schiller 
 and Goethe had a notion that it was capable of being hammered 
 into euphony, that it was by possibility malleable in that respect, 
 but then only by great labor of selection, and as a trick of rope- 
 dancing ingenuity. 
 
 Note 66. Page 393. 
 
 " Transcendental.^'' — Kant, who was the most sincere, honora- 
 ble, and truthful of human beings, always understood himself. He 
 hated tricks, disgaises, or mystifications, simulation equally with 
 dissimulation ; and his love of the English was built avowedly 
 on their veracity. So far he is a delightful pei'son to deal with. 
 On the other hand, of all men he had the least talent for explain- 
 ing himself, or communicating his views to othei-s. Whenever 
 Kant undertakes to render into popular language the secrets of 
 metaphysics, one inevitably thinks of Bardolph's attempt to ana- 
 lyze and justifj the word accommodation : — ^'Accommodation — 
 that is, when a man is (as they say) accommodated ; or when a 
 man is being whereby he may be thought to be accommodated, 
 which is an excellent thing." There are sometimes Eleusinian 
 mysteries, sealed by nature herself, the mighty mother, as apor' 
 'eta, things essentially ineffable and unutterable in vulgar ears. 
 tioug, for instance, he labored, but vainly he labored, to render
 
 566 
 
 hOTEB. 
 
 Intelligible the scholastic idea of the transcendental. This should 
 have been easy to deal with ; for on the one side lay the tramcen^ 
 dent, on the other the immanent, two buoys to map out the chan- 
 nel ; and yet did Kant, throughout his long life, fail to satisfy any 
 one man who was not previously and independently in possession 
 of the idea. Difficulties of this nature should seem as little related 
 to artifice of style and diction as geometrical difficulties ; and yet 
 it is certain that, by throwing the stress and emphasis of the per- 
 plexity upon the exact verbal 7iodus of the problem, a better 
 structure of his sentences would have guided Kant to a readier 
 apprehension of the real shape which the difficulty assumed to the 
 ordinary student 
 
 NoTK 67. Page 406. 
 
 "Southey affirmed: " — namely, in the " Letters of Espriella," 
 an imaginary Spaniard on a visit to England, about the year 1810. 
 
 Note 68. Page 408. 
 
 " Too much wealth .• " — Mr. Landor, who should know best, 
 Bpeaks of himself (once at least), as " poor ; " but thai is all non- 
 sense. I have known several people with annual incomes border- 
 ing on twenty thousand pounds, who spoke of themselves, and 
 seemed seriously to think themselves, unhappy '• paupers." Lady 
 Hester Stanhope, with twenty-seven hundred pounds a year (of 
 which about twelve arose from her government pension), and with- 
 out one solitary dependent in her train, thought herself rich enough 
 to become a queen (an Arabic maleky) in the Syrian mountains, 
 but an absolute pauper for London ; " for how, you know" (as 
 she would say, pathetically), " could the humblest of spinsters 
 live decently upon that pittance ? " 
 
 Note 69. Page 411. 
 
 " From Hegel : " — I am not prepared with an affidavit that 
 no man ever read Mr. Hegel, that great master of the impenetrabla 
 But sufficient evidence of that ftict, as I conceive, may be drawr 
 t'om those who have written commentaries upon him.
 
 HOTB8. 567 
 
 Note 70. Page 418. 
 
 " Freshness in the public mind : " — Ten or a dozen years ago, when 
 ills was written, the atrocity of Dahra was familiar to the readers of 
 newspapers: it is now forgotten ; and therefore I retrace it briefly. 
 The French in Algiers, upon occasion of some razzia against a party 
 of Arabs, hunted them into the cave or caves of Dahra; and, upon 
 the refusal of the Arabs to surrender, filled up the mouth of their 
 retreat with combustibles, and eventually roasted alive the whole 
 party — men, women, and children. The Mardchal St. Arnaud, who 
 subsequently died in supreme command' of the French army before 
 Sebastopol, was said to have been coi^erned as a principal in this 
 atrocity. Meantime the Arabs are not rightfully or specially any 
 objects of legitimate sympathy in such a case; for thej' are quite 
 capable of similar cruelties under any movement of religious fanati- 
 cism. 
 
 Note 71. Page 420. 
 
 Wale (Germanice wahl), the old ballad word for choice. But 
 the motive for using it in this place is in allusion to an excellent 
 old Scottish story (not sufficiently known in the south), of a rus- 
 tic laird, who profited by the hospitality of his neighbors, 
 duly to get drunk once (and no more) every lawful night, 
 returning in the happiest frame of mind under the escort of 
 his servant Andrew. In spite of Andrew, however, it sometimes 
 happened that the laird fell off his horse ; and on one of these occa- 
 sions, as he himself was dismounted from his saddle, his wig was 
 dismounted from his cranium. Both fell into a peat-moss, and 
 both were fished out by Andrew. But the laird, in his confusion, 
 putting on the wig wrong side before, reasonably " jaloused " that 
 this could not be his own wig, but some other man's, which sus- 
 picion he communicated to Andrew, who argued contra by the 
 memorable reply — "Hout, laird ! there's nae wale o' wigs i' a 
 peat-moss." 
 
 Note 72. Page 421. 
 
 Milton, in uttering his grief (but also his hopes growing out 
 pi his grief) upon a similar tragedy, namely, the massacre of 
 the Protestant women and children by " the bloody Piedmontese.
 
 568 
 
 NOTES. 
 
 Note 73. Page 425. 
 
 "Modern military life:" — By modern I mean sincp the 
 opening of the thirty years* war. In this w.ir, the sack, or 'partial 
 sack, of Magdeburg, will c^our to the reader as one or tliC worst 
 amongst martial ruilianisms. But this happens tc he a hoay. It 
 is an old experience, that, when once the demure muse of history 
 has allowed herself to tell a lie, she never retracts it. Many ar^ 
 the falsehoods in our own history, which our children read tradi- 
 tionally for truths, merely because our uncritical grandfathers 
 believed them to be such. Magdeburg was not sacked. What 
 fault there was in the case belonged to the King of Sweden, who 
 certainly was remiss in this instance, though with excuses more 
 than were hearkened to at that time. Tilly, the Bavarian general 
 had no reason for severity in this case, and showed none. Accord- 
 ing to the regular routine of war, Magdeburg had become forfeiteti 
 to military execution ; which, let the reader remember, was not, 
 in those days, a right of the general as against the enemy, and by 
 way of salutary warning to other cities, lest they also should abuse 
 the right of a reasonable defence, but was a right of the soldiery 
 as against their own leaders. A town stormed was then a little 
 perquisite to the ill-fed and ill-paid soldiei's. So of prisoners. If 
 I made a prisoner of " Signer Drew" [see Henry V.], it was my 
 business to fix his ransom ; the general had no business to inter- 
 fere with that. Magdeburg, therefore, had incurred the common 
 penalty (which she must have foreseen) of obstinacy ; and the only 
 diiference between her case and that of many another brave little 
 town, that quietly submitted to the usual martyrdom, without howl 
 ing through all the speaking-trumpets of history, was this — that 
 he penalty was, upon Magdeburg, but partially enforced. Harte, 
 the tutor of Lord Chesterfield's son, first published, in his Life of 
 Gustavus Adolphus, an authentic diary of what passed at that 
 lime, kept by a Lutheran clergyman. This diary shows sufficiently 
 that no real departures were made from the customary routine, 
 except in the direction of mercy. But it is evident that the people 
 of Magdeburg were a sort of German hogs, of whom, it is notori- 
 ous, that if you attempt in the kindest way to shear them, all you 
 get is horrible yelling, and (the proverb asserts) very little wool 
 The case being a classical one in the annals of military outrages. 
 I have noticed its real features.
 
 HOTEB. 569 
 
 Note 74. Page 428. 
 
 " Melanchthon'' s profound Iheory.'" — That the reader may not 
 suppose me misrepi-esenting Mr. L., I subjoin his words, p. 224, 
 vol. 1 : — " The evil of idolatry is this — rival nations have raised 
 up rival deities ; war hath been denounced in the name of Heaven : 
 men have been murdered for the love of God ; and such impiety 
 hath darkened all the regions of the world, that the Lord of all 
 things hath been mocked by all simultaneously as the Lord of 
 hosts." The evil of idolatry is, not that it disfigures the Deity 
 (in which, it seems, there might be no great harm), but that one 
 man's disfiguration difiers from another man's ; which leads tfl 
 quarrelling, and that to fighting 
 
 Note 75. Page 429. 
 
 " Grecian disguise : " — The tnie German name of this learned 
 reformer was Schwarzerd (black earth); but the homeliness and 
 pun-proToking quality of such a designation induced Melanchthon 
 to mask it in Greek. By the way, I do not understand how Mr. 
 Laudor, the arch-purist in orthography, reconciles his spelling of 
 the name to Greek orthodoxy ; there is no Greek word that could 
 be expressed by the English syllable "cthon." Such a word as 
 Melancthon* would be a hybrid monster — neither fish, flesh, nor 
 good red herring. 
 
 Note 76. Page 432. 
 
 An equal mistake it is in Mr. Landor to put into the mouth of 
 Person any vituperation of Mathias as one that had uttered opin- 
 ions upon Wordsworth. In the Pursuits of Literature, down to 
 the fifteenth edition, there is no mention of Wordsworth's name. 
 Southey is mentioned slightingly, and chiefly with reference to hia 
 then democratic principles ; but not Coleridge, and not Words- 
 worth. Mathias soon after went to Italy, where he passed the 
 remainder of his life — died, I believe, and was buried — never, 
 perhaps, having heard the name of Wordsworth. As to Person, 
 
 * The reader of this edition will notice that the American printer has altere<1 
 tlie spelling in the text, without reference to Mr. De Quincey's remarks on Mr 
 Landor's metlisd.
 
 570 KOTEB. 
 
 it is very true that Mathias took a few liberties with his private 
 habits, such as his writing paragraphs iu the little cabinet fitted 
 up for the gens de plume, at the Mor7iing Chronicle office, anil 
 other trifles. But these, though impertinences, were not of a 
 nature seriously to offend. They rather flattered, by the interest 
 which they argued in his movements. And with regard to Por- 
 son's main pretension, his exquisite skill in Greek, Mathias waa 
 not the man to admire this too little ; his weakness, if in that 
 "point he had a weakness, lay in the opposite direction. His own 
 Greek was not a burthen that could have foundered a camel ; he 
 was neither accurate, nor extensive, nor profound. But yet Mr. 
 Landor is wrong in thinking that he drew it from an Index. In 
 his Italian, he had the advantage probably of Mi. Landor himsell; 
 at least he wrote it with more apparent fluency and compass. 
 
 Note 77. Page 435. 
 
 *' Susurrus:" — The reader, who has had any experience of stable 
 usages, will know that grooms always keep up a hissing accompani- 
 ment whilst currycombing a horse as paviours do a groanmg. 
 
 Note 78. Page 443. 
 
 Herod the Great, and his father Antipater, owed the favor of 
 Rome, and, finally, the throne of Judaea, to the seasonable elec- 
 tion which they made between Rome and Persia ; but made net 
 without some doubts, as between forces hardly yet brought to a 
 satisfactory equation. 
 
 Note 79. Page 446. 
 
 "Stooped not to accept it." — The notion that Julius Caesar, 
 who of all men must have held cheapest the title of Rex, had 
 seriously intrigued to obtain it, arose (as I conceive) from two 
 mistakes — first. From a misinterpretation of a figurative cere- 
 mony in the pageant of the Lupercalia. The Romans were 
 ridiculously punctilious in this kind of jealousy. They charged 
 Pompey, at one time, with a plot for making himself king, bfr- 
 sause he wore white bandages round his thighs ; nojy white, in
 
 NOTKg. 
 
 571 
 
 Dldon days, was as much the regal color as purple. Think, deal 
 reader, of us — of you and me — being charged with making 
 ourselves kings, because we may choose to wear white cotton 
 drawers. Pompey was very angry, and swore bloody oaths tha* 
 It was not ambition which had cased his thighs in white fasctcB 
 " Why, what is it then ? " said a grave citizen. " What is it, 
 man?" replied Pompey, " it is rheumatism." Dogberry must 
 have had a hand in this charge : — " Dost thou hear, thou varlet ? 
 Thou art charged with incivism ; and it shall go hard with me 
 but I will prove thee to thy face a false knave, and guilty of flat 
 rheumatism. ' ' The other reason which has tended to confirm pos- 
 terity in the belief that Caesar really coveted the title ot Rex, was 
 ihe confusion of the truth arising with Greek writers. Basileus, 
 the term by which indifferently they designated the mighty Artax- 
 erxes and the pettiest regulus, was the original translation used 
 for Imperaior. Subsequently, and especially after Dioclesian had 
 approximated the aulic pomps to eastern models, the terms ^uto- 
 orator, Kaisar, Augustus, Sebastos, &c., came more into usa But 
 after Trajan's time, or even to that of Commodus, generally the 
 same terms which expressed Imperator and Imperitorial [viz., 
 Basileus and Basilikos'] to a Grecian ear expressed Rex and 
 Re galls. 
 
 Note 80. Page 453. 
 
 "Tts;" — Scotchmen and Irishmen (for a reason which 
 it may be elsewhere worth while explaining) make the same 
 mistake of supposing H is and 'f was admissible in prose ; which is 
 shocking to an English ear, for since 1740 they have become essen- 
 tially poetic forms, and cannot, without a sense of painful affecta- 
 tion and sentimentality, be used in conversation or in any mode 
 of prose. Mr. Landor does not make that mistake, but the redu- 
 plication of the 't is in this line, — will he permit me to say ? — is 
 dreadful. He is wide awake to such blemishes in other men of all 
 nations ; so am I. He blazes away all day long against the tres- 
 passes of that class, like a man in spring, protecting corn-fields 
 igainst birds. So do I at times. And if ever I publish that work 
 on Style, which for years has been in preparation, I fear that, from 
 Mr. Landor, it will be necessary to cull some striking flaws in 
 composition, were it only that in his works must be sought some 
 of its most striking brilliancies.
 
 572 
 
 Note 81. Page 454. 
 
 "Rocky harp:" — There are now known other cases, besid<« 
 the ancient one of Memnon's statue, in which the "deep-grooved " 
 granites, or even the shifting sands of wildernesses, utter myste- 
 rious music to ears that watch and wait for the proper combina- 
 tion of circumstances 
 
 Note 82. Page 469. 
 
 " Would then: " — This is a most important caveat: many thousands 
 of exquisite lines in the days of Elizabeth, James, Charles, down even 
 to 1658 (last of Cromwell), are ruined by readers untrained to the 
 elder dissyllabic (not monosyllabic) treatment of the twn. 
 
 Note 83. Page 472. 
 
 Mr. Craik, who is a great authority on such subjects, favoured me 
 some ten or twelve years ago with a letter on this line. He viewed 
 it as a variety more or less irregular, but regular as regarded its 
 model, of the dramatic or scenical verse — privileged to the extent 
 of an extra syllable, but sometimes stretching its privilege a little 
 further. 
 
 Note 84. Page 479. 
 * Iloberte the Deville : ' — See the old metrical romance of th&t 
 name : it belongs to the fourteenth century, and was printed 
 some thirty years ago, with wood engravings of the illuminations. 
 Roberte, however, took the liberty of murdering his schoolmaster. 
 But could he well do less ? Being a reigning Duke's son, and 
 after the rebellious schoolmaster had said — 
 
 ' Sir, ye bee too bolde : 
 And therewith tooke a rodde hymfor to chaste.* 
 
 Upon which the meek Robin, without using any bad language an 
 the schoolmaster had done, simply took out a long dagger ' hym 
 for to chaste,^ which he did eifectually. The schoolmaster gave 
 no bad language after that. 
 
 Note 85. Page 482. 
 Mitford, who was the brother of a man better known than hin^ 
 Belf to the public eye, viz.. Lord Redesdale, may be considered a 
 very unfortunat*. author. His work upon Greece, which Lord
 
 NOTES. 573 
 
 Byron celebrated for its * wrath and its partiality, really had 
 those merits : choleric it was in excess, and as entirely partial, 
 as nearly perfect in its injustice, as human infirmity vrould 
 allow. Nothing is truly perfect in this shocking world; absolute 
 injustice, alas 1 the perfection of wrong, must not be looked for 
 until we reach some high Platonic form of polity. Then shall we 
 revel and bask in a vertical sun of iniquity. Meantime, I will 
 say — that to satisfy all bilious and unreasonable men, a better 
 historian of Greece, than Mitford, could not be fancied. And 
 yet, at the very moment when he was stepping into his harvest 
 of popularity, down comes one of those omnivorous Germans that, 
 by j-eadLng everything and a trifle besides, contrive to throw 
 really learned men — and perhaps better thinkers than them- 
 seves — into the shade. Ottfried Mueller, with other archsolo- 
 gists and travellers into Hellas, gave new aspects to the very 
 purposes of Grecian history. Do j'ou hear, reader ? not new 
 answers, but new questions And Mitford, that was gradually 
 displacing the unlearned Gillies, &c., was himself displaced by 
 those who intrigued with Germany. His other work on ' the 
 Harmony of Language,' though one of the many that attempted, 
 and the few that accomplished, the distinction between accent and 
 quantity, or learnedly appreciated the metrical science of Milton, 
 was yet, in my hearing, pronounced utterly intelligible by the 
 hest practical commentator on Milton, viz., the best reproducer 
 of his exquisite efi'ects in blank verse, that any generation since 
 Milton has been able to show. ilr. Mitford was one of the many 
 accomplished scholars that are ill-used. Had he possessed the 
 splendid powers of the Landor, he would have raised a clatter 
 on the armor of modern society, such as Samson threatened to 
 the giant Harapha. For, in many respects, he resembled the 
 Landor : he had much of his learning — he had the same exten- 
 sive access to books and influential circles in great cities — the 
 same gloomy disdain of popular falsehoods or commonplaces — 
 and the same disposition to run a-muck against all nations, lan- 
 guages, and speUing-books. 
 
 Note 86. Page 483. 
 * In fact, a JVew Englander.' — This explanation, upon a 
 vaatter familiar to the well-informed, it is proper to repeat occa-
 
 574: NOTES. 
 
 eionally, because we English exceedingly perplex and confound 
 the Americans by calling, for instance, a Virginian or a Kentuck 
 by the name of Yankee, whilst that term was originally intro- 
 duced as antithetic to these more southern States. 
 
 Note 87. Page 485. 
 
 Pinkerton published one of his earliest volumes, under this 
 title — ' Rimes, by Mr. Pinkerton,' not having the fear of Ritson 
 before his eyes. And, for once, we have reason to thank Ritson 
 for his remark — that the form Mr. might just as well be read 
 Monster. Pinkerton in this point was a perfect monster. Afl 
 to the word Rimes, instead of Rhymes, he had something to 
 stand upon ; the Greek rythmos was certainly the remote foun- 
 tain; but the proximate fountain must have been the Italian 
 rima. 
 
 Note 88. Page 486. 
 
 The most extravagant of all experiments on language is 
 brought forward in the ' Letters of Literature, by Robert Heron.' 
 But Robert Heron is a pseudonyme for John Pinkerton ; and I 
 have been told that Pinkerton's motive for assuming it was — 
 because Heron had been the maiden name of his mother. Poor 
 lady, she would have stared to find herself, in old age, trans- 
 formed into Mistressina Heronilla. What most amuses one in 
 pursuing the steps of such an attempt at refinement, is its recep- 
 Uon by ' Jack ' in the navy. 
 
 NoiB 89. Page 486. 
 • It ever was ' — and, of course, being (as there is no need to 
 tell Mr. Landor) a form obtained by contraction from fidelita*. 
 
 Note 90. Page 487. 
 Of this a ludicrous illustration is mentioned by the writer 
 ..nee known to the public as Trinity Jones. Some young cler- 
 gyman, unacquainted with the technical use of italics by the 
 original compositors of James the First's Bible, on coming to the 
 27th verse, chap. xiii. of 1st Kings, 'And he' (viz., the old 
 prophet of Bethel) ♦ spake to his sons, saying. Saddle me the 
 ftss. And they saddled him ; ' (where the italic him, simply 
 meant that this word was involved, but not expressed, in the
 
 NOTES. 575 
 
 ■original,) read it, • And they saddled him ; ' as though thes« 
 andutiful sons, instead of saddling the donkey, had saddled the 
 old prophet. In fact, the old gentleman's directions are not 
 quite without an opening for a filial misconception, if the reader 
 examines them as closely as / examine words. 
 
 Wote91. Page 487. 
 He uses this and similar artifices, in fact, as the damper 
 in a modern piano-forte, for modyfy'ng the swell of the intona- 
 tion. 
 
 Note 92. Page 492. 
 The reasons for this anarchy in the naturalization of Eastern 
 words are to be sought in three causes : 1. In national rival- 
 ships : French travellers in India, like Jacquemont, &c., as they 
 will not adopt oui* English First Meridian, will not, of course, 
 adopt our English spelling. In one of Paul Richter's novels a 
 man assumes the First Meridian to lie generally, not through 
 Greenwich, but through his own skuU, and always through his 
 own study. I have myself long suspected the Magnetic Pole to 
 lie under a friend's wine-cellar, from the vibrating movement 
 which I have remarked constantly going on in his cluster of keya 
 towards that particular point. Really, the French, like Sir 
 Anthony Absolute, must ' get an atmosphere of their own,' such 
 is their hatred to holding anything in common with us. 2. They 
 are to be sought in local Indian differences of pronunciation. 3. 
 In the variety of our own British population — soldiers, mission- 
 aries, merchants, who are unlearned or half-learned — scholars, 
 really learned, but often fantastically learned, and lastly (as you 
 may swear) young ladies — anxious, above all things, to mystifc 
 OS outside barbarians. 
 
 Note 93. Page 497. 
 
 William Wordswoi '.h had, on the death of Southey, accepted th# 
 aureateship. 
 
 Note 94. Page 498. 
 ' Modem rector: "—viz., Lord Brougham.
 
 576 KOTBS. 
 
 Note 95. Page 510. 
 
 " Dirty half-hundred : '^ — By an old military jest, which probably 
 had at first some foundation in fact, the 50th regiment of foot has 
 been so styled for above a century. 
 
 Note 96. Page 511. 
 
 "The Wanderer" (as should be explained to the reader) is the 
 technical designation of the presiding philosopher in Wordsworth's 
 "Excursion." 
 
 Note 97. Page 511. 
 
 '^ Balby's carminative:" — This, and another similar remedy, called 
 Godfrey's cordial, both owing their main agencies to opium, have 
 through generations been the chief resource of poor mothers when 
 embaiTassed in their daily labours by fretful infants. Fine ladies 
 have no such difficulty to face, and are apt to forget that there is any 
 Buch apology to plead. 
 
 Note 98. Page 531. 
 
 [The Preface to the volume in the English edition, containing the 
 paper on Wordsworth's Poetry, has the following comments by De 
 Quincey on this essay.] 
 
 With regard to Wordsworth, what I chiefly regret is — that I 
 could not, under the circumstances of the case, obtain room for pur- 
 suing further the great question (first moved controversially by 
 Wordsworth) of Poetic Diction. It is remarkable enough, as illus- 
 trating the vapoury character of all that philosophy which Coleridge 
 and Wordsworth professed to hold in common, that, after twenty 
 years of close ostensible agreement, it turned out, when accident led 
 them to a printed utterance of their several views, that not one ves- 
 tige of true and virtual harmony existed to unite them. Between 
 Fancy, for instance, and Imagination, they both agreed that a dis- 
 tinction, deep, practical, and vitally operative, had slept unnoticed 
 for ages; that, first of all, in an earty stage of this revolutionary 
 mineteenth century, that distinction was descried upon the psycho- 
 logical field of vision by Wordsworth, or by Coleridge; but naturally 
 the accurate demanded to know — by which. And to this no an 
 swer could ever be obtained. Finally, however, it transpired that 
 any answer would be nugatory; since, on coming to distinct expla- 
 nations upon the subject, in print, the two authorities flatly, and 
 through the whole gamut of illustrative cases, contradicted each
 
 NOTES. 577 
 
 other. Precisely the same (or, at least, precisely an equal) agree- 
 ment had originally existed between the two philosophic poets on 
 the laws and quality of Poetic Diction ; and there again, after many 
 years of supposed pacific harmony, all at once precisely the same 
 unfathomable chasm of chaotic Schism opened between them. Chaos, 
 however, is the natural prologue to Creation, and although neither 
 Coleridge nor VTordsworth has left anything written upon this sub- 
 ject, which does not tend seemingly to a baiTen result, nevertheless, 
 there is still fermenting an unsatisfied doubt upon the question of 
 the true and the false in poetic diction, which dates from the dayg 
 of Euripides. "What were the views of Euripides can now be gath- 
 ered only from his practice ; but from that (which was not unobserved 
 by Valckenaer) I infer that he was secretly governed by the same 
 feelings on this subject as Wordsworth. But between the two poets 
 there was this difference: Euripides* was perhaps in a state of un- 
 conscious sympathy with the views subsequently h eld by Wordsworth 
 so that, except by his practice, he could not promote those views; but 
 Wordsworth held them consciously and earnestly, and purely from 
 Sybaritish indolence failed to illustrate them. Even Coleridge, 
 though indulgent enough to such an infirmity, was a little scandal- 
 ized at the excess of this morbid affection in Wordsworth. The old 
 original illustrations — two, three, or perhaps three and a-quarter — 
 cited from Gray and Prior ; these — and absolutely not enlarged 
 through a fifty years' additional experience — were all that Words- 
 worth put forward to the end of his life. Any decent measure of 
 exertion would have easily added a crop of five thousand further 
 cases. This excess of inertia, this (which the ancients would have 
 called) sacred laziness, operating upon a favoured theorj', is in it- 
 self a not uninteresting spectacle for a contemplative man. But a 
 still stranger subject for cynical contemplation is, that, after all (as 
 hereafter I believe it possible to show), Wordsworth has failed to 
 establish his theory, not simply through morbid excesses of holy 
 idleness, but also through entire misconception of his own meanmg, 
 and blind aberration from the road on which he fancied himself 
 moving. 
 
 * That Euripides, consciously or not, had a secret craving for the natural 
 Mid life-like in diction, is noticed by Valckenaer in his great dissertation 
 ■pon the Fhoenissae.
 
 S 087 t
 
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