Chapter II: Part 2

_Pliny the Younger_.--That vulgar minds should consider my attention to my studies in such a conjuncture as unnatural and affected, I should not much wonder; but that you would blame it as such I did not apprehend--you, whom no business could separate from the muses; you, who approached nearer to the fiery storm, and died by the suffocating heat of the vapour.

_Pliny the Elder_.--I died in doing my duty. Let me recall to your remembrance all the particulars, and then you shall judge yourself on the difference of your behaviour and mine. I was the Prefect of the Roman fleet, which then lay at Misenum. On the first account I received of the very unusual cloud that appeared in the air I ordered a vessel to carry me out to some distance from the shore that I might the better observe the phenomenon, and endeavour to discover its nature and cause. This I did as a philosopher, and it was a curiosity proper and natural to an inquisitive mind. I offered to take you with me, and surely you should have gone; for Livy might have been read at any other time, and such spectacles are not frequent. When I came out from my house, I found all the inhabitants of Misenum flying to the sea. That I might assist them, and all others who dwelt on the coast, I immediately commanded the whole fleet to put out, and sailed with it all round the Bay of Naples, steering particularly to those parts of the shore where the danger was greatest, and from whence the affrighted people were endeavouring to escape with the most trepidation. Thus I happily preserved some thousands of lives, noting at the same time, with an unshaken composure and freedom of mind, the several phenomena of the eruption. Towards night, as we approached to the foot of Mount Vesuvius, our galleys were covered with ashes, the showers of which grew continually hotter and hotter; then pumice stones and burnt and broken pyrites began to fall on our heads, and we were stopped by the obstacles which the ruins of the volcano had suddenly formed, by falling into the sea and almost filling it up, on that part of the coast. I then commanded my pilot to steer to the villa of my friend Pomponianus, which, you know, was situated in the inmost recess of the bay. The wind was very favourable to carry me thither, but would not allow him to put off from the shore, as he was desirous to have done. We were, therefore, constrained to pass the night in his house. The family watched, and I slept till the heaps of pumice stones, which incessantly fell from the clouds that had by this time been impelled to that side of the bay, rose so high in the area of the apartment I lay in, that if I had stayed any longer I could not have got out; and the earthquakes were so violent as to threaten every moment the fall of the house. We, therefore, thought it more safe to go into the open air, guarding our heads as well as we were able with pillows tied upon them. The wind continuing contrary, and the sea very rough, we all remained on the shore, till the descent of a sulphurous and fiery vapour suddenly oppressed my weak lungs and put an end to my life. In all this I hope that I acted as the duty of my station required, and with true magnanimity. But on this occasion, and in many other parts of your conduct, I must say, my dear nephew, there was a mixture of vanity blended with your virtue which impaired and disgraced it. Without that you would have been one of the worthiest men whom Rome has over produced, for none excelled you in sincere integrity of heart and greatness of sentiments. Why would you lose the substance of glory by seeking the shadow? Your eloquence had, I think, the same fault as your manners; it was generally too affected. You professed to make Cicero your guide and pattern; but when one reads his Panegyric upon Julius Caesar, in his Oration for Marcellus, and yours upon Trajan, the first seems the genuine language of truth and Nature, raised and dignified with all the majesty of the most sublime oratory; the latter appears the harangue of a florid rhetorician, more desirous to shine and to set off his own wit than to extol the great man whose virtues he was praising.

_Pliny the Younger_.--I will not question your judgment either of my life or my writings; they might both have been better if I had not been too solicitous to render them perfect. It is, perhaps, some excuse for the affectation of my style that it was the fashion of the age in which I wrote. Even the eloquence of Tacitus, however nervous and sublime, was not unaffected. Mine, indeed, was more diffuse, and the ornaments of it were more tawdry; but his laboured conciseness, the constant glow of his diction, and pointed brilliancy of his sentences, were no less unnatural. One principal cause of this I suppose to have been that, as we despaired of excelling the two great masters of oratory, Cicero and Livy, in their own manner, we took up another, which to many appeared more shining, and gave our compositions a more original air; but it is mortifying to me to say much on this subject. Permit me, therefore, to resume the contemplation of that on which our conversation turned before. What a direful calamity was the eruption of Vesuvius, which you have been describing? Don't you remember the beauty of that fine coast, and of the mountain itself, before it was torn with the violence of those internal fires, that forced their way through its surface. The foot of it was covered with cornfields and rich meadows, interspersed with splendid villas and magnificent towns; the sides of it were clothed with the best vines in Italy. How quick, how unexpected, how terrible was the change! All was at once overwhelmed with ashes, cinders, broken rocks, and fiery torrents, presenting to the eye the most dismal scene of horror and desolation!

_Pliny the Elder_.--You paint it very truly. But has it never occurred to your philosophical mind that this change is a striking emblem of that which must happen, by the natural course of things, to every rich, luxurious state? While the inhabitants of it are sunk in voluptuousness--while all is smiling around them, and they imagine that no evil, no danger is nigh--the latent seeds of destruction are fermenting within; till, breaking out on a sudden, they lay waste all their opulence, all their boasted delights, and leave them a sad monument of the fatal effects of internal tempests and convulsions.

DIALOGUE VIII.

FERNANDO CORTEZ--WILLIAM PENN.

_Cortez_.--Is it possible, William Penn, that you should seriously compare your glory with mine? The planter of a small colony in North America presume to vie with the conqueror of the great Mexican Empire?

_Penn_.--Friend, I pretend to no glory--the Lord preserve me from it. All glory is His; but this I say, that I was His instrument in a more glorious work than that performed by thee--incomparably more glorious.

_Cortez_.--Dost thou not know, William Penn, that with less than six hundred Spanish foot, eighteen horse, and a few small pieces of cannon, I fought and defeated innumerable armies of very brave men; dethroned an emperor who had been raised to the throne by his valour, and excelled all his countrymen in the science of war, as much as they excelled all the rest of the West Indian nations? That I made him my prisoner in his own capital; and, after he had been deposed and slain by his subjects, vanquished and took Guatimozin, his successor, and accomplished my conquest of the whole empire of Mexico, which I loyally annexed to the Spanish Crown? Dost thou not know that, in doing these wonderful acts, I showed as much courage as Alexander the Great, as much prudence as Caesar? That by my policy I ranged under my banners the powerful commonwealth of Tlascala, and brought them to assist me in subduing the Mexicans, though with the loss of their own beloved independence? and that, to consummate my glory, when the Governor of Cuba, Velasquez, would have taken my command from me and sacrificed me to his envy and jealousy, I drew from him all his forces and joined them to my own, showing myself as superior to all other Spaniards as I was to the Indians?

_Penn_.--I know very well that thou wast as fierce as a lion and as subtle as a serpent. The devil perhaps may place thee as high in his black list of heroes as Alexander or Caesar. It is not my business to interfere with him in settling thy rank. But hark thee, friend Cortez. What right hadst thou, or had the King of Spain himself, to the Mexican Empire? Answer me that, if thou canst.

_Cortez_.--The Pope gave it to my master.

_Penn_.--The devil offered to give our Lord all the kingdoms of the earth, and I suppose the Pope, as his vicar, gave thy master this; in return for which he fell down and worshipped him, like an idolater as he was. But suppose the high priest of Mexico had taken it into his head to give Spain to Montezuma, would his grant have been good?

_Cortez_.--These are questions of casuistry which it is not the business of a soldier to decide. We leave that to gownsmen. But pray, Mr. Penn, what right had you to the province you settled?

_Penn_.--An honest right of fair purchase. We gave the native savages some things they wanted, and they in return gave us lands they did not want. All was amicably agreed on, not a drop of blood shed to stain our acquisition.

_Cortez_.--I am afraid there was a little fraud in the purchase. Thy followers, William Penn, are said to think cheating in a quiet and sober way no mortal sin.

_Penn_.--The saints are always calumniated by the ungodly. But it was a sight which an angel might contemplate with delight to behold the colony I settled! To see us living with the Indians like innocent lambs, and taming the ferocity of their barbarous manners by the gentleness of ours! To see the whole country, which before was an uncultivated wilderness, rendered as fertile and fair as the garden of God! O Fernando Cortez, Fernando Cortez! didst thou leave the great empire of Mexico in that state? No, thou hadst turned those delightful and populous regions into a desert--a desert flooded with blood. Dost thou not remember that most infernal scene when the noble Emperor Guatimozin was stretched out by thy soldiers upon hot burning coals to make him discover into what part of the lake of Mexico he had thrown the royal treasures? Are not his groans ever sounding in the ears of thy conscience? Do not they rend thy hard heart, and strike thee with more horror than the yells of the furies?

_Cortez_.--Alas! I was not present when that dire act was done. Had I been there I would have forbidden it. My nature was mild.

_Penn_.--Thou wast the captain of that band of robbers who did this horrid deed. The advantage they had drawn from thy counsels and conduct enabled them to commit it; and thy skill saved them afterwards from the vengeance that was due to so enormous a crime. The enraged Mexicans would have properly punished them for it, if they had not had thee for their general, thou lieutenant of Satan.

_Cortez_.--The saints I find can rail, William Penn. But how do you hope to preserve this admirable colony which you have settled? Your people, you tell me, live like innocent lambs. Are there no wolves in North America to devour those lambs? But if the Americans should continue in perpetual peace with all your successors there, the French will not. Are the inhabitants of Pennsylvania to make war against them with prayers and preaching? If so, that garden of God which you say you have planted will undoubtedly be their prey, and they will take from you your property, your laws, and your religion.

_Penn_.--The Lord's will be done. The Lord will defend us against the rage of our enemies if it be His good pleasure.

_Cortez_.--Is this the wisdom of a great legislator? I have heard some of your countrymen compare you to Solon. Did Solon, think you, give laws to a people, and leave those laws and that people at the mercy of every invader? The first business of legislature is to provide a military strength that may defend the whole system. If a house is built in a land of robbers, without a gate to shut or a bolt or bar to secure it, what avails it how well-proportioned or how commodious the architecture of it may be? Is it richly furnished within? the more it will tempt the hands of violence and of rapine to seize its wealth. The world, William Penn, is all a land of robbers. Any state or commonwealth erected therein must be well fenced and secured by good military institutions; or, the happier it is in all other respects, the greater will be its danger, the more speedy its destruction. Perhaps the neighbouring English colonies may for a while protect yours; but that precarious security cannot always preserve you. Your plan of government must be changed, or your colony will be lost. What I have said is also applicable to Great Britain itself. If an increase of its wealth be not accompanied with an increase of its force that wealth will become the prey of some of the neighbouring nations, in which the martial spirit is more prevalent than the commercial. And whatever praise may be due to its civil institutions, if they are not guarded by a wise system of military policy, they will be found of no value, being unable to prevent their own dissolution.

_Penn_.--These are suggestions of human wisdom. The doctrines I held were inspired; they came from above.

_Cortez_.--It is blasphemy to say that any folly could come from the Fountain of Wisdom. Whatever is inconsistent with the great laws of Nature and with the necessary state of human society cannot possibly have been inspired by God. Self-defence is as necessary to nations as to men. And shall particulars have a right which nations have not? True religion, William Penn, is the perfection of reason; fanaticism is the disgrace, the destruction of reason.

_Penn_.--Though what thou sayest should be true, it does not come well from thy mouth. A Papist talk of reason! Go to the Inquisition and tell them of reason and the great laws of Nature. They will broil thee, as thy soldiers broiled the unhappy Guatimozin. Why dost thou turn pale? Is it the name of the Inquisition, or the name of Guatimozin, that troubles and affrights thee? O wretched man! who madest thyself a voluntary instrument to carry into a new-discovered world that hellish tribunal? Tremble and shake when thou thinkest that every murder the Inquisitors have committed, every torture they have inflicted on the innocent Indians, is originally owing to thee. Thou must answer to God for all their inhumanity, for all their injustice. What wouldst thou give to part with the renown of thy conquests, and to have a conscience as pure and undisturbed as mine?

_Cortez_.--I feel the force of thy words; they pierce me like daggers. I can never, never be happy, while I retain any memory of the ills I have caused. Yet I thought I did right. I thought I laboured to advance the glory of God and propagate, in the remotest parts of the earth, His holy religion. He will be merciful to well designing and pious error. Thou also wilt have need of that gracious indulgence, though not, I own, so much as I.

_Penn_.--Ask thy heart whether ambition was not thy real motive and zeal the pretence?

_Cortez_.--Ask thine whether thy zeal had no worldly views and whether thou didst believe all the nonsense of the sect, at the head of which thou wast pleased to become a legislator.--Adieu. Self-examination requires retirement.

DIALOGUE IX.

MARCUS PORTIUS CATO--MESSALLA CORVINUS.

_Cato_.--Oh, Messalla! is it then possible that what some of our countrymen tell me should be true? Is it possible that you could live the courtier of Octavius; that you could accept of employments and honours from him, from the tyrant of your country; you, the brave, the noble-minded, the virtuous Messalla; you, whom I remember, my son-in-law Brutus has frequently extolled as the most promising youth in Rome, tutored by philosophy, trained up in arms, scorning all those soft, effeminate pleasures that reconcile men to an easy and indolent servitude, fit for all the roughest tasks of honour and virtue, fit to live or to die a free man?

_Messalla_.--Marcus Cato, I revere both your life and your death; but the last, permit me to tell you, did no good to your country, and the former would have done more if you could have mitigated a little the sternness of your virtue, I will not say of your pride. For my own part, I adhered with constant integrity and unwearied zeal to the Republic, while the Republic existed. I fought for her at Philippi under the only commander, who, if he had conquered, would have conquered for her, not for himself. When he was dead I saw that nothing remained to my country but the choice of a master. I chose the best.

_Cato_.--The best! What! a man who had broken all laws, who had violated all trusts, who had led the armies of the Commonwealth against Antony, and then joined with him and that sottish traitor Lepidus, to set up a triumvirate more execrable by far than either of the former; who shed the best blood in Rome by an inhuman proscription, murdered even his own guardian, murdered Cicero, to whose confidence, too improvidently given, he owed all his power? Was this the master you chose? Could you bring your tongue to give him the name of Augustus? Could you stoop to beg consulships and triumphs from him? Oh, shame to virtue! Oh, degeneracy of Rome! To what infamy are her sons, her noblest sons, fallen. The thought of it pains me more than the wound that I died of; it stabs my soul.

_Messalla_.--Moderate, Cato, the vehemence of your indignation. There has always been too much passion mixed with your virtue. The enthusiasm you are possessed with is a noble one, but it disturbs your judgment. Hear me with patience, and with the tranquillity that becomes a philosopher. It is true that Octavius had done all you have said; but it is no less true that, in our circumstances, he was the best master Rome could choose. His mind was fitted by nature for empire. His understanding was clear and strong. His passions were cool, and under the absolute command of his reason. His name gave him an authority over the troops and the people which no other Roman could possess in an equal degree. He used that authority to restrain the excesses of both, which it was no longer in the power of the Senate to repress, nor of any other general or magistrate in the state. He restored discipline in our armies, the first means of salvation, without which no legal government could have been formed or supported. He avoided all odious and invidious names. He maintained and respected those which time and long habits had endeared to the Roman people. He permitted a generous liberty of speech. He treated the nobles of Pompey's party as well as those of his father's, if they did not themselves, for factious purposes, keep up the distinction. He formed a plan of government, moderate, decent, respectable, which left the senate its majesty, and some of its power. He restored vigour and spirit to the laws; he made new and good ones for the reformation of manners; he enforced their execution; he governed the empire with lenity, justice, and glory; he humbled the pride of the Parthians; he broke the fierceness of the barbarous nations; he gave to his country, exhausted and languishing with the great loss of blood which she had sustained in the course of so many civil wars, the blessing of peace--a blessing which was become so necessary for her, that without it she could enjoy no other. In doing these things I acknowledge he had my assistance. I am prouder of it, and I think I can justify myself more effectually to my country, than if I had died by my own hand at Philippi. Believe me, Cato, it is better to do some good than to project a great deal. A little practical virtue is of more use to society than the most sublime theory, or the best principles of government ill applied.

_Cato_.--Yet I must think it was beneath the character of Messalla to join in supporting a government which, though coloured and mitigated, was still a tyranny. Had you not better have gone into a voluntary exile, where you would not have seen the face of the tyrant, and where you might have quietly practised those private virtues which are all that the gods require from good men in certain situations?

_Messalla_.--No; I did much more good by continuing at Rome. Had Augustus required of me anything base, anything servile, I would have gone into exile, I would have died, rather than do it. But he respected my virtue, he respected my dignity; he treated me as well as Agrippa, or as Maecenas, with this distinction alone, that he never employed my sword but against foreign nations, or the old enemies of the republic.

_Cato_.--It must, I own, have been a pleasure to be employed against Antony, that monster of vice, who plotted the ruin of liberty, and the raising of himself to sovereign power, amidst the riot of bacchanals, and in the embraces of harlots, who, when he had attained to that power, delivered it up to a lascivious queen, and would have made an Egyptian strumpet the mistress of Rome, if the Battle of Actium had not saved us from that last of misfortunes.

_Messalla_.--In that battle I had a considerable share. So I had in encouraging the liberal arts and sciences, which Augustus protected. Under his judicious patronage the muses made Rome their capital seat. It would have pleased you to have known Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, Ovid, Livy, and many more, whose names will be illustrious to all generations.

_Cato_.--I understand you, Messalla. Your Augustus and you, after the ruin of our liberty, made Rome a Greek city, an academy of fine wits, another Athens under the government of Demetrius Phalareus. I had much rather have seen her under Fabricius and Curius, and her other honest old consuls, who could not read.

_Messalla_.--Yet to these writers she will owe as much of her glory as she did to those heroes. I could say more, a great deal more, on the happiness of the mild dominion of Augustus. I might even add, that the vast extent of the empire, the factions of the nobility, and the corruption of the people, which no laws under the ordinary magistrates of the state were able to restrain, seemed necessarily to require some change in the government; that Cato himself, had he remained upon earth, could have done us no good, unless he would have yielded to become our prince. But I see you consider me as a deserter from the republic, and an apologist for a tyrant. I, therefore, leave you to the company of those ancient Romans, for whose society you were always much fitter than for that of your contemporaries. Cato should have lived with Fabricius and Curius, not with Pompey and Caesar.

DIALOGUE X.

CHRISTINA, Queen Of Sweden--Chancellor OXENSTIERN.

_Christina_.--You seem to avoid me, Oxenstiern; and, now we are met, you don't pay me the reverence that is due to your queen! Have you forgotten that I was your sovereign?

_Oxenstiern_.--I am not your subject here, madam; but you have forgotten that you yourself broke that bond, and freed me from my allegiance, many years before you died, by abdicating the crown, against my advice and the inclination of your people. Reverence here is paid only to virtue.

_Christina_.--I see you would mortify me if it were in your power for acting against your advice. But my fame does not depend upon your judgment. All Europe admired the greatness of my mind in resigning a crown to dedicate myself entirely to the love of the sciences and the fine arts; things of which you had no taste in barbarous Sweden, the realm of Goths and Vandals.

_Oxenstiern_.--There is hardly any mind too great for a crown, but there are many too little. Are you sure, madam, it was magnanimity that caused you to fly from the government of a kingdom which your ancestors, and particularly your heroic father Gustavus, had ruled with so much glory?

_Christina_.--Am I sure of it? Yes; and to confirm my own judgment, I have that of many learned men and _beaux esprits_ of all countries, who have celebrated my action as the perfection of heroism.

_Oxenstiern_.--Those _beaux esprits_ judged according to their predominant passion. I have heard young ladies express their admiration of Mark Antony for heroically leaving his fleet at the Battle of Actium to follow his mistress. Your passion for literature had the same effect upon you. But why did not you indulge it in a manner more becoming your birth and rank? Why did not you bring the muses to Sweden, instead of deserting that kingdom to seek them in Rome? For a prince to encourage and protect arts and sciences, and more especially to instruct an illiterate people and inspire them with knowledge, politeness, and fine taste is indeed an act of true greatness.

_Christina_.--The Swedes were too gross to be refined by any culture which I could have given to their dull, their half-frozen souls. Wit and genius require the influence of a more southern climate.

_Oxenstiern_.--The Swedes too gross! No, madam, not even the Russians are too gross to be refined if they had a prince to instruct them.

_Christina_.--It was too tedious a work for the vivacity of my temper to polish bears into men. I should have died of the spleen before I had made any proficiency in it. My desire was to shine among those who were qualified to judge of my talents. At Paris, at Rome I had the glory of showing the French and Italian wits that the North could produce one not inferior to them. They beheld me with wonder. The homage I had received in my palace at Stockholm was paid to my dignity. That which I drew from the French and Roman academies was paid to my talents. How much more glorious, how much more delightful to an elegant and rational mind was the latter than the former! Could you once have felt the joy, the transport of my heart, when I saw the greatest authors and all the celebrated artists in the most learned and civilised countries of Europe bringing their works to me and submitting the merit of them to my decisions; when I saw the philosophers, the rhetoricians, the poets making my judgment the standard of their reputation, you would not wonder that I preferred the empire of wit to any other empire.

_Oxenstiern_.--O great Gustavus! my ever-honoured, my adored master! O greatest of kings, greatest in valour, in virtue, in wisdom, with what indignation must thy soul, enthroned in heaven, have looked down on thy unworthy, thy degenerate daughter! With what shame must thou have seen her rambling about from court to court deprived of her royal dignity, debased into a pedant, a witling, a smatterer in sculpture and painting, reduced to beg or buy flattery from each needy rhetorician or hireling poet! I weep to think on this stain, this dishonourable stain, to thy illustrious blood! And yet, would to God! would to God! this was all the pollution it has suffered!

_Christina_.--Darest thou, Oxenstiern, impute any blemish to my honour?

_Oxenstiern_.--Madam, the world will scarce respect the frailties of queens when they are on their thrones, much less when they have voluntarily degraded themselves to the level of the vulgar. And if scandalous tongues have unjustly aspersed their fame, the way to clear it is not by an assassination.

_Christina_.--Oh! that I were alive again, and restored to my throne, that I might punish the insolence of this hoary traitor! But, see! he leaves me, he turns his back upon me with cool contempt! Alas! do I not deserve this scorn? In spite of myself I must confess that I do. O vanity, how short-lived are the pleasures thou bestowest! I was thy votary. Thou wast the god for whom I changed my religion. For thee I forsook my country and my throne. What compensation have I gained for all these sacrifices so lavishly, so imprudently made? Some puffs of incense from authors who thought their flattery due to the rank I had held, or hoped to advance themselves by my recommendation, or, at best, over-rated my passion for literature, and praised me to raise the value of those talents with which they were endowed. But in the esteem of wise men I stand very low, and their esteem alone is the true measure of glory. Nothing, I perceive, can give the mind a lasting joy but the consciousness of having performed our duty in that station which it has pleased the Divine Providence to assign to us. The glory of virtue is solid and eternal. All other will fade away like a thin vapoury cloud, on which the casual glance of some faint beams of light has superficially imprinted their weak and transient colours.

DIALOGUE XI.

TITUS VESPASIANUS--PUBLIUS CORNELIUS SCIPIO AFRICANUS.

_Titus_.--No, Scipio, I can't give place to you in this. In other respects I acknowledge myself your inferior, though I was Emperor of Rome and you only her consul. I think your triumph over Carthage more glorious than mine over Judaea. But in that I gained over love I must esteem myself superior to you, though your generosity with regard to the fair Celtiberian, your captive, has been celebrated so highly.

_Scipio_.--Fame has been, then, unjust to your merit, for little is said of the continence of Titus, but mine has been the favourite topic of eloquence in every age and country.

_Titus_.--It has; and in particular your great historian Livy has poured forth all the ornaments of his admirable rhetoric to embellish and dignify that part of your story. I had a great historian too--Cornelius Tacitus; but either from the brevity which he affected in writing, or from the severity of his nature, which never having felt the passion of love, thought the subduing of it too easy a victory to deserve great encomiums, he has bestowed but three lines upon my parting with Berenice, which cost me more pain and greater efforts of mind than the conquest of Jerusalem.

_Scipio_.--I wish to hear from yourself the history of that parting, and what could make it so hard and painful to you.

_Titus_.--While I served in Palestine under the auspices of my father, Vespasian, I became acquainted with Berenice, sister to King Agrippa, and who was herself a queen in one of those Eastern countries. She was the most beautiful woman in Asia, but she had graces more irresistible still than her beauty. She had all the insinuation and wit of Cleopatra, without her coquetry. I loved her, and was beloved; she loved my person, not my greatness. Her tenderness, her fidelity so inflamed my passion for her that I gave her a promise of marriage.

_Scipio_.--What do I hear? A Roman senator promise to marry a queen!

_Titus_.--I expected, Scipio, that your ears would be offended with the sound of such a match. But consider that Rome was very different in my time from Rome in yours. The ferocious pride of our ancient republican senators had bent itself to the obsequious complaisance of a court. Berenice made no doubt, and I flattered myself that it would not be inflexible in this point alone. But we thought it necessary to defer the completion of our wishes till the death of my father. On that event the Roman Empire and (what I knew she valued more) my hand became due to her, according to my engagements.

_Scipio_.--The Roman Empire due to a Syrian queen! Oh, Rome, how art thou fallen! Accursed be the memory of Octavius Caesar, who by oppressing its liberty so lowered the majesty of the republic, that a brave and virtuous Roman, in whom was vested all the power of that mighty state, could entertain such a thought! But did you find the senate and people so servile, so lost to all sense of their honour and dignity, as to affront the great genius of imperial Rome and the eyes of her tutelary gods, the eyes of Jupiter Capitolinus, with the sight of a queen--an Asiatic queen--on the throne of the Caesars?

_Titus_.--I did not. They judged of it as you, Scipio, judge; they detested, they disdained it. In vain did I urge to some particular friends, who represented to me the sense of the Senate and people, that a Messalina, a Poppaea, were a much greater dishonour to the throne of the Caesars than a virtuous foreign princess. Their prejudices were unconquerable; I saw it would be impossible for me to remove them. But I might have used my authority to silence their murmurs. A liberal donative to the soldiers, by whom I was fondly beloved, would have secured their fidelity, and consequently would have forced the Senate and people to yield to my inclination. Berenice knew this, and with tears implored me not to sacrifice her happiness and my own to an unjust prepossession. Shall I own it to you, Publius? My heart not only pitied her, but acknowledged the truth and solidity of her reasons. Yet so much did I abhor the idea of tyranny, so much respect did I pay to the sentiments of my subjects, that I determined to separate myself from her for ever, rather than force either the laws or the prejudices of Rome to submit to my will.

_Scipio_.--Give me thy hand, noble Titus. Thou wast worthy of the empire, and Scipio Africanus honours thy virtue.

_Titus_.--My virtue can have no greater reward from the approbation of man. But, O Scipio, think what anguish my heart must have felt when I took that resolution, and when I communicated it to my dear, my unhappy Berenice. You saw the struggle of Masinissa, when you forced him to give up his beloved Sophonisba. Mine was a harder conflict. She had abandoned him to marry the King of Numidia. He knew that her ruling passion was ambition, not love. He could not rationally esteem her when she quitted a husband whom she had ruined, who had lost his crown and his liberty in the cause of her country and for her sake, to give her person to him, the capital foe of that unfortunate husband. He must, in spite of his passion, have thought her a perfidious, a detestable woman. But I esteemed Berenice; she deserved my esteem. I was certain she would not have accepted the empire from any other hand; and had I been a private man she would have raised me to her throne. Yet I had the fortitude--I ought, perhaps, to say the hardness of heart--to bid her depart from my sight; depart for ever! What, O Publius, was your conquest over yourself, in giving back to her betrothed lover the Celtiberian captive compared to this? Indeed, that was no conquest. I will not so dishonour the virtue of Scipio as to think he could feel any struggle with himself on that account. A woman engaged to another--engaged by affection as well as vows, let her have been ever so beautiful--could raise in your heart no sentiments but compassion and friendship. To have violated her would have been an act of brutality, which none but another Tarquin could have committed. To have detained her from her husband would have been cruel. But where love is mutual, where the object beloved suffers more in the separation than you do yourself, to part with her is indeed a struggle. It is the hardest sacrifice a good heart can make to its duty.

_Scipio_.--I acknowledge that it is, and yield you the palm. But I will own to you, Titus, I never knew much of the tenderness you describe. Hannibal, Carthage, Rome, the saving of my country, the subduing of its rival, these filled my thoughts, and left no room there for those effeminate passions. I do not blame your sensibility; but when I went to the capitol to talk with Jove, I never consulted him about love affairs.

_Titus_.--If my soul had been possessed by ambition alone, I might possibly have been a greater man than I was; but I should not have been more virtuous, nor have gained the title I preferred to that of conqueror of Judaea and Emperor of Rome, in being called the delight of humankind.

DIALOGUE XII

HENRY DUKE OF GUISE--MACHIAVEL.

_Guise_.--Avaunt! thou fiend. I abhor thy sight. I look upon thee as the original cause of my death, and of all the calamities brought upon the French nation, in my father's time and my own.

_Machiavel_.--I the cause of your death! You surprise me!

_Guise_.--Yes. Your pernicious maxims of policy, imported from Florence with Catherine of Medicis, your wicked disciple, produced in France such a government, such dissimulation, such perfidy, such violent, ruthless counsels, as threw that whole kingdom into the utmost confusion, and ended my life, even in the palace of my sovereign, by the swords of assassins.

_Machiavel_.--Whoever may have a right to complain of my policy, you, sir, have not. You owed your greatness to it, and your deviating from it was the real cause of your death. If it had not been for the assassination of Admiral Coligni and the massacre of the Huguenots, the strength and power which the conduct of so able a chief would have given to that party, after the death of your father, its most dangerous enemy, would have been fatal to your house; nor could you, even with all the advantage you drew from that great stroke of royal policy, have acquired the authority you afterwards rose to in the kingdom of France; but by pursuing my maxims, by availing yourself of the specious name of religion to serve the secret purposes of your ambition, and by suffering no restraint of fear or conscience, not even the guilt of exciting a civil war, to check the necessary progress of your well-concerted designs. But on the day of the barricades you most imprudently let the king escape out of Paris, when you might have slain or deposed him. This was directly against the great rule of my politics, not to stop short in rebellion or treason till the work is fully completed. And you were justly censured for it by Pope Sixtus Quintus, a more consummate politician, who said, "You ought to have known that when a subject draws his sword against his king he should throw away the scabbard." You likewise deviated from my counsels, by putting yourself in the power of a sovereign you had so much offended. Why would you, against all the cautions I had given, expose your life in a loyal castle to the mercy of that prince? You trusted to his fear, but fear, insulted and desperate, is often cruel. Impute therefore your death not to any fault in my maxims, but to your own folly in not having sufficiently observed them.

_Guise_.--If neither I nor that prince had ever practised your maxims in any part of our conduct, he would have reigned many years with honour and peace, and I should have risen by my courage and talents to as high a pitch of greatness as it consisted with the duty of a subject to desire. But your instructions led us on into those crooked paths, out of which there was no retreat without great danger, nor a possibility of advancing without being detested by all mankind, and whoever is so has everything to fear from that detestation. I will give you a proof of this in the fate of a prince, who ought to have been your hero instead of Caesar Borgia, because he was incomparably a greater man, and, of all who ever lived, seems to have acted most steadily according to the rules laid down by you; I mean Richard III., King of England. He stopped at no crime that could be profitable to him; he was a dissembler, a hypocrite, a murderer in cool blood. After the death of his brother he gained the crown by cutting off, without pity, all who stood in his way. He trusted no man any further than helped his own purposes and consisted with his own safety. He liberally rewarded all services done him, but would not let the remembrance of them atone for offences or save any man from destruction who obstructed his views. Nevertheless, though his nature shrunk from no wickedness which could serve his ambition, he possessed and exercised all those virtues which you recommend to the practice of your prince. He was bold and prudent in war, just and strict in the general administration of his government, and particularly careful, by a vigorous execution of the laws, to protect the people against injuries or oppressions from the great. In all his actions and words there constantly appeared the highest concern for the honour of the nation. He was neither greedy of wealth that belonged to other men nor profuse of his own, but knew how to give and where to save. He professed a most edifying sense of religion, pretended great zeal for the reformation of manners, and was really an example of sobriety, chastity, and temperance in the whole course of his life. Nor did he shed any blood, but of those who were such obstacles in his way to dominion as could not possibly be removed by any other means. This was a prince after your heart, yet mark his end. The horror his crimes had excited in the minds of his subjects, and the detestation it produced, were so pernicious to him, that they enabled an exile, who had no right to the crown, and whose abilities were much inferior to his, to invade his realm and destroy him.

_Machiavel_.--This example, I own, may seem to be of some weight against the truth of my system. But at the same time it demonstrates that there was nothing so new in the doctrines I published as to make it reasonable to charge me with the disorders and mischiefs which, since my time, any kingdom may have happened to suffer from the ambition of a subject or the tyranny of a prince. Human nature wants no teaching to render it wicked. In courts more especially there has been, from the first institution of monarchies, a policy practised, not less repugnant than mine to the narrow and vulgar laws of humanity and religion. Why should I be singled out as worse than other statesmen?

_Guise_.--There have been, it must be owned, in all ages and all states, many wicked politicians; but thou art the first that ever taught the science of tyranny, reduced it to rules, and instructed his disciples how to acquire and secure it by treachery, perjuries, assassinations, proscriptions, and with a particular caution, not to be stopped in the progress of their crimes by any check of the conscience or feeling of the heart, but to push them as far as they shall judge to be necessary to their greatness and safety. It is this which has given thee a pre-eminence in guilt over all other statesmen.

_Machiavel_.--If you had read my book with candour you would have perceived that I did not desire to render men either tyrants or rebels, but only showed, if they were so, what conduct, in such circumstances, it would be rational and expedient for them to observe.

_Guise_.--When you were a minister of state in Florence, if any chemist or physician had published a treatise, to instruct his countrymen in the art of poisoning, and how to do it with the most certain destruction to others and security to themselves, would you have allowed him to plead in his justification that he did not desire men to poison their neighbours? But, if they would use such evil means of mending their fortunes, there could surely be no harm in letting them know what were the most effectual poisons, and by what methods they might give them without being discovered. Would you have thought it a sufficient apology for him that he had dropped in his preface, or here and there in his book, a sober exhortation against the committing of murder? Without all doubt, as a magistrate concerned for the safety of the people of Florence, you would have punished the wretch with the utmost severity, and taken great care to destroy every copy of so pernicious a book. Yet your own admired work contains a more baneful and more infernal art. It poisons states and kingdoms, and spreads its malignity, like a general pestilence, over the whole world.

_Machiavel_.--You must acknowledge at least that my discourses on Livy are full of wise and virtuous maxims and precepts of government.

_Guise_.--This, I think, rather aggravates than alleviates your guilt. How could you study and comment upon Livy with so acute and profound an understanding, and afterwards write a book so absolutely repugnant to all the lessons of policy taught by that sage and moral historian? How could you, who had seen the picture of virtue so amiably drawn by his hand, and who seemed yourself to be sensible of all its charms, fall in love with a fury, and set up her dreadful image as an object of worship to princes?

_Machiavel_.--I was seduced by vanity. My heart was formed to love virtue. But I wanted to be thought a greater genius in politics than Aristotle or Plato. Vanity, sir, is a passion as strong in authors as ambition in princes, or rather it is the same passion exerting itself differently. I was a Duke of Guise in the republic of letters.

_Guise_.--The bad influences of your guilt have reached further than mine, and been more lasting. But, Heaven be praised, your credit is at present much declining in Europe. I have been told by some shades who are lately arrived here, that the ablest statesman of his time, a king, with whose fame the world is filled, has answered your book, and confuted all the principles of it, with a noble scorn and abhorrence. I am also assured, that in England there is a great and good king, whose whole life has been a continued opposition to your evil system; who has hated all cruelty, all fraud, all falseness; whose word has been sacred, whose honour inviolate; who has made the laws of his kingdom the rules of his government, and good faith and a regard for the liberty of mankind the principles of his conduct with respect to foreign powers; who reigns more absolutely now in the hearts of his people, and does greater things by the confidence they place in him, and by the efforts they make from the generous zeal of affection, than any monarch ever did, or ever will do, by all the arts of iniquity which you recommended.

DIALOGUE XIII.

VIRGIL--HORACE--MERCURY--SCALIGER THE ELDER.

_Virgil_.--My dear Horace, your company is my greatest delight, even in the Elysian Fields. No wonder it was so when we lived together in Rome. Never had man so genteel, so agreeable, so easy a wit, or a temper so pliant to the inclinations of others in the intercourse of society. And then such integrity, such fidelity, such generosity in your nature! A soul so free from all envy, so benevolent, so sincere, so placable in its anger, so warm and constant in its affections! You were as necessary to Maecenas as he to Augustus. Your conversation sweetened to him all the cares of his ministry; your gaiety cheered his drooping spirits; and your counsels assisted him when he wanted advice. For you were capable, my dear Horace, of counselling statesmen. Your sagacity, your discretion, your secrecy, your clear judgment in all affairs, recommended you to the confidence, not of Maecenas alone, but of Augustus himself; which you nobly made use of to serve your old friends of the republican party, and to confirm both the minister and the prince in their love of mild and moderate measures, yet with a severe restraint of licentiousness, the most dangerous enemy to the whole commonwealth under any form of government.

_Horace_.--To be so praised by Virgil would have put me in Elysium while I was alive. But I know your modesty will not suffer me, in return for these encomiums, to speak of your character. Supposing it as perfect as your poems, you would think, as you did of them, that it wanted correction.

_Virgil_.--Don't talk of my modesty. How much greater was yours, when you disclaimed the name of a poet, you whose odes are so noble, so harmonious, so sublime!

_Horace_.--I felt myself too inferior to the dignity of that name.

_Virgil_.--I think you did like Augustus, when he refused to accept the title of king, but kept all the power with which it was ever attended. Even in your Epistles and Satires, where the poet was concealed, as much as he could be, you may properly be compared to a prince in disguise, or in his hours of familiarity with his intimate friends: the pomp and majesty were let drop, but the greatness remained.

_Horace_.--Well, I will not contradict you; and, to say the truth, I should do it with no very good grace, because in some of my Odes I have not spoken so modestly of my own poetry as in my Epistles. But to make you know your pre-eminence over me and all writers of Latin verse, I will carry you to Quintilian, the best of all Roman critics, who will tell you in what rank you ought to be placed.

_Virgil_.--I fear his judgment of me was biassed by your commendation. But who is this shade that Mercury is conducting? I never saw one that stalked with so much pride, or had such ridiculous arrogance expressed in his looks!

_Horace_.--They come towards us. Hail, Mercury! What is this stranger with you?

_Mercury_.--His name is Julius Caesar Scaliger, and he is by profession a critic.

_Horace_.--Julius Caesar Scaliger! He was, I presume, a dictator in criticism.

_Mercury_.--Yes, and he has exercised his sovereign power over you.

_Horace_.--I will not presume to oppose it. I had enough of following Brutus at Philippi.

_Mercury_.--Talk to him a little. He'll amuse you. I brought him to you on purpose.

_Horace_.--Virgil, do you accost him. I can't do it with proper gravity. I shall laugh in his face.

_Virgil_.--Sir, may I ask for what reason you cast your eyes so superciliously upon Horace and me? I don't remember that Augustus ever looked down upon us with such an air of superiority when we were his subjects.

_Scaliger_.--He was only a sovereign over your bodies, and owed his power to violence and usurpation. But I have from Nature an absolute dominion over the wit of all authors, who are subjected to me as the greatest of critics or hypercritics.

_Virgil_.--Your jurisdiction, great sir, is very extensive. And what judgments have you been pleased to pass upon us?

_Scaliger_.--Is it possible you should be ignorant of my decrees? I have placed you, Virgil, above Homer, whom I have shown to be--

_Virgil_.--Hold, sir. No blasphemy against my master.

_Horace_.--But what have you said of me?

_Scaliger_.--I have said that I had rather have written the little dialogue between you and Lydia than have been made king of Arragon.

_Horace_.--If we were in the other world you should give me the kingdom, and take both the ode and the lady in return. But did you always pronounce so favourably for us?

_Scaliger_.--Send for my works and read them. Mercury will bring them to you with the first learned ghost that arrives here from Europe. There is instruction for you in them. I tell you of your faults. But it was my whim to commend that little ode, and I never do things by halves. When I give praise, I give it liberally, to show my royal bounty. But I generally blame, to exert all the vigour of my censorian power, and keep my subjects in awe.

_Horace_.--You did not confine your sovereignty to poets; you exercised it, no doubt, over all other writers.

_Scaliger_.--I was a poet, a philosopher, a statesman, an orator, an historian, a divine without doing the drudgery of any of these, but only censuring those who did, and showing thereby the superiority of my genius over them all.

_Horace_.--A short way, indeed, to universal fame! And I suppose you were very peremptory in your decisions?