Chapter X: Part 10

This news coming to the ears of Colonel Romsey and Robert West, who were bosom friends, the two, unconscious of the revelations of the Keelings, thought it now prudent to save their own skins by informing ministers of all that had occurred, and, indeed, to make their story the more palatable to the Government, of a little more than had occurred. Accordingly they wended their way to Whitehall, and there told how the house at Rye had been offered them by Rumbald, the maltster; how at this house forty men well armed and mounted, commanded in two divisions by Romsey and Walcot, were to assemble; and how on the return of the King from Newmarket, Romsey with his division was to stop the coach, and murder Charles and his brother, whilst Walcot was to busy himself in engaging with the guards. So far the narrative of the informers tallied with the confessions of the Keelings. But Romsey and West, aware how hateful Lord William Russell, Algernon Sydney, and the rest of the cabal were to the Government, by their open opposition to the home and foreign policy of the court, essayed to give the impression that the Council of Six were also implicated in the detestable designs of the Rye House plotters.[73] When unscrupulous men in supreme power are anxious to gratify their animosity, any evidence calculated to bring foes within reach is acceptable. The hints of Romsey and West were sufficient for the purpose, and orders were instantly issued by the Secretaries of State for the arrest of the Six. The first victim was Lord William, who was at once taken before the council for examination; but as he denied all the charges brought against him, he was forthwith sent to the Tower. Algernon Sydney next followed. He had been seized whilst at his lodgings, and all his papers sealed and secured by a messenger. Once before the council, he answered a few questions, “respectfully and without deceit,” but his examination was brief, for on his refusal to reply to certain queries put to him, he also was despatched to the Tower. Monmouth, having received timely warning, had placed the North Sea between him and the court. Ford, Lord Grey, had been brought before the council, had been examined and sent to the Tower, but managing to bribe his guards, had escaped. Lord Essex and Hampden were imprisoned: shortly after his confinement, Essex, who was subject to constitutional melancholy, committed suicide by cutting his throat. Lord Howard was still at large, protesting that there was no plot, and that he had never heard of any. Orders were, however, issued for his arrest, and when the officers came to his house, they found him secreted up the chimney in one of his rooms. As Keeling had informed against the Rye House plotters, so Lord Howard now informed against the Six. Weeping at the fact that he was a prisoner, he promised to reveal all; his revelations were considered so satisfactory that within a few days after their being taken down by the council, both Lord William Russell and Algernon Sydney were put upon their trial for high treason.

Russell was the first to stand at the bar. It appears that one evening he had been present at the house of Thomas Shepherd in Abchurch Lane, where the Rye House conspirators were occasionally in the habit of meeting and discussing their plans. He had gone thither to taste some wine. “It was the greatest accident in the world I was there,” said Russell at his trial, “and when I saw that company was there I would have been gone again. I came there to speak with Mr. Shepherd, for I was just come to town.” His excuse was raised in vain. Romsey, Shepherd, and Howard were playing into the hands of the Crown, and each did his best by hard swearing and false testimony to make the prisoner’s conviction certain. The gallant colonel asserted that he had seen his lordship at the house of Shepherd, where discourse was being held by the cabal of conspirators as to surprising the King’s guards and creating an insurrection throughout the country. Thomas Shepherd next followed, and gave very much the same evidence as Romsey—that his house in Abchurch Lane was let as a place of rendezvous for the disaffected; that the substance of the discourse of those who met there was how to surprise the guards and organise a rising; that two meetings were held at his house, and that he believed the prisoner attended both, but that he was certainly at the meeting when they talked of seizing the guards. Then Lord Howard was called as a witness. He said that he was one of the Six, and had attended the meetings at the house of Shepherd; at such meetings it had been agreed to begin the insurrection in the country before raising the city, and there had also been some talk of dealing with the discontented Scotch; at these deliberations no question was put or vote collected, and he of course concluded by the presence of Lord William that the prisoner gave his consent like the rest to the designs of the cabal.

In his defence Russell denied that he ever had any intention against the life of the King; he was ignorant of the proceedings of the Rye House plotters, and his mixing with the conspirators on the sole occasion he had visited Shepherd at Abchurch Lane was purely due to accident. He had gone thither about some wine. He did not admit that he had listened to any talk as to the possibility of creating an insurrection; but even had he made such an admission, talk of that nature could not be construed into treason, for by a special statute (the old statute of treasons) passed in the reign of Edward III., “a design to levy war is not treason;” besides, such talk had not been acted upon; they had met to consult, but they acted nothing in pursuance of that consulting. The attorney-general held a different view, and asserted it had often been determined that to prepare forces to fight against the King was a design within the statute of Edward III. to kill the King. The presiding judge, as a creature of the court, was, of course, of the same opinion; he summed up the evidence, deeming it unfavorable to the prisoner; and the jury, basing their verdict upon the tone of the bench, brought in a sentence of guilty of high treason. In spite of every effort that affection could inspire and interest advocate, Lord William Russell ended his days on the scaffold. “That which is most certain in the affair is,” writes Charles James Fox in his history of James II., “that Russell had committed no overt act indicating the imagining the King’s death even according to the most strained construction of the statute of Edward III.; much less was any such act legally proved against him; and the conspiring to levy war was not treason, except by a recent statute of Charles II., the prosecutions upon which were expressly limited to a certain time which in these cases had elapsed; so that it is impossible not to assent to the opinion of those who have ever stigmatised the condemnation and execution of Russell as a most flagrant violation of law and justice.”

The same measure was now meted out to Algernon Sydney as had been dealt to Russell. In the eyes of the bench, conspiring to levy war and conspiring against the King’s life were considered one and the same thing. It was in vain that Sydney asserted that he had not conspired to the death of the King, that he had not levied war, and that he had not written anything to stir up the people against the King. It was in vain that even the Rye House plotters had to confess they knew nothing of him, and had never seen him at the different meetings. Canting Nadab, however—as Dryden, in his immortal satire, calls Lord Howard—was there, ready to swear away a colleague’s life or do any other dirty trick provided his own skin and estate were not forfeited for past misdeeds; his evidence was the chief trump card on which the court relied to score the game. Accordingly his lordship began his testimony by relating what had passed at the meetings of the Six, as to the best means for defending the public interest from invasion, and the advisability of the rising breaking out first in the country instead of in the city. He also stated that it was the special province of Algernon Sydney to deal with the malcontent Scots, and had carried out this task through the agency of one Aaron Smith, who had gone north and been provided with funds for the purpose. This assertion, though Howard candidly said he only spoke from hearsay, was deemed sufficient by the advisers of the Crown to place Sydney’s head in jeopardy. As the law, however, demanded that in all trials for high treason there should be _two_ witnesses against the prisoner before sentence could be passed, and as no other witness had the baseness to act the part so well played by Lord Howard, it was necessary for the court to resort to some expedient which would sufficiently answer its purpose of convicting Sydney. The Court was equal to the emergency. Search was made among Sydney’s papers, and it was discovered that he had written a treatise—his famous discourse on Government—which particularly discussed the paramount authority of the people and the legality of resisting an oppressive Government. A few isolated passages of the work were read here and there, the extracts given were garbled, and, thanks to the coloring of the prosecution, the case against the prisoner looked black indeed. Entering upon his defence, Sydney, like Russell, denied that he had ever conspired to the death of Charles; nor was he a friend of Monmouth, with whom he had spoken but three times in his life: he objected to the evidence of Howard, which was based upon hearsay, but if such testimony were true, he was but one witness, and the law required two. As for regarding a mangled portion of his treatise as a second witness, it was iniquitous. “Should a man,” he cried, “be indicted for treason for scraps of papers, innocent in themselves, but when pieced and patched with Lord Howard’s story, made a contrivance to kill the King? Let them not pick out extracts, but read the work as a whole. If they took Scripture to pieces, they could make all the penmen of the Scripture blasphemous. They might accuse David of saying there is no God; the evangelists of saying that Christ was a blasphemer and seducer, and of the apostles that they were drunk.” Then he ended by denying that he had any connection with the malcontents in Scotland. “I have not sent myself,” he said, “nor written a letter into Scotland ever since 1659; nor do I know one man in Scotland to whom I can write, or from whom I ever received one.” He refuted the charges brought against him in vain. The notorious Jeffries was now the presiding judge, and never was summing up from the bench more culpably partial or more flagrantly at variance with the clauses of the judicial oath. “I look upon the meetings of the Six,” said Jeffries to the jury, “and the meetings of the Rye House plotters as having one and the same end in view; I place implicit faith in the evidence of Howard; I deny that it is necessary that there shall be two witnesses to convict a prisoner of high treason; and as for the treatise of Sydney, I declare it is sufficient to condemn the author as being guilty of compassing and imagining the death of the King.” Upon the jury retiring to consider their verdict, Jeffries sternly informed them that he had explained the law, and that they were bound to accept his interpretation of it. Thus left without any option in the matter, the jury returned at the end of half an hour into court, and brought in a verdict of guilty. After a brief confinement. Algernon Sydney was beheaded on Tower Hill, Dec. 7, 1683.

Thus ended one of the most iniquitous and unjust trials that the annals of justice ever had to record. “The proceedings in the case of Algernon Sydney,” writes Fox, “were most detestable. The production of papers containing speculative opinions upon government and liberty, written long before, and perhaps never intended to be published, together with the use made of those papers in considering them as a substitute for the second witness to the overt act, exhibited such a compound of wickedness and nonsense as is hardly to be paralleled in the history of judicial tyranny. But the validity of pretences was little attended to at that time in the case of a person whom the court had devoted to destruction; and upon evidence such as has been stated was this great and excellent man condemned to die.” Upon the accession of “the Deliverer” to the throne, an Act was passed annulling and making void the attainder of Algernon Sydney on account of its having been obtained “without sufficient legal evidence of any treason committed by him,” and “by a partial and unjust construction of the statute declaring what was his treason.” The fate of the Rye House conspirators was very various. Some fled never to return, and were outlawed like Ferguson and Goodenough; others confessed, and were pardoned like Romsey; whilst a third offered in vain to purchase life by turning informers, as was the case with Walcot and Armstrong. Two years later those who had been outlawed, and were living in exile, again tried their hand at insurrection by aiding Monmouth in his revolt.—_Gentleman’s Magazine._

MR. ARNOLD’S LAY SERMON.

Mr. Arnold’s lay sermon to “the sacrificed classes” at Whitechapel contrasts doubly with the pulpit sermons which we too often hear. It is real where these sermons are unreal, and frankly unreal where these sermons are real. It does honestly warn the people to whom it was addressed, of the special danger to which “the sacrificed classes” are exposed, whenever they in their turn get the upper-hand, the danger of simply turning the tables on the great possessing and aspiring classes. “If the sacrificed classes,” he said, “under the influence of hatred, cupidity, desire of change, destroy, in order to possess and enjoy in their turn, their work, too, will be idolatrous, and the old work will continue to stand for the present, or at any rate their new work will not take its place.” It must be work done in a new spirit, not in the spirit of hatred or cupidity, or eagerness to enjoy and appropriate the privileges of others, which can alone stand the test of time and judgment. So far, Mr. Arnold was much more real than too many of our clerical preachers. He warned his hearers against a temptation which he knew would be stirring constantly in their hearts, and not against abstract temptations which he had no reason to think would have any special significance to any of his audience.

On the other hand, if he were more real in what was addressed to his particular audience than pulpit-preachers often are, he resorted once more, with his usual hardened indifference to the meaning of words and the principles of true literature, to that practice of debasing the coinage of religious language, and using great sayings in a new and washed-out sense of his own, of which pulpit-preachers are seldom guilty. This practice of Mr. Arnold’s is the only great set-off against the brilliant services he has rendered to English literature, but it is one which we should not find it easy to condemn too strongly. Every one knows how, in various books of his, Mr. Arnold has tried to “verify” the teaching of the Bible, while depriving the name of God of all personal meaning; to verify the Gospel of Christ, while denying that Christ had any message to us from a world beyond our own; and even,—wildest enterprise of all,—so to rationalise the strictly theological language of St. John as to rob it of all its theological significance. Well, we do not charge this offence on Mr. Arnold as in any sense whatever an attempt to play fast-and-loose with words; for he has again and again confessed to all the world, with the explicitness and vigor which are natural to him, the precise drift of his enterprise. But we do charge it on Mr. Arnold as in the highest possible sense a great literary misdemeanor, that he has lent his high authority to the attempt to give to a great literature a pallid, faded, and artificial complexion, though, with his view of it, his duty obviously was to declare boldly that that literature teaches what is, in his opinion, false and superstitious, and deserves our admiration only as representing a singularly grand, though obsolete, stage in man’s development. Mr. Arnold is as frank and honest as the day. But frank and honest as he is, his authority is not the less lent to a non-natural rendering of Scripture infinitely more intolerable than that non-natural interpretation of the Thirty-nine Articles which once brought down the wrath of the world of Protestants on the author of “Tract 90.” In this Whitechapel lecture Mr. Arnold tells his hearers that in the “preternatural and miraculous aspect” which the popular Christianity assumes Christianity is not solid or verifiable, but that there is another aspect of Christianity which is solid and verifiable, which aspect of it makes no appeal to a preternatural [_i. e._, supernatural] world at all. Then he goes on, after eulogising Mr. Watts’s pictures,—of one of which a great mosaic has been set up in Whitechapel as a memorial of Mr. Barnett’s noble work there,—to remark that good as it is to bring home to “the less refined classes” the significance of Art and Beauty, it is none the less true that “whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again,” and to suggest, of course, by implication, that there is a living water springing up to everlasting life, of which he who drinks shall never thirst. Then he proceeds thus:—

“No doubt the social sympathies, the feeling for
Beauty, the pleasure of Art, if left merely by
themselves, if untouched by what is the deepest
thing in human life—religion—are apt to become
ineffectual and superficial. The art which Mr.
Barnett has done his best to make known to the
people here, the art of men like Mr. Watts, the art
manifested in works such as that which has just now
been unveiled upon the walls of St. Jude’s Church,
has a deep and powerful connection with religion. You
have seen the mosaic, and have read, perhaps, the
scroll which is attached to it. There is the
figure of Time, a strong young man, full of hope,
energy, daring, and adventure, moving on to take
possession of life; and opposite to him there is
that beautiful figure of Death, representing the
breakings-off, the cuttings short, the baffling
disappointments, the heart-piercing separations from
which the fullest life and the most fiery energy
cannot exempt us. Look at that strong and bold young
man, that mournful figure must go hand in hand with
him for ever. And those two figures, let us admit if
you like, belong to Art. But who is that third figure
whose scale weighs deserts, and who carries a sword
of fire? We are told again by the text printed on the
scroll, ‘The Eternal [the scroll, however, has ‘the
Lord’] is a God of Judgment; blessed are they that
wait for him.’ It is the figure of Judgment, and that
figure, I say, belongs to religion. The text which
explains the figure is taken from one of the Hebrew
Prophets; but an even more striking text is furnished
us from that saying of the Founder of Christianity
when he was about to leave the world, and to leave
behind him his Disciples, who, so long as he lived,
had him always to cling to, and to do all their
thinking for them. He told them that when he was gone
they should find a new source of thought and feeling
opening itself within them, and that this new source
of thought and feeling should be a comforter to them,
and that it should convince, he said, the world of
many things. Amongst other things, he said, it should
convince the world that Judgment comes, and that the
Prince of this world is judged. That is a text which
we shall do well to lay to heart, considering it with
and alongside that text from the Prophet. More and
more it is becoming manifest that the Prince of this
world is really judged, that that Prince who is the
perpetual ideal of selfishly possessing and enjoying,
and of the worlds fashioned under the inspiration of
this ideal, is judged. One world and another have
gone to pieces because they were fashioned under the
inspiration of this ideal, and that is a consoling
and edifying thought.”

Now, when we know, as Mr. Arnold wishes us all to know, that to him “the Eternal” means nothing more than that “stream of tendency, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness,” that “Judgment” means nothing but the ultimate defeat which may await those who set themselves against this stream of tendency, if the stream of tendency be really as potent and as lasting as the Jews believed God to be, we do not think that the consoling character of this text will be keenly felt by impartial minds. Further, we should remember that according to Mr. Arnold, when Christ told his disciples that the Comforter should “reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment; of sin because they believed not on me, of righteousness because I go to the Father, and ye see me no more; of judgment because the prince of this world is judged,” we should understand this as importing, to those at least who agree with Mr. Arnold, only that, for some unknown reason, a new wave of feeling would follow Christ’s death, which would give mankind a new sense of their unworthiness, a new vision of Christ’s holiness, and a new confidence in the power of that “stream of tendency, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness,” in which Christ’s own personality would then be merged; and further, that this powerful stream of tendency would probably sweep away all institutions not tending to righteousness but opposing an obstacle to that tendency. Well, all we can say is that, in watering-down in this way the language of the Bible, Mr. Arnold, if he is doing nothing else, is doing what lies in his power to extinguish the distinctive significance of a great literature. The whole power of that literature depends from beginning to end on the faith in a Divine Being who holds the universe in his hand, whose will nothing can resist, who inspires the good, who punishes the evil, who judges kingdoms as he judges the hearts of men, and whose mind manifested in Christ promised to Christ’s disciples that which his power alone availed to fulfil. To substitute for a faith such as this, a belief—to our minds the wildest in the world, and the least verifiable—that “a stream of tendency” effects all that the prophets ascribed to God, or, at least so much of it as ever will be effected at all, and that Christ, by virtue merely of his complete identification with this stream of tendency, is accomplishing posthumously, without help from either Father, Son, or Spirit, all that he could have expected to accomplish through the personal agency of God, is to extract the kernel from the shell, and to ask us to accept the empty husk for the living grain. We are not reproaching Mr. Arnold for his scepticism. We are reproaching him as a literary man for trying to give currency in a debased form to language of which the whole power depends on its being used honestly in the original sense. “The Eternal” means one thing when it means the everlasting and supreme thought and will and life; it is an expression utterly blank and dead when it means nothing but a select “stream of tendency” which is assumed, for no particular reason, to be constant, permanent, and victorious. “Living water” means one thing when it means the living stream of God’s influence; it has no salvation in it at all when it means only that which is the purest of the many tendencies in human life. The shadow of judgment means one thing when it is cast by the will of the supreme righteousness; it has no solemnity in it when it expresses only the sanguine anticipation of human virtue. There is no reason on earth why Mr. Arnold should not water-down the teaching of the Bible to his own view of its residual meaning; but then, in the name of sincere literature, let him find his own language for it, and not dress up this feeble and superficial hopefulness of the nineteenth century in words which are undoubtedly stamped with an ardor and a peace for which his teaching can give us no sort of justification. “Solidity and verification,” indeed! Never was there a doctrine with less bottom in it and less pretence of verification than his; but be that as it may, he must know, as well as we know, that his doctrine is as different from the doctrine of the Bible as the shadow is different from the substance. Has Mr. Arnold lately read Dr. Newman’s great Oxford sermon on “Unreal Words”? If not, we wish he would refer to it again, and remember the warning addressed to those who “use great words and imitate the sentences of others,” and who “fancy that those whom they imitate had as little meaning as themselves,” or “perhaps contrive to think that they themselves have a meaning adequate to their words.” It is to us impossible to believe that Mr. Arnold should have indulged such an illusion. He knows too well the difference between the great faith which spoke in prophet and apostle, and the feeble faith which absorbs a drop or two of grateful moisture from a “stream of tendency” on the banks of which it weakly lingers. Mr. Arnold is really putting Literature,—of which he is so great a master,—to shame, when he travesties the language of the prophets, and the evangelists, and of our Lord himself, by using it to express the dwarfed convictions and withered hopes of modern rationalists who love to repeat the great words of the Bible, after they have given up the strong meaning of them as fanatical superstitions. Mr. Arnold’s readings of Scriptures are the spiritual _assignats_ of English faith.—_Spectator._

AUTHORS AS SUPPRESSORS OF THEIR BOOKS.

BY W. H. OLDING, LL.B.

Alike in the annals of forgery—State forgery of “real” evidence—and in the annals of the British drama, “The Golden Rump” has a history very well known. It was a farce, the representation of which was made the excuse for the passing of the Act whereunder the licensing of theatrical performances was established. At the same time it was a farce which those in power had directly induced its author to compose. That there was no one to imagine or tolerate a play sufficiently rampant to justify the proposal to fetter, which Party Government imagined it well to execute—that this was believed, becomes a testimony to the potency of customary self-regulation. Now conversely, and carrying the analogy to all branches of literature, it may be asserted that the suppression of books by authors themselves is likely to be comparatively frequent just in those countries in which the State does not much concern itself with suppression by its authority. If this analogy have force it must, to Englishmen, be peculiarly gratifying—though the elements of restraint have prevailed in our history to an extent far beyond general belief—at a time when Dr. Reusch’s excellent Index of books prohibited by the authority of Pope, Archbishop, or Continental University is extracting from the competent critics of all countries the homage which untiring assiduity, monumental learning, and rich moderation compel.

However, into the measurement of this comparative frequency, _causes_ essentially enter. These, in England, as in other realms, have abounded. Now, of all the motives which have led authors to consign their compositions to the flames, one of the most frequent, if one of the least seductive, has been the ridicule and elaborate discouragement with which parents have received the knowledge of their offspring’s first essays. The feeling which prompts this is not one to be altogether blamed: it has its partial justification even in the distaste with which the recipient children lay open their treasure-house to those who in days of feebleness have guarded them. For there is, as Tom Tulliver felt, a “family repulsion which spoils the most sacred relations of our lives,” and which is only broken down by some community of art levelling with the sense of a universality wherein all distinction of discipleship is lost, or else by dire circumstance shattering into shapelessness beyond disguise. This, perhaps, rather than quicker sensitiveness, is why it is that young Mozart met response, but the little Burney girl did not. Only to Susanna, her sister, would Fanny breathe her secret, and anxious was she because her mother gained sufficient inkling to induce her periodically to tell the evils of a scribbling turn of mind. But, as with Petrarch centuries before, some time in her fifteenth year the promptings of obedience gained the day. “She resolved,” says Charlotte, her niece and editor, “to make an auto da fé of all her manuscripts, and, if possible, to throw away her pen. Seizing, therefore, an opportunity when Dr. and Mrs. Burney were from home, she made over to a bonfire in a paved play-court the whole stock of her compositions, while faithful Susanna stood by, weeping at the conflagration. Among the works thus immolated was one tale of considerable length, the ‘History of Caroline Evelyn,’ the mother of ‘Evelina.’”

As if further to justify the halting or rebuking posture which at first is apt to prove provocative of indignation, remarkable diffidence in maturer life has pushed its way into sight where early publications have been due to parental sympathy. The historian of Greece, Connop Thirlwall, Bishop of St. David’s, was taught Latin at the age of three: at four could “read Greek with an ease and fluency which astonished all who heard him,” and at seven began the composition of didactic homilies. Now to this precocity was allied a taste for verse, especially as shown in Dryden and in Pope; and the result was the issue of a work, edited and prefaced by the father, entitled “Primitiæ: or Essays and Poems on Various Subjects, Religious, Moral and Entertaining; by Connop Thirlwall, eleven years of age.” But not only did these effusions lead to no riper verse, but it is understood the Bishop disliked the little book, and by no means enjoyed seeing copies of it. That he went to the length of Thomas Lovell Beddoes we are not prepared to say. _He_, when a freshman at Oxford, first owned himself an author by sending to the press the “Improvisatore.” “Of this little memento of his weakness, as he used to consider it,” says his biographer, “Beddoes soon became thoroughly ashamed, and long before he left Oxford he suppressed the traces of its existence, carrying the war of extermination into the bookshelves of his acquaintance, where, as he chuckled to record, it was his wont to leave intact its externals (some gay binding perhaps of his own selection), but thoroughly eviscerated, every copy on which he could lay his hands.”

Gymnasiarch as well as poet, it was natural that Pehr Henrik Ling, the Swede, should do whatever he did with energy. Still, the burning of eleven volumes by the time the age of twenty-one was reached must be allowed to show as much vigor and striving after excellence in the language of the gods as in what has been humorously termed “the language of nudges.” Indeed, the author of the epic “Asar” does not seem to have thrown any work into general circulation until he arrived at thirty, and then only on the pressure offered by some friends, without his knowledge, having got up a subscription for the publication of one of his poems, when, says he, “I could not honorably refuse.” Yet there must have been much of interest in these now perished volumes, for not only had their author, early as school-days, experienced something of the bitterness of life—of a political life, which was shared by the people—in being driven from Wexio because he would not betray innocent youngsters who had been comrades, but in the wandering outcast career which for some years following he had strange and drear experience, which, acting on a nature poetic and passionate, can hardly but have expressed itself now in soothing verse, now in melancholy, but ever in rich and true. It could at least be wished, if but for the purpose of forwarding that life-resulting interchange of matter which men of science assure us ceaselessly proceeds, that some of those who compose under feeble inspiration, or under inspiration which has lost its fire with lapse of time and change of circumstance, and which, though a spiritless yeast, tempts to use as a ferment, would be as little sparing in their sacrifices, so that it should not be held up as a thing for boast, as we perceive it of late to have been in the case of the Rev. Dr. Tiffany, that some five hundred pages of _sermons_ have been delivered to the irrevocable pyre.

There is the semblance of a common motive inducing men to destroy their early work, and give over the labor of their hands to consumption on approach of death. But in the latter case there is usually more concentration and intensity of purpose. The purpose unquestionably may have this added intensity merely in meanness; but there is also scope for more valorous self-judgment. The argument is clearly seized by Dugald Stewart thus:—

It is but seldom that a philosopher who has been
occupied from his youth with moral or political
inquiries succeeds completely to his wish in
stating to others the grounds upon which his own
opinions are founded; and hence it is that the
known principles of an individual who has approved
to the public his candor, his liberality, and his
judgment, are entitled to a weight and an authority
independent of the evidence which he is able,
upon any particular occasion, to produce in their
support. A secret consciousness of this circumstance,
and an apprehension that by not doing justice to
an important argument the progress of truth may
be rather retarded than advanced, have probably
induced many authors to withhold from the world the
unfinished results of their most valuable labors,
and to content themselves with giving the general
sanction of their suffrages to truths which they
regarded as peculiarly interesting to the human race.

This finely balanced observation—kind, penetrating, lacking warmth, that it may appear more general, more forcible—was made apropos of Adam Smith. It appears from a letter to Hume that as early as 1773 Smith, who died in 1790, had determined that the bulk of the literary papers about him should never be published. And he would in after-life seem carefully to have separated, as he esteemed it worthy or not, whatever work he did. Among the papers destined to destruction one may guess—for though Smith, to the end a slow composer, had the habit of dictating to a secretary as he paced his room, the contents of his portfolios were not certainly known to any—were the lectures on rhetoric which he read at Edinburgh in 1748, and those on natural religion and jurisprudence which formed part of his course at Glasgow. But his anxiety to blot out the trace of even these, which he was too conscientious not at one time to have deemed sound, so increased as his last painful illness drew the threads of life out of his willing hand, that Dr. Hutton says he not only entreated the friends to whom he had entrusted the disposal of his MSS., to destroy them with some small specified exceptions, in the event of his death; but at the last could not rest satisfied till he learnt that the volumes were in ashes; and to that state, to his marked relief, they were accordingly reduced some few days before his death.

This anxiety of Smith’s, who had justly confidence in his executors, has frequently been entertained very reasonably indeed with regard to reminiscences, the spicy character of which often requires the publication to be long posthumous, but tempts the graceless to make it not so. Rochefoucauld’s “Mémoires,” which have, however, more of the chronicle and less of the journal than is generally relished, were certainly delayed, as the event turned out, long enough after his death, in appearing in any tolerable form. But it had been like not to be so. While he was still living he found that at the shop of Widow Barthelin, relict of a printer of Rouen, his work had been secretly put to press by the orders of the Comte de Brienne. The Count had furtively made a copy from the manuscript borrowed from Arnaud d’Andilly, to whom Rochefoucauld had submitted it for the purposes of correction—“Particulièrement pour la pureté de la langue.” Measures as furtive were necessary to recover it. The Duke accordingly pounced on the printer, gave Widow Barthelin twenty-five pistoles, carried off the whole of the edition, and stored it in a garret of the Hôtel de Liancourt at Paris. We doubt if it is generally known that this edition, wherein the widow had shown few signs of care, was entitled, “Relation des guerres civiles de France, depuis août 1649 jusqu’à la fin de 1652.” In curious contrast is the fact that sometimes a relative destroys what the author has shown no vigilant scrupulousness in suppressing. It was perhaps esteemed by the “very devout lady of the family of St. John,” who was mother to the notable Rochester, on whose death Bishop Burnet has so improvingly written, that the final scenes of her son made it unsuitable that any of his papers should be kept—especially the history of the intrigues of the court of Charles II. reported by Bolingbroke to have been written by him in a series of letters to his friend Henry Saville.

Nor let it be supposed that this would have been so adverse to the desires of Rochester himself. The late James Thompson, author of the “City of Dreadful Night,” destroyed before his death all that he had written previous to 1857, though he has been very virulent against a sample king who of malice prepense with gross ingratitude thus treated the donor of a priceless if imaginary gift:—

A writer brought him truth;
And first he imprisoned the youth;
And then he bestowed a free pyre
That the works might have plenty of fire,
And also to cure the pain
Of the headache called thought in the brain.

Pierius Valerianus tells us that Antonius Marosticus, when held in high esteem and loved of all men, enjoying the dainties of life at the court of some Cardinal, and dallying with existence which he had rooted hopes would henceforth be peaceful, was carried off within three days by a sudden epidemic. The doleful deed, Pierius says, was made more distressful by the fact that sanitary considerations required the cremation of all the dead man’s books with the dead man’s body. How far the sense of tragedy may lie in this melancholy incident, the death of Shelley helps one to appreciate. His corpse was washed ashore near the Via Reggio, four miles from that of his friend Williams, which lay close to the tower of Migliarino, at the Bocca Lericcio. The attitude was memorable. His right hand was clasped in his heart. Bent back and thrust away, as if in haste, was in a side pocket the last volume of the poet Keats. It had been lent by Leigh Hunt, who had told the borrower to keep it till he should return it by his own hands. This impossible, and Hunt refusing to receive it through others, it was burnt with the body amid frankincense and myrrh.

It was fit that the pathetic in death should spring from a cause so troublous in life. Again and again was Shelley wounded by the forced suppression of his work. Doubtless merit is not extreme in the two-act tragedy of “Œdipus Tyrannus, or Swellfoot the Tyrant.” But its fate was as subtle and sure as that of Œdipus himself. Written abroad, it was transmitted to England, printed and published anonymously, and stifled at the very dawn of its existence by the “Society for the Suppression of Vice,” who threatened a prosecution upon it, if not immediately withdrawn. The friend who had taken the pains of bringing it out did not deem it worth the cost, to pocket and nerve, of a contest, and it was laid aside—only to be revived in Mrs. Shelley’s second edition. It is said, indeed, that but seven copies are extant, one of which Mr. Buxton Forman, the industrious and intelligent editor to whom the best students of Shelley feel themselves the most beholden, secured, by search through the vast stores of Mr. Lacy, the dramatic publisher of the Strand—one of the very last plays in the very last boxes—a mere paper pamphlet, devoid of a wrapper, carried away at the cost of a six-pence, proving to be the treasure. And far was the Œdipus from being the sole cause of trouble in respect of the works of its author. Posthumous Poems of Shelley were suppressed on the application of Sir Timothy, his father. The Posthumous Letters, which excellent forgers had contrived to manufacture from articles written after the decease of the poet, exercising an amount of ingenuity described as “most extraordinary,” and receiving the reward of the labor of their hands from Sir Percy Shelley, or from Mr. Moxon, were called in on the discovery of the fraud. “Laon and Cythna” was cancelled to make way for the “Revolt of Islam.” “Queen Mab,” which had been written when Shelley was eighteen, though completed only when in his twenty-first year, was surreptitiously published while its author was in Italy—copies having been distributed among his friends—and though adjudged by the Court of Chancery, from which an injunction was sought for restraint of this irregular edition, to be disentitled to privilege on the futile score of an immorality shocking to the British constitution, it and its notes were, so late as 1840, the subject of prosecutions and convictions to all who openly, being men of fair fame, ventured to publish it, as Mr. Moxon experienced.

The poets, indeed, of Shelley’s time were peculiarly unfortunate. It is a sound enough deduction of law that what is evil—is filthy, or blasphemous, or scandalous—cannot be for the benefit of the public to learn of, nor therefore an object of the law, which is built on the needs of society, to extend its protection to—a protection which has in view the advantages of private individuals only as members of society. But in this refusal of the active bestowment of privilege the guardian of public morals in an individual man, in no sense a representative of his country—a judge of the old Court of Chancery. Now in active suppression, in punishment for enticing the public to things contaminating and none the less subtle because presented in intellectual form, there is indeed the benefit of the presence of a judge, but the issue is with a jury. And the unfortunate interval, or breach, through which public morals are so roughly assailable is measured (usually at least) by the _sum_ of the differences between a publication disentitled to privilege or worthy of punishment, and the judgment of an individual or the opinion of the country. In this vast moral interval, to say nothing of the interval of time which rapidity in administration, on the one hand, and slowness in administration on the other, scarcely ever fail to involve, there is an enticement to the indifferent part of the population, or to that bold and heroic part which dares to set up its private and painfully honest judgment against the judgment of a Chancery judge—to trade upon the bruited knowledge of a suspected well of evil, unchecked by unpalatable astringency in consumption of the draught. With the narrowness of men like Lords Eldon and Ellenborough, and the rebellious attitude held by a nation consciously approaching to the dawn of an age of a freedom of thought greater because more nobly and wit-wisely sanctioned, this breach was disastrously great, and beckoned the way to a flood of mischances directly or affectively extensive.

Now, a highly curious result of the working of these doctrines was seen in cases in which—not as with Shelley, nor as with Byron, who vainly sought in February 1822 to suppress the edition of “Cain” which the pirate, Benbow, had printed, and who in the same year saw his “Vision” first refused by the publishers of the Row, then given to John Hunt, then placed by John and his brother in the first number of the _Liberal_, and then made the subject of a true bill returned by a Middlesex grand jury on an indictment preferred by the “Constitutional Association”—in cases in which, I say, the authors, from change of opinion, were opposed to any publication of their earlier works. The most prominent instance of this occurs, of course, in the “Wat Tyler” of Laureate Southey. In the height of his pantisocratic schemes, and full of Socialist feelings, Southey had written this dramatic poem, and placed the manuscript in the hands of his brother-in-law, Robert Lovell; he took it to Mr. Ridgway, the London publisher. When Southey visited the Metropolis shortly afterwards, the year was 1794, Mr. Ridgway was in Newgate. Thither Southey went, and either found incarcerated in the same apartment with his publisher, or took with him, the Rev. Mr. Winterbottom, a dissenting minister. It was agreed that “Wat Tyler” should be published anonymously. The piece, however, appears to have been forgotten, and wholly to have escaped the memory of both publisher and Southey. But it had crept—so Cottle, Hone, and Browne may best be reconciled—into the hands of Mr. Winterbottom, who taking it with him, when years had passed, while on a visit to friends at Worcester, beguiled some dull hour by reading the piece for the amusement of the company, who were well pleased to pamper their dislike to Southey by chuckling at his _ratting_ in political opinions. But generosity clearly demanded that this pleasant spirit of carping should have a sphere extended far beyond a Worcestershire company. So thought two of the guests, who, obtaining the manuscript, with great devotion sacrificed the long hours of night by transcribing it, being careful the while to preserve the privacy which attends the most highly charitable actions. Through their hands the transcription reached the publisher, and no sooner had his edition appeared than Southey became naturally anxious to lay the ghost of his former beliefs. For that purpose, with the advice of his friends, he applied for an injunction. Lord Eldon refused to grant it, on the plea that “a person cannot recover damages upon a work which in its nature is calculated to do injury to the public.” The decision of the Court encouraged the vendors to redouble their efforts, and not fewer than 60,000 copies are said to have been sold during the excitement the case created. As for poor Southey, he defended himself as best he could in the _Courier_, and underwent the further suspense of seeing a prosecution urged against him by turbulent spirits in the legislature—Lord Brougham first, and Mr. William Smith after. The ridicule was all the more increased by the fact that Southey had recently published in the _Quarterly Review_ an article in most striking contrast. And it is noticeable that in _his_ American _Quarterly Review_ Dr. Orestes A. Brownson printed opinions destructive of his early views, which had also been in sympathy with Socialistic and transcendental movements, as well as with Unitarianism, and threw cold water upon, and indeed endeavored in his own country altogether to suppress, the work by which in this country he is best known, “Charles Elwood; or, the Infidel Converted.”

Certainly few authors have had better justification for a change of opinion than Adrian Beverland. In a work quite unfit for general reading, which purported to be issued “Eleutheropoli, in Horto Hesperidum, typis Adami, Evæ, Terræ filii, 1678,” he had maintained with nasty nicety that view of original sin which Henri Corneille Agrippa in his “Declamatio de originali Peccato” had nearly as undisguisedly maintained before him. For this performance he was cast into prison at Leyden, and would have fared badly enough had he not found means of escape. His work, however, was sufficiently thought of to provoke from Leonard Ryssenius a “justa detestatio libelli sceleratissimi,” just as a previous work had called from Allard Uchtman a “Vox clamantis in deserto, ad sacrorum ministros, adversus Beverlandum.” Passing these by, Beverland himself was contented to write stinging libels against the Leyden magistrates and professors, and then to flee to London, where he engaged himself principally in collecting odious pictures. But after a time came a measure of repentance, and though no excessive purity can be claimed for an “Admonition” published by Bateman, of London, in 1697, yet the preface or “advertisement” does certainly contain a strong condemnation of his “Peccatum originale.” Fifteen years after, he died in a state of deep poverty, a madman—impressed with the horrible idea that he was pursued by two hundred men allied by oath to slay him.

A state more interesting that either stanch advocacy or loud condemnation of a position once relied on is that of hesitation. It is one peculiarly unlikely to express itself, because the tendency of hesitation is to refrain; or if expressing itself to arrest attention, because subtile or feeble qualifications refer their interest to the themes they hedge and do not centre in themselves. But when a mind throws itself with force into a posture of racked doubt, and bids us be aware that the struggle, not the issue, is of utter worth, or when with yet greater fervor of expectancy a revelation, we know not whence, we know not whither, is awaited with every nerve full-strained, the world more surely than by either other mood becomes a gallery rocked with hearkening spectators. I think there is something of this earnest hesitation in a career it is not difficult, at this distance of time, to futilize—Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s. There is a very human weakness in his self-debate upon the publication of the “De Veritate,” but there is a very human need—and, moreover, a need made personal (as are all needs), though founded in philanthropy. Truly the more sacred experience is—unless it can reach to that intensity and presentness which thrills all who stand enclosed in the thin line of its horizon—the more clearly it is desecrated by the common tread, and seems a thing to mock at. So is it with the scene which Herbert himself describes.

Being thus doubtful in my chamber, one fair day in
the summer, my casement being open towards the sun,
the sun shining clear, and no wind stirring, I took
my work, “De Veritate,” in my hand, and kneeling on
my knees, devoutly said these words: “O Thou eternal
God, Author of the light which now shines upon me,
and Giver of all inward illuminations, I do beseech
Thee, give me some sign from heaven; if not, I shall
suppress it.” I had no sooner spoken these words,
but a loud, though yet gentle noise, came from
heaven (for it was like nothing on earth), which did
so comfort and cheer me, that I took my petition
as granted, and that I had the sign I demanded;
whereupon also I resolved to print my book.

An aspect of mind combining both resolution and diffidence, which has lead to the obliteration of literary work, is reliance on a friend’s counsel. An amusing example of this is related in the ecclesiastical history of Nicephorus Callistus concerning Marsilius Ficinus. This gentleman had translated Plato into Latin, and came to his learned friend Musurus Candiotus to know his opinion of it. Candiotus, after perusing some few leaves, perceived that it would not satisfy the expectation of the learned, and was even of opinion that it was so slubbered over as to resemble the original (as Cicero the younger did his father) in nothing but in name. He accordingly took up a sponge, dipped it in an ink-pot, and blotted out the first page. This done, he turns to Ficinus. “Thou seest,” quoth he “how I have corrected the first page; if thou wilt, I will correct the rest in like sort.” Now Ficinus was fully as mild in temper as slender in scholarship. “No reason,” says he, “that Plato should be disgraced through my default; refine away.” And according to his words was it done.