Chapter XXXI: Introduction: To an Account of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses (18)

I think the spirit of partisanship is of use in a point of view that has not been distinctly adverted to. It serves as a conductor to carry off our antipathies and ill-blood in a quarter and a manner that is least hurtful to the general weal. A thorough partisan is a good hater; but he hates only one side of a question, and that the _outside_. His bigotry throws human nature into strong light and shade; he has his sympathies as well as his antipathies; it is not all black or a dull drab-colour. He does not generalise in his contempt or disgust, or proceed from individuals to universals. He lays the faults and vices of mankind to the account of sects and parties, creeds and classes. Man in himself is a good sort of animal. It is the being a Tory or a Whig (as it may happen) that makes a man a knave or fool; but then we hardly look upon him as of the same species with ourselves. Kings are not arbitrary, nor priests hypocritical, because they are men, but because they are kings and priests. We form certain nominal abstractions of these classes, which the more we dislike them, the less natural do they seem, and leave the general character of the species untouched, or act as a foil to it. There is nothing that is a greater damper to party spirit than to suggest that the errors and enormities of both sides arise from certain inherent dispositions, common to the species. It shocks the liberal and enlightened among us, to suppose that under any circumstances they could become bigots, tools, persecutors. They wipe their hands clean of all such aspersions. There is a great gulph of prejudice and passion placed between us and our opponents; and this is interpreted into a natural barrier and separation of sentiment and feeling. ‘Our withers are unwrung.’ Burke represented modern revolutionists to himself, under the equivocal similitude of ‘green-eyed, spring-nailed, velvet-pawed philosophers, whether going on two legs or on four;’ and thus removed to a distance from his own person all the ill attributes with which he had complimented the thorough-bred metaphysician. By comparing the plausible qualities of a Minister of state to the sleekness of the panther, I myself seem to have no more affinity with that whole genus, than with the whiskers and claws of that formidable and spirited animal. Bishop Taylor used to reprimand his rising pride by saying, at the sight of a reprobate, ‘There goes my wicked self:’ we do not apply the same method politically, and say, ‘There goes my Tory or my Jacobin self.’ We suppose the two things incompatible. The Calvinist damns the Arminian, the Protestant the Papist, &c. but it is not for a difference of nature, but an opposition of opinion. The spirit of partizanship is not a spirit of our misanthropy. But for the vices and errors of example and institution, mankind are (on this principle) only a little lower than the angels: it is false doctrine and absurd prejudices that make demons of them. The only original sin is differing in opinion with us: of that they are curable like any occasional disorder, and the man comes out, from beneath the husk of his party and prejudices, pure and immaculate. Make proselytes of them, let them come over to our way of thinking, and they are a different race of beings quite. This is to be effected by the force of argument and the progress of knowledge. It is well, it is perfectly well. We cast the slough of our vices with the shibboleth of our party; a Reform in Parliament would banish all knavery and folly from the land. It is not the same wretched little mischievous animal, man, that is alike under all denominations and all systems, and in whom different situations and notions only bring out different inherent, incorrigible vices and propensities; but the professions and the theory being changed for the one, which we think the only true and infallible one, the whole world, by the mere removal of our arbitrary prejudices and modes of thinking, would become as sincere, as benevolent, as independent, and as worthy people as we are! To hate and proscribe half the species under various pretexts and nicknames, seems, therefore, the only way to entertain a good opinion of ourselves and mankind in general.

‘THE PIRATE’

_The London Magazine._] [_January, 1822._

This is not the best, nor is it the worst (the worst is good enough for us) of the Scotch Novels. There is a story in it, an interest excited almost from the first, a clue which you get hold of and wish to follow out; a mystery to be developed, and which does not disappoint you at last. After you once get into the stream, you read on with eagerness, and have only to complain of the number of impediments and diversions thrown in your way. The author is evidently writing to gain time, to make up his complement of volumes, his six thousand guineas worth of matter; and to get to the end of your journey, and satisfy the curiosity he has raised, you must be content to travel with him, stop when he stops, and turn out of the road as often as he pleases. He dallies with your impatience, and smiles in your face, but you cannot, and dare not be angry with him, while with his giant-hand he plays at pushpin with the reader, and sweeps the rich stakes from the table. He has, they say, got a _plum_ by his writings. What have not the public got by reading them? The course of exchange is, and will be, in our favour, as long as he gives us one volume for ourselves, and two for himself. Who is there that has not been the better, the wiser, and happier man for these fine and inexhaustible productions of genius? The more striking characters and situations are not quite so highly wrought up in the present, as in some former instances, nor are they so crowded, so thickly sown. But the genius of the author is not exhausted, nor can it be so till not a Scotch superstition, or popular tradition is left, or till the pen drops lifeless and regretted from its master’s hand. Ah! who will then call the mist from its hill? Who will make the circling eddies roar? Who, with his ‘so potent art,’ will dim the sun, or stop the winds, that wave the forest-heads, in their course? Who will summon the spirits of the northern air from their chill abodes, or make gleaming lake or hidden cavern teem with wizard, or with elfin forms? There is no one but the Scottish Prospero, but old Sir Walter, can do the trick aright. He is the very genius of the clime—mounts in her old grey clouds, dips in her _usquebaugh_ and whiskey!—startles you with her antique Druid spells in the person of Elshie, or stirs up the fierce heat of her theological fires with Macbriar and Kettle-drumle: sweeps the country with a far war-cry to Lochiel, or sighs out the soul of love in the perfumed breath of the Lily of St. Leonard’s. Stand thou, then, Meg Merrilies, on the point of thy fated rock, with wild locks and words streaming to the wind; and sit thou there in thy narrow recess, Balfour of Burley, betwixt thy Bible and thy sword, thy arm of flesh and arm of the Spirit:—when the last words have passed the lips of the author of Waverley, there will be none to re-kindle your fires, or recall your spirit! Let him write on then to the last drop of ink in his ink-stand, even though it should not be made according to the model of that described by Mr. Coleridge, and we will not be afraid to read whatever he is not ashamed to publish. We are the true and liege subjects of his pen, and profess our ultra-fealty in this respect, like the old French leaguers, with a _Quand même_.

The Pirate is not what we expected, nor is it new. We had looked for a prodigious _row_—landing and boarding, cut and thrust, blowing up of ships, and sacking of sea-ports, with the very devil to pay, and a noise to deafen clamour,

‘Guns, drums, trumpets,
Blunderbusses and thunder.’

We supposed that for the time ‘Hell itself would be empty, and all the devils be here.’ _There be land pirates and water pirates_; and we thought Sir Walter would be for kicking up just such a dust by sea, in the Buccaneers, (as it was to be called) as he has done by land in Old Mortality. _Multum abludit imago._ There is nothing or little of the sort. There is here (bating a sprinkling of twenty pages of roaring lads, who come on shore for no use but to get themselves hanged in the Orkneys,) only a single Pirate, a peaking sort of gentleman, spiteful, but not enterprising; in love, and inclined to take up and reform, but very equivocal in the sentiments he professes, and in those he inspires in others. Cleveland is the Pirate, who is wrecked off the coast of Zetland, is saved from destruction by young Mordaunt Mertoun, who had been so far the hero of the piece, and jilts him with his mistress, Minna, a grave sentimentalist, and the elder of two sisters, to whom Mordaunt had felt a secret and undeclared passion. The interest of the novel hinges on this _bizarre_ situation of the different parties. Sir Walter (for he has in the present work leisure on his hands to philosophize) here introduces a dissertation of some length, but not much depth, to show that the jilting of favoured, or half-favoured lovers, comes by the dispensation of Providence, and that the breed of honest men and bonny lasses would be spoiled if the fairest of the fair, the sentimental Miss, and the prude (contrary to all previous and common-place calculation), did not prefer the blackguard and the bravo, to the tender, meek, puny, unpretending, heartbroken lover. We do not think our novelist manages his argument well, or shines in his new Professor’s chair of morality. Miss Polly Peachum, we do indeed remember, the artless, soft, innocent Polly, fell in love with the bold Captain Macheath; but so did Miss Lucy Lockitt too, who was no chicken, and who, according to this new balance of power in the empire of love, ought to have tempered her fires with the phlegm of some young chaplain to the prison, or the soft insinuations of some dreaming poet. But as our author himself is not in a hurry to get on with his story, we will imitate him, and let him speak here in his superfluous character of a casuist, or commentator on his own narrative.

[A long passage from Chap, XIII., beginning ‘Captain Cleveland sate betwixt the sisters,’ follows.]

Suffice it to say, that we differ from this solution of the difficulty, ingenious and old as it is; and to justify that opinion, ask only whether such a man as Cleveland would not be a general favourite with women, instead of being so merely with those of a particularly retired and fantastic character, which destroys the author’s balance of qualities in love? Indeed, his own story is a very bad illustration of his doctrine; for this romantic and imprudent attachment of the gentle and sensitive Minna to the bold and profligate Captain Cleveland leads to nothing but the most disastrous consequences; and the opposition between their sentiments and characters, which was to make them fit partners for life, only prevents the possibility of their union, and renders both parties permanently miserable. Besides, the whole perplexity is, after all, gratuitous. The enmity between Cleveland and young Mertoun (the chief subject of the plot) is founded on their jealousy of each other in regard to Minna, and yet there had been no positive engagement between her and Mertoun, who, like Edmund in Lear, is equally betrothed to both sisters—in the end marrying the one that he as well as the reader likes least. Afterwards, when the real character of this gay rover of the seas is more fully developed, and he gets into scrapes with the police of Orkney, the grave, romantic Minna, like a true northern lass, deserts him, and plays off a little old-fashioned, unavailing, but discreet morality upon him. When the reader begins to sympathise with ‘a brave man in distress,’ then is the time for his mistress with ‘the pale face and raven locks’ to look to her own character. We like the theory of the Beggar’s Opera better than this: the ladies there followed their supposed hero, their _beau ideal_ of a lover, to prison, instead of leaving him to his untoward fate. Minna is no NUT-BROWN MAID, though she has a passion for outlaws, between whose minds and those of the graver and more reflecting of the fair sex there is, according to the opinion of our GREAT UNKNOWN, a secret and pre-established harmony. What is still more extraordinary and unsatisfactory in the progress of the story is this—all the pretended preternatural influence of Norna of the Fitful-Head, the most potent and impressive personage in the drama, is exerted to defeat Cleveland’s views, and to give Minna to Mordaunt Mertoun, for whom she conceives an instinctive and anxious attachment as her long-lost son; and yet in the end the whole force of this delusion, and the reader’s sympathies, are destroyed by the discovery that Cleveland, not Mertoun, is her real offspring, and that she has been equally led astray by her maternal affection and preternatural pretensions. Does this great writer of romances, this profound historiographer of the land of visions and of second sight, thus mean to qualify his thrilling mysteries—to _back_ out of his thrice-hallowed prejudices, and to turn the tables upon us with modern cant and philosophic scepticism? That is the last thing we could forgive him!

We have said that the characters of the Pirate are not altogether new. Norna, the enchantress, whom he is ‘so fond’ at last to depose from her _ideal_ cloudy throne of spells and mystic power, is the Meg Merrilies of the scene. She passes over it with vast strides, is at hand whenever she is wanted, sits hatching fate on the topmost tower that overlooks the wilderness of waves, or glides suddenly from a subterraneous passage, and in either case moulds the elements of nature, and the unruly passions of men, to her purposes. She has ‘strange power of speech,’ weaves events with words, is present wherever she pleases, and performs what she wills, and yet she doubts her own power, and criticises her own pretensions. Meg Merrilies was an honester witch. She at least stuck true to herself. We hate anything by halves; and most of all, imagination and superstition piece-meal. Cleveland, again, is a sort of inferior _Gentle Geordie_, and Minna lags after Effie Deans, the victim of misplaced affection, but far, far behind. Wert thou to live a thousand years, and write a thousand romances, thou wouldst never, old True-penny, beat thy own _Heart of Mid Lothian_! It is for that we can forgive thee all that thou didst mean to write in the BEACON, or hast written elsewhere, beneath the dignity of thy genius and knowledge of man’s weaknesses, as well as better nature! Magnus Troil is a great name, a striking name; but we _ken_ his person before; he is of the same genealogy as the Bailie Braidwardine, and other representatives of old Scottish hospitality; the dwarf Nick Strumpfer is of a like familiar breed, only uglier and more useless than any former one: we have even traces, previous to the Pirate, of the extraordinary agriculturist and projector, Mr. Timothy Yellowley, and his sister, Miss Barbara Yellowley, with pinched nose and grey eyes; but we confess we have one individual who was before a stranger to us, at least in these parts, namely, Claud Halcro, the poet, and friend of ‘Glorious John.’ We do not think him in his place amidst dwarfs, witches, pirates, and _Udallers_; and his stories of the Wits’ Coffee-house and Dryden’s poetry are as tedious to the critical reader as they are to his Zetland patron and hearers. We might confirm this opinion by a quotation, but we should be thought too tedious. He fills up, we will venture to say, a hundred pages of the work with sheer impertinence, with _pribble prabble_. Whenever any serious matter is to be attended to, Claud Halcro pulls out his fiddle and draws the long bow, and repeats some verses of ‘_Glorious John_.’ Bunce, the friend of Cleveland, is much better; for we can conceive how a strolling-player should turn gentleman-rover in a time of need, and the foppery and finery of the itinerant stage-hero become the quarter-deck exceedingly well. In general, however, our author’s humour requires the aid of costume and dialect to set it off to advantage: his wit is Scotch, not English wit. It must have the _twang_ of the uncouth pronunciation and peculiar manners of the country in it. The elder Mertoun is a striking misanthropic sketch; but it is not very well made out in what his misanthropy originates, nor to what it tends. He is merely a part of the machinery: neither is he the first gentleman in these Novels who lands without an introduction on the remote shores of Scotland, and shuts himself up (for reasons best known to himself) in inaccessible and solitary confinement. We had meant to give the outline of the story of the Pirate, but we are ill at a plot, and do not care to blunt the edge of the reader’s curiosity by anticipating each particular. As far, however, as relates to the historical foundation of the narrative, the author has done it to our hands, and we give his words as they stand in the _Advertisement_.

[Nearly the whole of the Advertisement is quoted.]

Of the execution of these volumes we need hardly speak. It is inferior, but it is only inferior to some of his former works. Whatever he touches, we see the hand of a master. He has only to describe action, thoughts, scenes, and they everywhere speak, breathe, and live. It matters not whether it be a calm sea-shore, a mountain tempest, a drunken brawl, the ‘Cathedral’s choir and gloom,’ the Sybil’s watch-tower, or the smuggler’s cave; the things are immediately there that we should see, hear, and feel. He is Nature’s Secretary. He neither adds to, nor takes away from her book; and that makes him what he is, the most popular writer living. We might give various instances of his unrivalled undecaying power, but shall select only one or two with which we were most struck and delighted in the perusal. The characters of the two sisters, daughters of Magnus Troil, and the heroines of the tale, are thus beautifully drawn.

[Here follows the description of Minna and Brenda, from Chap. III.]

So much for elegant Vandyke portrait-painting. Now for something of the Salvator style. Norna, the terrific and unhappy Norna, is thus finely introduced.

[The first introduction of Norna is quoted from Chap. V.]

We give one more extract in a different style; and we think the comic painting in it is little inferior to Hogarth’s.

[A passage, beginning ‘Now the fortunate arrival of Mordaunt,’ &c. is quoted from Chap. XI.]

Shall we go on? No, but will leave the reader to revel at ease in the luxuries of feeling and description scattered through the rest of the work.

We have only time to add two remarks more, which we do not remember to have seen made. One relates to the exquisitely good-natured and liberal tone displayed in the author’s quotations from living writers. He takes them every one by turns, and of all factions in poetry and politics, under his wing, and sticks a stanza from Coleridge, from Wordsworth, from Byron, from Crabbe, from Rogers, as a motto to his chapters, not jealous of their popularity, nor disdaining their obscurity. The author can hardly guess how much we like him for this. The second thing we would advert to is a fault, and a remarkable one. It is the slovenliness of the style and badness of the grammar throughout these admirable productions. Badness of the grammar! Slovenly style! What do you mean by that? Take a few instances, and we have done with the subject for ever. We give them _seriatim_, as we marked them in the margin.

‘Here Magnus proceeded with great _animation_, sipping from _time_ to _time_ the half diluted spirit, which at the same _time animated_ his resentment against the intruders,’ etc. P. 16.

‘In those days (for the _present_ times are greatly altered for the better) the _presence_ of a superior in such a situation,’ etc. P. 21.

‘The _information_, which she acquired by habits of patient attention, _were_ indelibly rivetted in a naturally powerful memory.’ P. 48.

‘And I know not _whom_ else are expected.’ P. 56.

‘Or perhaps he _preferred_ the situation, of the house and farm which he himself was to occupy (which indeed was a tolerable one) as _preferable_ to that, etc.’ P. 89.

‘The _strength_ of the retiring wave proved even _stronger_ than he had expected,’ etc. P. 169.

But let us have done with this, and leave it to the Editor of the Quarterly Review to take up the subject as a mighty important little discovery of his own!

‘PEVERIL OF THE PEAK’

_The London Magazine._] [_February, 1823._

The author of Waverley is here himself again; and it is on English ground that he has come upon his feet. Peveril of the Peak is all but equal to the best of the SCOTCH NOVELS. It is no weaving up of old odds and ends; no lazy repetition of himself at second-hand, and _the worse for the wear_. Peveril is all new, good,[65] full of life, spirit, character, bustle, incident, and expectation; nothing is wanting to make it quite equal to the very best of his former productions, but that it has not the same intense interest, nor the same preternatural and overpowering imagery. Fenella, a deaf and dumb dwarf, attached to the Countess of Derby, is, indeed, an exquisitely drawn character, and exerts a sort of quaint, apparently magic influence over the scene; but her connection with it is so capricious, so ambiguous, and at last so improbable, as to produce or to leave none of those thrilling and awe-struck impressions which were so irresistibly interwoven with some former delineations of the same kind. But as a sketch, as a picture, the little fairy attendant of the Queen of Man is one of the most beautiful and interesting the author ever struck out with his enchanting and enchanted pencil. The present Novel comes the nearest to OLD MORTALITY, both in the class of subjects of which it treats, and in the indefatigable spirit and hurried movement of the execution. It differs from that noble master-piece in this, that Sir Walter (or whoever else, in the devil’s name, it is) has not infused the same depth or loftiness of sentiment into his English Roundheads and Cavaliers, as into his Scotch Covenanters and Royalists; that the characters are left more in the outlines and dead colouring; and though the incidents follow one another as rapidly, and have great variety and contrast, there is not the same accumulation of interest, the same thickening of the plot, nor the same thronging together of eager and complicated groups upon the canvas. His English imagination is not so fully peopled with character, manners, and sentiment, as his Scotch understanding is; but, by the mass, they are not ‘thinly scattered to make up a show.’ There is _cut and come again_. We say this the more willingly, because we were among those who conceived there was a falling off, a _running to seed_, in some of the later productions of the author. The FORTUNES OF NIGEL showed a resuscitation in his powers; that is, a disposition to take new ground, and proceed with real pains and unabated vigour; and in his Peveril, we think he has completed his victory over excusable idleness and an inexcusable disregard of reputation. He may now go on upon a fresh lease, and write ten more Novels, just as good or as bad as he pleases!

There were two things that we used to admire of old in this author, and that we have had occasion to admire anew in the present instance, the extreme life of mind or naturalness displayed in the descriptions, and the magnanimity and freedom from bigotry and prejudice shewn in the drawing of the characters. This last quality is the more remarkable, as the reputed author is accused of being a thorough-paced partisan in his own person,—intolerant, mercenary, mean; a professed toad-eater, a sturdy hack, a pitiful retailer or suborner of infamous slanders, a literary Jack Ketch, who would greedily sacrifice any one of another way of thinking as a victim to prejudice and power, and yet would do it by other hands, rather than appear in it himself. Can this be all true of the author of Waverley; and does he deal out such fine and heaped justice to all sects and parties in time past? Perhaps (if so) one of these extremes accounts for the other; and, as ‘he knows all qualities with a learned spirit,’ probably he may be aware of this practical defect in himself, and be determined to shew to posterity, that when his own interest was not concerned, he was as free from that nauseous and pettifogging bigotry, as a mere matter of speculation, as any man could be. As a novel-writer, he gives the devil his due, and he gives no more to a saint. He treats human nature scurvily, yet handsomely; that is, much as it deserves; and, if it is the same person who is the author of the Scotch novels, and who has a secret moving hand in certain Scotch Newspapers and Magazines, we may fairly characterize him as

‘The wisest, _meanest_ of mankind.’

Among other characters in the work before us, is that of Ned Christian, a cold-blooded hypocrite, pander, and intriguer; yet a man of prodigious talent,—of great versatility,—of unalterable self-possession and good humour, and with a power to personate agreeably, and to the life, any character he pleased. Might not such a man have written the Scotch Novels?

It has been suggested, with great modesty, that the Author of Waverley was like Shakspeare. We beg leave with equal modesty to suggest another comparison, which we think much nearer the mark; and that is, to the writings of Mr. Cobbett. The peculiarity of Shakspeare’s mind is (we humbly apprehend) that sort of power which completely levels the distinction between imagination and reality. His mind properly has wings, and it is indifferent to him whether he treads the air or walks the earth. He makes us acquainted with things we did not know before, as if we knew them familiarly. Now Sir Walter Scott only recals to us what we already knew—he deals wholly in realities, or what are commonly received as such; and so does Mr. Cobbett. Both are downright matter-of-fact minds, and have little, if any, of that power which throws into objects more than ordinary opinion or feeling connects with them. Naturalness is the _forte_ of both these writers. They have a strong, vivid, bodily perception (so to speak), a material intuition of what they write about. All their ideas are concrete, and not abstracted. Mention an old, dilapidated castle, and a thriving, substantial brick mansion to Sir Walter Scott, and he immediately has an actual image of some such objects conjured up in his mind, and describes them as he has seen them, with all their local circumstances, and so as to bring back some similar recollection to the reader’s mind, as if there had been just two such buildings in the place where he was brought up. But this revived reality is all; there is no new light thrown upon the subject. It is a sort of poetic memory. Good. So set Mr. Cobbett to work upon the subject of our agricultural distress, and with quite as much poetry, as much of the picturesque, and in as good English as Sir Walter Scott writes Scotch, he will describe you to the life a turnip-field with the green sprouts glittering in the sun, the turnips frozen to a mere clod, the breath of the oxen steaming near that are biting it, and the dumb patience of the silly sheep. We should like to know whether he is not as great a hand at this sort of ocular demonstration as Sir Walter himself? He shall describe a Scotch heath, or an American wilderness against Sir Walter for a thousand pounds. Then for character; who does it with more master-strokes, with richer gusto, or a greater number of palpable hits than the Editor of the Political Register? Again, as to pathos, let Mr. Cobbett tell a story of a pretty servant girl or soldier’s wife, left by her sweetheart, or shot dead in his arms, and see if he will not come near the _Heart of Mid Lothian_? You may say it is not this or that, it is coarse, low, the man has no feeling, but it is nature, and that’s quite enough. The truth is, these two original geniuses have found out a secret; they write as they feel. It is just like school boys being able to read as they would talk. It is a very awkward difficulty to get over, but being once accomplished, the effect is prodigious. Then, there is the same strong sarcastic vein of _roystering_ pot-house humour in the one as in the other; and as for giving both sides of a question, nobody has done that more effectually than Mr. Cobbett in the course of his different writings. His style also is as good, nay, far better: and if it should be said that Mr. Cobbett sometimes turns blackguard, it cannot be affirmed that he is a cat’s paw—which is the _dernier resort_ of humanity, into which Sir Walter has retreated, and shuts himself up in it impregnably as in a fortress. To conclude this parallel, we will be bold to say in illustration of our argument, that there is hardly a single page in the Scotch Novels which Mr. Cobbett could not write, if he set his mind to it; and there is not a single page in Shakspeare, either the best or the worst, which he _could_ write for his life, and let him try ever so. Such is the genius of the three men.

So much by way of preface to our account of the most magnanimous Peveril of the Peak, and now for extracts. We have not time or limits to give the story, which, however, relates to the Civil Wars of England; but we shall furnish our readers with a specimen of the spirit with which it is written; it is the description of the meeting of Peveril with the dwarf Fenella, where she tries to prevent his going to meet Alice Bridgenorth at the Goddard Crovann-stone in the Isle of Man.

[The whole of Chap. XVI. of _Peveril of the Peak_ is set out].

We have been led to such length by the beauty of this description that we have not room for another extract, or we would give that master-piece of wit and irony, the scene where Peveril meets with Ganlesse and Smith at a low alehouse, on his route through Derbyshire.

COMMON PLACES

_The Literary Examiner._] [_September-December 1823._

I. The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure much.

II. Liberty is the only true riches. Of all the rest we are at once the masters and the slaves.

III. Do I not feel this from the least shadow of restraint, of obligation, of dependence? Why then do I complain? I have had nothing to do all my life but to think, and have enjoyed the objects of thought, the sense of truth and beauty, in perfect integrity of soul. No one has said to me, _Believe this, do that, say what we would have you_; no one has come between me and my free-will; I have breathed the very air of truth and independence. Compared with this unbiassed, uncontrouled possession of the universe of thought and nature, what I have wanted is light in the balance, and hardly claims the tribute of a sigh. Oh! Liberty, what a mistress art thou! Have I not enjoyed thee as a bride, and drank thy spirit as of a wine-cup, and will yet do so to my latest breath!

IV. But is not Liberty dangerous, and self-will excessive? I do not think so: for those who are not governed by their own feelings are led away by prejudice or interest; and reason is a safer guide than opinion, liberty a nobler one than fear.

V. Do I see a Claude? What is there to prevent me from fixing my eye, my heart, my understanding, upon it? What sophist shall deter me from thinking it fine? What is there to make me afraid of expressing what I think? I enter into all its truth and beauty. I wonder over it, I detect each hidden grace, I revel and luxuriate in it, without any doubts or misgivings. Is not this to be master of it and of myself? But is the picture mine? No—oh! yes, ten times over!

VI. That thing, _a lie_, has never come near my soul. I know not what it is to fear to think or to say what I think.

VII. I am choked, pent up in any other atmosphere but this. I cannot imagine how kings and courtiers contrive to exist. I could no more live without daring to speak, to look, to feel what I thought, than I could hold in my breath for any length of time. Nor could I bear to debar others of this privilege. Were it not that the Great would play the part of slaves themselves, they would hate to be surrounded with nothing but slaves, and to see meanness and hypocrisy crawling before them, as much as we do to see a spider crawling in our path.

VIII. I never knew what it was to feel like a footman. How many lords in waiting can say as much?

IX. When I consider how little difference there is in mankind (either in body or mind) I cannot help being astonished at the airs some people give themselves.

X. I am proud up to the point of equality—every thing above or below _that_ appears to me arrant impertinence or abject meanness.

XI. The ignorant and vulgar think that a man wants spirit, if he does not insult and triumph over them. This is a great mistake.

XII. For a man to be a coxcomb, shews a want of imagination. No one will ever pride himself on his beauty who has studied the head of the Antinous, or be in danger of running into the excess of the fashion, who has any knowledge of the Antique. The _ideal_ is incompatible with personal vanity.

XIII. A scholar is like a book written in a dead language—it is not every one that can read in it.

XIV. Just as much as we see in others, we have in ourselves.

XV. A painter gives only his own character in a portrait, whether grave or gay, gross or refined, wise or foolish. Even in copying a head, there is some difficulty in making the features unlike our own. A person with a low forehead or a short chin puts a constraint upon himself in painting a high forehead or a long chin. So much has sympathy to do with the operations both of the eye and the hand, with observation and practice!

XVI. People at a play hiss an unsuccessful author or actor, as if the latter had committed some heinous crime—he has committed the greatest crime, that of setting up a superiority over us which he has failed to make good.

XVII. The rich, who do nothing themselves, represent idleness as the greatest crime. They have reason: it is necessary that some one should do something.

XVIII. What a pity that kings and great men do not write books, instead of mere authors! What superior views they must have of things, and how the world would be benefited by the communication!

XIX. The greatest proof of superiority is to bear with impertinence.

XX. No truly great man ever thought himself so.

XXI. Every man, in judging of himself, is his own contemporary.

XXII. Abuse is an indirect species of homage.

XXIII. From the height from which the great look down on the world, all the rest of mankind seem equal.

XXIV. It is a bad style that requires frequent _breaks_ and marks of admiration.

XXV. It happens in conversation as in different games. One person seems to excel, till another does better, and we then think no more of the first.

XXVI. Those who can keep secrets, have no curiosity. We only wish to gain knowledge, that we may impart it.

XXVII. Genius is native to the soil where it grows—is fed by the air, and warmed by the sun—and is not a hot-house plant or an exotic.

XXVIII. All truly great works of art are _national_ in their character and origin.

XXIX. People are distinguished less by a genius for any particular thing, than by a peculiar tone and manner of feeling and thinking, whatever be the subject. The same qualities of mind or characteristic excellence that a man shows in one art, he would probably have displayed in any other. I have heard Mr. Northcote say, that he thought Sir Joshua Reynolds would have written excellent genteel comedies. His _Discourses_ certainly are bland and amiable (rather than striking or original) like his pictures.

XXX. The same kind of excellence may be observed to prevail in different arts at the same period of time, as characteristic of the spirit of the age. Fielding and Hogarth were cotemporaries.

XXXI. There is an analogy in the style of certain authors to certain professions. One writes like a lawyer: it seems as if another would have made an eminent physician. Mandeville said of Addison that he was ‘a parson in a tye-wig:’ and there is something in _The Spectator_ to justify this description of him.

XXXII. Salvator Rosa paints like a soldier; Nicholas Poussin like a professor at a University; Guido like a finished gentleman; Parmegiano with something of the air of a dancing master. Alas! Guido was a gamester and a madman; and Parmegiano a searcher after the philosopher’s stone. One of the happiest ideas in modern criticism was that of designating different living poets by the cups Apollo gives them to drink out of: thus Wordsworth is made to drink out of a wooden bowl, Lord Byron out of a skull chased with silver, &c.

XXXIII. Extreme impatience and irritability are often combined with a corresponding degree of indifference and indolence. When the eagerness of pursuit or the violence of opposition ceases, nothing is left to interest the mind, that has been once accustomed to a state of morbid excitement.

XXXIV. Artists and other studious professions are not happy, for this reason: they cannot enjoy mental repose. A state of lassitude and languor succeeds to that of overstrained, anxious exertion.

XXXV. It is the custom at present to exclude all but Scientific and Mechanical subjects from our fashionable Public Institutions, lest any allusions to popular sentiments or the cause of humanity should by chance creep in, to the great annoyance of the polite and well-informed part of the audience.

XXXVI. People had much rather be thought to look ill than old: because it is possible to recover from sickness, but there is no recovering from age.

XXXVII. I never knew but one person who had a passion for truth—and only one who had the same regard to the distinction between right and wrong, that others have to their own interest.

XXXVIII. Women are the sport of caprice, the slaves of custom.

XXXIX. When men are not favourites with women, it is either from habits of vulgar debauchery, or from constitutional indifference, or from an overstrained and pedantic idea of the sex, taken from books, and answering to nothing in real life.

XL. The object of books is to teach us ignorance; that is, to throw a veil over nature, and persuade us that things are not what they are, but what the writer fancies or wishes them to be.

XLI. My little boy said the other day, ‘He could not tell what to do without a book to read—he should wander about without knowing what to do with himself.’ So have I wandered about, till now, and, waking from the dream of books at last, don’t know what to do with myself. My poor little fellow! may’st thou dream long amidst thy darling books, and never wake!

XLII. Political truth is a libel; religious truth, blasphemy.

XLIII. The greatest crime in the eye of the world is to endeavour to instruct or amend it.

XLIV. Weighing remote consequences in the mind is like weighing the air in scales.

XLV. A hypocrite seems to be the only perfect character—since it embraces the extremes of what human nature _is_, and of what it _would be thought_.

XLVI. The Scotch understanding differs from the English, as an Encyclopedia does from a circulating library. An Englishman is contented to pick up a few odds and ends of knowledge; a Scotchman is master of every subject alike. Here each individual has a particular _hobby_ and favourite bye-path of his own: in Scotland learning is a common hack, which every one figures away with, and uses at his pleasure.

XLVII. A misanthropic writer might be called _the Devil’s amanuensis_.

XLVIII. To be a lord, a papist, and poor, is the most enviable distinction of humanity. There is all the pride and sense of independence, irritated and strengthened by being proscribed by power, and liable to be harassed by petty daily insults from every, the meanest vassal. What a situation to make the mind recoil from the world upon itself, and to sit and brood in moody grandeur and disdain of soul over fallen splendours and present indignities! It is just the life I should like to have led.

XLIX. The tone of good company is marked by the absence of personalities. Among well-informed persons, there are plenty of topics to discuss, without giving pain to any one present—without submitting to act the part of a _butt_, or of that still poorer creature, the wag that plays upon him.

L. Londoners complain of the dullness of the country, and country people feel equally uncomfortable and at a loss what to do with themselves in town. The fault is neither in the town nor in the country—every one is naturally unsettled and dissatisfied without his usual resources and occupations, let them be _what_ or _where_ they may.

LI. Each rank in society despises that which is a step below it, and the highest looks down upon them all. To get rid of the impertinence of artificial pretensions, we resort to nature at last. Kings, for this reason, are fond of low company; and lords marry actresses and barmaids. The Duke of York (not the present, but the late King’s brother) was at a ball at Plymouth. He danced with a Miss Byron, a very pretty girl, daughter of the admiral of that name, and aunt to our poet. But there was a Mrs. Fanning present, who was a paragon of beauty. The Duke asked, ‘Who is she?’ ‘A baker’s daughter,’ was the answer. ‘I don’t mean that; but what is she now?’—‘A broker’s wife.’ The lady did not perceive, that to a prince of the blood there was little difference between a tradesman’s wife and the daughter of a naval officer; but that the handsomest woman at a ball was an object of admiration in spite of circumstances.

LII. It has been asked, whether Lord Byron is a writer likely to live? Perhaps not: he has intensity of power, but wants distinctive character. In my opinion, Mr. Wordsworth is the only poet of the present day that is likely to live—_should he ever happen to be born_! But who will be the midwife to bring his works to light? It is a question whether Milton would have become popular without the help of Addison; nay, it is a question whether he is so, even with it.

LIII. An anecdote is told of General Wolfe,[66] that he was out with a party of friends in a boat the day before the Battle of Quebec. It was a beautiful summer’s evening, and the conversation turned to Gray’s _Elegy in a Country Churchyard_, which was just then published. Wolfe repeated the lines, ‘For who to dumb forgetfulness a prey,’ &c., with enthusiasm, and said, ‘I would rather be the author of those lines than beat the French to-morrow!’ He did beat the French, and was himself killed the next day. Perhaps it was better to be capable of uttering a sentiment like this, than to gain a battle or write a poem.

LIV. Authors, a short time since, set upon Government: Government have of late turned the tables on them, and set upon authors. In one respect, it must be confessed, the court-tools have greatly the advantage of us: they can go all lengths in vulgar Billingsgate and abuse, without being charged with vulgarity. They have the sanction of the Court; they plead the King’s privilege. It is not to be supposed that any thing inelegant or gross can be patronised at Carlton-house. Every thing about a place, even the convenience of an Admiralty secretary, must, one would think, be kept sweet and wholesome. But instead of the least refinement and polish, they treat us with nothing, but garbage. A lie and a nickname are their favourite figures of rhetoric—the alternate substitutes for wit and argument—the twin-supporters of the Bible and the Crown. They use us (it seems) contrary to the advice of Hamlet, ‘according to our own deserts, and not their own dignity.’ The dirt they fling sticks on their opponents, without soiling their own fingers. Loyalty is ‘the true fuller’s earth that takes out all stains.’ At all events, do or say what they can, it is they who are the _gentlemen_, and we who are the _blackguards_. If we were to call Sir Walter Scott a _Sawney_ writer, or Mr. Croker _Jackey_, it would be thought shocking, indecent, vulgar, and no one would look at our publication twice: yet on the Tory side the same thing passes for the height of sense and wit; and ladies of quality are delighted with the _John Bull_, gentlemen read _Blackwood_, and divines take in the _Quarterly_. There is Mr. William Mudford, of the _Courier_—a vapid common-place hack, pert and dull—but who would think of calling him by the diminutive of his Christian name? No; these are the extreme resources reserved for the Court-classics, who, in the zeal of their loyalty, are allowed to forget their manners. There is, in fact, nothing too mean for the genius of these writers, or too low for the taste of their employers.

LV. A Tory can rise no higher than _the assumption of a question_. If he relied on any thing but custom and authority, he would cease to be a Tory. He has a prejudice in favour of certain _things_, and against certain _persons_. This is all he knows of the matter. He therefore gives you assertions for argument, and abuse for wit. If you ask a reason for his opinions, he calls you names; and if you ask why he does so, he proves that he is in the right, by repeating them a thousand times. A nickname with him is the test of truth. It vents his spleen, strengthens his own prejudices, and communicates them mechanically to his hearers.

LVI. When an Elector of Hanover is made into a King of England, what does he become in the course of a century?—A George the Fourth.

LVII. If I were to give a toast at a loyal and patriotic meeting, it should be, _Down with the Stuarts all over the world!_

LVIII. The taste of the great in pictures is singular, but not unaccountable. The King is said to prefer the Dutch to the Italian school of painting; and if you hint your surprise at this, you are looked upon as a very Gothic and _outré_ sort of person. You are told, however, by way of consolation, ‘To be sure, there is Lord Carlisle likes an Italian picture—Mr. Holwell Carr likes an Italian picture—the Marquis of Stafford is fond of an Italian picture—Sir George Beaumont likes an Italian picture.’ These, notwithstanding, are regarded as quaint and daring exceptions to the established rule; and their preference is a species of _lèse-majesté_ in the Fine Arts—as great an eccentricity and want of fashionable etiquette, as if any gentleman or nobleman still preferred old claret to new, when the King is known to have changed his mind on this subject, or was guilty of the offence of dipping his fore-finger and thumb in the middle of a snuff-box, instead of gradually approximating the contents to the edge of the box, according to the most approved models. One would imagine that the great and exalted in station would like lofty subjects in works of art, whereas they seem to have an exclusive predilection for the mean and mechanical. One would think those whose word is law, would be pleased with the great and striking effects of the pencil[67]: on the contrary, they admire nothing but the little and elaborate. They have a fondness for cabinet or _furniture_ pictures, and a proportionable antipathy to works of genius. Even arts with them must be servile, to be tolerated. Perhaps the seeming contradiction may be thus explained. These persons are raised so high above the rest of the species, that the more violent and agitating pursuits of mankind appear to them like the turmoil of ants on a molehill. Nothing interests them but their own pride and self-importance. Our passions are to them an impertinence; an expression of high sentiment they rather shrink from as a ludicrous and upstart assumption of equality. They, therefore, like what glitters to the eye, what is smooth to the touch; but they shun, by an instinct of sovereign taste, whatever has a soul in it, and implies a _reciprocity_ of feeling. The gods of the earth can have no interest in any thing human; they are cut off from all sympathy with the ‘bosoms and businesses of men.’ Instead of requiring to be wound up beyond their habitual feeling of stately dignity, they wished to have the springs of overstrained pretension let down, to be relaxed with ‘trifles light as air,’ to be amused with the familiar and frivolous, and to have the world appear a scene of _still life_, except as they disturb it! The little in thought and internal sentiment is a necessary relief and set-off to the oppressive sense of external magnificence. Hence Kings babble and repeat they know not what. A childish dotage often accompanies the consciousness of absolute power. Repose is somewhere necessary, and the soul sleeps, while the senses gloat around. Besides, the mechanical and high-finished style of art may be considered as something _done to order_. It is a task to be executed more or less perfectly, according to the price given and the industry of the artist. We stand by, as it were, see the work done, insist upon a greater degree of neatness and accuracy, and exercise a sort of petty jealous jurisdiction over each particular. We are judges of the minuteness of the details, and though ever so nicely executed, as they give us no ideas beyond what we had before, we do not feel humbled in the comparison. The artisan scarcely rises into the artist; and the name of genius is degraded, rather than exalted in his person. The performance is so far ours that we have paid for it, and the highest price is all that is necessary to produce the highest finishing. But it is not so in works of genius and imagination. Their price is above rubies. The inspiration of the Muse comes not with the _fiat_ of a monarch, with the donation of a patron; and therefore the Great turn with disgust or effeminate indifference from the mighty masters of the Italian school because such works baffle and confound their self-will, and make them feel that there is something in the mind of man which they can neither give nor take away.

‘Quam nihil ad tuum, Papinane, ingenium!’