Chapter II: Part 2

I have come now to Dr. Johnson, and it is almost a test of a true man of letters that he should love him.

He was rugged and prejudiced, but magnanimous; impatient with the presumptuous, tender to modest ignorance, proudly independent of the patronage of the great, and was often doing deeds of noble self-sacrifice by stealth.

Through long years of hard, unremitting toil for his daily bread he lived bravely and sturdily, with no extraneous help but his stout oak stick--an unconquerable man.

His prose rises on occasion to a measured and stately grandeur above the reach of any of his contemporaries.

It was not often that he unveiled to the public gaze the beatings of his own noble heart, or invited the world to contemplate the depression and suffering amid which his unending labours were accomplished.

The concluding page of the preface to the first edition of the great _Dictionary_ is, therefore, the more precious and moving. I know not why this majestic utterance came to be deleted in later editions; certainly it sanctifies, and as it were crowns with a crown of sorrow, the greatest work of his life; and with reverent sympathy and unstinted admiration I reproduce it here:--

"Life may be lengthened by care, though death cannot ultimately be
defeated: tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to
degeneration: we have long preserved our constitution, let us make
some struggles for our language.

"In hope of giving longevity to that which its own nature forbids
to be immortal, I have devoted this book, the labour of years, to
the honour of my country, that we may no longer yield the palm of
philology to the nations of the continent. The chief glory of
every people arises from its authors; whether I shall add anything
by my own writings to the reputation of English literature, must
be left to time: much of my life has been lost under the pressure
of disease; much has been trifled away; and much has always been
spent in provision for the day that was passing over me; but I
shall not think my employment useless or ignoble, if by my
assistance foreign nations, and distant ages, gain access to the
propagators of knowledge, and understand the teachers of truth;
if my labours afford light to the repositories of science, and add
celebrity to Bacon, to Hooker, to Milton, and to Boyle.

"When I am animated by this wish, I look with pleasure on my book,
however defective, and deliver it to the world with the spirit of
a man that has endeavoured well. That it will immediately become
popular I have not promised to myself: a few wild blunders and
risible absurdities, from which no work of such multiplicity was
ever free, may for a time furnish folly with laughter, and harden
ignorance in contempt; but useful diligence will at last prevail,
and there never can be wanting some, who distinguish desert, who
will consider that no dictionary of a living tongue can ever be
perfect, since while it is hastening to publication, some words
are budding, and some falling away; that a whole life cannot be
spent upon syntax and etymology, and that even a whole life would
not be sufficient; that he whose design includes whatever language
can express must often speak of what he does not understand; that
a writer will sometimes be hurried by eagerness to the end, and
sometimes faint with weariness under a task which Scaliger
compares to the labours of the anvil and the mine; that what is
obvious is not always known, and what is known is not always
present; that sudden fits of inadvertency will surprise vigilance,
slight avocations will seduce attention, and casual eclipses of
the mind will darken learning; and that the writer shall often in
vain trace his memory at the moment of need for that which
yesterday he knew with intuitive readiness, and which will come
uncalled into his thoughts to-morrow.

"In this work, when it shall be found that much is omitted, let it
not be forgotten that much likewise is performed; and though no
book was ever spared out of tenderness to the author, and the
world is little solicitous to know whence proceeded the faults of
that which it condemns, yet it may gratify curiosity to inform it
that the _English Dictionary_ was written with little assistance
of the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the
soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academic
bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and
in sorrow; and it may repress the triumph of malignant criticism
to observe, that if our language is not here fully displayed, I
have only failed in an attempt which no human powers have hitherto
completed. If the lexicons of ancient tongues, now immutably fixed
and comprised in a few volumes, be yet, after the toil of
successive ages, inadequate and delusive; if the aggregated
knowledge and co-operating diligence of the Italian academicians
did not secure them from the censure of Beni; if the embodied
critics of France, when fifty years had been spent upon their
work, were obliged to change its economy, and give their second
editions another form, I may surely be contented without the
praise of perfection which, if I could obtain, in this gloom of
solitude what would it avail me?

"I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to
please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are
empty sounds; I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity,
having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise."

This seems to me to be the noblest passage that Johnson ever wrote.

Almost all the most magnificent utterances of man are tinged with sadness. In this they possess a quality that is almost inseparable from grandeur wherever displayed. No man of sensibility and taste feels it possible to make jokes himself, or to tolerate them from others when in the presence of the Falls of Niagara, or a tempest at sea, or when he views from a peak in the Andes--as I have done--the sun descent into the Pacific. The greatest pictures painted by man touch the heart rather than elate it; and genius finds its highest expression not in comedy, but in tragedy.

And this need cause us no surprise when we consider how much of the great work in letters and in art is directly due to the writer possessing in full measure the gift of sympathy.

People with this gift, even if they are without the faculty of expression, are beloved by those about them, which must bring them happiness.

Till he was over fifty Dr. Johnson's life was a weary struggle with poverty. He wrote _Rasselas_ under the pressure of an urgent need of money to send to his dying mother. His wife died some few years earlier. I have always thought that the sad reflections he put into the mouth of an old philosopher towards the end of the story were indeed the true expressions of his own tired heart:--

"Praise," said the sage with a sigh, "is to an old man an empty
sound. I have neither mother to be delighted with the reputation
of her son, nor wife to partake the honours of her husband.

"I have outlived my friends and my rivals. Nothing is now of much
importance; for I cannot extend my interest beyond myself. Youth
is delighted with applause, because it is considered as the
earnest of some future good, and because the prospect of life is
far extended; but to me, who am now declining to decrepitude,
there is little to be feared from the malevolence of men, and yet
less to be hoped from their affection or esteem. Something they
may take away, but they can give me nothing. Riches would now be
useless, and high employment would be pain. My retrospect of life
recalls to my view many opportunities of good neglected, much time
squandered upon trifles, and more lost in idleness and vacancy. I
leave many great designs unattempted, and many great attempts
unfinished.

"My mind is burdened with no heavy crime, and therefore I compose
myself to tranquillity; endeavour to abstract my thoughts from
hopes and cares, which, though reason knows them to be vain, still
try to keep their old possession of the heart; expect, with serene
humility, that hour which nature cannot long delay; and hope to
possess, in a better state, that happiness which here I could not
find, and that virtue which here I have not attained."

From the results of _Rasselas_ he sent his mother money, but she had expired before it reached her.

Down to the time of Dr. Johnson it was the custom for writers of books and poems to seek and enjoy the patronage of some great nobleman, to whom they generally dedicated their works.

And in pursuance of that custom Dr. Johnson, when he first issued the plan or prospectus of his great _Dictionary_ in 1747, addressed it to Lord Chesterfield, who was regarded as the most brilliant and cultivated nobleman of his time. Lord Chesterfield, however, took no notice of the matter till the _Dictionary_ was on the point of coming out in 1755, and then wrote some flippant remarks about it in a publication called _The World_.

At this Dr. Johnson wrote a letter to the condescending peer, which became celebrated throughout England and practically put an end to writers seeking the patronage of the great.

This wonderful letter concludes thus:--

"Seven years, my lord, have now passed since I waited in your
outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door; during which time I
have been pushing on my work through difficulties, of which it is
useless to complain, and have brought it, at last, to the verge of
publication, without one act of assistance, one word of
encouragement, or one smile of favour. Such treatment I did not
expect, for I never had a patron before.

"The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and
found him a native of the rocks.

"Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man
struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground,
encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to
take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind, but it has
been delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it; till I am
solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want
it. I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess
obligations where no benefit has been received, or to be
unwilling that the public should consider me as owing that to a
patron which Providence has enabled me to do for myself.

"Having carried on my work thus far with so little obligation to
any favourer of learning, I shall not be disappointed though I
should conclude it, if less be possible, with less; for I have
been wakened from that dream of hope, in which I once boasted
myself with so much exultation, my lord,--your lordship's most
humble, most obedient servant. SAM. JOHNSON."

Boswell's life of Dr. Johnson when you come to read it, as you will be sure to do by and by, has left a living picture of this great and good man for all future generations to enjoy, extenuating nothing to his quaintness, directness, and proneness to contradiction for its own sake, yet unveiling everywhere the deep piety and fine magnanimity of his character. He suffered much, but never complained, and certainly must be numbered among the great men of letters who have found true consolation and support in every circumstance of life in an earnest and fervent faith.

Your loving old G.P.

12

MY DEAR ANTONY,

Edmund Burke was born in 1730, and therefore was twenty-one years younger than Dr. Johnson, and he survived him thirteen years. He was a great prose writer, and although some of his speeches in Parliament that have come down to us possess every quality of solid argument and lofty eloquence, there must have been something lacking in his delivery and voice, for he so frequently failed to rivet the attention of the House, and so often addressed a steadily dwindling audience, that the wits christened him "the dinner bell."

All men of letters, however, acknowledge Burke as a true master of a very great style.

We see in him the first signs of a breaking away from the universal restraint of the older writers, and of the surging up of expressed emotion.

His splendid tribute to Marie Antoinette and his panegyric of the lost age of chivalry are familiar to all students of English prose.

"It is now (1791) sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen
of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never
lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more
delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating
and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in
glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendour, and
joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart must I have, to
contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little
did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of
enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be
obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in
that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see
such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a
nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand
swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look
that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry has gone.
That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and
the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.

"Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to sex
and rank, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that
subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude
itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of
life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment
and heroic enterprise is gone!

"It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of
honour, which felt a stain like a wound; which inspired courage
while it mitigated ferocity; which ennobled whatever it touched,
and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its
grossness."

This is a splendid and world-famous passage well worth committing to memory.

Your loving old G.P.

13

MY DEAR ANTONY,

Edward Gibbon, who wrote the _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, belonged to the later half of the eighteenth century, and was a contemporary of Dr. Johnson and Burke. He finished his great history three years after Dr. Johnson's death. It is a monumental work, and will live as long as the English language. It is one of the books which every cultivated gentleman should read. The style is stately and sonorous, and the industry and erudition involved in its production must have been immense.

Although it never sinks below a noble elevation of style, it nevertheless displays no uplifting flights of eloquence or declamation, and to me, and probably to you, Antony, the most moving passages in Gibbon's writings are those that describe with unaffected emotion the moment of the first resolve to compose the great history and the night when he wrote the last line of it. On page 129 of his memoirs[1] he wrote:--

"It was at Rome on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing
amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed fryars were
singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing
the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind."

Thus did he resolve to devote himself to the tremendous task, and at Lausanne twenty-three years later it was at last fulfilled. He recorded the event in a few pregnant sentences that are strangely memorable:--

"It was on the day, or rather night, of the 27th of June, 1787,
between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last
lines of the last page, in a summer-house in my garden. After
laying down my pen I took several turns in a berceau, or covered
walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the
lake, and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was
serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters,
and all nature was silent. I will not dissemble the first
emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and perhaps, the
establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a
sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had
taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and
that, whatsoever might be the future fate of my History, the life
of the historian must be short and precarious."

In June, 1888, just one hundred and one years after that pen had been finally laid aside, I searched in Lausanne for the summer-house and covered walk, and could find no very authentic record of its site. I brought home a flower from the garden where it seemed probable the summer-house had once existed, behind the modern hotel built there in the intervening time, and laid it between the leaves of my Gibbon.

The pressed flower was still there when I last took the book down from my shelves.

I hope my successors will preserve the little token of my reverence.

Your loving old G.P.

[Footnote 1: First edition, 1794.]

14

MY DEAR ANTONY,

Some of the most eloquent orators in the world have been Irishmen, and among them Henry Grattan was supreme.

The Irish Parliament in the later half of the eighteenth century frequently sat spell-bound under the magic of his voice.

In 1782, at the age of thirty-two, he achieved by his amazing eloquence a great National Revolution in Ireland. But eighteen years later all that he had fought for and achieved was lost in the Act of Union. In these days I suppose few will be found to defend the means whereby that Act was passed; but the public assertions that the people of Ireland were in favour of it wrung from Grattan the following cry of indignation and wrath:--

"To affirm that the judgment of a nation is erroneous may mortify,
but to affirm that her judgment _against_ is _for_; to assert that
she has said _ay_ when she has pronounced _no_; to affect to refer
a great question to the people; finding the sense of the people,
like that of the parliament, against the question, to force the
question; to affirm the sense of the people to be _for_ the
question; to affirm that the question is persisted in, because the
sense of the people is for it; to make the falsification of the
country's sentiments the foundation of her ruin, and the ground of
the Union; to affirm that her parliament, constitution, liberty,
honour, property, are taken away by her own authority,--there is,
in such artifice, an effrontery, a hardihood, an insensibility,
that can best be answered by sensations of astonishment and
disgust, excited on this occasion by the British minister, whether
he speaks in gross and total ignorance of the truth, or in
shameless and supreme contempt for it.

"The constitution may be _for a time_ so lost; the character of
the country cannot be so lost. The ministers of the Crown will, or
may, perhaps, at length find that it is not so easy to put down
for ever an ancient and respectable nation, by abilities, however
great, and by power and by corruption, however irresistible;
liberty may repair her golden beams, and with redoubled heat
animate the country; the cry of loyalty will not long continue
against the principles of liberty; loyalty is a noble, a
judicious, and a capacious principle; but in these countries
loyalty, distinct from liberty, is corruption, not loyalty.

"The cry of the connexion will not, in the end, avail against the
principles of liberty. Connexion is a wise and a profound policy;
but connexion without an Irish Parliament is connexion without its
own principle, without analogy of condition; without the pride of
honour that should attend it; is innovation, is peril, is
subjugation--not connexion.

"The cry of the connexion will not, in the end, avail against the
principle of liberty.

"Identification is a solid and imperial maxim, necessary for the
preservation of freedom, necessary for that of empire; but,
without union of hearts--with a separate government, and without a
separate parliament, identification is extinction, is dishonour,
is conquest--not identification.

"Yet I do not give up the country--I see her in a swoon, but she
is not dead--though in her tomb she lies helpless and motionless,
still there is on her lips a spirit of life, and on her cheeks a
glow of beauty--

"Thou art not conquered; beauty's ensign yet
Is crimson in thy lips, and in thy cheeks,
And death's pale flag is not advanced there."

"While a plank of the vessel sticks together, I will not leave
her. Let the courtier present his flimsy sail, and carry the light
bark of his faith, with every new breath of wind--I will remain
anchored here--with fidelity to the fortunes of my country,
faithful to her freedom, faithful to her fall."

Of another character, but not less admirable than his eloquence in the Senate, was Grattan's achievement with the pen. His description of the great Lord Chatham lives as one of the most noble panegyrics--it not the most noble--in the world. No writer, before or since, has offered anyone such splendid homage as this--that he never sunk "to the vulgar level of the great."

"The Secretary stood alone. Modern degeneracy had not reached him.
Original and unaccommodating, the features of his character had
the hardihood of antiquity, his august mind overawed majesty, and
one of his sovereigns thought royalty so impaired in his presence
that he conspired to remove him, in order to be relieved from his
superiority. No state chicanery, no narrow systems of vicious
politics, no idle contest for ministerial victories sunk him to
the vulgar level of the great; but, overbearing, persuasive, and
impracticable, his object was England,--his ambition was fame;
without dividing, he destroyed party; without corrupting, he made
a venal age unanimous; France sunk beneath him; with one hand he
smote the House of Bourbon, and wielded in the other the democracy
of England. The sight of his mind was infinite, and his schemes
were to affect, not England, not the present age only, but Europe
and posterity. Wonderful were the means by which these schemes
were accomplished, always seasonable, always adequate, the
suggestions of an understanding animated by ardour, and
enlightened by prophecy.

"The ordinary feelings which make life amiable and indolent--those
sensations which soften, and allure, and vulgarise--were unknown
to him; no domestic difficulties, no domestic weakness reached
him; but, aloof from the sordid occurrences of life, and unsullied
by its intercourse, he came occasionally into our system to
counsel and decide.

"A character so exalted, so strenuous, so various, so
authoritative, astonished a corrupt age, and the Treasury trembled
at the name of Pitt through all her classes of venality.
Corruption imagined, indeed, that she had found defects in this
statesman, and talked much of the inconsistency of his glory, and
much of the ruin of his victories--but the history of his country,
and the calamities of the enemy, answered and refuted her.

"Nor were his political abilities his only talents; his eloquence
was an era in the senate, peculiar and spontaneous, familiarly
expressing gigantic sentiments and instinctive wisdom--not like
the torrent of Demosthenes, or the splendid conflagration of
Tully; it resembled sometimes the thunder, and sometimes the music
of the spheres. Like Murray, he did not conduct the understanding
through the painful subtilty of argumentation; nor was he, like
Townshend, for ever on the rack of exertion, but rather lightened
upon the subject, and reached the point by the flashings of his
mind, which, like those of his eye, were felt, but could not be
followed.

"Yet he was not always correct or polished; on the contrary, he
was sometimes ungrammatical, negligent, and unenforcing, for he
concealed his art, and was superior to the knack of oratory. Upon
many occasions he abated the vigour of his eloquence, but even
then, like the spinning of a cannon ball, he was still alive with
fatal, unapproachable activity.

"Upon the whole, there was in this man something that could
create, subvert, or reform; an understanding, a spirit, and an
eloquence to summon mankind to society, or to break the bonds of
slavery asunder, and rule the wildness of free minds with
unbounded authority; something that could establish or overwhelm
empire, and strike a blow in the world that should resound
through its history."

Grattan died in 1820, and twenty years later, in 1844, another great English writer, Lord Macaulay, wrote a world-famous passage upon the great Lord Chatham in the _Edinburgh Review_:--

"Chatham sleeps near the northern door of the church, in a spot
which has ever since been appropriated to statesmen, as the other
end of the same transept has long been to poets. Mansfield rests
there, and the second William Pitt, and Fox, and Grattan, and
Canning, and Wilberforce. In no other cemetery do so many great
citizens lie within so narrow a space. High over those venerable
graves towers the stately monument of Chatham, and, from above,
his effigy, graven by a cunning hand, seems still, with eagle face
and outstretched arm, to bid England be of good cheer, and to hurl
defiance at her foes.

"The generation which reared that memorial of him has disappeared.
The time has come when the rash and indiscriminate judgments
which his contemporaries passed on his character may be calmly
revised by history. And history, while, for the warning of
vehement, high, and daring natures, she notes his many errors,
will yet deliberately pronounce that, among the eminent men whose
bones lie near his, scarcely one has left a more stainless and
none a more splendid name."

It is a great race, Antony, that can produce a man of such a character as Chatham, and also writers who can dedicate to him such superb tributes as these.

Macaulay's prose has been much criticised as being too near to easy journalism to be classed among the great classic passages of English; but this much must be recognised to his great credit--he never wrote an obscure sentence or an ambiguous phrase, and his works may be searched in vain for a foreign idiom or even a foreign word. He possessed an infallible memory, absolute perspicuity, and a scholarly taste. He detested oppression wherever enforced, and never exercised his great powers in the defence of mean politics or unworthy practices.

Such a writer to-day would blow a wholesome wind across the tainted pools of political intrigue.

We can salute him, Antony, as a fine, manly, clean writer, who was an honour to letters.

Your loving old G.P.

15

MY DEAR ANTONY,

Born in the same year as was Grattan, namely, in 1750, Lord Erskine adorned the profession of the Bar with an eloquence that never exhibited the slight tendency to be ponderous which sometimes was displayed by his contemporaries.

Grace and refinement shine out in every one of his great speeches.

He was a young scion of the great house of Buchan, being the third son of the tenth Earl. After being in the Navy for four years he left it for the Army, and six years later he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, and took his degree; thence he came to the Bar in 1778, and at once displayed the most conspicuous ability as an advocate.

He appeared for Horne Tooke in a six-day trial for high treason, which ended in an acquittal.

In 1806 he became Lord Chancellor and a peer.

I quote an indignant warning to the aristocracy of England which flamed forth in one of his great speeches:--

"Let the aristocracy of England, which trembles so much for
itself, take heed to its own security; let the nobles of England,
if they mean to preserve that pre-eminence which, in some shape or
other, must exist in every social community, take care to support
it by aiming at that which is creative, and alone creative, of
real superiority. Instead of matching themselves to supply wealth,
to be again idly squandered in debauching excesses, or to round
the quarters of a family shield; instead of continuing their names
and honours in cold and alienated embraces, amidst the enervating
rounds of shallow dissipation, let them live as their fathers of
old lived before them; let them marry as affection and prudence
lead the way, and, in the ardours of mutual love, and in the
simplicities of rural life, let them lay the foundation of a
vigorous race of men, firm in their bodies, and moral from early
habits; and, instead of wasting their fortunes and their strength
in the tasteless circles of debauchery, let them light up their
magnificent and hospital halls to the gentry and peasantry of the
country, extending the consolations of wealth and influence to the
poor. Let them but do this,--and instead of those dangerous and
distracted divisions between the different ranks of life, and
those jealousies of the multitude so often blindly painted as big
with destruction, we should see our country as one large and
harmonious family, which can never be accomplished amidst vice and
corruption, by wars and treaties, by informations, _ex officio_
for libels, or by any of the tricks and artifices of the State."

Mr. Erskine was entitled, as the son of the tenth Earl of Buchan, to speak such words of warning and exhortation to the aristocracy of England to which he belonged, and the lapse of a century and a quarter has not rendered the exhortation vain, though it may be hoped that the condemnatory clauses of the speech would not at the present time be so well justified as when they were delivered.

Great names carry great obligations, and, for the most part, those who bear them to-day recognise those great obligations and endeavour without ostentation to fulfil them.

The silly fribbles who posture before the photographic cameras for penny newspapers do not represent the real aristocracy of England.

We must not, Antony, mistake a cockatoo for an eagle.

Your loving old G.P.

16

MY DEAR ANTONY,

I shall not expect you in your reading often to penetrate into the innumerable dusty octavos that contain sermons. The stoutest heart may fail, without blame, before the flat-footed pedestrianism of these platitudinous volumes. But there does occasionally arise above the dull horizon a star whose brilliance is the more conspicuous for the surrounding gloom.

In 1796, Coleridge, in a letter[1] to a Mr. Flower, who was a publisher at Cambridge, wrote:--

"I hope Robert Hall is well. Why is he idle? I mean towards the
public. We want such men to rescue this _enlightened age_ from
general irreligion."

I suppose Robert Hall is a name known to but few in these days, but at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries his fame was great and deserved.

As a divine, dowered with the gift of inspired eloquence, Coleridge estimated his powers as second only to those of Jeremy Taylor. When Napoleon was at the supreme height of his conquests, and England alone of European countries still stood erect, uninvaded and undismayed, a company of soldiers attended Robert Hall's place of worship on the eve of their departure to Spain. The occasion was memorable and moving, and the preacher's splendid periods deserve to be preserved from oblivion:--

"By a series of criminal enterprises, by the successes of guilty
ambition, the liberties of Europe have been gradually
extinguished; the subjugation of Holland, Switzerland, and the
free towns of Germany, has completed that catastrophe; and we are
the only people in the Eastern Hemisphere who are in possession of
equal laws and a free constitution. Freedom, driven from every
spot on the Continent, has sought an asylum in a country which she
always chose for her favorite abode; but she is pursued even here,
and threatened with destruction. The inundations of lawless power,
after covering the whole earth, threaten to follow us here, and
we are most exactly, most critically placed in the only aperture
where it can be successfully repelled, in the Thermopylæ of the
universe.

"As far as the interests of freedom are concerned, the most
important by far of sublunary interests, you, my countrymen, stand
in the capacity of the federal representatives of the human race;
for with you it is to determine (under God) in what condition the
latest posterity shall be born; their fortunes are entrusted to
your care, and on your conduct at this moment depends the colour
and complexion of their destiny. If liberty, after being
extinguished on the Continent, is suffered to expire here, whence
is it ever to emerge in the midst of that thick night that will
invest it?

"It remains with you, then, to decide whether that freedom, at
whose voice the kingdoms of Europe awoke from the sleep of ages to
run a career of virtuous emulation in everything great and good;
the freedom which dispelled the mists of superstition and invited
the nations to behold their God; whose magic touch kindled the
rays of genius, the enthusiasm of poetry, and the flame of
eloquence; the freedom which poured into our lap opulence and
arts, and embellished life with innumerable institutions and
improvements till it became a theatre of wonders; it is for you to
decide whether this freedom shall yet survive, or be covered with
a funeral pall, and wrapt in eternal gloom.

"It is not necessary to await your determination. In the
solicitude you feel to approve yourselves worthy of such a trust,
every thought of what is afflicting in warfare, every apprehension
of danger, must vanish, and you are impatient to mingle in the
battle of the civilised world.

"Go then, ye defenders of your country, accompanied with every
auspicious omen; advance with alacrity into the field, where God
Himself musters the hosts of war. Religion is too much interested
in your success not to lend you her aid; she will shed over this
enterprise her selectest influences. While you are engaged in the
field many will repair to the closet, many to the sanctuary; the
faithful of every name will employ that prayer which has power
with God; the feeble hands which are unequal to any other weapon
will grasp the sword of the Spirit; from myriads of humble,
contrite hearts, the voice of intercession, supplication, and
weeping, will mingle in its ascent to heaven with the shouts of
battle and the shock of arms.

"While you have everything to fear from the success of the enemy,
you have every means of preventing that success, so that it is
next to impossible for victory not to crown your exertions. The
extent of your resources, under God, is equal to the justice of
your cause.

"But should Providence determine otherwise; should you fall in
this struggle, should the nation fall, you will have the
satisfaction (the purest allotted to man) of having performed your
part; your names will be enrolled with the most illustrious dead,
while posterity to the end of time, as often as they revolve the
events of this period (and they will incessantly revolve them)
will turn to you a reverential eye while they mourn over the
freedom which is entombed in your sepulchre.

"I cannot but imagine the virtuous heroes, legislators, and
patriots, of every age and country, are bending from their
elevated seats to witness this contest, as if they were incapable,
till it be brought to a favourable issue, of enjoying their
eternal repose.

"Enjoy that repose, illustrious immortals! Your mantle fell when
you ascended, and thousands inflamed with your spirit, and
impatient to tread in your steps, are ready 'to swear by Him that
sitteth upon the throne and liveth for ever and ever,' they will
protect freedom in her last asylums, and never desert that cause
which you sustained by your labours and cemented with your blood.

"And Thou, Sole Ruler among the children of men, to whom the
shields of the earth belong, 'gird on Thy sword, Thou most
Mighty'; go forth with our hosts in the day of battle! Impart, in
addition to their hereditary valour, that confidence of success
which springs from Thy Presence!

"Pour into their hearts the spirit of departed heroes! Inspire
them with Thine own, and, while led by Thine Hand and fighting
under Thy banners, open Thou their eyes to behold in every valley
and in every plain, what the prophet beheld by the same
illuminations--chariots of fire, and horses of fire!

"Then shall the strong man be as tow, and the maker of it as a
spark; and they shall both burn together, and none shall quench
them."

We, who have just emerged, shattered indeed and reeling, from another and yet more awful combat for freedom, can the better extend our sympathy to those forefathers of ours situated in like case, and can imagine with what beating hearts they must have listened to so magnificent a call to arms as this; commingling prayer, exhortation, and benediction.

Napoleon, after all, waged his wars with us according to the laws of nations, the rules of civilised peoples, and the dictates of decent humanity. But never since Christianity has been established has one man committed so dread and awful an accumulation of public iniquities as stand for ever against the base and cowardly name of William Hohenzollern, Emperor in Germany. He spat upon the ancient chivalries of battle; he prostituted the decent amenities of diplomacy; he polluted with infamy and murder the splendid comradeship of the sea.

When the captain of one of his submarines placed upon his deck the captured crew of an unarmed merchant vessel which he had sunk, destroyed their boats, took from them their life-belts, carried them miles away from any floating wreckage, and then projected them into the sea to drown, this unspeakable monarch approved the awful deed and decorated the ruffian for his infamous cruelty.

When gallant Fryatt, fulfilling every duty a captain owes to his unarmed crew and helpless passengers, turned the bows of his peaceful packet-boat upon the submarine which was being used to murder them all in cold blood, he fell into this Kaiser's hands, and the coward wreaked his vengeance upon nobility that was beyond his comprehension and valour that rendered him insignificant.

Of these horrible acts the proofs stand unchallenged, and for such deeds as these the world has cast him out: thrown him down from one of the greatest thrones in history; and left him in the place to which, white with terror, he ignominiously fled, stripped of all his power and splendour, his crowns, his crosses, and his diadems.

Idle is it for this man and his apologists to plead any extenuation or excuse.

It was his custom in the plenitude of his power to declare himself answerable for his actions only to God and himself. Then let the judgment of God be upon him. When we recall the awful and unnumbered horrors with which he covered Europe, I doubt whether all history can furnish a parallel to him.

By his authority helpless Belgium was invaded, treaties treacherously broken, and her people slaughtered. By his authority her priests were murdered in cold blood and her nuns violated by his vile soldiery. By his authority poison gases were first projected with low cunning upon brave and honourable adversaries. By his authority hospital ships at sea were sent to the bottom.

But time and the might of free nations have, after fearful sufferings, dissipated his invincible armies, and they have shrivelled before the wrath of mankind. The whole world rose up in its offended majesty and tore from him that shining armour of which it was his custom to boast; and, with the brand of Cain upon him, he now lies obscurely in Holland, bereft of all the trappings of his sinister power.

There were times in the past when justice would have avenged such awful crimes as lie at this man's door with the torture of his living body and the desecration of his lifeless remains, but his conquerors disdained to debase themselves by imitating his own abominations; and they left him to afford a spectacle to posterity as the supreme example of human ignominy!

When you are old, Antony, and this greatest of all wars has become part of England's history, you will be proud and happy to remember that your own father, at the first call for volunteers, laid down the pencil and scale of his peaceful profession, went out to fight for his country in the trenches in France, was wounded almost to death, and was saved only by the skill and devotion of one of the greatest surgeons of the day.[2] All the best blood of England, Scotland, and Ireland went marching together to defend the freedom of the world, and upon their hearts were engraven the glorious words:--

"Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war
and my fingers to fight."

May such a call never come to our beloved country again! But if it does, Antony, I know where you will be found without need of exhortations from me.

Your loving old G.P.

[Footnote 1: Now in my library.--S.C.]

[Footnote 2: Sir Arbuthnot Lane.]

17

MY DEAR ANTONY,

Grattan, of whom I have already written, had in the first Lord Plunket a successor and a compatriot very little his inferior in the gift of oratory.

He was born in 1764, and was therefore some fourteen years younger than Grattan, whom he survived by thirty-four years.

Like Grattan, he displayed a burning patriotism and, like him, fiercely opposed the Act of Union.

Few orators have displayed greater powers of clear reason and convincing logic than Plunket. It may be admitted that he seldom rose to great heights of eloquence, but tradition credits his delivery with a quality of dignity amounting almost to majesty. The gift of oratory consists in how things are said as much as in what things are said, and the voice, gesture, and manner of Plunket were commanding and magnificent.

When Attorney-General in Ireland, in 1823, in a speech prosecuting the leaders of the riot known as "the Bottle Riot," Plunket uttered the following fine tribute to the character of William the Third:--

"Perhaps, my lords, there is not to be found in the annals of
history a character more truly great than that of William the
Third. Perhaps no person has ever appeared on the theatre of the
world who has conferred more essential or more lasting benefits on
mankind; on these countries, certainly none. When I look at the
abstract merits of his character, I contemplate him with
admiration and reverence. Lord of a petty principality--destitute
of all resources but those with which nature had endowed
him--regarded with jealousy and envy by those whose battles he
fought; thwarted in all his counsels; embarrassed in all his
movements; deserted in his most critical enterprises--he continued
to mould all those discordant materials, to govern all these
warring interests, and merely by the force of his genius, the
ascendancy of his integrity, and the immovable firmness and
constancy of his nature, to combine them into an indissoluble
alliance against the schemes of despotism and universal
domination of the most powerful monarch in Europe, seconded by the
ablest generals, at the head of the bravest and best disciplined
armies in the world, and wielding, without check or control, the
unlimited resources of his empire. He was not a consummate
general; military men will point out his errors; in that respect
Fortune did not favour him, save by throwing the lustre of
adversity over all his virtues. He sustained defeat after defeat,
but always rose _adversa rerum immersabilis unda_. Looking merely
at his shining qualities and achievements, I admire him as I do a
Scipio, a Regulus, a Fabius; a model of tranquil courage,
undeviating probity, and armed with a resoluteness and constancy
in the cause of truth and freedom, which rendered him superior to
the accidents that control the fate of ordinary men.

"But this is not all--I feel that to him, under God, I am, at this
moment, indebted for the enjoyment of the rights which I possess
as a subject of these free countries; to him I owe the blessings
of civil and religious liberty, and I venerate his memory with a
fervour of devotion suited to his illustrious qualities and to
his godlike acts."

This is not so magnificent a panegyric as that of Grattan in his written tribute to Chatham, but, enhanced by the gesture and voice of the great orator, it was reputed to have left a deep impression upon all who heard it.

But few speeches, however eloquent, survive, while the printed work of the writer may long endure; but to the orator is given what the writer never experiences--the fierce enjoyment, amounting almost to rapture, of holding an audience entranced under the spell of the spoken cadences; and English, Antony, has a splendour all its own when uttered by a master of its august music.

Your loving old G.P.

18

MY DEAR ANTONY,

To-day I will write about Robert Southey, and, as he and Coleridge married sisters, you may claim a distant relationship with him. His personal character was beautiful and unselfish, and his dwelling at Keswick was the home that for years sheltered Coleridge's children.

With hardly an exception the poets of England have had an easy and royal mastery of prose; and in the case of Robert Southey there are some, and they are not the worst critics, who anticipate that his prose will long outlast his poetry in the Temple of Fame.

We may suppose that to a man whose whole private life was stainlessly dedicated to a noble rectitude of conduct, and whose every act was sternly subjected to the judgment of an unbending conscience, some circumstances of the private life of Nelson must have been distasteful and open to censure; but no such reservations dimmed the splendour of Southey's tribute to the public hero who gave his life in the act of establishing, beyond reach of dispute or cavil, the throne of England as Queen of the Sea.

"The death of Nelson was felt in England as something more than a
public calamity; men started at the intelligence, and turned pale,
as if they had heard of the loss of a dear friend. An object of
our admiration and affection, of our pride and of our hopes, was
suddenly taken from us, and it seemed as if we had never, till
then, known how deeply we loved and reverenced him.

"What the country had lost in its great naval hero--the greatest
of our own, and of all former times, was scarcely taken into the
account of grief. So perfectly, indeed, had he performed his part,
that the maritime war, after the battle of Trafalgar, was
considered at an end; the fleets of the enemy were not merely
defeated, but destroyed; new navies must be built, and a new race
of seamen reared for them, before the possibility of their
invading our shores could again be contemplated.

"It was not, therefore, from any selfish reflection upon the
magnitude of our loss that we mourned for him; the general sorrow
was of a higher character. The people of England grieved that
funeral ceremonies, public monuments and posthumous rewards, were
all which they could now bestow upon him whom the king, the
legislature, and the nation, would alike have delighted to honour;
whom every tongue would have blessed; whose presence in every
village through which he might have passed would have wakened the
church bells, have given schoolboys a holiday, have drawn children
from their sports to gaze upon him, and 'old men from the chimney
corner' to look upon Nelson ere they died.

"The victory of Trafalgar was celebrated, indeed, with the usual
forms of rejoicing, but they were without joy; for such already
was the glory of the British Navy through Nelson's surpassing
genius, that it scarcely seemed to receive any addition from the
most signal victory that ever was achieved upon the sea; and the
destruction of this mighty fleet, by which all the maritime
schemes of France were totally frustrated, hardly appeared to add
to our security or strength, for while Nelson was living to watch
the combined squadrons of the enemy, we felt ourselves as secure
as now, when they were no longer in existence.

"There was reason to suppose from the appearances upon opening the
body, that in the course of nature he might have attained, like
his father, to a good old age. Yet he cannot be said to have
fallen prematurely whose work was done; nor ought he to be
lamented, who died so full of honours, and at the height of human
fame. The most triumphant death is that of a martyr; the most
awful, that of the martyred patriot; the most splendid, that of
the hero in the hour of victory; and if the chariot and the horses
of fire had been vouchsafed for Nelson's translation, he could
scarcely have departed in a brighter blaze of glory.

"He has left us, not indeed his mantle of inspiration, but a name
and an example which are at this hour inspiring hundreds of the
youth of England; a name which is our pride, and an example which
will continue to be our shield and our strength."

Nelson left England the Queen of the Sea, and the great war with Germany has failed to displace her from that splendid throne. For the plain fact of history remains that, after the battle of Jutland, the German High Seas Fleet never ventured out of port again till the end of the war; and when it did emerge from its ignominious security, it sailed to captivity at Scapa Flow, there ultimately to repose on the bottom of the sea.

Your loving old G.P.

19

MY DEAR ANTONY,

There are four very celebrated lines written by Walter Savage Landor which you may have heard quoted; they were written towards the close of his life, and are certainly distinguished and memorable:--

"I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;
Nature I loved, and next to Nature Art;
I warmed both hands before the fire of life;
It sinks, and I am ready to depart."

It does not detract from the merit of the lines that as a fact Landor was of a fiery disposition, and strove a great deal with many adversaries, often of his own creation, throughout his long life[1]; and although he was of a fierce and combative nature he displayed in his writings a classical restraint and tender beauty hardly achieved by his contemporaries.

In the form of an imaginary conversation between Æsop and Rhodope, Landor makes the latter describe how her father, in the famine, unbeknown to her, starved that she might have plenty, and, when all was gone, took her to the market-place to sell her that she might live. There is an exquisite delicacy in this dialogue that places it among the wonders of literature:--

"_Rhodope_. Never shall I forget the morning when my father,
sitting in the coolest part of the house, exchanged his last
measure of grain for a chlamys of scarlet cloth, fringed with
silver. He watched the merchant out of the door, and then looked
wistfully into the cornchest. I, who thought there was something
worth seeing, looked in also, and finding it empty, expressed my
disappointment, not thinking, however, about the corn. A faint and
transient smile came over his countenance at the sight of mine. He
unfolded the chlamys, stretched it out with both hands before me,
and then cast it over my shoulders. I looked down on the
glittering fringe and screamed with joy. He then went out; and I
know not what flowers he gathered, but he gathered many; and some
he placed in my bosom, and some in my hair. But I told him with
captious pride, first that I could arrange them better, and again
that I would have only the white. However, when he had selected
all the white and I had placed a few of them according to my
fancy, I told him (rising in my slipper) he might crown me with
the remainder.

"The splendour of my apparel gave me a sensation of authority.
Soon as the flowers had taken their station on my head, I
expressed a dignified satisfaction at the taste displayed by my
father, just as if I could have seen how they appeared! But he
knew that there was at least as much pleasure as pride in it, and
perhaps we divided the latter (alas! not both) pretty equally.

"He now took me into the market-place, where a concourse of people
were waiting for the purchase of slaves. Merchants came and looked
at me; some commending, others disparaging; but all agreeing that
I was slender and delicate, that I could not live long, and that I
should give much trouble. Many would have bought the chlamys, but
there was something less saleable in the child and flowers.