GENERAL LACY AND CURA MERINO. severer war would not sunder them. We have no Government; because in that country there is no such price to pay. Independence is always the worthless wretch whose government leads to, or sentiment that follows liberty; and it is always can be brought into, contempt. This undefined the most ardently desired by that country, which, and undefinable offence, in England, hath consupposing the administration of law to be similar signed many just men and eminent scholars to and equal, derives the greatest advantage from poverty and imprisonment, to incurable maladies, the union. According to the state of society in and untimely death. Law, like the Andalusian two countries, to the justice or injustice of go-bull, lowers her head and shuts her eyes before vernment, to proximity or distance, independence she makes her push; and either she misses her may be good or bad. Normandy and Brittany object altogether, or she leaves it immersed in would have found it hurtful and pernicious: they bloodshed. would have been corrupted by bribery, and overrun by competitors, the more formidable and the more disastrous from a parity of force. They had not however so weighty reasons for union with France, as Portugal has with Spain. Merino. To avoid the collision of king and people, we may think about an assembly to be composed of the higher clergy and principal nobility. Lacy. What should produce any collision, any dissension or dissidence between king and people? Is the wisdom of a nation less than an individual's? Can it not see its own interests? and ought he to see any other? Surround the throne with state and splendour and magnificence, but withhold from it the means of corruption, which must overflow upon itself, and sap it. To no intent or purpose can they ever be employed, unless to subvert the constitution; and beyond the paling of a Look at constitution a king is fera naturæ. Russia and Turkey: how few of their Czars and Sultans have died a natural death! unless indeed in such a state of society the most natural death is a violent one. I would not accustom men to daggers and poisons; for which reason, among others, I would remove them as far as possible from despotism. When an action is brought by one subject against another, in which he seeks indemnity for an injury done to his property, his comforts, or his character, a jury awards the amount : but if some parasite of the king wishes to mend his fortune, after a run of bad luck at the gaming-table or of improvident bets on the race-course, he informs the attorney-general that he has detected a libel on Majesty, which, unless it be chastised and checked by the timely interference of those blessed institutions whence they are great and glorious, would leave no man's office, or honour, or peace, inviolable. It may happen that the writer, at worst, hath indulged his wit on some personal fault, some feature in the character far below the crown: this is enough for a prosecution: and the author, if found guilty, lies at the mercy of the judge. The jury in this case is never the awarder of damages. Are then the English laws equal for all? Recently there was a member of parliament who declared to the people such things against the Government, as were openly called seditious and libellous, both by his colleagues and his judges. He was condemned to pay a fine, amounting to less than the three-hundredth part of his property, and to be confined for three months in an apartment more airy and more To talk of France is nugatory: England then, splendid than any in his own house. Another, no where more causes are tried within the year than member of parliament, wrote something ludicrous among us within ten, has only twelve judges, about Majesty, and was condemned, he and his A brother, to pay the full half of their property, and criminal and civil, in her ordinary courts. culprit, or indeed an innocent man, may lie six to be confined among felons for two years! This months in prison before his trial, on suspicion of confinement was deemed so flagrantly cruel, that having stolen a petticoat or pair of slippers. As the magistrates soon afterward allowed a little for her civil laws, they are more contradictory, more light, a little more air, and better company; more dilatory, more complicated, more uncertain, not however in separate wards, but separate priThe judge who pronounced the sentence more expensive, more inhumane, than any now in sons. use among men. They who appeal to them for is still living; he lives unbruised, unbranded, and redress of injury, suffer an aggravation of it; and he appears like a man among men. when Justice comes down at last, she alights on ruins. Public opinion is the only bulwark against oppression, and the voice of wretchedness is upon most occasions too feeble to excite it. Law in England, and in most other countries of Europe, is the crown of injustice, burning and intolerable as that hammered and nailed upon the head of Zekkler, after he had been forced to eat the quivering flesh of his companions in insurrection.* In the statutes of the North American United States, there is no such offence as libel upon the * Albrizzi Sull' origine del Danubio and Respublica Hungarica. Merino. Why not? He proved his spirit, firmness, and fidelity in our country he would be appointed Grand-inquisitor on the next vacancy, and lead the queen to her seat at the first auto da fé. Idlers and philosophers may complain; but certainly this portion of the English institutions ought to be commended warmly by every true Spaniard, every friend to the altar and the throne. And yet, general, you mention it in such a manner, as would almost let a careless inattentive hearer go away with the persuasion that you disapprove of it. Speculative and dissatisfied men are existing in all countries; even in Spain and England; but we have scourges in store for the pruriency of dissatisfaction, and cases and caps for the telescopes of speculation. Lacy. The faultiness of the English laws is not complained of nor pointed out exclusively by the speculative or the sanguine, by the oppressed or the disappointed; it was the derision and scoff of George the Second, one of the bravest and most constitutional kings. "As to our laws," said he, "we pass near a hundred every session, which seem made for no other purpose but to afford us the pleasure of breaking them." This is not reported by whig or tory, who change principles as they change places, but by a dispassionate unambitious man, of sound sense and in easy circumstances, a personal and intimate friend of the king, from whose lips he himself received it, Lord Waldegrave. Yet an Englishman thinks himself quite as free, and governed quite as rationally, as a citizen of the United States! so does a Chinese. Such is the hemlock that Habitude administers to Endurance; and so long is it in this torpor ere the heart sickens. I am far from the vehemence of the English commander Nelson; a man however who betrayed neither in war nor policy any deficiency of acute ness and judgment. He says unambiguously and distinctly in his letters, "All ministers of kings and princes are in my opinion as great scoundrels as ever lived." Merino. Certainly there is no reason to complain that he is ambiguous or indistinct in his phraseology. Lacy. Versatility, indecision, falsehood, ingratitude, had strongly marked, as he saw, the two principal ones of his country, Pitt and Fox; the latter of whom openly turned honesty into derision, while the former sent it wrapped up decently to market. Now if all ministers of kings and princes are, what the admiral calls them from his experience, " as great scoundrels as ever lived," we must be as great fools as ever lived if we endure them we should look for others. Merino. Even that will not do: the new ones, possessing the same power and the same places, will be the same men. Lacy. I am afraid then the change must not be only in the servants, but in the masters, and that we must not leave the choice to those who always choose "as great scoundrels as ever lived." Nelson was a person who had had much to do with the ministers of kings and princes; none of his age had more; an age in which the ministers had surely no less to do than those in any other age since the creation of the world. He was the best commander of his nation he was consulted and employed in every difficult and doubtful undertaking he must have known them thoroughly. What meaning then shall we attribute to his words? Shall we say that "as great scoundrels as ever lived" ought to govern the universe in perpetuity? Or can we doubt that they must do so, if we suffer kings and princes to appoint them at each other's recommendation? Merino. Nelson was a heretic, a blasphemer, a revolutionist. Lacy. On heresy and blasphemy I am incapable of deciding; but never was there a more strenuous antagonist of revolutionary principles; and upon this rock his glory split and foundered. When Sir William Hamilton declared to the Neapolitan insurgents, who had laid down their arms before royal promises, that his Government having engaged with the Allied Powers to eradicate revolutionary doctrines from Europe, he could not countenance the fulfilment of a capitulation which opposed the views of the coalition, what did Nelson? He tarnished the brightest sword in Europe, and devoted to the most insatiable of the Furies the purest blood! A Caroline and a Ferdinand, the most opprobrious of the human race, and among the lowest in intellect, were permitted to riot in the slaughter of a Caraccioli. The English constitution, sir, is founded on revolutionary doctrines, and her kings acknowledge it. Recollect now the note of her diplo matist. Is England in Europe? If she is, which I venture not to assert, her rulers have declared their intention to eradicate the foundations of her liberties: and they have broken their word so often, that I am inclined to believe they will attempt to recover their credit by keeping it strictly here. But the safest and least costly conquests for England, would be those over the understandings and the hearts of men. They require no garrisons; they equip no navies; they encounter no tempests; they withdraw none from labour; they might extend from the arctic to the antarctic circle, leaving every Briton at his own fireside; and Earth like Ocean would have her great Pacific. The strength of England lies not in armaments and invasions: it lies in the omnipresence of her industry, and in the vivifying energies of her high civilisation. There are provinces she can not grasp; there are islands she can not hold fast but there is neither island nor province, there is neither kingdom nor continent, which she could not draw to her side and fix there everlastingly, by saying the magic words Be Free. Every land wherein she favours the sentiments of freedom, every land wherein she but forbids them to he stifled, is her own; a true ally, a willing tributary, an inseparable friend. Principles hold those together whom power would only alienate. Merino. I understand little these novel doctrines: but Democracy herself must be contented with the principal features of the English constitution. The great leaders are not taken from the ancient families. Lacy. These push forward into Parliament young persons of the best talents they happen to pick up, whether at a ball or an opera, at a gaming-table or a college-mess, who from time to time, according to the offices they have filled, mount into the upper chamber and make room for others: but it is understood that, in both chambers, they shall distribute honours and places at the com- | himself; and, remembering that he could enfold mand of their patrons. True indeed, the osten- his arms in his mantle, took off a glove and sible heads are not of ancient or even of respectable covered the unprotected part with it. Satisfied at parentage. The more wealthy and powerful peers the contrivance, he slept again; and more prosend them from their boroughs into the House of foundly than ever. Whether there was any savoury Commons, as they send race-horses from their odour in the glove, I know not: certain it is that stables to Newmarket, and cocks from their some rats came from under the fortifications, and, training-yard to Doncaster. This is, in like man- perforating the new defence of Don Britomarte, ner, a pride, a luxury, a speculation. Even bank- made a breach in the salient angle which had sufrupts have been permitted to sit there; men who, fered so lately by a less potent enemy; and he was when they succeeded, were a curse to their country called from that day forward the knight of the kidworse than when they failed. skin vizor. Let us rather collect together our former institutions, cherish all that brings us proud remembrances, brace our limbs for the efforts we must make, train our youth on our own arena, and never deem it decorous to imitate the limp of a wrestler writhing in his decrepitude. The Chamber of Peers in England is the dormitory of Freedom and of Genius. Those who enter it have eaten the lotus and forget their country. A minister, to suit his purposes, may make a dozen or a score or a hundred of peers in a day. If they are rich they are inactive; if they are poor they are dependent. In general he chooses the rich, who always want something; for wealth is less easy to satisfy than poverty, luxury than hunger. He can dispense with their energy if he can obtain their votes, and they never abandon him unless he has contented them. Merino. Impossible! that any minister should make twenty, or even ten peers, during one convocation. Merino. Sir, I do not understand stories: I never found wit or reason in them. Lacy. Let us return then to graver facts. England in the last twenty years has undergone a greater revolution than any she struggled to counteract: a revolution more awful, more pernicious. She alone of all the nations in the world hath suffered by that of France: she is become less wealthy by it, less free, less liberal, less moral. Half a century ago she was represented chiefly by her country-gentlemen. Pitt made the richer, peers; the intermediate, pensioners; the poorer, exiles; and his benches were overflowed with Honourables from the sugar-cask and indigo-bag. He changed all the features both of mind and matter. Old mansions were converted into workhouses and barracks: children, who returned from school at the holidays, stopped in their own villages and asked why they stopped. More oaks followed him than ever followed Orpheus; and more stones, a thousand to one, leaped down at his voice than ever leaped up at Amphion's. Overladen with taxation, the gentlemen of England, a class the grandest in character that ever existed upon earth, the best informed, the most generous, the most patriotic, were driven from their residences into cities. Their authority ceased; their example was altogether lost; and it appears by the calendars of the prisons, that two-thirds of the offenders were from the country; whereas, until these dis astrous times, four-fifths were from the towns. To what a degree those of the towns themselves must have increased, may be supposed by the stagnation in many trades, and by the conversion of labourers and artisans to soldiers. Lacy. The English, by a most happy metaphor, call them batches, seeing so many drawn forth at a time, with the rapidity of loaves from an oven, and moulded to the same ductility by less manipulation. A minister in that system has equally need of the active and the passive, as the creation has equally need of males and females. Do not imagine I would discredit or depreciate the House of Peers. Never will another land contain one composed of characters in general more honourable; more distinguished for knowledge, for charity, for generosity, for equity; more perfect in all the duties of men and citizens. Let it stand: a nation should be accustomed to no changes, to no images The country-gentlemen, in losing their rank but of strength and duration : let it stand then, as and condition, lost the higher and more delicate a lofty and ornamental belfry, never to be taken part of their principles. There decayed at once down or lowered, until it threatens by its decay in them that robustness and that nobility of chathe congregation underneath: but let none be ex-racter, which men, like trees, acquire from standcommunicated who refuse to copy it, whether from faultiness in their foundation or from deficiency in their materials. Different countries require different governments. Is the rose the only flower in the garden? is Hesperus the only star in the heavens? We may be hurt by our safe-guards, if we try new ones. Don Britomarte Delciego took his daily siesta on the grass in the city-dyke of Barbastro: he shaded his face with his sombrero, and slept profoundly. One day unfortunately a gnat alighted on his nose, and bit it. Don Britomarte roused ing separately. Deprived of their former occupations and amusements, and impatient of inactivity, they condescended to be members of gaming-clubs in the fashionable cities, incurred new and worse expenses, and eagerly sought, from among the friendships they had contracted, those who might obtain for them or for their families some atom from the public dilapidation. Hence nearly all were subservient to the minister: those who were not, were marked out as disaffected to the constitution, or at best as singular men who courted celebrity from retirement. tion. Merino. Kings stand in the place of God among us. Lacy. I wish they would make way for the owner. They love God only when they fancy he has favoured their passions, and fear him only when they must buy him off. If indeed they be his vicegerents on earth, let them repress the wicked and exalt the virtuous. Wherever in the material world there is a grain of gold, it sinks to the bottom; chaff floats over it: in the animal, the greatest and most sagacious of creatures hide themselves in woods and caverns, in morasses and solitudes, and we hear first of their existence when we find their bones. Do you perceive a resemblance anywhere? If princes are desirous to imitate the governor of the universe, if they are disposed to obey him, if they consult religion or reason, or, what oftener occupies their attention, the stability of power, they will admit the institutions best adapted to render men honest and peaceable, industrious and contented. Otherwise, let them be certain that, although they themselves may escape the chastisement they merit, their children and grandchildren will never be out of danger or out of fear. Calculations on the intensity of force are often just, hardly ever so those on its durability. Such was the state of the landed interest; and | mine if such language be offensive? Why should what was that of the commercial? Industrious intolerance hatch an hypothesis, or increase her tradesmen speculated; in other words, gamed. own alarm by the obstreperous chuckle of incubaBankers were coiners, not giving a piece of metal, but a scrap of paper. They who had thousands, lent millions, and lost all. Slow and sure gains were discreditable; and nothing was a sight more common, more natural, or seen with more indifference, than fortunes rolling down from their immense accumulation. Brokers and insurers and jobbers, people whose education could not have been liberal, were now for the first time found at the assemblies and at the tables of the great, and were treated there with the first distinction. Every hand through which money passes was pressed affectionately. The viler part of what is democratical was supported by the aristocracy; the better of what is republican was thrown down. England, like one whose features are just now turned awry by an apoplexy, is ignorant of the change she has undergone, and is the more lethargic the more she is distorted. Not only hath she lost her bloom and spirit, but her form and gait, her voice and memory. The weakest of mortals was omnipotent in parliament; and being so, he dreamed in his drunkenness that he could compress the spirit of the times; and before the fumes had passed away, he rendered the wealthiest of nations the most distressed. The spirit of the times is only to be made useful by catching it as it rises, to be managed only by concession, to be controlled only by compliancy. Like the powerful agent of late discovery that impels vast masses across the ocean, or raises them from the abysses of the earth, it performs everything by attention, nothing by force, and is fatal alike from coercion and from neglect. That government is the best which the people obey the most willingly and the most wisely that state of society, in which the greatest number may live and educate their families becomingly, by unstrained bodily, and unrestricted intellectual exertion: where superiority in office springs from worth, and where the chief magistrate hath no higher interest in perspective than the ascendancy of the laws. Nations are not ruined by war: for convents and churches, palaces and cities, are not nations. The Messenians and Jews and Araucanians saw their houses and temples levelled with the pavement: the mightiness of the crash gave the stronger mind a fresh impulse, and it sprang high above the flames that consumed the last fragment. The ruin of a country is not the blight of corn, nor the weight and impetuosity of hailstones; it is not inundation nor storm, it is not pestilence nor famine; a few years, perhaps a single one, may cover all traces of such calamity. But that country is too surely ruined, in which morals are lost irretrievably to the greater part of the rising generation: and there are they about to sink and perish, where the ruler has given, by an unrepressed and an unreproved example, the lesson of bad faith. : Merino. Sir, I cannot hear such language. Merino. As if truly that depended on men! a blow against a superintending Providence! It always follows the pestilential breath that would sully the majesty of kings. Lacy. Señor Merino, my name, if you have forgotten it, is Lacy: take courage and recollect yourself. The whole of my discourse hath tended to keep the majesty of kings unsullied by preserving their honour inviolate. Any blow against a superintending Providence is too insane for reproach, too impotent for pity: and indeed what peril can by anyone be apprehended from the Almighty, when he has Cura Merino to preach for him and the Holy Inquisition to protect him? Merino. I scorn the sneer, sir! and know not by what right, or after what resemblance, you couple my name with the Holy Inquisition; which our Lord the King in his wisdom hath not yet reestablished, and which the Holy Allies for the greater part have abolished in their dominions. Lacy. This never would have been effected if the holy heads of the meek usurpers had not raised themselves above the crown; proving from doctors and confessors, from old Testament and new, the privilege they possessed of whipping and burning and decapitating the wearer. The kings in their fright ran against the chalice of poison, by which many thousands of their subjects had perished, and by which their own hands were, after their retractings and writhings, ungauntleted, undirked, and paralysed. Europe, Asia, America, sent up simultaneously to heaven a shout of joy at the subversion: Africa, seated among tamer monsters and addicted to milder superstitions, wondered at what burst and dayspring of beatitude the human race was celebrating around her so high and enthusiastic a jubilee. Merino. I take my leave, general. May your Excellency live many years! I breathe the pure street-air again. Traitor and atheist! I will denounce him: he has shaved for the last time he shall never have Christian burial. PERICLES AND SOPHOCLES. Pericles. O Sophocles! is there in the world a city so beautiful as Athens? Congratulate me, embrace me; the Piræus and the Poecile are completed this day;* my glory is accomplished; behold it founded on the supremacy of our fellowcitizens. Sophocles. And it arises, O Pericles, the more majestically from the rich and delightful plain of equal laws. The Gods have bestowed on our statuaries and painters a mighty power, enabling them to restore our ancestors unto us, some in the calm of thought, others in the tumult of battle, and to present them before our children when we are gone. Pericles. Shall it be so? Alas, how worthless an incumbrance, how wearisome an impediment is life, if it separate us from the better of our ancestors, not in our existences only, but in our merits! We are little by being seen among men ; because that phasis of us only is visible which is exposed toward them and which most resembles them we become greater by leaving the world, as the sun appears to be on descending below the horizon. Strange reflection! humiliating truth! that nothing on earth, no exertion, no endowment, can do so much for us as a distant day. And deep indeed, O Sophocles, must be the impression made upon thy mind by these masterly works of art, if they annihilate in a manner the living; if they lower in thee that spirit which hath often aroused by one touch, or rather flash, the whole Athenian people at thy tragedies, and force upon thee the cold and ungenial belief, the last which it appears to be their nature to inculcate, that while our children are in existence it can cease to be among them. Sophocles. I am only the interpreter of the heroes and divinities who are looking down on me. When I survey them I remember their actions, and when I depart from them I visit the regions they illustrated. Neither the Goddesses on Ida nor the Gods before Troy were such rivals as our artists. Eschylus hath surpassed me :† I must excel Eschylus. O * Their decorations only; for the structures were finished before. The propylea of Pericles were entrances to the citadel: other works of consummate beauty were erected as decorations to the city, but chiefly in the Pacile, where also was seen the Temple of Cybele, with her statue by Phidias. + Sophocles gained the first prize for which he contended with Eschylus, and was conscious that he had not yet deserved the superiority, which enthusiasm on the one side and jealousy on the other are always ready to grant a vigorous young competitor. The character of Sophocles was frank and liberal, as was remarkably proved on the death of his last rival, Euripides. Pericles, thou conjurest up Discontent from the bosom of Delight, and givest her an elevation of mien and character she never knew before: thou makest every man greater than his competitor, and not in his own eyes but in another's. We want historians: thy eloquence will form the style, thy administration will supply the materials. Beware, O my friend, lest the people hereafter be too proud of their city, and imagine that to have been born in Athens is enough. Pericles. And this indeed were hardly more irrational, than the pride which cities take sometimes in the accident of a man's birth within their walls, of a citizen's whose experience was acquired, whose virtues were fostered, and perhaps whose services were performed, elsewhere. Sophocles. They are proud of having been the cradles of great men, then only when great men can be no longer an incumbrance or a reproach to them. Let them rather boast of those who spend the last day in them than the first; this is always accidental, that is generally by choice; for, from something like instinct, we wish to close our eyes upon the world in the places we love best, the child in its mother's bosom, the patriot in his country. When we are born we are the same as others: at our decease we may induce our friends, and oblige our enemies, to acknowledge that others are not the same as we. It is folly to say, Death levels the whole human race for it is only when he hath stripped men of everything external, that their deformities can be clearly discovered or their worth correctly ascertained. Gratitude is soon silent; a little while longer and Ingratitude is tired, is satisfied, is exhausted, or sleeps. Lastly fly off the fumes of party-spirit; the hottest and most putrid ebullition of self-love. We then see before us and contemplate calmly the creator of our customs, the ruler of our passions, the arbiter of our pleasures, and, under the Gods, the disposer of our destiny. What then, I pray thee, is there dead? Nothing more than that which we can handle, cast down, bury; and surely not he who is yet to progenerate a more numerous and far better race, than during the few years it was permitted us to converse with him. Pericles. When I reflect on Themistocles, on Aristides, and on the greatest of mortal men, Miltiades, I wonder how their countrymen can repeat their names, unless in performing the office of expiation.* *There are some who may deem this reflection unsuitable to Pericles. He saw injustice in others, and hated it; yet he caused the banishment of Cimon, as great a man as any L |