apple-trees in my croft, the friends of my youth, the companions of my dangers, and the associates of many a freak and frolic requiring no less enterprise. I lose above all... but alas! what are the children of the great to them! You stare at me, sir Count, when I spoke to you of mine. One would imagine that family meant coaches, horses, grooms, liveries, and gravy-spoons: one would imagine there is some indecency in the word child. Believe me, sir, they are different things with us from what they are with you. If you happen to cherish them, it is that they may carry a lily, a lion, a bear, a serpent, or a bird, when you have done with it. I love in them, yes, beyond my own soul, God forgive me! the very worst things about them; their unparriable questions, triumphant screams, and boisterous embraces. It is true, I never talked of them before so; but they are now beyond hail or whistle far enough. Metternich. I shall be happy to expedite the business of your petition, from which it appears to me, my friend, you have somewhat deviated, forgetting the exact place and circumstances where you are. Hofer. Excuse me, sir, once more I acknow ledge my error: I have been discoursing as if all the cloth in the world were of one colour and one fineness, and as if a man who goes upon two legs were equal to one who goes upon eight or sixteen, with a varnished plank betwixt, and another man's rear at his nostrils. Metternich. The brute! Others may have the same pretensions as you, and it is difficult to protect all we would favour. Hofer. I stand alone in this proscription. Pretensions I have none: my country has used me as she would a trumpet: I was in her hands what she wished me to be, and what she made me. Whether her brave hearts followed me or followed this feather, what matters it? I am not better than those of them who are with God: had I been, he would have called me among the first. Those who are yet living wish to reserve me for another day, if another, such as brave men pant for, is decreed us. Francis (entering). Sit still: who is that man, Count, stroking his cock's feather with his forefinger? rupted by secretaries, clerks, valets, and other such people as you. Francis. What does he want? Hofer. I thank you, friend. If you are idle, as you seem to be, pray show me the way: come along: we are losing time. Francis. Make out the order: send him off. Hofer. The gentleman is gone then! He gave his advice very fluently, almost as if he directed. When I would have embraced him for his readiness to serve me, his breath drove me back. O for a fresh pipe of tobacco! a bundle of sweet hay! a sprig of thyme! a bean-flower! Other creatures have each his own peculiar ill savour, and that suffices for the whole of him; but men, and in particular those of cities, have beds and parterres and plots and knots of stinks, varying in quality from the dells and dingles to the mountain-top. There are people who stink heart and soul: their bodies are the best of them. Away with these fellows! I would not be a materialist if I could help it; I was educated in no such bestiality; but is it possible that God should ever have intended spirits like these to be immortal? Metternich. Friend, it is not permitted in any public office to exceed the business to be transacted there. I will venture to pronounce that yours is the first reflection ever made in one; and it affords no proof of your delicacy or discretion. If you wish protection, never hazard a remark of any kind, unless you intend it for publication: in that case the censor will judge of its propriety, and it may do you no harm. Write freely; write everything you please; high souls are privileged at Vienna. Soldier, take this note to the governor, as directed: you may accompany him, Mr. Hofer. Hofer. To the governor! Do favour me, sir, with a prison. Metternich. I do. Hofer. But without sending me to his Excellency the governor of the city. Metternich. My note is addressed to the governor of the prison. Hofer. What! are jailers called governors? Metternich. God's blood! the fellow asks ques Metternich. It is the Andrew... Hofer... I tions: he examines ranks and dignities. Fare you think it is written. Francis. I wish we were fairly rid of him. Hofer. Sir, your countenance did not inspire me in the beginning with much confidence. When you entered, I observed that you dared not meet an honest man's eye. Metternich. Audacious! do you know... Francis. We may draw something from him: let him go on. Are we safe, Metternich? He is a strong rogue: I don't like his looks. Hofer. It becomes not me to be angry with anyone; but until I asked a favour from you, it would have been well in you to leave his Excellency to his own kind intentions. The little good that drips from the higher sources, is intercepted or cor well, Mr. Hofer: God preserve you, in reward of your zeal and fidelity. Francis (returning). Is he gone? Metternich. This instant, sire. Francis. The French minister is very urgent in the business: what is to be done? Metternich. I am afraid he must be surrendered. Francis. The empress says that all Europe would cry out against it, as an action the most ungenerous and ungrateful: such are her words. Metternich. With your Majesty's permission, I not only would oppose to them the opinion of the archdukes and of the whole aulic council, but could also prove the contrary by plain and irrefragable arguments. Ungenerous it cannot be DAVID HUME AND JOHN HOME. because he desired no reward, and none was in question. Ungrateful it can not be; for kings and [ emperors are exempt by the nature of things from that odious vice. It is the duty of subjects to do their utmost for the advantage of the prince : nothing is owing to them for an act of duty: duty is the payer, not the receiver. Whatever is accorded by a sovran to his vassal is granted by special indulgence; a signification of being pleased, a testimonial of being served, a patent to the person thus gratified that he is at full liberty to serve and please again. There can be gratitude only where there are obligations and duties; and to suppose any in reciprocity between prince and people, is rank jacobinism. Francis. Insurgents talk always of their country; a term which I would willingly never hear at all, and which no good subject ever utters in the first place. Emperor and country, king and country, we may bear; but hardly; although I have been assured that such phrases are uttered by But who ever heard of many well-meaning men. country and emperor, country and king? The times are bad enough; still the subversion of right Francis. He appears an irreverent, rash, hotheaded man: he could however be kept in order, as I said yesterday, by entering into one of my Austrian regiments, by going into Transylvania, or by lying a few years in the debtors' prison: and perhaps the French government, after a time, would be satisfied with the arrangement. To deliver him up is, after all, the more conformable to the desires of Bonaparte; and he can do me more injury than Hofer can do me good. Metternich. Your Majesty has contemplated the matter in its true political point of view, and is persuaded that those few diamonds, of which I informed your Majesty as usual, have no influence on my sentiments. I would not even offer my opinion; but hearing your Majesty's, it is my duty to see that your imperial will and pleasure be duly executed. DAVID HUME AND JOHN HOME. have been in a cherry orchard, and have observed the advantages of the jacket, hat, and rattle. Home. Our reformed religion does not authorise any line of conduct diverging from right reason: we are commanded by it to speak the truth to all men. Hume. We Scotchmen, sir, are somewhat proud | however let the discussion terminate. Both of us of our families and relationships: this is however a nationality which perhaps I should not have detected in myself, if I had not been favoured with the flattering present of your tragedy. Our names, as often happens, are spelt differently; but I yielded with no reluctance to the persuasion, that we are, and not very distantly, of the same stock. Home. I hope, sir, our mountains will detain you among them some time, and I presume to promise you that you will find in Edinburgh a society as polished and literate as in Paris. Hume. As literate I can easily believe, my cousin, and perhaps as polished, if you reason upon the ingredients of polish: but there is certainly much more amenity and urbanity at Paris than anywhere else in the world, and people there are less likely to give and take offence. All topics may be discussed without arrogance and superciliousness: an atheist would see you worship a stool or light a candle at noon without a sneer at you; and a bishop, if you were well-dressed and perfumed, would argue with you calmly and serenely, though you doubted the whole Athanasian creed. Home. So much the worse: God forbid we should ever experience this lukewarmness in Scotland. : Hume. God, it appears, has forbidden it for which reason, to show my obedience and submission, I live as much as possible in France, where at present God has forbidden no such thing. Home. Religion, my dear sir, can alone make men happy and keep them so. Hume. Nothing is better calculated to make men happy than religion, if you will allow them to manage it according to their minds; in which case the strong men hunt down others, until they can Here fold them, entrap them, or noose them. Hume. Are you likewise commanded to hear it from all men? Home. Yes, let it only be proved to be truth. Hume. I doubt the observance: you will not even let the fact be proved: you resist the attempt: you blockade the preliminaries. Religion, as you practise it in Scotland, in some cases is opposite to reason and subversive of happiness. Home. In what instance? Hume. If you had a brother whose wife was unfaithful to him without his suspicion; if he lived with her happily; if he had children by her; if others of which he was fond could be proved by you, and you only, not to be his; what would you do? Home. O the harlot! we have none such here, excepting the wife indeed (as we hear she is) of a little lame blear-eyed lieutenant, brought with him from Sicily, and bearing an Etna of her own about her, and truly no quiescent or intermittent one, which Mungo Murray (the apprentice of Hector Abercrombie) tells me has engulfed half the dissolutes in the parish. Of the married men who visited her, there was never one whose boot did not pinch him soon after, or the weather was no weather for corns and rheumatisms, or he must e'en go to Glasgow to look after a bad debt, the times being too ticklish to bear losses. I run into this discourse, not fearing that another philosopher will, like Empedocles, precipitate himself into the crater, but merely to warn you against the N husband, whose intrepidity on entering the houses of strangers has caught many acute and wary folks. After the first compliments, he will lament to you that elegant and solid literature is more neglected in our days than it ever was. He will entreat you to recommend him to your bookseller, his own having been too much enriched by him had grown insolent. It is desirable that it should be one who could advance three or four guineas: not that he cares about the money, but that it is always best to have a check upon these people. You smile : he has probably joined you in the street already, and found his way into your study, and requested of you by the bye a trifling loan, as being the only person in the world with whom he could take such a liberty. Hume. You seem to forget that I am but just arrived, and never knew him. Home. That is no impediment: on the contrary, it is a reason the more. A new face is as inviting to him as to the mosquitoes in America. If you lend him a guinea to be rid of him, he will declare the next day that he borrowed it at your own request, and that he returned it the same evening. Hume. Such men perhaps may have their reasons for being here; but the woman must be, as people say, like a fish out of water. Again to the question. Come now, if you had a brother, I was supposing, whose wife... Home. Out upon her! should my brother cohabit with her? should my nephews be defrauded of their patrimony by bastards? Hume. You would then destroy his happiness, and his children's: for, supposing that you preserved to them a scanty portion more of fortune (which you could not do), still the shame they would feel from their mother's infamy would much outweigh it. Home. I do not see clearly that this is a question of religion. Hume. All the momentous actions of religious men are referable to their religion, more or less nearly; all the social duties, and surely these are implicated here, are connected with it. Suppose again that you knew a brother and sister, who, born in different countries, met at last, ignorant of their affinity, and married. Home. Poor blind sinful creatures! God be merciful to them! Hume. I join you heartily in the prayer, and would only add to it, man be merciful to them also! Imagine them to have lived together ten years, to have a numerous and happy family, to come and reside in your parish, and the attestation of their prior relationship to be made indubitable to you, by some document which alone could establish and record it: what would you do? Home. I would snap asunder the chain that the devil had ensnared them in, even if he stood before me; I would implore God to pardon them, and to survey with an eye of mercy their unoffending bairns. Hume. And would not you be disposed to behold them with an eye of the same materials? Home. Could I leave them in mortal sin? a prey to the ensnarer of souls! No; I would rush between them as with a flaming sword; I would rescue them by God's help from perdition. Hume. What misery and consternation would this rescue bring with it! Home. They would call upon the hills to cover them, to crush and extinguish their shame. Hume. Those who had lived together in love and innocence and felicity? A word spoken to them by their pastor brings them into irremediable guilt and anguish. And you would do this? Home. The laws of God are above all other laws: his ways are inscrutable: thick darkness covers his throne. Hume. My cousin, you who have written so elegant and pathetic a tragedy, cannot but have read the best-contrived one in existence, the Edipus of Sophocles. Home. It has wrung my heart; it has deluged my eyes with weeping. Hume. Which would you rather do; cause and excite those sufferings, or assuage and quell them? Home. Am I a Scotchman or an islander of the Red Sea, that a question like this should be asked me? Hume. You would not then have given to Edipus that information which drove him and Jocasta to despair? Home. As a Christian and a minister of the gospel, I am commanded to defy the devil, and to burst asunder the bonds of sin. Hume. I am certain you would be greatly pained in doing it. Home. I should never overcome the grief and anxiety so severe a duty would cause me. Hume. You have now proved, better than I could have done in twenty Essays, that, if morality is not religion, neither is religion morality. Either of them, to be good (and the one must be and the other should be so), will produce good effects from the beginning to the end, and be followed by no remorse or repentance. It would be presumptuous in me to quote the Bible to you, who are so much more conversant in it: yet I can not refrain from repeating, for my own satisfaction, the beautiful sentence on Holiness; that "all her ways are pleasantness, and all her paths are peace." It says, not one or two paths, but all: for vice hath one or two passably pleasant in the season, if we could forget that, when we would return, the road is difficult to find, and must be picked out in the dark. Imagine anything in the semblance of a duty attended by regret and sorrow, and be assured that Holiness has no concern in it. Admonition, it is true, is sometimes of such a nature, from that of the irregularity it would correct, as to occasion a sigh or a blush to him who gives it; in this case, the sensation so manifested adds weight to the reproof and indemnifies the reprover. He is happy to have done, what from generosity and tenderness of heart he was sorry and slow to do; and the person in whose behalf he acted must be degraded beneath the dignity of manhood, if he feels less for himself than another has felt for him. The regret is not at the performance of his duty, but at the failure of its effect. To produce as much happiness as we can, and to prevent as much misery, is the proper aim and end of true morality and true religion. Only give things their right direction; do but place and train them well, and there is room to move easily and pleasantly in the midst of them. Home. What! in the midst of vice and wickedness? and must we place and train those? Hume. There was a time when what is wine was not wine, when what is vinegar was not vinegar, when what is corruption was not corruption. That which would turn into vice, may not only not turn into it, but may, by discreet and attentive management, become the groundwork of virtue. A little watchfulness over ourselves will save us a great deal of watchfulness over others, and will permit the kindliest of religions to drop her inconvenient and unseemly talk, of enmity and strife, cuirasses and breastplates, battles and exterminations. their ruins. Better let the cell be standing, than level it only for the thorn and nettle. Home. What good do these idlers, with their cords and wallets, or, if you please, with their regularities? Hume. These have their value, at least to the possessor and the few about him. Ask rather, what is the worth of his abode to the prince or to the public? who is the wiser for his cowl, the warmer for his frock, the more contented for his cloister, when they are taken from him? Monks, it is true, are only as stars that shine upon the desert but tell me, I beseech you, who caused such a desert in the moral world? And who rendered so faint a light, in some of its periods, a blessing? Ignorant rulers, must be the answer, and inhuman laws. They should cease to exist some time before their antidotes, however illcompounded, are cast away. If we had lived seven or eight centuries ago, John Home would probably have been saying mass at the altar, and David Hume, fatter and lazier, would have been pursuing his theological studies in the convent. We are so much the creatures of times and seasons, so modified and fashioned by them, that the very plants upon the wall, if they were as sensible as some suppose them to be, Home. These carnal terms are frequent in the would laugh at us. books of the Old Testament. Hume. Because the books of the Old Testament were written when the world was much more barbarous and ferocious than it is at present; and legislators must accommodate their language to the customs and manners of the country. Home. Apparently you would rather abolish the forcible expressions of our pious reformers, than the abominations at which their souls revolted. I am afraid you would hesitate as little to demolish kirks as convents, to drive out ministers as monks. Hume. I would let ministers and their kirks alone. I would abolish monasteries; but gradually and humanely; and not until I had discovered how and where the studious and pious could spend their time better. I hold religion in the light of a medal which has contracted rust from ages. This rust seems to have been its preserver for many centuries, but after some few more will certainly be its consumer, and leave no vestige of effigy or superscription behind: it should be detached carefully and patiently, not ignorantly and rudely scoured off. Happiness may be taken away from many with the design of communicating it to more: but that which is a grateful and refreshing odour in a limited space, would be none whatever in a larger; that which is comfortable warmth to the domestic circle, would not awaken the chirping of a cricket, or stimulate the flight of a butterfly, in the forest; that which satisfies a hundred poor monks, would, if thrown open to society at large, contribute not an atom to its benefit and emolument. Placid tempers, regulated habitudes, consolatory visitations, are suppressed and destroyed, and nothing rises from Home. Fantastic forms and ceremonies are rather what the philosopher will reprehend. Strip away these, reduce things to their primitive state of purity and holiness, and nothing can alter or shake us, clinging, as we should, to the anchor of Faith. Hume. People clung to it long ago; but many lost their grasp, benumbed by holding too tightly. The church of Scotland brings close together the objects of veneration and abhorrence. The evil principle, or devil, was, in my opinion, hardly Oworth the expense of his voyage from Persia; but, since you have him, you seem resolved to treat him nobly, hating him, defying him, and fearing him nevertheless. I would not however place him so very near the Creator, let his pretensions, from custom and precedent, be what they may. Home. He is always marring the fair works of our heavenly Father in this labour is his only proximity. Hume. You represent him as spurring men on to wickedness, from no other motive than the pleasure he experiences in rendering them miserable. Home. He has no other, excepting his inveterate spite and malice against God; from which indeed, to speak more properly, this desire originates. Hume. Has he lost his wits, as well as his station, that he fancies he can render God unhappy by being spiteful and malicious? You wrong him greatly; but you wrong God more. For in all Satan's attempts to seduce men into wickedness, he leaves everyone his free-will either to resist or yield; but the heavenly Father, as you would represent him, predestines the greater part of mankind to everlasting pains and torments, ante cedently to corruption or temptation. There is no impiety in asking you which is the worst: for impiety most certainly does not consist in setting men right on what is demonstrable in their religion, nor in proving to them that God is greater and better, than, with all their zeal for him, they have ever thought him. Home. This is to confound religion with philosophy, the source of nearly every evil in conduct and of every error in ethics. Hume. Religion is the eldest sister of Philosophy on whatever subjects they may differ, it is unbecoming in either to quarrel, and most so about their inheritance. Home. And have you nothing, sir, to say against the pomps and vanities of other worships, that you should assail the institutions of your native country? To fear God, I must suppose then, is less meritorious than to build steeples, and embroider surplices, and compose chants, and blow the bellows of organs. Hume. My dear sir, it is not because God is delighted with hymns and instruments of music, or prefers base to tenor or tenor to base, or Handel to Giles Halloway, that nations throng to celebrate in their churches his power and his beneficence it is not that Inigo Jones or Christopher Wren could erect to him a habitation more worthy of his presence than the humblest cottage on the loneliest moor: it is that the best feelings, the highest faculties, the greatest wealth, should be displayed and exercised in the patrimonial palace of every family united. For such are churches both to the rich and poor. Home. Your hand, David! Pardon me, sir; the sentiment carried me beyond custom; for it recalled to me the moments of blissful enthusiasm when I was writing my tragedy, and charmed me the more as coming from you. Hume. I explain the causes of things, and leave them. Home. Go on, sir, pray go on; for here we can walk together. Suppose that God never heard us, never cared for us: do those care for you or hear you whose exploits you celebrate at public dinners, our Wallaces and Bruces? yet are not we thence the braver, the more generous, the more grateful? Hume. I do not see clearly how the more grateful but I would not analyse by reducing to a cinder a lofty sentiment. Home. Surely we are grateful for the benefits our illustrious patriots have conferred on us and every act of gratitude is rewarded by reproduction. Justice is often pale and melancholy; but Gratitude, her daughter, is constantly in the flow of spirits and the bloom of loveliness. You call out to her when you fancy she is passing; you want her for your dependents, your domestics, your friends, your children. The ancients, as you know, habitually asked their gods and goddesses by which of their names it was most agreeable to them to be invoked: now let Gratitude be, what for the play of our fancy we have just imagined her, a sentient living power; I can not think of any name more likely to be pleasing to her, than Religion. The simplest breast often holds more reason in it than it knows of, and more than Philosophy looks for or suspects. We almost as frequently despise what is not despicable as we admire and reverence what is. No nation in the world was ever so enlightened, and in all parts and qualities so civilised, as the Scotch. Why would you shake or unsettle or disturb those principles which have rendered us peaceable and contented? Hume. I would not by any means. Home. Many of your writings have evidently such a tendency. Hume. Those of my writings to which you refer will be read by no nation: a few speculative men will take them; but none will be rendered more gloomy, more dissatisfied, or more unsocial by them. Rarely will you find one who, five minutes together, can fix his mind even on the surface: some new tune, some idle project, some light thought, some impracticable wish, will generally run, like the dazzling haze of summer on the dry heath, betwixt them and the reader. A bagpipe will swallow them up, a strathspey will dissipate them, or Romance with the death-rattle in her throat will drive them away into dark staircases and charnel-houses. You and I, in the course of our conversation, have been at variance, as much as discreet and honest men ought to be: each knows that the other thinks differently from him, yet each esteems the other. I can not but smile when I reflect that a few paces, a glass of wine, a cup of tea, conciliate those whom Wisdom would keep asunder. Home. No wonder you scoff emphatically, as you pronounce the word wisdom. Hume. If men would permit their minds like their children to associate freely together, if they would agree to meet one another with smiles and frankness, instead of suspicion and defiance, the common stock of intelligence and of happiness would be centupled. Probably those two men who hate each other most, and whose best husbandry is to sow burs and thistles in each other's path, would, if they had ever met and conversed familiarly, have been ardent and inseparable friends. The minister who may order my book to be burnt to-morrow by the hangman, if I, by any accident, had been seated yesterday by his side at dinner, might perhaps in another fortnight recommend me to his master, for a man of such gravity and understanding as to be worthy of being a privy councillor, and might conduct me to the treasury-bench. |
