instead of questioning and quibbling, had occupied his time in teaching the uses and offices of philosophy? There is as wide a difference between the imputed and the real character of this man, as there is between him who first discovered corn growing, and him who first instructed us how to grind and cleanse and prepare it for our sustenWe are ashamed to give a false character of a slave, and not at all to give a falser of our betters. In this predicament stands Plato, regarding his master, his scholars, and his opponents. ance. Eubulides. Before him Pythagoras and Democritus and, earlier still, Pherecydes, taught important truths, and, what is rarer, separated them from pernicious falsehoods. Pythagoras, who preceded Plato in Egypt, and from whom many of his fancies are taken, must have been a true lover of wisdom, to have travelled so far into countries known hardly by name in Greece. Demosthenes. Perhaps he sought some congenial soul; for if two great men are existing at the extremities of the earth, they will seek each other. Eubulides. Their greatness then must be of a different form and texture from what mankind hath usually admired. Greatness, as we daily see it, is unsociable. was not inhuman in disposition or weak in intellect? Either of these qualities may subvert a state, exposing it first to many sufferings. In our Athenian constitution, if we are weakly or indiscreetly governed, or capriciously, which hardly can happen, the mischief is transitory and reparable: one year closes it: and the people, both for its satisfaction and its admonition, sees that no corruption, no transgression, in its magistrates, is unregarded or unchastised. This of all advantages is the greatest, the most corroborative of power, the most tutelary of morals. I know that there are many in Thrace, and some in Sicily, who would recall my wanderings with perfect good-humour and complacency. Demosthenes has not lived, has not reasoned, has not agitated his soul, for these he leaves them in the quiet possession of all their moulten arguments, and in the persuasive hope of all their bright reversions. Pythagoras could have had little or no influence on such men he raised up higher, who kept them down. It is easier to make an impression upon sand than upon marble: but it is easier to make a just one upon marble than upon sand. Uncivilised as were the Gauls, he with his moderation and prudence hath softened the ferocity of their religion, and hath made it so contradictory and inconsistent, that the first of them who reasons Demosthenes. The perfect loves what generates will subvert it. He did not say, "You shall no it, what proceeds from it, what partakes its longer sacrifice your fellow-creatures:" he said, essence. If you have formed an idea of greatness," sacrifice the criminal." Other nations do the O Eubulides, which corresponds not with this description, efface it and cast it out. Pythagoras adapted his institutions to the people he would enlighten and direct. What portion of the world was ever so happy, so peaceable, so well-governed, as the cities of Lower Italy. While they retained his manners they were free and powerful: some have since declined, others are declining, and perhaps at a future and not a distant time they may yield themselves up to despotism. In a few Demosthenes. Religion, when it is intended for ages more, those flourishing towns, those inex- the uncivilised, must contain things marvellous, pugnable citadels, those temples which you might things quite absurd to the wiser. But I discover deem eternal, will be hunted for in their wilder- no absurdity in making men gentler and kinder; nesses like the boars and stags. Already there and I would rather worship an onion or a crust of are philosophers who would remedy what they bread, than a God who requires me to immolate call popular commotions by hereditary despotism, an ox or kid to appease him. The idea, not of and who think it as natural and reasonable as having lost her daughter, but of having lost her that children who cry should be compelled to by a sacrifice, fixed the dagger in the grasp of sleep and there likewise are honest citizens who, Clytemnestra. Let us observe, O Eubulides, the when they have chewed their fig and swallowed religion of our country, be it what it may, unless it, say, "yes, 'twere well." What a eulogy on the it command us to be cruel or unjust. In religion, human understanding! to assert that it is danger- if we are right, we do not know we are; if we are ous to choose a succession of administrators from wrong, we would not. Above all, let us do the wisest of mankind, and advisable to derive it nothing and say nothing which may abolish or from the weakest! There have been free Greeks diminish in the hearts of the vulgar the sentiments within our memory who would have entered into of love and fear on the contrary, let us peralliance with the most iniquitous and most inso-petually give them fresh excitement and activity, lent of usurpers, Alexander of Pherai, a territory by baring them to the heavens. On the modifiin which Thebe, who murdered her husband, is cations of love it is unnecessary to expatiate; but praised above others of both sexes. O Juno! I am aware that you may demand of me what may such marriages be frequent in such countries! Look at history: where do you find in continuation three hereditary kings, of whom one at least : same: often wantonly, always vindictively: the Gauls appease by it, as they imagine, both society and the Gods. He did not say, "After a certain time even this outrage on Nature must cease: but he said, "We have souls which pass into other creatures." A belief in the transmigration of souls would abolish by degrees our inhumanity. Eubulides. But what absurdity! excitement is required to fear. Among its modifications or dependencies are veneration and obedience, against the weakening of which we ought to provide, particularly in what relates to calmer minds what we have not the patience to our magisterial and military chiefs. investigate.* Eubulides. I do not conceive that Pythagoras hath left behind him in Gaul, unless at Massilia, the remembrance of his doctrines or of his name. Demosthenes. We hear little of the Gauls. It appears however that they have not forgotten the wisdom or the services of Pythagoras. The man of Samos was to some extent their teacher. It is remarkable that they should have preserved the appellation. He was too prudent, I suspect, to trust himself many paces beyond the newly built walls of Massilia; for the ignorant and barbarous priests would be loth to pardon him the crime of withdrawing a dependent in a proselyte. Eubulides. The Druids, the most ferocious and ignorant of all the priests our countrymen have anywhere discovered, fell back farther into their woods and wilderness at seeing the white stones of the citadel rise higher than their altars. Even these rude altars were not of their construction, but were the work of a much earlier race. The Phocæans and other Ionians were sufficiently well versed in policy to leave the natives unmolested in their religion. Already does that lively and imitative people prefer a worship in which the song and the dance and geniality warm the blood, to one which exacts it in the windy downs and gloomy woodlands, and spills it on the channeled stone and catches it dropping from the suspended wicker. Young men crowned with flowers are likelier to be objects of aversion to the ancient priests than to the most timorous and shy of their disciples. The religion of blood, like the beasts of prey, will continue to trend northward. Worshippers of Apollo, and followers of Bromius and the nymphs, would perish in the sunless oak forests; and the Druid has no inheritance in the country of the vine. But it becomes the quiet religion and placid wisdom of the Greeks, to leave inviolate all the institutions of the circumjacent people, and especially of those who wish to live among them. By degrees they will acknowledge a superiority which they could contend against were it asserted. Eubulides. Plato hath not mentioned him. Demosthenes. O greatness! what art thou, and where is thy foundation! I speak not, Eubulides, of that which the vulgar call greatness, a phantom stalking forward from a salt-marsh in Boeotia, or from a crevice in some rock of Sunion or of Taxos; + but the highest, the most illustrious, the most solid among men, what is it! Philosophy gives us arms against others, not against ourselves, not against those domestic traitors, those homestead incendiaries, the malignant passions; arms that are brilliant on the exercise-ground, but brittle in the fight, when the most dangerous of enemies is pressing us. Early love was never so jealous in anyone as philosophy in Plato. He resembles his own idea of God, whose pleasure in the solitudes of eternity is the contemplation of himself. Eubulides. Jealousy is not quite excluded from the school opposite. Aristoteles, it has been suggested to me, when he remarks that by the elongation of the last member in a sentence a dignity is added to composition, looked toward you, who, as you have heard the rhetoricians say, are sometimes inattentive or indifferent to nobility of expression. Demosthenes. When Aristoteles gives an opinion upon eloquence I listen with earnestness and respect: so wise a man can say nothing inconsiderately. His own style on every occasion is exactly what it should be: his sentences, in which there are no cracks or inequalities, have always their proper tone: for whatever is rightly said, sounds rightly. Ought I to speak nobly, as you call it, of base matters and base men? ought my pauses to be invariably the same? would Aristoteles wish that a coat of mail should be as flowing as his gown? Let peace be perfect peace, war decisive war: but let Eloquence move upon earth with all the facilities of change that belong to the Gods themselves; only let her never be idle, never be vain, never be ostentatious; for these are indications of debility. We, who have habituated ourselves Demosthenes. Pythagoras is said to have been from early youth to the composition of sonorous vigorous in enforcing his doctrines. periods, know that it requires more skill to finger Eubulides. In his school; not beyond. They and stop our instrument than to blow it. When are such indeed as we would little wish to see we have gained over the ear to our party, we have established in a free state, but none ever were other work to do, and sterner and rougher. Then better adapted to prepare the road for civilisation. comes forward action, not unaccompanied by veheWe find it difficult to believe in the metempsy-mence. Pericles, you have heard, used none, but chosis. In fact, as other things grow easy, belief kept his arm wrapped up within his vest. Pericles is apt to grow difficult. Demosthenes. Where there is mysticism we may pause and listen; where there is argument we may contend and reply. Democritus, whom you often mention, certainly no mystic, often contradicts our senses. He tells us that colours have no colour: but his arguments are so strong, his language so clear, his pretensions so modest and becoming, I place more confidence in him than in others: future philosophers may demonstrate to was in the enjoyment of that power which his virtues and his abilities well deserved. If he had carried in his bosom the fire that burns in mine, he would have kept his hand outside. By the contemplation of men like me, Aristoteles is what he is; and, instead of undervaluing, I love him posed by Democritus, the loss of whose voluminous works * Newton has elucidated the theory of colours first prois the greatest that Philosophy has sustained. ↑ Taxos was rich in silver-mines. the better for it. Do we not see with greater | shall imagine they have been singing to the drum partiality and fondness those who have been and horn, and dancing to dithyrambics. The educated and fed upon our farms, than those who dustbox of metaphysics shall be emptied no more come from Orchomenos or Mantinea? If he were from the schoolroom into the council. now among us in Athens, what would he think of two or three haranguers, who deal forth metaphysics by the pailful in their addresses to the people? Eubulides. I heard one, a little time since, who believed he was doing it, ignorant that the business of metaphysics is rather to analyse than to involve. He avoided plain matter, he rejected idiom; he filtered the language of the people and made them drink through a sieve. Demosthenes. What an admirable definition have you given, unintentionally, of the worst public speaker possible, and, I will add with equal confidence, of the worst writer. If I send to Hymettos for a hare, I expect to distinguish it at dinner by its flavour as readily as before dinner by its ears and feet. The people you describe to me soak out all the juices of our dialect. Nothing is so amusing to me as to hear them talk on eloquence. No disciple at the footstool is so silent and ductile as I am at the lessons I receive; none attends with such composure, none departs with such hilarity. I have been careful to retain as much idiom as I could, often at the peril of being called ordinary and vulgar. Nations in a state of decay lose their idiom, which loss is always precursory to that of freedom. What your father and your grandfather used as an elegance in conversation, is now abandoned to the populace, and every day we miss a little of our own, and collect a little from strangers this prepares us for a more intimate union with them, in which we merge at last altogether. Every good writer has much idiom; it is the life and spirit of language; and none such ever entertained a fear or apprehension that strength and sublimity were to be lowered and weakened by it. Speaking to the people, I use the people's phraseology: I temper my metal according to the uses I intend it for. In fact no language is very weak in its natural course, until it runs too far; and then the poorest and the richest are ineffectual equally. The habitude of pleasing by flattery makes a language soft; the fear of offending by truth makes it circuitous and conventional. Free governments, where such necessity can not exist, will always produce true eloquence. Eubulides. We have in Athens young orators from the schools, who inform us that no determinate and masculine peculiarities of manner should appear in public: they would dance without displaying their muscles, they would sing without discomposing their lips. Demosthenes. I will drag them, so help me Jupiter! back again to their fathers and mothers: I will grasp their wrists so tightly, the most perverse of them shall not break away from me. Tempestuous times are coming. Another month or two at farthest, and I will throw such animation into their features and their gestures, you I suspect I have heard the chatterer you mentioned. The other day in the market-place, I saw a vulgar and shuffling man lifted on a honeybarrel by some grocers and slave-merchants, and the crowd was so dense around me I could not walk away. A fresh-looking citizen, next me, nodded and winked in my face at the close of every sentence. Dissembling as well as I could my impatience at his importunity, "Friend," said I, "do believe me, I understand not a syllable of the discourse." "Ah Demosthenes!" whispered he "your time is fairly gone by: we have orators now whom even you, with all your acuteness and capacity, cannot comprehend." "Whom will they convince?" said I. "Convince!" cried my narrator; "who has ever wished to be persuaded against the grain in any matter of importance or utility? A child, if you tell him a horrible or a pathetic story, is anxious to be persuaded it is true; men and women, if you tell them one injurious to the respectability of a neighbour. Desire of persuasion rests and dies here. We listen to those whom we know to be of the same opinion as ourselves, and we call them wise for being of it; but we avoid such as differ from us; we pronounce them rash before we have heard them, and still more afterward, lest we should be thought at any time to have erred. We come already convinced : we want surprise, as at our theatres; astonishment, as at the mysteries of Eleusis." "But what astonishes, what surprises you ?" "To hear an Athenian talk two hours together, hold us silent and immovable as the figures of Hermes before our doors, and find not a single one among us that can carry home with him a thought or an expression." "Thou art right," I exclaimed; "he is greater than Triptolemos; he not only gives you a plentiful meal out of chaff and husks, but he persuades you that it is a savoury repast.” 66 By Jupiter!" swore aloud my friend," he persuades us no such thing: but everyone is ashamed of being the first to acknowledge, that he never was master of a particle out of what he had listened to and applauded." I had the curiosity to inquire who the speaker was. "What! do not you know Anædestatos?" said he, making a mark of interrogation upon my ribs, with a sharper elbow than from his countenance I could have imagined had belonged to him; "the clever Anædestatos, who came into notice as a youth by the celebration in verse of a pebble at the bottom of the Ilyssos. He forthwith was presented to Anytos, who experienced a hearty pleasure in seducing him away from his guardians. Anytos on his deathbed (for the Gods allowed him one) recommended the young Anædestatos warmly to his friends: such men have always many, and those the powerful. Fortunate had it been for our country if he had pilfered only the verses he pronounced. His new patrons connived at his withdrawing from the treasury no less than six hundred talents." "Impossible! six hundred talents are sufficient for the annual stipend of all our civil magistrates, from the highest to the lowest, and of all the generals in our republic and its dependencies." sybulos. This, I know not by what oversight, is legible among the accounts." Indignant at what I heard, I threatened to call him before the people. "Let him alone," said slowly in an undervoice my prudent friend: "he has those about him who will swear, and adduce the proofs, that you are holding a traitorous correspondence with Philip or Artaxerxes." I began to gaze in indignation on his florid and calm countenance; he winked again, again accosted me with his elbow, and withdrew. "It was before you came forward into public life, O Demosthenes! but my father can prove the exactness of my statement. The last little sip from the reservoir was seventy talents* for a voyage to Lesbos, and a residence there of about three months, to settle the value of forty skins of destatos. wine, owing to the Lesbians in the time of Thra Eubulides. Happy Athenians! who have so many great men of so many kinds, peculiar to yourselves, and can make one even out of Anæ BONAPARTE AND THE PRESIDENT OF THE SENATE. President. Sire, while the car of Victory is awhile suspended in its course, and mothers are embracing those pledges of affection, which a frightful Revolution hath spared to their maternity, happy France is devising, under the auspices of her immortal hero, new pangs and afflictions for the tyrants of the ocean. The radiant star that shone upon your Majesty's nativity, throws a lustre that eclipses the polar. It embellishes our soil, and renders it fruitful in all those resources of industry which will for ever keep it independent of distant and less happy climates. The beet-root, indigenous plant, satisfied all the wishes of a nation at once the most elegant and luxurious. "Frenchmen, I am contented with you," said her tutelary Genius: " yes, your Majesty said it." Suddenly a thousand voices cry, "Let us make fresh sacrifices: we have wished; it is not enough; we will do more." Ardent to fulfil their duties, and waiting but to be instructed how, the brave youth, and those whose grey hairs are so honourable, implore that paternal wisdom which never will cease to watch over them, that they may receive those august commands which will accomplish their destinies. The enemy no longer pollutes our soil: France recovers her attitude. Your Majesty wishes no new provinces: greater triumphs, wider dominion, to the successor of Charlemagne and of Trajan! That mighty mind, to bless a beloved and grateful people, shall make the animal kingdom confederate with the vegetable. Such are his conquests: the only ones that remain for him to achieve. From the calm of their retreats the sages of France step forth and behold the decree which your Majesty had already uttered at the bottom of their hearts. Bonaparte. Read it, and make haste. President. To put our implacable enemies to confusion, to drive proud Albion to despair, to abolish the feudal system, to wither for ever the * 14000 pounds. iron arm of despotism, and to produce, or rather to place within the reach of all your Majesty's subjects, those luxuries which a long war, excited by the cupidity of the monopolising islanders, seemed to have interdicted to our policy, and which our discretion taught us manfully to resign, it is proposed that every regiment in the French service be subjected to a mild and beneficent diabetes. Our chemists and physicians, ever labouring for the public good, have discovered that this disposition of the body, which if improperly managed might become a disease, is attended with the most useful results, and produces a large quantity of saccharine matter. The process was pointed out by Nature herself in the person of your Majesty, and of several of the Grand Dignitaries of the Empire, when the barbarians of the North flew from their capital, which they reduced to ashes, and threw themselves in consternation on the Vistula, the Oder, and the Elbe, to the very shores of the Cimbrian Chersonese. Bonaparte. Strike out that foolery. Now start again. President. I therefore have the honour of submitting to your Majesty, that the sugar, the produce of this simple operation, be made subsidiary to that of the beet-root in the proportion of onethird; and that this lively and long-desired sugar, so salutary to man from its prior relationship with his constituent principles, and so eager for its reunion, be the only sugar used in the French empire, and among the good and faithful allies of your Majesty: and further, that after the expiration of fourteen years, every Power in amity with France may fabricate it within its own territory. His Majesty the Emperor of the French, King of Italy, Protector of the confederation of the Rhine, and Mediator of Switzerland, was graciously pleased to make the following reply. May it please your Majesty to dictate one. Bonaparte. Write. 'Sir, president of my senate, I am content with you. My minister of the interior shall be charged and tearing the proud to pieces. No longer shall to carry your proposition into effect.' And now you are here, you may lay your heads together and prepare an address to me on the birth of my son, the King of Rome. President! why do you lift up your shoulders? President. May it please your Imperial Majesty, the glorious prince, whom France and the whole world sighs for, is unborn. Bonaparte. What the devil is that to you? He will be born within a day or two, or at most a week, and I may not have leisure or inclination to send after you again. Write down my words. 'The star which, on the day of my birth, promised me a son, accomplishes its promise. The King of Rome descends on earth, already the defender of monarchy and religion.' monopoly, with Feodality in her train . . Bonaparte. Stop there: alter that reverse the order: Feodality comes first. President. Contract and poison the sources of existence. The labourer shall prune his vine unmolested in the happy plains of Cashemir: and Beauty, the child of France, shall deign to accept her graceful shawl, earnest of gratitude and goodwill. The Georgians and Circassians, now groaning under the odious yoke of England. Bonaparte. Of Russia, I think, or Turkey. But let that pass: my good people will never find it out. President. Shall throw it off their necks at the approach of the first French soldier: and Phasis and Choäspes and Liffy shall roll their golden sands to the feet of their deliverer. To accomplish in one campaign these high destinies, a son, worthy of his august genitor, in happy hour is born to your Majesty. Egypt, from whom your Have you written, monsieur, what follows? President. Yes, Sir; although imperfectly. France, to commemorate the event, will aggra-star removed you, Sire, lies desolate. The palace vate on some future day the grief and malignity of proud Albion, seizing in her despite the noblest monument she left behind in Egypt. That pyramid from which forty ages spoke to your Majesty the purest French, is destined to stand at the bottom of your staircase at the Tuileries, and to bear on its summit the plumed hat of your adorable infant. Bonaparte. The sentiment is truly French. President. Memnon shall resound the name to his satellite the Odeon. Bonaparte. Bravo! of the Pharaohs, the Alexanders, and the Ptole mies, flew open in vain at the distant sound of your foot. Never more shall it rejoice in your presence: but your legions, under their young Alcides, already invincible by his father's name, shall carry him thither on their conglomerated arms, to solemnise the banquet of Victory. Resound, O Memnon! thy prelude to that morning-star, to which the brightened countenances of all nations are uplifted. Take thy sta tion, O Pyramid! at the bottom of a staircase which a hundred kings have mounted and de President. And every department of the empire scended, but only one great man. shall respond to the annunciation. Bonaparte. Sounding and sensible: but you have fallen from Memnon. Make a dash again at England. President. Too long has France permitted the frightful chariot of Juggernaut, driven by relentless Albion, to crush the children of India. Her eagle has one more flight, only one more, to make. From the summit of that pyramid she shall cover with her wing the Thames, the Hydaspes, the Indus, and the Ganges, protecting the innocent Bonaparte. President! take some lemonade. An instructive volume might be composed of the speeches made to Bonaparte and Louis XVIII. The adulation here falls short of that presented to Charles X. by M. le comte "Tous les de Sèze, president of the Court of Cassation. Bourbons se ressemblent : ils sont tous de dignes descendans THE ABBÉ DELILLE AND WALTER LANDOR. THE Abbé Delille was the happiest of creatures, when he could weep over the charms of innocence and the country, in some crowded and fashionable circle at Paris. We embraced most pathetically on our first meeting there, as if the one were condemned to quit the earth, the other to live upon it. Delille. You are reported to have said that descriptive poetry has all the merits of a handkerchief that smells of roses? Landor. This, if I said it, is among the things which are neither false enough nor true enough to be displeasing. But the Abbé Delille has merits of his own. To translate Milton well, is more laudable than originality in trifling matters; just as to transport an obelisk from Egypt, and to erect it in one of the squares, must be considered a greater labour than to build a new milliner's shop. Delille. Milton is indeed extremely difficult to translate; for, however noble and majestic, he is sometimes heavy, and often rough and unequal. Landor. Dear Abbé! porphyry is heavy, gold is heavier: Ossa and Olympus are rough and unequal: the steppes of Tartary, though high, are of uniform elevation: there is not a rock, nor a birch, nor a cytisus, nor an arbutus, upon them, great enough to shelter a new-dropt lamb. Level the Alps one with another, and where is their sublimity? Raise up the vale of Tempe to the downs above, and where are those sylvan creeks and har |
