most odious of crimes in other countries, is not even a blemish there: the sign of the cross laid over the uniform heals it perfectly. Read over the list of marshals: which of them has not abandoned his benefactor? Which of them does not drink to the health of Louis from wine poured out to him by Napoleon? nothing but superstition could tolerate, nothing of his country or its deluder? Ingratitude, the but despotism could devise. In the country where an archbishop is superior in rank to a general, a bishop to a colonel, things have not yet found their just proportions nor their full and final settlement. The poison may have evaporated or have been poured out, but the vessel is darkened by the dregs and crust. Enormity of absurdity and abuse! That the inmates of college and cloister, whose best learning are the actions of the just and brave, should for possessing this knowledge of them, take precedency of those whose actions in the field have been as brave, whose decisions in the courts of judicature have been as just. Baños. We truly are less men than they! be it so! but why are we? Because we left one with his ear against a girl's lips at the confessional, another at play with St. Augustin, a third asleep in his innocence, and went forth against the invaders of our country, and brought back with us these scars marks of ignominy and reprobation! And now, it appears, they are to be over-scored by fresh ones. We may indeed avoid a war if we will adopt the ricketty children at the next door: if we will only build a house of peers we may live quietly in our own. A peerage I consider as the parkpaling of despotism, arranged to keep in creatures both tame and wild for diversion and luxury. Such instruments are to kings what poles are to rope-dancers, enabling them to play their tricks above the heads of the people with greater confidence and security. Alpuente. The wisest and most independent of English parliaments declared the thing useless; but Cromwell, when he seized the supreme power, thought it needful to resume such a support. If the opinion of his nation is now favourable to it, let us respect it: but let us also teach that nation to respect ours, always less biassed by private interests and less addicted to party. The principal gods of antiquity had each his favourite tree; and some nations too, the English for example, theirs, the oak. The Spaniard has rather the qualities of the cedar: patient of cold and heat, nourished on little, lofty and dark, unbending and incorruptible. Nothing should stand between the nation and chief magistrate: the laws alone should be checks a free people can acknowledge no other. In these religion is included, which indeed is the great law-head whence they emanate. It is written in the heart of every man: but it is often so badly spelt as to become a matter of contest, by the notaries who traffic in transcribing it. The French, ridiculous as it may appear, would be our teachers. Let us not envy them the facility with which they build up constitutions and pull them down again, with which they take oaths and counter-oaths, with which while they violate honesty they declaim on honour : let us only ask of them, who of their most applauded public men has not been both traitor and perjurer, who among them has not been the deserter Baños. Dignity without pride was formerly the characteristic of greatness: the revolution in morals is completed, and it is now pride without dignity. Alpuente. The republic gave commissions for robbery; the despot gives keys to secure it; so that every thief, issuing from the foul and slippery alleys of politics, is glad to creep under the ermine. Look again at those French marshals, whose heads are now peeping out from it in quest of fresh plunder: to which of them does not my remark apply, even of those whose palms and foreheads are the least deeply branded? Baños. France is powerful by the weakness of Spain, in some degree; and the elder branch of the Bourbons hath always had the means of inculcating this truth on the younger. "If your people are flourishing they will be strong; if they are strong they will be turbulent: the richer they are, the poorer will you be. Let them recover their rights, as they call them, and you will lose your mines and your chases." The most wretched nations make the most splendid kings, as the thinnest rags the most lustrous paper. Alpuente. England, I trust, will exert her influence and her authority: for she loses what France gains. Baños. There are two which you cannot trust at once; Experience and England. As the Catholic Church holds that faith is not to be kept with heretics, so does the policy of England hold that none is to be kept with nations. On this she hath acted of late universally, but most openly and scandalously in her promises to Sicily. In regard to Spain, she seems resolved to adopt the principles of the Holy Alliance; her king, it is said, has approved them, and has expressed his regret that the constitution did not permit him to enter into the confederacy; the first time, I believe, that a king of England has openly regretted the precautions imposed on him by the constitution which placed his family on the throne. If we should go further than we have done, if we should vote on proofs of treason that our king has abdicated his, will England condemn in us what in herself she glorifies? No, England will not condemn us, but her government will abandon us. Alpuente. Yet at this moment she could obtain from us more than her wars have given her. By the cession of a fortress, from which she derives no other advantage than the appointment of an old drowsy governor to about one hundred thousand crowns yearly, she might possess our African harbours, which would alone yield her the dominion both of the Atlantic and Mediterra nean she might also, by other compromises of what neither strengthens nor enriches her, be mistress of that American island which secures and provisions the others, and whence she would derive advantages beyond her calculation, in those dreadful conflicts which must decide hereafter whether the mother or the daughter shall be mistress of the seas. Baños. Spain once ruled them, England rules them now: Spain was as confident that her supremacy would be eternal as England now is. From the time that we adopted a French family and French principles we began to decay and it is in vain that purblind politicians seek the germs of our corruption in America. Let us, Alpuente, rather look to that country for regeneration : there the Spaniard shoots up again: there also we perhaps may lay our bones at last. Alpuente. Eighty years have thrown their burden upon mine: they are not worth the freight. I can still watch for my country: I can still mount guard. No voice is such an incentive to valour as the feeble voice of age; neither flag nor trumpet marshals it like a man of eighty stabbed on his threshold. LORD CHESTERFIELD AND LORD CHATHAM. Chesterfield. It is true, my lord, we have not always been of the same opinion, or, to use a better, truer, and more significant expression, of the same side in politics; yet I never heard a sentence from your lordship which I did not listen to/with attention. I understand that you have written some pieces of advice to a young relative: They are mentioned as being excellent: I wish I could have profited by them when I was composing mine on a similar occasion. have seen many natives of that country no less elegant in manners than the most accomplished of French gentlemen. Chesterfield. I look back with satisfaction to my residence among them. Chatham. My lord, you certainly would not have done it, even supposing they contained, which I am far from believing, any topics that could have escaped your penetrating view of manners and morals: for your lordship and I set out diversely from the threshold. Let us then rather hope that what we both have written, with an equally good intention, may produce its due effect; which indeed I am afraid may be almost as doubtful, if we consider how ineffectual were the cares and exhortations, and even the daily example and high renown, of the most zealous and prudent men, on the life and conduct of their children and disciples. We will however hope the best rather than fear the worst, and believe that there never was a right thing done or a wise one spoken in vain, although the fruit of them may not spring up in the place designated or at the time expected. It may be difficult, I fear indeed it is impossible, to give our young nobility the graces and the amenity of the French: therefore I would rather try to cultivate the virtues inherent in them than engraft such as are uncongenial with the stock. We have indeed some few among us who far excell in politeness the most polished of any other nation; but the generality are as far surpassed, not merely by one nation, but by almost all. There is in them an arrogance, a self-sufficiency, an exhibition of defiance, which turn away from them the attentions they would receive abroad. Hence they call insincere those who actually did attempt to endure them, but were unable to keep pace with their professions and intentions. Yet, my lord, I do not despair of your accomplishing what it would be hopeless to expect from any other. For, since you were viceroy of Ireland, I Chatham. Well may your lordship. Never since the conquest has Ireland passed so long a time in tranquillity and contentment. In this, my lord, you stand high above the highest of our kings and by those who are right-minded, and who judge of men by the good they do and the difficulty of doing it, you will be placed by future historians in an elevated rank among the rulers of mankind. Pardon me for to praise a great man in his presence is no slight presumption. Chesterfield. My lord! although I did not come to you for my reward, I receive it at your hands with humble gratitude, and may begin to think I have in part deserved it. And now, if I am not taking too much freedom in requesting it, be pleased to give me the outline of your plan for education. Chatham. Willingly, my lord: but since a greater man has laid down a more comprehensive one, containing all I could bring forward, would it not be preferable to consult it? I differ in nothing from Locke, unless it be that I would recommend the lighter as well as the graver part of the ancient classics, and the constant practice of imitating them in early youth. This is no change in the system, and no larger an addition than a woodbine to a sacred grove. Chesterfield. I do not admire Mr. Locke. Chatham. Nor I: he is too simply grand for admiration: I contemplate and revere him. Equally deep and clear, he is both philosophically and grammatically one among the most elegant of English writers. Chesterfield. If I expressed by any motion of limb or feature my surprise at this remark, your lordship I hope will pardon me a slight and involuntary transgression of my own precept. I must entreat you, before we move a step farther in our inquiry, to inform me whether I am really to consider him so exquisite in style. Chatham. Your lordship is capable of forming an opinion on this point, certainly no less correct | in whose writings one might expect it, we find it than mine. Chesterfield. Pray assist me. abundantly in Bacon, not sparingly in Hobbes; the next to him in range of inquiry and potency Chesterfield. I should look upon it as upon a wonder, not to say a miracle: Newton, like Barrow, had no feeling or respect for poetry. Chatham. Education and grammar are surely of intellect. And what would you think, my lord, the two driest of subjects on which a conversa- if you discovered in Newton a sentence in the tion can turn yet, if the ground is not promis-spirit of Shakspeare? cuously sown, if what ought to be clear is not covered, if what ought to be covered is not bare, and above all if the plants are choice ones, we may spend a few moments on it not unpleasantly. It appears then to me, that elegance in prose composition is mainly this: a just admission of topics and of words; neither too many nor too few of either; enough of sweetness in the sound to induce us to enter and sit still; enough of illustration and reflection to change the posture of our minds when they would tire; and enough of sound matter in the complex to repay us for our attendance. I could perhaps be more logical in my definition, and more concise; but am I at all erroneous? Chesterfield. I see not that you are. Chatham. My ear is well satisfied with Locke: I find nothing idle or redundant in him and I admire him particularly for his selection of plain and proper words. This I apprehend to be the prime essential of that eloquence which appeals solely to the reasoning faculties. Chesterfield. But in the opinion of you graver men, would not some of his principles lead too far? Chatham. The danger is that few will be led by them far enough: most who begin with him stop short, and, pretending to find pebbles in their shoes, throw themselves down and complain of their guide. Chesterfield. What then can be the reason why Plato, so much less intelligible, is so much more quoted and applauded? Chatham. His words are these:-"I don't know what I may seem to the world; but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of Truth lay all undiscovered before me." Chesterfield. Surely Nature, who had given him the volumes of her greater mysteries to unseal ; who had bent over him and taken his hand, and taught him to decipher the characters of her sacred language; who had lifted up her veil before him higher than ever yet for mortal, that she might impress her features and her fondness on his heart; threw it back wholly at these words, and gazed upon him with as much admiration as ever he had gazed with upon her. Plato, I see from the Latin version, lies open on the table: the paragraphs marked with pencil, I presume, are fine passages. Chatham. I have noted those only which appeared reprehensible, and chiefly where he is disingenuous and malicious. Chesterfield. They indeed ought to be the most remarkable in the works of a philosopher. If the malice is against those who are thought greater or as great, it goes toward the demonstration that they are so if on the contrary the objects of it are inferior to himself, he can not take them up without raising them: unworthy of notice, they are more unworthy of passion. Surely no philosopher would turn to an opposite conclusion from that which in the commencement he had designed to prove; as here he must do. Chatham. The difficulties we never try are no difficulties to us. They who are upon the summit of a mountain know in some measure its altitude, by comparing it with many objects around; but they who stand at the bottom and never mounted it, can compare it with few only, and with those imperfectly. Until a short time ago I could have conversed more fluently about Plato than I can at present: I had read all the titles to the dialogues and several scraps of commentary: these I have now forgotten, and am indebted to long attacks of the gout for what I have acquired instead. Chesterfield. A too severe schoolmaster! I hope commentator of other laws. he allows a long vacation. Chatham. Severe he is indeed : yet, although he sets no example of regularity, he exacts few observances and teaches many lessons. Without him I should have had less patience, less reading, less reflection, less leisure; in short, less of everything but of sleep. Chesterfield. Locke, from a deficiency of fancy, is not likely to attract so many listeners as Plato. Chatham. And yet occasionally his language is both metaphorical and rich in images. In fact, all our great philosophers have this property, in a wonderful degree. Not to speak of the devotional, Chatham. He avoids an open hostility to Democritus and Xenophon and Aristoteles; yet I have detected him in more than one dark passage, with a dagger in his hand and a bitter sneer on his countenance. I know not whether it has been observed before that these words are aimed at the latter, the citizen of another state and the ἔλαβεν εἰδέναι, αλλ ̓ ἡμεῖς σοι ἱκανοὶ ἦμεν καὶ ἡ ἡμεΟὐδ ̓ ἐπιθυμία σε ἄλλης πόλεως οὐδ ̓ ἄλλων νόμων τέρα πόλις. The compliment is more injurious to Socrates, for whom it was intended, than the insinuation to Aristoteles. But the prime object of his hatred, open here and undissembled, is Prodicus; author of the beautiful allegory in which Pleasure and Virtue offer themselves to the choice of Hercules. In one place he mentions him with Polus and many others: the least difficult and least clever of malignant expressions, where genius is the sub ject of calumny and invective. One hardly could imagine that he had the assurance and effrontery to call Epicharmus the chief of comic writers, before a people who that very day perhaps had been at a comedy of Aristophanes. The talent of Epicharmus lay in puns and ribaldry, and Hiero punished him for immodest conversation. Chesterfield. I have read somewhere that, when Plato was young, it was predicted of him, from his satirical vein, that he would become in time a substitute for Archilochus. Chatham. Athenæus, I think, has recorded it. I do not find so much wit as I expected; and, to speak plainly, his wit is the most tiresome and dull part of him; for who can endure a long series of conversations full of questions to entrap a sophist? Why not lead us to the trap at once by some unexpected turn? Yet Plato ought to be more powerful in wit than in argument, for, it is evident, he labours at it more. There is more applicable good-sense, more delicate wit, more urbanity, more gracefulness, in a single paper of the Spectator, than in six or eight among the minor of these dialogues; in all which, not excepting the Phado, I was disappointed. Chesterfield. The language is said to be masterly and sonorous. Chatham. Αὐτὸ καθ ̓ αὑτὸ ὡσαύτως κατὰ ταῦτα ἔχει, καί ουδέποτε οὐδαμῶς ἀλλοίωσιν οὐδέμιαν ἐνδέXETAI. And again are several of the like sounds and words. Σμικρα φυσις ουδεν μεγα ουδεποτε ουτε ιδιώτην ούτε πολιν δρᾶ. Chesterfield. Come, come, my lord; do not attempt to persuade me that an old woman's charm to cure a corn or remove a wart, or a gypsy-girl's to catch a sixpence, is Plato's Greek. Chatham. Look yourself. Chesterfield. I have forgotten the characters pretty nearly faith! they appear to me, from what I can pick up, to correspond with the sounds you gave them. Jupiter, it is said by the ancients, would have spoken no other language than Plato's. If ever Jupiter uttered such sounds as these, it could be only when he was crossing the Hellespont. Chatham. What do you think of this jingle? Πρῶτον εὐλαβηθῶμέν τι πάθος μὴ παθῶμεν. Chesterfield. I really thought that his language was harmonious to the last degree. Chatham. Generally it is so his language is the best of him. We moderns are still children in our tongues, at least we English. For my own part, I always spoke in parliament what I considered the most effectual to persuade my hearers, without a care or a thought touching the structure of my sentences: but knowing that the ancient orators and writers laid the first foundation of their glory upon syllables, I was surprised to find no fewer than nine short ones together in this eloquent author, &vdpas àπodedoкiμakóтES.+ The accents which were guides to them, although unwritten, may have taken off somewhat from this peculiarity, and may have been a sort of support to the feebleness of the sound. No modern language can admit the concourse of so many such; and the Latin was so inadequate to the supply of them, that it produced, I believe, but one galliambic in the times of its strength and fertility; which poem required them in greater numbers and closer together than any other, but did not receive nine conjointly. Chesterfield. Cicero was himself a trifler in cadences, and whoever thinks much about them will become so, if indeed the very thought when it enters is not trifling. Chatham. I am not sure that it is; for an orderly and sweet sentence, by gaining our ear, conciliates our affections; and the voice of a beggar has often more effect upon us than his distress. Your mention of Cicero on this occasion, reminds me of his O fortunatam natam me consule Romam. Playful as he was in his vanity, I do not believe the verse is his but Plato wrote àλλà Ħap' avтOÙS A₺ TOÙS deiv oûs ovтas тaûta, &c. We may be too fastidious and fantastic in sounds and syllables; but a frequent recurrence of the same is offensive to the ear, and particularly in poetry. Nevertheless, he who appears to have had a more delicate one than almost any of the moderns, and indeed whose latinity surpasses in elegance that of any of the Romans themselves, excepting Cicero and Caesar, was persuaded that Tibullus was fond and studious of syllabic repetitions. It appears that this poet, says Muretus, thought it elegant to continue them, and that such as the following did not happen by accident, but were produced by application and design. "Me mea. Ipse seram. Multa tabella. Sicca canis." Poma manu. Chesterfield. His Latin may be elaborate and elegant, but he, like nearly all the best Latinists, was conceited, fantastical, and weakly-minded. And now I remember having been present at a discussion between two scholars on his merits in style. It was doubted whether he or Bembo is the most accurate: the beauties and faults of each were brought forward: and the sentence was given in favour of Bembo, for two or three reasons, of which the only one I can recollect is, that Muretus wrote sinceritas, never doubting its Latinity, whereas Bembo, when he employed it, said "Si verbo uti liceat." Chatham. I should never have suspected that a word so requisite was wanting to the Latin tongue. Let me turn over my scrap of paper, which however would best perhaps have kept its place between the leaves here. Chesterfield. No, my lord, if you thought anything worth noticing and writing down, surely I may well think it worth knowing. Chatham. First, then, I find a mark of admiration, that this most learned and eloquent man, Ciceronian as he was and enraptured by Virgil, should not have remarked in him or Cicero what he notices as a peculiarity in Tibullus. "Sin in processu. Sin in sua. Quin intra portas. Comprendere refert. Ore referret. Quærere regna. Crines effusa sacerdos. A fratre recepi. Surgere | something to exercise the ingenuity. I have seen regna. Ære renidenti. Servare recursus. Sub persons who could employ a moment or two unreluctantly in straightening a crooked nail: with about the same labour and interest I would hammer upon an inexact thought. Here is one which I wonder that Cicero, in mentioning the dialogue, has failed to remark. Our philosopher divides rhetoric into the true and the false; as if any part of a definition or description were to be founded on the defects of what is defined or described. Rhetoric may be turned to good or bad purposes; but this is no proof or indication that it must be divided into good and bad. The use of a thing is not the thing itself; how then is the abuse? aure reliquit. Mittêre relictâ. Stringere remos. Ολοι τρώϊοι ἵπποι ἐπιςάμενοι πεδίοιο. II. E. In the former you have the same six times in six feet; in the latter thrice in three. Yet the sound of neither verse is so unpleasant as that of Horace, where the repetition comes but once: "Dirus per urbes Afer it Italas." We have slided into Cicero's language from Plato's. As for his wit, what think you of this? "I am ready, O Socrates, to give myself up to the strangers, to flay me worse than they flay me now, if the flaying ends not in a hide, as that of Marsyas did, but in virtue." Or what think you of a project to make a doll and dedicate it to Memory? The stuff that follows is worse still. Toward the end of the volume, in the Gorgias, Polus says to Socrates, "Do not you see Archeläus, son of Perdiccas, reigning over the Macedonians?" to which Socrates replies, "If I do not see him, I hear of him." The wit of Plato's dialogues is altogether of a single kind, and of that which in a continuance is the least welcome. For irony is akin to cavil; and cavil, as the best wit is either good-natured or wears the appearance of good-nature, is nearly its antipode. Plato has neither the grace of Xenophon nor the gravity of Cicero, who tempers it admirably with urbanity and facetiousness. Although he is most celebrated for imagination, and for an eloquence highly poetical, there are incomparably more, both in quantity and quality, of poetical thoughts and images, in Bacon than in Plato. The language of Plato is vastly more sonorous: he is called, and nobody questions that he is, eloquent but there is no eloquence which does not agitate the soul: he never does. Demosthenes effects it by strong appeals, and through the reason. Rousseau effects it sometimes in despite of the reason, and by uniting the Graces with the Passions. We often say we hate Rousseau: but how often does the lover say (or wish to say) he hates the beloved! In fact, the moral part of Rousseau was odious, and much of the intellectual was perverse and depraved: there was, however, a noble instrument of harmony, soundIn the beginning of the same dialogue, Gorgias, ing along high and intricately vaulted arches. at the request of Socrates to be brief, assents to The characteristic of Plato is, the dexterity and his proposition twice, by using the monosyllable: ease with which he supports and shifts an arguwhereupon Socrates says, "I admire your replies, ment, and exhibits it in all its phases. NeverGorgias they are as short as they can be." If theless, a series of interrogations, long as he the same monosyllable had been the answer to draws them out for this purpose, would weary me several questions in succession, and if those ques- in one dialogue: he continues them in twenty, tions had been complicated and intricate, then, with people of the same description, on the same and then only, the remark had been well-placed. subjects. You remember, my lord, the derivations made by Swift, of Agamemnon, Ajax, Achilles, Andromache, and other names of heroes and heroines. These are hardly more absurd and ridiculous than almost all made by Plato and attributed with great complacency to Socrates, of the same and similar; and are much less literal. It is incredible how erroneous were the most learned, both among the Greeks and Romans, on the origin of words. Chesterfield. I have heard it reported that our own lexicographers are subject, in some degree, to the same animadversion: but I can judge more adequately of bad reasoning or bad wit. Chatham. A little of the latter tires and nauseates, while in the former there is generally Chesterfield. It is rather an idle thing for an old gentleman in a purple robe to be sticking pins in every chair on which a sophist is likely to sit down; and rather a tiresome and cheerless one to follow and stand by him, day after day in the cold, laying gins for tom-tits. Chatham. In general, I own, he did so: but both he and Aristoteles turned occasionally their irony (of which indeed the latter had little) where irony is best employed: against false piety, against that which would be the substitute and not the support of morality. When a high sound issues from a high soul, our ears and hearts are opened to it; otherwise we let "the wind blow where it listeth." He jokes on grave subjects, and such as he himself thinks to be grave; and he is grave |
