CURIOSITIES OF LITERATURE.

BY

ISAAC DISRAELI.

EDITED, WITH MEMOIR AND NOTES,

BY HIS SON,

THE EARL OF BEACONSFIELD.

IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOL. III.

LONDON:

FREDERICK WARNE AND CO.

AND NEW YORK

CONTENTS OF VOLUME III.

1

CURIOSITIES OF LITERATURE.

LOCAL DESCRIPTIONS.

Nothing is more idle, and, what is less to be forgiven in a
writer, more tedious, than minute and lengthened descriptions
of localities; where it is very doubtful whether the
writers themselves had formed any tolerable notion of the
place they describe,—it is certain their readers never can!
These descriptive passages, in which writers of imagination
so frequently indulge, are usually a glittering confusion of
unconnected things; circumstances recollected from others,
or observed by themselves at different times; the finest are
thrust in together. If a scene from nature, it is possible that
all the seasons of the year may be jumbled together; or if a
castle or an apartment, its magnitude or its minuteness may
equally bewilder. Yet we find, even in works of celebrity,
whole pages of these general or these particular descriptive
sketches, which leave nothing behind but noun substantives
propped up by random epithets. The old writers were quite
delighted to fill up their voluminous pages with what was a
great saving of sense and thinking. In the Alaric of Scudery
sixteen pages, containing nearly five hundred verses, describe
a palace, commencing at the façade, and at length finishing
with the garden; but his description, we may say, was much
better described by Boileau, whose good taste felt the
absurdity of this “abondance stérile,” in overloading a work
with useless details,

2

And then he adds so excellent a canon of criticism, that we
must not neglect it:—

We have a memorable instance of the inefficiency of local
descriptions in a very remarkable one by a writer of fine
genius, composing with an extreme fondness of his subject,
and curiously anxious to send down to posterity the most
elaborate display of his own villa—this was the Laurentinum
of Pliny. We cannot read his letter to Gallus, which the
English reader may in Melmoth’s elegant version,1 without
somewhat participating in the delight of the writer in
many of its details; but we cannot with the writer form the
slightest conception of his villa, while he is leading us over
from apartment to apartment, and pointing to us the opposite
wing, with a “beyond this,” and a “not far from
thence,” and “to this apartment another of the same sort,”
&c. Yet, still, as we were in great want of a correct knowledge
of a Roman villa, and as this must be the most so
possible, architects have frequently studied, and the learned
translated with extraordinary care, Pliny’s Description of his
Laurentinum. It became so favourite an object, that eminent
architects have attempted to raise up this edifice once
more, by giving its plan and elevation; and this extraordinary
fact is the result—that not one of them but has given a
representation different from the other! Montfaucon, a more
faithful antiquary, in his close translation of the description
of this villa, in comparing it with Felibien’s plan of the villa
itself, observes, “that the architect accommodated his edifice
to his translation, but that their notions are not the
same; unquestionably,” he adds, “if ten skilful translators
were to perform their task separately, there would not be one
who agreed with another!”

If, then, on this subject of local descriptions, we find that it
is impossible to convey exact notions of a real existing scene,
what must we think of those which, in truth, describe scenes
which have no other existence than the confused makings-up
of an author’s invention; where the more he details the more
he confuses; and where the more particular he wishes to be,
the more indistinct the whole appears?

3

Local descriptions, after a few striking circumstances have
been selected, admit of no further detail. It is not their
length, but their happiness, which enters into our comprehension;
the imagination can only take in and keep together a
very few parts of a picture. The pen must not intrude on
the province of the pencil, any more than the pencil must
attempt to perform what cannot in any shape be submitted to
the eye, though fully to the mind.

The great art, perhaps, of local description, is rather a
general than a particular view; the details must be left to
the imagination; it is suggestion rather than description.
There is an old Italian sonnet of this kind which I have often
read with delight; and though I may not communicate the
same pleasure to the reader, yet the story of the writer is
most interesting, and the lady (for such she was) has the
highest claim to be ranked, like the lady of Evelyn, among
literary wives.

Francesca Turina Bufalini di Citta di Castello, of noble
extraction, and devoted to literature, had a collection of her
poems published in 1628. She frequently interspersed little
domestic incidents of her female friend, her husband, her son,
her grandchildren; and in one of these sonnets she has delineated
her palace of San Giustino, whose localities she
appears to have enjoyed with intense delight in the company
of “her lord,” whom she tenderly associates with the scene.
There is a freshness and simplicity in the description, which will
perhaps convey a clearer notion of the spot than even Pliny
could do in the voluminous description of his villa. She tells
us what she found when brought to the house of her husband:—

MASQUES.

It sometimes happens, in the history of national amusements,
that a name survives while the thing itself is forgotten. This
has been remarkably the case with our court Masques, respecting
which our most eminent writers long ventured on so many
false opinions, with a perfect ignorance of the nature of these
compositions, which combined all that was exquisite in the
imitative arts of poetry, painting, music, song, dancing, and
machinery, at a period when our public theatre was in its
rude infancy. Convinced of the miserable state of our represented
drama, and not then possessing that more curious
knowledge of their domestic history which we delight to
explore, they were led into erroneous notions of one of the
most gorgeous, the most fascinating, and the most poetical
of dramatic amusements. Our present theatrical exhibitions
are, indeed, on a scale to which the twopenny audiences of
the barn playhouses of Shakspeare could never have strained
their sight; and our picturesque and learned costume, with
the brilliant changes of our scenery, would have maddened
the “property-men” and the “tire-women” of the Globe or
the Red Bull.2 Shakspeare himself never beheld the true
5
magical illusions of his own dramas, with “Enter the Red
Coat,” and “Exit Hat and Cloak,” helped out with “painted
cloths;” or, as a bard of Charles the Second’s time chants—

But while the public theatre continued long in this contracted
state, without scenes, without dresses, without an
orchestra, the court displayed scenical and dramatic exhibitions
with such costly magnificence, such inventive fancy,
and such miraculous art, that we may doubt if the combined
genius of Ben Jonson, Inigo Jones, and Lawes, or Ferobosco,
at an era most favourable to the arts of imagination, has been
equalled by the modern spectacle of the Opera.

But this circumstance had entirely escaped the knowledge
of our critics. The critic of a Masque must not only have
read it, but he must also have heard and have viewed it.
The only witnesses in this case are those letter-writers of the
day, who were then accustomed to communicate such domestic
intelligence to their absent friends: from such ample correspondence
I have often drawn some curious and sometimes
important information. It is amusing to notice the opinions
of some great critics, how from an original mis-statement
they have drawn an illegitimate opinion, and how one inherits
from the other the error which he propagates. Warburton
said on Masques, that “Shakspeare was an enemy to these
fooleries, as appears by his writing none.” This opinion was
among the many which that singular critic threw out as they
arose at the moment; for Warburton forgot that Shakspeare
characteristically introduces one in the Tempest’s most fanciful
scene.3 Granger, who had not much time to study the
manners of the age whose personages he was so well acquainted
6
with, in a note on Milton’s Masque, said that “these compositions
were trifling and perplexed allegories, the persons of
which are fantastical to the last degree. Ben Jonson, in his
‘Masque of Christmas,’ has introduced ‘Minced Pie,’ and
‘Baby Cake,’ who act their parts in the drama.4 But the
most wretched performances of this kind could please by the
help of music, machinery, and dancing.” Granger blunders,
describing by two farcical characters a species of composition
of which farce was not the characteristic. Such personages
as he notices would enter into the Anti-masque, which was
a humorous parody of the more solemn Masque, and sometimes
relieved it. Malone, whose fancy was not vivid, condemns
Masques and the age of Masques, in which, he says,
echoing Granger’s epithet, “the wretched taste of the times
found amusement.” And lastly comes Mr. Todd, whom the
splendid fragment of the “Arcades,” and the entire Masque,
which we have by heart, could not warm; while his neutralising
criticism fixes him at the freezing point of the
thermometer. “This dramatic entertainment, performed
not without prodigious expense in machinery and decoration,
to which humour we certainly owe the entertainment of
‘Arcades,’ and the inimitable Mask of ‘Comus.’” Comus,
however, is only a fine dramatic poem, retaining scarcely any
features of the Masque. The only modern critic who had
written with some research on this departed elegance of the
English drama was Warton, whose fancy responded to the
fascination of the fairy-like magnificence and lyrical spirit of
the Masque. Warton had the taste to give a specimen from
“The Inner Temple Mask by William Browne,” the pastoral
poet, whose Address to Sleep, he observed, “reminds
7
us of some favourite touches in Milton’s Comus, to which it
perhaps gave birth.” Yet even Warton was deficient in
that sort of research which only can discover the true nature
of these singular dramas.

Such was the state in which, some years ago, I found all
our knowledge of this once favourite amusement of our court,
our nobility, and our learned bodies of the four inns of court.
Some extensive researches, pursued among contemporary
manuscripts, cast a new light over this obscure child of fancy
and magnificence. I could not think lightly of what Ben
Jonson has called “The Eloquence of Masques;” entertainments
on which from three to five thousand pounds were
expended, and on more public occasions ten and twenty thousand.
To the aid of the poetry, composed by the finest
poets, came the most skilful musicians and the most elaborate
machinists; Ben Jonson, and Inigo Jones,5 and Lawes
blended into one piece their respective genius; and Lord
Bacon, and Whitelocke, and Selden, who sat in committees
for the last grand Masque presented to Charles the First,
invented the devices; composed the procession of the
Masquers and the Anti-Masquers; while one took the care
of the dancing or the brawlers, and Whitelocke the music—the
sage Whitelocke! who has chronicled his self-complacency
on this occasion, by claiming the invention of a
Coranto, which for thirty years afterwards was the delight
of the nation, and was blessed by the name of “Whitelocke’s
Coranto,” and which was always called for, two or three
times over, whenever that great statesman “came to see a
play!”6 So much personal honour was considered to be
involved in the conduct of a Masque, that even this committee
of illustrious men was on the point of being broken
up by too serious a discussion concerning precedence; and
the Masque had nearly not taken place, till they hit on the
expedient of throwing dice to decide on their rank in the
procession! On this jealousy of honour in the composition
of a Masque, I discovered, what hitherto had escaped the
knowledge, although not the curiosity, of literary inquirers—the
occasion of the memorable enmity between Ben Jonson
8
and Inigo Jones, who had hitherto acted together with
brotherly affection; “a circumstance,” says Gifford, to whom
I communicated it, “not a little important in the history of
our calumniated poet.” The trivial cause, but not so in its
consequences, was the poet prefixing his own name before
that of the architect on the title-page of a Masque, which
hitherto had only been annexed;7 so jealous was the great
architect of his part of the Masque, and so predominant his
power and name at court, that he considered his rights
invaded by the inferior claims of the poet! Jonson has
poured out the whole bitterness of his soul in two short
satires: still more unfortunately for the subject of these
satires, they provoked Inigo to sharpen his pen on rhyme;
but it is edgeless, and the blunt composition still lies in its
manuscript state.

While these researches had engaged my attention, appeared
Gifford’s Memoirs of Ben Jonson. The characteristics of
Masques are there, for the first time, elaborately opened with
the clear and penetrating spirit of that ablest of our dramatic
critics. I feel it like presumption to add to what has received
the finishing hand of a master; but his jewel is locked
up in a chest, which I fear is too rarely opened, and he will
allow me to borrow something from its splendour. “The
Masque, as it attained its highest degree of excellence, admitted
of dialogue, singing, and dancing; these were not independent
of one another, but combined, by the introduction
of some ingenious fable, into an harmonious whole. When
the plan was formed, the aid of the sister-arts was called in;
for the essence of the Masque was pomp and glory. Moveable
scenery of the most costly and splendid kind was
lavished on the Masque; the most celebrated masters were
employed on the songs and dances; and all that the kingdom
afforded of vocal and instrumental excellence was employed
to embellish the exhibition.8 Thus magnificently constructed,
the Masque was not committed to ordinary performers. It
9
was composed, as Lord Bacon says, for princes, and by
princes it was played.9 Of these Masques, the skill with
which their ornaments were designed, and the inexpressible
grace with which they were executed, appear to have left a
vivid impression on the mind of Jonson. His genius awakes
at once, and all his faculties attune to sprightliness and pleasure.
He makes his appearance, like his own Delight, ‘accompanied
with Grace, Love, Harmony, Revel, Sport, and
Laughter.’

“But in what,” says Gifford, “was the taste of the times
wretched? In poetry, painting, architecture, they have not
since been equalled; and it ill becomes us to arraign the
taste of a period which possessed a cluster of writers of whom
the meanest would now be esteemed a prodigy.” Malone did
not live to read this denouncement of his objection to these
Masques, as “bungling shows;” and which Warburton
treats as “fooleries;” Granger as “wretched performances;”
while Mr. Todd regards them merely as “the humour of the
times!”

Masques were often the private theatricals of the families
of our nobility, performed by the ladies and gentlemen at
their seats; and were splendidly got up on certain occasions:
such as the celebration of a nuptial, or in compliment to some
great visitor. The Masque of Comus was composed by
Milton to celebrate the creation of Charles the First as
Prince of Wales; a scene in this Masque presented both the
castle and the town of Ludlow, which proves, that although
our small public theatres had not yet displayed any of the
scenical illusions which long afterwards Davenant introduced,
these scenical effects existed in great perfection in the
Masques. The minute descriptions introduced by Thomas
Campion, in his “Memorable Masque,” as it is called, will
convince us that the scenery must have been exquisite and
10
fanciful, and that the poet was always a watchful and anxious
partner with the machinist, with whom sometimes, however,
he had a quarrel.

The subject of this very rare Masque was “The Night
and the Hours.” It would be tedious to describe the first
scene with the fondness with which the poet has dwelt on
it. It was a double valley; one side, with dark clouds
hanging before it; on the other, a green vale, with trees, and
nine golden ones of fifteen feet high; from which grove, towards
“the State,” or the seat of the king, was a broad descent
to the dancing-place: the bower of Flora was on the right,
the house of Night on the left; between them a hill, hanging
like a cliff over the grove. The bower of Flora was spacious,
garnished with flowers and flowery branches, with lights
among them; the house of Night ample and stately, with
black columns studded with golden stars; within, nothing
but clouds and twinkling stars; while about it were placed,
on wire, artificial bats and owls, continually moving. As
soon as the king entered the great hall, the hautboys, out of
the wood on the top of the hill, entertained the time, till
Flora and Zephyr were seen busily gathering flowers from the
bower, throwing them into baskets which two silvans held,
attired in changeable taffeta. The song is light as their
fingers, but the burden is charming:—

I cannot quit this Masque, of which, collectors know the
rarity, without preserving one of those Doric delicacies, of
which, perhaps, we have outlived the taste! It is a playful
dialogue between a Silvan and an Hour, while Night appears
in her house, with her long black hair spangled with gold,
amidst her Hours; their faces black, and each bearing a
lighted black torch.

That the moveable scenery of these Masques formed as perfect
a scenical illusion as any that our own age, with all its
perfection of decoration, has attained to, will not be denied
by those who have read the few Masques which have been
printed. They usually contrived a double division of the
scene; one part was for some time concealed from the spectator,
which produced surprise and variety. Thus in the
Lord’s Masque, at the marriage of the Palatine, the scene
was divided into two parts, from the roof to the floor; the
lower part being first discovered, there appeared a wood in
perspective, the innermost part being of “releeve or whole
round,” the rest painted. On the left a cave, and on the
right a thicket, from which issued Orpheus. At the back
part of the scene, at the sudden fall of a curtain, the upper
part broke on the spectators, a heaven of clouds of all hues;
the stars suddenly vanished, the clouds dispersed; an element
of artificial fire played about the house of Prometheus—a
bright and transparent cloud, reaching from the heavens to
the earth, whence the eight masquers descending with the
music of a full song; and at the end of their descent the cloud
broke in twain, and one part of it, as with a wind, was blown
athwart the scene. While this cloud was vanishing, the
wood, being the under part of the scene, was insensibly
changing; a perspective view opened, with porticoes on each
side, and female statues of silver, accompanied with ornaments
of architecture, filling the end of the house of Prometheus,
and seemed all of goldsmiths’ work. The women of
Prometheus descended from their niches, till the anger of
Jupiter turned them again into statues. It is evident, too,
that the size of the proscenium, or stage, accorded with the
magnificence of the scene; for I find choruses described,
12
“and changeable conveyances of the song,” in manner of an
echo, performed by more than forty different voices and instruments
in various parts of the scene. The architectural
decorations were the pride of Inigo Jones; such could not be
trivial.

“I suppose,” says the writer of this Masque, “few have
ever seen more neat artifice than Master Inigo Jones showed
in contriving their motion; who, as all the rest of the workmanship
which belonged to the whole invention, showed extraordinary
industry and skill, which if it be not as lively
expressed in writing as it appeared in view, rob not him of
his due, but lay the blame on my want of right apprehending
his instructions, for the adoring of his art.” Whether this
strong expression should be only adorning does not appear in
any errata; but the feeling of admiration was fervent among
the spectators of that day, who were at least as much
astonished as they were delighted. Ben Jonson’s prose
descriptions of scenes in his own exquisite Masques, as Gifford
observes, “are singularly bold and beautiful.” In a
letter which I discovered, the writer of which had been present
at one of these Masques, and which Gifford has preserved,11
the reader may see the great poet anxiously united
with Inigo Jones in working the machinery. Jonson, before
“a sacrifice could be performed, turned the globe of the earth,
standing behind the altar.” In this globe “the sea was
expressed heightened with silver waves, which stood, or
rather hung (for no axle was seen to support it), and turning
softly, discovered the first Masque,”12 &c. This “turning
softly” producing a very magical effect, the great poet would
trust to no other hand but his own!

It seems, however, that as no Masque-writer equalled
Jonson, so no machinist rivalled Inigo Jones. I have sometimes
caught a groan from some unfortunate poet, whose
beautiful fancies were spoilt by the bungling machinist. One
says, “The order of this scene was carefully and ingeniously
disposed, and as happily put in act (for the motions) by the
king’s master carpenter;” but he adds, “the painters, I
must needs say (not to belie them), lent small colour to any,
to attribute much of the spirit of these things to their
13
pencil.” Campion, in one of his Masques, describing where
the trees were gently to sink, &c., by an engine placed under
the stage, and in sinking were to open, and the masquers appear
out at their tops, &c., adds this vindictive marginal
note: “Either by the simplicity, negligence, or conspiracy
of the painter, the passing away of the trees was
somewhat hazarded, though the same day they had been
shown with much admiration, and were left together to the
same night;” that is, they were worked right at the rehearsal,
and failed in the representation, which must have
perplexed the nine masquers on the tops of these nine trees.
But such accidents were only vexations crossing the fancies
of the poet: they did not essentially injure the magnificence,
the pomp, and the fairy world opened to the spectators. So
little was the character of these Masques known, that all our
critics seemed to have fallen into repeated blunders, and used
the Masques as Campion suspected his painters to have done,
“either by simplicity, negligence, or conspiracy.” Hurd, a
cold systematic critic, thought he might safely prefer the
Masque in the Tempest, as “putting to shame all the
Masques of Jonson, not only in its construction, but in the
splendour of its show;”—“which,” adds Gifford, “was
danced and sung by the ordinary performers to a couple of
fiddles, perhaps in the balcony of the stage.” Such is the
fate of criticism without knowledge! And now, to close our
Masques, let me apply the forcible style of Ben Jonson himself:
“The glory of all these solemnities had perished like a
blaze, and gone out in the beholder’s eyes; so short-lived are
the bodies of all things in comparison of their souls!”13

OF DES MAIZEAUX, AND THE SECRET HISTORY OF
ANTHONY COLLINS’S MANUSCRIPTS.

Des Maizeaux was an active literary man of his day,
whose connexions with Bayle, St. Evremond, Locke, and
Toland, and his name being set off by an F.R.S., have occasioned
the dictionary-biographers to place him prominently
among their “hommes illustres.” Of his private history
14
nothing seems known. Having something important to
communicate respecting one of his friends, a far greater character,
with whose fate he stands connected, even Des Maizeaux
becomes an object of our inquiry.

He was one of those French refugees whom political
madness or despair of intolerance had driven to our shores.
The proscription of Louis XIV., which supplied us with our
skilful workers in silk, also produced a race of the unemployed,
who proved not to be as exquisite in the handicraft
of book-making; such were Motteux, La Coste, Ozell, Durand,
and others. Our author had come over in that tender
state of youth, just in time to become half an Englishman:
and he was so ambidextrous in the languages of the two
great literary nations of Europe, that whenever he took up
his pen, it is evident by his manuscripts, which I have examined,
that it was mere accident which determined him to
write in French or in English. Composing without genius,
or even taste, without vivacity or force, the simplicity and
fluency of his style were sufficient for the purposes of a ready
dealer in all the minutiæ literariæ; literary anecdotes,
curious quotations, notices of obscure books, and all that
supellex which must enter into the history of literature,
without forming a history. These little things, which did so
well of themselves, without any connexion with anything
else, became trivial when they assumed the form of voluminous
minuteness; and Des Maizeaux at length imagined that
nothing but anecdotes were necessary to compose the lives of
men of genius! With this sort of talent he produced a
copious life of Bayle, in which he told everything he possibly
could; and nothing can be more tedious, and more
curious: for though it be a grievous fault to omit nothing,
and marks the writer to be deficient in the development of
character, and that sympathy which throws inspiration over
the vivifying page of biography, yet, to admit everything,
has this merit—that we are sure to find what we want!
Warburton poignantly describes our Des Maizeaux, in one of
those letters to Dr. Birch which he wrote in the fervid age
of study, and with the impatient vivacity of his genius,
“Almost all the life-writers we have had before Toland and
Des Maizeaux are indeed strange, insipid creatures; and yet
I had rather read the worst of them, than be obliged to go
through with this of Milton’s, or the other’s life of Boileau;
where there is such a dull, heavy succession of long quotations
15
of uninteresting passages, that it makes their method
quite nauseous. But the verbose, tasteless Frenchman seems
to lay it down as a principle, that every life must be a book,—and,
what is worse, it seems a book without a life; for
what do we know of Boileau after all his tedious stuff?”

Des Maizeaux was much in the employ of the Dutch
booksellers, then the great monopolisers in the literary mart
of Europe. He supplied their “nouvelles littéraires” from
England; but the work-sheet price was very mean in those
days. I have seen annual accounts of Des Maizeaux settled
to a line for four or five pounds; and yet he sent the “Novelties”
as fresh as the post could carry them! He held a
confidential correspondence with these great Dutch booksellers,
who consulted him in their distresses; and he seems
rather to have relieved them than himself. But if he got
only a few florins at Rotterdam, the same “nouvelles littéraires”
sometimes secured him valuable friends at London;
for in those days, which perhaps are returning on us, an
English author would often appeal to a foreign journal for
the commendation he might fail in obtaining at home; and I
have discovered, in more cases than one, that, like other
smuggled commodities, the foreign article was often of home
manufactory!

I give one of these curious bibliopolical distresses.
Sauzet, a bookseller at Rotterdam, who judged too critically
for the repose of his authors, seems to have been always fond
of projecting a new “Journal;” tormented by the ideal excellence
which he had conceived of such a work, it vexed him
that he could never find the workmen! Once disappointed of
the assistance he expected from a writer of talents, he was
fain to put up with one he was ashamed of; but warily stipulated
on very singular terms. He confided this precious
literary secret to Des Maizeaux. I translate from his manuscript
letter.

“I send you, my dear Sir, four sheets of the continuation
of my journal, and I hope this second part will turn out
better than the former. The author thinks himself a very
able person; but I must tell you frankly, that he is a man
without erudition, and without any critical discrimination;
he writes pretty well, and turns passably what he says; but
that is all! Monsieur Van Effen having failed in his promises
to realise my hopes on this occasion, necessity compelled
me to have recourse to him; but for six months only, and on
16
condition that he should not, on any account whatever, allow
any one to know that he is the author of the journal; for his
name alone would be sufficient to make even a passable book
discreditable. As you are among my friends, I will confide
to you in secrecy the name of this author; it is Mons. De
Limiers.14 You see how much my interest is concerned that
the author should not be known!” This anecdote is gratuitously
presented to the editors of certain reviews, as a serviceable
hint to enter into the same engagement with some
of their own writers: for it is usually the De Limiers who
expend their last puff in blowing their own name about the
town.

In England, Des Maizeaux, as a literary man, made himself
very useful to other men of letters, and particularly to persons
of rank: and he found patronage and a pension,—like his
talents, very moderate! A friend to literary men, he lived
amongst them, from “Orator” Henley, up to Addison, Lord
Halifax, and Anthony Collins. I find a curious character of
our Des Maizeaux in the handwriting of Edward, Earl of
Oxford, to whose father (Pope’s Earl of Oxford) and himself
the nation owes the Harleian treasures. His lordship is a
critic with high Tory principles, and high-church notions.
“This Des Maizeaux is a great man with those who are
pleased to be called Freethinkers, particularly with Mr.
Anthony Collins, collects passages out of books for their
writings. His Life of Chillingworth is wrote to please that
set of men.” The secret history I am to unfold relates to
Anthony Collins and Des Maizeaux. Some curious book-lovers
will be interested in the personal history of an author
they are well acquainted with, yet which has hitherto
remained unknown. He tells his own story in a sort of
epistolary petition he addressed to a noble friend, characteristic
17
of an author, who cannot be deemed unpatronised,
yet whose name, after all his painful labours, might be
inserted in my “Calamities of Authors.”

In this letter he announces his intention of publishing a
Dictionary like Bayle; having written the life of Bayle, the
next step was to become himself a Bayle; so short is the
passage of literary delusion! He had published, as a
specimen, the lives of Hales and Chillingworth. He
complains that his circumstances have not allowed him to
forward that work, nor digest the materials he had collected.

Among the confidential literary friends of Des Maizeaux,
he had the honour of ranking Anthony Collins, a great lover
of literature, and a man of fine genius, and who, in a
continued correspondence with our Des Maizeaux, treated
18
him as his friend, and employed him as his agent in his
literary concerns. These, in the formation of an extensive
library, were in a state of perpetual activity, and Collins was
such a true lover of his books, that he drew up the catalogue
with his own pen.17 Anthony Collins wrote several well-known
works without prefixing his name; but having pushed
too far his curious inquiries on some obscure and polemical
points, he incurred the odium of a freethinker,—a term
which then began to be in vogue, and which the French
adopted by translating it, in their way, a strong thinker, or
esprit fort. Whatever tendency to “liberalise” the mind
from dogmas and creeds prevails in these works, the talents
and learning of Collins were of the first class. His morals
were immaculate, and his personal character independent;
but the odium theologicum of those days contrived every
means to stab in the dark, till the taste became hereditary
with some. I shall mention a fact of this cruel bigotry,
which occurred within my own observation, on one of the
most polished men of the age. The late Mr. Cumberland, in
the romance entitled his “Life,” gave this extraordinary fact,
that Dr. Bentley, who so ably replied by his “Remarks,”
under the name of Phileleutherus Lipsiensis, to Collins’s
“Discourse on Free-thinking,” when, many years after, he
discovered him fallen into great distress, conceiving that by
having ruined Collins’s character as a writer for ever, he had
been the occasion of his personal misery, he liberally
contributed to his maintenance. In vain I mentioned to that
elegant writer, who was not curious about facts, that this
person could never have been Anthony Collins, who had
always a plentiful fortune; and when it was suggested to him
that this “A. Collins,” as he printed it, must have been
Arthur Collins, the historical compiler, who was often in
pecuniary difficulties, still he persisted in sending the lie
down to posterity, totidem verbis, without alteration in his
second edition, observing to a friend of mine, that “the story,
while it told well, might serve as a striking instance of his
great relative’s generosity; and that it should stand, because
it could do no harm to any but to Anthony Collins, whom he
considered as little short of an atheist.” So much for this
pious fraud! but be it recollected that this Anthony Collins
was the confidential friend of Locke, of whom Locke said, on
19
his dying bed, that “Collins was a man whom he valued in
the first rank of those that he left behind him.” And the
last words of Collins on his own death-bed were, that “he
was persuaded he was going to that place which God had
designed for them that love him.” The cause of true religion
will never be assisted by using such leaky vessels as
Cumberland’s wilful calumnies, which in the end must run
out, and be found, like the present, mere empty fictions!

An extraordinary circumstance occurred on the death of
Anthony Collins. He left behind him a considerable number
of his own manuscripts, there was one collection formed into
eight octavo volumes; and that they might be secured from
the common fate of manuscripts, he bequeathed them all, and
confided them to the care of our Des Maizeaux. The choice
of Collins reflects honour on the character of Des Maizeaux,
yet he proved unworthy of it! He suffered himself to betray
his trust, practised on by the earnest desire of the widow,
and perhaps by the arts of a Mr. Tomlinson, who appears to
have been introduced into the family by the recommendation
of Dean Sykes, whom at length he supplanted, and whom the
widow, to save her reputation, was afterwards obliged to
discard.18 In an unguarded moment he relinquished this
precious legacy of the manuscripts, and accepted fifty guineas
as a present. But if Des Maizeaux lost his honour in this
transaction, he was at heart an honest man, who had swerved
for a single moment; his conscience was soon awakened, and
he experienced the most violent compunctions. It was in a
paroxysm of this nature that he addressed the following
letter to a mutual friend of the late Anthony Collins and
himself.

The manuscripts were never returned to Des Maizeaux; for
seven years afterwards Mrs. Collins, who appears to have
been a very spirited lady, addressed to him the following
letter on the subject of a report, that she had permitted
transcripts of these very manuscripts to get abroad. This
occasioned an animated correspondence from both sides.

Thus we find that, seven years after Des Maizeaux had
inconsiderately betrayed his sacred trust, his remorse was
still awake; and the sincerity of his grief is attested by the
affecting style which describes it: the spirit of his departed
23
friend seemed to be hovering about him, and, in his imagination,
would haunt him to the grave.

The nature of these manuscripts; the cause of the earnest
desire of retaining them by the widow; the evident unfriendliness
of her conduct to Des Maizeaux; and whether these
manuscripts, consisting of eight octavo volumes with their
transcripts, were destroyed, or are still existing, are all circumstances
which my researches have hitherto not ascertained.

HISTORY OF NEW WORDS.

Neology, or the novelty of words and phrases, is an innovation,
which, with the opulence of our present language,
the English philologer is most jealous to allow; but we have
puritans or precisians of English, superstitiously nice! The
fantastic coinage of affectation or caprice will cease to circulate
from its own alloy; but shall we reject the ore of fine
workmanship and solid weight? There is no government
mint of words, and it is no statutable offence to invent a
felicitous or daring expression unauthorised by Mr. Todd!
When a man of genius, in the heat of his pursuits or his
feelings, has thrown out a peculiar word, it probably conveyed
more precision or energy than any other established word,
otherwise he is but an ignorant pretender!

Julius Cæsar, who, unlike other great captains, is authority
on words as well as about blows, wrote a large treatise on
“Analogy,” in which that fine genius counselled to “avoid
every unusual word as a rock!”19 The cautious Quintilian,
as might be expected, opposes all innovation in language.
“If the new word is well received, small is the glory; if
rejected, it raises laughter.”20 This only marks the penury
of his feelings in this species of adventure. The great legislator
of words, who lived when his own language was at its
acmé, seems undecided, yet pleaded for this liberty. “Shall
that which the Romans allowed to Cæcilius and to Plautus
be refused to Virgil and Varius?” The answer to the question
might not be favourable to the inquirer. While a language
is forming, writers are applauded for extending its
limits; when established, for restricting themselves to them.
But this is to imagine that a perfect language can exist!
24
The good sense and observation of Horace perceived that
there may be occasions where necessity must become the
mother of invented words:—

But Horace’s canon for deciding on the legality of the new
invention, or the standard by which it is to be tried, will not
serve to assist the inventor of words:—

This præsens nota, or public stamp, can never be affixed to
any new coinage of words: for many received at a season
have perished with it.22 The privilege of stamping words is
reserved for their greatest enemy—Time itself! and the
inventor of a new word must never flatter himself that he
has secured the public adoption, for he must lie in his grave
before he can enter the dictionary.

In Willes’ address to the reader, prefixed to the collection
of Voyages published in 1577, he finds fault with Eden’s
translation from Peter Martyr, for using words that “smelt
too much of the Latine.” We should scarcely have expected
25
to find among them ponderouse, portentouse, despicable, obsequious,
homicide, imbibed, destructive, prodigious. The only
words he quotes, not thoroughly naturalised, are dominators,
ditionaries, (subjects), solicitute (careful).

The Tatler, No. 230, introduces several polysyllables introduced
by military narrations, “which (he says), if they
attack us too frequently, we shall certainly put them to
flight, and cut off the rear;” every one of them still keep
their ground.

Half the French words used affectedly by Melantha, in
Dryden’s Marriage à-la-Mode, as innovations in our language,
are now in common use, naïveté, foible, chagrin, grimace,
embarras, double entendre, equivoque, eclaircissement, ridicule,
all these words, which she learns by heart to use occasionally,
are now in common use. A Dr. Russel called Psalm-singers
Ballad-singers, having found the Song of Solomon in an old
translation, the Ballad of Ballads, for which he is reproached
by his antagonist for not knowing that the signification of
words alters with time; should I call him knave, he ought
not to be concerned at it, for the Apostle Paul is also called
a knave of Jesus Christ.23

Unquestionably, neology opens a wide door to innovation;
scarcely has a century passed since our language was patched
up with Gallic idioms, as in the preceding century it was
piebald with Spanish, and with Italian, and even with Dutch.
The political intercourse of islanders with their neighbours
has ever influenced their language. In Elizabeth’s reign
Italian phrases24 and Netherland words were imported; in
James and Charles the Spanish framed the style of courtesy;
in Charles the Second the nation and the language were
equally Frenchified. Yet such are the sources from whence
we have often derived some of the wealth of our language!

26

There are three foul corruptors of a language: caprice,
affectation, and ignorance! Such fashionable cant terms as
“theatricals,” and “musicals,” invented by the flippant
Topham, still survive among his confraternity of frivolity.
A lady eminent for the elegance of her taste, and of whom
one of the best judges, the celebrated Miss Edgeworth,
observed to me, that she spoke the purest and most idiomatic
English she had ever heard, threw out an observation which
might be extended to a great deal of our present fashionable
vocabulary. She is now old enough, she said, to have lived
to hear the vulgarisms of her youth adopted in drawing-room
circles.25 To lunch, now so familiar from the fairest lips, in
her youth was only known in the servants’ hall. An expression
very rife of late among our young ladies, a nice man,
whatever it may mean, whether that the man resemble a pudding
or something more nice, conveys the offensive notion
that they are ready to eat him up! When I was a boy, it
was an age of bon ton; this good tone mysteriously conveyed
a sublime idea of fashion; the term, imported late in the
eighteenth century, closed with it. Twaddle for a while succeeded
bore; but bore has recovered the supremacy. We
want another Swift to give a new edition of his “Polite
Conversation.” A dictionary of barbarisms too might be
collected from some wretched neologists, whose pens are now
at work! Lord Chesterfield, in his exhortations to conform
to Johnson’s Dictionary, was desirous, however, that the great
lexicographer should add as an appendix, “A neological dictionary,
containing those polite, though perhaps not strictly
grammatical, words and phrases commonly used, and sometimes
understood by the beau-monde.”26 This last phrase was
doubtless a contribution! Such a dictionary had already
appeared in the French language, drawn up by two caustic
critics, who in the Dictionnaire néologique à l’usage des beaux
Esprits du Siècle collected together the numerous unlucky
inventions of affectation, with their modern authorities! A
collection of the fine words and phrases, culled from some
very modern poetry, might show the real amount of the
favours bestowed on us.

27

The attempts of neologists are, however, not necessarily to
be condemned; and we may join with the commentators of
Aulus Gellius, who have lamented the loss of a chapter of
which the title only has descended to us. That chapter
would have demonstrated what happens to all languages, that
some neologisms, which at first are considered forced or inelegant,
become sanctioned by use, and in time are quoted as
authority in the very language which, in their early stage,
they were imagined to have debased.

The true history of men’s minds is found in their actions;
their wants are indicated by their contrivances; and certain
it is that in highly cultivated ages we discover the most
refined intellects attempting NEOLOGISMS.27 It would be a
subject of great curiosity to trace the origin of many happy
expressions, when, and by whom created. Plato substituted
the term Providence for fate; and a new system of human
affairs arose from a single word. Cicero invented several; to
this philosopher we owe the term of moral philosophy, which
before his time was called the philosophy of manners. But
on this subject we are perhaps more interested by the modern
than by the ancient languages. Richardson, the painter of
the human heart, has coined some expressions to indicate its
little secret movements, which are admirable: that great
genius merited a higher education and more literary leisure
than the life of a printer could afford. Montaigne created
some bold expressions, many of which have not survived him;
his incuriosité, so opposite to curiosity, well describes that
state of negligence where we will not learn that of which we
are ignorant. With us the word incurious was described by
Heylin, 1656, as an unusual word; it has been appropriately
adopted by our best writers, although we still want
incuriosity. Charron invented étrangeté unsuccessfully, but
which, says a French critic, would be the true substantive of
the word étrange; our Locke is the solitary instance produced
for “foreignness” for “remoteness or want of relation to
something.” Malherbe borrowed from the Latin, insidieux,
sécurité, which have been received; but a bolder word,
dévouloir, by which he proposed to express cesser de vouloir,
28
has not. A term, however, expressive and precise. Corneille
happily introduced invaincu in a verse in the Cid,

Vous êtes invaincu, mais non pas invincible.

Yet this created word by their great poet has not sanctioned
this fine distinction among the French, for we are told that
it is almost a solitary instance. Balzac was a great inventor
of neologisms. Urbanité and féliciter were struck in his
mint. “Si le mot féliciter n’est pas française, il le sera l’année
qui vient;” so confidently proud was the neologist, and
it prospered as well as urbanité, of which he says, “Quand
l’usage aura muri parmi nous un mot de si mauvais gout, et
corrigé l’amertume de la nouveauté qui s’y peut trouver, nous
nous y accoutumerons comme aux autres que nous avons
emprunté de la même langue.” Balzac was, however, too
sanguine in some other words; for his délecter, his sériosité,
&c. still retain their “bitterness of novelty.”

Menage invented a term of which an equivalent is wanting
in our language; “J’ai fait prosateur à l’imitation de l’italien
prosatore, pour dire un homme qui écrit en prose.” To distinguish
a prose from a verse writer, we once had “a proser.”
Drayton uses it; but this useful distinction has unluckily
degenerated, and the current sense is so daily urgent, that the
purer sense is irrecoverable.

When D’Albancourt was translating Lucian, he invented
in French the words indolence and indolent, to describe a momentary
languor, rather than that habitual indolence in which
sense they are now accepted; and in translating Tacitus, he
created the word turbulemment; but it did not prosper any
more than that of temporisement. Segrais invented the word
impardonnable, which, after having been rejected, was revived,
and is equivalent to our expressive unpardonable. Molière
ridiculed some neologisms of the Précieuses of his day; but
we are too apt to ridicule that which is new, and which we often
adopt when it becomes old. Molière laughed at the term
s’encanailler, to describe one who assumed the manners of a
blackguard; the expressive word has remained in the language.
The meaning is disputed as well as the origin is lost
of some novel terms. This has happened to a word in daily
use—Fudge! It is a cant term not in Grose, and only traced
by Todd not higher than to Goldsmith. It is, however, no
invention of his. In a pamphlet, entitled “Remarks upon
the Navy,” 1700, the term is declared to have been the name
29
of a certain nautical personage who had lived in the lifetime
of the writer. “There was, sir, in our time, one Captain
Fudge, commander of a merchantman, who upon his return
from a voyage, how ill-fraught soever his ship was, always
brought home his owners a good cargo of lies; so much that
now, aboard ship, the sailors, when they hear a great lie told,
cry out, ‘You fudge it!’” It is singular that such an
obscure byword among sailors should have become one of the
most popular in our familiar style; and not less, that recently
at the bar, in a court of law, its precise meaning perplexed
plaintiff and defendant and their counsel. I think it does not
signify mere lies, but bouncing lies, or rhodomontades.

There are two remarkable French words created by the
Abbé de Saint Pierre, who passed his meritorious life in the
contemplation of political morality and universal benevolence—bienfaisance
and gloriole. He invented gloriole as a contemptuous
diminutive of glorie; to describe that vanity of
some egotists, so proud of the small talents which they may
have received from nature or from accident. Bienfaisance
first appeared in this sentence: “L’Esprit de la vraie religion
et le principal but de l’evangile c’est la bienfaisance, c’est-à-dire
la pratique de la charité envers le prochain.” This word
was so new, that in the moment of its creation this good man
explained its necessity and origin. Complaining that “the
word ‘charity’ is abused by all sorts of Christians in the
persecution of their enemies, and even heretics affirm that
they are practising Christian charity in persecuting other
heretics, I have sought for a term which might convey to us
a precise idea of doing good to our neighbours, and I can form
none more proper to make myself understood than the term
of bienfaisance, good-doing. Let those who like, use it; I
would only be understood, and it is not equivocal.” The
happy word was at first criticised, but at length every kind
heart found it responded to its own feeling. Some verses from
Voltaire, alluding to the political reveries of the good abbé,
notice the critical opposition; yet the new word answered to
the great rule of Horace.

The French revolutionists, in their rage for innovation,
almost barbarised the pure French of the Augustan age of
their literature, as they did many things which never before
occurred; and sometimes experienced feelings as transitory as
they were strange. Their nomenclature was copious; but
the revolutionary jargon often shows the danger and the
necessity of neologisms. They form an appendix to the
Academy Dictionary. Our plain English has served to enrich
this odd mixture of philology and politics: Club, clubiste,
comité, jure, juge de paix, blend with their terrorisme, lanterner,
a verb active, lévee en masse, noyades, and the other
verb active, septembriser, &c. The barbarous term demoralisation
is said to have been the invention of the horrid
capuchin Chabot; and the remarkable expression of arrière
pensée belonged exclusively in its birth to the jesuitic astuteness
of the Abbé Sieyes, that political actor, who, in changing
sides, never required prompting in his new part!

A new word, the result of much consideration with its
author, or a term which, though unknown to the language,
conveys a collective assemblage of ideas by a fortunate designation,
is a precious contribution of genius; new words should
convey new ideas. Swift, living amidst a civil war of pamphlets,
when certain writers were regularly employed by one
party to draw up replies to the other, created a term not to
be found in our dictionaries, but which, by a single stroke,
characterises these hirelings; he called them answer-jobbers.
We have not dropped the fortunate expression from any
want of its use, but of perception in our lexicographers. The
celebrated Marquis of Lansdowne introduced a useful word,
which has of late been warmly adopted in France as well as
in England—to liberalise; the noun has been drawn out of
the verb—for in the marquis’s time that was only an abstract
conception which is now a sect; and to liberalise was theoretically
introduced before the liberals arose.28 It is curious
to observe that as an adjective it had formerly in our language
31
a very opposite meaning to its recent one. It was
synonymous with “libertine or licentious;” we have “a
liberal villain” and “a most profane and liberal counsellor;”
we find one declaring “I have spoken too liberally.” This
is unlucky for the liberals, who will not—

Dr. Priestley employed a forcible, but not an elegant term,
to mark the general information which had begun in his day;
this he frequently calls “the spread of knowledge.” Burke
attempted to brand with a new name that set of pert, petulant,
sophistical sciolists, whose philosophy the French, since
their revolutionary period, have distinguished as philosophism,
and the philosophers themselves as philosophistes. He would
have designated them as literators, but few exotic words will
circulate; new words must be the coinage of our own language
to blend with the vernacular idiom. Many new words
are still wanted. We have no word by which we could translate
the otium of the Latins, the dillettante of the Italians,
the alembiqué of the French, as an epithet to describe that
sublimated ingenuity which exhausts the mind, till, like the
fusion of the diamond, the intellect itself disappears. A philosopher,
in an extensive view of a subject in all its bearings,
may convey to us the result of his last considerations by the
coinage of a novel and significant expression, as this of Professor
Dugald Stewart—political religionism. Let me claim
the honour of one pure neologism. I ventured to introduce
the term of Father-land to describe our natale solum; I
have lived to see it adopted by Lord Byron and by Mr.
Southey, and the word is now common. A lady has even
composed both the words and the air of a song on “Father-land.”
This energetic expression may therefore be considered
as authenticated; and patriotism may stamp it with its glory
and its affection. Father-land is congenial with the language
in which we find that other fine expression mother-tongue.
The patriotic neologism originated with me in
Holland, when, in early life, it was my daily pursuit to turn
over the glorious history of its independence under the title
of Vaderlandsche Historie—the history of Father-land!

If we acknowledge that the creation of some neologisms
may sometimes produce the beautiful, the revival of the dead
32
is the more authentic miracle; for a new word must long remain
doubtful, but an ancient word happily recovered rests
on a basis of permanent strength; it has both novelty and
authority. A collection of picturesque words, found among
our ancient writers, would constitute a precious supplement
to the history of our language. Far more expressive than
our term of executioner is their solemn one of the deathsman;
than our vagabond, their scatterling; than our idiot or
lunatic, their moonling,—a word which, Mr. Gifford observes,
should not have been suffered to grow obsolete. Herrick
finely describes by the term pittering the peculiar shrill and
short cry of the grasshopper: the cry of the grasshopper is
pit! pit! pit! quickly repeated. Envy “dusking the lustre”
of genius is a verb lost for us, but which gives a more precise
expression to the feeling than any other words which we
could use.

The late Dr. Boucher, in the prospectus of his proposed
Dictionary, did me the honour, then a young writer, to quote
an opinion I had formed early in life of the purest source of
neology, which is in the revival of old words.

Words that wise Bacon or brave Rawleigh spake!

We have lost many exquisite and picturesque expressions
through the dulness of our lexicographers, or by the deficiency
in that profounder study of our writers which their labours
require far more than they themselves know. The natural
graces of our language have been impoverished. The genius
that throws its prophetic eye over the language, and the
taste that must come from Heaven, no lexicographer imagines
are required to accompany him amidst a library of
old books!

THE PHILOSOPHY OF PROVERBS.

In antique furniture we sometimes discover a convenience
which long disuse had made us unacquainted with, and are
surprised by the aptness which we did not suspect was concealed
in its solid forms. We have found the labour of the
workmen to have been as admirable as the material itself,
which is still resisting the mouldering touch of time among
those modern inventions, elegant and unsubstantial, which, often
put together with unseasoned wood, are apt to warp and fly
33
into pieces when brought into use. We have found how
strength consists in the selection of materials, and that, whenever
the substitute is not better than the original, we are
losing something in that test of experience, which all things
derive from duration.

Be this as it may! I shall not unreasonably await for the
artists of our novelties to retrograde into massive greatness,
although I cannot avoid reminding them how often they revive
the forgotten things of past times! It is well known
that many of our novelties were in use by our ancestors! In
the history of the human mind there is, indeed, a sort of
antique furniture which I collect, not merely for their antiquity,
but for the sound condition in which I still find them,
and the compactness which they still show. Centuries have
not worm-eaten their solidity! and the utility and delightfulness
which they still afford make them look as fresh and
as ingenious as any of our patent inventions.

By the title of the present article the reader has anticipated
the nature of the old furniture to which I allude. I
propose to give what, in the style of our times, may be called
the Philosophy of Proverbs—a topic which seems virgin.
The art of reading proverbs has not, indeed, always been acquired
even by some of their admirers; but my observations,
like their subject, must be versatile and unconnected; and I
must bespeak indulgence for an attempt to illustrate a very
curious branch of literature, rather not understood than quite
forgotten.

Proverbs have long been in disuse. “A man of fashion,”
observes Lord Chesterfield, “never has recourse to proverbs
and vulgar aphorisms;” and, since the time his lordship so
solemnly interdicted their use, they appear to have withered
away under the ban of his anathema. His lordship was
little conversant with the history of proverbs, and would
unquestionably have smiled on those “men of fashion” of
another stamp, who, in the days of Elizabeth, James, and
Charles, were great collectors of them; would appeal to them
in their conversations, and enforce them in their learned or
their statesmanlike correspondence. Few, perhaps, even now,
suspect that these neglected fragments of wisdom, which
exist among all nations, still offer many interesting objects for
the studies of the philosopher and the historian; and for men
of the world still open an extensive school of human life and
manners.

34

The home-spun adages, and the rusty “sayed-saws,” which
remain in the mouths of the people, are adapted to their capacities
and their humours. Easily remembered, and readily
applied, these are the philosophy of the vulgar, and often
more sound than that of their masters! whoever would learn
what the people think, and how they feel, must not reject
even these as insignificant. The proverbs of the street and
of the market, true to nature, and lasting only because they
are true, are records that the populace at Athens and at
Rome were the same people as at Paris and at London, and
as they had before been in the city of Jerusalem!

Proverbs existed before books. The Spaniards date the
origin of their refranes que dicen las viejas tras el fuego,
“sayings of old wives by their firesides,” before the existence
of any writings in their language, from the circumstance that
these are in the old romance or rudest vulgar idiom. The
most ancient poem in the Edda, “the sublime speech of
Odin,” abounds with ancient proverbs, strikingly descriptive
of the ancient Scandinavians. Undoubtedly proverbs in the
earliest ages long served as the unwritten language of morality,
and even of the useful arts; like the oral traditions of
the Jews, they floated down from age to age on the lips of
successive generations. The name of the first sage who
sanctioned the saying would in time be forgotten, while the
opinion, the metaphor, or the expression, remained, consecrated
into a proverb! Such was the origin of those memorable
sentences by which men learnt to think and to speak
appositely; they were precepts which no man could contradict,
at a time when authority was valued more than opinion,
and experience preferred to novelty. The proverbs of a
father became the inheritance of a son; the mistress of a
family perpetuated hers through her household; the workman
condensed some traditional secret of his craft into a proverbial
expression. When countries are not yet populous, and
property has not yet produced great inequalities in its ranks,
every day will show them how “the drunkard and the
glutton come to poverty, and drowsiness clothes a man
with rags.” At such a period he who gave counsel gave
wealth.

It might therefore have been decided, à priori, that the
most homely proverbs would abound in the most ancient
writers—and such we find in Hesiod; a poet whose learning
was not drawn from books. It could only have been in the
35
agricultural state that this venerable bard could have indicated
a state of repose by this rustic proverb:—

The envy of rival workmen is as justly described by a reference
to the humble manufacturers of earthenware as by
the elevated jealousies of the literati and the artists of a
more polished age. The famous proverbial verse in Hesiod’s
Works and Days—

Καὶ κεραμεὺς κεραμεῖ κοτέει,

is literally, “The potter is hostile to the potter!”

The admonition of the poet to his brother, to prefer a
friendly accommodation to a litigious lawsuit, has fixed a
paradoxical proverb often applied,—

In the progress of time, the stock of popular proverbs received
accessions from the highest sources of human intelligence;
as the philosophers of antiquity formed their collections,
they increased in “weight and number.” Erasmus
has pointed out some of these sources, in the responses of
oracles; the allegorical symbols of Pythagoras; the verses of
the poets; allusions to historical incidents; mythology and
apologue; and other recondite origins. Such dissimilar
matters, coming from all quarters, were melted down into
this vast body of aphoristic knowledge. Those “words of
the wise and their dark sayings,” as they are distinguished
in that large collection which bears the name of the
great Hebrew monarch, at length seem to have required
commentaries; for what else can we infer of the enigmatic
wisdom of the sages, when the royal parœmiographer classes
among their studies, that of “understanding a proverb and
the interpretation?” This elevated notion of “the dark
sayings of the wise” accords with the bold conjecture of
their origin which the Stagyrite has thrown out, who considered
them as the wrecks of an ancient philosophy which
had been lost to mankind by the fatal revolutions of all
human things, and that those had been saved from the general
ruin by their pithy elegance and their diminutive form;
like those marine shells found on the tops of mountains, the
relics of the Deluge! Even at a later period, the sage of
36
Cheronea prized them among the most solemn mysteries; and
Plutarch has described them in a manner which proverbs may
even still merit: “Under the veil of these curious sentences
are hid those germs of morals which the masters of philosophy
have afterwards developed into so many volumes.”

At the highest period of Grecian genius, the tragic and the
comic poets introduced into their dramas the proverbial style.
St. Paul quotes a line which still remains among the first
exercises of our school-pens:—

Evil communications corrupt good manners.

It is a verse found in a fragment of Menander the comic
poet:

Φθείρουσιν ἢθη χρήσθ᾽ ὁμιλίαι κακαί.

As this verse is a proverb, and the apostle, and indeed the
highest authority, Jesus himself, consecrates the use of proverbs
by their occasional application, it is uncertain whether
St. Paul quotes the Grecian poet, or only repeats some popular
adage. Proverbs were bright shafts in the Greek and
Latin quivers; and when Bentley, by a league of superficial
wits, was accused of pedantry for his use of some ancient
proverbs, the sturdy critic vindicated his taste by showing
that Cicero constantly introduced Greek proverbs into his
writings,—that Scaliger and Erasmus loved them, and had
formed collections drawn from the stores of antiquity.

Some difficulty has occurred in the definition. Proverbs
must be distinguished from proverbial phrases, and from sententious
maxims; but as proverbs have many faces, from
their miscellaneous nature, the class itself scarcely admits of
any definition. When Johnson defined a proverb to be “a
short sentence frequently repeated by the people,” this definition
would not include the most curious ones, which have
not always circulated among the populace, nor even belong
to them; nor does it designate the vital qualities of a proverb.
The pithy quaintness of old Howell has admirably
described the ingredients of an exquisite proverb to be sense,
shortness, and salt. A proverb is distinguished from a maxim
or an apophthegm by that brevity which condenses a
thought or a metaphor, where one thing is said and another
is to be applied. This often produces wit, and that quick
pungency which excites surprise, but strikes with conviction;
this gives it an epigrammatic turn. George Herbert
entitled the small collection which he formed “Jacula Prudentium,”
37
Darts or Javelins! something hurled and striking
deeply; a characteristic of a proverb which possibly Herbert
may have borrowed from a remarkable passage in Plato’s
dialogue of “Protagoras or the Sophists.”

The influence of proverbs over the minds and conversations
of a whole people is strikingly illustrated by this philosopher’s
explanation of the term to laconise,—the mode of speech
peculiar to the Lacedæmonians. This people affected to
appear unlearned, and seemed only emulous to excel the rest
of the Greeks in fortitude and in military skill. According
to Plato’s notion, this was really a political artifice, with a
view to conceal their pre-eminent wisdom. With the
jealousy of a petty state, they attempted to confine their
renowned sagacity within themselves, and under their
military to hide their contemplative character! The
philosopher assures those who in other cities imagined they
laconised, merely by imitating the severe exercises and the
other warlike manners of the Lacedæmonians, that they were
grossly deceived; and thus curiously describes the sort of
wisdom which this singular people practised.

“If any one wish to converse with the meanest of the
Lacedæmonians, he will at first find him, for the most part,
apparently despicable in conversation; but afterwards, when
a proper opportunity presents itself, this same mean person,
like a skilful jaculator, will hurl a sentence, worthy of
attention, short and contorted; so that he who converses with
him will appear to be in no respect superior to a boy! That
to laconise, therefore, consists much more in philosophising
than in the love of exercise, is understood by some of the
present age, and was known to the ancients, they being
persuaded that the ability of uttering such sentences as these
is the province of a man perfectly learned. The seven sages
were emulators, lovers, and disciples of the Lacedæmonian
erudition. Their wisdom was a thing of this kind, viz. short
sentences uttered by each, and worthy to be remembered.
These men, assembling together, consecrated to Apollo the
first fruits of their wisdom; writing in the Temple of Apollo,
at Delphi, those sentences which are celebrated by all men,
viz. Know thyself! and Nothing too much! But on what
account do I mention these things? To show that the mode
of philosophy among the ancients was a certain laconic
diction.”29

38

The “laconisms” of the Lacedæmonians evidently partook
of the proverbial style: they were, no doubt, often proverbs
themselves. The very instances which Plato supplies of this
“laconising” are two most venerable proverbs.

All this elevates the science of proverbs, and indicates
that these abridgments of knowledge convey great results,
with a parsimony of words prodigal of sense. They have,
therefore, preserved many “a short sentence, not repeated by
the people.”

It is evident, however, that the earliest writings of
every people are marked by their most homely, or domestic
proverbs; for these were more directly addressed to their
wants. Franklin, who may be considered as the founder of a
people who were suddenly placed in a stage of civil society
which as yet could afford no literature, discovered the
philosophical cast of his genius, when he filled his almanacs
with proverbs, by the ingenious contrivance of framing them
into a connected discourse, delivered by an old man attending
an auction. “These proverbs,” he tells us, “which contained
the wisdom of many ages and nations, when their scattered
counsels were brought together, made a great impression.
They were reprinted in Britain, in a large sheet of paper, and
stuck up in houses: and were twice translated in France, and
distributed among their poor parishioners.” The same occurrence
had happened with us ere we became a reading people.
Sir Thomas Elyot, in the reign of Henry the Eighth,
describing the ornaments of a nobleman’s house, among his
hangings, and plate, and pictures, notices the engraving of
proverbs “on his plate and vessels, which served the guests
with a most opportune counsel and comments.” Later even
than the reign of Elizabeth our ancestors had proverbs
always before them, on everything that had room for a piece
of advice on it; they had them painted in their tapestries,
stamped on the most ordinary utensils, on the blades of their
knives,30 the borders of their plates,31 and “conned them out
39
of goldsmiths’ rings.”32 The usurer, in Robert Greene’s
“Groat’s worth of Wit,” compressed all his philosophy into
the circle of his ring, having learned sufficient Latin to understand
the proverbial motto of “Tu tibi cura!” The husband
was reminded of his lordly authority when he only looked
into his trencher, one of its learned aphorisms having descended
to us,—

The calmest husbands make the stormiest wives.

The English proverbs of the populace, most of which are
still in circulation, were collected by old John Heywood.33
They are arranged by Tusser for “the parlour—the guest’s
chamber—the hall—table-lessons,” &c. Not a small portion
of our ancient proverbs were adapted to rural life, when our
ancestors lived more than ourselves amidst the works of God,
40
and less among those of men.34 At this time, one of our old
statesmen, in commending the art of compressing a tedious
discourse into a few significant phrases, suggested the use of
proverbs in diplomatic intercourse, convinced of the great
benefit which would result to the negotiators themselves, as
well as to others! I give a literary curiosity of this kind.
A member of the House of Commons, in the reign of
Elizabeth, made a speech entirely composed of the most
homely proverbs. The subject was a bill against double
payments of book-debts. Knavish tradesmen were then in
the habit of swelling out their book-debts with those who
took credit, particularly to their younger customers. One of
the members who began to speak “for very fear shook,” and
stood silent. The nervous orator was followed by a blunt
and true representative of the famed governor of Barataria,
delivering himself thus—“It is now my chance to speak
something, and that without humming or hawing. I think
this law is a good law. Even reckoning makes long friends.
As far goes the penny as the penny’s master. Vigilantibus
non dormientibus jura subveniunt. Pay the reckoning overnight
and ye shall not be troubled in the morning. If ready
money be mensura publica, let every one cut his coat according
to his cloth. When his old suit is in the wane, let him
stay till that his money bring a new suit in the increase.”35

Another instance of the use of proverbs among our statesmen
occurs in a manuscript letter of Sir Dudley Carlton,
written in 1632, on the impeachment of Lord Middlesex,
who, he says, is “this day to plead his own cause in the
Exchequer-chamber, about an account of four-score thousand
pounds laid to his charge. How his lordship sped I know
not, but do remember well the French proverb, Qui mange de
41
l’oy du Roy chiera une plume quarante ans après. ‘Who
eats of the king’s goose, will void a feather forty years
after!’”

This was the era of proverbs with us; for then they were
spoken by all ranks of society. The free use of trivial
proverbs got them into disrepute; and as the abuse of a thing
raises a just opposition to its practice, a slender wit affecting
“a cross humour,” published a little volume of “Crossing of
Proverbs, Cross-answers, and Cross-humours.” He pretends
to contradict the most popular ones; but he has not always
the genius to strike at amusing paradoxes.36

Proverbs were long the favourites of our neighbours; in
the splendid and refined court of Louis the Fourteenth they
gave rise to an odd invention. They plotted comedies and
even fantastical ballets from their subjects. In these Curiosities
of Literature I cannot pass by such eccentric inventions
unnoticed.

A Comedy of proverbs is described by the Duke de la
Vallière, which was performed in 1634 with prodigious success.
He considers that this comedy ought to be ranked
among farces; but it is gay, well-written, and curious for
containing the best proverbs, which are happily introduced
in the dialogue.

A more extraordinary attempt was a Ballet of proverbs.
Before the opera was established in France, the ancient ballets
formed the chief amusement of the court, and Louis the
Fourteenth himself joined with the performers. The singular
attempt of forming a pantomimical dance out of proverbs is
quite French; we have a “ballet des proverbes, dansé par le
Roi, in 1654.” At every proverb the scene changed, and
adapted itself to the subject. I shall give two or three of
the entrées that we may form some notion of these capriccios.

42

The proverb was—

The scene was composed of swaggering scaramouches and
some honest cits, who at length beat them off.

At another entrée the proverb was—

Opportunity was acted by le Sieur Beaubrun, but it is difficult
to conceive how the real could personify the abstract
personage. The thieves were the Duke d’Amville and Monsieur
de la Chesnaye.

Another entrée was the proverb of—

A loose dissipated officer was performed by le Sieur l’Anglois;
the Pipe by St. Aignan, and the Tabor by le Sieur le Comte!
In this manner every proverb was spoken in action, the whole
connected by dialogue. More must have depended on the
actors than the poet.37

The French long retained this fondness for proverbs; for
they still have dramatic compositions entitled proverbes, on a
more refined plan. Their invention is so recent, that the
term is not in their great dictionary of Trevoux. These
proverbes are dramas of a single act, invented by Carmontel,
who possessed a peculiar vein of humour, but who designed
them only for private theatricals. Each proverb furnished a
subject for a few scenes, and created a situation powerfully
comic: it is a dramatic amusement which does not appear to
have reached us, but one which the celebrated Catherine of
Russia delighted to compose for her own society.

Among the middle classes of society to this day, we may
observe that certain family proverbs are traditionally preserved:
the favourite saying of a father is repeated by the
sons; and frequently the conduct of a whole generation has
been influenced by such domestic proverbs. This may be
perceived in many of the mottos of our old nobility, which
seem to have originated in some habitual proverb of the
43
founder of the family. In ages when proverbs were most
prevalent, such pithy sentences would admirably serve in the
ordinary business of life, and lead on to decision, even in its
greater exigencies. Orators, by some lucky proverb, without
wearying their auditors, would bring conviction home to their
bosoms: and great characters would appeal to a proverb, or
deliver that which in time by its aptitude became one. When
Nero was reproached for the ardour with which he gave himself
up to the study of music, he replied to his censurers by
the Greek proverb, “An artist lives everywhere.” The
emperor answered in the spirit of Rousseau’s system, that
every child should be taught some trade. When Cæsar, after
anxious deliberation, decided on the passage of the Rubicon
(which very event has given rise to a proverb), rousing himself
with a start of courage, he committed himself to Fortune,
with that proverbial expression on his lips, used by gamesters
in desperate play: having passed the Rubicon, he exclaimed,
“The die is cast!” The answer of Paulus Æmilius to the
relations of his wife, who had remonstrated with him on his
determination to separate himself from her against whom no
fault could be alleged, has become one of our most familiar
proverbs. This hero acknowledged the excellences of his
lady; but, requesting them to look on his shoe, which
appeared to be well made, he observed, “None of you know
where the shoe pinches!” He either used a proverbial
phrase, or by its aptness it has become one of the most
popular.

There are, indeed, proverbs connected with the characters
of eminent men. They were either their favourite ones, or
have originated with themselves. Such a collection would
form a historical curiosity. To the celebrated Bayard are
the French indebted for a military proverb, which some
of them still repeat, “Ce que le gantelet gagne le gorgerin le
mange”—“What the gauntlet gets, the gorget consumes.”
That reflecting soldier well calculated the profits of a military
life, which consumes, in the pomp and waste which are necessary
for its maintenance, the slender pay it receives, and even
what its rapacity sometimes acquires. The favourite proverb
of Erasmus was Festina lente!—“Hasten slowly!”38 He
wished it be inscribed wherever it could meet our eyes, on
public buildings, and on our rings and seals. One of our own
44
statesmen used a favourite sentence, which has enlarged our
stock of national proverbs. Sir Amias Pawlet, when he perceived
too much hurry in any business, was accustomed to
say, “Stay awhile, to make an end the sooner.” Oliver
Cromwell’s coarse but descriptive proverb conveys the contempt
he felt for some of his mean and troublesome coadjutors:
“Nits will be lice!” The Italians have a proverb,
which has been occasionally applied to certain political personages:—

Ere this was a proverb, it had served as an embroidered motto
on the mystical mantle of Castruccio Castracani. That military
genius, who sought to revolutionise Italy, and aspired to
its sovereignty, lived long enough to repent the wild romantic
ambition which provoked all Italy to confederate against him;
the mysterious motto he assumed entered into the proverbs
of his country! The Border proverb of the Douglases, “It
were better to hear the lark sing than the mouse cheep,” was
adopted by every Border chief, to express, as Sir Walter Scott
observes, what the great Bruce had pointed out, that the
woods and hills of their country were their safest bulwarks,
instead of the fortified places which the English surpassed
their neighbours in the arts of assaulting or defending. These
illustrations indicate one of the sources of proverbs; they
have often resulted from the spontaneous emotions or the
profound reflections of some extraordinary individual, whose
energetic expression was caught by a faithful ear, never to
perish!

The poets have been very busy with proverbs in all the
languages of Europe: some appear to have been the favourite
lines of some ancient poem: even in more refined times, many
of the pointed verses of Boileau and Pope have become proverbial.
Many trivial and laconic proverbs bear the jingle of
alliteration or rhyme, which assisted their circulation, and
were probably struck off extempore; a manner which Swift
practised, who was a ready coiner of such rhyming and ludicrous
proverbs: delighting to startle a collector by his facetious
or sarcastic humour, in the shape of an “old saying and
45
true.” Some of these rhyming proverbs are, however, terse
and elegant: we have

The Italian—

Who hunts two hares, loses one and leaves the other.

The haughty Spaniard—

To give is honour, to ask is grief.

And the French—

The composers of these short proverbs were a numerous
race of poets, who, probably, among the dreams of their immortality
never suspected that they were to descend to posterity,
themselves and their works unknown, while their extempore
thoughts would be repeated by their own nation.

Proverbs were at length consigned to the people, when
books were addressed to scholars; but the people did not find
themselves so destitute of practical wisdom, by preserving
their national proverbs, as some of those closet students who
had ceased to repeat them. The various humours of mankind,
in the mutability of human affairs, had given birth to
every species; and men were wise, or merry, or satirical, and
mourned or rejoiced in proverbs. Nations held an universal
intercourse of proverbs, from the eastern to the western
world; for we discover among those which appear strictly
national, many which are common to them all. Of our own
familiar ones several may be tracked among the snows of the
Latins and the Greeks, and have sometimes been drawn from
“The Mines of the East:” like decayed families which remain
in obscurity, they may boast of a high lineal descent
whenever they recover their lost title-deeds. The vulgar
proverb, “To carry coals to Newcastle,” local and idiomatic
46
as it appears, however, has been borrowed and applied by ourselves;
it may be found among the Persians: in the “Bustan”
of Sadi we have Infers piper in Hindostan; “To carry
pepper to Hindostan;” among the Hebrews, “To carry oil
to the City of Olives;” a similar proverb occurs in Greek;
and in Galland’s “Maxims of the East” we may discover
how many of the most common proverbs among us, as well
as some of Joe Miller’s jests, are of oriental origin.

The resemblance of certain proverbs in different nations,
must, however, be often ascribed to the identity of human
nature; similar situations and similar objects have unquestionably
made men think and act and express themselves
alike. All nations are parallels of each other! Hence all
parœmiographers, or collectors of proverbs, complain of the
difficulty of separating their own national proverbs from
those which have crept into the language from others, particularly
when nations have held much intercourse together.
We have a copious collection of Scottish proverbs by Kelly,
but this learned man was mortified at discovering that many
which he had long believed to have been genuine Scottish,
were not only English, but French, Italian, Spanish, Latin,
and Greek ones; many of his Scottish proverbs are almost
literally expressed among the fragments of remote antiquity.
It would have surprised him further had he been aware that
his Greek originals were themselves but copies, and might
have been found in D’Herbelot, Erpenius, and Golius, and in
many Asiatic works, which have been more recently introduced
to the enlarged knowledge of the European student,
who formerly found his most extended researches limited by
Hellenistic lore.

Perhaps it was owing to an accidental circumstance that
the proverbs of the European nations have been preserved in
the permanent form of volumes. Erasmus is usually considered
as the first modern collector, but he appears to have
been preceded by Polydore Vergil, who bitterly reproaches
Erasmus with envy and plagiarism, for passing by his collection
without even a poor compliment for the inventor! Polydore
was a vain, superficial writer, who prided himself in
leading the way on more topics than the present. Erasmus,
with his usual pleasantry, provokingly excuses himself, by
acknowledging that he had forgotten his friend’s book! Few
sympathise with the quarrels of authors; and since Erasmus
has written a far better book than Polydore Vergil’s, the
47
original “Adagia” is left only to be commemorated in literary
history as one of its curiosities.39

The “Adagia” of Erasmus contains a collection of about
five thousand proverbs, gradually gathered from a constant
study of the ancients. Erasmus, blest with the genius which
could enliven a folio, delighted himself and all Europe by the
continued accessions he made to a volume which even now
may be the companion of literary men for a winter day’s fireside.
The successful example of Erasmus commanded the
imitation of the learned in Europe, and drew their attention
to their own national proverbs. Some of the most learned
men, and some not sufficiently so, were now occupied in this
new study.

In Spain, Fernandez Nunes, a Greek professor, and the
Marquis of Santellana, a grandee, published collections of
their Refranes, or Proverbs, a term derived A REFERENDO,
because it is often repeated. The “Refranes o Proverbios
Castellanos,” par Cæsar Oudin, 1624, translated into French,
is a valuable compilation. In Cervantes and Quevedo, the
best practical illustrators, they are sown with no sparing
hand. There is an ample collection of Italian proverbs, by
Florio, who was an Englishman, of Italian origin, and who
published “Il Giardino di Ricreatione” at London, so early
as in 1591, exceeding six thousand proverbs; but they are
unexplained, and are often obscure. Another Italian in
England, Torriano, in 1649, published an interesting collection
in the diminutive form of a twenty-fours. It was subsequent
to these publications in England, that in Italy,
Angelus Monozini, in 1604, published his collection; and
Julius Varini, in 1642, produced his Scuola del Vulgo. In
France, Oudin, after others had preceded him, published a
collection of French proverbs, under the title of Curiosités
Françoises. Fleury de Bellingen’s Explication de Proverbes
François, on comparing it with Les Illustres Proverbes Historiques,
a subsequent publication, I discovered to be the
same work. It is the first attempt to render the study of
proverbs somewhat amusing. The plan consists of a dialogue
between a philosopher and a Sancho Pança, who blurts out his
48
proverbs with more delight than understanding. The philosopher
takes that opportunity of explaining them by the events
in which they originated, which, however, are not always to
be depended on. A work of high merit on French proverbs
is the unfinished one of the Abbé Tuet, sensible and learned.
A collection of Danish proverbs, accompanied by a French
translation, was printed at Copenhagen, in a quarto volume,
1761. England may boast of no inferior parœmiographers.
The grave and judicious Camden, the religious Herbert, the
entertaining Howell, the facetious Fuller, and the laborious
Ray, with others, have preserved our national sayings. The
Scottish have been largely collected and explained by the
learned Kelly. An excellent anonymous collection, not uncommon,
in various languages, 1707; the collector and translator
was Dr. J. Mapletoft. It must be acknowledged, that
although no nation exceeds our own in sterling sense, we
rarely rival the delicacy, the wit, and the felicity of expression
of the Spanish and the Italian, and the poignancy of
some of the French proverbs.

The interest we may derive from the study of proverbs is
not confined to their universal truths, nor to their poignant
pleasantry; a philosophical mind will discover in proverbs a
great variety of the most curious knowledge. The manners
of a people are painted after life in their domestic proverbs;
and it would not be advancing too much to assert, that the
genius of the age might be often detected in its prevalent
ones. The learned Selden tells us, that the proverbs of
several nations were much studied by Bishop Andrews: the
reason assigned was, because “by them he knew the minds of
several nations, which,” said he, “is a brave thing, as we
count him wise who knows the minds and the insides of men,
which is done by knowing what is habitual to them.” Lord
Bacon condensed a wide circuit of philosophical thought,
when he observed that “the genius, wit, and spirit of a nation
are discovered by their proverbs.”

Proverbs peculiarly national, while they convey to us the
modes of thinking, will consequently indicate the modes of
acting among a people. The Romans had a proverbial expression
for their last stake in play, Rem ad triarios venisse, “the
reserve are engaged!” a proverbial expression, from which the
military habits of the people might be inferred; the triarii
being their reserve. A proverb has preserved a curious custom
of ancient coxcombry, which originally came from the
49
Greeks. To men of effeminate manners in their dress, they
applied the proverb of Unico digitulo scalpit caput. Scratching
the head with a single finger was, it seems, done by the
critically nice youths in Rome, that they might not discompose
the economy of their hair. The Arab, whose unsettled
existence makes him miserable and interested, says, “Vinegar
given is better than honey bought.” Everything of high
esteem with him who is so often parched in the desert is
described as milk—“How large his flow of milk!” is a proverbial
expression with the Arab to distinguish the most
copious eloquence. To express a state of perfect repose, the
Arabian proverb is, “I throw the rein over my back;” an
allusion to the loosening of the cords of the camels, which
are thrown over their backs when they are sent to pasture.
We discover the rustic manners of our ancient Britons in the
Cambrian proverbs; many relate to the hedge. “The cleanly
Briton is seen in the hedge: the horse looks not on the hedge
but the corn: the bad husband’s hedge is full of gaps.” The
state of an agricultural people appears in such proverbs as
“You must not count your yearlings till May-day:” and
their proverbial sentence for old age is, “An old man’s end is
to keep sheep?” Turn from the vagrant Arab and the agricultural
Briton to a nation existing in a high state of artificial
civilization: the Chinese proverbs frequently allude to magnificent
buildings. Affecting a more solemn exterior than all
other nations, a favourite proverb with them is, “A grave and
majestic outside is, as it were, the palace of the soul.” Their
notion of a government is quite architectural. They say, “A
sovereign may be compared to a hall; his officers to the
steps that lead to it; the people to the ground on which they
stand.” What should we think of a people who had a proverb,
that “He who gives blows is a master, he who gives
none is a dog?” We should instantly decide on the mean
and servile spirit of those who could repeat it; and such we
find to have been that of the Bengalese, to whom the degrading
proverb belongs, derived from the treatment they were
used to receive from their Mogul rulers, who answered the
claims of their creditors by a vigorous application of the
whip! In some of the Hebrew proverbs we are struck by
the frequent allusions of that fugitive people to their own
history. The cruel oppression exercised by the ruling power,
and the confidence in their hope of change in the day of retribution,
was delivered in this Hebrew proverb—“When the
50
tale of bricks is doubled, Moses comes!” The fond idolatry
of their devotion to their ceremonial law, and to everything
connected with their sublime Theocracy, in their magnificent
Temple, is finely expressed by this proverb—“None ever took
a stone out of the Temple, but the dust did fly into his eyes.”
The Hebrew proverb that “A fast for a dream, is as fire for
stubble,” which it kindles, could only have been invented by
a people whose superstitions attached a holy mystery to fasts
and dreams. They imagined that a religious fast was propitious
to a religious dream; or to obtain the interpretation
of one which had troubled their imagination. Peyssonel, who
long resided among the Turks, observes that their proverbs
are full of sense, ingenuity, and elegance, the surest test of the
intellectual abilities of any nation. He said this to correct
the volatile opinion of De Tott, who, to convey an idea of
their stupid pride, quotes one of their favourite adages, of
which the truth and candour are admirable; “Riches in the
Indies, wit in Europe, and pomp among the Ottomans.”

The Spaniards may appeal to their proverbs to show that
they were a high-minded and independent race. A Whiggish
jealousy of the monarchical power stamped itself on this
ancient one, Va el rey hasta do peude, y no hasta do quiere:
“The king goes as far as he is able, not as far as he desires.”
It must have been at a later period, when the national genius
became more subdued, and every Spaniard dreaded to find
under his own roof a spy or an informer, that another proverb
arose, Con el rey y la inquisicion, chiton! “With the
king and the Inquisition, hush!” The gravity and taciturnity
of the nation have been ascribed to the effects of this
proverb. Their popular but suppressed feelings on taxation,
and on a variety of dues exacted by their clergy, were murmured
in proverbs—Lo que no lleva Christo lleva el fisco!
“What Christ takes not, the exchequer carries away!” They
have a number of sarcastic proverbs on the tenacious gripe
of the “abad avariento,” the avaricious priest, who, “having
eaten the olio offered, claims the dish!” A striking mixture
of chivalric habits, domestic decency, and epicurean comfort,
appears in the Spanish proverb, La muger y la salsa a la mano
de la lança: “The wife and the sauce by the hand of the
lance;” to honour the dame, and to have the sauce near.

The Italian proverbs have taken a tinge from their deep
and politic genius, and their wisdom seems wholly concentrated
in their personal interests. I think every tenth proverb,
51
in an Italian collection, is some cynical or some selfish
maxim: a book of the world for worldlings! The Venetian
proverb, Pria Veneziana, poi Christiane: “First Venetian,
and then Christian!” condenses the whole spirit of their
ancient Republic into the smallest space possible. Their
political proverbs no doubt arose from the extraordinary state
of a people sometimes distracted among republics, and sometimes
servile in petty courts. The Italian says, I popoli s’ammazzano,
ed i principi s’abbracciano: “The people murder one
another, and princes embrace one another.” Chi prattica co’
grandi, l’ultimo a tavola, e’l primo a strapazzi: “Who dangles
after the great is the last at table, and the first at blows.”
Chi non sa adulare, non sa regnare: “Who knows not to
flatter, knows not to reign.” Chi serve in corte muore sul’
pagliato: “Who serves at court, dies on straw.” Wary cunning
in domestic life is perpetually impressed. An Italian
proverb, which is immortalised in our language, for it enters
into the history of Milton, was that by which the elegant
Wotton counselled the young poetic traveller to have—Il
viso sciolto, ed i pensieri stretti, “An open countenance, but
close thoughts.” In the same spirit, Chi parla semina, chi
tace raccoglie: “The talker sows, the silent reaps;” as well
as, Fatti di miele, e ti mangieran le mosche: “Make yourself
all honey, and the flies will devour you.” There are some
which display a deep knowledge of human nature: A Lucca
ti vidi, à Pisa ti connobbi! “I saw you at Lucca, I knew
you at Pisa!” Guardati d’aceto di vin dolce: “Beware of
vinegar made of sweet wine;” provoke not the rage of a
patient man!

Among a people who had often witnessed their fine country
devastated by petty warfare, their notion of the military character
was not usually heroic. Il soldato per far male è ben
pagato: “The soldier is well paid for doing mischief.”
Soldato, acqua, e fuoco, presto si fan luoco: “A soldier, fire,
and water soon make room for themselves.” But in a
poetical people, endowed with great sensibility, their proverbs
would sometimes be tender and fanciful. They paint the
activity of friendship, Chi ha l’amor nel petto, ha lo sprone
à i fianchi: “Who feels love in the breast, feels a spur in his
limbs:” or its generous passion, Gli amici legono la borsa
con un filo di ragnatelo: “Friends tie their purse with a
cobweb’s thread.” They characterised the universal lover by
an elegant proverb—Appicare il Maio ad ogn’ uscio: “To
52
hang every door with May;” alluding to the bough which
in the nights of May the country people are accustomed to
plant before the door of their mistress. If we turn to the
French, we discover that the military genius of France dictated
the proverb Maille à maille se fait le haubergeon:
“Link by link is made the coat of mail;” and, Tel coup de
langue est pire qu’un coup de lance; “The tongue strikes deeper
than the lance;” and Ce qui vient du tambour s’en retourne
à la flute; “What comes by the tabor goes back with the
pipe.” Point d’argent point de Suisse has become proverbial,
observes an Edinburgh Reviewer; a striking expression,
which, while French or Austrian gold predominated, was
justly used to characterise the illiberal and selfish policy of
the cantonal and federal governments of Switzerland, when it
began to degenerate from its moral patriotism. The ancient,
perhaps the extinct, spirit of Englishmen was once expressed
by our proverb, “Better be the head of a dog than the tail
of a lion;” i.e., the first of the yeomanry rather than the
last of the gentry. A foreign philosopher might have discovered
our own ancient skill in archery among our proverbs;
for none but true toxophilites could have had such a proverb
as, “I will either make a shaft or a bolt of it!” signifying,
says the author of Ivanhoe, a determination to make one
use or other of the thing spoken of: the bolt was the arrow
peculiarly fitted to the cross-bow, as that of the long-bow
was called a shaft. These instances sufficiently demonstrate
that the characteristic circumstances and feelings of a people
are discovered in their popular notions, and stamped on their
familiar proverbs.

It is also evident that the peculiar, and often idiomatic,
humour of a people is best preserved in their proverbs.
There is a shrewdness, although deficient in delicacy, in the
Scottish proverbs; they are idiomatic, facetious, and strike
home. Kelly, who has collected three thousand, informs us,
that, in 1725, the Scotch were a great proverbial nation; for
that few among the better sort will converse any considerable
time, but will confirm every assertion and observation
with a Scottish proverb. The speculative Scotch of our own
times have probably degenerated in prudential lore, and deem
themselves much wiser than their proverbs. They may reply
by a Scotch proverb on proverbs, made by a great man in
Scotland, who, having given a splendid entertainment, was
harshly told, that “Fools make feasts, and wise men eat
53
them;” but he readily answered, “Wise men make proverbs,
and fools repeat them!”

National humour, frequently local and idiomatical, depends
on the artificial habits of mankind, so opposite to each other;
but there is a natural vein, which the populace, always true
to nature, preserve, even among the gravest people. The
Arabian proverb, “The barber learns his art on the orphan’s
face;” the Chinese, “In a field of melons do not pull up
your shoe; under a plum-tree do not adjust your cap;”—to
impress caution in our conduct under circumstances of suspicion;—and
the Hebrew one, “He that hath had one of
his family hanged may not say to his neighbour, hang up this
fish!” are all instances of this sort of humour. The Spaniards
are a grave people, but no nation has equalled them in
their peculiar humour. The genius of Cervantes partook
largely of that of his country; that mantle of gravity, which
almost conceals its latent facetiousness, and with which he
has imbued his style and manner with such untranslatable
idiomatic raciness, may be traced to the proverbial erudition
of his nation. “To steal a sheep, and give away the trotters
for God’s sake!” is Cervantic nature! To one who is seeking
an opportunity to quarrel with another, their proverb
runs, Si quieres dar palos a sur muger pidele al sol a bever,
“Hast thou a mind to quarrel with thy wife, bid her bring
water to thee in the sunshine!”—a very fair quarrel may be
picked up about the motes in the clearest water! On the
judges in Gallicia, who, like our former justices of peace, “for
half a dozen chickens would dispense with a dozen of penal
statutes,” A juezes Gallicianos, con los pies en las manos:
“To the judges of Gallicia go with feet in hand;” a droll
allusion to a present of poultry, usually held by the legs. To
describe persons who live high without visible means, Los
que cabritos venden, y cabras no tienen, de donde los vienen?
“They that sell kids, and have no goats, how came they by
them?” El vino no trae bragas, “Wine wears no
breeches;” for men in wine expose their most secret
thoughts. Vino di un oreja, “Wine of one ear!” is good
wine; for at bad, shaking our heads, both our ears are
visible; but at good the Spaniard, by a natural gesticulation
lowering on one side, shows a single ear.

Proverbs abounding in sarcastic humour, and found among
every people, are those which are pointed at rival countries.
Among ourselves, hardly has a county escaped from some popular
54
quip; even neighbouring towns have their sarcasms,
usually pickled in some unlucky rhyme. The egotism of man
eagerly seizes on whatever serves to depreciate or to ridicule
his neighbour: nations proverb each other; counties flout
counties; obscure towns sharpen their wits on towns as obscure
as themselves—the same evil principle lurking in poor
human nature, if it cannot always assume predominance, will
meanly gratify itself by insult or contempt. They expose
some prevalent folly, or allude to some disgrace which the
natives have incurred. In France, the Burgundians have a
proverb, Mieux vaut bon repas que bel habit; “Better a good
dinner than a fine coat.” These good people are great gormandizers,
but shabby dressers; they are commonly said to
have “bowels of silk and velvet;” this is, all their silk and
velvet goes for their bowels! Thus Picardy is famous for
“hot heads;” and the Norman for son dit et son dédit, “his
saying and his unsaying!” In Italy the numerous rival
cities pelt one another with proverbs: Chi ha a fare con
Tosco non convien esser losco, “He who deals with a Tuscan
must not have his eyes shut.” A Venetia chi vi nasce mal vi
si pasce, “Whom Venice breeds, she poorly feeds.”

There is another source of national characteristics, frequently
producing strange or whimsical combinations; a
people, from a very natural circumstance, have drawn their
proverbs from local objects, or from allusions to peculiar
customs. The influence of manners and customs over the
ideas and language of a people would form a subject of extensive
and curious research. There is a Japanese proverb,
that “A fog cannot be dispelled with a fan!” Had we not
known the origin of this proverb, it would be evident that it
could only have occurred to a people who had constantly
before them fogs and fans; and the fact appears that fogs are
frequent on the coast of Japan, and that from the age of
five years both sexes of the Japanese carry fans. The Spaniards
have an odd proverb to describe those who tease and
vex a person before they do him the very benefit which they
are about to confer—acting kindly, but speaking roughly;
Mostrar primero la horca que le lugar, “To show the gallows
before they show the town;” a circumstance alluding
to their small towns, which have a gallows placed on an
eminence, so that the gallows breaks on the eye of the traveller
before he gets a view of the town itself.

The Cheshire proverb on marriage, “Better wed over the
55
mixon than over the moor,” that is, at home or in its vicinity;
mixon alludes to the dung, &c., in the farm-yard, while
the road from Chester to London is over the moorland in
Staffordshire: this local proverb is a curious instance of provincial
pride, perhaps of wisdom, to induce the gentry of
that county to form intermarriages; to prolong their own
ancient families, and perpetuate ancient friendships between
them.

In the Isle of Man a proverbial expression forcibly indicates
the object constantly occupying the minds of the inhabitants.
The two Deemsters or judges, when appointed to
the chair of judgment, declare they will render justice between
man and man “as equally as the herring bone lies between
the two sides:” an image which could not have occurred
to any people unaccustomed to the herring-fishery.
There is a Cornish proverb, “Those who will not be ruled
by the rudder must be ruled by the rock”—the strands of
Cornwall, so often covered with wrecks, could not fail to impress
on the imaginations of its inhabitants the two objects
from whence they drew this salutary proverb against obstinate
wrongheads.

When Scotland, in the last century, felt its allegiance to
England doubtful, and when the French sent an expedition
to the Land of Cakes, a local proverb was revived, to show the
identity of interests which affected both nations:

These are two high hills, one in Scotland and one in England;
so near, that what happens to the one will not be long
ere it reach the other. If a fog lodges on the one, it is sure
to rain on the other; the mutual sympathies of the two
countries were hence deduced in a copious dissertation, by
Oswald Dyke, on what was called “The Union-proverb,”
which local proverbs of our country Fuller has interspersed
in his “Worthies,” and Ray and Grose have collected separately.

I was amused lately by a curious financial revelation which
I found in an opposition paper, where it appears that “Ministers
pretend to make their load of taxes more portable, by
shifting the burden, or altering the pressure, without, however,
diminishing the weight; according to the Italian proverb,
Accommodare le bisaccie nella strada, ‘To fit the load on
56
the journey:’” it is taken from a custom of the mule-drivers,
who, placing their packages at first but awkwardly on
the backs of their poor beasts, and seeing them ready to sink,
cry out, “Never mind! we must fit them better on the
road!” I was gratified to discover, by the present and some
other modern instances, that the taste for proverbs was reviving,
and that we were returning to those sober times,
when the aptitude of a simple proverb would be preferred to
the verbosity of politicians, Tories, Whigs, or Radicals!

There are domestic proverbs which originate in incidents
known only to the natives of their province. Italian literature
is particularly rich in these stores. The lively proverbial
taste of that vivacious people was transferred to their
own authors; and when these allusions were obscured by
time, learned Italians, in their zeal for their national literature,
and in their national love of story-telling, have written
grave commentaries even on ludicrous, but popular tales, in
which the proverbs are said to have originated. They resemble
the old facetious contes, whose simplicity and humour
still live in the pages of Boccaccio, and are not forgotten in
those of the Queen of Navarre.

The Italians apply a proverb to a person who while he is
beaten, takes the blows quietly:—

And to threaten to give a man—

means to give him a thrashing. This proverb, it is said,
originated in the close of a certain droll adventure. The community
of the Castle Poggibonsi, probably from some jocular
tenure observed on St. Bernard’s day, pay a tribute of peaches
to the court of Tuscany, which are usually shared among the
ladies in waiting, and the pages of the court. It happened
one season, in a great scarcity of peaches, that the good people
of Poggibonsi, finding them rather dear, sent, instead of
the customary tribute, a quantity of fine juicy figs, which was
so much disapproved of by the pages, that as soon as they got
hold of them, they began in rage to empty the baskets on the
heads of the ambassadors of the Poggibonsi, who, in attempting
to fly as well as they could from the pulpy shower, half-blinded,
57
and recollecting that peaches would have had stones
in them, cried out—

Fare le scalée di Sant’ Ambrogio; “To mount the stairs of
Saint Ambrose,” a proverb allusive to the business of the
school of scandal. Varchi explains it by a circumstance so
common in provincial cities. On summer evenings, for fresh
air and gossip, the loungers met on the steps and landing-places
of the church of St. Ambrose: whoever left the party,
“they read in his book,” as our commentator expresses it;
and not a leaf was passed over! All liked to join a party so well
informed of one another’s concerns, and every one tried to be
the very last to quit it,—not “to leave his character behind!”
It became a proverbial phrase with those who left a company,
and were too tender of their backs, to request they would not
“mount the stairs of St. Ambrose.” Jonson has well described
such a company:

There are legends and histories which belong to proverbs;
and some of the most ancient refer to incidents which have
not always been commemorated. Two Greek proverbs have
accidentally been explained by Pausanias: “He is a man of
Tenedos!” to describe a person of unquestionable veracity;
and “To cut with the Tenedian axe;” to express an absolute
and irrevocable refusal. The first originated in a king of
Tenedos, who decreed that there should always stand behind
the judge a man holding an axe, ready to execute justice on
any one convicted of falsehood. The other arose from the
same king, whose father having reached his island, to supplicate
the son’s forgiveness for the injury inflicted on him by
the arts of a step-mother, was preparing to land; already the
ship was fastened by its cable to a rock; when the son came
down, and sternly cutting the cable with an axe, sent the ship
adrift to the mercy of the waves: hence, “to cut with the
Tenedian axe,” became proverbial to express an absolute
refusal. “Business to-morrow!” is another Greek proverb,
applied to a person ruined by his own neglect. The fate of
58
an eminent person perpetuated the expression which he
casually employed on the occasion. One of the Theban polemarchs,
in the midst of a convivial party, received despatches
relating to a conspiracy: flushed with wine, although pressed
by the courier to open them immediately, he smiled, and in
gaiety laying the letter under the pillow of his couch,
observed, “Business to-morrow!” Plutarch records that he fell
a victim to the twenty-four hours he had lost, and became the
author of a proverb which was still circulated among the Greeks.

The philosophical antiquary may often discover how many
a proverb commemorates an event which has escaped from the
more solemn monuments of history, and is often the solitary
authority of its existence. A national event in Spanish history
is preserved by a proverb. Y vengar quiniento sueldos;
“And revenge five hundred pounds!” An odd expression to
denote a person being a gentleman! but the proverb is historical.
The Spaniards of Old Castile were compelled to pay
an annual tribute of five hundred maidens to their masters,
the Moors; after several battles, the Spaniards succeeded in
compromising the shameful tribute, by as many pieces of coin:
at length the day arrived when they entirely emancipated themselves
from this odious imposition. The heroic action was performed
by men of distinction, and the event perpetuated in the
recollections of the Spaniards by this singular expression, which
alludes to the dishonourable tribute, was applied to characterise
all men of high honour, and devoted lovers of their country.

Pasquier, in his Récherches sur la France, reviewing the
periodical changes of ancient families in feudal times,
observes, that a proverb among the common people conveys
the result of all his inquiries; for those noble houses, which
in a single age declined from nobility and wealth to poverty
and meanness, gave rise to the proverb, Cent ans bannières et
cent ans civières! “One hundred years a banner and one
hundred years a barrow!” The Italian proverb, Con l’Evangilio
si diventa heretico, “With the gospel we become heretics,”—reflects
the policy of the court of Rome; and must
be dated at the time of the Reformation, when a translation
of the Scriptures into the vulgar tongue encountered such an
invincible opposition. The Scotch proverb, He that invented
the maiden first hanselled it; that is, got the first of it!
The maiden is that well-known beheading engine, revived by
the French surgeon Guillotine. This proverb may be applied
to one who falls a victim to his own ingenuity; the artificer
59
of his own destruction! The inventor was James, Earl of
Morton, who for some years governed Scotland, and afterwards,
it is said, very unjustly suffered by his own invention.
It is a striking coincidence, that the same fate was shared by
the French reviver; both alike sad examples of disturbed
times! Among our own proverbs a remarkable incident has
been commemorated; Hand over head, as the men took the
Covenant! This preserves the manner in which the Scotch
covenant, so famous in our history, was violently taken by
above sixty thousand persons about Edinburgh, in 1638; a
circumstance at that time novel in our own revolutionary
history, and afterwards paralleled by the French in voting
by “acclamation.” An ancient English proverb preserves a
curious fact concerning our coinage. Testers are gone to Oxford,
to study at Brazennose. When Henry the Eighth
debased the silver coin, called testers, from their having a head
stamped on one side; the brass, breaking out in red pimples
on their silver faces, provoked the ill-humour of the people to
vent itself in this punning proverb, which has preserved for
the historical antiquary the popular feeling which lasted about
fifty years, till Elizabeth reformed the state of the coinage.
A northern proverb among us has preserved the remarkable
idea which seems to have once been prevalent, that the
metropolis of England was to be the city of York; Lincoln
was, London is, York shall be! Whether at the time of the
union of the crowns, under James the First, when England
and Scotland became Great Britain, this city, from its centrical
situation, was considered as the best adapted for the seat of
government, or for some other cause which I have not discovered,
this notion must have been prevalent to have entered
into a proverb. The chief magistrate of York is the only
provincial one who is allowed the title of Lord Mayor; a circumstance
which seems connected with this proverb.

The Italian history of its own small principalities, whose
well-being so much depended on their prudence and sagacity,
affords many instances of the timely use of a proverb. Many
an intricate negotiation has been contracted through a good-humoured
proverb,—many a sarcastic one has silenced an
adversary; and sometimes they have been applied on more
solemn, and even tragical occasions. When Rinaldo degli
Albizzi was banished by the vigorous conduct of Cosmo de’
Medici, Machiavel tells us the expelled man sent Cosmo a
menace, in a proverb, La gallina covava! “The hen is
60
brooding!” said of one meditating vengeance. The undaunted
Cosmo replied by another, that “There was no
brooding out of the nest!”

I give an example of peculiar interest; for it is perpetuated
by Dante, and is connected with the character of Milton.

When the families of the Amadei and the Uberti felt their
honour wounded in the affront the younger Buondelmonte
had put upon them, in breaking off his match with a young
lady of their family, by marrying another, a council was held,
and the death of the young cavalier was proposed as the sole
atonement for their injured honour. But the consequences
which they anticipated, and which afterwards proved so fatal
to the Florentines, long suspended their decision. At length
Moscha Lamberti suddenly rising, exclaimed, in two proverbs,
“That those who considered everything would never
conclude on anything!” closing with an ancient proverbial
saying—cosa fatta capo ha! “a deed done has an end!” The
proverb sealed the fatal determination, and was long held in
mournful remembrance by the Tuscans; for, according to
Villani, it was the cause and beginning of the accursed
factions of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. Dante has thus
immortalised the energetic expression in a scene of the
“Inferno.”

This Italian proverb was adopted by Milton; for when deeply
engaged in writing “The Defence of the People,” and
warned that it might terminate in his blindness, he resolvedly
concluded his work, exclaiming with great magnanimity,
although the fatal prognostication had been accomplished,
cosa fatta capo ha! Did this proverb also influence his awful
61
decision on that great national event, when the most honest-minded
fluctuated between doubts and fears?

Of a person treacherously used, the Italian proverb says
that he has eaten of

Landino, on the following passage of Dante, preserves the
tragic story:—

This was Manfred, the Lord of Fuenza, who, after many
cruelties, turned friar. Reconciling himself to those whom
he had so often opposed, to celebrate the renewal of their
friendship he invited them to a magnificent entertainment.
At the end of the dinner the horn blew to announce the
dessert—but it was the signal of this dissimulating conspirator!—and
the fruits which that day were served to his
guests were armed men, who, rushing in, immolated their
victims.

Among these historical proverbs none are more entertaining
than those which perpetuate national events, connected with
those of another people. When a Frenchman would let us
understand that he has settled with his creditors, the proverb
is J’ai payé tous mes Anglois: “I have paid all my English.”
This proverb originated when John, the French king, was
taken prisoner by our Black Prince. Levies of money were
made for the king’s ransom, and for many French lords; and
the French people have thus perpetuated the military glory
of our nation, and their own idea of it, by making the
English and their creditors synonymous terms. Another
relates to the same event—Le Pape est devenu François, et
Jesus Christ Anglais: “Now the Pope is become French and
Jesus Christ English;” a proverb which arose when the Pope,
exiled from Rome, held his court at Avignon in France; and
62
the English prospered so well, that they possessed more than
half the kingdom. The Spanish proverb concerning England
is well known—

Whether this proverb was one of the results of their
memorable armada, and was only coined after their conviction
of the splendid folly which they had committed, I cannot
ascertain. England must always have been a desirable ally
to Spain against her potent rival and neighbour. The
Italians have a proverb, which formerly, at least, was
strongly indicative of the travelled Englishmen in their
country, Inglese Italianato è un diavolo incarnato; “The
Italianised Englishman is a devil incarnate.” Formerly
there existed a closer intercourse between our country and
Italy than with France. Before and during the reigns of
Elizabeth and James the First that land of the elegant arts
modelled our taste and manners: and more Italians travelled
into England, and were more constant residents, from commercial
concerns, than afterwards when France assumed a
higher rank in Europe by her political superiority. This
cause will sufficiently account for the number of Italian
proverbs relating to England, which show an intimacy with
our manners that could not else have occurred. It was
probably some sarcastic Italian, and, perhaps, horologer, who,
to describe the disagreement of persons, proverbed our nation—“They
agree like the clocks of London!” We were once
better famed for merry Christmases and their pies; and it
must have been the Italians who had been domiciliated with
us who gave currency to the proverb—Ha piu da fare che i
forni di natale in Inghilterra: “He has more business than
English ovens at Christmas.” Our pie-loving gentry were
notorious, and Shakspeare’s folio was usually laid open in the
great halls of our nobility to entertain their attendants, who
devoured at once Shakspeare and their pasty. Some of those
volumes have come down to us, not only with the stains,
but inclosing even the identical piecrusts of the Elizabethan
age.

I have thus attempted to develope the art of reading
proverbs; but have done little more than indicate the
63
theory, and must leave the skilful student to the delicacy of
the practice. I am anxious to rescue from prevailing prejudices
these neglected stores of curious amusement, and of
deep insight into the ways of man, and to point out the bold
and concealed truths which are scattered in these collections.
There seems to be no occurrence in human affairs to which
some proverb may not be applied. All knowledge was long
aphoristical and traditional, pithily contracting the discoveries
which were to be instantly comprehended and easily
retained. Whatever be the revolutionary state of man,
similar principles and like occurrences are returning on us;
and antiquity, whenever it is justly applicable to our times,
loses its denomination, and becomes the truth of our own age.
A proverb will often cut the knot which others in vain are
attempting to untie. Johnson, palled with the redundant
elegancies of modern composition, once said, “I fancy
mankind may come in time to write all aphoristically, except
in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connexion, and
illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made.”
Many a volume indeed has often been written to demonstrate
what a lover of proverbs could show had long been ascertained
by a single one in his favourite collections.

An insurmountable difficulty, which every paræmiographer
has encountered, is that of forming an apt, a ready, and a
systematic classification: the moral Linnæus of such a
“systema naturæ” has not yet appeared. Each discovered
his predecessor’s mode imperfect, but each was doomed to
meet the same fate.40 The arrangement of proverbs has
baffled the ingenuity of every one of their collectors. Our
Ray, after long premeditation, has chosen a system with the
appearance of an alphabetical order; but, as it turns out, his
system is no system, and his alphabet is no alphabet. After
ten years’ labour, the good man could only arrange his
proverbs by commonplaces—by complete sentences—by
phrases or forms of speech—by proverbial similes—and so on.
All these are pursued in alphabetical order, “by the first
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letter of the most ‘material word,’ or if there be more words
‘equally material,’ by that which usually stands foremost.”
The most patient examiner will usually find that he wants
the sagacity of the collector to discover that word which is
“the most material,” or, “the words equally material.” We
have to search through all that multiplicity of divisions, or
conjuring boxes, in which this juggler of proverbs pretends to
hide the ball.41

A still more formidable objection against a collection of
proverbs, for the impatient reader, is their unreadableness.
Taking in succession a multitude of insulated proverbs, their
slippery nature resists all hope of retaining one in a hundred;
the study of proverbs must be a frequent recurrence to a
gradual collection of favourite ones, which we ourselves must
form. The experience of life will throw a perpetual freshness
over these short and simple texts; every day may furnish a
new commentary; and we may grow old, and find novelty in
proverbs by their perpetual application.

There are, perhaps, about twenty thousand proverbs among
the nations of Europe: many of these have spread in their
common intercourse; many are borrowed from the ancients,
chiefly the Greeks, who themselves largely took them from
the eastern nations. Our own proverbs are too often deficient
in that elegance and ingenuity which are often found
in the Spanish and the Italian. Proverbs frequently enliven
conversation, or enter into the business of life in those countries,
without any feeling of vulgarity being associated with
them: they are too numerous, too witty, and too wise to cease
to please by their poignancy and their aptitude. I have heard
them fall from the lips of men of letters and of statesmen.
When recently the disorderly state of the manufacturers of
Manchester menaced an insurrection, a profound Italian politician
observed to me, that it was not of a nature to alarm a
great nation; for that the remedy was at hand, in the proverb
of the Lazzaroni of Naples, Metà consiglio, metà esempio,
metà denaro! “Half advice, half example, half money!”
The result confirmed the truth of the proverb, which, had it
been known at the time, might have quieted the honest fears
of a great part of the nation.

Proverbs have ceased to be studied or employed in conversation
65
since the time we have derived our knowledge from
books; but in a philosophical age they appear to offer infinite
subjects for speculative curiosity. Originating in various
eras, these memorials of manners, of events, and of modes of
thinking, for historical as well as for moral purposes, still retain
a strong hold on our attention. The collected knowledge
of successive ages, and of different people, must always
enter into some part of our own! Truth and nature can
never be obsolete.

Proverbs embrace the wide sphere of human existence, they
take all the colours of life, they are often exquisite strokes of
genius, they delight by their airy sarcasm or their caustic
satire, the luxuriance of their humour, the playfulness of their
turn, and even by the elegance of their imagery, and the tenderness
of their sentiment. They give a deep insight into
domestic life, and open for us the heart of man, in all the
various states which he may occupy—a frequent review of
proverbs should enter into our readings; and although they
are no longer the ornaments of conversation, they have not
ceased to be the treasuries of Thought!

CONFUSION OF WORDS.

“There is nothing more common,” says the lively Voltaire,
“than to read and to converse to no purpose. In history, in
morals, in law, in physic, and in divinity, be careful of equivocal
terms.” One of the ancients wrote a book to prove
that there was no word which did not convey an ambiguous
and uncertain meaning. If we possessed this lost book, our
ingenious dictionaries of “synonyms” would not probably
prove its uselessness. Whenever the same word is associated
by the parties with different ideas, they may converse, or
controverse, till “the crack of doom!” This with a little
obstinacy and some agility in shifting his ground, makes the
fortune of an opponent. While one party is worried in disentangling
a meaning, and the other is winding and unwinding
about him with another, a word of the kind we have
mentioned, carelessly or perversely slipped into an argument,
may prolong it for a century or two—as it has happened!
Vaugelas, who passed his whole life in the study of words,
would not allow that the sense was to determine the meaning
of words; for, says he, it is the business of words to explain
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the sense. Kant for a long while discovered in this way a
facility of arguing without end, as at this moment do our
political economists. “I beseech you,” exclaims a poetical
critic, in the agony of a confusion of words, on the Pope controversy,
“not to ask whether I mean this or that!” Our
critic, positive that he has made himself understood, has
shown how a few vague terms may admit of volumes of vindication.
Throw out a word, capable of fifty senses, and you
raise fifty parties! Should some friend of peace enable the
fifty to repose on one sense, that innocent word, no longer
ringing the tocsin of a party, would lie in forgetfulness in the
Dictionary. Still more provoking when an identity of meaning
is only disguised by different modes of expression, and
when the term has been closely sifted, to their mutual
astonishment both parties discover the same thing lying
under the bran and chaff after this heated operation. Plato
and Aristotle probably agreed much better than the opposite
parties they raised up imagined; their difference was in the
manner of expression, rather than in the points discussed.
The Nominalists and the Realists, who once filled the world
with their brawls, and who from irregular words came to
regular blows, could never comprehend their alternate nonsense;
“whether in employing general terms we use words
or names only, or whether there is in nature anything corresponding
to what we mean by a general idea?” The Nominalists
only denied what no one in his senses would affirm;
and the Realists only contended for what no one in his senses
would deny; a hair’s breadth might have joined what the
spirit of party had sundered!

Do we flatter ourselves that the Logomachies of the Nominalists
and the Realists terminated with these scolding
schoolmen? Modern nonsense, weighed against the obsolete,
may make the scales tremble for awhile, but it will lose its
agreeable quality of freshness, and subside into an equipoise.
We find their spirit still lurking among our own metaphysicians!
“Lo! the Nominalists and the Realists again!” exclaimed
my learned friend, Sharon Turner, alluding to our
modern doctrines on abstract ideas, on which there is still a
doubt whether they are anything more than generalising
terms.42 Leibnitz confused his philosophy by the term sufficient
reason: for every existence, for every event, and for
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every truth there must be a sufficient reason. This vagueness
of language produced a perpetual misconception, and
Leibnitz was proud of his equivocal triumphs in always
affording a new interpretation! It is conjectured that he
only employed his term of sufficient reason for the plain
simple word of cause. Even Locke, who has himself so admirably
noticed the “abuse of words,” has been charged with
using vague and indefinite ones; he has sometimes employed
the words reflection, mind, and spirit in so indefinite a way,
that they have confused his philosophy: thus by some ambiguous
expressions, our great metaphysician has been made to
establish doctrines fatal to the immutability of moral distinctions.
Even the eagle-eye of the intellectual Newton grew
dim in the obscurity of the language of Locke. We are
astonished to discover that two such intellects should not
comprehend the same ideas; for Newton wrote to Locke, “I
beg your pardon for representing that you struck at the root
of morality in a principle laid down in your book of Ideas—and
that I took you for a Hobbist!”43 The difference of
opinion between Locke and Reid is in consequence of an ambiguity
in the word principle, as employed by Reid. The
removal of a solitary word may cast a luminous ray over a
whole body of philosophy: “If we had called the infinite the
indefinite,” says Condillac, in his Traité des Sensations, “by
this small change of a word we should have avoided the error
of imagining that we have a positive idea of infinity, from
whence so many false reasonings have been carried on, not
only by metaphysicians, but even by geometricians.” The
word reason has been used with different meanings by different
writers; reasoning and reason have been often confounded;
a man may have an endless capacity for reasoning,
without being much influenced by reason, and to be reasonable,
perhaps differs from both! So Moliere tells us,

In this research on “confusion of words,” might enter the
voluminous history of the founders of sects, who have usually
employed terms which had no meaning attached to them, or
were so ambiguous that their real notions have never been
comprehended; hence the most chimerical opinions have been
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imputed to founders of sects. We may instance that of the
Antinomians, whose remarkable denomination explains their
doctrine, expressing that they were “against law!” Their
founder was John Agricola, a follower of Luther, who, while
he lived, had kept Agricola’s follies from exploding, which
they did when he asserted that there was no such thing as
sin, our salvation depending on faith, and not on works; and
when he declaimed against the Law of God. To what length
some of his sect pushed this verbal doctrine is known; but
the real notions of this Agricola probably never will be!
Bayle considered him as a harmless dreamer in theology, who
had confused his head by Paul’s controversies with the Jews;
but Mosheim, who bestows on this early reformer the epithets
of ventosus and versipellis, windy and crafty!
or, as his translator has it, charges him with “vanity, presumption,
and artifice,” tells us by the term “law,” Agricola only meant
the ten commandments of Moses, which he considered were
abrogated by the Gospel, being designed for the Jews and
not for the Christians. Agricola then, by the words the
“Law of God,” and “that there was no such thing as sin,”
must have said one thing and meant another! This appears
to have been the case with most of the divines of the sixteenth
century; for even Mosheim complains of “their want
of precision and consistency in expressing their sentiments,
hence their real sentiments have been misunderstood.” There
evidently prevailed a great “confusion of words” among
them! The grace suffisante and the grace efficace of the
Jansenists and the Jesuits show the shifts and stratagems by
which nonsense may be dignified. “Whether all men received
from God sufficient grace for their conversion!” was an inquiry
some unhappy metaphysical theologist set afloat: the
Jesuits, according to their worldly system of making men’s
consciences easy, affirmed it; but the Jansenists insisted,
that this sufficient grace would never be efficacious, unless
accompanied by special grace. “Then the sufficient grace,
which is not efficacious, is a contradiction in terms, and
worse, a heresy!” triumphantly cried the Jesuits, exulting
over their adversaries. This “confusion of words” thickened,
till the Jesuits introduced in this logomachy with the Jansenists
papal bulls, royal edicts, and a regiment of dragoons!
The Jansenists, in despair, appealed to miracles and prodigies,
which they got up for public representation; but, above all,
to their Pascal, whose immortal satire the Jesuits really felt
69
was at once “sufficient and efficacious,” though the dragoons,
in settling a “confusion of words,” did not boast of inferior
success to Pascal’s. Former ages had, indeed, witnessed
even a more melancholy logomachy, in the Homoousion and
the Homoiousion! An event which Boileau has immortalised
by some fine verses, which, in his famous satire on L’Equivoque,
for reasons best known to the Sorbonne, were struck
out of the text.

Whether the Son was similar to the substance of the
Father, or of the same substance, depended on the diphthong
oi, which was alternately rejected and received. Had they
earlier discovered, what at length they agreed on, that the
words denoted what was incomprehensible, it would have
saved thousands, as a witness describes, “from tearing one
another to pieces.” The great controversy between Abelard
and St. Bernard, when the saint accused the scholastic of
maintaining heretical notions of the Trinity, long agitated
the world; yet, now that these confusers of words can no
longer inflame our passions, we wonder how these parties
could themselves differ about words to which we can attach
no meaning whatever. There have been few councils or
synods where the omission or addition of a word or a phrase
might not have terminated an interminable logomachy! At
the council of Basle, for the convenience of the disputants,
John de Secubia drew up a treatise of undeclined words,
chiefly to determine the signification of the particles from,
by, but, and except, which it seems were perpetually occasioning
fresh disputes among the Hussites and the Bohemians.
Had Jerome of Prague known, like our Shakspeare, the virtue
of an if, or agreed with Hobbes, that he should not have
been so positive in the use of the verb is, he might have
been spared from the flames. The philosopher of Malmsbury
has declared that “Perhaps Judgment was nothing else but
the composition or joining of two names of things, or modes,
by the verb is.” In modern times the popes have more
skilfully freed the church from this “confusion of words.”
His holiness, on one occasion, standing in equal terror of the
court of France, who protected the Jesuits, and of the court
70
of Spain, who maintained the cause of the Dominicans, contrived
a phrase, where a comma or a full stop, placed at the
beginning or the end, purported that his holiness tolerated
the opinions which he condemned; and when the rival parties
despatched deputations to the court of Rome to plead for the
period, or advocate the comma, his holiness, in this “confusion
of words,” flung an unpunctuated copy to the parties;
nor was it his fault, but that of the spirit of party, if the
rage of the one could not subside into a comma, nor that of
the other close by a full period!

In jurisprudence much confusion has occurred in the uses
of the term rights; yet the social union and human happiness
are involved in the precision of the expression. When Montesquieu
laid down, as the active principle of a republic,
virtue, it seemed to infer that a republic was the best of
governments. In the defence of his great work he was
obliged to define the term; and it seems that by virtue he
only meant political virtue, the love of the country.

In politics, what evils have resulted from abstract terms to
which no ideas are affixed,—such as, “The Equality of Man—the
Sovereignty or the Majesty of the People—Loyalty—Reform—even
Liberty herself!—Public Opinion—Public
Interest;” and other abstract notions, which have excited
the hatred or the ridicule of the vulgar. Abstract ideas, as
sounds, have been used as watchwords. The combatants will
usually be found willing to fight for words to which, perhaps,
not one of them has attached any settled signification. This
is admirably touched on by Locke, in his chapter of “Abuse
of Words.” “Wisdom, Glory, Grace, &c., are words frequent
enough in every man’s mouth; but if a great many of those
who use them should be asked what they mean by them,
they would be at a stand, and know not what to answer—a
plain proof that though they have learned those sounds, and
have them ready at their tongue’s end, yet there are no determined
ideas laid up in their minds which are to be expressed
to others by them.”

When the American exclaimed that he was not represented
in the House of Commons, because he was not an elector, he
was told that a very small part of the people of England were
electors. As they could not call this an actual representation,
they invented a new name for it, and called it a virtual one.
It imposed on the English nation, who could not object that
others should be taxed rather than themselves; but with the
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Americans it was a sophism! and this virtual representation,
instead of an actual one, terminated in our separation;
“which,” says Mr. Flood, “at the time appeared to have
swept away most of our glory and our territory; forty thousand
lives, and one hundred millions of treasure!”

That fatal expression which Rousseau had introduced,
l’Egalité des Hommes, which finally involved the happiness
of a whole people, had he lived he had probably shown how
ill his country had understood. He could only have referred
in his mind to political equality, but not an equality of possessions,
of property, of authority, destructive of social order
and of moral duties, which must exist among every people.
“Liberty,” “Equality,” and “Reform” (innocent words!)
sadly ferment the brains of those who cannot affix any definite
notions to them; they are like those chimerical fictions in
law, which declare the “sovereign immortal, proclaim his
ubiquity in various places,” and irritate the feelings of the
populace, by assuming that “the king can never do wrong!”
In the time of James the Second “it is curious,” says Lord
Russell, “to read the conference between the Houses on the
meaning of the words ‘deserted’ and ‘abdicated,’ and the
debates in the Lords whether or no there is an original contract
between king and people.” The people would necessarily
decide that “kings derived their power from them;”
but kings were once maintained by a “right divine,” a
“confusion of words,” derived from two opposite theories,
and both only relatively true. When we listen so frequently
to such abstract terms as “the majesty of the people,” “the
sovereignty of the people,” whence the inference that “all
power is derived from the people,” we can form no definite
notions: it is “a confusion of words,” contradicting all the
political experience which our studies or our observations
furnish; for sovereignty is established to rule, to conduct,
and to settle the vacillations and quick passions of the multitude.
Public opinion expresses too often the ideas of one
party in place; and public interest those of another party
out! Political axioms, from the circumstance of having the
notions attached to them unsettled, are applied to the most
opposite ends! “In the time of the French Directory,”
observes an Italian philosopher of profound views, “in the
revolution of Naples, the democratic faction pronounced that
‘Every act of a tyrannical government is in its origin illegal;’
a proposition which at first sight seems self-evident, but which
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went to render all existing laws impracticable.” The doctrine
of the illegality of the acts of a tyrant was proclaimed by
Brutus and Cicero, in the name of the senate, against the
populace, who had favoured Cæsar’s perpetual dictatorship;
and the populace of Paris availed themselves of it, against the
National Assembly.

This “confusion of words,” in time-serving politics, has too
often confounded right and wrong; and artful men, driven
into a corner, and intent only on its possession, have found
no difficulty in solving doubts, and reconciling contradictions.
Our own history in revolutionary times abounds with dangerous
examples from all parties; of specious hypotheses for
compliance with the government of the day or the passions
of parliament. Here is an instance in which the subtle confuser
of words pretended to substitute two consciences, by
utterly depriving a man of any! When the unhappy Charles
the First pleaded that to pass the bill of attainder against
the Earl of Strafford was against his conscience, that remarkable
character of “boldness and impiety,” as Clarendon characterizes
Williams, Archbishop of York, on this argument of
conscience (a simple word enough), demonstrated “that there
were two sorts of conscience, public and private; that his
public conscience as a king might dispense with his private
conscience as a man!” Such was the ignominious argument
which decided the fate of that great victim of State! It was
an impudent “confusion of words” when Prynne (in order to
quiet the consciences of those who were uneasy at warring
with the king) observed that the statute of twenty-fifth
Edward the Third ran in the singular number—“If a man
shall levy war against the king, and therefore could not be
extended to the houses, who are many and public persons.”
Later, we find Sherlock blest with the spirit of Williams, the
Archbishop of York, whom we have just left. When some
did not know how to charge and to discharge themselves of
the oaths to James the Second and to William the Third, this
confounder of words discovered that there were two rights, as
the other had that there were two consciences; one was a
providential right, and the other a legal right; one person
might very righteously claim and take a thing, and another
as righteously hold and keep it; but that whoever got the
better had the providential right by possession; and since all
authority comes from God, the people were obliged to transfer
their allegiance to him as a king of God’s making; so that
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he who had the providential right necessarily had the legal
one! a very simple discovery, which must, however, have cost
him some pains; for this confounder of words was himself
confounded by twelve answers by non-jurors! A French
politician of this stamp recently was suspended from his lectureship
for asserting that the possession of the soil was a
right; by which principle, any king reigning over a country,
whether by treachery, crime, and usurpation, was a legitimate
sovereign. For this convenient principle the lecturer was
tried, and declared not guilty—by persons who have lately
found their advantage in a confusion of words. In treaties
between nations, a “confusion of words” has been more particularly
studied; and that negotiator has conceived himself
most dexterous who, by this abuse of words, has retained an
arrière-pensée which may fasten or loosen the ambiguous
expression he had so cautiously and so finely inlaid in his
mosaic of treachery. A scene of this nature I draw out of
“Mesnager’s Negociation with the Court of England.”
When that secret agent of Louis the Fourteenth was negotiating
a peace, an insuperable difficulty arose respecting the
acknowledgment of the Hanoverian succession. It was absolutely
necessary, on this delicate point, to quiet the anxiety
of the English public and our allies; but though the French
king was willing to recognise Anne’s title to the throne, yet
the settlement in the house of Hanover was incompatible
with French interests and French honour. Mesnager told
Lord Bolingbroke that “the king, his master, would consent
to any such article, looking the other way, as might disengage
him from the obligation of that agreement, as the occasion
should present.” This ambiguous language was probably
understood by Lord Bolingbroke: at the next conference his
lordship informed the secret agent “that the queen could not
admit of any explanations, whatever her intentions might be;
that the succession was settled by act of parliament; that as
to the private sentiments of the queen, or of any about her,
he could say nothing.” “All this was said with such an air,
as to let me understand that he gave a secret assent to what
I had proposed, &c.; but he desired me to drop the discourse.”
Thus two great negotiators, both equally urgent to conclude
the treaty, found an insuperable obstacle occur, which neither
could control. Two honest men would have parted; but the
“skilful confounder of words,” the French diplomatist, hit on
an expedient; he wrote the words which afterwards appeared
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in the preliminaries, “That Louis the Fourteenth will acknowledge
the Queen of Great Britain in that quality, as also the
succession of the crown according to the present settlement.”
“The English agent,” adds the Frenchman, “would
have had me add—on the house of Hanover, but this I
entreated him not to desire of me.” The term present
settlement, then, was that article which was looking the
other way, to disengage his master from the obligation of
that agreement, as occasion should present! that is, that
Louis the Fourteenth chose to understand by the present
settlement the old one, by which the British crown was to
be restored to the Pretender! Anne and the English nation
were to understand it in their own sense—as the new one,
which transferred it to the house of Hanover!

When politicians cannot rely upon each other’s interpretation
of one of the commonest words in our language, how can
they possibly act together? The Bishop of Winchester has
proved this observation, by the remarkable anecdote of the
Duke of Portland and Mr. Pitt, who, with a view to unite
parties, were to hold a conference on fair and equal terms.
His grace did not object to the word fair, but the word
equal was more specific and limited; and for a necessary preliminary,
he requested Mr. Pitt to inform him what he understood
by the word equal? Whether Pitt was puzzled by the
question, or would not deliver up an arrière-pensée, he put off
the explanation to the conference. But the duke would not
meet Mr. Pitt till the word was explained; and this important
negotiation was broken off by not explaining a simple word
which appeared to require no explanation.

There is nothing more fatal in language than to wander
from the popular acceptation of words; and yet this popular
sense cannot always accord with precision of ideas, for it is
itself subject to great changes.

Another source, therefore, of the abuse of words, is that
mutability to which, in the course of time, the verbal edifice,
as well as more substantial ones, is doomed. A familiar
instance presents itself in the titles of tyrant, parasite,
and sophist, originally honourable distinctions. The abuses of
dominion made the appropriate title of kings odious; the title
of a magistrate, who had the care of the public granaries of
corn, at length was applied to a wretched flatterer for a
dinner; and absurd philosophers occasioned a mere denomination
to become a by-name. To employ such terms in their
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primitive sense would now confuse all ideas; yet there is an
affectation of erudition which has frequently revived terms
sanctioned by antiquity. Bishop Watson entitled his vindication
of the Bible “an apology:” this word, in its primitive
sense, had long been lost for the multitude, whom he particularly
addressed in this work, and who could only understand
it in the sense they are accustomed to. Unquestionably, many
of its readers have imagined that the bishop was offering an
excuse for a belief in the Bible, instead of a vindication of its
truth. The word impertinent, by the ancient jurisconsults, or
law-counsellors, who gave their opinion on cases, was used
merely in opposition to pertinent—ratio pertinens is a pertinent
reason, that is, a reason pertaining to the cause in question,
and a ratio impertinens, an impertinent reason, is an
argument not pertaining to the subject.44 Impertinent then
originally meant neither absurdity nor rude intrusion, as it
does in our present popular sense. The learned Arnauld
having characterised a reply of one of his adversaries by the
epithet impertinent, when blamed for the freedom of his language,
explained his meaning by giving this history of the
word, which applies to our own language. Thus also with us
the word indifferent has entirely changed: an historian, whose
work was indifferently written, would formerly have claimed
our attention. In the Liturgy it is prayed that “magistrates
may indifferently minister justice.” Indifferently originally
meant impartially. The word extravagant, in its primitive
signification, only signified to digress from the subject. The
Decretals, or those letters from the popes deciding on points
of ecclesiastical discipline, were at length incorporated with
the canon law, and were called extravagant by wandering out
of the body of the canon law, being confusedly dispersed
through that collection. When Luther had the Decretals
publicly burnt at Wittemberg, the insult was designed for the
pope, rather than as a condemnation of the canon law itself.
Suppose, in the present case, two persons of opposite opinions.
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The catholic, who had said that the decretals were extravagant,
might not have intended to depreciate them, or make
any concession to the Lutheran. What confusion of words
has the common sense of the Scotch metaphysicians introduced
into philosophy! There are no words, perhaps, in the
language which may be so differently interpreted; and Professor
Dugald Stewart has collected, in a curious note in the
second volume of his “Philosophy of the Human Mind,” a
singular variety of its opposite significations. The Latin
phrase, sensus communis, may, in various passages of Cicero,
be translated by our phrase common sense; but, on other
occasions, it means something different; the sensus communis
of the schoolmen is quite another thing, and is synonymous
with conception, and referred to the seat of intellect; with Sir
John Davies, in his curious metaphysical poem, common sense
is used as imagination. It created a controversy with Beattie
and Reid; and Reid, who introduced this vague ambiguous
phrase in philosophical language, often understood the term in
its ordinary acceptation. This change of the meaning of
words, which is constantly recurring in metaphysical disputes,
has made that curious but obscure science liable to this objection
of Hobbes, “with many words making nothing understood!”

Controversies have been keenly agitated about the principles
of morals, which resolve entirely into verbal disputes, or at
most into questions of arrangement and classification, of little
comparative moment to the points at issue. This observation
of Mr. Dugald Stewart’s might be illustrated by the fate of
the numerous inventors of systems of thinking or morals, who
have only employed very different and even opposite terms in
appearance to express the same thing. Some, by their mode
of philosophising, have strangely unsettled the words self-interest
and self-love; and their misconceptions have sadly
misled the votaries of these systems of morals; as others also
by such vague terms as “utility, fitness,” &c.

When Epicurus asserted that the sovereign good consisted
in pleasure, opposing the unfeeling austerity of the Stoics by
the softness of pleasurable emotions, his principle was soon
disregarded; while his word, perhaps chosen in the spirit of
paradox, was warmly adopted by the sensualist. Epicurus,
of whom Seneca has drawn so beautiful a domestic scene, in
whose garden a loaf, a Cytheridean cheese, and a draught
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which did not inflame thirst,45 was the sole banquet, would
have started indignantly at

The fattest hog in Epicurus’ sty!

Such are the facts which illustrate that principle in “the
abuse of words,” which Locke calls “an affected obscurity
arising from applying old words to new, or unusual significations.”

It was the same “confusion of words” which gave rise to
the famous sect of the Sadducees. The master of its founder
Sadoc, in his moral purity, was desirous of a disinterested
worship of the Deity; he would not have men like slaves,
obedient from the hope of reward or the fear of punishment.
Sadoc drew a quite contrary inference from the intention of
his master, concluding that there were neither rewards nor
punishments in a future state. The result is a parallel to the
fate of Epicurus. The morality of the master of Sadoc was
of the most pure and elevated kind, but in the “confusion of
words,” the libertines adopted them for their own purposes—and
having once assumed that neither rewards nor punishments
existed in the after-state, they proceeded to the erroneous
consequence that man perished with his own dust!

The plainest words, by accidental associations, may suggest
the most erroneous conceptions, and have been productive of
the grossest errors. In the famous Bangorian controversy,
one of the writers excites a smile by a complaint, arising from
his views of the signification of a plain word, whose meaning
he thinks had been changed by the contending parties. He
says, “the word country, like a great many others, such as
church and kingdom, is, by the Bishop of Bangor’s leave,
become to signify a collection of ideas very different from its
original meaning; with some it implies party, with others
private opinion, and with most interest, and perhaps, in time,
may signify some other country. When this good innocent
word has been tossed backwards and forwards a little longer,
some new reformer of language may arise to reduce it to its
primitive signification—the real interest of Great Britain!”
The antagonist of this controversialist probably retorted on
him his own term of the real interest, which might be a very
opposite one, according to their notions! It has been said,
with what truth I know not, that it was by a mere confusion
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of words that Burke was enabled to alarm the great Whig
families, by showing them their fate in that of the
French noblesse; they were misled by the similitude of names.
The French noblesse had as little resemblance to our nobility
as they have to the Mandarins of China. However it may
be in this case, certain it is that the same terms misapplied
have often raised those delusive notions termed false analogies.
It was long imagined in this country, that the parliaments of
France were somewhat akin to our own; but these assemblies
were very differently constituted, consisting only of lawyers in
courts of law. A misnomer confuses all argument. There
is a trick which consists in bestowing good names on bad
things. Vices, thus veiled, are introduced to us as virtues,
according to an old poet,

As drunkenness, good-fellowship we call?

Sir Thomas Wiat.

Or the reverse, when loyalty may be ridiculed, as

The right divine of kings—to govern wrong!

The most innocent recreations, such as the drama, dancing,
dress, have been anathematised by puritans, while philosophers
have written elaborate treatises in their defence—the
enigma is solved, when we discover that these words suggested
a set of opposite notions to each.

But the nominalists and the realists, and the doctores fundatissimi,
resolutissimi, refulgentes, profundi, and extatici,
have left this heirloom of logomachy to a race as subtle and
irrefragable! An extraordinary scene has recently been performed
by a new company of actors, in the modern comedy
of Political Economy; and the whole dialogue has been carried
on in an inimitable “confusion of words!” This reasoning
and unreasoning fraternity never use a term as a
term, but for an explanation, and which employed by them
all, signifies opposite things, but never the plainest! Is it
not, therefore, strange that they cannot yet tell us what are
riches? what is rent? what is value? Monsieur Say, the
most sparkling of them all, assures us that the English
writers are obscure, by their confounding, like Smith, the denomination
of labour. The vivacious Gaul cries out to the
grave Briton, Mr. Malthus, “If I consent to employ your
word labour, you must understand me,” so and so! Mr.
Malthus says, “Commodities are not exchanged for commodities
79
only; they are also exchanged for labour;” and when
the hypochondriac Englishman, with dismay, foresees “the
glut of markets,” and concludes that we may produce more
than we can consume, the paradoxical Monsieur Say discovers
that “commodities” is a wrong word, for it gives a
wrong idea; it should be “productions;” for his axiom is,
that “productions can only be purchased with productions.”
Money, it seems, according to dictionary ideas, has no existence
in his vocabulary; for Monsieur Say has formed a sort of
Berkleian conception of wealth being immaterial, while we
confine our views to its materiality. Hence ensues from this
“confusion of words,” this most brilliant paradox,—that “a
glutted market is not a proof that we produce too much but
that we produce too little! for in that case there is not
enough produced to exchange with what is produced!” As
Frenchmen excel in politeness and impudence, Monsieur Say
adds, “I revere Adam Smith; he is my master; but this
first of political economists did not understand all the phenomena
of production and consumption.” We, who remain
uninitiated in this mystery of explaining the operations of
trade by metaphysical ideas, and raising up theories to conduct
those who never theorise, can only start at the “confusion
of words,” and leave this blessed inheritance to our
sons, if ever the science survive the logomachy.

Caramuel, a famous Spanish bishop, was a grand architect
of words. Ingenious in theory, his errors were confined to
his practice: he said a great deal and meant nothing; and by
an exact dimension of his intellect, taken at the time, it appeared
that “he had genius in the eighth degree, eloquence in
the fifth, but judgment only in the second!” This great man
would not read the ancients; for he had a notion that the
moderns must have acquired all they possessed, with a good
deal of their own “into the bargain.” Two hundred and
sixty-two works, differing in breadth and length, besides his
manuscripts, attest, that if the world would read his writings,
they could need no other; for which purpose his last
work always referred to the preceding ones, and could never
be comprehended till his readers possessed those which were
to follow. As he had the good sense to perceive that metaphysicians
abound in obscure and equivocal terms, to avoid
this “confusion of words,” he invented a jargon of his own;
and to make “confusion worse confounded,” projected grammars
and vocabularies by which we were to learn it; but it
80
is supposed that he was the only man who understood himself.
He put every author in despair by the works which he
announced. This famous architect of words, however, built
more labyrinths than he could always get out of, notwithstanding
his “cabalistical grammar,” and his “audacious
grammar.”46 Yet this great Caramuel, the critics have
agreed, was nothing but a puffy giant, with legs too weak
for his bulk, and only to be accounted as a hero amidst a
“confusion of words.”

Let us dread the fate of Caramuel! and before we enter
into discussion with the metaphysician, first settle what he
means by the nature of ideas; with the politician, his notion
of liberty and equality; with the divine, what he deems
orthodox; with the political economist, what he considers to
be value and rent! By this means we may avoid, what is
perpetually recurring, that extreme laxity or vagueness of
words, which makes every writer, or speaker, complain of his
predecessor, and attempt sometimes, not in the best temper,
to define and to settle the signification of what the witty
South calls “those rabble-charming words, which carry so
much wildfire wrapt up in them.”

POLITICAL NICKNAMES.

Political calumny is said to have been reduced into an art,
like that of logic, by the Jesuits. This itself may be a political
calumny! A powerful body, who themselves had practised
the artifices of calumniators, may, in their turn, often
have been calumniated. The passage in question was drawn
out of one of the classical authors used in their colleges.
Busembaum, a German Jesuit, had composed, in duodecimo, a
“Medulla Theologiæ moralis,” where, among other casuistical
propositions, there was found lurking in this old Jesuit’s
“marrow” one which favoured regicide and assassination!
Fifty editions of the book had passed unnoticed; till a new
one appearing at the critical moment of Damien’s attempt,
the duodecimo of the old scholastic Jesuit, which had now
been amplified by its commentators into two folios, was considered
not merely ridiculous, but dangerous. It was burnt
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at Toulouse, in 1757, by order of the parliament, and condemned
at Paris. An Italian Jesuit published an “apology”
for this theory of assassination, and the same flames devoured
it! Whether Busembaum deserved the honour bestowed on
his ingenuity, the reader may judge by the passage itself.

“Whoever would ruin a person, or a government, must
begin this operation by spreading calumnies, to defame the
person or the government; for unquestionably the calumniator
will always find a great number of persons inclined to
believe him, or to side with him; it therefore follows, that
whenever the object of such calumnies is once lowered in
credit by such means, he will soon lose the reputation and
power founded on that credit, and sink under the permanent
and vindictive attacks of the calumniator.” This is the
politics of Satan—the evil principle which regulates so many
things in this world. The enemies of the Jesuits have
formed a list of great names who had become the victims of
such atrocious Machiavelism.47

This has been one of the arts practised by all political
parties. Their first weak invention is to attach to a new
faction a contemptible or an opprobrious nickname. In the
history of the revolutions of Europe, whenever a new party
has at length established its independence, the original
denomination which had been fixed on them, marked by the
passions of the party which bestowed it, strangely contrasts
with the state of the party finally established!

The first revolutionists of Holland incurred the contemptuous
name of “Les Gueux,” or the Beggars. The Duchess of
Parma inquiring about them, the Count of Barlamont scornfully
described them to be of this class; and it was flattery of
the great which gave the name currency. The Hollanders
accepted the name as much in defiance as with indignation,
and acted up to it. Instead of brooches in their hats, they
wore little wooden platters, such as beggars used, and foxes’
tails instead of feathers. On the targets of some of these
Gueux they inscribed “Rather Turkish than Popish!” and
had the print of a cock crowing, out of whose mouth was a
label, Vive les Gueux par tout le monde! which was everywhere
set up, and was the favourite sign of their inns. The
Protestants in France, after a variety of nicknames to render
them contemptible—such as Christodins, because they would
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only talk about Christ, similar to our Puritans; and Parpaillots,
or Parpirolles, a small base coin, which was odiously applied
to them—at length settled in the well-known term of
Huguenots, which probably was derived, as the Dictionnaire
de Trévoux suggests, from their hiding themselves in secret
places, and appearing at night, like King Hugon, the great
hobgoblin of France. It appears that the term has been
preserved by an earthen vessel without feet, used in cookery,
which served the Huguenots on meagre days to dress their
meat, and to avoid observation; a curious instance, where
a thing still in use proves the obscure circumstance of its
origin.

The atrocious insurrection, called La Jacquerie, was a term
which originated in cruel derision. When John of France
was a prisoner in England, his kingdom appears to have been
desolated by its wretched nobles, who, in the indulgence of
their passions, set no limits to their luxury and their extortion.
They despoiled their peasantry without mercy, and
when these complained, and even reproached this tyrannical
nobility with having forsaken their sovereign, they were told
that Jacque bon homme must pay for all. But Jack good-man
came forward in person—a leader appeared under this
fatal name, and the peasants revolting in madness, and being
joined by all the cut-throats and thieves of Paris, at once
pronounced condemnation on every gentleman in France!
Froissart has the horrid narrative; twelve thousand of these
Jacques bon hommes expiated their crimes; but the Jacquerie,
who had received their first appellation in derision, assumed
it as their nom de guerre.

In the spirited Memoirs of the Duke of Guise, written by
himself, of his enterprise against the kingdom of Naples, we
find a curious account of this political art of marking people
by odious nicknames. “Gennaro and Vicenzo,” says the
duke, “cherished underhand that aversion the rascality had
for the better sort of citizens and civiller people, who, by the
insolencies they suffered from these, not unjustly hated them.
The better class inhabiting the suburbs of the Virgin were
called black cloaks, and the ordinary sort of people took the
name of lazars, both in French and English an old word for
leprous beggar, and hence the lazaroni of Naples.” We
can easily conceive the evil eye of a lazar when he encountered
a black cloak! The Duke adds—“Just as, at the beginning
of the revolution, the revolters in Flanders formerly took that
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of beggars; those of Guienne, that of eaters; those of
Normandy that of bare-feet; and of Beausse and Soulogne, of
wooden-pattens.” In the late French revolution, we observed
the extremes indulged by both parties chiefly concerned in
revolution—the wealthy and the poor! The rich, who, in
derision, called their humble fellow-citizens by the contemptuous
term of sans-culottes, provoked a reacting injustice
from the populace, who, as a dreadful return for only a slight,
rendered the innocent term of aristocrate a signal for plunder
or slaughter!

It is a curious fact that the French verb fronder, as well
the noun frondeur, are used to describe those who condemn
the measures of government; and more extensively, designates
any hyperbolical and malignant criticism, or any sort of condemnation.
These words have only been introduced into the
language since the intrigues of Cardinal de Retz succeeded in
raising a faction against Cardinal Mazarin, known in French
history by the nickname of the Frondeurs, or the Slingers.
It originated in pleasantry, although it became the password
for insurrection in France, and the odious name of a faction.
A wit observed, that the parliament were like those school-boys,
who fling their stones in the pits of Paris, and as soon
as they see the Lieutenant Civil, run away; but are sure to
collect again directly he disappears. The comparison was
lively, and formed the burthen of songs; and afterwards,
when affairs were settled between the king and the parliament,
it was more particularly applied to the faction of
Cardinal de Retz, who still held out. “We encouraged the
application,” says de Retz; “for we observed that the distinction
of a name heated the minds of people; and one
evening we resolved to wear hat-strings in the form of slings.
A hatter, who might be trusted with the secret, made a great
number as a new fashion, and which were worn by many
who did not understand the joke; we ourselves were the last
to adopt them, that the invention might not appear to have
come from us. The effect of this trifle was immense; every
fashionable article was now to assume the shape of a sling;
bread, hats, gloves, handkerchiefs, fans, &c.; and we ourselves
became more in fashion by this folly, than by what was
essential.” This revolutionary term was never forgotten by
the French, a circumstance which might have been considered
as prognostic of that after-revolution, which de Retz had the
imagination to project, but not the daring to establish. We
84
see, however, this great politician, confessing the advantages
his party derived by encouraging the application of a by-name,
which served “to heat the minds of people.”

It is a curious circumstance that I should have to recount
in this chapter on “Political Nicknames” a familiar term
with all lovers of art, that of Silhouette! This is well understood
as a black profile; but it is more extraordinary that a
term so universally adopted should not be found in any
dictionary, either in that of L’Académie, or in Todd’s, and
has not even been preserved, where it is quite indispensable,
in Millin’s Dictionnaire des Beaux-Arts! It is little suspected
that this innocent term originated in a political nickname!
Silhouette was a minister of state in France in 1759;
that period was a critical one; the treasury was in an
exhausted condition, and Silhouette, a very honest man, who
would hold no intercourse with financiers or loan-mongers,
could contrive no other expedient to prevent a national
bankruptcy, than excessive economy and interminable reform!
Paris was not the metropolis, any more than London, where
a Plato or a Zeno could long be minister of state without incurring
all the ridicule of the wretched wits! At first they
pretended to take his advice, merely to laugh at him:—they
cut their coats shorter, and wore them without sleeves; they
turned their gold snuff-boxes into rough wooden ones; and
the new-fashioned portraits were now only profiles of a face,
traced by a black pencil on the shadow cast by a candle on
white paper! All the fashions assumed an air of niggardly
economy, till poor Silhouette was driven into retirement, with
all his projects of savings and reforms; but he left his name
to describe the most economical sort of portrait, and one as
melancholy as his own fate!

This political artifice of appropriating cant terms, or odious
nicknames, could not fail to flourish among a people so
perpetually divided by contending interests as ourselves;
every party with us have had their watchword, which has
served either to congregate themselves, or to set on the ban-dogs
of one faction to worry and tear those of another. We
practised it early, and we find it still prospering! The
Puritan of Elizabeth’s reign survives to this hour; the trying
difficulties which that wise sovereign had to overcome in
settling the national religion, found no sympathy in either of
the great divisions of her people; she retained as much of the
catholic rites as might be decorous in the new religion, and
85
sought to unite, and not to separate, her children. John
Knox, in the spirit of charity, declared, that “she was
neither gude protestant, nor yet resolute papist; let the
world judge quilk is the third.”

A jealous party arose, who were for reforming the reformation.
In their attempt at more than human purity, they
obtained the nickname of Puritans; and from their fastidiousness
about very small matters, Precisians; these Drayton
characterises as persons that for a painted glass window
would pull down the whole church. At that early period
these nicknames were soon used in an odious sense; for
Warner, a poet in the reign of Elizabeth, says,—

Honest Fuller, who knew that many good men were
among these Puritans, wished to decline the term altogether,
under the less offensive one of Non-conformists. But the
fierce and the fiery of this party, in Charles the First’s time
had been too obtrusive not to fully merit the ironical appellative;
and the peaceful expedient of our moderator dropped
away with the page in which it was written. The people
have frequently expressed their own notions of different parliaments
by some apt nickname. In Richard the Second’s
time, to express their dislike of the extraordinary and irregular
proceedings of the lords against the sovereign, as well
as their sanguinary measures, they called it “The wonder-working
and the unmerciful parliament.” In Edward the
Third’s reign, when the Black Prince was yet living, the
parliament, for having pursued with severity the party of
the Duke of Lancaster, was so popular, that the people distinguished
it as the good parliament. In Henry the Third’s
time, the parliament opposing the king, was called “Parliamentum
insanum,” the mad parliament, because the lords
came armed to insist on the confirmation of the great charter.
A Scottish parliament, from its perpetual shiftings from place
to place was ludicrously nicknamed the running parliament;
in the same spirit we had our long parliament. The nickname
of Pensioner parliament stuck to the House of Commons
which sate nearly eighteen years without dissolution,
under Charles the Second; and others have borne satirical or
laudatory epithets. So true it is, as old Holingshed observed,
“The common people will manie times give such bie names as
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seemeth best liking to themselves.” It would be a curious
speculation to discover the sources of the popular feeling;
influenced by delusion, or impelled by good sense!

The exterminating political nickname of malignant darkened
the nation through the civil wars: it was a proscription—and
a list of good and bad lords was read by the leaders of
the first tumults. Of all these inventions, this diabolical one
was most adapted to exasperate the animosities of the people,
so often duped by names. I have never detected the active
man of faction who first hit on this odious brand for persons,
but the period when the word changed its ordinary meaning
was early; Charles, in 1642, retorts on the parliamentarians
the opprobrious distinction, as “The true malignant party
which has contrived and countenanced those barbarous
tumults.” And the royalists pleaded for themselves, that
the hateful designation was ill applied to them: “for by
malignity you denote,” said they, “activity in doing evil,
whereas we have always been on the suffering side in our
persons, credits, and estates;” but the parliamentarians,
“grinning a ghastly smile,” would reply, that “the royalists
would have been malignant had they proved successful.”
The truth is, that malignancy meant with both parties any
opposition of opinion. At the same period the offensive distinctions
of roundheads and cavaliers supplied the people
with party names, who were already provided with so many
religious as well as civil causes of quarrel; the cropt heads of
the sullen sectaries and the people, were the origin of the
derisory nickname; the splendid elegance and the romantic
spirit of the royalists long awed the rabble, who in their
mockery could brand them by no other appellation than one
in which their bearers gloried. In the distracted times of
early revolution, any nickname, however vague, will fully
answer a purpose, although neither those who are blackened
by the odium, nor those who cast it, can define the hateful
appellative. When the term of delinquents came into vogue,
it expressed a degree and species of guilt, says Hume, not
exactly known or ascertained. It served, however, the end
of those revolutionists who had coined it, by involving any
person in, or colouring any action by, delinquency; and many
of the nobility and gentry were, without any questions being
asked, suddenly discovered to have committed the crime of
delinquency! Whether honest Fuller be facetious or grave
on this period of nicknaming parties I will not decide; but,
87
when he tells us that there was another word which was introduced
into our nation at this time, I think at least that
the whole passage is an admirable commentary on this party
vocabulary. “Contemporary with malignants is the word
plunder, which some make of Latin original, from planum
dare, to level, to plane all to nothing! Others of Dutch extraction,
as if it were to plume, or pluck the feathers of a
bird to the bare skin.48 Sure I am we first heard of it in the
Swedish wars; and if the name and thing be sent back from
whence it came few English eyes would weep thereat.” All
England had wept at the introduction of the word. The
rump was the filthy nickname of an odious faction—the
history of this famous appellation, which was at first one of
horror, till it afterwards became one of derision and contempt,
must be referred to another place. The rump became a perpetual
whetstone for the loyal wits,49 till at length its former
admirers, the rabble themselves, in town and country, vied
with each other in “burning rumps” of beef, which were hung
by chains on a gallows with a bonfire underneath, and proved
how the people, like children, come at length to make a plaything
of that which was once their bugbear.

Charles the Second, during the short holiday of the restoration—all
holidays seem short!—and when he and the people
were in good humour, granted anything to every one,—the
mode of “Petitions” got at length very inconvenient, and
the king in council declared that this petitioning was “A
method set on foot by ill men to promote discontents among
the people,” and enjoined his loving subjects not to subscribe
them. The petitioners, however, persisted—when a new
party rose to express their abhorrence of petitioning; both
parties nicknamed each other the petitioners and the abhorrers!
Their day was short, but fierce; the petitioners,
however weak in their cognomen, were far the bolder of the
two, for the commons were with them, and the abhorrers had
expressed by their term rather the strength of their inclinations
than of their numbers. Charles the Second said to a
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petitioner from Taunton, “How dare you deliver me such a
paper?” “Sir,” replied the petitioner from Taunton, “my
name is Dare!” A saucy reply, for which he was tried,
fined, and imprisoned; when lo! the commons petitioned
again to release the petitioner! “The very name,” says
Hume, “by which each party denominated its antagonists
discovers the virulence and rancour which prevailed; for besides
petitioner and abhorrer, this year is remarkable for being
the epoch of the well-known epithets of whig and tory.”
These silly terms of reproach, whig and tory, are still preserved
among us, as if the palladium of British liberty was
guarded by these exotic names, for they are not English,
which the parties so invidiously bestow on each other. They
are ludicrous enough in their origin. The friends of the
court and the advocates of lineal succession were, by the republican
party, branded with the title of tories, which was
the name of certain Irish robbers;50 while the court party in
return could find no other revenge than by appropriating to
the covenanters and the republicans of that class the name
of the Scotch beverage of sour milk, whose virtue they considered
so expressive of their dispositions, and which is called
whigg. So ridiculous in their origin were these pernicious
nicknames, which long excited feuds and quarrels in domestic
life, and may still be said to divide into two great parties this
land of political freedom. But nothing becomes obsolete in
political factions, and the meaner and more scandalous the
name affixed by one party to another the more it becomes
not only their rallying cry or their password, but even constitutes
their glory. Thus the Hollanders long prided themselves
on the humiliating nickname of “Les Gueux:” the
protestants of France on the scornful one of the Huguenots;
the non-conformists in England on the mockery of the
puritan; and all parties have perpetuated their anger by
their inglorious names. Swift was well aware of this truth
in political history: “each party,” says that sagacious observer,
“grows proud of that appellation which their adversaries
at first intended as a reproach; of this sort were the
Guelphs and the Ghibellines, Huguenots and Cavaliers.”

Nor has it been only by nicknaming each other by derisory
or opprobrious terms that parties have been marked, but they
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have also worn a livery, and practised distinctive manners.
What sufferings did not Italy endure for a long series of years
under those fatal party-names of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines;
alternately the victors and the vanquished, the
beautiful land of Italy drank the blood of her children.
Italy, like Greece, opens a moving picture of the hatreds and
jealousies of small republics; her Bianchi and her Neri, her
Guelphs and her Ghibellines! In Bologna, two great families
once shook that city with their divisions; the Pepoli
adopted the French interests; the Maluezzi the Spanish. It
was incurring some danger to walk the streets of Bologna,
for the Pepoli wore their feathers on the right side of their
caps, and the Maluezzi on the left. Such was the party-hatred
of the two great Italian factions, that they carried
their rancour even into their domestic habits; at table the
Guelphs placed their knives and spoons longwise, and the
Ghibellines across; the one cut their bread across, the other
longwise. Even in cutting an orange they could not agree;
for the Guelph cut his orange horizontally, and the Ghibelline
downwards. Children were taught these artifices of faction—their
hatreds became traditional, and thus the Italians
perpetuated the full benefits of their party-spirit from generation
to generation.51

Men in private life go down to their graves with some unlucky
name, not received in baptism, but more descriptive and
picturesque; and even ministers of state have winced at a
political christening. Malagrida the Jesuit and Jemmy
Twitcher were nicknames which made one of our ministers
odious, and another contemptible.52 The Earl of Godolphin
caught such fire at that of Volpone, that it drove him into
the opposite party, for the vindictive purpose of obtaining the
impolitical prosecution of Sacheverell, who, in his famous
sermon, had first applied it to the earl, and unluckily it had
stuck to him.

“Faction,” says Lord Orford, “is as capricious as fortune;
wrongs, oppression, the zeal of real patriots, or the
genius of false ones, may sometimes be employed for years in
kindling substantial opposition to authority; in other seasons
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the impulse of a moment, a ballad, a nickname, a fashion can
throw a city into a tumult, and shake the foundations of a
state.”

Such is a slight history of the human passions in politics!
We might despair in thus discovering that wisdom and
patriotism so frequently originate in this turbid source of
party; but we are consoled when we reflect that the most important
political principles are immutable: and that they
are those which even the spirit of party must learn to
reverence.

THE DOMESTIC LIFE OF A POET.—SHENSTONE VINDICATED.

The dogmatism of Johnson, and the fastidiousness of Gray,
the critic who passed his days amidst “the busy hum of
men,” and the poet who mused in cloistered solitude, have
fatally injured a fine natural genius in Shenstone. Mr. Campbell,
with a brother’s feeling, has (since the present article
was composed) sympathised with the endowments and the
pursuits of this poet; but the facts I had collected seemed to
me to open a more important view. I am aware how lightly
the poetical character of Shenstone is held by some great
contemporaries—although this very poet has left us at least
one poem of unrivalled originality. Mr. Campbell has
regretted that Shenstone not only “affected that arcadianism”
which “gives a certain air of masquerade in his pastoral
character,” adopted by our earlier poets, but also has “rather
incongruously blended together the rural swain with the
disciple of virtù.” All this requires some explanation. It is
not only as a poet, possessing the characteristics of poetry,
but as a creator in another way, for which I claim the attention
of the reader. I have formed a picture of the domestic
life of a poet, and the pursuits of a votary of taste, both
equally contracted in their endeavours, from the habits, the
emotions, and the events which occurred to Shenstone.

Four material circumstances influenced his character, and
were productive of all his unhappiness. The neglect he
incurred in those poetical studies to which he had devoted his
hopes; his secret sorrows in not having formed a domestic
union, from prudential motives, with one whom he loved; the
ruinous state of his domestic affairs, arising from a seducing
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passion for creating a new taste in landscape gardening and
an ornamented farm; and finally, his disappointment of that
promised patronage, which might have induced him to have
become a political writer; for which his inclinations, and, it
is said, his talents in early life, were alike adapted: with these
points in view, we may trace the different states of his mind,
show what he did, and what he was earnestly intent to have
done.

Why have the “Elegies” of Shenstone, which forty years
ago formed for many of us the favourite poems of our youth,
ceased to delight us in mature life? It is perhaps that these
Elegies, planned with peculiar felicity, have little in their
execution. They form a series of poetical truths, devoid of
poetical expression; truths,—for notwithstanding the pastoral
romance in which the poet has enveloped himself, the subjects
are real, and the feelings could not, therefore, be fictitious.

In a Preface, remarkable for its graceful simplicity, our poet
tells us, that “He entered on his subjects occasionally, as
particular incidents in life suggested, or dispositions of mind
recommended them to his choice.” He shows that “He
drew his pictures from the spot, and, he felt very sensibly the
affections he communicates.” He avers that all those attendants
on rural scenery, and all those allusions to rural life, were
not the counterfeited scenes of a town poet, any more than
the sentiments, which were inspired by Nature. Shenstone’s
friend Graves, who knew him in early life, and to his last days,
informs us that these Elegies were written when he had taken
the Leasowes into his own hands;53 and though his ferme
ornée engaged his thoughts, he occasionally wrote them,
“partly,” said Shenstone, “to divert my present impatience,
and partly, as it will be a picture of most that passes in my
own mind; a portrait which friends may value.” This, then,
is the secret charm which acts so forcibly on the first emotions
of our youth, at a moment when, not too difficult to be
pleased, the reflected delineations of the habits and the affections,
the hopes and the delights, with all the domestic
associations of this poet, always true to Nature, reflect back
that picture of ourselves which we instantly recognise. It is
only as we advance in life that we lose the relish of our early
simplicity, and that we discover that Shenstone was not
endowed with high imagination.

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These Elegies, with some other poems, may be read with a
new interest when we discover them to form the true
Memoirs of Shenstone. Records of querulous but delightful
feelings! whose subjects spontaneously offered themselves
from passing incidents; they still perpetuate emotions
which will interest the young poet and the young lover of
taste.

Elegy IV., the first which Shenstone composed, is entitled
“Ophelia’s Urn,” and it was no unreal one! It was erected
by Graves in Mickleton Church, to the memory of an extraordinary
young woman, Utrecia Smith, the literary daughter
of a learned but poor clergyman. Utrecia had formed so fine
a taste for literature, and composed with such elegance in
verse and prose, that an excellent judge declared that “he
did not like to form his opinion of any author till he previously
knew hers.” Graves had been long attached to her,
but from motives of prudence broke off an intercourse with
this interesting woman, who sunk under this severe disappointment.
When her prudent lover, Graves, inscribed the
urn, her friend Shenstone, perhaps more feelingly, commemorated
her virtues and her tastes. Such, indeed, was the
friendly intercourse between Shenstone and Utrecia, that in
Elegy XVIII., written long after her death, she still lingered
in his reminiscences. Composing this Elegy on the calamitous
close of Somerville’s life, a brother bard, and victim to
narrow circumstances, and which he probably contemplated
as an image of his own, Shenstone tenderly recollects that he
used to read Somerville’s poems to Utrecia:—

How true is the feeling! how mean the poetical expression!

The Seventh Elegy describes a vision, where the shadow of
Wolsey breaks upon the author:

Even this fanciful subject was not chosen capriciously, but
sprung from an incident. Once, on his way to Cheltenham,
Shenstone missed his road, and wandered till late at night
among the Cotswold Hills on this occasion he appears to
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have made a moral reflection, which we find in his “Essays.”
“How melancholy is it to travel late upon any ambitious
project on a winter’s night, and observe the light of cottages,
where all the unambitious people are warm and happy, or at
rest in their beds.” While the benighted poet, lost among
the lonely hills, was meditating on “ambitious projects,” the
character of Wolsey arose before him; the visionary cardinal
crossed his path, and busied his imagination. “Thou,”
exclaims the poet,

And the bard, after discovering all the miseries of unhappy
grandeur, and murmuring at this delay to the house of his
friend, exclaims—

The silent departure of the poetical spectre is fine:

And to prove that the subject of this elegy thus arose to the
poet’s fancy, he has himself commemorated the incident that
gave occasion to it, in the opening:—

The Fifteenth Elegy, composed “in memory of a private
family in Worcestershire,” is on the extinction of the ancient
family of the Penns in the male line.54 Shenstone’s mother
was a Penn; and the poet was now the inhabitant of their
ancient mansion, an old timber-built house of the age of
Elizabeth. The local description was a real scene—“the
shaded pool”—“the group of ancient elms”—“the flocking
rooks,” and the picture of the simple manners of his own
ancestors, were realities; the emotions they excited were
therefore genuine, and not one of those “mockeries” of
amplification from the crowd of verse-writers.

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The Tenth Elegy, “To Fortune, suggesting his Motive
for repining at her Dispensations,” with his celebrated
“Pastoral Ballad, in four parts.” were alike produced by
what one of the great minstrels of our own times has so
finely indicated when he sung—

In this Elegy Shenstone repines at the dispensations of
Fortune, not for having denied him her higher gifts, nor
that she compels him to

Check the fond love of art that fired my veins;

nor that some “dull dotard with boundless wealth” finds
his “grating reed” preferred to the bard’s, but that the
“tawdry shepherdess” of this dull dotard, by her “pride,”
makes “the rural thane” despise the poet’s Delia.

The Delia of our poet was not an “Iris en air.” Shenstone
was early in life captivated by a young lady, whom
Graves describes with all those mild and serene graces of
pensive melancholy, touched by plaintive love-songs and
elegies of woe, adapted not only to be the muse but the
mistress of a poet. The sensibility of this passion took
entire possession of his heart for some years, and it was in
parting from her that he first sketched his exquisite “Pastoral
Ballad.” As he retreated more and more into solitude,
his passion felt no diminution. Dr. Nash informs us that
Shenstone acknowledged that it was his own fault that he
did not accept the hand of the lady whom he so tenderly
loved; but his spirit could not endure to be a perpetual
witness of her degradation in the rank of society, by an
inconsiderate union with poetry and poverty. That such
was his motive, we may infer from a passage in one of his
letters. “Love, as it regularly tends to matrimony, requires
95
certain favours from fortune and circumstances to render it
proper to be indulged in.” There are perpetual allusions to
these “secret woes” in his correspondence; for, although he
had the fortitude to refuse marriage, he had not the stoicism
to contract his own heart in cold and sullen celibacy. He
thus alludes to this subject, which so often excited far other
emotions than those of humour:—“It is long since I have
considered myself as undone. The world will not, perhaps,
consider me in that light entirely till I have married my
maid!”

It is probable that our poet had an intention of marrying
his maid. I discovered a pleasing anecdote among the late
Mr. Bindley’s collections, which I transcribed from the original.
On the back of a picture of Shenstone himself, of which
Dodsley published a print in 1780, the following energetic
inscription was written by the poet on his new-year’s gift:—

“This picture belongs to Mary Cutler, given her by her
master, William Shenstone, January 1st, 1754, in acknowledgment
of her native genius, her magnanimity, her tenderness,
and her fidelity.

“W. S.”

“The Progress of Taste; or the Fate of Delicacy,” is
a poem on the temper and studies of the author; and
“Economy; a Rhapsody addressed to Young Poets,”
abounds with self-touches. If Shenstone created little from
the imagination, he was at least perpetually under the influence
of real emotions. This is the reason why his truths
so strongly operate on the juvenile mind, not yet matured:
and thus we have sufficiently ascertained the fact, as the
poet himself has expressed it, “that he drew his pictures
from the spot, and he felt very sensibly the affections he
communicates.”

All the anxieties of a poetical life were early experienced
by Shenstone. He first published some juvenile productions,
under a very odd title, indicative of modesty, perhaps too of
pride.55 And his motto of Contentus paucis lectoribus, even
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Horace himself might have smiled at, for it only conceals the
desire of every poet who pants to deserve many! But when
he tried at a more elaborate poetical labour, “The Judgment
of Hercules,” it failed to attract notice. He hastened to
town, and he beat about literary coffee-houses; and returned
to the country from the chase of Fame, wearied without having
started it.

A breath revived him—but a breath o’erthrew.

Even “The Judgment of Hercules” between Indolence
and Industry, or Pleasure and Virtue, was a picture of his
own feelings; an argument drawn from his own reasonings;
indicating the uncertainty of the poet’s dubious disposition;
who finally by siding with Indolence, lost that triumph which
his hero obtained by a directly opposite course.

In the following year begins that melancholy strain in his
correspondence which marks the disappointment of the man
who had staked too great a quantity of his happiness on the
poetical die. This is the critical moment of life when our
character is formed by habit, and our fate is decided by choice.
Was Shenstone to become an active or contemplative being?
He yielded to nature!56

It was now that he entered into another species of poetry,
working with too costly materials, in the magical composition
of plants, water, and earth; with these he created those emotions
which his more strictly poetical ones failed to excite.
He planned a paradise amidst his solitude. When we consider
that Shenstone, in developing his fine pastoral ideas in
the Leasowes, educated the nation into that taste for landscape-gardening,
which has become the model of all Europe,
this itself constitutes a claim on the gratitude of posterity.57
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Thus the private pleasures of a man of genius may become
at length those of a whole people. The creator of this new
taste appears to have received far less notice than he merited.
The name of Shenstone does not appear in the Essay on Gardening
by Lord Orford: even the supercilious Gray only
bestowed a ludicrous image on these pastoral scenes, which,
however, his friend Mason has celebrated; and the genius of
Johnson, incapacitated by nature to touch on objects of rural
fancy, after describing some of the offices of the landscape
designer, adds, that “he will not inquire whether they demand
any great powers of mind.” Johnson, however, conveys to
us his own feelings, when he immediately expresses them
under the character of a “sullen and surly speculator.” The
anxious life of Shenstone would, indeed, have been remunerated,
could he have read the enchanting eulogium of
Wheatley on the Leasowes; which, said he, “is a perfect
picture of his mind—simple, elegant, and amiable; and will
always suggest a doubt whether the spot inspired his verse,
or whether in the scenes which he formed, he only realized
the pastoral images which abound in his songs.” Yes!
Shenstone would have been delighted, could he have heard
that Montesquieu, on his return home, adorned his “Château
gothique, mais orné de bois charmans, dont j’ai pris l’idée en
Angleterre;” and Shenstone, even with his modest and timid
nature, had been proud to have witnessed a noble foreigner,
amidst memorials dedicated to Theocritus and Virgil, to
Thomson and Gesner, raising in his grounds an inscription,
in bad English, but in pure taste, to Shenstone himself for
having displayed in his writings “a mind natural,” and in his
Leasowes “laid Arcadian greens rural.” Recently Pindemonte
98
has traced the taste of English gardening to Shenstone.
A man of genius sometimes receives from foreigners, who are
placed out of the prejudices of his compatriots, the tribute of
posterity!

Amidst these rural elegancies which Shenstone was raising
about him, his muse has pathetically sung his melancholy
feelings—

The poet observes, that the wants of philosophy are contracted,
satisfied with “cheap contentment,” but

An original image illustrates that fatal want of economy
which conceals itself amidst the beautiful appearances of
taste:—

He paints himself:—

The cause is, “criminal expense,” and he exclaims—

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While Shenstone was rearing hazels and hawthorns, opening
vistas, and winding waters;

while he was pulling down hovels and cowhouses, to compose
mottos and inscriptions for garden-seats and urns; while he
had so finely obscured with a tender gloom the grove of
Virgil, and thrown over, “in the midst of a plantation of
yew, a bridge of one arch, built of a dusty-coloured stone,
and simple even to rudeness,”58 and invoked Oberon in some
Arcadian scene,

the solitary magician, who had raised all these wonders, was,
in reality, an unfortunate poet, the tenant of a dilapidated
farm-house, where the winds passed through, and the rains
lodged, often taking refuge in his own kitchen—

In a letter59 of the disconsolate founder of landscape gardening,
our author paints his situation with all its misery—lamenting
that his house is not fit to receive “polite friends,
were they so disposed;” and resolved to banish all others, he
proceeds:

“But I make it a certain rule, ‘arcere profanum vulgus.’
Persons who will despise you for the want of a good set of
chairs, or an uncouth fire-shovel, at the same time that they
can’t taste any excellence in a mind that overlooks those
things; with whom it is in vain that your mind is furnished,
if the walls are naked; indeed one loses much of one’s acquisitions
in virtue by an hour’s converse with such as judge
of merit by money—yet I am now and then impelled by the
social passion to sit half an hour in my kitchen.”

But the solicitude of friends and the fate of Somerville, a
neighbour and a poet, often compelled Shenstone to start
amidst his reveries; and thus he has preserved his feelings
and his irresolutions. Reflecting on the death of Somerville,
he writes—

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“To be forced to drink himself into pains of the body, in
order to get rid of the pains of the mind, is a misery which
I can well conceive, because I may, without vanity, esteem
myself his equal in point of economy, and consequently
ought to have an eye on his misfortunes—(as you kindly
hinted to me about twelve o’clock, at the Feathers.)—I
should retrench—I will—but you shall not see me—I will
not let you know that I took it in good part—I will do it at
solitary times as I may.”

Such were the calamities of “great taste” with “little
fortune;” but in the case of Shenstone, these were combined
with the other calamity of “mediocrity of genius.”

Here, then, at the Leasowes, with occasional trips to town
in pursuit of fame, which perpetually eluded his grasp; in
the correspondence of a few delicate minds, whose admiration
was substituted for more genuine celebrity; composing diatribes
against economy and taste, while his income was diminishing
every year; our neglected author grew daily more
indolent and sedentary, and withdrawing himself entirely
into his own hermitage, moaned and despaired in an Arcadian
solitude.60 The cries and the “secret sorrows” of Shenstone
have come down to us—those of his brothers have not always!
And shall dull men, because they have minds cold
and obscure, like a Lapland year which has no summer, be
permitted to exult over this class of men of sensibility and
taste, but of moderate genius and without fortune? The
passions and emotions of the heart are facts and dates only
to those who possess them.

To what a melancholy state was our author reduced, when
he thus addressed his friend:—

“I suppose you have been informed that my fever was in a
great measure hypochondriacal, and left my nerves so extremely
sensible, that even on no very interesting subjects, I
could readily think myself into a vertigo; I had almost said an
epilepsy; for surely I was oftentimes near it.”

The features of this sad portrait are more particularly
made out in another place.

101

“Now I am come home from a visit, every little uneasiness
is sufficient to introduce my whole train of melancholy
considerations, and to make me utterly dissatisfied with the
life I now lead, and the life which I foresee I shall lead. I
am angry and envious, and dejected and frantic, and disregard
all present things, just as becomes a madman to do. I am
infinitely pleased (though it is a gloomy joy) with the application
of Dr. Swift’s complaint, ‘that he is forced to die
in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.’ My soul is no more
fitted to the figure I make, than a cable rope to a cambric
needle; I cannot bear to see the advantages alienated, which
I think I could deserve and relish so much more than those
that have them.”

There are other testimonies in his entire correspondence.
Whenever forsaken by his company he describes the horrors
around him, delivered up “to winter, silence, and reflection;”
ever foreseeing himself “returning to the same series of melancholy
hours.” His frame shattered by the whole train of
hypochondriacal symptoms, there was nothing to cheer the
querulous author, who with half the consciousness of genius,
lived neglected and unpatronised. His elegant mind had not
the force, by his productions, to draw the celebrity he sighed
after, to his hermitage.

Shenstone was so anxious for his literary character, that he
contemplated on the posthumous fame which he might derive
from the publication of his letters: see Letter lxxix., On
hearing his letters to Mr. Whistler were destroyed; the act
of a merchant, his brother, who being a very sensible man, as
Graves describes, yet with the stupidity of a Goth, destroyed
the whole correspondence of Shenstone, for “its sentimental
intercourse.”—Shenstone bitterly regrets the loss, and says,
“I would have given more money for the letters than it is
allowable for me to mention with decency. I look upon my
letters as some of my chefs-d’œuvre—they are the history of my
mind for these twenty years past.” This, with the loss of
Cowley’s correspondence, should have been preserved in the
article, “of Suppressors and Dilapidators of Manuscripts.”

Towards the close of life, when his spirits were exhausted,
and “the silly clue of hopes and expectations,” as
he termed them, was undone, the notice of some persons of
rank began to reach him. Shenstone, however, deeply
colours the variable state of his own mind—”Recovering
from a nervous fever, as I have since discovered by many concurrent
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symptoms, I seem to anticipate a little of that
‘vernal delight’ which Milton mentions and thinks

at least I begin to resume my silly clue of hopes and expectations.”

In a former letter he had, however, given them up: “I
begin to wean myself from all hopes and expectations whatever.
I feed my wild-ducks, and I water my carnations.
Happy enough if I could extinguish my ambition quite, to
indulge the desire of being something more beneficial in my
sphere.—Perhaps some few other circumstances would want
also to be adjusted.”

What were these “hopes and expectations,” from which
sometimes he weans himself, and which are perpetually revived,
and are attributed to “an ambition he cannot extinguish”?
This article has been written in vain, if the reader
has not already perceived, that they had haunted him in early
life; sickening his spirit after the possession of a poetical
celebrity, unattainable by his genius; some expectations too
he might have cherished from the talent he possessed for political
studies, in which Graves confidently says, that “he
would have made no inconsiderable figure, if he had had a
sufficient motive for applying his mind to them.” Shenstone
has left several proofs of this talent.61 But his master-passion
for literary fame had produced little more than anxieties
and disappointments; and when he indulged his pastoral
fancy in a beautiful creation on his grounds, it consumed the
estate which it adorned. Johnson forcibly expressed his
situation: “His death was probably hastened by his anxieties.
He was a lamp that spent its oil in blazing. It is
said, that if he had lived a little longer, he would have been
assisted by a pension.”

SECRET HISTORY OF THE BUILDING OF BLENHEIM.

The secret history of this national edifice derives importance
from its nature, and the remarkable characters involved in
the unparalleled transaction. The great architect, when obstructed
in the progress of his work by the irregular payments
103
of the workmen, appears to have practised one of his
own comic plots to put the debts on the hero himself; while
the duke, who had it much at heart to inhabit the palace of
his fame, but tutored into wariness under the vigilant and
fierce eye of Atossa,62 would neither approve nor disapprove,
silently looked on in hope and in grief, from year to year, as
the work proceeded, or as it was left at a stand. At length
we find this comédie larmoyante wound up by the duchess
herself, in an attempt utterly to ruin the enraged and insulted
architect!63

Perhaps this was the first time that it had ever been resolved
in parliament to raise a public monument of glory and
gratitude—to an individual! The novelty of the attempt
may serve as the only excuse for the loose arrangements
which followed after parliament had approved of the design,
without voting any specific supply for the purpose! The
queen always issued the orders at her own expense, and
commanded expedition; and while Anne lived, the expenses
of the building were included in her majesty’s debts, as belonging
to the civil list sanctioned by parliament.64

When George the First came to the throne, the parliament
declared the debt to be the debt of the queen, and the king
granted a privy seal as for other debts. The crown and the
parliament had hitherto proceeded in perfect union respecting
this national edifice. However, I find that the workmen
were greatly in arrears; for when George the First ascended
the throne, they gladly accepted a third part of their several
debts!

The great architect found himself amidst inextricable
difficulties. With the fertile invention which amuses in his
comedies, he contrived an extraordinary scheme, by which he
proposed to make the duke himself responsible for the building
of Blenheim!

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However much the duke longed to see the magnificent
edifice concluded, he showed the same calm intrepidity in the
building of Blenheim as he had in its field of action. Aware
that if he himself gave any order, or suggested any alteration,
he might be involved in the expense of the building, he was
never to be circumvented—never to be surprised into a spontaneous
emotion of pleasure or disapprobation; on no occasion,
he declares, had he even entered into conversation with the
architect (though his friend) or with any one acting under
his orders, about Blenheim House! Such impenetrable prudence
on all sides had often blunted the subdolous ingenuity
of the architect and plotter of comedies!

In the absence of the duke, when abroad in 1705, Sir John
contrived to obtain from Lord Godolphin, the friend and
relative of the Duke of Marlborough, and probably his agent
in some of his concerns, a warrant, constituting Vanbrugh
surveyor, with power of contracting on the behalf of the Duke
of Marlborough. How he prevailed on Lord Godolphin to
get this appointment does not appear—his lordship probably
conceived it was useful, and might assist in expediting the
great work, the favourite object of the hero. This warrant,
however, Vanbrugh kept entirely to himself; he never mentioned
to the duke that he was in possession of any such power; nor,
on his return, did he claim to have it renewed.

The building proceeded with the same delays, and the payments
with the same irregularity; the veteran now foresaw
what happened, that he should never be the inhabitant of his
own house! The public money issued from the Treasury
was never to be depended on; and after 1712, the duke took
the building upon himself, for the purpose of accommodating
the workmen. They had hitherto received what was called
“crown pay,” which was high wages and uncertain payment—and
they now gladly abated a third of their prices. But
though the duke had undertaken to pay the workmen, this
could make no alteration in the claims on the Treasury.
Blenheim was to be built for Marlborough, not by him; it
was a monument raised by the nation to their hero, not a palace
to be built by their mutual contributions.

Whether Marlborough found that his own million might
be slowly injured while the Treasury remained still obdurate,
or that the architect was still more and more involved, I
cannot tell; but in 1715, the workmen appear to have struck,
and the old delays and stand-still again renewed. It was
105
then Sir John, for the first time, produced the warrant he
had extracted from Lord Godolphin, to lay before the
Treasury; adding, however, a memorandum, to prevent any
misconception, that the duke was to be considered as the
paymaster, the debts incurred devolving on the crown. This
part of our secret history requires more development than I
am enabled to afford: as my information is drawn from “the
Case” of the Duke of Marlborough in reply to Sir John’s
depositions, it is possible Vanbrugh may suffer more than he
ought in this narration; which, however, incidentally notices
his own statements.

A new scene opens! Vanbrugh not obtaining his claims
from the Treasury, and the workmen becoming more
clamorous, the architect suddenly turns round on the duke,
at once to charge him with the whole debt.

The pitiable history of this magnificent monument of
public gratitude, from its beginnings, is given by Vanbrugh
in his deposition. The great architect represents himself as
being comptroller of her majesty’s works; and as such was
appointed to prepare a model, which model of Blenheim
House her majesty kept in her palace, and gave her commands
to issue money according to the direction of Mr. Travers, the
queen’s surveyor-general; that the lord treasurer appointed
her majesty’s own officers to supervise these works; that it
was upon defect of money from the Treasury that the workmen
grew uneasy; that the work was stopped, till further
orders of money from the Treasury; that the queen then
ordered enough to secure it from winter weather; that afterwards
she ordered more for payment of the workmen; that
they were paid in part; and upon Sir John’s telling them the
queen’s resolution to grant them a further supply (after a
stop put to it by the duchess’s order), they went on and
incurred the present debt; that this was afterwards brought
into the House of Commons as the debt of the crown, not
owing from the queen to the Duke of Marlborough, but to
the workmen, and this by the queen’s officers.

During the uncertain progress of the building, and while
the workmen were often in deep arrears, it would seem that
the architect often designed to involve the Marlboroughs in
its fate and his own; he probably thought that some of their
round million might bear to be chipped, to finish his great
work, with which, too, their glory was so intimately
connected. The famous duchess had evidently put the duke
106
on the defensive; but once, perhaps, was the duke on the
point of indulging some generous architectural fancy, when
lo! Atossa stepped forwards and “put a stop to the building.”

When Vanbrugh at length produced the warrant of Lord
Godolphin, empowering him to contract for the duke, this
instrument was utterly disclaimed by Marlborough; the duke
declares it existed without his knowledge; and that if such an
instrument for a moment was to be held valid, no man would
be safe, but might be ruined by the act of another!

Vanbrugh seems to have involved the intricacy of his plot,
till it fell into some contradictions. The queen he had not
found difficult to manage; but after her death, when the
Treasury failed in its golden source, he seems to have sat
down to contrive how to make the duke the great debtor.
Vanbrugh swears that “He himself looked upon the crown,
as engaged to the Duke of Marlborough for the expense; but
that he believes the workmen always looked upon the duke
as their paymaster.” He advances so far, as to swear that
he made a contract with particular workmen, which contract
was not unknown to the duke. This was not denied; but the
duke in his reply observes, that “he knew not that the workmen
were employed for his account, or by his own
agent:”—never having heard till Sir John produced the warrant from
Lord Godolphin, that Sir John was “his surveyor!” which
he disclaims.

Our architect, however opposite his depositions appear,
contrived to become a witness to such facts as tended to conclude
the duke to be the debtor for the building; and “in his
depositions has taken as much care to have the guilt of perjury
without the punishment of it, as any man could do.” He so
managed, though he has not sworn to contradictions, that
the natural tendency of one part of his evidence presses one
way, and the natural tendency of another part presses the
direct contrary way. In his former memorial, the main
design was to disengage the duke from the debt; in his
depositions, the main design was to charge the duke with the
debt. Vanbrugh, it must be confessed, exerted not less of
his dramatic than his architectural genius in the building of
Blenheim!

“The Case” concludes with an eloquent reflection, where
Vanbrugh is distinguished as the man of genius, though not,
in this predicament, the man of honour. “If at last the
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charge run into by order of the crown must be upon the
duke, yet the infamy of it must go upon another, who was
perhaps the only architect in the world capable of building
such a house; and the only friend in the world capable of
contriving to lay the debt upon one to whom he was so
highly obliged.”

There is a curious fact in the depositions of Vanbrugh, by
which we might infer that the idea of Blenheim House might
have originated with the duke himself; he swears that “in
1704, the duke met him, and told him he designed to build a
house, and must consult him about a model, &c.; but it was
the queen who ordered the present house to be built with all
expedition.”

The whole conduct of this national edifice was unworthy
of the nation, if in truth the nation ever entered heartily into
it. No specific sum had been voted in parliament for so
great an undertaking; which afterwards was the occasion of
involving all the parties concerned in trouble and litigation;
threatened the ruin of the architect; and I think we shall see,
by Vanbrugh’s letters, was finished at the sole charge, and
even under the superintendence, of the duchess herself! It
may be a question, whether this magnificent monument of
glory did not rather originate in the spirit of party, in the
urgent desire of the queen to allay the pride and jealousies of
the Marlboroughs. From the circumstance to which Vanbrugh
has sworn, that the duke had designed to have a house
built by Vanbrugh, before Blenheim had been resolved on,
we may suppose that this intention of the duke’s afforded the
queen a suggestion of a national edifice.

Archdeacon Coxe, in his Life of Marlborough, has obscurely
alluded to the circumstances attending the building of Blenheim.
“The illness of the duke, and the tedious litigation
which ensued, caused such delays, that little progress was
made in the work at the time of his decease. In the interim
a serious misunderstanding arose between the duchess and
the architect, which forms the subject of a voluminous correspondence.
Vanbrugh was in consequence removed, and
the direction of the building confided to other hands, under
her own immediate superintendence.”

This “voluminous correspondence” would probably afford
“words that burn” of the lofty insolence of Atossa, and
“thoughts that breathe” of the comic wit; it might too relate,
in many curious points, to the stupendous fabric itself.
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If her grace condescended to criticise its parts with the
frank roughness she is known to have done to the architect
himself, his own defence and explanations might serve to
let us into the bewildering fancies of his magical architecture.
Of that self-creation for which he was so much abused in his
own day as to have lost his real avocation as an architect,
and stands condemned for posterity in the volatile bitterness
of Lord Orford, nothing is left for us but our own convictions—to
behold, and to be for ever astonished!—But “this
voluminous correspondence?” Alas! the historian of war
and politics overlooks with contempt the little secret histories
of art and of human nature!—and “a voluminous
correspondence” which indicates so much, and on which not a
solitary idea is bestowed, has only served to petrify our
curiosity!

Of this quarrel between the famous duchess and Vanbrugh
I have only recovered several vivacious extracts from confidential
letters of Vanbrugh’s to Jacob Tonson. There was
an equality of the genius of invention, as well as rancour, in
her grace and the wit: whether Atossa, like Vanbrugh, could
have had the patience to have composed a comedy of five
acts I will not determine; but unquestionably she could have
dictated many scenes with equal spirit. We have seen Vanbrugh
attempting to turn the debts incurred by the building
of Blenheim on the duke; we now learn, for the first time,
that the duchess, with equal aptitude, contrived a counterplot
to turn the debts on Vanbrugh!

“I have the misfortune of losing, for I now see little hopes
of ever getting it, near 2000l. due to me for many years’
service, plague, and trouble, at Blenheim, which that wicked
woman of ‘Marlborough’ is so far from paying me, that the
duke being sued by some of the workmen for work done there,
she has tried to turn the debt due to them upon me, for which
I think she ought to be hanged.”

In 1722, on occasion of the duke’s death, Vanbrugh gives
an account to Tonson of the great wealth of the Marlboroughs,
with a caustic touch at his illustrious victims.

“The Duke of Marlborough’s treasure exceeds the most
extravagant guess. The grand settlement, which it was suspected
her grace had broken to pieces, stands good, and hands
an immense wealth to Lord Godolphin and his successors. A
round million has been moving about in loans on the land-tax,
&c. This the Treasury knew before he died, and this
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was exclusive of his ‘land;’ his 5000l. a year upon the post-office;
his mortgages upon a distressed estate; his South-Sea
stock; his annuities, and which were not subscribed in, and
besides what is in foreign banks; and yet this man could
neither pay his workmen their bills, nor his architect his
salary.

“He has given his widow (may a Scottish ensign get her!)
10,000l. a year to spoil Blenheim her own way; 12,000l. a
year to keep herself clean and go to law; 2000l. a year to
Lord Rialton for present maintenance; and Lord Godolphin
only 5000l. a year jointure, if he outlives my lady: this last
is a wretched article. The rest of the heap, for these are but
snippings, goes to Lord Godolphin, and so on. She will have
40,000l. a year in present.”

Atossa, as the quarrel heated and the plot thickened, with
the maliciousness of Puck, and the haughtiness of an empress
of Blenheim, invented the most cruel insult that ever architect
endured!—one perfectly characteristic of that extraordinary
woman. Vanbrugh went to Blenheim with his lady, in
a company from Castle Howard, another magnificent monument
of his singular genius.

“We staid two nights in Woodstock; but there was an
order to the servants, under her grace’s own hand, not to let
me enter Blenheim! and lest that should not mortify me
enough, she having somehow learned that my wife was of
the company, sent an express the night before we came there,
with orders that if she came with the Castle Howard ladies,
the servants should not suffer her to see either house, gardens,
or even to enter the park: so she was forced to sit all day
long and keep me company at the inn!”

This was a coup-de-théâtre in this joint comedy of Atossa
and Vanbrugh! The architect of Blenheim, lifting his eyes
towards his own massive grandeur, exiled to a dull inn, and
imprisoned with one who required rather to be consoled, than
capable of consoling the enraged architect!

In 1725, Atossa still pursuing her hunted prey, had driven
it to a spot which she flattered herself would enclose it with
the security of a preserve. This produced the following
explosion!

“I have been forced into chancery by that B. B. B. the
Duchess of Marlborough, where she has got an injunction
upon me by her friend the late good chancellor (Earl of Macclesfield),
who declared that I was never employed by the
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duke, and therefore had no demand upon his estate for my
services at Blenheim. Since my hands were thus tied up
from trying by law to recover my arrear, I have prevailed
with Sir Robert Walpole to help me in a scheme which I proposed
to him, by which I got my money in spite of the hussy’s
teeth. My carrying this point enrages her much, and the
more because it is of considerable weight in my small fortune,
which she has heartily endeavoured so to destroy as to throw
me into an English Bastile, there to finish my days, as I
began them, in a French one.”

Plot for plot! and the superior claims of one of practised
invention are vindicated! The writer, long accustomed to
comedy-writing, has excelled the self-taught genius of Atossa.
The “scheme” by which Vanbrugh’s fertile invention, aided
by Sir Robert Walpole, finally circumvented the avaricious,
the haughty, and the capricious Atossa, remains untold, unless
it is alluded to by the passage in Lord Orford’s “Anecdotes
of Painting,” where he informs us that the “duchess quarrelled
with Sir John, and went to law with him; but though
he proved to be in the right, or rather because he proved to be
in the right, she employed Sir Christopher Wren to build
the house in St. James’s Park.”

I have to add a curious discovery respecting Vanbrugh
himself, which explains a circumstance in his life not hitherto
understood.

In all the biographies of Vanbrugh, from the time of
Cibber’s Lives of the Poets, the early part of the life of this
man of genius remains unknown. It is said he descended
from an ancient family in Cheshire, which came originally
from France, though by the name, which properly written
would be Van Brugh, he would appear to be of Dutch extraction.
A tale is universally repeated that Sir John once
visiting France in the prosecution of his architectural studies,
while taking a survey of some fortifications, excited alarm,
and was carried to the Bastile: where, to deepen the interest
of the story, he sketched a variety of comedies, which he
must have communicated to the governor, who, whispering it
doubtless as an affair of state to several of the noblesse, these
admirers of “sketches of comedies”—English ones no doubt—procured
the release of this English Molière. This tale is
further confirmed by a very odd circumstance. Sir John
built at Greenwich, on a spot still called “Van Brugh’s
Fields,” two whimsical houses; one on the side of Greenwich
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Park is still called “the Bastile-House,” built on its model,
to commemorate this imprisonment.

Not a word of this detailed story is probably true! that
the Bastile was an object which sometimes occupied the imagination
of our architect, is probable; for by the letter we
have just quoted, we discover from himself the singular incident
of Vanbrugh’s having been born in the Bastile.65

Desirous, probably, of concealing his alien origin, this circumstance
cast his early days into obscurity. He felt that
he was a Briton in all respects but that of his singular birth.
The father of Vanbrugh married Sir Dudley Carleton’s
daughter. We are told he had “political connexions;” and
one of his “political” tours had probably occasioned his confinement
in that state-dungeon, where his lady was delivered
of her burden of love. This odd fancy of building a “Bastile-House”
at Greenwich, a fortified prison! suggested to
his first life-writer the fine romance; which must now be
thrown aside among those literary fictions the French distinguish
by the softening and yet impudent term of “Anecdotes
hasardées!” with which formerly Varillas and his imitators
furnished their pages; lies which looked like facts!

SECRET HISTORY OF SIR WALTER RAWLEIGH.66

Rawleigh exercised in perfection incompatible talents, and
his character connects the opposite extremes of our nature!
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His “Book of Life,” with its incidents of prosperity and
adversity, of glory and humiliation, was as chequered as the
novelist would desire for a tale of fiction. Yet in this mighty
genius there lies an unsuspected disposition, which requires
to be demonstrated, before it is possible to conceive its reality.
From his earliest days, probably by his early reading of the
romantic incidents of the first Spanish adventurers in the
New World, he himself betrayed the genius of an adventurer,
which prevailed in his character to the latest; and it often
involved him in the practice of mean artifices and petty
deceptions; which appear like folly in the wisdom of a sage;
like ineptitude in the profound views of a politician; like
cowardice in the magnanimity of a hero; and degrade by
their littleness the grandeur of a character which was closed
by a splendid death, worthy the life of the wisest and the
greatest of mankind!

The sunshine of his days was in the reign of Elizabeth.
From a boy, always dreaming of romantic conquests (for he
was born in an age of heroism), and formed by nature for the
chivalric gallantry of the court of a maiden queen, from the
moment he with such infinite art cast his rich mantle over
the miry spot, his life was a progress of glory. All about
Rawleigh was as splendid as the dress he wore: his female
sovereign, whose eyes loved to dwell on men who might have
been fit subjects for “the Faerie Queene” of Spenser, penurious
of reward, only recompensed her favourites by suffering
them to make their own fortunes on sea and land; and Elizabeth
listened to the glowing projects of her hero, indulging
that spirit which could have conquered the world, to have
laid the toy at the feet of the sovereign!

This man, this extraordinary being, who was prodigal of
his life and fortune on the Spanish Main, in the idleness
of peace could equally direct his invention to supply the
domestic wants of every-day life, in his project of “an office
for address.” Nothing was too high for his ambition, nor
too humble for his genius. Pre-eminent as a military and a
naval commander, as a statesman and a student, Rawleigh
was as intent on forming the character of Prince Henry, as
that prince was studious of moulding his own aspiring qualities
by the genius of the friend whom he contemplated. Yet
the active life of Rawleigh is not more remarkable than his
contemplative one. He may well rank among the founders
of our literature; for composing on a subject exciting little
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interest, his fine genius has sealed his unfinished volume with
immortality. For magnificence of eloquence, and massiveness
of thought, we must still dwell on his pages.67 Such
was the man who was the adored patron of Spenser; whom
Ben Jonson, proud of calling other favourites “his sons,”
honoured by the title of “his father;” and who left political
instructions which Milton deigned to edit.

But how has it happened that, of so elevated a character,
Gibbon has pronounced that it was “ambiguous,” while it is
described by Hume as “a great but ill-regulated mind!”

There was a peculiarity in the character of this eminent
man; he practised the cunning of an adventurer—a cunning
most humiliating in the narrative! The great difficulty to
overcome in this discovery is, how to account for a sage and
a hero acting folly and cowardice, and attempting to obtain
by circuitous deception what it may be supposed so magnanimous
a spirit would only deign to possess himself of by
direct and open methods.

Since the present article was written, a letter, hitherto
unpublished, appears in the recent edition of Shakspeare
which curiously and minutely records one of those artifices
of the kind which I am about to narrate at length. When,
under Elizabeth, Rawleigh was once in confinement, it
appears that seeing the queen passing by, he was suddenly
seized with a strange resolution of combating with the
governor and his people, declaring that the mere sight of
the queen had made him desperate, as a confined lover would
feel at the sight of his mistress. The letter gives a minute
narrative of Sir Walter’s astonishing conduct, and carefully
repeats the warm romantic style in which he talked of his
royal mistress, and his formal resolution to die rather than
exist out of her presence.68 This extravagant scene, with all
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its cunning, has been most elaborately penned by the ingenious
letter-writer, with a hint to the person whom he
addresses, to suffer it to meet the eye of their royal mistress,
who could not fail of admiring our new “Orlando Furioso,”
and soon after released this tender prisoner! To me it is
evident that the whole scene was got up and concerted for
the occasion, and was the invention of Rawleigh himself;
the romantic incident he well knew was perfectly adapted to
the queen’s taste. Another similar incident, in which I have
been anticipated in the disclosure of the fact, though not of
its nature, was what Sir Toby Matthews obscurely alludes to
in his letters, of “the guilty blow he gave himself in the
Tower;” a passage which had long excited my attention, till
I discovered the curious incident in some manuscript letters
of Lord Cecil. Rawleigh was then confined in the Tower for
the Cobham conspiracy; a plot so absurd and obscure that
one historian has called it a “state-riddle,” but for which, so
many years after, Rawleigh so cruelly lost his life.

Lord Cecil gives an account of the examination of the
prisoners involved in this conspiracy. “One afternoon, whilst
divers of us were in the Tower examining some of these
prisoners, Sir Walter attempted to murder himself; whereof,
when we were advertised, we came to him, and found him in
some agony to be unable to endure his misfortunes, and protesting
innocency, with carelessness of life; and in that
humour he had wounded himself under the right pap, but no
way mortally, being in truth rather a cut than a stab, and now
very well cured both in body and mind.”69 This feeble attempt
at suicide, this “cut rather than stab,” I must place among
those scenes in the life of Rawleigh so incomprehensible with
the genius of the man. If it were nothing but one of those

Fears of the Brave!

115

we must now open another of the

Follies of the Wise!

Rawleigh returned from the wild and desperate voyage of
Guiana, with misery in every shape about him.70 His son
had perished; his devoted Keymis would not survive his
reproach; and Rawleigh, without fortune and without hope,
in sickness and in sorrow, brooded over the sad thought, that
in the hatred of the Spaniard, and in the political pusillanimity
of James, he was arriving only to meet inevitable
death. With this presentiment, he had even wished to give
up his ship to the crew, had they consented to land him in
France; but he was probably irresolute in this decision at
sea, as he was afterwards at land, where he wished to escape,
and refused to fly: the clearest intellect was darkened, and
magnanimity itself became humiliated, floating between the
sense of honour and of life.

Rawleigh landed in his native county of Devon: his arrival
was the common topic of conversation, and he was the object
of censure or of commiseration: but his person was not
molested, till the fears of James became more urgent than
his pity.

The Cervantic Gondomar, whose “quips and quiddities”
had concealed the cares of state, one day rushed into the
presence of James, breathlessly calling out for “audience!”
and compressing his “ear-piercing” message into the laconic
abruptness of “piratas! piratas! piratas!” There was agony
as well as politics in this cry of Gondomar, whose brother,
the Spanish governor, had been massacred in this predatory
expedition.71 The timid monarch, terrified at this tragical
appearance of his facetious friend, saw at once the demands
of the whole Spanish cabinet, and vented his palliative in a
gentle proclamation. Rawleigh having settled his affairs in
116
the west, set off for London to appear before the king, in
consequence of the proclamation. A few miles from Plymouth
he was met by Sir Lewis Stucley, vice-admiral of
Devon, a kinsman and a friend, who, in communication with
government, had accepted a sort of surveillance over Sir
Walter. It is said (and will be credited, when we hear the
story of Stucley), that he had set his heart on the ship, as a
probable good purchase; and on the person, against whom,
to colour his natural treachery, he professed an old hatred.
He first seized on Rawleigh more like the kinsman than the
vice-admiral, and proposed travelling together to London, and
baiting at the houses of the friends of Rawleigh. The warrant
which Stucley in the meanwhile had desired was instantly
despatched, and the bearer was one Manoury, a French empiric,
who was evidently sent to act the part he did—a part
played at all times, and the last title, in French politics, that
so often had recourse to this instrument of state, is a Mouton!

Rawleigh still, however, was not placed under any harsh
restraint: his confidential associate, Captain King, accompanied
him; and it is probable, that if Rawleigh had effectuated
his escape, he would have conferred a great favour on
the government.

They could not save him at London. It is certain that
he might have escaped; for Captain King had hired a vessel,
and Rawleigh had stolen out by night, and might have
reached it, but irresolutely returned home; another night,
the same vessel was ready, but Rawleigh never came! The
loss of his honour appeared the greater calamity.

As he advanced in this eventful journey, everything assumed
a more formidable aspect. His friends communicated fearful
advices; a pursuivant, or king’s messenger, gave a more
menacing appearance; and suggestions arose in his own mind,
that he was reserved to become a victim of state. When
letters of commission from the Privy Council were brought
to Sir Lewis Stucley, Rawleigh was observed to change countenance,
exclaiming with an oath, “Is it possible my fortune
should return upon me thus again?” He lamented, before
Captain King, that he had neglected the opportunity of
escape; and which, every day he advanced inland, removed
him the more from any chance.

Rawleigh at first suspected that Manoury was one of those
instruments of state who are sometimes employed when open
measures are not to be pursued, or when the cabinet have not
117
yet determined on the fate of a person implicated in a state
crime; in a word, Rawleigh thought that Manoury was a spy
over him, and probably over Stucley too. The first impression
in these matters is usually the right one; but when
Rawleigh found himself caught in the toils, he imagined that
such corrupt agents were to be corrupted. The French empiric
was sounded, and found very compliant; Rawleigh was
desirous by his aid to counterfeit sickness, and for this purpose
invented a series of the most humiliating stratagems.
He imagined that a constant appearance of sickness might
produce delay, and procrastination, in the chapter of accidents,
might end in pardon. He procured vomits from the Frenchman,
and, whenever he chose, produced every appearance of
sickness; with dimness of sight, dizziness in his head, he
reeled about, and once struck himself with such violence
against a pillar in the gallery, that there was no doubt of his
malady. Rawleigh’s servant one morning entering Stucley’s
chamber, declared that his master was out of his senses, for
that he had just left him in his shirt upon all fours, gnawing
the rushes upon the floor. On Stucley’s entrance, Rawleigh
was raving, and reeling in strong convulsions. Stucley ordered
him to be chafed and fomented, and Rawleigh afterwards
laughed at this scene with Manoury, observing that he had
made Stucley a perfect physician.

But Rawleigh found it required some more visible and
alarming disease than such ridiculous scenes had exhibited.
The vomits worked so slowly, that Manoury was fearful to
repeat the doses. Rawleigh inquired whether the empiric
knew of any preparation which could make him look ghastly,
without injuring his health. The Frenchman offered a harmless
ointment to act on the surface of the skin, which would
give him the appearance of a leper. “That will do!” said
Rawleigh, “for the lords will be afraid to approach me, and
besides it will move their pity.” Applying the ointment
to his brows, his arms, and his breast, the blisters rose, the
skin inflamed, and was covered with purple spots. Stucley
concluded that Rawleigh had the plague. Physicians were
now to be called in; Rawleigh took the black silk ribbon
from his poniard, and Manoury tightened it strongly about
his arm, to disorder his pulse; but his pulse beat too strong
and regular. He appeared to take no food, while Manoury
secretly provided him. To perplex the learned doctors still
more, Rawleigh had the urinal coloured by a drug of a strong
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scent. The physicians pronounced the disease mortal, and
that the patient could not be removed into the air without
immediate danger. Awhile after, being in his bed-chamber
undressed, and no one present but Manoury, Sir Walter held
a looking-glass in his hand to admire his spotted face,72 and
observed in merriment to his new confidant, “how they
should one day laugh for having thus cozened the king,
council, physicians, Spaniards, and all.” The excuse Rawleigh
offered for this course of poor stratagems, so unworthy
of his genius, was to obtain time and seclusion for writing
his Apology, or Vindication of his Voyage, which has come
down to us in his “Remains.” “The prophet David did
make himself a fool, and suffered spittle to fall upon his
beard, to escape from the hands of his enemies,” said Rawleigh
in his last speech. Brutus, too, was another example.
But his discernment often prevailed over this mockery of his
spirit. The king licensed him to reside at his own house on
his arrival in London; on which Manoury observed that the
king showed by this indulgence that his majesty was favourably
inclined towards him; but Rawleigh replied, “They used
all these kinds of flatteries to the Duke of Biron, to draw
him fairly into prison, and then they cut off his head. I
know they have concluded among them that it is expedient
that a man should die, to re-assure the traffick which I have
broke with Spain.” And Manoury adds, from whose narrative
we have all these particulars, that Sir Walter broke out
into this rant: “If he could but save himself for this time,
he would plot such plots as should make the king think himself
happy to send for him again, and restore him to his
estate, and would force the King of Spain to write into
England in his favour.”

Rawleigh at length proposed a flight to France with
Manoury, who declares it was then he revealed to Stucley
what he had hitherto concealed, that Stucley might double
his vigilance. Rawleigh now perceived that he had two
rogues to bribe instead of one, and that they were playing
into one another’s hands. Proposals are now made to Stucley
through Manoury, who is as compliant as his brother-knave.
119
Rawleigh presented Stucley with a “jewel made in the fashion
of hail powdered with diamonds, with a ruby in the midst.”
But Stucley observing to his kinsman and friend, that he
must lose his office of vice-admiral, which had cost him six
hundred pounds, in case he suffered Rawleigh to escape;
Rawleigh solemnly assured him that he should be no loser,
and that his lady should give him one thousand pounds when
they got into France or Holland. About this time the
French quack took his leave: the part he had to act was performed:
the juggle was complete: and two wretches had
triumphed over the sagacity and magnanimity of a sage
and a hero, whom misfortune had levelled to folly; and who,
in violating the dignity of his own character, had only
equalled himself with vulgar knaves; men who exulted that
the circumventer was circumvented; or, as they expressed it,
“the great cozener was cozened.” But our story does not here
conclude, for the treacheries of Stucley were more intricate.
This perfect villain had obtained a warrant of indemnity to
authorise his compliance with any offer to assist Rawleigh in
his escape; this wretch was the confidant and the executioner
of Rawleigh; he carried about him a license to betray him,
and was making his profit of the victim before he delivered
him to the sacrifice. Rawleigh was still plotting his escape;
at Salisbury he had despatched his confidential friend Captain
King to London, to secure a boat at Tilbury; he had also a
secret interview with the French agent. Rawleigh’s servant
mentioned to Captain King, that his boatswain had a ketch73
of his own, and was ready at his service for “thirty pieces of
silver;” the boatswain and Rawleigh’s servant acted Judas,
and betrayed the plot to Mr. William Herbert, cousin to
Stucley, and thus the treachery was kept among themselves
as a family concern. The night for flight was now fixed,
but he could not part without his friend Stucley, who had
promised never to quit him; and who indeed, informed by
his cousin Herbert, had suddenly surprised Rawleigh putting
on a false beard. The party met at the appointed place; Sir
Lewis Stucley with his son, and Rawleigh disguised. Stucley,
in saluting King, asked whether he had not shown himself
an honest man? King hoped he would continue so. They
had not rowed twenty strokes, before the watermen observed,
120
that Mr. Herbert had lately taken boat, and made towards
the bridge, but had returned down the river after them.
Rawleigh instantly expressed his apprehensions, and wished
to return home; he consulted King—the watermen took
fright—Stucley acted his part well; damning his ill-fortune
to have a friend whom he would save, so full of doubts and
fears, and threatening to pistol the watermen if they did not
proceed. Even King was overcome by the earnest conduct
of Stucley, and a new spirit was infused into the rowers. As
they drew near Greenwich a wherry crossed them. Rawleigh
declared it came to discover them. King tried to allay his
fears, and assured him that if once they reached Gravesend,
he would hazard his life to get to Tilbury. But in these
delays and discussions, the tide was failing; the watermen
declared they could not reach Gravesend before morning;
Rawleigh would have landed at Purfleet, and the boatswain
encouraged him; for there it was thought he could procure
horses for Tilbury. Sir Lewis Stucley too was zealous; and
declared he was content to carry the cloak-bag on his own
shoulders, for half-a-mile, but King declared that it was
useless, they could not at that hour get horses to go by
land.

They rowed a mile beyond Woolwich, approaching two or
three ketches, when the boatswain doubted whether any of
these were the one he had provided to furnish them. “We
are betrayed!” cried Rawleigh, and ordered the watermen to
row back: he strictly examined the boatswain; alas! his
ingenuity was baffled by a shuffling villain, whose real answer
appeared when a wherry hailed the boat: Rawleigh
observed that it contained Herbert’s crew. He saw that all
was now discovered. He took Stucley aside; his ingenious
mind still suggesting projects for himself to return home in
safety, or how Stucley might plead that he had only pretended
to go with Rawleigh, to seize on his private papers.
They whispered together, and Rawleigh took some things
from his pocket, and handed them to Stucley; probably more
“rubies powdered with diamonds.”—Some effect was instantaneously
produced; for the tender heart of his friend
Stucley relented, and he not only repeatedly embraced him
with extraordinary warmth of affection, but was voluble in
effusions of friendship and fidelity. Stucley persuaded Rawleigh
to land at Gravesend, the strange wherry which had
dogged them landing at the same time; these were people
121
belonging to Mr. Herbert and Sir William St. John, who, it
seems, had formerly shared in the spoils of this unhappy hero.
On Greenwich bridge, Stucley advised Captain King that it
would be advantageous to Sir Walter, that King should
confess that he had joined with Stucley to betray his master;
and Rawleigh lent himself to the suggestion of Stucley, of
whose treachery he might still be uncertain; but King, a
rough and honest seaman, declared that he would not share
in the odium. At the moment he refused, Stucley arrested
the captain in the king’s name, committing him to the charge
of Herbert’s men. They then proceeded to a tavern, but
Rawleigh, who now viewed the monster in his true shape,
observed, “Sir Lewis, these actions will not turn out to your
credit;” and on the following day, when they passed through
the Tower-gate, Rawleigh, turning to King, observed,
“Stucley and my servant Cotterell have betrayed me. You
need be in no fear of danger, but as for me, it is I who am
the mark that is shot at.” Thus concludes the narrative of
Captain King. The fate of Rawleigh soon verified the prediction.

This long narrative of treachery will not, however, be
complete, unless we wind it up with the fate of the infamous
Stucley. Fiction gives perfection to its narratives, by the
privilege it enjoys of disposing of its criminals in the most
exemplary manner; but the labours of the historian are not
always refreshed by this moral pleasure. Retribution is not
always discovered in the present stage of human existence,
yet history is perhaps equally delightful as fiction, whenever
its perfect catastrophes resemble those of romantic invention.
The present is a splendid example.

I have discovered the secret history of Sir Lewis Stucley,
in several manuscript letters of the times.

Rawleigh, in his admirable address from the scaffold, where
he seemed to be rather one of the spectators than the sufferer,
declared he forgave Sir Lewis, for he had forgiven all
men; but he was bound in charity to caution all men against
him, and such as he is! Rawleigh’s last and solemn notice
of the treachery of his “kinsman and friend” was irrevocably
fatal to this wretch. The hearts of the people were
open to the deepest impressions of sympathy, melting into
tears at the pathetic address of the magnanimous spirit who
had touched them; in one moment Sir Lewis Stucley became
an object of execration throughout the nation; he soon obtained
122
a new title, that of “Sir Judas,” and was shunned by
every man. To remove the Cain-like mark, which God and
men had fixed on him, he published an apology for his conduct;
a performance which, at least for its ability, might
raise him in our consideration; but I have since discovered, in
one of the manuscript letter-writers, that it was written by
Dr. Sharpe, who had been a chaplain to Henry Prince of
Wales. The writer pleads in Stucley’s justification, that he
was a state-agent; that it was lawful to lie for the discovery
of treason; that he had a personal hatred towards Rawleigh,
for having abridged his father of his share of some prize-money;
and then enters more into Rawleigh’s character, who
“being desperate of any fortune here, agreeable to the height
of his mind, would have made up his fortune elsewhere, upon
any terms against his sovereign and his country. Is it not
marvel,” continues the personifier of Stucley, “that he was
angry with me at his death for bringing him back? Besides,
being a man of so great a wit, it was no small grief
that a man of mean wit as I should be thought to go beyond
him. No? Sic ars deluditur arte. Neque enim lex justior
ulla est quam necis artifices arte perire suâ. [This apt
latinity betrays Dr. Sharpe.] But why did you not execute
your commission bravely [openly]?—Why? My commission
was to the contrary, to discover his pretensions, and to
seize his secret papers,” &c.74

But the doctor, though no unskilful writer, here wrote in
vain; for what ingenuity can veil the turpitude of long and
practised treachery? To keep up appearances, Sir Judas resorted
more than usually to court; where, however, he was
perpetually enduring rebuffs, or avoided, as one infected with
the plague of treachery. He offered the king, in his own
justification, to take the sacrament, that whatever he had laid
to Rawleigh’s charge was true, and would produce two unexceptionable
witnesses to do the like. “Why, then,” replied
his majesty, “the more malicious was Sir Walter to
utter these speeches at his death.” Sir Thomas Badger, who
stood by, observed, “Let the king take off Stucley’s head, as
Stucley has done Sir Walter’s, and let him at his death take
the sacrament and his oath upon it, and I’ll believe him; but
till Stucley loses his head, I shall credit Sir Walter Rawleigh’s
bare affirmative before a thousand of Stucley’s oaths.”
123
When Stucley, on pretence of giving an account of his office,
placed himself in the audience chamber of the lord admiral,
and his lordship passed him without any notice, Sir Judas
attempted to address the earl; but with a bitter look his
lordship exclaimed—“Base fellow! darest thou, who art the
scorn and contempt of men, offer thyself in my presence?
Were it not in my own house, I would cudgel thee with my
staff for presuming on this sauciness.” This annihilating
affront Stucley hastened to convey to the king; his majesty
answered him—“What wouldst thou have me do? Wouldst
thou have me hang him? Of my soul, if I should hang all
that speak ill of thee, all the trees of the country would not
suffice, so great is the number!”

One of the frequent crimes of that age, ere the forgery of
bank-notes existed, was the clipping of gold; and this was
one of the private amusements suitable to the character of
our Sir Judas. Treachery and forgery are the same crime in
a different form. Stucley received out of the exchequer five
hundred pounds, as the reward of his espionnage and perfidy.
It was the price of blood, and was hardly in his hands ere it
was turned into the fraudulent coin of “the cheater!” He
was seized on in the palace of Whitehall, for diminishing the
gold coin. “The manner of the discovery,” says the manuscript-writer,
“was strange, if my occasions would suffer me
to relate the particulars.” On his examination he attempted
to shift the crime to his own son, who had fled; and on his
man, who, being taken, in the words of the letter-writer, was
“willing to set the saddle upon the right horse, and accused
his master.” Manoury, too, the French empiric, was arrested
at Plymouth for the same crime, and accused his
worthy friend. But such was the interest of Stucley with
government, bought, probably, with his last shilling, and, as
one says, with his last shirt, that he obtained his own and
his son’s pardon, for a crime that ought to have finally concluded
the history of this blessed family.75 A more solemn
and tragical catastrophe was reserved for the perfidious Stucley.
He was deprived of his place of vice-admiral, and left
destitute in the world. Abandoned by all human beings, and
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most probably by the son whom he had tutored in the arts
of villany, he appears to have wandered about, an infamous
and distracted beggar. It is possible that even so seared a
conscience may have retained some remaining touch of sensibility.

And Camden has recorded, among his historical notes on
James the First, that in August, 1620, “Lewis Stucley, who
betrayed Sir Walter Rawleigh, died in a manner mad.” Such
is the catastrophe of one of the most perfect domestic tales;
an historical example, not easily paralleled, of moral retribution.

The secret practices of the “Sir Judas” of the court of
James the First, which I have discovered, throw light on an
old tradition which still exists in the neighbourhood of Affeton,
once the residence of this wretched man. The country
people have long entertained a notion that a hidden treasure
lies at the bottom of a well in his grounds, guarded by some
supernatural power: a tradition no doubt originating in this
man’s history, and an obscure allusion to the gold which
Stucley received for his bribe, or the other gold which he
clipped, and might have there concealed. This is a striking
instance of the many historical facts which, though entirely
unknown or forgotten, may be often discovered to lie hid, or
disguised, in popular traditions.

AN AUTHENTIC NARRATIVE OF THE LAST HOURS OF
SIR WALTER RAWLEIGH.

The close of the life of Sir Walter Rawleigh was as extraordinary
as many parts of his varied history; the promptitude
and sprightliness of his genius, his carelessness of life, and
the equanimity of this great spirit in quitting the world, can
only be paralleled by a few other heroes and sages. Rawleigh
was both! But it is not simply his dignified yet active
conduct on the scaffold, nor his admirable speech on that
occasion, circumstances by which many great men are judged,
when their energies are excited for a moment to act so great
125
a part, before the eyes of the world assembled at their feet;
it is not these only which claim our notice.

We may pause with admiration on the real grandeur of
Rawleigh’s character, not from a single circumstance, however
great, but from a tissue of continued little incidents, which
occurred from the moment of his condemnation till he laid
his head on the block. Rawleigh was a man of such mark,
that he deeply engaged the attention of his contemporaries;
and to this we owe the preservation of several interesting
particulars of what he did and what he said, which have
entered into his life; but all has not been told in the published
narratives. Contemporary writers in their letters have
set down every fresh incident, and eagerly caught up his
sense, his wit, and, what is more delightful, those marks of
the natural cheerfulness of his invariable presence of mind:
nor could these have arisen from any affectation or parade, for
we shall see that they served him even in his last tender farewell
to his lady, and on many unpremeditated occasions.

I have drawn together into a short compass all the facts
which my researches have furnished, not omitting those which
are known, concerning the feelings and conduct of Rawleigh
at these solemn moments of his life; to have preserved only
the new would have been to mutilate the statue, and to injure
the whole by an imperfect view.

Rawleigh one morning was taken out of his bed, in a fit of
fever, and unexpectedly hurried, not to his trial, but to a sentence
of death. The story is well known.—Yet pleading
with “a voice grown weak by sickness and an ague he had at
that instant on him,” he used every means to avert his fate:
he did, therefore, value the life he could so easily part with.
His judges, there, at least, respected their state criminal, and
they addressed him in a tone far different from that which he
had fifteen years before listened to from Coke. Yelverton, the
attorney-general, said—“Sir Walter Rawleigh hath been as
a star at which the world have gazed; but stars may fall, nay,
they must fall, when they trouble the sphere where they
abide.” And the lord chief-justice noticed Rawleigh’s great
work:—“I know that you have been valiant and wise, and I
doubt not but you retain both these virtues, for now you shall
have occasion to use them. Your book is an admirable work;
I would give you counsel, but I know you can apply unto
yourself far better than I am able to give you.” But the
judge ended with saying, “execution is granted.” It was
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stifling Rawleigh with roses! the heroic sage felt as if listening
to fame from the voice of death.

He declared that now being old, sickly, and in disgrace,
and “certain were he allowed to live, to go to it again, life
was wearisome to him, and all he entreated was to have leave
to speak freely at his farewell, to satisfy the world that he
was ever loyal to the king, and a true lover of the commonwealth;
for this he would seal with his blood.”

Rawleigh, on his return to his prison, while some were
deploring his fate, observed that “the world itself is but
a larger prison, out of which some are daily selected for
execution.”

That last night of his existence was occupied by writing
what the letter-writer calls “a remembrancer to be left with
his lady, to acquaint the world with his sentiments, should he
be denied their delivery from the scaffold, as he had been at
the bar of the King’s Bench.” His lady visited him that
night, and amidst her tears acquainted him that she had
obtained the favour of disposing of his body; to which he
answered smiling, “It is well, Bess, that thou mayst dispose of
that, dead, thou hadst not always the disposing of when it was
alive.” At midnight he entreated her to leave him. It must
have been then, that, with unshaken fortitude, Rawleigh sat
down to compose those verses on his death, which being short,
the most appropriate may be repeated.

He has added two other lines expressive of his trust in his
resurrection. Their authenticity is confirmed by the writer of
the present letter, as well as another writer, enclosing “half
a dozen verses, which Sir Walter made the night before his
death, to take his farewell of poetry, wherein he had been a
scribbler even from his youth.” The enclosure is not now
with the letter. Chamberlain, the writer, was an intelligent
man of the world, but not imbued with any deep tincture of
literature. On the same night Rawleigh wrote this distich
on the candle burning dimly:—

127

At this solemn moment, before he lay down to rest, and at the
instant of parting from his lady, with all his domestic affections
still warm, to express his feelings in verse was with him
a natural effusion, and one to which he had long been used.
It is peculiar in the fate of Rawleigh, that having before
suffered a long imprisonment with an expectation of a public
death, his mind had been accustomed to its contemplation,
and had often dwelt on the event which was now passing. The
soul, in its sudden departure, and its future state, is often the
subject of his few poems; that most original one of “The
Farewell,”

is attributed to Rawleigh, though on uncertain evidence.
But another, entitled “The Pilgrimage,” has this beautiful
passage:—

Rawleigh’s cheerfulness was so remarkable, and his fearlessness
of death so marked, that the Dean of Westminster, who
attended him, at first wondering at the hero, reprehended the
lightness of his manner, but Rawleigh gave God thanks that
he had never feared death, for it was but an opinion and an
imagination; and as for the manner of death, he would rather
die so than of a burning fever; and that some might have
made shows outwardly, but he felt the joy within. The dean
says, that he made no more of his death than if he had
been to take a journey: “Not,” said he, “but that I am a
great sinner, for I have been a soldier, a seaman, and a
courtier.” The writer of a manuscript letter tells us, that
the dean declared he died not only religiously, but he
found him to be a man as ready and as able to give as to take
instruction.

On the morning of his death he smoked, as usual, his favourite
tobacco, and when they brought him a cup of excellent
sack, being asked how he liked it, Rawleigh answered—“As
the fellow, that, drinking of St. Giles’s bowl, as he went to
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Tyburn, said, ‘that was good drink if a man might tarry by
it.’”76 The day before, in passing from Westminster Hall to
the Gate-house, his eye had caught Sir Hugh Beeston in the
throng, and calling on him, Rawleigh requested that he would
see him die to-morrow. Sir Hugh, to secure himself a seat on
the scaffold, had provided himself with a letter to the sheriff,
which was not read at the time, and Sir Walter found his
friend thrust by, lamenting that he could not get there.
“Farewell!” exclaimed Rawleigh, “I know not what shift
you will make, but I am sure to have a place.” In going
from the prison to the scaffold, among others who were pressing
hard to see him, one old man, whose head was bald, came
very forward, insomuch that Rawleigh noticed him, and asked
“whether he would have aught of him?” The old man
answered—“Nothing but to see him, and to pray God for
him.” Rawleigh replied—“I thank thee, good friend, and
I am sorry I have no better thing to return thee for thy good
will.” Observing his bald head, he continued, “but take
this night-cap (which was a very rich wrought one that he
wore), for thou hast more need of it now than I.”

His dress, as was usual with him, was elegant, if not rich.77
Oldys describes it, but mentions, that “he had a wrought
nightcap under his hat;” this we have otherwise disposed of;
he wore a ruff-band, a black wrought velvet night-gown over
a hare-coloured satin doublet, and a black wrought waistcoat;
black cut taffety breeches, and ash-coloured silk stockings.

He ascended the scaffold with the same cheerfulness as he
had passed to it; and observing the lords seated at a distance,
some at windows, he requested they would approach him, as
he wished that they should all witness what he had to say.
The request was complied with by several. His speech is
well known; but some copies contain matters not in others.
When he finished, he requested Lord Arundel that the king
would not suffer any libels to defame him after death.—“And
now I have a long journey to go, and must take my leave.”
“He embraced all the lords and other friends with such
courtly compliments, as if he had met them at some feast,”
129
says a letter-writer. Having taken off his gown, he called to
the headsman to show him the axe, which not being instantly
done, he repeated, “I prithee let me see it, dost thou think
that I am afraid of it?” He passed the edge lightly over
his finger, and smiling, observed to the sheriff, “This is a
sharp medicine, but a sound cure for all diseases,” and kissing
it laid it down. Another writer has, “This is that that will
cure all sorrows.” After this he went to three several
corners of the scaffold, and kneeling down, desired all the
people to pray for him, and recited a long prayer to himself.
When he began to fit himself for the block, he first laid himself
down to try how the block fitted him; after rising up,
the executioner kneeled down to ask his forgiveness, which
Rawleigh with an embrace gave, but entreated him not to
strike till he gave a token by lifting up his hand, “and then,
fear not, but strike home!” When he laid his head down to
receive the stroke, the executioner desired him to lay his face
towards the east. “It was no great matter which way a
man’s head stood, so that the heart lay right,” said Rawleigh;
but these were not his last words. He was once more to
speak in this world with the same intrepidity he had lived in
it—for, having lain some minutes on the block in prayer, he
gave the signal; but the executioner, either unmindful, or in
fear, failed to strike, and Rawleigh, after once or twice
putting forth his hands, was compelled to ask him, “Why
dost thou not strike? Strike! man!” In two blows he was
beheaded; but from the first his body never shrunk from the
spot by any discomposure of his posture, which, like his mind,
was immovable.

“In all the time he was upon the scaffold, and before,”
says one of the manuscript letter-writers, “there appeared
not the least alteration in him, either in his voice or countenance;
but he seemed as free from all manner of apprehension
as if he had been come thither rather to be a spectator than
a sufferer; nay, the beholders seemed much more sensible than
did he, so that he hath purchased here in the opinion of men
such honour and reputation, as it is thought his greatest
enemies are they that are most sorrowful for his death, which
they see is like to turn so much to his advantage.”

The people were deeply affected at the sight, and so much,
that one said that “we had not such another head to cut off;”
and another “wished the head and brains to be upon Secretary
Naunton’s shoulders.” The observer suffered for this;
130
he was a wealthy citizen, and great newsmonger, and one
who haunted Paul’s Walk. Complaint was made, and the
citizen was summoned to the Privy Council. He pleaded
that he intended no disrespect to Mr. Secretary, but only
spoke in reference to the old proverb, that “two heads were
better than one!” His excuse was allowed at the moment;
but when afterwards called on for a contribution to St. Paul’s
Cathedral, and having subscribed a hundred pounds, the
Secretary observed to him, that “two are better than one,
Mr. Wiemark!” Either from fear or charity, the witty
citizen doubled his subscription.78

Thus died this glorious and gallant cavalier, of whom
Osborne says, “His death was managed by him with so high
and religious a resolution, as if a Roman had acted a Christian,
or rather a Christian a Roman.”79

After having read the preceding article, we are astonished
at the greatness, and the variable nature of this extraordinary
man and this happy genius. With Gibbon, who once meditated
to write his life, we may pause, and pronounce “his
character ambiguous;” but we shall not hesitate to decide
that Rawleigh knew better how to die than to live. “His
glorious hours,” says a contemporary, “were his arraignment
and execution;” but never will be forgotten the intermediate
years of his lettered imprisonment; the imprisonment of the
learned may sometimes be their happiest leisure.

131

LITERARY UNIONS.

SECRET HISTORY OF RAWLEIGH’S HISTORY OF THE WORLD,
AND VASARI’S LIVES.

A union of talents, differing in their qualities, might carry
some important works to a more extended perfection. In a
work of great enterprise, the aid of a friendly hand may be
absolutely necessary to complete the labours of the projector,
who may have neither the courage, the leisure, nor all necessary
acquisitions for performing the favourite task which he
has otherwise matured. Many great works, commenced by
a master-genius, have remained unfinished, or have been
deficient for want of this friendly succour. The public would
have been grateful to Johnson, had he united in his dictionary
the labours of some learned etymologist. Speed’s
Chronicle owes most of its value, as it does its ornaments, to
the hand of Sir Robert Cotton, and other curious researchers,
who contributed entire portions. Goguet’s esteemed work of
the “Origin of the Arts and Sciences” was greatly indebted
to the fraternal zeal of a devoted friend. The still valued
books of the Port Royal Society were all formed by this
happy union. The secret history of many eminent works
would show the advantages which may be derived from that
combination of talents, differing in their nature. Cumberland’s
masterly versions of the fragments of the Greek
dramatic poets would never have been given to the poetical
world, had he not accidentally possessed the manuscript notes
of his relative, the learned Bentley. This treasure supplied
that research in the most obscure works, which the volatile
studies of Cumberland could never have explored; a circumstance
which he concealed from the world, proud of the
Greek erudition which he thus cheaply possessed. Yet by
this literary union, Bentley’s vast erudition made those
researches which Cumberland could not; and Cumberland
gave the nation a copy of the domestic drama of Greece, of
which Bentley was incapable.

There is a large work, which is still celebrated, of which the
composition has excited the astonishment even of the
philosophic Hume, but whose secret history remains yet to be
disclosed. This extraordinary volume is “The History of
the World by Rawleigh.” I shall transcribe Hume’s observations,
that the reader may observe the literary phenomenon.
132
“They were struck with the extensive genius of the man,
who being educated amidst naval and military enterprises,
had surpassed in the pursuits of literature, even those of the
most recluse and sedentary lives; and they admired his
unbroken magnanimity, which at his age, and under his circumstances,
could engage him to undertake and execute so
great a work, as his History of the World.” Now when the
truth is known, the wonderful in this literary mystery will
disappear, except in the eloquent, the grand, and the pathetic
passages interspersed in that venerable volume. We may,
indeed, pardon the astonishment of our calm philosopher,
when we consider the recondite matter contained in this work,
and recollect the little time which this adventurous spirit,
whose life was passed in fabricating his own fortune, and in
perpetual enterprise, could allow to such erudite pursuits.
Where could Rawleigh obtain that familiar acquaintance with
the rabbins, of whose language he was probably entirely
ignorant? His numerous publications, the effusions of a most
active mind, though excellent in their kind, were evidently
composed by one who was not abstracted in curious and
remote inquiries, but full of the daily business and the
wisdom of human life. His confinement in the Tower, which
lasted several years, was indeed sufficient for the composition
of this folio volume, and of a second which appears to have
occupied him. But in that imprisonment it singularly
happened that he lived among literary characters with most
intimate friendship. There he joined the Earl of Northumberland,
the patron of the philosophers of his age, and with
whom Rawleigh pursued his chemical studies; and Serjeant
Hoskins, a poet and a wit, and the poetical “father” of Ben
Jonson, who acknowledged that “It was Hoskins who had
polished him;” and that Rawleigh often consulted Hoskins
on his literary works, I learn from a manuscript. But
however literary the atmosphere of the Tower proved to
Rawleigh, no particle of Hebrew, and perhaps little of Grecian
lore, floated from a chemist and a poet. The truth is, that
the collection of the materials of this history was the labour
of several persons, who have not all been discovered. It has
been ascertained that Ben Jonson was a considerable contributor;
and there was an English philosopher from whom
Descartes, it is said even by his own countrymen, borrowed
largely—Thomas Hariot, whom Anthony Wood charges with
infusing into Rawleigh’s volume philosophical notions, while
133
Rawleigh was composing his History of the World. But if
Rawleigh’s pursuits surpassed even those of the most recluse
and sedentary lives, as Hume observes, we must attribute this
to a “Dr. Robert Burrel, Rector of Northwald, in the county
of Norfolk, who was a great favourite of Sir Walter
Rawleigh, and had been his chaplain. All, or the greatest
part of the drudgery of Sir Walter’s History for criticisms,
chronology, and reading Greek and Hebrew authors, was
performed by him for Sir Walter.”80 Thus a simple fact,
when discovered, clears up the whole mystery; and we learn
how that knowledge was acquired, which, as Hume sagaciously
detected, required “a recluse and sedentary life,”
such as the studies and the habits of a country clergyman
would have been in a learned age.

The secret history of another work, still more celebrated
than the History of the World, by Sir Walter Rawleigh, will
doubtless surprise its numerous admirers.

Without the aid of a friendly hand, we should probably
have been deprived of the delightful History of Artists by
Vasari: although a mere painter and goldsmith, and not a
literary man, Vasari was blessed with the nice discernment of
one deeply conversant with art, and saw rightly what was to
be done, when the idea of the work was suggested by the
celebrated Paulus Jovius as a supplement to his own work of
the “Eulogiums of Illustrious Men.” Vasari approved of the
134
project; but on that occasion judiciously observed, not
blinded by the celebrity of the literary man who projected it,
that “It would require the assistance of an artist to collect
the materials, and arrange them in their proper order; for
although Jovius displayed great knowledge in his observations,
yet he had not been equally accurate in the arrangement
of his facts in his book of Eulogiums.” Afterwards,
when Vasari began to collect his information, and consulted
Paulus Jovius on the plan, although that author highly
approved of what he saw, he alleged his own want of leisure
and ability to complete such an enterprise; and this was fortunate:
we should otherwise have had, instead of the rambling
spirit which charms us in the volumes of Vasari, the verbose
babble of a declaimer. Vasari, however, looked round for
the assistance he wanted; a circumstance which Tiraboschi
has not noticed: like Hogarth, he required a literary man
for his scribe. I have discovered the name of the chief
writer of the Lives of the Painters, who wrote under the
direction of Vasari, and probably often used his own natural
style, and conveyed to us those reflections which surely come
from their source. I shall give the passage, as a curious instance
where the secret history of books is often detected in
the most obscure corners of research. Who could have imagined
that in a collection of the lives de’ Santi e Beati dell’
Ordine de’ Predicatori, we are to look for the writer of
Vasari’s lives? Don Serafini Razzi, the author of this ecclesiastical
biography, has this reference: “Who would see more
of this may turn to the Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and
Architects, written for the greater part by Don Silvano Razzi,
my brother, for the Signor Cavaliere M. Giorgio Vasari, his
great friend.”81

The discovery that Vasari’s volumes were not entirely
written by himself, though probably under his dictation, and
unquestionably, with his communications, as we know that
Dr. Morell wrote the “Analysis of Beauty” for Hogarth, will
perhaps serve to clear up some unaccountable mistakes or
135
omissions which appear in that series of volumes, written at
long intervals, and by different hands. Mr. Fuseli has
alluded to them in utter astonishment; and cannot account
for Vasari’s “incredible dereliction of reminiscence, which
prompted him to transfer what he had rightly ascribed to
Giorgione in one edition to the elder Parma in the subsequent
ones.” Again: “Vasari’s memory was either so treacherous,
or his rapidity in writing so inconsiderate, that his account
of the Capella Sistina, and the stanze of Raffaello, is a mere
heap of errors and unpardonable confusion.” Even Bottari,
his learned editor, is at a loss how to account for his mistakes.
Mr. Fuseli finely observes—“He has been called the
Herodotus of our art; and if the main simplicity of his narrative,
and the desire of heaping anecdote on anecdote, entitle
him in some degree to that appellation, we ought not to
forget that the information of every day adds something to
the authenticity of the Greek historian, whilst every day furnishes
matter to question the credibility of the Tuscan.” All
this strongly confirms the suspicion that Vasari employed
different hands at different times to write out his work. Such
mistakes would occur to a new writer, not always conversant
with the subject he was composing on, and the disjointed
materials of which were often found in a disordered state. It
is, however, strange that neither Bottari nor Tiraboschi
appears to have been aware that Vasari employed others to
write for him; we see that from the first suggestion of the
work he had originally proposed that Paulus Jovius should
hold the pen for him.

The principle illustrated in this article might be pursued;
but the secret history of two great works so well known is
as sufficient as twenty others of writings less celebrated. The
literary phenomenon which had puzzled the calm inquiring
Hume to cry out “a miracle!” has been solved by the discovery
of a little fact on Literary Unions, which derives importance
from this circumstance.82