act I speak of, is the order given by his Majesty, as I understand, for

the erection of a tomb or monument for our late sovereign Lady Queen Elizabeth: wherein I may note much, but this at this time; that as her Majesty did always right to his Highness's hopes, so his Majesty doth in all things right to her memory; a very just and princely retribution. But from this occasion, by a very easy ascent, I passed furder, being put in mind, by this Representative of her person, of the more true and more firm Representative, which is of her life and government. For as Statuaes and Pictures are dumb histories, so histories are speaking Pictures. Wherein if my affection be not too great, or my reading too small, I am of this opinion, that if Plutarch were alive to write lives by parallels, it would trouble him for virtue and fortune both to find for her a parallel amongst women. And though she was of the passive sex, yet her government was so active, as, in my simple opinion, it made more impression upon the several states of Europe, than it received from thence. But I confess unto your Lordship I could not stay here, but went a little furder into the consideration of the times which have passed since King Henry the 8th; wherein I find the strangest variety that in like number of successions of any hereditary monarchy hath ever been known. The reign of a child; the offer of an usurpation (though it were but as a Diary Ague); the reign of a lady married to a foreign Prince; and the reign of a lady solitary and unmarried. So that as it cometh to pass in massive bodies, that they have certain trepidations and waverings before they fix and settle; so it seemeth that by the providence of God this monarchy, before it was to settle in his Majesty and his generations (in which I hope it is now established for ever), it had these prelusive changes in these barren princes. Neither could I contain myself here (as it is easier to produce than to stay a wish), but calling to remembrance the unworthiness of the history of England (in the main continuance thereof), and the partiality and obliquity of that of Scotland, in the latest and largest author that I have seen: I conceived it would be honor for his Majesty, and a work very memorable, if this island of Great Britain, as it is now joined in Monarchy for the ages to come, so were joined in History for the times past; and that one just and complete History were compiled of both nations. And if any man think it may refresh the memory of former discords, he may satisfy himself with the verse, "olim haec meminisse juvabit:" for the case being now altered, it is matter of comfort and gratulation to remember former troubles.

Thus much, if it may please your Lordship, was in the optative mood. It is true that I did look a little in the potential; wherein the hope which I conceived was grounded upon three observations. The first, of the times, which do flourish in learning, both of art and language; which giveth hope not only that it may be done, but that it may be well done. For when good things are undertaken in ill times, it turneth but to loss; as in this very particular we have a fresh example of Polydore Vergile, who being designed to write the English History by K. Henry the 8th (a strange choice to chuse a stranger), and for his better instruction having obtained into his hands many registers and memorials out of the monasteries, did indeed deface and suppress better things than those he did collect and reduce. Secondly, I do see that which all the world seeth in his Majesty, both a wonderful judgment in learning and a singular affection towards learning, and the works of true honor which are of the mind and not of the hand. For there cannot be the like honor sought in the building of galleries, or the planting of elms along highways, and the like manufactures, things rather of magnificence than of magnanimity, as there is in the uniting of states, pacifying of controversies, nourishing and augmenting of learning and arts, and the particular actions appertaining unto these; of which kind Cicero judged truly, when he said to Caesar, "Quantum operibus tuis detrahet vetustas, tantum addet laudibus." And lastly, I called to mind, that your Lordship at sometimes hath been pleased to express unto me a great desire, that something of this nature should be performed; answerably indeed to your other noble and worthy courses and actions, wherein your Lordship sheweth yourself not only an excellent Chancellor and Counselor, but also an exceeding favorer and fosterer of all good learning and virtue, both in men and matters, persons and actions: joining and adding unto the great services towards his Majesty, which have, in small compass of time, been accumulated upon your Lordship, many other deservings both of the Church and Commonwealth and particulars; so as the opinion of so great and wise a man doth seem unto me a good warrant both of the possibility and worth of this matter. But all this while I assure myself, I cannot be mistaken by your Lordship, as if I sought an office or employment for myself. For no man knoweth better than your Lordship, that (if there were in me any faculty thereunto, as I am most unable), yet neither my fortune nor profession would permit it. But because there be so many good painters both for hand and colors, it needeth but encouragement and instructions to give life and light unto it.

So in all humbleness I conclude my presenting to your good Lordship this wish: that if it perish it is but a loss of that which is not. And thus craving pardon that I have taken so much time from your Lordship, I always remain

Your Lps. very humbly and much bounden

FR. BACON.

GRAY'S INN, this 2d of April, 1605.

TO VILLIERS ON HIS PATENT AS VISCOUNT

From 'Letters and Life,' by James Spedding

_Sir_:

I have sent you now your patent of creation of Lord Blechly of Blechly, and of Viscount Villiers. Blechly is your own, and I like the sound of the name better than Whaddon; but the name will be hid, for you will be called Viscount Villiers. I have put them both in a patent, after the manner of the patents of Earls where baronies are joined; but the chief reason was, because I would avoid double prefaces which had not been fit; nevertheless the ceremony of robing and otherwise must be double.

And now, because I am in the country, I will send you some of my country fruits; which with me are good meditations; which when I am in the city are choked with business.

After that the King shall have watered your new dignities with his bounty of the lands which he intends you, and that some other things concerning your means which are now likewise in intention shall be settled upon you; I do not see but you may think your private fortunes established; and, therefore, it is now time that you should refer your actions chiefly to the good of your sovereign and your country. It is the life of an ox or beast always to eat, and never to exercise; but men are born (and especially Christian men), not to cram in their fortunes, but to exercise their virtues; and yet the other hath been the unworthy, and (thanks be to God) sometimes the unlucky humor of great persons in our times. Neither will your further fortune be the further off: for assure yourself that fortune is of a woman's nature, that will sooner follow you by slighting than by too much wooing. And in this dedication of yourself to the public, I recommend unto you principally that which I think was never done since I was born; and which not done hath bred almost a wilderness and solitude in the King's service; which is, that you countenance, and encourage, and advance able men and virtuous men, and meriting men in all kinds, degrees, and professions. For in the time of the Cecils, the father and the son, able men were by design and of purpose suppressed; and though of late choice goeth better both in church and commonwealth, yet money, and turn-serving, and cunning canvasses, and importunity prevail too much. And in places of moment rather make able and honest men yours, than advance those that are otherwise because they are yours. As for cunning and corrupt men, you must (I know) sometimes use them; but keep them at a distance; and let it appear that you make use of them, rather than that they lead you. Above all, depend wholly (next to God) upon the King; and be ruled (as hitherto you have been) by his instructions; for that is best for yourself. For the King's care and thoughts concerning you are according to the thoughts of a great King; whereas your thoughts concerning yourself are and ought to be according to the thoughts of a modest man. But let me not weary you. The sum is that you think goodness the best part of greatness; and that you remember whence your rising comes, and make return accordingly.

God ever keep you.

GORHAMBURY, August 12th, 1616

CHARGE TO JUSTICE HUTTON

From 'Letters and Life,' by James Spedding

_Mr. Serjeant Hutton_:

The King's most excellent Majesty, being duly informed of your learning, integrity, discretion, experience, means, and reputation in your country, hath thought fit not to leave you these talents to be employed upon yourself only, but to call you to serve himself and his people, in the place of one of his Justices of the court of common pleas.

The court where you are to serve, is the local centre and heart of the laws of this realm. Here the subject hath his assurance by fines and recoveries. Here he hath his fixed and invariable remedies by _praecipes_ and writs of right. Here Justice opens not by a by-gate of privilege, but by the great gate of the King's original writs out of the Chancery. Here issues process of outlawry; if men will not answer law in this centre of law, they shall be cast out of the circle of law. And therefore it is proper for you by all means with your wisdom and fortitude to maintain the laws of the realm. Wherein, nevertheless, I would not have you head-strong, but heart-strong; and to weigh and remember with yourself, that the twelve Judges of the realm are as the twelve lions under Solomon's throne; they must be lions, but yet lions, under the throne; they must shew their stoutness in elevating and bearing up the throne.

To represent unto you the lines and portraitures of a good judge:--The first is, That you should draw your learning out of your books, not out of your brain.

2. That you should mix well the freedom of your own opinion with the reverence of the opinion of your fellows.

3. That you should continue the studying of your books, and not to spend on upon the old stock.

4. That you should fear no man's face, and yet not turn stoutness into bravery.

5. That you should be truly impartial, and not so as men may see affection through fine carriage.

6. That you be a light to jurors to open their eyes, but not a guide to lead them by the noses.

7. That you affect not the opinion of pregnancy and expedition by an impatient and catching hearing of the counselors at the bar.

8. That your speech be with gravity, as one of the sages of the law; and not talkative, nor with impertinent flying out to show learning.

9. That your hands, and the hands of your hands (I mean those about you), be clean, and uncorrupt from gifts, from meddling in titles, and from serving of turns, be they of great ones or small ones.

10. That you contain the jurisdiction of the court within the ancient merestones, without removing the mark.

11. Lastly, That you carry such a hand over your ministers and clerks, as that they may rather be in awe of you, than presume upon you.

These and the like points of the duty of a Judge, I forbear to enlarge; for the longer I have lived with you, the shorter shall my speech be to you; knowing that you come so furnished and prepared with these good virtues, as whatsoever I shall say cannot be new unto you. And therefore I will say no more unto you at this time, but deliver you your patent.

A PRAYER, OR PSALM

From 'Letters and Life,' by James Spedding

Most gracious Lord God, my merciful Father, from my youth up, my Creator, my Redeemer, my Comforter. Thou (O Lord) soundest and searchest the depths and secrets of all hearts; thou knowledgest the upright of heart, thou judgest the hypocrite, thou ponderest men's thoughts and doings as in a balance, thou measurest their intentions as with a line, vanity and crooked ways cannot be hid from thee.

Remember (O Lord) how thy servant hath walked before thee: remember what I have first sought, and what hath been principal in mine intentions. I have loved thy assemblies, I have mourned for the divisions of thy Church, I have delighted in the brightness of thy sanctuary. This vine which thy right hand hath planted in this nation, I have ever prayed unto thee that it might have the first and the latter rain; and that it might stretch her branches to the seas and to the floods. The state and bread of the poor and oppressed have been precious in mine eyes: I have hated all cruelty and hardness of heart: I have (though in a despised weed) procured the good of all men. If any have been mine enemies, I thought not of them; neither hath the sun almost set upon my displeasure; but I have been as a dove, free from superfluity of maliciousness. Thy creatures have been my books, but thy Scriptures much more. I have sought thee in the courts, fields, and gardens, but I have found thee in thy temples.

Thousands have been my sins, and ten thousand my transgressions; but thy sanctifications have remained with me, and my heart, through thy grace, hath been an unquenched coal upon thy altar. O Lord, my strength, I have since my youth met with thee in all my ways, by thy fatherly compassions, by thy comfortable chastisements, and by thy most visible providence. As thy favors have increased upon me, so have thy corrections; so as thou hast been alway near me, O Lord; and ever as my worldly blessings were exalted, so secret darts from thee have pierced me; and when I have ascended before men, I have descended in humiliation before thee.

And now when I thought most of peace and honor, thy hand is heavy upon me, and hath humbled me, according to thy former loving-kindness, keeping me still in thy fatherly school, not as a bastard, but as a child. Just are thy judgments upon me for my sins, which are more in number than the sands of the sea, but have no proportion to thy mercies; for what are the sands of the sea, to the sea, earth, heavens? and all these are nothing to thy mercies.

Besides my innumerable sins, I confess before thee, that I am debtor to thee for the gracious talent of thy gifts and graces which I have neither put into a napkin, nor put it (as I ought) to exchangers, where it might have made best profit; but mis-spent it in things for which I was least fit; so as I may truly say, my soul hath been a stranger in the course of my pilgrimage. Be merciful into me (O Lord) for my Saviour's sake, and receive me unto thy bosom, or guide me in thy ways.

FROM THE 'APOPHTHEGMS'

My Lo. of Essex, at the succor of Rhoan, made twenty-four knights, which at that time was a great matter. Divers (7.) of those gentlemen were of weak and small means; which when Queen Elizabeth heard, she said, "My Lo. mought have done well to have built his alms-house before he made his knights."

21. Many men, especially such as affect gravity, have a manner after other men's speech to shake their heads. Sir Lionel Cranfield would say, "That it was as men shake a bottle, to see if there was any wit in their head or no."

33. Bias was sailing, and there fell out a great tempest, and the mariners, that were wicked and dissolute fellows, called upon the gods; but Bias said to them, "Peace, let them not know ye are here."

42. There was a Bishop that was somewhat a delicate person, and bathed twice a day. A friend of his said to him, "My lord, why do you bathe twice a day?" The Bishop answered, "Because I cannot conveniently bathe thrice."

55. Queen Elizabeth was wont to say of her instructions to great officers, "That they were like to garments, strait at the first putting on, but did by and by wear loose enough."

64. Sir Henry Wotton used to say, "That critics are like brushers of noblemen's clothes."

66. Mr. Savill was asked by my lord of Essex his opinion touching poets; who answered my lord, "He thought them the best writers, next to those that write prose."

85. One was saying, "That his great-grandfather and grandfather and father died at sea." Said another that heard him, "And I were as you, I would never come at sea." "Why, (saith he) where did your great-grandfather and grandfather and father die?" He answered, "Where but in their beds." Saith the other, "And I were as you, I would never come in bed."

97. Alonso of Arragon was wont to say, in commendation of age, That age appeared to be best in four things: "Old wood best to burn; old wine to drink; old friends to trust; and old authors to read."

119. One of the fathers saith, "That there is but this difference between the death of old men and young men: that old men go to death, and death comes to young men."

TRANSLATION OF THE 137TH PSALM

From 'Works,' Vol. xiv.

Whenas we sat all sad and desolate, By Babylon upon the river's side, Eased from the tasks which in our captive state We were enforcèd daily to abide, Our harps we had brought with us to the field, Some solace to our heavy souls to yield.

But soon we found we failed of our account, For when our minds some freedom did obtain, Straightways the memory of Sion Mount Did cause afresh our wounds to bleed again; So that with present gifts, and future fears, Our eyes burst forth into a stream of tears.

As for our harps, since sorrow struck them dumb, We hanged them on the willow-trees were near; Yet did our cruel masters to us come, Asking of us some Hebrew songs to hear: Taunting us rather in our misery, Than much delighting in our melody.

Alas (said we) who can once force or frame His grievèd and oppressèd heart to sing The praises of Jehovah's glorious name, In banishment, under a foreign king? In Sion is his seat and dwelling-place, Thence doth he shew the brightness of his face.

Hierusalem, where God his throne hath set, Shall any hour absent thee from my mind? Then let my right hand quite her skill forget, Then let my voice and words no passage find; Nay, if I do not thee prefer in all That in the compass of my thoughts can fall.

Remember thou, O Lord, the cruel cry Of Edom's children, which did ring and sound, Inciting the Chaldean's cruelty, "Down with it, down with it, even unto the ground." In that good day repay it unto them, When thou shalt visit thy Hierusalem.

And thou, O Babylon, shalt have thy turn By just revenge, and happy shall he be, That thy proud walls and towers shall waste and burn, And as thou didst by us, so do by thee. Yea, happy he that takes thy children's bones, And dasheth them against the pavement stones.

THE WORLD'S A BUBBLE

From 'Works,' Vol. xiv.

The world's a bubble, and the life of man less than a span; In his conception wretched, from the womb so to the tomb: Curst from the cradle, and brought up to years with cares and fears. Who then to frail mortality shall trust, But limns the water, or but writes in dust.

Yet since with sorrow here we live opprest, what life is best? Courts are but only superficial schools to dandle fools. The rural parts are turned into a den of savage men. And where's the city from all vice so free, But may be termed the worst of all the three?

Domestic cares afflict the husband's bed, or pains his head. Those that live single take it for a curse, or do things worse. Some would have children; those that have them moan, or wish them gone. What is it then to have or have no wife, But single thraldom, or a double strife?

Our own affections still at home to please is a disease: To cross the seas to any foreign soil perils and toil. Wars with their noise affright us: when they cease, we are worse in peace. What then remains, but that we still should cry Not to be born, or being born to die.

WALTER BAGEHOT

(1826-1877)

BY FORREST MORGAN

Walter Bagehot was born February 3d, 1826, at Langport, Somersetshire, England; and died there March 24th, 1877. He sprang on both sides from, and was reared in, a nest of wealthy bankers and ardent Liberals, steeped in political history and with London country houses where leaders of thought and politics resorted; and his mother's brother-in-law was Dr. Prichard the ethnologist. This heredity, progressive by disposition and conservative by trade, and this entourage, produced naturally enough a mind at once rapid of insight and cautious of judgment, devoted almost equally to business action and intellectual speculation, and on its speculative side turned toward the fields of political history and sociology.

But there were equally important elements not traceable. His freshness of mental vision, the strikingly novel points of view from which he looked at every subject, was marvelous even in a century so fertile of varied independences: he complained that "the most galling of yokes is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor," the obligation of thinking as he thinks. He had a keen, almost reckless wit and delicious buoyant humor, whose utterances never pall by repetition; few authors so abound in tenaciously quotable phrases and passages of humorous intellectuality. What is rarely found in connection with much humor, he had a sensitive dreaminess of nature, strongly poetic in feeling, whence resulted a large appreciation of the subtler classes of poetry; of which he was an acute and sympathizing critic. As part of this temperament, he had a strong bent toward mysticism,--in one essay he says flatly that "mysticism is true,"--which gave him a rare insight into the religious nature and some obscure problems of religious history; though he was too cool, scientific, and humorous to be a great theologian.

Above all, he had that instinct of selective art, in felicity of words and salience of ideas, which elevates writing into literature; which long after a thought has merged its being and use in those of wider scope, keeps it in separate remembrance and retains for its creator his due of credit through the artistic charm of the shape he gave it.

The result of a mixture of traits popularly thought incompatible, and usually so in reality,--a great relish for the driest business facts and a creative literary gift,--was absolutely unique. Bagehot explains the general sterility of literature as a guide to life by the fact that "so few people who can write know anything;" and began a reform in his own person, by applying all his highest faculties--the best not only of his thought but of his imagination and his literary skill--to the theme of his daily work, banking and business affairs and political economy. There have been many men of letters who were excellent business men and hard bargainers, sometimes indeed merchants or bankers, but they have held their literature as far as possible off the plane of their bread-winning; they have not used it to explain and decorate the latter and made that the motive of art. Bagehot loved business not alone as the born trader loves it, for its profit and its gratification of innate likings,--"business is really pleasanter than pleasure, though it does not look so," he says in substance,--but as an artist loves a picturesque situation or a journalist a murder; it pleased his literary sense as material for analysis and composition. He had in a high degree that union of the practical and the musing faculties which in its (as yet) highest degree made Shakespeare; but even Shakespeare did not write dramas on how to make theatres pay, or sonnets on real-estate speculation.

Bagehot's career was determined, as usual, partly by character and partly by circumstances. He graduated at London University in 1848, and studied for and was called to the bar; but his father owned an interest in a rich old provincial bank and a good shipping-business, and instead of the law he joined in their conduct. He had just before, however, passed a few months in France, including the time of Louis Napoleon's _coup d'état_ in December, 1851; and from Paris he wrote to the London Inquirer (a Unitarian weekly) a remarkable series of letters on that event and its immediate sequents, defending the usurpation vigorously and outlining his political creed, from whose main lines he swerved but little in after life. Waiving the question whether the defense was valid,--and like all first-rate minds, Bagehot is even more instructive when he is wrong than when he is right, because the wrong is sure to be almost right and the truth on its side neglected,--the letters are full of fresh, acute, and even profound ideas, sharp exposition of those primary objects of government which demagogues and buncombe legislators ignore, racy wit, sarcasm, and description (in one passage he rises for a moment into really blood-stirring rhetoric), and proofs of his capacity thus early for reducing the confused cross-currents of daily life to the operation of great embracing laws. No other writing of a youth of twenty-five on such subjects--or almost none--is worth remembering at all for its matter; while this is perennially wholesome and educative, as well as capital reading.

From this on he devoted most of his spare time to literature: that he found so much spare time, and produced so much of a high grade while winning respect as a business manager, proves the excellent quality of his business brain. He was one of the editors of the National Review, a very able and readable English quarterly, from its foundation in 1854 to its death in 1863, and wrote for it twenty literary, biographical, and theological papers, which are among his best titles to enduring remembrance, and are full of his choicest flavors, his wealth of thought, fun, poetic sensitiveness, and deep religious feeling of the needs of human nature. Previous to this, he had written some good articles for the Prospective Review, and he wrote some afterwards for the Fortnightly Review (including the series afterwards gathered into 'Physics and Politics'), and other periodicals.

But his chief industry and most peculiar work was determined by his marriage in 1858 to the daughter of James Wilson, an ex-merchant who had founded the Economist as a journal of trade, banking, and investment, and made it prosperous and rather influential. Mr. Wilson was engaging in politics, where he rose to high office and would probably have ended in the Cabinet; but being sent to India to regulate its finances, died there in 1860. Bagehot thereupon took control of the paper, and _was_ the paper until his death in 1877; and the position he gave it was as unique as his own. On banking, finance, taxation, and political economy in general his utterances had such weight that Chancellors of the Exchequer consulted him as to the revenues, and the London business world eagerly studied the paper for guidance. But he went far beyond this, and made it an unexampled force in politics and governmental science, personal to himself. For the first time a great political thinker applied his mind week by week to discussing the problems presented by passing politics, and expounding the drift and meaning of current events in his nation and the others which bore closest on it, as France and America. That he gained such a hearing was due not alone to his immense ability, and to a style carefully modeled on the conversation of business men with each other, but to his cool moderation and evident aloofness from party as party. He dissected each like a man of science: party was to him a tool and not a religion. He gibed at the Tories; but the Tories forgave him because he was half a Tory at heart,--he utterly distrusted popular instincts and was afraid of popular ignorance. He was rarely warm for the actual measures of the Liberals; but the Liberals knew that he intensely despised the pig-headed obstructiveness of the typical Tory, and had no kinship with the blind worshipers of the _status quo_. To natives and foreigners alike for many years the paper was single and invaluable: in it one could find set forth acutely and dispassionately the broad facts and the real purport of all great legislative proposals, free from the rant and mendacity, the fury and distortion, the prejudice and counter-prejudice of the party press.

An outgrowth of his treble position as banker, economic writer, and general littérateur, was his charming book 'Lombard Street.' Most writers know nothing about business, he sets forth, most business men cannot write, therefore most writing about business is either unreadable or untrue: he put all his literary gifts at its service, and produced a book as instructive as a trade manual and more delightful than most novels. Its luminous, easy, half-playful "business talk" is irresistibly captivating. It is a description and analysis of the London money market and its component parts,--the Bank of England, the joint-stock banks, the private banks, and the bill-brokers. It will live, however, as literature and as a picture, not as a banker's guide; as the vividest outline of business London, of the "great commerce" and the fabric of credit which is the basis of modern civilization and of which London is the centre, that the world has ever known.

Previous to this, the most widely known of his works--'The English Constitution,' much used as a text-book--had made a new epoch in political analysis, and placed him among the foremost thinkers and writers of his time. Not only did it revolutionize the accepted mode of viewing that governmental structure, but as a treatise on government in general its novel types of classification are now admitted commonplaces. Besides its main themes, the book is a great store of thought and suggestion on government, society, and human nature,--for as in all his works, he pours on his nominal subject a flood of illumination and analogy from the unlikeliest sources; and a piece of eminently pleasurable reading from end to end. Its basic novelty lay in what seems the most natural of inquiries, but which in fact was left for Bagehot's original mind even to think of,--the actual working of the governmental system in practice, as distinguished from legal theory. The result of this novel analysis was startling: old powers and checks went to the rubbish heap, and a wholly new set of machinery and even new springs of force and life were substituted. He argued that the actual use of the English monarchy is not to do the work of government, but through its roots in the past to gain popular loyalty and support for the real government, which the masses would not obey if they realized its genuine nature; that "it raises the army though it does not win the battle." He showed that the function of the House of Peers is not as a co-ordinate power with the Commons (which is the real government), but as a revising body and an index of the strength of popular feeling. Constitutional governments he divides into Cabinet, where the people can change the government at any time, and therefore follow its acts and debates eagerly and instructedly; and Presidential, where they can only change it at fixed terms, and are therefore apathetic and ill-informed and care little for speeches which can effect nothing.

Just before 'Lombard Street' came his scientific masterpiece, 'Physics and Politics'; a work which does for human society what the 'Origin of Species' does for organic life, expounding its method of progress from very low if not the lowest forms to higher ones. Indeed, one of its main lines is only a special application of Darwin's "natural selection" to societies, noting the survival of the strongest (which implies in the long run the best developed in all virtues that make for social cohesion) through conflict; but the book is so much more than that, in spite of its heavy debt to all scientific and institutional research, that it remains a first-rate feat of original constructive thought. It is the more striking from its almost ludicrous brevity compared with the novelty, variety, and pregnancy of its ideas. It is scarcely more than a pamphlet; one can read it through in an evening: yet there is hardly any book which is a master-key to so many historical locks, so useful a standard for referring scattered sociological facts to, so clarifying to the mind in the study of early history. The work is strewn with fertile and suggestive observations from many branches of knowledge. Its leading idea of the needs and difficulties of early societies is given in one of the citations.

The unfinished 'Economic Studies' are partially a re-survey of the same ground on a more limited scale, and contain in addition a mass of the nicest and shrewdest observations on modern trade and society, full of truth and suggestiveness. All the other books printed under his name are collections either from the Economist or from outside publications.

As a thinker, Bagehot's leading positions may be roughly summarized thus: in history, that reasoning from the present to the past is generally wrong and frequently nonsense; in politics, that abstract systems are foolish, that a government which does not benefit its subjects has no rights against one that will, that the masses had much better let the upper ranks do the governing than meddle with it themselves, that all classes are too eager to act without thinking and ought not to attempt so much; in society, that democracy is an evil because it leaves no specially trained upper class to furnish models for refinement. But there is vastly more besides this, and his value lies much more in the mental clarification afforded by his details than in the new principles of action afforded by his generalizations. He leaves men saner, soberer, juster, with a clearer sense of perspective, of real issues, that more than makes up for a slight diminution of zeal.

As pure literature, the most individual trait in his writings sprang from his scorn of mere word-mongering divorced from actual life. "A man ought to have the right of being a Philistine if he chooses," he tells us: "there is a sickly incompleteness in men too fine for the world and too nice to work their way through it." A great man of letters, no one has ever mocked his craft so persistently. A great thinker, he never tired of humorously magnifying the active and belittling the intellectual temperament. Of course it was only half-serious: he admits the force and utility of colossal visionaries like Shelley, constructive scholars like Gibbon, ascetic artists like Milton, even light dreamers like Hartley Coleridge; indeed, intellectually he appreciates all intellectual force, and scorns feeble thought which has the effrontery to show itself, and those who are "cross with the agony of a new idea." But his heart goes out to the unscholarly Cavalier with his dash and his loyalty, to the county member who "hardly reads two books per existence," and even to the rustic who sticks to his old ideas and whom "it takes seven weeks to comprehend an atom of a new one." A petty surface consistency must not be exacted from the miscellaneous utterances of a humorist: all sorts of complementary half-truths are part of his service. His own quite just conception of humor, as meaning merely full vision and balanced judgment, is his best defense: "when a man has attained the deep conception that there is such a thing as nonsense," he says, "you may be sure of him for ever after." At bottom he is thoroughly consistent: holding that the masses should work in contented deference to their intellectual guides, but those guides should qualify themselves by practical experience of life, that poetry is not an amusement for lazy sybarites but the most elevating of spiritual influences, that religions cut the roots of their power by trying to avoid supernaturalism and cultivate intelligibility, and that the animal basis of human life is a screen expressly devised to shut off direct knowledge of God and make character possible.

To make his acquaintance first is to enter upon a store of high and fine enjoyment, and of strong and vivifying thought, which one must be either very rich of attainment or very feeble of grasp to find unprofitable or pleasureless.

THE VIRTUES OF STUPIDITY

From 'Letters on the French Coup d'État'

I fear you will laugh when I tell you what I conceive to be about the most essential mental quality for a free people whose liberty is to be progressive, permanent, and on a large scale: it is much stupidity. Not to begin by wounding any present susceptibilities, let me take the Roman character; for with one great exception,--I need not say to whom I allude,--they are the great political people of history. Now, is not a certain dullness their most visible characteristic? What is the history of their speculative mind? a blank; what their literature? a copy. They have left not a single discovery in any abstract science, not a single perfect or well-formed work of high imagination. The Greeks, the perfection of human and accomplished genius, bequeathed to mankind the ideal forms of self-idolizing art, the Romans imitated and admired; the Greeks explained the laws of nature, the Romans wondered and despised; the Greeks invented a system of numerals second only to that now in use, the Romans counted to the end of their days with the clumsy apparatus which we still call by their name; the Greeks made a capital and scientific calendar, the Romans began their month when the Pontifex Maximus happened to spy out the new moon. Throughout Latin literature, this is the perpetual puzzle:--Why are we free and they slaves, we praetors and they barbers? why do the stupid people always win and the clever people always lose? I need not say that in real sound stupidity the English are unrivaled: you'll hear more wit and better wit in an Irish street row than would keep Westminster Hall in humor for five weeks.

* * * * *

In fact, what we opprobriously call "stupidity," though not an enlivening quality in common society, is nature's favorite resource for preserving steadiness of conduct and consistency of opinion; it enforces concentration: people who learn slowly, learn only what they must. The best security for people's doing their duty is, that they should not know anything else to do; the best security for fixedness of opinion is, that people should be incapable of comprehending what is to be said on the other side. These valuable truths are no discoveries of mine: they are familiar enough to people whose business it is to know them. Hear what a douce and aged attorney says of your peculiarly promising barrister:--"Sharp? Oh, yes! he's too sharp by half. He is not _safe_, not a minute, isn't that young man." I extend this, and advisedly maintain that nations, just as individuals, may be too clever to be practical and not dull enough to be free....

And what I call a proper stupidity keeps a man from all the defects of this character: it chains the gifted possessor mainly to his old ideas, it takes him seven weeks to comprehend an atom of a new one; it keeps him from being led away by new theories, for there is nothing which bores him so much; it restrains him within his old pursuits, his well-known habits, his tried expedients, his verified conclusions, his traditional beliefs. He is not tempted to levity or impatience, for he does not see the joke and is thick-skinned to present evils. Inconsistency puts him out: "What I says is this here, as I was a-saying yesterday," is his notion of historical eloquence and habitual discretion. He is very slow indeed to be excited,--his passions, his feelings, and his affections are dull and tardy strong things, falling in a certain known direction, fixed on certain known objects, and for the most part acting in a moderate degree and at a sluggish pace. You always know where to find his mind. Now, this is exactly what (in politics at least) you do not know about a Frenchman.

REVIEW WRITING

From 'The First Edinburgh Reviewers'

Review writing exemplifies the casual character of modern literature: everything about it is temporary and fragmentary. Look at a railway stall: you see books of every color,--blue, yellow, crimson, "ring-streaked, speckled, and spotted,"--on every subject, in every style, of every opinion, with every conceivable difference, celestial or sublunary, maleficent, beneficent--but all small. People take their literature in morsels, as they take sandwiches on a journey....

And the change in appearance of books has been accompanied--has been caused--by a similar change in readers. What a transition from the student of former ages! from a grave man with grave cheeks and a considerate eye, who spends his life in study, has no interest in the outward world, hears nothing of its din and cares nothing for its honors, who would gladly learn and gladly teach, whose whole soul is taken up with a few books of 'Aristotle and his Philosophy,'--to the merchant in the railway, with a head full of sums, an idea that tallow is "up," a conviction that teas are "lively," and a mind reverting perpetually from the little volume which he reads to these mundane topics, to the railway, to the shares, to the buying and bargaining universe. We must not wonder that the outside of books is so different, when the inner nature of those for whom they are written is so changed.

In this transition from ancient writing to modern, the review-like essay and the essay-like review fill a large space. Their small bulk, their slight pretension to systematic completeness,--their avowal, it might be said, of necessary incompleteness,--the facility of changing the subject, of selecting points to attack, of exposing only the best corner for defense, are great temptations. Still greater is the advantage of "our limits." A real reviewer always spends his first and best pages on the parts of a subject on which he wishes to write, the easy comfortable parts which he knows. The formidable difficulties which he acknowledges, you foresee by a strange fatality that he will only reach two pages before the end; to his great grief, there is no opportunity for discussing them. As a young gentleman at the India House examination wrote "Time up" on nine unfinished papers in succession, so you may occasionally read a whole review, in every article of which the principal difficulty of each successive question is about to be reached at the conclusion. Nor can any one deny that this is the suitable skill, the judicious custom of the craft.

LORD ELDON

From 'The First Edinburgh Reviewers'

As for Lord Eldon, it is the most difficult thing in the world to believe that there ever was such a man; it only shows how intense historical evidence is, that no one really doubts it. He believed in everything which it is impossible to believe in,--in the danger of Parliamentary Reform, the danger of Catholic Emancipation, the danger of altering the Court of Chancery, the danger of altering the courts of law, the danger of abolishing capital punishment for trivial thefts, the danger of making land-owners pay their debts, the danger of making anything more, the danger of making anything less. It seems as if he maturely thought, "Now, I know the present state of things to be consistent with the existence of John Lord Eldon; but if we begin altering that state, I am sure I do not know that it will be consistent." As Sir Robert Walpole was against all committees of inquiry on the simple ground, "If they once begin that sort of thing, who knows who will be safe?" so that great Chancellor (still remembered in his own scene) looked pleasantly down from the woolsack, and seemed to observe, "Well, it _is_ a queer thing that I should be here, and here I mean to stay."

TASTE

From 'Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning'

There is a most formidable and estimable _insane_ taste. The will has great though indirect power over the taste, just as it has over the belief. There are some horrid beliefs from which human nature revolts, from which at first it shrinks, to which at first no effort can force it. But if we fix the mind upon them, they have a power over us, just because of their natural offensiveness. They are like the sight of human blood. Experienced soldiers tell us that at first, men are sickened by the smell and newness of blood, almost to death and fainting; but that as soon as they harden their hearts and stiffen their minds, as soon as they _will_ bear it, then comes an appetite for slaughter, a tendency to gloat on carnage, to love blood (at least for the moment) with a deep, eager love. It is a principle that if we put down a healthy instinctive aversion, nature avenges herself by creating an unhealthy insane attraction. For this reason, the most earnest truth-seeking men fall into the worst delusions. They will not let their mind alone; they force it toward some ugly thing, which a crotchet of argument, a conceit of intellect recommends: and nature punishes their disregard of her warning by subjection to the ugly one, by belief in it. Just so, the most industrious critics get the most admiration. They think it unjust to rest in their instinctive natural horror; they overcome it, and angry nature gives them over to ugly poems and marries them to detestable stanzas.

CAUSES OF THE STERILITY OF LITERATURE

From 'Shakespeare, the Man,' etc.

The reason why so few good books are written is, that so few people that can write know anything. In general, an author has always lived in a room, has read books, has cultivated science, is acquainted with the style and sentiments of the best authors, but he is out of the way of employing his own eyes and ears. He has nothing to hear and nothing to see. His life is a vacuum. The mental habits of Robert Southey, which about a year ago were so extensively praised in the public journals, are the type of literary existence, just as the praise bestowed on them shows the admiration excited by them among literary people. He wrote poetry (as if anybody could) before breakfast; he read during breakfast. He wrote history until dinner; he corrected proof-sheets between dinner and tea; he wrote an essay for the Quarterly afterwards; and after supper, by way of relaxation, composed 'The Doctor'--a lengthy and elaborate jest. Now, what can any one think of such a life?--except how clearly it shows that the habits best fitted for communicating information, formed with the best care, and daily regulated by the best motives, are exactly the habits which are likely to afford a man the least information to communicate. Southey had no events, no experiences. His wife kept house and allowed him pocket-money, just as if he had been a German professor devoted to accents, tobacco, and the dates of Horace's amours....

The critic in the 'Vicar of Wakefield' lays down that you should _always_ say that the picture would have been better if the painter had taken more pains; but in the case of the practiced literary man, you should often enough say that the writings would have been much better if the writer had taken less pains. He says he has devoted his life to the subject; the reply is, "Then you have taken the best way to prevent your making anything of it. Instead of reading studiously what Burgersdicius and Aenesidemus said men were, you should have gone out yourself and seen (if you can see) what they are." But there is a whole class of minds which prefer the literary delineation of objects to the actual eyesight of them. Such a man would naturally think literature more instructive than life. Hazlitt said of Mackintosh, "He might like to read an _account_ of India; but India itself, with its burning, shining face, would be a mere blank, an endless waste to him. Persons of this class have no more to say to a matter of fact staring them in the face, without a label in its mouth, than they would to a hippopotamus."...

After all, the original way of writing books may turn out to be the best. The first author, it is plain, could not have taken anything from books, since there were no books for him to copy from; he looked at things for himself. Anyhow the modern system fails, for where are the amusing books from voracious students and habitual writers?

Moreover, in general, it will perhaps be found that persons devoted to mere literature commonly become devoted to mere idleness. They wish to produce a great work, but they find they cannot. Having relinquished everything to devote themselves to this, they conclude on trial that this is impossible; they wish to write, but nothing occurs to them: therefore they write nothing and they do nothing. As has been said, they have nothing to do; their life has no events, unless they are very poor; with any decent means of subsistence, they have nothing to rouse them from an indolent and musing dream. A merchant must meet his bills, or he is civilly dead and uncivilly remembered; but a student may know nothing of time, and be too lazy to wind lip his watch.

THE SEARCH FOR HAPPINESS

From 'William Cowper'

If there be any truly painful fact about the world now tolerably well established by ample experience and ample records, it is that an intellectual and indolent happiness is wholly denied to the children of men. That most valuable author, Lucretius, who has supplied us and others with an almost inexhaustible supply of metaphors on this topic, ever dwells on the life of his gods with a sad and melancholy feeling that no such life was possible on a crude and cumbersome earth. In general, the two opposing agencies are marriage and lack of money; either of these breaks the lot of literary and refined inaction at once and forever. The first of these, as we have seen, Cowper had escaped; his reserved and negligent reveries were still free, at least from the invasion of affection. To this invasion, indeed, there is commonly requisite the acquiescence or connivance of mortality; but all men are born--not free and equal, as the Americans maintain, but, in the Old World at least--basely subjected to the yoke of coin. It is in vain that in this hemisphere we endeavor after impecuniary fancies. In bold and eager youth we go out on our travels: we visit Baalbec and Paphos and Tadmor and Cythera,--ancient shrines and ancient empires, seats of eager love or gentle inspiration; we wander far and long; we have nothing to do with our fellow-men,--what are we, indeed, to diggers and counters? we wander far, we dream to wander forever--but we dream in vain. A surer force than the subtlest fascination of fancy is in operation; the purse-strings tie us to our kind. Our travel coin runs low, and we must return, away from Tadmor and Baalbec, back to our steady, tedious industry and dull work, to "la vieille Europe" (as Napoleon said), "qui m'ennuie." It is the same in thought: in vain we seclude ourselves in elegant chambers, in fascinating fancies, in refined reflections.

ON EARLY READING

From 'Edward Gibbon'

In school work Gibbon had uncommon difficulties and unusual deficiencies; but these were much more than counterbalanced by a habit which often accompanies a sickly childhood, and is the commencement of a studious life,--the habit of desultory reading. The instructiveness of this is sometimes not comprehended. S. T. Coleridge used to say that he felt a great superiority over those who had not read--and fondly read--fairy tales in their childhood: he thought they wanted a sense which he possessed, the perception, or apperception--we do not know which he used to say it was--of the unity and wholeness of the universe. As to fairy tales, this is a hard saying; but as to desultory reading, it is certainly true. Some people have known a time in life when there was no book they could not read. The fact of its being a book went immensely in its favor. In early life there is an opinion that the obvious thing to do with a horse is to ride it; with a cake, to eat it; with sixpence, to spend it. A few boys carry this further, and think the natural thing to do with a book is to read it. There is an argument from design in the subject: if the book was not meant for that purpose, for what purpose was it meant? Of course, of any understanding of the works so perused there is no question or idea. There is a legend of Bentham, in his earliest childhood, climbing to the height of a huge stool, and sitting there evening after evening, with two candles, engaged in the perusal of Rapin's history; it might as well have been any other book. The doctrine of utility had not then dawned on its immortal teacher; _cui bono_ was an idea unknown to him. He would have been ready to read about Egypt, about Spain, about coals in Borneo, the teak-wood in India, the current in the River Mississippi, on natural history or human history, on theology or morals, on the state of the Dark Ages or the state of the Light Ages, on Augustulus or Lord Chatham, on the first century or the seventeenth, on the moon, the millennium, or the whole duty of man. Just then, reading is an end in itself. At that time of life you no more think of a future consequence--of the remote, the very remote possibility of deriving knowledge from the perusal of a book, than you expect so great a result from spinning a peg-top. You spin the top, and you read the book; and these scenes of life are exhausted. In such studies, of all prose, perhaps the best is history: one page is so like another, battle No. 1 is so much on a par with battle No. 2. Truth may be, as they say, stranger than fiction, abstractedly; but in actual books, novels are certainly odder and more astounding than correct history.

It will be said, What is the use of this? why not leave the reading of great books till a great age? why plague and perplex childhood with complex facts remote from its experience and inapprehensible by its imagination? The reply is, that though in all great and combined facts there is much which childhood cannot thoroughly imagine, there is also in very many a great deal which can only be truly apprehended for the first time at that age. Youth has a principle of consolidation; we begin with the whole. Small sciences are the labors of our manhood; but the round universe is the plaything of the boy. His fresh mind shoots out vaguely and crudely into the infinite and eternal. Nothing is hid from the depth of it; there are no boundaries to its vague and wandering vision. Early science, it has been said, begins in utter nonsense; it would be truer to say that it starts with boyish fancies. How absurd seem the notions of the first Greeks! Who could believe now that air or water was the principle, the pervading substance, the eternal material of all things? Such affairs will never explain a thick rock. And what a white original for a green and sky-blue world! Yet people disputed in these ages not whether it was either of those substances, but which of them it was. And doubtless there was a great deal, at least in quantity, to be said on both sides. Boys are improved; but some in our own day have asked, "Mamma, I say, what did God make the world of?" and several, who did not venture on speech, have had an idea of some one gray primitive thing, felt a difficulty as to how the red came, and wondered that marble could _ever_ have been the same as moonshine. This is in truth the picture of life. We begin with the infinite and eternal, which we shall never apprehend; and these form a framework, a schedule, a set of co-ordinates to which we refer all which we learn later. At first, like the old Greek, "We look up to the whole sky, and are lost in the one and the all;" in the end we classify and enumerate, learn each star, calculate distances, draw cramped diagrams on the unbounded sky, write a paper on a Cygni and a treatise on e Draconis, map special facts upon the indefinite void, and engrave precise details on the infinite and everlasting. So in history: somehow the whole comes in boyhood, the details later and in manhood. The wonderful series, going far back to the times of old patriarchs with their flocks and herds, the keen-eyed Greek, the stately Roman, the watching Jew, the uncouth Goth, the horrid Hun, the settled picture of the unchanging East, the restless shifting of the rapid West, the rise of the cold and classical civilization, its fall, the rough impetuous Middle Ages, the vague warm picture of ourselves and home,--when did we learn these? Not yesterday nor to-day: but long ago, in the first dawn of reason, in the original flow of fancy. What we learn afterwards are but the accurate littlenesses of the great topic, the dates and tedious facts. Those who begin late learn only these; but the happy first feel the mystic associations and the progress of the whole.

However exalted may seem the praises which we have given to loose and unplanned reading, we are not saying that it is the sole ingredient of a good education. Besides this sort of education, which some boys will voluntarily and naturally give themselves, there needs, of course, another and more rigorous kind, which must be impressed upon them from without. The terrible difficulty of early life--the _use_ of pastors and masters really is, that they compel boys to a distinct mastery of that which they do not wish to learn. There is nothing to be said for a preceptor who is not dry. Mr. Carlyle describes, with bitter satire, the fate of one of his heroes who was obliged to acquire whole systems of information in which he, the hero, saw no use, and which he kept, as far as might be, in a vacant corner of his mind. And this is the very point: dry language, tedious mathematics, a thumbed grammar, a detested slate form gradually an interior separate intellect, exact in its information, rigid in its requirements, disciplined in its exercises. The two grow together; the early natural fancy touching the far extremities of the universe, lightly playing with the scheme of all things; the precise, compacted memory slowly accumulating special facts, exact habits, clear and painful conceptions. At last, as it were in a moment, the cloud breaks up, the division sweeps away; we find that in fact these exercises which puzzled us, these languages which we hated, these details which we despised, are the instruments of true thought; are the very keys and openings, the exclusive access to the knowledge which we loved.

_THE CAVALIERS_. Photogravure from a Painting by F. Vinea.

THE CAVALIERS

From 'Thomas Babington Macaulay'

What historian has ever estimated the Cavalier character? There is Clarendon, the grave, rhetorical, decorous lawyer, piling words, congealing arguments; very stately, a little grim. There is Hume, the Scotch metaphysician, who has made out the best case for such people as never were, for a Charles who never died, for a Strafford who would never have been attainted; a saving, calculating North-country man, fat, impassive, who lived on eightpence a day. What have these people to do with an enjoying English gentleman? It is easy for a doctrinaire to bear a post-mortem examination,--it is much the same whether he be alive or dead; but not so with those who live during their life, whose essence is existence, whose being is in animation. There seem to be some characters who are not made for history, as there are some who are not made for old age. A Cavalier is always young. The buoyant life arises before us, rich in hope, strong in vigor, irregular in action; men young and ardent, "framed in the prodigality of nature"; open to every enjoyment, alive to every passion, eager, impulsive; brave without discipline, noble without principle; prizing luxury, despising danger; capable of high sentiment, but in each of whom the

"Addiction was to courses vain, His companies unlettered, rude, and shallow, His hours filled up with riots, banquets, sports, And never noted in him any study, Any retirement, any sequestration From open haunts and popularity."

We see these men setting forth or assembling to defend their king or church, and we see it without surprise; a rich daring loves danger, a deep excitability likes excitement. If we look around us, we may see what is analogous: some say that the battle of the Alma was won by the "uneducated gentry"; the "uneducated gentry" would be Cavaliers now. The political sentiment is part of the character; the essence of Toryism is enjoyment. Talk of the ways of spreading a wholesome conservatism throughout this country! Give painful lectures, distribute weary tracts (and perhaps this is as well,--you may be able to give an argumentative answer to a few objections, you may diffuse a distinct notion of the dignified dullness of politics); but as far as communicating and establishing your creed are concerned, try a little pleasure. The way to keep up old customs is to enjoy old customs; the way to be satisfied with the present state of things is to enjoy that state of things. Over the "Cavalier" mind this world passes with a thrill of delight; there is an exaltation in a daily event, zest in the "regular thing," joy at an old feast.

MORALITY AND FEAR

From 'Bishop Butler'

The moral principle (whatever may be said to the contrary by complacent thinkers) is really and to most men a principle of fear. The delights of a good conscience may be reserved for better things, but few men who know themselves will say that they have often felt them by vivid and actual experience; a sensation of shame, of reproach, of remorse, of sin (to use the word we instinctively shrink from because it expresses the meaning), is what the moral principle really and practically thrusts on most men. Conscience is the condemnation of ourselves; we expect a penalty. As the Greek proverb teaches, "where there is shame there is fear"; where there is the deep and intimate anxiety of guilt,--the feeling which has driven murderers and other than murderers forth to wastes and rocks and stones and tempests,--we see, as it were, in a single complex and indivisible sensation, the pain and sense of guilt and the painful anticipation of its punishment. How to be free from this, is the question; how to get loose from this; how to be rid of the secret tie which binds the strong man and cramps his pride, and makes him angry at the beauty of the universe,--which will not let him go forth like a great animal, like the king of the forest, in the glory of his might, but restrains him with an inner fear and a secret foreboding that if he do but exalt himself he shall be abased, if he do but set forth his own dignity he will offend ONE who will deprive him of it. This, as has often been pointed out, is the source of the bloody rites of heathendom. You are going to battle, you are going out in the bright sun with dancing plumes and glittering spear; your shield shines, and your feathers wave, and your limbs are glad with the consciousness of strength, and your mind is warm with glory and renown; with coming glory and unobtained renown: for who are you to hope for these; who are _you_ to go forth proudly against the pride of the sun, with your secret sin and your haunting shame and your real fear? First lie down and abase yourself; strike your back with hard stripes; cut deep with a sharp knife, as if you would eradicate the consciousness; cry aloud; put ashes on your head; bruise yourself with stones,--then perhaps God may pardon you. Or, better still (so runs the incoherent feeling), give him something--your ox, your ass, whole hecatombs if you are rich enough; anything, it is but a chance,--you do not know what will please him; at any rate, what you love best yourself,--that is, most likely, your first-born son. Then, after such gifts and such humiliation, he may be appeased, he may let you off; he may without anger let you go forth, Achilles-like, in the glory of your shield; he may _not_ send you home as he would else, the victim of rout and treachery, with broken arms and foul limbs, in weariness and humiliation. Of course, it is not this kind of fanaticism that we impute to a prelate of the English Church; human sacrifices are not respectable, and Achilles was not rector of Stanhope. But though the costume and circumstances of life change, the human heart does not; its feelings remain. The same anxiety, the same consciousness of personal sin which led in barbarous times to what has been described, show themselves in civilized life as well. In this quieter period, their great manifestation is scrupulosity: a care about the ritual of life; an attention to meats and drinks, and "cups and washings." Being so unworthy as we are, feeling what we feel, abased as we are abased, who shall say that those are beneath us? In ardent, imaginative youth they may seem so; but let a few years come, let them dull the will or contract the heart or stain the mind; then the consequent feeling will be, as all experience shows, not that a ritual is too mean, too low, too degrading for human nature, but that it is a mercy we have to do no more,--that we have only to wash in Jordan, that we have not even to go out into the unknown distance to seek for Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus. We have no right to judge; we cannot decide; we must do what is laid down for us,--we fail daily even in this; we must never cease for a moment in our scrupulous anxiety to omit by no tittle and to exceed by no iota.

THE TYRANNY OF CONVENTION

From 'Sir Robert Peel'

It might be said that this [necessity for newspapers and statesmen of following the crowd] is only one of the results of that tyranny of commonplace which seems to accompany civilization. You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius; but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor. What law is so cruel as the law of doing what he does? What yoke is so galling as the necessity of being like him? What espionage of despotism comes to your door so effectually as the eye of the man who lives at your door? Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to itself; it requires us to think other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits. Of course, if we do not, no formal ban issues; no corporeal pain, no coarse penalty of a barbarous society is inflicted on the offender; but we are called "eccentric"; there is a gentle murmur of "most unfortunate ideas," "singular young man," "well-intentioned, I dare say; but unsafe, sir, quite unsafe."

Whatever truth there may be in these splenetic observations might be expected to show itself more particularly in the world of politics: people dread to be thought unsafe in proportion as they get their living by being thought to be safe. Those who desire a public career must look to the views of the living public; an immediate exterior influence is essential to the exertion of their faculties. The confidence of others is your _fulcrum:_ you cannot--many people wish you could--go into Parliament to represent yourself; you must conform to the opinions of the electors, and they, depend on it, will not be original. In a word, as has been most wisely observed, "under free institutions it is necessary occasionally to defer to the opinions of other people; and as other people are obviously in the wrong, this is a great hindrance to the improvement of our political system and the progress of our species."

HOW TO BE AN INFLUENTIAL POLITICIAN

From 'Bolingbroke'

It is very natural that brilliant and vehement men should depreciate Harley; for he had nothing which they possess, but had everything which they commonly do not possess. He was by nature a moderate man. In that age they called such a man a "trimmer," but they called him ill: such a man does not consciously shift or purposely trim his course,--he firmly believes that he is substantially consistent. "I do not wish in this House," he would say in our age, "to be a party to any extreme course. Mr. Gladstone brings forward a great many things which I cannot understand; I assure you he does. There is more in that bill of his about tobacco than he thinks; I am confident there is. Money is a serious thing, a _very_ serious thing. And I am sorry to say Mr. Disraeli commits the party very much: he avows sentiments which are injudicious; I cannot go along with him, nor can Sir John. He was not taught the catechism; I know he was not. There is a want in him of sound and sober religion,--and Sir John agrees with me,--which would keep him from distressing the clergy, who are very important. Great orators are very well; but as I said, how is the revenue? And the point is, not be led away, and to be moderate, and not to go to an extreme. As soon as it seems _very_ clear, then I begin to doubt. I have been many years in Parliament, and that is my experience." We may laugh at such speeches, but there have been plenty of them in every English Parliament. A great English divine has been described as always leaving out the principle upon which his arguments rested; even if it was stated to him, he regarded it as far-fetched and extravagant. Any politician who has this temper of mind will always have many followers; and he may be nearly sure that all great measures will be passed more nearly as he wishes them to be passed than as great orators wish. Nine-tenths of mankind are more afraid of violence than of anything else; and inconsistent moderation is always popular, because of all qualities it is most opposite to violence,--most likely to preserve the present safe existence.

CONDITIONS OF CABINET GOVERNMENT

From 'The English Constitution'

The conditions of fitness are two: first, you must get a good legislature; and next, you must keep it good. And these are by no means so nearly connected as might be thought at first sight. To keep a legislature efficient, it must have a sufficient supply of substantial business: if you employ the best set of men to do nearly nothing, they will quarrel with each other about that nothing; where great questions end, little parties begin. And a very happy community, with few new laws to make, few old bad laws to repeal, and but simple foreign relations to adjust, has great difficulty in employing a legislature,--there is nothing for it to enact and nothing for it to settle. Accordingly, there is great danger that the legislature, being debarred from all other kinds of business, may take to quarreling about its elective business; that controversies as to ministries may occupy all its time, and yet that time be perniciously employed; that a constant succession of feeble administrations, unable to govern and unfit to govern, may be substituted for the proper result of cabinet government, a sufficient body of men long enough in power to evince their sufficiency. The exact amount of non-elective business necessary for a parliament which is to elect the executive cannot, of course, be formally stated,--there are no numbers and no statistics in the theory of constitutions; all we can say is, that a parliament with little business, which is to be as efficient as a parliament with much business, must be in all other respects much better. An indifferent parliament may be much improved by the steadying effect of grave affairs; but a parliament which has no such affairs must be intrinsically excellent, or it will fail utterly.

But the difficulty of keeping a good legislature is evidently secondary to the difficulty of first getting it. There are two kinds of nations which can elect a good parliament. The first is a nation in which the mass of the people are intelligent, and in which they are comfortable. Where there is no honest poverty, where education is diffused and political intelligence is common, it is easy for the mass of the people to elect a fair legislature. The ideal is roughly realized in the North American colonies of England, and in the whole free States of the Union: in these countries there is no such thing as honest poverty,--physical comfort, such as the poor cannot imagine here, is there easily attainable by healthy industry; education is diffused much, and is fast spreading,--ignorant emigrants from the Old World often prize the intellectual advantages of which they are themselves destitute, and are annoyed at their inferiority in a place where rudimentary culture is so common. The greatest difficulty of such new communities is commonly geographical: the population is mostly scattered; and where population is sparse, discussion is difficult. But in a country very large as we reckon in Europe, a people really intelligent, really educated, really comfortable, would soon form a good opinion. No one can doubt that the New England States, if they were a separate community, would have an education, a political capacity, and an intelligence such as the numerical majority of no people equally numerous has ever possessed: in a State of this sort, where all the community is fit to choose a sufficient legislature, it is possible, it is almost easy, to create that legislature. If the New England States possessed a cabinet government as a separate nation, they would be as renowned in the world for political sagacity as they now are for diffused happiness.

WHY EARLY SOCIETIES COULD NOT BE FREE

From 'Physics and Politics'

I believe the general description in which Sir John Lubbock sums up his estimate of the savage mind suits the patriarchal mind: "Savages," he says, "have the character of children with the passions and strength of men."...

And this is precisely what we should expect. "An inherited drill," science says, "makes modern nations what they are; their born structure bears the trace of the laws of their fathers:" but the ancient nations came into no such inheritance,--they were the descendants of people who did what was right in their own eyes; they were born to no tutored habits, no preservative bonds, and therefore they were at the mercy of every impulse and blown by every passion....

Again, I at least cannot call up to myself the loose conceptions (as they must have been) of morals which then existed. If we set aside all the element derived from law and polity which runs through our current moral notions, I hardly know what we shall have left. The residuum was somehow and in some vague way intelligible to the ante-political man; but it must have been uncertain, wavering, and unfit to be depended upon. In the best cases it existed much as the vague feeling of beauty now exists in minds sensitive but untaught,--a still small voice of uncertain meaning, an unknown something modifying everything else and higher than anything else, yet in form so indistinct that when you looked for it, it was gone; or if this be thought the delicate fiction of a later fancy, then morality was at least to be found in the wild spasms of "wild justice," half punishment, half outrage: but anyhow, being unfixed by steady law, it was intermittent, vague, and hard for us to imagine....

To sum up:--_Law_--rigid, definite, concise law--is the primary want of early mankind; that which they need above anything else, that which is requisite before they can gain anything else. But it is their greatest difficulty as well as their first requisite; the thing most out of their reach as well as that most beneficial to them if they reach it. In later ages, many races have gained much of this discipline quickly though painfully,--a loose set of scattered clans has been often and often forced to substantial settlement by a rigid conqueror; the Romans did half the work for above half Europe. But where could the first ages find Romans or a conqueror? men conquer by the power of government, and it was exactly government which then was not. The first ascent of civilization was at a steep gradient, though when now we look down upon it, it seems almost nothing.

How the step from no polity to polity was made, distinct history does not record.... But when once polities were begun, there is no difficulty in explaining why they lasted. Whatever may be said against the principle of "natural selection" in other departments, there is no doubt of its predominance in early human history: the strongest killed out the weakest as they could. And I need not pause to prove that any form of polity is more efficient than none; that an aggregate of families owning even a slippery allegiance to a single head would be sure to have the better of a set of families acknowledging no obedience to any one, but scattering loose about the world and fighting where they stood. Homer's Cyclops would be powerless against the feeblest band; so far from its being singular that we find no other record of that state of man, so unstable and sure to perish was it that we should rather wonder at even a single vestige lasting down to the age when for picturesqueness it became valuable in poetry.

But though the origin of polity is dubious, we are upon the _terra firma_ of actual records when we speak of the preservation of polities. Perhaps every young Englishman who comes nowadays to Aristotle or Plato is struck with their conservatism: fresh from the liberal doctrines of the present age, he wonders at finding in those recognized teachers so much contrary teaching. They both, unlike as they are, hold with Xenophon so unlike both, that man is "the hardest of all animals to govern." Of Plato it might indeed be plausibly said that the adherents of an intuitive philosophy, being "the Tories of speculation," have commonly been prone to conservatism in government; but Aristotle, the founder of the experience philosophy, ought according to that doctrine to have been a Liberal if any one ever was a Liberal. In fact, both of these men lived when men "had not had time to forget" the difficulties of government: we have forgotten them altogether. We reckon as the basis of our culture upon an amount of order, of tacit obedience, of prescriptive governability, which these philosophers hoped to get as a principal result of their culture; we take without thought as a _datum_ what they hunted as a _quaesitum_.

In early times the quantity of government is much more important than its quality. What you want is a comprehensive rule binding men together, making them do much the same things, telling them what to expect of each other,--fashioning them alike and keeping them so: what this rule is, does not matter so much. A good rule is better than a bad one, but any rule is better than none; while, for reasons which a jurist will appreciate, none can be very good. But to gain that rule, what may be called the "impressive" elements of a polity are incomparably more important than its useful elements. How to get the obedience of men, is the hard problem; what you do with that obedience is less critical.

To gain that obedience, the primary condition is the identity--not the union, but the sameness--of what we now call "church" and "state."... No division of power is then endurable without danger, probably without destruction: the priest must not teach one thing and the king another; king must be priest and prophet king,--the two must say the same because they are the same. The idea of difference between spiritual penalties and legal penalties must never be awakened,--indeed, early Greek thought or early Roman thought would never have comprehended it; there was a kind of rough public opinion, and there were rough--very rough--hands which acted on it. We now talk of "political penalties" and "ecclesiastical prohibition" and "the social censure"; but they were all one then. Nothing is very like those old communities now, but perhaps a trades-union is as near as most things: to work cheap is thought to be a "wicked" thing, and so some Broadhead puts it down.

The object of such organizations is to create what may be called a _cake_ of custom. All the actions of life are to be submitted to a single rule for a single object,--that gradually created "hereditary drill" which science teaches to be essential, and which the early instinct of men saw to be essential too. That this _régime_ forbids free thought is not an evil,--or rather, though an evil, it is the necessary basis for the greatest good; it is necessary for making the mold of civilization and hardening the soft fibre of early man.

BENEFITS OF FREE DISCUSSION IN MODERN TIMES

From 'Physics and Politics'

In this manner polities of discussion broke up the old bonds of custom which were now strangling mankind, though they had once aided and helped it; but this is only one of the many gifts which those polities have conferred, are conferring, and will confer on mankind. I am not going to write a eulogium on liberty, but I wish to set down three points which have not been sufficiently noticed.

Civilized ages inherit the human nature which was victorious in barbarous ages, and that nature is in many respects not at all suited to civilized circumstances. A main and principal excellence in the early times of the human races is the impulse to action. The problems before men are then plain and simple: the man who works hardest, the man who kills the most deer, the man who catches the most fish--even later on, the man who tends the largest herds or the man who tills the largest field--is the man who succeeds; the nation which is quickest to kill its enemies or which kills most of its enemies is the nation which succeeds. All the inducements of early society tend to foster immediate action, all its penalties fall on the man who pauses; the traditional wisdom of those times was never weary of inculcating that "delays are dangerous," and that the sluggish man--the man "who roasteth not that which he took in hunting"--will not prosper on the earth, and indeed will very soon perish out of it: and in consequence an inability to stay quiet, an irritable desire to act directly, is one of the most conspicuous failings of mankind.

Pascal said that most of the evils of life arose from "man's being unable to sit still in a room"; and though I do not go that length, it is certain that we should have been a far wiser race than we are if we had been readier to sit quiet,--we should have known much better the way in which it was best to act when we came to act. The rise of physical science, the first great body of practical truth provable to all men, exemplifies this in the plainest way: if it had not been for quiet people who sat still and studied the sections of the cone, if other quiet people had not sat still and studied the theory of infinitesimals, or other quiet people had not sat still and worked out the doctrine of chances (the most "dreamy moonshine," as the purely practical mind would consider, of all human pursuits), if "idle star-gazers" had not watched long and carefully the motions of the heavenly bodies,--our modern astronomy would have been impossible, and without our astronomy "our ships, our colonies, our seamen," all which makes modern life modern life, could not have existed. Ages of sedentary, quiet, thinking people were required before that noisy existence began, and without those pale preliminary students it never could have been brought into being. And nine-tenths of modern science is in this respect the same: it is the produce of men whom their contemporaries thought dreamers, who were laughed at for caring for what did not concern them, who as the proverb went "walked into a well from looking at the stars," who were believed to be useless if any one could be such. And the conclusion is plain that if there had been more such people, if the world had not laughed at those there were, if rather it had encouraged them, there would have been a great accumulation of proved science ages before there was. It was the irritable activity, the "wish to be doing something," that prevented it,--most men inherited a nature too eager and too restless to be quiet and find out things: and even worse, with their idle clamor they "disturbed the brooding hen"; they would not let those be quiet who wished to be so, and out of whose calm thought much good might have come forth.

If we consider how much science has done and how much it is doing for mankind, and if the over-activity of men is proved to be the cause why science came so late into the world and is so small and scanty still, that will convince most people that our over-activity is a very great evil; but this is only part and perhaps not the greatest part, of the harm that over-activity does. As I have said, it is inherited from times when life was simple, objects were plain, and quick action generally led to desirable ends: if A kills B before B kills A, then A survives, and the human race is a race of A's. But the issues of life are plain no longer: to act rightly in modern society requires a great deal of previous study, a great deal of assimilated information, a great deal of sharpened imagination; and these prerequisites of sound action require much time, and I was going to say much "lying in the sun," a long period of "mere passiveness."

[Argument to show that the same vice of impatience damages war, philanthropy, commerce, and even speculation.]

But it will be said, What has government by discussion to do with these things? will it prevent them, or even mitigate them? It can and does do both, in the very plainest way. If you want to stop instant and immediate action, always make it a condition that the action shall not begin till a considerable number of persons have talked over it and have agreed on it. If those persons be people of different temperaments, different ideas, and different educations, you have an almost infallible security that nothing or almost nothing will be done with excessive rapidity. Each kind of persons will have their spokesman; each spokesman will have his characteristic objection and each his characteristic counter-proposition: and so in the end nothing will probably be done, or at least only the minimum which is plainly urgent. In many cases this delay may be dangerous, in many cases quick action will be preferable; a campaign, as Macaulay well says, cannot be directed by a "debating society," and many other kinds of action also require a single and absolute general: but for the purpose now in hand--that of preventing hasty action and insuring elaborate consideration--there is no device like a polity of discussion.

The enemies of this object--the people who want to act quickly--see this very distinctly: they are forever explaining that the present is "an age of committees," that the committees do nothing, that all evaporates in talk. Their great enemy is parliamentary government: they call it, after Mr. Carlyle, the "national palaver"; they add up the hours that are consumed in it and the speeches which are made in it, and they sigh for a time when England might again be ruled, as it once was, by a Cromwell,--that is, when an eager absolute man might do exactly what other eager men wished, and do it immediately. All these invectives are perpetual and many-sided; they come from philosophers each of whom wants some new scheme tried, from philanthropists who want some evil abated, from revolutionists who want some old institution destroyed, from new-eraists who want their new era started forthwith: and they all are distinct admissions that a polity of discussion is the greatest hindrance to the inherited mistake of human nature,--to the desire to act promptly, which in a simple age is so excellent, but which in a later and complex time leads to so much evil.

The same accusation against our age sometimes takes a more general form: it is alleged that our energies are diminishing, that ordinary and average men have not the quick determination nowadays which they used to have when the world was younger, that not only do not committees and parliaments act with rapid decisiveness, but that no one now so acts; and I hope that in fact this is true, for according to me it proves that the hereditary barbaric impulse is decaying and dying out. So far from thinking the quality attributed to us a defect, I wish that those who complain of it were far more right than I much fear they are. Still, certainly, eager and violent action _is_ somewhat diminished, though only by a small fraction of what it ought to be; and I believe that this is in great part due, in England at least, to our government by discussion, which has fostered a general intellectual tone, a diffused disposition to weigh evidence, a conviction that much may be said on every side of everything which the elder and more fanatic ages of the world wanted. This is the real reason why our energies seem so much less than those of our fathers. When we have a definite end in view, which we know we want and which we think we know how to obtain, we can act well enough: the campaigns of our soldiers are as energetic as any campaigns ever were; the speculations of our merchants have greater promptitude, greater audacity, greater vigor than any such speculations ever had before. In old times a few ideas got possession of men and communities, but this is happily now possible no longer: we see how incomplete these old ideas were; how almost by chance one seized on one nation and another on another; how often one set of men have persecuted another set for opinions on subjects of which neither, we now perceive, knew anything. It might be well if a greater number of effectual demonstrations existed among mankind: but while no such demonstrations exist, and while the evidence which completely convinces one man seems to another trifling and insufficient, let us recognize the plain position of inevitable doubt; let us not be bigots with a doubt and persecutors without a creed. We are beginning to see this, and we are railed at for so beginning: but it is a great benefit, and it is to the incessant prevalence of detective discussion that our doubts are due; and much of that discussion is due to the long existence of a government requiring constant debates, written and oral.

ORIGIN OF DEPOSIT BANKING

From 'Lombard Street'

In the last century, a favorite subject of literary ingenuity was "conjectural history," as it was then called: upon grounds of probability, a fictitious sketch was made of the possible origin of things existing. If this kind of speculation were now applied to banking, the natural and first idea would be that large systems of deposit banking grew up in the early world just as they grow up now in any large English colony. As soon as any such community becomes rich enough to have much money, and compact enough to be able to lodge its money in single banks, it at once begins so to do. English colonists do not like the risk of keeping their money, and they wish to make an interest on it; they carry from home the idea and the habit of banking, and they take to it as soon as they can in their new world. Conjectural history would be inclined to say that all banking began thus; but such history is rarely of any value,--the basis of it is false. It assumes that what works most easily when established is that which it would be the most easy to establish, and that what seems simplest when familiar would be most easily appreciated by the mind though unfamiliar; but exactly the contrary is true,--many things which seem simple, and which work well when firmly established, are very hard to establish among new people and not very easy to explain to them. Deposit banking is of this sort. Its essence is, that a very large number of persons agree to trust a very few persons, or some one person: banking would not be a profitable trade if bankers were not a small number, and depositors in comparison an immense number. But to get a great number of persons to do exactly the same thing is always very difficult, and nothing but a very palpable necessity will make them on a sudden begin to do it; and there is no such palpable necessity in banking.

If you take a country town in France, even now, you will not find any such system of banking as ours: check-books are unknown, and money kept on running account by bankers is rare: people store their money in a _caisse_ at their houses. Steady savings, which are waiting for investment and which are sure not to be soon wanted, may be lodged with bankers; but the common floating cash of the community is kept by the community themselves at home,--they prefer to keep it so, and it would not answer a banker's purpose to make expensive arrangements for keeping it otherwise. If a "branch," such as the National Provincial Bank opens in an English country town, were opened in a corresponding French one, it would not pay its expenses: you could not get any sufficient number of Frenchmen to agree to put their money there.

And so it is in all countries not of British descent, though in various degrees. Deposit banking is a very difficult thing to begin, because people do not like to let their money out of their sight; especially, do not like to let it out of sight without security; still more, cannot all at once agree on any single person to whom they are content to trust it unseen and unsecured. Hypothetical history, which explains the past by what is simplest and commonest in the present, is in banking, as in most things, quite untrue.

The real history is very different. New wants are mostly supplied by adaptation, not by creation or foundation; something having been created to satisfy an extreme want, it is used to satisfy less pressing wants or to supply additional conveniences. On this account, political government, the oldest institution in the world, has been the hardest worked: at the beginning of history, we find it doing everything which society wants done and forbidding everything which society does _not_ wish done. In trade, at present, the first commerce in a new place is a general shop, which, beginning with articles of real necessity, comes shortly to supply the oddest accumulation of petty comforts. And the history of banking has been the same: the first banks were not founded for our system of deposit banking, or for anything like it; they were founded for much more pressing reasons, and having been founded, they or copies from them were applied to our modern uses.

[Gives a sketch of banks started as finance companies to make or float government loans, and to give good coin; and sketches their function of remitting money.]

These are all uses other than those of deposit banking, which banks supplied that afterwards became in our English sense deposit banks: by supplying these uses, they gained the credit that afterwards enabled them to gain a living as deposit banks; being trusted for one purpose, they came to be trusted for a purpose quite different,--ultimately far more important, though at first less keenly pressing. But these wants only affect a few persons, and therefore bring the bank under the notice of a few only. The real introductory function which deposit banks at first perform is much more popular; and it is only when they can perform this most popular kind of business that deposit banking ever spreads quickly and extensively.

This function is the supply of the paper circulation to the country; and it will be observed that I am not about to overstep my limits and discuss this as a question of currency. In what form the best paper currency can be supplied to a country is a question of economical theory with which I do not meddle here: I am only narrating unquestionable history, not dealing with an argument where every step is disputed; and part of this certain history is, that the best way to diffuse banking in a community is to allow the banker to issue bank notes of small amount that can supersede the metal currency. This amounts to a subsidy to each banker to enable him to keep open a bank till depositors choose to come to it....

The reason why the use of bank paper commonly precedes the habit of making deposits in banks is very plain: it is a far easier habit to establish. In the issue of notes the banker, the person to be most benefited, can do something,--he can pay away his own "promises" in loans, in wages, or in payment of debts,--but in the getting of deposits he is passive; his issues depend on himself, his deposits on the favor of others. And to the public the change is far easier too: to collect a great mass of deposits with the same banker, a great number of persons must agree to do something; but to establish a note circulation, a large number of persons need only _do nothing_,--they receive the banker's notes in the common course of their business, and they have only _not_ to take those notes to the banker for payment. If the public refrain from taking trouble, a paper circulation is immediately in existence. A paper circulation is begun by the banker, and requires no effort on the part of the public,--on the contrary, it needs an effort of the public to be rid of notes once issued; but deposit banking cannot be begun by the banker, and requires a spontaneous and consistent effort in the community: and therefore paper issue is the natural prelude to deposit banking.

JENS BAGGESEN

(1764-1826)

Jens Baggesen was born in the little Danish town Korsör in 1764, and died in exile in the year 1826. Thus he belonged to two centuries and to two literary periods. He had reached manhood when the French Revolution broke out; he witnessed Napoleon's rise, his victories, and his fall. He was a full contemporary of Goethe, who survived him only six years; he saw English literature glory in men like Byron and Moore, and lived to hear of Byron's death in Greece. In his first works he stood a true representative of the culture and literature of the eighteenth century, and was hailed as its exponent by the Danish poet Herman Wessel; towards the end of the century he was acknowledged to be the greatest of living Danish poets. Then with the new age came the Norwegian, Henrik Steffens, with his enthusiastic lectures on German romanticism, calling out the genius of Oehlenschläger, and the eighteenth century was doomed; Baggesen nevertheless greeted Oehlenschläger with sincere admiration, and when the 'Aladdin' of that poet appeared, Baggesen sent him his rhymed letter 'From Nureddin-Baggesen to Aladdin-Oehlenschläger.'

Baggesen was the son of poor people, and strangers helped him to his scientific education. When his first works were recognized he became the friend and protégé of the Duke of Augustenborg, who provided him with the means for an extended journey through the Continent, during which he met the greatest men of his time. The Duke of Augustenborg meanwhile secured him several positions, which could not hold him for any length of time, nor keep him at home in Denmark. He went abroad a second time to study pedagogics, literature, and philosophy, came home again, wandered forth once more, returned a widower, was for some time director of the National Theatre in Copenhagen; but found no rest, married again, and in 1800 went to France to live. Eleven years later he was professor in Kiel, returning thence to Copenhagen, where meanwhile his fame had been eclipsed by the genius of Oehlenschläger. Secure in the knowledge of his powers, Oehlenschläger had carelessly published two or three dramatic poems not worthy of his pen, and Baggesen entered on a violent controversy with him in which he stood practically by himself against the entire reading public, whose sympathies were with Oehlenschläger. Alone and misunderstood, restless and unhappy, he left Denmark in 1820, never to return. Six years later he died, longing to see his country again, but unable to reach it.

His first poetry was published in 1785, a volume of 'Comic Tales,' which made its mark at once. The following year appeared in quick succession satires, rhymed epistles, and elegies, which, adding to his fame, added also to the purposeless ferment and unrest which had taken possession of him. He considered tragedy his proper field, yet had allowed himself to appear as humorist and satirist.

When the great historic events of the time took place, and over-threw all existing conditions, this inner restlessness drove him to and fro without purpose or will. One day he was enthusiastic over Voss's idyls, the next he was carried away by Robespierre's wildest speeches. One year he adopted Kant's Christian name Immanuel in transport over his works, the next he called the great philosopher "an empty nut, and moreover hard to crack." The romanticism in Denmark as well as in Germany reduced him to a state of utter confusion; but in spite of this he continued a child of the old order, which was already doomed. And with all his unrest and discord he remained nevertheless the champion of "form," "the poet of the graces," as he has been called.

This gift of form has given him his literary importance. He built a bridge from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century; and when the new romantic school overstepped its privileges, it was he who called it to order. The most conspicuous act of his literary life was the controversy with Oehlenschläger, and the wittiest product of his pen is the reckless criticism of Oehlenschläger's opera 'Ludlam's Cave.' Johann Ludvig Heiberg, the greatest analytical critic of whom Denmark can boast, remained Baggesen's ardent admirer; and Heiberg's influential although not always just criticism of Oehlenschläger as a poet was no doubt called forth by Baggesen's attack. Some years later Henrik Hertz made Baggesen his subject. In 1830 appeared 'Letters from Ghosts,' poetic epistles from Paradise. Nobody knew that Hertz was the author. It was Baggesen's voice from beyond the grave, Baggesen's criticism upon the literature of 1830. It was one of the wittiest, and in versification one of the best, books in Danish literature.

Baggesen's most important prose work is 'The Labyrinth,' afterwards called 'The Wanderings of a Poet.' It is a poetic description of his journeys, unique in its way, rich in impressions and full of striking remarks, written in a piquant, graceful, and easy style.

As long as Danish literature remains, Baggesen's name will be known; though his writings are not now widely read, and are important chiefly because of their influence on the literary spirit of his own time. His familiar poem 'There was a time when I was very little,' during the controversy with Oehlenschläger, was seized upon by Paul Möller, parodied, and changed into 'There was a time when Jens was much bigger.' Equally well known is his 'Ode to My Country,' with the familiar lines:--

"Alas, in no place is the thorn as tiny, Alas, in no place blooms as red a rose, Alas, in no place is there couch as downy As where we little children found repose."

A COSMOPOLITAN

From 'The Labyrinth'

Forster, a little nervous, alert, and piquant man, with gravity written on his forehead, perspicacity in his eye, and love around his lips, conquered me completely. I spoke to him of everything except his journeys; but the traveler showed himself full of unmistakable humanity. He seemed to me the cosmopolitan spirit personified. It was as if the world were present when I was alone with him.

We talked about his friend Jacobi, about the late King of Prussia, about the literature of Germany, and about the present Pole-high standard of taste. I was much pleased to find in him the art critic I sought. He said that we must admire everything which is good and beautiful, whether it originates West, East, South, or North. The taste of the bee is the true one. Difference in language and climate, difference of nationality, must not affect my interest in fair and noble things. The unknown repels the animal, but should not repel the human creature. Suppose you say that Voltaire is animal in comparison with Shakespeare or Klopstock, or that they are animal in comparison with him: it is a blunder to demand pears of an apple-tree, as it is ridiculous to throw away the apple because it is not a pear. The entire world of nature teaches us this aesthetic tolerance, and yet we have as little acquired it as we have freedom of conscience. We plant white and red roses in the same bed, but who puts the 'Messiah' and the 'Henriade' on the same shelf? He only who reads neither the one nor the other. True religion worships God; true taste worships the beautiful without regard of person or nation. German? French? Italian? or English? All the same! But nothing mediocre.

I was flushed with pleasure; I gave him my hand. "That may be said of other things than poetry!" I said.--"Of all art!" he answered.--"Of all that is human!" we both concluded.

Deplorable indolence which clothes our mind in the first heavy cloak ready to hand, so that all the sunbeams of the world cannot persuade us to throw it off, much less to assume another! The man who is exclusively a nationalist is a snail forever chained to his house. Psyche had wings given her for a never-ending, eternal flight. We may not imprison her, be the cage ever so large.

He considered that Lessing had wronged the great representative of the French language; and the remark of Claudius, "Voltaire says he weeps, and Shakespeare does weep," appeared to him like the saying, "Much that is new and beautiful has M. Arouet said; but it is a pity that the beautiful is not new and the new not beautiful,"--more witty than true. The English think that Shakespeare, as the Germans think that Lessing, really weeps; the French think the same of Voltaire. But the first weeps for the whole world, it is said, the last only for his own people. What the French call "Le Nord" is, to be sure, rather a large territory, but not the entire world! France calls "whimpering" in one case and "blubbering" in another what we call weeping. The general mistake is that we do not understand the nature of the people and the language, in which and for whom the weeping is done.

We must be English when we read Shakespeare, German when we read Klopstock, French when we read Voltaire. The man whose soul cannot shed its national costume and don that of other nations ought not to read, much less to judge, their masterpieces. He will be looking at the moon by day and at the sun by night, and see the first without lustre and the last not at all.

PHILOSOPHY ON THE HEATH

From 'The Labyrinth'

Caillard was a man of experience, taste, and knowledge. He told me the story of his life from beginning to end, he confided to me his principles and his affairs, and I took him to be the happiest man in the world. "I have everything," he said, "all that I have wished for or can wish for: health, riches, domestic peace (being unmarried), a tolerably good conscience, books--and as much sense as I need to enjoy them. I experience only one single want, lack only one single pleasure in this world; but that one is enough to embitter my life and class me with other unfortunates."

I could not guess what might yet be wanting to such a man under such conditions, "It cannot be liberty," I said, "for how can a rich merchant in a free town lack this?"

"No! Heaven save me--I neither would nor could live one single day without liberty."

"You do not happen to be in love with some cruel or unhappy princess?"

"That is still less the case."

"Ah!--now I have it, no doubt--your soul is consumed with a thirst for truth, for a satisfactory answer to the many questions which are but philosophic riddles. You are seeking what so many brave men from Anaxagoras to Spinoza have sought in vain--the corner-stone of philosophy, the foundation of the structure of our ideas."

He assured me that in this respect he was quite at ease. "Then, in spite of your good health, you must be subject to that miserable thing, a cold in the head?" I said.

"Uno minor--Jove, dives Liber, honoratus, pulcher rex denique regum, Praecipue sanus--nisi cum pituita molesta est."

--HORACE.

When he denied this too, I gave up trying to solve the meaning of his dark words.

O happiness! of all earthly chimeras thou art the most chimerical! I would rather seek dry figs on the bottom of the sea and fresh ones on this heath,--I would rather seek liberty, or truth itself, or the philosopher's stone, than to run after thee, most deceitful of lights, will-o'-the-wisp of our human life!

I thought that at last I had found a perfectly happy, an enviable man; and now--behold! though I have not the ten-thousandth part of his wealth, though I have not the tenth part of his health, though I may not have a third of his intellect, although I have all the wants which he has not and the one want under which he suffers, yet I would not change places with him!

From this moment he was the object of my sincerest pity. But what did this awful curse prove to be? Listen and tremble!

"Of what use is it all to me?" he said: "coffee, which I love more than all the wines of this earth and more than all the women of this earth, coffee which I love madly--coffee is forbidden me!"

Laugh who lists! Inasmuch as everything in this world, viewed in a certain light, is tragic, it would be excusable to weep: but inasmuch as everything viewed in another light is comic, a little laughter could not be taken amiss; only beware of laughing at the sigh with which my happy man pronounced these words, for it might be that in laughing at him you laugh at yourself, your father, your grandfather, your great-grandfather, your great-great-grandfather, and so on, including your entire family as far back as Adam.

If, in laughing at such discontent, you laugh in advance at your son, your son's son's son, and so forth to the last descendant of your entire family, this is a matter which I do not decide. It will depend upon the road humanity chooses to take. If it continues as it is going, some coffee-want or other will forever strew it with thorns.

Had he said, "Chocolate is forbidden me," or tea, or English ale, or madeira, or strawberries, you would have found his misery equally absurd.

The great Alexander is said to have wept because he found no more worlds to conquer. The man who bemoans the loss of a world and the man who bemoans the loss of coffee are to my mind equally unbalanced and equally in need of forgiveness. The desire for a cup of coffee and the desire for a crown, the hankering after the flavor or even the fragrance of the drink and the hankering after fame, are equally mad and equally--human.

If history is to be believed, Adam possessed all the advantages and comforts, all the necessities and luxuries a first man could reasonably demand.... Lord of all living things, and sharing his dominion with his beloved, what did he lack?

Among ten thousand pleasures, the fruit of one single tree was forbidden him. Good-by content and peace! Good-by forever all his bliss!

I acknowledge that I should have yielded to the same temptation; and he who does not see that this fate would have overtaken his entire family, past and to come, may have studied all things from the Milky Way in the sky to the milky way in his kitchen, may have studied all stones, plants, and animals, and all folios and quartos dealing therewith, but never himself or man.

As we do not know the nature of the fruit which Adam could not do without, it may as well have been coffee as any other. That it was pleasant to the eyes means no more than that it was forbidden. Every forbidden thing is pleasant to the eyes.

"Of what use is it all to me?" said Adam, looking around him in Eden, at the rising sun, the blushing hills, the light-green forest, the glorious waterfall, the laden fruit-trees, and, most beautiful of all, the smiling woman--"of what use is it all to me, when I dare not taste this--coffee bean?"

"And of what use is it all to me?" said Mr. Caillard, and looked around him on the Lüneburg heath: "coffee is forbidden me; one single cup of coffee would kill me."

"If it will be any comfort to you," I said, "I may tell you that I am in the same case." "And you do not despair at times?"--"No," I replied, "for it is not my only want. If like you I had everything else in life, I also might despair."

THERE WAS A TIME WHEN I WAS VERY LITTLE

There was a time, when I, an urchin slender, Could hardly boast of having any height. Oft I recall those days with feelings tender; With smiles, and yet the tear-drops dim my sight.

Within my tender mother's arms I sported, I played at horse upon my grandsire's knee; Sorrow and care and anger, ill-reported, As little known as gold or Greek, to me.

The world was little to my childish thinking, And innocent of sin and sinful things; I saw the stars above me flashing, winking-- To fly and catch them, how I longed for wings!

I saw the moon behind the hills declining, And thought, O were I on yon lofty ground, I'd learn the truth; for here there's no divining How large it is, how beautiful, how round!

In wonder, too, I saw God's sun pursuing His westward course, to ocean's lap of gold; And yet at morn the East he was renewing With wide-spread, rosy tints, this artist old.

Then turned my thoughts to God the Father gracious, Who fashioned me and that great orb on high, And the night's jewels, decking heaven spacious; From pole to pole its arch to glorify.

With childish piety my lips repeated The prayer learned at my pious mother's knee: Help me remember, Jesus, I entreated, That I must grow up good and true to Thee!

Then for the household did I make petition, For kindred, friends, and for the town's folk, last; The unknown King, the outcast, whose condition Darkened my childish joy, as he slunk past.

All lost, all vanished, childhood's days so eager! My peace, my joy with them have fled away; I've only memory left: possession meagre; Oh, never may that leave me, Lord, I pray.

PHILIP JAMES BAILEY

(1816-)

In Bailey we have a striking instance of the man whose reputation is made suddenly by a single work, which obtains an amazing popularity, and which is presently almost forgotten except as a name. When in 1839 the long poem 'Festus' appeared, its author was an unknown youth, who had hardly reached his majority. Within a few months he was a celebrity. That so dignified and suggestive a performance should have come from so young a poet was considered a marvel of precocity by the literary world, both English and American.

The author of 'Festus' was born at Basford, Nottinghamshire, England, April 22nd, 1816. Educated at the public schools of Nottingham, and at Glasgow University, he studied law, and at nineteen entered Lincoln's Inn. In 1840 he was admitted to the bar. But his vocation in life appears to have been metaphysical and spiritual rather than legal.

His 'Festus: a Poem,' containing fifty-five episodes or successive scenes,--some thirty-five thousand lines,--was begun in his twentieth year. Three years later it was in the hands of the English reading public. Like Goethe's 'Faust' in pursuing the course of a human soul through influences emanating from the Supreme Good and the Supreme Evil; in having Heaven and the World as its scene; in its inclusion of God and the Devil, the Archangels and Angels, the Powers of Perdition, and withal many earthly types in its action,--it is by no means a mere imitation of the great German. Its plan is wider. It incorporates even more impressive spiritual material than 'Faust' offers. Not only is its mortal hero, Festus, conducted through an amazing pilgrimage, spiritual and redeemed by divine Love, but we have in the poem a conception of close association with Christianity, profound ethical suggestions, a flood of theology and philosophy, metaphysics and science, picturing Good and Evil, love and hate, peace and war, the past, the present, and the future, earth, heaven, and hell, heights and depths, dominions, principalities, and powers, God and man, the whole of being and of not-being,--all in an effort to unmask the last and greatest secrets of Infinity. And more than all this, 'Festus' strives to portray the sufficiency of Divine Love and of the Divine Atonement to dissipate, even to annihilate, Evil. For even Lucifer and the hosts of darkness are restored to purity and to peace among the Sons of God, the Children of Light! The Love of God is set forth as limitless. We have before us the birth of matter at the Almighty's fiat; and we close the work with the salvation and ecstasy--described as decreed from the Beginning--of whatever creature hath been given a spiritual existence, and made a spiritual subject and agency. There is in the doctrine of 'Festus' no such thing as the "Son of Perdition" who shall be an ultimate castaway.

Few English poems have attracted more general notice from all intelligent classes of readers than did 'Festus' on its advent. Orthodoxy was not a little aghast at its theologic suggestions. Criticism of it as a literary production was hampered not a little by religious sensitiveness. The London Literary Gazette said of it:--"It is an extraordinary production, out-Heroding Kant in some of its philosophy, and out-Goetheing Goethe in the introduction of the Three Persons of the Trinity as interlocutors in its wild plot. Most objectionable as it is on this account, it yet contains so many exquisite passages of genuine poetry, that our admiration of the author's genius overpowers the feeling of mortification at its being misapplied, and meddling with such dangerous topics." The advance of liberal ideas within the churches has diminished such criticism, but the work is still a stumbling-block to the less speculative of sectaries.

The poem is far too long, and its scope too vast for even a genius of much higher and riper gifts than Bailey's. It is turgid, untechnical in verse, wordy, and involved. Had Bailey written at fifty instead of at twenty, it might have shown a necessary balance and felicity of style. But, with all these shortcomings, it is not to be relegated to the library of things not worth the time to know, to the list of bulky poetic failures. Its author blossomed and fruited marvelously early; so early and with such unlooked-for fruit that the unthinking world, which first received him with exaggerated honor, presently assailed him with undue dispraise. 'Festus' is not mere solemn and verbose commonplace. Here and there it has passages of great force and even of high beauty. The author's whole heart and brain were poured into it, and neither was a common one. With all its ill-based daring and manifest crudities, it was such a _tour de force_ for a lad of twenty as the world seldom sees. Its sluggish current bears along remarkable knowledge, great reflection, and the imagination of a fertile as well as a precocious brain. It is a stream which carries with it things new and old, and serves to stir the mind of the onlooker with unwonted thoughts. Were it but one fourth as long, it would still remain a favorite poem. Even now it has passed through numerous editions, and been but lately republished in sumptuous form after fifty years of life; and in the catalogue of higher metaphysico-religious poetry it will long maintain an honorable place. It is cited here among the books whose fame rather than whose importance _demand_ recognition.

FROM 'FESTUS'

LIFE

_Festus_-- Men's callings all Are mean and vain; their wishes more so: oft The man is bettered by his part or place. How slight a chance may raise or sink a soul!

_Lucifer_--What men call accident is God's own part. He lets ye work your will--it is his own: But that ye mean not, know not, do not, he doth.

_Festus_--What is life worth without a heart to feel The great and lovely harmonies which time And nature change responsive, all writ out By preconcertive hand which swells the strain To divine fulness; feel the poetry, The soothing rhythm of life's fore-ordered lay; The sacredness of things?--for all things are Sacred so far,--the worst of them, as seen By the eye of God, they in the aspect bide Of holiness: nor shall outlaw sin be slain, Though rebel banned, within the sceptre's length; But privileged even for service. Oh! to stand Soul-raptured, on some lofty mountain-thought, And feel the spirit expand into a view Millennial, life-exalting, of a day When earth shall have all leisure for high ends Of social culture; ends a liberal law And common peace of nations, blent with charge Divine, shall win for man, were joy indeed: Nor greatly less, to know what might be now, Worked will for good with power, for one brief hour. But look at these, these individual souls: How sadly men show out of joint with man! There are millions never think a noble thought; But with brute hate of brightness bay a mind Which drives the darkness out of them, like hounds. Throw but a false glare round them, and in shoals They rush upon perdition: that's the race. What charm is in this world-scene to such minds? Blinded by dust? What can they do in heaven, A state of spiritual means and ends? Thus must I doubt--perpetually doubt.

_Lucifer_--Who never doubted never half believed. Where doubt, there truth is--'tis her shadow. I Declare unto thee that the past is not. I have looked over all life, yet never seen The age that had been. Why then fear or dream About the future? Nothing but what is, is; Else God were not the Maker that he seems, As constant in creating as in being. Embrace the present. Let the future pass. Plague not thyself about a future. That Only which comes direct from God, his spirit, Is deathless. Nature gravitates without Effort; and so all mortal natures fall Deathwards. All aspiration is a toil; But inspiration cometh from above, And is no labor. The earth's inborn strength Could never lift her up to yon stars, whence She fell; nor human soul, by native worth, Claim heaven as birthright, more than man may call Cloudland his home. The soul's inheritance, Its birth-place, and its death-place, is of earth; Until God maketh earth and soul anew; The one like heaven, the other like himself. So shall the new creation come at once; Sin, the dead branch upon the tree of life Shall be cut off forever; and all souls Concluded in God's boundless amnesty.

_Festus_--Thou windest and unwindest faith at will. What am I to believe?

_Lucifer_-- Thou mayest believe But that thou art forced to.

_Festus_-- Then I feel, perforce, That instinct of immortal life in me, Which prompts me to provide for it.

_Lucifer_-- Perhaps. _Festus_--Man hath a knowledge of a time to come-- His most important knowledge: the weight lies Nearest the short end; and the world depends Upon what is to be. I would deny The present, if the future. Oh! there is A life to come, or all's a dream.

_Lucifer_--And all May be a dream. Thou seest in thine, men, deeds, Clear, moving, full of speech and order; then Why may not all this world be but a dream Of God's? Fear not! Some morning God may waken.

_Festus_--I would it were. This life's a mystery. The value of a thought cannot be told; But it is clearly worth a thousand lives Like many men's. And yet men love to live As if mere life were worth their living for. What but perdition will it be to most? Life's more than breath and the quick round of blood; It is a great spirit and a busy heart. The coward and the small in soul scarce do live. One generous feeling--one great thought--one deed Of good, ere night, would make life longer seem Than if each year might number a thousand days, Spent as is this by nations of mankind. We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths; In feelings, not in figures on a dial. We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives Who thinks most--feels the noblest--acts the best. Life's but a means unto an end--that end Beginning, mean, and end to all things--God. The dead have all the glory of the world. Why will we live and not be glorious? We never can be deathless till we die. It is the dead win battles. And the breath Of those who through the world drive like a wedge, Tearing earth's empires up, nears Death so close It dims his well-worn scythe. But no! the brave Die never. Being deathless, they but change Their country's arms for more--their country's heart. Give then the dead their due: it is they who saved us. The rapid and the deep--the fall, the gulph, Have likenesses in feeling and in life. And life, so varied, hath more loveliness In one day than a creeping century Of sameness. But youth loves and lives on change, Till the soul sighs for sameness; which at last Becomes variety, and takes its place. Yet some will last to die out, thought by thought, And power by power, and limb of mind by limb, Like lamps upon a gay device of glass, Till all of soul that's left be dry and dark; Till even the burden of some ninety years Hath crashed into them like a rock; shattered Their system as if ninety suns had rushed To ruin earth--or heaven had rained its stars; Till they become like scrolls, unreadable, Through dust and mold. Can they be cleaned and read? Do human spirits wax and wane like moons?

_Lucifer_--The eye dims, and the heart gets old and slow; The lithe limbs stiffen, and the sun-hued locks Thin themselves off, or whitely wither; still, Ages not spirit, even in one point, Immeasurably small; from orb to orb, Rising in radiance ever like the sun Shining upon the thousand lands of earth.

THE PASSING-BELL

Clara--True prophet mayst thou be. But list: that sound The passing-bell the spirit should solemnize; For, while on its emancipate path, the soul Still waves its upward wings, and we still hear The warning sound, it is known, we well may pray.

_Festus_--But pray for whom?

_Clara_--It means not. Pray for all. Pray for the good man's soul:

He is leaving earth for heaven, And it soothes us to feel that the best May be forgiven.

_Festus_--Pray for the sinful soul: It fleëth, we know not where; But wherever it be let us hope; For God is there.

_Clara_--Pray for the rich man's soul: Not all be unjust, nor vain; The wise he consoled; and he saved The poor from pain.

_Festus_--Pray for the poor man's soul: The death of this life of ours He hath shook from his feet; he is one Of the heavenly powers.

Pray for the old man's soul: He hath labored long; through life It was battle or march. He hath ceased, Serene, from strife.

_Clara_--Pray for the infant's soul: With its spirit crown unsoiled, He hath won, without war, a realm; Gained all, nor toiled.

_Festus_--Pray for the struggling soul: The mists of the straits of death Clear off; in some bright star-isle It anchoreth.

Pray for the soul assured: Though it wrought in a gloomy mine, Yet the gems it earned were its own, That soul's divine.

_Clara_--Pray for the simple soul: For it loved, and therein was wise; Though itself knew not, but with heaven Confused the skies.

_Festus_--Pray for the sage's soul: 'Neath his welkin wide of mind Lay the central thought of God, Thought undefined.

Pray for the souls of all To our God, that all may be With forgiveness crowned, and joy Eternally.

_Clara_--Hush! for the bell hath ceased; And the spirit's fate is sealed; To the angels known; to man Best unrevealed.

THOUGHTS

FESTUS--Well, farewell, Mr. Student. May you never Regret those hours which make the mind, if they Unmake the body; for the sooner we Are fit to be all mind, the better. Blessed Is he whose heart is the home of the great dead, And their great thoughts. Who can mistake great thoughts They seize upon the mind; arrest and search, And shake it; bow the tall soul as by wind; Rush over it like a river over reeds, Which quaver in the current; turn us cold, And pale, and voiceless; leaving in the brain A rocking and a ringing; glorious, But momentary, madness might it last, And close the soul with heaven as with a seal! In lieu of all these things whose loss thou mournest, If earnestly or not I know not, use The great and good and true which ever live; And are all common to pure eyes and true. Upon the summit of each mountain-thought Worship thou God, with heaven-uplifted head And arms horizon-stretched; for deity is seen From every elevation of the soul. Study the light; attempt the high; seek out The soul's bright path; and since the soul is fire, Of heat intelligential, turn it aye To the all-Fatherly source of light and life; Piety purifies the soul to see Visions, perpetually, of grace and power, Which, to their sight who in ignorant sin abide, Are now as e'er incognizable. Obey Thy genius, for a minister it is Unto the throne of Fate. Draw towards thy soul, And centralize, the rays which are around Of the divinity. Keep thy spirit pure From worldly taint, by the repellent strength Of virtue. Think on noble thoughts and deeds, Ever. Count o'er the rosary of truth; And practice precepts which are proven wise, It matters not then what thou fearest. Walk Boldly and wisely in that light thou hast;-- There is a hand above will help thee on. I am an omnist, and believe in all Religions; fragments of one golden world To be relit yet, and take its place in heaven, Where is the whole, sole truth, in deity. Meanwhile, his word, his law, writ soulwise here, Study; its truths love; practice its behests-- They will be with thee when all else have gone. Mind, body, passion all wear out; not faith Nor truth. Keep thy heart cool, or rule its heat To fixed ends; waste it not upon itself. Not all the agony maybe of the damned Fused in one pang, vies with that earthquake throb Which wakens soul from life-waste, to let see The world rolled by for aye, and we must wait For our next chance the nigh eternity; Whether it be in heaven, or elsewhere.

DREAMS

FESTUS--The dead of night: earth seems but seeming; The soul seems but a something dreaming. The bird is dreaming in its nest, Of song, and sky, and loved one's breast; The lap-dog dreams, as round he lies, In moonshine, of his mistress's eyes; The steed is dreaming, in his stall, Of one long breathless leap and fall; The hawk hath dreamed him thrice of wings Wide as the skies he may not cleave; But waking, feels them clipped, and clings Mad to the perch 'twere mad to leave: The child is dreaming of its toys; The murderer, of calm home joys; The weak are dreaming endless fears; The proud of how their pride appears; The poor enthusiast who dies, Of his life-dreams the sacrifice, Sees, as enthusiast only can, The truth that made him more than man; And hears once more, in visioned trance, That voice commanding to advance, Where wealth is gained--love, wisdom won, Or deeds of danger dared and done. The mother dreameth of her child; The maid of him who hath beguiled; The youth of her he loves too well; The good of God; the ill of hell; Who live of death; of life who die; The dead of immortality. The earth is dreaming back her youth; Hell never dreams, for woe is truth; And heaven is dreaming o'er her prime, Long ere the morning stars of time; And dream of heaven alone can I, My lovely one, when thou art nigh.

CHORUS OF THE SAVED

From the Conclusion

Father of goodness, Son of love, Spirit of comfort, Be with us! God who hast made us, God who hast saved, God who hast judged us, Thee we praise. Heaven our spirits, Hallow our hearts; Let us have God-light Endlessly. Ours is the wide world, Heaven on heaven; What have we done, Lord, Worthy this? Oh! we have loved thee; That alone Maketh our glory, Duty, meed. Oh! we have loved thee! Love we will Ever, and every Soul of us. God of the saved, God of the tried, God of the lost ones, Be with all! Let us be near thee Ever and aye; Oh! let us love thee Infinite!

JOANNA BAILLIE

(1762-1851)

Joanna Baillie's early childhood was passed at Bothwell, Scotland, where she was born in 1762. Of this time she drew a picture in her well-known birthday lines to her sister:--

"Dear Agnes, gleamed with joy, and dashed with tears, O'er us have glided almost sixty years Since we on Bothwell's bonny braes were seen, By those whose eyes long closed in death have been: Two tiny imps, who scarcely stooped to gather The slender harebell, or the purple heather; No taller than the foxglove's spiky stem, That dew of morning studs with silvery gem. Then every butterfly that crossed our view With joyful shout was greeted as it flew, And moth and lady-bird and beetle bright In sheeny gold were each a wondrous sight. Then as we paddled barefoot, side by side, Among the sunny shallows of the Clyde, Minnows or spotted par with twinkling fin, Swimming in mazy rings the pool within, A thrill of gladness through our bosoms sent Seen in the power of early wonderment."

When Joanna was six her father was appointed to the charge of the kirk at Hamilton. Her early growth went on, not in books, but in the fearlessness with which she ran upon the top of walls and parapets of bridges and in all daring. "Look at Miss Jack," said a farmer, as she dashed by: "she sits her horse as if it were a bit of herself." At eleven she could not read well. "'Twas thou," she said in lines to her sister--

"'Twas thou who woo'dst me first to look Upon the page of printed book, That thing by me abhorred, and with address Didst win me from my thoughtless idleness, When all too old become with bootless haste In fitful sports the precious time to waste. Thy love of tale and story was the stroke At which my dormant fancy first awoke, And ghosts and witches in my busy brain Arose in sombre show, a motley train."

In 1776 Dr. James Baillie was made Professor of Divinity at Glasgow University. During the two years the family lived in the college atmosphere, Joanna first read 'Comus,' and, led by the delight it awakened, the great epic of Milton. It was here that her vigor and disputatious turn of mind "cast an awe" over her companions. After her father's death she settled, in 1784, with her mother and brother and sister in London.

She had made herself familiar with English literature, and above all she had studied Shakespeare with enthusiasm. Circumscribed now by the brick and mortar of London streets, in exchange for the fair views and liberties of her native fruitlands, Joanna found her first expression in a volume of 'Fugitive Verses,' published in 1790. The book caused so little comment that the words of but one friendly hand are preserved: that the poems were "truly unsophisticated representations of nature."

Joanna's walk was along calm and unhurried ways. She could have had a considerable place in society and the world of "lions" if she had cared. The wife of her uncle and name-father, the anatomist Dr. John Hunter, was no other than the famous Mrs. Anne Hunter, a songwright of genius; her poem 'The Son of Alknomook Shall Never Complain' is one of the classics of English song, and the best rendering of the Indian spirit ever condensed into so small a space. She was also a woman of grace and dignity, a power in London drawing-rooms, and Haydn set songs of hers to music. But the reserved Joanna was tempted to no light triumphs. Eight years later was published her first volume of 'Plays on the Passions.' It contained 'Basil,' a tragedy on love; 'The Trial,' a comedy on the same subject; and 'De Montfort,' a tragedy on hatred.

The thought of essaying dramatic composition had burst upon the author one summer afternoon as she sat sewing with her mother. She had a high moral purpose in her plan of composition, she said in her preface,--that purpose being the ultimate utterance of the drama. Plot and incident she set little value upon, and she rejected the presentation of the most splendid event if it did not appertain to the development of the passion. In other words, what is and was commonly of secondary consideration in the swift passage of dramatic action became in her hands the stated and paramount object. Feeling and passion are _not_ precipitated by incident in her drama as in real life. The play 'De Montfort' was presented at Drury Lane Theatre in 1800; but in spite of every effort and the acting of John Kemble and Mrs. Siddons, it had a run of but eleven nights.

In 1802 Miss Baillie published her second volume of 'Plays on the Passions.' It contained a comedy on hatred; 'Ethwald,' a tragedy on ambition; and a comedy on ambition. Her adherence to her old plan brought upon her an attack from Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review. He claimed that the complexity of the moral nature of man made Joanna's theory false and absurd, that a play was too narrow to show the complete growth of a passion, and that the end of the drama is the entertainment of the audience. He asserted that she imitated and plagiarized Shakespeare; while he admitted her insight into human nature, her grasp of character, and her devotion to her work.

About the time of the appearance of this volume, Joanna fixed her residence with her mother and sister, among the lanes and fields of Hampstead, where they continued throughout their lives. The first volume of 'Miscellaneous Plays' came out in 1804. In the preface she stated that her opinions set forth in her first preface were unchanged. But the plays had a freer construction. "Miss Baillie," wrote Jeffrey in his review, "cannot possibly write a tragedy, or an act of a tragedy, without showing genius and exemplifying a more dramatic conception and expression than any of her modern competitor" 'Constantine Palaeologus,' which the volume contained, had the liveliest commendation and popularity, and was several times put upon the stage with spectacular effect.

In the year of the publication of Joanna's 'Miscellaneous Plays,' Sir Walter Scott came to London, and seeking an introduction through a common friend, made the way for a lifelong friendship between the two, He had just brought out 'The Lay of the Last Minstrel.' Miss Baillie was already a famous writer, with fast friends in Lucy Aikin, Mary Berry, Mrs. Siddons, and other workers in art and literature; but the hearty commendation of her countryman, which she is said to have come upon unexpectedly when reading 'Marmion' to a group of friends, she valued beyond other praise. The legend is that she read through the passage firmly to the close, and only lost self-control in her sympathy with the emotion of a friend:--

"--The wild harp that silent hung By silver Avon's holy shore Till twice one hundred years rolled o'er, When she the bold enchantress came, From the pale willow snatched the treasure, With fearless hand and heart in flame, And swept it with a kindred measure; Till Avon's swans, while rung the grove With Montfort's hate and Basil's love, Awakening at the inspired strain, Deemed their own Shakespeare lived again."

The year 1810 saw 'The Family Legend,' a play founded on a tragic history of the Campbell clan. Scott wrote a prologue and brought out the play in the Edinburgh Theatre. "You have only to imagine," he told the author, "all that you could wish to give success to a play, and your conceptions will still fall short of the complete and decided triumph of 'The Family Legend.'"

The attacks which Jeffrey had made upon her verse were continued when she published, in 1812, her third volume of 'Plays on the Passions.' His voice, however, did not diminish the admiration for the character-drawing with which the book was greeted, or for the lyric outbursts occurring now and then in the dramas.

Joanna's quiet Hampstead life was broken in 1813 by a genial meeting in London with the ambitious Madame de Staël, and again with the vivacious little Irishwoman, Maria Edgeworth. She was keeping her promise of not writing more; but during a visit to Sir Walter in 1820 her imagination was touched by Scotch tales, and she published 'Metrical Legends' the following year. In this vast Abbotsford she finally consented to meet Jeffrey. The plucky little writer and the unshrinking critic at once became friends, and thenceforward Jeffrey never went to London without visiting her in Hampstead.

Her moral courage throughout life recalls the physical courage which characterized her youth. She never concealed her religious convictions, and in 1831 she published her ideas in 'A View of the General Tenor of the New Testament Regarding the Nature and Dignity of Jesus Christ.' In 1836, having finally given up the long hope of seeing her plays become popular upon the stage, she prepared a complete edition of her dramas with the addition of three plays never before made public,--'Romiero,' a tragedy, 'The Alienated Manor,' a comedy on jealousy, and 'Henriquez,' a tragedy on remorse. The Edinburgh Review immediately put forth a eulogistic notice of the collected edition, and at last admitted that the reviewer had changed his judgment, and esteemed the author as a dramatist above Byron and Scott.

"May God support both you and me, and give us comfort and consolation when it is most wanted," wrote Miss Baillie to Mary Berry in 1837. "As for myself, I do not wish to be one year younger than I am; and have no desire, were it possible, to begin life again, even under the most honorable circumstances. I have great cause for humble thankfulness, and I am thankful."

In 1840 Jeffrey wrote:--"I have been twice out to Hampstead, and found Joanna Baillie as fresh, natural, and amiable as ever, and as little like a tragic muse." And again in 1842:--"She is marvelous in health and spirit; not a bit deaf, blind, or torpid." About this time she published her last book, a volume of 'Fugitive Verses.'

"A sweeter picture of old age was never seen," wrote Harriet Martineau. "Her figure was small, light, and active; her countenance, in its expression of serenity, harmonized wonderfully with her gay conversation and her cheerful voice. Her eyes were beautiful, dark, bright, and penetrating, with the full innocent gaze of childhood. Her face was altogether comely, and her dress did justice to it. She wore her own silvery hair and a mob cap, with its delicate lace border fitting close around her face. She was well dressed, in handsome dark silks, and her lace caps and collars looked always new. No Quaker was ever neater, while she kept up with the times in her dress as in her habit of mind, as far as became her years. In her whole appearance there was always something for even the passing stranger to admire, and never anything for the most familiar friend to wish otherwise." She died, "without suffering, in the full possession of her faculties," in her ninetieth year, 1851.

Her dramatic and poetical works are collected in one volume (1843). Her Life, with selections from her songs, may be found in 'The Songstress of Scotland,' by Sarah Tytler and J.L. Watson (1871).

WOO'D AND MARRIED AND A'

The bride she is winsome and bonny, Her hair it is snooded sae sleek, And faithfu' and kind is her Johnny, Yet fast fa' the tears on her cheek. New pearlins are cause of her sorrow, New pearlins and plenishing too: The bride that has a' to borrow. Has e'en right mickle ado. Woo'd and married and a'! Woo'd and married and a'! Isna she very weel aff To be woo'd and married at a'?

Her mither then hastily spak:-- "The lassie is glaikit wi' pride; In my pouch I had never a plack On the day when I was a bride. E'en tak' to your wheel and be clever, And draw out your thread in the sun; The gear that is gifted, it never Will last like the gear that is won. Woo'd and married and a'! Wi' havins and tocher sae sma'! I think ye are very weel aff To be woo'd and married at a'!"

"Toot, toot!" quo' her gray-headed faither, "She's less o' a bride than a bairn; She's ta'en like a cout frae the heather, Wi' sense and discretion to learn. Half husband, I trow, and half daddy, As humor inconstantly leans, The chiel maun be patient and steady That yokes wi' a mate in her teens. A kerchief sae douce and sae neat, O'er her locks that the wind used to blaw! I'm baith like to laugh and to greet When I think o' her married at a'."

Then out spak' the wily bridegroom, Weel waled were his wordies I ween:-- "I'm rich, though my coffer be toom, Wi' the blinks o' your bonny blue e'en. I'm prouder o' thee by my side, Though thy ruffles or ribbons be few, Than if Kate o' the Croft were my bride, Wi' purfles and pearlins enow. Dear and dearest of ony! Ye're woo'd and buiket and a'! And do ye think scorn o' your Johnny, And grieve to be married at a'?"

She turn'd, and she blush'd, and she smil'd, And she looket sae bashfully down; The pride o' her heart was beguil'd, And she played wi' the sleeves o' her gown; She twirlet the tag o' her lace, And she nippet her bodice sae blue, Syne blinket sae sweet in his face, And aff like a maukin she flew. Woo'd and married and a'! Wi' Johnny to roose her and a'! She thinks hersel' very weel aff To be woo'd and married at a'!

IT WAS ON A MORN WHEN WE WERE THRANG

It was on a morn when we were thrang, The kirn it croon'd, the cheese was making, And bannocks on the girdle baking, When ane at the door chapp't loud and lang. Yet the auld gudewife, and her mays sae tight, Of a' this bauld din took sma' notice I ween; For a chap at the door in braid daylight Is no like a chap that's heard at e'en.

But the docksy auld laird of the Warlock glen, Wha waited without, half blate, half cheery, And langed for a sight o' his winsome deary, Raised up the latch and cam' crousely ben. His coat it was new, and his o'erlay was white, His mittens and hose were cozie and bien; But a wooer that comes in braid daylight Is no like a wooer that comes at e'en.

He greeted the carline and lasses sae braw, And his bare lyart pow sae smoothly he straikit, And he looket about, like a body half glaikit, On bonny sweet Nanny, the youngest of a'. "Ha, laird!" quo' the carline, "and look ye that way? Fye, let na' sie fancies bewilder you clean: An elderlin man, in the noon o' the day, Should be wiser than youngsters that come at e'en.

"Na, na," quo' the pawky auld wife, "I trow You'll no fash your head wi' a youthfu' gilly, As wild and as skeig as a muirland filly: Black Madge is far better and fitter for you." He hem'd and he haw'd, and he drew in his mouth, And he squeezed the blue bannet his twa hands between; For a wooer that comes when the sun's i' the south Is mair landward than wooers that come at e'en.

"Black Madge is sae carefu'"--"What's that to me?" "She's sober and cydent, has sense in her noodle; She's douce and respeckit"--"I carena a bodle: Love winna be guided, and fancy's free." Madge toss'd back her head wi' a saucy slight, And Nanny, loud laughing, ran out to the green; For a wooer that comes when the sun shines bright Is no like a wooer that comes at e'en.

Then away flung the laird, and loud mutter'd he, "A' the daughters of Eve, between Orkney and Tweed O! Black or fair, young or auld, dame or damsel or widow, May gang in their pride to the de'il for me!" But the auld gudewife, and her mays sae tight, Cared little for a' his stour banning, I ween; For a wooer that comes in braid daylight Is no like a wooer that comes at e'en.

FY, LET US A' TO THE WEDDING

(An Auld Sang, New Buskit)

Fy, let us a' to the wedding, For they will be lilting there; For Jock's to be married to Maggy, The lass wi' the gowden hair.

And there will be jibing and jeering, And glancing of bonny dark een, Loud laughing and smooth-gabbit speering O' questions baith pawky and keen.

And there will be Bessy the beauty, Wha raises her cockup sae hie, And giggles at preachings and duty,-- Guid grant that she gang na' ajee!

And there will be auld Geordie Taunner, Wha coft a young wife wi' his gowd; She'll flaunt wi' a silk gown upon her, But wow! he looks dowie and cow'd.

And brown Tibbey Fouler the Heiress Will perk at the tap o' the ha', Encircled wi' suitors, wha's care is To catch up her gloves when they fa',--

Repeat a' her jokes as they're cleckit, And haver and glower in her face, When tocherless mays are negleckit,-- A crying and scandalous case.

And Mysie, wha's clavering aunty Wud match her wi' Laurie the Laird, And learns the young fule to be vaunty, But neither to spin nor to caird.

And Andrew, wha's granny is yearning To see him a clerical blade, Was sent to the college for learning, And cam' back a coof as he gaed.

And there will be auld Widow Martin, That ca's hersel thritty and twa! And thraw-gabbit Madge, wha for certain Was jilted by Hab o' the Shaw.

And Elspy the sewster sae genty, A pattern of havens and sense. Will straik on her mittens sae dainty, And crack wi' Mess John i' the spence.

And Angus, the seer o' ferlies, That sits on the stane at his door, And tells about bogles, and mair lies Than tongue ever utter'd before.

And there will be Bauldy the boaster Sae ready wi' hands and wi' tongue; Proud Paty and silly Sam Foster, Wha quarrel wi' auld and wi' young:

And Hugh the town-writer, I'm thinking, That trades in his lawerly skill, Will egg on the fighting and drinking To bring after-grist to his mill;

And Maggy--na, na! we'll be civil, And let the wee bridie a-be; A vilipend tongue is the devil, And ne'er was encouraged by me.

Then fy, let us a' to the wedding, For they will be lilting there Frae mony a far-distant ha'ding, The fun and the feasting to share.

For they will get sheep's head, and haggis, And browst o' the barley-mow; E'en he that comes latest, and lag is, May feast upon dainties enow.

Veal florentines in the o'en baken, Weel plenish'd wi' raisins and fat; Beef, mutton, and chuckies, a' taken Het reeking frae spit and frae pat:

And glasses (I trow 'tis na' said ill), To drink the young couple good luck, Weel fill'd wi' a braw beechen ladle Frae punch-bowl as big as Dumbuck.

And then will come dancing and daffing, And reelin' and crossin' o' hans, Till even auld Lucky is laughing, As back by the aumry she stans.

Sic bobbing and flinging and whirling, While fiddlers are making their din; And pipers are droning and skirling As loud as the roar o' the lin.

Then fy, let us a' to the wedding, For they will be lilting there, For Jock's to be married to Maggy, The lass wi' the gowden hair.

THE WEARY PUND O' TOW

A young gudewife is in my house And thrifty means to be, But aye she's runnin' to the town Some ferlie there to see. The weary pund, the weary pund, the weary pund o' tow, I soothly think, ere it be spun, I'll wear a lyart pow.

And when she sets her to her wheel To draw her threads wi' care, In comes the chapman wi' his gear, And she can spin nae mair. The weary pund, etc.

And she, like ony merry may, At fairs maun still be seen, At kirkyard preachings near the tent, At dances on the green. The weary pund, etc.

Her dainty ear a fiddle charms, A bagpipe's her delight, But for the crooning o' her wheel She disna care a mite. The weary pund, etc.

You spake, my Kate, of snaw-white webs, Made o' your linkum twine, But, ah! I fear our bonny burn Will ne'er lave web o' thine. The weary pund, etc.

Nay, smile again, my winsome mate; Sic jeering means nae ill; Should I gae sarkless to my grave, I'll lo'e and bless thee still. The weary pund, etc.

FROM 'DE MONTFORT': A TRAGEDY