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The British Monarchy.

The learned professors of the rights of man regard prescription not as a title to bar all claim set up against old possession, but they look on prescription itself as a bar against the possessor and proprietor. They hold an immemorial possession to be no more than a long-continued and therefore an aggravated injustice. Such are their ideas, such their religion, and such their law. But as to our country and our race, as long as the wellcompacted structure of our church and state, the sanctuary, the holy of holies of that ancient law, defended by reverence, defended by power, a fortress at once and a temple, shall stand inviolate on the brow of the British Sion-as long as the British monarchy, not more limited than fenced by the orders of the state, shall, like the proud keep of Windsor, rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt with the double belt of its kindred and coeval towers-as long as this awful structure shall oversee and guard the subjected land, so long the mounds and dikes of the low fat Bedford Level will have nothing to fear from all the pickaxes of all the levellers of France. As long as our sovereign lord the king, and his faithful subjects, the lords and commons of this realm-the triple cord which no man can break; the solemn, sworn constitutional frankpledge of this nation; the firm guarantee of each other's being and each other's rights; the joint and several securities, each in its place and order for every kind and every quality of property and of dignity-as long as these endure, so long the Duke of Bedford is safe; and we are all safe together the high from the blights of envy and the spoliations of rapacity; the low from the iron hand of oppression and the insolent spurn of contempt.

(From the Reflections.)

From Burke's 'Letter to a Noble Lord' (the Duke of Bedford, who had opposed Burke's pension, 1796). I was not, like his Grace of Bedford, swaddled, and rocked, and dandled into a legislator-Nitor in adver sum is the motto for a man like me. I possessed not one of the qualities, nor cultivated one of the arts, that recommend men to the favour and protection of the great. I was not made for a minion or a tool. As little did I follow the trade of winning the hearts by imposing on the understandings of the people. At every step of my progress in life-for in every step was I traversed and opposed-and at every turnpike I met, I was obliged to shew my passport, and again and again to prove my sole title to the honour of being useful to my country, by a proof that I was not wholly unacquainted with its laws, and the whole system of its interests both abroad and at home. Otherwise, no rank, no toleration even for me. I had no arts but manly arts. On them I have stood, and, please God, in spite of the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale, to the last gasp will I stand. . . .

I know not how it has happened, but it really seems that, whilst his Grace was meditating his well-considered censure upon me, he fell into a sort of sleep. Homer nods, and the Duke of Bedford may dream; and as dreams-even his golden dreams-are apt to be ill-pieced and incongruously put together, his Grace preserved his idea of reproach to me, but took the subject-matter from the crown-grants to his own family. This is the stuff of which his dreams are made.' In that way of putting things together, his Grace is perfectly in the right. The grants to the house of Russell were so enormous as not

only to outrage economy, but even to stagger credibility. The Duke of Bedford is the leviathan among all the creatures of the crown. He tumbles about his unwieldy bulk; he plays and frolics in the ocean of the royal bounty. Huge as he is, and whilst 'he lies floating many a rood,' he is still a creature. His ribs, his fins, his whalebone, his blubber, the very spiracles through which he spouts a torrent of brine against his origin, and covers me all over with the spray-everything of him and about him is from the throne. Is it for him to question the dispensation of the royal favour?

I really am at a loss to draw any sort of parallel between the public merits of his Grace, by which he justifies the grants he holds, and these services of mine, on the favourable construction of which I have obtained what his Grace so much disapproves.

In private life, I have

not at all the honour of acquaintance with the noble Duke. But I ought to presume, and it costs me nothing to do so, that he abundantly deserves the esteem and love of all who live with him. But as to public service, why, truly, it would not be more ridiculous for me to compare myself in rank, in fortune, in splendid descent, in youth, strength, or figure, with the Duke of Bedford, than to make a parallel between his services and my attempts to be useful to my country. It would not be gross adulation, but uncivil irony, to say that he has any public merit of his own, to keep alive the idea of the services by which his vast landed pensions were obtained. My merits, whatever they are, are original and personal; his are derivative. It is his ancestor, the original pensioner, that has laid up this inexhaustible fund of merit, which makes his Grace so very delicate and exceptious about the merit of all other grantees of the crown. Had he permitted me to remain in quiet, I should have said: "Tis his estate; that's enough. It is his by law; what have I to do with it or its history?' He would naturally have said on his side: "Tis this man's fortune. He is as good now as my ancestor was two hundred and fifty years ago. I am a young man with very old pensions: he is an old man with very young pensions—that's all.'

Why will his Grace, by attacking me, force me reluctantly to compare my little merit with that which obtained from the crown those prodigies of profuse donation by which he tramples on the mediocrity of humble and laborious individuals? . . . Since the new grantees have war made on them by the old, and that the word of the sovereign is not to be taken, let us turn our eyes to history, in which great men have always a pleasure in contemplating the heroic origin

of their house.

The first peer of the name, the first purchaser of the grants, was a Mr Russell, a person of an ancient gentleman's family, raised by being a minion of Henry VIII. As there generally is some resemblance of character to create these relations, the favourite was in all likelihood much such another as his master. The first of those immoderate grants was not taken from the ancient demesne of the crown, but from the recent confiscation of the ancient nobility of the land. The lion having sucked the blood of his prey, threw the offal carcass to the jackal in waiting. Having tasted once the food of confiscation, the favourites became fierce and ravenous. This worthy favourite's first grant was from the lay nobility. The second, infinitely improving on the enor mity of the first, was from the plunder of the church.

In truth, his Grace is somewhat excusable for his dislike to a grant like mine, not only in its quantity, but in its kind, so different from his own.

Mine was from a mild and benevolent sovereign; his, from Henry VIII. Mine had not its fund in the murder of any innocent person of illustrious rank, or in the pillage of any body of unoffending men; his grants were from the aggregate and consolidated funds of judgments iniquitously legal, and from possessions voluntarily surrendered by the lawful proprietors with the gibbet at their door.

The merit of the grantee whom he derives from, was that of being a prompt and greedy instrument of a levelling tyrant, who oppressed all descriptions of his people, but who fell with particular fury on everything that was great and noble. Mine has been in endeavouring to screen every man, in every class, from oppression, and particularly in defending the high and eminent, who in the bad times of confiscating princes, confiscating chief-governors, or confiscating demagogues, are the most exposed to jealousy, avarice, and envy.

The merit of the original grantee of his Grace's pensions was in giving his hand to the work, and partaking the spoil with a prince who plundered a part of the national church of his time and country. Mine was in defending the whole of the national church of my own time and my own country, and the whole of the national churches of all countries, from the principles and the examples which lead to ecclesiastical pillage, thence to a contempt of all prescriptive titles, thence to the pillage of all property, and thence to universal desolation.

The merit of the origin of his Grace's fortune was in being a favourite and chief adviser to a prince who left no liberty to his native country. My endeavour was to obtain liberty for the municipal country in which I was born, and for all descriptions and denominations in it. Mine was to support, with unrelaxing vigilance, every right, every privilege, every franchise, in this my adopted, my dearer, and more comprehensive country; and not only to preserve those rights in this chief seat of empire, but in every nation, in every land, in every climate, language, and religion in the vast domain that still is under the protection, and the larger that was once under the protection, of the British crown. . . .

Had it pleased God to continue to me the hopes of succession, I should have been, according to my mediocrity, and the mediocrity of the age I live in, a sort of founder of a family; I should have left a son, who, in all the points in which personal merit can be viewed, in science, in erudition, in genius, in taste, in honour, in generosity, in humanity, in every liberal sentiment and every liberal accomplishment, would not have shewn himself inferior to the Duke of Bedford, or to any of those whom he traces in his line. His Grace very soon would have wanted all plausibility in his attack upon that provision which belonged more to mine than to me. He would soon have supplied every deficiency, and symmetrised every disproportion. It would not have been for that successor to resort to any stagnant wasting reservoir of merit in me, or in any ancestry. He had in himself a salient living spring of generous and manly action. Every day he lived, he would have repurchased the bounty of the crown, and ten times more, if ten times more he had received.

made a public creature, and had no enjoyment whatever but in the performance of some duty. At this exigent moment the loss of a finished man is not easily supplied.

But a Disposer, whose power we are little able to resist, and whose wisdom it behoves us not at all to dispute, has ordained it in another manner, and— whatever my querulous weakness might suggest-a far better. The storm has gone over me, and I lie like one of those old oaks which the late hurricane has scattered about me. I am stripped of all my honours; I am torn up by the roots, and lie prostrate on the earth! There, and prostrate there, I must unfeignedly recognise the divine justice, and in some degree submit to it. But whilst I humble myself before God, I do not know that it is forbidden to repel the attacks of unjust and inconsiderate men. The patience of Job is proverbial. After some of the convulsive struggles of our irritable nature, he submitted himself, and repented in dust and ashes. But even so, I do not find him blamed for reprehending, and with a considerable degree of verbal asperity, those ill-natured neighbours of his who visited his dunghill to read moral, political, and economical lectures on his misery. I am alone. I have none to meet my enemies in the gate. Indeed, my lord, I greatly deceive myself if in this hard season I would give a peck of refuse wheat for all that is called fame and honour in the world. This is the appetite but of a few. It is a luxury; it is a privilege; it is an indulgence for those who are at their ease. But we are all

of us made to shun disgrace, as we are made to shrink from pain, and poverty, and disease. It is an instinct; and under the direction of reason, instinct is always in the right. I live in an inverted order. They who ought to have succeeded me have gone before me; they who should have been to me as posterity are in the place of ancestors. I owe to the dearest relationwhich ever must subsist in memory-that act of piety which he would have performed to me; I owe it to him to shew that he was not descended, as the Duke of Bedford would have it, from an unworthy parent.

A collected edition of Burke's works appeared in 1792-1827; another with his Correspondence in 1852 (8 vols.); the Select Works in 1874-78 (3 vols. ed. Payne); his writings on Irish affairs in 1881 (ed. Matthew Arnold). See the Life by Prior (1824; 5th ed. 1854), J. Morley's longer (1867) and shorter (1879) monographs, and Lecky's History of England in the Eighteenth Century.

George Steevens (1736-1800), dramatic critic and biographer, was associated with Johnson in the second edition of his Shakespeare (1773), which was republished with additions by Malone in 1780. In 1793 he published a completely new edition of Shakespeare, in which, instead of showing 'servile adherence to the ancient copies,' he took large liberties with the text, such as 'the expulsion of useless and supernumerary syllables, and an occasional supply of such as might fortuitously have been omitted.' He was acute and well read in dramatic literature, but prone to literary mystification, and, according to Johnson, was mischievous though not malignant. He it was who concocted the famous legend of the deathdealing terrors of the upas-tree, which so comHe was pletely hoaxed Erasmus Darwin (see page 576).

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Edward Gibbon,

historian of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was by birth, education, and social standing distinctively an English gentleman; his father's family being an ancient Kentish house, though not (as Sir Egerton Brydges argued) descended from the Barons Say and Seale. Born at Putney, 27th April 1737, Gibbon was at first, on account of delicate health, privately educated; at fifteen he was entered of Magdalen College, Oxford. Almost from infancy he was a close student, but his indiscriminate appetite for books 'subsided by

EDWARD GIBBON.

From an Engraving after the Portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds.

degrees in the historic line.' He arrived at Oxford, he has himself told us, with a stock of erudition that might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a schoolboy would have been ashamed; and he spent fourteen months at college idly and unprofitably. At no period in its history had Oxford reached such a depth of degeneracy. 'The fellows of my time,' says Gibbon, 'were decent easy men who supinely enjoyed the gifts of the founder; their days were filled by a series of uniform employments; the chapel and the hall, the coffee-house and the common room, till they retired, weary and well satisfied, to a long slumber. From the toil of reading, or thinking, or writing, they had absolved their conscience; and the first

shoots of learning and ingenuity withered in the ground, without yielding any fruits to the owners or the public. . . . Their conversation stagnated in a round of college business, Tory politics, personal anecdotes, and private scandal; their dull and deep potations excused the brisk intemperance of youth; and their constitutional toasts were not expressive of the most lively loyalty for the house of Hanover.' After studying Bossuet and Parsons the Jesuit, young Gibbon became a convert to the Roman Catholic religion; and at the feet of a priest in London, on the 8th of June 1753, he 'solemnly, though privately, abjured the errors of heresy.' In order to reclaim him his father placed him under the care of the deist and poet Mallet, by whose philosophy the young inquirer was rather scandalised than reclaimed. He was next sent for some years to Lausanne to be under the charge of M. Pavilliard, a Calvinist clergyman, whose judicious guidance brought his pupil back to Protestantism; and on Christmas Day 1754 he received the sacrament in the Protestant church at Lausanne. 'It was here that I suspended my religious inquiries, acquiescing with implicit belief in the tenets and mysteries which are adopted by the general consent of Catholics and Protestants.' Here he began and carried out with rare steadfastness of purpose those studies in French literature and in the Latin classics which, aided by his prodigious memory, made him a master of erudition without a superior. And here too he fell in love with Mademoiselle Suzanne Curchod, the beautiful and accomplished daughter of the minister of Crassy, who lived to become the wife of the great French Minister and financier, M. Necker, and the mother of the gifted Madame de Staël. He found on his return to England that his father would not hear of the 'strange alliance,' and, like the more emotional Chateaubriand in the same case, submitted meekly to the family law. In the calm reflection of thirty years later he adds, 'After a painful struggle I yielded to my fate; I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son; my wound was insensibly healed by time, absence, and the habits of a new life.' The pair remained constant friends in later life.

In 1758 Gibbon returned to England, and three years afterwards appeared as an author in a slight French treatise on the study of literature. He accepted the commission of captain in the Hampshire militia; and though his studies were interrupted, 'the discipline and evolutions of a modern battle gave me a clearer notion of the phalanx and the legion, and the captain of the Hampshire grenadiers was not useless to the historian of the Roman Empire.' Released from his military duties at the peace of 1762, he paid a visit to France and Italy. He had long been meditating some historical work, and whilst at Rome in 1764 his choice was determined. As I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the temple of

[graphic]

Jupiter, the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started into my mind;' but years were to elapse before he realised his intentions. On returning to England in 1765 he seems to have been fashionable and idle; his father died in 1770, and he then began to form the plan of an independent life. The Hampshire estate of Buriton, his home off and on for the last twenty years, was left by his father much in debt, so that he determined to quit the country and live in London ; and it was then he undertook the first volume of his history. At the outset all was dark and doubtful even the title of the work, the true era of the decline and fall of the empire, the limits of the introduction, the division of the chapters, and the order of the narrative; and I was often tempted to cast away the labour of seven years. The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise. Many experiments were made before I could hit the middle tone between a dull chronicle and a rhetorical declamation : three times did I compose the first chapter, and twice the second and third, before I was tolerably satisfied with their effect.'

In 1774 he was returned for the borough of Liskeard, and sat in Parliament eight sessions during the memorable contest between Great Britain and America. Prudence, he says, condemned him to acquiesce in the humble station of a mute; the great speakers filled him with despair, the bad ones with terror. But he supported by his vote the administration of Lord North, by whom he was appointed one of the Lords Commissioners of Trade and Plantations. In 1776, after seven years of unremitting toil and much fastidious polishing of the style, the first quarto volume of his history was given to the world. For a grave historical work, its success was almost unprecedented: 'The first impression was exhausted in a few days; a second and third edition were scarcely adequate to the demand; and the bookseller's property was twice invaded by the pirates of Dublin: the book was on every table, and almost on every toilette.' His elder brother-historians, Hume and Robertson, generously greeted him with warm applause. 'Whether I consider the dignity of your style,' said Hume, 'the depth of your matter, or the extensiveness of your learning, I must regard the work as equally the object of esteem.' There was another bond of sympathy between the English and the senior of the Scottish historians Gibbon had unmistakably worked from quite anti-orthodox views as to the origins of Christianity. 'The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful.' This dictum pretty clearly indicates Gibbon's own religious belief: the philosophers of France had triumphed over the Calvinist divinity of Lausanne. Gibbon treated the growth of

Christianity as he did other historical phenomena, without reference to supernatural guidance; and his own temperament intensified the eighteenth century distrust and dislike of 'enthusiasm :' self-devoting zeal was hardly distinguished from fanaticism. It was not for some time that the religious world awakened to the very far-reaching issues of Gibbon's view of the growth and spread of Christianity in the fifteenth and sixteenthchapters, which, while not formally denying the convincing evidence of the doctrine itself, and the ruling providence of its great author,' nevertheless accounted for the rapid growth of the early Christian Church by 'secondary' or merely human causes. Of these Gibbon reckoned five: the inflexible and intolerant zeal of the Christians, the doctrine of a future life, the miraculous powers ascribed to the primitive Church, the virtues of the primitive Christians, and the union and discipline of the Christian republic. Ere long fierce controversy inevitably arose, and, as in the debates about Darwinism in the next century, thousands took a keen interest in the discussion and a strong side against the innovator who never had in their hands the book that raised the questions. Deism, supposed to have been routed from the field by the orthodox, had reasserted itself in a more formidable shape, and multitudes of answers' to Gibbon were written-perhaps the most noteworthy that by Watson, Bishop of Llandaff. But Gibbon deigned to reply only when a critic-the unfortunate Mr Davies of Oxford '-impugned 'not the faith but the fidelity of the historian.'

The author's modest claim for himself in the matter of style was amply justified: the stately and rhythmical roll of his sonorous periods stood out in contrast to anything yet attempted in English prose; though antithesis of sense and balance of phrase were at times too insistent, the style, in wonderful accord with the majestic and continuous march of the story, was at once less artificial and more English than Johnson's, more harmonious, more varied, and less tedious than Johnson is apt to become.

The second and third volumes of the history did not appear till 1781. After their publication, being disappointed of a place looked for from Ministerial patronage, Gibbon resolved to retire to Lausanne, where he was offered a residence by a friend of his youth, M. Deyverdun. Here he lived very happily for about four years, devoting his mornings to composition, and his evenings to the enlightened and polished society which had gathered in that city and neighbourhood. The completion of the history must be described in his own memorable words: 'It was on the day, or rather night, of the 27th of June 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last page in a summer-house in my garden. After laying down my pen, I took several turns in a berceau, or covered walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of the country,

the lake, and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all nature was silent. I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and perhaps the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that, whatsoever might be the future date of my history, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.' The house occupied by Gibbon, wholly or partly rebuilt, is now a muchfrequented hotel, called by the historian's name ; the acacia walk still commands substantially the same glorious view.

A month later he started for England to superintend the printing of the work; and the last three volumes were issued in the May of 1788. He returned immediately to Lausanne, where within a twelvemonth his much-loved companion Deyverdun died. The state of France filled him with trouble, though it was some solace to have the exiled Neckers beside him at Coppet near Lausanne; the letters between his old love and himself are creditable in the highest degree to the hearts of both. But his last years were not happy; good living and want of exercise had brought on burdensome corpulency, and he began to be racked with gout. His aunt had already died in 1786, Deyverdun and other favourite friends had quickly followed; last came the unexpected death of his dear friend, Lady Sheffield, and though travelling was now terrible to him, he made up his mind to go to console Lord Sheffield. After three months' stay at Sheffield Place, he came to London, where he was seized with dropsy. An operation gave temporary relief, but two months later he died, on the 16th of January 1794.

The work of Gibbon was translated into French by Leclerc de Septchênes and others (1788-95)— partly, it would seem, by Louis XVI., whose secretary Septchênes was. The whole was re-edited in 1812 by Suard, with notes by Guizot (not yet professor or statesman), who, like a devout Huguenot, took at first a very unfavourable view of Gibbon's attitude on the Christian problem, holding him guilty not merely of prejudice, but of serious errors. Later he said: 'A second attentive and regular perusal of the entire work, of the notes of the author, and of those which I had thought it right to subjoin, showed me how much I had exaggerated the importance of the reproaches which Gibbon really deserved; I was struck with the same errors, the same partiality on certain subjects; but I had been far from doing adequate justice to the immensity of his researches, the variety of his knowledge, and, above all, to that truly philosophical discrimination which judges the past as it would judge the present.'

Dean Milman was even more adverse to Gibbon than Guizot: 'Christianity alone receives

no embellishment from the magic of Gibbon's language; his imagination is dead to its moral dignity; it is kept down by a general tone of jealous disparagement, or neutralised by a painfully elaborate exposition of its darker and degenerate periods. . . . This inextricable bias appears even to influence his manner of composition. . . . The successes of barbarous energy and brute force call forth all the consummate skill of composition, while the moral triumphs of Christian benevolence, the tranquil heroism of endurance, the blameless purity, the contempt of guilty fame and of honours destructive to the human race, which, had they assumed the proud name of philosophy, would have been blazoned in his brightest words, because they own religion as their principle, sink into narrow asceticism. The glories of Christianity, in short, touch on no chord in the heart of the writer; his imagination remains unkindled ; his words, though they maintain their stately and measured march, have become cool, argumentative, and inanimate.'

Mr Bury, a more impartial judge, treats Milman's general charge against Gibbon of 'a bold and disingenuous attack on Christianity' as a libel impossible to prove or disprove. Gibbon's irony was thoroughly sincere; his contempt for enthusiasm largely a reflection of the temper of his times-was shown towards anti-Christian fanaticism as well as towards Christian fervour. 'The guiding moral of his history is briefly stated in his epigram, "I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion;"' the historical development from the second century was a retrogression for which Christianity was mainly to blame. But to attempt to deny a general truth in Gibbon's point of view is vain, and it is feeble to deprecate his sneer. We may spare more sympathy for the warriors and the churchmen; but all that has since been added to his knowledge of facts has neither reversed nor blunted the point of the Decline and Fall: If Gibbon were writing now, 'his manner would not be that of sometimes open, sometimes transparently veiled dislike; he would rather assume an attitude of detachment.' Neither the historian nor the man of letters 'will any longer subscribe without a thousand reserves to the theological chapters,' and 'no discreet inquirer would go there for his ecclesiastical history.' Yet Mr Bury even holds that Gibbon's success has in large measure been due to his scorn for the Church, which 'spiced the book' and excited interest by irritating the passions of readers. His works are read when those of his contemporaries are left on the shelf because of 'his accurate vision, his tact in managing perspective; his discreet reserves of judgment and timely scepticism; the immortal affectation of his unique manner.' Gibbon's diligent accuracy in the use of his materials cannot be overpraised, and it will not be diminished by giving due credit to his French predecessor Tillemont. Gibbon was accu

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