1This technical term, designating the class of youthful loungers, was a new term in 1596, when Sir John Davis wrote his “Epigrams”—“Oft in my laughing rimes I name aGull,But thisnew termewill many questions breed;Therefore, at first, I will expresse at fullWho is a true and perfect Gull indeed.”His delineation is admirable; Gifford, in his “Jonson,” quotes it at length,—i. 14. But whoever may be curious about these masculine “birds” will be initiated into the mysteries of “Gullery” by “The Gulls’ Horn-book” ofDekker, of which we have a beautiful edition, with appropriate embellishments, by Dr. Nott.2Dr. Bliss has given an excellent edition of Bishop Earle’s “Microcosmography, or a Piece of the World Discovered in Essays and Characters.”3Every atom of candour is to be grudged to this hapless monarch; it is lamentable to see such a writer as Mr. Hallam prompt instantly to confirm a mere suggestion of Mr. Collier, that James could never have written a letter to Shakespeare, incapacitated to sympathize with the genial effusions of our poet.
1This technical term, designating the class of youthful loungers, was a new term in 1596, when Sir John Davis wrote his “Epigrams”—
“Oft in my laughing rimes I name aGull,But thisnew termewill many questions breed;Therefore, at first, I will expresse at fullWho is a true and perfect Gull indeed.”
“Oft in my laughing rimes I name aGull,
But thisnew termewill many questions breed;
Therefore, at first, I will expresse at full
Who is a true and perfect Gull indeed.”
His delineation is admirable; Gifford, in his “Jonson,” quotes it at length,—i. 14. But whoever may be curious about these masculine “birds” will be initiated into the mysteries of “Gullery” by “The Gulls’ Horn-book” ofDekker, of which we have a beautiful edition, with appropriate embellishments, by Dr. Nott.
2Dr. Bliss has given an excellent edition of Bishop Earle’s “Microcosmography, or a Piece of the World Discovered in Essays and Characters.”
3Every atom of candour is to be grudged to this hapless monarch; it is lamentable to see such a writer as Mr. Hallam prompt instantly to confirm a mere suggestion of Mr. Collier, that James could never have written a letter to Shakespeare, incapacitated to sympathize with the genial effusions of our poet.
THE AGE OF DOCTRINES.
Wenow leave the age of Imagination for the age of Doctrines; we have entered into another reign; and, a new epoch arises in our Literature, our tastes, and our manners.
We turn from the noble wrestlings of power, the stirrings of adventure, and the commanding genius of the Maiden Queen, to the uninterrupted level of a long protracted tranquillity; a fat soil, where all flourished to the eye, while it grew into rankness, and an atmosphere of corruption; breeding, in its unnatural heat, clouds of insects. A monarch arrived in the flush of new dominion with a small people, who, as an honest soul among them said, “having been forty years in the desert, were rushing to take possession of the promised land.” All was to be the festival of an unbroken repose—a court of shows and sports, the rejoicings of three kingdoms.
But the queen, with these dominions, had bequeathed her successor two troublesome legacies, in two redoubtable portions of the English public; both the Romanists, and those numerous dissenters, emphatically called Puritans, were looking up to the new monarch, while the “true protestants of Elizabeth” closed not their eyes in watchfulness over both papist and presbyter.
To the monarch from the Kirk of Scotland, which he had extolled for “the sincerest Kirk in the world,” as suited a Scottish sovereign, and who had once glanced with a presbyter’s eye on “an evil mass in England,” the English bishops hastened to offer the loyalty of their church. His more ancient acquaintance, the puritans, were not behind the bishops, nor without hope, to settle what they held to be “the purity” of church discipline; but James had drunk large draughts of a Scottish presbytery, and knew what lay at the bottom—he had tasted the dregs. He did not like the puritans, and he told them why; to unking and to unbishop was “the parity” of their petty model of Geneva. The new monarchdeclared, perhaps he would not otherwise have been received, that “he came to maintain what the queen had established,”—he demanded from the puritans conformity to the State, and probably little imagined that they preferred martyrdom. James lived to see the day when silencing, ejecting, and expatiating, ended in no other conformity than the common sufferings of the party.1
The claims of the Romanists were more tender than those of the sons of John Knox; they prayed only for a toleration. The monarch, delayed what he dared not concede. He is charged by the non-conformist with being “very charitable” to these votaries of an indefeasible right of monarchy, and his project of “meeting them half-way” startled the English protestant. What does the king mean? Are our doctrines the same? are we to return to the confessional? purchase plenary pardons? require absolution and the salvation of souls from the bishop of Rome?
The main objection of the king himself to what he styled “the corruption of the mother-church,” was the papal supremacy, and its pretended power of deposing monarchs, or of granting a dispensation for their murder. Here the popular patriot exclaimed, “Was the great revolution of civil liberty made only for the prince’s safety?” Whatever might be this reverie of a coalition with Rome, Rome for ever baffled it, by the never-ceasing principle of her one and indivisible divine autocracy. “The celestial court,” omnipotent and omniscient, hurled its bolt at the pacific heretic of England. It menaced his title, while its priests busily inculcated that “anything may be done against heretics, because they are worse than Turks and infidels;” then barrels of gunpowder were placed under his throne, and the papal breves equally shook his dominion by absolving the Romanists of England from their oath of allegiance. The English monarch chose to be the advocate of his own cause, to vindicate his regal rights, and to protest before all Europe against this monstrous usurpation. He wrote “The Apology for the Oath of Allegiance,” and we must concede to his tract this merit, that if the cause were small, boundless andenduring was the effect. In every country in Europe, through all the ranks of the learned, and for many a year, this effusion of James occupied the pens alike of the advocates of the apostolical court, and of the promulgators of the emancipation of mankind;2nor is it remotely connected with the noble genius of Paul Sarpi, whose great work was first published in London, and patronized by the English monarch.
It was on a nation divided into unequal parts of irreconcileable opinions that James conferred the dubious blessing of a long peace; for twenty years there were no wars but the battle of pens, and the long artillery of a hundred volumes.
Polemical studies become political when the heads of parties mask themselves under some particular doctrine. Opinion only can neutralize opinion; but in the age of doctrines before us, authority was considered stronger than opinion, and in their unsettled notions and contested principles, each party seemed to itself impregnable. Every Æneas brandished his weapon, but could never wound the flitting chimeras. It was in the spirit of the age that Dr. Sutcliffe, the Dean of Exeter, laid the foundations of a college for controversies or disputations at Chelsea, on the banks of the quiet Thames. In this institution the provost and the fellows were unceasingly to answer the Romanist and the Mar-Prelate. The fervent dean scraped together all his properties in many an odd shape to endow it, obtained a charter, and obscured his own name by calling it “King James’s College.” He lived to see a small building begun, but which, like the controversies, was not to be finished. A college for controversy verily required inexhaustible funds. When the day arrived that those became the masters whom those dogmatists had so constantly refuted, the controversial college was oddly changed into a manufactory of leather-guns, which probably were not more efficacious.
James ascended the English throne as a poor man comes to a large inheritance. In securing peace he deemed he had granted the people all they desired, and he wasthe only monarch who cast a generous thought on their social recreations. That image of peace and of delight was to be reflected in the court: and in that enchanted circle of flattery and of hope, the silvery voices of his silken parasites told how “he gave like a king;” but he himself, a man of simple habits, with an utter carelessness of money, learned a lesson which he never rightly comprehended, how an exchequer might be voided.
James was a polemical monarch when polemics were political. But what creed or system did this royal polemic wholly adopt? Born of Roman Catholic parents and not abhorrent to the mother-church, for the childhood of antiquity had its charms for him; brought up among the Scottish presbyterians, with whom he served a long accommodating apprenticeship of royalty, and with the doctrines of the Anglican Church become the sovereign of three realms, did James, like his brother of France, modify his creed, for a crown, by the state-religion?
Behold this luckless philosopher on the throne closing the last accompts of his royalty with nothing but zeros in his own favour. By puritans hated, by Romanists misliked, and surrounded by trains of the “blue-bonnets,” who were acted on the stage, and balladed in the streets; little gracious with his English subjects, to whom from the first “the coming-in” seemed as much like an invasion as an accession; never forgiven by the foreigner for his insular genius, whose pacific policy refused to enter into a project of visionary conquest; and finally falling into a new age, when the monarch, reduced to a mere metaphysical abstraction, whose prerogative and privilege were alike indefinite, had to wrestle with “the five hundred kings,” as James once called the Commons; deservedly or undeservedly, this monarch for all parties was a convenient subject for panegyric or for libel, true or false.
But in reality what was the character of James the First? Where shall we find it?3
1James granted to the Puritans the public discussion then prayed for—the famous conference at Hampton Court.2A curious list of some of the more remarkable controversialists on both sides may be found in Irving’s “Lives of the Scottish Poets,” ii. 234.3I have at least honestly attempted “An Inquiry into the Literary and Political Character of James the First.”
1James granted to the Puritans the public discussion then prayed for—the famous conference at Hampton Court.
2A curious list of some of the more remarkable controversialists on both sides may be found in Irving’s “Lives of the Scottish Poets,” ii. 234.
3I have at least honestly attempted “An Inquiry into the Literary and Political Character of James the First.”
PAMPHLETS.
Pamphlets,those leaves of the hour, and volumes of a season and even of a week, slight and evanescent things as they appear, and scorned at by opposite parties, while each cherishes their own, are in truth the records of the public mind, the secret history of a people which does not always appear in the more open narrative; the true bent and temper of the times, the contending interests, the appeal of a party, or the voice of the nation, are nowhere so vividly brought before us as by these advocates of their own cause, too deeply interested to disguise their designs, and too contracted in their space to omit their essential points.
Of all the nations of Europe our country first offered a rapid succession of these busy records of men’s thoughts, their contending interests, their mightier passions, their aspirations, and sometimes even their follies. Wherever pamphlets abound there is freedom, and therefore have we been a nation of pamphleteers. Even at the time when the press was not yet free, an invincible pamphlet struck a terror; the establishment of the Anglican Church under Elizabeth disturbed the little synagogue of puritans, and provoked the fury of the Mar-Prelate pamphlets; the pacific reign of James covered the land with a new harvest of agricultural pamphlets; but when we entered on an age when men thought what they listed, and wrote what they thought, pamphlets ran through the land, and then the philosophical speculator on human affairs read what had never before been written; the troubles of Charles the First and the nation sounded the trumpet of civil war by the blast of pamphlets; state-plots and state-cabals were hatched at least by the press, under the second Charles, and popery and arbitrary government terrified the nation by their pamphlets; the principles of English government and toleration expanded in the pamphlets of the reign of William the Third, even Locke’s Treatises on Toleration and on Government were at first but pamphlets; andunder Anne the nation observed the light skirmishes of Whig and Tory pamphlets.
Our neighbours in their great revolutionary agitation, if they could not comprehend our constitution, imitated our arts of insurgency, and from the same impulses at length rivalled us; but the very term of pamphlet is English; and the practice seemed to them so novel, that a recent French biographer designates an early period of the French revolution as one when “the art ofPAMPHLETShad not yet reached perfection.”
The history of pamphlets would form an extraordinary history; but whoever gathers a history from pamphlets must prepare for contradiction. Rushworth had formed a great collection to supply the materials of his volumes, but speaks slightly of them, while insinuating his own sagacity in separating truth from falsehood; but he concluded “very suspiciously,” observed Oldys, that none need trouble themselves with any further examination than what he had been pleased to make. This suspicion was more manifest when Nalson began another collection from pamphlets to shake the evidence of the pamphlets of Rushworth. Each had found what he craved for; for whoever will look only into those on his favourite side, finds enough written with his own passions, but he will obtain little extension of knowledge, for this is much like looking at his own face in the glass.
But we must not consider pamphlets wholly in a political view; their circuit is boundless, holding all the world of man; they enter into every object of human interest. The silent revolutions in manners, language, habits, are there to be traced; the interest which was taken on novel objects of discovery would be wholly lost were it not for these records; and, indeed, it is the multiplicity of pamphlets on a particular topic or object which appear at a particular period, that offer the truest picture of public opinion.
Those who would not dare to compose a volume have fluttered in the leaves of a pamphlet. Three or four ideas are a good stock to set up a pamphlet, and look well in it, as picked wares in a shop-window. The mute who cannot speak at a dinner or on the hustings, is eloquent in a pamphlet; and he who speaks only to excite the murmursof his auditors, amply vindicates himself by a pamphlet. I doubt whether there is a single important subject to which some English pamphlet may not form a necessary supplement. Many eminent in rank, or who, from their position, have never written anything else, have written a pamphlet; and as the motive must he urgent which induces any such to have recourse to their pen, so the matter is of deeper interest; and it has often happened that the public have thence derived information which else had not reached them. The heads of parties have sometimes issued these manifestoes; and the tails, in the form of a pamphlet, have sometimes let out secrets for which they have been reprimanded.
Some of the most original conceptions, whose very errors or peculiarities even may instruct, lie hidden in pamphlets. These effusions of a more permanent nature than those of politics, are usually literary, scientific, or artistical, the spontaneous productions of amateurs, the precious suggestions, and sometimes the original discoveries of taste or enthusiasm. These are thedeliciæof the amenities of literature; and such pamphlets have often escaped our notice, since their writers were not authors, and had no works of their own among which to shelter them.
The age of Charles the First may becharacterisedas the age of pamphlets. Of that remarkable period, we possess an extraordinary collection, which amounts to about thirty thousand pieces, uniformly bound in two thousand volumes of various sizes, accompanied by twelve folio volumes of the catalogue chronologically arranged, exhibiting their full titles. Even the date of the day is noted when each pamphlet was published. It includes a hundred in manuscript written on the king’s side, which at the time were not allowed to be printed. The formation of this collection is a romantic incident in the annals of Bibliography.
In that critical year, 1640, a bookseller of the name of Thomason conceived the idea of preserving, in that new age of contested principles, an unbroken chain of men’s arguments, and men’s doings. We may suppose that this collector, commencing with the year 1640, and continuing without omission or interruption to the year 1660, could not at first have imagined the vast career he had to run; there was, perhaps, sagacity in the first thought, butthere was far more intrepidity in never relinquishing this favourite object during these perilous twenty years, amid a conflict of costly expenditure, of personal danger, and almost insurmountable difficulties.
The design was carried on in secrecy through confidential servants, who at first buried the volumes as they collected them; but they soon became too numerous for such a mode of concealment. The owner, dreading that the ruling government would seize on the collection, watched the movements of the army of the Commonwealth, and carried this itinerant library in every opposite direction. Many were its removals, northward or westward, but the danger became so great, and the collection so bulky, that he had at one time an intention to pass them over into Holland, but feared to trust his treasure to the waves. He at length determined to place them in his warehouses, in the form of tables round the room, covered with canvas. It is evident that the loyalty of the man had rendered him a suspected person; for he was once dragged from his bed, and imprisoned for seven weeks, during which time, however, the collection suffered no interruption, nor was the secret betrayed.
The secret was, however, evidently not unknown to some faithful servants of the king; for when, in 1647, his Majesty at Hampton Court desired to see a particular pamphlet, it was obtained for him from this collection, though the collector was somewhat chary of the loan, fearing the loss of what he felt as a limb of his body, not probably recoverable. The king had the volume with him in his flight towards the Isle of Wight; but it was returned to the owner, with his Majesty’s earnest exhortation, that he should diligently continue the collection. A slight accident which happened to the volume occasioned the collector to leave this interesting incident on record.1
When Cromwell ruled, a place of greater security was sought for than the owner’s warehouses: a fictitious sale was made to the University of Oxford, who would be more able to struggle for their preservation than a private individual, if the Protector discovered and claimed these distracted documents of the history of his own times.
Mr. Thomason lived to complete his design; he witnessed the restoration, and died in 1666, leaving his important collection, which was still lodged at Oxford, and which he describes in his will “as not to be paralleled,” in trust to be sold for the benefit of his children. His will affords an evidence that he was a person of warm patriotic feelings, with a singular turn of mind, for he left a stipend of forty shillings for two sermons to be annually preached, one of which was to commemorate the destruction of the Armada.
The collection continued at Oxford many years awaitinga purchaser;2and at length appears to have been bought by Mearne, “the king’s stationer,” at the command of the Secretary of State for Charles the Second; but Charles, who would little value old pamphlets, and more particularly these, which only reminded him of such mortifying occurrences, by an order in council in 1684 munificently allowed the widow of Mearne to dispose of them as well as she could. In 1709 we find them offered to Lord Weymouth,3and in 1732 they were still undisposed of; but in those times of loyal rebellion, either for the assumption or the restoration of the throne, that of the Commonwealth excited so little interest, and this extraordinary collection was so depreciated, that Oldys then considered it would not reach the twentieth part of the four thousand pounds which it was said that the collector had once refused for it.4In 1745 a representative of the Mearne family still held the volumes,5and eventually they werepurchased at the small price of three or four hundred pounds by George the Third, and by him were presented to the national library, where they now bear the name of the King’s Pamphlets.
Thus having escaped from seizure and dispersion, this noble collection remained in the hands of those who priced it as a valueless incumbrance, and yet seem to have respected the object of the enterprise, for they preserved it entire. It may be some consolation to such intrepid collectors that their intelligence and their fervour are not in vain, and however they may fail in the attainment of their motive, a great end may fortunately be achieved.
1In vol. 100, small quarto, we find the following memorandum:—“Mem’dum that CollWill Legg and Mr. Arthur Treavor were employed by his MajeseK. Ch. to gett for his present use a pamphltwhich his majestie had then occasion to make use of, & not meeting with it, they both come to me, having heard that I did employ myself to rake up all such things from the beginning of that Parliament, and finding it with me, told me it was for his majestys own use. I told them all I had were at his majycommand and service, & withal told them if I should part with it & loose it—presuming that when his majestie had done with it, that little account would be made of it, and that if I should loose it, by that loss a limb of my collection, which I should be very loath to see, well knowing it would be impossible to supplie it if it should happen to be lost; with which answer they returned to his majeseat Hampton Ct(as I take it) & tould him they had found the person which had it, & withal how loath he that had it was to part with it, he much fearing its loss. Whereupon they came to me again from his majeto tell me that upon the word of a king (to use the king’s own expressions) they would safely return it, whereupon immediately by them I sent it to his majestie. Who having done with it, & having it with him when he was going towards the Isle of Wight, let it fall in thedurt, and then calling for the two persons (who attended him) delivered it to them with a charge as they would answer it another day, that they should both speedily & safely return it to him from whom they had received it, and withal to desire the party to go on & continue what had begun. Which book, together with his Majtiessignification to me, by these worthy and faithful gents, I received both speedily and safely. My volume hath that mark of honour which no other volume in my collection hath, & vydiligently and carefully I continued the same until that most hapie restoration & coronation of his most gratious majestie King Charle ye2d, whom God long preserve.“Geo. Thomason.”The volume bears the “honours” of its mischance. There are a great number of stains on the edges of the leaves—some more than an inch in depth. The accident must have happened on the road in the king’s flight, from the marks of the mud.2In 1676, Dr. Barlow, one of the trustees, writes to the Rev. George Thomason, who was a Fellow of Queen’s College and the eldest son of the collector, respecting the collection and its value. The letter is printed in Beloe’s “Anecdotes of Literature,” vol. ii.3A letter from Dr. Jenkin, who was chaplain to Lord Weymouth, to Mr. Baker, Dec. 3, 1709:—“There is another rarity then to be sold, which is proffered to my lord—a Collection of Pamphlets, in number 30,000, bound in 2000 volumes. The collection was begun by Charles 1st in 1640, and continued to 1660. In a printed paper, where I saw this account, it is said the collectors refused 4000l.for them.”—Masters’ Life of Rev. Thomas Baker, p. 28.4“Phœnix Britannicus,”—“Oldys’ Dissertation upon Pamphlets,” p. 556. Oldys drew up an account of these pamphlets from “The Memoirs of the Curious,” published in 1701. He says, that the Collection was made byTomlinson, the bookseller, and the Catalogue by Marmaduke Foster, the auctioneer; and relates a traditional story, that it is reported that Charles the First gave ten pounds for reading one of these pamphlets, at the owner’s house in St. Paul’s Churchyard. This collection was not commenced until Nov. 1640, and the king left London in Jan. 1642; during this time the collection could not be very numerous, nor would there be that difficulty in seeing a pamphlet as at the subsequent more distracted period. It is curious to trace the origin of traditionary tales; they often stand on a rickety foundation. We find that the king did borrow a pamphlet, but at a time when he could not hasten to St. Paul’s Churchyard to read it; we may presume that the bookseller did not charge his majesty so disloyal a price as ten pounds for the perusal of a single pamphlet; he probably received only the king’s approbation of his design, which doubtless was no slight stimulus to its completion.5A Mr. Sisson, a druggist in Ludgate-street, who died in 1749; they then became the property of his relative; Miss Sisson, who seems gladly to have disburdened herself of this domestic grievance in 1761.—Hollis’ Memoirs, p. 121.
1In vol. 100, small quarto, we find the following memorandum:—
“Mem’dum that CollWill Legg and Mr. Arthur Treavor were employed by his MajeseK. Ch. to gett for his present use a pamphltwhich his majestie had then occasion to make use of, & not meeting with it, they both come to me, having heard that I did employ myself to rake up all such things from the beginning of that Parliament, and finding it with me, told me it was for his majestys own use. I told them all I had were at his majycommand and service, & withal told them if I should part with it & loose it—presuming that when his majestie had done with it, that little account would be made of it, and that if I should loose it, by that loss a limb of my collection, which I should be very loath to see, well knowing it would be impossible to supplie it if it should happen to be lost; with which answer they returned to his majeseat Hampton Ct(as I take it) & tould him they had found the person which had it, & withal how loath he that had it was to part with it, he much fearing its loss. Whereupon they came to me again from his majeto tell me that upon the word of a king (to use the king’s own expressions) they would safely return it, whereupon immediately by them I sent it to his majestie. Who having done with it, & having it with him when he was going towards the Isle of Wight, let it fall in thedurt, and then calling for the two persons (who attended him) delivered it to them with a charge as they would answer it another day, that they should both speedily & safely return it to him from whom they had received it, and withal to desire the party to go on & continue what had begun. Which book, together with his Majtiessignification to me, by these worthy and faithful gents, I received both speedily and safely. My volume hath that mark of honour which no other volume in my collection hath, & vydiligently and carefully I continued the same until that most hapie restoration & coronation of his most gratious majestie King Charle ye2d, whom God long preserve.
“Geo. Thomason.”
The volume bears the “honours” of its mischance. There are a great number of stains on the edges of the leaves—some more than an inch in depth. The accident must have happened on the road in the king’s flight, from the marks of the mud.
2In 1676, Dr. Barlow, one of the trustees, writes to the Rev. George Thomason, who was a Fellow of Queen’s College and the eldest son of the collector, respecting the collection and its value. The letter is printed in Beloe’s “Anecdotes of Literature,” vol. ii.
3A letter from Dr. Jenkin, who was chaplain to Lord Weymouth, to Mr. Baker, Dec. 3, 1709:—“There is another rarity then to be sold, which is proffered to my lord—a Collection of Pamphlets, in number 30,000, bound in 2000 volumes. The collection was begun by Charles 1st in 1640, and continued to 1660. In a printed paper, where I saw this account, it is said the collectors refused 4000l.for them.”—Masters’ Life of Rev. Thomas Baker, p. 28.
4“Phœnix Britannicus,”—“Oldys’ Dissertation upon Pamphlets,” p. 556. Oldys drew up an account of these pamphlets from “The Memoirs of the Curious,” published in 1701. He says, that the Collection was made byTomlinson, the bookseller, and the Catalogue by Marmaduke Foster, the auctioneer; and relates a traditional story, that it is reported that Charles the First gave ten pounds for reading one of these pamphlets, at the owner’s house in St. Paul’s Churchyard. This collection was not commenced until Nov. 1640, and the king left London in Jan. 1642; during this time the collection could not be very numerous, nor would there be that difficulty in seeing a pamphlet as at the subsequent more distracted period. It is curious to trace the origin of traditionary tales; they often stand on a rickety foundation. We find that the king did borrow a pamphlet, but at a time when he could not hasten to St. Paul’s Churchyard to read it; we may presume that the bookseller did not charge his majesty so disloyal a price as ten pounds for the perusal of a single pamphlet; he probably received only the king’s approbation of his design, which doubtless was no slight stimulus to its completion.
5A Mr. Sisson, a druggist in Ludgate-street, who died in 1749; they then became the property of his relative; Miss Sisson, who seems gladly to have disburdened herself of this domestic grievance in 1761.—Hollis’ Memoirs, p. 121.
THE OCEANA OF HARRINGTON.
Thehardy paradoxes, not wholly without foundation, and the humiliating truths so mortifying to human nature, of the mighty “Leviathan,” whose author was little disposed to flatter or to elevate his brothers,1were opposed by an ideal government, more generous in its sympathies, and less obtrusive of brute force, or “the public sword,” in theOceanaofJames Harrington.
Free from mere party motives of the Monarchist or the Commonwealth-man, for he gratified neither, Harrington was the greatest of political theorists; and his “political architecture,” with all his “models of government, notional and practicable,” still remains for us, and has not been overlooked by some framers of constitutions.
The psychological history ofHarringtoncombines with his works. His was a thoughtful youth, like that of Sidney, of Milton, and Gray, which never needed correction, but rather kept those around him in awe. Among the usual studies of his age, it was an enterprise to have acquired the modern languages, as entering into an extensive plan of foreign travel, which the boy had already decided on. The death of his father before his legal age enabled him to realise this project. Political studies, however, had not yet occurred to him; and when he left England, he “knew no more of monarchy, anarchy, aristocracy, and democracy or oligarchy, than as hard words for which he was obliged to look into the dictionary.”
In Holland, he first contemplated on the image of popular liberty, recent from the yoke of Spain; it was a young people rejoicing in the holiday of freedom. There he found a friend in the fugitive Queen of Bohemia: his uncle, Lord Harrington, had been the governor of that spirited princess. He passed over into Denmark with the crownless elector, soliciting for that aid which no politicalprudence could afford. He resisted the seductions of those noble friendships in pursuit of his great plan. He entered France, he loitered in Germany, and at length advanced into Italy. At Rome, he refused to bestow on his holiness the prostrate salutation, and when some Englishmen complained of their compatriot’s stiffness to Charles the First, who reminded the young philosopher that he might have performed a courteous custom as to a temporal prince, the reply was happy—“having kissed his majesty’s hand, he would always hold it beneath him to kiss any prince’s toe.”
Our future political theorist was deeply struck in his admiration of the aristocratic government of Venice, which he conceived to be the most perfect and durable government hitherto planned by the wit of man. Such was the prevalent notion throughout Europe concerning a government existing in secrecy and mystery! In Italy, he found Politics, Literature and Art, and provided himself with a rich store of Italian books, especially on political topics. Machiavelli with him was “the prince of Politicians;” but he has opened his great work with the name of another Italian, “Janotti (Giannotti), the most excellent describer of the Commonwealth of Venice.” Giannotti is a name which, though it has not shared the celebrity of Machiavelli, seems to have been that of a more practical politician, for Giannotti at length obtained that honourable secretaryship of Florence, the loss of which, it is said, so deeply mortified the lofty spirit of his greater rival, that the illustrious ex-secretary died of grief, which his philosophy should have quieted.
Harrington returned home an accomplished cavalier; but the commonwealth of Holland, the aristocracy of Venice, the absolute monarchy of France, imperial Germany, and what else he had contemplated in the northern courts, must have furnished to his thoughtful mind the elements of his theory of politics.
He returned home to the privacy of his studies, refusing any public employment; but that he kept up an intercourse with the court, appears by his personal acquaintance with the king. Many years form a blank in his life; once indeed he had made an ineffectual attempt to enter parliament, but failed, though his sentiments were wellknown in favour of popular government. It is probable, that in that unhappy period, when persons and events were alike of so mixed and ambiguous a character, our philosopher could not sympathize with the clash of temporary passions.
When the king was to be conveyed from Newcastle in 1646, Harrington was chosen to attend his person as “a gentleman well known to the king before, and who had never engaged with any party whatever.” He was then in his thirty-fifth year.
This appointment of Harrington was agreeable to the king. Charles found in Harrington the character he well knew how to appreciate. He conversed on books, and pictures, and foreign affairs, and found a ripe scholar, a travelled mind, and a genius overflowing with strange speculative notions. Their conversations were free; Harrington did not conceal his predilection for commonwealth institutions, at which the king was impatient. Neither could bring the other to his own side, for each was fixed in taking opposite views; the one looking to the advantages of monarchy, and the other to those of a republic. The only subject they could differ on, never interrupted their affections; the theoretical commonwealth-man, and the practical monarch, in their daily intercourse, found that they had a heart for each other.
In Charles the First, Harrington discovered a personage unlike the distorted image which political passions had long held out. In adversity the softened prince seemed only to be “the man of sorrows.” On one occasion Harrington vindicated the king’s conduct, and urged that the royal concessions were satisfactory. This strong personal attachment to Charles alarmed the party in power. Harrington was ordered away. He subsequently visited the king when at St. James’s, and was present at the awful act of the decapitation. Charles presented Harrington with a last memorial. Aubrey, who knew Harrington, may tell the rest of his story. “Mr. Harrington was on the scaffold with the king when he was beheaded; and I have ofttimes heard him speak of King Charles the First with the greatest zeal and passion imaginable; and that his death gave him so great grief,that he contracted a disease by it; that never anything did go so near to him.”
The agony of that terrible day afflicted Harrington with a malady from which he was never afterwards freed; a profound melancholy preyed upon his spirits; he withdrew into utter seclusion, not to mourn, but to despond. His friends were alarmed at a hermit’s melancholy; some imagined that his affection for the king had deranged his intellect; others ascribed his seclusion to mere discontent with the times.
To rid himself of friendly importunities, and to evince that his mind was not deranged, whatever might be his feelings, he confided to his circle that he had long been occupied in the study of civil government, to invent an art which should prevent the disorders of a state. It was his opinion that “a government is not of so accidental or arbitrary institution as people imagine; for in society there are natural causes producing their necessary effects as well as in the earth or the air.” The passionless sage was so discriminately just, that he declared that “our late troubles were not wholly to be ascribed to the misgovernment of the prince, nor to the stubbornness of the people; but to the nature of certain changes which had happened to the nation.” He then, for their curious admiration, disclosed the perfect model of a commonwealth in his “Oceana.”
Oceana, or England, was the model of “a free state;” a political “equality” was its basis; equality to be guarded by a number of devices. Harrington laid the foundation of politics, on the principle thatempire follows the balance of property, whether lodged in one, in a few, or in many. Toland asserts that this was as noble a discovery as that of the circulation of the blood, of printing, gunpowder, or the compass, or optic glasses; the Newtonian gravity had not then been established, or, doubtless, it had been enumerated.
To preserve the political equality, there were to be “balances” in dominion and in property. An agrarian law, by its distributions suitable to the rank of the individual, and which were never to be enlarged nor diminished, would prevent any man, or any party, overpowering thepeople by their possessions. All those states in Europe which were the remains of Gothic dominion, were thrown into internal conflicts by their “overbalances.” The overbalance of one man was tyranny; of a few, was oligarchy; of the many, was rebellion, or anarchy.2The perpetual shifting of their “balances” had produced all their disturbances. He traced this history in extinct governments, as well as in our own. So refined were his political optics, that he discerned when our kings had broken Magna Charta some thirty times; and during the reign of Charles the First, he asserts that these “balances” had been altered nine times.
The “balance of property” being the foundation of the commonwealth, the superstructure was raised of magistracy. Magistracy was to proceed by “rotation,” and to be settled by the “ballot.” The senate was to be elected by the purity of suffrage, which was to be found in the balloting-box. And in this rotatory government, the third part of the senate would be wheeled out at their fixed terms. The senate by these self-purgations would renovate its youth; and the sovereign authority, by this unceasing movement, would act in its perpetual integrity.
In this equal commonwealth no party can be at variance with, or gain ground upon another; and as there can be no factions, so neither will there be any seditions; because the people are without the power or the interest to raise commotions; they would be as likely to throw themselves into the sea as to disturb the state. It is one of his political axioms, that where the public interest governs, it is a government of laws; but where a private interest, it is a government of men, and not of laws.
Harringtonwas no admirer of a mixed monarchy; his political logic includes some important truths. “In a mixed monarchy, the nobility sometimes imposing chains on the king or domineering over the people, the king is either oppressing the people without control, or contending with the nobility, as their protectors; and the people arefrequently in arms against both king and nobles, till at last one of the three estates becomes master of the other two, or till they so mutually weaken one another, that either they fall a prey to some more potent government, or naturally grow into a commonwealth—therefore mixed monarchy is not a perfect government; but if no such parties can possibly exist inOceana, then it is the most equal, perfect, and immortal commonwealth.Quod erat demonstrandum.”
The “equality” of Harrington, however, was not fashioned to any vulgar notions of a levelling democracy. He maintained the distinctions of orders in society. The great founder of a commonwealth was first agentleman, from Moses downwards; though, he says, “there be great divines, poets, lawyers, great men in all professions, the genius of a great politician is peculiar tothe genius of a gentleman.” And further, “An army may as well consist of soldiers without officers, or of officers without soldiers, as a commonwealth (especially such an one as is capable of greatness) consist of a people without gentry, or of a gentry without a people.”
A work of such original invention, replete with the most curious developments of all former political institutions, of which the author proposed to resume the advantages and to supply the deficiencies, from the ancient commonwealth of Moses to the recent republic of the Hollanders, and moreover throwing out some novel general views of our own national history, formed a volume opportune to engage public attention. It was enlivened by the pleasing form of a romance, where, in the council of the legislators, the debaters plead for their favourite form of government with infinite spirit.
The publication of “Oceana” was, however, long retarded; first, by the honesty of our sage, and, secondly, by the influence of two very opposite parties equally alarmed. Harrington was anxious that his proselytes should debate his opinions, and even partially promulgate them in their pamphlets, before he ventured to publish them. What he ably elucidated they faithfully repeated: the consequence of this indiscretion was, that the novelty had lost its gloss; and, when finally his great discovery of empire following the balance of property appeared, theauthor was reproached for its obviousness. Every great principle appears obvious when once ascertained. The vague rumours that had spread that a new model of government was about to appear, made the Cromwellites and the cavaliers alike alert in their opposition; the bashaws of the great sultan, the new lords and major-generals of the Protector, sate uneasy in their usurped seats; the cavaliers, who knew Harrington’s predisposition for republican institutions, loudly remonstrated. The author was compelled to send his papers to the printers by stealth and by snatches, dispersing them among different presses. The first edition of “Oceana” exhibits a strange appearance, in a confusion of all sorts of types and characters—black letter, Italian and Roman, accompanied by an unparalleled “List of Errors of the Press,” being several folio pages with double columns! The author has even marked the lacerations of his panting and hunted volume from “a spaniel questing who hath sprung my book out of one press into two other.” The myrmidons of Oliver hunted down their game from press to press, and at length pounced on their prey, and, with a Pyrrhic triumph, bore it to Whitehall.
All solicitations of the author to retrieve his endeared volume proved fruitless; in despair he ventured on a singular expedient. Lady Claypole, the daughter of the Protector, studied to be exceedingly gracious, and to play the princess. Unacquainted with her ladyship, Harrington requested an audience; waiting in the antechamber, her little daughter soon attracted his attention; carrying her in his arms, he entered the presence-chamber, and declared that he had a design to steal the young lady—not from love, but for revenge.
“Have I injured you?”
“Not at all! but your father has stolen my child, and then you would have interceded for its restoration.”
The parable of the parental author was easily explained; the pleasing manners of the elegant cavalier, which were not commonly seen in the new court of the protectorate, doubtless assisted the petitioner with the recent princess of the revolution. “Are you sure,” she earnestly inquired, “that your book contains nothing against my father’s government?”
“It is a political romance! to be dedicated to your father, and the first copy to be opened by yourself.”
Lady Claypole conceived there could not be any treason in a romance. She persuaded Oliver to look it over himself; the Protector, who there found himself as “the Lord Archon of Oceana,” and probably with his sharp judgment deeming the whole a “romance,” returned it, drily observing, that “the power which he had got by the sword he would not quit for a little paper-shot:” but he added, with his accustomed sanctimonious policy, that “he as little approved as the gentleman of the government of asingle person, but that he had been compelled to take the office of High-Constable to preserve the peace among all parties who could never agree among themselves.”
“Oceana” was published at a crisis when the people were still to be enchanted by the name of “Commonwealth,” though they began to think that they had been mistaken in their choice, since their grievances had been heavier than under the old monarchy which they had dissolved. Harrington familiarly compared their present unquiet state to that of a company of puppy-dogs cramped up in a bag, when finding themselves ill at ease for want of room, every one of them bites the tail or the foot of his neighbour, supposing that to be the source of his misery. To such a restless people, a continual change of rulers on the rotatory system seemed a great relief; any worse than their present masters they would not suppose. “The Rota” of Harrington became so popular, that a club was established bearing its name; and they held their debates every evening with doors open for auditors or orators.
This political club was the resort of the finest geniuses of the age, many of whom have left their eminent names in our history and our literature. The members sat at a circular table—the table of ancient knighthood and modern equality, which left a passage open within its circuit to have their coffee delivered hot without any interruption to the speaker or “the state of the nation.” A contemporary assures us that these debates were more ingenious and spirited than he had ever heard, and that those in parliament were flat to them. Every decision how affairs should be carried was left to the balloting-box—“a boxin which there is no cogging,” observes the master-genius of “the Rota.”
This “balloting” and the principle of “rotation” were hateful to the parliamentarians; for, as we are told, “they were cursed tyrants, in love with their power, and this was death to them.”Henry Neville, the author of “Plato Redivivus,” the constant associate of Harrington, and who, Hobbes (alluding to the “Oceana”) said, “had a finger in the pye,” had the boldness to propose the system of “rotation” to the House, warning them that, if they did not accept that model of government, they would shortly fall into ruins. In their then ticklish condition, the House had the decency to return their thanks, and the intrepidity to keep their places.
This perfectioned model of a government, when opened for the inspection of mankind, exhibited a glorious framework; but it seemed questionable whether this political clockwork or intellectual mechanism could perform its exact librations, depending on a number of “balances” to preserve its nice equilibrium; and whether it could last for perpetuity by that “rotatory” motion by wheels which were never to cease. Some objected, that the author in the science of politics had been fascinated, as some in mechanics, who imagined that they had discovered “the perpetual motion.” But this objection the constructor of this “political architecture” indignantly rejected. He knew that the capacity of matter can only work as long as it lasts, and therefore there can be no perpetual motion; but “the mathematician must not take God to be such as he is. The equal commonwealth is built up by the understandings of the people. Now the people never die—they are not brute matter. This movement of theirs comes from the hands of the Eternal Mover, even God himself.”
This romance of politics has been pronounced by a high authority as “one of the boasts of English literature;” and the philosophic Hume has even ventured to pronounce the work as “theonly valuable model of a commonwealththat has yet been offered to the public.” Perhaps the historian would pass it off as “the only valuable one,” from a conviction that it was perfectly harmless. It is worthy of remark, that when, in 1688, a grandauto da fèwas performed by the university of Oxford on certain political works—when they condemned to the flames Baxter’s “Holy Commonwealth,” written against Harrington’s “Heathen Commonwealth,” as Baxter calls “Oceana,” with Hobbes, and Milton, and others—no one proposed this condign punishment to the manes of Harrington, considering, no doubt, that a romance was too impracticable as a political system. Yet the republican party has always held to “Oceana” as their text-book; and it was with this view thatTolandedited this great work, and, in his life of Milton, has declared “Oceana” to be an unrivalled model of a commonwealth, for itspracticableness,equality, and completeness; and onceHollis, during the fervour of founding a republic in Corsica, recommended by public advertisement “Oceana” as the most perfect model of a free government.
“Oceana” has perpetuated a thoughtful politician’s dreams. But are there no realities in dreams? Even in dreaming, a great artist often combines conceptions too fugitive, too mysterious, too beauteous, for his palpable canvas. And thus the fanciful pictures of our philosophical politician were the results of his deep and varied studies in the ancient and modern writings on the science of politics—from Aristotle to Machiavel, from Machiavel to Hobbes. His pages are studded with axioms of policy, and impress us by many an enduring truth. His style is not always polished, and is sometimes perplexed; but no writer has exceeded him in the felicity and boldness of his phrases; and his pen, though busied on higher matters, sparkles with imagery and illustration.
That a mind so sagacious and even predictive as was that of Harrington’s in the uncertainty of human events should be led away by theoretical fallacies, is an useful example for political speculators.3Constantly he extols thedark mysterious dominion of aristocratic Venice, “being a commonwealth having no causes of dissolution.” He dwells on “the rotation of its senate,” and its prompt, remedial, concealed power. “It is immortal in its nature; and to this day she stands with one thousand years of tranquillity on her back: notwithstanding,” he thoughtfully adds, “that this government consists of men not without sin.”
A single day of treason sufficed to terminate this immortal commonwealth of Venice, with all its “ballotings” and “its rotations,” and its hidden and horrible dictature, where sate the council of “Three” in their dark conclave, like the sister-fates, the arbiters of every soul in Venice. Alas for that folly of the wise, who, in the delusion of a theory, to support the edifice of imagination disguise the truths which might shake it! The advocate of a free state, he who pretends to draw sovereignty from the hands of a people, is the perpetual eulogist of the most refined tyranny that ever swayed the destiny of a people. Spirit of Harrington! meditate in thy sepulchral city, motionless and naked as she lies, there to correct so many passages of admiration which spread their illusion in thy “Oceana!”
Harrington was equally fallible on the strength of his political axiom, “that the balance of power depends on that of property;” applying it to his own critical period, he pronounced that it was impossible ever to re-establish monarchy among English commonwealth-men. Property had changed possessors; it could never revert to its former owners. Four years after “Oceana” was published, and “the Rota Club” was still illumining the nation, the commonwealth returned to monarchy by a beck, and without a word!
Theoretical politicians too often omit in their artificial constructions, and their moral calculations, something more prompt to act in the conduct of men than even theirinterests—the stirring passions of ambition, of faction, and the vacillations of “the sovereign people,” now maddening for a republic, now rushing into a monarchy, “tumbling and tossing upon their bed of sickness.”
When the Restoration arrived, however it may have deranged the system, it seems not to have disturbed the systematiser. He observed, that “the king comes in; if he calls a parliament of the cavaliers on our great estates, let them sit seven years, and they will all turn commonwealth-men.” He retained in all its force his master-passion of ideal politics. He now decided to reduce “Oceana” into plain axioms, divested of tedious argumentation, and formal demonstration, adapted to the most vulgar capacities. He was easily induced to offer some immediate instructions for the king’s service. A paper was first shown to some of the courtiers, who suspected treason in any scheme where their particular interests were not at all consulted. One morning, when Harrington was busily engaged, with all his aphorisms lying loose on a table before him, suddenly entered Sir William Poulteney, and other officers, to seize on the philosopher and the philosophy “for treasonable designs and practices.” As they were huddling together the scattered members of the “Oceanic” mind, the innocent philosopher, innocent of treason, begged the favour of “stitching them together” before they were taken to Whitehall. The derangement of his system appeared to him more dreadful than seeing himself hurried to the Tower.
Harrington had kept up his intimacy with old friends, among whom were many commonwealth-men, from Major Wildman, an intriguing Cromwellite, down to the notorious Barebones, on whom he declared, however, that he had only called, “at his shop” thrice in his life. He was now involved in a pretended plot, which the Chancellor himself, though furnished with accounts of the meetings of certain parties, declared that he could make nothing of. A speculative politician was a very suspicious person in the days of restoration. Harrington, assuredly, was no plotter. Our philosopher contrived to send his sisters his examination before his relative Lord Lauderdale and others, curious for its topics of discussion, and the poignancy of the dialogue. I cannot pass by one singular passage.
“You charge me with being eminent in principles contrary to the king’s government, and the laws of this nation. Some, my lord, say, that I, being a private man, have been so mad as to meddle with politics; what had a private man to do with government? My lord, there is not anypublicperson, not anymagistratethat has written in politics, worth a button. All they that have been excellent in this way have been private men, as private men as myself. There is Plato, there is Aristotle, there is Livy, there is Machiavel. My lord, I can sum up Aristotle’s politics in a very few words; he says there is the barbarous monarchy, such a one where the people have no votes in making the laws; he says there is the heroic monarchy, such a one where the people have their votes in making the laws; and then he says there is democracy, and affirms that a man cannot be said to have liberty but in a democracy only.”
My Lord Lauderdale, who thus far had been very attentive, at this showed some impatience.
Har.—“I say Aristotle says so; I have not said so much. And under what prince was it? Was it not under Alexander, the greatest prince in the world? Did Alexander hang up Aristotle, did he molest him?” And he proceeds with Livy, who wrote under Cæsar, and the commonwealth-man, Machiavel, under the Medici, unmolested.
“I wrote under an usurper, Oliver. He having started up into the throne, his officers kept a murmuring for a commonwealth. He told them that he knew not what they meant, but let any one show him that there was any such thing as a commonwealth, they should see that he sought not himself; the Lord knew he only sought to make good the cause. Upon this some sober men thought that if any in England could show what a commonwealth was, it was myself. I wrote, and after I had written, Oliver never answered his officers as he had done before; therefore I wrote not against the king’s government; and if the law could have punished me, Oliver had done it; therefore my writing was not obnoxious to the law. After Oliver, the parliament said they were a commonwealth; I said they were not; and proved it, insomuch that the parliament accounted me a cavalier, and one thathad no other design in my writing than to bring in the king; and now the king, first of any man, makes me a Roundhead!”
Certainly no theoretical politician has ever more lucidly set before us the cruel dilemmas of speculative science.
The story ofHarringtonnow becomes calamitous. In vain his sisters petitioned that the prisoner, for his justification, should be brought to trial,—no one dared to present the petition to parliament. He was suddenly carried off to St. Nicholas Island, near Plymouth, and by favour afterwards was lodged in Plymouth Castle, where the governor treated the state-prisoner with the kindness he had long wanted. His health gradually gave way; his mind fell into disorder; his high spirit and his heated brain could not brook this tormenting durance; his intellect was at times clouded by some singular delusions; and his family imagined that it was intended that he should never more write “Oceanas.” The physician of the castle had prescribed constant doses of guaiacum taken in coffee. At length, other physicians were despatched by his family; they found an emaciated patient deprived of sleep, and under their hands testified that the copious use of this deleterious beverage, with such drying drugs, was sufficient to occasion hypochondriasm, and even frenzy, in any one who had not even a predisposition. The surly physician of the state-prison insisted that Harrington counterfeited madness.
His delusions never left him, yet otherwise his faculties remained unaltered. He had strange fancies about the operations of the animal spirits, good and evil, and often alarmed his friends by his vivacious descriptions of these invisible agencies. “Nature,” he said, “which works under a veil, is the heart of God.” But how are we to account, in a mind otherwise sane, for his notion that his thoughts transpired from him, and took the shapes of flies or bees? Aubrey has given a gossiper’s account of this ludicrous hypochondriasm. Harrington had a summer-house revolving on a pivot, which he turned at will to face the sun; there sat the great author of “Oceana,” whisking a fox’s brush to disperse this annoyance of his transpired thoughts in the flies or bees, which, whenever they issued from crevices, he would appeal to those present,whether it was not evident to them that they had emerged from his brain? An eminent physician had flattered himself that he would be able to out-reason this delusion, by that force of argument and positive demonstration to which his illustrious patient only would attend; but the physician discovered that no argument could avail with the most invincible disputant in Europe. The sanity of the man only strengthened his insanity. Besides, our philosopher believed that he had discovered a new system of physiology, in what he called “The Mechanics of Nature.” Harrington declared that his fate was that of Democritus, who, having made a great discovery in anatomy, was deemed mad by his associates, till Hippocrates appeared, and attested the glorious truth, confounding the laughers for ever! He now resolved to prove against his doctors, that his notions were not, as they alleged, hypochondriacal whims, or fanciful delusions. Among his manuscripts was found this promised treatise, thus opening—“Having been for nine months, some say, in a disease, I in a cure, I have been the wonder of physicians, and they mine!” It is much to be regretted that the first part of this singular design has only reached us, wherein he has laid down his axioms, many of which are indisputable, coherent, and philosophical, however chimerical might have been their application to his particular notions. The narrative of his own disorder, which was to form the second part, would have been a great psychological curiosity, for the philosopher was there to have told us, how “he had felt and saw Nature; that is, how she came first into his senses, and by the senses into the understanding,” and “to speak to men that have had the same sensations as himself.” The logical deliriums of Harrington, it is not impossible, might have thrown a beam of light on “The Human Nature” of Hobbes, and “The Understanding” of Locke.
It is for the medical character to develop the mysteries of this condition of man; but this moral phenomenon of the partial delusions of the noblest intellect remains an enigma they have not yet solved. Harrington never recovered his physical energy, while his “Understanding” betrayed no symptoms of any decay in the exercise of his vigorous faculties.
There is one dark cloud which dusks the lustre of the name ofHarrington. Opening the volume of his works, we are startled by an elaborate treatise on “The Grounds and Reasons of Monarchy.” It is not merely one of the most eloquent invectives against monarchical institutions, but it overflows with the most withering defamations, such as were prevalent at that distempered season, when the popular writers accumulated horrors on the memories of their late sovereigns, to metamorphose their monarchs into monsters. In this terrible state-libel, all kings are anathematised: James the First was the murderer of his son; Charles the First was a parricide. Of that “resolute tyrant Charles,” we have an allusion to “his actions of the day; his actions of the night;”—from which we must infer that they were equally criminal.
The reader, already acquainted with the intimate intercourse of our author with Charles the First, and with all his permanent emotions, which probably induced his mental disorder, must start at the disparity of the writing with the writer. A thorough-paced partisan has here acted on the base principle of reviling the individual, whom he privately acknowledged to be wholly of an opposite character. It would be a solecism in human nature, had Harrington sent forth an historical calumny, which only to have read must have inflicted a deep pang in his heart. He was a philosopher, who neither flattered nor vilified the prince nor the people; their common calamities he ascribes to inevitable causes, which had been long working those changes independent of either. In the reigns of James and Charles, according to his favourite principle, “The English Balance,” in favour of “popularity,” was “running like a bowl down hill.” He does justice to the sagacity of the indolent James, who, he tells us, “not seldom prophesied sad things to his successors;” and of Charles the First, on succeeding to his father, Harrington has expressed himself with the utmost political wisdom and felicity of illustration. “There remained nothing to the destruction of a monarchy, retaining but the name, more than a prince who, by contending, should make the people to feel those advantages which they could not see. And this happened to the next king (Charles), who, too secure in that undoubtedright whereby he was advanced to the throne which had no foundation, dared to put this to an unseasonable trial, on whom, therefore, fell the tower in Silo. Nor may we think they on whom this tower fell were sinners above all men; but that we, unless we repent and look better to the true foundations, must likewise perish.”4All that our philosopher had to deliver to the world on the many contested points of that unhappy reign, was the illustration of his principle, and not the infamy of vulgar calumny. With the philosophic Harrington, Charles the First was but “a doomed man;” not more a sinner, because the tower of Silo had fallen upon his head, than those who stood without. This was true philosophy, the other was faction.
The treatise on “The Grounds and Reasons of Monarchy,” prominently placed at the opening of the works of Harrington, and inseparably combined with his opinions by the reference in the general index—this treatise which has settled like a gangrene on the fair character of the author of “Oceana,” which has called down on his devoted head the execrations of honourable men,5and which has misled many generations of readers, is the composition of a salaried party writer, in no way connected with our author. Toland, the first editor of Harrington’s works, introduced into the volume this anonymous invective, which has thus come down to us sanctioned by the philosopher’s name. There was no plea of any connexion between the two authors, and much less between their writings. The editor of the edition of 1771 has silently introduced the name of the real author in the table of contents, but without prefixing it to the tract, or without any further indication to inform the reader.
Whether zeal for “the cause” led Toland to this editorial delinquency, or whether he fell into this inadvertence from deficient acumen, it remains a literary calamity not easily paralleled, for a great author is condemned for what he never could have written.