Page images
PDF
EPUB

ment was immature, and his strength of purpose unequal to the control of his passions. He was only thirty-four years old when he was driven from power. During a long life which followed, He showed himself,

say, that from the date of these Memoirs [1771] to his death, which comprises a period of near forty years, there were few individuals more highly and more generally esteemed."-Note to Walpole's Memoirs of George III., vol. iv., p. 73.

You are too well acquainted with the temper of | your late allies to think it possible that Lord North should be permitted to govern this country. If we may believe common fame, they have shown him their superiority already. His he retrieved his character. Majesty is indeed too gracious to insult his sub-as Sir Dennis Le Marchant states, to be "by no jects by choosing his first minister from among means the insignificant or worthless personage the domestics of the Duke of Bedford. That that he appears in the pages of Walpole and would have been too gross an outrage to the Junius. A genuine love of peace, and hatred of three kingdoms. Their purpose, however, is oppression, either civil or religious, marked his equally answered by pushing forward this un- whole political life; and great as were the erhappy figure, and forcing it to bear the odium rors which Walpole and Junius have justly deof measures which they in reality direct. With-nounced in his private conduct, it is only just to out immediately appearing to govern, they possess the power, and distribute the emoluments of government as they think proper. They still adhere to the spirit of that calculation which made Mr. Luttrell representative of Middlesex. Far from regretting your retreat, they assure us very gravely that it increases the real strength of the ministry. According to this way of reasoning, they will probably grow stronger, and more flourishing, every hour they exist; for I think there is hardly a day passes in which some one or other of his Majesty's servants does not leave them to improve by the loss of his assistance. But, alas! their countenances speak a different language. When the members drop off, the main body can not be insensible of its approaching dissolution. Even the violence of their proceedings is a signal of despair. Like broken tenants, who have had warning to quit the premises, they curse their landlord, destroy the fixtures, throw every thing into confusion, and care not what mischief they do to the estate.

JUNIUS.

In leaving Junius, the reader will be gratified to see the following estimates of his character and writings from the two most distinguished literary men of that day, Mr. Burke, a Whig, and Dr. Johnson, a Tory.

ESTIMATE OF JUNIUS, BY MR. BURKE.' How comes this JUNIUS to have broke through the cobwebs of the law, and to range uncontrolled, unpunished through the land? The myrmidons of the Court have been long, and are still, pursuing him in vain. They will not spend their time upon me, or you, or you. No; they disdain such vermin, when the mighty boar of the forest, that has broken through all their toils, is before them. But what will all their efforts avail? No sooner has he wounded one than he lays another dead at his feet. For my part, when I saw his attack upon the King, I own my blood ran cold. I thought that he had ventured too far, and there was an end of his triumphs. Not that he had not asserted many truths. Yes, sir, there are in that composition many bold truths, by which a wise prince might profit. It was the rancor and venom with which I was struck. In these respects the North Briton is as much inferior to him, as in strength, wit, and judgment. But while I expected in this daring flight his final ruin and fall, behold him rising still higher, and coming down souse upon both houses of Parliament. Yes, he did make you his quarry, and you still bleed from the wounds of his talons. You crouched, and still crouch, beneath his rage. Nor has he dreaded the terrors of your brow, sir; he has attacked even youhe has and I believe you have no reason to triumph in the encounter. In short, after carrying away our Royal Eagle in his pounces, and dashing him against a rock, he has laid you prostrate. Kings, Lords, and Commons are but the sport of his fury. Were he a member of this House, what might not be expected from his 1 From a speech delivered in the House of Com

The character of the Duke of Grafton, as given by Horace Walpole in his Memoirs of George III., accords in most respects with the representations of Junius. "His fall from power was universally ascribed to his pusillanimity; but whether betrayed by his fears or his friends, he had certainly been the chief author of his own disgrace. His haughtiness, indolence, reserve, and improvidence, had conjured up the storm; but his obstinacy and fickleness always relaying each other, and always mal à propos, were the radical causes of the numerous absurdities that discolored his conduct and exposed him to deserved reproaches-nor had he a depth of understanding to counterbalance the defects of his temper."-Vol. iv., 69. His love of the turf brought him into habits of intimacy with low and unprincipled men, whose wants he was compelled to supply, and whose characters often reflected dishonor upon his own. His immoralities, though public, appeared less disgraceful at that day, when the standard of sentiment on this subject was extremely low; and in this respect he was so far outdone by Lord Sandwich and others of "the Bloomsbury gang," with whom he was connected, that his vices were thrown comparatively into the shade. It ought to be stated, in justice to the Duke of Grafton, that he entered very early into public life, when his judg- | eyebrows.

mons.

2 Sir Fletcher Norton, Speaker of the House, was distinguished for the largeness of his overhanging

knowledge, his firmness, and integrity? He | he has the art of persuading when he seconded would be easily known by his contempt of all desire; as a reasoner, he has convinced those danger, by his penetration, by his vigor. Noth- who had no doubt before; as a moralist, he has ing would escape his vigilance and activity. Bad taught that virtue may disgrace; and as a paministers could conceal nothing from his sagaci-triot, he has gratified the mean by insults on the ty; nor could promises nor threats induce him high. Finding sedition ascendant, he has been to conceal any thing from the public.

able to advance it; finding the nation combusti-
ble, he has been able to inflame it. Let us ab-
stract from his wit the vivacity of insolence, and
withdraw from his efficacy the sympathetic favor
of plebeian malignity; I do not say that we shall
leave him nothing; the cause that I defend
scorns the help of falsehood; but if we leave
him only his merit, what will be his praise ?
It is not by his liveliness of imagery, his pun-

ESTIMATE OF JUNIUS, BY DR. JOHNSON.3 This thirst of blood, however the visible promoters of sedition may think it convenient to shrink from the accusation, is loudly avowed by JUNIUS, the writer to whom his party owes much of its pride, and some of its popularity. Of JuNIUS it can not be said, as of Ulysses, that he scatters ambiguous expressions among the vul-gency of periods, or his fertility of allusion, that gar; for he cries havoc without reserve, and en- he detains the cits of London and the boors of deavors to let slip the dogs of foreign and of Middlesex. Of style and sentiment they take no civil war, ignorant whither they are going, and cognizance. They admire him for virtues like careless what may be their prey.5 JUNIUS has their own, for contempt of order and violence sometimes made his satire felt; but let not in- of outrage, for rage of defamation and audacity judicious admiration mistake the venom of the of falsehood. The supporters of the Bill of shaft for the vigor of the blow. He has some-Rights feel no niceties of composition nor dextimes sported with lucky malice; but to him terities of sophistry; their faculties are better that knows his company, it is not hard to be sar-proportioned to the bawl of Bellas or barbarity castic in a mask. While he walks like Jack the Giant Killer in a coat of darkness, he may do much mischief with little strength. Novelty captivates the superficial and thoughtless; vehemence delights the discontented and turbulent. He that contradicts acknowledged truth will always have an audience; he that vilifies established authority will always find abettors.

of Beckford; but they are told that JUNIUS is on their side, and they are therefore sure that JuNIUS is infallible. Those who know not whither he would lead them, resolve to follow him; and those who can not find his meaning, hope he means rebellion.

JUNIUS is an unusual phenomena, on which some have gazed with wonder, and some with JUNIUS burst into notice with a blaze of im- terror; but wonder and terror are transitory paspudence which has rarely glared upon the world sions. He will soon be more closely viewed or before, and drew the rabble after him as a monmore attentively examined, and what folly has ster makes a show. When he had once pro- taken for a comet, that from its flaming hair vided for his safety by impenetrable secrecy, he shook pestilence and war, inquiry will find to be had nothing to combat but truth and justice, en- only a meteor formed by the vapors of putrefyemies whom he knows to be feeble in the dark.ing democracy, and kindled into flame by the Being then at liberty to indulge himself in all the immunities of invisibility-out of the reach of danger, he has been bold; out of the reach of shame, he has been confident. As a rhetorician,

3 From a pamphlet on the seizure of the Falkland Islands, published in 1771.

Hinc semper Ulysses
Criminibus terrere novis; hinc spargere voces
In vulgum ambiguas.—Virgil, Æneid, ii., 97.
And Cesar's spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Até by his side, come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines, with a monarch's voice,
Cry HAVOC, and let slip the dogs of war.

Shakspeare's Julius Cesar, Act iii., Sc. ii.

effervescence of interest struggling with conviction, which, after having plunged its followers in a bog, will leave us inquiring why we regarded it.

nius secure from criticism-though his expresYet, though I can not think the style of Jusions are often trite, and his periods feeble--I should never have stationed him where he has placed himself, had I not rated him by his morals rather than his faculties. What," says Pope, must be the priest, where the monkey is a god?" What must be the drudge of a party, of which the heads are Wilkes and Crosby, Sawbridge and Townsend?

[ocr errors]

EDMUND BURKE.

EDMUND BURKE was the son of a respectable barrister in Dublin, and was born in that city on the first day of January, 1730. Being of a delicate and consumptive habit, he was unable to share in the ordinary sports of childhood; and was thus led to find his earliest enjoyment in reading and thought.

[ocr errors]

When eleven years old, he was sent to a school at Ballitore, about twenty miles from Dublin, under the care of a Quaker named Shackleton, who was distinguished, not only for the accuracy of his scholarship, but for his extraordinary power of drawing forth the talents of his pupils, and giving a right direction to their moral principles. Mr. Burke uniformly spoke of his instructor in after life with the warmest affection, and rarely failed, during forty years, whenever he went to Ireland, to pay him a visit. He once alluded to him in the House of Commons, in the following terms: "I was educated," said he, as a Protestant of the Church of England, by a Dissenter who was an honor to his sect, though that sect has ever been considered as one of the purest. Under his eye, I read the Bible, morning, noon, and night; and have ever since been a happier and better man for such reading." Under these influences, the development of his intellect and of his better feelings was steady and rapid. He formed those habits of industry and perseverance, which were the most striking traits in his character, and which led him to say in after life," Nitor in adversum, is the motto for a man like me." He learned that simplicity and frankness, that bold assertion of moral principle, that reverence for the Word of God, and the habit of going freely to its pages for imagery and illustration, by which he was equally distinguished as a man and an orator. At this period, too, he began to exhibit his extraordinary powers of memory. In every task or exercise dependent on this faculty, he easily outstripped all his competitors; and it is not improbable that he gained, under his early Quaker discipline, those habits of systematic thought, and that admirable arrangement of all his acquired knowledge, which made his memory one vast storehouse of facts, principles, and illustrations, ready for use at a moment's call. At this early period, too, the imaginative cast of his mind was strongly developed. He delighted above all things in works of fancy. The old romances, such as Palmerin of England and Don Belianis of Greece, were his favorite study; and we can hardly doubt, considering the peculiar susceptibility of his mind, that such reading had a powerful influence in producing that gorgeousness of style which characterized so many of his productions in after life.

66

Quitting school at the end of three years, he became a member of Trinity College, Dublin, in 1744. Here he remained six years, engaged chiefly in a course of study of his own, though not to the neglect of his regular college duties. It was said by Goldsmith, perhaps to excuse his own indolence, that Burke's scholarship at college was low. This could not have been the case; for in his third year he was elected Scholar of the House, which, his biographer assures us, confers distinction in the classics throughout life." Still, he gave no peculiar promise of his future eminence. Leland, the translator of Demosthenes, who was then a fellow, used to say, that "he was known as a young man of superior but unpretending talents, and more anxious to acquire knowledge than to display it." That his college life was one of severe study, is evident from the extent and accuracy of his knowledge when he left the University.

[ocr errors]

A few things have come down to us, as to his course of reading. He had mastered most of the great writers of antiquity. Demosthenes was his favorite orator, though he was led in after life, by the bent of his genius, to form himself on the model of Cicero, whom he more resembled in magnificence and copiousness of thought. He delighted in Plutarch. He read most of the great poets of antiquity; and was peculiarly fond of Virgil, Horace, and Lucretius, a large part of whose writings he committed to memory. In English he read the essays of Lord Bacon again and again with increasing admiration, and pronounced them the greatest works of that great man." Shakspeare was his daily study. But his highest reverence was reserved for Milton, "whose richness of language, boundless learning, and scriptural grandeur of conception," were the first and last themes of his applause. The philosophical tendency of his mind began now to display itself with great distinctness, and became, from this period, the master principle of his genius. "Rerum cognoscere causas," seems ever to have been his delight, and soon became the object of all his studies and reflections. He had an exquisite sensibility to the beauties of nature, of art, and of elegant composition, but he could never rest here. "Whence this enjoyment?" "On what principle does it depend?" "How might it be carried to a still higher point?"-these are questions which seem almost from boyhood to have occurred instinctively to his mind. His attempts at philosophical criticism commenced in college, and led to his producing one of the most beautiful works of this kind to be found in any language. In like manner, history to him, even at this early period, was not a mere chronicle of events, a picture of battles and sieges, or of life and manners: to make it history, it must bind events together by the causes which produced them. The science of politics and government was in his mind the science of man; not a system of arbitrary regulations, or a thing of policy and intrigue, but founded on a knowledge of those principles, feelings, and even prejudices, which unite a people together in one community" ties," as he beautifully expresses it, "which, though light as air, are strong as links of iron." Such were the habits of thought to which his mind was tending even from his college days, and they made him pre-eminently the great PHILOSOPHICAL ORATOR of our language.2)

Being intended by his father for the bar, Mr. Burke was sent to London at the age of twenty, to pursue his studies at the Middle Temple. But he was never interested in the law. He saw enough of it to convince him that it is "one of the first and noblest of human sciences-a science which does more to quicken and invigorate the understanding, than all other kinds of learning put together." Still, it was too dry and technical for a mind like his; and he felt, that, "except in persons very happily born, it was not apt to open and liberalize the mind in the same proportion." He therefore soon gave himself up, with all the warmth of his early attachment, to the pursuits of literature and philosophy. His diligence in study was now carried to its

1 Notwithstanding the extent of his reading in the classics, Mr. Burke (like many Irish scholars) paid but little attention to the subject of quantity, and a blunder in this respect, which was charged upon him in the House of Commons, gave rise to one of his happiest retorts. In attacking Lord North for being in want of still larger supplies, in the midst of the most lavish expenditure, he quoted the words of Cicero, "Magnum vectigal est parsimonia," accenting the word vectigal on the first syllable. Lord North cried out in a contemptuous tone from the Treasury Bench, vectigal, vectigal. Mr. Burke instantly replied, "I thank the right honorable gentleman for his correction; and, that he may enjoy the benefit of it, I repeat the words, Magnum vectigal est parsimonia."

These early tendencies of Mr. Burke's genius explain a fact which has been spoken of with surprise by all his biographers; namely, that he preferred the Æneid of Virgil to the Iliad of Homer, though he admitted, at the same time, the superiority of the latter in invention, force, and sublimity. To a mind like his, so full of sentiment and philosophy, there is something more delightful in the description of the world of spirits, in the sixth book of the Eneid, and the almost Christian anticipations of the Pollio, than in all the battle scenes of Homer. His extravagant attachment to Young's Night Thoughts, in early life, may be accounted for in the same way.

highest point. He devoted every moment to severe labor; spending his evenings, however, in conversation with the ablest men engaged in the same employments, and thus varying, perhaps increasing, the demand for mental exertion. Few men ever studied to greater effect. He early acquired a power which belongs peculiarly to superior minds—that of thinking at all times and in every place, and not merely at stated seasons in the retirement of the closet. His mind seems never to have floated on the current of passing events. He was always working out trains of thought. His reading, though wide and multifarious, appears from the first to have been perfectly digested. His views on every subject were formed into a complete system; and his habits of daily discussing with others whatever he was revolving in his own mind, not only quickened his powers, but made him guarded in statement, and led him to contemplate every subject under a great variety of aspects. His exuberant fancy, which in most men would have been a fatal impediment to any attempt at speculation, was in him the ready servant of the intellect, supplying boundless stores of thought and illustration for every inquiry. Such were his habits of study from this period, during nearly fifty years, down to the time of his death. Once only, as he stated to a friend, did his mind ever appear to flag. At the age of forty-five, he felt weary of this incessant struggle of thought. He resolved to pause and rest satisfied with the knowledge he had gained. But a week's experience taught him the misery of being idle; and he resumed his labors with the noble determination of the Greek philosopher, ynpáσкεLν didασкóμevos, to grow old in learning. Gifted as he was with pre-eminent genius, it is not surprising that diligence like this, which would have raised even moderate abilities into talents of a high order, should have made him from early life an object of admiration to his friends, and have laid the foundation of that richness and amplitude of thought in which he far surpassed every modern

orator.

Being on a journey to Scotland in 1753, Mr. Burke learned that the office of Professor of Logic had become vacant in the University of Glasgow, and would be awarded to the successful competitor at a public disputation. He at once offered himself as a candidate. Farther inquiries, however, showed that private arrangements in the city and University precluded all possibility of his being elected. He therefore withdrew from the contest; and the name of Mr. James Clow has come down to posterity as the man who succeeded when Edmund Burke failed.

Soon after his return from Scotland, the literary world was much excited by the publication of Lord Bolingbroke's philosophical works. Unwilling to incur the odium of so atrocious an attack on morals and religion, his Lordship had left his manuscripts, with a small legacy, in the hands of Mallet, to be published immediately after his death. This gave rise to Johnson's remark, that " Bolingbroke was a scoundrel and a coward a scoundrel, for charging a blunderbuss against religion and morality; and a coward, because he had not resolution to fire it himself, but left half a crown to a beggarly Scotchman to draw the trigger." Mr. Burke took this occasion to make his first appearance before the public. He wrote a pamphlet of one hundred and six pages, under the title of a Vindication of Natural Society, which came out in the spring of 1756, and had all the appearance of being a posthumous work of Bolingbroke. His object was to expose his Lordship's mode of reasoning, by running it out into its legitimate consequences. He therefore applied it to civil society. He undertook, in the person of Bolingbroke, and with the closest imitation of his impetuous and overbearing eloquence, to expose the crimes and wretchedness which have prevailed under every form of government, and thus to show that society is itself an evil, and the savage state the only one favorable to virtue and happiness. In this pamphlet he gave the most perfect specimen which the world has ever seen, of the art of imitating the style and manner of another. He went beyond the mere choice

« PreviousContinue »