The yellow earth, the centre of the whole, There lordly refts sustain'd on either pole. The limpid air enfolds in foft embrace The pond'rous orb, and brightens o'er her face. Here ance. fition of a particular providence, that fuppofition, however, is abfolutely neceffary to the grandeur of an epic poem. The great examples of Homer and Virgil prove it; and Camoëns understood and felt its force. While his fleet combat all the horrors of unplowed oceans, we do not view his heroes as idle wanderers; the care of heaven gives their voyage the greatest importWhen Gama falls on his knees and fpreads his hands to heaven on the difcovery of India, we are prefented with a figure infinitely more noble than that of the most successful conqueror, who is supposed to act under the influence of fatalism or chance. The human mind is confcious of its own weakness. It expects an elevation in poetry, and demands a degree of importance superior to the caprices of unmeaning accident. The poetical reader cannot admire the hero who is subject to fuch blind fortuity. He appears to us with an abject uninteresting littleness. Our poetical ideas of permanent greatness demand a Gama, a hero whose enterprises and whofe perfon intereft the care of heaven and the happinefs of his people. Nor muft this fuppofition be confined merely to the machinery. The reafon why it pleases also requires that the fuppofition should be uniform throughout the whole poem. Virgil, by difmiffing Eneas through the ivory gate of Elyfium, has hinted that all his pictures of a future state were merely dreams, and has thus deftroyed the highest merit of the compliment to his patron Auguftus. But Camoëns has certainly been more happy. A fair oppor. tunity offered itself to indulge the opinions of Lucretius and the academic grove; but Camoëns, in afcribing the government of the univerfe to the will of God, has not only preferved the philofophy of his poem perfectly uniform, but has alfo fhewn that the Peripatetic system is, in this inftance, exactly conformable to the Newtonian. But this leads us from one defence of our author to another. We have seen that the fuppofition of a Providence is certainly allowable in a poet: nor can we think it is highly to be blamed, even in a philofopher. The Principia of Newton offer, what fome perhaps may esteem, a demonftration of the truth of this opinion. Matter appeared to Sir Ifaac as poffeffed of no property but one, the vis inertia, or dead inactivity. Motion, the centripetal and centrifugal force, appeared therefore to that great man, as added by the agency of something distinct from matter, by Here foftly floating o'er th' aerial blue, Fring'd with the purple and the golden hue, The by a Being of other properties. And from the infinite combinations of the univerfe united in one great defign, he inferred the omnipotence and omniscience of that primary Being. If we admit, and who can poffibly deny it? that man has an idea of right and wrong, and a power of agency in both, he is then a moral, or in other words, a reasonable agent; a being placed in circumftances, where his agency is infallibly attended with degrees of happiness or misery infinitely more real and durable than any animal sensation. Now to fuppofe that the Being who has provided for every want of animal nature, who has placed even the meaneft infect in its proper line, and has rendered every purpose of its agency or existence complete, to suppose that he has placed the infinitely fuperior intellectual nature of man in an agency of infinitely greater confequence, but an agency of which he takes no fuperintendance. —to fuppofe this, is only to fuppofe that the Author of Nature is a very imperfect Being. For no propofition can be more felf-evident, than that an attention to the merest comparative trifles, attended with a neglect of infinitely greater concerns, implies an intellectual imperfection. Yet fome philofophers, who tell us there never was an atheist, some who are not only in raptures with the great machinery of the universe, but are loft in admiration at the admirable adaption of an oyster shell to the wants of the animal; fome of these philofophers, with the utmost contempt of the contrary opinion, make no fcruple to exclude the care of the Deity from any concern in the moral world. Dazzled, perhaps, by the mathematics, the cafe of many a feeble intellect; or bewildered and benighted in metaphyfics, the cafe of many an ingenious philofopher; they erect a standard of truth in their own minds, and utterly forgetting that this standard must be founded on partial views, with the utmost affurance they reject whatever does not agree with the infallibility of their beloved teft. There is another caft of philofophers no less ingenious, whofe minds, absorbed in the innumerable wonders of natural enquiry, can perceive nothing but a god of cockle-fhells, and of grubs turned into butterflies. With all the arrogance of fuperior knowledge these virtuofi smile at the opinion which interefts the Deity in the moral happiness or misery of man, Nay, they will gravely tell you, that fuch mifery or happiness does not The lightnings blaze, and heat spreads wide and rare; The not exist. At ease themselves in their elbow-chairs, they cannot conceive there is such a thing in the world as oppreffed innocence feeling its only confolation in an appeal to heaven, and its only hope, a trust in its care. Though the Author of Nature has placed man in a state of moral agency, and made his happiness or mifery to depend upon it, and though every page of human history is ftained with the tears of injured innocence and the triumphs of guilt, with miferies which must affect a moral or thinking being, yet we have been told, that "God perceiveth it not, and that what "mortals call moral evil vanishes from before his more perfe&t fight." Thus the appeal of injured innocence, and the tear of bleeding virtue fall unregarded, unworthy of the attention of the Deity *.. Yet with what raptures do these enlarged virtuofi behold the infinite wisdom and care of their Beelzebub, their god of flies, in the admirable and various provision he had made for the prefervation of the eggs of vermin, and the generation of maggots! Much more might be faid in proof that our poet's philofophy does not altogether deserve ridicule. And those who allow a general, but deny a particular providence, will, it is hoped, excufe Camoëns, on the confideration, that if we estimate a general moral providence by analogy of that providence which prefides over vegetable and animal nature, a more particular one cannot poffibly be wanted. If this life is a ftate of probation, there must be a particular providence to decide on the individual. If a particular providence, however, is ftill denied, another confideration obtrudes itself; if one pang of a moral agent is unregarded, one tear of injured innocence left to fall unpitied by the Deity, if ludit in humanis divina potentia rebus, the confequence is, that the human conception can form an idea of a much better god and it may modeftly be presumed we may hazard the laugh of the wifeft philofopher, and without fcruple affert, that it is impoffible that a created mind should conccive an idea of perfection, fuperior to that which is abfolutely poffeffed by the Creator and Author of existence. * Perhaps, like Lucretius, fome philofophers think this would be too much trouble to the Deity. But the idea of trouble to the Divine Nature, is much the fame as another argument of the fame philofopher, who having afferted, that before the creation the gods could not know what different feeds would produce, from thence wifely concludes, that the world was made by chance. The highest air and ocean's bed they pierce, The feat of man, the earth's fair breaft, behold; What thousand tribes whom various customs fway, X Afric behold, alas, what alter'd view! Her lands uncultured, and her fons untrue; Lo, u Here Chriftian Europe-Vès Europa Chriftan.—As Europe is already defcribed in the Third Lufiad, this fhort account of it has as great propriety, as the manner of it has dignity. x Afric behold. This juft and strongly picturefque defcription of Africa is finely contrafted with the character of Europe. It contains alfo a masterly compliment to the expedition of Gama, which is all along reprefented as the harbinger and diffuser of the bleffings of civilization. Lo, here enrich'd with hills of golden ore, There round the Cape, great Afric's dreadful bound By laws unform'd, unform'd by reason's sway : Shall with the martyr's palms his holy temples bind. Ꮓ Great Naya too fhall glorious here display. His God's dread might: Behold, in black array The feather'd race whole harvest fields devour; 401 In y Gonfalo's zeal fhall glow.Gonfalo de Sylveyra, a Portuguese jefuit, in 1555, failed from Lisbon on a miffion to Monomotapa. His labours were at first fuccessful; but ere he effected any regular establishment he was murdered by the Barbarians. Caftera abridged. z Great Naya too-Don Pedro de Naya..... In 1505 he erected a fort in the kingdom of Sofala, which is fubject to Monomotapa.. Six thoufand Moors and Cafres laid fiege to this garrifon, which he defended with only thirty-five men. After having feveral times fuffered by unexpected fallies, the Barbarians fled, exclaiming to their king, that he had led them to fight against God. See Faria. |