propriate passage from an author whose works can be called rare only from their being, I fear, rarely read, however commonly talked of. It is the instance of Xenophon, as stated by Lord Bacon, who would himself furnish an equal instance, if there conld be found an equal commentator. It is of Xenophon the philosopher, who went from Socrates' school into Asia, in the expedition of Cyrus the younger, against King Artaxerxes. This Xenophon, at that time, was very young, and never had seen the wars before; neither had any command in the army, but only followed the war as a volunteer, for the love and conversation of Proxenus, his friend. He was present when Falinus came in message from the great King to the Grecians, after that Cyrus was slain in the field, and they, a handful of men, left to themselves in the midst of the King's territories, cut off from their country by many navigable rivers, and many hundred miles. The message imported, that they should deliver up their arms and submit themselves to the King's mercy. To which message, before answer was made, divers of the army conferred familiarly with Falinus, and amongst the rest Xenophon happened to say: Why, Falinus! we have now but these two things left, our arms and our virtue; and if we yield up our arms, how shall we make use of our virtue ?' Whereto Falinus, smiling on him, said, 'If I be not deceived, young gentleman, you are an Athenian, and I believe you study philosophy, and it is pretty that you say; but you are much abused, if you think your virtue can withstand the King's power.' Here was the scorn the wonder followed ;-which was, that this young scholar or philosopher, after all the captains were murdered in parley, by treason, conducted those ten thousand foot through the heart of all the King's high countries from Babylon to Græcia, in safety, in despite of all the King's forces, to the astonishment of the world, and the encouragement of the Grecians, in time succeeding, to make invasion upon the kings of Persia; as was after purposed by Jason the Thessalian, attempted by Agesilaus the Spartan, and achieved by Alexander the Macedonian, all upon the ground of the act of that young scholar."* Often have I reflected with awe on the great and disproportionate power, which an individual of no extraordinary talents or attainments may exert, by merely throwing off all restraint of * Advancement of Learning. B. L-Ed. conscience. What then must not be the power, where an individual, of consummate wickedness, can organize into the unity and rapidity of an individual will all the natural and artificial forces of a populous and wicked nation? And could we bring within the field of imagination, the devastation effected in the moral world, by the violent removal of old customs, familiar sympathies, willing reverences, and habits of subordination almost naturalized into instinct; of the mild influences of reputation, and the other ordinary props and aidances of our infirm virtue, or at least, if virtue be too high a name, of our well-doing; and above all, if we could give form and body to all the effects produced on the principles and dispositions of nations by the infectious feelings of insecurity, and the soul-sickening sense of unsteadiness in the whole edifice of civil society; the horrors of battle, though the miseries of a whole war were brought together before our eyes in one disastrous field, would present but a tame tragedy in comparison. Nay it would even present a sight of comfort and of elevation, if this field of carnage were the sign and result of a national resolve, of a general will, so to die, that neither deluge nor fire should take away the name of country from their graves, rather than to tread the same clods of earth, no longer a country, and themselves alive in nature, but dead in infamy. What is Greece at this present moment? It is the country of the heroes from Codrus to Philopamen; and so it would be, though all the sands of Africa should cover its cornfields and olive-gardens, and not a flower were left on Hymettus for a bee to murmur in. If then the power with which wickedness can invest the human being be thus tremendous, greatly does it behoove us to inquire into its source and causes. So doing we shall quickly discover that it is not vice, as vice, which is thus mighty; but systematic vice. Vice self-consistent and entire; crime corresponding to crime; villany entrenched and barricadoed by villany; this is the condition and main constituent of its power. The abandonment of all principle of right enables the soul to choose and act upon a principle of wrong, and to subordinate to this one principle all the various vices of human nature. For it is a mournful truth, that as devastation is incomparably an easier work than production, so may all its means and instruments be more easily arranged into a scheme and system: even as in a siege every building and garden, which the faithful governor must destroy, as impeding the defensive means of the garrison, or furnishing means of offence to the besieger, occasions a wound in feelings which virtue herself has fostered: and virtue, because it is virtue, loses perforce part of her energy in the reluctance with which she proceeds to a business so repugnant to her wishes, as a choice of evils. But he, who has once said with his whole heart, Evil, be thou my good! has removed a world of obstacles by the very decision, that he will have no obstacles but those of force and brute matter. The road of justice Curves round the corn-field and the hill of vines, but the path of the lightning is straight; and straight the fearful path Of the cannon-ball. Direct it flies and rapid, Shatt'ring that it may reach, and shatt'ring what it reaches.† Happily for mankind, however, the obstacles which a consistently evil mind no longer finds in itself, it finds in its own unsuitableness to human nature. A limit is fixed to its power: but within that limit, both as to the extent and duration of its influence, there is little hope of checking its career, if giant and united vices are opposed only by mixed and scattered virtues; and those too, probably, from the want of some combining principle, which assigns to each its due place and rank, at civil war with themselves, or at best perplexing and counteracting each other. In our late agony of glory and of peril, did we not too often hear even good men declaiming on the horrors and crimes of war, and softening or staggering the minds of their brethren by details of individual wretchedness? Thus under pretence of avoiding blood, they were withdrawing the will from the defence of the very source of those blessings without which the blood would flow idly in our veins! Thus lest a few should fall on the bulwarks in glory, they were preparing us to give up the whole state to baseness, and the children of free ancestors to become slaves, and the fathers of slaves! Machiavelli has well observed, Sono di tre generazioni cervelli: l'uno intende per se; l'altro intende quanto da altri gli è *Poetical Works, VII. P. 480.-Ed. † Ibid. p. 480.-Ed. mostro; e il terzo non intende nè per se stesso, nè per dimostrazione di altri.* There are brains of three races. The one understands of itself; the second understands as much as is shown it by others; the third neither understands of itself nor what is shown it by others." I should have no hesitation in placing that man in the third class of brains, for whom the history of the last twenty years has not supplied a copious comment on the preceding text. The widest maxims of prudence are like arms without hearts, disjoined from those feelings which flow forth from principle as from a fountain. So little are even the genuine maxims of expedience likely to be perceived or acted upon by those who have been habituated to admit nothing higher than expedience, that I dare hazard the assertion, that in the whole chapter of contents of European ruin, every article might be unanswerably deduced from the neglect of some maxim which has been repeatedly laid down, demonstrated, and enforced with a host of illustrations, in some one or other of the works of Machiavelli, Bacon, or Harrington. Indeed I can remember no one event of importance which was not distinctly foretold, and this not by a lucky prize drawn among a thousand blanks out of the lottery wheel of conjecture, but legitimately deduced as certain consequences from established premises. It would be a melancholy, but a very profitable employment, for some vigorous mind, intimately acquainted with the recent history of Europe, to collect the weightiest aphorisms of Machiavelli alone, and illustrating by appropriate facts the breach or observation of each, to render less mysterious the present triumph of lawless violence. The apt motto to su cha work would be,―The children of darkness are wiser in their generation than the children of light. So grievously, indeed, have men been deceived by the showy theories of unlearned mock thinkers, that there seems a tendency in the public mind to shun all thought, and to expect help from * Il Principe, c. xxii.—Ed. Οὗτος μὲν πανάριστος, ὃς αὐτῷ πάντα νοήσῃ, Φρασσάμενος τά κ' ἔπειτα καὶ ἐς τέλος ῇσιν ἀμείνω· t "Ος δέ κε μήτ' αὐτὸς νοέη, μήτ' ἄλλου ἀκούων Εν θυμῷ βάλληται, ὁ δ ̓ αὖτ ̓ ἀχρήϊος ἀνήρ. Op. et Dies. 293, &c. Cic, p. Cluent. c. 31. Liv. xxii. 29. Diog. Laer. vii. 1. 21.—Ed. any quarter rather than from seriousness and reflection; as if some invisible power would think for us, when we gave up the pretence of thinking for ourselves. But in the first place, did those, who opposed the theories of innovators, conduct their untheoretic opposition with more wisdom, or to a happier result? And secondly, are societies now constructed on principles so few and so simple, that we could, if even we wished it, act as it were by instinct, like our distant forefathers in the infancy of states? Doubtless, to act is nobler than to think: but as the old man doth not become a child by means of his second childishness, as little can a nation exempt itself from the necessity of thinking which has once learnt to think. Miserable was the delusion of the late mad realizer of mad dreams, in his belief that he should ultimately succeed in transforming the nations of Europe into the unreasoning hordes of a Babylonian or Tartar empire, or even in reducing the age to the simplicity-so desirable for tyrantsof those times, when the sword and the plough were the sole implements of human skill. Those are epochs in the history of a people, which, having been, can never more recur. Extirpate all civilization and all its arts by the sword, trample down all ancient institutions, rights, distinctions, and privileges, drag us backward to our old barbarism, as beasts to the den of Cacus— deem you that thus you could recreate the unexamining and boisterous youth of the world, when the sole questions wereWhat is to be conquered? and who is the most famous leader?" In an age in which artificial knowledge is received almost at the birth, intellect and thought alone can be our upholder and judge. Let the importance of this truth procure pardon for its repetition. Only by means of seriousness, and meditation, and the free infliction of censure in the spirit of love, can the true philanthropist of the present time, curb-in himself and his contemporaries; only by these can he aid in preventing the evils which threaten us, not from the terrors of an enemy so much as from our own fear of, and aversion to, the toils of reflection. For all must now be taught in sport-science, morality, yea, religion itself. And yet few now sport from the actual impulse of a believing fancy and in a happy delusion. Of the most influential class, at least, of our literary guides-the anonymous authors of our periodical publications—the most part assume this character from cowardice or malice, till having begun with studied igno 66 |