Oldalképek
PDF
ePub

than the most solemn and sacred duty to his country and his God required!

66

To his latest breath did this great patriot maintain the noble character of a captain, the patron of peace; and a statesman, the friend of justice. Dying, he bequeathed to his heirs the sword which he had worn in the war of liberty, and charged them never to take it from the scabbard but in self-defence, or in defence of their country and her freedom; and commanding them, that when it should thus be drawn, they should never sheath it, nor ever give it up, but prefer falling with it in their hands to the relinquishment thereof," words, the majesty and simple eloquence of which are not surpassed in the oratory of Athens and Rome. BROUGHAM'S STATESMEN.

BACON.1

In the age of Elizabeth the English mind took its first bent; a new-born impulse in the nation everywhere was working out its religion, its legislation, and its literature. In every class of genius there existed nothing to copy; every thing that was to be great was to find a beginning. Those maritime adventurers in this reign who sailed to discover new regions, and those heroes whose chivalric spirit was errant in the marshes of Holland, were not more enterprising than the creators of our peaceful literature.

Among these first inventors-our epical Spenser, our dramatic Shakespeare and Jonson, our Hooker, who sounded the depths of the origin of law, and our Raleigh, who first opened the history of mankind,—at length appeared the philosopher who proclaimed a new philosophy emancipating the human mind by breaking the chains of scholastic antiquity. He was a singular being who was recognised without his

name.

Aristotle, in taking possession of all the regions of knowledge, from the first had assumed a universal monarchy

1 Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, Keeper of the Privy Seal and Chancellor of England in the reigns of Elizabeth and James I, is generally allowed to be the author of Modern Inductive Philosophy, in his great work, "The Instauration of the Sciences." This eminent man had the weakness of a partiality for ostentation, and a fondness for wealth that degenerated into avarice; he was disgraced for alleged corruption in his high office of Chancellor; and has been characterized by a satirical poet as

"The wisest, greatest, meanest of mankind."

more real than that of his regal pupil, for he had subjugated the minds of generation after generation. Through a long succession of ages, and amid both extinct and new religions, the writings of the mighty Stagyrite, however long known by mutilated and unfaithful versions, were equally studied by the Mahommedan, Arabian, and the Rabbinical Hebrew, and, during the scholastic ages, were even placed by the side of, and sometimes above the Gospel; and the ten categories which pretended to classify every object of human apprehension, were held as another revelation. Centuries succeed to centuries, and the learned went on translating, commenting, and interpreting the sacred obscurity, or the autocratical edict of a genius whose lofty omniscience seemed to partake in some degree of divinity itself.

But from this passive obedience to a single encyclopedic genius, a fatal consequence ensued for mankind. The schoolmen had formed, as Lord Bacon has nobly expressed himself, "an unhallowed conjunction of divine with human matters." Theology itself was drawn into a system, drawn out of the artificial arrangements of Aristotle; they made their orthodoxy dependent on the "scholastic gibberish ;" and to doubt any doctrine of "the philosopher," as Aristotle was paramountly called, might be to sin by syllogism, heretical if not atheistical. In reality, it was to contend without any possibility of escape with the ecclesiastical establishment, whose integrity was based on the immovable conformity of all human opinions. Every university in Europe, whose honours and emoluments arose from their Aristotelian chairs, stood as the sentinels of each intellectual fortress. Speculative philosophy could therefore no farther advance. It could not pass that inviolable circle which had circumscribed the universal knowledge of the human race. No one dared to think his own thoughts, to observe his own observations, lest by some fortuitous discovery, in differing from the Aristotelian dialectic, he might lapse from his Christianity. The Scholastic sects were still agitating the same topics, for the same barbarous terms supplied, on all occasions, verbal disputations, which even bloody frays could never terminate.

If we imagine that this awful fabric of the Aristotelian or Scholastic philosophy was first shaken by the Verulamian, we should be conferring on a single individual a sudden influence which was far more progressive. In a great revolution whence we date a new era, we are apt to lose sight of

those devious paths, and those marking incidents, which in all human affairs are the prognostics and the preparations. The history of the human mind would be imperfectly revealed, should we not trace the great events in their precursors.

Early in the sixteenth century appeared simultaneously a number of extraordinary geniuses. An age of philosophical inventors seemed to arise; a new generation, who, each in his own way, were emancipating themselves from the dogmas of the ancient dictator. This revolt against the old Scholastics broke forth in Italy, in Spain, in France, in Germany, and even reached our shores. These philosophers were the contemporaries of Luther: they had not engaged in his theological reformation, but it is more than probable that they had caught the inspiration of his hardy spirit. We are, indeed, told that the famous Cornelius Agrippa, though he could not desert the Rome of his patrons, yet saw with great satisfaction its great pontiff attacked by Luther; as Erasmus and others equally delighted to satirize all the Scholastic monkery. Luther, too, made common cause with them in demolition of that ancient edifice of Scholastic superstition which, under the supremacy of Aristotle, barred out every free inquiry.-D'ISRAELI; "AMENITIES OF LITERATURE."

THE REIGNS OF JOHN AND HENRY III. OF ENGLAND.1

Both Saxon and Norman were alike aggrieved by the tyranny of a bad king. Both were alike indignant at the favour shewn by the Court to the natives of Bretagne and Aquitaine. The great-grandsons of those who had fought under William, and the great-grandsons of those who had fought under Harold, began to draw near to each other in friendship; and the first pledge of their reconciliation was the Great Charter won by their united exertions, and framed for their common benefit. Here commences the history of the English nation. The history of the preceding events is the history of wrongs inflicted and sustained by various tribes, which, indeed, all dwelt on English ground, but which regarded each other with aversion such as has scarcely ever existed between communities separated by physical barriers. For even the mutual animosity of countries at war with each other is languid when compared with the animosity of nations which, morally separated, are yet locally

1 See p. 254.

Y

intermingled. In no country has the enmity of race been carried farther than in England. In no country has that enmity been more completely effaced. The stages of the process by which the hostile elements were melted down into one homogeneous mass are not accurately known to us. But it is certain that, when John became king, the distinction between Saxons and Normans was strongly marked, and that before the end of the reign of his grandson it had almost disappeared. In the time of Richard the First, the ordinary imprecation of a Norman gentleman was, "May I become an Englishman!" His ordinary form of indignant denial was, 66 Do you take me for an Englishman?" The descendant of such a gentleman a hundred years later was proud of the English name. The sources of the noblest rivers which spread fertility over continents, and bear richly laden fleets to the sea, are to be sought in wild and barren mountain tracts, incorrectly laid down in maps, and rarely explored by travellers. To such a tract the history of our country during the thirteenth century may not unaptly be compared. Sterile and obscure as is that portion of our annals, it is there that we must seek for the origin of our freedom, our prosperity, and our glory. Then it was that the great English people was formed, that the national character began to exhibit those peculiarities which it has ever since retained, and that our fathers became emphatically islanders,-islanders not merely in geographical position, but in their politics, their feelings, and their manners. Then first appeared with distinctness that constitution which has ever since, through all changes, preserved its identity; that constitution of which all the other free constitutions in the world are copies, and which, in spite of some defects, deserves to be regarded as the best under which any great society has ever yet existed during many ages.

Then it was that the House of Commons, the archetype of all the representative assemblies which now meet either in the old or in the new world, held its first sittings. Then it was that the common law rose to the dignity of a science, and rapidly became a not unworthy rival of the imperial jurisprudence. Then it was that the courage of those sailors who manned the rude barks of the Cinque Ports first made the flag of England terrible on the seas. Then it was that the most ancient colleges which still exist at both the great national seats of learning were founded. Then was formed

that language, less musical, indeed, than the languages of the south, but in force, in richness, in aptitude for all the highest purposes of the poet, the philosopher, and the orator, inferior to the tongue of Greece alone. Then, too, appeared the first dawn of that noble literature, the most splendid and the most durable of the many glories of England.

MACAULAY.

ENGLAND.

The history of England is emphatically the history of progress. It is the history of a constant movement in the public mind, of a constant change in the institutions of a great society. We see that society, at the beginning of the twelfth century, in a state more miserable than the state in which the most degraded nations of the East now are. We see it

subjected to the tyranny of a handful of armed foreigners. We see a strong distinction of caste separating the victorious Norman from the vanquished Saxon. We see the great body of the population in a state of personal slavery. We see the most debasing and cruel superstition exercising boundless dominion over the most elevated and benevolent minds. We see the multitude sunk in brutal ignorance, and the studious few engaged in acquiring what did not deserve the name of knowledge. In the course of seven centuries the wretched and degraded race have become the greatest and most highly civilized people that ever the world saw—have spread their dominion over every quarter of the globe-have scattered the seeds of mighty empires and republics over vast continents, of which no dim intimation had ever reached Ptolemy or Strabo-have created a maritime power which would annihilate in a quarter of an hour the navies of Tyre, Athens, Carthage, Venice, and Genoa together-have carried the science of healing, the means of locomotion and correspondence, every mechanical art, every manufacture, everything that promotes the convenience of life, to a perfection which our ancestors would have thought magical— have produced a literature which may boast of works not inferior to the noblest which Greece has bequeathed to us— have discovered the laws which regulate the motions of the heavenly bodies-have speculated with exquisite subtilty on the operations of the human mind-have been the acknowledged leaders of the human race in the career of political

« ElőzőTovább »