Front matter (continued 17)

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,5 and 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.

1 I must refer the reader for the development of the system of Hobbes to the Essay on Hobbes in the “Quarrels of Authors,” (last edition, p. 436.)

2 The masterpiece of legislation of Abbé Sieyes, who, during the French Revolution, had always a new constitution in his pocket, was founded on this principle of “checks and balances in the state,” evidently adopted from Harrington. In Scott’s “Life of Napoleon,” vol. iv., the Abbé Sieyes’ system is described.

3 I think that Harrington presciently detected the latent causes of a great revolution in France. The curiosity of the passage may compensate for its length—

“Where there is tumbling and tossing upon the bed of sickness, it must end in death or recovery. Though the people of the world, in the dregs of the Gothic empire, be yet tumbling and tossing upon the bed of sickness, they cannot die; nor is there any means of recovery for them but by ancient prudence; whence, of necessity, it must come to pass that this drug be better known. If France, Italy, and Spain were not all sick—all corrupted together, there would be none of them so; for the sick would not be able to withstand the sound, nor the sound to preserve their health without curing of the sick. The first of these nations, which, if you stay her leisure, will, in my mind, be France, that recovers the health of ancient prudence, shall certainly govern the world.”—Oceana, p. 168; edition 1771.

4 The Art of Law-giving, 366, 4to edition.

5 See the solemn denunciations of the “Biographia Britannica,” p. 2536, which are repeated by later biographers; see Chalmers.

THE AUTHOR OF “THE GROUNDS AND REASONS OF MONARCHY.”

The author of “The Grounds and Reasons of Monarchy,” whose historical libel is perpetuated in the works of Harrington, is John Hall, of Gray’s Inn, sometimes described of Durham; one of those fervid spirits who take the bent of the times in a revolutionary period. He must be classed among those precocious minds which astonish their contemporaries by acquisitions of knowledge, combined with the finest genius, and in their boyhood betray no immaturity. We may receive with some suspicion accounts of such gifted youths, though they come from competent judges; but when we are reminded of the Rowley of Chatterton, and find what Hall did, we must conclude that there are meteorous beings, whose eccentric orbits we know not how to describe. Hall, prevented by the civil wars from entering the university, pursued his studies in the privacy of the library at Durham. When the war ceased, he was admitted at Cambridge; and in 1646 published, in his nineteenth year, Horæ Vacivæ, or “Essays, with some Occasional Considerations.” These are essays in prose; and at a time when our literature could boast of none except the masterpieces of Lord Bacon, a boy of nineteen sends forth this extraordinary volume. Even our plain Anthony caught the rapture; for he describes its appearance—“the sudden breaking forth of which amazed not only the university, but the more serious part of men in the three nations, when they (the Essays) were spread.” Here is the puerility of a genius of the first order! A boy’s essays raised the admiration of “the three nations!” and they remain still remarkable! This youth seems to have modelled his manner on Bacon for the turn of his thoughts, and on Seneca for the point and sparkle of his periods. The dwarf rose strong as a giant.1

The boy having astonished the world by a volume of his prose, amazed them in the succeeding year by a volume of his verse, poetry as graceful as the prose was nervous; his verses still adorn the most elegant of our modern anthologies.2

Attracted to the metropolis, he entered as a student at Gray’s Inn; and there his political character soon assumed the supremacy over his literary. He sided with the independents, the ultra-commonwealth-men, and satirised the presbyterians, the friends of monarchy. He plunged into extreme measures; courting his new masters by the baseness of a busy pen, he justified Barebones’ parliament, got up a state-pamphlet against the Hollanders, proposed the reform of the universities, “to have the Frier-like list of the fellowships reduced, and the rest of the revenue of the university sequestered into the hands of the committee,” of which, probably, he might himself have been one. The exchequer was opened; he received “present sums of money;” and the council granted their scribe a considerable pension.

During this life of political activity, Hall, in 1650, was commanded by the council of state to repair to Scotland, to attend on Cromwell, for the purpose of settling affairs in favour of the commonwealth, and to wean the Scots from their lingering affection for the surviving Stuart. It was then that Hall, in his vocation, sent forth the thunder of a party-pamphlet, “The Grounds and Reasons of Monarchy.” This extraordinary tract consists of two parts: the first, more elaborately composed, is an argumentative exposition of anti-monarchical doctrines; in the second, to bring the business home to their bosoms, he offers a demonstration of his principles, in a review of the whole Scottish history, sarcastically reminding them of their kings “crowned with happy reigns, and quiet deaths (two successively scarce dying naturally).” It is a mass of invectives and calumnies in the disguise of grave history; and this historical libel, concocted for a particular time and a particular place, was eagerly received at Edinburgh, and immediately republished in London, where it was sure of as warm a reception.3

Hall’s passion for literature must have been intense; for amid these discordant days, he found time to glide into hours of refreshing studies. He gave us the first vernacular version of “The Sublime” of Longinus,4 and left another of the moral Hierocles. This gifted youth with sportive facility turned English into Latin, or Latin into English; it has been recorded of him that he translated the greater part of a singular work of the Alchemical Maier, in one afternoon over his wine at a tavern; and he entranced the ear of that universal patron, Edward Bendlowes, by turning into Latin verse three hundred lines of his mystical poem of “Theophila,” at one sitting.

In this impassioned existence, excited by the acrimony of politics, and the enthusiasm of study, he fell into reckless dissipation, and undermined a constitution which, probably, had all the delicacy and sensitiveness of his genius. He sunk in the struggle of celebrity and personal indulgence, and hastened back to his family to die, when he had hardly attained to manhood.

A true prodigy of genius was this John Hall; for not only he could warm into admiration our literary antiquary, but the greater philosopher Hobbes, not prone to flattery, has left a memorial of this impassioned and precocious being. “Had not his debauches and intemperance diverted him from the more severe studies, he had made an extraordinary person; for no man had ever done so great things at his age.”

1 Three or four of these Essays have been reprinted in “The Restituta,” vol. iii. The original book is very rare.

2 See Ellis’ “Specimens.”

3 I found the origin of this eloquent and factious performance in an account of John Hall, prefixed to his translation of “Hierocles on the Golden Verses of Pythagoras:” it proceeds from a friend—John Davies of Kidwelly. The treatise of Hall, in its original edition, is so rare, that no copy has been found at the British Museum, nor in the King’s Library; it was, however, reprinted at the time in London.

4 A piece of great learning, entitled ‘The Height of Eloquence,’ written in Greek, by Dionysius Longinus, rendered into English from the original, by John Hall, Esq., London, 1652, 8vo.—Brüggeman’s English Transactions.

COMMONWEALTH.

When the term Commonwealth deeply occupied the minds of men, they had formed no settled notions about the thing itself; the term became equivocal, of such wide signification that it was misunderstood and misapplied, and always ambiguous; and a confusion of words led many writers into a confusion of notions.

The term Commonweal, or wealth, indeed appears in our statutes, in the speeches of our monarchs, and in the political works of our writers, long before the idea of a republic, in its popular sense, was promulgated by the votaries of democracy. The term Commonweal explains itself; it specifies no particular polity but the public weal; and even the term republic originally meant nothing more than res publicæ, or “the affairs of the public.” Sir Thomas Smith, the learned secretary to Elizabeth, who has written on the English constitution, entitles his work “The Commonwealth of England.” James the First justly called himself “the great servant of the Commonwealth.” The Commonwealth, meaning the kingdom of England, is the style of all the learned in law.

The ambiguity of the term Commonwealth soon caused it to be perverted by the advocates of popular government, who do not distinguish the State from the people; this appears as early as the days of Rawleigh, who tells us, that “the government of all the common and baser sort is by an usurped nick-name called a Commonwealth.”1

It was in the revolutionary period of Charles the First that the terms Commonwealth and Commonwealth-man were adopted by the governing party, as precisely describing their purity of devotion to the public weal. In the temper of the times the Commonwealth became opposed to the monarchy, and the Commonwealth-man to the royalist. Cromwell ironically asked what was a Commonwealth? affecting an ignorance of the term.

When Baxter wrote his “Holy Commonwealth” against Harrington’s “Heathenish Commonwealth,” he had said, “I plead the cause of monarchy as better than democracy or aristocracy.” Toland, a Commonwealth-man in the new sense, referring to Baxter’s work, exclaims that “A monarchy is an odd way of modelling a Commonwealth.” Baxter alluded to an English Commonwealth in its primitive sense, and Toland restricted the term to its modern application. Indeed, Toland exults in the British constitution being a Commonwealth in the popular sense, in his preface to his edition of Harrington’s works, and has the merit of bringing forward as his authority the royal name of James the First, and which afterwards seems to have struck Locke as so apposite that he condescended to repeat it. The passage in Toland is curious: “It is undeniably manifest that the English government is already a Commonwealth the most free and best constituted in the world. This was frankly acknowledged by King James the First, who styled himself the great servant of the Commonwealth.” One hardly suspected a republican of gravely citing the authority of the royal sage on any position!

The Restoration made the term Commonwealth-man odious as marking out a class of citizens in hostility to the government; and Commonwealth seems, in any sense, to have long continued such an offensive word that it required the nicest delicacy to handle it. The use of the term has even drawn an apology from Locke himself when writing on “government.” “By Commonwealth,” says our philosophical politician, “I must be understood all along to mean, not a democracy, but any independent community, which the Latins signified by the word civitas, to which the word which best answers in our language is Commonwealth.” However, Locke does not close his sentence without some trepidation for the use of an unequivocal term, obnoxious even under the new monarchy of the revolution. “To avoid ambiguity, I crave leave to use the word Commonwealth in that sense in which I find it used by King James the First, and I take it to be its genuine signification—which if anybody dislike, I consent with him to change it for a better!” An ample apology! but one which hardly suits the dignity of the philosophical writer.

1 Rawleigh’s “Remains.”

THE TRUE INTELLECTUAL SYSTEM OF THE UNIVERSE.

It is only in the silence of seclusion that we should open the awful tome of “The True Intellectual System of the Universe” of Ralph Cudworth.1 The history and the fate of this extraordinary result of human knowledge and of sublime metaphysics, are not the least remarkable in the philosophy of bibliography.

The first intention of the author of this elaborate and singular work, was a simple inquisition into the nature of that metaphysical necessity, or destiny, which has been introduced into the systems both of philosophy and religion, wherein man is left an irresponsible agent in his actions, and is nothing more than the blind instrument of inevitable events over which he holds no control.

This system of “necessity,” or fate, our inquirer traced to three different systems, maintained on distinct principles. The ancient Democritic or atomical physiology endows inert matter with a motive power. It views a creation, and a continued creation, without a creator. The disciple of this system is as one who cannot read, who would only perceive lines and scratches in the fairest volume, while the more learned comprehend its large and legible characters; in the mighty volume of nature, the mind discovers what the sense may not, and reads “those sensible delineations by its own inward activity,” which wisdom and power have with their divinity written on every page. The absurd system of the atomist or the mere materialist, Cudworth names the atheistic.

The second system of “necessity” is that of the theists, who conceive that the will of the Deity, producing in us good or evil, is determined by no immutability of goodness and justice, but an arbitrary will omnipotent; and therefore all qualities, good and evil, are merely so by our own conventional notions, having no reality in nature. And this Cudworth calls the divine fate, or immoral theism, being a religion divesting the Creator of the intellectual and moral government of the universe; all just and unjust, according to this hypothesis, being mere factitious things. This “necessity” seems the predestination of Calvinism, with the immorality of antinomianism.

The third sort of fatalists do not deny the moral attributes of the Deity, in his nature essentially benevolent and just; therefore there is an immutability in natural justice and morality, distinct from any law or arbitrary custom; but as these theists are necessarians, the human being is incapacitated to receive praise or blame, rewards or punishments, or to become the object of retributive justice; whence they deduce their axiom that nothing could possibly have been otherwise than it is.

To confute these three fatalisms, or false hypotheses of the system of the universe, Cudworth designed to dedicate three great works; one against atheism, another against immoral theism, and the third against the theism whose doctrine was the inevitable “necessity” which determined all actions and events, and deprived man of his free agency.

These licentious systems were alike destructive of social virtues; and our ethical metaphysician sought to trace the Deity as an omnipotent understanding Being, a supreme intelligence, presiding over all, in his own nature unchangeable and eternal, but granting to his creatures their choice of good and evil by an immutable morality. In the system of the visible and corporeal world the sage contemplated on the mind which everywhere pervaded it; and his genius launched forth into the immensity of “The Intellectual System of the Universe.”

In this comprehensive design he maintains that the ancients had ever preserved the idea of one Supreme Being, distinct from all other gods. That multitude of pagan deities, poetical and political, were but the polyonomy, or the many names or attributes, of one God, in which the unity of the Divine Being was recognised. In the deified natures of things, the intelligent worshipped God; the creator in the created. The pagan religion, however erroneous, was not altogether nonsensical, as the atheists would represent it.

In this folio of near a thousand pages, Cudworth opens the occult sources of remote antiquity; and all the knowledge which the most recondite records have transmitted are here largely dispersed. There is no theogony and no cosmogony which remains unexplored; the Chaldean oracles, and the Hermaic hooks, and the Trismegistic writings, are laid open for us; the arcane theology of the Egyptians is unveiled; and we may consult the Persian Zoroaster, the Grecian Orpheus, the mystical Pythagoras, and the allegorising Plato. No poet was too imaginative, no sophist was too obscure, to be allowed to rest in the graves of their oblivion. All are here summoned to meet together, as at the last tribunal of their judgment-day. And they come with their own words on their lips, and they commune with us with their own voices; for this great magician of mind, who had penetrated into the recesses of mythic antiquity to descry its dim and uncertain truths, has recorded their own words with the reverence of a votary to their faiths. “The sweetness of philology allays the severity of philosophy; the main thing, in the meantime, being the philosophy of religion.2 But for our parts, we neither call Philology nor yet Philosophy our mistress, but serve ourselves of either as occasion requireth.” Such are the words of the historian of “The Intellectual System of the Universe.”

It is this mine of recondite quotations in their original languages, most accurately translated, which has imparted such an enduring value to this treasure of the ancient theology, philosophy, and literature;3 for however subtle and logical was the master-mind which carried on his trains of reasoning, its abstract and abstruse nature could not fail to prove repulsive to the superficial, for few could follow the genius who led them into “the very darkest recesses of antiquity,” while his passionless sincerity was often repugnant to the narrow creed of the orthodox. What, therefore, could the consequence of this elaborate volume when given to the world be, but neglect or hatred? And long was “The Intellectual System” lost among a thoughtless or incurious race of readers. It appeared in 1678. It was nearly thirty years afterwards, when the neglected author was no more, in 1703, that Le Clerc, a great reader of English writers, furnished copious extracts in his “Bibliothèque Choisie,” which introduced it to the knowledge of foreigners, and provoked a keen controversy with Bayle. This last great critic, who could only decide by the translated extracts, proved to be a formidable antagonist of Cudworth. At length, in 1733, more than half a century subsequent to its publication, Mosheim gave a Latin version, with learned illustrations. The translation was not made without great difficulty; and a French one, which had been begun, was abandoned. Cudworth has invented many terms, compound or obscure; and though these may be traced to their sources, yet when a single novel term may allude to metaphysical notions or to recondite knowledge, the learning is less to be admired than the defective perspicacity is to be regretted. It was, however, this edition of a foreigner which awakened the literary ardour of the author’s countrymen towards their neglected treasure, and in 1743 “The True Intellectual System” at length reached a second edition, republished by Birch.4

The seed of immortal thoughts are not sown to perish, even in the loose soil where they have long lain disregarded. “The Intellectual System” has furnished many writers with their secondary erudition, and possibly may have given rise to that portion of “The Divine Legation” of Warburton, whose ancient learning we admire for its ingenuity, while we retreat from its paradoxes; for there is this difference between this solid and that fanciful erudition, that Warburton has proudly made his subject full of himself, while Cudworth was earnest only to be full of his subject. The glittering edifice of Paradox was raised on moveable sands; but the more awful temple has been hewn out of rocks which time can never displace. Even in our own days, Dugald Stewart has noticed that some German systems, stripped of their deep neological disguise, have borrowed from Cudworth their most valuable materials. The critical decision of Leibnitz must not, however, be rejected; for if there is some severity in its truth, there is truth in its severity. “Dans ‘Le Système Intellectuel’ je trouve beaucoup de savoir, mais non pas assez de méditation.”

Such is the great work of a great mind! We have already shown its hard fate in the neglect of the contemporaries of the author—that thoughtless and thankless world many a great writer is doomed to address; and we must now touch on those human infirmities to which all systems of artificial theology and speculative notions are unhappily obnoxious.

In stating the arguments of the atheists at full, and opposing those of their adversaries, this true inquirer suffered the odium of Atheism itself! “It is pleasant enough,” says Lord Shaftesbury, “that the pious Cudworth was accused of giving the upper hand to the atheist for having only stated their reasons and those of their adversaries fairly together.” The truth seems, that our learned and profound author was not orthodox in his notions. To explain the difficulty of the Resurrection of bodies which in death resolve themselves into their separate elements, Cudworth assumed that they would not appear in their substance as a body of flesh, but in some ethereal form. In his researches he discovered the Trinity of Plato, of Pythagoras, and of Parmenides, and that of the Persian Mithra of three Hypostases, numerically distinct, in the unity of the Godhead; this spread an alarm among his brothers the clergy, and Cudworth was perpetually referred to as an unquestionable authority by the heterodox writers on the mystery of the Christian Trinity. Even his great principle, that the Unity of the Deity was known to the polytheists, was impugned by a catholic divine as derogatory of revelation, he insisting that the Pagan divinities were only a commemoration of human beings. Yet the notion of Cudworth, so amply illustrated, was not peculiar to him, for it had already been promulgated by Lord Herbert, and by the ancients themselves.

As all such results contradicted received opinions, this pious and learned man was condemned by some as “an Arian, a Socinian, or at best a deist.” Some praised his prudence, while others intimated his dissimulation; on several dogmas he delivers himself with great reserve, and even so ambiguously, that his own opinions are not easily ascertained, and are sometimes even contradictory. There have been more recent philosophers, who, from their prejudices, have hardly done justice to the search for truth of Cudworth; he is depreciated by Lord Bolingbroke, who, judging the philosopher by the colour of his coat, has treated the divine with his keenest severity, as “one who read too much to think enough, and admired too much to think freely.” Bolingbroke might envy the learning which he could not rival, and borrow from those recondite stores the knowledge which otherwise might not have reached him.

Our great author had indeed the heel of Achilles. Exercising the most nervous logic, and the most subtle metaphysics, he was also deeply imbued with Platonic reveries. Ambitious, in his inquiries, to discuss subjects placed far beyond the reach of human faculties, he delighted, with his eager imagination, to hover about those impassable precincts which Providence and Nature have eternally closed against the human footstep. It was this disposition of his mind which gave birth to the wild hypothesis of the plastic life of Nature, to unfold the inscrutable operations of Providence in the changeless forms of existence. There is nothing more embarrassing to atheism, in deriving the uninterrupted phenomena of nature from a fortuitous mechanism of inert matter, than to be compelled to ascribe the unvaried formation of animals to a cause which has no idea of what it performs, although its end denotes an intention; executing an undeviating system without any intelligence of the laws which govern it. We cannot indeed conceive every mite, or gnat, or fly, to be the immediate handwork of the ceaseless labours of the Deity, though so perfectly artificial is even its wing or its leg that the Divine Artificer seems visible in the minutest production. Cudworth, to solve the enigma, fancifully concluded that the Deity had given a plastic faculty to matter—“A vital and spiritual, but unintelligent and necessary, agent to execute its purposes.” He raised up a sort of middle substance between matter and spirit—it seemed both or neither; and our philosopher, roving through the whole creation, sometimes describes it as an inferior subordinate agent of the Deity, doing the drudgery, without consciousness; lower than animal life; a kind of drowsy unawakened mind, not knowing, but only doing, according to commands and laws impressed upon it.

The consequence deduced by the subtle Bayle from this fanciful system was, that, had the Deity ever given such a plastic faculty, it was an evidence that it is not repugnant to the nature of things, that unintelligent and necessary agents should operate, and therefore a motive power might be essential to matter, and things thus might exist of themselves.5 It weakened the great objection against atheism. Philosophers, to extricate themselves from occult phenomena, have too often flung over the gaping chasms which they cannot fill up, the slight plank of a vague conjecture, or have constructed the temporary bridge of an artificial hypothesis; and thus they have hazarded what yields no sure footing. Of this “folly of the wise,” the inexplicable ether of Newton, the whirling worlds or vortices of Descartes, and the vibrations and the vibratiuncles of Hartley, among so many similar fancies of other philosophers, furnish a memorable evidence. The plastic life of Nature, as explained by Cudworth, only substituted a novel term for a blind, unintelligent agent, and could neither endure the ridicule of Bolingbroke nor the logic of Bayle, and is thrown aside among the deceitful fancies of scholastic dreamers.

There was indeed from his earliest days a tinge of Platonic refinement in the capacious understanding of this great metaphysician. The theses he maintained at college were the dawn of the genius of his future works. One was on “The Eternal Differences between Good and Evil,” which probably led long after to his treatise on “Eternal and Immutable Morality”—an exposition of the dangerous doctrines of Hobbes and the Antinomians.6 The other question he disputed was, that “there are incorporeal substances immortal in their own nature”—a topic he afterwards investigated in “The True Intellectual System of the Universe”—against the principles of the Epicurean philosophy. These scholastic exercises are an evidence that the youthful student was already shaping in his mind the matters and the subjects of his future great work. Beautiful is this unity of mind which we discover in every master-genius! Even into his divinity he seems to have carried the same fanciful refinement; he maintained that “the Lord’s Supper was a feast upon a sacrifice;” and such was the charm of this mysterious doctrine, that it was adopted by some of the greatest divines and scholars. It is not therefore surprising that Cudworth was held in the highest estimation by the Platonic Dr. More, of which I give a remarkable instance. Cudworth, as other divines, wrote on Daniel’s prophecy of the seventy weeks, which, he says in a letter, is “A Defence of Christianity against Judaism, the seventy weeks never having yet been sufficiently cleared and improved.” Since the days of Cudworth others have “cleared and improved,” and his “demonstration” is not even noticed among subsequent “demonstrations;” but Judaism still remains. Yet on this theological reverie, Dr. More has used this forcible language:—“Mr. Cudworth has demonstrated the manifestation of the Messiah to have fallen out at the end of the sixty-ninth week, and his passion in the midst of the seventieth. This demonstration is of as much price and worth in theology, as either the circulation of the blood in physic, or the motion of the earth in natural philosophy.” This is not only a curious instance of the argumentative theology of that period, but of the fascination of a most refining genius influencing kindred imaginations.

We now come to record the melancholy fate of this great work, in connexion with its great author. He had arranged it into three elaborate volumes; but we possess only the first—the refutation of atheism; that subject, however, is of itself complete. Although I know not any private correspondence of Cudworth, after the publication of “The Intellectual System,” which might more positively reveal the state of his feelings, and the cause of the suppression of his work, in which he had made considerable progress, yet we are acquainted with circumstances which too clearly describe its unhappy fate. We learn from Warburton that this pious and learned scholar was the victim of calumny, and that, too sensitive to his injuries, he grew disgusted with his work; his ardour slackened, and the mass of his papers lay in cold neglect. The philosophical divine participated in the fate of the few who, like him, searched for truth freed from the manacles of received opinions.

Cudworth left his manuscripts to the care of his daughter, Lady Masham, the friend of Locke, who passed his latter days in her house at Oates. Her ladyship was literary, but the reverse of a Platonical genius; she wrote against the Platonic Norris’ “Love of God,” and admitted in her religion no principles which were not practicable in morals, and seems to have been rather the disciple of the author of “The Human Understanding,” than the daughter of the author of “The Intellectual System.” For the good sense of Lady Masham erudition lost its curiosity, and imagination its charm; and she probably with some had certain misgivings of the tendency of her father’s writings! He had himself been careless of them, for we know of no testamentary direction for their preservation. By her these unvalued manuscripts were not placed in a cabinet, but thrown in a heap into the dark corner of some neglected shelf in the library at Oates. And from thence, after the lapse of half a century, they were turned out, with some old books, by the last Lord Masham, to make room for a fashionable library for his second lady. A bookseller purchased them with a notion that this waste paper contained the writings of Locke, and printing a Bible under the editorship of the famous Dr. Dodd, introduced the scripture notes, found among the heap, in the commentary, under the name of Locke. The papers were accidentally discovered to be parts of “The Intellectual System,” and after having suffered mutilation and much confusion in the various mischances which they passed through, they finally repose among our national collections; fragments on fragments which may yet be inspected by those whose intrepidity would patiently venture on the discoveries which lie amid this mass of theological metaphysics. They are thus described in Ayscough’s “Catalogue,” 4983:—“Collection of Confused Thoughts, Memorandums, &c., relating to the Eternity of Torments—Thoughts on Pleasure—Commonplace Book of Motives to Moral Duties, two volumes; and five volumes on Free-will.” This description is imperfect; and many other subjects, the groundwork of his future inquiries, will be found in these voluminous manuscripts. One volume, still highly valued, was snatched from the wreck, Cudworth’s “Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality,” which was edited by Dr. Chandler many years after the death of the author.

After all, we possess a mighty volume, subject no longer to neglect nor to mischance. “The True Intellectual System of the Universe” exists without a parallel for its matter, its subject, and its manner. Its matter furnishes the unsunned treasures of ancient knowledge, the history of the thoughts, the imaginations, and the creeds of the profoundest intellects of mankind on the Deity. Its subject, though veiled in metaphysics more sublime than human reasoning can pierce, yet shows enough for us to adore. And its manner, brightened by a subdued Platonism, inculcates the immutability of moral distinctions, and vindicates the free agency of the human being against the impious tenets which deliver him over a blind captive to an inexorable “necessity.”

1 My copy is the folio volume of the first edition, 1678; but they have recently reprinted Cudworth at Oxford in four volumes.

2 A remarkable expression, which we supposed was peculiar to the more enlarged views of our own age. But who can affix precise notions to general terms? Cudworth’a notion of “the philosophy of religion” was probably restricted to the history of the ancient philosophies of religion.

3 In the first edition, the references of its numerous quotations were few and imperfect; Dr. Birch, in the edition of 1743, supplied those that were wanting from Mosheim’s Latin translation of the work. Warburton observed that “all the translations from the Greek are wonderfully exact.”

4 It may be regretted that this valuable mass of curious erudition is not furnished with an ordinary index. A singular clue to the labyrinth the author has offered, by a running head on every single one of the thousand pages; and a minutely analytical table of the contents is appended to the mighty tome. This indeed impresses us with a full conception of the sublimity of the work itself; but our intimacy with this multitude of matters is greatly interrupted by the want of a ready reference to particulars which an ordinary index would have afforded.

5 Continuation des Pensées Diverses, iii. 90.

6 This volume, still read and valued, was fortunately saved amidst the wreck of the author’s manuscripts, and was published from his own autograph copy which he had prepared for the press, so late as 1781, 8vo.

DIFFICULTIES OF THE PUBLISHERS OF CONTEMPORARY MEMOIRS.

The editors of contemporary memoirs have often suffered an impenetrable mystery to hang over their publications, by an apparent suppression of the original. By this studious evasion of submitting the manuscript to public inspection, they long diminished the credit of the printed volumes. Enemies whose hostility the memorialists had raised up, in the meanwhile practised every artifice of detraction, racking their invention to persuade the world that but little faith was due to these pretended revelations; while the editors, mute and timorous, from private motives which they wished to conceal, dared not explain, in their lifetime, the part which they had really taken in editing these works. In the course of years, circumstances often became too complicated to be disentangled, or were of too delicate a nature to be nakedly exposed to the public scrutiny; the accusations grew more confident, the defence more vague, the suspicions more probable, the rumours and the hearsays more prevalent—the public confidence in the authenticity of these contemporary memoirs was thus continually shaken.

Such has been the fate of the history of the Earl of Clarendon, which, during a long interval of time, had to contend with prudential editors, and its perfidious opponents. And it is only at this late day that we are enabled to draw the veil from the mystery of its publication, and to reconcile the contradictory statements, so positively alleged by the assertors of the integrity of the text, and the impugners of its genuineness. We now can adjust with certainty so many vague protestations of its authenticity, by those who could not themselves have known it, with the sceptical cavils which at times seemed not always doubtful, and with one infamous charge which was not less positive than it proved to be utterly fictitious. The fate and character of this great historical work was long involved in the most intricate and obscure incidents; and this bibliographical tale offers a striking illustration of the disingenuity alike of the assailants and the defenders.

The history of Lord Clarendon was composed by the express desire of Charles the First. This prince, in the midst of his fugitive and troubled life, seemed still regardful of posterity; and we might think, were it not too flattering to his judgment, that by his selection of this historian, he anticipated the genius of an immortal writer. We know the king carefully conveyed to the noble author many historical documents, to furnish this vindication, or apology, of the calamitous measures to which that fated sovereign was driven. The earnest performance of this design, fervid with the eloquence of the writer, proceeding on such opposite principles to those of the advocates of popular freedom, and bearing on its awful front the condemnatory title of “The Rebellion,” provoked their indignant feelings; and from its first appearance they attempted to blast its credit, by sinking it into a mere party production. But the elevated character of “The Chancellor of Human Nature,” as Warburton emphatically described him, stood almost beyond the reach of his assailants: it was by a circuitous attack that they contrived to depreciate the work, by pointing their assault on the presumed editors of the posthumous history. And though the genius of the historian, and the peculiarity of his style, could not but be apparent through the whole of this elaborate work, yet rumours soon gathered from various quarters, that the text had been tampered with by “the Oxford editors;” and some, judging by the preface, and the heated and party dedication to the queen, which, it has been asserted, afterwards induced the Tory frenzy of Sacheverell, imagined that the editors had converted the history into a vehicle of their own passions. The “History of Clarendon” was declared to be mutilated, interpolated, and, at length, even forged; the taint of suspicion long weakened the confidence of general readers. Even Warburton suspected that the editors had taken the liberty of omitting passages; but, with a reliance on their honour, he believed they had never dared to incorporate any additions of their own.

The History of Lord Clarendon thus, from its first appearance, was attended by the concomitant difficulties of contemporary history, as we shall find the editors soon discovered when they sat down to their task; difficulties which occasioned their peculiar embarrassments. Even the noble author himself had considered that “a piece of this nature, wherein the infirmities of some, and the malice of others, both things and persons, must be boldly looked upon and mentioned, is not likely to appear in the age in which it was written.” Lord Clarendon seems to have been fully aware that the freedom of the historical pen is equally displeasing to all parties. A contemporary historian is doomed to the peculiar unhappiness of encountering living witnesses, prompt to challenge the correctness of his details, and the fairness of his views; for him the complaints of friends will not be less unreasonable than the clamours of foes. And this happened to the present work. The history was not only assailed by men of a party, but by men of a family. They whose relatives had immolated their persons, and wrecked their fortunes, by their allegiance to the royal cause, were mortified by the silence of the historian; the writer was censured for omissions which had never entered into his design; for he was writing less a general history of the civil war, than a particular one of “the Rebellion,” as he deemed it. Others eagerly protested against the misrepresentation of the characters of their ancestors; but as all family feelings are in reality personal ones, such interested accusers may not be less partial and prejudiced than the contemporary historian himself. He, at least, should be allowed to possess the advantage of a more immediate knowledge of what he narrates, and the right of that free opinion, which deprived of, he would cease to be “the servant of posterity.” Lord Lansdowne was indignant at the severity of the military portrait of his ancestor, Sir Richard Greenvill, and has left a warm apology to palliate a conduct which Clarendon had honestly condemned; and recently, the late Earl of Ashburnham wrote two agreeable volumes to prove that Clarendon was jealous of the royal favour which the feeble Ashburnham enjoyed, and to which the descendant ascribed the depreciation of that favourite’s character.

The authenticity of the history soon became a subject of national attention. The passions of the two great factions which ruled our political circles had broken forth from these kindling pages of the recent history of their own day. They were treading on ashes which covered latent fires. Whenever a particular sentence raised the anger of some, or a provoking epithet for ever stuck to a favourite personage, the offended parties were willing to believe that these might be interpolations; for it was positively affirmed that such there were. Twenty years after its first publication, we find Sir Joseph Jekyl, in the House of Commons, solemnly declaring that he had reason to believe that the “History of the Rebellion” had not been printed faithfully.

An incident of a very singular nature had occurred, even before the publication of the History, which assuredly was unknown to the editors. Dr. Calamy, the historian of the non-conformists, at the time that Lord Clarendon’s History was printing at Oxford, was himself on the point of publishing his Narrative of Baxter, and was anxious to ascertain the statements of his lordship on certain matters which entered into his own history. This astute divine, with something of the cunning of the serpent, whatever might be his dove-like innocence, hit upon an extraordinary expedient, by submitting the dignity of his order to pass through a most humiliating process. The crafty doctor posted to Oxford, and there, cautiously preserving the incognito, after ingratiating himself into the familiarity of the waiter, and then of the perruquier, he succeeded in procuring a secret communication with one of the printers. The good man exults in the wonders which sometimes may be opened to us by what he terms “a silver key rightly applied.” The doctor had invented the treason, and now had only to seek for the traitor. A faithless workman supplied him with a sight of all the sheets printed, and, with a still grosser violation of the honour of the craft, exposed the naked manuscript itself to the prying eyes of the critical dissenter. To the honour of Clarendon, as far as concerned Calamy’s narrative, there was no disagreement; but the aspect of the manuscript puzzled the learned doctor. It appeared not to be the original, but a transcript, wherein he observed “alterations and interlineations;” paragraphs were struck out, and insertions added. Here seemed an important discovery, not likely to remain buried in the breast of the historian of the non-conformists; and he gradually let it out among his literary circle. The appearance of the manuscript fully warranted the conviction, of him who was not unwilling to believe, that the History of Clarendon had been moulded by the hands of those dignitaries of Oxford who were supposed to be the real editors. The History was soon called in contempt, “The Oxford History.” The earliest rumours of a corrupt text probably originated in this quarter, as it is now certain, since the confession of Dr. Calamy appears in his diary, that he was the first who had discovered the extraordinary state of the manuscript.

Some inaccuracies, great negligence of dates, certain apparent contradictions, and some imperfect details—often occasioned by the noble emigrant’s distant retirements, deprived, as we now know, of his historical collections—did not tend to dissipate the prevalent suspicions. The manuscript was frequently called for, but on inquiry it was not found in the Bodleian Library—it was said to be locked up in a box deposited in the library of the Earl of Rochester, who had died since the publication. Sometimes they heard of a transcript and sometimes of an original; it was reported that the autograph work by Lord Clarendon, among other valuables, had been destroyed in the fire of the Earl of Rochester’s house at New Park. The inquirers became more importunate in their demands, and more clamorous in their expostulations.

About this period, Oldmixon, one of the renowned of the Dunciad, stepped forth as a political adventurer in history. He enlisted on the popular side; he claimed the honours of the most devoted patriotism; but in what degree he may have merited these will best appear when we shall more intimately discover the man himself. Oldmixon had wholly engaged with a party, and being an industrious hand, had assigned to himself a good deal of work. Preparatory to his copious History of the Stuarts, he had preluded by two smaller works his “Critical History of England,” and his “Clarendon and Whitelocke Compared.” He had repeatedly insinuated his suspicions that the “History of the Rebellion” was not the entire work of Clarendon; but the more formal attack, by specifying the falsified passages, at length appeared in the preface to his History of the Stuarts. The subject of the genuineness of Clarendon’s text had so long engaged public discussion, that it evidently induced this writer to particularise it, among other professed discoveries, on his extensive titlepage, as one not the least likely to invite the eager curiosity of his readers. The heavy charge was here announced to be at length brought to a positive demonstration. We perceive the writer’s complacency, when with an air of triumph he declared, “to all which is prefixed some account of the liberties taken with Clarendon’s History before it came to the press, such liberties as make it doubtful what part of it is Clarendon’s and what not.”

It is here we find the anonymous communication of “A gentleman of distinction,” who was soon known to be Colonel Ducket, an M.P., and a Commissioner of the Excise. The colonel details a conversation with Edmund Smith, the poet, who died at his seat, that “there had been a fine History written by Lord Clarendon; but what was published under his name was patchwork, and might as properly be called the history of the deans Aldrich, Smalridge, and Atterbury; for to his knowledge it was altered, and he himself was employed to interpolate the original.” In a copy of the history, Smith had scored numerous passages of this sort, and particularly the famous one of Cinna, which had been applied to the character of Hampden.

We may conceive the sensation produced by this apparently authenticated tale. Oldmixon in triumph confirms it too from another quarter; for he appeals to “A reverend divine now living, who saw the Oxford copy by which the book was printed, altered, and interpolated.” This divine was our Dr. Calamy, who could not deny what he had truly affirmed.

The anonymous voucher for this extraordinary charge which appears in the preface, was an after-thought of our historical scribe at the late hour of publication, when it must have occurred to him that the world would require the most positive testimony of such a foul forgery. It is remarkable that Oldmixon had already, in the body of his work, broadly embroidered the narrative. We may form some notion of the mode in which this impetuous writer composed history, blending his passions with his facts, by observing what he did in the present matter. In the text of his history we discover the tale solemnly worked up into a tragic scene of penitential remorse on a death-bed; and, still farther to appropriate and confirm the exciting narrative of this forgery, he had artfully bolstered it up by an accompanying anecdote. When Smith the poet had foisted in the description of Cataline, (or Cinna, as it is erroneously written in Clarendon,) one of the doctors slapped him on the back, exclaiming with an asseveration, “It will do!” And our historian proceeds: “The remorse he expressed for being concerned in this imposture were his last words.” He then declares that in the highly-finished portraits of Clarendon, “all likeness is lost in a barren superfluity of words, and the workings of a prejudiced imagination, where one may suppose the drawing was his own. But that there has been much daubing in some places, and more dirt in others, put in by his editors, is now incontestable. In those clumsy painters into whose hands his work fell, there is something so very false and base, that such coin could only come from a college mint.” Thus, inconsiderately, but not the less maliciously, Oldmixon filled his rapid page, and betrays his eagerness to snatch at any floating rumour or loose conversation, which he gives the world with the confidence, though he could not with the dignity, of historical truth. And it is this reckless abandonment of his pen in his post-haste and partial works of history, which must ever weaken our trust in those more interesting portions for whose authority he refers to unknown manuscripts; and the more so, when we often detect his maimed and warped, and even interpolated quotations; and farther, recollect that Oldmixon stands himself a convicted criminal at the bar of history, having been detected in interpolating the historian Daniel when employed as editor by Kennet, which sunk the value of the first edition of that historical collection.

How was this positive and particularising charge to be refuted? Years had elapsed, and Smith had never whispered such an important secret to any friend. The original manuscript had not yet appeared to confront the detractor, and to prove the fidelity of the editors. There are difficulties which truth cannot always surmount. It is not only easier to raise a falsehood than to prove a truth, but it is possible that there may be accidents which may wholly prevent the discovery of truth. Of an accusation made years after the event, and the persons no longer in existence, we may never be enabled to remove the objections which it has succeeded in raising.

From this calamity the History of Clarendon had a narrow escape. All the parties concerned were no longer in life, save one, who seemed as much lost to the world—Atterbury, forgotten in exile. The authenticity of the History of Clarendon was, however, the concern of literary Europe. Foreign journalists conveyed the astounding tale, assuring the literary exile that if he remained silent, the accusation must be considered as proved. The reply did not linger, for a simple fact demolished this inartificial fabric. Atterbury solemnly declared that he had never seen any manuscript of Lord Clarendon’s History; that he believed he had never exchanged a word in his life with Smith, whose habitual conduct was too loose to tolerate; and if that were true which Ducket had affirmed, that “Smith had died with a lie in his mouth.” Atterbury added some new information respecting the real editors, who were Dean Aldrich and Bishop Sprat, and the late Earl of Rochester, the son of Lord Clarendon.

This unexpected confutation from the sole survivor of the accused parties revived the dismayed Clarendonians. The cards had changed; and these in their turn called for a sight of that copy of Clarendon said to have been scored by Smith. Oldmixon, baffled and mortified, appealed to his communicator; the most idle prevarications were alleged; and Colonel Ducket even cavilled at the wording of the letter which Oldmixon had published. Both parties were anxious to fling the odium on the other, but neither had the honesty to retract the slander. We may believe that they were both convinced that the manuscript of Clarendon had been tampered with, but that neither could ascertain either the matter or the manner. Ducket died during their embarrassment, and to his last day persisted in confirming his account, and even furnishing fresh particulars, as Oldmixon assures us.

In this extraordinary history of the fate of a disputed manuscript, which all had inquired after, and none had found, an incident occurred which put to rout Oldmixon and the numerous objectors to its authenticity. Seven books of the Clarendon manuscripts at length were discovered lodged in the custody of a lawyer in Bartlett’s Buildings, Holborn, who was one of the executors of the second Earl of Clarendon; and, to the utter dismay of Oldmixon, the often-controverted passage of Hampden was to be seen in the original writing of the noble author. Several distinguished personages were admitted to consult the autograph; but when others applied, who came formally armed with an autograph letter of Lord Clarendon, to compare the writing with the manuscript, the lawyer was alarmed at the hostile investigation, and cautiously evaded an inspection by these eager inquirers, perhaps judging that whatever might be the consequence, the trouble was certain.

Oldmixon, in his last distress, persisted in declaring that he was not bound to trust in the genuineness of a manuscript of which he was refused the examination. It must be acknowledged, that any partial view of the Clarendon manuscript, seen by a few, was not sufficient to establish its authority with the public; and certainly till the recent edition by Dr. Bandinel appeared, admirably collated, the aspersions and surmises of the objectors to its genuineness had by no means been removed, and, we may add, were not wholly unfounded.

This history of the great work of Lord Clarendon would be imperfect did we not develope the real causes which so long continued to obscure the inquiry, and involve its mysterious publication in the most perplexing intricacy.

Lord Clarendon himself not only doubted the propriety of the publication, but had even consented to its suppression till a “fit season, which was not likely to be in the present age.” His elevated genius looked far onward to posterity. In his remarkable will, he recommended his sons to consult Archbishop Sancroft and Bishop Morley; and it was only his second son, the Earl of Rochester, who took an active part. The position of editors was as delicate as it was perilous, and it has been aptly described by the last editor, who at length has furnished us with a complete Clarendon. “The immediate descendants of the principal actors were alive; many were high in favour; others were connected by the closer links of friendship or alliance.” The change of a virulent epithet might be charitable, and spare the ulcerated memories of a family; and time, which blunts the keen edge of political animosities, might plead for the omission of “the unfavourable part of a character,” which happened to be rather of a domestic than of a public nature.

All these were important causes which perplexed the editorship of the History of Lord Clarendon; and there were also minor ones which operated on the publication. Difficulties occurred in the arrangement of the parts. The Earl hardly lived to revise his work; portions of the “Life” had been marked by him to be transferred to the “History.” The first transcript by Shaw, the secretary of the author, was discovered to be very incorrect. It was necessary that a fairer copy should repair the negligence of the secretary’s. Dean Aldrich read the proofs, and transmitted them to the Earl of Rochester, accompanied by the manuscript copy which the earl preserved. The corrections on the proofs were by his hand. Sprat, Bishop of Rochester, who then had the reputation of being the most skilful critic in our vernacular idiom, it appears, suggested some verbal alterations. But it was affirmed, that the Earl of Rochester had been so scrupulous in altering the style of his father, and so cautious not to allow of any variations from the original, that the strictures of Sprat had not been complied with, which however was not true; for though the Earl of Rochester would allow no hand but his own to correct the proofs, there were omissions and verbal alterations, and occasionally may be found what went far beyond the mere change of words or phrases.

The manuscript which Calamy saw at the press shows that the transcript, however fair, had required corrections, and probably some confusion had sometimes occurred in transferring passages from the “Life” into the “History.” This only can account for the reasonable suspicions of “The Curious Impertinent,” which part had been so gratuitously acted by the learned Doctor on this occasion, and evidently spread the first rumours of a corrupted or an altered text.

The pretended forgery on Clarendon was nothing but a gross imposture. Who was most deeply concerned in the fabricated lie, we cannot now ascertain. Of the poet, however, we know that after frequent admonitions he had been expelled his college, for habitual irregularities; and having lost his election of the censorship of the college, indulged vindictive feelings towards Dean Aldrich. It was his delight to ridicule and vituperate the Christ Church deans,—and he might have called the History of Clarendon, “patch-work,” from some imperfect knowledge picked up at the Oxford press. The poet, whose conversation flowed with his wine, on a visit at the seat of Colonel Ducket, indulging to excess his Epicurean tastes, there died suddenly of repletion, by prescribing for himself so potent a dose, that the apothecary warned him of “the perilous stuff,” which advice was received with contempt. As the scored Clarendon by Smith was never brought forth, it probably never existed to the extent described; and as Smith died unexpectedly, there could have been no scene of a death-bed repentance, about a forgery which had never been committed. The party-lie caught up in conversation was too suitable to the purposes of Oldmixon’s History not to be preserved, and even exaggerated; Ducket found a ready tool in a popular historian, who was not too critical in his researches, whenever they answered his end.

But Truth is the daughter of Time—all the Clarendon manuscripts at length were collected together, and now securely repose in the Bodleian Library, where had they been deposited at first, the anxiety and contention which for half a century disturbed the peace of honest inquirers had been spared. Why they were not there placed, open to public inspection, is no longer difficult to conjecture. Although no historical fact in the main had been altered, yet omissions and variations, and some of a delicate nature, there were, sufficient to awaken the keen glance of a malicious or an offended observer. The anxious solicitude to withdraw the manuscripts till they might more safely be examined, at a remote period, was the real and the sole cause of their mysterious concealment; and led many from party-motives to question the authenticity, and others to defend the genuineness, of which they were so many years without any evidence.

This bibliographical tale affords a striking illustration of the nature of hearsays, surmises, and cavils; of confident accusations, but ill parried by vague defences; of the infamous fictions to which party-men can be driven; all which were the consequences of that apparent suppression of the original work, which had occurred from the critical difficulties which await the editors of contemporary memoirs. The disingenuity of both parties, however, is not less observable, for while the Clarendonians maintained that the editors, as these had protested, scrupulously followed the manuscript, they themselves had never seen the original, and the Oldmixons as audaciously assumed that it was interpolated and mutilated, without, however, producing any other evidence than their own surmises, or gross fictions of popular rumours.

With the fate of Clarendon before his eyes, a witness of the injury which this mysterious mode of publishing the History of Lord Clarendon had occasioned, the son of Bishop Burnet suffered that congenial work, the “History of his own Times,” to participate in the same ill-fortune. On the publication of the first volume, this editor promised that the autograph “should be deposited in the Cottonian Library for the satisfaction of the public, as soon as the second volume should be printed.” This was not done; the editor was repeatedly called on to perform that solemn contract in which he had engaged with the public. A recent fire had damaged many of the Cottonian manuscripts, and this was now pleaded as an excuse for not trusting the bishop’s manuscript to the chance of destruction. Expostulation only met with evasion. We are not now ignorant of the real cause of this breach of a solemn duty. The bishop in his will had expressly enjoined that his History should be given in the state in which he had himself left it. But the freedom of the paternal pen had alarmed the filial editor. He found himself in the exact position which the son of Lord Clarendon had already preoccupied. Omissions were made to abate the displeasure of those who would have writhed under the severity of the historian’s censure—characters were but partially delineated, and the tale sometimes was left half told. It happened that the bishop had often submitted his manuscript to the eyes of many during his life-time. Curious researchers into facts, and profound observers of opinions, had become diligent extractors, more particularly the supervisor of the printed proofs; and when the printed volumes appeared, most of these omissions stood as living testimonials to the faithlessness of the prudential editor. The margins of various copies, among the curious in Literature, overflowed with the castrations: the forbidden fruit was plucked. We now have the History of Burnet not entirely according to “the will” of the fervid chronicler, but as far as its restored passages could be obtained; for some, it is evident, have never been recovered.1 Thus it happened, that the editors of Clarendon and Burnet form a parallel case, suffering under the inconveniences of editors of contemporary memoirs.

The perplexed feeling of the times in regard to both these Histories we may catch from a manuscript letter of the great collector, Dr. Rawlinson:—“Among Bishop Turner’s2 manuscripts,” Rawlinson writes, “are observations on Lord Clarendon’s History, when sent him by old Edward’s son, the Nonjuror, who gave it to Alma Mater; if alterations were made, this may be a means of discovering. I have often wondered why the original MS. of that History is not put into some public place to answer all objections; but when I consider a whimsical family, my surprise is the less. Judge Burnet has promised under his hand, on the backside of every title of the second volume of his father’s History of his Life and Times, to put in the originals into some public library; but quando is the case. I purchased the MS. of a gentleman who corrected the press, when that book was printed, and amongst his papers I have all the castrations, many of which, I believe, he communicated to Dr. Beach’s sons, whom T. Burnet had abused in a life of his father, at the end of the second volume.”3 Here, then, the world possessed sufficient evidence at the time of their early appearance, that these Histories had suffered variations and omissions—by the heirs of their authors, and the imperfect executors of their solemn and testamentary will.

I cannot quit the present subject without a remark on these great party Histories of Clarendon and Burnet. Both have passed through the fiery ordeal of national opinion,—and both, with some of their pages singed, remain unconsumed: the one criticized for its solemn eloquence, the other ridiculed for its homely simplicity; the one depreciated for its partiality, the other for its inaccuracy; both alike, as we have seen, by their opposite parties, once considered as works utterly rejected from the historical shelf.

But Posterity reverences Genius, for posterity only can decide on its true worth. Time, potent over criticism, has avenged our two great writers of the history of their own days. The awful genius of Clarendon is still paramount, and the vehement spirit of Burnet has often its secret revelations confirmed. Such shall ever be the fate of those precious writings, which, though they have to contend with the passions of their own age, yet, originating in the personal intercourse of the writers with the subject of their narratives, possess an endearing charm which no criticism can dissolve, a reality which outlasts fiction, and a truth which diffuses its vitality over pages which cannot die.4

1 Burnet’s “History,” iv. 552, edition 1823.

2 Sic in original, but probably Tanner.

3 Rawlinson’s Bodleian MSS., vol. ii., lett. 38.

4 I refer the reader to “Curiosities of Literature,” vol. ii. art. “Of Suppressors and Dilapidators of Manuscripts;” he will there find that in the case of the Marquis of Halifax’ Diary, of which to secure its preservation the writer had left two copies, both were silently destroyed by two opposite partisans, the one startled at some mean deceptions of the Revolutionists of 1688, and the other at the Catholic intrigues of the court.

THE WAR AGAINST BOOKS.

The history of our literature, at the early era of printing, till the first indications appear of what is termed “copyright,” forms a chapter in the history of our civilization which has not been opened to us.

This history includes two important incidents in our literary annals; the one, an exposition of the complicate arts practised by an alarmed government to possess an absolute control over the printers, which annihilated the freedom of the press; and the other, the contests of those printers and booksellers who had grants and licenses, and other privileges of a monopoly, with the rest of the brotherhood, who maintained an equal right of publication, and contended for the freedom of the trade.

Although Caxton, our first printer, bore the title of Regius Impressor, printed books were still so rare in this country under Richard the Third, that an act of parliament in 1483 contains a proviso in favour of aliens to encourage the importation of books. During a period of forty years, books were supplied by foreign printers, some of whom appear to have accompanied their merchandise, and to have settled themselves here. It became necessary to repeal this privilege conceded to foreign presses, when under Henry the Eighth the art of printing was skilfully exercised by the King’s natural subjects, and to protect the English printers lest their art should decline from a failure of encouragement.

Our earliest printers were the vendors and the binders of their own books, and their domicile on their title-pages directed the curious to their abodes. Few in number, their limited editions, it is conjectured, did not exceed from two to four hundred copies. The first printers were generally men of competent wealth; and every book was the sole property of its single printer. The separate departments of author, bookseller, and bookbinder, were not yet required, for as yet there was no “reading public.” Some of our ancient printers combined all these characters in themselves. The commerce of literature had not yet opened in the speculative vendors of books, and that race of writers who have been designated in the modern phrase as “authors by profession.” The very nature of literary property could only originate in a more advanced and intellectual state of society, when unsettled opinions and contending principles would create a growing demand for books which no one yet contemplated, and a property, of a novel and peculiar nature, in the very thoughts and words of a writer.

The art of printing, confined within a few hands, was usually practised under the patronage of the King, or the Archbishop, or some nobleman. There existed not the remotest suspicion, that the simple machinery of the printer’s press, could ever be converted into an engine of torture to try the strength, or the truth, of the church and the state. Sedition, or any allusion to public affairs, never entered the brains of the ingenious mechanics, solely occupied in lowering the prices of the text-writers in the manuscript market, by their own novel and wondrous transcript. Their first wares had consisted of romances which were consulted as authentic histories; “dictes, or sayings,” of ancient sages which no one cared to contradict; and homilies and allegories whose voluminousness had no tediousness. Neither did the higher powers ever imagine that any control seemed needful over the printer’s press. They only lent the sanction of their names, or the shelter of their abode, at the Abbey of Westminster or the monastery of St. Albans, to encourage the manufacture of a novel curiosity, for its beautiful toy, a printed book—and the press at first was at once free and innocent.

But the day of portents was not slow in its approach—a stirring age pressed on, an age for books. Under Henry the Eighth, books became the organs of the passions of mankind, and were not only printed, but spread about; for if the presses of England dared not disclose the hazardous secrets of the writers, the people were surreptitiously furnished with English books from foreign presses. It was then that the jealousy of the state opened its hundred eyes on the awful track of the strange omnipotence of the press. Then first began that War against Books which has not ceased in our time.

Perhaps he who first, with a statesman’s prescient view, had contemplated on this novel and unknown power, and, as we shall see, had detected its insidious steps stealing into the cabinet of the sovereign, was the great minister of this great monarch. It has been surmised that the cardinal aimed to crush the head of the serpent, by stopping the printing press in the monastery at St. Albans, of which he was the abbot; for that press remained silent for half a century. In a convocation the cardinal expressed his hostility against printing; assuring the simple clergy that, if they did not in time suppress printing, printing would suppress them.1 This great statesman, at this early period, had taken into view its remote consequences. Lord Herbert has curiously assigned to the cardinal his ideas as addressed to the pope:—“This new invention of printing has produced various effects of which your Holiness cannot be ignorant. If it has restored books and learning, it has also been the occasion of those sects and schisms which daily appear. Men begin to call in question the present faith and tenets of the church; and the laity read the Scriptures; and pray in their vulgar tongue. Were this suffered, the common people might come to believe that there was not so much use of the clergy. If men were persuaded that they could make their own way to God, and in their ordinary language as well as Latin, the authority of the mass would fall, which would be very prejudicious to our ecclesiastical orders. The mysteries of religion must be kept in the hands of priests—the secret and arcanum of church government. Nothing remains more to be done than to prevent further apostacy. For this purpose, since printing could not be put down, it were best to set up learning against learning; and, by introducing able persons to dispute, to suspend the laity between fears and controversies. Since printing cannot be put down, it may still be made useful.” Thus, the statesman, who could not by a single blow annihilate this monster of all schism, would have wrestled with it with a statesman’s policy.

The cardinal at length was shaken by terrors he had never before felt from the hated press. This minister had writhed under the printed personalities of the rabid Skelton and the merciless Roy; but a pamphlet in the form of “The Supplication of Beggars” is a famed invective, which served as a prelude to the fall of the minister. The author, Simon Fish, had been a student of Gray’s Inn, where, in an Aristophanic interlude, he had enacted his grace the cardinal to the life, and deemed himself fortunate to escape from his native shores to elude the gripe of Wolsey. In this pamphlet all the poverty of the nation,—for our national poverty at all times is the cry of “The Beggars,”—the taxation, and the grievances, are all laid to the oppression of the whole motley prelacy. These were the thieves and the freebooters, the cormorants and the wolves of the state, and the king had nothing more to do than to put them to the cart’s tail, and end all the beggary of England by appropriating the monastic lands.

On a day of a procession at Westminster this seditious tract, aiming at the annihilation of the whole revenues of churchmen, was found scattered in the streets. Wolsey had the copies carefully gathered and delivered to him, to prevent any from reaching the king’s eyes. Merchants, at that day, were often itinerants in their way of trade with their foreign correspondents, and frequently conveyed to England these writings of our fugitive reformers. Two of these merchants, by the favour of Anne Bullen, had a secret interview with the king. They offered to recite to the royal ear the substance of the suppressed libel. “I dare say you have it all by heart,” the king shrewdly observed, and listened. After a pause, Henry let fall this remarkable observation—“If a man should pull down an old stone wall, and begin at the lower part, the upper might chance to fall on his head.” What at that moment was passing in the sagacious mind of the future regal reformer, is now more evident than probably it was to its first hearers. Wolsey, suspicious and troubled, came to warn the king of “a pestilent heretical libel being abroad.” Henry, suddenly drawing the very libel out of his bosom, presented a portentous copy to the startled and falling minister. The book became a court-book; and “the witty atheistical author,” as the Roman Catholic historian designated him, was invited back to England under the safeguard of the royal protection.

But the secret, and, perhaps, the yet obscure influence of the press, must often have been apparent to Henry the Eighth, when the king sat in council. There he marked the alarms of Wolsey, and the terrified remonstrances of the entire body of “the Papelins;” and when the day came that their ejectors filled their seats, the king discovered, that though the objects were changed, the same dread of the press continued. The war against books commenced; an expurgatory index, or a catalogue of prohibited books, chiefly English, was sent forth before Henry had broken with the papal power; subsequently, the fresher proclamation declared the books of the Papelins to be “seditious,” as the use of “the new learning” had been anathematized as “heretical.”

In these rapid events, dates become as essential as arguments. In 1526, anti-popery books, with their dispersers, were condemned as heretical. In 1535, all books favouring popery were decreed to be “seditious books.” There were books on the king’s supremacy, for or against, which cost some of their writers their heads; and there were “injunctions against English books,” frequently renewed as “pestilent and infectious learnings.”2 All these show that now the press had obtained activity, and betray the uneasy condition of the ruling powers, who were startled by a supernatural voice which they had never before heard.

When the first persecution of “the new religion” occurred, it did not abate the secret importations of Lutheran books.3 These with the merchant had become an article of commerce; and with the zealous dispensers, an article of faith: both alike ventured their lives in conveying them to London, and other places, and even smuggled them into the universities. They landed their prohibited goods in the most distant places, at Colchester, or in Norfolk. One of these chapmen in this hazardous commodity of free-thinking was at last caught at his bookbinder’s. He suffered at the flaming stake, and others met his fate.

It was now apparent that the secrecy and velocity of conveying the novel projects of reform, which could not otherwise have been communicated to the great body of the people, till this awful instrument had been set to work; the unity of opinion which it might create among the confused multitude; and the passions which a party either in terror, or in triumph, could artfully rouse in the sympathies of men; were felt and acknowledged by the monarch, who had himself staked the possession of his independent dominion on the energy and the eloquence of a single book,4 to prepare his people for his meditated emancipation from the Tiara; and were any other proof wanting, we discover the terror of the Bishop of Durham, on the appearance of “a little book printed in English, issuing from Newcastle.” His lordship writes in great trepidation to the minister Cromwell, of this portentous little book, “like to do great harm among the people,” and advising that “letters be directed to all havens, towns, and other places, to forbid the book to be sold.” All the ports to be closed against “a little book brought by some folks from Newcastle!” These incidents were certain demonstrations of the political influence of this new sovereignty of the printing-press.

In the simplicity of this early era of printing, the same bishop had all the copies of Tindal’s Testament bought up at Antwerp, and burned. The English merchant employed on this occasion was a secret follower of the modern apostle, who, on his part, gladly furnished all the unsold copies which had hung on hand, anxious to correct a new edition which he was too poor to publish. When one of the Tindalites was promised his pardon if he would reveal the name of the person who had encouraged this new edition, he accepted the grace; and he assured the Lord Chancellor that the greatest encourager and supporter of his Antwerp friends had been the bishop himself, who, by buying up half the unsold impression, had enabled them to produce a second. This was the first lesson which taught that it is easier to burn authors than books.

There were two methods by which governments could counteract the inconveniences of the press: the one, by clipping its wings, and contracting the sphere of its action, which we shall see was early attempted; and the other, by adroitly turning its vehemence into an opposite direction, making the press contend with the press, and by division weaken its dominion.

Henry the Eighth left the age he had himself created, with its awakened spirit. The three succeeding reigns, acting in direct opposition to each other, disturbed the minds of the people; controversies raged, and books multiplied. The sphere of publication widened, in this vertiginous era, printers greatly increased in the reign of Edward the Sixth. But the craft did not flourish, when the craftsmen had become numerous. We have the contemporary authority of one of the most eminent printers, that the practice of the art, and the cost of the materials, had become so exceedingly chargeable, that the printers were driven by necessity to throw themselves into the hands of “the Stationers,” or booksellers, for “small gains.”5 It is probable that at this period, the printers perceived that vending their books at the printing-office was not a mode which made them sufficiently public. This is the first indication that the printing, and the publication or the sale of books, were becoming separate trades.

In this history of the progress of the press in our country, the Stationers’ Company now appears. This institution becomes an important branch of our investigation, for its influence over our literature, for its monopoly, opposed to the interests of other publishers, and above all, for the practice of the government in converting this company into a ready instrument to restrain the freedom of the press.

Anterior to the invention of printing, there flourished a craft or trade who were denominated Stationers; they were scribes and limners, and dealers in manuscript copies, and in parchment and paper, and other literary wares. It is believed by our antiquaries that they derived their denomination from their fixed locality, or station in a street, either by a shop or shed, and probably when their former occupation had gone, still retained their dealings in literature, and turned to booksellers.6 This denomination of stationers, indicating their stationary residence, would also distinguish them from the itinerant vendors, who in a more subordinate capacity at a later period, appear to have hawked about the town and the country pamphlets and other portable books.

In the reign of Philip and Mary “the Stationers” were granted a charter of incorporation, and were invested with the most inquisitorial powers.

The favours of a tyrant are usually favours to individuals who profit at the cost of the community, and who themselves overlooking every principle of justice, bind up their own selfish monopoly with the prosperity of criminal power. This we discover in the Company of Stationers, who were the willing dupes of that absolute power in the State which had created the corporation to do its watchful work, to carry on the war against books, and by their passive obedience they secured to themselves those privileges, and licenses, and other monopolies, which they now amply enjoyed.

By this charter of the Stationers, it was specified that no one was to exercise the art of printing, unless he was one of the society; and the corporation, with their extraordinary but lawful authority, were to search as often as they pleased any house or chamber, &c., of any stamper or printer, or binder, or seller, of any manner of books, which they deemed obnoxious to the State, or their own interest!—to seize, burn, take away, or destroy, or convert to their own use.7 The Stationers were, in fact, a Spanish inquisition for the cabinet of Philip and Mary, and whom the queen consulted on critical occasions, for her majesty once sent for the warden to inquire whether they had seen or heard of a sort of books sent from Zurich? The war against books was never pushed to such extremities as in a proclamation of Philip and Mary, which Strype calls, “a short but terrible proclamation.” Here we learn that “whoever finds books of heresy, sedition, and treason, and does not forthwith burn the same without showing or reading them to any other person, shall be executed for a rebel!”8 It is evident, that the grant of this incorporation was designed to make the interests of the company subservient to those of the court; for by the intermediate aid of the vigilant Stationers, every printer would be controlled, since none were allowed to be printers who were not members of this corporation, and therefore amenable to its laws.

In the succeeding reign of Elizabeth everything changed except these state-proclamations in the war against books. The object had altered, but not the objection, for though the books were different the Elizabethan style is identical with the Marian. The same plenary powers of the Stationers were strengthened by an additional injunction, by which the government held the whole brotherhood with a closer grasp. The company were commissioned not only “to search into bookbinders’ shops, as well as printing-offices, for unlawful and heretical books,” but they were responsible for “any unruly printer who might endanger the church and state,” and “who for covetousness regard not what they print, whereby ariseth great disorder by publication of unfruitful, vain, and infamous books and papers. None shall print any manner of book except the same be first licensed by her majesty by express words in writing, or by six of her privy council.”9

When we recollect that the Stationers’ Company under Mary, were composed of the very same individuals who two years after under Elizabeth, were busily ornamenting their shelves with all their late “seditious and heretical” books, and in removing out of sight all their late lawful and loyal ware, this transition of the feelings must have placed them in a position painful as it was ridiculous. But the true genius of a commercial body is of no party, save the predominant; pliant with their interests, a corporation, like a republic, in their zealous union can do that with public propriety which, in the individuals it is composed of, would be incongruous and absurd.

The rage of government in this war against books was still sharper at a later period, provoked by the spread of the Mar-prelate pamphlets. A decree of the Star-chamber in 1586, among other orders, allows no printer to have an additional press without license; awards that there shall be no printing in any obscure part of a house; nor any printer out of the city of London, excepting at the two Universities; and till “the excessive multitude of printers be abated, diminished, or by death given over,” no one shall resume that trade; and that the wardens of the Stationers’ Company, with assistants, shall enter at all times warehouses, shops, &c., to seize all “letter-presses, and other printing instruments, to be defaced, melted, sawed in pieces, broken or battered at the smith’s forge.”10 Amid all this book-phobia, a curious circumstance occurred. The learned could not prosecute their studies for the prohibition against many excellent works, written by those who were “addicted to the errors of Popery in foreign parts,” and which also contained “matters against the state of this land.” In this dilemma, a singular expedient was adopted. The archbishop allowed “Ascanius de Renialme, a merchant bookseller, to bring into this realm some few copies of every such sort of books, upon this condition only, that they be first brought to me, and so delivered only to such persons whom we deem most meet men to have the reading of them.” At this time it must have been an affair of considerable delicacy and difficulty to obtain a quotation, without first hastening to Lambeth Palace, there to be questioned!

Printing and literature, during the long reign of Elizabeth, in spite of all these Star-chamber edicts, amazingly increased; there seemed to be a swell from all the presses. Of 175 stationers, 140 had taken their freedom since this queen’s accession. “So much had printing and learning come in request under the Reformation,” observes our historical antiquary Strype. And such was the proud exultation of the great printer John Day, that when he compared the darkness of the preceding period with what this publisher of Fox’s mighty tomes of Martyrology deemed its purer enlightenment, he never printed his name without this pithy insinuation to the reader, “Arise, for it is Day!” Books not only multiplied, but unquestionably it was at this period that first appeared the art of aiding these ephemeral productions of the press which supplied the wants of numerous readers. The rights of authors had hitherto derived a partial existence in privilege conceded by the royal patron, but it was now that they first gathered the fuller harvests of public favour. We shall shortly find a notice among the book-trade of what is termed “copyright.”11

If the freedom of the press had been wholly wrested from the printers, it was not the sole grievance in the present state of our literature, for another custom had been assumed which hung on the royal prerogative—that of granting letters patent, or privileged licenses, under the broad seal to individuals, to deal in a specific class of books, to the exclusion of every other publisher. Possibly the same secret motive which had contrived the absolute control of the press, suggested the grants of these privileges. One enjoyed the privilege of printing Bibles; another all law-books; another grammars; another “almanacks and prognostications;” and another, ballads and books in prose and metre. These privileges assuredly increased the patronage of the great, and the dispensations of these favours were doubtless often abused. A singing man had the license for printing music-books, which he extended to that of being the sole vendor of all ruled paper, on the plea that where there were ruled lines, musical notes might be pricked down; and a private gentleman, who was neither printer nor stationer, had the privilege of printing grammars and other things, which he farmed out for a considerable annual revenue, by which means these books were necessarily enhanced in price.

Such monopolies, which entered into the erroneous policy of that age, and the corrupt practices of patronage, long continued a source of discontent among the generality. This was now a period when the spirit of the times raised up men who would urge their independent rights. A struggle ensued between the monopolists and the excluded, who clamoured for the freedom of the trade. “Unruly printers” not only resisted when their own houses were besieged by “the searchers” of the stationers, but openly persisted in printing any “lawful books” they chose, in defiance of any royal privilege. A busy lawyer had been feed, who questioned this stretch of the prerogative. But the patriotism or the despair of these “unruly printers” led to the Clink or to Ludgate—to imprisonment or to bankruptcy! The day had not yet arrived when civil freedom, though youthful and bold, with impunity could “kick against the pricks” of the prerogative. It is curious here to discover that the aggrieved had even formed “a trade-union” for contributions to defend suits at law against the privileged; and when they were reminded that this mode only aggravated their troubles, and were asked by the sleek monopolists what they would gain if all were in common, which, as the privileged assumed, “would make havoc for one man to undo another,” that is, those who were patentless would undo the patentees—these Cains, in the bitterness of their hearts, fiercely replied to their more favoured brothers, “We should make you beggars like ourselves!”12

Amid these clamours in the commonwealth of literature, the patentees became alarmed at the danger of having their patents revoked. The booksellers had become the more prosperous race, and some of these, combining with the Stationers’ Company, opposed the privileged few. The advocates for the freedom of the trade advanced a proposition too tender to be handled by the Doctor of Civil Law, who was chosen for the arbitrator. At once these boldly impugned the prerogative royal itself in its exercise of granting privileges to printers, which they declared was against law; and however they might more successfully urge, that the better policy for the public was to admit of competition, and moderating of prices by this freedom of publication, they add, “So, too, let every man print what ‘lawful book’ he choose, without any exceptions, even ‘any book of which the copies thereof had been bought of the authors for their money.’” Here we find the first notice of “copyright,” and the very inadequate notions yet entertained of its nature.

The plea of the patentees more skilfully addressed the Doctor of Civil Law by their assumption of the irrefragable rights of the royal prerogative. Their own privileges they maintained by the custom, as they showed that “all princes in Christendom had granted privileges for printing, sometimes for a term of years, or for life; that ancient books bore this inscription, Cum privilegio ad imprimendum solum; that the queen’s progenitors had exercised this right, and would any dare to lessen her majesty’s prerogative?” All infringers had ever been punished. They further urged, that the good of the commonwealth required that printing should be in the hands of known men, being an art most dangerous and pernicious if it were not straitened and restrained by politic order of the prince or magistrates. With truer arguments they alleged that many useful books were now published unprofitable to the patentees, who had no other means of repaying themselves but by the sale of other books restricted to them by the protection of their privileges; and finally, they declared that the public were incurring some danger that good books might not be printed at all if privileges were revoked, for the first printer was at charge for the author’s pains and other extraordinary cost; but should any succeeding printer who had “the copy gratis” sell cheaper on better paper, and with notes and additions, it would put an end to the sale of the original edition; and they pithily conclude with the old wisdom, that “It is easier to amend than to invent.” Here again we see specified the cost of “copyright” in the publication of a new book.

This attempt to open the freedom of the trade, which occurred about 1583, the twenty-fifth year of the reign of Elizabeth, at length was not wholly unsuccessful; the monopolists conceded certain advantages,13 and about twenty years subsequently, towards the end of that queen’s reign, when the craft of authorship, adapting its wares to the fashion of the day, was practised by a whole race of popular writers, the booksellers became almost the sole publishers of books, employing the printers in their single capacity.14

In this war against books, the severe decree of the Star Chamber, 1586, was renewed with stricter prohibitions, and more penal severity by a decree of the Star Chamber, under Charles the First, in 1637. Printing and printers were now placed under the supervision of the great officers of state; law-books were to be judiciously approved by the lord chief-justice; historical works were to be submitted to the secretaries of state; heraldry was left to the lord marshal; divinity, physic, philosophy, and poetry, were to be sanctioned by the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Bishop of London. Two copies of every work were to be preserved in custody, to prevent any alterations being made in the published volumes, which would be detected on their comparison. Admirable preparatory and preventive measures! Here would ensue a general purgation of every atom in the human system, occasioning obstructions to the doctrines and discipline of the Church of England, and the state of government. The aim of all these decrees and proclamations was to abridge the number of printers, and to invigorate the absolute power conferred on the Stationers’ Company, who had long delivered themselves, bound hand and foot, to the government, for the servile possession of their privileges. Printers were still limited to twenty, as in the reign of Elizabeth, and only four letter-founders allowed. Every printed book on paper was to bear the impress of the printer’s name, on pain of corporal punishment. They held books in such terror, that even those which had formerly been licensed, were not allowed to be reprinted, without being “reviewed,” as they express it, and re-watched by placing on guard this double sentinel. There are some extraordinary clauses which betray the feeble infancy of the rude policy of that day. The decree tells us that “printing in corners without license had been usually done by journeymen out of work,” and to provide against this source of inquietude, it compels the printers to employ all journeymen out of employ, “though the printer should be able to do his own work without these journeymen;” and in the same spirit of compulsion, it ordains that all such unemployed shall be obliged to work whenever called on.15 Masters and men were equally amenable to fines impossible to be paid, and penal pains almost too horrible to endure, short of life, but not of ruin: a dark, a merciless, a mocking tribunal where the judges sate the prosecutors, and whose unwritten laws hung on their own lips; and where to discharge any accused person as innocent was looked on as a reproach of their negligence, or an imputation of their sagacity.