COLLOQUIES ON SOCIETY. 

BYROBERT SOUTHEY. 

CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited:_LONDON_, _PARIS_, _NEW YORK & MELBOURNE_. 1887. 

INTRODUCTION. 

It was in 1824 that Robert Southey, then fifty years old, published "SirThomas More, or Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society, " abook in two octavo volumes with plates illustrating lake scenery. Therewere later editions of the book in 1829, and in 1831, and there was anedition in one volume in 1837, at the beginning of the reign of QueenVictoria. 

These dialogues with a meditative and patriotic ghost form separatedissertations upon various questions that concern the progress ofsociety. Omitting a few dissertations that have lost the interest theyhad when the subjects they discussed were burning questions of the time, this volume retains the whole machinery of Southey's book. It givesunabridged the Colloquies that deal with the main principles of sociallife as Southey saw them in his latter days; and it includes, of course, the pleasant Colloquy that presents to us Southey himself, happy in hislibrary, descanting on the course of time as illustrated by the bodiesand the souls of books. As this volume does not reproduce all theColloquies arranged by Southey under the main title of "Sir Thomas More, "it avoids use of the main title, and ventures only to describe itself as"Colloquies on Society, by Robert Southey. "

They are of great interest, for they present to us the form and characterof the conservative reaction in a mind that was in youth impatient forreform. In Southey, as in Wordsworth, the reaction followed onexperience of failure in the way taken by the revolutionists of France, with whose aims for the regeneration of Europe they had been in warmestaccord. Neither Wordsworth nor Southey ever lowered the ideal of ahigher life for man on earth. Southey retains it in these Colloquies, although he balances his own hope with the questionings of the ghost, andif he does look for a crowning race, regards it, with Tennyson, as a

 "_far off_ divine event To which the whole Creation moves. "

The conviction brought to men like Wordsworth and Southey by the failureof the French Revolution to attain its aim in the sudden elevation ofsociety was not of vanity in the aim, but of vanity in any hope of itsimmediate attainment by main force. Southey makes More say to himselfupon this question (page 37), "I admit that such an improved condition ofsociety as you contemplate is possible, and that it ought always to bekept in view; but the error of supposing it too near, of fancying thatthere is a short road to it, is, of all the errors of these times, themost pernicious, because it seduces the young and generous, and betraysthem imperceptibly into an alliance with whatever is flagitious anddetestable. " All strong reaction of mind tends towards excess in theopposite direction. Southey's detestation of the excesses of vile menthat brought shame upon a revolutionary movement to which some of thepurest hopes of earnest youth had given impulse, drove him, as it droveWordsworth, into dread of everything that sought with passionate energyimmediate change of evil into good. But in his own way no man everstrove more patiently than Southey to make evil good; and in his own homeand his own life he gave good reason to one to whom he was as a father, and who knew his daily thoughts and deeds, to speak of him as "upon thewhole the best man I have ever known. "

In the days when this book was written, Southey lived at Greta Hall, byKeswick, and had gathered a large library about him. He was PoetLaureate. He had a pension from the Civil List, worth less than 200pounds a year, and he was living at peace upon a little income enlargedby his yearly earnings as a writer. In 1818 his whole private fortunewas 400 pounds in consols. In 1821 he had added to that some savings, and gave all to a ruined friend who had been good to him in former years. Yet in those days he refused an offer of 2, 000 pounds a year to come toLondon and write for the _Times_. He was happiest in his home bySkiddaw, with his books about him and his wife about him. 

Ten years after the publishing of these Colloquies, Southey's wife, whohad been, as Southey said, "for forty years the life of his life, " had tobe placed in a lunatic asylum. She returned to him to die, and then hisgentleness became still gentler as his own mind failed. He died in 1843. Three years before his death his friend Wordsworth visited him atKeswick, and was not recognised. But when Southey was told who it was, "then, " Wordsworth wrote, "his eyes flashed for a moment with theirformer brightness, but he sank into the state in which I had found him, patting with both his hands his books affectionately, like a child. "

Sir Thomas More, whose ghost communicates with Robert Southey, was bornin 1478, and at the age of fifty-seven was beheaded for fidelity toconscience, on the 6th of July, 1535. He was, like Southey, a man ofpurest character, and in 1516, when his age was thirty-eight, there waspublished at Louvain his "Utopia, " which sketched wittily an idealcommonwealth that was based on practical and earnest thought upon whatconstitutes a state, and in what direction to look for amendment of ills. More also withdrew from his most advanced post of opinion. When he wrote"Utopia" he advocated absolute freedom of opinion in matters of religion;in after years he believed it necessary to enforce conformity. KingHenry VIII. , stiff in his own opinions, had always believed that; andbecause More would not say that he was of one mind with him in the matterof the divorce of Katherine he sent him to the scaffold. 

H. M. 

COLLOQUY I. --THE INTRODUCTION. 

 "_Posso aver certezza_, _e non paura_, _Che raccontando quel che m' e accaduto_, _Il ver diro_, _ne mi sara creduto_. "

 "Orlando Innamorato, " c. 5. St. 53. 

It was during that melancholy November when the death of the PrincessCharlotte had diffused throughout Great Britain a more general sorrowthan had ever before been known in these kingdoms; I was sitting alone atevening in my library, and my thoughts had wandered from the book beforeme to the circumstances which made this national calamity be felt almostlike a private affliction. While I was thus musing the post-womanarrived. My letters told me there was nothing exaggerated in the publicaccounts of the impression which this sudden loss had produced; thatwherever you went you found the women of the family weeping, and that mencould scarcely speak of the event without tears; that in all the betterparts of the metropolis there was a sort of palsied feeling which seemedto affect the whole current of active life; and that for several daysthere prevailed in the streets a stillness like that of the Sabbath, butwithout its repose. I opened the newspaper; it was still bordered withbroad mourning lines, and was filled with details concerning the deceasedPrincess. Her coffin and the ceremonies at her funeral were described asminutely as the order of her nuptials and her bridal dress had been, inthe same journal, scarce eighteen months before. "Man, " says Sir ThomasBrown, "is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave;solemnising nativities and deaths with equal lustre, nor omittingceremonies of bravery in the infamy of his nature. " These things led mein spirit to the vault, and I thought of the memorable dead among whomher mortal remains were now deposited. Possessed with such imaginationsI leaned back upon the sofa and closed my eyes. 

Ere long I was awakened from that conscious state of slumber in which thestream of fancy floweth as it listeth by the entrance of an elderlypersonage of grave and dignified appearance. His countenance and mannerwere remarkably benign, and announced a high degree of intellectual rank, and he accosted me in a voice of uncommon sweetness, saying, "Montesinos, a stranger from a distant country may intrude upon you without thosecredentials which in other cases you have a right to require. " "FromAmerica!" I replied, rising to salute him. Some of the most gratifyingvisits which I have ever received have been from that part of the world. It gives me indeed more pleasure than I can express to welcome suchtravellers as have sometimes found their way from New England to thoselakes and mountains; men who have not forgotten what they owe to theirancient mother; whose principles, and talents, and attainments wouldrender them an ornament to any country, and might almost lead me to hopethat their republican constitution may be more permanent than all otherconsiderations would induce me either to suppose or wish. 

"You judge of me, " he made answer, "by my speech. I am, however, Englishby birth, and come now from a more distant country than America, whereinI have long been naturalised. " Without explaining himself further, orallowing me time to make the inquiry which would naturally have followed, he asked me if I were not thinking of the Princess Charlotte when hedisturbed me. "That, " said I, "may easily be divined. All persons whosehearts are not filled with their own grief are thinking of her at thistime. It had just occurred to me that on two former occasions when theheir apparent of England was cut off in the prime of life the nation wason the eve of a religious revolution in the first instance, and of apolitical one in the second. "

"Prince Arthur and Prince Henry, " he replied. "Do you notice this asominous, or merely as remarkable?"

"Merely as remarkable, " was my answer. "Yet there are certain moods ofmind in which we can scarcely help ascribing an ominous importance to anyremarkable coincidence wherein things of moment are concerned. "

"Are you superstitious?" said he. "Understand me as using the word forwant of a more appropriate one--not in its ordinary and contemptuousacceptation. "

I smiled at the question, and replied, "Many persons would apply theepithet to me without qualifying it. This, you know, is the age ofreason, and during the last hundred and fifty years men have beenreasoning themselves out of everything that they ought to believe andfeel. Among a certain miserable class, who are more numerous than iscommonly supposed, he who believes in a First Cause and a future state isregarded with contempt as a superstitionist. The religious naturalist inhis turn despises the feebler mind of the Socinian; and the Socinianlooks with astonishment or pity at the weakness of those who, having byconscientious inquiry satisfied themselves of the authenticity of theScriptures, are contented to believe what is written, and acknowledgehumility to be the foundation of wisdom as well as of virtue. But formyself, many, if not most of those even who agree with me in allessential points, would be inclined to think me superstitious, because Iam not ashamed to avow my persuasion that there are more things in heavenand earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy. "

"You believe, then, in apparitions, " said my visitor. 

_Montesinos_. --Even so, sir. That such things should be is probable _apriori_; and I cannot refuse assent to the strong evidence that suchthings are, nor to the common consent which has prevailed among allpeople, everywhere, in all ages a belief indeed which is truly catholic, in the widest acceptation of the word. I am, by inquiry and conviction, as well as by inclination and feeling, a Christian; life would beintolerable to me if I were not so. "But, " says Saint Evremont, "themost devout cannot always command their belief, nor the most impioustheir incredulity. " I acknowledge with Sir Thomas Brown that, "as inphilosophy, so in divinity, there are sturdy doubts and boisterousobjections, wherewith the unhappiness of our knowledge too nearlyacquainteth us;" and I confess with him that these are to be conquered, "not in a martial posture, but on our knees. " If then there are momentswherein I, who have satisfied my reason, and possess a firm and assuredfaith, feel that I have in this opinion a strong hold, I cannot butperceive that they who have endeavoured to dispossess the people of theirold instinctive belief in such things have done little service toindividuals and much injury to the community. 

_Stranger_. --Do you extend this to a belief in witchcraft?

_Montesinos_. --The common stories of witchcraft confute themselves, asmay be seen in all the trials for that offence. Upon this subject Iwould say with my old friend Charles Lamb--

 "I do not love to credit tales of magic! Heaven's music, which is order, seems unstrung. And this brave world (The mystery of God) unbeautified, Disordered, marred, where such strange things are acted. "

The only inference which can be drawn from the confession of some of thepoor wretches who have suffered upon such charges is, that they hadattempted to commit the crime, and thereby incurred the guilt anddeserved the punishment. Of this indeed there have been recentinstances; and in one atrocious case the criminal escaped because thestatute against the imaginary offence is obsolete, and there exists nolaw which could reach the real one. 

_Stranger_. --He who may wish to show with what absurd perversion theforms and technicalities of law are applied to obstruct the purposes ofjustice, which they were designed to further, may find excellent examplesin England. But leaving this allow me to ask whether you think all thestories which are related of an intercourse between men and beings of asuperior order, good or evil, are to be disbelieved like the vulgar talesof witchcraft?

_Montesinos_. --If you happen, sir, to have read some of those balladswhich I threw off in the high spirits of youth you may judge what myopinion then was of the grotesque demonology of the monks and middle agesby the use there made of it. But in the scale of existences there may beas many orders above us as below. We know there are creatures so minutethat without the aid of our glasses they could never have beendiscovered; and this fact, if it were not notorious as well as certain, would appear not less incredible to sceptical minds than that thereshould be beings which are invisible to us because of their subtlety. That there are such I am as little able to doubt as I am to affirmanything concerning them; but if there are such, why not evil spirits, aswell as wicked men? Many travellers who have been conversant withsavages have been fully persuaded that their jugglers actually possessedsome means of communication with the invisible world, and exercised asupernatural power which they derived from it. And not missionaries onlyhave believed this, and old travellers who lived in ages of credulity, but more recent observers, such as Carver and Bruce, whose testimony isof great weight, and who were neither ignorant, nor weak, nor credulousmen. What I have read concerning ordeals also staggers me; and I amsometimes inclined to think it more possible that when there has beenfull faith on all sides these appeals to divine justice may have beenanswered by Him who sees the secrets of all hearts than that modes oftrial should have prevailed so long and so generally, from some of whichno person could ever have escaped without an interposition of Providence. Thus it has appeared to me in my calm and unbiassed judgment. Yet Iconfess I should want faith to make the trial. May it not be, that bysuch means in dark ages, and among blind nations, the purpose is effectedof preserving conscience and the belief of our immortality, without whichthe life of our life would be extinct? And with regard to the conjurersof the African and American savages, would it be unreasonable to supposethat, as the most elevated devotion brings us into fellowship with theHoly Spirit, a correspondent degree of wickedness may effect a communionwith evil intelligences? These are mere speculations which I advance foras little as they are worth. My serious belief amounts to this, thatpreternatural impressions are sometimes communicated to us for wisepurposes: and that departed spirits are sometimes permitted to manifestthemselves. 

_Stranger_. --If a ghost, then, were disposed to pay you a visit, youwould be in a proper state of mind for receiving such a visitor?

_Montesinos_. --I should not credit my senses lightly; neither should Iobstinately distrust them, after I had put the reality of the appearanceto the proof, as far as that were possible. 

_Stranger_. --Should you like to have an opportunity afforded you?

_Montesinos_. --Heaven forbid! I have suffered so much in dreams fromconversing with those whom even in sleep I knew to be departed, that anactual presence might perhaps be more than I could bear. 

_Stranger_. --But if it were the spirit of one with whom you had no nearties of relationship or love, how then would it affect you?

_Montesinos_. --That would of course be according to the circumstances onboth sides. But I entreat you not to imagine that I am any way desirousof enduring the experiment. 

_Stranger_. --Suppose, for example, he were to present himself as I havedone; the purport of his coming friendly; the place and opportunitysuiting, as at present; the time also considerately chosen--after dinner;and the spirit not more abrupt in his appearance nor more formidable inaspect than the being who now addresses you?

_Montesinos_. --Why, sir, to so substantial a ghost, and of suchrespectable appearance, I might, perhaps, have courage enough to say withHamlet, "Thou com'st in such a questionable shape, That I will speak to thee!"

_Stranger_. --Then, sir, let me introduce myself in that character, nowthat our conversation has conducted us so happily to the point. I toldyou truly that I was English by birth, but that I came from a moredistant country than America, and had long been naturalised there. Thecountry whence I come is not the New World, but the other one: and I nowdeclare myself in sober earnest to be a ghost. 

_Montesinos_. --A ghost!

_Stranger_. --A veritable ghost, and an honest one, who went out of theworld with so good a character that he will hardly escape canonisation ifever you get a Roman Catholic king upon the throne. And now what test doyou require?

_Montesinos_. --I can detect no smell of brimstone; and the candle burnsas it did before, without the slightest tinge of blue in its flame. Youlook, indeed, like a spirit of health, and I might be disposed to giveentire belief to that countenance, if it were not for the tongue thatbelongs to it. But you are a queer spirit, whether good or evil!

_Stranger_. --The headsman thought so, when he made a ghost of me almostthree hundred years ago. I had a character through life of loving ajest, and did not belie it at the last. But I had also as general areputation for sincerity, and of that also conclusive proof was given atthe same time. In serious truth, then, I am a disembodied spirit, andthe form in which I now manifest myself is subject to none of theaccidents of matter. You are still incredulous! Feel, then, and beconvinced!

My incomprehensible guest extended his hand toward me as he spoke. Iheld forth mine to accept it, not, indeed, believing him, and yet notaltogether without some apprehensive emotion, as if I were about toreceive an electrical shock. The effect was more startling thanelectricity would have produced. His hand had neither weight norsubstance; my fingers, when they would have closed upon it, found nothingthat they could grasp: it was intangible, though it had all the realityof form. 

"In the name of God, " I exclaimed, "who are you, and wherefore are youcome?"

"Be not alarmed, " he replied. "Your reason, which has shown you thepossibility of such an appearance as you now witness, must have convincedyou also that it would never be permitted for an evil end. Examine myfeatures well, and see if you do not recognise them. Hans Holbein wasexcellent at a likeness. "

I had now for the first time in my life a distinct sense of that sort ofporcupinish motion over the whole scalp which is so frequently describedby the Latin poets. It was considerably allayed by the benignity of hiscountenance and the manner of his speech, and after looking him steadilyin the face I ventured to say, for the likeness had previously struck me, "Is it Sir Thomas More?"

"The same, " he made answer, and lifting up his chin, displayed a circleround the neck brighter in colour than the ruby. "The marks ofmartyrdom, " he continued, "are our insignia of honour. Fisher and I havethe purple collar, as Friar Forrest and Cranmer have the robe of fire. "

A mingled feeling of fear and veneration kept me silent, till I perceivedby his look that he expected and encouraged me to speak; and collectingmy spirits as well as I could, I asked him wherefore he had thoughtproper to appear, and why to me rather than to any other person?

He replied, "We reap as we have sown. Men bear with them from this worldinto the intermediate state their habits of mind and stores of knowledge, their dispositions and affections and desires; and these become a part ofour punishment, or of our reward, according to their kind. Thosepersons, therefore, in whom the virtue of patriotism has predominatedcontinue to regard with interest their native land, unless it be soutterly sunk in degradation that the moral relationship between them isdissolved. Epaminondas can have no sympathy at this time with Thebes, nor Cicero with Rome, nor Belisarius with the imperial city of the East. But the worthies of England retain their affection for their noblecountry, behold its advancement with joy, and when serious danger appearsto threaten the goodly structure of its institutions they feel as muchanxiety as is compatible with their state of beatitude. "

_Montesinos_. --What, then, may doubt and anxiety consist with thehappiness of heaven?

_Sir Thomas More_. --Heaven and hell may be said to begin on your side thegrave. In the intermediate state conscience anticipates with unerringcertainty the result of judgment. We, therefore, who have done well canhave no fear for ourselves. But inasmuch as the world has any hold uponour affections we are liable to that anxiety which is inseparable fromterrestrial hopes. And as parents who are in bliss regard still withparental love the children whom they have left on earth, we, in likemanner, though with a feeling different in kind and inferior in degree, look with apprehension upon the perils of our country. 

 "_sub pectore forti_ _Vivit adhuc patriae pietas_; _stimulatque sepultum_ _Libertatis amor_: _pondus mortale necari_ _Si potuit_, _veteres animo post funera vires_ _Mansere_, _et prisci vivit non immemor aevi_. "

They are the words of old Mantuan. 

_Montesinos_. --I am to understand, then, that you cannot see into theways of futurity?

_Sir Thomas More_. --Enlarged as our faculties are, you must not supposethat we partake of prescience. For human actions are free, and we existin time. The future is to us therefore as uncertain as to you; exceptonly that having a clearer and more comprehensive knowledge of the past, we are enabled to reason better from causes to consequences, and by whathas been to judge of what is likely to be. We have this advantage also, that we are divested of all those passions which cloud the intellects andwarp the understandings of men. You are thinking, I perceive, how muchyou have to learn, and what you should first inquire of me. But expectno revelations! Enough was revealed when man was assured of judgmentafter death, and the means of salvation were afforded him. I neithercome to discover secret things nor hidden treasures; but to discoursewith you concerning these portentous and monster-breeding times; for itis your lot, as it was mine, to live during one of the grand climactericsof the world. And I come to you, rather than to any other person, because you have been led to meditate upon the corresponding changeswhereby your age and mine are distinguished; and because, notwithstandingmany discrepancies and some dispathies between us (speaking of myself asI was, and as you know me), there are certain points of sympathy andresemblance which bring us into contact, and enable us at once tounderstand each other. 

_Montesinos_. --_Et in Utopia ego_. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --You apprehend me. We have both speculated in thejoys and freedom of our youth upon the possible improvement of society;and both in like manner have lived to dread with reason the effects ofthat restless spirit which, like the Titaness Mutability described byyour immortal master, insults heaven and disturbs the earth. Bycomparing the great operating causes in the age of the Reformation, andin this age of revolutions, going back to the former age, looking atthings as I then beheld them, perceiving wherein I judged rightly, andwherein I erred, and tracing the progress of those causes which are nowdeveloping their whole tremendous power, you will derive instruction, which you are a fit person to receive and communicate; for without beingsolicitous concerning present effect, you are contented to cast yourbread upon the waters. You are now acquainted with me and my intention. To-morrow you will see me again; and I shall continue to visit youoccasionally as opportunity may serve. Meantime say nothing of what haspassed--not even to your wife. She might not like the thoughts of aghostly visitor: and the reputation of conversing with the dead might bealmost as inconvenient as that of dealing with the devil. For thepresent, then, farewell! I will never startle you with too sudden anapparition; but you may learn to behold my disappearance without alarm. 

I was not able to behold it without emotion, although he had thusprepared me; for the sentence was no sooner completed than he was gone. Instead of rising from the chair he vanished from it. I know not to whatthe instantaneous disappearance can be likened. Not to the dissolutionof a rainbow, because the colours of the rainbow fade gradually till theyare lost; not to the flash of cannon, or to lightning, for these thingsare gone as so on as they are come, and it is known that the instant oftheir appearance must be that of their departure; not to a bubble uponthe water, for you see it burst; not to the sudden extinction of a light, for that is either succeeded by darkness or leaves a different hue uponthe surrounding objects. In the same indivisible point of time when Ibeheld the distinct, individual, and, to all sense of sight, substantialform--the living, moving, reasonable image--in that self-same instant itwas gone, as if exemplifying the difference between to _be_ and _not_ to_be_. It was no dream, of this I was well assured; realities are nevermistaken for dreams, though dreams may be mistaken for realities. Moreover I had long been accustomed in sleep to question my perceptionswith a wakeful faculty of reason, and to detect their fallacy. But, aswell may be supposed, my thoughts that night, sleeping as well as waking, were filled with this extraordinary interview; and when I arose the nextmorning it was not till I had called to mind every circumstance of timeand place that I was convinced the apparition was real, and that I mightagain expect it. 

COLLOQUY II. --THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE WORLD. 

On the following evening when my spiritual visitor entered the room, thatvolume of Dr. Wordsworth's ecclesiastical biography which contains hislife was lying on the table beside me. "I perceive, " said he, glancingat the book, "you have been gathering all you can concerning me from mygood gossiping chronicler, who tells you that I loved milk and fruit andeggs, preferred beef to young meats, and brown bread to white; was fondof seeing strange birds and beasts, and kept an ape, a fox, a weasel, anda ferret. "

"I am not one of those fastidious readers, " I replied, "who quarrel witha writer for telling them too much. But these things were worth telling:they show that you retained a youthful palate as well as a youthfulheart; and I like you the better both for your diet and your menagerie. The old biographer, indeed, with the best intentions, has been far fromunderstanding the character which he desired to honour. He seems, however, to have been a faithful reporter, and has done as well as hiscapacity permitted. I observe that he gives you credit for 'a deepforesight and judgment of the times, ' and for speaking in a propheticspirit of the evils, which soon afterwards were 'full heavily felt. '"

"There could be little need for a spirit of prophecy, " Sir Thomas madeanswer, to "foresee troubles which were the sure effect of the causesthen in operation, and which were actually close at hand. When the rainis gathering from the south or west, and those flowers and herbs whichserve as natural hygrometers close their leaves, men have no occasion toconsult the stars for what the clouds and the earth are telling them. Youwere thinking of Prince Arthur when I introduced myself yesterday, as ifmusing upon the great events which seem to have received their bias fromthe apparent accident of his premature death. "

_Montesinos_. --I had fallen into one of those idle reveries in which wespeculate upon what might have been. Lord Bacon describes him as "verystudious, and learned beyond his years, and beyond the custom of greatprinces. " As this indicates a calm and thoughtful mind, it seems to showthat he inherited the Tudor character. His brother took after thePlantagenets; but it was not of their nobler qualities that he partook. He had the popular manners of his grandfather, Edward IV. , and, like him, was lustful, cruel, and unfeeling. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --The blood of the Plantagenets, as your friends theSpaniards would say, was a strong blood. That temper of mind which (insome of his predecessors) thought so little of fratricide might perhapshave involved him in the guilt of a parricidal war, if his father had notbeen fortunate enough to escape such an affliction by a timely death. Wemight otherwise be allowed to wish that the life of Henry VII. Had beenprolonged to a good old age. For if ever there was a prince who could sohave directed the Reformation as to have averted the evils wherewith thattremendous event was accompanied, and yet to have secured its advantages, he was the man. Cool, wary, far-sighted, rapacious, politic, andreligious, or superstitious if you will (for his religion had its rootrather in fear than in hope), he was peculiarly adapted for such a crisisboth by his good and evil qualities. For the sake of increasing histreasures and his power, he would have promoted the Reformation; but hiscautious temper, his sagacity, and his fear of Divine justice would havetaught him where to stop. 

_Montesinos_. --A generation of politic sovereigns succeeded to the raceof warlike ones, just in that age of society when policy became of moreimportance in their station than military talents. Ferdinand of Spain, Joam II. Whom the Portuguese called the perfect prince, Louis XI. AndHenry VII. Were all of this class. Their individual characters weresufficiently distinct; but the circumstances of their situation stampedthem with a marked resemblance, and they were of a metal to take andretain the strong, sharp impress of the age. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --The age required such characters; and it is worthy ofnotice how surely in the order of providence such men as are wanted areraised up. One generation of these princes sufficed. In Spain, indeed, there was an exception; for Ferdinand had two successors who pursued thesame course of conduct. In the other kingdoms the character ceased withthe necessity for it. Crimes enough were committed by succeedingsovereigns, but they were no longer the acts of systematic and reflectingpolicy. This, too, is worthy of remark, that the sovereigns whom youhave named, and who scrupled at no means for securing themselves on thethrone, for enlarging their dominions and consolidating their power, wereeach severally made to feel the vanity of human ambition, being punishedeither in or by the children who were to reap the advantage of theircrimes. "Verily there is a God that judgeth the earth!"

_Montesinos_. --An excellent friend of mine, one of the wisest, best, andhappiest men whom I have ever known, delights in this manner to trace themoral order of Providence through the revolutions of the world; and inhis historical writings keeps it in view as the pole-star of his course. I wish he were present, that he might have the satisfaction of hearinghis favourite opinion confirmed by one from the dead. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --His opinion requires no other confirmation than whathe finds for it in observation and Scripture, and in his own calmjudgment. I should differ little from that friend of yours concerningthe past; but his hopes for the future appear to me like early buds whichare in danger of March winds. He believes the world to be in a rapidstate of sure improvement; and in the ferment which exists everywhere hebeholds only a purifying process; not considering that there is anacetous as well as a vinous fermentation; and that in the one case theliquor may be spilt, in the other it must be spoilt. 

_Montesinos_. --Surely you would not rob us of our hopes for the humanrace! If I apprehended that your discourse tended to this end I shouldsuspect you, notwithstanding your appearance, and be ready to exclaim, "Avaunt, tempter!" For there is no opinion from which I should so hardlybe driven, and so reluctantly part, as the belief that the world willcontinue to improve, even as it has hitherto continually been improving;and that the progress of knowledge and the diffusion of Christianity willbring about at last, when men become Christians in reality as well as inname, something like that Utopian state of which philosophers have lovedto dream--like that millennium in which saints as well as enthusiastshave trusted. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --Do you hold that this consummation must of necessitycome to pass; or that it depends in any degree upon the course ofevents--that is to say, upon human actions? The former of thesepropositions you would be as unwilling to admit as your friend Wesley, orthe old Welshman Pelagius himself. The latter leaves you little otherfoundation for your opinion than a desire, which, from its verybenevolence, is the more likely to be delusive. You are in a dilemma. 

_Montesinos_. --Not so, Sir Thomas. Impossible as it may be for us toreconcile the free will of man with the foreknowledge of God, Inevertheless believe in both with the most full conviction. When thehuman mind plunges into time and space in its speculations, it adventuresbeyond its sphere; no wonder, therefore, that its powers fail, and it islost. But that my will is free, I know feelingly: it is proved to me bymy conscience. And that God provideth all things I know by His own Word, and by that instinct which He hath implanted in me to assure me of Hisbeing. My answer to your question, then, is this: I believe that thehappy consummation which I desire is appointed, and must come to pass;but that when it is to come depends upon the obedience of man to the willof God, that is, upon human actions. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --You hold then that the human race will one day attainthe utmost degree of general virtue, and thereby general happiness, ofwhich humanity is capable. Upon what do you found this belief?

_Montesinos_. --The opinion is stated more broadly than I should choose toadvance it. But this is ever the manner of argumentative discourse: theopponent endeavours to draw from you conclusions which you are notprepared to defend, and which perhaps you have never before acknowledgedeven to yourself. I will put the proposition in a less disputable form. A happier condition of society is possible than that in which any nationis existing at this time, or has at any time existed. The sum both ofmoral and physical evil may be greatly diminished both by good laws, goodinstitutions, and good governments. Moral evil cannot indeed be removed, unless the nature of man were changed; and that renovation is only to beeffected in individuals, and in them only by the special grace of God. Physical evil must always, to a certain degree, be inseparable frommortality. But both are so much within the reach of human institutionsthat a state of society is conceivable almost as superior to that ofEngland in these days, as that itself is superior to the condition of thetattooed Britons, or of the northern pirates from whom we are descended. Surely this belief rests upon a reasonable foundation, and is supportedby that general improvement (always going on if it be regarded upon thegreat scale) to which all history bears witness. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --I dispute not this: but to render it a reasonableground of immediate hope, the predominance of good principles must besupposed. Do you believe that good or evil principles predominate atthis time?

_Montesinos_. --If I were to judge by that expression of popular opinionwhich the press pretends to convey, I should reply without hesitationthat never in any other known age of the world have such perniciousprinciples been so prevalent

 "_Qua terra patet_, _fera regnat Erinnys_; _In facinus jurasse putes_. "

_Sir Thomas More_. --Is there not a danger that these principles may beardown everything before them? and is not that danger obvious, palpable, imminent? Is there a considerate man who can look at the signs of thetimes without apprehension, or a scoundrel connected with what is calledthe public press, who does not speculate upon them, and join with theanarchists as the strongest party? Deceive not yourself by thefallacious notion that truth is mightier than falsehood, and that goodmust prevail over evil! Good principles enable men to suffer, ratherthan to act. Think how the dog, fond and faithful creature as he is, from being the most docile and obedient of all animals, is made the mostdangerous, if he becomes mad; so men acquire a frightful and not lessmonstrous power when they are in a state of moral insanity, and breakloose from their social and religious obligations. Remember too howrapidly the plague of diseased opinions is communicated, and that if itonce gain head, it is as difficult to be stopped as a conflagration or aflood. The prevailing opinions of this age go to the destruction ofeverything which has hitherto been held sacred. They tend to arm thepoor against the rich; the many against the few: worse than this, for itwill also be a war of hope and enterprise against timidity, of youthagainst age. 

_Montesinos_. --Sir Ghost, you are almost as dreadful an alarmist as ourCumberland cow, who is believed to have lately uttered this prophecy, delivering it with oracular propriety in verse:

 "Two winters, a wet spring, A bloody summer, and no king. "

_Sir Thomas More_. --That prophecy speaks the wishes of the man, whoeverhe may have been, by whom it was invented: and you who talk of theprogress of knowledge, and the improvement of society, and upon thatimprovement build your hope of its progressive melioration, you know thateven so gross and palpable an imposture as this is swallowed by many ofthe vulgar, and contributes in its sphere to the mischief which it wasdesigned to promote. I admit that such an improved condition of societyas you contemplate is possible, and hath ought always to be kept in view:but the error of supposing it too near, of fancying that there is a shortroad to it, is, of all the errors of these times, the most pernicious, because it seduces the young and generous, and betrays them imperceptiblyinto an alliance with whatever is flagitious and detestable. The fact isundeniable that the worst principles in religion, in morals, and inpolitics, are at this time more prevalent than they ever were known to bein any former age. You need not be told in what manner revolutions inopinion bring about the fate of empires; and upon this ground you oughtto regard the state of the world, both at home and abroad, with fear, rather than with hope. 

_Montesinos_. --When I have followed such speculations as may allowably beindulged, respecting what is hidden in the darkness of time and ofeternity, I have sometimes thought that the moral and physical order ofthe world may be so appointed as to coincide; and that the revolutions ofthis planet may correspond with the condition of its inhabitants; so thatthe convulsions and changes whereto it is destined should occur, when theexisting race of men had either become so corrupt as to be unworthy ofthe place which they hold in the universe, or were so truly regenerate bythe will and word of God, as to be qualified for a higher station in it. Our globe may have gone through many such revolutions. We know thehistory of the last; the measure of its wickedness was then filled up. For the future we are taught to expect a happier consummation. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --It is important that you should distinctly understandthe nature and extent of your expectations on that head. Is it upon theApocalypse that you rest them?

_Montesinos_. --If you had not forbidden me to expect from thisintercourse any communication which might come with the authority ofrevealed knowledge, I should ask in reply, whether that dark book isindeed to be received for authentic Scripture? My hopes are derived fromthe prophets and the evangelists. Believing in them with a calm andsettled faith, with that consent of the will and heart and understandingwhich constitutes religious belief, and in them the clear annunciation ofthat kingdom of God upon earth, for the coming of which Christ himselfhas taught and commanded us to pray. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --Remember that the Evangelists, in predicting thatkingdom, announce a dreadful advent! And that, according to the receivedopinion of the Church, wars, persecutions, and calamities of every kind, the triumph of evil, and the coming of Antichrist are to be looked for, before the promises made by the prophets shall be fulfilled. Considerthis also, that the speedy fulfilment of those promises has been theruling fancy of the most dangerous of all madmen, from John of Leyden andhis frantic followers, down to the saints of Cromwell's army, Venner andhis Fifth-Monarchy men, the fanatics of the Cevennes, and the blockheadsof your own days, who beheld with complacency the crimes of the FrenchRevolutionists, and the progress of Bonaparte towards the subjugation ofEurope, as events tending to bring about the prophecies; and, under thesame besotted persuasion, are ready at this time to co-operate with themiscreants who trade in blasphemy and treason! But you who neither seekto deceive others nor yourself, you who are neither insane nor insincere, you surely do not expect that the millennium is to be brought about bythe triumph of what are called liberal opinions; nor by enabling thewhole of the lower classes to read the incentives to vice, impiety, andrebellion which are prepared for them by an unlicensed press; nor bySunday schools, and religious tract societies; nor by the portentousbibliolatry of the age! And if you adhere to the letter of theScriptures, methinks the thought of that consummation for which you look, might serve rather for consolation under the prospect of impending evils, than for a hope upon which the mind can rest in security with a calm andcontented delight. 

_Montesinos_. --To this I must reply, that the fulfilment of thosecalamitous events predicted in the Gospels may safely be referred, as itusually is, and by the best Biblical scholars, to the destruction ofJerusalem. Concerning the visions of the Apocalypse, sublime as theyare, I speak with less hesitation, and dismiss them from my thoughts, asmore congenial to the fanatics of whom you have spoken than to me. Andfor the coming of Antichrist, it is no longer a received opinion in thesedays, whatever it may have been in yours. Your reasoning applies to theenthusiastic millenarians who discover the number of the beast, andcalculate the year when a vial is to be poured out, with as muchprecision as the day and hour of an eclipse. But it leaves my hopeunshaken and untouched. I know that the world has improved; I see thatit is improving; and I believe that it will continue to improve innatural and certain progress. Good and evil principles are widely atwork: a crisis is evidently approaching; it may be dreadful, but I canhave no doubts concerning the result. Black and ominous as the aspectsmay appear, I regard them without dismay. The common exclamation of thepoor and helpless, when they feel themselves oppressed, conveys to mymind the sum of the surest and safest philosophy. I say with them, "Godis above, " and trust Him for the event. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --God is above--but the devil is below. Evilprinciples are, in their nature, more active than good. The harvest isprecarious, and must be prepared with labour, and cost, and care; weedsspring up of themselves, and flourish and seed whatever may be theseason. Disease, vice, folly, and madness are contagious; while healthand understanding are incommunicable, and wisdom and virtue hardly to becommunicated! We have come, however, to some conclusion in ourdiscourse. Your notion of the improvement of the world has appeared tobe a mere speculation, altogether inapplicable in practice; and asdangerous to weak heads and heated imaginations as it is congenial tobenevolent hearts. Perhaps that improvement is neither so general nor socertain as you suppose. Perhaps, even in this country there may be moreknowledge than there was in former times and less wisdom, more wealth andless happiness, more display and less virtue. This must be the subjectof future conversation. I will only remind you now, that the French hadpersuaded themselves this was the most enlightened age of the world, andthey the most enlightened people in it--the politest, the most amiable, and the most humane of nations--and that a new era of philosophy, philanthropy, and peace, was about to commence under their auspices, whenthey were upon the eve of a revolution which, for its complicatedmonstrosities, absurdities, and horrors, is more disgraceful to humannature than any other series of events in history. Chew the cud uponthis, and farewell

COLLOQUY III. --THE DRUIDICAL STONES. --VISITATIONS OF PESTILENCE. 

Inclination would lead me to hibernate during half the year in thisuncomfortable climate of Great Britain, where few men who have tasted theenjoyments of a better would willingly take up their abode, if it werenot for the habits, and still more for the ties and duties which root usto our native soil. I envy the Turks for their sedentary constitutions, which seem no more to require exercise than an oyster does or a toad in astone. In this respect, I am by disposition as true a Turk as the GrandSeignior himself; and approach much nearer to one in the habit ofinaction than any person of my acquaintance. Willing however, as Ishould be to believe, that anything which is habitually necessary for asound body, would be unerringly indicated by an habitual disposition forit, and that if exercise were as needful as food for the preservation ofthe animal economy, the desire of motion would recur not less regularlythan hunger and thirst, it is a theory which will not bear the test; andthis I know by experience. 

On a grey sober day, therefore, and in a tone of mind quite accordantwith the season, I went out unwillingly to take the air, though if takingphysic would have answered the same purpose, the dose would have beenpreferred as the shortest, and for that reason the least unpleasantremedy. Even on such occasions as this, it is desirable to propose tooneself some object for the satisfaction of accomplishing it, and to setout with the intention of reaching some fixed point, though it should benothing better than a mile-stone, or a directing post. So I walked tothe Circle of Stones on the Penrith road, because there is a long hillupon the way which would give the muscles some work to perform; andbecause the sight of this rude monument which has stood during so manycenturies, and is likely, if left to itself, to outlast any edifice thatman could have erected, gives me always a feeling, which, however oftenit may be repeated, loses nothing of its force. 

The circle is of the rudest kind, consisting of single stones, unhewn andchosen without any regard to shape or magnitude, being of all sizes, fromseven or eight feet in height, to three or four. The circle, however, iscomplete, and is thirty-three paces in diameter. Concerning this, likeall similar monuments in Great Britain, the popular superstitionprevails, that no two persons can number the stones alike, and that noperson will ever find a second counting confirm the first. My childrenhave often disappointed their natural inclination to believe this wonder, by putting it to the test and disproving it. The number of the stoneswhich compose the circle, is thirty-eight, and besides these there areten which form three sides of a little square within, on the easternside, three stones of the circle itself forming the fourth; this beingevidently the place where the Druids who presided had their station; orwhere the more sacred and important part of the rites and ceremonies(whatever they may have been) were performed. All this is as perfect atthis day as when the Cambrian bards, according to the custom of theirancient order, described by my old acquaintances, the living members ofthe Chair of Glamorgan, met there for the last time, "On the green turf and under the blue sky, Their heads in reverence bare, and bare of foot. "

The site also precisely accords with the description which EdwardWilliams and William Owen give of the situation required for such meetingplaces:

 "--a high hill top, Nor bowered with trees, nor broken by the plough: Remote from human dwellings and the stir Of human life, and open to the breath And to the eye of Heaven. "

The high hill is now enclosed and cultivated; and a clump of larches hasbeen planted within the circle, for the purpose of protecting an oak inthe centre, the owner of the field having wished to rear one there with acommendable feeling, because that tree was held sacred by the Druids, andtherefore, he supposed, might be appropriately placed there. The wholeplantation, however, has been so miserably storm-stricken that the poorstunted trees are not even worth the trouble of cutting them down forfuel, and so they continue to disfigure the spot. In all other respectsthis impressive monument of former times is carefully preserved; the soilwithin the enclosure is not broken, a path from the road is left, and inlatter times a stepping-stile has been placed to accommodate Lakers withan easier access than by striding over the gate beside it. 

The spot itself is the most commanding which could be chosen in this partof the country, without climbing a mountain. Derwentwater and the Valeof Keswick are not seen from it, only the mountains which enclose them onthe south and west. Lattrigg and the huge side of Skiddaw are on thenorth; to the east is the open country towards Penrith expanding from theVale of St. John's, and extending for many miles, with Mellfell in thedistance, where it rises alone like a huge tumulus on the right, andBlencathra on the left, rent into deep ravines. On the south-east is therange of Helvellyn, from its termination at Wanthwaite Crags to itsloftiest summits, and to Dunmailraise. The lower range of Nathdalefellslies nearer, in a parallel line with Helvellyn; and the dale itself, withits little streamlet, immediately below. The heights above Leatheswater, with the Borrowdale mountains, complete the panorama. 

While I was musing upon the days of the Bards and Druids, and thinkingthat Llywarc Hen himself had probably stood within this very circle at atime when its history was known, and the rites for which it was erectedstill in use, I saw a person approaching, and started a little atperceiving that it was my new acquaintance from the world of spirits. "Iam come, " said he, "to join company with you in your walk: you may aswell converse with a ghost as stand dreaming of the dead. I dare say youhave been wishing that these stones could speak and tell their tale, orthat some record were sculptured upon them, though it were asunintelligible as the hieroglyphics, or as an Ogham inscription. "

"My ghostly friend, " I replied, "they tell me something to the purport ofour last discourse. Here upon ground where the Druids have certainlyheld their assemblies, and where not improbably, human sacrifices havebeen offered up, you will find it difficult to maintain that theimprovement of the world has not been unequivocal, and very great. "

_Sir Thomas More_. --Make the most of your vantage ground! My positionis, that this improvement is not general; that while some parts of theearth are progressive in civilisation, others have been retrograde; andthat even where improvement appears the greatest, it is partial. Forexample; with all the meliorations which have taken place in Englandsince these stones were set up (and you will not suppose that I who laiddown my life for a religious principle, would undervalue the mostimportant of all advantages), do you believe that they have extended toall classes? Look at the question well. Consider yourfellow-countrymen, both in their physical and intellectual relations, andtell me whether a large portion of the community are in a happier or morehopeful condition at this time, than their forefathers were when Caesarset foot upon the island?

_Montesinos_. --If it be your aim to prove that the savage state ispreferable to the social, I am perhaps the very last person upon whom anyarguments to that end could produce the slightest effect. That notionnever for a moment deluded me: not even in the ignorance andpresumptuousness of youth, when first I perused Rousseau, and wasunwilling to feel that a writer whose passionate eloquence I felt andadmired so truly could be erroneous in any of his opinions. But now, inthe evening of life, when I know upon what foundation my principles rest, and when the direction of one peculiar course of study has made itnecessary for me to learn everything which books could teach concerningsavage life, the proposition appears to me one of the most untenable thatever was advanced by a perverse or a paradoxical intellect. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --I advanced no such paradox, and you have answered metoo hastily. The Britons were not savages when the Romans invaded andimproved them. They were already far advanced in the barbarous stage ofsociety, having the use of metals, domestic cattle, wheeled carriages, and money, a settled government, and a regular priesthood, who wereconnected with their fellow-Druids on the Continent, and who were notignorant of letters. Understand me! I admit that improvements of theutmost value have been made, in the most important concerns: but I denythat the melioration has been general; and insist, on the contrary, thata considerable portion of the people are in a state, which, as relates totheir physical condition, is greatly worsened, and, as touching theirintellectual nature, is assuredly not improved. Look, for example, atthe great mass of your populace in town and country--a tremendousproportion of the whole community! Are their bodily wants better, ormore easily supplied? Are they subject to fewer calamities? Are theyhappier in childhood, youth, and manhood, and more comfortably orcarefully provided for in old age, than when the land was unenclosed, andhalf covered with woods? With regard to their moral and intellectualcapacity, you well know how little of the light of knowledge and ofrevelation has reached them. They are still in darkness, and in theshadow of death!

_Montesinos_. --I perceive your drift: and perceive also that when weunderstand each other there is likely to be little difference between us. And I beseech you, do not suppose that I am disputing for the sake ofdisputation; with that pernicious habit I was never infected, and I haveseen too many mournful proofs of its perilous consequences. Towards anyperson it is injudicious and offensive; towards you it would beirreverent. Your position is undeniable. Were society to be stationaryat its present point, the bulk of the people would, on the whole, havelost rather than gained by the alterations which have taken place duringthe last thousand years. Yet this must be remembered, that in commonwith all ranks they are exempted from those dreadful visitations of war, pestilence, and famine by which these kingdoms were so frequentlyafflicted of old. 

The countenance of my companion changed upon this, to an expression ofjudicial severity which struck me with awe. "Exempted from thesevisitations!" he exclaimed; "mortal man! creature of a day, what artthou, that thou shouldst presume upon any such exemption! Is it from atrust in your own deserts, or a reliance upon the forbearance and long-suffering of the Almighty, that this vain confidence arises?"

I was silent. 

"My friend, " he resumed, in a milder tone, but with a melancholy manner, "your own individual health and happiness are scarcely more precariousthan this fancied security. By the mercy of God, twice during the shortspace of your life, England has been spared from the horrors of invasion, which might with ease have been effected during the American war, whenthe enemy's fleet swept the Channel, and insulted your very ports, andwhich was more than once seriously intended during the late long contest. The invaders would indeed have found their graves in that soil which theycame to subdue: but before they could have been overcome, the atrociousthreat of Buonaparte's general might have been in great part realised, that though he could not answer for effecting the conquest of England, hewould engage to destroy its prosperity for a century to come. You havebeen spared from that chastisement. You have escaped also from theimminent danger of peace with a military tyrant, which would inevitablyhave led to invasion, when he should have been ready to undertake andaccomplish that great object of his ambition, and you must have beenleast prepared and least able to resist him. But if the seeds of civilwar should at this time be quickening among you--if your soil iseverywhere sown with the dragon's teeth, and the fatal crop be at thishour ready to spring up--the impending evil will be a hundredfold moreterrible than those which have been averted; and you will have cause toperceive and acknowledge, that the wrath has been suspended only that itmay fall the heavier!"

"May God avert this also!" I exclaimed. 

"As for famine, " he pursued, "that curse will always follow in the trainof war: and even now the public tranquillity of England is fearfullydependent upon the seasons. And touching pestilence, you fancyyourselves secure, because the plague has not appeared among you for thelast hundred and fifty years: a portion of time, which long as it mayseem when compared with the brief term of mortal existence, is as nothingin the physical history of the globe. The importation of that scourge isas possible now as it was in former times: and were it once imported, doyou suppose it would rage with less violence among the crowded populationof your metropolis, than it did before the fire, or that it would notreach parts of the country which were never infected in any formervisitation? On the contrary, its ravages would be more general and moretremendous, for it would inevitably be carried everywhere. Yourprovincial cities have doubled and trebled in size; and in London itself, great part of the population is as much crowded now as it was then, andthe space which is covered with houses is increased at least fourfold. What if the sweating-sickness, emphatically called the English disease, were to show itself again? Can any cause be assigned why it is not aslikely to break out in the nineteenth century as in the fifteenth? Whatif your manufactures, according to the ominous opinion which yourgreatest physiologist has expressed, were to generate for you newphysical plagues, as they have already produced a moral pestilenceunknown to all preceding ages? What if the small-pox, which you vainlybelieved to be subdued, should have assumed a new and more formidablecharacter; and (as there seems no trifling grounds for apprehending)instead of being protected by vaccination from its danger, you shouldascertain that inoculation itself affords no certain security?Visitations of this kind are in the order of nature and of providence. Physically considered, the likelihood of their recurrence becomes everyyear more probable than the last; and looking to the moral government ofthe world, was there ever a time when the sins of this kingdom calledmore cryingly for chastisement?"

_Montesinos_. --[Greek text]!

_Sir Thomas More_. --I denounce no judgments. But I am reminding you thatthere is as much cause for the prayer in your Litany against plague, pestilence, and famine, as for that which entreats God to deliver you allfrom sedition, privy conspiracy, and rebellion; from all false doctrine, heresy, and schism. In this, as in all things, it behoves the Christianto live in a humble and grateful sense of his continual dependence uponthe Almighty: not to rest in a presumptuous confidence upon the improvedstate of human knowledge, or the altered course of natural visitations. 

_Montesinos_. --Oh, how wholesome it is to receive instruction with awilling and a humble mind! In attending to your discourse I feel myselfin the healthy state of a pupil, when without one hostile or contrarientprepossession, he listens to a teacher in whom he has entire confidence. And I feel also how much better it is that the authority of elder andwiser intellects should pass even for more than it is worth, than that itshould be undervalued as in these days, and set at nought. When anyperson boasts that he is--

 "_Nullias addictus jurare in verba magistri_, "

the reason of that boast may easily be perceived; it is because hethinks, like Jupiter, that it would be disparaging his own all-wisenessto swear by anything but himself. But wisdom will as little enter into aproud or a conceited mind as into a malicious one. In this sense also itmay be said, that he who humbleth himself shall be exalted. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --It is not implicit assent that I require, butreasonable conviction after calm and sufficient consideration. David waspermitted to choose between the three severest dispensations of God'sdispleasure, and he made choice of pestilence as the least dreadful. Ought a reflecting and religious man to be surprised, if some suchpunishment were dispensed to this country, not less in mercy than injudgment, as the means of averting a more terrible and abiding scourge?An endemic malady, as destructive as the plague, has naturalised itselfamong your American brethren, and in Spain. You have hitherto escapedit, speaking with reference to secondary causes, merely because it hasnot yet been imported. But any season may bring it to your own shores;or at any hour it may appear among you homebred. 

_Montesinos_. --We should have little reason, then, to boast of ourimprovements in the science of medicine; for our practitioners atGibraltar found themselves as unable to stop its progress, or mitigateits symptoms, as the most ignorant empirics in the peninsula. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --You were at one time near enough that pestilence tofeel as if you were within its reach?

_Montesinos_. --It was in 1800, the year when it first appeared inAndalusia. That summer I fell in at Cintra with a young German, on theway from his own country to his brothers at Cadiz, where they wereestablished as merchants. Many days had not elapsed after his arrival inthat city when a ship which was consigned to their firm brought with itthe infection; and the first news which reached us of our pooracquaintance was that the yellow fever had broken out in his brother'shouse, and that he, they, and the greater part of the household, weredead. There was every reason to fear that the pestilence would extendinto Portugal, both governments being, as usual, slow in providing anymeasures of precaution, and those measures being nugatory when taken. Iwas at Faro in the ensuing spring, at the house of Mr. Lempriere, theBritish Consul. Inquiring of him upon the subject, the old man lifted uphis hands, and replied in a passionate manner, which I shall neverforget, "Oh, sir, we escaped by the mercy of God; only by the mercy ofGod!" The governor of Algarve, even when the danger was known andacknowledged, would not venture to prohibit the communication with Spaintill he received orders from Lisbon; and then the prohibition was soenforced as to be useless. The crew of a boat from the infected provincewere seized and marched through the country to Tavira: they were thensent to perform quarantine upon a little insulated ground, and the guardswho were set over them, lived with them, and were regularly relieved. When such were the precautionary measures, well indeed might it be said, that Portugal escaped only by the mercy of God! I have often reflectedupon the little effect which this imminent danger appeared to produceupon those persons with whom I associated. The young, with that hilaritywhich belongs to thoughtless youth, used to converse about the placeswhither they should retire, and the course of life and expedients towhich they should be driven in case it were necessary for them to flyfrom Lisbon. A few elder and more considerate persons said little uponthe subject, but that little denoted a deep sense of the danger, and moreanxiety than they thought proper to express. The great majority seemedto be altogether unconcerned; neither their business nor their amusementswere interrupted; they feasted, they danced, they met at the card-tableas usual; and the plague (for so it was called at that time, before itsnature was clearly understood) was as regular a topic of conversation asthe news brought by the last packet. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --And what was your own state of mind?

_Montesinos_. --Very much what it has long been with regard to the moralpestilence of this unhappy age, and the condition of this country moreespecially. I saw the danger in its whole extent and relied on the mercyof God. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --In all cases that is the surest reliance: but whenhuman means are available, it becomes a Mahommedan rather than aChristian to rely upon Providence or fate alone, and make no effort forits own preservation. Individuals never fall into this error among you, drink as deeply as they may of fatalism; that narcotic will sometimesparalyse the moral sense, but it leaves the faculty of worldly prudenceunimpaired. Far otherwise is it with your government: for such are thenotions of liberty in England, that evils of every kind--physical, moral, and political, are allowed their free range. As relates to infectiousdiseases, for example, this kingdom is now in a less civilised state thanit was in my days, three centuries ago, when the leper was separated fromgeneral society; and when, although the science of medicine was at oncebarbarous and fantastical, the existence of pesthouses showed at leastsome approaches towards a medical police. 

_Montesinos_. --They order these things better in Utopia. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --In this, as well as in some other points upon whichwe shall touch hereafter, the difference between you and the Utopians isas great as between the existing generation and the race by whom yondercircle was set up. With regard to diseases and remedies in general, thereal state of the case may be consolatory, but it is not comfortable. Great and certain progress has been made in chirurgery; and if theimprovements in the other branch of medical science have not been socertain and so great, it is because the physician works in the dark, andhas to deal with what is hidden and mysterious. But the evils for whichthese sciences are the palliatives have increased in a proportion thatheavily overweighs the benefit of improved therapeutics. For as theintercourse between nations has become greater, the evils of one havebeen communicated to another. Pigs, Spanish dollars, and Norway rats, are not the only commodities and incommodities which have performed thecircumnavigation, and are to be found wherever European ships havetouched. Diseases also find their way from one part of the inhabitedglobe to another, wherever it is possible for them to exist. The mostformidable endemic or contagious maladies in your nosology are notindigenous; and as far as regards health therefore, the ancient Britons, with no other remedies than their fields and woods afforded them, and noother medical practitioners than their deceitful priests, were in abetter condition than their descendants, with all the instruction whichis derived from Sydenham and Heberden, and Hunter, and with all thepowers which chemistry has put into their hands. 

_Montesinos_. --You have well said that there is nothing comfortable inthis view of the case: but what is there consolatory in it?

_Sir Thomas More_. --The consolation is upon your principle of expectanthope. Whenever improved morals, wiser habits, more practical religion, and more efficient institutions shall have diminished the moral andmaterial causes of disease, a thoroughly scientific practice, the resultof long experience and accumulated observations, will then exist, toremedy all that is within the power of human art, and to alleviate whatis irremediable. To existing individuals this consolation is somethinglike the satisfaction you might feel in learning that a fine estate wasentailed upon your family at the expiration of a lease of ninety-nineyears from the present time. But I had forgotten to whom I am talking. Apoet always looks onward to some such distant inheritance. His hopes areusually _in nubibus_, and his expectations in the _paulo post futurum_tense. 

_Montesinos_. --His state is the more gracious then because his enjoymentis always to come. It is however a real satisfaction to me that there issome sunshine in your prospect. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --More in mine than in yours, because I command a widerhorizon: but I see also the storms which are blackening, and may closeover the sky. Our discourse began concerning that portion of thecommunity who form the base of the pyramid; we have unawares taken a moregeneral view, but it has not led us out of the way. Returning to themost numerous class of society, it is apparent that in the particularpoint of which we have been conversing, their condition is greatlyworsened: they remain liable to the same indigenous diseases as theirforefathers, and are exposed moreover to all which have been imported. Nor will the estimate of their condition be improved upon fartherinquiry. They are worse fed than when they were hunters, fishers, andherdsmen; their clothing and habitations are little better, and, incomparison with those of the higher classes, immeasurably worse. Exceptin the immediate vicinity of the collieries, they suffer more from coldthan when the woods and turbaries were open. They are less religiousthan in the days of the Romish faith; and if we consider them in relationto their immediate superiors, we shall find reason to confess that theindependence which has been gained since the total decay of the feudalsystem, has been dearly purchased by the loss of kindly feelings andennobling attachments. They are less contented, and in no respect morehappy--that look implies hesitation of judgment, and an unwillingness tobe convinced. Consider the point; go to your books and your thoughts;and when next we meet, you will feel little inclination to dispute theirrefragable statement. 

COLLOQUY IV. --FEUDAL SLAVERY. --GROWTH OF PAUPERISM. 

The last conversation had left a weight upon me, which was not lessenedwhen I contemplated the question in solitude. I called to mind themelancholy view which Young has taken of the world in his unhappy poem:

 "A part how small of the terraqueous globe Is tenanted by man! the rest a waste, Rocks, deserts, frozen seas and burning sands, Wild haunts of monsters, poisons, stings, and death. Such is earth's melancholy map! But, far More sad, this earth is a true map of man. "

Sad as this representation is, I could not but acknowledge that the moraland intellectual view is not more consolatory than the poet felt it tobe; and it was a less sorrowful consideration to think how large aportion of the habitable earth is possessed by savages, or by nationswhom inhuman despotisms and monstrous superstitions have degraded in somerespects below the savage state, than to observe how small a part of whatis called the civilised world is truly civilised; and in the mostcivilised parts to how small a portion of the inhabitants the realblessings of civilisation are confined. In this mood how heartily shouldI have accorded with Owen of Lanark if I could have agreed with thathappiest and most beneficent and most practical of all enthusiasts aswell concerning the remedy as the disease!

"Well, Montesinos, " said the spirit, when he visited me next, "have yourecollected or found any solid arguments for maintaining that thelabouring classes, who form the great bulk of the population, are in ahappier condition, physical, moral, or intellectual, in these times, thanthey were in mine?"

_Montesinos_. --Perhaps, Sir Thomas, their condition was better preciselyduring your age than it ever has been either before or since. The feudalsystem had well-nigh lost all its inhuman parts, and the worse inhumanityof the commercial system had not yet shown itself. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --It was, indeed, a most important age in Englishhistory, and, till the Reformation so fearfully disturbed it, in manyrespects a happy and an enviable one. But the process was then beginningwhich is not yet completed. As the feudal system relaxed and tended todissolution the condition of the multitude was changed. Let us trace itfrom earlier times! In what state do you suppose the people of thisisland to have been when they were invaded by the Romans?

_Montesinos_. --Something worse than the Greeks of the Homeric age:something better than the Sandwich or Tonga islanders when they werevisited by Captain Cook. Inferior to the former in arts, in polity, and, above all, in their domestic institutions; superior to the latter ashaving the use of cattle and being under a superstition in which, amidmany abominations, some patriarchal truths were preserved. Lessfortunate in physical circumstances than either, because of the climate. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --A viler state of morals than their polyandrian systemmust have produced can scarcely be imagined; and the ferocity of theirmanners, little as is otherwise known of them, is sufficiently shown bytheir scythed war-chariots, and the fact that in the open country thepath from one town to another was by a covered way. But in whatcondition were the labouring classes?

_Montesinos_. --In slavery, I suppose. When the Romans first attacked theisland it was believed at Rome that slaves were the only booty whichBritain could afford; and slaves, no doubt, must have been the staplecommodity for which its ports were visited. Different tribes had atdifferent times established themselves here by conquest, and whereversettlements are thus made slavery is the natural consequence. It was apart of the Roman economy; and when the Saxons carved out their kingdomswith the sword, the slaves, and their masters too, if any survived, became the property of the new lords of the land, like the cattle whopastured upon it. It is not likely even that the Saxons should havebrought artificers of any kind with them, smiths perhaps alone excepted. Trades of every description must have been practised by the slaves whomthey found. The same sort of transfer ensued upon the Norman conquest. After that event there could have been no fresh supply of domesticslaves, unless they were imported from Ireland, as well as carriedthither for sale. That trade did not continue long. Emancipation waspromoted by the clergy, and slavery was exchanged for vassalage, which inlike manner gradually disappeared as the condition of the peopleimproved. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --You are hurrying too fast to that conclusion. Hitherto more has been lost than gained in morals by the transition; andyou will not maintain that anything which is morally injurious can bepolitically advantageous. Vassalage I know is a word which bears nofavourable acceptation in this liberal age; and slavery is in worserepute. But we must remember that slavery implies a very different statein different ages of the world, and in different stages of society. 

_Montesinos_. --In many parts of the East, and of the Mohammedan world, asin the patriarchal times, it is scarcely an evil. Among savages it is aslittle so. In a luxurious state more vices are called into action, thecondition of the slave depends more upon the temper of the owner, and theevil then predominates. But slavery is nowhere so bad as in commercialcolonies, where the desire of gain hardens the heart--the basestappetites have free scope there; and the worst passions are under littlerestraint from law, less from religion, and none from public opinion. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --You have omitted in this enumeration that kind ofslavery which existed in England. 

_Montesinos_. --The slavery of the feudal ages may perhaps be classedmidway between the best description of that state and the worst. Isuppose it to have been less humane than it generally is in Turkey, lesssevere than it generally was in Rome and Greece. In too many respectsthe slaves were at the mercy of their lords. They might be put in ironsand punished with stripes; they were sometimes branded; and there isproof that it has been the custom to yoke them in teams like cattle. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --Are you, then, Montesinos, so much the dupe of wordsas to account among their grievances a mere practice of convenience?

_Montesinos_. --The reproof was merited. But I was about to say thatthere is no reason to think their treatment was generally rigorous. Wedo not hear of any such office among them as that of the Roman _Lorarii_, whose office appears by the dramatists to have been no sinecure. And itis certain that they possessed in the laws, in the religion, and probablyin the manners of the country, a greater degree of protection thanexisted to alleviate the lot of the Grecian and Roman slaves. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --The practical difference between the condition of thefeudal slave, and of the labouring husbandman who succeeded to thebusiness of his station, was mainly this, that the former had neither thefeeling nor the insecurity of independence. He served one master as longas he lived; and being at all times sure of the same sufficientsubsistence, if he belonged to the estate like the cattle, and wasaccounted with them as part of the live stock, he resembled them also inthe exemption which he enjoyed from all cares concerning his ownmaintenance and that of his family. The feudal slaves, indeed, weresubject to none of those vicissitudes which brought so many of theproudest and most powerful barons to a disastrous end. They had nothingto lose, and they had liberty to hope for; frequently as the reward oftheir own faithful services, and not seldom from the piety or kindness oftheir lords. This was a steady hope depending so little upon contingencythat it excited no disquietude or restlessness. They were therefore ingeneral satisfied with the lot to which they were born, as theGreenlander is with his climate, the Bedouin with his deserts, and theHottentot and the Calmuck with their filthy and odious customs; and goingon in their regular and unvaried course of duty generation aftergeneration, they were content. 

_Montesinos_. --"Fish, fish, are you in your duty?" said the young lady inthe Arabian tales, who came out of the kitchen wall clad in floweredsatin, and with a rod in her hand. The fish lifted up their heads andreplied, "Yes, yes; if you reckon, we reckon; if you pay your debts wepay ours; if you fly we overcome, and are content. " The fish who werethus content, and in their duty, had been gutted, and were in the frying-pan. I do not seek, however, to escape from the force of your argumentby catching at the words. On the other hand, I am sure it is not yourintention to represent slavery otherwise than as an evil, under anymodification. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --That which is a great evil in itself becomerelatively a good when it prevents or removes a greater evil; forinstance, loss of a limb when life is preserved by the sacrifice, or theacute pain of a remedy by which a chronic disease is cured. Such wasslavery in its origin: a commutation for death, gladly accepted as mercyunder the arm of a conqueror in battle, or as the mitigation of ajudicial sentence. But it led immediately to nefarious abuses; and theearliest records which tell us of its existence show us also that menwere kidnapped for sale. With the principles of Christianity, theprinciples of religious philosophy--the only true policy, to whichmankind must come at last, by which alone all the remediable ills ofhumanity are to be remedied, and for which you are taught to pray whenyou entreat that your Father's kingdom may come--with those principlesslavery is inconsistent, and therefore not to be tolerated, even inspeculation. 

_Montesinos_. --Yet its fitness, as a commutation for other punishments, is admitted by Michaelis (though he decides against it) to be one of themost difficult questions connected with the existing state of society. And in the age of the Revolution, one of the sturdiest Scotch republicansproposed the reestablishment of slavery, as the best or only means forcorrecting the vices and removing the miseries of the poor. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --The proposal of such a remedy must be admitted asfull proof of the malignity of the disease. And in further excuse ofAndrew Fletcher, it should be remembered that he belonged to a countrywhere many of the feudal virtues (as well as most of the feudal vices)were at that time in full vigour. But let us return to our historicalview of the subject. In feudal servitude there was no motive forcruelty, scarcely any for oppression. There were no needy slave-owners, as there are in commercial colonies; and though slaves might sometimessuffer from a wicked, or even a passionate master, there is no reason tobelieve that they were habitually over-tasked, or subjected to systematicill-treatment; for that, indeed, can only arise from avarice, and avariceis not the vice of feudal times. Still, however, slavery is intolerableupon Christian principles; and to the influence of those principles ityielded here in England. It had ceased, so as even to be forgotten in myyouth; and villenage was advancing fast towards its natural extinction. The courts decided that a tenant having a lease could not be a villeinduring its term, for if his labour were at the command of another howcould he undertake to pay rent? Landholders had thus to choose betweenrent and villenage, and scarcely wanted the Field of the Cloth of Gold atArdres to show them which they stood most in need of. And as villenagedisappeared, free labourers of various descriptions multiplied; of whomthe more industrious and fortunate rose in society, and became tradesmenand merchants; the unlucky and the reprobate became vagabonds. 

_Montesinos_. --The latter class appears to have been far more numerous inyour age than in mine. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --Waiving for the present the question whether theyreally were so, they appear to have been so partly in consequence of thedesperate wars between the houses of York and Lancaster, partly becauseof the great change in society which succeeded to that contest. Duringthose wars both parties exerted themselves to bring into the field allthe force they could muster. Villeins in great numbers were thenemancipated, when they were embodied in arms; and great numbersemancipated themselves, flying to London and other cities for protectionfrom the immediate evils of war, or taking advantage of the frequentchanges of property, and the precarious tenure by which it was held, toexchange their own servile condition for a station of freedom with allits hopes and chances. This took place to a great extent, and theprobabilities of success were greatly in their favour; for whatever mayhave been practised in earlier and ruder times, in that age theycertainly were not branded like cattle, according to the usage of yoursugar islands. 

_Montesinos_. --A planter, who notwithstanding this curious specimen ofhis taste and sensibility, was a man of humane studies and humanefeelings, describes the refined and elegant manner in which the operationis performed, by way of mitigating the indignation which such a usageought to excite. He assures us that the stamp is not a branding iron, but a silver instrument; and that it is heated not in the fire, but overthe flame of spirits of wine. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --Excellent planter! worthy to have been flogged at agilt whipping-post with a scourge of gold thread! The practice ofmarking slaves had fallen into disuse; probably it was only used at firstwith captives, or with those who were newly-purchased from a distantcountry, never with those born upon the soil. And there was no means ofraising a hue and cry after a runaway slave so effectually as is done byyour colonial gazettes, the only productions of the British colonialpress. 

_Montesinos_. --Include, I pray you, in the former part of your censurethe journals of the United States, the land of democracy and equalrights. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --How much more honourable was the tendency of ourlaws, and of national feeling in those days, which you perhaps as well asyour trans-Atlantic brethren have been accustomed to think barbarous, when compared with this your own age of reason and liberality! Themaster who killed his slave was as liable to punishment as if he hadkilled a freeman. Instead of impeding enfranchisement, the laws, as wellas the public feeling, encouraged it. If a villein who had fled from hislord remained a year and a day unclaimed upon the King's demesne lands, or in any privileged town, he became free. All doubtful cases weredecided _in favorem libertatis_. Even the established maxim in law, _partus sequitur ventrem_, was set aside in favour of liberty; the childof a neif was free if the father were a freeman, or if it wereillegitimate, in which case it was settled that the free condition of thefather should always be presumed. 

_Montesinos_. --Such a principle must surely have tended to increase theillegitimate population. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --That inference is drawn from the morals of your ownage, and the pernicious effect of your poor laws as they are nowthoroughly understood and deliberately acted upon by a race who arethinking always of their imaginary rights, and never of their duties. Youforget the efficacy of ecclesiastical discipline; and that the old Churchwas more vigilant, and therefore more efficient than that which rose uponits ruins. And you suppose that personal liberty was more valued bypersons in a state of servitude than was actually the case. For if inearlier ages emancipation was an act of piety and benevolence, afterwards, when the great crisis of society came on, it proceeded morefrequently from avarice than from any worthier motive; and the slave whowas set free sometimes found himself much in the situation of a householddog that is turned into the streets. 

_Montesinos_. --Are you alluding to the progress of inclosures, which fromthe accession of the Tudors to the age of the Stuarts were complained ofas the great and crying evil of the times?

_Sir Thomas More_. --That process originated as soon as rents began to beof more importance than personal services, and money more convenient tothe landlords than payments in kind. 

_Montesinos_. --And this I suppose began to be the case under Edward III. The splendour of his court, and the foreign wars in which he was engaged, must have made money more necessary to the knights and nobles than it hadever been before, except during the Crusades. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --The wars of York and Lancaster retarded the process;but immediately after the termination of that fierce struggle it wasaccelerated by the rapid growth of commerce, and by the great influx ofwealth from the new found world. Under a settled and strong and vigilantgovernment men became of less value as vassals and retainers, because theboldest barons no longer dared contemplate the possibility of tryingtheir strength against the crown, or attempting to disturb thesuccession. Four-legged animals therefore were wanted for slaughter morethan two-legged ones; and moreover, sheep could be shorn, whereas the artof fleecing the tenantry was in its infancy, and could not always bepractised with the same certain success. A trading spirit thus graduallysuperseded the rude but kindlier principle of the feudal system: profitand loss became the rule of conduct; in came calculation, and out wentfeeling. 

_Montesinos_. --I remember your description (for indeed who can forgetit?) how sheep, more destructive than the Dragon of Wantley in thosedays, began to devour men and fields and houses. The same process is atthis day going on in the Highlands, though under different circumstances;some which palliate the evil, and some which aggravate the injustice. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --The real nature of the evil was misunderstood by mycontemporaries, and for some generations afterward. A decrease ofpopulation was the effect complained of, whereas the greater grievancewas that a different and worse population was produced. 

_Montesinos_. --I comprehend you. The same effect followed which has beencaused in these days by the extinction of small farms. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --The same in kind, but greater in degree; or at leastif not greater, or so general in extent, it was more directly felt. Whenthat ruinous fashion prevailed in your age there were many resources forthe class of people who were thus thrown out of their natural and properplace in the social system. Your fleets and armies at that time requiredas many hands as could be supplied; and women and children were consumedwith proportionate rapidity by your manufactures. 

Moreover, there was the wholesome drain of emigration open

 "_Facta est immensi copia mundi_. "

But under the Tudors there existed no such means for disposing of theejected population, and except the few who could obtain places asdomestic servants, or employment as labourers and handicraftsmen(classes, it must be remembered, for all which the employ was diminishedby the very ejectment in question), they who were turned adrift soonfound themselves houseless and hopeless, and were reduced to prey uponthat society which had so unwisely as well as inhumanly discarded them. 

_Montesinos_. --Thus it is that men collectively as well as individuallycreate for themselves so large a part of the evils they endure. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --Enforce upon your contemporaries that truth which isas important in politics as in ethics, and you will not have lived invain! Scatter that seed upon the waters, and doubt not of the harvest!Vindicate always the system of nature, in other and sounder words, theways of God, while you point out with all faithfulness

 "what ills Remediable and yet unremedied Afflict man's wretched race, "

and the approbation of your own heart will be sufficient reward on earth. 

_Montesinos_. --The will has not been wanting. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --There are cases in which the will carries with it thepower; and this is of them. No man was ever yet deeply convinced of anymomentous truth without feeling in himself the power as well as thedesire of communicating it. 

_Montesinos_. --True, Sir Thomas; but the perilous abuse of that feelingby enthusiasts and fanatics leads to an error in the opposite extreme. 

We sacrifice too much to prudence; and, in fear of incurring the dangeror the reproach of enthusiasm, too often we stifle the holiest impulsesof the understanding and the heart. 

 "Our doubts are traitors, And make us lose the good we oft might win, By fearing to attempt. "

--But I pray you, resume your discourse. The monasteries were probablythe chief palliatives of this great evil while they existed. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --Their power of palliating it was not great, for theexpenditure of those establishments kept a just pace with their revenues. They accumulated no treasures, and never were any incomes morebeneficially employed. The great abbeys vied with each other inarchitectural magnificence, in this more especially, but likewise inevery branch of liberal expenditure, giving employment to great numbers, which was better than giving unearned food. They provided, as it becamethem, for the old and helpless also. That they prevented the necessityof raising rates for the poor by the copious alms which they distributed, and by indiscriminately feeding the indigent, has been inferred, becausethose rates became necessary immediately after the suppression of thereligious houses. But this is one of those hasty inferences which haveno other foundation than a mere coincidence of time in the supposed causeand effect. 

_Montesinos_. --For which you have furnished a proverbial illustration inyour excellent story of Tenterden Steeple and Goodwin Sands. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --That illustration would have been buried in the dustif it had not been repeated by Hugh Latimer at St. Paul's Cross. It wasthe only thing in my writings by which he profited. If he had learntmore from them he might have died in his bed, with less satisfaction tohimself and less honour from posterity. We went different ways, but wecame to the same end, and met where we had little expectation of meeting. I must do him the justice to say that when he forwarded the work ofdestruction it was with the hope and intention of employing the materialsin a better edifice; and that no man opposed the sacrilegious temper ofthe age more bravely. The monasteries, in the dissolution of which herejoiced as much as he regretted the infamous disposal of their spoils, delayed the growth of pauperism, by the corrodies with which they werecharged; the effect of these reservations on the part of the founders andbenefactors being, that a comfortable and respectable support wasprovided for those who grew old in the service of their respectivefamilies; and there existed no great family, and perhaps no wealthy one, which had not entitled itself thus to dispose of some of its ageddependants. And the extent of the depopulating system was limited whilethose houses endured: because though some of the great abbots were notless rapacious than the lay lords, and more criminal, the heads ingeneral could not be led, like the nobles, into a prodigal expenditure, the burthen of which fell always upon the tenants; and rents in kind wereto them more convenient than in money, their whole economy being foundedupon that system, and adapted to it. 

_Montesinos_. --Both facts and arguments were indeed strongly on your sidewhen you wrote against the supplication of beggars; but the form in whichyou embodied them gave the adversary an advantage, for it was connectedwith one of the greatest abuses and absurdities of the Romish Church. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --Montesinos, I allow you to call it an abuse; but ifyou think any of the abuses of that church were in their origin sounreasonable as to deserve the appellation of absurdities, you must havestudied its history with less consideration and a less equitable spiritthan I have given you credit for. Both Master Fish and I had each ourprejudices and errors. We were both sincere; Master Fish wouldundoubtedly have gone to the stake in defence of his opinions ascheerfully as I laid down my neck upon the block; like his namesake inthe tale which you have quoted, he too when in Nix's frying-pan wouldhave said he was in his duty, and content. But withal he cannot becalled an honest man, unless in that sort of liberal signification bywhich, in these days, good words are so detorted from their original andgenuine meaning as to express precisely the reverse of what was formerlyintended by them. More gross exaggerations and more rascallymis-statements could hardly be made by one of your own thorough-pacedrevolutionists than those upon which the whole argument of hissupplication is built. 

_Montesinos_. --If he had fallen into your hands you would have made astock-fish of him. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --Perhaps so. I had not then I learnt that laying menby the heels is not the best way of curing them of an error in the head. But the King protected him. Henry had too much sagacity not to perceivethe consequences which such a book was likely to produce, and he said, after perusing it, "If a man should pull down an old stone wall, andbegin at the bottom, the upper part thereof might chance to fall upon hishead. " But he saw also that it tended to serve his immediate purpose. 

_Montesinos_. --I marvel that good old John Fox, upright, downright man ashe was, should have inserted in his "Acts and Monuments" a libel likethis, which contains no arguments except such as were adapted toignorance, cupidity, and malice. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --Old John Fox ought to have known that, howeveradvantageous the dissolution of the monastic houses might be to the viewsof the Reformers, it was every way injurious to the labouring classes. Asfar as they were concerned, the transfer of property was always to worsehands. The tenantry were deprived of their best landlords, artificers oftheir best employers, the poor and miserable of their best and surestfriends. There would have been no insurrections in behalf of the oldreligion if the zeal of the peasantry had not been inflamed by a sorefeeling of the injury which they suffered in the change. A greatincrease of the vagabond population was the direct and immediateconsequence. They who were ejected from their tenements or deprived oftheir accustomed employment were turned loose upon society; and thegreater number, of course and of necessity, ran wild. 

_Montesinos_. --Wild, indeed! The old chroniclers give a dreadful pictureof their numbers and of their wickedness, which called forth and deservedthe utmost severity of the law. They lived like savages in the woods andwastes, committing the most atrocious actions, stealing children, andburning, breaking, or otherwise disfiguring their limbs for the purposeof exciting compassion, and obtaining alms by this most flagitious of allimaginable crimes. Surely we have nothing so bad as this. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --The crime of stealing children for such purposes isrendered exceedingly difficult by the ease and rapidity with which a hueand cry can now be raised throughout the land, and the eagerness anddetestation with which the criminal would be pursued; still, however, itis sometimes practised. In other respects the professional beggars ofthe nineteenth century are not a whit better than their predecessors ofthe sixteenth; and your gipsies and travelling potters, who, gipsy-like, pitch their tents upon the common, or by the wayside, retain with as muchfidelity the manners and morals of the old vagabonds as they do the_cant_, or pedlar's French, which this class of people are said to haveinvented in the age whereof we are now speaking. 

_Montesinos_. --But the number of our vagabonds has greatly diminished. Inyour Henry's reign it is affirmed that no fewer than 72, 000 criminalswere hanged; you have yourself described them as strung up by scores upona gibbet all over the country. Even in the golden days of good QueenBess the executions were from three to four hundred annually. A largeallowance must be made for the increased humanity of the nation, and thehumaner temper with which the laws are administered: but the new crimeswhich increased wealth and a system of credit on one hand, and increasedingenuity, and new means of mischief on the part of the depredators haveproduced, must also be taken into the account. And the result will showa diminution in the number of those who prey upon society either by openwar or secret wiles. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --Add your paupers to the list, and you will then haveadded to it not less than an eighth of your whole population. Butlooking at the depredators alone, perhaps it will be found that the evilis at this time more widely extended, more intimately connected with theconstitution of society, like a chronic and organic disease, andtherefore more difficult of cure. Like other vermin they are numerous inproportion as they find shelter; and for this species of noxious beastlarge towns and manufacturing districts afford better cover than theforest or the waste. The fault lies in your institutions, which in thetime of the Saxons were better adapted to maintain security and orderthan they are now. No man in those days could prey upon society unlesshe were at war with it as an outlaw, a proclaimed and open enemy. Rudeas the laws were, the purposes of law had not then been perverted: it hadnot been made a craft; it served to deter men from committing crimes, orto punish them for the commission; never to shield notorious, acknowledged, impudent guilt from condign punishment. And in the fabricof society, imperfect as it was, the outline and rudiments of what itought to be were distinctly marked in some main parts, where they are nowwell-nigh utterly effaced. Every person had his place. There was asystem of superintendence everywhere, civil as well as religious. Theywho were born in villenage were born to an inheritance of labour, but notof inevitable depravity and wretchedness. If one class were regarded insome respects as cattle they were at least taken care of; they weretrained, fed, sheltered and protected; and there was an eye upon themwhen they strayed. None were wild, unless they ran wild wilfully, and indefiance of control. None were beneath the notice of the priest, norplaced out of the possible reach of his instruction and his care. Buthow large a part of your population are like the dogs at Lisbon andConstantinople, unowned, unbroken to any useful purpose, subsisting bychance or by prey, living in filth, mischief, and wretchedness, anuisance to the community while they live, and dying miserably at last!This evil had its beginning in my days; it is now approaching fast to itsconsummation. 

COLLOQUY V. --DECAY OF THE FEUDAL SYSTEM. --EDWARD VI. --ALFRED. 

I had retired to my library as usual after dinner, and while I waswishing for the appearance of my ghostly visitor he became visible. "Behold me to your wish!" said he. "Thank you, " I replied, "for thoseprecious words. "

_Sir Thomas More_. --Wherefore precious?

_Montesinos_. --Because they show that spirits who are in bliss perceiveour thoughts;--that that communion with the departed for which the heartyearns in its moods of intensest feeling is in reality attained when itis desired. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --You deduce a large inference from scanty premises. Asif it were not easy to know without any super-human intuition that youwould wish for the arrival of one whose company you like, at a time whenyou were expecting it. 

_Montesinos_. --And is this all?

_Sir Thomas More_. --All that the words necessarily imply. For the rest, _crede quod habeas et habes_, according to the scurvy tale which makes myfriend Erasmus a horse-stealer, and fathers Latin rhymes upon him. Butlet us take up the thread of our discourse, or, as we used to say in oldtimes, "begin it again and mend it, for it is neither mass nor matins. "

_Montesinos_. --You were saying that the evil of a vagrant and brutalisedpopulation began in your days, and is approaching to its consummation atthis time. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --The decay of the feudal system produced it. Whenarmies were no longer raised upon that system soldiers were disbanded atthe end of a war, as they are now: that is to say, they were turnedadrift to fare as they could--to work if they could find employment;otherwise to beg, starve, live upon the alms of their neighbours, or preyupon a wider community in a manner more congenial to the habits andtemper of their old vocation. In consequence of the gains which were tobe obtained by inclosures and sheep-farming, families were unhoused anddriven loose upon the country. These persons, and they who wereemancipated from villenage, or who had in a more summary manneremancipated themselves, multiplied in poverty and wretchedness. Lastly, owing to the fashion for large households of retainers, great numbers ofmen were trained up in an idle and dissolute way of life, liable at anytime to be cast off when age or accident invalided them, or when themaster of the family died; and then if not ashamed to beg, too lewd towork, and ready for any kind of mischief. Owing to these co-operatingcauses, a huge population of outcasts was produced, numerous enoughseriously to infest society, yet not so large as to threaten itssubversion. 

_Montesinos_. --A derangement of the existing system produced them then;they are a constituent part of the system now. With you they were, asyou have called them, outcasts: with us, to borrow an illustration fromforeign institutions, they have become a caste. But during two centuriesthe evil appears to have decreased. Why was this?

_Sir Thomas More_. --Because it was perceived to be an evil, and couldnever at any time be mistaken for a healthful symptom. And becausecircumstances tended to suspend its progress. The habits of theseunhappy persons being at first wholly predatory, the laws proclaimed asort of crusade against them, and great and inhuman riddance was made bythe executioner. Foreign service opened a drain in the succeedingreigns: many also were drawn off by the spirit of maritime adventure, preferring the high seas to the high way, as a safer course ofplundering. Then came an age of civil war, with its large demand forhuman life. Meanwhile as the old arrangements of society crumbled anddecayed new ones were formed. The ancient fabric was repaired in someparts and modernised in others. And from the time of the Restoration thepeople supposed their institutions to be stable because after long andviolent convulsions they found themselves at rest, and the transitionwhich was then going on was slow, silent, and unperceived. The processof converting slaves and villeins into servants and free peasantry hadended; that of raising a manufacturing populace and converting peasantryinto poor was but begun; and it proceeded slowly for a full hundredyears. 

_Montesinos_. --Those hundred years were the happiest which England hasever known. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --Perhaps so: [Greek text]. 

_Montesinos_. --With the exception of the efforts which were made forrestoring the exiled family of the Stuarts they were years of quietuniform prosperity and advancement. The morals of the country recoveredfrom the contagion which Charles II. Imported from France, and for whichPuritanism had prepared the people. Visitations of pestilence weresuspended. Sectarians enjoyed full toleration, and were contented. TheChurch proved itself worthy of the victory which it had obtained. TheConstitution, after one great but short struggle, was well balanced anddefined; and if the progress of art, science, and literature was notbrilliant, it was steady, and the way for a brighter career was prepared. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --The way was prepared meantime for evil as well as forgood. You were retrograde in sound policy, sound philosophy and soundlearning. Our business at present is wholly with the first. Becauseyour policy, defective as it was at the best, had been retrograde, discoveries in physics, and advances in mechanical science which wouldhave produced nothing but good in Utopia, became as injurious to the wealof the nation as they were instrumental to its wealth. But such had yoursystem imperceptibly become, and such were your statesmen, that thewealth of nations was considered as the sole measure of their prosperity. 

_Montesinos_. --In feudal ages the object of those monarchs who had anydeterminate object in view was either to extend their dominions byconquest from their neighbours, or to increase their authority at home bybreaking the power of a turbulent nobility. In commercial ages the greatand sole object of government, when not engaged in war, was to augmentits revenues, for the purpose of supporting the charges which former warshad induced, or which the apprehension of fresh ones rendered necessary. And thus it has been, that of the two main ends of government, which arethe security of the subjects and the improvement of the nation, thelatter has never been seriously attempted, scarcely indeed taken intoconsideration; and the former imperfectly attained. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --Fail not, however, I entreat you, to bear in mindthat this has not been the fault of your rulers at any time. It has beentheir misfortune--an original sin in the constitution of the societywherein they were born. Circumstances which they did not make and couldnot control have impelled them onward in ways which neither forthemselves nor the nation were ways of pleasantness and peace. 

_Montesinos_. --There is one beautiful exception--Edward VI. 

 "That blessed Prince whose saintly name might move The understanding heart to tears of reverent love. "

He would have struck into the right course. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --You have a Catholic feeling concerning saints, Montesinos, though you look for them in the Protestant calendar. Edwarddeserves to be remembered with that feeling. But had his life beenprolonged to the full age of man it would not have been in his power toremedy the evil which had been done in his father's reign and during hisown minority. To have effected that would have required a strength andobduracy of character incompatible with his meek and innocent nature. Inintellect and attainments he kept pace with his age, a more stirring andintellectual one than any which had gone before it: but in the wisdom ofthe heart he was far beyond that age, or indeed any that has succeededit. It cannot be said of him as of Henry of Windsor, that he was fitterfor a cloister than a throne, but he was fitter for a heavenly crown thana terrestrial one. This country was not worthy of him!--scarcely thisearth!

_Montesinos_. --There is a homely verse common in village churchyards, thetruth of which has been felt by many a heart, as some consolation in itskeenest afflictions:--

 "God calls them first whom He loves best. "

But surely no prince ever more sedulously employed himself to learn hisoffice. His views in some respects were not in accord with the moreenlarged principles of trade, which experience has taught us. But on theother hand he judged rightly what "the medicines were by which the soresof the commonwealth might be healed. " His prescriptions are asapplicable now as they were then, and in most points as needful: theywere "good education, good example, good laws, and the just execution ofthose laws: punishing the vagabond and idle, encouraging the good, ordering well the customers, and engendering friendship in all parts ofthe commonwealth. " In these, and more especially in the first of these, he hoped and purposed to have "shown his device. " But it was notpermitted. Nevertheless, he has his reward. It has been more wittilythan charitably said that Hell is paved with good intentions: they havetheir place in Heaven also. Evil thoughts and desires are justlyaccounted to us for sin; assuredly therefore the sincere goodwill will beaccounted for the deed, when means and opportunity have been wanting tobring it to effect. There are feelings and purposes as well as"thoughts, --whose very sweetness yieldeth proof That they were born for immortality. "

_Sir Thomas More_. --Those great legislative measures whereby thecharacter of a nation is changed and stamped are more practicable in abarbarous age than in one so far advanced as that of the Tudors; under adespotic government, than under a free one; and among an ignorant, ratherthan inquiring people. Obedience is then either yielded to a power whichis too strong to be resisted, or willingly given to the acknowledgedsuperiority of some commanding mind, carrying with it, as in such ages itdoes, an appearance of divinity. Our incomparable Alfred was a prince inmany respects favourably circumstanced for accomplishing a great worklike this, if his victory over the Danes had been so complete as to havesecured the country against any further evils from that tremendous enemy. And had England remained free from the scourge of their invasion underhis successors, it is more than likely that his institutions would atthis day have been the groundwork of your polity. 

_Montesinos_. --If you allude to that part of the Saxon law which requiredthat all the people should be placed under _borh_, I must observe thateven those writers who regard the name of Alfred with the greatestreverence always condemn this part of his system of government. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --It is a question of degree. The just medium betweentoo much superintendence and too little: the mystery whereby the freewill of the subject is preserved, while it is directed by the forepurpose of the State (which is the secret of true polity), is yet to befound out. But this is certain, that whatever be the origin ofgovernment, its duties are patriarchal, that is to say, parental:superintendence is one of those duties, and is capable of being exercisedto any extent by delegation and sub-delegation. 

_Montesinos_. --The Madras system, my excellent friend Dr. Bell wouldexclaim if he were here. That which, as he says, gives in a school tothe master, the hundred eyes of Argus, and the hundred hands of Briareus, might in a state give omnipresence to law, and omnipotence to order. Thisis indeed the fair ideal of a commonwealth. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --And it was this at which Alfred aimed. His meanswere violent, because the age was barbarous. Experience would have shownwherein they required amendment, and as manners improved the laws wouldhave been softened with them. But they disappeared altogether during theyears of internal warfare and turbulence which ensued. The feudal orderwhich was established with the Norman conquest, or at least methodisedafter it, was in this part of its scheme less complete: still it had thesame bearing. When that also went to decay, municipal police did notsupply its place. Church discipline then fell into disuse; clericalinfluence was lost; and the consequence now is, that in a country whereone part of the community enjoys the highest advantages of civilisationwith which any people upon this globe have ever in any age been favoured, there is among the lower classes a mass of ignorance, vice, andwretchedness, which no generous heart can contemplate without grief, andwhich, when the other signs of the times are considered, may reasonablyexcite alarm for the fabric of society that rests upon such a base. Itresembles the tower in your own vision, its beautiful summit elevatedabove all other buildings, the foundations placed upon the sand, andmouldering. 

_Montesinos_. 

 "Rising so high, and built so insecure, Ill may such perishable work endure!"

You will not, I hope, come to that conclusion! You will not, I hope, saywith the evil prophet--

 "The fabric of her power is undermined; The Earthquake underneath it will have way, And all that glorious structure, as the wind Scatters a summer cloud, be swept away!"

_Sir Thomas More_. --Look at the populace of London, and ask yourself whatsecurity there is that the same blind fury which broke out in yourchildhood against the Roman Catholics may not be excited against thegovernment, in one of those opportunities which accident is perpetuallyoffering to the desperate villains whom your laws serve rather to protectthan to punish!

_Montesinos_. --It is an observation of Mercier's, that despotism loveslarge cities. The remark was made with reference to Paris only a littlewhile before the French Revolution! But even if he had looked no fartherthan the history of his own country and of that very metropolis, he mighthave found sufficient proof that insubordination and anarchy like themquite as well. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --London is the heart of your commercial system, but itis also the hot-bed of corruption. It is at once the centre of wealthand the sink of misery; the seat of intellect and empire: and yet awilderness wherein they, who live like wild beasts upon theirfellow-creatures, find prey and cover. Other wild beasts have long sincebeen extirpated: even in the wilds of Scotland, and of barbarous, orworse than barbarous Ireland, the wolf is no longer to be found; a degreeof civilisation this to which no other country has attained. Man, andman alone, is permitted to run wild. You plough your fields and harrowthem; you have your scarifiers to make the ground clean; and if after allthis weeds should spring up, the careful cultivator roots them out byhand. But ignorance and misery and vice are allowed to grow, andblossom, and seed, not on the waste alone, but in the very garden andpleasure-ground of society and civilisation. Old Thomas Tusser's coarseremedy is the only one which legislators have yet thought of applying. 

_Montesinos_. --What remedy is that?

_Sir Thomas More_. --'Twas the husbandman's practice in his days and mine:

 "Where plots full of nettles annoyeth the eye, Sow hempseed among them, and nettles will die. "

_Montesinos_. --The use of hemp indeed has not been spared. But with solittle avail has it been used, or rather to such ill effect, that everypublic execution, instead of deterring villains from guilt, serves onlyto afford them opportunity for it. Perhaps the very risk of the gallowsoperates upon many a man among the inducements to commit the crimewhereto he is tempted; for with your true gamester the excitement seemsto be in proportion to the value of the stake. Yet I hold as little withthe humanity-mongers, who deny the necessity and lawfulness of inflictingcapital punishment in any case, as with the shallow moralists, whoexclaim against vindictive justice, when punishment would cease to bejust, if it were not vindictive. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --And yet the inefficacious punishment of guilt is lessto be deplored and less to be condemned than the total omission of allmeans for preventing it. Many thousands in your metropolis rise everymorning without knowing how they are to subsist during the day, or manyof them where they are to lay their heads at night. All men, even thevicious themselves, know that wickedness leads to misery; but many, evenamong the good and the wise, have yet to learn that misery is almost asoften the cause of wickedness. 

_Montesinos_. --There are many who know this, but believe that it is notin the power of human institutions to prevent this misery. They see theeffect, but regard the causes as inseparable from the condition of humannature. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --As surely as God is good, so surely there is no suchthing as necessary evil. For by the religious mind sickness and pain anddeath are not to be accounted evils. Moral evils are of your own making, and undoubtedly the greater part of them may be prevented; though it isonly in Paraguay (the most imperfect of Utopias) that any attempt atprevention has been carried into effect. Deformities of mind, as ofbody, will sometimes occur. Some voluntary castaways there will alwaysbe, whom no fostering kindness and no parental care can preserve fromself-destruction; but if any are lost for want of care and culture, thereis a sin of omission in the society to which they belong. 

_Montesinos_. --The practicability of forming such a system of preventionmay easily be allowed, where, as in Paraguay, institutions arefore-planned, and not, as everywhere in Europe, the slow and varyinggrowth of circumstances. But to introduce it into an old society, _hiclabor_, _hoc opus est_! The Augean stable might have been kept clean byordinary labour, if from the first the filth had been removed every day;when it had accumulated for years, it became a task for Hercules tocleanse it. Alas, the age of heroes and demigods is over!

_Sir Thomas More_. --There lies your error! As no general will everdefeat an enemy whom he believes to be invincible, so no difficulty canbe overcome by those who fancy themselves unable to overcome it. Statesmen in this point are, like physicians, afraid, lest their ownreputation should suffer, to try new remedies in cases where the oldroutine of practice is known and proved to be ineffectual. Ask yourselfwhether the wretched creatures of whom we are discoursing are notabandoned to their fate without the highest attempt to rescue them fromit? The utmost which your laws profess is, that under theiradministration no human being shall perish for want: this is all! Toeffect this you draw from the wealthy, the industrious, and the frugal, arevenue exceeding tenfold the whole expenses of government under CharlesI. , and yet even with this enormous expenditure upon the poor it is noteffected. I say nothing of those who perish for want of sufficient foodand necessary comforts, the victims of slow suffering and obscuredisease; nor of those who, having crept to some brick-kiln at night, inhope of preserving life by its warmth, are found there dead in themorning. Not a winter passes in which some poor wretch does not actuallydie of cold and hunger in the streets of London! With all your publicand private eleemosynary establishments, with your eight million of poor-rates, with your numerous benevolent associations, and with a spirit ofcharity in individuals which keeps pace with the wealth of the richestnation in the world, these things happen, to the disgrace of the age andcountry, and to the opprobrium of humanity, for want of police and order!You are silent!

_Montesinos_. --Some shocking examples occurred to me. The one of a poorSavoyard boy with his monkey starved to death in St. James's Park. Theother, which is, if that be possible, a still more disgraceful case, isrecorded incidentally in Rees's Cyclopaedia under the word "monster. " Itis only in a huge overgrown city that such cases could possibly occur. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --The extent of a metropolis ought to produce no suchconsequences. Whatever be the size of a bee-hive or an ant-hill, thesame perfect order is observed in it. 

_Montesinos_. --That is because bees and ants act under the guidance ofunerring instinct. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --As if instinct were a superior faculty to reason! Butthe statesman, as well as the sluggard, may be told to "go to the ant andthe bee, consider their ways and be wise!" It is for reason to observeand profit by the examples which instinct affords it. 

_Montesinos_. --A country modelled upon Apiarian laws would be a strangeUtopia! the bowstring would be used there as unmercifully as it is in theseraglio, to say nothing of the summary mode of bringing down thepopulation to the means of subsistence. But this is straying from thesubject. The consequences of defective order are indeed frightful, whether we regard the physical or the moral evils which are produced. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --And not less frightful when the political evils arecontemplated. To the dangers of an oppressive and iniquitous order, such, for example, as exists where negro slavery is established, you arefully awake in England; but to those of defective order among yourselves, though they are precisely of the same nature, you are blind. And yet youhave spirits among you who are labouring day and night to stir up a_bellum servile_, an insurrection like that of Wat Tyler, of theJacquerie, and of the peasants in Germany. There is no provocation forthis, as there was in all those dreadful convulsions of society: butthere are misery and ignorance and desperate wickedness to work upon, which the want of order has produced. Think for a moment what London, nay, what the whole kingdom would be, were your Catilines to succeed inexciting as general an insurrection as that which was raised by onemadman in your own childhood! Imagine the infatuated and infuriatedwretches, whom not Spitalfields, St. Giles's, and Pimlico alone, but allthe lanes and alleys and cellars of the metropolis would pour out--afrightful population, whose multitudes, when gathered together, mightalmost exceed belief! The streets of London would appear to teem withthem, like the land of Egypt with its plague of frogs: and the lavafloods from a volcano would be less destructive than the hordes whom yourgreat cities and manufacturing districts would vomit forth!

_Montesinos_. --Such an insane rebellion would speedily be crushed. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --Perhaps so. But three days were enough for the Fireof London. And be assured this would not pass away without leaving inyour records a memorial as durable and more dreadful. 

_Montesinos_. --Is such an event to be apprehended?

_Sir Thomas More_. --Its possibility at least ought always to be borne inmind. The French Revolution appeared much less possible when theAssembly of Notables was convoked; and the people of France were muchless prepared for the career of horrors into which they were presentlyhurried. 

COLLOQUY XIV. --THE LIBRARY. 

I was in my library, making room upon the shelves for some books whichhad just arrived from New England, removing to a less conspicuous stationothers which were of less value and in worse dress, when Sir Thomasentered. You are employed, said he, to your heart's content. Why, Montesinos, with these books, and the delight you take in their constantsociety, what have you to covet or desire?

_Montesinos_. --Nothing, except more books. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --

 "_Crescit_, _indulgens sibi_, _dirus hydrops_. "

_Montesinos_. --Nay, nay, my ghostly monitor, this at least is no diseaseddesire. If I covet more, it is for the want I feel and the use which Ishould make of them. "Libraries, " says my good old friend George Dyer, aman as learned as he is benevolent, "libraries are the wardrobes ofliterature, whence men, properly informed, might bring forth somethingfor ornament, much for curiosity, and more for use. " These books ofmine, as you well know, are not drawn up here for display, however muchthe pride of the eye may be gratified in beholding them, they are onactual service. Whenever they may be dispersed, there is not one amongthem that will ever be more comfortably lodged, or more highly prized byits possessor; and generations may pass away before some of them willagain find a reader. It is well that we do not moralise too much uponsuch subjects. 

 "For foresight is a melancholy gift, Which bares the bald, and speeds the all-too-swift. "

 H. T. 

But the dispersion of a library, whether in retrospect or inanticipation, is always to me a melancholy thing. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --How many such dispersions must have taken place tohave made it possible that these books should thus be brought togetherhere among the Cumberland mountains. 

_Montesinos_. --Many, indeed; and in many instances most disastrous ones. Not a few of these volumes have been cast up from the wreck of the familyor convent libraries during the late Revolution. Yonder "Acta Sanctorum"belonged to the Capuchins, at Ghent. This book of St. Bridget'sRevelations, in which not only all the initial letters are illuminated, but every capital throughout the volume was coloured, came from theCarmelite Nunnery at Bruges. That copy of Alain Chartier, from theJesuits' College at Louvain; that _Imago Primi Saeculi Societatis_, fromtheir college at Ruremond. Here are books from Colbert's library, hereothers from the Lamoignon one. And here are two volumes of a work, notmore rare than valuable for its contents, divorced, unhappily, and it isto be feared for ever, from the one which should stand between them; theywere printed in a convent at Manila, and brought from thence when thatcity was taken by Sir William Draper; they have given me, perhaps, asmany pleasurable hours (passed in acquiring information which I could nototherwise have obtained), as Sir William spent years of anxiety andvexation in vainly soliciting the reward of his conquest. 

About a score of the more out-of-the-way works in my possession belongedto some unknown person, who seems carefully to have gleaned thebookstalls a little before and after the year 1790. He marked them withcertain ciphers, always at the end of the volume. They are in variouslanguages, and I never found his mark in any book that was not worthbuying, or that I should not have bought without that indication toinduce me. All were in ragged condition, and having been dispersed, uponthe owner's death probably, as of no value, to the stalls they hadreturned; and there I found this portion of them just before my oldhaunts as a book-hunter in the metropolis were disforested, to make roomfor the improvements between Westminster and Oxford Road. I haveendeavoured without success to discover the name of their formerpossessor. He must have been a remarkable man, and the whole of hiscollection, judging of it by that part which has come into my hands, musthave been singularly curious. A book is the more valuable to me when Iknow to whom it has belonged, and through what "scenes and changes" ithas passed. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --You would have its history recorded in the fly-leafas carefully as the pedigree of a racehorse is preserved. 

_Montesinos_. --I confess that I have much of that feeling in which thesuperstition concerning relics has originated, and I am sorry when I seethe name of a former owner obliterated in a book, or the plate of hisarms defaced. Poor memorials though they be, yet they are somethingsaved for a while from oblivion, and I should be almost as unwilling todestroy them as to efface the _Hic jacet_ of a tombstone. There may besometimes a pleasure in recognising them, sometimes a salutary sadness. 

Yonder Chronicle of King D. Manoel, by Damiam de Goes, and yonder"General History of Spain, " by Esteban de Garibay, are signed by theirrespective authors. The minds of these laborious and useful scholars arein their works, but you are brought into a more personal relation withthem when you see the page upon which you know that their eyes haverested, and the very characters which their hands have traced. This copyof Casaubon's Epistles was sent to me from Florence by Walter Landor. Hehad perused it carefully, and to that perusal we are indebted for one ofthe most pleasing of his Conversations; these letters had carried him inspirit to the age of their writer, and shown James I. To him in the lightwherein James was regarded by contemporary scholars, and under theimpression thus produced Landor has written of him in his happiest mood, calmly, philosophically, feelingly, and with no more of favourableleaning than justice will always manifest when justice is in good humourand in charity with all men. The book came from the palace library atMilan, how or when abstracted I know not, but this beautiful dialoguewould never have been written had it remained there in its place upon theshelf, for the worms to finish the work which they had begun. IsaacCasaubon must be in your society, Sir Thomas, for where Erasmus is youwill be, and there also Casaubon will have his place among the wise andthe good. Tell him, I pray you, that due honour has in these days beenrendered to his name by one who as a scholar is qualified to appreciatehis merits, and whose writings will be more durable than monuments ofbrass or marble. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --Is there no message to him from Walter Landor'sfriend?

_Montesinos_. --Say to him, since you encourage me to such boldness, thathis letters could scarcely have been perused with deeper interest by thepersons to whom they were addressed than they have been by one, at thefoot of Skiddaw, who is never more contentedly employed than whenlearning from the living minds of other ages, one who would gladly havethis expression of respect and gratitude conveyed to him, and who truststhat when his course is finished here he shall see him face to face. 

Here is a book with which Lauderdale amused himself, when Cromwell kepthim prisoner in Windsor Castle. He has recorded his state of mind duringthat imprisonment by inscribing in it, with his name, and the dates oftime and place, the Latin word _Durate_, and the Greek [Greek text]. Hereis a memorial of a different kind inscribed in this "Rule of Penance ofSt. Francis, as it in ordered for religious women. " "I beseech my dearemother humbly to accept of this exposition of our holy rule, the betterto conceive what your poor child ought to be, who daly beges yourblessing. Constantia Francisco. " And here in the Apophthegmata, collected by Conrad Lycosthenes, and published after drastic expurgationby the Jesuits as a commonplace book, some Portuguese has entered ahearty vow that he would never part with the book, nor lend it to anyone. Very different was the disposition of my poor old Lisbonacquaintance, the Abbe, who, after the old humaner form, wrote in all hisbooks (and he had a rare collection) _Ex libris Francisci Garnier_, _etamicorum_. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --How peaceably they stand together--Papists andProtestants side by side. 

_Montesinos_. --Their very dust reposes not more quietly in the cemetery. Ancient and modern, Jew and Gentile, Mahommedan and Crusader, French andEnglish, Spaniards and Portuguese, Dutch and Brazilians, fighting theirown battles, silently now, upon the same shelf: Fernam Lopez and Pedro deAyala; John de Laet and Barlaeus, with the historians of Joam FernandesVieira; Foxe's Martyrs and the Three Conversions of Father Parsons;Cranmer and Stephen Gardiner; Dominican and Franciscan; Jesuit andPhilosophe (equally misnamed); Churchmen and Sectarians; Round-heads andCavaliers

 "Here are God's conduits, grave divines; and here Is Nature's secretary, the philosopher: And wily statesmen, which teach how to tie The sinews of a city's mystic body; Here gathering chroniclers; and by them stand Giddy fantastic poets of each land. "--DONNE. 

Here I possess these gathered treasures of time, the harvest of so manygenerations, laid up in my garners: and when I go to the window there isthe lake, and the circle of the mountains, and the illimitable sky. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --

 "_Felicemque voco pariter studiique locique_!"

_Montesinos_. --

 "--_meritoque probas artesque locumque_. "

The simile of the bees, "_Sic vos non vobis mellificatis apes_, "

has often been applied to men who have made literature their profession;and they among them to whom worldly wealth and worldly honours areobjects of ambition, may have reason enough to acknowledge itsapplicability. But it will bear a happier application and with equalfitness: for, for whom is the purest honey hoarded that the bees of thisworld elaborate, if it be not for the man of letters? The exploits ofthe kings and heroes of old, serve now to fill story-books for hisamusement and instruction. It was to delight his leisure and call forthhis admiration that Homer sung and Alexander conquered. It is to gratifyhis curiosity that adventurers have traversed deserts and savagecountries, and navigators have explored the seas from pole to pole. Therevolutions of the planet which he inhabits are but matters for hisspeculation; and the deluges and conflagrations which it has undergone, problems to exercise his philosophy, or fancy. He is the inheritor ofwhatever has been discovered by persevering labour, or created byinventive genius. The wise of all ages have heaped up a treasure forhim, which rust doth not corrupt, and which thieves cannot break throughand steal. I must leave out the moth, for even in this climate care isrequired against its ravages. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --Yet, Montesinos, how often does the worm-eaten volumeoutlast the reputation of the worm-eaten author!

_Montesinos_. --Of the living one also; for many there are of whom it maybe said, in the words of Vida, that--

 "--_ipsi_ _Saepe suis superant monumentis_; _illaudatique_ _Extremum ante diem faetus flevere caducos_, _Viventesque suae viderunt funera famae_. "

Some literary reputations die in the birth; a few are nibbled to death bycritics, but they are weakly ones that perish thus, such only as mustotherwise soon have come to a natural death. Somewhat more numerous arethose which are overfed with praise, and die of the surfeit. Briskreputations, indeed, are like bottled twopenny, or pop "they sparkle, areexhaled, and fly"--not to heaven, but to the Limbo. To live among books, is in this respect like living among the tombs; you have in them speakingremembrancers of mortality. "Behold this also is vanity!"

_Sir Thomas More_. --Has it proved to you "vexation of spirit" also?

_Montesinos_. --Oh, no! for never can any man's life have been passed morein accord with his own inclinations, nor more answerably to his owndesires. Excepting that peace which, through God's infinite mercy, isderived from a higher source, it is to literature, humanly speaking, thatI am beholden, not only for the means of subsistence, but for everyblessing which I enjoy; health of mind and activity of mind, contentment, cheerfulness, continual employment, and therewith continual pleasure. _Sua vissima vita indies_, _sentire se fieri meliorem_; and this as Baconhas said, and Clarendon repeated, is the benefit that a studious manenjoys in retirement. To the studies which I have faithfully pursued Iam indebted for friends with whom, hereafter, it will be deemed an honourto have lived in friendship; and as for the enemies which they haveprocured to me in sufficient numbers, happily I am not of thethin-skinned race: they might as well fire small-shot at a rhinoceros, asdirect their attacks upon me. _In omnibus requiem quaesivi_, said Thomasa Kempis, _sed non inveni nisi in angulis et libellis_. I too have foundrepose where he did, in books and retirement, but it was there alone Isought it: to these my nature, under the direction of a mercifulProvidence, led me betimes, and the world can offer nothing which shouldtempt me from them. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --If wisdom were to be found in the multitude of books, what a progress must this nation have made in it since my head was cutoff! A man in my days might offer to dispute _de omni scibile_, and inaccepting the challenge I, as a young man, was not guilty of anyextraordinary presumption, for all which books could teach was, at thattime, within the compass of a diligent and ardent student. Even then wehad difficulties to contend with which were unknown to the ancients. Thecurse of Babel fell lightly upon them. The Greeks despised other nationstoo much to think of acquiring their languages for the love of knowledge, and the Romans contented themselves with learning only the Greek. Buttongues which, in my lifetime, were hardly formed, have since beenrefined and cultivated, and are become fertile in authors; and others, the very names of which were then unknown in Europe, have been discoveredand mastered by European scholars, and have been found rich inliterature. The circle of knowledge has thus widened in everygeneration; and you cannot now touch the circumference of what mightformerly have been clasped. 

_Montesinos_. --We are fortunate, methinks, who live in an age when booksare accessible and numerous, and yet not so multiplied, as to render acompetent, not to say thorough, acquaintance with any one branch ofliterature, impossible. He has it yet in his power to know much, who canbe contented to remain in ignorance of more, and to say with Scaliger, _non sum ex illis gloriosulis qui nihil ignorant_. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --If one of the most learned men whom the world hasever seen felt it becoming in him to say this two centuries ago, howinfinitely smaller in these days must the share of learning which themost indefatigable student can hope to attain, be in proportion to whathe must wish to learn! The sciences are simplified as they are improved;old rubbish and demolished fabrics serve there to make a foundation fornew scaffolding, and more enduring superstructures; and every discovererin physics bequeaths to those who follow him greater advantages than hepossessed at the commencement of his labours. The reverse of this isfelt in all the higher branches of literature. You have to acquire whatthe learned of the last age acquired, and in addition to it, what theythemselves have added to the stock of learning. Thus the task is greaterin every succeeding generation, and in a very few more it must becomemanifestly impossible. 

_Montesinos_. Pope Ganganelli is said to have expressed a whimsicalopinion that all the books in the world might be reduced to six thousandvolumes in folio--by epitomising, expurgating, and destroying whateverthe chosen and plenipotential committee of literature should in theirwisdom think proper to condemn. It is some consolation to know that noPope, or Nero, or Bonaparte, however great their power, can ever thinksuch a scheme sufficiently within the bounds of possibility for them todream of attempting it; otherwise the will would not be wanting. Theevil which you anticipate is already perceptible in its effects. Wellwould it be if men were as moderate in their desire of wealth, as thosewho enter the ranks of literature, and lay claim to distinction there, are in their desire of knowledge! A slender capital suffices to beginwith, upon the strength of which they claim credit, and obtain it asreadily as their fellow adventurers in trade. If they succeed in settingup a present reputation, their ambition extends no further. The veryvanity which finds its present food produces in them a practical contemptfor any fame beyond what they can live to enjoy; and this sense of itsinsignificance to themselves is what better minds hardly attain, even intheir saddest wisdom, till this world darkens upon them, and they feelthat they are on the confines of eternity. But every age has had itssciolists, and will continue to have them; and in every age literaturehas also had, and will continue to have its sincere and devotedfollowers, few in number, but enough to trim the everlasting lamp. It iswhen sciolists meddle with State affairs that they become the pests of anation; and this evil, for the reason which you have assigned, is morelikely to increase than to be diminished. In your days all extanthistory lay within compassable bounds: it is a fearful thing to considernow what length of time would be required to make studious man asconversant with the history of Europe since those days, as he ought tobe, if he would be properly qualified for holding a place in the councilsof a kingdom. Men who take the course of public life will not, nor canthey be expected to, wait for this. Youth and ardour, and ambition andimpatience, are here in accord with worldly prudence; if they would reachthe goal for which they start, they must begin the career betimes; andsuch among them as may be conscious that their stock of knowledge is lessthan it ought to be for such a profession, would not hesitate on thataccount to take an active part in public affairs, because they have amore comfortable consciousness that they are quite as well informed asthe contemporaries, with whom they shall have to act, or to contend. The_quantulum_ at which Oxenstern admired would be a large allowance now. For any such person to suspect himself of deficiency would, in this ageof pretension, be a hopeful symptom; but should he endeavour to supplyit, he is like a mail-coach traveller, who is to be conveyed overmacadamised roads at the rate of nine miles an hour, including stoppages, and must therefore take at his minuted meals whatever food is readiest. He must get information for immediate use, and with the smallest cost oftime; and therefore it is sought in abstracts and epitomes, which affordmeagre food to the intellect, though they take away the uneasy sense ofinanition. _Tout abrege sur un bon livre est un sot abrege_, saysMontaigne; and of all abridgments there are none by which a reader isliable, and so likely, to be deceived as by epitomised histories. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --Call to mind, I pray you, my foliophagous friend, what was the extent of Michael Montaigne's library; and that if you hadpassed a winter in his chateau you must, with that appetite of yours, have but yourself upon short allowance there. Historical knowledge isnot the first thing needful for a statesman, nor the second. And yet donot hastily conclude that I am about to disparage its importance. Asailor might as well put to sea without chart or compass as a ministerventure to steer the ship of the State without it. For as "the strongand strange varieties" in human nature are repeated in every age, so "thething which hath been, it is that which shall be. Is there anythingwhereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of oldtime which was before us. "

_Montesinos_. --

 "For things forepast are precedents to us, Whereby we may things present now, discuss, "

as the old poet said who brought together a tragical collection ofprecedents in the mirror of magistrates. This is what Lord Brooke calls

 "the second light of government Which stories yield, and no time can disseason:"

"the common standard of man's reason, " he holds to be the first lightwhich the founders of a new state, or the governors of an old one, oughtto follow. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --Rightly, for though the most sagacious author thatever deduced maxims of policy from the experience of former ages has saidthat the misgovernment of States, and the evils consequent thereon, havearisen more from the neglect of that experience--that is, from historicalignorance--than from any other cause, the sum and substance of historicalknowledge for practical purposes consists in certain general principles;and he who understands those principles, and has a due sense of theirimportance, has always, in the darkest circumstances, a star in sight bywhich he may direct his course surely. 

_Montesinos_. --The British ministers who began and conducted the firstwar against revolutionary France, were once reminded, in a memorablespeech, that if they had known, or knowing had borne in mind, threemaxims of Machiavelli, they would not have committed the errors whichcost this country so dearly. They would not have relied upon bringingthe war to a successful end by aid of a party among the French: theywould not have confided in the reports of emigrants; and they would nothave supposed that because the French finances were in confusion, Francewas therefore incapable of carrying on war with vigour and ability; menand not money being the sinews of war, as Machiavelli had taught, and therevolutionary rulers and Buonaparte after them had learnt. Each of theseerrors they committed, though all were marked upon the chart!

_Sir Thomas More_. --Such maxims are like beacons on a dangerous shore, not the less necessary, because the seaman may sometimes be deceived byfalse lights, and sometimes mistaken in his distances; but thepossibility of being so misled will be borne in mind by the cautious. Machiavelli is always sagacious, but the tree of knowledge of which hehad gathered grew not in Paradise; it had a bitter root, and the fruitsavours thereof, even to deadliness. He believed men to be so malignantby nature that they always act malevolently from choice, and never wellexcept by compulsion, a devilish doctrine, to be accounted for ratherthan excused by the circumstances of his age and country. For he livedin a land where intellect was highly cultivated, and morals thoroughlycorrupted, the Papal Church having by its doctrines, its practices, andits example, made one part of the Italians heathenism and superstitious, the other impious, and both wicked. 

The rule of policy as well as of private morals is to be found in theGospel; and a religious sense of duty towards God and man is the firstthing needful in a statesman: herein he has an unerring guide whenknowledge fails him, and experience affords no light. This, with a clearhead and a single heart, will carry him through all difficulties; and thejust confidence which, having these, he will then have in himself, willobtain for him the confidence of the nation. In every nation, indeed, which is conscious of its strength, the minister who takes the highesttone will invariably be the most popular; let him uphold, even haughtily, the character of his country, and the heart and voice of the people willbe with him. But haughtiness implies always something that is hollow:the tone of a wise minister will be firm but calm. He will neithertruckle to his enemies in the vain hope of conciliating them by aspecious candour, which they at the same time flatter and despise; norwill he stand aloof from his friends, lest he should be accused ofregarding them with partiality; and thus while he secures the attachmentof the one he will command the respect of the other. He will not, likethe Lacedemonians, think any measures honourable which accord with hisinclinations, and just if they promote his views; but in all cases hewill do that which is lawful and right, holding this for a certain truth, that in politics the straight path is the sure one! Such a minister willhope for the best, and expect the best; by acting openly, steadily, andbravely, he will act always for the best: and so acting, be the issuewhat it may, he will never dishonour himself or his country, nor fallunder the "sharp judgment" of which they that are in "high places" are indanger. 

_Montesinos_. --I am pleased to hear you include hopefulness among theneedful qualifications. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --It was a Jewish maxim that the spirit of prophecyrests only upon eminent, happy, and cheerful men. 

_Montesinos_. --A wise woman, by which I do not mean in vulgar parlanceone who pretends to prophecy, has a maxim to the same effect: _Toma esteaviso_, she says, _guardate de aquel que no tiene esperanza de bien_!take care of him who hath no hope of good!

_Sir Thomas More_. --"Of whole heart cometh hope, " says old Piers Plowman. And these maxims are warranted by philosophy, divine and human; by humanwisdom, because he who hopes little will attempt little--fear is "abetrayal of the succours which reason offereth, " and in difficult times, _pericula magna non nisi periculis depelli solent_; by religion, becausethe ways of providence are not so changed under the dispensation of Gracefrom what they were under the old law but that he who means well, andacts well, and is not wanting to himself, may rightfully look for ablessing upon the course which he pursues. The upright individual mayrest his heal in peace upon this hope; the upright minister who conductsthe affairs of a nation may trust in it; for as national sins bring afterthem in sure consequence their merited punishment, so national virtue, which is national wisdom, obtains in like manner its temporal and visiblereward. 

Blessings and curses are before you, and which are to be your portiondepends upon the direction of public opinion. The march of intellect isproceeding at quick time; and if its progress be not accompanied by acorresponding improvement in morals and religion, the faster it proceeds, with the more violence will you be hurried down the road to ruin. 

One of the first effects of printing was to make proud men look uponlearning as disgraced by being thus brought within reach of the commonpeople. Till that time learning, such as it was, had been confined tocourts and convents, the low birth of the clergy being overlooked becausethey were privileged by their order. But when laymen in humble life wereenabled to procure books the pride of aristocracy took an absurd course, insomuch that at one time it was deemed derogatory for a nobleman if hecould read or write. Even scholars themselves complained that thereputation of learning, and the respect due to it, and its rewards werelowered when it was thrown open to all men; and it was seriously proposedto prohibit the printing of any book that could be afforded for salebelow the price of three _soldi_. This base and invidious feeling wasperhaps never so directly avowed in other countries as in Italy, the landwhere literature was first restored; and yet in this more liberal islandignorance was for some generations considered to be a mark ofdistinction, by which a man of gentle birth chose, not unfrequently, tomake it apparent that he was no more obliged to live by the toil of hisbrain, than by the sweat of his brow. The same changes in society whichrendered it no longer possible for this class of men to pass their livesin idleness have completely put an end to this barbarous pride. It is asobsolete as the fashion of long finger-nails, which in some parts of theEast are still the distinctive mark of those who labour not with theirhands. All classes are now brought within the reach of your currentliterature, that literature which, like a moral atmosphere, is as it werethe medium of intellectual life, and on the quality of which, accordingas it may be salubrious or noxious, the health of the public minddepends. There is, if not a general desire for knowledge, a generalappearance of such a desire. Authors of all kinds have increased and areincreasing among you. Romancers--

_Montesinos_. --Some of whom attempt things which had hitherto beenunattempted yet in prose or rhyme, because among all the extravagantintellects with which the world has teemed none were ever before soutterly extravagant as to choose for themselves themes of such revoltingmonstrosity. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --Poets--

_Montesinos_. --

 "Tanti Rome non ha preti, o dottori _Bologna_. "

_Sir Thomas More_. --Critics--

_Montesinos_. --More numerous yet; for this is a corps in which many whoare destined for better things engage, till they are ashamed of theservice; and a much greater number who endeavour to distinguishthemselves in higher walks of literature, and fail, take shelter in it;as they cannot attain reputation themselves they endeavour to preventothers from being more successful, and find in the gratification of envysome recompense for disappointed vanity. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --Philosophers--

_Montesinos_. --True and false; the philosophers and the philosophists;some of the former so full, that it would require, as the rabbis say of acertain pedigree in the Book of Chronicles, four hundred camel loads ofcommentaries to expound the difficulties in their text; others so empty, that nothing can approximate so nearly to the notion of an infinitesimalquantity as their meaning. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --With this multiplication of books, which in itsproportionate increase marvellously exceeds that of your growingpopulation, are you a wiser, a more intellectual, or more imaginativepeople than when, as in my days, the man of learning, while he sat at hisdesk, had his whole library within arm's-length?

_Montesinos_. --If we are not wiser, it must be because the means ofknowledge, which are now both abundant and accessible, are eitherneglected or misused. 

The sciences are not here to be considered: in these our progress hasbeen so great, that seeing the moral and religious improvement of thenation has in no degree kept pace with it, you have reasonably questionedwhether we have not advanced in certain branches, farther and faster thanis conducive to, or perhaps consistent with, the general good. But therecan be no question that great advancement has been made in manydepartments of literature conducive to innocent recreation (which wouldbe alone no trifling good, even were it not, as it is, itself conduciveto health both of body and of mind), to sound knowledge, and to moral andpolitical improvement. There are now few portions of the habitable earthwhich have not been explored, and with a zeal and perseverance which hadslept from the first age of maritime discovery till it was revived underGeorge III. In consequence of this revival, and the awakened spirit ofcuriosity and enterprise, every year adds to our ample store of booksrelating to the manners of other nations, and the condition of men instates and stages of society different to our own. And of such books wecannot have too many; the idlest reader may find amusement in them of amore satisfactory kind than he can gather from the novel of the day orthe criticism of the day; and there are few among them so entirelyworthless that the most studious man may not derive from them someinformation for which he ought to be thankful. Some memorable instanceswe have had in this generation of the absurdities and errors, sometimesaffecting seriously the public service and the national character, whichhave arisen from the want of such knowledge as by means of such books isnow generally diffused. Skates and warming-pans will not again be sentout as ventures to Brazil. The Board of Admiralty will never againattempt to ruin an enemy's port by sinking a stone-ship, to the greatamusement of that enemy, in a tide harbour. Nor will a cabinet ministerthink it sufficient excuse for himself and his colleagues, to confessthat they were no better informed than other people, and had everythingto learn concerning the interior of a country into which they had sent anarmy. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --This is but a prospective benefit; and of a humblekind, if it extend no further than to save you from any future exposureof an ignorance which might deserve to be called disgraceful. Weprofited more by our knowledge of other countries in the age when

 "Hops and turkeys, carp and beer, Came into England all in one year. "

_Montesinos_. --And yet in that age you profited slowly by the commoditieswhich the eastern and western parts of the world afforded. Gold, pearls, and spices were your first imports. For the honour of science and ofhumanity, medicinal plants were soon sought for. But two centurieselapsed before tea and potatoes--the most valuable products of the Eastand West--which have contributed far more to the general good than alltheir spices and gems and precious metals--came into common use; nor havethey yet been generally adopted on the Continent, while tobacco found itsway to Europe a hundred years earlier; and its filthy abuse, though herehappily less than in former times, prevails everywhere. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --_Pro pudor_! There is a snuff-box on themantelpiece--and thou revilest tobacco!

_Montesinos_. --Distinguish, I pray you, gentle ghost! I condemn theabuse of tobacco as filthy, implying in those words that it has itsallowable and proper use. To smoke, is, in certain circumstances, awholesome practice; it may be regarded with a moral complacency as thepoor man's luxury, and with liking by any one who follows a lighted pipein the open air. But whatever may be pleaded for its soothing andintellectualising effects, the odour within doors of a defunct pipe issuch an abomination, that I join in anathematising it with James, thebest-natured of kings, and Joshua Sylvester, the most voluble of poets. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --Thou hast written verses praise of snuff!

_Montesinos_. --And if thy nose, sir Spirit, were anything more than theghost of an olfactor, I would offer it a propitiatory pinch, that youmight the more feelingly understand the merit of the said verses, andadmire them accordingly. But I am no more to be deemed a snuff-takerbecause I carry a snuff-box when travelling, and keep one at hand foroccasional use, than I am to be reckoned a casuist or a pupil of theJesuits because the "Moral Philosophy" of Escobar and the "SpiritualExercises" of St. Ignatius Loyola are on my shelves. Thank Heaven, Ibear about with me no habits which I cannot lay aside as easily as myclothes. 

The age is past in which travellers could add much to the improvement, the comfort, or the embellishment of this country by imparting anythingwhich they have newly observed in foreign parts. We have happily more tocommunicate now than to receive. Yet when I tell you that since thecommencement of the present century there have been every year, upon anaverage, more than a hundred and fifty plants which were previouslyunknown here introduced into the nurseries and market-gardens aboutLondon, you will acknowledge that in this branch at least, a constantdesire is shown of enriching ourselves with the produce of other hands. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --Philosophers of old travelled to observe the mannersof men and study their institutions. I know not whether they found morepleasure in the study, or derived more advantages from it, than theadventurers reap who, in these latter times, have crossed the seas andexposed themselves to dangers of every kind, for the purpose of extendingthe catalogue of plants. 

_Montesinos_. --Of all travels, those of the mere botanist are the leastinstructive--

_Sir Thomas More_. --To any but botanists--but for them alone they arewritten. Do not depreciate any pursuit which leads men to contemplatethe works of their Creator! The Linnean traveller who, when you lookover the pages of his journal, seems to you a mere botanist, has in hispursuit, as you have in yours, an object that occupies his time, andfills his mind, and satisfies his heart. It is as innocent as yours, andas disinterested--perhaps more so, because it is not so ambitious. Noris the pleasure which he partakes in investigating the structure of aplant less pure, or less worthy, than what you derive from perusing thenoblest productions of human genius. You look at me as if you thoughtthis reprehension were undeserved!

_Montesinos_. --The eye, then, Sir Thomas, is proditorious, and I will notgainsay its honest testimony: yet would I rather endeavour to profit bythe reprehension than seek to show that it was uncalled for. If I knowmyself I am never prone to undervalue either the advantages oracquirements which I do not possess. That knowledge is said to be of allothers the most difficult; whether it be the most useful the Greeksthemselves differ, for if one of their wise men left the words [Greektext] as his maxim to posterity, a poet, who perhaps may have been notless deserving of the title, has controverted it, and told us that forthe uses of the world it is more advantageous for us to understand thecharacter of others than to know ourselves. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --Here lies the truth; he who best understands himselfis least likely to be deceived in others; you judge of others byyourselves, and therefore measure them by an erroneous standard wheneveryour autometry is false. This is one reason why the empty critic isusually contumelious and flippant, the competent one as generallyequitable and humane. 

_Montesinos_. --This justice I would render to the Linnean school, that itproduced our first devoted travellers; the race to which they succeededemployed themselves chiefly in visiting museums and cataloguing pictures, and now and then copying inscriptions; even in their books notices arefound for which they who follow them may be thankful; and facts aresometimes, as if by accident, preserved, for useful application. Theywent abroad to accomplish or to amuse themselves--to improve their time, or to get rid of it; the botanists travelled for the sake of theirfavourite science, and many of them, in the prime of life, fell victimsto their ardour in the unwholesome climates to which they were led. Latterly we have seen this ardour united with the highest genius, themost comprehensive knowledge, and the rarest qualities of perseverance, prudence, and enduring patience. This generation will not leave behindit two names more entitled to the admiration of after ages thanBurckhardt and Humboldt. The former purchased this pre-eminence at thecost of his life; the latter lives, and long may he live to enjoy it. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --This very important branch of literature can scarcelybe said to have existed in my time; the press was then too much occupiedin preserving such precious remains of antiquity as could be rescued fromdestruction, and in matters which inflamed the minds of men, as indeedthey concerned their dearest and most momentous interests. Moreoverreviving literature took the natural course of imitation, and theancients had left nothing in this kind to be imitated. Nothing thereforeappeared in it, except the first inestimable relations of the discoveriesin the East and West, and these belong rather to the department ofhistory. As travels we had only the chance notices which occurred in theLatin correspondence of learned men when their letters found their way tothe public. 

_Montesinos_. --Precious remains these are, but all too few. The firsttravellers whose journals or memoirs have been preserved wereambassadors; then came the adventurer of whom you speak; and it isremarkable that two centuries afterwards we should find men of the samestamp among the buccaneers, who recorded in like manner with faithfuldilligence whatever they had opportunity of observing in their wild andnefarious course of life. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --You may deduce from thence two conclusions, apparently contrarient, yet both warranted by the fact which you havenoticed. It may be presumed that men who, while engaged in such anoccupation, could thus meritoriously employ their leisure, were rathercompelled by disastrous circumstances to such a course than engaged in itby inclination: that it was their misfortune rather than their fault ifthey were not the benefactors and ornaments of society, instead of beingits outlaws; and that under a wise and parental government such personsnever would be lost. This is a charitable consideration, nor will Iattempt to impugn it; the other may seem less so, but is of morepractical importance. For these examples are proof, if proof wereneeded, that intellectual attainments and habits are no security for goodconduct unless they are supported by religious principles; withoutreligion the highest endowments of intellect can only render thepossessor more dangerous if he be ill disposed, if well disposed onlymore unhappy. 

The conquerors, as they called themselves, were followed by missionaries. 

_Montesinos_. --Our knowledge of the remoter parts of the world, duringthe first part of the seventeenth century, must chiefly be obtained fromtheir recitals. And there is no difficulty in separating what may bebelieved from their fables, because their falsehoods being systematicallydevised and circulated in pursuance of what they regarded as part oftheir professional duty, they told truth when they had no motive fordeceiving the reader. Let any person compare the relations of ourProtestant missionaries with those of the Jesuits, Dominicans, Franciscans, or any other Romish order, and the difference which hecannot fail to perceive between the plain truth of the one and theaudacious and elaborate mendacity of the other may lead him to a justinference concerning the two churches. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --Their fables were designed, by exciting admiration, to call forth money for the support of missions, which, notwithstandingsuch false pretences, were piously undertaken and heroically pursued. They scrupled therefore as little at interlarding their chronicles andannual letters with such miracles, as poets at the use of machinery intheir verses. Think not that I am excusing them; but thus it was thatthey justified their system of imposition to themselves, and this part ofit must not be condemned as if it proceeded from an evil intention. 

_Montesinos_. --Yet, Sir Thomas, the best of those missionaries are notmore to be admired for their exemplary virtue, and pitied for thesuperstition which debased their faith, than others of their respectiveorders are to be abominated for the deliberate wickedness with which, inpursuance of the same system, they imposed the most blasphemous andatrocious legends upon the credulous, and persecuted with fire and swordthose who opposed their deceitful villainy. One reason wherefore so fewtravels were written in the age of which we are speaking is, that noEnglishman, unless he were a Papist, could venture into Italy, or anyother country where the Romish religion was established in full power, without the danger of being seized by the Inquisition!

Other dangers, by sea and by land, from corsairs and banditti, includingtoo the chances of war and of pestilence, were so great in that age, thatit was not unusual for men when they set out upon their travels to putout a sum upon their own lives, which if they died upon the journey wasto be the underwriter's gain, but to be repaid if they returned, withinsuch increase as might cover their intervening expenses. The chancesagainst them seem to have been considered as nearly three to one. Butdanger, within a certain degree, is more likely to provoke adventurersthan to deter them. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --There thou hast uttered a comprehensive truth. Nolegislator has yet so graduated his scale of punishment as to ascertainthat degree which shall neither encourage hope nor excite the audacity ofdesperate guilt. It is certain that there are states of mind in whichthe consciousness that he is about to play for life or death stimulates agamester to the throw. This will apply to most of those crimes which arecommitted for cupidity, and not attended with violence. 

_Montesinos_. --Well then may these hazards have acted as incentives wherethere was the desire of honour, the spirit of generous enterprise, oreven the love of notoriety. By the first of these motives Pietro dellaValle (the most romantic in his adventures of all true travellers) wasled abroad, the latter spring set in motion my comical countryman, TomCoriat, who by the engraver's help has represented himself at one time infull dress, making a leg to a courtesan at Venice, and at anotherdropping from his rags the all-too lively proofs of prolific poverty. 

Perhaps literature has never been so directly benefited by the spirit oftrade as it was in the seventeenth century, when European jewellers foundtheir most liberal customers in the courts of the East. Some of the besttravels which we possess, as well as the best materials for Persian andIndian history, have been left us by persons engaged in that trade. Fromthat time travelling became less dangerous and more frequent in everygeneration, except during the late years when Englishmen were excludedfrom the Continent by the military tyrant whom (with God's blessing on arightful cause) we have beaten from his imperial throne. And now it ismore customary for females in the middle rank of life to visit Italy thanit was for them in your days to move twenty miles from home. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --Is this a salutary or an injurious fashion?

_Montesinos_. --According to the subject, and to the old school maxim_quicquid recipitur_, _recipitur in modum recipientis_. The wise comeback wiser, the well-informed with richer stores of knowledge, the emptyand the vain return as they went, and there are some who bring homeforeign vanities and vices in addition to their own. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --And what has been imported by such travellers for thegood of their country?

_Montesinos_. --Coffee in the seventeenth century, inoculation in thatwhich followed; since which we have had now and then a new dance and anew game at cards, curry and mullagatawny soup from the East Indies, turtle from the West, and that earthly nectar to which the Eastcontributes its arrack, and the West its limes and its rum. In thelanguage of men it is called Punch; I know not what may be its name inthe Olympian speech. But tell not the Englishmen of George the Second'sage, lest they should be troubled for the degeneracy of theirgrandchildren, that the punchbowl is now become a relic of antiquity, andtheir beloved beverage almost as obsolete as metheglin, hippocras, chary, or morat!

_Sir Thomas More_. --It is well for thee that thou art not a young beagleinstead of a grey-headed bookman, or that rambling vein of thine wouldoften bring thee under the lash of the whipper-in! Off thou art and awayin pursuit of the smallest game that rises before thee. 

_Montesinos_. --Good Ghost, there was once a wise Lord Chancellor, who ina dialogue upon weighty matters thought it not unbecoming to amusehimself with discursive merriment concerning St. Appollonia and St. Uncumber. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --Good Flesh and Blood, that was a nipping reply! Andhappy man is his dole who retains in grave years, and even to grey hairs, enough of green youth's redundant spirits for such excursiveness! He whonever relaxes into sportiveness is a wearisome companion, but beware ofhim who jests at everything! Such men disparage by some ludicrousassociation all objects which are presented to their thoughts, andthereby render themselves incapable of any emotion which can eitherelevate or soften them, they bring upon their moral being an influencemore withering than the blast of the desert. A countenance, if it bewrinkled either with smiles or with frowns, is to be shunned; the furrowswhich the latter leave show that the soil is sour, those of the formerare symptomatic of a hollow heart. 

None of your travellers have reached Utopia, and brought from thence afuller account of its institutions?

_Montesinos_. --There was one, methinks, who must have had it in view whenhe walked over the world to discover the source of moral motion. He wasafflicted with a tympany of mind produced by metaphysics, which was atthat time a common complaint, though attended in him with unusualsymptoms, but his heart was healthy and strong, and might in former ageshave enabled him to acquire a distinguished place among the saints of theThebais or the philosophers of Greece. 

But although we have now no travellers employed in seeking undiscoverablecountries, and although Eldorado, the city of the Cesares, and theSabbatical River, are expunged even from the maps of credulity andimagination, Welshmen have gone in search of Madoc's descendants, andscarcely a year passes without adding to the melancholy list of those whohave perished in exploring the interior of Africa. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --Whenever there shall exist a civilised and Christiannegro state Providence will open that country to civilisation andChristianity, meantime to risk strength and enterprise and scienceagainst climate is contending against the course of nature. Have thesetravellers yet obtained for you the secret of the Psylli?

_Montesinos_. --We have learnt from savages the mode of preparing theirdeadliest poisons. The more useful knowledge by which they render thehuman body proof against the most venomous serpents has not been soughtwith equal diligence; there are, however, scattered notices which mayperhaps afford some clue to the discovery. The writings of travellersare not more rich in materials for the poet and the historian than theyare in useful notices, deposited there like seeds which lie deep in theearth till some chance brings them within reach of air, and then theygerminate. These are fields in which something may always be found bythe gleaner, and therefore those general collections in which the worksare curtailed would be to be reprobated, even if epitomisers did not seemto possess a certain instinct of generic doltishness which leads themcuriously to omit whatever ought especially to be preserved. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --If ever there come a time, Montesinos, whenbeneficence shall be as intelligent, and wisdom as active, as the spiritof trade, you will then draw from foreign countries other things besidethose which now pay duties at the custom-house, or are cultivated innurseries for the conservatories of the wealthy. Not that I regard withdissatisfaction these latter importations of luxury, however far they maybe brought, or at whatever cost; for of all mere pleasures those of agarden are the most salutary, and approach nearest to a moral enjoyment. But you will then (should that time come) seek and find in the laws, usages and experience of other nations palliatives for some of thoseevils and diseases which have hitherto been inseparable from society andhuman nature, and remedies, perhaps, for others. 

_Montesinos_. --Happy the travellers who shall be found instrumental tosuch good! One advantage belongs to authors of this description; becausethey contribute to the instruction of the learned, their reputationsuffers no diminution by the course of time: age rather enhances theirvalue. In this respect they resemble historians, to whom, indeed, theirlabours are in a great degree subsidiary. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --They have an advantage over them, my friend, in this, that rarely can they leave evil works behind them, which either from amischievous persuasion, or a malignant purpose, may heap condemnationupon their own souls as long as such works survive them. Even if theyshould manifest pernicious opinions and a wicked will, the venom is in agreat degree sheathed by the vehicle in which it is administered. Andthis is something; for let me tell thee, thou consumer of goose quills, that of all the Devil's laboratories there is none in which more poisonis concocted for mankind than in the inkstand!

_Montesinos_. --"My withers are unwrung!"

_Sir Thomas More_. --Be thankful, therefore, in life, as thou wilt indeath. 

A principle of compensation may be observed in literary pursuits as inother things. Reputations that never flame continue to glimmer forcenturies after those which blaze highest have gone out. And what is ofmore moment, the humblest occupations are morally the safest. Rhadamanthus never puts on his black cap to pronounce sentence upon adictionary-maker or the compiler of a county history. 

_Montesinos_. I am to understand, then, that in the archangel's balancea little book may sink the scale toward the pit; while all the tomes ofThomas Hearne and good old John Nichols will be weighed among their goodworks!

_Sir Thomas More_. --Sport as thou wilt in allusions to allegory andfable; but bear always in thy most serious mind this truth, that men holdunder an awful responsibility the talents with which they are entrusted. Kings have not so serious an account to render as they who exercise anintellectual influence over the minds of men!

_Montesinos_. --If evil works, so long as they continue to produce evil, heap up condemnation upon the authors, it is well for some of thewickedest writers that their works do not survive them. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --Such men, my friend, even by the most perishable oftheir wicked works, lay up sufficient condemnation for themselves. Themaxim that _malitia supplet aetatem_ is rightfully admitted in humanlaws: should there not then, by parity of justice, be cases where, whenthe secrets of the heart are seen, the intention shall be regarded ratherthan the act?

The greatest portion of your literature, at any given time, is ephemeral;indeed, it has ever been so since the discovery of printing; and thisportion it is which is most influential, consequently that by which mostgood or mischief is done. 

_Montesinos_. --Ephemeral it truly may be called; it is now looked for bythe public as regularly as their food; and, like food, it affects therecipient surely and permanently, even when its effect is slow, accordingas it is wholesome or noxious. But how great is the difference betweenthe current literature of this and of any former time!

_Sir Thomas More_. --From that complacent tone it may be presumed that yousee in it proof both of moral and intellectual improvement. Montesinos, I must disturb that comfortable opinion, and call upon you to examine howmuch of this refinement which passes for improvement is superficial. Trueit is that controversy is carried on with more decency than it was byMartin Lutherand a certain Lord Chancellor, to whom you just now alluded;but if more courtesy is to be found in polemical writers, who are lesssincere than either the one or the other, there is as much acerbity offeeling and as much bitterness of heart. You have a class of miscreantswhich had no existence in those days--the panders of the press, who liveby administering to the vilest passions of the people, and encouragingtheir most dangerous errors, practising upon their ignorance, andinculcating whatever is most pernicious in principle and most dangerousto society. This is their golden age; for though such men would in anyage have taken to some villainy or other, never could they have found acourse at once so gainful and so safe. Long impunity has taught them todespise the laws which they defy, and the institutions which they arelabouring to subvert; any further responsibility enters not into theircreed, if that may be called a creed, in which all the articles arenegative. I? we turn from politics to what should be humaner literature, and look at the self-constituted censors of whatever has passed thepress, there also we shall find that they who are the most incompetentassume the most authority, and that the public favour such pretensions;for in quackery of every kind, whether medical, political, critical, orhypocritical, _quo quis impudentior eo doctior habetur_. 

_Montesinos_. --The pleasure which men take in acting maliciously isproperly called by Barrow a _rascally_ delight. But this is no new formof malice. "_Avant nous_, " says the sagacious but iron-heartedMontluc--"_avant nous ces envies ont regne_, _et regneront encore apresnous_, _si Dieu ne nous voulait tous refondre_. " Its worst effect isthat which Ben Jonson remarked: "The gentle reader, " says he, "restshappy to hear the worthiest works misrepresented, the clearest actionsobscured, the innocentest life traduced; and in such a licence of lying, a field so fruitful of slanders, how can there be matter wanting to hislaughter? Hence comes the epidemical infection: for how can they escapethe contagion of the writings whom the virulency of the calumnies hathnot staved off from reading?"

There is another mischief, arising out of ephemeral literature, which wasnoticed by the same great author. "Wheresoever manners and fashions arecorrupted, " says he, "language is. It imitates the public riot. Theexcess of feasts and apparel are the notes of a sick state; and thewantonness of language of a sick mind. " This was the observation of aman well versed in the history of the ancients and in their literature. The evil prevailed in his time to a considerable degree; but it was notpermanent, because it proceeded rather from the affectation of a fewindividuals than from any general cause: the great poets were free fromit; and our prose writers then, and till the end of that century, werepreserved, by their sound studies and logical habits of mind, from any ofthose faults into which men fall who write loosely because they thinkloosely. The pedantry of one class and the colloquial vulgarity ofanother had their day; the faults of each were strongly contrasted, andbetter writers kept the mean between them. More lasting effect wasproduced by translators, who in later times have corrupted our idiom asmuch as, in early ones, they enriched our vocabulary; and to this injurythe Scotch have greatly contributed; for composing in a language which isnot their mother tongue, they necessarily acquired an artificial andformal style, which, not so much through the merit of a few as owing tothe perseverance of others, who for half a century seated themselves onthe bench of criticism, has almost superseded the vernacular English ofAddison and Swift. Our journals, indeed, have been the great corruptersof our style, and continue to be so, and not for this reason only. Menwho write in newspapers, and magazines, and reviews, write for presenteffect; in most cases this is as much their natural and proper aim as itwould be in public speaking; but when it is so they consider, like publicspeakers, not so much what is accurate or just, either in matter ormanner, as what will be acceptable to those whom they address. Writingalso under the excitement of emulation and rivalry, they seek, by all theartifices and efforts of an ambitious style, to dazzle their readers; andthey are wise in their generation, experience having shown that commonminds are taken by glittering faults, both in prose and verse, as larksare with looking-glasses. 

In this school it is that most writers are now trained; and after suchtraining anything like an easy and natural movement is as little to belooked for in their compositions as in the step of a dancing master. Tothe vices of style which are thus generated there must be added theinaccuracies inevitably arising from haste, when a certain quantity ofmatter is to be supplied for a daily or weekly publication which allowsof no delay--the slovenliness that confidence, as well as fatigue andinattention, will produce--and the barbarisms, which are the effect ofignorance, or that smattering of knowledge which serves only to renderignorance presumptuous. These are the causes of corruption in ourcurrent style; and when these are considered there would be ground forapprehending that the best writings of the last century might become asobsolete as yours in the like process of time, if we had not in ourLiturgy and our Bible a standard from which it will not be possiblewholly to depart. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --Will the Liturgy and the Bible keep the language atthat standard in the colonies, where little or no use is made of the one, and not much, it may be feared, of the other?

_Montesinos_. --A sort of hybrid speech, a _Lingua Anglica_, more debased, perhaps, than the _Lingua Franca_ of the Levant, or the Portuguese ofMalabar, is likely enough to grow up among the South Sea Islands; likethe mixture of Spanish with some of the native languages in SouthAmerica, or the mingle-mangle which the negroes have made with French andEnglish, and probably with other European tongues in the colonies oftheir respective states. The spirit of mercantile adventure may producein this part of the new world a process analogous to what took placethroughout Europe on the breaking up of the Western Empire; and in thenext millennium these derivatives may become so many cultivated tongues, having each its literature. These will be like varieties in a flower-garden, which the florist raises from seed; but in the colonies, as inour orchards, the graft takes with it, and will preserve, the truecharacteristics of the stock. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --But the same causes of deterioration will be at workthere also. 

_Montesinos_. --Not nearly in the same degree, nor to an equal extent. Nowand then a word with the American impress comes over to us which has notbeen struck in the mint of analogy. But the Americans are more likely tobe infected by the corruption of our written language than we are to haveit debased by any importations of this kind from them. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --There is a more important consideration belonging tothis subject. The cause which you have noticed as the principal one ofthis corruption must have a farther and more mischievous effect. For itis not in the vices of an ambitious style that these ephemeral writers, who live upon the breath of popular applause, will rest. Great andlasting reputations, both in ancient and modern times, have been raisednotwithstanding that defect, when the ambition from which it proceededwas of a worthy kind, and was sustained by great powers and adequateacquirements. But this ambition, which looks beyond the morrow, has noplace in the writers of a day. Present effect is their end and aim; andtoo many of them, especially the ablest, who have wanted only moral worthto make them capable of better things, are persons who can "desire noother mercy from after ages than silence and oblivion. " Even with thebetter part of the public that author will always obtain the mostfavourable reception, who keeps most upon a level with them inintellectuals, and puts them to the least trouble of thinking. He whoaddresses himself with the whole endeavours of a powerful mind to theunderstanding faculty may find fit readers; but they will be few. He wholabours for posterity in the fields of research, must look to posterityfor his reward. Nay, even they whose business is with the feelings andthe fancy, catch most fish when they angle in shallow waters. Is it notso, Piscator?

_Montesinos_. --In such honest anglers, Sir Thomas, I should look for asmany virtues, as good old happy Izaak Walton found in his brethren of therod and line. Nor will you, I think, disparage them; for you were of theRhymers' Company, and at a time when things appear to us in their truecolours and proportion (if ever while we are yet in the body), youremembered your verses with more satisfaction than your controversialwritings, even though you had no misgivings concerning the part which youhad chosen. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --My verses, friend, had none of the _athanasia_ intheir composition. Though they have not yet perished, they cannot besaid to have a living existence; even you, I suspect, have sought forthem rather because of our personal acquaintance than for any othermotive. Had I been only a poet, those poems, such as they were, wouldhave preserved my name; but being remembered for other grounds, betterand worse, the name which I have left has been one cause why they havepassed into oblivion, sooner than their perishable nature would havecarried them thither. If in the latter part of my mortal existence I hadmisgivings concerning any of my writings, they were of the single one, which is still a living work, and which will continue so to be. I fearedthat speculative opinions, which had been intended for the possible butremote benefit of mankind, might, by unhappy circumstances, be renderedinstrumental to great and immediate evil; an apprehension, however, whichwas altogether free from self-reproach. 

But my verses will continue to exist in their mummy state, long after theworms shall have consumed many of those poetical reputations which are atthis time in the cherry-cheeked bloom of health and youth. Old poetswill always retain their value for antiquaries and philologists, modernones are far too numerous ever to acquire an accidental usefulness ofthis kind, even if the language were to undergo greater changes than anycircumstances are likely to produce. There will now be more poets inevery generation than in that which preceded it; they will increasefaster than your population; and as their number increases, so must theproportion of those who will be remembered necessarily diminish. Tellthe Fitz-Muses this! It is a consideration, Sir Poet, which may serve asa refrigerant for their ardour. Those of the tribe who may flourishhereafter (as the flourishing phrase is) in any particular age, will belittle more remembered in the next than the Lord Mayors and Sheriffs whowere their contemporaries. 

_Montesinos_. --Father in verse, if you had not put off flesh and blood solong, you would not imagine that this consideration will diminish theirnumber. I am sure it would not have affected me forty years ago, had Iseen this truth then as clearly as I perceive and feel it now. Though itwere manifest to all men that not one poet in an age, in a century, amillennium, could establish his claim to be for ever known, everyaspirant would persuade himself that he is the happy person for whom theinheritance of fame is reserved. And when the dream of immortality isdispersed, motives enough remain for reasonable ambition. 

It is related of some good man (I forget who), that upon his death-bed herecommended his son to employ himself in cultivating a garden, and incomposing verses, thinking these to be at once the happiest and the mostharmless of all pursuits. Poetry may be, and too often has been, wickedly perverted to evil purposes; what indeed is there that may not, when religion itself is not safe from such abuses! but the good which itdoes inestimably exceeds the evil. It is no trifling good to providemeans of innocent and intellectual enjoyment for so many thousands in astate like ours; an enjoyment, heightened, as in every instance it iswithin some little circle, by personal considerations, raising it to adegree which may deserve to be called happiness. It is no trifling goodto win the ear of children with verses which foster in them the seeds ofhumanity and tenderness and piety, awaken their fancy, and exercisepleasurably and wholesomely their imaginative and meditative powers. Itis no trifling benefit to provide a ready mirror for the young, in whichthey may see their own best feelings reflected, and wherein "whatsoeverthings are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things arepure, whatsoever things are lovely, " are presented to them in the mostattractive form. It is no trifling benefit to send abroad strains whichmay assist in preparing the heart for its trials, and in supporting itunder them. But there is a greater good than this, a farther benefit. Although it is in verse that the most consummate skill in composition isto be looked for, and all the artifice of language displayed, yet it isin verse only that we throw off the yoke of the world, and are as it wereprivileged to utter our deepest and holiest feelings. Poetry in thisrespect may be called the salt of the earth; we express in it, andreceive in it, sentiments for which, were it not for this permittedmedium, the usages of the world would neither allow utterance noracceptance. And who can tell in our heart-chilling and heart-hardeningsociety, how much more selfish, how much more debased, how much worse weshould have been, in all moral and intellectual respects, had it not beenfor the unnoticed and unsuspected influence of this preservative? Evenmuch of that poetry, which is in its composition worthless, or absolutelybad, contributes to this good. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --Such poetry, then, according to your view, is to beregarded with indulgence. 

_Montesinos_. --Thank Heaven, Sir Thomas, I am no farther critical thanevery author must necessarily be who makes a careful study of his ownart. To understand the principles of criticism is one thing; to be whatis called critical, is another; the first is like being versed injurisprudence, the other like being litigious. Even those poets whocontribute to the mere amusement of their readers, while that amusementis harmless, are to be regarded with complacency, if not respect. Theyare the butterflies of literature, who during the short season of theirsummer, enliven the garden and the field. It were pity to touch themeven with a tender hand, lest we should brush the down from their wings. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --These are they of whom I spake as angling in shallowwaters. You will not regard with the same complacency those who troublethe stream; still less those who poison it. 

_Montesinos_. --

 "_Vesanum tetigisse timent_, _fugiuntque poetam_ _Qui sapiunt_; _agitant pueri_, _incautique sequuntur_. "

_Sir Thomas More_. --This brings us again to the point at which youbolted. The desire of producing present effect, the craving forimmediate reputation, have led to another vice, analogous to andconnected with that of the vicious style, which the same causes areproducing, but of worse consequences. The corruption extends from themanner to the matter; and they who brew for the press, like some of thosewho brew for the publicans, care not, if the potion has but its desiredstrength, how deleterious may be the ingredients which they use. Horrorsat which the innocent heart quails, and the healthy stomachs heaves inloathing, are among the least hurtful of their stimulants. 

_Montesinos_. --This too, Sir Thomas, is no new evil. An appetite forhorrors is one of the diseased cravings of the human mind; and in oldtimes the tragedies which most abounded in them, were for that reason themost popular. The dramatists of our best age, great Ben and greaterShakespeare excepted, were guilty of a farther sin, with which thewriters whom you censure are also to be reproached; they excited theirauditors by the representation of monstrous crimes--crimes out of thecourse of nature. Such fables might lawfully be brought upon the Grecianstage, because the belief of the people divested them of their odious anddangerous character; there they were well known stories, regarded with areligious persuasion of their truth; and the personages, beingrepresented as under the overruling influence of dreadful destiny, wereregarded therefore with solemn commiseration, not as voluntary and guiltyagents. There is nothing of this to palliate or excuse the production ofsuch stories in later times; the choice, and, in a still greater degree, the invention of any such, implies in the author, not merely a want ofjudgment, but a defect in moral feeling. Here, however, the dramatistsof that age stopped. They desired to excite in their audience thepleasure of horror, and this was an abuse of the poet's art: but theynever aimed at disturbing their moral perceptions, at presentingwickedness in an attractive form, exciting sympathy with guilt, andadmiration for villainy, thereby confounding the distinctions betweenright and wrong. This has been done in our days; and it has accorded sowell with the tendency of other things, that the moral drift of a book isno longer regarded, and the severest censure which can be passed upon itis to say that it is in bad taste; such is the phrase--and the phrase isnot confined to books alone. Anything may be written, said, or done, inbad feeling and with a wicked intent; and the public are so tolerant ofthese, that he who should express a displeasure on that score would becensured for bad taste himself!

_Sir Thomas More_. --And yet you talked of the improvement of the age, andof the current literature as exceeding in worth that of any former time

_Montesinos_. --The portion of it which shall reach to future times willjustify me; for we have living minds who have done their duty to theirown age and to posterity. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --Has the age in return done its duty to them?

_Montesinos_. --They complain not of the age, but they complain of ananomalous injustice in the laws. They complain that authors are deprivedof a perpetual property in the produce of their own labours, when allother persons enjoy it as an indefeasible and acknowledged right. Andthey ask upon what principle, with what equity, or under what pretence ofpublic good they are subjected to this injurious enactment? Is itbecause their labour is so light, the endowments which are required forit so common, the attainments so cheaply and easily acquired, and thepresent remuneration in all cases so adequate, so ample, and so certain?

The act whereby authors are deprived of that property in their own workswhich, upon every principle of reason, natural justice, and common law, they ought to enjoy, is so curiously injurious in its operation, that itbears with most hardship upon the best works. For books of greatimmediate popularity have their run and come to a dead stop: the hardshipis upon those which win their way slowly and difficultly, but keep thefield at last. And it will not appear surprising that this shouldgenerally have been the case with books of the highest merit, if weconsider what obstacles to the success of a work may be opposed by thecircumstances and obscurity of the author, when he presents himself as acandidate for fame, by the humour or the fashion of the times; the tasteof the public, more likely to be erroneous than right at any time; andthe incompetence, or personal malevolence of some unprincipled critic, who may take upon himself to guide the public opinion, and who if hefeels in his own heart that the fame of the man whom he hates isinvulnerable, lays in wait for that reason the more vigilantly to woundhim in his fortunes. In such cases, when the copyright as by theexisting law departs from the author's family at his death, or at the endof twenty-eight years from the first publication of every work, (if hedies before the expiration of that term, ) his representatives aredeprived of their property just as it would begin to prove a valuableinheritance. 

The last descendants of Milton died in poverty. The descendants ofShakespeare are living in poverty, and in the lowest condition of life. Is this just to these individuals? Is it grateful to the memory of thosewho are the pride and boast of their country? Is it honourable, orbecoming to us as a nation, holding--the better part of us assuredly, andthe majority affecting to hold--the names of Shakespeare and Milton inveneration?

To have placed the descendants of Shakespeare and Milton inrespectability and comfort--in that sphere of life where, with a fullprovision for our natural wants and social enjoyments, free scope isgiven to the growth of our intellectual and immortal part, simple justicewas all that was required, only that they should have possessed theperpetual copyright of their ancestors' works, only that they should nothave been deprived of their proper inheritance. 

The decision which time pronounces upon the reputation of authors, andupon the permanent rank which they are to hold in the estimation ofposterity, is unerring and final. Restore to them that perpetuity in theproperty of their works, of which the law has deprived them, and thereward of literary labour will ultimately be in just proportion to itsdeserts. 

However slight may be the hope of obtaining any speedy redress, there issome satisfaction in earnestly protesting against this injustice. Andbelieving as I do, that if society continues to improve, no injusticewill long be permitted to continue after it has been fairly exposed, andis clearly apprehended, I cannot but believe that a time must come whenthe rights of literature will be acknowledged and its wrongs redressed;and that those authors hereafter who shall deserve well of posterity, will have no cause to reproach themselves for having sacrificed theinterests of their children when they disregarded the pursuit of fortunefor themselves. 

COLLOQUY XV. --THE CONCLUSION. 

_Montesinos_. --Here Sir Thomas is the opinion which I have attempted tomaintain concerning the progress and tendency of society, placed in aproper position, and inexpugnably entrenched here according to the rulesof art, by the ablest of all moral engineers. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --Who may this political Achilles be whom you havecalled in to your assistance?

_Montesinos_. --Whom Fortune rather has sent to my aid, for my reading hasnever been in such authors. I have endeavoured always to drink from thespring-head, but never ventured out to fish in deep waters. Thor, himself, when he had hooked the Great Serpent, was unable to draw him upfrom the abyss. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --The waters in which you have now been angling havebeen shallow enough, if the pamphlet in your hand is, as it appears tobe, a magazine. 

_Montesinos_. --"_Ego sum is_, " said Scaliger, "_qui ab omnibus discerevolo_; _neque tam malum librum esse puto_, _ex quo non aliquem fructumcolligere possum_. " I think myself repaid, in a monkish legend, forexamining a mass of inane fiction, if I discover a single passage whichelucidates the real history or manners of its age. In old poets of thethird and fourth order we are contented with a little ore, and a greatdeal of dross. And so in publications of this kind, prejudicial as theyare to taste and public feeling, and the public before deeply injuriousto the real interests of literature, something may sometimes be found tocompensate for the trash and tinsel and insolent flippancy, which are nowbecome the staple commodities of such journals. This number containsKant's idea of a Universal History on a Cosmo-Political plan; and thatKant is as profound a philosopher as his disciples have proclaimed him tobe, this little treatise would fully convince me, if I had not alreadybelieved it, in reliance upon one of the very few men who are capable offorming a judgment upon such a writer. 

The sum of his argument is this: that as deaths, births, and marriages, and the oscillations of the weather, irregular as they seem to be inthemselves, are nevertheless reduceable upon the great scale to certainrules; so there may be discovered in the course of human history a steadyand continuous, though slow development of certain great predispositionsin human nature, and that although men neither act under the law ofinstinct, like brute animals, nor under the law of a preconcerted plan, like rational cosmopolites, the great current of human actions flows in aregular stream of tendency toward this development; individuals andnations, while pursuing their own peculiar and often contradictorypurposes, following the guidance of a great natural purpose, and thuspromoting a process which, even if they perceived it, they would littleregard. What that process is he states in the following series ofpropositions:--

1st. All tendencies of any creature, to which it is predisposed bynature, are destined in the end to develop themselves perfectly andagreeably to their final purpose. 

2nd. In man, as the sole rational creature upon earth, those tendencieswhich have the use of his reason for their object are destined to obtaintheir perfect development in the species only, and not in the individual. 

3rd. It is the will of nature that man should owe to himself aloneeverything which transcends the mere mechanic constitution of his animalexistence, and that he should be susceptible of no other happiness orperfection than what he has created for himself, instinct apart, throughhis own reason. 

4th. The means which nature employs to bring about the development ofall the tendencies she has laid in man, is the antagonism of thosetendencies in the social state, no farther, however, than to that pointat which this antagonism becomes the cause of social arrangements foundedin law. 

5th. The highest problem for the human species, to the solution of whichit is irresistibly urged by natural impulses, is the establishment of auniversal civil society, founded on the empire of political justice. 

6th. This problem is, at the same time, the most difficult of all, andthe one which is latest solved by man. 

7th. The problem of the establishment of a perfect constitution ofsociety depends upon the problem of a system of international relations, adjusted to law, and apart from this latter problem cannot be solved. 

8th. The history of the human race, as a whole, may be regarded as theunravelling of a hidden plan of nature for accomplishing a perfect stateof civil constitution for society in its internal relations (and as thecondition of that, by the last proposition, in its external relationsalso), as the sole state of society in which the tendencies of humannature can be all and fully developed. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --This is indeed a master of the sentences, upon whosetext it may be profitable to dwell. Let us look to his propositions. From the first this conclusion must follow, that as nature has given menall his faculties for use, any system of society in which the moral andintellectual powers of any portion of the people are left undeveloped forwant of cultivation, or receive a perverse direction, is plainly opposedto the system of nature, in other words, to the will of God. Is thereany government upon earth that will bear this test?

_Montesinos_. --I should rather ask of you, will there ever be one?

_Sir Thomas More_. --Not till there be a system of government conducted instrict conformity to the precepts of the Gospel. 

_Montesinos_. 

 "Offer these truths to Power, will she obey? It prunes her pomp, perchance ploughs up the root. "

 LORD BROOKE. 

Yet, in conformity to those principles alone, it is that subjects canfind their perfect welfare, and States their full security. Christianitymay be long in obtaining the victory over the powers of this world, butwhen that consummation shall have taken place the converse of his secondproposition will hold good, for the species having obtained its perfectdevelopment, the condition of society must then be such that individualswill obtain it also as a necessary consequence. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --Here you and your philosopher part company. For heasserts that man is left to deduce from his own unassisted reasoneverything which relates not to his mere material nature. 

_Montesinos_. --There, indeed, I must diverge from him, and what in hislanguage is called the hidden plan of nature, in mine will be therevealed will of God. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --The will is revealed; but the plan is hidden. Letman dutifully obey that will, and the perfection of society and of humannature will be the result of such obedience; but upon obedience theydepend. Blessings and curses are set before you--for nations as forindividuals--yea, for the human race. 

Flatter not yourself with delusive expectations! The end may beaccording to your hope--whether it will be so (which God grant!) is asinscrutable for angels as for men. But to descry that great strugglesare yet to come is within reach of human foresight--that greattribulations must needs accompany them--and that these may be--you knownot how near at hand!

Throughout what is called the Christian world there will be a contestbetween Impiety and Religion; the former everywhere is gatheringstrength, and wherever it breaks loose the foundations of human societywill be shaken. Do not suppose that you are safe from this dangerbecause you are blest with a pure creed, a reformed ritual, and atolerant Church! Even here the standard of impiety has been set up; andthe drummers who beat the march of intellect through your streets, lanes, and market-places, are enlisted under it. 

The struggle between Popery and Protestanism is renewed. And let no mandeceive himself by a vain reliance upon the increased knowledge, orimproved humanity of the times! Wickedness is ever the same; and younever were in so much danger from moral weakness. 

Co-existent with these struggles is that between the feudal system ofsociety as variously modified throughout Europe, and the levellingprinciple of democracy. That principle is actively and indefatigably atwork in these kingdoms, allying itself as occasion may serve with Poperyor with Dissent, with atheism or with fanaticism, with profligacy or withhypocrisy, ready confederates, each having its own sinister views, butall acting to one straightforward end. Your rulers meantime seem to betrying that experiment with the British Constitution which Mithridates issaid to have tried upon his own; they suffer poison to be administered indaily doses, as if they expected that by such a course the public mindwould at length be rendered poison-proof!

The first of these struggles will affect all Christendom; the third mayonce again shake the monarchies of Europe. The second will be feltwidely; but nowhere with more violence than in Ireland, that unhappycountry, wherein your government, after the most impolitic measures intowhich weakness was ever deluded, or pusillanimity intimidated, seems tohave abdicated its functions, contenting itself with the semblance of anauthority which it has wanted either wisdom or courage to exert. 

There is a fourth danger, the growth of your manufacturing system; andthis is peculiarly your own. You have a great and increasing population, exposed at all times by the fluctuations of trade to suffer the severestprivations in the midst of a rich and luxurious society, under little orno restraint from religious principle, and if not absolutely disaffectedto the institutions of the country, certainly not attached to them: aclass of men aware of their numbers and of their strength; experienced inall the details of combination; improvident when they are in the receiptof good wages, yet feeling themselves injured when those wages, duringsome failure of demand, are so lowered as no longer to afford the meansof comfortable subsistence; and directing against the government and thelaws of the country their resentment and indignation for the evils whichhave been brought upon them by competition and the spirit of rivalry intrade. They have among them intelligent heads and daring minds; and youhave already seen how perilously they may be wrought upon by seditiousjournalists and seditious orators in a time of distress. 

On what do you rely for security against these dangers? On publicopinion? You might as well calculate upon the constancy of wind andweather in this uncertain climate. On the progress of knowledge? it issuch knowledge as serves only to facilitate the course of delusion. Onthe laws? the law which should be like a sword in a strong hand, is weakas a bulrush if it be feebly administered in time of danger. On thepeople? they are divided. On the Parliament? every faction will be fullyand formidably represented there. On the government? it suffers itselfto be insulted and defied at home, and abroad it has shown itselfincapable of maintaining the relations of peace and amity with itsallies, so far has it been divested of power by the usurpation of thepress. It is at peace with Spain, and it is at peace with Turkey; andalthough no government was ever more desirous of acting with good faith, its subjects are openly assisting the Greeks with men and money againstthe one, and the Spanish Americans against the other. Athens, in themost turbulent times of its democracy, was not more effectuallydomineered over by its demagogues than you are by the press--a presswhich is not only without restraint, but without responsibility; and inthe management of which those men will always have most power who haveleast probity, and have most completely divested themselves of all senseof honour and all regard for truth. 

The root of all your evils is in the sinfulness of the nation. Theprinciple of duty is weakened among you; that of moral obligation isloosened; that of religious obedience is destroyed. Look at theworldliness of all classes--the greediness of the rich, the misery of thepoor, and the appalling depravity which is spreading among the lowerclasses through town and country; a depravity which proceeds uncheckedbecause of the total want of discipline, and for which there is no othercorrective than what may be supplied by fanaticism, which is itself anevil. 

If there be nothing exaggerated in this representation, you mustacknowledge that though the human race, considered upon the great scale, should be proceeding toward the perfectibility for which it may bedesigned, the present aspects in these kingdoms are nevertheless ratherfor evil than for good. Sum you up now upon the hopeful side. 

_Montesinos_. --First, then. I rest in a humble but firm reliance uponthat Providence which sometimes in its mercy educes from the errors ofmen a happier issue than could ever have been attained by theirwisdom;--that Providence which has delivered this nation from so many andsuch imminent dangers heretofore. 

Looking, then, to human causes, there is hope to be derived from thehumanising effects of Literature, which has now first begun to act uponall ranks. Good principles are indeed used as the stalking-horse undercover of which pernicious designs may be advanced; but the better seedsare thus disseminated and fructify after the ill design has failed. 

The cruelties of the old criminal law have been abrogated. Debtors areno longer indiscriminately punished by indefinite imprisonment. Theiniquity of the slave trade has been acknowledged, and put an end to, sofar as the power of this country extends; and although slavery is stilltolerated, and must be so for awhile, measures have been taken foralleviating it while it continues, and preparing the way for its gradualand safe removal. These are good works of the government. And when Ilook upon the conduct of that government in all its foreign relations, though there may be some things to disapprove, and some sins of omissionto regret, it has been, on the whole, so disinterested, so magnanimous, so just, that this reflection gives me a reasonable and a religiousground of hope. And the reliance is strengthened when I call to mindthat missionaries from Great Britain are at this hour employed inspreading the glad tidings of the Gospel far and wide among heathennations. 

Descending from these wider views to the details of society, there, too, I perceive ground, if not for confidence, at least for hope. There is ageneral desire throughout the higher ranks for bettering the condition ofthe poor, a subject to which the government also has directed its patientattention: minute inquiries have been made into their existing state, andthe increase of pauperism and of crimes. In no other country have thewounds of the commonwealth been so carefully probed. By means ofcolonisation, of an improved parochial order and of a more efficientpolice, the further increase of these evils may be prevented; while, byeducation, by providing means of religious instruction for all by savingsbanks, and perhaps by the establishment of Owenite communities amongthemselves, the labouring classes will have their comforts enlarged, andtheir well-being secured, if they are not wanting to themselves inprudence and good conduct. A beginning has been made--an impulse given:it may be hoped--almost, I will say, it may be expected--that in a fewgenerations this whole class will be placed within the reach of moral andintellectual gratifications, whereby they may be rendered healthier, happier, better in all respects, an improvement which will be not morebeneficial to them as individuals, than to the whole body of thecommonweal. 

The diffusion of literature, though it has rendered the acquirement ofgeneral knowledge impossible, and tends inevitably to diminish the numberof sound scholars, while it increases the multitude of sciolists, carrieswith it a beneficial influence to the lower classes. Our booksellersalready perceive that it is their interest to provide cheap publicationsfor a wide public, instead of looking to the rich alone as theircustomers. There is reason to expect that, in proportion as this isdone--in proportion as the common people are supplied with wholesomeentertainment (and wholesome it is, if it be only harmless) they will beless liable to be acted upon by fanaticism and sedition. 

You have not exaggerated the influence of the newspaper press, nor theprofligacy of some of those persons, by whom this unrestrained andirresponsible power is exercised. Nevertheless it has done, and isdoing, great and essential good. The greatest evils in society proceedfrom the abuse of power; and this, though abundantly manifested in thenewspapers themselves, they prevent in other quarters. No man engaged inpublic life could venture now upon such transactions as no one, in theirstation half a century ago, would have been ashamed of. There is an endof that scandalous jobbing which at that time existed in every departmentof the State, and in every branch of the public service; and a check isimposed upon any scandalous and unfit promotion, civil or ecclesiastical. By whatever persons the government may be administered, they are now wellaware that they must do nothing which will not bear daylight and strictinvestigation. The magistrates also are closely observed by this self-constituted censorship; and the inferior officers cannot escape exposurefor any perversion of justice, or undue exercise of authority. Publicnuisances are abated by the same means, and public grievances which theLegislature might else overlook, are forced upon its attention. Thus, inordinary times, the utility of this branch of the press is so great thatone of the worst evils to be apprehended from the abuse of its power atall times, and the wicked purposes to which it is directed in dangerousones, is the ultimate loss of a liberty, which is essential to the publicgood, but which when it passes into licentiousness, and effects theoverthrow of a State, perishes in the ruin it has brought on. 

In the fine arts, as well as in literature, a levelling principle isgoing on, fatal, perhaps, to excellence, but favourable to mediocrity. Such facilities are afforded to imitative talent, that whatever isimitable will be imitated. Genius will often be suppressed by this, andwhen it exerts itself, will find it far more difficult to obtain noticethan in former times. There is the evil here that ingenious persons areseduced into a profession which is already crowded with unfortunateadventurers; but, on the other hand, there is a great increase ofindividual and domestic enjoyment. Accomplishments which were almostexclusively professional in the last age, are now to be found in everyfamily within a certain rank of life. Wherever there is a dispositionfor the art of design, it is cultivated, and in consequence of thegeneral proficiency in this most useful of the fine arts, travellersrepresent to our view the manners and scenery of the countries which theyvisit, as well by the pencil as the pen. By means of two fortunatediscoveries in the art of engraving, these graphic representations arebrought within the reach of whole classes who were formerly precluded bythe expense of such things from these sources of gratification andinstruction. Artists and engravers of great name are now, like authorsand booksellers, induced to employ themselves for this lower and widersphere of purchasers. In all this I see the cause as well as the effectof a progressive refinement, which must be beneficial in many ways. Thisvery diffusion of cheap books and cheap prints may, in its naturalconsequences, operate rather to diminish than to increase the number ofadventurers in literature and in the arts. For though at first it willcreate employment for greater numbers, yet in another generationimitative talent will become so common, that neither parents norpossessors will mistake it for an indication of extraordinary genius, andmany will thus be saved from a ruinous delusion. More pictures will bepainted but fewer exhibited, more poetry written but less published, andin both arts talents which might else have been carried to an overstockedand unprofitable market, will be cultivated for their own sakes, and forthe gratification of private circles, becoming thus a source of sureenjoyment and indirectly of moral good. Scientific pursuits will, inlike manner, be extended, and pursuits which partake of science, andafford pleasures within the reach of humble life. 

Here, then, is good in progress which will hold on its course, and thegrowth of which will only be suspended, not destroyed, during any ofthose political convulsions which may too probably be apprehended--tooprobably, I say, because when you call upon me to consider the sinfulnessof this nation, my heart fails. There can be no health, no soundness inthe state, till government shall regard the moral improvement of thepeople as its first great duty. The same remedy is required for the richand for the poor. Religion ought to be so blended with the whole courseof instruction, that its doctrines and precepts should indeed "drop asthe rain, and distil as the dew, as the small rain upon the tender herb, and as the showers upon the grass"--the young plants would then imbibeit, and the heart and intellect assimilate it with their growth. We are, in a great degree, what our institutions make us. Gracious God werethose institutions adapted to Thy will and word--were we but broken infrom childhood to Thy easy yoke--were we but carefully instructed tobelieve and obey--in that obedience and belief we should surely find ourtemporal welfare and our eternal happiness!

Here, indeed, I tremble at the prospect! Could I look beyond the cloudsand the darkness which close upon it, I should then think that there maycome a time when that scheme for a perpetual peace among the states ofChristendom which Henri IV. Formed, and which has been so ably digestedby the Abbe St. Pierre, will no longer be regarded as the speculation ofa visionary. The Holy Alliance, imperfect and unstable as it is, is initself a recognition of the principle. At this day it would bepracticable, if one part of Europe were as well prepared for it as theother; but this cannot be, till good shall have triumphed over evil inthe struggles which are brooding, or shall have obtained such apredominance as to allay the conflict of opinions before it breaks intoopen war. 

God in his mercy grant that it be so! If I looked to secondary causesalone, my fears would preponderate. But I conclude as I began, in firmreliance upon Him who is the beginning and the end. Our sins aremanifold, our danger is great, but His mercy is infinite. 

_Sir Thomas More_. --Rest there in full faith. I leave you to yourdreams; draw from them what comfort you can. And now, my friend, farewell!

The look which he fixed on me, as he disappeared, was compassionate andthoughtful; it impressed me with a sad feeling, as if I were not to seehim again till we should meet in the world of spirits.