Amenities of Literature Part 61

_Har._--"I say Aristotle says so; I have not said so much. And under what prince was it? Was it not under Alexander, the greatest prince in the world? Did Alexander hang up Aristotle, did he molest him?" And he proceeds with Livy, who wrote under Caesar, and the commonwealth-man, Machiavel, under the Medici, unmolested.

"I wrote under an usurper, Oliver. He having started up into the throne, his officers kept a murmuring for a commonwealth. He told them that he knew not what they meant, but let any one show him that there was any such thing as a commonwealth, they should see that he sought not himself; the Lord knew he only sought to make good the cause. Upon this some sober men thought that if any in England could show what a commonwealth was, it was myself. I wrote, and after I had written, Oliver never answered his officers as he had done before; therefore I wrote not against the king's government; and if the law could have punished me, Oliver had done it; therefore my writing was not obnoxious to the law. After Oliver, the parliament said they were a commonwealth; I said they were not; and proved it, insomuch that the parliament accounted me a cavalier, and one that had no other design in my writing than to bring in the king; and now the king, first of any man, makes me a Roundhead!"

Certainly no theoretical politician has ever more lucidly set before us the cruel dilemmas of speculative science.

The story of HARRINGTON now becomes calamitous. In vain his sisters pet.i.tioned that the prisoner, for his justification, should be brought to trial,--no one dared to present the pet.i.tion to parliament. He was suddenly carried off to St. Nicholas Island, near Plymouth, and by favour afterwards was lodged in Plymouth Castle, where the governor treated the state-prisoner with the kindness he had long wanted. His health gradually gave way; his mind fell into disorder; his high spirit and his heated brain could not brook this tormenting durance; his intellect was at times clouded by some singular delusions; and his family imagined that it was intended that he should never more write "Oceanas." The physician of the castle had prescribed constant doses of guaiac.u.m taken in coffee. At length, other physicians were despatched by his family; they found an emaciated patient deprived of sleep, and under their hands testified that the copious use of this deleterious beverage, with such drying drugs, was sufficient to occasion hypochondriasm, and even frenzy, in any one who had not even a predisposition. The surly physician of the state-prison insisted that Harrington counterfeited madness.

His delusions never left him, yet otherwise his faculties remained unaltered. He had strange fancies about the operations of the animal spirits, good and evil, and often alarmed his friends by his vivacious descriptions of these invisible agencies. "Nature," he said, "which works under a veil, is the heart of G.o.d." But how are we to account, in a mind otherwise sane, for his notion that his thoughts transpired from him, and took the shapes of flies or bees? Aubrey has given a gossiper's account of this ludicrous hypochondriasm. Harrington had a summer-house revolving on a pivot, which he turned at will to face the sun; there sat the great author of "Oceana," whisking a fox's brush to disperse this annoyance of his transpired thoughts in the flies or bees, which, whenever they issued from crevices, he would appeal to those present, whether it was not evident to them that they had emerged from his brain? An eminent physician had flattered himself that he would be able to out-reason this delusion, by that force of argument and positive demonstration to which his ill.u.s.trious patient only would attend; but the physician discovered that no argument could avail with the most invincible disputant in Europe. The sanity of the man only strengthened his insanity. Besides, our philosopher believed that he had discovered a new system of physiology, in what he called "The Mechanics of Nature."

Harrington declared that his fate was that of Democritus, who, having made a great discovery in anatomy, was deemed mad by his a.s.sociates, till Hippocrates appeared, and attested the glorious truth, confounding the laughers for ever! He now resolved to prove against his doctors, that his notions were not, as they alleged, hypochondriacal whims, or fanciful delusions. Among his ma.n.u.scripts was found this promised treatise, thus opening--"Having been for nine months, some say, in a disease, I in a cure, I have been the wonder of physicians, and they mine!" It is much to be regretted that the first part of this singular design has only reached us, wherein he has laid down his axioms, many of which are indisputable, coherent, and philosophical, however chimerical might have been their application to his particular notions. The narrative of his own disorder, which was to form the second part, would have been a great psychological curiosity, for the philosopher was there to have told us, how "he had felt and saw Nature; that is, how she came first into his senses, and by the senses into the understanding," and "to speak to men that have had the same sensations as himself." The logical deliriums of Harrington, it is not impossible, might have thrown a beam of light on "The Human Nature" of Hobbes, and "The Understanding"

of Locke.

It is for the medical character to develop the mysteries of this condition of man; but this moral phenomenon of the partial delusions of the n.o.blest intellect remains an enigma they have not yet solved.

Harrington never recovered his physical energy, while his "Understanding" betrayed no symptoms of any decay in the exercise of his vigorous faculties.

There is one dark cloud which dusks the l.u.s.tre of the name of HARRINGTON. Opening the volume of his works, we are startled by an elaborate treatise on "The Grounds and Reasons of Monarchy." It is not merely one of the most eloquent invectives against monarchical inst.i.tutions, but it overflows with the most withering defamations, such as were prevalent at that distempered season, when the popular writers acc.u.mulated horrors on the memories of their late sovereigns, to metamorphose their monarchs into monsters. In this terrible state-libel, all kings are anathematised: James the First was the murderer of his son; Charles the First was a parricide. Of that "resolute tyrant Charles," we have an allusion to "his actions of the day; his actions of the night;"--from which we must infer that they were equally criminal.

The reader, already acquainted with the intimate intercourse of our author with Charles the First, and with all his permanent emotions, which probably induced his mental disorder, must start at the disparity of the writing with the writer. A thorough-paced partisan has here acted on the base principle of reviling the individual, whom he privately acknowledged to be wholly of an opposite character. It would be a solecism in human nature, had Harrington sent forth an historical calumny, which only to have read must have inflicted a deep pang in his heart. He was a philosopher, who neither flattered nor vilified the prince nor the people; their common calamities he ascribes to inevitable causes, which had been long working those changes independent of either.

In the reigns of James and Charles, according to his favourite principle, "The English Balance," in favour of "popularity," was "running like a bowl down hill." He does justice to the sagacity of the indolent James, who, he tells us, "not seldom prophesied sad things to his successors;" and of Charles the First, on succeeding to his father, Harrington has expressed himself with the utmost political wisdom and felicity of ill.u.s.tration. "There remained nothing to the destruction of a monarchy, retaining but the name, more than a prince who, by contending, should make the people to feel those advantages which they could not see. And this happened to the next king (Charles), who, too secure in that undoubted right whereby he was advanced to the throne which had no foundation, dared to put this to an unseasonable trial, on whom, therefore, fell the tower in Silo. Nor may we think they on whom this tower fell were sinners above all men; but that we, unless we repent and look better to the true foundations, must likewise perish."[4] All that our philosopher had to deliver to the world on the many contested points of that unhappy reign, was the ill.u.s.tration of his principle, and not the infamy of vulgar calumny. With the philosophic Harrington, Charles the First was but "a doomed man;" not more a sinner, because the tower of Silo had fallen upon his head, than those who stood without. This was true philosophy, the other was faction.

The treatise on "The Grounds and Reasons of Monarchy," prominently placed at the opening of the works of Harrington, and inseparably combined with his opinions by the reference in the general index--this treatise which has settled like a gangrene on the fair character of the author of "Oceana," which has called down on his devoted head the execrations of honourable men,[5] and which has misled many generations of readers, is the composition of a salaried party writer, in no way connected with our author. Toland, the first editor of Harrington's works, introduced into the volume this anonymous invective, which has thus come down to us sanctioned by the philosopher's name. There was no plea of any connexion between the two authors, and much less between their writings. The editor of the edition of 1771 has silently introduced the name of the real author in the table of contents, but without prefixing it to the tract, or without any further indication to inform the reader.

Whether zeal for "the cause" led Toland to this editorial delinquency, or whether he fell into this inadvertence from deficient ac.u.men, it remains a literary calamity not easily paralleled, for a great author is condemned for what he never could have written.

FOOTNOTES:

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

[2] The masterpiece of legislation of Abbe Sieyes, who, during the French Revolution, had always a new const.i.tution in his pocket, was founded on this principle of "checks and balances in the state,"

evidently adopted from Harrington. In Scott's "Life of Napoleon,"

vol. iv., the Abbe Sieyes' system is described.

[3] I think that Harrington presciently detected the latent causes of a great revolution in France. The curiosity of the pa.s.sage may compensate for its length--

"Where there is tumbling and tossing upon the bed of sickness, it must end in death or recovery. Though the people of the world, in the dregs of the Gothic empire, be yet tumbling and tossing upon the bed of sickness, they cannot die; nor is there any means of recovery for them but by ancient prudence; whence, of necessity, it must come to pa.s.s that this drug be better known. If _France_, _Italy_, and _Spain_ were not all sick--all corrupted together, there would be none of them so; for the sick would not be able to withstand the sound, nor the sound to preserve their health without curing of the sick. _The first of these nations, which, if you stay her leisure, will, in my mind, be France_, that recovers the health of ancient prudence, shall certainly _govern the world_."--_Oceana_, p. 168; edition 1771.

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

[5] See the solemn denunciations of the "Biographia Britannica," p.

2536, which are repeated by later biographers; see Chalmers.

THE AUTHOR OF "THE GROUNDS AND REASONS OF MONARCHY."

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

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

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

During this life of political activity, Hall, in 1650, was commanded by the council of state to repair to Scotland, to attend on Cromwell, for the purpose of settling affairs in favour of the commonwealth, and to wean the Scots from their lingering affection for the surviving Stuart.

It was then that Hall, in his vocation, sent forth the thunder of a party-pamphlet, "The Grounds and Reasons of Monarchy." This extraordinary tract consists of two parts: the first, more elaborately composed, is an argumentative exposition of anti-monarchical doctrines; in the second, to bring the business home to their bosoms, he offers a demonstration of his principles, in a review of the whole Scottish history, sarcastically reminding them of their kings "crowned with happy reigns, and quiet deaths (two successively scarce dying naturally)." It is a ma.s.s of invectives and calumnies in the disguise of grave history; and this historical libel, concocted for a particular time and a particular place, was eagerly received at Edinburgh, and immediately republished in London, where it was sure of as warm a reception.[3]

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

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

A true prodigy of genius was this JOHN HALL; for not only he could warm into admiration our literary antiquary, but the greater philosopher Hobbes, not p.r.o.ne to flattery, has left a memorial of this impa.s.sioned and precocious being. "Had not his debauches and intemperance diverted him from the more severe studies, he had made an extraordinary person; for no man had ever done so great things at his age."

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Three or four of these Essays have been reprinted in "The Rest.i.tuta," vol. iii. The original book is very rare.

[2] See Ellis' "Specimens."

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

[4] A piece of great learning, ent.i.tled 'The Height of Eloquence,'

written in Greek, by Dionysius Longinus, rendered into English from the original, by John Hall, Esq., London, 1652, 8vo.--_Bruggeman's English Transactions._

COMMONWEALTH.

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

The term _Commonweal_, or _wealth_, indeed appears in our statutes, in the speeches of our monarchs, and in the political works of our writers, long before the idea of a _republic_, in its popular sense, was promulgated by the votaries of democracy. The term _Commonweal_ explains itself; it specifies no particular polity but the public weal; and even the term _republic_ originally meant nothing more than _res publicae_, or "the affairs of the public." Sir THOMAS SMITH, the learned secretary to Elizabeth, who has written on the English const.i.tution, ent.i.tles his work "The Commonwealth of England." James the First justly called himself "the great servant of the Commonwealth." The Commonwealth, meaning the kingdom of England, is the style of all the learned in law.

The ambiguity of the term _Commonwealth_ soon caused it to be perverted by the advocates of popular government, who do not distinguish the State from the people; this appears as early as the days of Rawleigh, who tells us, that "the government of all the common and baser sort is by an _usurped nick-name_ called a COMMONWEALTH."[1]

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

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

The Restoration made the term _Commonwealth-man_ odious as marking out a cla.s.s of citizens in hostility to the government; and _Commonwealth_ seems, in any sense, to have long continued such an offensive word that it required the nicest delicacy to handle it. The use of the term has even drawn an apology from LOCKE himself when writing on "government."

"By Commonwealth," says our philosophical politician, "I must be understood all along to mean, _not a democracy_, but any independent community, which the Latins signified by the word _civitas_, to which the word which best answers in our language is _Commonwealth_." However, Locke does not close his sentence without some trepidation for the use of an unequivocal term, obnoxious even under the new monarchy of the revolution. "To avoid ambiguity, I crave leave to use the word _Commonwealth_ in that sense in which I find it _used by King James the First_, and I take it to be its genuine signification--which _if anybody dislike, I consent with him to change it for a better_!" An ample apology! but one which hardly suits the dignity of the philosophical writer.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] Rawleigh's "Remains."