The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey Volume Ii Part 6

Such light lay in open front, but palpable ebony blackness, Sealed every far-off street in deep and awful abysses, Out of which rose like phantoms, rose and sank as a sea-bird Rises and sinks on the waves of a dim, tumultuous ocean, Faces dabbled in blood, phantasmagory direful and scenic.

But where is Belshazzar the Lord? Has he fled? Has he found an asylum?

Or still does he pace in his palace, blind-seeming or moonstruck?

Still does he tread proudly the palace, fancy-deluded, Prophets of falsehood trusting, or false Babylonian idols, Defying the odious truth from the summit of empire!

Lo! at his palace gates the fierce Apollyon's great army, With maces uplifted, stand to make way for great Cyrus of Elam.

Watching for signal from him whose truncheon this way or that bids: 'Strike!' said Cyrus the King. 'Strike!' said the princes of Elam; And the brazen gates at the word, like flax that is broken asunder By fire from earth or from heaven, snapped as a bulrush, Snapped as a reed, as a wand, as the tiny toy of an infant.

Marvellous the sight that followed! Oh, most august revelation!

Mile-long were the halls that appeared, and open s.p.a.ces enormous; Areas fit to hold armies on the day of muster for battle; Hosts upon either side, for amplest castrametation.

Depth behind depth, and dim labyrinthine apartments.

Golden galleries above running high into darkening vistas, Staircases soaring and climbing, till sight grew dizzy with effort Of chasing the corridors up to their whispering gloomy recesses.

Nations were ranged in the halls, nations ranged at a banquet, Even then lightly proceeding with timbrel, dulcimer, hautboy, Gong and loud kettledrum and fierce-blown tempestuous organ.

Banners floated in air, colossal embroidery tissues Of Tyrian looms, scarlet, black, violet and amber, Or the perfectest cunning of trained Babylonian artist, Or ma.s.sy embossed, from the volant shuttle of Phrygian.

Banners suspended in shade, or in the full glare of the lamplight, Mid cressets and chandeliers by jewelly chains swinging pendant.

Draw a veil o'er the rout when advances great Cyrus of Elam, Dusky-browed archers behind him, and spearmen before, When he cries 'Strike!' and the gorgeously inlaid pavements Run ruddy with blood of the festive a.s.syrians there.

VII.--_Greece and Rome._--My female readers, whom only I contemplate in every line of this little work, and who would have a right to consider it disrespectful if I were to leave a single word of Latin or Greek unexplained, must understand that the Greeks, according to that universal habit of viewing remote objects in a relation of ascent or descent with respect to the observer, whence the 'going up to Jerusalem,' and our own 'going up to London,' always figured a journey eastwards, that is, directed towards the Euphrates or Tigris, or to any part of Asia from Greece as tending _upwards_. In this mode of conceiving their relations to the East, they were governed semi-consciously by the sense of a vast presence beyond the Tigris--glorified by grandeur and by distance--the golden city of Susa, and the throne of the great king. Accordingly, the expedition therefore of Cyrus the younger against his brother Artaxerxes was called by Xenophon, when recording it, the Anabasis, or going up of Cyrus; and, from the accident of its celebrity, this t.i.tle has adhered to that expedition; and to that book--as if either could claim it by some exclusive t.i.tle; whereas, on the contrary, the Katabasis, or going down, furnishes by much the larger and the more interesting part of the work.

And, in any case, the t.i.tle is open to all Asiatic expeditions whatsoever; to the Trojan that just crossed the water, to the Macedonian that went beyond the Indus. The word Anabasis must have its accent on the syllable _ab_, not on the penultimate syllable _as_.

In coming to the history of Imperial Rome, one is fortunately made sensible at once of a vast advantage, which is this--that one is not throwing away one's labour. Sad it is, after ploughing a stiff and difficult clay, to find all at once that the whole is a task of so little promise that perhaps, on the whole, one might as well have left it untouched.

X. Yes, I remember that my cousin, Cecilia Dinbury, took the pains to master--or perhaps one ought to say to _mistress_--the history.

L. No, to _miss_ it, is what one ought to say.

X. Fie, my dear second cousin--Fie, fie, if you please. To _miss_ it, indeed! Ah, how we wished that we _had_ missed it. But we had no such luck. There were we broiling through a hot, hot August, broiling away at this intolerable stew of Iskis and Fuskis, and all to no end or use.

Granted that too often it is, or it may be so. But here we are safe. Who can fancy or feel so much as the shadow of a demur, when peregrinating Rome, that we might be losing our toil?

Now, then, in the highest spirits, let us open our studies. And first let us map out a chart of the _personnel_ for pretty nearly a century.

Twelve Caesars--the twelve first--should clearly of themselves make more than a century. For I am sure all of you, except our two new friends, know so much of arithmetic as that multiplication and division are a great menace upon addition and subtraction. It is, therefore, a thing most desirable to set up compound modes--short devices for abridging these. Now 10 is the earliest number written with two digits: and the higher the multiplier, so much harder, apparently, the process. Yet here at least a great simplification offers. To multiply by 10, all you have to do is to put a cipher after the multiplicand. Twenty-seven soldiers are to have 10 guineas each, how much is required to pay all twenty-seven? Why, 27 into 10 is 27 with a cipher at the end--27:0, _i.e._, 270. _Ergo_, twelve Caesars, supposing each to reign ten years, would make, no, _should_ make, with anything like great lives--12:0, _i.e._, 120 years. And when you consider that one of the twelve, viz., Augustus, singly, for _his_ share, contributed fifty and odd years, if the other eleven had given ten each that would be 11:0; this would make a total of about 170.

VIII.--_Beginning of Modern Era._--From the period of Justinian commences a new era--an era of unusual transition. This is the broad principle of change. Old things are decaying, new things are forming and gathering. The lines of decay and of resurrection are moving visibly and palpably to every eye in counteracting agency for one result--life and a new truth for humanity. All the great armies of generous barbarians, showing, by contrast with Rome and Greece, the opulence of teeming nature as against the powers of form in utter superannuation, were now, therefore, no longer moving, roaming, seeking--they had taken up their ground; they were in a general process of castrametation, marking out their alignments and deploying into open order upon ground now permanently taken up for their settlement. The early trumpets, the morning _reveille_ of the great Christian nations--England, France, Spain, Lombardy--were sounding to quarters. Franks had knit into one the rudiments of a great kingdom upon the soil of France; the Saxons and Angles, with some Vandals, had, through a whole century, been defiling by vast trains into the great island which they were called by Providence to occupy and to enn.o.ble; the Vandals had seated themselves, though in this case only with no definite hopes, along the extreme region of the Barbary States. Vandals might and did survive for a considerable period in ineffective fragments, but not as a power. The Visigoths had quartered themselves on Spain, there soon to begin a conflict for the Cross, and to maintain it for eight hundred years, and finally to prevail. And lastly, the Lombards had thrown a network of colonization over Italy, which, as much by the cohesions which it shook loose and broke asunder as by the new one which it bred, exhibited a power like that of the coral insects, and gave promise of a new empire built out of floating dust and fragments.

The movements which formerly had resembled those gigantic pillars of sand that mould themselves continually under the action of sun and wind in the great deserts--suddenly showing themselves upon the remote horizon, rear themselves silently and swiftly, then stalking forward towards the affected caravan like a phantom phantasmagoria, approach, manoeuvre, overshadow, and then as suddenly recede, collapse, fluctuate, again to remould into other combinations and to alarm other travellers--have pa.s.sed. This vast structure of Central Europe had been abandoned by all the greater tribes; they had crossed the vast barriers of Western Europe--the Alps, the Vosges, the Pyrenees, the ocean--these were now the wards within which they had committed their hopes and the graves of their fathers. Social developments tended to the same, and no longer either wis.h.i.+ng or finding it possible to roam, they were all now, through an entire century, taking up their ground and making good their tumultuous irruptions; with the power of moving had been conjoined a propensity to move. Rustic life, which must essentially have been maintained on the great area of German vagrancy, was more and more confirmed.

With this physical impossibility of roaming, and with the reciprocal compression of each exercised on the other, coincided the new instincts of civilization. They were no longer barbarous by a brutal and animal barbarism. The deep soil of their powerful natures had long been budding into n.o.bler capacities, and had expanded into n.o.bler perceptions.

Reverence for female dignity, a sentiment never found before in any nation, gave a vernal promise of some higher humanity, on a wider scale than had yet been exhibited. Strong sympathies, magnetic affinities, prepared this great encampment of nations for Christianity. Their n.o.bility needed such a field for its expansion; Christianity needed such a human nature for its evolution. The strong and deep nature of the Teutonic tribes could not have been evolved, completed, without Christianity. Christianity in a soil so shallow and unracy as the Graeco-Latin, could not have struck those roots which are immovable. The ultimate conditions of the soil and the capacities of the culture must have corresponded. The motions of Barbaria had hitherto indicated only change; change without hope; confusion without tendencies; strife without principle of advance; new births in each successive age without principle of regeneration; momentary gain balanced by momentary loss; the tumult of a tossing ocean which tends to none but momentary rest.

But now the currents are united, enclosed, and run in one direction, and that is definite and combined.

Now truly began that modern era, of which we happily reap the harvest: then were laid the first foundations of social order and the first effective hint of that sense of mutual aid and dependence which has, century by century, been creating such a balance and harmony of adjusted operations--of agencies working night and day, which no man sees, for services which no man creates: the agencies are like Ezekiel's wheels--self-sustained; the services in which they labour have grown up imperceptibly as the growth of a yew, and from a period as far removed from cognizance. One man dies every hour out of myriads, his place is silently supplied, and the mysterious economy thus propagates itself in silence, like the motion of the planets, from age to age. Hands innumerable are every moment writing summonses, returns, reports, figures--records that would stretch out to the crack of doom, as yet every year acc.u.mulated, written by professional men, corrected by correctors, checked by controllers, and afterwards read by corresponding men, re-read by corresponding controllers, pa.s.sed and ratified by corresponding ratifiers; and through this almighty pomp of wheels, whose very whirling would be heard into other planets, did not the very velocity of their motion seem to sleep on their soft axle, is the business of this great nation, judicial, fixed, penal, deliberative, statistical, commercial, all carried on without confusion, never distracting one man by its might, nor molesting one man by its noise.

Now, in the semi-fabulous times of Egypt and a.s.syria, things were not so managed. Ours are the ages of intellectual powers, of working by equivalents and subst.i.tutions; but theirs were done by efforts of brute power, possible only in the lowest condition of animal man, when all wills converged absolutely in one, and when human life, cheap as dog's, had left man in no higher a state of requirement, and had given up human power to be applied at will--without art or skill.

Then the armies of a Semiramis even were in this canine state. It was her curse to have subjects that had no elevation, swarming by myriads like flies; mere animal life, the mere animal armies which she needed; what she wanted was exactly what they would yield. To such cattle all cares beyond that of mere provender were thrown away. Surgical care and the ambulance, such as the elevation of man's condition, and the solemnity of his rights, seen by the awful eye of Christianity, will always require, were simply ridiculous. As well raise hospitals for decayed b.u.t.terflies. Provender was all: not _panem et circenses_--bread and theatrical shows--but simply bread, and that wretched of its kind.

Drink was an ideal luxury. Was there not the Euphrates, was there not the Tigris, the Aranes? The Roman armies carried _posca_ by way of such luxury, a drink composed of vinegar and water. But as to Semiramis--what need of the vinegar? And why carry the water? Could it not be found in the Euphrates, etc.? Let the dogs lap at the Euphrates, and stay for their next draught till they come to the Tigris or the Aranes. Or, if they drank a river or so dry, and a million or two should die, what of that? Let them go on to the Tigris, and thence to the Aranes, the Oxus, or Indus. Clothes were dispensable from the climate, food only of the lowest quality, and finally the whole were summoned only for one campaign, and usually this was merely a sort of partisan camisade upon a colossal scale, in which the superfluous population of one vast nation threw themselves upon another. Mere momentum turned the scale; one nuisance of superfluous humanity was discharged upon such another nuisance, the one exterminating the other, or, if both by accident should be exterminated, what mattered it? The major part of the two nuisances, like algebraical quant.i.ties of plus and minus, extinguished each other. And, in any case, the result, whatever it might be, of that one campaign, which was rather a journey terminating in a bad battle of mobs, than anything artificial enough to deserve the t.i.tle of camp, terminated the whole war. Here, at least, we see the determining impulse of political economy intervening, coming round upon them, if it had not been perceived before. If the two nations began their warfare, and planned it in defiance of all common laws and exchequers, at any rate the time it lasted was governed by that only. The same thing recurred in the policy of the feudal ages; the b.u.mpkins, the va.s.sals, were compelled to follow the standard, but their service was limited to a certain number of weeks. Afterwards, by law, as well as by custom, they dissolved for the autumnal labour of the harvest. And thus it was, until the princes would allow of mercenary armies, no system of connecting politics grew up in Europe, or could grow up; having no means of fighting each other, they were like leopards in Africa gnawing at a leopard in Asia; they fumed apart like planets that could not cross; a vast revolution, which Robertson ascribes to the reign of Francis I., but which I, upon far better grounds and on speculations much more exclusively pursued, date from the age of Louis XI. Differing in everything, and by infinite degrees for the worse from these early centuries, the age of Semiramis agreed in this--that if the non-culture of the human race allowed them to break out into war with little or no preparation but what each man personally could make, and if thus far political economy did not greatly control the policy of nations, yet in the reaction these same violated laws vindicated their force by sad retributions. Famines, at all events dire exhaustion, invariably put an end to such tumultuary wars, if they did not much control their beginnings,[42] and periodically expressed their long retributory convulsions.

Not, therefore, because political economy was of little avail, but because the details are lost in the wilderness of years, must we disregard the political economy in the early a.s.syrian combinations of the human race. The details are lost for political economy as a cause, and the details are equally lost of the wars and the revolutions which were its effects. But in coming more within the light of authentic history, I contend that political economy is better known, and that in that proportion it explains much of what ought to be known. For example, I contend that the condition of Athens, for herself and for the rest of the Greek confederacy, nay, the entire course of the Athenian wars, of all that Athens did or forbore to do, her actions alike, and her omissions, are to be accounted for, and lie involved in the statistics of her fiscal condition.

IX.--_Geography._--Look next at geography. The consideration of this alone throws a new light on history. Every country that is now or will be, has had some of its primary determinations impressed upon its policy and inst.i.tutions; nay, upon its feeling and character, which is the well of its policy, by its geographical position: that is, by its position as respects climate in the first place, secondly, as respects neighbours (_i.e._, enemies), whether divided by mountains, rivers, deserts, or the great desert of the sea--or divided only by great belts of land--a pa.s.sable solitude. Thirdly, as respects its own facilities and conveniences for raising food, clothing, luxuries. Indeed, not only is it so moulded and determined as to its character and aspects, but oftentimes even as to its very existence.

Many have noticed wisely and truly in the physical aspect of Asia and the South of Caucasus, that very destiny of slavery and of part.i.tion into great empires, which has always hung over them. The great plains of Asia fit it for the action of cavalry and vast armies--by which the fate of generations is decided in a day; and at the same time fit it for the support of those infinite myriads without object, which make human life cheap and degraded. That this was so is evident from what Xenophon tells.

On the other hand, many have seen in the conformation of Greece revolving round a nucleus able to protect in case of invasion, yet cut up into so many little chambers, of which each was sacred from the intrusion of the rest during the infancy of growth, the solution of all the marvels which Grecian history unfolds.

FOOTNOTES:

[20] This distinction is of some consequence. Else the student would be puzzled at finding [which is really the truth] that, after the Twelve Caesars and the five patriotic emperors who succeeded them, we know less of the Roman princes through centuries after the Christian era, than of the Roman Consuls through a s.p.a.ce of three centuries preceding the Christian era. In fact, except for a few gossiping and merely _personal_ anecdotes communicated by the Augustan History and a few other authorities, we really know little of the most ill.u.s.trious amongst the Roman emperors of the West, beyond the fact (all but invariable) that they perished by a.s.sa.s.sination. But still this darkness is not of the same nature, nor owing to the same causes, as the Grecian darkness prior to the Olympiads.

[21] Except, indeed, by the barbarous contrivance of cutting away some letters from a name, and then filling up their place with other letters which, by previous agreement, have been rendered significant of arithmetic numbers. This is the idea on which the _Memoria Technica_ of Dr. Grey proceeds. More appropriately it might have been named _Memoria Barbarica_, for the dreadful violence done to the most beautiful, rhythmical, and melodious names would, at any rate, have remained as a repulsive expression of barbarism to all musical ears, had the practical benefits of this machinery been all that they profess to be. Meantime these benefits are really none at all. They offer us a mere mockery, defeating with one hand what they accomplish with the other.

[22] It is all but an impossible problem for a nation in the situation of Greece to send down a record to a posterity distant by five centuries, to overlap the gulf of years between the point of starting--the absolute now of commencement and the remote generation at which you take aim. Trust to tradition, not to the counsel of one man.

But tradition is buoyant.

[23] _Crusade._--There seems a contradiction in the very terms of Pagan--that is, non-Christian, and Crusade--that is, warfare symbolically Christian. But, by a license not greater than is often practised in corresponding circ.u.mstances, the word Crusade may be used to express any martial expedition amongst a large body of confederate nations having or representing an imaginative (not imaginary) interest or purpose with no direct profession of separate or mercenary object for each nation apart.

[24] The truths of Scripture are of too vast a compa.s.s, too much like the Author of those truths--illimitable and incapable of verbal circ.u.mscription, and, besides, are too much diffused through many collateral truths, too deeply echoed and reverberated by trains of correspondences and affinities laid deep in nature, and above all, too affectingly transcribed in the human heart, ever to come within the compa.s.s or material influence of a few words this way or that; any more than all eternity can be really and locally confined within a little golden ring which is a.s.sumed for its symbol. The same thing, I repeat, may be said of chronology and its accidents. The chronologies of Scripture, its prophetic weeks of Daniel, and its mysterious aeons of the Apocalypse, are too awful in their realities, too vast in their sweep and range of application, to be controlled or affected by the very utmost errors that could arise from lapse of time or transcription unrevised. And the more so, because errors that by the supposition are errors of accident, cannot all point in one direction: one would be likely in many cases to compensate another. But, finally, I would make this frank acknowledgment to a young pupil without fear that it could affect her reverence for Scripture. It is of the very grandeur of Scripture that she can afford to be negligent of her chronology. Suppose this case: suppose the Scriptures protected by no special care or providence; suppose no security, no barrier to further errors, to have arisen from the discovery of printing--suppose the Scriptures to be in consequence transcribed for thousands of years--even in that case the final result would be this: it would be (and in part perhaps it really is) true or not true as to its minor or petty chronology--not true, as having been altered insensibly like any human composition where the internal sense was not of a nature to maintain its integrity. True, even as to trifles, in that sense which the majestic simplicity and self-conformity of truth in a tale originally true would guarantee, it might yet be, because of the grandeur of the main aim, and the sense of deeper relations and the perception of verisimilitude.

[25] '_A New Slave Country_'--and this for more reasons than one. Slaves were growing dearer in Rome; secondly, a practice had been for some time increasing amongst the richest of the n.o.ble families in Rome, of growing household bodies of gladiators, by whose aid they fought the civic battles of ambition; and thirdly, as to Caesar in particular, he had raised and equipped a whole legion out of his own private funds, and, of course, for his own private service; so that he probably looked to Britain as a new quarry from which he might obtain the human materials of his future armies, and also as an arena or pocket theatre, in which he could organize and discipline these armies secure from jealous observation.

[26] Here the pupil will naturally object--was not Judaea an Asiatic land? And did not Judaea act upon Europe? Doubtless; and in the sublimest way by which it is possible for man to act upon man; not only through the highest and n.o.blest part of man's nature, but (as most truly it may be affirmed) literally creating, in a practical sense, that nature. For, to say nothing of the sublime idea of Redemption as mystically involved in the types and prophecies of Jewish prophets, and in the very ceremonies of the Jewish religion, what was the very highest ideal of G.o.d which man--philosophic man even--had attained, compared with that of the very meanest Jew? It is false to say that amongst the philosophers of Greece or Rome the Polytheistic creed was rejected. No Pagan philosopher ever adopted, ever even conceived, the sublime of the Jewish G.o.d--as a being not merely of essential unity, but as deriving from that unity the moral relations of a governor and a retributive judge towards human creatures. So that Judaea bore an office for the human race of a most awful and mysterious sanct.i.ty. But (and partly for that reason) the civil and social relations of Judaea to the human race were less than nothing. And thence arose the intolerant scorn of such writers as Tacitus for the Christians, whom, of course, they viewed as Jews, and nothing _but_ Jews. Thus far they were right--that, as a nation, valued upon the only scale known to politicians, the Jews brought nothing at all to the common fund of knowledge or civilization. One element of knowledge, however, the Jews did bring, though at that time unknown, and long after, for want of historic criticism in the history of chronologic researches, viz., a chronology far superior to that of the Septuagint, as will be shown farther on, and far superior to the main guides of Paganism. But the reason why this superiority of chronology will, after all, but little avail the general student is, that it relates merely to the a.s.syrian or Persian princes in their intercourse with the courts of Jerusalem or of Samaria.

[27] Juba, King of Mauritania, during the struggle of Caesar and Pompey.

[28] Which clannish feeling, be it observed, always depends for its life and intensity upon the comparison with others; as they are despised, in that ratio rises the clannish self-estimation. Whereas the n.o.bler pride of a Roman patriotism is [Greek: autarkes] and independent of external relations. Nothing is more essentially opposed, though often confounded under the common name of patriotism, than the love of country in a Roman or English sense, and the spirit of clannish jealousy.

[29] This it was (a circ.u.mstance overlooked by many who have written on the Roman literature), this destiny announced and protected by early auguries, which made the idea of Rome a great and imaginative idea. The patriotism of the Grecian was, as indicated in an earlier note, a mean, clannish feeling, always courting support to itself, and needing support from imaginary 'barbarism' in its enemies, and raising itself into greatness by means of _their_ littleness. But with the n.o.bler Roman patriotism was a very different thing. The august destiny of his own eternal city [observe--'_eternal_,' not in virtue of history, but of prophecy, not upon the retrospect and the a.n.a.logies of any possible experience, but by the necessity of an aboriginal doom], a city that was to be the centre of an empire whose circ.u.mference is everywhere, did not depend for any part of its majesty upon the meanness of its enemies; on the contrary, in the very grandeur of those enemies lay, by a rebound of the feelings inevitable to a Roman mind, the paramount grandeur of that awful Republic which had swallowed them all up.

[30] I do not mean to deny the casual intercourse between Rome and particular cities of Greece, which sometimes flash upon us for a moment in the earliest parts of the Roman annals: what I am insisting upon, is the absence of all national or effectual intercourse.

[31] Even an attorney, however [according to an old story, which I much fear is a Joe Miller, but which ought to be fact], is not so rigorous as to allow of no lat.i.tude, for, having occasion to send a challenge with the stipulation of fighting at twelve paces, upon 'engrossing' this challenge the attorney directed his clerk to add--'Twelve paces, be the same more or less.' And so I say of the Olympiad--'777 years, be the same more or less.'

[32] And finally, were it necessary to add one word by way of reconciling the student to the subst.i.tution of 777 for 776, it might be sufficient to remind him that, even in the rigour of the minutest calculus, when the 776 years are fully accomplished--to prove which accomplishment we must suppose some little time over and above the 776 to have elapsed--then this surplus, were it but a single hour, throws us at once into the 777th year. This was, in fact, the oversight which misled a cla.s.s of disputants, whom I hope the reader is too young to remember, but whom I, alas! remember too well in the year 1800. They imagined and argued that the eighteenth century closed upon the first day of the year 1800. New Year's Day of the year 1799, they understood as the birthday of the Christian Church, proclaiming it to be then 1799 years old, not as commencing its 1799th year. And so on. Pye, the Poet Laureate of that day, in an elaborate preface to a secular ode, argued the point very keenly. It is certain (though not evident at first sight) that in the year 1839 the Christian period of time is not, as children say, '_going of_' 1840, but going of 1839: whereas the other party contend that it is in its 1840th year, tending in short to become that which it will actually be on its birthday, _i.e._, on the calends of January, or _le Jour de l'an_, or New Year's Day of 1840.

[33] See note immediately preceding on previous page.

[34] '_With impunity._'--There is no one point in which I have found a more absolute coincidence of opinion amongst all profound thinkers, English, German, and French, when discussing the philosophy of education, than this great maxim--_that the memory ought never to be exercised in a state of insulation_, that is, in those blank efforts of its strength which are accompanied by no law or logical reason for the thing to be remembered; by no such reason or principle of dependency as could serve to recall it in after years, when the burthen may have dropped out of the memory. The reader will perhaps think that I, the writer of this little work, have a pretty strong and faithful memory, when I tell him that every word of it, with all its details, has been written in a situation which sternly denied me the use of books bearing on my subject. A few volumes of rhetorical criticism and of polemic divinity, that have not, nor, to my knowledge, could have furnished me with a solitary fact or date, are all the companions of my solitude.

Other voice than the voice of the wind I have rarely heard. Even my quotations are usually from memory, though not always, as one out of three, perhaps, I had fortunately written down in a pocket-book; but no one date or fact has been drawn from any source but that of my una.s.sisted memory. Now, this useful sanity of the memory I ascribe entirely to the accident of my having escaped in childhood all such mechanic exercises of the memory as I have condemned in the text--to this accident, combined with the constant and severe practice I have given to my memory, in working and sustaining immense loads of facts that had been previously brought under logical laws.

[35] '_The long careering of an earthquake._'--It is remarkable, and was much noticed at the time by some German philosophers, that the earthquake which laid Lisbon in ruins about ninety-five years ago, could be as regularly traced through all its stages for some days previous to its grand _finale_, as any thief by a Bow Street officer. It pa.s.sed through Ireland and parts of England; in particular it was dogged through a great part of Leicesters.h.i.+re; and its rate of travelling was not so great but that, by a series of telegraphs, timely notice might have been sent southwards that it was coming. [The Lisbon earthquake occurred in 1755; so that this paper must have been written about 1849 or 1850.--ED.]

[36] '_The exact personality._'--The historical personality, or complete identification of an individual, lies in the whole body of circ.u.mstances that would be sufficient to determine him as a responsible agent in a court of justice. Archbishop Usher and others fancy that Sardanapalus was the son of Pul; guided merely by the sound of a syllable.

Tiglath-Pileser, some fancy to be the same person as Sardanapalus; others to be the very rebel who overthrew Sardanapalus. In short, all is confused and murky to the very last degree. And the reader who fancies that some accurate chronological characters are left, by which the era of Sardanapalus can be more nearly determined than it is determined above, viz., as generally coinciding with the era of Romulus and of the Greek Olympiad, is grossly imposed upon.

[37] '_And Asiatic._'--_Asiatic_, let the pupil observe, and not merely a.s.syrian; for the a.s.syria of this era represents all that was afterwards Media, Persia, Chaldaea, Babylonia, and Syria. No matter for the exact limits of the a.s.syrian empire, which are as indistinct in s.p.a.ce as in time. Enough that no Asiatic State is known as distinct from this empire.