Book viii
. Line 632._
FOOTNOTES:
[588-2] See Byron, page 548.
RUFUS CHOATE. 1799-1859.
There was a state without king or nobles; there was a church without a bishop;[588-3] there was a people governed by grave magistrates which it had selected, and by equal laws which it had framed.
_Speech before the New England Society, Dec. 22, 1843._
We join ourselves to no party that does not carry the flag and keep step to the music of the Union.
_Letter to the Whig Convention, 1855._
Its constitution the glittering and sounding generalities[589-1] of natural right which make up the Declaration of Independence.
_Letter to the Maine Whig Committee, 1856._
FOOTNOTES:
[588-3] The Americans equally detest the pageantry of a king and the supercilious hypocrisy of a bishop.--JUNIUS: _Letter xxxv. Dec. 19, 1769._
It [Calvinism] established a religion without a prelate, a government without a king.--GEORGE BANCROFT: _History of the United States, vol. iii. chap. vi._
[589-1] Although Mr. Choate has usually been credited with the original utterance of the words "glittering generalities," the following quotation will show that he was anticipated therein by several years:--
We fear that the glittering generalities of the speaker have left an impression more delightful than permanent.--FRANKLIN J. DICKMAN: _Review of a Lecture by Rufus Choate, Providence Journal, Dec. 14, 1849._
THOMAS K. HERVEY. 1799-1859.
The tomb of him who would have made The world too glad and free.
_The Devil's Progress._
He stood beside a cottage lone And listened to a lute, One summer's eve, when the breeze was gone, And the nightingale was mute.
_The Devil's Progress._
A love that took an early root, And had an early doom.
_The Devil's Progress._
Like ships, that sailed for sunny isles, But never came to shore.
_The Devil's Progress._
A Hebrew knelt in the dying light, His eye was dim and cold, The hairs on his brow were silver-white, And his blood was thin and old.
_The Devil's Progress._
THOMAS B. MACAULAY. 1800-1859.
(_From his Essays._)
That is the best government which desires to make the people happy, and knows how to make them happy.
_On Mitford's History of Greece. 1824._
Free trade, one of the greatest blessings which a government can confer on a people, is in almost every country unpopular.
_On Mitford's History of Greece. 1824._
The history of nations, in the sense in which I use the word, is often best studied in works not professedly historical.
_On Mitford's History of Greece. 1824._
Wherever literature consoles sorrow or assuages pain; wherever it brings gladness to eyes which fail with wakefulness and tears, and ache for the dark house and the long sleep,--there is exhibited in its noblest form the immortal influence of Athens.
_On Mitford's History of Greece. 1824._
We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.
_On Milton. 1825._
Nobles by the right of an earlier creation, and priests by the imposition of a mightier hand.
_On Milton. 1825._
Out of his surname they have coined an epithet for a knave, and out of his Christian name a synonym for the Devil.[590-1]
_On Machiavelli. 1825._
The English Bible,--a book which if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.
_On John Dryden. 1828._
His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run, though not to soar.
_On John Dryden. 1828._
A man possessed of splendid talents, which he often abused, and of a sound judgment, the admonitions of which he often neglected; a man who succeeded only in an inferior department of his art, but who in that department succeeded pre-eminently.
_On John Dryden. 1828._
He had a head which statuaries loved to copy, and a foot the deformity of which the beggars in the streets mimicked.
_On Moore's Life of Lord Byron. 1830._
We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.
_On Moore's Life of Lord Byron. 1830._
From the poetry of Lord Byron they drew a system of ethics compounded of misanthropy and voluptuousness,--a system in which the two great commandments were to hate your neighbour and to love your neighbour's wife.
_On Moore's Life of Lord Byron. 1830._
That wonderful book, while it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, is loved by those who are too simple to admire it.
_On Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. 1831._
The conformation of his mind was such that whatever was little seemed to him great, and whatever was great seemed to him little.
_On Horace Walpole. 1833._
What a singular destiny has been that of this remarkable man!--To be regarded in his own age as a classic, and in ours as a companion! To receive from his contemporaries that full homage which men of genius have in general received only from posterity; to be more intimately known to posterity than other men are known to their contemporaries!
_On Boswell's Life of Johnson_ (Croker's ed.). _1831._
Temple was a man of the world amongst men of letters, a man of letters amongst men of the world.[591-1]
_On Sir William Temple. 1838._
She [the Roman Catholic Church] may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.[591-2]
_On Ranke's History of the Popes. 1840._
The chief-justice was rich, quiet, and infamous.
_On Warren Hastings. 1841._
In that temple of silence and reconciliation where the enmities of twenty generations lie buried, in the great Abbey which has during many ages afforded a quiet resting-place to those whose minds and bodies have been shattered by the contentions of the Great Hall.
_On Warren Hastings. 1841._
In order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel and red men scalped each other by the great lakes of North America.
_On Frederic the Great. 1842._
We hardly know an instance of the strength and weakness of human nature so striking and so grotesque as the character of this haughty, vigilant, resolute, sagacious blue-stocking, half Mithridates and half Trissotin, bearing up against a world in arms, with an ounce of poison in one pocket and a quire of bad verses in the other.
_On Frederic the Great. 1842._
I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history.[593-1]
_History of England. Vol. i. Chap. i._
There were gentlemen and there were seamen in the navy of Charles II. But the seamen were not gentlemen, and the gentlemen were not seamen.
_History of England. Vol. i. Chap. ii._
The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.[593-2]
_History of England. Vol. i. Chap. iii._
I have not the Chancellor's encyclopedic mind. He is indeed a kind of semi-Solomon. He _half_ knows everything, from the cedar to the hyssop.
_Letter to Macvey Napier, Dec. 17, 1830._
To every man upon this earth Death cometh soon or late; And how can man die better Than facing fearful odds For the ashes of his fathers And the temples of his gods?
_Lays of Ancient Rome. Horatius, xxvii._
How well Horatius kept the bridge In the brave days of old.
_Lays of Ancient Rome. Horatius, lxx._
These be the great Twin Brethren To whom the Dorians pray.
_The Battle of Lake Regillus._
The sweeter sound of woman's praise.
_Lines written in August, 1847._
Ye diners-out from whom we guard our spoons.[593-3]
_Political Georgics._
FOOTNOTES:
[590-1] See Butler, page 215.
[591-1] See Pope, page 331-332.
[591-2] The same image was employed by Macaulay in 1824 in the concluding paragraph of a review of Mitford's Greece, and he repeated it in his review of Mill's "Essay on Government" in 1829.
What cities, as great as this, have . . . promised themselves immortality! Posterity can hardly trace the situation of some. The sorrowful traveller wanders over the awful ruins of others. . . . Here stood their citadel, but now grown over with weeds; there their senate-house, but now the haunt of every noxious reptile; temples and theatres stood here, now only an undistinguished heap of ruins.--GOLDSMITH: _The Bee, No. iv._ (1759.) _A City Night Piece._
Who knows but that hereafter some traveller like myself will sit down upon the banks of the Seine, the Thames, or the Zuyder Zee, where now, in the tumult of enjoyment, the heart and the eyes are too slow to take in the multitude of sensations? Who knows but he will sit down solitary amid silent ruins, and weep a people inurned and their greatness changed into an empty name?--VOLNEY: _Ruins, chap. ii._
At last some curious traveller from Lima will visit England, and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul's, like the editions of Baalbec and Palmyra.--HORACE WALPOLE: _Letter to Mason, Nov. 24, 1774._
Where now is Britain? . . . . . . Even as the savage sits upon the stone That marks where stood her capitols, and hears The bittern booming in the weeds, he shrinks From the dismaying solitude.
HENRY KIRKE WHITE: _Time._
In the firm expectation that when London shall be a habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul and Westminster Abbey shall stand shapeless and nameless ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh, when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, some Transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges and their historians.--SHELLEY: _Dedication to Peter Bell._
[593-1] See Bolingbroke, page 304.
[593-2] Even bear-baiting was esteemed heathenish and unchristian: the sport of it, not the inhumanity, gave offence.--HUME: _History of England, vol. i. chap. lxii._
[593-3] Macaulay, in a letter, June 29, 1831, says "I sent these lines to the 'Times' about three years ago."
J. A. WADE. 1800-1875.
Meet me by moonlight alone, And then I will tell you a tale Must be told by the moonlight alone, In the grove at the end of the vale!
_Meet me by Moonlight._
'T were vain to tell thee all I feel, Or say for thee I 'd die.
_'T were vain to tell._
SIR HENRY TAYLOR. 1800-18--.
The world knows nothing of its greatest men.
_Philip Van Artevelde. Part i . Act i. Sc. 5._
An unreflected light did never yet Dazzle the vision feminine.
_Philip Van Artevelde.