SENTIMENTS BECOMING THE CRISIS. In also, by their personal service in the fleets and their country may demand the certain sacrifice armies of their country. They do contribute, of thousands. and in their full and fair proportion, according to the relative proportion of their numbers in the community. They contribute all the mind that actuates the whole machine. The forti- Nor are sentiments of elevation in themselves tude required of them is very different from the turgid and unnatural. Nature is never more unthinking alacrity of the common soldier, or truly herself than in her grandest form. The common sailor, in the face of danger and death; Apollo of Belvidere (if the universal robber has it is not a passion, it is not an impulse, it is not yet left him at Belvidere) is as much in nature a sentiment; it is a cool, steady, deliberate prin- as any figure from the pencil of Rembrandt, or ciple, always present, always equable; having any clown in the rustic revels of Teniers. no connection with anger; tempering honor deed, it is when a great nation is in great diffiwith prudence; incited, invigorated, and sus-culties that minds must exalt themselves to the tained by a generous love of fame; informed, moderated, and directed by an enlarged knowledge of its own great public ends; flowing in one blended stream from the opposite sources of the heart and the head; carrying in itself its own commission, and proving its title to every other command, by the first and most difficult command, that of the bosom in which it resides; it is a fortitude which unites with the courage of the field the more exalted and refined courage of the council; which knows as well to retreat as to advance; which can conquer as well by delay as by the rapidity of a march or the impetuosity of an attack; which can be, with Fabius, the black cloud that lowers on the tops of the mountains, or with Scipio, the thunderbolt of war; which, undismayed by false shame, can patiently endure the severest trial that a gallant spirit can undergo, in the taunts and provocations of the enemy, the suspicions, the cold respect, and "mouth honor" of those from whom it should meet a cheerful obedience; which, undisturbed by false humanity, can calmly assume that most awful moral responsibility of deciding when victory may be too dearly purchased by the loss of a single life, and when the safety and glory of occasion, or all is lost. Strong passion, under the direction of a feeble reason, feeds a low fever, which serves only to destroy the body that entertains it. But vehement passion does not always indicate an infirm judgment. It often accompanies, and actuates, and is even auxiliary to a powerful understanding; and when they both conspire and act harmoniously, their force is great to destroy disorder within, and to repel injury from abroad. If ever there was a time that calls on us for no vulgar conception of things, and for exertions in no vulgar strain, it is the awful hour that Providence has now appointed to this nation. Every little measure is a great error; and every great error will bring on no small ruin. Nothing can be directed above the mark that we must aim at; every thing below it is absolutely thrown away. * * * * Who knows whether indignation may not succeed to terror, and the revival of high sentiment, spurning away the delusion of a safety purchased at the expense of glory, may not yet drive us to that generous despair, which has often subdued distempers in the state, for which no remedy could be found in the wisest councils? MISCELLANEOUS. WILLIAM III. FORMING THE GRAND ALLIANCE held on his course. He was faithful to his object; and in councils, as in arms, over and over again repulsed, over and over again he returned to the charge. All the mortifications he had suffered from the last Parliament, and the great The steps which were taken to compose, to reconcile, to unite, and to discipline all Europe against the growth of France, certainly furnisher he had to apprehend from that newly chosen, to a statesman the finest and most interesting part in the history of that great period. It formed the master-piece of King William's policy, dexterity, and perseverance. Full of the idea of preserving, not only a local civil liberty united with order, to our country, but to embody it in the political liberty, the order, and the independence of nations united under a natural head, the King called upon his Parliament to put itself into a posture "to preserve to England the weight and influence it at present had on the councils and affairs ABROAD. It will be requisite Eu-ers holding the pen, after expressing doubts on rope should see you will not be wanting to your selves." Baffled as that monarch was, and almost heartbroken at the disappointment he met with in the mode he first proposed for that great end, he were not capable of relaxing the vigor of his mind. He was in Holland when he combined the vast plan of his foreign negotiations. When he came to open his design to his ministers in England, even the sober firmness of Somers, the undaunted resolution of Shrewsbury, and the adventurous spirit of Montague and Orford, were staggered. They were not yet mounted to the elevation of the King. The cabinet (then the regency) met on the subject at Tunbridge Wells the 28th of August, 1698; and there, Lord Som the state of the continent, which they ultimately refer to the King, as best informed, they give him a most discouraging portrait of the spirit of this nation. "So far as relates to England," say these ministers, "it would be want of duty not to give your majesty this clear account, that | workman died; but the work was formed on there is a deadness and want of spirit in the na- true mechanical principles; and it was as truly tion universally, so as not to be at all disposed wrought. It went by the impulse it had receiv to entering into a new war. That they seemed from the first mover. The man was dead; to be tired out with taxes to a degree beyond what was discerned, till it appeared upon occasion of the late elections. This is the truth of the fact upon which your majesty will determine what resolution ought to be taken." but the Grand Alliance survived, in which King William lived and reigned. That heartless and dispirited people, whom Lord Somers had represented, about two years before, as dead in energy and operation, continued that war, to which it His majesty did determine, and did take and was supposed they were unequal in mind and in pursue his resolution. In all the tottering imbe-means, for near thirteen years. cility of a new government, and with Parliament totally unmanageable, he persevered. He per ERTY.1 severed to expel the fears of his people by his THE DUKE OF BEDFORD'S HOLD on his Propfortitude to steady their fickleness by his constancy-to expand their narrow prudence by his enlarged wisdom-to sink their factious temper in his public spirit. In spite of his people, he resolved to make them great and glorious; to make England, inclined to shrink into her narrow self, the arbitress of Europe, the tutelary angel of the human race. In spite of the ministers, who staggered under the weight that his mind imposed upon theirs, unsupported as they felt themselves by the popular spirit, he infused into them his own soul; he renewed in them their ancient heart; he rallied them in the same cause. It required some time to accomplish this work. The people were first gained, and through them their distracted representatives. Under the influence of King William, Holland had rejected the allurements of every seduction, and had resisted the terrors of every menace. With Hannibal at her gates, she had nobly and magnanimously refused all separate treaty, or any thing which might for a moment appear to divide her affection or her interest, or even to distinguish her in identity from England. 2 This The Crown has considered me after long service, the Crown has paid the Duke of Bedford by advance. He has had a long credit for any services which he may perform hereafter. He is secure, and long may he be secure, in his advance, whether he performs any services or not. But let him take care how he endangers the safety of that Constitution which secures his own utility or his own insignificance; or how he discourages those who take up even puny arms to defend an order of things, which, like the sun of heaven, shines alike on the useful and the worthless. His grants are ingrafted on the public law of Europe, covered with the awful hoar of innumerable ages. They are guarded by the sacred rules of prescription, found in that full treasury of jurisprudence from which the jejuneness and penury of our municipal law has, by degrees, been enriched and strengthened. prescription I had my share (a very full share) in bringing to its perfection. The Duke of Bedford will stand as long as prescriptive law endures; as long as the great stable laws of property, common to us with all civilized nations, are kept in their integrity, and without the smallest intermixture of laws, maxims, principles, or precedents of the grand revolution. They are secure against all changes but one. The whole revolutionary system, institutes, digest, code, novels, text, gloss, comment, are not only not the same, but they are the very reverse, and the reverse, fundamentally, of all the laws on which civil life has hitherto been upheld in all the governments of the world. The learned professors of the rights of man regarded prescription, not as a title to bar all claim, set up against all possession-but they look on prescription as itself a bar against the possessor and proprietor. They hold an immemorial possession to be no more than a long-continued, and therefore an aggravated injustice. The English House of Commons was more reserved. The principle of the Grand Alliance was not directly recognized in the resolution of the Commons, nor the war announced, though they were well aware the alliance was formed for the war. However, compelled by the returning sense of the people, they went so far as to fix the three great immovable pillars of the safety and greatness of England, as they were then, as they are now, and as they must ever be to the end of time. They asserted in general terms the necessity of supporting Holland; of keeping united with our allies; and maintaining the liberty of Europe; though they restricted their vote to the succors stipulated by actual treaty. But now they were fairly embarked, they were obliged to go with the course of the vessel; and the whole nation, split before into an hundred adverse factions, with a king at its head evidently declining to his tomb, the whole nation -Lords, Commons, and people-proceeded as one body, informed by one soul. Under the British union, the union of Europe was consolidated; and it long held together with a degree of cohesion, firmness, and fidelity, not known before or since in any political combination of that extent. Just as the last hand was given to this immense and complicated machine, the master-pus Act. Such are their ideas, such their religion; and such their law. But as to our country and our race, as long as the well-compacted structure of our church and state, the sanctuary, the holy of This passage is taken from a letter to a Noble Lord, which was called forth by an insulting attack from the Duke of Bedford when Mr. Burke receiv ed his pension. Sir George Savile's Act, called the Nullum Tem. to resist, and whose wisdom it behooves us not at all to dispute, has ordained it in another manner, and (whatever my querulous weakness might suggest) a far better. The storm has gone over me, and I lie like one of those old oaks which the late hurricane has scattered about me. I am stripped of all my honors; I am torn up by the roots, and lie prostrate on the earth! There, and prostrate there, I most unfeignedly recognize the divine justice, and in some degree submit to it. CHARACTER OF SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS. holies of that ancient law, defended by reverence, defended by power, a fortress at once and a temple, shall stand inviolate on the brow of the British Sion-as long as the British monarchy, not more limited than fenced by the orders of the state, shall, like the proud Keep of Windsor, rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt with the double belt of its kindred and coeval towers, as long as this awful structure shall oversee and guard the subjected land—so long the mounds and dikes of the low, fat, Bedford level will have nothing to fear from the pick-axes of all the levelers of France. As long as our sovereign lord the King, and his faithful subjects, the lords and commons of this realm-the triple cord, which Last night (February 23, 1792), in the sixtyno man can break; the solemn, sworn, constitu- ninth year of his age, died, at his house in Leitional frank-pledge of this nation; the firm guar-cester Fields, Sir Joshua Reynolds. antees of each other's being and each other's His illness was long, but borne with a mild rights; the joint and several securities, each in | and cheerful fortitude, without the least mixture its place and order, for every kind and every of any thing irritable or querulous, agreeably to quality of property and of dignity. As long as the placid and even tenor of his whole life. He these endure, so long the Duke of Bedford is had from the beginning of his malady a distinct safe; and we are all safe together-the high view of his dissolution, which he contemplated from the blights of envy and the spoliations of with that entire composure, that nothing but the rapacity; the low from the iron hand of oppres- innocence, integrity, and usefulness of his life, sion and the insolent spurn of contempt. Amen! and an unaffected submission to the will of Provand so be it, and so it will be, idence, could bestow. In this situation he had every consolation from family tenderness, which his own kindness to his family had indeed well deserved. Dum domus Æneæ Capitoli immobile saxum MR. BURKE ON THE DEATH OF HIS SON. Had it pleased God to continue to me the hopes of succession, I should have been, according to my mediocrity, and the mediocrity of the age I live in, a sort of founder of a family; I should have left a son, who, in all the points in which personal merit can be viewed, in science, in erudition, in genius, in taste, in honor, in generosity, in humanity, in every liberal sentiment, and every liberal accomplishment, would not have shown himself inferior to the Duke of Bedford, or to any of those whom he traces in his line. His grace very soon would have wanted all plausibility in his attack upon that provision which belonged more to mine than to me. HE would soon have supplied every deficiency, and symmetrized every disproportion. It would not have been for that successor to resort to any stagnant wasting reservoir of merit in me, or in any ancestry. He had in himself a salient, living spring of generous and manly action. Every day he lived he would have repurchased the bounty of the Crown, and ten times more, if ten times more he had received. He was made a public creature, and had no enjoyment whatever but in the performance of some duty. At this exigent moment, the loss of a finished man is not easily supplied. But a Disposer whose power we are little able Templum in modum arcis. Tacitus of the temple of Jerusalem. While on the Capitol's unshaken rock, Virgil's Eneid, book ix., line 448. Sir Joshua Reynolds was, on very many accounts, one of the most memorable men of his time. He was the first Englishman who added the praise of the elegant arts to the other glories of his country. In taste, in grace, in facility, in happy invention, and in the richness and harmony of coloring, he was equal to the greatest masters of the most renowned ages. In portrait he went beyond them; for he communicated to that description of the art, in which English artists are the most engaged, a variety, a fancy, and a dignity derived from the higher branches, which even those who professed them in a superior manner did not always preserve when they delineated individual nature. His portraits remind the spectator of the invention of history and the amenity of landscape. In painting portraits, he appeared not to be raised upon that platform, but to descend upon it from a higher sphere. His paintings illustrate his lessons, and his lessons seem to be derived from his paintings. He possessed the theory as perfectly as the practice of his art. To be such a painter, he was a profound and penetrating philosopher. In full happiness of foreign and domestic fame, admired by the expert in art and by the learned in science, courted by the great, caressed by sovereign powers, and celebrated by distinguished poets, his native humility, modesty, and candor never forsook him, even on surprise or provocation; nor was the least degree of arrogance or assumption visible to the most scrutinizing eye, in any part of his conduct or discourse. His talents of every kind-powerful from nature, and not meanly cultivated by letters-his social virtues in all the relations and all the hab itudes of life, rendered him the center of a very | ousy, too much innocence to provoke any enmigreat and unparalleled variety of agreeable so- ty. The loss of no man of his time can be felt cieties, which will be dissipated by his death. with more sincere, general, and unmixed sorrow. He had too much merit not to excite some jeal- HAIL AND FAREWELL! 1 DETACHED SENTIMENTS AND MAXIM S.1 Never was there a jar or discord between gen- | the existing materials of his country. A dispouine sentiment and sound policy. Never, no, sition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken never, did nature say one thing and wisdom say together, would be my standard of a statesman. another. Every thing else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution. The meditations of the closet have infected senates with a subtle frenzy, and inflamed armies with the brands of the furies. We are alarmed into reflection; our minds are purified by terror and pity; our weak, unthinking pride is humbled under the dispensations of a mysterious wisdom. The road to eminence and power, from obscure condition, ought not to be made too easy, nor a thing too much of course. The temple of honor ought to be seated on an eminence. If it be opened through virtue, let it be remembered that virtue is never tried but by some difficulty and some struggle. Public virtue, being of a nature magnificent and splendid, instituted for great things, and conversant about great concerns, requires abundant scope and room, and can not spread and grow under confinement, and in circumstances straitened, narrow, and sordid. All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust, and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great master, author, and founder of society. They who administer in the government of men, in which they stand in the person of God himself, should have high and worthy notions of their function and destination. Their hope should be full of immortality. It is with the greatest difficulty that I attempt to separate policy from justice. Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society, and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all. In all mutations (if mutations must be), the circumstance which will serve most to blunt the edge of their mischief, and to promote what good may be in them, is, that they should find us with our minds tenacious of justice, and tender of property. A man, full of warm, speculative benevolence, may wish society otherwise constituted than he finds it; but a good patriot, and a true politician, always considers how he shall make the most of A few of these sentences have been very slightly modified or abridged, in order to give them the character of distinct propositions, but in no way af fecting the sense. It is one of the excellencies of a method, in which time among the assistants, that its operation is slow, and, in some cases, almost imperceptible. It can not be too often repeated, line upon line, precept upon precept, until it comes into the currency of a proverb, to innovate is not to reform. It is the degenerate fondness for taking short cuts, and little fallacious facilities, that has in so many parts of the world created governments with arbitrary powers. Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour, than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years. I shall always consider that liberty as very equivocal in her appearance, which has not wisdom and justice for her companions, and does not lead prosperity and plenty in her train. What is liberty without wisdom and without virtue ? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint. The strong struggle in every individual to preserve possession of what he has found to belong to him and to distinguish him, is one of the securities against injustice and despotism implanted in our nature. It operates as an instinct to sesettled state. cure property, and to preserve communities in a What is there to shock in this? Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of polished society. It is a sour, malignant, envious disposition, without taste for the reality, or for any image or representation of virtue, that sees with joy the unmerited fall of what had long flourished in splendor and in honor. The perennial existence of bodies corporate and their fortunes, are things particularly suited to a man who has long views; who meditates designs that require time in fashioning, and which propose duration when they are accomplished. None can aspire to act greatly, but those who are of force greatly to suffer. Strong instances of self-denial operate powerfully on our minds; and a man who has no wants has obtained great freedom and firmness, and even dignity. Difficulty is a severe instructor, set over us by the supreme ordinance of a parental guardian and legislator, who knows us better than we know ourselves, as he loves us better too. Pater ipse colendi Haud facilem esse viam voluit.2 He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. It has been the glory of the great masters in all the arts to confront and to overcome; and when they have overcome the first difficulty, to turn it into an instrument for new conquests over new difficulties. Hypocrisy delights in the most sublime speculations; for, never intending to go beyond speculation, it costs nothing to have it magnificent. Men who are too much confined to professional and faculty habits, and, as it were, inveterate in the recurrent employment of that narrow circle, are rather disabled than qualified for whatever depends on the knowledge of mankind, on experience in mixed affairs, on a comprehensive, connected view of the various complicated external and internal interests which go to the formation of that multifarious thing called a state.3 Turbulent, discontented men of quality, in proportion as they are puffed up with personal pride and arrogance, generally despise their own order. The great must submit to the dominion of prudence and of virtue, or none will long submit to the dominion of the great. Living law, full of reason, and of equity and justice (as it is, or it should not exist), ought to be severe and awful too; or the words of menace, whether written on the parchment roll of England, or cut into the brazen tablet of Rome, will excite nothing but contempt. Men and states, to be secure, must be respected. Power, and eminence, and consideration, are things not to be begged. They must be commanded; and those who supplicate for mercy from others, can never hope for justice through themselves. The blood of man should never be shed but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for our family, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for our kind. The rest is vanity; the rest is crime. In a conflict between nations, that state which is resolved to hazard its existence rather than to abandon its objects, must have an infinite advantage over that which is resolved to yield rather than to carry its resistance beyond a certain point. 2 The Father of our race himself decrees That culture shall be hard. Virgil's Georgics, i., 121. It is often impossible, in political inquiries, to find any proportion between the apparent force of any moral causes we may assign, and their known operation. Some states, at the very moment when they seemed plunged in unfathomable abysses of disgrace and disaster, have suddenly emerged; they have begun a new course and opened a new reckoning; and even in the depths of their calamity, and on the very ruins of the country, have laid the foundations of a towering and durable greatness. There is a courageous wisdom: there is also a false, reptile prudence, the result, not of caution, but of fear. The eye of the mind is dazzled and vanquished. An abject distrust of ourselves, an extravagant admiration of the enemy, present us with no hope but in a compromise with his pride, by a submission to his will. Parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy, which is a distributive virtue, and consists not in saving, but in selection. Parsimony requires no providence, no sagacity, no powers of combination, no comparison, no judgment. Mere instinct, and that not an instinct of the noblest kind, may produce this false economy in perfection. The other economy has larger views. It demands a discriminating judgment, and a firm, sagacious mind. If wealth is the obedient and laborious slave of virtue and of public honor, then wealth is in If we command our its place, and has its use. wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed. No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian charity. Those who quit their proper character to assume what does not belong to them, are, for the greater part, ignorant both of the character they leave and of the character they assume. They have nothing of politics but the passions they excite. Surely the church is a place where one day's truce ought to be allowed to the dissensions and animosities of mankind. object of so serious a concern to mankind as govSteady, independent minds, when they have an ernment under their contemplation, will disdain to assume the part of satirists and declaimers. Those persons who creep into the hearts of most people, who are chosen as the companions of their softer hours, and their reliefs from care and anxiety, are never persons of shining qualities or strong virtues. It is rather the soft green of the soul on which we rest our eyes that are fatigued with beholding more glaring objects. When pleasure is over, we relapse into indifference, or, rather, we fall into a soft tranquillity, which is tinged with the agreeable color of the former sensation. Nothing tends so much to the corruption of sci See, also, on this subject, the sketch of Mr.ence as to suffer it to stagnate: these waters must George Grenville's character, page 251. be troubled before they can exert their virtues. |