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THE

CABINET PORTRAIT GALLERY

BRITISH WORTHIES.

VOLUME XI.

LONDON:
C. COX, 12, KING WILLIAM STREET, STRAND.

1846.

London: Printed by W. Clowes and Sons, Stamford Street.

CONTENTS.

CABINET PORTRAIT GALLERY

BRITISH WORTHIES.

[Pg 5]William Penn was born in London, October 14, 1644. He was the son of a naval officer of the same name, who served with distinction both in the Protectorate and after the Restoration, and who was much esteemed by Charles II. and the Duke of York. At the age of fifteen, he was entered as a gentleman-commoner at Christchurch, Oxford. He had not been long in residence, when he received, from the preaching of Thomas Loe, his first bias towards the doctrines of the Quakers; and in conjunction with some fellow-students he began to withdraw from attendance on the Established[Pg 6] Church, and to hold private prayer meetings. For this conduct Penn and his friends were fined by the college for nonconformity; and the former was soon involved in more serious censure by his ill-governed zeal, in consequence of an order from the king, that the ancient custom of wearing surplices should be revived. This seemed to Penn an infringement of the simplicity of Christian worship: whereupon he with some friends tore the surplices from the backs of those students who appeared in them. For this act of violence, totally inconsistent, it is to be observed, with the principles of toleration which regulated his conduct in after-life, he and they were very justly expelled.

Admiral Penn, who like most sailors possessed a quick temper and high notions of discipline and obedience, was little pleased with this event, and still less satisfied with his son's grave demeanour, and avoidance of the manners and ceremonies of polite life. Arguments failing, he had recourse to blows, and as a last resource, he turned his son out of doors; but soon relented so far as to equip him, in 1662, for a journey to France, in hope that the gaiety of that country would expel his new-fashioned and, as he regarded them, fanatical notions. Paris, however, soon became wearisome to William Penn, and he spent a considerable time at Saumur, for the sake of the instruction and company of Moses Amyrault, an eminent Protestant divine. Here he confirmed and improved his religious impressions, and at the same time acquired, from the insensible influence of those who surrounded him, an increased polish and courtliness of demeanour, which greatly gratified the admiral on his return home in 1664.

Admiral Penn went to sea in 1664, and remained two years on service. During this time the external effects of his son's residence in France had worn away, and he had returned to those grave habits, and that rule of associating only with religious people, which had before given his father so much displeasure. To try the effect of absence and change of associates, Admiral Penn sent William to manage his estates in Ireland, a duty which the latter performed with satisfaction both to himself[Pg 7] and his employer. But it chanced that, on a visit to Cork, he again attended the preaching of Thomas Loe, by whose exhortations he was deeply impressed. From this time he began to frequent the Quakers' meetings; and in September, 1667, he was imprisoned, with others, under the persecuting laws which then disgraced our statute-book. Upon application to the higher authorities he was soon released.

Upon receiving tidings that William had connected himself with the Quakers, the admiral immediately summoned him to England; and he soon became certified of the fact, among other peculiarities, by his son's pertinacious adherence to the Quakers' notions concerning what they called Hat Worship. This led him to a violent remonstrance. William Penn behaved with due respect; but in the main point, that of forsaking his associates and rule of conduct, he yielded nothing. The father confined his demands at last to the simple point, that his son should sit uncovered in the presence of himself, the king, and the Duke of York. Still William Penn felt bound to make not even this concession; and on this refusal the admiral again turned him out of doors.

Soon after, in 1668, he began to preach, and in the same year he published his first work, 'Truth Exalted,' &c. We cannot here notice his very numerous works, of which the titles run, for the most part, to an extraordinary length: but 'The Sandy Foundation Shaken,' published in the same year, claims notice, as having led to his first public persecution. In it he was induced, not to deny the doctrine of the Trinity, which in a certain sense he admitted, but to object to the language in which it is expounded by the English Church; and for this offence he was imprisoned for some time in the Tower. During this confinement, he composed 'No Cross, No Crown,' one of his principal and most popular works, of which the leading doctrine, admirably exemplified in his own life, was, that the way to future happiness and glory lies, in this world, not through a course of misery and needless mortification, but still through[Pg 8] labour, watchfulness, and self-denial, and continual striving against corrupt passions and inordinate indulgence. This is enforced by copious examples from profane as well as sacred history; and the work gives evidence of an extent of learning very creditable to its author, considering his youth, and the circumstances under which it was composed. He was detained in prison for seven months, and treated with much severity. In 1669 he had the satisfaction of being reconciled to his father.

William Penn was one of the first sufferers by the passing of the Conventicle Act, in 1670. He was imprisoned in Newgate, and tried for preaching to a seditious and riotous assembly in Gracechurch Street; and this trial is remarkable and celebrated in our criminal jurisprudence, for the firmness with which he defended himself, and still more for the admirable courage and constancy with which the jury maintained the verdict of acquittal which they pronounced. He showed on this, and on all other occasions, that he well understood and appreciated the free principles of our constitution, and that he was resolved not to surrender one iota of that liberty of conscience which he claimed for others, as well as for himself. "I am far from thinking it fit," he said, in addressing the House of Commons, "because I exclaim against the injustice of whipping Quakers for Papists, that Papists should be whipped for their consciences. No, for though the hand pretended to be lifted up against them hath lighted heavily upon us, and we complain, yet we do not mean that any should take a fresh aim at them, or that they should come in our room, for we must give the liberty we ask, and would have none suffer for a truly sober and conscientious dissent on any hand." His views of religious toleration and civil liberty he has well and clearly explained in the treatise entitled 'England's present Interest,' &c. published in 1674, in which it formed part of his argument that the liberties of Englishmen were anterior to the settlement of the English church, and could not be affected by discrepancies in their religious belief. He maintained that to live honestly, to do no injury to[Pg 9] another, and to give every man his due, was enough to entitle every native to English privileges. It was this, and not his religion, which gave him the great claim to the protection of the government under which he lived. Near three hundred years before Austin set his foot on English ground the inhabitants had a good constitution. This came not in with him. Neither did it come in with Luther; nor was it to go out with Calvin. We were a free people by the creation of God, by the redemption of Christ, and by the careful provision of our never-to-be-forgotten, honourable ancestors: so that our claim to these English privileges, rising higher than Protestantism, could never justly be invalidated on account of nonconformity to any tenet or fashion it might prescribe.

In the same year died Sir William Penn, in perfect harmony with his son, towards whom he now felt the most cordial regard and esteem, and to whom he bequeathed an estate computed at 1500l. a-year, a large sum in that age. Towards the end of the year he was again imprisoned in Newgate for six months, the statutable penalty for refusing to take the oath of allegiance which was maliciously tendered to him by a magistrate. This appears to have been the last absolute persecution for religion's sake which he endured. Religion in England has generally met with more toleration in proportion as it has been backed by the worldly importance of its professors: and though his poor brethren continued to suffer imprisonment in the stocks, fines, and whipping, as the penalty of their peaceable meetings for Divine worship, the wealthy proprietor, though he travelled largely, both in England and abroad, and laboured both in writing and in preaching, as the missionary of his sect, both escaped injury and acquired reputation and esteem by his self-devotion. To the favour of the king and the Duke of York he had a hereditary claim, which appears always to have been cheerfully acknowledged; and an instance of the rising consideration in which he was held appears in his being admitted to plead, before a Committee of the House of Commons, the request of[Pg 10] the Quakers that their solemn affirmation should be admitted in the place of an oath. An enactment to this effect passed the Commons in 1678, but was lost, in consequence of a prorogation, before it had passed the Lords. It was on this occasion that he made that appeal in behalf of general toleration, of which a part is quoted in the preceding page.

Penn married in 1672, and took up his abode at Rickmansworth, in Hertfordshire. In 1677 we find him removed to Worminghurst, in Sussex, which long continued to be his place of residence. His first engagement in the plantation of America was in 1676: in consequence of being chosen arbitrator in a dispute between two Quakers, who had become jointly concerned in the colony of New Jersey. Though nowise concerned, by interest or proprietorship (until 1681, when he purchased a share in the eastern district in New Jersey), he took great pains in this business; he arranged terms, upon which colonists were invited to settle; and he drew up the outline of a simple constitution, reserving to them the right of making all laws by their representatives, of security from imprisonment or fine except by the consent of twelve men of the neighbourhood, and perfect freedom in the exercise of their religion: "regulations," he said, "by an adherence to which they could never be brought into bondage but by their own consent." In these transactions he had the opportunity of contemplating the glorious results which might be hoped from a colony founded with no interested views, but on the principles of universal peace, toleration, and liberty: and he felt an earnest desire to be the instrument in so great a work, more especially as it held out a prospect of deliverance to his persecuted Quaker brethren in England, by giving them a free and happy asylum in a foreign land. Circumstances favoured his wish. The Crown was indebted to him 16,000l. for money advanced by the late Admiral for the naval service. It was not unusual to grant not only the property, but the right of government, in large districts in the uncleared part of America, as in the case of New York and New Jersey[Pg 11] respectively to the Duke of York and Lord Baltimore: and though it was hopeless to extract money from Charles, yet he was ready enough, in acquittal of this debt, to bestow on Penn, whom he loved, a tract of land from which he himself could never expect any pecuniary return. Accordingly, Penn received, in 1681, a grant by charter of that extensive province named Pennsylvania by Charles himself, in honour of the Admiral: by which charter he was invested with the property in the soil, with the power of ruling and governing the same; of enacting laws, with the advice and approbation of the freemen of the territory assembled for the raising of money for public uses; of appointing judges and administering justice. He immediately drew up and published 'Some Account of Pennsylvania,' &c.; and then 'Certain Conditions or Concessions,' &c. to be agreed on between himself and those who wished to purchase land in the province. These having been accepted by many persons, he proceeded to frame the rough sketch of a constitution, on which he proposed to base the charter of the province. The price fixed on land was forty shillings, with the annual quit-rent of one shilling, for one hundred acres: and it was provided that no one should, in word or deed, affront or wrong any Indian without incurring the same penalty as if the offence had been committed against a fellow planter; that strict precautions should be taken against fraud in the quality of goods sold to them; and that all differences between the two nations should be adjudged by twelve men, six of each. And he declares his intention "to leave myself and my successors no power of doing mischief; that the will of one man may not hinder the good of a whole country."

This constitution, as originally organised by Penn, consisted, says Mr. Clarkson, "of a Governor, a Council, and an Assembly; the two last of which were to be chosen by, and therefore to be the Representatives of, the people. The Governor was to be perpetual President, but he was to have but a treble vote. It was the office of the Council to prepare and propose bills; to see that[Pg 12] the laws were executed; to take care of the peace and safety of the province; to settle the situation of ports, cities, market-towns, roads, and other public places; to inspect the public treasury; to erect courts of justice; to institute schools for the virtuous education of youth; and to reward the authors of useful discovery. Not less than two-thirds of these were necessary to make a quorum, and the consent of not less than two-thirds of such quorum in all matters of moment. The Assembly were to have no deliberative power, but when bills were brought to them from the Governor and Council, were to pass or reject them by a plain Yes or No. They were to present Sheriffs and Justices of the Peace to the Governor; a double number, for his choice of half. They were to be chosen annually, and to be chosen by secret ballot." This groundwork was modified by Penn himself at later periods, and especially by removing that restriction which forbade the Assembly to debate, or to originate bills: and it was this, substantially, which Burke, in his 'Account of the European settlements in America,' describes as "that noble charter of privileges, by which he made them as free as any people in the world, and which has since drawn such vast numbers of so many different persuasions and such various countries to put themselves under the protection of his laws. He made the most perfect freedom, both religious and civil, the basis of his establishment; and this has done more towards the settling of the province, and towards the settling of it in a strong and permanent manner, than the wisest regulations could have done on any other plan."

In 1682 a number of settlers, principally Quakers, having been already sent out, Penn himself embarked for Pennsylvania, leaving his wife and children in England. On occasion of this parting, he addressed to them a long and affectionate letter, which presents a very beautiful picture of his domestic character, and affords a curious insight into the minute regularity of his daily habits. He landed on the banks of the Delaware in October, and forthwith summoned an assembly of the freemen of the province, by whom the frame of government, as it had[Pg 13] been promulgated in England, was accepted. Penn's principles did not suffer him to consider his title to the land as valid, without the consent of the natural owners of the soil. He had instructed persons to negotiate a treaty of sale with the Indian nations before his own departure from England; and one of his first acts was to hold that memorable Assembly, to which the history of the world offers none alike, at which this bargain was ratified, and a strict league of amity established. We do not find specified the exact date of this meeting, which took place under an enormous elm-tree, near the site of Philadelphia, and of which a few particulars only have been preserved by the uncertain record of tradition. Well and faithfully was that treaty of friendship kept by the wild denizens of the woods: "a friendship," says Proud, the historian of Pennsylvania, "which for the space of more than seventy years was never interrupted, or so long as the Quakers retained power in the government."

Penn remained in America until the middle of 1684. During this time much was done towards bringing the colony into prosperity and order. Twenty townships were established, containing upwards of 7000 Europeans; magistrates were appointed; representatives, as prescribed by the constitution, were chosen, and the necessary public business transacted. In 1683 Penn undertook a journey of discovery into the interior; and he has given an interesting account of the country in its wild state, in a letter written home to the Society of Free Traders to Pennsylvania. He held frequent conferences with the Indians, and contracted treaties of friendship with nineteen distinct tribes. His reasons for returning to England appear to have been twofold; partly the desire to settle a dispute between himself and Lord Baltimore, concerning the boundary of their provinces, but chiefly the hope of being able, by his personal influence, to lighten the sufferings and ameliorate the treatment of the Quakers in England. He reached England in October, 1684. Charles II. died in February, 1685. But this was rather favourable to Penn's credit at court; for, besides[Pg 14] that James appears to have felt a sincere regard for him, he required for his own church that toleration which Penn wished to see extended to all alike. This credit at court led to the renewal of an old and assuredly most groundless report, that Penn was at heart a Papist—nay, that he was in priest's orders, and a Jesuit: a report which gave him much uneasiness, and which he took much pains in public and in private to contradict. The same credit, and the natural and laudable affection and gratitude towards the Stuart family which he never dissembled, caused much trouble to him after the Revolution. He was continually suspected of plotting to restore the exiled dynasty; was four times arrested, and as often discharged in the total absence of all evidence against him. During the years 1691, 1692, and part of 1693, he remained in London, living, to avoid offence, in great seclusion: in the latter year he was heard in his own defence before the king and council, and informed that he need apprehend no molestation or injury.

The affairs of Pennsylvania fell into some confusion during Penn's long absence. Even in the peaceable sect of Quakers there were ambitious, bustling, and selfish men; and Penn was not satisfied with the conduct either of the Representative Assembly, or of those to whom he had delegated his own powers. He changed the latter two or three times, without effecting the restoration of harmony: and these troubles gave a pretext for depriving him of his powers as governor, in 1693. The real cause was probably the suspicion entertained of his treasonable correspondence with James II. But he was reinstated in August, 1694, by a royal order, in which it was complimentarily expressed that the disorders complained of were produced entirely by his absence. Anxious as he was to return, he did not find an opportunity till 1699: the interval was chiefly employed in religious travel through England and Ireland, and in the labour of controversial writing, from which he seldom had a long respite. His course as a philanthropist on his return to America is honourably marked by an endeavour to ameliorate the condition of Negro slaves. The society of[Pg 15] Quakers in Pennsylvania had already come to a resolution, that the buying, selling, and holding men in slavery was inconsistent with the tenets of the Christian religion: and following up this honourable declaration, Penn had no difficulty in obtaining for them free admission into the regular meetings for religious worship, and in procuring that other meetings should be holden for their particular benefit. The Quakers therefore merit our respect as the earliest, as well as some of the most zealous emancipators. Mr. Clarkson says, "When Penn procured the insertion of this resolution in the Monthly Meeting book of Philadelphia, he sealed as assuredly and effectually the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and the Emancipation of the Negroes within his own province, as when he procured the insertion of the minute relating to the Indians in the same book he sealed the civilization of the latter; for, from the time the subject became incorporated into the discipline of the Quakers, they never lost sight of it. Several of them began to refuse to purchase Negroes at all; and others to emancipate those which they had in their possession, and this of their own accord, and purely from the motives of religion; till at length it became a law of the society that no member could be concerned, directly or indirectly, either in buying and selling, or in holding them in bondage; and this law was carried so completely into effect, that in the year 1780, dispersed as the society was over a vast tract of country, there was not a single Negro as a slave in the possession of an acknowledged Quaker. This example, soon after it had begun, was followed by others of other religious denominations."

In labouring to secure kind treatment, to raise the character, and to promote the welfare of the Indians, Penn was active and constant, during this visit to America as before. The legislative measures which took place while he remained, and the bickerings between the Assembly and himself, we pass over, as belonging rather to a history of Pennsylvania than to the biography of its founder. For the same reason we omit the charges preferred against him by Dr. Franklin. The union in one[Pg 16] person of the rights belonging both to a governor and a proprietor, no doubt is open to objection; but this cannot be urged as a fault upon Penn; and we believe that it would be difficult to name any person who has used power and privilege with more disinterested views. That he was indifferent to his powers, or his emoluments, is not to be supposed, and ought not to have been expected. He spent large sums, he bestowed much pains upon the colony: and he felt and stated it to be a great grievance, that, whereas a provision was voted to the royal governor during the period of his own suspension, not so much as a table was kept for himself; and that, instead of contributing towards his expenses, even the trivial quit-rents which he had reserved remained unpaid: nay, it was sought by the Assembly, against all justice, to divert them from him, towards the support of the government. It is to be recollected that Franklin wrote for a political object, to overthrow the privileges which Penn's heirs enjoyed.

The Governor returned to England in 1701, to oppose a scheme agitated in Parliament for abolishing the proprietary governments, and placing the colonies immediately under royal control: the bill, however, was dropped before he arrived. He enjoyed Anne's favour, as he had that of her father and uncle, and resided much in the neighbourhood of the court, at Kensington and Knightsbridge. In his religious labours he continued constant, as heretofore. He was much harassed by a law-suit, the result of too much confidence in a dishonest steward: which being decided against him, he was obliged for a time to reside within the Rules of the Fleet Prison. This, and the expenses in which he had been involved by Pennsylvania, reduced him to distress, and in 1709 he mortgaged the province for 6,600l. In 1712 he agreed to sell his rights to the government for 12,000l., but was rendered unable to complete the transaction by three apoplectic fits, which followed each other in quick succession. He survived however in a tranquil and happy state, though with his bodily and mental vigour much broken, until July 30th, 1718, on[Pg 17] which day he died at his seat at Rushcomb, in Berkshire, where he had resided for some years.

His first wife died in 1693. He married a second time in 1696; and left a family of children by both wives, to whom he bequeathed his landed property in Europe and America. His rights of government he left in trust to the Earls of Oxford and Powlett, to be disposed of; but no sale being ever made, the government, with the title of Proprietaries, devolved on the surviving sons of the second family.

Penn's numerous works were collected, and a life prefixed to them, in 1726. Select editions of them have been since published. Mr. Clarkson's 'Life,' Proud's 'History of Pennsylvania,' and Franklin's 'Historical Review, &c. of Pennsylvania,' for a view of the exceptions which have been taken to Penn's character as a statesman, may be advantageously consulted.

[Pg 18]Joseph Addison was the eldest son of the Reverend Lancelot Addison, and was born at the parsonage of Milston in Wiltshire, of which his father was then rector, on the 1st of May, 1672. It is asserted by Thomas Tyers, in his 'Historical Essay on Mr. Addison,' that he was at first supposed to have been born dead; and it appears that even after he revived he was thought so little likely to live, that they had him baptized the same day. He was put to school, first at the neighbouring town of Amesbury, then at Salisbury, then, as Dr. Johnson was informed, at Lichfield, though probably only for a short time, on his father being made dean of Lichfield, and removing thither with his family in 1683; and thence he was sent to the Charter-house (not however upon the foundation) either in that or the following year. At the Charter-house he made his first acquaintance with Steele, whose name their long friendship[Pg 19] and the literary labours in which they were associated have for ever united with his.

In 1689 he was entered of Queen's College, Oxford (the same to which his father had belonged); but two years after he was elected a demy (or scholar) of Magdalen College, on the recommendation of Dr. Lancaster, afterwards provost of Queen's, who had been struck by some of Addison's Latin verses which he accidentally met with. To a date not long subsequent to this belong some both of his Latin and of his English poems that have been preserved, though they were not all published till many years afterwards. His first printed performance was a short address to Dryden, in English verse, which is dated Magd. Coll. Oxon, June 2, 1693, and which Dryden inserted in the 3rd vol. of his 'Miscellany Poems,' published in that year (p. 245 of the fourth edition, 1716). The 4th vol. of the 'Miscellany Poems' contains (pp. 6-17) 'A Translation of all Virgil's Fourth Georgic, except the story of Aristæus, by Mr. J. Addison, of Magd. Coll. Oxon.;' (pp. 20-22). 'A Song for St. Cecilia's Day, at Oxford, by Mr. J. Addison;' and (pp. 288-292). 'An Account (in verse) of the greatest English Poets,' by the same, dated April 3, 1694, and addressed to Mr. H. S., whom the writer styles his "dearest Harry," and who is no other than Sacheverell, the afterwards famous high-church parson. A verse translation by Sacheverell, of a portion of the first Georgic, dedicated to Dryden, is given in the same volume of the 'Miscellany Poems' (p. 148), in which Addison's first printed verses appeared. Spence (Anecdotes, edited by Singer, p.50) reports Pope to have stated that the letter to Sacheverell was not printed till after Addison's death; and this account has been commonly repeated. Pope is said to have added, "I dare say he would not have suffered it to be printed had he been living; for he himself used to speak of it as a poor thing. He wrote it when he was very young; and, as such, gave the characters of some of our best poets in it only by hearsay. Thus, his character of Chaucer is diametrically opposite to the truth;[Pg 20] he blames him for want of humour. The character he gives of Spenser is false too; and I have heard him say that he never read Spenser till fifteen years after he wrote it." It was not likely that the poem should have thus become the subject of conversation between Pope and Addison if it had not been printed, and if Addison, as is intimated, would gladly have concealed its existence. In other respects also the account here attributed to Pope is incorrect. Chaucer is not blamed for want of humour; he is expressly called a "merry bard;" and it is only affirmed that his wit has become obscure and his jests ineffective from the rust that has grown over his language. Spenser certainly is treated as a mere barbarian, and without the most distant suspicion of any of his real qualities. The most ambitious passage is that relating to Milton, beginning—

"But Milton next, with high and haughty stalks,
Unfettered in majestic numbers walks:"

a part of which has often been quoted. It is worth notice as evincing that the Paradise Lost was generally appreciated (for it has all the air of expressing a common or universal opinion) long before the appearance of the critical papers in the 'Spectator,' which many people suppose first Æneis) that it had been given him by a worthy friend who desired to have his name concealed; and the prose arguments throughout the translation, similarly acknowledged, were likewise furnished by Addison. Although he did not name Addison in reference to these contributions, Dryden in his 'Postscript to the Reader,' printed at the end of his translation, pays a compliment to "the most ingenious Mr. Addison of Oxford," after whose bees, he says, his own later swarm is scarcely worth the hiving, alluding to the version of the fourth Georgic. About this time also were written some, at least, of the[Pg 21] Latin poems which were first printed, under Addison's own care, in the second volume of the 'Musarum Anglicanarum Analecta,' published in 1699:—the 'Barometri Descriptio;' 'Πυγμαιογερανομαχία, sive Prælium inter Pygmæos et Grues commissum;' 'Sphæristerium' ('The Bowling Green'); 'Machinæ Gesticulantes' ('The Puppet Show'); and two or three other shorter pieces. That on the peace of Ryswick, entitled 'Pax Gulielmi Auspiciis Europæ reddita,' also contained in that collection, had, we believe, been printed before in 1697.

Addison took his degree of M.A. 14th February, 1693; and at this time it was his intention to enter the church, as he intimates in the conclusion of his letter to Sacheverell. There has been some dispute about the motives which changed this purpose; his friend and literary executor, Tickell (Preface to his collected works), represents him as having been actuated by a "remarkable seriousness and modesty," which made him think the duties of the priesthood too weighty for him. Steele, however (Preface to the second edition of The Drummer), insists that the true reason was the interference of Lord Halifax (then Mr. Charles Montague), who held out more inviting prospects to him in another direction. Appealing to Congreve, to whom the preface is addressed, Steele says, "As you were the inducement of his becoming acquainted with my Lord Halifax, I doubt not but you remember the warm instances that noble lord made to the head of the college, not to insist upon Mr. Addison's going into orders." Soon after this introduction to Montague, he addressed, in 1695, a poem to Lord Keeper Somers on one of King William's campaigns, which was followed in 1697 by the Latin verses on the peace of Ryswick, already mentioned; but it was not till after two years more of expectation, or, at least, of getting nothing, that he at last obtained through Somers a pension from the crown of 300l. a-year, to enable him to travel. He first took up his residence for above a year at Blois, probably, as Johnson suggests, to learn the French language. Spence (Anecdotes, p. 184) gives the following[Pg 22] account as received from the Abbé Philippeaux, who remembered him there: "He would rise as early as between two or three in the height of summer, and lie abed till between eleven and twelve in the depth of winter. He was untalkative whilst here, and often thoughtful; sometimes so lost in thought that I have come into his room and staid five minutes there before he has known any thing of it. He had his masters generally at supper with him, kept very little company beside, and had no amour whilst there that I know of; and I think I should have known it if he had had any." It must have been before his going abroad, we may here observe, that Addison acquired his habit of indulgence in wine, if what Spence was told by Dennis (Anecdotes, p. 45) be true, that although Dryden was generally an extremely sober man, for the last ten years of his life, during which he was much acquainted with Addison, he drank with him more than he ever used to do, "probably so far as to hasten his end." But this account would carry us back to Addison's nineteenth year, which seems an early date for either his hard drinking, or so great an intimacy with Dryden.

Addison remained abroad, principally in Italy, till the death of King William, in the spring of 1702, deprived him both of his pension and of an appointment which he expected to receive as secretary to Prince Eugene. Swift, in some lines quoted by Tyers, affirms that he was compelled by his pecuniary difficulties to become the tutor of a travelling squire; and the meanness of his appearance when he returned to England is said to have given visible testimony of his poverty. While abroad, he wrote, in 1701, his "Letter from Italy" to Montague, which has generally been regarded as the happiest of his poetical productions. During his residence in Italy, also, he is said to have written his 'Dialogues on Medals,' which, however, were not published till after his death. Signor Ficoroni told Spence (Anecdotes, p. 93) that he did not go any depth in that study: "All the knowledge he had of that kind," said Ficoroni, "I believe he had from me, and I did not give him above[Pg 23] twenty lessons upon that subject." Here, too, according to Tickell, he wrote the first four acts of his Cato; and Tonson told Spence (Anecdotes, p. 46) that he actually saw them when he met Addison accidentally, on his return, at Rotterdam. But Dr. Young, in a note which Spence has appended to this statement, assures us that, to his knowledge, all the five acts were written at Oxford, and sent from thence to Dryden. If so, it would have been interesting to know what Dryden thought of the play, of which, when the author brought it to Pope, as just finished, many years after, that poet gave it as his opinion that he had better not act it, and that he would get reputation enough by only printing it, thinking the lines well written, but the piece not theatrical enough (Spence, p. 196). Notwithstanding Young's confident assertion, it seems certain that the fifth act was either not written at all till long after the time of which he speaks, or was, at least, entirely re-written at a much later date.

Very soon after his return from Italy, Addison published his 'Travels,' inscribing the volume to Lord Somers. It was at first received somewhat coldly; but Tickell states that the price rose to five times its original amount before the second edition appeared. His friends, however, being now out of power, nothing was done for Addison for some time, and how he managed to subsist we are not informed. The first thing we hear of him is his engagement by Godolphin, on the recommendation of Lord Halifax, to celebrate the victory of Blenheim, gained in August, 1704, which produced his poem entitled 'The Campaign,' published in the end of that or beginning of the following year. This performance brought him a great accession of fame; and it also opened to him a career of prosperity which was never interrupted. While the poem was still unfinished, being advanced only to the celebrated simile of the angel, which occurs a little past the middle, it was read or communicated to Godolphin, who was so pleased with it that he immediately appointed the author to the place of one of the excise commissioners of appeal, just become[Pg 24] vacant by the death of Locke. Locke died on the 28th of October, and it appears that the new commission in which Addison's name was inserted was made out on the 16th of November. (Beatson's Political Index, ii. 375.) This post, it may be presumed, was very nearly or altogether a sinecure; Addison, whose duties were perhaps done for him by the other four commissioners, continued to hold it till he lost all his appointments on the change of ministry in 1710. In 1705 he is said by Niceron, in 'Mémoires des Hommes illustres' (xxxi. 71), to have attended Halifax to Hanover; but the fact, though it has been generally admitted, would seem to be more than doubtful if it rest only on that authority. In the following year, 1706, according to Tickell, he was selected to be under-secretary to Sir Charles Hedges, secretary of state; and when Hedges was, in December of that year, succeeded by the Earl of Sunderland, Addison continued to serve under the new secretary. The 'Biographia Britannica,' however, is mistaken in representing Hedges as having been newly appointed to office when Addison became under-secretary: he had been secretary of state since May, 1702. In 1707 Addison published, anonymously, a pamphlet in support of the government, entitled 'The Present State of the War,' which, although he is not known to have acknowledged it during his life, is printed in Tickell's edition of his collected works. This year, also, he wrote and published his opera of 'Rosamond,' by way of an attempt to supersede or cope with the Italian opera by a similar combination of music and recitative in the vernacular tongue; but, although the poetry has since been greatly admired, the piece was unsuccessful when brought out upon the stage, principally, it is said, owing to the indifferent style in which the songs were set to music. It has since been reset by Arnold. Besides his primary or more professed object of rivalling the Italian opera, Addison took an opportunity, in this production, of paying his court to the master of the ministry, the Duke of Marlborough, whose praises it celebrated in a very flattering strain, and to whose wife, the celebrated[Pg 25] Duchess Sarah, the author inscribed it on its publication. About the same time, the 'Biographia Britannica' states, he assisted Steele in his comedy of the 'Tender Husband;' but that drama was published two years before 'Rosamond.' Addison wrote the prologue spoken when it was acted at Drury Lane; and when it was soon after published, Steele dedicated it to his friend, in an address in which he acknowledges that he had been indebted to him for several of the most successful scenes. In the beginning of the year 1709, when the Earl (afterwards Marquis) of Wharton, father of the more notorious duke, who some years later became, for a short time, the patron of Young, went over as Lord Lieutenant to Ireland, he took Addison with him as his secretary; and the latter was, at the same time, appointed to the sinecure office of keeper of the records in Birmingham Tower, with a salary augmented to 300l. a year. He was in Dublin when the 'Tatler' was commenced in London by Steele, on the 12th of April; and Addison is said to have detected his friend by a remark on Virgil in one of the papers, which he recollected having communicated to him: it may be found in No. 6, published the 23rd of April, 1709. Addison soon after became a contributor; his first paper formed part of No. 20, which appeared on the 26th of May, and he soon took a larger share in the work than any other writer, except Steele. In his preface to the first collected edition, Steele acknowledged his obligations with his characteristic generosity and warmth of expression: "I have only one gentleman, who will be nameless, to thank for any frequent assistance to me, which, indeed, it would have been barbarous in him to have denied to one with whom he has lived in an intimacy from childhood, considering the great ease with which he is able to despatch the most entertaining pieces of this nature. This good office he performed with such force of genius, humour, wit, and learning, that I fared like a distressed prince who calls in a powerful neighbour to his aid: I was undone by my auxiliary; when I had once called him in, I could not subsist without dependence on him." Yet Addison's contributions to the 'Tatler'[Pg 26] scarcely amount to a fourth part of Steele's. We may here complete the account of the literary partnership of the two friends in the other periodical papers to which the success of this first undertaking in that line gave birth. The 'Tatler,' published thrice a week, was dropped with the 271st number, published the 2nd of January, 1711; the first number of the 'Spectator' appeared on the 1st of March following, and it was continued at the rate of a paper every day, except Sundays, till the 6th of December, 1712, when it was concluded with No. 555. The quantity of Addison's contributions to this first series of the 'Spectator' probably rather exceeds that of Steele's, and does not amount to much less than half of the work. To the first volume of the 'Guardian,' extending also at the rate of six papers a week, from the 12th of March, 1713, to the 15th of June in the same year, he contributed one paper only; but of the ninety-two papers composing the second and concluding volume, about fifty are assigned to Addison. The 'Guardian' terminated with No. 175, published the 1st of October, 1713; and then the 'Spectator' was revived on the 18th of June, 1714, and carried on, as a thrice-a-week paper, till the 20th of December. Of the eighty papers composing the second series of the 'Spectator' (to which Steele did not contribute), Addison is understood to have written twenty-four, all published before the 1st of October; he is not supposed to have had any concern with the work for the remaining three months of its existence.

A change in the political world had left him abundant leisure for literature during the greater part of the time that these publications were going on. The ministerial revolution which took place in the summer of 1710, although it was not completed till the dismissal of Godolphin in the beginning of August, appears to have jerked Addison out of office at the first shock: a new board of commissioners of appeal was appointed on the 25th of May, from which he was left out, and we may conjecture that he lost his Irish secretaryship and his place of keeper of the records about the same time. From this date he remained without any public employment for more than[Pg 27] four years; which interval, however, offers a few matters requiring notice besides his connexion with the 'Tatler,' 'Spectator,' and 'Guardian.' In September and October, 1710, he took his revenge on the new Tory ministry in a series of anonymous papers, five in all, published under the title of 'The Whig Examiner,' which are, of all the effusions of his wit and humour, perhaps the most exuberant and the most caustic. In 1711 he purchased an estate at Bilton, in Warwickshire, for 10,000l.: it is difficult to understand where he got the money, or any part of it, although he is said to have been assisted by his brother Gulston, who was governor of Madras. Gulston had obtained the appointment, according to Oldmixon, through his brother's interest; and this writer adds that when he died Addison got six or seven thousand pounds by the sale of his effects. "The first printed account of Addison's," says Tyers, alluding perhaps to the article in the 'General Biographical Dictionary,' "supposes that the death of his brother in the East Indies put him into plentiful circumstances". Early in 1712 his acquaintance with Pope commenced; he had already lived on intimate terms with Pope's friend Swift, while in Ireland, notwithstanding the opposition of their politics; and Pope and he were probably now brought together by Steele. In April, 1713, occurred one of the most memorable events in Addison's history—the performance and publication of his tragedy of 'Cato.' The 'Biographia Britannica,' Johnson, and most of the accounts state that it had a run of thirty-five successive nights; but, according to Baker's 'Biographia Dramatica' (Reed's edition), the number of times it was acted during its first run was only eighteen. Be this as it may, there is no doubt about its having been received with immense applause; to which it is equally undoubted that the political feeling of the moment contributed no inconsiderable share. "The Whigs," as Johnson puts it, "applauded every line in which liberty was mentioned, as a satire on the Tories; and the Tories echoed every clap to show that the satire was unfelt." This year, too, Addison wrote another political pamphlet, 'The late Trial and Conviction of Count Tariff,' an[Pg 28] attack upon the French commercial treaty, which, although published without his name, has been authenticated as his by being included in the complete edition of his works published by his executor after his death.

After the death of Queen Anne, in August, 1714, he was appointed secretary to the lords of the regency; and when King George came over it is said that there was some thought of making him secretary of state, if he could have been prevailed upon to accept the post. This is distinctly asserted by Tyers, and some particulars are given confirmatory of the story in his 'Historical Essay,' pp. 53-55. He was, in fact, reappointed in the first instance to his former office of secretary to the lord lieutenant of Ireland, now the Earl of Sunderland, under whom he had already served in another department; and when this arrangement was broken up by the almost immediate removal of Sunderland, Addison was made one of the lords of trade early in 1715. It was in the month of June of that year that the memorable incident occurred of the publication by Tickell of a translation of the first book of the Iliad, suspected to have been written by Addison, at the same moment at which the first volume of Pope's translation came out; a proceeding which turned a coldness that had for some time subsisted between Addison and Pope into a complete separation, and is understood to have prompted the well-known lines in which the character of Addison is sketched with so much severity by Pope, now inserted in the Prologue to the Satires, which was not published till after Addison's death, although this particular passage was certainly written and also handed about some years before that event. The most minute and elaborate investigation of the circumstances of this curious affair is contained in a long note on the article 'Addison' in Kippis's edition of the 'Biographia Britannica,' which is known to have been drawn up by Sir William Blackstone. (See also Spence's 'Anecdotes,' pp. 146-149.) In this same year (1715), too, was published, and likewise brought out on the stage, though with no success, the comedy of 'The[Pg 29] Drummer, or the Haunted House,' which Addison gave to Steele, and which the latter reprinted in 1722, with a preface addressed to Congreve, stating his conviction of its being by Addison, after it had been omitted in Tickell's collection. No doubt is now entertained that Addison is really the author of this piece: indeed, we have direct evidence of his having acknowledged it as his; Theobald, in a note upon the first act of Beaumont and Fletcher's 'Scornful Lady,' speaking of the character of Savil, states that Addison told him he had sketched out his character of Vellum in 'The Drummer' purely from that model. These speculations on the public discernment, however, did not occupy all his leisure. On the 23rd of September in this year, soon after the breaking out of the rebellion, he commenced a political periodical paper, in defence of the established government, under the title of 'The Freeholder,' which he kept up with great spirit, at the rate of two numbers a week, till the 29th of June in the next year. On the 2nd of August, 1716, he married Charlotte, Countess Dowager of Warwick and Holland (who had been a widow for fifteen years), after a long suit, which Johnson quotes Spence's MS. as representing to have commenced in Addison's acting as tutor to her son, the young earl; although it does not appear at what time of his life he could well have been employed in that capacity, unless, indeed, we are to adopt the notion of Tyers, who seems to think that the earl may have been the person to whom Swift speaks of Addison having acted as travelling tutor before his return from Italy in 1702. In the printed edition of Spence's 'Anecdotes,' all that we find (p. 48) is an assertion of Tonson, the bookseller, that he had thoughts of getting the lady "from his first being recommended into the family." The marriage made him nominal master of the mansion now called Holland House, but is understood to have added nothing to his happiness; the countess, it seems, holding it to be her right, or her duty, to make up for her condescension in giving him her hand by never[Pg 30] forgetting the difference of their rank in her after-behaviour.

On the 16th of April, 1717, after the breaking-up of the administration of Walpole and Townshend, Addison was elevated to a place in the new cabinet as one of the principal secretaries of state, Sunderland being the other. Pope told Spence ('Anecdotes,' p. 47) that Addison accepted this appointment "to oblige the Countess of Warwick, and to qualify himself to be owned for her husband." It was, in his opinion, "the worst step Addison ever took"—even his marriage itself is not stated to have been mentioned as an exception. Tyers gives a passage from a letter written about the time by Lady M.W. Montague to Pope, in which she says, "I know that the post was almost offered to him before. Such a post as that, and such a wife as the countess, do not seem to be in prudence eligible for a man that is asthmatic; and we may see the day when he will be heartily glad to resign them both." Addison was first returned to parliament for Lostwithiel, at the general election in 1708; but, after sitting from 18th November, 1708, to 20th December, 1709, he was declared to have been not duly elected; he was then returned for Malmesbury, on a vacancy occurring for that place, in March, 1710, within a month of the close of the same parliament; and he continued to represent Malmesbury till his death, having been re-elected in 1710, 1714, 1715, 1716 (on his being made a lord of trade), and 1717 (on being made secretary of state and a privy councillor). It was the Marquis of Wharton, Young told Spence, who first got him a seat in the House of Commons (Anecdotes, p. 350). But he never spoke in the House (although there are traditions of his having once made the attempt); and, with all his readiness as a writer in his proper line, he is said to have proved almost equally inefficient in the ordinary business of his office. The consequence was, that, after bearing up under these discouraging circumstances for not quite a twelvemonth, he resigned his secretaryship on the plea of ill health, and retired on a pension of[Pg 31] 1500l. (Tyers says 1700l.) a year. His friend Craggs was appointed his "successor on the 14th of March, 1718. In thus relinquishing, however, somewhat ingloriously, the race of political ambition, he did not cease to take an interest in the politics of the day. In the early part of the following year he engaged in a public controversy with his old friend Steele on the subject of the government bill for the limitation of the peerage, in defence of which, and in reply to Steele's paper called 'The Plebeian,' he published two pamphlets, under the title of 'The Old Whig,' Nos. 1 and 2. They were published anonymously, and were not reprinted by Tickell; but no doubt has ever been entertained of their having been written by Addison: Steele himself, in his rejoinder at the time, plainly intimated that he took them to be his; and the contemptuous style in which 'The Old Whig' spoke of his antagonist as "little Dickey," is understood to have broken off the friendly intercourse which had subsisted between them from boyhood. An unfinished treatise on the 'Evidences of the Christian Religion,' which was printed in Tickell's edition of his works, was another fruit of Addison's leisure after he retired from office; composed, according to Pope, when, having broken down, or sunk in character, as a politician, he thought of returning to the profession for which he was originally designed, and had an eye to the lawn (Spence's Anecdotes, p. 192). But his health soon completely gave way; he was attacked by a shortness of breath, which was followed by a dropsy; and he expired at Holland House on the 17th of June, 1719. Tyers mentions that Tacitus Gordon (that is, Gordon the translator of Tacitus) used to say that he killed himself drinking the Widow Trueby's water (for a eulogy upon the virtues of which the reader may consult the 'Spectator,' No. 329). By the Countess of Warwick (Charlotte, only daughter of Sir Thomas Middleton, of Chirk Castle, Denbighshire, and a grand-daughter of Sir Orlando Bridgman, keeper of the great seal in the reign of Charles II., who survived him several years) Addison left a daughter, who died unmarried in 1797. Tyers[Pg 32] (p. 56) quotes Oldmixon as stating, in his 'History of England,' that to this daughter and to Lady Warwick he left his fortune, amounting to about 12,000l.; and he further mentions (p. 63) that Mr. Symonds, professor of Modern History at Cambridge, had told him that Miss Addison was then (in 1783) in the enjoyment of an income of more than 1200l. a year. The accounts we have of this lady differ somewhat. "She inherited her father's memory," says the notice of her death in the 'Annual Register' (xxxix. 12), "but none of the discriminating powers of his understanding: with the retentive powers of Jedediah Buxton, she was a perfect imbecile. She could go on in any part of her father's works, or repeat the whole, but was incapable of speaking or writing an intelligible sentence." In the 'Beauties of England,' however (Warwickshire, p. 81), it is said, "She is mentioned with love and veneration by the neighbouring peasantry; and several articles in her will creditably evince her charitable disposition." She left her estate to a younger son of Lord Bradford, to whom she was related through her mother. Addison's library, which had remained entire throughout her lifetime, was sold by Messrs. Leigh and Sotheby, in May, 1799, in 856 lots, for 456l. 2s. 9d.

Anecdotes of Addison's private life, and traits of his habits and character, have been handed down in great abundance by Spence and others; so that, although there is little or nothing avowedly autobiographical in his own writings, we have, perhaps, as complete a picture of the man as of any other individual of that age of celebrated wits. He was, undoubtedly, accounted one of the principal figures of his time; and even now there is scarcely any other name of that day with which the world is more generally familiar. That he occupied so much of the eye of the world in his own day, he owed in part to the eminence of his social position; and there were also some points both in his moral and intellectual nature that were especially fitted to establish him in the favour of the most numerous class of the reading public. Neither his writings nor his conduct offered anything to startle[Pg 33] or discompose commonly received notions. The conventional proprieties, which make so large a part of the general morality, were in no danger of being rudely disturbed by anything he was likely either to write or to do. Some of the social habits attributed to him would seem to betray a greater cordiality or robustness of original nature than he commonly showed; but even his love of wine is not recorded to have ever been suffered to carry him beyond a safe limit; he went to the length he did in that indulgence, because, perhaps from the coldness of his constitution, he could stand more hard drinking than the generality of other men without losing his caution and regard to appearances. The strongest testimony has been borne by those who knew him intimately to the charms of his conversation when he felt himself free from all restraint. "He was," says Steele, "above all men in that talent called humour, and enjoyed it in such perfection that I have often reflected, after a night spent with him apart from all the world, that I had had the pleasure of conversing with an intimate acquaintance of Terence and Catullus, who had all their wit and nature, heightened with humour more exquisite and delightful than any other man ever possessed." (Preface to The Drummer. Lady Mary Wortley Montague told Spence that "Addison was the best company in the world." Anecdotes, p. 232.) Dr. Young's account was, that though he was rather mute in society on some occasions, "when he began to be company, he was full of vivacity, and went on in a noble stream of thought and language, so as to chain the attention of every one to him" (p. 335). "Addison," said Pope, "was perfect good company with intimates; and had something more charming in his conversation than I ever knew in any other man" (p. 50). But this was only when there was no one by of whom he was afraid. "With any mixture of strangers," Pope added "and sometimes only with one, he seemed to preserve his dignity much, with a stiff sort of silence." Young admitted that he "was not free with his superiors." Johnson quotes Lord Chesterfield as somewhere affirming that "Addison was the most[Pg 34] timorous and awkward man that he ever knew." Coarser minds, again, from the formality and stiffness of manner in which he wrapped himself up from their inspection, were led to set him down for a mere piece of hypocrisy and cant. Mandeville, the author of the 'Fable of the Bees,' after an evening's conversation with him, characterized him as a "parson in a tye-wig;" and Tonson, who hated parsons in any kind of wigs as much as Mandeville, and who, besides, had quarrelled with Addison, and did not like him, used to say of him after he had quitted his secretaryship, "One day or other you'll see that man a bishop! I'm sure he looks that way; and, indeed, I ever thought him a priest in his heart." (Spence, p. 200.) It must be acknowledged that this caution and cowardice spoiled Addison's character in some points of great importance; he was not a man on whom his friends could rely; and the way in which he lost or offended more than one of them was not to his credit. In his conduct both to Pope and to Steele, there was something underhand and treacherous—something of the "willing to wound, but yet afraid to strike," which the former has imputed to him. To Gay, again, he seems to have behaved ill without having been either detected or suspected at the time. A fortnight before his death he sent Lord Warwick for Gay, who had not gone to see him for a great while; and when they met, Addison told him "that he had desired this visit to beg his pardon; that he had injured him greatly; but that if he lived he should find that he would make it up to him." (Spence, p. 150.) Here again we see the conscientiousness of the man struggling with, and in the end, very nobly mastering, his more ignoble propensities; for it would be a great mistake to conclude from these instances of deceit and littleness, that the regard he professed for virtue was not both real and deeply felt. In part the restraint he put upon his outward behaviour may be attributed to his dread of public opinion, and his desire to stand well with the very numerous class whose judgment is principally swayed by such decorum and propriety of mere demeanour: in part he seems to have[Pg 35] done violence in this way to higher qualities which were in his nature, and to have checked the growth both of principles and powers which might have made his whole humanity a finer and higher thing than it really was; but there can be no doubt whatever, for all that, that he was a sincere and zealous friend both to morality and religion. He had his weaknesses, like all men; and in some respects, he even led a somewhat free life, when he was out of the public eye; but "of his virtue," as Johnson has observed, "it is a sufficient testimony that the resentment of party has transmitted no charge of any crime." The pious composure in which he died, as evinced by the anecdote of his parting interview with the young nobleman, his step-son,—first told by Dr. Young in his 'Conjectures on Original Composition,' published in 1759, though previously alluded to by Tickell, in his Elegy on Addison—is known to most readers. Dr. Young's words are:—"After a long and manly, but vain struggle with his distemper, he dismissed his physicians, and with them all hopes of life. But with his hopes of life he dismissed not his concern for the living, but sent for a youth nearly related, and finely accomplished, but not above being the better for good impressions from a dying friend. He came; but, life now glimmering in the socket, the dying friend was silent: after a decent and proper pause, the youth said, 'Dear Sir, you sent for me; I believe and hope that you have some commands: I shall hold them most sacred.' May distant ages not only hear but feel the reply. Forcibly grasping the youth's hand, he softly said, 'See in what peace a Christian can die.' He spoke with difficulty, and soon expired." Lord Warwick did not long survive his step-father: he died at the age of twenty-three, in August, 1721. Tyers says that "he was esteemed a man of great parts."

Addison's writings present something of the same struggle of opposite principles or tendencies which we find in his character as a man, resulting likewise in the same general effect, of the absence of everything offensive combined with some qualities of high, but none[Pg 36] perhaps of the highest, excellence. Notwithstanding all the hesitation and embarrassment he is said to have shown on some occasions in the performance of his official duties, so that a common clerk would have to be called in to draw up a despatch which could not wait for his more scrupulous selection of phraseology, he usually wrote easily and rapidly. "When he had taken his resolution," Steele has told us, "or made his plan for what he designed to write, he would walk about a room and dictate it into language with as much freedom and ease as any one could write it down, and attend to the coherence and grammar of what he dictated." (Preface to The Drummer.) Pope told Spence, however, that, though he wrote very fluently, "he was sometimes very slow and scrupulous in correcting." "He would show his verses," said Pope, "to several friends, and would alter almost everything that any of them hinted at as wrong. He seemed to be too diffident of himself, and too much concerned about his character as a poet; or, as he worded it, 'too solicitous for that kind of praise, which, God knows, is but a very little matter after all.'" (Anecdotes, p. 49.) By this way of expressing himself, he probably meant to mortify Pope, as well as to make amends, by a piece of moral profession, for his too anxious pursuit of an object which he had neither the self-control to relinquish, nor the heart to enjoy. To Pope he seemed to value himself more upon his poetry than his prose. (Spence, p. 257.) Except, however, in some of his Latin poems, he has scarcely given any example in verse of that easy humour and lively description in which he certainly most excelled. As a writer of serious and elevated poetry, he must be ranked, even without reference to the claims of the school to which he belongs, as standing only a little way above ordinary writers. His 'Cato,' his most ambitious effort, has some stately rhetoric in the principal scenes; but scarcely anything either of true poetic fire, or of the dramatic spirit. Even of strength and beauty of imagination, he has shown much more in his prose than in his poetry; so much, indeed, in one or two instances, as to seem to prove that what he most wanted[Pg 37] to make him a much greater poet was only more self-confidence and daring. There is far more poetry in his prose 'Vision of Mirza' and his 'Roger de Coverley,' than in all the verse he ever wrote. But his most remarkable and peculiar quality, and that in which he most overflowed, was undoubtedly his light, graceful, delicate humour; never, indeed, rising to anything very subtle or aerial; seldom pouring itself out in any rush of mere derisive mirth; not dazzling us with its sparkles of wit and fancy; but with its quiet, even, smiling stream refreshing and illuminating all things, and awakening a pleasurable sense of the ludicrous probably in a larger number and greater variety of minds than any other writer ever succeeded in touching with that emotion. It is the only humour, perhaps, that is perfectly to the satisfaction of the great multitude of reading men and women, who find Swift and Sterne revolting, and Shakspere unintelligible, but to whom Addison enlivens the picture of their familiar daily life, or the general aspect of human society and human nature, with a bright transparent varnish, the effect of which has nothing in it to startle the most simple understanding. A great change of manners, however, and a considerable change of taste, are fast diminishing the once universal popularity of the 'Tatler' and 'Spectator;' and they will probably very soon be little read. Addison's prose has been praised by Johnson as "the model of the middle style;" and, while it is eminently easy, unaffected, and perspicuous, it has a fair degree of purity, and often considerable melody and grace of expression. But, with all its merits, it has scarcely character enough to maintain itself as a model; and it may be apprehended that it is a rare thing now for any one "to give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison," as Johnson recommends, whatever description of English style he wishes to attain. (From the Biographical Dictionary of the Society of Useful Knowledge.)

[Pg 38]John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, the restorer of the tarnished lustre of British arms, the ablest general and one of the most consummate statesmen of his times, was born at Ashe in Devonshire, on the 24th of June, 1650, just five days before Oliver Cromwell marched into Scotland, to open that memorable campaign which was terminated by his great victory at Dunbar. As devoted royalists, the Churchills were at this time under a cloud.

Our hero was the second son of Sir Winston Churchill, a gentleman of ancient family (said to have been settled in the West of England ever since the Norman conquest) whose fortunes had suffered severely during the civil wars, through his steady adherence to Charles I. Sir Winston's wife, and the mother of his numerous family, was Elizabeth, daughter of Sir John Drake of Ashe, who came of the same good old Devonshire stock as Sir Francis Drake, that illustrious warrior and circumnavigator[Pg 39] of the Elizabethan age. It should appear that during their season of eclipse, the Churchills were almost entirely dependent on the more fortunate Drakes, who had sided with the Parliamentarians. During his childhood and boyhood John Churchill was familiarised with straits and privations, and with many of the unpleasantnesses attendant on poverty. This may have strengthened his character, and have quickened his reflection and mental resources; but it may also have implanted in his nature that love of money with which he was very generally reproached in after life. One day, in his old age, when he was wealthy as well as famous, as he was looking over some papers in his scrutoire with General Lord Cadogan, he opened one of the little drawers, took out a green purse, turned some broad pieces out of it, and, after viewing them for some time with a satisfaction that appeared very visibly in his face, he said, "Cadogan, observe these pieces well; they deserve to be observed! There are just forty of them: 'tis the very first sum I ever got in my life, and I have kept them always unbroken from that time to this day." "This," adds Pope, who told the anecdote, "shows how early and how strong this passion must have been upon him." But it may also show that Marlborough's first forty pieces had been obtained with vast difficulty. On the restoration in 1660 his father was among the vast crowd of suffering royalists who put in their claims of compensation or reward to an extravagant and heartless prince. Sir Winston Churchill was far more successful than the majority of these impatient supplicants, and than many men who had not suffered less, and who had done far more than he for the royal cause. He was rewarded with a place at the Board of Green Cloth, and sundry small offices under the crown for himself, and with the more questionable benefit of appointments for his children in the profligate court of Charles II. Arabella Churchill, his daughter, became, in the first place, maid of honour to the Duchess of York (Anne Hyde), and next, mistress to her husband the Duke, afterwards James II.; and John Churchill, our hero, who was appointed page[Pg 40] to the same prince, indisputably owed his early advancement to his sister's disgraceful connexion with royalty. They were a remarkably handsome race. Arabella Churchill was the only one of James II.'s many mistresses that had any pretension to beauty. Charles II. said that his brother chose his ugly favourites as penances. One of the moral favourites is reported to have said herself, "I know not for what he chose us; we were none of us handsome, and if any of us had wit he was too dull to find it out!" It is remarkable that one of the fruits of the connexion between James and Arabella Churchill, James Fitzjames, Duke of Berwick, proved a commander of renown only less illustrious than his maternal uncle Marlborough.

The natural genius and merits of young John Churchill were, however, of far too high an order to be solely dependent on the patronage which had sullied the honour of his house. He would have found his way to greatness if James had never seen his sister. Not even a neglected education could dwarf his abilities or stop his rise. Except the practical self-tuition he afterwards gave himself, his education was confined to a short residence at St. Paul's school, London; but here he gave early indications of spirit and intelligence, although he failed to acquire that taste and love of literature which must ever form one of the elements of a completely great man. This deficiency, and his want of sympathy with men of letters, added to his want of liberality, were not without their seriously injurious effects on his fortune and reputation in after-life. Except Addison and Prior, the poets bestowed but a forced and stinted praise on his great exploits when his political party was all prevalent in the state and omnipotent at court; and when that party fell, through a court intrigue, they were nearly one and all banded against the duke,—as, also be it said, against patriotism, honour, and common sense.

His desire for a military life having been gratified, at a very early age, by his patron the Duke of York, Churchill did not play the easy part of a carpet-knight, or courtly soldier. He entered upon active service;[Pg 41] he was eager to learn his profession in actual warfare, and he distinguished himself in each of his early campaigns. In the brave defence of Tangiers against the Moors, he gained his first laurels. He had his part in the successive operations in which the English troops shared as auxiliaries to the armies of Louis XIV., during the unprincipled alliance of Charles II. with that monarch against the Dutch and William Prince of Orange (subsequently William III. of England). Here he witnessed the operations—the sieges and campaigns—of some of the most accomplished generals of modern Europe, and began to learn the art of handling great masses of troops,—an art not to be possessed by intuition or to be acquired by brief practice, and which few English-born commanders had then (or have now) the means of acquiring. The wickedness of the cause apart, Churchill could not have been placed in a better school. On the great theatre of continental warfare—the Low Countries, where he afterwards gained immortal renown as a soldier—he continued to serve from 1672 to 1677. His brilliant courage and ability, and attention to the details of duty (without which no officer will ever achieve greatness) no less than the singular graces of his person, attracted the notice of the French marshals, and the illustrious Turenne predicted that "his handsome Englishman" would one day be a thorough master of the art of war.

On the conclusion of the peace of Nimeguen, Churchill, with the rank of colonel, returned to England, where he was soon happily rescued from a career of dissipation and licentiousness (the habitual life of all the men of fashion of that generation) by an ardent and constant attachment for the celebrated woman who became his wife, and who, for good and evil, influenced the whole tenor of his subsequent life. This was Sarah Jennings, a young lady of birth, genius, and exquisite beauty, whose irreproachable purity in a most vicious age, and in the very midst of the temptations of the court, would have rendered her worthy of the uxorious love of the hero, if her imperious temper had not disgraced his submission to[Pg 42] its tyranny, cooled or alienated his political friends, and finally embittered his own domestic peace. She was daughter and co-heir of Richard Jennings, Esq., of Sandridge, near St. Albans, in Hertfordshire. She had been placed, like Churchill himself, at an early age, in the household of the Duke and Duchess of York, where she had become the favourite associate of their daughter the Princess Anne, and had acquired over the future queen that commanding influence which it belongs to the stronger to exercise over the weaker mind. Her marriage separated neither her husband nor herself from their services in the ducal household. Churchill was confidentially employed by the Duke of York on many political occasions, and was the secret agent in whom he most trusted; and when his daughter the Princess Anne was married to George, Prince of Denmark, Lady Churchill was, by the princess's express desire, made a lady of her bedchamber. According to Anne's own passionate declarations, she could not live without her charming friend,—the chosen and constant companion of her girlhood. Previously to this royal marriage Churchill had been raised, through the interest of James, to a Scotch barony. On the accession of James to the throne, he was further promoted to an English peerage by the title of Baron Churchill, of Sandridge. In 1685 he contributed by his effectual military service to the speedy suppression of the Duke of Monmouth's insane rebellion, and was rewarded with his master's unbounded reliance on his fidelity.

But James's infatuated policy soon made the crown shake on his head. Between motives of self-interest, of religion, and of patriotism, he was openly abandoned or secretly betrayed by nearly every man in his service. Among these men were many who had been deeply indebted to his bounty and patronage; for James, though a bad king, and a bitter enemy, had generally been a good, warm friend. Churchill basely betrayed his confidence, before and after the landing of the Prince of Orange at Torbay, with a deliberate, unbounded treachery, which all the sophistry of political and religious party[Pg 43] has vainly laboured to justify, and the infamy of which can scarcely be so much as palliated even by the difficult circumstances of the times. After clandestinely offering his services to William, he accepted the command of a large body of James's troops to oppose him; and after accepting that command he deserted to William. Lady Churchill also played her part at this terrible crisis, in which the ties of filial duty were broken asunder like all others. She induced her mistress, the Princess Anne, to flee from Whitehall to join the revolutionists at Nottingham; and, with the Earl of Dorset, and Compton, Bishop of London, she smuggled Anne out of the palace in a hackney-coach and at the midnight hour. The Prince of Denmark, Anne's husband, had deserted before her: on the 24th of November he supped with King James at Andover, and, straight from the royal table, he got to horse and rode over to the Prince of Orange. The illustrious Dane, though little given to talking, had been profuse in his declarations of fidelity, and had been wont to say, with an expression of the utmost astonishment, when he heard of the desertion of any of those whom James had delighted to honour,—"Est-il possible?"—Is it possible? Upon learning his nocturnal evasion, the king merely said, "How? Est-il possible gone too!" But when, on the morrow of his flight, James arrived at Whitehall and found that his daughter Anne had followed her husband's example, he exclaimed in an agony and with tears, "God help me! My very children have forsaken me."

When the revolution of 1688 was so easily and speedily completed, and when—in February, 1689—William, by the Act of Settlement, became king, Churchill received the reward of his ingratitude, being created Earl of Marlborough, and appointed to the offices of privy-councillor, and lord of the bed-chamber. Yet, like so many others, he was either dissatisfied with his recompense, or apprehensive of a counter-revolution, which would restore the dethroned king; and, throughout the reign of William III. he corresponded with James, and intrigued with the Jacobites at home and abroad. By[Pg 44] this double treason and perjury, he for ever took from his former desertion of his deluded sovereign all extenuation of a conscientious principle; he broke his allegiance to his new king whose favours he had accepted; and he branded his own inconsistency with the meanest motives of self-interest and self-preservation.

If having numerous companies and accomplices in crime could be pleaded in diminution of guilt, Marlborough might very well have advanced that plea. More than half of the men who had made the revolution of 1688 laboured and plotted to unmake it before it was a year old. The Honourable Admiral Russell, Godolphin, Admiral Herbert (by the gratitude of William made Earl of Torrington), Admiral Delaval, Admiral Killigrew, the Earl of Shrewsbury, Lord Rochester, Sir James Montgomery, the Earl of Sunderland, and a score more individuals, eminent in station, who had promoted the revolution of 1688 as much as Marlborough, and who (for the most part) had profited as much by it, treacherously corresponded with the court of St. Germain, and betrayed the political secrets and military plans of the new king, to James and the ministers of Louis XIV.

When, in March, 1689, the Jacobites raised the standard of civil war in Ireland, Marlborough's military reputation pointed him out for employment; but he did not proceed to that country until the autumn of the following year, when King William had driven James back to France and had all but finished the war by his victory on the Shannon. Marlborough's mission was to take Cork and Kinsale, through which, principally, the desperate Irish Jacobites kept up their communications with France; and this duty he performed in a soldier-like manner, returning to England with triumph in little more than a month. Yet, in the course of this year (1690) we find him writing a letter to King William, who was then on the Continent, which proves he was suspected of peculation.[1] In the spring of 1691 he[Pg 45] accompanied William to the wars in Flanders, and was treated with every outward show of esteem and confidence. In the spring of 1692 he was suddenly disgraced, dismissed from all his employments, and prohibited from appearing at court. Evelyn, who hated the man, and who took the very worst view of the case, says, without mincing the matter, "Lord Marlborough, lieutenant-general of the king's army in England, gentleman of the bed-chamber, &c., dismissed from all his charges, military and other, for his excessive taking of bribes, covetousness and extortion on all occasions from his inferior officers." Lord Basil Hamilton, in a letter to the Duke of Hamilton, written at the moment when all London was wondering at the sudden disgrace, says, "Everybody make their guesses what are his crimes. Some say he was endeavouring to breed divisions in the army, and to make himself the more necessary, besides his endeavouring to make an ill correspondence betwixt the Princess [Anne] and the court; but everybody have their different thoughts."[2] Marlborough's wife, in the defence of her conduct which she published in her old age, insists that the disgrace proceeded from a court intrigue and the animosities of William's favourites; and that it was mainly intended to remove her from the Princess Anne, who was constantly differing with the king and her sister the queen. Part, at least, of the truth may be contained in these assertions. As the Princess Anne espoused the cause of the husband of her friend, and joined Lady Marlborough in styling the great William "a Dutch abortion," "a monster," &c., the quarrel between her and the queen became irreconcilable. Lady Marlborough was commanded to remove from the palace of Whitehall; and thereupon Anne, disdaining to continue in the royal residence, removed to Sion Hill, whence, in a short time, she repaired to Berkeley House, which became her permanent residence, and the resort of all who were friendly to the Marlboroughs and inimical to the court. But in the meanwhile, on the 5th of May, of this same eventful[Pg 46] year 1692, the Earl of Marlborough was arrested and thrown into the Tower on a charge of high treason. The defeat of the French fleet, in the great battle of La Hogue, dissipated the fears of invasion and of civil war in England. On the 15th of June he was admitted to bail; but on the 23rd of that month his own name and the names of two of his sureties—the Earl of Shrewsbury and the Marquis of Halifax—were struck out of the list of privy-councillors. After some vehement debates in the House of Lords, the King terminated the business by himself discharging Marlborough and others in the same predicament from their recognizances; and ministers were exonerated by a bill of indemnity. Marlborough renewed his intrigues with the agents of King James, begging all the while for employment from King William. Knowing equally well how to estimate the capacity and sincerity of Marlborough, William alternately imprisoned and employed, cashiered and re-commissioned the man whom he is said to have recommended on his death-bed to his successor Anne as the fittest person "to lead her armies and direct her councils." After the death of Queen Mary a sort of reconciliation was made between William and the very troublesome heir-apparent Anne. In 1697 when Anne's only surviving child, the Duke of Gloucester, attained the age of eight years, Marlborough was appointed his governor. "Teach him," said William, "to be like yourself, and he will not want accomplishments." As if to balance the Toryism of the governor—for Marlborough was as yet a hot-professing Tory—the King gave the preceptorship to the celebrated Dr. Burnet, the historian, a Whig of the first water. The very evening after this appointment the Earl was restored to his military rank, and to his place in the council; and, striking up a sudden friendship for the Whig bishop, he divided with Burnet the care of the Duke of Gloucester, who, like all princes or heirs to crowns that die young, is represented as a prodigy of virtue and genius.

But it was not until the accession of Queen Anne, in March, 1702, that Marlborough occupied that foremost[Pg 47] post in the nation to which he had long and impatiently aspired. His fidelity to the new sovereign was as undoubted as his military genius or as his capacity for business and diplomacy; but he was assailed by many interests and opposed by a very powerful party; and but for the favour and complete ascendancy of his beautiful and imperious wife, he assuredly would not have been entrusted with the supreme command of our armies on the Continent. Thus, if his final downfall was owing to the pride and violent temper of his consort, his rise—his opportunity of obtaining an imperishable name as one of the greatest captains of the modern world—proceeded directly from her influence over the queen. Anne, though in her thirty-eighth year, was as completely under the tutelage of Lady Marlborough as she could have been if she had been a girl of fifteen, or of still tenderer years.

Obtaining the command of the allied forces in the war of the Spanish Succession, Marlborough immediately entered on a course of glorious achievement, which, since the days of Henry V., had never been equalled, and which was never surpassed by a British commander until the time of Wellington.

At the opening of his first campaign of 1702, the French, under the skilful Marshal Boufflers, by their superior force and the vigour of their preparations, had already been able to assume everywhere the offensive; the very frontiers of the Seven United Provinces were threatened; and it was feared that the efforts of the English general must be restricted to the defence of the republican territory. Nearly everything seemed against Marlborough: the French army was one; his was composed of many; he had to encounter the narrow views, petty jealousies, and disobedience of the other allied commanders, and the almost constant opposition or absolute dictation of the Dutch field deputies, whom the States-General unwisely sent into the field to control the movements of their troops, and whose prejudices, ignorance of the art of war, and dread of responsibility were grievous impediments to every bold or great enterprise.[Pg 48] Yet notwithstanding these and other obstacles which tried his temper and most heavily taxed his patience and forbearance, he succeeded, by a series of masterly movements, in compelling the French armies to retreat in all quarters, delivered the Dutch frontiers from their presence, and closed the campaign by the sieges and capture of Venloo, Ruremond, Stevenswaert, and Liege. These services were so far beyond the most sanguine expectation of the allies, that the States-General loaded him with eulogy, and Queen Anne elevated him to the ducal rank. He had also enabled an army of the Empire to act on the offensive; and, during his own operations, those Imperialists, under the command of Joseph, the young king of the Romans, had reduced Landau and threatened the whole of Alsace. As Marlborough, on his return home, was descending the Meuse in a barge, he was surprised by a French partisan from Guelder, who, with thirty-five men, seized the tow-rope, hauled up the boat, and made all in it prisoners. The object of the party, however, seems to have been mere plunder, for, after pillaging the boat and the passengers, they let them go on the production of false French passports, not knowing the person of the English general and the great prize that was in their hands, and very probably not knowing how to read. At the Hague, however, Marlborough was for a time given up as lost. "Till they saw me," he writes to his wife, "they thought me a prisoner in France."

The following campaign of 1703 presented a repetition of the same trials of temper, and of the same vexatious obstacles to the enterprising spirit of Marlborough. He arrived in the Low Countries on the 17th of March. Death had delivered him from the jealousies of the Prince of Saarbruch, and of Ginckell, the old Dutch earl of Athlone; but, arrested by the timidity of the field deputies, and harassed by the misconduct of the Dutch generals, he was allowed to effect nothing in the Netherlands beyond the reduction of Bonn, Huy, Limburg, and Guelder; while the Elector of Bavaria, with his own troops, and his allies the French under Marshal Villars,[Pg 49] broke into the Imperial dominions on the Danube, signally defeated the forces of the Emperor, pointed the heads of their columns towards Vienna, and, by a blow on that capital, threatened dissolution to the grand alliance. These dangers (the fruits of the obstinacy and folly of others) roused Marlborough to attempt the master-stroke of his military career. The Queen advanced him money even out of her privy purse, the Pensionary Heinsius entered cordially into his schemes, which were carefully concealed from others, as they were sure of being opposed by the States, and as, somehow, it had generally happened, that when a scheme of operations was laid, and produced in the Dutch cabinet, in the allied camp, or in conferences with the ministers of the confederated powers, it was forthwith communicated, partially or entirely, to the court of Versailles, or to the French generals commanding in the field!

Early in the campaign of 1704 the great captain, after providing for the safety of the Netherlands, secretly, and upon his own responsibility, executed the bold startling design of marching to the Danube and into the heart of Bavaria. The only one of the generals of the allied powers that was intrusted with the secret was the illustrious Prince Eugene of Savoy, who had been appointed to the command of the Emperor's army on the Upper Danube. The whole of Marlborough's march was, for that time, a prodigy in war. It could never have been performed but for his close attention to detail and the unceasing care he had bestowed upon the commissariat and upon all other departments and dependencies of the army, which no English general had properly attended to before his day, and which have been but too frequently neglected by commanders even in our own. In the two preceding campaigns he had won the affection of his troops by the care he took of their comforts, and he had brought them into an admirable condition both of tenue and discipline. Now, on their reaching Mentz or Mayence, the astonished Elector of the State exclaimed, "These gentlemen seem to be all dressed for a ball!"

Overcoming every obstacle, Marlborough formed a[Pg 50] junction with the Imperialists on the Danube, stormed the strong Gallo-Bavarian lines at Donauwerth on the 2nd of July, and finally, in concert with that kindred spirit, Prince Eugene of Savoy, attacked the enemy on the 13th of August, at and near the village of Blenheim on the Danube, with such skill and impetuosity as to inflict on them a total defeat. In this memorable battle the French and Bavarians, who were commanded by the Elector of Bavaria in person and the French Marshals Tallard and Marsin, lost above 30,000 men in killed, wounded, and prisoners (Marshal Tallard himself being among the latter), all their cannon, a prodigious number of colours and standards, and all their tents and equipages. This, the greatest and completest disaster they had ever sustained in these wars, carried astonishment and consternation to the proud court of Versailles. Instead of trembling for his own capital, the Emperor saw the whole of Bavaria laid at his feet, and its Elector a fugitive and almost a pauper. But the moral and political effects of the victory were yet greater: it dimmed the lustre which the successes of Louis XIV. had shed upon his arms, it broke a prestige, it destroyed that charm of invincibility which the French have so often pretended to, and which the nations of the Continent have but too often stood in awe of. The Gallo-Bavarians were from 4000 to 5000 stronger than their adversaries, and they had an immense advantage over the confederates in the ground they occupied, and in their fortified positions. At the critical moment Marlborough was in the very midst of the fight, surrounded by the killed and wounded: his personal bravery was quite as conspicuous as his skill.

For this great exploit the greatest captain of his age was rewarded with the conveyance to himself and heirs of the poor crown lands at Woodstock, on which it was also resolved to erect for him a palace at the royal cost. This noble design to perpetuate the memory of his services was ultimately realized under the direction of the poet, playwright, and architect Vanbrugh, in the majestic pile which bears the name of Blenheim; but the public[Pg 51] enthusiasm which had dictated so splendid a monument was stifled in faction, and the completion of the work is indebted more to the care of Marlborough's high-spirited widow, and to the disbursements she made, than to the good faith of the crown and the munificence of the nation. No right-hearted Englishman that knows the real history of the building can stand in the park and look at the palace or château of Blenheim without a blush. The gratitude of the Imperial House of Hapsburg, for the preservation of its capital and dominions, was neither less loud at the moment nor more durable afterwards. In its first heat—when the escape from ruin was a recent benefit, when the field of Blenheim was covered with the dead, and the current of the Danube was wafting down to Vienna the bodies of the once victorious French and Bavarians—the Emperor Leopold addressed a letter to "The most illustrious Prince of us and the Holy Roman Empire, John, Duke of Marlborough," &c., announcing in form his elevation to a place among the princes of the Empire, &c.; and shortly after the territory of Mindelheim in Bavaria was conferred upon him; but, though the premature death of his only son left Marlborough without heirs male, the dignity was not allowed to descend in the female line; and when the lands of Mindelheim were included in the districts restored to Bavaria at the peace, the Imperial Court had the meanness to withhold any compensation from its deliverer.

Upon his return, to carry on the war in the Netherlands, Marlborough was again subjected to the paralyzing control of the Dutch field deputies, to the wretched intrigues of their officers, and to all the old impediments and annoyances; and, in the campaign of 1705, though he skilfully forced the French lines between Namur and Antwerp, he was once more restrained from striking any decisive blow upon the enemy. Perhaps the quality which this great soldier possessed in the most marvellous perfection was patience. Almost any other mortal man would have been thrown into despair and uncontrollable rage by the phlegmatic perverseness and obstinacy[Pg 52] of these Dutchmen; but he appears never, for a single moment, to have lost his temper or to have relaxed in his exercise of persuasion, conciliation, and gentle flattery. His letters and dispatches must be read to form any notion of how perfect a master he was of these winning arts and of his own temper. He entered upon this campaign of 1705 with the highest expectations. "I never," says Burnet, "knew the Duke of Marlborough go out so full of hopes as in the beginning of it; but things had not answered his expectations." At one moment he had got the French in a position where he might have annihilated them; but the Dutch deputies had refused to let their troops act. That position was on the field of Waterloo, which was thus reserved to be the field of the last and greatest victory of the Duke of Wellington.

In the campaign of 1706 the vast efforts and confident movements of the French in the Low Countries under Villeroy, enabled Marlborough to tempt them to an encounter; and in the great battle of Ramilies, fought on Whit-Sunday, May the 23rd (N.S.), he gained a second victory, so complete that the enemy, with the loss of 13,000 men, 80 standards, and all their cannon, were compelled to evacuate the whole of Spanish Flanders. During charges made by the British upon some heavy batteries which Villeroy had placed in front of the village of Ramilies, Marlborough's life was repeatedly jeopardized. Riding close up in person to cheer his soldiers under a murderous fire, he was recognised by the French dragoons, while talking apart with a few of his men who had recoiled from the guns, and in a moment he was almost surrounded: he put spurs to his horse and went off at a gallop; in leaping a ditch he was thrown and in great danger of being taken, but Captain Molesworth, one of his aides-de-camp, dismounted and supplied him with his horse: as Marlborough was mounting, a cannon-ball struck off the head of Colonel Binfield, who was holding the stirrup for him; but the fortunate general rejoined his lines in safety, with no other hurt than a slight bruise from his fall.

[Pg 53]After his glorious victory of Ramilies, Brussels, Ghent, Antwerp, and Oudenarde opened their gates to the conqueror, and the strong fortresses of Ostend, Menin, Dendermonde, and Ath were reduced by regular sieges. The Emperor and the Archduke Charles, the Austrian claimant to the Spanish crown and its dependencies, made Marlborough an offer of the government of the country—the Spanish Netherlands—which he had thus conquered for them; but there were various views and interests which jarred with his; and, by the obstinate opposition of the Dutch, he found himself obliged to decline the offer.

Through the apathy of the Dutch the brilliant campaign of 1706 was followed by a year of inaction. Moreover, during 1707, the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough were seriously alarmed by the influence a waiting-woman—a relation of the duchess, and once a humble protégée of their own—was acquiring over the mind of the queen, and by the clandestine intrigues she was engaging in with Harley, St. John, and other political and personal enemies to the great captain. The letters which Marlborough wrote to his wife from the Continent in the summer of this inglorious year, intimate his inward conviction that the fate of Europe, the final success of the war, and his own good fame and after glory, were all dependent on the caprice of the queen, the malice of a bedchamber woman, and the intrigues of a few unprincipled adventurers. The duchess, by violently endeavouring to displace Mrs. Masham, and regain her old ascendancy or absolute dictation, only made matters at court still worse.

In the campaign of 1708 the French, being 100,000 strong, and commanded by their king's grandson, the Duke of Burgundy, by Marshal Vendôme, and by the Duke of Berwick, the natural son of James II. by Arabella Churchill, assumed the offensive, and, as if with a full assurance of success, made an attempt to recover possession of Spanish Flanders; but their rash movements laid them open to the attack of Marlborough and Eugene, who, with less than 80,000 men, gave them a[Pg 54] most thorough defeat on the 11th of July, at Oudenarde. The French fled in disgraceful confusion from the field, leaving behind them 15,000 men, in killed, wounded, and prisoners, and more than 100 standards. The forcing of the passage of the Scheldt, the capture of the great fortress of Lille, a place of first-rate strength and defended by a garrison of 15,000 men under Boufflers, and the reduction of Ghent just before the setting in of a terribly inclement winter, were the chief fruits of the victory of Oudenarde. All these advantages were obtained by the happiest combination of perseverance, courage, and consummate skill; yet the maligners of Marlborough set them all down as pieces of sheer luck, and Matthew Prior, who had sold his wit and his pen to Harley and that party, wrote pages to prove that Marlborough, by his conduct in this campaign, had merited not praise but censure. Such is the mad unscrupulousness of political faction, which is restrained by no fact and abashed by no exposure. "Among party men in England," says Voltaire, "I have heard Marlborough called a coward, and Pope a blockhead!" At the beginning of the campaign of 1708 Harley and the Tories generally had revelled in the momentary successes of the French, and predicted that the English general would lose in one short summer all that it had cost him so many years to gain. If we change 1708 into 1812, and Tories into Whigs, and shift the scene from the Low Countries to Spain, we shall find a perfect historical parallel, or the same factious soothsayings attendant on the career of the Duke of Wellington.

The year 1709 was distinguished by the sanguinary combat of Malplaquet, which was fought on the 12th of September, and which is commonly considered as the most dubious of Marlborough's exploits; since, though he was undoubtedly victorious, the assault of an immense army under Villars, in a position of tremendous strength, has exposed him and his colleague Eugene to the charge of reckless temerity; and the result scarcely produced advantages equivalent to the frightful carnage by which it was purchased. The bloody tragedy of Malplaquet,[Pg 55] however, induced Louis XIV. to sue again for peace, and to propose humbler terms than he had hitherto done.

The next campaign (of 1710) was opened with another successful passage of the enemy's lines by Marlborough, which was followed by the reduction of Douay, Bethune, and some other posts on the French frontier. But the duke's spirits were depressed by the bad news which daily reached him from England, or by the assured triumph of his political adversaries, who had enlisted Dr. Sacheverell into their service; several sinister accidents embarrassed his movements, and he found himself under the necessity of giving up the bold notion, which had been warmly recommended by his friend my Lord-Treasurer Godolphin, of attacking Boulogne and opening the road to Paris. On his arrival at court, during the Christmas holidays, he met with the coldest reception; and the usual motion in parliament of thanks to him had been dropped by his friends for fear of its being negatived.

Marshal Villars employed the autumn and winter in constructing a series of strong lines near the Flemish frontiers, to cover the interior of France against the farther advance of the victorious allies; and so confident was he in the impregnable character of these works, that he openly boasted of having "at last brought Marlborough to his ne plus ultra." The futility of this vaunt was disgracefully exposed, and never did the valour and genius of Marlborough break forth with more splendour than in this, which was destined to be his last, campaign, and during the progress of which his mind was distracted and his resources were crippled by the malignant influence of Harley and St. John, the first being now prime minister of England, the second secretary of state. After various admirable movements, he, on the 5th of August, 1711, by a sudden, an unexpected and brilliant manœuvre, burst through the lines of his able though gasconading antagonist at Arleux, near Bouchain, without losing a man, formed the siege of that strong fortress, and reduced it in twenty days, under the eyes of Villars and his numerically superior French army. The capture of[Pg 56] Bouchain was Marlborough's last achievement, and, in point of military skill, one of his greatest. It, however, only tended to forward the secret negotiations for a dishonourable peace which Harley and St. John had long been carrying on with the agents of King Louis.

At the beginning of the year 1712 the great captain was dismissed from all his employments; in the month of April the irritated British army in the Netherlands was put under the command of the incompetent Duke of Ormond, who, in the month of May, when he took the field with Prince Eugene, received secret and positive orders from Secretary St. John not to fight the French, but to look upon Marshal Villars as a friend; and, at the close of the year, after a base abandonment of the Emperor and others of our allies, and after occurrences highly dishonourable both to our arms and policy, the terms of the treaty of Utrecht were arranged by St. John, now my Lord Viscount Bolingbroke. And thus was lost the most favourable opportunity of realizing the grand scheme of William III., or of reducing France to her proper limits. The proud, arrogant, overbearing temper of the Duchess of Marlborough, the personal piques and prejudices of the Queen, the intrigues of Harley and Bolingbroke, two of the most perfidious of all political adventurers, and the machinations of a bedchamber woman, had defeated this great object, and had been sufficient to change the political aspect of Europe.

The sudden hatred of the queen for the duchess—a hatred the hotter from the warmth of the affection and the all-confiding friendship which had preceded it—was soon unjustly and ungratefully extended to the man who had achieved the principal glories of her reign, and whose great merits were wholly innocent of personal offence to her majesty. The abject entreaties to which Marlborough descended to spare his duchess the mortification of her dismissal from her place in the royal household present the most humiliating scene of his life. The next blow struck by his enemies was his own removal from command, at a moment when victory was fixed on his crest, and when Louis XIV. was humbled[Pg 57] almost to the dust; and this measure was envenomed by the malignity of the triumphant faction with a compound charge of peculation, which can now be proved to have been utterly unfounded. The charges were got up merely for the occasion, by his unscrupulous foes, who never proved them, and who, indeed (their immediate purpose being served), can hardly be said to have attempted to substantiate them. The great soldier, as we have hinted, was meanly fond of money. He had made the most of fees and perquisites, and all those irregular allowances then allowed in the very defective administration of our army (and not yet, to our disgrace, entirely done away with); but he had, in no one instance, exceeded usage and precedent. Ever since the Revolution of 1688, as also before that time, every English commander-in-chief of the army in the Low Countries had been allowed to accept of perquisites on the conclusion or renewal of contracts for provisions, etc. These perquisites and others stood in lieu of the proper, adequate, and fixed salaries which they ought to have had, and which they had not. The worst charge of all—or that the contractor Sir Solomon de Medina, in consideration of the sums he paid annually to Marlborough, had been permitted to feed the soldiers with very bad and unwholesome bread—was disproved by the indignant denial of the whole army. That army had never anything meriting the name of a Commissariat, until Marlborough created one; no English troops had ever before been so well fed, clothed, accoutred, and quartered; no general-in-chief had ever bestowed so minute and incessant an attention to the comforts of his men (Marlborough's Dispatches, Letters Public and Private, and General Orders, will best prove this scrupulous care); and thence it was that those men had excited the admiration of Europe by their appearance, had borne with cheerfulness the toils of the long march, and their occasional and inevitable privations, and had carried, in the highest perfection, their native strength and courage into the battle and the charge.

At first it was given out that the duke was removed from his high command merely that the charges brought[Pg 58] against him might have an impartial examination. But then the Queen herself wrote him a letter, attributing his disgrace to ill treatment which she had received personally. Marlborough told her majesty that this was an ill reward for his long services—that the inveteracy of his enemies had been more powerful with her than any other consideration;—and shortly after he and his duchess withdrew to the Continent, where he was honoured as he merited, and where they remained until Queen Anne was assailed by her last and mortal malady. While Harley and Bolingbroke were traitorously plotting to bring in the Pretender, Marlborough kept up a correspondence with his personal friends the court of Hanover, and (notwithstanding some inexplicable by-play with the Stuart emissaries) he indisputably aided in smoothing the way to the accession of George I. to the English throne. Upon that event—in August, 1714, so short had been the Duke's disgrace!—Marlborough was restored to his military rank as Captain-General and Master of the Ordnance; Harley, now Earl of Oxford, was clapped up in the Tower; Bolingbroke fled, and was exiled and outlawed; and the Duke of Ormond, attainted of treason, was soon driven to end his days in poverty and a foreign land.

Marlborough passed the remaining eight years of his life in the undisturbed enjoyment of his dignities. In this interval, two paralytic strokes shook his strength, but without at all seriously impairing his faculties; and the line which Johnson inserted in the 'Vanity of Human Wishes,'—

"From Marlborough's eyes the streams of dotage flow,"

was, at least, a poetical exaggeration. For he continued to be consulted on all affairs of war or of policy, and to attend his parliamentary and other duties until a few months before his death, which occurred when he was in the full possession of his senses, and in the seventy-second year of his age, on the 16th of June, 1722.

On the premature death of his only son, the Marquis of Blandford, the reversion of the ducal title and estate[Pg 59] of Blenheim had been settled on Marlborough's daughters and their heirs male; and the eldest, who thus succeeded her father, having died leaving no son, the family honours descended through her next sister, the lady of Charles Spencer, earl of Sunderland, to the house which still inherits them, and which, in our own age, has assumed the name of Churchill.

Not less as a statesman than as a warrior, Marlborough was indisputably the most distinguished personage of his country and times. As a statesman, he was unrivalled in personal address and diplomatic skill, in the arts of persuasion and conciliation, and the powers of combination and arrangements. Had he not been so accomplished—so perfect a diplomatist, he could never have have had the opportunities of winning his high renown as a general; for the European coalition would have fallen to pieces through the bickerings, the jealousies and distractions of the princes and powers who composed it. In personal conferences, the charm of his manner is said to have been irresistible. He was trusted and admired, if not beloved, by well nigh every prince and prime minister on the Continent. He was the life and soul of the grand alliance which (though it might have done more) arrested the ambitious career of Louis XIV., and gave temporary security to the liberties of Europe; his influence pervaded every continental court; and by his energetic hand was set in motion every spring of that vast confederacy which centred its only real point of confidence in his spirit. Bolingbroke, one of his bitterest enemies and ablest contemporaries, was not ashamed to acknowledge, after the grave had closed over him, that Marlborough was the greatest minister this country had ever possessed.

As a general, Marlborough is not to be numbered with the few, such as Maurice of Nassau, Gustavus Adolphus, or Frederic of Prussia, whose genius has stamped its impress upon the warfare of their times, and made a distinct epoch in military history. He left the art which he practised with unrivalled ability, in the same state in which he had found it; nor is there a single change or[Pg 60] improvement in strategy attributed to his master-mind. But if this absence of inventive power may seem to detract from his claim to the very highest order of military merit, it must not the less be remembered that he was beyond comparison the most accomplished commander of his warlike age. It was an age of formal tactics and deliberate sieges; which had produced Vauban and Coehorn, raised the art of fortifying to an apparent perfection, and exaggerated the importance of regular fortresses and long drawn lines of intrenchment. In the system of operations which naturally grew out of such circumstances, Marlborough greatly excelled; and of six conspicuous occasions on which he is recorded to have penetrated the intrenched positions of his opponents, five were nearly bloodless triumphs of his tactical skill. In all these, his success equally proclaims his own superiority over his antagonists, and the vicious practice of the age, which in attempting to cover an assailable country with extended chains of intrenchments, laboriously invited as many points of attack as it multiplied works. But Marlborough himself, in his own practice, adhered to the same rules of defence, of which his success might have shown him the futility. Once, indeed, after the victory of Oudenarde, he broke through the pedantry of rules, and proposed to Eugene, by masking Lille and Tournay with a corps of observation, to penetrate into the interior of France and strike at the heart: a plan which, instead of consuming the remainder of a victorious campaign in the siege of two fortresses, might have triumphantly ended the war under the walls of Paris. But the bold proposal seemed too hazardous even to Eugene.

Each, however, of Marlborough's great battles, and of the operations which preceded it, will testify that his skill comprehended much more than the conduct of a war of sieges and intrenchments. The consummate adroitness with which the objects of his memorable march into Germany in 1704 were concealed from the enemy, and their fears successively misdirected to the Moselle, to Alsace, and to Landau, until it was too late[Pg 61] to prevent his real designs on the Danube, must ever be numbered among the most perfect efforts of military science. The beautiful manœuvres by which the battle of Ramilies was won, may also be cited with equal admiration. And when it is considered that the successes of Marlborough were gained with an army in which the native British contingent seldom amounted to 20,000 men, and of which three-fourths or four-fifths were composed of a motley roll of Hanoverians, Hessians, Wirtemburgers, Prussians, Danes, and Dutchmen, and moreover, that his plans were in almost every enterprise marred by the timidity or obstinacy of the Dutch deputies, our estimate of his genius must be wondrously elevated. His undisturbed concord and warm enduring friendship with his illustrious colleague, Prince Eugene, were beautiful as they were rare. Perhaps no other instance can be found in the annals of the whole world, of such a lasting friendship existing between two commanders in the like situation and circumstances—two men, different in nation, in education, and character, serving governments whose interests or immediate views so frequently clashed, and having a joint command over so heterogeneous an army, which included within itself so great a variety of national and local prejudices. In the united operations of these two generals, the Imperialists and the continental troops generally were disposed to confer the greater share of praise on Eugene, while the British troops claimed that share for their countryman: but neither Marlborough nor the Prince seems ever to have felt the slightest jealousy of the other, each, after a battle or at the close of a campaign, applauding his colleague with a simplicity and warmth which evidently came from the heart. This is about the best proof which can be given that both were truly great minds. Eugene—somewhat of a spendthrift himself—was accustomed to smile at Marlborough's parsimony; but, under every other possible aspect—and whether in the field, in the heady fight, in the cabinet, or in the calm retirement of private life, he regarded the character of his colleague and friend with reverence and[Pg 62] affection. When the duke was sacrificed to a faction, the prince, commissioned by the emperor, came over to London to expostulate with the queen, and to prove that the war—which she had not yet announced her intention of abandoning—could not be successfully prosecuted without her great general, whose name had become a word of terror to the French, and an assurance of victory to his own troops. Eugene failed in his mission, and witnessed, with an almost incredulous astonishment, the lengths and excesses, the calumny and the ribaldry into which party spirit could transport Englishmen; but he had the enviable satisfaction of passing much of his time with his old comrade in arms and councils, and of testifying, in that season of eclipse and disgrace, the veneration in which he held him.

Whatever may have been his political duplicity and previous tergiversations, from the time Marlborough assumed the supreme command of Queen Anne's forces in the War of Succession, his course, both as a statesman and soldier, appears to have been honest and direct. The late and much-lamented General Sir George Murray (than whom a better military authority could not be quoted), while engaged in editing the Marlborough Dispatches, said that, after an attentive study of the whole matter, or of all the campaigns from 1702 to 1712, he could not detect a single instance in which the duke had not acted most honourably by England and her allies, or one in which he had not done his very utmost as a soldier for the cause in which he was engaged, and for the great object held in view—a satisfactory, an honourable, and a lasting peace, based upon a fixed and durable limit to the power and ambition of France. And, shortly afterwards, Sir George Murray, in concluding his editorial labours with a brief sketch of the disgraceful events on the theatre of war, which followed the dismissal of Marlborough, said that the duke's letters and dispatches, which authentically detailed the separate transactions of the war, "would exhibit on the part of the British general, who was the soul of the confederacy, a union of extraordinary abilities, of indefatigable[Pg 63] activity, of unvarying steadfastness of purpose, and undeviating rectitude of conduct."[3]

Admitting all his faults, it will still be easy to prove that Marlborough had many of the qualities of a good patriot and a good man. His friend the Lord Treasurer Godolphin and himself appear, of all their contemporaries, to have been most free from the virulent spirit of faction and most sincerely devoted to the true honour and interests of their country. The attachment of Marlborough to the tenets and principles of the Church of England was sincere and pure; he was unaffectedly a person of strong religious feeling; and the example which, as a commander, he held out to his troops and enforced in his camp, of a piety without fanaticism, was as salutary as it has been infrequent. His high personal courage, which the inconceivable baseness of faction affected to doubt, assumed in his later years the calm and collected spirit of the Christian hero. In public action he was ever as humane and merciful as towards personal enemies he was placable and magnanimous. The profligacy of the court and beau monde, which Charles II. had made fashionable, did not cease with the Revolution; it was, in fact, but little amended until the accession of George III. Yet, in private life, if we except the stain of parsimony, Marlborough's conduct, at least after his marriage, was a pattern of moral virtue. His temper was imperturbably sweet, gentle, and affectionate; and he was but too fond a husband, too confiding a friend, and too indulgent a master.

The biographies of the great general are rather numerous, though not one of them can be cited as a very able or thoroughly satisfactory work. In 1808, there was published at Paris, 3 vols. 8vo., 'Histoire de Jean Churchill, Duc de Marlborough,'—a signal foreign tribute to his greatness, since it was composed by order of Napoleon[Pg 64] Bonaparte, and written, with a few exceptions, in a fair and candid spirit. In 1818-19 the late venerable Archdeacon Coxe published, in London, in three large quarto volumes, his 'Memoirs of John duke of Marlborough'—a work of which the chief value consists in a great mass of original correspondence, published from the family papers at Blenheim and other sources. But the best existing monument to Marlborough's fame is the collection of his own letters and dispatches, published from the originals, by Sir George Murray. Official occupation and his rapidly declining health rendered it impossible for Sir George to do much in an editorial capacity; nor did he, indeed, consider that very much was necessary to be done. His notions were—that the best service to be rendered to Marlborough's reputation would be to print fully and correctly the dispatches and correspondence bearing on the War of Succession, by the exploits in which the great captain won his imperishable fame;—that the work should serve as a book of reference for soldiers and statesmen, and as a contribution of the most authentic materials for the use of future historians and biographers. And, in these respects, the work is invaluable. We have but too few published materials of the kind. In every extensive library Sir George Murray's five volumes will find a place by the side of the Wellington Dispatches, published by Colonel Gurwood. The wonderful resemblance between the style and matter of the two greatest of our military heroes will strike every reader; nor will the following facts be uninteresting in military and literary history:—the able Quarter-Master-General of the Duke of Wellington, the sharer in the glories of the Peninsular war, and one of the most accomplished, scientific soldiers of the nineteenth century, so soon as these original Marlborough dispatches were discovered in the lumber-room of an old house at Woodstock—to which the culpable and well-nigh criminal negligence and indifference of the successors of the great man had consigned them—devoted all his leisure time to the subject, and urged on the publication as a tribute due to Wellington's illustrious predecessor; he corrected by[Pg 65] himself—and often while suffering the agonies of disease—every proof-sheet as it was sent him; he saw the whole work through the press,—and saw that it was correctly printed; and then, a few months after the completion of his task, Sir George Murray died.

[Pg 66]Christopher Wren, the most celebrated of British architects, was born at East Knoyle in Wiltshire, October 20, 1632. His father was Rector of that parish, Dean of Windsor, and Registrar of the Order of the Garter: his uncle, Dr. Matthew Wren, was successively Bishop of Hereford, of Norwich, and of Ely; and was one of the greatest sufferers for the royal cause during the Commonwealth, having been imprisoned nearly twenty years in the Tower without ever having been brought to trial. The political predilections of Wren's family may be sufficiently understood from these notices; but he himself, although his leaning probably was to the side which had been espoused by his father and his uncle, seems to have taken no active part in state affairs. The period of his long life comprehended a series of the mightiest national convulsions and changes that ever took place in England—the civil war—the overthrow of the monarchy—the domination of Cromwell—the Restoration—the[Pg 67] Revolution—the union with Scotland—and, finally, the accession of a new family to the throne; but we do not find that in the high region of philosophy and art in which he moved, he ever allowed himself to be either withdrawn from or interrupted in his course by any of these great events of the outer world.

His health in his early years was extremely delicate. On this account he received the commencement of his education at home under the superintendence of his father and a domestic tutor. He was then sent to Westminster School, over which the celebrated Busby had just come to preside. The only memorial which we possess of Wren's schoolboy days is a dedication in Latin verse, addressed by him to his father in his thirteenth year, of an astronomical machine which he had invented, and which seems from his description to have been a sort of apparatus for representing the celestial motions, such as we now call an orrery. His genius is also stated to have displayed itself at this early age in other mechanical contrivances.

In 1646 he was sent to Oxford, and entered as a gentleman commoner at Wadham College. Of his academical life we can say little more than that it confirmed the promise of his early proficiency. He was especially distinguished by his mathematical acquirements, and gained the notice and acquaintance of many of the most learned and influential persons belonging to the university. Several short treatises and mechanical inventions are assigned to this period of his life: but as these have long ceased to interest any but curious inquirers into the history of literature or science, we can only indicate their existence, and refer to other and more comprehensive works. In 1650 Wren graduated as Bachelor of Arts. He was elected Fellow of All Souls on the 2nd of November, 1653, and took the degree of Master of Arts on the 12th of December in the same year. Of the subjects which engaged his active and versatile mind at this time, one of the chief was the science of Anatomy; and he is, on apparently good grounds, thought to have first suggested and tried the interesting[Pg 68] experiment of injecting liquids of various kinds into the veins of living animals,—a process of surgery, which, applied to the transfusion of healthy blood into a morbid or deficient circulation, has been revived, not without some promise of important results, in our own day. Another subject which attracted much of his attention was the Barometer; but he has no claim whatever either to the invention of that instrument or to the detection of the great principle of physics of which it is an exemplification. The notion which has been taken up of his right to supplant the illustrious Torricelli here has arisen merely from mistaking the question with regard to the causes of the fluctuations in the height of the barometrical column, while the instrument continues in the same place, for the entirely different question as to the cause why the fluid remains suspended at all; about which, since the celebrated experiments of Pascal, published in 1647, there never has been any controversy. It was the former phenomenon only which was attributed by some to the influence of the moon, and which Wren and many of his contemporaries exercised their ingenuity, as many of their successors have done, in endeavouring to explain.

In carrying on these investigations and experiments, Wren's diligence was stimulated and assisted by his having been admitted a member, about this period, of that celebrated association of philosophical inquirers, out of whose meetings, begun some years before, eventually rose the Royal Society. But, like several others of the more eminent members, he was soon removed from the comparative retirement of Oxford. On the 7th of August, 1657, being then only in his twenty-fifth year, he was chosen to the Professorship of Astronomy in Gresham College. This chair he held till the 8th of March, 1661, when he resigned it in consequence of having, on the 31st of January preceding, received the appointment of Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford. On the 12th of September, 1661, he took his degree of Doctor of Civil Law at Oxford, and was soon after admitted ad eundem by the sister university. During all this time he had continued to cultivate assiduously[Pg 69] the various branches of mathematical and physical science, and to extend his reputation both by his lectures and by his communications to the 'Philosophical Club,' as it was called, which, in 1658, had been transferred to London, and usually met on the Wednesday of every week at Gresham College, in Wren's class-room, and, on the Thursday in that of his associate Rooke, the Professor of Geometry. The longitude, the calculation of solar eclipses, and the examination and delineation of insects and animalcula by means of the miscroscope, may be enumerated among the subjects to which he is known to have devoted his attention. On the 15th of July, 1662,[4] he and his associates were incorporated under the title of the Royal Society; and Wren, who drew out the preamble of the charter, bore a chief part in the effecting of this arrangement.

The future architect of St. Paul's had already been called upon to devote a portion of his time to the professional exercise of that art from which he was destined to derive his greatest and most lasting distinction. Sir John Denham, the poet, had on the Restoration been rewarded for his services by the place of Surveyor of the Royal Works; but although, in his own words, he then gave over poetical lines, and made it his business to draw such others as might be more serviceable to his Majesty, and he hoped more lasting, it soon became apparent that his genius was much better suited to "build the lofty rhyme" than to construct more substantial edifices. In these circumstances Wren, who was known among his other accomplishments to be well acquainted with the principles of architecture, was sent for, and engaged to do the duties of the office in the capacity of Denham's assistant or deputy. This was in the year 1661. It does not appear that for some time he was employed in any work of consequence in his new character; and in[Pg 70] 1663 it was proposed to send him out to Africa, to superintend the construction of a new harbour and fortifications at the town of Tangier, which had been recently made over by Portugal to the English Crown, on the marriage of Charles with the Infanta Catherine. This employment he wisely declined, alleging the injury he apprehended to his health from a residence in Africa. Meanwhile, the situation which he held, and his scientific reputation, began to bring him something to do at home. Sheldon, Archbishop of Canterbury, who was Chancellor of the University of Oxford, had resolved to erect at his own expense a new theatre, or hall, for the public meetings of the University; and this building Wren was commissioned to design. The Sheldonian Theatre, celebrated for its unrivalled roof of eighty feet in length by seventy in breadth, supported without either arch or pillar, was Wren's first public work, having been begun this year, although it was not finished till 1668. About the same time he was employed to erect a new chapel for Pembroke College, in the University of Cambridge, to be built at the charge of his uncle, the Bishop of Ely.

But, while he was about to commence these buildings, he was appointed to take a leading part in another work, which ultimately became the principal occupation of the best years of his life, and enabled him to afford to his contemporaries and to posterity by far the most magnificent display of his architectural skill and genius. Ever since the Restoration, the repair of the Metropolitan Cathedral of St. Paul, which during the time of the Commonwealth had been surrendered to the most deplorable desecration and outrage, had been anxiously contemplated; and on the 18th of April, 1663, letters patent were at length issued by the King, appointing a number of commissioners, among whom Wren was one, to superintend the undertaking. Under their direction a survey of the state of the building was taken, and some progress was made in the reparation of its most material injuries, when, after the sum of between three and four thousand pounds had been expended, the great fire,[Pg 71] which broke out on the night of Sunday, the 2nd of September, 1666, on the following day reduced the whole pile to a heap of ruins.

A considerable part of the year before this Wren had spent in Paris, having proceeded thither, it would seem, about Midsummer, 1665, and remained till the following spring. The object of his visit was to improve himself in the profession in which he had embarked, by the inspection and study of the various public buildings which adorned the French capital, where the celebrated Bernini was at this time employed on the Louvre, with a thousand workmen under him, occupied in all the various departments of the art, and forming altogether, in Wren's opinion, probably the best school of architecture to be then found in Europe. He appears accordingly to have employed his time, with his characteristic activity, in examining everything deserving of attention in the city and its neighbourhood; and lost no opportunity either of making sketches of remarkable edifices himself, or of procuring them from others, so that, as he writes to one of his correspondents, he hoped to bring home with him almost all France on paper. The terrible visitation, which a few months after his return laid half the metropolis of his native country in ashes, opened to him a much wider field whereon to exercise the talent which he had been thus eager to cultivate and strengthen by enlarged knowledge, than he could, while so engaged, have expected ever to possess. He was not slow to seize the opportunity; and while the ashes of the city were yet alive, drew up a plan for its restoration, the leading features of which were a broad street running from Aldgate to Temple Bar, with a large square for the reception of the new cathedral of St. Paul; and a range of handsome quays along the river. The paramount necessity of speed in restoring the dwellings of a houseless multitude prevented the adoption of this project; and the new streets were in general formed nearly on the line of the old ones. But they were widened and straightened, and the houses were built of brick instead of wood.

[Pg 72]Soon after the fire, Wren was appointed Surveyor-General and principal Architect for rebuilding the parish churches; and on the 28th of March, 1669, a few days after the death of Sir John Denham, he was made Surveyor-General of the Royal Works, the office which he had for some time executed as deputy. On the 30th of July he was unanimously chosen Surveyor-General of the repairs of St. Paul's (another office which Denham had also held) by the commissioners appointed to superintend that work, of whom he was himself one. At first it was still thought possible to repair the cathedral; and a part of it was actually fitted up as a temporary choir, and service performed in it. After some time, however, it became evident that the only way in which it could ever be restored was by rebuilding the whole from the foundation. Before the close of the year 1672, Wren had prepared and submitted to the King different plans for the new church; and his Majesty having fixed upon the one which he preferred, a commission for commencing the work was issued on the 12th of November, 1673. On the 20th of the same month, Wren, who had been re-appointed architect for the work, and also one of the commissioners, was knighted at Whitehall, having resigned his professorship at Oxford in the preceding April.

During the space of time which had elapsed since the fire, the Surveyor-General of Public Works had begun or finished various minor buildings connected with the restoration of the city, and also some in other parts of the kingdom. Among the former may be mentioned the fine column called the Monument; the church of St. Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside, the spire of which is considered the most beautiful he ever constructed, and a masterpiece of science, both begun in 1671, and finished in 1677; and the church of St. Stephen, Walbrook, begun in 1672, and finished in 1679, the interior of which is one of the most exquisite specimens of architectural art which the world contains, and has excited, perhaps, more enthusiastic admiration than anything else that Wren had done. During the whole of this time,[Pg 73] too, notwithstanding the little leisure which his professional avocations must have left him, he appears to have continued his philosophical pursuits, and his attendance on the Royal Society, of which, from the first, he had been one of the most active and valuable members. His communications, and the experiments which he suggested, embraced some of the profoundest parts of astronomy and the mathematics, as well as various points in anatomy and natural history, and the chemical and mechanical arts.

The design which Wren had prepared for the new Cathedral, and which had been approved by the King, being that of which a model is still preserved in an apartment over the Morning-Prayer Chapel, did not in some respects please the majority of his brother-commissioners, who insisted that, in order to give the building the true cathedral form, the aisles should be added at the sides as they now stand, although the architect is said to have felt so strongly the injury done by that alteration, that he actually shed tears in speaking of it. This difficulty, however, being at length settled, his Majesty, on the 14th May, 1675, issued his warrant for immediately commencing the work; and accordingly, after a few weeks more had been spent in throwing down the old walls and removing the rubbish, the first stone was laid by Sir Christopher, assisted by his master-mason, Mr. Thomas Strong, on the 21st of June. From this time the building proceeded steadily till its completion in 1710; in which year the highest stone of the lantern on the cupola was laid by Mr. Christopher Wren, the son of the architect, as representing his venerable father, now in the seventy-eighth year of his age.

The salary which Sir Christopher Wren received as architect of St. Paul's was only 200l. a year. Yet in the last years of his superintendence a moiety of this pittance was withheld from him by the Commissioners, under the authority of a clause which they had got inserted in an act of parliament entitling them to keep back the money till the work should be finished, by way of thereby ensuring the requisite expedition in the architect. Even after the building had been actually completed,[Pg 74] they still continued, on the same pretence, to refuse payment of the arrears due, alleging that certain things yet remained to be done, which, after all, objections and difficulties interposed by themselves alone prevented from being performed. Like his great predecessor, Michael Angelo, Wren was too honest and zealous in the discharge of his duty not to have provoked the enmity of many persons who had their private ends to serve in the discharge of a great public duty. He was at last obliged to petition the Queen on the subject of the treatment to which he was subjected; but it was not till after a struggle of some years that he succeeded in obtaining redress. The faction by whom he was thus opposed even attempted to blacken his character by a direct charge of peculation, or at least of connivance at that crime, in a pamphlet entitled 'Frauds and Abuses at St. Paul's,' which appeared in 1712, and in reference to which Sir Christopher deemed it proper to appeal to the public in an anonymous reply published the year after, wherein he vindicated himself triumphantly from the aspersions which had been thrown upon him.

The other architectural works which he designed and executed during this period, both in London and elsewhere, are far too numerous to be mentioned in detail. Among them were the parish-church of St. Bride, in Fleet Street, which was finished in 1680, and the beautiful spire of which, originally two hundred and thirty-four feet in height, has been deemed to rival that of St. Mary-le-Bow; the church of St. James, Westminster, finished in 1683, a building in almost all its parts not more remarkable for its beauty than for its scientific construction; and of which the roof especially, both for its strength and elegance, and for its adaptation to the distinct conveyance of sound, has been reckoned a singularly happy triumph of art; and the church of St. Andrew, Holborn, a fine specimen of a commodious and imposing interior: besides many others of inferior note. In 1696 he commenced the building of the present Hospital at Greenwich, of which he lived to complete the greater part. This is undoubtedly one of the most splendid[Pg 75] erections of our great architect. Among his less successful works may be enumerated Chelsea Hospital, begun in 1682, and finished in 1690, a plain, but not an inelegant building; his additions to the Palace of Hampton Court, carried on from 1690 to 1694, which are certainly not in the best taste; and his repairs at Westminster Abbey, of which he was appointed surveyor-general in 1698. In his attempt to restore and complete this venerable edifice, his ignorance of the principles of the Gothic style, and his want of taste for its peculiar beauties, made him fail perhaps more egregiously than on any other occasion. In 1679 he completed the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, one of the most magnificent of his works; and in 1683, the Chapel of Queen's College, and the Ashmolean Museum, at Oxford. The same year he began the erection of the extensive pile of Winchester Castle, originally intended for a royal palace, but now used as a military barrack. To these works are to be added a long list of halls for the City companies, and other public buildings, as well as a considerable number of private edifices. Among the latter was Marlborough House, Pall-Mall. Indeed scarcely a building of importance was undertaken during this long period which he was not called upon to design or superintend. The activity both of mind and body must have been extraordinary, which enabled him to accomplish what he did, not to speak of the ready and fertile ingenuity, and the inexhaustible sources of invention and science he must have possessed, to meet the incessant demands that were made for new and varying displays of his contriving skill. It appears, too, in addition to all this, that the duties imposed upon him by his place of Surveyor of Public Works, for which he only received a salary of 100l. a year, were of an extremely harassing description, and must have consumed a great deal of his time. Claims and disputes as to rights of property, and petitions or complaints in regard to the infringement of the building regulations in every part of the metropolis and its vicinity, seem to have been constantly submitted[Pg 76] to his examination and adjudication; and Mr. Elmes has printed many of his reports upon these cases from the original manuscripts, which afford striking evidence both of the promptitude with which he gave his attention to the numerous calls thus made upon him, and of the large expenditure of time and labour they must have cost him.

The long series of years during which Wren was occupied in the accomplishment of his greatest work, and which had conducted him from the middle stage of life to old age, brought to him also of course various other changes. He had been twice married, and had become the father of two sons and a daughter, of whom the eldest, Christopher, was the author of 'Parentalia, or Memoirs of the Family of the Wrens.' In 1680 he was elected to the Presidency of the Royal Society, on its being declined by Mr. Boyle; and this honourable office he held for two years, during which, notwithstanding all his other occupations, we find him occupying the chair in person at almost every meeting, and still continuing to take his usual prominent part in the scientific discussions of the evening. In 1684 there was added to his other appointments that of Comptroller of the Works at Windsor. In May, 1685, he entered parliament as one of the members for Plympton; and he also sat for Windsor, both in the convention which met after the Revolution and in the first parliament of William III. He afterwards sat for Weymouth in the parliament which met in February, 1700, and which was dissolved in November of the year following.

The evening of Wren's life was marked by neglect and ingratitude. In the eighty-sixth year of his age he was removed from the office of Surveyor-General, which he had held for forty-nine years, in favour of one Benson, whose incapacity and dishonesty soon led to his disgrace and dismissal. Fortunately Wren's temper was too happy and placid to be affected by the loss of court favour, and he retired to his home at Hampton Court, where he spent the last five years of his life chiefly in the study of the Scriptures and the revision of his philosophical[Pg 77] works. He died February 25, 1723, in the ninety-first year of his age.

More minute accounts of his life are to be found in the 'Parentalia,' already mentioned, and in Mr. Elmes's quarto volume. We may also refer the reader to a longer memoir in the 'Library of Useful Knowledge.'

[Pg 78]A biography of Newton, intended for such a collection as this, must necessarily be much condensed; the account of his discoveries must be little more than allusion, and a perfect list of his writings and their editions is out of the question. The only life which exists on any considerable scale (as justly remarked by the author), is that by Sir David Brewster in the Family Library (No. 24): this will be our chief reference on matters of fact. On those of opinion, particularly as to the social character of Newton, we must differ in some degree from our guide, as well as from all those (no small number) whose well founded veneration for the greatest of philosophical inquirers has led them to regard him as an exhibition of goodness all but perfect, and judgment unimpeachable. That we can follow them a long way will sufficiently appear in the course of this sketch.

Isaac Newton was born at Woolsthorpe, near Grantham, in Lincolnshire, on Christmas Day, 1642; a weakly and diminutive infant, of whom it is related, that,[Pg 79] at his birth, he might have found room in a quart mug. He died March 20, 1727, after more than eighty-four years of more than average bodily health and vigour: it is a proper pendant to the story of the quart mug to state that he never lost more than one of his second teeth. His father, Isaac Newton, though lord of the poor manor of Woolsthorpe, was in fact a small farmer, who died before the birth of his son. The manor, which had been in the family about 100 years, was Newton's patrimony: it descended to the grandson of his father's brother. This heir sold it in 1732 to Edmund Turnor, to whose descendant the world is much indebted for a collection of facts connected with Newton's history. A curious tradition of a conversation of Newton with Gregory, in which the former affirmed himself to be descended from a Scotch family, his grandfather having come from East Lothian at the accession of James I., will be found in the appendix to Brewster's life, with a careful attempt to see how far the presumption it affords can be supported by collateral evidence. But Newton himself (twenty years before the date of this conversation) gave his pedigree on oath into the Heralds' Office, stating that he had reason to believe that his great grandfather's father was John Newton, of Westby, in Lincolnshire. To bring all that relates to his family together, his mother, when he was three years old, married Barnabas Smith, rector of North Witham, by whom she had one son and two daughters (who gained by marriage the names of Pilkington and Barton). The children of these three, four nephews and four nieces of Newton by the half-blood, inherited his personal property, amounting to 32,000l. One of these nieces, Catherine, who married a Colonel Barton, became a widow, and afterwards lived in Newton's house. After her second marriage (to Mr. Conduit, who succeeded Newton as master of the Mint) she and her husband resided with him until his death. They are the authority for many anecdotes given by Fontenelle in the 'Eloge' read to the Academy of Sciences. Mrs. Conduit's only daughter, Catherine, married Mr. Wallop,[Pg 80] afterwards Viscount Lymington by inheritance; she transmitted a large collection of Newton's papers, also by inheritance, to the family of the Earl of Portsmouth. These 'Portsmouth Papers' still exist unpublished: and there is also a mass of papers in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, which are well known.

At his mother's second marriage Newton passed under the care of his grandmother. After some education at day schools, he was placed, in his twelfth year, at the public school at Grantham. He distinguished himself here by a turn for mechanics and carpentering; and among his early tastes was the love of writing verses and of drawing. The dials which he made on the wall of his family house at Woolsthorpe have lasted to our day. They were lately carefully cut out by Mr. Turnor, and presented, framed in glass for preservation, to the Royal Society. While at Grantham he formed a friendship, which afterwards became a more serious feeling, with a young lady named Storey, who lived with the family in which he boarded. Their marriage was prevented by their poverty: Miss Storey was afterwards twice married, and as Mrs. Vincent, at the age of eighty-two, after Newton's death, gave many particulars concerning his early life. He continued her friend to the end of his life, and was her frequent benefactor: and he lived and died a bachelor, though to say for her sake would perhaps be going beyond evidence; particularly when the engrossing nature of his subsequent studies is considered.

When he was fourteen years old his step-father died, and his mother, who then took up her residence at Woolsthorpe, recalled him from school to assist in the management of the farm. As it was found, however, that he was constantly occupied with his books when he should have been otherwise engaged, his maternal uncle recommended that he should be sent to Cambridge. He was accordingly admitted, June 5, 1660, a member of Trinity College, a foundation which his name has ever since not only supported, but invigorated. According to[Pg 81] the college books he was subsizar [5] in 1661, scholar in 1664, Bachelor of Arts in 1665, Junior Fellow in 1667, Master of Arts and Senior Fellow in 1668. In 1669, Dr. Barrow resigned the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics, and Newton was appointed his successor. From this period, when all money cares were removed by the emoluments of his fellowship and professorship, we must date the beginning of Newton's public career.

To go back a little; it does not appear that Newton went to Cambridge with any remarkable amount of acquired knowledge, or any results of severe discipline of mind. He had read Euclid, it is said, and considered the propositions as self-evident truths. This is some absurd version of his early studies: many propositions, no[Pg 82] doubt, are very evident; but if Newton ever gave this account of himself, which we do not believe, it proves nothing but that the lad carried to the University as much of self-conceit as the man brought away of learning and judgment. That the young mechanician, desultory in his previous reading, deep beyond his years in construction [6] and practical verification, found within himself at first some dislike to the beaten road of mathematics, and was willing to make it royal by admitting all he was asked to prove, is what we can easily believe: for such is the most frequent tendency of an unbalanced exercise of manual ingenuity. That he may have stated this when he expressed his regret that he had not paid greater attention to the geometry of the ancients, is not improbable. Were such his bent, the discipline of the university would soon show a mind like his the paramount necessity of a different mode of proceeding. Again, we are not told anything of Newton's pupillar career at Cambridge, except that he is known to have [7] bought a prism (an epoch in his life) in 1664; and that, in the same or the next year, being competitor for a college law-fellowship with a Mr. Robert Uvedale, the two candidates were of perfectly equal merit, and Dr. Barrow accordingly elected Mr. Uvedale as the senior in standing. We have no account of any great sensation produced by the talents of Newton during his college career. Even Barrow, the best judge in Cambridge, and, after Wallis, in England, writing to Collins in 1669 (when he was on the point of resigning the mathematical chair to Newton), mentions him as an unknown man [8] of[Pg 83] great promise, in terms of high, but not unusual commendation.

The first period of Newton's life is twenty-seven years, ending with his appointment to the Lucasian professorship. The second, of twenty-six years, ending with his appointment to his first office in the mint in 1695, was the period of the announcement of all his discoveries. The third and longest, of thirty-two years, containing his official residence in London, saw him in the uninterrupted possession of as much fame as man can have, and power never equalled over those of the same pursuits as himself. The merely biographical history of his second period is not long. Dec. 21, 1671, and Jan. 11, 1671-2, the Royal Society entered on their minutes, in such terms as people use who have not the gift of prophecy, two of the most important announcements they ever had to make. "Mr. Isaac Newton, Professor of Mathematics in the University of Cambridge, was proposed candidate by the Lord Bishop of Salisbury (Dr. Seth Ward)," and "Mr. Isaac Newton was elected." During the whole of this second period, he was seldom out of Cambridge more than three or four weeks in one year. Having missed the Law Fellowship (which was a lay fellowship) he would have been required, in 1675, either to take orders or to vacate the fellowship which he did hold. But in that year he obtained a dispensation from Charles II., no doubt granted at the application of the college. He lectured on optics in the year following his appointment to the Professorship; and it would appear that he lectured on elementary mathematics. The 'Arithmetica Universalis' (published by Whiston, it was said against Newton's consent, which Whiston denies) was taken from the lectures delivered on algebra and its application to geometry, which were preserved in the depositories of the university. When, in 1687, James II., among his other attempts of the same kind, ordered the University[Pg 84] of Cambridge to admit a Benedictine as Master of Arts without taking the oaths, and upon the resistance of the university, Newton was appointed one of the delegates to the High Court for the purpose of stating the case. The king withdrew his order, and in the next year Newton was proposed as Member of Parliament for the University, and gained his election by a small majority. He sat accordingly in the Convention Parliament which declared the throne vacant, though it appears by the records of the college that, except in 1688 and 1689, he was not absent from the university often enough or long enough to have taken much share in public business.

In 1692 occurs the curious episode of his history which produced abroad, as has recently appeared, a report that he had become insane. Most readers know the tradition of his dog Diamond having upset a light among the papers which contained his researches, and of the calmness with which he is said to have borne the loss. The truth, as appears by a private diary of his acquaintance Mr. de la Pryme, recently discovered, is, that in February, 1692, he left a light burning when he went to chapel, which, by unknown means, destroyed his papers, and among them a large work on optics, containing the experiments and researches of twenty years. "When Mr. Newton came from chapel, and had seen what was done, everybody thought that he would have run mad; he was so troubled thereat that he was not himself for a month after." Such phrases, reported, gave rise to a memorandum in the diary of the celebrated Huyghens (the first foreigner who understood and accepted the theory of gravitation), stating that he had been told that Newton had become insane, either from study, or from the loss of his laboratory and manuscripts by fire—that remedies had been applied by means of which he had so far recovered as to be then beginning again to understand his own Principia. That Newton was in ill health in 1692 and 1693 is known, but his letters to Dr. Bentley on the Deity, written during that period, are proof that he had not lost his mind.

[Pg 85]We now give a slight enumeration of the matters on which Newton's attention was fixed during the second period, which we have just quitted.

Optics.—The great discovery of the unequal refrangibility of the rays of light was made in 1666, the year in which he was driven from Cambridge by the plague. In 1668 he resumed his inquiries, and, judging that the decomposition of light which he had discovered would render it impossible to construct refracting telescopes free from colour, or achromatic, he applied himself to the improvement of the reflecting telescope. The telescope which he made with his own hands, now in possession of the Royal Society, was made in 1671. It was submitted to the Society immediately after his election as a Fellow, and was followed by the account of his discovery of the decomposition of light. This explanation of the known phenomenon of the colours of the prismatic spectrum was fully appreciated by the Society: but Newton had to reply to various objections from foreign philosophers, and to those of Hooke at home. At this time first appeared (indeed there had been nothing before to draw it out) that remarkable trait in his character of which we shall afterwards speak; extreme aversion to all kinds of opposition. "I intend," he says, "to be no further solicitous about matters of philosophy." And again, "I was so persecuted with discussions arising from the publication of my theory of light, that I blamed my own imprudence for parting with so substantial a blessing as my quiet to run after a shadow."

The researches on the colours of thin plates, and the explanation known by the name of the Theory of Fits of Reflexion and Transmission, was communicated to the Royal Society in 1765-6. Those on the inflexion of light, though probably made long before 1704, first appeared in that year, in his treatise on Optics. He never would publish this work as long as Hooke lived, from that fear of opposition above noted.

Principia; Theory of Universal Gravitation.—The discoveries of Kepler had laid down the actual laws of the planetary motions: and the idea of universal gravitation [Pg 86]began to occupy the minds of those who thought on these subjects. Gravitation was a term of some antiquity, used to denote the effort of bodies on the earth to descend: weight, in fact. The notion of matter acting upon matter as an agent of attracting force, and the possibility of such force extending through the heavens, and being the proximate cause of the motions of the planets, was floating through men's minds when Newton first turned his attention to the subject. There has hardly ever been a great discovery in science, without its having happened that the germs of it have been found in the writings of several contemporaries or predecessors of the man who actually made it. In the case before us it had even been asserted as matter of necessity, that supposing attraction to exist, it must be according to the law of the inverse squares of the distances: and Huyghens announced, in 1673, before Newton had completed any part of his system, the relations which exist between attractive force and velocity in circular motion. Newton first turned his attention to the subject in 1666, at Woolsthorpe; sitting alone in a garden, his thoughts turned towards that power of gravity which extends to the tops of the highest mountains, and the question whether the power which retains the moon in her orbit might not be the same force as that which gives its curvature to the flight of a stone on the earth. To deduce from what Kepler had exhibited of the laws of the planetary motions, that the force must vary inversely as the square of the distance, came within his power: but on trying the value of that force, as deduced from the moon's actual motion, with what it should be as deduced from the force of gravitation at the earth, so great a difference was found as to make him throw the subject aside. The reason of his failure was the inaccurate measure which he used of the size of the earth. The subject was not resumed till 1679; not, as commonly stated, because he then first became acquainted with Picard's measure of the earth (we think Professor Rigaud has shown this), but because leisure then served, and some discussions on a kindred subject at the Royal Society had awakened his attention to the question. In[Pg 87] 1679 he repeated the trial with Picard's measure of the earth: and it is said that when he saw that the desired agreement was likely to appear, he became so nervous that he could not continue the calculation, but was obliged to intrust it to a friend. From that moment the great discovery must be dated: the connexion of his speculations on motion with the actual phenomena of the universe was established. At the time when we write this, a distant result of that calculation has been announced, which Newton himself would hardly at any period of his life have imagined to have been possible. A planetary body, unknown and unseen till after the prediction, has made itself felt by its attraction on another. Unexplained (and very trivial) irregularities in the motion of Uranus suggested the idea of there being yet another planet by the attraction of which they were produced. From those irregularities the place and distance of that planet have been inferred, and, on looking into the part of the heavens at which its silent action proved it to be, if indeed it existed—there it was found. A heavenly body has thus been calculated into existence, as far as man is concerned.

How much Newton might have got ready it is not easy to say: all that is known is that he kept it to himself. At the end of 1683 Halley had been considering the question, and was stopped by its difficulties; but, being in August, 1684, on a visit to Newton, the latter informed him of what he had done, but was not able to find his papers. After Halley's departure, he wrote them again, and sent them: upon which Halley paid another visit to Cambridge, to urge upon Newton the continuance of his researches; and (December, 1684) informed the Royal Society of them, and of Newton's promise to communicate them. The Society, who knew their man, and how little they should get without asking, appointed a committee (Halley and Paget, the mathematical master in Christ's Hospital) to keep Newton in mind of his promise; so that (February, 1684-5) a communication was sent up, amounting to those parts of the first Book of the Principia which relate to central forces.[Pg 88] Newton went on with the work, and (April 21, 1686) Halley announced to the Society that "Mr. Newton had an incomparable treatise on Motion, almost ready for the press." On the 28th Dr. Vincent (the husband, it is supposed, of Miss Storey) presented the manuscript of the first book to the Society, who ordered it to be printed, and Halley undertook to pay the expenses. But it was not yet in harbour: Hooke, who used to claim everything, asserted that he had been in possession of the whole theory before Newton; with which the latter was so disgusted, that he proposed to omit the third book (being in fact all the application to our system). Halley, the guardian angel of the work, wrote him a letter, in which he soothed him almost as if he had been a child, and prevailed upon him to complete it as first intended. It appeared under the title of Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, about Midsummer, 1687, containing the mathematical discussion of the laws of solid and fluid motion, with their application to the heavenly motions, the tides, the precession of the equinoxes, &c. &c. The reader who understands the terms may refer to the Penny Cyclopædia (article Principia), in which the heads of all the propositions are given. No work on any branch of human knowledge was ever destined to effect so great a change, or to originate such important consequences.

Fluxions, now called the Differential Calculus. A curved figure differs from one the boundaries of which are consecutive straight lines in that there is always a gradual change of direction going on at the boundaries of the former, while at those of the latter, the changes are made only at certain places, and as it were in the lump. To apply the doctrines of mathematics to cases in which such perfectly gradual changes take place, had been always the greatest difficulty of the science. Archimedes had conquered it in a few cases: the predecessors of Newton had greatly extended what Archimedes had done, and had given what, to those who come after Newton and Leibnitz, would appear strong hints of an organized method of treating all cases. But the method itself, and an appropriate[Pg 89] language for expressing its forms of operation, were still wanting. About 1663, Newton turned his attention to the writings of Des Cartes and Wallis, and, in the path which the latter had gone over, found the celebrated Binomial Theorem: Wallis having in fact solved what would now be called a harder problem. This, far from lessening the merit of the discovery, increases it materially. In 1665 Newton arrived at his discoveries in series, and substantially at his method of fluxions. In 1669 Barrow communicated to Collins (on the occasion before referred to) a paper by Newton on series, not containing anything on fluxions. Various letters of Newton, Collins, and others, state that such a method had been discovered, without giving it. But one letter from Newton to Collins, December 10th, 1672, states a mode of using one case of this method, confined to equations of what are called rational terms (it being admitted on all sides that the great pinch of the question then lay in equations of irrational terms). Leibnitz, who had been in England in 1673, and had heard something indefinite of what Newton had done, desired to know more: and Newton, June 13th, 1676, wrote a letter to Oldenburg, of the Royal Society, which he desired might be communicated to Leibnitz. This letter dwells on the binomial theorem, and various consequences of it; but has nothing upon fluxions. Leibnitz still desiring further information, Newton again wrote to Oldenburg, October 24th, 1676, explaining how he arrived at the binomial theorem, giving various other results, but nothing about fluxions except in what is called a cipher. A cipher it was not, for it merely consisted in giving all the letters of a certain sentence, to be put together if Leibnitz could do it. Thus, the information communicated was—

aaaaaa cc d ae eeeeeeeeeeeee ff iiiiiii lll nnnnnnnnn oooo qqqq
rr ssss ttttttttt uuuuuuuuuuuu x.

These are merely the letters of a Latin sentence which translated word by word in the order of the words is "given equation any-whatsoever, flowing quantities involving, fluxions to find, and vice versa." Even this letter[Pg 90] had not been sent to Leibnitz on March 5, 1677; it was sent soon after this date. But in the mean time, Leibnitz, by himself, or as was afterwards said, having taken a hint from other letters of Newton, had invented his differential calculus. And, as open as Newton was secret, shortly after receipt of the above, he wrote to Oldenburg, June 21, 1677, a letter giving a full and clear statement of everything he had arrived at: making an epoch as important in the pure mathematics, as was the discovery of the moon's gravitation in the physical sciences. In the Principia, Newton acknowledges this in the following Scholium: "In letters which went between me and that most excellent geometer G. G. Leibnitz, ten years ago, when I signified that I was in the knowledge of a method of determining maxima and minima, of drawing tangents and the like, and when I concealed it in transferred letters involving this sentence (Data æquatione, &c., as above), that most distinguished man wrote back that he had also fallen upon a method of the same kind, and communicated his method, which hardly differed from mine except in the forms of words and symbols. The foundation of both is contained in this Lemma." In 1684 Leibnitz published his method: while in the Principia, Newton still gave nothing more than the most general description of it, and avoided its direct use entirely. By 1695 it had grown into a powerful system, in the hands of Leibnitz and the Bernoullis: while in England it was very little noticed. About 1695 an alarm began to be taken in England at its progress: and the friends of Newton began to claim what they conceived to be his rights. Wallis excused himself from mentioning the differential calculus in his works, on the ground that it was Newton's method of fluxions. In 1699, Fatio de Duillier, a Genevese residing in England, published an implied charge of plagiarism on Leibnitz: the latter denied the imputation and appealed to Newton's own testimony. The Leipsic Acts made something very like the same charge against Newton: and in the course of the dispute, Keill, an Englishman, asserted (Phil. Trans. 1708) that Leibnitz had taken Newton's method,[Pg 91] changing its name and symbols. This accusation roused Leibnitz, who complained to the Society: and after some correspondence, in which allusion was made to the Oldenburg letters as being sources from which he might have drawn knowledge of Newton's method, the Royal Society appointed a committee, consisting of eleven members, to examine the archives, and to defend Newton. This latter purpose, though not stated in words, was fully understood: and since the usual impression is that it was intended for a judicial committee, meaning of course an impartial one, we give in a note [9]some heads[Pg 92] of the proof of our assertion. The committee, appointed at different times in March 1711-12, reported in April that they had examined, &c., and that they were of opinion that Leibnitz had no method till after the letter to Collins of December 10, 1672, had been sent to Paris to be communicated to him, and that Keill, in asserting the priority of Newton, had done Leibnitz no injustice. This is, to us, the main part of the report. It was published, with abundance of extracts from letters, and letters at length, most of which had been found among Collins's papers, under the name of Commercium Epistolicum, &c. in 1712 and in 1725. The conclusion was not to the point: Leibnitz asked reparation for a charge of theft, and the answer is that there was no injustice to him in saying that the other party had the goods before the time when he was alleged to have stolen them. With regard to Collins's letter, besides its containing no more than any good mathematician could have drawn from Barrow and Format together, no proof [10] was given to[Pg 93] the world of Leibnitz ever having seen it which any man who valued his character would have ventured to produce in any kind of court with rules of evidence. In truth, though the committee were not unfair judges (simply because they were not judges at all) we cannot but pronounce them unscrupulous partisans, for the reasons given and others. Leibnitz never made any formal answer, but his friends retorted the charge of plagiarism upon Newton, and John Bernoulli made a short anonymous reply. The committee, content perhaps with the number of those who were ready to swear that black was both black and white and neither, and to believe it too, rather than yield anything to a foreigner (and it is to be remembered that Leibnitz, the servant of the Elector, was particularly obnoxious to all the Jacobites), published nothing further: the Society (May 20, 1714), in reference to the complaint of Leibnitz that he had been condemned unheard, resolved that it was never intended that the Report of the Committee should pass for a decision of the Society: but others persisted in calling it so. A mutual friend, the Abbé Conti, being in England in 1715, Leibnitz[Pg 94] at the latter end of that year wrote him a letter, in the postscript of which he adverted to the usage he had received. This letter excited curiosity in London: and Newton, whose power in matters of science was then kingly, requested and obtained the presence of all the foreign ambassadors at the Royal Society, to collate and examine the papers. After this had been done, Baron Kirmansegger, one of the ambassadors, stated his opinion that the dispute could not be terminated in that manner; that Newton ought to write to Leibnitz, state his own case, and demand an answer. All present agreed, and the King (George I.), to whom the matter was mentioned that same evening, was of the same opinion. Newton accordingly wrote a letter to Conti, in which he relies mostly upon what Leibnitz had either expressly or tacitly admitted. Nine times, on different points, he calls upon Leibnitz to acknowledge something because he had once acknowledged it. Leibnitz replied at great length. Newton did not rejoin, except in notes on the correspondence which he circulated privately among his friends. Leibnitz died in November, 1716, and Newton forthwith handed the whole correspondence, with his final notes, to Raphson, whose history of Fluxions was then in process of printing. The book appeared with this correspondence as an appendix: it is dated 1715, but the publication was retarded. And in the third edition of the Principia, published in 1726, Newton omitted the scholium we have quoted above, in spite of his doctrine that what was once acknowledged should be always acknowledged. In its place he put another scholium, with a similar beginning and ending, but referring not to Leibnitz but to his own letter to Collins of December, 1672. In the Conti correspondence—that is, in the notes which he would not print while Leibnitz was alive—he had evaded the plain meaning of this scholium, asserting that it was not an admission, but a challenge to Leibnitz to make it appear that the latter had the priority; and further, that by referring to the letters, he left the reader to consult them and interpret the paragraph thereby. This was the climax of blind [Pg 95]unfairness: for Newton does not specify the dates of the letters, and gives their description wrongly (for they were written to Oldenburg, not to him). And further, the reader could not use them, for they were not published, nor at that time intended for publication.

We shall presently make some remarks on the conduct of Newton in this transaction: but we now proceed to the merits of the question. That Leibnitz derived nothing from Newton except the knowledge that Newton could draw tangents, find maxima and minima, &c., by some organized method, we have no doubt whatever, nor has any one else, at this time, so far as we know. But, though we may be singular in the opinion, we agree with Bernoulli that Newton did derive from Leibnitz (without being aware of the extent of his obligation, we think) the idea of the permanent use of an organized mode of mathematical expression. On a simple question of fact, opinion and construction apart, we take the words of both as indisputable; neither would have descended to bare falsehood. Now, in the first place, it is essential to observe that the genius of Newton did not shine in the invention of mathematical language: and, the disputed fluxions apart, he added nothing to it. The notation of the Principia is anything but a model. We know by the Letter in which Leibnitz communicated his system to Newton, in 1677, that, at that period, Newton received communication of the idea of an organized and permanent language: and the question is whether he had it already. From his own Conti correspondence, written after it was within his knowledge that Bernoulli had asserted him to have taken his idea of notation from Leibnitz, and when he makes the fullest and most definite assertions as to the extent to which he has carried the use of his method, he does not assert that before receipt of Leibnitz's letter, he did more than "sometimes" use one dot for a first fluxion, two for a second, &c. Neither of the parties knew of the importance which posterity would attach to this simple point: and it is our full conviction, that Newton, who had only got the length of finding it occasionally convenient to [Pg 96]use a specific language, would never have organized that language for permanent use had he not seen the letter of Leibnitz. Even as late as the publication of the Principia he has no better contrivance than using small letters to represent the fluxions of great ones. We are avowedly expressing, in one point, our low estimate of Newton's power: and we believe the reason to have been, that he did not cultivate a crop for which he had no use. He who can make existing language serve his purpose never invents more: and Newton was able to think clearly and powerfully without much addition to the language he found in use. The Principia, obscure as it is, was all light in Newton's mind: and he did not attempt to conquer difficulties which he never knew.

We now pass on to the third period of Newton's life. In 1694, his old friend Charles Montague [11] (afterwards[Pg 97] Lord Halifax) became Chancellor of the Exchequer, and it was one of his plans to restore the adulterated coinage. He served both his friend and his plan by making Newton warden of the Mint, a place of five or six hundred a-year (March 19, 1695). In 1699, Newton was made Master of the Mint, on which occasion he resigned to Whiston, as his deputy, the duties and emoluments of the Lucasian Professorship, and resigned to him the professorship itself in 1703. In 1701, he was again elected member for the University; but he was turned out by two sons of lords in 1705. In 1703, he was chosen President of the Royal Society, and was annually re-elected during the rest of his life. In 1705, he was knighted at Cambridge by Queen Anne. In 1709, he entrusted to Roger Cotes the preparation of the second edition of the Principia, which appeared in 1713. All the correspondence relating to the alterations made in this edition is in the library of Trinity College. In 1714, at the accession of George I., he became an intimate acquaintance of the Princess of Wales (wife of George II.), who was also a correspondent of Leibnitz. Some observations made by the latter on the philosophy of Locke and of Newton brought on the celebrated correspondence between Leibnitz and Clarke. And at the same time, an abstract of Newton's ideas on chronology, drawn up for the Princess, and at her request communicated to Conti, got abroad and was printed at Paris: on which, in his own defence, he prepared his large work on the subject. On this it is not necessary to speak: his ideas on chronology, founded on the assumption of an accuracy in the older Greek astronomers which nobody now allows them, are rejected and obsolete. But the work does honour to his ingenuity and his scholarship, [Pg 98]showing him to be not meanly versed in ancient learning. In 1726, Dr. Pemberton completed, at his request, the third edition of the Principia. With this he seems to have had little to do, for his health had been declining since 1722. He was relieved by gout in 1725. February 28, 1726-7, he presided for the last time at the Royal Society. He died of the stone (so far as so old a man can be said to die of one complaint) on the 20th of March. All the tributes of respect to his memory belong rather to the biographies of those who had the honour to pay them than to his: the gradual reception of his philosophy throughout Europe belongs to the history of science. We shall now offer some remarks on his character as a philosopher and as a man.

We have already adverted to the manner in which his biographers have represented him to be as much above ordinary humanity in goodness as in intellectual power. That his dispositions were generally good and his usual conduct in the relations of life admirable to the extent which should make his worst enemy, if he had any regard to truth, hand him down as a man of high principle, no one who knows his history can deny. But when injustice is not merely concealed but openly defended; when meanness is represented as the right of a great philosopher; when oppression is tolerated, and its victims are made subjects of obloquy because they did not submit to whatever Newton chose to inflict;—it becomes the duty of a biographer to bear more hardly upon instances of those feelings, than, had they been properly represented, would have been absolutely necessary. Nor does it matter anything in such a case, that the instances alluded to are the exception in the character and not the rule: forbearance and palliation are so much of injustice towards the injured parties.

The great fault, or rather misfortune, of Newton's character, was one of temperament: a morbid fear of opposition from others ruled his whole life. When, as a young man, proposing new views in opposition to the justly honoured authority of Des Cartes and lesser names, he had reason to look for opposition, we find him disgusted [Pg 99]by the want of an immediate and universal assent, and representing, as he afterwards said, that philosophy was so litigious a lady, that a man might as well be engaged in lawsuits as have to do with her. How could it be otherwise? What is scientific investigation except filing a bill of discovery against nature, with liberty to any one to move to be made a party in the suit? Newton did not feel this; and, not content with the ready acceptance of his views by the Royal Society, a little opposition made him declare his intention of retiring from the field. He had the choice of leaving his opponents unanswered, and pursuing his researches; committing it to time to show the soundness of his views. That this plan did not suit his temper shows that it was not the necessity of answering, but the fact of being opposed, which destroyed his peace. And he steadily adhered, after his first attempt, to his resolution of never willingly appearing before the world. His several works were extorted from him; and, as far as we can judge, his great views on universal gravitation would have remained his own secret if Halley and the Royal Society had not used the utmost force they could command. A discovery of Newton was of a twofold character—he made it, and then others had to find out that he had made it. To say that he had a right to do this is allowable; that is, in the same sense in which we and our readers have a right to refuse him any portion of that praise which his biographers claim for him. In the higher and better sense of the word, he had no right to claim the option of keeping from the world what it was essential to its progress that the world should know, any more than we should have a right to declare ourselves under no obligation to his memory for the services which he rendered. To excuse him, and at the same time to blame those who will not excuse him, is to try the first question in one court and the second in another. A man who could write the Principia, and who owed his bread to a foundation instituted for the promotion of knowledge, was as much bound to write it as we are to thank him for it when written.

[Pg 100]When he was young and comparatively unknown, this morbid temperament showed itself in fear of opposition: when he became king of the world of science it made him desire to be an absolute monarch; and never did monarch find more obsequious subjects. His treatment of Leibnitz, of Flamsteed, and (we believe) of Winston is, in each case, a stain upon his memory. As to Leibnitz, it must of course be a matter of opinion how far Newton was behind the scenes during the concoction of the 'Commercium Epistolicum:' but from the moment of his appearance in propriâ personâ, his conduct is unjust. Leibnitz, whose noble candour in unfolding his own discovery, in answer to Newton's a b c, &c., must have been felt at the time as a stinging reproof, is answered with arrogance (dignified severity is the other name) and treated with unfairness. Nothing can excuse Newton's circulating his reply among his friends in writing, and printing it when he heard of the death of Leibnitz: this conduct tells its own story in unanswerable terms. And, if it were Newton's own act and deed, nothing can excuse in him the omission of the Scholium from the third edition, or rather the alteration of it in such manner as to resemble the former one in its general tenor. But, as Newton was then very old, and as he had allowed it to stand in the second edition, published when the dispute was at its height, it is possible that he left the matter to Dr. Pemberton, the editor, or some other person.

The story of the treatment of Flamsteed has only recently become known, by the late Mr. Baily's discovery of the correspondence. Flamsteed was Astronomer Royal, and his observations were to be printed at the expense of the Prince Consort. A committee, with Newton at its head, was to superintend the printing. If we took Flamsteed's word for the succession of petty annoyances to which he was subject, we might perhaps be wrong; for Flamsteed was somewhat irritable, and no doubt the more difficult to manage because he was the first observer in the world, and not one of the committee was an observer at all. But there are two specific facts which speak for themselves. The catalogue of stars [Pg 101](Flamsteed's own property) had been delivered sealed up, on the understanding that the seal was not to be broken unless Flamsteed refused to comply with certain conditions. After the Prince was dead, and the trust had been surrendered (it seems to have been transferred to the Royal Society), and without any notice to Flamsteed, the seal was broken, with Newton's consent, and the catalogue was printed: Halley was exhibiting the sheets in a coffee-house, and boasting of his correction of their errors. A violent quarrel was the consequence, and a scene took place on one occasion at the Royal Society which we cannot discredit (for Flamsteed's character for mere truth of narration has never been successfully impugned, any more than Newton's), but which most painfully bears out our notion of the weak point of Newton's character. As to the breaking of the seal Newton pleaded the Queen's command—an unmanly evasion, for what did the Queen do except by advice? who was her adviser except the President of the Royal Society? Shortly afterwards the second edition of the Principia appeared. Flamsteed, whose observations had been of more service to Newton than those of any other individual, and to whom proper acknowledgment had been made in the first edition, and who had increased the obligation in the interval, had his name erased in all the passages in which it appeared (we have verified, for this occasion, eight or nine places ourselves). To such a pitch is this petty resentment carried, that whereas in one place of the first edition (prop. 18. book iii.) there is, in a parenthesis, "by the observations of Cassini and Flamsteed;" the corresponding place of the second is, "by the consent of the observations of astronomers."

There is a letter of Newton to Flamsteed (Jan. 6, 1698-9), written before they were in open rupture, containing an expression which has excited much surprise and some disapprobation. Flamsteed having caused a published reference to be made to Newton's continuation of his lunar researches, the latter says, "I do not love to be printed on every occasion, much less to be dunned [Pg 102]and teased by foreigners about mathematical things, or to be thought by your own people to be trifling away my time when I should be about the King's business." This letter was not intended for publication, still less for posterity: the phrase was pettish, unworthy even of Newton in a huff. But the feeling was the right one. If there were any thing unworthy of the dignity of Newton, it was in taking a place which required him to give up the glorious race in which he had outstripped all men, and the researches which were for him alone, while the regulation of the Mint was not above the talents of thousands of his countrymen. But, having taken it, it was his duty to attend to it in the most regular and conscientious manner, as in fact he did to the end of his days. His contemporary Swift had the sense to refuse the troop of dragoons which King William offered him before he took orders: it would have been better for Newton's fame if he had left all the coinage, clipped and unclipped, to those who were as well qualified as himself. His own share might not have been so large,[12] but money was not one of his pursuits. He was nobly liberal with what he got, particularly to his own family: and it may be added that the position of his family, which was far from well off in the world, is the only circumstance which can palliate his giving up the intellectual advancement of all men, ages, and countries, to trifle away his time about the King's business.

His treatment of Whiston, as published in the autobiography of the latter, was always disregarded, as the[Pg 103] evidence of a very singular person. Standing alone—for his conduct to Leibnitz was defended by national feeling, and his treatment of Flamsteed was unknown,—it never carried much weight. Whiston had excessive vanity and a peculiar fanaticism of his own invention, which were sure to be made the most of; for a man who loses his preferment for his conscience had need be perfect, if he would escape those who think him a fool, and those who feel him a rebuke. And in Whiston's day the number was not small of the clergy who disavowed the articles to which they had sworn, without even having the decency to provide a non-natural sense. Newton refused him admission into the Royal Society, declaring that he would not remain president if Whiston were elected a fellow. A reason is asserted for this which we shall presently notice; but Whiston's account is as follows. After alluding to Newton having made him his deputy, and then his successor, he adds:—"So did I enjoy a large portion of his favour for twenty years together. But he then perceiving that I could not do as his other darling friends did,—that is, learn of him without contradicting him when I differed in opinion from him,—he could not in his old age bear such contradiction; and so he was afraid of me the last thirteen years of his life. He was of the most fearful, cautious, and suspicious temper that I ever knew."

It would have been more pleasant merely to mention these things as what unfortunately cannot be denied, than to bring them forward as if it were our business to insist upon them. But the manner in which the biography of Newton is usually written, leaves us no alternative. We are required to worship the whole character; and we find ourselves unable to do it. We see conduct defended as strictly right, and therefore of course proposed for imitation, which appears to us to be mean, unjust, and oppressive. As long as Newton is held up to be the perfection of a moral character, so long must we insist upon the exceptional cases which prove him to have been liable to some of the failings of humanity. [Pg 104]But to those who can fairly admit that his conduct is proof of an unhappy temper which sometimes overcame his moral feeling, and who therefore look for the collateral circumstances which are to excuse or aggravate, there are various considerations which must not be left out of sight.

In the first place, this temperament of which we have given instances, is of all others the one which occasionally lessens the control of the individual over his own actions. Every one knows how apt we are, from experience, to think of insanity as the possible termination of the morbidly suspicious habit. That the report which arose about Newton's mind was much assisted by a knowledge of this habit existing in him, we have little doubt: for we see, in our own day, how corroborative such a temper is held to be of any such rumour. In one instance, and in illness of a serious character, it did take a form which we can hardly hold consistent with sanity at the time. He spoke severely of Locke, his old and tried friend (in 1693), being under the apprehension that Locke had endeavoured to embroil him with women and by other means; he thought there was a design to sell him an office and to embroil him. For these suspicions he wrote a letter, worthy of himself, asking pardon, and saying also that he had been under the impression that there was an evil intention, or tendency at least, in some of Locke's writings. The latter, in an affectionate answer, desired to know what passages he alluded to: and the rejoinder was that the letter was written after many sleepless nights, and that he had forgot what he said. As we have only the letters and no further information, we must decide as we can whether Newton did really express himself to others as he said he had done, or whether he only fancied it. In either case there is, under illness, that morbid imagination of injury done or meditated, which seems to have been but the exaggeration of an ordinary habit. If we thought, from the evidence, that Newton had ever been insane, we should see no reason whatever for concealing our opinion: we do not think so; but we[Pg 105] think it likely that if his years from 1660 to 1680 had been past in the excesses of the licentious court of his day, instead of the quiet retirement of his college, there might have been another story to tell.

Next, it is not fair to look upon the character of any man, without reference to the notions and morals of his time. Take Newton from his pinnacle of perfection, form the background of the picture from the incidents of the era of political and social profligacy in which he lived, and his relative character then seems to be almost of the moral magnificence which is made its attribute. Let the sum total of his public career be compared with that of others who were "about the king's business," and we cannot help looking upon the honest and able public servant, who passed a life in the existing corruption of public affairs without the shadow of a taint upon his official morals, with an admiration which must tend to neutralize the condemnation we may not spare upon some incidents of his scientific life. Further, the idolatrous respect in which he was held at the Royal Society, and the other haunts of learning—the worship his talents received at home and abroad, from Halley's [13] nec fas est propius mortali attingere divos, to De l'Hôpital's almost serious question whether Newton ate, drank, and slept—the investment of his living presence with all the honours once paid to the memory of Aristotle—make it wonderful, not that he should sometimes have indulged an unhappy disposition, but that he should have left so few decided instances of it on record. That both his person and his memory were held dear by his friends there is no doubt: this could not have been unless the cases we have cited had been exceptions to the tenor of his conduct; and, knowing the disposition of which we have spoken to be one against which none but a high power can prevail, we are to infer that it was, in general, heartily striven against and successfully opposed.

[Pg 106]The mind of Newton, as a philosopher, is to this day, and to the most dispassionate readers of his works, the object of the same sort of wonder with which it was regarded by his contemporaries. We can compare it with nothing which the popular reader can understand, except the idea of a person who is superior to others in every kind of athletic exercise; who can outrun his competitors with a greater weight than any one of them can lift standing. There is a union, in excessive quantity, of different kinds of force: a combination of the greatest mathematician with the greatest thinker upon experimental truths; of the most sagacious observer with the deepest reflecter. Not infallible, but committing, after the greatest deliberation, a mistake in a simple point of mathematics, such as might have happened to any one: yet so happy in his conjectures, as to seem to know more than he could possibly have had any means of proving. Carrying his methods to such a point that his immediate successors could not clear one step in advance of him until they had given the weapons with which himself and Leibnitz had furnished them a completely new edge, yet apparently solicitous to hide his use of the most efficient of these weapons, and to give his researches the appearance of having been produced by something as much as possible resembling older methods. With few advantages as a writer or a teacher, he wraps himself in an almost impenetrable veil of obscurity, so as to require a comment many times the length of the text before he is easily accessible to a moderately well-informed mathematician. He seems to think he has done enough when he has secured a possibility of finding one reader who can understand him with any amount of pains: as if, seeing Halley to be of all men he knew next to himself in force, he had determined that none but Halley at his utmost stretch of thought should follow him. Accordingly one, to whom in his later years he used to send inquirers, saying, "Go to Mr. De Moivre, he knows these things better than I do," avowed that when he saw the Principia first, it was as much as he could do to follow the [Pg 107]reasoning. It would be difficult to name a dozen men in Europe of whom, at the appearance of the Principia, it can be proved that they both read and understood the work.

Newton himself attributed all his success to patience and perseverance more than to any peculiar sagacity: but on this point his judgment is worth nothing. Unquestionably, he had the two first in an enormous degree, as well as the third; nor is it too much to say that there is no one thing in his writings which the sagacity of some of his contemporaries might not have arrived at as well as his own. But to make an extensive system many things are necessary: and one point of failure is fatal to the whole. Again, it is difficult to put before the ordinary reader, even if he be a mathematician, a distinct view of the merit of any step in the formation of a system. Unless he be acquainted with the history of preceding efforts, he comes to the consideration of that merit from the wrong direction; for he reads the history from the end. He goes to the mail-coach, back from the railroad instead of forward from the old strings of pack-horses: from a macadamized road lighted with gas to the rough stones and the oil-lamps, instead of beginning with the mud and the link-boys. Perhaps the same sort of wrong judgment may accompany the retrospect of its own labours in a mind like Newton's; causing it to undervalue the intellectual part of which, in any case, it is least capable of judging.

The world at large expects, in the account of such things, to hear of some marvellous riddles solved, and some visibly extraordinary feats of mind. The contents of some well-locked chest are to be guessed at by pure strength of imagination: and they are disappointed when they find that the wards of the lock were patiently tried, and a key fitted to them by (it may be newly imagined) processes of art. Thus the great experiment, the trial of the moon's gravitation, seems wonderfully simple to those who have to describe it; precisely what anybody could do. If the moon were not retained by some force, she would proceed in a straight line MB: something causes her to[Pg 108] describe MA instead, which is equivalent to giving a fall of BA towards the earth. Now since EM, the distance of the moon from the earth's centre, is about 60 times EC, the earth's radius, it follows that if there be gravitation at the moon, and if it diminish as the square of the distance increases, it ought to be 60 times 60, or 3600 times as great at the surface of the earth as at M; or a body at the earth's surface ought to fall in one minute 3600 times as much as BA (supposing MA to be the arc moved over in one minute). A surveyor's apprentice, even in Newton's day, could with great ease have ascertained that such is the fact, if the data had been given to him. Now why was Newton the first to make this simple trial? The notion of gravitation was, as we have said, afloat: and Bouillaud had declared his conviction that attractive forces, if they exist, must be inversely as the squares of the distances. Did he try this simple test? Perhaps he did, and threw away his result as useless, not being able to make the next step. Or was it that neither he nor any one except Newton had any distinct idea of measuring from the centre of the earth? If so, then Newton was in possession of what he afterwards proved, namely, that a spherical body, the particles of which attract inversely as the squares of the distances, attracts as if all its particles were collected in its centre. In either case, this may serve to illustrate what a popular reader would hardly suppose, namely, that the wonder of great discoveries consists in there being found one who can accumulate and put together many different things, no one of which is, by itself, stupendous after the fact, nor calculated to produce that sort of admiration with which the whole is regarded.

We have not yet mentioned the theological writings of Newton, as his discussion of the prophecies of Daniel, &c. About his opinions on this subject there is a little controversy: and the various sects of opinion are in the habit[Pg 109] of opposing to each other the great names which are on their several sides of the question. That Newton was a firm believer in Christianity as a Revelation from God, is very certain: but whether he held the opinions of the majority of Christians on the points which distinguish Trinitarians from Arians,[14] Socinians, and Humanitarians, is the question of controversy. It is to be remembered that during the whole of Newton's life the denial of the doctrine of the Trinity was illegal, the statute of King William (which relaxed the existing law, for a man was hanged in 1696 for denying the Trinity) making it incapability of holding any place of trust for the first offence, and three years' imprisonment with other penalties for the second. Few therefore wrote against the Trinity, except either as, in the 'Unitarian Tracts,' without even a printer's name, or evasively, by arguing against the Trinity being an article of faith, that is, a necessary part of a Christian's hope of salvation. Premising this, we take the evidence, as it stands, for and against the heretical character of Newton's opinions.

There is a wide-spread tradition that Horsley objected to publish a part of the Portsmouth Papers on account of the heresy of the opinions contained in them; which statement used to be even in children's books, and was made by Dr. Thomson in his History of the Royal Society. These papers have never been published, nor has any one of those who have had access to them denied the rumour on his own knowledge. The refusal of Horsley is not conclusive in itself; because, to use the words of one of the children's books we remember (called [Pg 110]a 'British Plutarch,' or some such name), he was a "rigid high priest," and heterodoxy short even of Arianism would probably have led him to such a determination. But the suppression still continues, long after the above rumour has been very effective in aiding the probabilities drawn from other sources, that Newton's opinions were even more heterodox than Arianism; and there is some force in this.

Two witnesses from among Newton's personal friends, Whiston, an Arian (calling himself a Eusebian), and Hopton Haynes, who was employed under him in the Mint, and who was a Humanitarian, severally bear testimony to his having held their several opinions. Whiston, whose intimate acquaintance with him terminated some time before 1720, states in two places that Newton was a Eusebian [Arian] and a Baptist, and that he was "inclined to suppose" these two sects to be the two witnesses [15] mentioned in the book of Revelations. Haynes [16][Pg 111] declares him to have been a Humanitarian, and states that he much lamented that his friend Dr. Clarke had stopped at Arianism. On the other hand, the writer in the Biographia Britannica, who cites the last edition[17] (1753)[Pg 112] of Whiston's memoirs, says that Whiston there states that Newton was so much offended with him for having represented him as an Arian, that this was the reason why he would never consent to his admission into the Royal Society. The edition of 1749, thirteen years after Newton's death, shows that Winston had then no such knowledge of the cause. But, if it were so, and Haynes's testimony be true, he might have had Priestley's objection to Arianism rather than Horsley's: and in either case, we know enough of Newton to be sure that he would be likely to take offence at any talk about opinions he did not choose to avow, particularly such as were illegal; and above all, he would fear the tongue of a man like Whiston, all honesty and no discretion, who told the world long before his death all that he knew about himself and everybody else, without the least reserve.

Newton wrote (about 1690) under the title of 'Historical Account of two Notable Corruptions of Scripture,' against the genuineness of two passages on which Trinitarian [18] writers then placed much reliance: that is, against the genuineness of 1 John v. 7, and that of the word θεος [Greek: theos] (God) in 1 Timothy iii. 16. Now, though Trinitarians have often abandoned the first passage, and given up the Protestant reading of the second, it has rarely happened, if ever, that they have written expressly against them: the world at large sees no difference[Pg 113] between opposing an argument, and opposing the conclusion; and parties in religion and politics require [19] assent, not merely to their tenets, but to each and every mode of maintaining them. And writers who go so far as to say anything against one mode of supporting their own side of a question, generally make a decided profession of adherence to the conclusion while they reason against one mode of maintaining it. Newton does no such thing: his expressions are vague, or if not vague, they are the formular [20] words under which the opponents of the received[Pg 114] doctrine avoided imprisonment. The truth is to be purged of things spurious: the faith subsisted before these texts were introduced or changed: it is not an article of faith or a point of discipline, but a criticism, &c. There is an expression towards the end which admits of a double interpretation: "if the ancient churches, in debating and deciding the greatest mysteries of religion, knew nothing of these two texts; I understand not, why we should be so fond of them now the debates are over." The first clause, by itself, might rather have been written by a Trinitarian: though a Unitarian might write it, more especially if he wanted a formular phrase. But the second clause looks very like a formula: for there was no time at which the debate raged so fiercely as in the day of Newton, which was that of Wallis, South, Sherlock, &c., and hosts of anonymous writers. We find it difficult to suppose that Newton, whose friendship with Locke, Clarke, and Whiston, at that time was notorious, would do that which none but Anti-trinitarians, or very few, ever did, in a communication to an Anti-trinitarian intended at that time for publication abroad, without making a definite avowal of the orthodoxy of his belief, if he had it to make. It is right to [Pg 115]state, on the other side, Bishop Burgess's argument: that this was a writing which Newton suppressed from publication. Printing should have been the word: Newton published it when he caused it to be sent to Le Clerc. There is to us something corroborative, or at least significative of much difference from the most common opinion, in the Scholium which he added at the end of the second edition of the Principia. With Jewish and Christian writers, Deity is necessarily from eternity and without superior: the word God implies both necessary existence and omnipotence. With the Greeks, divine power might be communicated in such a manner that a hero, for instance, after death, might become as truly the object of worship as Jupiter himself. Newton adopts the Greek definition, or one very like it. The rule of a spiritual being makes him God. Dominatio entis spiritualis Deum constituit. And as if this were not precise enough, he adds, in the third edition, a note stating that thus the souls of dead princes were called gods by the Gentiles, but falsely, from want of dominion. He then proceeds to his well-known reflections on the Supreme Deity.

We have entered into this question, not from any particular interest in it—for there are too many great minds on both sides of the controversy to make one more or less a matter of any consequence to either,—but because we have a curious matter of evidence, and an instructive view of party methods of discussion. Whatever Newton's opinions were, they were in the highest degree the result of a love of truth, and of a cautious and deliberate search after it. His very infirmity is a guarantee for the existence of this feeling in no usual measure. With a competent livelihood, and the dread of discussion so strong that he would gladly have hidden his results from the world rather than encounter even respectful opposition, he could not have worked either for the hope of wealth or office, or even for the love of fame, except in a very secondary degree. The enthusiasm which supported him through the years of patient thought out[Pg 116] of which the Principia arose, must have been strong indeed when he had no ultimate worldly end to propose to himself. Who can say how much of the truth of his system we may owe to this very position? Had he been desirous of pleasing, he must have had strong temptation to build upon some of the prevailing notions; to have a little mercy upon the Physics of Des Cartes. Or even without going so far, a small portion of the vanity which loves to present complete systems and to confess no ignorance, might have biassed him to adopt such an addition to his law of attractive force (such a one as Clairaut for a little while thought necessary) as, without interfering with the main phenomena, would have served to bring out some more explanations. But he had no such bias: and speaking of his philosophic character, it may be said that never was there more of the disinterested spirit of inquiry, unspurred by love of system, unchecked by dread of labour or of opinion. For, however much he might dislike or fear opposition, there was one tribute to it which his philosophy never paid: the pages which he would gladly have burned rather than encounter discussion, contain no concession whatever.

In concluding this brief outline of a truly great man, one of the first minds of any age or country, of whose labours the world will reap the fruits in every year of its existence, we cannot help expressing our hope that future biographers will fairly refute, or fairly admit, the existence of those blots of temper to which the undiscriminating admiration of preceding ones has obliged us to devote so much of the present article. Of the facts, where we have stated them as facts, we are well assured: and there can be no reason why the warnings which the best and greatest of the species must sometimes hold out to the rest, should be softened, or what is worse, converted into examples of imitation, by fear of opposing an established prejudice, or by the curious tendency of biographers to exalt those of whom they write into monsters of perfection. Surely it is enough that Newton is the greatest of philosophers, and one of the best of men—that[Pg 117] all his errors are to be traced to a disposition which seems to have been born [21] with him—that, admitting them in their fullest extent, he remains an object of unqualified wonder, and all but unqualified respect.

For reasons which will be easily understood, the author of this article subscribes his name.

[Pg 118]Had the author of Robinson Crusoe written the narrative of his own 'Life and strange surprising Adventures,'[22] we should have found the story of the London writer little less strange or surprising than that of the York mariner. As it is, we must be content with a more commonplace tale. He has left indeed many personal recollections, but they are mostly refutations of calumnies that had been propagated, defences of conduct that had[Pg 119] been misrepresented, or apologies for writings that had been misunderstood. Still the best notices of his early history are those we have from his own pen, and these we shall use as far as they go. Of his later life we know far less than might have been expected of so prominent a writer. Not only had he no faithful Boswell to gather up every scrap of conversation, or after his death to collect every scattered fragment preserved by friendship; not only did his contemporaries leave his life unwritten; but with so little care was his memory cherished that when Chalmers, about fifty years after the death of De Foe, began to make inquiries with a view to writing a memoir of him, he tells us, "whether De Foe were born on the neighbouring continent or in this island, in London or in the country, was equally uncertain." Chalmers prosecuted his inquiries diligently and with tolerable success; and Wilson and others have zealously followed him in his labours; and probably all has been rescued from oblivion that may now be looked for respecting him.

Daniel De Foe was born in the year 1661, in the parish of Cripplegate, London. His father's name was James Foe; and the De was not assumed by Daniel until he grew to manhood; but neither the time nor the reason of the assumption is very clear. James Foe was a butcher, tolerably easy in his circumstances, and a dissenter in his principles; his son accordingly was sent for education to an eminent dissenting academy at Newington Green, of which Charles Morton, a man of learning and a judicious teacher, was the master. The education which Daniel received there, we are told by himself, was of a more comprehensive kind than was common, and it does not appear to have been less accurate. Probably at Newington Green De Foe missed much of the scholarship that he might have acquired on the banks of Cam or Isis, from which, being a dissenter, he was excluded; but if he was not initiated into the deeper mysteries of the Greek and Latin metres, he was taught how to employ his own language to advantage. All the lectures were delivered, and all the exercises[Pg 120] were written, in English; and thus, as he says, "though the scholars were not destitute of the languages, it is observed of them that they were by this made masters of the English tongue, and more of them excelled in that particular than of any school of that time." In afterlife, among the charges brought against him, that of want of learning was loudly and coarsely urged by Tutchin, in the 'Observator,' and other of the scribes of the day. At first he was inclined to let the charge pass unnoticed, that thus, as he expresses it, "these gentlemen that reproach my learning to applaud their own, may have it proved I have more learning than either of them—because I have more manners. I have no concern to tell Dr. Brown I can read English, nor to tell Mr. Tutchin I understand Latin; non ita Latinus, sum ut Latine loqui. I easily acknowledge myself blockhead enough to have lost the fluency of expression in the Latin, and so far trade has been a prejudice to me; and yet I think I owe this justice to my ancient father, still living, and in whose behalf I freely testify, that if I am a blockhead it was nobody's fault but my own; he having spared nothing in my education that might qualify me to match the accurate Dr. Brown or the learned Observator. . . . . As to my little learning, and his great capacity, I freely challenge him to translate with me any Latin, French, and Italian author, and after that to retranslate them crossways, for 20l. each book; and by this he shall have an opportunity to show the world how much De Foe the hosier is inferior in learning to Mr. Tutchin the gentleman."[23]

De Foe appears to have remained at this school till about 1680, probably preparing for the ministry, which, as we know from a passage in his 'Review,'[24] he was at[Pg 121] one time desirous to enter. Why he was thwarted in his wish it is perhaps vain to inquire, and scarcely worth while to speculate. It has been suggested that the inauspicious state of affairs, especially for dissenters, and his own inclination to politics, may have induced him to relinquish the idea; but it seems scarcely probable. Young De Foe was little likely to be turned aside from such a purpose because the times were unpropitious; and an inclination for politics was not then an uncommon thing in a minister whether in or out of the establishment. The real cause was perhaps of a very different kind. Among dissenters (or at least among Independents, to which sect he belonged), the candidate for the ministry has always had to undergo a somewhat elaborate and harassing ordeal. Besides the expressed desire of the candidate, and the "call of the church," with which he is connected, after having given proofs of his fitness by exhibitions of his "gifts," by relations of his personal "experiences and exercises," and by statements of his theological knowledge and doctrinal opinions; he has also to bear many more private tests and to pass through a somewhat lengthened probation. Now all this is easy enough to young men of strong religious impressions, and coarse feelings, but is often peculiarly grating to the more sensitive; and though a sense of duty will frequently carry them through it, many such are found inadequate, they give up of their own accord, or are pronounced wanting. De Foe most likely was either found not to have a sufficiently decided call, or his independency of spirit revolted under the inquisition. At no time of his life was he very forward to square his own notions and practices to the disciplinary rules of any sect or party. Be the cause of his forsaking his early purpose what it may, that purpose was not likely to have been adopted by him hastily, nor the renunciation of it to have been without influence on his future life; in the consideration of which it should therefore not be overlooked. To the end of his days he remained a dissenter, and was always ready to defend nonconformity; but neither during his life nor since his death has he been a [Pg 122]favourite of the party to which he belonged, and there are many hints in his works which suggest that the dissatisfaction was mutual. For the last fifty years of his life he did indeed live all alone.

Of the ardour of his theological zeal he gave early and decisive evidence. In 1682 he published a pamphlet against the prevalent high-church notions, which contains a spice of his ironic talent, as might be suspected from the title: 'Speculum Crape Gownorum; or a Looking Glass for the Young Academics newfoyld, with Reflections on some of the late high-flown Sermons; to which is added a Sermon of the Newest Fashion.' Even at this period he showed the fearlessness that marked his future career. He had already resolved "to venture upon the dangerous precipice of telling unbiassed truth," regardless whether by so doing he pleased or offended his friends, and careless of the danger to which he exposed himself. We cannot do better than let him describe, in his own graphic way, his conduct for the next few years. "The first time I had the misfortune to differ with my friends was about the year 1683, when the Turks were besieging Vienna, and the Whigs in England, generally speaking, were for the Turks taking it, which I, having read the history of the cruelty and perfidious dealings of the Turks in their wars, and how they had rooted out the name of the Christian religion in above threescore and ten kingdoms, could by no means agree with. And though then but a young man, and a younger author, I opposed it and wrote against it, which was taken very unkindly indeed. The next time I differed with my friends was when King James was wheedling the Dissenters to take off the penal laws and test, which I could by no means come into. And as in the first I used to say, I had rather the popish House of Austria should ruin the Protestants in Hungary than the infidel House of Ottoman should ruin both Protestants and Papists by over-running Germany; so in the other, I told the Dissenters I had rather the Church of England should pull our clothes off by fines and forfeitures than the Papists should fall both upon the Church and the Dissenters, and pull our skins[Pg 123] off by fire and faggot." ('Appeal to Honour and Justice.')

It was not with the pen alone that he displayed his enmity to the measures of James. In the disastrous affair of 1685 he informs us that he took "arms under Monmouth against his cruelty and arbitrary government;" but whether he was present at Sedgemoor we are not told; at any rate he escaped the terrible retribution which followed upon the failure of that ill-conceived attempt. When the more successful effort was made to arrest the career of the infatuated monarch, De Foe shared in the general enthusiasm. On the occasion of William and Mary visiting the City, they were escorted, says Oldmixon, by "a royal regiment of volunteer horse made up of the chief citizens, who, being gallantly mounted and richly accoutred, were led by the Earl of Monmouth, now Earl of Peterborough. Among these troopers, who were for the most part Dissenters, was Daniel De Foe, at that time a hosier in Freeman's-yard, Cornhill."

That De Foe was a hosier was commonly said by his contemporaries, and is still usually repeated. But he expressly denied that he had been "a hosier or an apprentice." He appears to have commenced business when he gave up the ministry, though he does not say what business he followed, simply calling himself a trader: he seems to have engaged in commerce, and particularly in trade to Portugal. His commercial undertakings were unsuccessful; but whether from the wars in which the country was engaged, and the misconduct of others, as he asserts, or from neglect and mismanagement on his own part, as has been affirmed, cannot now be ascertained. It is only certain that in 1692 he became bankrupt, but the commission was speedily superseded on the petition of his principal creditors, who agreed to a composition, accepting at the same time his simple bond—a circumstance sufficiently indicating the opinions formed of his rectitude by those most interested. Nor ought we to omit what he makes one of his creditors assert: "I compounded with him and discharged him fully; and several years afterwards he sent for me, and,[Pg 124] though he was clearly discharged, he paid me all the remainder of his debt voluntarily and of his own accord; and he told me that, as fast as God should enable him, he intended to do so with everybody. When he had done, he desired me to set my hand to a paper to acknowledge it, which I readily did, and found a great many names to the paper before me." And in 1705, when Lord Haversham threw out insinuations against his probity, he says that "with a numerous family, and no helps but his own industry, he had forced his way with undiscouraged diligence through a sea of misfortunes, and reduced his debts, exclusive of composition, from seventeen thousand to less than five thousand pounds." "These misfortunes in business," to use his own words, "having unhinged me from matters of trade, it was about the year 1694 when I was invited by some merchants, with whom I had corresponded abroad, and some also at home, to settle at Cadiz, in Spain, and that with offers of very good commissions. But Providence, which had other work for me to do, placed a secret aversion in my mind to quitting England upon any account, and made me refuse the best offers of that kind, to be concerned with some eminent persons at home in proposing ways and means to the government for raising money to supply the occasions of the war then newly begun. Some time after this I was, without the least application of mine, and being then seventy miles from London, sent for to be accountant to the commissioners of the glass duty, in which service I continued to the termination of their commission." This situation he held from 1695 to 1699.

The proposals for raising money for the government and for carrying on the war, of which he speaks, were connected with the coinage, with the establishment of county banks, the registry of seamen, a revision of the poor-laws, and various other projects. And he followed up his proposals by publishing, while serving in the commission on the glass duties, 'An Essay on Projects,' in which he suggests a great number of schemes, several of which would doubtless have been of much benefit to the country if they had been adopted. Like all his works it abounds[Pg 125] with original and sagacious remarks. Franklin acknowledges that this essay "gave him a turn of thinking that had an influence on some of the principal future events of his life," and many other writers and speculators have derived serviceable hints from it.

Meanwhile he had been busily engaged in the controversies of the day. One that he entered upon with the most ardour was the question of the Occasional Conformity of Dissenters, a practice imperative upon such as held any municipal or government office, but respecting the lawfulness of which the dissenters were divided in opinion. De Foe published several pamphlets against the practice, which was defended by the excellent John Howe. This he reckons the third occasion of difference with his friends; and he had the misfortune, he says, "to make many honest men angry, rather because he had the better of the argument, than because they disliked what he said." He also with his usual courage wrote about this time in defence of a standing army, the proposition being exceedingly unpopular. Another of his works was 'The Poor Man's Plea concerning a Reformation of Manners;' a hearty attack upon the vices of the upper classes, which he asserts were suffered to pass unreproved, while the poor were for every fault strictly punished; and thus the laws became "cobweb laws, in which the small flies are catched, and great ones break through." And in this way he went on attacking abuses wherever he discerned them, and endeavouring to destroy prejudices whether of friends or enemies.

The works we have noticed were published whilst he held his office in the glass commission; the leisure obtained upon the suppression of the commission in 1699, and perhaps the necessity of making up for the loss of the income—for he was married, and had a young family—stimulated him to increased activity, and in the course of the next two or three years he wrote a great number of pamphlets on a great variety of subjects, but all connected with the passing religious or political controversies, and all of them written with a thorough earnestness that leaves no doubt of the sincerity of the author. But [Pg 126]literature was not his only employment. He had devised many projects for the benefit of the public, and he resolved to carry into practice one that he thought might also be of service to himself. This was the attempt to introduce into this country the manufacture of pantiles, which had previously been imported from Holland. He erected works at Tilbury fort, and prosecuted the manufacture until he was thrown into prison in 1703; but the speculation was not successful. The public were slow to believe that English tiles could equal Dutch ones; the prejudice might have been overcome in time, but his arrest put a complete stop to the undertaking. In a scurrilous answer to his 'Free-born Englishman,' entitled the 'Free-born Huguenot,' he is called a "sorry paymaster and knave," and it is asserted that—

"Justices forc'd him to pay his slaves,
Who, subjects to a worse than Pharaoh's law,
Made bricks without due food instead of straw;
Who suffer'd for the maggots in his head,
And took great pains to go without their bread."

but whether there was any foundation for the charge we do not know; most likely it was a mere fabrication, for he was throughout his life the object of the constant and virulent attacks of a set of men by whom truth and decency were utterly disregarded. In the 'Review' (March 24, 1705) we have his own account of the affair. "Nor should the author of this paper boast in vain if he tells the world that he himself, before violence, injury, and barbarous treatment demolished him and his undertaking, employed a hundred poor people in making pantiles in England, a manufacture always bought in Holland; and thus he pursued this principle [of increasing the sources of employment,] with the utmost zeal for the good of England; and those gentlemen who so easily persecuted him for saying what all the world since owns to be true, and which he has since a hundred times offered to prove, were particularly serviceable to the nation, in turning that hundred of poor people and their families a-begging for work, and forcing them to turn other poor[Pg 127] families out of work to make room for them; besides three thousand pounds' damage to the author of this, which he has paid for this little experience." Oldmixon calls De Foe the secretary of the works, and Wilson follows him in the statement; but to have been so large a loser by their failure, he must have had a considerable share in them, if he was not (as we shall presently see him described) the owner. It was his last venture in business.

The pamphlets he wrote at this time were more important, and productive of more important results to himself, than any he had hitherto published. They are in verse and prose, and on all the leading topics of foreign and domestic policy. The nation was in a state of excitement, in which De Foe fully participated, but he did not suffer himself to be carried away by the popular notions. All these pamphlets are marked by the strong common-sense and shrewdness so characteristic of him, and many of them display great political discernment. One point to which he addressed himself with especial zeal was to convince the nation of the folly and injustice of "maltreating King William;" and this caused him his "fourth breach with honest men." William was not popular; the English feeling against foreigners had been carefully pandered to, and the king's reserved temper had tended not a little to increase the feeling. To check this growing prejudice De Foe, who was an ardent admirer of William's many excellent qualities, wrote his 'True-born Englishman,' which appeared early in 1701. Of the cause of his writing it, and the consequences, he has left a pretty full account in his 'Appeal.' "During this time there came out a vile abhorred pamphlet in very ill verse, written by one Mr. Tutchin, and called 'The Foreigners,' in which the author—who he was I then knew not—fell personally upon the king himself, and then upon the Dutch nation; and after having reproached his majesty with crimes that his worst enemy could not think of without horror, he sums up all in the odious name of Foreigner. This filled me with a kind of rage against the book, and gave birth to a trifle, which I never could hope should have[Pg 128] met with so general an acceptation as it did; I mean the 'True-born Englishman.' How this poem was the occasion of my being known to his majesty, how I was afterwards received by him, how employed, and how, above my capacity of deserving, rewarded, is no part of the present case, and is only mentioned here, as I take all occasions to do, for the expressing the honour I ever preserved for the immortal and glorious memory of that greatest and best of princes, and whom it was my honour and advantage to call master, as well as sovereign; whose goodness to me I never forgot, neither can forget; and whose memory I never patiently heard abused, and never can do so; and who, had he lived, would never have suffered me to be treated as I have been in the world."

De Foe was not a poet; but he could write vigorous if not harmonious verse, and he put out all his power in this piece. The satire is bold and trenchant; he wants to humble the excessive pride of his countrymen in their antiquity, and there is a daring about the manner in which he attempts to demolish this their favourite boast that is quite remarkable. He undertakes to show how

"From a mixture of all kinds began
That het'rogeneous thing—an Englishman;"

and he goes steadily through his history, without any attempt at softening down the rougher parts. Nor after he has, as he says, "the breed described," does he deal at all more favourably with their "temper," bestowing upon them the vices of all the nations that had contributed to their parentage, with very few of their virtues.

"What honesty they have the Saxons gave them,
And that, now they grow old, begins to leave them."

And he brings in Britannia herself to sing the praises of William, and to reproach her sons for their ingratitude to him.

The sale of the piece was quite unexampled. He says some four years afterwards in the preface to a collection of his works—in the course of some remarks on literary[Pg 129] piracy, from which he suffered greatly, and to the prevention of which he contributed more than any one,—"The True-born Englishman is a remarkable example, by which the author, though in it he had no eye to profit, had he been to enjoy the profit of his own labour, had gained above 1000l.: a book that besides nine editions of the author, has been twelve times printed by other hands; some of which have been sold for 1d., others 2d., and others 6d.; the author's edition being fairly printed, and on good paper, and could not be sold under a shilling [it was in 4to and contained 60 pages]. Eighty thousand of the small ones have been sold in the streets for 2d. or at a penny: and the author thus abused and discouraged had no remedy but patience." Nor, if we may believe a statement he made in a work he published long after his poem, was the effect of the satire less remarkable than its circulation. "National mistakes, vulgar errors, and even a general practice, have been reformed by a just satire. None of our countrymen have been known to boast of being true-born Englishmen, or so much as to use the word as a title or appellation, ever since a late satire upon that national folly was published, though almost thirty years ago. Nothing was more frequent in our mouths before that, nothing so universally blushed and laughed at since." It must not be supposed, however, that De Foe was un-English in his feelings; there was not a more thorough Englishman living; but he was an honest patriot, and would not participate in an affected patriotism, borrowed for mean, selfish, or party purposes; at the same time there is a little perverseness in the asperity with which he rebukes the faults of his countrymen. We have already seen that his poem was the occasion of his being introduced to the king, and of his being employed and well rewarded by him. The nature of the employment and the extent of the reward are unknown. That it was not with a view to any reward that he wrote the satire De Foe stoutly affirms, and there is no reason to doubt his declaration. He had been all along a zealous partisan of the monarch; and it should not be unnoticed that he continued to express his admiration of[Pg 130] him, long after it was possible to gain anything by so doing.

In May, 1701, the singular genius of De Foe was displayed in an event that excited a great commotion. The violent dissensions between the houses of parliament, the bitter strifes of the two leading political parties, and the consequent neglect of the public business, had caused strong feelings of disgust throughout the country, which at length found expression in the famous Petition of the Freeholders of Kent to the House of Commons. This petition called on the members in strong language to consider the dangerous state of the kingdom and the disturbed condition of all Europe, and laying aside all distrust of his "majesty, whose great actions are writ in the hearts of all his subjects never to be effaced," to take speedy measures for the safety of the nation, and "enabling the king to assist his allies before it is too late." The county members shrank from the presentation of such a remonstrance, until backed by a deputation of the principal memorialists. The petition was no sooner read than the House voted it to be "scandalous, insolent, and seditious," and committed the deputation to custody at the Gatehouse. A few days afterwards, as the speaker was entering the House of Commons, a packet was put into his hands, which, upon being opened, was found to contain a memorial, which he was "commanded by 200,000 Englishmen to deliver to the House of Commons, and to inform them that it is no banter, but serious truth, and a serious regard to it is expected." And a serious regard was paid. The Memorial, which was signed, "Our name is Legion and we are many," and hence came to be known as the 'Legion Memorial,' enters into a bitter examination of the misdeeds and neglect of the Commons; asserts boldly and eloquently the right of the people to remonstrate with their representatives "as they think fit, either by petition, address, proposal, memorial, or in any other peaceable way;" and declares that the House had acted illegally and arbitrarily in arresting persons who presented such petitions. It then proceeds to "publicly protest against all [Pg 131]the aforesaid illegal actions, and in the name of ourselves, and of all good people of England," to "require and demand" them immediately to adopt a number of measures that are very explicitly stated, but which are too long to quote; and winds up by threatening them, if they neglect, with "the resentment of an injured nation; for Englishmen are to be no more slaves to parliaments than to kings." De Foe never explicitly owned this memorial to be his invention, but there is no doubt whatever that he was the author of it. The style, with its keen skilful sarcasm, its clearness, boldness, and straight-forwardness, and the air of reality and sincerity that is thrown over it, everywhere betrays him. In his 'Original Power of the Collective Body of the People,' published the same year, in speaking of the origin of the 'Legion Paper,' he admits that he could "give a better history of it, if it were needful;" words that he carefully expunged when he reprinted the tract a few years later. It has been said that the paper was put into the speaker's hands by a woman; and Mr. Polhill, the son of one of the Kentish deputation, informed Chalmers that it was De Foe himself who was so disguised. Mr. Wilson doubts the fact; but the passage he quotes from De Foe's history of the Kentish petition shows that he was the person who delivered the memorial, though it seems to deny that he did it in female attire: "It was said, it was delivered to the Speaker by a woman; but I have been informed since, that it was a mistake, and it was delivered by the very person who wrote it, guarded by about sixteen persons of quality, who, if any notice had been taken of him, were ready to have carried him off by force." The effect of the Memorial was marvellous. The fall of a shell in the House could not have produced greater consternation among the members than the receipt of this terrible piece of paper. The Serjeant-at-arms was sent round to summon every member to immediate attendance. When they assembled they could not conceal their terror. One member who had been named in the Memorial declared that he stood in danger of being assassinated. Others fled to their country residences.[Pg 132] One committee was appointed to draw up an address to his majesty praying him to put a stop to these threatening petitions; another was appointed to make an inquiry into this dreadful conspiracy. Luckily for their fears, the truth became gradually apparent that there were not "200,000 Englishmen" ready to back this "remonstrance in an unpeaceable way," but that the whole was a mystification; and the committee thought it wisest quietly to dissolve. It was one of those bold strokes that only De Foe could have struck; and it is probable that it did in some measure accomplish its object. In the following year he published 'Legion's New Paper; being a second Memorial to the Gentlemen of a late House of Commons;' and also, as has been mentioned, a 'History of the Kentish Petition.' He was evidently well satisfied with the success of his ruse.

About this time he wrote an able and earnest remonstrance against a war with France, although that was a design upon which the king had set his heart. He also published two or three pamphlets on the succession to the crown, chiefly intended to warn the country against the machinations of the Jacobites. On the death of William in 1702, he wrote 'The Mock Mourners, a Satire by way of Elegy on King William,' in which he warmly eulogises the virtues of that prince, and censures the ingratitude with which he had been treated. Being in a poetic mood, he quickly followed this with another satire, entitled 'Reformation of Manners,' in which he makes a furious and unsparing charge on public and private vices, attacking by name a great number of persons in various ranks of life, but only, as he expressly asserts, such as made a public parade of their misdoings.

The death of William was a grievous misfortune to De Foe. Anne commenced her reign a fierce Tory and resolute supporter of "church principles." De Foe was a thorough Whig and a nonconformist. He had too, by his satires, made himself many enemies, who were not at all of a scrupulous character. In his various writings he had by turns offended all parties, and now he was to experience the enmity of all. Encouraged by the change [Pg 133]of monarchs, the "high church" party put forth the most extravagant claims, and asserted the most intolerant principles. De Foe at once entered the lists, and with inimitable skill showed the tendency of their doctrines. The method he adopted was thoroughly characteristic. In 'The Shortest Way with Dissenters,' assuming the character of one of the highest of high churchmen, he pretends to prove that the shortest and only effectual way to "live in peace and see piety flourish," and to "save many millions of future souls," is to root out the conventicles and to purge their frequenters, "the present race of poisoned spirits, from the face of the land." "'Tis vain to trifle in this matter; the light foolish handling of them by mulcts, fines, &c., is their glory and their advantage; if the gallows instead of the counter, and the galleys instead of the fines, were the reward of going to a conventicle to preach or hear, there would not be so many sufferers; the spirit of martyrdom is over: they that will go to church to be chosen sheriffs and mayors would go to forty churches rather than be hanged. If one severe law were made and punctually executed, that whoever was found at a conventicle should be banished the nation, and the preacher hanged, we should soon see the end of the tale; they would all come to church, and one age would make us all one again. . . . 'But,' says a hot-and-cold objector, 'this is renewing fire and faggot, reviving the act De Heret. Comburendo: this will be cruelty in its nature and barbarous to the world.'—I answer, 'tis cruelty to kill a snake or a toad in cold blood, but the poison of their nature makes it a charity to our neighbours to destroy these creatures, not for any personal injury received, but for prevention; not for the evil they have done, but the evil they may do. . . . .

"Moses was a merciful, meek man, and yet with what fury did he run through the camp, and cut the throats of three and thirty thousand of his dear Israelites that were fallen into idolatry: and what was the reason? 'Twas mercy to the rest to make these examples, to prevent the destruction of the whole army. . . . .

[Pg 134]"And the title of barbarous and cruel will soon be taken off from this law too. I am not supposing that all the dissenters in England should be hanged or banished; but as in cases of rebellions and insurrections, if a few of the ringleaders suffer, the multitude are dismissed, so a few obstinate people being made examples, there is no doubt but the severity of the law would find a stop in the compliance of the multitude."

These extracts will sufficiently show the scope and style of the work. To any one in our days it seems scarcely possible that the tenor of it should have been ever mistaken. But it was by both parties. The steady gravity with which the outrageous proposals were stated quite mystified them, and the book was universally received as genuine—by the high churchmen with delight, by the dissenters with dismay, and by moderate men with grief and abhorrence. When it was known that it was written by De Foe, the clamour raised against him was as extravagant and absurd as the previous blunder was stupid. The dissenters especially, he says, "flew at him like lightning, ignorantly and blindly, not seeing that he had sacrificed himself and his fortunes in their behalf; they rummaged his character for reproaches, though they could find little that way to hurt him; they plentifully loaded him with ill language and railing, and took a great deal of pains to let the world see their own ignorance and ingratitude." We may, however, say in excuse for them that there were some apparently hard hits for them in the book, and that, to borrow Sir Thomas Browne's words, "many positions seem quodlibetically constituted, and, like a Delphian blade, will cut both ways." The clamour was so great that De Foe thought it necessary to conceal himself. He published an 'Explanation,' though he protests "he thought when he wrote the book he should never need to come to an explanation, and wonders to find there should be any reason for it." But the violence of his enemies did not slacken: a complaint was made in the House of Commons (Feb. 25) against the work, and after the obnoxious parts were read, it was resolved "That this book, being [Pg 135]full of false and scandalous reflections on this parliament, and tending to promote sedition, be burnt by the hands of the common hangman to-morrow in New Palace Yard." Meanwhile the government had issued a proclamation offering a reward for the apprehension of the author. As it is not often that we can obtain an official description of the person of a celebrated man, it may be worth while to quote this; in reading it some allowance must of course be made for the tendency there always is in officials to describe delinquents in terms the reverse of flattering. De Foe himself several times, in subsequent writings, refers with some little subacidity of temper to this account of his "Dutch nose and sharp chin."

"Whereas Daniel De Foe, alias De Fooe, is charged with writing a scandalous and seditious pamphlet, entituled 'The Shortest Way with the Dissenters:' he is a middle-sized spare man, about forty [forty-two] years old, of a brown complexion, and dark-brown coloured hair, but wears a wig, a hooked nose, a sharp chin, grey eyes, and a large mole near his mouth; was born in London, and for many years was a hose-factor in Freeman's Yard, in Cornhill, and now is owner of the brick and pantile work near Tilbury Fort, in Essex; whoever shall discover the said Daniel De Foe to one of her majesty's principal secretaries of state, or any of her majesty's justices of the peace, shall have a reward of fifty pounds, which her majesty has ordered immediately to be paid upon such discovery."

The proclamation was successful, "the man being betrayed fell into the hands of the public ministry." He was tried for a libel, and the Attorney-General, Sir Simon Harcourt, treated him with great brutality. His own counsel he complains misled him. He was found guilty, and was sentenced to "pay a fine of two hundred marks to the queen, to stand three times in the pillory, be imprisoned during the queen's pleasure, and find sureties for his good behaviour during seven years." [Pg 136]And this execrable sentence was passed upon him after he had by "good words been wheedled to throw himself into their hands and submit, they giving him that gewgaw the public faith for a civil and gentleman-like treatment . . . yet they treated him in this most barbarous manner, on pretence that there were no such promises made, though he proved it upon them by the oath of the persons to whom they were made. . . . Thus he was ruined and undone, and left a monument of what every man must expect that serves a good cause, professed by an unthankful people." ('Consolidator.')

So long as the Tories remained in power this atrocious sentence was persevered in. He was duly set in the pillory; but it was not in the nature of the English people to insult over a man who was thus exposed not because he had committed a crime, for the true intent of his writing was now fully understood, but out of revenge. His exposure was in fact a triumph for him. The crowd looked on with silent pity, and when he was taken down expressed their sympathy "with loud shouts and acclamations." His persecutors cared not to repeat the exhibition. De Foe was not ashamed of his elevation. On his return to his prison he published his "Defiance of the Minister's Illegal Proceedings," in a 'Hymn to the Pillory;' and "their not thinking fit to prosecute him for it was a fair confession of guilt in the former proceedings, since he was in their power, and, as they thought, not like to come out of it" (Pref. to Works). The Hymn is one of his most spirited pieces of verse; and it quickly passed through several editions. He starts out in a loud strain,—

"Hail, hieroglyphic state machine,
Contriv'd to punish fancy in!
Men that are men in thee can feel no pain,
And all thy insignificants disdain:"

and never slackens his vigour throughout, while he describes those who have, and those who ought to have, stood in it; and he winds up with a sting sharp enough [Pg 137]to deter the ministers from provoking him by another procedure:—

"Tell them the men that placed him here
Are scandals to the times,
Are at a loss to find his guilt,
And can't commit his crimes!"

In his prison he did not give himself up to despair. He had all his prospects in life cut off; his manufactory was destroyed, his employments were gone: but he had a family to provide for, and with resolute industry he addressed himself to his task. Whilst in prison he wrote a continuation of his previous satire under the title of 'More Reformation, a satire on himself;' from the preface to which it appears that the dissenters still believed "that a certain book, which 'tis too true for me was of my writing, was writ with a design to have all the dissenters hanged, banished, or destroyed, and that the gallows and the galleys should be the penalty of going to a conventicle, forgetting that at the same time I must design to have my father, my wife, six innocent children, and myself, put in the same condition. All the fault I can find in myself as to these people is, that when I had drawn the picture, I did not, like the Dutchman with his man and bear, write under them, this is the man, and this is the bear, lest the people should mistake me." He also made collections of his writings in consequence of their having been collected and published by a piratical printer, of which he warmly complains. Another of the works that occupied him in his prison was published under the title of 'The Storm; or, a Collection of the most remarkable Casualties and Disasters which happened in the late dreadful Tempest both by Sea and Land, on Friday, Nov. 26th, 1703;' it is a superior work in every way to what might have been expected from the title, and it was several times reprinted. Besides these he published during his imprisonment fifteen or sixteen pamphlets on the prevalent religious and political topics, or in defence of the public and private worth of the late king. We have examined [Pg 138]most of these, and though of but temporary interest they serve to display the powerful intellect, amazing industry, and extensive resources of this wonderful man. But even all this, abundant as it appears, was not all that he accomplished during this imprisonment, of about eighteen months' continuance. He also, while in prison and uncertain when he should get out, projected and commenced the publication of his Review, a periodical that prepared the way for the Tatlers and Spectators of a later period. This work, which was at first published weekly and afterwards twice a week, was written wholly by himself, and was never remitted during the nine years that it lasted.

"The high-flying party" were driven from office in April, 1704; and Harley, who had succeeded the Earl of Nottingham as secretary of state, immediately made overtures to De Foe, who gives the following curious account of the affair. "While I lay friendless and distressed in the prison of Newgate, my family ruined, and myself without hope of deliverance, a message was brought me from a person of honour, who, till that time, I had never had the least acquaintance with, or knowledge of . . . . The message was by word of mouth thus:—'Pray, ask that gentleman what I can do for him?' But in return to this kind and generous message, I immediately took my pen and ink, and wrote the story of the blind man in the Gospel, to whom Our Blessed Lord put the question 'What wilt thou that I shall do unto thee?' Who, as if he had made it strange that such a question should be asked, or as if he had said that I am blind, and yet you ask me what thou shalt do for me? My answer is plain in my misery, 'Lord, that I may receive my sight!'" Harley understood the intimation; but it was four months before he procured De Foe's release. The queen, when the matter was brought before her at the council, declared that "she had left all that matter to a certain person, and did not think he would have used him in that manner." These were not mere words, says De Foe, as she gave convincing proofs, for she "was pleased particularly to enquire into my circumstances and family, and by my [Pg 139]Lord Treasurer Godolphin to send a considerable supply to my wife and family, and to send to me the prison money to pay my fine and the expenses of my discharge. . . . Here is the foundation on which I built my first sense of duty to her majesty's person, and the indelible bond of gratitude to my first benefactor." And this frank acknowledgment of his obligation, with a plain statement of those subsequently received, was made when the queen was dead and Harley in disgrace.

On his release he thought fit to retire for a while into the country, but as he complains he found that "a country recess no more than a stone doublet can secure a man from the clamours of the pen." Although he maintained entire silence, "the scribblers of the day vented their scurrilous street ribaldry and bear-garden usage, some in prose, and some in those terrible lines they call verse," till, though he "thought he had a talent of patience as large as might serve him in common with his neighbours," he found he could endure it silently no longer. He accordingly published what he called his 'Elegy,' being metaphorically dead, i. e., bound for seven years "not to write what some people may not like; and if that be not equivalent to being dead, as to the pen, I know not what is," and he "thus puts the case in order to a truce." He does not however forget to sprinkle some tart words even in this Elegy; while he exclaims loudly against the "legal tyranny" that has silenced him, he says:—

"Yet undisturbed I safely sleep,
And calm as death my silence keep;
I laugh at all the anger of mankind
Who, loth to hear the Truth, my pen confin'd;
I smile at human policy,
Who always stop that mouth whose words they can't deny."

He had retired to Bury St. Edmund's, where he employed himself in writing his Review; but probably he did not continue there very long. Harley saw his ability, and soon "employed him in several honourable though secret services." What these were he does not state,[Pg 140] but intimates that they were attended "oftentimes with difficulty and danger." When Harley was driven from the ministry, De Foe, with his full concurrence, continued to perform the same services under his rival Godolphin, who procured for him "the continuance of an appointment which her majesty had been pleased to make, in consideration of a former special service he had done, and in which he had run as much risk of his life as a grenadier upon the counterscarp." What this special and dangerous service was is left untold, but we gather from another part that it was "done in a foreign country."

Meanwhile our author, besides his Reviews, had gone on adding pamphlet to pamphlet with unflagging diligence. Among others appeared in verse a 'Hymn to Victory;' a 'Double Welcome to the Duke of Marlborough,' in which, while he celebrates the conquests of the hero, he adds an earnest cry for peace; and 'The Dyet of Poland, a satyr.' He also wrote some religious tracts, and some on the high-church and dissenting controversy,—for he appears soon to have cast off his care about his "seven years' silence," assured perhaps of the protection or acquiescence of the ministry. He wrote, too, several political pamphlets; and a couple of works in which he first gave decided intimation of his peculiar inventive powers. One of these, a little tract of a few pages, was produced under rather singular circumstances. A religious publication known as 'Drelincourt on Death' had been translated from the French, but its weighty qualities had not procured for it a rapid circulation. The publisher, like his shelves, "groaned under the burden." In his distress he applied to De Foe, who undertook to write a sufficient recommendation of the work. He quickly produced 'A true Relation of the Apparition of one Mrs. Veal, the next Day after her Death, to one Mrs. Bargrave at Canterbury, the 8th of September, 1705;' unquestionably the best ghost story of the kind ever invented. No other ghost ever came in such a rational way. The apparition is no pallid spectre clad in white, and coming in the midnight hour to speak terrible[Pg 141] things. She is the good, well-intentioned spirit of a plain kindly Christian woman, come to have a little parting feminine gossip with an old friend, and to condole with her in her sorrows; and she comes in the ordinary manner wearing her scoured silk gown, knocking at the door in broad daylight, and taking her seat in the elbow chair; and giving no intimation that she is not real flesh and blood. Mrs. Bargrave was in a little trouble at the time, and the conversation quite naturally took a religious turn, and quite naturally they talked about the religious books which in former days they used to read together. And then when they talked of death Mrs. Veal assured her that "Drelincourt's book on Death was the best ever written on that subject. She also mentioned Sherlock, the two Dutch books which were translated written upon Death, and several others. But Drelincourt, she said, had the clearest notions of Death and of the future state of any who had handled that subject. Then she asked Mrs. Bargrave whether she had Drelincourt. She said, Yes. Says Mrs. Veal, fetch it. And so Mrs. Bargrave goes up stairs and brings it down." And then Mrs. Veal quotes it and makes a few remarks upon what he says, and presently passes to other matters without any more references to the book. The account is all written in this homely style, from the narration of Mrs. Bargrave, whose honesty and character are vouched for by a neighbouring justice of the peace. The bait took. Its truth was not questioned, and the desired consequences naturally followed; for who that wished to prepare for death would not possess a book which a visitant from the other world had pronounced to be the best on the subject? The relation was afterwards prefixed to Drelincourt (which quickly passed through many editions), and its authenticity long remained undoubted. Boswell, in his 'Life of Johnson,' says, "I mentioned the famous story of the appearance of Mrs. Veal. Johnson. I believe, sir, that is given up: I believe the woman declared on her death-bed that it was a lie" (iii. 194, ed. 1835). Neither Johnson nor his biographer seems to have suspected that the whole was a hoax. Even[Pg 142] now there are probably many people who implicitly believe it, ghost and all. We know of some such, of both sexes.

The other work to which we referred, is an octavo volume of tolerable bulk, entitled 'The Consolidator; or Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World in the Moon,' translated from the Lunar language. It is a satirical review of the doings of the public men of England, an attack on the misconduct of men of all classes and orders. Not only the warriors and statesmen, but the poets and wits are sharply rebuked; and foreign policy as well as home is examined. Some parts of the book are of singular causticity and power, but it is, as a whole, rather tedious—partly, no doubt, from the temporary nature of most of it. Swift evidently owed a good deal to it, if he did not catch the idea from it of his 'Gulliver's Travels;' but Gulliver is incomparably more artistical in its execution. The lunarian veil is far too flimsy, and it is full of rents. The freedom of the work, and the somewhat indiscriminate character of its censures, together with the nature of his other political and ecclesiastical writings about this time, seem to have enraged the enemies of De Foe into absolute fury. Having to go into the western counties on some business, a scheme was concocted for kidnapping him and carrying him off to one of the colonies, or pressing him for a soldier. Suits were also commenced against him in his absence for fictitious debts, and pains were taken to circulate reports of his having fled from justice. If he had not published statements of all these things, at the time, in his 'Review,' they would have been scarcely credible.

In 1706 he published his longest and favourite poem, the 'Jure Divino, a Satyr, in 12 books,' and extending through more than 300 folio pages. It is an elaborate argumentative satire against non-resistance and passive obedience. The work was directed against a set of tyrannical principles that were becoming fashionable; but though it contains much of good forcible writing, it may be doubted if this was a sort of work likely[Pg 143] to be nearly so efficacious in checking their progress as some of his shorter and brisker pieces. But he was about to enter upon a different employment. When Godolphin, having renewed to him his former appointment, introduced De Foe to the queen, she was pleased, he says, to refer with approbation to his previous services, and to inform him that she "had appointed him for another affair, which was something nice," and she added that "the lord treasurer would tell him the rest." It was to proceed to Scotland as secretary to the English Commissioners for the promotion of the Union between the two countries. This measure was extremely unpopular in Scotland, and De Foe's office was both difficult and dangerous. His persuasive skill was put in full requisition; besides his immediate employment, he appears to have diligently sought to remove the objections of all influential persons with whom he came into contact; and his pen was constantly engaged in writing pamphlets for, or answering others against, the Union. He was looked upon as one of the leading agents of the English government; and, on one occasion at least, the mob broke his windows, and he had some difficulty in escaping their vengeance. De Foe was no doubt rewarded for his services, the value of which was fully acknowledged; but when some time afterwards it was asserted that he had received a pension for them, he plainly "declared to all the world that he had had none." In 1709 he published a 'History of the Union,' in which he has embodied full particulars of every step taken in that measure. This work, from his intimate knowledge of all the proceedings, even to "every most secret affair," his access to all important documents, and the scrupulous care with which it was compiled, so that as he declares "nothing material can have escaped him," is a production of great historic value; while the pleasant, easy, if not very dignified style in which it is written renders it one of the most agreeable books of the kind. There are displayed in it the same facility of narrative, explicitness, and comprehensiveness with equal minuteness of detail; and the same skill in assuming the position of the several actors, as were afterwards shown in his novel[Pg 144] "histories;" and alone it would have won for him the title of an able writer and a keen observer.

During the next few years his career was peaceable and not unprosperous, though not quite uncheckered. His patron Godolphin was, in 1710, forced to make way for Harley, De Foe's first benefactor; but the change made little difference in De Foe's position. He thought it proper to place himself in the hands of Godolphin, who good-naturedly advised him to wait upon the new lord-treasurer as soon as affairs were settled. Harley laid his case before the queen; but although still employed he does not seem to have retained his old appointment, preserving, as he says, "the queen's interest, but without any engagement of service." From the tone of his Reviews it is evident that he was beginning to tire of political engagements; and he expressly announces that he shall for the future speak of public affairs with more caution, "how he embroils himself with a party who have neither mercy nor sense of service." He still continued, however, to issue occasional pamphlets, though somewhat less frequently.

But a cloud was gathering that darkened all his prospects, and when it burst destroyed all his plans. The weak queen declined in health, and her court became daily a theatre for more and more violent intrigues, while the party of the Pretender became proportionably elated and more confident and unscrupulous in their advocacy of a restoration. De Foe again stood forth to the encounter. In his Review and by tracts he warned his countrymen of what they were to expect if they admitted the French pensioner. He met with his old reward. For three of these pamphlets—'Reasons against the Succession of the House of Hanover;' 'And what if the Pretender should come?' and 'An Answer to a Question that nobody thinks of, viz., What if the Queen should die?'—he "was prosecuted, taken into custody, and obliged to give 800l. bail:" and this, though the irony was even more transparent than in the case of 'The Short and Easy Way!' It was scarcely possible, indeed, that tracts could have been devised more calculated to arouse suspicion and distrust of the Pretender. [Pg 145]As he said, "No man in the nation ever had a more riveted aversion to the Pretender and to all the family" than he, and no man could have written more bitterly against them. But as it was, he was again prosecuted for publishing doctrines which he abhorred and intended to ridicule! perhaps really because it was felt that he was injuring the prospects of the family, whose all depended on those doctrines. He says that some of his leading prosecutors owned, "with more truth than honesty, that they knew this book had nothing in it, and that it was meant another way; but that De Foe had disobliged them in other things, and they were resolved to take the advantage they had, both to punish and expose him. They were no inconsiderable people who said this; and had the case come to a trial, I had provided good evidence to prove the words." ('Appeal.') This time, however, he escaped without trial. When he attended at the Queen's Bench to discharge his bail, he says, "I had an indictment for high crimes and misdemeanours exhibited against me by his majesty's attorney-general, which I was informed contained 200 sheets of paper." But this long array of crimes and misdoings was not opened. The trial was put off to the next term. In the interim De Foe was advised to submit his case to her majesty and throw himself upon her mercy. He knew, from sad experience, that he had little reason to place reliance on his innocence if he were tried. He knew also, as he says, "that in such cases it was easy to make any book a libel, and that the jury must have found the matter of fact in the indictment, viz., that he had written such books." But what might have followed he knew not. Wherefore he cast himself upon the clemency of the queen; who, after the matter had been carefully examined in the council, and the books read, was graciously pleased to issue a patent of pardon.

His imprisonment had been but brief. Whilst the trial was impending and he was at large on bail, he had made some remarks in a number of the Review, tending to show the innocence of his intentions. This the judges chose to consider an improper proceeding "while the case was before them in a judicial way," and committed[Pg 146] him to Newgate for contempt. De Foe acknowledged his error, but pleaded ignorance of its being improper, and the judges, after a short time, granted his release.

It was during this imprisonment that he concluded the 'Review,' which he had commenced in his former imprisonment. "In Newgate it began, and in Newgate it ended." He had now carried it on unaided for nine years, but he felt that he could no longer continue it with advantage. His trial was before him, and the result of it was uncertain. He felt that he must prepare for the worst. He must close his engagements and wait the event.

The 'Review' was the first of the English literary periodicals. Steele is frequently said to have first published periodical essays on subjects of general interest; but De Foe in the 'Review' was the originator, and whatever credit is due to Steele must be given to him for having dissociated them from politics, which were the staple of the 'Review,' while they were not admitted into the 'Tatler.' The first number of the 'Review' was published in February, 1704, of the 'Tatler' in April, 1709. When the 'Review' was first published it was in weekly numbers (in 4to., price a penny), and the politics were, or professed to be, confined to the affairs of France. Afterwards it was issued twice a week, and the politics of the day, both British and foreign, were discussed with the fullest freedom and energy. There was also a good deal of intelligence mingled with animadversion, so that to some extent it partook of the character of a newspaper. What may be called the literary portion consisted mainly of the proceedings of a certain "Scandal Club," which took cognizance of the prevalent fashions and manners, and answered questions respecting points of love, law, literature, and morality with all the promptitude and decision of the 'Tatler' and 'Spectator.' By one who wishes to catch a glimpse of the real social state of England at that period it may be consulted with great advantage; but the merely temporary nature of the larger portion renders the continuous reading of it, except as a task, out of the question. As a series of essays it is far inferior to[Pg 147] its more eminent successors; but it contains passages of considerable power. Wanting as it does the exquisite polish and easy courtly air of Addison, and the playful wit of Steele, it may be questioned if either of them could have reached the rude homely vigour of some of its better parts. Having never been reprinted, it is now extremely rare, only to be met with, indeed, in the larger public libraries, while a perfect copy is not known to be in existence. Its rarity induces us to give an extract from it, believing that our readers will be glad to see a specimen of this in preference to either of his other and more familiar works. In the number for Oct. 4, 1707, he says he has been requested to answer the question—"What is the worst sort of husband a woman can marry?" which he does in a thoroughly characteristic manner. The question he is obliged to "confess has led him a long way about, into the great, great variety of bad husbands of the age." Of these, after some general remarks, he mentions four sorts:—"1, There is the Drunken Husband, whose picture it would take up a whole volume to describe. 2, The Debauched Husband. 3, The Fighting Husband. 4, The Extravagant Husband." These he describes at some length, and then goes on as follows:—"Well, good people, here are four sorts of ill husbands, and take one of them where you will, the best of them is bad enough, and hard is that woman's case, especially if she be a woman of any merit, whose lot it is; but yet I think my first-rate is behind still; there is yet a bad husband that is worse than all these, and a woman of sense had better take up with any of these than with him, and that's—A Fool Husband.

"The Drunkard, the Debauched, the Fighting, and the Extravagant; these may all have something attendant, which in the intervals of their excesses may serve to alleviate and make a little amends to the poor woman, and help her to carry through the afflicting part; but a Fool has something always about him that makes him intolerable; he is ever contemptible, and uninterruptedly ridiculous; it is like a handsome woman with some deformity about her, that makes all the rest be rejected; if he is kind, it is so apish, so below the rate of manhood, [Pg 148]so surfeiting and so disagreeable, that, like an ill smell, it makes the face wrinkle at it; if he be froward, he is so insufferably insolent, that there is no bearing it. His passions are all flashes, struck out of him like fire from a flint: if it be anger, 'tis sullen and senseless; if love, 'tis coarse and brutish; he is in good, wavering; in mischief, obstinate; in society, empty; in management, unthinking; in manners, sordid; in error, incorrigible; and in everything, ridiculous.

"Wherefore upon the whole, my answer is in short, That the worst thing a sober woman can be married to, is a Fool; of whom whoever has the lot,—Lord have mercy, and a + should be set on the door, as of a house infected with the plague."

De Foe carried on the work for nine years, and gave to it a continued freshness amidst a constant and ever-varying round of other literary occupations. And yet a year or two before it ceased to exist Gay thus wrote of it in his 'State of Wit:' "The poor 'Review' is quite exhausted, and grown so very contemptible, that though he has provoked all his brothers of the quill, none will enter into a controversy with him. The fellow, who had excellent natural parts, but wanted a small foundation of learning, is a lively instance of those wits, who, as an ingenious author says, will endure but one skimming." And it is of De Foe that he is speaking! Why there was cream enough behind to have churned a score Gays out of! But Gay was one of the coterie of whom Johnson says in the 'Life of Swift,' "from their letters it might be inferred that Swift and Pope, with Arbuthnot and Gay, had engrossed all the understanding and virtue of mankind; that their merits filled the world; or that there was no hope of more."

The remainder of the queen's reign was a season of the vilest intrigue. De Foe, as merely a subordinate servant of the government, was removed somewhat out of the predominant influence, and Harley by this time knew him too well to ask of him anything that was not consistent with integrity. But the growing distaste he manifests for politics probably arose from the insight he had obtained into the meanness and selfishness of the leading [Pg 149]statesmen, and a distrust of all of them. His enemies however ceased not their pursuit of him. The utter disgrace of Harley, and the death of Anne, left him without any friend at court, and exposed to the full malice of his assailants. On the family of Hanover he had only the claim of having been their earnest advocate. Although a Whig, he was not a mere party man, and by the Whigs he was disregarded. His appointment was gone, and even the arrears of his salary were left unpaid. In these circumstances, and hunted down by the persevering malice of his persecutors, the spirit of the strong man at length gave way. For a time he remained silent under the "infinite clamours and reproaches, causeless curses, unusual threatenings, and the most unjust and injurious treatment in the world;" but after a while he so far rallied as to venture to publish 'An Appeal to Honour and Justice though it be of his worst Enemies.' This is the work from which we have quoted so many of the particulars of his previous public life, of which it professes to be, and undoubtedly is, a true account. What the Israelites said of the prophet he quotes as his motto, "Come, let us smite him with the tongue, and let us not give heed to any of his words;"—and it was but too descriptive of the treatment he had experienced. In some respects this is one of the most remarkable of all his publications. Writing under the solemn impression that his life was near its close,—in his own words "that by the hints of mortality, and by the infirmities of a life of sorrow and fatigue, I have reason to think I am not a great way off from, if not very near to, the great ocean of eternity,"—he passes under review the whole of his life, and in a strain of manly seriousness, which is often eloquent and always impressive, defends his conduct and intentions. While he declares his unconcern at the rage and clamour of party men, he acknowledges that he deeply feels the misconceptions of those whom he believes to be good men and good Christians, but he believes that they will some time or other have their eyes opened. "A constant, steady adhering to personal virtue and to public peace, which, I thank God, I can appeal to him, has always been my practice, will at last restore me to the opinion [Pg 150]of sober and impartial men, and that is all I desire." He then turns to refute some calumnies respecting his conduct in his family—but his feelings seem to have overpowered him, and the piece concludes abruptly. "While this was in the press and the copy thus far finished," says the publisher in a note, "the author was seized with a violent fit of an apoplexy, whereby he was disabled finishing what he designed in his further defence; and continuing now for above six weeks in a weak and languishing condition, neither able to go on, nor likely to recover, at least in any short time, his friends thought it not fit to delay longer the publication."

He did recover, but this was a turning point in his life. He meddled no more with politics; henceforth his career was that of a literary man, and little is known of his future doings but by the dates of his publications. But never did his real strength of character more reveal itself. He was now fifty-four years old, and probably in straitened circumstances; yet he addressed himself with the energy of a young man to an entirely new course. It was after this time that he wrote those works that have rendered De Foe a household name. His first works, arising probably from the state of mind induced by his misfortunes and his severe illness, were of a religious character. Of these we need only mention the 'Family Instructor,' which appeared in 1715, and to which he published a second part three years later. It was preceded by a recommendatory letter by the Rev. S. Wright, a popular London minister, the name of the author being carefully concealed. In the religious world it became exceedingly popular, being so much admired that some good men did not scruple "to recommend it as well from the pulpit as the press;" and it retained its popularity till a recent period. By parents it was regarded as their manual; as another work that he wrote in 1722 was looked upon as the manual of the young men and maidens. This was his 'Religious Courtship,' which became at least as popular as the other, and retained its popularity at least as long a time. Even to our own day it was in such circles placed in the hands of young people. Now it is a little antiquated, having [Pg 151]given way to Hannah More's 'Coelebs,' and among the young ladies we are told to some of the many feminine guides that have kindly volunteered their services within the last few years. "Being designed to divert as well as to instruct," both the 'Family Instructor' and 'Religious Courtship' are in dialogues; though the former has something more of the dramatic form; indeed, as he says in the preface to the second edition, "it was the author's first design to have made it a dramatic poem." Towards the end of his life he published 'A New Family Instructor,' but it is inferior to the first and never became very popular.

In 1719, when De Foe was about fifty-eight years old, appeared his master-work—'The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner.' Like several other of the writings that are looked upon as among, the most valuable of our literary possessions, 'Robinson Crusoe' with difficulty found a publisher. It is said to have gone the round of the "trade" before one was met with hardy enough to venture on the speculation. With the public its success was never doubtful: and the venturesome publisher is said to have cleared by it the then unusual sum of a thousand pounds. Since then it has passed through more editions probably than any other book of the century in which it was written. It was, like every other of De Foe's works, scoffed at when it appeared, but it now takes its acknowledged rank as one of the three novels of universal acceptance. And it is worthy to stand beside Don Quixote and Gil Blas. Like them it has been translated into every language, and is read with delight by people of every nation. Its inimitable qualities have been acknowledged as well by the learned as the unlearned; it is read with almost equal pleasure by the young and the old. With the thankless captiousness that is often shown toward the productions of genius, its originality has been questioned, and even now we hear it occasionally spoken of as a mere expansion of the adventures of Alexander Selkirk. Nothing can be more absurd. The idea of a solitary man dwelling on an island was no doubt taken from his story—De Foe expressly intimates it—but that is all. Selkirk was altogether [Pg 152]a different being from Crusoe; a poor hapless mortal, much such another as Robinson was for the first few days only. The real elasticity of mind which the Yorkshireman possessed, and the Scotchman wanted, is a good deal more like what was displayed by the Musquito Indian who was left alone for above three years on the island of Juan Fernandez. The account of this man in Dampier's Voyages De Foe most undoubtedly made use of, as he has also of Selkirk's story; but after all, the obligation to both is but small, and everything that makes the book so delightful we owe to his genius. A second part of the 'Adventures of Robinson Crusoe' appeared a few months after the publication of the first. Like all second parts, it has been considered as inferior to its predecessor; but except that the interest of the story had been already in a great measure satisfied, it is not easy to say in what the inferiority consists. The continued popularity of the book induced the author to publish about three years afterwards a religious supplement, called 'Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,' but it was never very popular, and has long almost ceased to be read. However well meant it might be, it was an excrescence on the original; and alone it was tedious. Robinson's own common-place, sensible reflections, in their proper places occur so naturally, that the work would be incomplete without them; but a book full of them strung together without the narrative is too serious an affair—especially after so pleasant a story. It is the sermon after dinner.

The year following the publication of 'Robinson Crusoe,' De Foe published another story of the same order, 'The Life, Adventures, and Pyracies of the famous Captain Singleton;' and in 1725 another entitled 'A New Voyage round the World, by a course never sailed before;' both works of uncommon interest, and only inferior to the great work.

In 1719 he appeared in a somewhat different style with the 'Dumb Philosopher,' being the life of one Dickory Cronke, a tinner's son in Cornwall, who was born dumb and continued so for fifty-eight years; and how some days before he died he came to his speech. [Pg 153]Dickory was a religious philosopher, and says a great many very instructive things: there is also added at the end a series of prophetical observations upon the affairs of Europe in general, and Great Britain in particular, for the next ten years following its publication, which no doubt helped the sale. Our author was so well pleased with his dumb philosopher, that in the next year he published in a much bulkier form the life of another, though of a rather different order—a Mr. Duncan Campbell, a dumb man, "who writes down any stranger's name at first sight, with their further contingencies of fortune, and is now living in Exeter Court, over against the Savoy in the Strand." This is a curious production, and, though evidently a hasty one, contains a fair sprinkle of the genius of De Foe. Duncan is a highlander, and has the gift of second sight, about which, and brownies, and other northern superstitions, there is a good deal of information. A few years later, as we shall see, De Foe returned with some ardour to this kind of subject. We may notice in passing, that, as if to show his versatility, he this year published a translation in rhyme of Du Fresnoy's poem, 'The Art of Painting.'

In 1722 he commenced a new sort of novel by the publication of 'The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the famous Moll Flanders.' Of this kind of biography, in which he probably drew on the knowledge he had obtained of the habits of thieves and profligates of both sexes during his residence in Newgate, and his observation, of the conduct of these classes during a long life spent in London; he gave another sample the same year, in the 'Life and Adventures of Colonel Jack, who was born a gentleman, put apprentice to a pickpocket, flourished six-and-twenty years a thief, and was then kidnapped to Virginia; came back a merchant, was five times married, went into the wars, behaved bravely, got preferment, was made colonel of a regiment; returned again to England, following the fortunes of the Chevalier de St. George; was taken at the Preston battle; received his pardon from the late king, is now at the head of his regiment in the service of the Czarina, fighting against the Turks, completing a life of wonders, and resolves [Pg 154]to die a General,' which is a pretty tale in itself to put upon a title-page. The story is well told, though it flags as it advances. But the Life of the little Forsaken Boy, in the commencement, has never been equalled, and approached only by Dickens, whose passages of a similar order constantly remind one of its little picturesque bits, and quiet touches of pathos. He completed the triology by the publication, in 1724, of 'Roxana, or the Fortunate Mistress.' In his prefaces De Foe contends for the morality of these pieces, and their tendency to improve as well as delight the reader, though he admits they may be made an ill use of. "In telling all the progressions of crime run through in threescore years," he says in one of them, "an author must be hard put to it, to wrap it up so clean as not to give room, especially for vicious readers, to turn it to his disadvantage." No doubt, as Moll Flanders observes after relating one of her naughty doings, "every branch of the story, if duly considered, may be useful to honest people;" and though there is a little freedom in parts, the tales are purity itself compared with the present race of French novels which are found so instructive. One mistake, if we may venture to call it a mistake, that prevails in the thieves' stories, with which we have in our own day been so abundantly favoured, he always avoids: he does not make his highwaymen and pickpockets a race of noble-minded, tender, sentimental ruffians. They are thieves always. The women are not chaste; nor the men brave and generous and graceful, acting as they do purely out of a sort of refined misanthropy. There is no dallying with vice. With him crime and immorality are not varnished over. They are there in their grossness and their truth, and they bring with them their proper reward.

There is one other novel of a somewhat similar kind, 'The Life and Adventures of Mrs. Christian Davies,' which is pretty generally attributed to him, and is inserted without the slightest remark in some of the collections of his miscellaneous works. But the style is so utterly unlike, and so much worse than that of any other of his many volumes, that it seems hardly possible he could have written [Pg 155]it. Besides it was published in 1740, and the preface states that Mrs. Davies died on the 7th of July, 1739; now as De Foe himself died in April, 1731, it is not easy to understand how he could have written the account of a woman's death eight years after his own.

About the same time as he published the 'Life of Moll Flanders,' he also published the first of his historical romances—works of such extraordinary truthfulness that they have frequently been mistaken for authentic memoirs even by men of high attainments. 'The Memoirs of a Cavalier; or a Military Journal of the Wars in Germany and the Wars in England, from the year 1632 to the year 1648,' is written with so apparently minute an acquaintance with the proceedings it describes, that the feeling that the author must at least have had possession of some real journal, or have derived his information somehow from one who had a share in the actions described, is irresistible, till we remember that the author is De Foe. The 'Memoirs of an English Officer who served in the Dutch War in 1672, to the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, by Captain George Carleton,' are as true and as deeply interesting as the 'Memoirs of a Cavalier.' Along with these may be placed the 'Journal of the Plague Year;' on the whole perhaps one of the most marvellous of his works after 'Robinson Crusoe.' In this History of the Plague it is indeed highly probable that he embodied a good deal of genuine tradition. He was four years old at the time of the visitation; his father was a citizen of Cripplegate, and must have anxiously watched its progress, and he, as we have seen, was alive as late as 1703. From him our author must have heard a great deal of minute information about it, and from others, while the impression was recent, he could have no difficulty in obtaining more. Be that as it may, the book is as far above all other plague journals, whether real or fictitious, as 'Robinson Crusoe' is above all other mariner's adventures. The merits of these three works may be summed up in the statement that Lord Chatham was in the habit of quoting the 'Memoirs of a Cavalier' as authority for the military proceedings of the civil war; that Johnson recommended 'Carleton's Memoirs' as the best account of Lord Peterborough's [Pg 156]campaign; and that Dr. Mead, the physician, referred to the 'Plague Journal:' and all of them in undoubting dependence on their authenticity.

In 1724, the same year in which he published 'Roxana,' he sent forth the first volume of a work, of a very different character, 'A Tour through the whole Island of Great Britain,' and in the two following years he completed it. "The preparations for this work," he says, "have been suitable to my earnest concern for its usefulness. Seventeen very large circuits, or journeys, have been taken through divers parts separately, and three general tours over almost the whole English part of the island; in all which the author has not been wanting to treasure up just remarks upon particular places and things." At the time of making these laborious journeys it will be remembered that he was about 63 years of age, a noticeable proof of his untiring energy. No other work of the kind then existing could at all compare with this one, and we have been in the habit for years of referring to it as a useful adjunct to more recent works. It is one of the most sensible and comprehensive topographical works we have.

All these works would seem a pretty fair "skimming" from a "poor fellow" whose wit was exhausted some dozen years before; but a good many have been of necessity passed over, and some yet remain that must be named, though they can be little more than named. The first, a singular book with a singular title, 'The Political History of the Devil,' is a thoroughly enjoyable production, and would by itself declare its author to be a man of genius. It was published in 1726, and in the course of the next year appeared a continuation of it, entitled 'A System of Magic,' which is quite worthy of the first part. This was followed in the same year by 'An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions.' All these are written in a pleasant manner, half jest, half earnest, that forms quite a contrast, and an agreeable one, to the downright reality of the rest of his writings. All of them were, as they well deserved to be, very popular.

About this time his attention appears to have been a good deal engaged by the subject of trade, and [Pg 157]matters connected with it; arising perhaps from his preparation for the 'Description of England,' in which such matters are carefully noticed. His largest and most popular book of this kind appeared in 1727, in two good sized volumes entitled 'The complete English Tradesman,' a work that, notwithstanding the subject, is really pleasant reading, and no doubt has been very useful to those for whom it was intended. In the following year he published 'A Plan of the English Commerce,' and 'Augusta Triumphans; or the Way to make London the most flourishing City in the Universe,' and this he quickly followed by 'Second Thoughts are best; or a further improvement of a late scheme to prevent street robberies; by which our streets will be so strongly guarded, and so gloriously illuminated, that any part of London will be as safe and pleasant at midnight as at noon-day, and burglary totally impracticable,' a consummation at which we have not arrived yet, even with gas-light and the new police. These last works are certainly extraordinary, and make one wish that De Foe had been a secretary of state. Many of the propositions are crude, and better have been since suggested, but anyone who is acquainted with the state of our cities then will see how great an advance would have been made had De Foe's plans been adopted. We have mentioned a good number of his writings, but they form only a small part of the whole. The entire list contains the titles of above one hundred and seventy distinct publications.

Such incessant occupation we might suppose would at least have placed him in easy circumstances, especially when we remember how many of his later writings met with immediate success. For a while indeed this seems to have been the case; but it was not so long. The story of his last days, as we read it in a letter which he wrote in August, 1730, a few months before his death, is very melancholy. The letter is addressed to Mr. Butler, the husband of his youngest and favourite daughter, whose great-great-grandson lent it to Mr. Wilson for publication in his Life of De Foe. From this it appears that De Foe was at Greenwich, apparently in concealment, and "sinking under the weight of an affliction too heavy for my[Pg 158] strength, and looking on myself as abandoned of every comfort, every friend, every relation, except such only as are able to give me no relief." He is, he says, "weak, having had some fits of a fever that have left me low. But these things much more. I have not seen son or daughter, wife or child, many weeks, and know not which way to see them. They dare not come by water, and by land here is no coach, and I know not what to do." But all this is not the terrible sorrow which is crushing him,—"the affliction too great for his strength," nor is it the persecution of vindictive creditors, for, he says, "my spirit has carried me on through greater disasters than these. It has been the injustice, unkindness, and I must say inhuman dealing of my own son, which has both ruined my family, and, in a word, has broken my heart; and as I am at this time under a weight of very heavy illness, which I think will be a fever, I take this occasion to vent my grief in the breasts of those who I know will make a prudent use of it, and tell you that nothing but this has conquered me, or could conquer me. Et tu, Brute! I depended upon him, I trusted him, I gave up my two dear unprovided children into his hands; but he had no compassion, and suffered them and their poor dying mother to beg their bread at his door, and to crave as if it were an alms, what he is bound under hand and seal, besides the most sacred promises, to supply them with; himself at the same time living in a profusion of plenty. It is too much for me . . . . I would say, I hope with comfort, that it is yet well—I am so near my journey's end, and am hastening to the place where the 'weary are at rest, and the wicked cease to trouble;' but that the passage is rough and the day stormy; by what way soever He pleases to bring me to the end of it, I desire to finish life with this temper of soul in all cases; Te Deum laudamus."

He died on the 24th of April, 1731, in the parish—it may have been in the house—in which he was born. He was buried two days afterwards in Bunhill-fields, then called Tindall's burial-ground, the favourite place of interment with dissenters, and that in which were deposited the remains of John Bunyan and others of their[Pg 159] most eminent men. Mr. Wilson copied the following entry of his interment from the register: "1731, April 26, Mr. Dubow, Cripplegate." He died without a will, but insolvent, for Mr. Chalmers found in the books at Doctors' Commons, "that letters of administration on his goods and chattels were granted to Mary Brooke, widow, a creditrix, in September, 1733, after summoning in official form the next of kin to appear."

Thus lived and thus died De Foe. Spending his days and nights, his earnest mind and best thoughts, for his country, he lived a constant struggle with poverty, the butt of the calumniator, misunderstood by the foolish, the scorn of the wise:[25] and he died bankrupt in estate and overwhelmed with sorrow.

To estimate aright the moral and intellectual character of De Foe it is necessary to look at all that he did. Of his private life scarcely anything is known. Of his political career and public conduct we must judge by his works. He has been called a party scribe, a Grub-street author, and many other similar names with which it was customary in the last century for a certain class of writers to bespatter those whom they chose to censure. But assuredly he was not a party writer. His political pamphlets are singularly consistent. He did not write merely to serve those he was associated with. He wrote because it was needful to write: and having felt the need he seems always to have looked steadily at the matter, and then to have spoken his own mind fearlessly about it. To us there appears to be an evident tone of honesty about all his controversial writings. He stood forth as the [Pg 160]opponent of what he thought to be tyranny both in church and state, and he fought as one doing righteous battle.

Of his later writings we have already spoken at sufficient length. The distinguishing excellence of all of them, that which every critic has pointed out, is the strong impress they bear of truth and reality. This, with the appearance of candour, of a desire to avoid concealment, to which the homeliness of the phraseology so much conduces, is very remarkable, and imparts to them an indescribable charm. His novels were meant, he tells us, to instruct as well as amuse, and the narrator seems to keep that constantly in view by ever and anon throwing in some plain sensible reflection. We have indeed no high philosophic flights such as we meet with in works written now-a-days, with a similar design; but then we have no dramatic exaggeration, or flimsy sentimentalism, or cold indifference, or heartless mockery—which is a great comfort. What is said, is said simply, unaffectedly, and honestly. He wrote genuine English—thoroughly idiomatic, but by no means faultless. He wrote far too much to write all well. His style has a colloquial ease, but also a colloquial negligence. It sadly wanted pruning. It is excellence run wild, but in which the very exuberance is a sign of vigour. His fertility is astonishing, his industry worthy of all honour. Perhaps no other man ever wrote so variously and so well. He has attained the first rank in but one instance, but he has done well in each. Altogether he was a man of a masculine intellect, a lively imagination, a cultivated mind; and through life he displayed unwearied industry, unswerving courage, and resolute honesty of purpose.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See the remarkable letter, dated 17th of June, 1690, in Appendix to Dalrymple's Memoirs.

[2] Dalrymple, Appendix

[3] "The Letters and Dispatches of John Churchill, First Duke of Marlborough, from 1702 to 1712. Edited by General the Rt. Hon. Sir George Murray, five vols. 8vo. London, 1845." Vol. v., p. 590.

[4] In the Life of Boyle this event is stated to have occurred in 1663. A second charter was granted to the Society, in that year, on the 22nd of April.

[5] A sizar at Cambridge was, in the original meaning of the word, a student whose poverty compels him to seek to maintain himself in whole or part by the performance of some duties which were originally of a menial character. By this institution a youth could live by the work of his hands while he pursued his studies. In our days there is but little distinction between the sizars and those above them; except in college charges, none at all. Those who look upon universities as institutions for gentlemen only, that is, for persons who can pay their way according to a certain conventional standard, praise the liberality with which poorer gentlemen than others have been gradually emancipated from what seems to them a mere badge of poverty. But those who know the old constitution of the universities see nothing in it except the loss to the labouring man and the destitute man of his inheritance in those splendid foundations. If sizarships with paid personal services had not existed, Newton could not have gone to Cambridge; and the Principia might never have been written. Let it be remembered then that, so far as we owe this immortal work and its immortal work to the University of Cambridge, we owe it to the institution which no longer exists, by which education and advancement were as open to honest poverty seeking a maintenance by labour, as to wealth and rank. Let the juries who find on their oaths that scores of pounds' worth of cigars are reasonable necessaries for young college students, think of this, if they can think.

[6] Let it be remembered that we are not told that Newton, when very young, took greatly to anything except arts of construction.

[7] The status pupillaris lasts about seven years, that is, until the degree of Master of Arts is taken.

[8] "A friend of mine here, that hath an excellent genius to these things, brought me ... some papers .... which I suppose will please you." And again, some days after, "I am glad my friend's paper gives you so much satisfaction; his name is Mr. Newton, a Fellow of our College, and very young (being but the second year Master of Arts), but of an extra-ordinary genius and proficiency in these things."

[9] First, the committee consisted of Halley, Jones, De Moivre, and Machin, Newton's friends, and mathematicians; Brook Taylor, a mathematician, but not then otherwise known except as a friend of Keill, the accused party; Robarts, Hill, Burnet, Aston, and Arbuthnot, not known as mathematicians, but the two latter intimate personal friends of Newton; and Bonet, the Prussian minister. To call this a judicial committee would be to throw a great slur on the Society. Secondly, the names of the committee were never published with their report, which would have been anything but creditable, if that report had been a judgment: but if the committee were only counsel for Newton's case it mattered not who they were. Thirdly, the Society had committed itself to Newton's side, by hearing his statement, and thereupon directing Keill to write the second letter in the controversy, and to "set the matter in a just light:" the only light they had sought being that which Newton himself could give. Fourthly, Burnet wrote to John Bernoulli while the matter was pending, stating in express terms—not that the Royal Society was inquiring—but that it was busy proving that Leibnitz might have seen Newton's letters. Fifthly, De Moivre, as appears by the statement of an intimate friend, considered himself, by merely joining that committee, as drawn out of the neutrality which he had till then observed: which shows that he did not consider himself a juryman. Sixthly, no notice was given to Leibnitz of the proceeding, still less an invitation to produce documents on his own side. All these things put together show that the committee was not judicial, nor meant to be so, nor asserted to be so on the part of the Society. If any one will have it that it was so, he must needs, we think, hold that it was one of the most unfair transactions which ever took place.]

[10] A parcel (collectio) of extracts from Gregory's letters are found in the handwriting of Collins, with a memorandum by Collins that they were to be sent to Leibnitz and returned by him: with a letter to Oldenburg, desiring him to send them: no mention of any one but Gregory in either memorandum or letter. With the parcel is this letter to Collins: what reason the Committee have for supposing this letter belonged to the parcel they do not say: they do not even say whether it was a separate paper or not. The papers of dead mathematicians, after going through the hands of executors, are, we suspect, not always tied up exactly in the order they were untied. Whether the parcel is otherwise known to have found its way to Oldenburg than from the intention expressed in the memorandum, we are not told—nor whether Oldenburg sent it to Paris—nor whether having arrived at Paris, it was sent on to Hanover: and finally they state, without adding how they came to know it, that it was sent to Leibnitz, June 26, 1676. If the letter belonged to the parcel, and if the parcel were sent to Oldenburg, and if Oldenburg sent it to Paris, and if his Paris correspondent sent it to Hanover, and if it arrived safe, and if Leibnitz, meaning to make an unfair use of it, was unwise enough to return this evidence against himself—the case of the Committee is good, with only one more if; that is, if the letter contained anything new to the purpose, which we think it palpably does not. That is to say, the letter itself is only what any strong mathematician might have drawn from Barrow and Fermat, who are almost the joint inventors of Fluxions, if that letter contained them. It is worth the remembering that Collins was not likely to tie up letters miscellaneously: he was a regular accountant, a methodical writer on and practiser of book-keeping, and a man of business. For aught we know, he may lie unquiet in his grave to this day, under the imputation of having sent a parcel which contained a paper neither mentioned in the docket nor in the letter of advice. Perhaps he never sent it at all: would not this methodical man have written on the parcel the date of its return?

[11] Montague was deeply attached, says Sir David Brewster, to Newton's half-niece, Catherine Barton, to whom he left a large part of his fortune. Mrs. Barton, to use Sir D. Brewster's words, "though she did not escape the censures of her contemporaries, was regarded by those who knew her as a woman of strict honour and virtue." Sir D. Brewster, who copies the words from the 'Biographia Britannica,' declines in his reverence for all that belonged to Newton (a feeling with which we have more sympathy than our readers will give us credit for), to state the whole case.—After the death of Montague's wife, he was disappointed in a second marriage which he projected, "which was the less to be regretted as he had some time before cast his eye upon a niece of his friend Sir Isaac Newton, to be the superintendent of his domestic affairs. This gentlewoman... was then a celebrated toast, being young, beautiful, and gay, so that she did not escape censure, which was however passed upon her very undeservedly, since we are well assured she was a woman of strict honour and virtue. 'Tis certain she was very agreeable to his Lordship in every particular.".... No wonder she did not escape censure, especially when the legacy left by Lord Halifax is left, to use his own words, "as a token of the sincere love, affection, and esteem I have long had for her person, and as a small recompence for the pleasure and happiness I have had in her conversation." And all this from an apologist: what then was the truth? On reviewing this note, we think it right to add, that the statement that there were feelings of love between the parties (which, if true, puts their relation to one another beyond any reasonable doubt) is not from the author here cited, but from Sir D. Brewster, who does not give his authority.

[12] Sir D. Brewster represents Newton as having a very scanty income before he gained his office in the Mint. But in fact he had from his college board and lodging (both of the best) and the stipend of his fellowship: from the university the salary of his professorship: and from his patrimony about 100l. a-year. He could not have had less than 250l. a-year over and above board and lodging: which, in those days, was a very good provision for an unmarried man, and would not be a bad now.

[13] Nor is it possible for man to be nearer to God: the last line of Halley's verses on the Principia.

[14] These names are bandied about in vituperative discussion, until they are so misused that the chances are many readers will need explanation of them. An Arian believes in the finite pre-existence of Jesus Christ, before his appearance on earth: a Socinian believes him to be a man, who did not exist before his appearance on earth, but who is still a proper object of prayer: a Humanitarian, with all others who come under the general name of Unitarian (the personal unity of the Deity being a common tenet of all), believes him to be a man, and not an object of prayer.

[15] This is strange; and if such had been Whiston's own opinion, we should not have hesitated to conclude that he had misinterpreted some civil decliner of controversy. But Whiston expressly states himself to have no such opinion. That he would intentionally utter a falsehood we believe to be out of the question.

[16] The testimony of Whiston is in his memoirs: that of Haynes is less direct. The Unitarian minister Richard Baron, who was a friend of Haynes, states the preceding as having passed in conversation between him and Haynes. The statement is made in the preface of the first volume of his collection of tracts, called 'A Cordial for Low Spirits' (three volumes, London, 1763, third edition 12mo.), published under the name of Thomas Gordon. This is not primary evidence like that of Whiston; and it loses force by the circumstance that in the posthumous work which Mr. Haynes left on the disputed points (and which was twice printed) there is no allusion to it. But those who weigh testimony will of course take into consideration its amount of corroborative force. And a great many writers on the Antitrinitarian side deserve blame for not stating distinctly that it is only a testimony to a testimony: Baron was a man against whose character for truth we never heard anything, but the chances of misapprehension increase very rapidly with the number of steps, in the communication of oral tradition.

[17] Though aware that we should have many results of bias to encounter, we had hoped that we should have got through our task without having to expose absolute and fraudulent falsification. Since writing what is in the text, we have obtained the loan of the edition of 1753, which is scarce compared with that of 1749. The Biogr. Brit. informs us (p. 3241) that in pages 178, 249, 250 of Whiston's Memoirs, edition of 1753, 8vo., we shall find the justification of these words: "Mr. Whiston, who represented Sir Isaac as an Arian, which he so much resented that he would not suffer him to be a member of the Royal Society while he was President." We look, and in p. 178 we find that Whiston states Newton to be an Arian, and in pages 249 and 250 we find that Newton excluded Whiston from the Royal Society, for which the reason Whiston gives is that Newton could not bear contradiction, in the words we have quoted in another part of this article. The biographer distinctly implies that he is giving, not his own reason, but Whiston's reason. And, having diligently compared the editions of 1749 and 1753 (the latter of which had some additions, by which the false biographer hoped to gain credit from those who looked at the former), we find that the paragraphs cited only differ as follows: In the first, 1749 has Revelation, 1753 has Revelation. The former has "and friendly address to the Baptists" (pages 14, 15), which the latter has not. In the second, 1749 has "desire," and 1753 has "desires" (a little instance by the way of the disappearance of the old English subjunctive), and the former has "through confutation," when the latter has "thorough confutation." Sir D. Brewster (p. 284) has copied the false biographer without verifying the reference—a common, but a dangerous practice. It was a mere accident that we went to the Biogr. Brit., for we distrust it from old acquaintance on all matters connected with Newton. We do not know at this moment that the false biographer, as we call him, is the original falsifier: but he must bear the blame for the present. We might have had to leave the explanation to Sir D. Brewster: for he who copies a reference without verification, and without stating that he copies, must take the responsibility of that reference. But as it stands, we need not say that Sir D. Brewster is as clear in this instance from the imputation of intentionally misleading his reader, as those could wish who respect his character and admire his labours: among the number of whom we desire to place ourselves. And his candour will lead him to acknowledge that he has had a happy escape from an imminent danger of misconstruction, with no blame to those who made it.

[18] Protestant writers, we mean; the reading contended for by Newton in the second instance has been that of Catholics from the time of Jerome.

[19] Dr. Chalmers, for example, states Newton to have "abetted" the leading doctrine of the Unitarians: whether upon the evidence of this writing only, or the general evidence, does not precisely appear: probably upon the former alone. The author of the life in the Biographia Britannica does not mention these letters. But it appears by the testimony of Le Clerc and Wetstein, that Locke sent them to Le Clerc, who did not know their author. The possessors of Newton's papers never published them until an incomplete edition had appeared abroad.

[20] Sir D. Brewster, to whom the admirers of Newton have much obligation, and from whom they expect more, in the larger life on which he is known to be engaged, argues from these words, which he quotes formally, that Newton received the Trinity. But, having the work before him, he should also have destroyed the effect of the following words of Newton:—"He [Cyprian] does not say the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost, as it is now in the 7th verse, but the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, as it is in Baptism, the place from which they tried at first to derive the Trinity." We never were quite satisfied till we saw this passage. We found the Trinitarian writers evidently shy of the question: and the Anti-trinitarians as evidently laying such an undue stress on Mr. Haynes's testimony, or rather Mr. Baron's testimony to Mr. Haynes's testimony, as made us suspect that our authorities on both sides were not fully satisfied in their own minds. But we hold it to be out of the question that a Trinitarian could have written the words in our italics. That many would not admit the baptismal form in itself to be a proof of the doctrine, is known; but what Trinitarian ever talked of a "they" who tried a text to prove the doctrine, "at first," implying that they failed, and then went to others: the clear implication being that he thought they had the doctrine before they tried any texts. Again, there is the following. Speaking of the manuscript on which Erasmus at last introduced 1 John v. 7 into his text, he says that the English, "when they had got the Trinity into his edition, threw by their manuscript (if they had one), as an almanac out of date." Now most of our readers are Trinitarians, and know whether this is the way in which those who hold that doctrine speak of it. The citations above are from Horsley's Newton.

When M. Biot said that there was absolutely nothing in Newton's writings which was other than orthodox, he must have meant in the writings which he had seen. This of course may have been the case. Moreover, what is more absurd than to argue from his silence that a man does not hold an opinion for which he might be ruined and imprisoned, or, up to 1699, even hanged?

[21] We cannot trace, in Newton's character, an acquired failing; nothing but the manifestations of the original disposition due to different circumstances.

[22] Some ill-tempered scribbler published a pamphlet immediately after the publication of 'Robinson Crusoe,' entitled 'The Life and strange surprising Adventures of Mr. D—— De F——, of London, Hosier, who has lived above fifty years by himself in the Kingdoms of North and South Britain; the various Shapes he has appeared in, and the Discoveries he has made for the Benefit of his Country:' but it has not even the merit of parodying the romance beyond the title-page, and tells nothing of the man whose life it professes to narrate.

[23] Review, No. 38, May 31, 1705.

[24] "And now, good people all, will you allow me to preach a little? It is not often that I trouble you with any of my divinity; I acknowledge the pulpit is none of my office—it was my disaster first to be set apart for, and then to be set apart from, the honour of that sacred employ." 'Rev.' Oct. 22, 1709.

[25] Pope placed him, whilst tottering on the brink of the grave, among the Sons of Dullness in the Dunciad! Twice he mentions him, and each time coupled with an untruth. In one instance there is an assertion with respect to his moral character, which his whole life refutes, and which is in this case known to be without any foundation. In the other he sneers at his having stood in the pillory—"Earless on high stands unabashed De Foe," in which is also an untruth, for his ears were untouched, and he was much less disgraced by his elevation than Pope by the ungenerous mention of it.

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:

[The end of The Cabinet Portrait Gallery of British Worthies Vol 11 of 12 by C. Cox]

THE

CABINET PORTRAIT GALLERY

OF

BRITISH WORTHIES.

VOLUME XI.

LONDON:
C. COX, 12, KING WILLIAM STREET, STRAND.

1846.

London: Printed by W. Clowes and Sons, Stamford Street.

CONTENTS.

CABINET PORTRAIT GALLERY

OF

BRITISH WORTHIES.

FOOTNOTES:

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:

	Page
PENN	5
ADDISON	18
MARLBOROUGH	38
WREN	66
NEWTON	78
DE FOE	118

THE

CABINET PORTRAIT GALLERY

OF

BRITISH WORTHIES.

VOLUME XI.

LONDON: C. COX, 12, KING WILLIAM STREET, STRAND.

1846.

London: Printed by W. Clowes and Sons, Stamford Street.

CONTENTS.

CABINET PORTRAIT GALLERY

OF

BRITISH WORTHIES.

FOOTNOTES:

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:

LONDON:
C. COX, 12, KING WILLIAM STREET, STRAND.