XVII. 1737. CHAP. secret, and thereby risen to great influence over her Royal mistress. Her real situation being thus unknown to her physicians, they treated it as gout in the stomach, and prescribed remedies which heightened the malady. When it was at length disclosed to them, it was already beyond their skill. One of the surgeons declared, that if he had known it two days sooner, Her Majesty should have been walking about the next day. She died on the 20th of November, to the deep and lasting grief, not only of the King, but of the nation. Her last days, though racked with pain, were courageously and patiently borne, and set forth, in the highest degree, temper, magnanimity, affection for her family, and resignation to God. Once, we are told, after a most painful operation, she became apprehensive that the agony had wrung from her some peevish expressions, and reproached herself with them. She took a tender leave of the King, and recommended her servants to his future favour, extending her concern even to the lowest. To Walpole she is reported to have said,-" I hope you will never "desert the King, but continue to serve him with "your usual fidelity;" and, pointing to her husband, she added, "I recommend His Majesty to "you." Yet the death-bed of this high-minded Princess was not wholly free from blame, still less from the malignant exaggerations of party. She was censured as implacable in hatred even to her dying moments: as refusing her pardon to her son, who, it XVII. 1737. was added, had sent humbly to beseech her bless- CHAP. ing. "And unforgiving, unforgiven dies!" cries Chesterfield in some powerful lines circulated at the time. With still more bitterness, Pope veils his satire beneath pretended praise. The real truth seems to be, as we find it stated in a letter only two days afterwards, that "she absolutely "refused to see the Prince of Wales, nor could the Archbishop of Canterbury, when he gave her "the sacrament, prevail on her, though she said "she heartily forgave the Prince." + In justice, however, to her memory, we should not forget how recent were the Prince's insults, and how zealously he had seized every occasion to treat her with studied slight and disrespect. 66 If, indeed, we could trust the assurances of Horace Walpole, Lord Orford, to Mr. Coxe, we might assert, that the Queen had sent. both her forgiveness and her blessing to her son, and said that she would have seen him with pleasure had she not feared to irritate the King. But the authority of Horace Walpole will seldom weigh with a dispassionate historian, unless when confirmed, or, at least, not opposed, by others. As is well observed by Mr. Hallam on another occasion, * "Hang the sad verse on Carolina's urn, "All parts perform'd, and all her children bless'd!" Epilogue to Satires. + Mr. Charles Ford to Swift, November 22. 1737. Coxe's Life, p. 550. XVII. 66 СНАР. "his want of accuracy or veracity, or both, is so palpable (above all in his verbal communications), "that no great stress can be laid upon his testimony." 1737. 66 During the ten years (from 1727 till 1737) in which Queen Caroline wielded so great an influence over public business, it continued to flow in a smooth and uniform current, seldom broken by obstacles, and bearing along comparatively few materials for history. Yet the periods which seem the most barren of striking incidents are sometimes the most fruitful of great results; and I shall here pause in my narrative to trace, first, the progress of LITERATURE, and next the origin and growth of METHODISM. * Constit. Hist. vol. iii. p. 383. CHAPTER XVIII. LITERATURE. ; XVIII. LITERA TURE. THROUGHOUT all the states of Europe, the lite- CHAP. rature of the Middle Ages was nearly the same. The usual fault of a barbarous period is not so much the absence as the false direction of learning and research, which waste themselves on subjects either beneath the notice, or above the comprehension, of man. In Spain and in Italy, as in France and England, the learned few, five centuries ago, equally lost themselves in the mazes of Thomas Aquinas, and trod in the beaten track of Aristotle while their lighter hours were amused with Latin quibbles and Leonine verses. But when, towards the year 1500, the human mind burst forth from its trammels, and the human intellect was stirred to its inmost depths when, at nearly one and the same period, printing was diffused, America discovered, and the errors of the Church of Rome reformed, then was a new and original impulse every where given to genius. And thus, in the next generation, almost every people began to XVIII. LITERA TURE. CHAP. possess a separate and distinctive literature of its own. No where did there gather a brighter galaxy of genius than in England during the era of Elizabeth it is by those great old writers that our language was raised and dignified; it is from that pure well of English undefiled" that all successive generations will draw with a quenchless thirst and in inexhaustible profusion. In the first half of the seventeenth century, most of our writers, trusting less, and having less reason to trust, their own inspirations, began to look abroad for models. The literature of Spain was then eagerly sought and studied, and by its faults infected ours. Had it been studied in a more discriminating spirit, our writers might have advantageously borrowed that remarkable nobility and loftiness of sentiment which pervades it, or those romantic traces of Eastern poetry which yet linger in the land of the Moors. Thus that beautiful fable of the Loves of the Rose and Nightingale, first made known to us, I think, by Lady Mary Montagu, in a translation of a Turkish ode *, and since so often sung and so highly adorned by the muse of Byron †, might have been found, two centuries ago, in the Spanish verse of Calderon.‡ The Bride of Abydos, conclu Campo, sol, arroyo, rosa, "Ave que canto amo rosa." CALDERON, El Magico Prodigioso ; a most remarkable performance; I think, in some respects, superior to Faust. |