NOTES

ΤΟ

LECTURE V.

NOTE 1.-Page 220.

*** Still more precious is the story of his own time recorded by a statesman, who has trod the field of political action, and has stood near the source of events and lookt into it, when he has indeed a statesman's discernment, and knows how men act and why. Such are the great works of Clarendon, of Tacitus, of Polybius, above all of Thucydides. The latter has hitherto been, and is likely to continue unequalled. For the sphere of history since his time has been so manifoldly enlarged, it is scarcely possible now for any one mind to circumnavigate it. Besides, the more fastidious nicety of modern manners shrinks from that naked exposure of the character as well as of the limbs, which the ruder ancients took no offence at; and machinery is scarcely doing less toward superseding personal energy in politics and war, than in our manufactures; so that history may come ere long to be written without mention of a name. In Thucydides too, and in him alone, there is that union of the poet with the philosopher, which is essential to form a perfect historian. He has the imaginative plastic power, which makes events pass in living array before us, combined with a profound reflective insight into their causes and laws; and all his other faculties are under the dominion of the most penetrative practical understanding."

J. C. HARE. "Guesses at Truth," p. 339.

NOTE 2.-Page 223.

"Liberal principles and popular principles are by no means necessarily the same; and it is of importance to be aware of the difference between them. Popular principles are opposed simply to restraint -liberal principles to unjust restraint. Popular principles sympathize with all who are subject to authority, and regard with suspicion all punishments; liberal principles sympathize, on the other hand, with authority, whenever the evil tendencies of human nature are more likely to be shown in disregarding it than in abusing it. Popular principles seem to have but one object-the deliverance of the many from the control of the few. Liberal principles, while generally favourable to this same object, yet pursue it as a means, not as an end; and therefore, they support the subjection of the many to the few under certain circumstances, where the great end, which they steadily keep in view, is more likely to be promoted by subjection than by independence. For the great end of liberal principles is indeed 'the greatest happiness of the greatest number,' if we understand that the happiness of man consists more in his intellectual well-doing than in his physical; and yet more in his moral and religious excellence than in his intellectual.

66

It must be allowed, however, that the fault of popular principles as distinguished from liberal, has been greatly provoked by the long-continued prevalence of principles of authority which are no less illiberal. Power has been so constantly perverted that it has come to be generally suspected. Liberty has been so constantly unjustly restrained, that it has been thought impossible that it should ever be indulged too freely. Popular feeling is not quick in observing the change of times and circumstances: it is with difficulty brought to act against a long-standing evil; but, being once set in motion, it is apt to overshoot its mark, and to continue to cry out against an evil long after it has disappeared, and the opposite evil is become most to be dreaded. Something of this excessive recoil of feeling may be observed, I think, in the continued cry against the severity of the penal code, as distinguished from its other defects; and the same disposition is shown in the popular clamour against

military flogging, and in the complaints which are often made against the existing system of discipline in our schools."

DR. ARNOLD'S Letter' On the Discipline of Public Schools,' in the 'Quarterly Journal of Education.' Vol. ix. p. 280. 1835.

In the same letter occurs the following remark, which, though referring only to the author's ideal of school discipline for young boys, admits of a much more enlarged application to men in their social and political relations :

“* * This would be a discipline truly generous and wise, in one word, truly Christian-making an increase of dignity the certain consequence of increased virtuous effort, but giving no countenance to that barbarian pride which claims the treatment of a freeman and an equal, while it cherishes all the carelessness, the folly, and the low and selfish principle of a slave," p. 285.

NOTE 3.-Page 224.

"The speech ascribed to Robespierre, when refusing to spare Lavoisier, 'the republic does not want chemists,' is just of the same character with the speeches of Cleon at Athens, and bur expresses the indifference of the vulgar, whether aristocrats or dem'ocrats, for an eminence with which they have no sympathy.” ** ARNOLD'S Thucydides. Note, B viii. 89.

NOTE 4.-Page 226.

There may be a doubt whether Hume's abhorrence of Puritanism is to be regarded as the sole or chief explanation of the political character of his history. But be that as it may, it is certain that his careless and epicurean temper was adverse not only to the earnestness and devotion of the Puritans, but to earnestness and devotion in any form. He was a cold-hearted unbeliever-selfsatisfied in a shallow philosophy; and as an historian, indolent in research and insidiously unfair in every thing directly or remotely connected with the Church of Christ. It is inveterate hostility to religion that has engendered in his history, and that too under a deceptive outward decorum, not a few of an historian's worst vices-

sophistry, misrepresentation, suppression of the truth, falsification, malignant hatred of Christian faith and holiness; so that it has come to be said without exaggeration, "that there is less in the popular history of the Christian kingdom of England which implies the reality of religion,-less acknowledgment of the laws and agents of a Divine government, partly concealed and partly manifested, to which the temporal rulers of the world are even here amenable,than in the legends, or even the political history of Greece and Rome."

Abundant proof of Hume's untrustworthiness may be found in an Article in the Quarterly Review for March, 1844, (No. 146,) in which many passages of his history are thoroughly discussed to exemplify his character as an historian.

NOTE 5.-Page 227.

The

"Aristophanes had to deal with Democracy, not when she was old, but when her heart was high and her pulse full, and when with some of the nobleness and generosity peculiar to youth, she had still more of its heat, impetuosity, and self-willedness. old age of Athenian democracy (and a premature old age it necessarily was) must be looked for in the public speeches of Demosthenes, and in the warning voice of that eminent statesman, fraught with all that is great, holy, and commanding, yet powerless to put more than a momentary life into limbs paralyzed and effete with previous excesses. For her midday of life we must go to the intervening speeches of Lysias, a writer full of ability and talent, but a thorough son of democracy, and for which the calamities suffered by himself and his family under the oligarchal party form great excuse. The very pages of this writer smell, as it were, of blood and confiscation; nor does simple death always content him; thrice, sometimes, would he 'slay his slain!' In running down his prey, this orator shows a business-like energy, unexampled in any other Grecian advocate: none hangs a culprit, or one whom he would fain make appear as such, so cleverly on the horns of a dilemma, and his notions of time, when in pursuit of democratic vengeance, are truly royal:- Nullum tempus Lysiæ occurrit.' 'Numbers' are his chief view of political society, and 'Your Manyship,' (rà

ὑμέτερον πλῆθος) his idol. Generous ideas of rank and birth, of the graces and accomplishments of society, seem utterly unknown to him: energy and business evidently comprise his vocabulary of excellence, while his stock in trade is all the gloomy images that pervade a disturbed state of society ; strife, sedition, discord, continual fluctuation of government, addresses to the passions, not to the reason, the voice of law stifled, or silent, that of party and faction perpetually predominant; add exile, proscription, fine, hemlock and blood spilt upon the ground almost like water, and we have the ingredients of a Lysiac speech, and the corresponding events of his period of history, pretty well in our hands.”

Mitchell's Note (Aristophanes'' Knights,' v. 1062.)

NOTE 6.-Page 227.

it is proper

When Pericles is spoken of as the leader of a party, to bear in mind the position which history describes him as having held in Athens, and the influence or rather control he exercised there over the people during his most remarkable administration. For his independence is described by Thucydides to have been such that he was the leader of the multitude but never led by them -that he could brave their anger and resist the popular will-and that, in short, the government, though called a democracy, was such only in name, for it was in one chief man:

σε * * αἴτιον δ ̓ ἦν ὅτι ἐκεῖνος μὲν δυνατὸς ὢν τῷ τε ἀξιώματι και τῇ γνώμῃ, χρημάτων τε διαφανῶς ἀδωρότατος γενόμενος, κατεῖχε τὸ πλῆθος ἐλευθέρως, καὶ οὐκ ἤγετο μᾶλλον ὑπ' αὐτοῦ ἢ αὐτὸς ἦγε, διὰ τὸ μὴ κτώμενος ἐξ οὐ προσηκόντων τὴν δύναμιν πρὸς ἠδονήν τι λέγειν, ἀλλ' ἔχων ἐπ ̓ ἀξιώσει καὶ πρὸς ὀργήν τι ἀντειπεῖν. ὁπότε γοῦν αἴσθοιτό τι αὐτοὺς παρὰ καιρὸν ὕβρει θαρσοῦντας, λέγων κατέπλησσεν ἐπὶ το φοβεῖσθαι, καὶ δεδιότας αὖ ἀλόγως ἀντικαθίστη πάλιν ἐπὶ τὸ θαρσειν. ἐγίγνετό τε λόγῳ μὲν δημοκρατία, ἔργω δὲ ὑπὸ τοῦ πρώτου ἀνδρὸς ἀρχή. οἱ δὲ ὕστερον ἴσοι αὐτοὶ μᾶλλον πρὸς ἀλλήλους ὄντες, καὶ ὀρεγόμενοι τοῦ πρῶτος ἕκαστος γίγνεσθαι, ἐτράποντο καθ ̓ ἡδονὰς τῷ δήμῳ καὶ τὰ πράγματα ἐνδιδόναι.”

NOTE 7.-Page 228.

Thucydides, ii. 65

All the ancient writers, without exception, call the government of Dionysius a tyranny. This, as is well known, was with them