THE APRIL 20, 1833. Roman Conquest of Italy. HE Romans would never have subdued the Italian tribes if they had not boldly left Italy and conquered foreign nations, and so, at last, crushed their next-door neighbours by external pressure. APRIL 24, 1833. Wedded Love in Shakspere and his Contemporary Dramatists.— EXCEPT in Shakspere, you can find no such thing as a pure conception of wedded love in our old dramatists. In Massinger, and Beaumont and Fletcher, it really is on both sides little better than sheer animal desire. There is scarcely a suitor in all their plays, whose abilities are not discussed by the lady or her waiting-woman. In this, as in all things, how transcendent over his age and his rivals was our sweet Shakspere! I have not read through all Mr. Tennyson's poems,' which have been sent to me; but I think there are some things of a good deal of beauty in what I have seen. The misfortune is, that he has begun to write verses without very well understanding what metre is. Even if you write in a known and approved metre, the odds are, if you are not a metrist yourself, that you will not write harmonious verses; but to deal in new metres without considering what metre means and requires, is preposterous. What I would, with many wishes for success, prescribe to Tennyson,-indeed without it he can never be a poet in act,-is to write for the next two or three years in none but one or two well known and strictly defined metres, such as the heroic couplet, the octave stanza, or the octo-syllabic measure of the Allegro and Penseroso. He would, probably, thus get 1 Alfred Tennyson's earlier volumes of 1830 and 1832 differ considerably from the portions of the laureate's works to which those dates are now prefixed. Coleridge's note is most interesting. We cannot but set side by side with it Wordsworth's remark, in a letter from " Trinity Lodge, Cam imbued with a sensation, if not a sense, of metre without knowing it, just as Eton boys get to write such good Latin verses by conning Ovid and Tibullus. As it is, I can scarcely scan some of his verses. MAY 1, 1833. I Rabelais and Luther.-Wit and Madness. THINK with some interest upon the fact that Rabelais and Luther were born in the same year.1 Glorious spirits! glorious spirits! "Hos utinam inter Heroas natum me!" "Great wits are sure to madness near allied," says Dryden, and true so far as this, that genius of the highest kind implies an unusual intensity of the modifying power, which, detached from the discriminative and reproductive power, might conjure a platted straw into a royal diadem: but it would be at least as true, that great genius is most alien from madness, yea, divided from it by an impassable mountain,—namely, the activity of thought and vivacity of the accumulative memory, which are no less essential constituents of "great wit." bridge," Nov. 26, 1830:—“We have also a respectable show of blossom in poetry. Two brothers of the name of Tennyson, in particular, are not a little promising." The brothers were still, at this time, undergraduates at Trinity. See, also, April 18, 1830. 1 They were both born within twelve months of each other, I believe; but Luther's birth was in November, 1484, and that of Rabelais is generally placed at the end of the year preceding.-H. N. C. 2 "Such a mind as Hamlet's is near akin to madness. Dryden has somewhere said, 'Great wit to madness nearly is allied,' 6 and he was right; for he means by wit' that greatness of genius, which led Hamlet to a perfect knowledge of his own character, which, with all strength of motive, was so weak as to be unable to carry into act his own most obvious duty."-Coleridge's Lectures and Notes on Shakspere, p. 162 (Standard Library Edition). The quotation, of which the text gives the correct version, is from Absolom and Achitophel, 1. 163. MAY 4, 1833. Colonization.-Machinery.—Capital. COLONIZATION OLONIZATION is not only a manifest expedient for, but an imperative duty on, Great Britain. God seems to hold out his finger to us over the sea. But it must be a national colonization, such as was that of the Scotch to America; a colonization of hope, and not such as we have alone encouraged and effected for the last fifty years, a colonization of despair. The wonderful powers of machinery can, by multiplied production, render the mere arte facta of life actually cheaper thus money and all other things being supposed the same in value, a silk gown is five times cheaper now than in Queen Elizabeth's time; but machinery cannot cheapen, in anything like an equal degree, the immediate growths of nature or the immediate necessaries of man. Now, the arte facta are sought by the higher classes of society in a proportion incalculably beyond that in which they are sought by the lower classes; and therefore it is that the vast increase of mechanical powers has not cheapened life and pleasure to the poor as it has done to the rich. In some respects, no doubt, it has done so, as in giving cotton-dresses to maid-servants, and penny gin to all. A pretty benefit truly! I think this country is now suffering grievously under an excessive accumulation of capital, which, having no field for profitable operation, is in a state of fierce civil war with itself. MAY 6, 1833. Roman Conquest.—Constantine.—Papacy and the Schoolmen. THE HE Romans had no national clerisy; their priesthood was entirely a matter of state, and, as far back as we can trace it, an evident stronghold of the Patricians against the increasing powers of the Plebeians. All we know of the early Romans is, that, after an indefinite lapse of years, they had conquered some fifty or sixty miles round their city. Then it is that they go to war with Carthage, the great maritime power, and the result of that war was the occupation of Sicily. Thence they, in succession, conquered Spain, Macedonia, Asia Minor, &c., and so at last contrived to subjugate Italy, partly by a tremendous back blow, and partly by bribing the Italian States with a communication of their privileges, which the now enormously enriched conquerors possessed over so large a portion of the civilized world. They were ordained by Providence to conquer and amalgamate the materials of Christendom. They were not a national people; they were truly— -and that's all. Romanos rerum dominos Under Constantine the spiritual power became a complete reflex of the temporal. There were four patriarchs, and four prefects, and so on. The Clergy and the Lawyers, the Church and the State, were opposed. The beneficial influence of the Papacy upon the whole has been much over-rated by some writers; and certainly no country in Europe received less benefit and more harm from it than England. In fact, the lawful kings and parliaments of England were always essentially Protestant in feeling for a national church, though they adhered to the received doctrines of the Christianity of the day; and it was only the usurpers, John, Henry IV., &c., that went against this policy. All the great English schoolmen, Scotus Erigena,' Duns Scotus, Ockham, and others, those morning stars of the Reformation, were heart and soul John Scotus, or Erigena, was born, according to different authors, in Wales, Scotland, or Ireland; but I do not find any account making him an Englishman of Saxon blood. His death is uncertainly placed in the beginning of the ninth century. He lived in well-known intimacy with Charles the Bald, of France, who died about A.D. 874. He resolutely resisted the doctrine of transubstantiation, and was publicly accused of heresy on that account. But the king of France protected him.-H. N. C. opposed to Rome, and maintained the Papacy to be Antichrist. The Popes always prosecuted, with rancorous hatred, the national clerisies, the married clergy, and disliked the universities which grew out of the old monasteries. The Papacy was, and is, essentially extra-national, and was always so considered in this country, although not believed to be anti-Christian. I MAY 8, 1833. Civil War of the Seventeenth Century.-Hampden's Speech. KNOW no portion of history which a man might write with so much pleasure as that of the great struggle in the time of Charles I., because he may feel the profoundest respect for both parties. The side taken by any particular person was determined by the point of view which such person happened to command at the commencement of the inevitable collision, one line seeming straight to this man, another line to another. No man of that age saw the truth, the whole truth; there was not light enough for that. The consequence, of course, was a violent exaggeration of each party for the time. The King became a martyr, and the Parliamentarians traitors, and vice versa. The great reform brought into act by and under William the Third combined the principles truly contended for by Charles and his Parliament respectively: the great revolution of 1831 has certainly, to an almost ruinous degree, dislocated those principles of government again. As to Hampden's speech,' 1 On his impeachment with the other four members, 1642. See the "Letter to John Murray, Esq., touching Lord Nugent," 1833. It is extraordinary that Lord N. should not see the plain distinction taken by Hampden, between not obeying an unlawful command, and rebelling against the king because of it. He approves the one, and condemns the other. His words are, 66 to yield obedience to the commands of a king, if against the true religion, against the ancient and fundamental laws of the land, is another sign of an ill subject: "-"To resist the lawful power of the king; to raise insurrection against the king; admit him adverse in his religion; to conspire against his sacred person, or any ways to rebel, though commanding things against our consciences in exercising religion, or against the rights and privileges of the subject, is an absolute sign of the disaffected and traitorous subject."-H. N. C. |